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April 24, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
47:15
Episode 932 Scott Adams: Talking About the Sleepy Guy in the Basement of a House (Not Moving Too Much)
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Oops, gotta use the official face scratcher.
That's better. That's better.
Hey everybody, come on in.
There's plenty of room in this digital world of ours.
What if we're actually simulated creatures who are Meeting each other over a digital channel.
That would be like two levels away from being real.
And it's still pretty good.
Still pretty good. Not bad at all.
So we got news.
News and stuff. So here's a little quiz for you.
If Antifa becomes active again, how are we going to know which ones are the Antifa And which ones are the counter-protesters?
Because they're all going to be wearing masks.
And I have a suggestion.
I had to tell them apart.
So if you see a big protest and the only thing you know is that some of the masked people are Antifa and some of the masked people are whoever they oppose, what you do is you wait for a skirmish and then you see who wins.
The one who is losing the skirmish would be the Antifa member.
So you can't tell right away.
You might have to wait for a skirmish.
But if they're getting their butt kicked, probably Antifa.
Here is a horrible question, but it's really just for the thought process.
It's a horrible question, but I'm going to ask anyway.
If the coronavirus, it turns out, Kills mostly elderly people.
While the economic slowdown mostly saves younger people.
So we're in this weird situation where we're consciously saving younger people somewhat accidentally because they don't get to drive their cars into poles.
But fewer youngish people, and I'm not talking about just 20 year olds, I mean Anybody under, say, 60.
So there are fewer younger people getting killed, but more older people.
Would the net effect of that be an increase in expected lifespan?
Would the average life expectancy actually increase because of this?
Because you could lose three elderly people whose entire combined lifespan might be another 20 years.
But if you lose one person in their 20s who might have died in a car crash, then they might lose 70 years of life.
So I think the math might be surprising.
I mean, it's all macabre and we can't take any pleasure from it, but math is the math.
Now, what you're going to ask me is what about suicides and I made a contrarian prediction on Twitter that I will follow up with now, which is that they will both be less, at least in this country.
And I'm fully aware that 100% of experts say that both of those categories will increase.
So you don't have to tell me That all common sense and all experts say that if you take people who are in a bad situation and you make their situation worse, common sense says they're more likely to do something that's bad for themselves.
But here's why I'm going to disagree.
Because there's something weird about this that pulls us all together, at least psychologically.
All of the priorities just changed.
And I think in a weird way, some people might find more meaning because they're now part of this bigger war, if you will.
And I think it's also interesting in a weird way because you want to see how it ends.
So there's some curiosity about it.
It's like, well... I might as well wait a few more months to see how this ends.
I'm kind of curious at this point.
You might also feel that you're not the one person who's having bad luck.
Now, I realize that people who are going to decide to end their life have a variety of different reasons and mental illness and everything, so there's no magic one reason.
But you've got to think that it would be some kind of a trade-off.
Some people more likely, because their situation got worse.
But other people, I think, may be forced to be around people more.
So they might just want to say, well, I'm not going to do it now because I didn't want to be living with my family, but now we're quarantining, so I don't have privacy.
So at the moment, I'm concentrating on something else.
There might be people who say...
That they want to check out, but they don't want to do it at a time when their family couldn't deal with it.
So they might say, you know, if it were just up to me, now would be good.
But I have to think about the people who are going to be affected by it, and they've got bigger problems right now.
So this is a long way of saying that people are complicated, and I think we might be surprised that That because the box is shaken so much during this coronavirus, that maybe just everything's different.
Because nobody's thinking the way they used to, and it's a little bit unpredictable.
So I'm going to go with the contrarian view that we'll have fewer of those, or at least similar, but not a lot more.
All right. Let's hope that's true.
There's a study out of China...
It's not really big enough, but out of 318 outbreaks...
Oh, 318 outbreaks, so that's a lot of people, because that's just, you know, multiple people per outbreak, and there are lots of them.
Found that transmission of the virus occurred out of doors in only one, involving just two cases.
So out of 318...
Outbreaks, you know, gigantic clusters.
I don't know how big they were, but they were clusters.
Only one of the clusters, 318, had any example at all that they could identify that was transmitted outdoors, and that affected two people, and maybe they were in the same situation.
I don't know. So the obvious implication of this is that if we all camped out, If we all just camped out and lived outdoors over the summer, there would be no coronavirus left.
It might come to us from some other country that had not eradicated it.
But in theory, if this is true, that the coronavirus just hates to be outdoors, and Trump was talking about this at the press conference, that the coronavirus doesn't like humidity, it doesn't like sun, and it doesn't like heat.
And so we could just all camp out.
Let me put it this way.
What would be the odds of getting coronavirus if you simply camped out for the summer?
You just lived in the woods.
Basically zero. Not quite zero, but pretty low.
So I think that gives also lots of ideas how businesses could open up.
Because as luck would have it, it's our summer.
So there are a lot of businesses that could open up, like the restaurants could just, I can imagine restaurants will do this, just get rid of the front windows and be an open-air restaurant in California.
You know, it doesn't work in every state.
But you know, it works in Hawaii.
They've got their open-air restaurants.
And they also have the lowest...
Oh, that's true. Hawaii has the lowest problem, or one of the lowest problems, and they also have all the conditions that would suggest it would stay that way.
Because you sort of live outdoors when you're in Hawaii.
Alright. There was leaked information that the remdesivir, it may not be that great, but who trusts anything these days?
That's a wait and see. Alright, the funniest thing...
Oh, let's talk one more thing about the coronavirus.
So, there's this preliminary study of 3,000 New Yorkers, and they found that roughly 14% of them tested positive for coronavirus antibodies, according to Cuomo.
So, what does that mean?
What does it mean that in New York...
They found that 14% already had it.
What's that mean?
Well, let's ask Matt Walsh.
So Matt Walsh tweeted, referring to that study.
He says, These antibody studies, if the results hold true, seem to indicate two things.
So these are the things that it indicates.
Number one, the virus is much less deadly than reported.
That would be true as a percentage of people who die who get it.
So this would suggest that there's a very, very small percentage of people who actually die from it.
That is good news. Yay.
Number two, says Matt Walsh, it had already spread widely before the lockdowns.
True. I mean, you could say that would be true, right?
So these are two true statements, no doubt about it.
Definitely true that it's less deadly than reported if these antibody tests are right.
And it's definitely true that it must have been spreading faster and more than we knew.
And then he says, and those lead to an inescapable conclusion.
So I want you to see if this conclusion seems inescapable to you.
Because watch me Houdini out of it.
Inescapable, you say.
We'll see. So the inescapable conclusion, says Matt, is we wrecked the economy for no good reason.
So there's two pieces of evidence.
The virus is much less deadly than reported.
True. As a percentage of people die.
And it had already spread more widely before the lockdowns.
Before the lockdowns even started.
True. And these lead to an inescapable conclusion that we wrecked the economy for no good reason.
Is that true?
Is that inescapable?
Well, let's do the math.
Suppose that the New York numbers hold, and let's say, just to be generous, that the rest of the world was like New York.
So the rest of the world is not like New York, but let's say 14% of the whole country.
So I'm intentionally going with the most conservative estimate here.
Because you know that 14% is probably only in the hot spots, and the rest of the countries must be lower.
But let's say it was that.
14% everywhere in the country, just magically to keep the math simple.
And that has produced, I believe, 46,000 deaths.
So, you know, 14% infection producing 46,000 deaths.
What would happen if When the infection reaches herd immunity level, which could be 60 to 70%.
Well, let's pick 70, because what we do know about this virus is it seems to be a little extra viral.
So I would think, common sense says, always dangerous, that If a virus is a little extra-viral, because of the way it goes to the air, etc., if it's a little extra-viral, you probably have to get higher on the end of herd immunity, like closer to 70% to really stamp it down versus 60%.
So let's say 70%. So to get from 14%, which has been measured just in New York...
To get to 70%, how many times is that?
It's about five, right?
So for the 14% who already have been exposed to grow to 70%, it would be five times as much as has happened already.
And again, this is the most conservative, because we know the rest of the country doesn't have anything like 14%.
It's a hotspot number.
So... If we continued on the way we're going with this super-weak virus, the 46,000 who have already died at a 14% infection would be five times that.
So that would be about 230,000 people who would die if we take the controls off.
And we're also hearing that people are getting organ damage that might be permanent.
We don't know. So there's at least the possibility that the organ damage type people might be ten times as much as the deaths.
So maybe you get a million people with organ damage, something like that, maybe two million, could be higher.
So would you say that we wrecked the economy for no good reason if what we did was at least slowed it down so maybe we could hold it to a few hundred thousand dead?
Because we slowed things down, got us a little closer to maybe a vaccination or some therapeutics that work or some better testing or something.
I don't know. To me, that looks like a lot of people.
So you could certainly make an argument that we should not have closed the economy and we should have just plowed right through.
You could make that argument, I think.
But you can't make the argument that there was no good reason.
You can only say, okay, it was a pretty good reason, but I still think we should have done this.
I think a few hundred thousand people dead, a million people with organ damage.
That's a good reason.
If it's not good enough for you, I'd respect that, but it's not a bad reason.
All right. Let's see.
We've got... This is weird.
Elizabeth Warren's brother passed away from, well, he had coronavirus, but they don't say he died from it.
He passed away after testing positive for it.
So, you know, I don't know what the ruling is on that.
And then Maxine Waters also said that her sister is dying from coronavirus and is in the hospital.
So, you know, remember I told you that we were going to have this Kevin Bacon thing, where, you know, the people who are having coronavirus problems are going to start out being, well, that's nobody I have any connection with, and that's going to be somebody you know who knows somebody, and that's going to be somebody you know.
And you can just feel this thing, like, It's somehow weaving its way into society because it's like, okay, now there's two people at least you know from television who've got a problem in the family.
So getting closer.
All right. I wonder if we need to get to...
Oh, let's talk about Joe Biden.
So did you see the brilliant branding that President Trump dropped on Joe Biden at the press conference?
I've been laughing for hours about this.
There is a real magic to the way Trump words things.
At this point, we just have to agree that he can put a sentence together, if it's going to be an insult or a persuasion sentence, like nobody else really does.
And here's what he said about Joe Biden when he was just riffing on him at the press conference.
And it looked like no preparation or anything.
And just off the top of his head, Trump says, We have a sleepy guy in a basement of a house.
We have a sleepy guy in a basement of a house.
Now, I could write a master's thesis on all the things that are right about this.
But let me just give you a hint.
So, first of all, it's visual, right?
It's not just in a basement.
It's in a basement of a house.
As soon as he said he's in a basement of a house, you can see the house, and then you can see the basement.
And by adding the house, you've added the contrast.
Being in a house would be pretty good.
Being in a basement under the house, that's worse.
If you just said basement...
If all you said was basement, there are cool basements.
People have their man caves in the basement.
Sometimes you like your basement.
But if you say the basement of a house, you've added the context that, no, you didn't even make it into the house.
You're the basement under the house.
So this is the sort of thing that Trump does.
Obviously, I don't think he planned it before he said it exactly.
But it's perfect phrasing.
And even the first part of the sentence, he didn't say, Joe Biden is a sleepy guy in the basement.
Which wouldn't really...
That wouldn't be funny, would it?
If all he said was, Joe Biden is a sleepy guy in a basement?
That would just lay there.
But look at the way he said it.
He goes, we have a sleepy guy in a basement of a house.
You have to admit...
That we have totally sells that sentence.
There's a hundred ways you could have started this sentence that would just lay there flat, completely uninteresting.
And you say, yeah, yeah, we get it.
You already said that.
Joe Biden, Sleepy Joe, got it, got it.
But somehow he makes this sentence just come alive by starting it with, we have.
Who's we? And why do we have him?
And the fact that you have to ask yourself, who's we?
And why do we have Joe Biden?
That's part of the magic.
Because everything that he says has a little extra.
If he just said, Joe Biden is sleepy and he's in the basement, that would be a little bit interesting.
But if he says, we have, suddenly your brain just stops and it goes, we have.
What exactly is we?
Who's we? Why do we have him?
And it's just a whole level of complexity that draws you in And keeps you on the sentence.
And he doesn't even use Biden's name.
He just says, and I don't even think he used Biden's name at all.
He just goes, we have a sleepy guy in a basement of a house.
And now combining the sleepy guy, he's not even like an ex-senator, an ex-vice-president.
He's not a candidate for president.
He's just a sleepy guy in a basement.
It is so minimizing.
He's just a sleepy guy.
He's not even a guy. He's a sleepy guy.
He's not even in a house.
He's in a basement of a house.
And then it gets better.
You know, he said a few other things, but then he puts this end cap on it.
So the first sentence was, we have a sleepy guy in the basement of a house.
He said a few other things, and then he puts this end cap.
It was just like... This perfect, you know, frame.
And then he ends it with...
He ends it with...
He goes, and he's not moving around.
He's not moving too much.
He's not moving too much.
You know, this is that kind of sentence fragment that all the...
The Trump haters hate it.
Because if you read it, it doesn't read as well as when you're talking.
He goes, he's not moving around.
He's not moving too much.
He's not moving around.
He's not even moving.
He's just some sleepy guy in the basement of the house.
He couldn't make it to the house.
He's in the basement.
He's not moving around.
She's really not moving much.
If you want something that's even funnier than this, if you want the topper, the fake if you want the topper, the fake news is running polls that Biden is just trouncing Trump in the swing states.
Biden Biden is just barely sentient.
He's just barely sentient.
He's just a sleepy guy in the basement.
And he's leading Trump by like 10 points in the swing states.
That's what we've come to.
That just made my whole day.
Alright, well, I think that's what I wanted to tell you today.
Oh, sleeping in the basement of his house.
No names given.
Alright. Oh, man.
That is so funny.
Yeah, it's like a Mike Lindell topper.
It's a MyPillow.
Oh! Alright, I was thinking of a topic for these evening periscopes.
Because I don't like to just do coronavirus all the time.
It's fun in the morning, but by the evening you want something else to think about.
So, I have a topic.
Let's see if you like this one.
And the topic would be the most surprising things I learned.
From either being old, so the most surprising things I learned...
Oh yeah, I did walk today.
Thanks for asking. About being old, about fame, about getting rich, because I've experienced all these things.
And I thought, would you like to hear the most surprising things about Those things.
And since your comments are delayed, I'll just assume you said yes.
And here's the most surprising thing about getting older.
I'm totally surprised how healthy I am.
Because when I was a kid, when I was a kid, I don't think there was any such thing as anybody my age who was also healthy.
It seems like it didn't exist.
I'm also surprised at the fact that you get smarter as you age.
I didn't think that was going to happen.
I thought I'd sort of, you know, cap out around 45.
I did not expect that I would feel smarter every year of my life into my current age.
That would not have occurred to me.
But it certainly feels like it's true.
And I think it's just because I layered a lot of skills together.
I also would not have guessed how much I could hack my own brain and reprogram myself.
So from my earliest memory, I was interested in understanding reality, but also in reprogramming my own brain.
And I started reading books when I was really young about, you know, the power of positive thinking and meditating.
And as you know, I learned hypnosis.
And all of that stuff was the same.
It was the same journey, which is trying to figure out how to directly reprogram my brain as though it were a computer and make it different.
So, you know, the easy ways you reprogram your brains, you learn something or you You break a habit or you give yourself a habit and all that.
But the thing that I would not have guessed is that there's very much a compound interest element to it.
Which means that the first 10 or 20 years you try to hack your own brain, you do get results.
And you say to yourself, that's pretty good.
I just spent 10 or 20 years...
Like working diligently and, you know, with the specific outcomes in mind to fix my brain and reprogram it, but how much further can you take it?
And I've got to tell you that it just keeps getting better.
And at this point in my life, I feel like I have an almost self-designed brain.
Meaning that I have so programmed and hacked my own brain that it's almost an invention of my own creation.
It just took 50 years to get there.
And if you had told me that that was something that could happen...
That you could just keep reprogramming your brain and you would just keep getting better at it.
Assuming that you were dedicated and it was something you were actually trying to do all your life.
It would just get better and better.
I would have been totally surprised.
Here's something I'll teach you how.
I could do that. On another day I'll teach you how to do that.
Here's the most surprising things about fame.
One is how much responsibility it is.
The thing you don't really count on about being famous is how much work it is.
It's really a lot of extra work to be famous, just to manage the famous part.
Because what happens is it attracts a lot of inquiries and messages and requests.
It's just a lot of work to be famous.
Now, I'm not complaining. I'm just describing, right?
Obviously, I wouldn't be in the careers that I've chosen if I didn't want to be famous.
So the positives outweigh the negatives, in my opinion.
But here, these are just the surprises.
So I was surprised how much responsibility there is, first of all.
And part of it is the Spider-Man problem.
You know, at the end of Spider-Man, he says something like...
With great power comes great responsibility.
And when you're famous, especially if it's attracting any kind of money, you end up feeling like, oh, there are just some things I can do.
Excuse me. I laughed until I coughed.
There's some things I can do that other people can't do.
So you feel like, well, I guess I have to do them.
The other thing I would not have expected...
Is the number of people you can heal if you're famous.
Which sounds weird, right?
But the number of people I've directly saved their lives, I've lost count.
And that's not something you'd expect.
Now you're probably wondering, can you give me an example of how many people you healed or saved their lives?
Yes, I can. One example is I had my own bout with this weird voice problem called spasmodic dysphonia.
So I couldn't speak for about three years, but I found a new surgical technique that I took the surgery, and then I became sort of an outreach ambassador.
So through my efforts, I got to tell a lot of people who probably would not have found it on their own that there was a way to fix this thing.
So there were a whole bunch of people who heard about it from me because I was going out of my way to make sure that they heard about it, who got the surgery and now can speak.
So those are people I basically healed.
Now, not directly, right?
The doctor did it, but it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't connected them.
And likewise, pyresis is something I've talked about before.
People have shy bladder. Just the fact that I talked about it and made it a public topic actually probably healed dozens of people who just heard about it because I gave some tips about it, etc.
I was among the first people to say that the coronavirus maybe was something dangerous enough to close the traffic from China.
And I've heard from people who said that that was the first moment they took it seriously and started doing their own social isolating about that same time.
So I'm thinking, well, maybe I helped indirectly in some way there as well.
Bro, you look like a goblin.
Oh, I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard that.
Here's another thing that I would not have guessed about fame, that it cures shyness.
It cures shyness.
You would never see that coming, would you?
Because you would think that being famous would be the worst thing that could happen to an introvert.
And I'm sort of naturally an introvert, but I'm naturally a ham at the same time, which is not that unusual.
A lot of people who become actors and stuff are actually introverts.
I'm a natural introvert, but becoming famous cured all of my introvert problems because it gives me something to talk about.
It makes people know who I am before they know who I am.
I don't have to get people interested in me because as soon as I hear what I do for a living, they're already interested.
And if people are interested and, you know, often they'll ask you questions about what you do, then it's really easy to talk to people.
Because you're not working hard at all.
You're just answering questions about yourself.
It's like, yeah, been a cartoonist, did this, sent newspapers, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, oh, somebody's saying like James Wood.
Is he an introvert as well?
That would not surprise me.
But being famous...
Creates a set of rules and expectations in psychology that makes being shy unnecessary.
It just makes it unnecessary.
So I'm biologically probably just as shy as I've always been, but because I always have a set of rules about how to behave, and people tend to be nicer to me than they would to people that they didn't know, it just made the whole problem go away, which was really cool.
Here's something I heard from Craig of Craigslist.
You know Craigslist, of course, right?
Well, you may not know that there's an actual Craig.
So Craig is the guy who literally wrote the initial program that became Craigslist.
And I once asked him, I had lunch with him once, and I once asked him about, I guess he famously passed up some gigantic offer to sell the company.
And if he had accepted the offer, it would have been, I don't know, hundreds of millions or billions, whatever it was, some gigantic number.
And it had been a news story, and I asked him why he decided not to take it.
And he decided for just to keep the company smaller and simpler.
And he said that being rich seemed like a lot of work.
And I thought to myself, that...
And when I heard that, it's one of those things that you just can't get out of your head because he actually made the choice based on how much work it would be.
You know, it's not like he ever, he wasn't choosing a bad life.
He was just choosing a really good life that was sort of simpler and With the complexities of, what do you do if you've got all this money?
Do you have to give it away?
Do you have to do something with it?
Do you have to hire people to take care of it?
Do you have to have a second house?
Should I have a plane?
And all these questions.
And I thought, maybe it's not a coincidence that he started a company that was so successful.
Because... For someone to have such a keen grasp on what matters, like to actually know what matters, it's hard to do.
And it's also the skill of a good programmer, a good engineer.
The skill of a good programmer or engineer, a technical person, is to get the best result you can get with the least nonsense, with the cleanest, most direct, most solid approach.
And so it shouldn't surprise me that when it came to sort of, let's say, a philosophy of life, that he had the most stripped-down, cleanest, most solid philosophy of life you might ever see.
So that always stuck in my mind as one of those things that you just can't not think about that.
Because I've sort of made the opposite choices of endlessly complicating my life because it's interesting.
I sort of like the challenge.
But I've got to say, there are many years of my life where I would wake up and say to myself, you know, today would have been better if it had been a little bit simpler.
Because, you know, typically I've got three careers going at the same time all the time.
And, you know...
Sometimes they're compatible, sometimes they're not.
But I got a lot of stuff going on, typically.
And if you ask me, Scott, did it make you happier?
Because these are all things I chose, right?
For the most part, they're things I have an option of doing or not doing.
And I choose them. Sometimes I choose them because they're hard.
I mean, it's the challenge that I sort of like.
It's like, I don't know if I can do that.
Let's see if that's possible.
Sometimes it's just irresistible creatively, and I just draw myself in.
Sometimes it's irresistible intellectually, socially.
Sometimes there's something I want to learn from it that is more the point.
Sometimes it's because of the people involved, you know, have some affinity for them, something like that.
But, you know, I always move toward complexity, and I don't think it makes me happier.
I don't. Do not think it makes me happier, but I don't know if I can stop.
Oh, home studio update, yes.
Well, I'll give you the tour.
So it turns out that there's no such thing that's better for the home studio than these ring lights.
I've got one here and one there.
So roughly speaking, there's one that's more on my left and one that's more on my right.
And I point them toward the wall because the iPad is actually the very best camera I've found and I actually have to darken the room quite a bit because the iPad has such good light detection that even with the lights off and I've got motorized blackout curtains now but even with just a little bit too much light So through great trial and error,
I have learned the following. There's no amount you can spend on a better camera system that would beat an iPad.
So this is an iPad.
The other thing that's important, if you ever want to do this, is put it at eye level.
So it may not be obvious to you, but the iPad is actually on a stand, so it's eye level.
If you've been watching all of the politicians and talking heads trying to do their Skypes and Zoom calls on TV, have you noticed that the camera is looking up at them because they're looking at a laptop and they all look distorted?
They look distorted and everything looks wrong because they're looking down at the camera on their laptop.
Don't do that. So if the only thing you do right is to put it at eye level, It'll look professional.
Now, notice that I don't have much in the way of any reflection on the glasses.
That's because the ring lights are pointing toward the walls instead of toward me.
If they were pointing toward me, you'd get a reflection pretty easily.
But because the iPad is such good light detection, basically, I point him away from me and there's still enough ambient light coming around that I look well lit.
I'm actually sitting in It's fairly half in the dark right now.
Then, I've also discovered by trial and error that the very best microphone is a $12 clip-on lavalier that's wired, so it goes directly into it so there's no wireless problems.
I just clip it to anything.
In my experience, it's better than or as good as a studio microphone.
Now, the studio microphone will have more, let's say, higher fidelity, but it won't necessarily sound better to the ear.
I've listened to myself on both, and because my voice is maybe not that pleasant, so to speak, that...
The more casual sound of the lavalier clip-on is a little bit better.
So that's probably more than you wanted to.
Now, I've tried a whole bunch of different softwares and hardwares to automatically stream to multiple platforms, etc.
And they all have the same problem.
They don't work twice.
Every time you come in, you have to start from scratch and troubleshoot.
Because just sitting there, just sitting there, from the time you walked away from it last time, it degrades.
There's something that needs to be updated, there's a connection that gets lost, there's a thing that needs to be rebooted, and then you get into this, you have to reboot things and restart things in a certain order and wait a certain amount of time, and then when it's all done, there are like 35 settings that have to be just right, and you don't really know if they're right, Until you go live.
That's the system.
It's a system where you actually don't know if you're going to have sound.
You just don't know until you're live.
Now, some of you actually saw me testing such a system.
There's one behind me. Wirecast system.
And it's not that this stuff doesn't work.
It's just that it's not as stable.
Because software is always changing.
The operating system is changing.
You need a patch software that connects this one to this one.
Oh, they're not made by the same company.
So now you've got one person's hardware and two pieces of software to get you to the fourth platform.
And if any of that doesn't work, which it never does twice in a row, who do you talk to?
Because you've got four different vendors involved and you're doing something that none of them have ever seen done quite the way you just did it.
They don't even know what to do.
So if you have a full-time engineer, let's say you're going full Joe Rogan, then it makes sense because then that's just the engineer's job.
But because what I do depends almost entirely upon energy and I'm an introvert, You see where this is going?
So, if I had an engineer, that engineer would be draining my energy instead of me having it available to do this.
So, one of the things I teach in my How to Failed Almost Everything book is that the thing you should manage to is your energy energy.
This is the most perfect example of this.
So my energy would be completely diverted to technical problem solving and being angry if I do it myself.
But if I hire someone, then they're going to be the source of my energy.
It's like, oh, did you want this?
Did you want this? Just checking, how's your sound?
And my energy would just be going into this semi-productive place.
So when I teach you that the most important metric is your energy...
This is the perfect example.
Because all of those things would have made the quality better, right?
The quality would have been better.
But my energy would have been just totally trashed.
So, it wouldn't have lasted.
In other words, it wouldn't be sustainable.
I wouldn't be interested.
I wouldn't look forward to it.
Do you know when I prepare for these?
Sometimes, I usually, you know, maybe an hour or two before you see me live, I start looking at what's in the news and looking at Twitter and stuff, putting some ideas together.
But the actual technical part, the technical part of how I go live, it is literally, I pick up this device, I hit one button, and my room goes dark.
I talk to my digital device and give it one command, a voice command, and it turns on my ring lights.
And then I hit Periscope.
My iPad is always here.
So that's the other part of the system.
I don't use my iPad for anything else.
All right? If you're going to do this, if I could give you one piece of advice, make sure you've got an iPad just for this.
Because as soon as you take it from here and take it anywhere else, something's going to be wrong when you've got to use it the next time.
So I don't even unplug the microphone.
I just leave it here.
I might add power to it.
That's it. So when I need to start, I push two buttons, put in the title, and hit live.
And boom! So that I have managed my energy.
So when you see me going live, I've only thought about things I wanted to think about.
And I've not interacted with another human being in the morning.
When you see me in the morning, I've not interacted with another live human being yet.
So you're getting the freshest, most genuine...
Clean energy you could get from me, and I'm not frustrated by my technology or anything else.
Alright. And, you know, when I looked at my new iPhone, which is a newer generation than even the iPad, and the quality of the cameras on the iPad and even the sound, it completely makes it unnecessary to have expensive equipment.
It's just completely unnecessary.
You're welcome. I knew that some of you would care about that, and so save it for the end.
That makes sense. Somebody says it's easier when you don't need to worry about a bad hair day.
Well, you know, some of you saw me cutting my own hair on Periscope recently, so I definitely had some bad hair days in the last month.
All right, that's all for now.
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