Episode 950 Scott Adams: Don't Miss My One-Act Play Called Kim Jong-Un Plans His Schedule
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Planning your day when you have 2,000 sex slaves
Test kits versus herd immunity
Tucker Carlson and totalitarian concerns
Testosterone levels and AJ Cortes provocative tweet
Success and drugs
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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
What a way to wake up and join the weekend, which is going to be amazing.
Best weekend in a while.
And the best way to kick off the weekend, I think you know.
Yeah. Yep.
I think you know. It requires a little thing called a 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, including the damn pandemic.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip.
It happens now.
Go. I can feel the hospitalization rates decreasing with every sip.
Let's talk about some stuff.
I tweeted a real thinker.
Yesterday. This one will make you stop and really, really think.
Or, it won't make any sense at all.
So one of those two things is going to happen to you in a moment.
You're either going to have a really profound moment, or, for most of you, maybe 80%, you're going to say, I don't even know what that meant.
It goes like this.
Listen carefully. 20% of you are going to have a profound moment.
80% of you are going to wish I would just change the topic.
Here's the statement.
Predicting and creating would be the same thing if you were good at both of them.
Yeah, let that sink in.
Creating and predicting would be the same thing.
If you were good at both of them.
Yeah, 20% of you just went, whoa.
80% of you just went, I don't even know what that's supposed to mean.
So that was just for the 20% of you.
All right, let's talk about some other things.
Kim Jong-un. Apparently he's been photographed at the opening of a fertilizer plant.
Now, I had jokingly said that when the news came out that he attended the opening of a fertilizer plant, I said on Twitter, but we don't know if he attended as a guest or as the fertilizer, because it seemed like both possibilities were open at the time.
But we have been provided with photographs, yes, actual photographs of something that may or may not be a fertilizer plant, in which Kim Jong-un is cutting a ribbon, As some place that may or may not be North Korea and may or may not have been in the last 10 years.
So in other words, we can't really tell from the photographs.
They don't tell you as much as they ought to.
We do know he wasn't walking with a cane and unless he got a miracle cure.
Do you think he went away for a week and got a miracle cure and now he doesn't need a cane?
Maybe. Maybe it was such a good hospital trip that he left looking younger.
Yeah, it was such a good hospital trip that they fixed him up and now he's thinner and younger and he doesn't walk with a cane.
Glad we got those photographs, huh?
Alright, I'm going to go on record.
Here's my prediction.
Fake photographs.
Fake photographs.
Here's why.
If you were going to produce real photographs, the point of which is to show that your leader is alive, they would be a little more unambiguous.
You don't publish ambiguous photos to prove something.
No. You prove something with unambiguous photos.
Perhaps something called video.
Even North Korea has heard of video.
It's a thing with movement.
Wouldn't be hard to demonstrate that Kim Jong-un was alive.
Wouldn't be hard at all.
In fact, it would be quite easy.
But instead they went with grainy photos of a younger Kim.
I don't know. I don't know.
So... I heard the news today, and I don't know, I think I was vaguely aware of this, but when you read a story about it, it reminds you of something that you couldn't believe, which is that reportedly Kim Jong-un has, assuming he's still alive,
2,000 sex slaves, literally 2,000 sex slaves, who apparently will accompany him on trips to his multiple resorts, 2,000 sex slaves for Kim Jong Un.
So, here's the news as best we know it.
And thank goodness we have intelligence agencies.
Because if we didn't have intelligence agencies and a free press, we wouldn't be able to narrow it down.
So we don't know exactly what Kim Jong-un is doing this week, but thanks to our press and our intelligence agencies, we have narrowed it down.
It's either he's dead or he's partying at his seaside resort with 2,000 sex slaves.
I've come to understand that he doesn't spend much time in between those two extremes.
Because think about it.
You're Kim Jong-un.
You have 2,000 sex slaves.
What else are you going to spend your time on?
And so I present to you a one-act play which features Kim Jong-un's advisors talking to him about the schedule for the day.
I'll start in the role of the advisor to Kim Jong-un.
You can tell who the advisor is, because the advisors always have notepads.
So that's how you know. Dear Leader, we're planning your day, and we have some very important budget meetings.
Can I put you down for the budget meeting at 2 p.m.?
Kim Jong Un.
Uh-huh. Budget meeting?
Yeah. Yeah, I could attend the budget meeting.
That's one possibility.
Or, I could go to my seaside resort, party with my 2,000 sex slaves, and maybe you could attend that meeting for me, and if I hear later that things didn't go well, I could execute you and everyone who attended the meeting.
How about that instead?
Okay, very good, very good.
I won't put you down for the 2 o'clock meeting, but we've got a...
A ribbon cutting at a fertilizer plant.
That's tomorrow.
Could you make the fertilizer plant ribbon cutting, dear leader?
Yeah, yeah.
That's completely possible.
I could drag my fat ass across North Korea to visit a factory that literally makes shit.
Or, or, I could go to my seaside resort And I could party with my 2,000 sex slaves while you visit the fertilizer plant.
And if I hear later that anything went wrong, I could execute you and kill everybody at the fertilizer plant too, just to make sure I've wrapped it all up.
How about that? Excellent plan.
An excellent plan, dear leader.
Do we need to talk about the rest of this schedule?
Not so much.
Not so much. And scene.
Now, this is actually an answer to a I guess a mystery that I've had all my life, and I should have known the answer because it was kind of obvious.
And I always say to myself, why is it you can't get a dictator to retire?
Why is there never any story about a dictator who says, I've been enjoying my dictatorship, but I'll tell you what, I'm going to retire.
We'll turn this into a democracy or whatever.
Now, it turns out that the answer is, That if you retire from being a dictator, you will lose, and here I'm just speculating, you will lose access to your 2,000 sex slaves, and you'll probably be hunted down and executed.
So retiring is a really bad strategy for your typical tyrant, because they might get executed, but at the very least, Whatever openness that comes with retiring and becoming democratic is really going to cut into your 2006 slave weekend.
How do you expect a dictator to retire when that's the proposition?
Here's the deal. How would you like to make peace?
We'll have some kind of North Korea, South Korea.
We won't necessarily merge right away, but there'll be more travel and openness, more connections, maybe a lot more communication.
And you see Kim Jong-un sitting there and thinking, yeah, yeah, yeah, we could do that.
We could do that. We could have the peace and openness.
I could get rid of my nukes, or, or I'll just put this out there, I could keep my nukes, which keeps you out of my country, and I could keep my 2,000 sex slaves.
How about that? And so the possibility...
That Kim Jong-un's sister might be the heir apparent if Kim Jong-un actually is sick or incapacitated or dead.
And I say to myself, isn't this interesting?
Isn't this interesting?
Because I don't know if there are historical cases in the modern era of female dictators who have sex slaves.
I kind of think they might have a few.
If you had a female dictator, she might have a few male sex slaves, maybe a few female sex slaves, why not?
But probably not 2000.
And if you were Kim Jong-un's sister, and let's say hypothetically you decided to make peace and have some kind of transitional stage toward a more democratic system, could you retire?
Could Kim Jong-un's sister retire?
Would she be safe from the reaches of the law?
Don't know. Because certainly she could argue that everything that happened was her brother's fault.
Because I don't know how many decisions she made.
She just had to do what the boss said.
So she could say, I didn't do anything.
I just carried down orders.
And by the way, I don't have 2,000 sex slaves.
I got three or four.
Probably take them with me.
But... You know, maybe we could have some peace.
Because think about it.
Realistically, all joking aside, realistically, would Kim Jong Un ever do anything to ruin his situation?
No. Nothing.
There isn't anything.
There's no risk of death.
There's nothing that's going to shake him out of his situation with his private train and all the booze he wants and 2,000 sex slaves.
There's no negotiating in which you say, all right, I got an offer.
And then Kim says, before you say your offer, can you tell me how it's better than owning my own country and Being a dictator, eating and drinking whatever I want, smoking a lot of pot, I assume he does, and playing with my 2,000 sex slaves at my luxury resort.
Is your offer better than that?
And then the negotiators would say, well, in some ways, and Kim would say, maybe we'll just put a hold on those negotiations.
So the bottom line is, it's possible that Kim Jong-un's sister could negotiate for peace, like a real one.
It is not possible, based on this new information.
That Kim Jong-un would have any interest in negotiating for something that would cause him to lose access to his 2,000 sex slaves anytime soon.
So I just don't see it happening.
All right. I was asked on Twitter to talk about the revised death count, which my understanding is that if we go back to work, so I think these estimates are based on We're still mitigating in all the smart ways, but some of us are phasing back to work.
So I think this new calculation takes that into account.
The low end would be 100,000, the high end would be 240,000 based on the current model.
Models, of course, are deeply inaccurate.
They don't predict.
They simply give you a range of where you might expect things to be.
And I would say that they do that actually pretty well.
So does that range look reasonable to me?
Yes. We've raced past 60,000.
Are we close to 70,000 deaths already?
I don't know what today's number is, but we'll be at 70,000 pretty quickly.
I would expect that in the month of May we would zoom past 100,000, unless something happens really quickly.
It could be the remdesivir and the hydroxychloroquine.
Maybe they work a little bit.
Maybe we get that going in May a little bit.
Maybe Maybe it reduces the daily count.
Maybe it goes down on its own.
But I don't really see a situation that will be less than 100,000 when it's all done.
Now, of course, there's also the issue of whether it's counted correctly.
Do they throw in a lot of other things?
I don't know. Don't know.
I did see a chart that showed total deaths compared to what we would have expected.
And here the expected is if it's a normal year.
And it looked like most of the weeks were below the normal year.
A couple were above it because there were so many deaths from COVID. But it looks like we're actually maybe close to break even with total deaths, if you count the ones that are saved.
Here's an update on what Bill Gates said about testing.
And again, this agrees with what I was thinking, but he says it better, so I'll give you his.
I've been telling you that based on everything I've been hearing at the task forces about testing, that you should just forget about testing.
Forget about it being a path out, because there's no evidence that we're doing anything That would allow us to test our way out.
We're nowhere near the number of tests available.
We're nowhere near testing the right people.
We're not even close.
I think that, again, people give me a hard time for bolstering the president and saying everything he does is good, but I've been brutal about the reporting from the task force.
In terms of giving us useful numbers, I would say that the task force's ability to give the public useful information is effectively zero.
Just a failing grade.
Just a pure failing grade.
I can't even give them a D minus.
It's just a pure failing grade.
One of the darkest, I would say one of the, maybe the biggest mistake of the Trump administration.
I would say so.
Maybe I can think of a few other things because it's hard to think of everything that's happened.
But I would say among the most grossly embarrassing, incompetent I think the overall effort is probably successful.
But in terms of just specifically the question of, is the public being informed?
No. Now, is it the administration's fault that we don't have enough tests and the right kind of tests and the right kind of priorities?
Probably. Probably.
Now, the technique they're using is making sure that the private sector is deeply involved and they're not trying to push too hard as long as the private sector is willing to step up, and they are.
But the way the tests are, there's so many different ones.
We don't know which ones are accurate.
And then Bill Gates said this on CNN, I think.
Apparently the tests we have, you're only going to get them if you have symptoms.
So if you have symptoms, you've already been spreading it.
So getting the test after you have symptoms doesn't help you for all of the time that you already had symptoms and you were spreading it.
And it doesn't help you get treatment Before that.
So in other words, we can't fix the past.
And since the only people getting tests were the ones prioritized, the ones who have symptoms, you didn't help the past.
But do you help the future?
And the answer is it takes about three days to get a result.
You know, you keep hearing about the fast tests.
Those exist. But I don't think they're the majority.
So imagine that you've had it for five days, you've got symptoms, you've been spreading it like crazy, you get the test, and you still don't know you have it for three days.
What do you do for those three days?
You live your normal life.
And you spread it around.
So by the time you get it, as Bill Gates says, by the time you get the test result, you've already spread it around.
And you're practically over it by the time you get the result.
Yes, there are faster tests and startups have even faster tests and immediate tests coming and all that.
But what information do you have about that?
Have you seen the chart that says, this is how many we have, this is how many the experts say we need of this type, and this is how we're getting there, or anything like that?
No. No.
My advice to you is to make your decision about You know, the whole situation as if testing doesn't exist.
As if it's not an option.
I would say that it is so poorly reported that you have to assume it's just not even a path.
And Bill Gates basically just laughed at it.
He freaking laughed at it.
He laughed at it.
That it's not even close.
It's not even in the conversation of being something that could be helpful.
Just think about that. And most of the reporting, most of the experts have said, we need to do more testing.
We all know that.
There's nobody who doesn't think if we can magically test everybody, we'd be better off.
But apparently it's hard to make test kits.
And it's hard to get it done.
So I don't think that we're going to have anything like a testing solution before we have herd immunity accidentally.
I keep watching Tucker Carlson's show where he is essentially complaining the whole show about totalitarianism and how our freedom and rights have all been taken from us and how we kind of just handed them over.
To which I say, I feel like I'm just watching crazy town.
It just looks crazy at this point.
Now, I'm a big fan of Tucker, and I think his show is one of the best shows on TV of its type, you know, in the news genre.
Definitely one of the best shows of its type.
But this particular theme that he's on, that we've given up all our freedoms, is both true and trivial and unimportant at the same time.
Because, let's say you're in a coma.
Have you lost your rights?
Yeah. You have.
Let's say, because you can't do all the things you could do before.
If you're in jail, have you lost your rights?
Yes. If you're in a dangerous neighborhood, can you do all the things you want?
Yes. If you're, you know, temporarily, if you have to go to work, are you free?
Not really. You have to go to work.
So we live in a world in which this whole freedom thing is sort of fluid and we're figuring it out as we go, but we have a general idea where we want it to be, but we're always sort of We're tweaking it all the time.
Now, assuming that this coronavirus stuff doesn't last forever, which of these rights that is being denied to us will still be denied to us in, let's say, the end of the year?
Do you think that any of these rights will be permanent?
I mean, the reduction in rights?
Do you think that when the coronavirus is gone, do you think the government is going to say you can't go to the beach?
Do you think they're going to say you can't work, go to a concert?
No. No.
In what world are any of these going to be permanent?
Now, the ones that will be permanent, we're going to be permanent anyway, which is your loss of privacy.
You might argue that this costs you a little bit of extra loss of privacy, but not really, because the government always could have tracked where you were with your cell phone.
They always had that ability.
They just maybe weren't doing it unless you were a criminal.
So I don't even a little bit understand what Tucker is talking about, because all the examples are true.
They're observable. Yes, they can't go to the beach.
They live in a free country and without any laws passed, no constitutional authority.
These things are all true.
The things that Tucker is reporting are true.
They just don't lead to the conclusion that he's concluding, which is we're in an emergency.
The way you would act in an emergency should not be similar to the way you would act in a non-emergency.
So why would you ever compare them?
Now, if he's going to make the case that there are a certain subset of rights that have a high likelihood of going away during this and then staying gone, well, I'd say that's a pretty good argument, if I'd heard it.
But I haven't heard that argument.
I've only heard that we have lost our rights temporarily during an emergency.
I've also heard that that's the way tyrants do it.
They can always find an emergency to use as an excuse for grabbing power.
But does that look like that's what's happening here?
I'd say not even close.
Because the minimum requirement for that to happen is that the public would be okay with it.
Now one of the things that people point out is how easily the public became sheep and just quarantined themselves.
To which I say, is that what happened?
Is that the public just turning into sheep and obeying their government?
Or is it a public who were informed about a risk and decided to take it seriously, doing what the experts advised them to do?
I mean, I'm not seeing a problem here.
Somebody says, because of the slippery slope, right?
The slippery slope is purely imaginary.
And somebody says...
Emergency, who defines Scotty?
Well, I'm going to block you for that comment.
So the comment is, emergency, who defines Scotty?
Now, I'm blocking you forever, so you'll never be part of this conversation again, because Scotty is personal.
You can certainly make a comment about the facts, your opinion, etc.
But when you add Scotty on there, that's sort of an instant block because you're trying to minimize me.
You can minimize the opinion just by saying what your opinion is.
But when you add the Scotty, then you're just being an asshole.
And assholes get blocked.
Goodbye, asshole. Alright, what else we got going on here?
There's a New York Times article that was fascinating.
It said that stress is not what kills you.
You know that stress can kill you.
You believe, right? Stress can kill you.
But it turns out that stress only kills you if you think it can.
Now, that's a little bit of an exaggeration.
But the article said that the science is pointing toward stress will kill you if you believe that stress will kill you.
In other words, if your mindset is that stress is all bad, it's just all bad, it's going to kill me, then it does.
It actually has that effect.
But apparently people who have a different mindset...
And just accept the stress as some sort of response their body has because they're trying to achieve something.
Stress being a normal reaction of the body.
Something maybe they can weaponize.
I use stress to power my fitness.
So my mindset is that when I feel stressed, and by the way, this is totally legitimate, and this is a lifetime habit.
So I'm not making this up because I just read this story.
This is something I've done all my life.
If I'll have a day of work and I'm really stressed out, And I don't think it's going to go away right away.
That's normal, right? Everybody has stressful days of work.
I say to myself, man, am I going to have a good workout today?
Because there's nothing that can power a good workout better than stress.
And when you're done, you know you're going to have less of it, less stress.
And you know that you use your stress productively to lift more and push yourself and exhaust yourself and really get a good workout out.
Now that's my mindset.
And one of the things that people always ask me is, why do you seem so not stressed?
And part of it is that I make it very much a part of my job, if you will, to avoid stress.
And a big part of it is that mindset.
It's like, what's the first thing you think of when you're stressed?
Oh my God, my blood pressure's going up?
Or, whoa, I'm going to really have a good lift today.
And I'm not making that up.
That's literally what I think when I feel stressed.
It's like, oh, this is going to be a good run.
So get your mindset right.
That's why you should be following people such as Mike Cernovich who talk about getting your mindset right.
One of my favorite follows on Twitter is AJ Cortez who does personal training.
And what I like about him as someone to follow on Twitter is that First of all, he takes the training to the mind-body-mindset whole way.
So it's more of a holistic approach where programming your body is a way to program your life.
I don't think he says it in those words, but that's effectively what it is.
So he's more than a trainer about how to lift stuff.
He does that too. But it's more about how all of this integrates into a better life.
So he had a tweet today that made me laugh.
I retweeted it not because I agree with every word of it, because it's so provocative that I couldn't help it.
Sometimes I just like to see people react to provocative ideas.
So this was his tweet from A.J. Alexander Cortez.
A generation of defective men have been produced to believe that being, and then he gives his list, these are the things that make them men, according to A.J., Agreeable, quiet, passive, desexualized, soft, gentle, and emotional.
And he says that...
This is AJ, not me.
Don't blame me. And he says these are traits of women.
And he says these men have been programmed into passive eunuch slaves to the mainstream narrative.
All right, so... I retweeted it because it's so darn provocative, not because it's exactly matching my opinion of things.
But let me give you my opinion of things.
So first of all, let's all agree that individuals are so different That it would be ridiculous to have a list of characteristics and say that this applies to men or this applies to women.
Can we all agree that individual differences are quite extreme?
But that doesn't change the fact that the averages can be the average.
So, I know you know somebody who's not like that.
I know you're not like that.
Can we agree that you and your friends are not who we're talking about?
So let's get out of the anecdotal mindset.
Yes, we all know individuals are all over the board on everything that people can be different about.
So it is certainly not true, in a technical, scientific way, That women are any of these things.
Agreeable, quiet, passive, desexualized, soft, gentle, or emotional.
I think the point isn't more that those are sort of traditional, you know, you don't have to say that that's good or bad.
Because I don't think AJ is saying these are good qualities or bad.
He doesn't say that.
He's just saying that there's some kind of gender difference.
You can agree or disagree.
But here's where I'll take this.
And it made me Google...
To see if there was any kind of a testosterone difference in Republicans versus Democrats.
So I googled that.
What do you think I found out?
Do you think that Trump supporters have more testosterone than anti-Trumpers?
What would you say? In the comments, based on your non-scientific opinion, just observation.
Is it your observation that the class of people who are supporters of Trump have more testosterone than those who are opposed to him?
Look at the comments.
The comments is, it's unambiguous, right?
It's very unambiguous.
You could tell me that this doesn't pass the science and then I would just doubt your science because it's so freaking obvious that I don't know how in the world you could not see it.
It's as obvious as anything could be obvious.
Now what causes that?
Now keep in mind there are two there are two things happening.
One is that Trump has more male supporters.
So if you were simply to you know Measure all the testosterone in the Trump supporters, you would of course get more just because there are more men in the group.
So that's the first thing. Second thing, it's just obvious.
It's just obvious.
And I had made the hypothesis before that the way people respond to Trump might be based on whatever experience they've had in the past I'm not going to be in this bullied situation,
so I can't support him.
And then I speculated that if you'd been the bully yourself, or you just hadn't been bullied, That you didn't see that.
And what you saw was a strong leader who may or may not agree with you.
But that's it. It wasn't scary.
I'm going to modify that because I feel as though the bullying thing might be a factor, but not the full explanation.
I feel like testosterone is the better explanation.
And here's why. And again, let me say that this is all speculation.
It's based on anecdotal stuff.
The moment there is a scientific, peer-reviewed, controlled study that says that there is no correlation, I will immediately adopt that opinion.
But at the moment, there isn't.
There is not that.
I just looked. There is no information on that.
So here's what I think.
I think that your testosterone level, if you're a man, so let's just talk about men, the higher your testosterone level, the less afraid you are of other men.
Would you agree with that?
Let's say, I think this would be harder to answer for the women.
But men, you've experienced just in your own life times when you knew your testosterone was high.
Let's say you just won a contest.
You've been working out.
You're feeling healthy.
You know your testosterone is high.
You can feel it. You also know that there have been times when you've been sick or down or you broke up with your girlfriend or whatever your problem was.
You knew your testosterone was down.
So can the men here first...
Confirm for me that they have a physical sensation and they know the difference between when their testosterone is jacked up and when it's not because their personality changes.
I would say my entire personality is quite different if I know my testosterone is raging, and I can tell.
Let me give you one example.
I used to do a lot of public speaking.
When you're a public speaker and you're invited because you're already popular, it usually goes well.
The audience claps and they cheer and they laugh.
If you spend an hour being the subject of affection of an audience, by the time you walk off stage and you're heading back to your hotel room, Your testosterone is just raging because it's just automatic.
If you become, you know, the celebrity on stage and everybody's clapping for you and literally standing sometimes, standing ovation, your testosterone is off the chart.
And your personality changes, too.
And you know it. I mean, you just feel it.
It's almost like you can feel it in your goosebumps and your hair.
You can feel it.
What comes along with, and men, men back me up on this.
I'm just looking for the men to answer this question.
Women would not be able to.
When your testosterone is jacked up, are you ever afraid of another man?
Are you? And I think the answer is almost never.
And I would say that I can't think of any situation in my life That I've ever been afraid of a man or men.
Not once. And I've been in lots of situations.
If you're a male, you've been in tons of situations that are dangerous.
You can't be a man in America and not have lots of experience with almost getting in a fight.
You were there when the trouble went down.
I mean, it's just normal life that men are around The male experience is violence and near violence all the time.
It's something that women can't possibly understand.
Men live in a permanently violent world.
And I don't mean that they're actually performing violence at any given moment.
I mean that our mindset is that you're ready for violence at the drop of a hat.
Maybe not all of you. This also could be a testosterone difference.
But I would say, and let the men in the comments confirm or deny this.
Men, would you say that you are capable of violence at the drop of a hat for a reason?
I'm not saying that you would do violence for no reason.
I'm saying that, is it true that you're always on the edge of being violent, but only if there's a reason?
And you don't really ever turn that off, do you?
So maybe you'll see some differences here.
You see somebody saying correct.
I don't know if they're...
Yeah, somebody says, I'm never afraid of anything.
Survival of the fittest.
Only if he's holding a gun.
So I've had guns pulled on me...
Three, four times.
So I've had guns pointed at my face four times in my life.
Once a bowie knife.
So I've had a knife pulled on me, four guns.
Two of them was when I was working as a bank teller.
I got robbed twice. Once was getting mugged in downtown San Francisco.
And another time was walking in the Mission District in San Francisco.
And when I was walking in the Mission District...
Somebody pointed a real gun out a window as I was walking by on the sidewalk.
And the window was really close to the sidewalk.
So, I mean, you were looking right at the person in the window.
It wasn't like there was a distance involved.
And I'm walking by, and the guy sticks a gun out the window, basically points it at my head, and he pulls the trigger.
And I watch the cylinder turn.
Click. And there wasn't a round in the chamber.
He had pointed at my head as I walked by a real gun.
Click. And pointed it at my head when I walked by.
So that's the neighborhood I lived in.
So just generalize that to what my neighborhood was like.
You know, this was when I first moved to San Francisco.
It was on the border of a rough place.
Anyway. So I've had numerous guns and weapons pointed at me, and I would say that my adrenaline went through the roof.
So if you're talking about adrenaline, yeah, adrenaline went through the roof.
But I don't know that I was ever afraid.
Like, I didn't feel...
Like any kind of experience that I would call fear.
I have, you know, normal fears of normal things, right?
I have, you know, ordinary appreciation for danger.
I'm not like the brave, I'm not a brave guy.
I would say as a man, I'm not especially brave or especially unbrave, probably average.
But I also have, I'm guessing, so here's an assumption.
I believe my testosterone is relatively high.
How does one know that?
Well, I have the tells for that.
So I have the balding.
Losing your hair is either a sign of testosterone or sensitivity to it.
I have the squarish jawline.
That's a sign of testosterone.
I think there's a difference with the finger length that tells you you have testosterone.
But more importantly, I live my lifestyle to maximize it.
So I lift, I exercise, I eat right, I sleep.
So I do all the things that should boost it.
And my experience of it is nothing really frightens me.
So when I look at Trump, I see his tool set, but I don't see a threat to me.
I could totally imagine that if you had low testosterone...
You would see somebody who was bristling with it and was unpredictable.
That's scary. Anyway, so I think that could be tested, but we'll leave that open question.
John Roberts reports, Fox News, that a senior intelligence source tells him that there's an agreement among most of the 17 intelligence agencies that That COVID-19 originated in the Wuhan lab and that it was believed to be a mistake.
So most of the 17 agencies agree.
Does that mean anything?
Does that mean anything?
It doesn't, does it?
The fact that 17 intelligence agencies agree, we know that that doesn't mean anything.
I remember when I would have heard that and said, 17 intelligence agencies?
Well, I mean, what are the odds they'd all be wrong?
Now let me tell you what it means when 17 intelligence agencies agree.
If you've ever worked in a large organization, you know this is true.
If you haven't worked in a large organization, you would be totally fooled by this.
Let me explain what it means when 17 intelligence agencies agree.
It means that one did the work, came up with an opinion, and the others heard about it.
You get that?
One agency did the work, and the others heard about it.
The other 16 are useless.
They're not duplicating the work.
Do you think that the United States has multiple agencies sending different people into North Korea?
I hope not.
I hope we don't have different agencies doing that.
Don't you think maybe there's only one that's got that responsibility?
I think there's only one intelligence agency that really has the primary responsibility of figuring out what's going on there, and I don't think they know.
So when you see something like 17 intelligence agencies agree, your brain should translate that into one intelligence agency has an opinion, 16 of them just said, yeah, whatever that guy says, he seems credible to us.
And the one who had the opinion is probably not right.
That's how you should interpret it.
If you interpreted it as 17 agencies say it's true, well, probably true then.
You got it completely wrong.
There's nothing in your reality that would suggest the 17 intelligence agencies in the United States agreeing tells you anything.
It doesn't tell you anything.
So that's how you should process it.
All right. Let's see what else we got here.
Now, that's mostly what I wanted to talk about today.
Is there anything I missed in the news today?
Somebody says, oh, there's the question that I was going to bring up.
Somebody says, what organization did not agree and why?
Exactly. Which organization did not agree?
Now, it doesn't say that there's an organization that disagrees.
So the way I would interpret that is that of the 17 agencies, one did the work, 14 of them said, yeah, that looks good to us.
We didn't do the work, but, you know, you did the work.
Looks good to us. And a few of them said, we haven't seen what you've done.
We haven't looked at it yet.
It's going to be more like that.
Somebody says, when everyone's thinking the same thing, nobody's thinking.
Well, unless they're all right.
I mean, you can't rule out the fact that sometimes people are right, but it's a good warning.
It's a peer-review rubber stamp.
Yeah, peer review I think is totally overrated too.
You got some better information?
I do. I got some better information.
I watched China's response.
If you watched China's response to the coronavirus situation, it's pretty obvious that they were concealing information from the world.
Do you need 17 intelligence agencies to tell you that China was lying?
We already know that. That's public information.
So what do the intelligence agencies know that we don't?
Yes, Elon Musk's tweet storm.
So, Elon tweeted, among other things, I think in the last 48 hours or so, among other things, that his girlfriend was having a baby on Monday.
People didn't know that.
And that Tesla stock was overpriced, in his opinion.
He sure likes trouble.
Talk about a guy who likes trouble.
I think he enjoys it.
And then some other random things that he tweeted.
Anyway, the tweets were let's say eyebrow raising enough that people started wondering if he was on drugs or crazy or trolling or what the heck's going on.
So it's like a cottage industry trying to decide what Elon is secretly thinking.
If I had to guess, I'd say drugs.
To me it looked like Somebody was on some kind of drug and tweeting.
Now, do I care?
Would I sell my Tesla stock if I learned that Elon had taken mushrooms?
I'm just speculating.
There's no evidence that he did that.
But would I do anything differently with my investments if I heard that Elon took some mushrooms and tweeted too much?
Nope. Because you know what?
Whoever Elon Musk is today, he was the same guy a few years ago, right?
If it worked, yeah, the other thing is he was going to sell off all of his possessions, his houses, etc.
Now, I don't know if any of that's true or whatever, but it sounds like somebody was on drugs.
Do I care if he was on drugs?
Nope. Because if he was, he was still the same Elon Musk that Who broke all the rules and will always be remembered, I think, as one of the great entrepreneurs of our time.
Do you care if Henry Ford drank too much?
I don't think he drank.
I'm not even sure if he did. But do you care if Steve Jobs did LSD? Because he did.
Do you care? No.
Do you care that almost every major company in Silicon Valley has major I guess my take on Elon's tweeting is he's still the same person.
You know, he didn't become less capable of doing anything.
He just is letting you know who he is.
That's it. The uncomfortable truth that nobody wants to say out loud, oh, let me say it out loud.
Let me be the first person to say it out loud.
Success in this world is about which drugs you get addicted to.
There. I said what a lot of people have thought But you don't want to say.
If what you got addicted to is alcohol, probably that's not going to go well for you.
Unless you're a functional alcoholic and you're in sales.
If you're a functional alcoholic and you're in the sales profession, it might be pretty good.
I mean, I wouldn't recommend it, but it could work out well.
In fact, I know several people who are clearly functional alcoholics Who have tremendous lives, as far as I can tell from the outside, because they just funnel that drinking into sales.
They're very social.
They make a lot of sales. Have a good life.
And they're drunk all the time.
And they don't seem to be any of the worse for wear.
So some people apparently can make that work.
Now, I'm not recommending that.
It's a special case.
But it's also true that people can be more creative depending on what they're taking.
They can relax. If they're on Adderall or other performance-enhancing drugs, sometimes they need them.
Sometimes they get them recreationally or just for performance.
But the point is, Silicon Valley is run on drugs.
If that wasn't clear enough, let me say it as clear as possible.
Silicon Valley runs on drugs.
And not the legal kind all the time.
Some of them are legal.
You know, Adderall is legal, etc.
But Silicon Valley is a drug-fueled industry.
Now, that's something that You don't see in the news so much.
You've seen stories about it, but it's not really emphasized.
But the fact is, I don't know what percentage, but the people in Silicon Valley who are using drugs are using it not recreationally exactly.
They're using it functionally.
So the Silicon Valley people who are using drugs and also successful, it's because the drugs they're either addicted to or choose to be addicted to are productive.
I'll use myself for an example.
Technically, you can't be physically addicted to marijuana, but I'm certainly psychologically addicted.
And I can guarantee you from my own experience that my creativity goes through the roof when I use it.
In fact, a lot of the ideas that you've seen coming out of me happened when I was enjoying a good 420 afternoon.
So would I be more or less successful?
I don't know. It's hard to know.
But I will tell you that a lot of the most successful people have simply chosen the right kind of drug that works for their particular situation, their particular genetic makeup, their particular whatever.
Now the reason that I don't recommend any of this is that it can kill you.
Right? Do you need a better reason?
How about this? Don't do it.
It could kill you.
That's it. That's the whole recommendation.
I'm not a doctor.
And if you're not a doctor, don't be playing around experimenting with drugs to make you a better person.
I'm not going to recommend that.
I'm just going to say some people have, for whatever reason, Reason have discovered that there are some types of drugs that make them better.
Other people have found drugs that just make them worse.
If you're taking a drug that just makes you worse, that's where you're going to end up.
Somebody says, pot doesn't kill.
Yeah, so there's a little bit of disagreement on that.
I'm on the side of saying that marijuana doesn't kill you, but there are other people who say, well, but if you were doing marijuana and tried to ride your motorcycle really fast, I suppose you could do something foolish.
Somebody says, stop taking any marijuana for a while and see if you have physical results.
Well, I've done that, of course.
And I know the difference.
I'm very aware of how different it is.
Often drugs are a try for a fix for an underlying mental issue.
I would say every time. I would say that all drugs, unless you're just trying them on the weekend or something, you're just experimenting.
But for people who are using them regularly, I would say that that statement is true, that people do it to fix something that wasn't giving them enough happiness or something.
I can't drink or get high during work.
It's a waste of a good buzz.
Yeah, most work is not compatible with marijuana, but some is.
Somebody says I should plug locals.com.
Yeah, I will remind you that I've moved a lot of my video content.
All the periscopes will be reproduced there.
I'll keep doing them here. This won't change.
But they're also on the locals platform.
So if you went to scottadams.com scottadams.locals.com You'll find my page.
You can look at my Twitter profile to see it as well.
And for a small subscription fee, you can get extra stuff and you can have everything in one place.
And the algorithm will not rule you.
I'll tell you my long-term play here.
So the long-term reason for putting it on a subscription platform is that the YouTubes of the world, they can't really handle my content because their business model requires them to pair content with advertisers.
And the advertisers all say, why would we take a chance on something that's controversial?
Just pair us with kitten videos.
So that's the problem that YouTube has.
Even if they wanted to, the advertisers would say, I'm not going to give you money to pair with this stuff.
Half the people who watch it are going to get mad at me for just pairing it.
So the advertising-based models, including my comic strip, everything else, sort of advertising model, they don't really work anymore.
For a variety of reasons.
The newspaper advertising model will probably just disappear because newspapers will disappear.
By the end of the year, I'll probably have no regular cartooning income, I would guess, from newspapers.
So I'm looking to reinvent my content, figure out how to adapt to the new world, the post-coronavirus world.
And I'm going to try the subscription service.
That's where I am at, scottadams.locals.com, if you want to be part of that.
You get all the good stuff and more.
Where will Dilbert be syndicated?
Well, it's in 2,000 newspapers, and it's on a lot of websites, and it's at dilbert.com.
Probably a number of them will continue online.
But I don't know if newspapers make enough money from just their online presence.
So my guess is that the physical newspapers, the local ones, will disappear.
The biggest ones don't actually carry comics.
The biggest newspapers, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, they don't have comics.
So when the little ones go away, USA Today is a big one, when the little ones go away, so too does the comic business, because they're associated with the local papers mostly.
Somebody says they mentioned me on The Five yesterday.
I watched The Five. I didn't see that.
Did I miss that part?
Yeah, $7 is the subscription fee per month.
If you're already donating to me on the Patreon site or on the WenHub platform, because people have done both, I would ask you to discontinue that.
And whether or not you want to be on the Locals platform, that would be a separate decision.
But, you know, you could discontinue Patreon and you could discontinue using the Interface app.
And I would be just as happy because now I have a little home and the people who want to use that subscription fee and see a little extra are going to see it.
So what I'll be doing on the Locals app is I'm going to put a lot of micro-lessons.
I put my first micro-lesson up there.
On how to write humor.
So these are going to be very short videos on one topic where I teach you that one topic.
My next one will probably be design.
So it'll be like 5 to 10 minutes to bring you up to about 80% of what you need to be a better designer.