Episode 974 Scott Adams: Comparing the Experts to Average Idiots, Who is Performing Better, Unmasking
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Nate Silver's amusing observations about bad data analysis
CNN Stephen Collinson thinks President Trump "rejects science"
Obama Administration unmasking General Flynn
Andrea Mitchell calls unmasking story "gaslighting"
Judge Sullivan's unusual order
Senator Richard Burr under FBI investigation
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If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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One of the best coffees with Scott Adams of all time.
By the way, I found out somebody noticed yesterday that apparently I have an IMDB page.
So I'm an official show.
I've made it. I've made it to IMDB. I've made something of myself.
Well, if you'd like to make something of yourself, I know how to start.
The best way is with a little thing called the simultaneous sip, but it doesn't take much.
All it takes is a cup or a mug or a glass or a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I'm partial to coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the damn pandemic.
Go. I can feel my convalescent blood serum improving by the moment.
Yes, yesterday I did my periscope from the parking lot of the veterinarian's place.
Snickers is resting.
She's on restrictions.
She's not allowed to jump up on the furniture.
So she just tweaked her back a little bit.
She does She gets a sports injury.
She's a very active dog.
So I've been through this before.
She should be fine. I've got her on pain meds.
Anyway, yesterday I was talking about what we need is a website where you could put in your own personal risks.
You know, what's your age, your BMI, and all that stuff.
And it would tell you your risk of getting coronavirus and your risk of dying.
And it turns out that exists.
So somebody built exactly that website.
I don't know how long it's been up.
But I just tweeted it before I got on.
So if you want to find it, you can find it at the top of my Twitter feed.
So I don't know if it's accurate.
I'm not vouching for it.
But it's interesting.
And I would recommend just giving it a look.
Maybe it'll tell you something.
So... The theme of today's Periscope is the experts.
Somebody's asking me how old Snickers is.
Snickers is about 12.
And that's around the life expectancy for this breed, unfortunately.
So Snickers is a senior citizen.
But anyway, the theme today is going to be the experts.
So we'll see how the experts are doing.
Make sure the experts are being experts.
So all I did was take headlines out of the news.
So I didn't do any research.
All I did was just look at the headlines.
So here's what the experts are doing in the headlines.
CNN has a story about a famed French serial killer expert, Stéphane Bourgogne.
So he was a big expert.
I guess he had built a reputation as the country's foremost expert He wasn't so much an expert on serial killers as he was an expert at plagiarizing experts on serial killers.
It turns out that the foremost expert on serial killers in France wasn't even an expert.
He was actually a con man.
Alright, that's your first report of experts.
So, so far, expert not looking too good.
We're going to be doing a little cherry picking here, so I'm not going to pretend this is an unbiased presentation.
I've told you before, but I'm going to say it again, that one of the most interesting accounts to follow...
During this era, where everybody's obsessing about data and what are the odds and everything, you've got to follow Nate Silver.
If you're not following Nate Silver, you're just missing just one of the best commentary as he's watching the common idiots try to figure out data.
Because he actually does this for a living, and he's good at it, and he has to watch as all the people who are bad at it and don't know they're bad at it Try to be good at it while being bad at it.
Imagine being him.
Now, when I look at this stuff with my tiny little bit of visibility of that world, even I can say, I'm not so sure.
I mean, I'm just skeptical.
I look at it and go, I don't know.
Could be right. I'm not sure I'm going to believe it.
A lot of things are wrong. So I have sort of the lowest level of skeptical detectors When it comes to data presentations, I just sort of generally don't trust them, because most of them are fake, but I don't have any special insight into them usually.
But Nate usually does. So just a perfect example, and this is just for one day.
Imagine he's doing this every single day, and he's picking out this news story about a surge of cases in Orange County.
So there's a story about a surge of cases.
So what do you make of that? What do you make of it?
It's out of control, right?
These Orange County people, they're not quarantining, they're not locking down, they're protesting.
No wonder it's out of control in Orange County.
And then Nate Silver tweets, you know why there's maybe been a surge of cases in Orange County, California, as this story focuses on?
Because they're doing a ton more testing than before.
The whole story is just garbage.
And he just takes it out with one tweet.
Yeah, they don't mention they're doing more testing.
What experts are we supposed to listen to?
I mean, here's some expert reporters for a big publication.
Was it, I forget who it was, LA Times maybe?
And they must have been collecting information from experts.
So the expert reporter expertly collects the information from the experts who collect the data, and then they write a story, and what's the public to make of it?
Well, wouldn't you believe it?
Because experts, right?
And then Nate Silver, also an expert, looks at it and says, uh, the thing you left out was the only important thing.
The only thing that mattered, you know, in terms of understanding the full context, The only thing that mattered was what effect did the testing have on kicking up new results.
And that's not even in the story.
My God! All right.
Experts so far?
Two out of three doing poorly.
Nate Silver? He gets an A for the week.
Here's some more experts in the news business.
CNN... I think that now that I've tuned you to it, you're probably seeing this everywhere.
You've noticed how much CNN does mind reading, right?
Where they pretend that a story is their opinion of someone else's internal thoughts.
And they sell this as news all the time.
It's usually in the opinion context, not in the harder news.
But the fact that it's even on an opinion, that it's even on a news site is mind-boggling.
So here's one. This is from Stephen Collinson.
And I'm not kidding.
I read his content to laugh.
So he's trying to be a serious critic of the president, but he has to produce so much critical content every week because apparently that's his job.
So no matter what the president is doing, Stephen Collinson is going to write a critical piece.
And if there's not actual data to look at to say, well, this is wrong...
He goes after the President's internal state.
So the title is, Trump's Rebuke of Fauci Encapsulates Rejection of Science.
It encapsulates his rejection of science.
Which is really sort of talking about his mental state, right?
Do we think that President Trump, in his internal mental cognition, rejects science?
Have you ever heard of anybody who rejected science?
That's not even a thing.
Who rejects science?
People reject individual parts, and then they give their reasons.
Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong.
But in your whole life, has anybody ever rejected science?
That is so not even a thing.
And it's a headline.
Yeah, it's just part of his rejecting science.
Which has never existed, can't exist, would never exist in the real world.
And then it goes on to say, the president's downplaying of the nation's top expert, meaning Fauci, shows that he has always been battling the pandemic that he wants to fight, rather than the one that exists.
So they have to put this in terms of what the president internally wants to What?
How does this guy, who's probably never even met the president, know what the president is currently internally wanting?
And apparently he currently internally wants it to be a different kind of pandemic.
That's quite the insight.
Do you know who else, privately and privately on their own minds, do you know who else wants this pandemic to be a less bad one?
Me... Is there anybody else who would want this to be less bad than it is?
I'm feeling confident that many of you also, like the President, who's being criticized here, would want the pandemic to be different than it is.
Which is different from saying he's doing the wrong stuff.
If they said he's doing the wrong stuff, then they could show their reasons why.
But they're free from showing that he's doing the wrong stuff Because they can just say that he's thinking about it wrong.
Yeah, he's thinking about it all wrong.
As if you know what's in his head.
And you look in there and he's not liking science in there.
You saw him bragging about his...
Was it his uncle? Who's a famous scientist?
Or a very successful scientist, anyway.
Some Trump. I mean, Trump...
Clearly, clearly respects science.
I mean, he's been taking all of the scientific recommendations, and then when it gets to the school closing one, that's not just a scientific recommendation.
That's also a public recommendation.
All right. Let's see some more of the experts.
So this user on Twitter, Kalamutkay, don't know who he is.
And... I did a thought experiment tweet.
I was talking about whether we were doing a good job understanding overweight people and the special risks they have.
So that was my tweet.
And I was wondering aloud whether we were looking at it right.
And Columet says to me on Twitter, Coronaviruses have been with us for decades.
Look more closely at the data instead of thought experiments and exercise in science fictions.
He says to me. So I replied that that was 2019 thinking.
In 2020, have we not noticed that the data that we need is unavailable, and the data that we have is unreliable?
So if you're telling me that we should use the data, Don't you also have a responsibility to, let's say, judge whether the data exists and is credibly accurate?
Because if you leave out the fact that it doesn't exist, and if it does, the stuff we've seen is not credible, don't lecture me About not using the data to make my decisions.
If you can give me some data that is useful and reliable, do you think I wouldn't use it?
Is there anybody who thinks that presented with credible and useful information, I would say, you know, I choose not to use this.
I think I'd rather guess.
No, I would not do that.
And so there are people who seem to imagine that other people are doing something like that.
It's a weird world. Anyway.
So here's my favorite.
So this is my actual tweet that caused a little trouble.
And I'll tell you how this went.
And my tweet was, how many Americans have died from coronavirus who are under 60 and also, here's the key part of the tweet, had a healthy body weight?
Whatever you want to define healthy as.
Low BMI, I guess. And then I said, I have a strong feeling that political correctness It's preventing us from understanding our individual risks, which could in turn keep the economy closed and ruin civilization.
So I was sort of thinking aloud, as one does on Twitter, that maybe the big issue is that we just can't be told.
I'm going to be impolite for a moment.
I'll need your permission to be impolite Just for a moment.
It's easier to communicate if we just make that agreement.
I am very much against fat shaming.
So if what you hear next sounds like fat shaming, let me say as clearly as possible that's not what I'm doing.
I'm not cool with that at all.
I do think maybe society has some benefits in encouraging people to live a healthier lifestyle, but it's not my thing.
I'm not going to tell you what to eat.
Like, that's just your personal decision.
You know, I wish it didn't cost me more in healthcare.
Probably does. But it's still your personal decision.
That's the country we live in.
Alright, so that's my statement. Now, having said that, let me speak plainly in the vernacular of regular people.
Is this a fat problem?
Again, no disrespect meant to anybody.
But is it a fat problem?
Because... I told you yesterday, CNN showed a family that tragically all three of them died.
And CNN showed their photos and said they had no underlying conditions.
And I looked at the photos and said, I see underlying conditions there.
There is obviously a weight issue with the family.
Again, I'm not criticizing.
It's tragic what happened.
We're not minimizing the tragedy whatsoever.
And I'm not saying they brought it on themselves.
Nothing like that. I'm just saying, can't we talk honestly?
They're showing us the picture and basically lying to us while they're showing the picture.
No underlying conditions?
And all the experts are telling us that's an underlying condition.
So, I'm actually wondering, have we ever seen...
I think we have seen statistics of obese...
Patients and how they have a higher mortality.
That's correct, right?
You've seen data about obesity, but have you seen data that would take the entire weight spectrum into account?
In other words, let's say you're carrying 20 extra pounds as an adult.
Are you a little bit more at risk?
Because I don't really know.
Do you have to get all the way to obesity before you sort of fall off a ledge and then you're into the dangerous territory?
Or is it sort of You know, scaled.
Like, is every extra pound outside of the ideal BMI, does it give you a little bit of risk and then it gets much higher the higher your weight is?
Don't know. But I do know that nobody's telling us that.
I do know that.
Somebody says, are Chinese people obese on average?
I would say probably not.
Probably not. But they also seem to have it under control, don't they?
So I don't know what's going on in China, and this gets back to the fact that all of our data is bad.
So my first instinct was to say to you when somebody said, yeah, but what about China?
To say, well, that's a perfect example.
They don't have a big weight problem, and they got it under control.
But as soon as I said that, I said to myself, do I really know that?
I mean, I think I know that they don't have a giant weight problem, but But I don't know how under control it is.
I don't really know what's happening in China.
But on the surface, it looks like that's compatible.
Alright, so I made this statement out loud about maybe weight is the thing, and then I got the following criticism from a Dr.
Angela Rasmussen, who is a virologist.
I can say she is a virologist, Because I know that that is the correct pronoun because she put it in her profile.
So she's a she slash her.
So Dr.
Angela Rasmussen says to me on Twitter, maybe you should compare...
I'm sorry. No, she said to me on Twitter...
I swear I wrote it down.
She said to me on Twitter...
Oh, uh-uh-uh-uh...
Well, I just tried for 20 minutes this morning to copy a piece of text into my notes, and every time Twitter had a bug and it didn't work.
But the essence of it is that she mocked me for doing a thought experiment when I should be listening to the experts.
So she mocked me for being a cartoonist and saying something about health in public.
And I feel as though the public is getting a little testy.
Have you noticed people getting a little crabby?
Maybe a little quick to respond.
And Angela, Dr.
Angela Rasmussen, caught me in one of those moods in which I was not in the mood to be criticized.
And I may have gone at her a little bit hard.
And I did this.
So after she said that you shouldn't listen to a cartoonist I tweeted back and said, maybe you should compare my public health recommendations to the coronavirus experts so far, dipshit.
I'm winning by a landslide.
Your team is looking like twice eating shit lately.
So the funny part about it was that this expert happened to pick the only cartoonist who has a public track record of consistently being right when all of the public experts are wrong.
Now, if you're new to the Periscope, that sounds like a ridiculous claim.
If you've been watching for a while, I've gone through the list a number of times.
First one to call for the closing of travel from China, well before the president.
First one to say the mask story is bullshit, they're all lying to you.
Probably one of the first ones to say, hydroxychloroquine might not work, but it's certainly not going to be a bad risk management for people.
And sure enough, lots of countries are doing it.
I mean, you could go right down the list.
And either I didn't have an opinion, or it was correct, and the professionals were wrong.
I don't think I've been wrong yet.
At least on anything that I asserted as true.
So, weirdly and humorously, the expert Decides to dump on me on Twitter and finds out I'm literally the only non-expert who has consistently trounced the experts in this very field.
Just recently. In the last two months.
So, speaking of Krabby, I saw a tweet on Twitter that just made me laugh because it reminded me of my own response that I just told you about.
So, a troll goes after Emily Campagna, I can never pronounce her last name.
So you know her from Fox News.
She's often on The Five and other Fox News shows.
And this guy Tim on Twitter says, I don't know why he was even going after her, but he goes, your world is criminal justice?
He goes, please, you work for Fox Opinion.
So Emily tweets back to him this.
Actually, Tim, I'm in my 13th year of practice.
Criminal defense and a former GS-14 rank as an acting director in a top 10 federal agency.
I've spent more hours in prisons and within the systems than you can imagine.
So why don't you sit the fuck down and let the adults talk?
I think it's funnier because you didn't expect the F word to come out of her.
But it was sort of perfect.
I've been laughing about that all morning.
So every time somebody tries to dunk on somebody, they haven't done their homework.
All right. Let's talk about Flynn.
So Trump is cleverly politically...
Selling this as the biggest deal in the world, people should go to prison for 50 years, talking about the Obama administration unmasking of Flynn, and that being part of the whole Russia collusion hoax, etc.
So Trump and the Republicans are making it a story that the Obama administration spied on a political opponent, meaning the Trump campaign.
And that is literally what happened, meaning that they literally spied on On a political opponent.
That statement is beyond question.
What is in question is if that's the reason they did it, which, of course, is their defense.
So there's no question of what happened, at least the broad strokes, that there was unmasking, these people unmasked them, it happened then, etc., But they still would say, no, no, we had a different reason.
It wasn't about spying on the campaign.
It was about making sure there wasn't any Russia problems.
So the president, cleverly, because he's the biggest voice in politics, and he can make the story sort of move in whatever direction he pushes it, he's cleverly and appropriately, I would say appropriately within the context of politics, pushing it to be the biggest thing in the world, And the beauty of this is almost breathtaking.
Because what he's doing, what Rand Paul was doing yesterday, is they're turning this into the exact mirror image Of all the things that they were falsely accused of, which was the Ukrainian phone call and using the power of the government to go after a political opponent.
In the case of Ukraine, it was using the politics to investigate Biden's Ukrainian stuff.
So now that the facts have come out on the unmasking, Trump and the Republicans quite cleverly And accurately, I think.
I mean, it would be as fair as what they were saying.
It's just the complete reversal.
Now, the beauty of this is that at the same time that the Democrats have to argue that this is not a correct framing of what happened, that things happened for different reasons.
It's exactly what Trump was saying.
Trump was saying, Well, the reason we looked into it is it was a national security concern.
Ukraine, Burisma, Biden, national security concern.
Yes, yes, it was also, you know, it would have been how convenient that they're also my political enemy, but that's not the reason I did it.
And likewise, the Democrats are going to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we did spy on a political campaign, but that wasn't the reason we did it.
The reason we did it was all these important geopolitical considerations.
It's exactly the same.
If you're not appreciating the beauty of that symmetry, I don't know.
I don't know how you could miss it.
Sometimes the fake news, just in its randomness, every now and then will line up With this sort of perfect irony or perfect coincidence or perfect story.
This is just so perfect.
It's the exact mirror of what he got impeached for exactly as he's going into election.
This couldn't be any better politically.
And here's the other part of it.
So I was wondering why we have released the names of the people who asked for the unmasking But yet we're still waiting for the backup documents that each of them had to fill out to say why they had asked for the unmasking.
Have you asked yourself why you didn't see them at the same time?
Why did you see the list of people who asked for the unmasking, but were still waiting for the documents in which those same people said, this is why I want to see it?
Well, I don't know. It could be just the most normal, administrative, bureaucratic thing.
It could be that one department had this information and they were done.
The other one's taking longer.
It could be that one department has both, but one of them takes longer to vet.
Somebody had some questions, held it up a little bit.
Probably just normal reasons.
But let me just suggest this possibility.
Isn't it better to drip it out a little bit at a time?
If you happen to be the Republicans, you're Grinnell, you're, let's say you're Trump, and you've got a bushel basket of little stuff, and every one of these little releases is going to be a news cycle, do you let it out all at once?
No, you don't let it out all at once.
Because when we saw the names, we got to be outraged.
And when we see the, someday I assume we'll see the backup documents that said why they need access, and I think we're going to be all enraged again.
So he's going to get two weeks, at least, of coverage for a story that would have been a one-week story if they just dumped it and the news had to process it and get over it.
So if you remember during the Russia collusion story and also the Ukraine story, what was the phrase that CNN kept using?
You're going to love this. You know the phrase.
It goes like this.
Drip. Drip.
Drip. How many times did you see CNN say that all the news that was going to eventually get the president impeached, how many times did you say it just keeps coming?
Drip. Drip.
Drip. And then the tables turned.
And what is CNN saying now?
Because it looks like the Republicans are playing the drip strategy on them.
It looks like they're going to drip, drip, drip, and just drip the piss out of CNN and the Democrats.
Now, I don't know that that's an explicit strategy.
I do know it should be.
And I do know they're obviously smart enough.
It would be obvious enough.
If I had to guess, if I had to guess, I think they're getting a little bit of their drip, drip, drip right back, which amuses me on a level I can't even explain.
First of all, the fact that they don't brag about it, because I don't think you're going to hear anybody, Republicans, say, yeah, we gave them the drip, drip, drip.
But the fact that you can see it happening...
And you kind of suspect if you don't know what's happening.
And watching them use the same strategy that just tortured Republicans for three years and just take the gun out of the hand of the Democrats and use it against them.
Drip, drip, drip, motherfucker.
It is beautiful to watch.
So meanwhile, the Democrats have to sort of build a little wall around their artificial reality, their bubble reality.
Andrea Mitchell took a good try on it.
And one of the attempts that they're going to make is that this unmasking stuff is so common, there's no story here.
And it's so common because it happens a lot.
Nine, ten thousand times a year.
And it's so routine.
Totally routine, this unmasking.
And Andrea Mitchell tweeted,"...10,000 unmaskings last year, 17,000 in 2018.
Necessary and routine." Can people please stop trying to gaslight us?
When you hear the word gaslight, that's your tell for somebody building an artificial reality around there.
Well, well, well. Don't know what happened there.
A little hiccup. Periscope gave me a message that said I could just continue with the same Periscope when it was uninterrupted.
Looks like it worked. How about that?
Anyway, so Andrea Mitchell was building this bubble reality around their little world by saying that the accusations about all the unmasking is just gaslighting.
It's just gaslighting.
But here's the trick that she's doing.
If you didn't catch the trick, it's a good one.
It's a good trick. So she's framing it as normal, routine behavior, therefore there's nothing to see.
But here's what she's cleverly doing that's a little less obvious.
What's less obvious is that she's...
Ignoring the reason it was done.
It is true that it's routine to unmask, which is what she says.
So she's just sticking with this one truth.
It's routine to unmask.
We unmask.
Nothing to see. What she leaves out is the reason for the unmasking.
I see in the comments somebody is enjoying my show more than usual.
So good for you.
Keep it up. Um...
So that's her trick. She doesn't say the reason.
Now, so the alleged reason is for political reasons.
Of course, they're going to say it's for national security.
But that's how they're going to build their artificial reality over at CNN. They'll call it gaslighting.
They'll say it's routine.
And they will simply not answer the question of why it was done, which is the only real question.
So I've been trying to follow this story that the Flynn judge...
So as you know, I guess the prosecutor wants to drop the charges against Flynn for all the reasons that you know.
But the judge, this Emma Sullivan, issued, quote, an unusual order Wednesday.
I'll say it's unusual.
Appointing a law firm partner to present arguments in opposition to the government's motion to dismiss.
So in other words, the prosecutor and the defense have both agreed to That this should be let go.
And the judge, instead of doing the most normal thing in the world, is like, okay, even the prosecutor doesn't want to prosecute?
Well, okay. We're done here.
He decides he's going to create this process to retry the case, basically, without a jury.
Basically, it would just be this guy retrying the case or something.
I mean, not technically, but even the fact that there's any new person coming in at this point.
And I said to myself, well, I'm no lawyer.
I'm no legal expert.
Don't know that much about the courts.
Is this weird?
Or is this not weird?
And so I watched the people who actually know what they're doing.
You know, the Mike Cernovich's, people who have legal backgrounds, etc.
And I was kind of watching their guidance to see, is this normal?
And as far as I can tell, there's nothing normal about this.
Am I right? It looks like he's just making it up.
It appears that justice has been completely distorted because this judge is just finding a way to keep Flynn in jail.
Is that the judge's job?
To try to find a way to keep innocent people in jail?
Dershowitz agrees with you.
Yeah. It looks like It looks like this is a complete bullshit thing that he just sort of made up to keep a guy in jail.
Now, I don't know if it's any crime itself, but we have all these weird situations lately.
If you ask me, should Emmett Sullivan go to jail, I'd say yes.
I would say that based on what he just did to try to create a system out of nothing to send an innocent person to jail while he's in a position of authority and trust...
Is so bad that if it were a crime, and I'm sure it's not, but if it were on the books as a crime, I would say it should be a jailable offense.
So he's doing something in full view of the public that just by chance and the vagaries of history is not illegal.
But it ought to be.
Shouldn't it? Shouldn't this be really illegal?
Or at least banned or something.
So to watch somebody do something which I would say is as serious and as ethically empty as this, it should be a crime.
People should go to jail for something like this, and there will be no penalty.
You'll either get away with it or you won't.
No penalty. Now, the president, of course, has correctly and wisely said that Flynn will be fined.
So, in other words, the president will back him up with a pardon or whatever you need to do there.
But nobody wants to do that for political reasons, but it's there.
So Flynn will be fined.
Did you see the story about Senator Richard Burr, a prominent Republican who sold a lot of his stock on February 13th while he was getting all these confidential briefings about the coronavirus?
And so he's in trouble because it looks like he used his insider information about the coronavirus to save money by selling off his stocks.
And apparently his brother-in-law did the same thing, but Burr denies coordinating with him.
That part gets a little sticky.
Now, here's the thing.
If you see this story, you say to yourself, well, that's a slam dunk.
It's illegal to use your insider government information in this way.
He had insider government information.
The dates line up.
He traded right after he got the information.
Slam dunk, right?
Boom. No problem, right?
Wrong. This isn't even close to a crime, in my opinion.
I will now give you my legal opinion based on my absolutely no legal background.
It goes like this.
As long as there's also a perfectly legitimate reason for whatever you did, you're not going to jail.
Just in general.
As long as there's also a legitimate reason, you don't go to jail because people think you are using mentally the other reason.
They can only look at what you did.
And if what you did had plenty of public reasons, it doesn't matter if you also had some extra Extra information, because you still would have done it.
Why do I know that?
Because on this very day that Senator Richard Burr was selling all of his stocks, I too, without the benefit of any of his intelligence, was very close to selling all my stocks.
And it was because of public information.
It was, what, three weeks after I'd Two or three weeks after I'd called publicly for travel to be stopped from China, we knew what was happening in Wuhan.
It was obvious that it was going to get out.
It was already a big story.
So I was sitting here thinking, I might want to sell all of my stocks.
Now I didn't.
I decided not to.
But, Senator Richard Burr, I don't think he's going to go to jail.
I think he's got a lot of explaining to do, but it seems to me that as long as people like me were looking at public information, which he also had access to, and that was enough to make the same decision he made with the private information, I don't see him going to jail.
His brother-in-law's got some questions to answer, though.
I don't know about that.
So there's that. Paul Graham...
Famous investor, started Y Combinator.
He has a great Twitter feed.
He has lots of little good things.
He was saying that he told his eight-year-old, this is the advice to his eight-year-old, if you do creative work, try to avoid situations where people with less ability than you can tell you what to do or edit your work.
I thought, well, that's good advice.
You don't want people with less ability telling you how to fix your creative work.
But I tweeted back that I call this boss diversification, and it's good advice for you.
If you have the option, you want to have as many bosses as you can get.
Because if you have one boss, your life is controlled by one person who might not be stable, might not even like you.
What could be worse than having the biggest part of your life determined by this one boss who might not like you?
So you want to go for what I call boss diversification.
Which usually means working for yourself, which usually means having customers instead of a boss.
Your customers become your boss if you're an entrepreneur, but you've got lots of them.
So I can have several customers a day fire me and do.
Probably every single day somebody says, that's it.
That thing you said today is the last day I'll ever read Dilbert.
So I get fired about seven times a day.
That's just the ones I hear about.
I don't know how many times I don't hear about it.
But it doesn't matter. Because as long as there are more people becoming my boss, meaning my customers, they can fire me all day long.
But what they can't do is tell me how to change my work.
All right. I would like to end on a...
I don't know if this is a poem or just good prose, but it's written by Gordana Birnat.
Birnat. B-I-E-R-N-A-T. I wasn't familiar with her.
She's a blue check, so she's apparently done some things.
A writer. And she wrote this little...
I don't know what it is. Is it like a poem without rhymes?
You decide. So I just liked it so much I wanted to end today's Periscope on this thought.
It kind of ties into the idea of the simulation.
It ties into rethinking all of our priorities.
It ties into rebooting.
Because the coronavirus allowed us to just sort of pull back and just look at everything.
Look at who we are, how we relate to our world, what we want, what our dreams, our ambitions, what's the meaning of life.
You know, all these things we're thinking of.
And I thought Gordana summed it up well.
So let me just read it the way she wrote it on Twitter.
Growing up, we somehow become consumers of things.
Forgetting our original sole purpose as collectors of experiences.
Know this.
All you truly own is yourself.
Everything else is borrowed in the illusion of time and space.
