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May 16, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
34:10
Episode 977 Scott Adams: Ego Management, SPOX Level Absurd, Talent Stacks and Fun
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Hey, everybody. Come on in.
Did you ever have one of those days when all the little stuff just doesn't seem to work right?
Well, having one of those, but I'm going to be out of it soon.
Watch this. If that printer makes a noise now...
Print.
Print. Well, Let me tell you what kind of a day it's been.
Do you have these days where every little thing doesn't work?
I had this weird day where everything that was big and important worked really well today.
So on all the big parts of my life, sort of a crazy good day.
But every little thing didn't work.
Every device didn't work, didn't have a battery.
The printer's not working.
Neither computer is working.
I'm trying to print out some notes.
I was just having some popcorn with Christina, and it was like we popped this corn in this special little popper, and I'm really looking forward to it, and the popcorn goes on the floor.
And I'm thinking, it's one of those days, but it won't last.
Have you noticed that you have those days when you are not relaxed?
So watch this correlation.
This will be the freakiest thing you've ever heard, right?
Now right now when you hear it, it won't be freaky when you first hear it, maybe.
But eventually, you're going to have a moment when you think back to it, and it's going to go like this.
When your environment is not conforming to you, you know, every little thing doesn't work, is out of place, is just off one, it's out of paper, the battery's gone, the car's out of gas, and it all hits at once.
It always happens when you're in a certain frame of mind.
And that frame of mind is if you're tense.
When you're tense, everything goes wrong.
Now ask yourself this after you've watched it for a few years.
This will take a few years to sink in.
After you've watched it for a few years, ask yourself if you're making it happen.
Now when I say make it happen, I don't necessarily mean at the real level of reality.
But maybe the bubble that you put around yourself can either be a happy one or not happy.
Maybe you just always have the same amount of problems that you just don't notice.
Have you ever noticed that? You have the same amount of problems, but sometimes that don't bother you.
Sometimes you just put paper in the printer.
Sometimes you just put gas in the car.
Go on with your day.
So ask yourself, how much of it are you bringing on yourself?
Alright, we've got a bunch of cool things to talk about.
How many of you saw my obnoxious posting that I just did?
Let's put something in front of this light.
There we go. Much better.
So I posted a picture of Snickers on Twitter.
And there's more to the story.
So that's the fun part.
It'll lead into something else.
So the picture shows me reaching down to pet Snickers.
You may have seen that there was sort of a big reaction to it.
And of course, that was somewhat planned.
So there were two elements of this picture, besides Snickers, who's popular.
There are two elements of it that tell a story.
One is that people quite rightly said, hey, are you really showing that because your arm looks muscular in the picture?
And the answer is, yes.
The second part of that is, hey, Are you sort of humble bragging because you have an elevator in your house and you took the picture in the elevator?
And the answer is, I didn't really think about that.
That was just where the lighting was good.
But I didn't think it was a problem.
Now here's what you want to learn from this.
If you want to build a following on Twitter, or if you're in some creative world, or even if you're in the business world, the person who stands out This is the one who gets all the attention.
Let me tie this to another point about ego.
Now, knowing that I would be mocked for putting that there, was it worth it?
Because I knew that people would say, hey, you arrogant, whatever, are you just bragging because you were working out during the coronavirus?
Since I knew that it would be that kind of reaction, and the trolls would be all over me, and they'd mock me, and they'd say bad things about my fiancé, everything that actually happened, and of course I knew that would happen.
Why'd I do it? So why'd I do it if I knew I was going to get people worked up?
And people would be a little jealous that I have an elevator, and they might think you're so arrogant.
And the answer is...
The answer is because it works.
It's a little bit of wrong.
So, Dr.
Carmen Simon, I talk about her sometimes.
She's an expert on memory.
If you want somebody to remember you, or to remember your PowerPoint slides, or to remember anything about you, or to remember your product, to remember just anything, the only way to do that is novelty.
And the best kind of novelty is when somebody processes something as a little bit wrong, but not so wrong that you have to do something about it.
So when people saw that picture, it was very much designed so that people would say, this is bothering me a little bit, and I don't know why.
I don't know that this was really appropriate for him to do that.
Is he trying to make me think that he's showing the muscle, or is he Trying to make me think that it's accidental.
So I created a situation with this picture, entirely intentionally, in which you would have many questions.
And it just, you know, brings energy my way.
Now, there are three people that I want you to consider.
And I'm going to give you a strange thought.
One is me. One is President Trump, and the other is Mike Cernovich.
I like using Mike for lots of examples.
He fits into lots of examples for some reason.
If you were to think of the three of us, what qualities would you imagine we have in common?
Now, I'm not looking for compliments like blah blah.
I'm looking for a negative quality.
What seemingly negative quality would be common to me, President Trump and Mike Cernovich.
Now, no positive qualities.
Obnoxious. Good.
You're going in the right direction.
Ego. Arrogance.
Brag a lot. Good.
Abrasive. Bragging.
Braggarts. Ego.
Cocky. That's the word I was looking for.
So all of those words are in that same general.
Alright, so I guess I shouldn't have been worried that you wouldn't know what I was talking about.
I guess I didn't have to worry that you wouldn't know what we had in common.
Alright, here's the kicker.
I would propose to you that when you look at the three of us, or individually, and you say...
There's a show-off.
There's somebody who has an ego problem.
Or there's something wrong with their ego.
Or they need to feed their ego.
Or they have thin skin.
I would suggest to you that it is exactly the opposite.
And that what the three of us really have in common is we can do any fucking thing in the world right in front of you and we don't care.
That's what we have in common.
And that is exactly the opposite of Of an ego.
An ego would have prevented you from doing the picture I just talked about.
Because you would have said to yourself, oh, somebody's going to think I'm kind of a douche.
Did that stop me?
It did not. It did not.
Because I wasn't worried about what anybody thought of me.
Because it's not an ego thing.
So I would say that Trump and Cernovich and I operate on almost an energy level, which is if you can move energy where you want it, that's all you need it to do.
If you're worried about the details, you're worried about the wrong stuff.
And that when you see somebody who can embarrass themselves in front of you, time after time after time, do you think that Trump is worried about being embarrassed?
I mean, he does more things that bring him more scorn and criticism than anybody you've ever seen in your entire life.
He seems to be able to brush it off.
Now you say to yourself, but Scott, there is so much reporting that President Trump is thin-skinned, and it really gets in his head when he gets criticized.
He's really angry and stuff.
Really? Who is it who's inside his head who knows that?
Let me give you an alternate explanation for everything you see with Trump.
He's competitive.
Explains every observation.
If you're competitive and you have a bad day, let's say the bad day is you had bad headlines, so the news didn't go your way.
If you're simply competitive, how do you feel about it?
Pretty worked up.
You might swear, you might get angry, you might raise your game, it might be part of building yourself up to perform better.
But a competitor gets angry about being behind on the score.
Is that ego?
Is it ego to be competitive and say, alright, but this is the game.
If we're all competitive, then you have capitalism.
If we're all competitive, you have a democratic system.
There's nothing wrong with being competitive.
I even tell the leaders of other countries, you should be competitive, because I'm going to be competitive.
So, if you listen to the way Trump talks about competition, it's very clear that he sees things as competition, which is a very different model than, my ego has been damaged, my God, I'm thin-skinned, I must lash out.
That's just the CNN, MSNBC, you know, baloney story.
So I would suggest to you that being able to take a great deal of criticism is sort of a superpower.
And that I am fully aware that some, I don't know, large percentage of the people watching this just got really turned off by me.
Does it matter? No.
Because I would prefer, especially since this is an entertainment medium, that whatever energy that created, I prefer the energy.
So, few people loved it, right?
I'll bet a few of you loved it when you heard me twist the ego thing around to just competition.
Some of you said, oh, that's not for me.
I don't get this guy.
Totally good trade-off, because I'll always take the positive energy, let the negative energy go elsewhere.
Let me talk about some people who are really getting the talent stack thing right lately.
If you're not watching Dan Bongino this week, oh my god, you're missing the show.
So, Dan Bongino, of course, I would say one of, if not the most capable person for explaining everything about the legalities and the ins and outs of the Obamagate, Russia collusion, etc.
But because you've But because events have gone his way, it's especially good.
And today, I saw it today, I don't know if it, I think it ran today.
I won't give away his latest thing, but he sounded discrepancy in this whole unmasking thing that you have to hear.
Now, he doesn't yet have, nor does anybody, I think, have the direct evidence, like the thing.
But man, he's so close.
He's so close that he can see it and smell it.
And he's sort of a predator.
I think some people are just predators.
And because he's so close to his prey that he's been basically stalking this prey for, what, three years or something?
And you can see his eyes are gigantic because he's almost there.
He's almost there.
Anyway, what I want to say is Dan Bongino...
It impresses me on a whole bunch of levels, but the main one is that it's clear from just observation, I think you'll agree with this, that he's built a talent stack that's ridiculous.
Because he isn't just good on TV, he's obviously into fitness and stuff, so he keeps his energy high, he knows how to be fit, it gives him charisma, gives him everything you need on TV. You can see he's learning politics.
He's added that on top of his analysis of police enforcement and how the government works and stuff.
He's just watching and layering.
He's just layering skill on top of skill.
And you can just see him doing it in real time.
And I just go, well, that's exactly how you do it.
Like, if you want to be...
Something in this world, and I take it he does, you say to yourself, what's it cost?
I've told you this before, the best advice you'll ever get, something I heard from some rich guy, I can't remember his name, he said that if you want to be successful, find out the price, and then pay it.
Now you think to yourself, well, can it be that easy?
No, the hard part is paying it.
That's the hard part. It's easy to know what to do, The hard part's doing it.
But apparently Dan Bongino can do it.
Because it doesn't seem to be too hard for him to just keep building those skills on top of skills on top of skills.
So it's just a pleasure to watch, honestly.
Now if you were to pick, if you were to say, what was the one thing that Dan Bongino does better than anybody else?
That's the magic. Nothing.
The magic is nothing.
But you put together that combination...
And who could do the show that he did today?
Maybe nobody.
Maybe nobody. I mean, Hannity's got an incredible talent stack as well.
But he's sort of a little different vibe.
So he found a way to make himself special, make himself provocative, build skills, bam.
Let's talk about Kayleigh McEnany.
Kayleigh McEnany. I can never remember her name.
She's got one of those names that sounds too much like other things that I have to really go through my categorization in my head where I store names.
I go, oh, that's one of those.
That's one of those, but spelled different.
Which box did I put that in?
And then I have to reassemble her name every time I try to think of her.
So she should change her name.
That's my advice. So, is it my imagination?
Or is she just next level?
Am I right? Have you watched her first several appearances?
Now, I don't think Trump has ever made a better hire than that.
It took him a while to narrow down.
By the way, I thought all of his prior press secretaries were great.
Sarah Sanders, great.
I thought they were all great. I didn't have a problem with any of them.
But she's a little bit next level.
And I was trying to figure out exactly why, and I think it comes back to the talent stack.
Because if you're trying to look for that one thing that she has, again, I don't know.
I don't think there's one thing that she's the best at.
But man, did she put together a package of individual talents.
The one I haven't seen before is she has some kind of level of super...
Preparation and organization.
So she's got some kind of a, I don't know, a book of talking points or something.
Except instead of being dumb talking points, it's like kill shot after kill shot.
Like normally they have just talking points.
Well, the president sure loves the country.
He loves the country. Yes, he does.
And anything you say that says the president doesn't love the country, well, that's the fake news because he loves the country.
You know, it's just... You just think it's a bunch of nothing?
But I feel like every word that comes out of her mouth lands like a dagger.
That's not the sound of a dagger, but I sort of combined an angry cat and a dagger.
So if you imagine a dagger that sounds like an angry...
Forget it. But the point is...
And I was also looking for technique.
So aside from the fact that she's so organized, that when...
You can see the question is asked, and you see this twinkle in her eye, and then she turns the page, and you know what's coming.
She's created a pattern now.
I swear that I think the reporters get afraid when they see this.
I'll try to, for those of you watching on video, I'll try to do it.
She'll be there waiting for the question.
Yeah, just smiling. And then she'll hear the question, and she'll know it's one of the ones that she's got five zingers for in her prepared book.
And you see this. This is just a little smile.
And then she looks down at her book.
She turns one page.
And that's the funny part. She never turns two pages.
She's always one page away from five kill shots.
And she just looks at you and she goes...
And then she looks down and you know it's going to be five minutes of pain for the press.
Because she's just slaughtering them.
It's just not even fair.
And... And the thing that...
What was the thing she did today?
Oh, the thing that she did today was brilliant was...
So, of course, Trump gets blamed for not being prepared enough.
And, you know, gosh darn, the Obama administration left a whole detailed plan of what to do in a pandemic.
And it's all chaos and, you know, blah, blah, blah.
So Kayleigh McEnany goes out there.
And instead of doing this, which you'd expect...
What you'd expect is, she'd say, no, we did pretty well.
We actually performed well.
Look at our ventilators.
Like, that's the normal thing, right?
You'd just say, no, it wasn't that chaotic.
We did really well.
Here's several examples.
No, she doesn't do that.
She says, yeah, we cleaned up Obama's mess.
What? What?
She completely reframes it to them cleaning up his mess.
Now, if that's all she'd said, without being able to back it up, I would have said, alright, that's just sort of a clever framing.
It's not that clever, right?
It's just that. But she backs it up with this.
She talks about the supply chain.
Now, that's strong, because the supply chain basically was the whole problem.
Not only was it the problem getting the PPE and the meds and everything else, But it highlighted a problem with China, just the whole China relationship.
So, you know, Obama not only was behind whatever was not good about the China relationship, according to the Trump administration, but also clearly the bad guy in terms of the supply chain and our inability to get what we needed.
So instead of just defending Obama, That, oh, it wasn't that chaotic.
We got you all kinds of ventilators and stuff.
You know, everything was fine.
She goes, full out, we had to clean up Obama's mess.
And then when you think you can't possibly support a claim that outrageous, she says, look at the supply chain, and you go, yeah, that was bigger than everything else.
If you added up everything that the Trump administration did wrong, if you took it all, added it all up and multiplied it by 10, It doesn't really come close to equaling the massive fuck-up of the supply chain being in China.
I mean, there's nothing that's really sort of like that.
That's fundamental.
So the fact that nobody had been able to pull that framing out yet until she popped it out.
So this is what...
Here's the bottom line. Generally, when...
The Press Secretary for the President makes news.
Isn't it usually the reporter who's making news?
Right? Because the reporter gets the trick question in, and then there's the awkward answer, or the non-answer, and then the reporter does their little star turn and everything.
So, the press, the whole press event is supposed to be, according to the reporters, an event for them to shine.
And somehow Kayleigh McEnany has turned it into an event for her to slaughter them on camera while we're all watching.
I mean, she's basically turned that whole audience into a wet market.
I hope I'm the first person who ever said that because I'm pretty proud of that.
Anyway, so the president has made two incredible hires recently.
One is, you know, Grinnell, Ambassador Grinnell.
As the acting DNI, and the other is his new Spox.
So he's really on a roll for some of that stuff.
Let me ask you, do you believe...
I talked this morning about Sorrento Therapeutics saying that they have literally a cure for coronavirus.
And my thinking at the time, I explained this morning, was...
No CEO of a company that recently turned down a billion dollar offer, so must be something to the company, no CEO in that position would tell such a bold lie to the public and basically risk everything, unless he thought it was true.
But you should do your homework on that company because let's just say I don't own that stock anymore.
Now it's not because I have any specific reason to distrust them, but after owning the stock for a few hours and looking at it go up, I said to myself, do I want this free money which is laying on this table, or do I want to find out in a few weeks that this wasn't quite what I thought it was?
Because if you were to look at the big picture and say, okay, how often are things not the way you think that they should be?
Or they don't turn out the way that you hope?
Well, that's most of the time, isn't it?
Sort of most of the time things don't work out right.
So anyway, I got out of that stock.
Don't take any advice from me on financial stuff.
I'm just giving you full disclosure because I mentioned it this morning.
I think it would be fair to say that.
What do you think about these Trump vaccines and they're going to deliver them with the military?
They got a great name, Project Warp Speed.
Here's the thing I like best about the plan.
I do like that it's sort of a Manhattan Project for vaccines, because doesn't that feel right?
Hasn't everybody been saying since the beginning, whenever there's a crisis, somebody says, well, let's do a Manhattan Project of something.
I'm sure there's a Manhattan Project that will fix everything.
And there's something about knowing there's a Manhattan Project that makes you feel like you're getting some progress, right?
So Trump does this Manhattan Project called Project Warp Speed where the government is really going to go in and make sure that the vaccines are produced in volume even before they know they're tested and they work.
So pretty impressive.
But here's the best part. The best part is that the president has, if this works, you know, and I'm a little skeptical that we'll have any kind of a working vaccine that quickly, but let's say it does.
If it does, what he's got lined up is that the military, in his words, is going to use every plane and truck and, I don't know, boat or whatever, to deliver it.
So he's got the military lined up to just, like, blanket the country with the vaccine.
Now, there are probably other ways to deliver a vaccine, wouldn't you say?
Probably other ways to do that.
Like, FedEx can get it to you tomorrow, can't they?
I mean, it can't be that hard to deliver a lot of vaccine with just our normal existing things.
But, yeah, you're ahead of me.
You're ahead of me. What does the country need more than that?
Like, what would be cooler than the military delivering the frickin' vaccines?
I don't care what that costs.
Like, you know, that's the sort of thing where I'd say to myself, shouldn't we price that out?
Because, you know, FedEx is pretty reasonable too.
But in this case, no.
No. We should not price that out.
The military needs to deliver this.
It's just so perfect. It's just so perfect.
I don't know what they think of it.
If they don't like it, then I'll change my mind, but...
I do love that visual.
And it's good for the country. Just good for the country.
Suicide is down in Japan.
Remember I predicted what I call the Sherrill theory, you know, Sherrill's law, that when there's anything that's just a big change, people will pause what they were going to do anyway.
And I thought that if the lockdown was brief, you might actually see a reduction in suicide.
Obviously, the longer it goes, that's going to reverse.
And I'm sure we've gone long enough now that there's probably a crossover point.
We're probably past it, unfortunately.
But in Japan, suicides went down.
And I think I'm the only person who predicted it was even possible.
So we'll see if that holds in the United States.
There's too many things that are different, but it would be worth looking at.
So... I was thinking of zooming instead of periscoping.
I think I can do that, right?
I think I can zoom and it still goes to periscope?
I have to look into that.
Because what I want to do is some split window stuff.
I'm not sure if we're there yet.
All right. Those were the comments I was planning to make.
And what do I think of the LA mayor?
You know, I don't think he's killing it.
I don't think he's killing it.
You know, I don't live in Southern California, so I'm not close to that situation.
Anybody have any questions?
Anything else you'd like to...
Oh, I'm sorry.
I promised you something and I didn't deliver.
So let me deliver.
I promised to tell you why in a tweet I said that tonight I would tell you why even ugly musicians have groupies.
Now the obvious answer why an ugly, let's say an ugly male musician just to keep the visual.
Now obviously they might be successful and rich and talented and those things would appeal to people but there's something else I figured out in the process of playing drums.
Now, I've talked to you a lot about how when you add talents to your talent stack, sometimes the talents will have some weird intersection that opens up a door.
And you can see something, clearly, that you wouldn't have seen if you had one talent or the other.
But when you mash them together, it's like, oh, you put these two together.
What am I seeing? And the two that I put together, intentionally, is, you know, I know persuasion.
And I know what persuades.
And one of the big elements of persuasion, one of the biggest by far, is pacing and leading.
Pacing meaning matching your bodily rhythms, your breathing, your motion, your posture, matching you in any way, matching the way you talk.
So you pace somebody that way, just match them, and then they more easily can be influenced because once they get comfortable with your same rhythm, Then you can sort of lead them.
That's the pacing and leading.
And that's what music is.
So music basically is the musician is pacing the audience until he can lead.
And once he can lead, well, your defenses are down.
And the groupies are coming.
So my insight here, and obviously it does make a difference that they're famous and talented and whatever, so those things are attractive as well.
But I'm pretty sure that there's something about the music itself that makes musicians uniquely attractive to people because they've been paced.
Now here's the trick.
It's the same problem with hypnosis as it is with music.
You have to first match people.
But how do you match All kinds of different people who are in different moods and different modes.
Well, the beauty of it is that now we have music that people self-select.
So people are selecting music that already matches their mood, or maybe one that they want to get into.
So people are already pacing with the music.
They do that themselves.
And if you were, let's say, a DJ, And you're reading the crowd, you would want to start out with what kind of music feels like the mood of the crowd.
If you can hit it, then you can take them to the next level.
So the DJ is trying to match you with your rhythms and your beats and your moods and the vibe, and then once you've been matched, then he can take you to a higher level, and that's a successful show.
That was an insight that I would not have had, except for the marriage of the fact that I'm learning drums now, and when I'm feeling the beat and the pattern, I'm thinking to myself, hey, this is just persuasion.
It's all just pacing and leading.
And it's clear when you've studied persuasion.
You should do group hypnosis, somebody says.
You know, it doesn't work as well.
It does... You can do a little bit, but because everybody's in a different place, hypnotizing a group is kind of hard.
The only thing you can do that works is relaxation, I would say.
You can get a group to relax all at the same time.
Do I have musical rhythm?
I'm trying to find that out.
I would say there's no indication of it.
There's no indication that I have rhythm.
But when I use my metronome, and if I pay attention...
I can match it perfectly, but how hard is that?
I mean, everybody can do that, I think.
Somebody says, I'm stuck on the toilet.
Can you help? I can.
So what you want to do is make sure you've got a nice seal, and then flush, and that'll cause a suction action that, once it reverses, will cause higher pressure pop you right off.
Well, it's worth a try. Someone was saying Starbucks is not taking cash.
I would imagine that's true.
I can't imagine anybody will be taking cash pretty soon.
Do I dance like Elaine?
Pretty much. Do I know Anthony Cools?
I do not. Is Elon Musk a master persuader?
Totally. Yeah, he's his own thing.
I don't think that he would conform to a lot of A lot of the base technique that I talk about.
But he's operating on another level.
The military will deliver the kill shot.
Yes.
Very good. I'll give you credit for that.
Alright, that's all we've got for now.
I'm going to go do something else.
And I hope that you have an amazing, amazing day.
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