Episode 988 Scott Adams: Things Getting Back to Normal Because the News is About Racism Again. Normal Might be Overrated.
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Jeffrey Shaman ProPublica article on COVID-19
Volkswagen ad
Kamala Harris resolution, "Chinese virus" is racist
Howard Stern hates Trump supporters...is that racist?
Stacy Abrams, black women and Democrat party
Facebook censored coronavirus information and protests
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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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Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
I can feel racism declining everywhere in the country.
I think it's the caffeine.
I think so. Well, I tell you, there's nothing better news than seeing things get back to normal, am I right?
And by getting back to normal, I mean the news is now full of stories about racism, fake racism, allegations of racism, People defending themselves against racism and policies that are racist.
Once you see the headlines look like that, on CNN mostly, back to normal.
Apparently there's nothing else happening.
But there are a few other stories which I shall talk about.
So ProPublica, which is a publication, they've got a story talking about how If the United States had locked down sooner, let's say if the country had locked down two weeks earlier than it did, it could have prevented 84% of the deaths and 82% of the cases.
This was said by a research team led by epidemiologist Jeffrey Shaman.
So to Jeffrey Shaman and his team of epidemiologists, oh, this would be a good time To ask your children to leave the room.
If we could. Or turn down your sound a little bit.
Maybe put on some headphones.
Because Jeffrey Shaman is not making me happy right now.
And sometimes, when I'm not happy, I will use inappropriate language.
I feel that moment is approaching.
So you've been warned.
So according to the team led by epidemiologist Jeffrey Shaman, if we had locked down two weeks early, we could have prevented 84% of our deaths.
To which I say to Jeffrey Shaman, fuck you, you fucking asshole.
You fucking stupid fucking asshole.
Did the best we could.
Did the best we could.
Where were you? Where were you when it was time to lock down with your fucking stupid model?
Thanks for coming after the crisis.
To stab the wounded, you fucking useless piece of shit.
This is the analysis we don't need.
We don't need you bayonetting the fucking citizens while we're still alive.
Can you let us just work through the fucking crisis without blaming people for making decisions they couldn't possibly have fucking gotten right every time?
50 fucking states with 50 fucking different situations.
Do you think anybody knew what to do?
Nobody knew what to do.
Don't give us your fucking after-the-fact bullshit.
You weren't there. You weren't a leader.
You didn't have to make any fucking decisions, Jeffrey fucking Shaman.
In other news, a separate analysis has shown that, let's see, I thought I wrote a separate analysis has shown that, let's see, I thought I wrote
In a separate analysis, there's another model too that says that if New York had shut down sooner, blah blah blah blah, I'll tell you, I don't have Any patience for the 2020 hindsight.
Those are the biggest useless motherfucking pieces of shit in this country.
Anybody who's here just to stab the people who did the best they could.
There wasn't anybody on the other side.
Everybody in the United States was trying the best they could.
That's it. We did the best we could.
Anyway, so apparently Sweden has taken the throne for the most deaths per thousand.
We don't know if that'll last, and obviously that's just a recent number.
If you look historically, they were not number one.
But now they're up to, Sweden has a little over six deaths per million inhabitants, inhabitants per day, on a rolling seven-day average.
Who knows if that keeps changing?
I would say that almost all of our data about coronavirus is sort of not credible.
So I wouldn't take any of it too seriously.
But it does tell you that leadership doesn't matter.
I keep saying that. That when this is all done, the countries are going to be sufficiently different.
There's enough difference going on in each country that I don't know if we'll ever know what made a difference.
I really don't. Because there's this one fact that I just can't get out of my head that I heard this one epidemiologist expert talk about.
And he said that we don't know why viruses ever burn out.
To which I said, what?
Really? We don't know the most basic thing, which is why any virus ever burns out?
Now, I think it's probably a combination of smaller things, right?
You get a little bit of herd immunity, but that's not the whole answer.
Maybe there's something about the temperature, the weather, people change behavior, something.
Maybe the virus mutates.
Maybe there's something about some individuals who are more susceptible, and once you've gotten all of those, that's effectively herd instinct because the other ones weren't going to get it anyway.
It's some kind of mysterious soup.
But the fact that we've gone this far into it, and we don't know even what stops the virus, is just mind-boggling to me.
Let's talk about the printing all the money.
So, I have a little rule, sort of a rule of thumb, which is, and I think you'll agree with this, it's probably not 100% effective, but it's pretty darn reliable, and it goes like this.
If somebody can't explain something to you simply, It's because they don't understand it.
So you'll see that rule works pretty effectively.
If you cannot simplify your argument to the point where I could understand it, it's because you don't understand it.
Because I could certainly, I'm capable of understanding a simplification, but if you're not capable of making one, it means probably you don't understand your topic.
Here's the perfect example.
When everybody's talking about the money supply, And I would ask the question you've been hearing me asking now for a few months.
What's the downside of just printing trillions of dollars?
And your brain immediately says, well, obviously the downside is, and then you can't finish the sentence.
Because you say, uh, because we owe too much money?
And then I say, well, we're not, we're just printing it.
We're not borrowing it.
We're just printing it digitally, but we're printing it.
And then you say, well, inflation.
And then I say, eh, can't have inflation because demand is too low.
The economy got whacked too hard.
Nobody's going to raise their prices.
They might lower them to get some more demand, but it's going to be a long time before it raises any prices.
And then you say, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's okay for now, but when the economy gets back on its feet...
Then there's too much money sloshing around.
So it's a problem for later, and it's very quantitative.
I mean, you could just measure it.
It's like this much extra money, economy gets up to speed, that much extra money causes all the inflation.
Pretty objective, wouldn't you say?
So let me see if I can explain it as somebody did today to me on the Locals platform.
It was the best explanation I've seen.
It goes like this. That the economy could be thought of as the money supply, literally how many dollars there are, multiplied times something economists call velocity.
Now, in economic terms, velocity is just how quickly the dollar is going through the economy.
You know, I buy something, then the person I bought it from quickly buys something, then they buy something.
So velocity is how quickly things are going through the economy.
So if you've got a high speed, and you've also got a lot of dollars, you've got a big economy.
Because lots of dollars times lots of speed is a big number.
So taking those two variables, simplifying it to just how much there is and how much is moving, you can change one of them as long as the other one is somewhat compensating.
So you can add lots of dollars so long as the velocity goes down or stays the same.
So would the velocity go up?
And here was an insight that somebody made, and I thought, that's pretty good, because there's a big unexplained part of this where my brain can't quite figure out what's going to happen a few years down the road, and I'm not sure anybody can, actually.
And it goes like this.
All of that extra money, if it stayed in circulation, at the same time the extra activity created the velocity to be higher, you would get inflation.
But rich people...
Don't necessarily circulate their money.
Sometimes they just sit on it.
So we have enough rich people, they could actually just absorb the extra cash and just take it out of the velocity equation.
Because they don't have to spend it.
They have what they need.
So the weird thing about this economic hit is that it hit half of the country, I'm just You know, throwing out approximate numbers, right?
Just making this up. But half of the country got whacked hard.
But generally speaking, it was the half of the country that didn't have much money to begin with.
It was the lower income wage earners.
The top half of the country actually got richer.
I know. It's not fair, it's not good, whatever.
But it is true that a whole bunch of people kept getting paid and didn't have any expenses for a few months.
They just got richer.
So we've never seen this situation, where half the country got richer at exactly the same time half the country lost everything.
I mean, when have we seen that?
So we at least have the possibility that the rich half of the country becomes like a regulator for the economy.
Remember, there are two variables that need to be tweaked.
How much cash, and then the velocity.
So the government is going to determine how many dollars there are, and they've done that.
They've printed a whole bunch of new ones.
So there's more of that.
At the same time, because inflation is slow, the half of the country with money can be like the regulator of the country working like a psychological engine Managed by the President of the United States and his optimism, essentially.
Because he's going to say, hey, things are good.
Spend some money. And then it's going to be good.
Because we've got a bunch of extra money.
We don't have enough velocity.
So the people who still have money, they spend.
They get the velocity up.
So now we've got the velocity up.
We've got all this extra cash.
Suddenly the GDP recovers a lot faster than you thought.
But then what? Then what?
If you keep going, you could overshoot the mark.
Then you've got too much cash and too much velocity.
Then you've got inflation.
But the rich people, again, the half of the country that's got the money, can pull back.
Now, would they?
I don't know. But it's interesting that they could.
They could literally just spend less.
Let's say your problem was, I don't know, 5% or 10% inflation.
That's what you're worried about.
If the rich people simply pulled back 5 or 10%, I don't think that math works quite, but there's some number that they could pull back just voluntarily, just because they wanted to.
And it wouldn't have any impact on their life, because at 10% less spending for rich people is immaterial.
And we could sort of just regulate this thing so that as the economy grows progressively, It eventually absorbs all that extra cash.
Boom. So here's the thing.
Is it mathematically possible?
Is it physically possible because of the laws of physics, the laws of math, the laws of the land, the way capitalism works?
If you take into account all of the forces, can we print trillions of dollars and still come out of this fine?
And I think the answer is yes.
I think the answer is yes.
Right? I don't know if I'm missing something, but it looks like the answer is yes.
But only because of this very specific situation.
And I've got to say...
I'm impressed that Mnuchin and the people making the high-end decisions, it could be that they just didn't have any choice, I suppose you could say that.
But it looks like they did exactly the right thing in terms of tweaking the economy.
It looks like it. So that's the good news.
Here's the funniest story of the day.
So we'll get into the racism theme now.
And I mean this seriously.
When the news, let's say on the left anyway, turns to non-stop stories about alleged and actual racism, you know that things are looking better, right?
Things are looking up if that's what we're talking about.
And sure enough, CNN's page is a whole bunch of racism stories.
So here's the funniest one.
If racism can be funny?
Sometimes it can.
Come on. Line up.
It's not always not funny.
In this case, Volkswagen accidentally did a racist advertisement.
Okay, that's funny.
Come on. Nobody's saying anything bad.
It's just funny that Volkswagen accidentally made a racist ad.
Now, I didn't see the ad, but it's described this way.
Let's see. You won't even believe this.
Like, I swear this is actually real.
Volkswagen had this ad.
I don't think it ran in the United States.
It must have been a German ad. It showed an outsized white hand pushing a black man away from a parked VW Golf before flicking him into a restaurant called Petite Colon, which translates from French as the little colonist or little settler.
Now, how many people in Germany Saw the commercial and saw the big hand coming down, the big white hand, and flicking a tiny character of a black character of the commercial into a restaurant called The Little Settler.
No flags were raised.
Do you know how many people see anything in a corporation?
In a corporation, there's rooms full of people.
Of all of those rooms full of people, there wasn't one person who said, I don't know.
This doesn't look quite right to me.
Not one person?
Let me make a guess on what happened.
This is just a guess, okay?
I'm guessing that a lot of people saw it as a script.
So they saw it written down and it said, there's a character here, there's a character here, and it didn't specify what they looked like or that they were white or black.
Because why would you even specify that?
I mean, who would write a script for a commercial that actually specified the ethnicity?
Like, unless that was the point of it, which it wasn't.
So I think the commercial was written as just a generic commercial and it didn't matter what characters you put in there.
They were probably just men. And then, whoever was casting the commercial said, you know, you know what would be good would be diversity.
This commercial needs a little diversity.
But we already filmed the part with the giant hand.
Now we need to film the second part that we'll put together with CGI. So we need just a guy who's just walking down the sidewalk.
Oh, I know. Why don't we be inclusive?
And we'll make sure that we show some diversity here.
So the other character in it, since one character is white, we'll make the other one black.
I was going to say African-American, but this is Germany we're talking about.
So it's a black character.
And probably the person who cast the commercial was the opposite of racist.
Was probably just saying, all right, we've got all these people.
Let's put some diversity in there.
Just guessing. I'm just guessing.
That whoever cast the commercial was just on a whole different wavelength and was literally trying to do the right thing as they saw it.
But then there's this whole time between when the commercial got shot to when other people in Volkswagen saw it.
Was there no point at which it was...
Sort of previewed to the management, because that would be the typical way to do it.
Almost always. You would preview your commercial to management before it ever got on TV. And was there no point at which management sat there and watched that commercial and said to themselves, Are you sure you cast this right?
Because this might get us in a little trouble.
Now the funniest part of the whole story is that when it came out, And Volkswagen was roundly criticized for it.
Volkswagen's response was, we made a racist commercial.
They didn't say, I don't know if this is to their credit or not.
You can decide. But what they didn't say is, oh my god, we didn't mean it that way.
It's a complete accident.
We sure hope you didn't take it that way.
We were just trying to put some diversity into it.
Didn't occur to us, but now we see it too.
Nothing like that. They just went straight at it and said, we made a racist commercial.
No excuse. And I thought to myself, that's weirdly refreshing, isn't it?
You know, you almost want to hear an excuse, because you'd like to know it was an accident, right?
Wouldn't you like to know it's an accident?
But there's something noble, there's something I can respect about the fact that they left out the excuse.
You kind of have to appreciate that, don't you?
Because they easily could have put it an excuse.
They could have said, you know, it was Bob.
Bob meant well.
We see how it came out, but, you know, sorry, Bob's not a racist.
We just didn't see it that way.
We don't see color. That's why we missed it.
There's so many ways Volkswagen could have weaseled out of this.
And keep in mind that they're still suffering from the fact that Volkswagen was associated with, you know, the Nazi regime.
Literally. So they've got a little reputational baggage there, if you could call being associated with Nazi Germany, baggage.
And instead of making any excuses, they just said, we made a racist commercial.
We don't even know how it happened.
Boom. Sorry about that.
I like the directness.
In racist story number two, Kamala Harris has introduced resolution.
Condemning the phrase Chinese virus as racist.
Because, you know, when you've got a pandemic, you've got to take care of the priorities.
And this was a pretty big priority, wasn't it?
Not! I would suggest that the phrase Chinese virus is indeed racist.
So I would agree with Kamala Harris in that.
But I would add this.
China virus is not.
Chinese, also to my ears, says, wait a minute, there are a lot of Chinese Americans that are Americans.
Emphasis on the Americans part, right?
Do I want to cause trouble with other Americans in the middle of a pandemic when we're all just trying to get through this together?
And the answer is, I do not.
I do not want to be accidentally insulting Chinese Americans or Chinese citizens in China either for something that none of them had anything to do with.
So I don't like Chinese virus as a phrase.
I don't think it's racist, you know, in terms of the people using it.
They're not using it in a racist way.
Certainly that's not what they're thinking.
I feel confident in saying that.
But sometimes words carry their own meaning.
Somebody says, oh please.
Oh, let me clarify if you're annoyed at my opinion.
It's only because I haven't clarified.
I don't personally give a shit.
So I don't want you to confuse me agreeing that these words are suboptimal.
That's different from me personally giving a shit.
Like, it doesn't feel racist to me.
Right? Right? And I don't think the people using it are even slightly thinking of it that way.
So it's not racist in reality.
It is racist in how it's going to feel to some people.
And in my opinion, we are a social species.
So if something bothers you, that should matter to me, right?
Should it not matter to me that something I do bothers you?
Of course it should. I should care about that.
So if there are people in the United States who are Chinese-American or even here on green cards or whatever status, would this make them uncomfortable hearing Chinese virus instead of China virus, which would be the government and the place, not the people?
And I would say they might.
I can see how somebody would feel a little uncomfortable about that phrase.
So I'm going to agree with Kamala Harris.
Not that it should be...
I don't think the government should be involved.
So I think that's a dumbass thing.
So I think what Kamala Harris is is a dumbass thing.
It's the least priority, and it's just not something the government should be messing with.
But in general, I see the point.
So that's all I'm saying.
Jake Novak points out...
That political humor that goes after one side is just hate speech with a laugh track, which is a good line on a tweet.
So political humor that goes after only one side is just hate speech with a laugh track.
Now, of course, all political speech pretty much just goes after one side.
But the difference is, and I think the context Jake was talking about, is sort of the Howard Stern situation.
You know that Howard Stern has decided that he's going to be saying publicly and provocatively.
Now remember, he's a shock jock, so we have to put everything in context.
But he's saying that he just hates Trump supporters.
Now here's the thing.
If you say you hate the politics or you hate the candidate, that's political.
But if you say you hate the voters, what's that?
Well, I would suggest it's racist.
So I would suggest that Howard Stern, when he says he doesn't like Trump voters, do you think that in his mind, see we're not mind readers, so we don't know what he's thinking, but let's just speculate of the possibilities.
Is Howard Stern, when he thinks about Trump supporters, is he thinking of any of them as being black?
I'll bet not. I'll bet he has an image in his head that's the stereotype image of some of the southern guys and women with their baseball hats and their MAGA hats and maybe their AR-15s or whatever.
And that's probably his image of Trump supporters.
Which is sort of racist.
Because you know that he's thinking of them as a certain type of white person, right?
I don't know. It feels racist to me.
And I mean literally. I'm not joking about that because it would be funny to call him racist.
I don't know what else it would be.
Right? Because I mean I think it fits their definition.
Because you couldn't and the test of course is you couldn't replace anybody else and get the same result.
Let's say he had said that he hated everybody in Black Lives Matter.
Would you say to yourself, well, that's not racist, because there are white people who are in Black Lives Matter?
No, you wouldn't say that.
If Howard Cern had ever said, and he hasn't, but if he said, I hate the people who are in Black Lives Matter, you'd say, well, that's racist, even though the people are all kinds of different people.
Because your mind would say, well, mostly black people.
So I would say this is just classic racism.
To me. I mean, looks like it to me.
Let's talk about some more racism.
Now let's talk about Olivia Jade Giannulli's.
So, you know, the rich kids who were getting into college on fake scholarships and stuff.
I don't know why this is funny, but Olivia Jade's fake scholarship was based on being a, what do you call it, when they row?
What's the name for that? What's the official name for rowing?
I forget what it is, but anyway.
But specifically, she was going to be a champion coxswain.
C-O-X-S-W-A-I-N. Now, I don't exactly know what a champion coxswain is.
I just know I wouldn't want to be telling anybody that my daughter went to college to be a champion coxswain.
You can fill in your own joke.
Don't make me do everything for you.
All right. I see that...
Oh, here's another racism story.
So Stacey Abrams recently said that black women are the strongest part of the Democratic Party.
To which I say...
And that's not racist?
What makes them the strongest?
How would you measure who's the strongest part of the Democratic Party?
Moreover, isn't the whole point of the Democratic Party diversity?
Isn't it sort of really basic to being a Democrat?
That it's diverse.
That's like the whole deal.
But according to Stacey Abrams, the Democrats are diverse, but there's one part that's a little bit stronger.
And that just happens to be the group she's in.
Black women.
The strongest part of the Democratic Party.
Now, I think because Stacey Abrams is not terribly important, She's not going to be the vice president, and she's not important to the country in other ways, except a little interesting character in the news.
But I can't imagine anybody else saying that there was one ethnic group within a political party that was the important one.
And get away with that.
Somehow that was okay.
Oh, thank you. The word I was looking for was crew, for the rowing stuff.
And the coxswain, somebody says, is the captain.
Am I pronouncing coxswain wrong?
It's a funny word.
If you're going to send your daughter to college, just hope she's not called a champion coxswain when she gets back.
That's all I'm saying. I crack myself up.
All right. So Facebook was getting in trouble.
For taking down coronavirus information.
Now, Facebook was trying to take down information that's incorrect, medically, and also information about protests.
To which I said, what?
You know, when I'd originally heard that Facebook was taking down medical information, I thought to myself, you know, at least that's well-intentioned.
I don't think there's any way to do it right because the World Health Organization had bad information and I had good information.
How was Facebook supposed to know that the cartoonist had the good information telling people they should wear masks when the World Health Organization was not?
I would have been banned by Facebook for my correct medical advice And the World Health Organization would have been included.
So the whole idea that you're going to ban the stuff that's not correct assumes that you know what's correct and we just prove beyond a shadow of a doubt That we just can't tell, no matter where it comes from.
So, a little bit of a problem, but at least you can say to yourself, alright, well, maybe at least they can get the big stuff.
You know, if somebody had a really bad medical advice that would just kill you, well, maybe they could catch that stuff, right?
But then, that's impossible, too.
Because would they take hydroxychloroquine off the list?
Or would they put it on the list?
I don't know. Would Facebook say, it's not approved for this use, and therefore even though a doctor could use it off-label, that's more about you and your doctor, we're going to take the whole idea of it and of your universe.
Would they do that? So the point is, even with good intentions, and I think Facebook has good intentions.
I mean, why would they? Why would they have bad intentions, right?
So I think Facebook has good intentions about getting people the right medical advice, because it matters.
It's just not doable.
It just isn't doable.
So it's an impossible task, and therefore you have to ask, why try?
Because they're going to be filtering good information with bad, and there's just no way to avoid it.
So that's one question.
But then the second question is, apparently they were taking down notices for anti-lockdown protests.
At which point I say, wait a minute.
An anti-lockdown protest?
I get that there's a medical...
You know, risks involved with that, just getting together.
But that's free speech.
It's one thing that you're trying to be helpful in getting us the good and useful medical advice, but you don't know how to do it and you did it wrong.
That's one thing.
I can sort of almost kind of forgive you for trying hard to get the medical part right, but just not knowing how to do it because it's hard.
Okay. But blocking a notice of a protest?
A peaceful protest?
In the United States?
Facebook needs to be destroyed.
Facebook sort of crossed the line here, don't you think?
If Facebook is suppressing political speech that's both legal and non-violent and has a good purpose, I mean, nobody's looking for a bad purpose here.
The protesters are looking to help the country, not hurt it.
You know, they have a different idea of what helps.
You take that kind of speech down, if you're suppressing ordinary protest speech, you have lost your moral authority to exist in the United States.
You can't coexist in our system And also be the primary vehicle of communication in suppressing people's free speech.
Now, of course, you can argue, blah, blah, blah, Scott.
Facebook's not the government.
They're a private company.
Well, public company.
But they can do what they want.
They're not the government. The First Amendment doesn't apply to the private companies.
I hear you. I get that you're technically correct.
You are technically correct.
What is also true is if you're still using Facebook, why?
Why does anybody use Facebook?
So, I have a Facebook account, and if I want to see if there's a picture of my stepdaughter or something on there, I'll go and check that one thing.
But why would you ever post on Facebook?
Why would you go there?
I actually don't know.
That's an honest question.
If I go to Twitter, I'm just filled with stories and ideas.
I'm getting informed and I'm debating people and I'm meeting people.
It's like this whole energetic situation where there's good and bad, but you certainly know why you're doing it.
I don't know why anybody uses Facebook, do you?
I can't think of a single reason.
Now, I suppose if you have families and you want to show pictures, but is there really no other way to show pictures?
You can't show pictures on Instagram.
Twitter shows pictures.
A lot of ways to show pictures.
So, I'm going to make a contrarian prediction on Facebook.
I don't think it's going to last.
I think Facebook could actually be A failed company in five years.
I think it would have to do with the fact that there's just something about it that doesn't work anymore.
Now, do you get any kind of a dopamine hit from Facebook?
I'm curious about that.
Because if I look at, let's say if I look at Instagram, which of course is part of Facebook, but walled off, if I look at Instagram, I can get a dopamine hit from that.
See some good pictures of some things I wouldn't see.
It's interesting. If I go to Twitter, I can get all kinds of dopamine hits.
I go to locals, I get dopamine hits like crazy.
For the creator, that's the highest dopamine hit, is locals.
And... But Facebook?
When was the last time you went to Facebook and got a dopamine hit?
Like it actually felt good?
I don't know if I've ever felt that.
So, since kids don't really use it, and I honestly don't know anybody who uses it, actually.
I mean, I know people use it, but not use it, use it.
I think Facebook is destined to become an elderly person's product.
That would be my guess.
So I'm going to predict that Facebook...
that the best part of their history is behind them, I think.
Alright. Those were my prepared comments.
How many of you...
Have learned a skill during the lockdown.
The reason I do this is because I want to inspire you by example.
I know that sounds terrible when you say that out loud, but that's the point.
The point is that humans are imitating species.
If all of your friends are doing X, the odds of you ending up doing X are really high.
So I'm using pure influence To persuade you in a positive way.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell you the things that I've personally accomplished during the shutdown so that you could say to yourself, whoa, there's still a few weeks left of the shutdown.
Let's see if I can get a few things done.
So this is the talent stack idea that if you have any opportunity to add a talent to what you already have, You can make yourself far more valuable.
So what I've done is I've moved a lot of content over to the locals platform.
So it's basically a whole new line of business.
I effectively started a new business by just moving my content over.
And that's doing great.
I have to admit, I'm way surprised at the number of people who have signed up and how well that's going.
So we did that. I started using Cameo just to see what that was about.
I'd have to say I probably won't use that for much longer, but in terms of A-B testing, I wanted to see if it was something I liked.
Now the problem with Cameo, if you don't know what that is, it's for semi-famous people like me to leave messages for people and they pay for the message.
So usually somebody paying for a message Happy birthday message, for example, for someone else.
Now, I tried it, and here's why it doesn't work for me.
What I thought was, really?
I could just say a few words and say hi, and somebody will give me money for that?
I'll try that. Here's the problem.
The people tell you what to say, and they're so confusing that you don't get it right the first time.
Because it would be like, say hi to my mother, she's...
She's a fan. She did this.
She's taking a class.
She's good at pottery.
Make sure you compliment her hat.
And I'll be like, okay, that's a lot of stuff.
And I'll be like, good in your pottery.
I like your hat.
You know, happy birthday. And then I'll submit it.
And so far, so good.
And then you get an email back.
Could you redo this?
Because the thing you said about the hat...
You left out the part about it should be a pink hat.
Could you redo it with just say everything you said, but say pink hat this time?
And at that point, I leave the app.
Because I don't want a boss.
I don't want anybody telling me what I did wrong.
I didn't sign up for that.
So I'm still on the app, but the point is...
Try some stuff.
It's not all going to work out.
The Cameo thing, I'm going to say, was a failed experiment, but totally worth trying.
The local stuff, I didn't know what to expect.
Looks like it's going to be hugely successful.
I'm really happy about that so far.
And who knows?
I've brainstormed a new book.
I've started doing these micro-lessons.
I added a periscope.
I worked on my fitness.
Got my muscles up.
I got a bike.
Started biking. I got more sun.
And on a personal level, a dozen other things.
So, those things I did intentionally because I knew I could do them during the lockdown.
So as soon as the lockdown started to emerge and I could see what we were looking at for the next few weeks, and I also improved my drumming.
I spent a lot of time doing that.
So, the point being, think to yourself what you can get done in the next few weeks.
You've still got a few more weeks where things are not normal, and you can pick up a few more skills.
I've tried to teach a bunch of skills, like the user interface for reality, etc., that I've been doing on these periscopes, so that you can at least even passively pick up skills.
I'll say this again because I think I want to just keep saying it forever, but I try to learn things from YouTube, and I'm watching mostly drum lessons, and if I watch a drum teacher talk for five minutes before telling me one useful thing again, I'm going to just, like, beat myself to death with a drumstick.
Please, the people who are making lessons, you know, put the homework or the You know, the housekeeping and the notes or something.
Don't make it the first five minutes of the frickin' video, because people try to learn.
Five minutes is a long time.
All right. With that one change of having lessons start immediately instead of a preamble, you would change education in this country.
Do you know how much more I would learn if I didn't have to wait five minutes for the lesson to start?
It doesn't matter what the topic is.
They all do the same thing. A lot more.
Alright. Somebody says I learned DoorDash.
I'm looking at your comments about what you've improved.
I've improved these skills.
You're multi-threading. Okay.
Oh, somebody's teaching TalentStack to a group of team leaders today.
That's great. Yeah, Drumeo.
I've tried that. Too much introduction stuff.
Get to the useful stuff.
You're all saying the same thing. You know, what I'd like to see is YouTube videos where you could easily go to the starting point.
Wouldn't you like to see a YouTube video come up on your screen, and then before you hit play, on the left there are a bunch of start times.
You can pick the start time based on the topic.
So wouldn't you like that for these videos if you watch them?
So you'd say, oh, it's minute five, boop, and you just hit it and it goes to minute five.
That's what you need. Somebody's writing a patent right now while listening to me.
Good. Look at a recipe video.
It's horrible. Yes, recipes.
I've done that. Try to do a recipe.
Oh my god. Here's the app that I would like somebody to invent.
Can you do this for me? Maybe it already exists.
Actually, if it exists, just tell me what it is.
So here's the app.
I want an app that does nothing but make it easy to put together 3 to 5 second videos really quickly to form a lesson.
So let's say I want to teach you how to start your water heater if it went off.
So starting your water heater is like several little steps.
It's like, look at this, find this knob, turn this, push this.
So if you're trying to make an instructional video, you'd have your app, and you'd hold down the thing for three seconds, and you'd point it at the button.
You'd say, here's the knob.
That's it. Three second video.
Then you do another three second video and you say, turn it to the right.
And then you put it on the readout and you say, here's where the readout will say such and such.
And you just put all these three second videos together.
No introduction.
Boom. It's called learning.
Does anybody make that app?
Is there an app that is designed to make a quick tutorial on any topic?
And I'm talking about something that could be explained in a minute or two.
Find that app. I need it.
I'm seeing the words Mark Cuban in my feed.
I think that's because you're asking about him running for president.
Is that why? And I think I saw a news bit go by that said he was not ruling it out.
Which, if you have any chance of running for president as a Democrat, why would you rule it out?
Why would you rule it out?
So one of the things that makes Mark Cuban smarter than other people is that free money thing.
If you're Mark Cuban, would it make sense to rule out running for president if Biden is the presumptive nominee?
It doesn't. It does not make sense for him to rule that out.
Because even if he's not really thinking about it seriously, you might as well have the country thinking about you seriously, because that could turn into something, even if the only thing it turns into is people listen to him more carefully, because he has lots of good ideas.
So if you're listening to Mark Cuban more carefully during the crisis, you're probably doing okay.
TikTok.
Why is everybody mentioning TikTok?
talk.
Thank you.
Oh, TikTok has the app that you could make a...
Okay, I got it.
So TikTok has that quick video thing that you can splice together.
Somebody said Instructables, but I don't think Instructables has quite the user interface I just described.
I know about Instructables.
China has it.
Somebody says TikTok lets you do it.
Well, you know, that's bad news because do people use TikTok for directions, though?
Is it actually used for that?
I only know it for those dumb little dancing videos.
Cuban debated Hannity.
You know, I have to watch that.
I'd like to see him debate Hannity.
We said TikTok for fast learners.
Okay, well, all right.
Alright, that's all I've got for now.
I will talk to you later today.
For the people on Locals, I've got a little lesson for them.