Episode 1169 Scott Adams: GDP Zooms, Anonymous No More, Men Versus Women in Politics and Who Wins the Election
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
CNN: News for Idiots
Ted Cruz questions Jack Dorsey
Anonymous NYT writer, Miles Taylor
Tucker's mysteriously stolen documents
Mutated COVID19 sweeping Europe
My principles for success
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Come on in! Yes, it's gonna be another terrific day.
How is it that we can have a terrific day at the same time every time?
I don't know. I don't know how we do it, but we've managed to do it somehow.
And this will be no exception.
Another great day. Starts with a simultaneous sip.
And do you know what you need for the simultaneous sip?
Check your notes. Yes, you do.
All you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now.
Go. Ah, sublime.
Well, well, well.
Yes, I'm back into my comfort blanket.
I'm considering doing two-a-day simulcasts when we get closer to the election here, because the country is getting a little nervous, a little bit nervous.
And if things get a little too tense, maybe I'll Maybe I'll start doing my evening broadcasts again in addition to the morning.
But let's talk about all the things.
There are many things.
Have you noticed that the news, as fake as the news has been, when you get close to Election Day, the pretense that anybody is trying to give you actual news as opposed to propaganda is just completely out the window.
I swear to God, and this is not an exaggeration.
This will sound like one of those things you say because it sounds funny.
I'm not saying this to sound funny.
Absolutely literal truth.
I watch CNN for the laughs.
And it's because when they do things that are so blatantly propaganda as opposed to news, I find it funny.
I don't know if any of you have reached that point yet, Where you just sort of turn it on and you just start laughing at all the exaggerated ridiculousness of it all.
So yesterday I turned on CNN and there was a story about...
I'll give you one example.
So there's a story about Jared Kushner.
And they had this tape of him talking to, I guess, Woodward back in whenever he talked to him.
And I've got to find that exact quote.
That I'm absolutely sure I wrote down.
Here it is. So this is what Jared Kushner said.
He said, Trump's now back in charge.
This is in a conversation he had back in April with Woodward, writer Woodward.
He goes, Trump's now back in charge.
It's not the doctors, the first son-in-law and White House advisor Kushner said back in April.
So CNN... Has decided that this statement, Trump's now back in charge, it's not the doctors, they've decided to do what CNN does, which is to take it out of context.
Do you think that when Jared Kushner said this sentence, Trump's now back in charge, it's not the doctors, do you interpret it the way CNN interprets it, to mean that he will no longer take any advice from experts or doctors?
Is that your interpretation?
Because that just makes me laugh when I see them say, oh, that means that he's not going to look at any medical expertise anymore.
No, that doesn't say anything like that.
The only way this is news is if you willingly misinterpret it.
And you would have to do it willingly.
This is not one of those accidental ones.
Because you'd have to have an IQ of about nine To think that Jared Kushner talked to Bob Woodward, who is writing a book at the time, or I don't know if he was writing it at the time, but he's a journalist.
Why would you tell him that the President of the United States is going to stop paying attention to medical experts?
You wouldn't.
You wouldn't. Of course you wouldn't.
In no world Would Jared Kushner do that?
Now remember, all the bad things that are being said about Trump, you know, Trump is this, Trump is that, he's, you know, he has the mind of a child, or whatever, whatever the critics are saying.
Nobody says that about Jared.
Nobody says Jared Kushner is dumb.
Right? Have you ever heard anybody say that?
Because it's so obviously not true.
You know, Jared's off there getting prison reform and peace in the Middle East and stuff.
He's obviously a brilliant guy.
And so, would he ever go onto a phone call with a journalist who is not friendly to his boss, President Trump, and father-in-law, and would he ever say that Trump is going to start ignoring doctors?
Of course not.
And any adult would clearly know that's not what it means.
Rather, it's a statement about balance.
In other words, the decision won't be made exclusively by doctors.
It's going to be a combination of all factors, including the doctors, and the president will make the decision.
That's all Jared said. And they turned it into news by acting as if they can't interpret Simple, you know, English language.
So, as I was watching yesterday, this is a true story, no exaggeration.
I turned it on, and the first story I see, it might have been this one, I don't remember, was obviously not real news, it was just something they willfully misinterpreted.
And I thought, well, there they go again, willfully misinterpreting something that's easy to interpret.
And then the next story was Something that was only a story because they did a fake edit.
They left out part of a statement.
I'm like, well, okay, you know, those are two stories in a row that with very little outside knowledge is very obviously not real.
And I think, okay, I guess all the news is this.
So I turn off the TV. Hours later, I turn on CNN again, and it's yet a third story that's completely made up based on willfully misinterpreting again.
It's like the entire network has turned into a misinterpreting network.
It doesn't matter what you do, they'll just take it the wrong way and make a story out of it.
It's the damnedest thing that we accept this as news.
But it was pretty hilarious.
Because there's a point where this stuff, you say to yourself, hey...
And I certainly said this at one point.
I said, hey, I think with my incredible insight...
I'm picking up on the beginning of a trend of some of these stories are not exactly accurate.
And then you think, am I the only one who's seeing this?
Then you realize other people are seeing it.
You're like, okay, you're seeing this too, right?
These stories are a little shaded, a little biased, a little bit left out of context.
But this week, as I was saying, it's so over the top.
I can't take any of it seriously.
I just laugh at it when I look at it.
It's like, well, that's not real.
Okay, that's not real.
Okay, that didn't happen.
And then move on.
All right. Here's another perfect example of fake news.
So the U.S. economy grew a record, it's a record, I tell you, 33.1% annual rate since last quarter, or last quarter grew that much.
And of course, the way CNN has to report this headline, all right, how would you, if you were going to report a headline about incredible Percentage growth in the GDP, but you didn't want this president to look good?
How would you do it?
Would you say the economy is surging back even more than we expected?
Would you do that?
Because that feels accurate, right?
Economy is surging back.
True. And it was a little bit more than the economists expected even.
True. Isn't that the way you'd tell the story?
Here's the headline that CNN used.
U.S. economy grew a record 33.1% annual rate last quarter, but the pandemic remains an enormous threat.
Yes, they had to work the pandemic into the headline because the headline was too good by itself.
Now, is there anybody out there who was reading the news who did not know that there's a pandemic going on?
Probably not. I don't think it added much to the knowledge of the reader because That, hey, by the way, here's some good news on the economy, but the pandemic, the pandemic's still going on.
A young child was saved from falling in a well, but the pandemic's going on.
President Trump got three nominations for Nobel Peace Prize because peace is breaking out in the Middle East, but there's a pandemic going on, pandemic, pandemic going on.
Do you have to pair there's a pandemic going on with other news?
Doesn't seem like other news needs that pairing, does it?
We kind of know about the pandemic by now.
I've heard of it. It's a thing.
But here's the fake news part about this.
Of course, the Democrats have been saying, and this is the delicious part about it, Democrats have been mocking Trump for almost four years because he was claiming great progress in the economy.
And then they would say, the Democrats would say, well, but, you know, President Obama had greater percentage growth.
Increase in the economy and improvements, greater increase in improvements and even unemployment.
So, therefore, Obama was better, right?
Because he had better percentage growth.
No, this is news for idiots.
In fact, that's what they should call CNN, news for idiots.
You would have to be an idiot to not know that the reason Obama had tremendous percentage gain is because he was coming off of such a low base.
So it's easy to get big percentage gains when everything has fallen apart.
It's hard to get big percentage gains when you're closer to the full recovery.
Which is what Trump did.
So Trump's smaller gains, at least percentage-wise, in unemployment before the pandemic were more impressive than Obama's big gains because the big gains are easy.
They're coming off a low base.
And toward the top, it's really hard to squeeze out any extra juice from the lemon because you've squeezed all you can squeeze.
And Trump, to his credit, Squeeze more juice out of that lemon, even though you didn't think it was possible.
You got unemployment to rates where even economists thought, I don't even know if you can get there.
So if you are unsophisticated, you think that the high percentage growth of one president somehow beats the low percentage growth of the other president, and But it's only because they don't report it with proper context.
Now, that's been bugging you for three and a half years if you're a Trump supporter.
It's like, stop saying that Obama had better percentage.
It's not the percentage that matters.
It's not. You have to look at the context to understand why that percentage is what it is.
Time goes by.
Days pass.
Here we are. The news comes out that there's a record 33.1% increase in the GDP. Should you be impressed by that?
No. Because the context is that we're coming off a low base.
It's definitely better than if we didn't have this high percentage increase, but this increase is completely misleading in terms of any kind of historical meaning.
Because it's coming off a low base.
Exactly the credit that Obama was getting and didn't deserve, because it was just a mathematical oddity, Trump is now the beneficiary of the same limited thinking.
So Trump supporters could go out there and say, 33% gain, historical, never seen that before.
And it is good.
There's no question that this is good news.
It's unambiguously good news, no doubt about it.
But it just looks like even better news than it is, and you get to use the Democrats' own trick against them, because once they've demonstrated that the public can't tell the difference, as long as the percentage looks good, the public is like, well, okay, well, it looks good to me.
Do you think this situation will be improving, the public not being able to understand the news in context?
Well, let me give you some new news.
This is from a tweet from Corey DeAngelis, who you should be following.
He tweets a lot about homeschooling and the failure of the teachers' unions, etc.
And there's some new information out about the 2019 results for 12th grade students, achievement in the United States.
All right? So this is seniors, high school seniors in the United States.
37% of them met some standard for reading proficiency.
Let me say that again, because I hope that you just said to yourself, well, I must have heard that wrong.
Listen to this. Only 37% of high school seniors met the reading proficiency level.
37%? I want to use the F word really badly right now, but I'm going to hold back.
There's something really broken about that.
But what about math?
Oh, math will be better, right?
24% of seniors met math proficiency in the United States.
24%?
Are you kidding me?
Now, I'll tell you what this tells me.
It tells me that we need a President Kanye.
Perhaps not in 2020.
But as I was saying in a prior livestream, Kanye is talking about building entire communities...
Where you design it from the bottom up to fit real people.
And when I say real people, I mean the people who do not have reading proficiency.
The people who do not have math proficiency.
Because it turns out there are more of them Then there are the other kind of people.
And if you don't start quickly redesigning and tweaking your country so that the ordinary people of America can have a good life, you're on the wrong path.
I mean, that's eventually going to blow up.
You have to redesign from scratch to make a community that has the kind of jobs that the people who don't have reading proficiency can do.
It has the kind of expense For a lifestyle, that a low-end job, again, not an insult, because all work is...
Let me say this as clearly as possible.
All work is honorable.
And I feel that.
That's not just a bumper sticker.
All work is honorable. Doesn't matter what it is.
If you're contributing to the world, to the country, to your community, if you're doing something that needed to get done, that is 100% honorable endeavor for Salary aside.
So you're going to need to build a world that has two parts.
One part for people who have high education and achievement and want to really be on that path, which is pretty stressful, but you need people like that.
And then you need another entire world that's almost agrarian in nature.
In other words, in the old days, you had a bunch of people who were farmers, and they didn't need to have much reading proficiency, right?
Then you had other people who might have been, you know, the lawyers and writers and politicians of the day and the business owners, etc.
And they needed more education.
Well, we've transformed our society...
Into one where we're telling everybody they need to learn to code.
Not everybody can learn to code.
You know, there's a cutoff level in your, I would say, both ambition and general intelligence where you're not going to learn to code.
That's just not a thing.
And pretending that everybody will learn to code or learn to have some high-end job if only we give them enough education is really sort of a fool's strategy.
If we want a strategy that could work, I mean, even has a chance of working, it's the Kanye strategy, where you've got to redesign.
You've got to re-engineer your whole situation so that people who are ordinary people, who are good people, they just not are academically inclined.
They have, you know, maybe tons of skills that you and I don't have, they're just not academically inclined.
They need a life, too.
So if we don't make that possible, we've got big problems coming.
So, President Kanye, someday in the future to fix that.
There's some...
Let's do this story first.
So, there's an indication, speaking of Kanye...
That Trump is actually within a striking distance of winning Minnesota.
Now, if you don't follow presidential politics much, that didn't mean too much, because it's just the state, and you think, well, he could win that state.
But it's Minnesota.
Minnesota should never go to a Republican if everything you know about the world makes sense.
So the fact that I think Trump has come within The margin of error on at least some polls in Minnesota.
And part of the reason is that Kanye is pretty popular in Minnesota for some reason.
I mean, not for some reason.
He's Kanye. But he's getting enough votes as a write-in, or he might be on the ballot, I forget, in Minnesota.
But he's actually taking enough of a Biden that there's a non-zero chance, probably still against, it's still unlikely, I think, but there's a non-zero chance that Trump, of all people, Could win Minnesota.
This is a thing that might actually happen.
Now, I'm not going to predict it.
I'm just saying the fact that he's within breathing distance, like Minnesota can feel his hot breath on the back of their neck, that wasn't supposed to happen.
And it makes you wonder if any of our polls are reliable at this point.
All right. Did you see the, you probably saw the clips of Jack Dorsey answering questions from senators such as Senator Cruz and Ron Johnson were grilling Jack Dorsey.
And I always put myself in the position of the person being grilled because for some reason I always imagined that my future would include being grilled by Congress at some point.
I just feel like that's in my future, and I always have.
Isn't that weird? It's a strange image for a high school student to have, but my entire life, from an early life, I always imagined that eventually I would be grilled by Congress.
For what? I don't know.
In my head, I just have this image that I'm the one who is in the Jack Dorsey I'm sure Jack didn't imagine that he would be grilled by Congress one day.
Maybe he did. Who knows? But here's what I took away from that.
The first takeaway is never be on the other side of Ted Cruz.
How would you like to be, you know, testifying or whatever it's called, in front of Congress, and the person who is giving you hostile questioning is Ted Cruz, who is extraordinarily gifted in this lawyerly role, to the point where he's argued and won cases at the Supreme Court.
You don't want the pit bull who wins cases at the Supreme Court to be asking you questions in public.
So that's the first thing.
And whenever I see Ted Cruz in that mode, I just really appreciate him as an American.
Meaning I'm glad he's on my side.
My side being America, not in this case politically, but just America.
It's just good to have people who have that level of skill doing things that require that level of skill.
So he's one of those people who makes me feel confident about the Republic because you have people who are just that much capability.
So that aside...
So Jack Dorsey came with some suggestions ahead of time, which was a good strategy.
And I don't know if I can characterize them right or if I understand them completely, but among his ideas are that the algorithm would have more transparency, as would their decision-making process about who gets banned or metered or whatever the words are.
So Jack Dorsey wants more transparency within Twitter on the algorithm.
He wants an appeals process that's straightforward.
So if somebody gets banned or limited on Twitter, they have a direct human being that can go through a process and get a human to decide.
I like that part. There is, even more provocatively, you might be able to choose your own algorithm someday.
So there might be third-party algorithms, and you get to just pick one.
Oh, I'll take the I'll take the Republican algorithm.
I don't know, I'm just making that one up.
But I like that.
If you get to choose your own algorithm, then the algorithms are competing against each other in a way.
So maybe that's good.
Maybe the free market can fix things that we're not clever enough to fix directly.
And then Jack Dorsey says that Twitter should publish its moderation practices so that you know exactly what they do and why.
Now, here's the part where I was imagining myself in the receiving end of this grilling, because they went at him pretty hard.
So Ron Johnson was grilling Jack about, did they know that the New York Post article that they banned on Twitter Did they know it wasn't true?
And Jack said no, that they did not know it wasn't true, but it got banned anyway.
Now here's the part that I wished I had been in Jack's seat.
When Ron Johnson was grilling him, Ron was doing this thing where he pretends As if Jack Dorsey had not already very publicly said, oh, that was a mistake.
We should not have done that.
We have corrected it.
So he's confessed with no ambiguity.
There's no but-ifs, nothing like that.
He just said, clear, unambiguous mistake, so we fixed it quickly.
That's not much to complain about, right?
If a CEO says that was a mistake, we fixed it in 24 hours, I don't care what the mistake is, unless somebody's dying or something.
That's pretty good, right?
That's pretty good. But Ron Johnson does this angry questioning that makes the viewer think that that sequence hadn't already happened.
And Jack, being the polite, smart CEO that he was, just sort of sits there and listens to it, and then just sort of softly responds that they had confessed that and taken care of it.
But I really wished I had been in that chair, because I would have been a lot more aggressive about responding to that.
I think I would have said something closer to I don't know exactly what I would have said, but something closer to, well, you know, Senator, we've already said that that was a mistake and corrected it.
Is there something else we should do to go back to the past?
We're kind of focused on the future here, but if you'd like to talk about the things we all agree about, we all agree that that shouldn't have happened, but I hope that you're happy that we corrected it in 24 hours, and I hope that you're happy that we're here, Coming with some legitimate suggestions for how to make things better.
But if you'd like to talk about the things we agree about, that that was not the right decision, but we fixed it quickly, I'd like to spend some more time on that, because I think the public should know how quickly we responded to that.
Yeah, somebody in the comments is saying quickly.
Quickly in 24 hours.
I think that was what Jack said.
Now, My understanding is that, is it true that the New York Post account is still frozen?
So somehow I'm maybe not understanding the issue as well as I should, because I don't know what it was they changed in 24 hours, because I think the account is still locked, but I need a fact check on that.
Anyway, the larger point is that there are some seemingly pretty good ideas for fixing things, if they could actually be implemented.
I think they also need a get out of jail free, not free, but get out of jail process, where somebody who's been banned permanently can maybe wait three years or pick a number, and that after three years there should be some independent board that decides whether they should come back.
I would like to volunteer.
Should there ever be an appeals board for Twitter bad behavior, and you need...
Relatively independent people to decide whether it is worthy of bringing them back, I would volunteer for that.
And I don't think anybody should do more than say a one-year term or something.
But I would do one year of a term as a relatively You know, and you have to say relatively because there's nobody who's unbiased.
You can't really get all the way to unbiased.
But you could imagine groups of people such as, I'll just throw out some names, Tim Poole.
If Tim Poole were one of the people with a one-year term with some other people to decide whether people should be brought back onto Twitter after whatever bad behavior and some time has passed, wouldn't you trust him?
You'd say, oh, yeah, he is completely capable of seeing a left opinion and a right opinion and judging appropriately.
I feel like I'm in that category.
I feel like you could probably come up with another half dozen names pretty quickly of people who would not be universally loved by left or right, but at least you look at them and you say, yeah, maybe I don't love that one choice, but I see what you're doing.
You know, with the other, say, five people or whatever there are.
I see what you're going for.
You're going for people who at least have demonstrated they have the capability of taking the other side's point of view sometimes.
I'm seeing some other names on here.
I see Jimmy Dore. I don't know enough about him to know if that is real.
So somebody in the comments is saying that Jack fixing it is fake news.
Now, you have to worry that any proposed solutions are not genuine, right?
I mean, that's a reasonable thing to worry about.
And I don't think there's any way to know until you see actual implementation.
As I say often, ideas are worthless because everybody has ideas.
Ideas are free. You want some ideas?
I got seven of them I just thought of just now.
Ideas are free. But implementation is kind of hard and rare and valuable.
So if Twitter can implement, and we can observe it, the things which they're talking about, I think these would be real solutions.
They look genuine in the sense that they're the right kinds of things.
But you have to wait for the implementation.
That is correct. All right, the other fun thing is that in 2018 there was this big article, and then there was a book.
But the article was written by an anonymous source, Who was allegedly a high-level White House person who was saying bad things about the president and alleged that people were doing things behind the president's back, meaning the staff, to try to thwart him in his bad ways.
And there was lots of guessing at the time of who wrote it.
Nobody knew. But we now know it's somebody named Miles Taylor, former DHS chief of staff.
And of course, the big story here is that he was not exactly, or not even close, to being a senior staff member.
And he was rarely or never in the room with the president.
And in fact, senior staff members would not necessarily even know he existed.
So that's the level of seniority he had, which is the senior people probably never met him, you know, didn't know his name.
But he was sort of oversold by the context and the New York Times, I would say, as being a little bit higher up than he was.
So he's come forward. And of course, he had lied on CNN when they asked him if he was anonymous, and he said flat out no.
And then Chris Cuomo asked him about that.
And Miles Taylor said that his reasoning...
And he had actually said in the document, or the book, I think, he said that if he had been asked, he would lie.
Because what he wanted to do was make sure that it wasn't personal.
In other words, he didn't become the subject of the attacks.
His explanation is he wanted the focus to be on the points he was making, not on him personally.
And that he would be the subject of insults, and then it would differ from his point.
So, do you think he had a point That if we knew who he was, that he would be insulted and that the attention would go toward those insults.
Yeah, he was right about that.
Because as soon as I saw him, I thought, man, he's one frat boy douchebag looking guy with a little bit too much hair.
And that was the first thing I thought about him.
It's like, God, what a douchebag this guy is.
So, did anybody else insult him?
Let's see. White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a statement Wednesday after Taylor's identity was revealed, quote, this low-level, disgruntled former staffer is a liar and coward who chose anonymity over action and leaking over leading.
So, maybe he had a little bit of a point there.
It turns out that the focus...
It is on him now.
And most of that focus is insulting his level of authority, his looks in my case.
And it's funny that I'm making fun of his looks because he's, you know, unambiguously, he's a good looking guy and he's better looking than I am.
But he does have sort of a frat boy douchebag look.
Can't take that away from him.
All right. And he wrote stuff like he thought that Trump's team was trying to sabotage him and stuff.
Anyway, once you realize who it is, you just start thinking to yourself, oh, it's just a disgruntled employee.
And then you put it in context.
Here's the funniest part of the story, and the payoff.
So CNN reports, and finally this is real news, They report that this guy is a public liar because he lied on CNN to CNN. So we don't have to wonder if he will lie in public.
He's actually famous for it because he lied to CNN and even they called him out.
And then they hired him.
So now he works for CNN. So CNN reports that he is a public liar and then they hired him.
And I'm thinking, well, he's kind of perfect.
He's kind of perfect.
And I realized that I think I could get a job at CNN if I could learn to lie a little bit better and become kind of known for it.
Then I'd get myself a job.
I'd be up there with Clapper and, you know, all the rest of the liars.
All right. Here's the weirdest story.
Tucker Carlson has this story about being in Los Angeles.
To talk to Tony Bobulinski, the Biden ex-business partner, who is whistleblowing on him, and he asked for a trove of new documents implicating Joe Biden's shady dealings to be mailed to him by some overnight service, and the documents were stolen in the process.
The container, the box, showed up, but it was empty, and the documents were stolen.
Now, I have to think...
That whoever provided the documents kept a copy.
So I don't think we have to worry about that information not existing somewhere, but you do have to wonder about who had the wherewithal and the capability to know what was in that package and to get it.
It's scary if anybody had that capability.
And if it was a random crime, it's the weirdest random crime there ever was, and if it wasn't random, It's really scary.
All right.
Given the gigantic difference between male and female voters and their preferences for Trump versus Biden, In your mind, does it feel like this election is the boys against the girls?
I'm just wondering if it's starting to feel like that to you.
Because there's lots of ways to frame this.
You could say it's Democrats versus Republicans.
It's liberals versus conservatives.
So there are a million ways that you could say what it is.
But To me, it's really devolved into the boys against the girls.
Because the girls are firmly in charge.
And here I mean women and men, not boys and girls.
But the women are firmly in charge on the democratic side, I would say.
And it seems that there's more of a male vibe.
Of course, there are both men and women in both cases.
But almost as if there's a testosterone difference.
Because I'm not the first one to note this.
There's no non-insulting sounding way to say what I'm going to say.
So just trust me that I'm not saying this to be insulting.
I'm saying it as an observation.
If it sounds insulting, I can't help it.
Democrats are largely beta males and women.
And The exception being a lot of black men who, in large numbers, seem to be moving to Trump.
Because to me, that was the one thing that didn't make sense.
You know, because there were a lot of black men who you would not say are beta males.
And I kept thinking, I feel like they're in the wrong party.
It just feels like that's not really the fit.
Forget about policy.
Forget about who's done what for who over the years.
Forget about any of that.
It just... It just seemed like apples and oranges a little bit.
And so I'm not surprised even a little bit that there's movement toward Trump in the black community and primarily the men.
Because I think there is a real male-female vibe that's forming completely unconsciously.
And yeah, the Democrat men who are comfortable in a female-led organization tend to be a certain...
Certain characteristic. Now, of course, these are gross generalities, and there are millions of exceptions, and I'm not saying that there aren't manly men in the Democratic Party, and I'm not saying that there aren't every type in the Republican Party, but I feel like the trend and the gravity and the weight is starting to separate in that way,
and that if you thought of it in the past as more of an ethnic thing, like The Democrats are the, let's say, the non-white or more plurality, more diversity, if that's what you were thinking.
It's true, but I feel like it's mostly now female versus male.
Like, that's the dominant theme that's starting to emerge, but isn't fully emerged.
But it feels like it's starting to emerge that way.
There's, of course, you've heard that there's coronavirus is breaking out We've got some more infections in the United States, but Europe is having a tough time.
So they're getting a big second wave.
We think that'll hit the United States too, so we're not going to gloat over that.
But there's some thinking, and this is very non-confirmed, more likely not true than true, but it's worth talking about, which is that the coronavirus seems to have mutated, in Europe anyway, and Spain, which is having a big problem with the flare-up, has mostly the mutation kind.
So the new version of the coronavirus is what a big part of the surge is in Europe.
And some people are saying, uh-oh, maybe the new one is a little extra catchy.
Maybe it's worse. Other people are saying there's no indication of that.
It might be just different.
It doesn't mean it's worse. It could be just a minor evolution, but it's basically the same thing.
It just looks a little different.
But I wonder if...
We've developed, and this is just me talking, this is nobody who knows what they're talking about talking, this is just me, and I don't know what I'm talking about.
It makes me wonder, just a hypothesis, if we had reached something closer to herd immunity to the first version, and that without the second version, maybe we wouldn't see as much of a second wave.
Now obviously there's a seasonality to it that will definitely have an impact, But maybe it wouldn't be as big a second wave if not for the mutation.
I think the experts are still betting against that, and they're probably right, but I just want to put that out there.
If you're trying to figure out, if I observe the world, what model makes everything make sense?
And while this might not be true, what would make sense is that the deaths were going down, even as the infections were going up, Would indicate that maybe some percentage of the public has a natural immunity, beyond just being young, and that maybe we had started reaching the edge of that group of people who were susceptible, and that you had to have a mutation to get more people.
It could be that the mutation is important, but we'll find out.
I was still bet against it being important, but not impossible.
More terror attacks in France.
Two more terror attacks within hours of each other.
Three people killed, two more of them beheaded.
So this beheading thing is turning into a little mini trend in France.
And here's a question that I think Nassim Taleb wrote about once.
And it is, how many...
How many Islamic citizens do you need before your country is guaranteed to become Islamic as a dominant theme?
What do you think is the percentage?
And I don't know what the percentage is in the United States.
Under 5%, I guess.
But in France, what's the percentage?
I don't know the percentage.
But I think the percentage is lower than you think.
I think it's lower than you think.
I think that, and I think this was Talib talking about this, that somewhere around 15%, if you have a 15% Islamic citizenship, that you're pretty much guaranteed to become an Islamic country.
And the thinking beyond that is that they have a superior system.
So it's the system, it's not the belief.
And the system involves that you can't leave.
It's tough to leave.
You could be killed if you leave the faith.
So Islam is sticky and a little bit more aggressive, so there's some thought that if you give 15% citizenship, or at least residence, that it's all going to go Islamic.
And I think France is there, right?
Am I wrong? I think France is at that limit or close to it, which would suggest that France will become an Islamic country.
And I would say that they're heading that way.
If I had to bet, I would bet France will become Islamic if I had to put money on it.
But it's not next year.
I mean, it's going to take a while.
But I would bet that there will be an Islamic country in, say, one generation.
The LAPD got approval to begin recording video footage from their helicopters above protesters.
Now, I don't know how much difference that's going to make, because the protesters mostly have masks, but that's kind of chilling, isn't it?
They'll have video of all the protesters.
Obviously, they'll be using facial recognition.
There's reports they already have, and they'll use more of it, I'm sure.
I'm not too concerned about this story when everybody's wearing masks, because I don't think it's going to make that much difference.
But I like where it's going.
Because the protests only work because they have safety in numbers, and they all dress, at least the Antifa people dress alike with the black block clothing, and so they can get away with stuff.
Every time you add a little bit more Let's say transparency to what's going on, which is what the video would do.
Fewer people are going to be bold enough to take that chance.
So I think that's a good step in terms of law and order and maybe a step in the wrong direction for civil liberties.
But something had to give, right?
You couldn't go forever letting the protesters do whatever they want.
That wasn't an option.
And if the only way to stop them involves a little...
A little hit to our civil liberties?
Well, you only had two options.
Right? Alright.
Here's a...
I'd like to wrap this up with a little lesson on success.
Are you ready? A lesson on success.
There are lots of ways to be successful.
Some of them involve luck and inheritance and crime and those things.
And some of them are just hard work and being smart and staying out of jail.
And those are good.
But there are more, let's say, subtle and unique and useful ways to be successful.
And I've been modeling one of them in front of you for the last several years, and I want to put some words to it.
One of the things I talk about all the time is A-B testing.
Where you just try something, see if it works, and then quickly try something else to see if that's better, until you sort of test your way to success.
You've seen me try to transfer or evolve from cartoonist to whatever this is, political pundit or whatever livestreaming is.
I don't know if it has a career name to it.
But what you've watched is, from the beginning, I started very small, with small risk, and just I literally, on day one, I picked up my phone, And said, I'd like to know more about this periscope thing, just to know more about it.
I felt like that was something my talents needed.
So I started just periscoping with my phone in my hand, and the quality was terrible, and I think, you know, a dozen people showed up the first time.
But I learned something.
And then I thought, ah, maybe I'll do this again.
And I kept experimenting up, buying studio equipment, experimenting with sound.
Researching video. I bought a number of different expensive devices like that.
There's a $13,000 device over my shoulder here for studio production, etc.
Now, none of the expensive equipment worked.
And when I say worked, I don't mean it was broken.
I mean that for what I wanted to accomplish, it didn't work.
And here's what I mean.
My other requirement And these are some of my principles for success, and we'll put them all together.
So principle number one is experimenting your way continuously.
So I've experimented with my setup and my technology until I have this setup, which I believe is the best I can get to While maintaining my other principles, which I'll talk about in a minute.
So right now I've got motorized curtains, which is huge, so I can do a blackout of all my light.
I've got two ring lights facing the walls, so I'm getting indirect light.
And I'm using two iPads together, clipped together with a potato chip bag clip so that they don't fall off the stand.
And so I have two live streams going, YouTube and Periscope simultaneously, on two iPads that are both in front of me here.
Now, I tried every complicated technology to do what I'm doing right now.
And you could get better quality.
You could get better video.
You'd have to record it to do that.
Live streaming is a lower resolution.
And you could get better sound, you know, with full production things, but you'd have to soundproof the room, etc.
And here's what I would lose if I went to the higher level of quality.
Number one, it wouldn't be fun anymore.
Because I like the content and the getting ready for it.
I like the experience. I love actually being live on the live stream.
It's partly why I do it, because I like it.
And I wouldn't enjoy it if I had to spend an hour every morning reloading my software and testing and rebooting.
And that's what you do with the complicated systems.
You need either a full-time engineer or a techie who works with you the whole time, and then you're managing people.
It's not what I wanted to do.
I don't want to manage people.
I want to just do this.
I just want to talk to you.
And so I managed through testing to get to the quality up to the point where these simple lavalier microphones, I've got two of them, one for each iPad, And the iPad quality and the lighting, etc., were good enough for live streaming in a way that YouTube would say, oh, these videos are high enough quality, could be better, but they're high enough quality that we can, you know, promote them, etc.
So once I reached a certain level and it was live-streamed instead of recorded, because what I used to do is take the Periscope and upload it onto YouTube and it was lower quality and took longer.
So, yes, and it wouldn't be as personal.
I didn't want this to be a slick production.
So here were the other requirements.
It had to be dead simple so that I could do it myself.
Because as soon as you add an assistant in the room, It's just the chemistry is wrong.
And then I'm managing people, and they've got problems, and they didn't show up today, and they've got a question, but I'm trying to think of what I'm going to say, but now I'm drawn into the technical problem because I need to answer a question.
So, A-B testing.
Develop your talent stack relentlessly.
In other words, the several talents it takes to do what I'm doing now, I had to assemble over time.
Learn lighting. Learn sound.
Learn live stream.
Learn how the algorithm works on YouTube.
Learn how to promote it.
Learn how to upload it. There's a lot.
But you just keep edging up.
Keep building that talent stack.
Keep A-B testing continuously.
Never stop. I'm not done now by any means.
I'll keep going. And there you are.
And then the last part is getting lucky.
Because luck is kind of required for success.
Because if you don't have good luck, you might have bad luck.
And that's not going to help you.
So how do you make luck happen if you don't have direct control over the universe?
And the way that you make luck happen is you go where the energy is and you practice in public.
And you wait.
That's it. If you go where the energy is, you're going to find more luck.
For example, when I graduated from college, I was in a very small town in upstate New York, and so I knew that there wouldn't be much luck.
You could call it opportunity, but I'm going to call it luck.
I'm not going to run into people that could help me someday.
I'm not going to accidentally be part of a startup.
I need to go where there's energy.
So I moved to California.
That was the first thing I did after college because I wanted to be where luck could happen.
And that was a good play.
In this case, I moved to the more dynamic video field.
So it was obvious that live streaming and video is the big growing thing.
So you go where the energy is and you have more chance of getting lucky because there's just more stuff happening.
And then...
If you can stay in business long enough, and certainly it wasn't like I was making money or anything from doing this for the first three years, but I didn't go anti-business.
In other words, it wasn't anything to make me stop doing it.
I could just keep getting better and wait for some luck to happen.
And then some luck happened.
It came in the form of this election.
Of course, it's not luck.
It was scheduled. But the election makes all the live streaming stuff on this topic go crazy, so all my numbers went through the roof because it's the right topic at the right time.
But also the coronavirus.
The coronavirus obviously is not luck for the world, but it caused live streaming and this form of entertainment to just, you know, zoom in importance, no pun intended.
And so I'm in the right place at the right time, but not by luck.
I engineered, very consciously, a move from a sleepy world of cartooning to a dynamic, visible world where luck could find me.
And luck is finding me all over the place.
So those are your tips.
Go where it's dynamic, where luck can find you.
A-B test continuously to improvement.
Build your skill stack over time.
If you do those three things...
Your odds of something good happening in a few years, not year one, but in a few years, is really good.
It's exactly the same process I used for building Dilbert and for other things that have worked out.
So that is your tip for the day.
Somebody says in the comments, lucky guy.
Definitely there's luck.
There is definite luck.
But I would say that anybody who did what I did, meaning...
Pursuing the energy, building a talent stack, A-B testing.
If you do those three things, luck is going to find you.
