Episode 1235 Scott Adams: My Nobel Prize, China's Octopus Strategy, Those Stimulus Checks
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
The history of calling "passion" BS
China's long-term strategy is really impressive
FOX News opposes $2,000 stimulus checks
Will there be fraud in Georgia runoff?
Testosterone levels and confidence
Defining "The Observer Problem"
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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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Well, we still have a little bit left in this year.
You want to get all the goodness out of it you can.
Squeeze it. Squeeze it.
Squeeze the goodness out of 2020, what little bit there was, and then savor it.
That's right. Squeeze it out and savor it.
That's the advice for today.
And all you need to enjoy today, to its maximum extent, is a cup or a mug or a glass.
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 of the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
It happens now. Go. Ah.
Oh, yes. Here's a little thing for you that you didn't know.
Did you know? That on Dilbert.com, where every Dilbert comic that's ever been published is available for free, that you can search by keywords.
So if you wanted to find all the comics about a certain topic, 4G, 5G, passion, whatever, you can just do a search.
The comic will come up if you want to use it for a presentation.
Any professional use, you just click a button and you can license it for that.
So, in case you were looking to spice up any presentations, are people doing presentations now?
Is anybody doing PowerPoint slides because of all the remote work?
Do they work as well on Zoom?
I don't know. I wonder if the whole PowerPoint thing is down.
I've told you before, one of the things I like to do And I will always be somewhat misunderstood for this.
The story of my life to be misunderstood.
Well, yes, I know you can do screen sharing on Zoom.
I'm just wondering if it's as common to do slideshows on Zoom as it would be in person.
So I like to trace influence wherever I can.
So if I think I might have influenced something, I like to see, was that really me, or were there other people influencing in other ways?
And so the interesting case of this, I've dug down a little bit more, is the question of calling out passion as BS. Now, I did a little googling, and the history of it's kind of interesting, so let me tell you. So in 2013, my book had failed almost everything, and still wouldn't be came out.
And one of the chapters was, Passion is BS. And I was telling people that if they succeed, and something works out really well, they'll probably get pretty passionate about it.
So instead of searching for your passion, just do something that you know will work.
And makes you money and makes you proud.
And you'll find your passion that way.
Now, in 2012, so that was my book in 2013, which was based on a blog post I'd written sometime earlier.
In 2012, a year before that, sometime around the time I wrote my first blog post on it, Cal Newport's book came out, So Good They Can't Ignore You.
And I haven't read the book, so I can tell you with certainty that I wasn't influenced by reading the book because I haven't read it, but I'm told that it's very similar, and that would have come out prior to my book, about the same time as the blog post, but he would have written the book probably 2011 or so before the blog post.
But even before that, so that was 2012, but even before that, Mike Rowe, Back in, there's a 2009, and somebody sent a 2004 reference to it as well.
But let's say mid or early 2000s.
2009 at least, but maybe 2004.
He had talked about bringing your passion with you instead of pursuing your passion.
His point being that there are lots of dirty jobs, as he liked to call it with his TV show, and that all of these jobs have a use that are important, they have to get done, and that it's better to just be good at something And the way he expressed it was to bring your passion with you.
Now that's a little different than what I was saying.
Because I was saying that you can't just bring your passion with you.
Because that's not much different than saying follow your passion.
Because if you could be passionate about anything, that would be pretty terrific.
But how do you do that? How do you just be passionate?
And then just bring it with you.
So I think the Mike Rowe thing, while Mike Rowe is a national treasure, I'm a big fan of everything that Mike Rowe does, I would say that the prescription of bring your passion with you is a little closer to the BS than it is something you could use.
In other words, if I told you, hey, just bring your passion with you, what would you actually do?
Right? If it doesn't change what you would do, It's not really telling you something useful.
So I don't know how you'd bring your passion with you unless you were just naturally passionate about everything.
So I think it's a better advice to say that if you just do something well, that eventually you're going to be happy about the outcome.
Whether you're passionate or not is an argument, but you'll be happy about your life.
Going back further, I found the first Dilber comic I could find using that same search thing I talked about on Dilber.com.
In 1998, I was mocking, in the comic strip Dilbert, I was mocking Passion.
So in 1998, I was calling out Passion for BS. That's the first printed place that I've seen it.
In 97 or so, The Dilbert Principle came out.
My book was a big bestseller.
And it talked about all the business practices being BS. So in the 90s, I kind of owned that argument that passion and a lot of the other management buzzwords were BS. By the 2000s, It was turning into books and sort of becoming a thing that people were saying.
And by 2013, I'd kind of put a bow on it.
So you can see that this influence stuff is nearly impossible to trace accurately, meaning that could it be That all the people mentioned from...
Scott Galloway was talking about this concept the other day.
Could it be that all of us sort of got to the same point independently?
And the answer is, well, you can't really be independent of the Dilbert comic in the 90s.
If you're old enough to remember the 90s, if you lived through the 90s, it was hard to miss the Dilbert comic.
If you're born today, you might miss it.
It's not as big a deal.
But in the 90s, it was on all the magazine covers, and it was just the biggest thing.
So certainly everybody was aware that I was calling out passion and the other buzzwords for BS. But that doesn't mean I influenced anybody.
There's an idea called the zeitgeist, which is the idea that for some mysterious reason, and the mysterious part doesn't mean magic, The mysterious part probably just means we don't know why, as opposed to magic.
And the mysterious part is it does seem that there are some kinds of ideas that spring up in different parts of the world and in different people at the same time.
So apparently that's a thing.
Now, is it a coincidence?
Is it just a coincidence?
That people will have similar ideas at the same time.
Probably. In some cases, it's just nothing but a coincidence.
Other times, probably lots of people are having the same idea, but you only notice a few of them.
And then you say, oh, just two people had this idea, but there might have been millions of them.
You just didn't notice them. But I would think that maybe the bigger effect here is that sometimes you're just ready for things.
Do you know what I mean? If something has been going a certain way for a while, people are going to be ready for whatever is the opposite of that message.
So there's something about just the totality of the signals that we're all getting, and many of us getting the same signals, because we watch, for the most part, the same popular media in some form.
So I think there is something that suggests certain ideas by the atmosphere.
There's just stuff happening that makes you think of an idea, but it makes other people think of it at the same time.
So I remind myself of this whenever I think I have an original idea.
The odds of it actually being original are really low.
Now, I've told you before that the value of a good idea is...
Tell me, in the comments, what is the economic value...
Let's just say economic value of a great idea.
A great idea.
Like a really, really great idea.
Whether it's a business idea or something that could be commercialized.
What is the value of it?
Yeah, zero. Right.
You've been trained well.
The value of a great idea is zero.
It's all about implementation.
You would do better implementing a pretty good idea, or just a solid idea, than you would doing a bad job implementing a great idea.
And by the way, nobody really knows what great ideas are until they happen.
Usually it's after the fact.
You know for sure they were great.
So anyway, there's a hilarious story.
Ah, Hilaria. Have you been watching the story about Alec Baldwin's wife?
Her name is Hilaria.
And apparently she was born Hillary.
So her given name was Hillary, but I guess her family called her Hilaria.
And I don't know what's true in this story.
So I'm not going to allege that one version of this is truer than the other.
I'll just tell you the story. So somebody is calling out Alec Baldwin's wife.
For being some kind of a fraud.
And again, this is not me saying it.
I don't know what's true and what's not in this story.
But the allegation is that early on, she would pretend to have a Spanish accent And that she was Spanish by birth.
And that she had some kind of...
She came here from Spain or something.
Turns out, that's not so true.
Number one, she's not Spanish.
Number two, didn't grow up in Spain.
Number three, when she says her parents live in Spain or in Mallorca, I think, they moved there later.
So it had nothing to do with her growing up.
She grew up in Massachusetts.
So she was a white girl named Hillary who grew up in Massachusetts.
And there's some videos of her early, before she was as well-known as she is now as Alec Baldwin's wife, in which she was actually talking in a Spanish accent.
But then there's more modern videos of her, no accent.
And she's tried to explain it a little bit, and Alec Baldwin has sort of told people to leave her alone.
And in my opinion, this is the smallest story in the world.
I wish Hilaria well, and I wish her kids well.
I even wish Alec Baldwin well, even though he's sort of annoying in terms of the Trump stuff sometimes.
So I don't wish anybody bad, and I don't think this is important, and I also don't think it's any of our business, really.
Whether or not she put on a little bit of an artifice is interesting.
It's interesting, and it's funny, but it's not important in any way.
So we shouldn't take it as important.
But I would just put this in a larger story that it feels as if everybody who is either a Trump supporter or a Trump critic is meeting a bad end.
Does it feel like that?
It doesn't matter which side you're on.
If you're well known as either a Trump critic or a Trump supporter, I feel as if you've got a target on your back.
And there's going to be some bad luck that comes your way, which might not be an accident, right?
Because there will be people who want to get you.
That's how they get you. And I keep wondering, is this ahead for me?
Or has it already happened?
I'm not sure. Why is it that people are dropping like flies, no matter which side they're on?
And I've got to feel like I must have been targeted so many times, just as any prominent Trump supporter has been.
And I wonder, have they tried to take me down and it didn't work?
Or did they not try?
What do you think? Do you feel that the, I don't know who is they in this case, just random people who might want to take people down for being on the other side, do you feel that anybody tried to take me down?
There were lots and lots of hit articles and bad tweets and stuff, but I don't know if anybody took a good try at that.
That might be ahead of me. So if I get taken out, if somebody takes me out, don't be surprised.
Have you noticed a lot of the news is about Jake Tapper this week?
Because he said some things about Kayleigh McEnany not telling the truth, etc.
Does it seem to you, and this will be a case of me doing some mind reading and speculation, it's not something I could know, but does it seem to you like the hosts of CNN... Are jealous that they're not the stars?
I feel like they feel bad that they only get to talk about the news as opposed to being the star of the news.
Do you get that feeling?
Again, it would just be our own imaginations.
We don't know what's in anybody's heads.
But it just feels like, when you're watching it, are you jealous that you're not the star of the show?
You don't like just being the narrator, right?
You kind of want to be part of the show, which would be normal.
If I had that job, I'd want to be part of the show.
I'm sure I would feel exactly the same way.
But it's also good for your career if you have a higher profile, so there's also a functional reason to do it.
What do you think of the odds that Joe Biden will get the Nobel Peace Prize?
Seems pretty high, doesn't it?
It doesn't matter what he does, he's going to get it.
Well, let me share with you a little prize I got back in 1997.
This is called the Reuben Award, R-E-U-B-E-N, named after Reuben.
Goldberg, who was a famous cartoonist of the past.
And Rube Goldberg, whose name is on the trophy.
So this is the top award in cartooning.
So this would be like the Academy Award, but for cartoonists.
Now for years, when I was a new cartoonist, I dreamed of someday, someday I will win the award for top cartoonist.
And then one day, I won the award for Top Cartoonist.
In the year I won that for Top Cartoonist, I also won the top award for Top Comic Strip.
So I won the top of my specific field, but also the number one in the whole field of cartooning.
So it was the biggest award you could possibly get.
Let me tell you how I felt.
Nothing. Nothing.
I thought that if I would win this frickin' award, it would make me feel good for the rest of my life, or something like that.
I thought that winning this thing would feel just so satisfying, like, ah, finally, I've achieved this goal.
The moment you win it, and it happens instantly, it really does happen instantly, the moment you win this thing, It doesn't mean anything.
All of its value just goes out of it.
And then you realize that winning this award was some people sitting around who said, who's going to win it this year?
Well, who have we picked in prior years?
Well, we don't want to give it to those same people again.
This literally happened.
Literally. They didn't want to give it to the same people who keep winning it, because then Calvin and Hobbes and Bill Watterson would just win it year after year.
Because at the time, when I won this award, Calvin and Hobbes was still in its heyday.
Do you think any cartoonist would have won an award if all it mattered is who's the best cartoonist?
Because it would have been Gary Larson, it would have been Bill Watterson.
For just straight cartooning.
But because they wanted to give the award to other people, they decided it was my year, and it was just some people sitting around saying, well, if we give the award to this guy, he's got a big name, so it will attract people to the award ceremony, and what we really want is a good award ceremony.
So the entire thing, the entire thing had no meaning.
It was just something that they did to promote their own event, and I got dragged into it by being a high profile at the time.
Now, similarly, prior to making a big with cartooning and with Dilbert, I thought that if I ever achieved a certain dollar amount of net worth, I would be the happiest guy.
Like, all my life, I really, really wanted to make a lot of money.
And I didn't know how, but I knew I did not want to be average income-wise.
I wanted to have a lot of money.
And from my earliest memories, I always had been aiming at exactly that.
And then one day after I got a big publishing contract...
I got a check in the mail.
I won't tell you how big it was, but it was national news at the time.
There were headlines about it.
And it was a big publishing deal because Dilbert was pretty hot and made a lot of news articles.
And I got that check.
Now, of course, keep in mind this is over 20 years ago, so a check that's really, really big and 20 years ago doesn't look the same today.
But it was a really, really big check, and it was big enough That I said to myself, I never have to worry about money again.
It was actually big enough.
No, it wasn't $25 million.
That would have been nice. But it was big enough that I knew that if I didn't want to, I didn't really even have to work again.
I mean, I wouldn't have lived in...
I would not have been able to live in splendor for the rest of my life, but I wouldn't have had to work if I didn't want to.
And When I'd achieved that goal, even the specific dollar amount, that's the thing.
I had a specific dollar amount and I hit it.
And it happened sort of all at once.
The moment it happened, how did I feel?
Achieving the biggest goal of my whole life.
How did I feel when I achieved it?
Depressed. Instantly, instantly depressed.
And one of the worst...
Bouts of depression I've ever experienced, actually.
Now, I don't have depression, clinical depression, except that a few weeks of every year something's going wrong.
So I seem to have a periodic, you know, every now and then a few weeks are pretty bad.
But I don't have anything like clinical depression.
I'm nowhere near that category.
But this is the most depressed I've ever felt.
And it was after I'd achieved my biggest goal.
Why? Because that was my organizing principle for my whole life.
Every decision I'd made, in terms of career-wise, was all aimed at this one thing.
And then I got it.
The purpose of my life disappeared.
I was like the dog that chased the car and caught it.
Well, now what the hell do I do?
I was completely lost.
My whole life I had to reinvent it, basically.
And the way I chose to do it was following, I think, instinct, in a sense.
And I believe that we're all designed the following way.
First, you have to take care of yourself.
Let's say you're in mortal danger.
Your first priority is live.
I've got to get out of this danger.
So you're not thinking about helping other people.
If you're in mortal danger, you've just got to get out of it.
But once you've taken care of yourself, You can start thinking about maybe your family, people close to you, taking care of them.
As things get better for you, maybe you take care of them, you say, well, what can I do for the town?
What can I do for the country?
What can I do for the world?
And so I found myself just being drawn down that funnel almost like I didn't have a choice.
Because once I had literally achieved everything I wanted, because I should have had higher goals, I suppose, but I got what I wanted.
And I immediately found myself biologically drawn toward making my impact more external.
In other words, instead of getting stuff for myself, I was done.
I needed to, just biologically, I felt the impulse to help other people.
Now, I'd like to think That what I experience is universal or close to it.
That anybody who would be in my experience would start thinking externally because I hope we're all wired that way.
I just hope that's natural.
And so I started to look for ways to find my satisfaction and meaning by being useful to other people.
And the second...
One of the things that happened there is I got married and tried to be useful in the context of a family.
Because if you can make one family work, that's a pretty big accomplishment, right?
If everybody could make one family work, it would be a great world.
But during that time when I was making the one family work as best I could, I didn't have as much energy for the external world.
And once I did, once I was divorced and things there were, let's say, I couldn't affect them as much, I literally felt lost again.
Because it was the second time I'd lost my entire meaning of life.
So at first I'd been chasing wealth, and then I got it.
And then I wanted to have something like a meaningful family life.
And then once that ended, not in a good way, it was divorce.
But once it ended, I had once again lost my meaning.
And I remember actually the day that I got it back.
And again, I think that it's biological.
I don't think I don't think this was a mental process.
I think my biology was pulling me along.
Just the way it would pull me along to take care of a family, once that wasn't there, it pulled me along.
And I actually made a promise to myself and to the world.
And I realized that at that point, I no longer belonged to myself, if that makes any sense.
I belonged to the world.
Because any benefit that I could produce was probably going to end up external, because I didn't have the internal reason anymore.
And when I made that decision to realize that what I'm going to do for the rest of my time is figure out some way to help other people, In whatever way makes sense for my particular skills, I found meaning again.
And so when I do this, or when I write the books, it's a lot of work.
It's not easy in a sense, but it has so much meaning that it's pleasurable in its own way.
I don't know why I brought that up, but it seemed important for some reason.
Oh, I was triggered by the fact that Trump is being mocked with some fake news.
New York Magazine is doing this fake news story that claims that President Trump is telling his dumb supporters that he won two Nobel Prizes, when in fact he was nominated twice but has not won a prize.
Now, it's fake news because while he did once speak of it, let's say, unclearly, He obviously knows he didn't win the prize.
I don't think he's trying to convince his supporters he really won the prize.
But being nominated twice, that's a pretty big deal.
I'd be bragging if I'd been nominated twice, so it's just fake news.
Let's talk about China.
The more we learn about China, the more distressing it is.
And I have to give it to China.
Their long-term strategy is really, really good.
Really good. And it goes like this.
I think they've referred to it by some other term, like, what is it, universal war or something.
But the idea is that everything the country does is in the context of trying to dominate other countries.
So it's like a permanent war footing, but it's not just military, it's economic, it's influence, it's cyber, it's everything they can do.
And when you see all the ways that they have succeeded in this, and you see that they have a hundreds of years span, like they're planning hundreds of years in advance.
Yeah, one belt, one road.
What's the Belt and Road Initiative?
Somebody's saying. But when you see how much influence they already have, it is shocking.
And here's the main thing you need to know.
Money... And military are now basically the same thing.
Now, they're used differently and they have their different purposes, etc.
But the more money you have, the more your economy is strong, the stronger you are to defend yourself and also to dominate other countries.
And what China has going for it is that its natural size should get it to the point where the Chinese government has more money than anybody else.
Now, at the moment, the United States collectively probably has more money and resources than anybody else who can control one pot of anything.
But eventually, there's no way around the fact that China is just so big that if they just grow naturally, and we grow naturally, they're going to be bigger, and it's not going to take long.
And already they have so much money that they can corrupt every element of society.
Let me ask you this.
If I had more business in China, I think I've got a few clients over there for English-speaking newspapers, nothing important.
They don't do much licensing or books.
But imagine, if you would, that...
I'll just pick a number. Imagine if 25% of my income came from China.
And that wouldn't be unusual for a lot of businesses, right?
So they might either have manufacturing there, or they might want to have a big market there, or they already do, etc.
But imagine me doing exactly what I'm doing now, talking on livestream, but 25% of my income comes from China.
Do I say the same things?
Nope. No.
Because even I would be really reluctant to give up 25% of my income just to make a point on one topic.
Now, I hate China more than most of you.
You know, my stepson died from fentanyl and other stuff.
And so I blame China for that.
So I've got a personal beef with China.
But I don't think I would be going after them nearly as hard if I had an actual, you know, meaningful financial interest.
I just wouldn't.
Now, wouldn't I love to tell you that I'm the kind of guy, hey people, I'm the kind of guy that would do any, you know, I'll do what's right, I won't be influenced by money, but that's not the real world.
The real world, even if you already have money, you're influenced by money.
Even if you don't need any more money, you're still influenced by money.
It would be great if we could turn that off, but we really can't.
And you're not even always aware of it, right?
Because you're making millions of choices a minute about what to do and what not to do.
And it would be really easy for me to not mention that China is the biggest threat to the United States and that they do clearly intend to destroy us.
Now, let me say that as clearly as possible.
China's intention, as far as I can tell, is to destroy the United States in the long, long run, meaning that to dominate us and to make the United States unimportant compared to China's influence in the world.
And it looks like they're on a path to do that.
It would be hard to imagine that they would not succeed because they have a gigantic advantage.
Their economy is just so gigantic.
So if we don't find a way to make more money than them or to shut them out from our technology development, We are absolutely screwed.
Maybe not in my lifetime, but if you're 30 years old, definitely in your lifetime, you would be Chinese.
You want to hear a scary thought?
I thought of this yesterday.
Imagine if you would, China somehow got, like, actual control of the United States.
You could argue that they have a lot of control because they have money and, you know, every politician basically is bought by China except Trump, as far as I can tell.
Trump might be the only politician who's not bought off by China.
And so we're seeing this happen now, right in front of us.
China taking over the world.
And if we don't treat it like we're right in the middle of an actual war, we don't have a chance.
So anyway, the thing I realized is that if China could control the United States today, they would kill me.
Actually, literally, physically, no joke, no hyperbole, no exaggeration whatsoever.
If they already controlled the United States, they would kill me on week one.
You might be okay, because you haven't spoken up, but I've spoken up.
I'm dead.
I'm physically dead on week one, if China controls the United States.
So that's how much control they have.
And the beauty of their strategy is very much like the alleged but not proven election fraud, which is only alleged and there's no court-proven proof.
Are you hearing that? I'm saying that so I don't get censored.
Obviously, the situation of the election invites massive fraud.
So if massive fraud had been invited by the system because it was easy and it was profitable and you could certainly get away with it, and it didn't happen, and it didn't happen, I don't know how to understand that world.
But let's agree there's no court proof that it happened.
It's just sort of impossible to imagine it didn't happen, right?
I don't even know where I was going with this point.
We're talking about China.
So the China strategy is like the alleged election fraud strategy.
If the election fraud happened, if it did, in all likelihoods it happened in small ways in a lot of places so that if you found any one place it happened, It wouldn't be enough to change the election.
So the court would say, yeah, that's fraud, but the part you found was small, so we can't do anything about it.
So it looks like China has packetized their war as well.
Because if China did a massive push on any one thing, that'd be a problem, right?
Suppose they put all of their energy into cyber war.
Well, that would be an actual war.
And we'd say, what are you doing?
There's like this gigantic cyber war.
It's already pretty big, but I imagine they could be bigger.
So we would treat that as like war.
But what if it's a little bit of cyber war?
You could say it's a lot, but it's not over the line where we have to start bombing them.
And there's a little bit of bribing, but not so much.
We're going to stop trading with them.
There's a little bit of cheating on the trade, but not so much that nobody wants to stop trading with them.
There's a little bit of influence by, let's say, buying a lot of shares of media properties in the United States.
Do you know how much of our media properties are owned by China?
A lot. But if you only looked at that by itself, you'd say, yeah, that's a problem, but by itself, it's not such a big problem.
So this This packetized war, where they're attacking us literally on every front where you can be attacked, they're sending us fentanyl.
Imagine if they sent us more fentanyl.
So the amount they're sending now is killing, what, 50,000 Americans a year?
Imagine if they upped that to 2 million.
Well, then it's war.
That's actual war.
If 2 million people a year were being killed in this country from their fentanyl, we would actually militarily respond.
But 50,000 a year?
They found our sweet spot.
Just enough to hurt.
Not enough that you want a nuclear war.
Right? Because right now it's only, well, my stepson died, but maybe yours didn't.
If your kid didn't die, it's not your biggest problem.
Right? I mean, the reason I have such an attitude about it is my kid died.
You would too. And so they have this brilliant strategy of packetizing all of their evil so it's just small enough that you don't nuke their fucking bastard asses.
It's brilliant.
It's brilliant. Now, I'd like to think that the United States is giving as good as it's getting.
I don't know that that's the case.
Because we hear about what China does, we don't hear what we do to China.
But I'd like to think it's a lot, and if it's not, it ought to be.
Let's talk about the checks.
So President Trump is doing something politically clever, which is he's pushing for the larger dollar amount for the direct checks to individuals.
And when I say he's doing the smart thing, let me explain to you politics.
It's very complicated.
If you're going to promise the public a dollar amount, a check, always go for the big one.
I know that's hard to understand, because politics is complicated, but let me say it again.
If you have a choice, always go for the big one.
That will never be wrong.
Politically, it'll never be wrong.
So Trump has exactly the right political instinct that the $2,000 rate is It's the right number for him to be remembered by.
Not the $600 thing.
That looks like just a failure and not even trying.
Now, but what is the counter-argument?
Let's go to CNN and read the counter-argument for why $2,000 checks should not be given.
Because, you know, if President Trump wants it, they're going to want to argue the other side.
So... What is the argument against the $2,000?
Well, let me check CNN. No argument.
There's no argument against it on CNN. Let's flip over to Fox News.
Fox News, do you have an argument against the $2,000 checks?
Yes. Yes, they do.
They have a Republican on, and the Republican says, why would we be giving $2,000 checks to rich people who didn't lose their jobs?
To which I said, what?
We were going to give the $2,000 check to just everybody?
If you're an adult, you get $2,000.
If you're a couple, you get $4,000.
And I thought to myself, you're kidding, right?
That's not really the plan, is it?
Because I had assumed...
Maybe incorrectly, it sounds.
I'd assumed that they had some kind of a needs test.
I don't know how you'd do it, because if you did it based on last year's income tax, that doesn't match the fact that you lost your job this year.
So how would you exactly document in a massive, fast way that you deserve it and I don't?
And I guess that's the problem, right?
Maybe somebody says $75,000 a year.
Can you fact check that?
Because the Republican senator, whose name I don't remember, who was on talking about it, acted as if there was no income check.
Now what he did say, so maybe I'm going to modify in real time here, because based on your comments, I'm thinking that what he meant was, check me if I'm wrong, what he meant then was that if you made $75,000 or whatever, but you hadn't lost your job, Maybe you shouldn't get to 2,000?
So is the problem just that if you still had a job, why are you getting 2,000 when there are people who don't even have any job, right?
Somebody says limited based on AGI. Yep, we didn't get it.
Well, but you're not talking about the current checks, right?
I know the last version had a needs check.
Anyway, So do a fact check with me on that.
But let me add this.
If it's true that people who are over that amount were to get a check, let's say for convenience the government just said, and I'm assuming this is not the case, right?
But assume they said this.
We'll just give a $2,000 check to every adult.
Could you depend on people who were well off to re-gift that same $2,000 to something local that needed it?
In other words, if I got a $2,000 check and the president or somebody else said, look, we don't have time to decide if you needed the check.
But do us a favor.
Be a patriot. If your income is about the same as it was before the pandemic, take your check and And figure out the best way to apply it locally.
Whatever that is.
Might be the food bank.
Might be something else. Could you depend on wealthy people to do that?
Well, not all of them, of course.
Some wealthy people will just be busy or they'll just cash the jack or whatever.
But I would think that the vast majority would say, yeah, I don't deserve this money.
You know, that wasn't the purpose.
I'll be happy to find a way to give my $2,000 to the community in the best way.
I feel as if 80% would do it.
At least above a certain income, 80% would do it.
If you're at $76,000 a year, or let's say you're 75 and you get the check, or you're 76 and you get the check, that's an arbitrary cutoff.
All right, so I guess I don't know enough about that.
But my point stands that the news is not reporting this well enough that we even understand the topic.
But I guess Bernie Sanders is pushing for the $2,000 at the same time as Trump is.
So Trump and Bernie Sanders on the same side with this $2,000 stuff, which I favor completely.
How many of you...
Here's a weird random question.
So yesterday I had an experience, I won't describe the details, in which a major part of my assumption of reality, let's say my personal reality, was challenged.
Meaning that I found out I was completely wrong on something so basic to my understanding of my life that it just blew me away.
But here's the funny thing.
It's not even the first time this month that that's happened.
I've had my entire understanding of reality, or at least my place in it, completely scrambled.
I feel like five times this year, like I've never seen before.
Just really, really basic assumptions about reality, and my place in it specifically, just blown away.
Have any of you had this experience that you've lost more of your illusions this year than any other time?
Where's the slaughter meter?
You know, so part of my annoying reality now is that all the people who believe that there was a fair election are coming over to mock me for predicting that Trump won.
I'm not going to concede I'm not going to concede that he got less votes.
I will concede that there was an election.
I will concede that there was an official process.
I conceded early on by congratulating Biden when the networks were calling it.
I'm certainly on board with the fact that the process is going to march forward, whatever.
Don't ask me to accept that that election was valid.
And let me go stronger.
If you're trying to force me to say that election was valid when it obviously wasn't, obviously, put some earmuffs on the kids if you would like to hear some cursing.
Would you like to hear some cursing?
A little holiday cursing?
Put the earmuffs on the kids.
Here it comes.
If you're telling me I can't say out loud in public that the election was obviously fraudulent, my statement based on the fact that the setup of how the election is designed guarantees massive fraud.
It can't go any other way, just because it's possible.
If it weren't possible, then I'd say maybe it didn't happen.
And if there were no profit for doing it, in other words, there's no upside, I'd say, well, yeah, it's possible, but nobody's going to do it because there's no point to it.
But if it's both possible and there's a gigantic upside, yeah, of course it happened.
Massively. Don't know if it changed the result.
Don't know if it's always changed the result.
There's lots of stuff we don't know.
But stop fucking pretending it was a fair election.
We all know it was a fucking fraudulent election.
We do know we don't live in anything like a republic or anything like a democracy.
We don't. That is a fucking lie.
And don't you tell me that I can't say in public that the election was completely bogus.
Now, Certainly bogus in the sense that it doesn't have credibility with much of the public, and I'm in that category.
But if you ask me, why didn't the courts find all that proof?
To which I say, you're just on the wrong topic.
If you get on the right topic, maybe we can talk.
The topic is that by its design, there had to be fraud.
That's it. I'm done.
If you want to talk about what somebody else, who is not me...
Did or did not do in some court case that had nothing to do with my point?
Knock yourself out.
But I'm not part of that conversation.
Alright. So, there's that.
What do you think is going to happen in Georgia?
I was wondering why there weren't as many predictions.
But even CNN in an opinion piece say they think the Republicans will win.
Do you believe that? I mean, I don't have a reason to believe it or disbelieve it, but if you believe that fraud is possible and profitable and it's easy to get away with, I'm not sure that Georgia's going to go, well, your way, if you're Republican.
I've got a feeling that the cheaters are really making a tough decision in the coming week or so, don't you think?
So suppose you were, hypothetically, Suppose you were a trickster and you were planning to steal the election in Georgia.
You were planning to do it.
You know how. You're all set up.
You can do it. You know you can do it.
But you know everyone's watching.
Everyone's watching this one.
So if you were going to try some voter fraud, would you do it on this one?
It's an interesting question, because the stakes are sky high.
So given that the stakes are so high, that suggests yes.
Given that it's possible, even with as much scrutiny on it as there will be, also suggests it's going to happen.
So the two conditions for massive fraud are, is it possible, and Meaning you can get away with it, or you have an expectation you can get away with it, even if you did get caught.
And that there are lots of people involved, so there's always somebody bad, willing to do bad stuff.
And that there's a big upside.
My prediction is there should be massive fraud.
There should be. Because all the conditions to have it exist, and all of the conditions to stop it do not exist.
There's nothing in place that I'm aware of that would stop it.
Because if we could stop it, we would have stopped it in the national election.
If we knew how to stop any of this, it wouldn't be happening.
So while I understand the idea that Republicans usually come out stronger in these kinds of elections, and so The history suggests that the Republicans should win.
We might be in a position where they'll just steal it.
And there won't be a damn thing you can do about it.
Because they'll packetize it.
Just like China, just like the national election.
They'll make sure that whatever you find individually will be small.
So, no change.
So... I don't know if I'm even going to talk about that.
Here's a thing I found out the other day.
Did you know that your testosterone level is related to your confidence?
Did you know that? You probably did, right?
But it's true for both male and female.
That might be the part you didn't know.
So your testosterone level, even if you're female, can affect your sex drive and your confidence, etc., Did you know that in a woman's monthly cycle that there is one week in which her testosterone is lowest?
Did you know that?
Yeah, it's the week before the actual period starts.
So in the PMS period, women have lower testosterone.
And I think you can just Google it.
That's fairly well demonstrated.
And if it's true that testosterone is lower, Connected to confidence, and I feel like that's well demonstrated, you should expect that women during that week would experience less confidence.
Now, here's something I was going to put on Locals, the subscription service, and I might shorten this and put it on there, but it's what I call the observer effect.
And the reason I'm giving a name to something that you all understand, That an observer can be wrong.
That's not really a shocking statement.
But when you give something a name, you give it extra power.
For example, naming Trump derangement syndrome, or TDS, allowed you to talk about it and gave power to that concept.
Here are some others where just naming it gives it power.
The Dunning-Kruger effect.
Until the Dunning-Kruger effect had that name, it was harder to talk about it.
It wasn't as powerful. But as soon as you put a name on it, oh, we all know what that is.
Now the power of that thing can increase as people understand it and talk about it.
And naming it gave you power.
The Gelman amnesia effect, the Peter principle, the Dilber principle.
So any of these things which were concepts that got a name, the name gave them power.
And so I'm trying to give power to this thing I call the observer problem.
I'll give you some examples.
And the first thing that happened when I tweeted about this, here's what I tweeted, and then I'll tell you what the response was.
I said, how many of you will hallucinate an opinion for me today because you're bad at mind reading and then criticize that hallucination like it is my fault?
I call it the observer problem.
Predictably, and I could have told you this would happen in advance, people went into the comments and said, oh, yeah, that's just the straw man thing.
You're just renaming the straw man.
No. No, I'm not.
I can see why you think it's similar.
The straw man, in my opinion, you won't see this in the definition, but in the wild and in my opinion, the straw man is somewhat intentional.
Or at the very least, the person doing it doesn't care if they're being accurate.
So a straw man is where, you know, you make an argument and then somebody Changes your argument into something weird so that they can criticize it.
So they're not really criticizing the real argument.
They're criticizing what's called a straw man or a fake version of your argument that's weak and hollow.
So that exists.
And of course that's called being a straw man.
But the observer problem, I would say, is different.
And the difference is that the observer doesn't know that the problem is on their end.
The person doing a straw man...
Either knows it intentionally, or they kind of suspect it.
You know what I mean? It's not like they necessarily know it consciously, but they kind of know it.
But the observer effect is they actually are just hallucinating.
They actually think something happened that didn't happen, and then they're arguing their hallucination.
And I think that calling it the observer effect You're going to see it in a bunch of context.
Now I'm going to tie together this thing about the testosterone and confidence.
Alright. It goes like this.
Follow along with this reasoning.
If you are a cocky, overconfident person, and you run into another cocky, overconfident person, how do you get along?
Pretty well. Pretty well.
And I say that as a cocky, overconfident person.
Whenever I meet somebody who's like me, overconfident, I get along marvelously.
Because they don't scare me.
They're familiar. I go, oh, that's me.
Hey, look at me over there.
That guy's just like me.
Suppose you have low confidence, very low confidence, and you meet somebody else who has low confidence.
How do you get along?
Probably pretty well. I've got low confidence.
You've got low confidence. Hey, we're not threatening to each other.
We get along. But what happens if somebody with low confidence, whether temporarily because it's just where they are in their life or their normal biological cycles, it doesn't have to be anything to do with your monthly cycle, you could just have low confidence.
What happens when a low confidence person comes into contact with a cocky, high confidence person?
See where I'm going?
To the person with low confidence, a person with high confidence looks not just like somebody who's got an advantage.
They look disgusting.
They look sickening.
They look like it makes your skin crawl.
And that's the observer problem.
The observer is looking at somebody, let's say in this case, it's not somebody who is so...
Grandiose in their thinking that they actually are a full narcissist with bad impacts.
Let's just say it's somebody like me who intentionally picks a point of confidence above my actual ability, as I see it, because I want it to be there.
The most functional place you can put your confidence is above your actual abilities.
Not much above. But above them as you understand them.
Because the problem is, you might underestimate your own abilities.
So to avoid the problem of underestimating your own ability, you intentionally, if you're smart, and this is what I recommend, you try to pin yourself to a level of confidence above what you believe is realistic.
Because you're usually wrong about what you can do.
Let me give you an example.
When I tried to become a professional cartoonist with no experience of being a cartoonist at all, I was putting my confidence well above anything that was rational about where my skill was.
Completely irrational.
Also intentional.
I was intentionally shooting above where I believed I could hit because I also believed I had an illusion about what my potential was.
And I was trying to find a system That would overcome my own illusion about my low quality of ability.
And so I quite intentionally peg my confidence well above what feels like I can do, because I don't know.
And this live stream is a good example.
And I've told you this story.
When I first started doing the live stream, Before I had my sinus surgery, my voice was terrible.
I had voice problems before.
I'm nasally not good at this.
I don't have a good physical look.
I'd be better on radio.
There are a million things wrong with it.
But because I peg my confidence above what is obviously my ability, I sometimes can hit it and just surprise myself.
And the number of times that you do hit the level that you don't think was even really realistic is amazing.
Have you seen my wife?
I could end the conversation with, have you seen my wife?
A perfect example of if I had not pinned my confidence well above what any kind of common sense says works.
I would have missed the marriage that I'm in, for example.
So I would say that it's always a good technique to put your confidence above your actual belief of your ability.
It's just good technique, that's all.
But the problem is that when the observer is watching somebody like me just use technique to put my confidence above where it belongs, I am disgusting.
And narcissistic.
And just like an abomination.
Because our confidence levels are mismatched.
Now that's the observer problem.
The problem lies entirely in the observer in this example.
Did I have a problem?
No, I actually had a good technique and a solution.
And one that has been a driving force to all of my happiness and success.
So I don't have a mental problem.
I have a success technique that works over and over and over again.
But the observer says the problem's on my end.
But the problem, obviously, is just the observer can't handle the differences in the confidence.
It's just disgusting if you don't have it.
Now, the day that that observer...
Does something amazing or something's turned around and their confidence comes up to something more equivalent to my artificial confidence?
How are they going to look at me now?
Not the same. Not the same.
But I didn't change.
Nothing about me changed.
It was only the observer changed.
And I would say that this is probably, you know, this observer problem crosses...
Pretty much everything. Personal, professional, political.
You see the observer problem just everywhere.
So, well, thank you.
Some of you are just too nice.
In the comments, somebody says, I happen to be happily married, but my wife isn't.
So somebody here is saying, more wallet size than confidence size.
Well, you know, I don't separate that.
I can't remember if I've said this in public before.
But when people say, hey, somebody likes you just because of your money or whatever, it would be one thing if I had inherited my money.
But if you've earned your money...
I think I'll borrow something, I think Naval said this once, or some version of this.
If I lost all of my money today, do you know how long it would take me to get it back?
One year? Right?
You couldn't separate me from my money.
You could take it all the way and I would just go get it back.
Because that's who I am.
You can't change who I am.
By taking my money away, that's just temporary.
I'll just go get some more because I know how to do that.
I built a talent stack that's designed for making money.
I could make a ton of money if you took it all the way tomorrow.
And it wouldn't even necessarily be cartooning or something.
I would just do something else.
So for those who say your money is attractive, I say, well, in relationships, do you know the number one cause of breakups and fights?
The number one cause of breakups and fights is money.
So if you can take that variable out of the equation, you're more attractive.
So suppose you said, Scott, you're great, except let's say you're an addict or you're an alcoholic.
Would you ever say, but Scott, we'll separate that and we'll evaluate you without that?
No. If you're an alcoholic, that's kind of pretty basic to who you are.
In the same way that being able to make money is pretty basic to who I am.
That's just built into my DNA, apparently.
plus technique.
Dumping the first spouse after getting rich is a common theme.
Well, I was rich before I had my first spouse, too.
So I got rich first.
Haters will always hate.
See, I don't know that that's the case.
I don't know that haters will always hate.
I think what I'm adding to that is that there's a reason some people...
Have an observer problem that they're disgusted by something else.
It has nothing to do with the something else.
It has to do with where they are.
So that's what I'm adding, if I'm adding anything.
Somebody says, Google my net worth.
Let me tell you that here's all you need to know about that.
If you Google my net worth, it says $75 million.
Forbes made that estimate.
They made that estimate 25 years ago and haven't changed it.
So do you think that my net worth stayed the same for 20 years?
So that's all you need to know about it, right?
So if you're asking me if that number is accurate, Just ask yourself that.
Do you think it didn't change in 20 years?
I've done a few things.
So either the number was never real, or it didn't stay real for long, right?
It's either by now it's doubled, or I did dumb things and cut it in half, or it was never right to begin with.
So no, you should put zero credibility in estimates of other people's net wealth.
Ask yourself how would they know?
How would some publication know my net worth?
Right? Is there any way that they could do that?
There's no possible way they could do that.
It's all private. They couldn't possibly know.
What if I had put a million dollars into Uber when it first came out?
Well, my net worth would be hundreds of millions of dollars.
Who would know that besides me?
Nobody. I did not actually do that.
I wish I had. So no, don't believe any of those numbers.
Those are ridiculous. Where does my money go?
Most of it I've given away, frankly.
I've given away, when I say given it away, I mean intelligently, in ways that make sense, including to exes and stuff.
That's giving it away, in a sense.
So my plan was always to die poor.
But then I got married again, and I'll probably have to modify that.
So, yeah, I do own Tesla stock.
I'll admit that. I will tell you that when the pandemic happened, I'm not a good investor.
I actually have lots of background in that.
But if you were to look at my track record, you wouldn't be impressed.
So I'm never going to try to sell you on the fact that I'm good at investing.
All right? So start with, you know, understand my humility.
But every now and then, there's a stock...
There's an investing concept...
That's closer to a guaranteed profit than really investing.
And that happened during the pandemic.
So when the pandemic happened and the entire stock market took a dump, I grabbed every piece of cash that I could get my hand on and put it into the stock market at the bottom.
Now, was that gambling?
Because it was a pretty big move.
And, you know, I didn't know the future.
It's like nobody can know the future.
Here's why that was not a gamble.
If the pandemic had driven the economy so far down that the economy failed and the country failed, well, it wouldn't matter what you had your money in.
So if the whole country was going to just fail, it just wouldn't matter.
But if the pandemic was going to be temporary, which was the smart bet, everybody figured it was temporary, we didn't know how long, but temporary, that the ones that did not go out of business would probably accelerate.
So buying Amazon stock at the bottom of the pandemic wasn't really a bet, was it?
I think it's up 70% or 80%?
No. I think 60% since I bought it.
So buying Amazon at the bottom wasn't really a gamble.
Likewise, I bought Twitter and Tesla and Microsoft and a few other tech companies.
And each of them are up 80%, 200%, 60%.
Now, I didn't put my whole net worth into this, just cash that I had not anywhere else.
So, here's the point.
It wasn't exactly a bet.
I just happened to have some cash laying around that I could do that, and there really wasn't a risk.
At worst, it would have broken even, I think, in the long run.
But by and large, it was likely to go up.
Somebody said Zoom. Zoom would have been an amazing investment if you were willing to take the chance.
I would not have, because there was a risk that could just go out of business.
Zoom could have gone out of business because of a specific China connection, but it didn't.
Bitcoin. So I am often asked to talk about Bitcoin, and I resist because I don't believe anybody knows anything about Bitcoin in terms of where it's going.
Now, smart people say That it will progress forever and it'll just get more important.
But I don't know that that can be known.
I hear and understand the smart people who say that the math is good and as long as there's not some new surprise, it should just keep on going.
And I don't disagree with that, but I don't find a reason to agree with it.
So I would tell you this.
Bitcoin falls into the category of things you probably ought to have in a diversified portfolio.
If you don't have a diversified portfolio, then you're just gambling.
And I don't give any advice on gambling.
The only advice I like to give on investing is to diversify, because that's the one thing you can be sure of makes sense.
Somebody says, Twitter has neutered Scott by killing live periscopes.
Well, actually, I've also used diversification in my platforms.
So YouTube is growing at the same time that Periscope will disappear at some point.
So we should be fine.
And also the Locals platform, that's subscription, will have a live stream sometime.
I hope in the next several months.
Did I see Elon Musk's tweet about Bitcoin?
No, I did not.
So Locals doesn't have live video yet, but they're working on that.
We'll have that pretty soon. All right.
Yeah, I mean, I think it would be smart to own some Bitcoin.
I don't think it would be smart to put all your money in Bitcoin.
You could win that way.
Some people have. But it'd be a gamble, not an investment.
Periscope apparently didn't make it in terms of paying for itself.
Yes, I am on Rumble as well.
So you put the books up one more shelf.
You can never be happy.
Alright, do Twitch.
You know, I'm thinking about doing Twitch, but I don't know too much about it.
I don't know that that's where I'd find an audience.
Twitch is younger, right?
The audience for Twitch would skew much younger, so I think that would not necessarily be my audience.
I might do that, though. Yeah, I'm on Parler, but I don't use it much.
Alright, that's all I've got for now, and I will talk to you later.
Alright, YouTubers. Big on games.
Don't be ageist. I'm just saying that the younger my audience is, the less likely they're going to be my audience.
Too many platforms.
Yeah, that's why we need a god mode that can publish to all platforms.
Penn Jillette is on Twitch.
Huh. Interesting.
Alright, you know, I think I could get on Twitch if I could fix my technology issues.
Doesn't the observer problem rely on mind reading, I'm asked.
Well, it's usually the observer doing the mind reading.
That's, yes, depends on that.
Just get another iPad?
Possibly. The Gavin Newsom recall.
You know, I have lots of complaints about California, but I'm not completely convinced that they're caused by Gavin Newsom.
I guess I don't follow state politics enough to have a good opinion on that.
Paul, are you asking me about Q? I don't have anything to say about Q. Wouldn't your opportunity to vote rigs apply to Republicans as well?
Yes, it would. Yes, it would.
So whether or not Republicans were trying to rig elections, well, let's put it this way.
You should assume both sides are doing it.
But there is a difference in who controls the big cities in swing districts.
So if the Republicans were also cheating, they would have been cheating in the wrong places because they don't control the same places as the Democrats.
So Paul, why are you sending me a cue with two little eyeballs over and over and over again?
If I see it again, I'm going to block it because I don't know what you're trying to send, but you could use your words and just say a whole sentence and stuff.
But if you just keep...
If you just keep tweeting that same thing, I'm going to block you.
Alright. Any predictions for January 6th?
Not exactly. Oh, I think I missed a question I want to answer there.
Why do you continuously talk about your accolades and money?
Well, Blake, this is the observer problem.
And it's on you.
What is your problem with it?
What is your problem with me adding context...
To make the story make sense.
Why does it bother you if I talk about myself accurately and that accurate account includes the fact that I'm a rich and famous cartoonist?
Do you think that I need to tell you over and over again for my own benefit?
Do you think that's what's happening?
Or do you think that, to understand the story better, that context is just an honest part of the story?
Blake, you are experiencing the observer problem.
Probably you have low confidence, and when you're exposed to somebody who has unnaturally high confidence, it feels wrong and disgusting to you.
And so you're probably experiencing exactly what I was talking about.
And I also don't think that it feels honest when you act humble...
In a way that's obviously acting.
I have lots of reasons to be humble about lots of stuff I'm not good at, but being humble about things that are observable is just sort of dumb.
Does Michael Jordan act humble about being able to dunk?
I hope not. I think he could just talk about it objectively and say, yeah, you know, that was a pretty good dunker.
I feel like he could say that.
Somebody says, I have low confidence by nature.
How can I boost it? I'll tell you, actually.
I have solid advice for that.
The way to get better confidence is to do something well.
You don't have to do everything well.
You just have to be able to hold on to the fact that there are things you can do well.
So as soon as you can do things well, Then it turns your frame from I'm bad at things or I have no confidence into there are things I try and I do well and then there are things that I'm not working on or I'm not trying or I don't care about and I'm not so good on those.
Once you realize that the difference between the things you're good at and the things you're not good at is your effort, then there's nothing to feel bad about.
You either put effort into something because you wanted to or you didn't.
And there's nothing about you in this.
So just get good at something.
Here's the other thing I recommend.
Also, be bad at something.
Be bad at something.
Learn how to be bad at things in public.
Because if you can't do something poorly in front of other people and survive it, you're going to be in bad shape.
It's just like a superpower to learn how to do things that embarrass you and just survive it.
Am I getting the shot?
My strategy for the shot is I will wait for the last minute.
So I'll have as much information as I could gather by then, and then I'll make the decision.
But if I don't hear anything negative, I will, yes.
Heisenberg uncertainty.
Does it apply to me?
I don't quite understand the analogy.
Accepting yourself.
I don't know if I buy into the advice that you should accept yourself the way you are.
I feel that that's giving you permission to be lazy.
I would rather that nobody accept themselves the way they are.
You don't have to dislike yourself.
That's going too far.
But I wouldn't accept the way you are as being good enough.
Because I think you can raise your game a little bit.
We all can. So you should be perpetually unsatisfied with where you are if you want to get better.
Look into OBS. I have used OBS. It's garbage.
Too complicated and too buggy.
Yeah, and being yourself is bad advice if you're a loser.
What do you think about getting the vaccine and still needing to wear a mask?
The mask thing has to be viewed as persuasion as well as medical.
If you see it as only one or the other, then it doesn't make sense.
If you understand that you couldn't have a practical policy where you only wear masks if you need to, you understand that's not possible, right?
If it were possible...
That only the people who needed to wear masks for medical reasons, let's say only people who had not had the vaccine or not had the virus already and recovered.
But the trouble is you can't tell.
And the moment you say, well, some people can have masks and some can't, who is going to wear a mask to the store?
Right? That's the end of it.
There is no solution in which some people wear masks and some don't.
It's either all or none. Unfortunately, because of the way people are built, we wouldn't have any possibility of people managing their own symptoms and saying, well, I think my dry cough is because it was dusty.
Right? People would do that.
They'd say, I kind of do want to get on that flight to Hawaii, so I'm going to call my cough an allergy.
Yeah, it's an allergy. You just couldn't do it.
Everybody's got to wear a mask if masks work.
If masks work for anybody in any situation, everybody's got to wear them.
Nothing else would make sense.
What if the vaccine doesn't work because of a mutation?
I think that that will not be a problem because the mutations are not the kind that are big enough that the vaccination would not still hit the parts it needs to hit.
Am I aware that small investors have a structural advantage?
Yes, I am. Because large investors need to make large investments.
So that limits the number of things that they can choose from.
So yes, small investors have some advantage if they can pick from more opportunities.
Makeup stocks are down because of masks.
So here's an investment that I didn't buy because I do think they have some risk of going out of business entirely.
But Ulta, U-L-T-A. They've got a lot of storefronts.
They sell makeup. They're a big deal.
But I thought, huh, as soon as the pandemic's over, that's going to go crazy.
But as somebody said, makeup probably is a lot less now because of the masks.
I think that's real. But as soon as you're not wearing a mask and as soon as you can go shopping again, Ulta is going to be in real good shape if they survive.
So that's the part that makes it not really an investment.
Buying a single stock is not an investment, people.
That's a gamble every time.
Because you don't know what one stock's going to do.
Nobody does. You have to buy a bunch.
So that some do well, some don't.
That's a good strategy. Alright, too much about that.
