Episode 1363 Scott Adams: UFO's Debunked, Jim Acosta Criticizes Fake News, National Debt Mystery, and Virtual People
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Convincing UFO video...debunked
Murderapolis (Minneapolis)
America's COVID performance vs others
Nobody talks about our national debt?
Jim Acosta calls Fox News the BS factory
"The Technician", Miko and success
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
And this is how you get your day off to the best possible start.
Yeah, I hope some of you are prepared.
Because all you need is a cup, a mug, a glass of tagger, a chalice of style, a canteen jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me, even you, Norway.
I see you. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Watch it. It's happening now.
Go! Hello, Ohio.
Yes, people all over the world streaming in to become part of the best thing that's happening.
It's the best thing.
Everything else is bad.
Now I do believe that we are deeply into the beginning of the Golden Age.
How do I know we're in the Golden Age?
Look at the news.
Look at the news.
There isn't any.
There isn't any news.
There's no war that just started.
There's no new pandemic, but the old one we seem to have a handle on now.
Just stamping it out.
We kind of ran out of news.
And, you know, maybe you don't notice this so much, but it's my job to wake up way before you do and to look at the news and then talk about it.
And there's not much news.
Now, I don't know how much of this is entirely because the news industry has just decided that there's no news.
But I don't know what's going on here, but let's talk about what is happening.
So just see if you can find out any...
Do you feel there's any shift in what the big stories are?
Think about whatever was the big story one year ago.
Whatever that is.
Something, something, Trump, pandemic, or something.
Now here's some of the big headlines today.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service got a shock when somebody caught a sturgeon that was 6'10", so almost 7 feet long, and 240 pounds.
It might have been over 100 years old.
So there you go.
There was a fish.
It was really big.
There's your headline.
Really, really big fish.
Now the alternate headline could have been, since they tagged it and then released it, that humans were so bored that they tortured a giant fish and then threw it back in the water, but they tagged it so that the next person who catches it and tortures it will know that it had been done before.
So it's tagged. So that's good.
So I'm trying to remember if I talked about this yesterday.
In the comments, this is one of those pitfalls that people who do what I do fall into.
You can't remember if you thought about talking about something, or did you talk about it.
And it has to do with the fake UFO sightings.
You've probably all seen the video of what you think is the most credible UFO sighting of all time.
And you know what it looks like, right?
It's some kind of a video from some pilots who were flying, and they're locked into this object below them, and it was defying physics, and it was flying really fast, and they were all excited, like, whoa, whoa, what is this?
What is this thing?
Do you remember that? And finally, after decades of UFO sightings that were not credible, finally we got one where even the military said, oh yeah, this is real.
This video is real.
And there we saw a little smudge that looked to be defying gravity and defying physics.
How many of you believe that was an alien spacecraft or some advanced human-made spacecraft?
How many of you thought that little smudge was actually a UFO? Alright.
I hope you remember that on day one I said to myself, I don't know what that is, but that's no spacecraft.
I might be the first person you heard publicly.
Privately, I'm sure lots of people said it.
But publicly, I think I'm the first person you heard to say, that's not a spaceship.
Whatever it is, it's not that.
So I saw a debunk on YouTube that I tweeted out yesterday.
You can see it in my Twitter feed yesterday.
And would you see it pulled apart by somebody who knows what they're talking about?
It's actually kind of hilarious.
Somebody says the pilots must be lying.
Not necessarily.
Because in order to know that that object was actually a bird, That's the answer.
It was a bird.
And here's how you know it was a bird.
First of all, there's one angle when you, if you blow it up, you can see it pulsating, because it's just a, it's an infrared video, so it's only seeing the heat, and the heat is just the torso of the bird.
But you can see it go, whoop, whoop, whoop, exactly about the same pace that you'd be flapping your wings.
So basically, it's a bird flapping its wings.
They can do the math and the geometry based on the information in the video, which tells you the angle of the plane, the direction, the altitude of the plane, and all this stuff.
If you do all the math, you find out that the object is this big.
Which you can just do from the math that's presented in the video itself.
Because around the video it's got all the details of, you know, direction and speed and altitude and all that.
So you just take the information that's right on the video, do the math, and it comes out to be about this big.
And it's flying at just about the height that you would expect a bird.
So it flaps its wings, it's the size of a bird, and it's where birds fly.
Somebody says it's the wrong video.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry to debug this for you, because I know you want to believe this.
There was a real picture of a UFO. But no, it looks like it was just a bird, and it was about a foot long, and that's it.
That's the whole story.
Now, all that part about the bird defying physics, was that the part that convinced you?
Because all the experts said, There's no way this object could have gone like this, and then like that, and then like that.
Well, it turns out that's all perfectly explained by the speed of the aircraft that videoed it.
So I don't know if I could do a good example of it, but let's say this pen was your line of sight from the plane, and the plane is moving really fast, and then the camera, let's say this is the camera, actually, and then the camera, as it's moving, It's moving to keep tracking of the object.
So it's not just the plane that's moving, but the bird is moving and the camera is moving.
And when you put all of those three things together and then you isolate on just the object, it looks like the object is moving like crazy, but it's really an artifact of the camera and the plane moving.
That makes the other thing look like it's moving, but it's just an illusion.
So, I can't explain it as well as the video, and I forget the name of the person who did the debunk, but it's completely convincing that that's not real.
In other news, the Dilbert NFT, the digital collectible version of the only naughty Dilbert comic, sold for $13,300, and the non-naughty version sold for $5,000.
Now, here's something you might not know about digital collectibles.
Because you say to yourself, Scott, weren't you expecting to make more than $13,300?
Well, I didn't really know what to expect.
I was just, you know, playing around to see what would happen.
But here's the part you don't know.
Every time this digital collectible is resold...
So now somebody won the bid, and they will be the owner, or it's already happened, I think, and then they can resell it.
Every time they resell it, one of the things that a digital collectible can do, that a regular piece of art, for example, cannot do, is that the original creator gets a cut every time it's resold.
So for infinity, no matter how many times it's sold and resold, I get a cut forever.
And that's a big advantage over physical art.
They can't do that. Have I told you that the big problem with the difference between conservatives and liberals Is that conservatives put human motivation as a prime variable in all of their systems, and liberals act like it isn't even a thing.
It's not even a variable at all.
You don't even need to consider it.
Here's another example.
I'll keep giving you examples until this becomes really obvious to you.
So, Minneapolis has become a murderous hellhole.
They have the second most homicides this year that they've had since 1995.
And in 1995, when they had that many homicides, they were actually nicknamed, the city was nicknamed Murderopolis.
That's how bad it was.
It was named after all the murderers.
Now, Which worldview predicted that murders would go through the roof?
Was it the liberals who said, hey, let's defund the police and that should help us out?
Or was it the conservatives who said, if you keep putting pressure on police, police will pull back and crime will go through the roof?
Which worldview Correctly predicted that the way things were going would be a giant increase in crime.
Duh. The worldview that considers human motivation.
Every time.
Is it ever wrong?
As long as human motivation is the core of why one would be predicting one way versus the other, the ones who consider human motivation are going to be right already.
Almost all the time, if not all the time.
Now, I'm not saying that every conservative opinion is right and every liberal one is wrong.
Nothing like that. I just mean when it's limited to something that has as a main variable human motivation, the conservatives are going to get that one every time just because they consider it.
The people who simply ignore the biggest variable are not really going to be good at predicting.
Surprise! And so yes, so there's murder through the roof in Minneapolis exactly like you think it would be.
Big question we all have is how long are we going to wear masks?
I think I told you my prediction that mid to late summer, I think masking will largely go away.
And it doesn't matter if the government wants it to go away or not.
I think by mid-summer, at least in the United States, let's just say the United States as our model here, I think the public will reach a breaking point faster than the government will make a decision.
So in other words, I don't think the government is actually in charge of this one.
So let me say that again.
The decision of how long Americans wear masks is no longer a government decision.
It was. And I think people quite wisely and reasonably listen to their government in an emergency.
Because what else are you going to do, right?
I mean, even if the government's wrong, it's still your best bet most of the time if it's an emergency.
But time goes by and the public gets educated.
We know what vaccinations are.
We look at the odds. We assess our personal situation.
And one thing that's maybe, I don't know how unique it is, but it's certainly a property of the United States, is that when it comes down to it, in the long run, the people run the country.
The citizens run the United States.
We don't like to.
You know, if you give us a choice, hey, citizen, would you like to spend a little more time running the country, you know, in addition to running your own life?
Most people would say, no, no, no thank you.
I'll just run my life.
Let the government run the government.
The exception comes when the government can't do the job.
There are some weird kinds of situations, there are not that many of them really, in which the government is the wrong person to do the job, wrong entity.
And the people are the right entity.
And that's this. This is exactly that situation.
Your government wants to reduce risk to zero.
Your government doesn't want anybody to die.
Your government wants to take no risks with your life.
Do you have a problem with that?
You shouldn't.
You don't want your government to take more risks with your life Than you do.
Alright? You know, there's an average going on here, so it's not every person has the same risk profile.
But you don't want your government to say, yeah, take a risk.
Go ahead. I know you don't want to, but yeah, we're going to make you take a little extra risk.
No. Your perfect situation is your government is trying to prevent you from getting killed, and you, the free citizen of the United States, is saying, I like that you care.
You know, that's cool. I'm glad we voted you people in.
It's good that you're trying to prevent me from getting killed.
And now we're going to go a different way.
Because the government doesn't get to make all your decisions.
They don't. If enough Americans, enough citizens, wherever you are, if they simply decide to ignore their government, that's the end of it.
That's the end of it. And my opinion is that the citizens of the United States, on average, somewhere around mid-summer, mid to late-summer, are going to say, we're done.
You could imagine situations in which everybody wears a mask onto an airplane, the airplane takes off, and then everybody on the airplane takes their mask off and says, fuck you.
What is the airline going to do?
Go back and land. What are they going to do?
Are they going to go land and say, oops, you took your masks off.
We're going to write you all up.
Yeah, maybe the first time.
Maybe the first one.
What happens if it happens two times?
The second time, everybody wears a mask, plane takes off, everybody takes off their mask at the same time.
What's the second airliner do?
Land, because they have to.
They might have requirements that they have to.
It would take about two or three airlines taking you off and landing before the whole rule would just go away, right?
So the point is that the government doesn't run your life.
It only runs it when it's credible.
And when it looks like it's doing something that's at least defensible, even if you don't agree with it.
And we would reach the point where it's just not defensible.
I think mid to late summer as things are going.
So when the TSA says that they're going to extend face mask wearing until September, September 13, weirdly specific, I think that's actually pretty reasonable.
I think the TSA is actually making a good decision here.
Because they're going...
I would say they're going at least a month further than I think it needs to go.
And that's just about perfect.
Because they can always pull back, right?
They can always say, oh, we're going to make it sooner.
But they don't want to make it later.
That's disappointing everybody.
So I think they gamed this just about right, I would say.
How many times have I told you that if your worldview predicts the future, well, you might have a good worldview?
Here's a prediction that I made that I heard exactly zero other people making sometime about last year.
Now, do my fact check for me, because I'm going to make a very big claim, and if it's wrong, call me out, all right?
So in the comments, call me out if this is incorrect.
I might be the only person, a year ago, who told you that if you're judging the United States' performance on coronavirus, that you're a little bit premature.
Because one thing that the United States is good at is adjusting.
We are some adjusting mofos.
We will start ugly and then adjust.
And if you're judging us by how we started, you've missed the whole show.
Americans don't start great.
We start, which is one of our greatest qualities.
If you said, what's like a really good quality of Americans?
You know, if you could make some average statement about Americans.
A great quality about Americans is that we run toward trouble.
We run toward trouble to fix it.
We don't wait around.
We are very action-oriented.
We just do stuff.
The other thing that Americans do is we don't agree with each other.
And we don't take shit.
And we don't just take everybody's orders just because they gave us orders.
We don't believe our government just because it told us something.
We're very...
Very independent and very, very skeptical.
What does that create on day one of a pandemic?
A clusterfuck, right?
You take a bunch of super independent, skeptical, action-oriented people...
And you throw them into the first days of the pandemic, and it's going to be the biggest clusterfuck in the world.
We're just going to be fighting, disagreeing, skepticizing.
That's not a word, is it? Is it?
Skepticizing? It should be. It should be a word.
But give us six months.
Give us six months.
Give the United States nine months.
And then let's check the score again against all you people who put on your masks and marched in line.
How's that working out?
The United States is really good at starting ugly and figuring it out.
It's what we do.
And so on day one when we started ugly and other countries seem to be maybe locking down more effectively, I'm not even sure if it made a difference, maybe masking more effectively, Did it even make a difference?
I don't know. Because we're still a little bit blind about why things happened the way they did.
We still don't exactly know.
So the United States is now clearly better than Germany, France, Sweden, to pick three.
So of our peer countries who were sort of in the same boat on day one, we are now kicking their asses.
And I told you that was going to happen.
So my worldview says we start ugly and then we win, because that's what we do.
We just do that.
I don't know why.
I mean, maybe it's something about the DNA of the country, but it's pretty consistent.
Look at climate change.
Now, many of you are still on the side of climate change is not real or whatever.
I know my audience, so a lot of you are doubting the Planet is even warming up, and if it is, if it's even bad.
I'm on the side of it's certainly warming up.
Humans are certainly part of it.
At least I believe that to be true.
But probably how bad it will be is overstated because of this.
This very thing.
That day one, it's a clusterfuck.
But then we work it out.
And that looks like that's what's happening with climate change as well.
We're all skeptics.
We don't believe it. We think the government's trying to turn into a one-world government.
We think every possible problem with the data.
And we're not wrong on day one.
But once we get a handle on things, You're going to watch nuclear power and you're going to watch a lot of things come together in the last innings.
So that's my belief about climate change is just like the pandemic.
We will start ugly and by the final innings we'll look great.
That's called the Golden Age.
What's the biggest mystery in the world right now?
I would say... The biggest mystery in the world is why no one serious is talking about the national debt.
What's going on?
Do you understand?
Because I really don't.
I have some hypotheses I'll talk about.
But why was it that the Tea Party and all serious people, even on the left, were saying, we can't run up debt forever, we'll all be poor, we're spending money we don't have.
But now, when the problem was tiny, we treated it like it was an enormous problem.
But now that the problem is, objectively speaking, enormous...
We're treating it like a small problem.
We don't even talk about it.
Why is there even anything else being discussed on the news?
Because if anything we thought was true about debt was actually true, then we're doomed.
And that would be a big story, right?
We're all doomed. You'd think that'd be in the news.
But take the other position.
What if, when we thought it was a big problem, even though it was far smaller, what if it was never a problem?
And what if it's still not a problem?
Because national debt doesn't work the way personal debt does.
You don't have to pay it off exactly.
You can sort of inflate it away, just wait forever until it seems less because of inflation.
So what's going on?
Do you think that there's some kind of common conspiracy idea among the leaders who control the media to simply downplay a problem that's going to kill us all and destroy the country?
Is that possible?
Or how about this hypothesis I saw today on MSNBC? You know, MSNBC is the racism filter channel.
You take any story, and they'll turn it into a racism story.
It's like, some boulders came loose and caused a rock slide in Montana.
Turn on MSNBC. Racism causes rock slide in Montana.
So they're sort of the racism filter channel.
And they say that the Tea Party was never about the debt.
What? Now this is a hypothesis, they're not presenting it as fact.
It's an opinion. And the opinion is, maybe the Tea Party people were just racists.
But they didn't want to say, hey, we're all just racists.
So instead of complaining about Obama being a black president, they complained about the debt.
Because that doesn't sound racist.
Does that sound like what was really happening?
Or does that sound like MSNBC's crazy racism filter that turns every ordinary story about anything into racism?
Yeah, I'm saying LOLs.
This is actually laughably stupid opinion, but not on MSNBC. On MSNBC, this looks like a normal, like, yeah, that's a pretty good opinion there.
Says, we complained about it under Clinton, too, right?
Yes. I don't know a time when conservatives were not complaining about the debt.
Until now. Because, you know, you still hear it.
You still hear people tweeting, blah, blah, debt.
There are still pundits on the news who say, blah, blah, we're running up our debt.
But we act as though it's like a hangnail.
The way we're acting has no correlation to what the thing is.
And the thing is, crushing debt, which according to everything we've always known, should just destroy the United States.
But it's just not even a concern.
What's going on?
Seriously, I don't know what's going on.
So there are a few possibilities.
One is that it was never a problem.
And we just figured out that national debt doesn't act like regular debt, and so we shouldn't treat it that way.
Maybe. Maybe.
It could be that we've learned that if you're the strongest economy in the world, you just don't have to worry about it.
If you have the best economy and the biggest military, maybe what we think about paying back debt just doesn't mean the same thing.
Maybe we think it's China's problem because they own a lot of the debt.
I don't know. But I worry that the real play here is that it's a massive income distribution that the Republicans haven't quite figured out yet.
Meaning that who's going to pay off the debt?
So right now, is it something like half of the country pays no taxes, right?
I don't know what the exact number is.
Something like half the country, or more, pays no federal taxes.
So who's going to pay off the debt?
Is it the half of the country that doesn't pay any taxes today?
Do they suddenly make a whole bunch of money magically and now they can help pay off the debt?
No. No.
It's going to be rich people.
So I believe the debt is just a massive tax on people like me.
So I believe that whatever I thought was my accumulated net worth is probably maybe 25% of that.
So probably 75% of my net wealth will be, in one way or another, reduced to pay this debt.
And I don't really get a vote on it.
It just is sort of a backdoor way for this to happen.
So I think that's what's happening.
But also, I think, and here's the last hypothesis.
The problem is so big that our brains can't handle it.
That's not a bad hypothesis.
Because that's what it feels like.
It doesn't mean it's true.
But it feels like people are stunned by it.
Meaning that the problem is so big and we're so doomed that we just act like it's not there.
Sort of like a meteor was plunging toward the earth.
Imagine, if you will, we saw a meteor coming toward the earth and we knew it was going to destroy the world.
What would you do? You might wake up and just do the same thing you did yesterday, even though it's a waste of time because you're going to all be dead in a week.
But I'll bet people would just go to work because they wouldn't know what to do.
You'd just be stunned by the bigness of it.
Maybe that's happening.
Don't know. All right.
One of the funniest stories in the news is Jim Acosta apparently used the word bullshit on the air intentionally and And he called Fox News a bullshit factory.
And what he was talking about is a story about Fox News reporting in a number of ways that Biden's plan for the climate would require you to have no more than one hamburger per month, which turned out to be fake news.
Now, is Jim Acosta wrong that, in this case, Fox News was a bullshit factory on that story?
No, he was not wrong.
And man, am I mad at Tom Arnold for making me retweet his tweet about Jim Acosta.
But he's right. He just happens to also be the author of, or one of the authors of, The Fine People Hoax.
So Jim Acosta certainly works for a bullshit factory who is, in this particular case, accurately criticizing another bullshit factory.
But once the news becomes news about the news, you're in the golden age.
If you turn on the news and a lot of your news is just the news people talking about the news people, do you know how much chatter there is now about Substack?
A lot of the news is people in the news criticizing Substack, which is a part of the news that criticizes the news.
It's just the news talking about itself now.
Here's another prediction I made back when the last election happened.
And it looked like the Congress was going to be sort of close to even on a lot of questions.
And I told you that Joe Manchin, a Democrat, would be the most powerful person in the country.
Because he's the only one smart enough to know that if you sometimes vote against your party, you get to run the country.
And I told you that Joe Manchin would probably be smart enough to figure out that he could be in charge of the country without being elected president and without anything, just by being the one person who's willing to go on either side.
And sure enough, Joe Manchin proved it again by opposing statehood for the District of Columbia, which effectively kills it.
So, did anybody's vote matter?
Except for Joe Manchin.
He's the only vote that mattered.
Nobody else mattered.
There was one person who made the decision about the D.C. becoming a state.
Just one person. Joe Manchin.
And Romney, of course, got booed in Utah at a GOP event.
Imagine being Romney and being booed at a Republican event.
That's not so good.
But yeah, I guess that gives Romney a lot of power too.
Although it doesn't look like Romney is using his power, let's say, for the country.
When I look at Joe Manchin's decision, and I don't know a ton about Joe Manchin, but it does seem to me that That when he crosses party boundaries, it looks different than when Romney does it.
Because Romney looks a little bit like he's anti-Trump, which doesn't really help me.
But Joe Manchin looks like he was just looking at what's good for the country.
And he figured that the Constitution required a constitutional amendment.
That's just an adult decision.
So, good job. Adult decision.
Elon Musk, as you know, will be hosting Saturday Night Live.
And again, this is telling you the state of the world.
This is news.
News is what Bill Maher says on his TV show or what Elon Musk is going to host on TV. That's the news.
I mean, we're running out of bad news, folks.
So Elon asked in a tweet what kind of skits he should consider, and there were some funny ones suggested.
I suggested that he should do a skit where he was interviewing applicants to go live on Mars, given that recently he said that a lot of people would die In the overall effect, the overall project of getting people to populate Mars, people would inevitably die.
Which is a fair statement, but it would be funny in that context.
But then somebody added on Twitter, Interviewing people to go to Mars, but they get rejected for being too woke.
Now that would be pretty funny.
Imagine rejecting people who want to go to Mars because they're too woke and you don't want any of that shit on Mars.
Somebody else suggested that Elon do a skit in which he's on the Joe Rogan show, as he famously was, but that he starts out with a drink or a joint.
And as the interview goes on, he goes to harder and harder drugs.
That would be pretty funny.
I don't know if they could put that on the air.
Anyway, if that's what we're talking about, we're in good shape.
Have you ever noticed that most criticism is illegitimate?
Meaning that people start with, I hate somebody, and then they criticize them for some unrelated thing.
That most of what you think is a criticism of somebody's performance is nothing like that.
It's somebody from the other team who doesn't like them for some unrelated reason, who is just criticizing them.
Here's an example in my case.
I made a comment about something in the news.
It doesn't even matter for this point.
And somebody named Elizabeth Spears tweeted this about my comment on Twitter.
And she said about me, she said, if this guy's on your side, you may want to examine your decision-making.
So instead of responding to the criticism, which I used to do, I said to myself, huh, because the criticism is just stupid and empty, I thought, well, who is this person?
And I look it up on her profile, and she's the editorial co-founder of Gawker.
So the editorial co-founder of Gawker...
A publication that was so illegitimate it couldn't even stay in business.
They literally got sued out of business for making up bullshit.
Well, actually sued out of business in this case for the Hulk Hogan stuff showing that video.
Etc. And other bad business.
And of course Gawker is also famous for writing fake news about me.
Yeah, Peter Thiel took him out.
And so Gawker is the least credible, and now defunct, publication in the history of non-credible publications.
But if you didn't know that, if you didn't know who she was, that she was a member of one of the deepest evils of our time, you would just think she had a comment about me.
And you would think to yourself, oh, What's wrong with that cartoonist?
There must be something wrong with him.
Somebody with a blue check is criticizing him.
So you always need to do that now.
You can just ignore the criticism and just look at what team they're on, and that's the whole story.
The criticisms are completely disconnected from the actual object of the criticism.
And I don't know, maybe that was always the case.
Here's another great story on a day when nothing seems to be going wrong too much.
Oh, by the way, there's a story about North Korea giving a little verbal pushback on Biden, because Biden said some insulting things, so Kim Jong-un is sending out some insults back.
But are you worried about North Korea?
Like right now?
Just where you are right now, your current thinking, Is North Korea in your top 10, top 20?
It's not.
It's not at all.
No. Trump fixed that.
Now, again, check your predictions.
Who told you on day one-ish of Trump and Kim Jong-un becoming friends and visiting, who told you that he solved the problem?
He didn't just make a first step.
He actually solved it.
Because if North Korea doesn't care about us, that's sort of the end of it, right?
So I think Trump actually permanently solved North Korea.
He simply said, by the way, we don't care about you in any kind of aggressive way.
There's no way we'd want to invade North Korea.
We just don't care.
Let's be friends. And I think that's still working.
Yeah, there's a risk that Biden will ruin that, but I'm going to give Biden a compliment because I don't think we should live in a world in which you can't compliment somebody for doing something right, even if you hate some other thing they're doing.
I do think Biden has enough adult, smart people around him that he won't break North Korea.
He does have to start out by a little bit of push, which he did.
You know, a little bit of verbal, you know, we'll go this far but not that far sort of thing.
I think he's handling it about right.
If he doesn't break it, Trump fixed it, and maybe he fixed it forever.
There's a story about a virtual creator on Twitch, the streaming platform.
And virtual means that it's an animated character, but the person who's behind it, the character is called Miko, M-I-K-O. The person behind it goes by the name The Technician.
I love the fact that it's just a person, but the person has a brand called The Technician.
If that's not perfect, I don't know what is, right?
So the technician, I guess, was fired or quit for some tech job and figured out how to put together the assets that would include a motion capture suit.
So the actual human wears a motion capture suit and that turns the animated thing into a moving thing that mimics her and sounds like her.
And it started out really slow, but she put tons of work into it, and now it's making a lot of money, I guess.
And she was once a solo operation, but now she has an engineer, an environmental model artist, a character artist, an animator, a rigger to help her with development, and now it's like a little operation.
Now, I think that this is actually the model for what education will become.
Remember I've told you that Everything you see on video is like the Model T Ford version of what video education and video entertainment will become.
Because the first decades of video was pretty much, at least if you don't count movies and TV, it was pretty much a person and a video.
And that's it.
Just a person getting videoed talking.
And if that's what education stays, it won't be very impressive.
But if you see that you can build a team of experts who have different talents, you can build a product which just goes through the roof.
So education is going to go this way too.
There will be teams of people with different skills making educational content, which is for the most part not the case right now.
Here's what I wanted to say about this.
There's a part of the story where this, it's a woman, this woman who started all this would get up at 2 in the morning to start development, and then she would stream from like noon to 6 p.m.
or whatever. So here's somebody who was getting up at 2 in the morning to make this work.
Maybe that's the story, right?
And Roly Poly on Twitter sent this to me with the observation.
That this isn't somebody who got lucky.
This is somebody who created a situation for luck to find her.
And that it did. And what I mean is she went through her own actions and decisions and energy.
She created enough opportunity...
For some luck to find her, and then I did.
All right. So I wanted to tell you a story that really goes to this, and I'll connect them in a moment.
But years ago, I was on vacation with another family.
So it was a family vacation in my last life.
And the husband from the other family was unusually fit.
And when I say unusually fit...
I mean, like, walked off the cover of a fitness magazine fit, like just ripped kind of fitness.
And of course, I always looked at him and thought to myself, God, is that genetic?
Like, I know he worked out a lot, but I couldn't imagine that working out a lot would get me to look any version of what he looked.
And I had this eye-opening encounter.
So I went to the gym once while we were on vacation, And he was there at the same time.
So I start my workout and I look over and I notice he's working arms.
And his arms were unusually fit.
And he's working arms.
And then I go from my legs and I do my back and my arms.
And I finished my entire workout.
So now that I'm done with my workout, I figure, well, I'll say a few words to him before I leave the gym.
Because we've been in different parts, but we're friends.
And so... So I started chatting with him and I said, well, you know, I'm going to leave now.
And then the entire time I did my entire exercise, every part of my body, including cardio, he had been working on his arms.
Because I checked him out every once in a while to see if he had any tricks.
He was still working on arms.
After I said I'm leaving, I'm completely done with my workout.
He's standing there and he goes, ah, what do I do next?
What should I do next?
And then he goes, I think I'll do arms.
And my frickin' head fell off.
Because it's one of those moments when you realize when you see somebody who's getting better results, there's a reason.
The reason he got better results is that he put in ten times more work.
Now, I thought to myself, wow, if I doubled my workout, I'll bet I could maybe get in the same kind of condition he is.
I'll double my workout.
I think I could do that, because I'm pretty dedicated.
I'm going to work twice as hard.
Wouldn't have even been close.
To get what he has, or had, I assume he still has, he just worked ten times harder.
He just spent all of his time on his arms.
Yeah. So since then, I learned his tricks.
He's also the one who taught me about using smaller weights.
I'm seeing in the comments a lot of you saying, steroids, steroids, but actually no.
I knew him well enough to know that if he had been doing any kind of supplements, I would know it.
So we were close enough that that wouldn't have been a mystery to me in any way.
But he wasn't. It was just hard work.
That's it. So when you see this, tying it back to Miko, the technician, and her streaming success, she got up at 2 a.m.
every day, worked on her skill stack, and then worked on her job, and then fell asleep, probably exhausted.
Was she lucky?
Was she lucky? Or did she put in so much effort that luck was going to find her?
Looks like she put in so much effort and did it right.
She had a skill stack effort as well as just brute force.
Took a chance, took a risk, did everything right, and it worked.
Every once in a while when you see somebody do everything right and that it works...
That gives you a lot of hope for yourself, doesn't it?
You just have to do what you know to do.
There was nothing that she did here.
That made a big difference.
Somebody's saying that my friend probably ate a lot of protein, and I think that is true.
I do think he did protein supplements.
I don't believe anybody ever built impressive muscles without protein supplements.
This is my belief, that I don't think it's ever been done.
If you don't supplement with protein, doing weights almost doesn't matter.
It's actually that big a difference.
Yeah, you should still do it even if you're not supplementing.
But if you want to actually grow muscles, you can't do it without supplements, in my opinion.
Somebody says maybe she sleeps from 6 p.m.
to 2 a.m. Not that complicated.
I don't believe there's any case of somebody who wakes up at 2 a.m.
who isn't a super hard worker and also has learned that that's when you can work without being disturbed.
Because you've got to be really serious to want to be awake hours before the rest of the world.
You've got to be pretty serious, and I was.
If you looked at the effort I put in to make Dilbert work, some of you know this story, For the first 10 years of Dilbert, I worked every day from 4 a.m.
to usually finishing 9 at night, and I never took a day off.
And I worked on Christmas, I worked on Thanksgiving, at least in the mornings.
And so if anybody looks at my success and they say, man, a lot of people tried to become cartoonists, but you succeeded, I guess you got pretty lucky.
Everybody who worked as hard as me was as lucky as me.
Now, I know you don't want to believe that, but it's hard to find an exception.
The people who worked as hard as I worked But also paying attention to the talent stack, like the technician did.
She built a whole technical talent stack from how to do animation to everything, the streaming, just tons of talents.
If you do those two things, Get up earlier than everybody else gets up.
Work seven days a week for ten years and build your talent stack logically so that they all work together.
You think you're not going to succeed?
You will. Probably closer to every time.
So that is your inspirational message for today.
Yes, somebody said in the comments, and I think that's a fair point, that dedication and willingness to work hard are probably genetic.
I don't know what percentage, but it feels more like something I was born with than something I acquired over time.
But I don't know if you can know how much you were born with if it hasn't been activated by your actual actions.
Yeah, some people do have the ability to put off pleasure for a greater gain.
I think maybe you're just born with that.
Somebody says, what actually does this technician actually do?
Well, what I'm talking about is the technician creates a character called Miko that appears on the Twitch network, but what she did before that was she worked in animation and some other job.
Somebody's saying, oh, this is Susan has a good comment here.
She goes, my siblings and I all had great work ethic, but two of us were more into lifelong learning.
Now, Susan, which of your two siblings did the best?
You all had good work ethic, but two of you were into lifelong learning.
I can tell you which ones did the best.
All right. Also having a strong mother and father.
Yeah, I think that does make a difference.
Somebody says Adam Kroll would argue it's not genetic.
I would have to hear that argument because I'm not going to take your word for it that that's his opinion.
My own opinion has been misrepresented so many times that when I hear a comment of that nature that somebody else disagrees with whatever, I think I'd have to see it from him to take that as something I need to respond to.
You don't have to put up pleasure.
You can take pleasure from your obsession.
Well, if you're lucky. But it's hard to be that lucky.
