Episode 1745 Scott Adams: Later And Better Than Usual
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Anti-Tucker Carlson propaganda
CNN treats math like an opinion
Is Russia intentionally slow-walking the Ukraine war?
Why aren't we tracking Fentanyl deaths?
CNN, a HOAX generating entity
Michael J. Goodwin stories
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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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Everybody. So we've got a laggy bad Wi-Fi connection here on locals and who knows if YouTube's going to work.
But what I do know is it's time for the simultaneous sip and all you need is a cup or glass or mug, a canteen jug or flask, a something something something, 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 thing that makes everything better.
Are you ready?
Go.
Paper cup coffee?
Not as good?
Protein bar, not my regular kind.
Everything's wrong. Well, yeah, we'll talk about the great replacement.
So that seems to be the big story of the day.
We've all been waiting for the hoax of the day.
This one seems to be based on the shooting of yet another little turd who's killing people for no good reason.
And this has caused CNN and everybody to blame it on Tucker Carlson.
Now, is it my imagination, or does the left think that Tucker Carlson runs everything?
Because it seems to me that they believe if they can take Tucker Carlson out, they can end the Democrats, you know, communication channel.
And it's almost true, isn't it?
I feel like Tucker Carlson has become the primary Republican voice for people who are really sort of watching things.
But let's talk about that.
So, Tucker Carlson has spoken of this so-called Great Replacement Theory.
Would it be possible for me to speak about it without being accused of embracing it?
What do you think?
If I simply broached the topic, would I be accused of embracing it and therefore a white supremacist?
It seems unlikely.
I don't know if you've watched.
There's a minor drama going on in my public life.
There's a specific individual, who I won't name, who runs a little cult.
So he's a cult leader of some sort.
He has a man cult.
And he's decided that he's really, really mad at me for my support of masks during the pandemic, which never happened.
So there's an entire organization who, you know, its members and its leader attack me on a regular basis.
They create accounts on social media to come after me.
And their biggest complaint is how pro-mask I was, which actually never happened.
Literally never happened.
So I never recommended them, never was in favor of them.
I talked about it. I showed you some studies.
So my life is influenced by somebody who has a completely wrong opinion and obviously never really watched anything I said.
But he's decided to wrap his life around it.
Okay. Alright.
So there's somebody out there who's got a whole mission to destroy me based on something imaginary.
Now that's my normal life.
My normal life is people coming after me for imaginary things.
It happens every single day.
It's the hardest thing.
So let's talk about replacement theory.
So I saw Tucker Carlson talk about it the following way.
He described it as math.
That if you're in the United States and you have a vote, it wouldn't matter if you're a Democrat or Republican, and you add more people from other countries, it will dilute your vote because of math.
Now, is there anybody who doubts the math that if there's an existing group of people who could vote and then you were to add new people to that group?
Wouldn't matter where they came from.
Wouldn't matter. Would that group, the original group, have less influence per person?
Is there anybody doubting the math?
Now, my understanding is that Tucker just showed the math and said, well, yes, literally, Literally and mathematically.
No, the math is that if you add something to an existing group, you dilute the group.
Right? So, that's not really an opinion.
So, CNN has treated math like an opinion.
No, seriously.
CNN's actual editorial opinion is that math, and the result of it, is racist.
And that actually is the biggest story today.
The CNN thinks math is racist.
Because when Tucker Carlson gives them a math lesson, it's coming from Tucker Carlson.
So I guess logically, QED, therefore, must be racist.
Now the part they don't say is they're assuming that Tucker Carlson's entire motivation is to have fewer brown people and more white people like him.
Has he ever said anything like that?
That would be a different conversation, right?
Because he does talk about culture.
Now, is it true that if you have an existing culture, And you were to add people from a different culture to it, would the existing culture stay exactly the same, or would it change exactly the way we like things to change?
Which is, we like to be influenced by each other, you know, develop our own civilization.
So if he says that the way things are, the culture, would change, if you added people from a different culture, it wouldn't matter which one it was.
Would it be different? Yes.
And if you liked it the way it was, would you be happy that something changed?
Well, people don't like change.
If they're already happy, they don't like change.
Now, which of those statements from Tucker are the big racist ones?
The one that's math, that if you add people to an existing group, it dilutes it.
Or the other one that's also basically math, which is you add different cultures to an existing culture, probably the average is going to change a little bit.
Those literally are both math.
The plumes. You know what?
Whatever happened to the plume theory?
Now you're going to make me talk about it.
The plume theory was that how much COVID you got initially would have a big impact on whether you got sick.
Did that get debunked?
Because I thought that was basic understanding.
I didn't think that was even a question, was it?
A basic understanding that if your initial contact was a little bit of virus, you could still get it.
But if you got a little bit of virus, maybe your body could mount a response a little better than if you just slammed it with a ton of virus.
Is that not true? Is getting infected with a tiny bit of virus exactly the same as taking a big swing if you've been drinking on a cup?
What do you think? Now, I think that it's probably different because I haven't heard anybody revise that opinion.
Now, I'm seeing David G. do the LOL food theory.
If that's the best you'd have as your counter, LOL, You don't have anything.
Because, do you know what argument I'm making about masks?
Math. It's math.
More virus is worse, less virus will give you a better situation.
Does anybody argue with the...
Let me see in the comments.
In the comments. Would you accept the assumption that more exposure to virus initially is worse?
Yes or no? Is more exposure initially worse for your outcomes?
Give me your answers. More exposure, better or worse?
People are saying yes on locals.
Somebody says unknown.
Well, you know, the experts said it's worse.
On YouTube, we're seeing some no's.
Oh, interesting. On YouTube, you're saying that the amount of initial virus doesn't matter.
Some people are saying that. A lot of people say yes.
Yeah, the concentration and the amount, yes.
All right. So, more is worse, yeah.
So, I think you would find that more is worse.
There's no question about that.
Now, if you have a barrier, which is sending your plumes sideways and up and down, instead of directly like a fire hose into somebody's mouth when you're talking to them, which is likely to give you more virus.
When we measure masks, what do they measure?
They measure infections, don't they?
Do they measure outcomes?
Has anybody done a study that said that the people who got it from somebody who had a mask on had as bad outcomes as somebody who got it from somebody who had no mask?
What do you think? And eyeballs too, yes.
Eyeballs and masks. So, To me, my argument is only math, and people have said it's an opinion.
Is math an opinion?
No, math isn't a fucking opinion.
It's math. Tucker's opinions are math.
My mask opinion is that I don't want one and it didn't make enough difference that I think it was useful.
So I've always been against them, but not because they make no difference.
There are lots of things I'm against that help a little, right?
They just don't help enough. Somebody says, this is not math.
Yes, it is. I mean, it's math plus engineering.
The engineering part's obvious, that the mask sends the plume sideways and up.
That part's obvious.
Because you can't blow out a camera with a mask on, can you?
Why does it not work the same with Omicron?
Omicron is just catchier, that's all.
All right. Now.
Statistics are an opinion?
Well, maybe it's an opinion about who did the math, right?
I suppose. All right, only with a crappy mask.
I suppose that's right, too.
What else is going on?
All right, so it looks like this Great Replacement thing will be the new CNN hoax, or at least they'll ride this for a while.
And the Republicans are trying to respond by saying, well, you guys did some bad stuff, too.
That's not very strong. So, I don't know.
Is that the best they have, the great replacement theory?
Scott Krog says, let's see how many people agree with Scott Krog.
He says, Scott, let's be honest.
You were pushing the vacs pretty hard for about two months.
All right? Those of you who have watched me the entire time, how many of you agree with stupid asshole Scott Krog?
How many say I was pushing the vaccine pretty hard for two months?
100% of people who watch me every single day on Locals are saying no.
100%. 100%, Scott.
Scott Krog. So, what the fuck were you looking at, Scott?
Because it wasn't me. You must have confused me with assholes.
Because assholes are the people who won't say anything positive about the thing they're against.
Right? So Scott, you may be projecting.
You may be projecting.
Yes, you're projecting.
Because you saw somebody reasonably saying, huh, you got this on this side, you got this on this side.
And you saw that and you said, well, he must be a fucking idiot.
Because he's looking at both sides.
That's what you did. That's what you did, Scott.
You saw somebody looking at both sides.
And you couldn't handle it.
Because you're a fucking idiot.
So don't come here and tell me what I'm thinking when you don't know and you don't understand anything about the topic or how to talk about topics.
So you don't... Not only do you not understand about vaccines, probably.
Probably. But you don't understand how people talk.
You don't understand that seeing a little bit of something doesn't tell you anything.
You don't understand a fucking thing about the world, Scott.
So go away.
Please leave the broadcast.
Yes, I didn't give any medical advice that I'm aware of.
I saw an Adam Scrabble tweet today, and this is a two-part story.
The first part is, I saw an Adam Scrabble tweet.
Do you know the last time I saw him tweet?
Was months ago.
And then Elon Musk informed us that if you tap that little star icon on the top of your app for Twitter, you can get it to give you your tweets chronologically, just as they come in, instead of having the algorithm decide what you see.
And as soon as I turned off the algorithm, do you know what happened?
Oh, there was an Adam Scrabble tweet.
So, for the first time, he wasn't blocked in months and months and months.
So, let me tell you what he said since I got to see him for the first time in months.
Thank you, Twitter algorithm.
So, Russia's current account is at a record high, meaning, you know, cash that they're getting in from exports.
So, from that one measure of the Russian economy, it's doing better than ever.
I mean, it's just one measurement within a larger economy.
And then Eurozone's plunged into a record deficit.
So that's not good. Do you believe anything that comes out of Russia?
Because only Russia would know what the current account for Russia is, right?
Or is that something that everybody has access to?
To me it sounds like this is a whole bunch of lies.
Let's talk about Putin dying.
I saw a tweet, which I tweeted, from somebody who, I'll give you his name, Jack Hopkins.
I don't know who he is.
He's a user on Twitter.
But he didn't look crazy.
And he said that he used to manage an oncology floor.
So apparently he spent years around people who were known to be dying of cancer.
And he shows a picture of Putin's face now, all puffy looking.
You know, next to a picture of him from just two years ago.
And he says, I've seen this look a million times, he's dying at some rate.
Basically as terminal something.
Probably cancer. Do you buy that because somebody who managed an oncology floor says, I've seen this look a million times, this is it?
What do you think? Do you believe Somebody says altered photos.
Well, no, all of Putin's photos have that same puffy look lately.
You believe he believes it, I guess.
Somebody says heart failure?
Does heart failure make you look puffy?
It does? Okay.
And how about cancer and steroids, right?
Make you look puffy or something?
So, My take on Putin from quite a while ago was he looked like he was dying.
Do you remember when I was saying...
How long ago was I saying that Putin was dying?
Six months ago? Can somebody give me a...
When's the first time you heard me say it?
Five months ago? Six months ago, or ish, right?
Now, when I said Putin was dying six months ago, and you can tell because he just looks it, where I said he was sick, one or the other.
How many people agreed with me?
If you wait longer, he's done.
And I got mocked, didn't I? Didn't most people mock me?
And my argument was that people can identify illness fairly well.
And that just looking at them actually is better than you think as a way of predicting how he feels.
That humans actually are pretty good at determining illness.
Just looking. You don't have to be a doctor in it.
Yeah, Norm MacDonald.
Yeah, Norm MacDonald puffed up.
That's actually, I hate to say it, but that was a good example, wasn't it?
At first he said he thought he was on testosterone.
Well, it looked like he was on something.
It looked like he was on something.
So, Yeah.
So anyway, I think there's a big health problem there.
And the rumors about a coup already starting would make a little bit of sense with the military situation.
Here's a way to understand why Russia's military is not succeeding so well on the battlefield.
You ready for this? Because they know that Putin's a short-timer.
That could be why Russia is not performing on the battlefield.
Because imagine that you are one of the leaders and you know that at the end of this there's a really good chance you're going to be brought up on war crime charges.
Pretty good chance. How would you play it if you thought Putin only had a week or two left in office?
Would you go balls to the wall and do every, you know, military war crime that you possibly could Or would you slow walk it?
Exactly. If you were a military leader and you saw that Putin was not going to last, you would slow walk it.
And it's hard to explain why the Russian military is doing so poorly.
You know, we do know that the Ukrainians have American training, NATO training, and great weapons.
Maybe that's enough. Maybe they're just a really, really good military, the Ukrainians.
That's entirely possible.
That could be the entire explanation.
The other explanation is that Russia's military isn't exactly taking orders from Putin the way they used to.
The way they used to is if I don't do this, he's going to kill me.
Right? If I don't sacrifice a third of my troops to take this town, I will personally be killed.
I'll be jailed. So then you sacrifice a third of your troops, because you gotta do it, otherwise you die.
But what happens if you think Putin's not gonna last?
Do you sacrifice a third of your troops, or do you tell Putin there's something stopping you from attacking?
Yeah, we're going to attack as soon as we get those new supplies you're sending.
Oh, the new supplies are the wrong kind.
Well, as soon as we get those new new supplies, we're totally going to attack that down and take it even though a third of us will die.
It feels like Russia started slow walking the war.
Now, remember that I told you this and wait to see how long it takes for it to be in the mainstream media.
How long do you think it'll take?
Because nobody's said this yet, right?
I don't believe anybody has said that the Russian military is slowing down because they also expect Putin not to last.
Well, I think you'll see it by the end of today.
By the end of today.
All right. Would you like a movie recommendation?
Since I've told you that all movies suck and they don't make good ones anymore?
I actually watched a movie last night on my iPad that was a good movie.
It's called Uncharted.
Have you seen it? And, you know, I won't give away the thing or anything.
So who's the young actor who played Spider-Man recently?
Oh, is that at Coen Brothers?
Yeah, Holland, right?
Tom Holland. So Tom Holland is really fit.
I didn't realize he was cut pretty well.
And he plays a guy, a normal guy, who is just really coordinated.
Just really, really coordinated.
And I love what they did with the action scenes.
Because just making an ordinary guy just really coordinated.
He just does lots of things that really coordinated people can do.
And it's really fun to watch.
And I'm tired of movies.
I'm tired of movies because it's all the same movie.
There's somebody tied to a chair and tortured.
There's a car chasing.
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
You know, there's one person who fights against 25 and beats them.
It's all the same. But this movie actually found a way to create completely new action scenes in the air.
That were pretty impressive.
It was very creative.
Creative movie, I liked it.
But you still have to fast-forward through all the scene-setting scenes.
When I come to a movie, if I'm watching it on my iPad and I'm alone, and you get to the part where two people are showing how much they love each other, Like it might be, you know, same sex and they're just best friends or something.
But you get to see that, you know, that really tender moments when they show each other's love to each other.
Fast forward. I don't really need to see half a minute of these two characters loving each other.
I'm like, I got it.
Those love each other.
Got it. Got it. Move to the plot.
I got it. I got it.
They love each other. I got it.
I got that in five seconds.
Got it. Move on.
That's how I watch a movie now.
Every time the scene is one that's going to be five minutes of really five seconds.
Fast forward. Well, here's another thing that I'm going to claim some rightness on, even though I was totally wrong about Ukraine being invaded by Russia in the first place.
So that one doesn't go away for my permanent record.
However, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg I guess yesterday and today expressed hope that Ukraine will prevail against Russia as Moscow's military advance appears to be stalling.
So now important people are saying out loud that Ukraine looks like they have a good chance of just winning the war.
Just outright winning the war.
Now Am I the rightest person in the world about this?
Can anybody give me the name of anybody listening does this for a living?
You know, people who talk in the public domain.
Is there anybody you saw, anybody besides me, who said that Ukraine would give them a fair fight?
Anybody? But I'm sure there were a lot of individuals.
But was there anybody willing to say it?
I think I'm the only person who was dumb enough to say it in public.
Malcolm Nance. But when did he say it?
Bill Barr on Ben Shapiro?
Or are you just saying you like that show?
Yeah, I can't. I think I own that one.
I believe. So we still don't know if Ukraine will...
Well, at this point, let me ask you.
At this point, would you say, as of today, just forget any opinion you've ever had before?
Forget all of your prior opinions, if you could.
Start today. Is Ukraine going to prevail in maintaining themselves as essentially the same country?
Yes or no? Will Ukraine prevail as of today?
Looking at your comments, I'm seeing more yeses than nos, but less nos.
And I think a no is a reasonable...
You're still reasonable if you're saying no.
I disagree with no, but you are not unreasonable with that opinion.
Yes, without the East, maybe.
Define prevail. Prevail means that they're effectively still Ukraine, but they may have lost some border territory or not.
So whether or not they lose some border territory, that's not the question.
The question is, is it still Ukraine, essentially?
I think yes. I think they're going to stay a country, it looks like.
So, that's what's going on.
Let me see if there's any headline that I've talked about.
I'm not going to talk about this shooter.
You don't mind, do you?
Is there anything to say about yet another mass shooter?
I just don't feel that I should talk about it.
So, with your permission, that's just not a story for me.
I mean, it's obviously a story, but we're not going to give him any more attention.
All right. Oh, and everybody's going to be talking about free speech.
Now, Johnny Depp is back.
There was a video of Johnny Depp acting really mad and slamming cabinets and stuff.
Amber Heard is testifying on the infamous defecation allegation.
Well, I've got a feeling that we're going to see some bad stuff about Johnny Depp come out, wouldn't you say?
Yes, Amber Heard is going to have some bad stuff.
So, I don't think that either of them are angels, but the video that she showed, the one I saw this morning, so Amber Turr took some, you know, secret video of Johnny Depp being all mad at something, and so the point of the video is to say that he's like this angry guy who punches cabinets.
And if he punches cabinets, well, maybe he punches people.
Now, let me ask you, Do you know anybody who violently destroys inanimate objects but would never hurt a person or an animal?
Do you know anybody like that?
Anybody who has a track record of destroying inanimate objects yet interestingly has no history of hitting people for any reason except self-defense?
That's not that unusual.
It's not that unusual.
But the video in which Johnny Depp was in their kitchen, apparently, and slamming cabinets, and I think he might have broken one.
Did you hear what he was saying while he was doing that breaking of the cabinets?
He was saying that something happened to him that morning that did not happen to her.
In other words, she did something that morning pretty terrible, I think.
Or something terrible happened to him that had nothing to do with her.
That's possible, too. But it looked like she had done something so horrible that he was in that mood and it was something she caused.
We didn't hear what the horrible thing was, but I think we will.
We might. Alright.
So, this baby formula thing.
Is it true that we can't ship in baby formula from other countries because of some Regulation.
Is that actually happening?
Because, correct me if I'm wrong, if we were to ship in formula from other countries, we'd have enough.
Because it's not like every other country has a shortage.
It's sort of an American shortage because of our companies that make it.
So... FDA regulations.
Yeah, it's a labeling law.
Boy, you know, how long would it take Trump to sign an executive order to make that go away?
Ten seconds. Now, the trouble is, well, actually, if you made that go away, you'd probably end up killing a bunch of babies.
Yeah, this is a tough one, actually.
Because it's not that the FDA does nothing.
But I feel like you'd be safe if they just tested it, you know, tested a couple of the bigger brands and said, okay, don't send everything.
But it's okay in these specific brands.
We took a weekend to look at them.
I feel like they could do that.
They can't do a study in a weekend, but they could look to see if there's anything in it that looks like a contaminant.
I think they could do that.
Preferably shipped from the EU and not China.
Yeah, except the EU probably got it from China.
All right. A reporter finds that critical race theory ideas in 39 of the top 50 medical schools.
Okay. There's a fentanyl awareness group.
I'm looking at the Fox News website, in case you're wondering where this is coming from.
There's a fentanyl awareness group that's asking Biden to track overdose deaths.
Which is weird, because I thought we already do that.
Because I always talk about that number.
Do we make that up?
We don't track it?
Oh, so they won't have counted the same way Alright, I'm totally in favor of this.
Let me get my full-throated support.
Literally yesterday, I was writing my book that I'm here trying to write.
And one of the things I was writing is that if you, and I've said this many times, if you're not tracking it, you're not managing it.
Is that right? If you're not measuring it, you're not managing it.
Because you wouldn't know if you did X or if you did Y if you changed the thing you're trying to change, because you're not measuring it.
If you didn't know why anything was changing, you wouldn't know if the thing you're doing is making a difference.
So, a good general rule is if you can't measure it or you're not measuring it, you're not managing it.
So if this group is asking for fentanyl to be reported and measured the same way, that's a smart idea.
Because what is it that is so frustrating about the fentanyl question, other than, you know, the obvious, what's frustrating is it doesn't look like the government's doing something.
Does it? And by the way, I said the same thing about Trump.
Trump talked about it and he asked China to do something, but nothing happened.
Literally nothing. So, you know, we're not securing the border.
We're not making China do anything differently.
Nothing. There's literally nothing being done.
So, that's an unmanaged problem.
Are you surprised that something is not being managed when it's not being measured and reported in the way that important things are?
Now, was the pandemic unmanaged?
No, it was not. Because we reported the piss out of it, didn't we?
And the more you reported it, the more the government had to only work on that, because that's what was getting reported.
So in many ways, the media has to take some responsibility here.
Because if the media had treated fentanyl the way it treats COVID, we'd probably be measuring it and managing it by now.
But, you know, the press treats it as another thing that's like all the other things.
It's like, well, more people died from this fentanyl thing.
It's no real story, it's just more people dying.
And more isn't a story.
The story is usually something different happening, not just more of the same.
It feels like I'm on a boat, yeah.
I'm right by the ocean. So yes, let me say, without knowing anything about this story, that if we're not reporting fentanyl deaths on the front page of Fox News and CNN, we're probably not managing it.
Oh, this is the coolest thing.
Somebody asked me what's on my wrist.
So it's been a while since I vacationed, at least in America.
This is the greatest innovation for being at a hotel.
So this opens my door.
And it's waterproof.
So I can swim with it.
Now, do you know how much pain in the ass I've had trying to keep my little door opening card?
It's the worst thing.
I'm always losing it.
I probably demagnetized one of those door opening hotel cards one out of three times that I travel.
I'd probably put it in the wrong pocket with my phone and demagnetize it.
Probably one out of three times. And then you get to your room and you can't...
It's just the most annoying thing about a hotel is the stupid room card.
Done. In fact, it's so unobtrusive that I didn't realize I still had it on.
I slept with it apparently.
Evidently. It's great.
Let's see what CNN's saying, in case there's anything interesting.
I doubt it. So...
Yeah, the shooter plans to shoot more people, blah, blah, blah.
Sweden and NATO getting in...
I'm sorry. Sweden and Finland getting into NATO. But it doesn't look like, you know, that alone is going to bother Russia.
All right. Let me tell you the funniest exchange I had on Twitter today.
And it was regarding Tucker Carlson.
So there was a user called Saban Khaticha.
And he was saying that Tucker Carlson spits out conspiracy theories.
And so I responded to him saying that Tucker Carlson spits out conspiracy theories.
I mentioned this, you know, I said, is it more than CNN? So I just wondered what his baseline was.
If he's complaining about Tucker Carlson creating these conspiracy theories, does he think that CNN doesn't do it?
And so he responded, what has CNN done that has encouraged bigotry and or mass shooters?
Were they too careful regarding COVID? He asked.
Is that worse than bigotry?
So yes, that's a good question.
What has CNN done that has encouraged bigotry and or mass shootings?
What have they done?
Well, there was the fine people hoax.
There was the drinking bleach hoax.
There was the Russia collusion hoax.
There was the Covington Kidd hoax.
There was the Russians paying bounties on American soldiers hoaxes.
There was a Kyle Rittenhouse hoax.
Should I go on?
Should I go on, Covington Kidds?
Yes, yes.
And so...
Now, not all those would, of course, encourage a mass shooting, but likewise, not everything that Fox News says would encourage any mass shootings.
Now, what exactly did Tucker Carlson say, allegedly, that encourage a mass shooting?
Can anybody give me, say, a quote?
Some kind of indication That Tucker Carlson would be in favor of mass shootings, or even accidentally said something that would encourage it.
Can somebody give me an example of that?
Because there's no fucking example of that.
There's no example of that.
No, he has a strong opinion about, you know, America first.
And you can hate that or you can love it.
But it's completely transparent.
He's not hiding anything.
There's no go shoot anybody at that.
That's just a perfectly, you know, I'd say typical.
I'm not going to say I agree with it or disagree with it.
It's just a typical opinion.
And none of that should cause anybody to shoot anybody.
So... And I thought it was fascinating that somebody who, at this point, would not know that CNN is primarily a hoax-generating entity.
How would you not know that?
Oh no, JetBlue is launching a hostile takeover for Spirit Air.
So, that's interesting.
I always thought that Spirit was a bad name for an airline.
Because the thing that people are afraid of with airlines is crashes.
And, you know, basically you turn from a corporeal being into a spirit.
And I'm not sure that was the best, Brandon.
Let's see. There have been 201 mass shootings in 2022.
So, do you call it a mass shooting if it's like a drive-by spraying of a crowd?
That's a mass shooting, right? How many of the 200 of the mass shootings were caused by white supremacists?
What do you think? It took CNN anchors over three minutes to list all the U.S. cities that had mass shootings this year.
But since all the news is about this white supremacist guy allegedly, shouldn't we know of the 200 mass shootings, how many of them were white supremacists?
They don't count gang shootings.
Scott Ritter on YouTube Yeah, I've checked out Scott Ritter on YouTube.
I don't think anybody knows what's happening there.
They count gangs down.
Yeah. Inflation's fixed.
There's not much to talk about with inflation because there's just more of it.
Here's the thing that makes me crazy about what's happening right now.
So we've had this long debate about socialism versus capitalism in this country, right?
Is it my imagination or is the effect of everything that's happening more socialism?
That's the net effect, right?
Because inflation is basically taken my wealth down by a third, maybe.
What would you say? So I'd say that poor people are still poor.
Right? So if you don't have much income, there's not much lower you can go.
You're scraping by.
But if you're rich, your wealth may have gone down by a third or a half, depending on what business you're in.
And that should vastly, you know, close the gap.
So if you raise taxes on the rich, you close the gap.
Gets you closer to socialism a little bit.
If you increase inflation, Who gets inflation hit the most?
It's two different answers.
Who hurts the most is the poor, right?
No doubt about that. The pain is at the poor.
But in terms of where the money disappears, more money disappears where there's more money.
So the wealthy would shrink by a third.
The poor would have more pain, but there's nothing there to shrink.
It's hardly any money. So, in a weird way, it seems like everything we're doing has this similar follow the money effect.
That it's a way to keep the poor fed and make them more dependent on the government, giving them direct money.
So basically the pandemic was a bunch of money taken from rich people and given to poor people, which I favored because, you know, you have to keep everybody alive, you know.
Maybe the way we did it could have been a lot better.
I'm sure that's true. But I don't object to the fact that rich people were tapped To give a little extra money to keep people alive in this country.
Nobody's going to complain about that.
Now when I say rich people were tapped, that's not exactly what happened.
Because we just created money out of nothing and spent it.
But who pays for the inflation?
Who pays for the higher taxes?
Who pays the deficit down?
It's people who have money. Poor people don't pay anything.
I mean, relatively speaking.
So rich people are going to shoulder the burden of all the inflation.
Well, let's say 95%.
And all the higher taxes, 95%, etc.
Now, I'm not complaining.
I'm explaining.
I'm explaining that it appears that the Biden administration has found a stealthy way to turn us into a socialist country.
That's what it looks like.
Scott, more poor are being created by inflation.
Yes. Yes.
So I'm not saying that more poor people aren't created.
I'm saying just, again, this is just a math question.
It's not even an opinion.
It's just math. That the rich people have the money.
So if somebody's going to pay taxes, it's got to be from them.
Right? That's where the money comes from.
So again, I'm not saying it's good or bad or anything.
It's just what's happening. And it's funny that we don't talk about it that way.
You'd expect that at least Fox News would be saying that we turned into a socialist country.
Or at least more of one.
We've always had a lot of socialism.
So over where we want to be.
Somebody says, I have my car, my stocks, my golf membership, none of this affected me.
What do you mean? You have stocks and you're affected by the market downturn?
I think you mean you're holding your stocks.
Which would be actually, that would be a good opinion.
So, I haven't looked at my stocks.
Normally I would look at my portfolio every day.
But I've literally not opened the app.
I have no idea what my net worth is.
I don't know what... I don't know.
And I'm not going to look.
I'm not going to look until the headlines say something like, the stocks are starting to reach their old highs.
Then I'll start looking again.
Because if the practice of investing...
Here's a little tip for you.
I don't think you've ever heard it in quite these terms.
Most of you, if you studied economics, maybe you did.
But the act of investing is primarily about managing your own psychology.
You got that? It's a little bit about knowing what to invest in, right?
But that's not hard, because you could just put it in an index fund and be done, just walk away.
So it's not hard to know what to invest in, just diversify.
You get a low-cost fund that tracks a big basket of stocks, and that's it.
So knowing what to buy is easy.
Knowing when to buy it is hard.
Knowing when to sell it or if to sell it is hard because those are questions of psychology.
So investment is not about knowing what to invest in.
That's easy. Unless you're dumb and you're trying to guess on certain companies.
That's gambling. So gambling is hard.
If you're trying to pick individual companies that will win, that's gambling.
So that's hard. But it's easy to invest.
Just put it in an index fund and walk away.
So, how do you manage your psychology?
The number one way you do it is by not looking at it.
It took me 50 years to be able to do this.
Or 40 years or something.
I probably couldn't do that for about 40 years.
But now I can. Like I finally, finally learned to not look at it.
Because if you look at it, you know what you're going to think?
Oh shit. I'd better be selling this thing right away before it all disappears.
Now, if you made terrible investments, maybe that's true.
I don't know. But if you have an index fund or a broad basket of stocks, I don't know.
The only way to measure your own animal instincts is to not look at it.
And you should also be thinking in terms of the five-year horizon.
I saw a tweet by Nival recently.
He said something like, Dear God, let me have one more bubble.
Because if you get one more good bubble, sort of ride it to what you think is the top and then sell everything.
Maybe that's your best exit strategy for retiring.
Give me one more bubble.
I just want one more bubble and then I'll put it all in cash or put it in my mattress or something.
Yeah, and to state the obvious, somebody very rude in the comments said I could be dead in five years.
That's... yeah.
So in five years, I will be almost sadly.
So yeah, I could easily be dead in five years.
Oh... All right.
I just remembered something.
So I'm going to take a point of...
Point of privilege? Is that what they call it?
Point of personal privilege? I'm going to tell you something that's not for your benefit.
It won't hurt you, but usually I'm presenting for what I imagine you would like to hear.
I'm going to give you one thing that's purely selfish.
The man who came up with the name Dilbert for my comic strip, which wasn't me, by the way.
It was suggested by my ex-boss and coworker.
He passed away in February.
His name is Michael Goodwin.
I'd like you to hear his name.
And he was the person who came into my cubicle that day and saw my drawing of this character who became Dilbert on my whiteboard, and I'd ask people to suggest names, and he picked up my whiteboard marker, took the cover off, and he wrote Dilbert on the board.
And I've told this story before, that when he wrote that word on the board next to the character, I felt myself go down and tumble to the future.
And I could see that that was his actual name in the future.
It wasn't like coming up with a name.
It didn't feel like assigning a name.
It didn't feel like picking a name.
It felt like...
What it felt like was I literally went to the future and saw Dilbert as a huge success.
Now, I could tell you this a thousand times and you're not going to believe that I actually had that experience.
I swear to it.
I swear on everything holy.
My dog. Anything you want.
I actually saw the future.
Now, not literally.
I don't mean I actually time travel.
I mean that I saw clearly that this character would succeed in the future.
The name was Dilbert.
It would always be Dilbert.
And I was done. From that moment on, I never once imagined it wouldn't work.
And the odds were something like 10,000 to 1.
So the odds were 10,000 to 1, roughly.
That's actually a real number of succeeding in this business.
That's right. Well, I'm not sure that wanting and deciding works in the case of cartooning because other people have to make decisions.
So other people have to say we like it and we'll put it somewhere.
So I don't have full control of that.
So the wanting versus deciding thing works when you do have the full control.
So you can decide, for example, to build yourself up to enter a weightlifting contest.
And, you know, you just push hard enough and you could probably make that happen.
But with cartooning, you really have to depend on luck and that there was somebody out there who would support you, who liked what you're doing, and that part you can't control.
I wonder if there are any other Dilberts.
There are. There are people named Dilbert, yeah.
And Dilbert Ground Loop was an aviator cartoon.
It wasn't called Dilbert Ground Loop, was it?
I think it was just called Dilbert.
And in the Navy, there's a thing called the Dilbert Dunker.
Has anybody heard of that? The Dilbert Dunker.
It's been around since at least World War II. And the idea was that Navy aviators would have a risk of, you know, crashing and being underwater in their plane.
And the pilots would have to figure out how to get out of their cockpit while they're submerged in water.
And they created something to test it.
It was called the Dilbert Dunker.
And the reason it was a Dilbert Dunker is that Dilbert was a cartoon that was done by the military, somebody in the military.
Osborn, I think was his name, the author.
And he had a little character named Dilbert, and Dilbert did all the wrong things that an aviator should not do.
Right? So he made all the mistakes, and that's how they taught people not to make those mistakes.
Now, when my boss suggested the name, he did not remember at the time that he had seen it before as a comic.
The worst possible situation I could be in.
Because I had already submitted it.
You know, it had been accepted as a syndicated comic.
And then, only then, Did he sheepishly come in and tell me he knows where the name came from in his own mind?
Because years ago he'd seen in his father's old trunk of things from, his father died in World War II, a trunk of materials from, he saw like the actual Dilbert comic and he realized he must have seen it before.
From that moment on, I said to myself, oh no.
Oh no. I'm going to get sued because I'm using the same name and it's a comic.
If it had been the name of a diner, like a Dilbert Diner, that would have been okay.
A different business. But it was also a comic.
So, for years, I would worry that somebody was going to come after me because it was too late to change it.
But it didn't happen. And it never did.
And I finally figured out, after 30 years, I figured out why.
Do you know why the original cartoonist who created Dilbert, or his family, do you know why they never even contacted me?
Ever. Somebody says copyright expired.
Somebody said trademark was dead.
Yeah, so you got it.
It was a government cartoon.
I already owned it. So did you.
If you're an American, you owned that cartoon.
Nobody owned it, because it was, you know, it was government property, basically.
So there was nobody. He made it under contract for the military.
I already owned it.
So did you. So apparently it was no risk at all, and I never came back to the party.
But I would like to tell you one more story, maybe more, from the life of Michael J. Goodwin.
I'm going to give you two stories.
Number one, Michael J. Goodwin taught me politics.
He taught me the only coherent political opinion I've ever heard.
Because he used to vote, even in all the local elections, he'd vote in all the elections.
He was very Republican.
And I used to ask him, why do you bother doing that?
Do you even know what the issues are?
And he said no. Do you read all the ballot initiatives?
Do you really know the ins and outs and why it's a good idea?
And he said, no. And I said, but you vote.
He goes, yes. I go, how the hell do you vote in any rational way without knowing what all of these things do?
And then he told me the smartest thing I've ever heard in politics.
He said, I vote against everything that raises my taxes or costs money because they already have enough money.
And I heard that and said, well, that's ridiculous.
That's so crazy.
God. Damn it.
That's the best political opinion I've ever heard.
I've never heard a better political opinion.
And he implemented it.
Like he would actually go vote.
And he would just say, all right, raises taxes?
No. Doesn't raise taxes.
Just a statement? Okay, yes.
That's it. Actually, I don't know if he voted for anything.
I think he just voted against anything that costs money.
And now you could argue that, hey, there's exceptions, there are things you really need money for, to which he would say, sure, just use the money you have.
I'll bet you got something you could save some money on.
Because he thought the government should operate just like you do.
If you don't have enough money for the new thing, You have to spend less money on the old thing.
That's it. Just like every company, every household, everybody else in the world makes do with what they have.
They don't just say, give me some more interest in their money.
They just make do. So that was his philosophy.
I don't know if it was a good one or a bad one, but it's the cleanest one I've ever heard of.
Now I'm going to close on my favorite Michael J. Goodwin story.
He was working with me when I worked in a laboratory.
And we were always connecting different equipment with cables to see if this equipment works with this equipment, you know, do the protocols work, etc.
And so mostly we were just testing different configurations of equipment.
And that required tools.
So we had a little tool drawer that would be the screwdrivers and stuff that we'd use for connecting equipment.
But there was a discussion in the lab.
There were just a handful of us who worked there.
About whether that drawer should be used for the tools, or the screwdrivers, mostly the screwdrivers, or the snacks.
Because we also kept some snacks in there.
And so we're like, hey, that drawer should be the tool drawer or the snacks.
And so I thought I was pretty funny.
And I said, well, this question boils down to this.
Would you rather screw or eat?
And I thought, okay, that's pretty fun, right?
Screwdrivers versus snacks.
Would you rather screw or eat?
And I thought I'd nailed it.
I thought I'd like to drop the mic.
It's like, would you rather screw or eat?
Drop the mic. Walk away.
And then Michael Goodwin said the funniest thing I've ever heard.
After I said, would you rather screw than eat?
He sat there and he said, depends how hungry I am.
And with that one sentence, Michael Goodwin described all of human nature.
There was nothing left.
There was no corner left unexplored.
There was no phenomenon left to be understood.
Michael J. Goodwin, magnificent bastard, had described all of human nature with one sentence.
Depends how hungry I am.
So this man, not only, gave us the name for Dilbert, which I believe changed the world.
I did. Because if Dilbert didn't have that name, I'm not even sure if it would have worked.
Honestly. There's something about the name that gave it weight.
Am I right? Could you imagine the Dilbert comic with any other name?
It's hard to do, isn't it? There's something about that name that makes it work.
It is. Now because of that, that allowed me to have some exposure.
It allowed me to talk about politics.
You saw with your own eyes, if you've been watching, that I got some things done.
For example, during the pandemic, I recommended an executive order to drop the doctors couldn't make a phone call to help you across the state border, which was dumb.
And so I recommended that during the pandemic, and the president at the time signed an executive order, and now telehealth is a way bigger market, should make a huge difference in people's lives, eventually.
Now that's just one thing.
There are other things that I managed to accomplish that I can't tell you about.
Those are the good ones.
But trust me.
Well, I'll give you another example.
My book, How to Fail in Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
It introduced the ideas of, you know, systems are better than goals and talent stacks.
Now, I don't think it's bragging to say that those two things made a huge difference in the world.
Because I hear about it all the time.
You know, talent stacks is the way smart people recommend anybody prepare their career now.
And the systems are better than goals.
Pretty much has been adopted as the standard way of thinking about stuff.
None of that would have happened without Michael Goodwin.
So not only did he have the cleanest political opinion I've ever heard, I vote against everything that raises my taxes.
He summed up all of human nature with one sentence, depends how hungry I am.
He named Dilbert, which basically caused a chain of action that brings us to this moment.
