took me 50 years to be able to do this. For 40 years or something I probably couldn't do that for about 40 years. But now again like I finally learned to not look at it. Because if you look at it, you know what you're gonna think. Oh, I'd better be selling this thing right away before it all disappears.

Now if you imagine 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, 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 Naval recently. He said something like, dear God let me have one more bubble. If you get one more good bubble, you know, sort of ride it to what you think is the top and then sell everything. You know, 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, 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 70. 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 personal privilege. Something called point of personal privilege. I'm gonna tell you something that's not for your benefit and it won't hurt you, but usually I'm presenting for you know 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 co-worker, he passed away in February. His name is Michael Goodwin. I'd like to say 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 asked people to suggest names, and he picked up my whiteboard marker, took the cover off, they 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 a tunnel 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 I literally went to the future and saw Dilbert as a huge success.

Now I can tell you this a thousand times and you're not going to believe that I actually had that experience. 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 traveled. 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 ten thousand to one. So the odds were ten thousand to one roughly. That's actually a real number of succeeding in this business.

And 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, right? So you could decide for example to build yourself up to enter a weightlifting contest and you know you just push hard enough 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 people named Gilbert. 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 there in the Navy there's a thing called the Dilbert dunker. Has anybody heard of that? The D