to start with a long windup so that you've got a context that will make this much more meaningful. You ready? All right.

So I mentioned a few of these things before, but I've never tied them together in the way you're going to see. One of them is I've always been, not always, but for years I've been a student of the Beatles, you know, the musical group The Beatles. And what I'm interested in is not just how much I liked them, especially when I was young, but their processes and the systems that they used and how did they get to be so great.

Because one of the things you would note about the Beatles is if you looked at any one of their skills, they have lots of skills across a variety of domains. None of them look like the best in the world. So they're not the best lyricists. In fact, a lot of their lyrics were random. They're not the best musicians in terms of playing their instruments, which they would even have told you themselves. You could argue that Ringo was actually world class, but you know, there'd be some debate on that.

But I was trying to count in my head after studying them for years how many skills they had combined because they had everything from the style to the sense of humor to the marketing, the business. They played multiple instruments like you said. They did their own lyrics. But on top of all that I think McCartney was the unsung genius of the group. You know everybody gets their credit. They were all amazing. But McCartney was sort of a systems over goals kind of a guy. He just didn't call it that. And I think he was also a talent stack kind of a guy because they were acquiring so many talents over time.

I'll just give you an example. I might have this wrong but the example still works. I believe it was McCartney who said they had a rule. Let's call it a system. If they started to write a song, they wouldn't end the night until they finished it. Now, presumably there were some exceptions to that, but one of the things that they're famous for is completing more, you know, writing more songs than anybody could even imagine.

So if you took just McCartney's skill stack, I'll bet he had at least 20 skills that worked perfectly together. And the magic sauce that I write about and I talk about is not that he had a lot of skills because if he'd been, let's say, really good at badminton, well, that wouldn't really mix with anything else he was doing. But if you're really good at studio work plus drums plus guitar plus blah blah, every one of those works together, including the business end of it.

So if you combine the four Beatles and their skills, I think you would end up with something like 20 to 50 skills that are not random. They all work together. And I don't think we've ever seen anything like that.

Now, time goes by and here's some more context. And remember, I'm going to tie this all together. So just make a mental note that the Beatles were not the best in the world at anything, but they were probably above average at 20 to 50 different skills. And that's in my opinion the magic sauce.

So time goes by. We're going to change the context a little bit to my early career when I was a younger man. I had the idea that most people have, which is if you have a big problem in your life, could be career, could be personal, could be health, that what you would try to do is recover from the problem. And that makes sense, right? If you have a big problem, obviously you should set as your objective to get back to where you were.

Now, I'll give you an example where I tried that and learned it's a bad idea. So you've heard this story again, but I'm putting it in a different context. When I was in my 20s, worked for a bank. I had a cubicle job. It looked like I had potential for promotion. One day my boss called me in and said, "I don't know how to tell you this, but the word has come down from management that we can't promote white men." So that would be a big problem because I was young and ambitious and if they told me directly I couldn't be promoted. Well, I very quickly put my resume together and quit to take a better job, slightly better job. I would say it's more of a lateral move from the bank to a phone company, but it was really just another cubicle job.

So that was an example of not using the system I'm going to describe. But once that turned out the same way, the phone company eventually called me into my boss's office and said, "I don't know how to tell you this, but word has come down that we can't promote a white male." So you see what I did was I set my objective to get back to where I was, you know, working in the cubicle and maybe getting promoted. And I got right back to where I was. But where I was wasn't good.

So sometime around that point in my life, I came up with a different strategy. You could call it a system. And the system was that no matter how bad the problem was, I would set as my objective to take advantage of the problem to be way better, like way way better than wherever I was before the problem.

And you've also heard this story. Again, I'm going to put it in a different context that when I turned 49, I had a rare neurological problem that affected my vocal cords, and they would clench when I tried to form words. So I could make noise, but people couldn't understand what I was saying. So instead of talking the way you hear me now, I'd talk like that. And people would say, "What? What?" I couldn't use the telephone etc.

So it took me a few years to even find out that it had a name, spasmodic dysphonia, and the bad news was the experts told me it was incurable. So I had an incurable voice problem and half of my job was public speaking and doing interviews and I really kind of needed to be able to talk. Now, I was lucky that half of my job was cartooning because that didn't require the talking. But boy, did I need to get back to where I was.

However, by that time I had learned my new system, which is to set my goal as being way better, way better than wherever I was before I had the problem. Now, in this case, getting back to where I was would have been a rather poor voice. Because long before I had spasmodic dysphonia, I had a weak, nasally sounding voice that I hated to listen to. Most of you have that, right? When you listen to your own voice on recording, you go, "Ugh."

However, for those years where I was trying to find a solution to the speaking, I did an affirmation usually in my car. And you know, because I couldn't speak intelligently, but it didn't matter because I was just alone driving my car. I would do it out loud, but it would sound like nonsense to anybody else, but I knew what I was thinking and saying. And the affirmation went like this. I, Scott Adams, will speak perfectly.

Now, remember, I never spoke perfectly. And it's also a subjective standard, right? So what exactly is speaking perfectly? And I'm going to tell you in a minute what that means to me.

So again, time goes by and in 2013 or so I published a book called *How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big*. And that included my advice about building a talent stack. It included my advice about having a system over a goal. And it also talked about my strategy of setting my recovery to be way better, way better than what I started with.

So now that the scene is set, turns out that one of the people who read that book and absorbed a whole bunch of the skills that it described is an artist called Akira the Don. Akira the Don. And for the last several years, he has been using the techniques from the book. And by the way, he tells me this. I'm not guessing. So he told me this directly that he learned the whole talent stack, systems over goals, and a whole bunch of other advice. He absorbed it. He put it together and he added it to his existing skills of music. And he also runs the business of producing music. He's learned to obviously do video marketing, social media, and I would estimate that he has now compiled somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 different skills that like the Beatles, this is the magic part, like the Beatles, they're not 20 random skills. They're designed because they work together.

So he's been cranking away at a new form of music, art, entertainment that most of you have seen by now that he calls Meaningwave, which combines a background beat in music with some kind of podcaster or some kind of philosopher who says interesting things that independently you would like to hear. For example, I think he did Alan Watts and Jordan Peterson and they combined their voices just talking with the music and oh my god is it powerful. But he also did it with me.

So he took clips from many of my podcasts and then this past week he, after all this practice and assembling of many talents, he dropped an album. It's an entire album. You can find it on YouTube or just go to the internet. You can search for it. Akira the Don plus my name. It'll pop right up. And he launches it last week. And last I checked it had 6 million views.

Now by the time the podcast clips were made, I had discovered a solution to my voice problem: surgery. And it took several years for me to get my voice back to strong enough that I could podcast. So by the time he took the clips, I had learned persuasion. I'd written books that were part of my talent stack on advice, affirmations, and I'd found a way to be persuasively verbal. So I wasn't trying to do any music because I have no musical talent whatsoever, but I was trying to make my voice as compelling and useful as possible.

Now, I'm going to expand the definition of my voice to include not just how it sounded, but what I said, because by then I'd learned to speak persuasively. And when you listen to it, you'll see that the persuasion part, the clips are really unusually well picked. So it's not everything I've ever said. Akira the Don was also talented in figuring out what clips would work well in the music, what would affect people, maybe what affected him, I'm not sure. And he puts it together.

And if you haven't heard it yet, you will be blown away because he's literally invented an entirely new form of entertainment. And I've never seen anything in a musical domain. And you could argue whether it's music or a whole new art form, but I've never seen anything with that. Nearly 100% of the people listen to it say, "My god, that's good." People put it on and play it all day. People use it to go to sleep.

So back to my definition and my system. Remember my system was not to get back to where I was because that would be a nasally unpleasant voice that even I would not want to listen to. But by that time I had learned to speak in a pleasant way. I had recovered the strength of my voice which took years. And the podcasting was part of that strategy to make sure that I talked for an hour a day at least. And the net result is that I produced without any effort on my own part. I guess I'll say Akira the Don produced with my clips an art form that's better than just about anything you've ever seen. Just unbelievably mind-blowingly innovative and just so good. So good.

So I would recommend that you at least give it a sample. At least give it a sample.

So now that's an example of both he and I using the same system. I was combining skills. He was reading about my suggestion to combine skills. I have a system. He had a system. Lots of systems. And it was just amazing.

Anyway, so here's my first shout-out. You're going to ask me because you're curious and it's a fair question. Am I sharing in the economics of this? The answer is no. No, I have no economic stake. Not directly, not indirectly. And that's exactly what I want to say publicly in case someday my estate decides to challenge it. I want my estate to know because I'm now saying it in public that it is not my wishes to share economically.

One of the reasons for that is that he has already rewarded me more than money. You know, money can't compensate. So the feeling that I got from watching my voice become not just serviceable but put it in context where it was way better than way better than it ever was that even when I listen to it I say to myself wow I really enjoy listening to me and that is rare.

So you could say that that is perfect because what would be more perfect than going from not being able to speak to being the featured vocalist in a special way just talking on a hugely successful and influential form of art that didn't exist before. If that's not perfect, well, I mean, you tell me what is.

So that's my first compliment and shout-out. Akira the Don. Give it a sample.

Second is somebody I've talked about a lot and you're going to say, "Scott, he's no artist." And I get it. I get it. But he does what he does so well that I think is elevated to art, right? You know, if somebody's just really good at what they do, then they're just really good at what they do. But some people can take that to such a level that you look at it and you go, "Wow, nobody could do that. Who else could do that? That's art." And the second person is Mike Benz, especially because of what he did the past week.

Now, if you don't know Mike Benz, you should follow him because I can't really reproduce what he talks about or says, and that's really the point. He is unreproducible because he's so artistically gifted. Now, he like Akira the Don has told me that I had some influence over his talent stack. Now I assume that means maybe just in the domain of persuasion. I don't know the details but I had some influence.

And what his special talent is that I've never seen anybody close is he has this insane encyclopedic memory and knowledge of the intelligence and government structures so that he knows exactly who is connected to whom, what organizations and people are connected, who's married to who, who used to work with who, where the money flowed. And he combines that incredible knowledge that I don't think honestly I don't think there's another person in the world who has his knowledge of just how things are fit together. But he combines that with just crazy pattern recognition.

And so he has this unique ability that has made a lot of MAGA people happy. I don't know if he would call himself MAGA, but he operates in that world more than the other. So he does a podcast and he's developed all these skills. You know, he's musical and he combines that. He plays a piano. So you can see that his brain is a certain structure. That's amazing.

So he's learned to podcast. He's got the business end of it. He's made lots of networking connections. But on top of that, if you add the encyclopedic memory, his knowledge of how everything is connected and now his pattern recognition, he was the first one to untangle in my mind the NGO badness because the theft that was massive, we'll talk about that later, seemed to be hidden in the complexity. So you needed someone who could look at this amazing complexity and pick out what mattered and what was noise. Nobody else can do that.

So first, and this is not what he did this week, he sort of demystified the whole NGO world and I think I would give him the most credit. Now obviously Elon Musk is a huge part of that and DOGE but it was Benz who kind of explained it all to me for the first time but you take that forward and this past week in my opinion he's the first one who completely explained the Epstein situation.

Now I can't reproduce his explanation but I'll give you the sort of idiot summary. The idiot summary is that while he was doing a podcast and he was starting to do some pattern recognition of everything we've learned so far, he realized that Epstein has been connected to at least four intelligence agencies. Again, this is because of his encyclopedic knowledge of who works with who, who was a roommate, who literally who was a roommate, who stayed with somebody for an extended period of time, things you would never know, but he does.

And I guess as he was doing the podcast, he suddenly put it all together. Now, if you haven't heard it, I would tell you to go listen to his version because you want to get the full thing. But the basic idea is that Epstein has clearly been associated with giant intelligence-related money laundering for several decades, starting