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Sept. 7, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
46:40
Episode 211 Scott Adams: White House Moles, Spartacus and Prison
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Hey everybody, I'm back.
And this time, I'm going to be talking about events in the news.
And President Trump, all of your favorite topics.
Yay! And I come with coffee again.
In case you missed my first Periscope this morning with Dr.
Shiva, you should catch up on that if you want to know a lot about healthcare costs.
It was very enlightening.
And now, please join me for the simultaneous sip.
Grab your beverage, your mug, your chalice.
Here it comes. Hmm.
For some of you, that's the second one today.
Even better. Well, I'd like to start out by saying that I am Spartacus.
You probably all saw Cory Booker destroy his political chances by claiming that he was Spartacus, or like Spartacus, by breaking a rule that wasn't even breaking a rule.
But the biggest problem that Cory Booker has is he's sort of Google-eyed.
You know, I don't know if you noticed, but on camera he's Sort of like this all the time.
And I would not like to make fun of anybody's look, because we should not be choosing politicians based on look, except that we do sort of pick politicians based on look.
So how they present themselves is indeed part of the conversation.
And his wide eyes Make me think there's something wrong.
I don't know exactly what it is, but he seems too happy and his eyes seem too googly-eyed.
So I think Spartacus, who gave himself a...
It's very convenient that he started off by giving himself a nickname.
So Spartacus and Pocahontas may be running for president.
Anyway, let's talk about the New York Times mole.
The mole who wrote the story for the New York Times saying that there are people within the administration who are managing the president by doing things like taking documents off his desk and other clever things that underlings do to manage their bosses.
Now, There are a number of contexts that are left out of the New York Times story that would completely change how you see it.
So you could keep all of the same writing that's in the story, but just add some context and it completely changes.
The first context is That the person who wrote the story believes that he or she, and I'm going to tell you later, I think it's a he, knows more about how to run the country than the president.
And the way it was reported and the way people are talking about it, it's as if that's a reasonable claim.
But here's the context.
Who would have advised the president to do anything he's done so far?
Almost nobody.
Almost nobody.
Let's take the example.
I finally got to see the letter that was taken off of his desk.
One example, I guess. And it was a letter to South Korea saying that we're gonna cancel our trade agreements because they weren't fair.
And I believe that that was taken off his desk because someone who thought they knew more than him, more than the president, about how stuff works, believed that it wasn't the right time or would cause too much trouble, etc. So, should we assume that the person who took it off the desk was the person who was right?
Why would you assume that?
I looked at it and I said, okay, it looks like the usual provocative things that this president does.
It looks like exactly what he promised to do, which is to be tough even on our allies, even on our allies for trade deals.
Now, how can you know how it would have turned out had he gone ahead and done it versus having it taken off the desk?
How do we know how that would have turned out?
Now, if you have been right about all things Trump from the time that he announced till today, then you might be one of those people who has a pretty good idea how things turn out if the Trump style of management is taken forward.
But if you were someone who was watching President Trump run for office and kept saying to yourself, oh, that's wrong.
Don't do that.
Oh, no. Don't do that.
Okay, that keeps working.
Stop doing that.
Okay, that worked. But you're certainly not going to do...
Okay, that worked, too.
But now, after being wrong for three years straight, there's some person who believes...
There's somebody who believes that they knew more than the president about how things would have gone with South Korea.
I don't think that's an evidence.
Maybe it was a bad idea to sign that document.
Maybe it was a good idea to not sign it.
Do you know?
Because I don't know.
All I know is that it's a president who promised to do stuff like this, got elected to do stuff like that, and so far, every time he does stuff like that, he makes it work.
So it would be hard for me to assume that the mole is really working in the interests of the United States.
Forget about the issue of whether anybody should be overruling the president in this sneaky way.
I think most of us would agree that's a bad situation.
But the excuse for it is, yeah, we're overriding him, but we're smarter than him and we know what to do and he doesn't know and he hasn't studied it.
That's not an evidence.
We don't have evidence that the things he wants to do, the way he wants to do them, doesn't work.
We have lots of evidence that it does work.
Now, if they had said, we're rewriting your tweets or your speeches or something, that would be a slightly different conversation.
But this was a substantive policy decision that is right in the president's wheelhouse, which is negotiating, and somebody took that away from him, allegedly.
All right, now, here's a couple of interesting things.
I don't know why we don't already know who this is, or at least the administration, because there's something called Stylomethy or something.
Anyway, it's the science of studying somebody's writing and then identifying who they are, if they're anonymous, by looking at other writing and finding similar writing elements.
Now, we don't know if the person who wrote it was smart enough to have somebody rewrite it for them, or maybe they, you know, possibly they wrote it once and then had somebody rewrite it to get rid of those tells, but probably not.
Probably not. Probably it's written by the original author.
Somebody says style is easily faked.
Not really.
You can fake parts of it.
For example, you could say, I think I'll put that word lodestar in there and that's going to make people look at the vice president.
So you can do surface-y stuff like that.
But looking at somebody's style gets down to how long are their sentences, when do they use adjectives.
There's a whole lot of stuff that I don't know that you'd even know how to fake.
So I'm guessing that it's the original author, most likely.
We can't know that for sure.
The next thing is, can you tell the gender of the author if you read the piece?
Most of you probably saw it.
Give me a guess, not based on who you think probably wrote it, but just on the style of the writing.
Can you pick out a gender?
I will take a sip while I look at your answers.
The gender is Dale.
That's a funny answer. I've seen one female answer, a couple more females, but more male.
Now I'm seeing women.
Let me tell you my experience.
I've probably received, I don't know, maybe hundreds of thousands of messages in my career.
From strangers.
Very often, I don't know who it's coming from until I've started reading it.
Now, the number of times that I can accurately determine whether a message is coming from a man or a woman before I see the name and before I have any overt cue of who it is, it feels like at least 90% of the time.
It actually feels like 100% of the time, but I'm going to knock it down to 90% for this discussion.
It feels like I can identify gender 90% of the time.
Now, if you said, how do you do that?
I haven't really looked into it enough to know, well, it's because I'm seeing this, or I'm seeing that, or whatever it is.
But my take is that it's a male writer, but not necessarily a manly man.
It might be a younger, let's say, not an alpha male.
So that's just my guess.
Male, but not too alpha.
Let's say somebody who's not big on hunting.
Just a guess. So you can compare that against whatever we find out later.
The other interesting thing is that Rand Paul has suggested lie detector tests.
Now let's assume that they can narrow down the suspects to a manageable group.
And other people, I think I saw Anderson Cooper point out correctly, that lie detector tests are not 100% reliable.
And in fact, they're not even reliable enough to be allowed in court.
So you can't build a court case based on a lie detector result.
Yet, lie detectors are used quite widely.
I believe the FBI uses them.
So there are lots of contexts in which lie detectors are used, and yet we know they're not completely accurate.
And you could argue how accurate or not.
But let me tell you a little bit about lie detectors so you get a better idea.
Lie detectors do work When people who are the subject of them believe that they work.
If you know that they don't work or you've been trained in how to thwart them, then you're not going to get as reliable an answer.
But if somebody thinks that you can tell with your magic device that they're lying, indeed their variables will spike because they think it works and then it becomes self-fulfilling.
Now, is that good enough, what I've told you so far, to find and identify for sure or with some good likelihood who the mole is?
Not by itself.
But consider this.
Probably more than one person knows who wrote it.
Right? Probably more than one.
Some people just know and they're not talking.
Because this person alleges that there are other people like him or her.
So probably somebody knows.
So the odds of you finding at least one person who believes or is worried that the lie detector works is pretty high.
You just have to find one person who thinks the lie detector works, and then they get a signal, and then the operator says, "Do you know anybody who you believe was involved in writing it?" Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.
"Who?" And then you've got a name.
Unless they want to go on record as being a liar who seems to know who it is but won't tell you.
It's probably at least close to a firing offense.
So if you find somebody who indicates they might know who it is, then you start talking to the people closest to them.
And you might say, hey, does your co-worker Bob also know who did it?
Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.
Talk to Bob. Bob, did you write it?
No. Do you know who wrote it?
Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.
So I think you could triangulate On the writer by finding enough people who believe it's real who also know who wrote it.
So although there are no 100% guarantees with lie detectors, the odds that you could narrow it down and get closer to the truth, pretty good.
Pretty good. Probably a 60% chance it would make a difference, just off the top of my head.
All right, so that's just a fascinating little thing we're watching.
Here's the other context that people leave out.
So I read and then I reread the Moles' opinion piece in the New York Times.
And I keep reading it looking for the damning parts.
But I'm not quite seeing them.
Hey, Naval. I'm not really seeing the damning parts.
I see the opinion of the writer that the president is not fully engaged and not competent.
But that's the opinion of just about every underling who isn't getting their way.
Right? In any normal situation, you've got a boss and there are various people who are trying to get their way.
People who are Who are suggesting various things, and that boss is maybe accepting some of the suggestions and rejecting other rejections.
If you're in the group whose suggestions were rejected, how do you conclude what that situation was?
Do you say to yourself, I had an idea, I suggested it to the president, he shot me down, therefore I'm an idiot?
In the history of the world, how often does that happen?
No, that doesn't happen.
People go away and say, my idea was brilliant.
It got shot down by the president.
Therefore, logically, since I'm such a genius and my idea was so amazing, there must be some kind of mental problem with the person who turned it down.
That's completely normal employee behavior, underling behavior.
So everything that I saw in that Moles article about the president looked to me, and by the way, I am the world expert on employees complaining about their bosses.
I mean, literally, I might be the world expert on listening to employees complain about their boss.
Seriously, can you think of anybody who has heard more complaints about more bosses It's literally my job for the last 30 years is listening to people complain about their boss.
And I'll tell you, I got some context here.
And when I look at this complaint about the boss, in this case the boss being the president, it's just routine.
So where is that context?
A totally routine complaint about a disgruntled underling.
Now, this is completely normal.
And I feel that a lot of people are coming to the same conclusion.
Not because they heard me or because they have the same context necessarily, but because it's the same stuff they say about their own boss.
I think their own experience might be enough to confirm that it isn't that far out of the ordinary.
Now the thing that the news has picked up on is that in the article, I forget the exact words, but it suggested that early on, meaning I guess early on in the administration, There was some talk among cabinet members about the 25th Amendment, removing the president for being mentally unfit.
Now here's the thing.
If that was talk that happened early on, but it's not talk that this same author is willing to say is happening right now, what happened to that talk?
The article itself suggests that people were worried early on about the 25th Amendment, the president's crazy, we have to remove him.
But what it doesn't say is that people are still talking about it.
It doesn't say that the administration, that there are secret people who are talking about pulling that trigger.
So I think the news has taken exactly the opposite impression from what is written.
To me, what's written is they used to be worrying about it, but they're not talking about it because it's missing.
There's no word that they're still talking about it.
That's a big deal. And at the same time, the smart people in the news, when they talk about it, even the people who are anti-Trump, They kind of quietly say, well, okay, the 25th Amendment really isn't about me disagreeing with the president.
It's not about his style.
It's not about him yelling at people.
Now, here's some more context.
So this so-called mole says that there are lots of people who are fighting hard to thwart the president's Will, you know, his preferences.
There's also reports that he might get mad and yell at people.
Do you see where I'm going on this?
There are two things reported.
The underlings are not doing what the president is telling them to do, and they're actively thwarting him.
And the president gets mad and flips out on people, his employees, For not doing what he wants them to do.
Let me say for the rest of you, thank you, Mr.
President, for getting in the faces of people who are not doing what you want them to do.
I think that's why he was hired.
Right? Imagine if you'd heard it the other way.
Imagine if this had been the story.
There's a whole group of people trying to thwart the president and actively undermining him, and he probably knows it.
And he's fine with it.
He's okay with that.
Would you be comfortable with that?
How comfortable would you be with a president who didn't get unhinged at that kind of behavior?
You put me in that job You put me in charge of the well-being of the whole frickin' country, and then you have my underling come in and not want to do what I tell him to do, what I got elected to do, which I've been doing for three years and it's been working.
What am I gonna do to that asshole?
Well, by the time he leaves, he's gonna be afraid he was, you know, he's gonna wish he had never been born.
I am going to be so unglued at that asshole for not doing what I need him to do that he's going to report that I'm unhinged.
And you know what I'm going to do to the next asshole that doesn't do what I want him to do?
I'm going to get even more unhinged.
I'm going to get as unhinged as you frickin' need me to do because I'm in charge of the country.
The whole frickin' country.
And if these idiots come in and they're not willing to do their jobs, not doing the will of the people, I'm going to get pretty freaking unhinged.
I'm going to go nuclear.
I mean, not nuclear bombs, but nuclear attitude toward anybody who's not doing their job in that context.
Should never be unhinged or triggered.
Well, when I say that the president acts unhinged, I mean it in the same way I would act unhinged.
Emphasis on act.
Remember, the president is trying to persuade people to do more or to do what he wants and to not thwart him.
If you need to ramp up your yelling, your attitude, your level of intensity to get that done, you do that.
You ramp up your intensity to whatever level it takes to make something happen differently.
Because if you ramp it up this, well, I don't want to get unhinged, but I would really appreciate it if you do what I wanted to do.
What's that going to get you?
Same thing you had before, probably.
No penalty. You're going to make a serious penalty to anybody who is not doing what you want.
So when I read this report about the president...
You know, going off on people, at the same time I'm reading a report that they're actively not doing what he wants, and the only example they can show me is this letter to South Korea that I have no idea was a bad idea.
Did that look like a bad idea to you?
How would I know? All I know is that people weren't doing their jobs and he came unhinged on them.
Thank you. That's what you should be doing.
Get a little more unhinged on those people, please.
Fire them if you can. If you can find them.
Then there's the stories of the president flip-flopping.
That he'll say one thing impulsively and then say the next thing the next day.
How much should we be worried about that?
Well, I'm a little bit soft on that because I'm a big flip-flopper myself.
It is my way, as well, to toss down ideas, see how they're received.
If people come back to me with a little pushback, and it's something I hadn't thought of before, I'm going to flip-flop.
And if somebody comes back with an even better idea, I'm going to flip-flop again.
Should you be worried that the president has an opinion, puts it out there, People push back, he learns some more, maybe he thinks about it some more, and then changes his mind.
Is that something to worry about?
I don't think so.
Because that's how I operate.
And I defend it as the smarter way to do.
I'd be a little bit more worried about somebody who said, well, here's the decision.
You have new information?
Ah, it doesn't matter. I made the decision.
Or the new information makes my decision look ridiculous?
Well, let's just stick with the original decision.
What the hell?
What are we comparing this to?
This flip-flopping.
The other thing that people blame the president for is that he doesn't get into the details.
In other words, he doesn't have a grasp of some of the details the way that the underlings think he should.
Should we be worried about that?
I don't think so, because the nature of the presidency is that the president is never going to have the details that the underlings have.
Now, there should be a level of detail that the president gets to.
What should you expect of your president?
Well, if it's a Jimmy Carter or an Obama, they might dig into the details.
And when they're done, would they know what was the important detail?
Would they know what mattered?
Because it's not really about mastering the details.
It's about looking into all the details and picking out what mattered.
You've been watching President Trump operate for three plus years or so.
Is he good at knowing what matters?
You've never seen anybody better?
Do you remember when I told you that facts wouldn't matter, but persuasion would?
And how much pushback I got on that when I said it in 2015?
And everybody kept saying, oh, you're crazy.
Facts matter. Although, of course, facts matter to the outcomes.
But if you're trying to persuade people, it turns out that you can ignore the fact-checkers 3,000 times.
I think that's the estimate for President Trump since inauguration.
3,000 times.
And the economy is screaming.
You know, defense looks strong.
A lot's going right, right?
So was the president accurate in knowing that moving people emotionally is more important than all of those facts that we can quite clearly see did not matter to the outcome of him getting elected and even his ability to manage to some extent.
Look at the, when he was running, people said, the most important thing is how much money you spend.
Or the most important thing is how organized your ground game is.
What did President Trump say?
Nope. I reject that.
The most important thing is how often I'm on TV, how much I can capture your attention, your imagination, how well I've picked my topics for emotional impact, how much I tweet, how much free airtime I get.
Everything about that is different from what normal people would have done.
And it worked great.
So if you look at one situation after another, you see a fairly significant pattern.
That the president has a good idea of what matters, and the people who criticize him do not.
That pattern, more than any other pattern you've seen since 2015, Kind of explains your world.
That the president consistently looks into the complexity, and he reaches in, and he picks out the thing that mattered.
You know, he finds the lever.
So, take the South Korean letter that was pulled off his desk.
The people who pulled it off his desk, no doubt, were thinking something like this.
My God, the president doesn't know that there are lots of considerations.
There's the political, there's the financial, there's the thing this is connected to, and it'll ripple and all this.
The president Probably, and I don't want to read his mind, so I'm just going to speculate here to make my point, right?
This is not mind reading.
Probably treated this like he treats everything else.
And he said to himself, I'm just going to push everybody for better trade deals.
I'll just push everybody.
And that will be a better message than if I just push a few people.
Now that might be brilliant.
To push everybody at once, which is essentially what he's doing.
The underling, who pulled that letter off his desk, decided to micromanage him and say, oh yeah, maybe all the other stuff you're doing, but I'm going to pull this South Korean one out because it's special.
Was it? Was it special?
Or did it detract from the President's big picture, which is I'm going to push everybody.
It doesn't matter if you're friend or foe.
If you've got a bad trade deal with us, we're going to push on it.
Now, even pushing South Korea, even in a delicate time, would have certainly sent that message very clearly.
How important was it to send that message clearly versus the smaller political things that might have been problematic?
But guess what? South Korea really needs the United States.
Were we going to break up over that?
Probably not. Were we going to join North Korea's side?
Probably not. Did the president correctly think that it was more important to make a big decision Impression on trade negotiation, even if it touched some allies that we normally would play nicer with.
You can't tell me that wasn't a reasonable strategy, even if we can't predict exactly how it would turn out.
So I would say that the people who are trying to manage the president from within the administration Might be the people who can't tell what's important from what is.
And we have a pretty long record of watching this president from the time he was a candidate, and I would argue from the time he was a business person, knowing what mattered and what didn't.
So look for that pattern.
You'll see more and more of it.
Am I still predicting a red wave?
I've never predicted a red wave.
My prediction, I've only made one prediction, which was nine months ago, and I said that the midterms would be closer than what people thought they would be back in January.
So I'm sticking with that.
But, no, I didn't predict a red wave.
Mixed house increases effectiveness.
Oh, somebody's asking, if the Congress becomes mixed and it's not all Republican, would that increase or decrease its effectiveness?
I'm on the side with Dana Perino, who said, Perino said the same thing that I'm going to say right now, which is that I think this president is Might work really well with a mixed Congress.
Because remember, this is the guy who will talk to Putin.
This is the guy who talks to Kim Jong-un.
This is the guy who will talk to the Ayatollah, you know, if the Ayatollah was willing.
So is he willing to talk to Democrats?
Hell yeah! If he can make a deal.
And the things that are left to make deals on scream for bipartisanship.
Healthcare, Screams for bipartisanship.
Immigration screams for it.
So, I do not predict doom with a mixed Congress.
I would tentatively suggest that on some topics, it might come out ahead.
On other topics, not so much.
Oh, somebody says, do I think the left is going to work with Trump?
Well, that's what happens when you have a mixed Congress.
If the Republicans have all the power, you should expect the opposition to be just a solid opposition.
We don't want to give you anything because we don't have any power, and maybe this is how we can get some power.
But if both sides have some power, they're going to need to explain to voters why they couldn't get anything done.
So the The double-edged sword here is if Democrats get more power, they're going to have a lot more answering to do.
And both sides will need to do some answering.
And then impeachment.
I have mixed feelings about impeachment proceedings.
This will surprise you.
Because I don't see any, there's no grounds for impeachment.
If there were, I suppose I'd have a different opinion.
But right now it seems to me that an impeachment proceeding would be such an overreach that it would just be ridiculous.
And so I kind of almost don't mind if Democrats try it just to take it off the page because I think other Democrats would squash it.
But at least we could get that conversation out of the headlines.
Let the Democrats kill it themselves.
So I'd say let the Democrats take a shot at it.
Democrats, I think, would kill it on their own unless there's some new thing that happens between now and then.
Too much mainstream media propaganda for a rational Democratic Party.
I agree with that statement entirely.
I believe that the media, the way it's organized to prefer excitement, has...
It has whipped up the Democrats to the point where many of them are irrational.
I'm sure you could say the same for both sides, some members of both sides, but it really seems like the Democrats are in full TDS, Trump derangement syndrome.
Talk about the lowest Trump approval ratings since the presidency.
Well, of course, the macro comment is beware of all polls.
The other thing is, I think the mainstream media is doing a really good job of persuasion.
And what I'm wondering is, how long can we go where the metrics for everything we care about are steadily going up?
You know, jobs are better, economy is better, Defense is better.
The courts are better, at least for half of the country.
How long can the president consistently improve almost everything, except the debt, I suppose, while his ratings are going down?
How long can you do that?
Don't you wonder if there's some kind of weird breaking point where, you know, these graphs are going in the wrong direction at some point?
Even the people who are anti-Trump are going to say, okay, we did double our GDP and ISIS is gone.
All right. Oh, healthcare costs going up.
So healthcare would be, yeah, on the top of my list of things that are not going right.
And I criticize the administration for healthcare quite a bit.
Build the wall or everything fails.
Well, I don't know.
I think the wall is being built because it's going to look like normal incremental progress.
When are we going to see a picture of the wall?
Because I know that they started replacing...
Broken parts with the new wall, right?
You want me to talk about Elon Musk because he was on Joe Rogan yesterday, I think.
And the part that everybody is tweeting around is that Joe Rogan asked Elon if he wanted to smoke a blunt.
A blunt being a tobacco slash marijuana cigarette.
And Elon took a hit.
Oh, that was this morning?
No. So Elon made a funny face after taking a hit, and that funny face is the one that everybody's tweeting around.
I don't know that there's much of a story.
The thing is that marijuana has now reached such a level of normalness That, you know, you saw when I was on Joe Rogan's show, I also smoked a joint with him.
And so it's no big deal if Elon does.
It's not like nobody knows that Elon ever did a drug.
I don't believe there's anybody who owns Tesla stock who's thinking, well, that Elon, I'll bet he's never had a drink or smoked a joint.
So I don't know that there's any new information there.
Somebody says, I can't believe you did drugs.
You mean ever? Or just on that show?
His CFO quit this morning.
Really? I don't know about that story.
A blunt is a hollowed-out cigar filled with weed only.
So the tobacco part is actually the wrapping.
So the wrapping is actually still made of tobacco.
So, but your correction is correct.
Scott still does correct.
Yes, I still use marijuana medicinally.
To me, I don't understand how anybody could use marijuana as a party drug.
Obviously people do, and I did when I was in college, but it just doesn't seem like that kind of a drug anymore.
If I didn't get about 12 medical benefits from it that are extraordinary, I wouldn't do it.
Will we ever see ethnic fascism in the USA?
I'm going to say no.
No, I don't think we'll ever see ethnic fascism.
Is Elon good at persuasion?
Yes. Was Charlie Manson a master persuader?
Clearly. Clearly he was.
What medical benefits?
Sleep apnea.
So I sleep like a baby.
It takes care of my allergies.
It takes care of my asthma.
It removes all my aches and pains.
There's even indication it's good for my lungs, my lung capacity.
You might argue with that one, but there's some studies that show that chronic marijuana users have better lung capacity than people who don't smoke anything.
My blood pressure, my stress, and general inflammation.
Now, if you put all of those things together, you know, if you could reduce somebody's stress, blood pressure, inflammation, allergies, asthma, and let them get better sleep, what would be your overall outcome?
Well, your overall outcome would be you would be the healthiest 61-year-old you've ever met.
Me, So there are very few people who are healthier than I am.
I was asking Christina if she can remember, and I don't know how long we've known each other, two and a half years, I think, if she can remember me being sick.
You've seen me on Periscope pretty much every day.
I don't get sick.
So somebody says, let's see the guns.
All right. It's not bad for my age.
I make no claims to be fit for a 20 year old.
I only make a claim to be fit for my age.
You sound sick every day.
Well, that's just allergies.
So in the morning, I'm not high and I do have allergies.
Embarrassing.
So I've talked at great length about how I've escaped from the bubble of embarrassment and shame that I used to live in.
So I obviously was quite aware that making a muscle on Periscope would cause derision and mocking and insults, etc.
Did that stop me from doing it?
Nah, don't care.
All right.
You got sick in Amsterdam.
I am.
Did I? I don't remember that.
Alright, I will talk to you.
Oh, you know what's weird?
In Amsterdam, most of the time I wasn't smoking.
Did I ever meet Burt Reynolds?
That is a funny question because I have met Burt Reynolds.
I'm going to tell you my Burt Reynolds meeting and then I'm going to sign off.
So many years ago, probably 20 years ago, I was a guest on Good Morning America and I was in the green room, but apparently there's more than one green room.
There's the green room for people who are not that famous and then the really famous people, you know, the A-listers get their own private room somewhere else.
So I was on a day when Burt Reynolds was going to be a guest on the show, either before me or after me.
And I'm in the green room, and it's just me, and I think my publicist was sitting there.
So it's just a room with two people in it.
And I'm sitting there, and all of a sudden Burt Reynolds comes up to the doorway.
And I have to do my Burt Reynolds impression.
And he just leans in the doorway, and he looks in, and he looks at me.
He looks at my publicist and he looks at me and he goes, how you doing?
And then he walks away.
So that was my only interaction ever with him.
I have to say that in five seconds he made me like him because he was He clearly put himself out there, and he was just being friendly to people he didn't know.
And I immediately just said, I like that guy.
In five seconds, he made me like him.
All right, so...
Oh, I said something back, but I don't know what it was.
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