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Dec. 3, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
55:38
Episode 323 Scott Adams: Watch Colorizing a Dilbert Comic on a Wacom Cintiq
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- - - - - - - So, I'm gonna watch myself so that I can see your comments without turning around.
How clever is that?
This totally works.
So there's a little bit of a timing difference, but now I can look in this direction and I can find out what's happening.
So, people sometimes wonder what's the process for making a comic, and so I thought I would show you.
Now, I realize you can't see it very well, but you'll be able to get the gist of it.
So what I'm using here is a Wacom Cintiq, and there's even a newer version I'm going to pick up pretty soon that's a little bit bigger, but it's a drawing surface.
So it's connected to a Macintosh.
You can also connect it to a Windows computer.
And it operates as a regular monitor, except that it has the dual purpose that you can draw on it.
Now this little raggy half a glove that I'm wearing, that makes me look like something out of a Dickens thing, this is just my own little hack that I learned from somebody else, that if your hand is going to be resting on the glass, You don't want the oils of your hand to be getting all over your computer.
So I wear this little glove that's really just a photographer's glove for handling negatives, and I just cut off the fingers.
So, this is a comic that I drew this morning, and the words are in a separate file.
I'll tell you why at the end.
And all I'm doing is putting in colors.
In the old days, this had to be done on paper, and you had to indicate what color it is on a separate piece of paper, and it was just a mess.
So I'm probably not going to be talking about too much politics today.
I just am doing this for those of you who had an interest in knowing what's it like to be a cartoonist.
So this is what I spend a lot of my time doing, is looking at this computer screen and drawing on it and doing what I'm doing now, which is the last stage of putting the color on.
Now, when I do the daily comics, those get colored at the printer.
Well, they get colored by the syndication service, and then they're sent to the printer.
And if you ask me, why did they put the color on the daily comics, whereas I put the color on the Sundays, I have no idea.
It's one of those historical oddities that has something to do with somebody's contract or something.
I don't know. Do I have templates of Dilbert or do I draw him every time?
Here's your answer. I don't know if you can see this.
But these are a bunch of Dilbert heads.
So when I'm drawing a new comic for the rough draft, I'll grab one of these and paste it in, and I'll just look for the one where he's facing the right direction.
So I've got one of these for all the major characters, but I do still end up doing an original drawing every time.
So even though I cut and paste them, they're always resized and a little twisted, so they're always drawn from scratch, ultimately.
So I just use these Templates to get it started and, you know, make sure the dimensions are always about the same.
Alright, let's get rid of this.
So, right now I'm just scrolling through and looking for places that are the same colors.
So putting the skin tones on them, making sure I got everybody here.
Then, I'm gonna Start coloring in Tina.
Tina's got black hair.
You will notice I'm not very organized when I do this because it's so insanely boring.
If you do this a lot, it's really, really boring.
I've been doing this for 30 years, you know, the last 10 or so or whatever it's been.
I've been doing it on the computer.
But it's insanely boring.
So if you do it the same every time, you'll just go crazy.
So I tend to have other things on and try to muddle my way through it without my brain exploding.
One of the reasons that I'm talking to you on Periscope is to reduce my own boredom of doing this.
And yes, I could give somebody else to do it, but there is something to be said for knowing that the creator of the comic touched every part of it.
And that's not sure how well you can see this, but it's just one tap with this tool and it fills in.
Next up, CGI cartoons.
Yeah, let me tell you what I would want this to be.
I would want to have templates of Dilbert that I could actually just rotate and then, you know, paste.
So I should be able to take a template, rotate it around in any direction, and then just have the comic come from the 3D template.
Yes, everyone's job gets boring, even glamorous ones.
The thing that most of you don't see is that it's a Macintosh.
What you don't see is that, as an official celebrity, my life is exactly the same as everybody else's 99% of the time.
The only time it's not is the time that people are watching me, because otherwise it's completely ordinary.
I mean, it's really good, but it's not like an alien experience or anything.
All right.
Scott, are you friends with any other major cartoonist?
Stefan Pastis is a good friend.
He's another Californian.
I would say that I'm acquainted with and friendly with quite a few cartoonists that I've met over the years.
But we tend to live all over the place.
You know, it's rare.
It's pretty rare if there's another cartoonist in your city.
You know, at least a high-end cartoonist.
I don't know if there are any cities that have two syndicated cartoonists in them.
That would be interesting.
Maybe New York?
I'm not sure.
Have I tried the new iPad Pro for art?
I tried the version just before it.
And my impression is that if you're just playing around or you're a kid or something, the iPad's a fun toy.
But for actual career-related production stuff, it's kind of useless.
Only because it's so small and it's limited.
The space...
Having this much real estate is about 80% of the job.
Do you know of Scott Stannis' work?
I know of it. Do you know the XKCD cartoonist?
No, we've never met.
Is Dale on your hand?
That is correct.
this raggy little half glove doubles as Dale.
If you ever made a spelling error, Yes, many times.
Now in most cases the editors catch it before it gets printed, but I still let one slip by every now and then.
So every now and then I have a spelling error, but it's maybe once a year or something.
Or less, I would think.
Now one of the things you have to learn about colorizing the comics is that sometimes it's more fun if you're picking colors that don't make real sense in the real world.
Thank you.
So I don't try too hard, for example, to make a building look like a building in terms of the colors.
Yeah...
So this tool is the gradient tool.
So what I did was made it look like the sun is hitting these windows so that they're not uniform.
There's a little less blue in the corners here.
Then I'll do the same thing with the outdoors.
So I'm just going to select it with that tool.
So now all the space around it is selected.
And then I'll pick a Sky color.
And then use this tool to make a gradient.
So it's darker blue up here.
Probably hard to tell on your monitors.
And then toward the bottom it's a lighter blue because of the tool I used to put it in there.
Then, I gotta colorize this stupid table.
How many times have I touched this Paint tool to something that looked like a table.
Quite a few times, turns out.
And then the chairs, and I've got to pick a chair color that will have some contrast to their clothing.
So, I don't like that.
It needs a little more gray in it.
If you ask me why I pick the colors I do, Probably every selection has a whole story of a history of, you know, why I first used it or why it makes sense in this context.
So there's actually a lot of thinking that goes into the colors, but there's sort of a story that goes with each one that would be its own story.
Now at one point, The Dilber universe changed from neckties to casual clothes and has also changed from standard coffee mugs to a Starbucks-like coffee.
The backs of phones are usually gray in the Dilber world.
And the way I indicate it's a phone is this little dot up in the corner that looks like the phone camera.
So one of the tricks of being a cartoonist is figuring out where you can cut corners and still tell the story.
So let me zoom in on this and see what I mean.
So here Dilbert is holding something and you know it's meant to be his phone and because it's a cartoon you don't have a lot of detail and a phone looks like really just sort of a rectangle.
So how do you indicate that he's holding a phone instead of some random rectangular object?
And in this case, fortunately phones have that distinctive little camera in the corner and that allows me to have something that's sort of universally recognized as a camera shape because it's got a dot in the corner.
So that's the least I could show here to quickly make you say that's a camera.
It's the very the lowest level of information that also gets you there very quickly.
Now I've got to find some background colors.
So rather than drawing complicated backgrounds, I use a fill with a fade.
So I'm just selecting all these backgrounds and then I'm going to change them all at once.
I'll use my favorite background color, which is sort of a darkish green at the top.
And then I'm going to use this gradient tool To give it a little interest.
So the background, one of the ways that I indicate that there's something behind them, but I don't need to show it to you, is by a faded background.
If I had a solid background, it would look like there's just a wall behind them, and your brain would say, that's boring, there's just a wall behind them.
But because I put a little fade in the color, it sort of tricks the mind into thinking, oh, I'm just focusing on the foreground, but there's probably some stuff back there, and I know it's an office, and I know it's a conference room looking thing, so your brain just fills in the stuff.
All right. And by the way, that's really two parts of the same technique.
In cartooning, you don't want to show all the detail because it would get busy.
You know, the picture would be too busy.
So you want to do the smallest amount you can.
And often you've got to do things wrong.
to make them look right which is the real magic of cartooning.
Right now I'm just going to use a brush and I've defined the borders of the coffee cup and I'm going to pick a larger brush and then I'm just going to add a little gray accent here This is probably more OCD than cartooning right now because I'm not sure that the reader is going to pick up any difference here with what I'm doing.
But I'm putting a little gray accent like there's a shade on the cup that tells your brain that maybe it's rounded.
So it's the lowest level of detail I can give it.
This still tells you as quickly as possible what it is.
That's what I'm going for. So a Dilbert cartoon because it's not Calvin and Hobbes and it's not it's not Bloom County and it's not any cartoon that has good artwork or in those cases great artwork and since I don't have the great artwork thing working for me I make you concentrate on the writing and the ideas.
And the best way to make sure that you're looking at the ideas and that I can control the timing of how you perceive the comic, which is very important.
So even though the comic is something that you read and you're all reading at your own rate, the cartoonist controls...
How quickly you're going from one thought to another, if they're a good cartoonist.
So this is another one of those cases where having a talent stack that includes persuasion and hypnosis makes me a better cartoonist.
It's one of those non-obvious things.
So... I think I've colored everything.
And I think I was in the middle of some other point.
But what I was saying is that the cartoonist tries to control the timing of even how you're reading a cartoon.
So if, for example, I wanted to put in a pause, I might have somebody sitting there silently for a panel, just so I know that you'll think about it for a moment before you go on.
You'll see a lot of Dilbert cartoons where this next-to-last panel, nobody's talking, and that's a humor pause that I've decided as the, let's say, the conductor of this orchestra, it needs to slow down right there before it gives you the big finale.
Then also part of the art is how do you get people to read the situation quickly?
So in the Dilbert universe, I have the advantage that you already know they're always at work.
So if you know they're at work, you don't have to put in a lot of cues.
Let me give you an example here.
So you can tell very quickly that he's sitting at a table and then I don't have to draw feet because feet are a pain to draw.
Nobody likes to draw feet.
It's just no fun to draw feet.
So I usually have them from the knees up or the waist up if I can.
Then the table, I want to make this as simple as possible, so it's literally just a rectangle, but I need to show that it's flat and not a wall that they're sitting behind.
Now your brain figures out that it's a table just because you see chairs and it's an office and they appear to be sitting, so your brain is filling in a lot of detail.
And a huge part of the skill of cartooning is to know when I can cause your brain to do the work, and so I don't have to put the detail into the comic.
So your brain is turning this into a table, even though it's literally nothing but a rectangle, and there should be no cues telling you that it's one orientation versus the other.
You shouldn't be able to tell.
But then I make sure that nobody is confused by putting a coffee cup or any other object on it.
And since that's such a recognizable, iconic thing, the coffee cup, you recognize it instantly, and that immediately adjusts what you know to be the flatness of the table.
There's a huge bunch of art in how people are standing.
So this is one of my most frequently used positions.
Let's see if I can blow this up.
Here, this is Tina, and she's got her hands together.
And this is one of the...
I think I learned this actually from Burke Brethet.
I think that's the first time I saw it.
Because in the real world, people don't really stand like this, with their hands like that.
And I'm pretty sure that I saw Burke Brethren do it in Bloom County for the first time, and then I stole it.
So there's a lot of technique that you'll see in comics that are little pieces you've stolen from other cartoonists over the years.
Which, by the way, is a really good way to learn to be creative.
You steal other people's stuff.
You put it together poorly and then nobody can recognize the original sources because you did such a bad job of combining all these pieces.
And that's only slightly meant to be a joke because it is literally true that if you tried to copy a great cartoonist, You would probably do it poorly because there are very few great artists.
And so if you do it poorly, it's going to look like your own thing.
So many of the characters in the Dilbert universe are poorly copied creatures from other people.
Sergio Aragones and Gary Larson are mostly the influences behind Dilbert's body shape, his little potato body.
And not having a knack, that comes from those cartoonists years ago.
Alright. And now, you're wondering, where are the words?
Where are the words, Scott?
So, I'm gonna go get some words.
You're not supposed to be able to follow along on this part, but trust me, I'm opening the file.
So this is an earlier version of the file that has words in it.
And over here are all of the words individually and their own layers, meaning that they're little separate compartments, if you will.
And then I'm placing all the words into it.
Now the reason the words were not there in the first place has to do with the editing process.
So the reason the words are separate layers, if you will, is that when my editor sees this, if I've made, let's say, a minor grammar error or something, that they can just edit the text because they have control over it and they can play with it.
But the art itself, they don't change, except for in the most minor ways.
So the art, I needed to work on and change the layers and flatten it and make it all one layer.
So there's just a technical, boring reason why the words were in different files, in case you're wondering.
All right, so now that I've transferred the words over, the file that they came from is now no longer useful, but I'll keep it around just in case something gets broken and I need it later.
And now, the big reveal.
I shall read you this comic that will not run until...
So this comic that I'm making would run on the internet and newspapers for the first time on January 20th, 1919.
What's today? So that's a month and 20 days or so, 18 days.
I think I'm supposed to get them in six weeks ahead of time, something like that.
I forget. But anyway, so I've got the finished comic here, and let me read it to you.
Here's the setup. Dilbert is playing with his phone.
He's sitting at a table. Tina, the tech writer, comes in, and Tina says, Sometimes it seems as if you don't like me.
Dilbert says, Don't be ridiculous.
And he doesn't really quite put his phone down.
He goes back to his phone.
He says, I'm just an introvert.
And Dilbert continues, being around people drains my energy.
And he continues, I only avoid you because spending five minutes with you feels like being buried alive.
With fleas instead of dirt.
Then Tina says, so it isn't personal.
And then Dilbert, who is already starting to nap, says, I need a nap.
So... If you know any introverts, you know that introverts actually lose energy when they're around people, and extroverts gain energy when they're around people.
So that's the type of cartoon that will appeal a great deal to people who are introverts and will not appeal much at all To anybody else?
What the hell? So the next thing that I'll be doing is just dragging that file into an FTP upload site and it will appear in New York at my syndication company's server and they will distribute that to newspapers and to internet sites.
You seem down, Scott.
Not at all. I'm actually in a terrific mood.
I'm in a very good mood. But I've been working most of the day.
While most of you have been playing, I have been working late into the night.
What program is it?
It's just plain old Photoshop.
Plain old Photoshop.
So the setup here, for those of you coming late, is the company is Wacom that makes the big display computer.
A good new one, the biggest size would be, I don't know, 3,400 or somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 on the lower end of that, I think.
And it can connect to either Macintosh or Windows computer.
And then I just use plain old Photoshop as my drawing software.
Now other people use other software for drawing.
I just have my own personal preferences.
Now one of the things that I learned, because I'm very serious about efficiency, is that if I draw with my right hand, and I also use the computer mouse with my right hand, then I've got to put down the pen all the time.
Or the stylus. And it was also overusing my hand, which I thought would be bad, you know, to be mousing with the same hand that I draw.
So I taught myself to mouse left-handed.
So whether I'm using an actual mouse or a trackpad, I train my left hand to do all the mousing, whether I'm drawing or not.
I just do that all the time.
And it feels natural now.
So it takes a while.
It takes... I would say a month before you're okay with it, and in two months, you don't know you're doing it left-handed, which is weird, because the first time you try to use your mouse left-handed, you just feel like you're drunk.
It's really hard.
If you've never used your left-handed mouse, the first time you do it, you're like, this doesn't work.
But it takes about two months of doing it a lot.
You know, just your normal using it every day.
And you actually stop even thinking about it being your left hand.
All you know is that you're mousing.
Somebody keeps saying, am I a cook?
I'm pretty far from a cook, although I have cooked for a living, and I've owned restaurants.
So I have cooked and I can cook, but it's not really my thing.
Oh, somebody else taught themselves to use the left hand.
Yeah. Oh, somebody did the same thing with a calculator and writing.
It's amazingly efficient.
Without that one change of not having to put down my pen, it's probably 20% more efficient just for that reason alone.
I've never had carpal tunnel, but I have had problems with other names with my hands.
When is the next course of Troll College?
Well, I think that the first course of Troll College seemed to hit all the notes.
What's the best grilled cheese you've ever had? - Yes.
You know, grilled cheese tends to be not that different, one to the next.
When was the last time you drew Dilbert on paper?
It's been... I was thinking about that the other day.
It was whenever the Wacom Cintiq, the device I'm using, it's whenever that was invented.
Or at least marketed.
I think it was 10 years ago, something like that.
I don't know exactly.
Was Troll College sarcasm?
Well... Depends if you want it to be a troll, I guess.
How's the drum coming?
I just got delivery of my new drum set.
And so I'm actually probably going to set that up tonight with Christina.
She's going to help me.
Do you have cow tools that sticks with you?
It's funny that I know what that means.
So that's cow tools.
For those of you who are not into the weird trivia of cartooning, cow tools refers to a Gary Larson cartoon in which cow tools was the punchline or the subject, I guess.
And it was unusually popular.
So I'm not sure that I have one that's quite the comparison to that.
Did you get sucked into the extended drum warranty?
I did not. What is a good way to find a great girlfriend?
I have an answer to that.
Going to the gym a lot and having a good haircut and dressing well and being rich are the obvious things.
If you're doing all you can to look good and be a productive person and all that, I recommend finding something that you can be good at, even if it's because you have to practice a lot to be good at it, and do it where there are women.
So find something that you're extra good at and do it in an observable way.
Because people are...
We sort of evolved to look for traits that we want to mate with and make babies out of.
So any kind of skill or talent, or it could even be fitness, something that would make somebody go, wow, I can't do that.
Something that, you know, you're just extra good at.
So just find something you can be good at, but the trick is you have to be good at it while you're being observed in some environment in which there are some women of the type you might want to meet.
Get good symbols. I did.
I got the Ziljan.
Ziljan. So the symbols are pretty high end.
What was the thing that Christina was drawn to?
You know, Christine and I, I don't think anybody believes that we have something like a normal, traditional relationship.
We're just compatible in a lot of different ways.
There's no magic to it.
Yeah, you know, money never hurts.
Being attractive never hurts.
If you can pull off either one of those things, you're definitely going to increase your odds.
What's the best brand of cowbell?
Funny you should ask.
I literally spent a part of today wondering what kind of cowbell I should buy.
That's the most random thing in the world that I was actually thinking about.
Cowbells.
Yes, we need more cowbell.
Did you get a gong?
I did not. How does fentanyl play into Trump's upcoming negotiations?
I'll talk about that on one of my political periscopes.
I'll talk about that tomorrow, actually.
I have no reason to be on here right now, except that I appreciate you keeping me company while I was bored doing my work.
Do I have a problem coming up with ideas for the comic?
Well, I saw a different question going by and I'm wondering if I'm going to answer it.
Everybody's good at something.
That's been my experience.
And I'm not talking about just career-wise, but everybody's good at something, even if it's just being a good friend, or even if you can just lift heavy objects.
Everybody's good at something. And if other people are good at something you're not good at, it looks really mysterious and magical.
Because you say, man, I can't do that.
For example, when I watch Christina learn, let's say, a new song on the piano.
Let's say it's Beethoven.
Watching somebody who knows how to play the piano break down a Beethoven piece and learning the parts and then putting it all together into this incredibly complicated thing, how many notes do you have to learn to play any song on the piano, much less Beethoven that probably has a few extra notes for all I know?
So when I watch that, it looks like magic to me.
Because I don't have any of those skills.
And even if I worked really hard, my mind isn't quite wired in a way that I would be able to pull that off because I don't have that kind of memory.
I can't remember 6,000 notes in order.
I mean, I don't know how many notes there are in a Beethoven song.
But what would you guess?
Like hundreds, right?
Hundreds and hundreds of notes, and they have to be put together in a certain timing, in a certain order.
So to me, that's like magic, that anybody can master that.
Likewise, when people, the most common question that people ask me is, how hard is it to come up with ideas?
Well, I was just born.
I think it's mostly just being born with it.
It could be something about my upbringing that improved it, and I think maybe there was.
But for me, coming up with ideas is not hard.
But that doesn't mean you can learn to do it.
I'd love to tell you that if you worked a little harder, you could come up with a commercial-grade, humorous idea every day of the year, which is the minimum I have to do because I do a cartoon in a day.
But if I'm writing a book or doing some other kind of content, I'm coming up with multiple creative ideas every day, and I have to generate a lot.
Now, the point was that it happens to be my certain thing that I'm good at, and then plus I've practiced for decades at being creative, and there is a skill to it also.
So, when you're asking, you know, how do you come up with ideas, or what do they come up with, or is it hard, or anything around that topic, I hate to tell you, it's impossible unless it's easy, is the closest I can come up to for an answer.
For me, it's easy.
For most people, it'd be impossible.
For Christina, it's easy to play Beethoven.
Or at least, you know, she has the skills to make that work.
It's probably never easy.
But for me, it would be impossible.
You know, I just could never get there.
So it's just a thing I can do.
Do you worry about the death of print?
Yes, I have...
I've been sure that newspapers would stop publishing in five years, every year since, well, for 20 years at least.
So something like 20 to 25 years, I have believed that newspapers have no more than five years left.
It's like, okay, they're definitely not going to last another five years.
And then five years goes by and I go, okay, now, now they're definitely not gonna last another five years.
And then it goes by and like, okay, this time.
I was wrong those other two times, but now, no way it lasts five years.
Now the truth is that when newspapers stop, it'll probably be kind of sudden.
They might all go on a business the same within two years or something, but we're not there yet.
We're not there yet. But I don't think you'll ever see a new newspaper.
You'll just see the ones that exist sort of fade out, I suppose, or at least move to the internet.
What are your plans if newspapers stop printing?
Well, almost every newspaper has a website.
So most of them would not just go in a business, they would just move to fully digital.
And Dilbert would also run on their website.
In many cases, as it already does.
And Dilber also runs on my website, so if people who liked looking at it in physical newspapers no longer could see it there, there's a greater chance that they would hunt it down on Dilber.com than that would be good for me.
Comics app.
Yeah, I could always just put it down on an app.
Do you get flack from newspapers for your views?
No. One of the greatest things about working or at least having my clients are newspapers.
There are, I guess, 2,000 of them or so.
The great thing about having 2,000 newspapers as your clients Is that a lot of them would have to get mad before it would make any difference to me.
So if a dozen newspapers got angry at me tomorrow, that's a dozen out of 2,000.
And very few of them would cancel me at this point because they would get too many complaints.
So Dilbert is on the short list of content for newspapers The people actually do cancel a newspaper when it stops being there.
So, for example, there are people who buy the newspaper mostly for the sports, or mostly for the horoscopes, or mostly for the crossword puzzles.
But there are lots of people who buy comics, or buy newspapers, mostly to read the comics.
And they usually really like maybe three comics.
So if one of them goes away, the editors get a lot of phone calls and anger.
Dilbert TV show ever?
Not any time in the foreseeable future.
There was a Dilbert animated TV show.
We did two half seasons, but it's not on the horizon.
Why keep doing it?
You're wealthy. Well, it's always good to have more money and There's a variety of reasons.
One is that I stay young by doing things that keep my brain nimble.
And I like that.
The other is it keeps me relevant.
It keeps me plugged in.
It's really good brain exercise.
And I don't know if I'm built to not work.
Are you addicted to Dilbert?
I think I'm addicted to being me, and I've been this way for 30 years.
So I've been doing Dilbert for 30 years.
I don't know how to not work anymore.
So I guess I have a little...
Maybe a psychological barrier to it.
I can tell you that there have been many times in my career where I've said to myself, you know, if I could only get my net wealth to this number, well then I'll just retire and I'll travel and I'll just every day I'll wake up and it'll be the best day because I don't have to work and I'm rich.
And then I would reach that number.
And I would say to myself, okay, okay, this isn't as much as I thought it was, but when I reach this number, I'm definitely going to quit.
Because when I've got this much money, why would I work again?
And then I reach that number, and I don't even feel a little like quitting.
So a lot of it is the psychology of it, and maybe I'm rationalizing for some reasons I don't even understand.
Do you enjoy presenting at IT conferences?
Well, I've stopped doing any public appearances in front of crowds for security reasons.
So it just isn't safe for me to be in front of groups of people who are familiar with my work.
It's dangerous to be in the company of too many people who are familiar with my work, which is both true and hilarious.
Was I influenced by Zig Ziglar?
I was not. I know who he was, but I wasn't really a follower or a consumer of his stuff.
What's my favorite city?
Eh, it depends.
Do you know the Charlie Brown guy?
I think you're talking about Charles Schultz.
And I did know him.
I mean, I didn't know him well, but I knew him.
We were friendly and had some conversations.
He passed away.
What do I think about Greg Gutfeld?
I think he's one of the best things on television.
You know, I've said this before, but my favorite TV show is The Five.
It's on Fox. And what I like about it is that you get filled in on the news, you know, through an opinion filter.
And I like that part.
But the personalities that they put together at the table, it's the best production.
And the best cast for that type of content that I've ever seen by far.
It's just worlds ahead of anything that's in that same genre.
I don't know if there's Emmys or anything for that category, but are there?
Yeah. Is that an Emmy category?
It must be, right?
But it's just head and shoulders above the other stuff in entertainment and usefulness and how quickly it seems to go by.
It seems like I turn it on and it's off already.
Oops, yeah, I was rubbing my hands next to the mics.
Sorry about that. Yeah, Fox probably can't win an Emmy, right?
Did you cover the Laura Loomer story?
Now, you know, I haven't...
Some of you may have noticed that I've been steering clear of the this person or that person got kicked off of social media.
And it's not that I'm unsympathetic.
It's that it's a little bit of a sucker play because the idea is for people like me to throw in with people who have said things that I don't agree with and then then I get painted with their opinion and then forever I'm like the guy who defended x and as much as I'm for free speech I don't want to spend a day a week defending the next person who said something I don't agree with.
And I don't know if she said anything I disagree with, by the way.
I'm intentionally ignorant of her story because that genre I just don't want to be the one who's defending other people's free speech.
Now if it happened to say one person once and you know it was a big story and somehow it was like a real free speech issue, I'd probably jump in like everybody else, but it's hard to defend so many people.
I just feel like that can't be my full-time job.
Somebody said, what about Alex Jones?
And it's the same story.
That I would love to defend Alex Jones because a number of people have said this, by the way.
So I'm going to say something I think you've heard lots of people say.
Personally, he's a really nice guy.
And it's hard to...
It's hard to overlook that.
It's hard to see past that.
He's genuinely a nice guy.
But to the degree that he reports on things that I would not say, I don't want to be in the position of having to defend Free speech, and then it becomes, I'm really defending what he said.
Yes, everybody understands the difference, but it doesn't really work that way.
You just end up thrown in the same basket with other people, and I just prefer not to.
There are enough people talking about those things that you don't need one more.
What about Q?
I'm not going to talk about Q because it just brings out all the trolls.
When is Muller wrapping up the witch hunt?
You know, let me put it this way.
All of the Mueller lawyers, including Mueller, are working by the hour, right?
I assume. They're all being paid by the hour.
And at that level, it's probably $1,000 an hour or some big number.
And if you're going to work at all and you've got this gig, do you want to be done?
You know, everybody talks about the political part of it.
But in my experience, if somebody's getting paid $1,000 an hour and their job is to call people and talk to them, if your job is to call people and talk to them and meet with your other lawyers and say, Hey Bob, how you doing?
How was the weekend? How was that witness?
I think you lied. Alright, have somebody fill out some paperwork and we'll do whatever we need to do.
It just feels to me That there's something wrong with the model.
You know, Mueller is deeply incented to never be done to the degree that he wants to keep working.
And I don't know if he's doing it just for the country or it's just like anybody else.
It's a really good job and he's qualified and everything else.
Did I see Darren Brown on Joe Rogan?
no but I flagged that podcast because I do want to watch that what about a Beto AOC ticket I don't think there's really any chance that Beto will be the candidate, the Democratic candidate.
Because if you haven't noticed, he's...
He's an adult white male.
And while that can work to some degree in a state, I don't know that the Democrats are going to come out for him.
So I don't see any scenario in which the Democrats elect a white male.
It just wouldn't make sense for their brand.
Now, I'm not saying that's good or bad.
You can put your own judgment on that.
I'm just saying it seems unlikely because the demographics being what they are, they can just do better with a candidate who's a woman or has some ethnic flavor that makes them interesting.
And it's time for How long before we see an openly LGBTQ candidate for president on the Democrat side?
I think it might not be that far away.
And would do well.
You know, imagine if you will, if Rachel Maddow ran for president.
I mean, think about it. I'm surprised that her name hasn't been floated.
Because as much as Republicans, you know, have an aversion to her for her politics and her smarmy attitude and whatnot, there's no denying that she's super smart.
Super, super smart.
And very successful. And she plays to her audience, right?
So, imagine if she ran for president.
Maybe not right away, but...
You know, some future time.
I think she might have, she would certainly have, you know, the political knowledge.
She would have the name recognition.
She would have all the intelligence.
She probably would be super connected.
She'd be interesting.
She'd be interesting.
You know, she's great on television.
If you have somebody who's great on television, And, you know, they check a lot of boxes.
They're brilliant, successful, connected.
She'd be tough to beat.
Alright. I think I'm going to do some more work that you don't need to watch.
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