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Dec. 25, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:00:02
Episode 349 Scott Adams: Merry Christmas, The Economy and End of Wars
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Hey Merry Christmas everybody!
Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas.
Hello Thailand. Gotta strap myself in here.
Good morning, good morning.
You know what it's time for.
It's time for Merry Christmas, but it's also time for the simultaneous sip.
Where's Snickers, you ask?
There she is. Loyal dog waiting for me.
She's wondering who I'm talking to.
I'm back.
So I've got a new microphone plugged in We'll see if that makes any difference.
See if it stops cutting off like it did yesterday.
So, I hope you all saw the clip of President Trump talking to a seven-year-old from the Oval Office about Santa Claus.
And the President asked the seven-year-old on the phone, so do you still believe in Santa Claus?
Because a seven, it's kind of marginal.
It's one of the funniest things ever.
All right. So, here are a couple of good news items.
A lot of people are worried about the economy because of the stock market.
I saw a tweet from David Pakman, who's sort of the Rachel Maddow male version on the left.
He was talking, he asked this question.
He said, at what point do we start blaming the president's bad decisions for the stock market going down?
Now, he didn't give any specific reasons, so I said, what would be your number one thing he did wrong that was an economic mistake?
And David Pakman did not offer a reason for that, just some generic answer.
And so other people in the tweet were saying, yeah, give us an example.
What's the worst decision he's made that's causing the stock market to go down?
So some people said, well, obviously it's he ran up the debt.
To which I and other people say, that didn't just happen.
The stock market is only just going down now.
Everybody knew their debt was going up, so it couldn't be that.
And then other people said, well, it's obviously this government shutdown.
To which I say, the government shutdown?
That's the most trivial economic thing you could ever imagine.
Completely unimportant.
It's not that.
Other people say that he's blaming the Fed and talking about firing the Fed chief, to which I say, if the Fed had not raised interest rates, would we be having a problem with tariffs and trade wars right now?
Because the tariffs and the trade wars Have been going on for months while the economy was doing great.
And I would argue that the situation with the trade wars is better than it's ever been.
Mexico and Canada and South Korea, they've all signed on.
And China looks like it's at least moving in the right direction.
So why would the trade wars cause the stock market to suddenly go down When the situation with the trade wars has gone from, gosh, it's really scary, we don't know if anybody will agree, to the current situation, which is pretty much all the smart people think it's going to get worked out.
So does that make the stock market go down if things went from scarier to far less scary and moving in the right direction?
On trade, anyway. Not really.
The only thing that changed There was a big change, and it happened recently, which coincided with the stock market.
Actually, two changes. One was Democrats taking over the House, right?
That's new. And the other is interest rates, the Fed.
That's new. Now, when the president criticizes the Fed, I have to agree That the Fed could have waited until at least the China trade deal got worked out.
I don't think it would have made that much difference if they waited six months.
So, it does look like a giant Fed mistake.
But I'm going to add some uncharacteristic humility to that comment because I'm not sure that any economist really knows what the Fed should or should not be doing with a six-month precision.
Yes, we understand that in general when they should raise rates and in general when they should lower them, but I don't think there's anybody Who is so accurate about what the Fed should or should not do that they can get things right within a six month, you know, you should have gone six months earlier or six months later.
Clearly the Fed could have waited.
And it would have been the smartest thing to do because the trade negotiation should have been putting a similar kind of damper on the economy as the increase in interest rates.
So we could have waited for that and then see if we needed the extra interest rates.
So, here's my point.
You're going to see what I call laundry list persuasion.
And I write about this in my new book, Loser Think, which will be out many months from now.
The idea is that if somebody says, ho ho, it's obvious why I'm right and you're wrong, and here's the laundry list of reasons.
So, here's a laundry list of reasons why the economies or the stock market's going down.
It's because of arguing about the Fed.
It's because, not the Fed itself, but arguing against the Fed.
It's the trade deals.
It's the shutting of the government, etc.
And so, What I do when I am presented with the laundry list is I have a persuasion trick which I tried to great success with David Pakman.
It goes like this. What you do is you say, on your laundry list, what is your strongest point?
Because if I can debunk your strongest point, would you agree you should rethink All of your points on your list that are less important and less persuasive than the one I just debunked.
So the only one I want to hear is your top reason.
It turns out very few people can give you one reason because they realize that their argument is going to fall apart, so they'll still just give you the laundry list again.
But if you can get them to give you one reason, They'll watch their own argument fall apart.
So if they had said, for example, well, it's the trade war.
Obviously, that's what's causing the stock market to go crazy.
I would say, well, why didn't it make the stock market go crazy three months ago when things were even worse in terms of this trade war?
Things are better now.
It's heading in the right direction now.
It should go up. So if that's your number one reason, Then you don't need to talk about numbers two and three and four, because you've taken out the top one.
Thank you for the reminder.
It is very much time for the simultaneous sip.
And now join me, if you will.
Ah, that could have been warmer, but still delicious.
Hello, first day on Periscope.
Do we live in a one-variable world?
Well, if you're talking about my technique of debunking the top priority, that has nothing to do with living in a one-variable world.
It has to do with the fact that if you can't identify even one big reason, you don't really need to listen to the rest of them.
Now, doing a specific response to each thing on the list doesn't work very well, because people just keep adding things to the list.
You need to stop with the top one.
Just say, your top reason, and watch me debunk it.
And once I've done that, then just understand that your other reasons are less good than the one I just debunked.
Hey, you got Win Bigley for Christmas?
Congratulations. Did anybody else get Win Bigley for Christmas?
I hope a few of you did.
Now, I tweeted last night about the president's tweet in which he said that Saudi Arabia Had stepped up to pay some amount of money.
Must be a large amount.
Oh good, I'm glad some of you gave my book or got my book.
Thank you. By the way, the President tweeted that Saudi Arabia was going to pay, presumably a lot, to help reconstruct Syria.
Now, remember when I told you that the President had leverage over Saudi Arabia because he was the only defender?
That's what leverage looks like.
Basically, the president said, okay, Saudi Arabia did a terrible thing, but if we support them, they're going to owe us a favor.
And so he supported them, and so they owed us a favor.
It looks like it's a pretty expensive one, too.
And so I tweeted that within the president's first four years, he has a non-zero chance, I don't know what the odds are, but it's definitely non-zero, of getting the United States out of, or ending, Five wars in four years.
Now, of course, this made Trump critics go crazy because the idea that Trump could end or at least get the United States out of five wars in four years, it just makes your brain explode if you're a critic.
But here are the five, and let me tell you if this sounds unreasonable.
Number one, Yemen.
We've put pressure on Saudi Arabia and Iran to end their proxy war, and sure enough, Yemen just had some peace talks and it agreed to a ceasefire.
That's one. Again, we don't know that any of these will go all the way to a good completion.
My statement is that there's a non-zero chance, and actually a pretty good chance, That the president will solve, or get us out of, five wars in four years.
So Yemen is number one.
Looking good. Number two is North Korea.
Technically at a state of war and absolutely looks safer because they're playing nice with South Korea.
They're tearing down border structures.
They're building a railroad to connect them.
And we can wait a few years to get rid of their nukes because we're no longer threatened.
They're not going to threaten us when things are going in the right direction.
So North Korea.
Then you've got Syria.
We're pulling out. That doesn't end the conflict in Syria.
But it does put a period on the U.S. involvement.
It looks like we're drawing down forces in Afghanistan, and apparently the Taliban is willing to talk and negotiate with the government of Afghanistan.
That's looking promising.
So that's four.
That's four wars that the president may be winding down or getting us out of.
And then the fifth, I'm going to say, is the whole mess with Iran wanting to destroy Israel and supporting Hezbollah and supporting Hamas, etc.
Yeah, Gaza. So it's sort of this perpetual low state of war in the Middle East.
And it's starting to look like, again, Saudi Arabia is going to be a key player in bringing people to maybe recognize Israel, or at least work with them, or maybe pull away some support from the Palestinian, whatever the less productive people there are.
And it's looking like everything's shaping up for that to happen.
So it's entirely possible that President Trump, there's a non-zero chance, he will solve or pull us out of five wars in four years.
Now, if you're still worried about the economy, let me give you some calming words about the economy.
And I realize that most of the public are not economists.
They're not investors. They don't have a good understanding of the stock market.
Here's what you need to know.
As long as employment is excellent, everything's fine.
I'll just say that again.
As long as employment is excellent, which it is, everything's fine.
You don't need to worry about the changes in the stock market until you see something that looks like a long-term trend that's a change in the employment market.
Somebody says, wrong, it's not just employment.
I know it's not just employment.
I'm telling you it's the most predictive variable.
If you get that variable right, the odds of everything else being good in the long run are really, really good.
So, employment is a lagging indicator, you're saying.
Well, it is true that the stock market is a leading indicator, but the other thing about the stock market is that it bounces around based on headlines.
And headlines are Fake news.
So we're seeing a world in which the stock market is, in the short term, largely controlled by fake news.
You know, worry about the trade deal, worry about the government shutting down, worry that the president is really crazy, you know, all those things.
But for the most part...
As long as employment is good and profits are good, you don't have to worry about the stock market bouncing.
I do not give financial advice.
But I will tell you that this is probably a rare buying opportunity.
I don't know where the bottom is, so that's the hard part.
So again, this is not financial advice, but I just put a lot of money in the stock market.
So personally, I'm going in strong because you don't get many situations where the market pulls back 10% or more.
So when it does, if you can afford it and you've got some extra cash, that's at least what you think about it.
Looks like Bitcoin is up, right?
Bitcoin has started to make a small recovery.
Deficit's up.
Debt is up.
Yeah, here's the thing about government deficits and debt.
We should worry about the direction of things, meaning that if the debt is getting perpetually worse, that probably is a problem at some point.
But... The current level of debt is historically not the highest it's ever been.
So we've had higher debt and we handled it quite well in a period of growing economic goodness.
So we're not at a point where it's a problem right now.
Somebody's mocking me for saying 10%.
Well, if you would listen to what I said, You would be mocking the wrong thing.
What I said was, it's rare for the economy to go down 10% or more.
So if you can see a 10% pullback, you should start to think in terms of looking for a buying opportunity.
But it could go down 20%.
20% is a pretty bad pullback, but it certainly could happen.
And buy WEM tokens, yes.
We're down 20% or so, but that's more to my point.
That's not a violation of my point.
that's making my point stronger than I was making it.
Is the book out?
at, no, the bookshelf behind me is just mostly books that people gave me that I haven't read.
And I, yeah, and I also don't worry about stock market corrections in general as long as employment is good.
it.
If you saw a mortgage collapse or unemployment, then you should get worried.
But otherwise, don't get worried.
Let's talk about crypto.
The main thing you need to know about cryptocurrencies is that the probable value of any cryptocurrency in the long run is zero.
Because most crypto offerings will disappear.
Bitcoin and some of the big ones are special cases, and they may last forever, but you don't know what they'll be worth forever.
Some people are having a problem with my hat.
It doesn't look Christmassy enough when it gets pulled back.
There, much better.
The supply curve of crypto is flat.
But...
Yeah, I think housing will slow for sure, but it probably should.
You know, anything that's been hot for a while and then slows for a while, that's not the worst news in the world.
The worst news is if everything stays hot too long, then you're in trouble.
Could crypto be a true democracy voting system?
Why are there so many crypto questions today?
So, how's that Trump...
Have you noticed that the anti-Trumpers have completely given up on reasons?
They don't use reasons anymore.
They use sarcasm.
Apparently there's an entire segment...
A segment of the population that believes that LOL is an argument and it goes like this.
I might say something like, Well, you know, the Fed's action was premature, and the trade deals were actually baked into the stock market.
So clearly, given the timing of things, it was the Fed's action more than the trade deals that are affecting the current short-term economic difference in the stock market.
So I would say something like this, and here's usually the economic argument I get in return.
Oh, Scott. LOL. LOL. Scott thinks the economy is okay.
LOL. LOL. And scene.
When did LOL become an argument?
If all you have left is sarcasm?
And correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't you watching the same phenomenon online?
I'm pretty sure...
Boo is behind me. I'm pretty sure we used to talk about real reasons.
Didn't we used to say things like, well, the deficit is too high.
Okay. That's a reason.
I can either say that's important or not important.
I can say we're going to deal with it or we're not going to deal with it.
But it's a reason.
I might disagree about its importance, but it's a reason.
Do you know what isn't a reason?
LOL. LOL, Scott.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Ha ha ha ha on your opinion.
Ha ha ha. I think I need some kind of linguistic kill shot for the people who come in and think that sarcasm is thinking.
Because I actually think that...
And the people coming in and saying, LOL, you're such an idiot.
I get that a lot on social media.
LOL, you're an idiot.
So, Mexico paid for the wall, LOL. It's not an argument, yeah.
And there are people who think they're making a really good point by saying that Mexico has not yet paid for the wall.
First of all, we don't know that they'll never pay for the wall.
And given that nobody's building a wall, it's a little premature to say who's paid for it.
But, Is there anything less important to Republicans?
Is there anybody who voted for Trump who voted based on the fact that Mexico would pay for the wall?
Anybody who heard me talking about Trump for the last three years knows that paid for the wall is making you think past the sale.
If you're talking about who paid for it, you're already accepting that there's going to be some kind of a wall.
So the whole paid for the wall thing was never real.
And how do we know it was never real?
Because we have a recording of Trump saying it.
Saying it to Mexico, right?
Didn't Trump tell Mexico, ah, the paid for the wall thing, don't worry about that.
I think he actually said that.
So if you can't distinguish between what is political talk and what is economic talk, you shouldn't be in the conversation.
You accept lies.
I don't accept lies.
I just told you literally the opposite of accepting it.
Oh, this is funny.
Somebody's comment here.
Somebody said they asked their brother, or their brother said they were waiting for Trump to be jailed, and then somebody asked him, jailed for what?
And the answer was, quote, everything.
And that's the laundry list tell for Trump derangement syndrome.
Ask him what's the strongest argument.
Just one.
Just one. Hey, brother.
What's the number one thing you think he's going to go to jail for?
Just the best one.
And after you debunk it, say, and would you agree, if that was your best reason, the others are less good than the one I just showed to be ridiculous.
Oh, let's talk about Charlottesville.
So, in the news, President Trump has signed a bill to rename a post office in Charlottesville, of all places.
It has to be Charlottesville, but of all places, by coincidence.
The post office will be named after, is it Captain?
Captain Kahn. Who was the war hero whose parents talked down against Trump at the Democratic Convention.
So now the president has done literally the opposite of what people would have expected him to do if he's anything like they thought he was.
Yeah, people are going to go, LOL, he's just trying to cover up his racist past.
LOL, he's just trying to cover up his racist past.
So have you noticed, I was watching Fox News yesterday, and have you noticed that pretty much everybody in the pundit class has come around to my way of thinking?
How many of you noticed that, I don't know when it was when I first started saying this, was it a month ago or two months ago?
Maybe you can fact check me on this.
Remember I said that this whole fence slash wall stuff wouldn't get solved Until both sides could say they got what they wanted.
And now we're seeing this steel slat barrier that you can't really tell if it's a wall or a fence.
And you're seeing both sides say, well, let's call it a steel slat barrier.
Is it a wall? Is it a fence?
I don't know. So I think you're seeing what I predicted would happen, which is that we would just get to the semantics of it.
Now, I told you before that the president...
Has a kill shot here that he hasn't used.
I don't know that he will.
I'm not going to predict that he will.
But the ultimate kill shot is to say, hey, Chuck Schumer, let's not make this personal.
Let's do something for the American people.
I know that you don't want me to get this wall because it's personal.
As soon as you say, stop making it personal, you have painted Schumer as an ineffective, useless political creep who's not doing anything for the country except wasting your time and your money.
So if the president said, maybe we need somebody who can do the job of A senator.
And maybe we don't need somebody who wants to make this personal at the expense of the American people.
Because that's what's happening, right?
Chuck Schumer is making this personal.
It's not even political.
You remember in the old days, you know, the two sides would disagree, but it was political.
It would be Republicans who didn't want Democrats to win.
It would be Democrats who didn't want Republicans to win.
Right? That was our normal situation.
But this isn't that.
This is actually personal.
This is Chuck Schumer not saying, I don't want Republicans to win.
He's not saying that. He is saying...
In pretty direct language, I don't want this one person, President Trump, to have a victory.
It's personal. It's not even political.
So if they were both being political, you could see how their own side would support them.
It's like, ah, yeah, it is political.
Of course we're fighting politically.
That's the game. We're all fighting politically.
But as soon as you take it to the personal side, You're no longer credible.
You've given up all of your credibility.
So I think Trump has that MO in his clip, and he hasn't used it, but it feels like that one could come out.
Yeah, given that Schumer and the Democrats have all talked about border security, given that the steel slat barrier is not exactly a fence, it's not exactly a wall, and it shouldn't be a problem for anybody, I think it's just personal. I think it's just personal.
and the President can point that out, and it would be devastating.
Alright. Rand Paul became a lot more interesting lately on Twitter.
If you're not checking out Rand Paul on Twitter this week, you're missing a good show.
He's gone full Trump in his humor and his approach.
Um... Yeah, there's a Kevin Spacey story and a video clip that I don't even want to watch.
Is it my imagination, or did Kevin Spacey transform from, you know, one of the national treasure's greatest actors ever, I want to see him in anything he's in, to just so creepy, I don't want to even look at him anymore?
And it has nothing to do with being gay, because I think everybody knew he was gay.
So this has nothing to do with gay.
There's just something about the whole situation that's just so creepy that it's hard to want to see him in anything these days.
Chris Rock.
What's the Chris Rock story?
Oh, didn't Chris Rock say that he wouldn't be bothered if his white friends used the N-word?
I suppose it depends on what context they were using it in.
And then people are mad at him.
I would like to suggest the following.
Many of you know that I have been, as much as I like free speech, I've said strongly, and for a long time, that when African Americans want to ban one word, just one word, the N-word, that's not a lot to ask.
And so even though, you know, on a larger scale, I support free speech and everybody's ability to speak freely, it's just not a lot to ask.
It's just one deeply, deeply offensive word.
You know, on a human level, Forget about the law.
Forget about, you know, forget about, you know, well, forget about the law, right?
Forget about the Constitution for a minute.
Just on a human level, We can give them that one thing, right?
It's not a lot to ask.
It's respect, exactly.
It's a sign of respect.
Now, I hear the argument that says, oh, you're asking too much, and why are you telling me what words I can and cannot use?
I hear all that. I understand the larger issue.
But on a human level, we're human beings.
Can't we give them that?
Are we so small that we can't give them that one word that has such a historically damaging effect?
But, given that I agree so strongly that that word should be not used in public, there's a separate question about whether you get kicked off a platform, blah blah blah, whether it's legal.
Those are separate questions.
I would like to propose Another banned word.
So, while I completely agree that black people should be able to sort of socially ban the N-word, I would like to add another N-word.
Nazi. To me, it seems that if anybody calls, well, especially if somebody who's not a white male, if someone who is not a white male calls me a Nazi, they've largely done something that's at least in the same range as using the N-word against a black person.
Because what could be worse than Hitler?
What can be worse than Nazis?
And I have some German heritage, right?
Maybe 20% or something, whatever the percentage is.
But I'm an adult white man being called a Nazi.
That's not fundamentally different from calling a black person the N-word.
And so, I completely support The banning of the N-word when it's used in any way, even if you're using it as a joke, I just think it's a terrible idea to use it in any way.
But likewise, while I believe that adult white men should be able to use the word Nazi, I don't think anybody else should be allowed to use it as a description of another adult white male.
I think it's just as bad, and I think it should be considered the new n-word.
It should be the n-word that's sort of the analog on the other side.
Then we both have a word.
Then I think that feels a little more balanced, doesn't it?
To say that, you know, I won't use the N-word against anybody else.
And don't. I don't.
And I don't want anybody using the N-word against me.
And I think that people should be kicked off of social platforms either way.
In other words, if you're kicking somebody else off a platform for using one of the N-words, I think people should get kicked off for using the other N-word.
They seem in the same range to me.
Now, if you're saying to yourself, ho ho ho, you snowflake scott, How in the world can you equate these two things?
One is a callback to slavery.
Two, the other one is you being part of the patriarchy and the white people who have everything.
It's not the same.
Well, here's my opinion.
Apparently you have not been called a Nazi very much.
I have. Do you think that black people would be bothered by the N-word If people rarely used it, like if it just never came up, do you think that black people would care?
If it was just like some weird historical word that never got used against them, didn't have much, they wouldn't care.
It's because of the meaning it's developed by the way it's been used.
Likewise, The other N-word, the Nazi word, gets used against people who actually have no love for Nazis, and it does affect your life.
So, to a large extent, I've had to shut down most of my public appearances and a lot of my social life because of that N-word.
There are so many people who have accused me of being, literally, have used the word Nazi, that it has changed the quality of my life.
So, let's play fair, and there are now two N-words, and I think we should treat them similarly.
All right. Somebody says, I think you're overreacting to words.
Whoever thinks that I'm overreacting to words must think that physical pain matters and psychological pain and how you can operate in society doesn't matter.
that's ridiculous because psychological pain is every bit as bad as physical pain.
One came from a position of power.
They are not equivalent, Scott.
Fuck you. Fuck you.
Sorry, that just slipped out.
When people are calling me a Nazi and telling me I can't leave the house because it's okay to punch a Nazi, I'm not coming from a position of power.
I'm coming from a position of people who are literally planning violence against me.
So you can make your little point about how they're not exactly the same, Scott.
They're not exactly the same.
Yes, I know they're not exactly the same.
That's what makes it an analogy.
If they were exactly the same, I wouldn't be talking about them because they're exactly the same.
The whole point is that using the word is damaging.
There's no place for it in society.
And so, those of you who would make that small point that, oh, they're different.
There's a small difference.
Yeah, there's a small difference.
Of course there's a small difference.
It isn't the important difference, though.
It's funny.
I was really trying not to swear on Christmas, but you know.
Sorry.
Hope the kids weren't listening.
Somebody says they are different.
LOL. Maybe you missed...
Have you noticed that it's impossible to tell the difference between sarcasm and real opinions now?
So I'm watching the comments go by, and I actually can't tell what is a real opinion and what is sarcasm.
So somebody said, those two N-words are completely different, LOL. And I'm thinking...
Is that a joke because they know they're saying that would be stupid or are they just stupid and actually saying that?
I actually can't tell.
I swear to God, I can't tell.
I have no idea whether that was a real comment or actually just somebody being stupid.
I'm going to say it was a joke.
Let's agree that it was a joke.
Scott, have you ever read Mein Kampf?
I have not. I'm not sure that reading Mein Kampf would be useful.
just because of the language problem.
Curious about the use of the N-word in music.
Well, I agree with the thought that black folks sort of want to take the power out of the N-word by using it themselves.
I get all that, and I think there's something to that.
But I think it's ruined music.
Wouldn't you say that the N-word has ruined popular music?
Because if you listen to a modern hip-hop rap song, and I don't know exactly where hip-hop ends and rap begins.
Does anybody know what the exact definition of those are?
But anyway, I'll turn on one of those songs or I'll hear it.
And it's so obvious to me that the artist is forcing those words into the song so that they can be that kind of an artist.
And it's so contrived now that it just feels uncreative.
Do you have the same feeling?
Whenever I hear the N-word used in a song by, let's say, a black artist who was just using it in the typical musical way, all I can think is, oh, here's somebody who's not good at music.
My first thought is they're not good at what they do because they put a corny, hackneyed, overused, completely unnecessary, gratuitous word in there.
I have similar standards for movies.
If I see a movie Where a good guy or a good woman is tied to a chair to be tortured, I immediately turn off the movie and I'll never watch the rest of it.
So I have this rule that if the writers are so bad, they have to have a scene where somebody's tied to a chair to be tortured, I'm out.
Because there's nothing else I'm going to like.
If your writing is that bad, that you have to have that scene, I'm out.
Here's another way to tell bad writing.
And you'll see it usually, I think it's, I forget which month of the year you'll see it, but if you watch TV sitcoms especially, they have teams of writers, and they'll say, okay, this is yours to write, and this script will be yours to write.
So there's different writers working on different scripts for TV shows.
There's a way you can tell it's going to be a bad script and you'll see this during the non-sweeps weeks.
So there are weeks where they don't measure viewership and then there are weeks when everybody knows they are measuring.
So the good writers work on the weeks that are being measured and then they use the new writers or the bad writers on those weeks that nobody's going to be measuring how well the show did.
Those bad writers have a tell.
And it's really obvious and it drives me crazy.
Bad writers make jokes about food.
So if you turn on a sitcom and it's a whole bunch of, well, I'm not that hungry.
You're not that hungry.
Maybe you haven't seen my cheesecake.
Oh, a cheesecake. I'm so hungry now.
But any punchline or reference to food in a comedy...
Is your signal as soon as you hear it, you can just turn it off.
Because good writers don't make food jokes.
Now coffee is a little different because coffee has a mental impact on you and it's part of the culture and stuff.
So making fun of coffee, or even when Homer Simpson makes fun of donuts, that's not necessarily bad writing because there's sort of special cases with donuts and coffee and stuff.
Fart jokes as well, yes.
If you see fart jokes, you can pretty much turn it off.
Yeah, the soup Nazi, of course, was not about the food.
It was about the Nazi.
You found a way to tie all of my themes together, food and Nazis.
Yeah, weed jokes are kinda weak too, aren't they?
But you're noticing that a lot of TV shows and movies are showing marijuana as just a normal part of culture now, so that's a little different.
Somebody's making fun of a joke from Dilbert series.
I can tell you that I tried to take that joke out of there for the very reason that you're pointing out, and I did not succeed.
A lot of writing, if it's for TV shows or movies, tends to be a group effort.
I did not write that, no.
Um...
I'm not even going to talk about it.
It was so bad. Sign of good writing.
Sign of good writing.
Well, that's a little harder.
But good writing usually is more complicated.
Bad writing is about stuff that's happening to your body.
I'm putting food in my mouth.
There's a fart coming out of my bottom.
So that's bad writing.
Good writing is about people's thoughts.
So if you see writing that's about somebody's selfishness and their bad character qualities, that's usually good writing.
Thoughts on indictments?
That's a big question that would have to be more specific.
Jim Gaffigan is hilarious and he does talk about food like Hot Pockets.
But here's what Jim Gaffigan does right that makes it work.
When he talks about food, it's not really a food joke.
When Gaffigan makes a joke, it's about himself.
So when people joke about their flaws, that can be good writing.
When the joke is about the food, in sort of a normal way that anybody would react to food, like, That's not good writing.
But when Gaffigan does it, he talks about his weakness for it, his urges, his being overweight.
You know, that's a whole different deal.
deal.
Yeah.
A great food joke I remember seeing on an early episode of Roseanne.
So before it got rebooted and before it got rebooted again, Dan Connor was talking about how they deal with was it Dan or Roseanne was talking about how they deal with their problems.
They say they have problems they just eat until they cover it up or something.
Which was kind of...
Anyway, it was funnier of the way they said it.
Who would you consider among the greatest comics?
You know, that changes based on humor.
Humor is very different over time.
If you listen to Steve Martin, if you listen to the early Steve Martin stand-up, where he was a wild and crazy guy and he had an arrow in his head and stuff, When he was doing them, in the day that that was brand new, it was the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life.
But if you watch it now, it's incredibly lame, because what we think of as humor evolves all the time.
So George Carlin, I would say, probably did better than most people at staying current.
His early stuff was completely different than his later stuff, and he was current in both cases.
So he probably was one of the best.
Yeah, Norm MacDonald, always great.
Dave Chappelle, great. Eddie Murphy was never...
I have to be careful here.
Because I make a big deal about saying that comedy is subjective.
So if I say I don't like somebody's comedy, that doesn't mean it's not great.
It just means I don't like it.
Eddie Murphy, to me, has never been funny.
Because he goes for the easy stuff.
You know, gay jokes, F-bombs.
It's just too obvious stuff.
Yeah, Bill Burr is funny.
Seinfeld, of course, hilarious.
Richard Pryor, I never thought was funny.
I don't know if it's because I didn't watch Richard Pryor when he was current.
Maybe if I'd seen it in the day, it would have seemed funnier at the time.
But I never left to that.
Louis C.K. is sometimes hilarious, but he's spotty.
Sam Kinison was hard to watch for me.
Chris Rock, probably one of the top stand-ups of all time.
Yeah, I'd put him in the top, certainly the top five of all time.
Kevin Hart's great.
George Collin was amazing.
Jim Jeffries is an interesting case.
Jim Jeffries is very talented, but the content that he talks about...
Well, let me put it this way.
He's not likable.
So Jim Jeffries looks like somebody who is very talented at his job, but probably...
The biggest asshole in the world, in real life.
I mean, it just sort of comes through in his performance.
I don't know that that's true, but that's the vibe I get.
And when I get that vibe that he's a terrible person in real life, it's just hard to enjoy it.
Yeah, Foxworthy.
Again, in his day, he was hilarious.
I haven't seen him lately. Joan Rivers was great in her time.
Greg Geraldo, I didn't see her that much.
Amy Schumer was great.
Yeah, Bill Murray is always funny.
All right, yeah, Joe Rogan is hilarious and current.
That's the other thing that Joe Rogan does well.
He stays, you know, his humor stays current.
Alright, well you don't need my opinion about every comedian in the world.
That would be the most boring periscope of all time.
Alright, so it's Christmas and we should end on something positive, don't you think?
Let's end on something positive.
I just saw a tweet from, I guess it's humanprogress.org That said that during Reagan's day, something like 40% of the world was in extreme poverty.
40% of the world was in extreme poverty in Reagan's era.
Today, closer to 9%.
We went from 40% extreme poverty to 9%.
And there's reason to believe that by 2030, I think it is, that extreme poverty...
We'll be eliminated. Actually eliminated.
That's the most amazing accomplishment the world has ever seen.
But because it happens kind of slowly, you don't get a moment to celebrate that.
So that's good.
The other thing is, jobs are great.
We're winding down wars.
At the moment, we have nobody pointing a nuke at us, at least an anchor.
And almost everything is trending in the right direction.
Yes, it's a golden era.
Excellent.
No, Yemen is trending in the right direction as well, because they just had a ceasefire agreement.
Now, in Yemen, you're going to have to assume that there will be agreements, and then breaking agreements, and, you know, it's going to be stopping and starting, but the process of de-conflicting has begun.
It just won't be easy, and it won't be fast.
All right. So, I'm going to...
Russia is always a potential threat, people say.
Can anybody tell me why we need to be enemies with Russia?
I just don't get it.
What is there going on?
Between the U.S. and Russia that we even need to be enemies?
What is the natural thing there?
It's easy to understand why we're a natural enemy with, say, Al-Qaeda or ISIS. Because their belief system is so opposite that only one can win.
You can't really coexist with that belief system.
But Russia, they don't really have a reason to be our enemy.
We don't have a reason to be their enemy, except we're just used to it.
It feels like just inertia, doesn't it?
Doesn't it feel like, well, you know, they always poke us, so they always will, so we'd better poke them.
And then they're thinking, hey, they keep poking us, so we should poke them back.
I just don't really get what the purpose is.
Yeah, now, some people are saying that Russia is an expansionist country, and they want to, you know, they're trying to gobble up their neighbors and stuff.
But if you look into it a little bit deeper, it looks kind of defensive from Russia's point of view.
In other words, Russia wants a certain amount of control over its neighbors for purely defensive reasons.
Now why do they need to worry about defense?
Because of NATO? Because of us?
It feels like it's all psychological at this point.
There's so many problems that are real, but the Russia problem is real, but it's based on psychology alone.
There's no natural reason we need to be enemies with them.
All right. Do you think they really want to recreate the USSR when they know it didn't work the first time?
I think they want a pipeline and I think they want security, national security.
And I'm not entirely sure what's the big deal if they had a pipeline.
I hear us talking about, no, Russia can't have...
You know, warm water port and they can't have contiguous land to make a pipeline.
And I'm thinking, is it just business?
Is it just because we want to compete with them?
That's why they can't have a pipeline?
Is there anybody else we're preventing from having a pipeline?
What is the moral...
What's the moral case for preventing someone from having a pipeline?
You know, we need to think a little deeper than this.
Anyway... That's all I have to say.
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