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July 11, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
51:51
Episode 594 Scott Adams: Talking to Bill Pulte #TwitterPhilanthropy Give Away, Tech Summit
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Everybody, everybody, come on in here.
It's going to be a good one.
Might be one of my best periscopes ever.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm Scott Adams.
This. Is my coffee.
But you don't need coffee. You just need your favorite beverage.
Whether it be in a cup or a mug or a glass.
Could be a tankard, a stein, or a chalice.
It might be a thermos, maybe a flask.
Doesn't matter what it is.
Any kind of vessel will do.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
And join me now for the incredible rush of the simultaneous sip.
Are you ready? Dopamine online.
Go. Oh, so good.
So good.
All right, in a moment, we're going to have a special guest, very special guest, Bill Pulte, to tell you why he is lighting up the entire internet today with his giveaway.
I'm going to let a few more of you pour in here so we can get the maximum crowd.
And Bill, I know you're standing by, so we'll bring you on live here in a moment.
I want to talk about a couple of things.
My favorite story of the day, well, two favorite stories of the day.
One is that AOC is calling Nancy Pelosi a racist.
I'll just leave that there.
There are some stories that don't really require a lot of commentary.
No commentary required.
But AOC is calling Pelosi a racist.
That's the whole story.
Other favorite story is there's a Mississippi gubernatorial candidate who has decided that he will not allow a woman reporter to follow him around all day.
I guess the newspaper was assigning reporters to candidates and they would track them around all day.
And he said that he didn't want to ride with a woman for his religious beliefs.
Now you knew we were going to get there.
You knew that the Me Too stuff would have some negative consequences as well as positive consequences.
And it looks like we're seeing it there.
Everybody who's commented on it so far, except for one person who didn't seem too stable on the internet, has said so far, just the comments I've seen, almost every person said, yeah, he's just smart.
He's just avoiding a problem.
And I have to say that If I didn't know anything about these candidates, and the only person I heard about was this one person who made this decision to keep himself out of any even potential trouble, I would have a slightly more positive feeling about that person than if I had heard nothing at all.
So those are the fun stories, but not as fun as what we're going to do next.
So let me go here to...
Let's see. I want to see, waiting for a bill.
Now, let me make sure that we have done this correctly.
So I'm going to make sure that Bill knows to join me right now.
Hold on.
Hold on.
All right.
This could be him now.
There he is, Bill.
Oops, Bill disappeared.
Bill might be having a signal problem.
Let's see. We will know in a moment.
It's processing. All right, Bill, we're having trouble adding you right now.
I don't know if you can hear me.
I'm going to tap to cancel that, and then I'm going to try it again.
All right, well, we're having a little difficulty here, a little technical difficulty.
Let's try it one more time.
Bill, are you there?
Bill? Bill, you do not have a good cell phone connection, Bill.
So let me try this one more time.
If it doesn't work, we might have to do this a different way.
Thank you all for bearing with me.
Bill, can you hear me?
Hey! You know, you won't believe it.
I may have to sign on to my Wi-Fi here, but the amount of media that's calling me now, I don't even know how these people get my phone number.
It's off the chain.
I mean, I can't stop these phone calls.
And I think they're robocalls, but then it's like, you know, this reporter, that reporter.
So anyway, I apologize.
Let's fill in the audience for those who don't know what's going on.
Bill, tell us, the audience who maybe is not familiar with you yet, tell us the offer that you've made on Twitter.
I am basically giving away $100,000 to people on Twitter.
What I'm trying to do is move philanthropy Right.
All this rigmarole that people have to go through in order to get funds.
And it's actually a problem that rich people have a hard time giving away money, as I understand it.
And so what I'm trying to do is basically bring philanthropy onto the Internet.
I mean, you'd think somebody would have come up with this already.
And so what I'm trying to do, frankly, is strong arm some of the other rich people who, by the way, have a ton of cash or sitting on the sidelines who could be giving money and aren't giving money to be giving in an immediate need kind of situation.
So I'm paying for veterans dentures.
I'm paying for electric bills.
I'm paying for gas bills.
I'm paying for, in some cases, water.
Some Americans don't even have access to water.
That's what I'm doing, Scott.
And you've given away how many chunks so far?
Well, I had the president tweet at me last night, which made things interesting.
So right there, boom, with one tweet, that's $30,000 of cash in my own money.
And then I probably gave away another $20,000.
So I'm probably north of $50,000 already in cash that I'm giving away.
Wow. And I'm going to get up to $100,000.
And keep going from there.
I mean, look, if I can even bring, let's say, a billion or two billion dollars from the sidelines and move it online and move it into Twitter, I mean, that would be huge.
I mean, can you imagine how many people's lives we would impact?
And everybody who's listening to this is helping me do this.
And I really appreciate your help, Scott.
You've been just amazing with this stuff.
And everybody should know how great you've been with it.
But together, we can do this.
Well, so I love this model and I love the fact that you can test it so easily and maybe it'll morph and maybe it'll become its own application someday.
I mean, there's no telling where it could go.
But just the general idea of how you feel when you're giving money directly to people who have a real need Like, right now, for something that could be life-changing, for you, it's not much of an expense for any individual gift, but it completely changes somebody's life if they don't have any other way to handle these problems.
Now, you've got, I think last I checked, 57,000 followers on Twitter?
Something like that, yep.
And you made an even more interesting offer just moments before we came on...
On Twitter, I think it was just recently you made it.
Tell us about your most recent offer for a million followers.
Well, I will select people and I will select causes to give $1 million to on Twitter once I get to a million followers.
And the reason that I'm doing that is, frankly, because I want to make sure that we have enough of a scope, enough of a presence, enough of a reach to be able to impact people with that money.
I mean, a million dollars is a lot of money, and so I have no problem giving it to people You know, who really need it.
But I want to make sure that we find the most acute cases, that we find the most significant people who need it.
I mean, you know, this guy, this veteran yesterday without dentures, I mean, he sent in a video.
He had no teeth. I mean, you know, this is the people who fought for our country and they don't even have teeth.
I mean, you know, and I have friends, and I'm sure you do too, Scott.
I have friends who are billionaires.
I have friends who are millionaires, tens of millions, hundreds of millions.
You know, these people can't take it with them.
They can't take it with them.
So, you know, why can't they give back more?
And I mean, this is the perfect way for the rich to build a bridge with the poor and to become one and come into communion with each other.
I mean, you know, you look at all of this vitriol and hate on Twitter, and I'm trying to inject some positivity into our culture.
And I think we can do it.
So I'm putting my money where my mouth is.
Yeah, I see this as much a leadership thing as a philanthropy thing in the sense that you're inspiring people to get on the same channel, even if they're using their own methods as well.
etc. So there's a larger inspirational message to this just about how we treat each other and looking for ways to do it in the most efficient way.
One of the questions here I saw go by is how are you vetting The different requests.
I know you're not looking at 100,000 requests yourself.
You have some help?
I do. I have a few people who are helping me, but I'll tell you, when I started this thing out yesterday morning, I turned to my wife, and at first she wasn't, let's say, the happiest person in the entire world, but I think she was pretty good with it.
And then all of a sudden the day progresses, and the president retweets me.
So I had like three people who were helping me with this.
And then bang, you know, the president sends it out.
It's like 80,000 likes or whatever.
So now I got hundreds of thousands of replies.
So I actually just posted, I think it's going to take me a few days to get through this.
I'm watching some of the comments here.
I'm trying not to laugh, cry, because of what you just said.
But I'm just imagining the scene where, you know, you're talking to your wife and you say, I've decided to do this thing.
And your wife is like, well, I don't know.
I'm not sure if this will be the best idea in the world.
And then the next thing you know, the President of the United States has just retweeted you.
Yeah. Well, you want to know it's funny, and I'll share this with you because you're a friend, and I know the people on here are friends.
But I went to dinner last night with my family, and And, you know, we're sitting there and we're talking and my dad's there and my family's there.
And they said, well, you know, so tell us about what happened.
And so, you know, I walked through it or whatever.
And I said, you know, I'm actually trying to get the president to retweet me right now.
And I didn't say anything about it, you know?
So, I mean, other than that, right?
So I get home and...
I'm walking onto my back patio, and all of a sudden I hit the button where you can see if people mention you, and it says, Donald J. Trump just said something to me, or whatever.
And... I'm thinking, holy shit, did that just happen?
So I saw that you also had some interesting offers out.
You tweeted at Candace Owens and then Kanye and Kim Kardashian.
Tell us what you tweeted at them.
Well, I also tweeted out, I think, $23,000 if Kanye retweets it, and $25,000 if Kim does it.
And again, I'm trying to bring people from all across to do this.
I mean, those two people, as you know, very wealthy people.
So, you know, if I can kind of lean on them, so to speak.
So if everybody could just go and retweet that and like those posts, I think we can get it.
Look, if we can get the President of the United States, I think we can get a couple of celebrities.
And I've gotten a lot of celebrities, by the way, that have either followed me or sent me direct messages.
I think I'm going to be going on Fox today at about 245.
So we got momentum.
Wow.
And I noticed literally just before I got on this Periscope, I saw that two non-famous followers had just jumped in.
One said he would give away 50 bucks.
One said he would give away 500.
That was Mark Schneider.
And I thought, well, you know, so it begins.
And so it begins.
So the hashtag is hashtag Twitter philanthropy.
It's going to start trending.
It has already trended.
And this is just amazing.
So your day is completely different now, isn't it?
Yeah, my kind of life is completely different.
I mean, I've always wanted to do this, Scott.
I've always wanted to work hard and then give to people who were in, you know, the toughest of situations.
And so I'm very happy to be doing this.
I just I didn't expect for it to happen this quick, which I'm delighted that it's happening.
But now I want to get all that.
Now I want to get all the rich people's money.
And I want them to help the poor because, you know, I have one of my friends.
He's worth over $100 million.
He was texting me earlier. I'm trying to get a million bucks out of him, too.
But, you know, it's like, you know, if you got over $100 million like this guy does, why doesn't he give a million dollars to somebody?
I mean, this one lady I gave, I forget how much, I think it was $300, $400 to yesterday.
You know, she's pregnant.
She's working three jobs.
She has a husband who also has a job.
And, you know, they're trying to feed their kids.
Why not give them a leg up for one week or one month?
That's what I'm trying to do.
I've often wondered about a more rigorous model where somebody can essentially propose their own life as something to invest in.
For most of my, let's say, successful part of my life, I've helped quite a bit individually.
So if somebody has a specific one-on-one problem, and the ones that I'd like to help with are very much like when you help the veteran who's getting the teeth.
It's something where you can say, okay, this is a very discreet, specific expense, which absolutely is going to help this person in amazing ways.
It could help him get a job, it could help him socially.
So when I see those situations where somebody just needs to pay for a class, they just need to have some childcare until they can figure something out, those I find very attractive because there's no middle person.
You get the direct benefit of the feeling.
And I don't think people...
Quite understand the enormity of what this can lead to.
Because I feel like the world has become disconnected by, I don't know, size and technology, etc.
So why not bring it together?
Yeah, you lose the feeling that you had when we were little tribes and little families.
Yes, yes. When your neighbors were helping you, you need to raise a barn.
Everybody comes out and helps you put up your barn.
But now we're just all distributed and we're all in our little cubicles and stuff.
We're all kind of disconnected.
Somehow, just in 24 hours, you shrank the world.
The whole world was 7 billion people, and suddenly you're talking to the President of the United States, I mean, via Twitter, but still, you, Bill Pulte, said, I got an idea and I have my phone in my hand, and next thing you know, the entire Internet is lit up, and all the most important people in the world are tuning in and saying, yeah, I think I would like to help raise a barn.
I think I would like to help my neighbor.
How does that feel? It's the feeling that I think is the magic juice here.
The way it's going to be reported is, you know, people are going to report it as it's about the money, but that's what gets you the attention.
But it's really about the feeling, and you can tell from the comments here that people are getting a contact high just by being part of it.
Yeah, well, what you just said there is absolutely beautiful and gives me chills.
I mean, that really is beautiful.
And that is the feeling that you get.
I mean, it's always been said, you know, when you give, you receive.
And, you know, I've really experienced that the last 24 hours.
It's been incredibly touching.
So, yeah, I hope we can do it.
And I know we can do it. I mean, you know, I woke up yesterday with this idea.
Next thing you know, Donald J. Trump is like, how the heck, you know?
Now, you're obviously, for many of the viewers here, you're more well known for your work on the blight authority and cleaning up the blight in the inner cities, something that you've also used your own money and collected money from other rich people to do.
Do you have anything upcoming that you'd like to tease?
Yeah, we've got a huge announcement coming next week, so we'll probably be back on with you, Scott, if you'll have us.
Yes. You know, it's going to be just...
An incredible week or two here, so it would be interesting to see the momentum we get.
Just really appreciate all of your followers, and as everybody knows, you can retweet at Pulte at P-U-L-T-E. We'd really appreciate the love and support.
If anybody wants to match us, as you saw, Scott, you had gotten some people who are starting to match some of my gifts, which is just amazing.
I think we can really create a phenomenon here.
It's only a matter of time before this happens, so why not have it happen now, and why not have more good happen now?
Yeah, why not? Why not?
And I don't know, Bill, did you see the video of, there's some startup who built a giant robotic arm, sort of the size of a crane, if you want to size it, that built a house out of blocks in, what, two days?
It was just a big arm that would grab a block and place it, and it built an entire, the wall structure in two days.
Did you see that? I didn't, no.
So just imagine that that already works in prototype.
You know, there's a video of that robot actually building a house in two days.
And I'm thinking there are probably lots of startups, lots of people who have ideas for what to do with these blight-cleared areas once, you know, once the land is available.
So anybody who's in that industry of trying to build a structure a unique way could either contact me or Bill Pulte on Twitter.
We'd love to see your ideas.
Wouldn't you say, Bill? I would love it.
I would love it. We got a lot of momentum.
I mean, you even look at some of these comments, you know, here that, you know, with the different followers.
So it's all very exciting.
And I think we're just getting started.
So a lot more to come.
Alright, so Bill, I'm guessing that you've got a lot to do today.
Am I right? I do. I do.
Is there anything else you want to leave us with before I let you go get back to that?
The media is going to be picking you apart today in a good way, I hope.
No, I would just say, you know, let's continue the good.
Let's continue the positivity.
Let's continue the good vibes.
If you can retweet my stuff, get it out there, like it for everybody who's done it.
You've been amazing, Scott.
I mean, really, you know, thank you for everything you've done.
I think we can do something great here.
Let's do something good.
There's so much negativity on all these platforms.
All this crap. Let's take it, throw it out, and let's replace it with love.
Generosity, kindness. You know, that's one of the other things that I'm doing, too, is if you guys, if anybody here on Periscope or on Twitter is doing acts of generosity, I'll also give money to you, too.
I mean, we need to be more generous to the people that we're around.
All needs to be loved.
That's it, Scott. Well, Bill, you are an incredible inspiration to me and I can tell in the comments to the rest of the people here.
Thank you so much for what you do.
We will talk to you again very soon, and I'm going to let you go now.
Thanks, Bill. Thanks, Scott. Bye-bye.
All right. Bye. All right.
That is amazing. So we'll update you on that as events happen.
So let's talk about some more things.
So today is the big tech summit at the White House.
Have you heard about that?
The Tech Summit? So apparently there's a big group of people who were invited to the White House to talk about the fact that the tech platforms have some bias.
Let me say some alleged bias, just to keep it technically accurate.
And I know all of you think it's a confirmed bias, but let's just call it alleged.
And bringing focus to that question.
Now, here's what's interesting about the Tech Summit.
In order to talk about any kind of bias or shadow banning or banning from platforms, you can't really invite a bunch of normal people who are in the middle of the road who have never been banned and never been shadow banned.
It wouldn't make sense To have a summit on this issue if the only people you invited were middle-of-the-road people who didn't have any problem in the first place.
So in order to find out where the boundaries are and to see if something needs to be fixed, which is part of the exploration of the summit, you need to bring in the fringe characters.
You need to bring in people who can help you define the edge.
What is the edge?
Who is too far?
Who is simply Wrong versus evil.
Who is simply giving an opinion versus destroying the country through their actions in some way?
Yeah, so I mentioned this yesterday that CNN referred to this as it's going to look like a Star Wars bar scene, to which I say, I hope so.
Because otherwise it's no good.
If it doesn't look like a Star Wars bar scene, then they invited the wrong people.
You need the people who are going to make your hair catch on fire.
They're the ones who matter.
All the people in the middle don't matter.
They're already getting everything they want.
They don't have a problem. So, but within that group, There's going to be lots of chatter about who got invited, who got invited, and then disinvited, and stuff like that.
I don't think that's going to be too terribly important.
It's fun to talk about.
It's gossipy. It's, hey, why'd this one get in?
Why didn't this one get in?
But not terribly important.
Here's what's important. Let me give you the three-dimensional look on this.
I've told you many times that persuasion...
Starts with attention.
If you can't get people's attention, you can't persuade.
And so what President Trump does, better than anybody's ever done in a leadership position like this, except maybe Steve Jobs, is that he can draw attention to the thing he wants you to think about.
Now, that's not a solution.
Simply drawing attention to something doesn't solve it, but it is the first step, and it's a necessary step.
Excuse me. And it's the step that the White House is doing.
If you expect too much from the summit, you will be disappointed.
Because I don't think we should expect that the summit will produce legislation.
I don't think the summit is going to produce an executive order.
In all likelihood, what the summit will produce is attention and focus and energy.
I think it will do all of those things, and partly because people will be complaining about who's in, who's out, whether they're too far, or what's the real problem here.
Think about the president's challenge.
The president's challenge is getting attention for something when all the people who control your attention, the tech platforms and the news, don't want you to have that attention.
So the president is craving an event that's so hard to ignore, Even the people who want to suppress that information can't ignore it because it'll be too much fun to mock it.
The fact that it's going to look like a Star Wars bar scene is both the reason that people will pay attention to it, mocking it, criticizing it, you know, every bad thing in the world, but it's also the only way you can penetrate their fortress of control.
So the President Completely consistent to his processes that work all the time.
He is forcing the world to look at something they didn't want to look at.
That's the win.
The win is that we're talking about it.
If you think the game is to come out of this with some kind of a solution, well then you're on the wrong game.
That's not the game. That comes later.
There will be some kind of actions later.
We don't know what they will be. They might be legislation.
It might be monopoly breakup action.
It could be...
I've been suggesting that the best way forward is some kind of a social media court, some kind of a special judge whose only job is to make sure that the algorithms are fair.
But... Without presenting the algorithm's deep information to the public, because the public could game it if they had too much information.
So I think that's where it's all going to head.
I think at some point there will be something that looks a little bit like oversight or a special court to guarantee freedom of speech within the Within the limited realm of technology and platforms.
It's not the freedom of speech that the Constitution talks about, because that's about the government.
But because the social platforms have effectively become the primary way we communicate, they have the power of a government.
It's accidental.
Nobody planned it that way.
But the social media platforms do have the power of a government.
And so it's a fair conversation for the country to have.
Do we need to treat it a little bit more as if these big entities are, in essence, accidentally, just by the accident of history, they've become government-like?
And should they be subject to the same free speech laws Let's say, parameters as the government itself.
So that's a good question, and I'm glad we're having that conversation.
The big trap in this summit, and you're probably all ahead of me on this, what is the big trap?
What's the worst thing that could happen at this summit?
The worst thing that could happen is a group photo.
It's the worst thing that could happen.
I don't know how you avoid it because it's the lighthouse, right?
So there's going to be somebody with a camera, somebody with a phone.
There are going to be pictures.
But I don't think you want to be standing next to the people who are in the Star Wars barroom scene that are the ones you don't want your brand associated with.
So there are going to be people there who are Let's say there will be people at the summit who are known to be very credible.
Somebody mentioned Tim Poole.
I think he's going to be there.
He would be an example of someone who, to the best of our knowledge, is a credible player who deals in facts and rational discussion.
If he gets his picture taken standing next to a supporter of Q... That's not good for Tim Pool, right?
Now, he might not care.
I'm not going to read his mind.
I'm not going to make any suggestions for how he lived his life or who he takes his picture with.
So I'm not giving him any advice on that.
But I would say it's a trap.
I think you have to be careful what the group picture looks like.
And if I were one of the people attending, which I'm not, I would not submit to photographs.
So I don't know how it can be avoided, but I think that's the trap.
Because those photographs will come back to bite you someday, and somebody's going to say, Tim Pool, why is he credible?
Here's a picture of him standing next to people who are not credible.
So how do you explain that?
Now, it won't actually mean anything if you stood next to somebody and somebody took a picture.
We should all be able to do that.
It's a free country. The president does it all the time.
The president has pictures taken with People who are supporters, some of them are credible, some of them are not, but he's sort of above that.
He can take the heat, as he often says, but be cautious with your own reputation because maybe you can't.
Now, an interesting thing happened with one of the invitees to the summit who was uninvited.
You're probably watching this story.
It's Ben Garrison. A very talented cartoonist who does cartoons that are primarily associated with the right and pro-Trump stuff.
You've probably all seen, well, most of you have probably seen his work on the Internet.
So the first thing I'm going to say is, very talented.
So on a professional level, cartoonist to cartoonist, he's really good at what he does.
So I want to put that out there.
But I guess he was invited and then he got uninvited because some of his cartoons surfaced to higher visibility that he was accused of being anti-Semitic in three of his cartoons, but one of them in particular.
And that cartoon showed a double puppet situation where the top was the Rothschild banking family With puppet strings to George Soros, with puppet strings to a couple of generals at the time.
So the idea was that there was some chain of control there, I guess.
I guess that was the point of the comic.
And the various groups said, hey, that looks anti-Semitic because the Rothschilds are Jewish, Soros is Jewish, so are you trying to make some kind of message about Jews running the world or something?
So he got in trouble for that and he was disinvited from the summit.
I tweeted at him saying that it would be useful For him to give a, what the hell were you thinking, explanation.
Now, hear my words carefully, because I got widely misinterpreted in this exchange on Twitter.
I'm asking for an explanation of what the intention of the comic was.
You did not hear me say, please apologize for it.
Right? That's not in what I just said.
I said... This is a comic that some people interpreted in a negative way.
What did you intend?
So I thought that was a reasonable question.
Because in order to interpret whether you're mad at it or whether you should be upset by it, you should first understand what did the creator mean and was it intended to send the message that people seem to be receiving.
Perfectly reasonable question.
Here's the answer I got from Ben Garrison.
He said, and I'm quoting from his tweet, Don't play the left's game.
If you criticize Soros slash Rothschild, you're anti-Semitic.
If you criticize Obama, you're racist.
If you criticize Hillary or Elizabeth Warren, you're misogynist.
If you criticize open borders, you're xenophobe.
If you criticize climate change, you're anti-science.
Now, so here's some people I see in the comments agreeing with his stand.
Now, here's the thing.
I appreciate a principled stand, and it's not unlike the president himself, who doesn't apologize for things, and he doesn't go out of his way to try to explain anything away.
I think it works for the president for the following reason.
He hasn't really done anything that is legitimately anti-Semitic or legitimately racist.
100% of the things that he's been accused of, let's say since the campaign and since, you know, I'm not going to delve into his 20 or 30 years ago because I just don't do that in general, no matter who it is.
But if you're looking at his campaign and his presidency so far, there are literally no examples of actual anti-Semitism.
Or actual racism to be concerned with.
So when he doesn't apologize and he doesn't explain, it's because there's nothing to apologize for and there's nothing to explain.
And so that's actually a strong play because he's treating it like it's unimportant and he can get away with that.
Now, Ben Garrison has taken what I would consider a similar stance.
That he's not going to play the left's game of getting into the explain yourself, apologize, explain yourself, apologize every time you walk outdoors.
Is that a good strategy?
Well, here's how I would define this.
If what you've done is legitimately not a problem but you're being criticized for it and reasonable people can look at the information and they can say, yeah, You don't need to apologize for this.
It's just critics being critics.
Under those conditions, not apologizing seems like a pretty good strategy, and the President has proven it effective.
He's proven it effective.
And in fact, when you saw Biden apologizing and some of the Democratic candidates apologizing for being attacked by their own side, they looked weak.
Now remember, I didn't ask Ben Garrison to apologize.
That never came out of my mouth, never tweeted it, never asked for it.
Probably wouldn't ask for it.
Because I'm not the person who needs an apology.
I'm not offended. But I did think that it was unclear.
And I didn't know what he intended.
Is it fair to ask for somebody to be clear if you're not sure what they intend?
Well, I always think that's fair.
He decided not to.
Here's the problem.
A comic that shows the Rothschild with a puppet string to Soros, with a puppet string to the government of the United States, looks to most reasonable observers exactly like an offensive anti-Semitic comic.
It looks exactly like it.
Now, is that something you should never explain?
Now, if the explanation had been, it's only a coincidence that they have some, you know, ethnic, religious correspondence, I would say, okay, the religion part had nothing to do with the point.
Then I know a little bit more about what you're trying to say.
But when you leave it out there without the explanation, you expose yourself.
Oh, and I should also point out that Garrison did do a public statement where he said in his public statement that he's not anti-Semitic and he said some other things.
My take on that is that the question of his anti-Semitism, alleged, has been asked and answered.
Somebody said, are you anti-Semitic?
And he said, absolutely not.
To me, that's the answer.
Now, I'm still confused about what the point of the comic was, but he doesn't need to answer me.
So people were saying to me, why must he do something?
Or why must he explain?
Or why must he apologize?
To which I say, he doesn't have to do anything.
Ben Garrison does not have to do Anything different.
Somebody's saying it's my problem, not his.
Exactly. That's what I'm saying.
I'm saying I had a request.
I would like to know what the comic meant.
Ben Garrison would not like to tell me.
Absolutely okay.
Right? I do not have a problem with that.
I'm not asking him for an apology.
I ask him for a clarification.
He doesn't want to give it.
He told me why he doesn't want to give it.
Perfectly acceptable. So he and I don't have any point of disagreement.
Can you get that?
Because people are going to see this as some kind of a cartoonist, uncartoonist controversy, and it's not that at all.
I asked a question.
He said he chooses not to answer it, and he told me why.
And it's a coherent response.
Now, I would have treated it differently.
If I were in his position, I would not have treated it this way.
I would have said, oh no, this is not what you think it is.
Or I might have said, it is what you think it is, whatever it is that the point was.
And he chooses not to.
Now, in choosing not to, strategically, it seems to me he has now allowed himself to be branded forever as an anti-Semite.
Obviously, he's fine with that.
If it were me, I would not want to be branded with that label.
And so, here's the part people are missing.
I had hoped to offer him an escape hatch.
I had hoped to offer him an easy door that he could walk through so there would be some public record.
That clearly says, oh God, no, this wasn't anti-Semitic.
It was this or that.
Whatever it was. Whatever he was thinking, which I still don't know.
He decided not to take that door.
Again, perfectly reasonable decision.
It's his life.
It's his career. He has a philosophy of how to deal with this situation.
He explained his philosophy perfectly.
He is being consistent with his philosophy.
I don't have any problem with that.
I respect it. But here's the thing.
He's made a choice that guarantees he will be branded with this label, and this will probably have a lot of effect on the rest of his life.
But if it's a choice he prefers, it's a free country, and I'm okay with that.
All right. But he has to live with the consequences, as we all do, right?
There's no difference between him and anybody else.
We all have to live with the consequences of our decisions.
Megan Rapinoe, the star of the women's soccer, said that she was saying that the female soccer players should get equal pay with the men.
Now there's some question about how big the pie is and all that, and people have talked about that plenty.
But I asked the question on Twitter, should you be paid the same if you're an athlete and your job is to entertain?
If you offend half of your potential audience, or whatever it is, 30 or 40%, if you offend that much of your audience, should you be paid as much as someone who doesn't offend anybody?
Because that audience is who views your content, who buys tickets, etc.
Now if you have a boss, and it's the boss's job to decide how much to pay everybody, Would you pay somebody who's driving customers away as much as you would pay somebody who's attracting them?
Now, she's sort of a mixed bag because I think she attracts people because she's so charismatic and interesting and she plays so well.
So she's certainly bringing people to the game.
There's no question about that.
But she might also be driving people away from the game.
We don't know the net of that yet.
So I put that question out there.
I don't have an answer myself. I'm just putting the question out there because I thought it was a fair question.
Somebody on Twitter said, should a cartoonist be paid as much if they offend half of their base of customers as I have?
So that was a fair question too.
So should somebody like me, a cartoonist, Who has clearly offended at least half of my potential customers.
Should I be paid the same?
And I answered, I've already lost probably 30 to 40% of my revenue almost immediately.
The moment I started talking about President Trump's, candidate Trump's persuasion abilities.
Now remember, I'm left to Bernie.
So policy wise, sometimes I'm on the same page with the president, sometimes I'm not.
But I was talking about his persuasion talents and I am a big fan of his effectiveness and I like him personally.
So I'm not going to deny those things.
I've also supported Bill Clinton when he was president, etc.
So it's not so much about the party.
I'm not a Republican.
But it was a fair question.
Should I be paid the same if I've offended a big chunk of my audience?
And the answer is no.
No. I knowingly went into this knowing that my income would go way down if I exercised my full right of freedom of speech.
I chose to exercise my full right of freedom of speech and my income went down 30% immediately.
Now, it's a pretty big deal.
So I'm just asking the same question about the soccer players.
But the difference is, I don't have a boss.
My boss is every client, newspaper, every person who clicks on the internet to see my comic, everybody who may or may not want to do a licensing deal or invite me to speak, etc.
So I have...
I guess millions of customers, if you look at it that way.
And so if 500,000 of my customers fire me, I still have a few million left.
So I'm in a different situation than someone is who's a professional athlete.
A professional athlete has a boss, one person.
So you can't compare them directly.
That's a fair question.
Let's see. Those were my primary topics.
Athletes are paid what their boss is willing to pay and what they're willing to accept.
Yeah, it's always a market negotiation situation.
That is correct.
Steel straw death.
That's not an interesting story.
It's just horrible. Somebody just asked about my book release.
You're talking about my book, LoserThink.
This is the uncorrected proof for limited distribution.
So the real book will be on sale to the public November 5th, roughly the same time as the audio version.
I haven't yet recorded the audio version, but I'll be doing that in September.
You can't get this one because it's the one that gets sent out to reviewers and important people who might want to provide some kind of a nice comment about it.
What do you think? Can you see it clearly?
How does it look? I just want you to see.
The reason I'm showing it to you is because I engaged all of you on the Internet To look at samples of covers and this is the one you collectively like the most.
So Christina was reading it the other day somewhere and noticed that people couldn't stop commenting on it and looking at the cover.
So generally speaking, as a general rule, people don't really buy books because of the cover.
You buy books because of the content, the author, the topic, what other people have said about it, etc.
In fact, there are tons of bestsellers that are nothing but just letters on the front, you know, just saying what the book is.
But I think this one might be different.
This might actually be the kind of book where the cover makes you buy it.
Am I wrong about that?
Because there's something that...
That stokes your curiosity about the people in the bubbles.
Right? Don't they make you curious?
It's the curiosity that should bring your attention to it.
And it's designed that way.
Who's in the bubble? Why are they in the bubble?
Is that me in the bubble? If I'm in the bubble, how do I get out of it?
Oh my God, we're all in bubbles.
Now, part of what I teach people who are trying to learn to write is I tell them that if you want If you want a lot of people to like your writing, you don't always shoot for that, but if your objective is for lots of people to like it and buy it and read it,
then the way I describe what you should do is I say that you should write what people are already thinking, but write it better than they're thinking.
So you don't want to introduce a brand new idea That nobody thinks is true yet, and then try to talk them into it.
That's a tough sell.
You want to take an idea that people already have in some lesser-formed sense in their mind.
It's already there, but it doesn't have a name yet.
It's something we've all witnessed, but nobody's labeled it yet.
Nobody's really defined it yet.
And I think this whole bubble reality that we're in is that.
Nobody has really quite defined what it means to be in the bubble, you know, other than we all know we're watching our own news, news sources, etc.
That part's obvious. But nobody's really defined this area.
And so I think this will be the book to do it.
And it will give you lots of tips for getting out of your own bubble, but more importantly, how to get people out of their own bubble as well, out of their bubble.
John Travolta is in the bubble, somebody said.
Somebody says, I love it when the author reads the book.
Yeah, so I will do the audio on this.
Iran versus British oil tanker story.
I might need to catch up on that story.
Somebody says they don't buy books online.
Claire says she doesn't buy a book if she doesn't like the cover.
Yeah, you know, there's probably something to that.
In the book business, I once asked the question, could I relaunch a book with a different cover?
And at least in the publishing business, there's not a sense That the cover makes that much difference.
You want a good cover.
If you did everything wrong, I suppose you could cause people not to buy your book.
But the difference between the very best cover and one that's just pretty good is not a big difference in sales.
Yeah, I did A-B test the book covers to get to the one I have.
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