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Sept. 23, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
45:46
Episode 672 Scott Adams: Jake Tapper Drawing Dilbert This Week, “Worse Than Watergate” guy, Ukraine
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Welcome to Coffee with Scott Adams and It's going to be lit today.
Lit, I tell you.
Do people still say that?
It feels a little dated.
Can somebody give me a more modern reference so I can pretend to be with it?
Hey everybody, take a seat.
We're going to get into some fun stuff today.
You know it. And it's going to be so good because we're going to start it with a little thing I call the Simultaneous Sip.
Yes! If you'd like to play along, and I know you do, if you'd like to join in on the Simultaneous Sip, you don't need much.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a stein, a chalice, a tanker, a thermos, a flask, a canteen, a grail, a goblet, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Go! So, you may have seen my tweet this morning that Jake Tapper of CNN is drawing Dilbert for the week.
The comic art that Jake draws, so I wrote the words, Jake did the art, so if you don't think they're funny, that would be my fault, not Jake's, just to be clear about that.
So I wrote them, Jake drew them.
He drew them in his own style, so they don't look like the same characters exactly, but you'll recognize them.
And that's part of the fun, is that he gets to reimagine that universe in a whole different visual way.
Now, I don't think...
The purpose of it is that they will be framed and then auctioned off.
So you can get our signatures on both of them, and they will be framed.
If you'd like to find out more about that, go to my pinned tweet.
And you'll see a link over to Homes for Our Troops.
Now, Homes for Our Troops is not just a veterans organization, but they take care of some of the hardest cases.
People have lost arms and legs, people who need special situations for their housing.
And I'll tell you how I looked at this.
Now, I can't speak for Jake, so I'll just speak for myself.
But it's probably fair to assume that something like this is happening in his mind.
But I can't speak for him.
You know, one of the most basic sort of principles, is it a principle or a practice?
You decide. Of our American experience is that we don't leave warriors behind.
If you're in the military, and even if somebody goes down, if they're dead or they're wounded, we don't leave.
We don't leave. It's like one of the most basic principles that keeps our country so safe.
Because would you join the military and would you serve your country if you thought you would be left?
If you thought there was even a chance?
If you thought there was any chance you would be left behind, would you serve?
Well, some would. Some would, of course.
But I've got to think that as part of the glue that holds civilization together is that if you do this stuff for the benefit of the country, we will make you one promise.
We won't leave you there.
That's it. It's like the primary promise.
And so these warriors who were coming home badly wounded It doesn't seem like they're all the way home.
So when I look at this situation, and probably Jake has a similar feeling, we can do a little bit more.
So that's what we're doing.
Now, for your amusement, I would like to read to you some of the comments from the internet over this project.
Now, keep in mind that the entire point It's to help badly wounded veterans.
It should be pretty obvious that that's the point.
And people also are quite aware that CNN and my brand have some conflict.
But that's not what that's about.
Because the highest principle is you don't leave people behind.
So we're operating on that principle, sort of the civilian version of that, where once they're home, they're still not all the way home.
You've got to bring them all the way home if you can.
So we're operating on just trying to be useful because people in the public eye, we have some extra tools that the average person doesn't have.
We can get a lot of attention.
So we're using our tools, get a lot of attention, help the veterans.
But here are some of the comments.
So you know what kind of a world you're living in.
So the worst comments are on Jake's tweet.
So Jake tweeted it this morning.
I did my own tweet.
So the comments under my tweet tend to be fairly supportive, but anti-Jake.
And as you might imagine, the comments under his feed are more anti-me.
So I'll just read the ones that are anti-me.
So keep in mind the noble cause.
And it's obvious this is for good purposes.
Everybody who's making these comments knows that Jake and I did a bunch of work and putting our time and effort and reputations on the line to try to do something useful.
And these are the comments we got.
Hey look, it's a cis white male privilege on parade.
And there's somebody who comes in who has a whole bunch of rumors about me.
He says, so this is somebody saying this about me.
He says, rape is a natural instinct for men.
Now, keep in mind that these are never things I've ever said.
These are things people imagined I said about a blog post that was a parody that people didn't know was a parody years ago.
So nothing that this guy says is actually representative of my opinion.
But this is what he comes in to do.
He comes in to destroy me.
On a charity project.
All right. And then this guy says, I get it, Jake.
You're rich. You're on TV every day.
You get to hobnob with the elite.
It's got to be fun. But the rest of us have to live outside of D.C. where men like Scott Adams spew this.
And then he's got some more spewing there.
All right. I was hoping this was straight up satirizing Scott Adams.
And I was just too dumb to get it.
But instead, you chose to promote him That's not what he's doing.
Nobody's promoting anybody, except the charity.
But instead, you chose to promote him and attempt to restore credibility and legitimacy to him and his opinions.
Wait, are you telling me I lost my legitimacy?
I didn't even know.
This is my worst day ever.
According to Rando on Twitter, I've lost my legitimacy and my credibility.
But maybe, maybe this whole charity thing can get it back.
This question to Jake on the internet.
Why are you partnering with that loon?
Have you asked Scott how he feels about your network and your peers, Jake?
You might want to look into that before you draw comics with him.
These are not helpful people.
These are not helpful people.
Here's another one. So this is the same guy who misrepresents my opinion.
He says, or this one.
So he's inferring that this is my opinion.
Where he says, if you can't hug women, he'll have to start killing them.
Does that sound like something I might have actually said?
No. I have never said, or implied, or thought, that if I am unable to hug women, I'll have to start killing them.
That's what somebody's actually wrote in public about me.
All right. Somebody else says, glad you're supporting a guy, meaning me, me being the guy.
Glad you're supporting a guy who used a mass shooting to promote his app, Jake.
Well, that's not exactly what I did.
I made a tool available at a time when it would be useful.
Okay. The cause is admirable.
Your choice of partners is highly unfortunate.
Very disappointed.
Unsmiley face. Then somebody else came in, one of my followers, and said, you're disappointed two friends came together for a good cause?
You're the hater. You're the problem.
Somebody else says, I like it, but working with Scott Adams strikes me as questionable.
Not a good look.
Let's see.
Oh, a few people saying positive things.
Okay.
Somebody saying it's a very good comic.
Oh, it looks like most of the bad people went away.
Somebody else says, this guy is Trumpy, why do you give him any publicity?
Alright. Gross.
Oh man.
So, apparently there's no such thing as doing a good thing in public anymore.
Because there are very broken people out there, who are not veterans, who are happy to criticize anybody trying to do anything positive.
But I will die on this following hill, that when it comes to the veterans, all the political stuff has to go away.
All the political stuff has to go away.
Now, I'm going to further blow your mind by saying some good things about Jake Tapper, which are true.
These are all true good things.
I talk about talent stacks a lot.
And how if you pile together a variety of talents that work well together, you become extraordinary, even if each of those individual talents is maybe not the best one in the whole world, but there are very few people who had to have that combination.
Jake's, I believe his background is education.
He's a historian, so he knows history.
He's obviously great on TV. He's got the look.
He's got the writing skill.
He wrote a novel. He's a cartoonist.
He's a better artist than I am.
And he's used all of those skills for his show.
He's one of the best examples you'll see of a talent stack.
Now, just to make it fair, taking the politics out of it and just talking about the skill set here, Sean Hannity is another one.
Sean Hannity has more skills in one person than you're...
It's amazing.
You know, same thing with Jake. They have so many different skills put together, but if you were to say, okay, what's the one thing Hannity is like the best in the world at?
And I'd say, well, I don't know.
It's not one thing. He's got a good look.
He talks well, presents well.
He obviously writes well.
He's had best-selling books.
He does radio. He does TV. He's apparently brave enough to say things he understands.
I could probably go on for about 20 more things.
Sean Hannity has as a set of talents.
Now, the people who don't like his program will say, well, it's all from the services company and I don't like it.
But certainly, the people that you see every day in the news have extraordinary sets of talents that work well together.
It's a good lesson for you.
All right, let's talk about the news. Do you ever wonder...
If Democrats wake up ever, like in the modern moment, let's say the moment, has any Democrat ever awakened this week and got up and like, oh, let's check the news.
And they check the news and pretty much everything's going right.
There's no bad economic news.
We're not really close to a war.
I mean, we're not really going to attack Iran.
And if we did, it would be some pinprick sort of thing.
It feels like Well, how did they reconcile their original predictions of how things would go under Trump with how things have gone so far?
Because, you know, the first few months you could say, oh, well, he's getting lucky or it's an overflow from all the goodness from Obama.
But year after year, Doesn't it get harder to hold on to the fact that you predicted 100% of everything wrong about him, and that just none of it is coming to pass?
Now, I think if you asked them, they'd say, it's all coming to pass.
Oh, it's all coming to pass.
And they would have to work pretty hard to make that true.
I think they'd say stuff like, Income inequality got worse.
Does anybody even care about that anymore?
When was the last time you saw a protest about income inequality?
It's like it doesn't even matter anymore.
As long as people have jobs and they're doing well, they care a lot less about other people, it turns out.
So I just wonder about the psychology of being so wrong In the face of the facts that things are going great.
Now, one of the ways that you know things are going great is that I'm going to tell you what the worst news is.
Here's the worst news on the major political sites.
Number one, blah, blah, blah, the Emmys.
Like, that's major news, the Emmys.
Okay, what else?
Well, mostly this Ukraine thing.
There's basically nothing else happening.
Just the Ukraine thing.
So let's talk about that, because there's something about the Ukraine situation that somehow captured everything else.
Have you ever noticed that? Oh yeah, we'll talk about Modi.
Remind me again. That was a great situation there.
So here's the thing that's happening with the Ukraine situation.
You all know the story.
The president made a phone call with President of Ukraine and tried to get him to investigate Biden and Biden's son's involvement in Ukraine.
And some people say that he was pressuring him.
And if he did...
So here it is.
Here's a statement.
This came off the CNN. I forget which commentator.
But if Trump used his power to try to coerce a foreign leader into influencing U.S. elections...
It could precipitate the worst political crisis of a presidency that has been mired in notoriety from its first hours.
So here's the frame that people are just beginning to realize, but we haven't quite realized yet.
Are you ready? Now, if you've been watching this Periscope for years, you know that I sometimes accurately predict things as much as a year ahead, sometimes longer.
Here's what's going to happen and how the news cycle is going to start evolving.
Are you ready for this?
All communications is influence.
At the moment, we're treating them like they're separate things.
But we know they're not.
And it just takes somebody like me to say it a few times before other people say...
Oh, yeah, all communication is influence.
So if the President of the United States, let me give you some examples to fill out my point.
Let's say four months before the election of 2020, China decides to sign a trade deal.
Would they be interfering with Yeah, people will say that, because every single thing a president does, if it involves a foreign leader, is trying to influence them.
They're trying to influence us.
It's all an influence job.
And you could use words like coerce, persuade, influence, Cajole, deal.
It's all that same realm.
All conversations between leaders are influence conversations even if they're talking about the weather.
They're trying to get to know each other.
They're trying to influence. So the only reason that this Ukraine story is a story is because people can't realize that communication and influence are always the same thing.
You can't do anything with another country on that level That is an influence, and obviously influence.
I'm not talking about some weird academic way you could determine its influence.
I mean, it's directly, obviously, observably, a study of influence.
As soon as we lose our childlike belief that communication can happen Separate from influence at this level.
Here I'm just talking about world leaders doing world leaderly things.
As soon as we lose that simple childlike view that some of it is influence and some of it is not, because it's all influence.
Every single word, every gesture, the clothes they wear, the places they meet, every single part of every interaction is designed intentionally For its influence on the world.
So, let's take, for example, let's say one of our allies, France, says something positive or negative about President Trump.
Are they influencing elections in this country?
Yeah, they are.
How about Modi comes to the United States He seems to be great personal friends with Trump.
They get along great. For some reason, their personalities are just...
Apparently, we can't tell what's really happening.
But by all observations, their personalities are just a perfect fit.
They just seem like, boom.
And you can see that everybody was commenting on that.
It's not an original observation on my part.
Everybody was saying that. If you didn't see the introduction that Modi gave to this huge rally-type crowd, where he introduced the president with such glowing terms, you could only imagine...
No, not imagine.
Any reasonable observer would conclude...
That the leader of India was influencing American elections.
What else was it?
Now, I'm not saying that's bad.
I'm saying that we have to grow up.
Because that's just what it is.
You know, everything...
Suppose he had said...
Suppose Modi had said instead, I am not going to visit the United States because your president is a bad person, blah, blah, blah.
You could easily imagine that happening, right?
Imagine all of the Indian-American voters, of which obviously there are a lot.
There was a whole stadium filled with people who were there to see Modi as well as Trump.
Imagine all of them hearing their Prime Minister back in India, you know, where they may have been born, or at least they may have some family connections through their parents or whatever.
Telling them that our president is so bad he won't even visit.
Just hypothetically.
That didn't happen. The opposite of that happened.
Wouldn't that influence the election?
Of course it would. Of course it would.
Did Modi's great attitude toward our president influence the election?
Absolutely. Of course.
Was it intended to do that?
Well, in the sense that all politics are about re-election or election.
I mean, everything's really oriented toward that because that's the system we built.
All of the politicians are supposed to be trying to get elected.
That's not the secret plan.
That's explicitly what we hire them to do.
Do such a good job, create such a good image, that we want to re-elect you or elect you.
That's your job. So they're just out there doing their jobs.
But can we imagine that the president's one phone call with the president of the Ukraine had any impact that was nearly as large as every time he visits a foreign leader or vice versa?
How can you compare Modi's visit, which was enormous influence on our election, It was.
Enormous influence on our election.
How do you compare that, where we're all watching, it's all obvious, but because it's just two leaders acting friendly to each other, you say to yourself, oh, that's normal.
That's just normal stuff.
Well, it is normal stuff for leaders to be friendly with each other.
But the level of camaraderie that you're seeing between these levels is influence-grade.
It's meant to influence both domestic populations, and I would argue it's doing a good job of doing exactly that.
And, of course, the other big example is, did the Brits influence our election through Christopher Steele, through anything that they did?
And the answer is, yes, of course.
And how about, do we influence elections in France and Israel and Great Britain?
Yes, all the time.
Do you think it doesn't matter to people in Israel that Trump and Netanyahu got along well?
Of course it mattered.
It mattered a lot.
It's all influence.
So the children in the room are looking at this conversation between leaders and saying, It was meant as influence, and if it could have had an impact on the election, it's something terribly, terribly wrong. Here's me recasting that same statement.
If it was meant as influence, and if it was meant to influence the elections, it would be like every other interaction between leaders.
All of them. They all have that same nature.
They all influence elections.
If you do it wrong, it's bad for you.
If you do it right, it's good for you.
So we should break out of this child frame of imagining that communication between leaders is ever influence-free or that it's ever not about the election.
Because it's always about the election.
All right. Some more on that.
The funniest part of the story is I don't know about you, but I love watching the anti-Trumpers trot out a new theory that's going to take down the president this time.
This time we got him.
Okay, the last ten times, those didn't count.
This time, this time we got him.
And then watching it fall apart in the usual ways.
It always starts with the bombshell from the Washington Post or the New York Times.
And we're not going to give you any names.
Sure, we're not going to name any names of our sources, but it's a bombshell.
And then the rumors start and everybody piles in and it's the biggest story.
And then stuff starts trickling out.
One of the things that trickled out over the weekend, I think, was that the so-called whistleblower, the person who was complaining about the Ukrainian phone call, wasn't there.
He didn't hear it.
Heard it from someone else.
Okay, now that doesn't mean that he heard it wrong, but it changes how you feel about it, doesn't it?
He wasn't in the room.
He didn't hear the actual words.
He heard someone else's description of the words.
Do you think of it the same anymore?
No, because whoever told him the words didn't quit.
Whoever reported to the whistleblower, this is what the President said, that person didn't quit.
And they should have quit if they had a problem with it.
Otherwise, they were just talking.
In other words, they didn't have a problem with it, which is part of the story, too.
So they bring out Carl Bernstein.
This is CNN. They bring out Carl Bernstein to compare it to Watergate.
Now, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, many years ago, developed the...
What is it? The seven...
Phases of acceptance for death.
You know, if somebody dies who's close to you, you go through the seven levels of, or is it your own death?
It was one of those. If your own death is approaching, there's the bargaining, and there's the denying, and there's, you know, you go down the seven levels of denial before you get to acceptance.
And one of the seven layers of whatever this is, this is a terrible analogy, but as you watch Conspiracy theories or charges against the president, whether it's Russia collusion or anything else, as you watch them disintegrate in front of you, they go through this predictable phase, stages of grief.
Oh, thank you. In the comments, people are telling me I should have said stages of grief, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.
But one of the stages of grief for a charge against the president that's dying is you wheel out Carl Bernstein to say it's a lot like Watergate.
I'm positive you don't bring that guy out unless you know your charge against the president is dying.
So he's like the angel of death for an impeachable offense.
So if somebody says, hey, President Trump made an impeachable defense.
Stage one, anonymous sources.
Stage two, a little bit of softening of the story.
It's like, well, the whistleblower didn't hear it, but he did talk to somebody who told him about it.
That's stage two.
Stage three is somebody pointing out that it wasn't illegal even if all the reporting is accurate.
Which we've had. It's like, what's the difference if he did it?
That's just a president talking to another leader.
He can say anything he wants.
It's legal. It's expected.
It's normal. At that point, it's obvious that there's no impeachable thing here.
So, the next stage of grief is you wheel out Carl Bernstein to say...
Bah! What are we talking about?
Bah! Well, that thing.
It's echoes of Watergate.
Watergate. Bah!
And then they sort of wheel him out, say, okay, thanks.
Thanks, Carl. That's great.
And then, of course, the stage of grief right after the Bernstein-Watergate guy is, I think you know this, is the Mitt Romney stage.
Where they bring in Mitt Romney to show that there's even a Republican who is terribly worried about whatever this behavior is.
So I think we've reached the Romney stage of grief, where Romney and pretty much only Romney thinks there's a big problem here.
And then I think the stage after that would be, look over here.
And then the stage after that, the last stage of grief is, it really did happen.
You're talking about it wrong.
No, we swear. The thing we said happened?
It did happen. Yeah, I know all the facts say it didn't, but it really did.
It happened anyway.
So that's the phase we haven't gotten to yet, but we're getting there.
All right. Here's my question.
There are two possibilities for this whole Hunter Biden thing and Ukraine.
One possibility is that nothing was done wrong by anyone.
Wouldn't you agree? And that's a possibility.
I don't know what the details are, and I could easily be convinced that maybe it looks bad, but nothing illegal happened.
I could easily be convinced of that.
I could also easily be convinced that there is something there.
I'm making a general statement.
I'm not telling you what I think is likely or what I hope is likely.
I'm just saying, two possibilities.
Either Hunter Biden did something terrible or Hunter Biden did nothing at all.
And by the way, those same possibilities apply to you and me.
Maybe I murdered somebody this morning, maybe I didn't.
Always two possibilities.
And I ask you, under either of those conditions, Wasn't it still a good idea for Trump to ask about it?
Because you still need to know.
You need to know which it is, don't you?
And suppose Ukraine said, yeah, we'll look into that.
Okay, we looked into it. Turns out it was just business as normal.
Wouldn't you need to know that?
But suppose it was the other way.
Wouldn't you also need to know that?
Because otherwise you might end up with Biden getting elected and being owned by Ukraine.
Why isn't anybody saying that except me?
If Biden got elected and we had not looked into this Ukraine whatever business is going on, and honestly, I don't know what the hell is going on over there.
I'm totally confused about the story.
Everybody else is too, I think.
But if Biden got elected, wouldn't we have to wonder If somebody had some stuff on them and it's over into Ukraine, which means Russia has it.
Now, that's a jump, right?
But I'm assuming that Russia has figured out how to get into Ukraine's business, meaning in the spy sense.
So I would think that if Ukraine had some good stuff on Biden, and I'm not saying they do, I think it's terribly unfair to assert that like it's true.
We can only say that the question has been asked, but you could ask me if I murdered somebody this morning.
It doesn't mean I did. It just means you asked the question.
So I don't like to throw a bunch of unearned guilt in the Biden direction, but we certainly needed to know.
Now, you might ask yourself, why does the president have to ask that question?
Oh, well, here's the other thing.
Well, suppose that's not the reason that Trump is asking the question.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all.
Even if Trump's mind, the only reason he was asking is to win an election, so long as it was also perfectly within the scope of his duties, it's still fine.
It would be like, what if the president boosted the economy so he could get re-elected?
Well, you wouldn't complain about that, because that's his job, right?
What if he protected us from terrorism and it was just to get elected?
Well, that's okay. That's how the system works.
He's supposed to work on getting elected, but part of that is just doing his job.
This was absolutely his job.
So whether or not you believe that the reason he was doing his job was for his own personal interests, completely irrelevant.
The system allows him to pursue his self-interest.
He did it in front of lots of witnesses, so long as it's also his job.
That's how it works. All right.
So this is another one of the stories that's too complicated for the public to follow along, sort of like Russiagate.
So it allows us to just retreat to our bias.
Anytime you add complexity to a story, it just allows people to retreat to their team and say, well, my team was right.
I don't know what's going on here, but my team is right.
So that's what's happening. You're not seeing anybody who's got any kind of a reasoned opinion on any of this stuff.
So, I keep seeing stories about the youth of this country are having eco-anxiety.
In other words, they're so worried about climate change that they're actually having mental health issues, like legitimate mental health issues.
It's not a laughing matter.
These are children being damaged By the games that adults are playing.
And adults are... I say games because climate change is sort of a political football.
And in order for the adults to sell their version of climate change to other adults, it necessarily ends up scaring the kids to death.
Maybe literally. I mean, I can't...
If you scare enough kids, somebody's going to die because of it.
At least one. It's a big country.
And so...
And so I saw a tweet from Mark Schneider, one of our favorite nuclear energy advocates, and he pointed out that nuclear energy is actually the cure for eco-anxiety.
And I thought about it, it was like, That's actually true.
If you were to actually accurately describe the risks of the new generations, you know, the current and future generations of nuclear energy, and you were to tell children accurately, hey, children, it's the safest technology we have for energy.
Every other technology has killed more people.
And here's the thing.
No matter what happens with...
With the planet, even the most aggressive estimates are that we'll be better off in the future, not worse.
Kids don't understand that.
When kids hear that the climate is going to heck, what they hear is that the world is going to go bad, that their experience of life will be worse than the ones before.
Here's the thing. Even the climate experts are not saying that.
The best estimate on economics is that over the next 80 years, the GDP will be 10% less than it could have been, but it will still be maybe 5 to 10 times better than it is now.
So the number of people who will be poor in the future, no matter what the climate does, is going to go way down.
The number of people who have a better life It's probably going to continue going up as it has through most of human history and certainly modern history.
So, who is teaching the children that they're doomed?
Bad teachers. Any teacher who understood the math of it, who understood the history of it, who understood that nuclear energy is just sitting there waiting to be used to solve the problem, it is.
We already have the solution to climate change.
We haven't. Who's telling the kids that we already have the solution to it and it's nuclear energy?
Now, obviously, there are government reasons and political opinion and public opinion and all that.
So there are things that need to be solved, but they're fairly minor compared to whatever the children are worrying about the fate of the planet.
They will be better off Almost in every situation.
I'll bet there isn't one climate forecast that doesn't also have those same children better off in the future.
They're just not as better off as maybe they could have been.
That's the claim. That's their claim.
That's not even me reinterpreting what they're saying or anything.
That's their explicit public primary claim.
The things will be a lot better, but they could have been even a little bit better.
So it almost makes me wonder if I need to fix this.
Meaning that this is a communication problem that children need to be deprogrammed.
So perhaps I could write a one-pager to put the, let's say, the child version of what I just said into an easy-to-digest Maybe a page is too much.
Maybe two paragraphs would be maximum.
Because remember, it's kids, so you have to really shrink it down to its tiniest little thing.
So why don't we tell kids that if they promote the modern version of nuclear energy, not the old stuff that was dangerous, but the modern version, if they promote that, and if they know that carbon scrubbing technologies are a thing, they should feel good.
Because not only is our generation not destroying the world, our generation made the world a lot better.
Don't you think? Would you agree that when I say our generation, I'm going to take my generation and every adult, you know, from, let's say, let's say from 40 to Infinity.
You know, over 40. Let's say the over 40 generation, which you would argue had the greatest influence on the way things are right now, I feel like the world is way better.
If you look at the amount of poverty way down, isn't everything better than it was 40 years ago, 60 years ago?
I think everything's better.
And that's not going to change.
And the kids need to know that.
But here's the deal.
Those kids are going to be the ones changing it.
All right? We did our job.
The greatest generation, that was the one before me, fought World War II, built this country into something amazing.
I kind of think they did their job.
I also feel like my generation did its job.
I think we did our job.
You know, my generation was protesting the Vietnam War, and apparently that worked.
We didn't do a good job with Iraq, but I'm not sure that was the public.
That was more the government.
So, that's the good news.
Alright, I feel like I've jabbered, jabbered enough.
I'm jabbering all over the place.
I would like to put in the plug for my book, Loser Think.
Now let me tell you some true facts.
Before you decide, When you're going to buy my book, LoserThink, and before you decide if you want the audiobook or the hard copy, let me tell you a few facts.
In 2013, I published my book, Kind of Failed Almost Everything and Still Went Big, and I predicted at the time that people wouldn't understand when it was published how important it would be.
Now, that was the book that introduced the idea of systems being better than goals, which I think you've observed has become A common public understanding since then.
That all came from me.
And then you've also heard the idea of the talent stacks.
That also came from me and that book.
Now, since then, that was 2013, so that's six years ago, enough people have tried the ideas in the book that now they're getting back to me.
People are saying they got promotions.
People have lost vast amounts of weight because using a system instead of a goal for weight loss.
And just these tremendous life changes.
People have started companies, quit their job, made a fortune.
I mean, I'm literally hearing this every day.
Every single day somebody contacts me, usually on social media, and says, your book changed my life.
Then I wrote Winn-Binkley, that came out about President Trump's powers of persuasion.
And it wasn't just about Trump.
It was a book to teach you persuasion in a very approachable, everyday way, so that you can see it happening to you.
You could use the same techniques for your own benefit, for your business, for your personal life.
And now I'm starting to hear those reports.
So enough time has gone by.
That I can't tell you how many people read that book, contacted me and said, hey, you know, I want a better situation in my job.
And I would say, well, you know, use some of those techniques in the book.
And then they'd get back to me and say, I got a huge raise or I got a promotion.
So Winn-Bigley is actually totally changing people's lives.
They are getting richer.
By using their negotiating powers and their persuasion powers and going out and getting stuff.
They're getting raises.
They're getting promotions. They're doing things that they didn't feel they had the tools to go get that thing.
And then they realized that the tools are quite approachable once they've been explained to them.
Then they can just take those into their boss and next thing you know, raise.
So my new book that's available for pre-sale, Loser Thinks, It's written for the same general purpose, meaning that it's meant to have a direct improvement on your life, in this case to allow you to see the world in a clearer way.
So the loser think is unproductive ways of thinking, and unproductive in this context just means you don't have experience across a number of domains.
For example, when I was just talking about climate change, did you notice how I put an economics spin on climate change?
The reason I can do that is because I'm an economics major, I have an MBA, etc.
So I've actually worked and lived in that world where you're doing projections.
So when I look at the economic projections, I can just see a little bit deeper.
I can understand them with more texture than if I'd never had that background.
Now the argument is you don't need to have a degree in economics to get the basics.
For example, it would be easy to learn about sunk costs.
It would take me a minute to explain it to you and then you'd know it forever.
It would take me maybe two minutes to explain the entire concept of the discounted value of money.
If you've never heard of it, Maybe you should.
And to understand that money in the future is worth less than money today.
So there are probably a dozen or so basic ways of thinking that are common to different disciplines.
If you've never been exposed to them, let's say your channel in life had been art, If you were an art major, or let's say just a history major, and you were looking at the world of politics, you would be flying totally blind.
Because you would be looking in one window, the window that you learned, your artist window or your history window or whatever, you're looking in one window, you're saying, okay, I see this house and it's a bathroom.
That's it. I'm only looking through one window.
All I see is a bathroom.
I gotta go. That's a delivery.
But if you can see through more windows, you can see the world better.
And that's what Loser Think is about, teaching you to look in all the windows.
I hope you get it. Pre-order now on Amazon.
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