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Oct. 29, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
56:50
Episode 708 Scott Adams: Latest Examples of #Loserthink From Pundits, Bernie’s Empty Shelves
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One of the best. So we got lots of fun things in the news.
Was it yesterday?
I'm losing track of time.
Was it yesterday that I said I wanted to try to get Matt Gaetz to be a guest on my Periscopes?
And I said you should all follow him on Twitter and maybe if he gets 10,000 new followers in a day, That would get his attention, and he would say, hey, okay, I'll be on your Periscope for 15 minutes.
So what happened?
In 24 hours, you amazing, sexy, and brilliant people gave Matt Gaetz 10,000 new followers.
I swear to God, sometimes I think I'm writing this simulation.
Had I asked for 12,000, would it have been 12,000?
I don't know. I said, let's get him 10,000 followers, and the next day I check, it's like, it's about 10,000 new followers.
Not exactly, but somewhere in that neighborhood.
And since then, Matt Gaetz has said yes, and we are scheduled for tomorrow.
So tomorrow, Congressman Matt Gaetz will appear on this Periscope, assuming the technology works.
It'll be the first time he's used Periscope as a guest, so I don't know if it'll work on the first try, but that's the plan.
All right. I love the fact that Trump not only released the photo of the hero dog, But he pinned it.
It's pinned on his Twitter feed.
He decided that that was the most important thing to pin to his Twitter feed, the picture of this adorable dog.
Now, somebody asked me about that in terms of persuasion.
I don't think I have to tell you.
People like dogs.
We love dogs.
There's only one thing that the public likes better than dogs.
It's not people.
I think you'd agree, right?
I think we all like, you know, there are a few people who don't like dogs, but in general, people like dogs more than they even like people.
We certainly like dogs more than we like politicians, generally speaking.
So having this dog as sort of the face of the operation was pretty good.
But there is one thing.
There is one thing we like better than dogs.
What is it? Hero dogs.
That's right. There's nothing better than a hero dog.
Oh, wait, wait.
I'm getting a message in my ear.
No, there's one thing we like better than hero dogs.
Wounded, purple heart, hero dogs, bam.
Most popular thing in the world.
So Trump is quite...
Cleverly putting that dog forward, and it has the secondary value of putting ISIS in its place.
What is ISIS? Is ISIS that brutal but effective organization that is capturing territory and threatening the entire civilization of the world?
Whoa, that's so last year.
Well, so last administration, really.
Today, ISIS is the organization whose leader was beaten by a dog.
Literally. Not only did the dog get there first, but the dog caused him to murder his own children before taking his own life.
Well, actually, at the same time.
I think the dog gets the kill.
Because there's no report that there was a human at least pointing a gun at him at the time that happened.
So, good for the dog.
Now compare the way Trump is managing this whole situation to, let's say, somebody who is allegedly at the same level and should be able to persuade just as well.
Let's take Bernie Sanders, for example.
What's the latest photo of Bernie Sanders?
Actually, it's a video. A video of Bernie Sanders talking to the public.
He's standing with Representative Tlaib, and the two of them...
I'm not even making this up.
This sounds like a joke.
I swear to God, this is true.
He did a video...
Standing in front of empty store shelves, the socialists did a video in which they stood in front of empty store shelves.
Now, what was Bernie talking about in his video?
Hell if I know. I even watched a little bit of the video and I don't know what he was talking about.
I mean, I probably knew when I watched it.
Completely uninterested in what he had to say.
But the visual. Oh, my God!
Could you come up with the worst visual if you're running to be a socialist?
An empty store shelf?
Now, let me ask you this.
Try to imagine this.
This is almost impossible to imagine, which is the reason I'm asking you to do it.
Imagine Trump.
Here's the hard part.
Imagine he was running as a socialist.
It's impossible, really, to imagine that.
But just imagine it. Can you imagine Trump agreeing to stand in front of empty shelves while doing a video while running to be a socialist president?
You cannot. It's literally unimaginable.
Do you think that Trump, when he's asked to be on a video of any kind, you know, let's say he has some control over the video, Do you think that he doesn't look what's behind him?
He does!
I'm not reading his mind.
I'm just saying that if you have a certain skill set for persuasion, you don't not look what's behind you.
That's sort of Persuasion 101.
Context, who else is in it?
What's the camera angle? How's my lighting?
How's my makeup? How's my hair?
Am I wearing a good suit?
Is it well-pressed? Is my necktie straight?
Do you think Trump lets any of that go?
No way! There isn't the slightest possibility That Trump would have made an enormous, enormous mistake like that, standing in front of empty shelves to do a video that he knows the world is going to look at.
Incredible! Alright, there's a lot of bickering on TV. About whether or not President Trump's description of the final moments of al-Baghdadi is accurate or not.
Was he actually whimpering and crying in his final moments?
Are you kidding me?
Let me remind you of something.
Do you know who writes history?
I'll wait.
Yeah, who writes history?
Is it...
Baghdadi? No, he can't write any history because he's resting in pieces.
No, Baghdadi will not be writing any history.
How about the other people in ISIS who are dead?
Will they be writing any history?
No, no.
No, the dead people don't write history.
How about the people who are still alive in ISIS, but they're hiding?
Will they write history?
No. No, they don't get to write history.
Do you know who gets to write history?
The dog. Because the dog's the winner.
The dog is who beat al-Baghdadi.
The dog gets to write history.
But, but, you're probably ahead of me here, dogs can't talk, right?
Well, maybe this one can.
I wouldn't be surprised if the military had a talking dog.
I don't think so.
But, you know, they're always a few years ahead in their technology.
President Trump won the war.
He killed Baghdadi.
Who gets to write history?
I don't make the rules.
I didn't make the rules.
President Trump wrote us some history.
And the history he wrote is that al-Baghdadi was whimpering and crying until the end.
That's it.
That's your history.
Is it true? Is it true?
Do I care?
Do you? What's the best history?
Doesn't matter what's the best one.
The only one you're going to get is the one that's written by the winners.
Now, here's my advice to the critics of the president.
Find something else to criticize.
Because really, it's a target-rich environment, right?
I'm pretty sure you can find something.
You can make something up about Russia.
You could make something up about Ukraine and his phone call.
Maybe you could call it less than perfect.
But can we just agree as a country that we won this round and that we get the right?
We get the right to history.
And I don't mind if the president does the first draft.
So let him write a history.
Is it exactly accurate?
Is any of your history accurate?
Think about it. Is any of your history accurate?
I think the names and dates are accurate, but is the motivation, the details, the variables, you know, who did what and why, and what should have happened, what could have happened, who made the decision, Is any of that accurate?
Probably not.
Probably not.
Not in any country.
Because the winners write the history.
Not the objective observers.
Objective observers don't get the opportunity.
It's not their job. You know, they could try to fix things in biographies later, but good luck with that.
All right. So here's the worst take from the pundits on that whole Baghdaddy thing.
I saw some pundits speculate that perhaps we had some video in the tunnel.
Maybe it was on a dog or a drone or whatever.
I'm guessing dog.
And somebody suggested that maybe we had a video camera on the dog, but not audio.
What? It's 2019.
Do you think there's anybody who said, let's design a camera for a dog, and the dog is supposed to sort of go into danger first, so we can see what's happening before we send humans in there.
Let's put a video on the dog, and then some engineer says, and audio of course, right?
Do you think there was anybody in the room who said, no audio?
No audio? I don't think so.
I think that's sort of automatic.
Now, here's a perfect example of loser think.
Loser think, as I define it, is not being dumb per se.
Rather, it's simply not being exposed to certain domains and ways of thinking that would be more productive.
Here's what these pundits apparently are not exposed to.
Technology. If you worked in the technology field and you heard that the dog had a video camera, Is there any doubt in your mind, if you have any background or knowledge in technology, is there any doubt in your mind that it also had audio?
Of course not. Of course I had audio.
You would need to know this much about the world, about how economics and how the law works, I'll explain that in a second, and how technology works.
You would know that the audio portion of the technology is so trivially cheap, especially if you're already streaming the video, for God's sakes, it's probably in the same signal.
You would know it's there.
I think maybe people had a blind spot because a lot of our security cameras have no video.
Why do the security cameras that you see in public everywhere have no video?
I'm sorry, they have video, but why do they have no audio?
Because that's the law.
The law says you can't have these public security cameras that also have audio because you don't want it picking up private conversations.
That's the law. It's not the technology.
I'm pretty sure they could put audio on any video camera they want.
It's 2019, for God's sakes.
All right. The other thing that I would like to remind people, this is the perfect time to do it, is that our military, including the civilian leadership, our military does not have an obligation to give truth to the American public.
You're okay with that, right?
Because I'm okay with that.
I'll say it again, our military has no obligation, no obligation, not even a little bit, to tell the American public, or anybody else, the truth.
Because you can imagine a lot of situations in which the truth works against the objective, and they have one objective, you know, keep the country safe.
That's sort of it.
And if the best way to do that is with a little bit of stretching the truth, maybe you leave out some of your secret techniques, maybe you tell the story in a way that prevents the problems from reoccurring in the future.
So, as we're listening to our military, which we have complete respect for, I think most of you on this Periscope would agree, our respect for our military in the United States is unparalleled.
Probably nobody has that level of respect.
Probably. Definitely.
When you say definitely, nobody has more respect in the United States than our military.
Still, they may be telling us some bullshit sometimes.
I'm going to trust them because they've earned that level of respect and trust.
I'm going to trust them that when they lie to us, because they will, it's for a good reason.
And that I'd be better off with the lie than the truth.
So just keep that in mind.
As information comes out, for example, this is a perfect example.
Is it true that within 24 hours we gave a burial at sea to the remains of Baghdadi?
It might be true.
Could be. I'm guessing no.
How many pieces of Baghdadi did we even find?
I mean, what was left of them?
Was that a priority?
Was it a priority for anybody to get this guy buried in an appropriate way?
No, not at all.
It was nobody's priority.
It wasn't the slightest priority.
But it could be a good play to say we did.
Because by saying we did, it creates an image of our people who are respectful to, let's say, the civilian population who have a set of beliefs.
We'd like to show respect to that, because otherwise it just causes problems.
And why not?
I think we have genuine respect for people's beliefs.
That part's not faking it.
We generally do.
As long as they're not extremist beliefs.
So I would say our military may have lied to us about the efficiency and the details of that burial, let's see.
Good for them. If they did lie, good job.
That's exactly what you should have done, and my respect for you as the military goes up.
If you told us that lie, And it's like a really, really productive one.
I accept it.
I incorporate it as my fake history written by the winners.
And I thank you.
Thank you for your service.
And thank you for that lie, if it was.
I don't know if it was.
Could be true. It's possible.
But keep that straight.
You don't need the truth from your military, if you trust them.
And we do. All right.
So, the other stuff that's happening today is that somebody named Vindman, he said that he registered his objections on the Ukrainian phone call when the President was talking to the President of Ukraine.
And he said that he registered his objections because he was, quote, concerned.
He was concerned that it would affect relations with Ukraine, it would make things too political, and therefore it would be damaging to relations.
Now, remember I told you that there are all these words that the anti-Trumpers are using, the Trump critics?
They're using words in replace of facts.
As substitutes. So they tend to talk about what might have happened or what could happen, short of anything bad actually happening.
So instead of saying, he did something bad, they say, well, something bad might happen.
And we register the something bad might happen as almost as powerful as if something happened.
So it's a good trick to replace facts of things that are happening with words that make it just as scary without those things actually happening.
Here's another one of those words.
He was concerned.
And do you know who I'm concerned about?
All of you. I'm concerned about all of you.
Some of you might commit a crime today.
Some of you might make bad decisions.
I'm concerned about everybody.
Like, literally concerned.
I'm interested. If there's anybody in my circle, my friends, etc., I'm always concerned.
I hope they make the right choices, and if they made the wrong choices, I would be sad.
So, watch for these little clever words that are substitutes for actual information.
This guy was concerned.
How concerned should you be about somebody else who was concerned?
Here's another word that people use instead of facts.
I thought the phone call with the Ukrainian president was problematic.
Okay. Can you be a little less specific than that?
Problematic. I'm concerned.
I'm concerned. It's problematic.
If it's true, it's big.
Somebody might tell us something that's bad.
When I talk about persuasion, I'm often saying what the president did right and the Democrats get wrong, as I already have with Bernie on this very call and with the president about the dog.
So you're very used to me saying the president's getting everything right persuasion-wise, the other side's blowing it, more or less.
But let me tell you, the side that's pushing impeachment They're doing a really good job.
They're doing a really good job.
There's something happening that because you're focused on the details, you're missing.
Democrats managed to start with talking about impeachment on day one of his presidency.
And on day one, what did you think about impeachment?
Wild, crazy, political, ridiculous.
Sort of ignore it.
That was day one.
Day two, kind of the same.
Day three, pretty much the same.
A few months later, now you're thinking, I sure am hearing a lot about impeachment.
And just because of repetition and time, The Democrats have taken this concept, which seemed just stupid.
It literally just seemed stupid and trivial and barely worth thinking about.
It was like Tom Steyer in his dumb old commercials.
But we just keep hearing more about it and there's a new alleged fact which never really turns into something concrete and the whole Russia collusion thing and yeah, Mueller debunked it all but still there's details and we hear the word impeachment, impeachment, impeachment and now Nancy is doing this new move Where she's doing something that makes it seem, as well as all the interviews with the witnesses, the whistleblowers, etc.
They're going through this sort of impeachment theater, which is having the diabolically clever effect of making the American public start with impeachments.
It's just silly. It's just stuff people are saying.
To actually believing it's likely.
And do you know what impeachable offenses have happened between the time that the president was sworn into office and now?
None. None.
Now, if you're watching the other channels, they'll say, well, 15 things, it's obvious, all these impeachable things.
But if you were to look at any one thing on the list, just pick one.
What's your best thing on the list?
It just sort of disappears when you start digging into it.
Just sort of disappears.
Likewise, the Ukrainian phone call, I don't think there's a slightest chance he could get impeached for the frickin' phone call.
I mean, I've given you my, if I were the defense lawyers for that, I mean, I would tear that apart in a heartbeat.
I'm not even a lawyer. I mean, I could do it.
I'm pretty sure you could do it.
I mean, we could all do it.
But the difference is, even though the evidence is just, here's something debunked, here's something debunked, here's something debunked, here's this Ukrainian thing, it will be debunked, or at least it will seem unimportant in history, unless the impeachers have moved the minds of the public from, stop wasting our time with us, it's stupid, through repetition alone.
Just repetition.
People are starting to think, hmm, I think this is going to happen.
This looks like a legitimate thing that's happening.
So you really miss that because it happens so slowly.
It's like a three-year progression.
The evidence for impeachment is probably worse than it's ever been, I would argue.
It's probably the weakest it's ever been.
Because in the beginning people were saying, hey, he's a racist.
The things he's doing are clearly racist, but now some time goes by and it doesn't look like that as much.
Even to the critics, it probably doesn't look so much like that.
For example, banning the so-called Muslim ban, it passed the Supreme Court, which makes it look a lot less racist, doesn't it?
If something passes the Supreme Court, it can't be that racist.
And then years go by, three years go by, and nobody who got in through that immigration process, the group that were banned, nobody from that banned group has done any terrorist acts in this country.
So it feels like it sort of worked.
No matter how you felt about it on day one.
And I could go through the examples.
There's the prison reform.
There's the support for the historically black colleges.
There's the president saying almost every day what he's done for African-American employment.
I could go down the list.
You all know the list. So the things that people thought were big deals.
He's going to nuke us.
He's going to destroy the economy.
He's going to put gay people in prison camps.
All the crazy stuff.
Has been proven by time and experience and observation not to be what anybody thought they might have been in the beginning.
But does it matter that they've debunked one thing after another for three years?
It doesn't. Your collective feeling is that impeachment is more likely, even though the evidence for it has decreased.
Because I think the Ukraine thing is nothing but vapors.
There's no chance of impeachment with any of that.
But I think the president also reached a point, you know, through trial and error, eventually he was going to do something that even some Republicans would say, hey, even we Republicans need to disavow that or, you know, it seems politically incorrect or whatever.
So sooner or later you were going to get some Republicans to say, at least on this minor topic, we don't agree with the president.
But there we are. Let's talk about some more persuasion.
There's a video of Yang doing karaoke at one of his events.
I don't have to tell you.
Well, I guess I do have to tell you.
He's not such a great karaoke singer.
But I loved watching it, because here's the thing.
Yang is apparently fearless.
And people really respond to that.
People respond to a lack of fear.
It's one of the strongest ways you can bond people to you as a leader.
So watching Yang go out there and doing something that clearly he had to know is not his sweet spot of skill.
Just went out in public and just...
He seemed to give a completely uninhibited, bad version of karaoke...
To which I said, number one, that's some bad karaoke I'm hearing.
And number two, I thought, I like him better.
I could actually feel it.
I could feel myself liking him more because he was uninhibited.
It's a very attractive quality in a human being, just to be uninhibited.
You know, you've heard the old saying, dance like nobody's watching.
He sang karaoke like nobody was watching, like nothing could embarrass him.
I love that quality in people, and most of us do.
When we recognize a lack of fear in people, and by the way, Trump has this like crazy.
Have you ever seen Trump look actually worried about anything?
He actually seems fearless.
It's a strong quality for a leader, so Yang has that, so he did a good job on that.
Let's talk about Kamala.
So Kamala decided to go full Hillary Clinton, and I don't mean that in a good way, in an interview she blamed race and sexism discrimination for low poll numbers.
Are you freaking kidding me?
Kamala Harris in 2019 is asking whether a woman or a person of color Can become president in these racist days.
To which I say, where have you been for the last 8 to 10 years?
You know we elected somebody named Barack Hussein Obama twice.
You did notice that Hillary won the popular vote by 3 million votes.
And in my view, she shattered the glass ceiling.
What I mean by that is even though she didn't get the job, that was for electoral college reasons, etc., but Hillary Clinton certainly proved that a woman can get elected.
Beyond that, I believe that the experts are saying that a female candidate actually has a voting advantage, meaning that people will line up to vote for a female president and prefer it.
There's a slight preference for a female candidate overall.
And I think to myself, Kamala is doing the most basic mistakes anybody can ever make.
You know, I've given some Periscope talks in detail about how what makes, what made Barack Obama so good, persuasion-wise, is that when he ran for president, he didn't make a big deal about being black.
He kind of left that as something for other people to talk about.
Exactly, brilliantly right.
It was reading perfectly what the non-black population needed to hear.
You know, I think people were, I can speak for myself here and probably lots of other people, I think people wanted a black president.
Just to sort of say we could, you know, get past it.
And when one came along who seemed to have the qualifications, and this is important, was not telling us every day that he's a black candidate, made people who are not black say, I like that.
He's leading with capability.
I can get behind that.
Let's not talk about the race stuff.
I'm bored with it. I think it's overdone.
I'll just vote for this guy.
He seems to have some capabilities that I like.
And people liked him so much they voted him in again.
So Kamala could not be playing this worse.
It's the biggest mistakes, in my view.
Well, Hillary made quite a few mistakes.
But one of her biggest mistakes was pressing the sexism-gender thing, when if she had just shut up about it, a lot more people would have said, I like that.
She's running for president. She is a woman, but she's not talking about that.
That's exactly what men...
Wanted to hear, and she didn't give it to us.
I mean, she could have gotten a lot more men just by saying, don't vote for me because I'm a woman.
You know, we should be past that.
Just vote for me because you like my policies or whatever.
Had Hillary done that, I would feel a lot better about her.
But she actually went all the way to saying that women have, that there's There's an advantage to a woman because they have more empathy or they listen better or something.
She actually said that in public.
Hillary did. Huge mistakes.
Huge. All right.
So I'll say again that I don't think I've seen a worse campaigner than Kamala Harris to the point where I've got to really wonder who the hell is advising her.
I mean, she's making...
You know, she has like 10 choices every day, and she's picking the worst one every time.
Like, every time. You couldn't do worse than this.
The only thing she could do worse is say she's anti-dog this week.
You know, you can see her come out and say, I'm anti-dog.
I hate dogs. Just when we're talking about the hero dog.
All right. China.
China allegedly says they're going to...
I felt like this was old news, but it got recycled today.
There's something new about it.
I don't know what it is. But China said they would ease foreign investments, ease the curbs on foreign investments.
In other words, people want to invest in China or move production there.
They said they would get rid of some of the rules, such as forcing technology transfers, etc.
Do you believe that?
They have an unbroken record of violating every agreement we've ever had, including the WTO, basically everything.
Why would we believe China on anything?
Now, there's something I've said before, but I've got a little more information on it and I'm going to suggest it again.
I'm going to combine two concepts.
Remember I told you the other day that the most important thing you will ever know about management, you don't have to get an MBA, you don't have to be an experienced manager to know one of the most important things about management.
It's easy, and it's this.
The things you measure are the only things you'll manage to.
If you can't measure whether the things you're doing are working or not, There's almost no chance you're even going to work on it, because you don't even know if the things you do are working.
Now, there could be exceptions to that, but as a good general rule, if you don't have a measurement, nothing's going to happen.
The things you can measure are the things that get acted upon.
That's the basic rule of management, and if you violate that, you can't even be a manager.
I mean, that's so basic, you couldn't possibly do your job if you're not measuring your performance in a variety of ways.
But with this trade deal stuff, we have some things that I suppose if they cheated, we could say, ah, you cheated.
But is that a measurement?
We could say, you made an agreement but you didn't keep it.
But that's not really a measurement.
That's a little different.
So they seem to be willing to break any agreement right in front of you.
And I would recommend the following.
I've said this before, and then I did some Googling to see if it already existed, because I'm the king of making suggestions that have already been done.
So I may be doing that again.
What I was looking for is some kind of a country grade or ranking, ranking by country, for whether they are investment grade.
Meaning, does the country have a set of rules and laws and practices that are good for business or bad for business?
So I googled this and I didn't have too much time.
I was doing it just before I went live.
So there are a number of different websites that have a variety of different approaches to ranking countries according to their worthiness, basic worthiness.
But I noticed that they were all kind of specific.
There were some that dealt with just certain elements of being easy to work with and some that dealt with other elements.
And I felt that they were sort of diverse and maybe diluted.
They didn't have much impact, because you don't even know they existed.
I mean, I had to Google it to even find out if it existed.
So here's what I'm suggesting.
I'm suggesting that the United States start, or at least get somebody else to do it, some kind of investment grading, a comprehensive investment grade for countries.
I would expect that the United States, maybe Switzerland or something, would have better scores for reliability and keeping your promises and all that, and that China would be low.
But here's the magic part.
So one part of the magic is that if you have a very public standard and it's a measurement, and you can actually raise your score or lower your score by your actions, that's very powerful.
You don't even have to tell China that they need to conform.
You don't have to force them to do anything.
You just keep publishing the grade.
And Vietnam's moving up the list.
Hey, India, India, we love you.
Looks like you're doing better.
You're moving up the list. You're much better to work with, India.
Oh, China, you're not keeping up.
So sad. Well, that's your business.
We're not going to force you to do anything.
China, you do you.
Do anything you want. But Vietnam's rating is going up and China's rating is going up and Honduras' rating is going up.
Oh, too bad.
Nobody wants to do business with you because your grade is too low.
Now, the beauty of this is if you have an actual ranking, a grade, a website, you can go to a poll, something that's got substance, then you've got something that the president and politicians can refer to.
And they can say, look, as long as China has an investment grade of F, and India has, just hypothetically, I don't know if this is true, and India has an investment grade of, let's say, C-.
Because, you know, they've got some corruption issues too.
They've got some things to work on.
But where are you going to build your factory?
In the F or the C-?
There's no question about it.
You're always going to go for the C minus.
It's way better than an F. So simply naming it, having a dependable, measurable grading system would be immensely powerful, especially if I put China in direct competition with India.
So we should try to do more to make sure that India and China are competing.
All right. Let's see, what else we got going here?
I talked about most of this.
Oh, I think I've...
Oh, here's another fun thing.
A couple of fun things. So I told you I was going to order a Tesla Powerwall for my home if researching it turned out that that was a good thing to do.
And I filled out Tesla's Online things, and they did call me back.
So, Tesla A-plus for having a system in which they got back to me.
I also learned that they don't have a big problem with supply, but it might take maybe two months to go through the process and get something installed, which would be fine.
Two months to get a battery backup for my house would be fine because I'm really preparing for next season, not this one.
This season's gotten lost.
The fire season will be over in a few weeks before I would get a battery anyway.
Let me give you a little bit more about that process.
Somebody says, how much?
All right, and that's what I'm going to talk about next.
So what I expected was that the system, that the process would work this way.
I thought I would contact Tesla, you know, say who I am and what I'm looking for.
They would tell me on the phone, oh, we got these products.
It looks like we might have a fit, but here's the important part.
I thought what they were going to do is send somebody out.
An engineer to look at my specific situation and say whether it would work or wouldn't work and if it worked, where could they put it?
Because where you locate it makes a big difference, right?
You want to be comfortable with where it's located.
That's what I thought would happen.
That's not what happened. Their process is that they call you.
They do answer any questions.
They're very nice, great on the phone.
But their process is that you get homework.
So they send you a link and Which I haven't done yet.
And they ask you to take pictures of your existing solar.
If you have existing solar, you take pictures.
And you send them in and you answer a bunch of questions about your existing system, etc.
And then they can engineer a price.
And then at some point, they'll schedule delivery, and you pay $99 just to get in the system.
Now, I think it's refundable if you end up not buying, but there is a commitment.
You put in $99 investment that you can get back.
Now, here's the question.
Do you think I'm going to do those things?
Do you think I'm going to walk out and take pictures with my phone and fill out the form and spend half a day knowing in advance that they're going to contact me and say I don't have the right pictures and that I need to take more pictures and get back to them again?
Probably not. All they had to do was say we're going to send somebody out They're really going to make sure this works in your house.
You're going to talk to them in person.
They're going to point to your wall, say, uh-huh, uh-huh, well, I see your solar.
Okay, we would connect here, and we'd have to put the device over there.
Are you good to go?
I would have said, you got me.
Good to go. Instead, they asked me to do homework.
Let me ask you this. If you're ever in the sales job and you ask your customer to do homework before you will consider selling them your product, that's as bad as you can do.
That's as bad as you can do.
Now, I understand why they'd want to automate their system as much as possible, and I also think it probably works fine 90% of the time.
Yeah, probably most of the time it works fine if you have a smaller house, etc.
But I've got a big complicated house.
I don't know how many units I would need, etc.
So I think, Tesla, you probably failed on this sales process because I can't imagine myself having time to do this in the next several weeks.
I've got the book tour coming up, etc.
So And here's the worst part.
The other thing I was considering was a standard gas generator backup.
By gas, I mean natural gas.
So since I already have natural gas coming from the utility, if my electrical cut off, the natural gas would automatically power up the system.
Generac, I think, is the company that makes most of them.
And I wasn't even going to research that option.
As long as Tesla sends somebody out and said, yeah, we'll start tomorrow, or whatever they said.
But now I have to, because it might be easier if I call Generac, and if they say, I don't know if they'll say that, but if they say, we'll send somebody out to your house to take a look, that's what I'm going to buy.
I'm going to buy the one that says I'm sending somebody to take a look at your house.
And somebody says I'll need a tank also.
I don't know if I do because it's natural gas that's being pumped in on demand from the utility.
All right, so Tesla, that system probably failed in my case, but it probably works for simpler cases.
That was an update on that.
Here's the funniest news.
Netflix is experimenting with a new technology that lets you speed up the movie.
So you can just put it at like 1.5%.
Sort of like a podcast. So you can do that now with podcasts.
You can speed it up. So that if people talk like this, you can still hear exactly what they're saying, but they're talking a little bit faster than they normally think.
You can get through an entire podcast much faster because people are talking so fast.
And so they're talking about making that available optionally to people who want to speed through movies.
And here's the funny part.
So, of course...
All the big directors are, you know, the creative types are complaining because it ruins their art.
So Judd Apatow, coincidentally a big critic of President Trump, he says, quote, in a tweet, don't make me have to call every director and show creator on earth to fight you on this.
Tweeted Director Judd Apatow.
I will win, but it will take a ton of time.
Don't F with our timing.
We give you nice things.
Leave them as they were intended to be seen.
Okay. I certainly understand why the creators would say that.
And let me tell you, if somebody tries to mess with my comic strip, I respond exactly this way.
So you want your creators to have this attitude.
So Judd Apatow's attitude is perfect for a creator and for somebody who supports creators.
But here's the thing.
Movies are no longer good.
Right? Movies are no longer good.
They used to be good. Movies used to be good.
But here's what's wrong with movies.
Our attention span has shrunk at the same time that movies are getting longer.
Movies are getting longer, but our attention span is getting shorter.
It's now mismatched.
So if you want me to watch a movie, and let's say it's a drama action movie, If I turn on an action movie, how many action movies eventually have a scene where somebody is tied to a chair to be tortured?
Let me think.
A hundred percent? A hundred percent of movies have that same stupid fucking scene which nobody who is a creator should ever be proud to put their name on?
If you made a movie and at any point in that movie you had somebody tied to a chair and tortured, you are not a creator.
You're a copier. You're just a copier.
Do I care if I'm speeding up the work of a copier?
No. No.
Am I ruining their art?
Because I sped through the time when somebody was tied to a stupid chair and tortured like every other frickin' action movie you've ever seen?
Have I ruined their art?
No. There was no art.
They wanted me to feel bad for X amount of time and I decided not to.
Do you know what else I would fast forward through?
Car chase. Because the car chases have all taken on, well, the action scenes, even a lot of the fight scenes, have taken on that, I'll call it the Transformers model, where there's so much happening, they don't actually know who's doing what to whom, except you can vaguely tell that the good guy is winning a little bit or losing a little bit.
I'm just not interested anymore.
The first thousand times I saw a fight scene, I thought, well, that's cool, good effects, exciting.
But after watching the same damn thing a thousand times, I might want to fast forward through that.
How about a sex scene? How about the scene where they're establishing that the character really loves his wife, because, you know, the wife is going to die later?
How about that? The moment you realize that the next 10 minutes of your movie are going to be some guy sweet-talking his wife in a way that makes you cringe.
Oh, baby, I love you so much.
Oh, whatever the hell it is.
Do you think that's art?
No. No, it's not art.
There's no art there.
They just have to have this scene that establishes that the guy loves his wife, so when she dies, you know why he goes crazy and kills everybody.
I get it. I get where you're going.
Okay, I get this. I get it.
You're going to make me sit here for 10 minutes to tell me something I got in one second.
He loves his wife. He's going to care when she gets killed.
Bored. Fast forward.
So I say to Joe Napatow, as a creator, I totally understand.
I would say exactly the same thing.
If I were you, I would say exactly the same thing.
So I wouldn't call this a criticism.
Because I don't criticize people who do exactly what I would do in that situation.
But you have to understand that movies are no longer good because they don't have our attention span in mind and they're so uncreative, copycat, every movie looks alike now that it's just, you know, there are a hundred scenes and all they're doing is rearranging them in different order and saying, ah, I got a movie.
No. No.
It's all the scenes I've seen in every other movie.
You just put them in a different order, that's all.
Anyway, I, for one, would be a big fan of a movie speed-up feature, because I already fast-forwarded through most movies, the boring parts, and they all have boring parts.
The funniest thing was, who was the director who was criticizing the superhero movies?
Was it Coppola?
Francis Ford Coppola?
I don't know. But there was some famous director who was recently saying that all the superhero movies, you know, the Marvel stuff, is not really cinema.
To which I say, do you know why there are lots of superhero movies?
And there isn't so much, at least in terms of box office success, there's not a lot of that great art and cinema.
Do you know why that is? Because people don't want to see it.
We don't care. We don't want your great art cinema because we already know it's just a bunch of scenes we've seen a thousand times reordered with different lighting and different cinematography.
It's the same movie, just over and over again.
I like watching my superhero movies because watching Robert Downey Jr.
make wisecracks is just always good.
At least I like that part.
All right. I think I've covered most of my points that I want to talk about today.
I should put these things in order so I can tell what I've already talked about.
All right. I think I hit all my points.
Let me suggest to you Today is an excellent time to order my book.
You can order the audiobook or the Kindle version.
Wherever books are sold, Amazon or wherever you like.
Oh, I heard recently that this book will be in the front window of Barnes& Noble through Christmas.
Do you know what a vote of confidence that is?
If Barnes& Noble says we're going to put your book in the window of the stores for several months before Christmas, the best time to be in the window of the bookstore, that's a real good deal.
I've done a number of interviews That are delayed, that will appear after the book hits shelves November 5th.
And people who have read it so far are pretty happy with it, which makes me pretty happy.
So I think people are captivated by a number of the parts that it's already changing how they see the world.
All right. California fires.
Yeah, here's a little update on that.
So the folks that I had staying with me got their power back, but I think they're supposed to lose it again maybe today, so I might have House guests back again.
But watching the whole state burn up, I just don't know how Democrats can even exist as a political party anymore.
So the Democrats get full control of one state, California.
So you've got this laboratory where you can watch whether Democrat policies are good or not.
Now, of course, you know, I always caution you, you don't have something to compare it to that's exact...
California is not really like anything else.
But you certainly are affected by the fact that California is having some tough times and they have pure democratic policies.
I don't know how long you can go without noticing that and having it make a difference.
Punchy De Niro, somebody's asking me about...
I'm not sure why. Is he in the news again?
Yes, there will be an audio book and the Kindle version.
They'll all be available at the same time.
I believe you can pre-order those as well and they just get delivered on November 5th.
So that's next week. You should do that right away because next week is right around the corner.
And if you can get this book on the bestseller list, It will change the world.
It actually will.
It was actually designed so that people who have read this book can just eviscerate in argument the people who have not.
And that's going to become kind of obvious after a while.
Enough people will have their arguments eviscerated and they'll know where it came from.
I feel like this might be a pretty big book.
We'll see. Alright, I will give you Well, that's all for now.
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