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Oct. 31, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
54:27
Episode 710 Scott Adams: The Hero Dog, China Trade Deal, #Shampeachment, Twitter Political Ad Ban
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What a day.
What a day. Come on in here.
Hey, Jerry. Good to see you.
Andrew. Kefefe2020.
And Wordy Snurdy, always a pleasure to see you.
Well, actually, it's your first day, but it's good to have you.
Marla, Jordy, what a pleasure.
You know... Today is one of those fun days.
You know, you ever wake up and you say to yourself, I'm not positive, but I think today's going to be good all day long.
It's Halloween. What could be better?
One of my favorite holidays of the year.
And not only that, but you are about to enjoy a little thing called the simultaneous sip.
Have you heard of it? It's amazing.
And you don't need much.
Not much preparation at all.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, snifter, stein, chalice, tanker, thermos, flask, canteen, grail, goblet, vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better on Halloween.
The simultaneous sip.
Go. Oh!
Oh, I can taste the simultaneity.
Connecting me to all people drinking a beverage anywhere in the world at the same time.
Yes, we are one. We are one.
Well, you'd be disappointed if I talked about anything except the hero dog.
Have you ever had more fun talking about a political topic than everything about the dog?
From the very first time you heard the report that there might have been a dog with a camera on his head who chased the number one ISIS guy into a tunnel and made him blow up himself and his children it started good from the jump.
And then it just kind of kept getting better.
I don't know how far we can milk this dog, so to speak.
I wouldn't want to milk a dog, but you know what I mean.
So, of course, you all saw the hilarious story yesterday.
The president, who has by far the best sense of humor and sense of showmanship of any president, and I'll even go further and say, we'll probably never have a funnier president.
Or one who understands the show, you know, how to put on a show.
So he tweets this picture around that was, of course, a photoshopped picture of the president putting something like a dog version of a Medal of Honor around a dog's neck.
And as you know, as you know, the media decided to fact check it.
Now, if I'm being totally honest, If I'm being totally honest, the first moment I saw the picture, I thought to myself, that could be real.
But I also had the foresight to expand the picture and look for the telltale Photoshop edges, which are quite obviously in the photo.
So if you use Photoshop every day, It's not hard to, you know, you just click on it, expand it, and say, oh yeah, that's Photoshopped.
You can see the edges. But I suppose if you didn't have experience with Photoshop...
Such as Jim Acosta.
Maybe he doesn't use a lot of Photoshop.
He fact-checked it.
He asked the White House if the dog was there.
Now, I talk about this in my book, Loser Think, which you should pre-order today because it will arrive on November 5th, and you'll be the first ones to learn what was wrong with Jim Acosta.
But let me summarize.
Loser think is about having at least a little bit of experience in multiple fields so that you have more visibility about your reality.
Every one of you who has experience with Photoshop looked at that picture and said to yourself, you know, I'm exaggerating when I say every one of you, but you know what I mean.
You probably looked at it and said, Probably Photoshop.
Let me see. Click.
Oh yeah, it's Photoshop.
So just a little bit of experience with Photoshop would have completely changed how you saw that story.
And a couple of journalists apparently are not Photoshop users and looked at that and thought, better check on this.
And then of course you saw all the The hilarious memes that came after that.
My favorite one is it shows the president giving a medal to Chewbacca in the Oval Office.
Oh, God. So I guess the name of the dog has been released.
So the president has named him.
His name is Conan. And he said that, and then today the president tweeted this.
He said, thank you, Daily Wire, because they're the ones who did the Photoshop tweet, I guess.
Very cute to recreation.
But the live version of Conan, the dog, will be leaving the Middle East for the White House sometime next week.
He's leaving for the White House.
Does that mean... That he's just going to appear at the White House and they'll have a ceremony in which he puts a medal around the dog's neck.
Is that going to happen?
Please. Please.
Please let that happen.
I don't know.
It doesn't need to be a Purple Heart, but some kind of dog medal would be just hilarious.
Now, The other question people are asking is whether the president means, when he says the White House, whether he means he's going to adopt the dog and make it the White House dog.
Now, he didn't say anything like that, and he has said before he's too busy to have a dog.
But I'll say again, this dog would be somewhat in danger in a regular house.
If you let this dog just go to some suburban house and say, hey, now you're the dog for the house, somebody might find the dog.
And I think the dog would have a little danger because there must be somebody in the country who's pro-ISIS. And so how better to protect the dog until the end of its noble life than to make it The president's dog.
Because even when he's an ex-president, he'll still have secret service.
He'll still have people to take care of the dog.
The president never needs to touch the dog.
Somebody said, you know, what if the dog attacks the president?
Well, I'm pretty sure the dog's well-trained.
I don't know all the details there, but, you know, we have leashes and we have handlers, and if you're a billionaire, you can afford a handler.
So, here's the thing.
Can you imagine...
A better, more perfect outcome.
Especially, you know, I have to say this because it's an election context for everything we do.
But can you imagine anything better for Trump's image, his election, or just for the best show in the world to adopt the dog and make it the White House dog?
Would... Let me ask you this.
The moment you saw, and just hypothetically, I'm not predicting he'll do it.
Here are the two facts you need to know.
Trump, I think you'll agree with this, is the best showman we've ever seen, certainly in the realm of politics, but I would argue in any realm.
He's the greatest showman ever.
The world has ever seen.
You know, partly because social media allows him to expand his influence.
But I would say, in the history of humanity, if you count his skill, his office, and the fact that we have all these tools of mass communication, by far the best showman of all time.
Now, keep that in your head, and then ask yourself, what would be the best show of all time?
Adopting the hero dog in the White House.
Are you with me? Can you imagine a better show?
You can't. You just can't imagine it.
Now, there might be real practical limitations to him doing it.
For example, if the dog has already been adopted or the handler is retiring and wants to go with his dog, if the handler is retiring, you know, the one who's primarily responsible for the dog, Maybe the dog's best life is with the handler.
So, you know, that's a determination, too.
But I know you agree with me.
Best showman of all time.
Access to, if he does it, the best show of all time.
Adopting the hero dog.
Now, I think this was Greg Guffeld's original suggestion.
So, credit where due.
I did not see that coming.
But maybe he did.
We'll see. All right.
There's all kinds of stuff happening with social media, which you would expect about the election.
So we've got Devin Nunes is suing Twitter for, I guess, allowing untrue things about him to remain on the internet.
And I don't know the details of this.
I guess he's claiming that Twitter can identify the bots And because they're letting the bots spread disinformation about him, something like that.
I don't know the details.
But I'm just mentioning this as context.
So that's going on. At the same time that Jack Dorsey had announced yesterday, I guess, that Twitter would no longer take political ads.
And when I first heard that, I thought, I think I have to think about this some more.
Because I'm not sure...
How does this affect the world?
My first impression was, was positive.
Because I thought, ah, just get rid of all these stupid ads.
Because political ads are generally worthless lies.
They're not entertaining. They barely change anybody's mind.
But, you know, you only have to change 1% to win an election.
And I thought, maybe that's just the safest thing to do, because otherwise they're in the business of spreading lies, because political ads are pretty much just lies.
And why should they be in the business of spreading lies?
So I thought from a, let's say, ethical, what's good for the world kind of point of view, coming out in favor of not spreading known lies is kind of supportable, right?
But the ramifications of that, we'll see.
Brad Parscale was not happy, the head of Trump's campaign and the digital guru of all things.
He points out correctly that the campaign who has the most money and the most sophisticated, best digital operation...
Is the one who gets hurt the most.
Because if you have the most money to buy ads, then somebody says you can't buy ads anymore.
Well, that hurts you the most.
So then other people are saying, can you imagine that Twitter would ever make this decision if we were not in this exact situation where Trump had the advantage?
Would he? Would he not?
I don't know. It seems like we would probably be here no matter what, because no matter who is running and no matter who is ahead, you still have the problem that the ads are lies, and why would you want them on your platform?
Even though, you know, social media is full of citizens lying, it's sort of different when people want to be president or lying.
So, but here's the thing.
When Twitter says it won't accept political ads, the way Jack Dorsey explains it is, he says, we don't want to be selling reach.
So when you put an ad on Twitter, it's not as if you can't just do a tweet.
So the president can tweet an ad, Or, you know, he can tweet anything he wants.
And anybody who creates an ad, they can tweet it.
They just can't pay extra to have it sent to people who are not following that account.
What I would ask you, if you were Brad Parscale's operation and the tweets that you make are both hilarious and well-produced, you probably get a lot of retweets just for free.
Well, what you don't get is that content crossing out of your silo of the people who follow you already and basically are already going to vote for Trump.
You just don't get any of the other people because nobody's paying attention.
They're not following you necessarily.
I think the president might be an exception.
He probably has people who are not his followers following him.
I mean, he has people who don't vote for him following him, I assume.
Lots of them. So maybe he can tweet stuff and that gives him some advantage.
But it's going to be hard to figure out how this all sorts out.
And at the same time, we've got Facebook, Zuckerberg, saying he's going to go the other direction.
He's still going to accept political ads.
But in his case, he says they don't want to be in the business of policing truth, and he would rather keep the fake, untrue ads up there.
And I assume this is what he means, let other people comment on it and say it's not true.
And that's the best...
The best disinfectant for lies is free speech in this model.
He didn't say that, but that's my interpretation, is that the more free speech, the better, and that's your only defense against lies, is maximum freedom of speech.
Is he right? I don't know.
You know, all these things are pretty gray, aren't they?
Because, so now, Twitter went a different way, which seems cleaner.
I like... I think I prefer...
I don't know.
They both made...
I think both Twitter and Facebook have made reasonable decisions that reasonable people can disagree with.
It's all really gray.
And I don't envy them having to even make these decisions because there's sort of no way to win.
But let me put a summary on all of these social media changes.
The net effect...
Wait for this. This will be my big jaw-dropping moment that you have to think about all day long.
Are you ready? The net effect of all these Twitter, Facebook, advertising, etc.
changes is we don't know what form of government we have.
Because I've told you before that we used to be something like a republic when the government was formed, and that meant we would elect people who would be our representatives and they would go off and make decisions on our behalf.
Really good system when your best communication is horse.
Here, take this letter on your horse three days later and deliver it somewhere.
So in those days it made sense to have a republic because you didn't have an option.
There was no way to get everybody to vote on everything, etc.
Time goes by, social media becomes the dominant way that people communicate and find news and just live their life.
And completely accidentally, the power of social media became the government.
So that's my interpretation.
That whatever social media decides the government needs to do, sooner or later the government needs to do it.
So we're at a point where the government is now not a republic, where we elect these people and then they make their own best judgment about how to support their people.
We have a system in which social media makes a decision.
In essence, you know, because it forms some kind of a consensus.
It informs the politicians what they can and cannot get away with.
And then they just, they sort of have to conform.
Now, of course, there'll be exceptions.
There'll be times when the politician goes against the weight of social media.
But those will be very selective times because they know they can't always be on the wrong side of social media.
So, in effect, social media is our government.
Informally, because it has so much power, power of opinion, power to shape the next election, you know, power.
But now we don't know what social media is or how it works, because the two biggest platforms, the ones that matter to politics, Facebook and Twitter, have made changes that are different changes.
And we don't exactly know, once you throw in the bots, once you throw in, I don't know what this does when you can't buy reach, what does it do to the way the campaigns are going to operate?
We actually lost sight of what our government is, and now it's lost in the algorithm.
Think about this.
We actually don't understand, nor is it possible.
The smartest person in the world At this moment, the smartest person in the world would not be capable, no matter how much research they did or how much access they had to base information.
The smartest person in the world now could not determine our form of government.
Because it's something with bots.
Certainly it includes foreign interference because we can't stop it on social media.
I mean, you can do what you can do, but you can't stop it.
Then there's the algorithm of Twitter.
And, you know, the no ads, what's that look like?
You know, who gets an advantage in that?
I mean, it's completely, you know, gray.
We just look into it and we go, I don't know.
It looks like it's bad for Trump, but what about the next election?
Who's it bad for? I don't know.
And then let me take it a little bit further.
So in the news today, there's news that Kamala Harris is running out of money, or at least she's decided to scale back her campaign and spend less, because she's not fundraising as big as well as the top people.
Likewise, Biden is considered in trouble because he's running out of money.
Now let me ask you, who voted for Kamala yet?
And who voted for Joe Biden yet?
Nobody. Nobody voted for Kamala.
Nobody voted for Joe Biden.
And they might have to get kicked out of the primaries, in effect, by running out of money.
So let me ask you this.
Do we have a system of government that's a republic in which the people vote, and then their vote is heard, and then our representative goes off and makes votes on their behalf?
Nope. Nope, we do not.
We have a system in which the people who are donating are absolutely deciding who is running.
And what system does that look like?
What system are you reminded of in which there's a free election, but there's a catch?
The only people who can be in the election have been sort of selected by Small group.
What does that system remind you of?
Answer? Iran.
I just described Iran's system of government.
In Iran, you can run for president, but only if the ruling clerics, primarily the Ayatollah, say you can run.
So the only people who get to be on the ballot are the ones selected, not by the people, but by somebody in charge.
We've accidentally drifted into something like that system, where the only people who can run as a Democrat will be the ones who get the most money.
Now, Bernie tried to break the system by getting small donations, and successfully.
And apparently he's still drawing the most people at his rallies.
The fact that an 80-year-old socialist is drawing the most attention at his rallies and getting small donations and stuff is really a credit to Bernie.
I've got to say, while I don't think he should be president, I don't think he's got the right policies, etc., and I don't want an 80-year-old to be president, you have to respect his game.
My God, he's good.
And his energy, his recovery from his heart attack, it's hard not to have a good degree of respect for Bernie, even if you don't want him to be president.
He's doing a heck of a job.
But here's my overall point.
We no longer know what our system of government is, because it's something about the people with money determining who can have enough money to even be in the primary and get through it.
It's something about whatever Twitter's doing, whatever Facebook is doing, whatever other countries are doing.
And whatever influencers on social media are doing and whose lies are the most effective.
Then, on top of that, we have this whole sham impeachment thing going on that will have probably an effect on the election.
And what does a sham impeachment have to do with our system of government?
Was there any time when the founders of the country were drawing up the Constitution and they said, you know what we need?
We have a rule for impeachment.
But what we need is something else.
We also need a rule for a sham impeachment.
You know, an impeachment that's just a sham, where they don't use the actual rules of impeachment, but rather they pretend they are to create news that makes the public think there's an impeachment process going on.
We'll just, no, it's not an impeachment.
Today we're just going to vote on the rules of impeachment.
If there were an impeachment, we'll know what our rules would be.
Now what's the public here?
Well, sounds like he's getting impeached.
So we have lost all connection to a form of government that ever made sense.
It's now the Wild West.
And in the Wild West, the best gunfighter is going to win.
And who's the best gunfighter in politics today?
Rhetorical question?
Trump. Trump is by far the best gunfighter in the Wild West, and politics just became Wild West.
I don't think anybody's going to beat the best gunfighter, especially if he gets a hero dog for the White House.
All right. Hillary Clinton is mad at Facebook for their decision to allow false information in political advertisements.
She calls it appalling.
It's appalling. Voters are being confronted by millions of pieces of misinformation.
A world where up is down and down is up is a world where democracy can't thrive.
Let me translate this for you.
I'm going to translate this from Clintonese into an actual language you understand.
All right, so here's her Clintonese.
Facebook's decision to allow false information in political advertisements is appalling, blah, blah, blah.
Here's what she's saying. Translation, if social media has that kind of power, then my trained journalists who are on my side won't have as much in a relationship.
So Hillary Clinton wants the truth to be something you hear in the news.
She wants that to be your single source of truth.
Now, does that give Democrats an advantage?
Yes, because if you take social media out of the equation, what do people have left to believe?
Well, what they see in the news.
And who controls the news?
Well, most of the Democrats, but of course, there's, I don't know, 40% of the country or whatever it is watching Fox News and getting their news that way.
But for Hillary Clinton to even imagine that Facebook could identify and remove the news that's fake, how in the world is anybody going to decide what's fake?
If anybody could decide what was real and what was fake, we wouldn't have had the Mueller investigation.
We're terrible at understanding what's real and what's not.
We just spent, what, two years listening to Hillary Clinton spout Fake news about Trump being a Russian agent and fake news about Tulsi Gabbard being a Russian asset.
I mean, she's the queen of fake news.
And she's saying that Facebook should crack down on fake news.
She doesn't mean her own.
I think she's assuming that Facebook being a left-leaning organization, famously, that if they decided to police the news, there's no way that wouldn't go in her favor.
Because there's no way you'd put Facebook employees in a room and say, here's an ad from Trump's group, here's an ad from the Democrats.
Can you tell us which one is true?
There's no way that works.
But she wants that because that would be good for Democrats.
Speaking of Tulsi Gabbard, I did send her a message and asked, so I DMed Tulsi, I guess her DMs are open, and asked her if she would come on this Periscope.
To my surprise, Tulsi responded personally, I think, it looked like it was her, to the DM and said, Yeah, here's my campaign person to set it up and connect with me.
What? So, that's my news for the day.
So, Tulsi Gabbard did say yes to coming on this Periscope at a time to be announced.
I'm talking to the campaign.
Now, before you get too excited...
Remember that I also invited Andrew Yang some months ago.
He also said yes, personally, referred me to his campaign, but sort of got lost in that shuffle.
So saying yes doesn't quite mean it's going to happen, right?
So we can't assume that all the connections will be made, but it's kind of mind-blowing.
It's kind of mind-blowing that the world is so small that I could be sitting here at my Dilbert drawing desk in California, surrounded by forest fires and blackouts and God knows what.
And I can just send a message on my little device to somebody who's running to be the most important job on the planet, President of the United States, and I can get a personal answer.
Sure. It's just mind-blowing, isn't it, how small the world got?
So we'll see if that happens.
I hope so. So the whistleblower got named.
I don't know if all of you are aware of it yet, but there's, I forget who popped the cork on this.
Apparently all the journalists already knew the name.
They knew who it was, but they weren't reporting it.
Or at least they were pretty sure they knew, but they weren't reporting it.
So now we know. I forget the person's name.
It doesn't matter. But he's a Democrat.
He's not just a Democrat.
He's sort of an active Democrat, if you know what I mean.
So the original whistleblower clearly was a partisan.
Now, I do not...
People will say...
People will tell me that I'm always supporting the President and saying that his persuasion skills are amazing.
And let me be really clear that his persuasion skill, the President's persuasion skills on this whole Ukrainian phone call, has not been perfect.
And indeed, and I don't know if they'll pivot to doing this, But the President, once he'd released the transcript, and we had a good idea of what was and wasn't said, and he probably knew that some investigation would pop up, people who were talking about the, quote, quid pro quo.
I think the big mistake, persuasion-wise, is to pretend that maybe that's something wrong.
The President should have said, and didn't, That checking on somebody who is number one in the polling to be the next president, Biden, checking on his connections to foreign countries, which are based on public information.
I mean, the public knows there's something we should understand better about the Bidens and Ukraine.
Now, it could be that if he asked Ukraine to look into it, Ukraine could ask a few questions, come back in two weeks and say, yeah, we looked into it.
It's nothing but, you know, normal business.
There's nothing there. Would you have been upset if the president asked about Biden and Ukraine looked into it and said, no, we don't really see anything.
Now, of course, you wouldn't be upset.
Most of you are Trump supporters.
But would anybody else be upset?
I think they'd say, oh, good, we just cleared Joe Biden.
That's one less thing that the other side can say if he becomes the nominee.
Wouldn't that be good for everybody?
Now, suppose it went the other way.
Suppose Trump said, I need you to look into these Bidens, and let's say Ukraine looked into it and actually found something that's a problem.
If I had to put the odds on it, I'd say that's low.
To me personally, I think the odds that they would find some smoking Biden gun, probably low, but there might be something that makes your eyebrow go up and your hair on the back of your neck go...
So there might be completely legal behavior that still looks a little swampy to you.
Wouldn't you want to know?
If you're going into the next election and you're a voter, and let's say it's Biden because he's leading the polls, just hypothetically, against Trump, wouldn't you want to know, just as you wanted to know if you were on the other side, actually I think everybody wanted to know, if there was any Russian collusion in the Trump campaign.
You could be hoping for it to come out one way or the other, but didn't you all want to know?
I mean, I certainly wanted to know I assumed there was nothing there, but I certainly wanted to know.
And why wasn't that completely appropriate?
It was. Because the voters need to know if their leader is compromised by another country.
So this Biden thing, let me say this as clearly as I can.
The White House communication and strategy on pushing back against the Biden thing is a complete failure.
I mean, it's very poorly done, in my opinion.
I'll tell you what was done well.
I think the President saying that the phone call was perfect, that's pretty good.
He's staying out of the details, just saying it was perfect.
And not any further than that, but that's okay.
But it's not enough. He's got to go all the way at this quid pro quo and say, in effect, he's got to say, every conversation with a foreign leader is a quid pro quo.
So stop saying that.
Why are you even bringing up quid pro quo?
All you have to know is that two leaders had a conversation.
If you don't think it's always quid pro quo, then you don't understand what a conversation between leaders actually is.
So you should take this quid pro quo thing and you should blow it up like al-Baghdadi.
That's right, I said that.
You should blow up that quid pro quo stupidity the way you blew up al-Baghdadi.
Because it's stupid.
There are some things which you can say, oh, my priorities are different than yours, my political opinion is different than yours.
But there are some things that are actually just stupid.
It has nothing to do with politics.
So to imagine that two leaders could have a conversation without a quid pro quo in it, that's just stupid.
So just call it stupid.
Your best defense is to say that you're being children.
All these conversations are quid pro quo.
Should the president have released funds before a conversation in which maybe he had some things to ask for?
Should he? No!
No, he shouldn't. If there's something you want to ask for, you keep your leverage and then you ask for it.
Maybe that's what he did.
We'd have to hear it in his own words.
But if he did, that's exactly what a president does.
Now the question is whether he was digging for dirt.
Because the President, and here's the biggest failure, the White House has allowed the other team to brand what he did as digging for dirt on an opponent.
Was it digging for dirt on an opponent?
Yes, it was.
Was it also his job and a top priority to make sure that there was no Biden connection with Ukraine?
Yes, it was. If something is all of those things, there's nothing there.
But he's allowing the other team to say it's only digging for dirt.
I haven't seen anybody say, stop saying it's digging for dirt.
He's doing the job of a president, and if he didn't ask about this, he wouldn't be doing his job.
So they're completely failing on the defense of this.
Now, I will say, there might be something about this, I suppose this is always true, there might be something about this that I don't understand.
For example, there might be a lawyer advising the president about something that I don't quite get is a trap or a risk.
So maybe there's some legal reason that I'm not seeing that they have to treat it the way they're treating it.
Maybe the president doesn't want to open up an attack against him.
By saying, oh, you know, that would basically say that the Mueller investigation was legitimate and not a witch hunt.
Although, at this point, I think the Lee Smith book is blowing that to hell.
By the way, I haven't read the Lee Smith book, the one that was, I think it was number one in the world, bestseller, recently.
But it talks about the plot against the president.
I forget the name of the book. And I guess there are some jaw-dropping revelations in there.
about the genesis of the Steele dossier.
And I've only heard about it.
I haven't read it.
But if that stuff's real, you know, if that book is accurately reporting what's going on, oh my God, the deep state is going down.
And it's hard to know what's true in this world anymore, but if any of that stuff's true, There are probably people going to jail.
Let's see. The president has tweeted that they have about 60% of a trade deal with China, meaning that 60% of everything they want has been agreed, and that they're planning to sign it.
So it would be a partial trade deal.
And they're just talking about the location and the timing of it now.
Now, you have not seen any news to suggest that the fentanyl shipments from China have stopped, have you?
And so I'm going to hold my opinion on this until I understand it better, because I don't know what is the part that's agreed to versus the part that's not.
If, and this is a very big if, because I don't know this to be true, but if the stuff they're going to agree on is simply good for everyone, for the business that's already there, maybe that's not a big deal.
So, for example, if China has agreed to not steal the IP of the companies that are already in China, well, sure, why not sign that deal?
Because that's just good for us.
If some of it is just, you know, some areas of tariffs, you know, are relaxed, maybe it's good for our farmers.
Maybe that might make sense.
And so we also don't know what is the 40% we're holding back, and maybe that's where we get some fentanyl motion.
So it could be that the 60% we're willing to sign we think is good for us, Whereas the 40% we think is more good for China, and we're going to hold that out until we see some action on, I don't know, fentanyl and Hong Kong and Uyghurs and stuff.
I've said before, and I'll say it again, if the President signs a comprehensive deal with China, For trade, and they continue sending fentanyl to this country, that would be an enormous failure on the part of the president.
Such a failure, and because I take this issue personally, I don't know if I can support the president after that.
That would be too personal to me.
And I hope you understand that I would still love all of you.
And I think the president's going to win no matter what.
So I don't think there's any chance the president will win.
But if he signs a deal with China and they just keep shipping fentanyl to this country, I don't know.
I could support that. I think that's where I'm out.
But I don't expect the President to do that.
I expect that he would not get to some kind of a final deal with China without a fentanyl improvement.
So we'll see. Obama was interesting recently.
He came out against cancel culture.
So Obama was basically saying at some event, That we should just sort of relax about people's smaller flaws and mistakes and maybe pay attention to things that are more important.
Just accept the fact that we're imperfect people in an imperfect world and maybe not obsess about the imperfections.
I gotta say, it was such a good reminder of why he got elected in the first place and why he got re-elected The way that Obama approached some topics was just the best way.
And the way he approached this is just so adult.
I have to say, I really appreciated it.
And I've said this before, that when he ran for president and did not make a big deal about himself being black...
That was just great Obama-ing.
I mean, that's just good technique.
And this is good technique as well.
So here's the funniest headline of the day.
So this is a CNN headline, all right?
So the context matters.
It's CNN. And this is their headline.
Fox News departure, colon.
Catherine Herridge joins CBS News saying, quote, facts matter.
So let me read that headline again and see how you interpret it.
This is on CNN. It says, Fox News departure.
Catherine Herridge joins CBS News saying facts matter.
How do you interpret that?
Wouldn't you interpret that to mean that she believes that Fox News doesn't report facts and so she's going to another network that does?
Isn't that how you report that?
I mean, how you interpret that headline?
That's how I interpret it.
And I thought, my God, really?
Did she actually say that?
So I drill into the article to find out where she said she's leaving Fox News so that she can report on facts for the first time.
Doesn't exist. Does not exist.
The headline is fake news.
The headline that says that Catherine Herridge joins CBS News, saying facts matter, is technically true, but of course is worded to be misleading.
Here's the part that's technically true.
She did say facts matter.
She did not say, I'm leaving because facts matter.
The because is implied in the headline, but doesn't exist.
It was just one of several things she said.
Now, if you're a journalist, how ordinary is it for you to say that facts matter?
Well, every journalist says that.
100% of working professional journalists will say, facts matter, I care about the facts, I'm going to report on the facts.
So what she actually said was close to nothing.
Because journalists, that's their job, report on facts.
She said facts matter.
She did not tie that to why she was leaving.
That's completely imaginary news that they put in the headlines.
And the funny thing is, it's a headline mocking fake news that is fake news.
Transparently, obviously, no doubt about it, this is a misleading headline and obviously intentional.
All right. That's about all I got for today, I think.
Pretty good and interesting news day.
Somebody says CBS ruined Star Trek.
I disagree. So I've been watching...
I watched the Star Trek that's running on CBS All Access.
The first season, kind of a mess.
Second season, they got new management, new showrunners.
Kind of great by the second season.
So I like the atmospherics of it.
Oh, yeah. In the comments, Jim is reminding me that one of the things that you haven't seen in the news about the California blackouts is, wait for it, how do you charge your electric car?
We have probably, I'd assume, I mean, I've never looked this up, but I'm going to assume that California has the most electric cars of any state.
It's probably fair to say.
And all those electric cars, it's not that they just...
How do you go to the store and get groceries in the blackout?
Now, I suppose if you had a Tesla Powerwall, a battery...
You could charge your car, I think.
I assume that those things work together.
Why wouldn't they? So you do have an option as long as the sun shines.
But if you have a car and no Powerwall battery, which could be tens of thousands of dollars, how do you charge your car?
I haven't seen anybody talk about that in the news, but a number of people have talked about that.
With your Generac?
Yeah, maybe. All right.
I'm going to be flying out to New York City on the 3rd.
I guess that's Sunday. So on Sunday I'll be flying out.
You'll maybe hear from me on various radio TV podcasts talking about my book, Loser Think.
and I've got a feeling this might be my biggest book.
I don't know yet.
I don't want to jinx it, but there's something about this book that's so sticky because it addresses all of the arguments you see in your life and in social media and gives you another window into them and a technique for avoiding the worst arguments and thwarting but there's something about this book that's so sticky because it addresses all of the arguments you see So I think it's going to be almost required reading for people who want to interact on the Internet and don't want to look foolish.
Because about the tenth time somebody says, well, that's mind reading, you're going to ask yourself, what book are they reading?
You see this already on the internet, right?
Mostly on my Twitter feed.
People will say that somebody in the news is mind-reading.
And when you start seeing how much of the news is some stranger assuming what somebody else is thinking incorrectly, you can't unsee it.
So that's one of the things that LoserThink is going to do.
It's going to give you a frame and some words, some vocabulary, so it's really easy to spot the bad thinking techniques.
It's going to make a difference.
Somebody says, you cannot title a book Loser and expect it to sell.
Well, you have...
Your point is well made.
Your point is well made.
People do buy books because of who they are.
So there's something about buying a book that matches your brand.
You know, it's like books are kind of personal.
So would somebody buy a book...
And sit there reading it on the airplane that has the word loser right in the word.
And the answer is, we'll see.
We'll see. Here's the thinking behind it.
Yeah, somebody's added me in the comments.
If you had asked me years ago if there would ever be a series of books in which you're calling the buyer of the book a dummy or an idiot, would anybody think anybody would buy that?
The dummy's guide to HTML. The idiot's guide to everything.
Those are two of the biggest selling series of books in the world.
And they literally insult the reader.
The trick is, if you do it in sort of good humor and people understand there's a function to the book and it brings attention to it and it makes it hard to forget, Those are pluses.
And LoserThink, because it's a new word, is kind of sticky.
Let me ask you this. Having heard the new word LoserThink, would you ever forget it?
Probably not. It's sticky, isn't it?
And LoserThink, given that the book is about how to avoid it and how to call it out in other people, we'll see.
So those of you who have pointed out that that could be a violation of common branding form to put loser in the title, the risk is, and it's an intentional risk, one that I did knowingly, the risk I took is that it's sticky and it's provocative and you won't be able to get it out of your head.
So that's the play.
All right. Some people like it.
I also think it's the best cover I've ever done.
I would go further.
This is one of the best covers I've ever seen on a book, honestly.
So I've written, if you count the Dilber books, I think I've got something like 45 books in my career.
11 of them, or is this the 12th?
I've lost count. This is the 11th or 12th book of the non-Dilbert type, where I got to design the cover without having to put Dilbert in it, although sometimes I did.
And this is the best one by far out of 45.
But do this little experiment.
If you find this book, Then go to whatever category it's in, because it's in some of the bestseller categories, like political humor, I guess.
And just look at the other book covers on the page.
Just expand the page so you can see all the book covers.
It really jumps out.
It really jumps out.
And there's a lot of science behind this, by the way.
Someday I'll talk about that.
Oh, somebody says, hold up the book cover?
Yeah. So, let me tell you why this is the best book cover you've ever seen.
Number one, the title is one word, and it's a new word, and it's one that's catchy.
So the title works. Number two, this burnt orange always tests well.
It catches your attention. So that's scientifically known.
If you had a choice, use this color.
You'll see there are a lot of...
In fact, there are quite a few on my shelf that have some of this palette.
Now, here's the other magic.
You see these people in the bubbles?
Makes you curious, doesn't it?
Why are they in the bubble?
What is the bubble? Is this a book about how to get out of the bubble?
How to get in the bubble? Is it about Democrats?
Is it about Republicans? Is it about all people?
Is it about some people? Curiosity and books...
Go together really well.
If you've ever read any of the Harry Potter books, probably most of you have.
I can never remember the author of the Harry Potter books, which is crazy, because she's the most famous author in the world, J.K. Rowling.
So J.K. Rowling is the best you might ever see Of stoking your curiosity throughout the book.
You'll see that a lot of the chapters end with, there's a sound in the distance, or there's something happening that's unexplained at the end of every chapter.
So you say, oh, I guess I'll have to read the next chapter to eventually get to the answer to what's happening at the end of this chapter.
So the cover does the same thing.
Makes you say, who's in the bubble?
Why are they in the bubble? What's the bubble about?
What does loser think?
So there's a great curiosity trigger built in.
That's the technique. And that's all for now.
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