Nov. 9, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
57:53
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| Man, this is a good book. | |
| Whoa! I can't put it down. | |
| That's only because I glued my hand to it. | |
| I actually can't put it down. | |
| It's just stuck in my hand. | |
| Well, I hope you have your copy. | |
| I'm still in New York City on a weird time zone, but I'm flying back today. | |
| So tomorrow's Coffee with Scott Adams at the correct time. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| This time zone stuff is difficult, but there is one thing that can make it better. | |
| If your day isn't perfect yet, try the simultaneous sip. | |
| It's coming up, and you can get ready for it by grabbing a cup, mug, glass, stein chalice, tankard, shot glass, canteen, 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, the simultaneous sip. | |
| Go. Ah. | |
| Feel the connectedness with everybody around the world. | |
| Our energy is connected. | |
| It is one. It is one. | |
| So, as you know, I'm in the middle of my book tour for LoserThink that just came out. | |
| It's making a big impact so far. | |
| It's the weirdest experience, I have to say. | |
| The odd thing about my life is that I've got three or four different things that people are independently becoming fans of or consumers of. | |
| And so when I travel now, people will come up to me and say, oh, I love your book, God's Debris from 15 years ago, or I love Dilbert, or I love one of your new books, or I love your Periscope. | |
| But the weird thing is, there are a lot of people who only consume one of those things. | |
| So I'm having this weird semi-rock star experience here. | |
| When I meet people who like one of those things. | |
| So some of them are... | |
| Somebody's saying it's a humble brag. | |
| It's not a humble brag. | |
| I'm just bragging. There's nothing humble about this. | |
| Let me point you to a chapter in my book, Loser Think. | |
| Let's see. This is a perfect example of how to use this book. | |
| So somebody just said, humblebrag. | |
| I know you're half-joking, but let me show you how to use this book. | |
| So you would look up, in this case, the section on ego, which would be on page... | |
| If I could do... | |
| All right, here it is. Looks like page 35. | |
| And if you went there, you would find out I have a chapter called The Ego Problem and how you should treat your ego as a tool. | |
| You should treat it as something you can dial up and dial down. | |
| It's not who you are. So I'm not the guy who brags and I'm not the guy who sometimes says humble things. | |
| But I do both of those things. | |
| It's just that the situation calls for one. | |
| Sometimes it calls for the other. | |
| And let me tell you, when you're on book tour... | |
| Should you dial up your ego? | |
| Or should you dial it down? | |
| Well, it's delicate. You don't want to go too far. | |
| But book tour is no time to be modest. | |
| It's no time to be modest. | |
| You're not going to sell a book if you're modest. | |
| You've got to say, this is a good book. | |
| Now, the fact is, people are saying it's my best book. | |
| So, we'll see. | |
| Let's talk about some other things. | |
| By the way, You will be seeing me on Greg Gutfeld's show tonight. | |
| And I can guarantee you, it's lit. | |
| It's going to be a good, it's going to be, I think I can almost guarantee you, maybe the best show ever. | |
| So watch the Greg Gottfeld show tonight, Fox News. | |
| So Don Jr. on The View. | |
| I only saw some clips from it. | |
| You know, I look at something that's meant for entertainment, such as a show like The View, and they know how to produce entertainment. | |
| So if you mix the hosts of The View with Don Jr., throw in a Kimberly Guilfoyle, that's a good show. | |
| That is a really good show. | |
| Remind me to answer your question, are your teeth real? | |
| Somebody just asked me. So I don't know what they, you know, what did they think they were going to get. | |
| You throw Don Jr. | |
| into that situation and he's not going to roll over. | |
| He's not going to be, he's going to give them a show. | |
| So whoever books the guests on the show, great job. | |
| Great job on that. Because you got some good entertainment, you got lots of viewers, and you can't take any of it too seriously. | |
| So when Don Jr. | |
| is out promoting his book, which by the way is out at the same time, called Triggered, I believe. | |
| Triggered. I think it's probably the number one book, probably. | |
| If it doesn't, I'm sure it will be. | |
| And He puts on a good show, and the hosts of The View put on a good show, and you put them together, and it's just a good show. | |
| There's nothing else that's important about what they talked about, in my opinion, but they're all talented. | |
| They put on a good show. | |
| Let's talk about the world. | |
| Oh, about my teeth. So, I do sometimes in public get complimented for my teeth. | |
| Now, they're veneers, which means that what you're seeing is basically something put over the original teeth. | |
| They are expensive, but if you can afford it, they're pretty worth it because they They do have a big impact. | |
| One of the things that straight teeth do, especially if they're white, is they make you look a little younger because your teeth are kind of a giveaway for age. | |
| So it's a good thing to do. | |
| If you're in the public eye, it's just part of the job. | |
| All right. Let's talk about China. | |
| This is a story in the National Review. | |
| And just when you think China can't get any worse, it's like, you know, China's a great country. | |
| Yeah, we should be friends. Yeah, sure, they send fentanyl over here and they kill 50,000 Americans a year with their fentanyl. | |
| But, you know, otherwise... | |
| You know, they're pretty good. China's pretty solid. | |
| Well, you know, they're reneging on Hong Kong and they're looking to oppress them when they said they wouldn't. | |
| But, eh, you can let that go. | |
| That's a small thing. | |
| Otherwise, China's pretty solid. | |
| Well, unless you count the fact that they're massively trying to steal everybody's intellectual property, you know, that's not cool. | |
| But otherwise... | |
| Good, solid country. | |
| Now, well, when I say a solid country, I'm not counting the fact that they're apparently using the Falun Gong followers for spare body parts and killing them on demand and selling their organs. | |
| But if you don't count that, China is a very respectable, great place. | |
| Well... Not counting the fact that they're rounding up the Uyghurs, minority, and putting them in concentration camps. | |
| But if you don't count that, and the fentanyl murders, weapons of mass destruction, the oppression of Hong Kong, using the Falun Gong people for body parts, 10 to 70 million of them, we don't know how many they'll use. | |
| But, you know, that plus the concentration camps. | |
| But that's not much. | |
| Today we learn that apparently China is assigning an ethnic Chinese replacement husband for the wives of the Uyghurs who the male has gone off to a concentration camp. | |
| Do you even hear that? | |
| That's right. | |
| China is assigning a rapist for the families where the father has been taken to a concentration camp. | |
| Let me say that again. | |
| China is assigning a rapist to every household of the Uyghurs where the man has been put in a concentration camp. | |
| So they put in this assigned ethnic Chinese rapist And he sleeps with the wife. | |
| And he tries to re-educate the family so that they're re-educated while the husband's in the concentration camp, possibly being used for parts. | |
| Now, somebody says, show me the proof. | |
| That's exactly what you should say. | |
| When somebody says something like I just said, Show me the proof, right? | |
| That's a fair thing to say. | |
| That's what I've been saying for, I don't know, a couple of years when people said China was using the Falun Gong folks for parts and killing them on demand and selling their organs. | |
| I thought, well, that's not true. | |
| That's ridiculous. | |
| You know, maybe it's based on some anecdote or they used to do it or something. | |
| But the evidence apparently is pretty, pretty solid. | |
| And when I say pretty solid, it's 100%. | |
| There's no doubt about it they're doing that. | |
| So, when I see the story that they're assigning a rapist, a full-time rapist, not one rape, not one rape, he's assigned to live with the wife whose husband went off to the concentration camp. | |
| It's mind-boggling. | |
| And so that's the situation. | |
| Now, is that worse, similar to, or less than the actual Holocaust? | |
| Because remember, I always say, don't compare anything to the Holocaust, because there's nothing like it. | |
| Don't compare anything to American slavery, right? | |
| Because there's nothing like it. | |
| They just sort of stand on their own as distinct evils that you should never compare anything to. | |
| But China is using for body parts a group that has 10 to 70 million people in it, plus the entire Uyghur population. | |
| I don't know how many there are, but there are a lot. | |
| And I would think that in the long run, China's going to set the record. | |
| And I don't mean it a good way. | |
| So, that's bad. | |
| Alright, let's talk about something else. | |
| That's what everybody else is going to do. | |
| Everybody else is going to look the other way and say, yeah, I hear there's a mega-holocaust going on in China, but I'm hungry. | |
| Let's go lunch. So, Bloomberg is teasing about getting into the race. | |
| I'm going to continue my prediction that Bloomberg will not get into the race in the end. | |
| But you might ask yourself, Scott, if you think he's not going to get into the race, why is he making so much noise about it? | |
| He could easily put out a statement, no, I do not want to get in the race. | |
| But he hasn't. Why would Bloomberg want to tease that he's getting into the race without actually getting into the race? | |
| What would be a strategy where that would make sense? | |
| Now, if he were someone else, I'd say, oh, it's just to get attention. | |
| Maybe it's to build up his business or something, but that really wouldn't work in his case. | |
| He's a multi-billionaire. | |
| He doesn't need any of that. | |
| So why would he do it? | |
| I'm watching your comments. | |
| and I'm seeing lots of pretty smart guesses, but I haven't seen the right one yet. | |
| Now, I don't know if it's the right one. | |
| I'm just going to give you my speculation. | |
| Alright, when you hear me say it, I've seen lots of guesses, but nobody's quite yet the one I'm going to say yet. | |
| Are you ready for this? | |
| He's doing it to take Biden out. | |
| Because Bloomberg and Biden would be somewhat close to the same positions. | |
| What's the one thing that will take Biden out? | |
| Will it be that he falls in the polls? | |
| Maybe, but you can't really count on it because Biden just keeps floating up there no matter what he does. | |
| So if you're a Bloomberg and you said to yourself, my God, we can't send Biden out against Trump, it'll be a slaughter. | |
| Don't you think Bloomberg knows, because all the Democrats know at this point, that if they send Biden out against Trump, there was no point in even having an election. | |
| There would be no point in having the election. | |
| It would just be a done deal. So, how do you take Biden out? | |
| You can't really ask him to quit, because it's just up to him, and obviously he wants to run. | |
| I think somebody said it. | |
| Funding? There you go. | |
| Somebody got it. If you were a money person, and you were thinking about giving money to Joe Biden, But at the same time, there was a serious rumor that Bloomberg was going to get into the race. | |
| Do you still give money to Joe Biden? | |
| No, you kind of delay. | |
| You might in the end, but as long as Bloomberg is teasing a run, why would you waste your money? | |
| Because if Bloomberg gets in, you'd probably say, okay, there goes Biden. | |
| Because, you know, Bloomberg's sort of an improved Biden, same age, but, you know, he's a little bit more in the ball. | |
| So, no, I'm not saying that, let me be clear, I'm not saying that the people who donate money would donate to Bloomberg instead. | |
| I'm saying they would just not bother donating to Biden because he wouldn't be as attractive a candidate. | |
| And I think Biden is kind of teetering on the edge That if his funding goes down another 10 or 20%, just pick a number, that might be enough to say, okay, this won't work. | |
| I'm moving in the wrong direction. | |
| So Biden only needs to see his funding shrinking every week. | |
| It doesn't have to shrink by a lot to know that it's not going to work out for him. | |
| So it could be that Bloomberg's play is just to freeze the donors, So they don't support Biden while they're waiting to see what Bloomberg does. | |
| So Bloomberg might be just trying to take Biden out of the race because that would be, I suppose, a good play. | |
| Now, Bloomberg doesn't want Warren or Bernie Sanders to win. | |
| But apparently Bernie Sanders and Warren are trying really hard not to win this race. | |
| So I think that part's going to take care of itself. | |
| Did you see Bernie's latest plan on the border? | |
| So Bernie looks at the news and he sees that there, you know, the slaughter of this Mormon family, Americans living in Mexico by the cartels. | |
| And before the family is even buried, he announces that he wants to open the border with Mexico and basically get rid of ICE, don't deport anybody, and give free health care to anybody who comes across. | |
| So he would decriminalize the crossing and not deport anybody. | |
| And if you get in, you get a reward, free health care and a job. | |
| I was wondering what that meeting looked like. | |
| Was there a meeting in which Bernie said, you know, that heart attack really got to me. | |
| I really don't want to be president anymore. | |
| Can anybody think of a policy that would guarantee I couldn't possibly win the election? | |
| Because I've been telling people I'm going to tax the hell out of them and I'm still one of the top polling people. | |
| What can I say to make people not vote for me? | |
| Is there anything I can do To guarantee that I can, you know, fall in the polls and get out of here? | |
| And somebody would be like, idea, over here. | |
| Yes, you. You could say open the border the same week that Americans were slaughtered by the cartel. | |
| And Bernie's like, that's good. | |
| Well, that's good. | |
| I'm going to try that. | |
| So I think Bernie is just self-immolating. | |
| He has no chance of being president with a policy like that. | |
| No chance. You imagine running against Trump with a policy of letting the cartel in and giving them free health care. | |
| I'm not even joking. | |
| Bernie's policy gives free health care to the Mexican cartel. | |
| All they have to do is drive onto our side of the border. | |
| Free healthcare. It's just mind-boggling. | |
| I can't even figure out if it's incompetence. | |
| Because it just looks like somebody intentionally trying to not win. | |
| It would be the very thing you would do if you wanted to lose. | |
| And of course, Warren's plan is scaring everybody with money, and that's no good way to win. | |
| So we'll see what happens. | |
| Buttigieg is still looking like the sleeper, dark horse candidate. | |
| You notice that nobody really talks about him. | |
| Except to say that he seems to be moving up in the polls. | |
| So Buttigieg continues to not make news. | |
| But the reason he's not making news is he's not being batshit crazy. | |
| So what is it that the Democrats want in the candidate right now? | |
| They kind of like someone who's not batshit crazy. | |
| And Buttigieg keeps delivering that. | |
| I'll just say reasonable things about health care. | |
| I'll say reasonable things about the border. | |
| I'll say reasonable things, I'm just not Trump. | |
| You know, I'm sort of Democrat policies, and I'm reasonable. | |
| You can't get any news coverage with that kind of a play, but eventually people will catch on. | |
| Oh yeah, you need somebody reasonable. | |
| In the comments, somebody saying, African Americans don't support Buttigieg. | |
| It's hard to know exactly if that's true because Biden's still in the race. | |
| I think the way to know who the African American Democratic voters would prefer would be after Biden leaves, which we all expect. | |
| So once Biden's out, where do those votes go to? | |
| Elizabeth Warren? Probably not. | |
| Bernie? Not so much. | |
| Buttigieg? I don't know. | |
| He might get his share. And I think that whoever gets elected is going to get a healthy dose of the African American vote just for being a Democrat. | |
| All right. Let's talk about Harris. | |
| So you might hear me making this same joke on... | |
| On the Greg Gottfeld show. | |
| But I can't help pointing out that when you're looking at the Democrats and there's sort of this oppressive level of incompetence that we're seeing in the whole field that is just sort of head-shaking stuff. | |
| And my favorite example is that There are some Democrats who want to lower the voting age to 16. | |
| That's an actual thing people are talking about. | |
| At the same time, Harris announced that she wants school day to be extended to a few more hours so that it matches up when the parents get home. | |
| Now, if you're a 16-year-old and you just got the right to vote, are you going to vote for the ones who want to put you in school for a few more hours? | |
| Or are you going to vote for Trump? | |
| We want you to go out and hang out with your friends. | |
| So somehow the Democrats have found the only way. | |
| They found a self-canceling policy. | |
| It's like, I've got an idea. | |
| We'll let the 16-year-olds vote because they're so heavily leaning toward Democrats. | |
| Clever. At the same time, we're going to jail them in school for three extra hours, and we'll see who they vote for. | |
| So I think they're creating a generation of Trump supporters, and they don't know it. | |
| So that was hilarious. | |
| Somebody has a Bloomberg campaign logo that I'm trying to decide if I think... | |
| Bloomberg had anything to do with it, or is it just somebody supporting him? | |
| But man, is it bad. | |
| And likewise, if you saw Harris' video, there was a campaign video. | |
| It was so bad, it looked like it was made for somebody who was running to be in a cubicle in the 80s. | |
| She's listening to her laptop, and she's got headphones on, That are corded. | |
| You know, at least give us some wireless headphones, will you? | |
| If you're running for president in 2019 and you're shown listening to a laptop, go wireless. | |
| Go wireless. So she looked like she was running to be... | |
| I don't know, an executive assistant in a cubicle environment in the 80s or something. | |
| It was the most unpresidential thing you've ever seen. | |
| And it's amazing that she allowed people to even see that. | |
| But my point is that you don't realize how bad other people are at messaging. | |
| Until you see Trump's campaign do it. | |
| When you see Brad Parscale's operation, you see the quality of the video they produce, you see that they hit every note. | |
| Anything that comes out of the Trump campaign is perfectly produced. | |
| The logo is always great. | |
| The visuals, the composition, the color, the sound, the message, the order of things, the length of it, All of it, from top to bottom, the Trump production, best we've ever seen, would you say? Maybe? | |
| Best we've ever seen? And then you see any of the other candidates, and it looks like they made it in PowerPoint or something in their spare time. | |
| It's insanely... | |
| There's quite a difference there. | |
| Anyway... Saudi Arabia reportedly bribed a Twitter employee to spy on users. | |
| So that's cybersecurity experts are saying that. | |
| Now, is that true? | |
| It's something that cybersecurity experts are saying. | |
| We don't really know that's true. | |
| I mean, it's in the category of things. | |
| That you should not necessarily automatically assume is true or even that you know the context. | |
| First of all, I don't know what it means to spy on users. | |
| I assume that means looking at their direct messages because everything else is public by design, right? | |
| I don't know. So maybe, maybe. | |
| But this raises the interesting question. | |
| How hard would it be to influence any of the social media platforms if you could find an employee who had the passwords? | |
| I'm simplifying. | |
| It's harder than just having a password. | |
| If you could find the right employee or employees and bribe them. | |
| And how much would you be willing to bribe somebody to influence an entire platform? | |
| Well, millions. | |
| Yeah. Five million dollars? | |
| There's probably somebody who would pay enormous amounts of money if they could find the right employee or employees who could somehow manipulate the algorithm without getting caught. | |
| Now, I don't know enough about the platforms and the algorithms and the security that they put on them to know if that's even possible. | |
| But I also don't know it's impossible. | |
| So I would love to dig into that. | |
| I've invited Jack Dorsey to come on the Periscope sometime, and he said yes, but as you've learned from my other invitations, there's a big difference between somebody saying yes and then actually getting it scheduled. | |
| So I don't know if I'll do it, but I'd love to ask him that. | |
| And Jack, if you're watching this, I'll ask you now so that you can think about it. | |
| Is there any way that we in the public Could understand the process and system that goes into creating the algorithm. | |
| And for example, how many people understand the algorithm? | |
| Let's just take Twitter for an example. | |
| How many people know the ins and outs in the code, and who's got control of it, and if you change this variable you get this? | |
| How many people understand the whole thing, if anyone? | |
| Or is it so enormous and complicated that everybody has their little module, and they become experts in the module, but that's all they know. | |
| They don't know how what they do influences the rest of it, except by guessing, I suppose, or common sense. | |
| So I'd love to know that, because it would tell you in sort of general terms how susceptible they are to a bribe. | |
| And, you know, do they have processes in place To make sure that the only people who have the access to be able to change the algorithm have multiple people watching them, you know, their controls, one password isn't enough, you know, that sort of thing. | |
| And then I asked myself, who are the potential people who would want to bribe an employee at a corporation? | |
| And the list is so long, it's crazy. | |
| First of all, it's, you know, every billionaire who has a dog in the race, every campaign, Every intelligence operation of other countries, plus our own, the CIA, our own CIA, they'd have a lot of reason to try to get control of the social media platforms. | |
| So, I think we need a lot more visibility into that, even if the visibility is sort of on the concept level. | |
| Alright, the funniest thing lately about Trump is there's a There's a new book out, and I don't even know the title of it. | |
| It doesn't matter. So there's a new insider book reportedly by some anonymous person about the inner workings of the White House and Trump. | |
| And it tries to make the case that he's impulsive and his decisions are impulsive and that he won't read the briefings and stuff. | |
| Now, these are things we've heard before. | |
| But what's different about it is this. | |
| What's different about it is that Trump has been president for three years. | |
| So if you're looking at Trump's operating style, and it's so consistently reported that I will say it's probably true that when people say he's impulsive, they're sort of reading his mind. | |
| You don't know what's going on in there. | |
| But let's just say he brings up topics that you weren't expecting. | |
| Now, to other people, that might look impulsive, right? | |
| But what they don't know is, how long has he been thinking about it? | |
| Has he talked to anybody else about it? | |
| If it's just the first time you hear him come up with an idea, hey, let's do X, and you've never been part of the conversation, what would you think of it? | |
| Would you think, well, we've never talked about this, you just threw this into the conversation? | |
| It's impulsive. But how do you know? | |
| This could be something he's thought about for 20 years. | |
| Could be something he's had meetings with, he's talked to his casual advisors. | |
| Could be something he's been thinking about for a long time. | |
| You don't know what's in his head. | |
| You just know it's the first time you heard it. | |
| So to call that impulsive is mind reading, which is one of the things I talk about in LoserThink. | |
| And we get... | |
| We get so accustomed to stuff like this that we start to believe that this mind reading is somehow a legitimate part of the news or a legitimate part of what we know about people. | |
| It's not. Nobody knows what's in his head. | |
| All you know is it's the first time you heard the idea. | |
| You don't know if it's impulsive. | |
| But then the other charge is that he doesn't read the briefing materials, the background stuff. | |
| Now, is that a problem? | |
| Well, you can imagine a situation in which it would be. | |
| You know, it's easy to imagine that's a problem. | |
| But it's been three years. | |
| What problem has it caused? | |
| Name a problem. | |
| Can you tell me one problem that caused? | |
| I've never heard of one. | |
| So, three years into it, is it still valid to talk about his management style? | |
| Think about it. Before he was president, was it valid to talk about his management style? | |
| Of course. Of course. | |
| In fact, it would be one of the most important things you could talk about. | |
| You'd want to talk about his character, his personality, his management style, his impulsiveness, whether he looks into the details. | |
| Terribly important. And you want to look at those things and say, okay, a person with those qualities is Is likely to do a good or a bad job in your opinion. | |
| But now we're three years in. | |
| Those questions are relevant now. | |
| Because you can tell that the combination of his personality and his characteristics is either working or it's not. | |
| And obviously it's working. | |
| Unambiguously, it's working. | |
| So you have to ask yourself, how the heck does that work? | |
| How can he get good results being all impulsive and not looking into the details? | |
| Well, maybe that is the system. | |
| So here's something that I've always said about Trump, I guess, in my mind. | |
| I don't know if I've ever said this out loud. | |
| So fact check me on this. | |
| Have I ever said this on a Periscope? | |
| One of the best qualities of Trump... | |
| In terms of strength of technique. | |
| So this is just a technique statement. | |
| One of his strongest strengths is simplification. | |
| And that's how he simplifies his messages. | |
| Build them all, you know. | |
| Push China. You know, stuff like that. | |
| He's a really good simplifier. | |
| That's what makes you good at branding and marketing. | |
| That's what makes you a good persuader. | |
| So he's a simplifier. | |
| But there's a skill that goes into simplifying. | |
| And it's the bigger skill. | |
| And I've never seen Trump get credit for this. | |
| And when you hear it for the first time, you're going to say... | |
| Oh, that's actually important. | |
| Here it is. If somebody is a good simplifier, they can tell what's important. | |
| That's the skill. | |
| The skill isn't simplification. | |
| The skill is knowing what's important so that when you get rid of all the other stuff, what's left is what's important. | |
| And you see that in everything Trump does. | |
| So when he was running, people said, hey, you can't spend this little money and run for president. | |
| Apparently he knew that spending a lot of money wasn't important in his case because he got a lot of free press. | |
| Hillary Clinton did not campaign enough in the battleground states. | |
| She didn't think that was important. | |
| At least in the context of her campaign. | |
| Trump campaigned in the right places to win the Electoral College because he knew what was important. | |
| So Trump consistently looks into complexity and pulls out the stuff that's important. | |
| That is such a superpower that And it's also invisible to people who aren't looking for it. | |
| All you see is sort of what he says and what he's doing. | |
| You don't have any sense that just before that was all the smart stuff. | |
| The smart stuff is what's worth talking about and what do I throw away? | |
| Do you think his decisions would have been substantially better if he read background reports? | |
| Probably not. What would have been different about the way we're negotiating with China? | |
| Nothing. What would be different about the way we're dealing with North Korea? | |
| What would be different about the way he handled taxes? | |
| What would be different about anything? | |
| He apparently knows how to get to the central truth of things without all the garbage. | |
| So, let me put it in starker terms. | |
| The people who are complaining about the president not reading their little background reports are people who don't know how to tell what's important. | |
| That's why they have those jobs, because they can't tell what's important, not at the same level that a top leader can. | |
| They think everything's important, so they put it in a report, they put it on the leader's desk, and the leader who's good at it, who can tell the difference between what's important and what's not, Just picks it up and says, okay, yeah, China. | |
| I got it covered. | |
| Get back to me. So we have never seen any specific problem that's caused because Trump did not read some document. | |
| One assumes that every time that Trump says in a meeting with his advisors, if he says, hey, I've got an idea, let's try X, at that point... | |
| When the president tosses out an idea, the smart people who have read the background material, because they should, they're the advisors, say, oops, there's something you don't know. | |
| That idea won't work. | |
| There's something in the background report that says why. | |
| It's because of X. And then the president, presumably, I'm not in a room, but I'm just, this would be the normal way that anybody would manage. | |
| And the president would hear that and say, are you sure about that? | |
| The advisor says yes. | |
| The president makes a judgment about the person. | |
| Is that a person who tells me the right things? | |
| Is it a person with good judgment? | |
| Is it a person who knows what he's talking about? | |
| Yes. Did they just give me a good reason that makes my idea not practical? | |
| Yes. Let's move on. | |
| He doesn't need to read the background materials. | |
| Indeed, his ability to avoid the details It's probably one of his best qualities, because he seems to be able to run things with any of that. | |
| Take an example of selecting Supreme Court justices. | |
| The way other presidents did it, I guess, is they looked at each justice and they listened to people's arguments or whatever, and then they picked one. | |
| What Trump did is he found an organization That is respected for selecting potential Supreme Court people. | |
| And then he told the public, I'm going to pick something from that list. | |
| Definitely. Eventually, that was his message. | |
| He said, it's definitely going to be from this list. | |
| Who's on the list, Mr. | |
| President? I don't know. | |
| Now, that's not quite true, because he actually knew some of the personalities on the list. | |
| He's known them for a long time, heard about them, etc., So he did know something about a number of the people on the list, but he didn't need to know much. | |
| He just needed to know that everyone agreed, everyone being conservatives, they agreed that the organization that made the list does a real good job of picking judges that are conservative and qualified for the court. | |
| That's all he needed to know. | |
| Hey, there's a respectable company or organization. | |
| They make a list. | |
| I'll pick from the list. So you can't get much simpler than that. | |
| And how's it worked out? | |
| Really, really well for conservatives. | |
| So my point is that it looks, it just looks, what I'll say, it looks inexperienced For somebody to look at a book about Trump's management style and characteristics, his impulsiveness and stuff, and judge that it's not working. | |
| Because it's clearly working. | |
| And it might even be the model. | |
| Remember they said the same thing about Reagan. | |
| And I think Reagan had the same quality, which is, Reagan might not have been the smartest guy in the world, but he could sure tell what was important. | |
| He had a knack for getting to the hardest stuff. | |
| All right. I believe that's what I wanted to talk about. | |
| Anybody have any questions? Did you notice what I didn't talk about today? | |
| I didn't talk about Ukraine. | |
| Because it's descending into ridiculous, boring, you know, just stuff we don't care about. | |
| Oh, Matt Taibbi had a good article. | |
| I read it. What was it? | |
| Let me say this. | |
| This would be the weirdest recommendation. | |
| I read Matt Taibbi's piece in Rolling Stone. | |
| There's a new one. And I remember thinking it was sensational. | |
| What was the topic? Something about Ukraine. | |
| Basically, it was a It was very anti-Democrats. | |
| I think it was about Ukraine. | |
| Totally worth reading. | |
| It was about the dossier. | |
| Something about that. | |
| But I think Matt Taibbi, who, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think he associates, or ever has, with the right, right? | |
| Isn't he sort of a left, you know, a reliably left-leaning guy? | |
| But he's going full independent on what's going on with Ukraine and Russiagate and stuff like that. | |
| In other words, he's a smart guy who's actually looking at the actual facts and And it's jarring because he's so good. | |
| He's one of the best writers you'll ever see. | |
| Just a sentence that he writes is really delightful. | |
| You'll enjoy reading his actual words. | |
| They're just great. So anyway, you should Google that and read it. | |
| Somebody says, Tybee has perspective. | |
| Yeah, that's a good way. Thank you all for getting my book. | |
| Somebody asked, is Tyrus back? | |
| He is, yes. Thoughts on Daryl Davis? | |
| I don't know who he is. Somebody says, do you and Christina see eye to eye on most things? | |
| Yes. Astonishingly, we're on the same page about Most things in life. | |
| Go on Joe Rogan again. | |
| It doesn't look like it. | |
| I've got a LA trip coming up and I haven't heard from him. | |
| I would, of course, go on his show anytime you wanted, but I don't think that I'm necessarily the kind of guest that he needs to bring back more than once. | |
| What happens after Trump? | |
| Trump. | |
| I don't know, that's a long time from now. | |
| 20 or 30 years from now? | |
| Thank you all for... | |
| You and Trump are number one bestsellers on Amazon today. | |
| I think I'm number one in a couple of categories. | |
| Not number one overall. | |
| But, you know, let me tell you, some of you like hearing sort of insider things about the author process. | |
| I hear that all the time. | |
| I'm going to assume that some of you do. | |
| And I want to tell you an interesting thing. | |
| So when you're writing a book, and in my case, because I have other things to do, it takes me maybe a year to write a book and get it all edited and design the cover and everything. | |
| So it's about a year. And that means that I write... | |
| When I start writing, I just start writing to get volume, and then I do a lot of editing and massaging and stuff. | |
| So there are things that I wrote a year ago that were in one form, and then I keep writing, and then I find, oh, I've written the same chapter twice, and then I have to get rid of one. | |
| So there's a whole bunch of editing and rearranging and rereading. | |
| When you're writing a book... | |
| And then you're rewriting it and reading it again. | |
| You're not reading it like a reader. | |
| You're reading it like the person who wrote it. | |
| So you can't really tell what you're creating while you're creating it because you can't put yourself in the independent observer's mind. | |
| You can't be a customer and see your own writing as the customer, the reader, would see it because you're into it too much. | |
| But the first time... | |
| That even I, as the author, can read my own book as a reader is when some time has gone by and it's in its final form. | |
| Because there's a big difference between my raw first draft and then the rearranged and edited and I've got the order of things and they're in good categories and the chapters make sense and one chapter leads to the next and all that. | |
| And the first time that I got to do that was actually last night. | |
| This is strange to say, but I'll just say it anyway. | |
| I got so many good comments about the book this week. | |
| I mean, like, insanely good comments. | |
| That I wanted to see what they were talking about. | |
| Like, I actually got curious about my own book. | |
| Because again, until last night, for all practical purposes, I had never read it. | |
| I wrote it. | |
| But I've never experienced it as a consumer. | |
| So I thought, well, let's see what's in there. | |
| Because I really didn't know. | |
| And so I read it for the first time. | |
| Not all of it, but a few chapters last night. | |
| And I thought to myself... | |
| It's pretty good. So part of the cycle of being an author is when you first write a few chapters, you might read them and say, yeah, these are good. | |
| You come back a week later and you read the same ones, you're like, oh, these aren't good. | |
| So you go through this, it's good, it's bad, it's good, it's bad, it's good. | |
| And what you can hope, the only thing you can hope is that the last thing that you read, it's good. | |
| And so I was quite delighted with this one, I must say. | |
| Yes, I am tooting my horn during book promotion week. | |
| I hope it's not too obnoxious. | |
| I do it for good purpose. | |
| I think this is the sort of book that people can get a lot out of. | |
| Start with bragging and end with bragging, somebody said. | |
| That's right, I'm bookending it. | |
| Have I hypnotized Christina? | |
| Well, not in the formal sense. | |
| Oh, let's talk about Kanye. | |
| If Kanye runs, well, he's not going to run in 2020, but he did say he's going to run in 2024. | |
| Um... Somebody just said I got an audible version of the book and I need a hard copy now. | |
| I've heard from dozens and dozens of people this week that they bought two versions of my book for themselves. | |
| People would buy a Kindle and a hard copy so that they've got one that travels and one for home. | |
| And they'd buy the audible for the car, but then they'd want to buy the hard copy for a reference. | |
| I've never seen... | |
| I don't know if this has ever happened before, and I just didn't know. | |
| But I've never seen so many people buy two separate versions of a book at the same time. | |
| Is that common? | |
| Do people do that? | |
| Do you do that for other books? | |
| Because people are wildly doing that for this book. | |
| Somebody says they bought three versions of Winn Bigley. | |
| Yeah, somebody else. I bought three formats. | |
| I bought hard copy in Kindle and audio. | |
| I've never seen that before. | |
| Somebody says, I've done it. | |
| I love being read to while reading. | |
| Oh, somebody says, I love being read to while reading. | |
| That's interesting. And other people are saying they routinely do that. | |
| Somebody says, I usually buy both. | |
| Somebody has Audible, Kindle, and the collector's version that has World in it, the typo. | |
| Huh. Somebody says, what made me put SA on the inside cover? | |
| And what you're referring to is this. | |
| I just took the cover off. | |
| And there's a little embossed SA here. | |
| I don't know what that is. | |
| I saw it too. | |
| Now, it happens to be my initials, but I don't know if that's why is there. | |
| I mean, I have no idea. | |
| It doesn't stand for loser thing. | |
| Alright. Oh yeah, there's a MAGA challenge. | |
| What was it? There's some African American rapper is running a challenge for people to make raps about the president and the president said he would invite the finalists to the White House. | |
| So the president is very good at knowing what's a good show. | |
| And so it was brilliant of him to say if somebody's creating raps for the president, obviously the president would like to bolster his African-American voting base. | |
| It's just brilliant. | |
| Because it's just fun. | |
| It's just plain fun. | |
| Compare Trump inviting probably African-American rappers to To the White House. | |
| How is that now fun? | |
| Because they'd be doing probably humorous and clever raps about the president. | |
| That's just nothing but fun. | |
| Now, compared to you can have a beer with Elizabeth Warren or something, whatever the other candidates are offering, they don't have a sense of the show. | |
| They just don't have a sense of what people want to consume. | |
| They're not rappers. Is that true? | |
| Am I using an outdated... | |
| Are they hip-hop artists? | |
| Am I using the wrong term? I think somebody's giving me a hard time. | |
| All right, let's talk about Kanye. | |
| Kanye seems to be serious about running in 2024. | |
| And as you all know, he is a force of nature, and you certainly would not want to rule him out for anything. | |
| If Kanye said he was going to try to compete in the Olympics, I'd say, what? | |
| He doesn't seem like an experienced athlete, as far as I know. | |
| Maybe he is. But because it's Kanye, I'd say, well, maybe. | |
| Maybe. I don't think he can bench press 500 pounds, but... | |
| You know, if he trains, maybe. | |
| So I say that jokingly. | |
| But I think Kanye has maybe something more important to offer. | |
| And by more important, I mean maybe something more like a spiritual leader. | |
| A spiritual leader who is accessible. | |
| There are lots of spiritual leaders, but they're not all accessible, meaning they're not for everybody. | |
| Maybe they're too cultish. | |
| Maybe it's not your religion. | |
| Maybe it's just not your ethnicity. | |
| Maybe there's something about it that you say, well, that's somebody else. | |
| That's not me. But Kanye has this... | |
| He's sort of developing a... | |
| I'll say a brand of spiritual, religious... | |
| experience that seems to be completely accessible. | |
| Stop laughing, Bill. That is more accessible. | |
| Meaning that who likes Kanye? | |
| Basically everybody. Who likes Jesus in the United States? | |
| Well, almost everybody who's a Christian And anybody who's not a Christian doesn't disagree with Jesus. | |
| You don't have to be a believer to say at the same time, well, the Jesus stuff is good stuff. | |
| Whether you think it's historically exactly accurate or not, all the Jesus stuff is good stuff. | |
| So Kanye has managed to find A way to appeal to, you know, the left while making them a little bit uncomfortable about how friendly he is with the right, while the right is a little bit uncomfortable, but, you know, because maybe they weren't fans before or whatever. | |
| But everybody's kind of seeing him do the Jesus stuff, and then suddenly both sides are like, oh, that's good. | |
| We like that part. | |
| And then he goes and he creates... | |
| I honestly didn't know if he could do this. | |
| So he created this... | |
| What would you call it? | |
| Christian music? Christian... | |
| I don't know what it is. | |
| I don't know the right terms, but his new album is all about Jesus and religion. | |
| And I thought to myself, is he going to find an audience for this? | |
| Is this going to be good? | |
| And sure enough, it is. | |
| It's not exactly my kind of entertainment. | |
| But apparently, it's hugely successful, well done, his usual amazing creativity. | |
| So he did it again. | |
| You know, every time you think to yourself, well, maybe you should stick to music, not fashion. | |
| Oh, okay, fashion worked. | |
| He made a billion dollars with that. | |
| But, you know... Don't do religious music. | |
| Stick to your regular music and stick to your fashion stuff. | |
| Oh, okay, I guess he can do gospel music, too. | |
| So he seems to be doing anything he wants. | |
| But my point is that I believe his strength is not in the details. | |
| So it feels like he would be wasted if he got ground up in the regular political process. | |
| Maybe not. Once again, I might be making an assumption that's unwarranted. | |
| But I hate to waste what he brings by putting him through the grinder. | |
| Because I don't know what you're like when you come out the other end of that. | |
| But if he keeps doing what he's doing, in every way, not just... | |
| The music, the inspirational stuff. | |
| But if he just keeps talking in public about things that matter to him, I don't know. | |
| He could be one of the most, maybe he already is, one of the most powerful figures in the country for all the positive stuff. | |
| And then he doesn't have to deal with the potholes and the details and stuff. | |
| So I say he's more powerful as not a president. | |
| And that the president experience would take away his power. | |
| You know, it would add a different kind of power. | |
| He'd been in charge of the military and stuff. | |
| But I just think he'd be more powerful than even a president in his own way if he just continues doing what he's doing. | |
| So running for president or putting your name out there is a good strategy even if you don't run for president. | |
| So I'm sure he is smart enough, he's definitely smart enough, to know That just putting his name into that conversation improves his power, and his power is being used for good. | |
| He's clearly decided to spend the rest of his productive life making the world better, instead of just making money. | |
| So, I'm a big fan. | |
| Anyway, that's all for now. |
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