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Dec. 3, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
54:19
Episode 745 Scott Adams: Trolls, Guns, Idiot Boycotts and More. With Coffee.
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Hey Austin, come on in here.
I know I'm competing with the president who's doing a press conference with...
McCrone right now, but McCrone is talking in French, and we don't understand that, so forget that.
Just come over here. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, and the highlight of the day is a little thing I call the simultaneous sip, and all you need to participate is a cupper, mugger, glasses, snifter, sign, chalice, tankard, thermos, flask, canteen, grail, goblet, vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Join me now. For the unparalleled pleasure.
The dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Simultaneous step.
Go.
Carl, you bought the art that Jake Tapper and I did at the auctions.
Thank you. I'm glad you bought that.
Well, let's talk about some things.
I was listening to the press conference with President He's over at the NATO conference in Europe.
And it's interesting to hear him say directly that we should be friends with Russia at the same time he's meeting with NATO, an organization entirely formed to fight Russia.
And I've said this a million times, but I think I'll just keep saying it forever.
We don't have a reason...
To not be friends with Russia if we stop poking each other.
Now, right now we have a reason to not be friends because we keep poking each other, you know, with cyber stuff and sanctions and everything else.
But what if we just...
Stop doing that, because there's no gain.
There's nothing you can do that's going to make Russia go away.
There's nothing they can do that's going to make us go away.
So, you know, the thought about weakening the other country and causing some civil unrest and, you know, messing with their elections, you can do all that stuff, but it's not really going to lead you to anything good.
There's just nothing, there's no there there.
And I say this a lot, but we tend to manage from a perspective of shortage.
If there were only limited resources in the world and we needed them and Russia needed them, well, maybe you need to have a war or at least treat each other like enemies.
But we don't really have that.
We don't have a resource shortage.
The smartest situation for both Russia and the United States is that we get along.
We just both make more money, less war.
I mean, it's all good.
Now, what is Russia's thinking on this topic?
I have no idea.
But my guess is that they poke us because they think we're poking them, and I'm sure we are.
So, what if we just stopped?
Or what if they just stopped?
Is there any way to get there?
And it seems to me that if you didn't have Putin in charge, well maybe there's just no way to get there.
But really there's just one mind that needs to be changed.
Just one person.
And I think the president is good at that stuff.
So I don't know if we can get there, where Russia will be our friend and we don't have to worry about him.
And maybe both of us can worry equally together about China, which does look a little scarier.
All right. Here's a good example of loser think in the wild.
So, as you know...
I'm sure you know. I wrote a book called Loser Think that's out recently, and you should buy it because it's the best gift you'll ever give.
Your family will love you.
You'll be a star of the family for the first time ever if you give them Loser Think, the best book in the world.
But here's the example in the wild.
I tweeted around an article about gun control, which is pretty interesting.
A guy who's good with statistics made the case that it makes sense to own AR-15s because of the unlikely chance that there'll be some kind of a war or civil unrest or revolution or something.
And he makes a really good case.
If you haven't read it, because I'm not going to try to paraphrase it here, but if you haven't read his mathematical explanation of why you need some pretty high-power rifles, you should.
It's in my Twitter feed. You can see it.
Anyway, that led to somebody making this comment.
It was somebody named Olivier Libra.
And he says... He's quoting the article at the end that says, you know, why would you want to own one of those things?
Talking about AR-15s.
And the author of the article said, please don't be surprised if they simply respond.
Why wouldn't you? Now, that's the conclusion of his article that says, statistically, it makes sense to own a gun and the unlikely chance that you need one.
And so this critic...
Or at least commenter on Twitter says, well, let's take that same argument made for guns, the why would you?
He said that the same argument as climate change.
People asking, why take a chance?
Meaning, why take a chance that climate will be catastrophic?
You know, don't take the chance.
Go aggressively against it.
And here's a perfect example of loser think.
Now, do you spot it?
See if you can spot it.
Now, so the point he's making is that if there's a good argument why you should own guns just in case, that's an oversimplification, but it's sort of a just in case in the unlikely event.
And the argument really is that the unlikely event that you'll need one is actually far more likely than you imagined.
So the article I tweeted around makes a good mathematical argument That the odds of needing that rifle because of a social breakdown are actually pretty high if you look over a, you know, 100-year period.
So here's, in case you didn't catch it, yeah, so he's using an analogy, so that's one problem, right?
But here's the thing.
I clicked on his profile to find out what his profession is.
Is his profession economist?
It is not. It is musician.
So this is the pattern that caused me to write the book.
Whenever I would see an argument that it's not a stupid argument, and I have nothing bad to say about Olivier, who made his point, loser think is about people who have not been exposed to different fields.
In this case, I'm going to talk about how Olivier was not exposed to To economics and maybe engineering and some other things.
So as a musician, he's made this analogy.
It's like, if having a gun is just in case, you know, the unlikely chance it's a big problem, then why wouldn't you take the same argument to climate and say, well, you don't know if it's a big problem, but you should treat it like it is.
Here's what the economist knows that the musician doesn't.
Are you ready? What the economist knows is that you would treat a situation of shortage and constraint much differently than you would treat a situation where you have abundance.
Guns are abundantly available.
We don't have a limitation on how many guns we can get.
We're not really running out of money.
Everybody who wants one can kind of get one unless they have a criminal record.
So for all practical purposes, In the United States, guns are easy to get, and there's no shortage constraint or anything like that.
You can get all you want. Compare that to climate change, where the solutions suggested cost trillions and trillions of dollars.
Do we have unlimited trillions and trillions of dollars?
We do not.
So in the gun situation, of course it makes sense to have a gun in case you need one, because it doesn't cost very much, and it's a good hedge against the unlikely case of civil disaster.
But in the case of climate change, you have a completely different situation.
You have constraints that don't exist with guns.
Everybody can get a gun, pretty much.
With climate change, you can't spend your trillions of dollars on one thing and still have enough money left over to do other things.
So the climate change analysis, you should compare your risk from climate change to all of your other risks so you can know where your money goes best.
You don't have to do that analysis with guns because most people can afford a gun without it changing their standard of living.
But certainly if we reoriented our entire economy to solve climate change, We would have less left over in case there's a pandemic, in case there's an asteroid heading towards the Earth, less ability to recover from an EMT attack, or any one of, you could think of a dozen things that you would still need that trillion dollars for.
And the most obvious one is that if you use your money to keep your economy strong, that defends against most of the economic impacts of climate change in the long run.
It also allows you to build devices that can suck carbon out of the air if you need to.
It allows you to build nuclear plants.
So simply having a strong economy that you have not crippled by spending all your trillions on this one risk, just building your economy gives you all kinds of options.
So someday, 10 years from now, we say, hey, we really need to get some CO2 out of the air.
Well, we put a trillion dollars at it.
By then, maybe it's only half a trillion, because the cost of the technology has gone down in time, they're more efficient, and you suck it directly out of the air.
So, that's just one example.
Anyway, my point is that LoserThink is not about people being dumb, it's about this exact situation that I gave you.
A musician Doesn't know what's wrong with his analogy when he says, get a gun just in case.
Well, why isn't that just the same with climate change?
Deal with the risk of climate change just in case.
And the difference is shortage.
Don't have a shortage of guns.
Do have a shortage of multi-trillion dollar expenses.
If you do it once, you don't have much left over for anything else.
Alright, so...
That was way too much on that.
Google is being destroyed by its own wokeness, apparently.
So apparently the Google employees...
Are very progressive.
And if Google is involved in anything they don't like, they're very vocal and they make a stink about it.
One of the things they don't like is kids in cages.
And so some of the employees looked into it to see if Google in any way is working with the people who are putting the kids in cages.
And it turns out They are.
Turns out Google is one of the vendors who is providing services to the people who are putting kids in cages.
So the people who work for Google were unhappy to learn that they worked for a company that was supporting kids in cages.
Now I use that as just one example.
But I think you can kind of see the writing on the wall here.
I think Google might destroy itself with good intentions.
Because once you go down that path of let's boycott things that we don't like, there's no real end to that.
Now, I don't want to say it's a slippery slope.
I'm just saying that it's something that doesn't have a stop on it.
So... I like the word slippery slope because it makes you think that something has a quality called slipperiness as if it's inevitable.
What you should look at instead is to just see if there's any counter forces.
In this case, I don't see one.
Seems like Google is going to have to stop doing business with every entity that has done something its employees or a subset of its employees are not happy with.
How many of Google's customers are involved in something that some subset of its employees would not support?
Well, that's a lot of stuff.
That's a lot of stuff.
One of the idiots on Twitter was coming after me, one of my critics, and saying that I should stop whining that I lost friends and revenue talking about Trump-related stuff because I live in a world in which, you know, it's fair to boycott.
Everybody has a right to buy what they want or not buy what they want.
So I should not complain.
That I lost income or that I lost friends because of my opinions.
That's just the way the world works.
To which I said, hey asshole, where was I complaining?
Show me where I complained.
I did not complain.
I've stated it as a fact.
I've simply said it as a fact.
I lost ex-friends.
I lost ex-income. I have said explicitly that I'm not going to care about that in the sense that I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing.
But here's my larger point.
The person who says, yes, it's good and it's part of the free system that people can boycott things they don't like.
To which I say, if you pursue that, and let's say we make it more of a standard, that that's just ordinary.
That people routinely boycott companies or people who are involved in any way with stuff they don't like.
What would that do to civilization?
It would actually destroy civilization.
If you couldn't work with, deal with, sell to, buy from people who at least have one opinion or one thing you don't like, there would be nothing left.
Now, if you're talking about another country, you can absolutely boycott another country.
Because we can sell and buy to other countries.
But if you have a country that's literally treating you like an enemy and is killing tens of thousands of your citizens, well, yeah, you can point out that.
That's really just war.
So I'm not opposed to a defensive war.
If it's a defensive war, I'm not opposed to that.
Other of my critics piled on.
There was a Wired interview with me, the Wired magazine, in which their headline, assigned by probably a manager, said that I was arguing for more civility online.
And people saw me attacking all of my critics online, the trolls.
And they said, you stupid, hypocrite cartoonist who really is the pointy-haired boss, because they're not very creative.
They all think that they're the first ones who thought of that.
Hey, I'm the first one who thought of this idea of comparing the cartoonist who draws a pointy-haired boss.
I got it. I got it.
I'm going to watch this.
I'm going to compare the cartoonist...
To the character in his cartoon.
Watch this. Watch this.
The cartoonist, he's like...
Oh, this is so clever. He's like the pointy hair boss.
Oh! Pat myself on the back.
Oh! Nobody thought of that one before.
Wait until he sees this.
He's so clever.
Okay, you're the millionth troll to say the same damn stupid thing.
If you can't insult me with a little bit of originality, I feel disrespected.
Put some work into the criticisms.
Put a little elbow grease.
Do a little research.
Try to say something better than he's the pointy-haired boss or that he draws Garfield.
Those are the two things that maybe you should have known, somebody has said before, Anyway, my point is, the editor assigned a title to the interview with me that said that I'm arguing for more civility online.
And my trolls came in and said, how can you argue for civility online when I just see 400 comments you made yesterday insulting your critics?
How's that civility?
Do you see what happened?
The headline to the story said that I'm arguing for more civility online.
That never happened.
That never happened.
I never used the word civility.
If I did, I don't think I did.
It's not a word I would typically use.
That was simply a word assigned by an editor.
So my critics are criticizing me for saying something that was just a misleading headline from an editor.
It has nothing to do with me.
Now, if you were to read Loser Think, you would see an extended description of the fact that something like 60% of the things that people say about me, even in well-known publications, It's just wrong or it's out of context.
In this case, it's out of context.
What I do in my book and what I talked about in the article is the 48-hour rule for accepting apologies and the 20-year rule for just ignoring things that people did when they were in high school, you know, unless it was murder or something terrible.
Now, those two things make the world a better place and they reduce the temperature.
But there has never been a time in my life I've ever said we should be civil to trolls, terrorists, criminals in the act, and assholes.
I don't think you'll ever find anything I've ever said that says we should be civil to assholes.
I've never said that. So most of my critics, in fact, almost all of them yesterday, not all of them, maybe 80% of my critics yesterday, and there were a lot of them, came in to argue that the headline that I didn't write and is completely misleading is making me a hypocrite because I said something completely different in a different context.
Anyway, typical day on Twitter.
What else we got going here?
Funniest story from yesterday?
There's some pretty funny ones lately.
Is that the Trump administration has decided to not give credentials, press credentials, to Bloomberg anymore, which would deny the Bloomberg reporters access to the White House and to the president, I guess.
And... And of course, he's doing it as a response, because Bloomberg is running for office, and Bloomberg the company announced that they would not do investigative articles about Bloomberg, but they would continue to do it about other people, including Trump. Now, what do you do with that?
Now, so Trump...
Or his administration.
I don't know who came up with this idea.
Now, I didn't see this coming.
Did any of you see this play?
This was completely invisible to me.
In retrospect, I should have seen it coming.
But when I saw that announcement that they were going to deny press credentials to Bloomberg, you know, Bloomberg the company, I thought to myself, damn it, that's good.
That is so, so good strategically.
You can make your own decisions about ethics and free speech and all that.
I don't think our free speech is too affected by one organization in one special case having some limited access.
It doesn't say anything about the rest of the press.
It's a special case.
So I don't think it's a First Amendment situation in any practical sense.
But as a strategy, just as a political strategy, you're not going to see much better than that.
You know, I tell you all the time that the trademark signature moves from Trump is that when he sees free money sitting on the table, he picks it up.
This was free money sitting on the table that I didn't see it.
Did any of you see this coming?
It was exactly the right play.
Here's why it's exactly the right play.
What does it make you talk about?
It makes you talk about whether it's good or bad to deny Bloomberg access because they've announced that they're going to be unfair.
Does it matter?
Nothing else matters.
That's it. That's the whole play.
The play is that now you have to talk about it because it's something the president did, you know, the White House did.
It matters. It involves Bloomberg.
It's the First Amendment.
You can't not talk about it.
And every moment you spend talking about it makes Bloomberg look like a tool.
Even though, you know, in one sense, you can kind of understand how we got here.
You can understand that realistically, Bloomberg wasn't going to, you know, do hit pieces on their own founder.
So since Bloomberg was not going to do hit pieces on their own founder, because they couldn't, you know, they'd get fired, it's completely ethical.
For Bloomberg to say, look, we would never be trusted and we certainly have too much bias and stuff and too much at risk to do honest stories about Mike Bloomberg so the most ethical thing we'll do is we're going to say we're just out.
We'll just not cover it because we can't do it in a way that would look unbiased.
That's actually a pretty ethical thing to do.
But... The only way that that would be completely ethical is if they also don't talk about the other politicians, including Trump.
We all realized that the moment it came out.
If viewed in isolation, that's an ethical and I would say responsible thing to do.
If you're a news organization who knows, who knows?
It's not even a doubt.
But you know that you can't cover this one individually in a way that even anybody would think was unbiased.
It's way better to say you're out.
Okay, we're just not going to do it because we know we can never be credible on this one topic.
I actually thought that showed an ethical consideration that I sort of appreciated.
But when they said they were still going to cover the president, I was like, well, well, you are halfway there.
My friends, you are halfway there.
And the president took them the rest of the way.
So they got halfway to an ethical place, and the president just said, hey, Who left this free money laying on the table?
Seriously. Seriously.
Free money? Anybody? Anybody?
Nobody. All right.
Free money. So he says, we'll ban Bloomberg, and now we have to talk about it.
And the more you talk about it, the worse it is for not only Bloomberg, the company, but Bloomberg, the candidate.
So as a strategy, damn, that was good.
Now, for those of you who are new to my Periscopes, and you're saying to yourself, I know what you're saying to yourself, and I need the damn beard.
Scott, why do you say everything the Fresno does is good, and everything everybody else does is bad?
Why do you do that? Everything he does, orange flame good, why do you say that?
Scene. For those of you who are new, I often criticize presidents.
For example, if the president does a trade deal with China before they've executed their main fentanyl dealers, I'm going to be seriously pissed off, like you've never seen me.
I think the president could do better on immigration, could do better on health care, could do better on marijuana legalization.
Tons of things to criticize him about it.
So I criticize the president about a lot of stuff.
But this play?
This was a good play.
I've got to say. All right.
So... The president...
Had a couple of good tweets that are funnier than even his funny ones.
So I think these are both today or yesterday.
He said, thank you to great Republican John Kennedy for the job he did in representing both the Republican Party and myself against...
against...
I like he uses the word against.
He goes, for representing both the Republican Party and myself against...
Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd on Meet the Depressed...
Meet the Depressed.
Now, my understanding is that the president did not come up with that nickname for the show, Meet the Depressed.
I think Rush Limbaugh did.
Somebody was suggesting Mark Levin.
So somebody else came up with that word, but the fact that the president used it in a tweet made me laugh heartily.
Because, you know, now everybody's seen it.
Meet the Depressed.
And it's so perfect because Meet the Press is pretty much complete sadness all the time.
They're sad about Orange Man Bad.
And if your entire show is, we're very sad about Orange Man Bad, we're very sad.
Man, I'm sad.
Orange Man Bad, I'm sad.
Orange Man Bad, I'm sad.
That's the whole show. So Meet the Depressed is pretty frickin' hilarious.
So congratulations to whoever came up with it.
He had another funny one in which the President referred to Mike Bloomberg.
And I'm terrible at reading my own notes.
But he...
Oh, here's his other page.
He goes, Mini Mike Bloomberg, I guess that's the kill shot he's testing out, Mini Mike.
He goes, Mini Mike Bloomberg has instructed his third-rate news organization Not to investigate him or any Democrat, but to go after President Trump only.
The failing New York Times thinks that is okay, because their hatred and bias is so great, they can't even see straight.
It's not okay.
A mini Mike Bloomberg.
Now, he was making fun of Bloomberg's height before, but I think he was calling it Little Mike or whatever.
But Mini Mike is instantly sticky.
And as much as you don't want the bully to win...
No, we don't want to live in a country where the bully wins.
But this is sort of a special case, because in this case, and I'm going to paraphrase it, but this is how I saw it.
The way I saw it in 2016, President Trump ran to be the bully in chief.
He ran to be a bully.
He was just going to bully people who had it coming.
He wasn't going to bully innocent people.
He wasn't going to bully his supporters.
But he was going to bully other countries.
He was going to bully China if he could.
And certainly we knew he was going to bully his political opponents.
So his voters, knowingly, completely well informed about what they were getting, Purchase, through their votes, their own bully.
So, in a sense, the country hired a bully to bully on our behalf.
Very much like hiring a murderer to kill somebody who needs to be killed.
So, do I support bullying?
No. No, not as a general thing, but we got kind of a special case.
He was actually hired to be a bully.
So if you hire somebody to be a bully, and then he bullies people, I don't think you can complain too much if you hire somebody and they do exactly what they were hired to do, and they make it humorous at the same time.
Now, I feel sorry for John Apatow, who used to make funny movies.
And as you know, Hollywood no longer values funny movies because they're too insulting to somebody.
There's always somebody who's the butt of the joke, and so you can't really make funny movies the way funny movies used to be made.
So Judd Apatow can't make funny movies, but he hates President Trump.
If you've seen his Twitter feed, you know.
And President Trump has used Twitter to, for all practical purposes...
Create his own funny movies.
And the reason that Trump can still be funny is that he's never politically correct.
So the very thing that Judd Apatow can't do anymore...
And here's the funny part.
Why is it that Judd Apatow can't make funny movies anymore?
It's because of people like Judd Apatow.
See where I'm going with this?
Judd Apatow can't make movies in which you make fun of anybody, which is the old way of making movies, because of people like Judd Apatow, who would complain about people making fun of people.
So he and his people that would, let's say, agree with him in the anti-Trump world, I've made it impossible for Judd Apatow to make funny movies anymore.
And then he has to fire up his Twitter every day and watch Trump make a funny movie every day.
It's a small movie in the form of a tweet.
But Trump is doing Judd Apatow's job better than Judd Apatow because Judd Apatow can't do his job because if Judd Apatow did his job making funny movies, he would be boycotted by Judd Apatow.
How do you not love that?
How do you not love that?
Come on. By the way, I think Judd Apatow is an amazing talent and his movies are great.
But it's a funny situation is all I'm saying.
I've got a new hobby where When I get especially ignorant trolls coming at me on Twitter, I click on their profile to see if they're musicians, unsuccessful writers, or they have the hashtag resist.
Because the number of people who come after me on Twitter and have one of those qualities, musician who is not successful, writer who is not successful, or hashtag resist, The comments are just vile, like they're just bleeding on their computer.
So anyway, I always look at the profile of the trolls because it's funny to me.
President Trump was just asked just a few minutes ago when he was doing his press conference with Macron, President Macron, somebody in the crowd asked him if the President or the United States supports The Iranian protesters.
Now, I've told you that it's better for the United States to stay out of it, right?
It's better if we're not seen to be supporting the protesters, because then it's easier for the regime to say, see, see, it's the CIA. You know, it's not about us.
It's an external threat.
You should rally around us.
So, here's how the president answered the question, do we support, you know, do we, the United States, the government, does it support the Iranian protesters?
And Trump said he didn't want to comment on that.
But yes. I don't want to comment on that right now.
But yes. What the hell kind of answer is that?
I don't want to comment on it.
But yes. I don't know what that meant.
So I think that meant that we support them with our minds.
I think he didn't say this, but I think this is true.
I'm just speculating here. That he was making a distinction between supporting them financially or with the CIA or supporting them with weapons or anything like that.
We're not doing that. But do we support them sort of intellectually, morally, with our wishes and our hopes?
Yeah, we do.
Sounds like he has some more clarification on that topic coming up.
Remember a few years ago I predicted that By the end of the first year of the Trump presidency, his critics would be saying some version of this.
Okay, sure, he's effective, but we don't like him.
The we don't like him part is partly because he's Republican, but partly because his character, they would say, his personality, they would say, his mean tweets, they would say.
And I actually am running into trolls Who will state that he's a horrible monster, and then I'll ask them, okay, okay, let me accept your characterization.
Accepting your characterization, that the president is a...
They always have, like, five different words in their list.
He's a racist, rapist, conman, criminal...
I don't know, insane or something.
So they always have like five things.
And then I ask them, okay, accepting that that's true, because that's your characterization, what's going wrong?
You know, what's he, you know, misogynously throw that in there.
What is going wrong?
What has he broken? What has he done to the country?
Because now it's been three years.
You would think that all of those bad qualities would start translating into bad things for the country.
So I ask that question, And I actually had somebody retreat to this point.
They said that I know darn well that the real problem is his character and morality.
So one of his biggest critics actually had retreated all the way from having no problem at all with his results.
Everything's going well, but his character.
And his morality.
You know, the things you can't measure.
And so, I offered you this deprogramming tip.
I might do more of this before Christmas.
I like giving you some things to say to your relatives who are anti-Trump, to deprogram them.
And let me tell you what I suggested here.
I'm sure I wrote down here, yes.
So, when somebody, when one of your relatives goes full anti-Trump, it goes on a rant.
Here's a fun little thing you can do to deprogram them.
Now, you can't really deprogram people in real time.
They don't change their minds. But you're going to have a lot of fun with this one.
So this one's fun.
It goes like this.
So this is my tweet, but you can imagine wording this in your own words.
So imagine you say to your relative, who's an anti-Trumper, who's just giving you the laundry list of all the things that are wrong.
Suppose you say, you know, Uncle Bob, I hear what you're saying.
But, Uncle Bob, does it give you a sixth sense, end of the movie kind of a feeling when you realize everything that can be measured Is trending positive?
But weirdly, everything you can't measure looks like a disaster to you.
Does it make you feel like you just saw the ending of The Sixth Sense?
Now, the reference to the ending of The Sixth Sense, I'm assuming almost all of you have seen that movie, If you make a reference to the end of The Sixth Sense, everybody who's seen the movie, and I'm not going to spoil the movie, so I'll just assume that you've all seen it, but anybody who saw the end of The Sixth Sense knows what the feeling is.
The feeling is, oh, crap, everything I thought was wrong.
And you have to reinterpret your history.
So I take that feeling at the end of The Sixth Sense, because everybody in the theater had the same feeling.
At the end, they were like, oh, damn it, everything I thought about this movie was dead wrong.
Dead wrong. Dead wrong.
But I'm not going to ruin the movie.
Too late. So here's another way to attack it.
Suppose you said to your anti-Trump relative, hey Uncle Bob, just so we can get on the same page, let's do this.
Let's make two lists.
One is the list of everything that involves the federal government that you could measure.
Things which have statistics, things that we can track.
So that's one list, things you can track.
Then there'll be another list of things that are important But they're not subject to, you can't put a number on it, you can't put a statistic, you can't really compare it.
So on the list of things you can't measure would be the President's character, the impact from his failing the fact-checking 11,000 times in a row, the morality, let's say the...
The friendliness of our allies overseas.
So you see where I'm going, right?
You can make a list of all the things that can't be measured but seem important.
Then your second list is all the things you can measure.
Unemployment rate, number of our military that are killed, amount that other countries are donating to NATO, And even, and by the way, you have to fact check me on this, but I believe that because the economy is so strong that more people have healthcare now than at any time in our history.
Probably both as a number and as a percentage.
But fact check that on, will you?
I also think, and I need to fact check on this, that the rate of rise of healthcare costs has leveled off.
Which means they're still rising, but they're not rising like this.
Suddenly the Trump administration is rising like that.
And sure enough, there are specific things the Trump administration has done and is doing for price transparency, allowing associations across state lines, allowing Florida and other states to buy discounted pharmaceuticals from Canada,
etc. But my point is, If you made two lists, things you can measure and things you cannot, you would soon discover that on the list of things that you can measure, the president is killing it.
Now, some people are going to put on that list some things that are a responsibility of the states.
For example, the homelessness primarily is something that, unfortunately, the states need to deal with, and the states are probably making the mistakes that are causing the problem.
There's not a ton that the federal government can do about that.
But anyway, it would be a fun holiday experiment to see if you can trigger in your anti-Trump uncle or family members the feeling of the end of the sixth sense.
Where you present to them that everything they have a problem with with the president is stuff you can't measure, and everything that you can measure is going well.
Because they should have that.
Once they realize that that's true, and I'm sure they'll find some exceptions, but that is basically true, let them go chew on that for a while.
Huh. Is it my imagination?
Huh. That all the things you can measure are going well?
All right. Somebody else said that another way to deprogram people quickly, this is something that somebody else says to their Democrat friends.
He says, you realize that the Democratic plan is to give your money to illegal aliens in the form of free health care.
And apparently that's enough to deprogram people on the spot.
I haven't tried it, so I can't confirm that you can deprogram somebody on the spot.
But is that an unfair characterization of what At least the more extreme Democrats who are running for office are saying.
Because they do want to give free healthcare to illegal immigrants.
And they do want to open the borders so that as many can come in as want.
Right? So, the Democrats' plan is literally to give your money to poor people in other countries.
And not just the little.
Trillions. Because if you open the border, and then you have to pay for healthcare if everybody wants to come in, how many people would want to come in to get some free healthcare?
How about all of them?
Who the hell would stay in Mexico if there were no border restrictions and you could get free healthcare in the United States?
The entire world I want to say this without swearing, but sometimes you just have to swear.
So let me give you a little heads up.
There's going to be an obscene word coming.
So cover the ears of your toddlers who did not go to school.
Cover your own ears if you don't want to hear this curse word that's coming up.
Are you ready? It's the answer to this question.
How many people in Mexico would start walking north to cross the border if there were no border restrictions and they could give free healthcare in the United States?
Every fucking person.
See, sometimes you just have to use a swear word to make the point.
All of them. They'd all come here.
Why wouldn't they? Would you stay in Mexico if you could just walk north and have a better life and free healthcare the moment you showed up?
They'd all come. Now, I think most people understand that.
So this little deprogramming thing is that the Democrats, by policy, is not even a hidden...
There's no hidden agenda here.
The Democrats say it directly.
We want to give your money that you pay in taxes.
To people from other countries to give them better lives.
That's explicitly what they're saying.
I'm not even interpreting. They're saying that directly.
You can forget every other element of politics and just say, well, I'll just give you this one thing.
Are you okay with that?
And by the way, it probably means less health care for you because your money is not infinite.
All right. I believe I have looked at...
Oh, yes. So we've got the...
So there's a report coming in.
The Inspector General's report is due in.
Who knows if that's ever going to happen.
I feel like we've been waiting forever for this...
You know, Horowitz, Inspector General's probe.
So there's already leaks, so everybody's trying to leak ahead of time to frame it so that when the actual news comes out, it will already be pre-framed and everybody's mind will be made up before they actually see any information.
And so some of the leakers are saying that it suggests that the FBI had every reason to spy on the Trump campaign.
So that's what the leaks are telling us to expect.
But then we're also being told, and you assume that these leaks are from the opposite side, that Attorney General Barr is going to disagree with the conclusions.
Based on the same set of facts.
So the rumor is, the leak is, that Barr is going to look at it, and even if the Inspector General says, this is enough to support what the FBI did, the Barr is going to look at the same data, the same report, and say, nope, don't see it.
Now, are either of those rumors true?
We don't know. Who knows?
You know, that's how rumors work.
You don't know until you know...
But we'll see. It's good persuasion to get people pre-framed, because then the data won't matter at all.
Remember I told you that we live in a world where facts don't matter?
We're watching in real time as people's minds are being made up by the leaks.
The facts won't change anybody's mind.
Or, you know, just about nobody.
There's an article in the New York Times about Harris.
Is it anti-Harris or pro-Harris?
I haven't seen it. Alright.
How can anyone fathom a crime occurred?
How can they fathom that there are so many crimes that have occurred that there are countless reasons to impeach this president?
That's actually what they think.
There are countless obvious proven crimes.
I just don't know of any.
Somebody's asking, Brian is asking, will I rerecord my book, How to Failed Almost Everything, and still went big in my own voice.
I'm thinking about it.
I'm thinking about doing that for God's Debris as well.
So I've built out my little studio in my house and I need to use it.
But I'm thinking of just doing a sort of a YouTube reading of my book, God's Debris.
Because right now it's already an audio book, but it's read by a person who's good at doing that.
So maybe I'll do that.
And if I did that, I would probably just post it on a YouTube channel.
And it would just be there for free.
The latest is that it's impeachable that Trump refuses to participate in his own impeachment.
I'll walk you through the studio.
I can't walk you through the studio because there's a surprise in there.
But you'll see it eventually.
Alright. What about Biden's blood, leg hair?
Yeah, I haven't talked about that.
Apparently that video came out in 2017, so it's not a new one.
But if you haven't seen it, it's pretty darn entertaining.
It's Joe Biden babbling about little kids brushing his leg hair.
That's all you need to know.
That Joe Biden was talking about little kids brushing his leg hair when he was young.
Okay. Alright.
So, then he bit his wife's finger on stage because he thought it was funny.
I call him Biden Biden now.
Joe Biden. Oh yeah, there's Melania in her coat.
So Melania is showing off the holiday decorations in the White House, and the Washington Post comment on it was that her coat looked bad.
Yeah, decorations are great, but she's got a bad coat.
And now I looked at the coat.
It's not a bad coat.
It's a really good coat.
It's an excellent coat.
So they just can't say anything unambiguously good, even about Melania.
Let me put it this way.
If you're criticizing Melania for not being stylish, you're on really shaky ground.
Because have you ever seen Melania not looking perfectly put together and stylish?
No, you have not.
Not even one time.
And not this time either.
So, if you're going to criticize somebody on style, I would think that the minimal requirement is that you have more style than the person you're criticizing.
And that is not the case.
I would love to see your critic at the Washington Post out in public.
Let's take a photo on any day.
Alright, here's your outfit. Now, just randomly, let's take a picture of Melania.
Compare their outfits.
Which one's going to be more stylish?
I rest my case. That's all I got for now.
And I will talk to you later.
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