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Jan. 2, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
42:12
Episode 775 Scott Adams: Sleepy Joe the Hoaxer, Anti-Semitism, The Press and More
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Hey everybody! Come on in here.
Were you worried that I was a little bit late?
That's right, I'm one minute late.
It's not like me at all.
But I wouldn't miss it for anything, even though it's perhaps the slowest news day of all slow news days.
Has there ever been a slower news day than today?
I don't think so.
But we'll be getting on to the good stuff.
Next week. But before we begin, I think you'd like to enjoy the simultaneous sip.
That's why you're here. And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a 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 simultaneous sip.
Go. So the news today is that President Trump has raised $100 million for his campaign, which turns out to be a pretty big number.
I don't know how you can ever compete with the incumbent, because when the incumbent is running for re-election, there's exactly one person that the entire Republican Party even thinks of to give money to.
It's not like they're giving money to Trump and the other candidate.
It's just Trump.
But the poor Democrats have to spread their love across all these candidates.
So that's a pretty big hurdle for a challenger.
That said, apparently Bernie Sanders has raised a huge amount of money, $34.5 million over the past three months.
Which is a lot, especially when you're taking small donations.
So Bernie is killing it on the donations.
Very interesting. I wonder if that predicts anything.
Let's talk about something else besides money.
Although we like money.
Money is good. Somebody says Castro dropped.
I don't know about that.
Let's see. So Ben Shapiro has an article talking about How the news business is having an awkward time covering anti-Semitism.
So apparently there's, at least anecdotally and maybe factually as well, there seems to be some scary uptick in anti-Semitism in New York City and beyond.
And as Ben points out, the problem is that it's not the usual suspects.
So if we saw an uptick in anti-Semitism and the perpetrators were all white supremacists, you'd see non-stop news about it.
But because a lot of the perpetrators are black and brown, as Ben Shapiro explains it, it makes it sort of awkward to talk about it.
And I ask myself, This sort of made me think, I wonder if there's any kind of research to show which ethnic groups in the United States, or let's say which racial groups, are the most prejudiced.
Did you ever wonder that?
Because one of the weird things about being a generic white guy, like I am, is that I hang around with a lot of generic white people.
I live in California, so it's sort of like a You know, it's always like the United Nations wherever I am in California, but I still spend a lot of time, especially online, interacting with generic white people.
And there's a complete disconnect between my experience of generic white people and how everybody else seems to see them.
Because I think there's some view When white people get together, they're all talking about racist stuff and lots of bad behavior.
But I never see that.
It just isn't in my experience.
And so I was wondering, huh, maybe that's just a California thing.
But I was wondering, I wonder if anybody's studied that.
Has anybody ever studied who's the most racist group?
And it turns out it's really hard to find that.
So I did a search online and there's this Quora question where somebody asked the same question.
In America, who are the most racist groups?
And there was some gentleman who weighed in and said he had a lot of data on it.
And here's the funny part.
It was a Ukrainian.
You can't make this stuff up.
The one thing I looked for that would have been the most, let's say, provocative thing, you know, fact you could ever look up, which is, has it ever been studied which ethnic or racial groups in the United States are the most prejudiced themselves,
the most racist? And he, of course, had a list which I wouldn't I wouldn't believe is true, but he put, I won't say who was at the top, because that's just going to cause trouble, but according to his list, white people in the United States were at the bottom.
The white people were the least racist of any ethnic group in the United States.
Now, he didn't show his link, and I wouldn't put any credibility to his study, and that makes it even funnier that he's Ukrainian.
What is up with these Ukrainians?
But the first question I ask myself is, why couldn't I easily Google that?
Why isn't it that when I Google it, I don't see anything on that question?
Doesn't it seem like such an obvious thing to ask?
Because white people are generally in the target zone of being the racists.
But a lot of that might be this so-called...
Structural or institutional racism, in that it's not what anybody's doing necessarily, it's just the existence of the entire situation.
So, this sort of connects to Ben Shapiro's point, and then I'm going to add my own new point.
It seems to me that it's easy to be less racist when you're in power.
Wouldn't you say? If things are going well for whatever group you're in, you're not feeling a ton of hatred for anybody else.
Maybe even feel some empathy for other groups.
But if things are going well for your group, you just don't have a reason to hate anybody.
Because everything's going fine.
And what I'm wondering is, if the changing demographic in the United States It's going to cause maybe, maybe they'll just always be the same amount of racism, no matter what, but it will be spread across different groups then.
Instead of people imagining that white people are racist against everybody else, it feels like there's some kind of a transition going on, at least in our minds, where there's some kind of recognition that Let's say racism and or prejudice and all those things are somewhat baked into everybody.
You don't get a free pass.
You don't get to be born brown and therefore you're not racist.
At least in terms of, you know, rather than debate the definition of racist, I'll just say we're all pattern recognition machines.
But we're not good at it.
We see patterns, we think they mean something, but most of the time they don't.
Most patterns are just coincidence or some other cause.
So, my take is that everybody's suffering from pattern recognition and we're not good at it, which makes everybody a little biased.
In every possible way you can be biased, but I don't think there's any special thing going on with one group, is what I'm saying.
All right. So Joe Biden has trotted out, again, the fine people hoax.
Again. It's as if he's immune to any kind of...
Any kind of persuasion against it.
Now, I'm genuinely curious, and for anybody who's not familiar, there might be a few people who are new here.
The fine people hoax is the idea that the president said that the neo-Nazis and racists in Charlottesville, who were marching with their signs and everything, the news reported that the president called them fine people.
That didn't happen. It's widely reported, and so many of you who are listening to this for the first time are saying, what?
What the hell are you talking about, Scott?
I saw it myself.
I heard it with my own ears.
I heard the president.
I saw it. He said that, Scott.
What the hell are you talking about?
And what the hell I'm talking about is you didn't see that.
You never saw that.
There are a lot of people, tens of millions of people, who believe they saw a thing that literally never happened.
And it's easy to prove.
You just have to Google the transcript or Google the full video of the actual event you think you remember.
Just look at it. Just see for yourself.
And you're going to be kind of amazed that you saw only a hoax version of the transcript, which is shortened, which reverses its meaning.
Anyway, Joe Biden has been using that hoax to hammer at the president, and now he's produced a campaign video, which features that first.
It's the first part of his campaign video.
Now here's the thing, and I'm going to ask in the comments, because I really don't know.
I'm genuinely curious.
Is Joe Biden so stupid that he doesn't know it's fake?
Or is he doing it anyway, knowing it's fake?
Which do you think it is?
Stupid or liar?
So there's two possibilities for Biden.
So why he would keep perpetuating this hope?
He's stupid. He thinks it's real.
Or he's a liar. He doesn't care.
It's just effective. So in the comments...
So I'm seeing most of you saying he's lying.
One's for stupid.
Somebody says maybe both.
Doesn't care doing it anyway.
Just reading your comments. Knows it's fake.
Liar or senile.
Liar. You know, I don't know.
Because here's the thing.
The reason that this hoax is so sticky is that it is resistant to evidence to the contrary.
You can show people the transcript, you can make them read it out loud, and you can watch in real time how it doesn't change their mind.
So it could be that he believed it once, And then when it's disproven to him, he just sort of discounts the debunking so that he just keeps his original thought through cognitive dissonance.
So I've got a feeling it's something like cognitive dissonance where he's been exposed to the fact that it's not true, but he just re-engineers it in his mind so it's true again because he doesn't want to lose it.
But in either case, isn't it pretty disqualifying?
And I know what somebody's going to say in about half a second.
They're going to say, wait, wait, wait.
President Trump fails the fact-checking 14,000 times so far.
So isn't that the same thing?
What's the difference between what Trump says that's not true and what Biden says that's not true?
Well, one big difference is that you take President Trump in context.
Everybody knows that President Trump uses hyperbole, but so far, as far as I can tell, it's all at least directionally useful.
You know, he's talking the economy up, even if he's exaggerating.
He's saying we've made great gains against ISIS, even if it's a little exaggerated, because those are good exaggerations.
It's useful. To tell ISIS that we're beating them badly in case they didn't know it.
It's useful to say the economy is doing great even better than it is because that's what keeps optimism up and keeps the economy going.
So the kind of hyperbole that the president uses is either funny or it's an insult or it's obviously not true but it's still funny or it's promoting the right direction or something like that.
But if you look at what Biden's doing It feels like there are two main possibilities.
Cognitive dissonance is like a weird middle ground.
But he's either a liar, and that removes his primary purpose for running.
If he's lying, and he knows it, about the fine people hoax, correct me if I'm wrong, doesn't that remove the primary argument for his presidency?
The primary argument is character.
So if he's lying about the fine people hoax in public, the most transparent lie you could ever do, at least transparent to the people who are onto it.
And so he says, is it a directional truth?
It's the opposite of a directional truth.
Because the president, as Major Garrett of CBS recently said, has a record that any president would be proud to claim on legislation and actions, executive orders and stuff, that are beneficial to minority and the black community.
So that's actually what's happening.
So to suggest that the president is doing the opposite of that, which drives the country apart, is the ultimate evil.
I mean, it really is the ultimate evil because it's the sort of thinking that gets you race wars and every other kind of bad behavior.
So I think Biden's argument that he's the one with good character is completely demolished if he believes, you know, if he knows he's lying about the fine people hoax.
The other possibility is he doesn't know he's lying.
Isn't that a little bit disqualifying as well?
If you don't know that the central story of the last few years in terms of how we understand the presidency and who Trump is and who we are as a country and all that Charlottesville was the central story.
If he doesn't know that, if he doesn't actually know what happened, He's not really with it enough to be president, I would say.
So that's a pretty damning situation for Biden.
But again, I don't think it'll make any difference to his voters.
His voters won't care if it's true.
They won't care if it's false. Are you following Daniel Dale of the New York Times?
So Daniel Dale is...
I guess he's the full-time fact-checker for the president.
So the New York Times has a guy who just tweets and writes about what Trump got wrong.
When I tell you that, your first impression is going to be, I hate that guy, if you're a Trump supporter.
You're going to say, I hate that guy because he's just a Trump critic.
But I've got to say, I have developed a grudging respect for Daniel Dale because he does keep it pretty factual.
And, you know, it would be so easy to just, you know, throw in a bunch of, you know, orange man bad into this type of content.
But he does, I would say, a pretty, pretty good job of keeping it just to the facts.
You know, there's a little bit of attitude that gets in there.
That would be impossible to get rid of all of it.
But not bad. So Daniel Dale, I would say that for the specific job you're doing, Good job.
Even if I don't like some of the output, it's still good work.
So he had this tweet that gives you a little peek behind the curtain, and it's kind of fun.
And it's a four-pointer, and he calls it the circle of life.
So point one, he says, the White House emails a list of Trump accomplishments to the entire media.
Alright, so the White House sends out, these are all my accomplishments for the year, for my term so far, and he sends it to all the media.
Number two, the Washington Examiner publishes the press release as an exclusive.
Alright, this is my favorite part.
What does CNN do when the White House sends them a list of all their accomplishments?
Well, they don't publish it, right?
What does MSNBC do when they receive a list of all the president's accomplishments?
Well, they don't put it on the air.
So the Washington Examiner, and this is one of the funniest things you'll ever see in your life, the Washington Examiner, knowing that this list of accomplishments went to all of the media, they still claim it's an exclusive because they're pretty sure everybody else is going to ignore it, except maybe Fox News and Breitbart, I suppose.
So I could not be more...
I couldn't be more amused or appreciative, I guess is the right word, of how the Washington Examiner handles this silly situation.
I could just imagine them sitting in the meeting and say, you know, everybody's going to ignore this.
So what should we do?
Should we just be the only ones who publish it?
And then somebody in the meeting, probably the funniest person in the meeting, said...
I've got an idea. Let's say it's an exclusive.
And so that's point three.
The Washington Examiner publishes it as an exclusive.
And point three is the White House, an aide, tweets the Examiner article, and then number four, Trump retweets it.
So the White House basically places it in the press.
The only one who bites on it is the Washington Examiner, who calls it their exclusive.
And then a White House aide tweets it, and then the President retweets it, and then Daniel Dale has to talk about it, and then I talk about it.
So basically everybody wins.
Daniel Dale gets some content.
I get to talk about it.
The President gets his message out.
The Washington Examiner gets an exclusive.
And, you know, the news gets out.
Basically, it's one of these funny situations where just everybody wins by just acting silly.
I would love to know who it is at the Washington Examiner who made the decision to use the word exclusive, because that's really funny.
It's funny on some kind of meta level.
I'm going to be laughing about that all day.
All right. Alright, here's a really cool thing.
You ready for a cool thing? There's an organization that has already formed and they're building small neighborhoods that are designed.
So they're designing a thousand person neighborhood that is a carless neighborhood and they're putting the first one in Tempe.
So the name of the organization is Cul-de-sac.
C-U-L-D-E-S-A-C, just like cul-de-sac,.com, and you can go see their stuff there.
So I don't know how far along they are.
It looks like they've got it designed and maybe funded and maybe breaking ground, but they've got some interesting designs.
And what I love about it is, first of all, it's exactly what I've been saying the future needs.
So if you're worried about the national debt, I would say there are three things that matter a lot.
Healthcare, military, and just cost of living.
And I think that you're going to see lots of experiments, and this looks like it's going to be a good one, to lower the cost of a very high quality life.
Because they're going to build this environment so it just looks and feels great, and everything's easy to do.
Imagine living somewhere, Where you walk outside and it's just, it's great.
It's just, you know, manicured spaces and trees and grass and it's built to look good.
And it's built to be easy to get around and there's no traffic, there's no cars, there's no car engines.
You know, I guess you can get around with an Uber and a bicycle and scooters and stuff like that.
And the weather would be good enough so you can do a lot of stuff outdoors.
I think you're going to see a whole bunch of experiments like this.
Now, one of the examples that they used is that instead of having a house where you've got a guest room, it seems like everybody has a house with a guest room above a certain size house, they're saying, you rarely use the guest room, so wouldn't it make more sense to have some public guest rooms And anybody can just, you know, use them as they need them.
So I'd love to get this founder on the Periscope sometime to talk about it.
But this is really the future.
The future is designed from the ground up communities where you just make it cheap and easy.
So imagine getting rid of all your transportation expenses, or let's say 90% of them, because you still might need to get to the airport.
So let's say 90% of your transportation expenses.
Now some of you asked, hey, how am I going to get to work?
And the answer is you wouldn't live here if that was a problem.
So remember, it's optional.
Nobody's going to make you live in this cul-de-sac community.
It's for somebody who wants to work locally or they can work remotely or whatever.
Or they've got enough money, I suppose.
So that's what's coming.
Somebody says no one wants to live there.
Now why would you say no one wants to live there?
What possible thinking is it?
Let me talk about a form of loser think that I should have put in loser think but I didn't.
It's the fallacy of thinking that other people think the way you do.
There is a gigantic, gigantic variance in how each of us want to live.
Some people need more privacy.
Some people need people. Some people need the city.
Some people need rural. It's just all over the board.
So building these small sort of specially designed communities is only meant for the 3% or whatever the population who are just perfectly suited for it.
And we can imagine that other places would be built for people who have different requirements and needs and preferences and it would be perfect for them.
But the point of it is you can lower the cost of living to the point where the government doesn't need to pay so much.
That's where it's all heading.
I want to live where the people who move there used to live.
Yeah.
How is this housing different from other worker housing promoted by socialist countries?
God, that question actually hurts me.
It's actually painful.
We have some kind of a disease in this country with socialism.
And it's sort of a two-way disease.
There's the people who have the disease because they think socialism is good because they don't understand things.
Basically, There are people who don't understand how the world works or incentives work, so they think, hey, socialism's a good idea.
And then there's the other group of people that, as demonstrated by that comment, who believe they see socialism everywhere and that therefore everything is broken because it's got a little socialism in it.
And that's just such an unproductive way to think.
So this cul-de-sac, to answer your question, doesn't have a fucking thing to do with socialism.
It could not be further from socialism.
It's a capitalist place that capitalists go to live because capitalists chose to live there.
That's it. There are a few shared services, just as today, and Uber car ride is a shared service, but it's as capitalist as you can get.
You could not get more capitalist than Uber, but it's a shared service.
So when I say to you this community might have some shared or common, let's say, common services such as guest rooms, that's not socialism.
That's not socialism.
It's not even close.
So don't be afraid of the boogeyman of socialism because somebody's found a way to save some money.
All right. Sorry, I had to swear there.
Somebody says, what's with your language lately, young man?
What is with your language?
I don't have an answer to that.
Some people don't want the public around them.
Yeah. Most people want the public around them sometimes.
Sounds like reinventing the small town village of rural America.
I would say no.
Because if the rural small towns of the past worked, we'd still have them.
So just being small is not what makes it work.
It's being small and designed.
It's the design that's never happened.
The small towns of the past were random.
A small town of the past was just a little random thing.
I'm seeing a lot of people asking me if my prednisone is making me swear more.
Let me answer that question because there's an interesting story there.
So some of you know I was taking prednisone for some nasal problems.
But the prednisone is really a...
A mind-altering drug as well as a physical one.
Because the physical changes change you mentally.
And the physical changes are you feel a little bit like a superman for a week.
So, for a week, I could exercise infinitely.
I could just exercise as much as I wanted, it felt like.
Wouldn't get sore, wouldn't get tired.
I could, you know, do any amount of work.
I didn't need to sleep.
I was sleeping four hours a night, and it was plenty, it felt like.
Now, you can't do this for long, because if you do the prednisone for, you know, longer than these limited little uses that your doctor recommends, it's really bad for you, all right?
It's really, really bad for you.
But for a short term, it turns you into a superhuman.
You're smarter, you're physically better, you don't have pain.
But, yesterday was the first day off.
So I had my first day without prednisone.
They tapered off so it's not such a big shock to your system.
So I did the taper, but there's still one, the first day that you don't have any.
And I gotta tell you, yesterday was the worst year, the worst day of my year.
I felt like I'd been run over by a bus.
And it lasted all day.
From the moment I woke up, I felt a bus running over my body.
Like, oh, every part of my body hurts.
So it's like, you know, the full body aches.
And I think it's the prednisone.
Now, somebody asked if that's having an effect on my mood.
And the answer is yes.
There's no doubt about it.
So when somebody said, you know, is that why you're swearing more?
I don't know. Because once your chemistry becomes different, you just imagine that's who you are.
You know, you forget that it was just a chemistry experiment, and the reason you're doing what you're doing is because your chemistry changed.
So, could be.
If I had to guess, I would say that I'm crankier today than normal because my body aches.
You know, I'm still coming out of it.
And when your body hurts, you tend to get cranky, so that might be it.
Oh, that's the other thing. The prednisone, I think it was the prednisone, made me so hungry all the time that I gained about eight pounds in a week.
I ate like a freaking pig.
You know, there was one day I ate six candy bars in a row.
And, I mean, I was just eating until my stomach hurt from expansion.
And I still was hungry.
So now the hunger is gone, so I'm good.
But anyway, there's a point to this.
There's a larger point to this.
One of the larger points is that if you think you have free will, try taking prednisone.
Because what will happen is you'll find that your preferences and your decisions and your actions change.
If you had free will, would that happen?
If you had free will, Why would you become a different personality, fairly predictably, by taking a drug?
The drug shouldn't change who you are, except that we don't have free will.
We are a chemistry experiment, and when you put a new chemical in, a powerful one, you're a new person.
You just turned into a new person.
That's right, I was famished and ravished.
Do you prescribe?
I don't know what that means.
On prednisone, you can be eating a sandwich, and while eating it, you're making another sandwich.
That is exactly what it feels like.
I spent almost 100% of my daily waking time on prednisone buying food, preparing food, and eating food.
I felt like it was all I was doing.
It was just eating. And then somebody says, it's interesting, so another one is, you proposed.
Well, the idea to propose, you know, I've had for months, so it wasn't like a decision I necessarily made.
But you're right. If I had made the decision, and I had never wanted to until I was on that drug, you'd have to worry, right?
I mean, even I would worry.
but that decision was made months ago I just executed somebody says how to overcome all odds That is a really interesting question.
So I don't know what's behind that question, but somebody said, how does one overcome all odds?
Well, of course, probably one can't overcome all odds.
But if you've heard my story enough, you know that there are a whole bunch of times in my life in which I beat the odds...
In ways that just don't seem possible.
I mean, if you think about it, I mean, starting with becoming a famous cartoonist, that is such a rare job.
There are very few famous cartoonists, but I set that goal and I became one.
You know, and even becoming somewhat famous more recently for predicting that Trump would win, very rare.
Very unusual. Having a best-selling book, number one best-selling book, at different times in my past, very rare.
Getting rid of an incurable disease, how often does that happen?
It's really rare.
Happened to me. Having a fiancé like Christina, very rare.
Very, very rare.
But it happened to me. So I do live in a world in which insanely unlikely things happen at a regular basis.
And by the way, this is kind of a tease, so I shouldn't do it to you, but I'm going to do it anyway.
You see the public version of what I present, the things I can tell you, the things that are not so private that I feel bad about telling you.
But you cannot imagine what my actual personal experience of life is like.
It can't even be explained.
If you were to look at all the stuff I've never talked about that are also unusual and beating the odds by so much, it's just mind-boggling.
If there were any way that I could communicate that, and I can't, because usually it's private, or it involves somebody else who would like to be private, or it's a story I can't tell for one reason or another, or it's a state secret, or it's a proprietary or something.
So I wish to God I could tell you.
All the good stories in my life, but I can't.
Just trust me when I tell you that as amazing and unlikely as my actual public life is, it's even weirder.
More in a good way.
It's more unusual than you can imagine.
Devin's going to go buy my book now.
Well, thank you. Am I working on any affirmations at the moment?
Not directly.
Not directly. I'm working on a lot of projects, which I think about a lot, and I'm working on a lot.
And most of them you know about.
But I am in a weird kind of situation in which I don't have many needs.
You know, my social life is amazing.
My personal life, I mean.
My career, totally happy with it.
So it's hard to sit down and do affirmations when you've got things going.
Did she let you grab her by...
That phrase will never be lost.
Somebody finished Chebbs?
You finished Loser Think last night?
Thank you. Any New Year's resolutions?
You know, I do.
Yes. I'm not sure I'll call them resolutions because I like systems better than discrete goals.
But I'll tell you that there are some systems that I'm looking to improve this year.
One of them is this.
So I'd like to take whatever I'm doing here on Periscope to some, let's say, even better level.
Maybe it's just the quality of the...
Of the broadcast? I don't know.
But I'm probably going to do more interviews.
So that'll be fun. Trying to get to half a million Twitter users by the end of the year.
I'd love to have a million, but that would be...
Something weird would have to happen for that.
I've said before that if I ever got to a million Twitter followers, that I would run the world.
And... Here's the...
Here's the thinking behind it.
So persuasion is a combination of your reach and your skill.
President Trump has the biggest reach of anybody because he's the president, so he gets lots of attention.
So he has the greatest level of reach combined with, in my opinion, the highest level of persuasive skill we've ever seen in public.
So he's got the two things operating at maximum degrees.
But he won't always be present.
If I got to a million followers, my reach would be big enough that my persuasion skill set, combined with the fact that the things I persuade about, I don't have a financial interest in.
And I'm not a child.
So Greta has her own problems because she's young.
And other people who are persuading, it's obvious, they're political, they're backing a team, it's for power, it's for money or whatever.
And because I'm in this very rare situation in which I'm doing this sort of thing, not for money, I like to make money.
So if I can find ways to monetize it, I'm going to do that.
So you should expect To see me trying to monetize what I'm doing, because I'm doing it anyway.
But I don't do it for that purpose.
I just believe monetizing is a good way to keep score.
It's a good way to grow something.
I can invest in it more, etc.
Anyway, if I get to a million followers with my skill set, combined with the fact that it should be somewhat obvious to most people that I'm not in it to make a buck, I would effectively run the world at that point.
I don't mean every topic, because the people who care the most tend to be in charge of topics.
But if I got to a million followers, you would see stuff like the cul-de-sac that I was talking about.
You'd see more of that, because you'd see lots of A-B tests.
People would say, well, we don't know if this will work, but I've got funding, I've got an idea, I've got energy, I'm going to try it.
So you'd see a lot more of that.
Somebody says, you're not in it to make a buck?
What are your books about?
So the last three books, that's a good question, actually.
The first of my last three books are a completely different field for me from cartooning.
So the first of the three was Had I Failed Almost Everything and Still Went Big.
And a friend referred to that as my magnum opus once.
It was the book that I read that I hoped would be my contribution to To the planet, you know, once I've left.
So one always writes books with a, well, let me say this a better way.
If you want your book to reach a lot of people, do it for money.
Unfortunately, those things are tightly coupled.
Because if I write the book for money, and write it in a way that I think will sell the most, and people will buy the most of them and design the best cover, and I really take a completely commercial approach to it, then my publisher will do the same.
And that's what gets into a lot of people's minds.
So if you don't get the commercial part right, your publisher doesn't want to work with you, the bookseller doesn't want to sell it, you need to feed the entire ecosystem, and that's what gets you the biggest reach.
So, of course, there's no situation in which I would ever say no to money, there's no situation in which I wouldn't want to make money.
On any content I produce, even if my main intention is that I want to do something good for the world.
I always want to put the commercial layer on there because it increases the value of the product.
Interview Seth Godin.
I know Seth a little bit.
We've communicated over many years.
He would be amazing.
I should ask for him. Thoughts on self-publishing.
It's tough. I don't Offhand, I can't think of anybody who has successfully self-published.
I'm sure it's happened, but I don't know any, so I have to think it's hard.
Dershowitz is giving his way for two bucks on Twitter.
Yeah, Dershowitz writes so many books.
I think he writes a book every six months or something, so he's a special situation.
All right. I see your suggestions for guests, and maybe I shall do that.
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