Episode 813 Scott Adams: The Strongest Democrat Presidential Candidate, and an Inspirational Story
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Sam Harris has updated thoughts on President Trump
The Democrat debate and Presidential candidates
Coronavirus update, first American citizen death
Amir Attaran's Tweet about Jordan Peterson's situation
One small act of kindness and endless ripples
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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams Weekend Edition, which is exactly like the weekday edition, except better for undisclosed reasons.
Well, today we've got lots to talk about.
And I'm going to give you an inspirational story toward the end, so make sure you stay for that.
But before we begin, is there something you're waiting for?
Something you expect?
Something you love? Yes, it's a simultaneous set, but all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a 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 thing that makes everything better.
The simultaneous sip.
Go! I can feel the lion energy just going through me.
It's like tiger blood, but different.
Alright, let's jump into the stuff.
All the stuff that's happening.
I was listening yesterday to a new podcast by Sam Harris.
I mean, a new episode.
Now, those of you who have been following me for a while know that I famously had an appearance on Sam Harris's podcast in...
2016, I think it was, in which I was talking about why President Trump, then-candidate Trump, was better than people thought.
In other words, I described his persuasion ability and made a case for him.
Now, that podcast got a lot of attention, and people talk about it literally every day.
I still hear about it every day.
Somebody mentions that they heard me on that.
So it made a fairly big impression.
So it was interesting to hear Sam's sort of update, you know, most current thinking about the president, and I thought I'd update you.
One of the things, and I think this is interesting, and it's one of the things that makes Sam Harris special and notable and worth listening to, which is that he acknowledges that TDS is a real thing.
And he acknowledges that he might be suffering from it.
I gotta say that if you have the intellectual firepower to rise above your own bias and then look back down on it and say, yep, there I am down there with my bias, that is a higher level of thinking than most people can accomplish.
But it doesn't help you get past the bias.
Because the whole point of bias is that you can't see past it.
If you could easily see past it, well, it wouldn't be biased.
So he acknowledges he hasn't, but then he makes his argument.
And apparently his feelings about the president have crystallized around this thought.
And he offers a provocative challenge.
And this is where it gets fun.
His theory about Trump is that he's essentially the Chauncey Gardner candidate.
Now, if you're not familiar with the movie and book of the same name called Being There...
It was about somebody who had no skills, was not smart, but through an amazing series of lucky coincidences, becomes the President of the United States.
And the whole point of the Chauncey Gardner mythical story is that these coincidences were so unusual, but they were all strung together, and it ended up in this moron being the President.
So, Sam's belief is that it was just luck, you know, just a coincidence of the way the variables lined up, that we got a president who is a moron.
That's my word, but in effect that's what Sam Harris is saying.
And here's the fun part.
Do I have something on my lip here?
I was just eating a little chocolate bar.
I think so. I got it.
Okay. So Sam makes this provocative challenge, if you will.
He said, in effect, that he would only need to hear Trump talking like a regular person with a full vocabulary, like a normal adult, just once in order to believe that the face we see in his rallies and his tweets and everything else is not his real one, and that he actually is a normal person Who simply chooses to communicate in a way that's effective for the people?
Now that's an interesting challenge, isn't it?
All it would take is five minutes, or even less, I suppose, of seeing President Trump talk like a normal, educated person.
Now here's the fun part.
I've had a private conversation with President Trump.
Most of you know I got to meet him in the Oval Office in the summer of 2018.
He invited me in because I'm a supporter, which is common.
He invites in other supporters just to make sure that he's supporting his supporters, essentially.
And I have a window into this that Sam Harris does not, which is I had a private, personal conversation with President Trump In the Oval Office.
Now, there was one other person there.
You don't need to know the details, but it was a private conversation, essentially.
And I'm here to report that when you talk to him privately, he's a normal, educated adult.
Surprise! Surprise!
When you talk to him personally, He's just like every other normal, college-educated adult you've ever talked to.
No difference. And when he goes on stage for his rallies, he takes on his stand-up, comedian, provocative personality, he lowers his vocabulary, and he becomes that person.
Now, there's a legitimate question of, you know, at a certain age, are people slowing down or whatever?
That's a good question. But I like Sam Harris' challenge only because I have a little insight into it in the sense that I've talked to him and I know that he's just a regular, normal, educated, college-educated adult who knows a lot of stuff.
No difference at all.
All right. Of course, the news today is that Vindman and Sondland got fired.
This is sort of a non-story.
The anti-Trumpers are trying to make it into a story about he's abusing his dictatorial powers to get rid of his critics.
And then, of course, everybody who supports the president says some version of this.
What's wrong with that?
What exactly is wrong with getting rid of somebody that you don't trust on your staff?
I'm not getting the criticism here.
If there's something wrong with that, I haven't heard it.
So, of course, he has the power to do it.
He has the right to do it.
Actually, I would argue, it's his responsibility to do it.
Because we want a president whose team, generally, he can trust.
So that's a non-story.
You'd expect it to happen.
Here's a little update in the confirmation bias world.
There was a surgeon and his girlfriend, I guess he was like a TV doctor for a while, and they were accused of being serial rapists, of luring women in, the two of them, and then drugging them and having sex with them.
The charges were just dropped because they couldn't find enough evidence that would be credible.
So think about that.
They're accused of being serial rapists.
It's not just something that he was accused of doing one time, but apparently a whole host of similar rapes.
And when they were done, the prosecutor looked around and said, um, turns out we don't have enough evidence for this.
Yeah, they were swingers, somebody says.
And so I think they admit that they, you know, had relations with those women, but it was...
It was consensual.
Now, here's the thing.
We don't know what happened and what didn't happen.
I'm going to assume innocence because that's the country we live in.
If you're not guilty, you're assumed to be innocent.
But this reminded me a lot of the McMartin preschool case.
If you don't already know the McMartin preschool case, it was the 70s, maybe?
In which a preschool was accused of having an underground satanic worship room that they were taking kids down there and abusing them and teaching them to worship Satan or whatever it was.
And they got brought into court and there was so much evidence.
I mean, because it was, you know, there was just tons of evidence because they interviewed the kids and the kids actually said it was happening.
Now, it turns out that they had led the witnesses.
And when the replays of the interviews were shown, people who had my skill set, in other words, they were hypnotists, or they understand how that world works, they saw that the questions were leading the kids into an imaginary world, and the kids were just speaking with their imagination, and the police took it as fact and tried to prosecute these people.
But in the end, there was not even any room under the The preschool, and it turned out the whole thing fell apart, and there was no evidence at all.
So it went from a mountain of evidence that all said the same thing to, oops, there wasn't any.
Not any. There was zero evidence in the end.
It ruined their lives, etc.
So I'm looking at this case of the California surgeon and his girlfriend, and who knows who did what, right?
You and I can't tell Who's guilty?
Who's innocent from a distance?
But this looks a lot like that.
If I had to place a bet, I would bet that there was tons of evidence, and then when I looked into it, there wasn't any.
That's my guess, is how that happened.
So, keep an eye on that.
That's one that tells you something about the world you live in.
Alright, let's talk about the The Democratic Debate.
I tried to watch it.
I kept falling asleep.
So I watched as much as I could in between napping.
And then I caught up with other people's opinions in the clips this morning.
Here's my take. First of all, it was the most generic stuff I've ever seen in my life.
So generic. Oh my god.
They were all talking about high-level concepts.
Nothing seemed to be about me as a citizen.
I kept waiting for the fact or the detail or the proposal or the policy that would have some direct effect on me.
And they did talk about health care, but not in a way that I could connect it to me, except that it would make my taxes go up.
So I watched all night, and I could only identify one thing that would actually affect me personally.
My taxes would go up.
That's it. That's all it was.
And so I thought, well, that's not good.
But let's talk about the winners and losers.
So the first thing to realize is that none of them were interesting.
That's it. None of them were interesting.
And whoever it is is going to run against the most interesting person in the history of civilization.
Trump running for re-election.
So I don't know how you run uninteresting people against the most interesting person we've ever known.
But that's their challenge. So let's talk about the individuals.
Some notable things is that Steyer, he had this argument.
He said that you have to beat Trump on the economy because all of the Democratic candidates have essentially identical policies.
They all want universal health care of some kind, different details.
They all want more gun control, more lots of stuff that Democrats want.
So Steyer says we're basically all alone, all the same, and so you should pick somebody who can beat Trump on the economy because it's the economy that people care about.
That's the part that touches people.
Now, do you think that Steyer can beat Trump on the economy?
I'm thinking to myself, that might be the worst strategy I've ever heard in my life.
Because, sure, sure, sure, Steyer can make the argument that it's not Trump's doing, that things are doing so well, etc.
But it's not the way voters think.
Voters don't understand economics.
They just say, who's the president?
How's the economy going?
That's it. Who's the president?
Trump. How's the economy doing?
Amazing. Amazing.
That's the end of the argument.
There is no way that Steyer is going to beat Trump on economics.
It's just not going to happen. It's the dumbest strategy I've ever seen.
But he does point out that all the candidates are kind of similar on the policies.
I think Biden is the only candidate who has a solid chance of bringing in the black vote.
But he's so weak as a candidate, it's hard to imagine him getting there.
Let's talk about who has a chance.
Well, let me give you this take.
It's basically I'm triangulating from the networks.
So I looked at CNN, Fox, and MSNBC this morning to find out who they thought won.
And it's very interesting to watch who the networks think won.
Who they thought won, because that sort of tells you how the coverage is going to happen and how they're going to persuade the voters.
So over at CNN, Chris Silliza wrote, you know, the main article about the debates was written by Chris Silliza.
And here's his ranking.
He said that Buttigieg won.
He was a winner. And Klobuchar, too.
And then lower down were Sanders and Bloomberg.
So basically his winner was Buttigieg.
And number two, Klobuchar.
So that's CNN. Over at Fox, they had a woman named Leslie Marshall, don't know much about her, wrote an opinion piece about the debates.
And her two winners were Klobuchar and Warren.
Now, here's what I would note.
Is it unfair to say that CNN is the most pro-LGBTQ network?
Wouldn't you say? I mean, MSNBC obviously is in the same realm, but I think it'd be fair to say, and this is not in any way a criticism, it's just a statement of fact.
Would you agree that CNN is the most pro-LGBTQ network, at least in terms of the people they put on the air, the way they cover stories, etc.?
And again, I'm not criticizing, I'm just stating a fact.
And why would I criticize that anyway?
It's just stating a fact.
Now, CNN picks the only openly gay guy who's running.
Is that a coincidence?
If you work for CNN, and it's sort of neck and neck between Klobuchar and an openly gay man, if I work for CNN, I'm going to say Buttigieg one, right?
Because you sort of always have to You're working for your boss, and you're working for your co-workers, and you're working for your company more than you're working for the audience.
Then over at Fox, a woman writes an opinion that two women won.
So here again, the skeptic in me says, is it a coincidence that a woman writes an opinion about the debates and she says that the two winners were the women?
Maybe. I mean, maybe they were.
Maybe that's unbiased, but you have to put a little asterisk next to that.
Then over at MSNBC, Chris Matthews was calling out Klobuchar for looking presidential.
So if you look at the three networks, Klobuchar was either number one or number two.
Think about that. Klobuchar just went from, what, fifth in the voting?
To all three networks?
Called her as number one or number two?
Something's happening here.
But there's more.
When I watched it last night, before I'd seen any opinions, I'm watching the debates, and my personal opinion, without any influence from any other pundit, was, huh, It looks to me like Klobuchar just won hard.
I thought she won unambiguously.
That was my opinion. I thought she unambiguously won the night.
But I wasn't sure if my opinion was matching with anybody.
This morning I checked Twitter.
I see Dave Rubin, a famously open-minded person.
He understands the left and the right.
He sort of straddles worlds.
And he said Klobuchar won.
And then I see a tweet from Greg Gottfeld, also one of the people who would be willing to say something good about the other side if they did something good.
Also, one of the more open-minded people in this realm.
And he picked Klobuchar.
That's a lot of Klobuchar for one night.
Now, let me break down...
I'm going to give you my take From best to worst, of which of the Democratic candidates would stand the best chance against Trump?
Okay? So this is not who I like.
It's not my preferences.
I'm just saying who would be the strongest matchup.
At the top of my list is Yang.
Yang's at the top of my list because what would be the only bad thing you could say about Yang?
Because think of them in terms of their flaws.
Because whatever flaws they have, either real or imagined, President Trump is going to find their flaw, and then he's going to magnify it until you can't imagine voting for him.
Because that's what he does.
So you've got to find somebody whose flaw is the most defensible.
What is Yang's flaw?
Lack of experience as a politician.
He's a successful business person.
Oh wait! Oh wait!
Yang's flaw is that he's never been in government, but he'd be running against the guy who proved that's not important.
That's a good matchup.
If Yang ran against somebody who had experience, you know, been a senator and a governor and like that, that'd be a real problem.
Because I'm not sure Yang has enough firepower the way Trump did to break through and become an inexperienced president The way Trump did.
So I think Yang actually has the strongest natural situation.
And then he also has the best attack against Trump.
Because he doesn't go so much for the racism and the easy social justice warrior things.
He talks about those things in the right ways, but that's not his emphasis.
He's more about solutions and the future and robots and technology and using science and stuff.
And there's nobody who doesn't like that stuff.
Literally everything Yang says, both sides say, yeah, it's pretty good.
And his $1,000 thing would be easy to test.
You could test it small and find out if it works.
And if you asked Andrew Yang, Andrew, do you think this is something we should implement nationally?
This $1,000 a month idea, or should we test it?
And then decide, well, I don't know what he'd say, but everything that I know about him suggests that he would say, well, of course you test it first.
Of course. He even tried to test it first on his campaign, giving away money to some people.
Not a good test, but at least he was thinking in those terms.
I don't think there's any chance that Yang will have enough support from the Democratic machine to get through and get the nomination.
So he's not a risk of getting nominated, but he would be the strongest candidate against Trump.
And he's also the only candidate who could pick up Republicans without them feeling bad about it.
Right? I think Yang could pick up Republicans who just say, you know...
Some of those ideas I haven't heard before.
They resonate.
I like his pro-science look.
He doesn't offend me too much.
So I think he'd pick up some of those.
Number two on my list of strongest candidates is Klobuchar.
Unlike Yang, she could actually get nominated.
I don't think it's the most likely outcome, but it could happen.
Yang is harder to imagine getting nominated, but Klobuchar could, especially after last night, when you've got all three networks and a lot of independent observers saying, huh, that was pretty good.
Pretty good. Now let me tell you what's the best thing about Klobuchar.
She doesn't have an obvious flaw.
The kind that you already believe about her, and then Trump just magnifies it.
Almost everybody else has something, except Yang, They have something that he could just pick on and blow it up, and that would be the end of them.
Most of them are one nickname away from oblivion, if you think about it.
So, Klobuchar, simply by not having an obvious flaw, meaning she's not too socialist, she was actually the only one who raised her hand and said it would be a problem having a candidate who was labeled as a democratic socialist.
She's the only one. So she's shooting right from that middle, and that does give her some possibility of bringing in some moderate Republicans and independents.
So simply, now here's her flaw.
If I can say it's a flaw.
She has no excitement whatsoever.
She has no charisma and no excitement whatsoever.
But... And that's a big deal when you're in the primaries, because she's trying to break through the crowded field.
But what would happen if she got the nomination?
It would be one-on-one.
How much excitement would Democrats bring to a candidate who actually had a shot?
Somebody who actually had a chance, and they don't totally hate her.
Well, I think the progressives are absolutely going to say, yeah, She's not saying the stuff we want about health care and stuff, but we're certainly not going to support Trump, and we want him gone.
So she would get all the progressives, and she would get all the people in the middle, and she'd pick up a few independents.
And she wouldn't have to be that exciting.
She would just have to show up and just be presidential, which she has accomplished.
She accomplished acting presidential.
I believe she's worked her way into the Gravitas of that situation.
So congratulations, Amy Klobuchar.
I think she took the tortoise and the hare approach where she just hung in there and didn't make mistakes.
Yeah, she's dull, but that's not going to hurt her when it's one-on-one.
Being dull is a big problem if you've got all these exciting candidates and you're trying to stand out.
But as the field is winnowed down, And you see that the other candidates don't have much to offer, or they have fatal flaws.
If Democrats want to win, she's their best bet.
So that's my current thinking.
I could change that tomorrow. After her, I would say Buttigieg, but he's got a black voter problem that I don't know he can overcome.
Then there's Bloomberg, who has, guess what?
A black voter problem that I don't think he can overcome.
Anybody who has a black voter problem, I don't know how they can beat Because Trump probably will get more black male votes, at least, than any Republican ever got.
That's my guess. Then you've got, next down on the list, Biden plus a good VP. Now, if you're just thinking of Biden, he doesn't have any chance against Trump, really none.
But if you paired him with a strong, younger VP, person of color, a Kablo Harris type, somebody interesting, Yeah, he could give it a shot, because he could at least get the black vote, but he's so vulnerable to just being, I don't know, pistol-whipped by Trump every time Trump goes in public that I don't think Biden could survive that.
Then down the list you've got Warren and Bernie.
They both have the same problem, and Mike Cernovich called it out succinctly on Twitter today.
He said that when he talks to his progressive friends, He asks them how you could have both open borders and free healthcare.
How do those two work together?
You can have one or the other, but how, just logically, just explain to me logically how both those things could coexist.
I don't think anybody can explain it.
So, both of them are dead the minute Trump says, These candidates want to take your money and give it to people in other countries for their health care, but not for yours, because there won't be much left.
Or some version of that.
He won't say that there's none for you because the others want universal health care.
But all he has to do is say, we're going to pay for health care for illegal immigrants, and that's sort of the end of the election.
And then there's Steyer, who's dead last.
He has no real chance.
All right, so that's how I'd rank them.
Yang, although he cannot get the nomination, he'd be the strongest.
Klobuchar, solid chance.
And then it starts going into hard to imagine them winning.
Buttigieg, Bloomberg, etc.
All right. Update on the coronavirus.
The numbers keep going up into scary numbers.
86 people died in a single day in China.
In one day, 86 people died.
The death stool stands at 724.
There's a whistleblowing nurse who says that, even a while ago, that there were 90,000 cases, but there are 34,000 that are reported in 27 countries, etc.
Now, we have this news that there's a first U.S. national fatality, but it didn't happen in this country.
It was a six-year-old woman Who was in Wuhan.
And she died from complications from the virus.
I hate to be the only person in the world saying this, but I keep waiting to find out if there's anybody dying who is not ethnic Chinese.
You know why I'm asking, right?
Because it's so conspicuously absent from the story.
So this is an American who died, But this American was a woman living in China.
What are the odds that she was not, at least by background, Chinese but an American?
So she had probably Chinese ethnicity because she was living in China.
This is just a guess. I'm speculating.
So, yeah, the first USA death was reported, but it wasn't in the USA. It was just a US citizen living in China who might actually be ethnically Chinese.
So I'm just waiting for the first report of somebody who's not Chinese.
Now there's a report that a Japanese citizen died, but there's some ambiguity because they couldn't confirm that that was the cause of death, and it's not quite clear.
So that was a little gray area.
We're waiting for that. And so we wait.
And I ask you this.
The United States keeps saying that we're safe.
Right? Our government keeps telling us it's under control, we're doing pretty good, and we're actually kind of slow closing the airports and stuff.
What is it about this virus that would make us think it's a gigantic problem in China and yet would not obviously become a gigantic problem here?
Is it because we're so good at taking care of stuff?
Or is it because our government knows It doesn't treat everybody the same.
Maybe your DNA might be one of the markers for whether it's going to kill you or not.
So these are just questions.
It's all speculation. I don't want to start any conspiracy theories.
But it's so obviously missing from the story of whether it's affecting everybody the same, I've got to ask about it.
Alright, there's a horrible story in the news about Jordan Peterson.
Apparently, he's gone through some tough times with his...
The story, if you don't know, Jordan Peterson apparently was prescribed some benzos because his wife was diagnosed with cancer and he was having a problem with that.
And then he got physically addicted, but he had...
Here's the just incredibly bad part about this.
Apparently, the benzos had what's called a paradoxical effect.
Meaning instead of helping him, they made things much worse.
Apparently that can happen.
It doesn't happen often, but it's common enough that it's a thing, it has a name and everything.
So the worst case scenario, he got addicted to the drugs that were also making him much worse.
Oh my God!
Like, that doesn't get any worse, right?
So I guess Western or Canadian and American hospitals couldn't help him He tried to wind down and get off in all the ways that you do.
It didn't work. He ended up in Russia because Russia had some kind of treatment not available here that apparently has worked.
So he seems to have gotten off the benzos and seems to have been the worst of those effects.
But there's some lingering, some kind of lingering damage.
We don't know what it is.
But here's the part that is just mind-blowing.
There's some gentleman named Amir Ataran who tweeted this.
I don't know that that's true.
That's just something he's saying in the tweet.
And then he says...
He deserves as much sympathy as he showed others.
What? That's like the worst thing I've ever heard anybody say.
That is really, that is dark.
I mean, I'm not above enjoying a little revenge when it's appropriate.
I'm not above a little schadenfreude if something bad happens to somebody that I think deserved it.
But what the hell did Jordan Peterson do other than try to help people?
Why was he addicted in the first place?
It was because of his empathy for his wife.
And when he says young men, he goes, Oracle to gullible young men.
Let me ask you this.
What young man is not gullible?
It's sort of built into being young.
Everybody young is gullible.
So first of all, that's not fair.
Everybody young is gullible compared to older people.
There's no exception to that.
And he calls it a preacher of macho toughness.
No. No, I wouldn't call it macho toughness at all.
That's not how I would label it.
And a hectoring bully to snowflakes.
So? Is that a crime?
He's telling people to take more responsibility for life and toughen up and do things according to ways that we know work and are biologically compatible.
None of that seems like anything that should be a cause for hatred.
I mean, this is amazing.
So, I think he's a professor up in Canada somewhere.
Alright, so that's the most hateful thing I've ever seen Probably the worst thing I've ever seen on the internet.
Here's my prediction about Jordan Peterson.
He's going to come back stronger.
Because going through this situation, first of all, he's learning a lot that probably didn't want to learn.
But he's going to come back stronger.
So watch for that.
All right, I promise you I'll tell you an inspirational story.
Are you ready? A little Saturday inspirational story.
There's a quote of mine from one of my books, or someplace, I don't know where it came from, but there's a quote of mine that's become semi-famous, and it's something I said decades ago, but it still gets passed around the internet every now and then.
And the quote was that there's no such thing as a small act of kindness, because every action has a ripple effect to infinity.
And I wanted to tell you a story about a A small act of kindness that had a ripple effect that is fun to watch.
The first part, some of you have heard.
In 1988, before I was a cartoonist, but I knew I wanted to be one, I sent a letter to a cartoonist who had a special on TV about how to be a cartoonist.
His name is Jack Cassidy, and I asked him for advice.
I had not drawn any comics professionally.
I just wanted to know how to get into business.
And his first act of kindness, there was nothing in it for him.
There was nothing to be gained by him answering my letter, but he did.
He wrote a two-page handwritten letter.
He told me what materials to buy.
He told me what book to look at, to know where to send my samples, etc.
So I got the book, followed the directions, did what he said.
Sent out some comics to the big magazines that publish comics, or cartoons.
And I got rejected by everybody.
And I put my materials away.
And I thought, well, at least I tried.
And I just forgot about it.
A year later, I got a letter from Jack Cassidy.
A year later.
I hadn't even thanked him for his first letter.
So we'd had no communication at that time.
And I go to my mailbox, and weirdly...
There's a letter from Jack Cassidy again, a follow-up letter.
And he said that he was cleaning his office, and he found my original letter to him from a year ago.
And he said that he was just writing to make sure that I hadn't given up.
That's it. There was nothing else in the letter.
He only wrote to make sure that I hadn't given up.
Now, in his first letter, he told me I would get a lot of cancellations or a lot of rejections, and he told me, don't give up.
So his first letter said, don't give up.
And then I gave up.
His second letter said, just making sure you didn't give up.
So I got my materials out of the closet and put together some sample cartoons that were roughly based on my experience in the workplace, and that cartoon was called Dilbert.
And I submitted it, and the rest you know.
So that small act of kindness in 1988 created a billion dollars of total activity.
That's not the part I earned or anything close to that.
But if you look at all the publishing, all the effects that Dilbert's had, the secondary effects and third effects, etc., one letter...
That took him probably 15 minutes.
Put a stamp on it.
Tiny, tiny act of kindness.
Caused a billion dollars.
Changed my life. Now, most of you have seen that I'm certainly at this part of my life.
And by the way, I am currently at, I think, approximately the age that Jack Cassidy was when he gave me his advice.
Jack Cassidy, by the way, is a veteran.
I think it was...
I'm not sure which war he was in.
But he's a veteran, so he has a history of service.
Now, the thing that I don't tell people is that while he made my career, his small act of kindness, no, it's not Jack Cassidy, the actor.
It is Jack Cassidy, a cartoonist.
Somebody you probably have never seen his work.
He wasn't famous as a cartoonist.
So, here's the thing.
Even though he changed my life, and he's in some ways responsible for everything good that ever happened to me after that point, he also cursed me.
It came with a curse.
And the curse goes like this.
I have to help other people.
I have to. I could try not to, but it doesn't work.
Because of the curse. So throughout my life, I've tried to help other people when the situation made sense.
Obviously, I can't help everybody.
I can't even help everybody who asks for it.
But I can pick my shots.
So I wrote my book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
And that was primarily to be helpful.
And I hear every day about people who've changed their lives and lost weight and people who've gotten off of drugs.
Because of that book. Just amazing things.
This all came from this one letter in 1988.
But it's better.
After Dilbert became successful, and this is going back to I think the mid-90s or so, the syndication company that handled Dilbert was introducing new comics regularly.
And of course most new comics don't do well and they just sort of You know, they make a small splash and then they die.
So probably 19 out of 20 new comics don't go anywhere.
And there was this new comic called Pearls Before Swine.
And the syndication company looked at it and they decided, well, you know, it's not good enough to put in newspapers.
But we have this new website that has, you know, good comics but also lesser comics.
You know, we just have lots of comics there.
So they said, well, we'll put it on the website.
They put it on the website and it didn't make much of a difference.
Not many people noticed it.
But I saw it and I thought, huh, there's something about this comic that's not like the other ones.
There just isn't.
This one's special.
And even though it wasn't fully formed, there was something special about it.
I could see it in the writing.
There was some intelligence that came through the writing that you don't often see.
So, at the time I had this newsletter that I was sending out that had just tons and tons of people read it.
So I called out that comic and I said, you know, this is great and gave a link to it so people could go see it.
It almost immediately, entirely just because I recommended it to my readers, it became the second, I think the second most trafficked comic on the website.
Now because it became the second most trafficked of all their comics, they had to rethink it.
The syndication company.
And they looked at it and said, huh, with all this attention, maybe we missed something.
So let's give it a run and see if it works in newspapers.
And it did. It's one of the top cartoons in the country right now.
So Stephan Apostas is the author of the comic.
And the other part of the story is that he has an amazing talent stack, which he continues to build.
He was an attorney before he became a cartoonist, so he had that talent.
And he met with me, thanked me, and picked my brain about technique and how to be a cartoonist.
And he's the only person I know who's asked me for cartooning advice and then took it.
You can't imagine how many people have asked me for advice.
And lots of times I give it.
I would say the total number of cartoonists I've given direct cartooning advice to It's in the hundreds.
Hundreds? Several hundred over my career.
But as far as I know, and I haven't surveyed each one of them, as far as I know, he's the only one.
He took my advice, he incorporated it, and his comic became one of the hottest sellers.
But that's not the best part.
So I opened up my computer today, just checking the news, and I see a hashtag trending.
And the hashtag, maybe you saw it today, but the trending hashtag is for a new Disney movie called Timmy Failure.
Have you seen that yet?
So it's about a young boy who either pretends or he's a detective, I guess, and he's got a gigantic polar bear who's his companion.
Now here's the thing.
Timmy Failure is a Disney movie, and it's going to stream on their new streaming service, so How great is it to have a Disney movie?
This Disney movie is based on a series of very successful kids' books called Tit Me Failure, written by Stephan Postas.
Stephan Postas has left cartooning and now he's a movie.
He's successful in movies.
All of this happened because Jack Cassidy Did one small act of kindness in 1988.
That caused me to succeed.
It caused me to write, had it failed almost everything.
It caused me to help Stefan Postis because the curse.
