Episode 683 Scott Adams AOC Eating Babies, Impeachment Theatre

Oh, I don't think I could be in a better mood. I'm sure you're in a pretty good mood, too. The news is serving up lots of entertainment, isn't it? But you know, you know what makes that entertainment go down better? Coffee. Or something like it. Oh, we got things to talk about today, but before we do that, we've got to have the simultaneous sip, because that's how your day starts out perfectly. You've heard of perfect conversations. Well, this is going to be the perfect simultaneous Sip trademark. And all you need to participate is a cupboard mugger, glass of stein, a chalice, a tankard, a thermos, a flash canteen, a grail, a goblet, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like my coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better. As if today could get any better. Seriously. Come on, join me now for the simultaneous sip. Oh, delightful. Delightful. So there's some things happening in the news. It's one of the funniest news days of all time. Now, if you didn't see it, where have you been? But there's a. There's a great video going around of AOC doing a town hall meeting, and a member of the audience gets up to ask a question, and it's a young woman who says she's very concerned about climate change, but she's worried that we don't have enough time to do what we need to stop it, and the only solution is going to be to eat our babies. So maybe bomb Russia, but definitely eat the babies. And she revealed that she had a T shirt. Eat the babies. Now, if you didn't see it, here's the funny part. AOC and the rest of the crowd couldn't tell if she was a troll or if she meant it. Now, approximately a third of the country. Have you ever heard that estimate before? One third of the people in this country, and really one third of humans, don't have a sense of humor and don't know it. It's the don't know it part that's the funny part. Approximately. I saw somebody do a Twitter poll asking how many people thought that the woman was a real person who was maybe a little disrawt, and how many thought she was obviously a troll. 38%. Obviously. This is not a scientific poll. It's on Twitter. But 38% said they thought she was real. 38%. Kind of close to one third. It's in that Neighborhood. Yeah. About one third of people can't recognize a joke when they see it. They actually have to be told by other people or they have to listen to laughter or they have to have some kind of cue to tell them it's a joke. Now, you probably think that the first time you heard me say that, because I've been saying it for a while. The first time you heard it, didn't you think that was the biggest load of BS you ever heard in your life? Didn't you say to yourself, one third of the people in the world can't recognize a joke? Scott, Scott, Scott, that's crazy talk. Well, I am a professional humorist who's been doing this for a number of decades, and I promise you one third of the public doesn't have a sense of humor. Like, actually just doesn't have one. Let's talk about this prank. Now, I'm going to label it a prank because I don't think there's the slightest chance it's anything else. I recognized it immediately. The moment she said something about eating babies. I was like, oh, prank, let's see where this goes. And then at the end, I noticed that people were sort of not sure if they should take her literally. And I thought to myself, best day ever. Best day ever. Now, there's somebody taking credit for the troll, but I don't believe them yet, so I'm not going to even mention that. But let me teach you something about a good practical joke. And I would call this a practical joke. You could call it a troll. But the best practical jokes have a specific quality to them that poorly planned jokes do not. This one was a thing of beauty, because the essential quality of a good practical joke, a really high level one, one that's really well thought out, is that the only person who will believe the essence of the joke is the target of the joke. So the best joke is one that only somebody who is living in their own little delusion could possibly believe that the prank was something real. That's what makes a great prank. It has to be only invisible to the target. Man, did this prank kill that? I mean, on that dimension. It's very clear not only from the comments after the event, but what was happening during that. The people in the audience and AOC for a while anyway, and maybe she still believes it, couldn't tell. They actually couldn't tell if they had alarmed people into being so afraid of the climate that that eating babies sounded like a pretty good idea. Now, some of you know the Jonathan Swift Modest Proposal History of this. I won't get into it. You can. You can Google it. Just Google A Modest Proposal and you'll. You'll see some historical precedent for this. Now, this joke or practical joke or troll did a lot more than just make us laugh, because it did. It also suggests a very productive way to ask questions of people who are concerned about climate change and are in the political realm. And here's the qu. Here's the serious question that the troll sort of makes us think of. And now it's in. Now it's in the public mind. And here's the serious question. Hey, aoc, so this is not a troll. This is a serious question. Aoc, you said that, you know, we're all in trouble and it's too late, probably, to do anything about climate change. You know, maybe it's too late, maybe it's not. But here's my question. What should I do as a citizen to prepare for the climate catastrophe now, besides voting, besides being politically active? What can I do in my actual personal life? What should I do with my investments? What should I do with my home? What should I do with my. Where I live? You know, all of my personal big decisions? What should I do differently because climate change is coming? Should I change my investments? Should I move? Should I, you know, other than recycling and voting and stuff, what I. What should I really do to prepare for a calamity? Because if the answer is nothing, what does that say about the risk? And if the answer is not nothing, what exactly should they do? Let me give you some examples. Wouldn't you invest differently? Should you put your money in Bitcoin? By the way, none of this is financial advice or anything like it. I'm just running through things that could be said. I'm not saying these are good ideas. Just to be clear. Should you take all your money out of the stock market? Should you stop spending because there'll be an economic meltdown and you need everything you can keep? Exactly. What should you do to prepare now, again, I'm not talking about plant a tree, vote for a Democrat, form a grassroots movement. I'm not talking about political stuff. What should I do in my personal life? Think about it. How would you answer that question? It's a devastating question. Here's another one. Aoc, I hear what you're saying about climate change and I believe you. I believe what you're saying about the risks. Can you give us a sense? What is a bigger risk? Is it a bigger risk to aggressively pursue the newer, safer types of nuclear power? Plants, or is it a bigger risk not to? Can you lay that out for us? Now, keep in mind, I believe that AOC has an economics degree, and I would love to see her answer the question economically and otherwise, which is the bigger risk? Because part of what you learn in economics is comparing things and risk management. I'd like to see your answer to that question. All right, so to further my point that one third of the world does not have a sense of humor, I tweeted this morning, because of the AOC troll situation, I tweeted this exact sentence. I said, is it true that AOC had Greta Thunberg over for dinner? Now, everybody who heard of the, you know, the AOC baby eating troll should have known that Greta Thunberg, being a minor aoc, inviting her to dinner, obviously I'm making a reference to AOC might eat her for dinner. Now, two thirds of you are saying, scott, why are you explaining that joke? That joke didn't need to be explained. If you knew about the AOC troll situation, why are you explaining it? Well, let me tell you, read the comments under that tweet from mostly conservatives and Republicans and Trump supporters. An alarming number of people said, hey, I think she's having her over to be eaten. As if that wasn't the joke, they needed to add the joke to the joke. So about a third of the people, I don't know, I'm just guessing, but a lot of people, maybe a third, saw my joke in which they already knew the story about AOC and the baby. And I said, AOC is a true. AOC is having Greta Thunberg over for dinner. And they felt they needed to add the joke because they didn't recognize the joke. They couldn't see it. Now, don't ever doubt me again when I tell you one third of the country actually doesn't have a sense of humor. And I don't mean that as an insult. I mean, at the same way a lot of people don't have, you know, can't hold a tune. You know, we're not all born with exactly the same capabilities. The same way people, you know, some people can tell the difference between fine wine and some people can't. There are all these minor skills that we have. They're not important terribly. I mean, it's not like you don't have to be institutionalized if you don't have a sense of humor. So it's not a big thing. Now, I tweeted the other day, and I've got some Dilbert comics running this week about what I call the parody inversion point where we actually can't tell the difference anymore between a joke and reality. Have you ever seen that more clearly than this AOC baby eating thing? We're at the parody inversion point. A huge percentage of the public, maybe a third, can't tell. Can't tell, Literally can't tell. And there's no joke here, Actually literally no joke, can't tell the difference between the joke and reality anymore because they've become so, so similar. All right, Fox News referred to the AOC baby eating situation this way. This is a quote from the Fox News website. A seemingly troubled woman at a town hall hosted by blah, blah, blah aoc. A seemingly troubled woman. So they don't call it a troll because, well, and, and to be fair, this actually is a completely accurate statement. So the way Fox News reported it is 100% accurate. And unless they've actually tracked down the person who was there and determined that it was a joke, all you could really say is that she was seemingly troubled because that was the image she was presenting. So that's a true statement. She was seemingly troubled. But they don't get into whether they think she was a troll or not. Seemed conspicuously missing from the story. Let's talk about the unemployment. We had a 50 year low unemployment rate, 3.5%. I want to introduce an idea, President Trump. And by the way, I don't know that this is true, but I'm going to guess that this is probably true. Have we ever had our unemployment rate and our GDP the same number in the history of the United States? Now we don't have it yet. The GDP I think is maybe sub 3, but we know it can flirt with 3.5. Am I right? Our GDP could certainly flirt with 3.5. Our unemployment rates down to 3.5. Has that ever happened? Has that ever happened? Now people are worried about recession, especially before the election, you know, so we're all talking about it. But here's a little brief lesson in economics for you. Are you ready? Unless you have a major shock coming, such as a war or something like a bubble meltdown. So if you have a big economic bubble that's ready to burst, or you have something like a war or an oil shortage, something big like that meteor strikes the earth, well, then things can go bad and they can go bad quickly. But we don't seem to have anything like that hanging over us right now. You know, we've got more national debt than we want, but it doesn't seem like it's going to crush us right away. So here's everything you need to know about economics. If your unemployment rate is 3.5%, you're great. You're great. You can ignore almost everything else. You, you can ignore every other indicator because you know those indicators bounce back and forth and they don't always tell you something clean, cleanly. They, they indicate things. And there are various variables that might be conflicting and sometimes they're in the same direction and sometimes they're not. But if you want to know, if you want to really understand economics, there's just a few things you need to know. And one of them is when unemployment is at 3.5%, you're in great shape and likely everything else will eventually, if not right away, is gonna, is gonna start trending in a good direction. That's amazing. The Joker movie is out. Does anybody care? I don't know who watches movies anymore. I think the long form movie is. I don't know, people are talking about it so I might have to watch it at some point. But I don't know who could watch a two or three hour movie. Our, our attention spans have shrunk and the news is serving up such great entertainment that's different every day. But movies are all the same. Can I describe the movie? The Joker has an or. I've never seen the movie. The Joker has an origin story. Something bad happened to him. Now he's a bad guy and so he's cleverly going to kill a lot of people. But the Batman stops him and that's about it. Why would you spend two hours watching that? No matter how well it's made? Punchy De Niro is being sued for some kind of sexual harassment and discrimination. Who saw that coming? Everybody. The odds of Dinero being sued by an employee for sexual harassment and discrimination seemed pretty high to me. There's another famous Hollywood producer slash director who I'm not going to name who's a famous anti trumper. And I just keep telling myself I'm just waiting for that guy to get me to edit. I don't want to give a name because then, you know, then I'm accusing somebody of something terrible. But do you believe there's any such thing as a, a top level Hollywood director who doesn't have some me too stuff in the closet? Do you think there is one? Even one? I think there's a little more me too ing. It's going to come out in for the anti Trumpers and they're not going to like it. All right, let's talk about impeachment. That's the fun stuff, right? So I'm going to be a little contrarian here on impeachment. Contrarian to what you're seeing in the news this morning. I was looking at how the President was handling things. You know, he made a statement about China, you know, doubling down, and there's nothing wrong with it, blah, blah. And of course, people were criticizing him and saying, oh, President Trump, stop bringing up China, you're making it worse. And blah, blah, blah, you're making it worse. And I'm sitting here thinking, whoa, something's happened, because suddenly the President's communication approach on impeachment just went weapons grade. And I don't think it was before. So in the early moments after this whole Ukraine phone call thing became a story, the president seemed, correct me if I'm wrong, the President seemed a little defensive. More like the call was perfect. You know, I didn't do anything wrong. Didn't it feel defensive? And I thought to myself, ah, playing defense is not his strong suit. And then yesterday, the President stands in front of the entire world and asked China to look into Biden. And I said to myself, there it is, there it is. I'll talk more about that in a moment. And at the same time, apparently the Trump administration is thinking of pressing Pelosi to hold a vote on impeachment. She wasn't going to vote. She was going to sort of handle it through committee rules and stuff like that without a vote. But if you make them vote, you put the Democrats on record and you can hold it against them during the general election, during the next election. So the President went on not just offense, but full offense. And I said to myself, what changed? And because his. Whoever is advising him now is freaking nailing it now, I don't think that the press has quite figured out what's going on now, but he's nailing it right now. And I just read a little tidbit. Who knows how much of this is true that says that Jared Kushner and Mulaney Mulvaney are in charge of impeachment strategy. So Jared Kushner is involved and Mulvaney, who seems to be very capable as well, and suddenly the President's impeachment game just went weapons grade. Coincidence. Is it a coincidence when good advisors are involved and suddenly you get good results? Let me tell you why this is so great. The public doesn't know how to understand this whole issue. Now, you and I, maybe we're following it because we're sort of News nerds. So some small amount of the public might dig in enough to form something like an independent opinion, but most of the country is not going to have anything like an independent legal opinion. They're going to look at people and one lawyer will say one thing, the others will say another, and they'll be like, ah, I don't know, let me just retreat to my bias. But if you have a situation where the President's being accused of impeachable crimes or behavior, let's not call them crimes. Some people are calling them crimes. And you have the President simply defending himself. What does the ignorant viewer conclude? Somebody's charging him. The our serious Congress is charging him with horrible behavior and he's defending himself. What's that feel like? Feels like he's guilty, right? I mean, if you're disposed to have a bad feeling about the President, you're going to say, well, you know, Nancy Pelosi held off for so long, she must have finally got a good reason. I don't quite understand the quid pro stuff. You know, I don't know what Biden was doing. I'm not a lawyer, but I can tell that Congress just went from not serious to something that looks serious. And he seems to be defending himself, feels guilty. That's where we were. What's it feel like today? Well, it looks like Trump is in the middle of doing, doing the grab the gun and turn it around trick that he does so well. Do you remember when fake news was a phrase that was used against the President? Is it still used against the President? No. The President grabbed that gun and turned it around and made it his own right. Fake news became the biggest weapon he's ever had, very effectively lowering the credibility of the news so that the attacks on him don't have the same effect. Very effective. Now, do you remember when people were saying, hey, President Trump, it looks like you went quid pro quo there with Ukraine, and you said to yourself, oh, man, that quid pro quo thing, that's quite an attack against the President. And then he nicknamed Joe Biden quid pro Joe. He took the gun out of a hand, turned it around, and now he's quid pro Joe. Who's got the stronger claim? All we're talking about is Hunter Biden and Joe Biden quid pro Joe. He took the gun and he turned it around. Now you say to yourself, well, sure, that's something you can do with words. You can turn a word around, you can turn a nickname around. Sure, not everybody could do it, but I'll give you that. I'll give you the President can turn a word around, but I'll tell you what the President can do. Nobody's this good. No president could be so good that he could turn impeachment around. But he is right in front of you. He is. When the President went on TV and said, you know what? Not only do I think Ukraine should look into this, what's China doing? China, you should look into the Bidens, too. He didn't just double down, he tripled down. He quadrupled down by bringing China into it. Now, of course, he doesn't expect China to look into anything. So there's no seriousness to that, to that. It's a political statement. But let's say you're watching tv. You're the person who doesn't have a legal opinion. You're just trying to sort this out. If the President acts guilty, what do you think is probably true? Well, maybe there's something there. But if the President says, not only am I not guilty, I showed you the transcript and I'm going to do it again right in front of you. Watch this. China, if you're listening to me, can you look into the Bidens? Did you see that? Did everybody see that? I just did a legal thing right in front of you. It's not just legal, it's desirable. It's not just something that's technically okay. It's very desirable. It's my job. It's my job to make sure that elections and foreign interference are minimized. We have treaties with China and Ukraine which spell out that they will cooperate with us on legal investigation type stuff. We have an agreement. The president is using the existing laws exactly as they were intended to be used, which is, countries can talk to each other and ask for help. That's what the law says. What's his job to make sure that we don't have foreign interference. That's the sitting President's job. Would it be a problem if Biden had some foreign blackmail potential and then he got the presidency? Of course. It'd be the biggest problem this country ever had. Does, does that give the President, the sitting president, a reason to look into it? That's his job. So the first thing that they're doing that's brilliant is by going right after it and quadrupling down. He didn't just double down, he quadrupled down by bringing China into it. That completely changes how you feel about it. It's like, well, why would he do that unless it's so legal that you could Shout it. He could stand. He could stand in the public square and shout that he's asking a foreign country to look into Biden and say, look, I'm shouting it. China, Ukraine, look at me. Hey, everybody, look at me. I'm going to do it right in front of you again. Why? Because it's legal and because it's my job and because it's a top priority for the country. Is it also good for his campaign? Of course. But we allow that. Our system allows him to do what's good for getting reelected, as long as he's doing it in public, as long as it's also his job. He meets all the tests. He's doing it transparently now. I mean, he's released the transcript now. It's transparent and it is his job. That's sort of all you need to know. So let's say you're not a legal person, you're not following all the details. How hard is it to understand? It's so legal and so part of his job. He's going to do it twice, three times if you count Russia. And then the best part, asking the Democrats to hold the vote, asking Pelosi to put it to a full vote of the House so that they all get on record this magnificent. I want to swear, because this is so beautiful, like, in the persuasion political way, it's beautiful. President Trump has done the impossible. He grabbed impeachment out of Pelosi's hand and turned it around, and he's shooting her in the leg with it. See what I did there? He actually turned impeachment into a weapon against Pelosi and the entire Democratic Congress, which he's on the verge of flipping back to Republican because of impeachment. It's really good. Now, it's the framing that makes it special, because by going on offense and saying, yeah, take a vote, put it up to a vote, he reframes it from something that's good for Pelosi and necessarily bad for Trump into something that's good for Trump and bad for Pelosi. And it's not even a stretch. There will be plenty of experts who will come on and say, you know, that's a pretty good play, Mr. Trump. That's a pretty, pretty good play. Every time I say pretty, pretty good. I should credit Larry David for that, for that's his saying. It's so catchy. I use it a lot, but it's not me. That's Larry David saying. And so I say, if Jared Kushner and Mulvaney are part of this package of persuasion perfection. It's really impressive. It's super impressive, honestly. It might be the, you know, the play of the year. It's so good. It's like crazy good. Now, I don't think the news will report it that way, of course, but, man, is it fun to watch. And let me ask you this, most of you, I believe, are Trump supporters. If you're watching this periscope, I personally don't have a preference about whether Trump is, whether the House votes to impeach him because, you know, the Senate's going to protect him. We, I think everybody agrees on that. So he's not going to be out of a job. But I kind of want them to vote on it. I kind of do. I mean, I'm clearly a supporter of the president, but I would kind of like to see the vote because he's the only president you can imagine who wouldn't be hurt by it. You know, certainly people have said that Clinton wasn't hurt by it, but, you know, that was, that was more in the very special case of, you know, it got more votes, right, because people were mad about this system being over applied. So they sort of reacted with their funding, with their votes. So you'll see that too. With Trump, I think it just, it's a winning proposition for him. Vote wise and energy wise and fundraising wise. It's just a win. But beyond that, he's making it look like it was almost his idea. I mean, he's almost turning impeachment into something that was good for him. That's way beyond what Bill Clinton was doing. Bill Clinton just survived, and it was good that there was some pushback on that, that helped him. But Trump, I think he found a way to weaponize it more so than even Clinton. All right, enough of that. Did you see that Israel and the idf, the Israeli Defense Force, they tweeted a photoshopped picture of Iran's leaders, Khamenei and Rouhani, the president. So it was a picture of them. And then they photoshopped in. I think it was Lindsay Lohan or something from the movie Mean Girls. There's some kind of mean Girls anniversary or something. And so they decided to call Kameni and Rouhani the mean girls of the Middle East. And I thought to myself, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. Let me tell you why that's good. A good nickname or a good persuasive attack is one that there's something about the target of your attack that just fits and makes you Say, oh, yeah, I wasn't really thinking it, but I was feeling it. Now you put a name to it. I'm thinking it harder. That's like a perfect attack. When you think of Khamenei and you think of, like, what's he trying to accomplish? And you say to yourself, all right, best case scenario, he thinks he's trying to spread his Islamic revolution, the Iranian revolution, he's trying to spread it, but it doesn't look like it has any chance of working right. So that almost doesn't make sense. It's like, why is he trying to do this that, you know, can't work? He can't really spread his. You know, basically, he's shrinking. If anything, things are going very poorly in Iran. So it doesn't really make sense why he's doing what he's doing, unless he's just mean. Have you seen a picture of Khamenei? Doesn't he look mean? He just looks mean. He looks like a mean old man. And so I don't think that the reason he's doing anything is because he's mean, but it looks that way because nothing else makes sense. If you try to figure it out rationally, it doesn't make any sense at all. He's been squarely pushed into, like, a prison cell of irrationality. Because unless Iran comes, comes to us, meaning us, meaning the rest of the world, with some kind of an offer or a deal that actually makes rational sense and could be practical, unless he does that, come up with a better reason for why he's doing the opposite of that. Can you think of any reason, his motivation, because the revolution is sort of over. I mean, it's just not working. Iran is just shrinking every day. Their economy is shrinking, their power is shrinking of the economic sanctions. So there is no explanation for Khamenei that makes sense to the observer. And then the IDF labels him as a mean girl. And I think to myself, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. Because it does look like he's mean and it does look like he's employing the rationality of a teenager. I'm not going to say teenage girl, because that's sexist, but the mean girls was about teenagers. And so he's about as rational as a teenager and he looks mean. It's pretty, pretty good. All right, I got to stop saying pretty, pretty good. Samsung has decided to pull out of China. Now. Samsung being South Korean company, they're pulling out of China. And so it begins. And so it begins. The decoupling now in this case, it wouldn't be us decoupling, it would be an ally. But that's just as good. I think you're going to see a lot of decoupling. Let's talk about Harris. So, as you know, Kamala Harris had been tweeting that the president needs to be kicked off of Twitter for his bad tweets that. I don't know, whatever she's saying about them, it's ridiculous. But I've said it was a great play, persuasion wise, because it did in fact get around the news. So who were we talking about yesterday? Who's running for president? Well, Trump, of course. Who else did we talk about yesterday? Who's running for president? Buttigieg? No, Bernie. No, except he's in the. Still in the hospital. Biden. All bad news. All bad news for Biden. Elizabeth Warren, I think she was quoted a few times. Basically non existent. Oh, yeah. And then Harris. So her play to be a little bit provocative and outrageous and to say something is clearly wrong. There is no chance that Jack Dorsey is going to kick Trump off of Twitter for doing what he's done so far. I mean, if he did something in the future, it's imaginable, but at the moment it's unimaginable. But she got on TV and she got her time and she got to say what she wanted to say, and people saw her and they didn't see somebody else. So that's a win. But I was watching. I was watching her performance. She did manage. She was interviewed by Jake Tapper on cnn. And Jake was pushing her. And he pushed her exactly right by saying, you know, if the president, you know, did get kicked off of Twitter, you'd have to kick half of Twitter off because how could you really distinguish the things he's saying from the things 40% of Twitter users say every day? Which is exactly the right question. Right? How can you possibly make that distinction? Now, of course, Jake was getting to the heart of the matter, which is that this is not a serious suggestion. It's a political suggestion. And that was highlighted by the question. Watching her answer the question was painful because you could tell she didn't have a belief in her own opinion, which is okay because it was a political opinion. Just like Trump saying, hey, China, you should investigate Biden. There's some things you say in the political season. This shouldn't be taken too seriously. You still need to be able to sell it, man. She did not sell that. She did not sell that at all. Now, she did give a serious demeanor and I don't know if it's because there was nothing to laugh at. Maybe she would have laughed if it had been a different question. But she doesn't look confident. And I also noticed she has helped me with the terminology, but I think she does up talk and it goes like this. Well, let me give you an example. If you are confident, you would say something like, china is a major threat. We're going to do the following things. This is how we're going to respond to them. All right, that's a confident sentence. A non confident thing is China's doing things. We're going to need to respond to them. I think we'll have to get tougher if you up talk. In other words, you almost turn your statements into questions. At the end, you don't sound confident and you don't sound like a leader. And when I watched her answer the questions about why Trump should be kicked off of Twitter, I thought, it's called upspeak. Is that what it's called? I thought to myself, just state it as a fact if you're trying to sell this to us. Don't up talk. Don't say things. I'm paraphrasing. These are not her words. But if you say things like, well, the way the president is talking, I think we need to look at it. Shouldn't we maybe have terms of service and maybe the terms of service because they're a corporation and maybe corporation should look at the way he's talking. So unpersuasive. Try this. The president's made several statements that clearly cross the line into provocative, possibly danger behavior. Twitter should look at that completely seriously and they should make a decision. Now, that's what you would sound like if you're trying to sound like a leader, if you're trying to not sound ridiculous when she up talked something that she wasn't even confident in. And you know she doesn't believe it because you don't have to read her mind to know that. Because it's not a serious kind of suggestion to kick the president off of Twitter. The whole thing seems so phony and contrived that I'm not sure she won by going on camera with that performance. But I felt like she was a little bit better. It did seem like even with the uptalk, even with my criticisms, I did think she made a noticeable improvement in, in her presentation. Now, I may be looking for it. Maybe it's something I'm expecting. So I may have some confirmation bias sneaking in. So let me confess that I would be not an unbiased observer here, but watch for this. See if you can see that Harris's demeanor starts getting more leaderly. Maybe she starts to take out the uptalk. Maybe you'll see some improvement and maybe you can fact check me to see if I'm imagining the improvement. All right. Have you seen a picture of Hunter Biden lately? There's one picture that Fox News runs all the time and I don't know if he looks the same in all the pictures. Have you noticed how crooked his smile is? Like, actually, there's one side. It's like super crooked. And that doesn't mean anything, right? Yeah. The shape of your mouth does not indicate your character or your criminal past. It doesn't do any of that. But it sure feels that way. If you're looking at that picture of Hunter Biden with that big crooked smile, you do not trust that face. That is the least trustworthy face. In that one picture. I'm positive there are pictures of him just looking perfectly pleasant and honest. But the one that Fox News uses, wow, that one, he looks crooked. Just the smile, it's just so off putting. Oh, the other thing that Kamala Harris did yesterday, she was doing some little town hall meeting and she asked this question that she thought she was going to get a different answer for. She said she asked if America was ready for her to be president. Now when you say that, is America ready for me as president? What do you think the audience is supposed to respond? The trouble is it's ambiguous because your first impression might be, yeah, no, the world is not ready for you because you're so awesome and honest. I don't think the world is ready for you. So she says she asked her crowd if the world, if the country is ready to have her as president. And her supporters yell no. And then she does her nervous self laugh. She goes, yes, yes, they are. The right answer is yes, they're ready. It was an awkward, cringeworthy moment, but it wasn't quite what it looked like. I don't think the audience was saying that she's not the right fit for the country. They were just trying to imagine what she wanted as the answer. And they. They guess wrong. But it was funny. All right. That was what you said with Bill Maher. I don't know what you're talking about. I'm just looking at your. So let me tell you a funny, awkward situation I'm having right now in which I might have a resolution to it. I'm going to be talking and looking at my email to See if I have a resolution to it. Kill her. Does he have the right to speed this along? Sorry about that. I don't think I have an answer yet. So here's my awkward situation. I'm writing an article for the Wall Street Journal for an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, might run Monday or Tuesday, and the Wall Street Journal asked me to do a little art to go with the article. So I drew a little piece of art in which there were two characters and one character was talking to the other. And I won't give you too much information, but it was in the political realm. And then because it's a comic, I went to add the colors to the comic, and I hit a real problem. Because here's the thing. There are only two characters. They're talking to each other, and they're on sort of different sides of things. But how do you color them? There are only two of them. If you have a crowd, then of course, you put in as much diversity as the art will allow, and then you're on the side of good, right? You've got some diversity in there. But if you have only two characters, your only choices are that they're the same, which doesn't fly in today's world, right? It wouldn't matter what ethnicity or gender they were if they were the same. People would say, why is it two women talking? Where's a guy? Or they might say, why are they both white? So you can't make them the same because it's a political context. And because there are only two of them, if you tried to make them diverse, all it would be is two different people. And if I do two different people and there's some text and they're talking and they're doing something, one of them is going to look like the bad one accidentally. So one of them will be perceived by the audience as like, oh, why'd you make the brown one the bad one? Or could be the opposite. Maybe somebody will say, oh, Scott, you snowflakey social justice warrior. You had to, you know, you made one, you know, a person of color, but then you had to make the bad one the white one. Right, you idiot. You know, why don't you just flip a coin or something? There's actually no right answer. There's no right answer. Now, I've suggested a solution, and some of you are probably ahead of me guessing what that might be, but I'm waiting for the Wall Street Journal. I won't mention Ames, who I'm working with, but so I'm waiting for the Wall Street Journal to give me an opinion about the way I handled it, because it turns out it's really hard. It's really hard to handle the public's expectations about humor and also diversity, because I'm completely on board with making art look like the real world. Why wouldn't you? I mean, everything about that makes sense, but it's hard to execute because, you know, 10 people are going to look at it and have 10, 10 different opinions. One of them is gonna. Gonna complain and want you to be kicked out of whatever you're doing. So I'll just tell you that there's something that'll run in the Wall Street Journal if all goes well early next week, and you should look at that and. And somebody's saying, make them both blue. I will tell you that I thought about making a blue one and a red one so that you've got, you know, the two parties, but it didn't quite map into red, blue. And that wasn't really the point I was making. It was more about how everybody's in their own world, and the red one looked like a person of color, but to some people, the blue one would look like a person of color. And I would still have the same problem because people would say, well, you made the blue one, who obviously is the person of color, do something that I interpret as being dumb, therefore you're racist. So you can't win with blue and red. And then I tried green, making them both green, and then I couldn't figure out what to do with the hair, because if I made them both green, but if I made their hair, there just wasn't any solution. But you'll. You'll see what I did with it. If. If it ever gets in papers, you'll see what it. If it ever gets on the Internet, you'll see what happens with it. All right, that's all for now. I will talk to you later. Bye for now.