Episode 814 Scott Adams: "Extremist Face", Van Jones the One-Eyed King, Bad Risk Management, Blame

Hey, everybody. It's good to see you. Come on in, Gather round. It's time for the best part of the day. Except for the rest of it, which is going to be pretty good, too. Yes, it's going to be coffee with Scott Adams this morning. And all you need, you don't need much. You need 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. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, the simultaneous sip. Erica, I see you there. Dr. Funk. Juice. Grab your mugs. Marla, come on. Go. Ah, sublime. Let's talk about the news and stuff. Stuff in the news. Well, there's a big story about some idiot in a white van who crashed into a voter GOP voter registration tent in a shopping center in Florida. Now, as luck would have it, he did not kill anybody, but apparently he wasn't that far away from killing anybody. This is one of those stories that you sort of had to be there to know if you were there. Could you know in advance, I mean, or could you know, by observing that he did or did not intend to hurt people. So one report is that he got pretty close to somebody, but I don't know if that person was jumping out of the way and was barely missed or if he aimed his truck at the objects and not the people. So we'll find out. But I'm not sure it makes it that much better if he was aiming at their tent. Apparently, the guy gets out and he's making all kinds of. He took a video of it and gave them the finger. So it was clearly political. But then we see his mug shot, and you look at the mug shot and you say to yourself, okay, I'm tired of pretending that I don't see the correlation. There's a correlation. So just before I got on, I tweeted in the replies to another tweet, I'd asked the question if there's something called antifa eyes. In other words, they have a look that you could identify. So I took a picture of a page full of antifa mugshots. People who definitely were in antifa. They got caught. And then I compared it to a page of shots of members of Congress, just headshots in both cases. Take a look at them. See if it looks like you could identify them just walking down the street. Not necessarily that you're antifa or that you're in Congress, but that in one case there's somebody who's likely to obey the law, and in another case someone a little less likely. Now, someone said quite correctly, hey, that guy that probably is associated with or at least compatible with the philosophy of antifa, the guy in the van who ran into the voter registration, somebody said, hey, he looks more like one of those neo Nazis. To which I say, yeah, he does. So here's my hypothesis. I think that there is an extremist look. I believe that you can identify people who are extreme on the right or extreme on the left. And here's how I think you can identify them by mental illness. I think that's the identifying characteristic is mental illness. Because if you're mentally ill, you're going to be far more likely to be gullible or drawn into something that's extreme. And depending on where you started from, you might say I'm extreme left or extreme right. But there's lots of science to suggest that human beings can detect illness. In other words, let's say there's somebody you're very close to. It's a spouse or boyfriend, girlfriend, somebody in your family, somebody you see all the time. And you walk into the room and you look at them and in a minute you can tell if they're sick most of the time, not every time, it's not one of those 100% things. But we're really good, we're really good at identifying, we're really good at identifying illness. And I think that would probably include mental illness. So I don't think it's a coincidence that when we see these extremists, they have a look. And to me, again, there's no science in what I'm going to say next. In my opinion, subjectively, the people on the extreme left and the extreme right look mentally ill. It might be different types of mental illness, but they certainly have a distinctive generic look. And maybe it would be more productive to talk about them that way because we end up talking about them in political ways. So the left will say, hey, that one neo Nazi killed somebody. So all you Republicans are bad. And of course Republicans say, hey, those antifa guys hit Dandy Noah on the head. So I guess all Democrats are bad. They don't say it exactly that way, but you know, it becomes a political thing when I think it's mostly a health thing. I think if you drill down, you'd find a health problem, a mental health problem. Anyway, just a hypothesis, Mike. Bloomberg has a commercial. It's an anti trump commercial in which he shows Trump quoting. Well, not quoting. He shows Trump as saying something about climate change. And I don't have Trump's exact words, but it's something like this. Trump says climate change, blah, blah, blah. A lot of it is a hoax. I think he said a lot of it, or much of it, or something like that. So in other words, the quote that Bloomberg puts on the screen is not Trump saying climate change is a hoax. He wants you to think that. But if you listen to the actual words, that's not what he's saying. Trump says something more like a lot of it is a hoax. Now, I think that's just true. I think that's objectively true. Now, you have to accept that in the political realm, the word hoax is being used very broadly for something that's not quite right, something that's not true. It doesn't necessarily mean that there's a prankster behind it who's running a practical joke on you. We've sort of morphed the word hoax from the original meaning to just mean there's something not right. Doesn't add up. Somebody's trying to get rich off it in general, that sort of thing. And if you were to look at it that way, there is, objectively speaking, let's just say the Paris Accords, if you just looked at that, that looks like a hoax, again, in the general sense, not of a prankster playing a trick, but of something that didn't add up. It didn't make sense to be a part of. It wasn't helping anything. It was costing us money, but it wasn't helping anything. Except, you know, the argument is, in some leadership way, it would make a difference, but not really. So Trump's opinion of climate change is, first of all, not what it's being presented, because there's a really big difference between saying the science is a hoax, which he didn't say. I don't know what he thinks. I'm just telling you what he said versus saying climate change. A lot of it is a hoax, because the whole topic is not just the science. It's the prediction models that are a little less dependable, probably, than the science. There's the economic models that are even less dependable, and then there's the politics. If you look at the politics and the models and stuff saying that a lot of that looks like a hoax, that's pretty reasonable. There's no departure from science whatsoever to say that, because it's not even a comment about science. So Bloomberg shows that with the intention of showing that Trump is anti science. And then it says, and here's the ridiculous part, and one of the things that politicians have to do is create content that matches and paces the people they're trying to reach. So I'm not going to say that this is necessarily Mike Bloomberg's personal, private opinion, but it's something that he approved to put in an ad. And it says in the ad, after mocking Trump for his opinion, said, Mike Bloomberg knows his science. To which I say, does he? Does he? Does Mike Bloomberg know his climate science? Because I don't think he's a scientist. Do you know who else doesn't know their science? All of the scientists. Well, I won't put it that way. It is loser think, as I devoted a part of a chapter in my book called Loser Think, to imagine that you can, quote, do your own research on a field that you don't understand. And let's face it, if you're not a climate scientist, you probably don't understand enough about climate science to do the research on your own and come to a conclusion that says, you know science. It's a ridiculous concept. So Mike Bloomberg is running with this proposition. I think this is fair to say. I think his proposition is he's running against somebody who doesn't understand science or doesn't respect it or bow to it, and he's the more rational candidate. That's the proposition. Right? One is rational. Mike Bloomberg looks at the facts and the other is irrational, according to Bloomberg, this Trump fellow. But his commercial is 100% irrational and it probably works. So in terms of political ads, it probably works because I think the people who want to believe this say, oh, yeah, Trump thinks science is a hoax, which he didn't say. And if he had said it, I think Mike Bloomberg would have used that clip instead of the clip where he talks generally about much of it being a hoax, which I take to be the political part. Now, this is the most irrational thing you could ever say, and many of you have said the same thing. So this is about you, too. If you believe that you can do your own research on the topic of climate change and reach an opinion that is rational because you've done your own research, you're not a rational person. You can't do that. There's no way that you or I could research climate change. No matter how much work we put into it, if we don't have a background in it, we haven't waded into it, haven't really wrestled with the details in a scientific way, we can't reach an opinion on that stuff. All you can do is believe people who told you stuff. That's it. So here's what Bloomberg's commercial should have said if it had been honest. And isn't he running on honesty? Isn't that one of his biggest propositions? Trump's a big liar. I'll give it to you honestly. And then he produces a campaign commercial that's pretty much the opposite of that. Because if he'd been honest about Trump's opinion, he would have said, okay, we don't know what he means by the hoax part. That would have been honest. Right, we don't know what he means. Is he talking about the basic science? He didn't say that. Or is he talking about the political element of it? That's the best interpretation. But again, you'd have to get his clarification on it. So it's a complete mischaracterization of the President's opinion. So first of all, Bloomberg is essentially lying by context, omission, just a lie. And he's running to be the honest guy. And it still works because his people will accept this message the way he wants them to. So it's a weird situation. All right, I don't trust the guy who believes what the experts tell him. I've got a little more trust, the one who says maybe, but it looks fishy to me. Who do you trust? I kind of have a little more natural trust for the person who says maybe, but there's a part of this that could be a little sketchy. I just naturally trust that person more. All right, I want to talk about Van Jones, my favorite Democrat. And I mean that. I mean that literally. Of all the people who are Democrats, he is my favorite one. And what I love about watching him is that you've heard that he's saying that in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. So Van Jones is like the only person who has an eyeball who's a Democrat too. I keep watching to see him suffer from tds and he doesn't. He doesn't. I've been watching him for a long time, since before the election, after the election, including last night. His comments about the impeachment, his comments about the debates, and I just can't find any Trump derangement syndrome at all. It's like he doesn't have it. How in the world could he live and operate in that world and be immune when everyone around him obviously is deeply infected with tds? And I have a hypothesis. You ready I probably shouldn't say this in public, so I apologize to you, Van Jones, in advance if you would wish I had not. But I'm just going to put this out here and the only people who are going to really understand this is people who've had a similar situation. I predict that at some time in his life, maybe not recently, but at some time, maybe in his younger life, Van Jones experienced some hallucinogens. Now, when I said that all of you who have never taken a hallucinogenic drug don't know what I mean. Everybody who has knows exactly what I just said. And you'll see it in the comments. All the people who know what I mean are just going to say, huh? Yeah, just watch the comments. You'll see all the people agree. Now, I mean this totally as a compliment. As you know, I'd like to see some kinds of hallucinogens legal because they're greatly implicated in helping people with various mental health problems, solving addictions, all kinds of good stuff. But one of their benefits is that you only have to do it once and you can start seeing the filters of life. The filters of life are the people who get caught in a little mental prison and then they can only see the world through one filter. And they think that they're one filter reality. But it's not. If you have one experience with hallucinogens, you experience living a world through a different filter, even temporarily. And when you're done, you always remember it. Now, you don't see the world the same way as you saw it when you were doing the hallucinogen. But what you come away from is the understanding that you can have a completely wrong or different view of the world and you can still operate, you can still eat and procreate and go to work and everything else. So if you had never had that experience and you were surrounded with people who said, you know, the world is this one way, this President Trump is an existential threat, he's going to destroy the world, what would you do? Well, if your entire experience of life was that there's just this one reality and the smart people can see it and the dumb people can't, you would buy into the majority view. It's the most natural thing you would do. You would go with the people around you, it's like, oh, everybody's seeing the world the same way. They all seem pretty smart. I think I'll probably adopt that view. Why wouldn't I? But time and time again, Van Jones, surrounded by tds, I mean, just he's like right in the middle of this boiling cauldron of insanity, and he's not affected, not even a little bit. And what can explain that? Well, you have my hypothesis. I believe he is experienced, and it doesn't have to necessarily have been hallucinogens. But my hypothesis is that Van Jones, at least once in his life, has experienced seeing the world through a different filter. I don't know what that filter was, but if you see the world through two different filters at two different times and you come to realize the subjectivity of your experience, it's easier to see past other false filters and know that they're more of a lifestyle choice. They could be a mental prison, et cetera. Here's what. Here's how Van Jones described this in his own words, roughly speaking, in a clip. I just saw it today. I'm not sure when he said it, but it was recently. And he said that the Democrats are playing fantasy football. And then he explains it this way. Now, listen to how much this sounds like two movies playing on one screen, but it's a slightly different version. And, and his examples of fantasy football that the Democrats are playing, according to him, are that, remember when Trump first got elected, there was all that talk that they would throw out the Electoral College results. How realistic was that? Wasn't really realistic, was it? And then it didn't happen. And they're like, God, I'm so surprised that didn't work. And then they did the Mueller report, and that didn't work. It didn't work. It was like a fantasy of getting rid of Trump. And then there was the impeachment, which also didn't have a chance at working. And when Van Jones explains those three things, and those were just three examples, by no means would I expect these to be the exhaustive list. But isn't that description fantasy football kind of really good, kind of perfect? Because they're playing a game with the Electoral College and Mueller and impeachment that they can fantasize is real, meaning that in their minds, they're like, yeah, we got them now. When Mueller brings in the goods, we got them now. So it allows them to live in a manufactured fantasy world in which they're winning or they're about to win. It's going to be good any minute now. Sure, it's been bad for us for years in a row, but any minute now. I thought that was a great, great way to frame this thing anyway. And I love watching Van Jones talking reasonably in the cauldron of tds, because I don't think other people know quite what to do with it. They don't really push back. They just sort of change the subject. Because if you're the only rational person in an irrational room, sometimes maybe they just change the subject. So I tweeted this this morning. I said, there are two things that MSNBC pundits know to be true. All right? These are the two things they know to be true if you're on msnbc. Number one, President Trump is an existential threat. It's a phrase I use all the time. Existential threat, meaning he's literally a threat to our existence that we could all die because of, or at least a lot of us could die because of President Trump. So they use this exact phrase, he's an existential threat. And they know that to be true because they all say it without any pushback. There's nobody on MSNBC who says, whoa, wait a minute. You mean that's hyperbole, right? You don't actually literally mean we're all going to die. Nobody does that. Do you know why? Fantasy football. They've all taken on this fantasy that there's this president who's going to kill us all, and they're all on the other team now. I'm adding that to Van Jones list. He didn't put that on the list. But to me, it seems the same, that there's like a fantasy filter on this. So that's the first thing they know, that President Trump is an existential threat. Here's the second thing they know. It's a special kind of existential threat that disguises itself for the first four years as a continuous flow of good news, meaning that the country's in good shape, things are going well. And so the people who believe that Trump is an existential threat, I would say to them, I can kind of see what you meant three or four years ago. Remember, by Election Day, we'll have four continuous years of a Trump administration. If he's an existential threat, wouldn't we see some signs of that? You know, it's one thing to say, this is a big unknown. You know, the election of President Trump on day one, when he sworn in, it's a pretty big unknown. So you would expect in the face of unknown unknowns, that people would have different opinions because they're just saying, you know, they're predicting with their biases or their preferences or their fantasies, whatever. So fairly reasonable. Fairly reasonable to be afraid of President Trump on his first day of office. I disagreed. I had a different opinion, and I Had a strong different opinion. But I don't think it was crazy to be afraid of the unknown, because he did talk, you know, he did talk in a way that people hadn't seen. People found it scary, you know, so reasonable. Reasonable turned out to be wrong, but it wasn't crazy. But now it's three years in, and when Election Day comes around, it's four years in. I think at that point, it's kind of crazy, right? You should be able to change your opinion if four years go by and all we are is better off. But no. All right. Rudy Giuliani went on Jesse Waters show last night and made news. I don't know if Jesse knew that he was going to be breaking a big story. He looked surprised, but there it was. Now, you may have seen President Trump tweeting ahead of last night's shows that there was going to be a great lineup on Fox last night. So President Trump basically just did a tweet commercial for Judge Jean, the Greg Gutfeld show and Jesse Waters show. And now we know why. Because Rudy Giuliani was on, and of course, he knew he would get favorable coverage in general. But Rudy Giuliani has this claim that he's got three witnesses ready to name names in an investigation into Hunter Biden. So there's alleged corruption, and Rudy Giuliani says he's got at least one document and three people who are willing to testify to something I don't know exactly had something to do with money laundering through different countries and making a loan not look like a loan. I don't know the details, so I don't want to characterize it. But Rudy is making a pretty big claim that there was something that wasn't too hard to find, apparently. I mean, Rudy found it without a lot of help and that it would change how you saw President Trump's request to Ukraine. Now, do you think that Rudy Giuliani really has the goods? What do you think if you had to put the odds on it, and of course, we don't know, but there are two possibilities. One is that Rudy is just being political and he doesn't really have the goods, but maybe it's something that he could convince you. Looked a little suspicious, so maybe. So that's one possibility. The other possibility is he totally has the goods. He totally has it. Now, given that Rudy Giuliani is literally famous as being, what, one of the most effective prosecutors of all time, what are the odds that Rudy Giuliani can't tell the difference between having the goods, the smoking gun as he called it, and not having a smoking gun, I feel as if he'd know the difference. And you would have to believe that he was intentionally lying to you about the quality of his evidence in order to think that there's something to question here. What are the odds that Rudy Giuliani, who has names, that he can show them to you? So in other words, he's offering, he's practically begging to show his sources. When people lie, do they beg you to look at their original sources, the same stuff they looked at, to reach their opinion? Well, not that often. He wants us to look at the evidence, which suggests, and given his experience and background, if I had to guess, if I had to put money on it, sounds like he's got something. So we'll see. In general, I have a proposition. One way to tell the difference between Republicans and Democrats is risk management. And I often see that Republicans seem, let's say, better skilled. I think that's the way to say it, better skilled at managing risk. Now, I've said, and I've said it often, that managing risk is not something you're born with necessarily. It's a learned skill. So if you had never learned to manage risk, you probably think you're good at it, but you wouldn't be, because it's like a lot of things, you get better over time. And you notice that a lot of antifa people either don't have corporate jobs, to say the least, or they're very young people in their 20s. What would you say is generally true of people who have never worked in the corporate world and are young? They're not all young, but many of them are. So it's people who don't have corporate experience and they're young. I would say the one thing that really characterizes that group, there would be a number of things that they'd have in common, I suppose. But one of them is that they had never learned risk management. How do we evaluate risks? You see that all the time. There's no better example than this one that Warren and Bernie Sanders want to radically change the economy at a time when the economy is doing better than it has ever done. If you were good at risk management, would you ever take something that's operating better than it has ever worked and change it completely? You could argue completely, but let's say a big change. I don't think you would. I don't think there's anybody who would make a big change to something that's working perfectly. Now, the exception to that would be, let's say you're in business and you make a good product and it's better than your competition's product. In that case, you know your competition is going to catch up soon. So in that case, you actually would make a big change because you anticipate that your competition will match you. So you'd better cannibalize your own product and make a big change. It's like our old one was dominating the market, but we're still going to throw it away because if we don't, the competition is going to catch us. So they throw away their own product, even though it's the best one in the market, to try to make an even better one. Now, in business, you have to do that because you can depend on competition pretty much 100% of the time. But when you're talking about the American economy, well, we have sort of a general competition with China and other countries, but we're beating all of them and probably will continue to because we have a superior system. And I think that's a really big difference. Now take climate change. The climate change, if the progressives got everything they wanted, would be a gigantic change again to the economy and would be really expensive and it would be a big risk in terms of how much money would be spent and how it would change the way we live. But they say there's a big risk of not doing it, so this makes sense. So the risk management analysis is that, sure, it would be risky to disrupt the economy, make all these changes, but it's an even bigger risk to let climate change do what it's doing according to them. Here's what's wrong with that. It's very bad risk management. In other words, it's sort of Risk Management 101. It's how you manage risk. If you don't understand risk, the Republican approach is to say, well, we don't know exactly what the risk is. The models are not that accurate, but there's probably some risk. So let's do all the things that don't hurt us. That would also be the right thing to do if it were a big risk. Nuclear power, planting trees. Just two examples. President Trump is all in favor of planting trees, and he's all in favor of developing nuclear power. At least he doesn't say it enough, and I think that's a flaw. But in terms of the Department of Energy and the government, they're doing a lot. They're doing a lot. So if you were to look at it not as a left or right situation, but rather as a risk management situation, which one of those is better? I would argue that, unambiguously, the Trump administration approach is better no matter what you think of climate change, because their risk management approach does all the things that would be good no matter what. Well, we can always use more trees. Trees aren't bad. It's not much of a risk, especially since everyone in the world is doing it, and it's not like we're the only ones planting trees. So risk management look for that in all of the differences. It's a risk management difference, and I think it's an experience difference as well. All right, here's a theory that I have some appreciation of because of my experience as the author of the Dilber comic. And it goes like this. When the Dilber comic first started, it kind of reached its peak during the 90s, the mid-90s, when there was a lot of downsizing and employees had very little power and their jobs were being sent overseas and all that. And Dilbert was immensely popular and people were always sending me suggestions to mock their bosses and the bad management and how bad businesses. So it was sort of the heyday for being the Dilbert guy, because people were giving me all this great material from their own unhappy experiences. And then Bill Clinton came along and the dot com situation happened. Now, when the dot com thing happened, it looked like everybody was not everybody, but it looked like the only thing keeping you from getting rich was yourself. Because so many people were doing so well in so many different ways during the dot com boom that if I asked you, hey, what's wrong with your career? And I did, let me give you the exact thing, people stopped sending me complaints. And I thought to myself, come on. You know, even if, let's say 10% of the population is doing great because of this dot com boom, it can't be more than 10%. The other 90% still have the same bad boss they have before and the same job. If you were complaining before with the same job, the same boss, the same co workers, why did you just stop complaining? I literally couldn't get people to send me complaints during the dot com era, to the point where I actually asked people to give me their phone number so I could call them at work and ask them if they have any complaints, because I wasn't getting any without solicitation. And so people volunteered, a lot of them, actually. And I would call them at work and sometimes they would pick up, sometimes not, and I'd say, hi, I'm Scott Adams, I'm the Dilbert guy. Tell me what's bothering you about your job? And they'd say, oh yeah, I'm having a good day. Nothing's bothering me. I go, no, really, there's nobody who has a perfect job and a perfect day. Just tell me what's really bugging you about your job. And I couldn't pry it out of them. I couldn't pry out of them a complaint about their boss or their company. It was amazing. And then after the dot com bust, things got better for the Dilber guy, me, because people went back to complain. Here's how this is relevant to our political situation. When the economy is bad, who do you blame? Who do you blame when the economy is bad? Well, you blame the government. Even if it's not the government's fault, you still get to blame them. Well, you should have done more. If you had done this, we wouldn't be so bad. You also blame management. You blame rich people. You blame big corporations. So you're blaming banks and businesses and corporations and stuff. Who does that sound like? Who did I just describe? Did that sound like Republicans or did that sound like Democrats? Democrats. So Democrats. Their message of blaming the government, the rich people, the system. That's what Democrats do. They blame the government, Big business, banks, Wall street, rich people. That makes complete sense. When the economy isn't working, the Democrat message is perfectly suited for a bad economy. What happens when the economy is really, really good? People blame themselves. Now, of course, these are generalities, so most people never change their mind no matter what the evidence is. So most Democrats will just vote Democrat and feel the same way they always feel, but for the small sliver of persuadables they suddenly found themselves from. Yeah, the government's bad. The big business to. Do you have any complaints about your job? You personally just. You personally don't talk about other people. Not employed. Don't tell me that other people are being discriminated against. I get that. I'm accepting all that to be true. Just you. You personally. Bob. Bob, are you okay? How are you doing? Well, you probably saw there was a study that said 90% of people are happy in their personal lives because there's nobody to blame. If your economy is screaming and you're not happy with your situation, whose fault is it? Right. People understand that if the system is giving them low unemployment, they can kind of change jobs. It's pretty easy to change jobs in this economy. So if you haven't changed jobs, if you haven't done what you need to do, if you haven't taken those courses to get that promotion. It's kind of on you. So we have what I would call a Republican biased situation, which Republicans by philosophy are, you have a problem, that's your problem. Go solve your problem. Sure, we'll try to do what we can to get the government out of your way, but the government isn't there to solve your problem. That's what you're for. You're the one who solves your problem. And that makes sense. When the economy is good, people will accept that message. So the point is, I don't know if anybody has mentioned this effect, but you can't get a strong Democrat turnout for an election. And I think it would be reflected mostly in turnout. You're not going to get a strong turnout from people who blame themselves for the problem. And that's the situation we're in. So I suggest there will be a low voter turnout because people won't want to abandon their hatred for Trump. They just might be busy that day. You know what I mean? They're not going to say, I didn't vote because even though I don't like Trump, I have to admit things are going pretty well. It's not going to be that. It's going to be, well, I could vote or, I don't know, I was invited to this thing. I can't say no to the thing. I'm going to have to go to the thing instead of vote today. So I think you can see low voter turnout and mostly because of that. All right, you've probably seen by now the clip of Buttigieg. Maybe you saw it live where, when he gave this long, nonsense word salad, sounded like a corporate consultant answer to a question during the debate. I watched that live and Buttigieg starts talking and it's all just concepts and words put into sentences. And the sentence sort of made sense, but in some cases not. And I kept waiting for that to turn into a crisp point. I would do this or, here's the problem, here's the solution. I thought it was going to turn into that. And then he just ran out of time and stopped. And it was almost a full minute of talking with no content. And I thought to myself, where have I heard that before? Where have I been in my life, in my history where I've heard somebody talk for a full minute without any content? And I thought, oh, yeah, I was sitting in a meeting at my old employer, Pacific Bell, and a high end, very expensive consultant from McKinsey was telling us how they were going to make everything better. It's consultant talk it's corporate jargon, except taken into the political world. It was pure empty calories. And I thought to myself, I've never seen somebody create a kill shot for themselves that was so effective. If he became the candidate and ran against Trump, all Trump would have to do is run that clip and show a picture of an empty suit. Am I right? Just show the clip and then do a split screen and it's like an empty suit that's standing there and there's nobody in it. Empty suit, it's over. So it's a big weakness he's got there. All right, So here's somebody who responded to my comments about Buttigieg, or actually, I think I retweeted somebody else's tweet in. I think it was Kathy's tweet. So this is what this individual said. Now, remember, I've told you that you can identify people who are artists without looking at their profile on Twitter. You can identify them by the way they address topics. So I'm going to give you this example. So on the tweet where people were making fun of that Buttigieg statements during the debate, where it was all word salad, this is what this. Presumably a supporter, or at least Democrat says quote, word salad, question mark, question mark. It's called being smart and informed. Trump can't even spell, for crying out loud. Do you know who was notoriously against intellectuals? Yeah, the Nazis. Why are you so threatened by intelligence? Someone is not elite because they read. Alright, now as I mentioned in my book, Loser Think talks about all the bad ways of thinking. They're almost all in this one tweet. Let me call them out. So he's saying it's not word salad. It's called being smart and informed. What is that? That's what I call word thinking. He didn't give a reason, he just relabeled it. That's it. He just relabeled it. Relabeling things is not thinking. You just put different words on the same thing. We're looking at exactly the same thing. There's no question about the facts. Just labeling it a different label didn't get you anything. So word thinking, then he says Trump can't even spell. What's that got to do with Buttigieg? What does spelling have to do with what Buttigieg just did? It's a ridiculous comparison. So that's the next thing that artists do. They don't know how to compare things effectively. And it's not a good comparison because spelling things wrong is so common. That everyone here says to themselves, yeah, I spelled a tweet wrong once. I went to college, and I spelled a tweet wrong. How many times have I spelled a tweet wrong or spelled something wrong in a blog post or mispronounced something? Fairly often. I've got a college degree. I've got a master's degree. I do this for a living. I'm a professional writer. They still spell stuff wrong all the time. It means nothing. But. So it was a weird comparison. Then he does the Hitler thing. He goes, do you know who was notoriously against intellectuals? Yeah, the Nazis. So that's what I call analogy thinking, where you imagine that because something reminds you of something, that there's something that you're learning because of that, you're not learning anything. You just got reminded of something. That's it. That's the entire end of the story. I was reminded of something. You don't take that and then say, therefore, I predict Trump will become Hitler. So that's the analogy thinking. And then he says, why are you so threatened by intelligence? Who was threatened by it? Was there somebody in this story who was threatened by intelligence? That's just mind reading. He's mind reading and getting the wrong answer. So he's got word thinking, bad comparisons, analogy thinking and mind reading. And then he ends with, someone is not elite because they read. And I'm not even sure he. Oddly enough, he had a typo. He spelled a word wrong in his tweet. In his tweet in which he was mocking the president for a spelling error, he has a typo. In this case, it's a typo, not a spelling error. But I'm thinking, well, you know, don't throw stones. Anyway, he says, someone is not elite because they read. And I'm thinking, who is arguing anything like that? Who does he imagine he is countering? He basically creates a strawman argument and then argues against it. So he's got word thinking, bad comparison, analogy thinking, mind reading, and a straw man all in one tweet. When I saw that, I said to myself, artist, click on profile. Professional writer for television. Was I surprised? No, I was not. Now, since the moment I pointed this out, and many of you have seen me point this out for a while, that you can identify an artist by their comments because they don't know how to, let's say, understand the world in rational ways, it's really obvious. All of the worst comments on Twitter are kind of from people who are professional artists or want to be. It's not A coincidence. All right, let me tell you the secret to success. All right, you ready? If you stayed to the end, you get this little nugget. One of the greatest secrets to success I learned from a salt salesman. He was my neighbor, and he'd gotten rich after being born. He was actually born in a shack in the south that didn't have running water. So this is a guy who was born into extreme poverty, lied about his age to get into the Navy. I think he was 16, because he just needed some way out of his extreme poverty. But when I met him, he was living in a mansion, small mansion, but he was a rich guy, lived in my neighborhood. And I once asked him at a party what his path to success was. He told me that he started out after the Navy. He became a salt salesman. He would sell salt to grocery stores. So he would go in and say, you should carry my brand of salt instead of the other one. And I laughed and I said, how in the world can you sell salt? It's just price. Salt is salt. Am I wrong? How could anybody say my salt is better than your salt? And I said, how in the world did you sell it? And he said, well. And he told me this story. He said, well, yeah, but the point is, from the consumer's point of view, it's a pretty generic thing. So he told me this story. He said there was a local grocery store guy who. When he called upon him, the guy said that he was going to be. He learned that the guy was going to be reorganizing his store over the weekend. So the guy was going to have to come in and work all night or weekend or something, reorganizing his shelves for some purpose. So the salt salesman shows up unannounced to help. He just shows up and says, well, you were going to reorganize your shelves, so I'm going to show up and help. So he works with him. And when he was done, that store owner bought this guy's salt forever. Now, what is the lesson from this? The lesson is that people who receive things, if they're smart, they created that situation by giving something and asking nothing in return. So he gave something to somebody, and that was his system. He had a system, not a goal. His system was, I'm going to be nice to people, I'm going to help them. I'm not going to ask for anything. And when they decide who they want to buy salt from, I'm going to get my share. And he became the best salt salesman in his company, and that created A bunch of money because he got paid on commission. And they parlayed that into a number of other businesses, became a famous entrepreneur. Here's the reason I bring this up. Somebody else is using this technique. Somebody who's watching this periscope right now. You probably already know him. His name is Dr. Funkjuice. Dr. Funkjuice started tweeting about my periscopes, the one you're watching right now. So I'm not sure how long ago. Several weeks ago. And he made a little image of a coffee cup, and I guess it was a Jeff, and announced that my periscope comes up at the same time, 10 Eastern, 7 Pacific, and told people to watch it. Now, the first time I saw it, I thought, oh, great, a fan. He's such a fan. He made a gif and is promoting my thing. And I don't know if I tweeted it or I liked it or whatever, but I enjoyed seeing it. Then the next day, he did it again, and again and again. Now, I had been thinking to myself, you know, I should do that myself. But it was just one extra thing, and I didn't feel like doing it. But it was convenient for me because every time Dr. Funkjuice would do one of those tweets, it would come in exactly the right time, like half an hour or so before the actual periscope. Perfect timing. And I would see it in my Twitter feed because I'm always on Twitter. Right before I come on here, I'd say, oh, I don't have to do a tweet. I'll just retweet Dr. Funk Juice. And day after day after day, a person I've never met, owes me nothing, gave me something. It was just a gift. Now, he apparently likes the content that comes out of this. Now, normally, I don't like to mention ethnicity, but I think it matters in this case. So Dr. Funkjuice, based on his profile, is an African American man and is a dj. And he has found the secret to success. Because who am I talking about right now? Dr. Funk Juice. And I'm going to tell you that you should follow him at DJ Underscore. Dr. Underscore. Funk Juice. One word. Funk Juice. And I gotta say that if I were to bet on somebody, I would bet on this guy because he's figured out the salt salesman trick. He simply gave me something for free and got my attention. And then he gave me something else for free, got my attention, and now I'm giving him a commercial. So presumably he will gain some followers. You know, get something out of it. But I don't think he had that specifically in mind. I'm guessing that he was running it like a system. I can't read his mind, but I'm guessing he didn't have a specific outcome in mind. He just knew what the salt salesman knew, that if I do this good thing and ask nothing in return, something good might happen. But I don't think he necessarily did it for that reason. I think he just understands the world at a deeper level. And the reason I mentioned ethnicity is this is the following point. I've often thought that one of the biggest forms of, I would call it almost, what's the word? Industrial racism or sort of built in racism is that if you're born a typical white kid and you've got a successful white family, you're getting all this advice even if you don't want it. You know, just being born in a family where you've got entrepreneurs and people who are, you know, going to college and stuff, you're just going to sort of pick up advice. And that's got to be a tremendous advantage over somebody who has some different situation and they don't get the benefit of that, you know, learning things by osmosis, just being around it. And I've often thought that there should be some kind of a class or a lesson and doesn't have to be for, you know, African Americans specifically. But as a group, they may have less access to people who have already made it. And that's part of the sort of intrinsic bias of our society is that there's some people just don't have access to mentors. So Dr. Fung choose either by being smart or possibly he had some good experiences with family members who were also successful. Is onto this secret, very, very powerful secret now. Can he share it? You know, I would imagine that if he has kids, I don't know if he has or he has them, someday they're going to have the benefit of his experience and by osmosis they'll learn what he did and maybe pick up some tricks. How could you expand that to, let's say, inner cities? People who really needed it. When I wrote my book how to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, I was thinking in those terms. But I don't think that book necessarily cracks every community. So anyway, big call out to Dr. Funkjuice for being so smart about success in particular. So thanks for that and thanks for the help. That's all I have for today and I will talk to you all tomorrow.