The Ricochet Podcast - It's Alright

Episode Date: November 15, 2019

Got the full band back together for this one and we’ve got Scott Adams on base (see what we did there?). You know Scott as the Dilbert dude, but you also know that he’s been a staunch supporter of the President since the ’16 primaries. So we wanted to see where Scott’s head is at in the midst of impeachment and well, he does not disappoint. Also, Mike Bloomberg writes a big check... Source

I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. As government expands, liberty contracts. It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That's a good thing. First of all, I think he missed his time. Please clap. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lalick.

Today we talk to Dilbert creator Scott Adams. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. This is indeed the Ricochet podcast, number 473, only two away from the meaningless number of 475. My name is James Lylex here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with Rob Long in New York and Peter Robinson in sunny California. Gentlemen, I imagine that this podcast will be put into a lead-lined box and buried because there's something that the future will want to know. It's how we felt about the first couple of days of the massive culture upending, historical feat that we call the impeachment hearings.

So I know that you guys have been hanging on everywhere and transcribing it frantically as the, uh, events go on. So let's just see, um, how you feel about this because remember history is watching. I am not watching history may be watching, but I, I, I'm busy and I don't have time for this. And I also don't want I don't want to allow this kind of idiotic politics, which is what it is. That's right. To sort of invade my day to day life. I don't I don't like it when I walk by, you know, restaurants or something and people are glued to the impeachment hearings. They are not interesting. Even if the Democrats are winning, they shouldn't be interesting. No, no trial. No, certainly no trial of a kind like this is interesting. It's always hard to keep the jurors awake when you're talking about conversations and you're trying to lay an argument down. So, you know what? I'll catch up to it later. It's like, it's, it's like, I'm not going to binge watch this, this show.

I'm going to wait and see, you know, which episode I need to watch. And I'll watch that one. That's, that's like the, the oratorical skills and sheer animal magnetism of Adam shift. Aren't drawing you to,

to watch this. Well, no, look, I mean, to do it properly, it shouldn't be. So when everyone's talking about all this bombshell,

this bombshell, that it, to do it properly, it shouldn't be. So when everyone's talking about, oh, that's bombshell this, bombshell that, that is certainly not the way white-collar crimes, which is what this would be, I mean, you know, if it's somewhere else, are prosecuted. They're just not. Like, the hardest thing for prosecutors to do when they're – for federal prosecutors to do when they're prosecuting financial crimes and white-collar crimes and that kind of stuff is to keep the jurors awake. That is literally to keep them literally awake. They tend to fall asleep because it's so boring. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. It doesn't mean they're not winning. It doesn't mean they're not losing. It just means that if it's interesting, they're doing it wrong. Well, then you would have the six foot drag queen with the with a bright wig there in the actual chamber itself conducting some of this, or maybe walking around with those number cards that they have in boxing matches. Peter,

how are you taking this? I'm sort of with Rob. I dipped into it for a few moments yesterday. And so something historic is happening, but that doesn't mean it's interesting or that anybody needs to feel some sort of civic duty to watch it. As distinct from Watergate, which I can just dimly remember, almost every day or every couple of days, there was something truly new and genuinely shocking about Watergate. I still remember how shocked my parents were when Time magazine printed material from tapes, from the tapes, and they used the word expletive deleted. And the idea that the president of the United States would use bad language in the Oval Office was truly shocking to my parents and to millions of Americans. There is no news, nothing new. Donald Trump released a transcript, paraphrase, whatever you want to call it, of the call. No one has challenged that.

Apparently there's no word-by-word transcript, but nobody says that this document is in any way misleading or false. The call took place roughly as that document suggests. So we know that. We know Donald Trump has bad judgment, that he's a loud mouth, that whatever comes into his head, he's likely to say. We also know that nobody can construct what took place on that call as a crime. The president of the United States saying to another foreign leader, will you please investigate corruption? Let's put it this way. There is easy and easy non-criminal construction that can be put on that. That's a reasonable request for a president to make of a foreign leader. We know every bit of that. So what is taking place in the hearings? They get some foreign policy

professionals who, like foreign policy professionals down through the decades, are self-important, don't like the political figures around them, convey an attitude, word, even body language that they believe they are by right the ones who should be conducting foreign policy and that the president was interfering with. Well, OK, fine. That's the way bureaucrats tend to be, even very skilled, even very patriotic bureaucrats. They devote their lives to learning all the details and then they're offended that the people elect someone who's crude. That's not new either. That goes back decades and decades. Peter, irregular channels were used. Yeah, irregular channels were used by Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he had Harry Hopkins, who was living in the White House.

That's how close a personal friend and confidant of FDR's he was. He had Hopkins fly to London and to Moscow to deal with Stalin and Churchill. John Kennedy had his brother, Bobby Kennedy. You could say many things about Bobby Kennedy, who was his brother's closest confidant and attorney general of the United States. He was not a foreign policy expert. And yet John Kennedy used Bobby Kennedy to open a back. Well, for that matter, Valerie Jarrett. Or Valerie.

And on and on it goes. You could doubt the judgment of any president in doing this, but the unquestioned constitutional authority to conduct foreign policy as he likes resides in the office of president. I'll tell you something else in the constitution, according to Nancy Pelosi, and that's bribery. And she's in and bribery she thinks is what the president should be brought up on which is just you have to cross your eyes and feel an aneurysm coming on when she says that does she not know exactly what the word means i mean that's that's talking about the president or an official being bribed by some potentate who wants to bestow money title or the rest of it but she's trying to make it sound as if trump was committing bribery by telling them uh we would like you to fulfill this treaty we got

about corruption before we give you the i mean well rob let me ask you this does it seem to you that after the expected uh muller report did not produce all of the necessary requisite box of smoking Tommy guns that effortlessly without skipping a beat, they moved to this Ukrainian matter, which was elevated to, you know, to the level of what they expected the Mueller report to, to, to produce. All of a sudden, this is the worst thing. And the, all that stuff before, never mind, it's this thing. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I agree. That's what's historic. What's historic is that it's so petty, that it's so boring, that the Democrats are using impeachment as a mere instrument of the usual partisan politics.

That's what's historic. They are defining down impeachment, and that's a serious crime against the Constitution, and it undermines the office of president and the president's ability to conduct foreign policy. That it is so boring that Rob and I feel perfectly free to ignore it. We'd pay money not to have to listen to the nonsense that's taking place because it's petty, ordinary, partisan politics. And that is not what impeachment should be. Yeah. I mean, the other thing is that the bribery issue is interesting because there are federal laws that prohibit bribing foreigners. Private U.S. companies can be prosecuted in the United States for bribing foreigners to do foreign things, right? So, you know, if a United States company goes to country X and bribes people to get, you

know, contracts or this or that, that is considered illegal in the United States. It's crazy, but I mean, not crazy, but it's convoluted, but certainly it is. But what's interesting about all this stuff is that, I mean, it is hard for even the most I dotted T crossed administration, which of which this is not one. It is hard to avoid stepping into this stuff. Like how many independents have we had? Tons. I mean, if anyone can explain to me exactly why Scooter Libby was prosecuted and what he was exactly what he's found guilty of, if anyone can really explain that to me in a TikTok fashion, I'll pay you $10 because it's very, very hard to do.

Well, I'll tell you. I can tell you right now, Scooter Libby went to jail because the Bush administration was silencing its critics like Hitler. And so put some and out of the very important national security asset. And I get that argument. What I mean is that it's that these things are designed to trap you. And when you have a president and an administration as clueless as this one on these things and as clumsy as this on everything, you're going to run into troubles. And this is what's happened. about it is and i think you're right it is essentially it's political um the odd thing about it is that this feels like we're watching an investigation unfold and the difference between that and watergate was watergate the conclusions had been made the evidence was already there everybody had read it um it was really the the the one of the reasons that Nixon resigned was because he knew he would have been removed. The die had been cast at the end.

But OK, I think you're compressing because, for example, it was a terrible shock to members of Congress as well as the public to discover that he had tapes. There was a there was a long summer. There was a there were a couple of months when months when the revelations were genuine revelations. That's right. That's right. You're making a different point. Sorry. Go ahead.

I suspect the difference there was that the people prosecuting that action knew exactly where they were going. And they knew exactly—they didn't even know the tapes, but they knew exactly where they were going. They were going to trial. And this feels to me like investigators' notes. Like we're watching people being interviewed for the very first time. We don't know what their answers are going to be. And so it seems much more amateur hour. And, of course, it's much more boring because there's no sense that – and full disclosure, I do – I know one of the prosecutors, one of the guys sitting behind Adam Schiff.

I know him. And I can't speak to him. I haven't spoken to him about this. He's in D.C. now, but I do know him. And he's been a federal prosecutor, and I've heard him talk about prosecuting crimes. And one of the things that you do, what they always say, is you never, ever walk into the courtroom. You never interview a witness in front of people unless you already know what that witness is going to say. Exactly.

But they don't. So it feels like a fishing expedition. But I also feel like they're kind of honest about it. Or at least in unguarded moments, it's clear that what the Democrats are doing is just softening the target for the election, which is why Peter's outrage is so appropriate, because they really are using, this is just one giant negative campaign ad that, of course, taxpayers are paying for and is derailing the country's business, but that's all it is, and everybody knows. I mean, we already know what the third act is. Unless they find something really horrible, and you can shock the 2019 equivalent of Peter Robinson's parents. Right.

Ain't nothing going to happen here. This is oppo. I feel bad for the people, the boomers, who grew up going into journalism because they saw all the president's men in high school. And now they finally got an impeachment thing and it just doesn't have the drama of the movie at all. There are no charismatic people standing around the office with their luxurious hair, ripping things out of the typewriter and meeting people in parking lots. It's just a bunch of boring people talking in a gilded room.

There's a drop-off between Robert Redford and Adam Schiff, I'm afraid. There's the Marianas Trench, actually, and I don't believe that James Cameron has developed a device capable of negotiating those depths yet. And there's a drop-off between the whistleblower and Linda Tripp. Ah, yes, indeed. Well, we also have a Democratic primary going on, and we have a couple other people who have thrown their caps into the ring. I heard the other day in NPR that somebody was appalled that yet to this day corporations and rich people can elect our politicians, which I think is funny because Tom Steyer spent a huge amount of money. I think he's

spent like 60% of the actual money being spent in this campaign, and he's not at 1%. Now, Michael Bloomberg has decided to spend $100 million on anti-Trump ads, and I'm stunned to find that the usual people complaining bitterly about Citizens United and money in politics aren't trying to keep Bloomberg from doing this. I mean, isn't this tampering with the American mind? We have no resistance whatsoever to $100 million of anti-Trump ads. How's Bloomberg going to do? I don't think too well. Well, no, I'm trying to think now because we had this conversation last week where Rob and I agree that Bloomberg is actually by the from the standards of politicians in New York. I want to make that very clear. I'm not talking about the standard of what conservatives might expect in a Texas governor, for example.

But what you could expect, what's within the realm of political possibility in New York. Mike Bloomberg was a spectacular mayor. Low crime, clean city, taxes too high, but he didn't raise them. Budget too big, but he didn't add a single line item to the budget. A big problem with the New York public schools, but he attacked the public schools, took on the teachers unions, didn't win. It turns out Mike Bloomberg over 12 years can't defeat the teachers unions, but he fought the good fight. He was a very good mayor.

If you say to yourself, wait a moment, the big news is he was considering putting his name on the ballot for the Democratic primary in Alabama. And the first thing that that's cognitive dissonance. Mike Bloomberg is so thoroughly a creature of the island of Manhattan that just picturing him campaigning in Alabama does it just I don't know. It scrambles my brain how he'll carry to the rest of the country. Right. In general, not that well, I don't imagine. Rob, Mike Bloomberg running ads against Trump feels to me like performative action. He's trying to show the Democrats who, by the way, he's running in the Democratic primary, which has not yet been settled. I don't know if anybody's told Mike Bloomberg that

yet. His opponents in the race right now are Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. If he's going to spend $100 million, he should be spending $100 million reminding people that they are too left wing to win or that Joe Biden is a tired figure who's run a bunch of times and lost. I mean, that is ultimately the real problem in the Democratic primary right now is that no one has no one is doing what they need to be doing, which is to be attacking the other and attacking the other on grounds that even Democrats being polled right now want to be illustrated, like Elizabeth Warren's financial plan is insane. And you could tell it's insane because the New York Times almost every day tiptoes around

calling it insane by remarking about how many economists believe it will slow the economy down by half a point. I mean, the slow panic on the part of the left-wing media establishment of what's going to happen if Elizabeth Warren wins is now starting to get louder and louder. Bloomberg's got to win that primary. And if he's not going to run in that primary, then why bother getting on the ballot? Let's just run as an independent. I mean, it just seems strange to me. Tell you, tell you, remember that one hundred million dollars for Mike Bloomberg is I mean, it's not a change.

It's like nothing. It's it's the stuff at the bottom of that trap in the washing machine. The very people who are the very people are criticizing the billionaire class and saying their money should be confiscated and delivering it to whomever by whatever means and mechanisms they imagine are probably pretty happy with Michael Bloomberg spending 100 million dollars on ads and enriching various media markets and people put the ads together because his heart's in the right place. Proof they're anti-Trump. What's funny about Bloomberg distinguishing himself from the rest of the candidates and going after them, as Rob was saying there, is this. I mean, Bloomberg would point to Warren and the rest of them and say, they want to take away your cars, your health insurance. I only want to take away your soda, your meat, your guns, and your tobacco. These maniacs want to take away that, but also your car and your heating plant and your ability to fly to Disneyland and the rest of it, because it's all a competition as to who can constrict American life more in the interest of, of course, monetary salvation. But here's the difference that we'll see if Bloomberg stays on

the stump, is that Bloomberg's actually very funny and charming about the smoking and the big gulps. Like he, he recognizes the criticism, he accepts it, and then he parries it in a way that you kind of find like, well, okay, I get it. I mean, his, his smoking arguments are pretty funny and they're pretty smart. Um, I don't agree with the nanny statism of it all, but he's not pretending that he's somebody he's not, he's not. He's not making this grand, you know, Elizabeth Warren-style moral problem. The problem with Mike Bloomberg's candidacy is that he's not a Democrat. And the media Democrats in New York and Washington and L.A. and all those places, they fantasize about a Mike Bloomberg Democrat. They can never bring themselves to

actually support one because they would be attacked by all the woke foot soldiers they've hired in their newsrooms. So instead, they have to quietly pretend that this guy who was a prominent Republican is not a Republican, which is too bad. All these matters of life and death. Speaking of life, you're always being warned about e-skimming. That's when cyber criminals watch online shopping carts in order to steal your credit card and debit card information from websites and mobile apps. Other information they can steal, names, dates of birth, account numbers, passwords, location information. Targeted businesses include retailers, ticket selling sites, travel related companies, utility companies, and the vendors who provide online ads.

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Save up to 40% off your first year by going to Norton.com slash Ricochet. That's 40% off Norton 360 with LifeLock at Norton.com slash Ricochet. And our thanks to Norton 360 with LifeLock for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast, Scott Adams. Yes, Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, appears in over 2000 newspapers, 57 countries and 19 languages, proving the universality of corporate malfeasance and idiocy. And also he's got a huge online following that goes off in different directions. We're here to talk about that and maybe get around to why Dilbert's tie does what it does. I've wondered that for decades. Scott,

welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. You know, you're fun on Twitter, as is the president. And recently you said that historians will say that Trump's tweeting, quote, was a really good idea. This is counterintuitive to those who believe that it's a nonstop parade of embarrassments that does not cover the office in glory. But a lot of people enjoy it, read it, and get something from it that the smart set might not. So explain why you think the historians may look at this and say the guy was on to something. Well, first of all, look at the history. He started out tweeting like crazy when he was running for office. And all the smart people said, you can't do that. That'll never work. You'll never become, okay, you're president. But now

that you're president, you really need to stop that. You've got to cut, okay, it's working, but you should really not do more. Okay, you're doing more of it. And every time he does it, his popularity seems to be rising. The economy is doing great. And I think one of the things it does is it bonds him to his followers, meaning that we see his typos. We see it raw. We know that you can tell, at least with most of them, you can tell that it didn't get filtered through anybody else. So you know you're not listening to the deep state's version of the president's opinion. You're listening to the president. But I think more than that, he's actually turned it into his own private TV channel so he can communicate directly with the public.

Scott, Peter Robinson here. The new book is Loser Think, How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America. And if I'm not mistaken, you've already made the New York Times bestseller list with this book. Can you give us two sentences that give us your thesis in loser think? People have, they have, let's say, gaps in their ability to think because of their lack of exposure to different domains and fields where people learn to think differently. And so they can't see in as many windows as people who've had that experience to sample the other way, the ways people think in other places. And can you, last time you and I spoke, you talked about Donald Trump's knowledge stack. I think that was your phrase, and it was

a fascinating observation. Could you give us that? Yeah, it's actually the knowledge stack. I think that was your phrase, and it was a fascinating observation. Could you give us that? Yeah, it's actually the skill stack. Skill stack, thank you very much. Yeah, and it has to do with putting together various skills that might not be individually the best in the world, but they fit together really well. So the president's got experience in business. He's got experience in the media. He's got experience negotiating. He's got experience as a reality TV guy. He had enough political experience. So he has this weird set of skills that work really well together, especially his humor and his ability to brand, his ability to simplify, and just his ability to take over a

room. He's got that big charisma. So it's hard to find somebody who has all of that happening at the same time. But if you were to look at any one of his skills, you'd say, well, is he the best speaker we've ever seen? Not exactly, but he's really, really good. And the same with the other skills. Right. So, Scott, this brings us to the unavoidable issue here. The three of us have been talking about it. We'd like to avoid it, but we just can't. Impeachment. Now, what's so intriguing about you is that you can take what everybody thinks they understand and turn it on its side and look at it in a fresh new way. I think everybody thinks they understand that Donald Trump blundered into this. The Mueller report cleared him of the Russia collusion after two and a half years of that nonsense.

It was over. and then he made this ham-fisted phone call with the president of Ukraine and gave them something, a new line of attack that he did. It was an unforced error. Scott? Well, I've noticed that in order to turn that phone call into something bad, you have to add a lot of adjectives, such as ham-fisted and it's bribery and extortion and all this. But here's a little thought experiment. Imagine explaining this situation to someone who didn't follow politics, didn't know who Trump was, but somehow they knew the system and how everything works. And you say, well, there's a president,

he called Ukraine, he had some questions that the public wanted to know as much as he did. Yeah, it was definitely helping him on his campaign, but it was also in the course of his job, which is to find out if there's any foreign interference with somebody who was polling at the top of the polls to be the next president. Is that something the public should want to know? And if you explained that to the person, would the person say, my God, he must be impeached? Or would they say, I don't even know why you're telling me this? Right. So there's nothing there. So and I think from what I've read, the polling that was done, you have to take immediate polling with a grain of salt. But as a result of the first two

days of the hearings, the president is ticking up just slightly and the Democrats seem to be ticking down just slightly. So explaining this to somebody, I get all that. One more question from me, though, before I remand you to the kind hands of James Lilacs and Rob Long. The president, we're three and a half years in. He's bonded himself to his base. I get that point, which is nobody else makes it the way you make it, which is the tweets are totally unfiltered. You have your phone in your hand and you feel as though you are hearing directly from the president of the United States in a way that no previous president has been the immediacy, the directness. Nobody else can match that. Got it. He hasn't expanded his base one whit. Doesn't he need to

just to feel secure going into the election? Wouldn't you be happier, Scott, if he'd found some way to reach four or five percent more Americans, just four or five percent? Well, the first thing I would say is you might be really surprised at the African-American vote this time around. And I think that's going to be the big shocker. Now, he's not going to get a percentage that's any way similar to what the Democrats are getting, but he could easily double what you're used to from a Republican president because he's got a good case to be made that he's done more for the African-American community than anybody. But I would say I would back up to a technological change that happened a while ago that made it impossible to win the

other side, which is that as soon as we could measure with precision who was clicking on what, then the news business became really a partisan business. It wasn't really about the news anymore. People took sides and their side listens to their content, mostly in a silo. And so if the president tried to convince the other side, they wouldn't really hear it. They would hear it filtered through partisans until it was ridiculous. And they'd say, why would we be convinced by something so stupid? Hey, Scott, it's Rob Long. Thank you for joining us. So I guess I want to follow up a little bit on Peter's question, because one of the things that's always made me nervous about the Trump administration, the Trump political operation and Trump himself is that he's not more nervous

about what was in fact an extremely narrow victory in 2016, 72,000 votes across a couple states, a massive popular vote defeat, and all the polls that show, the national polls show him not really making any inroads in popularity, and in some of those states that he won, having bigger and bigger trouble. I'm not suggesting that he won't win. I'm not suggesting that it's a done deal. But it does seem like when I hear people talk about all of his great skills, I never hear them talk about the squeaker of 2016 and what a president, any president, President X, President Y, it doesn't matter who, what a political leader needs to do to avoid that kind of squeaker in 2020? Or is what you're saying is that, you know, listen, the way we live today, it's always going to be a squeaker?

Well, the first thing is, I would say that I don't know that he worries the way other people worry. He seems to be more comfortable in this job than maybe any president. That's the first thing. The second thing is we have the experience. You don't think that this obsessive tweeting and keeping track of who says what about him is a kind of a worried mind displaying itself? No, it looks like he likes the fight, because if you looked at my Twitter feed, it would look the same way. And I'm not worried a bit, but I'm battling the trolls every day as hard as he is. And no, I'm just having a good time. And I think he is as well. So of course, he's the president. So some things are going to worry him. But he has the experience of 2020 where the polls were just outrageously wrong. You know, even though the race was close, up until the end, it looked like Hillary all the way.

So he knows that he's got sort of a hidden vote that emerges. I think it might be bigger than ever because I have this feeling that Republicans feel like this is one extended prank on Democrats. And I feel like maybe they don't answer the phone or give the pollsters the right answers anymore. So I'm not even sure it's possible to poll Republicans because they're all in on the joke at this point. That's just speculation. I have no reason to believe that. But I would say

that given that he's a sitting president with a screaming economy and success and all the things that his side likes from judges to ISIS, at least the caliphate part. Historically, it should be a landslide. And I think the polls will start to reflect that. And I'd like to point out something that Mike Cernovich says that I laugh every time I think about it. He says that people are looking at the president running against really sort of a concept, which is the best Democrat. But he's going to be running about against a specific person. And if that turns out to be Joe Biden, it's going to be the landslide of the century. If it's Warren or it's Bernie, landslide of the century.

And they're the three top polling candidates right now. Well, let's take a look at that. Rob, you had a follow up. No, well i know i was p it's peter here i i on bernie and elizabeth i get that right away scott but joe biden is polling pretty well and he's he's everybody on paper at least maybe that's your answer but my question is why do you expect a landslide against joe biden when trump won in the upper Midwest and Pennsylvania? That's sort of the working class Democrat centrist independence that you'd expect Joe Biden to appeal to as well. Well, I think it was David Axelrod who said that, you know, he's a famous Democrat strategist.

He was saying that Biden's and I think he called it the candidate protection program where they're trying to let the public see as little of him as possible because name recognition is all he's got. I believe that there's nobody who says they are voting for him that has seen him on video recently. And I think that describes a lot of people who answer the phone for a poll. I think all they have to do is just see him talking in person and any question about his capability will be answered fairly quickly and in the negative. So I think Biden is the weakest candidate maybe we've ever seen of all time. I can't think of a weaker candidate. Well, let's take a look at who might be the strongest candidate. Who would be the one that on the stage of the debate, one-on-one, would make the president look less apt for the job, and America would want to gather he or her to their bosom. Who's the best that he's got? So I once thought it would be Kamala Harris, but she's the worst campaigner I've seen.

Not worst candidate per se, but worst campaigner. I don't know why, but she's just the worst. So she's sort of taken herself out by bad campaigning. But Buttigieg and maybe Tulsi Gabbard could make a real strong play for the middle. I think he would have to worry about them the most. Yeah, you see, I'm up here in Minnesota where everyone's waiting for the Amy Klobuchar surge. And it just hasn't happened yet. Scott, I want to go back to something that Peter said before about Trump not expanding his base.

And I wonder if that might be perhaps an overstatement. It seems there are a lot of people who did not vote for Donald Trump the last time around because they didn't like him. They didn't like what he said. They didn't like the persona. They didn't like the brashness. They did not feel as if he brought the sort of intellectual flexibility and curiosity, the job required, et cetera, et cetera. So they went third party. They voted for a McMullen or they didn't vote for anybody. Now, however, even though we're not talking Flight 93 analogies anymore, they are looking at a party that has decided to move so far to the left, at least its intellectual outliers, that we're talking radical change of the very fundamental aspects of American civilization. And these people, they haven't seen anything from Trump that they didn't expect. And in fact, a lot of the things that they expected, they didn't get.

So is it true that he hasn't expanded his base, that a lot of people who previously were skeptical or indifferent to him might now, with even a small amount of enthusiasm, pull the lever because they see what the option is, they see what he's done, and they're not worried about another four years. Well, you're usually only talking about 2% of the public who even has the capability to vote for the other team. It's just not something that 98% of the voters would even contemplate. You could run a hamster on either ticket, and they would get 98% of the vote. So I do think that the strong performance of this presidency, and I think the historians

will say it's the most successful presidency probably of all time. If he quit today, that would be the judgment, I think. Scott. Peter here. So you just, all right. Now, you grew up in a small town in upstate New York, and I have a feel for that because so did I. And here you are all these years later, famous through your cartoon. You are beloved. As a matter of fact, I was just walking through my own office here on the Stanford campus, Stanford campus of all places, and I noticed a couple of Dilbert cut out of the newspaper and

taped to the office door. And that happens all across America. You're wealthy as a cartoonist who's been carried in hundreds of newspapers for many years would be. Why are you not on a golf course sitting back protecting your bipartisan, much-loved image? Here you are waiting in, putting up with trolls every day on Twitter and defending. He may go down as the most successful president. I wouldn't know about that. But for sure, he is the most polarized president, polarizing president anyone now alive can remember. And here you are defending him. What are you doing?

Why aren't you just sitting back and enjoying your life? Well, I'm something called an American. And being an American is a team sport. And the people who can help do help. So the people who can be in the military and want to do, the people who can help the poor do. And I'm in a position where I can help influence the political conversation just because of the weird situation I'm in.

And when I saw Trump come on the scene, I thought, well, here's trouble. But he's bringing a toolkit that we may never see again. He's the guy who might be able to do something with North Korea. He's the guy who might be able to just eliminate ISIS, you know, in a short period. He's the guy who can talk up the economy because he's a salesman. That's what he does. So to me, I thought, let's get a bunch of gains. I don't think he's going to undo anything I like. I don't think he's going to undo gay marriage. I don't think the courts are going to undo too much about abortion. So there's a lot of stuff that isn't going to change, but he's coming in with a new set of tools to maybe do a few things that just

couldn't get done easily the other way. After this president, maybe it's time for a Buttigieg. Maybe it's time for something else. Scott, last question here has nothing to do with anything we've been talking about. As a cartoonist, who's a cartoonist from the past that you like and admire? It might be somebody we already know about if we know the genre, or it might be somebody obscure, but who do you like to look at well of cartoonists who are currently working stefan pastas who does pearls before swine yeah and uh he's a californian and friend of mine so uh we've talked many times um and of course i was a big fan of peanuts whenuts when I was a kid and Calvin and Hobbes because you can't like comics and not love Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side, of course.

The Far Side, there have been hints that perhaps it might be coming back. Peanuts is the only one there from the old days. We forget nowadays how revolutionary Peanuts was when it first began, don't we? Yeah, the whole idea of a talking dog. I don't know if he was the first one to do it, but certainly after Snoopy was sort of a human-like creature, pretty much a lot of comics in the future had that same quality, including mine. There was nothing else that had to do with children

that actually was so saturated in sort of this existential ennui. Even though it's a funny strip, it can be rather bleak at times. And when you look and compare it to the stuff that was on the page of the day, you can see exactly why it caught on. As with yours as well, graphically different, different style, different tone, different subject matter, and it's been a pleasure to read you over the years, and it's been fun to have you on the podcast. The book is, let's hit this before we go out loser think so

let's uh all queue up at amazon and give that a look and uh scott thanks i hope to have you on the podcast sometime in the future as well thank you so much fun talking to all of you scott thanks so much and when we say it to you it's not an insult back to the drawing board ah yes uh you know comics are not for kids they are but uh you look at the old cartoons i mean i i spent a lot of time looking at 1920s cartoons and teens and seeing you know how the whole newspaper comic genre evolved and got sophisticated and the rest of it um it wasn't really for kids at the start there were ones cats and jammer. A lot of the burlesque strips were aimed at children. But there were a lot of strips that were aimed squarely at the middle class daily life.

And then somehow it just got to be sort of considered to be a kid thing. And I remember watching, you know, looking at the cartoons and comics in the paper when I was a kid. And they'd come every day and you'd have seven or eight strips. Wow, what a bounty. And then maybe you'd have one television show in the afternoon that was aimed at you, be it Walt Disney or some Three Stooges rerun or the rest of it. The world was geared toward adults and not for children. It's different today because kids have got about 10 million online distractions. They got their Fortnite, they got the Snapchat,

they got their Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. The list goes on and on and on and on. Are you worried perhaps that they're saturated by too many media opportunities and spending too much time staring at the screen? Well, friends, Circle. Circle makes it easy to take childhood offline when you need so they can focus on their homework, their chores, or their bedtime. Yes, we're here to talk about Circle. What is it? Well, it's the easiest way, really, to manage your family's online time across all their connected devices inside and outside your home. With Circle Home Plus and the Circle app, parents can filter what content is allowed, set limits for screen time, monitor history and usage. You can keep track across every single connected device you've got.

Laptops, your phones, tablets, smart TVs, streaming devices, video game consoles, all from one app, parents. Each family member, they have their own profile on the app that's fully customizable for their needs, their age, their maturity. So you'll never stop worrying about your kids, will you? No, of course, even after they go out in the world. But at home and over at their friends, with Circle, you'll have one less thing to worry about. So right now, you want to, wait a minute, I don't get what this is. It is a device that plugs into your router, and it is slick and beautiful, and it frankly looks like Apple could have cooked it up in one of their design labs.

And then you have the app which connects to it, and that allows you to monitor these devices wherever they happen to go out in the world. Plug and play, easy as pie. I've done it, worked like a charm. You can get it too, and you can get it at a limited done it. Worked like a charm. You can get it, too. And you can get it at a limited time offer of $30 off a Circle Home Plus when you visit meetcircle.com slash ricochet and enter the promo code ricochet at your checkout. That's $30 off when you go to meetcircle.com slash ricochet.

Enter the promo code ricochet at checkout. And believe me, it's a limited time podcast exclusive offer. That's meetcircle.com slash ricochet. Enter the promo code Ricochet at checkout. And believe me, it's a limited time podcast exclusive offer. That's meetcircle.com slash Ricochet. Enter Ricochet to save $30. And our thanks to Circle for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. All right. Well, it's been two weeks, two weeks since we've had a Rob Long poll of the week. So this will be the Rob Long poll of the fortnight. And I know, Rob, you've spent those 14 days exquisitely calibrating precisely what you want this poll to say with a faraway look in your eye at the dinner table. Before you go to bed, you bolt upright and jot down some notes on the end table paper. What is our poll of the week this week? It's a pretty simple one. It's kind of a, you

know, a hypothetical, futurizing kind of poll. There are 53 Republicans in the Senate. How will they vote on the impeachment? Should it reach the Senate, which I think what's going to, right? First choice, A, all will support Trump. B, there will be two to three wobblies who will eventually vote with Trump. C, there will be two or three Wobblies who vote to remove Trump. And D, the Republican senators who vote to remove Trump will be offset by Democrat senators who will vote with Trump. That's a more complicated one. Just get a sense of what you're predicting right now. I know what I'm predicting, and I think I know what Peter's predicting, and I want to know what the Ricochet members are predicting. Remember, this poll actually affects reality. So whatever the highest grossing answer is going to

be is what's going to happen. That's the cool thing about it. I don't know how Rob has this power or Ricochet does, but there you go. And speaking of the power of Ricochet, you have to be a Ricochet member to participate. And Lord knows there's so many other things you can do in the site, but if you would like to answer this and get your two cents in, spend your two cents and a few more and join Ricochet and participate in the poll. We also have a member post of the week, don't we, gentlemen? It's called the Lilacs member post of the week,

so I'm sort of waiting for you, James, to tell us what it is. Well, then I best come up with one, ought I not? Last week I remember saying it to you from the lobby of the Kaler Hotel in Rochester across from the Mayo Clinic before I went up to my room to discover that A, the window was open and it was 15 degrees outside, and B, my room had no heat. It's, yeah, I know. But it was a grand lobby. It had its 1920s glory with all this old wood and old, you know, all the trappings of a classic downtown hotel. So I liked it because I hadn't been up to my room yet.

I don't remember what I had. Oh, last week I had Gary Rums last week because Ricochet was shown at its finest as people had a civil discussion about something they disagree on. This week I went away from politics entirely to go into the member feed to find something that sounds a little morbid, but it isn't. It's from Cowgirl, and the post was service as in, when I'm dead, use this music at my service. So it could be construed as one of those dreaded YouTube posts where everybody puts in a song and you feel obliged to listen to one or two until you just start scrolling down. And you can if you wish. But the point is, what music would you like to hear at your, well, not you like to hear at your funeral because you're not going to

be listening to anything, but what would you like to have? And it's just an interesting idea. There's all kinds of contrary examples in there. You learn a lot from the members about their choices, and people get the chance to share and talk about something that doesn't have to do with Donald Trump or the Democrats or the rest of it. And that's the depth and the breadth and the joy of Ricochet. And what music would you like to hear at your funeral, James? Well, that's, you know, what I was thinking about. Would you like to have us here at your funeral? I was thinking perhaps it would be fun to start Bruckner's eighth symphony and just not stop and make people think, is he actually going to go the whole four movements? I am partial.

Very clear, because everybody would wish they were dead, too. After a while, they certainly would. I'm partial to Bruckner's Ninth, which has three movements to it and actually pretty much ends nicely. You don't need another movement out of that. But that would be cruel to people. I would like something up-tempo and very happy and get them dancing out the door. At my father's funeral, we had this montage of music, which I ended with, uh, end of the line by the traveling Wilburys, which in a way was almost a bit of revenge because my dad hated my rock and roll when I was growing up. But all the people in this, in this video, in the traveling Wilburys,

who were rock and rollers back then had mellowed into the sort of artists that my father would have liked. And, uh, the, the idea that I'd be playing Bob Dylan and Jeff Lynn at my dad's funeral, uh, he would have loved it, because it's a great song, and the message of it is powerful and joyful. And then the Navy hymn, which just brings, which unstrings your bow and knocks out your pins and unmans all of us. I've nothing in my life in terms of service that would merit any sort of tune like the song, melody like that, so I'm going to choose something from elvis castello that probably will have people snapping their fingers or maybe not i don't know the navy hymn is appropriate because you've been on so many cruises i'm not sure you've actually you've

actually been in peril on the sea but you've been on the sea i don't think that being in a caribbean storm where our old icebreaker was listing back and forth and the and the wine was falling out in the in the in the in in the back in the kitchen qualifies as peril, nor that being on a cruise is anything close to being. I'm looking right now at a picture on my wall of my dad's ship, the Block Island, the FBI, the fighting Block Island, which hung in our laundry room for all these many years now as a place on my on my wall. And that's service that earns you that song. Anyway, it's just it's a typical ricochet post. It's non wall, and that's service. That earns you that song.

Anyway, it's a typical Ricochet post. It's nonpolitical. It's deep. It's friendly. It's part of a conversation and part of a community. So, you know, go there and pony up and read. It's the ethical thing to do, wouldn't you say? I would indeed.

Well, this is where Rob is supposed to come in, but Rob, I believe, is scrolling his Facebook feed. Am I correct? No, I don't really do Facebook. Do you, at this moment, are you one of those people who sees a YouTube ad for, I don't know, like life insurance and things? Gosh, I don't have enough, and immediately rushes off to get the app to do that? Do you think about life insurance at all, Rob? I don't think about it because it's just too complicated and expensive and time-consuming.

That's where you're wrong. There's some sort of Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson dynamic going on here, but Rob is a traditionalist. Complex, expensive, time-consuming. You're right. Those are things people associate with life insurance. They're just a pain. I don't want to do it today. I don't like the implications of it. Later, later, later. Well, that's why we're here to tell you about ethos because it's not any of those things. It's not complex, expensive, and time-consuming. It's a faster, easier, and more affordable way to get life insurance to make sure your family's taken care of, even if you aren't around to take care of them. I mean, we've been talking about songs you'd like to play at the service. You would not want to have the lamentations of your loved ones drown out to the song because

you didn't get insurance and left them destitute. Ethos is committed to finding the plan that's best for you and your budget, all from the comfort of your computer, your tablet, or your phone in just 10 minutes or less. 10 minutes. Simply answer the questions online about things like your health, your age, your income, finish your application, and get a near instant approval. Everyone's different, but a healthy 35-year-old can get $1 million of coverage for only $50 a month. With Ethos, you can rest easy knowing that the people you love are taken care of. Those confusing terms and piles of paperwork, No, they're not included here. Now, our listeners to the Ricochet podcast can get started by going to ethoslife.com slash ricochet and clicking on

check my price. Again, get a fully personalized quote by going to ethoslife.com slash ricochet. One more time, make sure to visit ethoslife.com slash ricochet. That way they know we sent you and they like to know who's going to their site from us. Our thanks to Ethos for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And get some insurance. You'll feel better when you do. Now, we always like to end with a question of Rob Long that puts him on the spot because it's something he hasn't thought about. So I'm going to let him think what that might possibly be while I tell you some necessary information. First of all, I know, I know, I know. Go to iTunes, please.

Would it kill you to go to iTunes? Leave a nice little review because the more of those we have, five stars preferred, of course. That helps other listeners discover the show. They discover Ricochet and they sign up and they join and money flows into our coffers. And we're here for 2020 and 2022 and 2024 and all the elections beyond. And all the little cultural things that will flitter in and fill in the cracks.

Keep Ricochet going. And, you know, that review is part of it. Our thanks also to Circle, to Ethos, and to Norton 360 LifeLock. Great sponsors. You can find the links, of course, at the podcast page at Ricochet.com. And you help us and yourself when you go there. And now finally, this,

for Rob and for Peter, too. We got this Disney Plus thing. And Rob, you've got a glancing interest in television, right? I remain interested in it, but I'm not always convinced it's interested in me, but yes. And you're a network traditional kind of guy, too.

While everybody else is insisting that streaming services are the future, you still see a future in the eyeballs that network TV. Yeah, I don't think it's going to be either or. I mean, I think they're both going to coexist. They're just going to have to figure out what their actual product is, which is much easier to do as a broadcast network than it is to do as a streaming service. Why is that? Why is that? I feel as though you're onto something, but I haven't thought it through. Streaming services, well, they're very different businesses. They're not compatible. A broadcast is about eyeballs. The product a broadcast network sells is an audience to an advertiser. Streamers sell content, so they're subscribers. So it really doesn't matter whether you watch or not, as long as you pay every month and you don't think. The goal of the streamer is to get you

to never think about your credit card statement where that charge appears. Or if you do, to be able to give something to you for free. So if you're AT&T and you own Warner Brothers, you say, well, you'll get a free iPhone, a 20% offer. If you sign up for two years of cell service, we'll give you HBO Max for free. Or if you're Apple, I mean, you say, okay, we will give you a free Apple TV or we'll give you an upgrade, something like that, right? Same thing if you're Amazon, right? I mean, to never really think about the charge. The minute you start thinking about the charge, you say to yourself, why am I paying for this? Did anybody in this household watch anything on Hulu today? And that is a disaster because the minute you do that, you start saying to yourself,

well, why don't I just quit? In order to get you to want to watch something on a streaming service, they have to promote it outside the service, right? Because the minute I'm on the service, I'm already a subscriber. I'm not a new subscriber. If I'm watching what you also should watch on the Netflix feed, I'm already on Netflix. So in order to get you in, they have to spend 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 million dollars to advertise a title, which is basically like releasing a movie. No one can afford that, least of all Netflix. So broadcast already starts with, you know, there's 23 million people watching football. What can I promote while you're watching football? What are the

ads I can run for my content? So, and that, so, so, so broadcast TV still got a way to go. You know, the most fascinating thing I read this week, well, not the most, but close was somebody on Reddit who was talking about, uh, ads. It was a thread about which ads do you absolutely detest? And people were talking about car ads. And somebody said that car ads are not there to sell you your next car. They're there to make you feel good about the car that you just bought, which I think is fascinating. How can you spool that out a little bit? It's sort of fascinating, but also not obvious. How can that be?

I notice ads now for the car that I just bought, and I never noticed them before. I see. And I see them, and I never noticed them before. Oh, I see. And I see them, and I think, damn right, that's my vehicle, and I am a shark. Yeah, they're reinforcing the loyalties, which is important. Right, so that's the brand you go to next time. Anyway, this was my original question when I talked about streaming. Disney Plus has launched, and Disney's got just a metric buttload of content, all kinds of stuff. But they're also putting up warnings.

They used to do this when they would re-release some of the old cartoons as well. They had Whoopi Goldberg standing there telling us that there's some outmoded stereotypes in these things, and we're sorry for that. We apologize. We apologize. Dumbo, Lady and the Tramp, Jungle Book, they're old movies that they feel compelled now to tell us not to be offended by. And what I'm wondering, Rob, do you think there's going to—and The Simpsons, by the way, they've taken some stuff out of The Simpsons because The Simpsons are— Oh, that was the whole point of The Simpsons. Well, not only that, the whole point of The Simpsons is a variety of sight gags you don't see anymore because they've cropped it for a 69 aspect ratio. They feel that if anybody sees it in the original 4.3, they're going to freak out and think, my TV is broken.

There are black bands on the side. So they're losing some sight gags because they're stretching it and cropping it. But anyway, Rob, do you think at some point large swaths of cheers are simply going to be not appropriate anymore. And that we'll have a warning and then eventually some editing. And then eventually, you know, we're really promoting obesity and alcoholism here as well as workplace harassment. This isn't going to work anymore. Well, I'm not sure what the obesity and the alcoholism, those two, those things seem like, you know like as American as apple pie. But I suspect that there are one or two episodes that will be considered problematic. Oh, which ones?

You have a couple that come to mind immediately. One, Sam and Diane are arguing about something, and she slaps him, and he slaps her back. And then she slaps him back, and then he slaps her back and then she slaps him back and then she he slaps her back it's a great scene um they play it beautifully i mean i can say that i wasn't i was in high school i think when it aired i had nothing to do with it but it's a great scene and i have a i suspect that the tiny tiny tiny minds um now running uh you know the the cultural police department uh are not going to get it. There's also one, actually,

maybe this one wouldn't be where, uh, Norman cliff, uh, here reads, uh, here that the people are thinking of cheers as a gay bar. And they're convinced that, um,

that they're, they're, they're going to ferret out the gay guy or the gay guys in the bar. And of course they do it and they're all wrong. And it has a funny ending. So maybe that will be actually an okay one. But, you know, look, for a long time the people on the right didn't like Cheers because it celebrated this immoral Lothario character. People on the right, George Bush famously said about the Simpsons, we need less

Simpsons and more Waltons, which is one of those things that, you know, you can just see disassociated to the party from 20 million voters instantaneously. Ben Shapiro on this very podcast took a shot at Cheers. It was idiotic. And I think he was young and he's just, he's probably changed his mind. What did he say? I don't remember that. it was it was a liberal show because it celebrated uh you know lothario immoral acts of extra extramarital sex yeah and as if to be conservative means that you have to you can't be those things um but you know idiotic and i think he's i mean he was very young at the point. I think he's probably wised up. But the idea that that is politically liberal is idiotic. I think Sam's point was that he wanted to be Lothario.

Oh, yeah. He was. So that's what he was. He was a ladies man. Cheers was obviously a liberal show. Show me the show me the number of times that Cheers had to deal with licensing issues with the state. I mean, you know that being in Massachusetts, they had licensing issues.

They had fines. They had permits. We never got to see exactly how the unbroken window theory applied there, and there wasn't one other Cheers competitor right across the street. No, we had to have this happy little world of Massachusetts where they elect all the candidates and everything is fine and nobody complains about the taxes. The rest of it, total liberal show. Right. Thank you for listening to this podcast, gentlemen. It's been fun.

Our thanks to our guest, Scott Adams, and an ever hat tip to Blue Yeti and to E.J. Hill for the wonderful graphics for the show. We don't praise them enough. We ought to do so more. And we ought to thank you for listening and especially you who are Ricochet members who have contributed to help this enterprise continue to flourish. Gentlemen, it's been great fun and we'll see you next week. Next week. Well, it's all right. Riding around in the breeze.

Well, it's all right. If you live the life you please. Well, it's all right. Doing the best you can. Well, it's all right Doing the best you can Well, it's all right As long as you lend a hand You can sit around and wait for the phone to ring Waiting for someone to tell you everything

Sit around and wonder what tomorrow will bring Waiting for someone to tell you everything. Sit around and wonder what tomorrow will bring. Maybe a damn thing. Well, it's all right. Even if they say you're wrong. Well, it's all right. Sometimes you gotta be strong. Well, it's all right. Sometimes you gotta be strong. Well, it's all right.

As long as you've got somewhere to lay, well, it's all right. Every day is judgment day. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Down the road away. At the end of the line. You'll think of me and wonder where I am these days. How is New York? conversation. How is New York gearing up for Thanksgiving with all the usual patriotic glory?

Yeah, well, it's really, you know, there's a, there's a, you know, there's a paper Turkey in a window,

but what you know, they're just waiting to take it down and put up the Christmas stuff.