00:00:30.860Mitt Romney has come out and attacked President Trump.
00:00:34.960Mitt Romney has not even taken office yet as the new senator from Utah, but he's already published an op-ed in the Washington Post attacking Trump's character, his fitness for office.
00:00:46.720He says that the president has, quote, not risen to the mantle of the office.
00:00:52.620And then he says some other stuff, too.
00:00:54.380Now, I think that I can say this with some credibility.
00:00:58.220I think you know that I'm telling the truth when I say that I have no problem with people criticizing Donald Trump.
00:01:06.860There are some conservatives who will get very teary-eyed and tummy hurt when you say anything critical about Trump at all for any reason in any context.
00:01:53.380But, which is one of the reasons why I think it's really unfortunate when you've got, whether it's a Democrat president or Republican president, like you've got a Democrat president, so then Democrats feel like they have to defend him no matter what.
00:02:05.780Republicans feel like they have to defend the Republican president.
00:02:08.700There's just a very unfortunate dynamic because no matter who the president is, we should all enjoy criticizing him or her because that is the American way.
00:02:19.000It's what our founding fathers would have wanted.
00:02:21.600That said, the question must be asked, can Mitt Romney specifically criticize Trump specifically and be taken seriously while doing it?
00:02:34.100I think the answer to that question is obviously no.
00:03:22.180It just, it has the air of opportunism, of hypocrisy, of something extremely, extraordinarily self-serving and fake on the part of Romney.
00:03:31.600Romney has a reputation as a flip-flopper, and I think that this only reaffirms that reputation.
00:03:36.500This is not, and that's not really what Romney wants to do.
00:03:43.060I don't think he wants to reaffirm the reputation as a flip-flopper, because it really hurt him in his presidential run.
00:03:49.800Now, the thing is, I've always liked Mitt Romney, okay?
00:03:54.300I think that he would have made a good president.
00:03:57.240I think that if he does more than write op-eds about the president, he'll make a pretty good senator, too.
00:04:02.580But this is just nonsense, and it's shameless nonsense.
00:04:08.680Romney going between these extremes, between condemning Trump on such a fundamental level.
00:04:17.220And this is not just, when he condemns Trump, he's not just doing it on, oh, I disagree with this policy or that policy.
00:04:24.100He's attacking his character, his integrity, which, again, is fine.
00:04:31.560If you're going to do that, fine, but then you can't turn around and say, can I work for you, or can I have your endorsement?
00:04:39.160What do you, why would you want the endorsement of someone who you think is dishonest, an unfit president, has no character, so on and so forth?
00:04:46.820So, it's just, you can't possibly take it seriously.
00:04:53.780And I also, there's one other thing about Romney that I think needs to be pointed out.
00:05:00.120And again, I say this as someone, I like him generally as a politician.
00:05:07.480But there is something really disturbing to me about a person who cannot stop running for office, like someone who is addicted to running for office.
00:05:19.420Obviously, Hillary Clinton is a top offender in this category, but Romney is too.
00:05:24.140Romney ran for the Senate in the 90s and lost.
00:05:59.220Joe Biden is probably going to run for president at the age of 78.
00:06:05.680Joe Biden has been in political office, in positions of political power for, you know, five or six decades or whatever.
00:06:15.620And now he's going to be 78 in 2020 and he's going to run for office again.
00:06:20.660Rather than just going home, you're 78 years old, life expectancy for men, I think, is 84 or 85.
00:06:28.060So according to normal life expectancy range, you've got, you know, you've got six, seven years of life left.
00:06:37.140And so rather than just going home to be with your family and to enjoy the last few years that you have left, you're like you're running for office.
00:06:50.280Now, I know that if we want to be optimistic or if we want to be generous, which we should never be generous to politicians, but if we wanted to be optimistic or generous about them, maybe we would say, well, these people have a passion for public service, right?
00:07:07.240They just, they really want to, they want to help and they want to be, well, we could say that, but really if you're rich and you've been in power forever and you're old now and you really have a passion for helping, then go, then you could volunteer at a soup kitchen.
00:07:25.260I mean, if you're running for Senate or president, it's because you need to be in control.
00:07:30.980You cannot accept a reality that does not feature you in a position of power and control.
00:07:39.240So that even apart from, from his, from this back and forth with Trump, Romney is just another one of those guys, even if he seems like a pretty decent guy and all of that, as I said, but this, you just keep on running.
00:08:40.020So on Monday, as I kind of wandered bleary eyed back into the wilds of the internet and social media, I had been, you know, I hadn't paid attention to any of that stuff for, you know, seven or eight days, which was very nice.
00:08:59.680So I got to go on Twitter and I got to go on Facebook and social media and, um, and figure out what are the, what are the controversies everyone's talking about today?
00:09:10.120And I discovered on, on Monday, I discovered that people on Twitter were very, very mad about something, which, you know, they're always mad about something.
00:09:19.080And so on, on, on Monday, they were very, very, the thing that they were very, very mad about was, um, was Louis CK, who's a comedian.
00:09:30.980If you can believe it, just, just get a load of this.
00:09:34.360Louis CK, a comedian made jokes at a comedy club during a comedy set.
00:09:42.580I know that's very, it's very upsetting.
00:09:46.440And the jokes were vulgar and they were edgy and they were inappropriate.
00:09:50.280Uh, he joked about, he, he, he had some material about the Parkland school shooting.
00:09:55.820Uh, he joked about, um, that's the edgy inappropriate.
00:10:00.220Then he also joked about, uh, about gender fluidity or whatever, which is, which is perfectly fine.
00:10:05.280But the point is, those are the exact kinds of jokes that Louis CK has been telling for two decades, where he's joking about things that you're not supposed to joke about, really edgy, you know, inappropriate stuff.
00:10:21.040That's what he's been, that's been his shtick.
00:10:23.200That's what he's been doing for 20 years.
00:10:25.040And it's exactly the kind of thing that once earned him basically worshipful praise, like deifying praise from the very people who were now very, very mad about the jokes that he made.
00:10:43.300Um, and then there was also, uh, at some point in the days prior to that, I got wind of another outrage that I had missed.
00:10:50.800There was outrage over comments that had been made by a TV chef named Andrew Zimmern, who's the host of a show called Bizarre Foods, which is actually one of my favorite shows.
00:11:14.580Now, this is an observation that every person who has ever eaten Chinese food in the Midwest has also made probably verbatim because they are horse crap for the most part.
00:11:27.000Uh, same for Mexican food in the Midwest, same for a lot of different kinds of food in the Midwest.
00:11:31.000Honestly, there are some good, there's some good food too in the Midwest, but, um, a lot of bad food, you know, if I'm, if I'm just being honest, but people were very mad about it.
00:11:38.740Uh, especially on Twitter and they said it was, I don't know, they, they thought it was racist.
00:11:45.680And then it ended up with production on Zimmern's travel channel show being halted because of comments that he made about Chinese food restaurants in the American Midwest.
00:11:57.320Uh, there was another outrage that I missed over the, over the Christmas break.
00:12:02.320Um, Chris Rock apparently got into some trouble for not correcting Ricky Gervais and Louis CK yet again, when they use the N word on an HBO show seven years ago.
00:12:16.700Now this one takes a little bit of explaining.
00:12:19.020So back in 2011, Ricky Gervais, Louis CK, uh, Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld apparently filmed some sort of discussion show for HBO where they sat around in a room on chairs.
00:12:32.260And they talked about comedy for an hour and you know, so that was the show.
00:12:36.600I actually watched part of it when I heard about this.
00:12:38.340It was actually kind of interesting, but during the course of the conversation, uh, Gervais and CK joked about the N word and about how they themselves sometimes use the N word during their standup sets.
00:12:50.600And then Chris Rock, who was the only black guy in the discussion, instead of correcting them, he egged them on and he joked around also about the word with them.
00:13:00.160Now, nobody cared about this for almost an entire decade, right?
00:13:05.240For like seven or eight years, nobody cared.
00:13:10.340Then suddenly some very mad people on Twitter discovered the clip, posted it, and a two or three day Twitter outrage cycle ensued, which I basically missed.
00:13:21.680The only reason that I'm aware of it is that people emailed me, me about it.
00:13:24.900But if you go on Twitter now, you're not going to see any hint of any of this.
00:13:29.620Um, and you especially won't see any hint of any of these internet, Twitter, social media outrages.
00:13:37.880If you put down your phone and you go out and you interact with people in a three dimensional physical environment, here's, here's a really fun experiment.
00:13:50.000Um, don't actually do this because it'd be kind of awkward, but if you were to just walk down the street and then stop a random person who's walking by you and say to them, Hey, what do you think of that whole, uh, Chris Rock controversy?
00:14:02.460Or say, uh, say, Hey, what's your take on those offensive jokes that Lucy K told, or you could say like, excuse me, um, what's your opinion on Andrew Zimmern's comments about Midwestern Chinese food?
00:14:17.960Now I would bet you a hundred dollars that the first 50 people you stop will answer with some version of what in the world are you babbling about?
00:14:26.620Uh, and that's because normal humans in the real world don't care about any of this.
00:14:38.500They have no idea what people on the internet are very mad about or why they're very mad about those things.
00:14:45.780And they aren't going to take the time to find out because they simply don't care.
00:14:49.280The people that you encounter in, in the world are concerned about things that are much closer to them and much more relevant to their lives.
00:14:57.900So if you're in line at the supermarket, the woman in front of you, she's not thinking about what Ricky Gervais said on HBO in 2011.
00:15:05.920She's thinking about, she's getting all her coupons together and that's what she's thinking about.
00:15:09.140Or if you drive by a guy in traffic, he's not thinking about, he's not, he's not dwelling or stewing over, um, over offensive jokes that Louis C.K. told at a comedy club last week.
00:15:19.520He's thinking about, he's worried about layoffs at his job or something like that.
00:15:23.300Uh, the girl sitting across from you at the coffee shop, she's not worried about Chris Rock or, or what Andrew Zimmern said about Chinese food.
00:15:31.420She's studying for her exam that she's going to have in a couple of weeks.
00:15:34.600That's the, those are the things that people care about.
00:15:37.260And, and we, we should also keep this in mind that even if the girl at the coffee shop or the guy, uh, driving down the street or the woman in front of you at the supermarket, even if one of, even if they actually did stop at some point during the day to write an angry tweet about the outrage of the day, they still don't really care.
00:16:03.320Because obviously when, when, when, you know, we can't, when we can't, we can't really have this firm delineation between the real world and the internet because people in the real world are on the internet.
00:16:17.780So it, it may be, if you stop someone on the street, they may in fact be aware of these things and maybe they actually said something about it.
00:16:34.260They aren't spending all day thinking about it.
00:16:36.580Uh, it costs a person, nothing at all to send an angry tweet or to post a, can you believe that so-and-so said such-and-such type of Facebook post?
00:16:47.200You can churn that out kind of reflexively and then you go back to your day and it doesn't really matter to you.
00:16:54.260And that's the most striking thing about internet outrage is that it is so utterly, completely, aggressively, consistently empty and meaningless.
00:17:08.460It, it, it has almost no natural real world correlation or consequence.
00:17:15.920And I say natural because obviously it does have artificial, it can have artificial real world consequences.
00:17:24.700So people on the internet were very upset about whatever Kevin, I don't even, what was the Kevin Hart thing?
00:17:39.900There was a lot of outrage online, but that's another one.
00:17:42.040If you had stopped someone on the street, they, they would say they, they either wouldn't be aware of it or they really wouldn't care.
00:17:47.120And they wouldn't want to talk about it.
00:17:48.720Um, in spite of that though, and although it was empty, artificial, meaningless outrage, he really did lose his, uh, Academy Awards job over it.
00:17:59.860Um, Andrew Zimmern really is, you know, suffering professional consequences as well.
00:18:06.160But that's only because the decision makers in these companies, these corporate decision makers, they don't understand this extremely obvious point that I'm making right now.
00:21:12.460It is just sound and fury and angry-faced emojis signifying nothing.
00:21:17.660That's the incredible thing is that when you put your phone down and just walk away from it, it's like a tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it.
00:21:31.120I think I've told you before that I, I myself have been, have had, I've been the target of internet outrage many times.
00:21:39.720Um, and I've had the experience where I get, I've, I've, I've experienced it both ways.
00:21:45.560I've, I've had the experience where the internet outrage is, is, is coming fast and furious at me and I'm in the midst of it.
00:21:52.520And I, and I, for some reason I'm not able to put my phone down and so I'm reading all the comments and I'm getting all the emails and everything.
00:21:59.580And sometimes in those moments, it can feel very real and you could, you feel like this really means something.
00:22:06.120And, um, and maybe you even get a little nervous.
00:22:08.580You think like, oh no, what's going to happen.
00:22:11.860But then I've also had the experience of, I don't know, I'll send a tweet or something and then I'll just put my phone down and go about my day.
00:22:20.280Not knowing that the tweet goes viral and people are very angry about it and I'm getting hundreds of messages and comments and people are freaking out and I'm oblivious to, I don't even know that it's happening.
00:22:34.060And then a day later, I'll go back online and I'll see that this happened and it's already evaporated.
00:22:39.960The outrage has already evaporated and I just missed it.
00:22:43.240So then I can say, oh, okay, well, so that happened.
00:22:58.800For the rest of the week, for the rest of this week anyway, people will be talking about their New Year's resolutions and asking you if, I'm sure you've already been asked this question, but people are going to be asking you, what are your resolutions?
00:23:14.080Well, I've got that question already a few times.
00:23:19.400I have an idea for a New Year's resolution that we all can make, okay?
00:23:51.800In fact, I would say that you can always be certain, or almost always be certain, that a person is not going to do a certain thing if they ever announce a resolution to do that thing.
00:24:04.460And you can be sure that they're going to continue doing a certain thing if they've ever announced a resolution to not do that thing anymore.
00:24:13.320There are good things that I've successfully started doing, good habits that I've successfully formed, and there are bad habits that I've successfully broken.
00:24:22.380Not many on either count, admittedly, but it has happened.
00:24:26.080But the point is, when on the rare occasion I have actually successfully formed a good habit or broken a bad one, it has never happened after announcing my intention to do it.
00:24:37.700Now, I have many times announced my intention to do this and this, or not do this and that.
00:24:44.820And in every case, I have not followed through.
00:24:49.880But on the cases where I have actually done the good thing, continuously, formed the good habit, broken the bad habit, I didn't even notice that it was happening while I was doing it.
00:25:01.360In fact, as an example, I have many times resolved to start eating healthier, as we all have.
00:25:12.460And then most of the time, when I make that announcement and I say to someone, whoever's around me, to my wife or someone,
00:25:19.160for now on, I'm going to start eating healthier.
00:25:21.720And then three hours later, I'm drinking a milkshake.
00:25:23.500But there have been times when I've suddenly kind of stopped and noticed and said,
00:25:31.360wow, I've been eating healthy for six weeks.
00:25:34.600And that's because I never really officially resolved to do it.