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The Talk Show

300: ‘Holiday Party 2020’, With Merlin Mann

 

00:00:00   Screw episode 100, never market.

00:00:03   Episode 200, forget about it.

00:00:07   Four hundred in the future, we'll see.

00:00:10   I don't want to speak to the future.

00:00:12   Three hundred though, it's a holiday party.

00:00:16   We should clear a couple of things up.

00:00:19   You were still in the midst of a holiday party.

00:00:22   I am very disappointed in all of your listeners who think that I was

00:00:26   also participating in the holiday party at the same time,

00:00:29   which says a lot about, I guess, how I conduct myself.

00:00:32   That's a nice sounding book.

00:00:34   That is interesting. So four years ago,

00:00:38   the day after the election,

00:00:39   you and I recorded an episode and I was in the midst of a holiday party.

00:00:46   Perhaps I did you wrong.

00:00:49   Maybe we should straighten this out before we get to current events.

00:00:52   Perhaps I owe you an apology.

00:00:54   You owe me nothing. What had happened was that there had been

00:00:57   an election that had not turned out the way that we expected.

00:01:03   Like a lot of people,

00:01:04   we were a little bit fitful and needed to get some ideas and emotions out.

00:01:10   We did.

00:01:14   You think if it serves you'd been up all night?

00:01:17   Well, up is a weird word.

00:01:23   You've been reclined probably, arm over the arm of the couch.

00:01:29   I know. So going into this,

00:01:33   you and I didn't talk extensively about having a redux holiday party,

00:01:40   but it was on the table.

00:01:42   You and I get along well enough and we know each other well enough,

00:01:46   that it's like that Michelangelo painting where God and Michael,

00:01:52   or Adam, whatever his name is,

00:01:54   are just the touch of a finger.

00:01:57   Just the tip.

00:01:58   The slightest touch. Just the tip.

00:02:00   You and I, it was on the table. Let's see.

00:02:03   But as with so many things,

00:02:05   whether as rational as one likes to think one is,

00:02:08   I still have, I'm sure we'll talk about this.

00:02:12   I have a lot of my brain has,

00:02:14   I think pathways have been a little bit rewired,

00:02:17   and I have been superstitious about a lot of things.

00:02:21   Me too.

00:02:23   Our fingertips touched,

00:02:25   and we did not even need to say that we were being superstitious because

00:02:28   a superstitious person knows not to even mention that they're superstitious.

00:02:33   Right. A not superstitious person doesn't even want to admit,

00:02:38   and that the superstition is creeping up.

00:02:40   So for example, on that front,

00:02:43   I have some very negative associations with Mr. Steve Kornacki.

00:02:52   Steve Kornacki should come with a trigger warning.

00:02:56   Now, for those who don't know,

00:02:58   Steve Kornacki is the MSNBC personality who's in charge of their,

00:03:05   I'm not making this up, their big board.

00:03:08   Big board.

00:03:08   It's different than the magic board.

00:03:10   Right. He is the funnel point between their decision desk.

00:03:21   Now, those are people who are off-camera,

00:03:24   probably in a basement.

00:03:26   Well, there's a phrase that we don't use in journalism anymore,

00:03:30   but let's just call it a wall.

00:03:31   You get a wall between the advertisers,

00:03:35   and there's walls between advertisers, opinion, news.

00:03:39   In this case, there's somebody sitting in some underground bunker,

00:03:43   probably an assault mine somewhere in the West,

00:03:47   who will be the team that decides when a call is called.

00:03:51   Is that the rough idea?

00:03:53   All right. Numbers come in,

00:03:55   projections get made, and Kornacki is

00:03:59   the interface to the public of what the network is going to say.

00:04:04   It was Kornacki who was delivering the news four years ago where I knew.

00:04:10   I'm a junkie on this.

00:04:12   I really am. I get this stuff.

00:04:15   You're watching webcams, right?

00:04:16   Yeah. For me on election night,

00:04:23   it's like being the baseball fan who's not even really watching the game.

00:04:27   He's mostly watching.

00:04:29   You come in, you buy the score book,

00:04:30   and you take your pen and you're keeping score.

00:04:32   The score book is more important to me than the game. I'm watching it.

00:04:37   Four years ago, Florida went bad,

00:04:40   and it was like, "Ooh," and then they started talking about exit polls that were bad.

00:04:46   Then North Carolina went bad,

00:04:48   and then I just poured myself a pint glass of vodka and lights went out.

00:04:53   Yeah. There was that funnel though.

00:04:56   Everything starts out with the world of dreams and somebody just needs to get to 270.

00:05:01   As we've certainly seen over the last three, four days,

00:05:03   you do get to a certain point where,

00:05:06   and you know what, can we stop saying vote?

00:05:08   Why don't we say ballots?

00:05:09   Vote is not a plural noun.

00:05:11   Stop doing that. But anyway,

00:05:12   we're going to go find more vote.

00:05:14   We talked about this last time, I think,

00:05:16   but you get to Michigan and that big funnel is suddenly getting more and more narrow.

00:05:22   It's like, "Oh, Michigan, I don't know.

00:05:24   It's not looking very good." You give all down to this county.

00:05:26   Do you remember at one point,

00:05:27   this is when I was really just ready to get the pint glass,

00:05:30   was when we finally got down to like,

00:05:32   well, we think there might be one county with a few,

00:05:37   like there may be a box of votes somewhere.

00:05:40   We were just clinging to hope the entire time as that funnel continued to narrow everywhere.

00:05:46   It must be said on top of which, sure,

00:05:50   maybe we're idiots, but the whole thing seems so implausible for a million reasons,

00:05:54   including our friend at South by Southwest.

00:05:56   There were so many reasons to think.

00:05:59   There were so many reasons to think that everything was going to be fine.

00:06:03   It got narrower and narrower and narrower.

00:06:06   Then like you say,

00:06:07   it's the khaki interface.

00:06:10   He's the one who's going to bring that to us.

00:06:13   So I had it in mind.

00:06:17   October was when it got real because October,

00:06:22   the whole month of October was,

00:06:23   "Hey, the election is coming."

00:06:24   This is when it went from,

00:06:26   "I can't wait to try to vote this guy out to,

00:06:29   all right, here we are."

00:06:31   It got real.

00:06:32   Up and downs all along the way until a certain letter was posted.

00:06:39   You don't have to make a reservation.

00:06:40   You don't have to call up and get a ballroom.

00:06:43   You're not reserving anything.

00:06:45   I'm just picking which channel I'm going to put on TV.

00:06:48   Sure.

00:06:48   But I started thinking, what am I going to do?

00:06:50   Am I going to do kornacki or MSNBC like a big boy,

00:06:55   or am I going to go somewhere else because I got bad associations?

00:06:59   I'll tell you, 2018 with the midterm election,

00:07:03   I didn't watch MSNBC and it was for that reason.

00:07:06   I had a bad taste,

00:07:08   and not that I hold it against him personally, it's a bad taste.

00:07:11   My wife, my beloved wife,

00:07:13   when she was, I believe,

00:07:15   around six or seven years old,

00:07:16   had a spaghetti dinner and got a little bit touch of the food poisoning perhaps.

00:07:23   You know what happens is you're six, you get sick.

00:07:26   Yeah, you get filthy fingers.

00:07:28   Hasn't had a taste for spaghetti with red sauce ever.

00:07:31   Is that a fact?

00:07:33   That's a fact.

00:07:33   She feels things very deeply.

00:07:35   She's very intelligent. She's been to law school,

00:07:37   but she feels things very deeply,

00:07:40   including one must imagine,

00:07:42   her feelings about spaghetti.

00:07:43   Yeah.

00:07:43   Yeah.

00:07:44   One time, John and me,

00:07:46   my friends and I made a drink of,

00:07:49   we had a handle of Jack Daniels and a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew.

00:07:53   That was the thing that we made into drinks and drank.

00:07:56   I could not see a label.

00:07:59   I could not smell the smell.

00:08:00   I could not for years and years and years.

00:08:04   This is basic human psychology.

00:08:06   This thing made me very sad.

00:08:07   I don't want to feel that feeling again.

00:08:09   Now, was it the Mountain Dew or the Jack Daniels that gave you the badest decision?

00:08:13   That's the hope that kills you.

00:08:15   But it's also, I mean-

00:08:16   It's the Mountain Dew. It was Mountain Dew.

00:08:18   You blame the Dew.

00:08:20   Yeah.

00:08:21   Huh.

00:08:21   Well, I'm not saying that that's what made you sick.

00:08:23   I'm saying that you couldn't go.

00:08:25   So for example, you go to a movie theater,

00:08:27   you can order a Mountain Dew at the movie theater.

00:08:29   You cannot order a 64-ounce Jack Daniels.

00:08:31   It's also why some relationships are so toxic.

00:08:33   It's not that any will, sure,

00:08:34   both people are assholes,

00:08:35   but it's when you get two differently polarized assholes that come together.

00:08:39   They call it synergy, like a two plus two equals 35 situation.

00:08:43   You don't want to mix those.

00:08:44   Yeah.

00:08:45   Yeah. You eat a plate of spaghetti.

00:08:47   You get a little ill afterwards.

00:08:49   You feel bad in your stomach.

00:08:51   Maybe for the rest of your life,

00:08:52   you never have a taste for spaghetti with red sauce.

00:08:54   Now, she'll eat spaghetti with a garlic sauce, like a white sauce.

00:08:57   Would she have an Alfredo or a Primavera?

00:09:00   She loves an Alfredo. Sure, loves it.

00:09:02   Okay. That's what I'm going to do. I get it.

00:09:04   Yeah. She'll eat red sauce on, say,

00:09:07   any rigatoni or what have you, anything except the specific,

00:09:13   because you have that association.

00:09:15   That was Steve Kornacki for me.

00:09:18   But this year I thought, you know what?

00:09:20   I'm putting on the big boy pants.

00:09:21   No superstition. Let's go with it.

00:09:22   Let's go back. You got to face facts.

00:09:27   I watched the MSNBC.

00:09:28   I believe I watched for 72 hours.

00:09:31   Yeah. Not to beat this to death,

00:09:38   but I've heard a lot of people talk about this.

00:09:41   Something I put in our notes here to talk about is this ongoing,

00:09:46   equally unpleasant cocktail of anhedonia and madness that so many of us have felt.

00:09:52   So that night in 2016,

00:09:55   it was so difficult to,

00:09:58   there was a kind of cognitive dissonance or certainly,

00:10:01   at least an emotional kind of dissonance where you're saying,

00:10:03   how is this happening?

00:10:05   By the time on this recent Tuesday night,

00:10:08   as we recorded this, it's Friday, November 6th,

00:10:10   in the afternoon, John's time.

00:10:13   But there was that sense of like, oh man.

00:10:17   I talked about this with my kid.

00:10:19   I said, here's the thing about Florida.

00:10:20   There's a lot about Florida that's special.

00:10:22   Believe me, I grew up there.

00:10:23   It's America's Wang.

00:10:24   But there are certain things that are special about Florida in an election,

00:10:27   including that they have the early votes.

00:10:29   They count the early votes early.

00:10:31   There's all kinds of things.

00:10:32   Basically, what it came down to was,

00:10:34   in one estimation I read,

00:10:36   that basically Trump had to get Florida to win plus or minus,

00:10:40   and that Biden would be nice to get Florida to win.

00:10:42   But to take it even further down,

00:10:45   there's all the pathways.

00:10:47   There's some wonderful graphics for this.

00:10:48   There's an interactive graphic on,

00:10:50   I want to say New York Times where you can see what different scenarios indicate.

00:10:53   But what I said to her was, here's the thing.

00:10:55   We might know by seven o'clock if this thing's in the back,

00:10:58   where a situation in which they're able to say, okay,

00:11:02   Florida is very much too close to call, too early to call.

00:11:06   But boy, if Florida looks good for Biden,

00:11:08   it's not game over.

00:11:10   But basically, if Trump's playing Gallagher,

00:11:12   he's on his last dude.

00:11:14   Basically, if Biden wins Florida,

00:11:18   he's something like 90 percent likely to win.

00:11:20   Not also because Florida is a bellwether for places like other Southern states.

00:11:25   If Trump wins Florida,

00:11:28   it's only a one in three for the whole Shigella,

00:11:31   but that's still, it's a big difference.

00:11:33   It's what there's a big difference between no and everything but now.

00:11:37   So that's where we're hanging our hopes.

00:11:39   Guess what? Kornacki's up there,

00:11:40   he's looking real good, and it becomes clear it's not going to be Florida.

00:11:44   What does that do, John?

00:11:45   Now, I'm bringing up Piscaty all over the place.

00:11:48   >> Yeah.

00:11:49   >> Again?

00:11:50   >> Exactly.

00:11:50   >> Really? How is this even close?

00:11:53   I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

00:11:55   >> There was the easy way and there was the hard way.

00:12:00   The easy way was Florida goes Biden.

00:12:03   Again, not over, over,

00:12:05   but literally almost impossible.

00:12:07   Not just because of Florida's 29 electoral votes,

00:12:10   but because it's like this if-then,

00:12:13   cascading if-then statement of public sentiment.

00:12:17   That's exactly why I knew to break out the pint glass of vodka so early four years ago,

00:12:24   was there were a couple of if-then statements.

00:12:27   I just remember North Carolina being it.

00:12:30   Because North Carolina, and again,

00:12:31   this year it looks like Trump's going to win North Carolina.

00:12:33   We've recalibrated our thoughts on North Carolina.

00:12:36   But Obama had won it twice.

00:12:39   >> We also still need to learn there's more than one "Latino person."

00:12:44   >> That's me.

00:12:47   >> Saying the Latino vote is a little bit like saying the plaid shirt group.

00:12:55   >> Right.

00:12:55   >> It's not really super useful in terms of understanding that group of folks,

00:13:01   and maybe it's a little bit insulting whether you're Latino or wear a plaid shirt.

00:13:04   Not super useful.

00:13:06   >> Right.

00:13:06   >> We blew that a little bit,

00:13:07   and now we'll know that hopefully we'll work on that.

00:13:10   But yeah, that's when the feelings start welling up and got a little tight.

00:13:14   Now, I had a feeling I very rarely have because of all my various disabilities as a person,

00:13:18   as a human, I rarely feel like,

00:13:20   "Oh my gosh, I wonder if I'm having a cardiac event."

00:13:23   I'd gotten several bloops on my watch to let me know that my heart was a little bit accelerated.

00:13:30   But do you agree though?

00:13:31   I mean, there is that feeling of like,

00:13:34   "I cannot handle a here we go again situation.

00:13:36   I've been dreading this for four years."

00:13:38   My combination of anhedonia and madness is really dragging me down emotionally.

00:13:44   I would love tonight to be,

00:13:45   the phrase that I wrote down here is that we could have really used a clean break.

00:13:49   Clean break, decisive victory.

00:13:51   No problems with being able to say these eight votes in this box shouldn't be counted.

00:13:58   If it had been a decisive victory,

00:14:00   we gave ourselves, it's like the sand said less,

00:14:02   that's the hope that kills you. That's what we were hoping for.

00:14:06   When it didn't happen, you can't help but be a little bummed.

00:14:09   I've made some personal changes this year.

00:14:14   One of them is I've gotten diligent about my email and I've stuck with it all year.

00:14:21   This is a big change from someone who's finished most years in the whole 10,

00:14:26   15, 20,000 unread emails.

00:14:28   One of them is I figured out I have to,

00:14:33   and I'll name the company. I'll name them.

00:14:36   It's a company called Google.

00:14:38   They run a service called Gmail that I back several of my email accounts from.

00:14:45   I think I need to move,

00:14:47   but anyway, that's neither here nor there.

00:14:49   But the fact is every day,

00:14:52   I have about a grand total of very consistent, which is nice,

00:14:56   about 50-70 spams a day.

00:14:59   These are in the spam box.

00:15:01   Will you be claiming your Bitcoin?

00:15:02   Well, no.

00:15:05   That's a little tough enough for them to crack.

00:15:07   But a lot of emojis and the word Bitcoin and

00:15:10   the obviously not correct version of my name that's used in this particular email address.

00:15:15   That's also something they can't correct.

00:15:17   No matter what I do,

00:15:19   no matter who I add to my address book and what I flag as not spam,

00:15:23   there's at least two to three non-spams in my spam every day.

00:15:27   So I go through every day.

00:15:29   It actually feels very 1999, maybe 2001.

00:15:33   Yeah, that feels very 2002.

00:15:34   Back when you would get in something like Fastmail or SpamSib,

00:15:38   you get a Bayesian thing going,

00:15:39   but you still have to check in to make sure.

00:15:43   All I'm saying is where I'm going with this is that I eyeball all of my spam,

00:15:49   about 50-60 spams a day.

00:15:50   It's just part of my habit.

00:15:51   I have ingrained it.

00:15:53   It's like making coffee. I'm okay.

00:15:55   It's good, but I like fun.

00:15:56   I feel good about finding the ones that are in there.

00:16:00   You're like Oscar Schindler, but for mail. That's cool.

00:16:04   Sometimes I find ones,

00:16:06   it's a little freaky.

00:16:07   Election day, Tuesday, I'm going through my spam.

00:16:12   I don't know about you, but during the day on Tuesday,

00:16:16   I found a lot of busy work that needed to be done.

00:16:21   Absolutely. I'll put a little bit of salsa on that taco.

00:16:24   I found myself various times through this past week going,

00:16:27   "You're sending an email to me right now? Really?"

00:16:32   I make a lot of playlists and I rearrange the dorm fridge here at my office.

00:16:39   I find a lot of little projects to keep my hands busy and to keep the demon dogs at bay.

00:16:44   Do you remember what you worked on on Tuesday?

00:16:46   Your spam raking became the Zen Garden.

00:16:50   Yeah, but here's the thing. Here's where I'm going.

00:16:52   Every once in a while, if you look at your spam every day,

00:16:56   every once in a while,

00:16:56   you get one with a subject that it makes you double take.

00:17:00   Because it's not about boner pills or they send you a lot.

00:17:05   I don't know if you've looked at your spam lately,

00:17:06   but boy, you get a lot of offers for N95 masks.

00:17:10   I'm telling you this Bitcoin thing, payment verification.

00:17:13   I don't know why they think in a second.

00:17:16   But I get a ton of that.

00:17:18   I'll go look right now. Anyway, you're working on that.

00:17:20   Yeah.

00:17:20   Well, and one just jumps out at me.

00:17:23   The subject was, will you have a heart attack?

00:17:26   All caps, tonight.

00:17:28   [LAUGHTER]

00:17:32   I thought to myself, what do you know?

00:17:34   This could be a Blumhouse film.

00:17:36   That sounds like the beginning of a very good low-budget horror film.

00:17:39   I even clicked on that one just to double check that it

00:17:42   wasn't some good man from the future who might know something I didn't know.

00:17:49   Come with me if you want to live.

00:17:51   Yeah, exactly. Read this spam email.

00:17:54   That's the only way. Okay. Oh, God.

00:17:57   We've got to write this extra.

00:17:58   But here's what I got. It looks like yesterday.

00:18:01   This is the, it's from the username is dribblingavirin.

00:18:06   It's dribblingavirin@optionpoint.buzz.

00:18:10   What they're saying here is, press this anus pressure point to shrink in flame prostate overnight.

00:18:16   Yeah, that's a good one.

00:18:18   The truth is out. They say for 5,000 years,

00:18:20   the Chinese, oh, that's a little racist,

00:18:21   have kept this acupressure trick locked and sealed.

00:18:25   Boy, you see the best stuff.

00:18:27   Did that make you superstitious?

00:18:30   Did you think, okay, is this future me?

00:18:33   Is this like me with a strap-on beard from a different time?

00:18:36   But I can't let myself know that because I know I wouldn't believe it.

00:18:39   You know what I'm saying? You played that game.

00:18:40   You have a protocol with your wife about how to know whether you've been Face/Offed.

00:18:44   You must have thought about at various times,

00:18:48   how would I convince myself from a different time that it's me?

00:18:52   Yeah.

00:18:52   I don't think you were at liberty to tell people that, Merlin.

00:18:56   I think you just broke some of our opposite gun.

00:18:58   Oh, no. Did I break Face/Off protocol?

00:19:00   Well, it's all right.

00:19:02   I feel like our protocol is such that.

00:19:04   Maybe I have some questions for you right now because I have some concerns.

00:19:08   How much of the day could you eat a peach?

00:19:12   Don't ever think it.

00:19:14   Anyway, I watched the Kornacki.

00:19:18   I watched MSNBC.

00:19:20   I got the bad feeling.

00:19:23   So my friend Ben Thompson and I do a show, The Dithering.

00:19:29   We do it three nights a week.

00:19:31   We do it at 10 PM, Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, my time.

00:19:37   That's in the morning, Ben's time over there in Taiwan.

00:19:41   Then the show comes out for listeners of the show on Monday, Wednesday, Friday mornings.

00:19:46   It's been great success.

00:19:47   We have a lot of fun with it, 15 minutes an episode.

00:19:49   But it occurred to me last week,

00:19:52   I hadn't really thought about it.

00:19:53   This is our first year we started this thing,

00:19:55   I think back around April or so.

00:19:58   You go through your year,

00:20:00   your year has patterns.

00:20:02   It just never really occurred to me.

00:20:03   You think about things like Christmas and other major holidays.

00:20:07   Like Thanksgiving, we're not going to record Thanksgiving night.

00:20:10   We're not going anywhere on Thanksgiving.

00:20:12   I don't know if you heard there's a pandemic.

00:20:14   But election night, what are we going to do?

00:20:18   How do we record? I said to Ben, what do we do?

00:20:21   I mean, there's a very good chance that come 10 PM Eastern time,

00:20:25   we all literally have no idea who's the winner.

00:20:30   How do you do a show if you don't know the winner?

00:20:32   He's like, "Don't worry about it."

00:20:34   That seems to me like a John Gruber thing to say.

00:20:37   It felt like Ben was stepping into the role that I would usually play,

00:20:40   which is, "Don't worry about it,

00:20:42   it'll all work out."

00:20:44   We record right on time.

00:20:46   Ben said, "At 10 o'clock at night,

00:20:48   I'm starting to feel bad."

00:20:50   I was at a low point.

00:20:52   Ben was like, "Don't worry about it, it'll be good. We got it."

00:20:55   10 for you, 7 for me.

00:20:57   That's relatively early unless we got the Florida dunk, which we didn't.

00:21:02   So Florida had already gone south, right? Bad, real bad.

00:21:07   And maybe the only saving grace was that it was

00:21:11   this whole big demographic shift in South Florida from Cuban Americans

00:21:16   and other Latin Americans, Latinos, Hispanics.

00:21:22   When you're waiting for the polling locations to close

00:21:25   in the central time zone part of the panhandle,

00:21:30   that's not going to be your richest source of big wins for Mr. Biden.

00:21:36   As somebody who's from and who's lived in Tallahassee,

00:21:39   I've been to Waukala County and I have a pretty good idea how that's going.

00:21:44   Don't you love, do you love,

00:21:45   I love as a citizen of this great nation,

00:21:48   I love how every four years you learn some great county names.

00:21:53   First of all, I never think about DeKalb County, Georgia.

00:21:57   I would call it DeKalb County.

00:21:59   But now, of course, I know that because you've got John King up there.

00:22:02   And John King, I don't know,

00:22:04   he's really good at what he does,

00:22:05   but boy, he just seems a little bit annoyed all the time.

00:22:09   He's got to go over it again and again.

00:22:11   Well, I love seeing all this blue on there,

00:22:13   but that's okay. All right. Pump the brakes, John.

00:22:15   I'm going to tell you who John King is.

00:22:17   I learned so much about geography.

00:22:18   I know Kornacki. Kornacki, man,

00:22:20   as we stipulated four years ago.

00:22:21   The man's a monster.

00:22:23   Kornacki.

00:22:24   Arithmetic alone, let alone geography.

00:22:28   I don't know how he does it and stays so cheerful.

00:22:32   John King is the CNN Kornacki.

00:22:36   Yeah.

00:22:36   Yeah. Here's the difference.

00:22:39   John King is on TV all the time,

00:22:42   the other 364 days a year.

00:22:45   Yeah.

00:22:45   He's been a White House reporter correspondent.

00:22:48   I feel like Jesus Christ was a corporal.

00:22:50   Maybe the Clinton-

00:22:50   Kornacki. I don't know what the hell Kornacki does between elections.

00:22:54   I'm sure whatever he does,

00:22:55   he earns every penny of it.

00:22:56   But Kornacki, this is what Kornacki was born to do.

00:23:00   He's deployed. He's best deployed.

00:23:02   Sometimes he sits in.

00:23:03   Like when that one, what's his name,

00:23:05   the Dingling guy got fired from MSNBC.

00:23:07   Kornacki did a great job sitting in for him for a while.

00:23:11   But no, I think they mostly keep him in some kind of like what we do in Shadows Coffin,

00:23:15   mothballs, but they deploy Kornacki very,

00:23:18   they unleash the Kornacki.

00:23:19   They've got to deploy him very carefully.

00:23:22   He's like a gremlin.

00:23:24   Who is that Dingling who got fired?

00:23:27   That was Chris Matthews?

00:23:31   Yeah.

00:23:32   Chris Matthews. That's right.

00:23:33   Chris Matthews has always had outstanding Fred Willard energy.

00:23:38   I always wanted to love Chris Matthews because Chris Matthews is from the Philadelphia area,

00:23:45   and he talks like a Philly guy,

00:23:46   and he knows the Philly local poly.

00:23:49   He would have been so great if he hadn't been such a Dingling.

00:23:52   Yeah. I know.

00:23:53   This would have been his year.

00:23:54   So anybody who wants to keep dunking on Chris Matthews,

00:23:59   just know that Chris Matthews knows that this year when it all came down to the Philadelphia area,

00:24:06   the city, and the region, this was his year.

00:24:08   This was the year Chris Matthews was meant to be on TV,

00:24:11   and he Dingling did up real good.

00:24:13   You dunk on Matthews too hard,

00:24:15   he's going to throw a D battery at you.

00:24:17   That's where he's from. Take that, Pete Rose.

00:24:21   Ow. John King from CNN.

00:24:25   I think he's all right at his day-to-day job.

00:24:28   Not a big CNN guy, me.

00:24:29   I'm not really a cable news guy to tell you the truth.

00:24:31   That's like saying you're not really a doctor's office guy.

00:24:36   It's like when he wants to be there,

00:24:38   but sometimes when you're called.

00:24:40   You know what? That's not bad.

00:24:43   Our good friend, Mike Davidson,

00:24:46   he's got a luxurious beard, by the way.

00:24:50   Really, right up there with Letterman.

00:24:51   Letterman and Mike Davidson,

00:24:53   neck and neck for Trump era beard growth.

00:24:56   But Mike Davidson had a quote the other night.

00:24:58   It might have been Wednesday night,

00:25:00   literally 24 hours into this.

00:25:02   He was at one point at NBC, right?

00:25:05   Yeah. He was at a startup.

00:25:07   He's news guy. He's startup guy.

00:25:09   I know a bunch of people from when he was at NBC,

00:25:12   and now, for example, TIFF is now working at the New York Times doing graphic stuff.

00:25:17   But that's a fun group to have drinks with.

00:25:19   The tweet was basically,

00:25:22   I'll paraphrase because I'm not going to bother to look it up,

00:25:24   but the tweet was basically,

00:25:26   "Hey, you know how you're watching cable news nonstop right now?

00:25:29   Just know that millions of your fellow Americans watch this all day, every day."

00:25:33   I've been through it.

00:25:35   I had to really make at the strong advising of my shrink,

00:25:40   I really had to cut back because I was all the way in on the Rachel Maddow.

00:25:45   Like we had to throw out the script tonight.

00:25:47   Oh, what's going on with Rush the Craziest?

00:25:49   I was there like, "Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Because why?

00:25:52   Because what we know about cognitive biases."

00:25:54   Which is that in order for me to not feel like I'm taking crazy pills,

00:25:57   I have to hear somebody say out loud the things that are in my brain.

00:26:01   Is that wholesome?

00:26:02   In the end, it was not wholesome.

00:26:05   But I told you this morning,

00:26:07   one reason you need to catch me up in a minute on what's happening right now,

00:26:11   because as I talked to my shrink this morning,

00:26:12   he's like, "You still staying off social media?"

00:26:14   I'm like, "I could say yes,

00:26:17   but I think the evidence is out there that I'm not doing the best job at that right now."

00:26:24   No, you're absolutely right.

00:26:28   This could get us into a million different things about what we

00:26:31   each feed our brain with all day long.

00:26:35   When we sit here going,

00:26:37   "I still can't believe," like I said to my family over and over,

00:26:41   there's two things I say over and over.

00:26:42   I say, "I just want him to be sad.

00:26:46   I don't want him to go to jail.

00:26:47   Everybody wants him to go to jail.

00:26:48   I just want Donald Trump to be sad.

00:26:49   That's all I care about. I want him to be sad and I want to not

00:26:52   feel crazy about what I think I understand in the world."

00:26:58   Of course, the irony is that over on the other side,

00:27:02   all of the other sides,

00:27:03   everybody else is also thinking the same thing.

00:27:06   All those people outside praying and bowing in

00:27:09   red hats in front of the vote count last night.

00:27:12   Did you see that in the video?

00:27:13   >> Yeah, I did. That down in Arizona.

00:27:15   >> Holy mackerel.

00:27:17   If that's not a cult, it'll do for now,

00:27:18   but they're thinking the same thing.

00:27:20   It's just about a different thing from a different POV.

00:27:22   We're all wondering why we feel crazy because everybody else seems crazy.

00:27:27   It's never been clear that that's not going away anytime soon.

00:27:30   >> All right, let's take a break.

00:27:31   >> Oh, yeah.

00:27:32   >> Let me thank our first sponsor,

00:27:35   it's our good friends at Mac Weldon.

00:27:39   >> Is this a bit?

00:27:41   >> This is not a bit. This is legit.

00:27:43   This is on the schedule.

00:27:44   This is out of my doing.

00:27:46   Look, Mac, it's a premium men's essential brand.

00:27:50   They believe in smart designs, quality fabrics.

00:27:53   They sell things, underwear, socks, hoodies, underwear, polos.

00:27:57   I think I said underwear twice,

00:27:58   but that's what they started with.

00:27:59   Active shorts, I don't even know what the difference

00:28:01   between the inactive shorts and active shorts are.

00:28:03   >> But they also say that they say it's going to be the best underwear,

00:28:06   socks, and hoodies, and more.

00:28:08   I would love a pass at that edit because I

00:28:12   think it elides the fact that their stuff is actually insanely great.

00:28:16   I'm wearing three articles of Mac Weldon right now.

00:28:18   >> I love it.

00:28:19   >> Huge fan.

00:28:20   >> I love their undershirts.

00:28:23   >> Don't sell across the clothes.

00:28:24   You've got the stuff.

00:28:25   You've got the stuff. You don't need to say and more.

00:28:27   They got the underpants you want.

00:28:29   They got the shirts you want.

00:28:30   Why are we still talking about this?

00:28:31   >> Do you ever make a common sense realization later in life,

00:28:37   and it's the dumbest thing,

00:28:38   but you realize that you'll never get those decades back.

00:28:41   For me, it's the idea of the V-neck undershirt.

00:28:45   >> Interesting.

00:28:46   >> Because do you wear a necktie most of the time you go out?

00:28:51   Let's say you and the lady are in a family.

00:28:53   Maybe you're going out to a nicer dinner.

00:28:55   >> Or I got to do as they say a hit on cable news,

00:28:58   or I want to be photographed in front of a flag for a Twitter icon.

00:29:02   I'm going to put on a necktie, sure.

00:29:03   >> I'll see.

00:29:04   >> Not in my day-to-day though, John.

00:29:05   My feet don't fit into shoes anymore. A lot has happened.

00:29:08   >> Collared shirt, top button undone.

00:29:11   >> Yeah.

00:29:12   >> That's me. I'm not putting that top button in that top button.

00:29:15   What do you put underneath?

00:29:16   You put a regular t-shirt on,

00:29:18   you got the t-shirt sticking up over the shirt.

00:29:21   You put a V-neck t-shirt on.

00:29:22   That's what the V-neck is for. I don't know.

00:29:24   >> Wait a minute. That's what the V-neck is for?

00:29:28   >> Yeah. The V-neck is so that you can wear a collared shirt.

00:29:31   You undo the top button like a normal human being who's not a Poindexter,

00:29:35   and you don't see an undershirt underneath.

00:29:37   >> So you're telling me I wear one of my normal crew neck 18-hour tees that I get from Mac Weldon.

00:29:43   I wear that with a crew neck.

00:29:44   I'm looking like Stork from Animal House.

00:29:47   You're telling me-

00:29:47   >> You look all right. Get a V-neck.

00:29:49   >> You're sweet. I get a V-neck,

00:29:51   and now I can have that top button open.

00:29:53   I'll leave that open for Elijah.

00:29:54   >> You look like-

00:29:55   >> I'm going to look good is what you're telling me.

00:29:56   >> You look like a cool guy who doesn't even need an undershirt.

00:29:59   >> I know. I don't think of myself as a V-neck guy, and now I wonder.

00:30:02   >> Yeah, because I wear the V-neck undershirts when you're never going to see it.

00:30:08   It's because I got it. It's a literal undershirt.

00:30:10   Anyway, they've got those.

00:30:12   I swear by them. They're fantastic.

00:30:14   Also, swear to God,

00:30:16   the V-neck, I've been wearing these V-neck undershirts from them for years,

00:30:19   since you've been hearing me talk about Mac Weldon.

00:30:21   They all look brand new.

00:30:22   I don't know how that's possible because in theory,

00:30:25   the reason I'm wearing an undershirt is I tend to destroy them.

00:30:28   >> Well, yeah, you get those yellow pits.

00:30:29   But the other thing we learned about from Chris Anderson,

00:30:33   you get what's called the long tail.

00:30:34   I love the ability to tuck in that shirt and have it stay tucked.

00:30:38   It's not cute. It doesn't need to be its own whole brand, no offense.

00:30:41   In this case, you buy a t-shirt like a gentleman,

00:30:44   you put it on, you tuck it in,

00:30:45   it's not going anywhere, V or crew.

00:30:48   >> No. Anyway, but I blew decades in my life thinking I was not a crew V-neck fellow.

00:30:54   >> John, there's things we know and there's things that we know now.

00:30:57   So when people say to you, "Oh,

00:30:59   when your wife bugs you about replacing the timing belt,

00:31:03   because it'd be real expensive if it breaks."

00:31:05   You know that's true,

00:31:06   but it isn't until it breaks you go, "No, no, that's true."

00:31:09   To me, that sounds like your V-neck revelation.

00:31:13   >> Just great stuff. They've got advanced technology fabrics.

00:31:17   I don't know anything about fabric technology,

00:31:19   but the AirKnit X, Dry Near,

00:31:22   Warm Knit, the Silver stuff,

00:31:25   that's our friend Marco loves it because he can get sweaty as hell,

00:31:28   and it doesn't make you stink. It's good stuff.

00:31:29   They're not full of it.

00:31:31   >> I think it's called the, I don't want to say Waffle Knit,

00:31:34   I don't know if that's a brand name.

00:31:35   I'm wearing their black Waffle Knit shirt right now,

00:31:40   over a Daring Fireball shirt because I'm that guy.

00:31:43   But I also have some other items of Mack Weldon around right now.

00:31:45   >> Also, I forget what I don't have it handy,

00:31:48   but I got there, it's a zip-up hoodie.

00:31:51   >> Oh, the Ace hoodie?

00:31:53   >> Yeah, and it's thin.

00:31:54   I've been looking for something like this forever.

00:31:56   Mack Weldon has it. What I want,

00:31:58   I don't necessarily want it to go out in cold weather.

00:32:01   What I want is when I'm in the house and it's getting chilly,

00:32:05   and I need another layer in the house.

00:32:09   It's the greatest and it's super nice.

00:32:11   My son has had one for over a year.

00:32:14   He's like, "Why didn't you get one?"

00:32:15   >> My family always steals mine.

00:32:17   Famously, I think in a lot of people I know,

00:32:19   you get some garments.

00:32:21   My daughter is basically still in all of my clothing at this point because she's huge.

00:32:24   She's very, very, very statuesque.

00:32:26   No, but they just disappear.

00:32:28   I put it on a hook, I put it on a hanger,

00:32:30   I put it somewhere, and then it's like the good scissors.

00:32:33   I might find it later.

00:32:35   >> The scissors. Anyway, so many similarities between our families, Merlin.

00:32:40   I cannot keep the scissors.

00:32:41   >> It's a shame. But you like to be cozy,

00:32:44   you're in a cold climb,

00:32:45   you'll put on a hoodie.

00:32:46   Now, what about on your feet?

00:32:47   Do you get chilly down there?

00:32:49   >> The feet. Hold that thought.

00:32:53   >> Let me just tell you, I just want to fulfill some obligations here.

00:32:57   They've got a loyalty program.

00:33:01   >> Yes.

00:33:01   >> Level one, free shipping for life.

00:33:03   Once you get to level two,

00:33:04   all you have to do to get to level two, by the way,

00:33:06   is spend 200 bucks and then you get 20 percent off every order for the next year.

00:33:11   That's just fantastic.

00:33:13   Level one, free shipping for life.

00:33:15   Level two, 200 bucks of spending gets you 20 percent off everything else for the next year.

00:33:20   They have a guarantee.

00:33:21   If you don't like your first pair of underwear, you can just keep it.

00:33:24   I mean, who wants underwear back, frankly?

00:33:27   But they'll let you keep it.

00:33:28   >> I'm sorry, John. I didn't want to get you this bit.

00:33:29   >> They'll send you your money back.

00:33:31   >> It's a shame we have to say that.

00:33:32   It's a shame you have to say they don't want the underwear back.

00:33:36   Because what are they going to do with it?

00:33:37   >> Money you might want back.

00:33:39   Underwear, they don't want it back,

00:33:41   but they're so confident.

00:33:42   Anyway, 20 percent off your first order,

00:33:45   go to mackweldon.com, m-a-c-k-w-e-l-d-o-n.com/talkshow.

00:33:53   The promo code is the same thing, just talk show.

00:33:56   That gets you 20 percent off your first order,

00:33:59   mackweldon.com/talkshow, code talk show.

00:34:02   That gets us to,

00:34:04   you want to call this the continuation of the sponsorship,

00:34:07   you want to call it content, I don't care.

00:34:09   >> Yeah.

00:34:10   >> Gets us to the important thing and that's the slippers.

00:34:12   You and I, we never quite-

00:34:14   >> We screwed up so bad by talking about these goddamn slippers.

00:34:17   We blew it by mentioning to other people how good these slippers are.

00:34:22   We blew it because we talked about it on an episode of your podcast,

00:34:25   the talk show, and then what happened, John?

00:34:27   >> They sold out and we couldn't get them and I didn't have-

00:34:30   >> Months, months, probably years at this point.

00:34:33   >> I didn't have a spare pair.

00:34:35   Guess what happened in 2020?

00:34:38   I never needed anything but slippers.

00:34:40   I wore the damn things out.

00:34:42   I haven't worn anything all year except for Mack Weldon slippers.

00:34:47   When it got warm enough, some flip flops,

00:34:50   and now I'm back to the slippers.

00:34:53   They're worn out, but they came back into stock, the Mack Weldon slipper.

00:34:58   >> We had an exchange because I received,

00:35:02   forgive me, I don't know the person, I forget who said this,

00:35:04   but somebody on Twitter said, "Hey, FYI,

00:35:06   the slippers are back in stock."

00:35:08   I ran my daughter over and I ran straight to

00:35:12   the computer to text you and say, "John, it's go time.

00:35:14   Turn your key, sir. They're back in stock."

00:35:16   They're back in stock and then what did you see?

00:35:18   You said, "You just learned the same thing."

00:35:21   >> I've already gotten two pairs.

00:35:24   Now, I opened mine.

00:35:26   >> Okay. I was after I wrote mine on the air.

00:35:28   >> I heard you doing it.

00:35:29   >> I've been saving them knowing this is eventually coming.

00:35:32   >> I opened them just to examine them,

00:35:34   just to make sure it was all right.

00:35:36   >> All right. Let's see here.

00:35:38   I got a utility knife, cutting, open.

00:35:42   They say you can pull on the ripcord.

00:35:44   I don't like that. It feels sloppy to me.

00:35:47   Oh, look at these. I tried a different color this time.

00:35:49   I think these are called charcoal.

00:35:51   I got, oh, look at that.

00:35:53   They're in a bag. I love a bag.

00:35:55   Look at that bag. Then I got them here.

00:35:58   >> You can take that bag. You can put that bag right in the suitcase.

00:36:01   You know what I mean?

00:36:02   >> If you don't like the bag, you keep it.

00:36:05   >> Anyway, I'm doing it right now.

00:36:08   Right now, as we speak on the air,

00:36:10   I've just taken off my old slippers.

00:36:14   I've got my brand new ones.

00:36:15   >> Oh, John, this feels important.

00:36:17   >> All right. Here they go. Now, here's the thing.

00:36:19   Here's why I like the Mack Weldon slipper.

00:36:22   They've got a back, a back on the heel.

00:36:25   Now, it's not a high back.

00:36:27   >> If you want to be one of those monsters that wears them like a scuff,

00:36:29   you can do that or you could have some dignity and wear slippers with a back up.

00:36:34   But the thing is,

00:36:37   I had to berate my statue as Donner because she wore them to the park one time.

00:36:42   Look at these. They're so handsome.

00:36:44   John, you know what I love?

00:36:46   These are inside shoes.

00:36:47   These are inside shoes. I only wear these inside. That's the thing.

00:36:51   I might go to the garage to get toilet paper.

00:36:53   One of those occasions where my sweatpants fall down around my ankles.

00:36:56   But the Mack Weldon charcoal slippers,

00:37:01   now, all these are handsome.

00:37:02   But they're rugged. That's the thing.

00:37:04   It's not insubstantial.

00:37:06   >> They're closer to a shoe in terms of structure.

00:37:11   If you needed to run out,

00:37:12   if you had them on,

00:37:14   you're in the house and something happened, you need to leave.

00:37:16   You could leave and it would be hours,

00:37:19   like some kind of family emergency type situation.

00:37:22   >> You're saying Nicolas Cage breaks in.

00:37:24   >> Whatever.

00:37:26   >> I see.

00:37:26   >> You wouldn't realize until the incident was over,

00:37:31   holy crap, I left with my slippers on as opposed to a typical slipper.

00:37:35   As soon as you leave the house,

00:37:36   it would be like leaving without your pants.

00:37:38   >> How great is your running in flip-flops, John? Be honest.

00:37:41   >> In flip-flops, I wouldn't run.

00:37:43   See, I'm too old.

00:37:45   I can't take a fall at this age.

00:37:47   >> Oh my God. We're so brittle.

00:37:48   Hollow bones.

00:37:49   >> Yeah. I've got these new slippers on. I've been saving them.

00:37:53   Now, this is another one of those things where we just sort of-

00:37:58   >> The fingertips touched.

00:37:59   >> The fingertips touched.

00:38:00   >> We didn't need to have a lot of exchanges about this.

00:38:03   I think we could just go through intuition. It's time.

00:38:06   >> Now, what would we have done if the election had turned out bad again?

00:38:10   Would we still have done slippers?

00:38:13   >> Let's not get over our skis here.

00:38:15   It's still pretty early.

00:38:16   >> I'm not sure. This is something that didn't quite happen.

00:38:19   >> See, this is how they get you.

00:38:21   >> I'm not sure that this added up.

00:38:24   In my mind, it was like,

00:38:26   well, Biden seems like he's going to win.

00:38:29   We'll do another show and we'll put new slippers on.

00:38:33   >> Yeah. It didn't need to be said.

00:38:36   It was intuitively obvious.

00:38:39   >> Can I just tell you now,

00:38:40   I'm telling you right now,

00:38:43   I don't want to malign them.

00:38:45   I love these slippers.

00:38:47   I want to sell out.

00:38:48   I want them because I've already stocked up myself, so it's A-okay.

00:38:51   Go buy as many pairs as you want.

00:38:53   You're not robbing me of them.

00:38:54   I'm set for the year.

00:38:57   I don't want to imply that their slippers don't last.

00:39:01   What I'm saying is I wore the hell out of these slippers in the time since I bought them.

00:39:06   I mean, I'm very satisfied with the wear and tear.

00:39:09   >> It's like I say about the Apple TV.

00:39:11   It works great as long as you never use it.

00:39:13   If you're using the slippers,

00:39:15   there will be wear and tear.

00:39:16   This is not a problem with Mack or Weldon.

00:39:19   It's just that you love them so much, you love them too much.

00:39:22   It's like a beloved stuffy and you want fresh ones.

00:39:27   >> When I'm working, when I'm writing,

00:39:29   when the juices are flowing and the words are coming out,

00:39:32   I'm on the balls of my- I sit.

00:39:34   I don't have a standing desk.

00:39:35   Come on. I'm on the balls of my feet though.

00:39:39   >> I get a heart attack like a man.

00:39:42   So when you're "working", yeah.

00:39:46   >> But it might look like I'm sitting and I am sitting,

00:39:50   but I'm on the balls of my feet and my feet are moving.

00:39:53   I'm wearing the slippers down as I sit.

00:39:57   >> As active sitting.

00:39:59   >> Yeah.

00:39:59   >> Okay.

00:40:00   >> When I'm writing,

00:40:02   I think I'm not quite sure what I look like,

00:40:05   but I think when it's really going,

00:40:07   I might sit there and be in the flow for a full 45 minutes,

00:40:10   but if somebody were observing me,

00:40:12   they would say, "That's a man who needs to go to the bathroom."

00:40:15   >> I see that there's a kind of urgency that you haven't acknowledged yet.

00:40:18   >> A nervous energy.

00:40:19   >> Yes.

00:40:19   >> It's coming out.

00:40:20   >> Yes.

00:40:20   >> Right?

00:40:21   >> I know the feeling.

00:40:23   I used to write. I understand.

00:40:24   >> Yeah. Well, it's hard on slippers.

00:40:28   >> It's true. Well, it's occupational hazard.

00:40:32   >> What his lungs were to my grandfather,

00:40:35   the coal miner, the slippers are to me.

00:40:38   >> My father who was in Korea.

00:40:41   It's okay, Dad. I hope he's looking down and enjoying

00:40:46   my sophisticated contextual take on poop and boner jokes.

00:40:53   >> I got to get you out of this spot.

00:40:55   Are you going to bring me because we can't go all day today?

00:40:58   >> No.

00:40:58   >> Are you going to bring me up to speed on where we are now?

00:41:00   I was talking to my friend about social media.

00:41:02   Bring me up to speed as of 12 PM Pacific time on Friday, November 6th.

00:41:09   Where are we right now?

00:41:10   You're feeling good, but tell me what's still on the table.

00:41:13   >> No. It's a lock. It's done.

00:41:15   >> Oh, come on.

00:41:17   >> I'm telling you. Merlin, I'm not trying to spoil anything.

00:41:19   I'm telling you, the networks are only being,

00:41:24   they're gracious, they're more gracious than me.

00:41:26   It's all over. It's over.

00:41:28   >> Partly because if you call this too early and then you have to like,

00:41:33   that's what Fox is dealing with now,

00:41:35   is they got in front of this.

00:41:37   I guess decision desk HQ is now saying that,

00:41:40   but this is your bit. Tell me where we are now.

00:41:42   >> Here's where we are. None of this is official, by the way.

00:41:47   I mean, what's the reddest state in the country?

00:41:50   I don't know, Arkansas, maybe Mississippi, Alabama,

00:41:53   one of those states where Trump won by 30 or 40 percent.

00:41:58   Maybe you could take some blue states.

00:42:01   >> We've known all along this would come down to a handful of states.

00:42:06   >> None of those are official, right?

00:42:08   New Jersey, Biden was up by-

00:42:10   >> Well, nothing's official until the results are certified,

00:42:12   but I have found some solace in a BBC graphic that's been going around,

00:42:16   which was to say for this person to win,

00:42:18   they will need, in this case,

00:42:20   let's say the vice president is going to need two of these states or Pennsylvania.

00:42:25   For the current president,

00:42:27   it was that I think he was going to need two or three of these states and Pennsylvania.

00:42:32   >> He's not going to get Pennsylvania because Pennsylvania,

00:42:36   even though there are votes still to be counted,

00:42:39   the official tally already has Joe Biden in the lead and the votes to be counted.

00:42:45   >> Very much, and we learned this from Kornacki,

00:42:47   the votes coming out of very much of his favor.

00:42:48   >> They're all in his favor, decidedly preposterously so.

00:42:51   There are people who aren't paying attention who think,

00:42:54   well, that sounds crooked and it has nothing to do with crookedness.

00:42:57   It has to do with the fact that people who listened to the president and did what he told them to do,

00:43:06   voted in person instead of using mail-in ballots,

00:43:10   and people who didn't believe a word out of his mouth and were genuinely concerned

00:43:17   about the epidemiological aspects of leaving and going in person and trusted the state that,

00:43:25   hey, we've got mail-in balloting.

00:43:27   This is the first presidential election where the state of Pennsylvania had it.

00:43:30   They did this, but the laws of Pennsylvania were written.

00:43:34   >> They've had absentee before,

00:43:36   but this is their first.

00:43:36   >> Absentee but not mail-in ballot.

00:43:38   >> Yes.

00:43:38   >> Right. And the laws were such that they can take the envelopes, stack them in a box,

00:43:46   but they couldn't start opening them until 7 a.m.

00:43:50   >> Can I just mention one more thing here because I think it's salient to this point.

00:43:53   And of course, as we all know, once everything starts seeming related,

00:43:56   that's when you know that you're crazy.

00:43:57   Why are we so bad at COVID?

00:43:58   There's a million reasons we're bad at COVID,

00:44:00   but one of the reasons we're bad at COVID is America hates subtlety.

00:44:03   And one bit of subtlety that's valuable, and I think anybody with any sense goes,

00:44:07   "Wow, there's real different things going on in real different places."

00:44:09   Here's some more subtleties that suck.

00:44:11   Deaths, lag, cases in a way that can be tracked.

00:44:15   We know that this particular county with this particular makeup is going to have a very different thing.

00:44:20   I'm just saying that one reason we suck at COVID is there's not one COVID.

00:44:24   There's also not one election.

00:44:25   We like to say there's one election, but there's a lot of different elections.

00:44:28   It's something that is controlled at a state and lower level.

00:44:31   But on top of all of that, and I learned this from our board, Kornacki,

00:44:34   is that the way the votes are counted, the order in which—

00:44:38   well, first of all, the kinds of votes.

00:44:40   Obviously, you've got some in person.

00:44:42   You've got the early-late and the late-earlys.

00:44:44   You've got the mail-ins.

00:44:45   You've got the overseas ones.

00:44:47   But part of what's making this so frustrating for everybody, I think understandably,

00:44:52   is the order in which those votes are counted differs, especially from state to state.

00:44:57   So if you count in person in one of the western states, a red state, early,

00:45:02   well, yeah, that's going to look like a huge, what they call, I guess, a red mirage.

00:45:05   It's going to look like things are great for Trump.

00:45:07   When the later votes come in that we're mailing, especially in a case like Pennsylvania,

00:45:11   well, guess what?

00:45:12   That turns around.

00:45:12   But that's not the same everywhere.

00:45:14   Georgia, there's a different—

00:45:15   you know, don't you think that's part of what makes people crazy,

00:45:18   is not understanding which kinds of votes are being counted tonight?

00:45:22   Yeah.

00:45:23   Yeah, absolutely.

00:45:24   And it feels fishy because how could our big, wet boy

00:45:30   lose such a 600,000-vote "lead"?

00:45:34   And like a lot of people have said, I'm not into sportsball like you are.

00:45:37   But I mean, it's a little like saying, in the same way that the president likes to say,

00:45:41   "Well, if you don't count New York, COVID went great."

00:45:43   And again, it's sort of like saying,

00:45:45   "Well, the first two innings were very positive for our team, so why would we finish the game?"

00:45:52   Yeah.

00:45:53   Think about it.

00:45:54   Imagine you're shooting—

00:45:58   you're playing basketball, and the rules are such that your whole school can play the game,

00:46:04   but the rules are such that we're going to play—

00:46:06   your team only gets to have the ninth graders come out for the first half,

00:46:11   and then in the second half, you're going to have the seniors and the juniors come out.

00:46:15   Well, they're a lot better at basketball.

00:46:16   You get Mariano Rivera come out in the first inning,

00:46:20   but for some reason, he's playing shortstop, and no one knows why.

00:46:22   There's nothing crooked about it.

00:46:25   They knew it was going to happen.

00:46:26   And now that Biden already has the lead as we record, there's no mathematical chance.

00:46:31   They can call it.

00:46:32   They might have called it while we're recording this show, officially.

00:46:35   As we're recording right now, it looks like there was a Georgia Secretary of State thing.

00:46:39   I'm sorry, I'm not letting you finish.

00:46:41   Tell me.

00:46:41   No, that's okay.

00:46:42   You're confident.

00:46:44   I want to know what is the basis—

00:46:46   not that I disagree.

00:46:47   I want to be cheered up here.

00:46:49   What is the basis for your confidence momentarily for the sake of your audience?

00:46:55   Let's set aside the utter conflagration we will be going through for the next six to eight weeks.

00:47:00   Let's set that aside.

00:47:01   What makes you feel good right now on November 6th?

00:47:03   So I feel great because the states that have already been called

00:47:08   by every single news organization up and down the political spectrum

00:47:12   have Biden at over 200, like 253 electoral votes.

00:47:16   You need 270 to win.

00:47:17   Pennsylvania is worth 20.

00:47:18   He's taken, as of this morning, the official count, has him in the lead.

00:47:25   Most of the votes that are left are mail-in votes that have been running

00:47:30   80 to 20, give or take, in Biden's favor.

00:47:35   In other words, four out of every five of these are for Biden, one out of every five for Trump.

00:47:39   And this is different.

00:47:40   So there's a part of you that thinks, well, I mean, like,

00:47:42   I know enough about this kind of stuff to say, well,

00:47:45   just because you got heads four times in a row does not mean that you will get heads

00:47:50   17,000 times in a row, but if you're getting, as our boy Steve says,

00:47:54   you're getting 13,000 votes counted roughly per hour, and that trend line,

00:48:00   the percentage of how that's going actually continues to go up along the way,

00:48:05   that's a pretty good indication.

00:48:06   And Agile, right, they call this yesterday's weather.

00:48:09   Like, if it was 60 degrees yesterday, it's not going to be 50,000 degrees tomorrow.

00:48:12   I agree.

00:48:17   So anyway, Pennsylvania is, it's a lock.

00:48:20   If you knew what to look at, I felt certain.

00:48:26   It's a shoe-in.

00:48:27   Oh, that's a big shoe-in.

00:48:28   I felt like Pennsylvania was a lock for a while.

00:48:31   Joe Biden is a very superstitious politician.

00:48:36   I don't know if you've heard this.

00:48:38   Somebody has told me numerous times he's been in politics for 47 years.

00:48:42   47 years.

00:48:44   I notoriously, and I love the state of Delaware.

00:48:50   Delaware originally was sort of the southeast extension of Pennsylvania.

00:48:54   It's a very Pennsylvania, southeast Pennsylvania-like state.

00:48:57   There was like, it's sort of like a Shelbyville-type situation,

00:49:00   where people didn't like the the usurious credit card laws of the LTS that they marched out?

00:49:06   Yeah, I think so.

00:49:07   Yeah, something like that.

00:49:08   But culturally, extraordinarily similar to southeast Pennsylvania, almost identical.

00:49:14   Joe Biden had been the senator there for a long, long time, you know, early 70s.

00:49:19   You know, never took it for granted.

00:49:22   He's one of those guys, never ever, you know, he was a lock.

00:49:25   He was a lock to get re-elected.

00:49:26   I don't even know if anybody ran against him.

00:49:28   Never ever counted it, you know, doing the same.

00:49:32   They've already launched their transition website.

00:49:35   A superstitious 70-some-year-old man, you know.

00:49:39   Every time we learn something, and this is not conspiratorial,

00:49:44   but every time we learn something based on polling, it is reasonable...

00:49:48   So, sorry, every time we learn something based on public polling,

00:49:51   I think it is also reasonable to assume that that public information will also sit alongside

00:49:58   what people call internals, like internal polls, where they might have the ability to do stuff

00:50:04   with data that we don't have and have access to things that we don't have.

00:50:07   Now, on the one hand, you can use that to convince the president that, you know,

00:50:12   that he is the, I don't know, the emperor of Japan, probably, based on certain kinds of polling data.

00:50:18   But if you have insight that shows a trend line in your internal polls,

00:50:22   don't you imagine that must be a big part of the last couple days for them?

00:50:27   It is a very big part of it.

00:50:28   So, Pennsylvania does it.

00:50:32   If Pennsylvania is the only of the states that haven't been called, quote-unquote,

00:50:36   called, Pennsylvania alone put Biden over the top, and Pennsylvania is a lock.

00:50:41   And nobody is saying otherwise.

00:50:42   If he gets that 20, as we've known all along, for the slog anyway,

00:50:46   once he gets that 20, the game is over.

00:50:49   There are not enough points to be put on the board for the president.

00:50:53   Right.

00:50:54   But in addition to that, Nevada...

00:50:56   Now, I just learned how to pronounce that this week.

00:50:58   I thought it was Nevada.

00:50:59   You should be watching Veep.

00:51:00   Yeah, you would know.

00:51:01   So it's Nevada.

00:51:02   Nevada is closer than polls had suggested, but polls are just like betting lines in sports.

00:51:09   You know what I mean?

00:51:10   They tell you that the Patriots are favored by seven points,

00:51:13   and the Patriots wind up only winning by one.

00:51:16   Maybe they lose the game.

00:51:18   That doesn't mean...

00:51:19   Gamblers, you would know this because you're not a gambler,

00:51:21   but people who gamble have never been guilty of wishful or magical thinking,

00:51:26   because they're such raw data machines in terms of...

00:51:29   Exactly.

00:51:30   Yeah.

00:51:30   But anyway...

00:51:32   So like predicted.org is fun, but I would not look to that,

00:51:36   especially knowing what I know from election profit makers,

00:51:38   that the Magachuds have gone in there and basically bought...

00:51:41   They had bought in the previous couple of weeks a ton of Trump stuff to try and move the needle.

00:51:46   Can I tell you what's...

00:51:47   Showing up on predicted.

00:51:48   Can I tell you what's wrong with predicted?

00:51:50   And I...

00:51:51   Please, yeah.

00:51:52   I can both tell you what's wrong and do a little bragging.

00:51:55   I've actually won several thousand dollars on predicted.org this week.

00:51:59   Wow.

00:52:00   Well, because I'm a gambler.

00:52:02   Not that I would gamble, but if I were...

00:52:04   But you're not a degenerate gambler.

00:52:06   You're a gentleman gambler.

00:52:07   All right.

00:52:08   The only bet I lost this week was I did bet on the state of Florida,

00:52:12   and I lost quite a few hundred dollars.

00:52:15   Did you have trouble getting...

00:52:16   So I'm saying all this phonetically because everything I know about predicted comes from

00:52:18   the wonderful Election Profit Makers podcast, which is a podcast started in 2016,

00:52:22   where three people who are wonderful go in and try to make money betting on the election.

00:52:27   But I've heard from them that the market gets...

00:52:30   What do they call it?

00:52:30   The contract gets saturated or they won't take any more bets on a certain thing.

00:52:34   So you have to kind of come in the side door by saying,

00:52:36   "Okay, will the winner of the North Carolina Democratic primary win?"

00:52:40   Or, "Well, the big one is like, what's the margin for electoral votes?"

00:52:45   I mean, how many markets are you in?

00:52:47   Well, yeah, and they cap you.

00:52:51   I don't know why.

00:52:52   I don't know how much of this is law.

00:52:53   I don't know how much of this is not, but they cap your individual at $850 on a market.

00:52:58   So what you can do is you can bet $850 on Biden,

00:53:04   but then you could also bet $850 on which party's nominee will win the presidency,

00:53:10   Democrat or Republican.

00:53:11   And they count that as a separate market, just in case, you know, maybe Joe decides...

00:53:16   That's the thing is if you're like a logician, like there's a big difference between,

00:53:21   you know, can this happen?

00:53:23   Will this happen?

00:53:24   Like, how do you really close those?

00:53:26   And then the way that they do each of these markets is you also

00:53:29   didn't have a very specifically worded thing with a date on it, correct?

00:53:32   Right.

00:53:32   But they're...yes.

00:53:35   But basically where those, the predicted in particular,

00:53:38   is very different from a typical sports book is a sports book.

00:53:42   You can go in on the Super Bowl and if you want to bet a million dollars,

00:53:46   now, you know, you're obviously not coming up there with cash.

00:53:49   They're going to want to meet and greet with the manager.

00:53:51   You know, you're going to have...

00:53:55   You might have to sign a couple of papers, but they'll take your bet

00:53:58   if you would like to bet a million dollars on the Super Bowl.

00:54:02   Oh, right.

00:54:04   You can find somebody to take a bet.

00:54:07   You can find a prop Joe who will take your bet on almost anything.

00:54:11   Right.

00:54:11   So the predicted thing gets skewed and went way back and forth.

00:54:17   And like Tuesday night went way into Trump's favor.

00:54:20   And somebody who was truly like, you know, like our friend from South by,

00:54:27   really, you know, it really is just cold hearted, doesn't even care who wins.

00:54:32   Really honest to God, doesn't care if it's Trump or Biden, but just...

00:54:35   Let's all account for in the model, like who wins.

00:54:38   Looking at the numbers.

00:54:39   It's all in the model.

00:54:40   You could have made a fortune that night because of how the betting lines went Trump,

00:54:46   but you actually couldn't in the US markets because you could only bet up to $850.

00:54:51   You'd have to like pick individual things.

00:54:53   Like you can put another $850 on Wisconsin and another $850 on...

00:54:55   But it's also that you, I love the simplicity of the way it's set up,

00:55:00   which is there's a contract and there's a dollar.

00:55:03   So basically what you do is you buy or sell at a certain point.

00:55:06   So it's not as simple as saying I made this bet at this time, right?

00:55:10   Part of what makes it so interesting where you can go and scoop up bargains

00:55:13   or like, you know, choose poorly, isn't that part of the fun of it?

00:55:16   Is you say, well, Biden to win is selling at 61 right now.

00:55:21   Maybe I can arbitrage that because I'm pretty sure he's going to win, right?

00:55:25   Isn't that part of the fun is that you're buying at a certain rate.

00:55:28   It's the equivalent of odds in some ways.

00:55:31   Yeah, but it's not, it doesn't make, it would be a lot more fun to me if it was just simple odds,

00:55:36   because then you don't have to look for the arbitrage.

00:55:38   But basically, anyway, you were asking why do I feel good?

00:55:43   Pennsylvania is in the tank for Biden.

00:55:45   That puts him over 270.

00:55:47   Arizona, Arizona is a weird story because Biden's going to win.

00:55:53   But what's weird about Arizona, Pennsylvania in a lot of ways though, because of the way

00:55:57   that they're counting and the fact that like what started as a Biden lead has,

00:56:00   there's been attrition with that in the same way that Trump's lead has had attrition in Pennsylvania.

00:56:05   It sounds like what happened in our, and again, this will all get clarified in about two weeks

00:56:11   and we'll just know, but it sounds like Arizona and Nevada, which again, I can't get used to

00:56:16   saying it that way, but both of them seemingly were surprised by their number of mail-in ballots,

00:56:21   which is odd because really you would think anywhere where you could send a mail-in ballot

00:56:28   this year, people would, but they were surprised by the quantity.

00:56:31   It's like an emergency room saying, what's the rush?

00:56:32   Right. They were overwhelmed.

00:56:34   You couldn't have anticipated this?

00:56:36   Right. And so they've taken longer to count. Whereas Pennsylvania has been saying since

00:56:42   before the election, there is no chance, no chance that they will be able to count anywhere close to

00:56:48   all the votes on election day. No chance, no chance, no chance. Not only not on election

00:56:54   night, but probably not till Friday. And today's Friday.

00:56:57   Pennsylvania is an extreme example, but everybody everywhere has been saying,

00:57:01   it's like I said, like let the chicken cook as hungry as you are. And as much as you think the

00:57:05   chicken should be done, trust me, you do not want to eat this before it's done cooking. And then

00:57:10   everybody's like, whoa. It's like, no, it's not done yet, dude.

00:57:14   I'm hungry.

00:57:15   I'm so hungry. Just nine more bites.

00:57:17   I'm so hungry.

00:57:18   I need some kind of decisiveness.

00:57:21   This was a, this was a slice of dark beet, right? Yes. No, no.

00:57:28   Should this be purple?

00:57:29   I thought we talked about this, that you weren't going to eat the chicken.

00:57:34   I am very proud of this state. This state's handling of this election,

00:57:41   the city's handling of it, the entire state's handling of it has been extremely...

00:57:46   I love that mayor.

00:57:47   It's been extremely professional and they were ready for it. They had a facility, they had people,

00:57:53   they had webcams, nice high quality, high def cameras set up to anticipate that people might

00:57:59   want to see that how this is going. It's all been great. And they were spot on. They said,

00:58:05   probably not until Friday. Then there was some talk that maybe they would finish Thursday night.

00:58:10   There was a lawsuit filed by a fellow named Trump yesterday that got them to stop for...

00:58:16   Stop the count.

00:58:16   Stop the count.

00:58:17   Well, and they had to pause for a little bit to wait for something.

00:58:19   But they're on pace to finish today.

00:58:21   Allegheny had just dipped early on their own, right? That was not,

00:58:25   that was... Had Allegheny, Pittsburgh had to stop because of that or...

00:58:29   Because they paused a little bit yesterday, correct?

00:58:32   Yeah, I forget what the reason for that was. But basically, Pennsylvania's in the bag. It's

00:58:36   not even going to be that close. It really isn't. I am telling you, it's going to be

00:58:40   well over 100,000 votes and about one or 2% in the margin.

00:58:45   Arizona is interesting because Arizona, they seemed like they were overwhelmed.

00:58:49   Their votes that they are counting aren't over... There's no particular Biden or Trump slant to them.

00:58:56   They're more in that 50/50 range. So that's why people want to see them all counted. You can't

00:59:01   just say... Like with the Pennsylvania votes, you could say, "Look, we know how many there are left.

00:59:06   There's 140,000 of them. We know Biden has been winning 80% of the mail-in votes."

00:59:12   So let's just say... These kinds of votes in this district are

00:59:15   trending strongly this way. Right, in this district. So let's just say,

00:59:18   for the sake of argument, let's say instead of the 80% he has been getting,

00:59:22   which we reasonably could say... Let's just say he only gets...

00:59:26   Even if it's a gentleman 65, he's still going to...

00:59:28   65, right, which would be a huge swing, statistically, he would still win. That's

00:59:33   where we are in Pennsylvania, and that's why it seems so solid. And that 80% projection has been

00:59:39   super consistent from Tuesday night through now. Arizona is more 50/50. Nobody... They seem like

00:59:44   they were surprised, weren't ready for the count. But the weird thing about Arizona is that Fox News,

00:59:49   which... I don't know if you've heard of them. They're known for having a bit of a political

00:59:55   slant, which you wouldn't think is against the president.

00:59:58   My sense is what they would... Is that they would report, and then I would decide,

01:00:01   is am I getting something wrong? Right. And the Associated Press,

01:00:05   which is really the sort of... That's the gold standard of calling

01:00:09   a presidential race. Right. They called Arizona Tuesday night,

01:00:14   and nobody... Here we are Friday morning. Nobody else has called it. They're still counting votes,

01:00:18   but it really does look like they were right. It is closer. They probably shouldn't have called it.

01:00:22   They probably... But every step of the way when they might want to say, "Ooh, we're going to have

01:00:29   to take that back." And I don't know if you remember. Do you remember the year 2000?

01:00:33   The year 2000. Oh, I feel like I do. That's when we were relieved that our clock still worked.

01:00:39   Well, 2000's election actually had calls that went back and forth. There were calls of Florida

01:00:48   for Gore, and then I think it was NBC News, and they took it back. And then there was a Fox News

01:00:54   call. Gore had claimed, if memory serves, the indications were going to be that he was going

01:00:59   to win. He had... Hadn't it been that... No, was it that he had conceded to Bush and then withdrew?

01:01:06   He had to take it. So what happened was NBC News said Gore won Florida. Then they said, "Well,

01:01:11   we take it back. No good." Then Fox said, "Okay, we're calling it for Bush. Bush wins Florida."

01:01:17   And then a couple of other networks all said, "Well, if Fox is calling it, we should call it."

01:01:22   And literally called it because Fox called it. And then Gore said, "Well, if they're calling it,

01:01:27   I want to do the right thing." And he picked up the phone and called him and said, "It looks like

01:01:31   you won. I concede the election. Congratulations." And then 20 minutes later, they were like,

01:01:38   "Everybody realized that it was all because one guy at Fox decided to call it, and there was no

01:01:43   real reason for it. And it was probably way too close to call. Not that it was wrong, but that it..."

01:01:48   And in fact, we now know it really was. It was like 500...

01:01:51   But you take a divisive time, which all the times feel ever since then, but take a divisive time,

01:01:56   and then you make that so much worse by having an eroding sense of the kind of institutional truth.

01:02:04   Right. But there were callbacks. There were outlets that called it, took it back.

01:02:09   Right.

01:02:10   That the Arizona thing with the AP and Fox, neither of them has taken it back. They've

01:02:14   probably shouldn't have called it. But in the intervening days, as the count's gone on,

01:02:21   it still looks good. Biden's going to win it. Nevada looks the same. Nevada,

01:02:25   the similarity to Pennsylvania isn't in their preparation. Because one of the nice things

01:02:30   about Pennsylvania is Pennsylvania has been reporting 10,000 votes. Another 90 minutes go by.

01:02:36   Here's another 10,000 votes. Another 90 minutes go by. Here's 10,000 votes. Nevada is frustrating and

01:02:43   head-scratching to people because they kind of went radio silent for a day there where they were

01:02:48   like...

01:02:49   Yeah. So it's the memes my kid is really enjoying. The Nevada going out to take a powder. But

01:02:55   compounding this difficulty, according to Scuttlebutt is...

01:02:57   My wife...

01:02:57   Okay.

01:02:57   Well, you say this.

01:03:00   No, say it like... Compounding this, at least in the Scuttlebutt, the media Scuttlebutt is like,

01:03:04   Fox supposedly has been like a little bit, "Ugh, we probably shouldn't have done that."

01:03:08   But on top of it all, if you were going to call along the lines they were calling,

01:03:14   Nevada really should have been called too. In both cases, I'm glad they didn't.

01:03:17   Yes.

01:03:17   You know. But what are you going to do? Are you going to be the network?

01:03:21   Right.

01:03:21   I don't know how much you're reading the behind the scenes stuff with Ashley Parker

01:03:25   and Annie Carney and everybody. But apparently, I don't know if you know this, but the White

01:03:29   House is a little bit frustrated with Fox News right now.

01:03:34   Yeah, a little bit.

01:03:35   And Fox was the one that ended up essentially calling the entire... If you call Arizona,

01:03:41   which is ending up closer than a lot of people thought it was going to be a few days ago,

01:03:45   and on top of that you call Nevada, which would, I believe, put the vice president over the top,

01:03:50   oh boy, are you going to be in Dutch with the wet boy.

01:03:52   Yeah.

01:03:54   Right?

01:03:54   Here's the weird dichotomy of this, and we should start leaning towards wrapping this up.

01:04:00   Yeah.

01:04:00   But one or two percent is not a lot of percents. Right? So it's not. A hundred thousand votes

01:04:09   is a lot of votes. It is. Right? So...

01:04:12   This is what your friend, Bay Thompson, calls the law of large numbers. Stuff gets weird when

01:04:16   you're talking about like bigger than 10.

01:04:18   So let's take the state of Wisconsin, which was weird. So the three states that really screwed

01:04:24   Hillary Clinton four years ago were Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania. They were all considered

01:04:29   the quote-unquote "blue wall." They've been blue in presidential elections for as long as anybody

01:04:34   could remember, which is only like 20 years. You know what I mean? Like you go back to Reagan and

01:04:38   it's, you know, a totally different map, and everybody pretends like that's ancient history

01:04:42   when it's really just not that long ago.

01:04:43   And if you don't account for all the different demographic changes over the years.

01:04:47   But basically this year, everybody thought, "Look, if Biden can turn Wisconsin, Michigan,

01:04:51   Pennsylvania back to Democrat, then he wins. That's it. Doesn't matter. Don't worry about

01:04:57   any of the other states." Those three states. And the polls said they all look good for Biden,

01:05:03   but in this order, Wisconsin, big, big, big for Biden. There was a poll from ABC. I know ABC

01:05:09   and Washington Post, you know, not like rags, who said, "There's 17-point lead," which everybody

01:05:14   thought was an outlier.

01:05:15   In the midst of a huge flare up in the pandemic in Wisconsin.

01:05:19   Right. And everybody thought, "Well, that makes sense." Right? Terrible flare up. Everybody's

01:05:23   like, "Oh my God, this is terrible. We need to change." Wisconsin was big for Biden. Michigan

01:05:28   in the middle. Pennsylvania, ooh, a little too close for comfort. And it looks like in reality,

01:05:34   they're in reverse, where Pennsylvania is going to be finished with the biggest margin for Biden.

01:05:39   Michigan in the middle. And Wisconsin was razor thin. 0.3%, which is crazy. And you hate to think

01:05:47   the fate of the Republic, maybe the fate of democracy, maybe the fate of Western civilization,

01:05:52   all hinges on something like that. But also 0.3% in a big state like Wisconsin is 20,000 votes.

01:06:01   And 20,000 votes is actually a lot of votes. Like somebody on TV on MSNBC was talking about

01:06:08   physically how big 20,000, like if you just put them into boxes, how many votes 20,000 votes.

01:06:13   Well, I mean, think about it this way. I remember when I very first discovered SiteMeter,

01:06:17   when I had a blog nobody had ever heard of, and I installed SiteMeter on my site.

01:06:20   And the thing that I've always said, I've said this in talks for years, is that

01:06:23   when you get your first visit to your website, your website just went up 100% in visibility.

01:06:32   Right.

01:06:32   My math is not great, but I think that's accurate. It's just that different,

01:06:37   it depends on how much we're talking about here. Now, for somebody in something like a presidential

01:06:42   race, that may not seem like much. You take all these places for granted based on your model and

01:06:47   your polling, you know what I'm saying? And then suddenly when that funnel gets smaller and smaller,

01:06:51   but the proportions are still important. And that's really confusing to people. So how,

01:06:57   the president is saying, how could it be that I had a 600,000 vote lead and now that has over

01:07:02   two days gone down to this amount, that must be crooked. It's like, no, it's not. That's just the

01:07:06   funnel is narrowing in a way that has the percentage of that outstanding vote count that

01:07:13   you're getting is changing. And so, yeah, suddenly 1200 means a lot. If your lead is 1200, that is not

01:07:19   great, Bob. If there's another several thousand to come in, isn't that what we're talking about?

01:07:23   Right. No, that's it. So it's good. He's got it. And Nevada probably should have been called with

01:07:32   Arizona, but you're right that all of a sudden they're like, well, we kind of called this one

01:07:35   early. And if we call both of them, then it's sort of like, we're calling the elections over

01:07:39   and people still want to see these things counted. And honestly, I think it's great for the country

01:07:45   that instead of calling stuff, leaning towards calling it too early, they're all leaning towards

01:07:49   calling it too late. And it's one of those things. It's, you know, go back to high school math,

01:07:54   it's calculus where you're approaching from one side or the other. And as time goes on,

01:08:00   we get closer and closer and eventually, you know, you're approaching, you never quite get there to

01:08:05   the true exact count. Yeah, that's why they call it Zino's election. Yeah. But it is way more

01:08:12   responsible and better for the spirit of democracy, in my opinion, to err on the side of let's just

01:08:18   let them count and then we'll call it. But it's going to happen. The big surprise. And then,

01:08:23   again, Pennsylvania puts Biden over the top. It's over. Arizona and Nevada are almost certainly

01:08:29   both Biden. And that puts him even further over the top and therefore out of the reach of any one

01:08:35   legal dispute in any one state. And then providing enough, if you like, cushion to say like, hey,

01:08:42   you know, Dan Sinker has been having fun with this on Twitter, which is like, oh, yeah, so

01:08:46   so here we decided to throw the election, but we're going to throw the election in a way that

01:08:51   we don't get a majority in the Senate and we lose seats in the House. It's a really sophisticated

01:08:55   strategy. It basically involves every single person in America. And we were so good at it

01:09:00   that, like, in some ways we're worse apart from the presidency, we're worse off than we were a

01:09:04   week ago. Right. And that the local strategy, the local district and state level officials like

01:09:11   senators and Congress people who have the most to lose by actually losing the election, like

01:09:18   Democrats running for Congress who lost even though they were slightly favored to win. But

01:09:24   Biden won in the district that they would have, you know, worked against their own interests to

01:09:29   favor it for Biden, but not for them while they were at it cooking the books.

01:09:34   Think about the conventional wisdom people have about like, I forget what the exact mixture is,

01:09:38   but people will say like, we need this party to be, you know, federal executive and we need this

01:09:44   party. So like you might say like, oh, yeah, I really want a Democratic president, but a

01:09:47   Republican governor. There's there's certainly that there's the part that's been driving me

01:09:50   crazy all along, which is, do we just want to keep assuming that every vote cast by a registered

01:09:56   Republican is for the president? And the corollary being every, well, this country is a lot more

01:10:01   complicated than that. You got a serious coastline of Scotland problem in this country, which is the

01:10:06   more closely you measure everything, the longer that coastline gets, the more you learn about

01:10:10   every single different person. There's there's no way to just go, oh, where are my Latinos at?

01:10:16   Like that's really that's not a very sound strategy. So I mean, I can see why people

01:10:21   would say that because our people, like our parents voted party line, whatever that party

01:10:25   was, they would vote all the way up and down. And I believe actually, in some areas, perhaps even

01:10:30   the states, you can choose to vote party line, you could like hit one giant novelty sized button

01:10:35   and say, give me all the red hats. But we had, you know, we had that in Pennsylvania. Yeah,

01:10:40   for my lifetime. And in fact, that we gave it up, because it was considered to favor Democrats. I

01:10:45   don't know if it did or not. But it was considered to, I guess, because they think that in the big

01:10:49   cities, the people just hit the big D button for Democrats. So what happened in Pennsylvania was we

01:10:56   wanted mail-in balloting to be statewide. And the concession was, okay, we'll allow mail, you know,

01:11:02   you can just vote by mail, but we'll get rid of, it will get rid of straight ticket voting. And the

01:11:07   Democrats jumped on it and said, sure, because I think the Democrats rightly so thought that that

01:11:13   D button wasn't actually the magic boogeyman for electing Democrats that Republicans thought they

01:11:19   were. And it again, I really hate, I think we did a good job four years ago, I think we're doing a

01:11:24   good job today of not being, you know, we're not wearing our blue sweaters here on this show. But

01:11:29   it really is true. It's undeniably true that at a fundamental level, Democrats really do our

01:11:35   Annapoli named party, at least at the moment where they really do just want more people to be able to

01:11:40   vote and just count them. Just get more. I mean, Joe Kennedy maybe. I mean, you know, he paid a lot of share.

01:11:46   Well, you're going into history. I'm talking right now coast to coast.

01:11:50   Is this the point, John, where we say, use that phrase in modern times, like that's meaningful?

01:11:54   In modern times. In modern times. He's the most disruptive president in modern times. Well,

01:11:58   who else? Give me another one. I mean, like, you know, are you going to Grover Cleveland your way

01:12:02   out of this? Really? You're going to Coolidge this? You're going to Hoover me? Give me a break.

01:12:06   All right. Let me take one more break. I want to talk about something else I like.

01:12:10   I love this company. Oh man. Adams, A-T-O-M-S. Hey, why have your shoelaces become untied? Why are your

01:12:21   shoes only made- John, they make my mask. They make my mask. I wear their mask. Why are they only made in half

01:12:26   sizes? Why do your shoes stink? Why do your feet ache? Why are your shoes so uncomfortable? Adams

01:12:31   fixed all the annoying things about your shoes with their Model Zero sneaker. I believe when I

01:12:37   first started wearing the Model Zero sneaker, it didn't have a name. I believe it was sort of like

01:12:42   Apple Watch. Now we call Apple Watch Series Zero. It was just called Apple Watch. I was wearing

01:12:48   Adams when it was just Adams. Now it's called the Model Zero. It moves with you throughout the day.

01:12:53   Has elastic shoelaces that don't become untied. Features an odor fighting copper thread lining.

01:13:01   You'll feel like you're walking on clouds when you wear them. They are perfect for long walks. They

01:13:06   come in quarter sizes. Quarter sizes! I have their 9.75 shoes. My left foot's bigger than my right.

01:13:13   I forget the exact size. I have it written down. I have it saved. But I think I'm like an 11.

01:13:17   It's very partisan. It's very partisan of your feet. I think I'm like an 11 and a half on my left.

01:13:23   All right. Weird flex. Their masks are great too. I love them. The Adams mask. I will not wear

01:13:29   other masks. Other masks, you know, they call it a muzzle in the red states. Their mask,

01:13:35   everybody's got their own opinions about this, but boy, every single day I have extra ones. I've

01:13:40   deployed them like I would with pairs of scissors that will disappear. I put the masks all around in

01:13:45   all the places and there's always one. One in my backpack, one in my pocket all the time.

01:13:48   Here's my favorite thing about the masks is we went as a country. We went from,

01:13:53   "Can you believe we all have to wear masks? Can you believe we all have to wear masks?"

01:13:57   I thought it was weird. Everybody thought it was weird. It's weird. Don't worry about that.

01:14:00   Like too many people who don't want to wear masks are still hung up on the, it feels weird.

01:14:04   Like who am I? Howard Hughes? I'm going to wear it. What are you talking about?

01:14:06   We're with you, baby. It's the weirdest thing in the world. But my favorite thing is who would have

01:14:11   thought we'd all have abundant drawers full of masks. And preferences. And strong preferences.

01:14:19   The way that like, if you're like a dinky guy and you like all your different watches and your fancy

01:14:22   little palette, like, "Oh, this is going to be my day to evening mask." Here's the thing I love

01:14:27   about the Adams mask. Well, number one, it's made out of the same odor fighting material as the

01:14:32   insert of their shoe. And it does, it keeps my bad breath from stinking up the mask. I'm a big fan,

01:14:40   I'm a big promoter. I've told people this. Just keep your mask by your Altoids and just pop a

01:14:45   couple of mints in there before you put your mask on. But what's nice is with the sort of odor

01:14:50   fighting technology of the Adams mask, mine keeps a minty smell. Well, that's lovely. I think the

01:14:56   masks have really helped America understand that they are probably drinking too much coffee.

01:14:59   Because then when you leave the house, you realize you got the coffee breath. John Stewart, I saw John

01:15:03   Stewart on Colbert a couple months ago. Is that me? I think that's me. John Stewart said, "I would

01:15:08   like to apologize to everybody I've ever encountered in my life for my breath."

01:15:16   And I feel that smell after you floss, that's you all the time.

01:15:20   Yes, yeah, yeah. Do you ever hear that? That was the trick. For those who don't know, the trick is,

01:15:27   if you ever want to get in a habit of flossing, floss your teeth one time and then smell the

01:15:32   floss. And then once you do this, you'll realize, "Oh my God, I need to floss all the time." It'll

01:15:37   make you want to floss. Well, that's what wearing a mask is to your breath. Anyway,

01:15:41   the other thing I love about the Adams style, for me personally, maybe for you, it's different,

01:15:45   but they're stitched down the middle and it kind of gives it a fold over the nose and mouth that

01:15:52   keeps it as opposed to a one piece that to me is always touching my lips. Oh, I see. Yeah,

01:15:58   absolutely. It makes you a little bit aerodynamic, like some kind of like a shark.

01:16:02   Yeah. Well, it's like putting your hands in front of your face. They're also easy to put on. God,

01:16:08   where are we in life that we're talking about? And there's like a given mask.

01:16:12   Well, and they also have sizes. It turns out I've got a big fat head. I feel like I'm going

01:16:19   to Ted Kennedy style. You know what I mean? Like we're by the end of Ted Kennedy's life.

01:16:23   Oh, like somebody once said, like Conan O'Brien once said, he said, "I don't have a head. I have

01:16:27   a case for a head." You think about becoming very large headed in your later life? You get the Jim

01:16:34   blossoms and everything? There's no question about it. I happen to know. You know, and I'm a baseball

01:16:37   fan. And I happen to know that for most of my adult life, I was a seven and a quarter fitted cap size.

01:16:44   Seven and a quarter. Yeah. And then I felt like it was getting a little snug and I bought a seven

01:16:49   and three eights and it too was too snug and I'm up to a seven and a half. So, I've gone up. My

01:16:55   head is absolutely growing in size. I wear it large. It's like Adam said to Eve, "Stand back.

01:17:01   I don't know how big this thing gets." Yeah. Quite a few. Quite a few of my masks are way too tight.

01:17:06   They pull my ears forward. I look comical. It'll get you out. No good. Adam, what can people go to

01:17:12   learn more about Adams? Adams.com. A-T-O-M-S dot com slash DF. Adams.com slash DF and buy your first

01:17:21   pair of their sneakers today. And when you buy the sneakers, you'll get a free mask, which was rated

01:17:27   best material by the Wall Street Journal. Now, who are you going to believe? The Wall Street Journal

01:17:31   or me and Marlon? I'm telling you right now. Is that Joanna Stern? She works for that outfit.

01:17:36   I don't think that's who said it, but if it was, then I would take her word for it because she's

01:17:40   cool. But anyway, with each order, if you use the discount code DF while checking out, that's what

01:17:46   scores you the free mask. The free mask isn't something they just give to any Tom Dick or Harry.

01:17:52   I bought it with my own money like a sucker. What the hell is wrong with me? Yeah. Anyway,

01:17:56   my thanks to Adams. Great shoes. I wear them all the time. Great masks. Adams.com slash DF. All

01:18:01   right. Let's bring this home. Improbably comfortable. Let's bring this home. Wrap it up.

01:18:07   Drive this into the garage, John. What now? I think we got to go big picture. And what I want

01:18:14   to say to people, and if we lifted your spirits, and we've heard, you've seen it. We didn't want to

01:18:19   spoil it. We don't want to talk about it. But people have said that they've listened back

01:18:24   to the show four years ago. That's the nicest thing a person could say. It's so nice. It's very

01:18:28   nice. It's very nice. And you and I have had that success before. We did a thing at South by

01:18:32   Southwest. Oh, boy. About that time we saw that one guy in the bar, and he was tilting at

01:18:38   approximately six degrees and moaning. No, he was on the street. Is that where it was? I feel like

01:18:44   he was on the street. He was having some verticality issues, and I don't know if that

01:18:49   was accounted for in the model. I don't pass judgment. I don't pass judgment. No, me neither.

01:18:52   Hakuna Matata. What's next, John? Let's get out of this thing. Yeah. People have been very nice.

01:18:57   Thank you to everybody who said that. That means the world to me.

01:18:59   And I think the people who needed it and felt like they felt better because of it, they don't need it

01:19:05   this year. We got this. But what I'm hearing... So there was a first-level sense of dread four years

01:19:11   ago, and this is what really had me down. And it wasn't in the way that I would have felt down

01:19:17   if Barack Obama had lost to John McCain or to Mitt Romney four years later. It wasn't the way

01:19:25   that I felt down when John Kerry did lose to George W. Bush in 2004, even after what I thought

01:19:31   was four years of some pretty crummy policy. And there was a war that wasn't so well considered,

01:19:42   et cetera, and so forth. I felt worse four years ago, hopefully worse than I'll ever feel after

01:19:48   any election, not because my preferred candidate didn't win, but because I could see how this was

01:19:55   going to go bad. I could see that this was going to involve clowns being appointed to important

01:20:02   positions that you cannot have a clown. That Michael Lewis book, all these things that we

01:20:09   thought of as really, really, really boring infrastructure, donkey drills actually have

01:20:15   huge impacts. You don't want somebody at energy where the nuclear things live. You don't want

01:20:21   somebody who doesn't know what they're doing or got in because they bought room service at a Trump

01:20:25   hotel. The guy who originally had that job, Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, didn't know

01:20:32   what the Department of Energy did. Hadn't he tried, was he the one who tried to abolish it

01:20:37   at some point? Was that him? Yeah. He tried to abolish it. Was he a Dancing with the Stars

01:20:41   memory server? Yeah. After he got promoted for being Secretary of Energy. Good frames can make

01:20:49   you look smart, but it can't make you be smart. That's just the more you know from Rick Perry.

01:20:54   He was the good Trump nominee for Department of Energy. Then he left and, you know, the real,

01:21:00   you can see how this would happen. And you didn't know what it would be, but very few presidents go

01:21:07   through four years without a significant crisis. And the whole point of these crises is that you

01:21:11   don't know what they are. You don't know when it's going to be a meteoric, you know, coming in and

01:21:16   you got to send Bruce Willis and the gang up there to blow it up. And you don't know when it's going

01:21:21   to be a pandemic, you know. I don't want to miss a thing. You know, there's no, if you don't have

01:21:26   the interest, if you don't have the fear, somebody once said of George W. Bush, he's probably the

01:21:31   most incurious president we've ever had. And boy, now today, it's not even just the, I'm sorry,

01:21:36   I interrupted you, but it's just, God damn it. We knew, but it was also the cognitive dissonance of

01:21:41   how could this happen? What did I miss about my country that I could get this so wrong and I could

01:21:46   be spending the next four years with my dick in my hand trying to figure out if I'm losing my goddamn

01:21:50   mind. It was very, very difficult. Now, when somebody like John Kerry loses, that sucks because

01:21:55   they said some terrible things about him, but that's more like your local minor league team not

01:21:59   winning. With this one, it was more like, no, like this is not the sport you thought it was. And

01:22:05   you've been a fan of the wrong thing. And now you're going to be so confused and sad and incapable

01:22:10   of disappearing into joy for the next four years, if you're lucky. Remember that dumb thing I said

01:22:15   at the end that we both said, I think we'll be fine? Remember that when we said that?

01:22:18   That's a regret. That's a regret of mine. I didn't believe you.

01:22:23   Yeah, well. But here's what I want to say. Here's my parting message to everybody listening,

01:22:33   is God bless you. I'm glad you're listening. I thank you for your good words before, but I hear

01:22:38   it already where people are saying, well, how could this be so close? And they're down again.

01:22:44   They're already down. How could this be so close? How could we not take the Senate too? How could

01:22:48   we lose a couple of seats in the House? Blah, blah, blah. I agree. There's part of me that

01:22:53   wants to ask certain people who voted a certain way, what the hell are you thinking? What were

01:23:00   you thinking four years ago? How after all of this? There was an idea four years ago

01:23:08   that this Trump fellow, he says crazy things, but he's not going to do crazy things. How many times

01:23:14   do you hear that? It's an act. Yeah, they say what they say seriously, but not literally.

01:23:19   Right. He did crazier things than he said. Hell, the stuff that he said was less crazy than the

01:23:25   stuff that he did. He didn't say he was going to separate three-year-old kids from their parents

01:23:31   at the border and put them into cages. I mean, this is crazy stuff. I mean, it's really sad. And

01:23:37   I'm not making light of it. I'm saying that it's really... No, you've really got to go back. And

01:23:43   like with all the ways we try to survive emotionally and mentally, you got to go back

01:23:47   and re-experience all those things and to find people on both sides. And Adam Schlesinger from

01:23:52   Fountains of Wayne is dead because of COVID or like George Floyd or whatever it is. You have to

01:23:57   go back and walk back through each one of those like hysterically painful things that just made

01:24:03   America into a mouth with many missing teeth. It's just been brutal. What I want to say to all of you

01:24:10   who are depressed about the margin of victory is that a win is a win. And there is. The stakes are

01:24:18   entirely different between sports ball and politics because politics is as real as it gets. That's

01:24:24   where kids will actually wind up in cages and pandemics wind up spreading across the country,

01:24:30   coast to coast, and killing people and making people sick and real, real, real things. And with

01:24:38   sports ball, there's a team in blue jerseys and there's a team in green jerseys and one of them's

01:24:42   sad and one of them's happy and that's really ultimately all there is. But the similarity with

01:24:47   elections is the elections are a sport and you might be 100% convinced that your team is the

01:24:55   better team than the other team. 100% and that you should probably win this football game by 35

01:25:01   points going away. But it's the Super Bowl. It's the big thing. The bookies even say it. The bookies

01:25:07   have you up by two touchdowns. You're going to run away with this game and you end up...

01:25:12   But on any given Sunday...

01:25:14   And you end up... You're down. It's the second half. You're actually behind. Some of your fans

01:25:20   are pouring whiskey right down into their eye sockets because they can't take it. They think

01:25:26   it's all over. They saw this happen before, but your team sticks to the plan. They march down the

01:25:34   field at the end of the game and they kick a field goal. They win by three and they win. That team

01:25:41   celebrates. When that's over, that field goal goes through, the clock goes to zero and they're in

01:25:46   there and they hand them the trophy. There's no difference in the celebration than the amount of

01:25:51   champagne they're dunking on their heads and stuff like that. You won. Win is a win, right?

01:25:56   That's the thing. In a certain sixth sense, as close as it was, you'd like it to work better,

01:26:01   but it works. You win and then you get started and you move on. You go to the next one. Don't give up,

01:26:07   but keep going. It's all good. It's not the best, but it's good. There's no reason to be down.

01:26:12   Nobody should be down about this. This is a triumph of logic and empathy over the opposite,

01:26:21   whatever the opposite of Trump, I guess. That's good.

01:26:25   Whenever... Something to think about. I think there's nothing more tragic than a failed

01:26:34   romantic. I think when you feel like your heart's been broken over and over, it's difficult not to

01:26:40   become the sort of person that goes online and says, "Lol, nothing matters." I don't know. Maybe

01:26:45   it doesn't, but the one problem with "Lol, nothing matters" and whatever, everybody's all the same.

01:26:52   Well, not only is that the kind of thing Putin says, but there might be somebody in your life

01:26:57   for whom that does matter. I don't want to bust a gut, but even more than four years ago, I'm

01:27:02   very attuned to what these sorts of things mean for one particular person that I care a lot about.

01:27:07   I don't want to model "Lol, that matters" for people for whom it does matter. That's been a

01:27:14   huge change for me. I'm not saying I do what I can. I could probably do more, but it does matter,

01:27:22   and there's going to be the good days and the bad days, but don't cut yourself off completely,

01:27:29   not only just from the normal emotions we used to be able to enjoy for more than two seconds,

01:27:33   but be careful about letting the world redefine your horizons as being incredibly limited

01:27:42   and hopeless. I'm not trying to be Pollyanna. Everybody needs to do this in a different way,

01:27:46   but if we do just in some back part of our non-lizard brain, imagine that things could

01:27:53   be better than they are right this minute, that's still a little bit of hope. It's like Ted Lasso

01:27:57   says, "It's the last of the way. You've got to believe." I'm not saying put on blinders, but

01:28:02   remember that there's somebody in your life that you care about where it does matter. To go fully

01:28:09   bleak, hypernormalization is not going to help anybody. Contrary to your gut, it's not going to

01:28:16   make you feel better, and it's not going to protect you. You've got to tape up that little "believe"

01:28:23   sign. God damn it, I love that show. I would like to think with this as thin as some of these

01:28:31   margins are, maybe Ted Lasso had a little bit of a say in this election, maybe a thousand votes here,

01:28:38   a thousand votes there. Well, I'm not about to... Well, let me put it this way. Episode, I want to

01:28:43   say nine, which I didn't love as much as eight the first time I watched it, but I came back to it,

01:28:48   and I was like, "You know what? There's a healing power to forgiveness that really comes across the

01:28:54   second time you watch that episode. Everybody's just forgiving each other left and right."

01:28:57   I'm not saying we're all ready to go extend a hand and have some kind of pipes of peace moment

01:29:02   with two different Paul McCartney's. I'm not saying that at all, but what I am saying,

01:29:06   there's probably somebody in your life that could benefit from having a little bit of forgiveness,

01:29:10   and maybe one of those people is you. A very good show.

01:29:14   Yeah, such a good show. Your statement there was so sweet. I was going to end with this joke,

01:29:19   and I feel like a jerk for it, but I'm going to do it anyway.

01:29:20   Let's each commit to a joke. Do it.

01:29:22   This is one of my favorite jokes, and this is who I want you. I want you not to be this. This is

01:29:26   a joke. There's a Jewish grandmother, and she's walking with her young son down the beach. It's

01:29:33   a fall day. There's nobody at the beach. There's no lifeguards. It's not the type of day you go

01:29:37   swimming. It's chilly. You just put your feet in the water. Well, all of a sudden, the biggest wave

01:29:42   you've ever seen comes, takes the grandson, just wipes him out, washes him right out to sea, and

01:29:49   there she is all alone on the beach, and her grandson's just been washed out to sea. She can't

01:29:54   even see him, and she cries out to God. She says, "Oh, God, I pray to you, bring my grandson back.

01:30:00   I'll do anything for the rest of my life. I love him. He's the light of my life. He's my only

01:30:05   grandson." One more, out of the blue, another big wave like you've never seen, just comes right out,

01:30:11   washes the grandson right back up. He's soaking wet, but he's fine. Nothing's wrong with him.

01:30:15   Right at her feet, wave recedes. She looks up, and she says, "He had a hat!"

01:30:23   He was wearing a hat! My joke is we're celebrating by picking up some food tonight.

01:30:35   Guess what we're getting? H-O-P-R. You guys might have your fancy cheese sticks.

01:30:46   English pudding. What do they call it? Yorkshire pudding. Yorkshire pudding. You get the spinach.

01:30:52   You get the potato. You bring it all home. Does the creamed corn travel well? It travels well.

01:31:00   Yeah, we usually do a couple spinach and some creamed corn. They have a secret menu. You should

01:31:05   come back sometime in the aftertimes. Well, the creamed corn's not on the menu.

01:31:09   It's technically part of the secret menu, like getting it seared, like getting an end cut for

01:31:14   your dessert cut. Yeah, there's all kinds of little secret menu things. Well, enjoy.

01:31:19   Someday. Merlin, it's good to talk to you on better time. I know we've talked in between,

01:31:28   but it feels like bookend. Yeah. Thank you for having me. You can touch my finger anytime.