CHAPTER 95

Author: What did Manny say?

Louis CK: He said, ‘You’re an idiot’. I said, ‘Why do you just say I’m an idiot?’ And he said, ‘Did you hear Bush say that we’re doing it for oil? Did he say that?’ I said, ‘No, of course he didn’t’. He said, ‘Then you’re just a fucking idiot because can you read inside of a person’s mind? Is this something that you know about him?’ ‘No, but look, he has an oil company and he invaded an oil country.’ He’s like, ‘Do you hear what an asshole and an idiot you sound like? You don’t know these things.’ He said, ‘Limit yourself to the things that you know about this person and things that he has represented. You don’t think you can argue there? You don’t think that you have enough?’ So I refocused my argument and I remembered that Bush had said that he was doing this war to promote democracy and the thing was that they weren’t letting any parties run in the elections really that they didn’t like, so I said, ‘I think it’s bullshit that it’s for democracy.’ And he said, ‘There you have an argument.’

Author: Right. So this was probably 2003?

Louis: So I think it was Bush, the second Bush perpetrating the war after 9/11, I think that’s what it was. But it informed my thinking because you can just drink a beer and talk shit, but if you really want to get to the bottom of something you engage with what people are actually saying, and it’s usually enough. And I wish people thought like that more. People create a fake person out of somebody like a politician, they create their own image, and then they argue with that, and it gets you nowhere. So anyway. And you could extrapolate that to a lot of things, not just politics. Having a little more civility to your thinking by dealing with reality.