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June 28, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
37:31
Episode 121 - How to Avoid Angry Mobs of Democrats and Not Sell Past the Close
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Time Text
Akira.
He's got clout. Clout. Clout. Clout.
Join me.
Clout. Clout. Clout. Clout. Clout. Clout.
Here we are.
It's the beginning of another great day.
I hate this song. Shut up, Dale.
Join me. Sing along.
You know what. Okay, I freaking love this.
This is from Akira The Don.
A-K-I-R-A The Don.
D-O-N. You'll find him on Twitter and all over the internet, I guess.
It was nice enough to make this auto-tuned version of my theme song.
And I have to say...
When I first saw it, I was like, oh, this is going to be, you know, I'm not going to like this.
I actually can't stop listening to it.
It's really good. It's got levels to it.
It's pretty awesome.
Now, how many of you saw the video of Elaine Chao, I guess that's Mitch McConnell's wife, getting out of her or going to her car, and she is accosted by a number of angry leftists who corner her and yelled stuff like, you know, something, something, putting children in cages.
And on Twitter, somebody said, can you teach us what to do in that situation?
So imagine you're a Trump administration person or just some identified Trump supporter, and you get surrounded by angry, chanting leftists.
What do you do? Well, in this example, let's say in the unlikely event that you went out in public and you were not carrying, and you're unarmed.
It's just you. And let's say, for example, maybe even you're a woman.
And you're surrounded by, you know, bigger people.
And it's sort of dangerous.
What do you do? Well, I'm going to give you a suggestion that you could probably only use once.
Meaning that once they've heard it, it's not going to work as well the next time.
So you might, you know, a few of you might get to use it.
So you're in the middle. There are angry people saying, what do you do?
What do you do? You know, screw Trump.
And you turn to them and you say this.
Which one of you is in charge?
And they won't immediately answer because they'll still be in there yelling at you.
You say, are you in charge?
Which one of you guys is in charge?
That's it. Which one of you is in charge?
Because they'll immediately start dealing with that question.
And they're going to start wondering which one of them is in charge.
And the point of it is that you'd love to talk to whoever's in charge.
Say, which one of you is in charge?
And then, if they say, I'm in charge, I don't know if that's likely to happen, you say, what is it you're concerned about?
And they'll say something general like, you support a monster.
In particular, is there something bothering you today?
And then they'll say, you're supporting the guy who's putting children in cages.
And you say, supporting him?
I'm on your side. Are you the side that wants the children in cages?
I'm confused. They go, no, we don't want children in cages.
And you say, excellent, I'm on your side.
And they say, well, why are you supporting the guy who's putting them in cages?
And you say... We've always been putting them in cages.
All the administrations, we're trying to get them out of cages.
What are you trying to do? Well, you're supporting the guy who's putting them in cages.
No, I'm on your side.
How do we fix this?
Because the alternative to putting them in cages is that they might be endangered even more.
Was that the choice you select?
Do you want them more endangered or less endangered?
Because I'm on the less endangered side.
Which side are you on?
All right. Now, have you seen...
I'm changing topics a bit here...
Did you see, probably many of you saw the video of Erin Burnett interviewing, I don't know who it was, but somebody...
Here, explain this.
You probably saw this. Angela Rye.
Watch. Alright,
so Angela Rye just claimed that Chuck Schumer is racist because he did not agree with Maxine Waters' approach to dealing with Trump.
Now, You have to watch this video on your own and when you watch it, don't look at the people who are talking.
Look only at Erin Burnett in the middle and watch her try to keep an objective face when she hates people on both sides of her.
She doesn't agree to either side.
But it's more hilarious because the person who's probably closer to her own preferences is doing such a bad job of supporting her side that her face is like...
But that's not why I'm showing you this.
I want to give you a lesson in how not to sell past the close.
Have you ever heard of that term?
Selling past the close?
It's one of the big mistakes you can make in persuasion.
In persuasion, once you're done selling, stop talking.
Because anything you say after the sale is closed might undo the sale.
Alright? So, here, I don't know the name of the gentleman here.
Maybe you could tell me.
But watch him make the biggest mistake in persuasion of continuing to talk after he's just won.
He just won the conversation.
Because he just turned the opponent into attacking themselves for being racists.
Alright? All he had to do, Steve Cortez, all he had to do is stop talking.
Just say, thank you very much.
Thanks for having me. I'm out of here.
But he didn't. He kept talking.
So here's how you snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Donald Trump responded to that.
Come on, Aaron. There's time and time again we can look at Donald Trump's tweets.
He's intimidated by Jamel Hill.
He's intimidated by Frederica Wilson.
He's intimidated by Maxine Waters.
Overwhelmingly and disproportionately so, it has everything to do with race.
So far, Steve has won, right?
He's won. Stop talking, Steve.
Don't say anything, Steve.
No, don't say anything. You won.
You won, Steve. Stop. Stop right now.
As a Hispanic and as a minority, I will tell you that Donald Trump not only has our best interests at heart, but has absolutely zero, zero...
Okay, that's good so far.
Stop! Stop!
Stop! Okay, that's good, that's good.
Stop!
Stop!
Oh!
...women who support Donald Trump, which I find very interesting.
So, a lot of thuggery...
Oh, you went thuggery.
He said thuggery.
Have you ever seen anybody win so hard and pull a defeat out of the jaws of victory?
Now, I don't believe that the people who use the word thug are necessarily thinking in racial terms.
Some of them probably are. I think there's something to that.
The whole use of thug...
I buy into it a little bit that some people who use it in some contexts are thinking in racial terms.
Maybe not explicitly, but it might be showing a little bit of bigotry.
I don't think everybody who uses the word is thinking in racial terms because it's a word.
It's sort of a standard word.
And I don't think that Steve was using it in a racial sense.
I think he was using it in the sense of, you know, let's be nice instead of Acting like, well, I'm not even going to use the word.
So don't do what he did.
He won that so hard, and all he had to do was say, thank you, good night.
But it didn't go that way.
All right. What's a synonym for thug that doesn't have a racist?
I don't know. I mean, part of the reason might be that there are not...
Perfect synonyms for that.
So I'd stay away from it entirely.
Goon. Somebody said goons.
Hoodlums. Hooligans.
Bullies. Oh, bullies.
Bullies would be good. So...
We talked about the video in which the montage of Democrats acting badly was put together as a GOP ad.
And I'm wondering if someday somebody is going to put together the two movies.
Here's a movie I'd love to see.
I haven't thought this through, so it's not a recommendation, but just playing this in my mind.
Imagine, if you will, a GOP ad.
In which you show a tale of two movies.
One movie It's people who are enjoying the prosperity and feeling safer, you know, and talking about, oh my God, you know, life's good, business is up, my confidence is high, show a couple of charts of things going right.
You know, that's sort of the good movie.
You know, North Korea is going right, etc.
And then you show the other movie of people screaming after the election and their movie is off the hook and everything's bad.
But here's what you do.
You're waiting for the clever part?
You make the good movie, the people who are doing well, 100% minorities and women.
Just 100% minorities and women.
You don't make that the point.
You just have a lot of minorities and women.
Because there's no reason there has to be a white person in your video, right?
There's no rule that says you've got to throw a white person in there.
And... Just put a bunch of, you know, whole different cross-section of America saying, oh, I got a job, things are going great, I really love how things are going.
Then show the bad one, where you've got the people who are literally screaming at the sky, and make them all white.
Now, of course, neither of these is an accurate picture of the world, but that's what makes it a campaign ad, right?
It's not trying to be accurate.
But the subliminal power of that would be pretty powerful.
Somebody said to repeat it. So I'm saying in a campaign ad that just showed the two movies we're experiencing, one where everything's going well, one where everything seems to be, they're imagining dark things happening that aren't actually happening.
But you make all the people who are having a good time, minorities and women, and all the people who are screaming at the sky, a bunch of white people.
That's it. That's the whole ad.
You know, join our movie.
And by simply having no white people in the good movie, you make everybody talk about it.
It's like, how manipulative is this that they didn't put all those white faces over there?
And they'll be arguing about the wrong thing, because although it would be transparently persuasive, it would still work.
There's no reason that the good movie has to have a white face in it.
There's no reason. All right.
Is it time for another simultaneous sip?
I think it is. I think it is.
So this TDS problem seems to be bigger than ever.
And I want to give you a little bit of optimism of the kind you don't expect.
That's the best kind.
Here's something that is generally true that seems generally false.
It's something that's quite often true but almost always seems like it's not true.
And it's this. It's always darkest before the dawn.
Now that's an old saying, and until you actually see how many times that's true, it can be misleading.
Because you think, my goodness, everything's getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse.
Well, tomorrow should be worse too, and then we're all dead.
But you have to hit bottom before you can turn around.
And Take, for example, alcoholics.
If you've never been around an alcoholic, and you see an alcoholic heading for the bottom, you know, they're losing their friends, they're losing their job, and you say to them, stop, stop going down, stop going down, because you'll go down until you die.
And you'll be scared to death, which is of course what gives the alcoholic or the addict their power.
Because they know that you're going to help them before they'll help themselves and then you've got this sick relationship.
If you've been around alcoholics and addicts, which unfortunately I have plenty of experience being around them, you know that the only way they get out, two ways they get out, but both of them go through the bottom.
They hit the bottom and they keep going and then they just die.
And then they escape. Escape a bad life, apparently.
Or they get to the bottom and they decide to turn themselves around.
But they have to hit bottom.
If they don't hit bottom, they can't improve.
Take, for example, North Korea.
North Korea looked like it was at its worst point right before it went aggressively to its best point.
If you were a Trump supporter on election morning, things look worse than they could possibly look.
The Access Hollywood tape had recently dropped.
The poll said he didn't have a chance.
It was the darkest moment for the Trump supporter right before he won.
And so you can see lots of examples where it seems doomed Right before things improve, and it's not a coincidence.
It's not just luck that you get saved at the last moment.
It's because the last moment is so dire that things change.
What happened with the children in cages?
It used to be a little bit terrible, meaning that there were children in cages in the Obama administration, but it wasn't the worst they could get.
Then the number of families coming through increased, and it reached the worst it could get.
The people on the wrong movie said, my God, it keeps getting worse.
Some children in cages under Obama.
More children in cages under Trump.
Therefore, we must be heading toward full concentration camps.
It seemed as dark as it could get.
Until... The media said, hey, children in cages.
And the government said, whoa, that's unacceptable to the public.
We work for the public.
We're going to change that.
Now, I think in that story, there's a resource constraint that is always ignored.
So nobody talks about the fact that everybody wants kids and families to stay together.
We just didn't have the resources.
And the alternative was even worse.
By the way, don't want to get sidetracked on that.
So here we find ourselves in what looks like the worst situation, which is the left is just crazy, angry, emotional, they're beside themselves.
And the right is literally afraid to go out in public.
Afraid to go out in public.
I've told you I have one public appearance in my schedule for the entire year, and it's sort of a special case.
But I'm worried about it.
I'm worried about it.
And I'm thinking about hiring security, just in case.
So my point is, it seems like this is the darkest time and society is going to break apart I don't think so.
And here's why.
Because I think that for the people in the Trump derangement syndrome, there are two forces that are happening.
One is their movie keeps getting worse and worse, while the country keeps getting better and better.
So we're very close to the following things happening.
Very close to having a good North Korea.
ISIS hasn't bothered us.
We haven't had a terrorist attack, thank goodness.
Knock on wood, in the Trump administration, I don't think so.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
The economy's zooming, jobs are good.
And the big problem, of course, is that For the people on the left is they don't like the Supreme Court picks.
I think that's going to be less of a problem than they think.
And there's another wild card, which is Iran.
Iran's economy is so anemic right now and so on the edge and their local population is getting so restless that the odds of a good outcome there, meaning good for peace, and I hope good for Iran.
Isn't the problem with Iran the weirdest problem?
Because, correct me if I'm wrong, but Americans and even Israelis, I think, What's best for the Iranian people?
Wouldn't you say that's almost universally true?
There are very few people, I don't know anybody really, who's got a problem with Iranian people.
So we're at the brink of war with people we kind of like.
Has that ever happened before?
I mean, don't you have to sort of demonize each other's people?
It's not enough to demonize the governments.
You know, everybody demonizes their government.
But we kind of like each other.
Iranians are kind of cool, right?
The people. I don't know where you live.
If you've had much contact with people from Iran, I have.
I've had lots. And to a person, they're awesome.
Obviously, you can't make a generalization that big about all people, but as a cultural statement, Iranians are pretty awesome people.
That's my experience.
So, here's what I think.
I think that while the left is in the depths of their hitting bottom...
That they do have to hit bottom.
In other words, they're very close to bottoming out.
And they're either going to have to either kill themselves, we hope that doesn't happen, or cause a revolution to get the energy out, or change how they're thinking.
Like an alcoholic. An alcoholic's situation doesn't get better when they change their mind.
It gets worse. Until it's so bad that they can't live in their own head anymore.
And they change their mind and then they have a chance to get out of it.
The anti-Trumpers might have to hit bottom.
And here's the optimism.
This Supreme Court stuff and the children in cages stuff is going to feel like the bottom.
And watching their own side go out and harass people is going to look like the bottom as well.
They still need an escape hatch.
They need a fake because.
They need something to look at where they can say, all right, I didn't like this, but I'm going to put up with it.
Just some escape hatch, a mental escape hatch.
And we don't see what that would be yet.
But let me, yeah, we'll work on creating one.
If we get a good result with Iran, and our trade negotiations eventually start either settling down, or we get a good result, or even some improvement, it's going to be hard to maintain the other story.
Now, I said the other day, I think I said a week ago, before we knew about the Supreme Court change, I said that if Trump decided to voluntarily just resign the job last week, he would already be the most consequential president maybe ever.
Certainly in modern times, but maybe ever.
Because of what he's already done.
He wouldn't have to do anything for the rest of his term.
And if you just added up the things he's done, you know, North Korea, I'm thinking trade agreements will eventually settle down or be a little bit better for us at minimum.
Just the stuff he's done.
Then he got another Supreme Court pick.
Now this one, because it was a swing vote, is not as big as it could be, but the odds of him still being in office when Ruth Bader Ginsburg decides she's served her last are pretty high.
So he's certainly going to be among the most effective consequential presidents of all time.
There's just no way around that.
You might not like it, But there's no way around the fact that he's getting what his supporters want.
Now, so let me suggest a way out.
Now, I think President Trump knows this, what I'm going to say.
And I say that he knows this because I've said all along that his grasp of branding and persuasion is extraordinary.
And so this is something that would be somewhat obvious to him.
And he may be waiting for the perfect situation.
And the perfect situation is he has to find something to do That violates the left's movie so aggressively that they can't hold it anymore.
In other words, something that is so un-Hitlerish, un-bigoted, that there's no way you can hold in your mind any way that this could have happened unless you were wrong the whole time.
Now, you might have said to yourself, okay, when he did the pardons of, you know, the pardons of, you know, Jack Johnson, is that the right name?
And Alice, Alice, whoever she was, the grandmother.
And you say to yourself, well, there he is pardoning black folks that he didn't need to.
Just wasn't any reason.
But those are sort of one-offs, right?
So imagine if the president did something with prison reform that was just unambiguously good for black people.
Then imagine that it's way too early to talk about a pardon for Peter Strzok.
We need to hear what everybody has to say, right?
But something as big as that It would be mind-blowing.
Imagine, if you will, this is just a mental experiment.
No matter what you think of Peter Strzok and what he did or did not do, just imagine, if you will, that the president says, Trump derangement syndrome is the cause of this, and I'm going to help you get out of it.
Did we lose the connection here?
If you lost a connection, you might have to get out and get back in.
Alright, so I think we're back.
So imagine, if you will, that the President says, I'm going to help you out of Trump derangement syndrome.
You think I'm an authoritarian monster, so I'm going to do something that shows you I'm not.
I'm going to understand that the country went a little bit crazy, and I'm going to give you a break for that because it didn't look like people were operating in their correct mind.
And it would be consistent with his entire approach, which is that the media is brainwashing the people Right?
The president's problem with the media is not that they're just fake news.
That's not the problem.
The problem is because they're fake news, it has brainwashed half the country into thinking that a monster is running the country and they're all in immediate danger.
He could be completely consistent with his entire messaging by saying, the media has put you in a situation that's no good for you, it's no good for me, and it's no good for the country.
Let me break the bubble for you.
I pardon Peter Strzok.
Now, I'm not saying you should pardon Peter Strzok.
This is just an example.
But I'm talking about something that would be as dramatic as that that just couldn't be explained If the other movie is true.
It just has to violate that other movie so aggressively.
Somehow. You have to pick your right shot.
The Peter Strzok thing might not be the right shot.
But somehow. You've got to find something.
Pardon Hillary. I would.
But you need her to be accused of something that could stick before your partner.
You are brainwashed, Scott.
Am I brainwashed?
Well, those of you who say you don't see him pardoning Strzok, I agree with you.
I think the odds of that are vanishingly small.
So I use it just as an example of how you need to break the bubble by doing something so unexpected it couldn't fit in that movie at all.
It just breaks the bubble. But he's got to pick his shots.
Yeah, and I wonder if the president is actually talking about, you know, urban...
I wonder how much energy he's putting into urban revitalization and stuff.
By the way, I want to give you a little teaser, a little teaser, those of you who are nice enough to stay out here long enough.
I want to get you thinking about a way you can help the country.
And here it is.
Sometime soon, maybe in the next few weeks, not sure about the timing, I'm going to tell you where to go in terms of a website to make suggestions for what to do with the urban blight that's been cleared by Bill Pulte's Blight Authority, Urban Blight Authority, the Blight Authority, I guess.
And so we've got all these urban areas that have cleared fields that used to have run-down buildings filled with crime and drugs and stuff.
And now they're sort of green fields, if you could call it that.
And what do you do with them?
What would be the best thing for the people who are in these urban situations?
How do you approach this in the most efficient, best way to do it?
The thing that would be least interesting would be to build high-end housing and gentrify it.
Some of that might happen, but I'd be looking for more interesting ideas that directly help the urban folks either get educated, get jobs, get trained.
Have a reasonable place to live.
So I'd be looking for things like how do you organize things?
How do you build? What methods?
What processes? How do you put it in one place so that you turn a bad situation, the urban situation, into a better situation?
So start thinking about that.
As you're scouring your environment, you may see things and say, oh, that would be a good technology.
It might be a way to inexpensively build.
It might be a way to design a home that's inexpensive and meets all your needs.
It might be a way to feed people.
You've heard the phrase of food equality.
It's a big deal.
If you feed people right, you get better outcomes than if they don't have the right nutrition.
They literally act differently depending on the nutrition.
So there are a whole bunch of things that we could do better and right.
And, you know, I like the thought of the urban areas that are hardest hit.
Being the first to get the advantages of our best thinking.
Because that's the only place you've got a big empty field surrounded by a lot of people that have a lot of needs.
So I'll tell you more later.
Not sure exactly when, but pretty soon.
Where to go and post those ideas or pictures or suggestions.
We'll just start... I call this the moth to flame approach.
So we're going to create a little flame, which is bringing people's attention to these opportunities in the urban areas.
And we're going to attract all the thoughts.
There are probably companies already who already are up and running that make things that would be perfect for this situation.
And they're invited to.
Tell us what your product is.
Give us a link. Let's see all the great ideas in one place.
Once we get them all in one place, everybody in that one place will be able to see each other.
There may be people who have money to invest, and they can list themselves there.
There may be people who have an idea, have already built an inexpensive kind of home.
Maybe a tech company who wants to build something as a showcase.
Maybe there's an indoor farm.
Maybe there's somebody who wants to build a Maybe there's an energy company that wants to highlight an entire community that has as close to zero energy use as possible.
So think about all these things that there are big companies, people with money, who would like to try stuff at the very same time that you have the best possible situation for trying stuff.
You're going to get a lot of attention.
The land itself is going to be close to free and available.
And it would be in areas that have a lot of people around because people are good.
All right, so just be thinking about this.
And I guarantee you...
That your ideas, if they're good, will get seen by the right people.
And you could be part of the idea portfolio for taking a bite out of the urban problem.
All right. I think that's about it for now.
I'm going to leave you on that happy thought.
But here's what I think.
I think that the summer of love is still on.
At the same time, I think that the bad feelings are probably reaching their peak.
I don't think there's any chance it'll turn into a physical revolution for a variety of reasons.
Here are the reasons.
One, we are really well socialized in this country for the Constitution and protecting the Republic.
So our instincts and our socialization, you could call it brainwashing if you want, that would be the negative way to say it, is so strongly, you know, America as a country that you would need a lot of leftists complaining before anything changed about the solidness of the Republic.
So I think we're very solid.
And the second thing is that the people who have the most power in the guns, the Republicans, have shown absolutely no inclination to use that kind of firepower.
And I'm pretty sure that it would take a lot to get anybody to unholster.
You're seeing the people who have the guns on the right are the people who are also the most radical about when to not use them.
They're pretty radical about gun safety.
They're radical about keeping their guns, but they're just as radical about training, gun lock, gun safe, don't take it out until you're ready to kill somebody.
So I'm not worried about the right losing its shit.
Because the right has pretty good control of its shit right now.
Say what you will about both sides.
Say what you will about gun owners.
But they're a very controlled by choice set of people who understand the power of the handgun or any gun.
They understand the power of it, which is exactly why they're so aggressive about keeping it locked up.
They're the keep it locked up group.
I think that the odds of this turning ugly are actually very, very low.
So I would look for a bottoming out this summer, I hope.
And by the end of the summer, you may see things going so well that it just surprises you.
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