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Oct. 11, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:01:46
Episode 255 Scott Adams: Trump’s Moral Code, the Two Movies, Angry Dems, Walls
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Hey everybody!
Hey Scott, Joanne, you're quick.
Eric, Andrew, come on in here.
Jana, Donna, Badger, Valentine, Olga, Fuzzy, Clayton, come on in here.
It's time for the simultaneous sip.
Grab your mug, your cup, your chalice.
Fill it with your beverage of choice.
Coffee is the best.
And it's time for the simultaneous sip.
Join me. So, I saw in the news that there were two fairly large busts of fentanyl on the border, and what caught my attention was that both of them were caught by dogs.
So, drug-sniffing dogs apparently can sniff out fentanyl really easily.
I didn't know that, but there's a downside because apparently a lot of dogs are overdosing.
So drug-sniffing dogs are actually dying from over-sniffing fentanyl.
It's that deadly. Now, I have a question.
How hard is it to train a dog, let's say your family dog, If you had a regular family dog who was relatively trainable, could you train it to sniff fentanyl?
How hard would that be?
Because it seems as though any family that has a teenager would be well served if the parents would say, alright, our kid's 12 now, let's take the family dog in and train it to sniff fentanyl, just in case.
And then just have the dog do its thing.
And every once in a while, the dog's going to go, I smell fentanyl.
I'm pretty sure when you train a dog, it does that.
Just like that. Where's the fentanyl?
That could be a great aid for parents.
But I have a question.
Is that a good idea?
How hard is it to train a A dog to sniff fentanyl.
Could you do that with any dog?
Any dog that responds to treats and can be trained for anything.
Could you do it? I don't know.
And so I wish that I could use my company's app, Interface by WenHub, to ask that.
I just went on there to see if there were any dog trainers.
So this is an app where you can go on and get some expert advice.
And there are two dog trainers.
But if there's somebody who wants to get on the app before I'm done here and has expertise in training dogs specifically for sniffing drugs, Put in a keyword that says sniffing or drugs and dog, and I will look for you before the end of this Periscope.
See what I was talking about, about using my company's app to fill in those blanks?
Because that's either a really good idea, training the family dog to smell, to sniff out drugs with the teen's room, or it's not.
It might be a bad idea.
But there's no way to Google that, I'm guessing.
It's probably un-Google-able.
You'd actually have to talk to somebody who does that to even know.
So, let's go on.
Here's one of my favorite topics.
Oh, I'm going to do this after this.
Most of you have seen all the jabbering about the CNN panelists, Bakari Sellers, I talked about it too, on Don Lemon's show the night before last, in which Bakari Sellers and I think there was at least one African-American woman on there who were making negative comments about Kanye.
And the folks on the right, the Republicans and Trump supporters and conservatives, are making a lot of noise about the fact that I think Bakari was the one who said what was his statement.
He said, and he was, I think he was quoting somebody else, might have been Chris Rock or something.
So he said this sentence that you would not normally say on television, which is, this is what happens when Negroes don't read, right?
So this is coming from an African-American man on television.
This is not me saying that.
And so the conservatives are saying, racist, how can you say racist things?
Racist, racist, how can you call him a token?
Racist, racist, racist.
To which I say, what?
When did we start calling black people racist for saying things about other black people?
What? Let's be at least a little bit consistent about what even racism means.
If we're calling our own people, if you're calling a black person racist for talking about another black person who's not, in their opinion, being un-racist enough, It doesn't even make sense.
So here's a rule that I would propose.
That black people insulting each other, white people should not label that as racist.
It just feels silly.
Now, there are racists.
They exist. And when they get labeled as racist by somebody who's offended, you know, somebody who's in the target group especially, that's fair game.
And if a white person calls another white person racist because that other white person was saying something bad about black people, well, that's fair.
But it's kind of weird for white people to accuse a black guy of saying racist things about another black guy, specifically because he's complaining that the other black guy is siding too much with who they think are racist.
I mean, none of it makes sense.
So I think that's a totally wrong attack.
It just doesn't feel right on any level.
Attack from the right, that is.
But what was slightly, not even slightly, but more, Valid was that they were also making fun of Kanye for his past admitted mental issues.
I don't know how to label them, but Kanye himself has talked about being checked into some health facilities for some mental problems briefly at one point.
And I saw Glenn Greenwald did a tweet I retweeted that said, that's the bad part.
Discounting somebody because they once had an admitted medical problem that they got help for, that's pretty low.
Especially since a third of the people watching CNN at any minute probably have had some kind of mental problems, some kind of anxiety, some kind of phobia, some kind of PTSD, some kind of something.
So, that was actually a good criticism, because it's not who we want to be, right?
We don't really want to be the kind who say, you had that problem one time in the past, therefore you can never do anything.
So, we don't want to be those people.
Alright, let's talk about the two-movie thing.
I saw something that was just flat-out hilarious accidentally yesterday on The Five.
So it's my favorite show on Fox News, The Five.
They have Juan Williams, who plays the part of the opposition on the left, and the other panelists, the other four, are more likely to be pro-Trump, conservative types, or at least leading that way.
So you have that setup.
So it's quite normal that on that show you'd hear two versions of reality, one from Juan and one from the other panelists.
But yesterday I heard two versions of reality that are so stark that it was amazing.
And here's how it goes.
They were talking about universal health care.
And I forget who, it might have been Jesse Waters, said that the estimate for universal health care would be $32 trillion.
So one version of reality is that universal health care in this country would cost $32 trillion.
$32 trillion!
And then Juan Williams said, well, no, I think actually it would save money.
Now, there is a bit of a difference between $32 trillion and, no, actually it would save money.
Those are not even the same planet.
Now, I believe that the $32 trillion is way overstated because just the way it was calculated, and I believe the it's going to save money is ridiculous and overstated, and neither of those are true, I don't think.
I'm no expert on this, but my suspicion is that neither of those extremes is really accurate.
But those are the two extremes that are, I would think, maybe the average of the viewers of, say, CNN and the average of the viewers of Fox probably embrace those two extremes as the truth.
Now, how much further apart could you get on agreeing what reality looks like than something that's greater than $32 trillion, right?
Because one says it's going to be $32 trillion plus, a cost, and the other says it's not even going to be any cost.
It's going to be saving money.
So what's that? Maybe, let's say, a $35 trillion difference in reality?
$35 trillion in reality.
I don't know how to overemphasize that or emphasize it enough.
That's as big a difference as you can get in what the world actually is.
Now, you think that's rare?
It is not rare.
We have exactly the same situation with climate change.
So you've got one side saying climate change is, you know, it's the biggest problem and if we don't deal with it to the tune of trillions of dollars, the world will fall apart.
And the other side says, no, it would be better to not deal with it and just increase your economy, save your money, and use it to help people who are hurt by climate change.
But the difference in the analysis Is trillions.
Trillions! That's the difference in what people think those two paths would be.
Trillions of dollars of difference.
These are not the same planet.
So I've just never seen such a stark example of the two movies playing on one screen.
Because we're largely, we think we're watching the same information.
But somebody's seeing $32 trillion and somebody's saying, well, I think that'll save money.
Crazy. Crazy stuff.
All right. I saw New Gingrich tweeted, I think, yesterday...
That we need to build the wall.
There's a proposal by, I guess McCarthy has a proposal to fully fund the wall.
And Newt was listing some of the benefits of the wall and he listed that too much fentanyl and opioids are getting in across the border.
Now, there are only a few people in the world That when they disagree with my existing opinion, I will actually stop cold and say, uh-oh, I better change my opinion.
You know that Alan Dershowitz is one.
If his opinion is different from mine, I just stop cold and go, okay, what am I doing wrong?
Why is my opinion different from the smartest guy on TV? But Newt Gingrich is one of those people for me, too.
So when he and I disagree...
On anything, I just stop and I go, okay, what am I doing wrong here?
If Newt's got a different opinion and it's not obviously, let's say it's not obviously just a political opinion, if it's a logic opinion or maybe a strategy difference and Newt's on the other side, I stop and I go, okay, what the hell am I doing wrong?
Why am I on a different Different opinion than Newt.
And one of his opinions that did that with me today was that building the wall would somehow help with the fentanyl stuff.
Now I understand that a lot of fentanyl is coming across the border.
And therefore, the better your border security is in general, you would think that that would help.
If you had more dogs at the border, you could check more cars.
It makes sense that it would help.
But on the other hand, fentanyl is really small.
It feels like the one thing you could get across the border easier than just about anything else.
Easier than weed. Probably easier than cocaine, you know, even just the size of it.
So no matter how tall that wall is, all you have to do is, you know, put it on a rope at the end of a, you know, put it in a sock at the end of a rope and swing it around a few times and toss it over the wall to your friend who's standing on the other side.
So I don't know how the wall actually stops the fentanyl in that case.
Now, I'm going to make a distinction between that and my call for executing the Chinese lab owners who are creating the fentanyl in China and sending it here.
Executing the people that we can identify as actually being behind it in China is not just about stopping the supply.
It might. It might slow down the supply.
That would be great. But it's more about making sure that people know that those people need to be killed because they have killed so many Americans.
It's a lot about the message.
So when I say let's kill the Chinese executives or let's insist China kill them, because China does like to execute their drug dealers, The benefits of that are the message it sends about the importance of stopping fentanyl, and we're just using their lives as part of the message.
Because they've sacrificed their lives, they're mass murderers.
If somebody is literally a mass murderer, responsible for possibly thousands or tens of thousands of deaths in the United States, I have no hesitation to kill them if we can get some benefit out of it.
And the message would be the benefit as well as, it might disrupt the flow a little bit, but it's the message I want.
The wall, on the other hand, does send a message, but I don't know that it actually stops any fentanyl from coming in.
That's a slightly different question.
So yes on executing Chinese executives of drug labs that are creating fentanyl illegally, because first of all it's illegal.
But whether the wall stops fentanyl, I would like to hear from somebody who knows more about that.
If only somebody had an app in which you could talk to somebody who's actually involved in drug interdiction at the border.
An expert, perhaps, who could be on the interface by WinHub app.
All right. The question is, should borders be respected?
Well, yeah, those are separate questions.
There's an article that I tweeted this morning, so you can find it in my Twitter feed this morning, from a Democrat who has switched from anti-Trump to pro-Trump.
And you really have to read it.
First of all, it's really well written, so it's worth your time just for a good read.
But secondly, to see...
To see that mental transition from anti-Trump to, uh oh, I think I've been taken.
And it felt like it was somebody who was getting out of their cognitive bubble.
I think that's actually the phrase he used in there.
But you have to read it.
It's really well written.
I'm a little bit biased because after I read it, I thought, wow, that's really well written.
And then I saw the author tweeted that he had just finished Wynn Bigley, and I think that had some influence on him.
Oh, let me ask you this.
How many of you tried my technique to get at least one person to register?
How many of you tried my technique?
And tell me if it worked.
Tell me in the comments right now, have any of you used my technique to get, somebody got a six?
I did. I was halfway through when your Periscope started.
I registered three.
I did. I've got four.
Holy cow. Oh my God.
Go to my Twitter feed and you'll see the article.
It's one of the tweets I did this morning.
I'll repeat my technique, but look at all the people who said they used the technique and they registered multiple people.
I was saying just try one, but it looks like people got anywhere from two to six people registered already.
Alright, here's the technique.
The technique is you pick out somebody who you think would vote your way, somebody who's philosophically like you and is likely to vote the way you would like them to vote.
The only thing is you don't think they're going to vote.
So you want to see if you can influence them to vote and here's the technique.
You want to simplify the process to the smallest step and then offer to help them with the smallest step.
The smallest step is to register online and there's just a website and it takes about 60 seconds.
So if you have never registered before, or you haven't registered in a while, or you're thinking about it and putting it off, it helps to say, hey, have you registered?
It only takes 60 seconds, and here's the link.
Just click it. Just click it, and in one minute you'll be registered.
And then people think, Oh, but then at that day, I've got to get to work early, there's traffic, I've got to get to the polling place.
That's a lot of work.
So you take all that away from their mind and you say, oh, just check the box that says you want to vote by mail.
You know, if there's still time, right?
There's only a little time left.
But just check the box that says you'll vote by mail.
So here's the link.
Click it. 60 seconds to register, roughly.
And they'll just mail you a ballot.
And then the person's going to be thinking, well, I don't want to learn about all these topics.
I don't want to do a lot of homework.
And then you say, you don't have to vote on everything.
You can just vote on the things that you do understand and you care about.
You just leave the others blank.
So the process is, you take this big thing that in people's minds seems hard.
It's like, how do I register?
Do I have to go to the post office?
Do I have to wait for something?
Does it take a long time?
Is there some downside to this?
Do I have to drive to the polls?
It just seems like a lot.
So you want to shrink it down to the smallest thing.
Here's an email with the link.
Click it. In 60 seconds you'll be registered.
Check the box that says you want to vote by mail.
It just shows up in your mailbox.
And don't have to vote for anything you don't know about.
And by the way, I'll help you.
Let's vote during lunch, because I'm going to do it by mail too.
So we'll just go to lunch, and I'll help you fill it out if you want.
So if you use that process, you've made it sort of a social process, yeah, let's fill it out together.
I'll help you out. You've simplified it in people's heads to the smallest step, and then you've provided the step.
Click this link. You've chunked it down to the smallest bit.
That's the thing. So that's the technique.
But you want to start with somebody who's sort of pre-sold.
Someone who would vote.
They're busy.
They would vote, but they don't really know how.
They don't feel like figuring it out.
They would vote, but they're afraid that it's sort of a bigger process.
They don't want to bite it off.
So it's important to pick your targets carefully.
As people who would like to vote.
And they're halfway there, they just don't know how to get the other half.
So you saw how many people in the comments said that they actually successfully got somebody to vote.
So instead of standing on the street corner with a clipboard, you just find one person you know.
And you say, hey, here's a link.
All right. Here's another funny thing.
So the Democrats, as you have noted in the news, have become far more aggressive.
So they're talking about harassing Republican leaders in public.
They're yelling in the streets.
They're talking about impeachment.
They're stopping at nothing.
They're saying bad things about people.
They're using more provocative rhetoric, as we just talked about earlier.
And it seems that they've figured out that what they need to do is be more like Trump.
I'm not wrong about that, right?
The Democrats have decided to be more like Trump because they believe that his sort of impolite, let's say impolite, aggressive approach is the secret to why he won.
Is it my imagination or have they completely misanalyzed why Trump won?
They seem to think that the reason he won is the only part they can see is that he was provocative and insulting.
It's like they've looked at this big complicated bag of persuasion and policies and hard work and energy and And having the right message, understanding the real feeling in the country, adding the business perspective, making America great again.
All of these things.
There's a lot of stuff, right?
A lot of variables. But they looked into this whole world of variables, and they did the only losing thing you could do.
Well, probably isn't the only losing thing, but it's the most losing-est.
It's total loser think.
They looked at all these good things that Trump did that are unambiguously good things like understanding the voters better, playing a better strategic game in terms of what states he goes to, having rallies, using social media, coming up with great nicknames that are really quite scientifically cleverly created, the branding. I mean, you could go on and on.
About the things that Trump does well.
Everything from the way he tweets, which is frankly genius, and historians will treat it that way.
And they figured out the only thing that people don't like about him and decided to copy that.
Am I wrong that they decided to copy the only thing that even Trump supporters are uncomfortable with?
Which is the fact that it's a little risky and that it's a little aggressive.
Even the people who like Trump are a little uncomfortable with that stuff, right?
And so the Democrats who picked the only thing Trump does That is not the important part and decided to copy it.
It's hilariously incompetent.
In fact, you can see it backfiring all over the place.
Because what is it we're talking about when we talk about the Democrats now?
We're talking about their bad behavior.
Now, when we're talking about Trump...
We were talking about his wall.
We were talking about what he wanted to do for the economy, what he wanted to do with North Korea, etc.
When you talk about Trump, you're talking about policies and stuff.
But when we're talking about the Democrats, we're just talking about their bad attitudes and the fact that they're whiny and provocative and insulting.
It's all of the bad stuff with none of the good stuff.
There's no good stuff in there.
Now, there is an exception.
You're not going to like this.
You're not going to like this at all.
But I'm going to be consistent.
I like to be consistent, no matter which side I'm talking about.
There is something that the Democrats are doing that is pure Trump smartness.
Do you know what it is?
It's healthcare. So the Democrats went from the bad version of trying to sell healthcare is something like Obamacare.
Trying to resell Obamacare to a country that couldn't get it down their gullet last time would have been sort of the old way the Democrats would act.
It's like, ah, Obamacare, it's got all these problems, why do we want more of that?
It's sort of a halfway, I don't know, committee-driven monster of policies that nobody even really understands.
But, did they do that?
No. They went far to the left.
They went full Bernie, and by the way, credit Bernie for being the first one to be onto this.
Their first ask is so aggressive that in all likelihood, they're going to get something closer to it than if they had settled for arguing for Obamacare minor fixes.
So, Be aware that when the Democrats go way to the left and say, how about we go fold a democratic socialist and let's have some government-sponsored health care.
Whether or not that's feasible or not feasible is far less important Then the question of whether it captures your attention and moves your thinking so far left that if they could guess something halfway to what they're talking about, it would be a big victory for their side.
So when you see the Democrats just picking up Trump's attitude and, let's say, combativeness, Just mindlessly picking that up.
They're just missing the whole point.
But when you see Octavia Cortez say, heck with Obamacare.
Let's go all the way to Bernie-like health care for everybody.
And again, let's credit Bernie for the one who made that a national conversation.
Have you seen the polls?
Of how much the public is interested in sort of a national single-payer health care.
The polls have really moved in that position.
Who did that?
That was Bernie.
That was Cortez.
And so, if we're going to talk about just persuasion, good job.
Good job on the healthcare stuff for the Democrats.
So they get an A+. The deep lefties, the leftiest of the lefties, get an A-plus in persuasion on healthcare because they have moved the dial.
They've really moved the dial, and they did it a smart way by asking for way more than the public thought should be asked for at this point.
That was the good move.
All right. Let's talk about...
The issue that I have been seeing a lot of, but you might be seeing less of it in the future, and that was the idea that Trump has no philosophy.
He has no moral, ethical core.
That Trump doesn't have a strategy or vision That's sort of a cohesive, philosophical binding that would predict everything that he's going to do or where our policies go or give the country a brand that's a philosophical, moral, ethical brand.
And people say, Trump doesn't have that.
He's impulsive. He's all over the place.
He doesn't know what he's doing.
And again, I've been watching the same movie, I thought, but it turns out I was just in the same theater, but I was watching a different movie happening.
And on my movie, Trump's philosophy, his ethics, and all that are so transparently obvious that I don't know how anybody could be confused.
And here's what he did.
He simply took two extra skill sets and combined it with government.
That's all he did.
The two extra skill sets are as follows.
Theater. Theater.
He understands.
When Trump said recently about Hillary Clinton that she doesn't get it and she never will, it's a comprehensive statement, but part of what she doesn't get is that the theater of Trump is intentional and it's functional.
That the things people thought were the unimportant part about Trump were actually a very important part.
He understands that bringing the show is government.
You have to bring the show.
That's why the rallies are important.
That's why the base is fired up.
That's why people got off the couch and voted.
He brought the show.
He understands that theater is a skill set which stacked upon government, as long as you don't have bad intentions, right?
As long as your intentions are good, that's a really important skill set to bring over.
So that's the first skill he introduced, more so than any other politician, far more so.
The second skill set he brought in was business.
He brought in an actual capitalist business perspective.
And you can see that in terms of Make America Great Again.
What does a capitalist do when competing with other companies?
The capitalist does not try to kill them.
The capitalist does not say, I hate your CEO. Nothing like that.
The capitalist says, that CEO of that other company, that's great.
I love that guy.
I'm going to compete as hard as I can.
And you know what? That other CEO should compete with me.
And if we all compete hard, we'll get somewhere.
But what we're not going to do is leave money on the table if we have negotiating leverage.
So the old way, the old political way is, well, we don't want to hurt our allies.
We don't want to ruffle any feathers.
We want to be good people.
We want to be diplomatic.
And all that stuff is good to a certain degree.
What Trump layered on top of that was capitalism.
In capitalism, if you have the negotiating leverage, you use it every time.
There are not situations where you have the leverage, you have the power to get a better deal, where you don't use it.
That's why he brought to the trade negotiations.
So Trump came in and said, what kind of deals are these?
We have all the power.
We have the biggest market, the biggest economy.
We have all the leverage.
And these are the deals we negotiated?
Why don't we negotiate deals like a capitalist?
And by the way, China, I have great respect for you.
North Korea, I have great respect for you.
Russia, I have great respect for you, but we are going to compete your asses off, and you should too.
The best thing that could happen is we're competing.
It's completely transparent.
We're telling you what we're doing.
We're not breaking any laws.
We're just using our market power.
And if you had market power, we would totally expect you to use it.
Why wouldn't you? So, to me, capitalism...
Is a very clear, philosophical, moral code.
You could not like it.
There are people who don't like it.
But I don't know how you could say it's not clear.
How is that not clear?
Trump has the clearest strategy, moral code that I've ever seen in government.
It's so completely unambiguous.
In any given situation, what would you expect?
I guess this is the test of a good moral code, a good ethical set, a good strategy.
The test of it is that anybody from the outside could predict how you're going to act.
Because being predictable has benefits in some areas.
In other areas, like military, you want to be unpredictable, perhaps.
And negotiating, sometimes you want to be unpredictable.
But in a general way, isn't it true that other countries know exactly what Trump would do?
Which is to say, if there's something that's good for the United States, it's completely legal, and it's doable, we're going to try to do it.
Just like any capitalist would.
So it seems to me it's completely clear.
Now you could argue that capitalism itself has flaws, it has sharp edges, not everybody wins, it's unambiguously bad for some members of society.
Those are all true.
But it's also true that nobody's come up with a better plan, right?
As soon as there's something better than capitalism, and by the way, I think that might be coming.
You know, the age of robots Might be an age in which capitalism the way we've understood it doesn't make sense anymore, but at the moment Nobody has a better plan.
So capitalism has, you know, I think I saw a statistic that half of the world is middle class or better, and we've never been at that level before, and capitalism got us there.
So as a moral framework, capitalism has lots of sharp edges, but nobody has a better idea, and that's sort of what Trump is bringing to the table.
And I've said before that Where Trump seems to be failing the fact checking more than normal politicians, that's also because he's coming from capitalism.
Capitalism sells.
Capitalists are just selling.
They're using hyperbole.
They're marketing. They're exaggerating how good their own stuff is, and they're exaggerating how poor the competition is.
If you just move that framework into a political context, well, the politicians are going to say, hey, that's a lie, that's a lie, that's a lie.
I keep telling you that he's directionally accurate, meaning that any time he doesn't pass the fact-checking, he's in at least the right side.
He's moving our opinions, our thinking, our energy in a productive way, and you can see that in everything he says.
And the examples being that if the president says the economy is doing great under his leadership, the fact-checkers may say, hey, wait, Obama set this up.
But it's still smart For Trump to say his leadership is causing these good things.
Why? Because capitalists understand that economies run on confidence, they run on psychology.
So Trump, understanding psychology, understanding capitalism, understanding business, is telling us consistently that he's part of the reason, the big part, a big part, maybe not the big part, but that he's a big part of why things are going well with the economy.
Whether that's exactly true or not is less important than the fact that it's exactly the right thing to say.
Because that's what makes the economy actually confident.
That's what makes people invest.
They're like, ah, we got good things.
We got this president. He's the right person.
Things are going well under him.
I'll invest. And then suddenly the economy is doing well.
So you're watching the president actually invest.
Persuade the economy into a higher level.
Just right in front of your eyes.
He's actually persuading the economy to a higher level.
And I'm positive that historians and economists of the future will describe it that way.
They will say that he did that and that that was something he brought to the process in a way that nobody had done it as well before.
Alright, so it's crazy to me that people say that the president doesn't have a clear strategy and moral code.
If you just think of it as starting with politics, which is nasty and ugly, layers on top of a theater, because theater is a really good tool for managing expectations, and expectations are what you have to manage for everything from negotiating to war to the economy.
All of the big things Are persuasion leverageable?
Persuasion is a big variable that moves those things.
So he moves those things and he brings capitalism and theater and adds it to politics and you've got a full system that is proven, has stood the test of time.
He doesn't have to invent anything.
Reagan is theater.
Good example. Somebody just said Reagan understood also how to bring the theater.
Good example.
Reagan brought the theater.
That is exactly right.
I would argue that Trump is a clearly higher level of theater than even Reagan, and Reagan was The best we'd seen, right?
Wouldn't you say? Wouldn't you say Reagan was the best we've seen until Trump in terms of bringing the theater and understanding it?
He didn't just bring theater.
He understood its value.
So when I say Reagan understood the value of bringing the theater, Trump understands the value of bringing the theater.
And then you hear that Trump says about Hillary Clinton, she doesn't get it and she never did.
Now it makes sense, right?
She never got that theater as a tool because she wasn't good at it.
So I think it makes sense that Hillary would not think that the theater was a legitimate part of the process because she isn't good at it.
So she discounts it.
JFK was theater.
Good example. Alright, thank you.
Yeah, JFK brought the theater too.
He brought the family. He brought the wife, the look, the Camelot.
He brought the theater.
And it made a difference, right?
It made people feel good.
It was a good time in the economy.
That's a good example too.
Bill Clinton, yes.
Bill Clinton was more...
Charismatic and popular and just one heck of a good speaker.
A great speaker, really.
But I wouldn't call it theater for Bill Clinton.
He was just charismatic and really good at being a politician, I would say.
Yeah, he played the saxophone, so he was a little bit out of the box, but not that much.
Romney didn't get it.
Exactly. Yes, Romney did not understand the theater part.
So here's something to think about.
So I keep talking about Rand Paul because in my mind, Rand Paul's credibility and his game just keep getting better.
I didn't think he was a serious threat to become president because he didn't quite have a strong enough game, you know, the persuasion part.
But I feel like Rand Paul is watching the world's greatest display of persuasion and he's so close to it.
You know, he's right in the persuasion zone.
He's close to the president. It's got to be affecting him.
There's no way he's not picking something up out of this.
So the thing you should be looking for, and I would kind of expect it, is that the Rand Paul you used to see is sort of evolving in front of us to be a newer version of Rand Paul.
Rand Paul classic is rational science, logic, out of the box, libertarian, you know, a lot of good stuff.
But he didn't really package it well.
He didn't persuade well.
He didn't have that part.
He didn't have the theater. But now, does he understand the importance of the theater now?
I can't read his mind.
But my assumption is...
That Rand Paul being a bright guy who's right in the center of things, it would be impossible for him not to understand at this point that what Trump does, the theater of it, is part of the effectiveness.
And almost certainly...
He's starting to think how he can incorporate the better parts of that.
Now the parts he would be able to incorporate, in theory, would be the doing something a little bit wrong, a little bit provocative, a little bit just to gain attention.
You remember when Rand Paul was, it was during some budget time, he got the cameras to follow him around and he was knocking on doors to see if anybody read the big report or something like that.
I forget the details.
But it told me that he has recognized the importance of the show.
He got the theater element, and that he's trying to incorporate that.
You see him picking the pieces that he can fit into his personality, the part that fits into his platform, the platform being his whole package, if you will.
I keep telling you that you have to look at not just where people are, but you have to look at where they're heading.
And Rand is clearly on an uptick in terms of his talent stack and what he can bring to the process.
So keep an eye on him.
And the other one is Kanye, of course.
Now, the fact that people are criticizing Kanye, think about the situation we're in, and I don't think I'm going to say anything right now that isn't obviously true, but I'll just put it in a different package.
So people are criticizing Kanye for not doing his homework and not being an expert in the things that he's getting involved in, meaning politics.
And they criticize him for comments about slavery and everything else.
Now, who does that sound like?
Well, it sounds like Trump, right?
In 2015, Trump was the guy who didn't read up enough.
He didn't do his homework, etc.
So, first of all, you have to say, okay, well, it didn't stop Trump.
Why would it stop Kanye?
The thing that Kanye and Trump both have in common is an understanding about theater, right?
Kanye comes in with a full understanding, maybe better than anybody's ever understood it, about how theater works, how to get your attention.
So he has that in the same way that President Trump has it.
And he also has that entrepreneurial part.
He has the capitalism. So Kanye, or Yeh as we like to call him now, by his preference I understand.
So Yeh has the capitalism and he has the theater.
The part he lacks is the background in policy and some of the historical context and stuff.
Just like Trump. Now, he's probably behind Trump because he's much younger.
There are some things that you pick up just by being around a while.
So Kanye is younger.
But he's jumped in.
And he's already having meetings with the White House and with Jared about training convicts.
He picks the hardest issue.
He picks the hardest issue.
And he goes right after it.
So, by 2024, will Kanye be too uneducated in terms of politics to run for president?
Well, I would say that 2024 is a long way away.
All right? In six years, how much can a Kanye West learn?
Seriously. How much could that man learn in six years?
A lot. All right?
A lot. He could learn so much that he would be completely, you know, completely qualified in terms of background and context and understanding the politics of it in six years, should he choose to do that.
Now, the should he choose to do it part, we don't know.
He may change his mind.
Six years is a long time.
But if you're judging Kanye's ability to be president by Kanye 2018, you're going to be in for a big surprise.
Because he's not a steady state guy.
So Kanye 2024 is going to be a whole new invention, and it's going to be stronger, it's going to be more qualified, it's going to be more substantial.
In all likelihood, he'll have a portfolio of things he's actually done that you could point to and say, oh yeah, he did that thing.
You know, he helped out on that thing and that thing.
So... Just be aware.
You can't judge him by who he is, but you can probably make a prediction based on his trajectory.
And he is someone who will jump into something he doesn't know how to do, and he will not let his ego get in the way.
Have you noticed that Kanye has a weird ego?
Have you noticed that it would be easy for you to say, well, wait a minute, he's an egomaniac, and he thinks so much of himself, he's a narcissist, and you would think, oh, that's true, right?
And you could make an argument for it, and you could show clips that would support that, and etc., But at the same time, we're watching Kanye jump into areas that he knows he's going to get eviscerated for.
Areas in which he is not an expert and admits it.
So when he jumps into politics, he's coming in and saying, I don't know this field yet.
I'd like to help.
I'm jumping in. It is the most ego-vulnerable thing That anybody could do in his position.
Because remember, he's starting with a reputation that's sky high.
Like, just loved by people of all types.
You know, consistent, creative genius.
He's starting with this perfectly well-conceived brand, and he just put it all on the line.
He just put the whole frickin' brand right on the line.
That... It's something that you don't do if you're trying to protect your ego.
I have argued that people who can understand ego as something that you pump up when you need to, and you see him do that right in front of you, and then he sucks it down, and he completely sublimates it.
He completely pushes his ego in the back to get a job done.
And in this case, you're watching it happen right in front of you.
The fact that he would put on a MAGA hat and talk to the president, the fact that he would stand in front of the Saturday Night Live crew and say what he did that got cut off there, he is someone who knows how to manage his ego, pumps it up when he needs it, deflates it when it would get in the way because it would have stopped him from doing any of the things he's doing right now.
Doesn't stop him. Doesn't stop him.
No one else likes you.
What do you mean no one else?
No one in the whole world?
Just me. I'm the only one.
Alright. He lacks persuasion?
Are you kidding me? We're talking about him.
That's all you need to know.
Oh, so a funny thing happened.
You saw that, of course, you heard the quote where Trump said, I guess Taylor Swift said something anti-Trumpish political, I forget what it was, and Trump asked about it.
and he said, with sort of a twinkle in his eye, Trump said, now I like Taylor's music 25% less.
And what was funny is that he picked a specific number, 25%, that's what made it all hilarious.
And that's what he does.
That little bit of wrongness is why you can't look away.
If Trump had said, well, I like your music less, it's not that interesting.
But as soon as he said, I like it 25% less, it immediately captured your mind because how can you calculate such things?
So that little bit of wrongness that he put an exact number on it is what made it so viral.
And of course he knows that.
This is the sort of thing that Trump does automatically because he understands that that's the extra sauce.
The specificity was the wrongness.
It was just enough. But the funny part was that I guess Taylor was at the American Music Awards, I think it was, and the report was that the ratings were down for the show.
Do you know how much the ratings were down?
25%.
Now, I don't know, what are the odds of that happening?
Because it looked like, it kind of looked like, you know, the simulation was winking at us, that Trump looks at the camera and with a twinkle in his eye goes, I like her music, 25% less now.
And sure enough, the AMAs in which she was, you know, the star person of the show, the person they talked about afterwards, is down exactly 25%.
Now, I'm not saying it's related.
I'm not saying that's proof we're in a simulation.
It's just hilarious that it was the exact number, 25%.
When he shouldn't have picked, Trump shouldn't have picked a specific number in the first place.
But, you know, I've been talking about how his week is so good.
Trump has had the best week anybody's ever had, like, of all politicians ever.
I don't think anybody has been more successful in one week than this president.
And then he gets that.
He even gets that 25% thing by just weird coincidence.
It's just perfect.
Alright, so I don't want to ignore the hurricane winds or storms or whatever we're labeling it in Florida.
I hope everybody does okay.
I just don't talk about the hurricanes too much because I don't have anything to add.
I think FEMA in all likelihood is doing a great job and the people there, I hope they're paying attention to all the safety stuff and staying safe.
All right. Let's try to have a great day.
Oh, Nikki Haley.
I'm sorry. I was going to say something about Nikki Haley.
All right, here it comes.
So the Nikki Haley decision, the top two candidates are Dina Powell and, I forget his first name, Grinnell, who's the ambassador to Germany.
And pundits are trying to guess who Trump will pick.
Well, I'll give you some breakdown on that.
Now, if it's true, And I don't know that this is true.
But if it's true that the decision is between Grinnell and Tina Powell, which would be the best pick for this president?
Well, here's my take on it.
Richard Grinnell, okay.
So Richard Grinnell is a gay Republican, which looks great, right?
So having a gay Republican in the highest diplomatic office that any president has ever had, somebody who's out anyway, I'm sure there have been other gay diplomats, but he's the first one who's out, is great.
It's great for the brand, it's great for the public, it's just a great thing.
If you were to move him from Germany, where he's already a great symbol of the better part of Republicans, and you move him over to be the UN representative to take Nikki Haley's job, you haven't really gained that much, have you?
In terms of your brand, you already had him in one of the most important countries in the world, Germany.
It would be It would be not that much of a difference.
And then what would happen if you replaced him with, let's say, a woman?
Wouldn't that look like a demotion for a woman?
In other words, if a woman had been in Nikki Haley's job But then the next time a woman was promoted, it was for a head of, let's say, to be the diplomat for Germany, the ambassador to Germany, it would feel like a little bit of a demotion for women coming into the midterms when the man-woman thing is going to be so important in terms of how people feel about the two parties.
If Dina Powell is picked to replace Nikki Haley, not only do you replace a woman with a woman, which would be a better look, right?
Because you still get Richard Grinnell apparently doing a great job and still an important part of the image of the brand.
But here's the thing.
Everybody's asking, why did Nikki Haley announce so early?
You've wondered about that, right?
Why did she announce so early?
I can think of one reason, but I'm not going to assume this is true.
But I can think of one reason that would make a lot of sense.
And it goes like this.
It's so the president can announce another high-level position for another woman before the midterms.
Now that position would be just replacing Nikki Haley, so really it's just a woman for a woman.
So it's not really like women have gained by, you know, a one-for-one replacement.
But what's it going to feel like?
If the news is focused on a high-level appointment of a woman right before the midterms, that's as good as it gets.
That is the best situation for President Trump.
So hypothetically, If Nikki Haley had been talking to the President about making the change at the end of the year, I guess, it would have made sense for them to say, what's the best time to announce it?
Is the best time to wait to the last minute, or is the best time to go really early, which is very transparent, and I think the public appreciates it, right?
The public appreciates the transparency.
There's no downside to it.
But it also gives Trump at least the opportunity, we don't know if the timing will work, but at least the opportunity to appoint a high-level, highly qualified woman for a high-level position and even though it's just a replacement the headline is going to look good for Republicans and women so If you had to bet, and don't bet based on me, right?
Because there may be a lot we don't know.
It has a lot to do with the personalities, who supports these people, what friends do they have in the administration, who has offended, who is married to who.
There are a whole bunch of things that we don't know.
But if the only thing came down to how it looked, The woman is the right choice.
And not only because, you know, as our external face, you know, the external face of the United States, the face we're putting on to the rest of the world, half of the world is female.
So having a woman in that position That's a good look, because half of the world is female, and women probably have a worse time of it than men in most of the rest of the world.
But putting a gay man as the face of the United States would also be great.
I think I would, you know, I like that for all the signaling it does that, you know, we're the kind of country that has gotten past that.
So that part is good.
But here's the thing. Only 5% of the world is gay.
But half of the world is a woman.
So the woman seems like the better outer face for our exterior facing personality, if you will.
It just makes more sense. Alright.
I'm just looking at your comments here.
And I think we've said enough.
And I'm going to talk to you all later.
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