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Oct. 20, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
58:41
Episode 267 Scott Adams: Saudi Excuses, #JobsNotMobs, Voter Turnout
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
Gather around. I hope you have your coffee.
Because you know what time it is.
Hey Jack. Come on in here.
Hey Jeremy. Hey Yvonne.
Facts are safe. Good morning.
Good morning, good morning.
Grab your cup, your vessel, your mug, your stein, your glass, your container.
Make sure it's filled with your favorite beverage.
I like coffee.
And now, join me for the simultaneous sip.
Ah.
Well, we've got stuff to talk about. - Right.
I just retweeted a tweet from your favorite economist, Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist.
So, let me frame this by saying, you don't really win a Nobel Prize unless you're pretty smart.
Alright? I'm talking about the scientific economic prizes.
You don't win those unless you're really smart.
So Paul Krugman, by any objective measure upon which you can measure intelligence, either his grades, his accomplishments, his credentials, his Nobel Prize, smart, smart guy. So I think we'd all agree that on raw IQ, Very smart, smarter than me, smarter than most of you.
But here's what he tweets today.
So it's on part of a tweet storm about the president and how he's treating Saudi Arabia.
So Paul Grugman says, so the supposed economic payoff from dealing with a murderer, he's talking about Saudi Arabia here, is a mirage.
Why does Trump keep talking about it?
Now here's the fun part.
Unfortunately, the answer is obvious.
He likes autocrats who murder journalists and is looking for excuses to stay friendly with them.
What? What?
So let me give this to you again because you probably had the same reaction I did, which is it looks like he's saying 2 plus 2 equals orange.
I have no idea how he gets to this conclusion.
So the context is, he was talking about how we have far more economic connection to China than we do to Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia is just a tiny dot And the deals that we have that Trump is talking with are very small compared to our economy.
So that much, I assume, is true.
I doubt we got that wrong.
But then he takes it from why is he treating Saudi Arabia different than China?
Because the economies are so different, you'd think it would be the reverse.
He should be harder on China and less hard on Saudi Arabia if economics was really Trump's reasoning.
I'm okay with questioning the size of the economic impact.
So far, perfectly reasonable.
But then he jumps from that to, why does Trump keep talking about it?
Unfortunately, the answer is obvious.
Now, whatever follows the answer is obvious is usually something that's just batshit crazy.
Unfortunately, the answer is obvious.
He likes autocrats who murder journalists.
He likes autocrats who murder journalists?
How the hell do you get from comparing the economies of China and Saudi Arabia to Trump likes autocrats who murder journalists?
I'm pretty sure that's not the only explanation of the facts that are in evidence.
Here's another solution.
Here's another set of facts that would help explain why Trump treats Saudi Arabia the way he does.
How about Saudi Arabia is critical to peace in the Middle East, and peace in the Middle East is critical to our security?
How is that? You know, I can't read Trump's mind, but if you're leaving out the possibility that the Middle East has something to do with world security and the United States security, I think you're leaving out a pretty big hypothesis,
you know? So, it's really fascinating to watch somebody who is, and again, I'll say this, and I mean this, if you were to just measure Paul Krugman's IQ, it would be higher than probably all of us.
You know, not all of us.
Some of you are pretty smart. It would be higher than mine.
I'm pretty sure if he and I took an IQ test, he would outscore me.
And I'm pretty sure if we did a test of general knowledge about politics, about economics, he would kill me.
But you can see the Trump derangement, yeah, the TDS, it's a case of Trump derangement syndrome.
I guarantee you that when he wrote this, he thought to himself, this makes sense.
I would be very surprised, and again, I'm not reading his mind, I'm just saying, I'm speculating that this is the most likely explanation, is that he wouldn't put a public tweet out unless he thought it was a pretty good one.
Which means that he thought this made sense.
I can't imagine that there's any other possibility for why you'd put that in a tweet if you didn't think it made sense, why would you do it?
Alright, that's enough about that.
It's mind-boggling when you see it.
I also am amused by the comparison of the way Trump treats the media, the news media in particular, and dictators.
So people are trying to draw the comparison between what happened with Cheshawgi versus what President Trump does when he talks about the media.
So here's what they're comparing.
So according to Trump's critics, the following two things are roughly equivalent.
Because that's their point. They're making an equivalency here.
They're saying that Trump calling Chuck Todd sleepy eyes is very close, and it might be a slippery slope from calling Chuck Todd sleepy eyes to dismembering him with a bone saw.
You know, as soon as you start making fun of somebody's sleepy eyes, Slippery slope, and the next thing you know, bone saw time.
And I'm thinking to myself, do they really think that makes sense?
Given that, and here's the part everybody leaves out, when people criticize the president for criticizing the press, here's what they leave out.
The press really deserves some criticizing.
If the press...
We're not, you know, fairly corrupt in terms of the way they skew stories.
If the press was not corrupt, if the press were not corrupt, would the president be trash-talking them?
Well, maybe, but we'll never know.
We'll never know because there's a lot of fake news and he does call it out.
Now, he may overplay that, but he overplays everything.
Hyperbole is sort of his brand.
Yeah, so watching people try to compare calling somebody sleepy eyes or saying that Megyn Kelly has blood coming out of her or whatever, to compare angry, not so watching people try to compare calling somebody sleepy eyes or saying that Megyn Kelly has blood coming out of her or whatever, Not exactly the same thing.
I'm...
Somebody's saying that they came up with Jobs Not Mobs.
You know, let's talk about Jobs Not Mobs.
So you've seen that it has caught on and now the president is using it multiple times.
You've seen other politicians sort of picking up on it and it's a gigantic meme now.
People are asking me if I started it.
No, I was not the inventor.
Of Jobs Not Mobs.
I did help popularize it, meaning that I tweeted about it when it was in its infancy, and just the way numbers work, if somebody with a blue check tweets something, it's more likely to go viral than if somebody with a blue check did not tweet it.
I don't know if I was the first blue check to tweet something like that, but I might have been among the first.
So I gave it fuel, and I helped explain why it was powerful, but I did not invent it.
And I just saw it on the internet.
Somebody says, Ali Alexander is giving me credit.
No, he's only giving...
I saw what you were talking about.
I saw his periscope. He's only giving me credit for popularizing it.
He's using the same word I'm using right now, popularizing, and he's very clear about that.
I appreciate the clarity that he's talking about my involvement, so I don't want to exaggerate that.
But here's my point about that.
You know, the president is the best brander you've ever seen, but it's bigger than that.
The president is very clearly, through his staff probably, not directly, but he's very clearly scouring the internet for the memes, the approaches, the attacks, the tweets that work.
So people are clearly looking at what the Trump followers are doing collectively, finding out what is popular, what gets a lot of clicks, what gets a lot of likes, and then taking that to the boss at some point, one assumes, or taking it to the speechwriter, which ends up being very similar because the boss is going to look at it.
And then he A-B tests it.
So he's not just good at branding, sitting in a room and thinking up brands.
He's expanded the system so that they're scouring the internet for things which are naturally viral.
Things that people are already responding to.
And he sees, presumably, somebody in the administration saw Jobs Not Mobs somewhere on some Twitter feed and said, let's give it a try.
Now the next part of this is the A-B testing, which is where you just put it out there and you see how people react.
And you saw him do that at his rally.
And when the crowd Had a visceral reaction to it.
You could tell that when he landed at the very first time in a rally, that the crowd responded with a big laugh and a good reaction.
Now, if you Have ever spoken in front of big crowds you can really feel the energy.
I spent years giving very large keynotes to big ballrooms and theaters filled with thousands of people.
So I've had the experience of being on stage hundreds of times with thousands of people in the audience who are just there to see me and if I land a good joke The audience responds and you can just feel the energy.
The crowd is just giving you energy when you're up on the stage.
And a laugh, here's your little persuasion tip.
A laugh or a reaction like that, like a groan, so it could be a negative reaction or a positive one, those are the ones you really want.
Here's the reaction you don't really care about.
If you're on stage and you're trying to influence people, here's a reaction you don't care about.
Yay! Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.
Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.
That doesn't tell you anything.
Because people in crowds clap.
They might be clapping just because they like you, just because, you know, maybe they're drinking, maybe it's a fun night, maybe they're out to have a good time.
Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.
Tells you nothing. But if you land a good joke, or in his case, you know, within the political context, just a clever slogan, you know, jobs, not mobs, and you hear the audience laugh in unison Simultaneously, and that's the important part. It wasn't like a little laugh that caught on or something.
The moment people heard him, you know, he used his own phrasing, you know, we've got jobs, they've got mobs.
Instant laughter.
I can tell you for sure that the president could feel that.
Like actually feel it in his body.
Because the laughter is a whole other level of higher level impact.
If somebody laughs, you've got control of their body.
Let me tell it to you in the most easy to understand way.
If you can make somebody laugh, Then you're controlling them, their involuntary actions.
Because the laughter is just something that comes out.
You don't really think about it.
You just laugh. is a real persuasive connection, making somebody laugh.
Getting somebody to clap is not as predictive, because they're there to clap, right?
Everybody's like, okay, other people are clapping.
I'm clapping. There's lots of clapping.
Tells you nothing. Because people are using their brain to say, oh, this is the clapping time.
Looks like one of those clapping moments.
Clap, clap, clap. But a laugh Is involuntary.
If you can get an entire crowd of people, thousands of people, to have the same involuntary action at the same moment, that's a keeper.
You keep that joke.
If you're a comedian, you keep that joke.
If you're a politician, you keep that meme.
So he A.B. tested it live, got the reaction that he liked, and the same night he had already tweeted out the hashtag, jobs not mobs.
So, now compare this.
I always like to think about the poor Democrats.
So do you remember the Democrat slogan?
So the Republican slogan for the midterms, the Trump slogan, let's say, which is sort of the midterm slogan, I think it's been called, is Jobs Not Mobs.
So you know what that one is.
Now it's a few weeks before the midterms.
Quickly, tell me in the comments, what is the Democrats' slogan for the midterms?
It is...
Question mark, question mark, question mark?
The Democrat slogan for the midterms is, I don't know.
The Democrat slogan for the midterms is, do they have one?
I don't know.
Right? So imagine that you were on part of the Democrat strategic, high-level people, the people who are really the movers and shakers on the Democrat side, and they hear jobs, not mobs, for the first time.
I would like to demonstrate for you with my accomplice, Dale, I'd like to give you now a play in one act.
This is Dale.
He's an anti-Trumper.
And he's hearing Trump's new midterm slogan for the first time.
They got nothing.
They got nothing. What's he saying?
What's that slogan?
Jobs not mobs.
Oh hell.
I think we lost again.
Scene.
I mean just think about it.
You know, Make America Great Again will go down in history as one of the all-time great branding You know, branding moves.
But you probably think, if you're a Democrat, you're probably thinking to yourself, and I've heard, by the way, what I'm going to say next, I've heard from billionaires.
I've heard it from really well-informed Jacked in people who have said that the only explanation for Trump is that he's like Chance the Gardener, the person who just became president by luck.
He doesn't know anything, he just somehow, the universe just threw all this luck at him and suddenly he's the president of the United States.
There are serious people who are actually very smart people, very successful, Should understand how the world works pretty well, who literally, not as a joke, but literally believe that he became the president and is performing at the highest level, in my opinion, that any president has ever performed.
That might be true.
He might be performing at the highest level any president has ever performed at.
And there's a belief that it's luck.
Now imagine if you held that theory.
You believed that his winning was luck.
And then you hear, jobs not mobs.
What do you say to yourself?
Do you say to yourself, he got lucky again.
Oh my God, that jobs not mobs thing is like one of the best slogans ever.
And he got lucky again.
He got lucky with that Make America Great Again thing.
He got lucky with all of his nicknames, Low Energy Jeb.
He got lucky with all of his branding.
He got lucky with his tariffs.
He got lucky with the economy.
He got lucky with ISIS. He got lucky with North Korea.
But dammit, he's got lucky again.
How lucky can he get?
It's got to be a tough time to hold any of those Trump derangement syndrome opinions because it's being falsified at a rate of whatever the rate of falsifying is.
Now the other thing that Trump is saying is that the midterm is going to be about Kavanaugh and Caravans or Caravans and Kavanaugh.
Now, because it's two k sounds, Caravans and Cavanaugh, I say to myself, okay, that's good, because it sort of has a good sound to it, but there's a little bit of a problem here, and I think you know what it is, right?
Cavanaugh and Caravan.
Tell me what the problem is.
All right, so this one's not a winner.
Kavanaugh and Caravan.
If you hear that coming from the president, what's the problem with that?
Caravan and Kavanaugh.
Let's see if anybody gets this.
Somebody's going to add a third K. That's the problem.
And if you're a Republican, you don't want any slogans that have three K sounds in them.
See where I'm going on this?
Yep. Alright.
Yeah, so you can see in the comments.
I'm not even going to say it.
But you don't want a slogan that's two K sounds, Caravan and Kavanaugh, Because somebody's going to say, huh, let's add a third K sound.
And even though caravan starts with a C, because your brain is hearing it as a K, you're hearing three Ks.
And even though it has nothing to do with anything, it's not a real connection, your brain doesn't care that that's not real.
Your brain doesn't, yeah.
Collusion, climate, caravan, Kavanaugh.
It would be so easy for someone to add a third sound.
That one's chancy, ironically.
So I hope that one doesn't pass the A-B testing.
That one's a little risky.
Now, When people are comparing, I've been in this debate several times now, so...
I've been saying about the Chinese fentanyl dealers, for those of you who don't know, China is the main source of fentanyl in the United States, and fentanyl is killing maybe 30,000 Americans a year.
Yes, you heard that right.
30,000 Americans a year are dying primarily from Chinese fentanyl, the illegal stuff from the illegal labs.
And I've said that we should execute the, apparently it's organized crime mostly, we should execute the owners of those labs if the Chinese government won't do it themselves.
So the first choice is that we pressure China to get more aggressive about their illegal fentanyl, because their brand is now Fentanyl China.
That's what I call them.
So China is, in my opinion, disgraced at this point, and they need to do something about it.
So the first choice is that you pressure China To execute their own big dealers.
And the second choice is, I've said that because they're killing 30,000 people a year, they're mass murderers.
And if China won't kill them themselves, to the extent that we can identify them, or anybody in the In that group, I think it's fair to send in whoever does that.
Whoever does the wet work for the United States, you know that every big country has got somebody who kills people.
I believe we should just kill them.
And if China finds out that we're killing their criminals You know, we gave them the first try.
I think, you know, it's not going to lead to war because they would kill them themselves if they could get it done, I think.
But what people have been saying to me is they hear this and they say, the first thing they say is, you idiot, don't you know that that won't make any difference to the supply?
Because if you killed all of the labs in China, all the owners of the labs, it would take five minutes for another lab to pop up to fill the need, and it's just little packages.
Of course it's going to get here.
I totally agree with that.
Killing the Chinese owners of those drug labs would probably make no difference to supply.
We should do it anyway.
Because you do kill mass murderers.
It doesn't matter that somebody else is going to be a mass murderer in the future.
That's not really even relevant.
If you can find somebody who is a mass murderer, you kill them.
Right? Legally or illegally.
Either way, you kill them.
There's no exception to that.
So, people have been saying to me things like, well, if you're blaming the producer, wouldn't you blame the gun owners should you kill the manufacturer of guns?
To which I say, first of all, analogies never work.
You can't really compare a legal product to an illegal product.
That's not really a good comparison.
And secondly, you can't compare something that kills X number of people to something that kills 10 times as many people.
The size of it does matter.
The fentanyl from China is the size, in two years it will kill more Americans than the Vietnam War killed of Americans.
So you don't treat those the same.
You don't treat a hangnail like a heart attack, because they're both health problems.
But here's my advice to you.
So people have been coming after me with bad analysis.
Oh, let me just finish. The reason I think you should execute the mass murders in China is because it sends a signal about the importance of the fentanyl.
So I would like potential users of fentanyl in the United States To hear on a regular basis that the people who are producing it are being executed because producing this drug is such a bad thing.
It's just for branding.
I really don't care Well, let me say it in a different way.
It's not about stopping the supply because I recognize that's impossible.
It's about branding China and branding the producers as mass murderers and not just people who are making a drug that other people are abusing.
That's not the right branding.
But anyway, when people come after me with bad analogies, This is my new approach.
I am A-B testing this.
And so far, very good.
So I'll say something like, let's kill those fentanyl dealers in China.
And somebody will say, well, what about killing?
Would you also be in favor of killing people who make legal firearms?
Which, of course, is ridiculous.
But instead of addressing that, which is my old approach, I used to just say, well, your analogy is bad.
Here's the reason why. I just say, I don't answer.
Two bad analogies.
And sometimes I add, and all analogies are bad.
So here's my recommendation to you.
Watch how often this is useful.
When somebody tries to argue with you, argue your point with an analogy, do not address the analogy.
Never. Don't say one word about the analogy.
Just look at them and say, well, I don't talk about bad analogies, but if you want to talk about my point and tell me why it wouldn't work, I would like to listen to that.
But I don't address bad analogies, because an analogy is literally a different situation.
No two situations are alike, and you shouldn't treat it like that.
An analogy is like, and by the way, analogies as argument are useless and a waste of time.
Analogies for explaining a new concept, very useful.
So here's my useful explaining a concept.
When people are using analogies, they're acting like an ingrown toenail and a heart attack might be similar in some way, because they're both health problems.
It doesn't help you.
Knowing that heart attacks and hangnails are both health problems doesn't tell you that you should treat them the same way.
So analogies are always misleading if they're used as an argument.
But they can be good for making a point, as I just used it.
So the difference is, if I just give my analogy to explain something, I'm not asking you to respond to my analogy.
I'm just explaining something.
But if somebody says to you, oh, well, then would you be in favor of, you know, killing children?
And they're making some weird analogy.
Do not address the analogy.
Just say you don't address bad analogies and all analogies are bad.
Let's talk about the postage situation.
So many of you know that I was proposing that we put some kind of a tariff on Chinese packages.
And that we increase the postage and use that increase in revenue to buy more fentanyl sniffing technology so that we could check their packages more efficiently.
And again, I know that there's no amount of checking packages anywhere that will really make a difference in the supply, but we should certainly do what we can to put the Chinese dealers into business.
We should at least make it a bad idea to be in business and to be a mass murderer in every way that we can.
So it could be dogs, it could be some technology, but we have ways to detect fentanyl apparently.
And then you saw that the government announced that they were looking to renegotiate some big international treaty about postage because it turns out that China has unusually low postage and that it was intentional.
So that the developing countries could develop.
And now Trump, quite reasonably, is saying, well, those countries are now developed enough, let's even the playing field.
It's now time to do that.
But apparently it's hard to do that because it's a big international treaty and it's just not easy.
You can't just unilaterally say, oh, we're increasing our postage.
So I make this suggestion.
Here's my suggestion.
That instead of changing the postage, we just slap a tariff on them.
I don't know if this is practical, by the way.
I'll just put this idea out there.
And instead of saying we're increasing the postage, which we should also do, but that will take a while, we should just slap a fee on top of everything and say, you're going to need a special stamp from China.
We're not even going to look at your package unless you've got the special fentanyl stamp.
Oh, here would be a good idea.
Is it true? I don't know if this is true, but packages from China, they're not necessarily going to have a stamp on them, right?
They're just going to be...
Yeah, you don't necessarily have a stamp on packages anymore, right?
But it would be great to have a fentanyl stamp that is only applicable to China.
This is not a practical idea.
This is sort of a wishful thinking idea, so I understand that this is not practical.
But the ideal thing would be to create a stamp that we will not accept any packages from China unless this stamp is on it.
But it's not a postage stamp.
It's an extra stamp.
It's a fentanyl China stamp that says you've got to pay extra to cover the cost of us checking all the packages from China.
I believe the American Revolution was fought over something like that.
Stamp tax. Something along those lines.
Alright, here's a speculative idea for you.
You've learned a lot about influence in the last few years.
You've learned a lot about persuasion.
You've learned some of it from me.
You've learned some of it from reading my book, Win Bigly.
And you've also learned that the big media companies Through how they surface stories and ads and opinions, how they prioritize, how their algorithm works, can influence events.
And I wanted to put this out as a mental experiment.
As far as I know, what I'm going to explain next might be illegal.
So I'm not recommending it.
This is just a thought experiment.
So not a suggestion.
Just a thought experiment.
Imagine this.
Imagine if the tech companies decided to try to influence the vote, the midterm vote, and didn't want to be detected.
Let me tell you how they could do that.
This should scare you.
The polling places around the country are all going to have different weather situations.
Some places it will be raining, some places it will be warm, some places it will be cold.
So there will be all kinds of different weather situations at the polling places on election day.
Imagine you're a big tech company and you want the result to go one way or the other, conservative or liberal, of course they would like to go liberal.
Suppose that all you did is tweak your algorithm So that the places that have a combination of...
Let me say it this way.
So that wherever the polling place legitimately has bad weather, you surface a weather report, but you only show it to Republicans.
So there's no fake news here.
All it is is, you know, you're on Facebook or you're on Twitter and all of a sudden you see something that says that at your polling place the weather is going to be extra bad that day.
And it might be in a positive way.
It might say, remember to leave early because it's going to be raining.
And let's say that the algorithm only sends this to one side.
They only send it to Republicans or they only send it to liberals.
What would that do to turn out?
It would be completely accurate news.
It would be news that the person who received it would want to know, so it would be useful.
It would be completely accurate.
But all you'd have to do is not show the bad weather reports to the other side, and you would completely change voter turnout.
Because I guarantee you, the people who are on the margin, you know, trying to decide whether to vote or not, the weather will make a difference.
If the weather is rainy or sleety or cold or something, you're going to get that in your head.
You're going to think about, ah, after work, after work, I want to vote.
The weather's going to be terrible.
I could wear a coat.
I wonder if the lines are long.
I certainly want to vote, but I just heard the weather's going to be terrible.
Ah, well, maybe I'll do something else.
The only reason I mention this, and by the way, let me say again, I'm not suggesting this because I think it might be illegal, but I would love to know an opinion on that.
Is it? Would it be illegal for a tech company to give selective weather reports that are accurate and are useful to the people who get them?
They would be useful.
I don't know. Does anybody know the answer to that?
Yeah, it would be hard to trace, and by hard, you know, it just wouldn't be traced.
Weather forecasts have a range of accuracy, that doesn't matter.
Yeah, somebody's saying it should be illegal, but do you imagine that it is illegal?
Because I imagine it's not illegal.
Now, you could also use the same technique if you're just making political ads.
You could send down political ads based on your own databases and just pay for the ad that just says something like, bring a raincoat.
Bring a raincoat to vote.
And only send those to certain types of people who are, for example, on the other side.
And could Facebook ban an ad They accurately said the weather will be bad, and there's no question it's based on a weather report.
It might not turn out that way, but it's based on a weather report.
So it'd be true in terms of the weather report, and it would be useful.
Bring a raincoat. You might be standing in line.
Could they say that?
Would that be a fair ad?
It feels like you shouldn't be.
But look how easy it would be to fake that.
Now here's another way to influence the election without getting caught.
You may be familiar with a book called Pre-Suasion.
Pre-Suasion.
And the idea is that when people are subjected to a certain type of idea or thought, it can prime them to respond differently on, and here's the important part, an unrelated topic.
So you can prime people with unrelated topics, and there's a pretty big impact on the other topic.
The test that Cialdini talks about in Pre-Suasion, which you should read, it's a terrific book, is that when people were exposed to an American flag, they were more likely to vote Republican if they had just seen an American flag.
Now, apparently in people's minds, or enough people's minds, the American flag is sort of pro-Republican in a way that it's a little less Democrat.
Obviously, both sides like the flag.
But you could pre-suede and have a tremendous effect on the election, and nobody would know Nobody would know.
So imagine if, just to use this same example, imagine if the social media companies wanted people to vote Republican.
That's not the case, but just imagine it for a thought experiment.
And they knew that showing an American flag right before somebody votes would bias them a little bit Republican.
How easy would it be for them to say, hey, it's election day, I hope everybody votes, big old flag.
Now, if you said, it's election day, I hope everybody votes and does their patriotic duty, here's a big flag, a picture of a flag, would that be illegal?
Think about it. Would that be illegal for the social media companies to say, it's election day, I hope you all vote, big flag?
That would not be illegal.
Would it change the election?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Would anybody know that they had done it intentionally?
Well, somebody like Cialdini would know.
I would know if I happened to know that they sent out a lot of those pictures.
If I happened to be aware of it, I could tell you what was going on in some cases, but only because I know that specific example.
If you did not know that that had been studied and that the American flag does bias people Republican, if you didn't know that and you just saw that ad, would it click anything in your head to say, hey, something's going on?
It would not. So now imagine if there's some other symbol That's not the American flag, but say there's some other symbol that biases people to vote Democrat.
Could the social media companies just show that image a lot around Election Day and get a result that's skewed?
Yeah, they could.
Yes, they could.
Would it be illegal?
I don't know.
Do you know?
I don't know if that's illegal.
Should it be? Maybe.
But I don't know how you'd ever police it.
Because the whole point of pre-suasion is that it's not obvious that this symbolism or this idea influences what you think is an unrelated topic.
If you haven't done the study, you don't really know.
Somebody's saying hammer and sickle would make people vote Democrat.
I don't think so.
But you have to think that there probably is some symbol that would bias people Democrat.
So when I talk about how Trump might be the last human president And by the way, I talked about that on Ben Shapiro's Sunday show that will air, and I think it's the last Sunday of this month.
So yesterday I was talking with Ben Shapiro on his show.
I think it's the last Sunday of this month that it will air.
I'll make sure I tweet it out.
But I was talking about Trump being the last human president.
And what I mean by that is that He might be the only president who's not being run by some other billionaires.
He's not being managed by other people's money.
Because he's just a singularly unique individual.
He's got his own money.
He doesn't apparently need money to win because he won with far less money.
Yeah, it's the Sunday special.
Somebody's asking for clarification.
So Ben Shapiro's Sunday special.
Last Sunday of this month, I believe.
And I think that after Trump, the algorithms will be making our decisions.
At first, the algorithms will be influenced by humans, but it will very soon be so complicated that there are no humans who understand what the algorithm is doing.
But the algorithm will decide.
How will the algorithm decide?
Well, I don't mean it will think and it will make a decision, but it will be the decisive thing that moves people, you know, in whatever direction.
So, for example, if the algorithms of these social media companies accidentally, and this is possible, just to use this same example, if they accidentally surfaced lots of ads with American flags in them, then the algorithm might cause a Republican victory.
But it wouldn't be because the algorithm decided, and it wouldn't be because somebody who programmed them decided.
It would be an accidental outcome of a complicated system.
So I think that Trump is the last president whose personal power, his influence, his style, Can kind of rise above the algorithm and rise above the competition.
After him, a regular politician is going to be weaker than the algorithms.
Because the algorithms are getting stronger, the next president is not going to be stronger than the algorithm.
They're going to be less persuasive.
All right. Oh, well, I guess we have to talk about Saudi Arabia's explanation of what happened to Jez Yogi.
Now, before I talk about this, I want to clarify, because since I'm talking about this topic a lot, I'm having a lot of critics come after me on Twitter because they don't know my opinion.
They're just seeing what I'm saying that day.
They don't know the full context.
My opinion of the Cheshogi thing is I don't care.
And I don't think the United States should care.
And I don't think any of the citizens should care.
So don't come after me and say, why do we care?
Why are you talking about this?
We should just ignore it.
I agree. But the fact is, it's not being ignored, and therefore it is a topic, and it's insanely interesting.
It's horrible, but it's interesting at the same time.
So I'm going to talk about it.
So I think a lot of us were hoping that the Saudis would come up with an alibi that was at least a little bit believable.
Just a little bit plausible.
And what they came up with was that Jashogi died in a fight.
You know, a fight broke out and it was sort of an accidental death.
Now I ask myself, was the accidental death before or after they removed his fingers?
You know, it was the most ridiculous excuse, and it really exposes Trump.
If I were President Trump, and I was counting on my presumed allies, Saudi Arabia, to give me some cover, To make it easy to not punish them too hard.
Give me some kind of explanation that is at least a little bit plausible.
It should be something that at least one side believes.
Something that either the Democrats might believe or maybe even just the Republicans would be inclined to believe.
But don't give us an explanation of what happened that nobody believes.
Literally nobody. Zero people believe that explanation.
I'm not wrong, right? Zero people.
And so, Trump is exposed.
Because now he can't act like that, it's true.
It would be a huge political mistake.
I'd be amazed if the president falls into this trap.
But they've sort of set up the president where I think they kind of want him to say, well, maybe that could have happened, you know.
I don't think he can say that.
He can say a lot of stuff.
I mean, we have a president who's not afraid of, you know, going out on a limb.
He's not afraid to depart the fact-checking if it's for a good reason.
I don't think he can embrace that explanation.
I just don't see any way that he can do that.
So what's he gonna do? Well, I've suggested yesterday that he take advantage of this crisis, never let a good crisis go to waste.
And suggest that the Saudis need to pay a price because nobody believes it.
In fact, I think President Trump is going to be very tempted to say flat out we don't believe it.
How much would you love that?
How much would you love President Trump saying, well, you know, Saudis have been our ally.
They're very important. We wanted to wait until we had a full explanation.
They've now given us their explanation.
It is ridiculous.
It's not even slightly believable.
So now that's the facts that we have to work on.
So now what are we going to do about it?
Now it might be...
That he still says, it's just not worth doing anything about it, because frankly, you know, it's like an internal problem.
It doesn't have to be our problem if we don't want it to be.
So he could just say, oh, that's completely ridiculous, but it's just not going to be our problem.
I would kind of like that myself.
I'm not predicting it.
I'm just saying I would enjoy it if he did that.
But I think you should take advantage of it and say, look, Saudi Arabia, Every once in a while, I feel that I have to swear.
With your permission, or maybe not, I'm going to swear.
If you have kids in the room, earmuffs.
Put the earmuffs on the children.
You have been warned.
Children! Children!
Get out of the room! Run, children!
Cover your ears! There is cursing coming!
And it goes like this.
Saudi Arabia just fucked our president.
You know it, right?
Saudi Arabia, with their lame-ass excuse, just fucked our president.
I don't like it.
I don't like it.
You shouldn't like it either.
But that doesn't mean we have to shoot ourselves in the foot over it.
I do think they've got some Let's say they've got some amends.
They've got to make some amends.
And it would be the perfect setup for this president to say, Saudi Arabia, you just fucked me in front of the entire world.
Because they did. By coming up with such a bad excuse, such a bad excuse, I mean, just embarrassingly bad.
They exposed our president, who was trying, he was trying to make this work.
It's pretty clear that he was saying, well, let's wait.
He was giving them room to come up with a good explanation.
Just something he could sell a little bit, something that would have a little doubt, something that would just, just a little reasonable doubt, that's all.
And they didn't deliver that.
I don't know why, but they decided to come up with the worst excuse in the world, and they just totally exposed President Trump.
I don't like it.
I think they owe us.
I think that it's time for them to make a bigger gesture.
There's nothing we can do to bring back Shashoggi, but there's definitely something we can do to make the Middle East a safer place.
Recognizing Israel would be one.
That would be helpful. Maybe taking over some expenses in the Middle East that maybe are something that we were spending money on, or maybe something that would be positive for peace, helping the Palestinians in some way, something like that.
So I think that they need to write a big check.
I think they need to write a big check.
And not just a money check, if you know what I mean.
They need to write a big money check, but they need to write a really big check.
Because they just screwed our president right in front of us.
And I think President Trump is smart enough that he's not going to act on pure ego and say, well, you screwed me, now I'm going to put you guys out of business or anything.
He's not going to do that.
But I think he's going to do whatever he thinks is best for the situation.
But man, I don't like it.
I do not like what they just did to our president, and I think they need to pay for it.
They've got to write some checks, if you know what I mean, because I'm certainly not okay with it.
All right. Yeah, all they had to do was say something like, I didn't authorize this action.
I knew they were going to...
Interrogate them, but I didn't know the details.
I didn't know they were going to do it in the embassy.
I didn't know they were going to bring a bone saw.
I don't give specific directions to people.
They were acting a little bit outside their mission.
That would have been a totally acceptable, not acceptable, but at least reasonable doubt.
At least a little reasonable doubt?
Something? But they just left our president totally exposed on this.
And now I think he's got to act aggressively in some way, even if it's only for the betterment of the Middle East, not anything directly about joshyogi.
Let me ask you something that, this is totally random, Somebody mentioned Adam Schiff on here, which makes me think of his big googly eyes.
You know how the white around his eyes is big and the eye part seems small within the eye?
I've been noticing that...
I'm wondering...
So this is a hypothesis.
You see that look...
When people are either trying to...
Well, here's where you see that look, the wide-eyed look.
It's the Cory Booker look, the Adam Schiff look, the Ottavio Alexander look.
If you see the photos of the pro-Clinton people screaming at the sky, they often have the big googly eyes.
And it looks like it means something.
Because you don't see that on the right, do you?
At least not right now.
And what it makes me wonder is, I wonder if people are hallucinating when it happens.
Or are they trying to get you to think that what they're saying makes sense?
If you're trying to get somebody to believe you, And you know your story is not believable.
I think something happens with your eyes.
It's like, I want you to believe my story.
Yeah, let me tell you the story.
It's really dangerous and it's important.
And I'm totally telling you the truth.
Look at my eyes. My eyes are open so much.
I'm totally telling you the truth.
I'm not looking shifty at all.
My eyes are open so much.
Now, I don't think people have any kind of a conscious process about that, but it seems like it's one of those two things that's going on, and I'm not sure which one.
It's either they're trying to artificially convey an impression of the reality that even they don't believe, or they're actually hallucinating.
It looks a little, and when I say hallucinating, I don't mean they're completely disconnected from their physical reality.
I mean, if you see, for example, Cory Booker with the wide-eyed thing, and they don't do it all the time.
It just seems like in some cases their eyes get really wide.
It feels like in that moment he's sort of imagining He's sort of hallucinating a world in which, let's say, Trump is Hitler or some ridiculous thing, and he's trying to get you to believe it at the same time he's imagining it.
Maybe it's a combination.
Maybe the wide eyes means you're imagining something that doesn't exist and you're trying to convince someone else it's true.
It could be that combination.
Somebody says Adderall.
Could be. But I swear, it's not my imagination, right?
That at the moment, that look, that wide-eyed look, seems to be exclusively on the left.
And I don't know if it's because Democrats have wide eyes.
I don't think it's that. I think it's because they've been triggered into the Trump derangement syndrome, and that those eyes are part of the tells, For Trump derangement syndrome.
Part of a tell for any kind of a hallucination, any kind of a delusional look.
People are saying Adderall, but I don't know about...
I have no reason to believe that's true.
So NPC eyes, yeah.
So the NPC meme that's really taken off, I have to say it amuses me.
It's starting to get a little overplayed.
If you don't know what that means, it means non-player characters.
So within a...
A multiplayer video game, you will see some characters in the game that are other real people controlling those characters, but then there are characters that are just background characters.
They're not players. They are non-player characters or NPCs.
So the joke, the meme, is that if we're in a simulation, And, of course, we probably are.
You know, about a trillion to one-aunt of that.
That there may be characters who are not players.
And that there are some people who don't have anything like a soul or an actual intelligence or any kind of free will or something.
They're just sort of background, but they walk and talk.
So, I don't think that's literally true.
But it sure feels like it's true.
So it's a very effective meme.
Alright, I've been talking too long.
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