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Oct. 26, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
35:36
Episode 274 Scott Adams: The Mad Bomber and Soros
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Hey everybody, I'm back for another bonus, Periscope.
It also involves the simultaneous sip.
If you missed it earlier, you get to catch up now.
Different topic, your favorite topics, but it starts with the simultaneous sip.
All right.
I want to talk a little bit about the crazy bomber.
As far as I know, we don't have any new information about it today that tells us too much.
But I wanted to put a framework on this in terms of people talking about whether the president has incited this situation.
And it occurred to me that People watching the president, this president, President Trump, don't quite understand the theater that he brings to it.
Now, he's been criticized for being, hey, you're a reality TV guy in politics.
Well, I don't think people see the power in that.
Because what the president does is he inhabits different characters.
Like, as if you were in a play.
And I want to give you an example of some of them.
So for example, you may have noticed, we'll go to the whiteboard, that based on the setting, President Trump takes on a different character.
For example, when he's doing his rallies, he talks like a wrestler.
And when I say a wrestler, I mean like a TV wrestler where they talk about how they're going to beat up their enemies and they're going to be tough.
And everything is kind of exaggerated big.
Now, if he took his rally personality, which is sort of like a wrestler, And he brought it into, let's say, a diplomatic situation.
That wouldn't go very well.
But it is the perfect personality for energizing a gigantic stadium full of people.
So he brings the personality to the setting that's the right match.
So he brings sort of a WWE wrestler personality bigger than life.
Hey, I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue.
I like body slamming.
Beat that guy up.
I'll pay for the medical records.
The people in the rally apparently understand what's going on.
In other words, they've gone to an entertainment venue.
An entertainer comes on.
He happens to be the president.
and the entertainer takes on the personality that makes sense In that context, he's entertaining.
The people know he's entertaining.
They take it as that.
Now, some people are not mentally stable.
And they might see this and say, Hey, everything he says is true.
Maybe I should act on it.
That's a little dangerous.
I'm not saying it's not dangerous.
I'm just putting it in context.
When he's in the White House, that's probably when he does his best deal making.
I say that because he talks about the importance of the setting.
The place that you negotiate and the variables in that place and time are a big factor in success.
Could you imagine a better place to negotiate than in the White House?
Because anybody who comes into the White House is sort of taken in by the awe of it all.
In the White House, he's sort of a dealmaker, sort of a boss and a dealmaker.
When he's overseas, he acts like a statesman.
Have you been surprised or not surprised that when he does his international trips, everything goes great?
Because when he does his international trips and he's talking to foreign leaders, he's not playing a wrestler.
He's not really playing a dealmaker, at least not internationally, as much as you'd expect, because probably those deals are either made or not made before he gets there.
On Twitter, he plays a different character.
He plays a bully. Who else plays a bully on Twitter?
Everybody interesting. That's what Twitter is.
Twitter is a place you go to bully each other.
If you're not going to be a bully and you don't want to be bullied, Twitter's sort of the wrong place for you.
So when he goes to Twitter, he brings his Twitter bully personality.
How many times have I been bullied on Twitter just this morning?
A lot, right?
I've been bullied on Twitter...
People have called me, I've been insulted for my personality, my looks, my comic strip, my talent, my character.
That's a pretty long list.
So when you say somebody is a Blue Star user of Twitter and he's a bully, it's almost redundant because you're getting bullied and you're probably giving it back.
At about the same rate.
So that personality fits really well with Twitter.
Is it an accident that President Trump has an enormous Twitter base?
It's not an accident.
Because he brought the personality to Twitter that works really well on Twitter.
You don't go to Twitter and act like you're somewhere else.
You act like you're on Twitter.
And I'm not saying that's a bad thing.
I'm just saying that if you go on Twitter It's a bullying kind of setting and you gotta expect some of that.
So he definitely does some bullying on Twitter.
But does he do bullying in the other situations?
Well, not in the same kind of sense.
He picks his spots.
It's a different kind of approach for every sense.
If he's talking to kids, he goes into grandfather mode.
You've seen him when kids are in the Oval Office, he just goes into grandfather mode.
I've seen him personally.
Most of you know, I got a chance to meet him in the Oval Office.
We chatted for a little while, and I saw yet another personality, which was appropriate to the small setting, which is a really fun, engaging, charismatic guy.
So, one-on-one, completely different personality.
Because he picks his personality to match the setting.
He brings theater to his situations and he brings the character that gets him the right result.
Here's the problem.
If you look at his rally personality or his Twitter personality and you imagine that that's his personality, you've sort of missed the bigger picture.
That he matches the personality to the scenario to get the best result.
So if you put him with a group of Girl Scouts, would he act like a bully?
Let's say it was the president meeting a room full of Girl Scouts.
Would he bully them?
Probably not, because he brings the personality that fits the situation.
So when you see the news criticizing him for talking like this and then being afraid that it'll go all wrong if he goes overseas, that doesn't make sense because he doesn't bring that personality overseas.
And anytime you see that he's criticized for the wrong personality, just ask yourself, wait a minute, is it the wrong personality for that setting?
So when you see people say that the president has incited the bomber, we should ask, to what degree?
To what degree is the president inciting people?
In his rallies, there's no evidence that people don't understand what he's doing.
It seems to me, and maybe early on there was a little more confusion, including the people on his side, but I'm pretty sure that something close to 100% of the people who attend his rallies know that he's taking on a personality for that purpose.
And they don't take it too seriously if he says, you know, beat up this person, rough up this person.
It's just part of the act.
All right? Now, I've said before that the President does talk in this way, and there is certainly a risk that people who are unhinged will not understand that it's part of the act and that they might act on it.
So you can't say that it's never happened or it wouldn't happen or it didn't happen.
It's just impossible to measure.
But let's take a look at what the President does Versus what the press, the anti-Trump press does.
Don't you need both of those things to raise the temperature?
Imagine, if you will, that the press talked about the president the way I am.
Which is not illegitimate, is it?
I just said he has different personalities in different settings, and you can observe that that's true.
So imagine if the press reported it the same way I just described it, which I think you agree is not biased.
These are different personalities in different contexts.
So imagine that he said something like, I'm glad that politician body slammed that guy.
If the press had reported it the following way, what would be the result?
President Trump today, in his rally personality, was pretending like he was in favor of body slamming a reporter.
The crowd laughed.
Suppose it had just been reported that way.
That's not biased, is it?
He said something in his rally personality.
The crowd laughed.
That could be the whole story.
But if you're biased and you're trying to paint the president as a monster, you'll say, well, I think he's incited a bomber because he's talking about violence and the bomber did something that looks like violence.
So... You have to have two elements.
You've got to have the president saying stuff, the raw materials that the news is reporting, but it absolutely requires the news to put it in bad context for it to be weaponized.
For it to be weaponized.
So I would say that the president does say things that if he wanted to avoid the news weaponizing them, he probably could say things differently.
But here's the problem when we imagine that we can give the president advice on the way he communicates.
If you had gone back in time to 2015 and said, okay, you're the president's or the candidate's advisor.
You're President Trump's advisor as a candidate.
Tell him what to do and he'll take your advice.
Would he have become president with your advice?
Probably not. Probably not.
Whatever the president is doing and whatever he did to become president appears to work.
At the same time, all of us who are observing are absolutely positive that we have a better way of how he should have done that.
But we didn't become president.
So you have to have a little bit of humility about how certain you are that your method is better than his method when you observe that his method keeps working.
Now, it doesn't work without a cost.
So you could argue quite persuasively that, ah, you know, that raised the temperature too much and there's a price to this.
Yeah, that would be a valid argument.
But none of this temperature rising would happen unless you've also got the press.
The best example I like to use is the Charlottesville hoax, as I call it.
The hoax is this.
When the president was saying that there are nice people on both sides, the both sides that should be understood by anybody watching this situation is that it was a protest about people who wanted to keep these statues, the Civil War era statues, and people who wanted to get rid of them.
The president is saying both of those groups have good people in it.
The press took the context and changed it to say that he was saying that the people who were saying anti-Semitic things and marching with the tiki torches were fine people.
When the president was asked to clarify, he clarified that he did not mean that they were fine people, and he disavowed them.
Now, if the news had reported what I just said, which is there was a little bit of ambiguity about what he said, So we asked him to clarify.
And thank God, he clarified that he's not supporting the racists.
It sounded a little bit like maybe he was saying that, but it's a good thing he clarified.
That was the whole story.
That was the whole story.
Or should have been.
But it was reported, and you'll see this on CNN continuously, the pundits will say, and he called the racists fine people.
And the host, whatever host it is, just lets that go.
Just lets it go as if that's a fact.
It's not a fact.
It's a hoax. And it's reported repeatedly.
And I would guess that the Charlottesville hoax, more than just about any other fake news, has turned up the heat in this country so that people just...
Yeah, Juan Williams said it yesterday on The Five.
I saw that. And every time that goes by unchallenged, it creates a much worse situation in this country, and I don't think you can blame that on the president, because he did clarify.
And remember, I have the 48-hour rule that says if you've said something that offends or might be ambiguous, just give the person 48 hours to clarify, which he did.
All right, let's talk about While we're talking about hoaxes, let me say something that will trigger most of you.
I can't figure out what the problem is with George Soros.
And some of you have observed that I'm running, I guess you'd call it a public experiment.
And it's an experiment, except I'm not hiding anything.
So it's all completely public.
There's no hidden motive here.
So what I've done is I've asked people to essentially convince me that George Soros is as bad as everybody says.
He's the big bogeyman.
And here are the types of responses I'm getting so that you can see what my point is.
One response I'll get is that when he was 14 years old, he collaborated with Nazis to remove, yeah, you're seeing it in the comments, a Nazi collaborator.
Number one, that's based entirely upon a hoax video.
Most of you don't know that.
It's a hoax video.
It is George Soros on 60 Minutes saying things in his own voice.
And so most of you say, well, that's not a hoax.
I watched it myself.
It's his own video.
It's his own language.
But it's edited to remove the part in which he says he just was an observer.
So in context, he was just a person who existed at that time.
If you believe that Soros said he enjoyed it and he participated in taking gleefully was part of the Nazi movement, you have been hoaxed.
But on top of that, what the hell does that have to do with 2018?
If your problem is that Soros is a current problem, It is not relevant that he did something at age 14.
And the thing you think he did at age 14 is actually a hoax.
It's taken out of context.
You can see it on Snopes.
You can see the full interview.
All right. Now, I know Snopes, you think, is biased, but they show the full interview, so the interview does its own talking.
Now, some people say, but what about the time he manipulated this or that currency or this or that market and made money, and therefore he's evil?
Maybe. You could certainly have a judgment about that.
But that's not really about the political stuff he's doing.
It's just another topic.
You could certainly judge him for being a high finance guy who's taking advantage of the system in a legal way.
And those of you who are claiming you're calling foul because I used Snopes as a source, all I'm saying is that they have the full video.
You don't have to believe anything about Snopes.
Just watch the video and you'll see that you've been hoaxed.
And it requires no credibility for Snopes whatsoever.
All right. The other thing, so the two biggest things people say, he manipulated currencies in this or that case, or markets in this or that case, and that he did something in 14, don't really have anything to do with his political work.
So let's talk about the political work.
So the first two things are indications of some kind of cognitive dissonance, because it's people who believe that those two things are relevant to to political things in 2018, and they just clearly are not.
But what they say about the political things is that Soros is a funder of these various organizations that are left-leaning, or very left, and they're organizations that most of you don't like, most of you on this video.
So I've said, that's a good point.
What percentage of those budgets is Soros responsible for?
And then there's a big silence.
Because if you don't know...
Well, let me put it this way.
If you know the dollar amount he gave, that's the beginning of something useful that you could know.
It's the beginning. But you kind of have to know the full budget and who else is giving to these organizations to have an opinion on it.
Because if the problem is that whoever's saying so naive...
You have to give reasons or else you're supporting my argument.
So anybody on here who says, Scott, you're so naive and that's all you say, remember you're supporting my argument.
My argument is that you don't have any reasons.
So if you complain about me and you don't give a reason, and you have plenty of space in this comment, you don't have to give detail.
You could say, but what about the time he did X? Okay?
So yes, so Judicial Watch, I just tweeted about them this morning.
They have documents, they've shown that Soros has contributed to various organizations that do things that you don't like.
I take that as true.
What percentage has he donated?
Let me give you some context, the reason I ask this.
And I don't know if this is true, but this is what I read recently.
That he donated to Media Matters.
Media Matters is an evil organization that sends trolls after people like me.
Right? So I've been a victim of the Media Matters trolls.
In fact, they're out this week.
If you've seen my Twitter feed, you can see all the trolls that came out around the election have all come out because they all say the same thing.
And they all have about the same number of followers, you know, the low 200s.
And, you know, there's not much else about them.
So Media Matters is evil.
Soros gives money to Media Matters.
So far, I'm pretty sure that's a fact.
And we're all on the same page.
How much does he give to them?
I heard that it was a million dollars in 2010.
In 2010.
What was the budget of Media Matters?
Around 30 million since then?
So about 1 30th of Media Matters money came from Soros.
What is the percentage? And by the way, I don't know that that's true.
That's just based on some stuff I read in a source that I'm not sure is necessarily true.
But the question is, could we see a list of the things he donates to and then see what percentage of their budget it is?
Because if it's 1 30th, I don't think he's a big factor.
He's just a guy who's giving to a lot of things.
If it was 1 30th and he hasn't given to the same organization since 2010, I'm not sure that's anything.
So if you were to say, let's say this is true, that he gave a million dollars in 2010, well, that was eight years ago, and it would be 1 30th of it.
I'm not saying it's good.
Media matters is evil.
If he gave money to them, he supported evil, but in a kind of a trivial way.
So if your point is that he's important, It is not demonstrated by the money he gave to Media Matters if it was 1 30th of their budget and he hasn't given any money since 2010, all of which needs fact-checking.
I'm just giving you some framework to understand it.
I don't know if that's true or not.
Likewise, everything from the caravan, etc.
Now let's look at the funding of the caravan, as we learned in my prior Periscope.
The caravan is mostly a caravan to give themselves protection from the cartels because it's too dangerous or you have to pay off the cartel.
It's just too dangerous unless you're in a big group.
So the real reason for the caravans is to keep them safe to get from a bad situation to a good one.
Now did Soros fund anything involved with the caravan?
It's possible. When he wrote the check for whoever he funded, did he know it would be to support the caravan?
That's not in evidence.
It's possible that he funded organizations that do sort of generally good things for immigrants, and some of that money found its way into this caravan situation because somebody thinks it's genuinely good for immigrants.
But what percentage of their budget came from Soros, and did he know that that's what they were going to do with it?
Maybe, but it's not in evidence.
So people are asking me if Soros is blackmailing me.
So here's why I talk about Soros.
Not because I necessarily care too much.
What's interesting to me about it is that it has every sign of being a derangement scenario in which people imagine that he's more powerful and more evil than he is.
That doesn't mean he's on the right side.
He could still be doing plenty of things that you don't like, but they're probably not that important.
And they're probably not evil in intention.
So many of you have said, my God, if you want to find out how evil he is, here's a link to a book.
Or here's a link to a long article about him.
I have looked at many of those sources, and they all have something in common, that they don't really get to what is he doing that you care about, and what percentage is he funding, and how much difference does it make.
Without that, you really don't know much about him.
So it seems to me that he's just the designated bad guy whose impact might be this big that we imagine to be this big.
Are there evil intentions?
There's no evidence of that.
Now the other thing that people say is that he's in favor of open borders and a world government.
I believe there's something close to that that's true, but not exactly.
Which is that I believe Soros favors some kind of international bodies that would make it easier for all countries to get along, I guess.
And I'm sure that that would be better for the small countries and worse for the big countries like the United States.
So if you don't like that plan, I think you have a good argument.
But how likely is it that Soros is going to get his way and create these international governments that the United States says, oh yeah, we'll just give up some of our authority to this international body.
Kind of zero. The odds of Soros actually having some kind of a world government...
And by the way, he's not replacing governments.
That's not what he's proposing.
He's proposing that in some specific areas...
That we act globally.
I don't know what his argument is, but it doesn't matter, because it can't ever happen.
It's just so far from something that's going to happen, you could just ignore it.
So here's my take on Soros.
I don't know what he's thinking.
But if you look at the things he's donating to, they mostly are things that are trying to help people, but you don't think they're the right things.
Or you don't think it's fair, but they're not evil organizations.
He's not funding Nazis, right?
He's funding people who are trying to help immigrants.
You just don't like the way he's doing it because it comes out of maybe your pocket in some way.
That's not that evil. It's just something you don't like, you don't agree with.
And then how much he's influencing these organizations, we don't know.
Because I haven't seen a list of what percentage he donates.
If it's just a big organization that's giving a bunch of money to a bunch of things that are sort of generally on his side, It's not the most evil thing in the world.
If you're judging him by what he did when he's 14, that's irrelevant.
If you're judging him from what he did with his finances and his business, you can hate that, but it doesn't have anything to do with politics.
So that's my take on him.
This has triggered just about everybody, and that's why I do it.
I do it Well, a few reasons.
One of the reasons I do it is because in order for my periscopes to be useful and additive, you need to hear that I can say something you don't like.
I would go so far as to say that you don't watch this Periscope because you agree with everything I say.
You're actually more addicted because of the things you don't agree with.
Because when you see me agree with you on a bunch of things and then when I disagree with you on something important, What's it do to your brain?
Your brain goes, I agreed with him on all those other things and they sounded reasonable, but why am I so disagreeing with him on this Soros thing?
That's my point.
You need to know that I can disagree with you on important points.
That's the only thing that makes this valuable.
And you need to know that my specialty is identifying hysteria and irrational thinking.
And that the Soros situation has every tell for irrational thinking.
Every tell. It's all there.
There's nothing missing from that situation.
Which is different from saying, Soros is a good guy.
I'm not saying that.
I'm saying that there's no evidence for he's the evil genius behind the curtain.
People are saying, what do I know about Soros?
And the answer is...
I don't know anything that would tell me that what people say about him is true.
And I've asked for it for weeks.
More recently, asked for it a lot.
So, if somebody can send me a list of the things that he's donated to, and by the way, watch what happens.
I asked for this this morning, and people would send me different things.
So let me give you a stark example of how cognitive dissonance can be spotted.
So I'm going to tell you what I'm asking for, and it's going to be very clear, and then watch people send me other things.
That's your tell. So what I've asked for is a list of organizations that Soros has donated to recently and what percentage of the budgets of those organizations his donations are.
That's very clear, right?
What are the organizations and what percentage of the budget did he contribute?
Very clear. Watch what happens as soon as I'm off of this Periscope.
You'll see my Twitter and you'll see people sending me all kinds of links.
None of those links will be what I just described.
But people will act as if it is.
That's been happening all morning already.
But watch that. Watch how people...
I'll say, hey, can you hand me a phone?
Can you hand me a phone?
And people will say, I could hand you a phone.
I could definitely hand you a phone.
Watch. Here it is.
Here's your phone. And I'll look at it and say, that's a coffee mug.
I asked for a phone. Can you give me a phone?
And then watch this.
They'll say, and I'll show, it's a phone.
I need a phone. Like one of these.
Just so we're talking about the same thing.
Please send me a phone.
And they'll say, my God, why can't you do your own research, Scott?
Why are you so thick?
Why are you, are you a Soros puppet?
Let me send it to you again.
I sent it to you before.
Here's your phone. And then I'll say, you sent me a coffee mug again.
If you see that, and you will see that in my Twitter feed, that's cognitive dissonance.
That's someone whose brain can't wrap their head around the fact that they've hated Soros, but the only information that would be useful to know if he's even relevant is what I'm asking for, and nobody will present that.
Just watch. Now, if somebody does present it, and he's funding big percentages, enough that he could be the one who's driving these organizations, I'm glad to update my opinion.
So I don't have a trigger for cognitive dissonance, now or later, about Soros, because I just told you in public that if I had that information, it could very well be persuasive.
But watch. No one will give me that information.
They will only give me things that are not that information and try to act like I don't understand what they gave me.
Alright, so you can see it right here in the comments.
Somebody's saying, go to his webpage.
So you see already people sending me to sources that have nothing to do with what I'm asking for and could not possibly have an impact on my thinking.
Would anybody else like to do it?
So we have another example of it here.
Arrested the bomber. Did that happen?
My question is irrelevant and unanswerable.
Did they catch the bomber?
Alright, well, maybe if you don't mind, I'm going to check that.
Check that on CNN. Should be the top thing.
Arrests made in connection to suspicious packages sent to Booker and CNN. Huh.
That looks like I've arrested a man in connection with suspicious packages.
Is it a man that the arrest happened in South Florida?
No additional information.
Alright. They arrested a man.
So the first part of my prediction is correct.
It was a man, if that's really him.
We should not assume that the person who got arrested is necessarily guilty.
That would be a good thing for us to not assume.
So it looks like that's all we know for now.
All right, so let's all go watch the news.
We'll see if we can find out more.
The moment we get that name, you know what happens next, right?
Within five minutes of hearing the name, You're going to see social media pages from this person.
And the first wave of social media pages you see are going to be the wrong person.
You know that, right?
So you're going to see his social media page, his Facebook page, his Twitter feed.
The moment we hear his name, it's going to be the wrong person.
In other words, it'll be somebody with the same name that somebody imagined was him.
So you've got to kind of wait...
Wait to make sure you got the right person.
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