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Dec. 8, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:00:02
Episode 329 Scott Adams: Modern Presidential Tweets, Mueller Porn Updates
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Hey everybody, it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
and That's me, and pretty soon it will be you.
Hello, Blake.
Hello, Yvonne, Forrest, Stephan.
Good to see you all. I hope you have your beverage.
Do you have your beverage?
Where's Joanne?
Joanne's usually quick on the buttons here.
Edmund? Hey, Ray?
Grab your coffee. Grab your stein, your cup, your mug, your chalice.
Fill it with your favorite beverage.
And join me for the simultaneous sip.
It comes now.
Ah! So today will be the tale of three tweets.
The first tweet will be the Don Jr.
tweet about eating dogs.
The second one will be AOC's reply to Don Jr.
And then we'll talk about President Trump's tweet about Rex Tillerson.
We've got three good tweets here.
So I'm going to move my monitor a little bit so I can read to you.
From my other monitor. Sorry about the big hand.
Let's do this. Okay, that's better.
So, Don Jr., he shared a meme.
In which he mocked AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, by saying that, well, let me just look at the actual tweet.
So the meme asked, why are you so afraid of a socialist economy?
Followed by the answer, because Americans want to walk their dogs, not eat them.
Apparently that's a reference to Venezuela.
So Venezuela is doing so poorly with socialism that people are literally eating dogs.
So the first thing we should look at is, how good was the Don Jr.
tweet? I would say A+. And by the way, I don't want to ruin it for you, but all the tweets I'm going to talk about today are all A+. In terms of getting your attention, being a little more provocative than you think someone ought to be, and being visual.
So those are the things you look for.
Look for something that's out of the acceptable box, but not so far out.
Somebody goes to jail, nobody gets hurt.
You know, it's just a little bit inappropriate, which is what makes it so interesting.
It's why we talk about it.
Now, a dog is very visual.
Eating a dog is super visual.
So the Don Jr.
meme that he shared was really well weaponized because it Calls out a reference to Venezuela, makes you talk about it.
So you're thinking about Venezuela as the model of socialism.
You're imagining eating your dog.
Most of us are probably dog lovers.
So from an emotional, you know, just construction quality, the meme was excellent.
So you don't have to like the message, but in terms of the quality of it, It hit all the notes.
It was provocative.
It was visual. It goes to your motion centers.
It brings in Venezuela A+. Now, here's the fun part.
Alexandria decides to respond.
And let's look at her response.
Which I've just lost.
Hold on a second.
She tweeted.
All right.
I hate when I'm reading a news story that doesn't show the tweet.
They just talk about it.
So Alexandria says, speaking about Don Jr.'s tweet, she says, I have noticed that Junior...
Junior here has a habit of posting nonsense about me whenever the Mueller investigation heats up.
Please keep it coming, Junior.
It's definitely a, quote, very, very large brain idea to troll a member of a body that will have subpoena power in a month.
Have fun! So, here she goes with the very, very large brain quote, which is, again, visual.
Now, she's referring to, I believe it was the president who said that the Chinese negotiators over the trade agreements had said that he has a very, very large brain.
And people laughed because it's such a classic thing for President Trump to say.
And so she's using that against him to mock him.
Now you may have noted that the Democrats...
Generally use sarcasm to replace reasons.
I don't know if you've noticed that.
And I'm sure that it happens on both sides, but it seems more prevalent.
I could be biased about this, but it seems more prevalent that instead of giving reasons for things, they will treat it as though the reasons are obvious and all you have to add is sarcasm.
So when she says, it's definitely a very, very large brain idea, To troll a member of a body.
So she's using sarcasm.
Now sarcasm works really well with her base.
They love sarcasm.
It's like they're bread and butter.
So that part's good.
And she also follows the Don Jr.
model and the President Trump model, which is why she's so dangerous, of saying something that's so provocative you can't ignore it.
Who are we talking about?
Her. Who else knows how to do something like this?
President Trump. So she's using a very strong messaging strategy to say things that are a little farther outside the box than they need to be, especially the part where she says that it's a bad idea to troll a member of a body, meaning the House, that will have subpoena power in a month.
So, of course, the critic said, wait a minute, are you threatening somebody over a tweet?
Are you threatening to take somebody to jail over a tweet?
And she's not exactly saying that, but she's kind of indicating that annoying the very people who are going to decide whether you get subpoenaed might be a bad idea.
So I'd say her tweet is very powerful for her base.
Hits all the right notes.
It's provocative.
It seems a little crazy, but not too crazy.
Then she had to follow up.
Because a lot of people complained, and her second tweet said, and I haven't read this, by the way, I'm only seeing it for the first time, for the GOP crying that this is a, quote, threat, I don't have power to subpoena anybody.
Congress as a body, GOP included, has the power.
Although, in this case, GOP will be the minority voters, so they don't really have power.
No individual member can issue a subpoena unless they are a chair, which, as a freshman, I can assure you will not be.
Also, it must be under her purview.
So I don't know what most of that means.
So that one, I would say the follow-up tweet was weak.
But her first one was good because it got her attention.
It got us talking. She made us think about the Mueller investigation, which is good for her.
She made us think about the president's statement that he has a very, very big brain.
She turned it into sarcasm, which her team likes.
Pretty good. And we're talking about her.
That's a win. Now, you may not be aware that Rex Tillerson, who was fired as Secretary of State after however many months he did it, recently gave a public interview.
In which he said that one of the reasons he couldn't work with President Trump is that the president had a different moral fiber, I guess.
And that he had, quote, asked him to do something illegal.
He didn't mention what that was.
But the context here is that Tillerson was dumping on the president in a pretty brutal way.
That is a really brutal thing to say.
About your president.
That he had no moral fiber that Tillerson wanted and he wanted to do illegal things without any specifics.
So President Trump, being the counterpuncher he is, sent this tweet, which I believe you've all seen by now.
He said, talking about his current Secretary of State, he goes, Mike Pompeo is doing a great job.
I'm very proud of him.
So here he's creating contrast.
So the contrast is, I don't insult everyone.
Mike Pompeo is doing a great job.
So that's a good start.
Then he goes, his predecessor, Rex Tillerson, didn't have the mental capacity needed.
He was dumb as a rock.
And I couldn't get rid of him fast enough.
He was lazy as hell.
Now it is a whole new ballgame.
Great spirit estate. So, here again, we see him crossing the line from polite behavior into something that you can't look away from.
You can't read this tweet and then just go on with your day.
You have to stop what you're doing and really focus on this one because it's provocative in the way he likes to do it.
He takes things further than anybody's supposed to take it, but that's why you're looking at it.
So just like Alexandria, he takes it to the next level where nobody gets killed, nobody gets hurt, nobody loses money, but it makes your brain on fire.
So that's why it's so good.
Now look for the visual part of this.
He said, talking about Tillerson, the president said, he was dumb as a rock and also lazy as hell.
Now I was thinking to myself, imagine Rex Tillerson in your head.
Alright, get a little mental picture of Rex Tillerson.
Does Rex Tillerson look like a coffee cup?
No, not really. Does Rex Tillerson look like a squirrel?
No. No, there's nothing about him that looks like a squirrel.
Does Rex Tillerson look like an automobile?
No, he doesn't.
Does Rex Tillerson remind you of a rock?
A little bit. He's got sort of the same shape.
He's got sort of a block head and he's got that sort of grayish coloring like a rock.
You actually see a rock.
So once again, the president has picked a visual comparison that when you look at him, you just think, yeah, I can see it.
Sort of rock-like.
And then I went back, and of course I had to watch what Tillerson said after I'd read this tweet, because I didn't know what sparked it.
And if you watch Tillerson talk, even in this interview, because he's got a Texas drawl, He has the Jeb Bush problem, which is that prior to you telling me that Jeb Bush was low energy, I just thought he was a qualified executive who was calm and cool.
But the moment you say low energy, that's all I can see forever.
With Rex Tillerson, before you told me he was lazy as hell, according to the President, I would have said, well, he's a successful executive from Exxon.
You don't get that job without being a hard worker, you know, a real go-getter.
But the moment the President said he was lazy as hell, and I looked at Rex Tillerson talking in the interview, I found myself saying, he's talking kind of slowly.
He's sort of low energy.
I can kind of see the lazy thing.
Now, that doesn't mean he's lazy.
It would be surprising to me if somebody who had his resume, Rex Tillerson, was actually lazy.
But as a tweet and a punchback, because this is a counterpunch, it's really powerful.
Yeah, the lazy box of rocks comment, well, he's dumb as a rock, comment is great.
And then I've told you before that one of the persuasion things that the president does, I think better than I've ever seen it done.
So this specific persuasion technique, I doubt you'll ever see it done better than this.
And that is contrast.
So he doesn't just tell you that Tillerson is dumb.
Because if the tweet said nothing but Rex Tillerson was dumb and lazy, you would say to yourself, there's a president who just calls everybody dumb and lazy.
And it would feel like he was just insulting people he didn't like.
But because he starts his tweet with, Mike Pompeo is doing a great job.
I'm very proud of him. He's created this enormous contrast between doing a good job that he likes and being on his bad side.
It's the biggest contrast you'll ever see.
And it's the size of the contrast that adds the persuasion.
If he had just talked about one of them without the other, you would miss all the contrast.
So he consistently knows how to build into his persuasion, maximum contrast, visual persuasion, and taking things a little bit farther than you think he should.
But again, just like Alexandria's tweet, just like Don Jr.'s tweet, he didn't take it so far that anybody gets hurt.
It's just we can't look away.
I should also mention, I forgot to mention this, that in Alexandria's tweet, she referred to Don Jr.
as just junior, which is a pretty clever dismissive, because just calling him junior makes him sound like a child or something.
So that's actually pretty good persuasion, too.
So there you have three out of four tweets That were really well done.
One was Don Jr.'s original tweet about socialism making you eat dogs.
Try to forget that one, right?
Try to get that out of your head.
You can't.
You know, if you start thinking about eating dogs equals socialism, that is some powerful persuasion.
So Don Jr.
gets an A+. Then Alexandria Octavia Cortez replied with a very clever reply.
I gave her an A-plus on that.
Her response to the first tweet was kind of weak.
And then the president's tweet is an absolute A-plus because his base laughs at it.
But it also rings true, doesn't it?
The thing about, I'll talk about Kevin Hart, remind me again if I forget.
So it rings true because in the Tillerson regime, it doesn't feel like we got a lot done, does it?
But as soon as Mike Pompeo was on board, it felt like trade negotiations were going our way and North Korea was acting well.
It does feel like Tillerson didn't do the job that Pompeo did.
Now, from our point of view, we can't know that that's true, right?
We don't really know who did what.
We don't know if Pompeo was just there in the right time and things would have gone well for Tillerson had he stayed around.
You don't know that. But the way it looks is that the president has a good point.
That's how it looks.
Now, the critics of the president are piling on to me on Twitter, and they're using their most powerful weapon against me, sarcasm.
That's right. The sarcasm trolls have attacked me for my tweet saying that I would talk about the president's tweet.
And they said some version of this.
I don't have Dale with me today, so I'll have to do my best without him.
Some version of, oh, Scott, you say that the president is so good at hiring people.
If he's so good at hiring people, why did he hire somebody like Rex Tillerson, who's dumb as a rock and is lazy?
How could he be a good hirer if he hired such a bad person, which he now admits?
How can you explain that, Scott?
How can you possibly explain that?
To which I say, The smartest people I know will tell you the hiring is mostly guessing.
The skill is the firing.
If you can't fire people, being good at hiring isn't going to be good enough because everybody makes mistakes hiring.
There's no exception to that.
There's no such thing as a leader who hires only good people.
That's not a thing.
If you were to tell me that Rex Tillerson, you know, being the head of Exxon, one of the biggest companies in the world, having international connections, having managed massive organizations, if you had told me that he was available to be Secretary of State, I'm pretty sure I would have hired him if he didn't drool during his interview the first time I talked to him.
Because that's a serious resume, right?
On paper, Rex Tillerson should have been pretty great at that job, and I was actually expecting he would be.
Now, he didn't work out.
We'll never know exactly what the reasons are, but he didn't work out.
He didn't work with the President well, or he just didn't work well.
Nobody will ever know those details.
But the President did get rid of him in a fairly timely manner.
In other words, he gave him long enough to work, That he could have a good opinion on whether he would be good to keep.
And then when it was time to fire him, he pulled the trigger.
So my take on this situation is you saw excellent leadership.
Hiring him was probably a good decision, given how good he looked on paper.
And here's the important part.
Given the number of people who would not be willing to work with the president, Remember, when the President first took office, most of the most qualified Republicans didn't want to have anything to do with it.
And he sort of had to pick a Republican, right?
So the pool of people he could pick from was very small.
And it was not crazy to think that somebody with a business background, especially one that powerful, would be a good fit with the President.
That was a pretty reasonable thing to assume.
Now, assuming things based on good reasons and being wrong is not stupid.
It's how you deal with being wrong that is the difference between whether you're smart or dumb.
This is one of the most important things that you'll ever hear as a tip.
If you judge people by whether they made a mistake, you're a loser.
I'll say that again. If you judge people by whether they made a mistake, you are a loser.
You should judge them by how they deal with the mistake.
Because you're making mistakes too.
If you've never made one, you probably will.
If you're the only person who's never made a mistake, your time will come.
How people deal with their mistake We'll tell you a lot.
The fact that someone makes a mistake actually doesn't tell you that much because that's a universal quality.
We all make mistakes. We all have blind spots, right?
So I would say this is an example of the president doing the best you can do under the situation that was presented to him.
Very few people to pick from.
Very little time because he had to hire a lot of people.
You know, you're really busy in the beginning.
He picked somebody that was terrific on paper And then after it was clear it wasn't working out, he got rid of them.
That's about as good as you can do.
You know, you'd like to say, well, why didn't he hire a good person in the first place?
And the reason is, nobody can do that.
Nobody. Pick whoever you think is the smartest person you've ever known.
Let's say Warren Buffett.
Let's say Warren Buffett.
Has Warren Buffett ever had to fire anybody?
Well, I don't know, but I'm guessing yes.
Don't you think Warren Buffett has fired people?
Does that make Warren Buffett bad at business?
How about Elon Musk or Bill Gates?
Mark Zuckerberg.
Have they ever had to fire anybody?
Of course! Have they ever had to fire people that they thought would work out but didn't?
Of course! Does that make them bad at hiring?
No! No!
It makes them ordinary, meaning, you know, they're not doing anything wrong.
It makes them leaders.
There are people who make mistakes and then they have to fix it.
That's the job. Alright, Kevin Hart.
Kevin Hart was picked to host the Oscars.
And then people poured through his tweets and found some what has been called anti-LGBTQ stuff in there.
Not too recent, but recent enough that it was a problem.
And He decided that rather than doing, you know, the normal kind of, I'm so sorry, apology, I did everything wrong, I've changed, please forgive me, I'm so sorry about the people I hurt, he kind of went at it more like a professional comedian.
Which is, he wasn't going to back off from the fact that he was joking.
Now, I looked at the tweet, and I think the tweet had to do with the fact that if he saw his son playing with a dollhouse, he would break that dollhouse because he wouldn't be happy that his son was potentially gay.
And so people said, that's hate.
That's hate speech. I would have to say that they're right.
If you're going to say, if there's any such thing, As hate speech, it probably looks a lot like that.
All right? Now, you could argue, oh, he was just joking, and I'm sensitive to that argument.
Because sometimes people are just joking.
And I think there might have been some explanation where the real joke was about his own intolerance.
The joke wasn't about his son.
The joke wasn't about gay people or the value of gay people.
I believe what he was talking about is how he was not an evolved father.
Not good enough, right?
In our world today, you know, I follow the argument.
I hear what he's saying. I understand the concept of how you could say, yeah, that it's self-deprecating.
I understand the argument. You know, I'm a professional humorist, and so I get that, you know, maybe in his mind it wasn't as bad as it was the way it came across.
But, The way he handled it was not the way the public wanted it handled, and so they decided to put some pressure on him, and he pulled out, and he got out of there.
Now, the situation itself is a little bit interesting.
You know, I think I'm going to back the LGBTQ community The critics, the people who are pro-LGBTQ and are criticizing Hart, I think I'm going to take their side on this one.
Because what he did say was very...
It was offensive.
And he had a chance.
They gave him a chance to explain himself.
And he chose not to take that path.
I think under those conditions, the LGBTQ people and ABC had...
Every right to do what they did.
But here's the interesting part.
Taking it a level higher.
It seems to me that increasingly the Democratic Party is throwing the black community under the bus in favor of women and LGBTQ. Now, when I'm talking about this, I'm not talking about facts, and I'm not talking about all the context that would give you a clearer picture of this.
I'm talking about the way it feels.
And the way it feels is more predictive than what the facts are, because people act on their feelings.
If you were, let's say, a black man in the United States, and you're just paying attention to the news, you're not doing a deep dive because most people are not, right?
Most people just sort of skim the headlines.
They're vaguely aware of the news.
So let's say you're just a typical American.
You're watching the headlines like everybody else.
You're seeing President Trump working with a bipartisan group of black leaders on prison reform.
And being apparently all in.
And you're seeing that his team is the one who was driving it, you know, Jared.
So there's no doubt No doubt, if you're watching this, no ambiguity whatsoever, that the president is doing something that is unambiguously good for the African American world.
You're also looking at your employment rate looking great, and you're looking at some pardons of African American people who are wrongly accused.
You're looking at Alright, so you're looking at those things, and then you're watching the Democratic Party, which is your home, right?
Your political home, if you're an African American, you know, if you're African American in this country, most likely you think the Democratic Party is your home.
And then you see Kirsten Gillibrand's tweet, and it says that the future is women.
The future is women.
Now, that actually is probably true, right?
So I'm not going to criticize whether that's a true or false statement, because it's true enough.
I would say that that's a valid statement.
But, how does it feel?
How does it feel?
When I say the future is women, the way I interpret that, based on Gillibrand's quote, is that I would say the female sensibility will dominate.
And I think that's probably true.
It will increase in importance in the future.
And I would observe that that has been true, and I think it will continue to be true.
But how does that feel?
If you're a black man and you're watching your party say the future is women, and then you're watching the party go hard at Kevin Hart, do you think Kevin Hart is a Republican?
Probably not. I mean, I don't know.
I have no idea what his political feelings are, but just based on the fact he's in the entertainment industry and he's a black man, probably...
He leans Democrat. But now you're watching the LGBTQ community go after him.
In my opinion, they have a good point.
But the way it feels is that, you know, black men are being sort of pushed out of the party, and the Republicans are offering something, something that the Democrats weren't offering, which is respect and getting some things done.
You're not seeing respect or getting things done if you're a black man.
Oh, and then look at immigration.
Who benefits job-wise when you tighten up immigration?
Here's one of the biggest little secrets among the Democratic Party.
There are a lot of Democrats who don't like immigration.
Ha ha! And even Democrats can't say it out loud.
And I'm pretty sure that if you're a black American, and especially if you're in the income group that would be most competing with jobs from immigrants, that you're not too big on immigrants.
You're probably plenty friendly in terms of the people who are already here.
But the question of how many you let in, You might be a little more Republican than you're letting on, because people do pursue their self-interest, and this is clearly self-interest.
And there's something else about Republicans championing immigration control, and that is that rich people kind of benefit by immigration.
If you look at my life, like how is my personal rich white guy life, how has it been influenced by immigration?
Probably improved, because there's cheap labor, there's people to do stuff that I need.
If you compare it to, let me give you an example.
Where I grew up in upstate New York, there's close to zero undocumented immigrants.
So I grew up where there are basically no immigrants, and that would be true today.
So I keep in touch with family, etc.
back there. If you wanted somebody to do a small task for you in my town in upstate New York, you wanted to hire somebody just to, let's say, fix something in your house or dig a hole or something like that, you can't find anybody.
You cannot hire Anybody to do a whole range of physical labor where I grew up because there are no undocumented immigrants.
They handle this massive amount of labor that you just can't get done unless they're there.
So when you watch Republicans or anybody who's supporting them, when you think of Republicans, you think of rich white guys, this sort of automatic association.
But they're acting against their own self-interest in many cases.
So acting against their own comfort and even financial self-interest in limiting the amount of low-cost labor in the country.
So somebody says, BS, not a good argument.
It's not really an argument.
I'm not presenting this as an argument.
I'm telling you that the way people feel is based on what they're seeing and they're experiencing, and how they feel is not an argument.
So it should feel, if you were a black citizen of the United States, it's probably feeling, forget about the facts, It's probably feeling like the Republicans are making a good-faith, genuine effort to make your life better.
And the Republicans and the Democrats are kind of more of a party for women.
They're self-branding as a party for women.
They're talking about the future in terms of women.
So it might be a little less welcoming.
So you can see a surprise there.
All right. Your anecdotes about whether or not you can find somebody to dig a hole for you are not really convincing.
Anecdotal evidence is not convincing.
When I use my example of not being able to find labor in my old hometown, it's to describe the story.
That one example should not be persuasive.
It's just how to tell the story with an example.
How's the altitude sickness?
All better. Yeah, who knew?
For some reason, I never knew there was a thing called altitude sickness until I came where I am right now.
I'm in Utah at 8,000 feet, and the first two days here were pretty bad.
You're dizzy, you can't breathe, headachy, you lose your appetite, you can't sleep.
It's pretty ugly.
And I think it happens to at least half of the people who come here.
Yeah, when I got here, everybody was handing me water and saying, drink water, drink lots of water.
But they didn't say why.
They said that you'd get dehydrated up here, and so I thought that's why you drink water.
You drink water because you're dehydrated.
They did not say that drinking water is your primary defense against altitude sickness.
That was never mentioned.
I've got a feeling that the people working in the resort and vacation industry up here more focus on your thirst than the fact that it's preventing you from getting an actual illness that feels like the flu.
Is there a difference if you drive in versus flying?
I think so. Anecdotally, people here talk about people getting off the plane that came from lower altitude and they're instantly at higher altitude.
And one of the ways that you can adjust is by staying a thousand feet lower for a day to kind of adjust and then you go up the next thousand feet.
so my guess is that driving is better but I don't have science for that how do you do Denver's mile high so that would be a little lower wouldn't it?
There's something magical about 8,000 feet.
When you reach 8,000 feet that's when altitude sickness seems to kick in.
So Yeah.
At 5,000 feet, you're not going to get a lot of altitude sickness.
At 7,000, you're not going to get a lot.
But there's something about 80,000, at least people are telling me that, that's sort of a magic cutoff for when it becomes problematic.
Does weed make it better?
Well, I can't say for sure, but you sound very calm.
I'm just looking at your comments.
Okay.
Christina had less problem with it, but she had a little problem breathing.
If you go to the gym here, there's a gym in the resort.
If you go to the gym, everybody's just sucking wind.
Let's talk about Mueller and all the new Mueller porn news.
I forgot to talk about that.
You can see so clearly in all of the Mueller revelations, the two movies effect.
I was pretty sure that whatever new information dropped about Cohen or Manafer or anything else about Mueller, I was pretty sure that I would read it and I would say, um...
So what? Big deal.
Doesn't involve the president, etc.
And I was pretty sure that all the anti-Trumpers would read it and say, Ha!
Ha ha! This feels so good.
We got him now.
This time we gotcha.
And of course, that's what happened.
So, it looks like all of the news about the big news and the clues, to me they feel like they're leaning...
Toward Trump being in the clear.
Now he tweeted, apparently, without any context, he tweeted that he had been completely vindicated or shown to be in the clear somehow.
And I assume he was talking about the new information coming out of the Mueller stuff.
And one of them that is hard to interpret, so I'll rely on Dershowitz to do the legal interpretation, If Cohen had given them something on the president that was really actionable, something that would really take down the president, would Mueller recommend a long sentence?
Because the recommendations are that he go to jail for a significant amount of time.
It seems to me that if Cohen had been useful in terms of implicating somebody above him, That he would be up for very little jail time.
Seems to me. Flynn was the opposite situation, because he was very cooperative, but we haven't seen anything come out of that.
And my guess is, given that what Flynn was accused of, which was really just not being forthcoming about some Russian guys he talked to, if that's all he knew, If Flynn didn't know anything else except his own situation, it makes sense that he would fully cooperate, and then when he was done, there wouldn't be anything about the president that was a problem.
So the Flynn thing makes complete sense in my movie, where the president is not implicated by anything that Flynn is saying or doing.
And then the Cohen situation, Cohen really does know, unlike Flynn.
Flynn, we could imagine, doesn't know what everybody else is doing, didn't know what the president did or did not do.
But Cohen was on the inside of the Stormy Daniels stuff and whoever the other woman was.
And he was on the inside with whatever conversations they had with Russia about a Russian deal.
So you would expect that if anybody had the goods, it would be Cohen.
And because Cohen has burned all of his bridges with anybody who is associated with the president or likes the president, all of those bridges are burned.
The only thing that Cohen can do that would be good for Cohen and his family is to cooperate and get no jail time.
But yet he did not cooperate enough and did not get off.
So apparently he'll get jail time.
That tells me he didn't have anything to offer and that all of his problems were self-generated.
In other words, somebody's pointing out that the initial interviewers of Flynn said he didn't lie.
So there were lots of extenuating circumstances around the Flynn situation.
But the Flynn situation was trivial, and the Cohen situation seems to be all about Cohen.
It doesn't seem to be about the president.
But, that said, there's enough Russia-related things in the sentences that people use when they talk about it that everybody who hates the president is going to assume that he did something.
something, we just haven't found it yet.
So those who say the president is in trouble, Don't have any evidence for that hypothesis, nor do I have evidence that he's not in trouble.
But it would be very unusual if you're just trying to handicap the odds here.
The odds that we wouldn't already know something that would get the president in trouble feels very low, doesn't it?
Because look at all the things we do know.
Put together all the things we know that did happen and how they're not really terribly problem for the president in terms of him being removed from office or going to jail or anything like that.
None of them really seem important.
And we know a lot of them.
In this leaky world...
What are the odds that we would not have even heard of a rumor of something that could take down the president?
Nothing. Not a suspicion?
Well, there's suspicions without evidence.
But there's nothing that's like evidence that somebody would say, well, if that's true, nothing like that.
Yeah, the Roger Stone thing...
Is a fun element to this story.
As I've said before, what makes it fun is that he's famous for not telling the truth.
So would it really matter what Roger Stone did or did not say?
About what he did or did not do.
And same with Corsi. So they're literally famous for being unreliable.
So can you build a case based on the BSing of two people who are known to be unreliable?
There's not much of a case there.
Yeah.
Was it, who said the walls are closing in?
Was that Brandon? So listen to that language, the walls are closing in.
Do you know what that phrase, the walls are closing in, leaves out?
What's missing? What's missing is anything like a reason or a fact.
Now, of course, the reason or the context is that, you know, Cohen and Flynn and all these people are talking and that Mueller might be reaching the end of whatever he's doing.
We like to think every week, but it doesn't happen.
But where are the reasons?
And can anybody explain to me?
I think I'll just maybe ask this question once every week or two until somebody offers even a stab at the answer.
If the Russians were trying to help Trump, as opposed to just muddle with our process and make it less credible or whatever, if their real reason was to help Trump, why did they make ads that were anti-Hillary?
Was it some of the employees got the message wrong?
How do you explain that?
Was it to help cover their bases in case they got caught?
Doesn't really feel like a good plan.
Was it...
Is somebody saying yes?
I think that's yes to covering their bases.
And if they were serious about it, why were the memes so weak and so poorly done that you can't imagine any major developed country could be behind it?
It looked like, you know, some rogue guy maybe trying to help Putin out.
Maybe get a little, you know, get some brownie points with Putin.
It looks like somebody just said, hey, we'll do some memes and maybe Putin did or did not say go ahead.
But that's pretty weak.
And haven't we heard people question at this point, haven't we seen some questions whether we can really know the intentions of Russia?
Compare these two hypotheses.
One hypothesis is that Russia thought that Clinton would be a disaster, not just for Russia, but maybe for the world, right?
Because if Russia gets into it with the United States, it's not a good situation.
So what's the difference between saying that Russia was pro-Trump versus saying they were anti-Hillary?
How do you make that distinction?
Isn't it possible that Russia was more likely in anyone but Clinton camp?
Don't you think that they just didn't want Clinton to win?
Now, they may have said, well, let's just screw with the system.
But you also have to think that Russia...
Thought the same thing that we thought, which is that she was definitely going to win.
Do you think the Russians thought that Trump was going to win?
It doesn't feel like it, because nobody else did, except a few pundits like me.
All right. Why hasn't someone put together a report on all the Russian ads used?
Well, I've seen from Facebook, they did release the ads that were on Facebook, and you can look at, I think it's a full list of the ads, and they are so weak and poorly done, and as I said, they're on both sides of Clinton and Trump, that it's hard to imagine what the purpose was.
If I had to look at that evidence, let me give you a conspiracy theory.
I guess it would be that because I don't have any evidence of it.
So what I'm going to say has no evidence.
But I'm just going to give you an explanation for those Russian campaign ads for 2016 that's different from the one you've heard.
The one you've heard is that the Russian government for some reason did a terrible amateur job that was easy to detect and for some reason criticized both sides.
Maybe, but it would be unusual.
Let's compare that to another theory.
Somebody paid this Russian company.
Somebody who wasn't Russia could have been a billionaire in this country.
Somebody paid this little Russian troll farm to make ads.
And the Russian troll farm, because they're Russians, and they know that they can take this billionaire's money, and they don't really have to produce much in terms of effectiveness, said, oh yeah, we can make you some great memes.
Give us a few million dollars and we'll make you some campaign memes and, well, these would really be worth the money.
And then the unknown buyer gives them money.
They do terrible ads because they don't know how to do it well, but they said they did.
And then the next thing you know, Putin is getting blamed.
Which is more likely?
That Russia is so bad at making memes and their best people can't make a meme?
Is that possible?
Or is it possible that a Russian company screwed a customer?
Let me just ask you that.
Of those two things, which is more likely?
A Russian company screwed a customer Or, they were working with Putin to do a really bad job, and they didn't even have all their ads pointing in the same direction.
Now imagine they had two customers.
One of them wanted them to create ads that were anti-Trump.
That customer paid a lot and got a lot of ads.
A second customer comes in and says, hey, can you make me some anti-Hillary?
Yeah, some anti-Trump ads.
So one customer says, give me some pro-Trump ads.
Another says, give me some anti-Trump ads.
The second one has less money.
Pays less, gets fewer ads.
So when the FBI and CIA and everybody who's looking at it, they say, oh, 90% of these are pro-Trump.
So that must be Putin's intention.
It's kind of a leap.
Because remember, this was a commercial troll farm that I imagined would take money from anybody who wanted to pay them.
So if any outside sources said, give me some Trump ads, Give me some Hillary ads that would completely explain everything we've seen.
I'm not saying that's what happened.
I'm not offering evidence that happened.
I'm just saying that if you compare that explanation, which is completely ordinary and explains every fact, right?
The fact that they just had customers who bought memes and they didn't care what the memes were for explains every fact that we can see.
That doesn't mean it's true.
But the official story doesn't explain the facts.
Doesn't explain why they're so bad.
Doesn't explain why they're so easy to catch.
And it doesn't explain why they had ads targeting both sides.
Just doesn't explain it. Somebody says Russian intel isn't commercial.
The troll farm wasn't part of the intel community.
It was a commercial separate thing owned by a billionaire.
It was just one of the companies he owned.
Now, it's probably true that they did work for the Russian government if the Russian government was willing to pay them or they had some favors to curry.
But it wasn't officially a part of their intel.
Their intentions were to be divisive.
Maybe. Maybe.
So if their intention was to be divisive, that too would be more likely in terms of explaining all the facts than the official version.
So I would say there are two explanations that, given the facts and evidence, are more likely than the official one.
Let's see.
Yeah, why is there no Academy Award category for periscopes?
Where are the Emmys for Periscopes?
Good question. I'm seeing lots of questions about Navarro, and all I understand is that he's kind of a China trade hawk, but I don't know anything beyond that.
It's probably good to throw a hawk in there because that, again, creates contrast.
If we decide to make a deal with China that is in the reasonable zone, it will be helpful to have a hard-nosed person on the negotiations.
Thoughts on the yellow jackets?
Well, it looks like they did their job of getting that gas tax reversed.
So I think when it comes right down to it, people in the middle class do not want to fund climate change.
So what happens when the people who have to pay for it just refuse?
What do I think of the Proud Boys and Gavin McGinnis?
Well, I don't think I know enough about the group, but it seems like they're like every other group in which they have some perfectly nice people and some who are not.
That would explain every large group, right?
So that's the only thing I can say about that.
And a lot of the folks that get accused of racism...
Are really closer to the free speech category.
In other words, people who who speak freely and are not worried about what they say in terms of how other people interpret it almost always look like terrible people or they will be portrayed as terrible by others and with the Proud Boys there's certainly some of that going on but I'm not going to defend or criticize them because I don't know enough I'll just make a general statement My opinion on Laura Loomer's ban from Twitter.
The weird thing about Laura Loomer being banned from Twitter is that she was banned for liberal speak.
So she's obviously more associated with conservatives.
But the thing she got banned for was agreeing with liberals.
And I don't know how to explain that.
Because what she was saying was, and I don't want to get banned from Periscope from making the same mistake, but I'll say it generally.
I believe she was speaking out against discrimination.
She was speaking out against anti-Semites and about anti-women.
Now, she named a specific person as being in that camp, and I believe she offered some reasons.
I don't know enough about that person, and I don't want to get banned from Twitter for talking about something I don't know too much about.
But the message that Laura Loomer got banned for, as I understand it, was that there should be less anti-Semitism and that women should be treated better.
Now, the context was Sharia, but it still was a perfectly liberal message.
Now, it happens to be a liberal message that conservatives agree with, but I think it's the first time, correct me if I'm wrong, is it the first time anybody's been banned from Twitter for being politically correct?
Can you think of an example?
Because that was, I'm saying politically correct, just to make the point.
What she was saying was fact-based, which is that Sharia, you know, the way it's practiced and the way some people would prefer to practice it, Could be bad for anybody who is not Islamic, and it could be bad for women.
I don't think anybody defends the fact that there's some risk in that, but that's all I know about it.
Yeah, we've already talked about Tillerson.
What does a female future look like for men?
Well, it's a good question.
You know, the value of men has certainly decreased because women don't need men for incomes.
They don't necessarily need men to protect them, you know, as long as they're police forces and stuff like that, which are men, but they don't need a husband to do it necessarily.
So I think the value of men has decreased.
But interestingly, the value of women has decreased as well for different reasons.
So I think the value that men and women have for each other has tremendously decreased.
And it's no surprise that younger people are not even dating.
All right. Oh, look who owns more of Twitter than Jack Dorsey.
Yeah, so there is a Saudi investor who owns a part of Twitter, I understand.
But I don't know if that's the reason Laura Loomer got banned.
That would be a leap.
Alright, I think I've said everything I need to say for today.
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