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Sept. 26, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
44:02
Episode 675 Scott Adams: Ukraine Persuasion, How to Know Who is Right
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
It's time for another Coffee with Scott Adams.
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Go! Alright, so we've got funny news and stupid news.
Here's the stupidest news of the day.
There's some news that you can't label any other way.
It's like, well, this is stupid news.
So you probably all know Dave Rubin from the Rubin Report.
I think I'm going to be on his show talking about my upcoming book in several weeks.
But Dave Rubin, if there's anybody here who doesn't know Dave Rubin, he identifies as liberal, as gay, And Jewish.
This is important to the following story.
Otherwise, not important.
But important to the following story.
He was going to do an event with Maxime Bernier, who I don't know anything about, but maybe is a little controversial.
And it was going to be at Mohawk College.
And then the local newspaper...
Got into it, and here's what they say about Dave Rubin.
Now remember, Dave Rubin is a liberal, gay, Jewish guy.
Important to know, before I tell you what the local paper said he was.
So this is the local paper.
They say Dave Rubin is a far-right, YouTube personality.
Well, that part's right. And a significant part of a radicalization process ushering people into the neo-Nazi movement.
Are you effing kidding me?
According to a recently published study out of Cornell University which analyzed 79 million comments and 300,000 other videos, blah, blah, blah.
Now, do you believe that Dave Rubin...
Is recruiting people into the KK, into the neo-Nazis.
That is the most insanely stupid, defamatory, slanderous, libelous, I don't know, all those words sound alike to me.
It is so bad.
That is so bad.
I thought I had it bad.
Yeah, poor Bill Pulte.
I think he's on the Periscope today.
You heard what happened to him.
He tries to give away money.
Give away money. He's trying to, like, give away his own money and help other people become part of the process of charity.
Just try to create some kind of virtuous energy toward giving money.
What happened to Bill Pulte for being a charitable, good person?
He got doxed.
His wife is getting, like, threatening calls on her cell phone.
Are you kidding me?
What happened to the world?
What happened? Now, I'll give you a little bit of an update on my situation.
So, you know, is it John Cook?
I can't remember his name. But, well, I won't even talk about my thing.
Just say that I'm pursuing...
Some action against somebody who's just as bad, but you know that story.
All right. Bill Gates has a special on Netflix, or it's a special on Netflix about Bill Gates.
I think it's Bill Gates' mind.
And Netflix, this is important.
Remember, Netflix is the Obama...
Kind of a, what would you call it, a production company.
So Obama is working with Netflix.
So nobody would say Netflix is some conservative, any kind of an outlet, right?
It's clearly identified a little bit more with the left.
And so Netflix decides that one of the portions that they're going to tweet out to promote the Bill Gates show on Netflix It's not a show.
It's one piece of content called Bill Gates Mind, I think.
And they tweet out the part where Bill Gates is saying that nuclear is the solution to climate change.
I'm simplifying, but that's the sense of it.
Now think about that. There's Netflix.
This isn't some far-right, hey, we like nuclear power.
It's Netflix. And it's Bill Gates.
And Netflix has decided that what the world needs to see, because Netflix has a big footprint, right?
What the world needs to see is that Bill Gates says that the new technologies and new developments in nuclear are going to be the way.
I think that feels like a turning point, doesn't it?
Because you've got Booker and Yang.
And Biden, they're all pro-nuclear.
And of course, Republicans are almost all pro-nuclear.
So I feel like climate change is largely solved.
Now, by solved, I don't mean fixed.
I mean that the path to fixing it is known.
It's possible.
Not just possible, it's doable, completely doable.
So we know how to do it.
It's completely practical.
We can get there.
It's a lot of work, but we know how to get there.
And here's the hard part.
The left and the right largely agree now.
Now, what you're watching is the left convincing itself.
So there are elements of, let's say, the political left who are completely in agreement with the right on how to save the world.
And I don't think you would see this much agreement, except that the left has also scared themselves into action.
So, as many people have pointed out, if you're saying that climate change is real, In the sense that it's a real near-extinction risk.
So that's the real part, whether it's an extinction-level, horrible, cataclysmic future.
If you believe that, and you've scared your own side into believing it, suddenly the risk of nuclear seems irrelevant.
Because you could actually, let me put it in direct terms, you could lose two or three nuclear plants, you know, just something bad happens.
And it would still be totally worth it.
Even if, you know, a 10 or 20 mile piece of land wasn't usable at some point, still the cost benefit would be totally worth it.
Now, I shouldn't have even said that, because as you know, the risk for the new technologies, you know, the most current types of nuclear plants have never had any kind of bad event.
Zero. Never.
It's only the older technologies that have ever had a bad event.
So, everybody's on board now.
Enough about that. Let's talk about the, everybody wants to talk about Ukraine.
I've got an angle on Ukraine that you haven't heard.
So, you're going to be hearing all the same stories everywhere.
But let me, I'll get, and it'll take me a while to work into it here.
Here's the first thing.
Didn't we elect President Trump to pressure other leaders for things that we want?
Am I wrong that the reason Trump was elected, and indeed really the job description of the president, is they should be pushing other leaders?
Isn't that exactly why we hired him?
So I was rereading the The Ukraine transcript, the phone call transcript-ish, because it's not exact.
And what I saw was a president who was using all the tools of his office and all the tools of being the president, basically.
And he was building a persuasive kind of a mode because he did mention Things such as, you know, Ukraine's future could be great.
He did mention, you know, and of course the context is that there was some money out there that was slated and had not been granted.
But let me ask you this.
Let's say there was no such thing as President Trump asking about Biden.
Let's say that never happened.
Would you expect that Trump still would have Trump told his people to hold off on the money to Ukraine until he talked to the leader of Ukraine.
Do you see it yet?
Of course he would. Because it's what he does every time in every situation.
The most basic thing that Trump does is if he's going to go talk to a foreign leader, the first thing you do is you stop that thing you were going to give him.
You talk to him first.
Let me put it in even more stark terms.
If you give money to the foreign leader before you talk to him, you're a fucking idiot.
Am I wrong? Because the job of the president is to persuade other leaders.
I'm not wrong on that, right?
We want him to persuade England.
We want him to persuade China.
We want him to persuade France.
We want him to persuade Israel.
That's what he's hired to do.
So if you send him into a conversation with a foreign leader, do you want to send him in armed or unarmed?
Armed! Every time.
Armed. Now you say to me, but wait a minute, this conversation was not about negotiating.
So if you took the Biden part out, there wasn't even anything to talk about.
It was just, hey, congratulations for winning your election, right?
So you might say, that wasn't really a negotiation situation.
So without the Biden part, why in the world would he be held back?
Let me give you the answer to that.
Because he's smart?
That's why. Do you know why else you would hold back that until you talk to him?
Because it makes it a treat when you get it.
He would pair, if he's smart, which he is apparently, he would pair the gift, you know, the money that we promised, the actual giving of it, with the conversation.
Wouldn't you try to pair your conversation, your first impression, with a very large gift?
Of course you would. So every reason in the world supports the idea that he should hold it until he has the conversation.
You could take Biden out of the whole story and it's exactly the same.
He should not have given them the money before he talked to them.
Period. Now part of it was he needs to get the measure of the person.
Because remember, there was some question about corruption.
There was, you know, who knows what our relationship with Ukraine will be exactly until you get the new leader.
The leaders had to size each other up.
Do you give somebody a whole bunch of money before you size them up?
Before you see what your deal is between leader to leader?
Well, if you do, you're an idiot.
You're an idiot. Stopping the money until you have the conversation is always the smartest thing to do if you are the most powerful country in the world and every conversation is persuasion because it is.
It would have been perfectly reasonable for the president to make it very clear to this guy that he's the guy, he's the guy who determines if you get the money, not Congress.
Let me ask you this.
When we send our president overseas to negotiate for us, do you want him to go unarmed?
Do you want him to go into a conversation with a foreign leader and the foreign leader thinks, I don't care about you because Congress is the one who gave me the money.
Congress is the one that I need to worry about.
President. Do you want to send the president unarmed into a conversation with another leader?
No. No!
What's the best thing the president could do?
Stop the money from the Congress, walk into the conversation, and make sure that whoever he's talking to knows who controls the money.
Then he's armed. Then he can do his job more effectively.
All right, so take Biden out of the question, and you still, if you're smart, you stop the money until the conversation.
Um, secondly, there is something extraordinarily brilliant in how the Democrats are playing this.
And I don't know that I've heard anybody say this yet.
So this will be the, maybe the first time you've seen it.
You know, I talk a lot about making you think past the sale.
So you've heard that from me a bunch of times.
If you can say to somebody, just if this is the first time you've heard it, a car salesman would say, well, do you like the red one or the blue one?
You know, how will this look in your garage?
So he's making you think past the decision of do you buy the car and make you wrestle with the question of which color it's going to be.
That's a salesman's trick to make you think past the decision of buying as if you've already bought it and then think about what it looks like in the future.
There's a form of that, not exactly the same thing, with this Ukraine transcript.
And when I tell you, you're going to be mad.
You're going to be mad because there's something they've hidden in plain sight here.
It's like there's a part of the story that's just hiding, and it's because of their trick.
And once I reveal the trick, the thing they're hiding will just go whoomp, and you're going to see it.
Watch this. They're making you think of whether it's appropriate for the president to, let's say, pressure another leader, and whether it's appropriate to offer some quid pro quo.
That's the only conversation we're having, right?
All the conversation is about whether the president's process was appropriate.
What is the question we haven't asked?
The question nobody's asking is, is it a fair question?
If Biden is guilty, It's a whole different story, right?
If Biden was actually guilty of something, that's all that matters.
I mean, that changes the whole story because, of course, the president should have asked about that.
How about this crowd strike stuff that he also asked about?
Should the president have asked about that?
Yes. So the Democrats are making the world.
Think past the issue of whether these are good questions that a president should get the answer to.
And they are good questions that the president should get an answer to.
Here's some of the dumbest takes I've seen in the story.
On Twitter, people saying, well, that's not the president's job, that's the FBI's job to figure that stuff out.
Well, that's something you'd say if you're very inexperienced.
If you have experience working in big organizations, you would know that when the underlings try to talk, it's usually just a roadblock.
Because underling to underling, the underling you're trying to guess something out of will say, that's not my job, I don't have authority, no reason to work with you, etc.
Underling to underling is rarely a productive path.
And when that fails, and maybe you try that first, but if it fails, and it probably did...
You move it up to boss to boss.
And then when boss to boss makes an agreement that something's going to happen, you tell your underlings and then they can maybe communicate a little bit better and get something done.
But those people who say, no, it's the FBI, you've never worked in any kind of a large organization.
Underling to underling is rarely a productive path.
So it's perfectly appropriate that the bosses talk about that.
Now, So anyway, did you see the magic trick?
You all saw that, right?
We're being made to think past the sale of whether or not the Biden thing has any meat to it.
The whistle...
You know I introduced the idea of two movies playing on one screen, and we've never seen a better example than this.
People are reading the same transcript and seeing completely different movies.
And I've been trying to see the other one, you know, sort of like a Yanni Laurel thing, where you squint and you see if you can see the other movie on your screen, and I can't quite see it.
Which doesn't mean it's not there, right?
You can't really say the other movie is wrong.
You can only say, I can only see mine.
Now, here's a little tip for deciding what is real and what is not.
I talk about this a lot, but I want you to apply it to this situation.
And it's the how to tell who is hallucinating.
So hallucinations are generally additions to a scene.
The hallucinator is seeing something that isn't there.
So if you have two people looking at the same data, the same content, the same anything, and one group says, oh, it's here, it's here, look at it.
Can you read? I mean, I'm reading it.
It's right in front of me. And the other group, who are also legitimate, you know, ordinary adults, are looking at the same thing at the same time, and they go...
I don't see it.
I don't see anything.
Under those conditions, who do you bet on?
Always bet on the one who doesn't see it.
Likewise, if the two networks, I like to use Fox News and CNN, but you could substitute any left and right, you know, outlets.
If one of them is reporting the thing is true and the other is not, It's probably not, right?
Russia collusion. CNN reports it's true.
Fox News reports it's not.
It's not. The ones who are seeing it were seeing confirmation bias.
The ones who didn't see it were not affected by confirmation bias because they were not inclined to believe it was true.
So the people who don't see a thing are far more likely to be the ones who are right in the end.
You want to try some more? I'm going to try some you don't like.
Uranium One. I watched the Uranium One scandal for months and months and months from people saying it's a big old scandal and I would listen to it.
And even on the surface, the way it was reported, I would say, I don't see anything.
I don't see anything there.
I see all the right people signed off.
I see no shortage of uranium in the world that matters.
I see that the mine involved was actually physically in the United States, so if we ever needed it, we could just take it.
I mean, really, we could just take it, if it was any, like, emergency need.
And sure enough, you've seen no prosecutions.
That just sort of died, didn't it?
So use that standard.
It is not 100% accurate, but as far as I know, I can't think of a time, at least in the political sense, that it hasn't worked.
You could do some hindcasting with that.
Well, it would be a little bit hard for you to check, because if you hindcast with that, it's going to tell you some of the things you do believe are not real.
The embassy's sonic weapon attack.
Some people could see it as clear as day.
I couldn't. To me, that was completely nonexistent.
Couldn't see a whiff of it. And it looks like it probably doesn't exist.
All right. So then the whistleblower's report comes out, and it just turns out it's secondhand reporting about something he heard in the meeting on the transcript we've already seen.
So I think this thing is falling apart.
And then I heard about, but I did not see myself, so I'll look for some confirmation.
I believe Alan Dershowitz was on probably Fox News yesterday and just took the piss out of the whole The whole Ukrainian thing.
No laws broken, nothing impeachable.
Use the Dershowitz standard.
I urge you.
Wait for Dershowitz to tell you what this means on this or other topics, because he's the only frickin' person on the whole planet who has a sufficient legal background who is willing to be honest.
He's the only one willing to try.
Who also has, you know, all the legal credentials.
The guy's become sort of a national treasure in the sense of sorting things out for us.
All right. Here, Howard Kurtz had what I think is one of the worst takes on the Ukrainian situation.
So Howard Kurtz, and for context, he's on Fox News.
And I don't identify him as being right or left.
So he's a media critic type.
So my observation is he does try to play it as close as he can get to the middle.
One of the few people who actually tries to do that.
And I love his show, by the way.
So Howard Kurtz is...
I'm a big fan of his.
But the following take on the transcript, I think, is one of the worst.
Here's why. What he noted was that when he read the transcript, one of his takeaways was, and sort of a test he would put on it to see how important it is.
He said, and I quote, but if you flip the script, if Barack Obama had asked Ukraine in 2011 to help investigate one of the Mitt Romney's sons, one of Mitt Romney's sons, Republicans would have gone nuclear.
Now, first of all, that's true.
We'd all agree that if the situation were reversed, because we live in a political world and there's a big election coming up, that if you reversed the facts, that Republicans would be the ones going nuclear.
I think that's a fair statement, just because we live in a political world.
But that has nothing to do with how important the actual event is.
That's a political statement.
It is politically true that the Republicans will go nuts if Democrats do something, Democrats will go nuts if Republicans do something, and that if you reverse the situation, the other one would go nuts.
That's true of every situation.
You can't think of any topic where you couldn't reverse it and the other side would go nuts.
So using the if I reversed it, the other side would go nuts as any kind of a standard to reach a decision about how you should feel about it It just doesn't connect.
So I think you should reject the standard of how would you feel if this were reversed.
It's useful to tell you that you're being biased about it.
I mean, that part's really good.
As an exercise for your own checking of your bias is really helpful to do.
So Howard Kurtz has a very helpful suggestion, indirectly, in the sense that you should always reverse it and say, what would this look like if the other side were doing it?
Would I feel the same?
That's a good question to ask.
But it has nothing to do with whether it's impeachable, has nothing to do with whether it's illegal, and has nothing to do with really how you should see it.
Because if you're trying to be unbiased, it wouldn't matter what other people would think in other situations.
That's the least important thing.
I don't care what somebody else hypothetically would have thought in a hypothetical situation.
I just care about this one.
All right. Apparently, the president has given alternate stories for why the money was held.
One of them was that other countries were not pulling their weight and helping Ukraine, and I think that was also reinforced in the phone call, so we judge that to be true, that other countries are not pulling their weight and that it was an issue and they had been talking about it.
That would be a good reason to at least hold back the money a little bit, just to sort of see, maybe they put a little pressure on other people.
We don't know if that's the one reason.
And then another reason the president gave us that Ukraine is corrupt.
He needed to sort of feel out the new leader to see if this money is going to go into corrupt or non-corrupt hands.
And this guy seems to be a corruption fighter.
At least, you know, he's labeled that way.
So here's the thing.
Does it matter that he gave two different stories for why he did it?
That doesn't strike me the same.
And again, I'll use my, you know, what happens if the other side had two different stories for something, would I feel differently?
And the answer is no. Here's a standard for you.
If somebody has two or three reasons for doing something, they're probably all true.
Sometimes you're thinking about one.
Sometimes you think that's the important one.
Because if you were to say which is more important, The fact that other countries were not putting in money, not pulling their weight, is that more important than the fact that Ukraine might have some corruption and the money might not be used correctly?
Well, on any given day, you might think you might reverse those.
If you're talking in public, you might say, yeah, it's because the other countries aren't pulling their weight, but you're trying to influence the other countries.
Another time, if maybe it's a press conference or something, you might call out the corruption.
So whether this was a Democrat or a Republican, I always give everybody two or three reasons.
If they make sense. If any of those reasons are just ridiculous, then you have to reassess.
But for big, complicated situations, having two or three good reasons why you're doing it and not exactly knowing how to rank them or which one to highlight first, that's just business as usual.
The one you want to watch out for is when there are ten reasons.
I call that the laundry list.
If you see a whole list of reasons for anything, A list of reasons why the president is really an alien from space or whatever.
Once you get to a whole number, they're probably all bad.
Two or three is normal. All right.
Here is my take on that you haven't seen yet.
President Zelensky...
of the Ukraine is a student of persuasion.
Surprise! Here are some pull quotes from the transcript.
You ready for this? Look for the pacing.
So pacing is where you agree and become the other person.
So watch him agree with and become Trump.
Watch this. This is Zelensky from the transcript.
You are absolutely right, Mr.
President. See? The pacing's already starting.
We did win big.
Win big? Win bigly?
Win big? Win bigly?
And we worked hard for this.
What are the two things that Trump likes better than anything?
Winning big and working hard.
Energy and winning.
The two biggest things that Trump cares about, Zelensky put it in one sentence.
And you say to yourself, you say to yourself, well, Scott, that might be a coincidence.
It might be a coincidence that in one sentence, he's frickin' nailing.
Nailing it. But is it?
Did you hear what he said next?
He says, this is still Zelensky, he says, we worked a lot, but I would like to confess to you that I had an opportunity to learn from you.
So Zelensky is saying he learned from President Trump.
Then he says, we use quite a few of your skills and knowledge to And we're able to use it as an example to our elections.
Yes, it is true that these were unique elections.
So you see, he's agreeing with everything the president's saying, and then he's amplifying, we won big, we worked hard, and we use your skills to do it.
Now, if you say it's just flattery, You're operating in the 2D world.
Flattery works. You know, there's no question that flattery is a thing and it works.
But this is nuclear flattery.
The flattery is almost a cover for the fact that these are pacing skills.
And then a little bit later, Zelensky says, in response to something the president said, he says, well, yes, to tell you the truth, To tell you the truth, that little statement is, you just slip that in there, to tell you the truth, because you uncritically hear that as the truth is coming, even though you haven't heard what it is yet.
We were trying to work hard, because we, see, work hard again?
He keeps saying work hard, work hard, work hard.
What does this president like better than hard work?
Frickin' nothing, right?
Except maybe money, I don't know.
I mean, he loves hard work.
And he says, we're trying to work hard because we wanted to drain the swamp here in this country.
Bam. Now, of course, he was a corruption fighter.
That was what he was trying to brand himself.
So the general statement, of course, you'd expect him to say.
But he uses the president's language, drain the swamp.
Remember, he's not a Native American speaker.
The Zelensky isn't.
He's clever.
He's clever. Then the president says something, and then Zelensky responds.
He goes, yes, you're absolutely right.
Not only 100%, but actually 1,000%.
Who do you know that would go from 100% right to 1,000% right?
President Trump.
I don't know any other politician who would speak in that style.
Zelensky is pacing the heck out of him.
I mean, really, really well.
This is good technique.
So the whole story that you've been watching is that Trump was pressuring Zelensky.
Here's the story you didn't watch.
Zelensky was giving as good as he was getting.
Zelensky has some game, and I didn't know that until I read the transcript.
Zelensky is no idiot.
Zelensky is learning, and he is learning fast, and it's working.
He won the election. So now listen to Trump, the negotiator.
Now, I said before that you always want to send your leader in to negotiate.
He's always negotiating, even if he's not negotiating.
Everything a leader does with another leader is negotiation, even if they're not calling it that, right?
Let's agree we're adults.
It's all influence, because even if they're just trying to be friends, that's part of the negotiation.
So here's something that Trump says.
Trump says, the United States has been very good to Ukraine.
I wouldn't say that it's reciprocal, necessarily, because things are happening that are not good, but the United States has been very good to Ukraine.
That's the process of reciprocity.
So the president is saying, we've given you something, meaning generally, we're good to you.
Creating a situation where, on his own, Zelensky is supposed to be thinking, oh, I owe you one.
Now, you're calling it mob talk.
I would call it just the president doing his job.
If the president doesn't talk like this with every leader every time, he's not doing his job.
This is exactly how he should be talking to every leader every time.
If you're saying that there's something special about this conversation, Then I think you're missing some context.
This is how the president should talk with every leader, foe or friend, every time.
The president should bring the entire weight of the office to every conversation with every leader.
The whole weight of the office.
He should not leave any of that home.
The whole weight.
And he's bringing it.
It's like, well, the United States has been very good to you.
I don't see that coming back.
That Is frickin' exactly why he was elected.
All right? Let me be as clear as I can.
If we send a president into a meeting like this with any major leader, And he doesn't do this.
He doesn't create the situation that says, we've been good to you.
Let's see what you can do for us.
If he's not creating that feeling, he's not doing his job.
You need another president, one who knows how to walk into a room and own it.
President Trump knows how to walk into a room and own it.
Now he's got the full weight of the office and the United States behind him, and he brings it.
He brings the whole office.
Every time. Because he's not dumb.
Of course you bring the whole office.
You bring the whole bag every time.
Why would you leave anything home?
Alright, here's some more. Listen to Zelensky do some more pacing.
So this is Zelensky in that transcript.
He says, it turns out that even though logically the European Union should be our biggest partner with Ukraine, but technically the United States is a much bigger partner than the European Union.
How much does Trump want to hear that he's better than the European Union?
And it goes on.
And I'm very grateful to you for that, because the United States is doing quite a lot for Ukraine.
Pacing, pacing, pacing.
Much more than the European Union, especially when we were talking about sanctions against the Russian Federation.
The United States is much better than the European Union.
All right, so are you watching this dance?
So Trump comes into the dance.
He says the United States is doing way more than Ukraine is doing for us.
How do you counter that?
If you're just as persuasive as Trump, what's a good counter to that?
A really good counter to that is, wow, you're way better than the European Union.
Because when you say you're way better than the European Union, how does that make Trump feel?
That he's good where he is.
That the current situation is good.
Hey, I like being better than the European Union and I love hearing Ukraine say it.
So, Zelensky, in real time, very cleverly created a new frame.
Which is not the United States versus Ukraine who can be better to each other.
That was Trump's frame and it was the right frame to bring.
Zelensky very quickly in real time turns it into the United States versus the European Union.
And hey, you're winning.
You're way better than the European Union.
This is really, really good stuff.
If you can't see why Zelensky won the election, you're missing a good show.
And then Zelensky says, I would like to thank you for your great support in the area of defense.
We're ready to continue.
And he says, specifically, we're almost ready to buy more javelins from the United States for defense purposes.
Bam. Zelensky just told the president that he would buy more military stuff if the president kept being good to Ukraine.
Now, he didn't say quid pro quo.
He didn't say quid pro quo.
But he did suggest that if the Ukraine has a lot of money to buy some military equipment, that the president would be very happy if it was what?
Zelensky is giving as good as he's getting.
Maybe better. I mean, he's got some serious game here.
All right. Trump says, the other thing, the other thing.
So when he asked for a favor, he was talking about the crowd strike stuff, looking to the crowd strike stuff.
But then later on, he goes, the other thing.
So you could reasonably say that this is part of the question about, I need a favor.
Here's a lot to talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that.
So he says a lot of people want to find out about that.
That's just true, right?
A lot of people want to find out about that.
So do whatever you can with the Attorney General.
Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution.
So if you can look into it, he goes, it sounds horrible to me.
Now, the counter to that, if you haven't heard it, is that the prosecutor was widely considered not effective and not fighting corruption.
So it seems there were good reasons that he was fired and that maybe Biden had some good reasons for him to be fired that weren't necessarily family-related.
But I don't know what they were.
So here's the thing.
Is it fair to say that there was some uncertainty, both with Trump and with all of us, about what the Bidens were doing over there?
There were, right? You and I don't exactly know why it is that Hunter Biden got paid so much, other than it looks sketchy, right?
Wouldn't you like to know?
Don't we all have a right to know?
Shouldn't we know what was going on if Biden is leading in the polls in a matchup in the general election?
It's the most, I would say, if you were to rank all the things that the president should be doing, you could make an argument that should be first.
If you want to make a rank of all the things President Trump should do, the highest priority to the lowest, I would say close to the highest would be making sure that the guy who's leading in the polls to become president of the United States doesn't have what looks like an obvious Conflict of interest with a major country that's connected to Russia.
How is that not the president's top priority, given that we don't have a war going on that's a hot war right now and the economy is chugging along?
I would say that might have been the president's top priority, even if when they look into it there's nothing there.
There might be nothing there.
But certainly looking into it, it's got to be a top priority.
All right. Then Zelensky says, I heard the prosecutor was treated very badly.
Oh, no, this was still Trump saying.
Trump said, I heard the prosecutor was treated very badly, and he was a very fair prosecutor.
I guess that's up to debate.
So good luck with everything.
And then the president says, your economy is going to get better and better, I predict.
You have a lot of assets.
It's a great country. And then he says he has many Ukrainian friends.
So there's the president. He likes to paint that picture of everything's going to be good for you.
But it's also sort of suggested that their good working with each other might be part of it, even though he doesn't state that.
It's just sort of the proximity to it that makes you think, well, there's something about this productive...
You know, working with the United States and the fact that you're a great country, something good can happen.
And then Zelensky throws in that on some trips to the United States, he stayed at Trump Tower.
I love that part.
Zelensky just like tosses that in and I stayed at Trump Tower.
What does that do?
Concept of reciprocity.
You say to yourself, that is such a trivial thing.
There is no way that the President of the United States is going to be influenced by one guy staying at his hotel.
He's a billionaire. It couldn't possibly matter.
Now, well, somebody's saying it's flattery.
I don't know. I wouldn't say that was flattery.
When he threw in that he was staying at Trump Tower, I would say that was closer to the concept of reciprocity.
I gave you something.
And here's the thing. Reciprocity doesn't require you to give the same amount.
So a salesperson will say, hey, can I send you some tickets to the show?
You know, they're worth a few hundred bucks.
And you say, yeah, I can. And then you pick that vendor over the other vendors for a multi-million dollar project.
So the concept of reciprocity does not require equal value.
I could give you a stick of gum for nothing, just, hey, would you like some gum?
And you will automatically be tuned to being friendlier to anything that I need later.
That's how reciprocity works.
So that little comment I stated at Trump Tower Good stuff.
Good stuff. Now, I don't know who's advising him, but I know he used the phrase win big, and I would be surprised if nobody on the Ukraine team read win bigly.
Just saying. So, I've got to run.
I've got somebody coming. Keep an eye out for Zelensky on the world stage.
Here's my prediction. Zelensky is going to be bigger than Ukraine.
Zelensky is going to be bigger than Ukraine because of skill.
That's my prediction. So that's all for today.
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