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Sept. 27, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
32:13
Episode 676 Scott Adams: Ukraine, Persuasion Power of “Grifter”, How All This is Bad For Children
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Somebody says, you got me.
Well, well, well.
I don't know if the news has ever been more interesting.
There's just interesting news.
The kind that isn't terrible.
It's sort of fake terrible news.
You know, what about the Republic?
Probably not. We don't really have a lot of problems, so our news is really just whatever's interesting these days.
One interesting thing is the Adam Schiff parody.
If you didn't see this, it's hilarious.
So Adam Schiff, who apparently has no comedic timing whatsoever, or comedic sense, decided that he would do a Parody-exaggerated version of the president's phone call with the Ukrainian president.
And so he simply added things to his parody that weren't actually present in the call.
Now, here's the problem.
As I've often told you...
One third of the public, approximately, that's my professional estimate, about one third of the public can't tell the difference between a joke and not a joke.
Actually, literally, in my experience over decades of producing humor and watching the feedback, roughly a third of the public doesn't have a sense of humor and can't recognize humor in the wild.
So what Schiff did, assuming he doesn't get fired for it or something, fired meaning doesn't win re-election, but probably turned out to be a really good move.
I mean, not good for the country, not good for the president, not good for you, but good for Adam Schiff, because he puts that out there, a whole bunch of parody-like lies, and then he goes, whoops!
Whoops! I sure wish I hadn't done that parody that everybody heard, and that one-third of the people who heard it thought it was actually true.
Whoops! Whoops!
So, as mistakes go, it was a little bit too clever, persuasion-wise.
So Schiff gets the win.
For persuasion, you can make your own decisions about the ethics of what he did.
But it worked.
I hate to say that.
It worked. Let's talk about the word grifter.
Is it my imagination, or did the word grifter...
Suddenly go from an obscure word you rarely would ever hear, except on some old-time movie or something, to something that somebody accuses even other citizens of.
You've seen me be accused of being a grifter.
You've seen everybody being accused of being a grifter.
And the first thousand times I saw it, I thought to myself, here's a new word.
It's just replacing whatever the last word was that was an insult for the president.
But the more I thought about it, the more I started to wonder, If there isn't someone especially talented in persuasion who may have entered the game, and I didn't notice for a little too long.
Do you remember, some of you remember back in 2016, when Hillary Clinton went from having no persuasion game whatsoever.
She couldn't do a tweet, her message was weak, and then suddenly around May, boom!
It went super strong.
It was about the same time that Bernie dropped out.
Bernie had the best persuasion game until he dropped out.
He had the best commercial, for example, and he was outperforming everybody's expectation.
But when he dropped out, suddenly Hillary's persuasion went weapons grade, and she started using this word, dark.
And I said at the time, that is a professional's word.
That's not a politician's word.
That is somebody who knows persuasion at a really deep level, who's saying, if you say dark...
It's a new word introduced to politics.
You know, we hear that word a lot.
And it's open.
It allows people to read into it whatever is their worst of fears.
It's a super strong word that everybody started using at the same time, the Democrats.
Not accused, but I speculated at the time that there was somebody that I nicknamed Godzilla because I wasn't 100% sure.
And I said, I think the Godzilla of persuasion has entered the game.
This is 2016. And who I was referring to was Robert Cialdini, if I'm pronouncing his...
I always say his name wrong.
When I was doing my audio book, I tried to pronounce his name and my audio producer kept making me say it over and over again because I was saying it wrong.
So however I just pronounced it, probably wrong.
But I speculated that he had entered the game because that word was so strong and it reminded me of his teachings that I thought, man, I think it might be him, the Godzilla of persuasion, the most effective author about influence of all time.
And he was asked, by reporters and others if he had been helping the campaign, the Hillary Clinton campaign, and his answer was, no comment.
Who says no comment when asked if they're advising a campaign?
Well, make your own conclusions.
I would think if you're not advising a campaign and somebody asks you if you are, there's only one answer.
No. No.
There's only one answer.
If you are advising a campaign, there are two answers.
Yes and no comment.
Now, again, it's not 100%, but other people who apparently are familiar with Robert Gialdini in person have confirmed, in their opinion, They say that it was him.
So, let's say it was.
Is he back?
And so I ask you, where did the grifter word come from?
Bernie's back in the race.
Does Bernie have a little bit of help this time?
Again. Does Bernie have Godzilla on his team?
Or, or...
I think, you know, Childidi has reached a certain age.
I don't know if he still would have an interest in directly participating, but would one of his protégés, somebody with similar talents, be advising?
Now, some of you are going to say, ah, Scott, that word's been around forever.
So I'm only talking about the frequency of it and how it's being applied at the moment.
It's being applied more vigorously and somewhat thoroughly by Democrats.
It feels like a professional's work and not a politician's work.
Professional persuader, not a politician.
And I didn't catch on for a while how powerful this word is until somebody on social media accused me of...
said that the word was sort of getting under my skin, that it was bothering me.
And I thought... Well, you know you're right.
It actually does get under my skin.
It's a good word.
Here's what's good about it.
Let me call it down for you.
What's good about grifter is you don't know exactly what it means and you don't hear it a lot in politics.
So introducing a new-ish word or a word that people know From another context, but moving it into politics is a real good start.
That's what happened with dark.
It wasn't really a political word, but then it became one.
And then you can read all of your fears into it.
Grifter is like that.
If you label somebody a grifter, everybody who sees that label says, ah, they're doing something to get away with something, to make money.
So really they're...
But how? Well, I can imagine...
A thousand ways that somebody could be running some scheme to make money.
So because it's nonspecific, it's also not falsifiable.
That's the magic.
If the label was so specific that you could check to see if it were true, let's say you say somebody was a murderer.
Well, you could check.
Did they murder?
Did they not? Look at the evidence and maybe you could falsify it.
Nope. No evidence of a murder.
So that wouldn't work.
But if you call somebody a grifter, that means something different to everybody.
Now, others have said it's not that good a word, because not everybody knows what it means.
So I did a little poll on Twitter, and last I checked, about a quarter of the people answering were not quite sure what it meant.
And I'm not even sure if that matters.
Because if three quarters do know what it means, that's fine.
The others might look it up, or they might think it means something bad, and they're also reading their fears into it.
So it's this word that's like a battery that's getting charged with everybody's fears, but they're different ones.
Everybody who uses that grifter label is thinking, ah, he's making money this way, or maybe it's this way.
It's really beautiful.
So I'm going to start using the word a lot.
When talking about my nemesises.
What's the plural of nemesis?
Nemesi? My nemesises?
But I'm going to start using it and deactivate that word.
I've got a question about China and their pharmaceuticals.
Apparently we get, like, almost all of our pharmaceutical base chemicals from China.
The stuff that we use to make our pharmaceutical products pretty much all comes from China.
That's a pretty big risk.
Why is it that the United States can't designate some industries as security risks and just bring them home?
Couldn't we say, yeah, China, we'll keep dealing with you, but just on pots and pans and pencils.
But you can't have high tech.
We won't even let you touch it.
We're not even going to stand in your country with a new technology.
And you can't have pharmaceuticals.
Because they're too important and God knows what you're doing over there with our pharmaceuticals.
There should be some industries that we just sort of start picking off highest priority and then working our way down.
You know, the technology stuff, especially that would have any kind of military possibility or any kind of spying or IP theft or any of that, those would be highest priority.
But right behind them, It has to be pharmaceuticals.
And it seems like this country could simply say, look, we'll give somebody some gigantic loans, government-backed loans, to start a factory here to make those chemical precursors for pharmaceuticals.
It should be a national priority to bring that stuff home.
One of the mini-scandals of the day, because there aren't any real scandals, so there are all these mini-scandals.
Mini-scandal of the day is that Trump was recorded in some kind of very private-ish gathering, saying that the whistleblower is almost like a spy.
And you know what we did with spies in the old days?
And people said to me on Twitter, explain that, Scott.
Explain that. Now, let me do this right.
Dale? Dale?
Tell us what people said to me on Twitter.
Oh, Scott! Explain that!
Explain that, Mr.
Trumpsplainer! Mr.
Trumpologist! How do you explain Trump saying that maybe that whistleblower is kind of close to a spy and we used to, you know, do up to spies?
That's what he implied. How do you explain that, Trump?
Explainer? Scott?
And scene. Here's how I explain it.
Has Trump shot anybody on Fifth Avenue yet?
And are you expecting that to happen?
Have you noticed that the president sometimes uses a thing called hyperbole?
Have you ever noticed the president to talk tough For effect.
Sometimes for humorous effect.
Sometimes just to remind people that he's the toughest one in the room.
Have you ever seen that?
First time you've ever turned on the TV? First day on Twitter?
It's what he does.
All the time.
If you're interpreting it as a literal, you haven't been paying attention for the last three or so years.
All right. Apparently, House Democrats will be holding a, quote, discussion Friday on, quote, adverse childhood experiences and the Trump administration's policies and proposals.
So the Democrats are holding some kind of a discussion on how Trump is destroying our children with all of his policies and proposals that are making them crazy.
So the children are losing their minds because of Trump's proposals.
And here again, the Democrats are doing something clever.
It's actually pretty clever.
Now, it's humorously stupid In the sense that just on the surface it's kind of laughable.
But it's clever because it's going to make people think, my God, this monster is destroying the children.
And you don't have to convince most people that something's true.
Remember, politics is a game of millimeters.
Everything that you do is not trying to move the ball all the way across the finish line.
You're just trying to Move it a little bit with everything you do.
So the impeachment process is moving the ball a little bit, because they know they're not going to get an actual impeachment.
The Ukraine call, moving the ball a little bit, a little bit, a millimeter.
And this discussion about the adverse childhood experiences of Trump policies and proposals, it's not a big deal, but it helps move the ball a little millimeter.
So persuasion-wise, good play.
I mean, it's despicable, but it's effective.
So if I'm trying to be objective about persuasion, Trump isn't the only good persuader in the game.
I just talked about Godzilla, for example.
But the Democrats collectively are hitting a lot of solid doubles and triples in persuasion.
And this is another one. It's pretty solid.
Even though it's stupid. But persuasion-wise, it's not bad.
It makes you think of a new frame.
Trump is damaging the children.
Now, what's the magic trick?
The magic trick is that they're redirecting you to their frame, which is what Trump is doing is injuring the children.
What's really happening?
What's really happening is that the press and the way Trump is covered is injuring the children.
The Democrats and their partners in the press are literally injuring the children because of the way they talk about Trump.
But they have cleverly decided that the frame is that it's Trump's fault, not the way they cover him.
It's obviously the way they cover him.
And of course, they were vulnerable.
When it became clear that with this Greta Thunberg situation, it became a little bit obvious that it was sort of the Democrats that are scaring children to death, because if you tell the children, well, most of you saw my article in which I was trying to reprogram children to worry less while still being productive.
Should the climate change situation require their best efforts and ours as well?
We want them to be productive but not scared.
So I wrote an article to try to do that.
So it's very clever of the Democrats to try to reframe that into the dumbest frame, but it still works.
Not bad. Not a bad play.
I wrote a blog post that I just posted before I got on here, so a lot of you haven't seen it yet.
I'm noticing it just got retweeted by Jason Chaffetz, Greg Godfeld.
Apparently it's going to go viral now.
You can tell in the first 10 minutes or so, I can usually tell if something's going viral.
Viral in my case is a few thousand retweets, something like that.
And here's the argument that I made in the blog post, if you haven't seen it, that this president knows how to set the table when he goes to talk to any leader.
And here's the question that has not been asked, and I believe I'm the first to ask it.
If the president, well, let's put it this way, if there had never been any such thing as a Joe Biden or a Hunter Biden, let's say they had never been born and didn't exist, Would it still make sense for President Trump to withhold funds from Ukraine until the phone call?
And the answer is yes.
Yes, it would. Because what this president knows, and apparently other politicians are just catching on, he knows how to negotiate.
And part of that is what he calls setting the table.
That's actually his own phrase.
He says you set the table before you walk in.
So you need to set all the variables in your favor before you even talk to the other leader.
The other thing is that leaders...
The leaders are always negotiating.
There's no such thing as a conversation between world leaders that's not a negotiation.
It might be that they're just getting friendly and pacing each other.
That's part of negotiating. Maybe they're getting the feel of each other.
Maybe they're putting in the other's mind what the priorities are.
They're framing things. All conversations between leaders are persuasion.
You want your leader to be the most effective persuader in the room.
So you want your leader to go in fully armed with the table set whenever that's possible.
What Trump does continuously is he sets the table in the following ways.
Now, it's more than one way he sets the table, but this is the way that's important to the story, which is that he makes sure, before he talks to a leader, he makes sure that leader knows who's in charge.
So he may have canceled a deal.
He may have withheld funds.
He may have taken a little power from Congress temporarily.
The temporary part is important, because if he tried to grab power from Congress forever, then you have a dictator and you have to remove him.
But if Congress has approved some funds, who's in charge?
Congress, right?
Do you want your president to go into a meeting with a foreign leader And the foreign leader thinks, I don't even know why I'm talking to this guy.
I only care about Congress.
Because Congress is giving me the money.
This guy is just a clown I'm talking to.
Trump puts a hold on the money before he goes and talks to a foreign leader.
Who's in charge then?
Trump. Trump is.
That's the way you set the table.
You make sure before you talk to the foreign leader, even if you're not going to ask for anything during that conversation, you set the table.
I'm the guy who controls your funds.
I'm the guy you need to deal with.
I'm the guy you need to make happy.
That's how you send your president in.
We give presidents wide latitude to negotiate because you want one boss.
You don't want to send your president in like the car salesman's like, well, I'd have to check with my boss.
Can't make any commitments, but better check with Congress.
Meanwhile, Congress is kneecapping him while he's overseas.
You don't want that president.
Nobody wants that president.
You want the president to represent that he's the one or she's the one you need to talk to.
You gotta talk to him.
Like you're the boss.
Trump goes into every meeting like a boss.
So here's the thing.
If the Biden family had never existed and there was never any conflict question whatsoever, the president should show Ukraine and show everybody else that he's setting the table and he's going in as the boss.
Now, like I said, You don't want your boss to take power from Congress or from any other branch of government and keep it, but showing that he has power over it Even temporarily, it's pretty good.
It's pretty good for me.
The other question that the media completely ignores because of the magic trick of making you look the wrong way is, I was trying to think, what would be a higher priority for the president in today's time?
What would be a higher priority than protecting the republic and protecting our elections against foreign interference?
Now, if we had a war in progress, like a hot war, well, that would be a higher priority.
If we had a hurricane, a disaster, that would be a higher priority.
If our economy was crashing, well, that would be a higher priority, right?
There are lots of things that could have been a higher priority.
But at the moment, most of that stuff is working pretty well.
No major wars, the economy is well, etc.
I would argue that perhaps the highest priority that the president had around that time was making sure there was no foreign interference, was polling to win by a large margin the presidency was polling to win by a large margin the presidency of the United States.
The polls say Biden will be the next president.
I know your opinion will be different.
But you can't discount the fact that the polls say Biden will be the next president.
At the same time, it is public knowledge that his son is receiving what seems to be a large amount of money for not so much of a resume, not so much...
Did we get a...
Oh, seriously?
Did we get another Periscope glitch?
Try signing off and signing back in.
Yeah, it's getting distorted.
Wow. I would love to think that's all a coincidence.
But you probably heard my point.
The point being that you can't have a situation where the guy polling at top for being the next president, his son is taking money from a foreign country, an entity connected with the oligarchs of the foreign country.
You just can't have that.
That's a high, high, high, high, high priority.
Now, some people said, well, why don't you let the FBI handle it or whoever handles it?
I don't even know who would handle such a thing, but let's say the FBI for discussion.
Why didn't the president just assign it to the FBI or whoever so that it doesn't look like foreign interference?
Well, here's a reason.
It'd be exactly the same thing.
If the president tells the FBI to talk to the Ukraine, it's still the same thing.
It's not that different.
So, if you've ever had experience with any large organizations, you know it's a complete waste of time to assign your underlings to talk to the underlings of the other big bureaucracy because they won't be able to make decisions.
They won't really know if they're pleasing their leader because the leaders haven't talked.
It is normal business for the leaders to talk And then you assign your underlings to work effectively together.
But until the leaders have talked, and the underlings know they've talked, you can't get much done, you know, FBI to Ukrainian intelligence services or whoever they're talking to.
You just wouldn't get much done.
So, the President said that his phone call with Zelensky, President of Ukraine, was, quote, a perfect call.
That's also my opinion.
It was a perfect call.
It was persuasion perfect.
He withheld funds, as he should, demonstrated who's in charge, as he should, And brought up the highest priority in the country, which is that the guy polling highest to be president has a son who's taking a lot of money from Ukraine, and we're not sure he's giving value for that.
How high a priority is that?
Pretty darn high.
So the president goes in, sets the table perfectly, brings up one of the top priorities in the country, successfully gets the leader of the other country to not only Like the country and like the president,
gets along well with him, that's good technique, and gets him to agree to look into our top priority, the integrity of the election, and making sure that the next president, whether it's Biden or anybody else, is not being influenced by a foreign government.
There's no blackmail potential there.
Now, what would be a more perfect phone call than that?
That really was a perfect phone call.
He got exactly what he wanted.
He did the public's work.
It's my top priority.
Isn't it a high priority?
You know, it's hard to say what's the top priority because there's so many important things.
But it's one of the top priorities to protect the election.
Does anybody disagree with that?
So I had to put it in writing in blog form because when I say it on these Periscopes, I noted that it got sort of amplified a little bit, but it's just more portable when you put it in blog form and people could read it and forward it around.
So I did that as a public service.
We'll see if that framing catches on.
Subordinates sounds better than underlings.
Yeah, it does, but...
You want to learn a technique for public speaking?
Here's a technique for public speaking.
I actually used to teach this when I would do presentations for big corporate groups.
If you can use the interesting word instead of the boring word, you should use the interesting one.
And I use the example of what would be a better word for your writing or for your public speaking?
Pull? Or yank.
Yank, right? It's just a better word.
Yank has just more action to it.
It's more interesting.
It's got a K sound.
It's got a Y. They're unusual letters.
You know what it means? It's just a better word.
Likewise, when I say underlings, I know subordinate is another word for it.
It might be the more technical one.
Which one's more interesting? Underling or subordinate?
Well, underling, right?
It's just way more interesting.
And you know what I mean.
So, peon is more intentionally an insult.
And underling, you're not quite sure if it's an insult.
Or it's just a description of the organization.
So that's what makes it a little more interesting.
You're like, underling, is that an insult?
I'm not sure if that's an insult.
Or is that just a word?
So that's what makes it have a little bit extra.
Got a little extra in it.
Alright. So, make sure today, as you're talking to the grifters who oppose you, that you label them first.
Label those grifters as grifters.
Today I'll be talking to a lawyer.
On the topic of business defamation.
Those of you who were wondering what's happening with my little situation online, I'll tell you.
I'm having a conversation on business defamation today, and I'll give you updates as we go.
And don't let the grifters get you down, okay?
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