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Sept. 30, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:04:52
Episode 679 Scott Adams: Presidential Tweet Persuasion, Ukraine and More
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
Yeah.
It's Monday morning and you know what time it is.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams and a little thing I call the simultaneous sip.
You might know it as the best thing ever.
Because if you've tried to enjoy your morning without the simultaneous sip, well, you can do it.
Yeah, you can do it.
It's just not as good.
Ask everybody who's tried.
And it doesn't take much to participate.
No, it doesn't. All it takes is a cup or a mug or a glass of stein, a chalice, a tanker, a thermos, a flask, a canteen, a grail, a goblet, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Join me now.
Go That's good coffee.
Wow. Alright.
Does it seem to you that this Ukraine story feels like the third sequel of a movie where they couldn't get the original movie stars to appear in that sequel?
It feels like...
The bad sequel when they didn't have quite the budget that they used to, but they're going to use the name recognition.
It's like, hey, we're going to make a sequel.
We're going to call it Putin 2, Stars and Ruining Democracy in the United States.
And then they talk to Putin.
He's like, no, no, da, da.
I already do movie.
I want to work on creative projects, maybe something small next time.
And people say, wow, we can't get Putin.
Damn it, our sequel is ruined.
Wait a minute. Wait a minute.
I think we can get a deal on Ukraine.
Let's try toss a little Ukraine at them.
I don't think the public can tell the difference.
Russia, Ukraine, are they really going to know the difference?
Because they're pretty sure that Russia took over Ukraine, half of the world.
So, let's go with the sequel, Ukraine, Russia Collusion 2, the movie.
It's not going too well.
I'm close to the end of watching a miniseries on Showtime about Roger Ailes, the first news who started Fox News.
And I gotta tell you, I thought it was going to be about his Me Too stuff.
You know, I thought that's what it mostly was about.
But there's a lot of context about the news business that is just sort of jaw-dropping.
I don't know that any of it is completely unexpected or surprised, but to actually see it presented...
In what is being presented as a factual way is pretty amazing.
So I haven't finished that, but one of the key takeaways is that if we are to believe that any of this really happened.
Now keep in mind that when you see a miniseries about a real person who is deceased, most of the dialogue Nobody could have seen or really known what happened.
So 100% of the dialogue, or probably 98% of it, is made up by the movie makers to be as close as they can get to what they believe happened behind closed doors.
So you can't believe it all.
But what they allege is that Roger Ailes literally just made stuff up and then told Fox News to report it like it was a fact.
Right. On more than one occasion, he regularly, according to the miniseries, he would just make up a fact and tell his people to report it as fact.
Now, to his credit, apparently his bosses, meaning the Murdoch family, were not in favor of that and tried to get him to Report the news more like the news.
So now that Ailes has deceased, one might expect that Fox News would be adhering more to the facts as they see them, which I think probably is the case.
I don't know. If you've been watching Fox News for a long time, it does feel as if they've approached something like...
Closer to the middle than they were, at least in terms of literally just making stuff up and running with it.
I don't see that happening anymore.
I do see, however, things that are not true.
And this Ukraine situation is just amazing because both sides are operating upon apparently a lie.
So both sides of the Ukraine situation seem to be basing all of their opinions on Things that aren't true.
I'll give you an example.
So the anti-Trumpers are saying that he withheld the aid to Ukraine in order to get a favor.
But the reporting is showing that the aid had been withheld for months.
And that there were, actually there's record of legitimate concern about corruption and about whether other countries were stepping up to pay as much.
So apparently those two separate concerns were out there.
On top of that, the president has a general concern about how much we give to other countries and foreign aid.
And apparently he'd been holding this back for months.
So if you tell me that the president held that back As leverage and apparently didn't ever tell them it was held back because they didn't know it was being held back.
They were just wondering what was going on.
So apparently the whole held back money to get a favor thing just falls apart factually because the timeline doesn't work.
It had been held back so far back that it's hard to believe that the president was anticipating that phone call.
It doesn't quite pass the sniff test.
At the same time, There was a rather embarrassing situation with Jim Jordan and Jake Tapper, in which Jake Tapper shredded him on live TV for apparently a factual inaccuracy.
And the factual inaccuracy It's about the so-called corrupt prosecutor.
Now, of course, someone who's being accused of being a corrupt prosecutor was asked, did you get fired because you were investigating?
It doesn't matter what the corrupt prosecutor says, because that would not be a credible voice.
So you can't listen to that guy.
But he said something.
I'm not even going to repeat it, because you should not treat it as credible.
He's the guy that got fired for being allegedly corrupt.
So whatever he says is not credible, even if it's true.
Doesn't have the credibility.
So here's the thing that Jim Jordan said.
He said that Biden demanded that that prosecutor be fired because he was looking into Hunter Biden's company.
But apparently that's just not the case.
Apparently there are a number of international groups that wanted that prosecutor fired for being corrupt and for not For not investigating.
Apparently they weren't investigating.
Nobody was investigating Hunter Biden's company.
And that's part of the reason they wanted him fired.
So the entire story on the left is completely falsified.
The entire story on the right is completely falsified.
So we're having this weird debate of two versions of history, neither of which are true, and it's fairly easy to demonstrate that they're not true.
Now... What is true, as far as I can tell, using...
Somebody says, Scott has been duped.
We'll delete you.
So what is true is that Hunter Biden took what seems to most observers an unreasonable amount of time, an unreasonable amount of time to...
The facts show that they were not investigating Burisma.
That's what CNN is reporting.
So, as it stands, the facts seem to falsify both sides of the story.
But what does matter is that Hunter Biden was taking a large amount of money from a foreign entity associated with their government, because oligarchs are always associated with the government, and nobody thinks that was a good idea, except Hunter Biden.
So that's our world, that the news isn't even anymore.
There's the fake news and then there's the truth.
Now it's just two versions of fake news, apparently.
Giuliani claims yesterday he has documents showing the prosecutor was investigating Biden's son.
Doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if he was a corrupt investigator and they were going to get rid of him anyway.
If he was corrupt, in general, it kind of doesn't matter what he was doing with that one company.
He still had to get fired, right?
Am I right? Even if Giuliani's right, even if that one company was actually being investigated and not on hold as is reported by CNN, even if that's true, it doesn't matter.
He still needed to get fired if all the other stuff about him was true.
So, anyway, let's talk about something else.
We'll talk about Trump's tweet here in a moment.
Elizabeth Warren did an event in South Carolina at a historically black college.
And couldn't get black people to show up.
That's right. Elizabeth Warren, number two in the polls for the Democrats, who has trouble getting black support, went to South Carolina, substantial black population, did an event at an historically black college, and couldn't get many black people to show up.
I think that tells you what her odds of getting elected are.
Pretty close to zero.
Let's talk about India. Modi is pushing to have India do nuclear energy to help with climate change, plus they need energy, plus they want clean air and water.
So Modi is pushing nuclear power.
But guess what?
Oh God, did I just say guess what?
I just want to blow my own brains out for saying that, the overused phrase from you know where.
I guess that's a tell for watching a particular network, isn't it?
So Modi wants nuclear energy, but he can't have it.
Did you know that?
Were you aware that India, one of our allies, Wants to have nuclear energy and can't do it because the rest of the world won't let it?
What? Now, the reason is fairly solid.
The reason is that they're unwilling to sign a non-proliferation agreement.
And if they did sign it, then other countries would be allowed to assist them with technology and fuel and stuff, as I understand it.
But because they find some kind of a flaw in the agreement itself, just the document, the agreement has some kind of flaw, which I don't know what it is, and wouldn't understand if I did, they're not allowed to do it.
Now let me ask you this.
They're our ally, and they want to solve climate change, and they know how, and it's nuclear energy, and the rest of the world won't let them do it.
How serious are we about nuclear?
How serious are we about climate change, really?
Shouldn't the rest of the country, shouldn't France and Great Britain, anybody who's got nuclear, shouldn't they be lobbying hard for India to get nuclear power?
Really? Does anybody think India, with all of its resources and all of its engineers, do we think that India couldn't pull off a nuclear weapon?
I mean, they have one, don't they?
Don't they already have a nuclear weapon?
Why can't they have nuclear power?
There's something here in the story I don't understand.
But anyway, the larger point of me bringing it up is that nuclear power will be the answer to climate change, even if there is no climate change risk.
It's the only thing that makes everybody happy and we can actually do, and there's no other option.
That's it. It's the only thing that could get us across the finish line of surviving as a species, apparently, if you believe the calamity people.
Somebody on the internet asked me this question, which was actually a perfectly fair question.
Somebody said, who's paying me to promote nuclear energy?
How much am I being paid by the nuclear energy or anybody else to promote nuclear?
The answer, of course, is nothing.
Nothing. And I was disappointed to learn that maybe somebody would pay me for promoting nuclear energy, and I thought, what?
I could get paid for this?
I've been doing this for free.
I don't expect to be paid for it, by the way.
Now, one of the reasons that I feel like I can add something to the national conversation, if you will, is because of this very thing.
You can reasonably depend that I'm not being paid for my advocacy.
Because I was already rich and, you know, I wouldn't care about it that much.
So no, I'm not being paid by anybody for my nuclear advocacy.
It is simply a message which needed to be boosted.
And there are a number of situations where I boost messages that I think are good for the world but are being suppressed for whatever reason.
Maybe we have some misunderstandings, some fear, some ignorance.
There might be something blocking a better message from getting through.
And I try to help amplify those messages.
That's pretty much the whole story with me.
If you're asking me what's in it for me, which is a good question, by the way, you should be asking yourself, wait a minute, why would he be pushing nuclear energy if nobody's paying him?
And it probably will be bad for him, meaning that there will be X number of people who will hate me, For my position.
Why would you take a position that gives you no compensation and makes people hate you, which will actually reduce your income because in my case, people punish me by not buying my book or not reading Dilbert or something.
So why would I do something that is clearly bad for me economically?
It's obviously bad for me economically.
Trust me on that.
And no gain.
Why would I do that? Well, I'm of the view that nobody does anything for nothing.
Wouldn't you agree? Can't we agree that nobody really does anything for nothing?
So there must be something I'm getting out of it.
And there is. I like being useful.
And if it ever came to a point where somebody said, hey, Scott, we will give you some, I don't know, praise or attention for being useful, I'd say, great!
Thank you, I like praise.
I like being useful. I like being recognized for being useful.
But if that never happened, and the only thing that happened was the world was saved from, let's say, climate disaster.
Let's say the air was cleaned all around the world and the water was clean.
If the only thing that happened was all of those good things and nobody ever said, thank you, Scott, for your little piece of that, I'd be okay with that.
Totally okay. That would be 100% acceptable, not just acceptable, most amazing outcome ever.
I would be the happiest person in the world if I were some teeny little piece Of something good that happened.
Why wouldn't I? How could anybody feel bad about that?
Could you? Could you feel bad about being part of something that really made a difference?
Of course not. We're all wired that way.
It's part of our most basic wiring that we do feel good when we do stuff for the world that's good.
We can't help it.
So you may have seen Punchy De Niro, Robert De Niro, I call him Punchy, because he threatens to punch people.
Punchy De Niro went on CNN and dropped the F-bombs on live TV talking about Trump, and when he was asked sort of what's wrong with Trump, he could not articulate any reasons.
He just sort of babbled about all the things he does.
And I thought to myself, we've now...
I think Punchy...
Punchy De Niro, I think he marked a turning point in my understanding of the world.
And here's the turning point.
I no longer see Trump resistance as based on fears.
Because it used to be. It used to be based on fear.
It was, oh no, he's going to ruin the world if he gets elected.
But that fear seems to have dissipated by years of Trump administration so far in which things are just going well.
The big stuff, economy, wars, things are kind of going well.
AIDS is being tapped down.
I mean, really, we are in an amazing time.
This is a great time to be alive.
So people's fears, I think, So now they're still locked into opposing Trump, but they've lost the fear, I think.
Some few people probably have it, but I think the average person has lost the fear, and that was really the motivating thing.
Then the next thing was the facts.
They would look at the facts and they'd say, wait a minute, it seems to be the facts that That Russia, he was colluding with Russia.
So for a long time, they lost the fear, but then they jumped to the facts.
Oh, the facts. These facts from Schiff, who is very reliable.
Yes, he's very reliable.
And Maxine Waters and all the other reliable Democrats, they're telling my team that there are facts that would say Trump is bad because of Russia collusion.
Whoops. The facts disappeared because Mueller could not confirm what they imagined was to be true.
So they lost their fear before he got elected.
Oh, he's going to ruin the world.
Nuclear explosions were all going to be rounded up.
Gays will be put in concentration camps.
Turns out he actually is working hard to eradicate AIDS. Who saw that coming?
Well, everybody who voted for him saw it coming.
So I believe we're in phase three, and Punchy De Niro is marking that period.
Phase one, we're afraid of Trump because he hasn't been elected, and we're told he will do terrible things.
Phase two, well, he's doing terrible things, and that happened with Russia.
Okay, that wasn't true either.
Facts go away. Economy's doing great.
Facts no longer work.
We can't use facts against the president anymore.
Our facts, even the facts that were true, Stuff about Stormy Daniels.
They were just inert facts.
They were facts, but they didn't have any power.
Now we're in phase three.
Do you know what phase three is?
Lifestyle. Right.
Punchy De Niro is a lifestyle resistor.
His identity, his social life, his reputation...
Have all been consolidated around this punchy hatred of Trump.
Likewise, a number of people in Hollywood, etc., are managing their brand.
And managing their brand requires a certain set of beliefs.
You've got to be concerned about the environment while ruining the environment at the same time, apparently.
That seems necessary. And I would say that Punchy, when he could simply not...
He couldn't even give a reason He was on CNN. They asked him about the president.
All he could do was swear in an entertaining fashion.
He couldn't come up with a reason.
Not even like a general wave your arms, I think the president will ruin X or Y. He didn't have anything.
Nothing. I think he marks the lifestyle phase where the people are sort of actors in their own life.
Now, we've been watching this two-movie situation and it's probably as stark as you could possibly have it.
I tweeted about this.
I forgot to write it down.
But I tweeted that the two movies have become, at least with this Ukraine situation, one of them is that a hero...
He thwarts a coup attempt on the United States.
So the hero beats the coup attempt, and then, through completely legal processes with witnesses, he asks for an ally to the United States, Ukraine, to help him with a legal investigation of something he suspected might be a problem.
And he wanted to get to the bottom of it.
So that's one movie. Hero beats a coup as an ally for legal, completely legal help, looking into a legal situation that has great import to this country because the person in question is leading in the polls to be the next president.
That's one movie. The other movie is Orange Hitler is rummaging for dirt on his political opponent.
Both movies seem to fit the observed facts.
But I believe that people are starting to see the movies as movies.
In other words, I don't know if people are completely buying anymore that their version of the truth is actual truth.
There seems to be something like an adopted truth or a lifestyle truth or a preferred truth, a subjective truth.
That the public is sort of rallying behind two different versions.
So Punchy seems to have marked that turning point where you don't even need reasons anymore.
Because nobody is adopting their lifestyle because of reasons.
It's not because of fear.
That was phase one. It's not because of facts.
That was phase two. That didn't work.
Now we're in phase three.
It's just a lifestyle.
And when you start seeing it that way, it looks different.
Watch how, now that I've pointed this out, you're going to see the resistors as being sort of like voluntarily they're actors.
They are literally acting out their play.
Now, let me ask you this.
Would you agree that the resistance, you know, the people marching in the streets against Trump, started out with high energy, high fear, like actual fear of President Trump, and that it led to them acting on the actual fear with violence?
We saw way too much violence.
Is it my imagination, or has the violent phase of the resistance Kind of stopped.
Do you know why the violent phase would stop?
Now, of course, as soon as I say that, some Antifa idiot is going to hit somebody over the head with a blunt object.
So you know that's going to happen.
So don't take it as an absolute.
But in general, the resistors, Antifa, etc., went from high energy, scared to death, and willing to commit violence on fellow citizens to...
Act out their resistance.
You don't see that, do you?
When was the last time you saw that level of energy and hatred on the street?
It's not there. Because the fear has dissipated.
The reality of a few years of Trump is like, oh, well, that's not as bad as we thought.
That's not even close to it.
Well, actually, it's pretty good.
I think I just got a job offer.
Well, maybe I got something else to do today.
So we're in the third phase, the lifestyle phase of the resistance.
And when you see people resisting, you ask yourself, does that look real?
Because it doesn't look real anymore.
I'll tell you what was different.
In the first months of the Trump presidency, when I saw somebody railing against him and complaining, it looked to me, as an observer, Real.
It didn't look like politics to me.
It looked like real citizens and I had empathy for them, like literally a lot.
I had empathy for the people who were scared to death that this president was going to be, you know, promoting some kind of holocaust or something.
They really believed it and I really felt sorry for them.
That group of people has dissipated down to some kind of seething, mentally ill group.
And I mean that with affection.
That's not an insult.
The mental illness is real.
I have actual empathy for that.
There are people who have been scared and frightened and PTSD'd into some form of pretty bad...
Mental illness. And it's a real thing, and I don't think we should laugh about it.
It's actually real. But clearly the temperature is way down at this point.
So that's good.
Let me tell you about the president's tweet, which I consider one of his best.
I was watching old footage of Trump giving his early stump speeches.
It was also on that same Showtime miniseries.
And I was taken by how much better he's gotten.
If you look at early footage of Trump when he was just becoming a candidate for president, he was good.
You could see immediately why he had something special.
But if you were to compare Trump 2016 with Trump 2019, Man, he's gotten better.
So you don't expect people to improve a lot at that age, at anything, right?
You don't think people are going to get better at something, you know, starting at age 70, whatever.
You think, well, you've reached your cap.
That's about as good as you're going to get.
But Trump has apparently.
Yeah, somebody says he's more confident.
He's more confident, but he's also more practiced.
So those two things are really showing.
You look at his current performance, and I will call it a performance because I think he would, it's tremendous.
It's unambiguously the best we've ever seen.
I would say at this point, I'm going to say with complete seriousness, there's no hyperbole to what I'm going to say next, Trump, communication-wise, he's the best president.
Better than Lincoln. Of course, Lincoln has some disadvantages, right?
Didn't have any technology.
So this is sort of an apples to oranges thing.
But certainly better than all the modern television presidents.
You know, Kennedy had his charisma and stuff.
But Trump overall, he just dusts Reagan, he dusts Clinton, he dusts Obama, he dusts...
He's by far the best communicator.
Let me give you an example. Now, of course, he does it in a way that maybe nobody will ever do it again, because he's more provocative.
Well, all the things you know.
So here is his tweet.
He's talking about the whistleblower and the Ukraine stuff.
And I'm going to read through it.
It's a long one, but then I'm going to go back and I'm going to pick out the technique.
So the first read-through is just to get the lay of the land, and then they'll do the technique.
So it's a three-part tweet.
That's why it's so long. President Trump said yesterday, like every American, I deserve to meet my accuser.
Especially when this accuser, the so-called whistleblower, represented a perfect conversation with a foreign leader in a totally inaccurate and fraudulent way.
Then Schiff made up what I actually said by lying to Congress.
His lies were made in perhaps the most blatant and sinister manner ever seen in the great chamber.
He wrote down and read terrible things and then said it was from the mouth of the President of the United States.
I want Schiff questioned at the highest level for fraud and treason.
In addition, I want to meet not only my accuser, who represented second and third-hand information, But also the person who illegally gave this information, who was largely incorrect, to the whistleblower.
Was this person spying, in capital letters, on the U.S. President?
Big consequences.
Do you know what the big consequences are for being a spy?
Death penalty.
All right. So, what is the President doing right in this tweet?
Just about everything. Just about everything.
Now remember, when I say he's doing everything right, I mean as a communicator and as a politician.
I'm not saying that the facts are correct.
The factual accuracy, as we know, doesn't seem to be a factor in persuasion.
The whole Ukraine thing is built on lies on both sides.
The whole thing is just a big old lie.
So the truth isn't actually a factor.
It's a variable that can be ignored for the purposes of looking at persuasion.
Now, for those of you who are new to me, I'm not saying that facts have no impact.
They have an impact on the result all the time.
They don't have much impact on how we see things.
They don't have much impact on persuasion.
So that's what I say.
When I say facts don't matter, I mean to persuasion, not to whatever the outcome is.
Alright, so here's President Trump's technique.
His very first sentence, he says, like every American.
A great way to start this.
Because you start by pacing.
You say I am like you.
So that's always the best communication style is to establish that the viewer and the speaker Are one and the same.
He goes right at it.
He goes, like every American, bang.
What is one of the strongest brands and feelings that you, as an American, most of you Americans, have, and it's your identity as an American, especially Trump supporters, who he's mostly talking to.
So when you start your point by saying, like every American, what does every American say?
They go, okay, that's your frame.
Starting from the frame of we're all Americans, go on, continue.
And then he continues.
He says, I deserve to meet my accuser.
And then he talks about the whistleblower.
Now, what's your feeling?
Forget about the facts.
Forget about the facts.
Forget about the law for a moment, because I know what you're going to say.
Forget about the facts and the law for a moment.
When you hear, like every American, you say, okay, okay, you're on my team, we're Americans, and he says, I deserve to be my accuser.
How do you feel about that?
Damn right, you agree with that, right?
Legally, he does not have a right to find out who a whistleblower is in this context.
We'll all agree that on a factual basis, there's no delineated law or constitutional right that would allow him to see his whistleblower at this phase.
If it became a legal problem, a legal case, or even an impeachment, I don't know.
But at some point, you can imagine he could find out.
But at this point, he does not have that right.
But he says, I deserve to meet my accuser.
He didn't say I have the right. He said I deserve.
How do you feel about that?
If you were accused, because he says, I'm like every American, imagine you're in this situation.
Imagine you're an American, and you've been accused of something by somebody you don't know.
What's your sense of it?
How do you feel about it?
How would you feel if it were you?
Right? It's really good because he says, I'm just like you.
I'm not above the law.
I'm not below the law.
That's implied by saying, like every American.
Like every American, not above the law, not below the law.
We're a nation of laws. And he doesn't say, I have a right to meet my accuser.
He says, I deserve it.
Boom. Now, when people use the word deserve, I always mock them because nobody deserves anything.
I mean, I've said that a million times in my life, like a child or somebody else will say, somebody deserves something.
I always say the same thing.
Nobody deserves anything. There's just what you can get.
That's it. That's your world.
If you can convince somebody you deserve something and they buy into that, well, that could be good persuasion.
But it's a nonsense concept.
We don't deserve anything.
They're just rules.
Sometimes they're followed, sometimes they're not.
Nobody deserves anything.
But for persuasion purposes, perfect word.
Because you would put yourself in the same situation.
You'd say, if I were being accused of something that could literally cost me my job, and I don't know who's accusing me, is that fair?
Nope. So this is a really, really strong emotional...
Reflexive point, because it puts people in his corner by saying, I'm not above the law, but I'm not below the law.
I'm like every American.
I deserve to meet my accuser.
That statement is as true as anything that will ever be stated, while at the same time, there's no legal basis for it.
He talks about the so-called whistleblower.
So he puts the whistleblower in quotes, and that's good, because he's signaling to us that the whistleblower may not be pure.
Meaning the whistleblower may not be doing this simply because there was some sense of wrong that they're trying to surface, but rather that it might be a political situation.
So he puts it in quotes.
He calls it a so-called whistleblower, so we know that there's some doubt.
And then he talks about that he represented a perfect conversation with a foreign leader.
Now, he's been using that phrase, a perfect conversation, I love it, because he's branding it.
He actually branded a conversation.
That man can brand damn near anything.
He can brand people.
He can brand border security as the wall.
He brands like nobody has ever branded.
And he's branded a conversation as the perfect conversation.
It's sort of like the immaculate catch in football.
Only football fans know what I'm talking about.
But the immaculate catch, there was one catch in all of football They got its own brand.
It was so special. It was the Immaculate Reception.
Now, Trump has branded a conversation as the perfect conversation.
Now, is it true that it was a perfect conversation?
Doesn't matter. What matters is he's branded it that way and it definitely makes a difference because if he repeats it enough, it starts feeling like it's a fact.
So, very good technique.
And then he says that he's been misinterpreted in an inaccurate and fraudulent way.
Then he talks about Schiff, when Schiff did his little parody in front of Congress, where Schiff read something as if the president said it before revealing that he was talking, you know, that it was his own words and he was speaking as if the president...
So what Schiff did was parody, which he revealed as parody.
So after he did it, he made sure that we knew he'd made that part up.
But still, it was weaselly to the extreme.
Nobody who sees this situation thinks that was an appropriate way to break it down.
It was persuasive, perhaps, which is the problem.
Schiff did something that probably was persuasive.
It was persuasive. That's why he did it.
Because you remember what he said better than you remember people saying that's not what the president said.
So it's the old print the lie, and then later, a week later, put the little disclaimer that said, whoops, we got that fact wrong, and then nobody reads the disclaimer.
So you get away with the persuasion that was in the fake fact.
So the president is characterizing Schiff's parody, which even Schiff said was parody at the time when he was done with it, he's called them lies that were made in perhaps the most blatant and sinister manner.
That's kind of true.
They were, you could call, I think you could fairly call them lies because they were presented in a way to persuade the viewer that there were truthfulness to them, that there was a truth equality to them without being precisely accurate.
So I think you could call it a lie.
And was it made in a blatant and sinister manner, the most blatant one ever seen in the Great Chamber?
Well, here we see the President's hyperbole, which always works.
Could it be the most blatant and sinister manner ever seen in the Great Chamber?
So that's good technique.
Bad technique would be to say it was blatant and sinister.
Good technique is to make you wonder if it's the most blatant and sinister thing you've ever seen in the great chamber.
Imagine how many blatant and sinister things have happened in that chamber.
Probably a lot!
So he's making you, once again, think past the sale.
If you're asking yourself, is it the most blatant, sinister thing?
Or is it maybe the top ten?
I don't know if it's the most blatant and sinister thing that's ever happened in the Great Chamber, but you know, if it's in the conversation, it's probably in the top ten.
So that's a technique to make you think past the question into the less relevant question of whether it's the most blatant and sinister.
Trump uses this technique all the time, and it's a really good technique.
He wrote down and read terrible things, then said it was from the mouth of the president.
Well, sort of.
That's close in the general neighborhood of what sort of happened.
What he doesn't say is that Schiff meant it as parody.
So the president's using a little bit of, let's say, Creative exaggeration of what happened for effect, but does it well, because people reading this are not up on all the details.
And it says, in addition, I want to meet not only my accuser, who presented second- and third-hand information.
So there he's reframing the information as second- and third-hand.
Now, I had not heard that there was any third-hand information, had you?
Now, if there had never been anything called third-hand information in this, it's still smart that he throws that in there.
Because it's hard to disprove that some of it is third-hand.
And he doesn't give a percentage.
There might have been one thing that was third-hand and all the rest was second-hand.
Which would mean something, right?
Versus one thing that was second-hand and all the rest was third-hand.
By not putting any sense of perspective on it, the reader is left to say, wow, third-hand information isn't worth anything.
We all know that game telephone, right, where information changes every time it's whispered to the next person.
So just by throwing in that third-hand part, he makes you think past the sale again.
Because you end up arguing with yourself, wow, how much of it was second-hand and how much of it was third-hand?
If you're thinking about that, He's already got your mind where he wants it, which is thinking about the unreliability of the information.
Great technique for persuasion.
But he also wants to know who's the person who illegally was the original source, apparently somebody who was in the room or listening to it, and it was largely incorrect, he says, this so-called whistleblower.
And then he ends with, was this person spying in all capitals on the U.S. president?
Big consequences.
Now, here's the beauty of that.
President Trump knows that when he uses this word spying, and he knows this from experience because it just happened, like it's fresh in his mind, that when he used the word spy, it makes the news go crazy.
So this is where he's controlling your attention and what the news will talk about.
He does this on a Sunday so that whenever all the A players get back to work, That's what they have to chew on.
So he's giving this word spying.
He puts it in capital letters so you can't possibly miss it.
So the president is saying, here's your red meat.
Here's some red meat. Here, here, here everybody.
You know, and the news is like spying.
Does he want to execute this person?
He wants to execute him.
You know what it means when he says big consequences.
That can only mean one thing.
We're not a democracy.
He's a dictator. He wants to execute his staff for spying.
Spying! And scene.
So this was sort of the sentence that made me want to talk about this.
This is so obviously the president screwing with the press.
He is so obviously...
Probably laughing out loud when he wrote this sentence.
Because not only does he know exactly how they will interpret it, but he already watched them do it once and it didn't make any difference.
It just made them go crazy for a week.
So he's just giving them the same red meat he gave them last time because he knows what they're going to do with it and he knows it didn't hurt him.
He knows it didn't hurt him.
Let's say you're an uninterested observer.
Let's say you're somewhere in the middle, as if there's anybody who's in the middle on Trump.
Hypothetically, imagine that there are a few people who are undecided.
I can't even say that with a straight face.
Who in the world would be undecided about Trump?
Like, does such a person exist?
But let's imagine that there's somebody who's close to the sitting on the fence here.
Does it sit right with you?
That somebody might have been called a spy for outing the president on a private conversation, which it was private, but he did it with other people in the room, so obviously he wasn't trying to hide it from posterity.
He was doing it with the assumption he was doing something legal and useful, apparently, because he did it in front of lots of witnesses.
But do you feel that whoever outed him was a whistleblower, or do you feel that they were kind of a weasel?
Well, it's sort of a toss-up, right?
The people on the left will retreat to whistleblower, the people on the right will say, spy.
But he's introducing this thought that that person is just, let's say, not to be respected.
A whistleblower is somebody you respect a lot.
So you would give extra credit to a whistleblower for taking personal risk to do something good for the world.
So a whistleblower is sort of a real high-level, credible label to have on somebody, and you don't want your opponent To be labeled with the most respectful label.
So he's gone all the way, as far as you can go, to a disrespectful label, which is a spy who could actually be executed for being so bad.
Now, I don't believe anybody thinks that the person in the room was an actual spy for another country.
But, what would a spy for another country do in a situation like this?
If there were, let's say, a Chinese spy, or if there were a Russian spy, let's imagine, if there were an actual spy who was really working for a foreign government, how would they act that would be different from how this so-called whistleblower acted?
How different would it be?
Probably not. Probably not different, right?
If you were a Chinese spy and you wanted to take down this government, that might be one way to go, to out him for a conversation which seems at least mildly impeachable, or at least people are going to think so.
If you wanted to sow discontent, wouldn't you do it that way?
All right. No, you wouldn't.
The answer is you would never become a whistleblower if you were a spy.
In the real world. Because if you were a spy and you had so much access, you were listening to the president's phone call, or you were talking to people who had just listened to it, you don't give yourself up.
That would be the best spy ever.
So what's not happening, I don't think there's any chance that this so-called whistleblower is working for a foreign country.
Because if they were, they wouldn't give up their cover.
It would be too valuable if they were that close to the inside.
So there isn't really any chance That this person was a spy in the foreign country kind of spy.
It doesn't fit any rational theory that you can imagine where they would be.
Now, I say that at the same time I have a book coming out called Lose Who Think, in which I warn people that their lack of imagination should not be seen as evidence.
Now, because I can't imagine a situation in which it would make sense for a foreign spy to do what this alleged whistleblower is doing, that doesn't mean there is no theory that would make that make sense.
I just can't think of one.
So if you also can't think of one, that's a pretty good sign that we can't think of one.
So I don't think it's a foreign spy situation.
I don't think it's Russian interference.
And so using the word spy is clearly meant as Just getting the press to go nuts.
But spy could mean, in this sense, for the Democrats or for the deep state.
Now, if they're a spy for the deep state, and the deep state literally exists, meaning that they have meetings, they talk to each other, and they're trying to overthrow a legally elected person for just power reasons, Well, I think you could call that a spy.
That would be a spy for the coup planners.
But I don't know if a spy will ever be the right fit.
So I will not allege that said whistleblower is a spy.
Probably a partisan.
Now, being...
Scott is intellectual but misguided.
We block people who say stuff like that.
Goodbye. Remember, you're always allowed to disagree, and you're always allowed to give reasons.
But when you simply insult me without putting a reason, then I block you, because I don't want people like you in my life.
You can disagree with me all day long.
Tell me what's wrong.
You've got plenty of room. You don't even have to give details.
You can say, I disagree with you because of the Constitution.
And I would say, oh, okay, there's no details there, but at least, you know, it's obvious you have some kind of reason that you're thinking.
You don't get blocked for that.
If you even suggest that you have a reason for your opinion, I will not block you, assuming it's a legitimate-sounding reason.
I don't have to agree with it.
It just has to be in the realm of legitimate.
All right, that's just my little rule.
So, just recapping the President's excellent tweet, he, you know, departs from the fact-checking per usual, uses his hyperbole in place of more accurate language as usual, But damn, it's good because he's creating a news cycle that will look like it's bad for him because people will jump on this and say, you're calling him a spy.
You're bringing risk to him.
You're a bad person.
But it's going to make you deal with the word spy.
So if the president makes his critics...
Talk about the president using the word spy, and he does it long enough, more people will hear that the Democrats spied on him.
In the White House or the deep state did.
So he is getting his message amplified by his critics, which is amazingly good for him.
And I would say that in this case, you know, I'm not a mind reader, right?
So I could be wrong, which is always a good thing to say when you're about to say what I'm going to say.
If you ever say something like I'm about to say and you don't throw in, but I could be wrong...
You're probably a little overconfident in your opinion.
So I could be wrong.
But it seems to me that the president is signaling with a wink and a nod to his supporters that he's just getting the anti-Trump press stirred up and that he's doing it intentionally because it amplifies his message.
It looks pretty overt to me.
But again, I could be wrong.
I'm not a mind reader. Reveal the name of the whistleblower.
Yeah, I don't know how that process works.
So I think I have to get educated on what happens to the identity of a whistleblower if the whistleblower complaint keeps going through its process.
I don't even know what the process is.
I suppose it depends if there's a crime or not a crime.
Yes, and then there was the story about the whistleblower rules suspiciously changed about a month ago, quietly, to allow second-hand information.
Now, I don't actually have a problem with that change.
That's a change that I listen to and I go, you know, if somebody comes to you with second-hand information of some horrible thing happening, You'd want to look into it, even if it's secondhand information.
So I don't think the rule change is a bad one, but the timing of it seems pretty suspicious.
Could be a coincidence, but you don't know.
I'm just looking at your comments here for a moment.
Yeah, who changed it?
I think that's still a question that hasn't been answered.
All right.
Well, let's get back to all the lifestyle politics that we have adopted.
Thank you.
All right. Oh, let me say something about transgender athletes, because I saw something in the comments that reminded me of that.
So, as you famously know, I made most, if not all of you, angry by saying transgender athletes Now, there's a second part of this that needs to be said, and it goes like this.
Why is there a separate men's and women's league for any sport?
Now you're going to say, Scott, that's a dumb question, because there's a size difference, there's muscle difference.
If small women played on the same team with large men, first of all, they could never make the team, and second of all, they'd get hurt, and third of all, why can't women have sports where they can excel?
Why should they always be in this sport and have some lower role, sit on the bench or something, right?
That doesn't make any sense. But here's the thing.
Every sport is divided, even within gender, let's say we're just talking about the men, every sport is divided by talent level.
Always. They're all divided by talent level.
If you threw men and women together and continue doing what we already do, which is dividing the entire sport by talent level, some people are professionals, some are semi-pro, some made it on the college team, some played on a competitive casual league, some played on a less competitive casual league, some played in just pickup games.
You can find a league in which you are compatible no matter what your biological truth is.
I used to play in an indoor soccer league, a co-ed indoor soccer league.
It was a co-ed indoor soccer league.
Now, if you've ever played co-ed soccer and you put a top male co-ed soccer player against Even a pretty good female player, that female player could get hurt.
Unless they were, you know, probably if they were college or professional level, they would know not to get hurt.
But it would be a dangerous situation.
Was there ever any problem with my pickup league, which had all different class levels, you know, from a real competitive one to just people who learned to play soccer yesterday?
No. The men and the women...
I played on the same team perfectly well because all of the leagues were organized by talent level.
So I played on my own team with...
This happened by complete coincidence.
I didn't know it at the time.
I just got my friends to be on a team.
What I didn't know is that several of my friends were insanely good soccer players.
I didn't even know that. And some of them were women.
So the women on the team were so good that they were clearly better than some of the men.
Now that means that we were about in the right place, meaning that if some of the women are better than some of the men and vice versa, you're on the right team.
Now, soccer, if somebody's saying bad example, soccer is one sport.
But every sport has that quality where people can compete at a higher level or a lower level and just find their level.
Now, if part of what makes you not as competitive is your size, let's say you're really good at something but you're not very big, There's a level for you.
You might be the best one on the lower level, but you would know, and everybody else would know, that if you went up a level, it would be dangerous.
You wouldn't be able to compete at that level.
You'd get hurt. Then don't do it.
So, MMA, same thing.
If the best woman fighter wants to compete against what would probably be almost one of the worst male fighters, because they're roughly competitive, I don't see any problem with that, if they're competitive.
Now, you wouldn't want the best female player, best female MMA fighter to fight the best male fighter, because that would just be dangerous.
And we don't do that.
We don't do it even within genders.
You don't take the best female MMA fighter and have her fight the worst MMA fighter.
Those two never get in the cage.
They never fight. So, those of you who are complaining about transgender, maybe rethink this.
Why do we have separate male and female sports to begin with?
It would be simple, because we already do it within genders, to divide the teams by skill level.
That's it. That's the whole thing.
It's easy. And there's probably...
I would imagine that in the future, separating sports by gender...
It just wouldn't make sense. Now, you might ask yourself, well, Scott, Scott, Scott, doesn't that mean that there would be no women's team that ever got to compete, let's say, at a high school level?
You know, they wouldn't have a team, because the best team would presumably be 99% men.
There'd be a few women who would get through, but 99% men.
Is that fair? Well, is it fair that I can't make the basketball team?
Is that fair? I'm 5'8", so if I can't make my high school basketball team, should they make a new basketball team for me because I'm not tall?
Shouldn't I be able to petition my school and get a law change so that short people can be on the starting team?
Why not? Why is it fair that short people can't be on the team?
The answer is these things are not designed to be fair.
Sports are designed to showcase unfairness.
If you think it's anything else, you're probably seeing it wrong.
The whole point of sports is to showcase that some people are amazing at it, And it's fun to watch them play.
And other people are not so good and they are treated as not so good.
They get the lesser leagues.
Fewer people watch them.
They don't get the same level of equipment.
That's just the way it goes. I would be in the same category as most women because I'm not big enough to play.
And 90% of men would also be in the category of not good enough to play on the high school team.
90%? 95%, right?
Don't 95% of males not make the team?
So who the hell cares that a handful of kids in high school got to be stars and they were all men?
I don't care, because I'm not one of them.
Screw them. You could get rid of the whole sports in general.
I'd be okay with it, because I'm not on the team anyway.
Just to be clear, I could have made all of my teams in high school.
I went to a very small high school, and I actually could have played on the varsity basketball team.
My coach actually asked me to play.
But that's how bad the team was.
That's not how good I was.
That's how bad the teams were.
And you're saying a lot of women care.
Well, let's say 100% of women thought that was unfair.
To do it that way, just one set of teams, and you, both, every gender, however many genders you want.
Wouldn't matter how many genders there are, because just, you could be, anybody could play, you just find your level within the sport.
Would that be unfair to women?
Sure. Would it be unfair to men who are not athletic?
Exactly the same way.
Exactly the same way.
Sports are not designed to be fair.
They're designed for the best people to be highlighted and celebrated.
I think that's a bunch of ridiculousness and should end.
But if people want to do it, I'm in the same category as the women, same category as the transgenders, who don't get to play on the varsity team.
We all have some physical limitation that prevents us from playing on the top team.
So I'm with the trans, trans athletes.
I'm with them because I'm more like them than I am like a star quarterback.
I'm more like the women than I am like the star quarterback because I can't make the team either.
Can't make the team. I don't have those skills.
Never can have those skills.
So, but I also think sports are a bunch of BS that are, you know, probably overemphasized.
All right, that's all I got to say about that.
So, I'm solidly with the transgender athletes and the women on this.
We're all in the same category.
We can't make the team either.
I just don't care. And I think we should just have one set of sports and everybody can just find their level.
It works better than you think it does.
And I'll tell you, I have to tell you that co-ed soccer is way more fun than male-only soccer, you know, because I've played a lot of both.
And it's fun because it just brings in some extra something.
It's just another level of variable that makes it better.
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