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Oct. 3, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:02:01
Episode 682 Scott Adams: Trump Campaign Ads, Chinese Tainted Pork, Citizen Participation
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Hey, I just noticed that people are coming online to watch me.
Grab a seat. Gather around.
There's still room. Still room on the internet.
So, what a fun day.
I love it when the news is all funny.
I think, well, in this country anyway.
There's a tragedy in France.
But the news in this country seems to be all the funny kind.
The kind I like. And we can enjoy it together with a little thing called the simultaneous sip.
It's coming at you. It's coming at you fast.
And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a stein, a chalice, a tank or a thermos, a flask, a canteen, a grail, a goblet or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I'm partial to coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Oh, it's gonna be a good one this time.
Simultaneous hip, go.
I hope you could all enjoy the full simultaneity of that.
and It was sublime.
Well, of course, I know you want me to talk about Trump's two campaign video ads.
He just came out with, he meaning his team, two of the strongest, best campaign ads you're ever going to see.
And look what time it is.
I mean, we've got a lot of time between now and the election.
Apparently, they're smelling blood in the water and they just unloaded the magazine into Joe Biden.
So if you didn't see them, they're just classics.
And here's something that we can now say with a certain degree of confidence is probably going to be a theme for future Trump ads.
And the theme will be funny.
Because funny works.
Funny works every time.
And these latest two ads, I'll talk about in a moment, were both funny without a punchline.
They're just hilarious.
Just because of what they express.
Just the ideas themselves are actually laugh, you know, fall down, hilariously funny.
So the most famous one that he did yesterday or was released yesterday was showing Joe Biden saying that he never had a discussion with Hunter Biden, his son, about his overseas business with Ukraine.
And then it cuts immediately from Biden saying that To Nickelback, the band, and I guess there's a music video in which they hold up a photograph.
And in place of whatever photograph was there in the original song, was the golf photograph of Joe Biden, his son, and the Ukrainian board member who was golfing in their foursome, and some other random guy.
It's hilarious because of the way they juxtapose it and the way they throw in the Nickelback.
Because when you see Nickelback, you laugh anyway.
You just automatically, Nickelback.
Because Nickelback is the only band.
Well, are they? There might be another one.
But I can't think of another band where when you just say the name of the band, you start laughing.
Nickelback. Because so many people have, you know, a feeling about Nickelback.
Now, of course, I'm no music expert and they've been hugely successful.
So I'm not the one who says that art is subjective.
I will just note that the way the public receives this band is sort of with a little bit of a priming to laugh.
Because they're used as a punchline so often.
So it was sort of the perfect video because when you see him saying that and then you see the picture, it's really devastatingly hilarious because it's so effective and because it's Nickelback, so it's sort of ridiculous at the same time.
It's sort of perfect.
I mean, you couldn't make a better ad than that.
Now, if I'm being objective, I don't believe that the photograph disproves what Biden said, because he was kind of specific about what he said.
He said, I haven't discussed it with my son.
That's not the same as saying, I never met a guy you work with.
I've golfed a lot, and I've never talked business during golf.
Well, I haven't golfed that much, but I've golfed.
And I don't really talk business.
It just doesn't happen. So, while I don't think it's innocent when somebody golfs with the vice president, the sitting vice president, you know, it's sort of always business, I think it might be technically true that he didn't have anything like a substantive conversation about Hunter Biden's overseas activity.
But the campaign ad is just as effective either way, because it looks like the answer to the question that makes Biden look like a liar.
So the people will receive it the way it was intended.
They probably won't lawyer it up like I just did.
The other one was just as good, because it showed a whole bunch of older clips of Trump's impeachment nemeses, all saying that impeachment is taking away the will of the voters.
Of course, they were talking about Clinton, I think.
So it's everything from Maxine Waters to Nancy Pelosi to, what's his name, the penguin?
I can't remember his name, Nadler.
It shows all of them saying in the clearest, passionate language that impeachment to simply change the result of an election is wrong.
It's devastating.
I mean, it's really effective.
So I would say that the Trump, whoever's doing their digital stuff, man, they got some good people there.
So I don't know who's in charge of that.
Is that Brad Parscale?
Whoever it is, they're killing it.
Alright, that was a lot of fun.
And predictably, it looks like Nickelback probably complained.
It looks like there was some kind of a takedown notice for it.
But of course, as soon as it's taken down, somebody else reposts it, so it's hard for Twitter to stay ahead of it.
And I'm sure, I'll say this with complete certainty, the team that made this Knew that it would be taken down.
They knew that, right?
They knew that if they put something up with some famous rock band's song on it in a political context, you knew there was going to be a complaint, you knew it was going to be taken down.
But isn't that part of the fun?
You know that's part of the fun.
Because the taking it down is not a bug, that's a feature.
What is the only way to get this two bumps of publicity?
One is when it goes out, and it's funny.
Two, when it gets taken down.
That's your second bump of publicity, and then people want to see it even more, and they're going to go looking for it.
Say, where can I see that forbidden video?
It's sort of perfect.
I don't know if there's any kind of an Emmy that you can get for making these campaign videos.
That's like two Emmy-worthy videos on one day.
And it's like months ahead of the election.
I mean, how much better can they get between now and then?
It's pretty impressive.
Let's talk about something else. I guess our border patrol discovered one million pounds of infected Chinese pork headed our way.
And they lied about, I guess, whoever was shipping it lied about the contents.
Now, you might not know That pig Ebola, which is a thing, may have killed 220 million pigs, half the population of pigs in China.
That's how big a deal it is.
Half. And they just sent us, knowingly, knowingly, in other words, they falsified the contents, they knowingly sent us one million pounds of infected Chinese pork.
Now, somebody said, well, I don't think that pork can get into our pigs unless there's some weird situation where our pigs were eating the other pigs.
So I don't know if that's true.
Is that like mad cow where a cow has to eat the other cow to get mad cow?
I don't know. I don't know how that works.
But here's what I do know.
If another country sends you one million pounds of infected pork, And they lie about the contents.
That country is not your friend.
That's not a country you could do a deal with.
You can't do a deal with that country.
Not even a little bit.
So... Yet more evidence that...
And the other thing, if you get Chinese pork...
Do you ever wonder how much of that is actually prisoners?
Like... I'm just going to take the word for it that most of it comes from pigs.
But does any of that meat come from dissidents?
Would you know the difference?
Just going to put that out there.
All right. Oh, my, oh, my, what a day.
There's a bill in Congress.
I may have mentioned this before, but it's worth mentioning again.
It's bipartisan. Now why this is important is that with this impeachment stuff going on, it seems as though nothing can get done even if both sides agree.
So let's watch this one.
There's a bipartisan bill.
To add more transparency to the pharmaceutical pricing.
Apparently there's this middleman situation.
I think Dr. Shiva explained this once on one of my calls.
And I tweeted it so you can see the details.
But there's a middleman that controls the pricing and that's all opaque to us.
We can't see what's going on.
We can't see how much the middleman Entity is charging the pharmacies and therefore we don't know why the prices are so high in the United States versus other places.
There's just something missing.
So the proposed bill that's bipartisan would make them show you the prices so that you'd know how much overpriced they were and that would, of course, force them to lower prices because it would be embarrassing, I guess.
So, think about the fact that there's a bipartisan bill that is just dead simple.
Hey, you guys who aren't showing us the prices and your costs, you have to do that now.
Show us the prices and the costs.
Dead simple. Republicans agree.
Democrats agree. Who do you think is holding it up?
Right? It's not the president.
The president isn't holding it up.
It's the government who's wasting their time.
They're literally wasting your money.
Every time you go to the pharmacy, you can thank Nancy Pelosi that you paid 20% more than you needed to.
Because apparently the solution is here.
They just have to pass that bill.
Both sides like it. Just have to do their damn job.
That's all. Just do your job.
Save you 20% at the pharmacy or something.
All right. North Korea says they're optimistic about their upcoming working-level talks about denuclearization.
Now here's something I don't know about this process.
If you have a working-level meeting about denuclearization, does that indicate that the bosses have already decided in principle?
Or is it reverse?
Is it the working level meeting that will try to produce something that the bosses, meaning Trump and Kim Jong-un, can see so that they can say yes or no?
Which one of those do you think it is?
Do you think the bosses have said yes in a broad way and now they're working out the details?
Or is it opposite?
The bosses haven't said anything because they're waiting for some details to percolate up.
It could go either way, right?
Could go either way. Here's some speculation.
I'm not sure I'll make this a prediction, but here's the speculation.
The key sticking point seems to be, from the start, North Korea getting security guarantees.
Now, that's the language they use in whatever translated form.
They talk about North Korea getting some kind of security guarantee from the surrounding countries, as well as meaning China, South Korea, and the United States countries.
Being the important ones in the region.
So they could get some, and Russia I suppose, they've got a little bit of a border with North Korea.
So, here's the thing.
Do you think that President Trump Whatever offer that he could, under the right conditions, meaning that the nuclear program was more transparent, do you think the president could ever give security guarantees?
In other words, saying, not only do we formally end the war, the Korean War, but we'll guarantee That we'll help you if any of these other countries want to attack.
We've all agreed that we'll not do that or some version of that, right?
Do you think President Trump could ever offer security guarantees under the condition that we get what we need and that it's verifiable and it's like a real deal, not a BS deal?
I think he could.
I think he could. I do believe that this President could say to Kim Jong Un, and here's the key, their personal relationship was a necessary building block of being able to say, I think we can give you security guarantees, and have Kim Jong Un believe it.
Do you know what Gaddafi did not have the advantage of?
A personal relationship with the President of the United States.
Think about who Gaddafi was to us.
He was just sort of this nameless villain.
Not nameless, but he was this villain we don't know, personally.
And then think of what Kim Jong-un is to President Trump.
They have actually a legitimate personal connection.
Do you think that President Trump would be okay with killing Kim Jong-un as long as Things were moving in the right direction at whatever pace.
I mean, it could be slowly, but at whatever pace we're at least moving in the right direction.
Do you think President Trump No, because it's not in our interest.
It wouldn't be consistent with their personal relationship.
Again, just assuming everything's moving in the right direction, and it looks like it is.
So Kim Jong-un and Trump seem to have solved for Qaddafi.
Number one, you get rid of Bolton.
Because Bolton is the guy who brought up the Libyan model in the first place, right?
So you've got to get rid of Bolton.
Step one, complete.
And then the other steps are they need a personal relationship, and they both need to show that something positive is happening, so they can show their...
Their team, that it's a productive relationship.
It's not an adversarial, but it has been transformed into some kind of mutually productive, forward-looking arrangement.
I believe President Trump and Kim Jong Un have pulled that off.
And it could be that this working level meeting is actually a details meeting.
It could be that the big guys have said, in principle, we're not promising this yet, but in principle, if you could come up with some way we could really keep an eye on this nuclear program and feel safe about that, there's a deal to be had.
I feel like maybe the big guys have agreed, but we'll see.
Could be the other way, too.
All right. So we still don't know who the whistleblower is in this Ukraine situation.
Now, I don't want to start a new rumor about who the whistleblower might be, but I'm just going to point out a fact.
Again, you can connect these facts any way you want.
I'm just going to point out a fact.
Justin Trudeau has a lot of disguises.
That's all I'm saying. We don't know who the whistleblower is, but...
Justin Trudeau has a lot of disguises.
That's all I'm saying. Connect the dots any way you want.
All right. One of the things I love about the Trump administration is that it seems to be a two-way communication street.
There's two-way communication that's always open.
Between the presidency and the citizens, in a way we've never seen before.
I was watching, for example, I was watching the miniseries about Roger Ailes, and in that, and who knows how accurate this is, but in that you saw that the...
Who was it? One of the guys working for President Bush called Roger Ailes and asked him for his help, essentially managing the news to be consistent with what the White House wanted.
And I thought, I'll bet...
Before the Trump administration, the best way you could describe the relationship between the government and the people is that the government would make decisions with their experts and with their advisors and with their lobbyists and everything else.
So the government would make decisions and then they would try to sell it to the people.
I feel like that was the model up until Trump.
Trump has a superior model of dealing with the public.
Now, it may be someday in the future when historians look at it and go, hey, we didn't know it at the time, but that's a superior model.
Let me give you an example. The president is often mocked for having his TV on during the day, quite a bit, watching Fox News, but also we know he watches CNN, at least.
He's probably watched a little MSNBC. So we know the president is sampling the news from the both sides.
Whereas we imagine that a Bill Clinton or a President Obama were reading the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and Tony upscale magazines and things that would be a higher intellectual plane than mere television.
Which of those two models gives you a better idea where the country is at?
Which of those two models rapidly A-B tests messages so you can see what's working in real time, see how people react to it.
TV is the pulse of the country.
This president is doing the smart thing.
He's watching the pulse.
He can see in real time somebody tries a message, whether it's on Fox or CNN, and he can tell how it comes across.
He can tell how he feels about it.
He can ask the people in the room, usually people in the room if you're president.
He can ask them what they think about it.
How'd that go over? Did that work?
Maybe I'll try that.
So the president has created this interactive, real-time relationship with the press.
But it's better than that.
Because the press often reacts to social media and vice versa.
There's a symbiotic relationship, social media, news, government.
And this president has made those three things almost one unit of a machine, whereas it used to be sort of a top-down, hey, we're going to try to make you guys do what we want.
Do you not see examples where there are individuals on social media...
Who come up with a good message, a good approach, a good meme.
For example, Carpe Dunctum creates great memes, and next thing you know, the president's tweeting it.
So what we're seeing is something we've never seen before, which is that an individual voter, just a citizen, can have a good idea, put it on social media, or it could be just a good message or a good way of expressing something, puts it on social media, Gets a bunch of likes, gets a bunch of retweets.
It bubbles up. Somebody with a blue check notices it.
They retweet it.
Maybe another blue check.
And then suddenly the office of the president notices that there's a good message that's getting a lot of traction.
And then he uses it.
It's amazing. The entire system of government has been completely rewritten by this president, and it's one of those things you're going to see in hindsight much clearer, because when you're in it, you don't really have the same vision to be able to see it while you're in it.
But I've never seen a more interactive approach.
Let me give you an example.
Here's a concrete example.
I mentioned the other day that there's something called the Office of Nuclear Energy.
Which you can follow at GovNuclear.
So our government has a department that's promoting nuclear energy and has lots of information about the newest stuff and the newest test facilities and what's coming online now, etc.
So apparently it's a newish Twitter account.
And I called attention to it because my attention was drawn to it through Mark Schneider.
Our resident nuclear advocate expert.
And so he called my attention to it, and then I tweeted it.
Their number of followers was just a couple thousand.
I forget the exact number, but two or three thousand, something like that, followers in total.
That was the total attention they were getting.
Today they have five thousand.
So two thousand people We're citizens who are interested in nuclear and can be sort of weaponized as advocates because there are people who had enough interest to follow this account.
And I mention it again, which will again boost their attention.
So you can see a concrete example where I tweeted them and their exposure roughly doubled.
I mean, it was a small number, but it doubled.
So you can see the effect that the public is boosting parts of the government that are productive, and then that government does something for the people.
So it's this continual two-way virtuous cycle that I just don't know existed before.
It feels like it's really taken on a life of its own.
Here's another example. So earlier I was just talking about how there's a bipartisan bill To lower pharmaceutical costs.
Well, don't you think that knowing that, because I just told a bunch of you, don't you think that knowing that increases the chance that maybe it could happen?
So there are lots of things that we the citizens on social media, and especially the blue check people who have a lot of followers, we can boost the signal Of anything worth boosting.
You know, we can do it with a campaign ad.
I can do it with the AtGov nuclear site.
I can do it with a bill.
I can do it with China.
I can do it with fentanyl.
So you can see that individuals are now sort of testing messages.
We know that the White House is watching.
They are watching at least the Blue Jacks, and you see the presidents actually retweeted people who were not even highly visible, just people who had a good idea.
That is just hugely inspirational to me, because it feels like, I don't want to take this too far into optimism, because you won't be able to follow me there, but it feels like almost a rebirth of the Republic.
Too much? Is that too much?
It feels like a rebirth, a reboot of the Republic.
Because it seems to me that our founders built a pretty darn good system, you know, given with what they had to work with, etc.
But it sort of evolved into things happening behind closed doors.
And, you know, the lobbyists and the power brokers are the only people who had any power after a while.
Doesn't it feel like that? And it feels now that under the age of Trump, and who knows if this will last or not, it feels like the public is completely empowered now.
Completely. Who saw that coming?
Not me. I didn't see that coming.
It seems to me that an average citizen can today have as much power as an average citizen could have in the beginning of the Republic when things were so small that you probably knew the other people in government.
You would know your governor.
You might know him personally.
Because the world was so small, there just weren't many people there during the formation of the Republic.
But it feels like Trump gave...
Well, Trump and Jack Dorsey and Zuckerberg...
In a sense, the social media platforms, in conjunction with this weird, unusual president, has created a situation that has empowered...
Individuals in a way I've never seen it.
Let me give you an example.
If an individual came up with a terrific idea for gun control, let's say, would that individual be able to get that terrific idea to bubble up all the way to the White House?
Absolutely. I never would have said that any other time, would you?
Just fact-checking on this.
Based on your observation, this is more opinion than fact, but based on what you've watched about the process, based on the number of times you've seen an individual tweet bubble all the way up to the White House, would a great idea, from just a person, make it all the way to the White House?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
That doesn't mean they'll use it, because they get a lot of ideas and they know more than we do about You know the variables that are involved, but absolutely a good idea from an individual will go right into the president's hands.
That's amazing! That's amazing!
And it can happen in 24 hours.
It's like it's a whole new world.
So I could not be more optimistic about the Republic because I think the Republic went stale.
Instead of having to get refreshed with the blood of patriots, because you know that the founders assumed that every now and then you gotta refresh the tree of freedom with the blood of patriots or something.
As luck would have it, we've taken that warfare to the internet.
So there's blood of patriots, but it's in the form of people getting ratioed and losing their jobs because of social media.
So that stuff's still pretty bloody in a figurative sense.
But it looks like patriots are weighing in and they're putting tons of energy.
People are putting their necks on the line.
I am. You've watched me put my neck on the line repeatedly.
I take risks that you shouldn't take because I can afford it.
I made enough money that if I lost my job tomorrow I'd be fine.
So you get to watch me take some risks that I'm happy to take on your behalf because I can afford it and you can't.
So I'm happy to do that as a patriot.
And your support to me Makes that meaningful, right?
The fact that you support me in this, collectively, is what makes it doable.
So your individual sort of, you know, I would say love and support that you give to me, neither of those words are too much, I think, allows me to boost my voice and boost other people, like the ones I mentioned.
It's a good system, as long as we have this president.
I hope the next president is as flexible, because I'd hate to lose this.
It's pretty important. All right.
The Washington Post has a hilarious article, which I retweeted, in which they're mocking the followers of President Trump for assuming that everything he does, everything I say, Everything he does is genius as opposed to accidental flailing.
Now they gave two examples of this.
Apparently there are some people who think the president cleverly wants to be impeached because it'll be good for his re-election.
Now I'm not in that camp.
I'm pretty sure if the president had a choice of being impeached or not being impeached, he would choose not impeached.
I'm pretty sure that.
So if there's anybody out there who thinks it's the president cleverly goading them into impeachment, as in actually literally impeaching him, I don't think that's his plan.
What I would say, and if you think that was his plan, I think you're overthinking it.
What I would say is that he's good at improvising.
In other words, he's good at turning a bad situation into a good one.
You want to see an example?
What did everybody say about Trump's phone call to Ukraine?
They said, hey, you shouldn't have done that because you offered an implied quid pro quo.
So how often did you hear quid pro quo about President Trump?
Hey, that phone call was a quid pro quo.
And now let me ask you this.
What's the new nickname for Joe Biden?
Quid pro Joe.
This is actually a new nickname, Quid Pro Joe.
So this president certainly did not have some long-term plan where he would get accused of making a bad phone call and then cleverly turn the complaint into a nickname for his biggest competitor.
But he did it.
That's what happened.
So I don't think there's any chance he saw it coming, you know, set a trap, you know, intentionally said things to get people calling, using the phrase quid pro quo, so he could turn it into quid pro Joe.
But it happened.
So he took a situation...
And he capitalized on it, as we've seen him do over and over and over again.
Grifter Joe. Oh, I love you.
Whoever just said Grifter Joe, my God, I love that.
If ever the word Grifter could be used in a more perfect context, Grifter Joe Biden.
Now, let's talk about Oh, and then the other example they said is people are saying that he does misspellings intentionally.
And I have to confess, I'm probably the one, I probably have to take responsibility for the fact that people think that he misspells intentionally.
I have personally, I don't know if I've ever said he's misspelled intentionally.
Maybe there was one time.
Yeah, there might be one time I suspected it.
But in general, I would say the misspellings are nothing but misspellings.
There are typos, misspellings, autocorrect, whatever.
Here's what I think is the case.
He doesn't care.
He doesn't care.
And do you know what that makes me care about?
Well, not his typos.
The fact that he doesn't care, and you know he doesn't care because he doesn't take the tweet back and correct it.
It would be easy just to take the tweet back, correct it, reissue it.
It would be easy. He doesn't do it.
I freaking love that.
It went from, oh, you know, it's not an optimal look.
I mean, in the early days, you'd see a typo or something, a grammar error, and you'd say, oh, maybe it would have been better if somebody looked at that before he sent that out.
But we've gotten to the point where it just seems genuine.
Am I right? When you see his typos, what do you know for sure?
He sent it with his own fingers.
He actually, he probably, almost certainly, typed it with his own thumbs.
You're seeing the actual President of the United States, the most important person in the world, I think you could argue, and you're seeing a message that you know damn well came from him and his two little thumbs, and is what came right out of his brain.
I kind of love that.
I don't think I could like that any more than I do.
So, typos?
I'm all for them.
Because they're little markers for authenticity that originally struck me as, eh, it'd be better without these.
But now that it's sort of just worked into a somewhat of an expectation that he'll have a misspelled word or something now and then, I just look at them as authentic.
Now it just looks like, yeah, I know where this came from.
It didn't go through a committee.
That's for damn sure.
This came from the guy that you voted for.
It didn't come from his advisors.
It didn't come from handlers. It came from the person you voted for.
I can't not love that.
Really, I can't.
And the other thing it does is it humanizes them in a way you can relate.
How many of you have sent out a tweet with a misspelling?
I did it... Twice yesterday, I think.
One for sure. But if I'm not mistaken, I may have sent out two misspelled tweets yesterday.
I may be conflating with some in my mind, but at least one.
So when I see the president do it, I think it's authentic, and I kind of bond with him a little bit.
Because I go, well, I did that too.
I did the same damn thing yesterday.
Literally yesterday. But I love the fact that the Washington Post wrote a story in which they're trying to debunk the notion that the president is playing chess while others are playing checkers.
If you don't know, I'm probably the author of that idea, that he's playing 3D chess.
That was me back in 2015 saying that, and people mocking me until he became president.
And now they're still mocking me, indirectly.
But I think it's funny that they feel they need to complain about that Because it feels like they're sensing there's too much truth in it, maybe.
Am I reading too much in there?
Am I doing a little too much mind reading?
That they wouldn't do an article about it if it wasn't getting to them.
In other words, there's something about this situation that matters to them.
They need to know, they need you to know, he's not playing chess.
But if he's not playing chess, Could you explain that to QuidProJoe?
Because he probably thinks they are.
QuidProJoe. That's the best.
And by the way, I think QuidProJoe is another example that bubbled up from just a Twitter user.
I don't know who it was, but I think some Twitter user or somebody said it first, and it was good.
So it would bubble up.
That's your new republic right there.
It's amazing. Chris Eliza has the funniest article that wasn't trying to be funny today.
Chris Eliza, as you know, CNN, I guess, pundit slash analyst, maybe?
Political guy. So he's one of the top anti-Trumpers.
So he's anti-Trumper to the core.
And he's, I don't know if I'll ever stop laughing about this.
This is so funny. I tweeted this if you want to see it.
He was talking about there's a new Monmouth University poll In which they're asking people about the Ukraine transcript, the president's phone call with the president of Ukraine.
And it said that, according to the Monmouth University poll, just four in ten Republicans believe that the transcript even mentions Biden's name.
60% of Republicans don't think Biden's name is even in the transcript.
Now, of course it is.
It's there twice.
It's there clearly and unambiguously, and it comes from the President's office himself.
So there's no question of the facts.
The facts are as objective as any fact could be.
Every single person who participated in the call in any way Knows that Biden's name was mentioned.
And still, 6 out of 10 Republicans say that Trump never mentioned Biden in his call with Zelensky.
Now, it could be that the poll was worded in a way that people didn't know that's what they were answering exactly.
Because it could have been something like, without seeing the question, it could have been, do you think there was some quid pro quo with Biden or something?
So it's possible that I'm not seeing the full context of this.
But it is still hilarious, and I'll tell you why, that Chris Eliza is complaining that six in ten people can't look at a transcript and see what's right before their eyes.
You know why that's funny?
Because Chris Eliza is one of the biggest pushers of the fine people hoax.
What would it take to debunk the fine people hoax, the idea that the conspiracy theory rumor that's not true, that President Trump called the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville fine people?
What would it take to debunk that?
Just read the transcript.
That's it. Just read it.
It's right there that he said the opposite.
If you read half the transcript, you could be confused, and that's what most people see.
But if you read the full transcript, there's no ambiguity whatsoever.
He clearly said, I'm not talking about those people.
He said it directly.
I'm not talking about them.
And nobody even asked him to explain it.
He explained it on his own. Just to be clear, I'm not talking about them.
All you have to do is read the transcript.
So one of the biggest pushers of the fake transcript, in other words, the idea that he did call...
The neo-Nazis find people is CNN and Chris Eliza.
And so the tide has turned.
Karma has come to visit.
And Karma comes to visit and says, well, I don't even think Trump mentioned Biden in that phone call.
All right, so here's...
It gets even better. And this is Chris Eliza's comment to his own observation that six out of ten Republicans don't even see the name Biden in the transcript.
He goes with periods.
R, period. You, period.
Kidding, period. Me, period.
Yeah. Um...
And then Liz goes on to say this.
Listen to this. He says, this poll finding doesn't seem so unbelievable.
The primary work of Trump's candidacy and his presidency has been to erode the idea that objective truth exists.
So Chris Elizabeth of CNN says that President Trump has been working to erode Erode the idea that objective truth exists.
That's exactly what he's doing.
He's eroding the idea that objective truth exists.
Is that bad? Well, it would depend, wouldn't it?
It would depend if objective truth exists.
If it doesn't exist.
Well, then it would be good that President Trump is teaching us that objective truth doesn't exist.
If it does exist, well, then that would maybe be bad, because that would be untrue, right?
But... In a real sense, and this is something I told you back in 2015, I predicted that Trump would change more than politics.
I said it directly, publicly, and multiple times.
I said that what he would change is your understanding of reality.
And you see it happening.
So Liz's understanding of reality...
It's changing. Because he's saying, how could it be that people could look at the transcript and just not see the name Biden and it's right there?
Well, how could you, Chris Eliza, think that the president called neo-Nazis fine people when the transcript says clearly I'm not talking about them?
I said the opposite. Chris Eliza has been introduced to subjective reality.
While working at a news organization, that's got to be a mindfuck.
That's got to be hard to process.
I work for an organization that puts out the objective truth, which doesn't exist.
How do you process that?
I don't work for a news organization, so I can live comfortably in a world where objective truth isn't really a thing.
Well, how do you work for a news organization and believe objective truth doesn't exist?
What would that do to your mental health?
That's going to be hard to process, seriously.
Now, let me clarify.
I know there are a lot of science pedantic people out there who are going to say, Scott, Scott, Scott, there is a base reality Just because some people are fooled and can't see it, that doesn't make the objective reality go away.
It's still there.
Well, I'll give you two answers to that.
Doesn't matter, because we don't use any objective reality to make our decisions.
So when I say it doesn't matter, I'm talking about the realm of political decision-making.
Objective reality doesn't seem to be much of a factor in anything.
You can see it on every topic.
People are all over the place on what they're seeing and they're looking at the same stuff.
There's no evidence of objective reality in terms of how we make decisions and how we process things.
But is there, you ask, still outside the realm of our ability to perceive it accurately all the time, is there an actual objective reality?
Maybe. And maybe that objective reality can affect your life if you walk in front of a truck Whether or not you see the truck probably doesn't affect the fact that it will kill you.
So yes, there's an objective reality in terms of there might be a truck, and if you walk into it, it's going to kill you, even if you don't see it.
So in that sense, yes.
But if you're trying to decide, oh, what do I think about this Ukraine situation?
What did I think about Russia collusion?
What do I think about healthcare for everybody?
Any of these big political topics, you're not using objective truth.
Nobody is. We're all just using our subjectivity and arguing that it's based on objectivity.
But suppose we're a simulation.
Suppose our reality is a simulation.
Under the simulation...
Is there an objective reality?
Well, yes, there is.
But the objective reality is our programmer's reality, not ours.
Our reality would be completely subjective.
It would act as though it's subjective in many cases.
Again, if you walk in front of the truck...
Could be a simulated truck, but your simulated self is going to get killed by that simulated truck.
So yeah, in some sense, there's an objective reality.
But in terms of our filters on the world, we can't really see it in any reliable way.
So that was the understanding reality that I said would change.
We see this happening in stark...
In real time, in a very stark way, where you see that people can literally look at the same document, a document no longer than this.
They can look at it, and some of them won't even see names that are on it.
They won't even be able to see sentences.
They actually, their ability to see objective reality is so weak that they're inventing it on the fly.
All right. This is something else that Selyza claims.
He says, so this is a CNN claim, okay?
There is zero evidence that the whistleblower in the Ukraine story is a partisan.
Do you agree with that?
Because I think your news sources, most of you, is telling you that that's just a fact, that we know that the whistleblower is a partisan.
Have you seen evidence of that?
What's the evidence of that?
Do you believe that it's a fact that the whistleblower is a partisan?
I believe it's possible.
I also believe that I have never seen evidence of it.
Have you? Have you ever seen evidence that the whistleblower was a partisan?
I've heard people say there is evidence, but I haven't seen it.
Does that blow your mind? Because I'll bet you've watched news reports that say, oh yeah, he's a partisan.
Well, he might be. If I had to put my own money on it, I'd bet on it, right?
If you had to bet, you'd bet he was a partisan.
But where's the evidence?
The ICIG report stated he was a partisan, but where's the evidence?
Now, so I'm not going to say that the CNN report is true, but when somebody says, where's the evidence?
And I say to myself, well, I don't know.
I haven't seen it either. I've only heard it reported that he is.
Now, I would say if the ICIG report says he's a partisan, it's very likely he is.
But I would still want to see the evidence, wouldn't you?
I'd want to see the evidence.
So I wouldn't say there's zero evidence.
I would say, you know, I could use a little more support on that point.
Let's see.
The other thing that, oh, the other thing that Solisa says there's no evidence for, he says specifically, independent fact checkers don't give credence to the idea that Joe Biden called for the firing of Ukraine's top prosecutor to avoid an investigation into his son.
So CNN is reporting that there's no evidence that the reason Joe Biden called for the firing of the Ukraine prosecutor is to avoid an investigation into his son.
Have you seen the evidence to the contrary?
I haven't. Where is the evidence that that's why he did it?
I'm not saying he didn't do it for that reason.
I'm just saying, okay, I haven't seen the evidence either.
Is it evidence that he went golfing with a board member?
No, not really. It's not really evidence of anything.
Is it evidence that...
I don't know.
I would agree with this fact that...
I would agree with the statement that the fact-checkers are not buying into Joe Biden doing it You know, to get the investigator off his son.
But I don't think that matters to the story too much.
Somebody says, the video is not evidence.
The video is not evidence that he did it because of his son.
The video is evidence that he did it.
What we don't have is evidence of why.
Right? But...
I don't think any of that matters because Hunter Biden was taking a lot of money from a Ukrainian entity while his dad was vice president.
Does it really matter what Joe Biden did?
It kind of doesn't matter what Joe Biden did or did not do with the prosecutor.
It's sort of irrelevant. Because you have all the badness you would ever need, just the fact that his son was taking all this money from the Ukrainian entity while the vice president's portfolio included Ukraine.
And then there was also the issue of Hunter Biden went with his dad to some China event and met with a banker and got a deal with some bankers in China while on a trip with his father, who was the sitting vice president.
Come on. So what the president said, if you saw this part, which was really good by the way, did you see the president look in the camera, I think it was yesterday, and he said, as strongly as you've ever heard him say anything, he looked directly in the camera and he said, Joe Biden is a stone-cold crook.
He's stone-cold crooked.
You know it and I know it.
Did you see him say that?
That was really good, in terms of persuasion.
Because it looked different from other things that people say about politics.
When somebody says, blah, blah, I was a racist, your brain automatically says, well, maybe yes, maybe no.
It just sounds like something that people say in politics.
If somebody says, somebody's crooked, like Hillary, it may be true, it may be false.
It sounds like something you say in politics.
Somebody says somebody's incompetent, somebody's crazy, somebody's impulsive, somebody's dumb.
All of those things, you automatically put your Your political filter on, don't you?
You just say, yeah, maybe.
Maybe. That's something said by a political opponent, so you filter it.
But when President Trump looked at the camera and said, Joe Biden is stone cold crooked, you know it, and I know it, that didn't sound like politics, did it?
That felt like he had broken the fourth wall or something.
You know, that's not quite it.
But that looked like reality peeking through the politics.
It looked like he believed that to be stone-cold true, and he was selling it pretty well.
Now again, I'm not saying it's true, but I'm saying that the way he said it was I don't know.
That's a 10 out of 10 for sounding credible, even if it isn't true.
It really sounded like he believed it, and he knows you believe it.
And here's what I believe. Every one of us sees Hunter Biden taking that money.
Every one of us thinks it's crooked.
Even the Democrats.
Even the media. There's nobody in the media who's defending Hunter Biden, is there?
So when Trump looked at the camera and said, he's stone cold, crooked, that's an amazing turn of words.
I mean, I don't know if that was spontaneous or he had thought about it a little bit, but those are dagger words.
It's like, stab, stab, stab, stone, cold, crooked, and you're dead.
And then when he said, you know it, and I know it, that's like the next level of persuasion.
Because one of the main, strongest parts of persuasion is when you say what somebody else is thinking as they're thinking it.
If you can ever do that, it really gives you like a superpower for persuasion.
So he said, if he had said, I believe it, and the public believes it, that's politics.
That's weak. But when you look at the camera and you say, you know it, and I know it, That's persuasion.
When you tell somebody what they know, that's a gold-plated A-plus persuasion, if it's true.
You have to actually hit something they actually know to be true, or it doesn't work.
Anyway, so I got some...
I have some questions about what is the truth of all the Joe Biden stuff, but we don't have to wonder about the Hunter Biden stuff.
That part looks crooked just on the surface.
You don't have to dig into any details to know that there's something wrong going on there.
All right. As I've said before, it looks to me...
Oh, and then here's something that somebody on Twitter asked when I tweeted that around.
Somebody said, is there evidence Ukraine didn't know the funds were delayed?
That's interesting, right?
Because how can it be a quid pro quo phone call, the president's phone call with Ukraine, if, as it's being reported, the Ukrainians didn't know that their funding was being held up?
They weren't even aware of it.
So if you're not even aware of the threat part, even existing, how could you possibly receive the phone call as quid pro quo?
And I thought, good point.
So I'm not sure any of the facts really matter because we'll make our decisions without them, but that's what's going on.
All right. Biden has a history, blah, blah, blah.
Biden's son is not crooked, but not good optics either.
Well, it depends on your definition of crooked.
If crooked means illegal, then I would agree that Hunter Biden has not done anything that I've heard of that's illegal, besides in his personal life, perhaps.
That's another story.
But wouldn't you call it crooked?
I mean, I would call it crooked on...
Is this a legal term?
I heard some lawyer say it.
Was it... I forget who said it.
But prima facie?
Prima facial?
Or something? On its surface, it's obviously crooked.
You don't really need to dig any deeper.
You just look at it and say, okay, well, that's crooked.
Seems that way to me. But legal.
Probably perfectly legal, but still crooked.
There's an article in Reason, Reason.com Talking about NorCam, I think it's called.
There's a drug that you can take if somebody has a fentanyl overdose.
And apparently it works really well.
So if somebody overdoses on fentanyl or they're in the process of overdosing and they're going to die, if you give them this NorCam drug, apparently it revives them and works really well.
And there are lots of success stories of people who have done that.
And I guess it's not available except by asking the pharmacist.
So you have to ask for it at the counter.
Now imagine, here's the situation.
There are drug addicts who are likely to have a problem with fentanyl.
Remember, they're drug addicts.
And in order to get the thing that could save their life, they have to talk to the pharmacist in their town, probably.
Do you want to do that? If you're a drug addict, do you want to talk to the pharmacist about your drug addiction?
Maybe not. Maybe not.
So the idea is that maybe this Narcan could be available from vending machines and some method that would allow you to avoid human contact to get it.
Because if you're a drug addict, you might want to keep that to yourself.
And I thought to myself, that is so commonsensical.
And apparently there's some law that prevents that from happening.
Yeah, cops have it, for example.
They carry it with them, I think, in many cases.
But, not every case, but many cases they have it with them.
It seems to me that's another simple tweak.
Like, why in the world?
If you can simply ask for it and a pharmacist can give it to you, you know, it's that safe, it's not a regulated thing apparently, why not get it from a vending machine?
Why not get it from Amazon?
Of course, in that case, your name would be on the record.
You might not want that.
But a vending machine is perfectly anonymous, right?
Assuming you could use cash in it, I guess.
Alright, so there are plenty of good ideas out there to fixing the world.
Remember I told you that the golden age, which we are entering, will be defined by simply having to design better systems.
What's a better system for pharmaceuticals?
Transparency. And we've got a bipartisan bill to give us that.
That would be a better system. What's a better system for the republic?
The president gets ideas as they bubble up from the public.
Hey, that's happening now.
Our system has evolved on its own.
Nobody did it intentionally, but we evolved to a fairly good system where the public and their president are quite connected and they communicate every day.
So there are a lot of good systems, and I would say nuclear energy is another one of those.
I tweeted around, I think I tweeted it, maybe I just liked it, an article by Steven Pinker talking about what needs to be done to store nuclear waste in a safe way.
Now, skipping the details, the bottom line is we know how to do it.
We know how to store nuclear waste, and we're developing even better waste.
And we could use it for fuel if we developed the right kind of reactors, etc.
So that, again, is a design problem.
We simply have to design.
All right, I'm going to have to get this, so I'm going to talk to you later.
But think about design.
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