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Oct. 13, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
58:24
Episode 692 Scott Adams: The Power of Simplicity, Comparing Things Without Loserthink, Normality
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Well, let's talk about all the fun news.
Yes, the fun news.
So, have you noticed that the simpler the message, the more effective it is?
That's one of those ways you can predict the future.
Now, not with any sense of certainty, of course, because the future is a pretty squishy thing.
But one of the tricks that I often use to get an advantage in guessing what's going to happen next or to guess what messages are more persuasive is that the simpler the message, The more easy it is to spread and become viral and to repeat it, and it sticks in your head better, the more people can understand it.
So if you have a contest between a simple message and a complicated one, usually you want to bet on the simple one, all other things being roughly equal.
Let me give you some examples. Build the wall.
Now, of course, there's tons of pushback against build the wall, but everybody would agree that was a super effective organizing slogan.
How about this one?
No collusion. Compare build the wall to all of the arguments about open borders and blah, blah, blah.
It's a complicated argument against build the wall.
Look at Russia collusion, this big complicated story of who met who, who talked to who, who gave who a dossier, versus Trump's message, no collusion.
No collusion. Now, it helps to be on the right side of the facts, as apparently the president was, but I'm just making the point about the simpler messages are more powerful.
Now, here's where it gets more relevant.
If you're talking about the Ukraine phone call, President Trump says it was a perfect call.
Simple. But a little general.
Perfect allows a little bit of disagreement.
Here's what the other side is saying.
That the phone call was, quote, and you've noticed they all use the same term, digging up dirt on Biden.
Now, I've said...
That a better way to explain that call is that the president was pursuing one of the highest priorities of the presidency, which is to make sure that the republic is not corrupted by a foreign power.
And certainly if the highest polling person running for president, Biden, had some kind of financial connection to Ukraine, It would be the highest priority of a sitting president to get to the bottom of that, find out if there's anything there to be worried about.
So my explanation of what the president was doing is complicated.
It's got, you get the constitution, what's the job of the president, you have to consider our history with Russia, you have to look at the priorities, you have to see that our other priorities are under control, the economy is going well, so that makes other priorities higher.
It's this big complicated story, which has the advantage of being completely true, but complicated.
Compare what I just said, and I believe every part of what I just said is true.
Highest priority. It matters if the guy polling number one is in the pockets of Ukraine, and the information we already have shows that he's certainly got a conflict of interest, because you're not going to sell out your kid.
So that much is sort of obvious.
So if you look at the complicated story, it's all true.
Top priority, president's job, clear evidence in the public domain that nobody's arguing about, that Hunter Biden's making a lot of money from a foreign country.
But it's complicated.
It can't really compare with digging up dirt on your opponents.
So, in terms of messaging, in terms of persuasion, the Democrats have a clear advantage, because they can express their view of the world, their movie, With a simple phrase, digging up dirt on an opponent.
You've noticed that almost all of the Democrats and anti-Trumpers use the same phrase, right?
They always say digging up dirt.
Now, what's the difference between digging up dirt on your opponent and doing your job as a president to further a legal and totally appropriate investigation of something that's the highest priority in the United States?
Well, You know, those messages are hardly competitive.
Digging up dirt is a strong message.
All right, how about this one with the Kurds?
What do the people who agree with President Trump say, in terms of moving our troops out, versus what do his critics say?
The people who think it might be a good decision, I don't know.
I would have to say I'm still in the fog of war.
If you're asking me to unambiguously back the president on this, I would say, anybody who has a firm opinion about this Kurd-Turkey situation, I don't trust.
The only reasonable opinion is, we don't really know how this is going to turn out.
We just don't know.
We know people will die.
But maybe they would have under every other condition.
We don't know what the alternative is.
We don't know. I'll talk more about that.
But to support the president, you would have to come up with some kind of a story that recognized the 400 years of history of the Kurds.
You would have to know that there are Kurds inside Turkey and Kurds outside Turkey.
You would have to know that there are Kurds that fought with us and we considered allies.
Still do, I guess. But also Kurds that the good ones are associated with were clearly Kurds.
Even we consider, the United States plus Turkey, consider terrorists.
See how complicated it gets.
There's a safe zone involved.
There's Turkey who wants to use the safe zone to repatriate Syrians who moved into Turkey when the Syrian war started.
That's a legitimate goal.
So it gets this big complicated thing, and then Turkey's a NATO ally, and there's defense contracts, and there's Russia.
So in order to back the president on this decision, You've got a pretty complicated story.
What does the other side have?
What do the anti-Trump people have?
Here's what they have.
Abandoning our allies.
Ouch. Compare this big complicated 400 year of Kurds and Turks and allies and Russians and all that.
It's so complicated you can barely hold it in your head at the same time.
Versus Abandoning our allies.
Ouch! That's really powerful.
And you can see it in the news.
What is it that Americans want to do less than abandon allies?
Not much.
You know, the United States has a long history of allies being really the main thing that keeps us alive.
You know, starting from the Revolution.
You know, the Revolutionary War, we had to go get allies.
In that case, France.
When World Wars I and II happened, thank goodness we had allies, and thank goodness our allies had us as allies.
And right down the line, whenever the trouble goes down, whether it's 9-11 or anything else, you look to your allies.
The United States consciousness and brand, I hate to use that word, for this.
But just our self-image, who we are as a country, our patriotism, all of that is really tightly wound around the idea that you respect and play well with your allies, just as we expect them to play well with us.
So the message, abandoning your allies, is super strong persuasion.
But let's talk a little bit more about the other side.
Oh, and then another simple one is that President Trump's trying to do this trade deal with China, right?
The pro-Trump side is all complicated.
Because you've got IP theft, I think, several different ways.
You've got some fentanyl production there.
You've got a whole bunch of different tariff situations.
What are they doing? What are we doing?
What's their long-term strategic military goal?
I mean, I could just go on and on about the complexity of why pushing back on trade makes sense.
Here's the other side.
Trade deals never work.
Trade deals never work.
That's the anti-Trump side.
Look how simple that is.
Everybody can understand that, even though it's not true.
First of all, who said trade deals never work?
Well, if you never do them right, they don't work.
I would argue that almost every international deal we make is a trade war.
It's just that somebody won quickly.
It doesn't look like a war because somebody surrendered right away during their first negotiation.
Ah, damn it.
I'm going to sign your contract.
It's the best I can get.
We're in a continuous state of trade war.
It's just some are bigger, some are smaller, some are faster, some are not.
And, you know, maybe Trump's on the verge of winning this one with China, although I'm still skeptical.
I think we're better off decoupling.
All right. So, simplicity goes to the Democrats for, I'll say, the childlike arguments.
In the cases of the Kurds and the cases of the Ukraine situation, there is sort of an adult way to look at it and a child way to look at it.
And I've noticed that the Democrats keep picking the child view, the simplify it until you've lost all the nuanced view.
Here are some questions I have not heard answered in the news on the whole Kurdish-Turkey situation.
So maybe you can help me in the comments.
These are big questions.
Number one, what is Turkey's goal with the safe zone?
What exactly does their end state look like?
Does it look like Turkey is managing it, but there's some local control?
Does it look like they don't care who's in charge as long as their military is there so they can do what they want with that area?
Are they looking to kill all the Kurds?
Are they looking to move the Kurds in or out of the safe zone?
Are they looking to find an agreement with the Kurds?
What exactly is Turkey trying to do?
We don't know. So it's hard to be strongly for or against anything that's happened there, because I don't know what they're trying to do exactly.
I mean, you know in general that they're moving in and controlling that territory.
You know they want to move some of the refugees in there, and we know that They're not happy with the Kurds.
But what exactly do they think is the end state that Turkey wants to have there?
What's that look like? I don't know.
Do you? Here's one.
Here's the biggest question. Why are the Kurds, who are in that area that Turkey's moving into, not asking the United States to moderate peace talks?
Is that not conspicuously missing?
Right? Right?
Isn't that a gigantic gap in the whole narrative?
On both sides, I guess.
Wouldn't the most natural thing to happen if you had a big partner like the United States, and your big partner was moving out, but obviously has good relations, you know, long-term relations with Turkey, and Turkey's attacking you?
And you don't think you have a chance against them because the Turkish army is just going to overwhelm the smaller Kurdish forces who are probably less armed.
What would be your natural inclination?
Wouldn't you ask the United States...
To try to work out a deal where you could keep some Kurdish autonomy, or maybe part of the safe zone would be still Kurdish, but maybe the rest of it they could use to repatriate the immigrants.
Would any of that work?
So, the question is this.
Can you support an ally who Who's not asking you to at least help as the first stage to negotiate a peace deal?
Why is that missing?
Why is it that only war is the option that's being talked about?
Have you ever seen a situation where only war was talked about?
The Kurds just immediately grabbed their weapons and went to go fight.
They never said, as far as I know, unless I've missed it, they never said, please, United States, can you get us in a meeting with the Turks, and we're trying to work this out so we understand they have more power than we do, but we want to work out whatever's our best deal that doesn't involve us all getting slaughtered.
Where is that? Now, it could be that they have such a bad history, 400 years of animus between Turks and Kurds, it could be that they just both know it can't happen.
Now what do you do in a situation where neither side wants to not fight?
It looks like the Kurds prefer fighting based on the fact that I don't see them asking for anything else.
It looks like the Turks prefer fighting based on the fact that I'm not aware of them asking the United States to work something out with the Kurds.
Maybe it's happened, but the news is not reporting that, so it leaves us in this unknown situation.
So let me ask you this.
Let's say you're in public somewhere and you come upon a fight.
And it's two adult males.
They seem about evenly matched, just for this example.
This is not a perfect analogy to Turks and Kurds.
But just for this example, let's say they look about evenly matched.
And it's obvious that they both want to fight, and they're starting to fight.
It's clear that neither of them wants to back down.
They want to fight.
What do you do? Do you break them up?
I don't. Never.
I would never break up a fight between two people who want to be fighting.
I just wouldn't do it.
Because I wouldn't take a chance of getting hurt.
That's two people doing what they want to do, roughly evenly matched.
Let them fight it out.
Yeah, there's a pretty high risk of grievous injury, but they're both making that choice.
So I tend to look at that differently than if you come upon a fight where one obviously doesn't want to be there.
If one is trying to get away, or one is obviously, you know, mismatched, but maybe doesn't know how to back down, in those cases, I would be tempted to step in.
But I'm looking at Turkey and the Kurds, and all I see is two groups that want to fight.
Do the Kurds who are in northern Turkey want a deal, or do they want to carve out a homeland, which would require fighting?
So, this kind of gets us to where do we have the greater connection?
In other words, is our obligation to Turkey as a NATO ally greater than our obligation to the Kurds, who we fought with, and have a military sort of, you know, a bond forged in war, which is a pretty strong bond.
So I looked up the mission of NATO, Because I wanted to remind myself what that was about.
Because I wasn't sure, since NATO was sort of formed as a Soviet Union defense thing, I wasn't sure if it was still oriented specifically toward Russia.
But here's, at least from Wikipedia, here's Wikipedia's description of NATO. It constitutes a system of collective defense, meaning all the dozens of countries that are part of NATO are a collective defense, Whereby its independent member states agree to mutual defense in response to an attack by an external party.
So if an external party were to attack any member of NATO, then all of NATO would be activated.
So if there were an external enemy fighting Turkey, we would be by...
By agreement, our NATO agreement, we will be bound to defend Turkey against external attack, assuming that the external attack was not also a NATO member.
I suppose that could happen.
But under the normal situation where a NATO member gets attacked by an external force, we have an obligation to join the NATO side.
So now you ask yourself, wait a minute, who's doing the attacking?
This looks more like Turkey attacking the Kurds.
Well, here's where it gets kind of a gray area.
Because the Kurds have a long history of doing terrorist attacks against Turkey.
And I don't think Turkey makes much of a distinction between the ones that are living in Turkey, although they would call it Kurdistan, the Kurds might, versus the ones that are right on the border.
And associated with the terrorists.
I think you saw the way the United States treated the Taliban for harboring al-Qaeda, and the Taliban is not who attacked the United States.
But we sort of treated them all the same, didn't we?
We kind of said, Taliban, al-Qaeda, you're a little too friendly.
We're just going to treat you all the same.
Turkey... is treating all of the Kurds the same as some of the Kurds.
Is that fair? It's what we did.
We went after all of the Taliban, not some of them, right?
It seems to me that given that Turkey has a legitimate claim that Kurds in general We're good to go.
Even if it's not the cleanest one, that because the Kurds are associated with or represent or are a little too close to Kurdish terrorists, That they can move to control Kurds.
It's not a bad argument.
And I would say that if there were any such thing as a court, they had to decide which of our two allies to back when they start fighting.
By the way, I can't think of another example of this, can you?
Can you think of a case recently where two military allies of the United States fought each other?
There probably are plenty of examples.
I can't think of one. But I'd love to know how that went.
Anyway, if there were some kind of a court where the United States had to pick a side because they're both our allies, but they're fighting each other, I think the NATO treaty would be the winning document.
I think if there were any kind of objective court...
They would say, oh, this is an ugly one, because we're side with the Kurds in Syria, but we also side with Turkey and NATO, which is the ruling relationship.
I think a court would side with backing Turkey.
Even if you hate it.
I mean, I think that the NATO agreement would just be a stronger commitment and that the Turks have demonstrated that the Kurds are a danger to Turkey.
Now, you could argue that the Kurds should be a danger to Turkey.
You could argue that the Kurds deserve a homeland and those would all be fair enough things.
You know, they may fear Turkish domination and that could be bad in a lot of ways.
But, but, you still have to back your NATO ally, or what is NATO? What does NATO mean if you're not going to back your ally against someone who's not in NATO? All right.
So those are my questions.
And without knowing the answer to those questions, it's hard to have an opinion about whether what Trump is doing is good or bad.
Now, that won't stop people from having opinions.
But I would, as I argue in my new book, LoserThink, which is available for pre-order, and thank you to all the people who are sending me on Twitter, a lot of people are sending photos of Showing the receipt that they bought the book.
So thank you, Adam Townsend, for suggesting that and for recommending that people look at the book.
But anyway, in LoserThink, one of my main themes is that people are not good at comparing things.
And if you're looking at what Trump is doing, pulling out, With the pulling out from the Kurdish area there, you would have to compare it to the alternatives to have any kind of a rational opinion.
Have you seen anybody do that?
Have you seen anybody who opposes Trump's decision to pull out our 50 or so troops?
Have you seen anybody who opposed it describe what it would look like if they stay?
How long would they stay?
And would Turkey then say, oh no, we can't attack the Kurds because there are 50 people somewhere in the general vicinity that we don't want to hurt?
I think the Turks would do what they're going to do anyway, wouldn't you?
Let me ask you this.
If the United States had a terrorist threat that was assembling on its border, right on the border, let's say it was Mexico, And we knew who they were, and we knew that some of them were associated with terrorists, etc.
Would we not act against them?
Because somewhere within those hundreds and hundreds of miles, somewhere in a well-defined area, we'd probably know exactly where they were, there were some British troops.
You know, and we wouldn't want to accidentally kill any British people.
But we also know where they are.
And we also know where the bad guys are in this scenario.
Would we stop acting militarily against the bad guys who are in hundreds of miles of well-identified area where the 50 British troops were not?
Would we really hold back?
Because there were 50 troops somewhere where we could easily avoid them?
I don't think we would.
Now, when I say easily avoid, remember it's war, so nothing's easy, and maybe some of them would get hurt.
So it makes perfect sense that we would get out of the way, just in case.
But I don't think Turkey was going to hold back.
Their national interest is pretty extreme in this case, and it's greater than ours, unfortunately.
They have more immediate life-and-death national integrity reasons to control their border than we have, unfortunately, in treating the Kurds that we fought with the way most of us would like to treat them, which is better. Tough choices.
And so it seems once again that Trump is making the adult decision.
Doing the hard thing because the easy thing wasn't available.
Nobody had the option of the easy thing.
There were just hard choices.
Trump looked at hard choices and he picked one.
Is he right? Don't know.
Don't know. So, Smirkanish on CNN had a law professor on, and he asked this question.
This is about the Ukrainian phone call, so I'm bouncing back and forth from topics here.
He asked, could President Trump use as a defense that it was a legitimate issue to hold back funds Until we had a better idea about Ukrainian corruption.
Because it wouldn't make sense to release funds into a corrupt system.
So Smirconish asked, would that be a legitimate defense against impeachment?
And I don't know what the professor said, yes or no, it doesn't matter.
Because my point is that Smirconish didn't ask quite the right question.
Because the more right question is, is there a national interest of the United States...
To understand if the person leading in the polls to be president has a foreign entanglement.
That feels like a perfect defense to impeachment, because that's exactly what the president was asking, and it's our highest priority, and it's his job.
Why didn't Spurkanish ask that question?
Isn't that the better question?
Why am I the only one who ever says it?
I feel like I'm the only person who's ever phrased it the way I just did.
Top priority. We have evidence in public domain that Hunter Biden has a financial connection.
President's top priority.
And for the people who say, oh, we should have had the FBI look into it.
It's not the president's job.
If you've ever worked with any large organization, you know that until the bosses agree, the underlings just don't do the work, at least not effectively.
So I'm sure if the president could have just assigned it to somebody, he would have done that if he thought it would actually happen.
There's an article...
I tweeted around. So on Good Morning America, there's an author who's sort of an anti-Trumper type, but he admits that the deep state is real.
Except, here's his twist.
So he says, of course the deep state is real.
But they're there defending the Constitution.
They're not bad guys.
They're not trying to reverse an election.
They're just trying to protect the Constitution.
Here's what I say about this.
Everybody who says they're just trying to protect the Constitution, check them for a long black robe.
If they're wearing some kind of a long black robe, and they happen to be on the Supreme Court, they might be involved in protecting the Constitution.
If you see somebody in a military outfit, perhaps carrying a weapon, That person might be involved in protecting the Constitution.
If you see an idiot on Twitter or somebody writing a book or in an interview who is none of those things I just mentioned, not in the Supreme Court and not in the military, One thing you can be sure of is they're not there protecting the Constitution.
They have their own interests and they're using the Constitution as their little fig leaf to say, well, protecting the Constitution.
One of your tells for illegitimate opinion, meaning it's not what the person actually believes, it's just a political opinion, is if you say it's to protect the Constitution.
By the way, I'll say this no matter which side is saying it.
It doesn't matter if the conservatives are saying it about their topic.
It doesn't matter if the liberals are saying it.
As soon as you hear somebody say, yes, these normal people in the government, these deep staters, are protecting the Constitution, that is just almost certainly bullshit.
Because we can all interpret the Constitution any way we want, right?
Right? You interpret it as you can have guns and any kind of gun you want under any condition.
It's in the Constitution. The person sitting right next to you says, no, that's not what it means.
I read the Constitution.
It's all about a militia.
You should have a militia.
You're not a militia, so give me your guns.
So anybody who's protecting the Constitution, but they're not on the Supreme Court, He's not your friend.
The last thing you want to hear is that somebody's doing something to protect the Constitution if they don't have a robe on.
I don't want to hear it.
All right, so that's enough of that.
Mitt Romney, I don't know if he's behind it or not, but somebody who seems to be supporting Mitt Romney printed up some shirts that say Mitt Happens.
Now, here's my advice to you.
If you're making a shirt for yourself, don't associate yourself with shit.
You should associate yourself with something good.
Happiness, puppies, money, power.
There are a lot of things that are good.
That you can associate yourself with.
But do not associate yourself via a shirt with a witty saying that makes you think of somebody's last name and translate it immediately to shit.
So it happens.
I will put that in the Hall of Fame of Bad Ideas.
Hall of Fame.
All right.
Here's some more stuff.
There's a PSA that was running, and I guess it got a little news, that was comparing youth football to smoking cigarettes.
And the idea was that kids playing football are getting concussions, and if you were concerned about the health of children, you would treat youth football the same way you would treat youth smoking cigarettes.
You should treat them both as something that's bad for your health.
Now, A lot of people pushed back and said, my God, football is amazing.
We can't have people saying football is bad.
Let me give you my opinion.
I'm pretty sure someday we will be amazed that we let kids play sports that were almost guaranteed to give them concussions.
Because we know now that concussion is just a fancy word for brain damage.
And in many cases, too many cases...
It's permanent. Permanent brain damage.
Now, it might have a small effect, it might have a large effect, it might not affect you until later in life, but it is brain damage.
So I'm going to say that whoever came up with a PSA comparing youth football to smoking cigarettes, A+. Because you made people talk about it.
And you made people think about it, and you made people try to argue about it, but in the process of arguing about it, you probably got people to talk themselves into the fact that it's pretty dangerous stuff.
Here's my tip for you.
Are you ready? If something typically requires a helmet to do it, don't do that.
Let me say it again. Here's some of the best advice you'll ever have in life.
If there's an activity that typically requires a helmet, don't do that.
You're just asking for trouble.
And in the comments I'm saying, what about bicycling?
Bicycling. Yeah, bicycling is among the most dangerous things you could do.
Now, I know that people ride bicycles because they like it and they understand the risks and they take them.
So, you know, you're an adult and you're in a country where you have that freedom.
So I'm not going to tell you that as an adult you should not ride a bike because it requires a helmet.
Skiing, similar, yeah.
Baseball if you're batting.
Soccer, if you're heading the ball in soccer consistently, like, you know, you're playing competitive soccer and you're heading the ball all the time, Don't do that.
Just don't do that.
We're a little bit smarter about head damage or brain damage now.
Now, I have, unfortunately, personal experience with this.
My stepson had a bicycle accident with a helmet, with a helmet, and had permanent brain damage.
So much so that it probably contributed to his death later in drug overdose because he lost all of his ability to judge risk.
He couldn't tell how dangerous things were after the injury.
I agree with youth football being compared to smoking.
I think that's a fair comparison, persuasion-wise and rationally.
It's pretty good.
Now, I also have a big problem with schools pushing sports in general.
Somebody says, life is risk.
Sure it is. Don't we prevent children from risks?
We prevent children from risks all the time.
There's a million ways we prevent children from risks.
There's something that...
Naval Ravikant said that, I had him on my periscope a while ago, and he said that, you know, in the past, maybe your physical strength is what determined your success.
More recently, it's more like your intelligence would be your determinant of success.
And he's predicting that in the fairly near future, the biggest predictor of success would be your ability to avoid addiction.
And it's one of those thoughts that just hits you like a pile of bricks, because you realize it's probably true.
Because, you know, once we get to the point where, I don't know, maybe there's UBI and robots helping us out, and we've solved most of our big problems, your biggest problem as a human will be avoiding addiction.
And if you look around at your adult friends, how many friends do you know, adults, who don't have some kind of an addiction?
Some of them might be medically prescribed.
Some of them might be legal.
A lot of them are illegal.
But addictions, nonetheless.
I don't know too many people who aren't on some kind of drug.
It's unusual in my world.
Maybe that's a California thing.
I don't know.
I don't know.
The...
Oh, where I was going with this, I forgot my point, is that now that we know how prevalent concussions are, and that they are permanent brain damage in many cases, if not most, and we know exactly which activities are likely to give them to you, and we know exactly which activities are likely to give I'm wondering if you could have a corollary to Naval's thought that avoiding addiction is going to be your main determinant of success.
Here's another one.
Avoiding brain damage might be your primary indicator of success.
And here I'm going to throw addiction into head injury and make them the same category.
Those people who protect their brains and sort of nurture them Have far more likelihood of success than those people who put their brain at risk.
One way you can put your brain at risk is by drinking too much, smoking cigarettes, doing drugs, lots of addiction ways to put your brain at risk.
But playing sports where they require you to wear a helmet, there's a reason you wear that helmet, and obviously it doesn't help enough.
So... I think that protecting the integrity of your physical brain, addiction plus avoiding things that would give you concussions, probably are going to be some of the strongest indicators of future success.
All right. A Twitter follower today tweeted out something very interesting.
I'm bouncing all back and forth on topics here.
But I know you can keep up.
Andreas Backhaus, he's got a PhD in economics, does research stuff.
He created a map of all the violent incidents between Turks and Kurds, the PKK and the YPG, I guess the two groups of Kurds, between the beginning of 2017 until recently.
So just two years-ish.
More than 6,500 fatalities.
So there were 6,500 incidents of Turks and Kurds getting into violence, enough so that they were researchable.
So forget about things that were so small that they didn't get the news or anything.
These are just the researchable moments of violence, 6,500 of them in about two years.
Now, how does that change your opinion of whether the Kurds and the Turks can work things out?
I don't think they can work things out.
But getting back to the point Would it be fair to say that the Turks feel that they've been attacked by an outside force?
They got a pretty good argument that they've been attacked by an outside force.
And so that certainly has a NATO implication.
If you are bad at...
Well, never mind that.
I'm going to change my topic.
Have you noticed that the anti-Trumpers, let's say CNN, MSNBC, and people on Twitter, they're starting to say that the president is not normal.
As if that's bad.
It's pretty much the reason he got elected, because he's not normal.
That's exactly what his supporters wanted.
They wanted him to be not normal in a specific way that he delivered.
But what does it mean when you see people say that something is weird, non-standard, non-presidential, not normal?
What do all of those things have in common?
He's not presidential.
He's not normal. It's unusual.
It's non-standard. It's not the way it's done.
All of those have one thing in common.
They don't mean anything.
They actually don't mean anything.
Isn't Calling something not normal is...
Let me put it this way.
I spend a lot of time in my life driving teenagers from one place to another.
So if you're an adult and there are any kids in your life, you probably spend a lot of time listening to them talk in the back seat while you're driving them from one activity to another.
So I've spent countless hours Listening to teenagers talk candidly because, you know, they'll forget that there's anybody listening and talk to each other.
What is the main thing that people, that teenagers will say about other teens?
You know, they, of course, they'll say all the normal things that you'd expect.
You know, they're smart or dumb or attractive or not attractive, all the usual stuff.
But one of the most common things, as they say, is weird.
That people are weird and not normal.
But they don't mean not normal in some major brain problem or anything.
Just not quite the way they are.
The feeling that something is not standardized the way they would like to see it standardized is off-putting.
That there's sort of an emotional, biological, natural reaction to anything that's non-standard.
And so I'm watching this Weird inversion happening in which liberals and conservatives have changed sides.
Have you noticed that? If you were to define what a conservative was 10 years ago, you'd probably say something like, well, conservatives are the ones that don't like things to be weird.
We just like, you know, just keep it normal.
Just don't be weird.
With your long hair, you hippie, and your drugs, just do the standard things that have worked before.
Be conservative.
That's what you would have thought in a very general way, you know, traditional values and there's a religious element, etc.
And you would have said that liberals would be defined by Hey, let's loosen up.
Let's try some different things.
Let's experiment.
I can live my life this way.
You can live your life that way.
You're fine. I'm fine.
We're just different. Diversity.
Everybody can do their own thing.
That would feel like that was the old liberal view.
But when you see the anti-Trumpers revert to he's not normal, he's non-standard, he's non-presidential, they've completely flipped sides.
What did the liberals say when the president used profanity in his rally speech?
Let me give you an impression of every flaming liberal who saw the president use a mild profanity in a rally speech.
He used a bad word.
Oh, God!
What will we do?
It's the end of the world!
Who did that used to be?
It used to be the conservatives.
Wouldn't you imagine that if a politician used a bad word in public, that the conservatives would rush in and say, ah, we don't act like that.
That is not the way to be presidential.
That's not the way it's been done.
That doesn't lead to good traditional values.
Our kids deserve better.
It's all coming from the other side.
What do conservatives say about President Trump's show?
I like to use the word show because the president clearly, and it's obvious that it's intentional, puts on a show that's a little bit separate from who he is as a person or who he is as a politician.
He puts on a show, and the show has many benefits that help him in a variety of ways.
It gets people's energy up and takes attention away from his critics and everything else.
But what do the conservatives say about his show that is very non-conservative?
Love it. Can't get enough of it.
We'd sure like to see another one.
So it seems that...
And I guess conservatives always had the seed for this...
For this. And what I mean by that is, one of the things I love most about Christians, without actually being one, so I'm not a believer, we don't need to get into that, but I'm simply not a believer.
But I'm a big fan of religion, because I see that it has many benefits in people's lives, and I like benefits.
So if people can get benefits out of religion, I'm all for it, as long as it doesn't hurt me in some way.
But one of the things I've always most appreciated about Christians is the whole forgiveness idea.
You know, you hate the sin, love the sinner.
That's a really strong concept.
And you can see that with Trump.
With Trump, I think Christians are being true to Christianity in a sense, in that they're saying, you know, I don't love the sins.
Not approving of the sins.
But I kind of like the guy.
Because I think he's moving us in a productive direction.
And so the conservatives seem, true to course, forgiving.
They're forgiving of this president.
And man, has he given them a lot of things they need to forgive.
There's a lot of forgiveness going on there.
But it is also their core belief.
A core Christian belief is that you can redeem yourself.
Maybe you used to do some bad stuff.
If you used to do some bad stuff, but now you don't, what does a Christian say about you?
You're awesome. Right?
Compare this. A Christian sees that you did some bad stuff, but you've clearly changed your life and now you're working for the good.
A Christian says that It's ideal.
Because we're all sinners.
We've all made mistakes.
I'm going to judge you by what you did about it.
That's a powerful thought.
I'm not going to judge you by the sin, because we all sin.
I'm going to judge you by what you did about it.
Now, in the legal sense, you have to have legal penalties and stuff to keep society working.
But how you think about it personally, in the Christian way, is not judging the sin, not judging the sinner.
That's sort of God's job.
But I'm definitely going to judge what you did about it.
Did you fix it?
Did you fix it?
If you did, I'm good with you.
What did the liberals say?
If you're a little bit weird, we can't deal with it.
If you're non-standard, it has to be stopped.
If you're unusual...
Maybe we should put the foot down on that.
If you're not presidential in the way it has been done classically and historically, we're not comfortable with that.
So the liberals have completely shifted with the conservatives on sort of their visceral opinion of non-standard behavior.
So now the non-standard behavior is completely owned by the conservatives, weirdly enough.
But the conservatives have an established, very effective, very powerful base of philosophical thought that allows them to do that effortlessly.
It's effortless for a Christian to forgive.
It's the basic thing.
It's the most basic thing they do.
All right. I think I had one more point.
Oh, this is it. So, for a variety of reasons, I don't want the president to be impeached.
So, in my perfect world, the president would not be impeached.
But, if he's impeached and not removed from office, I'm not going to say that I won't enjoy the process.
I might sort of enjoy the show.
I might enjoy where that leaves.
I might enjoy that the Republicans would get subpoena power in that situation and lots of things would come up about the Democrats.
I might enjoy the show.
But I was thinking today, what if, and I'm not predicting this happens, I think it's hugely unlikely, but what if Democrats succeeded?
And impeach the president, and let's say that there are enough Republicans who are mad about the Kurds, that even the Senate goes with it.
Imagine if you will, imagine if you will, President Trump removed from office.
There's an interesting thing that would happen after that.
And I was just sort of, you know, gaming it through in my head, like, what would that look like?
What would the world look like after that?
Now forget about who takes over.
Let's say... Let's say Pence fills in for a few months and then Elizabeth Warren or somebody else becomes president.
What happens next?
Well, here's the thing.
What happens next is Scott winning so hard it would be harder than anybody ever won.
And what I mean by that is everything that I've said, predicted...
Or promoted would look to be validated when President Trump, if he were replaced...
I'm getting a lot of incoming messages from the same person.
A friend of mine is drunk texting me from another country.
So I wondered why my text was just blowing up at this early in the morning.
I had a friend in another country, in another time zone, he was drunk texting.
That's funny. Anyway, what was I saying?
Oh, if President Trump left office, you would have a new president.
And here's where I'm going with this.
What would the new president do about China and trade talks?
Would the new president say, President Trump, you were wrong all along to have a trade war?
I don't think so. It wouldn't matter if you had a Democrat or Republican.
Wouldn't anybody who became the new president, no matter how much they hated the old president, because Trump has already shown that China can be made to be flexible, because this phase one he's talking about, it's obvious that China is willing to do some stuff that they weren't going to do before.
And it's stuff that we care about and seems to make a big difference.
Wouldn't you think that the next president has to keep the trade war going, or at least benefit by the fact that Trump finished it and we got a good result?
I think Trump is on the verge of being treated as the rightest president who has ever been right about China.
Am I wrong? That even a Democrat would have to take on Trump's stand with China or else they would look like idiots.
So I think no matter what, Trump is going to be right about China.
I think he's going to be right about the other trade deals as well, because the day that Trump leaves, probably Congress can approve the USMCA, right?
As soon as Trump is gone, probably Congress can say, okay, Trump's gone, let's approve his deal.
So I think he'd be right on all the trade deals.
I think that at least the conservatives would always say he got great judges in.
The other side will think the opposite.
I think that On, let's say, North Korea.
What will happen if somebody who decided to get tough with North Korea became president?
Things would go south fast.
I think that North Korea would make Trump look like a genius if you put in another president before North Korea gets handled in some way, and that's going to take years probably.
So I think he's going to look right on that.
I think that Syria is going to be a basket case no matter who's president, and it's going to look smart that we got out as much as we could.
So I think Trump will be vindicated on the economy, trade, Syria, North Korea, probably nuclear power, Because I think, you know, you see even the left starting to say, oh, yeah, we need nuclear power.
Bill Gates, his company, one that he invested in, TerraPower, has several designs that don't have any of the dangers of the old nuclear power stuff.
And we're ready to go.
So Trump is going to look like he's right on nuclear power, which makes...
The climate change argument, not as powerful as it used to be.
Because if you're doing everything you should do, whether you believe climate is at risk or not, that takes away a lot of the argument.
And I don't think that Trump is opposed to green technology.
And if nuclear steps up, as I predict it will, He's going to look right about that, too.
And then there's immigration.
Everything that Trump does on immigration looks bad because it's Trump.
All right? So imagine you remove Trump, you put a Democrat in there.
What the hell is that Democrat going to do with immigration that is much different than what Trump is doing?
Whoever goes in after Trump is going to have the same problem, and they're probably going to have to get tough on the border Because otherwise, people will just stream across the border, and no Democrat could really abide that situation.
So I think if Trump ever got impeached, you would have this weird thing happen where he would be, the moment of impeachment, he would be one of the top disgraced presidents of all time.
Five years later, Even after being impeached and removed from office, if that were to happen, and again, I don't think it's going to happen, he would be considered one of the greatest presidents of all time, because everything that he did would start to look like they were good choices.
You know, five years later, you'd say, well, I'm glad he got us out of Syria, glad that economy's going well, glad we got nuclear energy, glad we got deals with...
North Korea, China.
He's going to look like a genius in five years, even if he gets impeached.
So, the best way to make President Trump look great is to give us a couple more years of a Democrat as president.
I think you're going to see things a little bit more clearly when you've got something to compare.
All right. Boo is saying hi back there.
She apparently has something to say to me.
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