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Oct. 23, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
52:50
Episode 702 Scott Adams: The Winningest President Ever, The Sim Takes Over, Lots of Loserthink
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Time Text
Hey, where is everybody?
Oh, there you are!
Hey, Harry, come on in.
Good to see you. The rest of you, come on in.
You seem a little slow this morning.
What's going on? What's going on?
But I do notice that you all look a little bit sexier than usual.
I think that's probably just from the exposure to Coffee with Scott Adams.
You can have that effect. But before we get going, I think you know what you need.
You need a little thing called the simultaneous sip.
And you can do that without much preparation at all.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of snifter, stein, chalice, tanker, thermos, flask, canteen, grail, goblin, vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I'm partial to coffee.
And join me now...
For the simultaneous sip, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Go. Ah.
Better than ever.
Whoa. Whoa.
Let's talk about a few things.
I mentioned in the title of this Periscope that the simulation is talking to us.
Every now and then, I feel as though we're just in sort of a simulation where the writer is writing hackneyed sort of obvious plot parts where you say, yeah, that part's obvious.
I saw that coming.
That's exactly the way I would have written it.
Here's an example.
Kim Jong-un has decided that the resort that he built with the help of South Korea some years ago Do I have to even finish the rest of this?
Kim Jong-un needs help building a luxury resort.
Come on!
Are you telling me that this stuff is randomly happening?
There's got to be somebody writing this reality.
Because what could be more perfect as an opening for President Trump than to say, you know, I know a guy.
Let's just get together and talk about your resort.
Would it be the coolest thing ever?
This is not going to happen.
But you can imagine it in this weird world.
Would it be the coolest thing ever if the President invited Kim Jong-un over to the White House just to talk about the resort?
And then that's it.
We just wanted to talk about the resort, see if we could help.
Now, you're saying to yourself, wait, wait, wait, that would be a waste because what about nuclear weapons and everything?
But here's the thing.
You don't have to worry too much about a company or a country that has nuclear weapons if they like you.
That's how it works.
People point their weapons at people they don't like.
So if President Trump just continues to like Kim Jong-un, as long as he's president, we don't really have much of a problem.
Now the next president might be a problem, but what are the odds that Kim Jong-un wants to build a quality resort?
That's just too perfect. Steven Crowder, YouTube personality.
I don't know what to call him, but he's got a YouTube show with a lot of followers.
And he claims that he has discovered that Google is restricting searches for Tulsi Gabbard, but only in the United States.
So apparently, if you search in Europe, you get lots of results.
If you search in the United States, you get fewer.
Here's my problem with that.
I do not for a moment doubt that the allegation is true.
But is that the only way this could happen?
And the answer is, maybe not.
This is one of those situations where the other explanation could fall into that big gray category of things you couldn't have imagined, things you never thought of.
Things that are caused by other things you didn't know were things.
So it's certainly completely feasible, if it's all observed, everything, that Google would be intentionally suppressing some candidates.
None of that would be surprising.
None of that would, I think, even be new.
But is this one of those cases?
The trouble is that for every one of these situations where you're sure you've caught them, I got you now.
Now there's no way you can explain this away.
Sometimes there are ways to explain it away.
They're just not obvious.
Now, I don't know if there is one in this case.
I'm making more of a general statement that when you see some specific claim about a social media platform, it might be true.
It might be true, but you don't know all the variables involved, so it might not be true.
Let me give you an example where I can't imagine Anything but bad behavior being a reason.
I recently got a DM from somebody who follows me on Twitter.
Both of us are, let's say, names you might be familiar with.
So the person who DM'd me is somebody you may have seen on Twitter or would know of the person from that person's other work.
And informed me that he or she had to, I'm just keeping some privacy in the conversation there, and told me that he or she has had to repeatedly follow me on Twitter, I think three or four times now, and each time gets unfollowed automatically.
Now, I say to myself, well, first of all, the same thing happened to my brother, and my brother only follows one person.
My brother only follows me.
That's it. It's the only reason he's on Twitter, just to follow me.
There's one person he follows, and after months of following me, one day, God automatically unfollowed.
Now, do you think there's any chance that that was a fluke?
Or a random accident with Twitter?
Maybe. Maybe. You know, maybe, but I can't see it as being possible.
And then when the newer one reported, it's the same thing when I did a little Twitter poll some time ago in which I asked how many people have been automatically unfollowed from me, and I think I got, I don't know, 1,500 people or something.
Whatever it was, it was a big number.
So it seems to me That Twitter automatically unfollowing is a thing.
But I don't know why.
It doesn't necessarily mean anybody's intentionally doing it.
Because if you've ever worked with software, you know that unintentional consequences are the most common thing in the world.
So, for example, let's say the algorithm couldn't handle, I don't know, a certain volume of things.
You would only notice it with some users who have high volumes of activity because it's a volume-related bug.
So I could certainly see that somebody like me who has, I guess, 342,000 followers, and maybe if I've got a tweet that's getting a lot of attention.
This is just a hypothetical.
I'm not saying this is likely.
I'm just giving you a hypothetical.
Could it be that there could be a bug that would only affect larger accounts And because I tend to be looking for problems and people are reporting them to me because they're looking for problems, could it be that conservatives hear about the bug while it's happening at the same rate with large, you know, left-leaning accounts, but they're not looking for it because they don't expect there's any problem?
Could it be just selective attention?
That it's a universal bug that affects some people under some circumstances, but the people on the left have no reason to suspect the platforms are doing anything wrong, so I've just never noticed.
Is that possible?
Totally possible.
It's completely possible that what looks unambiguously like it has to be bad behavior could have some other explanation.
So, to avoid loserthink, always remind yourself that the most likely explanation for an event you can't explain is something you hadn't thought of.
It's just something beyond your experience, but it's not that unusual.
By the way, if you have not ordered my book, Loserthink, it's available now for pre-order, and it would help me a lot if you did that.
So please do. Because sooner is better.
All right. Let's talk about Germany.
So here's more of the simulation winking at us.
I thought this was a fake story when I first read it.
But I think this is a real story, because it was on a real news site.
Was it on Fox News, I think?
Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the country's attempt at building a multicultural society have utterly failed.
Can you believe that?
So Angela Merkel, one of Trump's biggest critics, and of course everybody in the world is a critic of Trump for wanting to limit the amount of Or at least amount or even types of immigration.
Because it's a drain on the country.
It's a burden on the country if it takes too much assimilation, takes away from jobs, etc.
You know the arguments.
But Angela Merkel has just come right out and said that the immigration and the multicultural society utterly failed.
Is that the most mind-blowing thing you've ever seen?
Now, she does go on and say that they're committed to continuing immigration and they're committed to making it work even though it has not worked yet.
So, she has said fairly unambiguously, I mean, utterly failed is as clear as you can say something.
She's saying that the thing that has been my primary policy, one of my biggest differences with the president, who's doing it the other way, my biggest policy, almost a signature event, is an utter failure.
And I'm going to keep doing it.
That's actually what she said.
It's mind-blowing. And the thing is that with Trump, I think Trump supporters have always had the following feeling.
That Trump would be excoriated, eviscerated, and criticized more than you've ever seen anybody criticize for most of his decisions in the short run.
But that time would vindicate him.
In other words, he's making...
Trump often makes what I would call adult decisions that really, really hurt when they happen.
But the whole point is that later you'll be better off.
So I would say that Trump is vindicated on trade negotiations with China, for example.
Wouldn't you say he's been vindicated?
Meaning that the critics said, no, no, you can't have a trade war.
the economy will plunge.
Didn't happen.
Trump was right.
I mean, it had a big effect on some segments, which we can do what we can do to help ease them, such as the farming segment.
But apparently it didn't hurt our economy at all.
Trump was right.
And as we learn more about China's bad behavior, the country has been persuaded by Trump from, hey, leave China alone, it's just business, to, oh my God, China is a real problem on a lot of different levels from fentanyl to you name it.
and to stealing our IP, to bad trade negotiators.
So now I think Trump has been completely vindicated, no matter what happens with China.
If we get a trade deal, he'll be vindicated.
And if we decouple, he'll also be vindicated.
Because remember, the starting point is that we don't want those old deals with China.
They're not a good partner. He's right.
I would say he's been totally vindicated.
When Trump became president, even before he was sworn in, the experts said, the economy is going to crumble.
Crumble, I say.
Did it? No, it did not.
All the experts who are anti-Trump were all wrong.
Here's another one just to blow your mind.
It looks like things are going to work out in Syria as of this morning.
So maybe that'll change by tomorrow.
But as of this morning, it looks like Russia and Turkey have decided to work together to patrol the safe zones.
Which will allow Turkey to repatriate people.
It will create a much more stable situation.
And it killed exactly zero American troops to get it done.
None. How many Kurds got killed?
Have you heard?
Because my news sources don't tell me.
I don't know if even one has died.
Do you? I mean, I assume people have died, because it's military action, bombs are going off.
I don't know how nobody would die.
But why have we heard zero estimates, reliable ones, you know, from some kind of entity that you would trust?
Zero estimates of death?
Maybe there weren't many.
Maybe there weren't many.
Because it looks like they've worked it out, and it looks like the president is going to be totally vindicated again.
Meaning... That shaking the box and just saying, all right, we're out.
If you can't make a deal with us in, make a deal with us out.
So he took us out. I think history is going to love him for this.
Let me ask you another question.
This is for the historians.
Historians, please weigh in.
Is there any American president...
Who has had fewer military troops for our country die during his first three years?
Has any president had fewer military deaths for his own country in his first three years?
Probably. There must be some periods where we weren't fighting much.
But he might have the record.
Yeah, you might have to go back to, somebody said Van Buren, Calvin Coolidge.
You might have to go back a while.
You might have to go back a while.
And if you do go back, you end up with a lot of accidental military deaths.
I mean, my guess is that if you go back, you know, 100 years, you had military people dying from all kinds of things that they didn't need to be dying from that were not necessarily military-related.
So somebody says Jimmy Carter?
I don't know. Maybe.
Oh, that second simultaneous sip without the simultaneity was great, too.
So, it looks like we're heading toward a situation where Trump might get impeached.
At the same time, he may have the best record of any president for preserving life, military life in our country.
He might have the best economy of all time.
The best policy about trade negotiations.
And then, I talked about this before, even the left is agreeing that Trump made Mexico pay for the wall.
Even his critics agree.
That he made Mexico pay for the wall.
Now, what I'm talking about is actually paying for their own troops to guard the southern part of Mexico to keep the caravans from coming up, which effectively is a big expense.
So, I don't know, it just seems like one thing after another, Trump is being proven to be correct in the long run.
What do you think of this story that Hillary Clinton's email server, there were a bunch of improprieties by a bunch of people, but none of it raises to the level of, you know, illegality, I guess.
So there won't be any legal anything for Hillary Clinton based on her email server.
Now, let's all check our predictions.
What was your prediction about the outcome of the Hillary Clinton email situation once you knew that Republicans were going to be looking into it?
Remember, it's not Hillary's own insider team that was looking into it.
It was Republicans and Democrats, too.
But what did you think was going to be the outcome?
Well, I'll tell you what my prediction was.
Does anybody remember what my prediction was for the emails?
No big deal. That was my prediction.
My prediction was it's no big deal.
It'll never turn into anything because there isn't enough there.
You know, there are some things that shouldn't have been done the way they were done, but there just isn't enough there that will ever become illegal.
Now, was that your prediction?
Because one of the things I recommend in LoserThink is that you track your predictions, even if you didn't make them in public, as I did.
Track how many times you're right and how many times you're wrong.
Because if you find out that your predictions are consistently wrong, maybe do something differently.
I would say that this is the situation in which my prediction was exactly right.
Yeah, it wasn't perfect.
People did some things.
There were some things categorized wrong, but not much there.
Just nothing there.
Now, what do you think will come of the...
The Ukraine phone call situation.
Well, for those of you who say, I never criticized the president or this administration, let me criticize the president and the administration right now.
And this will be a pretty big criticism.
So, again, store this away when you're tempted to say, Scott only agrees with the president and says whatever he does is right and it's all good.
I am starkly going to disagree with how the president and his staff have handled the Ukraine phone call situation.
All right? Here's what they're doing wrong.
They should have gone directly at it.
They almost did.
Um... The president has said it was a perfect phone call, and then Mulvaney did his confusing thing where he thought he was talking about one thing, but then he tried to clarify it and made it worse.
So I would say that the administration has completely blown an easy layup.
Here's the layup. Now, there might be some lawyer who tells me that this is a bad idea, but this is my opinion for now.
The president should have said, and still can, And his administration should have said, and still can, and the pundits who support him should have said this and still can, that it was absolutely the president's job to look into any problems with the Bidens and the Ukrainians.
It's his job.
And here's the key part.
It's his top priority.
So you need to throw that in.
Don't just say, well, it's the president's job to make sure that there's no foreign interference in our political system.
Biden is still leading in the polls, not just against other Democrats, but against Trump.
According to all objective measures, if you take your subjectivity out of it for a moment, Biden is the most likely next president.
Does Biden have some things which need some explaining?
It may not be illegal, but certainly we need some visibility on it with his connections with Ukraine.
Yes. Unambiguously, yes.
There's no question that because Hunter Biden had an association that was a lot of money for we can't tell what, presumably political connections, that alone, the stuff that we know, the public knows, is by far enough for the president to say, can you look into Joe Biden?
Is there any Joe Biden, anything that we need to worry about?
With Ukraine and look into his son in particular.
Now, have you heard the president say that?
Somebody said he said it. I have not heard the president say these two things.
It's my job.
It's my top priority.
That's the key part. The top priority part is the making you think past the sale part.
If you just say it's my job, they'll say, I know it's not.
Maybe the FBI should be doing that.
They'll argue it, even if their argument is bad.
So if you just say, yeah, it's my job to look into these things, it's not enough.
Take it to the next level.
Level two. It was my top priority.
Because you want them to argue not whether it was your job, yes or no, because you know they'll say no.
It was his job, but they'll say no.
You want them to argue past the sale of whether it was his job and into the sale of was it his top priority or just something important?
Top priority or just something important?
Top priority or just important?
If you can bring their minds there, then you have them exactly where you want them because it's either top priority or just something important.
But to hear them, let me say, I've got a little quote here from somebody on the other team talking about this in the worst possible way.
So, who said this?
Was it in some political piece today?
Somebody said that, doesn't matter who.
That the Trump supporters are being forced into a fallback argument.
So this is what the anti-Trumpers are saying.
Saying that what he did was inappropriate, talking about the Ukraine phone call and asking them to look into Biden.
Agreeing that it was inappropriate but falls short of the standard for high crimes and misdemeanors needed for impeachment.
Is that the fallback argument?
To say, yeah, okay, he did it, but it's not that bad.
It's not impeachable bad.
That's not the fallback argument.
That's a terrible fallback argument.
How about using the argument instead of a fallback argument?
It's not a fallback to say it was his job to look into foreign interference.
There was plenty of evidence that says that should be looked into.
And it was his top priority.
It's not a fallback argument.
It's the argument.
It's never been made.
Why am I the only person saying this?
By the way, I've said this now a number of times in public, maybe not as clearly as I'm saying it now.
I've not seen anybody argue against what I'm saying.
Is there any legal reason that he can't claim that keeping the country safe from foreign interference, especially when it's so blatant, It's so blatant in the sense that there's enough there that you need to look into it, which is different from saying it's blatantly illegal or it's a problem.
Don't know if it's a problem. Do know.
I want to look into it it is his job to ensure that foreign aid is not wasted in corruption Correct, but off point.
So those people were saying, but he was doing his job by asking them to look into CrowdStrike and the 2016 election.
That's not the part anybody's arguing about.
So you don't need to defend the part that nobody's talking about.
That part's fine. It's only the part about looking into Biden that the left has been allowed to define as digging up dirt on your political opponent.
As long as you allow them to define what happened as digging up dirt on your political opponent, well, that's never right.
Nobody's going to be in favor of that.
But here are some words that mean exactly the same thing and are 100% accurate.
He was protecting against foreign interference.
He was doing his job and it was a top priority.
And we have a deal with Ukraine that we cooperate on this stuff.
There's no way that my approach isn't the kill shot on this.
And I'm puzzled why the Trump administration doesn't take it.
Unless there's some kind of legal reason that's not obvious to me.
I don't know how it would ever be illegal to do your job And also work on your top priority with an ally who has an explicit agreement for this, that we have a coordination agreement on judicial stuff.
So it blows my mind that the administration has completely, I would say, completely messed up on their response to all of this stuff.
They had a clear kill shot.
Still do. Not using it.
They're letting the kill shot just lay there.
How about it was my job and it was my top priority?
And you would be mad if I didn't do it.
I'm loving the Republicans' response to this guy Taylor, who apparently was one of the secret...
So secret meaning that some of the congress people know what was said, but not the public.
It's all secret, secret, secret.
So because it's secret, the bad people can define it any way they want.
So the Democrats can say, oh, you would not believe the secret stuff we heard about the president today.
I can't tell you. But man, he's so impeached based on what I heard that I can't tell you.
Now, what are you going to do with that?
There's nothing you can do with it because you can't prove your case.
You can't show the facts.
You just have somebody making an opinion.
So the Republicans have gone with this.
They're saying that his testimony was totally dismantled by somebody else's questioning.
Is that true? Is it totally true that the witness, Taylor, in the case was totally dismantled by a few questions from a Republican?
Who knows?
Who knows?
We weren't there. So it's actually diabolically clever to simply make up a lie that offsets their lie.
Because I'm pretty sure it's a lie.
That something was said that just says impeachment's a sure thing.
I'm sure that's a lie from the Democrats.
It's probably a lie from the Republicans to say that the testimony was so dismantled and discredited, it's all done.
That's probably not true.
It's probably some gray area in between that's exactly what you thought it would be, a big gray area in between.
But it's a good strategy, because nobody can check it.
All right. The president started calling the Democrats the do-nothing Dems.
And people have asked me, is that good branding?
Is that effective?
Good persuasion? Bad persuasion?
And it's sort of a mixed bag.
Do-nothing Dems rolls off the tongue really well.
Easy to repeat. You know what it means.
It's on target.
It looks like they aren't doing anything except resisting the president.
But here's what it doesn't have.
It doesn't have a visual.
And it's not scary.
Your two strongest persuasion techniques are fear.
This doesn't really have any fear.
The less that Congress does, maybe the better off we are, right?
People are not afraid of Congress not doing stuff.
That's just business as normal.
Maybe they prefer it.
And there's nothing visual about the concept of Democrats doing nothing.
Doing nothing is literally the opposite of a visual.
There's nothing there. So the president's usual persuasive genius, I would call it, often has something in there that's some fear or a visual, the wall, etc.
And he doesn't have this one.
But he does have, it's got a good sound to it.
You know, it rolls off the tongue.
Do nothing Dems. Do nothing Dems.
I don't know why you would call that in a musical sense, but just the words work well together.
Now, that's something he does really well.
I've talked about that with Make America Great Again.
Make America Great Again almost has a percussion beat to it.
Make America Great Again.
It almost has drum beat.
I mean, that is seriously good stuff.
Make America Great Again.
Do nothing Dems. Do nothing Dems.
It's got good percussion.
But I'd say it's not his A-plus material, because it needs a picture.
Or some fear.
It doesn't have either. Joe Biden is...
I don't know what to make of this, but he's going up in the polls.
Joe Biden is actually going up in the polls.
He's basically a walking advertisement for dementia, and he's still the top Democrat.
Now, one way to look at it is, well, he's got good name recognition.
Another way to look at it is, gosh, I guess they really want to win because they think he's the one who can win, and that's all they care about.
That's one way to look at it.
Here's another way to look at it.
How terrible are the 16, or whatever, people running for the Democratic nomination?
How bad must they be that Joe Biden, who I don't even know if he'll survive the primaries, I mean, God knows, he may just fall apart.
What does it tell you that he has a commanding lead?
And what's the other news?
The other news is that even the Democrats don't think that Biden can win against Trump.
They just don't think he has the basic capability of showing up and performing.
And so they're talking about all these speculative people jumping in like Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton and Mike Bloomberg and some governor.
If your team is talking about Shit canning every person who actually is running in favor of someone who hasn't even decided to run.
You are in panic mode.
The Democrats are clearly in maximum panic mode.
What would be the worst possible thing for the Democrats?
Joe Biden getting the nomination.
Can you think of anything worse for the Democrats?
Because first of all, even if he wins, they get an old white guy who's got some troubling racial comments in the past.
He's not a racist, but still, he's got a little baggage there.
What would be worse for them?
Losing? I don't know.
It feels like winning or losing, they wouldn't care either way.
They're both bad. So...
The Democrats have to be in panic mode.
They've got to be in panic mode.
So I've said before that none of the top three are viable candidates against Trump.
Certainly not Warren.
Certainly not Bernie.
Bernie keeps falling.
So what happens if one of the top three drops out?
Let's game this, okay?
Let's say one of the top three drops down.
It depends who it is and when, right?
Let's say that Bernie's poll numbers keep going down.
Let's say Bernie decides that he can't recover from his lower poll numbers.
People are too worried about his age and his health.
And let's say he decides to throw all of his support to Elizabeth Warren.
Would that put Elizabeth Warren in the lead?
And if it did...
Would that be enough for the Democrats to completely panic and say, okay, we've got to get somebody else in the air because there's no way Elizabeth Warren can win?
So what might they do?
Well, one thing they might do, are you ready for this?
They might talk Joe Biden out of running.
They might get him to quit.
Because if Joe Biden quits, his more middle-of-the-road supporters are going to have to go somewhere.
Will they go to Warren?
I don't think so.
I think they're going to go down to Buttigieg and Harris.
And depending on whether Democrats think that either Buttigieg or Harris have some chance of winning, or maybe Klobuchar, but she's even down at 3% or something, I feel as though a possible path is that Bernie goes first,
and that puts Warren in the lead because she would pick up his voters, And when Warren isn't the lead over Biden, he's no longer the presumptive winner, that he will find some excuse with the help of other Democrats to leave the race.
And when he leaves the race, all of those voters have to go somewhere, and if they wanted Warren, they would already be there.
If they wanted Bernie, they would already be there.
So I think all those votes go down to the fourth and fifth players, and suddenly they're going to be strong number two.
One of them will be. So, could be Kamala Harris.
You never know. All right.
This is something that Matt Lewis, who's an anti-Trumper, He goes, think of it.
Even for a professional spinmeister, there is no intellectually honest way to defend pressuring a foreign government to dig up dirt on a domestic political rival.
Do you see what he did there?
He said, there's no intellectually honest way to defend pressuring a foreign government to dig up dirt on a domestic political rival.
To which I say, well, that's true.
You could not intellectually defend Digging up dirt on a domestic rival through a foreign entity.
Could you defend a president doing his job and pursuing his top priority, which involves finding out more about Biden through a foreign entity?
Sure you could. Could you intellectually support that?
Not too hard, since that would be the president's job.
So, every time somebody says he can't defend digging up dirt on Biden, you should stop them and say, but could he defend doing his job?
Is that defensible?
How about doing his job? Can somebody ever defend just doing their job?
How about everybody can defend that?
It's the easiest thing to defend.
All right. Here's some more word thinking of the day.
Quid pro quo.
Quid pro quo. We're all talking about what it means and whether it applies.
But you're seeing more people start to say, and I think Mark Thiessen said this today, seeing more people start to say, quid pro quo is every conversation that leaders have.
The quid pro quo part is ridiculous because there's never not a quid pro quo.
There's no situation where leaders talk to each other and there's not some implied Or at least indirect, quid pro quo.
So the whole quid pro quo thing is trying to win on clever Latin words.
Because if you can convince people that because it has some words, because what the president did falls into the category that those words describe, he must be guilty.
That's word thinking.
So the logic was not, what is his job?
Was he doing his job?
That would be good logic.
The bad logic is we're going to label it with these Latin words.
We're going to say what he did has these three words, quid pro quo.
And then we're going to say that the words themselves indicate something bad happened.
There's no logic there.
They're trying to use words to replace logic.
Do you see that? We're just going to label what this is as quid pro quo, and then we're going to use quid pro quo as something that's clearly obviously bad, and then say it's bad because the words we use to label it are what you use for bad things.
So there's no thinking there, but the public is letting them get away with it.
I saw a word today, a made-up word from username, Lurchspun, L-U-R-C-H-S-P-U-N, if you want to follow Lurchspun, who is clever, calling the impeachment a sham-peachment.
It's a sham impeachment.
It's pretty good, isn't it?
Sham-peachment. Because, remember, people are very influenced by words.
We don't have a word that To describe an impeachment process that's illegitimate.
Well, now we do.
Shampeachment. Hashtag shampeachment.
And giving words to things actually is good persuasion.
As you can see with the quid pro quo example, it's not logic using word thinking, but it can be persuasive.
That's why people do it.
Let's talk about the word lynch.
It's all in the news.
So President said that lynch mobs were after him to try to impeach him.
And then his critic said, how can you use such a racially charged word?
Don't you know the bad history of lynching of African Americans in this country?
And so they accuse him of his, I don't know, racist dog whistle, whatever.
And I feel as though I need to make a ruling on this.
Are you ready? Here's my ruling with a little context.
If there's a group, whether they be an ethnic group or any other identifiable group, and there are some specific words used to describe them that they object to, I believe we should listen to that.
For example, the N-word is offensive.
It's a word used to describe a group of people, and I think that we should all honor That people hate that word.
There's good reason for it.
I accept that I will not use that word in any kind of a way.
What about other words?
Here's another one. Ron DeSantis once called his opponent, who was an African-American man, and still is, by the way.
He's still an African-American man.
He said that he was articulate.
Now, when you call an African-American citizen articulate, would you know that that's an insult?
And the answer is, some people would.
Lots of people would. It's considered a backhanded compliment because you rarely hear it used with anybody else.
So it's like suspicious.
You're like, huh, I don't hear anybody saying Pete Buttigieg is articulate.
But I just saw somebody say it just yesterday, literally, that Cory Booker was articulate.
Do you see it?
I gotta admit.
I gotta admit.
You know, when I first heard people saying you shouldn't use the word articulate, my first reaction was, it's just a word.
You should be able to use words that are just common words that describe an observation.
But it is a fact that people tend to gravitate toward it more often when they're talking about an African-American public figure.
And I can't not notice that.
So my ruling on articulate is...
The people who use it usually are doing it accidentally, I think, because they don't know that it sounds wrong to other people.
So I think there's a genuine lack of knowledge that other people are offended by that word.
But I agree that if you do know that it could be offensive, don't use it.
So don't use a word that is associated with basically an insult, because articulate is used as kind of an insult In a roundabout way.
Now let's talk about lynch.
Lynch again is a common word meaning everybody knows what it means and it applies to a variety of situations of which most recently the worst possible situation with African American citizens being lynched in this country.
A horrible stain on our history.
But it's also a common word And I think this is where I'm going to draw the line.
I don't think you get to reserve words because this word was very clearly not being used in any sense directly or indirectly about black people.
The president's use of lynching was about himself.
I believe that in all cases you should be able to use common words about yourself.
Had President Trump called himself articulate, well, people might argue that point, but would anybody say it was racist?
No, because he's talking about himself.
If he uses the common word lynch in any kind of a context that would suggest that even somewhere in the topic are black people, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
I would not support that in any way.
Because then, you know, you should have known better, right?
But if you use a common word about yourself, and there are no black people in the story whatsoever, my ruling is approved.
So, of course, it's just a fun political thing, and of course the Republicans, it took them all of the few hours to produce endless video of Democrats using the word exactly the way Trump used the word, right?
So it turns out everybody uses this word, but not everybody gets in trouble for it.
So people said, well, it's because the president has this, you know, this reputation of trying to stir up trouble racially.
I don't think that's enough.
Because that reputation was assigned to him.
It's not something he went out and got.
So my ruling is that you may use, if you are a white person, any kind of white person, and you use the word lynch about yourself, totally approved.
If you were to use that word in some other context, talking about other people, and there was any connection to the black population of this country, not approved.
That's my ruling. All right.
Let's see what else we got.
So the Hong Kong government formally withdrew its controversial extradition bill.
Do you think that'll stop anything?
Apparently not. That was the thing that got things rolling in terms of the protests, but now they have other demands.
So the protesters have kind of got, you know, a little taste of blood, and now they're not going to be happy with just that one thing being changed because they want the people who were arrested to be released and a few other things.
But in the long run, I've said it before, China will win.
They didn't win right away, but they'll win, and they'll get what they need out of Hong Kong because they're there for a thousand years.
Let's see, what else we got here?
All right. I see the critics of President Trump's decisions about Syria saying some version of this, that the big winners are Turkey, Russia, Iran, ISIS, and Syria, beating Assad.
Now, does that feel true?
Would you say that the big winners of the U.S. pulling out of that safe zone are these other countries that maybe you don't love so much?
Russia, Syria, ISIS, not quite a country, and then Turkey, who's sort of a frenemy these days.
Does that sound fair, that they're the big winners?
Well, let me ask you this.
It's not exactly free, but Those countries are going to be dying.
So their citizens will die.
Ours won't. They'll be paying a lot of money.
We won't. And they will have endless entanglement issues that might last forever.
We won't.
Does it look to you like they're winning?
That's a weird way to win.
So it turns out that the winners are getting everything we didn't want.
We don't want entanglement, expense, and dead soldiers.
But apparently they do, for some larger strategic reason.
Now, I don't see ISIS thriving in a situation where Russia and the Turks are doing joint patrols in that region.
And I'm pretty sure Assad is no fan of ISIS. I've got a feeling that ISIS is going to be in worse shape, not better, especially since we're still sort of over there.
We'll still help tampen them down.
So to me, it looks like a big victory, at least preliminarily.
We'll see. I was laughing, I was just watching a clip on YouTube, this is pretty random, in which comedian, writer, actor Larry David was telling the story about his mother was suggesting he'd make a good mailman when he was young.
So she was trying to talk Larry David into becoming a mailman.
She thought he should go down there and take the civil servant test and Get himself a proper job.
That's what he was saying that maybe he wanted to be a comedian, and that didn't look like much of a career.
Why this is funny is that my father also gave me the same advice at the same age.
So when I was about the same age, my father was telling me, maybe I should take these civil servants tests and work for the post office, as he did, because I'd always have health care, and the hours are good, and the pay was okay.
So I ask myself, what is the value of parental support?
Because, you know, in many ways I got plenty of parental support, certainly educationally and confidence-wise and otherwise.
But I also had a father who suggested I go work for the post office, same as Larry David had a mother did.
And so it just makes me wonder.
How much does the environment affect people's trajectory?
And how much of it is just some people are going to make it happen and some people are not?
Because I always felt like I was going to make it happen.
I didn't know exactly how, but I figured I'd make something happen.
And so far, so good.
All right. That's about all I have for today.
It's another fun day.
The anti-Trumpers are sure that President Trump is on the verge of impeachment.
I'm going to go all the way to say I favor impeachment.
Not for the reasons that maybe the critics do.
I favor impeachment because it will give Republicans the power of investigation.
And that, my friends, will be more fun than anything you've done in a long time.
So, impeachment? Sure.
If you want to impeach the most successful president of all time, good luck with that.
I'm good. I'm good with that.
I don't mind that he gets impeached.
He still is going to be, if nothing changes, he's already on a trajectory to be the best president we've ever had by far.
I mean, it's not even going to be close.
My guess is if you can fast forward today to the historians, assuming nothing new happens, right?
There's always going to be surprises, but if nothing new happened, He'd be the best president we ever had by far, historians will say.
Economy, war, trade deals, border, everything.
He'll just be the best president we ever had.
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