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Oct. 24, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:06:53
Episode 703 Scott Adams: #Shampeachment, Michael Moore Racing Bernie, Zuckerberg Getting AOC’d
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Hey everybody!
Good to see you, Eric, Andrew, Jesse.
Always a pleasure.
You're looking more attractive every day.
All of you, really. I've noticed that as the days go by, the more you enjoy coffee with Scott Adams and the simultaneous sip, The better looking and stronger you get.
Possibly smarter, but definitely sexier and better looking.
So before I'm blinded by your brilliance and your sexiness, Let us have a little thing I call the simultaneous sip.
It's the best part of your day.
You don't need much to enjoy it.
All you need is a cup of mug or a glass snifter, stein, chalice, tanker, thermos, flask, canteen, grail, goblet, vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit that makes the rest of your day great.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and you're about to do it now.
Oh, so good.
So good.
Do you remember the old days when the news was sort of...
The news was really oriented around the idea that if it bleeds, it leads.
And the idea was that the news likes to focus on violence because everybody is interested in violence.
It's just automatically interesting.
So that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
I feel as if we don't really get any reporting out of the war zones, so you don't have any bad news to look at from war zones, because there are no reporters there.
And the rest of the news is just so much more fun.
I mean, could today be any better?
Let me give you an example.
Michael Moore said in some recent address that Bernie Sanders could be him, Michael Moore, in a 100-meter dash, even after his heart attack.
I don't even need to add the joke.
I don't. Sometimes you don't need to add the joke.
Sometimes the joke is in the setup.
But I'll add this.
I think it's a perfect commercial for Bernie.
It could be an ad for his campaign.
I'd like to see the ad.
It would show Bernie and then it would say, I'm healthier than Michael Moore.
Let's just go with that.
I'm healthier than Michael Moore.
Do you know who else is healthier than Michael Moore?
China. Everyone.
That's just one country.
All right. So, there's a lot of funny stuff happening today.
So, Matt Gaetz, Congressman Matt Gaetz, led a bunch of well-dressed congresspeople to the SCIF, To try to obstruct injustice, I guess.
And, of course, it's just an event that's made for the cameras.
But everybody cooperates by acting as though it's some kind of a more serious thing than it is really a persuasion mechanism.
It's all it really was.
But really good.
So, as I often say, Matt Gaetz is sort of the strongest, I would say, maybe just the strongest, but certainly the strongest of the younger generation on the Republican side.
AOC is still the gold standard of younger, persuasive people on the left.
But watching Matt Gaetz do this, it's super visual.
It captured all the headlines.
It did change the narrative of the story.
It was completely successful.
Completely successful.
So So, good work on that.
Now, I hear some people trying to defend the secrecy of the SCIF process, the way it's being done for the sham-peachment.
By the way, that's the word of the day.
It's impeachment, but it's a sham.
Hashtag sham-peachment.
I want to see if I can get that trending today.
So, the sham-peachment...
Is being defended by people saying that, don't you understand?
There's a lawyer on Twitter who put it this way.
I'm paraphrasing, but this is close enough.
Don't you understand?
Let me make this simple for you poor, poor moronic bastards.
Do you not see that the impeachment inquiry, or whatever they're calling it, is really more like a grand jury situation?
And those are meant to be private.
So, if it's similar to a grand jury, and grand juries are meant to be private, why can't this be private?
Well, let me suggest one reason.
I don't think you have grand jury, you don't call a grand jury simply for the purpose of winning an election, producing leaks, and fake news.
It's a perfect example of loser think to use the analogy of a grand jury to make your case and persuade that therefore secrecy is okay in this completely different context.
As Byron York pointed out, one of the reasons that this skiff impeachment, sham-peachment thing is different is that the majority can just make it whatever they want.
They can change the rules at will, as long as they're the majority and they vote for it.
So that's a basic difference, but really it has to do with the purpose.
I don't think anybody thinks that the purpose of this, at least nobody in politics, thinks that the purpose of this is anything but politics.
You don't really call a grand jury just to ruin the accused.
That's not the point of a grand jury.
Let's call a grand jury to see if we can use the grand jury to destroy the accused.
That's a pretty big difference.
So I have a chapter in my book about why analogies are terrible for persuasion, and this is a perfect example.
One of the things that I recommend in my book, Loser Think, that you can order right now, is...
is how to deal with things like mind readers online.
People think they're reading your mind and they can see an argument in there that's different than the one you're saying.
And so instead of debating the argument you're presenting, they argue instead what they imagine you're thinking.
So I've said that when you run into that situation, the bad analogies and some other situations, you should just use your phone Take a picture of the page in my book and just post it into your Twitter response when you're debating somebody and then you'd have the benefit of something from a book that's, you know, let's say a tightly organized argument.
So I was trying that this morning on some of my own critics.
And one of the critics said, Scott, Scott, Scott, you apologist, I'm paraphrasing here, you apologist, can't you see that Trump is ruining America in so many ways?
And I said, what would be an example of that?
Can you give me an example of how Trump is ruining America?
And he came back with a list of about ten things.
Now, I anticipate that in my book.
It's the laundry list persuasion.
People make lists of ten things because they don't have one thing that's a good argument.
If you had one good argument, would you bother with the other nine?
No, you wouldn't.
So the whole point of having a whole list is to distract from the fact that there's nothing on the list that's a good point.
If you live to be a thousand, You'll never see somebody who has a really good point add nine things to it that aren't important.
They'll just stick with their good point.
Good point, done.
So I, of course, took a picture of my book, the page that talks about that, and post it.
And I challenged the...
I also used a technique from my book in which I challenged my critic...
To pick his strongest point.
Say, in the interest of time, what's your strongest point?
And would you agree that if I debunk your strongest point, maybe you would rethink your confidence of your own points that are less strong than the one I just debunked?
What do you think he did?
Do you think he said, well, that's an excellent plan.
Here is the strongest point on my list.
Nope. He did something else that I predict in the book.
He devolved into insisting that the only way to have this conversation is to deal with all the points on the list as though they're one solid.
And he fought for it.
I've been going back and forth with him all morning.
God, he fought for it.
He fought to not pick one item from the list To just say, how about deal with this one?
So I modified after it was clear he would not pick out anything on his list he thought was a good point, that they're all somehow equal or additive or something.
Yeah, he's still fighting.
I think he's still tweeting me right now as I'm talking.
But you can see the advantage of making people crazy by taking a picture of my book.
Just sending it to him. And it's a good technique.
I think you can enjoy it if you use it yourself.
All right. Here's my question.
Did you see the Joe Biden thing?
It's just so funny all the time.
So did you see the video compilation of all the times he said in public he has incorrectly pronounced the word exponentially as exponentially with a real emphasis on the den that doesn't actually exist in the word, which is weird because his name is Biden.
And he's added half of his own last name to the word exponentially.
So he calls it exponentially.
So I clicked on the video and I said to myself, well, you know, how many times has he said the same misstatement?
Once? Maybe he did it twice?
Well, it turns out that for years he's been saying exponentially in public, and apparently nobody loves him, because nobody's pointed out that that's not how you pronounce exponentially.
So that was hilarious, because I really didn't believe when I saw the first one that there could be two of them.
And then the second one plays, and I'm thinking, oh, that's funny.
They found a second time that he said this word completely wrong.
And then there was a third one, and a fourth one, and a fifth one.
And the longer you watch it, the funnier it gets.
Because you say to yourself, there can't be another one.
I swear to God, there's no one.
There it is. There's another one.
But even funnier than that was Biden did a little campaign video in which he managed to demonstrate everything that's wrong with him in one video.
Number one, It was low production.
So apparently it was just somebody standing there with their phone in this orientation, not this orientation.
That's right. Joe Biden and his crack staff made a video to play on the internet in portrait instead of turning it sideways.
Now, that should be disqualifying right there.
Now, I get that maybe the candidate is not steeped in how to create content, and maybe the candidate wouldn't know, but who was holding the phone?
Was there nobody on his trusted team who could say, okay, good, good, but just turn it this way?
Because this way is what smart people do when they're creating video that will be replayed everywhere on the internet.
If it's only going to be on Instagram, sure.
Yeah, if it's only going to be on Instagram, you could do this.
But I think you want it on Twitter, and I think you want it on Facebook, and I think you want it on YouTube, and you want it to be viral.
So do this.
Do this. That's my little hint.
And then, of course, because it was just the sound from a phone, he's standing in front of hard objects like a door and something else, and the sound is terrible.
So he's got terrible sound, Terrible video.
And then he goes into his message that's just so weak I can't even remember it.
And then he ends with a request for funding.
And he starts his request, you know, there's a visual there that shows you could give $1 or $5 or $10.
Never start negotiating with the lowest amount you're willing to accept.
The dumbest persuasion thing you could do is to say, I'm raising money.
Give me, how about one dollar?
You know, it could be five, it could be ten.
But if the first thing that comes out of your mouth is, how about one dollar?
You've created an anchor in people's mind.
The odds of somebody giving you, somebody who was going to donate anyway, the odds that they would say, I guess he doesn't need five or ten dollars.
He did mention that one dollar was good enough.
I think I'll give him one dollar.
So, if you can't negotiate better than that, starting with one dollar, that's my offer, one dollar.
Do you think, in your wildest imagination, can you ever imagine Trump asking for money and starting with one dollar?
You can't even imagine it.
You can't even imagine it.
One of the things that is amusing me greatly as I'm watching the election process is that, on one hand, in Trump's campaign, you've got Brad Parscale, Who is creating the best campaign ads and tweets that we've ever seen.
Period. I'm going to say that with complete confidence.
Normally, this is the sort of statement you'd want to hedge a little bit.
You'd say something like, well, you know, I haven't seen every campaign ad, but these are really good.
I'm not doing that.
I'm not going to hedge. What Brad Parscale is creating for Trump are by far...
By far, the best campaign ad you've ever seen.
And even his tweets are the best tweets you've seen from somebody who's an operative for a campaign.
By far. There's nobody who is even close to that league.
It's not like there's somebody else in the league, but they're playing not well in the league.
There's nobody in the league.
Joe Biden Had a video taken of him standing against a brown wall by somebody who had the phone in the wrong orientation and didn't think sound quality mattered, or message, or persuasion, or visuals, or anything.
Anything! Now, how about Kamala Harris's video?
I tweeted that.
It's the worst Her video yesterday was the worst one I've ever seen in any context, in a political context, but in any kind of a campaign.
And it showed her, again, it was just somebody with a phone taking pictures of her with very low energy, talking to a teacher who's sitting in a chair, And some students around in the most unimpressive setting you could ever be.
The second one I know of, in which she's just interacting with children, looking so non-presidential, she looked more like a teacher's assistant.
Whoever said, let me take a video on my phone of you acting like a teacher's assistant and talking about the issue of internet access to rural communities, Whoever told her that was a good idea, and by the way, even the camera angle of her is terrible.
It's like a sideways, slumpy, poorly dressed image.
If you're going to make a campaign ad, something you're actually going to tweet, make sure it's your good angle.
At the very least, don't have a bad picture of yourself, low energy on a topic that very few people care about.
Now, before you jump on me, Yes, I do understand that internet access to rural communities who don't have it is a really important concept.
It's a very important topic.
And she's not wrong.
For mentioning it as an important topic, and I would very much, you know, 100% agree that that's something that needs to be fixed right away, because it's leaving a whole bunch of students of all types just behind.
They can't possibly compete.
If students don't have access to the internet, they just can't compete.
So yes, it's a big topic.
But is it a sexy topic?
Is it a topic that gets you the presidency?
It is not. Even though it's terribly important, it's just not the kind of topic that excites you.
Here's why. Who votes?
Who is it who votes?
Is it people who already have the internet or people who don't?
Mostly people who have the internet.
So when she's talking about this, she's basically telling the people who do vote to transfer their money to people who don't.
Because the people who don't have the internet probably don't even know who to vote for.
If you don't have the internet, I don't know, you're probably not voting either.
It's probably not your highest priority.
So Kamala did literally everything you can do wrong in a campaign act, from energy to message to film to audio to setting.
Literally everything about it was the worst you could do in that dimension.
It was almost unbearably bad.
And I'll tell you, you don't realize How good Trump's team is on the messaging and the campaign stuff until you see the best from the other side.
Because remember, we're looking at their best work.
This is their best work.
And it's not even in the league with the competition.
All right. And now imagine if you saw the Joe Biden thing where he's just standing there talking in front of a door.
Imagine President Trump, or even candidate Trump before that, giving any kind of a message that was so low energy and lacking of anything interesting.
You can't. You can't even imagine Trump being uninteresting.
I don't think Trump could be uninteresting if he tried to do it intentionally.
Because everybody would say, hey, he's trying to be uninteresting.
Let's talk about that.
Here's some more funny news.
So apparently the president either misspoke or was misinterpreted.
I don't think it matters. But he said something about building the wall and said that he was building the wall on the border of Colorado.
Now, Colorado does not have a border with Mexico, and so people said, what?
What? Let's make this a headline.
Now, I don't know, did the president misspeak?
Did he get his geography wrong?
I think he tweeted a clarification saying that what he meant to say is that, like Kansas, who he also mentioned, they benefit from the wall without actually being a border country.
Now, this is in the category for me of things that I don't really care.
I don't really care.
And to be consistent, if a Democrat said something that was, you know, he misspoke about his state or forgot who the leader of a country was or called somebody by the wrong name or even said exponentially once, I would say that doesn't mean anything.
If you speak in public all the time, you misspeak all the time.
How many times have you seen me misspeak?
A lot! Every now and then I'll replay my periscopes back just to kind of see what I'm doing right, doing wrong, and I'll hear myself misspeak, and I'll go, oh, that was entirely the wrong word I put in that sentence.
It actually reversed its meaning.
I do it all the time.
Does it mean I have Alzheimer's?
I don't know. Maybe it does.
But I'm pretty sure I would have done the same thing at any age.
So the President talked about putting a wall around Colorado.
He misspoke, of course.
Or he was misinterpreted.
We don't know. It doesn't matter.
But on the same day, because the simulation is kind to us, and the simulation...
Which I pray to, oh dear programmers of the simulation, deliver to us humorous news so that we might feast upon the humorous goodness of your generosity.
And sure enough, the simulation provided the very next day that Trump misspoke and said he might want to put a wall around Colorado We hear the news that Colorado priests sexually abused at least 166 children over the past 70 years.
And my immediate thought was, we need to put a wall around that state.
I don't think I've ever had that thought before.
It's literally the first day I've ever had the thought, maybe we should put a wall around Colorado.
I don't want any of that stuff getting out into my state.
So, the simulation has provided.
Here's something else the simulation will provide.
Are you ready for this?
When somebody picks a vice president What goes into that calculation?
Well, of course, they're picking somebody who has some qualifications for the job.
Sometimes they're picking somebody who has a geographic advantage.
Maybe they're from a state that you want to win, or they're from the South and you want to pull in the South, something like that.
But above even those considerations, the vice president has to be somebody who is less impressive than number one on the ticket.
So if you look at Obama, Obama's choice of Biden was kind of perfect.
It was a perfect choice.
Because Obama, whether you like him or don't like him, I think most of us would agree, he has charisma, he's a superstar.
Even if you hate everything he did, he's still a superstar.
So having a superstar of Obama Makes perfect sense to get this sort of boring, low-energy, not-too-capable Joe Biden who people say, yeah, as an emergency spare, I suppose, you know, in the worst-case scenario, something happens to a president, I guess we could put the spare on and limp to the big O tires to get a proper tire on there.
Yeah, I guess Joe Biden would be good enough for that, right?
But here's the fun part.
Obama's the star.
Biden is the low-energy, empty version, who's perfect for a spare tire.
But what happens when the spare tire runs for president?
The spare tire has to pick a vice president, too.
Let's think ahead.
Let's say Joe Biden gets the nomination.
Who does Joe Biden pick as his vice president who is, wait for it, Less impressive than Joe Biden.
Do you see it?
Who in the world is going to take the job of vice president when it's obvious that that means that the world sees you as less impressive than Joe Biden, who is literally decomposing in front of us?
I mean, his eye is falling out, his teeth are falling out, he can't remember words.
Somebody say Harris.
I don't think so.
Because even Harris looks younger and more on the ball, even though she has the worst campaign I've ever seen.
If she looks younger, more vital, probably smarter, I think she would look like she should be the top of the ticket.
That's a problem, right?
So, Biden has a problem of vice president delusion.
If you are the vice president, you still have to pick somebody when you run who is less impressive than you, so you're two versions away from the guy who won, Obama.
Now, if you think I'm joking, consider Ronald Reagan.
Who was Ronald Reagan's vice president?
Bush Senior, right?
Ronald Reagan, superstar.
Barack Obama, superstar.
Donald Trump, superstar.
They have to pick a vice president.
Trump picks Pence.
Is Pence a good emergency spare?
Perfectly good. Perfectly good.
Almost, even if you don't like Pence, if you're on the other side politically, you say to yourself, well, he's experienced.
He knows all the right people.
He knows how everything works.
I don't like his views, but the country is not going to fall apart if he ended up being president for a year or two.
Good spare tire.
Now look at Reagan.
He picks Bush Senior.
Was Bush Senior a good spare tire?
Perfect. Did not have charisma?
Was not a Ronald Reagan?
How long did he last?
One term. Because all it took was a charismatic challenger, Bill Clinton, and suddenly the watered-down vice president, who had to pick his own watered-down vice president in Dan Quayle.
By the time you get to Dan Quayle, you're two levels away from the superstar.
And that's the team.
Would you be just as confident If George Bush Sr.
had somehow left office for whatever reason, and Dan Quayle took over.
Hmm. Dan Quayle isn't the emergency spare.
Dan Quayle is the emergency spare is broken too, and you have to get out and try to jog, you know, 10 miles to your destination.
So Biden has the vice president problem.
There's nobody he could pick who wouldn't look like they should be at the top of the ticket.
Here's my prediction of how things are going to go.
Are you ready? A version of this I've said before, but I like to update it and make it a little bit crisper.
Here's what I think is going to happen.
Number one, Bernie's poll numbers will continue to drop.
Elizabeth Warren will be the benefactor of that, and she'll continue to rise.
So far, we probably agree, right?
At some point, and this is the key part of the prediction, I think Bernie is going to say...
Damn it. It's obvious that I cannot get the nomination.
But I would like my ideas to go forward.
So if Bernie decides that he's not going to continue because his poll numbers have shrunk and it just doesn't look like he could get the nomination, what's the most reasonable thing he would do?
He would endorse whoever might have a chance of winning and is the closest to him in policies, which is Warren.
So the most likely sequence of events is Bernie's numbers fall to the point where he says, I think this would be the right time to make a graceful exit.
I will endorse Warren.
And then he does. Now what happens when Warren's numbers get above Joe Biden's numbers?
Even a little bit, and they stay there for a while.
Now we've seen some where they've traded places, depending on whether you're looking at national or a battleground state or an early state.
But let's say that Bernie leaving causes Warren to get above Joe Biden and just sort of stay that way.
What happens to Biden's campaign funding?
Well, it's already shrinking and he's already, you know, a low fundraiser, especially being the front runner.
So he probably, almost certainly, I would say that Biden will be starved of funds and that will drive him out of the race.
And I don't think, it's obvious to me at this point, probably you too, I don't think there's a scenario in which people simply go to Biden and say, you know, I think you've lost a step, Joe.
For the good of the country, for the good of the party, maybe you should step aside.
It's obvious that nobody's doing that.
Now, maybe somebody tried and it didn't work, but far more likely there needs to be a situation that sort of evolves in somewhat of a natural way that would cause Joe Biden to make his own decision.
And the best way that would happen is the money people will just starve him of money, and then he sort of has to drop out.
He'll just say, I'm leading in the polls, which is weird, but nobody's giving me money.
I guess I have to drop out.
Now, there might also be a, you know, you might say his energy or something isn't where it needs to be or something.
So he might come up with some other reason, but I think the money is going to be the key thing, even if he gives a different reason.
Now, what happens if Warren's at the top and Joe Biden says, ah, no more campaign money or not enough, I'm going to drop out too.
Who does he endorse?
Well, probably not Elizabeth Warren, right?
Because Elizabeth Warren wants to do things that even Biden says is crazy.
I don't know that he could make that kind of a leap.
You know where I'm going.
So if you get past the top three, you're starting to talk about Buttigieg and Warren.
Let's think about Buttigieg and Warren.
And remember, Warren, I'm sorry, Buttigieg and Harris, Kamala Harris.
In my brain, I store Warren and Harris in the same bucket, because they're sort of the same feeling kind of a name, so I confuse them all the time.
See, I misspeak all the time.
Let's put a wall around Colorado.
So, let's say the party leaders start looking at Kamala Harris seriously.
And she seems to have some good connections in the old Hillary Clinton network, etc.
And they say to themselves, what would be our best package?
Here's what the best package would look like.
And by the way, let me also say, I was watching Buttigieg a little bit lately because he's more interesting because his numbers are going up.
He's good. I'm going to say that Buttigieg is the best package Can I say this?
Yeah, I think I can say this with some confidence.
Among the Democrats, Buttigieg is clearly the best campaigner.
Does anybody disagree with that?
It seems to me that although he's having trouble getting purchased, I think that mostly has to do with lack of name recognition in the beginning and the fact that he's a mayor of a smaller city.
It doesn't seem to be that he has the name recognition or resume That people imagine as president.
But can you imagine him as vice president?
Imagine this team, Kamala Harris at the top, and Pete Buttigieg as the vice president.
Think about it.
Because you would have on your team Buttigieg's brains, Because he's not willing to say that ridiculous plans are worth trying.
You know, he's willing to do things that he can afford, that, you know, the country can afford.
And, I don't know, he probably has the most reasonable, centrist opinions, but probably he's not ready.
He's not seasoned enough in the public's mind, anyway.
He's not seasoned enough in the top spot.
But imagine him working as a team with Harris, because he corrects a lot of her biggest problems.
I think that with a little advice from Buttigieg, assuming that she was willing to take it, he could fix most of her big problems.
Same as I could, but she's not listening to me, of course.
I seem to be getting a lot of super hearts at the moment for saying this stuff.
So now imagine if you have a package of Kamala Harris and Buttigieg.
Who votes for that package?
Well, you've got women. So women is covered.
So you get the Hillary Clinton folks who just say, you know, it's time for a woman.
You've got the people of color.
You need that.
If you don't have a black person at the top of the ticket, are you going to get the same kind of energy that an Obama could get.
Now Kamala is, you know, I'll call her a person of color because she has a more interesting ethnicity.
But it seems, I think people would say, well, you know, she's more like me than somebody else.
So I think she would get the people of color, I think she'd get the women.
And then Buttigieg probably would get something close to 100% of the gay votes.
Do you think there are people who would vote for Buttigieg who simply wouldn't have bothered to vote before?
You know it. You know it.
Within the gay community, you know, whatever that is, five, ten percent, I think you could increase that to ten or twenty percent if you include family members of gay people.
And that's the part you forget.
If you said to yourself, well, how many people are going to vote for Buttigieg just because he's gay?
A lot. A lot.
And it's not just going to be people who are gay, it's going to be family members who say, you know, my brother, my cousin, somebody I know is gay, and wouldn't the world be better for my cousin, my brother, my friend If we had a gay man in the White House, it would. That's one of the reasons I think it would be great to have a gay president eventually, whether it's now or later.
So I think these smart people on the Democrat side are going to look at their matchups and they're going to say, we can't win on policies, but maybe we can win on identity.
And the best identity package you could put together, by far, Would be Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg.
Now, I don't think they could beat President Trump, but they would be the best competitors by far.
Does anybody have a different opinion?
Here's the problem with Tulsi Gabbard.
She's very popular with Republicans.
That's a problem.
I just don't see...
The Democrats picking the candidate who's the most popular with Republicans.
But you're probably ahead of me now, and you're saying, wait a minute, Scott, hold on.
If you had a candidate that the Democrats would vote for just because they're Democrats, and also a candidate that a lot of Republicans would say, huh, you finally have a Democrat I can vote for.
Oh, I'm going to go for it.
Wouldn't that be the strongest candidate you could ever have?
Well, logically, you'd say yes.
But I don't think logic is going to rule the day.
I think that a Democrat who hears, wait a minute, are you telling me the Dilbert guy said some good things about Tulsi?
Wait, wait, did I just see a tweet in which Don Jr.
said some positive things about Tulsi?
That's the end of her. That's the end of her.
Because she would be destroyed by association.
Now, I am willing to change my opinion on her.
If her poll numbers increase, I will modify my opinion appropriately.
But at the moment, it looks like she may be sort of capped there.
Now, I've got a few questions.
I've got some questions.
And I wrote them down so that I would not forget them.
them.
Here they are.
If we believe that Trump loves Putin, let's say you're a Democrat, and you believe that Trump loves Putin, how do you explain that Trump gave Putin Syria if he loves Putin?
if he loves Putin.
I can't think of anything that would be worse for Russia than having to take care of Syria.
I can't think of anything that would be worse for Russia than having to take care of Syria.
The thing that people forget, because when you talk about Russia, it's easy to imagine them as sort of our peer.
It's like, yeah, there's the United States, and then there's Russia, you know, superpowers with big nuclear weapons and stuff.
And Putin's always on the world stage, just like Trump is.
There's somehow, there's some kind of equivalence there.
And there is some equivalence in terms of, let's say, punching power.
Russia punches way above its weight class.
But here's what they don't have.
Money. Russia is like a dot compared to the United States' wealth.
They don't have a lot of money.
And if you were to say, hey, should the United States stay in Syria forever, basically protecting a Kurdish homeland or anything like that, what's the first thing you'd ask?
Well, can we afford it?
No, because we wasted a bunch of money on Iraq and other places.
So, probably even the United States couldn't afford it.
How hard would it be for Russia to afford a continuous presence in Syria?
Feels kind of expensive to me.
So I'm not sure that Putin is winning here.
There's a great article I just read.
I think I tweeted it if you want to read on it.
It's just talking about what President Trump's apparent strategy is in the Middle East.
I thought this was a pretty good take.
I forget who it was.
But if you look at my Twitter feed, you'll see the article tweeted.
And the idea was that President Trump seems to have an implied strategy that says that there are two priorities in the Middle East.
Number one, contain Iran.
True. Number two, protect Israel.
True. Those two things do seem like the primary variables that Trump cares about.
Now apparently Jared Kushner has already created a 50-page plan for Middle East, which he said the Palestinians might be surprised how much they like it.
I don't know what that means.
My guess is that there's some kind of a deal in which the Israelis would keep as much security-type control as they need, while at the same time the Palestinians get massive investment and ability to improve their living lifestyle.
So it's something like that.
Now, I don't think anybody thinks that the odds are good that any kind of peace deal in the Middle East will work.
But you have to appreciate the clarity of our work over there.
You know, contain Iran, protect our ally, Israel, which tends to be, those are very related things, because the biggest threats against Israel tend to be funded by Iran.
That's a very clean strategy.
It's very clean.
I like that. I'm not sure I'd call it a strategy.
I'd just call it priorities.
Because I always make fun of people saying that strategies exist.
Because strategies only last until a variable changes.
And variables change, well, all the time.
Variables change all the time.
So a strategy is usually useless.
You can have priorities, but be open to the fact that the variables change and you might have to change your priorities.
Here's an interesting question that Senator John Cornyn asked on Twitter about Schiff's secret impeachment, the sham-peachment as we call it, hashtag sham-peachment.
He said, the senator says, if the testimony is so damning for Trump, why not make it public?
Now this is a very clever tweet.
Because it's not as if everybody wasn't talking about this topic, and sort of the way he's talking about it, in the sense that we've all been talking about, hey, why can't the Republicans talk about it, or why can't the public see it?
I guess the Republicans are part of the meetings, so they do have access to the base information, but they're not allowed to talk about it.
And I thought this was really good framing.
Because the Democrats, I don't think anybody trusts them, including the Democrats themselves, because we're in a political season.
So I would think that, and this would be true on both sides, I would think that even Republican voters don't completely trust everything Republicans are saying in an election season.
They recognize hyperbole and gamesmanship and things left out, and that's part of persuasion.
So I don't think there's any Republican who thinks Republicans are completely credible on all claims in an election season.
I don't think there's any Democrat who thinks that everything Democrats are doing is simply to follow the law.
I don't think anybody believes that their only objective is to get to the truth.
Nobody believes that, right?
So given that even Democrats don't believe their own team...
I try to not be a mind reader here.
I can't read their minds.
But do you think it's reasonable that Democrats are looking at all the machinations of Nadler and everything, and they don't understand that it's at least, if not mostly, if not entirely, political?
It's not really about getting to the facts.
It's not really about nobody's above the law.
I mean, I think everybody gets that it's not really that.
It's a political process.
So given that, Wouldn't it be strange to you that if the testimony is so damning, as Senator Cornyn says, if it's so damning, wouldn't the Democrats be fighting to make it public?
Because it's the best thing that could possibly happen.
They would get their damning information and then make it public.
But instead, they're keeping it private and having people talk about how bad it is if only you could see it.
Does that sound like somebody who has the goods?
If you had the goods, would you do it this way?
Somebody in the comments is saying, I want to see Nadler in a 100-yard dash against Michael Moore.
I'd pay to see that too.
So Corden had a great framing, so congratulations on good persuasion there.
It's the perfect question.
If it's so damning against Trump, Why don't Democrats want us to see it?
Is it because they love the rule of law so much that they appreciate confidentiality?
Does anybody believe that the reason the Democrats are not telling us what's going on is because they just love confidentiality?
It's the leakiest group of people in the entire world.
If they had anything, we'd know what it was.
Now, I see people saying that Taylor's testimony was so damning and, you know, it's all over and that's the end of it, to which I said, what?
How come I'm not aware of it?
Why is it that there are people who are alive and citizens and watching the same stuff I am, claim that there's some impeachable thing and this guy Taylor...
Has spoken of it, and if you saw it, you'd say, well, that's impeachable.
I don't even know what they're talking about.
Is it because I haven't seen the right news?
I'm just not aware of this impeachable stuff.
Now, as I've often said before, if somebody's new to my periscopes, the defense that the White House is not using is the good one.
The good defense is not to continually conflate asking about CrowdStrike, which even his critics would agree was a reasonable question because there's an ongoing investigation, but rather to say it was also my job and it was a top priority for the country to find out if Biden's got any Ukrainian ties we should worry about because the public information would suggest there's something we ought to look at.
How is that not the sitting president's One of his top priorities.
So the president, instead of running away from it or trying to conflate it with the crowd strike thing or trying to just label it as perfect or whatever he's doing, he's missing the most obvious play, I think.
Maybe there's some lawyer who would say, Scott, Scott, Scott.
I don't think you're seeing that there's some legal ramification if you did what you say, but I don't know what it is.
If you make me president, I'm going to say, yeah, it was quid pro quo, because it's my job.
To make sure that we don't have foreign interference.
People were watching.
I had witnesses when I did it.
I gave you the transcript.
I told you I did it.
And it's your top priority to make sure that there's no interference.
That's your top priority.
It's mine, too. But don't complain when I'm pursuing your top priority by making sure that there's no foreign interference.
Let's say, should Biden get elected?
All right. Here's my other question that I tweeted too much retweeting.
If Russia wanted to harm the United States, meaning basically decrease our power, make us less effective, make us struggle in some way so that they would be relatively advantaged in the power balance, do you think that they'd be promoting Tulsi Gabbard?
Is that the way they would play it?
Do you think they're over there saying, yeah, we'll pick somebody who's near the bottom of the list, and we will try to promote that person.
Is that your best play? Now, I understand that maybe the play is to get her to run as a third party and ruin things or something, but does that seem likely enough?
That that's a serious play?
Is there somebody in Russia who says, I think Tulsi Gabbard is a good candidate to mount a third party challenge?
There's nobody in the United States who thinks that, is there?
Is there anybody who's, let's say, in the pundit class who legitimately believes that Tulsi Gabbard would mount a third party campaign?
I don't think so. So here's my question.
Wouldn't the obvious play, if you were Russia, let's say you're Putin, and you intend to mess with the United States and make us weaker, wouldn't you support Elizabeth Warren?
That's a serious question.
Isn't that the obvious play?
Because Elizabeth Warren is suggesting big radical changes that would put the economy at risk.
And if you're If you happen to be Russia, you want the person who wants the least fighting overseas, and I think Warren is pretty peace-oriented, similar to Trump, but a different style.
But she also wants to make major changes to the entire economy.
Don't you think Putin would love the United States to make major changes to its economy?
I can't think of anything that Russia would like more than the United States making major changes to its economy.
Because maybe those changes are good, but probably not.
Probably not in terms of GDP. Probably not.
It might be good for the citizens.
That would be Warren's argument.
It might be good for an entire class of people who would otherwise be greatly disadvantaged.
But Putin doesn't care about that.
He cares about our GDP. I think he'd like it to be lower.
Which one gives you the lower GDP? Elizabeth Warren or Trump?
That's a no-brainer, right?
If you're Putin, are you saying to yourself, huh, Elizabeth Warren or Trump?
Elizabeth Warren or Trump?
You know, I think Elizabeth Warren would really make the stock market zoom.
Literally nobody thinks that.
Wall Street is panicked about the possibility.
Now somebody says Bernie.
Well, Bernie would be a good choice for Russia if he also had a good chance of getting elected.
But I would think that Elizabeth Warren would be the top choice, so I wonder about that.
So AOC did some awkward questioning of Mark Zuckerberg.
And if you watch the video, it's just sort of cringy.
She's just... I felt like it was a seal hunter just clubbing a baby harp seal that couldn't defend itself.
It's like...
And the baby harp seal was just like, oh, my talking points, my talking points.
So... I have this observation about Zuckerberg, and I can't make a decision here, so maybe you can tell me.
I couldn't decide if Zuckerberg did a good job or a bad job in responding to Congress's interrogation.
And here's why it's confusing.
If you watched his answers, you probably thought to yourself almost every time, Oh man, you're sticking to your talking points.
You're not really answering the question.
You look awkward and uncomfortable.
It doesn't look like you're nailing it.
So that's one point of view.
But there is something that Zuckerberg does As well as I've ever seen anybody do it.
And that is sticking to what he wants to say and avoiding, you know, an emotional thing that maybe would create a viral video and avoiding answering a direct question, which is only designed to get him on record in an embarrassing way.
So I have mixed feelings.
I think maybe he nailed it.
But it's hard to score it.
I think he nailed it because he said nothing that was interesting, which I would guess, yeah, it's media training.
I've talked about that before.
If you take training how to talk to the media, how to do what Zuckerberg was doing in the public, they will teach you not to answer the question.
Because the questions are traps.
And you just use those questions to restate your point of view, your talking points.
And he did that really well.
He's very disciplined.
He's smart. He's disciplined.
The talking points were good enough.
I think maybe he succeeded.
That's my take.
The funniest part...
Remind me, who was it who asked Zuckerberg, I think it was somebody else, not AOC, who asked him if he was aware of how many LGBTQ employees are working at Facebook or working on something at Facebook?
And Zuckerberg said he didn't know.
It was Al Green.
And I thought to myself, I better be prepared for this question.
Because I employ people now and then, and I thought, I'd better collect that information from any future or current employees to find out if they're LGBTQ, because what if I get called into Congress and I have to speak to it?
And I thought, well, it's probably illegal to ask, isn't it?
I mean, is it legal to ask your employee, hey, by the way, Are you gay?
Is that even legal?
I don't know how that works, because I think some of these things get tracked by the government, but I can't imagine that would be legal.
So I was trying to think, well, how could I determine if I have LGBTQ employees without asking?
Because that seems illegal.
And I came up with this idea.
If it's somebody who identifies as male, I would ask them to have sex with me.
If they say yes, I would say, ha, okay.
I take out my clipboard, let's say, identifies as male, agreed to have sex with me, check mark.
I have one statistic.
Then I would go to the employees who identify as female, and I would say to them, would you like to have sex with me?
Now, if the woman says no, I'd pick up my clipboard, let's say...
Lesbian. Now, it would be a little harder with identifying the bisexuals and the transgenders, so I need to work on that a little bit more.
But I think those two questions would give me all the data I needed.
Or you could be indirect about it.
Instead of asking somebody's sexual orientation, you could ask questions in the general field and then try to deduce it.
And then maybe that would work. For example, if somebody you identified as a man, or even a woman, I guess it works either way, you could say, just making conversation.
How's the weather today? Oh, good, good.
Well, it's sunny. You know, I was just wondering, Bob, Have you ever had any part of another man in your mouth?
Or in any part of your body?
Has any part of another man been in any part of your body?
Now, you have to be careful here, because you might be talking to someone who is a doctor, a proctologist, for example, or a cannibal.
You know, you might accidentally be talking to a cannibal, and they'd say, oh yeah, I've had...
I've had male body parts in me.
Well, let me tell you. Every night at dinner.
So you have to be careful, you know, that you don't have a proctologist or a cannibal.
But otherwise, I think that question would get to the bottom of it.
By the way, if you're new to these periscopes, I'm super pro-gay.
Gay are the better. And by the way, I mean that totally seriously.
Here's something you never hear.
Are you ready for this? Here's an opinion you've never heard.
Gosh, that neighborhood went to hell because of all the gay people who live there.
You've never heard that.
Is there anybody who ever said, gosh, there's gay people in the neighborhood.
There go our property values.
Not. Ever.
Never will happen. So I'm super pro-gay, super pro-LGBTQ. I'm your best friend, but funny is funny.
All right. So, what else we got here?
Is anything else funny happening?
Oh, so I told you the other day, Joel Stein, who is a very good writer, one of the funniest writers in America, used to write for Time Magazine.
He had that funny article in the back of Time Magazine for years.
He's written a number of books.
And his latest book about the elites, In Defense of Elitism...
Has a chapter about me.
I think I'm actually in a few of the different chapters.
And one of the humorous anecdotes that he pulled out of our interaction is he asked me if I thought I could be Secretary of State.
So he asked me if I thought I would be qualified to be Secretary of State.
And I answered, unambiguously, no.
And he was relieved of that because he was worried that I might think that with no experience I could just become Secretary of State.
But then I explained longer that it's because I don't have a good memory for leaders' names and I don't have the stamina to do all that international travel.
I don't like the time zones, and it just feels like a lot of work.
So no, I couldn't do the travel, and I couldn't remember the leader's name, so I would not be qualified to be Secretary of State.
At which point Joel humorously and cleverly points out that that was not what he was expecting, as the reason I thought I was unqualified.
Now let me ask you this.
Was Rex Tillerson qualified to be Secretary of State?
I don't think so. And it turns out he didn't last.
Is Mike Pompeo, when he first took the job, was he qualified to be Secretary of State?
I doubt it. I mean, he had a good resume that was very appropriate.
You know, he was closer than most people.
You know, if you've been CIA, you've been in Congress.
But I don't think, unless you do the job, I don't think unless you do the job, you're qualified, right?
Do you become qualified for a job by doing an unrelated job just because you've heard the names of world leaders or something?
I don't think so. I feel quite strongly that experience is overrated in a lot of domains, and the government's probably the main one.
So yes, I believe if I had a memory for names and I wanted to do it and I didn't mind all the travel, I could totally be the Secretary of State.
And I don't mean because I'm so awesome.
I think there are a lot of you who are watching this Periscope.
Maybe not a lot as a percentage, but there are probably quite a few people on this Periscope, maybe a hundred of you, who if you were given the job of Secretary of State, you could probably work it out.
It would probably be fine.
All right. What else we have going on here?
Well, I think those were all the funny things.
So it's all about the impeachment today.
Keep watching. How are the California fires?
Well, apparently my power is going to go out again.
Actually, my power didn't go out the last time they threatened to turn off the power in California.
But it might the next time.
I don't know. Depends where the fire is.
I think that's where the wind is and where the fire risks are.
So I guess Snowden appeared on Joe Rogan's show, but I haven't listened to it yet.
I plan to when I get a good piece of time.
Oh, todos con Biden.
So Joe Biden. He tries to start this sub-campaign within his campaign called Todos con Biden.
So it was aimed at Hispanic voters, and it was supposed to make him one of them and telling them how to get on board supporting Biden.
But he did not have the good sense to capture the URL. So he comes up with a tagline, but he doesn't get the URL. So, guess what happened?
It took about a minute and a half for somebody, probably associated with Brad Parscale and the campaign, To grab the domain, create a page to mock Joe Biden and his merciless.
And there's also a Twitter account which is tweeting all the bad Joe Biden stuff that also uses the same name as the URL. And I thought to myself...
Even that is a higher quality campaign move than anything we've seen, anything from the entire democratic field.
And it even made me wonder if the campaign did it, which is my assumption.
I'm assuming somebody that Brad Parscale works with or his actual team probably did it.
Because they would have the fastest reaction at the highest quality of production.
And it was a really high-quality production.
Their takeover of the URL and the Twitter feed looks really clean.
I mean, it's just got all the things to make it look legitimate while it's obviously not.
But here's the other observation I had, and I'll see if you agree with me.
There are... Trump voters and supporters who have nothing to do with the campaign who make better campaign ads than the entire democratic field.
And what I mean is, on any given day, you know, something wicked or carpe donctum or, you know, Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich, you could probably come up with I don't know, 15 names of Trump supporters who on a regular basis create better campaign content, even just for fun.
You know, they're not even doing it intentionally.
That is a far higher quality Than what the professionals working on the Democratic campaigns are producing.
Just far better. It's not even close.
And those are just voters.
Forget about the actual campaign, which is like the nuclear arsenal of good persuasion.
Just regular voters are better than the entire professional field.
Never seen that before.
All right. That's all I got for now.
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