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Nov. 22, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
48:31
Episode 734 Scott Adams: Loserthink on Twitter Today, #Shampeachment, Teaching You Magic Trick
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That's not even the trick.
It gets better.
But first...
But first.
I think we need to start the day out right.
Not randomly.
Start it out right.
It goes like this.
You know what to do.
I think you do.
Get ready. All you need is a cupper, mugger, glasses, snifter, stein, cellist, tanker, thermos, flask, canteen, grill, 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 of the day.
The simultaneous sip.
Go! Mmm, that's magical too.
So I told you I was going to teach you a magic trick, but I'm going to teach you two magic tricks.
This first one is really good for the holidays.
Let's say you've got some young people in your family or just some people who are not that smart.
And you want to amaze them with your magic skills.
I'm going to teach you the easiest magic trick in the world.
You start with a napkin.
And you crunch it up. Like this.
And you put it in your hand.
And by the way, this trick works best with children and adults who are not that bright.
And it goes like this.
You go to the person, just as I'm going to you.
Imagine that you are looking through the screen, just as you are now.
And you see me say, I'm going to make this disappear.
Watch. So my hand, and then I'm just going to shake it.
I'm going to shake it until it's gone.
But don't leave sight of my hand.
Okay? Shake!
And it's gone. How?
Magic. All right.
If you couldn't tell how I did that, I feel sorry for you.
But for the three people who didn't know how I did that, let me tell you.
You take your napkin, you fold it up, you put it in your hand, and you move your hand faster than people can pay attention.
And then when you're at the top, just out of their line of sight, you just throw it over their head.
So all I did was throw it over the head of the person watching and say, look, Now, if you do it with something that's heavier than a napkin, somebody's going to hear a hit the ground behind you.
In those cases, you need a partner.
Have a confederate who just catches the object.
So you could do it with something heavy like a battery or a coin, but you just have somebody standing behind the subject who just catches it when you toss it over their head.
But that's not the trick I was going to show you.
No, it's not.
This is the trick I'm going to show you.
There are four cards here.
This part is no trick.
There are really just four cards.
And they're really real cards.
And you see that I've got them organized with...
We've got the Black Kings on one side, and then on the other side, we've got the Red Queens.
And watch this. I'm going to put the...
I'm going to put the Kings on the inside...
Where you can see the queens are on the outside.
See if you can see that.
The queens on the outside.
The kings are on the inside.
Now watch this. The kings are on the inside.
Black kings. Put them together.
Then I'm just going to blow on them.
And now the red queens are in the middle.
And the kings are on the back.
How'd that happen? Let's see it again.
Let's do it in reverse. Queens are in the middle, alright?
Putting the queens right together.
Queen, queen, right together.
Now I'm going to blow on them.
Now the kings are in the middle.
How? How?
Well, there are two tricks to this trick.
There's a little bit of sleight of hand, which is really easy.
And then there's a cognitive trick, which is the reason I'm showing it to you.
The cognitive trick is that I lured you into thinking that these are black kings.
And I lured you into thinking that these are red queens.
But they're actually more than that.
There's the queen of hearts, and then there's the queen of diamonds.
If I had called out attention to the suit...
Instead of the color, you might have known how the trick was done.
Now that's your first hint.
Alright? That I misdirected you by calling them kings and queens and saying that they're the black kings and the red queens.
And that misdirected you from thinking about which suit.
Now watch it again.
But this time, pay attention to which suit is where.
Okay? Okay?
So you've got these guys here.
And then you've got the queens.
You see you've got a diamond queen on this hand?
Alright, just pay attention to that.
so the diamond queen is in this hand right there now it's the heart laughing So they did more than switch sides.
They switched...
They switched...
From hearts to diamonds, I mean from diamonds to hearts.
Here's how the trick is done, okay?
These really are just four normal cards.
All I'm doing is I'm putting them together, except when I blow on them, I'm actually doing a sleight of hand in which I'm trading which hand is holding which cards.
So right now this hand is holding this card, this two.
This hand is holding these two, and I just switch.
So now, I make this hand over here, holding the cards that are on this side.
And when I take them apart, I do it quickly, but I'm doing this.
Get it? Watch me do it in slow motion.
The Black Kings are in the middle.
And now the Red Queens are in the middle.
Alright, so that's your trick.
Gone. Gone.
All right. I wanted to show you that because it was a good little introduction to how your brain can be so easily fooled.
I studied magic when I was a kid, before I studied hypnosis.
You would be amazed how closely those two skills fit together.
Because indeed, indeed, indeed, Damn it, my pages are all messed up here.
Indeed, indeed. A hypnotist is a little bit of a magician, and a magician is a little bit of a hypnotist.
They're actually overlapping skills.
You wouldn't know that until you studied both of them.
All right. So, I'm going to give you some examples of bad thinking on the internet.
There's so many of them today.
These are really good.
So you all know Preet Barrera.
He's a big anti-Trumper, a lawyer, one of the lawyers that Trump fired when he took office.
So Preet is not a big fan of the president.
And he tweets this.
He says, have reporters asked congressional Republicans this simple question?
Do you sincerely believe Donald Trump cares about corruption generally?
Seriously? Can you give an example not named Biden?
Just one?
So, here's Preet, who's a lawyer.
He's a high-end lawyer, so he's trained in persuasion, but also trained in the law.
Which one is this?
Is this persuasion?
Or is this like a good legal point?
Well, it's not a good legal point, but it is good persuasion.
So if you didn't recognize the trick, you would think this was a good point.
Pret- I'm not going to read his mind, but let's just say he's a trained persuader.
He has a point of view that's not ambiguous at all.
And it's fair to assume that somebody with that level of trading, doing something this irrational, he knew what he was doing.
Meaning that it works as a persuasion point, but it doesn't pass the logic test.
Here's why. He's basically saying, why is it that Donald Trump only cares about this one bit of corruption that just coincidentally helps him get reelected?
Is that a good point?
No. No, it's not.
Because first of all, it doesn't matter.
It's completely irrelevant.
If somebody does the right thing, it is not a good argument that they didn't do the right thing in the other cases.
That's not an argument.
You can only judge the thing you're talking about.
You can't say, well, why did he do different things in the past?
I mean, it might be an interesting question, but it would have no legal validity.
I suppose there'd be some exceptions.
But in this case, it really doesn't matter.
If he was doing the right thing in this case, it does not matter if you think he did the wrong thing in the other cases.
You can't get blamed for doing the right thing because somebody thinks you did the wrong thing in an entirely different context somewhere else in a different time and place.
That doesn't make sense.
But it does raise the question.
It goes to the question of whether Trump was doing it for personal reasons, or was he doing it for the country?
In other words, we voters had an interest.
I certainly did. I wanted to know if there was anything I needed to know about Biden, who might be my next president.
I wanted to know.
Is there any Biden stuff we need to know over in Ukraine?
Now, if the answer was, no, there's not really.
Which is actually the answer I would expect.
I would expect, yeah, Hunter was a little shady, but there's no reason to think his father was directly involved in any of that.
So, I was expecting, let's look into it, there's not much there.
Great, now we can have a fair election without that hanging over us.
So, here's the thing.
Does it pass the sniff test that Trump has only cared about corruption in this one case?
So Preet puts out the assumption, uncritically, that Trump is only caring about corruption in this one case.
Can you think of any other example?
Yes. How about Trump talking nonstop about the Clinton Foundation?
How about Trump talking non-stop about how the Democrats screwed Bernie in the election?
How about Trump talking non-stop about Hillary's server?
How about Trump talking non-stop about Russia collusion and the FBI being corrupt?
How about Trump sending Barr to investigate all of this?
How did the How did everything from the FISA warrant to the dossier get connected?
Does Trump talk about much else besides corruption?
And when Trump was reported that he was talking about Ukraine, when he was not talking about Biden in general, but he was talking about Ukraine, did he not say that Ukraine is like massively corrupt?
Independent of the connected but separate question of Biden doing anything bad, which I'm not aware of any evidence that he has.
Joe Biden, that is.
And then here's the other thing.
Part of this is a failure of imagination problem.
It's one of the things I talk about in my amazing book, Loser think, in which all of these dumb ways of thinking are cataloged with suggestions for improvement.
And pretty much everybody who read the book called this out accurately.
In other words, simply reading the book makes you look at this tweet differently than you might have before.
Before you might have said, hey, that's a good point.
Why is this the only time he's interested in corruption?
Well, it's not.
He talks about it all the time.
Usually he talks about it in the ways that are also good for him.
But our system is designed that our leaders can do that.
Our leaders can pursue their job while it is simultaneously good for their re-election.
It's actually designed for them to do that.
If they didn't do that, that would be a bigger problem.
Imagine electing people who then never tried to get re-elected.
Well, that wouldn't be a good situation, because they wouldn't be doing what the people wanted.
The way you get re-elected is by doing what the public wants.
So, of course we want them pursuing their personal political self-interest, as long as it's public, as long as we can see it.
And Trump apparently wanted a public statement about this investigations in Ukraine.
He wanted it public.
Transparent. I really don't have too many complaints about anything that's transparent.
Because if we're watching, we can say, was it good for the country too?
And if it is, that's fine.
Doesn't matter if it's good for Trump.
If it's good for the country, that's how the system is designed.
Here's another loser thing.
So Joe Biden tweets, It's clear that Donald Trump has abused the power of the presidency.
Full stop. Have I taught you that when people end their statement with full stop, it's because they don't have reasons.
If you had a reason, wouldn't you provide it?
Have you ever seen anybody who had a really good reason Who would leave it out of their argument?
If you live to be a million, you'll never see somebody who has a good reason leave it out of their argument.
That's what a debate is.
If you're trying to persuade somebody, it's very useful to actually give a reason.
It doesn't even have to be a rational one, but give a reason.
When you punctuate your statements as if it's just obvious, full stop!
Trump has abused the power of the presidency.
Full stop. Or, period.
Or, end of story.
They're all the same thing.
They're this huge glowing tell that you actually don't have reasons.
If you had reasons, you'd mention them.
You'd mention them.
Alright. There is a really, really interesting video that I tweeted.
You can see it on my Twitter feed.
Just this morning, so it's one of the ones toward the top.
And I don't know who it was, but you can see it in the tweet.
Was doing, like, person-on-the-street interviews with Trump protesters.
So it was a little group who had signs that they were protesting Trump.
And the interviewer asked them, basically, what is it specifically?
What's the main thing?
That bothers you about Trump.
Can you give me an example of your one greatest complaint about Trump?
Here's the fun part.
They couldn't.
She actually, by her questions, she revealed that there were a bunch of people who decided to spend their day making signs and protesting Trump.
And when she asked them, what's your best reason for why he needs to go?
None of them could come up with anything at all.
And what I uncovered is that they had been susceptible to the laundry list persuasion.
Now, the laundry list is when you don't have any one good reason.
If you had one good reason, you just stick with your one good reason because that's all you need.
You know, the other ones might exist, but you don't need them.
You got that one good reason.
Impeach him. I got this one good reason.
I don't need 10. Look, I got this one good one.
Let's go with the strongest one, and then we're done.
But if you don't have one good reason, you try the laundry list instead.
Well, there was a time he said this, the time he thought that, the time he wanted to do this, but we stopped him.
There was a time he didn't do this, the time he almost did that.
But then you look at each individual one in the laundry list, And they just sort of dissolve.
Individually, they just don't have any power at all.
You're like, eh, that's sort of a nothing.
And people imagine that all of that nothing adds up to something.
And then you put the microphone in their face and say, all right, why are you here?
What's your one good reason?
And they go, uh...
Ooh, best reason?
Wow, so many of them.
So many reasons.
Well, there's character and stuff, and corruption, I think.
What would be a good example of the corruption?
Well, all the reasons.
So many. I can't even...
Where do I begin?
Bob? What would you say is the worst reason?
I'm busy over here, holding a sign.
Don't bring me into this.
Now, I'm... Exaggerating what was on that video, that was my Schiff version of it, but it wasn't too far off.
You have to see a bunch of people who have spent their day protesting and can't explain why.
It's totally eye-opening.
And by the way, it is also my complete experience in life.
If I go to the biggest anti-Trumper, I don't know how many times I've done this now, But I've done it so many times.
And just say, what's the one biggest problem?
They have a tough time.
They want to go to the laundry list right away.
All right, there's an analyst who writes a lot for CNN's website, Stephan Collinson.
And I recommend his writing to all of you.
Not for a good reason.
I always look for him because he writes the funniest anti-Trump stuff on a fairly regular basis.
He's one of the most frequent contributors.
And it's funny because it's so ridiculous.
I actually read it as comedy.
I'm not joking about that.
When I read his stuff, I do it with an eye toward having a good laugh.
And he never disappoints.
Let me give you an example.
So I missed much of the testimony of Fiona Hill yesterday.
I saw little clips, but I didn't feel like I had the full sense of it.
And so I said to myself, Well, I better catch up this morning before I go on Periscope so I know what happened.
So I go to the analysis by Stephan.
I hope it's Stephan, not Stephen.
Stephan Collinson at CNN. And the headline says this, Fiona Hill nails the Democrats' case.
And I thought, whoa.
She nailed the Democrats' case.
It's funny, I didn't see that on Fox News, but there must be some good reasons here, so I'll dig into the good reasons.
So, here's more of what Stephen Collins has said.
Fiona Hill, the last witness in two weeks of televised impeachment hearings, made the case against her old boss, President Trump, better than Democrats ever have.
And I thought, whoa.
There's some good stuff coming in this article.
Because the Democrats have made a lot of accusations.
But apparently...
This Fiona Hill has wrapped them all up in a tight little package and really made them persuasive.
I can't wait to see how she did that.
So I read on.
The former National Security Council official, meaning Fiona Hill, on Thursday, distilled the fog of shady dealings and competition between Trump appointees and career bureaucrats with a crystal clear condemnation of his rogue foreign policy operation in Ukraine.
What? She distilled the fog of shady dealings?
Okay, but what specifically?
What exactly did she add to this?
Was it distilling the fog?
Was that her addition to the process?
Was it talking about her crystal clear condemnations?
I kind of need a little detail on the crystal clear condemnations, but obviously those will be here.
That's just setting us up for the real evidence that's to come.
So I shouldn't be too judgmental.
He's just framing it that she's going to distill the fog of shady dealings and crystal clear condemnation about his rogue foreign policy.
Okay, waiting for the facts.
And then further down it says, Hill said she only really began to understand the scandal herself while watching testimony from Trump's ad hoc messenger to the new government in Kiev, Gordon Sondland.
Wait, what?
Fiona Hill only understood her own testimony by watching television They're watching somebody else's testimony.
What? What?
He's actually writing that she didn't understand what happened until she watched television and watched somebody else talking about it.
That's her damning case against the president as she watched television with the rest of us.
I watched television, too.
I didn't see it.
Did you? I watched Sondland's testimony.
I didn't see it.
But she watched television at the same time you and I did.
Whoa, she saw it.
It all came together at that point.
And then the article goes on.
It says, Hill's comment summed up evidence that build a strong case.
Well, here it comes. All right.
I spoke too soon because the strong evidence is obviously yet to come in the article.
So we'll get to the strong evidence.
So builds a strong case that Trump, as Sondland put it, when Hill was watching television, she watched Sondland put it, In an overheard telephone call, so it's based on somebody overhearing a telephone call,
well, we'll talk about that, in July, quote, talking about Trump, that he, quote, didn't give a shit about Ukraine, but wanted the vulnerable ex-Soviet state to cough up political favors.
Cough up. That's not a biased framing.
Cough up some political favors.
Now, what is a favor if not something that doesn't have a quid pro quo?
So every time I see the critics use the word favor, which is what the president used, I think, isn't this a self-refuting statement?
If somebody asks for a political favor...
It's a favor. It's sort of different than a quid pro quo.
Anyway, I think it was Matt Lewis who pointed out that the President's statement where he directly said to Sondland, I don't want a quid pro quo, and this is an important fact.
It doesn't change anything, but it's important to know it accurately.
Apparently, Trump said, no quid pro quo, I just want Ukraine to do the right thing, after the news had come out that there were some quid pro quo questions.
So when he used the phrase, no quid pro quo, it's because he had already been blamed of a quid pro quo.
So Trump's clear statement that he didn't want a quid pro quo unfortunately comes after he was already being challenged, which means that it doesn't have the same credibility as if it had been said before.
If he had said it before anybody to even question it, he'd say, oh, that's as clear as can be.
No quid pro quo. But he said it after he'd been accused, which puts it in a different light, right?
Trump being fair puts it in a different light.
But it is also the only thing reported by anybody that came out of Trump's mouth or directly from Trump This said anything about his state of mind.
So it's not as credible as it could be, but it's the only thing that is directly from Trump, and that is counterfactual to the charge.
Now, it's not the strongest counterfactual.
I thought it was stronger when I thought it came earlier, but Matt Lewis correctly upgraded that timeline.
It doesn't change the bottom line on anything, but it's good to know, because that was definitely fake news, In the sense of the way I understood it.
So I think I fake newsed myself without knowing the dates and stuff.
Did you all see Chris Cuomo's demonstration of a cell phone where he called his mother and then he wanted to see if Dana Bash could overhear it without holding the phone up to her ear?
So he calls his mom on air, live TV, to show that you could easily hear A cell phone conversation without it being on speakerphone.
And so he holds it up and Dana Bash is like, you can tell she can't hear it?
And then Cuomo tries to save it and goes, oh, she probably can't hear me.
Meaning he's saying that his mother doesn't know that he just asked her to say something.
So he's like, Mom, say something.
And then apparently she was talking.
At least it's implied that she was talking.
And you couldn't hear her.
So even Dana Bash couldn't hear her.
So that was sort of the if the glove doesn't fit you must acquit situation going on there.
But... What if she had heard?
What if you could hear it?
What would it mean? Well, nothing.
In my experience, every phone call is a little bit different.
There are definitely phone calls that are louder than other phone calls.
So whether she'd heard it or not, it wouldn't tell you whether Trump's particular phone call was a loud one.
I don't know. So that was just funny.
It didn't prove anything. It wouldn't have proved anything if it worked.
So it was an interesting television, but wouldn't have proved anything.
All right. It turns out that a...
So let's...
Wait, what's going on here?
Oh, I was just going to change topics, but let me wrap up the impeachment thing.
I would say if we've heard everything we're going to hear, it's sort of the end of the story.
There's just not enough there.
So we're kind of...
I don't think there's any chance of impeachment.
I think you can just take that off your assumptions now.
Let's talk about the...
Apparently we're learning now that a former FBI lawyer is under a criminal investigation after allegedly altering a document, probably a FISA document, related to 2016 surveillance of the Trump campaign.
So, do you think Trump will talk about that corruption?
Now, we don't know what it means yet.
We don't know if it's really the FISA document.
We don't know how relevant this is to the Russia collusion hoax, but we're going to find out.
And so it's certainly tantalizing.
It's tantalizing.
But here's the funny part.
Uh... Oh, so CNN says that this new news is, quote, likely to fuel accusations from President Trump and his allies that the FBI committed wrongdoing in its investigation.
Yes, if this is true, it is, quote, likely to fuel accusations.
Do you know what else is likely to fuel accusations?
Murder. Murder.
If you murder somebody, well, you know, if you murder somebody, there's a very good chance somebody's gonna make a, it's gonna fuel an accusation that you're a murderer.
That's how it works.
If you do bad things, it fuels accusations that you did bad things.
But I'm putting this in my list with, the Republicans are gonna pounce on this.
They're gonna seize it.
They're gonna seize it for their point.
And they're going to make political hay.
That's the other one I heard. They're going to make political hay out of this.
Like it's a bad thing.
The facts are the facts.
If it's true that this happened and is relevant to the whole story, I don't know if it's relevant yet.
But if it's true, I think Republicans are going to pounce it and seize it and make political hay and it might even fuel their accusations.
But that doesn't make them wrong.
Did you all see the video of Elon Musk introducing the Tesla Cybertruck?
So it's more evidence that you shouldn't test things for the first time in public.
So one of the claims of the Cybertruck is that you can't dent it, and apparently somebody came up with a sledgehammer to test it, and it didn't dent, which is pretty impressive.
There was also a claim that the glass in the windows was break-proof.
So they brought a guy up with a brick or rock or something and had him try to break the window.
So he throws his heavy object at the window and it breaks it on the first try.
So, poor Elon Musk.
I'm a huge fan of Elon Musk, so I just feel bad about it.
But it's news.
It has to be said.
So, I've never seen an example of a technology...
A technology, what do you call it, demonstration that went that wrong.
That's the most wrong.
That's the most wrong I've ever seen a technology demonstration go.
Now, is it important?
No. Because I don't think too many people were going to buy that truck because the windows were shatterproof.
I mean, that would be cool.
And maybe it's more shatterproof than other windows, and that'd be great.
So I don't think it makes any difference to the sale of the product.
But, man, I'm glad it wasn't him.
There was a hilarious interview with Swalwell, also by Chris Cuomo on CNN. And...
And Cuomo asked him about going on Fox News, and this was Swalwell's response about going on Fox News.
And I have to say, this is one of the best responses from a politician I've ever seen.
Eric Swalwell says that he has to go on Fox News because it's the only way his parents can see him on TV. Now, I'm not mocking Eric Swalwell.
That's a really good answer.
That's a totally good answer.
Because the first thing it does is it's like self-deprecating in a way that's the only way his parents can see him on TV. Like, that's important.
So it's very human, so I like that.
But it also suggests that he's very familiar with conservative ways of thinking, because his parents apparently are Fox News viewers.
So it was actually, you know, we've all had fun making fun of Swalwell when he was running and making fun of his alleged passing of gas on TV, which didn't really happen, but it looked like it did.
But you've got to give him credit.
This was actually a really clever answer.
I liked it. And then he went on to blame President Trump for not getting any work done because he's always focusing on impeachment.
I don't think Swalwell can have a completely good day.
It seems beyond him at this point.
So if your party is working on a sham impeachment, And then your worst complaint about the president is he's spending too much time defending himself against the sham impeachment.
You don't have a strong case.
That's almost as bad as saying your window is break-proof.
Or that you can hear the cell phone conversation when it's not up to your ear.
These are just delightful public examples.
All right. I read a partisan's opinion, I think this was on CNN too, that the House Democrats' strategy was, quote, nothing short of genius.
And when he says that the House Democrats' strategy is nothing short of genius, then he went on to detail the order of things and the set of rules that they used which were good for their side.
And I think that was true, that the way Schiff set it up Was quite clever.
So I think that would be a fair statement, you know, saying nothing short of genius is hyperbole, but it was very clever.
But here's the thing. It didn't work.
It didn't work. How can it be just short of genius if it didn't work?
I mean, it's not going to get impeached.
I mean, it's not going to be removed from office anyway.
And it's definitely not going to help him in the election.
It's going to hurt him. I think that's really easy to predict.
So that's a pretty low bar for genius.
If everything fails, well, that's nothing short of genius.
I guess you'd have to be full genius before something actually works.
Bill Barr said something interesting about Epstein.
Barr told the Associated Press, and I'd never heard this before, and I also don't believe it's true, So, this next thing I'm going to say, I think you need to apply a whole bunch of skepticism to it, because it's the opposite of what we've heard.
It might be true. I'm not saying Bill Barr is wrong.
I don't know. I'm just saying that other evidence seems to suggest that what I'm about to say he said Isn't true.
So we have to figure out whose version is true, Bill Barr's or what has been reported outside of him.
And he said that Epstein's death was suicide.
And part of the reason he said is because he personally reviewed security footage in the jail that confirmed that no one entered the area where Epstein was housed the night he died.
What? What? Didn't we learn from all the reporting that the cameras weren't working?
Now, could it be that there are multiple cameras and just some of them didn't work?
Is that possible?
But there was some other camera that by itself was sufficient to know that there were no other ways for anybody to get in?
Aren't you skeptical of that?
Show us the video. Or just show us a still.
Show us one still picture from the video that Barr saw, and then we can look at it and say, oh yeah, Anybody who's familiar with the jail would have to do this.
So, unfortunately, there are plenty of people familiar with that jail, guards and inmates, and just have somebody who's been there say, oh yeah, this camera view is all you need, because there's no other way to get there.
Or maybe it's two camera views, whatever it is.
But would one camera view convince you that nobody got in?
Unless that camera was right on his cell...
I don't know that that would quite be all the evidence you need.
Now, keep in mind that I'm firmly on the side that it was suicide.
I might be the only person in the world besides the coroner who did the case who believes in suicide, but I'm sticking with it.
And the rules that I'm using to stick with it are that the normal explanation is always preferred over the extraordinary one.
Now you have two extraordinary situations.
One is that he could kill himself with all these coincidences happening, and oh, just a coincidence, and that he could break that bone in his neck, which you would expect only from murder.
So it would be extraordinary if he pulled off such a successful suicide when everybody thought it was going to happen.
But it would be a little more extraordinary if For this big plan of murder, and nobody saw it coming.
And I also wonder, could nobody hear what was happening in Epstein's cell?
Like, he wasn't yelling like crazy when somebody tried to murder him?
So I'm still on the side of the least spectacular explanation is that he's really, really good at killing himself.
Which isn't too surprising because he was really, really good at doing a whole bunch of things that you and I could never do.
I could never make money the way he made it.
I could never blackmail people the way he blackmailed them.
I could never do the crimes that he got away with for so long and get away with it.
He was a super capable guy, just very evil.
So when a super capable guy kills himself more effectively, maybe he just figured out the best way to do it, That's not surprising.
Because he's a super capable guy who keeps doing things that other people wouldn't think would be possible.
Versus a clever murder scheme that many people are involved in.
Blah, blah, blah. Possible.
Can't rule it out.
So I'm only dealing in statistical likelihoods here.
And yes, I know every single person here disagrees with me.
That's why it's fun. Remember, you all disagreed with me, or most of you did, when I said that the Cuban sonic weapon would never be discovered, because there wasn't one.
Remember how most of you thought, no, they're all reporting it's a sonic weapon.
I'll bet it's a sonic weapon.
Well, not so much.
Do you remember when I said that the Vegas shooter was not ISIS, even after ISIS claimed credit for it, and I still said it's not ISIS? Do you remember that?
There weren't many of you who thought I was right.
But I was. So, we'll see.
I don't mind being the minority on that.
Here are my three favorite kinds of idiots on Twitter.
I can't tell you how many times I've seen this.
Some form of this. You think you're a genius, but you're really just stupid.
And then they misspell the word genius.
Or when people call themselves a genius and they misspell the word genius.
How many times have you seen that?
I've seen that a lot of times, that exact thing.
It's one of my favorites.
The other one is one I got today.
I get this almost every day.
Somebody tweets at me just to tell me that I'm irrelevant.
Why are you tweeting at me if I'm irrelevant?
That's the opposite of irrelevant.
Irrelevant is the person you don't tweet at.
Alright. I talked about the other one.
When do you say full stop at the end of a sentence?
That's my other favorite. Here's a little...
Oh, some people asking me why Yang is not getting attention and why he's being sort of blocked from better media and I said he's boring.
The problem with Yang is that he says sensible things, which is intellectually interesting, and you can see why a lot of people would be interested.
But he's still boring.
His pin that he wears says math.
As others have pointed out, Jason, if you're watching, you pointed it out, math is not sexy.
Most people don't like math.
If you had to say, make a list of things that people don't like, math would be pretty near the top.
It wouldn't be number one, but it'd be near the top.
So I suggested that Yang has to do something more provocative.
I'll just give you a suggestion.
He could say, I have the solution to climate change.
It's nuclear power, plus these carbon scrubbing machines, plus other green energy.
That would get him attention. Now, it's also true that it is the solution to climate change.
He could just say, I have the solution to climate change.
He's already pro-nuclear.
Be a little more interesting.
Be more provocative.
All right, the best brainwashing trick that I've seen in a long time is the framing that people are using for this Ukraine situation.
I'll read you a tweet that somebody tweeted at me to give you an example of it.
So this was tweeted at me today.
As you know, every person involved in this, meaning the Ukraine thing, including Mulvaney, Solan, Volker, Vindman, Dr.
Hill, Trump appointees et al., all agree.
Trump abused his power by using publicly funded military aid for personal political favor.
Now, is that true? Did they all agree that that's what was happening?
Well, here's what's left out.
This is why it's such a clever brainwashing technique.
Here is my response.
I said, you fell for the faulty framing.
And by the way, you should use this technique.
The first thing you should say when somebody frames something in that way, that they're trying to trap you to join their frame, is you always say the frame is ridiculous.
So I said, you fell for a faulty framing.
I like to say that they fell for it, or that they're gullible, or that they got brainwashed, because that really sets the tone.
And then I said, it is the president's job to look into exactly this sort of thing, meaning foreign interference.
If it isn't getting done at the staff level.
And it wasn't.
Do you think the president would have personally asked Zelensky to look into this if he thought it could happen at the staff level without his involvement?
Of course not. The fact that it is also good for him politically, meaning Trump, is how the system is supposed to work.
He's supposed to do things that are public.
This was pretty public.
Good for the country.
I thought it was good for the country and also good for his re-election.
That's the system working the way it's supposed to.
All right. I think I had nothing else to say.
So I'm going to stop it there and I'm going to do some other stuff.
You have a good weekend and I'll talk to you later.
Oh, I'm going to be on Tucker Carlson on Monday.
So look for me Monday on Tucker Carlson.
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