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Dec. 8, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
53:58
Episode 750 Scott Adams: Trump's 3rd Term, Mind-Reading Impeachment, Persuasion Trick
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Hey, everybody. Come on in.
Yes, it's time for another round of Coffee with Scott Adams, the best part of your day.
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Simultaneous caffeine for some of us.
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All good. Let's talk about some stuff.
As you know from my prior periscopes, I took the Joe Biden push-up challenge and did 25 push-ups and posted my video.
It took all of one day for Tom Sauer to publish, to post a video of himself at Trump Tower, I think in D.C., dropping and doing 50 perfect military push-ups.
To which I said, damn it.
Tom Sauer. And so I did another video in which I used Tom's technique, which apparently is allowed in the military, where you can pause at the top of your push-up, as long as you don't lose form too much.
And so I paused, and I tried it again.
Got to 37, and had to admit defeat.
So, good job, Tom Sauer.
And, oh, we're not done.
I hope you can do more than 50 because I'm just getting started.
So more on that later.
So in Trump derangement syndrome news, S.E. Kupp, who works for CNN and pretends to be a conservative but doesn't do a very good job of pretending, and she tweeted, Remember when Bloomberg demanded a third term as mayor and got it?
Trump will do the same.
Beware the same autocratic impulses.
Beware. Now, here's what would not be crazy.
So, if this tweet had said Trump could do the same, Trump might do the same, there's a non-zero chance that Trump would try it.
Those things would be things I would deeply disagree with.
But they wouldn't be crazy.
But you know what is crazy?
Trump will do the same.
Once you go all the way to he will, try to become a dictator and not leave office, that's no longer part of the sane world.
Here are some other Trump insults that I hear a lot, and I'd like to test them with you.
If you'd like to test these other criticisms about Trump, all you need is your beverage, let's test them.
The way we're going to do it is I'll read each claim about Trump, a criticism, and then I want you to taste your beverage and see if it's any different.
Number one, Trump is insincere.
Tastes the same.
Did anything change in your world?
Check your wallet. Do you have less money?
Do you have less money now because President Trump is insincere?
Anything tastes different?
Anything at all? Or we'd better do a few more.
Trump is incompetent.
Nope.
It's all the same.
What's going on here? These are gigantic problems that are threatening the world, and I can't see anything different.
How about, he hurts America's standing in the world?
Nope, nothing.
I think.
Nothing. Again, check your wallets.
Check your 401k.
Are they down? Because Trump has hurt our standing in the world.
That's got to hurt, right?
Why am I not in pain?
Here's another one.
Trump cares only about himself.
Okay. And?
And? What?
They didn't laugh at Gerald Ford?
Really? How about Trump is impulsive?
He's impulsive.
Not only is he impulsive, but he takes a really long time to decide whether to release aid to Ukraine.
So he's impulsive, and he takes a long time to make decisions.
Apparently they're both true.
Check your beverage?
Still the same. He wants to be a dictator.
Okay. What are the odds of that happening?
Still zero. Still zero.
He's corrupt. In what way that actually affected you?
Blah, blah, blah, Trump University.
Didn't affect me. Even the people who went there ended up making money out of the deal.
How about, he's a con man.
And affected me how he's a liar.
How did that affect me?
What statistic is suffering because of all of these horrible, horrible, horrible things that Orange Man is doing?
And it gets worse.
Believe it or not, Trump was caught lying, I think it was yesterday, or the day before, Trump was caught flat out lying about the number of times you have to flush a toilet these days.
Damn lie. The correct number is once or sometimes twice.
Trump lied. He lied.
He's a liar. He said that sometimes you have to flush your toilet 12 to 15 times.
Now, I have to admit, I was at the gym when I heard the first time I heard the video clip.
And I'm working out on one of the stair machines, and that video comes on, and I'm watching Trump talk about light bulbs and toilets, and he gets to the part where he says, these modern toilets, you have to flush them 12 to 15 times.
And I just, I just reckon lost it.
I just started crying.
I was laughing so hard.
And I'm in the gym and I'm trying to, you know, of course I've got my earphones in, my earbuds, so nobody knows why I'm laughing.
I'm trying to not fall off the stare machine and not look like I'm having some kind of a manic mental breakdown.
So I'm losing the machine and I'm like, oh, I want to laugh.
Oh, I want to laugh. Tears are coming down my cheek.
Oh! He really said, you have to flush your toilet 12 to 15 times.
And the reason I was laughing is, if I've said it once, I've said it a million times, that Trump uses hyperbole, of course, but he's also directionally correct.
Now, when he's not directionally correct, it's just because maybe the facts don't agree with him or something.
But he typically...
Maybe always, is exaggerating in a direction that's positive in some way.
Now, the issue here is that there are some places in the country where they don't have a water shortage, and the president's saying, if you don't have a water shortage, why don't you have a better toilet that does the job better?
So that part's not crazy, but what he says, you've got to flush your toilet 12 to 15 times.
I mean, that was just funny.
Because as soon as I saw it, I realized that it was going to be a headline.
Trump says toilets need to be flushed 12 or 15 times, and then they would fact check it.
I don't know. It struck me as funny.
We have more information about Epstein's guards.
So apparently there are some, I guess, lawsuits or something against them, so that allows us to see more information about what the guards were doing.
Now, remember my theory.
My theory is that he did kill himself, it was suicide, and that we should not think there was anything unusual by the complete and utter and thorough incompetence of the staff.
Because what I said is, and remember, I'm the author of Dilbert, so every now and then I talk about a subject I actually know something about, and I do know something about big incompetent organizations.
And one of the things I know is that if you find a little bit of incompetence, the odds of finding a lot of incompetence are pretty good.
Incompetence travels in bunches.
And when I read the part about at least one of the guards who was sleeping during the Epstein suicide, allegedly, that the guard was working the second eight-hour shift.
If you work 16 hours in a row and your job is just to sort of be there, you're a security guard, let me guarantee that you are planning, not just accidental, but if you're working two eight-hour shifts and one of them is overnight, you're planning to sleep.
It's not an accident that you fell asleep.
You take those two shifts and one of them is overnight and there's just nothing happening, typically.
You're, you know, you're planning to sleep.
I say that as someone who once worked as a security guard when I was in college.
I worked as a security guard at a resort, so I was the only one who was supposed to be awake.
Did I ever take a nap during my eight-hour overnight shift when nobody else was awake?
Yeah. Might have been some napping in there.
Might have been a little napping.
So everything about that situation looks like a typical incompetent organization.
First of all, who takes the job of sleeping in jail?
Or even being a guard?
It's sort of a job that you don't take If you're, well, I'm not going to say it.
I don't want to insult prison guards.
But let me just say that if I had to guess, that for every really highly qualified and sincere and hardworking prison guard, of which I'm sure there are many, there's at least one who's not that.
And apparently there was some kind of a security camera that was working that could tell with certainty that nobody else got into the Epstein area.
So if nobody else got in that area, we have perfectly good reasons why guards were falling asleep.
Looks like suicide to me.
Don't tell me about broken bones and necks, because I think Epstein would be clever enough to do a really good job of killing himself.
All right. Let's talk about North Korea.
So North Korea says it's taking denuclearization off the table.
And President Trump is a dotard again.
And they've tested something, but we don't know what.
But it's really awesome.
And Kim Jong-un rode a white horse up a mountain in the snow.
Now, I think what's happening with North Korea is that everybody's waiting for everybody else to go first.
And somehow we got in a situation where both sides imagined that the other side was offering more than they were ever offering.
So, Kim Jong-un seems to be under the impression that we will start giving him stuff before he gives up his nukes, which is sort of exactly what we're not going to do this time.
I mean, that's, you know, Trump doesn't have any chance of giving anything substantive.
Well, they still have the nukes.
So I guess they're just figuring out that he's not going to do that just because he's friendly.
So I asked myself, what could break the logjam?
What would it take for North Korea to put denuclearization back on the table?
And let me offer a few suggestions.
Now, I don't imagine that these suggestions have not already been thought of.
I'll just put them out there so you can kind of get a sense of persuasion in what might work.
All right, so Kim Jong-un needs our side to go first.
So is there anything that we could do that would be considered going first that would be meaningful and yet wouldn't cost us anything?
In other words, it wouldn't make us less safe in any way, but it would seem like a big deal.
And indeed, there is something.
One of the things that we could give them that wouldn't cost us anything...
And again, when I talk about these issues, I'm open to fact-checking and adding context.
Scott, Scott, you don't know the details.
But just tell me the details.
You don't have to tell me I'm an idiot.
You can just tell me if there's something that I'm missing in this analysis.
So one of the things we could give Kim Jong-un that wouldn't cost us anything...
And would look like we went first, is declaring peace.
How hard would it be to simply declare peace?
Secondly, now of course we don't want to give Kim anything unless he's doing some stuff we want, and apparently we haven't seen that.
But could we say to him, look, here's the deal.
You can keep your nuclear industry, but just say that you're transitioning it to domestic nuclear power.
And, you know, we don't know how long that's going to take, but, you know, you can work with the international community and turn it into a money-making domestic nuclear energy, kind of a Generation 4 safe nuclear energy situation.
And that would still be nuclearization.
So how do you denuclearize North Korea without denuclearizing North Korea?
Because you know Kim Jong-un doesn't want to give up the fact that he's developed this industry that's, you know, first world competitive.
And the way to do that is to say we're not asking you to denuclearize.
We're asking you to make money.
So you could maybe do with words something that couldn't be done with an actual agreement.
In other words, we could say, we're not asking you to denuclearize.
We're simply asking you to convert those resources into domestic nuclear stuff.
Why would he do that?
Well, he might do it if we declared...
At the end of hostility, you know, an official end of the war.
He might do it if we transitioned some of our troops that are in South Korea into some other function.
Right now, what does North Korea and the rest of the world think we have troops in South Korea for?
Why does he think they're there?
Well, I assume he thinks they're there because we might want to attack North Korea.
I'm sure that Kim Jong-un thinks that.
So is there anything we could do that would keep our forces there, or some percentage of the forces there, by relabeling them?
Maybe we relabel our forces to something else.
Maybe it's a defensive force against China.
Now, where I'm going with this is that both leaders, Trump and Kim Jong-un, need to be able to say that they're winning even if they're negotiating, even if they're both giving something up that they don't want to give.
So maybe you could create a world in which what Kim is getting is For example, let's say a security agreement by, let's say, China, Russia, and the United States.
They could have a security agreement.
They could have the end of the war.
And they could remain a nuclear country.
They just have to transfer it over to peaceful means over time.
With some inspections, you're going to have to have inspections.
There's no way around that.
So... Could all of that be put together as sort of a first offer?
We'll do all of these things, which are largely symbolic, while you do all of these things, which are, in the short run, largely symbolic.
Now, if both sides do largely symbolic things in the short run, can you ever get to things that actually mean something?
Well, yes. North Korea could, if they gain trust that they're not about to be attacked, could over time have no reason to have nuclear weapons.
So maybe they look to their security agreement with the big countries.
If they could come to trust those agreements, then I think maybe there's something they have to work with.
And in terms of the US, could we ever remove troops from South Korea if we became comfortable that North Korea was well on its way to being no threat at all?
I think yes. So in the short run, the only thing you can do is make promises that seem more, let's say, theoretical and more about persuasion and more about how it looks.
But those things, if successful, could also lead very long term into something good.
So maybe there's a way to go there.
We'll see. I've got people coming at me on Twitter saying, Scott, you stupid cartoonist, why did you think North Korea would ever denuclearize?
To which I say, what, are we done and I didn't know about it?
Because all I see is North Korea walking away from the negotiating table.
Just the way we walked away, well, the same way they'll walk away again.
Walking away from the negotiating table doesn't mean you're done.
It means you're in the middle.
So don't tell me I got it wrong until we know how it ends, which might be years from now.
All right. So here's something interesting.
Have you noticed that if you saw Saturday Night Live, they were mocking the Europeans who were mocking President Trump.
So they did a skit where Macron and Trudeau and Boris Johnson are at the cool kids' cafeteria table and Trump is ostracized because the cool kids are making fun of him.
But what's interesting is, it was weirdly pro-American.
And it was weirdly pro-Trump even while it was mocking Trump.
And it feels like there's some kind of Shift going on.
At least as Saturday Night Live.
Because I watched that skit and I came away thinking, oh yeah, they made fun of President Trump, as they always do, but they also made fun of his critics.
And it looked to me, his critics in this case, the European leaders, and it looked to me like Saturday Night Live was giving it to them just as hard as they were giving it to Trump, which is sort of gentle comic ribbing.
I don't know if that means anything.
Maybe it means that there's...
It could be that they're just doing it for ratings.
But it does seem like a shift.
Here's something else. So President Trump tweeted that we've done all the work to be able to designate Mexico a, well not Mexico, but the cartels, terrorist organizations, which would give us more power in dealing with them, especially financially. And the president of Mexico, for reasons unknown, talked President Trump out of doing that.
So we were all ready to get tough on the cartels.
Designating them terrorist organizations.
And the president of Mexico said, not so fast.
Let's work together and see what we could do.
What do you make of that?
Now the real story is that we don't know what to make of it because there's obviously information that we're not privy to.
But we can speculate.
One speculation is that the president of Mexico is just part of the cartel.
Or owned by the cartel, or doesn't want to make the cartel mad, or the cartel will kill his family, or something.
But if that were the case, wouldn't President Trump just go ahead and designate the cartels a terrorist organization?
There's nothing to lose.
Under the assumption that the president was already corrupted by the cartels, You might as well designate them terrorist organizations.
I don't see there to be a downside to that.
So it makes me suspect that maybe the president of Mexico has some kind of a plan.
That we're not privy to.
Could be negotiating with them.
Could be, who knows, maybe just better cooperation so that the United States can help Mexico with resources so Mexico can go ahead and take care of the cartels themselves.
That way they keep their sovereignty.
So we don't know what's going on there.
I mockingly tweeted that it looks like it's hugs it is.
Because it looked like the least effective thing we could do was nothing.
So it looked like we weren't even trying.
That's sort of a wait and see.
I'm seeing a movement online, mostly from conservative Twitter people, to try to get people, men mostly, to stop looking at porn.
Have you seen that? So, quite a few smart, influential people, mostly on the right, are...
I don't know where the movement came from, but a lot of people are simultaneously saying the same thing, that porn is harmful and it ruins your brain and your relationships and your energy and stuff.
And I would just like to add this to the conversation.
Porn is probably like...
Alcohol and marijuana in this one sense, that everybody's response to it is different, and everybody's in a different situation.
There are clearly people who, if they drink alcohol, they have the gene, they become an alcoholic, ruins their life.
No doubt about that.
There are clearly people who get into marijuana, become, I don't know, lazy or whatever, ruins their life.
And I believe it's also true that people can watch porn until their brains are rewired and it ruins their life.
So I think that all three of those things have definitely the potential to ruin people's lives.
But all three of them are legal.
And it's also true that some people just get all positives.
So some people can drink their whole life.
They never become an alcoholic.
They just keep it on the weekends.
It's a social thing.
It adds to their enjoyment of life.
It helps them, you know, party with their friends.
So while alcohol is poisoned, in my opinion, I can't ignore the fact that for some people, they get more positives than negatives.
It just doesn't work for all people.
Likewise, marijuana is for some people, especially if they have medical use for it.
More positive than negative.
You all know I'm a big fan of marijuana, but I wouldn't be a big fan of it if I were not a rich cartoonist with a flexible schedule and I've already made my money.
There's not much downside at my age, with my career, You know, I can pay somebody else to drive.
I mean, I don't really have a downside the way other people have a downside.
So, marijuana, too, can destroy some people's lives, I'm sure.
But other people just get mostly positives from it.
Porn is probably the same way.
You will notice that the people who are advising the public to keep away from porn, first of all, they're all well-meaning and they're all smart.
Pretty much everybody who's saying this, I would say, is very smart, very well-informed, and well-meaning.
That's all good. But I would add this following caveat.
The people who are saying that you shouldn't use porn are almost totally the people who have options.
If you have an alternative, well, that's a pretty good reason not to look at it.
If you don't have an alternative, and that's got to describe a pretty sizable chunk of the population, there are a lot of people who just aren't capable, and never will be, of enjoying a normal social, even physical life.
For them, I would imagine that porn is filling in some gap that they would not really realistically be able to fill in in another way.
So, the only thing I'll add to the conversation is I will agree that alcohol, marijuana, and porn can destroy lives.
I will agree, definitely agree, that porn can rewire brains and make you, let's say, it can sap your energy, it can divert you from more important things, it can make you less social, it can make you kind of a zombie, it can ruin your sex life, it can do all those things.
Definitely can do all those things.
But there are individual differences, and that's all I have to say about that.
All right. John McAfee, Announced his candidacy for president.
Now, somebody's saying in the comments, they're also talking about keeping young kids away from it.
In terms of keeping young kids away from it, I'm 100% on board.
No exceptions. I don't think we should even consider the possibility, just as we would not with alcohol.
Nobody's going to say, well, some 16-year-olds, they can drink alcohol.
No. No. Nope.
Until you get your brain at least a little bit more mature.
If there were a practical way to do it, and I don't think there is, if you could ban children from seeing it, that would be great.
I'd be all for that. All right.
The Democrats are preparing their impeachment report, and of course we have some You know, advanced information and everybody's trying to frame it and spin it.
Joel Pollack is doing a public service by actually looking into it.
You know, most of the news that you hear on this topic will be people who didn't read it.
People like me who probably won't read the whole thing.
But there are a few things that stick out even early.
There will be lots more to talk about this.
But apparently the report says, and I'm quoting...
The question is not whether...
You have to listen to this quote.
This is mind-boggling.
This is one of the main points in the impeachment report.
Quote, Do I even have to comment on that?
The impeachment report is literally a loser-think document in which they're trying to make the claim that they can deduce President Trump's inner thoughts.
Now, really?
We're going to impeach the President based on the opinion of strangers about his inner motivations?
Really? Is that the country we live in?
Let me make a prediction.
That's not going to happen.
Now, of course, the Democrats might vote to impeach, but I'm using the casual language to talk about removing him from office, which would require the Senate.
So the removal from office, there's no chance.
Well, there's no chance they would do it for this reason.
I don't know if there are other reasons that we'll hear.
But if there was anything that gave up the game more than this, I don't know what it is, which is that the Democrats went into the meetings to write the articles of impeachment before they had agreed what they would be.
Think about that.
That the people who went to write the articles of impeachment got in a room together and And we're not even in agreement about what was impeachable, even the people who are writing it.
They had to reach a consensus in the room of what things to even talk about.
Now, if that doesn't tell you that the whole thing is, you know, is look for a crime as opposed to, you know, show me the person, I'll show you the crime, as we often hear Alan Dershowitz say, that should be the end of the story.
If they went into the meeting not knowing what even they were going to write down was the impeachable offenses, that should be the end of it.
But of course, we don't live in that world.
So... Let's see how often you hear the phrase mind reading.
So this will be a test of how much influence I'm having on things.
I think most of you who have been watching me for a while know that I believe I'm the first person who introduced the idea that one part of loser think is imagining you know what other people's motives are.
Because you don't. So See how many times you hear the phrase mind reading in the analyses of the impeachment report.
I think it's going to come up.
Then also, as Joel Pollack pointed out, apparently the document, the impeachment document, refers to Andrew Jackson and his impeachment as an example of precedence.
Except, as Joel points out, and I'm no historian, so I'm just repeating what Joel said, apparently the Andrew Jackson impeachment was widely considered a sham.
So the Democrats, apparently being either ignorant of history or hoping that the public is ignorant of history, which would be a good bet.
So we can't assume that they were just ignorant.
Because the better assumption is that they knew exactly what they're doing by referencing Andrew Jackson, and they know that the public won't know the difference.
Oh, it's Johnson, not Jackson.
Andrew Johnson.
Johnson, Jackson, come on!
So anyway, so yes, thanks for correcting that, Andrew Johnson.
I'm all confused now, so I'm not sure that I got that right.
Everybody in the comments was saying Andrew Johnson, so just edit everything that I said back to Johnson.
All right. In any case, the Andrew Johnson impeachment was considered a sham, and they're using that as a precedent.
It probably will work, because people don't know their precedence.
Now, another thing that I think it was Adam Schiff tweeted, and I don't have this in front of me, but so fact check me on this.
I think he said something like that there were 500 maybe constitutional scholars, but at least legal experts, that say there are plenty of impeachable offenses that President Trump has committed.
So, are you influenced by the fact that 500 people signed a document, and apparently they're experts, that say there's plenty of impeachable material?
In 2019, the year 2019, how much weight should you put on 500 experts saying they agree with Democrats?
The exact amount of weight you should put on that is zero.
In my book, Loser Think, which I hope you're all buying as gifts for your entire families, one of the things I described is if you only know what happened, you don't know anything, because you don't know what didn't happen.
So in this case, if 500 experts are willing to say that there is plenty of impeachable material, what's missing?
What's missing is how many experts are willing to sign a document that says that they don't see impeachable conduct.
Is that 500?
Is it zero?
Is it 10 million?
Is it a thousand?
I don't know. So somebody in the comments is saying 500 out of how many?
If all you know is that 500 agreed, really, here's how you should read that.
Oh, there are 500 lawyers who are also Democrats.
That's it. That's exactly how you should read that.
There are 500 lawyers who are also Democrats.
That's all that tells you.
John McAfee has announced his candidacy for president, which is interesting because he's not allowed in this country without getting arrested.
So he acknowledges that it will be difficult for him to be president, given that he can't have fun in the country without going to jail.
But man, is John McAfee interesting.
I don't know what drugs he's on.
I mean, he admits to enjoying his drugs quite a bit.
So I don't know what drugs he's on, but they're good ones.
And I saw his tweet, and for some reason I wanted to see if he follows me on Twitter, and he does.
So John McAfee actually follows me on Twitter.
I follow him as well. So John McAfee, if you're listening to this, you should come on my Periscope, because that would be fun.
So that's my official invitation.
Just DM me if you hear this and you accept.
I would love to interview you now that you have declared for president.
Admit it. Can you think of anything more fun than me interviewing John McAfee?
Seriously. Well, maybe me interviewing President Trump.
But of all the people you could interview, it might be the most fun.
So... Here's a story that sounds like a small story, but might be a big story.
And there's a persuasion lesson in this.
Apparently Tehran, Tehran, how do you pronounce the big city in Iran?
Is it Tehran or Tehran?
Well, it's one of those. Fill it in your mind, whatever one is right.
Tehran. Apparently they've got a problem where they have periodically a horrible odor coming from some parts of the capital, and they can't seem to figure out what it is.
They don't know if it's a sewer problem or...
You know, some other weird effect.
But it's not all the time, but it's bad enough that even the Ayatollah said to the president, you know, you need to fix this.
Now, here's why this is important.
Whatever happens in Tehran in terms of the public and the protests against the leadership is probably the most important thing.
I'm seeing some help in pronunciation, except that everybody's giving me different answers.
So I guess I can't read your comments and decide because they're opposites.
Some people are saying Tehran, and some are saying Tehran, and I guess I don't know.
Maybe it's a difference whether you live there or whether you don't live there.
All right, but back to my bad smell in Tehran.
Here's the thing.
The more senses that you get involved in an opinion, the stronger it is.
So that's your... That's your persuasion tip for the day.
The more of your five senses that you can get involved, let's say you're trying to persuade somebody, if you can get them to see and touch and smell and hear, was that all five?
If you can get all five of their senses engaged in something you're trying to persuade, that's powerful.
Tehran, quite accidentally, has the smell of failure, the smell of rot.
The smell of a decaying old man who needs to be deposed.
Now, is there anybody in Iran, in Tehran, Tehran, is there anybody there who's thinking that the smell is connected in any way to the protests against the government?
Probably not. There's probably nobody there who's thinking in exactly those terms.
But here's where it gets interesting.
Here's where it gets interesting.
Have you heard of a book called Presuasion?
Presuasion, written by Robert Cialdini, who also wrote the incredible book Influence, which is about ways that people are influenced.
Presuasion, his follow-up book, which is a newer one, talks about how people can be primed For an opinion with a priming material that doesn't seem to be related to the thing you're trying to persuade.
Now the best example in the book is that people who are exposed to images of the American flag are more likely to vote Republican soon after.
Now, the American flag, of course, is a symbol of the entire country.
The American flag is not a Republican symbol.
It is one that the Republicans tend to use more often.
But I don't think that's why it's persuasive.
I think that when you see the flag, you sort of hone in, your brain goes to the Constitution and more traditional, historical, happy thoughts about the flag.
And And apparently those have some kind of weird overlap in your mind with republicanism or republican values.
So if it's true that something unrelated to republicans, at least not directly related, a flag, can cause you later to vote republican, are there other things that can prime you in the same way?
And if there are, are they intentional?
For example, if you are Israel...
Or the United States, and you had read the book, Presuasion, and you wanted to topple a rotten, old regime, what would you do to persuade the people who are on the ground?
Huh? Huh?
One of the ways you could do it, and I'm just speculating, because these things all have to be tested.
So there's no way to know if this would be a good idea or a bad idea unless they've been tested.
But it's easy to test.
All you do is you bring people in, you expose them to a smell, and then you ask their opinion.
And you see if their opinion has changed because they were exposed to a bad smell.
Now, if I said to you, Tehran smells like failure and death and old man, at the same time, somewhat unrelated, people are trying to get rid of their failed government that's run by an old man.
And that sensation of the smell, one of the big five of your senses, is sort of floating around in your brain.
Does that make you more likely to want to overthrow your government?
Here's my persuasion answer.
Probably yes, and probably a lot.
Now, I've talked before about persuasion being, you know, a game of millimeters.
You know, you could be a candidate and try to persuade voters all year, you know, for a year, and you'd be lucky if you can move a sliver of the independents, right?
So persuasion is not always a strong force.
It's got very weak forces, such as a candidate trying to move the electorate, and then it has strong forces, like a really good advertising campaign, for example.
Adding this persuasive smell to Tehran, if it came from the United States, or if it came from Israel, I'm just speculating, I'm not saying it did, but if they came up with that idea to make Tehran smell like failure, it's one of the smartest things ever, because that would be really powerful, I think.
Now, I don't think they'd do it unless they had tested it in some way, But it's easy to test.
And I'm pretty sure that if you tested it, you would get the result that I imagine you would get.
You would be persuaded to be more, let's say, more incentivized to get rid of the government and the smell because they would merge in your minds as the same thing.
And you would even have some logic to that because you'd say, well, if we had a good functioning government, you know, I'm sure they would have taken care of this smell.
Um... So, I'll just put that out there.
I'm not going to say that the smell is intentional, but I might ask, why isn't it?
Because it's probably a really good strategy.
So... The president used another technique which I will teach you.
It's called the small ask.
If you are a salesperson and you're trying to get somebody to buy a million dollar item, one of the techniques that a salesperson will do is they'll try to get you to agree or say yes to something smaller.
They'll try to get you to Do anything, you know, attend a meeting, to do you a favor, to, you know, anything.
If you can get somebody to do something small for you, it primes them to do something larger.
It's a basic salesperson technique.
President Trump, when he got, he got some hostages back in an exchange with Iran, some hostages that had been there for a while, and he tweeted, taken during the Obama administration, despite $150 billion gift, Returned during the Trump administration, meaning the hostages. Thank you to Iran on a very fair negotiation.
See, we can make a deal together, the president says.
See, we can make a deal together.
So the president is calling out this very small deal as successful, and it's something that Iran probably got a result they were happy about.
And it's a very small ask.
We're not going to ask you to give up nukes, but let's just do this little exchange.
It's very smart to do little things and then call them out as successful if you're trying to get a big thing done.
So that's good technique from the president.
I assume that the reason they did the exchange is because they were going to do them anyway.
I don't think they did the exchange as part of a persuasive package.
But once you've done it, you should do what the president did, which is call it out as a tiny example of progress that you could build on.
It's a good technique.
All right.
Did I talk about SE copy-up?
Yeah, I think I did.
All right, what else we got here?
I believe that's all I had.
I think we've solved all.
Playing the oldies, yeah.
So, have you noticed that the anti-Trumpers are flailing around to try to find some new attack on the president?
So you see Pelosi, she pivoted back to Russia because Ukraine didn't work out.
So she's like, oh, back to Russia, back to Russia.
It's all about Putin.
So apparently they're using the Kevin Bacon six degrees of separation to say that anything that Trump does in the international realm is good for Putin.
It's all about Putin.
And S.E. Kupp...
Tweeted that, you know, that the real reason that the president isn't going to leave office.
Now, if you're throwing in the mix the possibility that the president might not leave office after a second term, aren't you out of ammunition?
Isn't that a big old signal that says, you know, we've got nothing, so let's imagine that we can read his mind, and not only read his mind, but that he will do something that is literally impossible.
Now, I suppose anything's possible, but what are the odds that any president could get a third term in the United States?
And that's as close to zero as you can get.
So they first of all read his mind and see his intentions, Crazy.
Then they think he is somehow capable of doing that, while at the same time being the most incompetent president, in their view, of all time.
Why is the president so competent on just this one thing, being a dictator?
Really? He's impulsive and incompetent in everything else, according to his critics, but this one thing, he's really good at being a dictator in the future.
So, it's cray-cray.
All right. You are leaning on mind-reading way too much, which would be the example of what?
If you think that I'm relying on mind-reading because I'm saying that the Democrats are out of ammo, I will acknowledge I don't know what's in their minds, but...
If you're a monster and you're running at somebody who has a gun and they decide to throw the gun at you instead of shoot you, you can usually, not always, but you can usually assume the gun is empty because they threw the gun.
So when you see people saying he's going to become a dictator and stay in office, that's a lot like being out of ammo and just throwing the gun at the monster.
That's what it looks like.
But anybody who says I'm not a mind reader, you're correct.
I am not a mind reader. But I will tell you that you should read Loser Think because the entire impeachment process is going to be nothing but Loser Think.
It's going to be half opinions where people look at the cost but not the benefits or vice versa.
You're going to see the people leaving out context.
You're going to see mind reading.
You're going to see analogies You're going to see everything in my book, Loser Think, this coming week when the impeachment report comes out.
So that'll be fun.
Yes, Loser Think is available as an audiobook as well.
Thank you.
I'm glad you like the audiobooks.
So some people are saying they've enjoyed it.
Wordy Snurdy is read it three times already.
Yeah, I'm hearing that a lot.
I'm hearing a lot of people are reading and then rereading the book, which is a really good sign.
Oh, let's talk about Saudi Arabia, just quickly.
So I saw a tweet by some anti-Trumper who said, well, we're being awfully nice to Saudi Arabia, awfully non-belligerent after one of their citizens shot some military people on a base and killed them.
And the critics said, huh, if Iran did that, we'd be looking for war.
But Saudi Arabia does that, and we're just like, oh, whatever.
Now, is that the dumbest comment you've ever heard?
Because there is a difference between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Lots of differences. But one of them is our ally.
And the other is our nemesis.
Why in the world would you treat an ally and a nemesis the same way?
Why would you treat them the same?
Who can tweet in public something so dumb that they think we should treat our allies and our enemies exactly the same based on what they do?
I'm not defending Saudi Arabia.
I'm saying they got some issues.
They got some questions that need to be answered.
But it is nonetheless true that if a Saudi citizen kills Americans, you don't really think it's because it came from the top.
You don't think it was ordered by, you know, MBS. But if an Iranian citizen Military person killed Americans.
You would kind of think it came from the top.
So why would you treat those two situations the same?
You should not. Alright, that's all I've got for now.
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