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Jan. 24, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
27:29
Episode 797 Scott Adams PART2: (Continued) Mopey Dick Trying to Harpoon Trump and More

Content: (Continued from Part1) Simple Impeachment defense...there WAS a national interest Adam Schiff winning (so far) with loserthink Democrats beginning to embrace SAFE Gen IV nuclear Netanyahu and his rivals invited to White House --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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You know they're saying he used it to dig up dirt and that they're withholding documents.
That's all you know, all the details the public doesn't know.
It's just too confusing. But you know that.
Now do it the other way.
What's the president's defense, not for me, but what's the president's defense as so far expressed by his defenders in the impeachment?
I don't know. I watched it and I actually don't know.
I think it was something like, your accusations don't have merit.
I don't know. But here's what it should have been.
It should have been, there's only one relevant question.
Did the President have a legitimate interest in looking to Biden in Burisma?
The Democrats say he did have a good reason.
That's really the end of the case.
So we yield our time to the Democrats.
Our entire defense will be five minutes.
He had a good reason to look into it, and the Democrats have acknowledged that because they say he believed that there was something there.
That's what they say. We believe it too.
So we're all on the same page.
We all believe that the President thought there was something legitimate in terms of the national interest that should be looked at.
That's it. I wouldn't say anything else.
I wouldn't defend my president's confidentiality with their advisors and all that stuff.
It's all important. But if you're trying to convince the public, you need to keep it simple.
And I don't think that's happened.
So I expect them to focus in on that point.
All right. Let's talk about Schiff and his presentation.
I'm going to start with a positive.
And I said this before.
Schiff is like the Energizer Bunny.
I have never seen Schiff look tired.
Have you? Have you ever seen him look tired?
Now, I think he's pure evil.
But man, the guy's got energy.
He's like a pit bull.
And as I said before, I recently learned that he also runs marathons and triathletes and stuff.
It turns out that Schiff is like a really good athlete.
I'm actually very impressed, and that's a good role model, and I don't want to lose that good part just because the other part is pure evil.
So was it, I think CNN had this headline, Schiff gets choked up during emotional speech.
What? What theater were you watching?
I didn't see Schiff get choked up.
I saw him pretending to be choked up.
Do you think Schiff is really choked up about any of this stuff?
Do you think he even believes his case?
I don't think there's a slight case that he even believes his own case.
So it's hilarious that he fooled anybody into thinking he had genuine emotion in this.
That was not genuine emotion.
That was just acting.
So I've been mocking Schiff for his many cases of loser-think, as I describe in my best-selling book, Loser-Think, all the bad ways of thinking and arguing.
And he uses all of them. Laura Ingram pointed out the mind reading.
So he makes lots of assumptions about what strangers were thinking in their secret thoughts.
He also uses laundry list persuasion, which is bad persuasion, because if you don't have one good reason, you have to give ten.
And it makes you think, well, there's no one good reason, but if you put all ten together...
So he's doing laundry list persuasion, mind reading.
He's doing half pinions.
A half pinion is where you show one side.
Now, because this is a domain in which people are just being advocates, of course they're only doing their side.
But... In terms of loser think, showing one side of a decision is irrational.
It's not irrational in terms of persuasion, but I'll talk about that.
He shows the failure of imagination.
How many times have you seen Schiff say, what other explanation is there except this?
Well, if you can't think of another explanation for the facts you're seeing, it could be because there's only one explanation.
It could also be Because you're not good at thinking up alternate explanations.
It could be just a failure of your own imagination.
If you can't think of more than one reason to explain the facts you see, the problem might be on your end.
You can't tell the difference.
They look exactly the same.
Then, of course, confirmation bias.
You know, it acts like every piece of evidence fits together in this big mosaic, but in fact, that's not how life works.
Lots of times it's just confirmation bias.
Now, people ask me, why are you saying that Schiff was winning yesterday at the same time you're saying he's using all this loser thinking and it's all just irrational babble?
Those two things are not incompatible.
When I talk about persuasion, the things that matter the most is what messages are getting through.
How much time are you spending on it, and what was that message?
He's spending a lot of time making at least the people watching the news focus on what he wants you to focus on.
That is a gigantic persuasion win.
The fact that in the process of doing that, he's using exclusively, almost, loser think.
There's lies, there's stuff taken into context.
The videos he's showing are just lies.
They're just taken out of context to reverse their meaning.
He's irrational.
He's reading minds. Does any of that matter?
Not really. Because my book before LoserThink was Winn Bigley, Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter.
What he's trying to do is not be logical.
He's not trying to convince A judge or a real jury who might try really hard to concentrate on facts.
He's trying to persuade the public.
And you don't need good thinking to persuade the public.
You just need your message to be repeated a lot, focused on, having emotional content.
That's about it. So his completely irrational, loser-think arguments are very effective because of how much time he's getting And the fact that we haven't heard yet the rebuttal.
I would expect the situation to reverse.
When the defense is doing its full push, he's going to get annihilated.
Don Lemon has a little legal problem.
You may know this.
It's an older story, but it's bubbling up again.
I'm not sure why. But there's a man who's suing Don Lemon, CNN host, for allegedly A sexual assault.
Now, I don't want to give you the details of it, but let's just say something creepy happened at a bar.
Drinking was involved.
Nobody took their clothes off.
I don't want to get into the details, but it's a creepy accusation if it happened.
Now, of course, CNN is quite famous for...
Me Too stories, as really the entire press is famous for that.
There are a lot of them. But the question for CNN is, when do you believe the accuser?
Because the accuser's got a story that, on the surface, sounds pretty credible.
I think there were witnesses. I think there were multiple witnesses, actually.
Now, if those multiple witnesses are saying the same thing, and that's the early reporting that they are, why does CNN keep him on the payroll?
It's a good question, right?
Now, I'm very much in favor of innocent until proven guilty, so if he worked for me, if I were his boss, I would definitely keep him on the payroll.
And I would also have kept everyone else on the payroll who was accused of things while the trial or the process is working its way through.
But, here's all I want to say about that.
If CNN ever did decide...
To cancel Don Lemon, let's say the lawsuit went someplace.
Would we ever see this headline, CNN Sours on Lemon?
That's all. That's the whole reason I'm telling you this story, because I don't care too much about it, other than, will we ever see Fox News with this headline, CNN Sours on Lemon?
Well, I hope so. Well, no, I don't hope that anything bad happens to him.
I just hope, if something does, That we get a funny headline in it.
But I don't wish anything bad on anybody.
Alright, so there was an interesting poll from National Emerson College.
Poll. And they asked supporters of the various Democratic candidates if they'd be willing to support any Democratic nominee if their preferred one doesn't get picked.
So at the top of the list was Elizabeth Warren.
So 90% of the people who want Warren to be the nominee also say that That they would support, well, whoever gets nominated.
That's good. Biden's at 87%, Buttigieg's 86%, so they're clustered toward the top around that 90%.
So what does that tell you?
Well, let's keep going.
So Bloomberg, 78%.
He's sort of in the middle of the pack.
And then at the bottom, it gets interesting.
Sanders, only 54% of the people...
Who say they want Sanders as their first choice are willing to pick just any old Democrat if it's not him.
Only half?
And Yang's not exactly half.
Yang supporters say that only half of them would support the Democrat if it's not Yang.
Half! Only half of them.
So what's that tell you? What does that tell you about who would be the stronger candidate?
Well, I think this is sort of upside down from what you think.
If you think that the best candidate...
Well, let me put it this way.
I'll go right to the punchline.
The reason that Yang has only 50% of the people who say they want him to be president would be willing to support any Democrat is clearly because they're not Democrats.
In other words, Yang and Sanders are picking up A whole bunch of support from people who don't maybe consider themselves quite totally Democrat.
They might be independents.
In some cases they might actually be Republicans who just happen to like this one guy, Yang, because he's more science-based or whatever it is.
So I'll tell you what this tells me.
That the two candidates with the biggest chance of beating Trump would be Sanders and Yang.
And here's why.
I believe that the Democrats who are just solid Democrats are just going to vote Democrat.
All the ones, even the ones who say, 90% of them say that they would support Warren, but, you know, that's their first choice, but 10% of them apparently would not support the other candidate if it's somebody else.
I don't believe that. I believe that something like 100% of the people who support Warren, probably 100% of them, will still, no matter what, vote Democrat, because the alternative is Trump, right?
But what about those Sanders and Yang people, where about half of the people Well, if you did pick Sanders or Yang, doesn't that suggest you would pick up a lot of independents and Republicans that you couldn't get with any other candidate?
Am I wrong? I feel like I need to be checked on the logic of that.
But my logic is, Sanders and Yang are clearly signaling that they can pick up people who are not Democrats.
Because if they were solid Democrats, Half of them would not abandon their candidate just because another Democrat got elected.
I feel like this poll is telling us as clearly as possible.
I might be wrong about this.
I feel like... I'm not quite confident in my opinion on this.
I feel like it's saying Yang and Sanders are the ones that could beat Trump.
All right. There's a study that says one-third of household food is wasted.
This is important because I've been saying forever...
That the way to balance the budget is to figure out how to lower the cost of living a high-quality life.
Now, do you know why a third of the food in American households is wasted?
Well, a variety of reasons, right?
But one of the big reasons given is that you have to drive to get the food.
In our system, you have to get in the car, you've got to plan it, and you go and drive and get some food.
And what does that cause you to do?
What causes you to buy more food than you need today?
Because you don't want to drive every day.
So you buy a bunch of food.
Some of it goes bad before you eat the stuff that you like the most.
So there's something about your food being far away from where you want to eat it that causes a third of it to be wasted.
There are other factors, so that probably doesn't explain the whole third.
But that's the hypothesis for why it's so wasted.
I saw this in the context of how to design a proper future city, Where your food is close to you.
So you can just walk outside.
So let's say it's 4.30 in the afternoon and you want to eat dinner at 6.
You just walk outside.
Ten minutes away, there's a market.
You grab a bag full of fresh food and you go eat what you bought today.
So if you designed the way people live to be more efficient, you could cut their food costs by a third.
By a third. And they'd be not only...
Just as happy. They would be happier because the food that they did eat would be fresher.
So I think there's a gigantic opportunity to lower the national debt because if you can lower the cost of living in general, then all of the people who need a little extra help won't need as much help.
And that's where most of our money is going.
Here's an interesting little signal of things to come.
I talked about this before, but I'm going to add a point to it.
So I talked about how the president agreeing to be part of the trillion tree planting to combat climate change, and the fact that he recently said it wasn't a hoax, strongly suggests that the president is sort of migrating toward the center.
The center being, you know, that climate change is enough to worry about.
We don't know everything about everything.
Maybe we can't predict the future too accurately.
Maybe the alarm is too high, but it's something to worry about.
So you can see the president shifting toward the middle.
Now, I said that before, but we also see Democrats starting to embrace nuclear power, especially the newer types that are safer.
Generation 4 is coming down the pike, if we can develop it quickly enough.
Doesn't melt down, because it's built so it can't.
And it eats existing nuclear waste as its fuel, in some cases.
So you're watching two things happening.
You saw two highly polarized camps.
You know, AOC is saying, it's the end of the world, we're all going to die.
Trump originally saying, that's all a hoax.
Completely opposites.
But, every time there's a new story that says the temperatures are the highest they've been or whatever, it gets a little more convincing.
That something's happening, whether it's man-made or partly man-made or not.
But there is some general agreement that the temperatures look like they're going up.
And it looks like Trump is sort of drifting toward the middle, which is absolutely the smartest thing you should do politically.
Forget about the science.
Politically, it's a no-brainer.
Politically, drifting toward the middle is exactly what you want to do.
Because that's such a big issue, and it's going to be a big issue for the election.
So you're seeing both sides drifting toward the middle.
I think it's because we're now recognizing a common enemy.
It's the difference between the two sides thinking that the other is the enemy, which is where we've been, right?
The Green New Deal people are saying, you Republicans are the enemy, because you're going to get us all killed.
And the Republicans are saying, you green new deal people are the enemy, because you're going to ruin our economy and get us all killed.
But it feels like this gradual move to the center is because both sides are finally realizing there's a common enemy, the temperature.
Now, I'm not going to get into the debate of what's real and what's not.
I'm just talking about the politics of it, that it's drifting toward the middle.
And here's another sign of it.
There was one of the articles on Fox News, which famously is pro-Trump, and that's the important point.
So Fox News, a very pro-Trump entity, has this headline, Did Trump have a change of heart over climate change policy?
It talks about, on The Five, Greg Gottfeld was talking about the same topic, and noting that the president seems, because of the trillion tree planting, It seems he's softened on his position, moving toward the middle a little bit.
Here's the interesting part.
There was nothing in this article that was negative about climate change.
It was just straight-up reporting that this is what the Five said, and this is what the President did.
Now, I feel as if a year ago that would not have looked the same.
I feel as if Fox News would have said something a little more skeptical sounding because its readership is certainly many of them are in that camp.
So it's looking to me like there's something happening there.
Now, as you know, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is working on a plan for energy and consumption Clean climate.
Those two things are really the same topic.
And we might see some good stuff coming out of there.
And so we're definitely seeing a movement on the Republican side toward accepting at least the risk of climate change.
So that's a big deal.
Here's another little thing that's bubbling up.
Apparently the White House has invited Israel's Prime Minister and his main Political rivals to Washington.
This is weird, isn't it?
So the White House has invited Netanyahu, but also his main political rivals, the people who disagree with him, to meet with them in Washington to talk about a potential Palestinian peace plan.
Makes sense to me, because if you can't get Israel to agree on a plan, you know, internally, well, you're done, right?
So step one...
Get the Israelis on roughly the same page so that there's at least one less thing to worry about before you even talk to anybody else.
Why are they doing that now?
I think maybe it's because conditions are changing.
And there are apparently massive hundreds of thousands of people protesting in Iraq to get the US out and we've said, at least preliminarily, we've said no.
They're not leaving. So And also, you know, you're up to date on everything with Iran, and we'd like to have some kind of a nuke deal with Iran that actually did prevent them from getting nuclear weapons, which we don't have now.
Here's what I think.
And they're also talking about the White House has delayed a few times their big peace plan ideas for the Palestinian-Israeli situation, but that maybe they're starting to ramp up again.
Because they wouldn't call Israel in to a meeting if they weren't serious about trying to ramp it up again.
Here's what's interesting.
Look what we have to offer now.
Now, if you believe that Iran is the biggest influence on the Palestinians, and let's say Hezbollah, and the anti-Israel forces in general, the proxies, What's different?
Well, Solomon A is no longer on the playing field.
So the main military guy who was causing the main military problems is now off the chessboard.
And because Iran did that semi-fake attack, They've said, well, we're done retaliating.
And as far as I know, and maybe the reporting is not good on this yet, but as far as I know, they have stuck to calling, you know, winding, not winding down, but at the moment the proxies that you would expect to be active don't seem extra active.
I mean, I'm sure that there will always be some missiles lobbed toward our allies or us, But it looks like something in Iran is different.
Their economy is on the brink, so they're probably more flexible than ever.
At the same time, Iraq's citizens, at least a lot of them, seem to want us to leave.
What this creates is, for the first time, all of the variables have fell into place for a big deal.
And it goes like this.
And, you know, of course the U.S. is not going to offer this unless it's the last thing.
In order to get a peace deal, we would need Iran to stand down from its proxies, stop supporting terror.
You would need Iran to agree to negotiate on some kind of a deal that had more teeth in return for sanctions coming off their economy.
But here's the big one.
And this asset just got created out of nothing.
It might be that what we have to negotiate is leaving Iraq, which we want to do anyway.
The president has created a situation in which he can say, I've got something to trade.
Here's something to trade.
How about we get out of the Middle East?
Would Iran consider themselves victorious if they got the United States military out of the Middle East, or at least reduced its footprint to something Something manageable.
Iran would actually call that a victory.
Wouldn't it? And I think it would be.
I think they could legitimately say it was a major victory if they got the U.S. out of the Middle East.
At least in substantial ways in Iraq anyway.
I think that that's a deal under the right circumstances we might be willing to make.
Because we want to leave anyway, but we don't want to leave until it's a good idea to leave.
So I'm thinking... That we've never had this situation before, where Iran is presumably desperate for a deal because their economy is on the brink.
We have something to give, which is us leaving Iraq, which doesn't cost us much, which is the ultimate deal situation.
You want a situation where somebody can give up something that's the key to the deal, but the thing they're giving up didn't cost them much.
So it's possible to give it up.
It's possible for us to give up Iraq.
Under the right conditions.
And then the other thing that's the right conditions is that you've got a dealmaker as a president, and everybody recognizes that.
Everybody in the Middle East understands that this president will make a deal.
It's not dogma.
He's a dealmaker. And that gets in their heads, and I think that that actually makes it more likely to do a deal simply because when they think of the president, they think of dealmaking.
And we're such simple creatures that if you just say, this guy's a dealmaker, a dealmaker, a dealmaker, if you hear that enough, what do you start thinking?
Just uncritically, you say to yourself, maybe we can make a deal.
So just the fact that his reputation as a dealmaker greatly increases the chance that people's minds will be in dealmaking mode.
That's a huge deal, and it's invisible, right?
It's just part of The benefit of this president is he brings that with him to every situation, and it takes everybody's mind to deal-making.
Because they think, well, that's the variable we're dealing with now.
But the other thing that we've never had before is the strongest, I think, the strongest leaders we've ever had in all areas there.
We have some really capable leaders.
And I'm even talking about Iran.
I'm talking about Saudi Arabia.
Sure, sure, sure. We've got our problems, right?
Sure, sure, sure. MBS needs to explain why he's killing journalists.
But Saudi Arabia is a solid ally at this point, and they've got a strong leader who's also a dealmaker.
He's willing to do what other people were not willing to do.
Netanyahu, obviously a dealmaker.
Iran, always dealmakers.
Iran, they're dealmakers.
So we have the most dealmaking, solid, sane people we've ever had dealing.
Probably Solomon A. was the big problem there.
And we may be finding out that his absence makes everything better.
So, I think I hit all of my main points here.
I think I did.
Alright. Somebody says he wasn't a journalist.
He was really just a spy for somebody.
Yeah, I saw the thing about the...
So Elizabeth Warren wants to cancel student debt and a citizen confronted her and said, what about all the money I paid?
Why am I being penalized for being good at saving?
And I would say, that's a good question.
And it's probably why this whole student debt thing will never work.
Alright, thank you.
Oh, people are complimenting me on my Periscope today.
Thank you. I appreciate that.
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