Episode 1117 Scott Adams: Persuasion Against Antifa, Cohen's Book, Gravity Batteries, Fake News of the Day
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Of course more testing...finds more COVID19
Vaccine availability before the election
Whiteboard1: What Democrats, Antifa and BLM want
Whiteboard2: What Republicans want
The military industrial complex, the press and wars
Mail-in voting in the year 2020
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Yeah, that's a look out my window at the smoky California air.
That is the air I have to breathe.
If you're thinking that looks like fog, you'd be wrong.
If you think it looks like low clouds, you'd be wrong.
That is what I have to breathe.
And it's like that every summer lately because California is a mess.
But let's talk about other stuff.
But before we do that, should we prepare?
Yes, we should. Because the most exciting part of the day is about to happen now.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip.
And by the way, Omar, I haven't forgotten about you.
I am going to get to that.
All you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or a stein, a canteen, a jug or a flask, a 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 thing that makes everything better.
Except the air quality.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Ah.
Well, there is a smell of sulfur in the air.
So I'm guessing Kamala Harris is in the state.
I don't know, just a guess.
Somebody alerted me to the fact that Wikipedia has been updated to include my hoax.
Except that they don't know it's a hoax.
Which should tell you everything you need to know about Wikipedia.
So Wikipedia thinks that I believe that Biden and Harris have satanic messaging.
The part they miss...
Is that when I introduced this idea, I said publicly and clearly, I don't believe in Satan.
I'm just going to see if they take me out of context.
Sure enough, got taken out of context, which is hilarious to me, would be frightening to the rest of you probably.
So there's a story about a California fire that's already burned 10,000 acres, and it was a It was started by a gender reveal party that had some kind of explosive device or incendiary device or something.
Anyway, they had a party.
They exploded something and it burned 10,000 acres.
And I wondered what name you would give the baby.
What would be a good baby name for a baby whose gender reveal party destroyed 10,000 acres in flames and counting?
I'm gonna go with Sparky.
Don't you think Sparky would be a good nickname, no matter what the baby's name would be?
Hey, how'd you get that name?
Well, it's embarrassing.
My parents burned up half of California, so they call me Sparky.
Michael Cohen's book, I guess, is out because there's a bunch of tweets about it, and I don't know if you've read any of the quotes.
But they're so over the top that they actually just read as funny now.
There was a time when you'd say to yourself, Trump said what?
And you'd think, ooh, I'm a little worried about that.
What's that mean? But it's become so ridiculous at this point, the things that people are making up and putting in Trump's mouth.
I think the White House called it fan fiction.
And I've got a feeling none of it is going to have any impact.
I think these are all the things that people think are going to have an impact and absolutely nobody cares.
Here's why. Number one, we have four years of Trump.
We don't really have to wonder what he would do or how he would act as president.
We know exactly how he's going to act.
So revealing all these little things he may or may not have said at some point in the past doesn't really tell you anything you need to know.
Because what you need to know is what kind of president would he be?
Asked and answered. We just watched it for four years.
So if you want more of that, You know how to get it.
And if you don't want more of that, you don't really need to read Michael Cohen's book.
Because what will Michael Cohen's book tell you that you didn't know already?
Did you know? This may come as a shock to you, but did you know that Trump sometimes says things which people find offensive?
I know! Big surprise, right?
You didn't know that.
And that's really all we're finding out.
So because the fake news and the critics want to put it in the worst possible sense, they'll turn it into, he's a racist, he's a whatever.
But it all kind of fits into one category, doesn't it?
If you take everything that Trump is accused of saying or thinking, and you just sort of try to summarize it, it's that he offends people.
Who didn't already know that?
Oh, somebody is saying that the baby name should be Smokey.
Smokey would be a funny baby name.
Smokey, Sparky.
All right. And here's the trick that the fake news and the publishers and the authors are playing on you.
And it goes like this. Imagine, if you will, close your eyes and imagine that All of your private conversations, the things you've said one-on-one to your closest confidants over the course of your life, imagine that all of your private conversations suddenly became public.
How would you look?
Would you look offensive?
Maybe. Maybe just a little bit.
Would you look like you're a little bit biased or bigoted or maybe have some bad qualities?
Would you look like you're a hornbag or you're crazy?
Maybe. And here's the trick.
It's sort of a magic trick, if you will, on the public.
The trick is that the way all of us talk privately to people we trust is completely different Than the way we would speak publicly.
Because if you're speaking publicly, you will speak in a way that you will protect your reputation.
But also, importantly, you would protect the feelings of the people you are talking to.
Because you don't need to make any enemies, right?
So when you speak in public, you speak a certain way that doesn't get anybody hurt, or you try to.
When you speak privately, you don't have to worry about that.
Because nobody's going to hear it except the person you're talking to in a perfect world.
In the real world, if you run for president and they decide they don't like you, they might write a book someday.
So when they take private conversations, which wouldn't hurt anybody, and they move them into the political realm, I say that responsibility for the message once moved from the private realm to the public should be on the messenger.
That's right. So anything that you learned in the Cohen book that is offensive should be attributed to Cohen.
Because if Cohen didn't tell you, you wouldn't know it.
Are the things that you would say in public that you think are not really harmful, they're not meant in any bad intention, but they're pretty raw?
You would just say it privately.
You just wouldn't say the same thing in public.
Let me give you a specific example so you can get the sense of this.
President Trump is alleged to have said that the service people who fought in Vietnam were suckers.
Now, I don't think you can believe any of these reports, because all these anonymous reports, etc., they just don't have credibility.
But let's take it as an example, and suppose he did.
Suppose that did happen.
What would you say to somebody in a private conversation if they said to you, you know, I think that the people who went to Vietnam They meant well.
They were serving their country.
But you feel bad for 19-year-olds, 18-year-olds who are joining the service because they don't know or they didn't know that the press and the government were running a scam, that the war was not legitimate.
And so, privately, you might say to your friends, you know, I think the service people who fought in that war As noble as their motives were, they were suckers.
They were suckers.
Because if they had known that the war was useless and couldn't be won and didn't have a purpose anyway, maybe they would have resisted.
But instead, they were good Americans, good patriots, did as they were told, did as their country asked.
That's not wrong.
It's just that the purpose they were asked to go fight didn't really have a good justification.
So, if you were talking to your friend privately who understood you, knew your mind, knew your heart, if you will, and you said, you know, I gotta say, the people who fought in that war were kind of suckers.
Would that offend you if your friend said it and nobody else was supposed to hear it?
Let's say neither of you had served, or, alternately, let's say both of you had served, so that your peers, whichever way that goes, I think you would not be offended by that.
Hoodwinked might be better, as somebody says in the comments.
Hoodwinked might be a better way to put it.
You know that Trump uses the more aggressive language for just about everything.
So if his meeting was these young people who got drafted in most cases, they didn't choose it.
They got drafted.
And they get drafted into a bad situation.
If he called them suckers, privately, would you have disagreed with that if you knew that he respected the service?
Because he's your friend, so you know that.
You just think that he's making a case that the government screwed a generation.
Right? So I've got a feeling that when people hear these stories that Trump said privately, And they hear that somebody who was really an asshole made them public.
Let me say this as clearly as I can.
If there's something that you know happened privately, and you're the one who makes it public, and then it becomes offensive because it's public, couldn't have offended anybody privately because there was nobody listening to it.
You're the asshole.
There's just no way around that.
It's not the person who said it.
It's you. It's you, Michael Cohen.
Are the one who made it offensive by making it public.
It is you, Atlantic Magazine and Jeffrey Goldberg, who are the asshole.
Because whatever Trump said or didn't say could not have hurt anybody when he did it.
And he would have known that.
A private conversation just doesn't hurt anybody.
By making it public, plenty of hurt.
Because it actually degrades the readiness of our military.
Because it puts some questions in people's heads about the Commander in Chief.
That is one of the most despicable acts of unpatriotic assholery you will ever see in your life.
It would be hard to even invent a scenario Short of actually directly hurting people, that you could do a thing that would be more despicable than taking a private conversation that didn't hurt anybody and turn it into a public conversation that degrades the entire military readiness of the United States, creates chaos, creates a race war, creates God knows what.
That is serious assholery.
I mean, that's like a 10 out of 10.
And I don't know if the public is sophisticated enough to do the mental gymnastics of saying, oh, wait, wait, wait.
I have to view this as though it were a private conversation, because that's the way it originally started.
And that's a whole different context.
All right, so I've got a feeling that Just like the Michael Wolff book, the Michael Cohen book will be, you know, some headlines for a few days and then everybody will say, eh, we don't like Michael Cohen.
How much do people like lawyers?
Not much, right?
You know, unfortunately lawyers do not have a great reputation.
But let me ask you this.
How much do people like lawyers who screw their own client?
Now you could say to yourself, hey, Trump should have pardoned Cohen, whatever.
But isn't it true that what you see is a lawyer who you already felt a little not so comfortable with, because lawyers are not that popular, and then this lawyer actually publicly crucified his own client and his ex-best friend.
That's the worst person in the world.
If your lawyer goes to jail, that's a bad lawyer.
If your lawyer goes to jail and then writes a tell-all book in which at least some of this looks like it's just completely made up, that's the worst lawyer who ever lived.
You couldn't even design a worse lawyer than this.
How about some good news?
Last week, a British energy startup came up with this idea that looks like it could work for storing energy using massive weights.
So in other words, they'll use energy to lift a weight on a pulley, and then when they want to release the energy, in a battery sense, like a battery, they just let the gigantic weight Go down the pulley and it generates electricity by making something turn.
It turns out that this idea looks actually completely doable on paper and that it's come down to just an engineering kind of a situation.
Now it might turn out that like windmills it sounds better on paper but then you have maintenance issues and it kills some birds and nobody saw that coming so much or at least not to the extent that it happened.
So we don't know if it'll work But apparently they want to use abandoned mines that have gigantic vertical holes that go down.
It could be like a mile of depth, and put that giant weight in there, and apparently they can generate just a ton of electricity.
But remember, it's a battery, so you have to put the electricity in before you can get it out.
But still, having a Gigantic battery would be cool.
Somebody on Twitter, whose name I didn't write down, but it was a good comment, I wish I had, said, why do you need a big hole in the ground?
Why don't you just use something like a train car on a mountain on a train track?
Why does it have to be under the ground?
Why can't it just be some heavy object on a track?
To which I say, I wonder.
There may be a difference in just how much friction is involved.
Maybe there's an engineering reason why that isn't good enough to just put it on a hill.
But here's the other thing that I ask.
If you can dig or even find gigantic holes, can't you use those gigantic holes to condition homes?
Meaning, use the fact that the temperature under the earth It's usually around 56 degrees no matter what.
You can use that to pump up air to cool a home if it's too warm or to warm a home if it's below 56 degrees.
So couldn't you use abandoned mines wherever there are gigantic holes in the ground that exist?
Could you not use them for building a town nearby that uses that for its heating and cooling and takes 50% off the cost of that?
Or something. Anyway, so there's some good news happening because entrepreneurs continue to entrepreneur and inventors continue to invent.
And while we're concentrating on all this political assholery, there are real good citizens creating good solutions for the future.
Yeah, geothermal is one of the words I was looking for there.
All right. The company name is Gravitricity.
Gravitricity is the name of them.
They need a little help on the name of their company.
Alright. Yeah, and somebody's mentioning in the comments, Elon Musk's company, the boring company, that bores holes.
I've often thought that if you just bored a gigantic tunnel...
That would be the first start of building a town above it for the same reasons.
You could use your tunnel for running all of your utilities, but it could also be a source of your heating and cooling, could be transportation under the town, could be a lot of things.
I've said this before, but our ability to inexpensively dig really deep holes is going to be one of the key technologies of the future.
The fact that Elon Musk Owns a whole digging technology and company.
It kind of tells you that that's a bigger deal than just a good idea.
It really is the future.
The ability to dig cheaply underground is the future.
Here's a thought I want to just put in your head as we're obsessed with all things coronavirus and virus and epidemics.
Have you noticed how much China is treating Islam like a virus.
If it's true the stories we're hearing about what China is doing with the Uyghur minority, their Muslim minority within China, and the reports are that they're being rounded up and put in essentially concentration camps, and who knows what other badness is happening besides that.
But if you look at the way China treats Islam, They treat it exactly like a virus.
Because the first thing they do is quarantine.
And like a virus, like a regular virus, religion does transfer by association.
If you never had connection with anybody physically or over the internet or any other way, if you never had contact with anybody who had a religion, you probably wouldn't develop one spontaneously.
It's Physical contact and communication that makes religion spread.
So I'm not going to say this is good or bad, because you can put your own obvious morality on top of this, but it's interesting that China treats religion like a medical problem.
Are they wrong?
Because we treat mental health as a medical problem, don't we?
We didn't always. But today, our more enlightened view of the world is that if you have a mental problem, that's a health problem.
It's no more or less a health problem than a broken leg.
It's just part of your body is not functioning the way you'd want to.
And And we would treat things like, let's say you were brainwashed to do something terrible, you know, to be a Nazi or something.
We would treat that as like a mental condition.
And it's interesting that China treats religion in general.
Now, in this case, they're treating Islam that way, but I think they do the same with the Falun Gong.
And I think they would do the same with any Christian sect in China, if there was such a thing.
So it has more to do with religion than it has to do with Islam.
But it's an interesting approach, as immoral as it is.
Here's something we learned from the coronavirus, that the regular flu was always bullshit.
I saw the president say this in an interview.
I didn't see it when it went live.
It was from not too long ago he did an interview in which he was pointing out that he personally, the president, knew several people who had died from the coronavirus.
So personally, he knew several people who died from coronavirus.
But as Trump said, and I've said a number of times as well, how is it that we've gone our entire lives and never heard of anybody dying from the regular flu?
Your whole life. Because even if you say to yourself, but Scott, Scott, Scott, this coronavirus killed way more people, so it's obvious that you would be aware of more of them.
To which I say, no, no, let me do the math for you.
I've been alive, let's say, let's round it off from the moments, let's say 50 years or so of my life, I've been old enough that I would have noticed if anybody died for a specific reason.
So let's take 50 years of my life and multiply it by the 50,000 people that supposedly died.
Cover up your speaker for a moment.
Alexa, what is 50 times 50,000?
50 times 50,000 is 2.5 million.
So that would be 2.5 million people who would have died just in the United States of the regular flu during my, let's say, that 50-year period when I was old enough to know if somebody died and why they died.
Over 2 million people And I don't know any of them?
None of them? That's ten times as many as have died, more than ten times, have died from the coronavirus in the United States.
And I don't know anybody who's died of the regular flu.
Now, Trump called this out in the interview, and I've never heard anybody else say it who was a public figure.
And he just raised the question, why have I never heard of anybody dying of the regular flu?
Now, he was using it more to make the point that the coronavirus was bad stuff, which was a really good way to make the point.
I'm making a slightly different point, which is I think we've been lied to for my whole life.
I don't think the regular flu is all that dangerous compared to what we've been told.
I do think the coronavirus is dangerous, but part of what made people say the coronavirus It's not that dangerous is the belief that 50,000 people a year were dying from regular flu.
I don't think that ever has happened.
I think it was always bullshit and that the coronavirus is special.
That's what I think. But I could be wrong.
It's always a good thing to say after everything you assert.
If I could give you one good habit for open-mindedness, it would be this.
We know from the study of influence and persuasion, we know that if people simply make a statement or write down a statement, especially if they say it in public, they come to believe the thing they said even if they didn't believe it in the first place.
So when I finish speculation by saying, I could be wrong, the I could be wrong is not just for you.
When I finish a statement that is obviously speculative, And then I say, but I could be wrong.
I'm talking to myself.
And that's part of my self-programming to remind myself I could be wrong.
It's a really good thing to do that.
So if you think I was talking to you when I said I could be wrong, I was a little bit, but mostly that's programming myself.
That's a good strategy.
You should use it. So, one thing that Black Lives Matter and Antifa have in common, besides wanting to tear down the government, is they both seem relatively okay with sexual assault.
Now, isn't that a weird thing to say?
Because if you ask them, I'm sure they would say, no, no, are you crazy?
We're not okay with sexual assault.
That's crazy. But they do act that way.
Because Antifa literally wants to do away with the police.
What do they think is going to happen when the police go away?
It's going to be massive sexual assaults, as well as massive every other kind of crime.
There's not really an alternative to that happening.
So we know that Antifa wants an end state in which there would be massive sexual assault.
They don't say that's a goal, but it's obviously what would happen.
There's no way around that, really.
Black Lives Matter, as you're watching them, they're talking about the...
I'm forgetting the names.
There are so many victims now that I'm getting their names mixed up.
What a terrible world when there are so many famous victims of police actions that I can't keep their names straight.
At one point, it was a perfectly reasonable thing for the protesters to say.
They would say the name, say the name, say the name.
To make sure you didn't forget somebody who had been in this situation.
But now there are enough of them that I think I could be forgiven for forgetting which one is which.
It's getting hard to keep them all straight.
Which, of course, is Black Lives Matter's very point.
And so that point is taken.
But we're watching this latest case of the gentleman who got shot seven times and was accused of a sexual assault before that.
Now, I'm going to say alleged and accused because just because he got shot seven times does not make him guilty of an unrelated crime.
Can we agree at least?
Can we at least agree that no matter how many times he got shot for something else, That doesn't make him guilty of the unrelated allegation.
But it might be. But it does seem to me that Black Lives Matter is de-emphasizing the sexual assault, emphasizing the police action, and that's a choice.
It's a choice to, you know, lower that priority.
So it's one thing that Antifa and Black Lives Matter have in common is less concern about sexual assault.
And I think the Republicans get that right, because the Republicans are kind of obsessed with that topic, especially if anybody underage is involved.
That is a very Republican kind of thing, to go after stopping that.
And the President's actually had amazing...
Well, during his administration, it's hard to know who gets all the credit for what, but during the Trump administration, the actions against every kind of sexual trafficking Have been unprecedented.
So that's another gigantic difference that should be mentioned more, I think.
I want to confess some stupidity.
And I know I'm doing this, and let me remind you before I do this, that I've told you that one of my superpowers, and indeed I think one of the values that I can bring, is that I'm not embarrassed by stuff.
And it's a learned skill to not be embarrassed by stuff.
And so I'm going to embarrass myself now by confessing something I don't understand that I think many of you do understand.
Maybe you could explain it to me.
Now, sometimes when I say something doesn't make sense, I'm asserting that there's something wrong with the thing.
Because it doesn't make sense.
In this case, I'm not asserting that.
I'm asserting that there must be something wrong up here in my head area, somewhere in the brain department, just to me personally, that there's something that other people seem to understand that I don't.
And let me put it out there.
Here's what I don't understand.
When President Trump or people who agree with him Say that the reason we're discovering so much virus in this country is because we're doing more testing.
And the critics say, oh, how stupid.
How stupid. It's just not true.
It's just not true. Ask all the experts.
The amount you're testing has nothing to do with With how much virus you're detecting.
And every time I hear that, I go, okay, continue.
Continue making the point so I can see the part where you say that doing the thing that detects the virus is not the thing that's detecting the virus.
Because there's probably a good reason.
All the smart people are saying it.
All the anti-Trumpers say it.
They say it consistently. And I believe there are even pro-Trump people who say it.
And they mock him like it's just sort of obvious why that's wrong.
And I say to myself, what's wrong with me?
Why can't I tell what's going on here?
Honestly, I don't even have a theory for why that's wrong.
Now, is this one of those situations where Where CNN etc.
are just telling you that an apple is banana and they're just trying to get away with it?
Or is there actually a smart version of this where they can explain why testing does not find more virus?
Tests are all wrong, some people are saying.
That's a different topic. Alright, so I'm looking at your comments.
I don't think anybody understands that.
Yeah, so...
Are all of you...
Alright, here's the funny part.
The reason I've never mentioned this in public is because I thought it was just me.
I thought I was being stupid because I can't imagine a scenario where doing more testing Doesn't produce more positive outcome, more positive results.
I don't get it.
All right, so apparently there's nobody here who even understands what the argument is, much less agrees or disagrees.
It's like you don't even know what they're talking about.
And we let that go like that's okay.
I guess it is okay.
They might be looking at positivity rate, somebody said.
I don't know. Numbers are numbers.
But if somebody does have an answer for that, and I still think there might be, send it along.
I love the fact that the president is teasing that there might be a vaccine sooner than you think.
There's a big discussion about the fact that the vaccines might be being rushed to have them done before the election.
Now, would it be good for the president if the vaccine started to be available, even if only for a few people, before Election Day?
Would that be good for Trump?
Maybe. Depends how the news handled it.
They might say it's rushed and therefore it's worse than not having it.
That's what Kamala Harris seems to be indicating.
But let me give you a dose of the real world.
Are you ready? If you're below a certain age, this will be the first time you've ever heard this.
And this is a truism of big organizations, of projects, of everything.
This is a universal truth.
If you don't give somebody a deadline, it'll never get done.
If you don't give somebody a deadline, it'll never get done.
Things get done on the deadline.
Doesn't matter what it is.
This is something I've experimented with all my life.
And I'll give you a concrete example.
When I was first doing my Comic strip while I was working full time.
Sometimes I would sit there in the morning before I went to my day job and all of my time would get used up and I hadn't drawn a comic.
I just couldn't come up with an idea.
And I had 10 minutes, literally 10 minutes, because I would never let myself go a day without making a comic, to make whatever I could make.
To make a comic.
And what happened? I would always, 100% of the time, with no exceptions, over 30 years, Haven't missed it once.
10-minute deadline to do a day's work.
I could fit a day's work into 10 minutes.
Now, of course, cartooning is not like other jobs.
But the point is, if you don't have a deadline, Things just don't happen.
And it almost doesn't matter where the deadline is.
You could say the deadline's next year, or you could say the deadline is this.
My guess is, and I don't know this field, but the people who make the regular vaccine for the regular annual flu, don't you think they have deadlines?
It's probably an internal deadline.
It's probably a deadline that looks like this.
If we don't have this done by, pick a day, if we don't have this done by September, We won't get to make any money this year, because it'll be too late.
So I would imagine that every vaccine has at least an internal company deadline, because if it didn't, nothing would happen.
Nothing gets done without a deadline.
And the part, if you're young, this is the part you don't know, and I would encourage you, if this sounds like ridiculous, if the first time you hear this you say, that doesn't make any sense at all, I would ask you to talk to somebody experienced in just life.
If you give a deadline, people will meet it.
It's like magic.
It's one of the greatest tricks of management is that people do work toward deadlines.
That's it. And so when the president makes, and I think we would all agree, an artificial deadline to get this done by, let's say, before Election Day...
Does that make the world a worse place or a better place?
Now, if you're inexperienced, what you're going to say to yourself, whoa, that's going to make them cut corners.
That's a dangerous situation.
That would be the inexperienced view of the world.
And I think the Democrats will count on you or enough people to have an inexperienced worldview.
Here's the experienced worldview.
Those FDA people and the people who have to approve this, they're not going to throw away their whole lives to approve something that doesn't look solid.
There are a lot of people who are going to put their whole careers on the line to sign off on this thing.
And they would, I think most of them, or at least enough of them, would be willing to quit rather than put something out that they didn't feel comfortable with.
So this deadline will almost certainly cause one of two things to happen.
It'll either be done before Election Day and it will be solid or it won't be done because the FDA will not have approved it.
There are only two possibilities.
So the possibility of it being done before Election Day and being shoddy and having the President force people to say things they don't believe are true about the safety of it Very unlikely in the real world.
Very unlikely because this is life and death.
If it were just a project and maybe there was just money on the line, oh yeah, you can get people to lie about that.
It would be easy to get people lying about how good is your product or anything like that.
But life and death?
We're talking about people in the FDA or whoever has to sign off on stuff.
We're talking about people who would know they would be putting their name on something That could kill or injure tens of thousands of people, worst case scenario.
That's not a risk people take.
All right, typically.
And we would hope that there's maximum transparency on those people.
And if the news business wants to keep everybody honest, which would be a good idea, we should get the names of the people who need to sign off, both government and medical, and really, really talk to those people, know who they are, put the light on them, and say, here's the deal.
We are literally going to trust you with our lives.
We are going to trust you with the fate of the republic.
Bob, or whatever their names are, Bob, we're looking at you.
Do not sign that piece of paper, Bob, or whoever, unless you're willing to put your life on it that this is a good decision.
Nobody's magic. You can't be right all the time.
But we're watching, Bob.
We've got to have that going and we don't have that right now.
Alright, I feel like the loser sucker hoax is already dying from neglect that will just be replaced by the Michael Cohen book, which will be replaced by something next week.
So it looks like the whole loser-sucker thing just fell apart.
And here's the rule that I would like to put on this, which is if somebody makes several claims, whether it's the Steele dossier or it's the Atlantic article, and there's a major claim within there that can be debunked, you're done.
You don't need to debunk the rest of them.
If you can determine that one of them is clearly a lie, and clearly a lie that somebody knew was a lie, you don't need to talk about the rest of it.
Walk away. And just say, it's debunked.
Walk away. Now the word that CNN used for debunked is confirmed.
So they just put different words on things.
So CNN itself, confirmed, That the story about why the one event was cancelled because of weather, they've also confirmed that that's not true.
They too should say, and therefore, the entire body of work is disqualified.
But they don't.
I was thinking about ways that the protests could be handled or solved.
I was throwing out some ideas on Twitter.
Let me run a few of these by you.
Let me do some whiteboarding for you.
I just noticed that my lighting is terrible.
I still have my curtains up.
Excuse me while I put down my curtains and improve things a little bit.
I want to go to the whiteboard here.
Because I don't think most people know what Black Lives Matter or Antifa even want.
So here's my model of the world.
So before you can argue anything or persuade, you have to get people in a common frame or understanding of the world.
I would say Democrats are favorable to Antifa and to Black Lives Matter.
So far, would you say that that is true?
That neither...
That the Democrats don't really criticize, of course they don't criticize Black Lives Matter, but even Antifa.
To the extent that Antifa are part of the protests, Democrats are sort of on their side.
What does Antifa want?
How many Americans know what Antifa wants?
If you ask them, they'd say they want an end to racism.
Does Antifa want an end to racism?
Who knows? It might be part of what they want, but what they really want is the destruction of civilization.
Now, they don't word it that way.
What they say is, we want to get rid of all government and all police.
Let's say they were successful.
Let's say Antifa got rid of all government and all law enforcement.
What would be the obvious, undeniable outcome of that?
Well, we would be conquered by any other country that wanted to, because we would be a sitting duck.
Anybody could conquer us.
But beyond that, if we had no centralized government of any kind, we would just devolve into sort of a tribal situation.
You wouldn't have entrepreneurship.
You wouldn't have anything.
Because if anybody worked and made money, they would have to immediately share it, or they would be attacked by the masses to take their stuff.
So, there's no doubting this, that what Antifa wants is the end of civilization.
They pretty much say it as directly as I do.
They just don't fill in the blanks like I did, which is, what would happen if you got what you wanted?
It would be the end of civilization.
There's no argument to that.
That's just what it would have to be.
Because they do not account for human motivation.
It would be great if humans could all share and still work hard and they would still have motivation and you didn't need a government because we were all so nice that we would just agree on things.
But that's not the real world.
In the real world, if you disband your military, the country next to you conquers you in 10 minutes.
That's the real world. Now let's take Black Lives Matter.
They do not want an end of civilization.
So it's weird that they're on the same team.
What they want is to take your stuff Meaning anybody who is now black.
And to solve systemic racism by a transfer of wealth.
Now if you ask them, would they say that?
Does Black Lives Matter say, yeah, what we'd like to do is solve systemic racism by taking your stuff and giving it to black people?
They kinda do.
They kinda do say that.
Because what would reparations be?
Reparations would be taking things and redistributing them.
What would any of socialism be?
Socialism, 90% tax rates, the things they're talking about would be taking things that legally belong to other people, but here's the key, maybe not morally.
That would be their argument.
So the Black Lives Matter argument would be Yeah, yeah, yeah, you white people and other people have a lot of stuff, but you wouldn't have that stuff if not for slavery.
So really, even though the law says it's your stuff, it's not really morally your stuff.
So we're just going to adjust things until they're morally comparable, and that would require a change in the law, perhaps, or legislation or whatever.
So what happens if you have a system That's based on transferring resources from people who make it and have it to people who aren't making it and don't have it.
The end of civilization.
There's no other way that goes either.
It looks different because they're not thinking about the end state.
They're just thinking about can we solve systemic racism and this would be the way to do it.
Some kind of a transfer of wealth.
It all ends in the same place.
It ends with a destruction of civilization.
Now, why don't the Republicans make that case?
I don't know. That's what I'd do.
Here's what the Republicans are offering or could.
They're offering school choice in all of its forms under the theory that if you've got school choice, you at least have the opportunity To make something of your life.
Can't guarantee it.
Nobody's guaranteeing you good outcomes.
But at least you have the opportunity.
I would argue, however, that there's a missing component.
And the missing component is that no matter what school you choose, they're probably not teaching you life strategies.
They're not telling you how to succeed.
And my belief is this.
That people who use similar strategies in life get similar outcomes.
If you're black and you get A's in school, you don't join a gang, you don't do drugs, you probably could get a scholarship to college, how is your life going to turn out?
Pretty good. Pretty good.
If you're white and you're born with, let's say, white privilege, but you do drugs, do crimes and go to jail, You know, get your 14-year-old girlfriend pregnant and don't pay attention in school.
How does your life turn out?
Does it turn out great because of all your white privilege?
No. Turns out terrible.
So the big magic trick that Black Lives Matter and to some extent Antifa are doing is to make it seem as if the way you act in life doesn't matter.
Doesn't matter. Let me give you some advice.
If you're ever in a discussion with anybody over any topic, doesn't have to be any of this stuff, just in general, and the other party says, here's the deal.
All of the changes have to be on your side.
And our side, we will simply be the benefit of your changes.
If they say that, walk away.
There is no such thing as a negotiation where one side gives and the other side takes.
Maybe you would like that to be the case, but that becomes a case of negotiating with yourself.
How about I give you this?
Thanks. Now, give us some more.
Okay, well, I thought I was done, but...
Okay, I'll give you a little more.
Thank you. Now, how about some more?
Wait a minute. Where is this end?
Where is the end of us giving you stuff?
If you don't tell us what you want, we would be idiots to give you anything.
So that should be, you know, logic number one, which is, if you're not asking for something specific, we will offer you zero.
Because to do otherwise is just stupid.
It's just stupid.
Because you can't negotiate with yourself.
You have to have somebody on the other side who says, if we got this, it would be enough.
Maybe we can meet in the middle.
So, I would say that the Republicans could have a good case if they said, If you get school choice right, that's not enough.
They've got to teach some kind of a life strategy about how to stay under trouble.
Here's how I would teach a life strategy in the second grade or first grade.
You want to keep it simple, right?
And whatever somebody learns when they're really, really young, that becomes extra sticky in terms of brainwashing.
So you want to brainwash kids, every kid.
I'm not talking about black kids.
I'm talking about every kid. You want to brainwash them early About life strategies.
And because they're kids, you've got to keep it simple.
And I would keep it this simple.
Here's my idea. We call it the 100% life.
So instead of saying, I'm going to teach you a life strategy, you're already losing a first grader.
They're like, strategy? Don't even know what that word means.
So instead, you make it a checklist.
And you say, here's how to have 100% life.
100% life just means a full life that's got all the good stuff in it.
If you commit a crime, subtract 4 points.
If you get bad grades in school, subtract 7 points.
If you become addicted to a substance, subtract 25 points.
Whatever the numbers are, I'm just putting random numbers on stuff.
But you could actually have a checklist of, say, five to ten items and just tell the kids, if you want your life to be 100%, make sure you don't check any of these boxes of these big mistakes.
Here's why this would work.
Simplification always works, but it's better to say you could lose something than if you do something, you might gain something in the future.
Imagine telling a first grader that if you work hard today, 25 years from now, you're going to have a good time.
It doesn't work because people don't respond the same to opportunity as they do to the risk of losing something.
So instead, You reverse the equation and you say, you were born with 100% life.
Your life is perfect in first grade.
You know, your home life might be a disaster, but in terms of where you could go, 100% if you did all the right stuff.
But I'm going to take away from you some of your life if you make these mistakes.
And then people start seeing it as a loss.
Wait a minute, I was born with 100% potential.
And then I made this choice and this choice, and I could see how that diminished my potential.
And then I could look at all the older people who were not having a good life, and I could say, wait a minute, oh yeah, this checklist totally works.
That person's having a bad life, and yep, sure enough, committed a crime, joined a gang, it's right here on the list.
Got addicted to substance, there it is.
It's right on the list. Had a baby at 12, it's on the list.
So you could teach a first grader life strategy by just giving them a list of ten things and say, don't do any of these ten things, and you'll be fine.
The Republican approach, should they adopt something like this, would be one of abundance, where everybody could win.
So that still becomes a problem of equality, but if you took care of education and life strategy, it might be as good as you can do.
So it's not a perfect world, but it might be the best world that you could produce.
So, that's how I would frame it if I were in charge.
Here are some, just some more thoughts on the same topic.
Have you wondered why there have been no counter protests for the Portland stuff?
So Portland actually has an A protester camp where they have nice little tents.
It looks like they were acquired from the same source.
And they've got like a tent village where they live.
I guess they probably sleep during the day and protest and riot at night.
And I'm not recommending this because it would be dangerous.
People would get hurt. But I'm wondering why it hasn't happened.
That nobody has targeted their camp while they're gone.
Because you could just destroy...
Again, I'm not recommending this because it would be super dangerous.
People would get killed. But I don't know why it hasn't happened.
It feels like the obvious thing would be some group of anti-protesters would just wait until the protesters mostly left the camps and they would just go through and rip it apart or set it on fire or just steal their stuff or whatever.
And I think that would go a long way.
But I don't recommend it.
It would be dangerous.
Just a question. Did you know, and fact check me on this, that the original Antifa was allied with Hitler?
Now I read this online, so fact check.
So here's the claim. The claim is that Antifa, the original one, was against fascism, but also against organized government, just like it is now.
And that when they had a choice of the Weimar Republic, which was unpopular in Germany, or the Nazis, Antifa actually chose the Nazis because they were seemingly more anti-government.
In other words, the Nazis seemed to be on their side because they also didn't like the Weimar regime.
And so Antifa and the Nazis allegedly, I need a fact check on this, Worked together to overthrow the government, and then the first thing that happened was that Hitler got rid of Antifa.
Because, of course, you don't want those guys around, so the first thing they do is get rid of their partners.
And it made me think, does Antifa think ahead?
Because I can't see any scenario where they don't lose and literally die if they get what they're asking for.
It's weird that people could get what they're asking for and it guarantees their destruction.
But Antifa has that philosophy.
I'd like you to give me something that destroys you, but oh yeah, it will destroy me at the same time.
That's a weird philosophy.
All right. I also think that, well...
I'm confused about whether the supporters of Antifa, which is Antifa itself for the most part, are lying to everybody else, or if they don't realize that Antifa wants to destroy civilization.
Is there anybody who's in favor of Antifa who actually just doesn't understand that in order for them to get what they want, civilization itself would have to be destroyed and not replaced with something better, right?
Because that option isn't there.
It's not even something that's unlikely, but if everything went right, it could happen.
It can't happen.
There is no way that the United States could have no government, which would be the Antifa preference, and still survive in a world where China still has a government and a military.
They would conquer us 10 minutes into that plan.
So I'm just curious whether it's stupidity or Or what?
I don't get it.
Alright, one of the things that Trump could do to mess with the protesters is ask them to pick a leader to negotiate with.
Now what would happen if Trump said, you know, maybe it would help if we could listen to your concerns, so you Antifa and BLM people, all you protesters, just do me a favor, Select somebody who will be your spokesperson and bring us some specific demands.
Because if you ever saw their specific demands, nobody would be in favor of them.
And the Democrats, the ones running for office, would have to disavow the protesters.
They would have to.
But they don't have to disavow the protesters yet.
Because the protesters are cleverly not asking for specific things that you can really dig into and say yes or no to.
So defund the police sounds like it's specific, but it's not.
Because they don't know what that means.
Does it mean the money goes somewhere else?
Do you replace that with something else?
What do you do with the government itself?
If you're Antifa, you don't want the government.
So simply asking the protesters to give you a cohesive Leadership set of negotiating demands should make the protesters turn on each other.
Because it would force them to realize they're not actually on the same team.
Because when it gets to the point where they have to ask for something, they wouldn't ask for the same stuff.
It would be different stuff.
so it would turn them against each other.
So I'm going to be working on this high ground maneuver, which is getting people to understand that the protesters want the end of civilization But if somebody wants instead the end of systemic racism, the only way to get it is through education.
That's as close as you can get.
There's nothing else that could actually work.
But education could work.
We know that. Trump did a persuasion play that I thought was just frankly brilliant.
And I'm going to give you a comparison.
You remember, I've told this story a number of times, that I realized that Trump could win it all, especially when I saw him in the debate, the first debate in the first election, in which he was challenged about his statements about women, and he answered with the only Rosie O'Donnell maneuver.
Now what made that special is that his answer was so funny and provocative that you couldn't think about the original question.
He just sucked all the energy from the question, which would have ruined his campaign, onto an answer that wasn't even an answer.
It wasn't even the right answer to the question.
But it was so interesting you wanted to talk about that instead.
When Trump was dealing with these accusations about calling soldiers losers and suckers, which I believe did not happen, you couldn't directly disprove it because you can't prove a negative.
You can't prove something didn't happen.
You can just prove that you don't see any evidence of it.
So he had this impossible situation, similar to Megyn Kelly asking him this impossible question in the debates.
How do you get out of an impossible situation?
Turns out there's one person in the world who knows how to do this, and his name is President Trump.
So what did he do?
He said this, and by the way, anybody who misses the brilliance of this is really, really missing a good show.
Because I know that the president does a lot of stuff that you think, well, I wouldn't have done that.
But every now and then, he'll do something that is just transcendently smart to the point where you can't even recognize it as smart.
It's so smart, the smart people can't recognize it as smart.
Here it is. He said in his press conference, I'm not saying the military is in love with me.
This is pacing. He's agreeing.
I'm not saying the military is in love with me.
The soldiers are.
So he's made a claim that the soldiers like him.
And then he goes, the top people in the Pentagon probably aren't because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.
Trump told reporters.
Now, do you see what he did?
That's the Rosie O'Donnell move.
How do you talk about some unsubstantiated claims about what Trump may or may not have said in private, which isn't all that important?
How do you talk about that when Trump just dumped on you the most explosive claim any commander-in-chief ever made, ever?
Which is that his generals are dopes and they're in it for the money.
Oh my god!
Now, here's the good part.
Will he be criticized for being the commander-in-chief and basically calling his generals and top military people corrupt?
Will he be criticized for that?
Yes. How do you criticize him when he's saying the same thing that General Dwight Eisenhower said, later President Eisenhower, I believe when he was leaving office and he gave the famous speech about the military-industrial complex, meaning that the military was creating wars so that the industry people could make money selling bombs and bullets.
So Trump mirrored Eisenhower's most, probably the most respected speech any president's ever given.
In terms of it being true, prophetic, important, and totally non-partisan.
There is nothing partisan about Eisenhower saying, watch out for this combination of the military and industry.
Keep an eye on that. That's what Trump said.
Now that is such a provocative thing, because remember, Trump is currently the commander-in-chief.
It's one thing to say something as you're walking out the door, and fact check me on that, but didn't Eisenhower do his speech after he was leaving office?
I think so, but that would be an important point.
Trump did it while he's running for re-election.
That is a whole other level of provocation.
Because he's saying I'm going to be the boss over these people that I don't even think are doing it for the right reasons.
They look corrupt to me.
How much do you want that president?
Please? If Trump had never done anything else, Except throw his own military under the bus and say, watch out for these guys.
They have a monetary motive to get us into war.
If he had never done anything else but just that one thing, he would have my vote.
He would have my vote.
Would I care that he called the soldiers who were sent to war by?
By? Who sent the soldiers to war in Vietnam?
Was it? The soldiers themselves?
Nope. It was the military-industrial complex.
Who got us hooked up with the war in Iraq?
Was it because of all those weapons of mass destruction?
Nope. It's because the military-industrial complex got a new friend called the press.
Now it's the press Military-industrial complex.
Trump, although he's never stated it this way, has basically added a third leg to the Eisenhower warning.
Watch out for the fake news press, military-industrial complex, because they gave you Iraq.
And, here's the brilliant part, they treated our military like suckers.
Yeah. Do you see it yet?
That's what Trump did.
He actually took...
Trump said the service people were suckers, the worst thing you could ever hear, right?
Our most respected class of people are our military.
We like it that way. We like them to be the most respected class.
That just works. It's just a good idea.
And he took that...
And turned that into the military-industrial complex and even my own people in my organization treated soldiers like suckers.
It's different, isn't it?
Now, I know that I get a lot of heat from my critics who say, Scott, Scott, Scott, you're imagining that you're finding gold nuggets in this big pile of crap And all it is is chaos and flailing and Trump doesn't know what he's doing.
He's incompetent.
He's just waving his arms and stuff.
And I say to you, if my theory was correct from 2015, that Trump plays 3D chess or 4D chess, if you prefer, and that he can do things that other people just can't do, That frame of mind would predict that if he were president, as he is, that he would continue to do things that you would say, I don't think anybody else could have done that.
This is one of those things.
This is something, I swear, there is no other president who could have gotten out of this trap.
Not only did he get out of the trap, I think we came out ahead.
Because now we're talking about the military-industrial complex, I've added the press.
And I think we should. Because that's where a big problem is.
Kind of brilliant. That is so brilliant.
You've never even seen a president do anything that smart before.
This is other level persuasion smart.
This is not normal people stuff.
I don't think I could have gotten out of that.
Alright. We're also entering in no particular order here.
We're entering a phase of the pandemic where we're going from a place where Trump was arguably the worst choice for the job.
Because early in the pandemic, what the public seemed to want is some kind of empathy and plain talking about how bad it was.
Now, unfortunately, or depending on your point of view, fortunately, this is either a feature or a bug, This president doesn't know how to talk negative.
He just doesn't know how to say things are going to get worse.
It's also why we like him, those of you who do like him, because he's an internal optimist.
No matter how bad things are, it's going to get better, make America great again.
Optimism is his primary feature.
But if you end up in a pandemic, in the early start of it, in the beginning, where really you do have to just tell the public, look, this is going to be bad.
I've got to be honest with you, this is going to be bad.
But we need to pull together.
He isn't that guy.
If we can be honest, no matter how much you love the president, he's just not that guy.
He's not the guy who delivers bad news It makes you feel comfortable with it.
It's just not. But that was the guy we needed, you know, a few months ago.
If we had had an election then, maybe he would have lost and maybe that would have been fine if we could get somebody in who was good on that phase.
It wasn't really, you know, an option.
But where are we going to be around election day?
Well, I think that no matter what's happening with the virus, whether we get our drugs and vaccines or not, we're gonna be working on the economy more than we're working on saving lives, because I think the therapeutics and the way we're treating people is so good that the death rate's gonna come down, probably keep coming down.
If the stuff we learned about vitamin D is true, that death rate is gonna plunge more.
If the vaccine works, The optimism alone will be good for the economy, but the death rate will plunge again.
So we're entering a phase where you could almost guarantee that rebuilding the economy will be more important than fighting the virus fairly soon.
We're talking about this winter.
We're going to be talking about the economy more.
Who is the best person you've ever seen for that phase?
Trump. I would argue that just as it is true that he was the wrong personality for the first part of the pandemic, you don't want him talking about medical stuff because he uses hyperbole.
You don't want that, right?
You don't want medical conversation with hyperbole.
That's a bad, bad combination.
You don't want the eternal optimist to be the one who has to deliver bad news every day.
It just doesn't work.
It doesn't work. And I've said this before, everybody who thinks there's such a thing as a good president and a bad president doesn't really understand how the world works.
There's no such thing as a good president or a bad president.
There is such a thing as a president who is right for the situation.
I would argue that Obama was right for the situation he picked up in his first term.
Which was an economy on the edge, and we just wanted a reassuring voice.
And Obama brought that.
We wanted somebody that we knew would look at the details.
Obama gave us that.
So he was a perfect fit for taking us off the edge of the economic thing.
He would not be a perfect fit if you put him into the presidency, let's say in November, And say, hey, Obama, your job is to goose the economy.
Not the right guy.
You know, he's solid, but he's not the one who's going to put the rocket fuel on it.
He's not the rocket fuel guy.
We've only had one president who's the rocket fuel guy, and that's the one you got.
So, I would argue that the president is moving from the phase where he would be the least fitted, that, you know, empathy, no optimism stuff, and moving into the place where You couldn't design a better situation for this president to fit into.
He's the comeback president.
He came back from his own business losses in the past.
He came back from being behind Clinton.
He's behind Biden right now.
He's probably going to come from behind and beat Biden.
And he's going to pick up an economy that he had roaring, that got whacked by the virus, And I think literally nobody on the planet and of 7 billion souls I don't think there is one better person for this specific need than President Trump.
That's what I think.
Alright. I'm hearing some I'm hearing some Talk about mail-in votes versus absentee ballots.
And the people who are arguing that we have experience with mail-in, but we also have experience with absentee, and some states have done full mail-in for a while.
So the people who say that the mail-in vote will be dependable and credible are also saying that it's no problem because we've tested it enough in these states.
We'll just do what they did.
It'll be fine. But here's the part they get wrong.
2020 is not like any other year because you don't have any baseline of expectation so that let's say the votes came in and they were 5% different than they would have been if people voted in person.
What's it tell you? Nothing.
If we had had a history of voting by mail, And then this year, there was something different in the outcome.
And you look at it and go, huh, these numbers don't look real.
It looks like this district faked something over there.
So if you had a baseline of doing this all the time, you could maybe detect if some mischief had happened.
But 2020, there's no baseline.
We haven't done it before.
We expect massive cheating because...
It's America and people will cheat if they can.
We don't know, because of the coronavirus, what the vote would have looked like.
We don't know if the polling is accurate because of the shy Trump voters.
We have no way to know that the outcome we get is anywhere near the truth.
That's different. So everybody who says, hey, hey, hey, we've done mail-in before, we know how that works.
Is missing the biggest part of the decision, which is, wait, wait, it's 2020.
If you had said this in any prior year, I would say, yeah, yeah, that might be dependable enough.
Even 2016, I would have said, yeah, we know how many people vote, we've got a good handle on it, we would detect any mischief, we would see it.
Not in 2020. In 2020 it will be completely hidden by all the other noise from the coronavirus to shy Trump supporters to the polls being not credible entirely.
So here's what I would suggest.
I think the sooner the government gives the public a clear path in terms of what would happen under different scenarios, the sooner we can start arguing about the rules Instead of figuring out how to kill each other when it all goes bad.
So I would like to see the government, in some form, just put out a flowchart that says, this is our understanding of if we get to election day and we don't have a result, we're going to do this.
These people will be in charge and they will give us this outcome.
Then, if we still don't have a result we can trust, and I'm just making this part up, On this date, we'll have the Supreme Court decide, again, I'm just making this all up, the Supreme Court will decide if we should hold the second election, if we should just do it again.
Or, they might decide to just do it in a couple of problem areas.
Maybe there's a state or some counties that look like they're not reliable.
So it doesn't matter what the process is, so long as it looks credible on paper, It's presented well in advance so that we can live with it for a while.
I want to be able to live with the idea that, no, no, this isn't going to be like normal elections.
We will not have a result on election night.
Then the process will be the follows.
Let's say the process is that we ask the networks not to report who is even ahead.
Suppose you just don't report it and you wait till all the votes are counted And there's some kind of official sign-off before the networks can give you any results.
Maybe you just say, there's no news on this.
You just can't report the news until all the votes are counted.
How about that? Could you make that a stick?
I don't know if it would even work.
But it doesn't matter what the process is.
My point is, you have to get the public pregnant with that process now.
You don't want to wait until election night And have the public find out for the first time where it goes.
Big, big mistake.
That is a Civil War-sized mistake if you don't educate the piss out of the public.
I'm not talking about having some news stories or doing a release that says what will happen under these conditions.
I'm talking about blanketing the brains of the public with it until every person who might vote Can recite exactly what will happen if we don't get a clear result in a quick time frame through the normal process.
What happens? What's that look like?
Does Nancy Pelosi become the supreme leader or something?
