Episode 1142 Scott Adams: I Think You Know the Topics This Morning
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Content:
The stock market responds to President Trump's COVID19
Generalized distinction between Republicans and Democrats
Angry John Roberts of FOX News
Disavowing White supremacy
Gavin McInnes, Proud Boys founder, suing Biden and CNN
Condemning the Proud Boys...without knowing who they are
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You need to come in here for the best part of the day.
And this is the sort of day you really need to get up for the day.
You're going to have to dig a little bit deeper today.
But all you need to get going on the right foot is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or a flask of 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, and we hope that includes the coronavirus.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
And let's lift our glass to the good health of our First Lady and the President.
To all of you.
Ah.
Well, it's a busy news story.
So let me look through my notes and see what we want to talk about first.
There's the economy.
Don't really care about that today.
We could talk some more about the Biden debate.
We don't really care about the Biden debate.
How about climate change is the most important, it's by far the most important issue in the country.
I don't give a shit about that.
There's a giant asteroid heading toward the Earth that will kill us all in about 16 hours.
But like I'm interested in that, I'm not.
So, where do we start?
Where do we start?
You know, when I went to sleep last night, I told myself quite incorrectly that I might be one of the big stories in the morning.
I thought to myself, you know, I'm trending on Twitter yesterday afternoon.
I'm trending. My name's trending.
Dilbert is trending. And I thought to myself, there's articles about me in the Hill.
People are contacting me all over the place.
And I thought to myself, you know, I'm going to wake up and I'm going to be the big story in the morning.
Well, that didn't work out.
So, here's the big story about me.
Alright, well, I'll talk about that in a moment.
But, first, let's get to the good stuff.
The biggest story, of course, I mean, I don't think there's any doubt about what the big story is, and that is that Gavin McGinnis has decided to sue Joe Biden and CNN for calling the Proud Boys white supremacists.
Was there anything else that happened?
Any other stories?
And, of course, it's just such a weird day.
I don't quite know what to do with this day.
So I was going to talk about some other things, but there's nothing else to talk about.
There's just nothing else to talk about.
The news of the President and the First Lady having coronavirus...
Just made everything else unimportant, all at the same time.
It wasn't just me.
You know, of course, like everybody, I think the world revolves around me.
But nothing else feels important, does it?
Are you having the same feeling?
That just nothing else feels important?
It just took everything else and just put it in its own little perspective.
But let's talk about that.
Number one, what will this do to the president's empathy issue?
In other words, the people who think he's not showing enough empathy, will this change it?
In other words, when it happens to him, will people say, well, now you've got some empathy, and suddenly their own biggest complaint about the president will be fixed?
Because that's the big complaint.
He doesn't understand How big it is or how big the risk is.
But I'll bet he does now.
Or at least people will imagine that it's changed his mind, even if it doesn't.
So, it's going to be really tough to predict the psychology of this.
The psychology is wildly unpredictable.
Let's just talk about where it could go.
Number one...
Did you see the video?
There's a little clip from the debate in which Joe Biden...
Was trying to list three things.
And he skipped the second one.
He goes, number one, blah, blah, blah.
And then he goes, number two.
And then he goes, number three.
He just skips whatever number two is and goes to number three.
And Trump was talking over him the whole time.
And Trump not only keeps his own train of thought, but while he's thinking it, he realizes, while he's talking, Trump realizes that Biden has skipped a number.
And in the middle of his sentence, he goes, you missed a number.
And he goes back to talking, and I thought, that takes a lot of concentration.
He was literally doing two things at once.
He was listening, listening to math, and talking in front of the public, and he was actually tracking both of them at the same time.
It was kind of impressive. And funny, too.
But that's not what I was getting at.
So you've got the empathy issue.
What will that happen? Here's another part of the psychology.
I'll just hit all the little parts and see if we can put them together into anything.
Another part is that since Trump has been the one who's been saying, maybe more than anybody, at least anybody prominent, that we should take the risk of getting back to work.
So if you ask yourself, what was the message That Trump was telling the country.
What was the leadership message?
It probably was something along the lines of let's take the risk with this thing because getting the world getting everything working is more important than some of these individual risks.
He walked the walk and he took the risk and he actually contracted it.
So he modeled Not intentionally, of course, but he ended up exactly modeling the thing he said was the condition we should be walking toward.
So he actually walked into the situation he was promoting, not the situation he was avoiding.
So nobody can say, you tried really hard not to get it, you did everything you could not to get it, and blah, blah, blah, but bad luck, he got it anyway.
He designed this level of risk and then he walked into it and he had bad luck.
He was one of the ones who got it.
At least I hope it was bad luck.
I hope there was nothing nefarious going on there.
I feel as if there is some authenticity in that and I don't know which way that works for him.
I feel like it works a little bit in a positive way.
Because he was consistent to his own description of how we should handle this.
And he was consistent meaning that he said we should try to live our best life while masking up when we can and doing the things we can, but not to hide from life.
And sure enough, he modeled the very behavior that he was promoting for the rest of the country Good or bad.
I'm not saying that that's good or bad.
I'm not putting the judgment on it.
I'm just saying that he modeled what he wanted for us.
So he did not hide from the risk that he asked the public to take.
That's a big deal.
Imagine two different generals.
One rides into battle at the front of the charge and is part of the battle and is in the battle.
The other general is back at headquarters and phones it in and says, I'll be getting a massage.
Why don't you attack the front lines and let me know how it goes.
Which of those leaders is the bigger leader?
Is it the leader who does and models exactly what he's asking of the troops, in this case the country, or is it the one who has a completely different existence, one who hides from the virus While telling you not to hide from the virus.
Now, you could argue whether he was, you know, trying hard enough to stay away from the virus.
I don't think anybody would take the position that he really quarantined himself the way he could have.
You know, as president, he could have had a...
The president could have had a total seal on his contacts.
He could have. He just chose not to.
And it was the same decision he thinks we should make.
Now... We have to ask the question, unfortunately, it's just horrible that it even has to come out of my mouth, but you have to ask the question if he'll survive.
I haven't yet seen, and I'm pretty sure I'll see it as soon as I'm done here, an estimate for somebody in his specific situation, you know, his age and his health.
What are the odds of his survival?
I think it's still 95%, right?
Doesn't he still have a 95% chance of survival or higher?
98%? It's pretty high.
And you add that to probably early detection.
You add that to the best healthcare in the world.
I think his odds are pretty good.
But here's the question you have to ask.
Was it an assassination attempt?
You have to ask that question.
Now, in all likelihood, it was not, right?
Because the virus is everywhere.
The most likely scenario is he got it the normal way.
But, if you were trying to take out a leader of another country, isn't the first thing you do is make sure that there was a lot of virus among the people who would have contact with him?
Isn't that the obvious thing you would do if you were a bad player?
Get a little virus, make sure that the assistant to the staff, whatever, gets infected until you get lucky and somebody gets close enough to the president?
So I don't know how they could possibly know that one way or the other, but you can't rule that out because it would be such an obvious play.
Then we have the question of whether Biden will get it or already has it, because I would think that the president probably already had contracted it when he was at the debate.
He may have actually contracted it at the debate.
That's possible. So he was probably at least in the general vicinity of Biden when he was infected, you know, 20 feet away.
And what would that change?
What if they both get it?
I mean, these are completely impossible to sort out the psychology in advance of how that would affect things.
But what will happen to Trump's...
What will happen to his campaign?
Because that's the end of his physical campaigning.
Will Trump get better credit for staying home because that's good behavior, I guess?
Or will he just lose his momentum because he's losing his energy?
Is Trump, without being Trump, still Trump?
In other words, if you take the high energy which we know to be Trump, And you take 40% off the energy because he's sick.
If it turns out he has symptoms, we don't know yet.
But if it takes, let's say, 40% off his energy, can he even do a Zoom?
Right? Can you even do a Zoom if you're at low energy?
Probably not. It's entirely possible that Trump will just disappear from public view.
It may be that If he's low energy, I don't know if he wants us to see him.
If he even looks like he's sick, is that going to help him or hurt him if you saw him on Zoom?
It might help him.
Again, these are totally imponderables at this point.
We'll be able to look back in hindsight and say, oh, that was the one variable that mattered.
But right now, it's a whole bunch of variables, and they're all just swirling around.
And one of them is, imagine this.
Let's say...
You know, he loses his energy or something, which would be typical.
And he still does a Zoom because he still wants to get out there.
And you watch the Zoom and everybody who watches it says he doesn't look well.
He doesn't look well. What would that do to your feelings about re-electing him?
Would you say, ah, I can't elect somebody who's literally, you know, might not make it to election day, you know, if it looked like that was the case?
Or would you say, finally he looks human?
You know, there's something about this which has become sort of the third act.
You know, it's the turning point.
It's the thing that changes him.
Might he be a different person after this?
Because that's possible.
This is the sort of event that could actually change him.
Not in every way, but it might change an opinion.
It might change a policy.
It might change his empathy.
It might change how people see him.
It could be big.
We don't know. People are unpredictable.
Let's see. The other things that we need to think about this is...
If you were investing, the most important thing you should do as an investor is, fill in the blank, diversify.
There's nothing more important if you're investing than making sure that you spread your risk across different stocks or different classes of investments.
But when we run two candidates for president, just two, that's not very well diversified, right?
So you need one of those two to work out so you don't have any choice, any chance of a good outcome.
But what we did is we started with a senior citizen president and we added one choice, which is somebody who is even older.
It doesn't make any sense that we run two elderly candidates for president.
That was maybe one of the dumbest things that America has ever done.
Because if you run two elderly candidates for president, and by any measure, Joe Biden looks like he's right on the margin of even being functional, you really just had one president as a spare.
Because you had sort of a shaky Biden from the starting gate.
Your backup is President Trump.
If anything happened to him, You don't have a healthy candidate.
You actually would not have a candidate for president who is sufficiently healthy, just healthy.
Forget about policy.
Forget about his record, his background.
Forget about all that.
We intentionally, meaning America, we put ourselves in a position where we had a very high risk of this very thing.
This was the risk we knew we were putting ourselves into.
Two elderly candidates, maybe none of them would be up for the job by Election Day.
There was a good chance of this.
You can't say...
You can certainly say you didn't see this specific thing coming, that it was coronavirus back in November of last year.
You probably didn't see this coming.
But was it impossible to see...
Could smart people have forecast that it was a bad idea to have two elderly candidates and one of them's already shaky?
We did this to ourselves.
This is absolutely America kicking itself in the nuts and knowing it.
It's like, I think I'll kick myself really hard in the nuts.
Why are you doing that? I don't know.
I don't know. Seemed like the thing to do.
And then we kicked ourselves really hard in the nuts, and here we are.
So, how's the stock market look?
Well, not so good.
Yeah, looks like a lot of red.
Red, red. So, does that tell you that the system just doesn't like risk and change, or does it tell you that they think that If President Trump doesn't get re-elected, that the market will tank.
What's it telling you?
I think it's telling you that there are a lot of shy Trump investors, if you know what I mean.
People who think Trump is better for the market, even if they don't necessarily want to vote for him.
They still think he might be the better one for the economy.
The polls show that.
So, the stock market is is tapping the public on the shoulder and saying, I know you're talking about the President's health and the First Lady's health and their health is the most important thing, but I just got to tap you on the shoulder here a little bit.
Just don't forget about me.
The stock market over here, the stock market doesn't exist by itself.
The stock market is a psychology engine.
And the spark plug that runs the psychology engine, the economy, just got a hiccup.
And when your spark plug looks like it's starting to misfire, the entire engine of the economy starts to sputter.
And I just want to give you a little tap on the shoulder.
I'm just going to pull back the Dow Jones a little bit.
Make sure you notice. Because we don't want you not to know that, hey, You know, we're watching.
Wow. In the middle of this all, the citizens of the United States decided to have a separate competition to see who could be the worst human being in the entire world.
Now, if you go to Twitter, you can see the competition raging.
And so far, it seems to be mostly just Democrats who have entered the contest.
But look at some of the comments from the people that you believed were good people.
You know, just good citizens.
Look at the things that they say.
Now, I'm not going to excuse conservatives.
I'm not going to say conservatives never say horrible things on social media.
That would not be true.
But at the moment, this is mostly coming from the left, and it's truly horrible.
It's truly quite horrible.
And you're going to see the worst of humanity come out of this.
Just the worst. I will tell you my opinion, that when the President of the United States, no matter who it is, gets a potentially fatal disease, I'm not a Republican and I'm not a Democrat, never was really, but I suddenly become not a partisan anymore.
Certainly I was partisan.
But when your president and your commander-in-chief takes a bullet, if your head is on right, that should immediately collapse your support.
And it should collapse it into, I mean, we should be on the same team for a little while.
Because you can't lose your president even when you're running for president.
Even when there's another one that might be coming on, that could be months before Things get sorted out.
Nobody wants to lose the Commander-in-Chief now, under any circumstance.
You might want him not to win the election, but this is the time to kind of come together if it can be done.
Now, the President has often talked about the coronavirus as being an enemy.
And it is a common enemy now.
And it's not only a common enemy, but it's an enemy that just took a big ol' shot at our Commander-in-Chief.
And we'll see.
We'll see if this makes a difference in terms of how people think about it.
I've noticed that there's a correlation Between Democrats and Republicans, or not a correlation, a distinction.
And it goes like this, and I want you to see if you've noticed this pattern.
Republicans, for the most part, and this is going to be a gross generalization, right?
So I'm not going to say every Republican, and I'm not going to say every Democrat.
Just in your mind, you should always translate that I never mean every single person.
Would it be true that Republicans tend to be Christian Let's say Christian biased, meaning that they tend to be influenced by the Bible and by that teaching, even if they're not actively religious, they probably came from that cultural thing.
One of the biggest elements of Christianity is forgiveness.
In fact, there's almost nothing more central to Christianity than forgiveness, right?
Second chance, you know, you can make up for it in heaven.
It's all about forgiving sins.
The Democrats, on the other hand, tend to be a little more godless, at least some of the protesting active ones appear to be.
And they seem to have a philosophy that is not forgiveness.
It's hate. And it's hate based on anything you've ever done.
But here's the weird part.
It's hate based on imagined sins.
So here's the distinction.
Republicans will, by choice, this is actively their philosophy, they will forgive you for actual real sins.
Including, you know, you saw the President do that First Step Act.
If you can get your life together in prison, you know, learn something and, you know, serve some of your time, you are forgiven.
You're forgiven.
You're released. And I think Christians actually mean that.
I think that's really baked into them, that, you know, you can do some pretty bad stuff, But if you are genuinely forgiving and you do something with your life, you could be forgiven.
It's the opposite with Democrats.
They actually will imagine something that you did.
We imagine that you're a racist.
We imagine that you hate us.
We imagine that you're guilty because of something your ancestors did, something like that.
And you're guilty forever, and the stain can never be washed off.
That's a big difference, isn't it?
Look for that pattern.
Republicans and Christians being forgiving of real sins, Democrats being permanently condemning of imaginary sins.
That's pretty different.
Condemning imaginary sins.
Somebody says that Barron tested negative.
Well, good. Good for him.
But... How would you like to be a mother and you can't touch your kid for three weeks or whatever it's going to be?
That's pretty tough. I do wish them well.
All right. So, let's talk about some other stuff.
My favorite part of the story about the president not...
Not condemning white supremacists in the way that people wanted him to do it, in the words that they wanted him to use, was the John Roberts subplot.
Did you all catch the John Roberts part of it?
So the part you need to know is that John Roberts, who works for Fox News, he's married to another journalist, Kyra Phillips, who is ABC, I think, works for ABC News.
And so, part of the story is that his wife had asked Trump about the condemning and hadn't gotten quite the crisp, exact answer that people were looking for, where he just says it in direct language.
So, then John Roberts followed up when it was his turn and he asked the same question and he also wasn't getting from, at least he was talking to Kayleigh McEnany, and he wasn't getting from her The exact language that people wanted.
Direct condemnation.
And then finally the president went on Hannity and said the words exactly the way people wanted him to say it.
So he finally said the words exactly the way they should.
So then John Roberts tweeted that.
But the best part of it was how mad he got About the whole situation.
Because I feel as if his professional life and his married life sort of intersected a little bit there.
And there probably were some conversations at home that were part of the story.
My net from this is I ended up liking John Roberts more.
And I already liked him before.
By the way, full disclosure, John Roberts has been in my home.
This was years ago.
But when he was working for CBS, I think, he interviewed me at my home in California.
So I spent some time with him.
He's a great guy. Like, terrific guy.
You know, you spend time with him, you're going to like him.
So watching this, you know, gave me a little more extra pleasure just because I'd bet him.
So I love that. And the part that made news is when he got angry at, I guess, the public, really.
He got angry at the public and other people giving him crap for simply asking the question.
Now, did John Roberts go, let's say, did he cross some kind of line By pushing the president for a specific answer?
I say no. I think he exactly did his job exactly the way you'd want him to.
You want him to push for that answer.
You know my part of the story.
I was feeling the same thing.
So I think he came out...
I like the passion he put into it because I think part of his wife was part of the story.
He became part of the story.
I just love the human...
The anger that he showed on camera was real, and I liked it.
So, good for you, John Roberts.
Alright, so, I guess we have to talk about me, even though it seems as unimportant as anything could be.
Seems very unimportant now.
I swear, it was the weirdest thing.
So, just in case you don't know the story, After the debate, I was very disappointed with the president's answer about white supremacy.
I don't have any doubt in my mind that he has condemned it many times in the past.
I don't have any doubt in my mind that he condemned it that night in weak language, but he certainly condemned it.
It was unambiguous, but it was a weak statement, but it was clear.
Clear but weak.
And so I don't have any, you know, Uncertainty about what the president thinks or what he would do in the future.
But I too, like the rest of the country, felt a little bit tweaked, like a lot of people, that he couldn't just say it the way we wanted him to say it.
I will give you a couple of theories as to why I think he doesn't answer it the way you wanted him to answer it.
Are you ready? Number one, in persuasion, And of course what the president is doing all the time is persuading.
Here's a rule of persuasion that you might not be aware of.
And one of the reasons that I say you should build your talent stack is so that you can see the world through more windows if you have more skills.
It just allows you to see the world a little more cleanly.
If you had skill, let's say you had learned and trained to be a salesperson, or trained in psychology, trained in persuasion, if you had trained in any of those fields, here's something you would know that other people wouldn't necessarily know.
And it goes like this.
If you're trying to persuade somebody, the best thing you can do, a really good thing to do, like it's powerful, is get them to do something small that primes them to later do something big, which is the real thing you want.
So, if you're in a negotiating contest or you're trying to be the alpha in the room, here's what you never want to do.
You never want to do exactly What somebody else asked you or is trying to force you to do.
If you give a little bit on anything at all, it makes it easier for them to get more.
They'll immediately double down.
Ah, he moved an inch.
He moved an inch.
We got him to say the words that we told him to say.
Look, his mouth is moving, and the words he's using are our words.
Look what we did. We turned him into our puppet in a small way.
Very small way. All we did was get him to say the words exactly the way we wanted them to be said.
If you can get somebody to do something small like that, and here's the key, something that looks completely reasonable.
Don't you think it's 100% reasonable to ask the President of the United States to disavow white supremacists?
Totally reasonable. That's the most reasonable small thing you could ever ask for somebody.
If you didn't understand this field, you would say to yourself, oh, well that's very small, it's very reasonable, of course I'm going to do it.
And then you just do it.
And you would have given somebody a little bit of something, and you would have lost ground.
You might not feel it, but it would have been a persuasion mistake.
Now, in my opinion, there's one exception to this rule.
The one exception where you should just do what you're asked is this one.
This exact situation.
If somebody asks you as president to disavow white supremacists, this is the one time I recommend that you just say, oh crap, I'm going to have to actually do this exactly the way they want.
Of course, I want to anyway.
It's not like I resist the idea of it.
I just don't want to do what you want me to do.
So here's the first thing I'm going to try.
The first thing I'm going to try is to say it my way.
Right? Because you're going to try to weasel the situation.
You're going to try to say, okay, I'm not going to say it the way you want, only because you're the one telling me to do it.
It has nothing to do with the thing you want me to say.
I'm not editing or judging the content of what you want me to say.
I'm only judging that you're telling me to say it.
And that disqualifies it from me being able to say it.
So instead, I'm going to try to sell you my version.
And it goes like this.
I oppose all violin groups, but I think most of it comes from the left.
Which is what he did.
So he tried to avoid the One of the biggest mistakes you could make in persuasion, which is take somebody else's frame and just be their puppet, even on a small thing.
Now, in my opinion, that was an error, because he still should have just done it, and he should have minimized it.
He could have minimized it away, that's the way I would have played it.
I would have said, obviously, of course everybody condemns white supremacy, so do I. And then go right into Antifa.
Just give it a clear, distinct statement, but really small.
Just compress it down and say, everybody, including me, disavows white supremacy, but let's talk about Antifa.
And then just do a whole big Antifa thing.
That's how I would have played it.
So it was a mistake, but in my opinion, it had to do with not wanting to be pushed.
And that was the right instinct, just maybe the wrong time for it.
The other possibility, which I mentioned before, but I'll just put it here for completeness, is that anybody who's trained in media stuff, and that would include me, so I actually had an actual expert sit with me for half a day and train me how to handle media situations.
You think it's easy?
It's not. Here's what you have to do if you're being interviewed by the media.
You need to listen to the question, Often while the camera is running, so there's extra pressure, so you're listening for the question, you're formulating your answer to the question, but then there's another layer on top of that, and here's the trouble part.
The extra layer is, you have to say to yourself, how could they misconstrue this answer?
What are all the ways this could be taken out of context?
And so here's one of the things that you would not want to do if you've been trained in media stuff.
You would not want to start a statement Where the first part of it could be misleading if taken in a context and then add the clarification at the end.
That's a trap.
Do you know why? You've seen it a hundred times.
The news will simply clip off the second part of your statement as they did with the fine people hoax.
And then sometimes they'll clip off the front part of the statement as they did with the injecting bleach.
Because if they cut off the part about he was talking about light as a disinfectant and then they cut off the end of it where he went back to make sure that you knew he was talking about light.
So you have to think in terms of an answer while you're on camera, while the question is being asked, maybe a complicated question, you're thinking about your answer and then you're thinking of the structure of the answer so it can't be dissembled.
It's not frickin' easy, right?
There's a reason that there are not many President Trumps.
You see how good he is on camera, usually.
It's rare. It's really hard to do that stuff, because there's just way too much thinking going on.
Now, have I made this mistake before?
Yes, I have. Let me give you an example of how to answer a question about your parents.
Let's say you're a famous person.
You're me. And the interviewer says on camera, Scott, What about your mom and dad?
Tell me what they were like.
My parents are both deceased, but imagine they're both alive.
And they ask me on camera, tell me about your parents.
Here is the wrong answer.
Anything. Everything you say about your own parents will be taken out of context and will be used against you, and your parents are going to pick up a newspaper and they're going to say, He said that about his parents.
It will be out of context, and it will look terrible.
So here's how you answer the question about your parents, as I have, actually, a number of times, but not until I did it the wrong way first.
You know, I had to learn this the hard way.
Scott, can you tell us about your parents?
It was very average.
It was just a normal, totally normal situation.
Well, can you tell us more?
Can you give us some detail?
So, yeah, my... My father worked for the post office.
It was a very normal upbringing and very average.
Everything was completely average and normal.
And we loved each other.
That's the only way to answer that question.
Everything else you say about it can be misconstrued into an insult to your parents.
And if you think that's not real, that it wouldn't turn into an insult to your parents, You haven't taken media training, and you haven't done this for a living, as I have.
You can't say anything about a topic that could be taken out of context.
So when the president was asked first by Jake Tapper in the first election to disavow the KKK, and he paused and he asked for clarification, what was actually going on in his mind?
We don't know. We can't read minds.
That's crazy. I can't read his mind, but I'll tell you that with similar training and experience of being interviewed, if I had received that question, I would be thinking ahead, what are they going to do with it?
And I would have thought this.
What are they going to ask me after this?
That's the media training.
The media training would say, where's this going?
It's not a question about the question.
The question is, where's this going?
And here's where it would go.
Do you disavow the KKK? Absolutely.
Easy question. Disavow the KKK. Do you disavow David Duke?
Easy question. Yup.
Disavow them. Do you disavow white supremacists?
Yes! Yes, of course I do.
Disavow them. Do you disavow the Proud Boys?
I'm not sure exactly what they do.
Are they...
What are they?
Are the Proud Boys white supremacists?
Because they're being accused of that.
And Gavin McGinnis, one of the founders, is suing CNN and others for saying that.
Joe Biden, I guess, for saying that.
And they have a multi-ethnic membership.
That's right. They have a multi-ethnic membership One of their leaders is a black Cuban or something.
And you've seen the pictures.
They have African-American members.
But they have been accused of being white supremacists.
So now you're the president.
What do you do?
Do you disavow them?
Just to be clean?
Just to make sure it doesn't affect you?
Because if you do, there are going to be a whole lot of people who say, wait a minute, I think you just disavowed law-abiding Americans.
I think that's a little too far.
Look at the comments.
Some people are saying that they are best described as patriots.
Now, I'm not going to give you an opinion of what I think the Proud Boys are.
Because I don't think they're one thing.
I think it's a bunch of people who have some things in common, like they want to be part of this group.
They like America.
They have that in common.
They seem to be chauvinistic.
They seem to be sort of male-dominated kind of thinking.
Now, you could condemn them maybe for some of those other things, but here's my point.
The moment the president starts condemning, the easy ones come first.
But it guarantees that he's going to go down the line until he gets to something like this.
Do you condemn Breitbart?
Right? Because, in my opinion, Breitbart has nothing to apologize for.
At least I've never seen anything that was over the line.
But other people think so.
If other people believe or are willing to accuse some entity of being whatever...
Does the president have to disavow everybody until he's disavowed his entire base?
So that's the trap.
You saw the president in the debate do exactly the same thing he did with the Jake Tapper or KKK thing.
He paused. You could tell there was a thought process going on.
Probably that thought process is, where does this go?
I think he was thinking as many chess moves in advance as he could, and like, am I going to get myself in a trap here?
Because it Because if possible, I would like to not disavow anybody who would vote for me.
Just period. I'd prefer not to disavow anybody if they could vote for me.
So I think that's all that went on.
Now, what is my level of certainty that the real problem was that?
He was just thinking about his best answer.
The answer is there's no way to know what anybody's thinking.
I'm just saying that if your interpretation Was that the only explanation is that he was winking to racists while running for president.
I think that's crazy.
In my opinion, the least likely explanation of what was going on is that he was thinking to himself, how can I pretend to sort of disavow them while winking at the same time?
I think that is the dumbest interpretation.
Because it sort of assumes a low-functioning person as president, right?
He's not low-functioning.
That would just be a dumb strategy.
And I don't think there's evidence that he would do something that dumb.
That's pretty dumb. Somebody says Proud Boys is an idea.
Joe Biden said that Antifa is an idea and not an organization.
That's pretty funny. Yeah, the Proud Boys, it's a concept.
It's not even an organization.
It's not an organization, it's just an idea.
See if anybody buys that.
Alright, so, that said, I was so disappointed with the President's answer, the inadequacy of it during the debate, that I said that I would withdraw my vote for the President.
Now here's the funny part.
If you've been watching me for a while, I think the people who've been watching me the longest were probably onto this early.
My vote for president doesn't have any functional value because I live in California.
There isn't any reasonable chance that my vote In California will make any difference to the presidency.
So if I say I am voting for him or I'm not, it doesn't have a functional purpose, as in getting elected or not.
It only has a symbolic importance.
And if something is only symbolic, you can move it around and you can do whatever you want to make a point with it.
So when I say I'm voting for or not voting for the president from the perspective of a Californian, it is purely symbolic.
Now, what happened when I said that I would not vote for the president?
Was I aware that that might get some attention?
Yes, I was.
Not my first rodeo.
It's not the first time.
It's not the first time I've dealt with the media.
So of course I knew that if I did a dog bites man story, that it would be a big deal.
Sure enough, within a day, I'm trending on Twitter.
So two of the top trending terms yesterday were my name and Dilbert separately at the same time.
I think Max Boot might have been the first one to tweet my video where I was saying I wasn't going to vote for the president.
And that got it into the left hemisphere, new silo.
And then what happened?
Then what happened?
So the first question you ask yourself is, did I know that it would cause a minor flurry of attention?
Yes, of course.
The basic rule is that if you act against type, and you're a public figure of any kind, and you do something that people don't expect you to do, that's news.
So when I said I wasn't going to vote for the president, the only reason I said that is for the effect.
Right? Because it would be this provocative.
It gets your attention. Now, I did want to get the attention of both the left and the right, which is very hard.
It's really easy to get the attention of the right if you're in the right, and the left if you're in the left.
What it's hard to do is if you're associated with the right, as I am, it's hard to get any attention on the left.
Unless you do something that looks like a Giant news story.
At which point all the attention from the left comes pouring in.
Now what I didn't fully anticipate is how ugly it would be.
Now I assume that when you get attention from the left a lot of it is going to be trolls.
A lot of it's going to be insults, etc.
But I think I opened some kind of portal to hell and every Democrat demon came streaming through to crap on my head and And I thought to myself, wait a minute, wait a minute.
They're crapping on me while I'm agreeing with their point of not voting for the president.
Do you see how important that is?
Instead of forgiving me, instead of saying, thank goodness, we're glad that you have come to your senses, and while you don't agree with us on everything, we do love the fact that you've said in public that you would not vote for the president, and for this reason.
Because this reason is one that we consider important, the whole disavowing racism thing.
And so what should have been the right response?
Well, as I've taught you, if you would like to encourage something to happen, you should reward it.
If you would like to discourage something from happening in the future, you should penalize it.
That always works.
What happened when I gave the left exactly what They should have wanted, which is a staunch Trump supporter switching to say that I would not vote for him, and here's the best part.
The reason I gave is their top reason.
Their top reason.
Their number one reason that they would want me to change my vote, I expressed clearly, emotionally, and honestly, completely honestly, and then I said I would give them what they wanted.
What was their response?
They shit on me.
In buckets.
What was my response to giving them everything they wanted and then having them shit on me in gigantic quantities?
Well, if you saw my pinned tweet, you know the answer to that.
They switched me back to vote for Trump.
Because the number one reason for voting for Trump is to not let those people have power.
They have demonstrated by penalizing me for doing the right thing that they can't hold power.
You can't let power be held by people who will penalize the stuff they want.
And the reason they would penalize me is because of past crimes.
In other words, past crimes meaning supporting the president.
In other words, no forgiveness.
What did I tell you is the difference between Republicans and Democrats?
If I had gone from a Democrat to a Republican, you're ahead of me, right?
I don't even have to finish the sentence, but I will anyway, in case there's anybody who needs it.
If I had gone from staunch Democrat to saying, forget it, Biden has lost me.
I'm gonna vote for Trump. What would Trump supporters do?
How would they treat me?
You know the answer.
You know the answer.
The way you would treat me is like a friend.
The way you would treat me is like a guest.
The way you would treat me is like special.
You would have actually rewarded me for doing what you thought Was the right thing?
Wouldn't you? In the comments, look at the comments, you can see it.
As a philosophy, Republicans understand human motivation.
Democrats don't.
It's very consistent. What is socialism?
Socialism is a whole bunch of people who don't understand how human motivation works and don't understand systems and economies and how to build something that could last.
Republicans like free markets, which are cruel, but it understands human motivation, it understands people, it allows that they are flawed, but it's just the best we can do with our flawed selves.
So when you see this pattern, it's hard to unsee it.
And so I'll say again that the Democrats, within one day, forced me back to be a Trump supporter because I can't be on the team That penalizes good behavior.
They just don't understand how anything works.
Anything. I want to be on the team where I can totally F up.
And if I say, damn it, I messed that up.
Here's what I'm going to do to fix it.
I want to be on the team that says, yeah, you did F up.
We're not going to take that away.
That's history. That's just a fact.
But I do appreciate the fact that you've made good.
I'm okay with you.
That's Republicans. And there's only one of those two countries I want to live in, and it's not the one where I get punished for doing the right stuff.
Now, how much did I anticipate that this would happen?
Well, I could see it coming from a mile away.
Now, I didn't know exactly what form it would take, but I did assume that bringing this attention to myself Would do one of two things.
Well, let me put it this way.
Instead of saying one of two things.
As I've taught you, the number one thing you have to do with persuasion is get attention.
Until you get people's attention, it doesn't matter what persuasion technique you have, what your message is, nobody's watching.
So the big part is getting the attention of the left.
Why did I want to do that?
Why did I intentionally...
Say something provocative like, Trump lost my vote.
Why did I want to do that on this topic of not disavowing the white supremacist?
The reason I wanted to do it is that I have discovered, as you have, that people on the right see the whole news and the people on the left see only half of it.
Because if you're on the right, you can't avoid seeing the mainstream news.
It's just too prevalent.
But if you're on the left, you can easily avoid Watching Fox News or reading Breitbart or something that would be, you know, right-leaning.
So what I wanted to do was open a channel so that the left would pay attention to me in a way that they normally would not.
If I could get them to pay attention to me, they would be open to my persuasion for the first time.
And once they're open to my persuasion, they would have at least the opportunity to see the compilation clips of the president Clearly and consistently disavowing white supremacists and neo-Nazis a number of times throughout his presidency, throughout his candidacy, and throughout his life.
I've never met any Democrat who had ever seen that video unless I showed it to him.
Would you agree? You've never met a Democrat who's ever seen that compilation video, but I'll bet almost every one of you has seen it.
I'll bet just about every one of you I've seen all the times he's disavowed it in clean, complete, exact language, just like you'd want to hear it from a president.
He just didn't want to get pushed during the debate.
That's what it looks like to me.
So I did assume that he would eventually say a clean and complete statement, and it would allow me to vote for him.
So I knew it was coming, but I didn't think it would happen as quickly as it did With the bile and evil and horribleness of the left.
They actually convinced me a lot faster.
You know, I would have waited probably for the president's statement that he finally made on Hannity, I guess.
So here's his exact statement on Hannity.
And by the way, doing it on Hannity was exactly the right place to do it.
If the president could pick one place to make this statement, it was on Hannity.
Nailed it. Because you want to be on the rightmost Trump-friendly platform, in part because the whole situation will go well for him, but partly because it forces the left to watch it.
He created a Hannity clip that the left just had to watch because the story is too big.
They can ignore Trump on Hannity if he says ordinary stuff.
But they couldn't ignore this.
The story is too big.
So putting it on Hannity was kind of brilliant.
Here's what he said. Quote, if you missed it, I condemn the KKK. I condemn all white supremacists.
I condemn the Proud Boys.
Here's the best part.
He goes, I don't know much about the Proud Boys.
Almost nothing. But I condemn them.
But I condemn them.
Alright. Could that have been more perfect?
Let me read between the lines.
The first part of his statement, I condemn the KKK. True.
Not only does he condemn them, he actually put them on a domestic terrorism list.
So, yeah. You know that is freaking true.
He condemns the KKK. And he's said it lots of times in the past as well.
He goes, I condemn all white supremacists.
Again, something he's said a number of times that the left has never heard, but the right has heard lots of times.
All good. So now he's said the two important things.
And notice that he said them first.
If you're good at media relations, you do this.
You say you lead with the thing you want to say.
You don't put any qualifiers.
You just say, I condemn the KKK. I condemn all white supremacists.
So he's moved from the debate where his answer was bad to this where it's perfect.
There's no improvement on this.
This is a perfect statement.
But then when he throws in the Proud Boys, don't think of this as throwing them under the bus exactly, because I don't quite see that.
Here's what I see.
This is a little bit tongue-in-cheek.
Remember I told you that the hard part is where do you draw the line?
Like, how do you go from KKK, definitely bad, white supremacist, definitely bad.
I don't know who the Proud Boys are.
But the fact that he said explicitly, I don't know much about them, almost nothing, but I condemn that?
Come on. Come on.
Could that have been more perfect to say he doesn't know anything about them and he condemns them?
That tells you everything you need to know about it.
Because remember, the problem was what happens when he gets into the gray area?
The way he handled the gray area was to say he doesn't know what they do but he condemns them anyway.
You can't do better than that.
That is the best answer maybe anybody has ever given to any question from the beginning of recorded history.
You will never see a more perfect answer to a trap question.
Remember when, harking back to the Rosie O'Donnell situation in his first debate, when he said only Rosie O'Donnell, and he got out of the worst question trap you could ever get out of, And that was the, you know, as I've told the story, that was the moment I said, wait a minute.
He's doing things that nobody can do.
He just did the impossible right in front of me.
He got out of the impossible trap.
Now, he did not get out of the trap in the debate, but when he had time to prepare and think about it, he came up with, really, you could not craft a better answer than this.
Because you can read the Proud Boys part As tongue in cheek.
The fact that he would condemn them while saying he doesn't know what they are.
That is the funniest...
I'm sorry. I feel like I have to swear.
Do you mind an F word in the middle of this?
Give you a little bit of warning?
To send the children away?
Earmuffs. Earmuffs on the children.
There's sometimes when the F word is the only word that works in a sentence.
Have you ever noticed that? So let me say it with the F word the way it should have been said.
When the president said, I don't know much about the Proud Boys, almost nothing, but I condemn that?
That's the funniest fucking thing a president ever said.
That's just the funniest fucking thing.
And I don't know if everybody's gonna appreciate how brilliant that is.
Because what it does was, in a million years, I couldn't have seen this solution.
Literally, this is like a Houdini situation.
Because I would not have known Had to get under the trap of going down the gray area.
Now, what happens if next he's asked to condemn somebody who's even more, let's say, holy?
The next one, he could do the same thing.
He'd say, well, I don't know much about them, but I condemn them.
You happy? Sure, I condemn them.
I don't know what they do, but I condemn them.
That's it. He's shown a willingness to condemn people just because you wanted them to say it.
It took all the power out of it.
It's sort of like Jay-Z using the N-word.
If you've ever seen Jay-Z, he was asked about, well, why do you always use the N-word in your music?
And part of his answer was that it takes the power out of it.
Instead of it being a horrible insult, he just owns it.
He uses it, turns it into a tool.
Good technique, Jay-Z. And the president kind of did that a little bit by saying, you want me to condemn?
What do you want? Yeah, give me a name.
Give me a name, I'll condemn him.
How about...
I'm trying to think of some other example.
How about the...
I don't know.
Anybody else? Alright, unemployment down to 7.9 in September.
Well, room to grow.
So, let me give you a bottom line on the President and his coronavirus situation.
First of all, what are the odds that the...
Is it the head of the Democratic Party?
Her name is Rona. What are the odds that...
I'm sorry, the head of the Republican Party...
Isn't the chair of the Republican Party named Rona?
R-O-N-A? What are the odds of that?
I'm just tossing that in there because it struck my mind funny.
But anyway, my guess is that this will work for the president.
I think it could go either way.
So I wouldn't put a ton of confidence in this initial opinion.
And I'll reserve the right to revise my opinion.
Because you need to see how the public responds.
And once you see how they respond, you'll get a better idea if this is going to work for or against the president.
But let me ask you this.
Is it more likely that the president would cause trouble by speaking out and doing public appearances, or that he would gain votes?
I don't know. There was probably more downside from active campaigning at this point than upside.
It's hard to say. And Tom Arnold.
People are suggesting people to condemn.
What about the Elbonians?
Well, I don't know anything about the Elbonians, but I condemn that.
I think I'm going to tweet that after we're done here.
My guess is that this will create some sympathy for the president, but in addition, it's very, very compatible with his notion that we should try to get back to work, even at great risk to some people.
And he was one of the people who took the risk.
He lived the life that he was promoting, which is take precautions, but still work.
That's what he did. He took precautions, but he still worked.
That's what he asked of the country.
And he took a risk, and in a weird way, he turned into an accidental role model because he took the risk.
So, we'll see. Alright.
That's all I got to say about this.
And I condemn everyone.
I condemn everything I don't understand.
In general, if I don't know about it, I condemn it.
