Episode 1475 Scott Adams: Fresh Coffee and Even Fresher News. Let's Criticize the Dopes in Charge.
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
CNN's anecdotal persuasion
OBL wanted Biden to be President?
Poppy fields and the Taliban
Kabul airport hostages
Afghanistan withdrawal, incompetence or intentional?
How President Trump would have done in Afghanistan
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If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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And I don't think it gets much better than this all day long.
So, better enjoy it.
Grab that pleasure while you can.
Grab it by the neck.
And let's enjoy it.
And to enjoy it to its maximum potential, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein a canteen, jug or 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 to the other day, the thing that makes everything better, is called...
Yup, that's right.
The simultaneous sip, but it happens now.
Go! I feel my need for a third booster shot just decreased to 5%.
It won't stay that way, apparently, but good for now.
We're good for now.
Let us begin our episode by talking about anecdotal persuasion.
Anecdotal persuasion!
As you know, if you watch CNN at all, what is it that they want us to understand?
Well, one thing more than anything else.
Orange man bad.
We'll get to that later.
But there's a second thing they want us to believe, which is that they are the network of science who support the party of science, the Democrats.
They're all about the science.
The science.
And they would like to give you data, good, solid data, Within the context of science.
And that will help you all make really good decisions.
Except that the way they're persuading you is with anecdotes.
What? That's right.
Even CNN knows that they can't convince anybody with science.
Because science is really important, except it doesn't work for persuasion.
Now, in a sense it does, because the most persuasive thing you could do is to stop using data, which CNN has done.
So instead of telling you that vaccinations are good, or that you should get them, they'll give you anecdotes of people having a bad time.
And instead of telling you, here's the data that says climate change is going to get you, they say, here's somebody who died in a flood, So CNN is in this weird situation where they're the promoters of science while couching all of their stories and anecdotes.
Literally the opposite of scientific thinking.
So that seems ironic, except that it is actually quite compatible with science to not tell people the science.
If you want to persuade people...
Don't tell them the science.
Apparently that doesn't work.
You gotta scare them. Scare them with stories.
So here's one for today. Melissa Joan Hart.
You know her from TV as Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
She was fully vaccinated and still got sick with COVID. Did not get hospitalized but she's having a tough time with it.
Now She might be on the list of people you'd say needs that third booster.
So CNN is persuading us with anecdotes and is working.
Because, scientifically speaking, we don't get much persuaded by facts but anecdotes?
Yes. Would you like to hear a true story from behind the curtain?
Things that only minor celebrities like me and Sabrina the Teenage Witch experience.
True story, I once partnered with Joan Hart, who was Sabrina the Teenage Witch, on a local episode of Wheel of Fortune.
So sometime back, it was a while ago, as you might imagine, the Wheel of Fortune show did a traveling version where they would do the regular national show, but they would also go to different regions and do a local show, and it would be local minor celebrities.
So I was one of the local minor celebrities who appeared on a California version of the show, and it was still, you know, It was Vanna White and, you know, it was the regular staff.
They just did a local run.
And I was partnered with, because it was celebrities, they put us on teams because we were too stupid to, too dumb to do it ourselves, I guess.
So Melissa Joan Hart was on my team, and we did not do well.
Turns out, turns out, we did not do well at all.
And that's where I learned that a 20-something person is not the best person to have a wide range of the trivia of the world.
We got beaten by a retired ex-basketball professional, NBA player.
And I thought to myself, if you get beaten in a battle of intelligence, because part of it is intelligence...
Buy a retired basketball player?
You need to erase your game a little bit.
So Sabrina the Teenage Witch and I got smoked at Wheel of Fortune.
One of my biggest failures to this day.
I bow in shame.
So here's some more fake news.
Maybe. Maybe.
Maybe. So here's a story.
I would have to see this with my own eyes to believe it's true.
Because you know how one way to identify fake news, I've told you many times, it's a little bit too on the nose.
You know when the news is a little bit too perfect?
It's usually not true.
It's one of the most predictive tells.
You know, something that will really tell you that something's not working out is...
That's not really Melissa Joan Hart, is it?
Somebody's sending me a picture of Melissa Joan Hart that I don't think is Hart, is it?
Anyway. So here's the news I don't believe, that the Daily Mail is quoting notes retrieved after the 2010 operation to get Osama bin Laden, and it says that Osama had a handwritten note.
It said he wanted Biden to be president of the U.S., And banned any attempt to assassinate him because they wanted an incompetent president who will lead the U.S. into crisis.
Now, does that sound real?
What do you think? I'd have to see the note.
I'd have to have a handwriting analyst look into it.
Yeah, I'm seeing some people say it's true, some people say it's fake.
I don't know. I would say it might be true, it might be fake, but...
but...
it is in the category of things that are usually fake.
If I had to bet money on it, I'd bet fake.
But maybe 40% chance it's true.
You know, something like that. I mean, it wouldn't be a good bet.
It wouldn't be a safe bet.
But I'd bet it's not true.
Or that it's out of context or something.
Somebody said they heard that years ago.
It doesn't make it true...
Well, all right, here's another anecdotal persuasion from CNN. Why is it that climate change only makes storms and hurricanes worse?
Why does climate change make everything worse everywhere?
Are you telling me that you can't come up with one story about the place that used to be not as good for agriculture, but they're having record agriculture?
No. No, there's no story like that.
Because it's not so much climate worsening, although there's a lot of worsening going on, it appears, but there's climate change.
Wouldn't you expect, just your common sense, that there might be some places in the globe that were a little too cool and making them a little warmer really help things?
Where are those stories?
And are you seeing the real story if you're only seeing the bad stuff, if the change is making some stuff worse and some stuff better?
Let me ask you this.
Could you have thrown a dart at any point in the timeline in American, let's say, industrial age history, and could you not have found...
That there were more disasters in some places than usual, at the same time that some parts of the world were having a better-than-usual time.
I feel as though you could have done these same anecdotal stories at any time in the past, no matter what climate change had been doing.
You tell me you can't find, even if you took away all climate change, let's take the assumption it makes no difference at all.
You don't think you could find lots of people, lots of places on Earth, setting records?
Of course. Of course you could.
But you would also find places that are having the best weather they've ever had.
I don't know that this should be persuading you.
It's not science, but that's your climate change persuasion.
All anecdote. CBS News has decided that everything is about climate change, including the Taliban takeover.
And that one of the reasons that the Taliban so easily got control of the country is that the rural places, their crops had been destroyed by climate change, and then they were more easily co-opted into a new system because they were desperate.
So don't you think that the news is going to figure out how to make climate change about everything?
Like, every story is going to have to have a climate change angle how it made it worse.
And the further they go with this, the less credible they are, it seems to me.
If they stuck with the things that really seem pretty solid, I think it would be a better argument than trying to make everything that happens about climate change.
But on the other hand, they're not making a logical argument.
They're making an emotional one.
And for that, this stuff probably works.
As I saw in the comments, and I was going to say it myself, why is it...
That climate change made everything worse except the poppy fields.
Am I wrong?
Were the poppy fields the only thing that wasn't affected by climate change?
It turns out climate change might be really, really good for poppies.
And that's related to another topic, which is the question of where does the Taliban get their funding?
Where do you think the Taliban gets their funding?
Well, almost entirely from illegal activities.
They're basically, you know, the Taliban's basically an Islamic mafia.
And they sell drugs and traffic various things.
And they make anywhere from hundreds of millions to a low billion per year from doing illegal stuff.
Kidnappings, ransom, mineral exploitation, illegal tax collection.
Well, I don't know what's illegal.
And that sort of thing.
Now, let's say they're selling illegal drugs, poppies, is their main source of income.
What would be a way to destroy their poppy business and weaken them?
Fentanyl. Now, as you know, I'm not pro-fentanyl.
Fentanyl is what probably killed my stepson.
But it's kind of weird that Afghanistan is cozying up to China, the main producer of fentanyl, Because I feel like you could produce fentanyl cheaper and ship it easier.
I feel as if the poppy business might be in trouble.
Am I wrong? Because fentanyl apparently is cheaper, easier.
You can ship it better.
You don't have to process it as much.
You know, if you've got a lab, you're set.
You don't need any property.
It shouldn't be that hard to get the chemicals because you can get them from China as much as you want.
So, I wonder if the poppy business is going to take a hit.
Secondly, I heard lots of reports that we were intentionally allowing the poppy fields to stay because it's the only way the poor people in Afghanistan could survive.
They had to sell illegal drugs or else they would starve to death.
Well, is that our problem still?
I would say that when we were in Afghanistan and had a degree of control over the government, directly or indirectly, it really was our problem to feed everybody.
And maybe we had to make some tough choices about feeding the locals versus killing their poppy business.
But we're gone now.
Can't we bomb it now?
Now that we're out of the business, can't we just destroy all the poppy fields?
And if we did, what would happen?
It would just make fentanyl more available, right?
You know, the fentanyl would just fill the gap.
So I'm not entirely sure you could mow the poppy fields and make any difference at all.
Because it's just such a fungible thing that somebody would say, oh, fewer poppies, let's just crank up the fentanyl production.
We'll break even. So I don't even know if you can do anything about it.
But I do think that fentanyl is one of the stories that has one of these unintended consequence sort of things baked into it.
It'll either kill the poppy business or replace it or something or make fentanyl bigger.
One of those. Let's see.
Here's a fake story by lack of context.
So here's a challenge to you.
I'm going to tell you a story that's in the news that you all know about Afghanistan, right?
And then I'm going to tell you the context that they don't tell you, that as soon as you hear it, you're going to say, oh, that is true, and you're going to be mad, okay?
So my challenge is to make you mad at the quality of the news coverage.
Are you ready? We're worried about the Taliban capturing a whole bunch of weapons that Americans left.
That part's true.
As far as we know.
I mean, it looks true. So we all know that story.
And it's a bad, bad thing.
Right? It's all bad.
Now, even if the Taliban can't operate the helicopters, they can sell them.
Somebody could maybe reverse engineer them.
Maybe somebody would use them.
Iran might use them against somebody.
I don't know. So you can think of lots of bad, bad things that would happen because we left so many weapons behind.
Here's what they didn't tell you.
Are you ready to get mad?
They also have, the Taliban, all of the weapons of the Afghan army.
Now how do you feel?
How much fucking difference does it make that they got all the American weapons we left behind?
They got an army.
They got the whole Taliban army.
They have all the weapons that we left a 300,000-person Taliban army.
The Taliban army was like five times the size...
No, the Afghan army was about five times the size of the Taliban, right?
So the Afghan army...
Probably has five times the weaponry that we left behind, or something like that.
It's basically, if you own an entire nation's army, which is what the Taliban does, they own the army.
Do you really care about the extra weapons that the Americans left?
Let's put it into context.
How many rifles were captured by the Taliban because they were left behind?
Probably a lot. Like, it's a big, alarming number, right?
But as a percentage of all the weapons they gained, by taking over an army, they took over an army.
They owned the army.
I don't think a few warehouses of extra weapons are going to make that much difference.
Now, wouldn't we prefer that they didn't have those weapons?
Of course. Of course.
Is it a mistake to leave them?
Looks like it. It looks like a terrible mistake.
But I don't know if it's as big a deal as we're making it.
I feel like the news has intentionally taken away the context.
And the context is, they conquered a whole army.
They own everything that the Army owned.
It's all theirs now. I don't know if it made any difference.
I can easily see that there will be some things we learn about the decisions that the military made about pulling out.
Here's my prediction. My prediction is we're going to learn some facts that we don't know now that will change your mind about what happened.
One of those facts we might learn is that a lot of the advanced equipment was disabled, maybe.
Another fact we might learn is that it doesn't matter how many weapons the Taliban has, Because they have so many weapons from the army.
It just doesn't matter. And it's possible that the Americans said, you know what?
If we blow up our own weapons, we're going to injure some of our friends who are too nearby, and we're going to scare everybody, and we're going to panic everybody.
It's possible that the military made a conscious decision to leave the weapons.
Well, obviously it was a conscious decision.
But I mean, they might have actually calculated that it would be worse to destroy them.
Because it might have caused panic and might have hurt people who were nearby.
I don't know. Now, of course, your common sense says, seriously?
You can't tell everybody to just back off from that warehouse and just lob a bomb onto it?
Well, it seems like it.
I mean, common sense says you can't just throw a hand grenade in there and make sure you're effing up the sightings and stuff on the weapons.
I mean, how hard would it be to lob a few grenades into the Into the small arms place and blow it up.
I don't know. Seems like you could damage enough of the weapons that they wouldn't fire correctly.
Maybe not. I don't know.
And now we're talking about maybe dropping bombs on them after the fact.
But now we can't do it.
You know we can't bomb those weapons now, right?
Because we haven't gotten the Americans out.
So this is a hostage situation already.
Because the fact that Americans are there and the Taliban can control whether they get out, that means already they're controlling what we can and cannot bomb right now.
Because we can't bomb the weapons we left behind.
Too dangerous.
They've got our hostages. So it's already a hostage problem.
Remember the other day, maybe even yesterday, I was saying that we can't yet know enough to know how bad the decision was.
On the surface, I'm completely with you.
On the surface, it looks like the biggest botched thing of all botched things.
We can all agree on that, right?
I will stipulate...
That based on what we know so far, it looks like the worst mistake ever made in the military-industrial, or no, the military-political world.
I guess we could agree on that.
But there's a dog not barking here.
How do you explain that 100% of the people who were not in charge knew exactly the right thing to do, but 100% of the people who were in charge didn't?
How do you explain that? Seriously, how do you explain that?
That's not a point.
It's an actual question of curiosity.
Every one of us who were not there knew what to do.
But everyone who was there didn't.
And knowing what was right to do was kind of easy, wasn't it?
You know? Blow up your own weapons.
Get the Americans out first.
Kind of easy. Right?
Yeah. Wouldn't you say?
They were easy, easy decisions that anybody could have made right.
Almost guarantees that there's something we don't know.
How many of you would agree with the statement that it's more likely that there's something big we don't know about versus it was exactly as incompetent as it looks?
Which one do you think it was?
There's something we don't know, something big...
Or that it was exactly as incompetent as it looks, and the only people who didn't know how to do it right were the people in charge.
And everybody else in the world knew how to do it right.
Which is more likely?
I would say that the we don't know what happened, there's more to the story, is maybe five to one more likely.
That would be my guess.
Just based on living in the world.
You know, you live in the world long enough, you start to develop these...
These rules of thumb in your head, they're not accurate necessarily.
They're just patterns and impressions you've picked up.
But mine is, there's a 5 to 1 chance that the explanation is there's something we don't know about.
Some kind of deal we made.
Some kind of risk we wanted to take.
Some kind of leverage somebody had on somebody.
Some kind of threat.
I don't know. Something.
So here's a Here's another question that we all love talking about.
Why is it that Trump...
Well, why do you think that Trump might have done a better or worse job?
Do you think that the Democrats are having any missing Trump problem?
A little bit. Let me tell you something that Trump would do in this situation that Biden has not.
Okay? And I think it's easy to imagine this.
Now, first of all, Trump says he wouldn't have been in this situation, and maybe not.
Because whatever it was that caused Biden to be in this situation, it probably means somebody made a cowardly decision, or they made a hard decision and didn't explain it to us, or something.
And I feel like Trump wouldn't have done that.
I think Trump would have made a hard decision and just told us.
I think you just would have told us.
Yeah, I mean, I had to make this hard decision.
It's really going to be bad for this one thing, but, you know, you've got to make a decision.
This is what I decided. But here's the other thing that I think Trump would do that Biden so far is not doing, and I think it would go like this.
If Trump found himself in this situation, and we don't know that he would, of having all these Americans there and having to trust the Taliban to let them out, here's what Trump would probably say to the Taliban.
Taliban, you're getting everything you want.
We only want one thing.
If you don't give us that one thing, which is allow the Americans out, we'll take everything you have.
Everything. We will come back every five minutes and just mow the lawn.
We will wait until you assemble in groups larger than five and drop a fucking bomb in the middle of it.
Every time, as long as it takes.
Forever. Forever. If you give us any trouble with getting the hostages out.
And let me tell you that I will do it for fun.
I'll enjoy it.
I will wipe out every freaking Taliban.
Anybody with a gun is going to be dead.
I will degrade your entire country.
We'll leave nothing there.
Unless you let the Americans out.
Now... We believe the Taliban respond to threats because they're rational people, and they have no benefit whatsoever of messing with the Americans except whatever psychological, weird, evil benefits they get.
I feel as though this is one of those situations where Trump was the perfect president, if he had been the president.
Now, to be fair...
I've said many times that it's not really about having a good or bad president.
It's usually about a fit.
Like, who's the right fit?
And Trump was the right fit for this.
He was really the right fit for this.
Exactly, exactly the right president for this.
He just wasn't president. I would say that Trump was maybe not the right president for the pandemic.
Wouldn't you say? I would say if there was one issue...
Really, this stands above all the rest.
It would be trusting Trump with health decisions, right?
Because one of the things that Trump created for himself is wild hyperbole, Which works.
Politically, it works really well and had a lot of benefits.
But you don't want to be the wild, hyperbole person when it's a health scare.
It's just the wrong fit.
It has nothing to do with Trump's talent.
It has nothing to do with his brains or his motivation, his intentions, or anything else.
Just some things fit better than other things.
And I'd sure like to have a President Trump while we're trying to get Americans out of Afghanistan.
To me, that's no contest.
I feel as if even the Democrats would agree with the statement that Trump could get the Americans out better.
It's scarier.
Let's see what else we got here.
What is the difference between Biden withdrawing from Afghanistan and the California governor's recall election?
Well, one difference is that the people who will be left in Afghanistan will still have power and electricity, and their country is mostly not on fire.
Mostly not on fire.
Whereas the Californians, after Newsom leaves, we won't have enough power or water, and the sky is full of smoke because our state is on fire.
So the Newsom recall is a little bit worse.
In terms of what gets left behind?
All right, I'm kidding. Afghanistan's worse.
But you have to ask yourself about how bad is California that you can even make a reasonable comparison to Afghanistan and people will listen.
Well, today I did a Robots Read News comic.
If you're not following those, I just...
Tweeted one out and posted it on Locals.
So I only do that comic because I can post it on Locals and not get in trouble.
But sometimes they're ones I release into the wild as well if they don't look too bad.
And so the Robot Read News comics, you want to read those on the Afghanistan topic.
You don't want to miss that. Now, let's talk about how Larry Elder should not be advertising pain relief when running for governor.
Yeah, he's on one of those pain relief commercials.
So every day that goes by that we don't hear a genuine Larry Elder scandal...
I think his odds of becoming governor just go up almost every day because California itself is looking worse every day.
I've got my blinds down, but you want to see a picture of what it looks like outside?
You're going to hear the sound of my blinds going up, and I'm going to get over lit in here, but I'll do this just so I can show you what it looks like.
Oh, I just realized, I don't know if I can change the...
Oh, I don't think I can do this on Locals.
I'll turn the screen around.
All right. On YouTube...
Let's see.
I think I can turn you around.
I'll turn the screen around.
So look out my window there, and then on Locals, I'll just turn the screen around so you can see.
So you're looking out my window.
This looks like fog, but isn't.
That's the actual air quality.
So that's the smoke...
And Christina got trapped out of town in a small aircraft.
She was doing a little ferrying an aircraft for someone at the hangar.
And she can't get back in town because she can't fly a small aircraft in the smoke.
So she's going to have to get back on a commercial flight, I guess.
So that's what California looks like.
Now tell me, if you have to put your mask on to go to the gym...
And you can't go outside and take a walk.
I can't take a walk.
Just think about that.
Just try to imagine that you're in your state, whatever state you're in.
I can't take a walk.
It's too dangerous.
I can't go outside.
I mean, I could walk to my car, but I literally can't go for a walk.
It's just, you know, I've got asthma too, so it's a little worse.
So how does a governor get re-elected when the residents of the state can't take a walk?
I mean, think about that.
I feel as if Larry Elder just has to show up and he's going to be the next governor.
I just don't know how you can elect the guy who manages the state so poorly.
You can't go outside.
I mean, that's crazy.
Who has ever done worse than that?
Ever. Has anybody ever done worse than that?
I don't know. Yeah, the blackouts and the brownouts.
So far, the weather has been more mild than I thought.
So here's the weird thing.
It might be that, and this is true, by the way, the only reason I still have electricity...
Somebody tell me, what's the only reason I still have electricity?
Does anybody know why?
It's because the forest fires are so bad, they're blocking the sun, so I don't need AC. I'm not making that up.
That's legitimately true.
The only reason I have electricity is because the forest fires are blocking out the sun, and so it's cooler.
I'm not making that up.
That's real. That's the only reason I have electricity.
Do you think a governor can get re-elected when the only reason you have electricity is that the forest fire blocked the sun temporarily?
How does it get worse than that?
And he's responsible for closing down our last nuclear power plant, the only hope we had of having enough electricity.
Not good. Not good.
It looks like we're going to run out of water in California.
And I don't know that there's a plan to get more.
What exactly is our water-making plan?
The only way I can see that we can do it is to stick a hose into the ocean, build a nuclear reactor on the coast, and start desalinating.
Otherwise, we all have to move out of California, I guess.
So, obviously, I've come to the end of my content.
It seems like the only things happening are Afghanistan and climate change.
And I guess the recall.
So is...
Oh, I also saw...
Was it Austin?
And maybe Millie said this too?
That nobody saw any predictions that the Taliban could take over in 11 days.
So that's sort of the defense.
So the defense is that we have, you know, 20-20 hindsight.
But if the military had known...
That the Taliban could take over so quickly, they would have acted differently.
Does that work for you?
That's even an incompetent defense.
Don't you expect that even if people do a bad job, they can probably put on a pretty good defense, because they have time to think about it, and they get a lot of help, and lawyers probably talk to them and say, all right, say this.
It won't be true, but it's going to sound pretty good.
It'll be a good defense. They can't even defend themselves.
Because here's the problem.
Even if they had more time, shouldn't they get the Americans out first?
The only question was, what order do you do things?
And his statement about we didn't know that the Taliban would fall so quickly doesn't address the main complaint.
The main complaint is you did it in the wrong order.
And he doesn't even address it.
He acts like that was the right order of things.
Right? So...
I would say that I could not have less confidence in our military leadership than I have right now.
And I would go further.
I would say that if Biden doesn't fire both Milley and Austin over this, then maybe he doesn't need to be president anymore.
I'm not sure if he is, because we're still trying to figure out who's making the decisions.
By the way, does anybody know who's making all the decisions?
I have a theory on this.
But let's see your opinion.
So tell me in the comments, who do you think is the power behind the power?
I'm seeing Susan Rice, BlackRock, Hillary Clinton, Obama, Jill, Susan Rice, Hillary, Xi Jinping, Valerie Jarrett, Ron Klain.
Okay, here's the answer.
And I would die on this hill, meaning that I would bet basically everything that I'm right.
You ready? It depends who cares the most.
Per topic. So here's who I think is running the country.
Everyone who cares the most, and is also a Democrat, per topic.
So in other words, there is almost certainly a group of people who really, really care about, let's say, what we do with Israel.
And I think they're in charge because there isn't enough pushback from anybody else.
So I think any group of people...
We're sort of the experts on that domain.
There'll be some China experts, some Russia experts, some NATO experts, some climate change experts, etc.
I think that the people who care the most and are most part of those advisory stuff, I think they're making the decisions.
Because I think by the time it gets to the advisors, the advisors say, I don't know, well, they're the experts.
And I think Joe isn't capable enough to override an expert the way Trump would.
What is the main thing you want from a president?
If I were to say there's one talent you want the most, what would it be?
What talent would you most want from a president?
Let's say they're all good at communicating and the basics, right?
So let's say everybody... By the time you become president, you've got all the basics.
But what? What one single talent...
There you go. It's funny.
I watch the difference in the comments between the people on Locals, the people who subscribe to my content, and the people who may be more of a general audience on YouTube.
And it's such a difference in the comments.
And on locals, people immediately went to the right answer, which is bullshit detection.
The only thing you need your president to do is to know when the experts are wrong.
That's it. Because otherwise, the experts would just run everything.
You could just say, all right, just tell me what to do about climate change.
You're the experts. All right, I'll do that.
Right? The only thing the president does is call bullshit on experts.
Trump... I would say, did this better than anybody's ever done it.
Even with whatever mistakes you might say, and there would be a few, I'd say that Trump is the best bullshit detector we've ever had as president.
I think. Now, that doesn't mean he also doesn't give the most bullshit, because he does, right?
And you know the old saying, it takes one to know one?
Well, that is so true!
Let me give you an example. Every now and then somebody will make a movie that involves a tennis game and maybe a tennis professional.
If you are a tennis player and you watch a movie where people are pretending to play tennis, you can immediately spot that they don't know how to play tennis.
No matter how much acting lessons they took to hit correctly, anybody who's an experienced tennis player can say, they're somebody who never hit a tennis ball until they started practicing for this movie.
Right? Same in golf.
Right. Same in golf.
If you're a golf expert, you can just look at somebody's swing and you know what's going on.
But Trump is literally the most prolific bullshitter of all time.
And, yeah, he was the most prolific bullshitter.
And don't you think he can spot it?
I do. I think he's done it over and over again.
Now, he used a little hyperbole when he talked about China and, you know, climate change being a hoax.
But if you look at the context in which he meant that, meaning that China wanted us to be in a bad situation economically compared to them, it was a hoax.
Now, that doesn't mean that climate change isn't real.
I'm not saying that. I'm saying that he correctly called out that there was a whole bunch of bullshit baked in with the real stuff, if there's any real stuff.
Right? He spotted the bullshit part of it, and I think he got that completely right.
Now... I guess the other thing the president needs to do is take the hard choices and take the heat.
Because sometimes it's not so much about the experts, it's priorities.
And when it's just priorities, then you need a president who can take any amount of heat.
Who could do that better than Trump?
Nobody. Ever.
Ever. No president could take more heat for a decision that just needed to be done than Trump.
And imagine a second-term Trump.
Oh, my God. A second-term Trump could make the hardest decisions, because he could.
And he would. And I think he would play the long game.
I think he would. I think Trump would play the long game, which is to make the hard decision.
Withdrawing from Afghanistan is one of those.
And just get it done.
And I think history would be kind to him if he did.
All right. No more old presidents, somebody saying.
I agree with you.
I mean, I said it before Trump ran the first time.
I said, we shouldn't have 70-plus-year-old presidents.
I think it's too old.
On the other hand, what is the biggest advantage of an old president?
You know what you're getting.
That's the big advantage.
You know what you're getting.
And I think with Trump we got exactly what we thought we would get.
You know, some of the details were different, but not really.
I mean, basically you got exactly what you expected.
He was Trump from day one.
He was never un-Trump.
Biden too. Didn't you know what you were getting with Biden?
Of course you did. You got exactly what you voted for.
Now people chose that, consciously.
I hope they like their choice.
It doesn't look so good this week.
But... Presidents need to be post-sexual.
That's not a bad concept.
Yeah, if you get your presidents old enough so that they've crossed over their sex life, you have one less thing to be distracted with, a la Clinton, for example.
Yeah, once you cross 80, the statistics look bad.
I would allow that young 70s isn't like it used to be.
I'm being asked for a lesson, a micro-lesson, on self-hypnosis for stress relief.
I don't know that that would be a micro-lesson so much as I should hypnotize you.
So I should do a video in which I just hypnotize you to sleep better, which I could do.
I'm working on one now about how to create assets on a nothing.
You know, basically psychological assets.
And coming along on that, I've got a problem right now that there's some construction in my house.
So almost as soon as I'm done with the live streams, there's going to be construction noise all day.
So it's tough to make videos.
By the way, if you're on Locals and you're wondering why I slowed down on the videos, that's why.
I can't do them during the day like I used to.
But that won't last forever, so there'll be more of them.
And that...
Is what I call Coffee with Scott Adams.
That's right. You have come to the end of another fantastic segment.
The kind of entertainment that, really, you can't buy because I don't sell it.
You might have to watch some advertisements, but okay, you could subscribe to it.
So you can buy it. But forget about that.
And here's how I tell you you should watch this show.
I think that different forms of...
Oh, by the way, before I go, I'm going to give you a recommendation of some entertainment, media entertainment that's amazing.
The way you should watch this live stream is either by exercising while you're doing it, taking a walk, doing something like that, or housework, washing the dishes, putting your headphones, or just having it on as sort of a friend who's talking to you while you're getting ready for your day, or commuting, that sort of thing.
So the way to listen to this is not so much that you're picking up the news, but you're having a conversation with a friend who talks too much, thinks he knows everything.
That's me. I'm your invisible friend.
How many of you who got lonely during the pandemic?
Did anybody get lonely during the pandemic?
Yeah, I just want to see it in your comments.
How many were lonely? A lot of no's because your families were close.
Yeah. But then there were a lot of people, especially single people, it was just devastating.
But one of the ways to listen to this is as your imaginary friend, who's not really imaginary...
And I'm just there hanging out with you a little bit, talking about what's new.
All right, here's your recommendation.
Have you all seen, I know you have, there's a series called Ted Laszlo on, I think it's only Apple TV, so you have to buy it.
And I just started watching it, and you know I've told you that there's no good TV shows anymore, and there are no good movies.
They don't match our sense of, I don't know, our patience.
It doesn't work anymore.
And the content is terrible.
It's just terrible. And it makes you feel bad.
It's cringy and all that.
It's woke. And then there's the show Ted Laszlo.
Now, I resisted watching it because the previews are terrible.
Have you seen the previews?
The previews don't make that look good.
But I found out there's a reason.
You can't make a preview of that show.
And here's why. This show is a cumulative masterpiece.
Every moment of the show is a little muted, a little reduced in, let's say, energy.
So if you watch a preview, you're going to get one of these low-energy, just somebody who's talking to somebody, and you're like, I'm not sure why I watch that.
But that low-energy stuff accumulates over the course of an episode, and then also over the course of the arc of the entire show.
And it is a frickin' masterpiece.
It's very nearly the best thing I've ever seen on television.
And I'll tell you what he does right.
So, who is it?
Sudeikis, who's the executive producer and the star.
I'll just give you the setup without being a spoiler.
He plays an optimistic American who has chosen to be a soccer coach in a British Premier League.
And he's never played soccer and he doesn't even know the rules.
Now, what's the show about?
If it's about an American who is a coach in a different...
In a different level, in a different sport.
What's it about?
Persuasion. It's a whole show about persuasion.
Because this person, he has no skills.
He has no experience.
The only thing he knows is how to motivate people.
And you watch him as he uses one persuasion trick after another, usually in a more dramatic sense, so they're exaggerated a little bit.
But he uses one trick after another, and you watch him build a thing over the course of the shows that's amazing.
It's really amazing. It's the best Ted Lasso.
Is it Laszlo or Lasso?
So it's Ted Lasso and it looks terrible in the previews.
So let me say this as clearly as possible.
Don't look at the previews.
Don't look at them.
It's not good.
The previews cannot capture the genius that went into this freaking thing.
It's pure genius from beginning to end.
The first episode, you might not feel it.
At around the third episode, you're going to say to yourself, what the hell am I watching?
This is so good.
It's got layers.
It's like layers on layers on layers.
One of the things they do is what I call the Beatles technique.
I've been studying the Beatles for a year now to find out what they did right.
Not just musically, but what was in their systems or techniques?
It turns out that both McCartney and Lennon were systems people.
They would develop a system that would get them there, not just a goal of having a good song.
And one of the systems was they would take anything that sounded good and put it in the same song, even if it didn't make sense.
They'd say, well, this sounds good.
This is this bell ringing. Ding-dong-ba-dong-ba-dong.
Yeah, I like the way that bell sounds.
And then you've got a guitar lick over here.
You know what would sound good?
We'll take that bell that I like individually, we'll put it with that guitar lick that I like individually, and we'll have a bell and a guitar, and we'll call it a song.
And we'll add some random lyrics that don't really have anything to do with anything.
That's how the Beatles made their songs.
They took individual things that felt good and put them together.
I don't know if anybody does that.
But... But anyway, this show does that because one of the things it takes is bits from the best thing you've ever watched.
How many of you like shows where the underdog wins a sporting competition?
Right? Don't you like anything where the big underdog wins a sporting competition?
Or it could be a spelling bee by any competition.
Right. Every movie that has that, if they execute it well...
I like it. So they throw that in there.
That's in Ted Lasso. Then you've got a fish out of water.
That's sort of the basis for most humorous stuff.
That's there. You've got persuasion lessons, which is fun.
That's there. You've got great dialogue.
You've got the most interesting character.
That's there. The casting is freaking genius.
When do you see the casting?
You need an Academy Award for just casting that stupid thing.
But every part of this is genius, and the parts aren't supposed to go together.
They put them together anyway.
They just said, take everything that's great and put it in a show.
What's the thing I hate worse about any show?
They make you feel bad in order to make you feel good.
They have to take the viewer down into depression so that when things go well, you're like, oh, finally, I feel good now.
But this show makes you feel good almost the whole way, except he's got some marital problems that are kind of necessary to the plot.
But otherwise, you're just sort of happy the whole time.