Episode 117 - Reducing Bias, Eating at the Red Hen and Midterm Turnout
Date: 2018-06-25 | Duration: 1:00:52
Topics
Red Hen restaurant and President Trump’s tweet Maxine Waters call for harassment of conservatives Hawk Newsome’s recommendation for pardon consideration Scott’s conversation yesterday, with an… informed, educated, highly intelligent liberal media person
Transcript
[0:08]
Has anybody noticed that Farmers Insurance uses my theme song? Except I think they came up with it first. They’ve got this little theme song where they go, “We are farmers, bump-a-bump-bump-bump-bump.” Sounds a lot like my music, doesn’t it? Speaking of music, I’m not a music guy, but I had to check out Kanye’s album, Ye, and oh my God, it’s so good. I just had to tell you that. So if you care about music more than I do, you’re gonna have to check that out. I’ll tell you what was amazing about it. My big complaint with music is that when you’re listening to a band or an artist’s song, they might have one big hit and then all the rest is just either boring or it sounds the same.
[1:11]
You can listen to Kanye’s music and it just is never the same. It doesn’t sound like anybody else. It doesn’t even sound like a genre. It seems to borrow from genres, and it’s the most creative thing I’ve ever heard from music. I don’t know if it’s the most I’ve ever heard, but the level of sheer artistic genius in that thing is just off the hook. Anyway, enough about that. Some of you saw the President’s tweet about the Red Hen restaurant. If you didn’t, let me read it to you. The Red Hen restaurant—this is from President Trump, and as you know, they refused service for Sarah Sanders: “The Red Hen Restaurant should focus more on cleaning its filthy canopy, its doors and windows, badly needs a paint job, rather than refusing to serve a fine person like…”
[2:12]
“…Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I always had a rule: if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it’s dirty on the inside.” He’s definitely the funniest president. That speaks for itself. Now you might ask yourself: is that gonna be good or bad for business for the Red Hen? My guess is in the short run, they might actually get more business because people will say, “I’m going to support that restaurant that has my same politics.” So in the short run, they probably picked up business. In the long run, this is a sort of tweet that settles in with people after a while. It’s like, “Hey, this building is dirty on the outside.” So here’s the great part about it. I’ve told you before how the…
[3:12]
…President likes to frame things and brand things so you are continually reminded. For example, some of you just reminded me to take the simultaneous sip because you missed it. Let’s do that simultaneous sip with me. It’s my way. So the President, by branding this Red Hen restaurant as being filthy on the outside—and by the way, I don’t know if it is, but let’s say it’s imperfect on the outside—he’s caused everybody who sees the outside of it to be reminded of his tweet. So if there’s any imperfection on the outside of this restaurant—there’s maybe a bird did his business on the awning, a little bit of paint flicked off, anything—where’s your brain gonna go? President’s tweet: “Dirty on the outside, must be filthy on the inside.” Just this automatic…
[4:15]
…connection he made. So in the long run, I would expect business to go down. In the short run, they might get a bump from the publicity. Anyway, that was kind of hilarious. You’re seeing more examples of Trump supporters, specifically in the administration, being run out of places and insulted in ways that we’ve never seen before. It seems to be getting more personal than it ever has, and one of the big questions that people ask is: what’s this gonna do for the midterm? I think I told you that I feel personally, physically threatened for my security because of this situation that’s developing. As simply a self-defense, I’ve decided to get involved, at least persuasion-wise…
[5:19]
…with increasing the Republican turnout for the midterms. Because I think that if they take down the President, I don’t know where this ends, really. And so the stakes are probably enormous. Now, I don’t agree with Republican policies on everything; I’m not a Republican. But it’s a dangerous situation and I’m gonna change tracks here for a moment. So let me just say, I’m going to do some more persuasion on turnout. It seems to me the best persuasion is that they might be coming for you next because they have decided to demonize Trump supporters as less than human. You know where that ends up, don’t you? The less-than-human demonization that’s happening…
[6:21]
…now—it’s one thing when politicians do it to each other because that’s just the game. But when they start to express explicitly turning you against each other—if your politicians are turning the citizens against each other, that’s as bad as you can be as a politician. Maxine Waters has publicly now called for Trump administration people to be harassed wherever they live, work, or eat. She actually went in public and said to harass them where they live and work and eat because they’re so bad. I say to myself, that is the worst politician I’ve ever seen. You could even forget about her policies. Anybody who turns Americans against each other is automatically in…
[7:23]
…the bottom 1% of all politicians. It’s certainly the worst thing you could possibly do. Now, I know people will say, “But the President has done that, too.” No, I would argue the President has tried to make America the team in friendly competition with other countries. And so he’s preferred people on his team, just as Coach Kerr prefers people on the Warriors. But the media, of course, has turned that into something horrible. Now the question you might ask yourself—and this is the part of our Coffee with Scott Adams I wanted to talk about—is how to get rid of bias in politics. Let’s talk about that. To talk about that, we need to go to the whiteboard. As you know, human beings are horrible, biased robots. We’re just full of bias for everything. We think we have knowledge and reason and opinion and stuff, but we…
[8:24]
…don’t. We’re mostly bias and then we rationalize things after the fact. So in many realms, what humans have finally figured out how to do is how to create a system that decreases their bias over time. It’s imperfect, but at least it gets you closer. For example, if your domain is science, you might use the scientific method, understanding that all the scientists might be individually biased, and biased by who’s paying for their study, and biased in lots of different ways. But the scientific process over time will drive out that bias with everything from controlled studies to peer review to that sort of thing. So science has a process for reducing bias—not to zero, but it’s a good process. The legal system has thousands of rules about how you can and cannot prosecute somebody, what a lawyer can and cannot do, jury trials, etc. Collectively, the legal system and all of…
[9:26]
…its rules is designed to drive bias out of the system. It doesn’t do it perfectly well—it’s a continuous work in progress—but it’s a good system. Compared to other countries, it does drive bias out of it. Engineers drive bias out of their decision-making using stuff like math and A/B testing. So they just make sure that the math works and they’ve tested it and they can be sure it works, and that does a pretty good job. In politics, politics doesn’t have a process anymore, but it used to. So politics used to have a process for reducing bias. That process was the press would write stories about the government and that would shine a light on things that were going wrong. In other words, let’s say there was money influencing it or something was out of whack. And that…
[10:29]
…process of the press focusing on things that are wrong helped us improve it and drive out the bias over time. But the business model of the press changed. Now the only way the press could stay in business is by getting lots of attention and lots of clicks. The only way to do that at this point is to be more outrageous and more biased. The very mechanism that was for many decades taking bias out of politics—the business model changed, and now the very thing that was supposed to take bias out is injecting bias. So I would say the big difference in the bias you’re seeing—the extreme polarization—is that the business model of the media changed and now it’s their job to create bias. That’s how they get more clicks and keep an audience instead of driving it out. So of all these domains…
[11:30]
…there’s only one of them—and I’ll talk about these ideas in a moment—but only one of these domains literally doesn’t have a mechanism. It used to, but it doesn’t now. Social media and the press just make bias worse because they like to, or it’s their job, or the business model supports that. Let me suggest some systems that might get us to less bias. I recommend that for the big complicated stuff—and that could be healthcare, it could be immigration, it could be prison reform, it could be climate change—the big stuff that Congress can’t get done. By the way, have you noticed this correlation? Whenever there’s a big political topic that the President is primarily in charge of, it’s going really well. North Korea: President’s mostly in charge, going well. The war against ISIS in the other territories of ISIS: going well. The…
[12:31]
…economy: now, of course, Congress helped with the tax cut, but that was still the President, and that was a layout for the tax cuts for a Republican anyway. But the economy is largely driven by psychology, and the President’s nailing it on the psychology because consumer and manufacturing confidence are at all-time highs. Unemployment slowed. And then picking judges. Wherever the President has most of the power himself, he’s killing it. He’s just killing it. But where the President has to rely on Congress—and that would be things like healthcare and immigration—totally unsuccessful. That’s not a coincidence. That’s because we don’t have any mechanism for driving bias out of politics, and it would help if we did. Because that’s probably the only way you can get to a point where Congress could agree on something. Because right now, the polarization in the media and social…
[13:33]
…media makes it almost impossible for one side to agree with the other and still get elected. So you need something that changes that. I recommend, for those big issues, a public debate with real-time fact-checking with judges. In other words, let me compare that to news coverage. News coverage goes like this: “By the way, the President strangled a baby, and now the news, let’s move on to talk about something else.” That’s a bad example, but the point is that nobody stops and says, “Oh hold on, you just made a claim of fact. What did the judges say?” The independent judges that fact-check say you can’t say that anymore, so that one’s off the table. So say again what you were gonna say, but take that fact out because we’ve now shown that one to be not very good. And importantly, you don’t want a time limit on your debate. So I’m…
[14:35]
…talking about a debate that could take three months. Maybe you only air 15 minutes of it a week on a sub-weekly format or something. So you give people time to go back to deal with whatever objections were raised during their debate, reschedule, come back, summarize where you are so far. “In our last debate, we decided this, this, and this. Today, there was some question about this, so the team is coming back and now they’re going to address that.” And then you move on as long as it takes until the public has been informed. You’ve created some videos that live forever so that people can catch up easily and you drive out the bias. Now, this doesn’t have to reach a decision necessarily, but it would be part of a process to drive out bias. If facts don’t matter, why do you suggest this? The reason the facts…
[15:36]
…don’t matter—and by the way, when I say facts don’t matter, I mean facts don’t matter to decisions. Christina is on the road and will be staying at a Trump property in New York pretty soon; just for fun, check it out, see what the vibe there is like. Now I’ve lost my train of thought. See what Christina does to me? What was I talking about? My brain just got scrambled there for a moment. You do that to me, Christina. Christina is my girlfriend who’s traveling right now. Do you worry about being affected by your politics? Let me get back to fact-checking. Somebody asked: if facts don’t matter, why do a debate which would be all about reason and facts? When I say facts don’t…
[16:38]
…matter, I mean the facts don’t matter to our decision-making. Obviously, facts matter to results, because if you walk in front of a truck and the truck kills you, that’s a fact and you’re not happy. But in our decision-making, we tend to ignore that and use bias. We would use facts more often if they were presented to us in some way we could actually understand and agree. The reason that we don’t use facts and the facts don’t matter is that they’re not presented to us in any way that would ever be persuasive. This would be a way that at least the people in the middle—not the people on the far right, not the people on the far left, they’re gonna be stuck in their worlds no matter what—but there are enough people in the middle that can change something that’s a logjam. It can move the logjam. So there are some people who will be persuaded by the persuasiveness of facts and reason. There just aren’t…
[17:39]
…many of them, and they don’t have any chance of being persuaded by facts and reason unless it’s presented in a persuasive form. Presenting facts in unpersuasive forms, such as the way climate science is presented, is not persuasive. Now when I say that climate science uses facts in an unpersuasive way, I mean they’re not shown in context. They have to be compared to other people’s facts. You need fact-checkers, you need time, you need some back-and-forth, you need simplicity, you need a judge, you need a lot of things to activate the persuasiveness of facts, and we’re not anywhere near being able to do that. I see that most of you have been sidetracked by my personal life. I think the comments… it happens to me, too, so I…
[18:40]
…understand that. Let me see what else we got going here. I’m gonna turn away from the board back to me. More about me smoking early today? Somebody said… now, I am not high, in case you’re wondering. Let’s talk about what happened with the kids and the cages. Do you understand exactly what happened when the President signed his directive to end the separation of children and kids? Does everybody know what happened—like, what happens because of that specifically? Now, the people who were simplistic in their understanding of things said to themselves, “Problem solved. The President solved…”
[19:42]
“…appeals, signed a piece of paper.” Now the critics of the President had painted themselves into a corner by claiming that the only thing you needed to do was sign a piece of paper. Sign that paper, problem solved. What’s the problem? Children and families separated. What’s the solution? Sign a piece of paper. That was the complete depth of their political analysis. Now the President had from the beginning, and the administration said, that the real problem is that you could sign anything you want, but it doesn’t make facilities instantly appear. It doesn’t make extra judges instantly appear. It doesn’t change any of the physical things. And the reason that children were separated from parents was because there was a risk of sexual violence and other violence. So in no case do you ever keep parents and adults together, especially if you don’t know the actual…
[20:43]
…relationship. They might not actually be their kids. You don’t keep them together until you know the situation, right? Common sense says that. But the public has required the President to depart from this equation. The equation was: we’ll do something that’s very unpleasant for a lot of kids and a lot of parents. This separation is temporarily very unpleasant. Experts say it could have some psychological damage, perhaps. Nobody likes that. But it was compared to some kids being raped and killed and beaten. So that was the Trump formula: to avoid some kids having awful problems, we’ll create a situation where, unfortunately, temporarily, some adults and some kids are in some stressful situations that might have some lasting problems. Those were the only choices on the table in the short run. In the long run, of course…
[21:43]
…you can do anything you want. In the short run, those were the only choices because the number of people coming through as a family had grown quickly and our ability to adjust just wasn’t as fast. So what they forced was to endanger children so that they could be right. How bad is politics right now? The political situation in the United States is so bad that the haters of the President were willing to endanger children in the worst place—death and rape and everything else. They were willing to endanger children just to make sure that he looked even worse. Now I know that some of the critics will say, “Wait a minute, there’s no risk. He signed a piece of paper, everything should be fine.” But they’re not the adults in this conversation. It’s…
[22:44]
…not the adults in this conversation. It’s time for another sip. That’s what I hear. You must be right; tiresome. And now of course, because facts don’t matter, we’re seeing that the people who were opposed to the President have decided that they’re the holy ones. So the ones who have forced the President’s hand into endangering children in the worst possible way are celebrating their virtue, having almost certainly doomed a number of children to death and destruction. Children—that actually happened, and we all watched, and we didn’t really have much choice about it because the sentiment was so strong on one side there wasn’t really anything you could do about it. But the public got what they wanted. Now I’ve said this before, but every time I say this, I feel like it just needs to be said again, which is the very thing that people were…
[23:45]
…worried about with this President was that he would do dictator stuff, meaning that he would ignore the will of the people and do something just for him, or just to enhance his own ego—that he would just be a mean old dictator. If you watch this situation, what happened was the system worked, actually, the way you’d want it to work, which is the public wanted something that wasn’t happening. They wanted something that the President didn’t want. They wanted something very, very different from the President’s preference. And here’s the key part: it was the President’s highest priority to be tough on the border. His highest priority. He won on that. Largely that was one of his big issues, right? And then on his biggest issue, the public and…
[24:48]
…the media said, “No, we don’t like this. Kids and parents being separated, that’s not going to fly. Change it.” What do you do? You sign the paper. It doesn’t make anything change quickly. It probably endangered them, but the public got what they wanted. The odd thing about the complaints is that the public demonstrated to itself, or should have, that this President can be influenced, and fairly immediately, by public opinion. And if they believe they’re on the right side of this public opinion—and of course they do, they think that they went from a bad situation to a better one—that’s debatable. But we went to one that they preferred, and the President just gave it to them. The system kind of worked perfectly. Do you know what was missing? There was only one thing missing. Let me…
[25:48]
…tell you what was missing: reason. That’s what was missing. So we did get an outcome that probably is irrational. In other words, the President signing that document probably just caused lots of confusion and I’m sure it caused a whole other set of problems: people being released, and the danger, etc. And it’s because we didn’t have any way to drive the bias out of the system. There just wasn’t any mechanism. The press makes it worse; they don’t make it better. Now, will you get a fact-checker—me personally? No. It seems to me that you could probably…
[26:49]
…the private industry could create this model of these online debates, and I don’t know what would stop them except that there’s no business model that supports it. So maybe it’s something I can try at some point. I might take a run at it one of these days. Scott, you should go on Jesse Lee Peterson’s show. I have been on his show. Jesse is amazing. He’s one of my favorite people. He’s got a kind of a Buddha energy. When you’re just around him, he changes people in the room. That’s kind of amazing just to see him work. You may have noticed that Hawk Newsome suggested someone for a pardon. Someone who had a life sentence for a first offense for drugs and has served several decades—is 62 now and has been…
[27:50]
…an ideal citizen. I thought it was a really strong recommendation. Of course, you need people to dig in and make sure all the facts that are presented are correct. But let me present to you a proposition. Here’s a proposition I make about Trump supporters: if you’re bad to Trump supporters, they’re often going to be bad to you. True, right? People who are bad to Trump supporters are gonna get a bad reaction back. That’s pretty safe to say. Not every person, but in general, yeah, you’re gonna get as good as you give. But here’s the other thing about Trump supporters that might be different than the other way: there’s an activating mechanism for Trump supporters and for…
[28:53]
…conservatives, I would say. Watch in the comments to see if this is true or not true. I’ll look for your agreement or disagreement. If you do a favor for a Trump supporter or conservative, what’s the outcome? So that’s my question to you. If you do something good, unasked—you’re just doing something good for a Trump supporter, or you compliment them when it wasn’t expected, do them a favor wasn’t expected—yeah, look at all probably 100% of the comments are gonna say the same thing: appreciation, reciprocity, thank you, gratitude, reciprocity. Who, if I told you, is the smartest person in the game in terms of Black Lives Matter? Hawk Newsome. What did Hawk Newsome…
[29:53]
…do? I retweeted it. It wasn’t long ago, a few weeks ago. What did Hawk Newsome tweet without being asked? Nobody asked him to do this. He tweeted that black people don’t need to vote Democrat and that they should vote for the side that does the best job for them. How did you feel when one of the—probably I would say the most effective voice for Black Lives Matter—said, “I’m going to give you guys a shot”? Did you expect that? Did you expect the leading voice of Black Lives Matter, in my opinion anyway, to say, “I’ll give Trump a shot if he performs”? Did you expect that? You did not. So he’s given you a gift. Yeah, and it’s a pretty big gift. It’s…
[30:55]
…reasonable, it’s love-based, it’s Christian-based, it’s everything you want, and you didn’t expect it. Now Hawk says, “Here’s this idea for an African American 62-year-old who’s been in prison for probably way too long for the wrong reason.” Well, it’s the right reason, but way too long. And he suggests that this would be a good pardon. How do you respond? Well, you take it seriously, right? You take it seriously because you’re triggered to offer some reciprocity. Now, in all of this, there’s self-interest involved, right? So Hawk is doing the best he can for the people he’s championing, which is not strictly black people, by the way. Hawk has a bigger view of the world. He’s not trying to do what’s only good for black people; he’s doing things that are…
[31:56]
…good for prison reform, poor people, etc., but they happen to be a little disproportionately good for the black community, and that’s great. And of course, Trump supporters would like to have more votes and support, and there’s lots of things that they would like as well, and sometimes they might just like to make the world better. So everybody wins. But I think the active part is the reciprocity. So Hawk delivered something you weren’t expecting, which is the possibility of outreach and a little bit better relationships between the Republicans and black community. He is the kind of person who could deliver it, at least on the small scale. It doesn’t change the world overnight, but you got to move in the right direction. And he’s made a suggestion for someone who seems very pardonable, as far as I can tell. I could be wrong on the facts, but it looks like it. So I would say that this would be the ideal person to pardon…
[32:58]
…not just because of the person being pardonable and there’d be the right message, etc., but because of where it came from. Time to repay a favor. I had a fascinating experience yesterday that I’ll tell you, but I have to leave out some of the details. I spent the day—several hours—with somebody in, we’ll say, the writing business. I’m gonna be as vague as possible. And it was somebody who was physically ill on election night when he learned that President Trump got elected. He was actually physically sick. So he has a terrible case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, as we like to say. But he also spent several hours with me talking about all kinds of things, but a lot of it was about our differing opinions on the President’s performance. And here’s the first thing that I learned that was…
[33:59]
…really fascinating. So imagine someone who was part of the media and very, very well-informed in general, highly educated, and has a strong opinion. The number of things I mentioned as explanations or background or context that he had never heard of was staggering. And I’m not saying that he’s under-informed. This is a comment on the two channels of life. There’s one side that’s only hearing things coming from a certain set of media, and then there’s another side that’s hearing only their own stuff. But for him to experience for the first time the bubbles connecting—because apparently where he lives, you just don’t see Trump supporters, or they don’t talk—it was like he had never had a conversation with a Trump supporter, even though I know he had. But the number of just ordinary…
[35:02]
…facts that everybody on the right knows, they had never heard even once, is really interesting. I don’t know how much of the difference in the sizes that explains, but man, we are not looking at the same stuff. Just the base information is completely different. For example, I asked him about success in North Korea, and his opinion is that there isn’t any. Now, is that mind-boggling to you? That as of today, someone could be watching the news and say, “No, it doesn’t look like there’s any progress with North Korea because they didn’t really give us anything they can’t just take back.” Doesn’t that just make your head go… how could you possibly be watching this…
[36:02]
…situation with all of its moving parts about North Korea and not see any progress? What he would say is, “No, all that happened was Kim Jong Un got something he wanted, which was credibility, which will help Kim Jong Un maybe with China and maybe in other ways. But what do we get? Nothing. He could just take it all back tomorrow.” And then I said, “You may have seen the greatest diplomatic move of all time from President Trump regarding North Korea.” And I explained it this way: “Can you think of any other time in history where two countries were at the brink of war and one of the leaders took away their reason? Just psychologically, not in any physical way, he took away the reason. He took it away from our side, and then he helped Kim take it away from his side.” Have you ever seen that?
[37:04]
No. And it’s invisible, apparently, to half of the country. Half of the country didn’t see that happen. And I say things like: the whole idea with reunification is that if you have dual intentions to somehow get to a unified country—forget about the details of who’s in charge, because it’s gonna take decades to get there—but if your goal is to be the same country, you’re not really thinking in terms of, “I’d better keep my nukes so I can nuke myself,” because that’s what it would become. Reunification took the idea of nukes just off the table. And then the President’s framing of things: instead of being our enemy, which is the worst thing, we could really help you have a Switzerland-Singapore kind of a country where you don’t have much of a military or a reason for a military. We can give you some security guarantees, we can help you rebuild, you can have condos on the beach. And I think to myself, that’s…
[38:07]
…how he took the reason away. The reason that all the other good stuff is happening. And so the person I was talking to still was clinging to, “No, I don’t know that that’s real.” And then I said, “You’ve heard, of course, that Kim has ordered that the anti-US graffiti and signs be removed in North Korea.” And I looked at his face when I told him that, and I could see him escaping from the bubble because he didn’t know that. This is, again, another piece of news that… let me ask you: how many of you knew that piece of news? How many of you knew that Kim has ordered the anti-US graffiti and all the anti-US stuff to be scrubbed from North Korea? Yeah, look at all the “yeses.”
[39:11]
How many people on the left know that? Yeah, a few did not, but you can see that far and away, the people watching this Periscope know that that happened. But an anti-Trumper didn’t know it happened. And when he heard it—I swear I’ve talked to you about this before—there’s a thing that’s sort of a brain lock, and it happens when cognitive dissonance is triggered. It looks like this: a normal person, you say, “Hey, what’s your favorite color?” and the person will say, “Hey, red. I like green.” That’s a person who’s in their normal mode. But a person who gets triggered into cognitive dissonance—in other words, they just realized that their entire worldview was wrong—you say to them, “What’s your favorite color?” and they go…
[40:13]
…there’s a brain lock. I’m not sure I saw that in him, but the moment he realized that Kim Jong Un would never remove his anti-American graffiti unless he were serious about this whole peace thing, it was sort of like his brain had a moment. I doubt that I changed his mind in any serious way because people tend to retreat back to their base after a conversation. But the takeaway from it was the extraordinary difference in just base information that the two sides are looking at. Now, I assume that this works both ways. I assume that if some of you had a conversation with somebody on the left that was well-informed, they would say, “Did you know XYZ?” and probably you’d say, “What? We’ve never…”
[41:13]
“…heard of that.” So I assume it works both ways; don’t get too cocky. Now, here’s another thing I said that caused strong reactions. Listen to how provocative this following statement is, and it’ll take you a moment because you might have the same reaction. Your brain is gonna skip a gear here for a moment. Most of you will skip a gear and then get right to the right place. But imagine if you’re in the other movie and when I make you skip a gear, you know what’s going to happen. Here’s the statement: My statement is that if President Trump voluntarily resigned from office today, he would already be the greatest president we’ve ever had based on what he’s done so far. Now, what…
[42:17]
…did that just do to your brain? Now let me put a little more detail on this. Think about all the complaints about the President and then think about all the things that even his critics would say are going well. There’s an interesting difference—a general pattern—between the things that even the critics would say are going well (economy, etc.) and the things that they’re most worried about. Do you know what that difference is? I’ll bet nobody said this before. Here’s the difference: all of their criticisms are about their imagined future. I’ll just let that hang there for a moment. All the things he’s accomplished have already happened. He already has great judges and lots more of them. He’s already cut regulations. He’s already done tax stuff. The economy is already…
[43:19]
…good. ISIS is already defeated. North Korea is already going in the right direction. Trade wars probably are gonna result in something good. Our economy is so strong we can take some hits even if it didn’t. So all the things he’s accomplished are real; they actually exist. What are the things that people are worried about? Some damn thing he’ll do later. Right? Because even the Russia collusion thing has now dissipated to the point that I don’t think anybody’s counting on that. Now, that would have been something in the past if it existed, but now we know it didn’t. So all of the things we thought were gonna be real kind of didn’t happen. But you’ve got this worried stuff in the future. So if he were to resign today—and resigning is sort of the key to this question because…
[44:19]
…let’s say that the day you resign, all the investigations and everything just stop, right? Because there’s no point; people stop caring. So all of the big future things people are afraid of just go away. If he were to resign today—this is just a mental experiment—but all the things he’s done, such as judges, economics, trade deals, North Korea, they kind of last forever. And if you can show me another president who stopped a potential nuclear war by removing the reason, good luck with that. It was the single greatest diplomatic move, maybe, of all time. Somebody’s saying Reagan. I think Reagan had a little bit of luck on his side about timing, and I think Reagan really just pressed until they failed, which is a little bit of a different situation. However…
[45:22]
…you are wrong. I don’t know what that means. So it was sort of a brain explosion. I think I may be overstating it, but the moment you realize that the person you thought was the worst person in the world, if he resigned today, would be the best president we’ve ever had… I think historians could make a pretty good argument for that. All of the problems, or presumed problems, are things we imagine will happen in the future. And here’s another key part: they’re very similar to the things you imagined should have already happened. Because if all those things you’re worried about in the future were real, they probably would have already happened. Now, hold on a second. I’ll be back. Coming back. The only thing that the anti-Trumpers had to hang onto…
[46:24]
…because this situation is tough to keep your sanity when the monster that you think is the madness of the world keeps succeeding. And then they had this children and families thing which, of course, nobody really understood and people pushed for the worse outcome instead of the better outcome, even though both of them were terrible. So it was a messy, ugly situation, but it was like a cool drink of water for the people who had mental distress because they couldn’t figure out why this guy keeps getting lucky. Why does this guy keep getting lucky? What’s up with that? So at least they had that children thing. What will the history books tell us about Trump? My guess is that the history books that are written by people who are alive during Trump’s administration will be negative because they won’t get out…
[47:26]
…of their bubble. But the historians that come in a hundred years will look back and say, “I can see why it was polarizing, but he sure got some stuff done.” I think that’s what’s gonna happen. It depends who’s writing it. Same with Lincoln. Was that true? That Lincoln’s reputation was better a hundred years after Lincoln than it was during his time? I think that’s true, right? Because he was pretty unpopular in his time. It was just the weight of history that rehabilitated him. Trump was in Home Alone 2, you say? Yeah, I saw that. The difference between motivation…
[48:30]
…and persuasion. I’m going to have a motivation expert on in the next week or so. We just have to schedule Dre Baldwin and we’ll talk about that. That’s a good question: what’s the difference between motivation and persuasion? Have you ever read Outwitting the Devil by Napoleon Hill? I have not. I’ve read Napoleon Hill’s work before. By the way, Napoleon Hill—if I have this right, check me—I believe Andrew Carnegie, the richest man in the world at the time, wanted to figure out why rich people are rich and why other people aren’t. Is there some kind of a trick to it? I believe the story is that he hired a writer—what was his name? Hill. And Hill…
[49:34]
…wrote about the techniques that rich people… yeah, Think and Grow Rich. He wrote about how rich people do their thing. And I think that the Power of Positive Thinking, which grew out of… Napoleon Hill wrote Think and Grow Rich and he influenced Trump’s pastor who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale. And that influenced Trump. It influenced me, influenced lots of people. So if you trace it back, Andrew Carnegie was actually the thought entrepreneur—I don’t even know if there’s a word for what he did—but he was the thought entrepreneur who got this whole string of events…
[50:36]
…into the future that are literally affecting the presidency today. “Patron” is a good word, yes. Thank you. North Korea skips annual gathering of anti-US nations? I assume that’s a headline today. The stock market is down. I understand some people are saying it’s because of tariffs. Let me give you a little primer on understanding finance and the stock market. When you see an expert on television say the stock market is down or the stock market is up because of X, nobody really knows why the stock market goes up or down on any given day. Now, some of the day traders may be trading on the news and it may be blips, but there are…
[51:36]
…always such bigger forces and bigger variables that when you’re looking into this thing that has 100 big variables, but the only one that changed today is the little one, here’s how this works. If there’s something that looks like a little bit of bad news, like some trade dispute, and by coincidence—here’s the key part—and by coincidence, the stock market also goes down, what do the experts report? They say, “Because of this small problem in the news, the stock market went down.” What happens when the stock market goes a little bit in the other direction, opposite the bad news? What do the experts say? What do the experts say when the market moves in the opposite direction from what the news is?
[52:40]
They say it moved in spite of the bad news. Or they say it’s already been discounted in; people knew it was coming, it’s already discounted into the numbers. Or they say there’s some other big variable that we don’t know what it is, and that doesn’t matter. So when you see people say the market moved because of X, in your mind, you should translate it into the following sentence: “Blah blah blah, I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, blah blah blah.” Did you get that? I’ve just translated finance talk into actual human being talk. I’ll give it to you again. It was a little complicated, but it goes like this: Financial analyst, tell me, what do you think about the market today? “Well, I’ll tell you, President Trump with his unwise tariff wars has scared the market and it is down 1%. The market is down 1% because of our President scaring people about…
[53:40]
…tariffs.” Now, if you hear that, the translation is: “I’d like to translate that from talk into human talk, and human talk means blah blah blah, nothing, nothing, nothing, blah blah blah.” I hope you got that and I hope that doesn’t become a screenshot meme, dear God. Will political outrage be getting better or worse? I think political outrage will be pretty high going into the midterm because the midterm creates a safety valve. I think people are going to feel safe ramping up their hatred before the midterm because they’re going to think, “Ah, but when the midterm comes, it’s all…
[54:42]
…released. All of our anger that we’re building up, we’re gonna productively use this to get out the vote and vote against these Republicans and then we can feel good finally after our long trip in the desert. We, too, will be able to have water.” Simultaneous sips. And then they’re gonna get to the midterm. My guess is that the midterms will be some kind of a mixed-bag thing that doesn’t change much, but it could go either way. It’s hard to handicap or guess about the midterms because so much of it is the individual matchups and I don’t know enough about the individual matchups. But if you have terrible candidates on one side, it doesn’t matter what else is going on. Do you think Republicans will win the midterm? I’m not going to make a prediction on that. I…
[55:45]
…have one prediction about the midterm I made back in January-ish, and that prediction was that the Republicans would do substantially better than whatever we expected them to do in January of 2018. Now, I didn’t go so far as to say who would win or lose. I just said Republicans would do better than people expected. Back then, that looks like that’s going to happen, because back then the numbers were like this; right now they’re closer to this. So far my prediction is right, but I’m gonna make a new prediction and you’re gonna hear it here. Are you ready? My new prediction about the midterm: Republican turnout for the midterm will be a record, or at least a recent record. I probably have to adjust that for whatever is the last twenty years or so because you can’t really…
[56:47]
…compare anything to thirty years ago. But let’s say for the last twenty years or so, I believe that the Republican turnout will be a record, and I plan to persuade in that direction. Now, if there’s record turnout, I think that’s just a healthy situation no matter how things go. Everybody got to have their chance to have their will be known. But I think it’s gonna be a record turnout. Predicting your own success? I’m not sure what that means. I do plan to… oh yes, I am predicting my own success because I already told you I plan to persuade toward high turnout. And the most persuasive thing I can think of is: look at what’s happening and they’re…
[57:48]
…gonna come for you next. You better make sure that your side stays in power because it’s the only way you’re gonna protect yourself. It’s the only way you’re going to keep the gains that you’ve gotten. It’s the only way the economy is going to stay strong, and it’s probably the only way that North Korea keeps going in the right direction. Keep in mind that almost everything the President did that turned out well, the other team would have done differently. True story. Now, how could the Republicans run the table? Well, I gave you a little tutorial about how politics should be more debate—they should have some kind of a debate model. If the Republicans come up with that and present it and say, “Look, Congress is broken, you’ve all seen it. We can’t do these big complicated things like healthcare and immigration; we’re just… it’s hard for us to get past the logjam. So we’re gonna bump this up to the public, and here’s how…
[58:50]
…we’re gonna do it. We’ll have some debates, there won’t be an end time, we’ll make sure that there’s lots of fact-checking by independent people as we go. We will inform the American public to the point where they can help us push this debate one direction or the other.” If Republicans did something like that, they would have a commanding majority and I think they would dominate. Maxine Waters just helped Republicans, somebody says. Yes. Maxine Waters, by encouraging Democrats to go after Trump supporters in the administration, probably did the dumbest thing a politician ever did. And you know, that’s a pretty big category. Name one thing dumber than what Maxine Waters…
[59:52]
…told her supporters to do. Because if there’s anything that’s gonna get Republicans to the polls, it’s Maxine Waters telling people to harass Republicans. If you want to get them to the polls, that’s the way to do it. Now, by the way, compare Maxine Waters—“Oh, we’re gonna punish them”—how do Trump supporters respond? They push back. They don’t like being pushed; they push back. Compare that to my earlier story about Hawk Newsome, who is trying visibly to meet halfway to get productive real-world solutions. How do you respond to that? Probably by paying it back. Let’s go do something good today. Try to keep positive thoughts and I’ll talk to you all tomorrow.