Episode 1117 Scott Adams: Persuasion Against Antifa, Cohen’s Book, Gravity Batteries, Fake News

Date: 2020-09-08 | Duration: 1:20:27

Topics

Find my “extra” content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com

Rough Transcript

This is an auto-generated transcript and may contain errors.

Transcript

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• Of course more testing…finds more COVID19

• Vaccine availability before the election

• Whiteboard1: What Democrats, Antifa and BLM want

• Whiteboard2: What Republicans want

• The military industrial complex, the press and wars

• Mail-in voting in the year 2020

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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[0:09]

yeah that's a look out my window at the smoky california air that is the air i have to breathe if you're thinking that looks like fog you'd be wrong if you think it looks like low clouds you'd be wrong that is what i have to breathe and it's like that every summer lately because california
mass but let's talk about other stuff but before we do that should we prepare yes we should because the most exciting part of the day is about to happen now it's called the simultaneous sip and by the way omar i haven't forgotten about you
you i am going to get back i am going to get to that um all you need is a copper margarita glass a tanker chelsea stein the canteen joker flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure the dopamine hit of the day the thing

[1:10]

the dopamine hit of the day the thing that makes everything better except the air quality it's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now
well there is a smell of sulfur in the air so i'm guessing kamala harris is in the state i don't know just a guess um somebody alerted me to the fact that wikipedia has been updated to to include my hoax except that they don't know it's a hoax
which should tell you everything you need to know about wikipedia so wikipedia thinks that i believe that biden and harris have satanic messaging the part they miss is that when i introduced this idea i said publicly and clearly i don't believe in satan i'm just going to see if they take me out of context sure enough got taken out of context which is

[2:11]

got taken out of context which is hilarious to me would be frightening to the rest of you probably so there's a story about a california fire that's already burned 10 000 acres and it was uh it was started by a gender reveal party they had some kind of explosive device or incendiary device or something anyway they they had a party they exploded something that burned 10 000 acres and i wondered what name you would give the baby what would be a good baby name for a baby whose gender reveal party destroyed ten thousand acres in flames and counting i'm gonna go with sparky don't you think sparky would be a good nickname no matter what the baby's name would be hey how'd you get that name well it's embarrassing my parents burned up half of california so they call me sparky um

[3:13]

so they call me sparky um michael cohen's book i guess is out because there's a bunch of tweets about it
it and i don't i don't know if you've read any of the quotes but they're so over the top that they actually just read as funny now
now yeah there was a time when you'd say to yourself trump said what and you think i'm a little worried about that what's that mean but it's become so ridiculous at this point the things that people are making up and putting in trump's mouth that's i think the white house called a fan fiction and i've got a feeling none of it is going to have any impact i think these are all the things that people think are going to have an impact and absolutely nobody cares here's why number one we have four years of trump we don't really have to wonder what he would do or how he would act as president we know exactly how he's going to act so

[4:16]

we know exactly how he's going to act so revealing all these little things he may or may not have said at some point in the past doesn't really tell you anything you need to know because what you need to know is what kind of president would he be asked and answered we just watched it for four years so if you want more of that you know how to get it and if you don't want more of that you don't really need to read michael cohen's book because what will michael cohen's book tell you that you didn't know already did you know this may come as a shock to you but did you know that trump sometimes says things which people find offensive i know big surprise right you didn't know that and that's really all we're finding out so because the fake news and the critics want to put it in the worst possible sense they'll turn it into he's a racist he's a he's whatever but it all kind of fits into one category doesn't it

[5:18]

into one category doesn't it if you take everything that trump is accused of saying or thinking and you and you just sort of tried to summarize it it's that he offends people who didn't already know that there's oh somebody is saying that the baby name should be smoky smoky would be a funny baby name smokey sparky all right and here's the trick that the fake news and the publishers and the authors are playing on you and it goes like this imagine if you will close your eyes and imagine that all of your private conversations the things you said one-on-one to your closest confidants over the course of your life imagine that all of your private
conversations suddenly became public

[6:18]

how would you look would you look offensive maybe maybe just a little bit would you look like you're a little bit biased or bigoted or maybe have some bad qualities would you look like you're a horn bag or or you're crazy maybe and here's here's the trick it's sort of a magic trick if you will on the public the trick is that the way all of us talk privately to people we trust is completely different than the way we would speak publicly because if you're speaking publicly you will speak in a way that you will protect your reputation but also importantly you would protect the feelings of the people you are talking to because you don't need to make any enemies right so when you when you speak in public you you speak a certain way that doesn't get anybody hurt or you try to when you speak privately you don't have

[7:20]

when you speak privately you don't have to worry about that because nobody's going to hear it except the person you're talking to in a perfect world in the real world if you run for president and they decide they don't like you they might write a book someday so when they take private conversations which wouldn't hurt anybody and they move them into the political realm i say that responsibility for the message once moved from the private realm to the public should be on the messenger that's right so anything that you learned in the cohen book that is offensive should be attributed to cohen because if cohen didn't tell you you wouldn't know it are the things that you would say in public that you think are not really harm they're not harmful they're not meant to any bad intention but they're pretty raw you would just say it privately you just wouldn't say the same thing in public let me give you a specific example so

[8:22]

let me give you a specific example so you can get the sense of this president trump is alleged to have said that the uh the the service people who fought in vietnam were suckers now i don't think you can believe any of these reports because all these anonymous reports etc they they just don't have credibility but
but let's take it as our example and suppose he did suppose that did happen what would you say to somebody in a private conversation if they said to you you know i think that the people went to vietnam they you know they meant well they were serving their country but you feel bad for 19 year olds 18 year olds are joining the service because they don't know or they didn't know that the press and the government were running a scam that the war was not legitimate and so privately you might say to your

[9:23]

and so privately you might say to your friends you know i think the service people who who fought in that war as noble as their motives were they were suckers they were suckers because if they'd known that the war was useless and couldn't be won and didn't have a purpose anyway maybe they would have resisted but instead they were good americans good patriots did as they were told did as the country asked that's not wrong it's just that the purpose they were asked to go fight didn't really have a good justification so if you were talking to your friend privately who understood you knew your new year your mind knew your heart if you will and you said you know i gotta say the people who fought in that war were were kind of suckers would that offend you if your friend said it and nobody else was supposed to hear it let's say neither of you had served or alternately let's say both of you had served so that

[10:24]

served so that your peers whichever way that goes i think you would not be offended by that yeah who'd winked might be better if somebody says in the comments hoodwinked might be a better uh way to put it you know that trump uses the more aggressive language for just about everything so if his meeting was these these um these young people who got drafted in most cases right they didn't choose it they got drafted and they got drafted into a bad situation if he called them suckers privately would you have disagreed with that if you knew that he respected the service because he's your friend so you know that you just think that he's making a case that the government screwed a generation right so i i've got a feeling that when people hear these stories that trump said privately and they hear that somebody who was really an made them

[11:26]

who was really an made them public let me say this as clearly as i can if there's something that you know happened privately and you're the one who makes it public and then it becomes offensive because it's public couldn't have offended anybody privately because there was nobody listening to it you're the there's just no way around that it's not the person who said it it's you it's you michael cohen are the one who made it offensive by making it public it is you atlantic magazine and jeffrey goldberg who are the because whatever trump said or didn't say could not have hurt anybody when he did it and he would have known that a private conversation just doesn't hurt anybody by making it public plenty of hurt because it it actually degrades the readiness of our military because it makes puts some question in people's heads

[12:26]

puts some question in people's heads about the you know the commander-in-chief that is one of the most despicable acts of unpatriotic array you will ever see in your life it would be hard to like even invent a scenario short of actually directly hurting people that you could do a thing that would be more despicable than taking a private conversation that didn't hurt anybody and turn it into a public conversation that degrades the entire military readiness of the united states creates chaos creates a race war creates god knows what that is serious assholery i mean that's like a 10 and a 10. and i don't know if the public is sophisticated enough to do the mental uh you know the mental gymnastics of saying oh wait wait wait i have to i have to view this as though it were a private conversation because that's the way it originally started and that's a whole different

[13:28]

started and that's a whole different context all right so i've got a feeling that just like the michael wolff book the michael cohen book will will be you know some headlines for a few days and then everybody will say we don't like michael cohen
how much do people like lawyers not much right you know unfortunately lawyers do not have a great reputation but let me ask you this how much do people like lawyers who screw their own client now you could say to yourself hey trump you know should have pardoned cohen whatever but isn't it true that what you see is a lawyer who you already felt a little not so comfortable with because lawyers are not that popular and then this lawyer actually publicly crucified his own client and his ex-best friend

[14:28]

and his ex-best friend that's the worst person in the world okay if your lawyer goes to jail that's a bad lawyer if your lawyer goes to jail and then writes a tell-all book in which at least some of this looks like he's just completely made up that's the worst lawyer who ever lived you can't even get you you couldn't even design a worse lawyer than this all right how about some good news there's uh last week a british energy startup uh came up with this idea that looks like it could work for storing energy using massive weights so in other words they'll use they'll use energy to lift a weight on a pulley and then when they want to release the energy you know in a battery sense like a battery they just let the gigantic weight go down the pulley and it you know generates electricity by making something turn

[15:30]

by making something turn it turns out that this idea looks actually completely doable on paper and that it's it's come down to just an engineering kind of a situation now it might turn out that like windmills it sounds better on paper but then you have maintenance issues and it kills some burrs and nobody saw that coming so much or at least not to the extent that it happened so we don't know if it'll work but apparently they want to use abandoned mines they have gigantic vertical holes that go down it could be like a mile a mile of depth and put that giant weight in there and apparently they can generate um just a ton of electricity but remember it's a battery so you have to put the electricity in before you can get it out but still having a gigantic battery would be cool somebody on twitter whose name i didn't write down but it was a good comment i wish i had
had said why why do you need a big hole in the ground why don't you just use a uh something

[16:33]

why don't you just use a uh something like a train a car on a mountain on a train track you know why does that have to be under the ground why can't it just be some heavy object on a track to which i say
say i wonder there may be a difference in just the uh how much friction is involved maybe there's an engineering reason why that isn't that isn't good enough to just put it on a hill but here's the other thing that i ask if you can dig or even find gigantic holes can't you use those gigantic holes to condition homes meaning use the the fact that the temperature under the earth is usually around 56 degrees no matter what and you can use that to pump up air to cool a home if it's too warm or to warm the whole warm a home if it's below 56 degrees so could you use abandoned mines wherever there are gigantic holes in the

[17:33]

wherever there are gigantic holes in the ground that exist could you not use them for building a town nearby that uses that for its heating and cooling and takes 50 percent off the cost of that or something anyway the so there are some good news happening because entrepreneurs continue to entrepreneur and inventors continue to invent and while we're concentrating on all this political assholery there are real good citizens creating good solutions for the future yeah geothermal is the is one of the words i was looking for there all right um the company name is gravisit gravisit gravicity gravitricity gravitricity is the name of them they need a little help on the name of their company all right yeah and somebody's mentioning in the comments elon musk's company the boring company

[18:34]

elon musk's company the boring company that bores holes i've often thought that if you just board a gigantic tunnel that would be the first start of building a town above it for the same reasons you could use your tunnel for running all of your utilities but it could also be a source of your heating and cooling could be transportation under the town could be a lot of things i i've said this before but our ability to inexpensively dig really deep holes is going to be one of the key technologies of the future yet the fact that elon musk owns a a whole a whole digging you know technology and company it kind of tells you that that's a bigger deal than just a good idea it really is the future you know the ability to dig cheaply underground is the future here's a thought i want to just put in your head as we're obsessed with all things coronavirus and virus and

[19:35]

all things coronavirus and virus and epidemics have you noticed how much china is treating islam like a virus if it's true the stories we're hearing about what china is doing with the uyghur minority they are muslim minority within china and the reports are that they're being rounded up and put in in essentially concentration camps and who knows what other badness is happening besides that but if you look at the way china treats islam they treat it exactly like a virus because the first thing they do is quarantine and like a virus like a regular virus religion does transfer by association if you never had connection with anybody physically or over the internet or any other way if you never had contact with anybody who had a religion you probably wouldn't develop one spontaneously it's it's physical contact and communication

[20:38]

it's physical contact and communication that makes religion spread so i'm not going to say this is good or bad because you know you can put your own obvious morality on top of this but it's interesting that china treats religion like a medical problem are they wrong because we treat mental health as a medical problem don't we we didn't always but today our more enlightened view of the world is that if you have a mental problem that's a health problem you know is no more or less a health problem than a broken leg it's just part of your body is not functioning the way you'd want to and and we would treat things like let's say you were brainwashed to do something terrible you know to be a nazi or something we would treat that as like a mental condition and it's interesting that china treats

[21:39]

it's interesting that china treats religion in general now in this case they're they're treating islam that way but i think they do the same with the falun gong and i think they would do the same with any you know christian sect in china if there was such a thing so it has more to do with religion than it has to do with islam but it's an interesting approach as immoral as it is um here's something we learned from the coronavirus that the regular flu was always i saw the president say this in an interview i i didn't see it when it went live it was from not too long ago he did an interview in which he was pointing out that he personally the president knew several people who had died from the coronavirus so personally he knew several people who died from coronavirus but as trump said and i've said a number of times as well how is it that we've gone our entire lives and never heard of anybody dying

[22:40]

lives and never heard of anybody dying from the regular flu your whole life because even if you say to yourself but scots got scott this coronavirus killed way more people so it's obvious that you would be aware of more of them to which i say no no let me do the math for you i've been live let's say let's round it off from the moments let's say 50 years or so of my life i've been old enough that i would have noticed if anybody died for a specific reason so let's take 50 years of my life and multiply it by the 50 000 people that supposedly died uh cover up your speaker for a moment alexa what is fifty times fifty thousand fifty times fifty thousand is two point five million so that would be 2.5 million people who would have died just in the united

[23:40]

who would have died just in the united states of the regular flu during my let's say that 50-year period where when i was old enough to to know if somebody died um and why they died over two million people and i don't know any of them none of them that's ten times as many as have died you know more than 10 times have died from the coronavirus in the united states and i don't know anybody who's died of the regular flu now trump called this out in the interview and i've never heard anybody else say it who was a public figure and he just raised the question why have i never heard of anybody dying of the regular flu now he was using it more of a more to make the point that the coronavirus was bad stuff which was a really good way to make the point i'm making a slightly different point which is i think we've been lied to for my whole life i don't think the regular

[24:42]

my whole life i don't think the regular flu
flu is all that dangerous compared to what we've been told i do think the chronovirus is dangerous but part of what made people say the coronavirus is not that dangerous is the belief that 50 000 people a year were dying from regular flu i don't think that ever has happened i think it was always and that the coronavirus is special that's what i think but i could be wrong it's always a good thing to say after everything you assert if if i could give you one good habit for
for open-mindedness it would be this we know from the the study of influence and persuasion we know that if people simply make a statement or write down a statement especially if they say it in public they come to believe the thing they said even if they didn't believe it in the first place so when i finish a finish speculation by

[25:43]

so when i finish a finish speculation by saying i could be wrong the i could be wrong is not just for you when i finish a statement that is obviously speculative and that i say but i could be wrong i'm talking to myself and that's part of my self programming to remind myself i could be wrong it's a really good thing to do that so if you think i was talking to you when i said i could be wrong i was a little bit but mostly that's programming myself that's a good it's a good strategy you should use it
so one thing that black lives matter and antifa have in common besides wanting to tear down the government uh is they both seem relatively okay with sexual assault now isn't that a weird thing to say because if you ask them i'm sure they would say no no are you crazy we're not okay with sexual

[26:44]

are you crazy we're not okay with sexual assault that's crazy but they do act that way because antifa literally wants to do away with the police what do they think is going to happen when the police go away it's going to be massive sexual assaults as well as massive every other kind of crime there's not really an alternative to that happening so we know that antifa wants an end state in which there would be massive sexual assault they don't say that's a goal but it's obviously what would happen there's there's no way around that really black lives matter as you're watching them they're talking about the um
forgetting the names there are so many victims now that i'm getting their names mixed up what a terrible world when there are so many famous victims of police actions that i can't keep their names straight you know at one point it was it was a perfectly reasonable thing for the protesters to say you know they would say the name say the

[27:45]

you know they would say the name say the name say the name to make sure you didn't forget somebody who had been you know in this situation but now there are enough of them that i'm
i'm i think i could be forgiven for forgetting which one is which it's getting hard to keep them all straight which of course is black lives matter's very point and so that point is taken um but we're watching this latest case of the uh gentleman who got shot seven times and was accused of a sexual assault before that now i'm gonna say alleged and accused because just because he got shot seven times does not make him guilty of an unrelated crime can we agree at least can we at least agree that no matter how many times he got shot for something else that doesn't make him guilty of the unrelated allegation but it might be um but it does seem to

[28:46]

but it might be um but it does seem to me that black lives matter is de-emphasizing the the sexual assault uh emphasizing the police action and that's a choice it's a choice to you know lower that priority so there's one thing that antifa and black lives matter have in common is less concerned about sexual assault and i think the republicans get that right because the republicans are kind of obsessed with that topic especially if anybody underage is involved that is a very republican kind of thing to to go after stopping that and the president's actually had amazing well during his administration it's hard to know who gets all the credit for what but during the trump administration the actions against every kind of sexual trafficking have been unprecedented so that's that's another gigantic difference that should be mentioned more i think uh

[29:48]

that should be mentioned more i think uh i want to confess some stupidity
and i know i'm doing this and i've let me remind you before i i do this that i've told you that one of my superpowers and indeed i think one of the
the values that i can bring is that i'm not embarrassed by stuff and it's a it's a learned skill to not be embarrassed by stuff and so i'm going to embarrass myself now by confessing something i don't understand that i think many of you do understand and maybe you could explain it to me now sometimes when i say something doesn't make sense i'm asserting i'm asserting that there's something wrong with the thing because it doesn't make sense in this case i'm not asserting that i'm asserting that there must be something wrong up here in my head area somewhere in the brain department just to me personally that there's something that other people seem to understand that i don't

[30:49]

understand that i don't and let me put it out there here's what i don't understand when president trump or people who agree with him say that the reason we're discovering so much virus in this country is because we're doing more testing and the critics say oh how stupid that was stupid it's just not true it's just not true ask all the experts the amount you're testing has nothing to do with how much virus you're detecting and every time i hear that i go okay continue continue making the point so i can see the part where you say that doing the thing that detects the virus is not the thing that's detecting the virus because there's probably a good reason all the smart people are saying it you know all the anti-trumpers say it they say it consistently and i believe there are even pro-trump people who say it

[31:51]

people who say it and and they mock him like it's just sort of obvious why that's wrong and i say to myself what's wrong with me why can't i tell what's going on here i don't honestly i don't even have i don't even have a theory for why that's wrong now is this one of those situations where cnn etc are just telling you that an apple is banana and they're just trying to get away with it or is there actually a smart version of this where they can explain why testing does not
not find more virus
tests are all wrong some people are saying that's a different topic
all right so i'm looking at your comments i don't think anybody understands that

[32:56]

yeah so are all of you all right here's the funny part the reason i've never mentioned this in public is because i thought it was just me i thought i was being stupid because i can't imagine a scenario where doing more testing doesn't produce more positive outcome more positive results i don't get it all right so apparently there's nobody here who even understands what the argument is much less agrees or disagrees it's it's like you don't even know what they're talking about and we let that go like that's okay i guess it is okay
they might be looking at positivity rate somebody said i don't know numbers are numbers all right let's uh but if somebody does have an answer for that and i still think there might be send it along

[34:02]

i love the fact that the president is teasing that there might be a vaccine sooner than you think and there's a big discussion about the fact that the vaccines might be being rushed to have them done before the election now would it be good for the president if the vaccine started to be available even if only for a few people before election day would that be good for trump maybe depends how the news handled it they might say it's rushed and therefore it's worse than not having it that's what kamala harris seems to be indicating but let me give you a dose of the real world are you ready this is if you're below a certain age this will be the first time you've ever heard this and this is a truism of big organizations of projects of everything this is a universal truth if you don't give somebody a deadline

[35:03]

if you don't give somebody a deadline it'll never get done if you don't give somebody a deadline it'll never get done things get done on the deadline doesn't matter what it is
is this is something i've experimented with all my life uh and i'll give you a concrete example when i was first doing my comic strip uh while i was working full-time sometimes i would sit there in the morning before i went to my day job and all of my time would get used up and i hadn't drawn a comic i just couldn't come up with an idea and i had 10 minutes literally 10 minutes because i would never let myself go a day without making a comic to make whatever i could make to make a comic and what happened i would always a hundred percent of the time with no exceptions over 30 years haven't missed it once 10 minute deadline to do a day's work i could fit a day's work into 10 minutes now of course

[36:04]

into 10 minutes now of course cartooning's not like other jobs but the point is if you don't have a deadline things just don't happen and it almost doesn't matter where the deadline is you could say the deadline's next year you could say the deadline is this my guess is and i don't know this field but the people who make the regular vaccine for the regular annual flu don't you think they have deadlines it's probably an internal deadline it's probably a deadline that looks like this if we don't have this done by pick a day if we don't have this done by september we won't get to make any money this year because it'll be too late so i would imagine that every vaccine has at least an internal company deadline because if it didn't nothing would happen nothing gets done without a deadline and the part if you're young this is the part you don't know and i would encourage you if this sounds like ridiculous if the first time you hear this you say that's that doesn't make any sense at

[37:06]

that's that doesn't make any sense at all
all i would ask you to talk to somebody experienced in just life if you give a deadline people will need it it's it's like magic it's one of the greatest tricks of management is that people do work toward deadlines it's just that's it and so when the president makes and i think we would all agree an artificial deadline to get this done by let's say before election day does that make the world a worse place or a better place now if you're inexperienced what you're going to say to yourself whoa that's going to make them cut corners that's a dangerous situation that would be the inexperienced view of the world and i think the democrats will count on you or enough people to have an experienced world view here's the experienced world view those fda people and the people who have to approve this they're not going to throw away their whole lives to approve something that

[38:08]

whole lives to approve something that doesn't look solid there are a lot of people who are going to put their whole careers on the line to sign off on this thing and they would i think most of them or at least enough of them would be willing to quit rather than put something out that didn't they didn't feel comfortable with so this deadline will almost certainly cause one of two things to happen it'll either be done before election day and it will be solid or it won't be done because the fda will not have have approved it there are only two possibilities so the possibility of it being done before election day and and being shoddy and having the president force people to say things they don't believe are true about the safety of it very unlikely in the real world very unlikely because this is life and death if it were just a project and maybe there was just money on the line oh yeah you get people to lie about that it

[39:10]

you get people to lie about that it would be easy to get people lying about you know how good is your product or anything like that but life and death we're talking about you know people in the fda or whoever has to sign off on stuff we're talking about people who would know they would be putting their name on something that could kill or injure tens of thousands of people if you know worst case scenario that's not a that's not a risk people take
all right typically and we would hope that there's maximum transparency on those people and if the news business wants to keep everybody honest which would be a good idea we should get the names of the people who need to sign off both government and medical and really really talk to those people know who they are put the light on them and say here's the deal we are literally going to trust you with our lives we are going to trust you with the fate of the republic bob or whatever their names are

[40:11]

bob or whatever their names are bob we're looking at you do not sign that piece of paper bob or whoever unless you're willing to put your life on it that this is a good decision nobody you know nobody's magic we can't you can't be right all the time but we're watching bob we gotta have that going and we don't have that right now all right um i feel like the loser sucker hoax is already dying from neglect that will just be replaced by the michael cohen book which will be replaced by something next week so it looks like the whole loser sucker thing just fell apart and here's the rule that i would like to put on this which is um if somebody makes several claims whether it's the steele dossier or it's the atlantic article and there's a major claim within there that can be debunked you're done you don't need to debunk the rest of them if you can determine that one of

[41:13]

them if you can determine that one of them is clearly a lie and clearly a lie that somebody knew is a lie you don't need to talk about the rest of it
it walk away and just say it's debunked walk away now the word that cnn used for debunked is confirmed so they just put different words on things so cnn itself confirmed that the story about why the you know the one event was canceled because of weather they've also confirmed that that's not true they too should say and therefore the entire body of work is disqualified but they don't all right um i was thinking about ways that the protests could be let's say handled or solved and i was throwing out some ideas on twitter let me run a few of these by you um

[42:14]

well let me do some whiteboarding for you
you i just noticed that my lighting is terrible i still have my lights my curtains up excuse me while i put down my curtains and improve things a little bit um i want to go to the whiteboard here because i don't think most people know what black lives matter or antifa even want so here's my model of the world so before you can argue anything or persuade you have to get people in a common frame or understanding of the world i would say democrats are favorable to antifa and to black lives matter so far would you say that that is true that neither neither that the democrats don't really criticize of course they don't criticize black lives matter uh but even antifa to the extent that antifa are part of the protests democrats are you know sort of on their side what does

[43:15]

you know sort of on their side what does antifa want how many americans know what antifa wants if you ask them they'd say they want an end to racism does does antifa want an end to racism who knows it might be part of what they want but what they really want is the destruction of civilization now they don't word it that way what they say is we want to get rid of all government and all and all police let's say they were successful let's say antifa got rid of all government and all law enforcement what would be the obvious undeniable outcome of that well we would be conquered by any other country that wanted to because we would be a sitting duck anybody could conquer us but beyond that if we had no centralized government of any kind we would just devolve into sort of a tribal situation you wouldn't have entrepreneurship you wouldn't have anything

[44:15]

wouldn't have anything because if anybody worked and made money they would have to immediately share it or they would be attacked by the the masses to take their stuff so there's no there's no doubting this that what antifa wants is the end of civilization they they pretty much say it as directly as i do they just don't fill in the blanks like i did which is what would happen if you got what you wanted it would be the end of civilization there's not there's no argument to that that's just what it would have to be because they do not account for human motivation it would be great if humans could all share and still work hard and they would still have motivation and you didn't need a government because we were all so nice that we would just agree on things but that's not the real world in the real world if you disband your military the country next to you conquers you in 10 minutes that's the real world now let's take black lives matter they do not want an end of civilization

[45:17]

they do not want an end of civilization so it's weird that they're on the same team what they want is to take your stuff meaning anybody who's now black and to solve systemic racism by a transfer of wealth now if you ask them would they say that does black lives matter say yeah what we'd like to do is solve systemic racism by taking your stuff and giving it to black people they kind of do they kind of do say that because what would reparations be reparations would be taking things and redistributing them what would any of socialism be socialism you know 90 tax rates the things they're talking about would be taking things that legally belong to other people but here's the key maybe not morally that would be their argument so the black lives mar matter argument would be yeah yeah you you white people and other people have a

[46:17]

you white people and other people have a lot of stuff but you wouldn't have that stuff if not for slavery so really even though the law says it's your stuff it's not really morally your stuff so we're just gonna adjust things until they're morally comparable and that would require a change in the law perhaps or legislation or whatever so what happens if you have a system that's based on transferring resources from people who make it and have it to people who aren't making it and don't have it the end of civilization
there's no other way that goes either it looks different because they're not thinking about you know the end state they're just thinking about can we solve systemic racism and this would be the way to do it some kind of a transfer of wealth it all ends in the same place it ends with a destruction of civilization

[47:17]

with a destruction of civilization now why don't the republicans make that case i don't know that's what i'd do here's what the republicans are offering or could they're offering school choice in all of its forms under the theory that if you've got a school choice you at least have you have the opportunity to make something of your life can't guarantee it nobody's guaranteeing you good outcomes but
but at least you have the opportunity i would argue however that there's a missing component and the missing component is that no matter what school you choose they're probably not teaching you life strategies they're not telling you how to succeed and my belief is this the people who use similar strategies in life get similar outcomes if you're black and you get a's in school you don't join a gang you don't do drugs you you probably could get a scholarship

[48:19]

you you probably could get a scholarship to college how is your life going to turn out pretty good pretty good if you're white and you're born with let's say white privilege but you do drugs do crimes and go to jail you know get your 14 year old girlfriend pregnant and don't pay attention in school how does your life turn out does it turn out great because of all your white privilege no turns out terrible so the big magic trick that black lives matter and to some extent antifa are doing is to make it seem as if the way you act in life doesn't matter it doesn't matter let me give you some advice if you're ever in a discussion with anybody over any topic doesn't have to be any of this stuff just in general and the other party says here's the deal all of the changes have to be on your side and our side we will simply be the

[49:19]

and our side we will simply be the benefit of your changes if they say that walk away there is no such thing as a negotiation where one side gives and the other side takes you maybe you would like that to be the case but that becomes a case of negotiating with yourself how about i give you this thanks now give us some more uh okay well i thought it was done but okay i'll give you a little more thank you um now how about some more wait a minute where's this end where's the end of us giving you stuff if you don't tell us what you want it's we would be idiots to give you anything so that should be you know logic number one which is if you're not asking for something specific we will offer you zero because to do otherwise is just stupid it's just stupid because you can't negotiate with

[50:20]

because you can't negotiate with yourself you have to have somebody on the other side who says if we got this it would be enough maybe we could meet in the middle so i would say that the republicans could have a good case if they said if you get school choice right that's not enough they've got to teach some kind of a life strategy about how to stay in a trouble here's how i would teach a life strategy in the second grade or first grade you want to keep it simple right and whatever somebody learns when they're really really young that becomes extra sticky in terms of brainwashing so you want to brainwash kids every kid i'm not talking about black kids and talk about every kid you want to brainwash them early about life strategies and because they're kids you got to keep it simple and i would keep it this simple here's my idea we call it the 100 life so instead of saying i'm going to teach you a life strategy you're already losing a first grader they're like the strategy don't even know what that word means so instead you make it a checklist and

[51:22]

so instead you make it a checklist and you say here's how to have 100 life 100 life just means a full life that's got all the good stuff in it if you
you commit a crime subtract four points if you get bad grades in school subtract seven points if you become addicted to a substance subtract 25 points whatever the numbers are i'm just putting random numbers on stuff but you could actually have a checklist of say five to ten items and you just tell the kids if you want your life to be a hundred percent make sure you don't check any of these boxes of of these big mistakes here's these here's why this would work simplification always works but it's better to say you could lose something then if you do something you might gain something in the future imagine telling a first grader that if you work hard today 25 years from now you're going to have a good time doesn't work because people don't respond the same to

[52:24]

because people don't respond the same to opportunity as they do to the risk of losing something so instead you reverse the equation and you say you were born with a hundred percent life your life is perfect in first grade you know your home life might be a disaster but in terms of where you could go
go 100 if you did all the right stuff but i'm going to take away from you some of your life if you make these mistakes and then people start seeing it as a loss wait a minute i was born with 100 potential and then i made this choice in this choice and i could see how that diminished my potential and then i could look at all the older people who are not having a good life and i could say wait a minute oh yeah this checklist totally works that that person's having a bad life and yep sure enough committed a crime joined a gang it's right here on the list got got addicted to substance there it is it's right on the list had a baby at 12 um it's on the list

[53:26]

um it's on the list so you could teach a first grader life strategy by just give them a list of ten things and say don't do any of these ten things and you'll you'll be fine uh the republican approach should they adopt something like this would be one of abundance where everybody could win so you know that still becomes a problem of equality but if you took care of education and life strategy it might be as good as you can do so it's not a perfect world but it might be the best world that you could produce so that's how i would frame it if i were in charge um here are some just some more thoughts on the same topic um
have you wondered why there have been no counter protests for the portland stuff so portland actually has an a protester camp where they have nice

[54:26]

an a protester camp where they have nice little tents it looks like they were acquired from the same source and they've got like a tent village where they live i guess they probably sleep during the day and protest and riot at night and i'm not recommending this because it would be dangerous people would get hurt but i'm wondering why it hasn't happened that nobody has targeted their camp while they're gone because you could just destroy again i'm not recommending this because it'd be super dangerous people would get killed but i don't know why it hasn't happened it feels like the obvious thing would be some group of
anti-protesters would just wait until the protesters mostly left the camps and they would just go through and rip it rip it apart or set it on fire or or just steal their stuff or whatever and i think that would go a long way but i don't recommend it it would be dangerous just a question all right um did you

[55:27]

just a question all right um did you know and fact check me on this that the original antifa was allied with hitler now i read this on
on online so you know fact check so here's the claim the claim is that antifa the original one was against fascism but also against organized government just like it is now and that when uh when they had a choice of the weimar republic which was unpopular in germany or the nazis antifa actually chose the nazis because they were seemingly more anti-government in other words the nazis seemed to be on their side because they also didn't like the weimar regime and so antifa and the nazis allegedly i need a fact check on this worked together to overthrow the government and then the first thing that happened was uh the uh the hitler got rid of antifa because of course you don't want those

[56:28]

because of course you don't want those guys around so the first thing they do is
is is get rid of their partners and it made me think does antifa think ahead because i can't see any scenario where they don't lose and literally die if if they get what they're asking for it's weird that people could get what they're asking for and it guarantees their destruction but antifa has that philosophy i'd like you to give me something that destroys you but oh yeah it will destroy me at the same time that's a weird philosophy all right um
uh i also think that uh well i i'm confused about whether the supporters of antifa which is anti-fod-sol for the most part are
are lying to everybody else or if they if they don't realize that antifa wants to destroy civilization

[57:30]

to destroy civilization is there anybody who's in favor of antifa who actually just doesn't understand that in order for them to get what they want civilization itself would have to be destroyed and not replaced with something better because that option isn't there it's not even it's not even something that's unlikely but you know if everything went right it could happen it can't happen there is no way that the united states could have no government which would be the antifa preference and still survive in a world where china still has a government and a military they would conquer us 10 minutes into that plan so i'm just curious whether it's stupidity or or what i don't get it all right um one of the things that trump could do to
to mess with the protesters is ask them to pick a leader to negotiate with now what would happen

[58:31]

to negotiate with now what would happen if trump said you know maybe you would help if we could listen to your concerns so you
you anti-fun blm people all you protesters just do me a favor select somebody who will be your spokesperson and bring us some specific demands because if you ever saw their specific demands nobody would be in favor of them and and the
the the democrats the ones running for office would have to disavow the protesters they would have to but they don't have to disavow the protesters yet because the protesters are cleverly not asking for specific things that you can really dig into and say yes or no to so defund the police sounds like it's specific but it's not because they don't know what that means does it mean the money goes somewhere else do you replace that with something else what do you do with the government itself if you're antifa you don't want the government so simply

[59:32]

you don't want the government so simply asking the protesters to to give you a coherent cohesive leadership set of negotiating demands should make the protesters turn on each other because it would would force them to realize they're not actually on the same team because when it gets to the point where they have to ask for something they wouldn't ask for the same stuff it would be different stuff so it would turn them against each other
so all and i'm going to be working on this high ground maneuver which is getting people to understand that the protesters want the end of civilization but if somebody wants instead the end of systemic racism the only way to get it is through education that's as close as you can get you know there's nothing else that could actually work but education could work we know that trump did a persuasion play that i thought was just frankly brilliant and i'm going to

[1:00:34]

just frankly brilliant and i'm going to give you a comparison you remember i've told the story a number of times that i realized that trump could win it all when i especially when i saw him in the debate the first debate in the first election in which he was challenged about his statements about women and he answered with the only rosie o'donnell maneuver now what made that special is that his answer was so funny and provocative that you couldn't think about the original question he he just sucked all the energy from the question which would have ruined his campaign onto an answer that wasn't even an answer it wasn't even the right answer to the question but it was so interesting you wanted to talk about that instead when trump was dealing with these accusations about calling soldiers losers and suckers which i believe did not happen you couldn't directly disprove it because you can't prove a negative you can't prove something didn't happen you could just prove that you don't see any evidence of it

[1:01:36]

any evidence of it so he had this impossible situation similar to megyn kelly asking him this impossible question and the debates how do you get out of an impossible situation turns out there's one person in the world who knows how to do this and his name is president trump so what did he do he said this and by the way anybody who misses the brilliance of this is really really missing a good show because i know that you know the president does a lot of a lot of stuff that you you think well i wouldn't have done that but every now and then he'll do something that is just transcendentally smart to the point where you can't even recognize it as smart it's so smart the smart people can't recognize it as smart here it is he said quote in his press conference i'm not saying the military is in love with me this is pacing all right he's agreeing i'm not saying the military is in love

[1:02:36]

i'm not saying the military is in love with me the soldiers are so he's made a claim that the soldiers like him and then he goes the top people in the pentagon probably aren't because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy trump told reporters now do you see what he did that's the rosie o'donnell move how do you talk about some unsubstantiated claims about what trump may or may not have said in private which isn't all that important how do you talk about that when trump just dumped on you the most explosive claim any commander-in-chief ever made ever which is that his generals are dopes and they're in it for the money oh my god now now here's the good part will he be criticized

[1:03:37]

criticized for being the commander-in-chief and basically calling his generals and top military people corrupt will he be criticized for that yes
yes how do you criticize him when he's saying the same thing that general dwight eisenhower said later president eisenhower i believe when he was leaving office and they gave the speech about the the famous speech about the military industrial complex meaning that the military was creating wars so that the the industry people could make money selling bombs and bullets so trump mirrored eisenhower's most probably the most respected speech any president's ever given in terms of it being true prophetic important and totally non-um what do you call it nonpartisan there is nothing partisan about eisenhower saying watch out for

[1:04:37]

about eisenhower saying watch out for this combination of the military in the industry keep an eye on that that's what trump said now that is such a provocative thing because remember trump is currently the commander-in-chief it's one thing to say something as you're walking out the door and fact check me on that but didn't eisenhower do his speech after he was leaving office i think so but that that would be an important point um trump did it while he's running for reelection that is a whole other level of provocation because he's saying i'm going to be the boss over these people that i don't even think are doing it for the right reasons they look corrupt to me how much do you want that president please if if trump had never done anything else except throw his own military under the bus and say watch out for these guys they have a monetary motive to get us into war if he had never done anything else but just that one thing

[1:05:40]

anything else but just that one thing he would have my vote he would have my vote would i care that he called the soldiers who were sent to war by by who sent the soldiers to war in vietnam was it the soldiers themselves nope it was the military industrial complex who got us hooked up with the war in iraq was it because of all those weapons of mass destruction nope is because the military industrial complex got a new friend called the press now it's the press military industrial complex trump although he's never stated this way has basically added a third leg to the eisenhower warning watch out for the
the fake news press military industrial complex because they gave you iraq and

[1:06:41]

iraq and here's the brilliant part they treated our military like suckers yeah do you see it yet that's what trump did he actually took trump said the the service people were suckers the worst thing you could ever hear right our most respected class of people are our military we like it that way we like them to be the most respected class that just works it's just a good idea and he took that and turned that into the military industrial complex and even my own people in my organization treated soldiers like suckers
now i know that i get a lot of heat from my critics who say scott scott scott you're you're finding you're imagining that you're finding

[1:07:42]

you're imagining that you're finding gold nuggets and this big pile of crap and all it is is chaos and flailing and and trump is doesn't know what he's doing and he's just you know he's incompetent he's just waving his arms and stuff and i say to you if if my theory was correct from 2015 that trump plays 3d chess or 4d chess if you prefer and that he can do things that other people just can't do
that that frame of mind would predict that if he were president as he is that he would continue to do things that you would say i don't think anybody else could have done that this is one of those things this is something i swear there is no other president who could have gotten out of this trap not only did he get out of the trap i think we came out ahead because now we're talking about the military industrial complex i've added the press and i think we should because that's

[1:08:43]

and i think we should because that's where a big problem is kind of brilliant that that is so brilliant you just you've never even seen a president do anything that smart before this is this is other level persuasion smart this is not normal people stuff you know i
i i don't think i could have gotten out of that um all right we're also entering in no particular order here we're entering a phase of the pandemic where we're going from a place where trump was arguably the worst choice for the job because early in the pandemic what the public seemed to want is some kind of empathy and plain talking about how bad it was now unfortunately or depending on your point of view fortunately this is either a feature or a bug this president doesn't know how to talk negative

[1:09:44]

negative he just doesn't know how to say things are going to get worse it's also why we like him those of you who do like him because he's he's an internal optimist no matter how bad things are it's going to get better make america great again it's optimism is his primary feature but if you end up in a pandemic in the early start of it you know in the beginning where really you do have to just tell the public look this is going to be bad you know i got to be honest with you this is gonna be bad but we need to pull together he isn't that guy all right if we if we can be honest no matter how much you love the president he's just not that guy he's not the guy who delivers bad news and makes you feel comfortable with it it's just not but that was the guy we needed you know a few months ago if we had had an election then maybe he would have lost and maybe that would have been fine if we could get

[1:10:45]

would have been fine if we could get somebody in who was good on that phase it wasn't really you know an option but where are we going to be around election day well i think that no matter what's happening with the virus whether we get our drugs and vaccines or not
not we're going to be working on the economy more than we're working on saving lives because i think the therapeutics and the way we're treating people is so good that the death rate's going to come down probably keep coming down if the stuff we learned about vitamin d is true that death rate is going to plunge more if the vaccine works the optimism alone will be good for the economy but the death rate will plunge again so we're entering a phase where you could almost guarantee that the rebuilding the economy will be more important than fighting the virus fairly soon you know we're talking about this winter we're going to be talking about the economy more

[1:11:45]

economy more who is the best person you've ever seen for that phase trump i would argue that just as it is true that he was the wrong personality for the first part of the pandemic you don't want him talking about medical stuff because he uses hyperbole you don't want that right you don't want medical conversation with hyperbole that's a bad bad combination you don't want the eternal optimist to be the one who has to deliver bad news every day it just doesn't work it doesn't work and i've said this before everybody who thinks there's such a thing as a good president and a bad president doesn't really understand how the world works there's no such thing as a good president or a bad president there is such a thing as a president who is right for the situation

[1:12:46]

who is right for the situation i would argue that obama was right for the situation he picked up in his first term i wish it was an economy on the edge and we just wanted we wanted a um a reassuring voice and obama brought that we wanted somebody that we knew would look at the details obama gave us that so he was a perfect fit
fit for taking us off the edge of the economic thing he would not be a perfect fit if you put him into the presidency to let's say in november and say okay obama your job is to goose the economy not the right guy you know he's solid but he's not the one who's going to put the the rocket fuel on it he's not the rocket fuel guy we've only had one president who's the rocket fuel guy
guy and that's the one you got so i would argue that the president is moving from the phase where he would be the least fitted that you know empathy no optimism stuff and moving into the

[1:13:48]

no optimism stuff and moving into the place where you could not descend you couldn't design a better situation for this president to fit into he he's the comeback president he's you know he came back from his own uh business losses in the past he came back from being behind clinton he's behind biden right now he's probably going to come come from behind and beat biden and he's going to pick up an economy that he had roaring they got whacked by the virus and i think literally nobody on the planet and of 7 billion souls i don't think there is one better person for this specific need than president trump that's what i think

[1:14:50]

i'm hearing some uh talk about mail-in votes and uh versus absence-y balance and the people who are arguing that we have experience with mail-in but we also have experience with absentee and some states have done full mail-in for a while so the people who say that the mail-in vote will be dependable and credible are also saying that it's no problem because we've tested it enough in these states we'll just do what they did it'll be fine but here's the part they get wrong 2020 is not like any other year because you don't have any baseline of expectation so that let's say the votes came in and they were five percent different than they would have been if people voted in in person what's it tell you nothing if we had had a history of voting by mail and then this year there was something different in the outcome and you look at it and go huh

[1:15:50]

it and go huh these numbers don't look real it looks like this district faked something over there so if you had a if you had a baseline of doing this all the time you could maybe detect if some some mischief had happened but 2020 there's no baseline we haven't done it before we expect massive cheating because it's america and people will cheat if they can we don't know because of the coronavirus what the vote would have looked like we don't know if the polling is accurate because of the shy trump voters we have no way to know that the outcome we get is anywhere near the truth that's different so everybody who says hey hey hey we've done mail and before we know how that works is missing the biggest part of the decision which is wait wait it's 20 20. if you had said this in any prior year i would say yeah

[1:16:53]

in any prior year i would say yeah yeah that might be dependable enough even 2016. i would have said yeah we know how many people vote we've got a good handle on it we would detect any mischief we would see it not in 2020. in 2020 it will be completely hidden by all the other noise from the coronavirus to shy trump supporters to the polls being you know not
not credible entirely
so here's what i would suggest i think the sooner the government gives the public a clear path in terms of what would happen under different scenarios the sooner we can start arguing about the rules instead of figuring out how to kill each other when it all goes bad so i would like to see the the government in some form just put out a flow chart that says this is our understanding of if we get to election day and we don't have a result we're going to do this

[1:17:54]

result we're going to do this these people will be in charge and they will give us this outcome then if we still don't have a result we can trust and i'm just making this part up uh on this date we'll have the supreme court decide again i'm just making this all up the supreme court will decide if we should hold the second election if we should just do it again or they might decide to just do it in a couple of problem areas maybe there's a state or some counties that look like like they're not reliable so it doesn't matter what the process is so long as it looks credible on paper it's presented well in advance so that we can live with it for a while i want to be able to live with the idea that no no this isn't going to be like normal elections we will not have a result on election night then the process will be the follows let's say the process is that we don't uh that we ask the networks not to report who is even ahead

[1:18:56]

report who is even ahead suppose you just don't report it and you wait till the votes are counted and there's some kind of official sign off before the networks can give you any results maybe you just say there's no news on this you just can't report the news until all the votes are counted how about that i don't could he make that stick i don't know if it would even work
but it doesn't matter what the process is my point is you have to get the public pregnant with that process now you don't want to wait till election night and have the public find out for the first time where it goes big big mistake that is a civil war-sized mistake if you don't educate the piss out of the public i'm not talking about having some news stories or doing a release that says what will happen under these conditions i'm talking about blanketing the brains of the public with

[1:19:56]

blanketing the brains of the public with it until every every person who might vote can recite exactly what will happen if we don't get you know a clear result in a quick time frame through the normal process what happens what's that look like does nancy pelosi become the supreme leader or something i don't know all right i've talked too long i've gone on too long and i think that's it for now and i will talk to you later