Episode 1142 Scott Adams: I Think You Know the Topics This Morning

Date: 2020-10-02 | Duration: 1:06:15

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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• The stock market responds to President Trump’s COVID19

• Generalized distinction between Republicans and Democrats

• Angry John Roberts of FOX News

• Disavowing White supremacy

• Gavin McInnes, Proud Boys founder, suing Biden and CNN

• Condemning the Proud Boys…without knowing who they are

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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[0:15]

hey everybody come on in um i overslept did anything happen in the last half a day did i miss anything oh yeah i think i did i think you did miss something we're going to be talking about that come on in come on in you need to come in here for the best part of the day and this is the sort of day you really need to you really need to get up for the day you're going to have to dig a little bit deeper today but all you need to get going on the right foot is a copper marker glass attacker tells just not a canteen checker flask of a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure the dopamine hit of the day the thing that makes everything better and we hope that includes the coronavirus it's called the simultaneous hip
hip and let's uh lift our glass to the good health of our first lady and the president to all of you

[1:27]

well it's a busy news story so uh let me look through my notes and see what we want to talk about first there's uh there's the economy don't really care about that today uh let's we could talk some more about the biden debate the app we don't really care about the biden debate how about the climate change is the most important it's by far the most important issue with give a about that um there's a giant asteroid heading toward the earth that will kill us all in about 16 hours but like i'm interested in that i'm not so where do we start where do we start you know when i went to sleep last night i told myself quite incorrectly that i might be one of the big stories in the morning

[2:30]

i thought to myself you know i'm trending on twitter yesterday afternoon i'm trending my name's trending dilbert is trending and i thought there's articles about me in the hill uh people are contacting me all over the place and i thought to myself you know i'm gonna wake up and i'm gonna be the big story in the morning well that didn't work out so here's the big story about me
all right well i'll talk about that in a moment but first let's get to the good stuff uh the biggest story of course i mean i i don't think there's any doubt about what the big story is and that is that uh gavin mcguinness has decided to sue joe biden and cnn for calling the proud boys white supremacist was there anything else that happened any other stories

[3:33]

and of course uh it's just such a weird day i don't quite know what to do with this day so i was going to talk about some other things but there's nothing else to talk about there's just nothing else to talk about the the news of the president and the first lady having coronavirus just made everything else unimportant all at the same time it wasn't just me you know of course like everybody i think the world the world revolves around me but nothing else feels important does it are you having the same feeling that just nothing else feels important it just took everything everything else and just put it in its own little perspective but let's talk about that number one
what will this do to the president's empathy issue in other words the people who think he's not showing enough empathy

[4:34]

think he's not showing enough empathy will this change it in other words when it happens to him will people say well now you've got some empathy and suddenly their own biggest complaint about the president will be fixed because that's the big complaint he doesn't understand how big it is or how big the risk is but i'll bet he does now or at least people will imagine that it's changed his mind even if it doesn't so it's going to be really tough to predict the psychology of this the psychology is wildly unpredictable let's just talk about where it could go number one did you see the video there's a little clip of from the debate in which joe biden was trying to list three things and he skipped the second one he goes number one blah blah blah and then he goes goes number two and then he goes number three he just skips whatever number two is and goes to number three and trump was talking over him the whole time and trump

[5:34]

time and trump not only keeps his own train of thought but while he's thinking it he realizes while he's talking trump realizes that biden has skipped a number and he and in the middle of his sentence he goes you missed a number and he goes back to talking and i thought that takes a lot of concentration he was literally doing two things at once he was listening listening to math and and talking in front of the the public and he was actually tracking both of them at the same time it was kind of impressive and funny too but that's not what i was getting at um so you got the empathy issue what will that happen here's here's another part of the psychology i'll just i'll just hit all the little parts and see if we can put them together into anything another part is that since trump has been the one who's been saying maybe more than anybody at least anybody prominent that we should take the risk of getting back to work so if you if you ask yourself what was

[6:36]

so if you if you ask yourself what was the message that trump was telling the country you know what was the leadership message it probably was something along the lines of let's take the risk with this thing because getting the world getting everything working is more important than some of these individual risks he walked the walk and he took the risk and he actually contracted it so he modeled you know not intentionally of course but he ended up exactly modeling the thing he said was the condition we should we should be walking toward so he actually walked into the situation he was promoting not the situation he was avoiding so nobody can say you tried you tried really hard not to get it you know you did everything you could not to get it and blah blah but bad luck he got it anyway he he designed this level of risk

[7:38]

he he designed this level of risk and then he walked into it and he had bad luck you know he was one of the ones who got it
it at least i hope it was bad luck i i hope i hope there was nothing uh nefarious going on there and i feel though i feel as if there is some authenticity in that and i don't know which way that works for him i feel like it works a little bit
bit in a positive way because he he was consistent to his own description of how we should handle this and he was consistent meaning that he said we should try to live our best life while you know masking up when we can and doing the things we can but not to not to hide from life and sure enough he modeled the very behavior that he was promoting for the rest of the country good or bad i'm not i'm not saying that that's good or bad i'm not putting the judgment on it i'm just saying that he modeled what he

[8:38]

i'm just saying that he modeled what he wanted for us so he did not he did not hide from the risk that he asked the public to take that's a big deal imagine two different generals one uh rides into battle at the you know at the
the front of the the charge and is part of the battle and is in the battle the other general is back at headquarters and phones it in and says uh i'll be uh i'll be getting a massage uh why don't you attack the front lines and you know let me know how it goes which of those leaders is the bigger leader is it the leader who does and models exactly what he's asking of the troops in this case the country or is it the one who has a completely different um existence one who hides from the virus while telling you not to hide from the virus now you could argue whether he was you know trying hard enough to stay away from the virus i don't think anybody would take the

[9:39]

i don't think anybody would take the position that he really quarantined himself the way he could have you know as president he could have had a the president could have had a total seal on his contacts he could have he just chose not to and it was the same decision he thinks we should make now
we have to ask the question unfortunately it's just horrible that it even has to come out of my mouth but you have to ask the question if you'll survive i for i haven't yet seen i'm pretty sure i'll see it as soon as i'm done here an estimate for somebody in his specific situation you know his age and his health what are the odds of his survival i think it's still 95 percent right doesn't he still have a 95 chance of survival or higher 98 it's pretty high and you add that to probably early detection you add that to the best healthcare in the world you know i i think his odds are pretty

[10:39]

you know i i think his odds are pretty good um but here's a question you have to ask was it an assassination attempt you have to ask that question now in all likelihood it was not right because the virus is everywhere the most likely scenario is he got it the normal way but if you were trying to take out a leader of another country isn't the first thing you do is make sure that there was a lot of virus among the people who would have contact with them i mean isn't that the obvious thing you would do if you were a bad player get a little virus make sure that you know the assistant to the staff whatever gets infected until you know you get lucky and somebody gets close enough to the president so i don't know how they could possibly know that one way or the other but you can't rule that out because it would be such an obvious obvious play
then we have the question of whether biden will get it or already hasn't

[11:41]

biden will get it or already hasn't because i would think that the president probably already had contracted it uh when he was at the debate he may have actually contracted it at the debate as possible so he was probably at least in the general vicinity of biden when he was infected you know 20 feet away
and what would that change what if they both get it i mean these are completely impossible to to sort out the psychology in advance of how that would affect things but what will happen to trump's um what will happen to his campaign because that's the end of his physical campaigning will will trump get better credit for staying home because that's good behavior i guess or will he will he just lose his momentum because he's losing his energy is trump without being trump still trump

[12:43]

is trump without being trump still trump in other words if you take the the high energy which we know to be trump and you take you know 40 off the energy because he's sick if it turns out he has symptoms we don't know yet you know but if it takes let's say 40 off his energy can he even do a zoom right can you even do a zoom if uh if you're at low energy probably not it's it's entirely possible that trump will just disappear from public view you know it may be that you know if he's low energy i don't know if he wants us to see him if he even looks like he's sick is that going to help him or hurt him if you saw him on zoom it might help him again these are totally imponderables at this point you know we'll be able to look back in hindsight and say oh that was the one variable that mattered but right now it's a whole bunch of variables and they're they're all just swirling around and one of them is

[13:43]

swirling around and one of them is imagine this let's let's say you know he loses his energy or something which would be typical and he still does a zoom because he still wants to get out there and and you watch the zoom and everybody who watches it says he doesn't look well he doesn't look well what would that do to your feelings about reelecting him would you say i can't elect somebody who's literally you know might not make it to election day you know if it looks like that was the case or would you say finally he looks human you know there's there's something about this which has become sort of the third act you know it's the turning point it's the thing that changes him might he be a different person after this because that's possible this is the sort of event that could actually change him in not in every way but it might change an opinion it might

[14:44]

but it might change an opinion it might change a policy might change his empathy it might change how people see him it could be big we don't know people are unpredictable um see the other things that we need to think about this is if you were if you were investing the most important thing you should do as an investor is fill in the blank diversify there's nothing more important if you're investing than making sure you spread your risk across different stocks or different classes of investments but when we run two candidates for president just two that's not very well diversified right so you so you need one of those two to work out so you don't have any choice you know any chance of a good outcome but what we did is we started with a senior citizen president and we added one choice which is somebody who was

[15:46]

one choice which is somebody who was even older it doesn't make any sense that we run two elderly candidates for president that was maybe one of the dumbest things that america has ever done because if you run two elderly candidates for president and by any measure joe biden looks like he's right on the margin of even being functional you really just had
had one president as a spare because you had sort of a shaky biden from you know from the starting gate your backup is president trump if anything happened to him you don't have a healthy candidate you actually would not have a candidate for president who is sufficiently healthy just healthy forget about policy forget about his you know his uh his record his background forget about all that we intentionally meaning america we put ourselves in a position where we had a very high risk of this

[16:48]

where we had a very high risk of this very thing this was the risk we knew we were putting ourselves into two elderly candidates maybe none of them would be up for the job by election day
day there was a good chance of this you can't say you you could certainly say you didn't see the specific thing coming that it was coronavirus back you know back in november of last year you probably didn't see this coming but what was it impossible to see could smart people have a forecast that it was a bad idea to have two elderly candidates and one of them's already shaky
we did this to ourselves this is absolutely america kicking itself in the nuts and knowing it it's like i think i'll kick myself really hard in the nuts why are you doing that i don't know i don't seem like the thing to do and then we kicked ourselves really hard in the nuts and here we are

[17:49]

and here we are so how's the stock market look well not so good um yeah looks like a lot of red red red so does that tell you that the uh the system just doesn't like risk and change or does it tell you that they they think that if president trump doesn't get reelected that the market will tank what's it telling you i think it's telling you that there are a lot of shy trump investors if you know what i mean people who think trump is better for the market even if they don't necessarily want to vote for him
him they still think he might be the better one for the economy the polls show that so the stock market is is tapping the public on the shoulder and saying um um i know you're talking about the president's health and the first lady's health and their health is the most important thing

[18:49]

most important thing but i just gotta tap you on the shoulder here a little bit just just don't forget about me you know the stock market over here where the stock market doesn't exist by itself the stock market is a psychology engine and the spark plug that runs the psychology engine the the economy just got a hiccup and when you're your spark plug looks like it's starting to misfire the entire engine of the economy starts to sputter and just want to give a little tap on the shoulder we're just going to pull back the just going to pull back the dow jones a little bit make sure you notice because we don't want you not to know that hey you know we're watching
um in the middle of this all the citizens of the united states decided to have a separate competition to see who could be the worst

[19:50]

the worst human being in the entire world now if you go to twitter you can see the competition raging and the so far it seems to be mostly just democrats who have entered the comment contest but uh look at some of the com comments from the people that you believed were good people you know just good citizens look at the things that they say now i'm not going to excuse conservatives for you know i'm not going to say conservatives never say horrible things on social media that would not be true but at the moment this is mostly coming from the left it is truly horrible it's truly quite horrible and you're going to see the worst of humanity come out of this just the worst i will tell you my opinion that when the president when the president of the united states no matter who it is gets a potentially fatal disease

[20:50]

gets a potentially fatal disease i'm not a republican and i'm not a democrat never was really but i suddenly become not a partisan anymore certainly i was partisan when your president and your command group chief you know takes a bullet you don't really if your if your head is on right that should immediately collapse your support and it should collapse it into i mean we should be on the same team for a little while because you can't lose your president even when you're running for president you know even when there's another one that might be coming on that could be months before things get sorted down nobody wants to lose the commander in chief now under any circumstance you might want him not to win the election but this is this is the time to to kind of
of come together if it can be done now the president has often talked about the coronavirus

[21:51]

has often talked about the coronavirus as being as being a uh an enemy and it is a common enemy now and it's not only a common enemy but it's an enemy that just took a big old shot at our commander-in-chief and you know we'll see we'll see if this makes a difference in in terms of people how
how how people think about it [Applause] i i've noticed that there's a there's a correlation between democrats and republicans or not a correlation a distinction and it goes like this and i want you to see if you've noticed this pattern republicans for the most part and this is going to be a gross generalization right so i'm not going to say every republican and i'm not going to say every democrat just in your mind you should always translate that i never mean every single person would it be true the republicans tend to be

[22:51]

be christian or christian let's say christian biased meaning that they tend to be influenced by the bible and by that you know that teaching even if they're not actively religious they probably came from that you know cultural thing and one of the biggest elements of christianity is forgiveness in fact there's almost there's almost nothing more central to christianity than forgiveness right second chance you can make up for it in heaven it's all about forgiving sins the democrats on the other hand tend to be a little more godless at least some of the protesting active ones appear to be and they seem to have a philosophy that is not forgiveness it's hate it is hate based on anything you've ever done but here's the weird part it's hate based on imagined sins so here's the distinction republicans

[23:54]

so here's the distinction republicans will by choice this this is actively their philosophy they will forgive you for actual real sins including you know you saw the president do that first step act if you can get your life together in prison you know learn something and you know serve some of your time you are forgiven your alice your alice jones and you're forgiven you're you're released and i think christians actually mean that i i think that's really baked into them that you know you can do some pretty bad stuff but if you're but if you are genuinely you know forgiving and you do something with your life you could be forgiven
it's the opposite with democrats they actually will imagine something that you did we imagine that you're a racist we imagine that you hate us we imagine that you're guilty because of your something your ancestors did something like that and you're and you are guilty forever and the stain can never be washed off

[24:57]

and the stain can never be washed off that's a big difference isn't it look for that pattern republicans and and christians being forgiving of real sins democrats being permanently condemning of
of imaginary sins that's pretty different condemning imaginary sins somebody says that baron tested negative well good good for good for him but how would you like to be a mother and you can't you can't talk you can't touch your kid for three weeks or whatever it's gonna be that's pretty tough i i do wish them well all right um so uh let's talk about uh let's talk about some other stuff my favorite part of the story about the president not uh not condemning white supremacists in the way that people wanted him to do it and the words that they wanted him to use was the john roberts uh subplot

[25:57]

was the john roberts uh subplot did you all catch the john roberts part of it so the part you need to know is that uh john roberts who works for fox news he's married to another journalist kyra phillips who is abc i think works for abc news and so part of the story is that his his wife had asked trump about the condemning and hadn't gotten quite the the crisp exact answer that people were looking for where he just says it in direct language so
so then john roberts followed up when it was his term and he asked the same question and he also wasn't getting from at least he was talking to kaylee mcani and he wasn't getting from her
her the exact language that people wanted direct direct condemnation and
and then finally the president went on uh hannity and said the words exactly the way people wanted him to say it so he finally said the words exactly the

[26:59]

so he finally said the words exactly the way they should so then john roberts tweeted that but the best part of it was how mad he got about the whole situation because i i feel as if his professional life and his
his and his married life sort of intersected a little bit there and there probably were some conversations at home that were you know part of the story my my next from this is i ended up liking john roberts more and i already liked him before by the way i have full disclosure john roberts has been in my home um this was years ago but he when he was working for cbs i think he interviewed me
me at my home in california so i spent some time with him he's a great guy like terrific guy you know you spend time with him you're gonna like him uh so watching this you know gave me a little a little more extra pleasure just because i bet him so i love that so i and uh the the part

[27:59]

so i love that so i and uh the the part that made news is when he got angry at i guess the public really he got angry at the public and other people giving him crap for simply asking the question now did john roberts uh go let's say did he cross some kind of
of line by pushing the president for a specific answer i'd say no i think he exactly did his job
job exactly the way you'd want him to you want him to push for that answer you know you know my part of the story i was feeling the same thing so i think he came out i i liked the passion he put into it because i think you know it was part of his his wife was part of the story he became part of the story i i just love the the human uh the anger that he showed on camera was was real and i liked it so good for you john roberts um [Music] all right so i guess we have to talk

[29:00]

all right so i guess we have to talk about me even though it seems as unimportant as anything could be uh seems very unimportant now i swear it was the weirdest thing so just in case you don't know the story um after the debate i was very disappointed with the president's answer about white supremacy i don't have any doubt in my mind that he has condemned it many times in the past i don't have any doubt in my mind that he condemned it that night in weak language but he certainly condemned it it was unambiguous but it was a weak statement but it was clear clear but weak and so i don't have any you know uncertainty about what the president thinks or what he would do in the future but i too like the rest of the country felt a little bit a little bit tweaked like a lot of people that he couldn't just say it the way we wanted him to say it i will give you a couple of theories as

[30:02]

i will give you a couple of theories as to why i think he doesn't answer it the way you wanted him to answer it are you ready number one in persuasion and of course what the president is doing all the time is persuading he's negotiating he's persuading he's cajoling he's selling all the time would you agree that that's true that the president is always in persuasion mode all the time that's his job that's that's who he is by personality but on top of that that's exactly his job he should be persuading all the time here's a rule of persuasion that you might not be aware of and one of the reasons that i say you should build your talent stack is so that you can see the world through more windows if you have more skills it just allows you to see the world a little more cleanly if you had skill let's say you had learned and trained to be a salesperson or trained in psychology trained in persuasion if you were trained in any of those

[31:03]

if you were trained in any of those fields here's something you would know that other people wouldn't necessarily know and it goes like this if you're trying to persuade somebody the best thing you can do really good thing to do like it's powerful is get them to do something small that primes them to later do something big which is the real thing you want so if some if you're in a negotiating contest or you're you know you're you're you're trying to be the alpha in the room here's what you never want to do you never want to do exactly what somebody else asked you or or is trying to force you to do if you give a little bit on anything at all
all it makes it easier for them to get more they'll immediately double down ah he moved an inch he moved an inch look what yeah we got him to say the words that we told him to say look his mouth is moving and the words he's using are our words look what we did we turned

[32:05]

are our words look what we did we turned him into our puppet in a small way very small way all we did was get him to say the words exactly the way we wanted them to be said if you can get somebody to do something small like that and here's the key something that looks completely reasonable don't you think it's 100 reasonable to ask the president of the united states to disavow white supremacists totally reasonable that's the most reasonable small thing you could ever ask for somebody if you didn't understand this field you would say to yourself oh well that's very small it's very reasonable of course i'm going to do it and then you just do it and you would have given somebody a little bit of something and you would have lost ground you might not feel it but it would have been a persuasion mistake now in my opinion there's one exception to this rule

[33:07]

to this rule the one exception where you should just do what you're asked is this one this exact situation if somebody asks you as president to disavow white supremacist this is the one time i recommend that you just say oh crap i'm going to have to actually do this exactly the way they want of course i want to anyway it's not like i resist the idea of it i just don't want to do what you want me to do so here's the first thing i'm going to try the first thing i'm going to try is to say it my way right because you're going to try to weasel the situation you're going to try to say okay i'm not going to say it the way you want only because you're the one telling me to do it has nothing to do with the way you with the thing you want me to say i'm not editing or judging the content of what you want me to say i'm only judging that you're telling me to say it and that disqualifies it from me being able to say it so instead i'm going to try to sell you

[34:08]

so instead i'm going to try to sell you my version and it goes like this i oppose all all violent groups but i think most of it comes from the left which is what he did right so he tried to avoid the one of the biggest um prob or mistakes you could make in persuasion which is take somebody else's frame and just be their puppet even on a small thing now in my opinion that was an error because he still should have just done it and and he should have minimized it
it he could have minimized it away that's the way i would have played it i would have said obviously of course everybody condemns white supremacy so do i and then go right into antifa you know just just give it give it a clear distinct statement but really small just compress it down say
say everybody including me disavows white supremacy but let's talk about antifa and then just do a whole big antifa thing that's how i would have played it so it

[35:09]

that's how i would have played it so it was a mistake but in my opinion it had to do with not wanting to be pushed and that was the right instinct just maybe the wrong time for it um the other possibility which i mentioned before but i'll just put it here for completeness is that anybody who's trained in media stuff and that would include me so i actually had a actual expert to sit with me for half a day
day and train me how to handle media situations you think it's easy it's not here's what you have to do if you're being interviewed by the media you need to listen to the question walls often while the camera is running so there's extra pressure so you're listening for the question you're formulating your answer to the question but then there's another layer on top of that and here's the trouble part the extra layer is you have to say to yourself how could they misconstrue this answer what are all the ways this could be taken in a context

[36:09]

could be taken in a context and so here's one of the things that you would not want to do if you've been trained in media stuff you would not want to start a statement where the first part of it could be misleading if taken in a context and then add the clarification at the end
end that's a trap do you know why you've seen it a hundred times the the news will simply clip off the second part of your statement as they did with the find people hoax and then sometimes they'll clip off the front part of the statement as they did with the injecting bleach because if they cut off the part about he was talking about light as a disinfectant and then they caught off the end of it where he went back to make sure that you knew he was talking about light so you have to think in terms of an answer while you're on camera while the question is being asked maybe a complicated question you're thinking about your answer and then you're thinking of the structure of the answer so it can't be dissembled

[37:10]

dissembled it's not freaking easy right there's a reason that there are not many president trumps you know you see how good he is on camera usually it's rare it's really hard to do that stuff because there's just way too much thinking going on now have i made this mistake before yes i have let me give you an example of how to answer answer a question about your parents let's say you're a famous person you're me and the interviewer says on camera scott uh what what about your mom and dad you know tell me about tell me what what they were like my parents are both deceased but imagine they're both alive and they ask me on camera tell me about you know your parents here is the wrong answer anything everything you say about your own parents will be taken out of context and will be used against you and your parents are going to pick up a newspaper and they're going to

[38:11]

pick up a newspaper and they're going to say um he said that about his parents it will be out of context and it will look terrible so here's how you answer the question about your parents as i have actually a number of times but not until i did it the wrong way first you know i had to learn this the hard way scott can you tell us about tell us about your parents it was very uh average it was just a normal totally normal situation well can you tell us more can you give us you know some detail you know so yeah my my father worked for the post office um yeah and my you know the it was a very normal upgrading and uh very average everything was completely average and normal and we loved each other that's the only way to answer that question everything else you say about it can be misconstrued into an insult to your parents and if you think that's not real that it wouldn't turn into an insult to your parents you haven't taken media training and you

[39:11]

you haven't taken media training and you haven't done this for a living as i have you can't say anything about a topic that could be taken out of context so when the president was asked first by jake tapper in the first the first election to disavow the kkk and he paused and he asked for clarification what was actually going on in his mind we don't know we can't read minds that's crazy i can't read his mind but i'll tell you that with similar training and experience of being interviewed if i had received that question i would be thinking ahead what are they going to do with it and i would have thought this what are they going to ask me after this that's that's the media training the media training would say where's this going it's not it's not a question about the question the question is where's this going and here's where it would go do you do you disavow the kkk absolutely easy question disavow the kkk do you disavow david duke easy question

[40:14]

do you disavow david duke easy question yup disavow do you disavow white supremacists yes yes of course i do
do disavow do you disavow the proud boys
are they are they what are they are the proud boys white supremacists because they're being accused of that and gavin mcginnis is you know one of the founders is suing cnn and others for saying that and joe biden i guess for saying that and they have a multi-ethnic membership that's right they have a multi-ethnic membership one of their leaders is a black cuban or something and you know you've seen the pictures they have african-american members but they have been accused of being white supremacists

[41:15]

accused of being white supremacists so now you're the president what do you do
do do you disavow them just just to be clean just just to make sure it doesn't affect you because if you do there are going to be a whole lot of people who say wait a minute i think you just disavowed law law abiding americans i think that's a little too far look at the comments some people are saying that they are best described as patriots now i'm not going to give you an opinion of what i think the proud boys are because i don't think they're one thing i think it's a bunch of people who have some things in common like they want to be part of this group they like america they have that in common they seem to be chauvinistic they seem to be sort of male male dominated kind of thinking now you could condemn them maybe for some of those other things but here's my point the moment the president starts

[42:15]

president starts condemning the easy ones come first but it guarantees that he's going to go down the line until he gets to something like this do you condemn breitbart right because in my opinion breitbart has nothing to apologize for at least i've never seen anything that was over the line but other people think so if other people believe or willing to accuse some entity of being whatever does the president have to disavow everybody until he's disavowed his entire base so that's the trap you saw the president in the debate do exactly the same thing he did with the jake tapper or kkk thing he paused you could tell there was a thought process going on probably that thought process is where does this go i think he was thinking as many chess moves and advance as he could and like am i going to get myself in a trap here because it because if possible i would like to not

[43:16]

because if possible i would like to not disavow anybody who would vote for me just period i'd prefer not to disavow anybody if they could vote for me so i think that's all that went on now do what is my level of certainty that the real problem was was that he was just thinking about his his best answer the answer is there's no way to know what anybody's thinking i'm just saying that if your interpretation was that the only explanation is that he was winking to racists while running for president i think that's crazy in in my opinion the least likely explanation of what was going on is that he was thinking to himself how can i how can i pretend to sort of disavow them while winking at the same time i think that is the dumbest interpretation because it sort of assumes a low functioning person as president right he he's not low functioning that would

[44:18]

he he's not low functioning that would just be a dumb strategy and i don't think there's evidence that you would do something that dumb that's pretty dumb so um somebody says proud boys is an idea yeah joe biden said that antifa is an idea and not an organization that's pretty funny yeah the proud boys is just it's a concept it's not even an organization it's not an organization it's just an idea see if anybody buys that all right so that said i was so disappointed with the president's uh uh answer uh the inadequacy of it during the debate that uh i said that i would withdraw my vote for the president now here's the funny part if you've been watching me for a while i think the people who've been watching me the longest were probably they were probably on to this early my vote for president doesn't have any functional value because i live in california there isn't

[45:20]

because i live in california there isn't any reasonable chance that my vote in california will make any difference to the presidency so if i say i am voting for him or i'm not
not it doesn't have a functional purpose as in
in getting it elected or not it only has a symbolic importance and if something is only symbolic you can move it around and you can do whatever you want to make a point with it
it so when i say i'm voting for or not voting for the president from the perspective of a californian is purely symbolic now what happened when i said that i would not vote for the president was i aware that that might get some attention yes i was not my first rodeo it's it's not the first time it's not the first time i've dealt with the media so of course i knew that if i did a dog bites man story that it would be a big deal sure enough

[46:24]

that it would be a big deal sure enough within a day i'm trending on twitter so the two of the top trending terms yesterday were were my name and dilbert separately at the same time i think max boot might have been the first one to tweet my video where i was saying i wasn't going to vote for the president and that that got it into the left hemisphere new silo and then what happened now so the first question you ask yourself is did i know that it would cause a minor flurry of of attention yes of course the the basic rule is that if you
you act against type and you're a public figure of any kind and you do something that people don't expect you to do that's news so when i said i wasn't going to vote for the president the only reason i said that is for the effect right because it would be this

[47:25]

right because it would be this provocative it gets your attention now i did want to get the attention of both the left and the right which is very hard it's really easy to get the attention of the right if you're in the right and the left if you're in the left what it's hard to do is if you're associated with the right as i am it's hard to get any attention on the left unless you do something that looks like a giant news story at which point all the attention from the left comes pouring in now what i didn't fully anticipate is how ugly it would be now i assume that when you get attention from the left a lot of it is going to be trolls a lot of this can be insults etc but i think i opened some kind of portal to hell and every democrat demon came streaming through to crap on my head and i thought to myself wait a minute wait a minute they're crapping on me

[48:26]

crapping on me while i'm agreeing with their point of not voting for the president do you see how important that is instead of forgiving me instead of saying thank goodness we're glad that you have come to your senses and while you don't agree with us on everything we do love the fact that you said in public that you would not vote for the president and for this reason because this reason is one that we consider important the whole disavowing you know racism thing and so what what should have been the right uh the right response well as i've taught you if you would like to encourage something to happen you should reward it if you would like to discourage something from happening in the future you should penalize it that always works what happened when i gave the left exactly what they should have wanted which is a staunch trump supporter switching to say that i would not vote for him and

[49:28]

for him and here's the best part the reason i gave is their top reason their top reason their number one reason that they would want me to change my vote i expressed clearly emotionally and honestly completely honestly and then i said i would give them what they wanted what was their response they on me
in buckets what was my response to giving them everything they wanted and then having them on me in gigantic quantities well if you saw my pinned tweet you know the answer to that they switched me back to vote for trump because the number one reason for voting for trump is to not let those people have power they have demonstrated by penalizing me for doing the right thing

[50:29]

for doing the right thing that they can't hold power you can't let power be held by people who will penalize the stuff they want and the reason they would penalize me is because of past crimes in other words past crimes meaning supporting the president in other words no forgiveness what did i tell you is the difference between republicans and democrats if if i had gone from a democrat to a republican right you're ahead of me right i don't even have to finish the sentence but i will anyway in case there's anybody who needs it if i had gone from staunch democrat to saying uh forget it biden has lost me i'm going to vote for trump what would trump supporters do how would they treat me you know the answer you know the answer

[51:30]

the way you would treat me is like a friend the way you would treat me is like a guest the way you would treat me is like special you would have actually rewarded me for doing what you thought was the right thing wouldn't you so in the in the in the comments look at the comments you can see it as as a philosophy republicans understand human motivation democrats don't it's very consistent what is socialism socialism is a whole bunch of people who don't understand how human motivation works and don't understand systems and economies and and how to build something that could last republicans like free markets which are cruel but it understands human motivation it understands people it allows that they are flawed but it's just the best we can do with our flawed selves so when you see this pattern it's hard

[52:30]

so when you see this pattern it's hard to unsee it and so i'll say again that the the democrats within one day forced me back to be a trump supporter because i can't be on the team that penalizes good behavior they just don't understand how anything works anything i want to be in the team where i can totally f up and if i say damn it i really i mess that up here's what i'm going to do to fix it i want to be on the team that says yeah you did f up we're not going to we're not going to take that away that's history that's just the fact but i do appreciate the fact that you made good i'm okay with you that's republicans and there's only one of those two countries i want to live in and it's not the one where i get punished for doing the right stuff now how much did i anticipate that this would happen well i could see it coming from a mile away

[53:32]

it coming from a mile away now i didn't know exactly what form it would take but i did assume that bringing this attention to myself would do one of two things well let me put it this way instead of saying one of two things i as i've taught you the number well the number one thing you have to do with persuasion is get attention until you get people's attention it doesn't matter what persuasion technique you have what your message is nobody's watching so the the big part is getting the attention of the left why did i want to do that why did i intentionally say something provocative like trump lost my vote why did i want to do that and on this topic of the not disavowing the white supremacist the reason i wanted to do it is that i have discovered as you have that people on the right see the whole news and the people on the left see only half of it because if you're on the right you can't you can't avoid seeing the

[54:33]

you can't you can't avoid seeing the mainstream news it's just too prevalent but if you're on the left you can easily avoid watching fox news or reading breitbart or something that would be you know right leaning so what i wanted to do was open a channel so that the left would pay attention to me in a way that they normally would not if i could get them to pay attention to me they would be open to my persuasion for the first time and once they're open to my persuasion they would have at least the opportunity to see the compilation clips of the president clearly and consistently disavowing white supremacists the neo-nazis a number of times throughout his presidency throughout his candidacy and throughout his life i've never met any democrat who had ever seen that video unless i showed it to him would you agree you've never met a democrat who's ever seen that compilation video but i'll bet i'll bet almost every one of you has

[55:33]

i'll bet almost every one of you has seen it i'll bet just about every one of you
you has seen all the times he's disavowed it in clean complete complete exact language just just like you'd want to hear it from a president he just didn't want to get pushed during the debate that's what it looks like to me
me so i did assume that he would eventually say
say a clean and complete statement and it would allow me to um to uh you know vote for him so i knew it was coming but i didn't think it would happen as quickly as it did
did with the the bile and evil and and horribleness of the left they actually convinced me a lot faster you know i would have waited probably for uh the president's statement that he finally made on uh hannity i guess so here's his exact statement on hannity and by the way doing it on hannity was exactly the right place to do it if the president could pick one place to make this statement it was on hannity

[56:36]

to make this statement it was on hannity nailed it because you want to be on uh on the the most uh rightmost kind of you know trump-friendly platform uh in part because you know the whole situation will go well for him but partly because it forces the left to watch it he he created a hannity clip that the left just had to watch because the story is too big they can ignore trump on hannity if he says ordinary stuff but they couldn't ignore this the story is too big so putting it on hannity was kind of brilliant here's what he said quote if you missed it i condemn the kkk i condemn all white supremacists i condemn the proud voice i don't wanna here's the best part he goes i do i don't know much about the proud voice almost nothing but i condemn them

[57:37]

could could that have been more perfect let me let me read between the lines
the first part the first part of his statement i condemned the kkk true not only does he condemn them he actually put them on a domestic terrorism list so yeah you know that's that is freaking true he condemns the kkk and he said it lots of times in the past as well he goes i condemn all white supremacists again something he said a number of times that the left has never heard but the right is heard lots of times all good so now he said the two important things and notice that he said them first if you're good at media relations you do this you say you lead with the thing you want to say you you don't put any qualifiers you just say i condemn the kkk i can my white supremacists all right so so he's moved from the debate where his answer was uh bad do this where is perfect there's no

[58:38]

do this where is perfect there's no improvement on this this is a perfect statement but then when he throws in the proud boys don't think of this as throwing them under the bus exactly because i don't quite see that here's what i say this is a little bit tongue-in-cheek remember i told you that the hard part is where do you draw the line like how do you go from kkk definitely bad white supremacist definitely bad i don't know who the proud boys are but the fact that he said explicitly i don't know much about them almost nothing but i condemn that come on come on could that have been more perfect to say he doesn't know anything about them and he condemns them that tells you everything you need to know about it because remember the problem was what happens when he gets gets into the gray

[59:38]

happens when he gets gets into the gray area the way he handled the gray area was to say he doesn't know what they do but he condemns him anyway you can't do better than that that is the best answer maybe anybody is ever given to any question from the beginning of recorded history you will never see a more perfect answer to a trap question remember when uh you know harking back to the rosie o'donnell situation in his first debate when he said only rosie o'donnell and he got out of the worst uh question trap you could ever get out of and that was the you know as i've told the story that was the moment i said wait a minute he's doing things that nobody can do he just did the impossible right in front of me he got out of the impossible trap now he did not get out of the trap in the debate but uh when he had time to prepare and

[1:00:40]

but uh when he had time to prepare and think about it he came up with really you could not you could not craft a better answer than this because you can read the proud boys part as tongue-in-cheek the fact that you would condemn them while saying he doesn't know what they are that is the funniest i'm sorry i feel like i have to swear can i do you mind an f word in the middle of this give you a little bit of warning you know to send the children away earmuffs earmuffs on the children there are some times when the f word is the only word that works in the sentence if you ever notice that so let me say it with the f word the way it should have been said when the president said i don't know much about the proud boys almost nothing but i condemn that that's the funniest thing a president ever said that's just the funniest thing and i don't know if everybody's going to appreciate how brilliant that is because what it does was i in a million years i couldn't have

[1:01:42]

i in a million years i couldn't have seen this solution literally this is like a houdini situation because i would not have known how to get out of the trap of going down the gray area right now what what happens if if next he's asked to condem somebody who's even even you know more you know more let's say holy the next one he could do the same thing you say well i don't know much about him but i condemn him you happy sure i can demo i don't know what they do
do but i condemn them that's it he's he's shown a willingness to condemn people just because you wanted him to say it it took all the power out of it it's sort of like a it's sort of like jay-z using the n-word if you've ever seen jay-z he was asked about well why do you always use the n-word in your in your music and part of his answer was that it takes the power out of it

[1:02:43]

that it takes the power out of it you know instead of it being you know horrible insult he just owns it uses it turns it into a tool good technique jay-z and the president kind of did that a little bit by saying you want me to condemn what do you want yeah give me a name give me a name i'll condemn him how about um about i'm trying to think of some other example uh how about the uh the i don't know anybody else all right unemployment down to 7.9 in september well room room to grow so let me give you a bottom line on the president and his coronavirus situation first of all what are the odds that the uh is it the head of the democratic party her name is rona what are the odds that i'm sorry the head of the republican party uh isn't the chair of the republican party named rona r-o-n-a what are the odds of that

[1:03:45]

r-o-n-a what are the odds of that um i'm just tossing that in there because it struck my struck my mind funny but uh anyway my guess is that this will work for the president i think it could go either way so i wouldn't put a ton of confidence in this initial opinion and i'll reserve the right to revise my opinion because you need to you need to see how the public responds and once you see how they respond you'll get a better idea if this is going to work for or against the president but let me ask you this is it more likely that the president would cause trouble by speaking out doing public appearances or that he would gain votes i don't know there was probably more downside from active campaigning at this point than upside it's hard to say um and
tom arnold uh people are suggesting people to condemn

[1:04:47]

people to condemn what about the albonians well i don't know anything about the albonians but i condemn that i can done that i think i'm going to tweet that after we're done here all right my guess is that this will create some sympathy for the president but in addition it's very very compatible with his notion that we should try to get back to work even at great risk to some people and he was one of the people who took the risk he he lived the life that he was promoting which is take natural you know take precautions but still work that's what he did he took precautions but he still worked that's what he asked he is what he asked of the country and he took a risk and you know in a weird way he turned into an accidental role model because he took the risk so we'll see all right that's all i got to say about this and i condemn everyone i condem

[1:05:48]

and i condemn everyone i condem i condemn everything i don't understand in general if i don't if i don't know about it i condemn it that's my my take on this and uh somebody said rona is coveted positive that's not i don't know if that's a real thing so don't believe that
all right that's all for now i'll talk to you later