Episode 803 Scott Adams: Dale the Anti-Trumper Argue Against Alan Dershowitz, ME Success

Hey, everybody, come on in here. It's time for coffee with Scott Adams. It's going to be a very special one. You know why it's going to be special? Because it always is. That's right, Kyle. Welcome to your first day on periscope. And somebody just called out your name. What a day for you. Quite special. But if you'd like to make it as special as it could be, I'm talking extra special. You're gonna need something, Kyle. I hope you're prepared, because you're gonna need something. And it could be several different things. It could be a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen, jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day. The thing that makes everything better. The simultaneous sip. Go. Ah. Feel the simultaneity coursing through your veins. It's a good, good feeling. While we have to talk about Chia Impeachment, the impeachment theater that's been going on. And I gotta say, I don't think this could be more entertaining. You would think. You know, you see a lot of people saying, oh, it's boring. And it's certainly boring because of the length of it and the repetition of the arguments. But there's really a lot of entertaining stuff happening if you pull out the nuggets. So let's pull out some nuggets. All right, here's my favorite part of the testimonies yesterday. So apparently, the way the Constitution is written and at least interpreted. Justice. Chief Justice Roberts presides over the Senate impeachment proceedings, but apparently he's not allowed to do anything important, so he's just there to bang the gavel and say, who's next? And recognize people. Now, what opportunity did that give the clever people in the Senate? Because at some point yesterday was the phase where any senator could submit a question, and then Justice Roberts would read the question out loud, and then one of the two or both the lawyers for both sides would respond, depending on who the question was for. Apparently Kamala Harris, who has more game than maybe I suspected because she did something really smart, disgusting, but really smart. And I'm going to make an assumption here. All right, now, this is speculation because I can't read her mind, right? But what I'm going to assume is that Harris knew exactly what she was doing because she embedded a grotesque lie in the body of her question. And she made the Chief justice of the United States read her lie in front of the entire world in the Senate. And he couldn't call it out as a lie. He had to just read was so clever. I'm wondering why nobody else thought of it. So I think if I could recall, I think the lie was the. They take out of context Trump saying, I can do anything because I'm president, something like that. But of course it's a lie because the actual quote was about something specific he can do, which is hire and fire a comey, because that's his job. So what Trump was actually saying is that the President has the authority to hire and fire people in the executive branch is literally nobody disagrees with. There's nobody in the world who's on the other side of what Trump clearly and unambiguously said. So what the Democrats have been doing is taking that out of context and repeating it until they repeat it into reality. And you've seen them do this with the Charlottesville hoax, you know, saying that the. The President called the racists. Fine, people. Didn't happen. Never happened. You can look at the transcript, you can look at the video and find out for yourself. It never happened. But they've repeated it so much, it just sort of morphed into a fact for half the country. Well, now they're doing the same thing with the impeachment, and actually they're doubling down on that. I'll talk about that later. So Harris very cleverly embeds this grotesque, obvious lie, which is really central to their case. That little quote gives them the frame to put their entire. He's trying to be a dictator. You can tell because he said so. He must be trying to be a dictator. So if they lose that narrative that he's trying to be a dictator, they don't have as much of a case. They don't have a framework to. To attach everything to. So that lie is very central to what they're doing. And getting the Chief Justices of the United States to read it on live television in the Senate was really good. But wait, but wait, it gets better. It gets better. That's not the end of the story. That's the beginning of the story. So it turns out that. That Kamala Harris is not the only smart person in the Senate. Over on the quasi Republican side, you've got this guy called Rand Paul. Rand Paul. Now, here again, I'm going to make an assumption, and I try to call it out when I'm, you know, just speculating, because mind reading is always A thinking error. I think Rand Paul saw what she did, this is just a guess, and said, good Lord, look what she did. This is my imagination of what he might have been thinking. Let's see if I can do that. So Rand Paul submits a question to the Chief justice of the United States, which has embedded in the question the name of the whistleblower. Will you join me in a slow clap? I want you to play along at home. Rand Paul. Oh, my God. That was probably the funniest political move you have ever seen in your life. Now, what happened when Chief justice saw that the whistleblower name was in the question? He rejected it. Can he do that? Does the Chief justice, in this context, does he have the option of rejecting a question? Well, he did. Now, I'm just guessing that his reasoning might be that he didn't want to be party to a crime. So I think Rand Paul's question, if the Chief justice had read it, I don't know. I'm not sure about this, but it might have made him party to a crime. Okay. There's nothing funnier than that. Rand Paul trying to trick the Chief justice into being a party to an actual crime and outing the whistleblower. Because Kamala Harris used that same trick just before. This is gray stuff. If you are not entertained by this, you're dead inside. You're dead inside. So, anyway, the Chief justice declined to read that question. And what do you think predictably happened? Well, it turned into a tweet. And what do you think when the news story got turned into a tweet about what Rand Paul tried to do? Well, of course, the news story doesn't mention the name of the whistleblower, but every person in the comments did. Every person. In fact, you're seeing the name fly by on the screen here in the comments. So Rand Paul's play, completely successful because he got the entire country to be angrily putting that guy's name, the whistleblower, into every communication that they can. So that was the funniest thing. I don't know if it's as funny as Joe Biden on the campaign trio reminding people that he's going to die soon because he's old. He actually said that. I mean, it's my own words, but he actually said he's an old guy, so he needs a young vice president. There's no way to interpret that other than he might die in office. Right. There's no other way to interpret it. And I actually give him credit for being completely candid about that. So it Actually made me like him more frankly. But it's a good point. He might die in office at his age, that's a risk that you've got to consider. So there's a viral video of Joe Biden telling people not to vote for him. He has this little quirk where when he gets challenged at some public event, he'll push back a little, but then he will dismissively say, well, don't vote for me, vote for the other guy. Vote for the other guy. And I'm thinking to myself that, I don't know, in some context that might be the right play because it's sort of folksy and seems plain spoken and all that. But if you keep saying it, it turns into something else. And I think he said it enough now that it's turned into, you start wondering if he really wants to win this thing. Let me ask you this. Do you think that Joe Biden wants to spend the last years of his life doing one of the hardest jobs in the world? I think he's barely handling the campaign. And I say that just because he doesn't, you know, I'm assuming unless something has changed, that he's not keeping an intense campaign schedule because they're, you know, acknowledging his age. Do you think he really wants to be president? I think he would rather win than lose, because everybody likes to win more than they like to lose. So I think he's, you know, going to try, but I don't think his heart is in it. Remember, I taught you that when I was learning hypnosis to become a hypnotist. One of the things we were taught is that people tell you exactly what they want in direct words, but sometimes you have to pick it out of the paragraph. And in this case, Joe Biden repeatedly is telling people to not vote for him. Now, the context, of course, is that he thinks there are people who won't vote for him anyway, probably. So there's a reason for why he's saying it the way he's saying it. But the hypnotist says, you know, there were other ways to say that. If all he was trying to say is that he's not for everyone, there could have been a less direct way to say it. He could say, you know, I acknowledge your argument, and I know I'm not going to change every mind, but, you know, I hope we can change your mind, you know, with the other stuff. I hope that's not your only. The only thing that you're worried about. It's a big country. Lots of topics you know, I hope you'll stay with me. He could have said that there are a thousand ways that Biden could respond to people in public disagreeing with a policy or two. But he keeps telling him not to vote for him. I think he means it. I think he means it. On some level. It looks like he's revealing that he's not fully intimate. Let's talk about the play of the day. All right. So as you know, the Democrats coordinate their messaging, their anti Trump messaging, and it's very clear that they have landed on the following strategy for today. And the strategy is to take what Alan Dershowitz said in his arguments yesterday and prior to that and misinterpret them. So let me this is what Stefan or Stephen Collinson wrote on CNN today and see if this sounds familiar from something you've heard from me. So he said the Republicans have variously argued. So he's going to talk about the different ways that the Trump defenders have argued that Trump is innocent. They variously argued that Trump did nothing wrong, the Democrats made up impeachment charges, or that there was no quid pro quo. But they have, and this is according to Collinson, but they have apparently been pushed to this final fallback position in the light of Bolton's claim about the manuscript, blah, blah, that Trump did indeed tell him to withhold aid Kiev. But so now they're going with the Dershowitz thing that it doesn't matter because it's not impeachable. Now, who was the first person when this whole impeachment thing started? Who was the first person who said, stop arguing about the details because it's not a winning, it's not a winning strategy. Did I call it? Who could have called this more accurately? I said those little weed arguments of it's not a quid pro quo, blah, blah, blah, are not going to win. The only argument is it doesn't matter because it's not impeachable anyway. So as even Collinson is saying that the Republicans have apparently sort of taken their bruising on the weeds and they're backing up. And by the way, I think they won on the weeds. If you were to look at their actual arguments from a legal perspective, I do think the president's attorneys won on all the details. It's just that the public can't follow it. So winning on the details is exactly like losing because the public can't follow the details. So they don't know you won. But they can certainly hear all the points. And the more they hear quid pro Quo. The president wants to be a dictator. That's all they're hearing. So it doesn't matter if you win on the weeds, you still lose that way. Dershowitz being the smartest person in the game, apparently brought the only argument that has a chance of winning, which is it's not impeachable. But here's the fun part. Here's how the various critics are wading in to misinterpret Dershowitz. That. Now keep in mind, Dershowitz's argument is a total kill shot. It's simple to understand. And it's the stake driven through the heart of impeachment. Dershowitz killed impeachment. As dead as anything can be dead. It doesn't live anymore. Even its undead vampire life. He just killed that too. He put a stake right through the vampire's heart. Impeachment's over. He killed it. So what do you do? The Democrats are going to their go to strategy. They're going to grossly misinterpret him and repeat the misinterpretation until their team thinks it's true. They did it with Charlottesville. They did it with that quote taken out of context. I can do anything I want was out of context. And now they're doing it with Dershowitz argument. Let me tell you, Here's what Dershowitz actually said. So this is A quote on CNN's page, you know, one of their pages. And I think it's in Paul Bugollo's thing or someplace. But Paul Begollo was writing on cnn. He's one of their anti Trump go to guys. So he here's what Dershowitz actually said, and then I'll tell you how he was interpreted. All right, this is the actual quote from Dershowitz. And if a president did something that he believes will help him get elected, comma, in the public interest, that's the important part. In the public interest. That cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment. So what Dershowitz is clearly saying is if there are two conditions, you know, one is that there's something that will help somebody get elected. That's the first condition. But also at the same time, comma, it's in the public interest. That's not an impeachable thing. Right? So two things are true. It's good for the politician. It's good for the country. That's not impeachable. So how did Paul Begala and all of the other people misinterpret this? Here's Paul Begola's interpretation of that. He's putting these words basically in Dershowitz mouth. If a president thinks his re election is in the public interest, anything he does in pursuit of his re election is legal. What? What? That is not anything like what Dershowitz said. So he makes this completely false statement that's stupid on its face that a president can do anything he wants, basically. I'll read it again. If a president thinks his re election is in the public interest, anything he does in pursuit of his reelection is legal. No, that's not the quote that you, that you gave Dershowitz in your own article. That's completely wrong. All right, so then Bogalla goes on to argue against his own misinterpretation. All right, how about, how about Stephen Collinson? This is his misinterpretation and these are actually Collinson's actual words that he's putting in Dershowitz's mouth as the misinterpretation. The Harvard emeritus professor claimed on the Senate floor that if a politician thinks his re election is in the national interest, any action he takes toward that end cannot by definition be impeachable. Dershowitz didn't say that or anything like that. This is completely made up. And then he goes on to write his article based on his completely false interpretation. It gets better. Here's how Adam Schiff misinterpreted Dershowitz. He's putting this. He said he's basically doing another fake quote and putting it in Dershowitz mouth. So this is Adam Schiff making up a hypothetical fake quote to mischaracterize what Dershowitz says. Fake quote. You can't do anything about it because if he views it as in his personal interest, meaning the president, if he views it as is in his personal interest, that's just fine. He's allowed to do it. None of the founders would have accepted that kind of reasoning. Schiff said, well, Schiff, you are correct that none of the Founders would have recognized that kind of reasoning because it didn't happen. Dershowitz never said that. These are complete misinterpretations. But my favorite came from Stephen Colbert. So he accepts the Democrat misinterpretation. And then he does this whole cringeworthy. I'm calling it cringetainment. Sometimes when you watch something that's cringe worthy but it entertains you because it's cringe worthy. I'm calling that cringetainment. You can use that. And he does this whole bit where he very mockingly makes Fun of Alan Dershowitz for being illogical. That's right. Stephen Colbert, with not a trace of irony or self reflection claims on national television in a mocking, sarcastic way that he, Stephen Colbert can tell with his great powers of reason that one of the most, or maybe the most famous experienced constitutional scholars in the world had an illogical argument. Let me say this. You can have arguments that you disagree with. That's the thing. And some people have illogical arguments. Let me tell you what, Alan Dershowitz does not have any illogical argument. Not this one, probably not ever. Now there are arguments which he's lost, I'm sure. I mean, I don't know, but I imagine he's argued cases and lost in the past. I don't know that that's true actually. Maybe you want them all, but it's one thing to lose because the other argument just carries more weight. But when was the last time Alan Dershowitz was illogical in his argument? Never. How about never? How about probably never? Certainly not in this case. The only way you can get to illogical is by believing the Democrats with their misinterpretation of what he said. And then of course it looks illogical. I say to this, I say to Colbert, just something to consider. Just put this in the hopper of something you should maybe reflect on. I'm not going to suggest you change anything you're doing. Just keep this thought in the back of your head when you're mocking a preeminent constitutional scholar because you believe he's being illogical. Just keep this thought in mind. Maybe, just maybe the problem's on your end. I'm just putting that out there. Can you rule it out? I don't think so. So I think, I think next we'll see on the Late show with Colbert his snide takedown of Einstein. So you know, you know that's coming. It's like Einstein, he could barely do math. Are you kidding me with his physics? Who is he trying to kid, that Einstein guy? Oh my God. All right, so I would like to give you a one act play in which Dale the anti trumper will be arguing the Democrats side of this. I will take the role of Alan Dershowitz, famous constitutional scholar. You know, Dale, it looks like this impeachment will probably be over soon because the founders would agree that the claim, the allegations or the impeachment articles do not come anywhere near what they intended as a crime or misdemeanor or anything that's like a crime because there's no abuse of power or anything that's really a crime. And. And that the abuse of Congress is ridiculous for other reasons. What do you think about that, Dale? Well, it's obvious that if you accept that argument, the president's just a dictator and he can do anything he wants. That's what you're saying, Alan Dershowitz. The president's a dictator. He can do anything he wants. No, no, I actually didn't say anything like that. Let me explain it to you. If the president does something that is good for the nation, or even arguably you could disagree, but let's say he does something that's good for the country, but it's also good for his re election as long as those two conditions are met. It's not impeachable because that's our system. Our system allows you to pursue your best election re election result by doing good work for the nation. That's how the system works. You get that, Dale? Oh, I get a plenty. I get a plenty. You're saying that the president can just ignore what's good for the people and do whatever will get him reelected. Shoo somebody on fifth Avenue, for example. No, I'm not saying anything like that. All I'm saying is if there are two conditions, and one of them is that it's good for the country, but it's also good for the politician, that cannot be impeachable unless it's actually a crime. I suppose. And Dale would say so you admit that the president can commit gross crimes for his reelection. Digging up dirt, using foreign interests, and that's okay with you? That's okay with you, Alan Dershowitz? No, no, I'm not saying even anything remotely like that. Not even in the same universe as whatever the hell you're hallucinating, Dale. It's just real simple if he's doing the people's work. But it's also good for reelection and it's all legal. You're fine. There's nothing impeachable. Wouldn't you be happy with that dictator situation? Wouldn't you? Next thing you know, he's dictator for life. Because you just said Alan Jeswitz, you just admitted that he can have foreign countries dig up dirt on an opponent for just his personal interest. And you're okay with that? You're okay with that? Are you willing to say that in public that you're okay with that? No, no, Dale, I'm not okay with that. I didn't say that. I didn't say anything like that. Nothing like that. Dale, what is wrong with you? Scene. So watch this. Watch this one act, play, play out all day today, all day long, the Democrats are going to be misinterpreting Dershowitz just like I did. And here's the bad part. It's going to work. Now, I don't think it'll work in terms of reversing the outcome of the Senate vote. The President will be cleared, but it's going to work on the public. The public is definitely going to believe that the Democrats have interpreted Dershowitz correctly. Do you know why? Because for every one person who watched Dershowitz live, there will be a thousand people who only hear the Democrats version of what Dershowitz said. So it's a thousand to one more effective for them to lie than to do anything that would be in the realm of truth. And so they are. There's no penalty for lying in this context, which you have to think is a flaw in the process. All right, let's see what else we got going on here. I like permission to curse. Everybody okay with that? There is some cursing coming up. Mild cursing. All right, so if you don't like that, you might want to mute your phone for that. And it has to do with the topic of General Flynn because there's some. There's an update. So apparently the Department of Justice is not going to see jail time. Originally, they were going to seek jail time, and Flynn had withdrawn his guilty plea because apparently he just got. He got basically blackmailed into it because they said they'd take down his family. It sounds like. It sounds like he was trying to protect his family. And he said, I'm guilty, even though he wasn't. So he basically took a bullet for his family. But now that more information has come out about the, you know, the faked FISA and all the other stuff and Russia collusion, disappeared, changed his plea to not guilty, and the Department of Justice said, no, they're only going to be looking at probation. So they're only going to look at probation. There's a little swearing coming, okay? If our justice system plans to find General Flynn guilty in this situation and whether they want to sentence him to jail or probation, fuck that. I got 60 million people who say to you, department of Justice, Fuck that. Fuck that. Innocent or nothing. Fuck that. You can have 60 million really fucking pissed off people if, under these current conditions, he's still found guilty, probation or not, Fuck that. And if they do find him guilty and give him probation, I imagine that gives the President just full authority to void the whole thing and wipe the record Clear whichever words you use on that. But yeah, there's 60 million people who are not going to be able to live with Flynn being railroaded like this just isn't going to happen. So the Department of Justice just has to figure out how to change their mind. 60 million fucking pissed off people. It's not going to be pretty. So if the Department of Justice wants to retain any sense of credibility, rethink that. All right, Swearing is off for now. Well, maybe I should put it back on for this next topic. Apparently, six suspected drug dealers accused of running a $7 million fentanyl distribution operation were released without bail under the new criminal justice law. What? What? These people running a seven million dollar fentanyl distribution operation. We're not talking about street dealers. They were major, major fentanyl dealers released without bail. Are you happy with that? Well, here's what I Would it be legal to build a private website? Private, meaning privately built and funded, not private from the public that listed the people who are known. Or, and here's the controversial part, suspected fentanyl dealers. So that parents can just take a photo of their kids friends and run it through a system and say, ah, you're hanging around with a fentanyl dealer. Maybe you shouldn't hang around with that kid anymore. And of course your immediate reaction is, my God, people will. It's like the. What is that? The shitty men's list. Somebody made a private list of the men who would me tooed people. But unfortunately anybody could contribute to the list. And so it appears that a number of innocent people were labeled as me too ers when in fact they were not. So that's a gigantic risk, wouldn't you say? But I believe there's probably a way to do this. And here the whole point of this is it looks like the government is helpless. If the government is helpless to stop fentanyl, wouldn't it help if you could tell every person who sold fentanyl when you saw them socially? It would be hard to operate in normal society if everywhere you went, everybody knew you were a fentanyl dealer. Now, is there a way that you can do this without libeling people? I don't know, but I'll bet there is. My intuition says there's a way to do this that does. Let me give you an example. This is just brainstorming. I'm not going to say this is the idea. But suppose anybody could contribute to the list, but they had to provide their own identification and they had to provide a paragraph that says why they know this to be true. Now, perhaps you don't make that person who contributed to the list public unless there's a dispute. If there's a dispute, then the person so accused could maybe hire a lawyer or something and then talk. At that point, the person who made the claim could either remove the claim or make their name public just to the lawyer and the person who's got the dispute. So in that case, you would always be able to face your accuser if you challenged it. If you don't challenge it, you just have to live with the fact that you're on a list of fentanyl dealers. But if you challenge it, there should be a process where at that point, you know who your accuser is, you know what the argument is, the accuser can modify it or correct it, or you can argue your case. So there might be some way to make it safe against people being put on that list. All right, so that's just something to think about. I can't go so far as to say we should do it. Speaking of misunderstanding, Elizabeth Warren came out with a plan on digital disinformation. And the idea is that she wants to make illegal some forms of. I'll read the exact words. So she wants the social media companies to address false posts. Don't know what that means. Having them label certain content. Don't know exactly what that means. Who gets to decide how to label stuff? Ban accounts trying to interfere with elections. How do you define that? And alert users who have interacted with content determined to be disinformation. Again, who gets to determine what's disinformation? Among other things, she would also lead a charge to criminalize spreading false information about voting. In other words, if you had a social media post that said, hey, everybody, vote the day after election day, and it was designed to keep people from voting, she would make that illegal. Now, that part may not be the worst idea in the world because it is direct election interfering. The part about if you're telling people that election day is on the wrong day, or that there's some process that makes it impossible to vote, maybe that should be illegal. I could see that argument, but the other stuff, I would have to hear a more detailed argument as to who it is who gets to decide what is disinformation, it would be far better, in my opinion, if anything that was in this disinformation category, if you could provide a link to the other argument. So, in other words, I wouldn't be too sad if every time there was a claim that somebody thought was false that instead of removing it or making it illegal or something, that, that the social media company attached what they thought is the counter argument that might be a little better than our current situation. So I think Warren's got a big ask here. In other words, she's asking more than I think the nation could ever accept. But there's something there, there's a little bit something in there that's worth talking about. I don't know if she's sussed that out well enough. Let's talk about the Middle east peace plan that the major media seems to want to ignore. I assume that they're ignoring it. Why? Because it's good for Trump. I don't know exactly why, but it is getting less attention than anything. And there's something emerging about this peace plan that is really clever and you're not going to see this coming. Here's my take on it. It's not a peace plan. Everybody's going to call it a peace plan. I think it's called officially, it's probably called a peace plan of some kind. But it's not. It's peace plan like it's peace plan adjacent. It's suggestive of a peace plan. It's in some ways analogous to a peace plan, but not completely. Here's what it really is. It's a path. It's a path that the Israelis. And here's the fun part, apparently in Israel, both the, you know, both the leading parties have agreed on this. That's a gigantic thing to get all of the people in Israel, at least the two major parties on the same side, a gigantic move forward on just that part. But it's better than that. Saudi Arabia signed on. A few other Arab countries have signed on. Egypt says it's worth looking at. So suddenly the Palestinian faction is sort of abandoned and surrounded. Meanwhile, Israel can just go down their path without regard to whether the Palestinians like it. This is what's different, a normal peace plan. Both sides have to agree what it looks like. Right? That's what a peace plan is. You agree, I'll do this. You do this. We both agree what we're doing. That's not this. That's why it's not a peace plan. Israel is basically saying, this is what we're going to do. We don't control what you're going to do. We're just going to control what we do. We are going to get on the same page as our whole country, the majority anyway, and the same page with your neighbors, the Arab countries who typically, or I don't know if you want to call them Muslim countries or Arab countries in this case. I think they're all the same in this one context because, you know, Iran, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, longer story. So we have this situation where Israel can just march forward because they drew the boundaries in a way that it just captures the places that they already are. All they have to do is start building some borders and Israel can say, well, we're done. Here's the fun part. The Palestinians can complain forever and, you know, do some terrorist attacks and fire some rockets. But they were going to do that anyway. Right. If the Palestinians decide to play along and agree to the plan, nobody thinks that's going to happen. Or if they don't, which one would have more terrorist attacks against Israel? Probably the same. Probably exactly the same. If Abbas, Palestinian leader, decided tomorrow to sign off on the deal, he can't control everybody in this country, you would still have the same amount of terrorist attacks, which fortunately are not that terrible. Israel's got a good control on that with their wall, etc. So Israel has no downside risk in terms of terrorism. Make a deal, don't make a deal. It's probably going to look exactly the same in terms of terrorist attacks. And then it puts the Palestinians in this weird, isolated situation. Correct me if I'm wrong. I need a fact check on this, but hasn't the United States already withdrawn financial aid from the Palestinians? That's correct. Right. Who else gives the Palestinians financial aid? Well, I don't know this, but I'm imagining other countries in the region, maybe Saudi Arabia right now, somebody said Iran. I don't know exactly what kind of support Iran does if it's just supporting the terrorist stuff or if it's more. But Iran is broke. So you've got the United States isn't giving the Palestinians money. Saudi Arabia and the others who say that the peace plan looks good now have a reason to stop funding the Palestinians if they were. I don't know the exact situation there, but I assume the Palestinians were getting help from a variety of places. If they turn down the deal and other people say, you know, you're never going to get a better deal than this. So if you turn this down, why the hell am I going to waste my money? Sending money to your failed country, you can't even help yourself. So this situation we've never been in, where the Palestinians have a choice and it has nothing to do with other people's choices. This is the cool part. If the Palestinians decide to not try to become A recognized nation, they can. What will that change? Well, it changes nothing in Israel. They're just going to draw their borders and do everything that they were going to do anyway. Doesn't change what their so called allies in the region would do. Do the same thing. So I think the only thing that the Palestinians have to decide is whether they want help and redevelopment and money from other countries or not. Do they want to be a nation building towards something good or not? But Israel doesn't have to agree with what they do. They don't even have to care. So you actually have a situation where the Palestinians have been isolated. All their support is either eroded to the point of trivial or gone. And they can just live their own life and it can be a good one or a bad one and nobody cares. You've never seen this before. This is not a peace plan. It's a path and we're already walking down it. We don't have to wait for anybody. I've never seen anything like this. Really. It doesn't fit in any good category. So I think that's also why people are going to have trouble understanding. Doesn't fit any other model, I guess. The border, our border people found the longest border tunnel ever that they've discovered under the border between Mexico and the United States. And there's such a thing as a tunnel task force. Did you know that? There's a tunnel task force And I guess they find tunnels and this one was really well built at ventilation and lighting and electricity and it ran for long, long stretch. I don't know what it was. But here's the question I ask myself. Why do you need a tunnel? Did you ever wonder that? You know, I know they use all kinds of different means to ship drugs in, probably some by land and air and sea and everything else. But isn't a tunnel a pretty hard thing to do? I know that cartels have lots of money and resources, but it's kind of hard to build a tunnel with all the resources that it requires. And I thought to myself, would you be building this tunnel if it were easy to just go across the border on land? Have we gotten to the point where it's just so hard to cross, where there's a wall or maybe even where there is no wall that it's easier to build a tunnel? Why is it easier to build a tunnel than all of those other places? The only thing I could take away from this is that we're getting a lot better with our border security. Now I know there have been tunnels for a Long time. But the fact that tunnels are needed at all suggests that those other mechanisms for getting into the country have higher risk. So I imagine we're getting better at detecting tunnels. There's got to be some technology for that. All right, see. Oh, here's a little persuasion lesson for you. This comes courtesy of Mark Schneider, our favorite nuclear energy advocate. And he had this realization which he tweeted about, which I thought was amazingly clever and good persuasion. And it goes like this. I'll just read you his tweet. It just occurred to me why nuclear waste leaks scare people. The waste from weapons production was stored as a liquid. So you get it right? If you knew that nuclear waste was liquid, that's pretty scary because you think, well, if it's liquid, isn't it going to melt through the bottom of whatever you put it in if you wait long enough? Are you sure that thing is well sealed? Can't that liquid get out? And then Mark points out, and I didn't know this. This was brand new information for me. He says in his tweet, inside the spent fuel containers at commercial sites, you know, the ones that are just producing electricity inside those fuel containers, the spent fuel are solid fuel assemblies. And they showed a picture of one. They're actually like physical, solid tubes in sort of a structure that holds them together. And I thought if you. I was going to. I didn't have time. I was going to print down a picture and show it to you. Yeah, they're rods, physical rods. And I thought that really changes how you see this. If you said to somebody, to control nuclear waste, we've got to put these hard rods inside a container. Isn't that a completely different mental model than any kind of a liquid waste? Am I right? It completely changes how you feel about the risk, doesn't it? Let me test that on you. If you knew that it was a solid, doesn't that tell you, well, yeah, we can definitely put a solid in a container and it'll probably stay there forever. Somebody says they already knew that. Well, I didn't know it. And let me point out what makes this so good. So this is persuasion wise. First of all, it's visual. Visual persuasion always wins. So the way I'm telling you is not nearly as persuasive as if you saw the picture. I'm merely describing. You see it and you go, oh, that does look safe. So it's visual, it's simple. Weapons used to use nuclear waste would have nuclear waste. Commercial ones, the ones we care about don't pretty simple. And it's also a contrast play because he's contrasting how safe these solid ones are with what you imagine was less safe, the liquid version. So you get contrast, simplicity. It's visual, and it reframes the argument. Perfect, perfect, perfect. Persuasion. All right, let's see what else we got. I think we've hit all the big points. I think that's all we got. So watch today in Delight and Entertainment as people misinterpret Dershowitz and argue against their own hallucination. It'll be fun. And I will talk to you later.