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Oct. 3, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
53:13
Episode 244 Scott Adams: Kavanaugh, Taxes, Chinese Fentanyl, the Anti-Male Party
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Come on in here.
Turns out there's a lot to talk about today, eh?
How about that?
And you're in time for, yes, the simultaneous sip.
It hasn't been a good week.
But maybe things will get better.
And if you have your mug, your glass, your vessel, your chalice, fill it with your favorite beverage.
You've got time.
Come on over here and join me for the simultaneous sip.
It happens now.
Let's talk about Chinese fentanyl.
As you know, my stepson died from what we presume to be a fentanyl, a fentanyl overdose.
Seems that a lot or even most fentanyl comes from China, from Chinese pharmaceutical labs, which apparently the government has investigated and knows who those labs were.
Now the problem is, you say to yourself, wait a minute, if we know who the fentanyl labs are, and they're sending all these drugs from China, who the great...
When I talk about China, I'm just going to call them fentanyl China.
Just two words now.
So fentanyl China, which is the primary effect that they have on the United States, Is killing tens of thousands of Americans every year.
These little labs will send us stuff when we find them.
Law enforcement closes them down in China.
But at least one person on Twitter says the problem is that the Chinese government will seize the equipment and then sell it to another lab.
And then the other lab opens up and starts selling fentanyl.
So I don't know if that's a universal problem or something that happened a few times or one time.
I'm not sure how pervasive that is.
But I suggested online that the owners of the labs be the first thing that comes up in a Google search on fentanyl.
If you do a search on shame or fentanyl or China, you should see the names of the fentanyl lab CEOs, the owners.
I would like to see them publicly shamed for being the mass murderers that they are.
Now if that doesn't work, if we can't get Google To include that at the top of the rankings, and I imagine that would be a problem since they do what China tells them to do.
Here's another suggestion.
If it's true that we can determine, even as an estimate, that Chinese companies are sending X amount of fentanyl, and that fentanyl has a street value of X hundreds of millions of dollars, and if we can sometimes Determine the percentage of people being killed in America,
however many tens of thousands, tens of thousands per year are being killed by fentanyl China, then I would say we should include that in our tariffs.
Just throw that out there as a suggestion.
Perhaps if China causes us $700 billion worth of drug problems, we should just add that to their tariff.
Just toss that on.
Once a year, we'll take an inventory, those things which we have investigated and found to be Chinese fentanyl.
If they send us a billion dollars of fentanyl, we add a billion dollars to their bill.
We just add it to the tariff.
And we don't even, you know, we'll show them the evidence, but just add it to the tariff.
If we determine that 10 or 20 or 30,000 Americans in a year were killed, by Chinese fentanyl, even if we don't know exactly which dose came from where, if we can estimate it and say that, let's say, 10 or 20,000 Americans were killed by fentanyl, let's put a value on a human life.
Let's say each human life was worth, I don't know, 100 million dollars?
And then just multiply 100 million dollars times 20,000.
It's a pretty big number.
And then just add it to their bill.
So I think we should at least raise this possibility in the negotiations.
We should say, if you can't stop the fentanyl, we'll just bill you for it.
And we'll also try to kill those owners of those labs.
Now, it might be that we don't need to kill any lab owners in China.
I'm talking about extra legal, hunt them down, give them a shot of their own fentanyl sort of situation.
But we might not have to do that because it could be that the Chinese government Closes down the lab and even executes the owners as soon as we tell them about them.
It might be that the Chinese government doesn't want these labs any more than we do.
It's just sort of a whack-a-mole situation.
That's possible. But I think we should bill them, we should see the faces of the owners, and we should try to kill them.
If the Chinese government isn't, we should definitely do it on their soil.
That's my suggestion. Now you say to yourself, my God, my God, you can't disrespect the sovereignty of China and kill Chinese citizens on Chinese soil.
To which I say, China is killing 20, 30,000 people a year with their fentanyl.
Can we kill a few lab owners on their soil?
Yes, we can.
Yes, we can.
And if somebody says, hey, there are a lot of suspicious deaths of these lab owners, it seems like they're all dying of fentanyl overdoses.
Because if you can catch one of these lab owners, well, you know what?
We'll kill them. Fentanyl.
Just give them a couple of shots of fentanyl and walk away.
That should do it. That's enough on fentanyl.
Let's talk about the headlines.
So there's a big New York Times story, 14, I don't know, a whole bunch of pages, 15,000 words, in which they have dug through ancient Trump tax returns, and they have determined, and I know this is going to be hard to believe for many of you,
but the New York Times has determined that the Trump business, going back to Fred, the father, The Trump Organization has aggressively, and I don't know how to tell you this, they've aggressively tried to reduce their tax burden.
It's true. I knew this day was coming when the anti-Trumpers Would finally find something so terrible that they could take down the president.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's true.
The Trump Organization has tried aggressive tactics to reduce their tax burden.
Now, you might say to yourself, wait a minute, isn't that 100% of every company that can afford an accountant?
And I say, yes, yes it is.
But their names are not Trump.
Now, were all of the things that they did legal by today's standards?
Well, here's the first problem.
Are we, and I don't know the answer to this question, so I'll just make it a question.
Are we judging what happened back then Decades ago by the standards of today.
I hope not, but there might be things that you couldn't do today that were more standard practice back then.
Second thing I wonder is, here's some tax advice I once heard from somebody who understood taxes.
A friend of mine once had an ambiguous situation.
There were two ways to calculate his taxes, and under the rules of the IRS, it seemed as if both of them were accurate.
In other words, they were both supported by IRS rules.
One of them, he calculated, would cost him a lot more money than the other way he calculated it.
So he asked his friend, who knew about taxes, He said, if there are two ways to calculate it, and they both seem supportable by the IRS rules, which way should I use?
And the expert said, use the one where you pay the least taxes.
That's it. You don't need to decide which of those ambiguous rules is the slightly better one.
You just have to have a reason, and you've got to say, okay, well, use the one that costs me the least amount of money.
Now, is it true that if The IRS had dug into some of these tax avoidance techniques that the Trump family used.
Is it possible that they would have said, yeah, this is technically true, but not what we had in mind?
Probably. Probably.
Probably. Probably the IRS, if they'd really dug into it, they could find some things that were technically, it looks like they followed the rules, but this is not the way we imagined these rules should work.
That's the most common situation in the world.
Every time there's any kind of a tax change, all the big corporations think, wait a minute, if I open a company in Ireland, and I funnel it through there, and if I put my headquarters in Estonia, and I've got a couple of car-bound companies, I can move that money.
That's just normal business.
Now what happens when the IRS determines that you have abused the rules and stretched them beyond what they were intended to be stretched to?
What happens to the company that does that?
They pay a fine.
Or they just have to do it the other way.
It's not jail time.
Because if somebody did something that's at least supportable by a real live accountant who's willing to sign it and say, yeah, I'm going to sign this.
I'm going to put my name and my reputation as a tax preparer, as an accountant, probably a big accounting company.
I'll sign this because this at least has a good argument for it.
So if his taxes...
Are in the opinion of the New York Times reporters and some experts they talk to, if those experts in today, 2018, look back at those decades old mechanisms for reducing or eliminating taxes, and they say, that's sketchy, that would be illegal.
That's sort of a normal situation.
Because a big company is going to do enough stuff that they know the gray area stuff, the vague stuff, the places where they stretch the rules a little bit.
They're just hard to find.
And if the IRS doesn't actually ask for the details of those things, they don't really look at it.
A lot of people don't know that an IRS audit typically is not an audit on everything you've done.
They tend to focus on something.
So they might audit you on, is the home business you claimed an actual home business?
But they won't necessarily audit you on the rest of your return.
I suppose if it was a lot of fraud going on on the one thing that they found, they might look further.
But they tend to limit it.
So in a big company, anytime you've got any gray area, anytime your accountant says, you know, you could do this, But you could also do this, and this one would save you a lot of money.
What would happen if I get caught doing this sketchy one?
Well, we have an argument, and our argument goes like this, that we can do this sketchy thing because of this and this and this and this.
If you have an argument, nobody's going to jail.
You might pay a fine.
But it's sort of normal business.
Companies pay fines all the time, and they do stretch things until they get caught.
So let's talk about the politics of it.
In terms of a way to attack the president, I think the people who already thought he had tax problems and there was sketchy stuff there, it gives them something to talk about.
But it's really sort of an extension of what they were talking about anyway.
And for the people who voted for Trump, raise your hands.
Raise your hands, because I can see all of you.
How many of you already knew that the Trump Organization, both currently and historically, did everything it could to avoid taxes, and that some of those things might be questionable to the IRS, but, and here's the big but, All of it went through professional accountants, and all of it got signed off on.
Somewhere in this mix, there are professional accountants who don't work for the Trump Organization who looked at all this and said, it's a stretch.
You know, this one's a little bit of a gray area.
But yeah, this is legal...
According to the technical rules, so we're gonna try it and see what happens.
So I don't think the tax story is gonna change minds because the people who supported the president, it was already baked in.
Everything that you hear now will not threaten the president legally because he wasn't the one who even knew the details.
Literally, he didn't know.
It's fair to say that he didn't know the details.
When he was two years old and Fred Trump was funneling him money, the way the New York Times writes it is that Donald Trump was helping his father cheat on taxes when he was two.
So Donald Trump was helping his father cheat on taxes when Donald Trump was two.
So I don't think there's any legal risk, and I think the political risk is, eh.
There's a tell, there's a big tell in the New York Times story that made me laugh out loud when I saw it.
I needed a good laugh this week.
There's a, I don't have the exact quote, but in the story it says that they went through 100,000 documents.
Can you imagine that?
The New York Times reporters and whoever they had helping them, they went through 100,000 documents.
What's left out of that story?
They went through 100,000 documents and found stuff about those taxes.
Let me tell you what's left out of that story.
How many of the 100,000 documents made any difference?
Were there two pages?
Is it possible that maybe two pages had something on them that was of any importance?
Why did they have to tell us I went through 100,000 documents?
I'll tell you why. Because it's a really big number.
And if you say we went through 100,000 documents, it sounds like your proof is really good.
Well, how much more certain can you be there were 100,000 documents?
So the 100,000 documents thing, without any reference to how many of those documents made any difference at all, is just pure manipulation.
That's not reporting.
That's manipulation of the reader.
Let's go to another topic.
So now, this is a great breaking story headline.
Shocking news.
Here's some shocking news.
It's being reported that That the president may have been behind the payments to Stormy Daniels.
I know. I know.
You're thinking what I'm thinking.
What are the chances?
We didn't know that.
We didn't know that the president might have talked to Michael Cohen and had something to do with the payments to Stormy Daniels.
What? What?
Are you kidding me?
And what about the fact that the president said something that wasn't true about an alleged affair with a porn star?
Really? Really?
You think the president may have shaded the truth when asked in public about an affair with a porn star that is alleged to happen while his wife was pregnant?
Huh! We didn't see that coming.
I actually heard the news And I thought to myself, uh, uh, that's news?
And so it kind of got to the larger question of lying, because we're talking about Kavanaugh, and the implication is that Kavanaugh is going to be the top judge, or a top judge, or he's a candidate for it.
And And if he lied on anything during his testimonies, if he lied on anything, it makes him untrustworthy, and you have to have the most trustworthy people in the Supreme Court, goes the argument.
But imagine this.
Imagine if they'd said to Kavanaugh, Mr.
Kavanaugh, did your family ever own a pet?
Yes, we did.
We had a dog named Fluffy.
Mr. Kavanaugh, is Fluffy still with us?
No, Fluffy is not with us anymore.
Mr. Kavanaugh, did Fluffy die or did you tell your children that something else happened to Fluffy?
And Kavanaugh would be like, yeah, he didn't exactly die.
Fluffy went to a farm.
He went to a farm where he's very happy, talking to other dogs, running around all day with other dogs forever, in eternity.
He's in a farm.
Now, obviously I'm joking because everybody lies to their kids about their dog dying if their kids are young.
And at what level do you say the lie is trivial?
If the man is asked in front of the world and his family and his children, did you drink too much?
What do we expect him to say?
I'll tell you what I want him to say.
No. I want him to minimize that.
Because it didn't really matter to the point, in my opinion.
At least not in a way that changes anything.
So a little bit of lying.
I'm okay with that, frankly.
So let me say that, I'll say it as clearly as possible.
If Kavanaugh or the next judge that the Democrats maybe put up there, if any judge in the future lies about stuff that isn't terribly important and, you know, it might have been embarrassing, so it's better just to lie about it.
I'm okay with that. I will not feel bad when the Supreme Court judge is ruling on some important thing Because they lied about their dog or they lied about how many beers they had.
I would not have any problem with that.
Now let's talk about lying in general.
Think about where Trump came from.
Trump came from the business world.
In the business world, do people lie?
Do people lie in the business world?
Well, if you have any experience in the business world, and I do, you will know That without lying, capitalism wouldn't even work.
Lying, and we don't like to teach the kids this, and we don't like to say it out loud, but the entire capitalist system really depends on lying.
Now, the lying comes in many forms.
The lying might look like this.
Yes, we can totally meet your deadline when you know you can't.
But once they get a little bit pregnant, you'll be able to make some excuses and you still get the deal.
So lying about deadlines is almost universal.
How about lying about your total cost?
You're the vendor, you're selling a software system, a hardware system into a big company.
Do you tell them all the costs?
Do you tell them what it's likely to cost for the upgrades unless they ask?
Do you tell them what will happen if something breaks?
Do you really disclose all the costs or are you sort of lying to get the job and then once you've got the job it's too hard for them to get rid of you so it's easier for you to overcharge for changes?
What about every advertisement?
What about marketing? Have you ever seen an advertisement that said, here's our new product.
We compared it to all the other products, and frankly, our competitor makes a lower-cost product that's better, and you should buy that.
But we have one that's almost as good.
That would be honest, and that would be the way most people should market if there was anything like honesty in the capitalist world.
So I contend...
The lying is a central ingredient to what greases the capitalist engine.
If there were not enough lying, there would be less buying.
Let me say that again.
If we didn't have so much lying in capitalism, we wouldn't have as much buying.
And if people didn't buy as much, the system kind of doesn't work.
So Trump comes from a world in which you always lie about your product.
Always. I mean, it's about the most universal thing you've ever done, you can see.
It's like, hey, is your building a pretty good building?
Or is it the greatest building ever?
Is it people should die to live there?
Is it the best building you've ever seen?
Which one do business people say?
So Trump brings this, let's say the capitalist business ethic into government, which is that you're allowed to To lie about anything.
Really, you're allowed to lie about anything.
You can say the competition is doing terrible things that maybe they're not.
You can say that yours will cost less than the competition.
Well, maybe it doesn't exactly.
But if you didn't do all those things, it would be hard to persuade people forward.
And we see that the president's persuasion is very effective.
Now, I've said in the past that the president is always, as far as I can tell, there might be some exception out there, but I haven't seen one.
He is always directionally accurate.
And by directionally accurate, I mean that even if he's not technically accurate, he's moving our minds in the right direction that you would want for a president.
So, for example, if the president says, this economy is the best it's ever been, And then people do some fact checking and they say, it's not the best it's ever been.
Remember that one year under Obama, etc.
Now you would say, well, technically, let's score that as a lie.
Here's how I score it.
It's like capitalism.
It's an exaggeration of your success.
It's a minimization of the people who are your competitors, if you will.
It is exactly how capitalism is built.
And capitalism works really well.
So he's bringing the same technique here, and what it did was it sort of increased the total stockpile of lying in government.
Because it's no secret that senators and congresspeople and candidates, it's no secret that they all lie.
But they generally try to lie in ways that you can get away with it a little bit.
Hoping nobody notices, that sort of thing.
You know, the political lies are sort of like sheepish lies.
A little bit, I'll say it quickly, hope nobody notices.
So you don't want to be a liar as an elected official, but, you know, the lying helps a little bit.
So you've got a little bit of lying going on.
Trump comes in with the capitalism ethic, which is that it's absolutely okay to lie about absolutely everything, all the time.
You lie about how good your employees are, how you'll meet the deadline.
You lie about your prospects for the future.
You lie about the fact that the reorganization is coming and everybody's going to be fired.
I mean, it's a big lying enterprise, and it needs to be that way, because if people stop doing that, people would stop being persuaded to do stuff.
And you need people to buy stuff, you need people to make deals, you need them to believe The B.S. And I think what Trump did is shock the system by taking what works perfectly in capitalism, complete 100% exaggeration, hyperbole, outright lies to drive the capitalist engine, brought it over to government, but instead of the profit motive, he has the make America great again motive.
Everything you do in capitalism is for profit.
You know, within the law. You're trying to stay within the law as much as possible.
But profit. It's a single purpose of every lie you tell.
So you're not lying randomly.
You're not lying for no good reason.
You're lying for profit.
And as long as people just lie for profit, capitalism chugs along okay.
Likewise, in the government, as long as the things Trump says are inspiring people to invest, they're inspiring ISIS to quit, Because let's say he's even lied to ISIS. He told ISIS that he was going to destroy them, he's never going to leave, he's going to crush them.
To the degree that they believed he would be better at it than the last people, that's very demotivating for ISIS. Is that a bad lie?
Saying that you might be more powerful against ISIS than maybe even you think you might be?
That's not a bad lie.
That's a really good lie.
It's a capitalism kind of a lie.
It moves the bar where you want it.
Not toward profit, but toward making America safer and greater again.
So you got that.
Let's change the subject a little bit here.
I'm going to give some credit to the Democrats for persuasion.
More for strategy, I guess, than persuasion.
This is sort of a gray area.
Alan Dershowitz pointed out on Twitter that Lawrence Tribe, a prominent lawyer and anti-Trumper, Wrote an article from the Washington Post, I think, or New York Times, one of those, in which Lawrence Tribe described a strategy for blocking Kavanaugh that was pure evil,
just pure evil, and at the same time I said to myself, okay, if I'm going to be objective and I'm going to separate the morality from the tool, the tool is It's pretty darn clever.
It's evil. Yeah, it's totally evil.
And it's bad for the system.
It could destroy the whole country.
So it's that bad.
But it might work.
And here's the technique.
The idea is that in a general way, he gives a lot more detail, but in a general way, any organization such as the ACLU, if they would announce their opposition to Kavanaugh, They're the type of entity that ends up at the Supreme Court a lot.
So if you knew that the ACL had come out strongly against Kavanaugh, you could not expect Kavanaugh to stay on that case if the ACLU ever came in front of them.
Kavanaugh would have to recuse because he had been an enemy or they had been an enemy to his nominations.
Now, the tribe's idea was that if enough entities oppose him publicly, then he would have to recuse himself from any decisions when they came before him, and he would be such a wounded potential jurist that there's no point in nominating, or there's no point in putting him on the court.
Because he will only be able to, you know, be like a part-time justice because he'll have to recuse himself from so many things because all these people opposed him.
And I thought to myself, okay, that is pure evil.
But I don't know if it won't work.
I mean, I'll tell you one thing you can't say about the Democrats anymore.
Here's what you can't say about the Democrats anymore.
They're afraid to fight.
If you're going to be real, keeping it real as we used to say, keeping it real.
One of the things that was the big criticism of the Democrats is they just didn't have enough fight in them.
But holy cow, this Kavanaugh thing...
It's changing my mind about that, right?
There's a lot of fight in the whole Russian collusion thing.
That's a lot of fight.
So you've got to give A-plus for effort.
I mean, the Democrats, in terms of stepping it up for the power of the persuasion and the level that they're willing to go to is sort of a 10.
I mean, that's kind of a 10.
They're talking about everything from Well, they're talking about every means of removing Trump.
So I'll give them that they have some fight in them.
They don't have good strategies.
So here's the catch.
They've taken the fight to a situation, the Kavanaugh situation, in which the president has two ways to win and probably no way to lose.
So they've chosen as their final battleground Maybe not final, but they've chosen as their major battleground the only situation I can think of in which Trump wins both ways.
And here's how. You'll hear other people talking about this now.
I think I was talking about it early, but now it's sort of a common...
And by the way, did anybody say this before me?
I assume so, but for some reason I never heard it from a pundit until I said it.
And it goes like this. If Trump gets Kavanaugh in, even wounded, even with a bad reputation, it's still unambiguously a win.
And it's a giant win.
But if Kavanaugh doesn't get in, if he is thwarted by this level of machinations, Let's say nothing new comes out, but he's still thwarted.
Republicans will just go nuts.
And you think, yeah, it's going to be a red wave like you've never seen in your life.
Because at this point, it would really be...
If Kavanaugh is thwarted by this kind of claim, it would look like a proposed system change in the United States...
That would really be rewriting the Constitution, rewriting our, you know, in effect.
Because even though the Constitution allows everything that's happening, it would feel like we're treating the Constitution differently.
So, in effect, it would be like a rewrite.
Because then the Senate would not be in the advise and consent.
They would just be in some weird team fight kind of thing where they just make stuff up.
That's a completely different system than advice and consent.
So the Republicans, if there's one thing Republicans don't like and that will motivate them, is activists, judges, and somebody trying to mess with the system.
Republicans like the system.
And if you mess with the whole system, as opposed to just getting a result they don't like, let me say it more clearly.
If Republicans see a result in politics that they don't like, but they also recognize that the system was followed, you know, everything was constitutional, nobody broke any laws, they're going to accept it with resistance, but they're going to accept it.
And they're going to fight to change in the future, but again, they're going to respect the system.
If Republicans get a result they don't want because somebody broke the system, which looks like what's happening, and part of the system is innocent until proven guilty, or in the political job category,
not that standard, not innocent until beyond a doubt, And not just preponderance of evidence, but you know, You need some corroboration that's the solid kind.
If you don't have that, that's a pretty big change in how things have been done and it would be a permanent change.
That's very motivating for Republicans.
They don't like some group of voters, Democrats, changing the system without permission and then getting a result that they don't like.
So Trump wins with the red wave and Trump wins if he gets Kavanaugh and doesn't get a red wave because I think I actually think Trump could function with a split Congress if it ends that way.
So Democrats, tons of fight.
Terrible strategy.
They picked the wrong fight. The other story that's related to the New York Times story about Trump's taxes is that...
Gleefully, CNN is reporting that it blows up the story of Trump as a self-made businessman and the myth that he borrowed a million dollars and turned it into 10 billion or something.
And they're saying, this proves that he actually got hundreds of millions from his father.
To which I say, what?
Are you kidding me?
All of the news doesn't feel like news, does it?
Is there anybody who didn't know he got tons of money from his father?
I don't think there's any Trump supporter who read that and said, What?
Are you kidding me?
Are you telling me his net worth is not $10 billion?
Are you telling me that he got a lot of money and a great start from his rich father?
What? Who's having that conversation?
Nobody. Literally nobody.
So I've described what happened mostly yesterday as the kitchen sink.
So if you're not American, there's an American saying...
It's called throwing the kitchen sink at it.
It means you've tried everything else and there's just nothing left to throw.
Everything in the kitchen has already been thrown.
So you have to pull the kitchen sink out and throw that.
That's like the last thing you've got left.
And it felt like that yesterday, didn't it?
Remember I've taught you that being on the edge of doom looks almost identical, or can...
To being on the edge of complete victory, right?
Almost doom and almost complete victory can look exactly the same.
And this might be one of those situations.
Because on one hand it looks like, oh my god, there's all this new reporting.
All this horrible stuff about President Trump.
And then you look at all the reports, it's like, well, we kind of suspected he tried to avoid taxes.
I think we knew he got more money from his parents because, remember, he's a capitalist and he lies about everything.
Now, what did President Trump get?
And of exaggerating his business success.
Well, it got him on The Apprentice and it made him President of the United States.
Is he the dummy?
Oh my God, that dumb old President Trump.
He managed to spin a story into the presidency.
I feel like that was pretty good play, right?
Because if there's one thing I can teach you, it's that the person who sells the best Is the best.
Let me say that again.
The person who sells the best is the best.
The person who can sell is the most powerful, the most useful, has the most utility.
And while other people were learning maybe different business stuff or having different experiences, Trump was becoming the best promoter, salesperson, brand manager of all time.
Was that a good strategy?
Obviously yes! Because he not only succeeded himself, but he brought that same bag of skills to the presidency, and he's selling the heck out of the United States.
That's what he's doing. He's acting as a salesperson for the United States, and he's selling the heck out of it.
Is he ruffling some feathers?
Sure! But he's selling the heck out of it.
Let's talk about...
So, I've talked before about how the Democrats have become somewhat a woman-centric party, meaning that their primary interest in the Democrat side is the interest of women.
And they've largely just thrown black people under the bus, you know, Hispanics under the bus.
They've kind of thrown everybody under the bus except women.
Now again, I'm not saying that's good or bad.
It might be a really good thing that there's a major political party that's concentrated on the preferences of women.
That might be a really healthy thing.
So I don't have an opinion about that.
I'm just describing it.
And I had tried to describe Republicans as being about protecting women, but I think it would be more fair to say that the Republicans are the party of protection.
So Republicans are strong on...
Anti-crime, strong on law enforcement, and that's really a protection thing.
They're strong on defense, that's sort of a protection thing.
And this protection applies to both men and women.
Republicans are strong on immigration.
That's a protection thing.
The president talks about the risk of rape.
Does he exaggerate?
Of course. On everything he does.
But rape is a specific female risk.
Not exclusively, but it's primarily a female risk.
And he talks about protection of men and women.
Protection. He's not against gays.
He's fine with gay marriage, etc.
So it's about protection.
If you're an American, male or female, it's about protection.
And in this world, men are seen as protectors.
Again, I'm not saying all men are protectors.
I'm not saying that women are not also protectors.
But it's sort of a brand-wise thing.
Men are good eggs.
Let me put it to you this way.
How often is a woman the victim of a man when there are other men in the room?
Well, sometimes. You might have these rare cases where there's some kind of a group rape situation.
But generally speaking, for a woman to be victimized, she usually needs to be in the company of one man.
If there's more than one man in the room, she's safer, not more dangerous, because the other men act as a protection against the one man who's problematic.
So Trump has sort of a protection mode, and he said what you're not supposed to say at the rally.
He said explicitly that we're in a situation where it's starting to get dangerous for your sons and your husbands, because they might be the The recipient of uncorroborated accusations, and that could be devastating for them as well as anybody who loves them.
And the media acted like he wasn't allowed to say that.
It wasn't fair to say that men matter.
It's fair to say black lives matter, but it seemed to be unfair to say that men and boys matter.
He wasn't saying they matter more than anybody else.
He wasn't saying, let's stop worrying about other people.
He was saying that men matter.
That's it. He was just saying that men matter too.
And there was pushback on that.
There was pushback on the notion that men might matter too.
Think about that.
And so it seems to me that the framing that's developing, you know, things are evolving every day, But it feels like the frame that's evolving is that the Democratic Party is not pro-woman exclusively.
They're also anti-male.
So the Democrats are unambiguously anti-male and don't even try to hide it anymore, which is sort of shocking.
And this president is willing to call BS on it.
It's like they're not even hiding the fact that they're anti-male.
How much do you like to hear me say that?
Because I think the needle has moved from, let's fight to get what's good for women.
The fight for contraceptive, contraceptions.
Fighting for contraception or having it paid for is not anti-male.
In fact, men are probably better off, if that's your point of view.
Men are better off, and women too.
Fighting for abortion...
Doesn't feel anti-male because what is aborted is at least potentially male and potentially female in equal numbers.
It's more about what's good for women.
But I feel like we've left that envelope, the Democrats have, and they've extended it to a general anti-male feeling.
Now, I'm not going to say that the president has no No influence on that.
I mean, his approach made it easy for the Democrats to frame men as the demons.
But let's see it for what it is.
It feels like the Democrat brand has turned from pro-woman to anti-male.
Whereas the Republican brand is still protection The Democrats have specific protection-related things.
They're trying to protect... The factory workers.
They're trying to protect workers.
They're trying to protect people physically.
Now, I think the Democrats would argue, wait, we're the protection group because we're more about climate change.
That's protecting. And we're protecting the environment, and that's protecting.
But it doesn't feel the same.
It feels just in terms of the persuasion, the way we see it in register, it just feels like Democrats are anti-male now and they no longer are trying to hide it.
Which makes it increasingly embarrassing to be a man in the Democratic Party.
Yeah, and I was thinking the other day that I always look for the unintended consequences of things.
And it seems to me that when Black Lives Matter became a popular slogan, A lot of people would try to respond to that and say, well, all lives matter.
And they thought that was sort of a higher ground maneuver, but in fact it was a trap.
Because if you say all lives matter, you're sort of refuting the point that black lives matter even though you're not.
But it can be argued that way.
And so therefore you're a racist.
So it was sort of a genius slogan because you either agreed with it or they could pin you as a racist and it was very effective.
But at the same time, the unintended consequence of having societal acceptance of the fact that black lives matter, the ability to call out one group and say this group matters, kind of made it safe for Trump to say men matter.
I'm not even sure he could have said that before Black Lives Matter.
He can say men matter.
And you're also seeing people who are willing to come forward and say, what's wrong with being white?
What's wrong with being a man?
Why do I have to apologize for that?
Because somebody else got a benefit.
Let's talk about...
Oh, I shouldn't do this.
I'm right on the edge of throwing my career away, and I'm wondering if I should.
Nah, I'm gonna wait for another day to do that.
No reason to do that this week.
Anyway, my startup, the interface app, Interface by WenHub, We have a new version.
By the way, if you don't have the new version of the Interface by WinHub app, let me show you what it looks like.
It's a big upgrade and you'll need to upgrade your current version to use this with people who have the new version.
So, let me just show you.
So, what the app does is it allows you to either be an expert or to find an expert.
If you want to be an expert, you just say, I'll take credit cards or I'll take crypto and, you know, you select it.
You just set your price and put in your keywords and your bio.
It takes you about 60 seconds to become an expert.
You can be an expert in whatever you want.
It could be gardening, it could be technology, it could be anything.
It could be doctoring.
And if you want to find an expert, you just click the top and put in the search term.
So I'm going to look for French tutor.
So it looks like a French tutor was recently on here.
It could be any kind of a tutor, but look!
There's one. So right now there's a French tutor who's online right now named Aurore Boone.
And for $40 per hour, all I have to do is push a button and for $40 an hour I have a French tutor.
Now if you have a kid who's taking French and you did not take French and you need somebody to tutor them, you could be making dinner, just call this up, put the phone on the kitchen table, And have your kids sit there while you're making dinner and they're getting French tutoring.
Now imagine this for every kind of skill.
Imagine that there's anything you can learn.
Anything. You can learn anything just by finding somebody who will tell it to you right at that moment for a price.
Yeah, it is $40.
Tutors can cost a lot more than $40 an hour.
So if you could get a $40 an hour tutor, depending on the part of the country, you know, the rich parts of the country have expensive tutors.
But I think tutors can be $65 an hour.
They can be pretty expensive.
And one of the things that we're fixing in the upgrade is that we didn't have a A fully functioning system where if you couldn't find somebody, you would be notified when they were online.
And now you will be.
So if you say you were looking for a French tutor, but they weren't available because somebody was already talking to them, you could set it to give you a notification when the French tutor was back online.
All right, so the world will be changing quite a bit.
You can hear a lot more in the coming days about the app.
But, just to make things interesting, if you would like to talk to me right after this is over, I'm going to go online as an expert, whoops, right now, on the interface app.
You could find me by my name or by cartooning or persuasion.
I'm going to accept both WEN tokens, which you get for free just from signing up.
So it wouldn't even cost you anything to call me because we give you some free WEN tokens.
Those are our own cryptocurrency.
So you could just use those and call me.
And I'm going to set my hourly rate at $100.
So you're going to pay $25 if you want to talk to me.
And I'm going to go online.
Alright, I'm online.
I'm going to hang up from this Periscope.
And if anybody wants to call me and try out the Interface by WinHub app, you can do that right now.
Interface by WinHub, it's in the app stores.
It's a free download.
And calling me would be free the first time because you get some free tokens just for signing up.
So we'll see who calls first.
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