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March 4, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
56:16
Episode 438 Scott Adams: Persuasion Scorecard For Politics so Far This Year. Who is Winning?
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It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
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Join me. Ah, tankards.
Yes, that's the other word I keep forgetting.
Your books changed my life, says Chit Chat 101.
Well, good. Thank you.
You know, I hear that a lot.
It's not always the same book.
But most people are talking about how to fail at almost everything and still win big.
So that book came out in 2013 and almost every day somebody contacts me and says, you changed my life.
Which is good because I wrote that book to do exactly that.
That's what it was for. Alright.
Somebody says, I'm begging you, don't talk about climate.
Alright. Well, I'm going to block you and talk about climate.
Alright. So, let's talk about a...
Let's talk about the...
Persuasion Scorecard. Now I've got a few things that I'm going to talk about in terms of Persuasion.
But I want to see if you have any extras that you want to add to the list.
So I'll be looking at the comments.
But let's just take a look at some of the more current Persuasion plays.
But before I do this, well actually I'm going to start somewhere else.
I'm going to start on the back. Yes, my whiteboard has a front and a back.
That's because I'm fancy like that.
So I had this realization the other day.
And the realization was this.
That people conflate the idea of debating With the idea of persuading.
And there's a really, really big difference.
And I worry that part of the reason that when I talk about persuasion, people have trouble understanding.
Not most of you.
Most of you have come along for the journey, so you're up to speed.
But if you tried to convince somebody who'd never been introduced to the whole persuasion filter on life, That persuasion is a thing and it matters and you can persuade people.
It would be hard.
And part of the reason is that they're stuck in a debate mindset.
Now here's the big difference.
When you're debating, you're trying to convince the judge or judges.
So a debater is not trying to persuade the person they're debating with.
It's a very different process.
You're trying to win points with a judge.
Now the judge is going to be looking for some, you know, specific kinds of rational, logical things.
So if you're rational and logical, the judge will go, ping, give you a point.
If you have a fact that's true, ping!
If you can debunk the other person's fact, ping!
You get a point. And so, you can actually win a debate without changing anybody's mind.
Think about that.
You can win a debate without changing anybody's mind.
Debating and persuading are just completely different processes.
So when you're persuading, you're persuading the audience.
You're persuading the person you're talking to, or the people you're talking to.
And when you're debating, you're talking to the judge.
Now, when you watch the pundits on television who are complaining about, let's say, President Trump's fact-checking, or it could be AOC's fact-checking, or it could be Bernie's fact-checking, it doesn't matter who it is.
If you're watching people on TV saying, oh, that fact-checker, or I'm sorry, that politician failed the fact-checking, They did not pass the fact-checking.
Those are people who are stuck in a debating mindset.
And they imagine that the participants are appealing to the judge.
And then the pundit says, well, I'll be the judge.
If I were the judge of this debate, I would say the one that had the wrong facts just lost.
But that's not what we're doing.
There is no judge.
There are only persuaders and persuadees trying to persuade each other.
So with that in mind, let's go to the persuasion scorecard and look at a few of the topics in the news.
And what I did was I tried to pick out topics Where we have a word or a phrase or a topic name.
Something that is clearly new and current.
So let's just go through a few.
Make America Great Again.
When it was launched, for the purposes of the campaign, it was a gigantic success.
Probably one of the best slogans of all time.
I wrote about this in my book, Win Bigly.
But what about now?
Now, I would say that the Democrats have successfully turned this slogan into a sign of racism.
Now, how many of you just said, My God, Scott, what the hell are you talking about?
MAGA is not racism.
How can you say they turned it into a...
There it is. No way, says Michelle.
No way. You are talking like debaters.
Everybody who just disagreed with me, you fell into a debater frame.
Because the facts do not support what I just said.
And if you were in a debate, then maybe that would matter.
But you're not.
You're persuading. Would you feel comfortable walking outside with a Make America Great Again hat?
I wouldn't. I would not wear a Make America Great Again hat in public.
Absolutely frickin' not.
Because there are enough people who will attack you physically for it that it's off the table.
So, I'm going to give a grade to Omega for persuasion, A+. So that's an A-plus for the other team.
So that's an A-plus for the Democrats.
Persuasion-wise, they've turned the best slogan of all time into a racist symbol.
That is really, really effective persuasion.
Now, if you're saying to me, no, Scott, I don't personally think it's a racist symbol.
You're not even on the same topic.
It doesn't matter what you think.
It matters that you can't even wear these clothes outdoors.
They demonized clothing.
They demonized this slogan to the point where you can't even walk outside with it.
That's good persuasion.
Let's talk about the witch hunt.
The president uses the witch hunt name a lot.
Has the witch hunt branding for the Mueller investigation been successful?
I would say yes.
I would say that it does.
Capture the essence of it.
It's a really good, you know, phrase.
It fits.
It's got some historical context with actual witch hunts.
I would say that's strong.
I give it at least a...
I give it at least a B+. So that's a B-plus for the president on that.
Here's Bernie's new political slogan.
It's not me dot us.
Now if you understand persuasion, you know that people tend to read the first part of a sentence and they don't pay attention to the second part so much.
So putting not me in the front of your slogan is just about the dumbest thing I've ever seen in a political campaign.
So this is an F for Bernie.
Bernie in general is very persuasive.
We're only having these conversations about socialism because of Bernie.
So if you were to look at him as a character, as a politician, he's very persuasive.
He's really good, overall.
But on his slogan, that's just a failure.
The president is going to sign an executive order on free speech.
So he's going to say that colleges have to respect free speech or they won't get federal money.
Now, I don't know if you could enforce that.
I don't know what money they're talking about.
I don't know if they could in any practical way withhold money.
I don't know if the executive order makes sense on any logical level.
But we're not talking about logic.
This is not a debate.
It's talking about persuasion.
On the persuasion level...
Let's get rid of this critic block.
On a persuasion level...
The president has caused the Democrats to have to argue against free speech.
It's the funniest persuasion play you've seen in a long time.
And it was just sort of there to be taken.
Until the president came up with that idea, or I don't know who came up with the idea, but until the president announced it, I'd never thought of it.
Had any of you? Had any of you thought, well, wouldn't it be funny if he signed an executive order supporting free speech and then make the other team argue against free speech?
It was there for the taking.
It was invisible to me.
Somebody, either Trump himself or on his staff, said, you know, if you just say you're supporting free speech, they don't have much of an argument on the other side.
So this approach, A+. So that's A-plus for the president.
Socialism. We're seeing socialism being persuaded in both directions.
We're seeing the people who like socialism persuading in favor of it.
It probably has the highest profile as an idea that it's ever had.
We're seeing the Trumpers persuade against it.
We're seeing the conservatives persuade against it.
And on one hand, you've got Venezuela being the cautionary tale, but at the same time, socialism is growing in popularity.
I heard that only 18% of the public thinks socialism is a good idea, but I don't know if that means they don't like universal health care, because socialism is a bigger concept than just what you do with health care.
So I'm going to say this is sort of a tie right now.
So both sides are persuading against each other.
It looks like it's sort of even right now.
It looks like each side is persuading its own base.
The Cohen situation.
Now it seems to me, and I may be in my bubble a little bit, but it seems to me that the Cohen situation deflated the collusion bubble, or should have.
Or should have. I'm not sure that it did as much as we thought it did.
Because the collusion people are pivoting.
And they're seamlessly pivoting from collusion.
Who ever said collusion?
We were talking about obstruction of justice all the time.
Obstruction of justice?
Who was ever talking about that?
What we really meant is the presidents of financial dealings need to be investigated.
And it feels to me that against all odds, the collusion pivot is being successful on their own team.
In other words, they're speaking only to other Democrats, but they seem to have changed the topic without changing the alarm or the complaints.
So the feelings stayed the same about the president, and all they did is change the topic.
And they're sort of trying to find a topic that gets a little more traction now.
So I think the collusion pivot...
Weirdly is working.
It's not a home run, but the Dems are actually kind of pulling it off in terms of persuading themselves.
They're not persuading anybody else, but they're persuading themselves that they were not crazy traders for the last two years.
Now, in my opinion, if this were a debate and there was a judge and there were people looking at the facts, they would have to say, oh my god, this collusion thing was the biggest disaster ever because they didn't make their case and they spent two years of the country's time and money to come up with nothing and now it's obvious that it was never real in the first place.
But their side is so deeply hypnotized for whatever is bad for Trump is good for the world that they don't really even care what the reason is.
So I would say the Democrats are somewhat reason-independent.
It literally would not matter what facts emerged, what is proven, what is not proven.
At this point, none of that matters.
All that matters is that they have a feeling, and they're going to maintain that feeling even as the facts change.
So the Cohen thing I thought would be persuasive, but it wasn't.
So I'm just going to say it was sort of not applicable.
Let's talk about the fine people hoax.
I have reframed my own persuasion.
So I have been saying, and this was a huge mistake on my part, and I hope you can see how big of a mistake this was when I explain it.
But I've been talking about what I was calling the Charlottesville hoax.
And what I was referring to is the fine people quote, which the media illegitimately reports as the president was referring to the racists as fine people when in fact he was talking about the debate about the statues and that there are good people on both sides of the statue question.
So the persuasion game was that the anti-Trumpers have turned a fake news bit, a hoax, into a generally accepted truth, meaning that the public at large actually believes that the President of the United States called the marching anti-Semites, the racists, the neo-Nazis, fine people in public.
They actually believe That literally happened in the real world.
It's mind-blowing that anybody believes that.
But here's what I've done.
When you say it's the Charlottesville hoax, your opponents will say, are you saying that nobody died in Charlottesville?
Are you telling me that there were no Nazis in Charlottesville?
And, of course, that takes them down the wrong road.
So, calling it the Charlottesville hoax is, in my case, a complete failure of persuasion.
And I should have seen that.
So, I'm confessing here that was a complete failure.
I should have said, it's the fine people hoax.
Because when you say it's the fine people hoax, you're narrowing Charlottesville to this one question, which is the only question that mattered, right?
So going forward, I'm going to call it the fine people hoax.
You can see that immediately you recognize it as soon as I say it, right?
Until I explain that, That wasn't obvious, was it?
Because it wasn't obvious to me until I got pretty far along the wrong path.
So I'm going to call it to find people hoax from now on.
But I'm going to give the purveyors of this my highest grade.
A+++. I have perhaps never seen persuasion this good.
Again, it has nothing to do with what is a fact and what is not a fact.
It has nothing to do with what is moral and what is not moral.
Just talking about persuasion, you're all free to make your own moral and ethical judgments about all this stuff, and I trust you to do it right.
I'm reading your comments and trying to think at the same time, and I think that I will ignore them for now, but I'll get back to some of those ideas.
Um, So the fine people hoax has become so sticky that CNN and the other news outlets report it as fact.
It's reported as a fact.
That's amazing to me.
It's just amazing because it's so objectively, easily proven to not be true.
All you have to do is look what he said, look at the context, and it's obvious.
But the persuasion is so strong that people can't see the obvious.
Let's talk about the wall.
When the president was saying, build the wall, build the wall, during the campaign, was that a successful persuasion?
The answer is yes.
During the campaign, it was very, very successful.
But now we're in the governing phase.
In the governing phase, the anti-Trumpers have managed Successfully to turn a wall into a racist image.
So the president, I would say, gets a, let's see, Trump.
I'll give him a grade of F. For continuing to use the wall persuasion after election when the other side was successfully converting it into a sign of racism.
Whereas the opponents, let's say the Dems, have demonized the wall to the point where even mentioning it feels like something I wouldn't want to do in public.
Like, actually, literally.
I would not mention wall.
Even the word, I'm afraid to say it in public.
That's how well they've persuaded against it.
So I'd say I give the Dems A+. For those of you who are my critics, who often say, why is it that you say everything Trump does is genius and everything the other people do is wrong?
Well, here's an example. I would say that Trump's persuasion on the border stuff, I would say, is an F. I would say that he's completely blown that persuasion as president.
Now, as a candidate, A +, it was a totally winning theme.
Now, remember, if you're joining me late, We're not talking about any facts.
We're not talking about ethics.
We're not talking about morality.
We're just saying how effective was each side in terms of their persuasion.
Let's talk about the crime as one of the elements of border persuasion.
Now, when the president says there's too much crime coming from the South, that's his persuasion, that we need a border security or a wall because there's so much crime coming.
His grade on that is an F. It may have been, and I'm not even sure it was then, but during the election cycle, it probably made sense to ramp up the fear and get the base all consolidated and stuff.
But as a sitting president, talking consistently about the crime coming from the South is too easy for the other side to paint as racist, and they did.
So the other side, using the crime angle, which is, hey, you guys keep saying there's all this crime coming, but immigrants have lower than average crime, which, by the way, is probably not true.
Because if you only looked at the people who are coming across the border illegally, And you're not counting all the people who came in, let's say, on airplanes from other countries.
If you don't count that group that is low crime, and you only count the people coming across the southern border, and you take into account that most of their crimes are against their own group, in other words, there's rape, a lot of rape within, a lot of violence within the group, that doesn't get reported, frankly.
It's probably not true what the Democrats say in terms of, hey, these people coming across the border are a low-crime group.
Factually, probably not true.
Probably not true.
But, in terms of persuasion, totally nailed it.
I'll give the Dems...
I'll give them an A. And again, we're not talking about what's true or what's factual.
We're not talking about what's ethical or what's not.
We're only talking about who persuaded.
Because we would already have border security if the president had been successful with his persuasion.
But by talking about crime and focusing on that, instead of, let's say, humanitarian issues.
If the president had focused from the beginning on humanitarian issues, maybe more on resources, there are probably a number of different ways he could have gone.
But the crime persuasion has so far just been a failure because the other side just turns it into, you must be a racist.
So I give the Dems an A on that.
The Green New Deal.
The Green New Deal, I'll give the Democrats an A for having a bold, I'd say bold to the point of being impossible, vision, making it the national conversation.
So this is sort of AOC's thing, I guess you could say.
And I'll give this an A. Now again, it doesn't mean it's possible.
It doesn't mean it's a good idea.
It doesn't mean any of their facts are right.
But we're all talking about it.
So the conversation has completely changed from what we were talking about to this.
So I'd give it an A. The North Korea situation.
The thing that everybody seems to miss with North Korea is if you look at the North Korea situation a year and a half ago or whatever it was, we had a big problem that we had a mortal enemy that was aiming nukes at us.
So we had a really bad relationship with North Korea, and that was so bad that they were building nuclear weapons and aiming them at us and threatening them with us.
That's as bad as things can get, right?
That's the ultimate bad situation.
The president, well, most presidents and most so-called experts would have said, okay, the problem is these nuclear weapons.
If we can just do something about these nuclear weapons, then we're in good shape.
What the President did, President Trump, that seems obvious now, but somehow was invisible to most of the world, is that the problem was not the nukes.
Are you ahead of me already?
The problem was not the nuclear weapons.
The problem was the relationship.
The problem is that the United States and North Korea's government We're such enemies that both were building tools to take care of that problem.
The nukes were part of the tools.
The president saw past the nukes to the root problem.
The root problem was the relationship.
So the president just went right at the root problem.
Oh, this is a relationship problem.
If you solve this, the other thing becomes irrelevant immediately.
And at least a small enough problem that you can chew through it over time.
But you don't need to hurry. Because you've solved the problem.
The problem was the relationship.
So he fixed it. So I would say the President gets an A-plus.
Unambiguous. Unambiguous A-plus for the President, even though they still have nukes, etc.
Because the problem It's kind of solved.
Now we're just working out the details.
And if it takes 100 years, who cares?
Doesn't matter to me.
Doesn't matter to you. Alright.
So, here's my scorecard.
Is there anything else you'd like to get a score on?
Is there any other stuff you'd like to see?
Somebody says, explain how a stupid idea like the Green New Deal is a persuasive idea.
Well, you may have joined us late, because that was the first part of the Periscope.
If you were talking about facts and logic, and if you were in a debate in which you were debating the Green New Deal versus not the Green New Deal, and you had a judge for your debate, the Green New Deal would lose every time.
So if you're in a debate mindset, the Green New Deal, terrible idea.
Just ridiculously bad idea.
If you're in a persuasion mindset, where you're trying to move people sort of directionally toward greener stuff and directionally towards universal basic income and whatever else is in there, then it creates a conversation that we're all focused on.
So the fact that you asked me why the Green New Deal is a good deal...
Proves my point. We're talking about it.
So that's the persuasion.
That part is unambiguously true that we're talking about it.
We're not talking about somebody else's idea.
We're not. Warm beer.
The warm beer thing...
I'm going to offend all of you by saying it doesn't matter.
The warm beer thing...
I could give it a grade...
But honestly, it doesn't matter.
We tend to make a big deal about individual deaths because we're anecdotal creatures, because we have empathy, because when you hear the details of somebody being tortured and brutally murdered, you really do care.
And if it's, you know, an enemy of your country and it happens to, you know, one of your country people, it's just emotionally it's terribly, terribly important to you.
But geopolitically, I'm afraid, with all due respect to Otto Wormbeer and his family, with all due respect, they don't matter.
They don't matter.
To peace with North Korea.
And we shouldn't treat it that way.
So I'm going to treat that as an issue to ignore.
Cheshogi. I think the Cheshogi situation is not so much a persuasion case.
The what can happen on that is fairly constrained.
Let's block a troll.
I've had a lot fewer trolls lately.
Thoughts on the Michael Jackson allegations resurgence?
So there's an HBO special on Michael Jackson, which I've read about but I've not watched.
I'm actually planning to watch it.
I have an appointment to watch it.
My understanding is that the special makes such a strong case that Michael Jackson was a lifelong pedophile that it would be hard to debate after you watch it.
I'll give you one alleged fact from the special.
Now, I've only read about it.
I haven't watched it. But the alleged fact Is that the staff at, what's the name of his ranch there?
Neverland? Apparently the staff will claim that Michael Jackson never spent the night with a woman, including any of his wives.
He never spent one night with a woman in his bedroom.
But apparently there's plenty of evidence that he often spent the night with young boys, including, and this is the weird part, in the homes of their parents.
Michael Jackson would go to the home of the kids and sleep in the kids' beds overnight routinely while the parents were downstairs watching TV or whatever they were doing.
So I am going to watch that video.
And you should too.
How persuasive is Jussie Smollett?
Well, I think the Jussie situation is persuasive in the sense that people who may have doubted that fake news exists changed.
So I think the Jussie Smollett situation sort of reinforced for all of us How amazingly manufactured the news could be.
Very, very manufactured.
Have you seen Abducted in Plain Sight documentary?
I've not. So the Covington thing, working with the Smollett situation, has created, I would hope, A great deal of doubt in people's minds about the quality of the news.
Because now you've seen Covington, you've seen Smollett, you saw Cohen blow apart a lot of fake news.
Talk about Joe Rogan and Alex Jones.
So I haven't seen the whole show.
I only saw a clip.
I saw a clip of Joe Rogan talking to Alex Jones in which Alex Jones was talking about the aliens who have come to Earth and they're mating with the people and creating half aliens, half people, something like that.
And it's five hours long.
People are saying it's amazing.
I guess I have to watch the whole thing.
I'm going to reserve my comment until I've watched the whole thing.
The ghost of John McCain.
That topic is...
Let me tell you, I'm so tired of arguing about who has or who has not offended John McCain.
I could not care less about John McCain.
I don't have a good feeling about him.
I think he was a patriot and an asshole.
That's my point of view.
I think you can be both.
I think you can be a hero and a patriot and a complete asshole at the same time.
There's nothing that would prevent all of those things from happening.
So when I see stuff about John McCain, I just don't care.
That's it. Michael Jackson is dead, so why care about it?
I care about Michael Jackson in the fake news context.
In the sense of understanding how the world works and how easily you could be misled or fooled or persuaded about something so hideous and so long-lasting.
I mean, it really tells you something about how people think.
2020 winner, if it were held today.
If we had the election today, I usually try to avoid such hypotheticals.
If we had the election today, maybe Bernie?
Bernie might win.
Here we're assuming that he's also the nominee.
By 2020?
We'll see. The Michael Jackson documentary, I believe, is on HBO. Is Trump losing the persuasion game?
Well, remember, Trump is persuading against the entirety of the news industry.
It's sort of like one person and I guess his followers, you'd say, as people who boost his signal.
But he's got the single highest level of challenge anybody's ever had to persuade against, which is the entire news democratic organization.
So I would say that the President is still doing a great job overall.
I think he's totally failed on the border stuff, persuasion-wise.
But, you know, that could still work out well.
We'll see. Do you predict Trump will win in 2020?
I have not made a prediction on that, strangely enough.
But I will right now.
Or should I? I was kind of waiting until they have a candidate.
Because, you know, at the moment, none of the Democrats that we're talking about look competitive with Trump, as far as I can tell.
But so much is going to change between now and 2020 and the vote.
It would be sort of a Hard to make that prediction.
But if nothing changes, if the slate of candidates is the ones we see, what you should expect is that they'll all look stronger than they are.
So we're in a phase where all the Democrats individually look stronger than they will when there's one left.
Because whoever is the one who starts to emerge as the Democrat they have to beat is going to start taking incoming from their own side in a fairly brutal fashion.
So remember, the Democrats are going to beat themselves up.
And Trump is going to be beating them up at the same time.
So I think you're going to see the Democrats' point of view completely demolished by Election Day.
Not completely demolished, that's an exaggeration.
But you're going to see so much attack on it.
However competitive you think Democrats are now, it will be less by Election Day.
So you should take whatever advantage they have and shrink it by 25% to predict that in the future.
Now, there are some interesting, let's say, black swan surprises that we could have.
So let me give you some conditional Conditional predictions.
If Trump decides to run against the Green New Deal and against climate change by pushing Generation 4 nuclear, And makes his case.
Let's say he makes the case that they're safe and it's the only solution to everything from security to the economy to pollution to climate change if climate change is the problem that the scientists are telling us.
If Trump says let's do the most unifying thing we could possibly do Which is to use our massive technological power to find a solution that everybody agrees with.
And he could sell Generation 4 nuclear, because these are the safe designs that don't have a risk of meltdown.
They actually eat nuclear waste for fuel.
And apparently you could make them so small that you could literally build them in a factory, put them on a truck, and deliver them where they need to be.
So if the president were to take that position, there isn't a chance that the Democrats could win.
So let me say that again.
If nothing else changed, let's say all the other issues remain roughly the same, and Trump just did one thing.
He just said, look, we've got this big climate change problem, we've got pollution, let's do the one thing that everybody should be able to agree on.
Generation 4 nuclear.
It's now safe. People don't understand that, but I'm going to tell you it's safe.
Look into it yourself.
Run some stories.
Hey, press. Press, do your thing.
Fact check me on this. You can see that Generation 4 is the way to go.
You can ask Bill Gates.
Bill Gates will tell you it's the way to go, etc.
Under those conditions, the president would have no chance of losing.
In my opinion. Now, I think the president needs to make a stronger case on health care and needs to show more progress on that.
But I think you're going to see, you know, remember it's 18 months or whatever it is, so you're going to see him put some things out there on health care and maybe even have some successes.
By then, they may have actually lowered the cost of pharmaceuticals.
It's possible. By then, they may have designed some kind of a low-end health care insurance that's just for the critical part of health care.
They may have done some trials.
They might have some special medical startup zones.
There could be a lot that happens, but we'll see.
At the moment, the president is weak on health care, and those are his biggest problems.
I did see that Kamala came out in favor of legalizing sex work, legalizing cannabis, and what was the other thing?
Legalizing something else.
And I have to say, not bad.
Not bad.
I don't hate those things.
I had another topic.
That I was going to talk about.
What is the other thing that's happening right now?
Dammit, I've lost it.
Healthcare isn't a right.
That is correct. Healthcare is not a right.
But, probably should be.
Remember, rights are whatever we decide they are.
So if we all change the law and say health care is now guaranteed, well then it's a right.
Rights are not something you're born with.
There are things which the law can constrain and the law can grant.
Unfortunately. So Stormy Daniel, somebody mentioned Stormy in the comments.
And I was thinking about how Stormy Daniels lost her whatever lawsuit she had and she was ordered to pay 200 and some thousand dollars back to Trump.
So Stormy's actually ordered by the court to reimburse Trump for probably I guess the legal costs or something.
And I thought to myself, is Trump the first person in the history of the world to get a refund from a porn star?
Has anybody ever done that before?
Can you think of anybody else who ever got a refund from a porn star?
Now that's some good negotiating right there.
Now, of course, I'm exaggerating and it's just a joke, but it's a funny one.
It's a funny one. Some rights are God-given, such as self-defense.
No, that is not true.
That's just what you want to be true.
The word rights, the way our government is organized, are a government invention.
All right.
Reparations.
So, did Kamala say yes on reparations?
Yes.
We'll see about that.
I don't have much to say about reparations at the moment.
Let me tell you one interesting factoid.
Let's do a quick poll, and while I see your answers go by, I'm going to talk about my point.
So, first of all, all of you answer this question.
How many of you are aware that Generation 4 nuclear is safe?
And already designed.
In other words, there's not a lot of engineering left to do.
We've got the basic idea.
How many of you were aware of that?
So just say yes or no in the comments, and we'll see.
The reason I bring it up is that I had a conversation yesterday with a prominent Democrat.
Now when I say prominent Democrat, I mean it's somebody you know, right?
So somebody Who's very well known in the Democrat world.
I just happened to have a conversation with this person.
And I asked the following question.
I said, as far as you know, are Democrats aware of Generation 4 nuclear and that the safety problems have already been solved and that it actually eats nuclear waste for fuel?
And that we can build them small and economically.
Are you even aware of it?
And the Democrat I was talking to said, not aware.
Not aware. Now, I would say that most of the people on the right, even if they're pro-nuclear, are probably not as informed as they need to be.
So I'd say the right is largely pro-nuclear, but Even pro-nuclear for the old designs, which I think is less warranted.
The old designs do have some Fukushima problems.
They can melt down.
You don't want that stuff near your home, etc.
But how interesting is it that the Green New Deal and climate change are considered emergencies at the same time that the folks on the left, the Democrats, are not aware That the technology to address it aggressively already exists.
It already exists.
So if you think about that, think about the fact that their signature issue on the left is climate change, and they don't know that the solution already exists.
It's mind-boggling.
Now, let's put that into the conversation and see if maybe the country can find something to come together on Because, yeah, some people are saying nuclear is a bad word.
We should call it a molten salt reactor.
The only reason I resist that, because I know what you're talking about.
Maybe it needs to be called something different from nuclear power.
But the trouble is, it is nuclear power.
And I resist persuasion and framing that's so blatantly manipulative and to the point of dishonest, really.
It is nuclear. We just have to deal with the fact that they figured out how to de-risk it.
Let's talk about, here's the topic I was trying to remember before.
So Democrats are threatening that if the President's emergency declaration for border funding makes it through the system, all the way through the Supreme Court I guess, and let's say he vetoes the overturning of it, that they might use the same power to ban guns To declare an emergency for climate or maybe for health care.
And when you first hear that, you say, ooh, that's pretty bad.
Because then you'd be giving the emergency powers to people who might not agree with the things you agree with.
But I'm not so sure that's as bad as you think it is.
Because just think this through.
Let's say you get a Democratic president someday and they declare a climate emergency.
Let's say they do.
What would that necessarily cause to happen?
Almost certainly it would cause Generation 4 nuclear to rise to the top because when it's an emergency you're willing to take bigger risks.
You're willing to sort of do more than you might have done with business as usual.
So I suspect that if the Dems created an emergency, that the Republicans would make sure that nobody heard anything except Generation 4 nuclear every time they turned on the television.
And you would end up with what we should be doing now.
Think about that.
If the Democrats got in power, declared an emergency for climate change, the end result almost certainly would be what we should be doing right now anyway, which is Generation 4 nuclear, because there is no other idea.
You could have lots of ideas, but they wouldn't work.
So there's only one path.
Let's say they decided to do an emergency about guns.
That wouldn't happen. Are you really worried that the Democrats would declare a gun emergency and try to confiscate your guns?
Well, they might declare an emergency on some small rule change.
But there isn't the slightest chance that Democrats are going to declare a gun emergency and try to round them up.
I mean, they might try, but it would literally be civil war.
So I don't think you have to worry about An executive order that literally would obviously create a civil war.
I mean there's no question it would do anything else.
So I'm not too worried about it.
Now healthcare. Suppose they said it's an emergency to create healthcare.
Well here again, who has a suggestion on how to make it work?
If taxing people physically doesn't work, meaning the math doesn't work, it can be an emergency.
But if you don't have a solution, what's the difference?
The main thing that you need for an emergency is that you have to understand that there's some solution.
The border emergency has also a very clear, unambiguous path forward, which is, oh, it's an emergency.
We'll put more border security there.
Emergency solution.
If you know the emergency and you know the solution, declaring an emergency to pair the solution with the emergency, Makes sense.
But let's say you say healthcare is an emergency.
What's the solution? Taxing the country into ruin?
There is no solution.
So you could declare something an emergency that doesn't have a solution, and it doesn't help you.
At the very least, you have to know the solution, or else you could call it anything you want.
It's an emergency. It's not an emergency.
It doesn't change what you do.
Because you don't have a solution.
And then the gun thing is you can't really compare gun rights to any other right.
It's always a mistake.
As soon as you say, well, if you're doing that with this topic, what about guns?
Guns are so special, good and bad, that there's just no analogy that tells you anything about guns.
Guns are in the Constitution.
They're just part of people's identity to a great degree.
Alright. Somebody says, doesn't change the fact that Trump is a narcissist.
Well, we have a time traveler.
Would everybody say hi to the time traveler who just joined us?
There's somebody who traveled from 2016 to be with us here in 2019 who believes that the big issue is that Trump is a narcissist.
Haven't we sort of moved on from that?
But we welcome you from the past.
Have you heard of collusion?
Are there any time travelers who want to travel back to 2018 and talk about collusion like it's real?
Somebody says, I said hi last year.
Good one. Alright, did you see the billboard that pranksters put up near CNN's Hollywood office?
Let's see. I have to show it to you.
If you haven't seen it, I think most of you probably have seen it by now.
But some pranksters put up a very funny billboard.
That I will show you a picture of in case you haven't seen it.
What is more boring than watching one of these when somebody is looking for something?
Nothing. Alright, where is it?
There it is. Now you won't be able to see it well, but I'll describe it.
It says CNN, and in big words it says, keep Korea divided.
It's got a picture of Jeff Zucker, the head of CNN. And then there's an asterisk on keep Korea divided, and it goes to this little comment in the corner.
It says, because orange man bad.
So the message here is that CNN would prefer North Korea be in a continuous state of war because it's good for business and, by the way, orange man bad.
So it's kind of one of, you know, it's probably one of the more fun pranks I've seen.
Alright. Was down in seven hours?
that's too bad um is there a non-financial reason for fake news um Yeah, I mean, there's a political reason.
Alright, do we have anything else to talk about?
I think we might be done for today.
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