All Episodes
Previous Next
July 16, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
53:11
Episode 599 Scott Adams: Guest Steve Hsu of Genomic Prediction, Predicting Disease
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody, it's time for another exciting episode of Coffee with Scott Adams.
Best part of the day is the part that gets your dopamine pumping, coursing through your veins, making you feel alive.
Alive, I say. It's going to get better every time.
And today, all you need...
To enjoy this perfect moment, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass.
It could be a steiner, a chalice, or a tankard.
Might be a thermos, a flask, a canteen.
Might be a vessel of any kind, but you want to fill it with your favorite liquid.
And what you want to do then is join me for this simultaneous sip and unparalleled pleasure.
Oh, I feel sorry for anybody who didn't experience that.
So, we've got an exciting show.
I've got a special guest who's going to be probably more interesting than just about anything you've heard this week.
Give you a little break from the news.
If I could summarize all of the news, allow me to summarize every piece of news on every website everywhere.
So-and-so is a racist.
That's it. Pretty much, that's the whole story.
So-and-so is a racist.
So that's all the news.
In a moment, I will be inviting my special guest.
And I say that he's already here.
So let me bring him on.
Steve Hsu will give you a proper introduction in a moment, as soon as you're here.
Steve, can you hear me?
Whoops, hold on.
Let's try that again.
Steve, can you hear me? Yes, Scott, can you hear me?
I can hear you, yes.
So, for the audience, this is Steve Hsu, co-founder of, and Steve, correct me if I get any of this wrong, co-founder of Genomic Prediction, is that correct?
That is correct. You have an impressive resume, which I won't give all the details, but you've been You're Vice President for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics, Michigan State University, educated at Caltech in Berkeley.
You were a Harvard Junior Fellow, held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon.
You co-founded SafeWeb that you sold for a whole bunch of money, and you're a scientific advisor at BGI. And basically all that is saying Steve is a very smart guy.
And the topic today, which is your...
Your startup is involved with.
That's the correct name, right?
Genomic prediction is the whole name?
That is the whole name.
Okay. So you're using AI and genomics to predict disease.
Tell us about that.
Well, this is a kind of typical AI story that your listeners may already be familiar with.
As we develop better algorithms, and really importantly, as we get access to sufficiently large data sets, we are suddenly able to build predictors for all kinds of complex genetic traits.
And so what's happened in the last year or two is that new predictors for about 15 or 20 common disease conditions have appeared in the scientific literature process.
including from my research group.
And what that means is that from an inexpensive genotype, the same kind of genotype that you would get from 23andMe or Ancestry.com, we can predict or we can find individuals that are outliers.
So, wait, predicting this into ordinary people language, you're saying that the test itself is inexpensive and easy?
Yeah, the readout of your genotype, so the measurement of what exactly you have as DNA in specific locations on your genome is now inexpensive.
In fact, the cost to 23andMe or to an actual lab to do it is below $50 now.
Wow. And how complete is that in terms of what we can do and what we do do for under $50?
Do you map the entire genome or just the good parts?
So this is an interesting thing.
So there are about 3 billion locations in your genome.
And we only differ, you and I, for example, just to take two random people, we only differ at about 1 in 1,000 places.
So in most places, we're actually very similar to each other or identical to each other on our genome.
So 1 out of 1,000 out of 3 billion positions is a few million differences, typically, between two people.
And The inexpensive technology called a gene array measures your genetic code at about a million positions.
So the million places where two people are most likely to differ from each other.
That's where there's the, as genomicists would say, the most variation in those locations.
So it won't pick up every single thing that might make a difference, but statistically it gets all the ones that matter.
Basically. So places where there's very rare variation, like almost everybody is the same at this location, but one in 10,000 people has a mutation there, the array won't pick that up.
But the places where like 10% of the people are A and 90% of the people are B, or even 98% of the people are A and 2% of the people are B, it picks up that kind of variation.
Alright, now what are the practical things you can do?
Give us some nuts and bolts.
You've got this technology.
Who's using it and for what?
So the practical thing that's become possible just in the last year or so is you genotype a population of people and you say, hey, I can identify the outliers.
Let's say breast cancer risk.
I can find the 1% of women that have the highest breast cancer risk based on their genotype and I can identify them inexpensively and I could for example alter the way that they're screened for breast cancer.
I could for example screen them more frequently or screen them earlier in life than would be the case for a typical person.
Has there not been screening for breast cancer risk for a while?
Or was that just a one-off test, whereas you can test for an array of things all at the same time?
So, yes, we can now test for a bunch of things all at the same time using the same sort of $50 genotype.
But the reason I chose the example of breast cancer is that there are very rare breast cancer variants called BRCA or BRCA variants that only about 1 in 1,000 people have.
And in that case, we've been aware of those dangerous mutations for a long time, and we have a well-established way to treat women who have that variant.
But what I'm saying now is that there are 10 times as many people who, because of risks that are spread out more evenly over their genome, but which we can now detect, That larger group of women can be identified using inexpensive genotyping now.
So there's the simple things you can look for that we always used to know, but then there's the spread out, more complicated situation which you can now detect with the AI. That's exactly right.
So who's using it?
Well, let me give you...
What would happen if you could detect it?
Does that tell you if you have, let's say, breast cancer risk?
Is that telling you to go get a double mastectomy if you've got the highest of the high risk?
What's it telling you to do in a practical sense?
I am not a medical doctor, so this is not medical advice.
But the American Cancer Society recommends, in the case of the BRCA variants, That if you have one of the variants, you may, for example, start getting mammograms or screening earlier and more frequently than a typical woman.
And I imagine the same guidelines will eventually be in place for women that have what we call hypolygenic risk, so risk that is arising from many different individual genetic variants that we measure through the gene array.
But probably the medical treatment for those people will be similar to what is currently done for people that have And would the main benefit of this be, given that the world has limited resources for essentially everything, would that mean that we would put our testing and mostly our screening resources toward these people who have the biggest risk?
So would that make a big difference in how many people are picked up early?
Yes, so I think health systems are going to eventually, it may happen sooner in some systems, which are, for example, single-payer systems, like the UK or Taiwan or something like this.
They may screen the whole population, and then they may be able to tell based on the genotype.
Who should be monitored more closely for diabetes or heart disease or breast cancer risk?
And then who, for example, at the other end of the spectrum, we can identify people that are abnormally low risk, usually low risk.
Those people maybe have, you know, one-tenth or one-twentieth the chance of getting a particular common disease as a typical person.
And so, go ahead.
And what happens, so trying to think through, I know you've had to wrestle with all of the Social and ethical and moral dilemmas that just naturally fall out of this technology.
What would happen to healthcare insurance if we could tell who's going to be expensive in the first place before anybody's even sick?
You can kind of tell who's going to be expensive, right?
Yes. In a system like ours, this is going to cause a huge problem because you can have what the economists call asymmetric information.
So someone like you might buy your genotype from a company and find out what your risks are, and then you might then turn around and purchase an insurance policy without letting the insurer know that you're high risk or maybe you're definitely going to get Alzheimer's later in life or something.
And you might, that one policy, if you actually calculate the expected value of it, might cost the insurance company a million dollars because it's mispriced given your risk.
Insurers are eventually going to be driven either to ask for your DNA before the price of the policy for you, or we may be forced in the U.S. to go to a kind of single-payer system where all risks are pooled.
So interestingly, this technology might guarantee that we have a single-payer insurance situation because it seems to me that it would be fair to charge somebody more if they had not tested for their genome risk and just make that as the only divider.
If you've tested, we don't care what the result is, you're okay, you get the low price or Or if it's a single payer, I guess there's no price at all because the government's paying it.
But probably at some point I think we'll see a distinction between people who have submitted to the test and people who haven't because the people who have at least have given more visibility and more chance of chasing down a disease and preventing it.
So if I'm an insurance company, all things being equal, I want the people who have tested, right?
Your description is accurate.
However, the issue is that we'll never know who has already secretly tested themselves using, say, some commercial genomics company and is therefore aware of some hidden risk about themselves that they're not disclosing and then is trying to purchase a low-cost policy.
So it will become very tricky to deal with people who are not submitting a DNA sample when they ask for a price.
Well, you're blowing my mind a little bit here because...
I don't see any way around the government being the only healthcare insurer once this information is widely available and there's a 100% chance that this will be more widely available because it's already here and the price is affordable.
Am I characterizing that correctly?
Yes, I agree with you 100%.
And what will happen is that health systems will want to screen everyone at a population level anyway because doctors actually, most of them, do want to give the best possible care.
So if you're a doctor and there's a very useful test available, you're going to want it for any patient that comes in for physical, right?
So eventually it will be at scale.
This is so interesting because it makes every conversation about health care...
A sort of a moot point because we know where it has to go.
There isn't really another way to do it.
If you look in the scientific literature at the number of papers published on polygenic – these are called – the technical term is polygenic risk score or polygenic predictor.
The number of papers has skyrocketed just in the last year or two.
And so in the small scientific community of computational genomicists, it's well known what's happening.
However, policymakers, most medical doctors, most people out in the world are not aware that we've passed through this – Amazing transition in our ability to predict risk using genes.
Now, I'm trying to get a size on this.
So let's say we did everybody's genome, just hypothetically.
We had every adult's genome.
So we could tell who exactly are the big risks for cancer.
If we had all of that information and then people acted upon it, meaning they got more frequent screening, they were more aggressive in looking for it, maybe some lifestyle changes as well, If cancer at the moment is a 10 out of 10, you know, I realize cancer treatments have improved a great deal, but let's just say its current state is a 10 out of 10 bad.
Let's say we started genome testing everybody universally tomorrow.
From a 10 out of 10, where would that get us in terms of curing, treating, remediating cancer?
Well, this specific set of discoveries isn't necessarily telling us anything about how to cure cancer, but it will improve our ability to detect it early and to focus the detection resource.
Well, I'm conflating things, not talking in a medical sense, but the ones that can be detected early are effectively treatable in a way that late detection is not.
So if you can imagine a 10 out of 10 where you start, can you bring that down to an 8, or are you talking about bringing it down to a A three in terms of how big a deal cancer is to an adult.
You know, I'm not a medical doctor or even a medical policy researcher.
All I will say is that for a certain segment of the population, so the people who are, say, top 1% risk for a particular condition, the chances that their cancer is detected early will increase dramatically based on this genetics.
Yeah, so there's no way to know until it plays out.
Would you also be able to detect people who have unique immunity to certain things in a way that you could, let's say, capitalize on that and turn it into a cure?
Is that a thing? Yes.
So, for example, one of the better predictors that currently exists, although, again, this is only in the scientific research literature.
None of this has been deployed at scale anywhere.
is for heart disease. So we're actually able to detect people who are almost certainly going to have heart disease and have high risk of a heart attack later in life, and people who are almost certainly not going to have heart disease.
And there are some protective mutations associated with, for example, being able to eat whatever you want and never having any plaque in your heart.
And some researchers are actually looking at the ability to genetically engineer people so that I could modify you so that you And what is the modification process?
I realize this is a little bit science fiction-y, but it's not really that science fiction-y because we're just about there.
Is that the CRISPR technology?
Is that stem cells?
What are the words that describe what you would do if you wanted to modify an adult?
So we're talking about using CRISPR technology and actually injecting it to treat the cells in the appropriate part of your body that are involved with, for example, the plaque buildup or metabolizing cholesterol, things like this.
This is still speculative because currently using CRISPR on an adult has only been looked at in a very narrow set of cases because you have to inject the CRISPR vector and affect a very large number, billions at least, of cells.
The other alternative is to genetically engineer someone when they're still an embryo and then you're only trying to alter a few cells.
And that obviously has its own other controversies.
Yeah. And we probably don't want to talk about that today.
That's just going to take us down a different path.
So what are the other benefits for adults to have this information?
What else could you know about yourself besides disease and That would be functional and useful for your life.
That would make your life better.
The other aspect, this is maybe not necessarily...
Well, it will make all our lives better in a certain way, but one thing that all of this technology is going to change is law enforcement.
So it's very difficult for a criminal not to leave some DNA at the scene of the crime.
Like, you're shedding DNA all the time, like individual cells off your skin or your hair, etc.
I'm not... I'm not shedding any DNA, but that's because I have no hair.
Okay, but you have skin.
I don't know. From a tiny amount of DNA, you know, DNA, and if you know, we can now amplify that DNA and we can get a pretty decent age type of individual from a crime scene.
And now it's very easy.
You can figure out the height of the person, about 1 to 1 inch from their DNA. You can figure out whether they're all, whether they're all eyes, and they're all the same.
Steve, I'm having some sound issues.
I can't tell if the audience is having it too.
Yeah, it's getting a little garbled.
Are you in a bad cell phone place?
Do you know? I think I lost Steve.
Let's see if Steve comes back on.
Connection dropped. Wait a second, and...
Oh, there he's back. Let's try this again.
Yes, you're back, and you're clear again.
We missed the last 15 seconds of what you were just saying.
Oh, so from the genotype that we can easily derive, crime scene DNA, we can...
Predict traits of an individual like what they look like what their ethnic background is, but we can also match them and find relatives so typically in an investigation you'll be able to find a second cousin of Someone right away Please really want to solve a crime if you know a second cousin the person you've now narrowed it down to So so so in other words if you find some DNA in Denver of a crime scene and You can run it against known public records or even private records,
I suppose, of known DNA. And if you find a second cousin, you can go to the second cousin and say, hey, do you know anybody in your family who's from Denver?
And if they say yes, you've got a good chance of finding the guy.
Is that about it? That's about it.
And we currently have hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits in this country, which if the authorities were serious about solving those crimes, in many cases there's going to be DNA from the rapist in the rape kit.
And they could narrow it down to 100 people almost immediately.
So it's just a question of how serious they are about catching this person.
Wait, does your company do any of the rape kit testing?
So, I'm a founder of another company called Othram, which is 100% devoted to law enforcement and military applications of DNA forensics.
And that company does work with law enforcement to catch criminals.
How many untested rape kits are there?
It's hundreds of thousands.
Oh, my God.
Are you telling me that if Trump could somehow get all of these rape...
probably not federal.
But if they were all tested, which is probably just a matter of money, is that the only thing?
So it's only a matter of money.
You could probably solve or at least narrow down more than 100,000 rape cases.
Yes.
There was a great paper written by a Stanford economist where he estimated the ROI from processing all this backlog of rape kits.
And it costs about $1,000 to run the kit.
Then, of course, you have to track down the killer, so there's still some gumshoe detective work involved.
But he calculated that when you catch someone, often these people are serial rapists.
So you're often reducing the overall population of rapists that are out roaming around substantially significantly.
And so he calculated an unbelievable ROI. It's one of these, like, society fails an IQ test.
It doesn't do something that's very, obviously, practical and beneficial.
Let's go and test it.
Now, what do you think is preventing it from happening?
Is it knowledge that it's now inexpensive, or is it still budget?
Even though it's inexpensive, they still don't want to spend the money at the local level.
What's the holdup? Well, everything has changed.
So the technologies I'm talking about have only existed for the last year or two.
Oh, wow. Yeah, so it's just catch-up time.
The older system of DNA testing for law enforcement, which you may remember from the OJ trial, it's that old, only captures a limited number of markers from your genome, and therefore it's not very useful for finding relatives or second cousins.
So the old technology, the OJ technology, would match the criminal to the, you know, the crime to the suspect if you had the suspect in hand.
Yes. But if you didn't have the suspect in hand, you're not going to be able to find it from relatives or anything else.
But the new technology does that.
Yeah, Scott, you caught on extremely quickly.
That's exactly the issue.
In the old days, it's like if you got the guy in the cell, you can say, was this the guy who left this DNA? That's about all you could do with it.
Was the Golden State Killer caught with any of this technology?
Somebody's asking that in the comments.
That's probably the best known example of this new use of the technology.
So he was actually caught based on identifying a relative?
Yes. Wow.
That's a serial killer.
That's pretty good stuff.
So who in the world, who would be the most important person in the United States, government-wise or otherwise, who upon hearing this could act upon it in a way that would get these...
It's all three.
So, depending on who has custody of that rape kit, they will determine at what pace these things are tested.
Now, if one person, say Donald Trump, became aware that there was this huge Wow.
And what do you think would be the budget to get rid of that backlog of rape kits?
Well, if you say I have 100,000 kits and it costs $1,000 to process a kit, that's about $100 million.
But if you think about what we spend on prisons and law enforcement, it's not a lot of money.
So it would be $1,000 to test the kit and not $50?
Right. So the extra expense here is that typically you're dealing with a very dirty sample here.
You've got to do all kinds of chemical prep, biochemical prep processes before you can run the...
You may ultimately be running a $50 genotype or $100 process at the end, but you've got to prep it and clean it and do all these other things.
It's typically about $1,000.
Would it make more sense for the federal government to set up a lab where everybody sends it in for testing...
Would it make more sense for every individual state or something to just sort of do it on their own?
There are great advantages to scale, which is why at Othram, which has a 4,000 square foot special lab with air handling and all kinds of clean room characteristics, You know, there are reasons why to have specialists in this kind of DNA processing forensic work all in one place and who can operate at scale.
And so that's what we did when we invested in this company.
Can you spell the name of Othram?
Yes, it's O-T-H-R-A-M. And Othram in The Lord of the Rings was the wall that protected Minas Tirith from the orcs and Sauron.
Well, you have demonstrated your geek credentials very well.
I think my audience will appreciate that.
Yes. The news and you know that President Trump authorized big expenses for AIDS drugs to keep people from spreading it, I guess. And if you spent enough on those AIDS drugs, you could almost eradicate it in the United States just by making a prophylactic that worked.
And the thought that we could take a huge bite out of cancer and other diseases.
What are some of the other diseases that would be caught early that you could treat early?
There are other diseases like type 1 and type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypothyroidism.
All kinds of common diseases generally have some complex genetic architecture and now the AI type work is able to identify people at high risk just from their genotype.
So, if we had $100 million at the federal level in a lab, would Authorum be able to do all the work?
You'd have to gear up tremendously to handle big volume, right?
To handle the national volume, you'd need an even bigger lab.
But, you know, these things, people know how to do these things, right?
I mean, it's all now pretty mature technology that we're talking about, and scaling it It's relatively inexpensive.
So it's something that could get done.
We could be at a point where we're processing everything efficiently within a couple of years if government were serious.
Wow. And have you talked to any billionaires to fund this sort of thing?
Yeah, go ahead.
So Othram is a venture-backed startup, and amongst the investors are some billionaire-type people.
Of course, you know, It is getting a fair amount of traction now with law enforcement.
And as it gets bigger, obviously, we'll probably raise another funding round.
It seems like the kind of...
It's very unique because it's the sort of thing where if you're in the police department and you find out that the city next door is using this and you're not, you kind of have to use it, don't you?
I mean, you can't really hear about it and know that somebody else is using it and not use it.
Your bringing public attention to it will put pressure on law enforcement to actually use the best technology to catch.
The people we're talking about here are killers and rapists.
I mean, if there's anything that every American can agree on is that people who commit crimes like that should be caught, right?
Well, yes. What if individuals who are, let's say, associated with the victim wanted to self-fund the testing?
Would local law enforcement allow that?
Well, we have actually thought about creating a GoFundMe or kind of, you know, Patreon campaign where people can donate money to get rape kits or kits taken from killers processed because oftentimes the issue is money.
Local law enforcement doesn't have the budget to actually do it.
Or maybe they're allocating the budget differently because they themselves don't understand the new technology and don't realize how powerful it is.
Well, this is really amazing.
So, the three big takeaways here that are just sort of blowing my mind, one is that knowing people's genome and their risk is likely to push us toward a single-payer healthcare system no matter what your philosophical or political leadings are.
There's going to end up being only one Feasible way to have it.
That's a mind-blowing thought.
Of course, the future is not predictable in such a straight line, but just the fact that that's out there, and I don't think anybody outside of your industry sees this coming.
It's almost going to guarantee enormous changes in our healthcare situation, but it also might lower the cost of some of these bigger problems by catching them early.
Would it raise or lower the cost of healthcare?
Because on one hand, we would be doing massive screening and then massive prevention, but when you save people, as opposed to waiting too long and then they die tragically, unfortunately, people dying tragically from things they didn't know they had is probably less expensive than treating them, isn't it?
Or do we even know the trade-off there?
At fixed outcome, so say you're not really trying to change the death rate or incidence of these diseases.
At that fixed outcome, you can save a ton of money, right?
So you can catch things earlier and treat them much earlier.
You get better outcomes at lower costs.
So it's net beneficial.
Of course, you can always spend an arbitrary amount on your healthcare system.
That's an overall decision that you want to make, because you could drive down the rate of incidence or the The cure rate, you could increase that by just spending more money.
But basically, if we wanted health care as good as what we currently have now, you can get it more cheaply by catching all these diseases earlier.
Wow. All right. And then it would have a huge impact on crime.
So is there anything else that we should know?
Anything I forgot to ask you?
Well, the other... Mind-blowing aspect of this technology is that for people undergoing in vitro fertilization today, they can screen their embryos using these genetic technologies, and they can make sure that if they have a family history of type 1 diabetes or breast cancer, they can pick the embryo that is a low-risk rather than a high-risk embryo.
They can kind of break that chain of inheritance in their family where the different Genetic variants that are predisposing the people in the family to breast cancer are not passed on to their next generation.
Would it be fair to say that those are also the expensive things?
In the healthcare system?
Yes. So the things you could prevent by choosing the embryo?
Is that what you're testing? The embryo?
So the embryo is external to the human being.
You've got a few embryos in test tubes, essentially, I'm simplifying.
And you could test them and say, oh, of these embryos, this one is unlikely to get these horrible diseases.
And over time, if everybody did that, you would effectively eliminate those diseases, would you not?
Maybe not fully eliminate, but you would drive down the rate of incidence in the overall population.
Which would drive down the cost of healthcare overall.
Which could make a single-payer quite inexpensive, relatively speaking, given that the horrible diseases are also the expensive ones.
Yes. You know, I mentioned the ROI from testing a rape kid and locking up a rapist.
Here, we are talking about a genetic test that, at the embryo level, only costs a few thousand dollars, say, to test ten embryos or five embryos.
The ROI from that to society, if you end up, say, preventing having a kid with type 1 diabetes, The ROI there is phenomenal and it's something governments will eventually figure out, I hope.
So I'm seeing people freaking out in the comments.
They're saying, eugenics, eugenics.
And what is the...
My take on all of this is that it wouldn't matter what you thought of it ethically or morally because it's going to happen.
Would you say that's true?
Yes, because...
Well, let me give your listeners a statistic.
So currently in the world today...
One million embryos are genetically screened each year worldwide.
And currently what they're screening against typically is Down syndrome or well-known single gene variants like this BRCA breast cancer thing, rare variants that the family is known to be carriers for.
But because the genetic technology has improved, everybody can screen and eliminate some amount of risk for themselves.
So it's going to become not 1 million a year, but 10 million a year or more are screened.
And maybe people will even choose to do IVF even if they don't have fertility problems.
So in a sense, people like to use the scariest word for it because it has connotations for every worst thing you can think about.
But in a sense, it would just be doing better what we're already doing, because we're already screening for these few things, but now we can just screen for more things.
Exactly. I mean, so Down syndrome is about a 1% risk, and so people already sort of routinely screen against it, and so now we're just expanding the set of things you could screen against.
So what happens when somebody starts screening for height?
Well, that's the real slippery slope.
So the technology currently exists, although we don't offer it, to rank order your embryos for height because we think that society is not ready for that kind of thing.
But for disease risk, everybody kind of agrees.
Nobody wants to have a child that is going to have a short or unhealthy life.
And so almost everybody agrees it's very analogous to Down syndrome or screening against cystic fibrosis or some rare genetic disease.
Everybody agrees it's reasonably defensible for the parents to just say, well, if I have 10 embryos, don't implant the one that is definitely going to have early risk of breast cancer.
We have nine healthy ones.
Can we just implant one of the others?
Well, it's going to be a whole lot of questions to be answered in the future.
And thank you so much, Steve Shue.
Could you tell us how most easily people can connect To your company or your Twitter feed or website, where would they find more about what you're doing?
There are two companies here.
One is Othram, so if you Google O-T-H-R-A-M, you'll find it.
And the other one is Genomic Prediction, and you can type in genomicprediction, all one word,.com, and you'll find it.
Great. And are you on Twitter?
I am on Twitter. My handle is mylastname__steve.
So it's shoe__steve.
But you can just type in my name to Twitter, Steve HSU, and you'll find me right away.
So last name, shoe, spelled H-S-U. Thank you, Steve.
This was incredibly enlightening.
Yeah, it's been a pleasure. All right.
And we'll talk to you again soon, and have a great day.
Have a great day. Bye. Bye.
Wow. How about that, huh?
That was interesting. Let's talk about the news.
So, as I said, it turns out everybody's a racist.
My favorite news story from yesterday was President Trump was doing a little press conference thing and somebody asked him about Nancy Pelosi's comment where Nancy Pelosi said that President Trump is not trying to make America great again.
But rather, she said, he's trying to make America white again.
And the president was asked about that.
And what did the president say?
He said, that's racist.
That's a very racist thing to say.
Now, I don't know if you can be a racist if you're a white person talking to another white person.
I don't know. But apparently we've reached a new level where everybody is a racist.
And I think that Trump, whether he's thinking of it expressly this way, or he just sort of feels it instinctively, the whole racism claim has become so ridiculous that I think it's lost its power, or it might be heading in that direction, in the sense that...
So think about the people who have been called racist just in the past month.
Joe Biden...
I mean, not technically called a racist, but Kamala Harris questioned his past opinions on busing, for example.
Nancy Pelosi, President Trump.
My favorite is Steve Cortez, who's a Trump supporter who appears on CNN, was accusing...
Let's see, what's the name of this guy?
He just did an interview on CNN with...
Wajahat Ali, who I think writes for the New York Times, and Ali actually suggested that Steve Cortez, he actually said this to Steve Cortez and repeated it a few times.
He goes, quote, no matter how hard you try to be the Latin face of Trump, they'll never love you.
And he kept repeating that, they'll never love you.
It was like super racist, but it was Two people of color, one calling the other racist.
And again, the whole everybody's a racist thing has so jumped the shark.
I mean, we're so in the territory of it's just ridiculous.
And remember I always tell you that the slippery slope always has It always has something that forms as a counterforce.
There's always something that changes to make you not slip forever.
And I think you probably will be back and forth on this, but it feels like we hit some kind of a weird racist wall where it all just looks stupid.
It all just looks ridiculous.
I think the credibility of any of these claims is zero.
Now, part of the reason the credibility of claims of racism have approached zero is that it gets more and more obvious that it's sort of everybody.
You could find a reason to call absolutely everybody a racist.
For example, a popular thing that the Democrats are saying now The Democrats are saying, well, President Trump is definitely a racist now because of that tweet, which, of course, didn't mention race.
That's their usual thing.
He mentions countries, and then people say, you're really talking about race.
I forgot my whole point there.
I was going for something very clever.
it'll come back to me um oh just looking at your So the other thing they're doing is they're trying to say that everybody's xenophobic.
How many people in the United States had to look up xenophobic?
I think they're using xenophobic because racist wasn't quite landing.
Do you remember the story of President Trump kicking the British diplomat out of the country?
He called the diplomat basically stupid and worthless, and he kicked him out.
He didn't actually kick him out, but he made it impossible for the guy to keep his job, and sure enough, he quit or got fired, I forget.
But that guy was British.
He was a white guy. Did anybody say that that was racist?
No, they didn't.
But if he had been a person of color, they would have, right?
Right? So I think we've got to the point where everybody is calling everybody racist just all the time, and it's starting to completely lose its power.
Now here's the math, the racism math that the left got wrong.
For three years, they've been adding example to example of all the reasons President Trump is allegedly a racist.
Individually, every one of those reasons is either weirdly off point or literally fake news.
For example, birtherism is about a birth certificate, not really about race.
It's the same play that the President used when Ted Cruz was rumored to have some Canadian roots.
So we know he uses it for that.
And we're watching...
I'm just reading your comments.
This is totally taking me off my game today.
So we're watching people of color calling other people of color racists.
We're watching AOC call Pelosi racist.
We're watching everybody be called a racist.
But because the president has been called a racist for a hundred different reasons, right?
I'm exaggerating.
But the left have a hundred different stories which they say, oh, he's a racist because of this and this and this and this and this and because of this and this and this.
So what the president knows, math-wise, is that this latest provocation in his tweet added 1%.
It added 1% to this mountain of imaginary information that they have to call him a racist.
Adding 1% to it Almost certainly is not going to change any votes, because the argument only changed by 1%, and it wasn't very persuasive to begin with.
But what the president got for this in return, and all the smart people are weighing in today, New Gingrich is saying it, you can see it in a bunch of people, are saying that the president has successfully Put all the energy on the squad, as they like to call themselves, and cause them to be the face of the Democrats.
That's the last thing that Pelosi wants.
It's a total losing position because they're so unpopular.
The squad is unpopular, very unpopular, even within the Democratic Party.
So the President's play seems to be completely successful.
He put all the pressure on the squad, made them the story, which makes them the face of the Democrats, which makes the Democrats really have no chance of winning.
And why he traded for that was he added 1% to a thing that was already ineffective, all the complaints about the racism.
So I would say that was a pretty, pretty good play.
And what I'd love to see is Trump taking this further.
Because he has, you know, he's always A-B testing things, even if he doesn't think of it that way.
He throws stuff out, and then he sees what the reaction is.
And if it worked, he does more of it.
So he's testing, how about this, how about that?
One of the things he tested, and again, this was probably just spontaneous, but now it's out there.
Is when he accused Pelosi of being a racist, he can kind of watch and see what happens.
Okay, was that good?
Was it bad? And I'm kind of loving this.
I'm kind of loving it.
Because you saw that Steve Cortez was also accusing his accuser of being a racist.
Obviously, AOC and the squad are racist.
I think that's fair to say.
And what would happen if the Democrat message...
What if Trump started calling them racist all the time?
Remember when the fake news was first a phrase?
You almost forget that it was used against Republicans and against the president.
So the two words fake news originally were born as an attack on Republicans and on the president.
What is it now?
Well, now it's the opposite.
Now fake news means mainstream media, it means CNN, it means MSNBC, it means all the illegitimate people who are attacking the president.
The president rebranded that so thoroughly and effectively that it took their little attack and turned it into a landmine that kills them every day.
I think he may have sniffed the opportunity to start flipping the racist thing around.
Because the thing about the racism allegation is it's the allegation that matters.
The one thing that was proven in the last three years is that, as I say often, the facts don't matter at all.
What matters is if you can cause your opponent to defend against the accusation, you win, even if they do a good job.
If they can spend all their time saying, I'm not a racist, you win.
It was the position they tried to push Trump into, but it just flows off him.
He's Teflon that way.
As long as his supporters are, I don't know, 94% in his corner, I think he's in good shape.
David Axelrod said of the President's tweet and his strategy, he said, now David Axelrod, of course, is He's been a campaign strategist, expert for the Democrats, so he'd be one of the smartest people in politics, I would say, one of the smartest people about how to do it, how to win an election.
That would be his expertise.
And he says of Trump, with his deliberate racist outbursts, Real Donald Trump wants to raise the profile of his targets, meaning the squad, drive Dems to defend them, and make them emblematic of the entire party.
It's a cold, hard strategy.
Yeah, it's a cold, hard strategy.
That works.
That works.
Because he wouldn't be talking about it if it didn't.
And I think there might be a new feeling of panic setting in.
Because the president has really tied up 2020 with this stuff.
I mean, it really makes a huge difference.
All right. So everybody's crying wolf about racism until it means absolutely nothing to anybody.
And then... Oh, Dr.
Drew. Somebody's asking me about Dr.
Drew. He is scheduled for...
I think Friday. Let me check my calendar.
Yeah, I'm going to talk to Dr.
Drew on Friday about what's called the homeless situation in L.A., but I think we're going to learn that homelessness is the easy part to solve.
The real parts are the mental illness and the drugs and disease and everything else.
So we'll talk about that, see if there's a smarter way to think about that.
We'll do that Friday. Alright, so it turns out the North Korean envoy, who was rumored to have been executed by Kim Jong-un for doing a bad job negotiating, is alive.
And he'll be negotiating, it looks like.
So that whole rumor that I guess came out of South Korea was completely nothing.
Um, completely nothing.
Alright, um...
I think those are the main things I wanted to talk about today.
Is there anything else on your mind?
I almost missed the story.
There was some Antifa bomber who tried to attack some border patrol facility and it didn't get as much attention as I thought it should.
It's not in the headlines. It just sort of came and went.
Is that because it's Antifa?
Now, and I'm wondering if that's an Antifa thing.
So we've got a whole bunch of interesting things going on here.
I saw some videos today on Twitter of Obama talking about immigrants and children in cages and stuff.
And Obama sounded...
Actually worse than Trump does.
If you hear it out of context, you'd say to yourself, man, that guy's a badass on immigration.
But we'll see.
What happened to Kamala Harris?
Well, I think you're going to have to wait for the next debate, see if she can make another move.
I keep expecting Biden to be taken out by the other Democrats.
It seems like that's where things are going, so we'll see.
Peter Thiel versus Google.
I didn't see Tucker Carlson's interview with Peter Thiel.
I have it recorded. I'll probably watch it today.
But my understanding is that the gist of it is that Thiel thinks Google is – I hate to use the word traitorous because – That's a specific meaning, but maybe not sufficiently in the United States corner with this working with China versus the United States.
So I think there's definitely something there.
There's something to that.
All right. I think that's all we need to talk about today.
Make sure you're following Bill Pulte.
He continues to Give away money to people who have made a good case that they need it on Twitter.
So follow him at at Pulte, P-U-L-T-E, and you're going to see a fun show because he's been contacting people who don't know they're going to get money, and then you can get to see their reaction, which is very touching.
And it's spreading.
People are talking about it all over, looking at ways to directly give.
And so follow that.
And that's all I got for now.
▲
Export Selection