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July 18, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
48:32
Episode 601 Scott Adams: “Send Her Back”, Google Rigging the Election, Mining the Moon
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
You know what time it is.
You know. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm Scott Adams, and you already know you, so no introductions needed.
But I know why you're here.
You're here because you need to get that dopamine hit, that little charge, that little piece of energy, the thing that makes the rest of the day amazing.
And it starts with a little thing I call the simultaneous sip.
It's easy to join in if you'd like to be part of the simultaneous sip.
There's not much to it at all.
All it requires is a cup or a mug or a glass, a steiner, a chalice or a tankard, a thermos, a flask, a canteen, maybe a vessel.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
Mmm. Oh, that is the best one today.
Whoa! If you haven't tried stretching after the simultaneous sip, you really ought to add that in.
It makes the whole thing complete.
So tomorrow you don't want to miss my periscope.
I'm going to talk to Dr.
Drew if all things technological work out.
And we're going to be talking about the horrible scene that will probably bring us bubonic plague in Los Angeles.
Why are we going to have bubonic plague in Los Angeles?
Well, it has a little something to do with our governments being incompetent.
That's the big picture, but we'll talk about that more tomorrow.
Alright, so the big news, the big news, the big news in the news is the old news that's no news, that's nothing whatsoever but a presidential tweet that turned into a week of news.
And everybody is talking.
Is it racist?
Is it a racist tweet?
Now the latest thing is for people who don't want to commit to To say the president's a racist, such as Nancy Pelosi, such as Anthony Scaramucci, I think there are a few others.
They're starting to say, well, I'm not going to say the president's a racist.
But I will say that the tweet itself is a racist tweet.
So now you can have people who are racists But you can have actually collections of words that are racist if they're in a tweet.
So now that tweets can be racist, separate from the intention of the sender, which is weird.
You would think that racism is something that somebody has to do intentionally.
But apparently there are some critics of the president and some friends of the president who are a little critical in this case.
And they say that the tweet itself could be racist, while the president, the person who thought it and wrote it, might not be.
Okay, I guess this is just more of everything can be racist.
And I think I'm going to drink to that, because when you're drinking your racist cup of black coffee, and you're drinking that of a white cup, and we're a racist civilization filled with racist...
Might as well go with it.
And so, as I said, I believe the racism charge sort of lost its energy.
Am I wrong? So I think I'm the first person to, well, probably not.
I was going to say I'm the first person to say this, but probably not.
I'm going to call it I think racism lost its credibility.
Now, most of you thought it lost its credibility a long time ago, but it only lost its credibility with Half of the public, or 40%, whatever, the Trump supporters, they had already given up on that as being a meaningful word that actually meant something in the real world.
Now, it should and could mean something, but the way it's overused, it just becomes ridiculous.
And I think that it's now a little bit more obvious even to people on the other side.
I tweeted a tweet by Jake Tapper that I thought was fascinating.
So Jake, in his thread on Twitter that I retweeted, talked about talking to Democrats without their identities being mentioned.
And one of the Democrats said, in no ambiguous terms, he said, the president won this round.
So even the Democrats are clear on the fact that Trump took a pretty risky play, in their view.
I don't think it was risky, and I'll tell you why.
But in their view, it was risky, but it worked.
And so even the Democrats are saying, oh, damn it, he won this one.
You didn't see that coming, did you?
unless you watch my periscope, in which I told you it was coming, in direct language.
So even the Democrats know they lost this round.
But why is this different?
Now, I would say that what looked like a gigantic risk on the part of the president to say something that's clearly provocative, it's clearly he knew it was going to be offensive because he wrote it that way.
He wrote it to be provocative and offensive.
Now, of course, in this world, provocative and offensive is always conflated with racist.
It was just automatic.
So he had to know. He had to know this was going to draw this kind of fire.
But the president's critics have put him in a situation where it's a free pass.
It's free money. How many times have I told you that one of the things that marks this president's style and his effectiveness is that when he sees free money laying on a table, he picks it up.
It's just laying there.
It's just a big pile of free money.
And everybody else says, hey, we can't pick up that free money.
And the president sees it and he says, I'm pretty sure this is free money.
Does anybody claim this money?
This big pile of money on the table?
And everybody says, I wouldn't touch it.
I don't know. I wouldn't touch it.
And the president says, well, I guess I'll take the free money.
Grabs it and walks it away.
And what does everybody say after the president takes the big pile of free money?
They say, I saw that coming.
But they didn't. For the most part, they didn't see that coming.
In this case, here's my analogy.
And remember, analogies are terrible for persuasion, but they're very good for explaining a new concept.
That's how I'll be using it.
I'm going to explain a concept.
If you imagine that all of the criticisms about President Trump in the realm of being a racist, if all of those together were a big pile of manure, You don't even have to make a decision right now whether it's all true stuff or all fake stuff.
You don't even have to decide that for what I'm talking about next.
But it's a lot of it.
You'd agree that the laundry list of things is pretty long.
Adding one more thing...
That is, yet again, one of those things that you're not quite sure.
Is it a whistle?
Is it obvious? Is it not obvious?
Is it technically not racist because he said, come on back?
He puts it right in that ambiguous area, like all of the other stuff.
It's in this weird gray, well, it might be racist, depending on how you look at it, depending on what you imagine he was thinking when he said it, but not really, not on the surface.
So imagine that all of the accusations so far are a giant mound of, let's say, cow feces.
Just a giant pile of it.
Whether it's true stuff or even false stuff, doesn't matter.
There's a lot of it.
And then this latest tweet about Go Back Home comes by, and it's like a fly flew over the giant pile of cow feces, and the fly pooped on it.
Do flies poop? I don't know.
Probably, right? I'm no fly expert, but I'm guessing they do.
And here's the thing.
Does the fly pooping on a giant pile of poop change anything?
Well, from a physics perspective, yes.
There is a tiny, tiny little change to the giant pile of poop.
But in a political sense, No difference.
It was a giant pile of poop, and now a fly pooped on top of the giant pile of poop, and it's just a little more poop.
No difference whatsoever.
So the President had a free shot.
He could do this thing, and it wouldn't change anybody's opinion.
But, by focusing all of his energy on the squad, he elevated them to become the face of the Democrats.
Which essentially destroys their entire organization.
Now, will they recover?
We don't know.
But it looks like it was a kill shot.
It looks like he took a kill shot early just to see.
Because think about it.
Think about the risk management here.
If this had had no good impact for the president, let's say it hadn't worked.
It just would have been one more fly-pooping than a big pile of poop.
It wasn't much to risk.
And by the time, you know, Election Day comes along, there are going to be 110 more provocations, and this one will be totally forgotten.
So it was a free shot.
If it worked, it would dismantle the entire Democratic Party with two tweets, or three, whatever it was, compound tweet.
And it worked. According to the Democrats, it worked.
It destroyed their party.
Because for now until the end, they're just going to be arguing with each other about who's the worst person, you know, is Pelosi a racist, who's in charge of the party, is socialism really their theme, blah, blah, blah.
All right. Now, so, from a risk management perspective, it's something that nobody else in the world would have done.
Trump did it because he recognized it was free money.
It was either going to work, which it did, or if it didn't work, a little bit of fly poop on top of a giant mountain of poop, no difference whatsoever.
So that's where we are.
Now, what is being lost In this whole conversation.
Remember, what I like to do, quite often, is I like to point out the thing that everybody's ignoring while the magician is making you focus in the wrong place.
Let me say something that I don't believe...
I have not heard anybody say it as directly as I'm going to say it.
And I said something similar before, but think about how this is not being said.
So it won't be a radical thought.
It would just be a thought that keeps being ignored.
And here it is. The squad that President Trump criticized are four young people of color, all female, who are killing it.
These four women are super successful.
More successful, I would argue, than any other politicians in the whole country, in the biggest, most important, not biggest, but most important country, at least in economics and military, in the world. Who's talking about that?
Do you know how you get a President of the United States to talk about you?
How do you do that?
How does somebody get the President of the United States to continually insult them?
Well, you do that by being crazy successful.
Crazy successful.
Look at Omar, right?
You don't like Omar, right?
I know the people watching this are mostly Trump supporters, mostly do not like Omar.
You don't have to like her.
I'm not going to ask you to.
But she's killing it.
She's very, very successful and coming from a very tough situation, you know, literally a Somalian immigrant who's now in the mind of the president on all of our lips and is moving the needle.
I mean, she's certainly moving people's opinions, etc.
Somebody says 9% approval.
Where have we heard that before?
Do you know anybody else who had 9% approval once?
President Trump.
President Trump once had 9% approval when he first started.
Now, I'd like to add another thought that I don't think you said enough.
So the first thing I'm going to say is if you can divorce yourself from the opinions, the political opinions of the four people, and just say, we live in a country where those four people...
Literally, you know, the people who would most be considered, what would be the right term?
I guess if you're female and young, all three things.
If you're female, you're young, you're a person of color, and especially if you were born in another country, you have a lot working against you, don't you?
In theory, everything's working against you.
That's the country you're in, right?
That's the maximum amount of discrimination is, you know, age, gender, ethnicity, country of origin, and even religion, right?
It's everything that's discriminated against.
And what did these four women do?
They're killing it.
They just took over the entire Democratic Party.
They're killing it. Why don't we talk about that?
Why don't we talk about the fact that we live in a country...
We're four people who should, by every law or rule or common sense thing that we know about how bigoted and terrible the country is, everything we know or have been told should have kept those four women from being in the situation they are, and yet they are the talk of the town.
You don't have to like him.
Remember, people didn't like President Trump either, but he became the talk of the town.
So let's not lose an amazing thing.
If we're talking about this, it means nothing much else is going on that's bad.
First of all, let's remember that.
If this is our topic, We're talking about a tweet.
If that's a topic, things are going well.
But beyond that, that these four women could have so much influence on the Democratic Party, why don't we celebrate that?
Why don't we celebrate that they're in the president's...
How shall I say it?
They're in his mind and they're top priority.
So let's not lose that.
That's pretty cool.
I would say that, correct me if I'm wrong, if you took the squad and you took one of them out and replaced them with somebody else who, let's say, was also young and female and person of color, how much difference would it make?
Well, it would depend on which one you replaced.
If you replaced AOC, you would never have heard of any of these four people.
That's what I think.
I mean, maybe Omar would have made a little noise and then gone away.
But the reason that Omar is even a conversation is that she's sort of joined with AOC. There's only one star in the group, AOC. The other three are sort of dingleberries that are hanging around AOC. If you took AOC's star power, And I'm going to say talent.
We can say that now, right?
Is everybody finally on board with me with what I said, I don't know, 18 months ago or whenever I was first saying it?
When I first said, uh-oh, AOC is the real deal.
You don't have to like anything she says politically, but watch how her power will grow.
I told you that early on, right?
And some people who had similar training and background were saying the same thing.
You saw Mike Cernovich say it from day one, same as I did, because we have similar talent stacks.
And so there she is.
I did not say that about any of the other people in the squad because it's not true.
The other people in the squad don't have the star power.
They're very capable, and I give them great credit for achieving what they've achieved.
It's all very credit-worthy.
But they are not AOC. AOC is sort of her own thing.
And if you...
If you took her out of the group, there would be no such thing as the squad.
They would be irrelevant. It's AOC's star power that even makes them a thing.
And their purpose right now is simply to amplify AOC. But here's the interesting thing.
What will happen if one of the members of the squad starts working against AOC's interests?
Which is sort of what's happening right now, isn't it?
It seems that in addition to dividing the Democrats, the president is starting to divide the squad.
I'm not sure you've seen that.
Now, he talked about each member of the squad individually and had something to say about him.
But Presley?
I've never even heard of Presley.
Do I even have the right name?
Presley, that's the name of one of the squad.
I've never even heard of her until this week.
Is she like an important part of the squad?
No. And Talib, why is she important?
Because she swore a few times in public.
That's it. That's it.
That's her whole game. She swore a few times in public.
Irrelevant. But Omar...
Omar's making some noise.
Omar... Is ruining AOC's brand.
Do you see that?
Do you see that for a short time AOC can hang with this group because they're sort of emphasizing and they're elevating AOC because it makes it look like she's a leader of a group and that makes it look like she has more power.
But... If Omar keeps going in the wrong direction of looking, or at least being branded anti-Semitic, I don't have an opinion about her and her thoughts, but she can certainly be branded that way based on things she's said or done.
Will AOC stick with her once she becomes more problem than benefit?
Because if you're...
I believe that AOC's rating would be higher if she were separated from Omar.
And I'm sure that the Republicans will make sure that she knows that.
But will she do it?
I don't know if she can, but in order to get to the next level, she needs to.
Because Omar is like a ball and chain.
Is that racist? You have to stop every time you say something that's any kind of an analogy.
Don't you have to stop these days and say, wait a minute, that was racist.
Okay, I'm going to say, I'm going to rule on this.
Ball and chain, says prisoner, could be racist.
So I'm going to back that out and say, and say, I'm just sort of joking about that.
That's not racist. I'm going to use a different analogy, though.
AOC can't rise because Omar is an anchor.
Omar puts the ceiling on AOC's potential.
As long as they're joined at the hip, AOC can never rise higher than she can drag Omar with her, and she can't drag Omar too far because Omar's an anchor.
So, I would predict, and I don't think it necessarily happens before 2020, but it could.
I predict... That AOC is going to make a break from at least Omar, but certainly the squad.
And she will do that when she doesn't need them, and when it's clear that they're an anchor on her progress.
Because I'm pretty sure that AOC's ceiling in politics, she's nowhere near it.
You don't want to hear that, right?
She's nowhere near it.
The others may have hit their peak.
But AOC has not.
And if she allows them to be part of her brand, well, they're an anchor.
So I think you could predict that she will be smart enough to put some distance between her and the others.
All right, here's something fun.
There's a story that there's a lot of helium-3 on the moon, which sounds very boring until you realize it could be a nuclear fuel.
And the story said it was some kind of a waste-free nuclear fuel.
I don't quite understand that.
Maybe Mark Schneider can explain that to us.
But the idea is that countries, and I guess Europe, is gearing up to actually mine the moon in just a few years.
You know, something like seven years or something.
They plan to be on the moon mining it.
And part of it might be a tremendous difference in our energy situation.
In other words, if this helium-3 is easy to mine or easy enough, it's so valuable that it would make mining the moon tremendously profitable.
I guess there are a lot of other things they can mine as well up there that are equally valuable.
But it could totally change the energy situation on Earth.
And I ask you, do any of the climate models include mining the moon?
Which of the many climate predictions models say, well, in 2025 we'll start mining the moon, which will totally change the energy economics on planet Earth?
No, that's not in there.
Here's another little tidbit.
Also, I think I saw this through Mark Schneider's Twitter feed, which you should be following.
Apparently, Indonesia just took the world lead in nuclear energy by claiming they're going to fire up a thorium reactor in just a few years.
If that happens and Indonesia fires up a thorium reactor, and I believe even if it goes over their budget, even if it doubles, even if they blow through their budget, it still looks like it's going to be super practical.
If they get it done, thorium and let's say Generation 4 nuclear in general is the sort of thing that as soon as somebody gets one working, it's going to grow pretty fast.
It's sort of like the iPhone.
Until Apple made an iPhone, there wasn't going to be any kind of a smartphone market.
But once Apple did it, then everybody could say, well, I guess we need a smartphone.
So if Indonesia succeeds with their thorium reactor and it proves the economics and the safety and everything else, maybe you could see just a ton of it happening right after that.
All right, let's talk about Professor Epstein, PhD, in Google.
So there's a researcher slash scientist slash very qualified guy It was made the claim in public and in writing that Google influenced the 2016 election by rigging it for Hillary by somewhere between his estimate is 2.6 to 10.4 million votes were manipulated in other words influenced by Google manipulating their search engine results.
Now Yeah, we're still blocking all the people who...
Oops, I missed them. Yeah, let me get the blocker.
So remember, I'm blocking people who complain about the audio.
Um... Even though we know now that the audio was an actual problem with Periscope that apparently they fixed.
So there was a problem with people on some devices.
But it's not that it's true or false that I have audio problems.
I delete you because it interrupts the show like it is right now.
Don't you wish I weren't talking about this?
Of course you do.
And I wish I weren't talking about it too.
So it's nothing personal, but I don't want people complaining about the sound on here because I can't do anything about it.
All right. So this Dr.
Epstein says that millions of votes, and he's pretty confident about his estimates.
I don't know how confident you could be about those estimates.
Can you really be confident about that?
I don't know if you can.
But I guess Hillary won by three million votes on the popular vote.
It wasn't enough to get her elected because of the electoral college.
But... Damn it.
Dammit, dammit. I'm having a different problem now with my technology, but I think it's solved.
All right. So here's the thing.
Do we believe, Dr.
Epstein, that Google manipulated between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes and changed them toward Hillary?
Now, one thing we can believe is that, and seems reasonably true, is that he was a big Clinton supporter and still is.
So the person saying that Google rigged the election for Hillary is a Hillary supporter.
So that works toward his credibility.
What we don't have is other researchers saying, we checked his work, we did an independent research, we found out the same thing.
So we don't have that. So I don't think you can necessarily leap to believing he's nailed the range or anything else.
I'd need to hear from more people.
But it is very compatible with everything I know about people in life.
It does seem to me...
That Google could move that many votes.
To me, that seems commonsensical.
Doesn't mean it's true, but common sense and everything I know about how people work and how they're influenced by what they see, it would suggest that maybe that many votes could move.
Now, you might say to yourself, well, it's just a few million votes.
But... It might represent something like the vast majority of all the people who were undecided.
So Google may have persuaded all of the people who were undecided, or 80% of them.
Those are the types of estimates.
Think about that. That's the whole game.
That's not just tweaking things on the margin.
That's the election.
That's the whole thing. If you can move the undecideds, and according to this researcher, they did, they can and they did, and they did it intentionally, and they did it successfully, that's the whole election.
The only thing that stopped it from being a deciding factor is that Trump was more strategic and had more support than people thought, probably.
But he's more strategic about the states, et cetera.
So what's going to happen in 2020?
Same thing, right?
Do you see anything in place that would stop Google from doing exactly the same thing?
And do you think they'll be better at it four years later?
Yeah. Yeah.
Because now they have four years of experience They'll have more than that.
They'll have something like five or six years of experience by the next election.
Imagine Google with four to six years of experience manipulating votes, and now they can actually find out who changed their votes.
So I don't know if they've collected this information, but they would be wrong not to, because it's collectible.
They could have the data to tell them how successful they were Think about that They might actually know how successful they were, and they might actually know specifically what people's minds they changed last time.
Imagine them with that knowledge.
If they know what it was about those people, they can say, aha, people who have these characteristics are more likely to change their mind.
We can find more of those people.
Because now they know the exact demographic and, let's say, personality traits, lifestyle, etc., of people who did change their minds.
Before, they were probably just spraying it out there and they changed a bunch of minds.
But now they know who changes minds and who doesn't.
The odds of them being more effective on the second go-round are 100%.
100% they'll be better at it and a lot better this time.
A lot better.
What's the government going to do about it?
As far as I can tell, nothing.
Do you see anything happening?
I don't see anything happening. And, yeah, I guess Peter Thiel made the same point.
But common sense should tell you the same thing.
It's pretty obvious when you...
When you do a Google search, that somebody is deciding what you see.
Or the algorithm which somebody created is deciding what you see.
And that, of course, makes a big difference.
The things that come to the top are, of course, going to have more impact on your thinking.
So I'm just going to call it.
I'm just going to call it right now.
The Republic...
Is dead. That's it.
The republic, that form of government created by the founders, and that has successfully guided our civilization for lo these few hundred years plus, is gone.
It's not something that might go away.
It already went away.
The only reason it's not obvious...
Well, no, let me take that back.
We don't feel the pain of it so much because Trump got elected anyway.
But there's only one of him.
He probably will get elected, re-elected again because he's just got such a strong game.
But the next presidents or the next candidates, whoever they are, it won't be up to them.
Because if there are regular candidates and they don't have the super power of the sun like Trump does, Trump can just obliterate a news cycle any way he wants.
You just saw him do it this week.
Nobody else could do that.
Maybe. I don't think anybody else could do that.
But at this point, Google...
Decides who the president is.
Maybe not this next time.
They're gonna try.
They'll probably get close.
Maybe not this time.
But forever after that, it's just up to them.
And you know that, right?
You know that's true.
Even if Epstein's numbers don't check out, you know that they can control the election if they want to.
Now, what could change that?
The only thing that could change that is an American Revolution.
It worked once.
Remember that old American Revolution where the patriots fought and took power away from the monarchy in England?
Well, we just lost our republic accidentally.
Nobody saw it coming. Well, some did, but there weren't enough of us.
And It will require an actual revolution.
This time not violence.
This time we don't need to shoot anybody.
This time the revolution just needs to be a data revolution.
There needs to be an uprising of the people Against the authority, which is Google, and maybe some of the other social media companies to a lesser extent.
But the Trump administration can put in place, because they are the last vestige of the republic.
Trump's administration is the last vestige of the republic.
Once he's gone...
Google can't be touched.
If Google can get to the other side of the Trump administration, if they can last it out, they'll run the country forever.
Whether or not there's a, you know, a nominal bunch of politicians or not.
If the Trump administration It puts in some kind of oversight, and I've suggested some kind of a special court that, you know, some kind of court that can control, some kind of court that can look at the algorithms and make sure fair things are happening.
If we don't do that, that's it.
That's it. After the Trump administration, Google is your king.
All right. I loved reading this.
I think this was from Trey Gowdy.
He was talking about Congress.
And he said, quote, Congress has worked itself into obscurity and irrelevance.
When you can go on the floor of the House, as the President says, I'm going to do it with or without you, and Congress stands up and cheers, you have rendered that branch of government feckless and irrelevant.
Gowdy says. Congratulations, the House doesn't matter anymore.
White House and Senate matter.
The House doesn't matter.
So that's Trey Gowdy, who would be a good authority, saying that the House of Representatives have rendered themselves irrelevant.
At the same time, Google has rendered itself the kingmakers.
So the government is self-destructing, At the same time that Google is rising, what is the only way to check them?
Well, the Senate by itself is useless without the House.
So the Senate has no purpose whatsoever if the House is useless.
All that leaves is the executive branch, which is stronger than ever.
The executive branch, if they don't have the power on their own to regulate the social media platforms, Probably won't get done.
Here's something interesting.
Do you remember when I told you that I could sense that North Korea was getting closer to having some kind of productive conversation with us?
And I called it before it happened, and everybody was surprised, and now here we are.
And there are ongoing negotiations with North Korea.
It doesn't seem like we're in worse shape.
It looks like we're heading toward very incrementally, slowly, but at least the right direction, which is all we really care about, the right direction.
Iran is sending me signals, meaning that I'm seeing signals in their actions, that they're pretty close to talking.
Pretty close. Now some of the signals are, of course, that they say they'd be willing to talk, but then they give us requirements for talking that we're never going to comply with.
So they say they want to talk, but they also make it impossible to have that conversation by requiring us to give up things before we even talk, such as the sanctions.
But then I'm looking at the small things that they're doing, such as the fairly minor damage of a tanker, the complaining about the British.
And now there's a new one.
A new micro-complaint.
And it's the smallness of this that is the story.
So, Iran's state television said Thursday that the regime have captured a foreign tanker with a crew of 12, Accused of smuggling oil.
I don't even understand why Iran is angry about anybody smuggling oil, since their entire country is based on trying to get around sanctions.
But apparently the news doesn't even know who owns the tanker.
So now Iran is moving against a tanker, and we don't even know who owns it.
Is that the weakest story you've ever heard?
It's like, well, there may or may not be a tanker that we may or may not have captured.
It may or may not be actually that other tanker from before that we're actually just helping.
That's it. If you look at what Iran is doing in reaction to the sanctions, it looks pretty small.
And it looks like a country that doesn't want to get in a shooting war.
And I'm feeling that the entire Middle East, again, is down to one person's opinion, the Ayatollah.
He's in his 80s, not going to live forever, and probably knows at this point there's no winning path other than peace.
Peace is a very winning path.
The president has made that clear.
You've got a great path.
Iran can be one of the great countries in the world, as it was once before, I would argue.
So somebody says it seems like they're just buying time.
Could be. But for what?
Do they really want to go to the next level on nuclear stuff?
Because they will get wiped out.
They have to know that.
I think Iran has to know that if I go to a certain level with this stuff, we will pull the trigger.
It's pretty clear that President Trump would pull the trigger if he needed to.
I think they know that.
Or at least they're worried about it enough.
So I'm going to call it That we've never been this close to peace in the Middle East, because Iran is sort of the key to the larger peace in the region.
Everybody else is kind of on board at this point.
And if the Palestinians are not, they would be isolated to the point of irrelevance.
So Iran is the key, and they're right on the edge.
Might be another year, could be two years before things get serious in terms of talking, but they're right on the edge.
I think you're going to see something positive there.
All right, that is all I have for today.
Does anybody have any questions?
Somebody says, why is Iran the key?
Iran is the key because they're the last major country in the region that still wants to be trouble.
Everybody else has either said, okay, I guess we can live with Israel, or there are not really much trouble to begin with.
All right. Oh, just a correction.
People informed me on Twitter.
So I'd ask the question, why would Turkey, who is a NATO ally, buy Russian stuff?
And why do we care if they have some missile defense?
Because they're NATO after all.
But the argument is if they have Russian anti-aircraft missiles and technology, and they also have American F-35s, that they could use the technology on the Russian equipment to learn more about the signal that comes off of the F-35 that they could use the technology on the Russian equipment to learn more about
So it would make the F-35s in general around the world more vulnerable if one country had both an F-35 and Russian technology.
So having them in the same country allows them to look at each other and gather data about each other in a way that you couldn't as easily otherwise.
That's the argument. I'm not sure if I'd buy that entirely, but let's go with that.
All right. Now Turkey is begging to be back in the F-35 program.
Oh, do I still think Kamala Harris is going to be the nominee?
Yes. So I'm sticking with my Kamala Harris prediction.
Is it not obvious that the Democrats who know things know that Biden can't win?
Right? I'm right about that, aren't I? That Biden just can't win.
And It also seems that Bernie is getting no respect.
So I think Bernie's poll numbers have topped.
I don't think that they're going any higher.
And what happens when Bernie drops out?
Where will Bernie's votes go to if Bernie is not the nominee?
Think about that.
I would argue that Bernie has all the votes that will go to Warren and Harris.
So Warren and Harris should take a big pop should Bernie decide to get out.
And maybe he will.
I mean, you can imagine Bernie getting out on principle, saying to himself, well, it doesn't look like I can win.
But I could throw my support to one of these other characters who have a better chance.
And that would be...
That would be a tough package.
If Bernie said, I'm going to throw my 100% support behind Warren or Harris, that could put him over the top.
Now, I would think that Warren is closer to Bernie in terms of policy.
I don't know if I'm right or wrong about that.
But even if all he did was just release his supporters by not being viable or just quitting, you're going to see Biden drop into second place, maybe third place, fairly quickly.
Actually, if Bernie dropped out, I think Biden would drop to third place overnight, right?
Probably. All right.
Yeah, so...
Area 51 is going to be stormed by a bunch of people, and I gotta say, I wish I were there.
That sounds like the craziest thing.
Of course, they might all be killed by security forces trying to get into a top-secret government facility, but...
Sounds like a great party until that happens.
All right. Uh...
To give Kamala credit.
Yeah. All right. So I'm going to stick with Harris as the likely nominee.
She's going to have to up her game.
She did so in the debates.
If she has one more good debate where she lands a few blows, I think she'll be the presumed nominee.
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