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July 19, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:08:16
Episode 602 Scott Adams: Dr. Drew Talks About LA Apocalypse, Trump’s Tweet, Iran
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
It's a terrific morning, great day, but we're going to talk about some serious stuff in about five minutes.
We will be joined in a little bit with Dr.
Drew. But before that, we've got some important stuff to do.
Important stuff to do, I say.
And that important stuff is something I call the simultaneous sip, which you are about to enjoy with me.
The entire dopamine hit that you can only get by simultaneously sipping.
And it's easy. It's easy.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a stein, a chalice or a tankard, a thermos, a flask, a canteen, a vessel of any kind to hold your liquid.
I like coffee.
Put it in there. Lift it to your lips and join me for the unparalleled pleasure of this simultaneous sip.
Oh, so good.
So, so good.
All right, we're going to bring Dr.
Drew on right now, assuming he is ready.
A little bit earlier than I told you.
Dr. Drew, are you there?
Well, you have been the, it seems like the lone voice talking about the, I'm going to call it an apocalypse happening in Los Angeles.
Give us a lowdown, and by the way, I'm assuming that everybody watching this knows Dr.
Drew. But maybe for anybody who is brand new to, I don't know, the world, could you tell them your background, medically, professionally, whatever you think is relevant to this conversation?
Sure. I mean, most people know me from my media work.
I was involved with a radio program called Loveline for about 35 years.
It was on MTV briefly.
Then I did a program called Celebrity Rehab, where I treated celebrities for addiction.
And Presently, a lot of people know me from a program called Team Mom, where I host these reunions.
Professionally, I was trained as an internist.
I started moonlighting in a psychiatric hospital when I was in residency.
I ended up taking over their Department of Medicine and running that, and eventually ran their medical, excuse me, their addiction services, and they did that for about 20 years.
And all the while that I was working all those years in a psychiatric hospital, I ran a big hospital and outpatient medical practice.
So the part I wanted people to hear is, first of all, that you're a real medical doctor, and your experience with mental health and addiction is highly relevant.
Now, give us your explanation of what's happening in L.A. with the, quote, homeless population.
Right. There's a great book called American Psychosis, and you want to see how we got into this mess.
But essentially, we strangled our hospital We belched them out into.
We decided we were going to try to do something about the prison thing, and perhaps we went a little too far with these things called Prop 47, Prop 57, where we essentially now have made drug use and drug trafficking and stealing non-crimes, essentially non-crimes irrelevant, so the police can't do anything about them.
Which massively increased our homeless population.
And we now have 3,000 people.
And what got me...
And I've practiced medicine long enough in the San Gerbil Valley here in Southern California to know that when that happens, we will have a typhus outbreak.
So about 18 months ago, I predicted a typhus outbreak.
And I was correct.
That was the first thing that caught my attention.
Now, typhus, that's carried by the rats?
How do humans get typhus from rats?
It's on the rats.
It's endemic here, particularly in the valleys of Southern California.
It comes off the foothills.
It's in the raccoons and possums.
It gets onto the rats. It gets onto our pets.
The fleas come off the rats onto our pets and literally defecate on the pets.
We pet our pets.
It gets on our hands. That gets into us.
Wow. Okay, and...
I've heard you say that even bubonic plague is a possibility when we reach a certain point that we're nearing.
Tell us about that. Another book, if you want to hear about this, called Black Death at the Golden Gate.
The last outbreak of bubonic plague was in Los Angeles, because it is also an endemic organism here.
We have the rickettsial diseases, like Rocky Mountain spotted fever and typhus, and we have Ursinia pestis bubonic plague.
It's in the squirrels. It gets onto the rats.
When the rats proliferate, it gets onto the humans.
The last outbreak was in the 1920s.
It was nearly, it was only because of some heroic efforts by a group of physicians that it didn't become a massive problem.
It killed everyone who came in contact with the Case Zero.
And we now have somewhere between 12 and 20 million rats in Los Angeles.
And one of the only cities in the country who is doing, has no rodent control plan.
None. And if you look at the pictures of Los Angeles, you will see that the homeless encampments are surrounded by dumps.
People defecate there, they throw their trash there, and the rats just proliferate there.
Now, is this a homeless problem per se?
Yeah, this is what's driving me insane.
So because of my medical concerns, I started directing my attention at the homeless thing.
And then I started realizing, you know, this is not...
If you can walk around, close your eyes to this, and if you open them, and these are my patients.
I mean, these are the people that used to populate the psychiatric hospitals.
They were the drug addicts.
Some of this is the last wave of the opiate epidemic.
Once we, my peers, And then Matt suddenly cut them off.
Well, when you cut them off, they go to the streets, they go to heroin.
The heroin you end up on the streets.
And that's who we have.
So we're having a little bit of audio problem cutting in and out, but I think we're getting the gist of it.
So even if we had more housing, if suddenly housing just appeared out of nowhere and it was free, these people wouldn't necessarily even take a free house, would they?
Correct. The part that is now driving me to my grave, I think, on this problem is Is that this is a population that if you walk up to them and say, let's go, I've got a great place for you to live, the majority and the vast majority will refuse.
And people don't believe this, but when you are chronically mentally ill, unless you have treatment, it's very difficult to live in four walls.
If you're a drug addict, you seek the streets.
So there's a attachment to this lifestyle that is not being addressed.
The other thing is, Not only would they do not want housing, housing is not the problem in Los Angeles.
We just absorbed in the last year or so about, conservatively, 800,000 undocumented immigrants.
We're a sanctuary city. We welcome them in.
None of them are on the streets.
They all found a place to live.
800,000 people in a year found a place to live.
So the government continued to focus on the housing.
It's a hoax, and I can't understand why they're focused on it.
Well, it could be because the real problem is unsolvable.
No, it's easily solvable.
Okay, go. It just doesn't fit an ideology.
There's something called the Landma-Petrus Act, which is what allows us to treat patients.
Again, you've got to read this book called American Psychosis.
The Landma-Petrus Act came out in the 1960s.
And throughout human history, when people had chronic psychiatric illness or addiction, The system would determine need for care.
If somebody met criteria for what was called need for care, they were cared for.
They were put in a hospital and cared for and stabilized and returned to their life.
In the 1960s, there was a guy named Robert Felix that convinced President Kennedy that chronic psychiatric illness didn't really exist, that state hospitals caused it.
We had one flu over the We had these crazy books that were going out that made the idea of putting people in a psychiatric hospital inhumane.
And they passed something called the Lantharm and Petrus Act, which moved need for care to the criteria for care as simply harm to self or other.
And if you weren't saying, I'm going to kill myself, or I'm going to kill somebody else, or I'm so severely gravely disabled, which is a definition that we have to work on, Then we could only hold you for 72 hours, which doesn't accomplish much of anything.
So we could help people with harm to solve for other than 72 hours, but gravely disabled could do nothing.
So we must change the definition of gravely disabled.
We must expand conservatorships.
We must modify Prop 47 so we can start to prosecute drug laws again so we can motivate drug addicts to get treatment.
The problem with drug addicts is they go one of three places.
Institution, which we've taken away, prison, which we've taken away, or they die.
So we are leaving drug addicts to die.
Let's say we understood the problem as you've described it, as opposed to being fooled into thinking it's a housing problem.
What are the biggest obstacles?
Is it funding? Is it political competence?
Is it that the city is not working with the state, which isn't working with the federal system?
Where's the problem?
Sort of all of the above.
And for instance, when you look at the rat problem, why they're not addressing that aggressively, you shake your head.
There's about to be a serious problem.
And by the way, we were focusing on the rats.
We have tuberculosis. We have other illnesses blossoming in California as well.
But in terms of the incompetence, where is the incompetence?
When you really boil it down, there seems to be something about ideology here.
There's a guy named John Morlock, a state senator, that went up to the state.
I sort of woke him up to what was going on, and he went up and proposed – he brought families up there with homeless offsprings, with homeless loved ones.
And they begged the state senate, we want our loved ones back.
There are thousands of us.
We have homes for them. We can give them resources.
We can do nothing because of the laws.
Please help us modify gravely disabled.
The state senate essentially said to these suffering families, take a hike.
Who are you to tell these people what to do?
And think about this, Scott.
If these were dementia patients we were talking about, if there were dementia patients walking out, On the street, disorganized, lack of insight, unable to care for themselves, and people did not help them, there would be outrage.
And it's the same symptoms caused by a different illness.
Same symptoms. But we privilege psychiatric symptoms in the law because of ideology.
There's yet another thing, Scott.
There's another thing that's driving me crazy.
These 60,000 people are defecating and urinating directly into the gutters every day, so we have this sewage of 60,000 people hitting the ocean every day.
Do we need some kind of a czar to take care of it?
I don't know what it would be. It's because it's not a homeless.
Mental health and drug addiction are sort of different but overlapping.
What kind of czar...
Does the federal government just need to come in and say, look, the cities aren't handling this.
We could have bubonic plague.
This could go everywhere. The federal government has to step in.
Do you think the federal government needs to step in?
A guy named Reverend Andy Bales, who's run the LA Union Mission for 20 years, one of the leading I'm not quite there yet.
I'm ready to pull that trigger if we start to see the diseases I think we are going to, then we have to.
No, but the FEMA organization is also not equipped to handle drug addiction and mental health.
So, I mean, they could have tents like crazy and people maybe won't even go in the tent.
But if you have the National Guard, you can supersede the state laws and you can say, look, this is a national emergency.
We have to bring you in.
We have armies of people prepared to help the homeless here.
It's not for lack of resources.
The taxpayer isn't In this region have set aside billions and billions of dollars.
It's just they cannot get through their own regulation and their own ideology to deal with this humanitarian catastrophe.
So would you say that this is sort of a president, without getting political, President Trump likes to cut through regulations.
He likes his executive orders.
Does he have the power to take care of this?
If it were a national emergency, my understanding is that that's one of the ways to do it.
I'm hoping, you know, I'm just trying to slog through the process of making the changes I recommended to you, of, you know, modifying the proposition, you know, these laws we have, trying to change the way we deal with mental illness.
And one of the reasons I think we need to take a little time with this is we have to build, some of the LA County supervisors are in the process of building Jails that can handle mental illness, and psychiatric beds, which we need many more of.
So there are some things happening, but way too slowly to stop the bubonic plague, it sounds like.
Oh, so things are happening that look positive, but probably way too small and way too slow to stop the bubonic plague?
That's what I'm concerned about.
And if that begins to emerge...
And again, it could be...
Imagine if measles gets into this population.
This is a suboptimal...
...can get in.
We have tuberculosis getting in.
There could be some... We had typhoid fever broke out in Los Angeles.
And a police station contracted it.
I mean, it's the potential.
What's the thing that's driving...
I'm obviously... You know, exercise about this whole thing.
Is this the basic needs of civilization?
I have a government that is ignoring the basic needs of human civilization.
You know, it seems to me that the reason that this snuck up on us, and I think you know, I had some experience with my stepson and addiction recently.
I lost him less than a year ago.
And one of the things I found when he turned 18...
Is if you're an adult, nobody can tell you to do anything.
And if you want to do things that are dangerous to you and dangerous to others, there's absolutely nothing that can be done.
But on top of that, I think that society has reached a point where there are a larger number of peoples who can't make their way in society in the normal way.
In other words, if it were 200 years ago and somebody was a little slow or maybe had a little mental problems, they could still work on the farm and you probably wouldn't be any worse off for it.
But today, if you've got an IQ under a certain level, you've got a mental problem, you've got an addiction problem, there is no place in the United States that you can go and be productive.
You're pretty much doomed.
And it seems to me, let me run an idea by you.
I don't see any way to fix this without creating essentially cities that are just for these types of folks.
Maybe a city for addicted, a small city for people with mental health issues.
Because don't you have to get them out of where they are?
Put them in one place where you've got the resources and they can't get a hold of drugs and they can't run away too easily.
Is location going to be a part of the solution or do you think it can be fixed where it is, the 60,000 people in LA? Part of the reason we're in the problem you described is we refuse to acknowledge that we have brains And the brains are different one to the other, and the brains get sick sometimes.
If we don't acknowledge that, well, we can't possibly help people that have these disabilities.
And so that's part of the problem.
Now, going to a separate place, you know, one of the interesting thought experiments you can do with yourself is think about who the pioneers were.
I mean, who went out onto, you know, who thought it was a good idea to walk into these dangerous territories?
And some of the homeless would have been those people, which is kind of an interesting thought experiment to do.
These are people that could be productive in ways, if we could stabilize them, psychiatrically, and find ways to help them be creatively contributed.
My patients, look, I wouldn't have been in the field of addiction treatment if nobody ever got better and nobody ever regained, you know, a place in the world.
Most of my patients did.
So it's possible to do so.
And those that did not still found meaningful existence with their family, as long as you can get them into the process.
And you, of course, have to have the motivation, as you said.
We need to be a little more firm about that.
How many of the people on the street, do you think, out of the 60,000, how many of them would cooperate with anything?
You know, we're really talking about the chronically homeless, right?
The city keeps talking about people who are transiently homeless, which most people get out of homelessness in about three months.
It's those that are permanently homeless and thrive, that want to be on the streets.
And your question was, how many of them would take anything if you offered it?
Is that the question? Well, how many would take help if it meant they had to cooperate with some authorities, go somewhere, get off of drugs, etc.?
This is the point.
Help is available. Right now, we have armies of people available.
But you would have to force them to take the help, right?
Correct. So you would literally need armed people to come in and pick them up off the ground and And probably restrain them and take them to a facility, would you not?
It doesn't have to be that dramatic.
Those armed personnel would be these people who would be enforcing these things called vagrancy laws and drug laws and would say, hey, you have a choice.
I'm going to take you to prison or you can go to treatment.
Okay. Well...
So, what do you think is the problem in getting people to understand the magnitude of it?
Is it that people are saying, well, it's an LA problem, and LA just doesn't have the competence to solve it?
Is it that people think it's someone else's problem, or they're just not seeing it as big a deal as it is?
Most of the country, I think, is not seeing it as big a deal as it is.
Those of us who live here are...
Just this sleepy city is beginning to wake up to what's going on.
We could ignore it.
We could step over it.
It was in concentrated areas, but it is spilled everywhere.
It's all the way into the San Guerrero Valley.
Think about it. That is, what, 25 miles from Skid Row is extended that far.
And so nobody can ignore it anymore.
And crime is going off the chart.
People are dying in the streets.
You can't You can't live in the city and not be aware of it any longer, and so it can no longer be ignored.
What is the one thing that we listening can advocate for?
Whose job is it to declare an emergency, for example, if you think that would be maybe the most important thing?
Is that the most important thing right now?
What I would advise is that all of us keep the heat on our city.
The LA County Board of Supervisors is beginning to respond.
The LA City yesterday just agreed that they need to fight harder against the ACLU and all the organizations that keep suing them.
See, every time they try to do something, the civil liberties organizations come in and sue them and say, you can't touch these people.
You can't touch their belongings.
This is the problem.
And my question, what I keep asking these people that are the do-gooders that have false compassion For people that are dying on the streets, is how many must die?
How many of these people must die before you change your philosophy?
And if they not, if they, and their deaths, soon enough we're going to lead to community deaths, these infectious diseases spread.
So how many must die before you change your damn direction?
So are you saying that the ACLU is literally going to be complicit if things go the way they look like they're going, that the ACLU will literally be behind bubonic plague in Los Angeles?
Categorically. Categorically.
Wow. So let's paint them with that, because this is the first time I've heard that.
I haven't heard a villain, and sometimes you need a villain to organize anger and organize action.
If the ACLU is behind bubonic plague in Los Angeles, I think they need to own that.
There's a woman, an attorney who's one of the leaders, I forget her name again, I wish I could remember it.
I had her on my radio program and I asked her, I said, you know, she was going on about, you know, housing and we asked her two questions.
What is the price that housing should be That would cause homeless people to go indoors.
What's that number? Of course, she didn't have that.
And number two, I asked her how many people are going to die before you stopped it.
How many? Wow.
All right. Dr.
Drew, give us our takeaways.
What can we do as American citizens?
Is there any place to focus our energy to help you on this?
Organizations like the LA Union Mission need your support.
If you have your line at ca.gov, you can just find your representative and send an email.
Supposedly, go ahead.
Well, I have a little bit of audio trouble, so give us the contact again.
Again, if you're in California, you just call the California website.
I believe it's ca.gov, something like that.
And on there you can find your representative and you send them an email.
From the City of Los Angeles, keep an eye out for the proposition.
There will be in 2020 a modification of proposition.
But it's going to be slow, unfortunately.
But we have to keep at it every day.
All right. Well, I will add to the voices and try to be as persuasive as possible.
Scott, you very kindly introduced me to Bill Pulte, and we're building a little coalition of people, and I think coalition building could...
Yeah, we lost the audio there.
All right. Dr.
Joe, I heard you say that Bill Pulte, you're starting to work with him looking at the options and trying to build a little energy around that.
We'll hear more about that through Bill or through you?
In terms of updates on what we're doing, I'll put it out on Twitter.
Okay, so everybody should follow you at, give us your Twitter so we can follow you.
That's easy. All right.
Thank you so much.
I'm going to go on with the rest of my content here.
We all love you for doing this.
It's a tremendous service.
The world owes you for this.
Thank you. I can't not do it, Scott.
I'm a physician. Just every day I wake up thinking about it.
All right. Well, we will help as much as we can.
And thank you again, Dr.
Drew. All right. Well, I mean, that really is a wake-up call, isn't it?
And it's just so hard to find the right levers.
But I think between Dr.
Drew and if Bill Pulte is...
Getting interested in this problem, that brings a whole level of capability that probably they've never seen on this problem.
And I'm talking about a lot of capability.
So maybe the government isn't the right lever.
Maybe it needs to be activists and people with money and people who know how to do stuff.
Let's talk about some other stuff because it can't be all bad news today.
Alright, in no particular order, did you see that the Trump campaign is selling plastic straws as a fundraiser?
So you can buy a plastic straw, according to their website, so you don't have to use the weak paper straws from the liberals.
Now, I like my environment.
And if people say that plastic straws are bad for it, well, who might argue?
I don't know if it's the biggest problem in the world, but less plastic seems like a good idea to me.
That said, this is hilarious.
It is absolutely hilarious that the Trump campaign is selling plastic straws to raise money, and apparently successfully.
It looks like it's doing well.
I actually thought of getting some.
But I don't want to get kicked out of any restaurants.
Ted Cruz and Bill Cassidy have introduced a resolution to have Antifa designated as a domestic terrorist organization.
How about that?
Do you think that will be approved?
Do you think that Congress could approve the resolution to call Antifa a domestic terrorist organization?
Well, that will be interesting, won't it?
I am 100% behind this.
Antifa has to be classified as a dangerous, violent organization.
Now, I get it.
I get it. Not every person who calls themselves Antifa has any intention of being violent.
I get it. I get it that they're fighting against bad people in their minds.
But Unfortunately, when you guys show up in a public place, the people with the costumes, who are sort of what I call lifestyle terrorists, start hurting people.
And you either need to get a new organization, or stop having public events, or live with the fact that Congress is considering.
Just think about the fact, if you're thinking of joining Antifa, Just think about this.
You're thinking of joining and Congress is considering a resolution to designate the organization you're considering joining as a domestic terrorist organization.
Think about that before you put it on your resume.
All right? If you join Antifa and it ever shows up on any social media that you're part of that organization, You are now part of an organization which is being seriously debated to be designated as a domestic terrorist organization.
So things are going to get fun.
Even if that resolution doesn't get approved, you don't want that on your resume.
Trust me, that's not going to get you a job.
A couple of hoaxes to talk about.
A couple more hoaxes.
The world is full of hoaxes lately.
Do you remember that big deal about how Jared got his security clearance, and maybe Ivanka too, and there was some thought that the people who do security clearances had been leaned on, and maybe they short-circuited the process?
Well, it turns out none of that happened.
The people in charge of the security clearances testified and said, no, there's no pressure.
Normal process, just like always.
Total news cycle.
How long did we hear the news about that?
All fake news.
There was literally nothing there.
Here's another one.
Do you remember all that big deal about the president's hush money payments to porn stars and to the playmate?
And was this some kind of a campaign law violation?
Well, it seems that the...
Federal prosecutors in New York have ended their investigation of all that and they kind of didn't care.
Now, I guess they're just not going to pursue it, meaning that it's either not illegal or it can't be proven illegal or they don't care or it's too trivial or something.
But it turns out it was never a big problem.
More fake news.
All right. Here's some more fake news.
The President said that at his rally, when people started chanting, send her back, he said, did you notice I started talking quickly to try to talk over it and shut it down?
And other people said, we've seen the video, Mr.
President. You did not do that.
You did not do that.
Who's right? Did the President try to talk quickly and shut down the chant, or did he not?
Well, you're both right.
Because if you watch the entire video, and of course, we don't live in a world where people show you the entire video anymore, there was a small chant that started, and the president did jump in and continued his speech, and it did slow it down or stop it.
Did you see that?
If you didn't see that part...
Then you probably saw an edited video that's like all the other edited videos to give you a misleading picture.
Now, he started talking but after a while the chance started up again and at that point he just sort of stopped for a moment and turned around and then got back to his speech.
But he wasn't encouraging it and he did try to shut it down the first time it happened.
The second time it happened, it was a little big and he just sort of let it go and then didn't really acknowledge it and kind of went on.
So that was sort of a half true, half false.
It depends which moment you're looking at.
But I'm watching the outrage competition and I'm trying to see who on the left, which anti-Trumpers, even on the right, which ones have done the best Role-playing of being deeply offended.
I've got a feeling that a lot of people who say they're the most offended by it are, first of all, not immigrants and probably are not that offended by it at all.
So it all looks like acting to me.
It's like, yeah, it's the Outrage Olympics.
And I think the winner is S.E. Cups.
If you read her stuff...
I think she's done the best job of being deeply offended by it all.
And so give her credit for acting the most offended.
Now, how much should we care about it?
The president said he was unhappy with the chant.
I would add to that, I am personally unhappy with the chant, but I'm only unhappy about the way it was received.
The people doing the chant, I think, were just having a joke.
It looked like they were having a laugh.
I don't believe anybody chanting thought that Omar was at any risk of being deported, at least for the reasons stated.
But imagine how scary it would be.
Pretty scary. So I would agree with the President's assessment that maybe we should tone that sender back Stuff down, because it does scare a lot of people and it's not fair.
Do you know what else we should stop doing?
Calling people Nazis.
Maybe we should tone that down, don't you think?
Maybe we should give Antifa less reason to hit people on the head when they're not looking.
So, I don't think you can treat them as substantially different.
The problem with the chant, send them home, has nothing to do with the people in the room who are chanting.
It has to do with, let's say, normalizing, normalizing a type of behavior which could lead directly or indirectly to bad behavior because it condones it.
It would make somebody someday somewhere more likely to cross a line because they believe, mistakenly, I think, they would believe that there are a lot of people sort of on their side.
There are a lot of crazy people in the world, a lot of dumb people in the world, and even though there's people at the rally, we're probably just having a laugh with it.
I think they were just doing it for fun.
Somebody's going to take it seriously, and somebody's going to say, well, yeah, we should act on this in some bad way.
In fact, I've seen videos of bad actors telling individuals to go back home.
We don't want that.
But we also don't want people calling us Nazis for wanting good border security, for example.
How about we treat them the same?
How about we make a deal?
No sender home and no Nazi stuff.
Let's call it the same thing because they both have the same effect that it will cause somebody crazy to do something.
Now there's a huge story that I think is only a huge story in the left-leaning Twitterverse and social media and I'm just going to mention it because it would seem missing if I don't.
And it's the allegations that Representative Omar got to the United States under false pretense.
The allegation is that she pretended to marry her brother, and that was part of getting him here or her here or whatever.
Here's my take on all of that.
Don't really care.
Don't really care.
You know, you can have fun with it.
I'm sure the people who are deeply into the politics of it all are going to have fun dancing all over it because it's something about marrying a brother and it's strange behavior and it might be illegal.
Blada, blada, blada, blada.
Here's my take on that.
The legal system can handle that stuff.
And I use the same standard for President Trump that I'm going to apply to Omar, if something is illegal, I'll let the legal system take care of it.
When the legal system is done, I'll take a look at it.
But I'm not the legal system.
I'm not the legal system.
I'm not the one who's going to convict President Trump for whatever he's being accused of.
I'm not the one who's going to start convicting Omar for whatever she's being accused of.
At the moment, there are no proven facts on that that the legal system cares about.
And until the legal system has weighed in, it's none of my frickin' business.
All right? Now, how do I feel about it as a human?
Just how do I feel about it as a person that somebody may have gamed the system to get out of a terrible situation To get to a much better situation in the United States and some allegations that some part of her family went to Great Britain.
How do I feel about that?
Pretty good. Pretty good.
You know, the legal system still has to handle whatever it needs to handle.
So I'm not excusing anything legally.
If there's a legal problem, the legal system will deal with it and I'll weigh in after that.
But when I see somebody in a bad situation who figures out how to bend a rule or two to make their situation better, I say, if that were me, I'd do the same thing.
So let me put this out there as clearly as possible.
If I were in her situation, a bad situation, and I could bend a rule to get to a good situation, I would do it.
I can't judge people ethically or morally for doing exactly what I would do.
Somebody says you're excusing it.
Let me make this clear for the stupid people.
Okay? I'm only going to talk to the stupid people now.
The rest of you already know the answer to this.
For the stupid people, legal responsibility...
Nobody is excusing it.
I just said, if the legal system has a problem with any of it, they will deal with it, and once they're done, I'll make a judgment.
Until they're done, it's innocent until proven guilty.
That's a standard I will die on.
And, personally, I'd do the same thing.
All right? So, if you're saying that's excusing it, Well, you can put any words on it you want, but legally nothing's excused.
We have to play by the same rules, but I would have been to rule in that situation if I were her, so I can't feel too bad about that.
Have you noticed that there are a bunch of stories?
Maybe you haven't noticed, but Mark Schneider's been doing a great job of Keeping people informed about all the Generation 4 or at least new nuclear technology and new builds.
I guess Indonesia has jumped into the lead on nuclear.
They're building something. I guess NuScale?
Is that the NuScale?
A startup is doing something.
So there's a whole bunch of stuff that's getting ready to happen here.
People are asking me about Dershowitz.
So, here's what I know about Alan Dershowitz.
Let me just finish up on the nuclear stuff.
There's a lot of stuff happening in the nuclear startup new technology field.
A lot of stuff.
And it's hard to imagine that's not going to make a big difference to civilization.
So, thanks to Mark Schneider for keeping us informed on all of that.
Alright, let's talk about Alan Dershowitz.
Again, innocent until proven guilty.
What is the one thing that Alan Dershowitz argues for his clients and argues for President Trump and argues for anybody who has been accused?
Consistently and every time he says, innocent until proven guilty.
So what do I say about Alan Dershowitz?
Innocent. Unless somebody proves him guilty.
Now, what are the odds of it?
That's what you want to know, right?
You want me to predict?
You want me to tell you the odds?
Well, I've watched the accusers, and if you watch the accusers in isolation, you say to yourself, huh, that sounds pretty bad, because accusers will often sound credible in isolation.
Then you hear Alan Dershowitz talk about those same accusers and things that I think we know about their history, for example.
And you say to yourself, oh, that changes everything.
So I will only base this opinion on what I've heard so far.
There may be things I haven't heard.
But based on hearing the accusers and then hearing Dershowitz talk about his side of it, I will tell you that guilty people don't talk the way he talks.
Guilty people don't do what he's doing.
Guilty people don't use the mannerisms, the words, any of it.
If I were to judge him just on mannerism, words, actions, how he's dealing with it, how much he's willing to release all of his information, if we can see their information as well, he's either The smartest guilty person who ever lives.
Can't rule that out.
Or he's totally innocent because he's acting like an innocent guy.
Secondly, when he gives his version of, let's say, framing what we know about the accusers, it's really damning.
In other words, the accusers have credibility problems that aren't small.
They are not small problems.
Somebody says, why did I judge Smollett, you hypocrite?
I'll just get rid of you.
Some people just like to complain.
So, here's my take on Dershowitz.
Based on what I've seen so far, I would say innocent.
That's my prediction.
If there's some new person, new accusation, and something else comes up, well, it's something I haven't seen, and therefore I don't have an opinion on things I haven't seen.
But, based on what we know, listening to his defense, and listening to the accusers, Dershowitz is a lot more persuasive.
That's all I can tell you.
Now, you have to keep in mind that he's an expert on people being accused.
So if anybody could put up a good defense, it would be him, obviously.
But he looks really innocent to me.
Doesn't mean he is.
But he's innocent until proven guilty, and it doesn't look like anybody's going to prove it.
Because what he said about the accusers...
It looks like that's easy to demonstrate.
In other words, he's making claims about the accusers which are easy to verify, that they've made other claims in the past, for example, that were not credible.
So I think that he's going to be okay when this is all done.
All right. The most interesting thing...
All right, here's another tidbit.
Joel Pollack...
Of Breitbart pointed this out, and I love this observation.
So apparently Omar said recently, and forgive her bad grammar, but she said, if I was wearing a MAGA hat, if there was a Somali person wearing a MAGA hat, they would not be deported.
Because I criticized the president, I should be deported.
Now, as Joel points out, she just said it wasn't racist.
Wasn't the whole point that it's racist?
But her statement is that if she were exactly the same race, exactly the same person, same gender, same ethnicity, same situation, if everything had been the same, this is what Omar is saying, but she was also a Trump supporter wearing a MAGA hat, she says that nobody would want to deport her.
So, in other words, it's not about her race.
Says Omar.
At the same time, she's saying, well, it's all about my race.
So it feels to me as if the whole you're a racist, you're a racist thing, it's just completely dissolving.
It's just falling apart.
It's just stupid at this point.
There used to be a point, and I think it was a legitimate point.
If you went back, I don't know, let's make it easy.
Let's go back three decades.
Three decades ago, if somebody said, hey, somebody's being racist against white people, you would have said, most people would have said, that's not a thing.
Yeah, you can be bad to white people, but you can't be racist against them because they have all the power, and it doesn't work that way.
The powerless are not really racist against the people in power.
So that was three decades ago and really up to the present people would have said something like that.
It no longer looks that way to me.
To me it looks like there is absolute unambiguous racism against at least Trump supporters, at least conservatives, and mostly white people.
So I think that that framing of that you can't be racist against white people, I feel as if this is the year that that changed.
I feel as if this is the year that you could go in public and say, oh yeah, it's just total racism.
It might not be as bad as other people's racism.
It might be a different kind.
There might be a different power dynamic in play.
That could all be true. But let's call it what it is.
People are getting pretty racist in every direction.
Now, what I've said before, and I'll say again, people don't have an option of not being biased because your brain is a pattern recognition machine, but it's not very good at it.
So we see patterns everywhere, but some huge percentage of the time it's just an illusion, but then we form our opinions based on those illusions.
So people are, by nature, Biased by their experience and anybody who's different is going to be automatically the subject of bias.
So the way we should be judged is the degree to which we can overcome it.
And I think we have to just accept that we are a really bigoted species.
Pretty much everybody.
And it's expressed in different ways and different amounts.
And I'm not saying it's all equal.
I'm just saying that everybody looks pretty bigoted to me, one way or another.
But we're not all as equally talented at dealing with that.
All right. Let's talk about something else.
Here's some good news.
Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham apparently went golfing with the president recently.
And came away with an agreement that Rand Paul could talk to a senior Iranian official, I guess the official will be in the United States, and try to see if they can get some conversation started about peace.
Now, what do you think of Rand Paul as, let's say, a key diplomat in this context, a key negotiator with Iran?
What do you think of that? Might be one of the best ideas I've ever seen.
So I've said this before.
I don't agree with all of Rand Paul's political, philosophical leanings.
So I can't say I'm on the same page with him fairly frequently.
But here's some things we can say about him.
Number one, he's more creative than normal politicians.
Check. You're going to need somebody who thinks outside the box.
Somebody who's not constrained by anything.
And I don't believe that Rand Paul is constrained by anything except what he thinks is a good idea.
So that's good.
That's the person you want there.
Secondly, because of his weird independent stance, he's not a Democrat.
He's not really a Republican.
He just works with Republicans.
He's sort of his own person.
And I'm trying to think, is there any instance or allegation against Rand Paul for being not trustworthy?
Is there any scandal I'm not aware of?
Because I believe Rand Paul might be just about, correct me if I'm wrong, might be The most credible person in the entire government.
Am I wrong?
Because here's what we could know about Rand Paul.
Just because the politics are leaning in one direction tells you absolutely nothing about what Rand Paul is going to do, right?
He seems to be completely free from political wind.
And he seems to have the ability to, first of all, be persuasive.
I feel as though he's become more and more persuasive even just in recent years.
So he's probably the United States best.
Now, I suppose you could find somebody who's been retired for a while, etc.
But does Iran want to talk to some 80-year-old retired person who used to be negotiating during the Reagan era?
No. They want to talk to somebody who just golfed with President Trump.
Rand Paul is just about perfect for this job.
Just about perfect.
Now here's the better part.
Lindsey Graham had this idea he wrote about recently.
With Jack Keene, General Jack Keene, in the Wall Street Journal, talking about a deal, a proposed deal with Iran in which they could continue their nuclear development, but it would be for peaceful nuclear power, and the fuel rods,
which would be the dangerous part that you could turn into weapons, I suppose, that the fuel rods could come from China or Russia, and the United States might be okay with that because China and Russia already have nukes, And they have an interest in keeping Iran non-nuclear too.
So maybe everybody wins.
Now that's not enough because there are all kinds of other issues, support for Hezbollah, whatever they're doing in Yemen, you know, a bunch of other stuff.
But as a basic starting point, it's really good.
And as Lindsey Graham pointed out, if Iran poo-pooed that completely, You know, the idea of using their nuclear capabilities for peaceful nuclear power.
Remember, that's what they say they want it for.
Iran says they want it to build power plants.
That's been their story.
So if they won't accept their own story of why they want nuclear power, well, then you've proven that there's ulterior Ulterior objectives and then you have to deal with it, but you'd have more power to deal with it because then it would be more clear what the problem is.
So yeah, we could call them on it.
So I've been telling you that the Middle East, different from any time in history, the Middle East peace is down to one person who needs to change their opinion.
That's it. The Ayatollah in Iran.
If that one person Decides to play well.
We've got something amazing.
And you can't overstate the power of luck and timing and being in the right place.
But you need a President Trump.
You probably need a Rand Paul.
I think you need a Lindsey Graham.
These are really strong players.
You need a Netanyahu strong player.
And I know you're not going to like this.
But you need Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince MBS. He's a strong player in the sense that he's willing to go against convention.
He's willing to go against history.
He seems to have control of his country and he wants peace.
He wants to work something out.
Yes, brutal murder.
We're not overlooking that.
But we have never been this close.
It's right on the Right on the cusp.
Now, of course, the Ayatollah could blow it all up tomorrow and send us back to square one, but we've never been this close.
Let me give you one other negotiating concept.
Somebody said they like watching my periscopes because they pick up some negotiating tips.
Here's a negotiating tip for Iran, sort of working in North Korea.
We've already said, hey, Iran, Your economy could be great.
You could be a great country.
But I think we should make an offer that's just bigger than all offers.
In other words, I don't think it's enough.
It doesn't change the way you think about things enough to simply say, hey, let's stop being bad with each other.
Stopping being bad isn't enough.
We should offer...
That they become part of something big.
You know, part of the golden age, if you will.
They should be, Iran should be, wait for it, an ally of the United States.
That should be the ask.
The ask should not be, hey, can we be less afraid you're going to nuke us?
That's not big enough.
That's not good negotiating.
Good negotiating is, I don't want to just stop being your enemy.
We need to be allies, because we've got some big issues coming up.
We don't want to go to war with you.
You don't want to go to war with us.
We never want to go to war.
If you could maybe just stop some of these proxies, you could be our ally, and then anything's possible.
So I would make a bigger ask than just fewer nukes.
I would go full ally.
And I would do the same with Russia, by the way.
Full ally as an offer.
Because then when you're negotiating back from that, it changes everything about the way you think of it.
It's completely different to say stop being bad than it is to say, how about you just be our ally?
How about if somebody attacks you, Iran, maybe we'll help you out.
Not right away, but, you know, when things get going.
Maybe Iran would like a little military protection from outside forces.
I don't see that we would necessarily be against that, you know, if they're part of a larger security agreement.
Speaking of North Korea, apparently their trade with China is way down.
It's down 48% since the sanctions started.
So I think North Korea is going to get flexible.
I think Iran is already flexible and are making signals like they might.
But I know what you want to talk about.
You want to talk about the President's tweet in which he went after Thomas Friedman.
I will read the tweet for your entertainment.
All right, this is from the President of the United States, apparently Thomas Friedman, famous author and writer for the New York Times.
He must have said something the President didn't like.
Something the President didn't like, because the President gave him three vicious tweets.
I will read them.
President Trump says, Thomas, quote, the chin, Friedman, the chin.
If you haven't seen a picture of Thomas Friedman, And I'd only say this because it's headline news.
I'm not comfortable talking about people's appearance, but here it is.
He has a weak chin.
He just doesn't have much of a chin.
So by Trump nicknaming him the chin, it draws attention to his least good feature.
Because remember, he's an otherwise good-looking guy, you know, smart, successful.
He doesn't have many flaws, except that chin.
So the president goes after the chin.
Thomas the Chin Friedman, a weak and pathetic sort of guy, writes columns for the New York Times in between rounds of his favorite game, golf.
I don't know why that's there.
Two weeks ago, while speaking to a friend on his cell phone, I unfortunately ended up speaking to Friedman.
I don't know why we need all those details.
We spoke for a while and he could not have been a nicer or more respectful to your favorite president, me.
I love when he calls himself your favorite president.
Over time it'll wear you down.
Then I saw the column he wrote.
Quote, Trump will be re-elected, won't he?
He called me a racist, which I am not.
And said Rhode Island went from economically bad to great in five years because the governor of the state did a good job.
That may be true, but she could not have done it without the tremendous economic success of our country and the turnaround that my administration has caused.
Really nasty to me in his average IQ columns.
His average IQ columns.
So he's calling Friedman...
So he's called him the chin, a weak and pathetic sort of guy, And that he writes average IQ columns and that he, quote, kissed my ass on the call.
Phony. Man, our president does not like Thomas Friedman.
Here's what I think.
You know, when Nancy Pelosi and I saw some other people frame it this way, they said of the send-them-home quote, They said that the tweet was racist, which is different from saying the person is racist.
Can we agree that people can say things which are bad without being bad people?
Is that a thing? Can we agree that that's possible?
Nancy Pelosi says so.
I think it is.
That would be important.
But we continually conflate offensive with racists.
How offensive was it for President Trump to call Thomas Friedman the chin, a weak and pathetic sort of guy with an average IQ column who kisses his ass and he's a phony?
Is that not offensive?
Well, yeah, it is.
It's meant that way.
It's intended to be offensive.
Now, is the president a racist?
Because he criticized Thomas Friedman.
No. Why?
Because Thomas Friedman is a generic adult white guy.
But if he criticizes the people who have banded together as the squad, who either by coincidence or intention happen to be people of color and women, if the president criticizes them with this kind of fire, What will people say?
Racist! Racist!
Now, I'm pretty sure if Thomas Friedman had been born in Great Britain, that the President would have at least considered saying he should go back home.
So, I'm kind of in the camp of the President is offensive, and if you think that offensive is the same as racist, there's something wrong with you.
That's a problem on your end.
Now, if you're complaining because he's being offensive and you don't like your president to be offensive, I would say, well, okay, that's an opinion.
I happen to think it's hilarious.
I happen to think it works.
So it's effective and it's hilarious.
But it's also undignified.
And if somebody thinks that's more important, I would say that's a reasonable opinion.
It's not one I'm likely to adopt, but it's not unreasonable.
But when you say that somebody who is offensive to everyone is a racist when he's offensive to people of color, that's just not flying.
That's just not good, anything.
All right. I think we've talked about How many of you noticed on Jeopardy last night, one of the answers was me?
So I was a Jeopardy answer last night.
The question was, I guess the answer was, because Jeopardy works backwards, the answer was the creator of Dilbert who got an MBA from Berkeley.
And I think I got that one right.
I think that was me.
All right. Those are all...
I will close by saying, if you did not see Bill Pulte's Periscope, it's on his Twitter feed.
You can see it on my Twitter feed as well, in which he awarded a car, a $20,000 car and $10,000 in cash to a veteran who is a woman who is a single mom.
And it is the coolest thing to watch.
You have to watch that video.
Because to watch the veteran...
I was a woman.
And to watch her reaction to how much that changed her life, to have some transportation and little cash to get going, that's life-changing.
And I'll tell you what I love about it.
You know, one of the things that makes our military the best in the world is is the psychology of it.
I mean, a lot of other reasons too, obviously.
But the psychology of our military is a big part of their success and their effectiveness.
And part of that psychology is you don't leave people behind.
So you don't leave the wounded behind.
You don't even leave the dead behind.
You don't leave anybody behind.
And even if you risk your own life, you don't leave people behind.
And when I watch Bill Pulte, who is in effect...
Helping a veteran who, at least in an economic sense, had been left behind, it really makes you feel good.
It really makes you feel...
That's something important to our human experience, important to the military, important to the defense, important to the national psyche, the national mental health.
There's something important happening there.
So keep your eyes on Bill Pulte.
What he's doing is amazing, and I can't say enough about it, but I will tell you, you're going to hear more from Bill Pulte.
I've got a little bit of idea what's in the pipeline.
And there's some good stuff coming.
I gave $1,000 recently through Bill's efforts to a veteran and family whose possessions burned up.
It was in a moving truck and the entire moving truck caught on fire and they lost everything they owned.
And so a number of us, including me, donated some money to, it won't cover all of it, but at least, you know, it'll take some of the sting away.
And I was honored.
You know, I gave $1,000, and the only thing I felt about it was honored.
I felt that in some small way, and it is small, a small way that I could help this veteran in ways that veterans help us all the time.
So, that's your feel-good moment.
Let's take that into the rest of the day and watch for more Bill Pulte news.
It's going to be fun.
There's stuff coming up.
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