All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 1, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:09:49
Episode 615 Scott Adams: Who Won the Debate Last Night, Reagan’s Phone Call, A$AP Rocky
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Andrew, come on in.
We've got lots of seats up in the front.
Take one. Doug, good to see you.
Morgan, Deep Southern, always a pleasure.
You're all my favorite people, and you're here right away.
Well, well, well, we've got lots to talk about.
But before we get into the talking...
There's something more important than the talking.
It requires a little talking and a little sipping, and it might require you to have a cup or a mug or a glass, a stein, a chalice, a tankard, a thermos, a flask, a canteen, a vessel of any kind, as long as it holds the liquid.
The liquid of your favorite...
I don't know how to end that sentence, but your favorite liquid.
How about that? And if you have it in a cup or a mug or a glass or a container, Lift it to your lips now and enjoy with me the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Today's going to be a good day.
Sip with me now. Shaking off the evening.
Getting ready to start fresh.
Well, let me catch up with the news.
If none of you have been watching the news lately, here are the stories.
President Trump, racist.
All Republicans, racist.
All people who voted for Trump, racists.
Kamala Harris, racist.
Joe Biden, racist.
Aesop Rocky, racist.
And Ronald Reagan, racist.
Bam! There you go.
That's your news for the day.
Every single person in the world is a damn racist.
Except you! Not you!
Whoa, I'm sorry, did I indicate that you were a racist?
No, not you. I meant everybody in the world except you.
You're awesome. Everybody else?
I feel sorry for them.
Those poor, poor racist bastards.
Every single one of them.
Except you. Luckily, you're not.
But the other 7 billion people, they got some explaining to do.
I'll catch you up on all this.
But let's talk about...
Well, we have to start with the Reagan tape.
Have you all heard the recently produced recording?
Not produced, but recently discovered...
Recording of Reagan talking to Richard Nixon and saying the most racist thing you've ever heard in your life?
Pretty bad.
I'm happy to say that I was never a big Reagan fan.
I was a huge fan of his communication ability, so that part he certainly got right.
He got a lot of other things right, too.
I think he dealt with the Soviet Union right, probably.
He may have gotten some lucky credit for the fall of the Soviet Union.
It might have happened on his own.
But in general, he wasn't really my god.
You know, I didn't pray to Reagan.
I never was that guy. As you know, I'm left of Bernie.
So Reagan was never my guy, but I always admired his skill.
You know, the same as I feel for President Trump.
Skill can be called out separately.
Character can be dealt with separately.
Politics can be dealt with separately.
But the skill of being a politician, I wouldn't take that away from him.
Even though that tape is just about the worst thing you've ever heard.
But it raises an interesting question.
It raises an interesting question.
Oh, somebody's asking what he said.
All right, so not everybody heard it.
I'm going to try to tell you what he said without saying it, if you don't mind.
He used the M word.
The M as in monkey.
And he used it in this context.
He was talking about, to President Nixon, he said that he was watching some African nation celebrating, and he said that they look like the M-word, and that they were still uncomfortable wearing shoes.
Yeah, that's pretty bad.
That's pretty bad.
But here's what I want to talk about.
We have as a basic standard in this country that if you do something, if your actions are bad or racist or illegal or whatever, whatever your actions are, you can be judged by them.
You can be fired from your job.
You can go to prison, depending on the action.
So we do have as a standard that your actions are what we judge the harshest.
And we've had as a standard that your private thoughts are not judged the same way we judge your actions.
So you could have some pretty bad thoughts, but if you never express them in the real world, we generally believe that you would be called a good person in that case.
Imagine, if you will, somebody who has some bad thoughts about committing a crime, but never does, never even gets close, but the thoughts are there.
They kind of wish they could commit this really bad crime, whatever this crime is, but they don't.
They never do.
Never do anything that's even close to that.
How do we judge that person?
Do we say, I don't know, that person is just like a criminal because of the way they think.
Well, first of all, we don't know how they think.
That's hard to judge.
But secondly, we say, all right, we're going to say we can only judge you on your behavior.
But then now there's this middle ground.
That is getting bigger and bigger.
It was always there, but because so many things are recorded, and so many things are surfacing that were recorded long ago, that we have this middle ground, which is not really your actions, and it's not really your thoughts.
It's things you said privately to one other person or small group.
How should we as a society judge People's private pronouncements to another person in the context of believing it would never be public.
Is that sort of a private thought, which we mostly agree should not be criminalized, or is that an action?
Because they actually said it in the real world.
They didn't intend it ever to be known, but it got out.
Now, I'm not trying to defend Reagan.
Like I said, Reagan was never my guy.
I just admired some of his skill level.
But you have to ask yourself, how deep do we go in this surfacing people's private conversations?
Let me tell you why this is important.
Everything I say in my own house privately, even when no one else is in the house, is all recorded or recordable.
I have devices, several of them, not just my phone, but the Amazon device that I won't name, in several of my major rooms in the house, and they can record and do record me.
So all of my private thoughts The things that I imagine nobody would ever hear could someday be part of the public record, as could all of yours.
Things that you said privately to one person, should you run for president, somebody's going to find out about it.
So we should make a decision as a society how important we're going to treat that.
I'm not sure I have an exact decision on that, but it seems to me that we should treat it as that middle ground it is, and not treat it like an action, and maybe not treat it like a private thought.
Because, you know, if you say things out loud, you're sort of releasing it into the world, even if you're releasing it to one person.
But I feel like the offense...
is closer to the thought crime.
It's not, because it entered the real world.
But in terms of severity, I think we should judge it partly in terms of how long ago it happened.
That does matter. I think we should count that.
It should matter how long ago it happened.
And whether it was closer to a thought crime or a real-world crime.
So, I'm not going to give you an opinion on how you should treat those, but I think we should put things in context properly.
Speaking of context, there's some criticism going around the internet about Aesop Rocky.
Somebody discovered that the lyrics of one of his songs was very critical of President Trump, as it turns out, likening President Trump to the KKK. And some people say that the lyrics suggest a desire for assassination.
Specifically in the song, I think the line is that we were hoping for JFK, but we got KKK. And some say, whoa, you mentioned JFK. Didn't he get assassinated?
Were you hoping for JFK? Meaning, were you hoping that the president, this president gets assassinated?
Or are you just saying, we were hoping for a very progressive president?
Now, I think that's a good argument.
The people saying, no, no, no, the JFK reference, the way I read it, is not assassination.
It's rather that he was a progressive, you know, kind of president, the one that you would want.
But here's the question you have to ask yourself.
Why wouldn't he say Obama?
If you were going to mention a president that you wanted, one that gave you everything you wanted and was inspirational for, let's say, your demographic part of society, why wouldn't you mention Obama?
If I said to the typical African-American voter in this country, hey, name a president that you respected, somebody who was really progressive and stood for the ideals that you stand for, would they say JFK? No, somebody says it rhymes better.
Oh yeah, that counts.
It rhymes better.
But later in the song he mentions assault rifles.
So if you mention JFK, you mention that this current president you believe is in the KKK, you know, in essence, not in reality, and you talk about AR-15s in the same lyrics, and your lyrics are a little bit ambiguous because it's not uncommon that you read song lyrics and you don't know exactly what the artist meant.
Yeah, I'm acknowledging here, I'm seeing in the comments.
Yes, JFK and KKK, they fit together better as a lyrical scheme.
So I'm going to go, I'm going to say that you can't tell.
It's ambiguous. So my opinion is, I can see why people think he's referring to assassination.
It's easy to see how people think that, but I could also easily imagine that he wasn't thinking anything like that at all.
He did, however, say that the president was in the KKK. I mean, not literally as in a member, but in essence.
What does that do to those of you watching this video?
Does it not paint a target on your back for violence?
It does. It does.
Yeah, if somebody who's a prominent artist says that the person that you voted for is a member of the KKK, in essence, is he not saying that violence against you would be justified?
I say yes.
I say yes. So people who have been on A $AP Rocky's side might look at that lyric.
And ask themselves if they have been targeted for violence by that song.
I say yes. So I would say that A $AP Rocky's lyrics target me for violence.
Actually me, personally, for violence.
And am I okay with that?
Well, I'll tell you what.
If he didn't commit any crimes in Sweden, if it turns out that Sweden frees him, then I say, well, the legal system has done its duty.
If Sweden decides that he did commit a crime, and they've got the evidence, and he gets a fair trial, and he goes to jail in Sweden, I'm okay with that.
If he committed a real crime and it's a real trial and they have real evidence and stuff, I wouldn't want anybody to get railroaded, American or otherwise.
But if he committed a crime, I'm okay with that.
And I don't think we should hold him up as any kind of a role model.
And honestly, I wouldn't spend a half a second of my time, and I regret that I ever tweeted anything in his support.
So I deeply regret...
My first impression was that we should put a lot of resources into helping him, because he's targeted me, and many of you, for violence by his artistic expression.
So I don't forgive that.
Not even a little bit. I don't forgive that even a little bit.
So let the legal system in Sweden do its thing, I say.
All right. Although I do, you know, the fact that the president, you know, put in some effort to try to get him out of there is a good look, especially given what ASAP said about the president.
It's a good look for the president to try to get him out.
And that is the president's job.
So I guess he played it right.
Anyway, would you like an update on my scandal?
Did anybody come here for a scandal update?
I'm not even going to reiterate the scandal that you all know.
But I said something in a tweet that was poorly received.
I apologize for it, clarified it, that it was taken differently than I intended it, but it doesn't make me less responsible for tweeting it.
It's just that it wasn't quite the way I intended it.
So I did my duty.
I explained in detail what I was thinking.
I said that I wouldn't do it that way again.
And I apologized to the people who were relevant to the apology, but not to the Not to the outraged tourists, the people who just enjoy being outraged and the people who are just being outraged for political purposes because they're picking off targets before 2020.
So those people I don't apologize to because no apology is needed.
They're not really the offended class.
They're just actors, essentially.
But traffic is up.
You're looking at the Periscope, 2.8 thousand people on here.
That's substantially better than before.
Traffic at the app is up.
Sign-ups are up.
YouTube traffic is way up.
But YouTube traffic is up while monetization is way down.
So monetization on YouTube is way down.
While viewership numbers are sharply up.
Why? Because YouTube has decided that my content, no matter what I actually say, regardless of the actual specific content of the videos, they're all demonetized automatically.
Until we complain, so they have a process for asking for a manual review, the manual review reverses it Basically every time and the few times it didn't are obviously mistakes because there wasn't any content in there that was any substantially different than anything else I do.
So I have essentially a hundred percent clean content in my opinion.
I think that's I can say that with confidence.
There is nothing I've ever produced on any of these videos that would be even remotely against the terms of service.
Nothing even close. They do have, of course, responsibility to their advertisers to match content with advertising that makes sense.
So I understand that that's a legitimate need.
But they do have a business model...
That treats me harshly, but also people who would be anti-Trump, that they're getting treated harshly too, because they talk about the same contents in their own way.
The same content, but in their own way.
So, here's the...
Those of you who gave me advice, I want to give you an update.
So, I got a lot of advice.
When you're in a scandal, you get a lot of advice.
I don't think most of you are good at giving advice.
Let me just say that as a general statement.
People aren't really good at giving advice.
Yeah, we got seven billion people on the planet, and of that seven billion, the total number of them that are good at giving advice, I don't know.
300? It's really rare when people are good at giving advice.
And this situation is so unique that people aren't really equipped, but they think they are.
So the common thing that people say is, well, you've got to apologize and take down that tweet.
That's really terrible advice.
It actually is. It seems like it's good advice.
But it's actually terrible advice.
If you take something down from Twitter, you become worse, not better.
That's how Twitter works.
If you don't understand that, you've never been asked to take something down or you've never taken something down.
If you're in the public eye and you do something offensive on Twitter and then you take it down, People will take a photocopy of it, the screen grab from the archive, and they'll start a whole new round of what's wrong with you and how bad you are and the cowardly you are for taking it down.
So you never take it down.
I've made that mistake in the past.
It just gets worse.
So for all the people who gave me advice, you should take down that tweet, Scott.
Don't you understand what you've done?
No. Worst advice ever.
Secondly, apologies do have a place.
But you should never apologize for the whole thing if you've been misunderstood.
You should make sure that your only apologies are in the context of saying, clearly I didn't mean it that way, because clearly I didn't mean it to hurt anybody.
And there was a reason I thought it wouldn't, and I gave my reasons.
I had a blind spot, and I said, oh, I have a blind spot.
I completely acknowledge the complaints of my critics as valid.
Completely accepted the complaints as valid.
That's really disarming.
There's nothing more disarming than completely accepting the criticism of your critics.
And it should get very close to the end of the topic, right?
Once you've said, you know, everything you say, I take that as a valid criticism.
Here's why I did it.
Here's who I apologize to.
Let's move on. But taking down the tweet just sort of erases your history and makes you look like a weasel.
So the biggest complaint I got is from the people who said I didn't complain, or I didn't apologize, but of course that was the first thing I did, and it's pinned to my Twitter, and people still like to complain.
All right. So the bottom line is, socially I came out behind because people are mad at me, I guess.
In person, Zero people have expressed that.
So in my daily life of just, you know, interacting with humanity, zero people had any problem with anything I did.
So of all the people I meet in real life, people would actually talk to me.
Plenty of them think I shouldn't have tweeted what I tweeted, but there's nobody really has a problem with me in real life.
None. Or at least nobody has expressed it.
So I don't have any experience of it in the real life.
It's only sort of an online outrage thing, which is part of why I know it's artificial.
All right. So enough on that.
Too much about me. Let's talk about the Democratic debate.
Who won? Who lost?
All right. I made a prediction ahead of the debate.
It was a small prediction.
I put in a comment to a Van Jones tweet.
And I said this.
I read a lack of confidence talking about Harris.
I read a lack of confidence in her public persona, but if she nails this debate, which I said was likely, and her poll number Surge looked for a confident Kamala to emerge, which would be hard to beat.
So I said it would be likely, That Harris would nail the debate, that she would do well.
Because she seems to do well in set pieces.
She does well when she's interrogating somebody in Congress.
She did well in the last debate.
She did not do well in this debate.
And her biggest problem is, in my opinion, confidence.
She doesn't act like she thinks she belongs there, and it comes across.
If she can't act like she belongs there, then the voters will agree with her.
The voters are going to agree with her if she looks like she doesn't think she belongs there.
So there's a lack of confidence in her body language.
When she was being criticized, if you saw her face when she was being criticized by the other candidates, which was the normal thing that was happening up there, she looked bothered and thrown off.
Her face registered that.
The other candidates, when they would be just excoriated, is that the right word?
They would be getting ripped apart, and you'd see their faces, and they'd just either have a little smile like, Or they would just look at you like it didn't matter.
And those are much better ways to play it.
But she projects a lack of confidence.
And by the way, I was listening to her talk in my headphones without looking at her, and I discovered something that I hadn't noticed before.
When you take Kamala Harris's voice out of the visual, in other words, if you're only listening to her but you're not looking at her at the same time, it's much weaker.
So her voice, outside of her personal appearance, gets very forgettable and weak.
And that's tough to get past.
I've often thought that you could predict the presidency by voice.
If you just had a bunch of people listen to people's voices talking about absolutely anything, you'd do a pretty good job of predicting who's going to be the next president, male and female.
I think voice and the confidence you put across and the power that you put in your voice It might be 60% of the game.
I mean, it's that big a deal.
We are so influenced by voice quality.
One of the things I noticed when I worked in my corporate career is that not only was there executive hair, the executives all seemed to have similar haircuts and good hair.
I thought, how is it likely that all of the executives have good hair?
What are the odds of that?
But they also had really interesting voices.
The executives, now this was also years ago, so I think things may have changed since then, but they had those executive deep voices.
And even the women who were succeeding had more, I'd say, masculine-sounding, at least mannerisms, if not voices.
So voices are very important.
The best voices up there are Biden, Biden, by far, has one of the best executive-sounding voices.
If you could divorce the things that Biden says and the things that he's done and his policies, if you could imagine all of that away and just listen to the tonal quality of his voice, it's really presidential.
And I have a feeling that a lot of the reason that people think he's their guy and the front runner, knowing nothing about any of the subjects, how many of the voters at this point do you think even understand healthcare, immigration?
How many of them have any understanding of those topics?
I would say none.
Out of the entire country, the number of people who understand healthcare?
Zero. Zero.
Including the experts. Zero.
How many people understand the exact right way to do immigration?
I mean, we generally have some preferences about children in cages.
We don't like that part. But who understands the whole complicated thing?
Nobody. Nobody.
But I do believe people hear a confident voice and they say, well, I don't understand those things.
But that voice sure sounds like somebody who understands those things.
And we'll get to the other players in a minute.
So let me just go down the list of who did well and who didn't.
Biden, I think...
Who is going to take a hit in the polls?
I think that Biden made some old man errors that you can't really get past.
They sort of reveal that he's not completely on his game.
And it wasn't It wasn't the biggest error in the world, but because we're looking for this kind of error, it makes it look bigger.
So at the end, I guess, even Vox, which is a left-leaning entity, said that he, quote, bungled the debate closing statement.
If you hear the word bungled coming from your own team...
You've bungled. That's a bad bungle when your own team says the word bungle.
Because your side doesn't use the word bungle unless you bungled.
And what he did in particular, Was that he said, if you agree with me, go to Joe3330.
And everybody laughed and said, that's not a website.
It's Joe2020 that's the website.
But of course, he wasn't talking about the website.
He was talking about a phone line or code that you can call to, I don't know, donate or do something.
But the mere fact...
That old Sleepy Joe, who probably has never used a computer, the fact that he would not distinguish between a landline and a website, that's pretty bad.
It's as bad as a look.
There's nothing wrong with it, really.
He just didn't clarify that it was a telephone line.
If he had, it would have been fine.
But just the fact that he got up there and promoted a telephone line, In 2019.
If you're promoting using the telephone in 2019, what do the young people say?
Now, of course, you know, smartphones are, you know, part of their body practically, but just the fact that the way you phrased it was telephonically, as opposed to website-y, you know, more modern language, sort of a tell.
That people aren't going to love.
Actually, it's a text number, but just the fact that he screwed that up makes him look like an old man.
And then he said, he referred to eight more years of Donald Trump will change America in a fundamental way.
Now what he meant is eight years of Trump, and what he meant was four more years.
So when he said eight more years, very normal verbal slip, something anybody could have done at any age, at any IQ. But because it's Biden, it's a national story, then he said a sentence wrong that we know what he meant.
So these are little things, but the fact that even his friends, you know, the people on the left are pointing this stuff out, means they're not all on that page, if you know what I mean.
The most interesting thing about the debates was that Obama got thrown totally under the bus.
I did not see that coming.
One week ago, you would have expected that all Democrats would have supported Obama and all Republicans would have said good things about Reagan.
Well, two weeks ago is a long time.
Because this week, we're throwing Obama under the bus.
In fact, the protesters who were there at the debate were protesting that Obama had deported so many people.
Obama! Now, I don't know if they were legitimate protesters or paid protesters just to mess things up for the Democrats.
I suspect that might be part of it.
But they were anti-Joe Biden because of his connection to Obama.
And watching people frame Obama as bad on immigration, watching the Democrats do it, was amazing.
Like, I don't mean amazing good, I mean remarkable.
So it was like a spectacle to behold in that way.
And I thought, yeah, and even Joe Scarborough, In his words, they portrayed Obama as, quote, more heartless than Donald Trump on immigration.
And they were also against Obamacare.
So the Democrats just went full Trump.
What has Trump been saying?
Obama deported more people.
What has Trump been saying?
Obama built the cages for the kids.
What has Trump been saying?
He's been saying that Obamacare was a bad idea.
The Democrats just agreed with Trump on the most major issues that they care about.
Now, they obviously don't agree on all the details, blah, blah, blah.
But it was amazing watching the party just self-immolate by attacking the things which they were strongest on in order to get at Biden.
All right. In essence...
The people who are anti-Biden, the Democrats that are trying to get past Biden for the nomination, is it my imagination or did they try to frame Biden as Trump?
They're not trying to become the nominee to be Trump.
They just framed Biden as just another Trump.
They didn't say just another old white guy, but they kind of meant it.
Don't you think? I mean, nobody's going to say that.
But it's kind of easy to lump Biden with Trump because they're both old white guys.
So your brain just automatically, your bigoted brain just puts them in the same category.
So it might be effective.
It might be exactly the thing that takes Biden out.
I don't know. Harris actually accused Biden of working with segregationists.
That's like one of the dirtiest attacks.
First of all, there's no one, including Republicans, who believes that Joe Biden's a racist, right?
Does anybody think Joe Biden's a racist?
No. No.
Even the people who desperately don't want him to be president, they don't think he's a racist.
But when you see Harris say that Biden was working with segregationists and then she just sort of moves on to her point, it makes it seem as though Biden was agreeing with segregationists.
No. He was working with people who had been elected to Congress because he didn't have any choice.
Once somebody's elected to Congress, that's who you work with.
It's not up to you who you work with.
You didn't make the decision.
You didn't vote for the segregationists.
You're just trying to get something done.
And the things he was trying to get done were not segregationist policies.
He was trying to work with them to do something that wasn't segregationist.
So the fact that she threw him under the bus as, quote, working with segregationists when it was a day and time when that was the only option, was, first of all, a super dirty trick, and second of all, pretty darn effective.
As dirty tricks go, eh, A+. So, consistent with my trying to separate technique from whether I personally agree with it, her technique of matching the idea of Biden with segregationists is really strong.
It's a really strong technique.
It's just totally illegitimate.
Totally. It just won't matter.
It works anyway. Biden made the mistake of saying that if a PhD comes across our stage, I think he meant comes into the country.
It sounded like he misspoke on that, but I'm not entirely sure.
But Biden said that if an immigrant who has a PhD comes here, we should try to keep him.
Because, you know, indicating that we want talented people, especially, we want talented people, and if they're immigrants, let's keep them.
And then Booker, of course, tore into him, saying that that was just like Trump.
That if you follow that path and say, give me all the PhDs, you end up with...
He didn't say it, but the implication was you end up with white people.
And then Booker went ahead and used the S-word on TV, the S-hole countries, and he said, you're no better than Trump with his talking about S-hole countries.
And I thought, wow!
Wow! Wow!
First of all, very effective.
So, Cory Booker had a good night, I thought.
I thought Cory Booker was the strongest we've seen him.
And he was brutal.
I mean, he really took...
I think he took a chunk out of Biden that night.
Now... So my overall conclusion on Biden is that he should go down in the polls after this.
Maybe not a lot.
But I think that the Democrats exposed him as being too much like Trump to win.
Right? Because remember, Biden would have to limp into the general election.
Let's say he got the nomination.
If he limped into the general election, he would be limping in With this big wheelbarrow full of ammunition that his Democratic opponents have given President Trump, and he's just going to hand it to Trump.
And Trump's going to say, well, let's see.
Let's see, Joe. Let's see what the Democrats say about you.
They say you hang out with segregationists.
That's what the Democrats said about you.
They say Obamacare is a huge mistake.
That's what the Democrats say about you, Joe Biden.
He's dead in the general election because the basically, let me put it this way.
The Democratic challengers have put down a poison pill for Joe Biden.
And feel free to borrow that analogy because A poison pill is when that comes from the merger and acquisition world.
So sometimes a company, if it knows it might be acquired by another company and it doesn't want that to happen, will build into its internal corporate rules that if they're acquired, and I'll just make up an example, everybody gets a million dollar bonus, all the employees do.
Now, of course, if that happened, the company would no longer be worth acquiring because all of the money that the acquirer thought they were going to get would immediately go to the employees and there would be no money left in the company.
So why would you buy a company with no money in it?
So that's a poison pill.
So a company has created a set of laws that makes them unacquirable.
It's a poison pill. If they try to acquire you, they get the poison and they die.
That's what the Democrats who are challenging Biden have done.
They have poison-pilled him.
In other words, they have criticized him so much as Democrats that that ammunition makes him unviable as a general candidate.
So he will not be viable because of the poison pills that the Democrats just laid down.
Now, the public may not yet see that.
It's going to be the sort of realization that will sort of emerge over the next few weeks as one pundit after another says, you know, I think they've damaged him so much.
That if he had never run against anybody in the primaries, he'd be a strong candidate against the president.
But now they've kind of weakened him to the point where he can't win.
And the others have not been similarly weakened.
The others have not been weakened to the point where they can't win.
They won't win, but it's a different situation.
So here's the thing that really struck me about It seemed to me that the Democrats are focusing on the, let's say, the part of society that they think is in the worst hole.
So they talked about prisoners quite a bit.
They talked about prisons and convicts quite a bit and making their situation better.
They talked about children and making the situation with children better, both legal and illegal residents.
They talked about immigrants who were not legal citizens and making things better for them.
And they talked about other countries, Guatemala, etc., and making things better for them.
What do all of those groups have in common?
Have you figured out what all of those groups have in common?
The ones that they focused on all night.
They can't vote.
The Democrats have crafted...
And it almost sounds...
If I'd said this out of context, like if I had just said this without this actually being the real situation that we're watching right now, if I'd said to you that one of the major parties decided to craft their entire election message for the people who can't vote, children can't vote, convicts can't vote, illegal immigrants can't vote, if I told you that that had been their actual strategy...
I think you would have laughed.
And you would have said, you know what?
I'm no political expert, but if I'm going to try to get elected, I think I would craft my message for voters, people who vote.
Now, I certainly understand why they want to show compassion, and they want to focus their compassion on the groups that are the hardest hit.
And those three groups are pretty hard hit.
Kids, prisoners, and a lot of the prisoners, of course, have addiction problems, maybe some mental illness problems and stuff.
So there's a lot of stuff that's not necessarily entirely under their control and stuff.
And, you know, maybe they got a bad start in life, just bad childhood experience, bad everything.
So I completely get the empathy.
The empathy makes complete sense.
But can you win an election by making your entire message appeal For the people who don't vote.
It looks like a bad strategy.
Guess we'll find out.
Let's talk about Yang. Everybody keeps saying, Yang, Yang, Yang, Yang, Yang.
My message is here.
Every five seconds somebody says, what about Yang?
Here's my take on Yang.
His presentation skills and his speaking in public, his persona, really, really good.
I gotta say, his public persona is, dare I say, Reagan-esque.
Yang, and I don't mean in the racist way, Yang is funny in a very relatable sort of way that makes us all laugh.
He said that he was literally the opposite of President Trump because he's an Asian man who's good at math.
Very good line. I've heard him say it before.
It works every time. The public laughs.
It's self-deprecating in a sense.
Not really, but it's self-deprecating in a funny sense.
And it sort of gets to the point, and it makes you like him.
And then he talks about his, essentially one idea, the $1,000 for everybody.
Now I think to myself, who doesn't want $1,000 for everybody?
Everybody wants $1,000.
So that might actually be a much smarter idea than you think.
We get the sense when we watch him that maybe he doesn't have any depth in the other topics.
Maybe he doesn't have a good idea for immigration.
Maybe he doesn't have a good idea for healthcare.
But I suppose if you gave everybody $1,000 a month, well, they could buy themselves some healthcare, right?
$1,000 per person Would buy you healthcare.
How do you afford it?
Well, I guess that's the question.
But he's not...
What I like about Yang's take on this is that he's the only one who's looking at the future with any realistic view.
But I don't think we elect politicians who are good at anticipating the future.
Nobody wants that.
I think we want politicians who are good at fixing yesterday's problem.
We don't really want ones that are good at anticipating the next one.
That's why nobody's voting on climate change.
That's why the candidates whose main thing is climate change are not getting any traction.
Because we just don't care about the future.
As much as we care about re-litigating the past.
And who was it?
Was it Bennett who chastised the people on stage for talking about something that happened 50 years ago with busing?
And we should be talking about the future?
And I thought to myself, hey, that's a nice high ground maneuver.
The high ground maneuver is when you say something that people can't disagree with.
And he took it up to, should we be focusing on what happened 50 years ago?
And you say to yourself, ah! No, we shouldn't.
Because nobody thinks you should focus on something that happened 50 years ago.
Until he brings it up, though, they're going to do it.
So Yang, I thought, is an engaging personality.
He has plenty of style and personality.
Comes across well.
He looks likable for both Democrats and Republicans.
There's nothing to dislike about him.
But people don't really get the $1,000 thing.
And I've not heard it summarized in a brief way that would convince anybody.
In fact, I don't even know that I've heard the entire argument.
I mean, I know the basics, that automation will take away our jobs, we're going to have to do something with all the unemployable people, but I don't know how that gets to how we pay for it and that.
I think he has answers, I just don't know what they are.
And I actually would like to hear them.
All right. Let's talk about some other candidates.
You all want me to talk about Tulsi.
So I thought Tulsi Gabbard had a good night, not good enough to propel her into the lead.
My problem with Tulsi as a candidate is her mannerism is a little too laid-back Hawaiian.
I can like everything she says without being the least bit inspired by it.
Do you know what I mean? She doesn't inspire.
She just makes you think, oh yeah, well that was pleasant.
I see where she's going with that.
Well, isn't she a nice person?
So I have those kinds of feelings about her.
Like, yeah, she seems like quite a nice person.
Very, very smart.
Looks like she served her country.
I like that, Tulsi Gabbard.
But when she talks, she has almost...
I don't know if it's a Hawaii thing or sort of a laid-back, almost a surfer delivery that it doesn't sound serious.
It doesn't sound like it has the gravitas...
It doesn't sound like if you put her in the room with Putin, things go well.
Unless Putin wants to date her, and then maybe things would go well.
But, just kidding, I don't think that, I don't think Gabbard is going to make it into the top three.
The guys, who was it?
Bennett, Inslee, I don't know.
The generic white guys, the governors, I just can't take them seriously yet.
And I'm not saying that they're not qualified.
I'm not saying they're not talented.
What I'm saying is that they're generic white guys.
And I just don't see the Democrats going for that.
The only reason Biden's up there is because of his Obama connection.
Otherwise, he certainly wouldn't be there.
And the only reason that Bernie's there is because he's giving free stuff to young people, so he has a lot of young people supporting him.
But Bernie won't make it either.
All right. Who else was up there?
Oh, let's talk a little bit about Corey.
Corey. So I said he had the best night.
I thought mentally, strategically, mentally meaning smart, strategically, performance-wise, right level of aggressiveness, I'd probably give him an A on all that, wouldn't you? I thought that his performance was close to flawless.
It was really good.
But here's the thing.
There's something about Cory Booker, you know, it's the wide eyes and the way he talks, that doesn't come across as genuine.
Is that the problem?
I don't know exactly what it is, but there's something about his persona that is not quite clicking.
I don't know exactly what it is.
And I'm curious about whether Democrats are feeling anything different.
I like Booker when he said to Biden that, Biden, you can't have it both ways.
You can't embrace Obama and then go against Obama.
I thought the most The most disqualifying thing that Biden did is that when he was asked what he advised President Obama before Obama started deporting lots of illegal immigrants and Biden actually said that it was a private conversation and he wouldn't talk about what a vice president tells the president.
Ouch. Ouch.
Because that puts Biden in a position...
Where he has to be a weak weenie, or he agreed with Obama on all those deportations, and both of them are completely disqualified.
So I think Booker...
Was it Booker who pushed him into that position?
I think that was a kill shot.
So I think Biden can't survive that debate.
My guess, so here's my prediction.
I'm going to say that Biden goes down, and I'm going to say that the winner of the debate was, are you ready?
Who do you think I'm going to declare the winner of the debate?
Who was the winner of the debate?
The answer is Elizabeth Warren, who wasn't there.
The winner of that debate was Elizabeth Warren, because in her own debate, she held her own, was perfectly competent in her Elizabeth Warren way.
And I would think on this debate, the lower ranked people may have had maybe a little move up, but not enough to make them a challenge.
And I think that the top two candidates who are opposed to Warren both had a less than good night.
I think Biden's night should take his poll numbers down.
And I think that Harris's numbers are going to stay relatively similar and maybe go up a little.
Because as Biden's support disappears, Biden's support is going to go somewhere.
Some of it might go to Harris.
So even though all the candidates were attacking Biden, the pro-Biden people have to go somewhere with their vote if they change their mind.
And where are they going to go?
You're not going to go from Biden to very anti-Biden positions.
So I think Harris might actually pick up a little bit of support or at least stay very similar.
People are saying that Tulsi Gabbard will go up.
Remember, she could double, you know, Tulsi could double and it just wouldn't make any difference.
So it's sort of irrelevant what the lower ranked people do.
Now, I will say this.
I think people are so obsessed with winning that I don't think people are going to say, hey, that candidate who had 2% support, I think if we all get behind him or her, we can bump that up to 4%.
I don't think people want to go to the person who's got a 2% support because it's just a wasted vote, even if you're just talking to a pollster.
It's sort of a wasted conversation.
So people are going to move from Biden to whoever is most Biden-like who also could win.
Is that Harris?
No. I'm sorry.
Is it Elizabeth Warren?
No. Not so much, because Elizabeth Warren is sort of the opposite Biden.
She's more extreme left, he's more middle of the road.
The closest person to Biden who's not Biden is Harris, who also has the right gender and the right ethnic composition to be sort of naturally popular in a group that values that stuff.
So, I do not expect that Harris will be knocked down of the race by a less than great performance last night.
She'll stay where she is.
I think maybe Warren will have a little bump and Biden will be down a little bit.
Maybe Booker gets a little bump, but he's not going to be in the hunt.
He's not going to be in the top three.
So... One of the, which was the candidate?
Was it Bennett or somebody else?
I forget which one. He said, we have a white nationalist in the White House.
Now, calling somebody a white nationalist, that, given what evidence there is in the news, etc., that is such a destructive thing.
In terms of, you know, tearing the country apart, that even if you believe that's true, that should be disqualifying to say out loud.
Well, I suppose if it were true, it wouldn't be disqualifying.
But given that half of the country is saying, we voted for that guy and we don't think he's anything like that.
I don't know how you can win a general election.
By saying that half of the voters put a white nationalist in the office.
That was maybe so irresponsible that you wouldn't want that guy in charge of the military.
Would you? I mean, that was a look that...
That's like a permanent state.
All right. So...
Let me give you a kill shot for Biden if he's not already finished off.
Are you ready for this? So Biden is getting a lot of pushback for his getting tough on crime past.
So we put a lot of people in prison, and in 2019, there's more effort, especially by the Trump administration, to get people out of prison if they've served their time or they're not there for reasons we think are appropriate.
But here's a kill shot that has not been used on Biden.
That could be used by the Democrats.
It wouldn't work so well for Trump to say it.
But just, I'm going to give you one sentence in the form of a question.
Imagine any Democrat challenger asking this question to Biden on stage.
You ready? How many women have you put in prison?
See, the thing is that Biden put more people in prison.
I assume that it wasn't just all men.
Don't you think he put a lot of women in prison?
If anybody goes after Biden for putting more women in prison by his policies, which I think could be supported by the facts, somebody has to fact check me there, because if it's not supported by the facts, it's going to be weaker, but it still works.
I mean, even if it's not true, people are going to think it's true.
But the reason that kids in cages work so well is that we don't think the same about putting an adult male who committed a crime in prison as we do when we talk about a kid, especially a kid who hasn't made any adult decisions about any crimes or anything.
So I think that Biden would have a tough time explaining why he puts so many women in prison.
You know, I think it's supportable by the facts, and I'm not sure that those women didn't need to go to prison for their crimes.
I don't know what the details are, but it might be an interesting approach.
Maybe you'll see that. The other thing that Biden did, which really hurts him, I think, is that he's the only candidate we've seen who, as soon as the moderator tells him he's done, he stops in the middle of a sentence.
Isn't that jarring?
It looks submissive.
So remember, he was a vice president, not a president.
So a vice president is a submissive position.
The point of being a vice president is to be submissive.
You are literally an underling.
You are literally the one person in the government who can never disagree with the president.
Am I right? Every other person from Lindsey Graham to Mark Meadows, you name it.
Every other Republican who otherwise supports the president can still criticize him on certain topics.
And you've seen it over and over, right?
There's no shortage of Republicans who are willing to criticize the president except for one.
There's only one Republican in the world Who you've never seen criticize the president during his administration?
Pence. Because that's his job.
Pence's job is to be the most submissive politician who's running, or who has a job, not running.
So Pence actually ran for the job of a submissive politician, sort of a politician in a box just waiting for an emergency.
Biden, for eight years, was the world's most submissive politician.
Nobody's arguing that, right?
You're submissive if all you do is agree with your boss and you can't even tell us what you advised him.
So, Biden will be running as the most, if he got the nomination, he'll be running as the most submissive politician who's still alive.
Against the most dominant politician who's ever lived.
Think about that.
Biden is the most submissive politician who's still alive.
I don't know if there's any other vice presidents around.
I guess quails around, but he was only one term, right?
In terms of eight years of submissiveness, nobody tops Biden.
And he'd be running against the most alpha-dominant politician of all time in the United States.
That's not a good look.
Let's see what else we got here.
I think we talked about most of the things here.
Is there anything else you want to talk about?
Somebody says my audio is good today.
You know, I don't really know why the audio is good some days, not good other days, because unless I'm wearing the headphones when I'm doing interviews with people and talking to people, it's always the same.
It's just my iPad.
I just stick this little clip to my shirt, and that's it.
Somebody says, Trump is not the most dominant politician.
Hint, hint. Oh, somebody said Al Gore.
Yeah. Al Gore also did eight years.
You're right. But Al Gore, you know, I don't know.
Was Al Gore submissive?
Not as submissive as Biden.
Because when you think of Al Gore, he was always framed as a co-president.
Because Bill Clinton was good at this.
He would say that you got Hillary for free, and it's two presidents, not one, because he was going to give Gore a big portfolio of important stuff, and Gore actually did a lot of important stuff.
He made the government more efficient, and then later he talked about climate change and stuff.
So when you look at Gore, you see somebody who had a portfolio of real work, And was really respected.
And you imagine that when he went to lunch with...
You imagine that when Al Gore had lunch with Bill Clinton, that when Al Gore had an opinion, Bill Clinton probably listened to it.
Don't you? Don't you imagine if those two guys were talking back in the day that President Clinton would completely respect Al Gore's opinion and incorporate it into what he was doing?
Of course. Of course he would.
So even though Gore had the job that's the submissive job, we didn't see it that way because you knew he was more like a partner than a subordinate.
Pence? I don't know how often Pence is even in the room, frankly.
I mean, he might be. I just don't know.
We don't hear about it. And how about Biden?
I guess Biden had a portfolio too.
I think he had something to do with the recovery funds.
But we don't really think of him that way.
We don't imagine him as anything except the guy who disappeared behind Obama's shining star power.
So that's got to be a factor.
So I see somebody still mocking Al Gore with, Al Gore built the internet.
Somebody type that in all capital letters followed by LOL. You know, Al Gore is completely unfairly criticized for that.
The reality is that Al Gore built the internet.
I'm sorry, that was just true.
Al Gore built the internet.
Oh, you're saying he didn't do the programming, he didn't do the technology, he's not an engineer.
That was all done by technology people, not Al Gore.
Well, you know, Al Gore is who funded it.
Al Gore is the person who championed the funding to make that happen.
He was the one who saw that that was important and he went and got the money for it.
So if Al Gore says, I built the internet because he's the one who championed it and got the money, that's pretty close to true.
There wasn't one person who built the internet.
Even the technical people, there is one person, I think, who was sort of the architect of some of the basics of the technology.
But that one person didn't build the internet.
There was like thousands and thousands of people.
But probably the most important person, the one person who had to do what he did, was Al Gore.
Say what you want to say about his politics.
Say what you want to say about climate change.
Say what you want to say about any of his opinions.
But, truth is, Al Gore was a pretty serious guy.
He was qualified.
And he did make the internet happen.
So, here's what I criticize Al Gore for.
He did what people advise me to do.
Which is sort of fall on the sword.
And so he made a joke of himself for saying that he invented the internet.
So he acted as though the criticism were true, and he's just, haha, okay, I said that, I'm wrong.
That probably was the wrong approach.
What he should have said every time that came up is to say, I never meant that I invented it, as in, I never meant that I coded it, I meant that I was, you know, the one who got the money, and the money is important.
Nothing happens without money.
Now, if he'd said that, we would have said, okay, he sort of exaggerated his role, but the money part is so important, and the vision to know to get that money, that's a pretty big deal.
So he didn't take credit for what was one of the greatest things a government servant ever did.
Al Gore funding the beginning of the internet is one of the most important things any politician ever did, and instead of taking his full credit, he went with the joke and laughed at himself.
I think it was a huge mistake, politically, because I think he should have taken the credit for that.
And keep in mind that Al Gore was also, I think he was the only Democrat who sided, maybe the only one, who sided with Bush Sr.
about the first Iraq war, which was the one people liked.
So that was sort of the limited one where we just stopped him from going into Kuwait.
Stopped... What's his name?
So... I've always liked Al Gore, and I don't apologize for that.
I think he was the real deal.
I think he had some flaws as a politician, but they were not flaws as a person.
They were flaws as, you know, his BS wasn't as good as other people's BS. I can't fault him for that.
And on climate change, I think we have to wait and see because there's certainly something happening.
You know, it looks like the climate's changing.
And we can disagree about the role of humans and all that, but if he rose our consciousness about it and that causes us to, let's say, build more green technology and have more clean nuclear power, if it leads to those things, I think it's going to be okay.
All right. Somebody said he was wrong on NAFTA. That might be.
That could be.
You know, NAFTA is kind of a strange one because...
I don't know how you can score NAFTA, because I think you could make an argument that if NAFTA never happened, you know, there might have been massive immigration and dislocation in the South, and we would have a bigger immigration problem than we did.
But because NAFTA happened, it helped the economy of other countries on our borders, while being bad for ours, apparently, or at least employment, But did we come out behind?
There's no way to know.
We can't judge whether NAFTA was good or bad because we don't have, and here's an important point for those of you who have not been in the world of science or economics or business, if you've never been in those fields, you can't really compare something without an actual comparison.
So we can't say NAFTA was good or bad because what we don't have is those same years with no NAFTA. There's nothing to compare it to.
You can say that something went the way we don't want.
That would be true. But you can't say it didn't work.
You can only say some bad stuff came out of it.
Some good stuff came out of it.
We don't like the bad stuff.
You can say that.
But you don't know what would have happened if you didn't do it.
That's unknowable.
So, I'll leave you with that thought.
▲
Export Selection