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Aug. 14, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:02:52
Episode 628 Scott Adams: Stock Predictions, Don Lemon, Ken Cuccinelli, Epstein, Bernie vs Fake News
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hey everybody!
Come on in here!
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm Scott Adams. And if you'd like to enjoy the best part of the day, the part that gives you that little dopamine push that you need to get through the rest of the day, you came to the right place.
And it doesn't require much on your part.
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I'll tell you what you need.
You need a cup or a mug or a glass, a stein, a chalice, a tanker, a thermos, a flask, a canteen, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
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Oh, it's going to be a good one.
Here it comes.
Yes.
What a day.
All right.
Let's talk about all the things that are happening.
Because if you read the news, or you follow social media, you would realize that things are happening.
They're not terribly important things.
Seems like news just sort of stopped lately.
But that's the summer-August phenomenon.
Have you ever noticed that when the people who report the news go on vacation, Because, you know, government and the press, they go on vacation in August.
Have you noticed that the news stops?
Why does the news stop?
There's got to be some news happening.
But it's all sort of low-grade, easy-to-report kind of stuff.
Read a press release, talk about it, that sort of thing.
All right. I tweeted an interview between Aaron Burnett on CNN and Ken Cuccinelli.
Who I believe is the acting U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director.
And the reason I tweeted it is not so much for political interest, but for skill.
You have to watch Ken Cuccinelli handling hostile questions.
Sorry. You've never seen it done better.
That might be true.
It's possible you've never seen it better.
Now, I'll make an exception for President Trump.
President Trump does it better in the way that only President Trump can do.
But if you're not President Trump, and you're trying to be the best you can be among, let's say, normal human beings, so Trump is still a level above in terms of what he can do with the press and And the public.
But for the next level down, for someone who's not actually named Trump, wow.
Just wow.
You have to watch how well he handles the difficult questions.
Now, I'll just call out a few things.
I'm not going to say he's a master persuader, per se, because I'm not sure he had I don't know if he did or did not exhibit persuasion skill, but his public interview skill, second to none.
Wow! Let me tell you a few things he did right.
The biggest thing he did right is he maintained what I would consider a high-ground demeanor.
A high-ground demeanor.
What normally happens if you're the subject of hostile questions is that you react to the questioner.
So the questioner says, I'm attacking you, I'm attacking you.
What's the most natural way to respond when you're attacked?
Retreat or attack?
Right? Those are the two normal ways you respond.
Which one of those did he do?
And neither. That's what made it special.
He didn't defend, in other words, he didn't take a, he of course defended his point of view, but he didn't take a defensive demeanor.
Nor did he take an offensive demeanor.
He didn't do either one.
He took the high ground.
And you'll never see it done better, but if you watch his body language, The tone of his voice, the precision with which he just sort of sliced and diced her points.
He started off a little bit finding his bearings, because he didn't know where the questions were coming from, what was going to happen.
The moment he realized what the field looked like, He ran the table, and it was just really fun to watch.
So I wish I could give it a better telling, but you just have to watch it.
But the thing to look for is his demeanor.
He took a demeanor without saying it in words that made him the teacher to her the student.
So look for that.
Look for him taking a demeanor in which he's simply explaining it to someone who is not as informed.
Without being arrogant, Without being defensive, without being offensive, he simply took a higher plane and then lived there, and she had to figure out how to respond to that and looked a little flustered.
It was really fun to watch, skill-wise, just to pick up some skills.
All right, there's an article in the LA Times that wonders if Trump possesses the correct neurological makeup for empathy.
And they're wondering if he has something called mirror neurons, which I imagine would be the distinction between a psychopath and a real person.
Okay. All right.
The first question I'd ask is, how much does it matter?
This is the sort of question you might ask when somebody is, say, running for the nomination.
It's the sort of question you might still ask if that same person got the nomination and was running for president.
You know, everything's fair.
That would be fair in terms of, you know, all the crazy things that people ask.
It's in the list.
It would be fair. But is it still a sensible question after three years of Trump administration?
It is what it is.
We see where his priorities are and they don't seem to change.
So I'm not sure it makes that much difference.
But we do see him consistently be pro-American, pro-vet.
He's even helped with prison reform.
He helped with Aesop Rocky.
So you could argue with me all day long about what he feels internally and what his neurons are doing.
You could tell me all day long that the president's neurons are doing the wrong thing as long as he's getting Americans out of jail in foreign countries, he's working on the economy, he's negotiating trade deals, etc. Don't really care.
So three years in, don't really care.
All right. Hilariously, Bernie Sanders is attacking the Washington Post and he threw in the New York Times as entities that do not cover him in the way that he would like to be covered.
In other words, he doesn't call them fake news, but he's saying that their coverage is, let's say, corporate determined as opposed to just talking about the facts because he thinks he'd get a better shake if they were more objective.
Sounds like somebody we know.
Yeah, sounds familiar, doesn't it?
Now, there's no accident that people who like Trump are more likely to like Bernie At least personally, you know, not his policies, but are more likely to like him as a candidate, as a real person.
Say what you will say about Bernie.
He's definitely his own person.
He's an original.
And he seems, I would say, genuine.
Meaning that it looks like he believes what he says and, you know, he's doing his Bernie best.
Now, whether you like or don't like it, It's interesting to note he's on the same side with Trump in attacking the media.
Now, Chris Cillia, a commentator for CNN, weighed in on this and said it's inappropriate, essentially.
And Chris said that he worked for the Washington Post for several years under the Bezos ownership, and he can tell us personally that Bezos, and indeed, I guess management in general, never told them what to write in terms of how to slant things.
He said it didn't happen to him, didn't happen to anybody, it isn't a thing.
Management at the Washington Post does not tell you what to write.
Do you believe that? Do you?
Do you believe that management of the New York Times, and let's say the Washington Post, those two publications, Celia was talking specifically about the Washington Post, but I think you could generalize this.
Do you think that management tells them what to write, Or at least tells them what bias to show.
Okay, I've worked for a big company and I would say that Chris Cillia's claim almost certainly true.
Is that what you expected?
Chris Cillia's claim that management and Jeff Bezos has never, not once, told the staff what to write or how to spin it.
He says it hasn't happened.
I rate that as true.
Not just a little bit true.
I rate that 100% true.
Based on everything I know about everything, right?
Remember, I kind of work in the newspaper business, you know, because my comic strips.
I'm in that world all the time.
I've been interviewed a million times.
I know dozens and dozens of people in that business.
So I know it pretty well.
I would say that is 100% true.
I do not think there's ever been a conversation with any writer or reporter in which management said, you know, I think you should shade this a little more against Bernie or a little more against Trump.
Now, is that important?
No. It's a complete dodge.
Now, I don't know if Chris Celia knows this.
So, I mean, I can't read his mind.
So I don't know if he knows it's a dodge, but it ends up that way.
Here's how the real world works.
People know what their boss wants.
People know what fits in.
People know what's going to get them promoted.
People know what kind of articles get put on the front page, don't they?
If you work for the Washington Post, do you think you would know what kind of article to write to get it on the front page?
Do you think you know what kind of article to write so that your editor won't edit it heavily?
Of course you do. If you weren't smart enough to know that, you wouldn't be smart enough to write articles that are worthy of the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Say what you will about their editorial bias.
If you can write for the Washington Post or the New York Times, whatever else anybody else wants to say about you, you can write.
You know how to write.
Those are the best writers in the world are writing for those publications.
Including Chris Celia.
So his writing skills, tremendous.
Great writer. You can disagree with his opinions, but his writing skill, excellent.
So those people are very smart.
They don't have to be told what to do to fit in.
And they're probably also hired because maybe they're leading in a certain direction.
You know, when people hire you, they get a sense of what you've written before.
So they know what you're likely to write again.
So nobody has to have a conversation about what to write.
That's just completely unnecessary.
And let's say two people write articles.
Neither of them were told what to write.
Let's say it's the Washington Post or it's the New York Times.
Two articles, one of them is, say, pro-Trump, one of them is anti-Trump.
And then separate people, who also have not been told what to do or how to do it, decide what goes on the front page and what goes on the top left of the website, what gets prominent play, what gets edited down to a shorter version, what stays large, what gets a photograph, what doesn't get a photograph.
A lot of decisions happen after the writing.
And those two are not necessarily going to be treated the same.
So it's a second chance for somebody else who also has not been told what to do, but they know where they work.
They know what gets the clicks.
They know who their audience is.
They know who their boss is.
They know what a bonus looks like.
So nothing has to be explained.
All right. CNN's got a piece that's interesting, but...
It's a perfect example of what I call loser think, which I'll explain in a moment.
And what they've done is they're comparing stock market performance by president.
So they're saying for the first X days of each presidency, how did the stock market do?
And they've determined that Obama's stock market went up a higher percentage, sharply higher percentage, than Trump's has so far, which has also been good.
And so the conclusion from the CNN graph is that Trump is doing better than, I guess, Bush, but way worse than Obama, and not too bad compared to Clinton, I guess, similar. So is that a good analysis?
Let's say all the numbers are correct.
Let's say they got all the numbers correct.
Is that a good analysis?
Here's the problem, and here's the theory behind my upcoming book, it'll be out in November, called Loser Think.
And the background idea is that people who don't have experience across multiple domains are at a disadvantage, and that they'll have blind spots for things which are obvious to someone who spent time in, let's say, the field of law, to someone who spent time in the field of Let's say art, if you haven't had any experience there.
Someone who's experienced in economics.
Someone who's experienced in business.
Each of these experiences gives you a different filter on life.
And my take is that the more of those filters you can combine into your maximum filter, the more likely you are to escape what I call loser thing.
So loser thing doesn't mean you're dumb.
Doesn't mean you're ignorant in the classic sense.
Loser think means you haven't been exposed to a domain of thought and it happens to be the one you need for this problem.
Perfect example.
Do you think that the people who made this graph for CNN and the editors who decided to put it were aware of the following economic truth?
You ready? I have a degree in economics, I've got an MBA, worked in business for a long time, specifically had the job of making charts and graphs and financial projections.
So unlike perhaps the editors of CNN, I don't know for sure because I don't know who they are, but there's a blind spot in this graph and it's gigantic and it's one that everybody who studied economics and finance and business can see immediately.
Yeah. Somebody in the comments is already all over it.
Now, you're saying it differently.
You're talking about QE1. What I was going to say is that you should expect in all cases, this is just a general truth, that if your economy is at the bottom of the barrel, the percentage of increase that you're likely to have during the first parts of recovery are going to be really high.
Why? Because that's the easy part.
If you recover it all, which takes some skill, and by the way, I do credit Obama with skillfully stopping the economy from going further down, adding some confidence to the system, stabilizing it so that it could do its thing to grow back up.
Here's the thing. The percentages increases you get in the beginning of a recovery should be high.
That's how it works.
Because you've got companies that are already built.
You've got factories already built.
They just have to make more stuff because the economy is improving.
You've got people who are fully trained, ready to go back to work.
So they do. You're ready to go from the bottom of the economic hole.
But when you get closer to the top, which is where Trump was, getting any kind of percentage gain is really, really hard.
These two are not comparable.
You can't compare coming off the bottom...
With trying to top off the top, which is what Trump is doing, much harder.
And I would argue it takes a different skill set.
I've said this before.
Obama, for all you might dislike about his policies in general, because he was a stable, kind of serious, you know, non-whimsical kind of a personality, he felt like a dependable, you know, pair of shoes that you needed To give some confidence to the system, and he poured some money into it, etc.
So he made the right moves, but he was also the right personnel.
Imagine President Trump in Obama's job.
Would you want somebody as, let's say, unpredictable as Trump when things are already scary?
Maybe not.
Maybe not. But, when you start getting toward the top of how well an economy can do, how about that?
That is exactly when you want a President Trump.
Because he's the one putting the gas on the fire.
He's the one who can goose anything.
Trump can bring energy to anything.
He can bring energy to a nuclear bomb.
He can say, well, let's make it a little more energetic.
So, The two presidents have completely different skill sets, but in my opinion, they are both well suited for their time and the occasion.
So, does CNN know that anybody who had any experience with finance and economics would recognize that their comparing stock performances against different presidents would be complete nonsense?
Do they know that? Well, maybe some of them do.
Obviously, the people covering the economic part of CNN know that cold, right?
So, for sure, everybody who's a pundit at CNN who has a background in economics and finance knows that.
That's just basic.
But, if you had a degree in journalism, would that be obvious to you?
Would it? If you didn't know that, what I just described to you about coming off the bottom versus trying to top off a good economy, if you didn't know that, you're not stupid.
Right? It's just a field that you haven't had experience.
And you're not ignorant in some kind of classic way where you didn't read enough books or something.
No, it's just a field of study that you did not spend time in.
There's nothing wrong with you.
You're completely healthy and you're a good person.
But you haven't had experience in that field.
So that's what loser think is about.
It's not being dumb. It's not being ignorant.
It's about blind spots because you didn't spend enough time in a field.
All right. Similarly, the economic models around climate change.
When I look at the economic models around climate change, I'm pretty sure I say what something like 100% of people who have studied economics and done economic models and made economic forecasts say.
This is a big claim, but I'm going to stick by it.
My big claim is anybody who has an economics degree, finance degree, who has spent time in that world projecting economic things in the future, every one of them thinks That the economic projections about what bad things will come out of climate change are ridiculous guesses.
All of them. Now, I'm not talking about the science part.
The science part that says the temperature will go up by this amount.
I have no visibility into that world.
I see claims.
I can count the number of people who say it, but I can't...
I don't know if it's true or false.
I'm inclined... To go with the majority of scientists, because I'm always inclined to do that.
But I can't say it's true.
And it doesn't matter if it's true or not, if they are saying the economic impact is as low as they're saying it is.
The official climate change economic forecast is something like a 10% hit to GDP over 70 years, which would literally be not noticeable.
That's the official number.
But here's the thing. Can you depend on that?
No! A 70-year economic forecast?
Nonsense. Anybody who has experience with economics will say, oh, that's just crazy nonsense.
That's nothing you should use to make decisions.
All right, let's talk about...
Here's an icky story.
I'm going to say right offhand, before I even get into the topic, this has low credibility.
Yeah, it's the Don Lemon story.
So there's some accusation against CNN host Don Lemon, which I know makes you enjoy it because, you know, you see him as the enemy, etc.
And he was accused of some Me Too kind of a thing with some gentleman in the Hamptons who has filed a civil suit.
Now, what kind of credibility should you put on that claim?
Well, I might be the only one who tells you this about once a week, but accusations of this type in a political environment where people are being targeted to be taken out, you know, people on both sides are being targeted, I would put the credibility of this below average.
Lower credibility than most stories, and most stories are not 100% credible.
If I had to put a guess on this, I don't know, 10, 20% likely to be true.
There's never been a better case of innocent until proven guilty.
I would love to make, you know, unlike the rest of you, and I'll enjoy a good case of schadenfreude, you know, with the rest of you, you know, feeling something bad happen to people that have been annoying you.
But I don't feel it on this way.
So I hate to be the defender of Don Lemon for this audience, because I know we have some Don Lemon haters in the group here.
But I'm going to defend him.
Innocent until proven guilty.
Period. Innocent until proven guilty.
Period. That's all I'm going to say about it.
And if you don't embrace that standard...
Remember what you said about Kavanaugh.
Remember what you said about President Trump, accusations.
Just remember what you said about everybody else.
Let's keep that standard.
Speaking of that, let's get back to Chris Cuomo.
You all know the story. Approached by a gentleman in public who called him Fredo, who is referenced to the less competent son and the godfather, but others say it's a racial, ethnic slur.
I saw a video with Joe Piscopo, who I believe is quite a Republican, who said that, in his opinion, it is also an ethnic slur.
Now, I think it does matter who's being called Fredo, because I guess this insult has been used against people who don't have any Italian heritage.
So when it's used against someone who doesn't have any Italian heritage, then I guess you can say it's not an ethnic slur, but people who are Italian are telling us that they receive it as a racial slur.
So who's right? If it can be used as a word, a general word about anybody, and most people agree that it has been used with people who are not Italian, is it then fair to say, well, it's not an ethnic slur because we use it in all different cases?
No, it doesn't work that way.
It doesn't work that way.
Because take articulate.
You can say that a white candidate is articulate and But it is, I'll say, generally agreed, not 100%, but widely agreed, that if you were to say a black candidate was articulate, it would be considered a racial, ethnic slur.
So it does depend who you're talking to.
You can't just look at the word and say, hey, this word's in the dictionary.
I'm going to use all the words in the dictionary.
And freedom, freedom of speech, I'll use all the words in the dictionary.
Well, you can do that. It's a free country.
But here's my rule, which I'm not going to suggest you adopt, but I'll just defend it.
My rule is this.
Don't be a dick. That's pretty much my rule.
Don't be a dick. If there's a word that some ethnic group, 30% of the people in that ethnic group say, my God, you've insulted me with that word.
If 30% say it's an insult and 70% say, no, it's just a word, I say, why would you unnecessarily insult 30% of an ethnic group?
Don't be a dick. It's the same argument with the statues.
I understand.
I saw a poll that something like 44% of African American citizens favor Confederate statues.
Even though they understand the bad history of it, they favor the freedom of speech, the art of it, the remembering your history, the cultural continuity, stuff like that.
So... So there's certainly lots of black folks who like keeping Confederate statues, even if they, you know, of course don't love the memory of that stuff, but would like to keep it alive.
Now, but there are still lots of people of color who say, yeah, I get that there are other people who are not offended, but I'm really offended, and this is beyond the pale for me.
Let's say half of the people Let's say half of the people of color, be they black or be they anything else, were offended by the statues.
To me, that's a good enough reason to get rid of them.
Or, you know, deal with them somehow.
Maybe you don't destroy them.
Maybe you put them in a museum, or maybe you put up a plaque to inform people that you're not praising the person in the statue, but rather it's a historical thing.
Whatever. So my rule is just don't be a dick.
It's okay to treat people in public the way you'd want to be treated.
I wouldn't want people to just be a dick to me, so I try not to be.
Speaking of dicks... Andy Dick, comedian, was attacked and severely punched, I think.
I think it was a fist.
And I guess he was unconscious for 15 minutes and went straight down onto a concrete sidewalk and was hospitalized, etc.
Now, I once met Andy Dick.
I was on a TV show called News Radio.
Andy Dick played a character on the show.
I was just a guest actor.
Because the topic of the show was about the Andy Dick character on this TV show fell in love with Dilbert comic scripts.
And that was sort of a theme of the show.
So that as the creator of Dilbert, they invited me on to have a little bit part.
So I met Andy Dick.
Which is just some interesting background for it.
He was nice to me, so I understand he's got a background which other people have some complaints with, and maybe they're good complaints.
But here's my point.
I saw the video of the attacker, and the attacker was not provoked.
He walked up and, without any warning, punched Andy Dick as hard as he could, or he might have had something in his hand, I couldn't tell from the video, and Andy Dick went down.
If he was unconscious for 15 minutes, as reported, and hit his head on the concrete, as reported, he has brain damage.
How much? I don't know.
Nobody will ever know.
But the odds that Andy Dick is the same person today that he was before he was punched is actually low.
His personality probably will change.
He might have headaches forever.
He might have lost his, you know, depending on what part of the head he fell on and what part of the brain was affected.
He could have permanent brain damage.
What I'm going to say is that it should be the death penalty.
So I'm in favor of the death penalty for anyone who does an unprovoked attack on somebody's head that's severe enough that they have gashes and cuts and unconsciousness and concussions and stuff like that.
I think consciously giving somebody a concussion or attacking their head should be the death penalty.
Because you've killed whoever Andy Dick used to be.
There will still be an Andy Dick.
He'll still have a social security number.
He'll be able to walk around in public.
But that guy killed him in all likelihood.
Now, even if Andy Dick says, you know, I don't feel any different, seems the same, that's what people say when they have brain damage.
They don't always feel like they're different.
But if you've ever seen somebody before and after a severe head injury, as I had the misfortune to experience with my late stepson, they can become very different people.
So that's my thing.
Andy Dick, if they find your attacker, I think they probably will.
You know, it's a world of cameras.
They'll find this guy.
I wish the law allowed the death sentence because I would be in favor of it in this case.
Same with Antifa. So the newest information on Epstein is that the guards did not make the checks that they were supposed to make and they may have falsified the logs.
And unnamed sources, New York Times is reporting that unnamed officials say that the guards fell asleep at some point and did not check up on him for up to three hours.
So now we have the incompetence theory versus the elaborate plot to kill Epstein.
Which one's looking better?
You remember that early on, when everybody was buzzing with conspiracy theories, what was the first thing I told you?
I told you the odds are incompetence, because the odds are always incompetence.
If the other theory is elaborate, you know, deep state, clever plan, the elites found a way to get to him, whatever.
If that's the alternative, well, it could happen.
I'm not going to say it couldn't happen.
I'm just saying if you're comparing it to a security guard fell asleep, one of them is really, really likely.
The other one? Not so likely.
Let me give you some background.
I have worked as a security guard.
Have any of you worked at a security guard in which, for long periods of time, you were the only one awake?
Have you ever had that job where you had to stay awake all night and you were the only one awake and maybe you can't play with your phone?
I don't know if prison guards can play with their phone.
Do they have anything to keep them awake or anything really to do except walking back and forth in the hallway that doesn't really change much?
Let me ask you this.
How many times do you think I fell asleep During my job as an overnight security guard at a hotel resort, quite a few times, the number of times I fell asleep as an overnight security guard Quite a few times.
Yeah, quite a few times.
So when you say to me, what are the odds that a professional security guard, and it's been reported that they're understaffed, so they've worked, you know, 12-hour shifts and stuff.
If somebody is that exhausted, and there's nobody watching, and everybody else who even could be awake is behind bars, do you think you might fall asleep for a few hours?
I would be surprised if that's not the normal situation.
I'll betcha overnight security guards falling asleep is so common.
Yeah, you just don't hear about it because everybody else is asleep.
Let me ask you this. How many times did I get caught by my bosses Literally sleeping on the job.
Like actually being just flat out asleep in my workplace.
How many times did I get caught?
Well, as a security guard, zero.
Because everybody was asleep.
How many times did I get caught literally sleeping in my cubicle in corporate America?
Zero. How many times did I actually take a nap in my cubicle in Well, I learned to nap while sitting straight up.
I could balance my neck just right, and I could just close my eyes with my face facing the computer, but, you know, the doorway to my cubicle was behind me.
A lot. I had a lot of really good naps in the workplace.
So how common is it for people to fall asleep when they're a security guard?
Pretty, pretty common.
All right. So there's an article in the Washington Examiner, which is trying to attack the people who are attacking the fine people hoax.
So you know Steve Cortez, Joel Pollack, and I have been Tirelessly hammering away at that hoax, the hoax that says that the president called neo-Nazis and racists fine people.
Now, because the hoax is now so debunked, I mean, it really is debunked, you see the hoaxers trying to shift and morph the argument into a different argument that can still be right.
So the central argument was, who was Trump referring to?
And the transcript is crystal clear.
He stated his assumptions.
I'm not talking about the racists.
I'm paraphrasing here, but he said it clearly.
I'm not talking about the racists.
I'm saying that I believe there were people there who were just, you know, good people on both sides of the statue question.
That was my assumption, and they would be fine people.
Now, he stated his assumption.
So even if he was wrong on the details, and by the way, nobody really looked into the details.
Nobody really knows who was there exactly.
Some people have talked to some people, but we don't really know exactly who was there.
And so instead of looking at his assumption and saying, okay, well, he meant to say this, and he wasn't talking about the racist, he was clear about that, worst case scenario, he had inaccurate information about the crowd.
Is that a crime?
Well, Given that the other people who have inaccurate information about the crowd would include the entire press.
All of it. 100% of the reporting press doesn't know who was there that day.
Nobody did an interview.
Nobody did a poll.
They were dressed alike.
You know, the people with the tiki torches, I think, had something in common with their look.
But there were lots of other people who were just dressed in street clothes, weren't necessarily carrying signs.
Which side were they on?
Were they racist? It's just Americans in a big place.
How can you possibly tell what they were thinking or what side they were on?
They were just sort of milling around, etc.
So, the weasels, in this case, Quim Hillier was a writer, tries to convince us that because the president may have been inaccurate about the composition of the crowd, that therefore he really was supporting white supremacists.
That doesn't make any sense at all.
If he was incorrect about the composition of the crowd, that means he is just like the press, that we don't know who was there.
That's all it means.
But it doesn't mean he was calling neo-Nazis fine people because he said, I'm not talking about the white nationalists and neo-Nazis.
They should be condemned totally.
There's no ambiguity in that statement.
And he said it as part of the statement about the fine people on both sides.
Now, there are other people who are trying to conflate Comments, I think there were a day before, in which he had said there are bad people on both sides, meaning Antifa, in this case, and the Tiki Torch guys.
Now, the critics of the president are trying to turn that into, hey, he's making a moral equivalent between racists and people protesting racists.
No, he's making a moral equivalent between Antifa and And the neo-Nazis.
Do I agree with that?
Yup. Both of them are 100% bad, because Antifa supports violence against American citizens.
Am I wrong? They do support violence against American citizens, who have not otherwise committed a crime.
Neo-Nazis are neo-Nazis, so you don't have to wonder if they're bad people.
They're bad people, let me say it clearly.
So, in my opinion, once you reach the point of completely bad, you're morally equivalent.
If your argument is that one of them is 10% badder or 40% badder, you've got some explaining to do.
Because both of them, to me, have reached 100% disavowal bad moral behavior.
You know, if somebody murders three people, can you say, whoa, whoa, whoa, this person who murdered three people in cold blood, don't compare him to this person who killed ten.
You can't compare somebody who killed three to somebody who killed ten.
Of course you can. They have exactly the same moral standing.
Zero. They're both zeros.
How about somebody who committed only a rape compared to somebody who murdered?
Is the rape not so bad, do you say, because nobody died?
No! They're both zero on the moral scale.
Completely condemnable, period.
How about the guy who punched Andy Dick?
Andy Dick says a lot of things that people think deserve some punching.
He's not a good guy.
I don't think he would even say he was.
And he wasn't killed, probably given brain damage.
What's the moral statement of the guy who did the punching?
Is he not as bad as a murderer?
Yes, he is.
He's exactly as bad as a murderer on the moral scale.
Now, on the legal scale, we make distinctions.
But on the moral scale, there's no frickin' difference between the guy who punched Andy Dick and neo-Nazis.
There's no difference. No difference between them and rapists, murderers, terrorists.
And there's no freaking difference between any of them and Antifa.
Because Antifa favors attacking citizens who did not break the law in this country.
Completely condemnable.
Anyway, so people like Quinn Hillier, who wrote for Washington Examiner, trying to say...
That because the president may have been wrong on the details of who was there, therefore, blah, blah, something bad about him.
Now, here's the thing.
When I read this article, I said to myself, having just written the book, Loser Think, I said to myself, what's wrong with Quinn Hillier?
Is this person intentionally just trying to fool dumb people?
Or does Quinn Hillier believe that this is a valid...
And that the analysis has been done in a, let's say, a rational, logical way.
Because I'm looking at it, and I thought, well, it's obvious he's just confused.
Because Trump's statement came with an assumption of what he was talking about.
That's the end of the story.
He said who he was talking about, and then he described them, and everybody would agree with it.
If he was wrong on the facts...
That's just a different story.
And that would put him in the same category as the New York Times and everybody else who was wrong on the facts.
So, I googled Quinn Hillier to find out if Quinn Hillier had a background in any of the analytical fields.
I said to myself, would a trained engineer make this kind of logical error?
Would a trained economist How about a mathematician?
How about anybody in a technical field?
How about a lawyer? Do you think Quinn Hillier has a law degree?
So I wondered to myself, Is Hilliard suffering from loserthink, meaning there are just fields of study that...
I don't know if it's a he or a she.
Quinn can go either way. But is it somebody who has experience in the fields where they would be capable of looking at a semi-complicated situation and sorting out what mattered from what didn't?
And I believe if I've got the right person...
That Quinn Hillier graduated from the Isidore Newman School in 1982 before matriculating at Georgetown University.
Good school, all right? So, so far, that's good, right?
Good school means probably a smart person.
Graduating with an A.B. in Government and Theology in 1986.
So this person's background is in Government and Theology.
Do you think that a person with government and theology background is capable of examining a complicated situation and picking out the elements which are the important ones from the ones that are just sort of got confused together in their head?
There's no way to read minds and we don't know what other experience Quinn has so we cannot answer the question Is this mess of bad thinking in this article?
Is it intentional because Quinn thinks you'll believe it?
Or is it just someone who is suffering from loser think?
Again, not an insult. It is not an insult to say somebody's experiencing loser think because it's a universal thing.
There are domains in which we all don't have experience.
And in that domain, you might have a blind spot.
Okay? Okay. But that looks like what's going on.
I noticed that Portland...
Can somebody fact check this for me?
Can you fact check whether Portland is gearing up for another battle between Antifa and the right wing?
I saw a passing reference to that on the internet and then I lost it.
But is it true that Portland...
Somebody say yes. Portland is ramping up.
Now... What was your impression?
So you're hearing it maybe for the first time from me.
What do you assume, what do you feel, what's your first impression when you hear that Portland is gearing up for a battle in the streets between Antifa and some far-right organizations unnamed?
Here's what I say. Excellent.
If there's anything that I could enjoy more than watching two groups I hate beat each other senseless with sticks, I don't know what that would be.
If you said, Scott, quick, name two organizations you'd like to be seen beaten with sticks in public.
I'd say, well, neo-Nazis, you know, they're not very nice.
And how about Antifa?
Well, as luck would have it, it's the battle in Portland.
It's being set up exactly like a sporting event.
It's not a sporting event, you say?
Well, let me describe a sporting event.
A sporting event would be a scheduled event at a certain playing field.
So far. So far, they've scheduled it.
It's in a field, which is the street, but they know where they're going to be.
Or it might be a park, I don't know.
There are two teams.
Check. Check.
Two teams. They wear uniforms.
Check. Check.
Antifa has their uniforms.
The people on the right probably will have some identifiable kind of uniform going on.
And there are rules.
Are there not rules?
There are rules. There's the law, and then there are sort of the rules of social behavior, and there's the understanding that some of them are going to start hitting each other.
Those are the rules.
And we know that there are referees.
The referees are the police.
The referees are going to allow a little bit of nonsense to happen, because they probably are incapable of stopping every little bad behavior.
So the referees are going to let them play, sort of like a basketball referee lets the players get a little more physical during the playoffs.
There's fouling, but they're not going to call everyone because they want the audience to get a good show.
So somebody says LARPers versus LARPers.
Exactly. But the degree to which this is gearing up as a televised sporting event is pretty insane.
So, here's my level of empathy for all the people who are going to get the crap beat out of them in Portland.
Don't care. Is it because I lack the mirror neuron necessary for empathy?
No. It's because it's two groups that are voluntarily going somewhere to have a fight, and they want to be in a fight.
There's nobody going to this who doesn't want to be in a fight.
I mean, really. If you didn't want to be in a fight, you would not go to Portland on that day.
So they want to have a fight.
I'm not the one who's going to stop them, but I guess the police will.
All right. So I guess we've got two competing stock market indicators.
One says everything's going to fall apart and the other says everything's fine.
One is the spread between the US two-year and 10-year yields on bonds.
Now for those of you who are not You're not economics majors or finance people.
The basic idea here is that people are moving money out of stocks and into bonds.
And as people buy bonds, it changes the yield.
People are saying, hey, it looks like there's a flow from the stock market into these other investments.
And then one article said that it has predicted accurately a recession Every time there's been a recession.
So for 50 years, it has been accurate every time in predicting an economic pullback.
But this is the way all these economic indicators work.
There's always one that's pointing in the other direction that's never been wrong, too.
So one of these two things is going to be wrong this time.
And the other one is that the joblessness rate is great.
When was the last time we had a major economic dislocation when there was full employment?
So those two things are sort of opposites.
One is sort of a technical indicator with the bond yield inverting.
You don't need to know the details of that.
But the other one is everybody's got a job who wants one.
And, you know, not everybody, but in an economic sense, we've reached something like full employment, because you always want a little bit of unemployment, so there's some flexibility going on.
So you probably want my prediction.
Or maybe you don't.
But I'm going to give you my economic wisdom.
You ready? Here's my economic wisdom.
Will there be a pullback in the stock market?
Yes. Because there always is.
There's always a pullback in the market.
Maybe this month.
Maybe next year.
Maybe in two years.
But will the stock market have a serious pullback?
Yeah. Always.
It always does.
Will that be the beginning of the end and the entire country will go to hell?
Well, that's never happened before.
Every time we have a pullback, we consolidate, and then we go in the other direction.
So will we have a pullback?
Yes. Will we be okay in the long run?
Yes. That's what you need to know.
What about this China situation?
Apparently that's part of what's spooking the markets.
Here's what's missing, and I'm wondering where the people talking about this are.
So we've got this deal with, you know, the trade deal with China.
It looks like China, for possibly cultural reasons, is not willing to make a fair deal, which, frankly, I didn't see coming.
But there are people who are more experts on China who say that China just culturally or whatever, for whatever reason, does not recognize A fair deal as being something that's valuable.
Rather, they only try to get an unfair deal.
And if they can't get an unfair deal, they'll go somewhere else where they could get an unfair deal.
Now, that's not crazy.
If you can get an unfair deal, do it.
Trump would do it. You'd do it.
I'd do it. If you can get an unfair deal, do it.
But if you can't get an unfair deal, You probably want to get a fair deal because that's the best you can do.
But there might be some cultural or other obstacle that is preventing China from making that kind of a deal, maybe ever.
If you think about that.
Yeah, I'm not an expert on China.
But it does seem that there may be no incentive in terms of their psychological and social makeup to make a balanced deal with us.
And to the extent that that seems clear now, and I'm not that close to the negotiations, so maybe they have a different feel, but shouldn't we be...
Coming up with some kind of a Marshall Plan for Central America, where we specifically target the industries we don't want to be in China anymore.
In other words, the foreign companies that are operating in China, and even the Chinese companies.
And make it real easy to move to Central America, Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala.
Now, I've heard the President talk about it and say, well, companies are looking at Central America, etc.
But is that enough?
Is that enough? Why can't we just take it to the next level and say, look, here's a billion dollars, and we're going to use this to encourage companies to move to Central America.
And we're just going to say, let's put it this way.
You know how Trump likes to walk away from the table in order to get a deal?
When you're doing this trade deal, since you can kind of drag things out with I'll tariff you, you tariff me, maybe we'll talk again next year, you can just sort of drag things out forever.
And maybe China's even playing for time just in case Trump doesn't get re-elected.
It would be crazy for them to make a deal before 2020, wouldn't it?
China would be crazy to make a deal with the United States before 2020.
Because the next president might be a Democrat, in their mind.
And that's an opportunity for a better deal, maybe.
And given the stakes, it would only be sensible for them to try to stall as long as they can.
So how should we respond to a stalling play?
We should walk away from the table.
But we should not walk away from the actual negotiating table.
Rather, we should...
Put a billion dollars or whatever number toward building up the business in Central America, not only to stem immigration, but to maybe reduce shipping costs, strengthen our part of the world, decrease the power that China has over our economy, and just phase out.
We should walk away from the table Without walking away from the table.
In other words, we can keep talking to them as long as they want, because they're in a stalling mode, but you don't want to, you know, stop talking to them.
It doesn't work for anybody.
But while we're talking, and they're stalling, let's just throw a billion dollars toward attracting the companies in China to Central America, where they belong.
Because they do belong there.
They do belong there.
All right. There's one other thing I wanted to say about Chris Cuomo.
We talked about him, but there's one other thing I wanted to say.
So much is being made about what's being called an overreaction, and I think he characterized it the same way, said he should have been better than the people who were taunting him.
I watched it, and I'm not going to criticize him for his reaction.
I don't know if anybody else had this same feeling.
But first of all, it was just words.
And it didn't look like it was going to escalate.
And my take on it is that he knew he was going to keep it in words.
And maybe if the guy had taken a punch at him, he would have turned it into something else.
But I don't think the guy was going to take a punch.
And there were other people around there to quickly break them up if anything came down.
Yeah, he said he was going to throw them down the stairs, but that's talk, right?
He just got called what he considered an ethnic slur, and he responded aggressively, but just talk.
I don't really have a problem with any of that, honestly.
Yeah, he got trolled.
He wishes it hadn't happened and all that, but I, for one, will criticize him from time to time for the way he presents Trump on the news in particular.
But I just don't have a problem with him having an aggressive verbal reaction to this guy.
Somebody says he grabbed him.
I don't know. If he grabbed his arm or something, that's nothing.
I don't know if that happened, but that would be irrelevant.
So I'm going to support Chris Cuomo to the extent that if somebody insults you in public and you go hard at them in words, I'm fine with that.
I completely find that acceptable behavior and not an overaction in my opinion.
Made a threat? Yeah.
He made a threat. I'm okay with that.
I'm okay with him threatening violence against that guy.
I'm not okay if he punched him without being hit first or something.
I wouldn't be okay with that. But I don't think that was going to happen.
I think it was talk to make a point.
And he made a point. All right.
I think that's about all I was going to talk about today.
You were overriding First Amendment on the authority of PC etiquette.
I don't know what that means. Yeah, you said, I'll throw you down a flight of stairs.
But it was talk. So when you say to somebody, if you keep that up, I will kick your butt.
It's talk until you do it.
So I'm okay with that.
Somebody says, is equating the word Fredo to the N-word acceptable?
Here's my rule.
You may have missed it.
If 30% of Italians say that the word Fredo used in that context because he's Italian heritage, if 30%, just as an example, say, yes, that's an ethnic slur, I say, okay.
I accept that. I don't care that 70% say it's no big deal, if they do.
I don't know if they do. It might be 70-30 the other way.
But I don't care. There are enough people who would call that an ethnic slur that...
If the person who used it didn't mean it that way, well, maybe he should clarify or apologize.
But I'm going to take the side that we don't need to talk like that to each other.
And it's helpful to know that some people accept that as an ethnic slur.
All right, that's all I've got for now.
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