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Sept. 5, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:04:01
Episode 653 Scott Adams: Climate Change Debate Winners and Losers, Hong Kong
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Hey everybody!
Hey Tyler!
Get in here. Grab a seat.
Gather around. It's time to talk about the big climate debate.
Who are the winners? Who are the losers?
Well, you'll find out today.
So just 30 seconds ago, I saw something on Twitter.
This says that a group of criminals used artificial intelligence to imitate the voice of a CEO, and then they called the CEO's subordinates and got them to wire them a whole bunch of money.
So it seems to be the first AI crime where somebody used a deep fake voice to do a crime over the phone.
I haven't read the details, so I might have some of that wrong.
But that's not why you're here.
You're here for the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
It doesn't take much to participate.
All you need is a cup or mug or a glass of stein, a chalice of tank or a thermos of flask, a canteen or a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. Join me now if you're ready for the simultaneous sip.
All you have to do is lift it to your lips in a simultaneous way and you'll have a dopamine hit that will last you all day.
Go! Oh, it gets better every time.
Am I right? Am I right?
So Deborah Messing and Eric McCormick continue to prove to the world that they don't have smart friends to talk them out of doing whatever the hell they're doing every day.
The latest is Deborah Messing apologizing for something she tweeted about a sign that was offensive, I guess.
And in her tweet apologizing, she mentions the fine people hoax.
But not as a hoax, as if it's real.
And I'm thinking to myself, I don't know if there's another level of stupid.
Like when you've climbed the summit of being completely hoaxed about everything and not understanding the slightest thing about politics, not knowing the basic facts of what did or did not happen.
Maybe you should stop talking in public.
Maybe it's time. Time for an intervention.
You should make some friends, Deborah and Eric.
Make some friends who can tell you to just maybe be a little bit quieter.
Let's talk about Hong Kong.
So Hong Kong, there seems to be something that people are calling a victory, as the Chief Executive Carrie Lam So she's, I guess, the leader in Hong Kong, decided to withdraw the controversial extradition bill, the one that said you could be grabbed from Hong Kong and tried in a Chinese mainland court, and that started all the protests.
So that was withdrawn.
Problem solved, right?
Right? Well, here was my prediction.
And we won't know if my prediction was right yet, but it's kind of looking good.
My prediction was that China wins in the end.
But here's the trick.
The end is as long as you want it to be.
Could be 100 years.
Could be 300 years.
But China will have full control of Hong Kong, or Hong Kong will destroy China from the inside.
One of those two things is going to happen, and I think China certainly have the upper hand here.
So, while it appears that this particular obnoxious extradition law has been sidelined, it's not over, or even close to over.
A related story that's in the news is that apparently China is flooding Hong Kong with mainland immigrants.
That's right. China is playing the long game.
They're going to change the people who live in Hong Kong over time until there are enough regular mainland Chinese over there that there's not enough of a majority to resist.
Because they'll just say, well, we're China too, so why should it be different?
So yes, I'm calling them immigrants, but they're immigrants from China to China in the sense that they're going from the mainland to Hong Kong.
Now, I don't know if that report is true.
That could be hyperbole too.
But my larger point is that China doesn't have one lever to push, one lever to pull.
They have lots of levers and they have infinite time.
So if you have lots of levers and infinite time, it doesn't matter if you had to temporarily move one back in place.
It's going to happen. It'll just take longer.
People complaining about President Trump diverting some of his military budget, $3.9 billion, over to building the wall.
Now, let's say that that doesn't get stopped by the courts.
I don't know if there's a legal challenge.
There's always a legal challenge to everything.
But let's say it goes ahead and they start building some wall with that $3.9 billion.
Is that a big...
Pain point for the military that they had to give up that money from what it was previously budgeted for, construction projects in the military.
Yeah, I'm sure it will cause some pain.
But let's put it in perspective, shall we?
Let's put it in perspective.
3.9 billion is what percentage of the total military budget?
Well, I don't know.
Just off the top of my head, I think it's half of 1%.
So I believe that half of 1% of the total military budget got diverted to the wall.
Does that seem like a lot?
Well, it's a lot if the entire amount came out of one budget, let's say the construction budget.
But is there anything that would stop, and there might be, so this is a question, not a rhetorical question.
Is there anything that would stop the rest of the military from saying, you know what, we'll kick in half of 1% of our budget to make that military budget whole again?
Maybe that's illegal.
Maybe you can't move buckets.
There's a good chance that's not legal.
But in a practical world, in a practical sense, if the other budget categories within the military just said, you know, I'll give up half of 1%, I'm not even going to know the difference.
And then your military budget is whole again.
So it's not the end of the world, it's just maybe inconvenient a little bit.
So I think Trump, very much like mainland China in this case, it seemed that Trump was going to pull every lever, push every door, turn every doorknob, kick every wheel to try to find some money to work on this wall.
It looks like he did.
And best of all, he's making Mexico pay for the wall by making Mexico mobilize their military.
In essence, it's paying for border security on behalf of the United States.
You know, I like to think that if this situation were reversed, I would have the same opinion.
But in my opinion, as we're watching Mexico spend a lot of money to mobilize their military to control their southern border, at least, it looks to me exactly like Trump got Mexico to pay for the wall.
You know, it's just not a physical wall, it's just border security.
Now, if this were reversed, And let's say Obama had said, I'm going to make Mexico pay for the wall.
Okay, they didn't pay for the actual bricks or the metal for the actual wall, but they did mobilize their entire military to guard the border, and it's as good as a wall in many ways, and it's faster.
Would I say in that case, just because it was Obama and not Trump, would I say, oh no, Obama, no, nice try, nice try.
You said that Mexico was going to pay for the wall.
They didn't pay for the wall.
They paid for something that was just as good and faster.
So, you lose Obama, they didn't pay for the wall, they paid for something else that does the same thing, but much faster, because you can move troops faster than you can build a wall.
Would I have said, ha ha ha, Obama, another broken promise?
I don't think so.
I mean, I'd like to think I wouldn't have.
Because as a trained economist, I see things as somewhat fungible, meaning that some things are perfect replacements or nearly perfect replacements for other things, and that I would reasonably treat them as similar.
So troops on the border, wall on the border, largely similar.
And they both require money.
So I'm going to give credit.
Let me call the game right now.
I call the game in favor of Trump.
His primary campaign promise is now kept.
That's my ruling.
And I swear to God, if this had been reversed, and this had been Obama doing everything that Trump is doing, And it made the same promise.
I would have said, Obama, okay, credit.
Obama, you did exactly what you said you'd do.
It didn't look the way we expected it, but yeah, that's it.
That's exactly what you said you'd do.
You get Mexico to pay for the wall, but they used troops instead, just as good.
And you got money for the wall, and you started building it.
That's what you said you'd do.
I give Trump the win, a clean win.
I swear to God, that's not even a gray area in my mind.
Of course, it might be in other people's minds, but in my mind, that's not a gray area.
Trump made a promise and it looks like he kept it.
Even if you don't like it, it looks like he kept his promise.
So, let's talk about the seven hours of climate debate.
Now, like most people, I could not struggle through the entire debates, but I caught a lot of the clips.
I was dipping in and out during the thing.
And I was trying to get a sense, because most people are not going to watch the whole thing.
Very few people watch CNN to begin with.
And even fewer of those who watch CNN are going to watch that entire thing.
So you can't say that the entire body of the debate affected The outcome.
What you can say is whatever bubbles up as the clips that will be played and replayed, or the quotes which will be picked out of it, those things, which are very selective summaries and context and anecdotal, that stuff might make a difference, because that's the stuff that will travel.
You know, everything that was said that did not get picked up as a video clip or a quote, that stuff's dead.
Nobody saw it. It doesn't matter what you said during that debate, if it didn't turn into a news story, a clip, or a video that people are going to see, it didn't happen.
It was as if it didn't happen.
So let's talk about just the things that other people, so it doesn't matter what you and I thought should have been pulled out of that debate as important, let's look at what was pulled out by the major news industries and by social media especially.
And I know you want me to talk first about Biden's bloody eye.
Alright, I'm a little confused on this story.
I'll tell you the story, but with doubt in my voice.
So everything I'm going to say, put a big doubt around it.
I don't think anything I'm about to say is...
Credible, but I'm going to say it anyway with that caveat.
So I saw on social media some talk about Biden's eye, one of his eyes, literally bleeding as he was talking on stage.
And so I said to myself, what?
His eye?
Not bleeding externally, but turning red.
And I thought, well, I'll look.
So I pulled out my phone.
And I've got, you know, a big screen phone.
And I call it up and I watch the section where people said his eye is turning red.
Couldn't see it. Couldn't see it on video.
Now I thought, well, maybe that's just because my phone screen is small so I can't see it.
Later I saw on some right-leaning websites a photograph that was more of a close-up and it showed that one eye had a bunch of obvious redness.
And I thought to myself, well, is that photo real?
Because, you know, you can't trust anything, right?
The fact that there's a photograph and it's being reported in a website you've heard of, you know, one you've read before, does that mean it's real?
I guess it was on Drudge, etc.
Does that make it real because you saw a photograph of it?
Not really. Not really.
So just the fact that it was a photograph and it was on a major news site, which is generally reliable, I'm not sure I believe it yet.
I will tell you this.
Two prominent pundits, shall we say, who will remain unnamed, but two people you've heard of, names you've seen on Twitter and in the world, I'll just say that.
Two of them independently messaged me during the climate debate, and they both said, and I thought this is the interesting part, they used the same phrase, he's done, about Biden, because of the bloody eye.
So two people who just said, ah, bloody eye, done.
Now, I don't know if that means everybody was thinking that, but it's weird that I got two messages and they used the same language.
He's done. That that's clearly the end of it.
But here's the thing. See, now my eye is itching because I'm thinking of Biden's eye.
I'm reading all your comments about his eye and it made my eye go weird.
From suggestion. Like literally, literally that's what happened.
Your suggestion and talking about his eye made my eye feel strange.
And then I was like, what's wrong with my eye?
So, and then I said, okay, I'll wait for the morning and I'll see if CNN or Fox News is reporting on this alleged bleeding eye.
And they're not. Now it doesn't surprise me if CNN doesn't report on it.
But Fox News didn't report on it either.
I'm not sure it happened.
Or if something happened, I don't know if it happened on stage, or if he just had a little red eye problem that's literally nothing.
I mean, I have no idea. So I'm right in the middle of, somebody says Fox did a report on it.
It's not on their Fox News site.
So they may have done something live.
But if they didn't commit it to print or did not commit it to a story on their website, that might indicate that they have some question about it.
Alright? So, yeah, the fact that it was talked about on air would be a different level of credibility.
Because you can talk about what people are talking about on air.
And you can speculate and stuff because it's live.
But by the time it's committed to a website story, it means they're fairly certain that they're talking about something that's real.
And I haven't seen that yet.
So I got a problem that I don't know what this means, what really happened, how red it was.
I just have my questions why it's being ignored.
Now... I don't think that CNN would ignore it, even though it's a Democrat, because there was a story on CNN today in which they were showing the Stephen Colbert interview with Joe Biden, which was not good for Joe Biden.
Because the interview was about all of his gaffes, etc.
And I thought, well, if CNN's running something about Biden's gaffes and losing his mind, they're not really pro-Biden.
So there's that.
So if CNN didn't mention it, Fox News is sort of playing it down.
I don't know if it's a big deal.
Let's talk about how some of the other candidates fared.
I would say the big loser of the climate debate, I thought, was Kamala Harris.
She's terrible. She's really terrible.
You know, my prediction from a year ago is that she would end up being the nominee because the other ones would fall apart for different reasons and it would just be, you know, she's the one that's left.
That assumed a minimum level of capability, which she is not demonstrating.
Now, when I say a minimum level of capability, I mean somebody who could be a senator.
I mean, she is a senator.
But I think you could, you know, throw a dart into Congress and find almost anybody who would have more charisma and more leadership skills when talking in public.
Here's what she does wrong.
Number one, body language.
Terrible. She's all, you know, like playing with her hands.
She's doing something with her hands.
And, you know, she just looked uncomfortable and weak.
That was terrible.
She doesn't dress well.
Unfortunately, I hate to make a fashion comment, but we live in a shallow civilization.
In the same way that President Trump's haircut and fitness and age were part of the discussion, And should be, because people are influenced by those things.
Likewise, Kamala Harris has the potential to be really well put together in every sense from fashion to fitness to just naturally having an interesting look.
But she's not using it.
She's just not putting it all together.
I don't know what's up with that. But she speaks tentatively.
She doesn't speak like a leader.
She doesn't seem to understand power and leadership.
She has no leadership instinct whatsoever that you can see in live questions.
She's much better when she's grilling people from prepared questions in Congress.
And I got fooled by that act.
Because when she had prepared questions and she was in her element, she was actually strong and she looked very capable.
But as soon as she gets into the wild, she can't handle the questions.
She's too giggly. So the entire event was about climate change.
And the reason it was the event...
The reason that there was the focus is because it is presumed by all the people involved that it's the biggest existential problem to the planet Earth.
If you've got only a few minutes on stage to talk about the biggest problem on the planet...
The one that might kill millions or billions, that's what they believe, right?
They believe this is a threat to the planet.
And it's not a small threat, it's not a remote threat, it's like a real immediate frickin' threat to the whole planet.
So that's what they think it is.
So what did Kamala use for limited time to talk about?
Straws. Straws.
She talked about...
She was trying to sort of pace the people and say how bad it was to use these paper straws.
But they have to be eliminated anyway, the plastic ones.
Now, could you talk about something less important than that?
Is there anything less important...
Then the United States talking about eliminating plastic straws.
First of all, I don't know if this is true, but there's reason to believe that Asia and someplace else is responsible for 95% of all the plastic straws that end up in the ocean, wherever they end up.
Maybe that's true, maybe it's not.
Here's the way I look at it.
I have personally spent a lot of time at beaches over my life.
If you count every time I've ever gone to the beach, every time I've ever been on vacation where there's a beach, I've seen a lot of beach.
In a lot of different places.
I've been in a lot of seawater.
I've been on the water. I've been on, you know, little excursions in which you get in a boat and you go somewhere.
And I've never seen a straw in the water.
I've never even seen one.
Do they float or do they fall in the bottom?
Where are the straws going?
My entire life, I don't believe I've ever seen one straw in the ocean.
Now, I'm not saying it's not a big problem.
Pollution in the ocean presumably is a very big problem.
I mean, you know, I don't see it visually, but one assumes that it probably is.
So if you're a voter and you're looking for leadership and you see Kamala Harris talking about straws and you've never even seen a straw in the ocean, you can't even imagine if you were tasked with trying to come up with The least effective thing you could say on the topic of climate while the public is watching,
it is the least effective thing you could do is talk about the quality difference between a plastic and a paper straw.
And that's what Kamala Harris did with her limited time on stage.
It was one of the most jaw-dropping failures of leadership instinct I've ever seen in my life.
Now, you might say to yourself, okay, President Trump does these little diversions too.
He talks about, you know, and some of his don't even make sense because he talks about, for example, if the windmill stops, you can't watch TV. But when I watch the president say that, I receive it as a joke.
He doesn't literally mean you can't watch TV when the windmills stop.
He doesn't literally mean that.
And that's what's funny about it.
It's just sort of weird.
And he's sort of making the point, the larger point, that the renewables are not consistent.
The television part just turns it into a funny anecdote.
Or a funny comment.
Basically turns it into a joke form that you can understand.
So his are completely different.
President Trump never leaves, and has never left since the beginning of his campaign, leadership mode.
In other words, when Trump showed up, he never took off his suit.
Trump never took off his suit, even to visit Iowa.
He's the smartest one to visit Iowa because he didn't take off his suit.
I'm sure other people have done it before.
He never once became a person of the people.
He never once became a dad or a grandfather.
He waves his hands at those things, has pictures with his grandkids.
But even when he has a picture with his grandkids, he's wearing a suit.
Trump knows that if you want to sell yourself as a brand, you don't leave the brand.
Take Kamala Harris.
So she left the brand entirely to talk about the difference between straws.
It wasn't a funny anecdote.
It just was useless. But then she also had this comment about your babies.
Let's see if I wrote that one down.
She said something about, you know, think about your babies and your grandparents.
Oh, yeah, here it is. Uh...
So this is another thing Harris said.
She said, as it relates to those Republicans in Congress, where I've now been for two and a half years, okay, so that's stupid, she should not say that she's only been a senator for two and a half years.
Because if you didn't know that, you might assume she'd been a senator longer.
So that's the first stupid thing.
I mean, it's just a mistake.
There's no other way to say that.
She should not use her limited time to say that she's only been in Senate two and a half years, because nobody is going to think that's a long time.
Nobody is going to register that as ready or experienced.
Now, I realize Obama hadn't been in office long either, but Kamala Harris is not Obama.
She doesn't have what he had, which is a whole set of tools that she's not even close to.
All right, so she goes on. She says, every one of those members need to look at the babies and the grandbabies in their life and then look in the mirror and ask themselves, why have they failed to act?
So here is Kamala Harris going into what I would call mom filter.
So she leaves the leadership filter and she goes into a mom point of view.
And the mom point of view is, look at my baby, look at my grandkid.
So I guess you could call it grandma, mom point of view.
Now there's nothing wrong with mom point of view.
If you're running to be a mom, if you're running to be the leader of the nation, Don't talk like your mom.
That's getting off-brand.
So even if everything she says is true and valid and it's perfectly reasonable through the filter of a mother or a parent's eyes, that's all fair to say.
But it takes her out of leadership mode.
You just can't see her as a leader.
You just see her as a mom complaining about stuff.
Then it got worse for her.
So Kamala was asked about nuclear power, which I'll talk about with the other candidates as well.
And she demonstrated, in my opinion, that she has not looked into it.
Let that register for a moment.
The entire event was about climate change, the existential threat to the planet, say the people who were there.
And The most important variable to whether we can solve this problem that they say exists.
I'm not saying it doesn't.
I'm just trying to avoid the question of whether it's true or false.
I'm just talking about what they believe.
And the biggest variable, nuclear energy, literally the only thing that these smart people say could get us to where you need to go fast enough and is popular on both sides.
Democrats and Republicans could probably get behind it.
She showed that she hadn't looked into it.
That's as hard as you can fail.
Let me show you the hardest failure in the world.
Scott, what's your number one issue in the world?
Climate change. Scott, what do you think we should do about the number one most important element to your most important subject, climate change?
What do you think of nuclear, the most important variable?
And I say, I haven't really looked into it.
All credibility is gone.
Now, she didn't say, I haven't looked into it, but you could tell from her answer that she had sort of a haven't really paid attention to it answer.
She said, well, I'm very concerned about storing the nuclear waste.
She did not say, it can't be done.
She did not say, and here's your tell.
I'm going to give you a tell for finding out if somebody has even looked into nuclear energy.
Have they even looked into it?
Ask them how much real estate you would need to store all of the nuclear waste that would be generated if we had replaced our entire grid with nuclear.
We're not going to do that, or even say half.
Let's say to replace half of our grid or half of our power need with nuclear energy, what would be the total Real estate you would need to store all, every bit of the nuclear waste that's made from all of that.
Is it a thousand miles?
Is it one acre?
Now, I don't know the exact answer to that, but I will tell you it's closer to one acre.
It's a lot closer to one acre.
Than it is to a mile or 100 miles or something.
Now, there's certainly an issue about where you put it, but where are we putting it now?
Who asked that question?
Where are we putting the nuclear waste now?
Because suppose the nuclear waste, all the nuclear waste we have, has filled up in its various places, collectively, two acres.
I don't know if it has taken that much, but let's say all of it together takes two acres.
What if we just put a few more barrels where that stuff already is?
Are people going to complain extra because she puts some extra barrels there?
I'm not sure there's any problem there.
I feel as though she hadn't looked into it.
She just took the top-level thing she'd heard.
I'll say something about nuclear waste so I don't have to commit to nuclear power because I don't know how to defend it.
Totally I didn't know the most important topic.
So Conley Harris, I'm going to say...
This is why you listen to me.
This next thing I'm going to say...
I don't know if I'm going to say it.
Yeah, I'm going to say it. I'm going to say it for entertainment.
I'm going to say this is an opinion.
So the next thing that comes out of my mouth cannot be supported...
By science and facts.
This is purely an opinion.
Kamala Harris has a submissive personality.
That's it. Now, you don't have to, you know, take that into the bedroom for your interpretation.
But the fact is, she has a submissive personality.
You can see it in her body language.
You can see it in the way she talks.
And I don't see that she has a fire in her belly to be a leader.
She looks like a follower and she looks like she would be more comfortable as one.
Now that's an opinion.
But remember, the voting public is going to be looking at all these characters, and they're going to be forming opinions which are not always fact-based.
Some of it's just the impression you get.
So I guess that's as far as I'll go.
I'll say it's the impression I get, but of course I can't read her mind, right?
So I can't know that it's true, because I can't see what's in her head.
But what she's projecting is pure submissive energy.
And there's just no way that becomes president.
So, I'm not going to change my original prediction that she gets the nomination, because that wouldn't be fair.
Because nothing, you know, I made the prediction based on the people above her being completely unelectable.
That's still true.
But it might be that whoever gets the nomination is even lower in the ranking than Harris's, because they might have to go right over her.
All right, let's talk about the other people.
Let's see. Bernie Sanders is anti-nuclear and Elizabeth Warren are both opposed but in different ways.
Warren said that she would oppose nuclear energy as a way to combat climate change should she get elected.
And she said, we're not going to build any nuclear power plants and we're going to start weeding ourselves off of nuclear energy and replacing it with renewable fuels, Warren said.
Adding that she hopes to phase out nuclear power by 2035.
That is basically surrendering the country.
Let me give you an argument that you haven't heard, but you're going to hear more of it.
Sometimes I cheat because I know about things before you do, so I can tell you what's coming before you see it.
Here's an argument that you haven't heard before, Then you're going to hear for the first time, and when I tell you, you're going to say this, oh shit.
You ready? You're going to say that to yourselves, quietly, or maybe out loud, but as soon as I tell you this way of thinking about nuclear energy and the future of the United States, you're going to say, oh shit, I didn't think about that.
Here it comes. Space force.
You can't militarize space without nuclear power, and you're not going to be able to dominate space without having a very robust nuclear industry that's not only producing nuclear experts, but has enough of them that some of them are working on Space Force.
If we don't have control, military control of space, we will have given it away to China, To Russia?
Maybe to India?
Maybe to somebody else?
Look at the comments.
Am I wrong?
I'm not wrong.
If you let your nuclear industry atrophy, which is Warren and Sanders' intention, they are intentionally ceding outer space to our biggest military opponents.
If we give up outer space, we're also giving up the country.
Because whoever owns space owns the planet.
There's no getting around that.
Whoever owns space around the planet is in control of the planet for all practical purposes.
Because it's hard to shoo stuff up, but it's kind of easy to shoo stuff down, if you know what I mean.
So... I would say that Warren and Bernie have explicitly surrendered the United States to China.
I mean, that's as clear as it could possibly be.
If you don't have a robust and continually improving nuclear industry, you can't populate space.
It can't be done. So we'd be giving up space.
You hadn't heard that before, had you?
Tell me you've ever heard that argument before.
You're gonna hear it in the future.
So mark my words on that.
Here's the most fun part.
Both Cory Booker and Andrew Yang are, I guess I could say, pro-nuclear.
Yeah, I guess I could say pro-nuclear.
Now, Yang gets to another level of detail.
So Yang talks about thorium and, you know, there's a conversation about whether thorium is the future or where it has problems.
But he at least knows what it is.
How many of the candidates running for president could have a conversation about thorium reactors compared to standard light water reactors?
How many could even be in the conversation?
I think two. Probably Booker.
Because remember, Booker is super smart.
And he said explicitly, here's what he said about nuclear, it needs to be part of the fight against climate change.
And he said, blah, blah, blah, the people who oppose it are, quote, aren't looking at the facts.
So Cory Booker, brilliant guy, you know, even if you don't like his politics, even if you don't like his style or whatever, He's a brilliant guy, like super smart, you know, credentials for educational credentials, etc. And he says that you could only be against nuclear energy if you haven't looked at the facts.
Ouch! How do any of the non-nuclear candidates How do they contrast with that and not look like troglodytes?
Because first of all, they don't understand climate change.
They just know what people are saying about climate change.
And they certainly don't understand the primary variable that could change the climate change situation if it's what scientists say it is.
So I have to say...
That Cory Booker and Andrew Yang just rose above the crowd.
Because if you're having an entire event about let's believe science, and you haven't looked into at least the pros and cons of nuclear energy, if you don't even understand the topic, the way apparently Harris does not understand the topic, you can't make any claim to having science on your side.
So, here's what Yang and Booker have done right.
If you're going to go out there and say, climate change is a real big problem, and science says so, and if you don't agree with science, you're a freaking idiot.
So that's the Democrat argument, right?
You have to be on the right side with science.
If you can say that sentence, and then you can also say, and, and, science is also very clear that at the moment, there is no better solution than Than a robust nuclear energy.
If you can say both of those things, you're at least consistent with science.
That doesn't mean you're right, right?
That's different. But at least it makes sense.
If you say, I love science, you've got to say, I agree with the scientists on climate change, but I also agree with the scientists on nuclear energy.
That's consistent. But look at poor Elizabeth Warren, who's got to run on this platform.
I believe scientists when they talk about climate change, but I don't believe scientists when they talk about nuclear energy.
That's what she has to run on.
Are you freaking kidding me?
Now look what Trump...
You know, Trump doesn't do a good job with nuclear.
He just doesn't really talk about it much.
But here's what he could do against that.
Well, Elizabeth, I'm glad you're picking and choosing your science.
So you like science when it happens to fit your socialist ideals in climate change, but you don't like science when science proposes a solution for the very thing you think is a problem.
Why do you like science sometimes and sometimes don't?
Here's what I say.
I say that reasonable people can disagree on the science, but reasonable people cannot disagree with the following statement.
Nuclear energy is the only way we know to meet our nuclear deeds in a clean energy way, because it's consistent power as opposed to irregular power of renewables.
Now, if President Trump said that, he would not have to have an opinion on climate change.
He could just say, well, whether you have climate change problems or not, you're still going to need the energy.
You still want your energy costs to go down because that's good for the poor.
It's good for the poor if energy costs go down.
And we need a consistent, reliable network, etc.
So the president... It has a very consistent statement, which is, we can't be sure about climate change, but we are sure that there's only one known way to get us to cleaner, better, abundant, cheap energy.
And so let's do it.
Let's look at somebody else.
Cloverture. So Klobuchar is kind of an interesting candidate because she seems so reasonable and very much in the Joe Biden, let's not get too crazy mode.
But because Biden has absorbed all of the sort of middle of the road boring Democrats, Let's call them the boring Democrats versus the AOC and the Bernie Sanders who are the exciting Democrats.
So the boring Democrats are pretty much Joe Biden people.
But what happens if Joe Biden drops out?
What happens if people say, ah, darn it, I wanted Joe Biden, but I'm going to have to go to my second choice because he dropped out, if that happens.
Who do you go to as your second choice after Biden?
Well, Klobuchar is kind of in there.
But I would think that if she were ever going to have the type of popularity that would make you president, we would have seen more of it by now.
Meaning that she would have naturally been popular in the way that, let's say, somebody like Yang or Buttigieg are popular.
So you see that Yang and Buttigieg get a lot of energy.
They create a lot of energy.
Whereas Klobuchar doesn't seem to create any energy.
So without that, it's hard to imagine that she could rise.
But I want to say one compliment to Klobuchar.
The people I worry about as leaders are the ones who can't take advice.
Now, you don't want your leader to be too...
Too dependent on advice.
You want them to have their own opinions as well.
But you want somebody who can listen to a better idea and then implement it, because it's just a better idea.
And I've been looking at, and I realize this sounds shallow, but wait for the whole thing.
Klobuchar, until last night, at least that's the first thing I noticed, had the worst haircut I've ever seen on a woman.
Am I right? Her hair, is that the right word for a woman?
Is it a hairdo or a haircut?
But her hairstyle, until last night, that's the first time I saw the updated hairstyle that looks great, she had a Dumb and Dumber haircut.
Now, I don't mean literally like that movie Dumb and Dumber, but if you were going to run for president and you were going to choose a hairstyle, you would not choose a Dumb and Dumber hairstyle, like Jim Carrey in the movie Dumb and Dumber.
You wouldn't do that, because everybody would look at it and say, well, that's not a leader haircut.
That looks like somebody who doesn't know what he looks like.
That looks like somebody who's so clueless or has no friends to tell them to change their haircut.
Klobuchar looked like that.
She looked like somebody who had no friends to tell her to change her hairstyle.
But I tuned in last night and I thought, holy cow.
She changed her look.
It looks like she may have changed more than her hairstyle because, I don't know, maybe the hairstyle changed the whole look.
Maybe your makeup got an upgrade or something.
So because she's a woman, I don't want to dwell on appearance.
I will say that I would say the same set of things about a male candidate.
Joe Biden's hair plugs probably hurt him.
Wouldn't you agree? But I would say that whatever work he's had on his face probably helped him because it did smooth things out a little bit.
I would say that President Trump's haircut is certainly an issue.
There are probably some people who are on the fence and just couldn't get behind his haircut.
I think that's the thing. I think Chris Christie had a weight problem that would have limited the number of people willing to vote for him.
We're a shallow bunch of preachers.
But if you don't recognize how shallow we are, and if you don't manage your campaign to at least take advantage of our shallowness, well, you're not really trying.
Because if you don't understand that your appearance is part of your package, that's not trying, right?
Look at Pete Buttigieg.
He looks great. Wouldn't you agree?
Pete Buttigieg looks terrific.
You know, his hair looks good.
He looks fit. He dresses well.
You know, he knows that the package is the whole package.
It's not a little bit of the package.
It's the whole package. Now, Bernie's got his own thing going on, because Bernie is, you know, Bernie is aggressively...
What would you call it? Unkempt.
So Bernie's whole brand is, I'm just going to be a mess, but listen to my policies.
Now, he makes it work.
I do think that Bernie's appearance probably cost them some votes because, again, people are shallow and they see their president as sort of an accessory to themselves.
So you don't want a bad accessory.
In the same way that you don't want a boyfriend or girlfriend who has an embarrassing automobile.
You might say, I love my boyfriend or girlfriend, but my boyfriend or girlfriend has an embarrassing automobile.
It would bother you. It wouldn't be necessarily a deal-breaker, but it would bother you.
You wouldn't want to get out of that car.
So props to Klobuchar for changing that visual element and doing it very well.
I thought whoever worked on her or whoever worked with her to get her new look kind of nailed it.
Kind of nailed it.
I'm not making a comment about beauty or sex appeal or any of that.
I'm trying to keep it out of the realm of sexism as much as I can.
I'm just saying that she went from an embarrassingly, I mean, just awkward-looking haircut to really nailing it, looking pretty sharp.
So that might help. You might see her...
I don't know if her ranking will go up just because she sort of disappears.
Let me talk about Yang.
Yang has a little bit of the Kamala Harris problem, but a different form of it.
In the way that Kamala Harris doesn't stay in leadership mode, she turns into mom mode and sort of submissive mode, and those are off-brand if you're trying to be a leader.
Yang might be the smartest or one of the smartest people.
Cory Booker's pretty smart. Elizabeth Warren's pretty smart.
Actually, most of the candidates are pretty smart.
Buttigieg is brilliant.
So you'd have a lot of smart people there.
But Yang is one of them.
And his problem is that he slips into nerd mode.
Now, I love nerds.
You know I love my nerds, right?
If you're the creator of Dilbert.
You probably like your nerds.
I love my geeks. I love my technical people.
If you're on the spectrum, I love you probably a little extra.
All right? So I love engineers.
I mean, it's a personality type that I'm just drawn to because I think the same way.
You know, I'm not an engineer, but I tend to think in similar structure.
So I love Yang's vibe.
Because he embraces the sort of the geeky side of himself without being too technical.
In other words, he manages to simplify and also look like he could handle details.
That's a tough thing to do, and I give him a lot of credit for that.
I would say that Yang has overperformed more than anybody else has overperformed, meaning he's gotten farther Then, you know, the smart people would have suggested was possible.
And he did it with skill.
Right? None of it's luck.
Yang is climbing up through the ranks with skill.
Right? All right?
And some of them, you know, the other candidates, it's a little bit more about exposure.
It's a little bit more about, well, I want free healthcare.
You know, so there are a variety of reasons why people would like the other candidates.
But there's only one person who started, you know, way back in the pack and just started just moving himself up a little bit at a time, gathering support.
All through skill.
Can't ignore how much skill it took for him to get this far into the pack.
More skill than anybody else has demonstrated.
But, here's the problem.
That skill is not looking like leadership skill.
Even if you tell yourself, I would love to have a leader who has that grasp of the world and that ability to communicate and obviously has the ability to get people excited.
He's interesting on stage.
He seems to have good intentions, doesn't seem to be wed to some ideological anchor, seems to be mentally flexible.
He's got a lot going on that people are noticing and they like it.
But I don't know if it looks like a leader.
In other words, there's a vibe that he collectively gives off that looks like he'd be a really good senator.
Or he'd be a really good advisor.
Yeah, he looks like he could be one of the most important people in the country.
In terms of being able to understand topics, communicate them, create energy around them, he might be one of the most important people that have ever walked around in 2019.
But he doesn't give off the I'm never taking my suit off even when I'm with my grandkids leadership vibe that Trump does.
Indeed, there was a There was this set of debates where Yang did a tweet and he said that he just learned there was no dress code for the debate.
And, you know, he said it kind of humorously as if maybe he won't wear a suit to a presidential debate.
Now, I love how geeky that is.
It totally... It paces me in the sense that I don't like wearing suits either.
So as a human being, I loved his tweet.
You know, just on the human level.
I was like, oh, that's funny. Wouldn't it be funny if he showed up without a suit?
But if you're trying to be president of the United States...
Don't even joke about taking your tie off if you're a guy.
And if you're a woman, whatever is the comparable to that.
But if you're a woman, don't say you're going to show up to work in your jogging pants because there's no dress code.
I don't want to hear that.
I want to hear that you sleep in your suit.
I think Trump sleeps in his suit.
If we didn't see pictures of him golfing, I would think he actually falls in bed with his suit on at night.
So Trump is still putting off the leader alpha vibe, and he never goes into character.
It's always leader, it's always alpha.
Even if you don't like it, it's always those two things.
Yang is human.
Very smart human, very capable human, but he's human.
He hasn't quite nailed the alpha leadership thing.
He feels like the guy you want working for the leader.
The one who's in the room who says, oh, you haven't thought about this yet.
Or maybe you should explain it this way.
Because he'd be great at that.
But I don't know if he's selling himself as the alpha leader that people are looking for.
Let's talk about...
I'm watching with great interest Bernie and Elizabeth Warren splitting votes.
I will say that I think Elizabeth Warren won the night because there are few or no videos of her talking.
So she ended up not making news.
So Elizabeth Warren didn't make any news, which is good, because she wants to avoid mistakes at this point, and most of the news was about people did something wrong.
But here's my question.
If Bernie and Elizabeth Warren are serious about their own opinions about how to run the country, if they believe their own speeches, then both of them know that eventually one of them needs to throw their full support to the other because they're the closest in philosophy.
Now, if you're Bernie and you're assessing your own odds, And you're looking at Warren.
Does Bernie think that he has a better chance of winning than Elizabeth Warren?
Because remember, Elizabeth Warren has the female advantage.
And if you're running as a Democrat, being a white, old white guy isn't your strongest look for getting out the vote.
Don't you think Bernie has to realize, and probably pretty soon, that Warren is the better version of him, the more electable version of Bernie?
Let me put it this way. You're a voter, and you have a choice between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
Let's imagine, hypothetically, you had that choice.
Bernie Sanders lost to the person who lost to Trump.
Think about that.
Bernie lost to Hillary, and Hillary lost to Trump.
He's a double-level loser.
In this exact race, right?
Because the last one was about Trump too.
You don't pick the person who lost to the person who lost to the person you're going to run against.
Elizabeth Warren has never run for president, and therefore she's never lost to anybody.
And people would relish the matchup because Trump has been mocking her for the Pocahontas thing forever.
People would love it.
So if you're Bernie, there's got to be at least some part of your mind, because Bernie still has all of his faculties.
Unlike Biden, Bernie looks like he still has his entire mind.
Bernie has to know that if he wants his policies, or some version of the things he wants, to become policy, the very best thing he can do is to bow out and endorse Warren.
If he doesn't do that, And fairly soon, he's not credible, because it means it's about Bernie and not about the country.
If Bernie cares about the country, he will throw all of his support, and fairly soon, to Elizabeth Warren, because she has a far better chance of winning.
She's younger, she can get the female vote more capably, and she'd be a more fun matchup.
So that's what I'm watching.
I think Bernie has some explaining to do as to why he's making things harder for the very policies he's promoting.
So his very existence makes his own policies less likely to happen.
If he wants his policies to win, he gets out of the race and puts all of his support to Warren.
So if you don't see that, it's not about the policies.
All right. Let's talk about this.
So, I watched Biden answer some questions, and my feeling was that he's just not all there.
And I'm not talking about the famous gaffes, because you can explain away the gaffes as, you know, he's always done it, and Yeah, I would be confused too if I were on the campaign trail and I was in a different city every night.
I'd forget where I was.
I've given lots of speeches where you travel to a place and you're on stage.
And one of the reasons I avoid mentioning the city is because I'm not confident I'll remember what town I'm in when I'm doing my speeches.
So that stuff doesn't bother me too much.
What does bother me is just that when he's talking just in general, it just doesn't look like he's quite all there.
It looks like Grandpa at Thanksgiving just talking about politics.
All right? So I don't think Biden has a chance.
I think Bernie's going to have to give his support to Warren.
Right now, if you had to bet, I would say Warren has a lock on the nomination.
If nothing changed. But of course, lots of things change, right?
So, Elizabeth Warren with Andrew Yang as vice president or something?
That'd be pretty interesting.
I doubt she'd pick him, but...
Yeah, Warren has by far the greatest likelihood of getting the nomination at this point.
She is consistently capable.
Even if you hate all of her policies, and I'm not a fan, she is consistently capable...
Quick, name an Elizabeth Warren Gaff.
Is there one?
How much has she been talking in public?
Name an Elizabeth Warren Gaff.
Can't do it. I can't think of one.
So, although in a perfect world we would have a better candidate, I think she's really learning quickly.
She's strengthening her game, and if Bernie gives her her support, she would be quite a formidable candidate, and then she would lose.
Here's what Elizabeth Warren said last night.
She said that conversations around regulating light bulbs, banning plastic straws, and cutting down on red meat Are exactly what the fossil fuel industry wants people focused on as a way to distract from their impact on climate change.
Now compare Harris and other people talking about meat and straws and light bulbs.
That's the smallest in the weeds conversation you can have.
So Warren is correctly pointing out that her competition is in the weeds.
If you're talking about straws and light bulbs and red meat, you're doing exactly what the fossil fuel industry wants you to do, which is talk about all the wrong stuff.
That showed that Warren knows what the high ground is.
She recognizes it as a strategy because she used it.
If you see somebody pull the high ground strategy, the most important, I'd say powerful, persuasion that isn't fear.
Fear is always the most powerful.
But beyond fear... The high ground maneuver is solid gold, works basically every time.
And she just high grounded her competition like they were bitches.
I mean, she just said, if you talk about light bulbs and straws and red meat, you're just basically playing into the enemy's hand.
And she's right.
When you hear her say that, Is there anybody in the world who hears Warren say, stop talking about this little stuff.
It's exactly what they want you to be talking about.
When she says that, does anybody say, no, no, Liz, you're so wrong.
These straws are important.
They don't. They immediately realize that she's taken the high ground and they are like, all right, maybe I'll change the subject.
So Warren has a stranglehold on the nomination as of today.
The slaughter beater is still 100%.
She can't beat Trump with the policies she has.
In order to beat Trump, she would actually have to fundamentally change her policies to be more mainstream, more Biden-like.
Let me tell you this.
If Elizabeth Warren does a 180 on nuclear energy, She might be your next president.
Because that might be enough.
If Elizabeth Warren completely reverses on nuclear energy and says, well, I looked into it a little bit more, and I got to say that the newer technology is safer than I thought, and given that, I'm going to say, let's go for that.
If she did that, she'd be really hard to beat.
Let me tell you, she'd be really hard to beat, but I don't know if she'll do that.
All right, that's all I have for now.
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