All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 2, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
55:05
Episode 681 Scott Adams: Frickin’ Alligators and Snakes in Border Moats, Leg Shooting, Kamala
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody, come on in here.
Come on in here and enjoy the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
Yes, it's going to happen right here and you're part of it.
Think of all the billions of people in the world who are not enjoying this Oh, empathy is in order.
Let us feel sorry for those who are not enjoying the simultaneous sip, as you wise and punctual people will enjoy momentarily.
And you don't need much.
All you need is a cup or mug or a glass of Steinichellis at the tanker, thermos, flask, canteen, grail, goblet, and vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite beverage.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
You're going to have an amazing day today, thanks to the Simultaneous Sip.
Go! Oh yeah.
So let's talk about a few things.
So Kamala Harris suddenly sent her first interesting tweet.
To which I said, huh, looks like maybe something happened with her staff.
And sure enough, she shook up her staff.
So, simultaneous with shaking up her staff, Kamala Harris has her first, that I can remember anyway, interesting tweet.
Now, by interesting, I mean it made us talk about it.
That's the entire test.
If you're talking about it, she's winning.
Now, I've explained this until I'm, you know, blue in the face, as they say.
I explained it with Trump.
He's taking all the attention.
It doesn't matter what he's saying.
I explained it with AOC, when you thought she was a flash in the pan, but it turns out she's running the whole show.
I told you. That getting attention is 50% of persuasion.
If you don't understand that point, there's almost nothing else you're going to understand.
I'm not talking to most of you.
I'm talking to these several people who will come to my Twitter feed today and say, why are you saying it's a good tweet?
Why are you saying it's a good tweet?
And then I'll say back to them, because you're talking about it.
And then the next person will come and say, Scott, why are you saying it's a good tweet?
It's not a good tweet. It's such a boring tweet.
It bores me so much. And then I'll say, but you're talking about it.
And then the next person will come, and guess what they'll say?
You're probably ahead of me, but it'll look something like this.
Why do you say it's a good tweet?
It's not a good tweet. It's such a bad tweet.
I always see bad tweets. Why do you say that, Scott?
And then I'll say, for the third time, because you're talking about it.
And no matter how many times I say that, there will still be a fourth person who will say, well, you know how it goes.
For some reason, that message doesn't connect.
I don't know why. It doesn't connect with everybody.
Most of you are on board with that.
But there's some minority of people who simply can't hear that getting attention is pretty much always good in the political realm.
I mean, you'd have to be saying things so bad.
Well, let me give you an example.
Representative Tlaib...
I never know if I'm pronouncing her name right, so I apologize if I got that wrong, Tlaib.
Fox News is reporting that she has now tweeted a total of four separate race hoaxes, all of which were discovered to be hoaxes later, and she hasn't corrected any of them.
She's never tweeted, oh, I got that wrong.
I guess that was a race hoax.
Now, Who are we talking about?
Tlaib. She's still in the news, no matter what she does.
Can you think of something that would be worse Then tweeting four separate race hoaxes, getting the world all worked up with stuff.
And then apparently yesterday she was touring some police facility that had...
They were showing off their facial recognition.
And I swear I'm not making this up.
She said, you know, in public to people who could record her and witness it, she said...
Maybe you should only hire black people to do the facial recognition because white people can't tell black people apart.
She actually said that.
That actually came out of her mouth.
Now, did it hurt her?
Probably not. Probably not.
Apparently, there's nothing she can say that won't make her just more famous.
And somehow that works.
Now, if that example doesn't make my case, I don't know what will.
Keep in mind that if you were a Democrat or an anti-Trumper, watching Trump's entire act, you would have been screaming the whole time, there's no way this is going to work.
Sure, he's getting a lot of attention, but look at the things he's saying.
Come on! Sorry, cat's in the act again.
The things he's saying will disqualify him.
No, they got him all the attention.
He became president, most important person in the world.
That's how it works.
So, getting back to Kamala, if we're talking about it, it's working.
And the tweet was, she was tweeting that the president should be kicked off a tweet, Twitter for his...
Outrageous tweets. And then she, I think there was two of them, and the second one she tweeted to Jack Dorsey saying, Jack, what are you going to do about this?
Kick him off of Twitter.
Now let me ask you this.
Do you think that Kamala Harris believes that there's any chance that Trump would be kicked off of Twitter?
Can we agree that she doesn't think that's actually going to happen?
Because that's important. You have to know that she doesn't believe.
You know, I'm not reading minds, but you'd have to have an IQ of about six to think that anything will happen to the president in terms of getting kicked off of Twitter.
You know that's not going to happen.
No chance. So, given that it can't happen, why would somebody suggest it twice?
Well, probably because she got better advisors.
So whoever advised her, and it looks like maybe there's a better advisor in the mix here, because she did shake up her staff yesterday.
Whoever advised her certainly was not thinking, hey, if you send a couple of tweets, Twitter might take the president off of Twitter.
No. Nobody thought that.
Nobody thought that.
They thought that it would be a provocative tweet that would allow her to get back into the news cycle where she has disappeared.
Did it work? Yeah.
Totally worked. It was a headline all yesterday.
That's all we talked about. Well, we talked about other things, but of all the other Democrats that were running, how much attention did they get yesterday?
Less. Less attention.
So keep an eye on Kamala.
I've been saying for a while, and this will be the point that will be ignored unless it becomes important sometime in the future.
It's one of those things you can't hear when it's first said.
You can hear it in the past when you go back and say, oh, he said that.
Here's what I said. The top three polling Democrats are unelectable.
And I think a lot of professionals and people in the base know that for different reasons.
They're unelectable. If you were to turn the polls around and put, you know, someone like Delaney and Yang and stuff on the top, you would end up with a more electable group.
It's just the weirdity of the system allowed the least electable people to be the top three.
Now, as the professionals start to exert their control over the system, and I think that happens especially as the crowd thins out a little bit, the professionals will have more influence over everything, I believe that they will start looking for somebody who could win.
And what's unique about Kamala Harris is that her problems, while enormous, Are easily solvable.
She has the most solvable problems.
Let me give you an example.
When she talks, she gets jumpy, like her shoulders go up.
It doesn't look leadership-like.
How hard would it be to learn to calm your body while you talk?
And to maybe not hold your hands together like this in front of you like you're nervous.
How hard would it be to learn that?
One minute. 60 seconds.
She'd just have to be aware of it.
And then if she started to do it, she'd say, oh, don't do that.
She'd probably fix her posture, stand up straight, and just put her arms and hands in whatever position look.
More leaderly. How hard?
60 seconds to correct probably a third of her problems, which is her body language.
How hard would it be for her to learn to not laugh at her own jokes?
Well, it's a lifelong habit, so you don't break it immediately.
But how hard would it be to learn to start doing it?
60 seconds. Somebody says to her, you know, people are talking about this.
It makes you look less like a leader, more like a follower.
Don't giggle like a schoolgirl at your own jokes.
The first time you hear that, I tell you, it's so chilling that you would remember it.
If somebody you trusted said, look, your nervous laugh at yourself just makes you look like you could never be president.
Just stop doing that. How hard would it be to stop?
Not really hard, because once it became a priority and you're running for president, you'd just put a little attention on it and it would stop right away.
So she can fix her body language.
She can fix her nervous laugh.
That's 60% of her problem right there.
Who else can fix their biggest problems in 120 seconds?
That's unique, right?
Then the last thing is how to be interesting.
And how to have good policies and stuff that people care about.
That part has a lot to do with her professional staff.
So if she's moved out of the way, whoever was boring us to death with their advice, and if she moved in somebody who could get some attention, Which wouldn't be the hardest thing in the world.
All you have to do is hire a better advisor or get somebody out of the way who was maybe blocking the good advisors you already had.
Looks like that just happened.
So, of the biggest problems to solve, looks like she has very solvable problems, and the first thing you would imagine that would happen to solve those problems would be a shake-up in the staff, and that happened yesterday.
Now, the odds of her pulling up from 3% to leadership are low, right?
I think we would all agree, you know, when you get down to like 3%, the odds of coming back, I don't know.
Has that ever happened? It'd be hard.
But the next thing that's going to happen is some consolidation.
And by that I mean somebody in the top three is going to drop out.
And when the first person in the top three drops out, will there only be three left at that point?
In other words, will one of the top three drop out only when it's down to three?
Or will one of them drop out while they're still stragglers and three percenters in the race?
That's important. I think Biden might drop out Before the group winnows too much.
If Biden drops out early, and I think you'd have to say, that's a good 50-50 chance, wouldn't you?
Wouldn't you say there's a good 50-50 chance that Biden will find some respectable reason, oh, I had a health problem, something like that?
There'll be some reason that will look natural why he has to drop out.
Because you figure at this point the professionals are encouraging him to do it or at least not supporting him enough to get to the finish line.
So when Biden goes, where does his support go?
Does it go to radical Bernie and radical Warren or does it go to the next person after the two radicals who at least has some chance of finding something like a reasonable middle?
That's the play. So that's the play that I'd be looking for.
I'm not going to say I predict it.
I'm going to stick with my prediction from over a year ago, in which I said Kamala would be the nominee, but then lose to Trump in the general.
I'm going to stick with that only because it's interesting.
I did lay out the reasons.
The reasons haven't changed.
The only thing that did change is that we learned she's the worst campaigner we've ever seen.
But it's fixable.
The things which make her the worst candidate I've ever seen are actually really easily fixed.
so watch out for that let's see oh and of course people are saying how can Kamala Harris ask a social media giant to silence the first amendment That's exactly why the tweet works, because people are falling for it.
They're just totally falling for it, like it's a serious suggestion.
You know what else is not a serious suggestion?
There's a book out now that claims that Trump...
Quote, wanted to dig a water-filled trench at the border, stocked with snakes and alligators.
Now, there's no mention about whether these snakes and alligators would have frickin' lasers attached to their heads, because there's no point in building a border moat With just snakes and alligators, if you're not going to take it to the next level and put some frickin' lasers on the alligators' heads.
Snakes are a little harder because they're smaller, but at the very least, put some frickin' lasers on the alligators' heads so they can just look at people and try them.
And then there's also...
Also in this book, they say that Trump suggested migrants be shot in the legs to slow them down.
I'm not laughing about shooting migrants.
Let me be clear.
I'm laughing at the ridiculousness of the report.
There's nothing funny about shooting people at the border, and we shouldn't make fun of it.
But it's also not going to happen the way it's described.
Now, do I think...
That Trump has ever said anything that other people could interpret as asking about shooting people in the leg and asking about building a moat with snakes and alligators.
I think he probably did ask those questions.
How seriously should that have been taken?
Probably not too seriously.
It doesn't sound a lot different than if three of you were sitting in a room having some beers and just talking about stuff.
The way he talks apparently in professional settings is not a lot different than an ordinary person talks all the time.
It's just that he does it in the White House.
Now, do I think there's anything we should worry about in this reporting, in this one book?
It took us until now to hear this.
Obviously, anybody else who heard this didn't think it was serious enough to even mention.
So if it took this long for it to come out in a book, one thing you could be fairly confident about is that it's out of context.
In other words, all the people who didn't complain about it, Probably because they heard it in context and just laughed or thought it's just him talking.
He's just stirring up the room.
It's not real.
Right.
Now, the shooting in the leg thing, I have to think, was because of something specific.
I don't believe there's any chance that he thought, you know, just as a general policy, if you see somebody crossing the border, you know, say it's a young family with their children in their arms, you know, doing their best to make a new life, leaving a dangerous situation, maybe we should just start shooting them, but not killing maybe we should just start shooting them, but not killing them, just shooting them in the leg.
He never said that.
I think we could agree that nothing like that actually happened.
Now.
Did he say that there might be some special case where shooting somebody's leg was better than whatever the alternative was?
Maybe. He may have thrown something out there just to see how people react.
But I don't think he can take any of that as seriously.
And I think you just have to look at where actual policies end up to know that this was...
It's just another fake news story.
But a funny one. If you believe that the President seriously wanted to build a moat with snakes and alligators, I think that's on you.
If you think the President literally wanted to start shooting immigrants in the leg as some kind of general policy or something, I think that's on you.
I think that's on you.
Because that's not really a credible report.
Here's something interesting you didn't know about.
There's an Office of Nuclear Energy in the government.
Did you even know that?
I didn't. I knew there was a Department of Energy, and I knew that they were doing some pro-nuclear stuff, Rick Perry's group, but I didn't know there was an Office of Nuclear Energy.
I found out yesterday when Mark Schneider, who's our famous nuclear energy advocate, Mark Schneider said that they started following him.
Which is great, because he's one of the most effective advocates for nuclear energy.
So they should follow him.
So I followed him too, just to see what they're about.
And, man, that was a good follow.
I'll tell you what they are. They're at GovNuclear, G-O-V-Nuclear, at GovNuclear on Twitter.
And worth following if you want to follow, you know, if you're interested in climate or energy or nuclear energy or any of that, it's a good follow.
They don't have many followers yet.
So they tweeted this, are you ready?
There are three advanced reactor systems, meaning three different new technologies for nuclear power, could be coming as soon as 2030 and are expected to be safe, cheap, etc., So, there's an international consortium, like consortium, consortium, that we are a part of, we being the United States, and the Office of Nuclear Energy is talking about it, and they're Generation 4.
Gen 4. Stuff that won't melt down, and we know how to make them less expensive.
It's easy to make nuclear less expensive.
If you don't know that, you're not paying attention.
A lot of people say, nuclear is too expensive.
Well, the old way is.
The old way is really expensive.
The way we know how to do it in the future is the way you make anything less expensive.
You standardize it, you build them in factories, you agree on one design, so everybody knows how to make that one design, and you test it until your one design is pretty solid, and then you reproduce it.
So it's mass production, it's factory built, it's making them smaller, in some cases you get some economies that way, because you can ship stuff on trucks, etc.
Build them in a factory, ship it on a truck, assemble it.
So, because economics is such a mature science, I guess, if you want to call it a science, it's not quite, not a science, but it's a mature field.
We know exactly how to make a nuclear power plant less expensive.
We just make it smaller, standardize, test it, you know, make sure that anybody who knows how to work at one sort of automatically knows how to work at another because it's the same technology.
So the government is well on its way working with other countries to have advanced designs working by 2030.
And then once you have them, how quickly can you roll them out?
Ah, you're thinking the old way.
If I told you in 2030 we'll have these really good, safe, small, economical nuclear plants, you're probably going to say to me, if you're a climate alarmist, I'm not sure I love that term, but let's say you believe that the climate is a big problem, You might say to yourself, too late, Scott.
It's too late. It takes so long to approve and build a nuclear plant that if we don't start building these safe ones in 2030, it's already too late.
Well, no it isn't, because you're thinking of the old way.
The old way of getting something approved and built was way too slow and too expensive.
They had two things not working for it.
By 2030, If we're serious about this, and if we still care about the planet, and let's say worst case scenario, sea level has risen, similar to the predictions, could happen.
Yeah, it might happen on its own, not for human warming, but maybe it just happens.
Then people are more panicked.
So it's the panic I'm talking about, not the truth of climate science.
In 2030, we're likely to have a little warmer planet, and people are going to say, whoa, let's do this.
I didn't know you could make these small and cheap and safe.
As soon as the public understands that small, cheap, and safe has been accomplished, and it looks very doable.
There's some engineering, testing, iterating challenges, but they're all within the realm of just engineering.
You don't need Einstein to invent something new.
You just need to engineer it and test it and iterate until it's working just the way you want, for the most part.
In all likelihood, we could roll them out pretty quickly once they're safe.
Because that's the trouble, right?
Nobody wants one near them if it's going to potentially even in their mind be unsafe.
Now you should know that the current generation that we could build today Is already the safest power that we have.
The things that have had problems in the past were earlier generations, which were less safe for reasons we understand really well.
So the current newest generation of nuclear has never had a major event.
All right. Event meaning somebody dying or that sort of thing.
Here's my idea.
For... Getting rid of hurricanes and making the world a better place.
This is my whiteboard that you can barely see.
But if you could, you can see that this is a very bad map of Africa, with the top part of Africa being the Sahara.
So that's all desert up there.
Suppose you put together three technologies that we understand.
We know how to build nuclear.
So you put a nuclear power plant right on the coast.
We're close enough to the coast that you can get the water from it and then you put a desalinization plant right next to it to take advantage of the energy because desalinization is an energy intensive thing.
That gives you an ability to irrigate, but irrigating a desert isn't enough.
You would also need nutrient dense soil.
Turns out we know how to do that too.
If you put a bunch of free-roaming livestock on the border between vegetation and desert, Those livestock will wander over into the desert part now and then and poop.
And their activities of eating plants and pooping seeds, and the poop being the fertilizer, fairly quickly and faster than you would imagine would be the case, meaning over just a few years, they actually move the border of the vegetation into the desert.
So you can actually expand You can expand vegetation into a desert just by having livestock wandering around on the border.
So if you combine those three things, you could target the Sahara, one of the hottest places on Earth, for a specific and targeted cooling.
Why does that matter?
Oh, I'm not even going to...
How many of you know why that matters?
Why would it matter so much to do it there versus somewhere else?
Does anybody know the answer to that?
The answer is because that's where hurricanes start.
Hurricanes are born because of the difference in temperature between, and somebody will have to fact check me on this, but I'm pretty sure this is approximately true, that the ocean is relatively cool, the desert is relatively hot, and there's a certain time of season when that difference is enough to make the wind turn into a storm configuration.
If you could cool just a few degrees, Off of the, you know, the coastal Sahara part, there are smart people who believe, and again, I'd have to be fact-checked on all this, I'm not the climate scientist, but I believe you could actually weaken hurricanes.
Now, weakening hurricanes is not an answer to climate change, because hurricanes and storms are just one thing that people are worried about.
You know, they're worried about this super storm, etc.
But we could somewhat directly go after it.
We could find the hottest spot and just take a couple of degrees off it over time.
So that now we're 40 years in the future when there would be super hurricanes, assuming climate change, you know, goes like the scientists say.
Now, what if climate change is a big old hoax?
A lot of you believe that, right?
Say you believe climate change is a big old hoax.
Isn't it still a good idea to get rid of that desert and turn it into something useful?
Of course it is. It's never going to be a bad idea.
To have desalinization and fresh water and cheap energy and a place you can plant more stuff.
So I just put that out there as a possibility.
Speaking of climate change, there was a study published in a prestigious journal called Nature, That was retracted, and it was a study that said that the oceans were warming even more than we thought, so it was going to be even worse than we thought.
And that paper got retracted.
But here's the interesting part.
It was retracted because somebody named Lewis, a mathematician who was a critic of The climate change consensus.
He looked at the paper and after it was published.
So remember, he was not an initial reviewer.
He saw it after it was published.
And he posted a critique and then the scientists looked at his critique and said, oh, darn it, you're right.
And they withdrew the paper.
Now let me tell you how they describe the discrepancy.
So they say, quote, shortly after publication arising from comments from Nicholas Lewis, so he would be the climate skeptic, we realized that our reported uncertainties were underestimated owing to our treatment of certain systemic errors as random errors.
What? So the problem was that they treated systemic errors as random errors.
I don't know what any of that means.
But here's the punchline of the story.
100% of climate scientists didn't catch this mistake.
The only person who caught it was not a climate scientist.
Let me say it again.
100% of all the climate scientists in the world didn't catch the obvious mistake.
The only person who caught it was somebody who's not a climate scientist.
He's a mathematician.
Now he knows about climate science because he follows it, but he's a mathematician.
Now let me ask you this.
How unusual is it that all of the experts would be fooled And the one person who's not an expert would catch it.
And remember, now all the experts have agreed that the guy who caught it was right, that it just had an error in it.
How unusual is that?
Unfortunately, that's not unusual.
So let me ask you this.
How unusual is it that an outsider, a mathematician, could have enough information To debunk a study that has been published in a prestigious manual or a prestigious publication.
It's kind of unusual, right?
Because the error that he caught was, I think, in just the math and the statistics of it.
So, in other words, it was a rare situation in which the outsider had everything he needed.
Because it's just math and statistics, and I guess the raw data was there, so he could just look at it and say, no, I'm a mathematician, you got this wrong.
That's not that usual.
Let's compare that to somebody who said, we went to all the measuring stations around the world, and we came up with this estimate of what the warming is.
Let's say you read that paper.
Could you and I, or anybody else, No, if they did the measurements correctly.
Well, not really, because you'd have to sort of do what they did and travel there and see if there's anything interesting or wrong with the measuring stations.
Most things, I would imagine, are not easy to check if you're just an observer of the paper.
If all you have is the paper, what are the odds that you could debunk it even if it's wrong?
Probably not, because all you have is what's on the paper.
You're not going to go reproduce the stuff.
I mean, if you're just a reviewer, you're not going to try to reproduce it.
Other people might try to reproduce it later.
So, here's what experience gets you that inexperience doesn't.
And I talk about this in one of my chapters in Loserthink, which is my great book that's almost out.
You can buy it on pre-order right now.
It's called Loserthink, and it's available wherever books are sold.
Audiobook will be available, too, at the same time.
November 5th is when it comes out, but you can pre-order it now.
It'd be a good time to do that.
And I talk about this effect where if you're experienced, it would not seem unusual for the consensus of reviewers to be so wrong so often that the public would have an incorrect view about climate change.
That wouldn't even be that weird if you're experienced.
Because if you're experienced, you've seen this situation a whole bunch of times.
If you're 22 and it's the first one of these you've seen, you're like, oh, there was a publication and then it was criticized and then it was pulled out, you'd probably say to yourself, science is working really well.
Because that's how it works. Nobody expects science to be right on the first try every time.
Nobody expects every paper to be true.
That's how it works. You're transparent.
People criticize you.
You fix it. So if you're 22, you'd read this story and say, everything's working fine.
It was just one paper.
Just one time.
And they caught the error.
They fixed it. It doesn't really change the big picture.
Everything's working fine.
If you're experienced, this is the hundredth time you've seen something like this or whatever.
You've seen it over and over again.
If you've worked for a big company, you've seen these blind spots.
And you've seen lots of situations where the majority are all wrong.
If you've never seen situations in which the majority were blinded to their wrongness, even for years, you would assume it's unusual.
And you would assume, well, it's not happening in this case.
What are the chances that so many people could be wrong?
Well, if you're experienced, you would say, totally feasible.
Doesn't mean that's what's happening.
And I want to be very clear here.
I'm not telling you that all the climate scientists are wrong.
I'm telling you that if they're wrong on the big picture, you know, the level of risk, if they're wrong, I would conclude, based on my longer life and vaster experience and different large organizations, etc., I would say, huh, can't say I didn't see it coming.
Now, I'm not saying it's true.
I'm not saying that climate change is all alarmist and no science.
I'm not saying that. How would I know?
I'm not a scientist. I will say that if someday we find out it was not valid, I would say, yeah, that's consistent with my experience.
That wouldn't be surprising at all.
Even though, and let me say this as clear as possible, the scientific community is pretty unified.
Sure, there's 5% or whatever it is that is on the other team, but They're pretty sure.
And still, it would not surprise me if they were blind to some, you know, certain types of errors.
All right. And I don't believe that the scientific process is robust enough to catch it within any time frame.
I will say the scientific process probably is robust enough that it would catch any major errors with climate science eventually.
But the problem is you don't know when it eventually starts, right?
Could it be a year?
Could it be five years?
Could it be 10 years? Could it be 20 years before some major error is found in the scientific consensus?
Easily. Yeah, easily you could go 20 years and then find out, oh man, we got all this wrong.
That wouldn't even be surprising.
But I'm not saying that's the case.
I'm saying it wouldn't be surprising.
All right. Trump offered congratulations on China's Communist Party anniversary, their 70th anniversary.
And people criticized the president.
They would say, Are you kidding me?
How can you compliment President Xi for this regime of 70 years that's done all these bad things?
And so, Mr.
President, you're doing it all wrong.
Why can't you learn to deal with leaders the right way?
To which I say, who taught you how to negotiate, you critics?
Here's how you negotiate with China.
You show them complete respect at the leadership level, which eliminates any reasons they have to work against you.
It eliminates any ego, brand, reason to work against you.
So by showing the leader maximum respect, the president takes off the table Any problems it would cause by not doing that.
Now he can talk to them.
Now, at the same time, that only works if you're tough as nails on the actual deal negotiating, which apparently we are.
Otherwise, by now we would have a deal if we were not being pretty, pretty tough.
So, The perfect negotiating stance is complete respect for the person you're dealing with, even if you don't feel it on the inside.
You might not feel it on the inside.
But it's a good strategy to show respect.
You get the best communication that way, the best level of trust, etc.
And then you go hard as nails on the negotiating.
Now, as I've said, there's no chance that we're going to have a trade deal.
We are heading toward a soft decoupling, and I don't see the slightest chance that's going to change.
Take that as a prediction.
It used to be a preference, but now it's a prediction.
I think it's the first time I've predicted it.
So my prediction is a soft decoupling.
Soft meaning we're not going to have some kind of law that says everybody get out of China.
Stop doing business with China.
Rather, it will be something like simply not doing any more business with China.
Because all we have to do is stop the trend.
That's all we have to do. We just say, all right, if you're already there, it's going to be hard to leave.
We get that. But your next factory...
Your next factory kind of needs to be a little closer to home.
It doesn't have to be America.
That'd be great. If you're like Apple Computer and you built your plant in Texas, that'd be great.
But it doesn't have to be. It just shouldn't be in China.
So decoupling is coming.
And I say that because China is never going to act on fentanyl.
They're never going to give up on squashing Hong Kong.
They're probably not going to stop the Holocaust against the Uyghur community, and they're never going to stop stealing IP, and they're never going to be trustworthy on any kind of technology deal or really anything.
So we should just stop pretending that that could ever be a deal.
All right. Here's the other news, fake news.
Fake only because I thought it already happened.
So it's not fake news in the sense that it's false.
It's fake news in the sense that, why is this news?
And the news is that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo admitted he was on the call between Trump and the Ukraine president.
To which I said, I thought we already knew that.
Are you telling me that the president would call the president of Ukraine and he wouldn't have Mike Pompeo on the call?
In what world is Mike Pompeo not on that call?
Didn't you assume he was on the call?
And I'm watching the comments.
People are going, who cares?
That was his job.
Why are we even talking about it?
You know what else Mike Pompeo did?
And I swear I'm not making this up.
Mike Pompeo, and I hate to be the one to break this news to you, but Mike Pompeo once put on a crisp-looking suit with a necktie and went to work.
I swear I'm not making that up.
Mike Pompeo, and you could probably get him to admit it, he once put on a good-looking suit, put on a necktie, and went to work one day.
That's the same story.
Mike Pompeo went to work.
That's it. It's ridiculous.
All right. I saw CNN in one of their headlines to a story.
They said, Trump is branding impeachment as a coup.
I love the way that they worded it, that he's branding it.
He's rebranding impeachment as a coup.
Now, is that fair?
Is it fair to call impeachment a coup?
Well, impeachment as a general concept is certainly not a coup.
It's almost the opposite of a coup.
It would be, under normal circumstances, the impeachment process would be part of what keeps the Republic healthy.
It would be more like a cure than a disease, under normal circumstances.
What we're seeing is not normal circumstances.
What we're seeing is people who started with impeachment and then figured out their reasons after the fact.
And that's pretty well established at this point.
So, is it fair In terms of being close enough to true when Trump is saying that impeachment is a coup.
I say yes.
I say yes.
Now, I think you've watched me long enough to know that I will disagree When something doesn't make sense.
I hope you've seen me enough to know I don't just reflexively agree with everything the administration does.
But they do a lot of stuff right.
And I do tend to focus on the things they do right, because that's where the interesting stuff is.
That's where you learn something, when they do something right.
And Trump branding impeachment as a coup is right.
It is right. Because it fits the facts.
It's a completely fair description of the intentions of the people involved, and the intentions are to undo an election, and not for illegitimate reasons.
What would you call it?
I think calling it a coup is actually factually, ethically, morally completely fair, completely appropriate.
Now, I can see why they don't like it, but I think it's fair.
Now, and then, of course, the people who are going to complain about Trump branding it a coup, no doubt are going to say, oh, you're starting a civil war, you're starting a race war.
I talked about this yesterday.
Do you know what I don't see?
If I walk outside, I'm not going to see any race war.
If I talk to my neighbors, I'm not going to see any race war.
I don't think there's going to be a race war.
Because, first of all, nobody wants one.
And that's all you really need.
If nobody wants one, that's probably sufficient.
You don't need more than that.
Literally nobody wants one.
Period. Nobody wants one.
It's not gonna happen.
All right. Let's see what else we got going on here.
Oh, I think that was most of it.
I hit all the high points.
Got any questions? Bernie in the hospital, two stents put in.
Is that true? Did Bernie get hospitalized?
Because that would end him.
I don't know that that's true.
Can somebody confirm that? Bernie stents.
I'm just going to search it while you're here.
I don't think that's true.
Ooh, canceled events until further notice.
Oh, it is true.
So ABC, is this current?
Yeah, October 2nd.
Bernie Sanders, age 78, canceled events until further notice after being hospitalized.
Medical evaluation, he was found to have blockage in one artery and two stents were inserted.
He's conversing and in good spirits.
And he's done.
He's done. So, let me wish Bernie Sanders well.
This is no time to be political, but you can't help it because he's running for president.
Everything's political if you're running for president.
So you can't really take that out of it.
But let me just say, Bernie Sanders has been a national treasure.
Even if you hate everything he's ever said.
Because I think you can respect people for their passion and for fighting for things.
He's certainly changed the conversation.
He's changed the entire Democratic Party.
He's moved things which he thought were crazy into the, well, let's talk about it, realm.
He's been a good fighter.
He's had infinite energy.
He's inspired people.
I think he's a patriot.
I think he's a patriot, even if you disagree with everything he's ever said or done.
I think he's a patriot.
And so I wish him well.
But at age 78, if you are hospitalized during a campaign with a fairly serious heart condition, even though the treatment of it seems fairly trivial, I think you're done as a candidate.
Is that too harsh?
Tell me in the comments, do you think that's the end of it?
Because if you had a choice of Warren or Sanders, and one of them didn't look like he could make it to the finish line, because he's 78, and now he's got a medical problem, it would be okay to be 78 with no medical problem.
Well, I don't know how okay that would be, but I mean, it wouldn't be okay with me, but apparently his supporters didn't care.
But I don't know how you could have a major cardio situation At age 78, obviously he'll have to pull back on his schedule for a while, etc.
So we wish him well, but that should end his campaign.
In a sense. Now, I was expecting Biden to come up with this kind of an excuse first.
It's not an excuse in Bernie's case.
I'm sure he didn't want this to happen.
But I would expect Biden to have some kind of a health event, whether real or imagined, because once you reach a certain age, you're pretty much in and out of the doctor's office once every two weeks, aren't you?
I mean, if you reach a certain age and you get pretty acquainted with your doctor, So I feel sorry for Bernie.
Well, apparently the operation was completely successful, so there's nothing to feel sorry about in terms of his health.
Looks like the medical community did its job.
So good job for the medical community and we wish him well.
He's a communist who wants us all in chains.
Chains, I say. Well, I think that might be a slight exaggeration.
Now, you don't get a sympathy vote for president.
There's no such thing as the sympathy vote for president.
Now, the impeachment thing, there was some poll that showed that a number of people were against impeachment just because they knew it would be bad for Democrats.
The Democrats were against it because they knew it would be bad for Democrats.
So impeachment is not a sympathy situation.
It's more an anger situation and a strategic political situation.
And here comes Kamala.
I don't think Kamala Harris would be the natural recipient of Bernie's voters.
I think they go to Warren.
If Warren takes...
So here's the sequence of events.
Bernie will drop in the polls, presumably.
His support will go to Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth Warren will become the uncontested frontrunner.
If you're Biden, what is your one claim for being in the race?
That you're the one who can win.
What's it look like if Biden thinks he can't win the nomination once Warren has a commanding lead?
And once Warren absorbs Bernie's people, I think that's going to happen.
I don't think they're going to go to Biden.
Especially if your candidate had an age-related health problem, are you going to move your vote to the other guy who's that age-ish?
That seems like a stretch.
So the logical thing that's going to happen is that Bernie's support will go down, Warren's support will go up, sufficient that she's the front-runner, and then the entire reason for Biden disappears.
Biden's reason for running will disappear if he's not the frontrunner.
He only makes sense as an unquestioned frontrunner.
The moment he's not, he's completely irrelevant in second place.
In second place, he has no relevance to anything.
And he's going to know it.
And anybody who might give him money or sport him is going to know it as well.
So, the likely sequence of events, Warren goes to number one.
Biden no longer has a reason to be in the race.
Bernie becomes irrelevant in the race, whether he stays in or not.
He might drop out if Warren goes to the top.
And then you're going to start looking around for who's next level down.
And you'll see a bump for Yang and Buttigieg and maybe Harris.
Maybe Harris and maybe others.
So it looks like that's the way it's lining up.
Let me tell you, if I get my Kamala Harris prediction right, you'd have to admit, Now, I'm not going to say it will be right, but I'm sticking with the prediction because all of the reasons for the prediction are still in place.
I just have one additional fact that she's a bad campaigner, but it looks fixable.
So, that's what we've got going on right now.
It's all fun, and remember, snakes and alligators and moats, they're no good without freaking lasers on their heads.
That's a reference to Dr.
Evil and... Well, most of you knew that.
Reference to Dr. Evil with the frickin' lasers.
Somebody says Hillary's going to slide in.
I say zero chance of Hillary.
The reason I say zero chance of Hillary is because, number one, she would not take a second beating, and I don't think she could handle the risk of losing a second time.
Number two, nothing would motivate Trump supporters more than Hillary in the race.
It would be the best thing ever.
Two, or three, or whatever I'm up to, Hillary does not strike me as a spontaneous personality, meaning that If she were planning to run, or even if she had a secret desire to run, we would have seen it.
She would have already had a meeting with X. Somebody would have said, I just talked to her.
It would be something like fundraising.
You would see signs of it.
She's not going to just go from zero to 100 miles per hour without all the stuff in between.
Hillary does not strike me as an unprepared candidate.
I don't think she would run unprepared.
And that's part of the reason people liked her, right?
I mean, she was a serious, detail-oriented person.
So I just don't see her spontaneously getting in.
It would be so out of brand.
All right. That's enough for now.
Somebody says, you are underestimating Buttigieg.
Maybe. I think Buttigieg and...
Who else is down there?
Cory Booker. You know, you can see somebody who's in sixth place or whatever, rising up to third.
I can see that happening. All right, enough for now.
▲
Export Selection