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Oct. 10, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
54:11
Episode 689 Scott Adams: Ukraine, China, California, and Other Basket Cases
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Time Text
Hey everybody. Scott could not make it.
It was too dark in California.
So I'm Dale. I'm Dale and I'll be doing today's Periscope for Scott, who is sort of a dope.
He's sort of an idiot.
Oh, I love the way I said that.
It was so clever. So this morning will be coffee with Dale.
Scott couldn't make it.
It's too dark in California because we don't have light in California.
Lots of big countries like Ukraine have things like electricity, power.
They've got electricity and power in places like Honduras and other places where people think they're coming to a better place.
Joke's on them. They had power when they left.
They came to California.
No power. So I'm Dale.
And I'd like to lead you through a very dark California coffee with Dale.
And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, some kind of stain or maybe a chalice or possibly a tanker, a thermos, a flask, a canteen, a grail, a goblet, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like tea.
And join me now for the simultaneous sip.
It's terrible.
It's terrible.
You're going to have a terrible day today.
And so, as Dale, I would like to talk about all the bad things happening in the world.
Wait a minute. Hold a second.
Somebody's calling me. Hold on.
Hold on. Don't go anywhere.
Hold on. Oh, there it is.
Dale. Dale, Dale, Dale.
It's hard to tell the difference between Dale and Whistleblower 3.
They look a lot alike. But let's do it right.
Will you join me in the proper simultaneous sip?
Dale just can't do it right.
Dale. Alright, join me now for the simultaneous sip, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Go! Oh, that's the way to do it.
Dale can't do anything right.
So, let me give you an update on California.
So yesterday, the schedule in California is that I was supposed to, my town, was supposed to lose its electricity, potentially or probably or something, and At noon yesterday.
So at first I thought it was going to be at midnight yesterday, you know, the start of the day.
And then it was noon.
So I couldn't really do much yesterday because you just sort of sat around waiting for the power to go out.
I'll tell you one thing. Most of the people I talked to had no idea that there was even a potential for a power outage of that type where they just turned out the lights and wait.
Until the day before or the day of.
There are people who were found out about that the day of, including me.
I thought it was a joke.
Christina said, oh, they're going to turn off the power for, you know, 12 hours or something.
And I thought, no, they're not.
What kind of weird conspiracy theory are you falling for, Christina?
And then I saw it was real.
And then I thought, wow, we really need another governor.
Let me tell you, if you live in a state where you wake up and that same day you learn, for the first time ever, that you might lose electricity for the whole day because your state does not have an infrastructure that can support electricity, and you're just finding out about it, you have to get rid of your governor right away.
You shouldn't...
You know, I hate that we even have to wait for an election.
Now, had our governor said, you know, we've got this problem, it could happen any day now, we're working on it, we're doing what we can, but we have to warn you, sometime in the next several months we might have to do this thing.
Now, if that had been the case, I would feel a little bit differently about it.
I'd feel, well, there's a problem, it's a hard one.
Somebody's communicating with us, they're working on it, they have something like a plan, Nothing like that's happening.
I mean, at least I haven't noticed.
Maybe I don't watch enough local news.
But we desperately need to get rid of our governor.
There aren't too many things that would make me say that.
But sitting around waiting for the frickin' lights to go off?
There isn't the slightest chance this guy can get re-elected, is there?
Can you get re-elected when you just made all of your voters sit there waiting for the lights to go out in the most technologically advanced place on the frickin' planet Earth?
Have you heard of Silicon Valley?
It's here. You get that?
Silicon Valley?
That's here. The smartest technologists in the universe, they're here.
You can't figure out how to keep the lights on on the state that includes Silicon Valley.
You can't make that work.
There's nothing in your head that says, you know, what can we do technologically to properly prepare to have electricity in the state of California?
Is there anybody we could talk to?
Anybody who's got some ideas?
Anybody who's got some money?
My God, if you can't keep the lights on in California, just leave.
You know, Gavin Newsom should just wait until the lights go out and then just slink away to another state.
I could not be more embarrassed to be the governor of a state if it's California that can't keep its lights on.
Now, if you told me that New Mexico was having a problem with their grid, I would say, well, poor New Mexico.
New Mexico doesn't have as many resources, doesn't have the money, maybe not even the human capital to keep the lights on.
I would say to myself, man, maybe we should do something to help New Mexico because they don't have the same resources as big states.
Maybe they need some help. But if you can't keep the lights on in California and you're not going to tell the public heads up, not going to tell us what you're doing, not going to tell us how you're working on it, Time for a new governor.
Alright, that's enough of that.
Oh, by the way, the lights didn't go out yesterday.
And I don't have an update about whether or not they went out in other places.
Maybe they did. But in my town, the lights didn't go out.
I don't know why. And I don't know if they'll go out today.
So maybe it'll happen today.
I don't have any information.
I don't know. Does it surprise you how many sons of Democrats have worked for Ukrainian oil companies?
There's one I'm forgetting, but maybe you can fill me in.
So it was Pelosi's son, Kerry's son, and Biden's son, and there was one other, right?
Who was the other Democrat's son?
Somebody tell me in the comments.
But really, what are the chances...
All of those Democrats would have a family member working for a Ukrainian company.
What are the odds of that, really?
And I was asking myself, is there something wrong with Chelsea Clinton that she wasn't on a board of a Ukrainian oil company?
I mean, really, what's wrong with Chelsea Clinton?
Is it sexism?
Why can't Chelsea get a board seat at a Ukrainian oil company?
It feels like she'd be a natural, given the pattern.
Here's an interesting thing.
Coal usage in the United States is expected to decline 14% this year, which would be on top of large declines going back to the Obama administration, mostly because of alternatives.
Cheap gas, And some renewables.
So it turns out that the market is working.
The market economy is solving what the government can't do anything about or doesn't know it's real or whatever in terms of climate change.
So the United States, simply by waking up and going to work, is solving one of the biggest problems in the world.
Which is climate by just some natural reduction in the amount of coal that's used because the market has less demand for coal than it has for other things that are cleaner and in some cases cheaper.
So this is another one of those cases where capitalism just sort of takes care of business if you wait long enough.
Sometimes the problem is you don't want to wait.
Then you add on top of that that, as I've said before, Bill Gates, his company TerraPower, just one example, has a fully functional design for a Generation 4 nuclear plant if they can get it permitted someplace that they can test it.
And if you don't know, Generation 4 means that there's no danger of meltdown.
Because it's designed that if it loses power, it just stops working, whereas the current versions, the older versions, if they lose power, there's a danger of losing containment.
The new designs don't have that risk at all.
And they also eat nuclear waste that already exists, so it reduces waste, and it could be economical if you built them in a standardized way.
So we've got that It's not sitting out there that the market economy makes possible, because there are people who are willing to invest in it.
It's just sort of sitting out there.
The only thing that it needs is President Trump, probably.
So, weirdly, President Trump, the person who believes that, or has said many times, that climate change is a hoax...
Now, I don't take that literally, but I do think that he's talking about China getting one over on the United States, because China would not have the same restrictions in the Paris Climate Accords as the U.S. would, and so it would be an unfair thing.
So in that way, it's clearly not a good deal.
But whatever the President believes about the actual risk of warming, he is sort of the face of climate denial.
And given that he's the face of climate denial, it is the weirdest thing that he is the one person on earth who could simply go on television and solve all of the risk of climate change.
How did this simulation get to the point?
Where there's one person in the world who just has to go on television, basically, and say, you know, if you let Bill Gates get licensed, we'll probably take care of all your problems about climate change, because we'll have a working, robust Generation 4 nuclear plant.
We'll probably have to tweak it a little bit, but then we just clone it.
And we've got free, clean, not free, but economical, clean, risk-free power for the rest of eternity, or at least until fusion kicks in.
And all the president has to do is say, look, it's really hard to get a permit, but we're going to put all of our attention on making this happen.
So if somebody can't get something done, give me their name.
Literally, give me their name.
As President of the United States, who is it who's stopping Bill Gates from getting to build the first prototype of this Generation 4 plant?
Because he has the money.
It's fully designed.
Oh, here's a fun fact.
Listen to this fact.
Do you know that all existing nuclear power plants in this country were designed before computers, right?
Just hold that thought for a moment.
All existing nuclear power plants, the ones that are operating in the United States, were all designed before computers.
Slide rulers. Now, does that feel safe to you?
Does that feel safe?
Well, not so much.
Bill Gates' design, which he's looking for a place to do, Is designed and fully simulated with supercomputers.
Supercomputers. So they've got a pretty good idea, you know, how this thing's going to operate.
You still have to build it to be sure.
So imagine President Trump saying, look, I'll just, I'll find a way to get this done faster than it should take.
I think it would take 40 years to get something approved in our current system.
Just bring me the name of the person who's not doing the job.
Who is it who's dragging their feet?
Who is it who doesn't have the resources?
Give me their name. Is it a guy named Bob?
Bob, call me.
Bob, why can't you get your part of this licensing thing done?
Bob, what are you doing that's more important, Bob, than getting this done?
Maybe you work a little longer today.
Bob, you're saving the entire planet.
Now, maybe the President doesn't think that, but certainly the President would be in favor of the United States being the leader in a new form of nuclear energy.
Do you think President Trump would enjoy being the President who initiated a whole new era of clean, safe nuclear energy, Bill Gates blessed and funded to get it going?
Do you think President Trump would like to be that President?
Well, he should. I don't know what I would like more than that.
Maybe the only thing cooler than that would be what?
Space Force? We know he likes that.
So how weird is it that the entire, really the entire climate change risk has come down to one person doing one thing.
One person is President Trump, And the one thing is figuring out a way for Bill Gates and TerraPower to get licensed in an expeditious way for some place in the United States.
Now, I don't know what their limitations are about where they need to locate.
Maybe they need to be near an existing grid or something, so there may be some limitations.
But you can't tell me there's any place in the whole United States That wouldn't allow Bill Gates to put the safest nuclear power plant in the world.
At least we assume it's safest based on design.
All right. New York Times has obviously turned on Joe Biden, which is sort of all you need to know, right?
If you're wondering to yourself, hey, will Joe Biden get the nomination?
Well, consider this factoid.
The New York Times just ran a giant...
A giant, I guess sort of the head opinion piece, written by the guy who wrote Clinton Cash.
Schweitzer is the author.
Now, the person who wrote Clinton Cash is obviously a major anti-Democrat, and he did a big opinion piece calling out Biden for not doing anything illegal, but for Basically enriching himself with Ukraine.
Now, I'm not saying that's credible or not credible.
I'm not saying it's true or false.
I don't know. You know, the whole Ukraine thing, I don't know if any of us really know what's going on there.
But the fact that the New York Times highlighted it to the point where the Biden campaign was complaining about it, they officially complained, and publicly, I guess, about the New York Times coverage.
That kind of tells you that the Democrats are not going to support Biden.
And it also tells me that they'd like him to get off the stage as quickly as possible.
Every day that Biden is still in the race is a bad day for all Democrats.
And I think that they're all starting to realize that.
Because Biden is becoming their brand.
And I think even a Democrat would acknowledge that the following facts are kind of damning, as expressed in one of the best tweets you'll ever see in your life.
Now, I say this a lot, right?
When I talk about President Trump, I say, well, this is the best tweet you've ever seen, or this is like a legendary tweet or something.
I stand by that.
I don't think it's hyperbole to look at the body of President Trump's work and say that, not every tweet, of course, but there are some of them there that are just legendary.
I mean, you couldn't even imagine designing better...
Communication, you know, nuggets than these.
Here's one. This is just so beautiful, just the construction of it.
It just makes me happy to see how well this is done.
So it's a two-parter.
The first part of the tweet is that Eric Trump does a tweet.
Then the second part, which is what makes this powerful, is what the president did in his retweet and comment.
So it's a two-parter, which makes it beautiful.
The first part is Eric Trump.
Now, keep in mind that this is the president's son.
That's important to the story.
So President Trump's son, Eric Trump, tweets this...
Board members of ExxonMobil, one of the world's largest and most prestigious energy companies, make $330,000 annually.
Hunter Biden, with no industry knowledge or duties, was being paid $600,000 annually.
All of this while the average annual salary in Ukraine is $1,700 per year.
So, first of all, Eric Trump's tweet is brilliant.
It's clean.
It's easy to understand.
There's no opinion here.
There's no opinion, right?
He gives you three facts that you could check yourself.
Is it a fact that Exxon, in one of the richest countries in the world, is paying people $330,000 to be in the board?
Probably. I mean, I imagine if you check that, that's going to be true.
Is it true that Hunter Biden, with no industry knowledge or duties, was being paid almost twice that by the poorest country around, Ukraine?
Looks like that's true.
Looks like that's true.
And then, is it also true that the average annual salary, just to give you some context, in Ukraine is $1,700 per year?
Probably. That's probably true.
This is a really strong tweet, but it gets better.
The president retweets it with his own comment.
Now, here's the beauty of it.
This is why this is like, you know, 4-D chess.
The president is retweeting his son, who doesn't have any of these problems.
Eric Trump doesn't have any of these Hunter Biden problems.
Eric Trump is just somebody that seems to be trying to make a better world, has some great kids, You know, his family looks strong, just a solid supporter of the president.
Doesn't have any of the problems that Hunter Biden has, right?
So that's the first brilliant part about it.
So Eric Trump has made three comparisons of fact that are really strong when put together.
Just boom, boom, boom.
Three bullet points. Damn, that's strong.
And he's Eric Trump.
So it's not just that he said something that was concise and well organized.
It's that he's Eric Trump.
Right? That's the important part that makes this next level.
So then the president retweets his successful and respected son and says, where is Hunter Biden?
He has disappeared.
Well, the fake news protects his crooked daddy.
Now, This just couldn't be any better.
So what the president does so well is comparisons.
He's like the king of comparisons.
And comparisons are really the key to persuasion, right?
Because everything that you do or want to do or think about or your priorities, everything is compared to what?
So, you know, you like things compared to other things.
You hate things compared to other things.
So the world is a comparison.
The president treats it that way and always gives you really good comparisons.
So here he's giving you the comparison between Hunter Biden, who's literally hiding, and Eric Trump, who's literally tweeting.
So Eric Trump is in this example.
He's in public.
Here I am. I'm Eric Trump.
Anybody looking for me?
I'm right here. Eric Trump, I'm tweeting.
And then the president throws in his comparison.
So now you're on the fourth comparison.
All right, so Eric Trump gave you three things to compare.
That's all A-plus persuasion technique.
Comparisons are strong.
And then the president throws in just the closing comparison without saying, look how good Eric Trump is compared to Hunter Trump.
He doesn't have to say it because it's just right there.
You can see it. So that's the beauty.
If he'd compared, it would have been going too far.
You wouldn't want the president to say, Eric Trump's doing great.
Hunter Biden's not doing so great.
You wouldn't want to do that.
But just the fact he puts them out there at the same time, you can't help saying to yourself, okay, Joe Biden produced Hunter Biden, but President Trump produced Eric Trump.
Who wins? Not Biden.
All right. And now the other part I love about this is the president likes to focus the news where he wants it to be focused.
And so he's focusing on where is Hunter Biden.
So he's bringing out the fact that Hunter Biden is literally hiding.
He's hiding. Now, I wasn't completely aware of the fact that Hunter Biden was sort of invisible in this.
I just thought, well, he's keeping his head down, maybe he hasn't commented or something.
But I'm not even sure we know where he is, do we?
Does the press even know where he is physically?
Because they're not, are they camped outside his house?
No one's seen him?
Somebody says he's hanging around with Jelaine Maxwell.
I don't think so. But, well, K. Rool, no.
But the fact that the president is using the power of the presidency to say, where is this guy?
Where's Hunter Biden?
How do you ignore that?
How could you possibly ignore the president of the United States saying, where's Hunter Biden?
So what does the news do now?
Say, ah, we don't care.
How do they ignore that?
It's so beautiful.
So, again, I don't think I'm overstating how perfectly constructed both of these tweets are.
Eric Trump nailing it.
The president nailing the comment and nailing the focus of the press, creating perfect context without going too far about, you know, saying, my kid's better than your kid, but that's what it says.
That's really well done.
Who else is doing that, all right?
Let me give you a comparison.
I'm a little unprepared here, but...
Let me go over to Twitter.
And I don't know how this will work out, so I'm going to do a little live experiments.
So I'm going to look up Kamala Harris' Twitter feed.
And see, that might be a pinned tweet, so I don't want to do the pinned tweet.
So here is, so you just heard a tweet from President Trump that I would consider like a Hall of Fame level tweet.
Totally big league, right?
This is a serious, knows how to communicate, hits every note, bam, bam, bam.
Now look at Kamala Harris' latest tweet.
I'm just randomly picking this.
I'm putting Donald Trump and members of his cabinet on notice, followed by a video of her talking to some MSNBC guy with no credibility, and looking worried, with their worried eyes.
Oh, Oh, I'm talking about President Trump.
Look at my eyes.
My eyebrows tell you that I'm so concerned because of the eyes.
Are you noticing my eyes?
Very concerned. This is how not to tweet.
This sentence, I'm putting Donald Trump and members of his cabinet on notice.
That feels like a legal deposition that you received in the mail, but it wasn't really for you, and it doesn't have any power or importance.
There is nothing in this tweet.
She's talking like a DMV employee.
Kamala Harris tweets like a DMV employee.
No, I take it back. I don't want to insult DMV employees.
But what I mean is, somebody who's just sort of a bureaucrat, who's just following a set of rules, is like, let me write a memo.
I must leave out anything interesting.
I cannot be interesting in my memo.
I don't know how President Trump loses re-election.
I really don't. All right.
So there's a story now that poor Hillary Clinton is being dragged into this Matt Lauer story and Weinstein.
Have you heard the latest Matt Lauer accusation?
Well, I don't want to be the one who doubts women.
Let us just acknowledge that of all the accusations that women make about men, probably most of them are true.
I don't know, more than half.
But I think we'd all agree that there are sometimes accusations that may not be as true as other accusations.
Trouble is, you can't really tell.
You can't always tell just by looking at the accusation.
So it is good form, and probably good for the world, all things considered, that you err on the side of trusting accusations as being credible until you look into it, and should you find out it's not credible, change your mind.
But at least as a starting point, as a starting point, I think we should all agree that if somebody says something so horrible happened to me, you should take that quite seriously and look into it.
That said, The way that...
And I'll take the pressure off of the accuser in this.
The way the accuser is described in Ronan Farrow's new book...
I guess this is all coming out in his new book.
The way the encounters and the relationship, if you can call it that, between Matt Lauer and his accuser is described...
I wasn't there, so I don't have an opinion on what's real and what's not.
But the way it was described doesn't look real at all.
Which doesn't mean it's not real.
Could be 100% true.
You can't... I can't know.
I'm just saying that the way it was described, if you were an objective observer and you would hear the description, and I'm not going to recount it, by the way.
You're going to have to go research it yourself.
But the way it was described...
Does not pass the sniff test.
I don't think anybody's disagreeing with that.
Anybody who's read what the accusation is, there are some details of the accusation that make you say, well, that stretches credibility quite a bit, but not impossible.
I would certainly not say that the evidence, you know, disproves it.
And there are enough accusations against Matt Lauer that, you know, I would take anybody seriously.
But that last one?
This latest one is a little bit Kavanaugh-ish, if you know what I mean.
But in any event, it's looking like that Hillary Clinton got dragged into the story.
Poor Hillary Clinton.
Do you know anybody who's been attached to more stories of Me Too-ing than Hillary?
I mean, first of all, Hillary obviously has the Bill Clinton problem, and then she gets dragged into the Weinstein story, and now she's being attached somehow to this Matt Lauer story as somebody who tried to protect him or her staff did or something.
I don't care about the details.
But... Poor Hillary Clinton.
How many times can you be pulled into the same sort of sounding scandal?
And I'll say again, there isn't any chance that she's going to enter the race.
That's not happening. All right.
Who is next after the top three?
So... My belief is that Biden and Bernie are going to fade before the primaries are over, and that that would put Elizabeth Warren solidly at the top.
But there should be enough Democrats with money and influence and experience and all that who are going to say, uh-oh, we actually can't win with Warren.
And I think that you can't win partly because Trump's just a better campaigner, and partly because she doesn't come off as authentic, partly because she doesn't seem to excite the black vote, which is pretty important.
So suppose they give up on Warren because they know she can't win.
The biggest problem is her policies.
Because she has the kind of policies that for everyone who says, yeah, I would like to get some free healthcare, there's going to be a Democrat who has healthcare through their employer who doesn't want to lose it, and they don't want to pay for somebody else's healthcare at the same time.
While they're losing their healthcare and paying for somebody else's, that's a tough proposition for your own party.
Hey guys on my team, I would like you to lose your good healthcare Be put in a pool with people who have marginal health care.
Oh, and by the way, it's going to cost you more.
She doesn't have a plan that she can really sell to her own team.
And without that, what are you going to do?
So let's talk about moving down the line.
Let's talk about Buttigieg. I think Buttigieg is fourth place in the poll.
Is that true? But he's somewhere in that range.
And I'm trying to figure out how to talk about this without me looking like I'm saying something bad.
So let me start by saying I'm very pro-gay.
I'm as pro-gay as you can get without actually being gay.
So I would actually be...
I would be interested and amused and somewhat happy about having a gay president.
There's something about that in the same way that Obama's presidency was interesting and useful beyond the fact of his personal abilities, because it marked sort of an important point in the country.
Psychologically, electing a black president was just one of the best things the country ever could have done, independent of how well you think he did his job.
It was just good to get the country past that little obstacle.
I would love to see the country have a gay president because of what it would say about who we are.
Your president does do a little bit about defining who you are as a country.
But let me ask you this, if we're being fair.
Would Buttigieg be received the same in Saudi Arabia?
As President Trump.
Ask yourself that.
Would Buttigieg get the same level of respect when people are talking privately?
In public, of course, the President of the United States will be treated with respect wherever he or she goes.
So you could count on the fact that publicly he would get all kinds of respect.
But would Putin, behind closed doors, And we're assuming that Russia is not so pro-gay.
And we're assuming that China's not too pro-gay.
Saudi Arabia, not too pro-gay.
How many other allies do we have who are not too pro-gay?
Would Buttigieg handicap the United States?
Not because of our opinion of our president, which I think would be positive, on average.
But would it become a problem in dealing with other countries?
When people are dealing with Trump, what does their prejudice tell them about Trump?
Their prejudice tells them that he's sort of a strongman, dictator, impulsive guy, right?
Does that help us or hurt us?
Well, it's hard to sort that out, but it might help us in some cases.
Don't you think it helps us that people have a bias that President Trump is a strong personality who's going to strongly act on things and get things done and be a real powerful personality?
Now, that may not be true.
It may simply be their own biases that they're projecting onto our president.
But likewise, because people are human, would some of these foreign leaders also project Something that's not true onto a Buttigieg presidency.
Would they, because they're biased or prejudiced, say, hey, he's gay, so therefore, whatever.
Maybe he won't be as tough, which would not be true.
I mean, he's been in the military, he's plenty tough enough, I'm sure.
But would other countries take him seriously?
Now, I think you have to ask the same question about a woman president.
But I don't know that it's the same problem.
Because we've had enough strong female presidents of other countries...
Margaret Thatcher comes to mind.
Golda Meir, for example.
So there have been enough examples of strong female presidents and leaders in countries that I think other countries might say, well, maybe we're a little biased, but we've seen this work.
Nobody's questioning whether Margaret Thatcher was a tough personality.
So there's some history.
That would make, let's say, an Elizabeth Warren or a Hillary Clinton, I think they would be taken pretty seriously by foreign leaders, even if they were primed to be biased by their culture, for example.
But because we don't have that same track record of gay leaders being successful and strong leaders in other countries historically, they'd have to make up their mind for the first time.
And you have to ask yourself, No matter what you personally think, and no matter what the United States thinks about whoever elects for president.
And I think Buttigieg, smart enough.
I think he's got a lot of qualities.
So I would not have any negative opinions about him as a leader, except whether I liked his policies or not.
But other countries?
Other countries? Does it matter?
Would Kim Jong-un have exactly the same feeling about Buttigieg, as he has about President Trump, I think you have to factor that in.
And then, of course, you have enough homophobia in this country that it might make some impact on whether he gets elected in the first place.
I don't know how to judge that.
Have you ever seen any kind of a poll about whether that would affect Buttigieg's chance of getting elected?
Because I don't even know if it's positive or negative in this country.
Do you? I don't know.
Would it work in his favor? It might.
So, I don't know.
I think that Buttigieg, the biggest problem with him is that he looks too young.
He doesn't have the physicality That we expect from the president.
It has nothing to do with being gay, of course.
He's blessed with a very youthful appearance.
He's a good-looking, youthful-looking guy.
And I just don't know if that's the...
I don't know if it signals strength in a way that American voters...
Tend to be drawn to it.
So I think Buttigieg has some weaknesses, but a lot of strengths.
I have a lot of respect for him as a candidate.
And obviously he's over-performed.
I mean, I don't think anybody saw him getting this far, really.
I mean, it's a pretty good performance.
So you have to say he's strong.
What about Yang? I think Yang is a one-trick pony.
Yang is popular until he has to talk about things Seriously, policy-wise.
As long as Yang can answer every question with, hey, how about a thousand dollars a month?
Or maybe something about technology or, you know, robots taking our jobs or something.
As long as he can stick to that stuff.
He's that cool guy who's smart and likable and he skateboards and stuff.
But I doubt that the Democrats who I doubt they see him as being their guy.
So I don't think he can get Democrats on his side.
Harris, we've talked about forever, her communication and campaigning is the worst I've ever seen.
I've just never seen worse.
She is the lowest, the worst of all the Democrats, and maybe the worst I've ever seen.
But, as I've said before, she also has the most fixable problems.
Because she could hire somebody who could teach her how to tweet.
She could fix her body language.
That's not hard to do.
And she could improve her rhetoric and stop her nervous laugh and stuff.
So there are things she could do that are easily fixed.
We don't know if you will, but they're the most easily fixed.
And then once you get past Buttigieg and Harris, you get down to the one percenters, Booker.
Apparently Booker just doesn't have enough support.
So I don't know what the problem is with Cory Booker.
I mean, he's smart enough, he's experienced enough, he's passionate, he's pro-nuclear.
If I were a Democrat...
I'd be looking pretty hard at Cory Booker if I were a Democrat.
But for some reason they don't.
I don't know exactly why. He's just not connecting.
And I wouldn't expect that to change.
So whatever it is that makes him a one percenter, that's not going to change.
Now obviously Beto is not going to get in there.
It doesn't look like Delaney has a chance just because he seems too Republican, I think.
I think Delaney just looks like a Republican if you happen to be a Democrat.
Then who else do you have?
Klobuchar? Klobuchar also is just not exciting people.
I don't know exactly what's wrong.
She seems solid.
She seems pretty solid, but she's not exciting people, and I don't expect that to change.
Then you have Tulsi Gabbard, right?
Everybody wants me to talk about Tulsi.
Every single day, people are tweeting at me, what about Tulsi?
What about Tulsi? And here's the thing.
I've avoided talking about her until she gets some popularity.
You know, if she started going up in the polls, then we could talk about her.
But she's down with the one percenters, and Somewhere in that neighborhood.
If she can't make more of a dent than that, then I don't feel the need to talk about her.
Yeah, Steyer doesn't have a chance.
He just looks like the golem.
Steyer just has a physicality about him that is so off-putting that he couldn't possibly make a dent.
So, let's put it all together.
So far, which of those candidates could possibly beat Trump?
None, right? There's nobody in that group who would have even a little bit of a chance against Trump.
All of our elections are going to be close-ish, because Democrats will just back their team for the most part, but none of them could get over the line.
But which of them could come the closest and also get Democrat support?
I hate to tell you, I hate to tell you, it's still Kamala.
Because all she'd have to do is fix the smallest, easiest to fix problems.
Just ask somebody to help her to tweet.
Ask somebody to help her with some quotable lines, be a little more provocative.
Fix her body language, all easy to do, and I'll bet her there must be somebody in her campaign who's telling her what to do, and maybe she's listening to them.
But she's still the best chance they have of winning.
Because if she cleaned up her communication act, she hits a lot of checklists.
She's a senator. Her policies are close enough to what Democrats could get behind, and she might have to modify them a little bit.
She's a woman. She's a person of color.
She hates President Trump.
She's the only one who could be turned into a viable candidate.
She'd still lose. But she's the only one who could be crafted into something.
The rest have fatal flaws.
If you dump them all on an island and they were fought it out, Harris would actually win because she has the most solvable problems.
All right. That doesn't mean she will.
But I'm keeping my prediction just because it's fun.
What else is happening?
Thoughts on the Fox News impeachment poll.
Yeah, so Fox News did a poll about whether the president should be impeached, and I think more than half of the people responding said some version of yes, and other people complained, hey, the way that poll is worded, Seems to be biased.
In other words, it looks like it's not questions created by professional pollsters.
Maybe it was. I don't know.
But I'm no expert.
I've had a little bit of experience designing poll questions when I was in the corporate world.
I've worked with professionals where we would try to do some kind of survey, and so I would ask a question and have the experts would say, that's not how you ask it.
That would bias people. This is how you fix it.
This is how you randomize the questions.
So I've had a little bit of exposure.
To how proper survey questions should be written.
I'm not an expert, but I've seen it done.
I've been around it enough to suspect that those questions don't look like they were.
They don't look to me like professionals designed them.
Or if they did, the professionals wanted them to be biased.
So I wouldn't say that we're learning too much about these.
Now keep in mind, you've got two things going on.
You've got Democrats who say, impeach him, because that might help get rid of President Trump.
But I think you now have a new thing, which is Republicans say, impeach him, because we'd like to see it.
Come on, admit it.
Wouldn't you like to see an impeachment?
You know you would, because it would give the Republicans subpoena power.
Right now, we have this secret kangaroo court thing going on with the Democrats, where it's not quite an impeachment, but it's impeachment-like, but it's not an impeachment, and it's secret, and we're not going to tell you who we're talking to or what they said.
Well, we'll tell you what they said, but it'll be our version of what they said.
So that's sort of a nothing.
If you give me a choice between doing more of that versus an impeachment process where the Republicans can feedback...
Imagine, you know, Jordan and Matt Gaetz and those guys.
Imagine freeing them to investigate the other side and question them.
Right now, you've got your top attack dogs on the Republican side are just sitting there, like, on the leash.
Like, I have this mental image of all the best, you know, attackers on the Republican side.
They're just sitting there like...
But they can't attack because it's not an impeachment process.
They don't get to play.
They get to stand outside the building while something secret is happening that we don't know what's happening with people we don't know inside the building.
If you give me a choice of more of that, whatever that secret process is, or taking the leash off the Republican attack dogs...
Which one do you want to see?
Come on. Which one do you want to see?
You know which one you want to see.
You know which one you want to see.
You want to see Matt Gaetz rip a hole in the universe and watch the other side just being shattered.
Because I've got to say that skill-wise, the Republicans also have the better attack dogs.
Now, when I say attack dogs, I mean that in a positive sense, that they have some really good people on camera.
The Democrats have Schiff and Nadler and Pelosi.
Think of their performances on camera.
Schiff on camera, Pelosi on camera, Nadler on camera.
Just hold those in your minds.
Now, Jordan, you know, and Matt Gaetz, and, you know, it's too bad Trey Gowdy isn't there anymore, but just imagine, you know, any of the Democrats.
It's sort of a slaughter, you know, in terms of ability to control a camera, ask a question, etc.
It's sort of a slaughter.
Yeah, Jim Jordan. Yeah.
So, I don't know.
What's it mean when Republicans say they're in favor of impeachment?
Does it mean what you think it means?
Does it mean that, you know, a whole bunch of Republicans want to get rid of President Trump?
Some of them. Probably some of them.
But I've got a feeling it doesn't mean what you think it means.
I think it might mean that they want a fair fight.
And I'm ready for one.
Now, in a perfect world, I would not want any kind of impeachment, anything.
I wouldn't want it for the other team either.
I didn't like impeachment against Clinton.
You know, Nixon was different. But I wouldn't want impeachment against Clinton.
I wouldn't want it against this president.
It's just a waste of resources and attention.
But here we are.
We didn't have a choice of whether to be where we are, because now we're there.
So now we forget about the past.
That's the sunk cost.
Let's look forward and ask ourselves, would we like to see it fought out publicly?
I kind of would. All right, let me remind you that my book, LoserThink, It is available for pre-order, and it would help me a lot if you pre-ordered it instead of waiting a few weeks until it's ready, because the pre-orders allow it to hit the bestseller list.
So if you would like to support these periscopes, that's the way to do it, and you get an excellent book at the same time.
The beauty of this book is it's designed for you to pick out the parts that will embarrass your opponents, take a photo of it, put it online.
I expressly give you permission to do that in the book.
So you won't have any copyright problems if it's just a page.
And their arguments for destroying other people's bad, keep them in a bubble argument.
And you will enjoy them because they're written to be very approachable and fun.
Generally, if you were to buy a book to tell you how to think, it would be boring to the point of unreadable.
It'll be like, here's my mental model and here's my construct and my framework and all that.
I don't do any of that. I'm giving you the friendly, easy-to-digest version of how to think better.
It might not be as important to you.
There are certainly people on this Periscope who don't need any help at all.
Who have experience across lots of different fields, know how to analyze things.
But for you, you still might want to get the book and give it as a gift.
So there's somebody in your life who you think isn't thinking so well, and it's a perfect gift for them because it's easy to digest.
All right. So please do that.
I saw it start to zoom up the bestseller list yesterday, so I know that a number of you already have.
And if you continue enjoying hearing my voice, this is one way to guarantee that you get more of it.
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