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Oct. 16, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:00:51
Episode 695 Scott Adams: Losers of the Democrat Debate, The Hypnosis Coup
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Ah, yes.
That's the good stuff right there.
All right.
Let's talk about the Democrat...
Or Democratic debate.
I never know what's the correct way to say that.
Is it the Democrat debate because they're all Democrats?
Or is it a Democratic debate because it's the Democratic Party?
I never know which one is right.
So, the coup by hypnosis continues to go strong, if you don't know what that means.
There's an active coup attempt happening, but it's not using weapons.
It's using, actually, the most modern and powerful methods of hypnosis to convince the country that nothing like that is happening.
So the hypnosis is convincing at least half of the country.
There's no coup.
There's nothing to see here.
No. There's just terrible crimes by a president.
We can't really Enumerate them.
And by the way, you might be confused by the fact that the president is not already in handcuffs and in jail.
How do you explain that?
How do you explain the fact that he's not already being arrested and taken to jail with all those crimes?
Well, it's because they're not real.
It's a hypnosis coup, and it's working really well.
I don't know if it will succeed in the long run.
But they have definitely set their sights on brainwashing the public into changing the form of government.
Amazingly. And they actually have a good chance of pulling it off.
I don't think they will. I think Trump will prevail.
But you've got to say, it's a heck of a try.
I don't know that we've ever seen Anything like this before.
We have certainly seen politics and persuasion and lies and hyperbole and all the usual stuff.
But at this point, it's more obvious that it's a legitimate co-attempt by some combination of unhappy Democrats Who may or may not be called the deep state and the media.
You know, we saw the Project Veritas undercover recordings about CNN and it's pretty clear that Jeff Zucker just cares about impeachment and maybe not much else.
So I don't think we can call this anything else at this point.
It's a coup by hypnosis and it's It's moving along pretty well, if you like coups.
President Trump's comment about the Democrats' debate last night.
This is such a great tweet.
So his entire summary of the Democrats is in this tweet.
Our record economy would crash, just like in 1929, if any of those clowns became president.
Clowns.
You know, he's probably not wrong.
All right.
One of the reasons that it works is because your first impression is, well, that's not true.
The economy is not going to crash just because you elected Elizabeth Warren.
Oh, yeah, I guess it would crash if you elected Elizabeth Warren.
But she's just one of the candidates.
I mean, things would be fine if you elected Bernie...
Well, okay, if you elected Bernie, the economy would crash.
But you always have Biden.
No, that would crash the economy.
Damn, he's right. If any of those clowns get elected, the economy might actually just crash.
That's not funny, but it's just funny that he summarizes things so succinctly.
I've noticed a trend.
And it looks like this.
Republicans hate bad systems, such as socialism.
It's a bad system. Democrats seem to hate people.
Have you noticed that?
Go after people.
They go after personalities.
They go after individuals. It seems entirely hatred of people.
Whereas Republicans do a little bit of going after people, too, of course.
You know, the president is his own thing.
But it doesn't seem generally true that Republicans talk about systems and Democrats seem to just hate people.
If I go onto Twitter and the anti-Trumpers come after me, They almost never come after me for anything that I've said or any point.
They almost never criticize my opinion.
They almost always criticize me personally.
And it's what the Democrats have started to do with Trump.
So it seemed to me, as I was watching the Democrat debate, That they all looked small because their focus was just on one guy's personality.
And here's the kicker.
They couldn't say much about what he's doing wrong.
They could only talk about how they hate him.
Did you notice that?
Because it was conspicuously missing.
So here's what you would have expected to hear.
The president has all these bad character flaws according to them.
And therefore, what we've observed are all these problems.
Because remember, he's had three years to create problems.
They must have plenty of things to talk about.
Where's the problem?
Sure, they don't like him.
I get it.
Message received.
You don't like him.
You don't like his character, his personality.
You don't like his ethics. You don't like his style.
I get it. Now, finish the picture.
And because of that character, and because of those problems, what?
What would be an example of something that we wanted to do but we couldn't do because of his personality?
What was something that went all wrong because of his character?
Can you think of anything?
Economies roaring, you know, whatever you want to say about Syria.
Let's take Syria, for example.
The closest that anybody got to an actual complaint, meaning that the things about the president's personality translated into the real world, was Buttigieg.
I think he was the only one who actually even took a stab at it.
And Buttigieg spoke entirely speculatively.
Even he didn't have an actual problem to talk about.
His best point, which I consider invalid, but his best point, just argumentatively, is that he said that the soldiers were demoralized by having to pull out of Syria and leave their allies to destruction.
But here's the thing.
Here's the thing.
Can you think of any situation in which...
Remember, we have a volunteer military.
So this is important to the story.
It's a volunteer military.
So everybody who is in the real fighting forces, you know, the Marines, etc., the ones who are actually seeing combat, they joined voluntarily.
And probably had a pretty good idea where they were going to be deployed and who they were going to be fighting.
Because, you know, the Al-Qaeda thing has been going on for a long time.
Or some version of Al-Qaeda, ISIS, etc.
So, what would you expect would be the attitude of the military, the professional military, volunteers, when they're asked to withdraw?
What would there, under any condition, you ask this set of the bravest people in the world who volunteered to put on uniforms, train hard, and go over there and fight?
Fighting not only against the enemy, but fighting for their comrades, fighting for their allies, fighting for their people.
What do you expect them to say?
When the civilian leadership asks them to withdraw.
Only one thing, we're not done.
If the military said anything except, no, we don't want to withdraw.
We will, because we respect the, you know, the chain of command.
We'll do what you order, but no, we are not happy about leaving a fight.
If we had soldiers Who under any conditions were happy about leaving the fight, we didn't do a good job of training them or selecting them or they're the wrong people.
Our soldiers should want to stay in the fight and finish it no matter what the civilian leadership says is the better idea.
As long as they go ahead with the civilian leadership.
If they were bucking orders, I would say that would be a big problem.
But I would say that as a class of people, I think the military is always going to say, let us finish the job.
Let us protect our allies.
Let us finish the job. So that doesn't change the fact that there may be situations in which somebody's asking me if I serve.
The answer is no. So I'm open to correction if there's somebody who served who has more clarity on this.
But I think it's fair to say that the...
The hero-type personality who volunteers to go over there and fight, they mean it.
They're not just punching a clock.
They went there to fight.
And I think if you pull them off the fight, I don't see how they could ever be happy about that because it's just too much baked into who they are.
So what's your perfect situation?
Let me describe a perfect situation.
Military slash civilian situation.
The perfect situation is when the president cares more about the troops than the troops care about their own safety.
That's the perfect situation.
Do you want it the other way around?
Would you want the president to care less about the troops than they cared about their own safety?
I mean, obviously they care about their safety.
But these are people who are not like regular people.
These are unusually brave people.
These are people who signed up to do this.
So they're not like us, right?
Not like me, anyway. They might be like you.
But it's the perfect situation.
A civilian leader...
Who cares about the soldiers enough to pull a man of harm's way if there's not an overriding national interest?
And what you would want is that those soldiers obey, number one.
Yes, they are obeying.
Number two, don't want to leave.
That's your perfect situation.
You can't get better than that.
You can't describe a situation that's more perfect than what you just saw.
Now, it's not perfect in terms of impact, because one of the downsides is that the Kurds are at the mercy of the Turks.
And, of course, the way the Democrats explain that is they say, we've abandoned our allies.
Well, did we?
Or were there two sets of allies that we had to choose?
There were two sets of allies, the Turks and the Kurds.
We didn't have a choice of abandoning an ally.
You get that, right?
There were two choices, and both of them involved abandoning an ally.
You could either abandon Turkey, NATO ally, or abandon Kurds, ally in our fight against ISIS. Those were your only choices.
You couldn't back both of them.
And if you just got out of there, you left one of them to the mercy of the other.
I saw an interesting video yesterday that I would not say is credible, so take this with a grain of salt, but I'll put this in the form of a question.
We haven't seen that much damage or military fighting coming out of the area.
Some of it might be just the lack of reporters, maybe it's just too dangerous.
But I have a sneaky suspicion that those poor Kurds that were left to be slaughtered, number one, the most effective fighting force in the region.
Everybody agrees, right?
That's a fairly standard opinion from everybody, that the Kurds are the most effective fighting force in the region.
And they're tactically strong, as well as just brave and willing.
They're tactically very good.
Do you know what else they have?
Do you know what else the Kurds have?
I'm just guessing.
Now, this is speculation.
My guess is that the Kurds have some really good weapons.
Do you think we left them without weapons?
Do you think we took all our good shit and just loaded it in trucks and took it away?
Probably not. How long do you think a Turkish tank...
We're last in Kurdish territory.
About 10 seconds?
I don't think the Turks can control the ground.
I think they can bomb forever, but we know that bombing doesn't get you to controlling the ground.
You know, it's good stuff if it's in support of ground troops, but bombing doesn't get you to control the ground.
You've got to do that on the ground.
And I don't know if the Turks, even with their full military, can beat the Kurds, who are dug in, really good fighters, and they might have some really good weapons right now.
Like, I'm talking about the really good stuff.
Things maybe you don't even know we have.
I'm just guessing. I don't think we left them unarmed.
That's my guess.
Now, that's pure speculation, but wouldn't you expect by now there would be a lot more reporting about how Turkey overran a Kurdish unit?
Turkey has captured 300 Kurds.
Turkey has slaughtered these Kurds.
It's kind of missing, isn't it?
Isn't sort of today the day we're supposed to be hearing about how Turkey's crushing the Kurd military?
It might not be going the way the Turks expected.
It might not be going that way.
There is some chance that the Kurds are kicking the Turks' ass right now.
On the ground. Now, you know, in terms of the air, I guess the Turks probably control the air.
I don't know. That's just speculation that maybe that fight is not going the way everybody thought it would go because Kurds...
Kurds seem to just defy the military calculation because they just tend to be good.
All right. Here's...
Let's talk about the Democrat debate.
I thought... That the biggest story of the debates is the stuff they didn't talk about, which includes Russia collusion.
Wasn't much about Russia collusion, was there?
How would you feel if you were a Democrat and a voter, and you've been watching your team push Russia collusion for two and a half years, and then just stop talking about it?
It just doesn't come up.
Would you say to yourself, wow, my team was really wrong for two and a half years.
Maybe I shouldn't trust the next thing they bring up.
What about the fact that for three years or more, the primary attack from the Democrats is calling this president a racist?
Where'd that go? Did you notice that that was just missing last night?
It used to be their primary problem.
If the Democrats believed that this president was an actual racist, which is the things that they claim, or they used to claim all the time, wouldn't that be grounds for impeachment?
I mean, really?
If the Democrats had, in fact, anything like the obvious evidence that they claim is all over the place, That the President of the United States is an actual racist and doing racist things and obviously signaling to people and all that.
If any of that were true, isn't that grounds for impeachment?
Because impeachment is a political act.
It doesn't require a crime.
Impeachment requires that the politicians just decide.
You're being all racist.
We've got to get rid of you. So if you're a Democrat, what do you make of the fact that the biggest complaint from your team, racism, just sort of, they stopped talking about it?
Wouldn't it make you wonder if it were ever real in the first place?
Now, to his credit, President Trump has been chipping away at that.
There's something about funding the historically black colleges.
There's the First Step program, prison reform.
He's always bragging about unemployment being great for The African-American community.
And you sell the vents with just scads of black people who seem very happy about the president.
Then there's Kanye West who's saying he still loves the president, even if he doesn't like his policies in some cases.
So I've got a feeling that the whole racist complaint Wasn't getting traction.
They must test this stuff, the Democrats.
So they must have figured out that the public was over it.
It was the biggest thing, and then they just let it go.
Moving on. What about...
They don't really talk about President Trump destroying the economy, do they?
Where's that? That used to be a big problem, right?
He's destroying the economy.
Don't have that anymore.
What about climate change?
Now, I realize that climate change, CNN had a whole seven hours of just climate change topic with these candidates, but wasn't it conspicuously missing from the questions?
I think some of the candidates mentioned it, but it wasn't even part of the question.
I don't think that climate change works anymore as a topic.
Why do you think it doesn't work as a topic anymore?
Yeah, and Biden didn't mention the Charlottesville hoax.
Why do you think the Charlottesville hoax and climate change stopped being good targets for the Democrats?
I don't know, but I'll give you some speculation.
I think the racist thing wasn't working, and I think that the...
That the fine people hoax being consistently debunked by people like me and others, Steve Cortez and Joel Pollack doing a lot of the heavy lifting on that.
I think that maybe we made that look like it wasn't valid anymore.
Now, how about climate change?
I think the fact that there are at least two, no, there are three Democrats running who are pro-nuclear.
It makes the topic not work anymore.
Because if you start asking about it, you kind of raise the question of nuclear, and this administration is pro-nuclear.
So it kind of makes climate change look like Not the win topic, because the best thing to do about it is what the administration is already doing or trying to do, which is promote nuclear as one of the many things that you do.
It's not the only thing. I think the Bill Gates Brain special on Netflix may have actually moved the dial.
Because if you think about it, how many people in the, let's say, the press...
Are likely to have seen a Netflix special about Bill Gates and, you know, these big things he's doing for Africa and fresh water and sanitation and nuclear.
All of them? I mean, that's the sort of special that you would expect in due time that nearly 100% of the people who work in the press would have seen.
So what happens when 100% of the press gets informed for the first time that there's something called Generation 4 nuclear and that people as smart as Bill Gates and some of the smartest people in the world say, yeah, we just need a place to do this.
We already know how to build it.
We already know how to solve some of the biggest problems in the world.
Just let us build it.
Just figure out how to get past the red tape.
I think maybe the combination of people like Mark Schneider and Michael Schellenberger and all of you and talking about nuclear and Bill Gates, I think it's just making climate change look a little bit solved.
Now, not solved as in we already know how to do it, but there seemed to be so many good approaches to handling it that it went from this big problem that we don't know what to do about it to, oh, okay, I guess we sort of know what to do about it.
We kind of do.
And then there wasn't much about China.
So, with all those Democrats on stage, They mostly were focused on the coup by hypnosis.
And the coup by hypnosis says that you just keep saying things about Trump personally until people think it must be true.
So how many people just said, well, he's obviously corrupt, President Trump?
How many times was the president called corrupt?
Okay. A lot, right?
Now, give me the best example of that.
What is it? What's the best example that would support the claim that he's corrupt?
Was it a phone call that he did in front of witnesses that happened to be perfectly the top priority of his actual job description, which is to make sure there's no foreign interference or influence on the Biden family because they're leading in the polls?
That was his top priority.
So... I don't know.
To me, the slaughter meter is at about a thousand percent right now.
I don't see... I can't imagine the president losing to anybody who was on that stage, and I don't see anybody else joining the fight.
Let's go down to some of the individual performers.
I thought Warren looked weak and evasive.
Buttigieg sort of nailed her down on healthcare, and he totally won that exchange.
Because by pointing out that she didn't really...
She couldn't even speak to her own plan.
And her own plan was actually Bernie's plan.
So first of all, it's not even her own plan.
And second of all, she was unwilling...
Obviously unwilling.
Buttigieg really brought that out.
She was unwilling to even talk honestly...
About her own plan, which is actually Bernie's plan.
I mean, she died a thousand...
I mean, I thought that was a dagger.
I thought that she can't possibly win by having, you know, that being her signature...
I would say that's probably her signature policy, and she's not even willing to describe it in public.
That was a hard fail.
Let's say Buttigieg.
Let's talk about him.
He was the closest thing to the adult in the room, and it seemed to be that's the channel he's trying to carve out, is the one who doesn't say crazy stuff.
So he was saying that for healthcare, since we already know the public will never go for a solution where they lose their private healthcare that they like, Buttigieg is saying exactly what I said a few months ago when I did a whiteboard thing,
which is what's wrong with keeping the private ones for people who want it while making a public option, sort of the Medicare for all, or the Medicare for the ones who want to sign up for it, let's say, as the most practical way to get to something like full coverage.
That's maybe hard.
Maybe we can't get there.
But it's a reasonable thing to say.
So Buttigieg is carving out this reasonable zone.
And he's carving it out in guns and healthcare.
So on guns, he looks at Beto and he says, you're not going to go to people's homes and get all their guns.
The best we can do...
And this is best meaning if you're of this political persuasion, not my personal opinion best, but the best you can do is to stop the sale of new ARs, you know, the new assault rifles, as they would call them. And I thought to myself, you know, that might be a good idea or it might be a bad idea, but it's an adult idea.
So Buttigieg took the role of the adult.
By saying, it's great that you love candy before dinner, but you can't have candy before dinner.
Right? So he does that on both guns and healthcare.
I thought it was very effective.
So I'm seeing some people saying that there was no clear winner last night and there was nobody who stood out, and I disagree.
I would say that Buttigieg, if that didn't move him into the top three, and I doubt it moved him that much, he should put him in a solid fourth place, if he's not already there, maybe he's already there, as the top three start to falter.
So... Somebody says, when Pete echoes Scott, Scott thinks highly of him.
Well, of course. That's exactly what I'm doing.
When he agrees with me, I think he's smart.
That's how it works.
That's how it works for all of us.
So I think Buttigieg had a great night.
I would be surprised if he doesn't at some point get into the top three.
And it depends which of the top three falters first, I think.
Let's talk about Bernie.
Bernie once again impressed.
Bernie looked healthy and vigorous.
Damn it, Bernie. You're impressing the hell out of me with your vigor and your fight.
And I thought he had a good debate, too.
Now, I don't think it matters, and I don't think it matters that AOC and three of the four squad endorsed him.
That's the other news.
Because I think the hard problem and the fact that he's so completely unelectable in the general election, I don't think Bernie can get to cross the finish line.
But his performance was great.
Health looked great. He had a good debate.
It won't be enough. Let's talk about Biden.
Biden is being chided by both sides.
So even the liberal pundits are mocking him for his word salad.
So whoever used the phrase first, it might have been Bret Baier, who said that Biden was talking in word salad.
Now, that's especially word salad about somebody who has a cognitive decline in their old age.
Now, I don't know that Brett Baer was intentionally trying to make that connection, but in my brain, it's automatic.
If you hear that somebody of a certain age is talking in a word salad, your brain automatically goes to a cognitive decline.
And it looked like cognitive decline to me.
Have you noticed that Biden's smile is upside down?
Have you noticed that? Here's what a smile should look like.
Here's Biden's smile.
I can't even do it.
But he somehow looks like he's smiling while his smile is actually inverted.
I don't know how to do it.
Somehow he makes it look like a smile while he's frowning.
It's the freakiest thing.
I don't know if that's because of all the facelifts or what.
I don't know. But Biden still looks like the get off my lawn guy.
Did it seem to you that he looked too angry for the situation?
Especially when he...
There was a moment when Biden turned to Warren and he got angry and he was sort of gesturing.
And there were two camera angles on that.
One camera angle was straight on.
And with the straight on angle, you could tell that there was enough distance, physical distance between Biden and Warren, that when he was gesturing toward her with his hand, it wasn't getting right in her face.
He was gesturing toward her, but he wasn't really in her personal space or anything.
But CNN instantly changed from that point of that camera angle, which was...
Fairly, you know innocent looking to one in which it was over the shoulder of Warren as she's looking at Biden and from that camera angle you see Biden's hand Coming right toward the camera, which is toward Biden and it looked like he was right in her face So from that camera angle he looked like a yelling old man getting in the face of a woman It looked it looked too much But if you saw that exact same camera angle from the front and you could notice the distance between them,
it doesn't look like that at all.
It just looks like he's making his point.
So beware of camera angles.
I would say that maybe CNN's choice of that camera angle could have been just a producer's choice on the fly.
I'm not going to say that there was any intention in that, but it certainly made him look bad.
He had no answer for the Hunter Biden thing that made him look like he's already given up.
His dentures were slipping.
He was fumbling his words.
He was rambling. There is not the slightest chance he will be the nominee.
There isn't any chance.
In a graceful way.
What would he claim there was a health issue?
Would he say, you know, maybe he would just fall in the polling and that would be enough?
Because if he were no longer polling a solid number one, then his argument that he's the only one who can beat Trump just doesn't have the same power.
So, I think what's going to happen is, you saw the reporting about his fundraising.
So Biden has less than $10 million.
The other candidates are like 20, 30 million.
So there are three candidates who are just way outperforming him in fundraising.
I think that's the answer to how Biden gets out.
I think Biden will be starved of money...
And that's all it will take.
So in other words, Biden will not choose to leave the race, and he might even be leading in the polls when it happens, which would be the weirdest thing.
He might run out of money at number one in the polls.
That could actually happen.
And it could easily happen because he's number one in the polls for name recognition among the general public who is not really even paying attention.
At the same time that the people who are paying attention and want to win the general election know that he's not the guy to do it.
So I think the funding, since it's mostly big donor funding, I think the funding will shrink to nothing and then Biden will just have to quit.
He just won't have any money.
So I think the big donors are going to starve him out of the race.
What do you think? It looks like that's where it's headed, right?
They're just going to starve him out of the race.
All right. Here's the other thing that Biden said.
I was just shaking my head, because he does these old-timey references that sometimes don't make sense, like the record player he mentioned last time.
And he said, why should someone who's clipping coupons in the stock market, blah, blah, blah, something about tax rates, it doesn't matter, but you don't really clip coupons in the stock market.
That's not a thing.
If you have bonds...
There's something called clipping coupons when it comes to bonds.
But there's no such thing as clipping coupons in the stock market.
That's not actually a thing.
But he doesn't know.
Now, I have a guilty pleasure watching the Biden campaign have problems.
And I probably shouldn't even admit how much I enjoy this.
But prior to Biden running...
CNN had an analyst who was one of their most frequent guests, Simone Sanders, who is now, I think, the senior advisor for the Biden campaign.
So she's either the top or among the top of his advisors.
And I was watching her be interviewed after Biden's performance.
Oh my god, it's fun.
She is in such pain because she's watching her candidate just die right in front of us.
I mean, he's literally just lying on the floor decomposing and she's on television trying to put up appearances that maybe everything's fine.
And watching him decompose while she's trying to defend him, and you can see in her face that she wishes she were doing anything else in the world.
Now, I may be reading too much into it.
I'm not a mind reader. But she looks like she's really uncomfortable supporting a guy who can't put two sentences together.
It must be a terrible place to be because she can't really leave.
You know, that would be bad for him.
But you can't win. So I confess to a guilty pleasure because she was my least favorite pundit on CNN. She was the angry one who just thought that President Trump was the devil and anything he did was bad.
All right. Why is it that we care if Russia has more influence than Syria?
Oh, let me talk about some of the other candidates just to round it up.
I thought Yang was interesting, got a lot of attention, but I just don't think...
He's not going to catch on with the general voters.
So I don't think that mattered.
I thought that... Tulsi Gabbard has her fans and if we're being honest, a lot of her fans are just sort of in love with her.
I mean, I think that's a real thing.
Tulsi Gabbard has male fans who just sort of want to see more Tulsi Gabbard.
I'm not...
I'm not promoting that, and I'm not giving you my own opinions on the situation.
I'm just stating as a fact that I hear from a lot of men, including Republicans, who say, I wouldn't mind seeing some more Tulsi Gabbard on my TV screen.
Now, I don't think she's going to win, but it's interesting that she has almost a cult-like following of people who I think were in love.
Oh, let's talk about Harris.
So my biggest complaints about Harris' performance were that she laughed at her own jokes and she had unpresidential body language.
Did you notice that during the campaign she did not laugh at her own jokes?
And there was a moment where she smiled like she could have laughed, but she kept it down.
And her body language was pretty good.
I thought she fixed her body language, she fixed her presidential, let's say, mannerisms, and she didn't laugh at her own jokes.
Now, remember what I've been telling you from the beginning, that what's different about Kamala Harris is that as big as her flaws have been, they're the easiest ones to fix.
How hard is it to fix your body language?
You just watched her do it.
You just watched her do it.
She fixed it.
Now, I don't know if she'll be able to do it consistently, but in the context of the debate, she fixed it.
How hard is it for her to remember not to laugh too hard at her own jokes?
Not hard. Right?
That's not hard. She did it last night.
Now, I don't know if there was really a trigger for laughing at her own joke, but I thought she had enough of a trigger, and it looked like she had learned to hold back.
Now, let's talk about her main topic.
She got attention for saying that the president should be kicked off of Twitter.
My first impression was, oh, God...
You don't run for president arguing against freedom of speech.
I couldn't think of a worse way to run for president.
You know? I think freedom of speech is overrated.
Maybe my political opponent should not have freedom of speech.
And I'm thinking, that might be the worst attack anybody ever thought of.
And then I watched it get a lot of attention.
And it's the second time she's done it, because she did it online, and then she brought it to the debate.
And I thought, she's actually getting attention for this.
And then I thought, I wonder if this could work.
I don't feel like it's a good idea, you know, my first impression, but then she got attention.
And what do I always say?
Half of persuasion is just getting attention.
And I think she was fourth or fifth in how much time she got to talk.
You saw her push Elizabeth Warren on the question of whether Elizabeth would join her and ask you for Trump to be banned from Twitter.
And Elizabeth Warren simply was avoiding the question.
Which allowed Kamala to sort of press her and make her look weak because she wasn't even answering the question.
Now, it could be that both of them lost in that exchange.
Kamala may have lost because the issue is so weak and probably there's nobody in the country who thinks the president should lose freedom of speech.
There may be nobody.
There might literally be nobody in the world.
Who thinks a president should lose the ability to use a major communication platform?
I just don't think that's a thing.
But Elizabeth Warren looked weak as well.
So I think they made each other look weak.
That said, if Kamala Harris can figure out how to have some policies that people care about, she may have fixed her two biggest problems, the laugh and the body language.
Those are big deals that don't seem like big deals, but they really are.
So I'm not going to change my prediction.
Somebody is asking me about her little catchphrase, dude's gotta go.
So that's the second time she's used that in public.
Dude's gotta go.
I think every one of us who heard it, or almost, said some form of, ugh, that's not presidential.
That's just not presidential.
And, of course, we watch President Trump do non-presidential things all the time, but he seems to do them in a way that makes you laugh.
Or you can tell what he's up to, or there's some hyperbole involved or something.
Or he's just punching back, you know, as he does.
So somehow it just feels different when President Trump acts non-presidential, he makes it work.
When Kamala did it, because that's not her brand, her brand is not, I can do anything and be non-presidential if I feel like it.
Her brand is more prosecutor, straight-laced, I'm a senator.
So when she uses that phrase, it feels a little not genuine to us.
I think that's how you're feeling.
It's like, it didn't feel genuine.
But what are we talking about?
It made news, right?
It made news. So both times she said, dude's got to go, she got attention for it.
And if there's one thing you can learn from me, is that never underestimate getting attention.
It's not nothing.
So it's not enough, but it's not nothing.
All right. Next question on Syria.
Why do we care that Russia has more influence than Syria?
I would care if Assad were in charge in Syria.
But I don't know that he is, right?
Doesn't it seem like Putin just sort of owns Syria?
Because Putin's military is the dominant military.
And if you have the dominant military, you're sort of in control.
You know, even if you're not the one doing the garbage pickup and stuff, you're sort of in control.
Here's the thing. Are we worse off, we the United States, or even the Middle East, worse off because Russia has more control over Syria?
Are we worse off?
Because it doesn't feel like it to me.
Does Russia want the Syrian army to use chemical weapons again?
Probably not. Probably not.
Because that can't be good for Russia.
Does Russia want Syria to get a nuclear weapon of their own?
Probably not.
Probably not. Does Russia want Iran to have a greater role or more power in the Middle East?
Well, they're allies-ish, sort of sometimes, but probably not.
So, if you look at the United States objectives and Russian objectives, you can say, oh, there are all these places where our objectives conflict.
But in the Middle East and in Syria, do they conflict?
Do they? Is there anything we want out of that area?
That is incompatible with what Russia wants.
There might be. I mean, I'm speaking out of ignorance because there might be something we care about.
Now, I've heard it said that Russia's big play is about a pipeline and warm water ports and all that and access to, you know, through Syria, to which I say, do we care?
Do we care if Russia has a good pipeline?
Do we care if Russia has a reliable warm weather port?
Really? I mean, do we care?
I just don't know that we care.
So, do we care if Russia or Turkey is controlling the safe zones on the border with Turkey?
Not really. Don't care.
Now, I think we do care a lot that Russia doesn't invade Turkey, because then it activates NATO. We don't want that.
But does it look like Russia is going to invade Turkey?
No. Oh, that's the last thing they'd want.
So, the idea that Russia has more influence in that area It looks to me like their interests are pretty compatible with ours.
And at the same time, it's going to be their expense, not ours.
The best situation is to have somebody else pay the tab and do the same things that you would have done.
Destroy ISIS, keep Syria from getting a nuclear weapon.
It looks like it's all the same stuff.
But maybe I just have a gap in my knowledge there.
All right. In the debate, CNN asked directly, and they kept at it, about age and health.
If CNN, along with the New York Times, who co-hosted, if they're focusing, because remember, they didn't ask anything about climate change.
I don't know if they asked anything about China.
I don't remember. Maybe they did.
But CNN gets to influence how the public is thinking by what questions they ask.
And one of the questions was about age.
What does that tell you?
What it tells me is CNN is not too excited about the three leading candidates because they're all too old.
Because I don't think they would ask the question...
Unless they thought that it mattered and that their own team would be better off wrestling with the question.
So it seemed to me that they were painting a little laser target on the top three candidates because they're the older ones.
So what happens if the top three go away?
Who's left? If the top three fail, what do you got?
Got your Buttigieg?
You got your Kamala Harris.
You got your Klobuchar, but she doesn't seem to be catching on.
There's something about Klobuchar that just, I don't know, it's not connecting with people, even though I would say objectively she's the other adult in the room with Pete Buttigieg.
Now, let me ask you this.
If you had a choice, let's say you're a kingmaker on the Democrat side, so you're a big money person, let's say you're Pelosi, you're somebody who wants the Democrats to win, and you're given this choice.
You only have two choices, hypothetically, and your choices are Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg, and you can have one of them as your candidate.
Which do you pick? And don't tell me about vice presidents, because nobody votes for a vice president.
Which of those two, if you're a Democrat, which of those two do you say is the better choice?
Buttigieg or Kamala Harris?
Go. In the comments, stop saying Tulsi.
We're not going to talk about her. All right.
Let me just say, I don't have any interest in Tulsi Gabbard, because she doesn't have a chance of winning.
And there's just no point in talking about her, okay?
So just forget about commenting about her for a while.
So I'm looking at your comments.
I'm seeing Pete, Kamala, Pete, Kamala, Harris, Pete, Harris, neither, stay home, Pete, Pete, Pete's too young, something homophobic, Mayor Pete, hard pass, Kamala, Kamala.
Somebody says, Harris, you persuaded me.
Harris, Harris, Harris, Harris, Harris, Harris, Buddha judge.
So it's pretty split.
So I'm looking at your answers.
And most of you are probably Trump supporters and Republicans.
So you're not really the voice of the Democrats.
You'd be guessing what they would want.
Yeah, it looks like it's pretty split between Harris and Buttigieg.
Alright, let me give you this.
Are you ready for it?
Kamala Harris for president.
Pete Buttigieg for vice president.
Huh? Huh?
Think about it.
Buttigieg for president, we might not be ready for.
And when I say we, I don't mean me.
I would love a gay president.
Honestly, it would make me happy every day.
If I woke up with a gay president, honestly, it would just make my day better.
Because I'd be thinking, I can't wait until he meets with Saudi Arabia.
I can't wait until he meets with foreign leaders.
Just see what happens.
What do they do? What does Saudi Arabia do with our gay president?
So I would love a gay president.
I'm the most pro-gay guy you'll ever meet.
Pro-LGBTQ in general.
But Just in the same way that I thought that it was good for the country to elect Obama, just to get us over the hump.
You know, just to say, this is who we are.
You know, you can be anybody in this country.
If you have the qualities, we'll elect your president.
So I think Obama's election was way bigger than just the administration that he presided over.
Way more than whatever the performance was.
It was just historically...
It was important. And we had to get to that point.
I'm glad we did. Same thing with Pete Buttigieg.
I'd love to get to that point where we had a gay president.
If not him, someday.
I'd be all in favor of that.
But are we ready?
In 2020, are we ready for a gay president?
Because we're still largely a homophobic country.
Right? There's way too much of it.
And especially if the question is leadership.
Because the people who are most homophobic are probably also going to have a bias.
It's like, well, is that the brand we want to lead with?
Will other countries take us seriously?
And other homophobic thoughts.
I don't think any of them really matter.
So I think Pete Buttigieg would be a great president.
If the public elected him, he would do a great job.
I don't think any of that would be a negative.
And it would be great to, you know, crack that ceiling and finally just get past that.
But I think the public doesn't believe we're quite ready.
Now, let me ask you this.
Suppose you seasoned Mayor Pete with four or eight years as a vice president.
After being seasoned, he's older.
He's experienced in the executive branch of the government, because right now he's a mayor.
And we have eight more years to just grow as a society.
Is he ready then?
Yeah. Yeah.
Pete Buttigieg plus four years or plus eight years is a whole different Pete Buttigieg.
Remember, he's just practicing right now.
He's really young and he's already gotten a whole lot better on the campaign trail.
He's getting better. He's got some serious game, and he would have a lot of rich backers.
Some of them would be gay, which helps.
It's good to have an enthusiastic base that has money.
So, here's what I'm suggesting.
The strongest package for the Democrats, which they might come to believe on their own, is that the top three in the polls, Warren, Biden, and Bernie, are too old and too extreme.
Once you've gotten rid of them, and I think that the people with money and influence will work on doing that, should they be successful in getting the top three out of the mix, A Kamala Harris, Buttigieg team wouldn't look bad.
That would not look bad.
And if you were trying to attract women, people of color, LGBTQ, can you beat that?
Seriously. Could you beat...
Harris and Buttigieg as just a package that describes the Democrat Party in the way that the Democrats say, oh yeah, that is us.
That combination gets everything.
Like we've got some straight, some gay, some male, some female, some person of color, some white.
It hits it all. And they're young enough.
So, I don't think I've convinced you that my prediction of Kamala Harris As the nominee, I don't think she'll win against Trump.
But as the nominee, does it sound so bad now?
Doesn't sound so bad, does it?
You got pretty quiet when I said that, didn't you?
Because it's the first time you can imagine somebody who would be competitive with Trump.
Harris plus Buttigieg would be pretty competitive compared to the others who would be not competitive at all.
All right. That's about all I've got for now.
I would like to remind you that my book, Loser Think, which is already screaming up the bestseller charts, is number one in its category, and it's not even on sale yet.
That's just pre-orders. Its category being business and political humor, and also most anticipated, I think.
I'm number one on Amazon.
So yesterday I did some...
Some personal signings of my book.
If you're wondering how I did it, I just had people call me on my app.
Let's see if you can see this.
I can't see it.
But on my whiteboard I had a drawing.
And I would just add people's name to it and let them take a screenshot.
They were using the interface by WenHub app.
Contact me personally, and I would just write their name on the whiteboard and hold up my selfie phone, and they would have a selfie of me with their autograph, and they could just print that out and stick it in a book.
Now here's why this is great.
You could get my autograph for the book without actually having it on the book.
And then you can read the book, keep the autograph, and give the book as a gift.
Best of everything.
I think of it all.
All right. Thank you for pre-ordering.
All of you who pre-ordered, that makes a big difference, and I appreciate that the most, because the pre-orders are what give it its buzz when it starts, and what buzz it has when it starts tends to be very predictive of how it's going to do.
You just said the vice presidents don't matter.
Nobody votes for the vice president.
But as a package, it gives people a reason to show up.
And what's different about Buttigieg as a vice president candidate is that I think people would understand that he needs to get seasoned in that kind of a job.
The only thing that Pete is lacking is seasoning.
And I feel like everybody sees that.
So you season him, you get him as an eventual president later.
It's a strong play. That's the way I'd do it if I were a Democrat.
Alright, that's all for now.
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