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Nov. 10, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams

01:00:02

Episode 720 Scott Adams: Crowdstrike, Ukraine, Baby Trump’s Stabbing Death, Bloomberg’s Odds

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	Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hey everybody!
	Guess what?
	Yes, right! I'm in the right time zone!
	Yes! My week of publicity for my new book, LoserThink.
	In New York is over.
	I'm getting ready to head down to LA tomorrow.
	We'll do a little more interviewing.
	Gonna see Dave Rubin, Adam Carolla, I think.
	Some more. So we got more publicity coming.
	And I hope you have your copy.
	It's zooming up the bestseller list in its categories.
	But before we talk about all the news of the day, let us do a little thing that makes life so much better.
	You start with an ordinary day.
	And then you add what we're going to do next?
	Turns into a great day.
	Your dopamine is about to spike.
	Get ready. Because it's coming.
	It's called the Simultaneous Sip.
	And all you need is a cover mugger, a glass of Snifter, Stine Chalice, Tanker, Thermos, Flask, Canteen, Grill, Goblet, Vessel of any kind.
	Fill it with your favorite liquid.
	I like coffee. Enjoy me now.
	For the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
	The simultaneous sip.
	Go. Oh, delightful.
	I'm going to put that right back in my coffee warmer and make sure that it's just the right temperature.
	So, how many of you watched me on the Greg Gutfeld show, which aired last night, and I believe it will air at least one more time this weekend?
	Did anybody get to catch that?
	It was a lot of fun. I don't like to brag, but I think it was the best Greg Gutfeld show of all time.
	Not just because of me.
	I thought everybody was on fire that day.
	So, there's a little bit of a delay on your comments.
	Oh, okay, some of you saw it.
	That's good. Let's talk about some other things.
	There's a tragic death I have to report on.
	Yes, it's true. The baby Trump inflatable balloon was stabbed to death before the big football game that the president attended.
	And so, can we take a moment of silence for baby Trump, the inflatable balloon, that lived a brief, but I think noteworthy life.
	We remember baby Trump, the inflatable baby Trump, with fondness.
	It was part of our life.
	But, sadly, crime, crime is just getting worse, and it's just more proof.
	That the only thing that can stop a man with a knife is a good citizen with a knife.
	But there were no armed citizens to protect baby Trump.
	It turns out that the people who were in charge of keeping baby Trump safe were not armed.
	I bet they wish they had a concealed carry now.
	So, baby Trump is no longer, but perhaps he can be patched up and put back into action.
	Now, I gotta admit that baby Trump is an attack on President Trump that I've never minded even once.
	You know, it bothers me when people attack him for illegitimate things.
	It bothers me when they obsess about his tweets and things that don't really matter.
	So there are a lot of things that I find bothersome about Trump's critics, but I do not ever find baby Trump any less entertaining.
	So I hope baby Trump can be resuscitated because I'm in it for the entertainment and that float is pretty entertaining.
	And getting stabbed to death is entertaining too.
	Everything about that baby Trump is fun.
	All right. So I've been noticing that there's a trend.
	about the criticism of Trump.
	The things that they think they have on him, the impeachable stuff, is all complicated and it's hard to get the public to care.
	And if the public doesn't even understand what you're talking about, like a Ukraine phone call for what?
	Yes for what? Crowd strike who?
	If the public doesn't even know why, Well, good luck impeaching the president.
	So, I've noticed that the anti-Trumpers have gone full word thinking.
	Here are some of the words used about the president.
	I think just on CNN's website just today.
	So just today, just one website.
	Somebody says, it doesn't matter who, because they all say similar things.
	So somebody on CNN on the website was saying that the transcripts depict Trump as, quote, fickle, susceptible to flattery, and prone to grudges.
	Elsewhere on the site, he is called mercurial.
	Also consumed by festering grievances and the administration is perpetually thrown into chaos by rash decisions.
	Also says that he acts on his whims and that he acts like a child or a criminal.
	He is impulsive and he is deranged.
	What do all of those things have in common?
	Well, a few things. One is that they're a little bit difficult to demonstrate.
	If you say somebody's fickle, all you can point to is that they used to say this, but now they say that.
	But isn't that normal?
	I would say in the realm of being the president, don't you often have situations where the leader will say, hey, let's do X, and then somebody pushes back or he learns a little bit more, his advisors weigh in, and then he says, huh, well, I guess my first thing wasn't so good, let's try this other thing. Isn't that kind of common?
	Do we want a president who doesn't change his mind?
	So labeling it impulsive or a whim or a rash decision is an example of what form of loser think, as described in my incredible bestselling book, The Best I've Ever Written, mind reading.
	Yeah, it assumes that you know the president's inner thoughts.
	And we don't. We don't even know our own inner thoughts.
	We barely know our spouse or girlfriend or, you know, our siblings.
	We usually don't know anybody's inner thoughts.
	But you don't know how long somebody's been thinking about something, and you don't know what data they're processing.
	You just know that they used to say this, and now they've changed it to this.
	But to imagine that the process of changing from this opinion to this opinion Has no thoughts in between?
	There's no thinking process?
	There's no evidence of that.
	All we know is that we don't know what he was thinking.
	That's it. That's the only thing we know.
	We don't know that it went directly from this idea to thinking again, but now I have a new thought.
	Is that what they think when they think about this fickle, impulsive stuff?
	Do they think that the process just before either the change or the original decision is the brain shuts down and it just goes into maintenance mode and it's like...
	Let's evade a country!
	And suddenly you wake up with an impulsive thought.
	What exactly do they think brains do?
	Do brains not do the thinking part?
	They just go directly to the decision?
	Well, they do actually, quite often.
	But it's insane to think that they can read the President's mind.
	Now, I made the mistake of turning on...
	I was on the plane, so I was trapped on an airplane.
	And when you're trapped on an airplane, you will watch content that you would not watch in any other circumstance, because you're bored out of your mind, and it's a cross-country flight, and you're...
	So, I turned on MSNBC... Which I don't even usually sample because it's so odious.
	I can watch CNN even when they say things that I think are a little biased.
	But man, if you go full MSNBC, you are into another world.
	CNN is just somebody who doesn't like the president, or generally speaking, they have a bias against the president.
	Fox News is somebody who generally has a bias that seems in favor of the president, the opinion people in particular.
	But you go to MSNBC, and it doesn't even look like those two things.
	It doesn't look like somebody just has a bias.
	It doesn't look like something's working over there.
	So I'm watching Chris Hayes, and it was fascinating to me because, number one, it's obvious he's very smart.
	I don't think anybody would ever say that.
	Nobody would ever accuse him of not being smart.
	I watched him come out and do basically a monologue in front of his audience that lasted a long time.
	It was really well constructed and coherent and really laid out the case, told the story.
	It was a really good performance.
	I would say on a performance level and on an intelligence level, Chris Hayes is very impressive.
	I can see why he's the host of a show.
	And so I was watching it with a specific agenda.
	I wanted to see if I could identify the point Where they departed into a different movie and what that was.
	Was there one thing?
	Is there a few things?
	What is it that caused them to have this different view of life?
	And I think I found it.
	It was really interesting.
	So Chris's monologue had to do with the fact that the president released the transcript and said it was perfect.
	Look at, you know, read it yourself.
	And Chris Hayes believed that the transcript very clearly is so damning that he was trying to figure out why the president would tell everybody to read the evidence that is so damning against the president and then act like it's not.
	And so here were his two hypotheses.
	He said...
	Either the president is so cleverly manipulative that he knows that just saying is perfect, and a lot of people won't read it, a lot of people will say, well, I trust him, he says it's perfect, I'm not going to read it.
	That's it. Or maybe just because he framed it that way, it would influence people to read it and have the same impression, because they'd be primed to see it the way he framed it.
	So, you know, Chris didn't say it as well as I just said it, but that's sort of the implication.
	The other hypothesis that Chris Hayes entertained is that the president is the dumbest person in Washington.
	Because you would have to be the dumbest person in Washington, per Chris Hayes, to ask the public to look at the most damning evidence against you.
	Who would do that?
	And he says, only the dumbest person in Washington.
	And then he humorously, in a way that his audience enjoyed, suggested multiple times that therefore the president must be just basically the dumbest guy in the world.
	Because nobody would ask people to look at damning information about themselves.
	There's another possibility left out, which is that Chris Hayes and people like him are seeing something that isn't there.
	Would you agree? There are probably other hypotheses or explanations that also work.
	But three that we have on the table are the president is cleverly so manipulative he knows that claiming there's nothing there will actually cause people to either not look at it or to think there's nothing there when they look at it.
	In other words, fooling them into thinking there's nothing there.
	Or he's so dumb he can't tell it's bad for him.
	And then the one I'm adding, which is they're seeing something that we don't see.
	So Chris Hayes digs into the transcript to show us the bits that are the damning parts.
	And so he starts out by showing the president's language that suggests that the president was suggesting that we've been good to Ukraine, but maybe it hasn't been reciprocal.
	And can you do me a favor?
	So Chris does a good job Of pointing out that the president is sort of setting up the conversation as in, you know, I have some leverage, I have something you want, and there are things I want.
	I would say that part perfectly clear.
	I would agree completely that the president's entire approach to this was very much one about having leverage in the conversation.
	Now, I've said before that if you're talking to a foreign leader that you're giving a lot of money to, if you're not asking for something in return, you're doing it wrong.
	Do you want a president who gives away our money and doesn't ask for anything in return?
	If he can, of course.
	Now, did he ask for something that's reasonable and we would agree with?
	That's a separate question.
	But of course... I agree with Chris Hayes, and I see it too.
	I'm looking at the same document.
	He says he's using a little leverage on the president of Ukraine.
	And here's the language.
	And I look at the language. I go, oh yeah, I see it.
	I can see that he's setting up the conversation.
	But of course, my interpretation is, You always do that.
	So the real question is not whether he used leverage against them, but whether the thing he's asking for is appropriate.
	So that's a separate question. But so far, I'm on the same page.
	I see it, Chris. I'm looking at the transcript.
	He does seem to be saying, hey, you owe us.
	Do me a favor. We got this thing.
	You want this. We want this.
	I accept that that was the frame.
	Here's the fun part.
	Here's the fun part. So then he reads the part about how President Trump asked for some information on CrowdStrike and the Bidens.
	And he reads what the President says, and then he turns to his audience and says that the transcript says that the President is asking Ukraine to, quote, dig up dirt on his political opponent.
	Do you see it?
	So, Chris Hayes is all factual, all logical, all rational, and he's even saying, read it.
	And then he reads it to you on screen, and right after he reads one thing to you, he says, there he was, asking him to dig up dirt.
	That's not there. There's nothing like that there.
	It doesn't say dig up dirt.
	Dig up dirt, the only way I interpret it, is to make up something that isn't real.
	Wouldn't you say that's the interpretation?
	That when you say dig up dirt, it sort of assumes that the dirt is not really something we should be worrying about, or maybe it's not even real, it's just dirt.
	So where in the transcript does the president ask the president of Ukraine to make shit up?
	It doesn't exist. And so this is the magic trick.
	So the magic trick is that Hayes is pacing his audience.
	This is actually a hypnosis trick.
	I doubt he's thinking of it this way, but this is the mechanism.
	The mechanism is that he says something his audience agrees with.
	They're chosen to be, you know, they wouldn't be in the audience if they weren't sort of pro this opinion.
	And he says, things you agree with, things you agree with, things you agree with, things you agree with.
	That's priming you and pacing you.
	Things you agree with, things you agree with, things you agree with.
	Digging up dirt, things you agree with, things you agree with.
	You just throw it in the middle of things that people agree, but it's just not there.
	It's a made-up imaginary thought.
	That he asked him for something that wasn't real.
	And here's why that's important.
	You have to make that little magical leap.
	And I have to admit, I watched it, and I couldn't tell if he did it intentionally.
	That's the funny part.
	Sometimes you can watch a pundit and you say to yourself, all right, I know it's spin, you know it's spin, you don't believe it, I know you're just trying to convince me to believe it, I know you don't even believe it.
	But this didn't look like this.
	I actually couldn't tell if he was trying to sell us something and knew he was making something up, or if he actually saw it on the page.
	Now, if you are not well-versed in the ways of irrational thinking and hypnosis and, let's say, persuasion in general, you may say, Scott, Scott, Scott, don't be naive.
	Anybody can tell the difference between asking for an investigation and asking somebody to dig up dirt.
	Because an investigation would be in a legal context, and it would be things that are important to the state, and you would expect only accurate information, and you only care about things that matter.
	That's what an investigation would be.
	Digging up dirt would be, you don't even really have to investigate.
	Just give us some stuff.
	Just give us some stuff.
	It doesn't even need to be real. So here's the thing.
	In my experience...
	It is completely common for people to imagine things that don't exist.
	It's one of the most common things in our experience.
	In fact, in a little bit, I'm going to tell you some things that you probably think are true that just aren't true, to demonstrate the point.
	So I think there's some chance that Chris Hayes believed that the words on that transcript Translate accurately to digging up dirt.
	He might not know they don't.
	I mean, I don't see it.
	I don't see anything there that would suggest that the president would be happy with them making something up.
	Because it doesn't feel like it would last.
	Somebody was mentioning the Charlottesville example.
	And that's a pretty good comparison in this case.
	So that was the magic trick.
	So imagine you're in the audience.
	You've agreed with everything you said, emotionally, because they're really on the same page, emotionally, their hopes and dreams are all that the president's going to be erased any moment now.
	You would accept I think Chris Hayes is an attorney, lawyer.
	Is that true? If somebody that smart and that compatible with your thinking said that he's reading it right in front of you and saying it says dig up dirt, essentially, wouldn't you believe it?
	You would very easily take on his interpretation because he's very convincing, but it's not there.
	So I found that quite interesting.
	Now, the irony, of course, is that Chris's first theory is that the president was using a psychological magic trick to make you imagine there was nothing there simply because he's so willing to let you read it.
	What Chris Hayes did was the same trick right in front of you, which is he primed you to believe there was something there and that he read something that wasn't there.
	And then he said, there it is.
	And he explained exactly what was there that wasn't there.
	Because he just read what was there and it wasn't what he said.
	Nothing about digging up dirt.
	So he used the same trick.
	And again, I don't know if it was intentional.
	If it had been intentional, it was kind of brilliant.
	But it would be perfectly normal that he actually thought he saw it there.
	He could have thought he saw it.
	All right. So, let's talk a little bit more about CrowdStrike.
	So, the President of Ukraine was asked by Trump to look into not only Biden, but something about CrowdStrike and a Ukraine connection.
	And I have to admit, I just always assumed everybody else knew what that meant.
	I didn't know what it meant. I had no idea what Ukraine and CrowdStrike and Hillary's server or any of that have anything to do with anything.
	And so I just saw that and I was like, somebody must know what that means.
	It must be something out there where that makes sense.
	But as you read the anti-Trump opinions, they say that any suggestion that CrowdStrike has anything to do with Ukraine...
	It's just imaginary, because there's no evidence that would suggest that Ukraine was behind the hacking instead of Russia.
	I think that's the bottom line, is that the president thought there was some suggestion Ukraine was behind the hacking instead of Russia.
	But there's no evidence of that.
	So then I said to myself, it's a conspiracy theory, but I wonder where that came from.
	Who exactly is saying that Ukraine and CrowdStrike have something in common?
	So I started digging into it.
	First thing I notice is that these search engines, at least on Google, are very clear that there's nothing there.
	The top hits you get are, ah, it's a conspiracy theory, conspiracy theory, debunked, debunked, CrowdStrike has nothing to do with Ukraine.
	But if you keep digging a little bit, you can find some obscure blog posts where people are laying out their theories.
	And so I went down the rabbit hole a little bit to see at least what the conspiracy people were saying.
	Because I just wanted to know, is the president acting on something that's just batshit crazy?
	That nobody's saying?
	Or is there somebody who's saying there's some kind of a connection there?
	And let me give you a few things I found out.
	There's this thing called the Atlantic Council.
	Now, I'll probably get kicked off of YouTube even for talking about this stuff.
	Somebody says, once again, you're two years behind.
	You are correct. I was two years behind because I kept waiting for this to matter.
	And I wasn't sure it was mattering.
	But here are some connections.
	So there's a... What do you call it?
	A think tank called the Atlantic Council.
	It's a United States think tank.
	Now, think tanks tend to get corrupted by foreign countries because they require funding.
	And foreign countries will say, hey, I'll fund...
	You, for millions of dollars, to do some position paper or study, but of course they hope that position paper will be in their favor, and millions of dollars are on the line, so probably will be.
	So the first thing you need to know is that all of these think tanks have at least the potential to be completely shams because they're taking money from people and giving them opinions that are compatible with who funded them.
	Now, I'm not saying that's the case with the Atlantic Council in particular.
	I'm just saying that think tanks all have that quality.
	They can't really think that you're getting any kind of an independent opinion.
	So here's the interesting thing.
	Who do you think is on the advisory board for the Atlantic Council?
	Well, one person was the founder of...
	a co-founder of CrowdStrike.
	Another person was James Clapper.
	And another person was a Ukrainian billionaire who has donated lots of money to the Clinton Foundation.
	So there's this one organization that is What does the Atlantic Council, what is their main sort of theme?
	And when I say that, this will be based on even independent people talking about them.
	So this is not just critics, but objective independent people would say the Atlantic Council's sort of overarching mission is anti-Russia.
	It's an anti-Russia organization.
	They're pro-NATO and anti-Russia.
	So, you've got the co-founder of CrowdStrike, whose analysis showed that Russia was at fault, at the same time he's an advisory member of a think tank that's anti-Russia.
	So he joined an anti-Russia organization, and then coincidentally, when they had a chance to look at a hack, Well, it looks like it was Russia's fault.
	At the same time, the James Clapper is also an advisor.
	Now, there's no evidence that they hang out.
	I don't know. You could be an advisor and never go to a meeting, I suppose.
	But these are just the connections.
	They simply exist. We don't know that Clapper was necessarily having meetings with this guy or anything like that.
	So, and then this Ukrainian billionaire, who's also aligned with us, of course Ukraine is anti-Russia, for all the right reasons.
	So there's big money involved.
	I think there's a rumor that this Ukrainian guy funds the Atlantic Council.
	But what I found is that looked like it'd been debunked, because they list who funds them.
	That seems to be public information, and The Ukrainian billionaire is not funding them in any direct way.
	But, if I've taught you anything about Ukrainian billionaires, you don't have to fund things directly.
	If you've learned anything from Hunter Biden's example, you don't have to directly You can find somebody in the family who needs a good job.
	You can find, let's say, a Clinton Foundation that could use $25 million or whatever.
	We don't know how much he gave.
	You can find something that they want that could benefit from a lot of money.
	So, now the question is, since CrowdStrike was the one that analyzed Clinton's server on behalf of the FBI, so CrowdStrike does digital forensics to find out who hacks so CrowdStrike does digital forensics to find out who hacks things, among other things.
	And one of the complaints about that is that They only gave the FBI an image of the server instead of the physical server or servers, and a lot of people on the right complain, hey, that's clearly bad.
	Now, the experts will say the image from the server is what you want.
	The physical server It's just going to say the same thing.
	The image is an exact copy of what was on the server.
	So anybody saying, hey, we don't have the physical server, probably doesn't understand how servers work and how images work.
	This would be the official...
	This is not my opinion.
	This is what the debunkers say.
	Now, I have a question, and probably somebody who knows more than I do can answer this.
	If somebody gave you an image from a server, a physical server, and they took the digital image of it, and it's exact, and they give it to somebody, let's say the FBI, how does the FBI know it's the exact image?
	Have you ever wondered that?
	Is there any way to know?
	Because if you take the image, it's just zeros and ones, right?
	And if I give you a pile of zeros and ones, how do you know I didn't change any of the zeros and ones?
	Is there any way to know that?
	It feels unknowable.
	And it feels like you could make it look any way you wanted.
	Now I'm not accusing CrowdStrike of changing the mirror image copy.
	In fact, that would be an amazingly large legal risk for anybody to take.
	It stretches the imagination that they would change it if there were any chance of getting caught.
	But, was there any chance of getting caught?
	That's a fair question, right?
	Was there any chance of getting caught if they did change it?
	I don't know. Maybe a hacker or somebody more technical can tell me, or maybe somebody in law enforcement who has a better idea of whatever.
	So it has a checksum, somebody is saying.
	So somebody is saying that if there were any changes, You would know because a checksum means the quick explanation is there's an algorithm you run against The data, and it gets a specific result.
	So if any of the data is changed, and you run the algorithm on it later, you'll get a different output, and you'll say, oh, I don't know what got changed, but it's not the same anymore, because the algorithm gives me a different response.
	I think that's a good explanation of the checksum.
	I might have oversimplified that, but that's the basic idea.
	But, here again, when is the checksum originally done, and who did it?
	And does that give you an opportunity to say, oh yeah, the checksum was great, then you change it, or can you make a change and still get the same checksum?
	Is there any way to fool the system?
	I don't know. So a lot of questions.
	But what we do know is this.
	We do know that an organization that has close connections with anti-Russia think tank Decided that Russia was the hacker.
	Now, I'm not saying they weren't.
	I'm just saying, in what world do you trust the anti-Russian organization to give you an independent opinion that it was Russia behind it?
	In any world, does that make sense?
	So, common sense tells you That CrowdStrike is the last company you would ever want to be involved in looking into a hack where one of the suspects is Russian.
	How often will CrowdStrike look into an ambiguous situation and say it wasn't Russian?
	Probably not that often.
	Now here's a little interesting tidbit I was not aware of.
	Maybe you can fact check this on me.
	I hope this is right. So when the big report was put together, using CrowdStrike's information, the CIA and the FBI said they had high confidence that it accurately identified Russia as the cause of the hack.
	So there were three organizations, CIA, FBI, and NSA. CIA and CIA, Clapper, FBI, Comey, had high confidence that Russia was behind it.
	The NSA, with Admiral Mike Rogers, did not have high confidence.
	And he looked at the same stuff.
	I assume. Because they would all have clearance, right?
	So they could all look at the same information.
	And NSA has only moderate confidence.
	What would you call...
	What's another name for moderate confidence in something?
	If you had moderate confidence that something was true, what would be another way to say that?
	You don't know.
	Moderate confidence means, well, I lean in this direction, but I'm just sort of leaning there.
	I don't know. And then, I guess, Roger said in his testimony...
	He said, he stated in a Senate hearing, this is Admiral Mike Rogers, director of the NSA, that his confidence did not reach even this threshold.
	Now, that's somebody else's writing.
	What he said is, I wouldn't call it a discrepancy.
	I'd call it an honest difference of opinion between three different organizations.
	And in the end, I made that call.
	It didn't have the same level of sourcing And the same level of multiple sources.
	In other words, one professional in this field, out of three, said the evidence was not conclusive.
	He was looking at the same evidence.
	The two who said it was conclusive were part of the coup.
	I mean...
	The two who said it was conclusive were literally part of the coup.
	So what does that do to your confidence?
	Now, one of the other pieces of information is that it's widely reported that the data...
	Let's see, was it the data from the whistleblower or somebody?
	So some data that was transferred ultimately to Wikilinks was transferred so fast it had to be an inside job, like on a thumb drive.
	But apparently that's debunked.
	Have you heard that theory? The theory that it had to be an inside job, not outside hackers, because the data transmission speed was so fast that you can only do that locally.
	But, apparently that's been well debunked.
	And the way that that was debunked, my cat has been missing me for a week, so she's all over me here.
	So the way that that was debunked, is that apparently people who know how this stuff is done is that it would be common to hack one computer on the inside at a slow speed and then transfer from another server onto the hacked server and then suck it out of that server.
	So the thinking is that there may be some place in the process that was a local transfer which would be at a high speed.
	But it would still be the hacker.
	The hacker would just be moving it from one internal server to another and then extracting it, which apparently is a common process.
	So the thought that it was an inside job and Seth Rich was behind it seems to be debunked, at least in terms of there was no other way it could have been that high transfer speed.
	Apparently that's just normal.
	There's nothing unusual about that high transfer speed in a hacking situation.
	So let's put this all together.
	So the president asked Ukraine to look into this CrowdStrike situation.
	The president may have good information, may have bad information.
	Don't know. Somebody says William Binney says no.
	But William Binney is not a hacker.
	If you talk to the hackers, the hackers will say, oh, there's an obvious reason.
	It's because they just transferred internally on the server.
	All right. So I think you should probably...
	This is my opinion. None of this stuff could be 100%.
	I would say if you still believe that the internal transfer speed is somehow a clue, you should probably release on that.
	That doesn't seem like that's a credible piece of information.
	So the President is asking about the Ukraine.
	I think he believed or does believe that the Ukrainians might be funding...
	I don't know, the Atlantic Council, but I don't think that's true based on their public information.
	But when you've got a billionaire involved, they have lots of ways to compensate people indirectly.
	So you can't rule anything out.
	So there's nothing in all of this that tells me that there's necessarily any kind of Ukrainian...
	Bad things going on.
	But what I can say is that the CrowdStrike analysis, in my opinion, lacks credibility.
	If it couldn't convince the head of the NSA, and this Atlantic Council clearly has all the wrong players in the same place, or at least they're associated with anti-Russian stuff, there's no credibility to that.
	So I'm not going to say that I found something wrong, nor will I say that Russia wasn't behind it.
	I'm not going to say that.
	I'm just saying that the people who determined Russia was behind it should be given no credibility.
	Zero. The amount of credibility you should give them should be zero because of the players involved.
	You would do that in any other case, right?
	If somebody's accused of murder, do you ask the murderer, hey, murderer, did you do it?
	No, I didn't do it.
	Oh, good. You're free.
	Free to go. We don't do that, right?
	Because the person who has the most interest in lying is where he got the information from.
	all right enough on that at another point I wanted to make So, just to make things interesting, there's a report that Trump is considering attending Russia's Victory Day Parade, which would be a military parade on May 9th, I guess, of the coming year.
	Now, first of all, I don't know if that's true.
	But let's say it is.
	Let's say the President is considering, has not accepted, but is considering attending an event which basically would be exalting Putin and Russia.
	Is that a good idea?
	Let me remind you that President Trump does not approach foreign relations the way anybody else does.
	And by that I mean he does it the smart way.
	He does it a smart way that only could work for him.
	Because there's a special quality of this president that others would not necessarily have.
	So it allows him to do things differently because there's something about him.
	And here's the something about him.
	Don't you believe that President Trump could be completely friendly with you, sincerely, actually like you, And still screw you if it made sense to do so.
	Don't you believe that?
	Would you believe that Jimmy Carter could be nice to you in person, treat you with respect, say, you got a great country there, you're doing a great job, and then turn around and screw the person he was saying nice things about?
	Probably not. You wouldn't really believe it if it came from Jimmy Carter.
	How about Obama? Do you think Obama could praise somebody and then screw them?
	Could he praise them and screw them at the same time?
	I don't think so. I think Obama would say, you're our enemy, we're screwing you.
	He would want to be consistent.
	I'm screwing you, and now I'm talking with you, and I'm talking to you like I'm screwing you.
	Because I'm screwing you.
	That's what I'm doing. We're screwing you.
	So, what President Trump can do, and he says it explicitly, it's not like I'm guessing, I'm not reading his mind, he's said it numerous times as directly as you can say it, I'm going to treat the leaders with respect while being as tough as I need to be.
	He's doing it with China.
	He did it with North Korea.
	He's doing it with...
	One of your comments is making me laugh.
	Now he's doing it with Russia.
	And he's telling us what he's doing.
	He's doing it with Saudi Arabia.
	So he has a process in which he will make personal relationships with the people we want to influence while looking them right in the eye and saying, you know, I'm squeezing your economy to death.
	Let's go to lunch.
	Who else could do that?
	And by the way, it's the very best way to be.
	If you're trying to convince somebody to go your way, you don't present yourself as a dick because you're talking to people who have egos and they run countries and stuff.
	And if you come across as a demanding dick, They're going to react that way.
	Because the way he reacts affects how they react.
	He is smart enough to know that his mannerisms, his approach, everything he does will have a personal and important effect on the other leaders.
	So he uses his personal charisma at the same time he's putting sanctions on you and sending weapons to the Ukraine and anything else he has to do.
	Um... So, I would say that where Trump is being criticized is, in my opinion, one of his biggest strengths.
	You know, people ask me, how could I be supportive of this president with all of his typos and tweets and his bad words and stuff?
	And I always say it's because I thought ahead of time, and I think I've been proved correct, that he would bring a set of tools to the job that we've never seen before.
	And then every now and then you need a new set of tools because there are some sets of problems that you just haven't solved with the old tools.
	Now, maybe you don't need a President Trump-like personality forever.
	Sometimes you bring in the head man.
	Sometimes you bring in the turnaround expert, because the turnaround expert for your company has a different skill set than the steady state person.
	Sometimes the entrepreneur starts the company, but then you need to bring in somebody who's been a CEO to get some stability.
	So I always thought that Trump had this kind of quality, which he could simply do stuff That makes sense that other people can't do.
	Other people would never be able to look Putin in the eye, genuinely like him, and this is the weird part.
	I think Trump actually genuinely likes some of these people, because in person he's quite charismatic, and I imagine they are too.
	So he doesn't have any problem with genuinely liking them and screwing them as hard as he needs to because he doesn't work for them.
	He can like them, but they're still on the other team.
	You can like the players on the other team and still try as hard as you can to beat them.
	That seems to be what he's doing.
	So should Trump go to the May 9th event?
	I don't know. He likes to do stuff like this.
	It would control the news cycle.
	Everybody would complain. But would it be effective?
	Well, let me frame it for you.
	What's the biggest risk for the United States going forward?
	China. What would China hate more than anything?
	The United States and Russia becoming allies.
	That's what China would hate more than anything.
	Because right now China and Russia have a pretty good relationship.
	I would say that if you're trying to keep China in check...
	You kind of want to start developing a Russian relationship because nothing would be more powerful than Russia plus the United States having, at least sometimes, a unified opinion should China cross any kind of a line.
	It feels to me like strategically right as long as he's also putting the screws on.
	Now, there's a conversation that I think needs to be had with Putin and probably with Xi, but I don't know if it would work with Xi.
	It might work with Putin. So here would be the Putin conversation.
	This is what I would do if I were President Trump or I had that job.
	I would say to Putin, all right, we've got decades of poking each other in the eye.
	You poke us in the eye, we poke you in the eye.
	We've been doing it for decades.
	Can you give me one example of when that was good for either of us?
	No. No.
	I mean, maybe in some small way, something we never heard of, there might have been some advantage gained, but then the other gets an advantage and it's just this mess.
	Now imagine that compared to working productively together.
	How much better off would Russia be If they just said, you know, it doesn't make any sense that we're at your throat.
	We don't threaten you.
	We don't want to have a war with the United States.
	It's literally the last thing we want.
	If you were to make a list of all the things that Russia doesn't want, the thing they don't want the most is a nuclear war, a war with the United States, which could turn nuclear, probably would.
	I think that one of the strongest things this president could do for the long-term future, if you imagine that China's influence will continue growing, which is a safe bet, would be to figure out how to work with Russia in a way that we both understand that being each other's enemy just doesn't have a payoff.
	There's just no payoff.
	In the old days, I think it made sense to try to diminish the United States power because there might be things that you want that are in conflict with what the United States wants.
	But what are they?
	What problem do we have with Russia making money?
	If Russia is not making money to buy missiles to point at us, which is the place you want to get to, is you're not pointing missiles at each other.
	If we're not pointing missiles at each other, do we care if they have a warm water port?
	Do we care if they have a pipeline?
	Do we care if they sell stuff?
	I think we'd be fine with Russia being more prosperous.
	So, anyway, I think Putin and Trump are the only two leaders of their respective countries who could ever make this kind of a deal, which is, how about we just stop being enemies?
	Unless you have a reason.
	Hey Putin, do you have a reason why we're still acting like enemies?
	Can you even remember why we do this?
	Because I can't think of a reason.
	We should be allies because China is the bigger risk for both of us.
	So, there's that.
	Alright. Let's talk about Bloomberg.
	So, I'm still on the side, or the prediction that Bloomberg will not enter the race.
	Even if all the signs are there.
	I think he will not do it for several reasons.
	Number one, he couldn't possibly win against Trump.
	I doubt he could get the nomination, but he can't possibly win against Trump.
	Number two, he's 77, and that's part of why he can't win.
	And he may not have an appeal beyond the Northeast.
	We don't know. But I just think he may be sending a signal To other Democrats that they just need somebody better.
	Imagine being the Democrats, and you've gone this far, and you're so unconfident about your own group of candidates, the whole group of them, you have so little confidence in them that you're willing to look at this 77-year-old who will be 78, I guess, during the election, and you think that that's your best hope.
	Yeah. Somebody says Bloomberg is honest and Biden isn't.
	You know, that's probably true.
	There was a time when I actually said in public that I thought Bloomberg would be a good president.
	That time was when he was younger.
	This is not that time.
	So, you know, Bloomberg in his 60s, he was a pretty good package.
	You know, I thought he was serious.
	I think he really just cares about the country, not in it for the money, doesn't have any, you know, ideological crazy stuff going on.
	But I don't want an 80-plus-year-old president.
	It doesn't matter who it is.
	And I don't think other people do.
	All right. What else is going on?
	Okay. Let me make a prediction for you, okay?
	Here's a prediction.
	It's sort of an if prediction.
	If it's true, it's big.
	Here's the if prediction.
	That, assuming that the top three candidates, Biden, Warren, and Sanders, are just, don't have a chance of winning, there could be a time between now and the primaries being decided that one of the lower-ranked people will float up.
	Now, Buttigieg is the closest.
	He's got a good, solid, strong fourth place going on there, and I think third place in some polls.
	But, you know, you also have Tulsi Gabbard and you have Yang, etc., Here's my...
	People are yelling at me because I never mention Seth Rich.
	Seth Rich. Seth Rich.
	Now, conspiracy theorists, are you okay?
	I said it. Seth Rich.
	Now, my personal opinion is, I doubt there's anything there.
	Just because you don't know why he was shot, and you don't know why they didn't take his wallet, it isn't hard to figure out why.
	If somebody shot him because they were crazy, or his mistaken identity, or they were planning to take his wallet, and then a car came by, so they ran away.
	I mean, you could think of a million reasons why he'd get shot in the street.
	So, I would say that the evidence that he's the leaker primarily is Julian Assange indicating he was.
	Now it is true, I would say it is true, that Julian Assange unambiguously indicated or wanted us to believe that he was the leaker.
	But my current thinking is that doesn't mean it's true.
	It could mean that Julian Assange was trying to take the attention away from whoever was the leaker.
	So I do not believe Julian Assange, but it is unambiguously true he did want us to believe it was Seth Rich.
	I just don't believe it. So that's my current thinking on that.
	So you can stop saying anything about Seth Rich now, because I'm not going to talk about him again, and I'll probably block you if you just obsess on it, because it's too boring and I don't want to talk about it.
	So, what were we talking about?
	Oh. So here's my if prediction.
	If either Tulsi Gabbard or Pete Buttigieg appear on my Periscope, they will be the nominee.
	Yeah? Challenge accepted.
	I believe I could make either one of them the nominee by appearing on this Periscope.
	Do you think so? And it wouldn't be because they appeared on the Periscope.
	It's because I could advise them on the Periscope until they became the candidate everybody wanted.
	Now, I've hesitated to do this.
	You know, I've wanted to have one of them on here just because it would be fun, it would be entertaining, it would be educational, it would be great.
	But I'm worried because I think I could turn one of them into the nominee.
	I didn't say Andrew Yang because I couldn't turn him into a nominee.
	He doesn't quite have the breadth that the party is looking for.
	But either Buttigieg or Tulsi Gabbard are perfectly electable people.
	Tulsi voted for impeachment.
	She is dead to me. You know...
	You're not going to get a Democrat who agrees with you, so you're not the one voting for the Democrat anyway.
	So that would be the interesting experiment.
	So, I put this out here.
	Tulsi or Pete Buttigieg appear on my Periscope.
	And your odds of winning the nomination will go way up.
	If you're seeing this or hearing this third-hand from somebody, you have no idea why that makes sense.
	Let me ask you, how much of a ridiculous boast am I making, and how much sounds to you like, hmm, that could actually happen?
	I'd be interested in your opinion.
	Does that sound too much?
	Is that an over-promise?
	Now, I haven't heard from Tulsi's campaign beyond when I answered some questions, so I was still waiting for a get back on that.
	No, I don't have a crush on anybody, but thanks for, except for Christina.
	All right. Harris, you know, I could probably turn Harris into the nominee, but I just don't imagine her being able, I can't imagine her coming on my periscope after I've been saying she's running the worst campaign in the history of all campaigns.
	So I don't see that happening.
	But if she did, I'll throw her in the mix.
	I can make Kamala Harris the nominee.
	I'll bet I could do that.
	All right.
	Too much, too much.
	Hype, too much? Alright, that's the way I like to be.
	I like the fact that you don't think that that's a reasonable thing for me to see.
	I kind of like that.
	Too much. Well, that's why it would be a fun challenge.
	Could you fix Kamala in an hour?
	I could fix her in half an hour.
	I could fix her in half an hour.
	I really could.
	Now, whether she could take that advice is a different assumption.
	Oh, thank you. You saw me on Greg Goffeld.
	I haven't watched it in replay yet, because I was flying yesterday.
	Somebody says that my persuasion can move 2% to 3%, but not 20%.
	My persuasion could move 2% for people who didn't want to change their minds.
	Over time, you could work on people who don't want to change their minds.
	Maybe you get 2%.
	But there are people who don't mind changing their mind.
	And right now, I think the Democrats are all in that frame of mind.
	Because everybody who has a specific candidate they like knows that whoever the candidate is, they're going to back.
	So everybody in the Democrats now are primed to be willing to change their mind, but only under the condition that the other candidate is more electable.
	Then whoever they're backing.
	So under that condition, people are not resisting the persuasion.
	They're actually open to changing candidates because they know they're going to.
	Most of them will. Most of them will change candidates because their candidate won't make it through the primary.
	So if you're persuading a group that is ready to be persuaded and willing, completely willing, you can get a much higher percentage than 2%.
	Trump would get mad at you.
	Would he? I mean, I can help any one of them get the nomination, but none of them have a chance in the general.
	None of them have any chance in the general election.
	They're going to get stomped.
	And by the way, I wouldn't even offer this if I thought it would make a difference in the final outcome.
	Well, I wouldn't worry about it because I don't think any of them are going to agree to be on here.
	But I'm just saying, it's a missed opportunity.
	Anyway, I will talk to you all later.

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