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Dec. 5, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:03:39
Episode 747 Scott Adams: DNA News With Othram CEO David Mittelman, Impeachment
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
It's good to see you.
It's always good to see you.
Today we have an amazing coffee with Scott Adams.
No, I know, it's hard to imagine because they're all so amazing.
To imagine that today is extra amazing, it's almost unfathomable.
Don't I know it.
But, in order to enjoy this day, I think you know what you need.
I think you do. I think you need a cup or a mug or a glass of snifters, dying jealous, tanker, thermos, flask, canteen, grail, goblet, vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
You know it does.
Go. Oh yeah.
That's the good stuff.
Well, let's see.
If all goes well, I'm going to be inviting a special guest who in a moment will be revealing himself so that I can add him to the guest list here.
Let me just check here.
I'll tell you, this system could be a little bit better.
All right, let's talk about some things.
I'll wait for my special guest to make himself available here, and then I will ask him to join.
So, a few things going on here.
Joe Biden was asked what he thought about Kamala Harris.
For Vice President, maybe.
Or what is, you know, what does Joe Biden think of her now that she's quit?
Joe Biden had some excellent things to say about Kamala Harris, said she was very talented.
Could be Vice President, could be President, could be Attorney General, could be anything, because she's so talented.
And somebody asked Joe Biden, did he hold a grudge for things that Kamala Harris said during the debates?
And I'm going to give credit where credit is due here.
I know you hate it when I do this because it's not good team play, but Joe Biden had one of the best responses you'll ever see in your entire life.
I'm like, really good.
So I'm going to call this out as something you should borrow.
It's so good you should just use it yourself.
So when asked by a reporter, when Biden was asked by a reporter, do you hold a grudge against Kamala Harris He looked at the reporter and he said, I'm not good at holding grudges.
Damn, that's good!
That is so good!
Here's what it does. It makes you think past the sale.
The sale is, do you have a grudge or do you not have a grudge?
Had he done the most obvious answer, which is, no, I don't have a grudge, what would you think?
You would think, well, you might be lying.
Might be lying. He might have a little grudge there.
Okay, looks like my guest is on.
I'll be adding him in a moment.
So, what Joe Biden did was by saying, I'm not good at holding a grudge, he made a comment about himself, which is actually compatible with his reputation, because he's known as One of the nicest people, even if you don't like his politics or his skill level.
Even his opponents say, he's a really nice guy.
That answer was the nicest nice guy thing I've ever seen in my life.
I mean, it was so simple.
I think it was spontaneous.
It didn't look like it was practiced.
But he said, I'm not good at holding a grudge.
It makes you think all the way past, yes or no, is he holding a grudge?
You think all the way past that to what kind of a person Joe Biden is.
And the person he is, his answer was compatible with his entire reputation.
He's just not the person who holds a grudge.
It was awesome.
I really, really liked it.
All right. So, now, as you know, Joe Biden is not my choice for president.
But you've got to call out good technique when you see it.
I'll talk about him a little bit more in a bit.
Let me see if I can bring on my guest.
If my technology is working, in one moment I'll be talking to David.
Are you there? There might be a little bit of echo.
Do you have two devices listening to me now?
I hear a little echo when I talk.
How about now? Now it's better.
Alright, so, David Middleman, you are CEO of Othram, and Othram does what?
Remind us. Yeah, so Othram is basically a forensics laboratory, and we try to make human identifications from crime scenes, unidentified remains, you know, just any kind of material that's been left, either in a crime scene or somewhere else, and help identify victims in the case of a crime scene, perhaps perpetrators that might have contributed to the crime.
Now, every time I watch the news, it seems like there's a new news story that involves DNA in one way or another.
So that's why I wanted to have you on to update us on the two things.
And one of the exciting things, which figures into something I wrote about in my book, Loser Think, where I talked about the golden age...
And how the days where crimes are unsolved might be ending for a variety of reasons.
The technology to solve crimes is becoming insanely good.
And if you don't see this coming, you're missing a big trend.
So can you tell us about DNAsolves.com?
Yes, so there's been almost 30 million people that have been tested with consumer tests.
Some of those folks know victims or families of victims.
Some of those folks are in law enforcement or know law enforcement, and they have read the same articles you've read, and they've come to the conclusion that they want to make a difference.
And helping us solve, you know, some of these cases, as you said, have gotten unsolved for decades.
There's a government database, it's called NamUs.gov, and it catalogs unidentified remains.
There's over 13,000 Many of those have DNA, and they've remained unsolved.
And DNA testing can help bring a value there.
So dnasolves.com is a private database that we built.
It complements, when I say private, I mean it's not publicly accessible the way GEDmatch and some of the other tools are built.
And it's designed only for use in law enforcement, which I think de-risks how other databases can be used.
It can only be used in a law enforcement investigation, it can only be used according to DOJ policy, and it is generally used to identify a victim, like I said, or players in a violent crime.
So is the idea that anybody can donate their DNA to this Sort of, yeah. From a genetic point of view, we're all related, so you and I are related.
So it's not really relationships in the sense that we would societally describe, but we're all, you know, fourth, fifth, sixth cousins of each other by some way or another.
And so from that perspective, you may be distantly related in the genetic sense to someone that was either murdered, died, you know, by no ill means, but died and was never identified, or as a perpetrator in a crime.
And so for those kind of scenarios, That with a fourth cousin or a third cousin, you can work large family trees and with people's information as a scaffold, you can kind of bring light and figure out who these folks are.
So it works on both sides.
You're finding not only perpetrators of crimes, but victims of crimes who have long been unidentified for decades in some cases.
Yeah, I'll tell you a quick story. There's a torso found in 1979 in Idaho in a cave when decades unidentified.
I think they found the arms in the 90s, the arms and legs perhaps in the 90s, and they were not able to identify the person.
I mean, whoever... And I don't even know the full story.
Perhaps whoever disposed of that person purposely removed the limbs so they couldn't be identified.
And our laboratory teamed up with some genealogists and we took material that was very degraded.
It was from 1979. We were able to pull a decent amount of DNA sequence and give this person a name.
The person's been unnamed and anonymous since 1979, and so I think law enforcement will be announcing that pretty soon.
But there's a real humanitarian value to being able to take folks that have been lost to time and re-anchor them to society.
And then to your point, I think also in being able to curb violent crime, not just in being able to solve it, but I think just the ability to deploy that technology acts as a deterrent against future violent crime.
Yeah, let me ask you this.
What percentage of all violent crimes don't leave any kind of DNA, at least of the perpetrator?
There's always the victim's DNA, but what percentage of the perpetrators leave their DNA at, let's say, a violent crime or even maybe a property crime?
Is it 100% at this point?
It's definitely not. No, no, it's definitely not 100%.
I wish I could give you an exact number.
I don't know. There's a number of things that can go wrong, right?
You may execute the perfect crime and leave no DNA evidence, especially if you're planning a crime, right?
You may have left evidence, but the evidence gets lost or degraded, or there's not enough DNA to do anything.
So this certainly is not going to help in 100% of cases.
But there are substantial cases Particularly in, like, Crimes of Passion, we haven't planned it in advance, where DNA is left at a scene, and those crime scenes remain unsolved.
And then, of course, if you either by malicious or unintentional means die on the side of the road or your body gets left somewhere, there's obviously DNA there.
So certainly it really advances our ability to help identify victims.
And for a good number of crimes, but certainly not all, we'd have the ability to help Right.
Right. Well, this is a question for the audience.
What are the odds that if Epstein had been murdered in his cell, is there any chance there wouldn't be DNA there?
I mean, even if the perpetrator wore gloves, is there still going to be some DNA there?
I mean, I don't know how it happened, but there would be a good chance that someone would leave DNA. I mean...
It's crazy the different ways you might leave DNA unintentionally, if you're holding an item.
There's even stories of...
I can't think through all the scenarios.
There's a lot of different ways you could do that.
In the future, I guess, if you want to take someone out and you don't want to leave any DNA, you'll either have to send someone else or maybe you need a futuristic drone to go in and shoot somebody.
But if you're there, you're leaving DNA. Okay.
Now let me ask you, are you following the story, and I don't even know if this is true, that China is developing technology that they would be able to take DNA and figure out what the person probably looked like so that they could do facial recognition just based on DNA? Is that even a thing?
Okay, so I did read the story.
I will tell you my assessment, and then, you know, I obviously haven't been to China, so I can't tell you.
I can only tell you what I read. But I will tell you, based on our understanding, based on, like, scientific understanding of craniofacial genetics, Drawing people's faces from DNA is a lot more science fiction than it is real.
So, I would tell you I'm remarkably skeptical that I can run a DNA sequence and print a face.
What I will tell you is that there are some parts of your physical appearance, right, eye color, hair color, There are parts of your physical appearance that can be very easily mapped to DNA. And number two, there are, you know, anthropologists have known this for years, but if you know the ancestry of an individual, to some extent you can approximate what their face might look like.
And so, some of the people that have tried to claim that they can predict faces from DNA, they're using that kind of approach, but to actually draw someone's face from DNA I think is not possible.
Could you, let me ask you a specific question.
Could I say, would I know from somebody's DNA if they had a broad or a small nose?
There are some markers that will be able to just, you know, there's some markers and research that have been done into looking to, like, distance between the eyes, width of nose.
Yeah, there are classic landmarks for which some of those have genetic components.
So I think the most accurate way to say it is there are some genetic features that can be described with genetic markers.
Some inherited facial features can be described with genetic markers, but you definitely can't do what I think they're advertising, and what I've heard others advertise over the years, but never produce any substantiated evidence that you can draw a face from DNA, certainly with the haircut and everything all in place.
You know, suppose you had some monstrously large computer, and you just ran a whole bunch of different DNA through it, And then you ran the photos of the people who matched that DNA through it, and you had millions of them.
Don't you think that the millions of faces matched with the millions of sets of DNA would probably start to be predictive over time?
Even if you didn't know exactly which genes were predicting what, wouldn't you be able to compute it out without even knowing exactly why?
It makes sense, and I think that you certainly can't know what will happen in the future, but I'll tell you that there are two big challenges here.
The first challenge is that how people get the DNA, so to speak, like what markers they're looking at.
Are they looking at every marker in the DNA? Are they looking at a subset?
That's going to describe whether you're able to make correlations to facial features.
The second problem that's really important is that correlating DNA to things is very hard when you don't have exact descriptions.
And the face is by nature not exact.
The face changes over time as you get older.
Right? The face changes depending on orientation.
The face is a 3D object projected onto a 2D plane.
So I'm just saying it's...
I'm not saying that it's impossible.
I'm saying it's incredibly hard.
No one's demonstrated that can be done.
And fundamentally, I think it's not a 2019 phenomenon.
But I do want to point out something that I think will make the discussion moot because...
According to that article in the New York Times, China is advertising that they have collected DNA information for 80 million people, right?
And so I told you a minute ago that we're all kind of a societal network of genetic relatives, right?
I don't know how many people are in China.
Is it like one and a half billion?
Let's say. Let's say one and a half billion.
Okay, so with 80 million, you're beginning to approach You know, you're beginning to approach a substantial component, right?
A portion of the population.
You know, once you start getting even a few percent of people genetically typed in a population, you don't need faces.
You just identify them.
I mean, you can just literally identify them through relationships.
So I think that the article, I don't know where they got the information.
I don't think faces can be drawn.
But I think the bigger issue is that China will invest in taking 80 million folks growing that number and then being able to identify anyone regardless.
You don't need the face. You've got the relationships.
Is it possible, David, is it technically possible that China could ever develop a chemical biological weapon that would affect people with certain DNA that are, let's say, non-Chinese without affecting somebody who's Chinese?
Just hypothetically, is that even possible?
I mean, people have targeted drugs to things in your DNA. Whether you can target ethnic groups as we would think of ethnic groups, I think it'd be easier to draw faces from DNA right now.
Okay. All right, David, I'm going to move on to politics.
Is there anything you want to – any final thoughts?
Yeah, I want to mention that along with face recognition, GPS tracking, all the technologies that have come to bring good in the world, there's a negative component to it as well.
And right now, with 30 million U.S., mostly U.S. folks, tested with consumer tests, there's an asymmetric risk to the United States versus other countries in having this data out there.
Like with every other kind of piece of data and technology, it's out there and it'll be developed whether we, you know, write legislation against it, pout about it, or ignore it.
And so I would encourage everyone to think, what is the best way to bring value, help victims and their families, identify perpetrators, but do it in a way that wouldn't lead us down the road that China's taken in some kind of, you know, 1984-like Big Brother surveillance initiative.
But just simply ignoring it has consequences, too.
There are consequences to acting and also not acting.
Alright, last question.
Yes or no? Someday there will be a dating service that matches people by DNA. Yes or no?
The only way I would do that is if you told people who not to date, right?
So if you're too related, don't date.
Okay. Alright, good answer.
Thank you, David Middleman at Othram, O-T-H-R-A-M. We appreciate your updates, and we'll talk to you again, David.
Thank you. Thanks, Scott. Alright, bye-bye.
All right. That's always fun to get that.
It's so futuristic to hear what's going on there with D&A. Let's talk about some other things.
Biden or his campaign or maybe some PAC or somebody is running an anti-Trump ad focusing on the event at the NATO conference in which Justin Trudeau and some others were seen potentially laughing behind his back.
And the commercial takes the theme that the other countries are laughing at our president behind his back.
Now, I gotta tell you, it's a really good commercial.
So again, two things that the Biden campaign did exceptionally well.
Completely surprisingly, I must say.
So this is the first time I've seen that Biden, or at least people associated with him, whoever made the commercial, are willing to go all the way into the mud.
Because this commercial is sort of off-brand for Biden, who's the bring the country together, you know, let's all hold hands and sing.
But I tell you, this is a pretty brutal commercial.
It's very personal and it's against Trump.
And it's well done from an effectiveness perspective.
It's not fair.
It's the type of ad that the Trump folks do about Biden, putting misleading clips together so it makes you think that the misleading clips describe the whole thing.
And Biden's campaign just served it right back to Trump.
Pretty good job, execution-wise.
Only talking about execution, it was well executed.
All right. So, as you know, I made the risky prediction that Kamala Harris would be the Democratic nominee, but she dropped out of the race.
My worst, worst prediction of all time.
But I doubled down yesterday and said...
What about if she becomes Biden's vice presidential pick and Biden doesn't make it all the way to Election Day for one reason or another?
And apparently that prediction is a little more popular than my original prediction.
So I got some press today.
Google turned up a few articles about that.
So apparently the thought that Kamala could be a vice presidential pick for Biden is not that crazy.
Not so crazy.
So at least the part about being a vice presidential pick is not so crazy.
Let's talk about the impeachment stuff.
All right. I'm going to say this again, but Jonathan Turley, who is the one expert who I guess you could say is on the side of The Republicans, but he's not a pro-Trump guy per se.
He's just a Republican.
Did not vote for Trump.
And his arguments I found by far the most compelling.
But, am I biased?
Am I biased?
Is it just my bias that Turley seemed to have a rock-solid End of story.
We don't even need to talk to anybody else.
That's all you need to know.
Easy, clear, nothing to argue with.
It seemed pretty solid.
But is that just my bias?
Because when I listened to who was the other expert, Carlin?
So they had three experts on the other side.
One of them was a woman named Carlin.
And I don't know how to talk about this story without saying the obvious.
But unfortunately, if you say the obvious, you look like a sexist or something.
Misogynist. Misogynist?
Yeah. And so I'm going to word it very carefully.
I have no opinions about Carlin, Professor Carlin.
I have no opinions about her because I don't know her personally.
So, I will just speak about how her presentation was received.
So, I can't know what's in her head.
I can't know anything about her.
So, I'm not pretending I do.
All we know is her presentation.
So, I'm judging only from how it looked.
And it looked like a crazy cat lady Who was just bitching about the world.
She did not look, and again, I'm making a distinction between what I know to be true, because I can't know anything about her personally, with what it looked like.
So I'm just saying the presentation came across and was received by me as actually mentally unstable.
And I don't mean that You know, it's hard to talk about this topic without sounding like a partisan, without sounding like you're just saying it for effect.
I'm not saying this just for effect.
That's my actual reaction to it was, oh, this looks a lot more like a mental health problem, literally.
Again, I'm not trying to make a joke, and I'm not saying that any of that is true.
Because you can't diagnose somebody's mental state by watching one presentation.
But she came across as the least likable person I've seen in a decade, which is saying a lot.
I mean, I would not want her in my home, would you?
If you invited somebody to your house and they said, hey, I'm going to bring a friend.
And you find out later that the friend is this professor, Carl, and she comes over to your house.
Would you ever have her in your house again?
Again, I don't know her personally.
She might be perfectly nice, you know, in her actual real life that we don't have access to.
But based on the presentation, she was the most unpleasant, crazy-looking person you could ever see.
So I don't think that worked the way the Democrats hoped it would work.
And then, of course, well, I'm not even going to say that.
There's a topic I want to talk about, but I'm just not going to because it's too explosive.
All right. So if you're not watching Alan Dershowitz's Twitter feed about this impeachment, you're missing a really good show.
So I tweeted that yesterday.
Dershowitz was sort of live tweeting, I guess you'd call it, while the impeachment stuff was going on.
And he was fact-checking the experts in real time.
Now, people get on me when I say I don't trust the experts in one field or another.
But look at this situation.
Look at all the constitutional experts jabbering about impeachment.
Am I right or am I wrong that there are highly qualified experts on opposite sides?
What the hell does that mean?
What does it mean when you have the best constitutional scholars in the world and they can't even agree what's impeachable and whether or not this is one?
That's a pretty big deal.
And it should give you some pause about what it means to be an expert.
But, again, I might be biased, but when I look at Turley's explanation and when I look at Dershowitz's explanation, who, by the way, agrees with Turley, who, by the way, agrees with me.
So prior to seeing Turley's explanation, I think I'm the only person who had been saying the only thing that matters is if Trump had a A national interest in finding out more about Burisma and Biden.
If that's true, or if you can't prove it's untrue, it's the end of the story.
All the other stuff doesn't matter.
All the other things don't matter.
All that matters is that one question.
Did the president have a reasonable reason to look into it?
For the national interest in addition to his political interest.
Because we don't care if it's also good for him politically as long as it's good for the country.
The system allows that and encourages that.
And so Turley is the only one who focused on that.
Besides me. So I guess I'm a constitutional scholar now.
You're welcome. Now, since I am apparently as qualified as the greatest constitutional scholars in the world, based on the fact that I agree with them, see what I did there, I'm going to extend my expert constitutional law opinion.
Are you ready? Here it comes.
Apparently there's some disagreement about whether the Constitution accuses, whether the Constitution says that abuse of office or abuse of power, which are similar, did the President abuse his office or abuse the power of his office?
They're all the same. And Alan Dershowitz says, show me in the Constitution where it says abuse of power or abuse of office is impeachable.
Can you point to that?
And the answer is, not there.
It's not there. And indeed, if this standard were applied, lots of past presidents would have been impeached.
But, here's the fun part.
Did you know that senators can be impeached?
Well, I did a Google search and some random stranger referenced a part of the law that says that they can be.
So I'm going to say that that's true.
By the way, so fact check me on that.
Fact check me on the question, can senators be impeached?
I believe the answer is yes, right?
Same as the president.
Now, if senators can be impeached, and if the standard we're using is abuse of power, meaning abusing the power of their office, how in the world do you not...
Put Pelosi, Schiff, and Nadler up for impeachment.
Because there are one of two possibilities.
One is that the president is innocent of all impeachable offenses.
Now, if the president is found, let's say innocent, well, innocent is the wrong word.
Let's say that the Senate...
Votes on party lines to reject the impeachment.
Would we not be able to conclude that Pelosi, Schiff, and Nadler had abused their power by bringing such a weak case all the way to a Senate vote?
I think you could make that case.
That taking such a weak case that they know was weak is an abuse of power.
Because they would be doing it just for, wait for it, political reasons.
Now, if it were three years before the next election, you'd say, well, that's not just for political reasons.
There must be something here.
But when you're this close to an election, it is impossible to imagine that it has any purpose other than political.
Their argument is, we have to remove him immediately because he might make another phone call like that Ukrainian thing.
Are you kidding me?
Are you kidding me?
That's your risk?
You want to bring down an elected president who's doing a great job in general?
Great job. Over that?
That's purely an abuse of power.
So remember, situation number one is that the Senate rejects the impeachment along party lines.
That should be enough to prove that Pelosi, Nadler, and Schiff abused their power for taking such a weak case right before an election through the process.
But what about the other possibility?
What if the Senate looks at the argument and says, oh, I think we're going to accept this standard.
Let us accept the standard that abuse of power is an impeachable offense.
Thank you.
What then? If you accept the standard, you can still impeach Nadler, Schiff, and Pelosi because they would have met that standard.
So I'm quite serious about this.
I think Pelosi, Schiff, and Nadler should be brought up on impeachment charges, and I don't know why we wouldn't.
Can you think of any reason we wouldn't?
I think maybe in a chess sense, maybe there's some reason not to.
But I don't mean this politically.
I'm not saying this politically.
I think there's an actual danger to the country that Schiff, Pelosi and Nadler have created.
They're actually destabilizing the Republic for, as far as I can tell, purely political reasons.
It looks like an abuse of power and the worst one we've ever seen, perhaps.
Would you agree that this is the worst abuse of power we've ever seen?
I can't think of one that would rival this.
Now, maybe somebody who's a historian can give some examples of worse abuse of power, but short of actually breaking the law, which is a different standard, I don't know.
We've seen a worse abuse of power.
I mean, they're actually trying to overthrow a legally elected president on a bunch of crap.
That's the worst abuse of power I've ever seen.
So I think those three have to be brought up on impeachment charges, and I'm not kidding even a little bit.
I'm not kidding even a little bit.
That's important. I think they're trying to destroy the country.
They're doing it right in front of us, and it's pretty obvious that it's an abuse of power.
I don't know how you could possibly see this any other way.
All right, let's talk about...
So Pelosi and the Democrats keep using the phrase, no one is above the law.
I think that should be exactly the standard that impeaches them, because they're abusing their power, To essentially create laws that don't exist.
Pelosi is trying to be above the Constitution.
So if Pelosi says no one is above the law, here's the right response.
Yes, Nancy Pelosi, no one is above the law.
But also, no one is above the Constitution.
And the Constitution says you should be impeached.
Not even for breaking the law.
Because the law is here.
And the Constitution is here.
What Pelosi is doing is she's twisting the Constitution in a way it was not intended and the framers were pretty clear about what they thought should be impeachable and what shouldn't and there's nothing that Trump's done that meets that standard.
So Seems to me that no one is above the law is the low-level bumper sticker, but the higher level is no one's above the Constitution, Nancy.
You can't make up stuff and put it in the Constitution.
Take it to the bank.
Somebody in the next 24 hours on a major news network is going to say, no one is above the Constitution.
Bam! Bam! As soon as you heard that, didn't you say to yourself, oh damn, that's pretty good.
Because there's not much you can say when somebody says, nobody's above the law.
Because whatever your response is, tends to be down in the weeds.
Instead say, nobody's above the Constitution.
And you're just adding stuff to the Constitution.
And, you know, there you go.
Apparently the president was overheard confirming that when he called Justin Trudeau two-faced, it was a joking reference to the blackface history that Trudeau has.
So how much do you love it that President Trump intentionally called him two-faced to make us all talk about Trudeau's blackface?
I love it.
Good move.
Pete Buttigieg took himself out of contention for president today.
Now, he didn't quit the race in the usual way, but rather he said something disqualifying.
So if you've been watching this Periscope a while, you know that I've been saying that Buttigieg is a strong candidate, and I have to say that I liked a lot about him.
So I won't reiterate all the things I liked about him, but he's, you know, summary.
He's smart. He's closer to the middle.
I'd love to have an LGBTQ president eventually, just because I think it's healthy for the country.
Doesn't have to be him.
Doesn't have to be now. But as a general concept, Let's get ourselves an LGBTQ president.
Sooner or later. Let's at least be open to it.
Let's hope it happens.
It doesn't have to be this year.
It doesn't have to be next year.
Let's get that done.
In the same way that it was good for the country to have a black president, Just so we could check that box, get past it, be able to say for the rest of eternity, yeah, you could be president if you're black.
It's a really big deal.
We shouldn't pick people based on their ethnicity, but president is different.
President sends messages by just being who they are.
So in that case, you do want to check all the boxes eventually.
You want a woman to be president.
You want to get one of everything, eventually.
That said, Pete Buttigieg said the following, I think it was yesterday or recently, anyone who supported this president, meaning Trump, is at best looking the other way on racism, comma, at best.
And he's done.
You can't run for president calling half of the country, ish, Either racist or racist supporters.
You can't be president that way.
Our current president, I believe, has never made that mistake.
Am I right? Correct me if I'm wrong, but as acerbic and insulting and aggressive and bullying as our president can be, can you think of any time He's branded half the country, let's say the half that didn't vote for him.
Is there any time he branded them assholes?
Fact check me on this.
Is there any time that President Trump, the most insulting, bullying person who has ever lived, even one time has he ever branded the people who didn't vote for him as assholes?
Because Buttigieg just did that.
Buttigieg just said...
I'll read the sentence again.
Tell me if you think I'm over-interpreting it.
Buttigieg said, anyone who supported this president is at best looking the other way on racism at best.
He's calling you assholes.
There's no other way to look at that.
All right? Now, he's not saying that the people who supported the president are necessarily themselves racist because he's allowing that you could be, you know, there's something wrong with you.
Maybe not you're a racist.
But if you're supporting a racist, you're an asshole.
Pete Buttigieg now can't be president.
It can't happen.
His campaign ended today.
Now, I actually feel pretty bad about that, I have to admit.
Because I liked him.
I liked him.
He had a lot to offer.
Maybe in the future he will.
But you can't say that.
Let me tell you what you can say and still be president.
They let you grab him by the...
You can be caught on tape saying that when you're famous and rich and you're a celebrity, women will let you, let you being the important sentence, let you, grab them by your parts.
Apparently you can say that and still be president because people just put it in context and they go, eh, you know.
We know what we're getting.
There's no surprise there.
He did say they let you, so technically it's not assault, because they let you.
I know everybody will debate that, but you can say that and still be president.
What you can't say is that the people who supported this president, half of the country, are assholes.
And that's basically what he said.
He didn't use that word, but it's pretty clear.
So, somebody says, but you liked Kavala, too.
Well, I didn't like her to be my president.
I expected she would do better, and I have confessed continually that what I didn't see coming is that Kamala would run the worst campaign in the history of all presidential campaigns.
Now, be honest.
Did any of you see that coming?
Is there even one person here who can tell me honestly that you knew in advance that her campaign would be not just unsuccessful?
That part a lot of people knew.
But did you know that she would run the worst campaign of all campaigns of all time?
Nobody knew that.
That was tough to predict.
So I won't make an excuse for...
Being wrong, if I'm wrong, because I still think she has a path to become the nominee.
If she gets the vice president, she'll pick as a candidate, and then Joe Biden slides away.
You want to hear another reason that I think Kamala could be at the top of the ticket by Election Day?
I predicted she would win the nomination, but watch this.
Who supports Kamala Harris?
Well, she has the second most endorsements by important Democrats of anybody.
She also had a lot of Hillary Clinton supporters who supported her.
Who else does that describe?
The person who has the most, the only person who had more endorsements from established Democrats was Joe Biden.
And so, if you were to combine Joe Biden with the most support from Democrats, with the person who had the second most endorsements from Democrats, you have recombined sort of Hillary Clinton in virtual form.
The only thing wrong with the picture of Biden plus Harris as a team, the only thing wrong with it is...
Biden. Now, suppose you were a Hillary Clinton-type supporter, but you're looking for a different candidate.
Wouldn't your dream situation be that Biden, who may not be able to, let's say, be as capable as when he was young, gets the nomination, has Harris on the ticket, and before the election, they switch.
Or Biden drops out and Harris is what's left.
I think they might like that.
They might like that. All right.
What is up with Judge Napolitano?
Are you watching the Judge Napolitano commentary on Fox?
Is it just me?
Is there something wrong there?
I'm going to wait for your comments to catch up because there's a little bit of a delay.
But... It's one thing to have pundits on your news program that you know which way they're going to go.
But what is wrong with Judge Napolitano?
Is there something wrong there?
Because he must hate the president.
And when I see his comments, it only looks like that.
He comes across as the least...
Credible lawyer-type person on TV who isn't...
Who's the other guy who's...
Who's the guy at Harvard who's always mocking the president?
Well, there's a few other lawyers who are completely non-credible.
But Judge Napolitano has sort of I don't know.
He's created this little niche where he just looks like...
I don't know.
I don't want to assume any motive on his part, but there's something going on there that's not right.
That's all I'll say.
Apparently, the Horowitz Report, and we don't know for sure, but there are rumors, and I think maybe Barr...
Attorney General Barr said something about this.
It's expected to say that the FBI did have a legal predicate for its investigation of the Trump campaign, even though some lower-level FBI people maybe handled things wrong.
Now, let me ask you, who are the two people in the world who have the following prediction?
The following prediction, which is that way back at the beginning of the Russia collusion scam, how many people had the following opinion?
That President Trump did not collude with Russia, and, and that's the important part, because a lot of you believed he did not collude with Russia, so that's a big population.
But how many believe that, and at the same time, believe that the FBI... Was not part of a deep state plot to take down the president.
I only know of two people.
I only know of two people who had the opinion that the president did nothing wrong, and although there were some wrong activities, you know, individually at the FBI, that there was not an identifiable plot, an organized plot, to take down the president.
Who had that opinion? Two people in the world.
Me. Me.
And Jonathan Turley.
As far as I know, only two people suggested that that was a good possibility.
Turley wrote about it months ago, and I wrote about him.
He's actually in my book.
I wrote about Turley's opinion and it was in the context of imagination, trying to imagine possibilities.
And one of the possibilities that I imagined and Turley also imagined, and I'll say that we imagined it more than we predicted it, is that maybe everybody was just doing what they thought was right.
Maybe Trump was just doing his job and it had nothing to do with Russia.
And maybe the FBI was just doing their job.
And some of them did it wrong.
So it's starting to shape up like Turley's description of what was possible and mine might be the right ones.
So I don't know who else had those opinions, but I suppose if it turns out to be true, a lot of people are going to say they had those opinions.
What else is going on?
Is there anything else you want me to talk about that...
Laura says, don't bruise your back, patting it.
Laura, that's what I do here.
I make predictions, and then when they're wrong, I take it like a man.
And when they're right, I pat myself on the back so that you can understand which ones were right, but you also see which ones are wrong.
So I'm going to be fully transparent there.
Now, some of you are saying that Brennan set it up.
I see this in the comments.
So some of you suspect that there was still something there.
Now, Horowitz didn't get to look outside of the FBI, right?
I think for Horowitz, his domain was just the FBI. So when he says the FBI wasn't part of a plot, that might be true.
It does not mean that the CIA was also not part of a plot.
So I think that the Durham investigation, which can go broader than just the FBI and Department of Justice, I think that investigation will get more interesting because then it gets into the CIA, etc.
All right. I'm looking at your...
The FBI was just incompetent, somebody says.
Apparently. Apparently that's what it's going to come out to.
Oh, so Hillary went on Howard Stern, and Howard Stern asked Hillary if she'd ever been a lesbian or had a relationship with a woman, and Hillary said, no, no, no, I have not.
If that's what you wanted me to comment on.
I don't care who slept with who.
I mean... Would you like Hillary less if she'd had a sexual relationship with a woman sometime in her life?
Do you care? Does anybody care?
Would you like her less because of that?
If you would like women less because they may have once had a sexual relationship with another woman, I got bad news for you.
You're not going to like many women.
Maybe it's a California thing, but...
In California, an adult woman has a very high likelihood of having had at least one relationship with another woman.
Very high. So what does it mean?
Nothing. It has no value.
Talk about Barron. Okay, I'll talk about Barron.
So Melania, let's say, punched back or punched...
Via tweet, she got on that Professor Carlin.
Am I saying her name right?
Because the professor, when she was testifying, tried to make a joke where she was making a pun about the president being a dictator or a king, and could he have a baron?
But he can only have a child named baron.
He can't appoint a baron.
So she brought...
a minor child into the conversation as I just did so I guess I'm just as guilty and Melania she high ground her until she apologized so Melania said you don't bring minor children into these things and she's right you certainly don't bring minor children into it now I just did the same thing So Melania,
I apologize. I would like to apologize to Melania for doing exactly what she said you shouldn't do, which is, let's stop talking about politics and bring a 13-year-old into it.
Let's maybe just act like none of that's happening.
So let's leave that behind.
Melania, you are perfectly correct, and I apologize for even bringing it up.
Somebody says, it's not about Hillary, whether she's a lesbian.
It's about her hiding it.
No, it isn't. No, it isn't.
If there's one thing you should let people lie about, it's their private sexual life.
You know, it's not always a good idea to hide your private sexual life.
I mean, the gay experience shows it was better to come out of the closet and live above ground, so to speak.
But I'm not going to say that any individual needs to tell me about their private life.
And in fact, I give all of you blanket permission from my perspective, just me personally, to lie to me about your private sexual life.
So if it ever comes up and I ever say, hey, have you ever had sex with an animal?
And let's say you have.
I give you permission to say, no, I have not.
I have never gotten with an animal.
So that's what I prefer.
I'm not comparing animals with anybody else, right?
So don't try to conflate that.
I'm just saying that whatever you're into, I don't care.
And if you lie to me about it, you're okay with me.
You did it recalling a story.
I don't know what that was about. You weren't being malicious.
no but I I would agree that even I should not have brought up uh the topic because it's inappropriate um all right What else we got going on here?
Yeah, it's sort of a who cares.
and Yeah. All right.
Is she being authentic?
Well, has anybody ever accused Hillary Clinton of being authentic?
I don't know that that's a plus or a minus.
You know, people do like authentic people.
But I wouldn't require it.
So this is just my personal opinion.
It's true that voters are going to prefer authentic people.
That part's good.
But just speaking for myself, I don't require it.
So if authentic you is kind of a jerk, and you're willing to pretend to not be a jerk in the service of being a politician, I'm okay with that.
I don't need you to be authentic.
I just need you to do the work.
And if you do the work, well, be as phony as you want.
I don't care. China is about to collapse.
Well, it makes you wonder how long President Xi can hold on to power.
Because while it's true that it is a dictatorship, it is also true that the dictator...
Probably needs the support of at least the upper echelon.
Now, he may have so much control over them in various ways that there's nothing they can do.
That's possible. It's hard for us to know over here.
But there's at least the possibility that the leadership of China has the power and ability and maybe even the will sometime to remove President Xi should he do an unusually bad job for any reason.
Now, as the economy continues to suffer, and as President Xi becomes the face of the Uyghur Holocaust, as Xi becomes the face of the Falun Gong folks who are being murdered systematically for body parts that they then sell to people who buy them, sometimes from other countries.
They come to China for the operation.
China kills a Falun Gong, takes out their parts, and sells them to you.
That's actually happening, at least reportedly, and the reporting seems to be pretty solid, as far as I can tell.
And, of course, they're cracking down in Hong Kong.
You know there's going to be lots of jailing and torture and people killed whenever they get full control of that.
And I'm even leaving out, stealing our IP, I'm leaving out sending us fentanyl, etc.
So President Xi has taken China's reputation to its lowest point.
Would you not agree that President Xi has brought China's reputation and, what's the right word, respect, to the lowest level in my lifetime?
I think. And does the leadership of China, looking at how he's essentially destroyed their credibility, he has destroyed their credibility, he can't get a trade deal done with the United States because he's apparently not competent.
So how long does the leadership of China let the guy who is a dictator stay in charge While he is systematically destroying everything good about China?
I don't know. Maybe forever, because if he's got full control, nothing matters.
But I think that it's the sort of thing that could change quickly.
Yeah, I'm talking about Xi, Chairman Xi.
Yeah, if you look at...
China polluting the world, and literally, according to the Democrats, China is actually destroying the planet with pollution.
India has some explaining to do as well, but China being the bigger one.
China is actually destroying the planet, according to most of the people who are Democrats.
So if you put all of those things together, and the fact that they're not even willing to sign a trade deal...
Are you kidding me? They're not even willing to sign a trade deal because they're not willing to offer anything that even approaches a fair deal?
Well, he was appointed, not voted in.
That is correct, but you still need the support of the top of the Communist Party to stay in power.
Somebody says, revolution in China, is that possible?
It seems remote, because I think that the party would remove Xi before anything like that happened.
You know, about the same time that the population wanted to actually go to the streets and revolt, would be about the same time that the party leadership would say, well, maybe we got the wrong guy here, let's make a change.
Nancy is holding a press conference saying that impeachment is about Russia, somebody says.
So, they're going to go back to Russia for their impeachment stuff?
Pelosi is denying its politics.
She's got to be impeached.
She has to be impeached.
Now, Bloomberg, this is hilarious, that Mike Bloomberg said that China is not a dictatorship.
He didn't say they were democracy, somebody in the...
Somebody in the comments was saying that he said they're a democracy.
He didn't say that. He said they're not a dictatorship.
That's kind of technically sort of right.
But it's not a democracy.
It's the Communist Party gets to decide who the leader is.
It's not exactly a dictatorship.
Exactly. It's just acting exactly like one.
Okay. So we're going back to collusion, obstructing justice.
Let me tell you, if you can create a situation in which you're pursuing a witch hunt against the president based on nothing, and then in the end you decide to impeach him because he resisted the witch hunt, the only person who knew there was nothing there for sure was the president.
And he resisted false charges Do you put that guy in jail?
Do you impeach the guy who resisted the witch hunt?
Even if resisting the witch hunt meant maybe he obstructed justice in your opinion?
Even if he obstructed it, given that he knew it was a witch hunt.
We didn't. You and I didn't know for sure until the Mueller report.
But now we all know. The president knew from day one because he knew what he did and he knew what he didn't do.
So he already knew.
If you could get impeached for that, wow.
All right. I think I'm babbling now.
I'm going to go listen to Pelosi.
And Pelosi, Schiff, and Adler just have to be impeached for abuse of power.
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