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Dec. 26, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:06:14
Episode 768 Scott Adams: Pardons, Fixing the So-Called Homeless Problem, Trump Takes on California
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It gets better every time. Did everybody get everything that they wanted for Christmas?
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Happy Boxing Day! If anybody knows what Boxing Day is all about, please tell me.
I understand there are a few different theories on that.
And we don't know which one it is.
Thank you, somebody liked my comic today, Dilbert.
So, we got stuff to talk about.
Are you ready? UN Agenda 2030.
I don't know about that, but I'll look into it.
Here's what's going on, in no particular order.
Where the heck are our pardons for Roger Stone and General Flynn?
Now, I've said...
That there probably could never be a better time to pardon Flynn and Stone than right now at the end of the year.
But there might be some considerations.
Some people have said, let their pleas run out before you pardon them because if they succeed in their plea deals, then there's nothing to pardon and that's the best of all cases.
Well, maybe. Maybe.
But I see both Flynn and Stone as sort of special cases, and if they were to get pardoned, I don't think that would have any impact on their careers versus going through the appeals process and being cleared that way if they got lucky that way.
But I can't think of a better time to do it.
Can you? It seems to me that the president has clearly signaled his interest and willingness to do it because when he was asked about it, instead of saying yes or no, which is the correct thing to do, he doesn't want to give a yes or no, but he says immediately they were treated very, very unfairly. That's the cats on the roof, right?
If your president who has the power to pardon only has one comment about the people you're asking about and the comment is a positive one, He's decided.
I mean, it seems to me he's decided that's what he wants to do.
Now, that doesn't mean he can do it, meaning that there may be bigger considerations here that we don't quite understand.
The legal system can be a little opaque sometimes.
But let me say, on behalf of an exhausted public, and see if you back me on this in the comments.
I want to see if you agree.
Because Stone and Flynn were caught in process crimes for something that was a setup, basically a way to squeeze these guys, and they were essentially entrapped because if you put Roger Stone on the record, he's going to say something that isn't exactly true maybe.
Possibly. So, in a way, it looks like Roger Stone is going to prison for being Roger Stone.
And I know that you can't make it okay to lie to law enforcement.
I get that that has to be a crime.
But the reason for pardons is that there are special cases that override our technical need for following all the rules.
I've never seen a better case than this.
I don't believe...
You'll ever see, maybe, you'll probably never see a case this clean where the circumstances that caused them to get in trouble in the first place were so illegitimate on behalf of the entire country that it just seems right at this point.
It just seems right to clean the record as much as a pardon can clean record.
So I don't know the legal technicalities, but I would say, Mr.
President, The greatest showman on earth.
I've called him that before.
The president probably has the best sense of drama, story, and show that you've ever seen.
I mean, he just has a natural sense of knowing what the moment is, what the most provocative thing would be, what the clever twist would be to keep the thing interesting.
I mean, he's the most interesting person any of us have ever known.
Love him or hate him, President Trump is the most interesting person any of us have ever known.
I mean, I think that's just true.
He doesn't even know how to be uninteresting.
Have you ever seen him uninteresting?
Once? Even once?
I don't even think he could turn off interesting.
Don Jr. has the same thing, by the way.
Don Jr., I think it's impossible for him to be uninteresting.
Love him or hate him, always interesting.
So, they've got that.
And here's my point. Because we're in this little weird holiday season when people are far more biased toward goodwill than they are toward fighting, and it's the only time of the year that happens.
Really, this is the only time of the year the entire country is a little bit more biased toward love than let's fight it out.
You couldn't pick a better time to do this because he's going to get brutalized no matter what.
But why not do it when the press is on vacation and the country is already leading your direction?
There is no better time.
This is the best time to do it, unless there's some legal thing I don't know about.
Anyway, so enough on that.
The stock market is reportedly up more than 50% since Trump was elected, which is reportedly faster.
If you look at just this point in his presidency entering the third year, or into the third year, It's faster stock market growth than any president before.
Any president. Now, here's the fun part.
He has the best stock market growth of any president and I don't think the stock market is overdone because the experts are not warning us that we've hit a bubble and the stock market is going to pull back.
There are just as many experts saying, you know, 2020 is looking kind of good.
And this is on top of, and I might be the only person in the world who says this, on top of a really strong performance by the Obama administration.
I always give Obama credit for taking us off the bottom, but that's a different skill set than taking you from a strong position to an oh my god position, which is what Trump has done.
Obama did a solid, solid job of taking us from the very bottom, you know, the precipice, almost falling off the edge, to a strong position.
But Trump took us from strong to I didn't even know that was possible.
You've got to give both of them credit for that.
It's just a different skill set.
Different skill set at a different time.
If you would reverse their jobs, if you'd made Trump president first and Obama president second, I don't know this would have worked, honestly, because their skill sets would have then been mismatched to the situation.
Let's talk about something else.
Oh, just one more thing on that.
When I say stuff like the stock market is up after Trump got elected, let me say for the benefit of the people who don't make the normal assumptions, I do not believe that any one economic indicator It tells you what's happening.
I am aware that the federal debt is pretty scary looking, although it's not like regular debt, so I don't know exactly how to evaluate it, but it's scary.
I will acknowledge that a good stock market doesn't help everybody.
I'll acknowledge that lots of other factors, etc., and I acknowledge that Obama was a big part of getting things strong as a base.
That said, it is unambiguously room for celebration that the stock market is up and it's not a bubble.
I mean, that's just good.
There's no negative spin you can put on that.
It's just not everything. My cat is ripping up my hassock right now, if you hear fabric flying through the air.
I've got a suggestion.
Let's talk about the so-called homeless problem, which is really a mental health and drug addiction problem.
Let's talk about that, because I feel as though 2020 is going to be the year that we get serious about that.
It feels like the zeitgeist is starting to focus on the homeless problem.
Maybe it's because of scale.
It finally got big enough that nobody has the luxury of ignoring it anymore.
It could be because our other problems are under better control than before, so we have a little luxury of focusing on the next big thing.
It could be because it's a political season and California versus Trump gets some jabbering about whether California is doing a good job with their own state.
And it could be, and I think this might be the biggest thing, is that Dr.
Drew is making a dent in the national consciousness.
How many of you are aware, and I talked about this before, when I once tweeted something, I think last week, in which I, without comment, I tweeted something that made it look like the homeless problem is a lack of housing.
And so many of you jumped on me because you had been trained either directly or directly through Dr.
Drew's work, Dr. Drew Pinsky, that it's not really a homeless problem.
And the compelling reason that he gives is we have, you know, how many millions of immigrants come into the country illegally every year and they don't sleep on the street.
Even people who have nothing Can find a place indoors to sleep.
But the people who are out in the street, it's because they have some kind of mental problem, some kind of a drug addiction problem in general.
I'm generalizing. And once you understand that the problem is not a lack of housing, But a lack of people who want to get into that housing because they'd rather stay outside, sleep on the sidewalk, take some drugs, fall asleep in a heroin stupor, and maybe it's not a bad day.
Think about it. If you were one of these people on the streets and you had two possibilities, one is that you could spend half of the day under heroin, Which I've never had, but I understand feels good.
That's why they do it. And then you fall asleep on a pile of clothing and you're dressed up with 50 pounds of clothing on you so you're not that cold and you're drunk or you're on heroin anyway.
They at least have some part of a day that's pretty good.
I hate to say it, but they have some part of their 24-hour day that's kind of good because they're stoned or drunk or whatever or asleep.
And So as Dr.
Ju points out, you can't solve that problem by building houses that they don't want to live in.
They couldn't live in, don't want to live in, won't live in, can't force them.
So I have a framed suggestion.
Instead of calling it a homeless problem, which I think gets us down the wrong track, and by the way, we'll talk about Gavin Newsom and the President's words with each other in a bit.
I would prefer to reframe this, and I'm just going to throw this out as a suggestion.
We're in the brainstorming category, so I make no claim that the following suggestion will be productive.
It'll just make you think differently than you are.
Rather than saying we have a homeless problem or that it's a mental health or even a drug addiction problem, I wonder if you could define people as indoor people versus outdoor people.
Indoor people versus outdoor people.
The indoor people would be people who want to be indoors.
Now, if they can't get indoors but they want to, well, let's see if we can help them.
What's that take? If your only problem is you don't have a drug problem, you don't have a mental problem, your only problem is that you wish you lived indoors and you're outdoors, that's one set of solutions.
What do you do for that person?
In fact, I talked about this.
One of the solutions was People are literally sleeping in their cars, but in parking lots that have a security guard and it's for that purpose, and they have some kind of public restroom facility.
For those people who just have a money problem, and it might be temporary because they have jobs, so they're working through their temporary money problem, maybe that's some kind of solution like that, where it's not really outdoors, but it's not quite indoors.
But there must be, it seems to me, let's call them the outdoor people.
The people who wouldn't go indoors even if you gave them the opportunity, is there a way to keep them outdoors but much, much more comfortable, much safer in a way that they're less likely to die?
It's just a question. Could you literally make it more of a tense situation?
Could you take advantage of, somebody suggested this the other day, of using, let's say, broken or obsolete campers You know, ones that are not good enough to be on the road anymore, but maybe they're good as a shelter.
You put them in some kind of outdoor campsite.
So I'm just going to brainstorm.
And I think that there might be a place in some situations, not every situation, where improving the outdoor life and getting them off the public street, get them to something that has something like a bathroom facility, you know, however rudimentary it is.
Is that better? I don't know.
Does that get you anything, or does it make people want to go live there?
I don't think you'd want to live there.
I don't think anybody would say, hey, give me some outdoor life so I can live with the drug addicts and the mentally unstable people.
I mean, nobody's going to choose it, but it might be better.
Now, the other thing that has to be talked about, and Dr.
Drew brings this up the most, is the laws do not allow you to involuntarily control somebody.
So if somebody's an adult and they're not breaking a specific law that's the kind you get arrested for, you can't make them leave the street, apparently.
There's nothing you can do.
If somebody's crazy and dangerous to themselves, there's not much you can do.
You just leave them there until they die.
I think Dr. Drew said there was something like a thousand homeless people died just being outdoors in dangerous situations of various types.
So... The conversation that has to happen, and you're going to see it in 2020, looks like this.
What moral responsibility does the government have regarding the people who are outside and really can't take care of themselves in a safe way?
Do we have a moral responsibility to step in, take control of them physically, and say you can't be on the street, You must be in this facility.
You must take this treatment.
You must take this, maybe in some cases, pills, if they have mental illness that could be helped by medication.
So that is a question which I think is going to be a big, big 2020 question.
And I'll help Dr.
Drew magnify that.
Maybe some of you will. And I don't know that I have the answer.
It well could be.
That the country looks at it, wrestles with it as a moral, you know, a real moral contest, if you will, pro and con.
And at the end of it, it could be that we say, you know, freedom is actually that important that we'll let a thousand people a day die in the street or whatever it is, whatever the number becomes, because it's better than involuntary incarceration for things that normally would not be.
So I think the conversation has to happen.
It has to happen by responsible people who mean well.
And 2020, that's going to happen.
All right. Interestingly, I'm watching President Trump take aim at California, specifically Governor Newsom and Nancy Pelosi, for their districts being a mess with homelessness and addiction and bad stuff in the streets, etc.
And... Gavin Newsom responded back by saying, and this is sort of mind-blowing, given the conversation I was just having, sort of mind-blowing.
Earlier this month, Gavin Newsom, governor of California, blamed the Trump administration over rising homelessness in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, saying the White House was taking no action on, quote, housing first, the governor's approach to solving homelessness.
The proposal would involve getting people in homes first and potentially adding job skills, training, or addiction services later.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Governor Newsom's proposal, first of all, exactly the opposite of what I think Dr.
Drew, an actual expert in this field, would tell you you should do?
It's exactly the opposite.
Right, it's backwards. So, is it a bad thing that President Trump is not allowing Or helping Governor Newsom do something that is exactly backwards and guaranteed to fail.
I mean, there's some things that you could say, well, it might work, right?
There are lots of things where you'd say to yourself, this could work.
You know, give it a chance.
But this is one of those things you know won't work.
And that's actually a rare category.
If you take a drug-addicted person and put them in a nice home, how long does that last?
You know? It's just not a home problem.
And if the governor doesn't understand even what the problem is, it makes you wonder, why does he want to build facilities?
Well, anytime you have local politicians, let's say state politicians, who are in favor of building construction to solve the problem, what's the first thing you think of?
Right? If the local politicians control who gets what bid, What budgets go to what construction projects and all that?
Immediately, you're talking about all kinds of corruption.
Now, I'm not saying that Governor Newsom is corrupt.
I've never heard anything that would suggest that.
But it's immediately going down the road that has all the problems because that's where the corruption lives, building a facility.
So certainly I would like to see, if California were even a little bit serious about this, California would say, you know, we may not know exactly what the problem is or how to fix it.
Let's try a few things.
You will know that California is on the way to getting fixed when you hear the following.
We're going to try something we haven't tried before in this one area in California and Maybe we'll try some other things at the same time, but we're going to test and we're going to see what works.
If you hear California saying something like that, we'll get to test it against other things, and then whatever works best we'll do more of, you might have something.
You might be hearing about the beginning of an improvement.
Somebody says they have heard that, but I haven't heard that.
When that becomes the dominant message, you might have something.
But if you're hearing somebody say, we have a homeless problem and the federal government isn't letting us build more structures, you do not have anything that is even a potential problem.
There's nothing in that that even might work.
It's empty.
It's completely empty. So the president is hammering California and...
It feels like he's really put the crosshairs on him, as a state and as an issue, and I think he's really strong.
Now, I don't think anybody thinks it's possible that President Trump could win, let's say, the popular vote or the electoral vote in California.
But let me just toss this out here.
I want to say this in the most dramatic way.
Anybody you ask who knows anything about politics would tell you that it would be impossible for President Trump to win California in the electoral college.
But I think he might be taking a run for it because the way he's targeted them and his attacks you know are relentless.
They're going to be targeted.
They will be repeatable.
They will be catchy, and they will become as big an issue as he wants them to be because he's the president, and he's not an ordinary president.
He's President Trump.
So if he wants you to think about how bad California is for the next year, you're going to be thinking a lot about how bad California is for the next year.
If it turns out he doesn't have a bigger target to go after, and given that Pelosi's in California and some of the biggest problems that are Democrat- Related or in California, he might just focus all lasers on California.
And I want to be the first one to say, although it does seem impossible on any rational basis that the president could flip California, I think this president could flip California.
Now maybe a year isn't enough, but I'll bet he can move the dial.
Because he does have those skills.
He has the skills to move people's brains like nobody ever has.
Nobody's ever been anywhere in this, even the vicinity of his effectiveness of doing this stuff.
And if he decides that this is going to be his big thing, to go after drug addiction and homelessness, and it's all related, maybe in a lot of people's minds it's related to immigration in some indirect or direct way, he might take a shot at it.
He might. I wouldn't predict he could succeed, but I've never heard – there's nobody else who would ever even have a slight chance, but he might.
You never know. All right.
I would say that the best way to think of the, quote, housing shortage – so when Gavin Newsom talks about the need for low-cost housing for the homeless, I think that housing should not be considered, low-cost housing should not be considered a solution for the homeless, although in some cases it is, but there are limited cases.
I think that low-cost housing should be seen as a solution to, wait for it, what is low-cost housing a solution to?
The debt and to high taxes.
Because if we can build, and I think this is the future, I've been saying this forever, but the biggest change that's coming in the next, say, ten years is low-cost housing that's actually good housing.
We've had low-cost housing that's, you know, low quality.
We've had high-quality housing that was good quality.
What we've never had, but now can, because we have the ability to do it, just nobody's doing it.
We have the ability to build very low-cost housing That's actually more livable, better, a better quality of life than even expensive housing.
We have all the know-how to do that.
Maybe some local building codes would have to be revised.
People would have to form businesses in different ways and find different business models and all that.
But that's what the golden age is.
I've defined this as the golden age.
Meaning that it's a period when there are no real shortages.
We don't have a shortage of goods.
There's enough stuff.
There's enough money.
There's enough materials.
There's enough metal in the ground, etc.
There's enough stuff.
What we don't have is systems that are designed correctly to put the right stuff where it needs to be.
So we're in a design phase where everything that needs to be fixed is a question of design, not of shortages, basically.
So every time we talk about a housing shortage and the need for low-cost housing, think of it in terms of if we could get the cost of living, let's say, a really high-quality retirement life Or a millennial young person life?
If we could get the cost of living a good life down to, let's say, 20% of what it costs now, what does that do to your ability to buy healthcare insurance?
Well, suddenly you've doubled the number of people who are covered.
Let's say that in a rational way.
You might cut in half the number of people who don't have healthcare if you made their living expense so low that now they can afford it.
So thinking about the housing shortage, so to speak, or the need for low-cost housing should really be a question about the national debt About, you know, the social services expenses and about taxes and the question about the people who are living outdoors.
Well, maybe they're just indoor people and outdoor people.
First you decide which they are and then you decide, let's try some stuff.
Maybe we leave them outdoors but give them more services.
Maybe there's one county where we involuntarily lock them up, but we just try for a year because we don't want to necessarily commit to this forever.
Just see how it works. All right.
So here's a cautionary tale for you.
Lindsay Vaughn, famous Olympic skater Lindsay Vaughn, proposed marriage to her boyfriend, PK, who's a professional athlete, and posted it on Instagram, I guess.
And she said, women aren't the only ones who should get engagement rings.
And she showed that she bought an engagement ring and proposed to her boyfriend, and he said yes.
What do you think about that? What does everybody think about...
I just want to get your reaction.
Now, on one hand, on one hand, can we not all celebrate?
Can we not all celebrate that we're all different?
We're all completely different.
We're not just different in gender.
We're not just different in ethnicity, experience, income.
We're just all completely different.
And it's only our minds that try to put us in these packages and say, all right, you're mostly Filipino and you're a woman, so that's your package.
That's just our minds organizing ourselves into categories because we like to deal with categories.
But the truth is we're all just completely different people.
So there's certainly no right or wrong way to do anything.
So let me say this.
Lindsay Vaughn and her betrothed, this probably worked just fine for them, so I don't have any criticisms whatsoever.
I will say, this would not work for most people, and it gets worse.
They pose with a picture, and it looks like she might be a little bit taller than him.
I can't tell, but it looks like she might be a little taller.
I think she's tall. And they have their arms around each other, But in the same photo that's announcing their engagement, she has her arm around him above, so their arms around each other side by side, and it looks like his is below and hers is above, and so you see her one arm coming, let's see, how do you do it, coming over his shoulder like this, in like a dominant position, like she's got the highest arm position.
so she's sort of towering over him physically while announcing on Instagram that she proposed to him and he said yes and she gave him a ring now all I got to say about this is they look really happy And again, I'm not going to judge what works for those two people, because the most important thing over all of this is that no two people are alike.
This could be the greatest thing ever.
He might be saying, you know, that's why I want to marry you.
I mean, it's perfectly possible that what he says is, this is exactly why I want to marry you.
This. You know, you make everything work for us.
You know, I wasn't ready, so I'm glad you did it.
Could be perfect. But, ladies, ladies, Let me give you this advice.
You probably don't want to follow this model.
It might work perfectly for them.
No criticism intended or accidental.
But don't follow this model.
That's all I'm saying. Because I would say that 99% of men would not respond positively to this.
But I'm glad that they seem to be happy.
Because they do look pretty happy in their pictures.
Kanye West dropped his new album, Jesus is Born, on Christmas.
On Christmas. He drops an album on Christmas.
Who drops a new album on Christmas the day you get the least publicity?
Kanye. Now, this is a follow-up to his other album about Jesus.
I guess most of it is from his Sunday services, the choir that he brings to his Sunday services.
And I've got to say, every time I hear more about Kanye, I like him better every time I hear a news story about him.
Now, for full disclosure, I am not a fan of that genre of music.
So I'm not a believer.
I wouldn't be somebody who would naturally attend to I'm not a spiritual service, nor would I listen to spiritual music.
It doesn't quite connect with me.
But nonetheless, it is fair to say it's very popular around the world, and his last album was a giant hit.
I think this one will be too.
And the reason I talk about Kanye is because I think he's more important than other people think.
I think he's more important to the world.
He talks about being president, and I've said this before, But I think President would be shooting low in his case.
Do you think Kanye West's talents would be best used sitting around meetings all day?
Like, oh, there's a meeting, and when the meeting's done, you've got another meeting, and then you're going to cut a tape and pat somebody on the head, and you're going to meet the ambassador from Luxembourg.
Does that feel like...
The best use for maybe the greatest creative force of our time.
Hey, greatest creative force of our time, why don't you go to some meetings?
That feels like the worst thing he could possibly do, right?
Now, could he become president?
I think he could, actually.
I think he could run for president if he got as serious as you could possibly get, and he said stuff like, if I become president, I will choose from among this group of people as my advisors.
You'd say, oh, okay.
The same thing Trump did with judicial appointments for the Supreme Court.
One of the things that made people comfortable with Trump is he said, this is the list that the Federal Society or somebody made of judges.
I will only pick from this list, so you don't even have to worry if I'll make a bad pick.
It's already pre-picked.
So somebody like Kanye could do something like that and say, look, I'm not an economist, but I'm going to pick an economist from this list.
They all won, I don't know, awards or whatever.
So yes, Kanye could win the presidency.
Maybe not this next one, but at some point, he's a young man, he could win the presidency if that's what he wanted.
But I'll say this again, I think it would be a waste of his talent because he seems to be doing something that's bigger.
Way bigger. The biggest gap in this country wasn't even government.
Our government has lots of flaws, but it runs along.
The government, it chugs along.
It's not broken per se.
But we were kind of broken on the spiritual level.
Wouldn't you say? We have a fractured country Maybe our biggest problem is that people are divided and we're fighting about identity politics and stuff that we don't need to be fighting about.
We've solved so many of our big problems and our external threats that we've sort of turned on each other.
Not too seriously, but it's getting that way.
If you can't walk outside with the name of Trump on your hat without getting your ass kicked, we've got some work to do, right?
So I think that Kanye...
Is essentially, without saying it, and maybe I don't even know how much intention there is to this, he is emerging, shall we say, so I'll take the intention out of it, and I'll just say he's emerging through intentional acts as a spiritual force that is very unique.
Think about this.
If you said to yourself, any other religious leader, let's say anybody from the religious right, If somebody from the religious right, whether it's Bill Graham Jr.
or whoever, tried to emerge as the spiritual leader for the United States, how would that go over?
It wouldn't, right?
It wouldn't go over at all.
It wouldn't go over because people would say, no, that's a white Republican guy.
I don't really want to be in the spiritual path with the white Republican guy.
And if it were whoever else, somebody would say, I'm not one of those.
Kanye has done something that other people can't do, and he's already done it, which is he's become free from labels.
Whoever did that?
Who has ever been free from labels?
Because say to yourself, what label do you put on Kanye?
Conservative? No.
Liberal? No. Name another person that you can't tell me if they're a conservative or a liberal.
Name one other person in the whole world that you actually can't answer the question.
You know, I don't even know if he's conservative or liberal.
Right? And I'll bet for a lot of you that's the first time you've thought of it that way.
Now, somebody's saying liberal.
But when I say conservative, when he talks about freeing yourself from your...
The mental prisons of the past and just working and doing the best at what you can do with what you have.
That's a very conservative message.
He just doesn't wrap it in traditional conservative language.
But in terms of lift yourself up, pray to your God, take care of yourself first, and then you can take care of other people, he's an amazing role model.
Amazing role model.
And he's done what nobody else can do.
He has freed himself from labels.
He freed himself from labels.
Do you know why Jesus, historical Jesus, was in part one of the reasons that Jesus is such an important historical religious figure is that Jesus also was free from labels.
Name somebody besides Jesus who was free from labels.
Was Jesus a liberal?
Even his ethnicity, Jesus' ethnicity was almost irrelevant.
You couldn't even tell if Jesus was part human, part God.
Jesus was almost, well, I don't know, accidentally or by design, I don't know.
But Jesus is sort of unlabelable.
Why is it that black people, white people, every kind of people can pray to Jesus?
Because Jesus isn't really...
On the other team, Jesus is the character who you can't even tell what color he's supposed to be, if he's human, liberal, you just don't know.
So that's part of the magic of Jesus.
Kanye, he managed to pull off a Jesus move.
I'm not saying he's Jesus.
Calm down, calm down.
I'm not saying Kanye's as good as Jesus.
All I'm saying is, That if you were to look at that one element, the ability to be free of labels, who else did it?
Who else did it?
I can't think of anybody.
So keep your eye on Kanye.
Once he freed himself from labels...
And by the way, here's another thing that Kanye freed himself.
Here's something I talk about all the time.
How many times have I talked about using your ego as a tool...
Instead of using your ego as who you are, I've got to protect my ego.
I don't want to be embarrassed.
I don't want to go out there and have people think badly of me.
Watch what Kanye does over the course of his career.
How many times has Kanye put his ego completely on the line?
Imagine making this, you know, famously when he said the thing about President Trump didn't like black people, famously when he said what he said about Taylor Swift, you know, maybe shouldn't have won that award and should have gone to somebody else.
Think about all the things that Kanye's done and now his support of the president, you know, at least as a person, his movement to this kind of music, Really, almost everything Kanye does is an ongoing public debate with his own ego.
You saw that in the famous video when he was with the TMZ crew.
He got kind of emotional because he was talking about how he had lipo so that the people he was talking to, the press and the public, would not make fun of him for being fat.
And you can see it was a very vulnerable moment.
You can see it actually bothered him.
But here's what's special about it.
He was saying it in public.
Kanye was actually putting his, you know, even though he told you his ego was damaged in a sense because he had to get lipo so he didn't get mocked for being fat.
But he was sort of confessing that in public.
And so he was basically telling you, You know, I had a weight problem.
It bothered me. I mean, he was completely putting his ego on the line.
So watch for this pattern, because I've said this is a success tell for somebody who's going someplace, somebody who's still on the way.
The people who are still on the way somewhere, they're still rising, are the people who can have that honest conversation with their ego.
And they can say, you know, I'm just going to put my ego inside.
It hurts. I'm going to move it aside.
I'm going to talk about it. I'm going to take a chance.
I'm going to take a risk. I'm going to put myself out there.
He does that every day. Kanye does that every day.
I sounded like a Fox News commercial there.
All right, they're getting in my head, apparently.
Michael Moore, famous anti-Trumper, recently said, I think it was yesterday in an interview, he said, and I quote, white men who voted for President Trump were, quote, not good people.
And then he went on and made another quip about it.
So he said that two-thirds of white men voted for Trump, and if you see three white men walking down the street, two of them are not good people on average.
And I thought to myself, has President Trump – here's just a mental exercise – What has President Trump ever said, let's say, as president?
We'll limit it to his time as candidate or president.
What has President Trump ever said that was as evil and as potentially damaging as what Michael Moore said, that white men who voted for President Trump were not good people?
Is there anything that any time President Trump has ever said or done that's actually as bad as this?
You know, I'm not talking about policies.
I'm talking about statements.
This is one of the worst things I've ever seen a person say in public.
Now, of course, he can get away with it because, you know, that's the way our press works and because he is a white man, he can make fun of a white man.
That's the rule. I get that.
But as soon as you go down that road of demonizing a group by some kind of identity, you are, I'm not going to say the H word, but you are in territory that never goes well.
Do you know what Kanye West never says?
Let me tell you something that Kanye West has never said and I will predict today never will say.
This kind of stuff.
Kanye West would never say.
It's just my opinion.
You know, he can never say never. But in my opinion, Kanye is on a whole different level of spiritual awareness.
He would never say this, would he?
Can you even imagine Kanye West demonizing an entire segment of the American public?
I don't think so.
Anyway, Pete Buttigieg said in an interview, I guess maybe this week, That all drug possession should not result in jail time.
So he would like to see no jail time for any form of drug possession.
So I assume that means the drug dealers still have an issue, but in terms of possession, no jail time.
And then somebody said, are you kidding me?
You mean even cocaine and meth, even that, no jail time?
And Buttigieg said, correct, no jail time.
And in this move, Pete Buttigieg has eclipsed President Trump's position on drugs.
So I would say that Buttigieg has the clear advantage on the drug question because of this opinion.
And if he ran against President Trump and there were only one topic, I'd vote for him.
Of course, there is not one topic.
But if the only topic there was, If every other problem in the world were solved, let's say Trump solved every other problem and the only thing left was drug addiction and Trump ran against Buttigieg, I'd vote for Buttigieg every time because Buttigieg is just way ahead in the thinking about taking a chance and being creative and everything.
Now, I would of course add my usual caveat.
Why are we not testing this somewhere?
Why are we still having a conversation in the United States about whether drug...
It's not legalization, but de-jailatizing?
I don't know. What is the term for something still being illegal, but there's no jail time?
There's a term for that, probably.
But if we're not at least testing that in some county and some state, it can't be said that we're trying.
Let me say that as clearly as possible.
The problem with drug addiction, in my opinion, is that we're not trying to solve it.
Because trying to solve it would look like this.
There's a test going on in this town.
There's a different test going on in this town.
There's a different test going on in this town.
We're watching those three tests very closely.
We're tracking stuff. And then when we find out which one works, we'll take that one and run it.
And if we think of something that might even be better, we'll test that too.
If you ever hear something like that going on, that means that you've decided to solve the problem.
If you don't, People are saying that decriminalization is the word for something that's still illegal but you don't go to jail.
Is that true? It feels like that should not be the right word because if you get a fine for it, it's still a criminal act, right?
Or does criminal have a specific...
We'll figure that out, but you know what we're talking about anyway.
So I would appeal to President Trump and his administration to leapfrog Pete Buttigieg, who is in the lead on this topic.
So he's taken a clear, unambiguous high ground, but he could be leapfrogged by saying, not only do we think we should look into that, but we're going to fund a few tests.
Let's just see. That would be the higher ground.
So Buttigieg has the high ground, but there's a little bit higher ground, which is, we don't know, let's test it.
That's the higher ground.
In a very interesting move, timed with the holidays, maybe coincidentally, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday repeated his campaign pledge To annex, in other words, make part of Israel proper, all West Bank settlements as well as the Jordan Valley.
Now, I don't know my geography well enough to know if that includes all of the disputed lands or just the important ones or whatever, but it's the same point.
That is a really clever idea.
Now, I'm going to use the word clever Because I'm not going to take sides.
So at the moment, I'm not going to take sides, Israel versus the Palestinians.
I'm just going to talk about the strategy.
If you were Netanyahu, this would be exactly the right time to try that.
Because he's doing it for election purposes.
It's an election promise.
Because I don't know that there would be ever a better time to do it.
And I always talk about picking up the free money on the table.
If you have a situation where the Palestinians and your enemies in the region have said that under any circumstance they want to wipe you off the map, if they leave anything laying around, it's free money.
Because there's nothing you can do to make your enemies less want to wipe you off the map.
Apparently there's no path to get them to, hey, let's just live in peace, you can have this land, we'll have that land.
It doesn't exist. And because Israel's enemies have made it clear that that doesn't exist and they don't want it ever to exist, Israel would actually be stupid not to take the land they can take.
It's free. It's free in the sense that there's no extra charge because if your penalty is 100% we want to wipe you off the map and then nothing will stop us, there's no expense.
So Netanyahu is picking up free money here at probably the exact right time to do it.
Because remember, we're going to be mad about Iran building their nuclear capabilities and Syria is trying to sort itself out.
You've just got all kinds of stuff going on over there.
And I think Israel might be concerned that if they don't get it now, Maybe there'll be some kind of comprehensive peace plan that they'll have to treat seriously, that they maybe don't want to treat seriously.
So by grabbing this land, I think Israel would do two things.
First of all, make it basically impossible to get a peace plan.
So whatever Jared was working on, I think that would become impossible, right?
because of this but I suppose it could be some kind of a negotiating trick where Netanyahu is going to take the extreme position of annexing all this land and then in a grand gesture for a major peace deal he could give up the thing which nobody thought he would give up and then it looks like a concession so it could be that Netanyahu is just going to consolidate land so he has something to give back It could be nothing but one of the best negotiating moves in the world planned 10 years in advance.
It could be that. So let me say again, I will not get into the moral historical argument of who owns the land and who should own the land and who's being mean to who and who's occupying who.
You can keep all those arguments and I'm not going to debate them.
But as just a strategy thing, This is kind of brilliant.
It's exactly the right time to do it.
It's free money. It's going to be expensive because it'll cause problems, you know, probably be an uptick in deaths, etc.
But I think any country that had this opportunity to acquire land that has a security and financial benefit for ages, if they didn't do it, I don't know.
Somebody says Scott wants World War III. No, I don't think...
The thing that makes this idea so appealing is that the Palestinian side seems so weak that I don't see anything but an uptick in low-level military stuff.
That's about it. Has anybody had any arguments about kids in cages over the holidays?
Because I have a curiosity about this.
I have... If you count Twitter and casual conversations, I've mentioned or been as part of a conversation about the kids in cages and kids separated from their mothers and stuff lots and lots of times.
How does that conversation go every time?
See if you agree. It goes like this.
Trump put kids in cages.
And then what do you say?
Obama did too.
And then what does the other side say?
I don't know. I don't know what the other side says.
Doesn't it always go like that?
You know, hey, Trump put kids in cages.
And then the Republican or Trump supporter says, Obama started it.
It's actually literally Obama's cages.
He built those cages for that purpose.
Trump just used them and used them more because the problem that, you know, Obama had a problem of a temporary upsurge.
And it was the temporary upsurge that caused Obama to build some cages and to separate people by genders and stuff to keep them safe.
Trump had an even bigger upsurge, so there were even more people separated from parents, etc., and put in cages.
As far as I know, they were similar situations, except one was a smaller case and one was a bigger case.
But in either case, was the president responsible for it being a small case of that problem or a big case?
In both cases, it was events happening south of the border that caused the influxes.
Now, here's what I've never experienced, and I'm wondering if any of you have.
Have you ever talked through...
And ask people what their view of the world looks like.
Just describe your world view.
And it would go like this.
Trump put kids in cages.
Then you say, Obama put kids in cages.
And then you say, what do you think should have been done as an alternative?
And I've never heard anybody walk through that, where if you just say to the other person, instead of stopping it as, hey, those are Obama cages, why not take it the next push?
And say, you know, nobody wants kids in cages, right?
Can we agree on that? You know, you, me, is there anybody who wants to put a kid in the cage, rip a baby from a mother's arms?
Anybody want that? Okay, so can we start there?
Can we start with, we both don't want it.
Can we further agree that if you could reduce it, we'd be happier?
As long as reducing it did not make something worse.
So I would go for this agreement in advance and say, would you agree That you and I would both very much like to see less of this kids in cages business.
We both want that a lot, but we would both agree that if the only way we can get there is to make something else worse, well in that case we wouldn't.
Would you agree with me before we talk about the details?
Yes, you would of course, because you're a reasonable person.
And then you say, why did Obama put kids in cages?
What was even the point of it?
That's where you have to get the person to walk through the thinking.
My understanding, and maybe I'm wrong, but my understanding is the reason that anybody was separated is that you couldn't tell who were real parents from not real parents.
And furthermore, because of the risk of sexual bad behavior, which is rampant in the immigration population, not rampant in the Mexican population, let me be very clear, Not rampant in immigrants in general.
I want to be very clear.
I'm talking about people who are literally in the act of crossing the border.
There's a little more crime there.
It's more of a lawless situation by its nature.
And so the cages, my understanding, was for the temporary purpose of keeping them safer than under any other scenario which we could reasonably come up with on short term.
Is that right? Somebody says, your level of nuanced understanding is purposely manipulative.
I'm not going to block you for that.
I normally do.
But because you use big words, it makes me think that you have an actual point that you haven't said.
So I'd like to hear whoever said that I'm being purposely manipulative with my nuance.
I might be, but I'm not aware of it.
Meaning that I'm not, no.
If it was purposeful, I would be aware of it.
So I'm not aware of it.
But if there's something I've said that would suggest that, I'd actually like to hear that because that could be interesting.
There might be something in the way I'm saying this or leaving out.
Somebody says he's right.
Some of you are having the same experience.
If there's something I'm leaving out, fill it in.
Please do. Cage is a small word.
Yeah, they're more like facilities with wire fences, but that doesn't help much, does it?
So others are agreeing that I'm saying it in a way that's unfair.
You know what? If there's anybody here who wants to come on as a guest, let me take a guest.
So I'll give you a moment to come on.
I'll only pick from people who are not yet on.
So right now there's one person who's volunteering as a guest, but I'll wait for some others.
So I'm looking for somebody only who wants to debate the question that there was some fundamental difference between the way Obama did it and the way Trump did it or to fill in the blanks about why Obama did it in the first place.
So I'm only looking for something that fills in the blanks there.
Let's see. I could tell from some of the names that...
All right. I'm not sure I'm going to get anybody, but let's...
Now, Joe, I don't think you're going to argue that case.
Let's say Kate.
I'll just take a shot.
Kate may not be coming on for that purpose, but let's see.
Kate, Kate, Kate, are you there?
Kate? Kate? Kate is not there.
Alright, let's try somebody else.
All the ones who are signing up have funny troll names.
You're all trolls. All the ones with the funny troll names are coming on.
I think Theresa might be real.
Let's get Theresa on here.
Theresa, are you there?
Maybe this feature isn't working.
That's two people in a row I tried to add and it didn't work.
Let's try G. Duffy.
Are you there? I'm good.
How are you? Are you here to talk about immigration?
Yes, I am, but actually a slightly different take on the whole thing.
So long-time listener, first-time caller, I've read your comics since I was 13 years old.
Thank you. So make it quick, because I want to talk about this idea of the cages.
Are you on that topic? Did I lose you?
It looks like we have some kind of a technical difficulty, so we lost the caller.
All right, so I won't try that again.
There seems to be some kind of technical difficulty here.
Sorry about that. But anyway, I'd love to hear the argument.
About what they should have done instead of the cages in the case of Obama, which would have been the same solution they should have done in the Trump administration, but at a higher scale, I would think.
All right. I think that's all we got for now.
Oh, and there's the DNA test.
Yeah, so I think there's some issue about DNA testing the kids to make sure they're related to the adults.
Now, I think the people who think kids should not be in cages do not think in terms of incentives.
This is a typical Republican versus liberal, not Republican versus liberal, but left versus right thing.
People on the right tend to think in terms of what kind of incentive will that create.
And if you made it easy to come across the border with a kid, then the cartels are going to start kidnapping children and putting them with people and selling them as a package to get across the border easily because there's a kid with them.
So that's the incentive.
Somebody says, take down Kate, then try again.
I took down all of the callers on my end.
There's nobody here.
Will I do a 2020 New Year's prediction show?
I hadn't thought about that.
But maybe. Oh, you can still see Kate on the screen.
Interesting. Let's see if I can.
Yeah, she's not on my screen.
So I can see all the names of people and none of them are Kate.
All right, so it's just technical difficulty.
We'll try. We'll do better next time.
Somebody says go on now.
Let's try again. All right, let's see if I can bring on L.A. Child.
L.A. Child, can you hear me?
Good morning. Thanks.
Did you have a comment on immigration and kids in cages?
Yes, I do. It occurs to me that many of us didn't know about Obama having kids in cages in his era.
And so that is the one thing that keeps gnawing at me.
Well... But I would argue, so I'll just take the other side of the argument just for fun here.
I would argue that in the Obama administration, it was a brief and temporary situation.
In the Trump situation, it was simply larger.
And it had nothing to do with what the presidents were doing.
It had to do with just events below the border.
There were more organized events during the administration of Trump.
So Would you not say it's not terribly surprising that a small problem did not become a national news story, whereas a bigger problem did?
And Trump, through no fault of his own, they just weren't ready for it, nor was there any reason that they should have been ready, just had a bigger problem.
Would you say that that would explain what you've seen, because the Obama problem was just smaller in scale?
I really don't know if I've gotten that far.
What I think is incongruent with all of this is that we didn't really have the information before, so it's new to all of us.
Were you an Obama supporter or a Trump supporter?
I was not an Obama supporter during Obama's time, but I never heard of it.
I never heard of it either, but I think that can be explained by the fact it was small.
There are thousands and thousands of small tragedies happening all over the country.
If somebody takes a gun and kills one person, We don't hear about it nationally.
If they kill two, we might, but you probably hear it at a state or local level.
If they kill ten, it's a national story.
So it shouldn't be too surprising that a small Obama cages problem wouldn't be reported, but a somewhat larger one later would be reported.
But your question is completely fair.
I'm wondering, did Obama have caravans?
Were there also caravans that we were unaware of?
I don't remember caravans per se, but there was an uptick in volume.
So in other words, there was some kind of a change or something happened in which the number of people coming over with kids suddenly increased, but I don't remember the details.
Thanks for calling, and I appreciate it.
All right, so more to find out about that.
I have a feeling it's shaping up.
That the anti-Trumpers are going to use the kids in cages because they're going to go back to stuff that seemed to be working before.
And because the Russia collusion didn't work, Ukraine isn't working, impeachment isn't working, the economy is doing well, because everything else is doing well, they're going to be searching for crumbs.
And it looks like the crumbs that they're going to pick up Can we somehow figure out how to get past the conversation that ends after somebody says Trump put kids in cages and then you say so did Obama and then you change the subject?
Can we push it to the next level?
Is there a way to force that conversation into the third thing, which is one of them had a big problem, one of them had a small problem, and they both handled it the same way?
All right. That's all for now.
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