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Jan. 16, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:00:15
Episode 789 Scott Adams: #Shampeachment Theater, Liz and Bernie, Lev Parnas, China Deal

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Young people still believe "The News" is legitimate Emotional impeachment Robert Hyde and Ukraine Ambassador surveillance Nice try Rachel Maddow CNN didn't report the MAJOR China deal yesterday? No pretense of being a news organization CNN's common opinion piece TRICK Musical artist Akon building his own city in Senegal --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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I hope you can hear me when I plug in my microphone after I've already started.
Sorry I'm a little late.
I'm late because there's so much news.
There's news all over the place and it's good and it's fun and it's the good kind.
It's the funny kind.
It's the best kind.
And all you need to enjoy the news today is...
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Go. I know, I'm three minutes late.
Why? Good reasons.
Good reasons. When you see the quality...
Of today's Periscope?
You're going to say to yourself, I'm glad I waited the extra three minutes.
Wow! It's blowing me away.
It's so good. First of all, I'd like to start with a tip.
If you saw today's Dilbert comic, you know it's about the topic of people who repeat themselves.
Have you ever been in a Debate with somebody who keeps repeating the same point, and you say to them, no, I understand your point, but here's what I'm saying.
And then they'll just say that same point again as if you had not addressed it.
Here's what you do. After about the third or fourth time that the person you're talking with says exactly the same point, say, hold on a second.
Let me write this down.
You take a little note in the paper and you say, alright, I will stipulate, and you write down the sentence, Bob says that it involved birds, or whatever it is, doesn't matter.
You put it on a little piece of paper and you put it on the table between the two of you, face up, so it can be read.
And then you start your conversation again.
And at that point, When the person starts repeating themselves, this is what you do.
You just reach over to the piece of paper, and you just slowly move it a few inches in their direction.
And it's going to make them mad.
Then, wait until they repeat it again, because they will.
And then again, reach over and take the little note that says exactly what they just said, and just move it a little bit closer to them.
Eventually the person will get really angry at you and storm out of the room.
Victory. Alright, let's talk about the Democrats, or let's say the left, is in complete self-immolation mode.
They've turned on each other.
It's a wonderful sight to see.
And you're seeing it all over.
Did you see the story about Wendy Williams mocking Joaquin Phoenix for a Let's say...
I don't even want to say.
I'm not even going to say. But let's say it's something physical.
It was one of the worst things I've ever seen on television.
When I saw it, I thought, seriously?
That's what you're mocking?
You're mocking this guy for that?
In public? Well, she had to apologize, and it's not up to anybody except Joaquin Phoenix to accept it or not.
But the trouble that she got into...
There's one more example of the left eating itself.
But my favorite is Michael Moore, who is quite distressed that Warren and Bernie Sanders are at each other.
And he says, they both appeared in my films.
I love them both. Why Elizabeth chose to stick a knife in Bernie's back is beyond me.
Well, it's not really beyond me.
So let me explain this to Michael Moore.
There's this thing called the presidential election that's coming up, and there's this thing called the primary.
There are people in the primaries who want to win, and then they do things like that because that's how you win.
Did it work? Totally.
Now, a lot of you said Oh, Elizabeth Warren, it sounds like you're causing trouble.
You said you wouldn't.
You're stabbing Bernie. That seems bad.
You know, sort of a bad look and all that.
But a day later, it totally worked.
I would say that Operation Stab Bernie in the back was a complete success.
If you saw the panel that...
Well, actually, most of the pundits...
Well, the big moment from the debate was when Elizabeth Warren said that the only people on the stage who had ever won any elections were the women.
Actually, the others had won elections, but they had also lost, I think, ten elections, but the women had won every election.
Tremendously good political point.
So from a point of controlling the conversation, moving people's attention where you wanted to move it, I'm going to say Elizabeth Warren, A+++. She totally changed the conversation, sort of highlighted the fact that it's a bunch of white people on the stage, which is bad enough, but at least there are some women.
Right? Because the day before that, we were all talking about ha ha ha, Democrats are the party of inclusivity, and they just got rid of all of their people of color on the stage.
Wasn't that the story two days ago?
Two days ago, that was the story.
Not anymore. What's the story today?
Thanks to Elizabeth Warren, the story today is, hey, there's still two women on the stage, and Are we ignoring the fact that they've won all of their elections and that the men on the stage have 10 lost elections collectively?
It's a really good point, just in terms of politics.
I'm not saying it's a good point in the world or that it's a good point logically or rationally or anything else.
But politically, wow.
So I'm going to say Warren has the play of the week.
Political Play of the Week.
Very successful. I think she actually changed how people are thinking about this.
Good job. Now the real question is, who's lying?
Is Bernie lying when he says, I never said a woman can't win?
Or is Elizabeth Warren lying when she says that he did say that?
I have the answer to that.
In my opinion.
So I can't read minds.
Of course, you've all seen it by now.
The clip of Elizabeth Warren not shaking hands with Bernie.
And CNN magically found a separate audio file that they matched up with the video so you could hear what she was saying.
And Elizabeth Warren walks directly over to Bernie and says, You accused me of lying on television.
I think, did you say on television or in public?
Now, what have I taught you About detecting liars.
Liars say things such as, what evidence do you have?
Or, you know, why would you make that accusation?
Based on what? You know, that's what a liar says.
Here's what an honest person says.
They get right in your face and they say, you're a liar.
Now, keep in mind, That it's not clear that Warren knew that this would be picked up on audio.
Some are suggesting she's smart enough to know that there probably was an audio.
Some have suggested she was colluding with CNN and that she knew there would be an audio.
I'm not going to say it was that clever.
It looked like an honest moment to me.
So my impression is that she actually believed Bernie lied.
I believe that Elizabeth Warren believes her own story.
I also believe, because of everything that Bernie has said and done and his entire career, he's so credible to me and to many of you.
But to me, he's completely credible.
So you have two versions that both believe their stories, I believe.
So my opinion is that they both absolutely do believe their versions of the story.
How unusual is that?
Not. It's two movies on one screen.
Two people were in a room, and when they left the room, they had two different impressions of what happened in the room.
How unusual is that?
Zero unusualality of it.
See, I made up a word.
Unusuality. You can use it.
Yeah. One of the things about being a professional writer Is that if I start using a word, it could enter a common usage.
So the unusuality.
Or maybe it's already a word, but I doubt it.
So, let me give you another example of exactly this situation, which is also in the news.
So there's a story about, let's see, a gentleman, Peter Lucido, who's a Michigan State Senator.
Now, he's apologized after a female reporter, so a young 20-something reporter, was spending some time with this Michigan state senator, and I guess he said that he was going to be meeting with some high school boys later, and said that she should hang around because it'd be a lot of fun, according to him.
So his version is, Hey, you should hang around.
It's going to be a lot of fun hanging out with these guys from this high school.
Hang around a little bit. She says that some version of it was that you'll have a lot of fun with those boys and they'll have a lot of fun with you, if you know what I mean, or some version of that.
So her version of a private conversation between two people, she left the room, and I think she actually believes that he said something With an inappropriate sexual tone to it.
If you watched his response, he looks really credible when he says, that didn't happen.
I just said it would be fun.
It has nothing to do with any kind of sexual anything.
Now, it's possible that one of them is just lying, right?
But, I don't think so.
I think they're both telling the truth.
Because exactly like Warren and Bernie...
I think two people had the same experience, but watched two different movies.
And when they left, they both believed their movie.
How many times do you need to see people experiencing two different movies in the same place before you understand it's the most normal thing in our experience?
It's not the exception.
Because if you imagine it's the exception, you say, okay, one of them's lying.
It's not one of those weird cases where somebody saw two different movies in the same place.
That would be weird.
It's not. That's the operating system of human beings.
We're subjectively creating our own little environments and worlds all the time.
It's the basic way we operate.
Once you understand that, everything starts making a little more sense.
So that's my preliminary.
Maybe it's my final conclusion.
Warren telling the truth as she saw it.
Bernie telling the truth as he saw it.
Two people who are being honest, although Warren may be a little opportunistic by bringing that up at exactly the right time.
Seriously, that was just a great, great political play.
Ethical? Not so much.
But still within the realm of what we expect in our political process, so it's not that far out.
We're going to talk about impeachment in a moment.
Here's an example of why it's better to be a boomer than a doomer.
Now, boomers, people like me, my age, we have a lot of experience.
We've seen a bunch of things.
Does it help? Well, let me give you an example.
Today I saw a message came in to me from a social media platform, and it was a writer asking me if I would be interviewed for an article he wants to write on the topic of love and persuasion.
And because I talk about persuasion, he thought, oh, I'll ask this cartoonist guy.
If you will give me some quotes from my article on love and persuasion.
What did I say?
Because I'm a boomer, and it's not my first day on earth, I said, nope.
Nope. Not get anywhere near it.
Because can you imagine how many ways that would go wrong?
As soon as you throw persuasion and love in the same conversation, Nothing can go right from that point on.
Whatever I would be quoted as saying would look terrible out of context, because it would be his context, whatever his article was going to be.
It wouldn't be my context.
I might be able to do it, but probably not.
I mean, I don't even think I could do it if I did everything I could to put it in the right context.
It would just seem creepy.
So that's one of the advantages of just being around a while.
If I were 25 and I got that same request, you know what I would have said?
Ah, free attention.
I'm all over it.
And by the way, OKDoomer, with a D as in dog, as a response to OKBoomer, works really well.
Because it does seem that the younger people Feel like everything is doomed.
Do you know why young people think everything is doomed?
Climate science is going to kill us, President Trump's going to blow up the world.
Do you know why? Because young people still believe that the news is legitimate.
Imagine, a lot of you are, let's say probably half of you are over 40, I'm guessing, roughly.
I saw my statistics recently, that's about right.
So about half of you are over 40.
Haven't you seen the doom and then, oh, just kidding, process just repeat itself?
We're all doomed. Oh, no, I guess it's okay.
Oh, no, we're going to die.
I guess not. Oh, we're running out of oil.
Not so much. Yeah, it's going to be a nuclear war.
Well, it didn't happen. If you see it enough, you become skeptical of everything else.
So the doomers, which is a perfect name for them because they've been sold this story of doom, are walking around in this weird doom bubble that I do not envy.
Now, when I was a child, I grew up in the era in which we thought Russia was going to nuke us at any moment.
We actually had a nuclear bomb shelter in my house.
Now, it wasn't very effective because it was just a basement.
But, you know, my father wasn't exactly a radiation expert, let's say, so he built a little bomb shelter in the basement, and I actually didn't think I would grow up to adulthood.
I actually believed the odds were very good that I would be killed in a nuclear war, and that was my childhood.
A childhood where you actually expected that there was a high likelihood you'd die in a nuclear fireball.
Alright, let's talk about impeachment.
Because I know you want to do that.
So I've been calling this an emotional impeachment.
And I don't think I've ever branded anything better.
Because once you consider that even the Democrats think there's no real chance that the President will be removed from his office, then what was the point?
Isn't the point of impeachment?
You're trying to remove him.
But if you know that's not going to work, why are you doing it?
Well, of course, there's the political part.
And Pelosi said it directly.
She said that the president would always have this stain of impeachment would be dogging him forever.
She used her own words. But she basically put it in terms of, ha-ha, I gotcha.
That's it. Ha-ha, I stained you.
That's why they did it?
Because it feels just personal and emotional and completely irrational.
Now, I get that they think it's going to work maybe for elections, but that would be dumb because I think they should have been able to predict that it would help his fundraising, it would galvanize his base.
Exactly what happened.
It's the same thing that happened to Bernie Sanders.
His fundraising went through the roof when Sanders, when Warren attacked him.
So, Was Pelosi not wise enough to know that this would work in the president's favor when there's a pretty good track record to suggest, especially with Bill Clinton, to suggest it probably would.
So if it wasn't to remove him from office, and it wasn't even to hurt him in the election, really, unless you make the case that it's all about getting Democratic senators elected the next time they have a chance to do that, It just looks like it was emotional.
It looked like it was an emotional impeachment.
So I've joked that so far the impeachment trial looks like a combination of three movies.
Did you see the little impeachment parade?
Okay, I watched the impeachment parade live because I thought it would be hilarious.
It was a little funnier than I had hoped.
Because they were all trying to act serious and somber after they'd all been yucking it up with Nancy handing out the 20 ceremonial pens.
They're trying not to look like they're happy about the day.
So they're doing the somber march.
We are sombering.
It is a solemn day.
Let us solemnly march with our little black suits.
And Nancy's pink, but we're wearing our little black suits.
And it looked like there were three movies that had been put together as a trilogy.
The first movie, if you've ever seen March of the Penguins, it looked like a bunch of penguins.
You know, you had Nadler there, the monarch penguin.
But they all sort of had these black suits and they all were like walking down, not talking.
So you got March of the Penguins.
Then, of course, the trial is just going to be dumb and dumber.
I don't know how it could go any other way.
It's going to be Dumb and Dumber.
You don't have to wait for the details.
That's what it's going to be. And in the end, we know how it ends.
Titanic. It's a three-movie trilogy.
March of the Penguins, Dumb and Dumber, and Titanic.
That's the whole impeachment trial.
Boom. Do you want to know how the impeachment should go?
Well, let me tell you. I tweeted this out.
And, you know, people keep accusing me, of course, of always supporting the president and his team and everything.
But I've said over and over that I think the Republicans have totally botched their defense of the president in terms of this whole Ukraine thing and the quid pro quo and all that.
Here's why it's botched.
And the Senate has a chance to make good on this.
So here's what I tweeted yesterday.
In terms of how the Senate should handle the impeachment trial.
Two steps.
Step number one, ask both the Democrats, their top lawyer, which lawyer was it?
Feldman? One of the Democrats' lawyers admitted in the last round of impeachment hearings, he admitted that there was a legitimate reason to look into Burisma and the Bidens.
So question number one, you ask a Democrat lawyer, and then you ask a Republican lawyer.
Doesn't matter who. Turley could be Dershowitz.
And you say, based on what we know, was there a legitimate U.S. national interest in understanding what was going on with Burisma and the Bidens?
Now the answer is going to be yes.
Because both the Democrats and the Republicans are going to say, yeah, kind of had to look into that.
Step two, vote.
Just vote. Because that's the only thing that matters.
The Democrats have correctly, completely bamboozled and owned the Republicans by making them talk about the topic of whether it was for the President's own self-interest.
It's not relevant.
It's not. And every moment that the Republicans argued the case of was it a quid pro quo, any of those details about who said what, who wrote what, who was in the meeting, as soon as the Republicans engage in any of that, they've lost. Because most of the trick from the Democrats is to get them to engage in all the details.
Because the more you're thinking about the details, the more you're thinking about impeachment, and the more it's bad for the President.
It just gets you in that, my God, there's all this stuff.
Why are we talking about it?
It must be important because we're talking about it.
Complete mistake. Total mistake.
Even the House should have done the same thing.
We've got one question.
Was it legitimate for the United States to look into this Burisma-Biden situation?
The answer is yes.
Democrats will say yes.
Republicans will say yes.
That's the end. It doesn't matter if it's also good for the President's re-election.
It doesn't matter. Completely irrelevant.
The Senate should say, this is a big complicated thing, but it comes down to one question.
Was there a U.S. legitimate interest?
Yes, say Democrats.
Yes, say Republicans.
Bipartisan. Let's vote.
If they have witnesses, well, the only reason to have witnesses is if they already know what Bolton and anybody else is going to say, and that it doesn't add anything to it, and what they'd really love is to bring Hunter Biden in.
Now, the Democrats are arguing that bringing Hunter Biden in doesn't make sense Because he's not a fact witness, meaning he's not a direct witness to any of the conversations between Ukraine and the president and the president and his staff.
He's outside of that circle, so therefore he's irrelevant.
Wrong. Completely wrong.
Why? Because there's only one question.
The one question that matters, did the United States have a legitimate reason to look into Burisma and the Bidens?
How do you know the answer to that question without talking to Hunter Biden and saying, we've got a few questions for you.
You know, it might not answer all of our questions, but we'll at least find out if there's something that was sketchy enough that the president had a legitimate reason to look into it.
Could be there's nothing there.
I mean, nothing beyond the obvious swampiness that we see.
So that's the way it should go.
There's this other sub-story about Giuliani telling Lev Parnas, who was, I guess, some loose associate who was helping over in Ukraine.
And apparently there's a distinction that the Democrats are trying to make between Giuliani working for the government, doing what's good for the United States, versus what's good only for Trump's re-election.
In other words, only something that's personally good for him.
And Giuliani apparently was telling people, including Lev Parnas, that he wanted to be very clear that he represents the president, not the government.
So he's the president's personal attorney, not the government.
How should you interpret that?
Well, one way to interpret is, oh, that's proof.
It's proof it wasn't for the country.
It's proof it was just for Trump's own good reelection.
Now, that's only one way to interpret it.
Here's the other way to interpret it.
Giuliani did not have official government, let's say, portfolio.
He was not appointed.
He was not elected.
He had not registered as some kind of a lobbyist, I'm sure.
From a legal perspective, if you're a lawyer, Wouldn't you like to make it clear to everybody that you're not officially working for the US government?
Probably. It probably has some specific legal importance that he needed to say, no, I'm not an official emissary from the government, because I would imagine that would put him under some different legal constraints.
But here's the thing.
If Giuliani says, I represent Trump, can you separate that from From Trump's job.
The answer is you can't.
I've had lawyers.
Lots of lawyers. In fact, I fired one of my lawyers last week.
I got lots of lawyers for different phases of my business.
There's the contract lawyers.
There's other kinds of lawyers.
And here's the thing.
Do my lawyers, no matter what field they're working in, Do my lawyers make a distinction between me personally and me, the creator of Dilber, who has a job and a public figure?
The answer is no. No, they don't.
Because if they did, I'd fire them.
Because I am a complete person who is me personally and me, my profession.
You can't separate that.
So what does it mean to say that Giuliani is the president's personal lawyer?
It doesn't mean He's not concerned with the job of being president.
Of course he is. Because otherwise you couldn't serve the client, which is the person.
So, I don't know that that means anything, that Giuliani said he's personally representing the president, because you can't really separate out the profession from that.
It's not a thing. Now, here's the funniest part.
So yesterday I heard this story That I didn't even understand that it didn't make any sense.
I'm noticing my numbers are way down today.
It must be because the impeachment's on?
Are people watching the impeachment live right now?
So this guy, Lev Parnes...
Well, we got from the documents that were produced that this guy, Robert Hyde, who is a prominent Trump donor, so some rich Trump donor, was making...
In some messages that Lev Parnes was suggesting that he had the Ukraine ambassador, Yovanovitch, under some kind of surveillance.
And I saw those messages and I thought, what?
Because when I read it, did I have something on my lip?
When I read it, I did not get that out of it.
So a lot of people were reading those messages and they seemed to be getting some kind of a A point out of it that I wasn't getting when I read it.
And it took me a day to figure out what they were seeing.
And what they were seeing is that it seemed to indicate that this rich Trump donor, Robert Hyde, somehow was involved in direct monitoring or investigating or stalking this ambassador in Ukraine.
When I read it, I just thought, well, that just sounds like crazy talk.
So my impression was, it looks like crazy talk.
I didn't think anything of it.
And I didn't even know what other people were seeing.
So he was asked by, and this is just so funny, this was my favorite part of the day.
So he gets interviewed by Rachel Maddow.
And he says, no, that text message you saw was just this Hyde guy.
He was just drunk.
Now, Maddow, cleverly, because she's very smart, whether you like Rachel Maddow or not, we'd all agree she's super smart.
So she sees the flaw in this, and she says that Hyde's texts, which were sort of on the same similar topic, went on for several days.
So the explanation that he was drunk doesn't really fit the evidence.
And here's just the best thing.
Parnasse quickly noted, he's drunk the whole time, Parnasse responded.
He wakes up and he's drunk.
He starts at six.
I've never seen him not drunk.
That's the star witness.
The best evidence they've ever had against this president is somebody who starts drinking at 6 in the morning.
Oh, can it be better than that?
It can't be better than that.
I mean, it really can't be better than that.
So not only is Rachel Maddow interviewing the person, this Lev Parnas, who, based on just the little bit I've heard, I thought...
Was the least credible person on the planet Earth.
And I thought to myself, you know, your whole case is built around this Lev Parnas guy, and from what I can tell, I mean, I don't know him personally, but it feels like he might be the least credible person I've ever heard in my life.
But he's not. The least credible person you've ever heard of in your life is the guy who was texting him, drunk at six in the morning.
That guy was a little less credible.
So if you look back at the messages and you say to yourself, okay, now let's put the drunk filter on it.
Do those look like drunk messages?
Yeah. Yeah, they do.
They look pretty drunk to me.
So there's that.
Devin Nunes getting a little heat because I guess he had said that he didn't know who Lev Parnas was.
But we have now learned that there was, I think, one phone call that Nunes took, which he says he did not remember.
Now, if you're Democrats, how do you react to that?
Liar! Liar!
He's a liar! Because he said he didn't know who this...
Lev Parnass guy was, but now we have proof that he had a phone call with him.
Liar! Well, that's what inexperienced people say.
Here's what experienced people say.
They say exactly what Devin Nunes said.
He said, I'm in Congress.
I'm paraphrasing.
Do you know how many people we meet and talk to in an average day?
A lot! How many of them would he remember their names and have some lasting memory of?
10%? 20%?
Of all the people he meets, how many does he actually remember their names a year later?
No more than 10%.
So if you're an inexperienced person or, let's say, an artist, you might say to yourself, Well, if he talked to the guy, he obviously knows him.
If you've done anything in your life that involves meeting lots of people, and this is my life as well, do you know how many people I meet?
Do you know how many people send me a message and I communicate with them?
Today, before I got on here, I communicated with maybe...
Twelve people whose names I'd never seen before that I actually directly had a communication with.
Now most of them were on LinkedIn.
People were messaging me and I was just saying, hey, responding to queries and questions and stuff.
So now there are twelve people just this morning, just today, in my life, I'm just a cartoonist, but in my life, twelve new people entered my life.
Every one of them will remember that they communicated with me.
Because I'm the Dilbert guy.
How many of them will I remember their name if I saw it again and they say, hey, do you remember we talked?
None. Probably none.
I might remember the topic, but I'm not going to remember even one of their names.
So what are the odds that Devin Nunes is telling the truth that it was just one of many phone calls and he doesn't remember it?
I'd say close to 100%.
All right. You can't read minds.
You never know. You could be wrong.
But that's completely credible.
Completely credible.
So the people who say that he should have remembered are just inexperienced.
They're not just wrong.
They're probably just inexperienced.
Alright, so...
Let's see what else we got here.
Hilariously, on Jeopardy!, I think it was yesterday...
One of the questions was about Adam Schiff.
So Adam Schiff was the answer to a Jeopardy question, and none of the contestants knew who he was.
So if you ever wondered, hey, is the rest of the country paying attention like we are?
Because most of you are probably political junkies if you're watching this periscope.
And it's easy to forget the rest of the country isn't paying attention to any of this.
None of it. Three very smart people on Jeopardy didn't even know who this guy was when they saw a picture of him.
Now, it's extra funny to me, because I've been a Jeopardy answer maybe three or four times, and they always get it right.
So when the Jeopardy question slash answer is about me personally, I think at least one of the contestants has gotten it right every time.
Sometimes it's about the Dilbert comic, sometimes it's about me.
So I think I'm three to one advantage over Adam Schiff on the all-important Jeopardy scale.
So there was gigantic news yesterday, I mean really big news, about Trump signing phase one of the China trade deal.
I mean that's big, big news.
So I went to read about it, On the CNN website, but it didn't have anything.
It's the biggest news.
And I looked at the CNN website and I'm like, all right, let's see what CNN says about the China trade deal.
Crickets. There was one tiny little article over on the non-emphasized part of the page about something bizarre that happened during the signing.
There was something weird happened.
And I think it was just because Trump talked about impeachment or something.
Whatever it was. That's it?
That's like one of the biggest stories of all time.
And it didn't even make the front page of CNN. Gordon Chang, who I quote lots of times, so he's an expert on all things Trump.
In terms of China and North Korea and other stuff.
And basically...
Oh, this was CNN's headline.
The little squib they had.
Trump's China trade deal signing takes a surreal turn.
That's it. There was something surreal about the signing itself.
Alright, so Gordon Chang basically said the deal is inadequate.
It's a fake deal because China is not going to do anything they say.
And that the part about protecting intellectual property is totally fake because they still have the ability to monitor and steal anything in the country.
So anything that has an electronic communication to it, they're going to pick up in the country.
So it's easy for China to say, oh yeah, we won't force you to turn over your technology to us.
They don't need to. They'll just steal it.
So they can actually agree to it because they're not giving anything up.
Well, we'll just steal it anyway.
So Gordon Chang says it's a fake deal, basically.
I shouldn't put words in his mouth, but certainly that it's a deal with some substantial holes in it.
Do I think that's true?
Yes. Yes, I do.
Do you know what's missing and they haven't talked about?
Fentanyl. Fentanyl is missing.
So I'm not a fan of the China deal, because if fentanyl is not the first thing that you deal with, You're not dealing with a country you should be doing any business with at all.
So we just made a business deal with a country that's knowingly killing tens of thousands of Americans every year.
I would call that a gigantic failure.
So I'll put that in my portfolio of criticisms of Trump.
So when everybody says, hey, you keep agreeing with him all the time, put that in there too.
Phase 1 trade deal I would call a gigantic failure because they shouldn't even be able to negotiate until they shut down the fentanyl dealers.
That should be a ticket to the negotiations.
If that's in Phase 2, really?
Phase 2? You're going to wait for that?
Or it's not even part of the deal?
Somebody said Trump did.
Trump talked about it.
He mentioned arrests.
Well, until the major...
I'll wait to see an article on that.
So I'm being corrected in the comments that he did mention it, but I don't see it in the news anywhere, so I'll have to dig a little deeper.
It's not in the headlines. He mentioned at the ceremony, but it doesn't mean that they've actually done it.
So here's the thing, and I'll say this a million times until this message is all you can think about on fentanyl.
There's one guy in China who's the guy.
He's the main fentanyl dealer.
There's probably lesser ones.
But there's one who our government, we have his picture, we have his name, and 60 minutes actually found him and talked to him.
He's not even hard to find.
He's a public figure.
We know his name, we know his picture, and we told China, this is the guy.
If you don't hear that guy's in jail or executed, they're not trying.
So anything else they do is just BS. Alright.
So call me a giant skeptic on the China deal.
I say decouple.
Let's decouple. Alright.
Let's see what else we've got going on here.
Yeah, so somebody's saying in the comments, the number one guy needs to be dealt with.
I had one critic today on Twitter, which is strange.
Usually there are more. And he tweeted back to me that I'm a dishonest clown.
I'm a dishonest clown.
So I tweeted back to him, how long have you been involved in the arts?
If you're new to this, you know that I mock people for being artists because artists do not have a good view of the world.
Had he been an economist, probably would have given me some reasons for disagreeing.
So I said to him, Michael Grant, who called me a dishonest clown, I said, how long have you been involved in the arts?
And he responded back, he's written 150 books over 40 years.
And so I said, good for you.
Very productive. I no longer want to get into debates with artists.
I'm just going to note their artists and then move on.
If you haven't tried this, you really need to.
Because somebody says you're an artist.
Let me give some context.
Thank you for asking.
First of all, I'm not much of an artist, but it is true that I write and I draw for a living.
In my book, Loser Think, which I'm sure all of you have ordered by now, if you haven't already read it, I talk about how having exposure to multiple fields gives you more windows into every topic.
So I'm an artist, but I've got a degree in economics, I've got an MBA in business, and I've worked in corporate areas and everything from marketing to strategy to you name it.
So, in my particular case, art is my job, but my actual experience is much broader than that.
Yes, that is what I wrote in my book.
It's called Loser Think.
I'll put it back here so you can't help but look at it.
Alright. What else we got here?
We got... So, do you know the musical artist Akon?
A-K-O-N. Those of you who are not up on your music, he's one of the most successful artists in the world.
And I think he came from Senegal, or that's where his family roots are, I can't remember, in Africa.
But he's building his own city there.
So Akon decided to build his own city in Senegal.
And he's They're going to have their own cryptocurrency.
And I love this.
I absolutely love this.
Now, I'm not going to say that Akon is going to build the best city.
What I love is that he's trying.
And he even says the same thing.
What's the point of having a billion dollars if you're not going to go fix stuff?
I'm a big fan.
I mean, I was a fan of his music.
But when you see an artist of this stature say, what's the point of having a billion dollars if you're not trying to fix the world?
And then he goes out and he tries to build a city in Senegal.
I don't even care if it works.
I love what this guy's doing for the world, for the way we think.
I just love that he's A-B testing.
I'm sure he wants this to be the thing that works, but whether it works or not, we're going to learn something.
And maybe the city after that or the city after that is a good one.
But good going, Akon.
I like to think that in some ways I would be surprised if Kanye is not somehow an influence on this, directly or indirectly.
Because, you know, Kanye is trying also separately to design and build lower-cost structures for people to live in.
Which is good stuff. All right.
I told you one of the tricks that CNN uses with its opinion pieces is that they'll make a claim about, usually, Trump, how bad he is, and then you'll have to read way, way, way down the article to see why they say it.
So why are you saying that?
And there's just this best example, one of their usual pundits who just writes an anti-Trump piece every day for their website.
This is how he starts it.
This is on CNN.com.
President Trump is not waiting to be acquitted of impeachable crimes.
So first of all, he says that the crimes are impeachable.
That's not true. So the very first sentence tries to get you to uncritically accept that these are impeachable crimes.
Well, he was impeached, but they're not really impeachable crimes, because we're going to find out that the Senate is going to throw it out.
So I suppose maybe technically it's true, but they're not crimes.
There's no crimes involved, or even alleged.
A CNN, in news site, very first sentence, accuses Donald Trump of having impeachable crimes.
And yet, their own reporting has never suggested a crime.
At least in terms of what's impeachable and what's on the impeachable list.
And then it goes on, to show that no one can stop him doing what he wants to do.
What? That's what Trump is doing?
He's trying to show...
The world that no one can stop him?
Is that mind reading?
Where do you get that?
What factual basis do you have that Trump is, quote, trying to show that no one can stop him doing what he wants to do?
That's not an evidence.
There's no evidence of that at all.
And he doesn't even offer an argument.
He just says it like it's a fact.
Then he says, no constitution, democratic house, code of accepted presidential behavior, foreign Islamic, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is going to reign him in.
So basically he's saying nothing's going to reign him in.
So the tenor of this is that he's going to become a dictator because he's going to get away with this impeachable stuff that doesn't exist.
And then way down the article, I'm waiting for the actual reasons, Because so far it's just a bunch of insults and accusations that don't match the facts.
But way down, I'm waiting for, well, there must be some reasons.
So let's get to the reasons.
So after an entire page of insults and libelous claims, such as crimes, here's his reason.
A week after a showdown with Iran nearly erupted into a new war, The administration is still defying congressional demands for more information about the rationale for killing Tehran's top general.
Now, this entire story is based on CNN and other people misquoting the president.
So, when you finally get to a reason, it's not even a real one.
It's based on a misquote.
Because what the president said was that he believes...
Four embassies would have been targeted.
They changed that into, he claimed he saw intel that four specific embassies were being targeted.
He never said that. He stated his belief that four embassies would be targeted.
He's right, he's wrong, it doesn't matter, it was a belief.
CNN turned it into a statement of fact, fact-checked it, turned it into a A statement that he was lying and then turned it into more of an argument that nothing will stop him and he's going to only do undemocratic things before he becomes a second-term dictator.
This is so far from reasonable discourse.
Rolling Stone had an article by Matt Taibbi who, what did he call...
I want to see exactly what he called CNN. I forgot to write down this quote.
So Matt Taibbi just went after CNN, especially for that part where Abby Phillip treated the disagreement between Warren and Bernie as being Warren is true because it must be true what Warren is saying Because CNN has reported it as fact.
Now, as smart people have pointed out, a number of them, you've seen a bunch of people say this, the reason that CNN reported it as a fact, well, it had to be one of two people told them, because there were only two people in the room, Bernie or Elizabeth Warren.
And then she said, and then a And then I think it was Abby Phillips said that Elizabeth Warren confirmed was CNN reported.
No. Obviously Elizabeth Warren, or her people, are the people who told CNN in the first place.
If Warren confirmed it, there's no confirmation.
It's still the same source.
It's one source said something that the other source says didn't happen.
That's it. So for CNN to treat it like it's a fact because they got it from Warren and then Warren said it was true so it was confirmed, they turned one fact into two facts right in front of you.
They're not even trying to hide it.
So as Tucker Carlson pointed out and Matt Taibbi pointed out in Rolling Stone, CNN has just stopped any pretense of not being a political player.
Any thought of being a news organization is sort of out the door.
And it's amazing to watch, because as I said before, the doomers still think it's news.
The doomers watch MSNBC and they watch CNN, and they actually think they're watching the news.
They're not. It's not the news anymore.
That's what it used to be.
I would like to close by saying, have you ever tried to mail a letter recently?
So yesterday, I had these W-2s that come to me.
They come in these envelopes this size.
And I needed to mail them out to my couple assistants.
And I thought to myself, how do you mail things?
It's been so long since I put a stamp on an envelope and mailed it that I was having a little trouble remembering how to do it.
So the first thing I needed to do is get these things called stamps.
And I thought I had some in a drawer.
You know, there's a little junk drawer in my kitchen.
And I was sure I saw some stamps in there some time ago.
So I looked through the drawer, and I looked again, because I knew there were stamps, and I couldn't find them.
So I looked again, and then I really looked.
I took each item out and really looked, and the stamps were not in the drawer.
Now, all of the men watching this know what happened next.
I don't even have to say the next part, do I? So finally, after several times of looking through this one drawer, I didn't look anywhere else, because I knew it was in the drawer.
I looked and looked, couldn't find it.
I went to Christina, and I said, Can you help me find the stamps?
I think they're in this drawer, but I can't find them.
So she said sure, but I think we said it when I was in the car and we didn't write it down to remind ourselves and forgot.
And I thought about it again, but she was busy.
I thought about it again, but she was out of the house.
I thought about it again, but I was busy.
It took me one week To find a time when Christine and I were both available at the same time and in my kitchen so that she could open the drawer and do this.
Here you go. Here are your stamps that are right here.
Here you go. Now, you already knew that's what was going to happen, right?
It's a basic male-female difference.
When I look in the drawer, I just see noise and it's really hard for me to pick out an item.
When she looks in the drawer, she sees all the items.
Like, I don't know how.
It's just some kind of male-female difference, I guess.
She sees them all. So she says, oh, here's your stamps.
I spent probably 30 minutes total on different occasions looking through that drawer without finding those stamps.
So now I've got my stamps.
And I thought to myself, how do you know how many stamps to put on a letter?
Because it's not a regular-sized letter.
So, I've got to go to the website for the USPS.com, and I'm looking for the information on how much postage to put on it.
And luckily I've got a postal scale behind me.
So I take out my postal scale, I go to the website, and there's no example of this envelope.
You had to sort of guess.
Well, it might be sort of this thing or that thing, but not really a direct answer.
So I'm sort of guessing.
So then I use my scale, and the battery's dead.
So now I've got to go find a battery to put in my scale, so I can weigh my envelope, so I can look on the website, figure out what the postage is, get my stamps, put it on the letter.
Now, I finally figure out roughly what the postage would be, but I figure I'll double it because I don't want to go light.
So I take my stamps, and they're these forever stamps.
And I look at them and I go, uh, what's a forever stamp?
I mean, I think I know, but I'm not positive I know.
Does a forever stamp work for any kind of envelope?
Is it a specific value, or does it say that anything that's this kind of envelope will always be this?
So I have to Google, what's a forever stamp?
But I don't have enough forever stamps.
I've got some other stamps with a value on them.
So I'm looking at these and I'm like...
I just put too much on it.
So I just over-postaged it.
And now I've got to take them somewhere.
And I'm like, well, I could put them in the mailbox and put the thing up, but sometimes they don't take it.
So I ended up driving to the UPS store, because I had another package I had to drop off anyway.
I think altogether I spent half a day trying to put stamps on an envelope and mail it.
And I thought to myself, no, I did not lick the stamps.
They were self-licking stamps.
Man, we've got to get rid of the post office.
Let me ask you this.
Let's say if Amazon.com...
Offer to buy the post office and privatize it.
Would you be okay with that?
I would. Because that post office should be taking the mail that I get, scanning it, and emailing it to me.
Period. I should never get a piece of mail.
Let me tell you my other mail problem.
So several years ago, I created a rule where no US mail can enter my house.
It can only enter the garage because the garbage is out there.
So I always sort my mail in the garage, because if it gets in the house, it becomes a big pile of garbage in your house.
And almost all of the U.S. mail is garbage.
Almost all of it. So I sort it in my garage so that it can't get in my house.
But my mailman keeps thwarting me, because if he has a package, he'll bring it to my door, and then to do me a favor, he brings the mail also to the door.
And I'm like...
Mailman. I love my mailman.
He's a great guy. But I don't like mail in my house.
Can you bring it to my garage?
There should never be mail in my house.
Alright, that's enough on that.
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