Episode 801 Scott Adams: David Mittelman on DNA Opportunities, Sour Don Lemon, Impeachment, China
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Guest David Mittelman discusses DNAsolves.com
A crime solving DNA database for law enforcement
Bernie's poison pill option to ensure he wins
Alan Dershowitz:
The articles of impeachment are NOT impeachable
Closing our airports to flights from China?
Don Lemon and guests denigrating Trump supporters
Prime Minister Netanyahu and the potential for Middle East peace
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So now I do. And today is going to be a very special day.
We're going to be talking about impeachment and China and coronavirus and all that.
But before we do that, I'm going to bring on a special guest to talk about some updates in the world of DNA, some stuff that you will be interested in, because it will matter to you either now or later.
But first, if you'd like to participate in the simultaneous sip, it doesn't take much.
It takes a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind, and fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, The thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
Go. Now let me check to see if my guest has found us.
I'm going to bring on my guest and introduce him.
David, can you hear me?
My guest today is David Middleman.
You've seen him before. He's the founder and CEO of Othrum, a biometrics company that uses DNA sequencing and genomics to advance human identification, and especially in the crime-solving domain, which is some of the interesting parts.
David, how are you this morning?
I'm doing good. How are you?
I'm great. Thanks for joining us to catch us up on some stuff.
One of the interesting things I wanted to ask you about I believe Othram has started a database where you can voluntarily have your DNA stored there for crime-solving purposes.
Am I saying that right?
Yes, yes. So what's the name of that and how do people participate if they want to?
So we started a database.
It's called dnasolves.com.
And so you've probably heard, folks have heard from watching your show as well as from reading about the news about the Golden State Killer and a number of other folks that have been caught, victims identified, all because there's genealogical data that's been out on public databases to help triangulate and identify who unknown folks are.
And so what we've done with DNA Solves is we've built a database that has nothing to do with You know, medical research or genealogy research, right?
This is a database that is broadly available for folks that have been tested and want to contribute their DNA towards identifying the victim or solving a crime.
How would they do that?
So they've been tested for some other purpose and it's in some other database?
How do they get it into your database?
Yeah, so folks have tested with, you know, recreational testing companies such as Ancestry.com or 23andMe, when you test to learn something exciting about yourself, you can then take that profile, that information, and download it from your site.
And then you can upload it.
Some people upload it to genealogical databases.
Some will upload it through tools that predict medical traits.
We've built a database that allows you to upload it so that in the event that you're genetically distantly related to someone, It might be a perpetrator or a victim in a crime.
We can use your data point as kind of like a stepping stone to identify who that person is.
So if I've got, let's say I'm afraid that there's somebody in my family, could be a distant cousin, but somebody in my family who might be a serial killer, and I don't want to turn him in, I could just register my DNA and let the system do the rest, couldn't I? Yes, and if you know that your sibling is a serial killer and you don't want them to get caught, then you would specifically not upload your data to the database.
Now, my data is in 23andMe, and I have not authorized anybody, at least not that I'm aware of, unless I did it accidentally.
I'm not aware of telling them to share it or download it.
How likely is it that my DNA would be available to law enforcement right now?
With no change, could they get at it?
There's been discussion about whether or not there's an ability to essentially, like they used to do in the 90s with the ISPs, kind of use the court system to request data from these companies.
I think 23andMe has a very clear position.
They don't work with law enforcement.
I think they've done a stellar job of protecting data.
And in fact, if you've been a 23andMe customer for a long period of time, you'll notice they used to have like a third-party API Where you could authorize people to look at your data, they killed it.
I would say 23andMe is a very secure place to keep your information.
The only way your data leaves 23andMe is if you go in there and specifically click a button that says, I would like my raw data.
And again, some people will do that for a variety of reasons, research, genealogy, whatever.
But 23andMe will not move your data on your behalf, even if you ask them to.
You have to actively pull it yourself.
So, what percentage of all Americans, let's say adults, what percentage of them have at this point at least one relative who's close enough that would help identify them, who's in one of these databases that law enforcement can get at?
Are we closer to 10% or closer to 90%, meaning that you've got at least a cousin or something who's in the database?
So, GEDmatch, which was a public database, before they moved to the opt-in model, I think there was about a million profiles in there.
And I think with that size of a database, there was pretty good odds that closer to 90% of people would have some connectivity to someone that's tested.
It may not be a first or second cousin, but at least a third cousin or closer.
And so And how close does a relative have to be before it becomes, let's say, useful for law enforcement?
I know every situation is going to be different, but you said a third cousin.
Can you go even further?
You can. You can.
And it obviously depends.
It depends on luck and the size of your family, and even some extent, like where in the world you're from.
Obviously, Americans are enriched for these databases.
But yeah, the answer to your question is that if you have a first, second, or third cousin, and a third cousin is pretty far out, it's very easy to then use that to figure out the identity of an unknown DNA sample.
If you go further out, you can solve it.
But as you move past fourth and fifth cousin, it becomes more difficult.
I made a provocative claim without really knowing what I'm talking about the other day, and I said that this technology is very close to making all serial crimes, at least the violent ones, to make all serial crimes solvable by the end of the year.
In other words, If somebody's doing a serial sex crime or serial killer, they're always going to leave DNA, wouldn't you say?
Would you say it's close to 100% of the time?
I mean, it's a matter of time, yeah.
And the way technology has moved, you know, Offerum, unlike, you know, so Offerum's a laboratory, so we actually work on not just the integration of data, but the collection of DNA, and we've been able to collect, you know, decent amounts of DNA from touch DNA. It's not just that you're leaving DNA, it's that the limit of what you can leave and still generate useful information for has continuously dropped as well.
I would say you're right.
If you're a serial rapist, you're probably going to leave DNA at some point somewhere.
How many people do you think have already figured out that they're adopted or at least not related to their father?
Without doing much work.
In other words, are the databases such that if you've done one of these tests and you download your own data and upload it somewhere else, is there any way that you can just find out if you're really related to your parents?
There is, and since that's a non-law enforcement application, you can do that at 20B or Ancestry.
They have giant databases.
23andMe's database is over 10 million people.
I think Ancestry just announced that they surpassed 16 million people.
So with that size of a database, it would be very straightforward to look for what they call MPEs, which are nonpaternal events.
So situations where your father is not your father.
There's stories all the time.
People discover relatives they didn't know they had.
On the other side, and kind of the less cheery side, people discover that relationships that they thought were real or not real.
So, and it's a personal decision if you go on that journey, but there's a story it seems like all the time.
And that's actually how things were done prior to this application to law enforcement.
I mean, it's basically taking the adoption agencies and these kind of family mysteries and applying it towards folks who are not your family, right, that could have been involved in a crime.
I know you're not specifically working on the medical stuff, but you probably know about it.
I keep hearing about there are some people who might have a natural immunity to, let's say, cancer or certain types of cancer.
Are you going to be able to identify people who have DNA that just won't get certain kinds of problems and therefore we can Would we be able to commercialize that and say, if these people can't get this disease, we can figure out what it is and take some proteins or whatever the hell you do?
Is that a thing? Is that a real thing?
It is a thing. So I will tell you, in my opinion, it's a really good idea to separate medicine and medical traits from human identification.
And so 23andMe, for example, doesn't participate in human identification.
But they do medical research.
And what you're describing is kind of the direction 23andMe is headed, right?
Are there DNA components that would help predict if someone responds positively to a drug or not?
Are there new drugs that can be developed based on DNA markers that would make them more effective in some folks that otherwise are benefiting from a drug?
But at Offerum, we're the inverse company.
So what you're saying, I think, is very likely and true.
But at Offerum, it's not about a science issue.
It's more of a policy issue.
We simply do not use any information for medical work.
And if you look at the dojsolves.com website, you'll see that we're very clear the only application, and this is consistent with the DOJ policy, the only application is human identification, because we don't want to create any anxiety or Or make people think they're mixing multiple topics together, trick them into participating.
People should come to the site for no reason other than to solve a crime, not because they're trying to cure cancer or find a new drug.
All right. I can tell my audience is itching for me to talk about the impeachment.
They're coming here primed.
So just tell us again how they can find this database to voluntarily upload their data if they want to help with law enforcement.
Yeah, so the website is dnasolves.com, and anyone can participate.
And obviously, whoever it is, we appreciate it.
And you'll probably be seeing in the news over the next year or two, just dozens and dozens, not just perpetrators found that commit crimes, but I think a lot of victims that otherwise would have remained anonymous being identified and being re-anchored into society.
So I think that's a great thing as well.
David, thanks for coming back.
We're going to have you on in the future.
I know there's going to be lots more DNA news, so it's great having somebody who's immersed in it to sort us out.
Thanks so much, David. Thanks for having me.
Take care. Let's talk about the news, some other stuff that's happening.
Here's an interesting idea.
Bernie Sanders You may have the opportunity to completely win the nomination by using a poison pill.
Now, a poison pill is a term from mergers and acquisitions of companies.
What it means is if you don't want your company to get purchased, you can pass some internal rules that are called a poison pill, meaning that if somebody tries to buy your company, they will wish they hadn't because the purchase will trigger something.
For example, if you didn't want your company to be bought by a larger company, but you were a public company, so there's nothing you could do to stop it because they could just buy your stock and own you, you could say, I'll pass a rule that says all the employees get a 500% bonus if we get purchased, which would make you unpurchaseable because the moment you were purchased, all the money in the company would be given to the employees and the purchaser would be out of luck.
So that's called a poison pill.
There's something you do that makes you unbuyable.
Bernie Sanders could do a version of this, just by analogy here, he could do a version of this if his supporters decided to claim that if Bernie doesn't get the nomination, they'll vote for Trump.
In other words, if you can get enough Bernie Sanders people to say, either signing up or they sign a petition or just say it on social media, if they say, look, if Bernie gets screwed out of the nomination again, two years in a row, or two cycles in a row, that they're just going to protest to vote for Trump.
Now, there are a lot of people who probably believe that, so it wouldn't be much of a stretch.
Now think about this.
It would make it impossible for any of the other Democrats to get elected in the general election.
So Biden's argument that he's the only one who could beat Trump just disappears.
Because the moment anybody but Bernie gets elected, The protest vote kicks in.
It's a poison pill, and it makes it impossible for the actual nominee to get elected.
Now, you could say to yourself, well, every politician has that option, right?
Anybody could do that, so why are you saying this about Bernie?
No, not everybody could do that.
There is something special about Bernie's supporters.
Bernie's supporters are just sort of, I would say, a mirror version of Trump supporters in this one special way.
I mean, they favor different policies, obviously, but in one way they're the same.
Trump supporters wanted somebody to burn down the system.
Bernie supporters want somebody to burn down the system.
So if they don't get somebody to burn down the system, they're not going to be terribly concerned about who it is, because it's just going to be more of what we already had.
So I think Bernie supporters could actually form a poison pill and make it impossible for anybody else to win the nomination and have a fair chance of winning in the general.
But I don't know that that will happen, but the play is there.
Let's talk about the impeachment.
I've been watching, of course, the president's attorneys argue against impeachment, and I've got a few observations in no particular order.
Pam Bondi made a really good argument that Burisma is sketchy and that Biden's association with it just needs to be looked into.
That is key.
Because if you accept that Burisma was worth looking into, then that's the end of the story.
Because that's what the president asked for.
Obviously, it would have a national interest.
And there you are.
There's nothing else to be said as long as Burisma was worth looking into.
And Pam Bondi made that argument.
Now, there's one part of her case which I don't know why all conservatives keep saying this.
Because it's just...
Inaccurate, as far as I can tell.
And that is that there's something important about the fact that Biden asked for the prosecutor in Ukraine to be fired when that prosecutor either had an open case or some kind of paperwork involved about looking into Burisma.
Trump supporters and lawyers are saying, well, that just shows that Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to do something.
But in fact, it's a ridiculous argument because Biden was doing what was national policy.
It was national policy that that guy was rotten, that he wasn't really going after Burisma.
Lots of other entities wanted him gone.
So I think, including that part of the argument, In why the Burisma-Biden thing is all sketchy, I think that just really weakened the argument, because it's a part of the argument that is just demonstrably false.
If you make an argument with a fact that is just so easily debunked, that's just not a strong play.
I thought Pam Bondi made a good argument that Burisma is dirty and worth looking into, but that one fact Let's talk about Alan Dershowitz.
Now, I just caught up with his presentation.
I watched it on delay, and as I imagined, it was a total kill shot.
If you think that Alan Dershowitz made a good presentation, It doesn't matter what anybody else says.
It doesn't.
Because he made a very convincing argument, very convincing, that the articles of impeachment are not impeachable offenses.
And the argument goes to what is high crimes and misdemeanors.
And Dershowitz walked through the entire history of it, what the various founders who were important to it, what they said.
What people misinterpret about it because they've conflated things and he clears that up.
So he gives you a real clean history of how we got here.
And I would say it was 100% persuasive.
You know, obviously people will just stick to their sides because they want to.
But if you were even a little bit open-minded and you heard his presentation, you would say to yourself, oh yeah, They really did mean something like a crime or something that's so like a crime, even if it's technically not a crime, it's still a crime.
The example he used was, what if the president did something terrible, such as taking a bribe or whatever, but it wasn't on American soil?
It was in some country where it wasn't illegal or it couldn't be prosecuted.
Is that impeachable? Well, yes, because that crime is exactly a crime in our country, and even though there's a technical reason why he couldn't be prosecuted, it's no doubt about it, it's a crime.
That would be crime-like, so that would be impeachable.
But as Dershowitz points out, there is no law against abuse of power, nor, and this is the important part, nor could there be.
Not only is there not a law against abuse of power, But the framers were very clear, and Dershowitz walks you through their thinking, about how you can't have a vague standard.
Because if you have a vague standard, like what is abuse of power?
You can't even really tell when it's happened.
As long as you can have that kind of vague standard, then it makes the presidency a puppet of the House and the Senate, I guess.
So Congress would actually own the presidency if they could get rid of a president just by claiming something they did was an abuse of power, because apparently every president abuses their power according to someone.
So you can never have a constitutional rule about removing a president that is so subject to interpretation, you can't even tell if the standard has been met.
That's all you need to know.
In fact, there's nothing more predictive about all this legal stuff Then if you see that there's something where legal experts can't even agree if any kind of a crime has happened.
Anytime you're in that situation, you're going to go free.
It doesn't matter if you're president and somebody's trying to impeach you.
It doesn't matter if you get picked up on the street for some alleged crime.
If lawyers look at the activity and they're not arguing about the facts, they're looking at the same facts, and some of them say, yeah, this is a crime.
But others, just as experienced and unbiased, say, I don't know, I don't see it.
You're almost certainly going to go free.
So whenever you see that much ambiguity about whether it even is a crime, that's good for the defendant.
So I thought Nershowitz put the hammer down.
In our world in which people aren't really going to change their minds, pretty much everybody knows how they want to vote, but you've got a handful of senators who are in these swing districts and they need some backing.
In other words, the Republicans probably would prefer to vote with the other Republicans because it's less trouble, but they also want to win re-election.
So they need a reason to vote for the Republicans that's clean.
One they can explain to their base and say, look, here's my reason.
Let's call it a fake because.
Sometimes people have already decided, but they need to have a reason to give to other people.
This sounds good.
And the reasons that don't sound good are all the things that the other lawyers were talking about.
Was it quid pro quo?
Was it not? Did anybody know about it?
Was the money withheld?
All of that stuff All of that stuff will get you not re-elected.
If you're arguing in the weeds, there are too many weeds.
You can't argue them all.
The other side has weeds too.
You just can't win if you're at that lower level.
Dershowitz just provided the senators that are in that danger zone.
If they vote one way, they might lose their job, but if they vote the other way, they might lose their job.
Very few senators Just got a simple, clean, fake because.
So should they decide to vote with the other Republicans, here's what they say.
Alan Dershowitz's presentation on whether or not these were constitutional charges was so strong That we could ignore the specifics because it doesn't pass the first test of being something worthy that rises to the level of an impeachable offense no matter what the facts are.
We don't need to have an opinion about whether it was a good idea for the president to do this.
We can still say it wasn't.
We don't have to have an opinion about whether it was quid pro quo or not.
We don't have to have an opinion about any of that because you can stop With Dershowitz's opinion that it's not impeachable, tell your base, you know, I've got two responsibilities.
One is, of course, to the people, but another is to the Constitution.
And I'm not going to degrade the Constitution by turning something that's kind of specific into something that's kind of vague by precedent, because then we'll never have another president who completes a term if the Congress is the other party.
So, I think Dershowitz did what he needed to do, which is he gave the people on the fence a clean argument.
Just look at Dershowitz.
What he said is what I said, and now you can vote for the President.
Rush Limbaugh, again, was talking about my tweet about Bolton, the so-called Bolton bombshell.
Somebody unironically called it a bolt of lightning.
they should have called it a Bolton of Lightning but they missed that opportunity and what you see when and the reason I'm mentioning that Rush Limbaugh was talking about my tweet it's the second time this week on the same topic of impeachment a different
What I tweeted was that the Bolton manuscript proves that the president should not be impeached Because Bolton's story is that the president was worried about Ukraine and corruption.
So once you've established that the president genuinely cared about corruption and Ukraine and other countries not paying their share and other things, that's all you need to demonstrate.
As long as there's a national interest, it doesn't matter if it's also good for the president, as Dershowitz also explained.
But here's my point.
And every time I see an example of this, I'm going to call it out until you see the pattern.
We are no longer a constitutional republic the way we always had been through history.
Because of the internet, there are voices, in this case it was mine, where I simply had an idea that was worthy of being shared.
So because my idea was good, a lot of people saw it, Then, apparently, they were tweeting at or sending him to Rush Limbaugh and saying, you should read this on the air, and then he did.
Rush Limbaugh has a far bigger audience than I do.
Mine's pretty big. His is far bigger.
Then, basically, everybody's seeing it at that point.
I think that we've reached something like an idea meritocracy, meaning that if you have a good idea, It's going to get to the right place because we've developed somewhat accidentally and I think Jack Dorsey gets the win on this one for building Twitter.
Twitter allows a good idea to find supporters and then grow from that small good idea into something that actually forces the politicians to move in that direction because the public is already there.
So keep watching for that.
We haven't We have an idea meritocracy instead of a constitutional republic and we just sort of drifted into it.
I was looking at the CNN pundits who were trying to find something wrong with the president's legal case and so here was a funny one from Jen Pisaki writing for CNN and she said that President Trump's defense team failed at their most important job And I thought, uh-oh, his defense failed at their most important job?
You mean the president's going to be impeached?
You mean they failed to keep him from being impeached?
No, no, that's not what she meant.
She says they failed at their most important job, which was making a clear and compelling argument that there was no need to hear from Bolton.
Well, did he hear anything I said about Dershowitz?
I would say that they absolutely hammered the thing they needed to do.
The thing they needed to do was to give the senators on the fence a clean, easy way to vote for the president instead of against them, and they did that.
Is it going to matter that Bolton testifies?
Nope. Not if you accept the Dershowitz argument, and it's so strong that you should.
If you accept the Dershowitz argument and he said directly more than once, he said it at the beginning and he said it at the end, no matter whether the new Bolton information is correct or not correct, it has no bearing on the decision because none of it's impeachable.
The true version or the fake version, they're both not impeachable.
It doesn't matter. So Jen Psaki Saying that they missed their most important job, and that's just not true.
They made her entire question irrelevant.
That's as good as you can get.
All right. Here's a question for you, just sort of a general way to predict what's going to happen.
And I've seen a few people ask this question on social media.
How many people would switch from Trump, let's say they voted or supported Trump in the past, and vote for a Democrat, Versus how many Democrats are likely to, for the first time, switch and support Trump?
It reminds me a little bit of those old Apple computer and IBM commercials.
Somewhere along the line, when IBM was still making personal computers and they were the main competition for Apple, somewhere along the line, someone at Apple Cleverly realized that when people move from the IBM PC over to Apple, they almost never move back.
But very few people will move from Apple to IBM. So it's basically, it was always a one-way direction.
And sure enough, that predicted where we are today.
Where I live in Silicon Valley, you don't even see a Windows computer.
I mean, it's the rarest thing.
If you see a laptop, At least within the Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Bay Area, if you see somebody with a laptop and they happen to be in the tactical world, it's an Apple pretty much every time.
So Apple won because they did have that quality where when people change their minds, they only change it in one direction.
I think that's starting to develop with Trump versus at least the generic Democrats.
Anecdotally, I'm hearing people who are going to vote for Trump for the first time.
But I'm not hearing people saying, Trump disappointed me, I'm going to go vote Democrat.
Now, I'm not saying it won't happen.
I'm just saying that it's starting to shape up like it's a one-way path.
Watch for that. Let's talk about closing the borders.
Apparently, Tibet is going to close their border with China, and Hong Kong is talking about closing the Closing traffic coming in and out of Hong Kong.
I think even since yesterday, the number of people infected has maybe doubled and the estimates are climbing every day.
Here's the question, which I'll just ask every day.
I guess I'll just ask this every day.
Why does our government not tell us why they've decided to not close all of our traffic coming in from China?
Now, I know they've expanded the checkpoints, so there are more airports being checked from more destinations from China.
That's great. I'm glad that they're checking people coming in, but we do know the checks don't work, meaning that unless somebody's already feverish, and I think that's the main symptom, maybe cough, I'm not sure, but if they don't have symptoms yet, you can't tell. And apparently, there might be tens of thousands of people with no symptoms.
So we know our government has implemented a set of processes that can't work completely.
They can slow it down.
They can get the obvious cases.
But we know it can't stop everybody.
So how much do you let in?
Well, I saw some really bad arguments.
Well, first of all, let me say this.
Look for the dog that isn't barking.
Can you tell me who is the face in our government who's in charge of deciding if the airports are open or closed?
Right? Do you remember seeing anybody who was identified as being in charge of that decision?
Do the airports stay open or closed?
What do we do with China traffic?
Who is that? Because on some level, of course, it's always the president.
But isn't there a cabinet-level person, somebody?
Is there not a person we should see on the news every single day explaining to us why what we're doing is better than closing the airports?
Where's that person?
The fact that you haven't seen that person tells me the government is failing you.
If the government could give you a person This is the person responsible.
Here's why we have not yet closed the airports.
We might, but this is why we have not yet.
Even if you don't agree with the reason, if you don't have that person with a face, with a job, whose job it is, you know, maybe with the President's approval, of course, but short of that, you haven't seen it, have you?
People are saying the CDC, but who?
Who's the face? Who's the person?
Why are they not in every interview, every 10 minutes on TV all the time?
There's something missing.
That missing part should make you distrust your government's motives.
Because if everything was on the up and up, you would know who that person is and they would be interviewed every day.
Every day. So there's something about this process that isn't working.
And let me just put this thought out there.
If this is somehow a political decision, and it might be, right?
It might be a political decision.
I hope it's not a political decision.
I hope it's a health and welfare and security decision.
But what if it's a political decision?
I would like to put this thought out here.
No president ever lost his job or her job by being too cautious about a pandemic.
Let me say that again. Nobody ever lost their job by being too cautious about a pandemic.
But if President Trump is not cautious enough, you can definitely lose your job for that.
Indeed, if we don't close our airports, This thing gets into our country and starts killing people by the hundreds or thousands.
How could you possibly support Trump for re-election?
I couldn't. Could you?
He has a political risk of losing the election, but there's nothing he could do in terms of being overly cautious that could cost him even one vote.
There's not one person who would vote against him if he went too tight and was too cautious.
But I'm telling you, I'm getting close to voting against him just for not talking about it enough.
So I'm close to the edge where this issue should grow and more people in the United States get it and the deaths are coming in.
If we see that, how do you support the president?
I mean, really, how could you?
That would be such an egregious failure.
All right, egregious.
I'm seeing some people who are bad at economics argue that we shouldn't yet close travel from traffic because of the economic cost.
I want to just dig into that a little bit.
Would there be a, let's say, a formidable or A cost that's just so high that we can't stand it if we close travel for, let's say, 30 days.
Because 30 days is a long time in the life of one of these pandemics.
Maybe if you could stop travel for 30 days, just to pick a number, we can get a good foothold.
Now what's the economics of that?
Now remember, we're not talking about stopping trade.
Trade wouldn't stop.
We're only talking about human beings.
How much trade would be lost because for one month, human beings could only talk to each other on the phone or video chats or e-mail or whatever?
How many deals would be lost simply because people had to wait a month to fly?
Close to none, right?
How much would the travel industry lose If the people who wanted to fly between China and the United States this month, suppose they had to wait until next month.
Well, first of all, most of those people who waited a month still have to go.
Most of the people who didn't go this month, let's say hypothetically the travel was shut down between China and the US, the people who didn't go still have to go.
If they were visiting family, they still got to visit their family.
They just do it later.
So it might not even have that much of an impact on travel, except that one month would be low, but you'd probably have the best month you ever had the month after.
It wouldn't be enough to compensate, but probably 80% of it would just come back the next month.
And then other people were making this terrible economic comparison.
This is why I wrote LoserThink.
My book that you should read.
People were saying that so few people have died from this coronavirus compared to, let's say, a regular flu, which actually can kill thousands of people every year, or let's say car crashes.
So somebody said, well, if you're going to be that cautious, shouldn't you stop people from driving cars?
To which I say, analogies do not win arguments.
You may have heard me say that.
It is a ridiculous comparison of a mature risk that is basically, you know, woven into the fabric of our entire economy versus a risk that's just starting and we don't know how big it could get.
You can't compare those things because on day one of the AIDS epidemic, more people died from stepping on rakes, right?
On day one. The first day that anybody ever found an AIDS virus, this is more hypothetical than literal, the first day that somebody got AIDS and died, a human being, there were more deaths from people stepping on rakes that year,
right? So would you say, well, AIDS is no problem, because look, one person died, versus all these people drowned in swimming pools and car accidents and drank themselves to death, so why worry about AIDS? Because AIDS is going to grow quickly.
That's why. You can't compare day one.
You'd have to look at what it could become and make your decision based on risk management.
So a lot of people were really bad at comparing things and looking at the economics way in, and it's a good thing I'm here to fix that for you.
Apparently, Boris Johnson over in Great Britain has decided they're going to use China's Huawei company for their networks.
Now, that's a problem because China, the government, we believe, at least the United States believes, they use this company to spy on anything that crosses the network.
This would, in theory, give China, the government, the utility to snoop on all of the Great Britain traffic.
You might ask yourself, what the hell is Boris Johnson thinking?
To the point where people are suggesting online that we not do a trade deal with Great Britain because we don't want to be dealing with them because all of our information will be stolen.
Anything that you do with Great Britain from now on presumably would be known by China or could be.
So, Piers Morgan tweeted on this and he said, big call by Boris on Huawei.
Not least because it will infuriate President Trump.
He's not saying that's a good thing, but he's just saying that's what makes it big.
And this should end any fears our Prime Minister will be a lapdog to the White House.
Well, maybe. But doesn't this make him a lapdog to China?
Isn't it better to be a lapdog to the United States, if you're Great Britain, than to be a lapdog to China?
Looks like those are the only two choices, and he picked the wrong one.
Here's a question that keeps coming up and again, here's another economic lesson for you in small.
I've been saying that wouldn't it be great if there were some way to bet on climate change because then all the people who are so certain of their views that it's a problem or not a problem could bet.
They just get into the betting market and everybody would think they would have an advantage.
And I suggested that we already have that opportunity because there are insurance companies.
There are big insurance companies that insure lots of stuff.
And therefore, you could just bet on the insurance companies.
If you think climate change is not going to be a problem, well, they probably can charge greater premiums for it every year because every year they'll adjust their rates.
So next year they might say, hey, we'll throw a 2% on there for climate change risk.
So in theory...
If you believe climate change is not a risk, these insurance companies would look like pretty good bets because they would charge for this risk but not have to pay it out, according to you.
Now, people said, no, that doesn't work.
Because these are big multi-business, multi-national insurance companies.
And one type of risk isn't necessarily going to move the stock enough that you could isolate it.
So it's not a clean play.
To which I say, if that's not a clean play, then we don't have a problem with...
We wouldn't have any problem...
With climate change if it doesn't reflect into the profits of the insurance companies in a big way.
Let me say this cleaner. If it were true that we would not notice any particular insurance company having a really bad year because of climate change now or anytime in the future, if there's no insurance company that's going to go out of business from this, it is also true that climate change is not that big a problem.
Right? It can't be a problem if all insurance companies are going to say, well, yeah, our losses on climate change were pretty big, but we made it up on car insurance and life insurance and stuff.
There's no world in which climate change can go bad the way the people who say it could go bad will go, and insurance companies can still make money.
It's not a thing. At the very least, they would have to stop covering things they used to cover.
So, in every scenario, even if they found a way to limit their losses, the number of things which they could insure would drop like crazy.
So, there is no world in which the insurance companies are not hugely affected by climate change if climate change is the risk that the scientific community is telling us.
I saw an idea From Balaji Srinivasan, talking about some kind of a blockchain situation where you could have a certain set of thermometers, you'd have to agree on which thermometers were part of this, but the thermometers would just automatically register their temperatures, ideally without human intervention, if you could control such things, and it would report it.
And then people could gamble using their cryptocurrency just for this purpose, They could gamble whether the temperatures could be higher or lower next year, and then over time, maybe any given year, there's some noise, but over time, if you place your bet every year for 10 years, you could find out if your temperature predictions are better or worse than the experts.
You actually could build a betting situation.
Did you all see, it's just huge news today, the Don Lemon interview.
He was talking to Rick Wilson, big anti-Trumper, and another gentleman I didn't recognize, Ali somebody.
I can't remember his last name.
But the three of them got yucking it up about how Trump supporters are stupid southern hillbillies, basically.
They didn't use those words, but they were pretty clear what their meaning was.
And I think everyone who was a Trump supporter looked at that, and a lot of people were not, and said, you know, if you want a landslide for Trump, do more of that.
Right.
Because the Democrats seem to consistently make the same play, which is instead of going after the leader or the policies, they go after the people.
I mean, they're going after people, citizens, just for having different opinions.
Most people regard that as just way too far, and I think the adjustment to that is that Trump is likely to win in the landslide.
If you see more of that, one incident may be a lot of nothing.
Netanyahu is flying out to meet Putin right now, I guess, to talk about the peace plan.
Now, I keep telling you that we've never been closer to Middle East peace Even though most of you think it's impossible, right?
Most of you are going to say, it's impossible, Scott.
Thousands of years of history.
Tens of thousands of years of history.
It's never going to be peaceful over there.
But to that I say this.
We've never had this strong a team, meaning the leaders of the various countries.
They're all strong leaders and they're all deal makers.
And most of them get along with the exception of the Ayatollah.
Who just got isolated because he lost his general, his economy is falling apart, and the entire Middle East is sort of anti-Iran at this point, except for the places that Iran actually controls.
We've never had a more conducive situation.
The people who would stop it are more flexible, probably, because their economies are in shambles, and we've got the right people, which is probably at least half of the battle.
I know what you're thinking. Still, Scott, even with all of these so-called advantages you're talking about, I still don't think it can happen because these people will just fight forever.
It's just impossible.
Well, let me confess something.
I'm not just predicting.
That's not what I'm doing.
If you've watched me long enough, and especially if you've read Win Bigly, You know that sometimes I'm just predicting, but sometimes I'm trying to change something.
And here's specifically what I'm trying to change.
In order for anything to get done by humans, in order for humans to say, okay, let's do this and then go do it, there's one really important thing that has to happen first.
And that is, you have to believe it's possible.
If you believe something's impossible, You will put no effort into it.
Well, it's impossible. And so in the Middle East, the first most important thing which must be accomplished is that for the public to say, you know, no matter how unlikely it is, for the first time, it does look possible.
And so that's what I'm doing.
I'm doing it overtly.
I'm not trying to hide it.
I'm trying to tell people, everybody I can talk to, that it's possible.
And only because something's different.
What's different is the group of leaders are unusually strong, very strong leaders and dealmakers.
It's very important. And Iran is weakened to the point of being flexible, probably.
They lost their general, probably makes a big difference.
So I think we should act as though it is possible.
Because if we act as though it's possible, you've created at least the first necessary condition For it to be possible.
So it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I'm going to tell you it's possible because I really believe that, and based on observation and the variables and the players, etc.
So I would ask you to at least accept, even if you think it's deeply unlikely, I'm just trying to move you to, but it's possible.
But it's possible.
Alright, here's a funny story.
Sort of funny story.
There was a football coach at Grand Valley State University who got fired because he responded to a student interview.
So he was interviewed by a student and the student asked, name three people you'd like to have lunch with.
And the coach said Adolf Hiller was one of the three people he'd like to have lunch with because he was very clear to say he doesn't support any of the bad stuff that Hiller did, but he was noting in his opinion that Hiller was a strong leader, got people to do stuff, and he would like to have lunch with them to learn that technique.
Well, he got fired for that, but there's a punchline here.
What was his exact job title?
And I'm not making this up.
This is the simulation wiki at you.
The guy who said that he wanted to have lunch with Hitler just to learn his technique, not because he was a friend of Hitler, and got fired for it, his job description was offensive coordinator.
That was his actual job.
Offensive coordinator.
And he got fired for being offensive coordinator.
That's all. He got fired for being offensive, and he was an offensive coordinator.
Well, if you want somebody to not be offensive, maybe you should hire an inoffensive coordinator.
That's what I'm saying. All right.
So I guess there'll be some more of the president's defense.
I think so far the president's defense team is A +, really, really good.
One of the things that's interesting too, and the President always gets some heat for this, the President is famous for saying that he likes people who look like they came from central casting, people who look good on television, people who play the part.
So the President gets heat for that, but I got to tell you, it does matter.
The President is so right about that, because if you look at the team that's against them, Nadler, Schiff, these are not television-ready personalities, if I can be kind.
There are people who have maybe a face for radio, could I say?
And they're against, and I'm watching the president's councils, and they're all kind of good-looking.
Have you seen Jay Sekulow's hair?
I was looking at his hair yesterday.
He was on there and he was doing a close-up.
I was leaning into the television to look at his hair because I just thought, that is the finest head of hair I've ever seen on a human being.
You could do anything with that hair.
You could pick any kind of hairstyle.
I mean, that's some seriously good-looking hair.
And then his other lawyers are tall and good-looking, and they've got powerful voices and stuff.
And I would even say, if you were going to pick the odd person out in that group, and by the way, even Pam Bondi looks great on camera.
They're just people who look great on camera.
Alan Dershowitz, 80 years old.
In the past, he's had some weird curly hair situation in which somebody needed to tell him to shave off.
But at 80 years old, it looks like he's cut his hair close to his head and looks great.
He looks great.
I mean, he just stood up there and did this long presentation that didn't look like it missed.
I don't even think he's a tenth of a step slow.
If you saw it, there was no point in Dershowitz's presentation when you said to yourself, no point when you said to yourself, wow, he's 80.
Didn't happen. He did a presentation like he was 62 and at the height of his analytical powers and strength.
So first of all, his haircut looks great.
Let me say that. That looks great.
He should have done that years ago.
I mean, it just totally improved his overall credibility and look.
