All Episodes
Oct. 1, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
54:51
Episode 1141 Scott Adams: What We Will Remember From Debate, How the Republic Could Collapse, Rittenhouse Slander

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: Do Democrats realize Joe Biden is a gigantic, perpetual liar? President Trump...doesn't like to get pushed around "Court Packing", the end of our Republic? Identify "super-spreaders" by their genes? California's corporate board diversity law Kyle Rittenhouse slandered by Joe Biden ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
*singing* Hey everybody, come on in.
Come on in, gather around.
It's time for coffee with Scott Adams.
Best part of the day.
Is it good? Oh, it's good.
You want to see what it looks like out my window?
Total whiteout conditions?
That is unhealthy air quality right there.
Forest fires still putting a lot of smoke into my neighborhood.
They're not very close to me, but there are so many fires that I can't go outside.
But we don't need to go outside yet.
What we need is a simultaneous sip.
And it doesn't take much to enjoy it.
Not really. All you need is a cup or mug or glass of Anchor Chelserstein, a canteen drink or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Interestingly, my traffic is very small today.
Something's going on.
And you should fill that vessel with coffee or your favorite beverage and join me for the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Simultaneous sip. Happening right now.
Go. Well, I think that cleared the air quality a little bit.
I'll probably have to drink some more to fix it entirely.
Alright, let's talk about all the things.
The big mystery of the day is...
Now this is interesting.
My traffic is roughly...
Half of what it was yesterday.
I wonder why that is.
Is there something going on today?
Your Twitter is down?
Twitter isn't working, somebody's saying?
Oh, it could be that the automatic notification didn't go up on Twitter.
That's what it was. No notification.
All right, well, let us enjoy those of us who are here.
Alright. One of the big questions is, what's up with President Trump not forcefully disavowing the racist groups?
With emphasis on the word forcefully, because he actually did say he would disavow them.
He's disavowed them in the past multiple times.
But when asked in the debate, as you all know, he did not.
So Periscope didn't post to Twitter.
Okay. So it looks like there's some kind of issue going on.
But here's a hypothesis I want to put out there.
President Trump, and I think I wrote about this in Win Bigly, President Trump is very savvy about media stuff.
Would you agree that he is one of the most experienced, Maybe the most experienced media personality, you know, just about of all time.
You know, who has been interviewed more times than President Trump?
Not many people. And there's a trick that he would see coming that I would also see coming because, like him, I get interviewed a lot.
And here's the trick.
If somebody says to you, will you disavow X, And you think to yourself, well, that group that you mentioned, this group X, they're a bad group.
I can easily disavow them.
So let's say it was the KKK. How hard would it be to disavow the KKK? Not hard.
Not hard at all.
Socially acceptable.
Easy to do. I'd disavow them.
What would happen? What would be the next thing that would happen If the president disavowed the KKK, not in a speech that he's giving, this is important, but rather in a give-and-take scenario.
Now, if he's giving a speech, he can just disavow all he wants, and he doesn't have to take questions if he doesn't want to, and he can get his message out there and say, yep, I disavowed the KKK, and then walk away.
That's all good. No problem, right?
But what if somebody asks him to disavow somebody?
Well, there are two problems here.
Number one, it looks weak when people force you to say stuff.
Think about it.
How do you look when somebody randomly can make you say stuff, literally make you say words?
Okay, I'm going to make you say these words.
I disavow whoever.
And then you say the words.
Who's in charge? Is it the person who repeated what they were told to repeat, or is it the person who forced them to say it in public?
It's a power thing.
So that's the first thing you need to know.
The president seemingly never, I can't think of an exception, he never gives up the power position.
And the power position is who's making somebody say something.
It's not the person who's Who's just conforming.
So that's the first problem.
It does look weak.
Now, but you say to me, but Scott, yeah, I get what you're saying.
You can't just say what other people tell you to say.
That would look weak. But come on.
Any fool can disavow a racist group.
White supremacist. How hard is that?
That's an exception. Clearly you can do that.
No problem at all.
Right? No problem.
What would happen if he had?
Game it out. Now, this is the sort of thing you learn if you have media training, as I do.
I literally have training with a real expert who sat with me and taught me how to deal with media interviews.
The next thing that would happen is you'd get another question.
Okay, so you've disavowed white supremacists.
Very good, very good. Do you also disavow the Proud Boys?
Okay, now it's getting a little harder, right?
Because if you don't know exactly who the Proud Boys are, and I confess I didn't really know until this morning, I've even been interviewed by Gavin McGinnis back in 2016, so I knew that there was something called the Proud Boys.
I knew they existed.
I've even communicated with some of them.
People have messaged me on social media, etc.
But I didn't know who they were or what they were.
I vaguely knew that they liked to fight or something and say politically incorrect things.
But are they a white supremacist group?
Well, they would say no.
And you know what argument they would give for not being a white supremacist group?
Well, the black members of Proud Boys would be a pretty good argument, that they're not a white supremacist group, because it's hard to explain why the white supremacist group would have black members, but they do, and other ethnicities as well.
But have they ever said something, let's say, about Islam or about women?
Have they ever said anything that the President would need to put some distance from?
Probably yes.
Probably yes.
But he doesn't know exactly what they've said, so does he disavow them?
Well, suppose he does.
Let's say he does.
So he disavows the Proud Boys.
What's the next thing that'll happen?
Do you disavow Breitbart?
A publication that has been blamed by some people for saying things that other people have considered Islamophobic or racist or whatever.
What does he do?
He's already disavowed the easy one, white supremacy, and hypothetically, let's say, he is Sort of tentatively disavowed the Proud Boys, just in case.
Don't know what's in there. Nobody's quite sure what they're about.
I'm not entirely sure.
But let's say he disavowed them.
Now, what about Breitbart?
Because lots of people on the left say bad things about Breitbart.
Does he have to disavow them?
Let's say he did. Now, it's not going to happen, right?
In a million years, Trump would never disavow A publication that tends to be friendlier to him.
But suppose he did.
What happens next? Does he have to disavow Joe Rogan?
Because remember, when Spotify took on Joe Rogan's program, they said, oh, there's several of these episodes we're going to have to delete.
Because they seem too friendly to white supremacists or whatever they said.
Spotify's employees apparently are rebelling.
So then what does he do?
Does President Trump disavow Joe Rogan?
Because they would be able to make an argument.
I think it's a bullshit argument.
But somebody could make an argument.
Well, he associated with, by interviewing, McGinnis.
There you go. He actually interviewed Gavin McGinnis.
Joe Rogan interviewed me.
What about me? Would President Trump have to disavow me?
Because I've been on Joe Rogan's show.
Joe Rogan talked to Gavin McGinnis.
Gavin McGinnis was the founder of Proud Boys.
Where does it stop?
Now, even if you disagree with my examples that are imperfect, the point is...
The moment you accept the frame that I'm going to make you say stuff, and you're going to have to keep saying stuff, because I'm going to keep giving you stuff to say.
And the moment you say, I don't know if I want to keep saying the things that you're telling me to say, you're racist.
It's over. Now the president has taken the position, you've seen it for a long time, that he just doesn't like to get pushed around.
It's not a good look, and he just prefers not to.
So I think that when you saw the hesitation, the first time was when Jake Tapper asked the president to disavow David Duke and the KKK, and you saw the president hesitate, and he tried to get a sense of who else he would have to disavow.
I think that was the source of the hesitation.
Now, of course, I'm speculating, Because I'm not inside his head.
I can't know what he was thinking.
But based on my own experience with media interviews, I would have seen that trap.
So if I'd been asked that question as I was answering it, and this is hard to do.
It's hard to have a separate thought that's complicated while you're talking on camera to millions of people.
It's very hard to do.
So you're trying to process, okay, if I answer this question, what does that lead to?
What's the question that naturally follows that?
Am I setting a precedent?
Am I walking into a trap?
Is this one of those, do you still beat your spouse kind of questions?
So I feel as if the president has found himself planning a couple of moves ahead and not knowing where it would go, and I think that that cost him because he would have been better off just going with it and then changing the subject.
And like I said, there's a big difference between something he could say in the speech, because he can say everything he wants to say and nothing extra, and then just walk away.
But when somebody is doing a back and forth, you know what the next question is going to be.
They're going to extend this until they trap you.
How about this as an answer?
I often think about how to answer this.
If I'm the president, how would I answer it?
And I think I might go something like this to avoid the trap.
Do you disavow the KKK? Let's say that's the question.
Here's an answer I'm playing with as a better way to go.
Instead of disavowing people, Disavow, let's say, opinions.
So you could easily say, I disavow every racist viewpoint, no matter where it comes from.
Then what does the interviewer say?
So are you explicitly disavowing the KKK? And then the president could say, does the KKK have any racists in it?
I'm disavowing all racism, no matter where it is.
So, you know, if you want to make a list, ask yourself if there are any racists in there.
Because if there's any racists in your list, I'm disavowing them.
Well, are you specifically, can you say you're disavowing the KKK? Well, I've already put them on a terrorist, a domestic terrorist list, so that's pretty disavowed, wouldn't you say?
So, Twitter's down, people are telling me.
It's interesting.
Periscope's up, but Twitter is down.
It looks like people figured out that I'm broadcasting because the traffic is back up.
Anyway, I think I'd go after the thought of racism and disavow that wherever it is.
I saw that one of the Trump campaign websites...
It had 33 false or misleading claims that Joe Biden allegedly made at the debates.
33 false or misleading claims.
That's a lot of misleading claims, isn't it?
33 in an hour and a half?
Now, here's my only point.
Did President Trump say 33 false or misleading things?
I don't know what the exact count is, but probably, right?
But here's the thing.
The people who most dislike President Trump, if you asked them one year ago, name what's the worst thing about Trump, they would probably say he lies.
Wouldn't you agree? That would be the number one thing that would come out of people's mouth.
At least that's my experience.
Now, sometimes they'll go with the racism thing first, but I would say at least number two is going to be that he lies.
He's lied. 20,000 lies.
He lies, lies, lies, lies.
But why don't they say that about Joe Biden?
Does Joe Biden lie less than President Trump?
I don't see any evidence of that.
It looks like Joe Biden lies continuously, like just full-on Almost nothing but a wall of lies.
Probably 70% lies to 30% truth, something like that.
Now, why is it that we don't think of Biden as a liar?
Now, some of you do if you're Trump supporters, but why don't Democrats see Biden as a liar when he's wall-to-wall lies all the time?
And I think it has to do with whatever your brand is.
You know, once you've decided that somebody is a brand, you just sort of stick with it.
I'll give you an example. When I was a kid, it was considered a truism that Volkswagen Beetles were unusually reliable.
There was something about them being built simply or whatever.
But the thought was that they're very reliable.
These VW Bugs, more reliable than any other vehicle.
But yet, when I would You know, drive around town, if I saw a broken-down car by the side of the road, the percentage of times it was a Volkswagen Beetle was really, really high, to the point where you couldn't not notice it.
There'd be, like, broken-down Volkswagen Beetles all over the place, far more than any other car I ever saw.
And yet, and yet, the reputation was it was the most dependable car.
There was no correlation Between what you observed with your own eyes and what everybody believed to be true.
I think that was one of the first times I thought that the world is a crazy place, because it was just so obviously not true that they were dependable.
And it's so obviously true that Biden is a gigantic liar, but one of the things you're seeing a little bit less is that that's a reason for disliking Trump.
Correct me if I'm wrong, and watch for this as we get closer to election.
I'll bet you that between now and election day, the complaint that Trump is a liar will shrink.
You'll still hear it, but the number of times they'll say it will be way less.
And the reason is, now they have something to compare him to.
When it was just Trump versus whatever your ideal of a better candidate is, well then it looks like Trump's a big liar.
Because he's being compared to your ideal, honest candidate that doesn't really exist.
But as soon as you get a real one, you get a real candidate, it's Joe Biden, and you start counting up the lies and it's 33 in 90 minutes.
33 lies in 90 minutes.
How can you possibly say to yourself, with any kind of intellectual integrity, how can you say, ah, I'm going to vote for Joe Biden because I don't want a liar for a president.
I feel like that reason for voting for Biden just went away because he lies continuously.
All right. Here's my take two days after the debate.
When the debate is fresh...
You have a certain set of feelings because you can remember a lot of the details.
So there will be things that feel like they're having an effect on you because you remember them.
They just happened. You're thinking about it.
It must be important because you're thinking about it.
But you get just a few days away from it, and memories being what they are, you start forgetting slices of it.
And you're forgetting this, and you're forgetting that, and you're forgetting that.
Pretty soon, There's not much left of your memory.
This is just normal way memories work.
So what's left after a few days have gone by and there's lots more political noise and distractions and suddenly here's the memory that you'll be left with from that debate.
There was a contest to see who could bullshit the most and Trump dominated it.
That's it. That's sort of what you'll remember because that was the visual And it was sort of the overall theme and feeling you got.
You can't forget how much Trump was trying to dominate and talk over Biden, and how Biden was doing a pretty good job of trying to fight back.
But it looked like a battle of bullies, because if you've ever watched Biden debate not Trump, if you've seen past Biden debates, he's pretty bullying.
But when you put him on the stage with Trump, he's the lesser bully, and that's what you remember.
So let me ask you this.
Let's say you were totally put off by Trump's aggressive, you know, not following the rules performance.
Totally put off by it.
But, separately, you have to make a decision about the following.
One of those two people, Biden or Trump, is going to fight for something on your side.
So you have to pick one of them to be on your team, to be a team leader.
And once you pick them, they're going to go do some fighting for you.
So whatever they can get, whatever deals they can make, whatever advantages they can get, that's going to accrue to you because you picked them.
They're on your team. If the only thing you knew about them was that debate, who do you pick to get you some shit?
Right? You see it, right?
You could hate everything about what Trump did on that stage, but if you said to yourself you can only pick one of them and they have to go forth and get you some stuff, it's a no-brainer.
You're going to pick Trump every time because he controlled the situation.
Even if you hated it, that's the guy you want on your team.
If you're hiring a lawyer Do you want the lawyer who's the most polite?
No, you don't.
You don't want the lawyer who's most polite.
You might want the lawyer who's polite to you.
But when your lawyer is fighting the other team, you don't want them to be nice, necessarily.
I mean, unless there's some advantage to it.
You want them to be a killer.
You want them to be a shark.
So I got a feeling that people were not as put off By the strongman performance, which is what it was.
It was showing who had the most alpha energy.
And on that point, I saw just a great comment.
So this is from Frances Martel, who's a Breitbart International News Editor.
And I'm assuming because she has some Spanish words in her profile that she's Hispanic.
Which is important to the point.
And she tweeted this.
My hottest take is that Hispanics like this debate because this is how we engage each other politically all the time.
It isn't uncivil.
It's just passionate.
The pearl clutching about how presidents aren't supposed to act like those people doesn't sit well with me.
And apparently a number of other people, not apparently, I saw the comments and there were a lot of people from Of various, let's say, interesting cultures who said, oh yeah, same here.
Same here. That's like my family.
And they looked at it and thought to themselves, oh yeah, that looks just like I would expect it to look.
Why wouldn't it look like that?
Of course the president is aggressive.
Of course he's talking over him.
Of course he's interrupting.
How else do you do it?
That's exactly how a political conversation is supposed to look.
Now, I don't have my own insight into this, but there were a whole lot of people who agreed with it.
So that's all I'm going to say.
A lot of people agreed with it.
I saw Dan Bongino's take on the debate, and I thought it was a really strong one, so I'll repeat it here, which is that it's a base election, In other words, nobody is trying to persuade somebody else to vote from the other team.
So everybody is just trying to get their own people to show up.
And it's all about getting your own base to get off the couch or fill out the form and actually vote.
So that's the first thing.
And as Dan points out, strategically...
Did Trump make a dent in Biden's support by separating him from his far left?
Well, I don't know, because a lot of those people are going to say, well, you know, I'm still closer to Biden than I am to Trump.
I don't like Trump, so maybe.
But what about the people who are sort of Just not that excited about voting.
Maybe they would have. Maybe they wouldn't.
They're on the fence. It's not a case that they would have switched their vote to Trump, but rather they're just not going to show up and vote for Biden because they're just not as excited.
Maybe they were Bernie supporters and they feel like they were thrown under the bus.
So did the president make his point that the Biden supporters are not all on the same page?
I feel like he did.
As Dan Bongino pointed out, I think he made that case, and he made it well.
But what about the problems that Trump gave himself by his, let's say, bad performance on the question of disavowing white supremacy?
Do you think that cost him any votes from his base?
And the answer is, probably not.
Because there's nothing that happened in the debate That Trump's supporters are not accustomed to.
In other words, it's sort of more of the same.
Okay, we already know he doesn't like to be pushed into saying stuff.
We already know he doesn't like to be into apologizing, clarifying, defense.
He just likes to play offense.
And so that's what you get.
Now, to his supporters, We've all seen the compilation clips of him clearly and strongly disavowing white supremacy and racists in the KKK. So if you're a supporter, you know that the claims against him are bullshit, even if you understand that the way he handled the question was completely botched, which would be my take on it.
Now, my own take, he did lose my vote.
I told you this yesterday.
Personally, he lost my vote.
But I also haven't voted lately, so it's not like it's any big difference.
And as I explained, losing my vote is just personal.
It's just personal.
It's not anything I would try to talk you into.
I would not try to talk you into it.
I just spent way too much of my own personal currency debunking that whole fine people hoax.
I just wanted a little hand.
And I didn't get it.
I took it personally.
So that's just me.
You don't need to follow that model.
I wouldn't encourage you to do it.
So yeah, the Bongino analysis I feel is solid.
Pretty solid. I think the president might have done nothing to hurt his base and probably hurt Biden's base a little bit.
That could matter. We'll see.
The court-packing question I thought was interesting.
And by the way, if you recorded Tucker Carlson's show from last night, you've got to watch that thing.
You know, Tucker Carlson is probably one of the strongest opinion shows on TV. Not probably.
It's one of the strongest opinion shows.
Best quality, most interesting, you know, Most creative takes on stuff, I would say.
But last night's show was kind of a masterpiece.
It was one of the best shows I think he's ever had.
And one of the points he talked about was the importance of this court-packing question that Joe Biden avoided.
And I had not really thought it through as much as Tucker fleshed it out a little bit.
And here's the thing that I was missing.
The court packing question isn't just a little throwaway preference kind of a thing.
It is the end of the republic.
And that was not obvious to me at first.
And here's how it's the end of the republic.
If right now the republic depends on the equal Branches having their own power, so that the judiciary is somewhat independent from Congress, from the president, so that they all have their individual powers.
But what would happen if court packing became acceptable?
Because the first time it happens won't be the last time.
It means that whoever is in charge will just pack the court until there are 150 people on the court.
But more likely, and this is the This is the scary part.
There's a very possible scenario that goes like this.
Democrats win the presidency.
Democrats win maybe even the Senate.
And then Democrats pack the court.
What happens if Democrats have the court, Congress, and the presidency at the same time?
Well, under our current highly polarized situation, it would almost guarantee that they would modify the system until they couldn't lose ever again.
In other words, it would be everything from jerry-rigging to changes in how many...
How many states there are in the Union?
They might accept, let's say, accept Puerto Rico and Guam, turn them into Democrat strongholds.
No, I think it was not Guam.
Maybe it was D.C. So I think Puerto Rico and D.C. become states.
They would both be Democratic states.
Democrats would control everything.
That's it. You could very easily reach the point where we're a one-party system and we're this close to it.
We're this close. All it would take was a good election cycle this time.
That's it. And once you have only one party, they can use the court to lock themselves in because Republicans might try to challenge it, say, hey, you can't do this or that because it's illegal.
And then the court says, well, we're a bunch of Democrats and we always go Democrat.
There it is. So we actually are this close To losing the Republic.
And the biggest part of that is probably the court packing.
If the court packing is allowed.
And Joe Biden is not saying no to it.
He's actually open to it, apparently, because he's not saying no.
So, if that doesn't scare you, it should.
And here's a frame that I think would be useful for the President.
People like certainty more than they like improvement.
This is a very important element of human psychology.
If you say, would you like something to be better?
Everybody says yes. Of course I like improvement.
But if you said, would you like improvement at the risk that there could be, you know, it might go wrong?
Well, then it's different.
Then I'll say, depends where I am in life and what's going on.
Maybe I'll just be happy with where things are.
Because the risk of trying to improve it could blow the whole thing.
Biden is the risky play.
Here's why. You don't know what you'll get.
If you re-elect President Trump, do you know what you'll get?
Yes, you do. You totally know what you'll get with President Trump.
Because, first of all, he has a very strong record of doing what he told you he would do.
Or at least trying to do what he said he would do.
That's kind of unique about Trump, is that you can really bank on what you expect him to at least try to do.
He's going to go hard at China.
He's going to try to build a border wall.
He's going to keep taxes low.
Pretty much everything about Trump, you kind of can predict.
Will he continue to do things which his critics will call racist?
Of course. Will they actually be racist?
Probably not.
Probably not. But you'll be accused of it, of course.
So a second Trump term would look a whole lot like you expect it would look.
What would a Biden term look like?
Number one, who's the president?
You don't even know who the president is.
Number two, who's running Biden?
Who's the power behind Biden?
Not so sure. If you get Biden, how much of the Green New Deal do you end up with, even if his intention is to stick with the Biden Green Deal?
You don't know, because you don't know how powerful that wing of the party will be.
A Biden presidency is a complete unknown.
You don't even know if you'll still have a republic.
Literally, you don't know if the republic would survive it, because...
Packing the court is sort of the end of the republic.
That turns it into a...
Or could turn it into a one-party system.
So uncertainty is a big deal.
There's continuing information about new testing stuff for coronavirus.
So I don't know too much about this.
It was just a tweet today.
Sheba Medical Center...
And Israel, I guess, is testing a new antigen coronavirus test that could give you a result in 2 to 15 minutes.
And they're working on a saliva-based test.
So we're very close to the super cheap saliva test, meaning that you can do it yourself.
You don't need anybody to stick anything up your nose.
And I don't know how many different test companies are working on it.
But I'm guessing that the technology involved to make a saliva-based, cheap, no-equipment-needed coronavirus test is understood.
Because there are enough different entities working on it.
It must be something that people who deal in this field must know how to do.
So we might be like a month away.
from having massive amount of inexpensive testing and then it's going to look good.
So that's some good news.
There's a study out of India that could be really important.
It says that 8% of infected people accounted for 60% of new infections.
So these would be the so-called super spreaders.
So the super spreaders If you could somehow identify who was a super spreader and you only could take care of them and nothing else, that might take care of it because it's such an outsized difference.
And here's a question I have.
Could you identify the super spreaders by their genes?
Is there a genetic DNA kind of correlation?
Because suppose it turns out that in order to be a super spreader, you would have to have, I don't know, some kind of lung situation or maybe a blood type.
I'm just spitballing here.
There might be something about you that makes you more likely to be a super spreader.
Now, it's possible All that is is you have a big lung capacity or you speak loud.
Maybe that's all it is.
So maybe you couldn't find that in genetics.
But what if you could?
What if you could actually find out that some people, even if they don't have the infection, if they did get the infection, they're the type of person who would become a super spreader.
That would be useful, wouldn't it?
Because you could say to yourself, we don't have a ton of tests, but let's make sure that the people who have a DNA propensity to be a super spreader, let's make sure we test the crap out of those guys.
Just test them every day.
Until we have enough tests to do everybody all the time.
So that's just a question.
Here's a take that you won't see from people who have...
Better instincts for survival than I do.
One of the benefits of these periscopes is that I can say things that people don't say out loud.
You ready? Here's something that somebody doesn't say out loud too much for all the obvious reasons.
How many children, let's say, how many 10-year-old children would you trade for how many 80-year-olds?
Let's say you knew that the coronavirus was going to take, let's say, five years off the age of a senior citizen, if they get it.
But if the 10-year-old can't go to school, can't live their regular life, everything's shut down, what if they kill themselves?
Worst case scenario, right?
Kid does themselves harm.
Well, if a 10-year-old...
Their life is ruined by the coronavirus in any way that causes a death.
The number of years of life that that 10 year old had might be 80.
So if a 10 year old were to perish, they would lose 80 years of life.
If an 80 year old dies, maybe they lose 5 years of life.
So if you lost 16 80 year olds, it would be the same number of years of life as one kid.
One kid would be the same number of years of life as 16 80-year-olds.
I'm just making up these numbers, but it's somewhere in that range.
Now, in public, you're supposed to say this.
Every life is precious.
We don't value one life over another.
We don't treat anybody as expendable.
And I agree with all of that.
That's what you say in public.
What do you say in private?
In private you don't say that.
There are things that you say in public, and you should.
Every life is equal.
Everyone is respected.
You're gonna fight like hell for every single life.
That's what you say in public, and you should.
But it's not what you think.
You don't think that privately.
Privately, you know that the life of a child It's just worth more than the life of somebody who's 80.
It's just a fact. And if you ask the 80-year-old, well, what do you think?
What do you think, 80-year-old?
Do you think we should put you at a little more risk to save the life of a kid or at least give them a life that's worth living?
The 80-year-old, most of them would say, you know, maybe so.
Maybe so. You know, I had a good run.
So here's where I'm going with this.
I think Trump's instincts about opening the economy, which benefits the young at the expense of the old, right?
Opening the economy benefits the young and gives them something like a life, something like a better education, which affects their whole life.
Maybe they don't die from depression and suicide and drug addiction and all that other stuff.
I think the president Is doing in public what every one of us thinks in private.
That's one of the reasons he got elected.
Because he can say in public the things that you can only say in private.
And he's willing to do it.
And I think that the President is very close to the public in terms of the trade-off of the economy versus lives.
Have you had any conversation in your private life Somebody says, my mom is 86, her life is not expendable.
Did I disagree with that?
Did I disagree with that?
In public, every life is precious.
But the reality is, sometimes you have to choose.
And these choices are adult choices.
It's not like you get to choose, why don't we let them both live and have wonderful lives?
Sometimes you don't have that choice.
Sometimes you've just got to make a choice.
I think that the President's bias toward the young is exactly where the public is.
And I think that when I hear 200x thousand Americans died of coronavirus, I still don't know one.
Let me ask you here.
How many of you have a Somebody close who died from coronavirus.
Because I wonder how deeply it's getting into the everyday public.
The fact that I've never met one.
I don't know anybody. Actually zero people that I know personally.
I know people who know people, but I don't actually still know anybody personally.
So in the comments, tell me if you know anybody who's died of coronavirus.
And let's say that you did.
Let's say you did know somebody who wasn't a family member because you're way too biased about family members.
But let's say you knew an acquaintance who was 80 years old and died of the coronavirus, but the trade-off was that the economy got opened, children could go to school, people could live something closer to a real life.
What do you think about that?
If you had to make that choice, Which way would you go?
Somebody says in the comments, I choose my kids over my mom.
Yup. Because you would choose your kids over yourself.
Yeah, you would choose your kids over your mom.
That's absolutely true.
And I have a feeling that the public is way closer to Trump in terms of taking the risk of opening the economy.
And also the risks about wearing masks and all that.
So here's the thing that the illegitimate media doesn't ever do.
They don't really look at the costs and the benefits.
They just like to look at the costs, or they just like to look at the benefits.
They don't weigh them, and they certainly don't say, is there any difference between what you say in public and what you say in private?
So I'm seeing lots of no's in the comments.
One says, my 80-year-old aunt.
Governor Dan Patrick said he would risk dying to keep a strong economy for his grandkids.
You know, a lot of the people in their 80s, isn't that the greatest generation?
The people who fought in World War II, etc.?
Oh, somebody's 92-year-old mom had COVID and recovered.
Good for her. A friend's uncle.
A single 80-year-old, blah, blah, blah.
Alright. Just looking at your comments.
California passed a new racist law.
What the hell is wrong with my state?
What a mess. So, California passed a law that has an ethnic and gender requirement for boards now.
So, if you have a corporation with a board You'll be fined up to $100,000 for not having diversity on your board.
Now, do I like diversity?
Yes, I do. Yeah, I do like diversity.
Is there an advantage to having a diverse corporate board?
Yup. Yes, there is an advantage.
There's an advantage socially because you can say you did it, but there's also an advantage in terms of just being able to look through more windows, more points of view.
How is that bad?
Of course it's good.
But should it be a law?
Given that a diverse board is unambiguously good for the company itself, and the company would agree with that, if you asked any of these corporations, hey, do you think, you know, just privately, just privately, just you and me, do you think privately it would be better if you had a more diverse board?
What would the company say?
Well, if it's a big company, I think every one of them would say, yeah, you know, it is better.
Because first of all, it will take the heat off us.
That's good. Second of all, the employees are going to like it because they want the board to look like them.
That's good. Thirdly, our customers are going to like it.
Because they want the company to look like the public.
And fourthly, you're going to get a perspective that you just wouldn't get without it.
So, of course they want it.
But should it be a requirement?
A racial requirement?
That is racist.
There's no other spin on it.
If you have a law that requires Some races are okay to put on a board from now on, and some are not, meaning that the next person you add can't be a white male.
It's just racist.
But apparently that'll happen.
John Thompson on Twitter, just a Twitter user, John Thompson, had this tweet.
He said, the violence you see in the streets today is, he calls it, woke supremacist.
Woke supremacist violence.
And I thought, yeah, that is what it is.
The woke protesters have become sort of a woke supremacist group because the woke people don't say, I wish you would change the way you're acting.
They say you suck, right?
The woke people do believe, literally believe, that they're superior and To people that they would consider less woke.
So, isn't that a supremacist thing?
If you think you're better than the other people, that's what that is, right?
Well, there we go.
So, I don't know where we're heading with all this stuff, but it does seem that all of the racial and ethnic and gender stuff There's sort of a logical place it all ends up, which is failure.
Because if you're focusing on that, you can't really solve it.
Because you can never really get to the point where you've got the right balance and everybody's happy.
Since it's not possible to make everybody happy, you have to find some balance of trying hard enough that you're trying to make things better.
But you haven't destroyed the whole system.
I don't know how that happens.
All right.
So that's where we're at today.
I would expect that the next two debates, you would see Trump do better.
One of the reasons that Trump will do better is because, for whatever reason, the incumbent doesn't do well in the first debate.
It's a weird kind of pattern, and I can't convince myself that there's a reason for it, except maybe being president is too different from debating, and presidents maybe have overconfidence.
I don't know. But I would expect him to do much better.
And what is more important, the debate that's closer to the election or the one that goes first?
Well, experts say the first debate seems to be important, but I would argue that the one that is closest to election day would be the most important.
Yeah, my air quality today is unbreathable, so I'm locked in the house.
Again, once again, I'm in house arrest in my house.
Oh, let me say one more thing about the California law, about the boards.
So the boards will be required to add ethnic and gender diversity, but here's the funny part.
You can self-describe.
So apparently you're allowed to self-identify anything you want.
So how many corporate boards are just going to say, hey, does anybody want to self-identify as Hawaiian Native or something?
Anybody want to be Native American?
And somebody will say, well, I hadn't thought about it before, but I'll self-identify.
Then you're all set.
Yeah, the next debate, apparently they're talking about cutting off the microphones.
The one thing that I think is hilarious about the first debate is given the way that they organized it with these two minutes you get to talk and the other person doesn't get to rebut, if the other person doesn't get to rebut, they're going to talk over you.
So whoever designed that first debate, they got exactly what they designed.
It was designed...
To give you just what you saw.
Especially because President Trump was part of it.
If you design a system where somebody can talk over you, and then you say, okay, I got this system where you could, you know, there's nothing that would stop them really, except the moderator and he can't really stop them.
And then we're going to add President Trump into it.
What the hell do you expect?
Right? So, I'm not sure that this whole debate thing even works.
Doesn't seem to have any real point to it.
I will say that I am surprised and a little bit impressed that Joe Biden got up the day after the debate and still looks like a fully functional day.
So whatever it is that Biden is experiencing, and I feel like it's unambiguously true that he's declining and it's very noticeable.
That just feels completely true.
But he does have good periods.
Will that be enough? We'll find out.
Oh yes, I was going to talk about the Kyle Rittenhouse thing.
So apparently Biden has referred to Kyle Rittenhouse in a tweet.
He tweeted a picture of him and referred to him as a white supremacist.
And in so doing, made Kyle Rittenhouse a rich man.
Because Kyle Rittenhouse has a good lawyer, Lin Wood, who has already said he's going to sue I think he's going to sue the media, some part of the media, and also Joe Biden for slandering his client.
Now, do you think he'll win?
Yes. I would think this would be the world's easiest lawsuit.
Because the evidence of the slander is in a tweet.
The evidence that Biden should have known that Kyle Rittenhouse...
Had no connection with white supremacy whatsoever.
There's no evidence. When I say no evidence, I mean none.
There's nothing suggesting it.
There's nothing hinting at it.
There's nothing there.
He is nothing but a good guy who found himself in a bad situation.
You could argue that he made a mistake being there with a gun, and I would not debate that.
But he's a good person, apparently.
And I think Lin Wood is just going to sue the living crap out of Joe Biden.
And I'm going to be pretty happy about that.
If he gets away with it, maybe I can get Lin Wood to sue some of the people on Twitter who call me bad things.
So how much do you like the fact that Kyle Rittenhouse probably is going to be a millionaire?
Looks like it to me. Alright.
Export Selection