Episode 1148 Scott Adams: Did CNN Send a Tiny Fly Drone to Distract Pence? And More About the Debate
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Content:
Rioters break windows of residential homes
VP Pence was solid in debate
Kamala pushes "Fine People" HOAX, Pence debunked it
Claims of sexism, misogyny, mansplaining
Whiteboard: Expected Value Calculation
Funny CNN comments on the debate
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If you're watching this on YouTube, you might say to yourself, hey, the sound is not so good.
It sounds a little like you're in a barrel or something.
That's because I was using my AirPods as my microphones, but a lot of people don't like how they look because it looks like you're a walrus with teeth sticking out of your ears instead of your mouth.
I don't want to look like a walrus with With teeth coming out of my ears.
So I've ordered a new microphone, which will be here in a few days, so next week you'll have a good sound.
I think it sounds pretty good on Periscope, in case you care.
Now, what do we need to have the best day ever?
Yeah, you know. You know.
All you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice, which is a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Parallel pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the debates.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go. Delightful.
Well, as everybody's piling in to hear my thoughts on the debate, because I know that's why you're here.
Did you see there's another video, Andy Ngo has it on his Twitter feed, of Black Lives Matter rioting in Wisconsin in Wauwatosa.
That's the name of the town, Wauwatosa.
That's actually the name of the town, Wauwatosa.
Anyway, the Black Lives Matter rioters were smashing the windows of random residential homes.
Is that scary?
Are you scared yet?
It's one thing when retail stores get broken into and destroyed.
But when residential homes, which probably there were children at home, Think about it.
You're at home, your children are there, and a brick comes through your front window, and there's an angry mob outside.
How do you feel? Pretty scared, right?
I think that's the kind of persuasion that wins elections.
We shall see. All right, let's talk about the big debate last night.
I'm sure you all saw it.
And I have many thoughts on that in no particular order.
Number one, Pence won.
It wasn't even close.
In my opinion, Pence dominated.
He dominated in terms of personality.
He dominated in terms of better points.
I've been telling you, how many times have I told you, the most underrated public servant is Mike Pence.
I don't think pundits and experts fully understand how good that was last night.
Because what you notice is mistakes, right?
Those are the things that get your attention.
You look for moments.
You look for knockout punches.
You look for mistakes. But that's not Pence's game.
Pence is a boxer who's going to win on points every time.
You're not going to get a knockout because Pence doesn't give any vulnerabilities.
So there's never a knockout.
But he will win on points if you hang in there with him.
So I think that's what happened.
He won easily on points.
You all saw CNN's new technology.
It was kind of impressive.
So CNN now has a drone that's so small and it's shaped like a fly.
And they flew it into the debate stage and landed it right on Mike Pence's head to try to distract him.
But he's so cool.
Didn't even bother him that a CNN fly drone was on his head.
Didn't even slow him down for a bit.
That's how good Mike Pence is at debating.
When you watch him debate, it felt more like a surgeon, didn't it?
Because where Trump was sort of like a cannon, if you think about it, it didn't matter what Biden did.
It was sort of irrelevant what Biden was doing in the debate.
Trump was just a cannon.
Boom, boom, boom. Offense, offense.
But watching Pence work, it was like watching a surgeon.
It's like, well, here's your claim.
Let's look at your claim.
Well, let's dissect it.
Let's take this part off.
He was deadly.
And I don't think he made a mistake.
Think about the fact that of all the coverage this morning, there is zero Commentary on anything that Pence did wrong.
Nothing. They're talking about the fly that landed on his head because that's all they have.
They're reduced to talking about the insects in the building.
That's it. That is winning a debate.
You don't win a debate harder than making your critics talk about the insect in the building.
That's a win. All right.
I wonder who was the staffer who got the job of telling Kamala Harris what she did wrong last night?
Because that feels like a tough job.
I would like to give you my impression of the staffer who drew the short straw to explain to Kamala what her biggest weakness was in the debate last night.
And it goes like this.
Miss Harris, do you have a moment?
I'd just like to talk about some of the things you did right and maybe some things that could have been better in the debate last night, if you have a minute.
Why sure, I'm always open for feedback.
What do you think I did right and if I did anything wrong, I'd like to hear that too.
Well, well, on your lies, your lies were excellent.
You had lots of good lies, and we thought those were good.
You really landed those. But, and in general, in terms of your overall presentation, we thought you were excellent from, I'd say, the chin down.
From the chin down, all good.
Really good. From the chin up, There's a little bit of an issue.
I don't want to make a big thing about it, but there are some facial expressions that are suboptimal in the context of a national debate, televised debate.
And Harris says, really?
Facial expressions? I don't exactly know what you're talking about.
Can you be more specific?
Oh, I was hoping you wouldn't ask me to be more specific.
Sometimes you look maybe a little condescending, a little bit.
Maybe your smile is a little too big.
And Harris says, I'm not really following you.
What would a condescending look look like?
And what do you mean I smile too much?
What do you mean? Okay, the only way I'm going to be able to convey this is maybe I'm going to try to do an impression of you.
And don't take this the wrong way, but this is the sort of facial expression we'd like to see more of.
Let me demonstrate.
See, this would be a comfortable, confident smile like this.
You want to do more of that and then less of, less of, less of this.
Try to do less of that.
Okay? And Kamala would say, um, anything else?
Yeah, yeah.
The condescending thing?
You can sometimes, if the other person is saying something you don't like, Here's a good way to go.
Just look down and just give your head a little shake.
Like, gosh, that's not true.
Because that conveys to the audience that you're confident and you're signaling that the other person's statement is not exactly accurate.
Just a little bit of a side to side like that.
So we want to see more of that and less of this.
Yeah, see this face?
Do less of that one and more of this one.
Okay, got it. And then the staffer would be fired.
So that's the way I think that went.
Let me tell you, and as long as we're all going to be accused of being sexist, you accept that, right?
We're all going to be accused of being sexist if you say anything at all about Kamala Harris.
But it is a fact.
That overall impression, even the way you look, your height, your hair, your presentation, it matters because people are influenced by your character as you present it, as much as your policies.
And in that totally non-sexist framing that I'm giving you, it has to be said that she was having a bad hair day.
Now this might be somewhat subjective, But I would like to start by saying Kamala Harris usually has very good hair days.
In fact, I would say that as a female politician, she has really excellent hair, to the point where I would say it's a plus most of the time.
And she has a variety of different looks for her hair, which is normal.
And most of them, I would say, 9 out of 10 of her hairstyles, I would say that's pretty good.
Pretty good. Whatever she did with her hair last night, I don't know if she was happy with it, but I have this question to the women watching this livestream.
So instead of making a statement, I'll put it in the form of a question.
If you're a woman and you're debating on TV and you feel in your own mind, just your own opinion, that you're having a terrible hair day, what's that do to your performance?
Very sexist, right?
Now, obviously, no two people are alike.
Some women don't care about their hair.
Blah, blah, blah. We're all individuals.
I get it. But that's why I'm asking the question.
Women, how would you feel if in your own opinion, not other people's, just your own opinion, you were going on stage and you were having a terrible hair day?
Because I feel like maybe that was happening last night.
Did anybody else have that impression?
She generally has, I would say, some of the best hairstyles of any woman politician.
But last night, no.
There was something going on last night with her hair that wasn't good.
And it matters. It matters if it affected how she felt about it.
It matters if it affected her confidence.
And maybe it did.
We don't know. Now, you all know that the big excitement for me, if you saw my tweet especially, is that when I saw Kamala Harris queue up the fine people hoax, in other words, she was going to claim, yet again, That the president had said that neo-Nazis and white supremacists were fine people, which is literally the opposite of what happened.
As you know, he said the opposite.
He called them out by name and said they should be condemned totally.
But Biden has made that the centerpiece of his campaign.
The trigger for his campaign, the reason he had to enter the politics when maybe he was past his prime, was that this fine people hoax was sort of the last straw for him.
And it never happened.
It's just a complete made-up hoax.
Now, as soon as Kamala queued it up, and I believe that Pence had a little bit of a tell, where I think he shook his head, you know, in the way that you should, to signal that there's something wrong going on.
And I jumped off the couch and I tweeted, you know, do it, Pence, do it!
Because he looked like a coiled snake, didn't he?
He looked like, you could see Kamala, you know, talking about the fine people hoax, and I'm looking at Pence, and in my mind, he actually transformed from, you know, this vice president looking guy into a coiled cobra.
Like you could almost see it like it was visual.
He just morphed into this coiled cobra.
And that's what got me off the couch.
I saw that look and I said, okay, that look is a coiled cobra.
He's going to go for this.
And then he did. Magnificent bastard.
He did. He went right after it.
And he did a really good job.
He said, this is why the public doesn't trust the press because it's exactly this kind of thing.
And then he went on to say how they edited it out to the part where he said explicitly that he condemned the white nationalists and neo-Nazis.
And it was perfect. Now, that's not the good part.
The good part is what happens next.
Because you know that the debates are always fact-checked.
And any major claim is going to be fact-checked.
Right? So, a major claim like that, where Kamala says this happened and Pence says it didn't happen, that obviously is going to be on the list of fact-checking things on CNN, right?
Let me check. Okay, CNN, let's see, where you fact-check the fine people hoax?
Not there.
They ignored it.
MSNBC? Let's see.
I don't even have to check, do I? I don't have to check.
They ignored it.
And I haven't checked. So if it turns out I'm wrong, I will be amazed.
But I'm making this claim without even looking.
Without even looking, I make the following claim.
They did not try to fact check it.
However, in another country that we're very fond of, it's called Great Britain.
They've got this news organization called the BBC, and they fact-checked it.
And they fact-checked it in favor of Pence.
And they gave him a full true rating for calling the fine people hoax a hoax.
They fact-checked Pence as true.
Both. Now, they're not the only ones.
There were some lesser publications that also did it.
And, of course, Breitbart's been doing it forever.
Joel Pollack's been doing it.
Steve Cortez has been debunking it with videos and articles for two years.
I've been doing it for two years.
So, the three of us, Joel and Steve and I, who probably worked the hardest on debunking that damn thing, were feeling pretty good last night.
Feeling pretty good because it felt like vindication.
It did, is what it felt like.
And I believe that the Trump campaign also has tweeted out some of the facts checking on that.
So, are we done?
Here's what's fun.
The fun part's coming up.
This has opened up a line of attack that, for whatever reason, President Trump had not been taking before.
And here's how it goes.
Once you've got the fact-checking established, so now that the hoax has been debunked and nobody has done an undebunk, in other words, there's only debunking.
There's debunking and there's silence.
That's all there was. Nobody was supporting it.
Oh, and by the way, as If you saw the video of Kamala Harris while Pence was debunking it, watch your face.
Because remember, when somebody is saying something in a debate that the other side believes is a false statement, what do they do?
If it's not your turn to talk and somebody else is lying, you always do the head shake.
You go, Wait till it's my turn.
Did she do that?
When Pence was debunking the main claim of the Biden campaign, the central claim of his campaign, Pence was debunking, and what did Kamala Harris do?
She looked down.
That's it. She just looked down.
She looked like a kid who got caught in the candy jar, because she was.
And it also signaled to me Clearly that she knows it wasn't true.
That's the good part.
The good part is she signaled so clearly that she knows it's not true.
Because you don't act that way if somebody debunks the most important thing of your campaign.
You don't just look down.
You resist. You talk over them.
You throw in a little debunk of the debunk when it's your time to talk again.
You shake your head.
You make a face.
You do something.
If the central claim of your campaign has been taken out by the other side, you don't just sit there and look down.
Unless you knew it was a lie all along.
And that's, it's increasingly obvious.
All right. I think the president could take that momentum and the next time he has a chance, he could just say, look, the central claim of the Biden campaign is the fine people hoax.
It was debunked by the BBC. It was debunked by everybody who looked into it.
It was debunked by Breitbart.
Anybody who looked into it debunked it.
There was no counter to that last night.
So I think the president could drive that home and it would really matter.
The big story, of course, is also the sexism, the misogyny.
Was there sexism and misogyny last night?
Pence was talking over his time and sometimes talking over Kamala Harris.
Was he mansplaining, as some people said?
Was he being a big old bully?
Was he just being a terrible man?
Well, I don't think that complaint is working quite the way the defenders of Kamala Harris wanted it to.
Because the only thing that could be worse than losing a debate is losing a debate and thinly claiming that the reason was sexism.
Because the whole country looked at that and said, I don't think so.
I watched that debate.
I know what sexism looks like.
And then I watched this.
That's not what I saw.
And even women Democrats who would support Kamala Harris in general, even they were saying, oh, slow your roll on the sexism thing.
That's not what we saw.
And the women who, to their We're trying to be, let's say, nonpolitical in the sense of being accurate.
They said another woman would have been able to handle that situation.
True. Fact check.
True. Imagine Hillary Clinton in the same situation.
Does Hillary Clinton get bulldozed?
Nope. Nope.
Imagine Margaret Thatcher.
Does she get bulldozed?
Probably not. Imagine Elizabeth Warren.
Does she get bulldozed in that situation?
I don't think so.
I don't think so. It felt like it was a Kamala Harris situation.
It didn't feel like it was a man-woman situation.
Even women didn't feel that.
So I think she lost terribly, like really badly.
And some people tried to say that she looked presidential.
I'm going to talk about some of the comments after.
But in my mind, she lost some presidential credibility.
Because if she couldn't stand up to a vice president who's one of the nicest guys in the world, on the other side of two sheets of plexiglass, if that was too much for her to handle, how is she going to handle Putin, how is she going to handle Xi, etc.
So I think she really hurt herself, especially because people see her as the top of the ticket, and she looked unqualified.
In my opinion, and I realize that her supporters said the opposite, they said, oh yeah, she's very presidential looking there.
I didn't see it.
The facial thing and the sort of complaining and sort of the letting him bully her, because she didn't let him, she allowed it to happen, none of that looked good and none of that looked presidential.
And the facial expressions, they looked Unusually unpresidential.
In fact, I would go so far as to say I'm not aware of anybody who's ever run for president, male or female, who got to a high level, let's say.
I can't think of one example of anyone whose, let's say, mannerisms were less presidential than Kamala Harris.
I can't think of anybody.
Can you? Male or female, think of any personality Whose demeanor, her facial expressions, just the way she acts or he acts.
Can you think of anybody who didn't look presidential?
If you look at, you think of the entire, you know, slate of characters from...
Remind me of the name of...
Who is the woman who was running for Democrat in 20...
No, she was running as a Republican.
I can't remember her name.
But anyway, she would be another example of somebody who would not have wilted under pressure.
Palin. Yeah, I think Palin would have done fine, and that's true.
Carly Fiorini, thank you.
I'm trying to think of Carla Fiorini.
Fiorini would not have wilted under pressure, and you know it, right?
Because we've seen her under pressure.
She didn't wilt. So I think the claim that it was sexism just falls apart and certainly weakens that side of the story.
Let me go to the whiteboard here.
We'll talk more about people's impressions about the debate, but I want to make this point before we go too far.
For those of you who have not studied economics or statistics or business, you may not have heard of something called an expected value calculation.
It's one of the ways that you use logic and reason and math To help you sort out what's true and what matters and what is bigger than something else.
And it goes like this.
You take the odds of something happening and you multiply it by the cost and then you can compare it to other choices.
So let's say that the odds of Trump getting re-elected and destroying the United States, and of course there are lots of things that could go wrong in any administration, but we'll just keep it simple at the concept level, okay?
So just imagine that there's one risk and it's the risk of the United States being totally destroyed, but it's very small.
Even if you were totally anti-Trump, he's got a full term behind him, so you know what you're going to get.
You might not like it, but you know what you're going to get, and the country was not destroyed.
So let's say there was a 1% chance that he would destroy America.
You would multiply that 1% times, if you wanted to look at it financially, you would multiply it by the total value of the United States.
You'd say, well, there's a 1% chance that you could have a cost that would cost the entire United States, or a 1% chance That it would kill all the people in the United States.
So, 1% of 370 million or 1% of however many trillions we're worth.
Now, we don't have to do the math because I'm just sticking to the concept.
If you were to compare that to the alternative, The alternative is a Biden-Harris administration, which we know would be staffed with progressive people.
You know the AOC would have a bigger role, etc.
I would say there's probably a solid 30% chance that going as socialist as the Democrats want to go would destroy America.
I'd say about a 30% chance.
Now, if you watch Tucker Carlson, it looks like it's closer to a 100% chance, but remember that everything in the political season is sort of tripled in magnitude, so everything that seems like it's a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10, it's looking like a 9 at the moment because everything's ratcheted up, but in reality, Let's say Biden gets elected.
In reality, literally, what are the odds that the whole United States is going to be destroyed?
Well, it's not 100%.
It's not 90%.
I don't think it's 70%.
But when you get down to about 30%, When you look at the actual things that are being presented, you know, fewer police, etc., you start to say to yourself, yeah, financially, that actually wouldn't work.
And if you took away the incentive for people, that's going to be bad.
If you took away law and order, that's bad.
So I think there's a solid 30% chance that America would be destroyed by a Biden administration.
Now, you, of course, get to put your own odds on this.
So there's a subjective nature of this, right?
Nobody knows what's going to happen.
So you're just sort of guessing what the odds are.
But the main point is this.
The total risk of getting four more years of Trump is really small.
In terms of will the country be destroyed?
No. No.
It's a very small risk.
The odds of socialism, in its fuller form, leading to the destruction of the United States and conquest by some other power, is pretty good.
It's pretty good, actually.
It's not most likely, but would you take a 30% chance of destroying the country?
I think that Trump can do a better job of scaring the country into voting for him.
And it would be completely fair.
Because I do think that these are roughly the odds.
That's my opinion.
All right. Here are some comments that people made on CNN about the debate, and I wanted to see them because they were funny.
So here's something that Sarah Isger said.
So these are all CNN related pundits.
She said that Senator Harris came in with sky-high expectations.
Is that true? In your experience, do you think that Kamala Harris had sky-high debate expectations?
That never happened, did it?
I think everybody thought that she would just be okay.
I don't believe anybody thought she had sky-high expectations.
But we did have high expectations for Pence.
Because he's always performed well in debates, and I would say he exceeded sky-high expectations.
In my opinion, Pence, he's doomed to never get the full credit for the good things he's done.
He will never get credit for how good that debate was.
That was one of the best Debate performances I've ever seen.
That's hard to top.
So they start out by trying to convince you that there were sky-high expectations, and therefore if she didn't meet the sky-high expectations, well, it's not because she did a bad job.
It's because your expectations were too wrong.
It's your fault.
It's not Kamala Harris's fault.
You have to take some responsibility for her failure because your expectations for her were too high, way too high.
Why do you do that?
Why do you hurt Kamala Harris like that by making your expectations sky high?
Okay, that never happened.
And then there's Julian Zelizer, also CNN person, And he says, given her immense skill as an orator and in debating.
What? That's his first sentence.
Given her immense skill as an orator and in debating.
I don't think that's an evidence, is it?
Does she have immense skill?
As an orator or as a debater because I think if she had any of those things she might have been the candidate for president.
It feels to me that she would have gotten a little bit deeper into the campaign in the primaries if she'd been a skilled orator or Good at debating.
And then he goes on to say she was incredibly restrained.
So turning it into a good thing.
Yeah, she's very skilled, but she's restrained.
All right, that's a good thing.
Even sticking to her time.
So she stayed within her timelines, whereas Pence did not.
So that's a little bit like a participation trophy, isn't it?
It's like, sure, sure, Mike Pence won the debate, but I don't think that's the whole story, because you have to look at the fact that she stayed to her time limits.
If that's what you have, she stayed to her time limits, and she didn't have a fly on her forehead?
That's losing the debate.
All right. And then there's Frida Gietas, also CNN, who said that Harris won because she had so much more material to work with.
All she had to do was cite the facts.
Blah, blah, blah about the catastrophic handling of the coronavirus.
So Frida, she's decided that the debate can be decided not on anything that you do in the debate.
It's just the facts that existed independent of what you said about them.
Now, these are so weak, the defenses of Kabul Harris, that they're hilarious.
How about Van Jones?
So Van Jones, trying to make lemonade out of a turd, said Vice President Pence was masterful at one thing, normalizing conservatism.
He can take right-wing conspiracy theories and President Trump's grievances and make them sound mellow and unthreatening.
Okay, was it Pence who was making that stuff sound unthreatening?
Was that his magic trick?
Or is it that that stuff is unthreatening and the only person who can make it sound threatening is Trump?
Trump's magic trick is he makes everything seem bigger, more important, sets your hair on fire.
So the real story is that Trump can make ordinary things sound dangerous and provocative.
Pence can simply describe ordinary things as ordinary things.
So, is that like Pence's great skill?
That he can take these extraordinary things and describe them as ordinary?
No. That's not what was happening.
Pence was describing completely safe and ordinary things, like law enforcement, etc., in ordinary terms.
It wasn't magic.
He just described stuff.
That's it. So then Van Jones went on to say that Harris made history tonight as a black woman.
Okay, so made history.
Again, I would like to think that we're at least on the verge, if not already there, where it's more sexist and more More racist to call it out as special than it is to ignore it.
All right, is there anybody here who thinks it's special that a woman is running for the highest office?
I hope not. I hope not.
Is there anybody here who thinks that's weird or special or crazy?
Because, you know, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.
So we shouldn't be talking about her being a woman anymore.
That feels like a nothing.
You know, we should be over that.
How about talking about her because she's a person of color?
Aren't we over that?
We had eight years of Obama.
Did his color matter?
No. Except maybe it's a positive.
And Just the fact that we still have to call that out.
It's a remarkable time for women who have a background from India and from Jamaica or wherever.
We've just got to stop talking about that.
All right. And then he says, after 90 minutes of the debate, no one is saying she could not serve as president of the United States.
He says they'll quiddle over her answers, but now everybody can see her as a president.
Is that true? Because I had the opposite feeling from the debate.
Before the debate, I could see her as president.
After the debate, less.
Because that facial thing, it looks like she can't control that, and it's pretty bad.
It's not a good look.
The fact is that we do pick presidents like we pick ornaments.
We do pick presidents for a look, a demeanor, a presentation.
They become the brand and the logo of the country.
So they don't have to be beautiful, you know, it's not about attractiveness per se, but you need a certain look of gravitas.
Did Kamala Harris convey gravitas?
Like, did she convey weight?
I would say no.
I think she went the other direction.
I believe that she looked non-confident and that she couldn't handle a mild bully.
Because, you know, Pence was, obviously by strategy, he was taking extra time.
But all he was doing was taking the shelf space that he could get away with.
Part of the game. Part of the game is if you can use up most of the shelf space, you know, use up the time, that's an advantage.
So when Pence could see that he kept talking and he wasn't being stopped, they tried, you know, the host tried to stop him, but there was no penalty.
So he just kept going.
That didn't look like a mistake to me.
That looked like good strategy, which was obviously decided in advance, and he implemented it, and it worked.
So in my opinion, she looked less presidential last night than at any point during the campaign season.
That's just my take.
SE Cup? Said that, quote, what I saw was a man who talked over not just his female opponent, we're going full sexist here, but also the female moderator.
Oh, double misogyny.
Double misogyny.
That mean old Mike Pence, not only did he talk over a woman who was running for vice president, but he talked over a woman who was a moderator.
Double misogyny.
But none of that is what happened, and other women who are being fair and honest about this are saying the same thing.
Other women who have succeeded based on their talent and hard work and skill are looking at Kamala Harris and saying, you know, the right amount of talent and hard work and skill would have been better.
She could have been better.
Paul Begella, Who is sort of the golem of CNN. If CNN were sort of a Hobbit movie, Paul Begala would be the golem.
And he's so far away from being anybody you should take seriously.
He's probably the person I take least seriously.
All right. He says, Harris showed the world why Joe Biden's first presidential decision was a masterstroke.
So, okay.
She indicted the Trumperzine with a relentless, remorseless command of the facts.
She was cunning, yet charming, righteously indignant, yet likable.
It was that last word that caught my attention.
Would you have used the word likable?
For Kamala Harris last night?
And again, watch out your sexism, because if you say that a woman is not likable, you're sort of automatically suspected of being a sexist, right?
Well, would you have said that about a man?
Let me be as clear as I can about this in my own opinion.
Would I say that a man was not likable if he made the same faces that Kamala Harris did?
Yeah. Yeah, I would.
I would say that anybody who made those faces would be unlikable.
Likewise, anybody who spread the fine people hoax is automatically unlikable, in my opinion.
Megyn Kelly made some news by saying in a tweet, she said, take it like a woman, don't make faces.
So she was tweeting at Harris during the debate, take it like a woman, don't make faces.
So what happened with Megyn Kelly?
When she did this tweet, take it like a woman, well obviously people decided to make that sexual.
Do you think that Megyn Kelly intended that statement, take it like a woman, don't make faces, do you think she was thinking of that as a sexual comment?
No! No!
That was not a sexual comment.
It was a comment about look tougher.
Look tougher. All right so take it like a woman was like take it like a man except you know more appropriate version it was just saying don't make that face that's all it was and she got dumped on on social media now will any of this matter it will matter if uh the campaign takes advantage of it So there is an advantage to take.
The advantage is, first of all, you can paint Kamala Harris as the real top of the ticket so that you can attack her like she's the top of the ticket.
And that sounds fair because people expect that at the very least she'd be the candidate for a second term if Biden got elected.
So you can certainly attack her as the top of the ticket in waiting, and you could attack her on the fine people hoax now.
Now that it's been fact-checked by credible news organizations, you could just say, you could do a campaign ad where you say the Biden campaign was based on the biggest lie in American history.
Now, calling the fine people hoax the biggest lie in American history is technique.
If you've heard me say it or tweet it, it's technique.
The technique is this.
You say to yourself, I'm not sure that's the biggest lie in American history.
Let's look at some other ones and see how big they are.
Let's compare them. That's what I want you to do.
It doesn't matter if it's literally the biggest lie in American history.
If I can put it in that category and make you argue about whether there might have been, There might have been some other lie that was bigger.
Then I've already sold my point that it's among the biggest lies and that it's a lie.
That's the point. So when you say it's the biggest lie in American history or the most divisive lie in American history, that might be true.
That's the most divisive lie.
You're trying to over-claim because that's strong technique.
So if you said Biden keeps telling this bulging vein thing and then you show the video clip, all that came out of the weeds with the bulging veins, and then you show the debunk, Show that it's not true, and then you end the campaign commercial with noting that Richard Spencer, the organizer of the Charlottesville march, has endorsed Biden.
You just end it with, and the organizer of the Charlottesville event endorsed Joe Biden, which is true.
And people will go to fact check that.
They're like, that can't be true.
Oh, that actually happened.
And that's real, by the way.
So while the vice presidential debate is not by itself something that will change the election too much, it did expose a line of attack that could change the election.
So it did make possible a dismantling of their campaign.
So the other big news is that Trump has refused to take part in the next debate if it's going to be a virtual one, and that's what they wanted to do.
So they decided they wanted the next one to be virtual, which makes sense because the president and others have been You know, tested positive for coronavirus.
You don't know how long that stuff lasts.
You don't know who else traveling with him might be exposed.
So maybe you want to go virtual.
It's not a mistake. But do you agree with President Trump refusing to do the debate?
Remember, he's behind in the polls.
Generally speaking, when you're behind in the polls, you do the debate, right?
Have you ever seen an exception to that?
Has there ever been an exception where the person who's behind in the polling didn't want to do a debate?
Because that's the only way they have to make up ground, for the most part.
I'm watching your comments.
I won't be able to read my notes and also call out the Super Chats, but I do look at them.
Most of them I'm seeing, in case you're wondering, but I can't read them out loud and look at my notes at the same time.
So I apologize for that.
So here's what is good about Trump refusing to do it.
I believe that the second part of this, which has been unstated, but you know it was coming, if Trump had agreed to a virtual debate where they're in different places and it's just being broadcast, what is the predictable next thing that would happen?
You know what it is.
The next thing that would happen is they would change the debate rules To turn off the mic so that Trump could not be heard at all.
Now, if he was on the same stage with Biden and they turned off his mic, he could still talk over him, right?
And the camera might pick up the two of them and might see the Trump talking.
Maybe you could even hear it on the other microphones.
So the idea of putting him in a remote location, I think, It's probably 80% about turning off his microphone.
Don't you think that that was the real play?
It's about the microphone? And they'll use the excuse of coronavirus, and that's a good excuse.
It's a really good excuse, but it's about the microphone.
Now, the president being behind says, I'm not going to do it.
Now, it might be a negotiating ploy.
Remember, the president is always negotiating, especially when he leaves the negotiation.
Leaving the negotiation is just part of his negotiating.
He says that, so we know that to be true.
And so maybe they'll still have some kind of a debate.
But think about the fact that he could do this after Pence beat Kamala Harris in the debate.
I think that Pence's solid win made it possible for Trump to cancel the other debates, or at least made it easier.
Because at least Pence goes out with a solid victory.
I know some crazy people will say that you didn't win, and CNN's running fake polls showing that Kamala Harris totally won, like by a lot.
I don't think so.
That's not the debate I watched.
But the bottom line is that you can't win a debate as a vice president.
You can't win any harder Than having the top of the ticket say, you know, we don't even need any more debates.
We just won this one so badly and Kamala is really the head of the ticket.
So we just beat my number two, Pence, my number two guy just demolished your number one candidate because their number one candidate is sort of Kamala Harris.
That's not a bad time to leave.
If you're going to pull out of the rest of the debates, you couldn't pick a better time than that.
So I think Trump is good at recognizing a moment, and this was exactly the right moment for that play.
It gets the news cycle, gets you talking about the debates, so you're talking less about the coronavirus.
All good. Lauren Kenton said something funny on CNN that was funny enough that I just wanted to repeat it.
She said, COVID-19, thanks for the bad hair year.
It's not a bad hair day.
It's a bad hair year.
I don't know. I thought that was funny.
Did you see the video of Trump talking about Regeneron and he was doing a proof of life thing where he's not on camera as much, so he's doing these videos so you can see he's still Trump and he's still healthy.
And I had a few impressions about that.
Number one, I can't tell if it was just the lighting and it might be just the lighting, but it looks like there's no orange left in his hair.
And it looks like there's no orange tone to his TV makeup.
Now, there could be a reason for this, and I'm just going to speculate now.
I'm guessing that because of his age, that his hair color is colored, right?
Doesn't he add something, some highlights to give it that...
That non-grey color, I think.
I would assume he's gray.
I would assume if he didn't do anything to his hair it would be gray.
So if you go into the hospital, and in particular if your problem is one that people can't be around you, is somebody else the one who colors his hair?
I'm just going to speculate that he has some assistant who normally once a week or whatever adds a little tone to his hair to keep it that color.
If you go into the hospital, the nurses and the doctors are not going to perform that function and there's nobody else you can ask because you're infected with the coronavirus.
So it could be that like other people who go into the hospital, you just can't keep up your hairstyle while you're in the hospital.
So he may have let it revert.
Now it could have been just the lighting.
I may be completely off here, so we'll have to see him again.
But if he let it revert, he emerged as Gandalf the Grey.
Do you know Gandalf? He was actually Gandalf the Grey at first and turned into Gandalf the White when something happened and he transformed.
I don't want to call him Trump the White because that turns into a whole different thing.
So it's like he emerged as Gandalf the Grey.
Like he came out of the coronavirus a different person or a different leader.
And I gotta say I like it.
If the grey is real, and if he's going to keep it, and I don't know either of those to be true, it works.
And I think also there might be an issue with how he does TV makeup.
Because how does a makeup artist put makeup on somebody who's got coronavirus?
So he may not be getting TV makeup.
Maybe a family member, probably Melania, because Melania already has the virus.
So maybe he says, Melania, can you put on some TV makeup?
And maybe she does it better.
Maybe she just gives him a more natural look.
Maybe it's because his hair is not as orange, so they have to tone down the face makeup as well.
Whatever it is, it works.
So I'm just going to say, I like it.
It's a good look. So if he keeps it, I think that'd be a pretty good decision.
But let's talk about what he said, which wasn't so good.
The part about him talking?
Not as good. Not as good.
And he has one mistake that he seems to want to make over and over again, which is saying medical stuff that non-medical people just shouldn't say.
Now, of course, you all know he got in trouble with hydroxychloroquine because he's not a doctor, not a scientist, and was a little enthusiastic about that, and that didn't work out for him politically.
But then he has this Regeneron and several other drugs, remdesivir and I don't know what else, vitamin D, etc.
And he gives this video and he says that it was the Regeneron that made all the difference.
And when he said that, I just said, oh, don't say that.
I know why he's saying it.
It makes perfect sense to say it.
But He's again falling into the trap of making a medical claim that presidents should not make.
If a medical person made this claim, you could at least take it seriously, but I just don't like to see the president say, I took six drugs, but this is the one that made the difference, because I don't think you could know that.
I don't think you could know which of the drugs made you feel the way you feel, and on top of that, He's taking that other drug that's got a long mane that's a steroid.
The steroid, I believe, makes you feel better even if you're not better.
Somebody needs to fact check me on that.
Any doctors want to fact check me on that?
Would not the steroid just by itself, wouldn't that make you feel better even if underlying problem wasn't that much better?
So when he says, I felt immediately better after the Regeneron, I gotta ask myself, what else were you taking about the same time?
So his credibility on medical claims could not be lower, and so I think it was a mistake for him to promote this.
But I have to say, I didn't see that much pushback.
Maybe because there's other news that's more interesting, but he might have gotten away with it.
I think they'll double back on that later.
But here's the thing. He's trying to present a story in which the therapeutics are the savior and the vaccines will be great and the vaccines will finish it off.
But the therapeutic, especially Regeneron, if it's real and if it's working, is here now.
And it's a big difference.
So he wants people to feel safer about the odds of catching it.
So that's good.
So he's dealing with the fear.
How's he doing? Let me ask you this.
When you saw President Trump go into Walter Reed, how much fear did you have about coronavirus?
Probably a lot. You started with a healthy dose of fear for somebody in their 70s.
Maybe you weren't afraid for yourself, but you were certainly concerned about anybody in their 70s.
And when he went in the hospital, you were really concerned, probably, you know, if you were a supporter.
When it turns out that this drug, if this is true, and it could be true, the Regeneron made him feel instantly better, if that's true, that makes you feel a lot safer, doesn't it?
And again, not safer necessarily for yourself, but safer on behalf of the exposed, vulnerable population.
So I think that part's probably good.
To the extent that he sold the story, That there's a therapeutic that can really make a difference.
Big Pharma pushes new meds, even at Walter Reed.
Yeah, so Big Pharma was using this as a marketing opportunity, that's true, and successfully.
Now, I hope we will not find that the president has any financial tie to Regeneron.
I believe he used to have some stock in that company, but doesn't anymore.
If that reporting is correct, I need a fact check on that.
So, I love the fact that he's selling the story that the therapeutics are already here and they will keep you alive in almost every case.
That's a pretty good story and it is compatible with reopening the country.
In a related news, in an unprecedented move it's been called, the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine I have publicly condemned the Trump administration for their COVID pandemic response.
And calling for the current U.S. leadership to be voted out of office.
That's pretty unprecedented because it's a medical organization and they don't usually, maybe never, have gotten involved in politics.
But in their opinion, the treatment of the medical part of his job, if you will, the pandemic, that according to them he's botched it so badly he should be voted out of office and they should break their long-standing tradition to make that case.
Here's what I get out of this.
This is exactly why you can't let doctors make decisions.
This. This is exactly why you shouldn't listen to doctors on big political decisions.
Now, should you listen to your doctor about a medical decision?
Sure. Of course.
Of course you listen to your doctor on a medical decision.
Is the pandemic handling a medical decision?
Nope. Nope.
It's a very big decision.
It's a national decision.
It's a national defense decision.
It's an economic decision.
It's a mental health.
It's a physical health.
It's a medical decision.
It's a lot of things.
It's not a medical decision.
This demonstrates the stupidity of doctors as well as just about anything could.
They have ignored That is stupid.
Because they're at least smart enough to know they don't know that.
It'd be one thing if you didn't know what you don't know.
But doctors are smart in general.
They're smart people.
They're people with high IQs.
They know they don't know economics and they know that that's the other part of the decision and they have consciously decided to just ignore it.
They know that freedom is a thing and that people want it and that people will willingly take a risk of dying to get it.
Did they talk about freedom?
Nope. Wasn't part of the conversation.
So doctors having a limited talent stack, meaning they could have all the talent in the world at doctoring, They know they don't have those other things.
They know they don't speak for our freedom.
They don't speak for your soul.
They don't speak for your, you know, your quality of life.
They don't speak for the economy.
They don't speak for national defense.
But the president does.
And the president He took all of those things into consideration and made the decisions, and he did.
I believe he followed the medical decisions in every case, but I looked for a specific example because, obviously, if doctors are going to make such an unprecedented move, they're going to have to give their reasons, right?
So here are the reasons.
For example, they say in their statement, for example, masks work.
What? Was there a point when the president said masks don't work?
The only point that happened is when the doctors told him to say that.
That's the only time.
The only time Trump said masks don't work is when doctors told him to say it.
That's it. As soon as the doctors reversed, Fauci and the Surgeon General, etc., as soon as they reversed, Trump reversed too.
Now, he of course doesn't want to overdo the masks, but he always said they worked.
He's always promoted them.
He carries one in his pocket.
So the first part is just not true.
And then they say social distancing works.
Was there ever a point where Trump said that doesn't work?
No. These are just lies.
They quarantine and isolation work, right?
Again, There's nobody, including the president, who's ever said these things don't work.
No, that's not true. There are citizens who say they don't work, but certainly not Trump.
And this is amazing.
All right. I would like to frame Trump's handling of the coronavirus this way.
When you have a leader Leaders have two roles.
I held up three fingers there when I said two, but you know this one doesn't count.
Two. Two roles.
One is to lead the public where they don't know they want to go.
That's really where leaders get the most credit.
If a leader can tell the public, all right, it's going to be tough.
We've got to go to war, for example.
It's going to be horrible, but we got to do it anyway.
That's leadership. Getting the public to do something they didn't think they wanted to do, but it's good for them.
The other kind of leadership is giving the public what they want because it's legitimate, right?
So the public wants, let me give you an example.
The public wants freedom of speech.
If the president simply didn't put his own opinion on it and just said, all right, everybody wants freedom of speech.
I'm your leader. I'm going to go get you some freedom of speech.
That's not really leadership in the other way, where you're giving them something they don't want or don't know they want.
You're giving them what they want.
What was the coronavirus?
Was the coronavirus the first kind of leadership where the president was leading people to do something they don't want?
Or was it more the follower kind of leadership where you say, all right, everybody's on the same page.
This is what you want. I will simply deliver it to you.
I think it was more the second part.
There was a little bit of the first part.
You know, you got to social distance and we're going to close the economy.
So there were parts of that.
But here's the part that I think nobody has talked about.
It goes like this.
The public had a vote.
It was never the president's decision.
The president never had the power, never had the ability, probably never had the desire to override the citizens on this question.
Because I think the citizens had enough information to make their own decisions.
And the citizens said, In effect, they didn't say it explicitly, but in effect, yeah, we're willing to risk a few hundred thousand lives to run the country a little bit more closer to a normal situation.
Keep the economy strong.
Keep our national defense strong.
Protect the poor, especially.
Do what we can with the vulnerable people, especially.
But the citizens decided.
The president didn't have a choice.
If you think the president could have made the citizens respond much differently, I would say that's a very unsupported assumption and doesn't track.
Imagine, if you will, a President Obama.
That's a completely fair mental experiment.
Imagine a President Obama And he told the country, you've all got to wear your masks.
What do the Conservatives do?
Do the Conservatives say, oh, President Obama says we have to wear masks?
I'm in. Because the way he said it was very credible.
And he's a man of science.
He respects science.
So if President Obama says we Conservatives and Republicans should wear masks, I'm in.
I'm wearing a mask. No.
In your wildest imagination, You can't see, you can't see President Obama getting more compliance from the public.
Do you know why? Not his decision.
It's not. Watch this.
This is me not wearing a mask.
If I want to, I can walk out doors and I can walk into a store without my mask.
I'll get kicked down, but I can do it.
I have the power. President Obama couldn't have made me wear a mask if I didn't want to.
He couldn't make me not meet with my friends if I want to.
President Trump doesn't have that power either.
So as soon as you imagine that the president was leading in that first way, which is getting the public to do something that maybe they didn't want to do, you end up with the wrong answer.
Because if he had been trying to do that, he failed.
I would agree with that.
If he had been trying to make everybody wear a mask and trying to make everybody socially distance the way he was telling you or the experts, yeah, that didn't happen.
Was it ever possible?
Was it? No.
Because he didn't have the only vote.
This was a situation where every one of you had a vote.
And you voted.
You voted with your actions.
And if you look around, you see a lot of people who said, you know, I know that a few hundred thousand people are gonna die if I act this way and other people act this way.
Yeah, I was just reading your comments.
That's why I was pausing there for a moment.
So, whoever the president was, they were going to get the same response from the public.
The public was going to vote.
Americans have voted.
Americans have chosen freedom and growth and prosperity over absolute safety.
Do you know why we chose that?
Because we're Americans.
There's nothing more American than that.
If you say to an American, here's your deal.
The only way you can keep the economy going is a few hundred thousand people are going to die.
We don't know their names, but we know it's going to happen.
But it's the only way to keep this engine working, and this engine is what has made the world as good as it is.
Do you want to break the thing that made everything work?
Basically, the whole rest of the world benefits from a strong United States.
I feel that's a safe thing to say.
That's my take. The public voted, the president basically agreed with the public, and we got exactly what we bought.
If you go into a store and you say, I'm going to buy a loaf of bread, I've got my whatever bread costs I have no idea.
I don't buy bread. But you give them $4 for your loaf of bread, and they give you a loaf of bread.
What do you say? Do you say that was a failure?
No. No.
You had money. You wanted bread.
You give them money. They give you bread.
It's what you wanted. It's what they wanted.
Everybody got what they wanted. Nobody failed.
If the public of the United States said, yeah, I know it's going to cost us a couple hundred thousand lives and more, and I'm still going to go get that loaf of bread, because you know what?
I know what a loaf of bread costs.
I know it's not free.
I'm not asking for free bread.
I'm American, right?
Americans don't ask for free bread.
We know it costs something.
We're going to pay it.
So Americans paid it.
The president allowed the transaction.
Let me say that that way.
All right. That's all I got for now.
I will talk to you tomorrow.
All right. Periscope is off.
YouTube is still on.
I like to hang around and just take some extra questions on YouTube.
Somebody said Pence had less time than Harris.
I saw that, but it's funny how it didn't seem like that, right?
The impression of it was different than the actual math of it, I think.
Somebody says, social media ruined politics.
Yes, I would say that the artificial intelligence ruined social media, which ruined politics.
Because the AI determines what we see and it's decided we'll only see things that make our hair catch on fire.
What did I think of the Lincoln lie?
I don't know which one you're talking about.
Do masks work?
Let me give you the answer I've given before.
I'll give you the short version.
If you believe that masks definitely don't work, or you believe that masks definitely work, you are not smart.
Sorry. Sorry.
Because there are smart people who are arguing they work, and there are smart people also looking at the data.
In all cases, everybody's looking at the data, and smart people will say they do work.
So what can you conclude, as a citizen who is not an expert, when there are smart people who say they work, smart people say they don't work.
What should you do? What's the right decision?
The right decision is you wear a mask, because it might work.
If the stakes are really high, it's this.
It's a version of the expected value thing.
The cost of wearing a mask, there is some cost, especially if you've got an underlying health condition or something, there is a cost.
And it's a pretty big cost.
But the alternative of potentially millions of deaths is bigger.
So if you don't know that they work, and you don't know that they don't work, The right play in terms of risk management is to wear a mask.
So when you ask me, do they work or do they not?
I don't need to answer that.
I only need to tell you that smart experts have looked at the data and they disagree.
That's it. That's the whole, that's all the data you need to know to wear a mask.
All right. Somebody says that Kamala had nothing to Promote or to tout.
That's true. I saw one expert pundit say she only needed to show up and not lose and it would be fine because the ticket's already ahead.
I think there's something to that.
She didn't have to take a chance.
So she didn't take a chance and she didn't have to take a chance.
Maybe that was enough.
What's the dumbest? The comments are going by so quickly a lot of them I can't read.
Can you speak to the answers to the last question?
Remind me what was the last question?
I don't remember.
Who was more positive and upbeat?
I would say Pence.
Pence was the more positive message.
Did I watch the Frank Lutz focus group?
I did not.
I once shared a shared a car with Frank Luntz years ago.
We both gave a talk at the same place and we we shared a car back to the airport.
So in a weird small world way I spent some time in a car with him.