Episode 554 Scott Adams: Biden’s Climate Plan, Plan to Reduce Gun Violence, 2020 Election

Goes the dynamite. Here I am. Where are you?

Come on in here. Gather round. Quick, run and get your beverage because.

You know it's coming. By the way, I'm using a new.

Microphone, so if anybody has any comments on the quality of my sound, that would be great. Hope you could hear me. I know why most of you are here. Some of you are here for the.

Incredible entertainment, the innovative thinking, the new framing, the learning.

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How delightful. Well, we have fun news today. It's always better when the news is fun.

I can't always control that. Sometimes the news is not fun.

Sometimes the news is fun.

Today is fun.

I'm going to start out while people.

Are streaming in here.

With Dino Joe Concha.

He wrote an article in which he once again, not once again, but he repeated the Fine People hoax, suggesting that President Trump, quote, supported white nationalists at Charlottesville. Charlottesville.

That, of course, is the opposite of what happened. I don't have to rehash that.

You've all seen this transcript. You all know that that's fake news. What I did in response to that was I used a very vulgar profanity in my reply.

Now, I'm not going to repeat it.

Because I'm trying to stay nice on these things. Whoever said, no sound, you get to be blocked because you're a troll.

So I used a very offensive reference.

Let's just say that I gave the.

Lord a middle name. And in my tweet, when I showed.

My frustration with the continuation of this hoax, especially since it was coming from Joe Kocha, who is not associated with.

The left, I gave the Lord a middle name in my reply.

Needless to say, some people resisted that and said, scott, Scott, Scott, we don't like your blasphemy. We agree with your point, but I certainly cannot retweet that because you used such a profane way of describing it. Here's what you need to know. It was intentional and it was supposed to offend. That was the built in error. If you want something to go viral.

A really good way to do it.

Is to build in a mistake, something you just shouldn't have done. Something that makes people read it and then say, for whatever reason, I'm going to spend some time on this. I'll write him to tell him his language is bad.

I will, I will.

You know, I will say that I'm.

Offended if I can get you to do that.

That's the point. So everybody who wrote to me to say, Scott, I do not like your use of this vulgar term, just know that that's why I used it, because I want it to hurt. I want people who have been passing this hoax around to stop and say, my goodness, what's the problem?

So I'm using a directional mic, by.

The way, instead of. Instead of my clip on. So it's a brand new mic, it's directional. I've seen too many people say, put.

On the other microphone.

So we will end this experiment with this. Excuse me.

Bear with me. All right, back to the directional microphone. Apparently the. The best technology for sound is is this little wired $10 microphone. This is an expensive one. It's got a little thing on and everything looks like, you know, Don King, but doesn't work. None of the directional mics sound good. Anyway, back to my point. The reason I swore is to get people's attention. And I'm trying to get rid of the last leg of Trump Derangement Syndrome, a three legged stool. So this is an update. You've seen this before. Trump Derangement Syndrome depends on lots of beliefs, but there are three that are central. One was the Russia collusion hoax and that leg got knocked out. One was he's crazy. And the longer he goes without doing anything that could be identified as crazy, the less believable that is. So I think time alone and success has made this not a problem. Do you know what would have been a problem? If he'd met the Queen and he'd done something completely crazy. All right? When you see Trump in a situation where he really, really, really should not be playing around, he doesn't. If he goes to a funeral, if he goes to visit the Queen, if he has a state visit, totally well behaved. It's just when he finds advantage in being outrageous, such as on Twitter, he doesn't. So I think time has shown that he knows how to control the craziness and that it's very much like my cursing in that tweet. It all has utility. What's left is this crazy little hoax that he once called the neo Nazis and white nationalists in Charlottesville find people. That's literally the opposite of what he said. You can look at the transcript. It's right there in writing. You can look at the video. The hoax is because people play the first part before he says the sentence. I'm not Talking about the white nationalists and neo Nazis, they should be condemned totally. If you cut out that second part.

It reverses his meaning.

So that's where the hoax comes from. So Trump derangement syndrome is teetering on the one remaining leg of the stool. You can keep one legged stool up if you have really good balance. And that's sort of what's happening. So to see Joe Concha repeat that as if it were true was disappointing to the extreme. I mean, I don't often get disappointed. That's not one of the emotions I feel. But I'm kind of disappointed in that. I will say in the interest of completeness, let me say that it doesn't necessarily mean he wrote the article or that he wrote that sentence. It may not be true that he wrote that sentence. There could have been an editor involved, you know, could have been anything. So let's not assume that he believes it, but it was in the article. All right, I'm going to give you a suggestion for reducing the massive gun shootings. Now before I do this, I want, obviously this is one of, this is one of the more controversial topics. So I'm going to see if I can introduce a new thought to an old gun control and I'm going to start with the assumption that nobody should take your gun away. So I'm going to start with an nra should be somewhat compatible, maybe not. We'll see. Here's the idea. And by the way, this is not intended to eliminate all gun problems. It's intended to take off, I don't know, maybe 10% risk of the mass shootings, something like that. So I'm not, I'm not trying to take it all out with one move, trying to chip away at it. And here it is. Suppose there were a law that said that if you buy a gun legally, you go through the process, the government knows who you are, that there is a separate law that you, that the gun transaction would be reported to your personal doctor, the doctor of your choice. But it'd be your personal doctor. Think about it. If you buy a gun, the purchase would be reported to your doctor. The nose are coming in, let me just fill it out. Now I think you know by now that when I make a suggestion like this, I'm not suggesting that we do it, suggesting that it's part of the idea, the idea storm. Alright? So it might remind you of something that's a better idea without actually being the good idea. So let me explain it and then I know a lot of you will not like it. Anyway, but let's fill it out. The idea is this. 99 times out of 100, the doctor will get the notice and say, why do I care? Citizen has a gun, no big deal. A lot of people have guns. I have no reason to think this is a problem. But every now and then there's going to be a doctor who says, oh, this is something I need to look into a little bit more. Maybe I should call him in. Maybe I should get a colleague to talk to him. Or let's say that the person buying the gun specifies a doctor and then that doctor doesn't exist or doesn't specify a doctor or chooses not to specify a doctor. What then? Well, perhaps a doctor should visit that person. Maybe there should be some kind of a doctor on call for somebody who doesn't have their own doctor. So the idea is this. If it's a mental health problem and not a gun problem, why should we be afraid to treat it like a mental health problem? The people who most want to protect their guns are very clear on this about the mass shootings. I think you would say it's not the availability of the gun that caused the mass shooting. That's one of the variables that had to exist. But it's not the reason. The reason is because the person's crazy. So if you deal with the crazy, you're not going to get it all. But every now and then you're going to find a doctor who says, ping, I got a problem here. I better talk to this guy. The solution is not that the doctor has the gun taken away. I suppose in some extreme cases that might be what happens, but rather that the doctor is a little more aggressive in applying some counseling, getting some help for somebody, testing to make sure that they don't have any issues. So that's the idea. That may not be the good version of the idea, but put that into the mix. Because if you treat it like it's a health, mental health problem, you got to bring a doctor in. If you say it's a mental health problem and you're not bringing a doctor in when it's still early enough to do something about it, then you don't think it's a mental health problem. Let me challenge you this way. For those of you who just said, absolutely, no, no, no, I don't want anybody else involved knowing I have a gun, then you don't believe it's a mental health problem. If you believe it's a health problem, you bring in the doctor. Otherwise you don't believe it. You don't believe it if you don't want the doctors involved, period. I can't be convinced on that. Now, obviously, you know, there's the problem that it's implemented wrong, etc. But those are separate. Just think about that one for a while. Okay? We'll let that lay there for a while and percolate. You saw that one of Mueller's key witnesses, somebody who is mentioned many times in the Mueller report, got arrested for child pornography. George R.F. nader. Now, if you were on the team that wanted the Mueller report to say, let's go impeach that president, you're having a bad week. You know, it's bad enough that Avenatti turned out to be Avenatti, but when one of your key witnesses turns out to be accused or actually arrested for child pornography, you're just having a bad week. That's what a bad week looks like. Now, CNN was talking about a new poll about the candidates switching topics, and I want to give you an update on what that looks like based on the new polling. So here's the interesting things. I pulled out 59% of people polled. This is US voters. 59% of them have, quote, never heard of Pete buttigieg. So nearly 60% of the entire country has never even heard of this name Pete Buttigieg. Now, you and I and everybody listening to this, we're all just going, what? What? How could you not hear of Pete Buttigieg? The only way you could not know who Pete Buttigieg is is if you don't listen to any News. And apparently 60% of the country doesn't listen to any news. Isn't that funny? Now, you knew that people didn't follow the news maybe as much as you do. You know, every time when I try to have a conversation with a civilian. So I'm treating all of you like you're political professionals. You and I, we do this every day. You know, we follow the news. We know most of the candidates who are running on the Democrat side, but most of the country, they're just civilians. They're just trying to live their life. They're trying to ignore all of this. They have no idea what's going on in the country. If you've never even heard of Pete Buttigieg, you don't follow any news because it would just accidentally be there all the time. You couldn't possibly miss it. The first candidate who's a man with a husband running for president, and he's in the top five in the polls, and you haven't even heard of the name. All right, so that's the most shocking thing. Even though it's not surprising, in general, Kamala Harris is viewed positively by only 52% of Democrat leaning voters. Only half of Democrats view Kamala Harris positively. You have no chance of getting elected with that kind of a number. Now, you know, Zirli, one imagines that if she did all the right things, she can improve that. But the most famous thing, what is the most famous thing you know about Kamala Harris? Kamala Harris, if you've been watching television this week, the. The only notable thing she did is she had somebody take her microphone away from her on stage. When she was at some event, some protester walked up and she just handed her microphone to him and acted shocked. Now, here's the problem. You ask yourself, would President Trump have handed over a microphone to a protester? Maybe. Maybe. Because I think she actually didn't know what was going on. It looked like she was maybe confused, thought he was with the. Might have thought he was with the production. Maybe she was just being smart. It was just smarter to let him have it and let other people deal with it. You know, she's not going to stand up and fight him. Right? So I don't fault Kamala Harris in any way. She didn't do anything wrong. But, man, did it look bad. It looked weak, weak, weak, weak, weak, weak, weak. And you can't imagine an adult male handing over that microphone. I'm sorry, but there's a sexist element to this because it's a sexist country. We do see things that way. And I'm not saying you should see that way and by no means should you see it that way. Again, Kamala Harris did nothing that wasn't anything but smart. She avoided a problem. She did nothing wrong. But it sure didn't look like she played as strong. She looked weak. So I would say at the moment, Kamala Harris looks like she has no chance of beating the president, but she still might get nominated because she's in the top three or four in the polling. And the ones above her are two people who also can't get elected president. So what else do we have? Voters over the. So voters overwhelmingly said in this poll that it would be a better approach for the Democratic candidate. So these are Democrats, Democrat leaning voters. They said overwhelmingly it would be better for whoever is the candidate to focus on bringing, quote, quote, bringing Democrats together as opposed to focusing on their dissatisfaction with Trump, who only 15% wanted to focus on dissatisfaction with Trump. Do you know why? Because most Democrats have figured out he's not doing so bad. Only 15% of actual voters want the candidate to focus on Trump being a bad president. Think about that, what that means. That's sort of a, it's sort of a reverse approval poll, meaning that it tells you Democrats do not disapprove of this president in the way we are led to believe. Yeah, 15, 1 5, 15% according to this poll. Polls are always sketchy, especially this time, this early in the season. But that only 15% wanted the Democrat to focus on the dissatisfaction now. Now it doesn't say that only 15% are dissatisfied with the president because we know that would be a much bigger number. It would be like 80%, 90% if you ask them that direct question. But if you ask them, should we focus on getting our own act coordinated, being good Democrats, or should we focus on how bad a president? They say 15% only think he's such a bad president that that's what you should focus on. Boo's doing a walkthrough. That's a pretty strong indication that Trump's going to get reelected. But let's talk about Joe Biden. Here's the biggest news and I wanted to save it. Boo just insists on being part of this. Boo. I'll let Boo watch. Joe Biden announced his climate change plan. That's right. Joe Biden announced a major. Fairly detailed, as detailed as these kinds of plans can be, a fairly detailed plan for dealing with climate change. The amount he wants to spend is tiny compared to what AOC wants to spend. So he's as aggressive as AOC in terms of rhetoric and priority. But he's got a plan that would spend much less. She's got a plan that would be sort of dangerous and bigger. Are you waiting for the best part? He's very pro nuclear energy. Joe Biden is very pro nuclear energy and specifically developing the new, the new types. He talks about small reactors, that's the Generation 4. He doesn't use the Generation 4, but I think when he talks about building small reactors, that is generation four. So I'm going to do the thing that is always shocking. I'm going to be open minded. It's so strange to hear that from anybody talking about politics. The that I know this will be unsettling for some of you. If climate change were my biggest issue. It's not. But if it were my biggest issue, I would support Joe Biden. He has the best plan by far. Sorry. If climate change really is the big issue that people vote on. Joe Biden should be president. He delivered. I only skimmed his plan, but on my first look, it's the adult thing to do. He focused on nuclear. He doesn't put it in the title. He buries it a little bit because he has to. But if that were the only thing you cared about, Joe Biden is who you should vote for. As of this moment now, I'm optimistic that some kind of a, I don't know, Trump platform would have a big focus on nuclear, too. But we haven't seen it. You know, the administration is doing lots of stuff that is pro nuclear, but you don't see the President talking about it. And Biden, who I think will not become president, nailed it. I'm just going to be honest, you know, I think, you know that if he had blown this, if he had done a bad job on this climate proposal, I'd be telling you, I'd tell you he blew it. I'd be laughing at it. I'd be mocking it. I'd be saying how he's going to go down in humiliating defeat. I'd be saying all that. But he didn't. He didn't. He came up with an adult, affordable, pretty good looking plan. I don't know if every part of it's good, but nobody knows that. So I hate to say he just took a commanding lead on the, let's say, the leadership of one of the most important, one of the most important points in the country. And he just took the leadership. Clearly he owns it. And so it's a challenge for Trump. Now, I do think that Trump will have a response that's, that's going to be, you know, I think it'll be, he'll have a credible response. We have to wait for that. But damn Joe Biden, he just delivered a plan that could work, we could afford it. And it's right on point, at least in the nuclear part, being in Ephesus. So think about that. Did not see that coming, but I'm not going to take that away from him. All right, we still have the problem that, or Joe Biden has the problem that he doesn't want to appear on camera too much because the more we see of him, the less we'll like him. And I say that in the funny way, but that's actually literally their strategy is to show less of Joe Biden because the more you see, the less you like him. We saw that President Trump's approval when he first started campaigning for the office was around 10% the day he started. And the more we saw Trump, the more we liked him, the voters, the more we see Joe Biden, I think the less we're going to like him. And part of that is the contrast because Trump is so interesting and sort of powerful in his approach. And Joe is going to look like the, he's going to look like the, the black and white version of the Technicolor Trump. It's just, he's just not going to match up well and that's really going to hurt him. And he's sleepy. That's right. All right. I think those were my main points. Let me check my. Oh, here's a question for you. You know, I always tell you to look for the empty space. Don't look at just what the news is, look at what the news isn't that you would have expected to be. Here's the news I would have expected and I'm surprised by its absence. When was the last time you heard of Black Lives Matter? Think about it. When was the last time Black Lives Matter were in the news? Now, every now and then I'll see that hog Newsome's marching or something in New York City, but it seems really limited to maybe New York City. And it just disappeared, didn't it? Correct me if I'm wrong. It disappeared in Antifa, I guess, I don't know, are they marching now and then in Portland or something? But that's about it. When was the last time you saw Antifa? Did Antifa just sort of disappear? Because there's nothing that would be better for President Trump than to see a lot of Antifa people marching with masks and beating people with clubs like they normally do. Somebody says, Candace destroyed Hawk. I wouldn't put it that way, but she's certainly the stronger voice. Just ask yourself, could the president lose this election when Black Lives Matter can't even get attention? Now, part of it might be that there hasn't been a high profile police shooting of a black man who as far as we could tell, was unarmed or wasn't, wasn't doing anything that should have got him shot. So it could be that we're just one, you know, one police action away from it being all over the place. So you don't want to act too quickly and say it's gone because it might not be gone, but it looks like it's kind of gone, as far as I could tell. You saw, I think you all, probably all saw the news of the two Democratic hopefuls that are way down in the polls. They both have less than 1%.

Hickenloopers won.

And I don't even remember the other guy's name, but they both got booed by their own Democratic base for saying that socialism wouldn't work. So as long as you've got Democrats out there saying that, the central tenet of a lot of the Democrats plans can't possibly work. Delaney is the other one. Somebody's prompting me, as long as they're out there saying it won't work, you have such a, you know, such a disorganized Democratic base. It's just hard to see. It's just hard to see that the Democrats can prevail with that kind of atmosphere. All right, I saw. So CNN was trying to embarrass Jared Kushner for his interview by Axios in which he said a few things and he tried to avoid some specific questions. So I'll tell you, I'll tell you what he did, and then I'll tell you how well he did it. So one of the questions was, he was asked, so Jared Cushing was asked in the interview, do you think the birtherism was racist? And Jared kept saying something along the lines of, I was not involved in that. So that's not really the answer. The answer is, what's your opinion? Is birtherism racist? And he kept saying, well, I wasn't involved in any of that. And the interviewer asked him several times, and he kept giving the same non answer, was that good performance or bad? Well, CNN replayed it as, look at this answer. This is so avoiding, etc. He did say, he added, he's known the president for a long time and there are no racists bones in his body, some message like that. So Jared did say directly to the base problem, that's not true. He simply avoided the birtherism topic by saying he wasn't avoided. He wasn't part of it, doesn't need to talk about it. I give that a pass. I'm going to say that even though it looked awkward when you saw it, he didn't have many ways to go with that. So because his. You can always get away with more if you're in character. So in other words, what we know about Jared Kushner is he doesn't get into that kind of stuff. That's almost his brand. Jared Kushner doesn't get into that kind of stuff. He's more about policy. He's more about getting stuff done. So because his brand is I don't get into that kind of stuff, giving an answer that would be really a terrible Answer. If he were a senator, if you were one of these talking heads who was always fighting to be on tv, that would be a terrible answer. But because he's Jared Kushner, his brand is. I don't even get into that stuff. His evasive answer was on brand. It's honestly one of the best things about him. You know, I think there are a lot of good things about Jared Kushner. He's obviously crazy smart, capable, doing, I think, doing amazing stuff. As far as I can tell, the things we know about are pretty amazing. So he's probably one of the most important people in the world right now, I would say, because of his position. But he gets a complete good grade for staying in character, which is he doesn't address the BS stuff. Then he was asked some other provocative question where the whole point of it was to get him in a quote that could be taken out of context. And so instead of doing the quote that could be taken in the context, he said, it's hard to do hypotheticals. So it was one of these, well, what if? Blah, blah, blah. And he said, it's, you know. Oh, I think it was. Would you take that meeting again about the Trump Tower meeting? You know, would you do it if it came. If something like that came up again or something similar like that came up again, would you take the meeting? And Jared said, it's hard to do hypotheticals, so. So he just wouldn't address it. Pretty good answer. Now, when you're watching it, it looks a little awkward, and you say, hey, that's sort of avoidy, but again, completely in character. He's the guy who avoids the dumb questions. Right? That's who he is. That's like his brand. If he asks me a dumb political question, I'm going to avoid it. I'll avoid it today. If he asks me tomorrow, I'll avoid it then, and I'll avoid it the next day. Why? Because they're not important. It's not me. It's not what I do. It's not my brand. It's not anything I want to deal with. Pretty good. All right. So as awkward as it looked when it was taken out of context and showed by CNN as, you know, like. Like it was the main thing he was talking about, when in fact it was the least important thing he was talking about, I would say it was a good. A good way to approach it because he was on. On his own brand. And when you do that, you can get away with a lot. Just the way President Trump can insult. He can insult the mayor of London in a tweet, like, really insult him. President Trump can insult somebody on Twitter. He can insult their height, their intelligence. Why? Because we accept that that's who he is. As long as Trump is being Trump, he gets a little bit of leeway. Jared Kushner is not Trump. If Jared Kushner insulted a public leader, I would say, who is this guy? I don't know him now. And you always have a little less trust for somebody you don't know. It's like, ooh, I don't know what he's going to do in a certain situation. I don't know what to think of this. So as long as Jared is in his own personality and consistent to it.

As long as the president's in his.

Own own personality, inconsistent to it, they both have more leeway to operate as long as they stay within their brand. I hope I haven't said that too much. So I think that was all the fun we had today. I would remind you that my YouTube channel is where these things get downloaded and then eventually uploaded in an hour or so. And you could just Google the phrase real coffee with Scott Adams and you could find it. Oh, about my YouTube experiment. So I did a couple of YouTube. Well, I did a few videos from Periscope that went to YouTube in which I tested the idea that if I use the words impeach and Trump, would I get more traffic than if I said something else? So both of my videos over performed the average. So I have debunked the notion that the title would make one of them be suppressed and the other would not be suppressed. They both performed above my average. So this is no kind of scientific. You know, it's not any kind of scientific study or anything like that. But anecdotally, I did something that should have shown a difference. If the finger on the scale was a heavy finger, there would have been a difference. Wasn't a difference. Okay, updating you on something I said yesterday in which I got a fact wrong. And there's something that we can learn from this. Remember, most of you know, I said yesterday that I couldn't understand unless there was something mischievous going on. Why Anthony, Anthony Scaramucci, who had been following me on Twitter for a couple years, suddenly had to refollow me? Because I noticed that's my cat again, sorry. Because I noticed he had refollowed me the other day, and I thought, oh, there's no way that he intentionally ever unfollowed me. Like that seemed very unlikely. So why would he ever need to refollow me. And I checked his account and it's his original account with lots of followers. So he didn't change his account. So what could be the explanation? So I said to myself, there's the only explanation is that he got automatically unfollowed the way so many people have. And I happen to notice that because he's a blue chick. I learned yesterday that there was another reason, and this is very instructive, because a lot of the things we think about the world are not by direct observation thereby process of elimination, meaning that something happened. That's the part you know about. And your interpretation of it is within the bounds of things you can imagine. You don't interpret something using something you can't imagine. Right. So I experienced a failure of imagination. I could think of no other reason than Anthony Scaramucci would delete me. I'm sorry. Block me. Not block me, unfollow me, and then refollow me. Could think of no reason. Turns out there's a really good reason, as somebody informed me later. And the reason was he had been following thousands and thousands of people. He paired it back to 100 or so people. So he went from thousands he was following to 100 or so. And then I found myself added back. So once you know that, it's kind of obvious what happened. He pared down who he was following from thousands to a few. And then he adjusted it toward the end to add back a few people that maybe got unfollowed that he wanted to follow anyway. And I heard another blue, another blue check told me yesterday that the same thing happened. And then somebody else separately told me that he had gone from thousands to a hundred or so. So that's all that happened. Now take that lesson, because I'm certainly taking that lesson. The lesson is just because I couldn't imagine why it happened, that doesn't mean I know why it happened. It only means I can't imagine why it happened. That's all. That's where the thinking should stop. Something happened. I can't imagine all the possibilities. I'm done. I don't know why it happened. That's where I should have stopped. But because we are confirmation biased machines and we've been talking about throttling and shadow banning and all these things, didn't every one of you think, well, there's no reason Anthony Scaramucci would suddenly unfollow him and then follow them. It makes no sense. It had to be. Had to be mischief. So probably not. Anyway, the social media platforms. It looks like the government is going to take a deep dive in their. Into their situation. Yesterday, I opened an account on Parler, P A R L E R. It's a Twitter competitor. We'll start up. Their claim is that they will be less. Less biased in their algorithms. And, you know, you can get away with more, apparently. I opened it just so it's on hot standby. Somebody's saying it's pronounced parle, but in fact, I heard the. I heard one of the founders talking about it, and it's actually pronounced parlor P A R L E R. Had it been a foreign word, you would pronounce it the other way, but it's pronounced parler. I don't know if I'll be tweeting on there, if that's what it's called, or posting on there, but it's open and now I have a backup. So were I to be banned from Twitter, I would have a backup, but it would be obviously a small audience, so I just have an emergency backup there. Somebody says, bad moves. Splitting Trump base 18 months out. Should fight instead. No, you are not hearing me. I'm saying I'm staying on Twitter. Twitter is my primary platform. I would like that not to change, but if it got changed for reasons that were not my decision, that's where I would go. That's all. That's it for today. I will talk to you all later.