Episode 823 Scott Adams: Fareed Zakaria Calls Bernie's Climate Plan "Magical Thinking", Daytona 500

Hey, everybody, come on in. It's time, it's time for coffee with Scott Adams. The best part of the day. Yeah, it's going to be a good one today. Partly because it's always a good one. And partly because it's Monday and aren't Mondays wonderful? Just keep telling yourself that until it's true. But you know, if you want to enjoy coffee with Scott Adams, you need to also enjoy the simultaneous sip. And you don't need much to enjoy it. No, you don't. All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass. A tank or chalice or stein. A canteen, jug or flask. A vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure. The dopamine hit of the day. The thing that makes everything better. The simultaneous sip. Go. Breathtaking. I know you feel the same. So, quick update. The Coronavirus is in 24 countries. Ish couple dozen and nearly every continent. And still. Still, I think we're waiting, fact check me on this, but I think we're still waiting for our first non Asian death. Now, I'm not saying there haven't been any, but I am saying I haven't seen any reporting that would suggest there have been any. And it's getting kind of obvious that, that that's not happening. So keep an eye on that. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna. I don't want to start a rumor by saying it can't happen or that it won't happen. But it's been a while. You know, that virus has been making the rounds and I'm gonna be scratching my head if we don't hear a report sometime soon of somebody who wasn't, you know, compromised. You know, if an 80 year old dies from the flu, that doesn't count because 80 year olds can die from a bad cold. So we're still watching to see if there's something unusual about this virus that would suggest it's not like other viruses. You all saw the news yesterday. I can't think of a better, better signal that things are going well in the United States than the fact that there was so much news about the President making an appearance at the Daytona 500. Now, say what you will about this President, I know a lot of people don't like him, a lot of people do. But no matter which side you're on, you have to admit, nobody puts on a show like this President. And I would go further and say nobody has ever understood better the political and functional value of the show. It's not for nothing. It's not a coincidence that leaders like to put on the show. And I think if other leaders were capable of putting on the kind of show that Trump can put on reflexively. I mean, he puts on a show even if he wasn't planning on it. Everything he does seems to be interesting. But it was just amazing yesterday. I mean, if you saw the news coverage, you know what I'm talking about. He starts by flying Air Force One kind of low over the crowd. Come on, that's just so great. You're running Air Force One, like directly over the crowd. That's just great showmanship. Then, of course, there were. Was it the Thunderbirds? They did a little show too. You know, the. That makes you feel the military and gives you that rush. So you're seeing the President's plane. You're there for this motorsport. Your body is just raging with anticipation. You see the Thunderbirds. I mean, it's like every emotional chemical reaction you would want was all captured in that. And then they throw on a bunch of obviously patriotism and the Pledge of Allegiance. Did they do the pledge or just national anthem? But the point is, this was the most American situation you could ever have. And then they let the President's car, nicknamed the Beast, do a few laps. Come on, come on. Nobody thought of that before. Now I have to wonder if the President was in that car. I hope not. Right? And I also hope the President wasn't in Air Force One when it went directly over the crowd. I'd like to think that the Secret Service took him out of those things, but maybe left the suggestion that he was still in there because it was more fun. But for safety reasons. I hope he wasn't in the car when it was going around the track. And I hope he wasn't in Air Force One when it went directly over the event. But maybe he was, who knows? I saw that the military now has a laser beam that shoots down drones. Have you seen that? It's a truck mounted. I don't know where it's in use, but it's been invented and there's a video of it in action and it's for shooting down the small drones. So it's not for the big, the big rocket jet type of drones. I don't think it shoots those down, but you could have a small swarm of smaller drones coming towards you and this laser beam just heats them up and fries them in the air. And I saw it take out three. I don't know if it did it quickly enough, but certainly worked, at least on the video anyway. So that was a gigantic home run. So here's my thought experiment about the Daytona 500. Can you imagine either Bernie Sanders or Mike Bloomberg pulling off what the President did yesterday? You can't imagine it, can you? Because they would be such fish out of water. But you take President Trump and you drop him in the middle of the biggest nascar. I guess that's nascar, right? I don't know anything about racing into that environment. Even though he grew up a rich kid in Manhattan, he fits perfectly, right? Isn't that weird that you can take somebody who shouldn't be able to fit into that world and you plop him right into the middle of it and not only does he fit, but they hail him as their king, you know, figuratively speaking. So now imagine Bloomberg or Bernie doing that. You can't do it, can you? Now, I know what you're going to say to yourself, sure, but there are places that President Trump can't go, and maybe there are neighborhoods he wouldn't want to go that maybe Bernie would. So there's that. But here's the thing. You can also imagine President Trump in a room in which he's the only white guy and everybody else is an African American citizen. Because you've seen that. You've seen it a bunch of times. It's usually associated with Charlie Kirk or Candace Owens and some kind of young black conservative group. But we've all seen the footage. Now, does Trump seem comfortable and fits in perfectly with a room full of young African American citizens? Well, if you've seen the video, you know, the answer is yes. Yes, he does. He fits in perfectly. He looks like he's having a great time. Like genuinely. He doesn't look uncomfortable. He looks like he's having a great time. They're loving him. He's loving them. It's a big old love fest. Now, who else can you imagine? Just this is just a mental experiment. Take any of the Democrats and plop them in those two environments. Well, you can see Bernie doing well with an all black crowd. Bloomberg, not so much, because you can't see either one of them dropped into the middle of a NASCAR event and feeling like, these are my people, we relate, we're on the same page. So it's quite remarkable. And I think that I've said this since the beginning, but I think that historians are going to be way kinder to President Trump than the current coverage. Does anybody agree with me on that? Because I think when you look back on it, you're going to say, my God, how did he fit into these completely different American cultures, these subsets, how does he fit them all? Like it's an old slipper. Like he can just put his foot into any group and he fits. You saw him with, you know, you see him with rich people and socialites and, you know, billionaires and you say to yourself, yeah, fits perfectly. Trump is in a room full of billionaires. Fits perfectly. You can actually take that man and put him in any environment. Now, did you happen to see Mike Bloomberg recently had some event. And of course, Bloomberg is suffering from the accusations of racism, blah, blah, blah. We'll talk about that in a minute. But he's introduced by an African American woman who, for the purpose of the story, you have to know, is a large woman. All right? Because unfortunately that's part of the story because she was sort of large for a woman. This is not any kind of an insult. I'm not slighting her. I'm just painting you a picture here. And Bloomberg is smallish for a man. So he gets the benefit of an African American woman giving a full throated endorsement to him. Bloomberg does. That's good. That's a good optic. And then Bloomberg gets on stage and he tries to give her an awkward stage hug. And because he's smallish and she, and again, this is not any kind of a diss. I don't do that. She was a larger woman. You can picture it in your mind, right? It was just the most awkward. He tried to put his arm around her, but he was kind of small and, you know, he couldn't pull it off. So Bloomberg couldn't even look comfortable with one African American woman who just, who just complimented him on stage. He couldn't pull that off. You've seen Trump do it. You've seen Trump do it. A lot of times he can pull that off because he can pull off apparently being comfortable with anybody. And by the way, that was my experience when, you know, I talk about it too much. But, you know, I got to meet the president in 2018 and got to chat with him a little bit. And the immediate, my most immediate reaction is that he made me feel comfortable in the Oval Office. Think about that, think about being invited, because this actually happened to me, invited to the Oval Office, sitting there across the desk from the President of the United States. And not even just an ordinary one. We're talking about the most colorful, famous President of the United States we'll ever have, probably sitting across the desk. And he Made me feel completely comfortable, like I was just chatting with a friend. Now, I assume he can do that with everybody because we hear that, but it's a remarkable talent. Bill Clinton had it, a lot of politicians found it. I'm sure Obama had it. But I don't see that with Sanders and I don't see it with Bloomberg. Exactly. They seem a little uncomfortable with the common people, if you know what I mean. All right. Most of the news seems to be taking things out of context and pretending we're mad about them. So there's two stages to the most common story we're going to hear between now and Election Day. Somebody said something in a different context, we're going to take it out of that context, and then we're going to pretend we're really mad about it, but not really, because it didn't bother us before, so probably shouldn't bother us now. So let me give you some examples. So there's a video of Bloomberg talking to some group in which he's making the point that it's not difficult to be a farmer, or, well, let me put it into different words, it's not difficult to do a lot of the tasks in farming, such as planting and watering and. And picking crops. But his larger point was supposed to be that people are going to need different skills in the modern world. And farming was a relatively low skill task in the past, but we might need higher skills now. Nothing about that is controversial, right? Did I say anything you don't agree with? Of course you agree with that. Of course you agree that some types of jobs have different requirements for different kinds of skills. Nobody disagrees with what he was saying. But once it's taken out of context from whatever small group he was talking to and you just throw it up there as an insult to farmers, it kind of looks like an insult to farmers, doesn't it? Kind of looks like he's calling them morons, doesn't it? But was he. Did he say anything that a farmer would disagree with? Well, if you're talking about the farm employees, not the farmer, who actually has to be half scientist and businessman. And, you know, if you're the owner of the farm, you're managing the farm, you need a lot of skills, a lot of skills. Everything from, you know, you've got to know enough about animals and veterinarian things and crops and fertilizers and, you know, it's pretty complicated stuff. But if you're just working on the farm, you might have one task that you do all day and doesn't require a lot of training. So I don't think there's even a farmer who would disagree with what Bloomberg intended. And I don't think anybody was necessarily put off by it when he said it originally because it was a message that he tailored for whatever group he was with. Apparently he didn't think they would be bothered with it, and they probably weren't, or at least not much. But here's the rule that I would like to see become a thing. I don't think it ever will, but this is a rule I'd like to see that when somebody's statements are taken out of context and delivered to a new context, in other words, from that small gathering to the entire public in the context of a presidential campaign, I don't think that the person who said it should be responsible because the person who said it said it in a specific context. And I think in this case Bloomberg is 100% responsible for the communication to that small group where he said it. So if any of them were offended, well, I would say that would be between Bloomberg and whoever was offended, if anybody. But whoever it was, and lots of people were involved in this. But whoever it was who took that and moved it to another context, I believe they're the author at that point. Now, I know nobody's going to agree with this because we have too much fun taking stuff out of context, but in my opinion, the author of the offensive Bloomberg statement is not Bloomberg. Once you've taken it out of context because you've changed the meaning, that's you, you the messenger who took that and altered its meaning by changing its context, I think you're responsible for it. There's nobody else who said it. All right, let me give you some more examples that Bloomberg also said there's another video of him with again, a small group, and he was saying he gave an example of a 95 year old who says she has cancer. And he was saying that maybe we just, we should say there's nothing we can do for you because Even curing the 95 year old would put them through presumably a year of unpleasantness. Their life is probably not so spectacular at 95. Maybe we should be looking at just letting people die with some dignity on their own terms. He didn't say any of the words I'm saying exactly. But the point of it was that if we want to get to, I assume this was the context. If we wanted to get to a point where everybody could have affordable health care, we might not want to spend so much on these Lost causes, basically. People aren't going to make it anyway and it's not even going to help them. Now, how many people disagree with that? Some. Some. I think there are plenty of people who would say, no, you should always fight as hard as you can for life, no matter what. But what if you have to pick your battles? What if it's a triage situation and because of limited resources, you can either help the 95 year old with cancer or you can help the 25 year old who would go on to live a good life if they got the right health care. I think he's saying nothing that any of us really disagree with if we were having a private conversation. But once again, Bloomberg made these comments in a context, in a small group. I don't know if anybody in that group was offended by it, because probably they were on the same page, but somebody took it out of context because it's a political season. And I think whoever took it out of context has to answer for it. I don't think that's Bloomberg's answer. And of course, you know, I'm just living in my own fantasy world where anybody would ever agree with what I just said, because I don't think any of you, I don't think any of you are going to agree with it to the point of making it your normal way of thinking and acting. I don't think that's going to happen. I see some people agreeing in the comments on a conceptual level. Here's another one. Rush Limbaugh, he said, quote, this is Rush Limbaugh. I don't know when he said it, but recently, America is not ready for two gay guys kissing on stage or something like that. And of course, Rush Limbaugh is then accused of being anti gay. But is that what he said? Is that what Rush. Because I'm reading the sentence and I'm thinking Rush Limbaugh didn't say that was his opinion. In fact, it's unambiguous. He says, America is not ready. Now, that's a. That seems like just a fact you could check, right? Can't you just check that fact? Is America ready for LGBTQ president? And apparently there's a survey that says 78% of America says they are. So 78% of the country says, yeah, no problem. LGBTQ president, no problem. But that leaves a big percentage of people who are not ready. According to the poll, if 22% say, not ready now, I disagree with them. Because, as you know, you've heard me talk about this. I'm not Only ready. But I think we would come out ahead if we could get an LGBTQ president sooner or later. Doesn't have to be, Pete, but sooner or later, I just want somebody who's, you know, who is publicly lgbtq. I think we've had probably some gay presidents in the past. It would be fair to assume that that's true. But I think we're better off if we can just set the example that that's not a limitation for public service. We'd all be a better country for that. But let's look at Rush Limbaugh's statement. He says America is not ready. Is that in the context of a presidential race? If a current poll says 22% of the country, and I disagree with that, 22%, but they say they're not ready, isn't that enough to justify what Rush Limbaugh said on just a fact check? All right, now, I don't just being as clear as I can, I want an LGBTQ president eventually, but I think Rush Limbaugh's statement is perfectly factual, that America has a little problem with it. I'm not even sure that's anti. Is that anti lgbtq? It looks like just a statement of a fact about something you could poll, and then it confirms it. Oh, well, so that's sort of an added context thing. Then, of course, there's all of Bloomberg stop and frisk stuff, you know, that's taken from a context in which a lot of smart people who meant well thought it was a good idea and thought it was working. Today, in 2020, we don't think it was a good deal. So, again, taking what we thought in a different context and moving it to the present, it's a little bit unfair. I would judge him by his current point of view. And then Bloomberg is also being criticized for saying that this is words that are putting into his mouth, basically saying that the banking crisis of, what, 2009 could have been averted if. If banks had been able to discriminate more against black and brown people. According to Elizabeth Warren, that's how she's interpreting Mike Bloomberg as saying that, well, according to Bloomberg, we could have avoided that banking crisis if banks had made fewer loans to black and brown people. So that's Warren accusing Bloomberg. Is that fair? Is that fair? No. I mean, there's a lot of. There's a lot of nuance in the whole, you know, who gets a loan and how do you do that? But I certainly don't see. I just. I'm just not seeing that criticism as Valid. All right. Because I don't think she's characterizing Bloomberg correctly. Now let's, here's another one. Do you remember when Trump famously, well, let me put this in a new context. He you remember when Trump called some of the countries s hole countries, you remember that? And that was in the context of a small meeting in which I believe everyone understood the context to mean that there are some countries that are going to be if you let everybody send whoever they want. There are some countries who would send people who don't have educations and don't speak English and wouldn't be able to contribute as much as other countries were who are more easily going to bring least economic value into the country. Now, of course, I got taken out of context and when you hear that out of context, it sounds like nothing but racist. So let's talk about Fareed Zakaria. This is where I'm heading with all of this. So all of that was a lead up into this topic. So you probably know Fareed Zakaria from CNN and other places and he's one of the most interesting thinkers out there. I've been a fan for a long time. And what's interesting about him is not only that he's extraordinarily good at explaining complicated things, he's really gifted at that. But he seems to be an independent thinker. You don't hear exactly the same things coming out of his mouth that you hear from others. Indeed, he's called himself a centrist and he has two opinions that I've never heard from the same person. And I want to see if you agree. And this is really a sign of somebody who is flexible and nimble and able to break out of their mental bubble. So here's two opinions that Fareed has. One is that the president is a big old racist because and his example was the reference to the s hole countries who were mostly black and brown. And he talks about the Muslim ban, the so called Muslim ban, which is more technically a ban on countries that don't have good identification processes which turn out to be mostly Muslim. And he was complaining about Nigeria being added to that. And of course, the official reason is that Nigeria is one of the countries that doesn't do a good job identifying people. So we don't know what we're getting. But according to Fareed Nigeria, we also have a national strategy of getting closer to them and building that relationship. He points out that that's a conflict. How can we be banning their immigration and also trying to be, you know, more of a trading partner and all that sort of conflicting, which is fair. But so far he puts together the S hole comments and the so called Muslim ban that isn't really a Muslim ban and decides basically that the President's a big old racist. Okay, but in the same show, the same day, I think this was yesterday, he comes out against Bernie Sanders Green New Deal and calls it magical thinking and goes on to say that if you, I'm paraphrasing here, but saying that if you didn't allow gas, natural gas, and you didn't allow nuclear to be part of the solution, there is no way that anybody knows how to get to a carbon free, you know, situation by 2030, which is what Sanders is saying. So in the clearest possible terms, Fareed is saying that the Green New Deal, as Bernie sees it and prices it and anticipates it, is magical thinking. He actually calls it just a fantasy and asks this provocative question. Are we afraid we being, I guess, the Democrats, are they afraid that Sanders won't get elected or are they afraid that he will? I've never seen such a direct broadside in completely rational and reasonable terms against the Green New Deal on cnn, have you? Now you've seen, I think you've seen CNN allows the occasional conservative pundit to come on and get in a few words. But have you ever seen an opinion person or a main employee of CNN just come out and say the Green New Deal is a fraud? That's my word, fraud. But that's basically what Fareed is saying, is that it's magical thinking, it's nonsense, and there is no way it can be done. Now, who do you know who holds those two opinions that the Green New Deal is nonsense, but also that there's evidence that the President's a big old racist? I don't know anybody who holds those two opinions. They just don't travel together. So this is one of the reasons that Fareed is so interesting, because he's not trapped in a bubble. This made me curious about his background, so I went to Wikipedia. I assume it's accurate enough for our purposes. I wanted to see what kind of background he has because, you know, I wrote the book Loser Think about how people can't escape their mental bubbles unless they've had a broad exposure to the thinking styles in different fields. And when I watch Fareed talking about, let's say, economic issues, I'm always impressed that he gets it right, which is unusual. If you watch anybody talk about economics on the news, they might get some part of the story, right? But then you go, ah, you're leaving out the important part. But if you see Fareed talking about something that's complicated and involves economics, you wait for him to leave out the important part, but then he doesn't. He mentions the important part importantly. So he seems to have like this comprehensive view of the field that's unique. But here's what I didn't know about him. I didn't know that he, I guess he comes from a Muslim tradition. So I don't know the details, I don't know which family members are practicing Muslims. But he comes from a Muslim dominated culture. But he is not a Muslim except culturally, I guess. So he's not a believer of all the details of Islam, so he doesn't practice. But that's his heritage. Is that the right word? I don't know. So I ask you this. If you were Farid and you had that heritage, that background that was sort of your family connections and you, your history, what would you think of President Trump banning mostly Muslim countries from coming in? I'd like to think I could look at it objectively, just like I do now, but I don't know that I could. I don't know that you could ask somebody who actually is Muslim or has a spread, you know, a close connection to them to look at the ethical countries comments or to look at the ban on immigration and to have a different opinion. So as an observer, it looks to me like he's suffering from a little bit of tds, but it seems really limited to that category and there's a really good explanation for it, which is if you're being honest, if you're being honest, if you were in his situation and your family and friends and your background and everything came from that culture and you saw a president who seemed to be pushing back against that culture or it looks like it, or is close to it, or it seems like he's not saying the right words or talking about it. Right. You'd probably say that president was a racist. That doesn't mean you're right. But if you put yourself in his shoes, you can see how he could hold these two opinions at the same time and be a reasonable person at the same time. All right, so here's what was amazing about this. I'm so curious about CNN's editorial process. When you see Fareed, I mean, he's a major, major talent on cnn. When you see him say that Bernie is just full of crap and his Green New Deal is a fantasy and it's the Primary, I would say it's literally the most important issue and he's just saying it's nonsense. Does he check with the boss first? That's a serious question. Did anybody look at his commentary besides maybe a producer or something? But did Jeff Zucker know that Farid was going to essentially endorse the president's plan for climate change? I mean, he didn't say that, but he did say we shouldn't be discounting gas, nuclear power. And that's pretty much what the Trump administration is doing about climate change, if you can call it that. So my guess is that he probably didn't. I can't imagine that every, every opinion piece goes past the boss, but I do imagine that all of the talent at CNN have some idea what they can get away with and what they can. And we're all human. So no matter how independently we think, you're still going to give the boss what the boss wants, in your best opinion of what that is. And I would say that CNN is clearly signaling, especially if you ever see more of this. I'd wait for another confirmation, somebody else to say the same or similar, but it looks like CNN is signaling that they're not going to back a progressive, let's say a Warren or a Bernie or somebody who's too far left. I think they're signaling that now. I'd wait for a little confirmation a little early, but it's starting to look that way. So who would CNN back if they had their choice? It's kind of a problem because they don't seem to love Bloomberg. Bloomberg looks like he's just a, you know, Trump light. So I don't see CNN backing Bloomberg. He's got too much baggage. That's a problem for the Democrat brand and for CNN's brand. What about Pete? I think that Pete Buttigieg is the closest to CNN's brand, but I don't know if he can win. So if you see them seeming to lean toward Pete, I feel like that's when they've admitted they're not going to win because I think they need to stay at least true to their brand and to their, you know, to their image and true to the Democrats, et cetera. But I don't know that Pete could win because he doesn't have enough black support, but at least CNN could maybe help him try to get some. So maybe there's a path there for him anyway. And somebody also mentioned that Bloomberg is literally the competition for cnn. How could CNN want their competitors, their competitor, to win the presidency I'm pretty sure CNN doesn't want Bloomberg, a news agency, a news competitor to get that. I'm going to make a prediction that if Mayor Pete gets the nomination, and I'm not predicting he will, by the way, so this is an if prediction, if he got the nomination, that he would evolve to be more pro nuclear evolve. So most, it's not uncommon for people to evolve toward the center once they get the nomination. And I think Pete Buttigieg, who I believe he's been a little timid on nuclear, I think he wants to maybe keep the ones we've got but not build any new ones. I think he would evolve toward, let's be a little more serious about building new safe ones once he got nominated. So here's a good example of the bubble when Fareed tweeted his own story in which he was calling Sanders out for his magical thinking on climate change. So Fried has 945,000 followers on Twitter. When he tweeted it out a few days ago, he got 54 retweets. Now, if you spend any time on Twitter, you know that if somebody who has nearly a million followers tweets something out and only gets 54 retweets, that is not a popular message. So Fareed, taking on the magical thinking of Sanders on the climate change just died. So then I tweeted out the same content, but I tweeted it out directly from the link. I didn't retweet Fareed. I tweeted it originally. My tweet got 192 retweets in one hour. All right, I've got 380 something thousand. So I've got something like 40% of the number of followers is Fareed, but his side doesn't like this message. I got 54 retweets in like three or four days. I got 192 in an hour. So you can see the bubble in those numbers, right? So because the people that I tweet to, the people who follow me were receptive to that message. They were like, yeah, let's hear about, let's hear about somebody knocking Sanders. But when Farid does it, no retweets, nobody wants to boost that signal. So here's the thing. Fareed and CNN's message is getting will probably get, I don't know, something like five to ten times more attention on the pro Trump side than even on the CNN's base followers. So there's your bubble right there. So let's talk about the peace around the world. So there's an alleged Afghan peace deal that people are talking about. And some people say it's optimistic and some people say it isn't. But does anybody really care about Afghanistan anymore? I mean, I care that we have troops over there and it's costing us money, but I don't feel like I care that much. So who knows if that's going to work out? But it's good to know that there's something like peace conversation coming on. The Iran peace deal. There's no Iran peace deal. But President Rouhani of Iran is talking about, hey, we could negotiate with the United States. They would just have to agree that we're going to get back to the nuclear deal we had. Now, that's an interesting framing, isn't it, given that we just took out their top general. I mean, think about this. This is remarkable. It's fresh news that we just killed the number two, or I would argue he really was the number one guy in Iran because he had the weapons, which was Soleimani. Just weeks after that, the President of Iran is saying, oh, yeah, we could talk with the United States. We just have to have this deal structure. And I'm thinking, what. In what world does this make any sense? How do you take out one of their top. Not one of. But the top general, the main military guy, how do you kill him? Publicly brag about it? And then the President of Iran, you know, after their little slap back, which unfortunately did leave some head injuries, which I think we should be concerned about, but it was a very muted response compared to what it could have been. How do we explain that Rouhani is talking nice after we just killed their general? How do you explain that? Now, of course we're not going to buy back into the old nuclear agreement, but. But the fact that he would even suggest a completely rational starting point, not that we should agree with that, but it's a rational thing for them to put out there. I feel as if they didn't want Soleimani either, because everything we've seen after he was killed suggests they wanted him gone. Right, because their pushback was purely symbolic. Even though there were injuries, which was tragic. And I don't see a lot of reports of them doing more terrorist acts. Maybe they are. We're not hearing about it, so there's something going on there that doesn't make sense, but it looks like a good sign. And of course, the Israeli Palestinian peace deal is floating around. Most people think that's not going to happen, but I think it already did happen. I think Israel floated a plan or agreed with the United States on a plan that doesn't require the other side to agree. So I would say that you don't have to wonder if there will be an Israeli Palestinian peace deal, because it's just the current situation. The deal that Israel is offering is the one they're just going to take. They're just going to define their borders and act like the deal is done. And then the Palestinians can do whatever they want to do. They can agree to it. They can not agree with it. It's just nobody cares. So it's this weird situation where Trump has made us simply sort of not care. And then North Korea, I would argue, has become irrelevant from being the biggest threat we had to being. They don't seem to be wanting to kill us, and I don't think they think we want to kill them. Or at least we're not working on it. So we could kind of ignore each other for a while. That seems better than where we were. So we have this weird situation where there's a whole lot of sort of talking about peace, and the emphasis of conversation seems to be on more economic security issues where they need to be. All right, so the funniest thing that's happening recently is that in the age of Trump, Trump came up at a time when the Democrats really gathered around the idea of intersectionality and divisive racial and gender attacks. So their entire attack against Republicans, but mostly Trump, was that he was a certain kind of guy and they were more virtuous. They were the good ones and he was the bad one. And that works until you have a lot of people running for the Democratic candidacy, until you have a primary. Because when the primary started that all the people on the left turned their guns on each other and said, what kind of weapons do we have? And they realized they kind of only had one weapon. They didn't have anybody making good economic arguments, really, but they have just accusations of racism and sexism. So they turned it on each other. They turned all of their weapons on each other. And in so doing, they've proven that they can't pass their own standards. Think about that. What kind of impact does that have on the thinking of the public? When we watch the Democrats who had a set of standards which you could argue were holier than yours, in other words. Yeah, we'd like to be this super inclusive place, like, as an ideal, we'd like that. That sounds good. But when you put it into practice, beyond the obvious stuff that you have to get right, you can't discriminate on jobs, etc. But once you get the obvious stuff right and you're getting into more of the opinion and the subtlety and the built in stuff and it's not so obvious and it's background racism and it's that sort of thing, once you get into the opinion part of falls apart because there's no standard that you can agree on and then they can turn those weapons on each other. So I think one of the weird, accidental outcomes of this race could be that the old way of attacking may give way to something more reasonable. And maybe Fareed Zakaria is ahead of the pack there because he's making an economic argument and making an argument against Trump that I think is at least rational. I mean, they could try being rational for a while. All right. I think that's all the fun we're having for today. You know, people keep wanting Klobuchar to suddenly make the surge to the top of the pack. So she's done a great job. I would say that, I'm going to say I have a lot of respect for Klobuchar as a politician. I think she's done a really good job with what I call the tortoise strategy of just staying out of trouble and letting everybody else assassinate each other in the primary and by simply not having a gigantic flaw and everybody else does. All the other candidates have, you know, they have lots to offer, but also gigantic flaws. And since the primaries are mostly about people getting hammered for their flaws, she's kind of flying under the, under the radar a little bit. But she's so unexciting. I mean, she's super uninteresting. And maybe we're in a, we're in a period of the world where you just have to be interesting. Maybe it's not an option anymore. All right, so we'll see what happens. And that's all for now. Talk to you tomorrow.