Episode 1148 Scott Adams - Did CNN Send a Tiny Fly Drone to Distract Pence? And More About the Debate

hey everybody come on in come on in 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 uh airpods as my microphones but a lot of people don't look out 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 good sound i think it sounds pretty good on periscope in case you uh 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 copper bug or glass tanker chelsea just die in a canteen joker 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 of the day thing makes everything better including the debates it's called the simultaneous step and it happens now go ah 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 uh andy know has it on his twitter feed of uh black lives matter rioting in wisconsin in wauwatosa that's the name of this the town wawa watosa that's actually the name of the town 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 in which probably there were children at home think about it your 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 uh big debate last night i'm sure you all saw it and i have many thoughts on that in no particular order number one uh pence won it wasn't even close in my opinion uh pence dominated be dominated in terms of you know personality he dominated in terms of better points uh i've been telling you how many times have i told you the most underrated public servant is mike pence 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 they 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 yeah you're not going to get a knockout because pence doesn't give him give any vulnerabilities so there's never a knockout but he will he will win on points if you hang in there with him so i think that's what happened you won easily on points uh you also have a cnn's new technology it was kind of impressive so cnn now has a drone that's so small and 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 um when you watch him debate he felt more like a surgeon didn't it because where trump was sort of like a 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 boom boom just offense offense offense but um but watching pence work it was like watching a surgeon it's like well here's your claim let's let's look at your claim well let's dissect it let's take this part off he was 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 zero uh 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 they're reduced to talking about the insects and 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 um i wonder who was who is the staffer who got the job of telling kamala harris what she did wrong last night because that feels like a tough job and 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 uh miss harris uh 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 what do you think i did right and if i did anything wrong i'd like to hear that too well well um on your your lies your lies were excellent you had lots of good lies and i we thought those were good you really landed those but um and in general in terms of your overall presentation we thought you were excellent from well i'd say that the chin down from the chin down all good really good um from the chin up there's a little bit of an issue i you know 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 harrah 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 ah i 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 what would a condescending look look like and what do you mean i smile too much what do you mean okay uh 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 um this is the sort of facial expression we'd like to see more of let me demonstrate see this would be a comfortable um 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 calmly 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 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 just a little bit of a side to side like that so we want to see more of that and less of this yeah let's 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 um and as long as we're all going to be accused of being sexist you 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 uh overall impression and the way 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 in that totally non-sexist uh 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 camellaris 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 and a 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 this live stream so instead of making a statement i'll put it in the form of a question if you were 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 you know 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 that she she generally has i would i would say some of the best hairstyles of any woman politician um but last night no there was something something going on last night with her hair that wasn't good and it matters it matters if it affected uh how she felt about it it matters if it affected her confidence and maybe it did we don't know um now you all know that the big excitement for me if you saw my tweet especially is that when i saw kamala harris cue up the find 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 said i that he called them out by name and said they should be condemned totally but biden has made that the centerpiece of his campaign the the very the trigger for his campaign the the reason he had to enter the politics when maybe he was you know passed 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 and i believe that pence had a little bit of a tell where 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 i you could almost see it like it was visual he just he just morphed into home 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 gonna go for this and then he did magnificent bastard he did he went right after it he and he did a really good job he said this is why you know the press doesn't trust the public or i'm sorry 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 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 where calmly 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 to find 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 a full true rating for calling the fine people hoax a hoax they fact-checked pence as true boom now not the only ones there were some lesser publications that also did it and of course breitbart's been doing it forever you know joel pollock's been doing it steve cortez has been debunking it with videos and articles for for two years i've been doing it for two years so the three of us uh you know 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 uh tweeted out some of the fact checking on that so are we done here's what's fun fun parts 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 no nobody was supporting it oh and by the way as uh if you saw the video of uh of com layers wall 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 handshake you go ah wait wait was 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's 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 uh debunk or they debunk when it's your time to talk again you shake your head you 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 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 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 um 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 watch this that's not what i saw and even even the women democrats who would support kamala harris in general even they were saying oh slow your role on the sexism thing that's not what we saw and the women who to their credit were were you know trying to be let's say non-political in the sense of you know being accurate they 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 um 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 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 you know two sheets of uh plexiglas if that was too much for her to handle how is she gonna handle putin how she can handle you know she 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 realized that her supporters said the opposite they said oh yeah she's very presidential looking there i didn't see it the 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 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 who got to a high level let's say i can't think of one example of anyone who's let's say mannerisms or 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 um uh remind me the name of a uh who who is the woman who is running for democrat uh in 20 no she was running as a republican uh i can't remember her name but anyway she would be another example of somebody who would not have wilted under pressure um palin yeah i think i think palin would have done fine and that's true carly fiorini thank you i was trying to think of carla fiorini fiery 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 um let me let me go to the white board here uh we'll talk more about uh people's impressions about the uh the debate but i want to make this point before we go too far there's 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 and you know 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 uh term behind him so you know what you're gonna get you might not like it but you know what you're gonna get and the country was not destroyed so let's say there was a one percent chance that he would destroy america you would multiply that one percent times if you wanted to look at it financially you would multiply it by the total value of the united states you say well there's a you know one percent chance that you can have a cost that would cost the entire united states or a one percent chance that it would kill you know all the people in the united however many st were 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 you know 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 100 chance but remember that everything in the political season is is sort of tripled in magnitude so everything that seems like it's a three on a scale of one to ten it's looking like a nine at the moment because everything's ratcheted up but 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 a hundred percent 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 i 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 it's pretty good it's pretty good actually it's not 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 uh 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 that's my opinion all right uh here are some comments that people made on cnn about the debate and i wanted to see them because they were funny uh so here's something that sarah isgur said so these are all cnn related pundits she said that senator harris came in with sky-high expectations is that true and you and 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 he i would say he exceeded sky-high expectations in my opinion you know pence will he will just 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 i don't it's good that's hard to top but uh so they started 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 camel harris like that by making your expectations sky high okay that never happened um and then there's a julian zelizer also cnn person uh 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 it does she have immense skill as an orator or 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 a little bit deeper into the campaign in the primaries if she'd been a skilled orator or good at debating and then 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 um 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 um and then there's frida gitas 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 a lemonade and a turd said uh 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 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 right trump's magic trick is he makes everything seem bigger more important sets your hair on fire all right 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 is that like pence's great skill that you can take these extraordinary things and 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 but uh so then uh then van jones went on to say this that uh 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 on the verge if not already there where it's more sexist and more uh more racist to call it down a 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 as a positive and just the fact that we still have to call that out as like a it's a remarkable time for women who are who have a background from india and from you know jamaica or wherever um we 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 that you know he says they'll quibble over her answers but but now everybody can see her as a president is that true because i had the opposite of healing 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 the fact is that we do pick presidents like we pick um ornaments we do pick presidents for a look a demeanor uh 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 i think she went the other direction i believe that she looked non-confident and she couldn't handle a mild bully because you know pence was pence was obviously by uh strategy he was taking extra time but all he was doing was taking the shelf space that he could get away with that's part of the game part of the game is if you can use up most of the shelf space you know that use up the time that's an advantage so when when pence could see that he kept talking and he wasn't being stopped they tried you know they were the uh the the host tried to stop him but there was no penalty so he just kept going um 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 um essie cupp said that uh quote what i saw was a man who talked over not just his female opponent oh 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 um paul magella who is sort of the golem of cnn if if cnn were sort of a hobbit movie paul bugalo would be the the golem and uh he's he's so far away from being uh anybody you should take seriously he's probably the person i think least seriously all right um he says ahera showed the world why joe biden's first presidential decision wasn't master stroke so okay she indicted the trump regime with a relentless remorseless command of the facts she was cutting yet charming righteously indignant yet likeable it was that last word that uh caught my attention would you have used the word likable for kamalaris 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 oaks is automatically unlikable in my opinion megyn kelly made some news by saying in 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 to you know 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 megan 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 uh 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 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 find people hoax now now that it's been fact-checked by credible news organizations you could just say you can do a campaign ad where you say the the biden campaign was based on the the biggest lie in american history now calling the fine people hoax the biggest lie in american history is technique if you've 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 um you're trying to overclaim because that's strong technique so if your but if you said biden keeps telling this bulging vein thing and then you show the video clip all that came out of the wheels 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 uh march has endorsed biden you just 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 that's and that's real by the way so while the while the vice presidential uh 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 uh 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 you know and others have been uh you know tested positive for chronovirus 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 what do 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 you know to make up ground for the most part um i i'm i'm watching your comments i won't be able to you know read my notes and also call out the super chats but i do look at them so uh for 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 um so here's 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 you know what it is the next thing 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 is probably 80 percent 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 does he says that so we know that to be true and so maybe maybe they'll still have some kind of a debate but think about the fact that he could do this after uh 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 you know that i know some crazy people will say that you didn't win but um and cnn's running a fake polls showing that kamala harris totally won like by a lot uh i don't think so that's not the debate i watched but um the bottom line is that uh 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 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 cumulative that's not a bad 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 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 um uh lauren kenton said something funny on cnn that was funny enough that i just wanted to repeat it she said covet 19 thanks to the bad hair year it's not a bad hair day it's a bad hair a year i don't know i thought that was funny did you see the uh the video of trump talking about regeneron and he was 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 um 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 get it to give it that that non-gray color i think i would assume he's gray i would assume if he didn't do anything to his hair it would be grey 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 gonna speculate that he has some assistant who normally once a week or whatever adds a little you know 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 you know your hairstyle while you're in 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 gray you know gandalf he was actually gandalf the gray at first and turned into gandalf the white when when something happened and he transformed i 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 gray like he came out of the coronavirus a different person or a different leader and i gotta say i like it he the if the gray is real and if he's gonna keep it and i don't know 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 it 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 maybe 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 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 rem deserver and i don't know what else vitamin 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 makes perfect sense to say it but uh he's he's again falling into the trap of making a medical claim that presidents should not make you know 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 he's taking that other drug that's got a long name that's a a steroid the steroid i believe makes you feel better even if you're not better somebody needs to fact check me on that and any doctors want to fact check me on that would not the steroid just by itself wouldn't that make him 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 uh i think they'll double back on that later but here's the thing he's trying to uh present a story in which the therapeutics are that are the savior and the vaccines will be great and that 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 you know 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 and 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 that to the extent that he's 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 uh financial tie to regeneron i i believe he used to have some stock in that company but doesn't anymore if that reporting is correct i'd need a fact check on that so i love the fact that he's selling the story that the therapeutics are already here and that will keep you alive in almost every case that's a pretty good story and it is compatible with reopening the uh the the country in related news uh in an unprecedented move it's been called the editors of the new england journal of medicine uh have publicly condemned the trump administration for their covet pandemic response and calling for the 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 the treatment of the the medical part of his job if you will the pandemic that according to them he's botched us 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 the the economic part of the equation that is stupid because they're at least smart enough to know they don't know that right it'd be one thing if you didn't know what you don't know but doctors are smart in general right 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 the thing and the people want it and the 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 took all of those things into consideration and made the decisions that 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 uh you know an unprecedented move they're going to have to give the 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 them 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 fouchy and uh 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 quarantined in isolation work right again there's nobody including the president who's ever said these things uh don't work no that's not true they're they're citizens who say they don't work but certainly not trump um and this is amazing all right um 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 uh two rules one is to lead the public where they don't know they want to go that's 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 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 a social distance and we're gonna close the economy so there were there's parts of that but here's the part that i think nobody has talked about and 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 to run the country a little bit more closer to a normal situation keep the economy strong keep our national defense strong protect the the poor especially do what we can with the vulnerable people especially but the citizens decide 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 doesn't track imagine if you will a president obama all right that's the fair that's a completely fair uh 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 he's a man of science very 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 outdoors and i can walk into a store without my mask i'll get kicked down but i could do it i have the power president obama can't you know he 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 wanted 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 you know getting the public to do something that maybe they didn't want to do you 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 distanced the way he was telling you were 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 um yeah i was just reading your comments that's why i was pausing here 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 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 i mean basically the whole rest of the world benefits from a strong united states i feel that's a safe thing to say so that's my take the the public voted the president um basically agreed with the public and we got exactly what we bought if you go into a store and you say i'm gonna buy a loaf of bread i've got my whatever bread cost i don't know four dollars what is bread cost i have no idea i don't buy bread um but you give them four dollars for your loaf of bread and they give you a loaf of bread what do you say do you say that was that was a failure no no you had money you wanted bread you gave them money they gave 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 and more and i'm still gonna 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 all right americans don't ask for free bread you know we know it costs something we're gonna we're gonna 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 uh extra questions on youtube somebody said harris had less time than uh or pence had less time than harris i saw that but it's funny how it didn't seem like that right the 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 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 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 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 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 or to tout that's true i saw one expert pundit to say she only needed to show up and you know not lose and it would be fine because the tickets already had 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 um i would say pence pence was the more positive message did i watch the frank lund's focus group i did not i once shared a shared a car with uh frank luntz years ago we both gave a talk at a at the same place and we we shared a car back to the airport so uh in a weird small world way i spent some time in a car with him all right that's all for now and i will talk to you all

[Music]

hey everybody

come on in come on in if you're watching

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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

uh airpods as my microphones

but a lot of people don't look out 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 good sound

i think it sounds pretty good on

periscope in case you uh

in case you care now what do we need to

have the best day

ever yeah you know you know

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it's called the simultaneous step and it

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ah 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 uh

andy

know has it on his twitter feed of uh

black lives matter

rioting in wisconsin in

wauwatosa that's the name of this

the town wawa watosa

that's actually the name of the town

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 in which probably

there were children at home

think about it your 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 uh big

debate last night

i'm sure you all saw it and i have many

thoughts on that

in no particular order number one

uh pence won it wasn't even close

in my opinion uh pence dominated

be dominated in terms of you know

personality

he dominated in terms of better points

uh i've been telling you how many times

have i told you

the most underrated public servant

is mike pence 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 they 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 yeah you're not going to get

a knockout

because pence doesn't give him give any

vulnerabilities so there's never a

knockout

but he will he will win on points

if you hang in there with him so i think

that's what happened you won

easily on points

uh you also have a cnn's new technology

it was kind of impressive so cnn now has

a drone

that's so small and 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 um

when you watch him debate he felt

more like a surgeon didn't it because

where trump was sort of like a

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 boom boom just offense

offense offense

but um but watching pence work

it was like watching a surgeon it's like

well here's your claim

let's let's look at your claim well

let's dissect it

let's take this part off he was 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 zero

uh 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

they're reduced to talking about the

insects and 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 um i wonder

who was who is the staffer who got the

job

of telling kamala harris what she did

wrong last night

because that feels like a tough job and

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 uh

miss harris uh 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 what do you think i did right and

if

i did anything wrong i'd like to hear

that too

well well um on your your lies your lies

were excellent

you had lots of good lies and i we

thought those were good you really

landed those

but um and in general in terms of your

overall presentation we thought you were

excellent from well i'd say that the

chin

down from the chin down all good

really good um from the chin up

there's a little bit of an issue i you

know 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 harrah 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

ah i 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

what would a condescending look look

like and what do you mean i smile too

much

what do you mean okay uh 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 um this is the sort of facial

expression we'd like to see more of

let me demonstrate see this would be a

comfortable um 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 calmly 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 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 just a

little bit of a side to side

like that so we want to see more of that

and less of this

yeah let's 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 um

and as long as we're all going to be

accused of being sexist

you 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

uh overall impression and the way 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 in that totally non-sexist

uh 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

camellaris 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 and a 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 this

live stream so instead of making a

statement

i'll put it in the form of a question if

you were

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

you know 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

that she she generally has

i would i would say some of the best

hairstyles

of any woman politician um

but last night no there was something

something going on last night with her

hair that wasn't good

and it matters it matters if it affected

uh how she felt about it it matters if

it affected her confidence

and maybe it did we don't know um

now you all know that the big excitement

for me

if you saw my tweet especially is that

when i saw kamala harris

cue up the find 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 said

i that he called them out by name and

said they should be condemned

totally but biden has made that the

centerpiece of his campaign

the the very the trigger for his

campaign the

the reason he had to enter the politics

when maybe he was you know passed 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 and i believe that pence had a

little bit of a tell

where 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 i you could almost see it like it

was visual he just

he just morphed into home 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 gonna go for this

and then he did magnificent bastard

he did he went right after it he and he

did a really good job he said this is

why

you know the press doesn't trust the

public or i'm sorry 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 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 where

calmly 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

to find 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 a full true rating

for calling the fine people hoax a hoax

they fact-checked pence as true

boom now not the only ones there were

some lesser publications

that also did it and of course

breitbart's been doing it forever

you know joel pollock's been doing it

steve cortez has been

debunking it with videos and articles

for

for two years i've been doing it for two

years so

the three of us uh you know 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 uh tweeted out

some of the fact checking on that so

are we done here's what's fun

fun parts 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 no

nobody was supporting it oh and by the

way as

uh if you saw the video

of uh of com layers

wall 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 handshake

you go ah wait wait was 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's 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 uh debunk or they

debunk when it's your time to talk again

you shake your head you 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 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 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

um 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

watch this

that's not what i saw and even

even the women democrats

who would support kamala harris in

general even they

were saying oh slow your role on the

sexism thing

that's not what we saw and the women who

to their credit were were you know

trying to be

let's say non-political in the sense of

you know being accurate

they 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 um 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 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 you know two sheets

of uh

plexiglas if that was too much for her

to handle

how is she gonna handle putin how she

can handle you know

she 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 realized

that

her supporters said the opposite they

said oh yeah she's very presidential

looking

there i didn't see it the 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

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 who got to a high

level let's say

i can't think of one example of anyone

who's

let's say mannerisms or 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 um

uh remind me the name of a

uh who who is the woman who is running

for

democrat uh in 20

no she was running as a republican uh

i can't remember her name but anyway she

would be another example of somebody who

would not have wilted under pressure

um palin yeah i think

i think palin would have done fine and

that's true carly fiorini thank you

i was trying to think of carla fiorini

fiery 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 um

let me let me go to the white board here

uh

we'll talk more about uh people's

impressions about the

uh the debate but i want to make this

point

before we go too far there's 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

and you know 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

uh term behind him so you know what

you're gonna get

you might not like it but you know what

you're gonna get

and the country was not destroyed so

let's say there was a one percent chance

that he would destroy america you would

multiply that one percent times

if you wanted to look at it financially

you would multiply it by

the total value of the united states you

say well there's a

you know one percent chance that you can

have a cost that would

cost the entire united states or a one

percent chance

that it would kill you know all the

people in the united

however many st were 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 you know

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 100 chance

but remember that everything in the

political season is is sort of

tripled in magnitude so everything that

seems like it's a three

on a scale of one to ten it's looking

like a nine

at the moment because everything's

ratcheted up but

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 a hundred percent 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

i 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

it's pretty good it's pretty good

actually it's not

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

uh 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

that's my opinion

all right uh here are some comments that

people made on

cnn about the debate and i wanted to see

them because they were funny

uh so here's something that sarah isgur

said so these are all

cnn related pundits she said that

senator

harris came in with sky-high

expectations

is that true and you and 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 he

i would say he exceeded sky-high

expectations

in my opinion you know pence will

he will just 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 i

don't it's good that's hard to top

but uh so they started 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 camel harris like that

by making your expectations sky high

okay that never happened um

and then there's a julian zelizer

also cnn person uh

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

it

does she have immense skill as an orator

or

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 a little bit deeper

into the campaign in the primaries

if she'd been a skilled orator

or good at debating

and then 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

um 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

um

and then there's frida gitas 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 a lemonade and a turd

said uh 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 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 right

trump's magic trick is he makes

everything seem

bigger more important sets your hair on

fire all right

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 is that like pence's great

skill

that you can take these extraordinary

things and 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 but uh

so then uh then van jones went on to say

this that uh 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 on the verge

if not already there where it's more

sexist and more uh more racist

to call it down a 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 as a positive and

just the fact that we still have to call

that out as like a

it's a remarkable time for women who are

who have a background from india and

from

you know jamaica or wherever um

we 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

that you know he says they'll quibble

over her answers but

but now everybody can see her as

a president is that true

because i had the opposite of healing

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 the fact is that we do pick

presidents

like we pick um ornaments

we do pick presidents for a look a

demeanor

uh 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 i think she went the other

direction

i believe that she looked non-confident

and she couldn't handle a mild bully

because you know pence was pence was

obviously by uh strategy he was taking

extra time

but all he was doing was taking the

shelf space

that he could get away with that's part

of the game

part of the game is if you can use up

most of the shelf space you know that

use up the time that's an advantage so

when when pence could see that he kept

talking

and he wasn't being stopped they tried

you know they were

the uh the the host tried to stop him

but there was no penalty so he just kept

going

um 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 um

essie cupp said that uh quote

what i saw was a man who talked over not

just his female opponent

oh 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

um paul magella who is

sort of the golem of cnn if if cnn were

sort of a hobbit movie paul bugalo would

be the the golem

and uh he's he's so far away from being

uh

anybody you should take seriously he's

probably the person i think

least seriously

all right um he says ahera showed the

world why joe biden's

first presidential decision wasn't

master stroke

so okay she indicted the trump regime

with a relentless

remorseless command of the facts she was

cutting yet charming

righteously indignant yet likeable it

was that last word

that uh caught my attention would you

have used the word

likable for kamalaris 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 oaks

is automatically unlikable in my opinion

megyn kelly made some news by saying in

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 to you

know 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 megan 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 uh 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

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 find people hoax

now now that it's been fact-checked

by credible news organizations

you could just say you can do a campaign

ad where you say the

the biden campaign was based on the

the biggest lie in american history

now calling the fine people hoax the

biggest lie in american history

is technique if you've 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 um

you're trying to overclaim because

that's strong technique

so if your but if you said biden keeps

telling this

bulging vein thing and then you show the

video clip all that came out of

the wheels 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

uh march has endorsed biden

you just 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 that's and

that's real by the way

so while the while the vice presidential

uh 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

uh 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

you know and others have been

uh you know tested positive for

chronovirus 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 what do 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

you know to make up ground for the most

part

um i i'm i'm watching your

comments i won't be able to you know

read my notes

and also call out the super chats but i

do

look at them so uh for 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 um

so here's 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 you know what it is the

next thing 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 is probably 80 percent

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 does he says that

so we know that to be true and so maybe

maybe they'll still have some kind of a

debate but

think about the fact that he could do

this

after uh 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 you know that i know some crazy

people will say that you didn't win

but um and cnn's running a

fake polls showing that kamala harris

totally won

like by a lot uh i don't think so that's

not the debate i watched

but um the bottom line is that uh

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 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 cumulative that's not a bad

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 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 um

uh lauren kenton said something funny on

cnn that was funny enough

that i just wanted to repeat it she said

covet 19 thanks to the bad hair year

it's not a bad hair day it's a bad hair

a year

i don't know i thought that was funny

did you see the uh

the video of trump talking about

regeneron and he was

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

um 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 get it

to give it that that non-gray

color i think i would assume he's gray

i would assume if he didn't do anything

to his hair it would be grey

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 gonna speculate that he has

some assistant

who normally once a week or whatever

adds a little you know 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 you know

your hairstyle while you're in 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 gray

you know gandalf he was actually gandalf

the gray at first and turned into

gandalf the white

when when something happened and he

transformed i 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 gray

like he came out of the coronavirus a

different person or a different leader

and i gotta say i like it he the

if the gray is real and if he's gonna

keep it

and i don't know 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 it

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 maybe 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 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

rem deserver and i don't know what else

vitamin

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

makes perfect sense to say it but

uh he's he's again falling into the trap

of making a medical claim that

presidents should not make you know 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 he's taking that other drug that's

got a long name that's a

a steroid the steroid

i believe makes you feel better even if

you're not better

somebody needs to fact check me on that

and any doctors want to

fact check me on that would not the

steroid

just by itself wouldn't that make him

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

uh i think they'll double back on that

later

but here's the thing he's trying to uh

present a story in which the

therapeutics are that

are the savior and the vaccines will be

great

and that 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

you know 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 and

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

that to the extent

that he's 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 uh financial tie to

regeneron

i i believe he used to have some stock

in that company but doesn't anymore

if that reporting is correct i'd need a

fact check on that

so i love the fact that he's selling the

story that the therapeutics are already

here

and that will keep you alive in almost

every case

that's a pretty good story and it is

compatible with reopening

the uh the the country

in related news uh in an unprecedented

move it's been called the editors of the

new england journal of medicine

uh have publicly condemned the trump

administration for their covet

pandemic response and calling for the

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 the treatment

of the the medical part of his job if

you will the pandemic

that according to them he's botched us

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 the the economic

part of the equation that

is stupid because they're at least smart

enough to know they don't know that

right it'd be one thing if you didn't

know what you don't know

but doctors are smart in general right

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 the

thing and the people want it and the

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

took all of those things into

consideration and made the decisions

that 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 uh you

know an unprecedented move

they're going to have to give the

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 them 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 fouchy

and uh 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 quarantined

in isolation work

right again there's nobody including the

president who's ever said these things

uh don't work no that's not true they're

they're

citizens who say they don't work but

certainly not trump

um and this is amazing

all right um 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 uh two rules one

is to lead the public where they don't

know they want to go

that's 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 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 a social distance and

we're gonna close the economy so there

were

there's parts of that but here's the

part

that i think nobody has talked about

and 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 to run the country a little bit more

closer to a normal

situation keep the economy strong keep

our national defense strong

protect the the poor especially do what

we can with the vulnerable people

especially

but the citizens decide 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 doesn't track imagine if you

will

a president obama all right that's the

fair

that's a completely fair uh 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 he's a man of science very 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 outdoors

and i can walk into a store without my

mask i'll get kicked down

but i could do it i have the power

president obama can't you know he

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 wanted

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

you know getting the public to do

something that maybe they didn't want to

do

you 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 distanced the way he was

telling you were 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

um yeah

i was just reading your comments that's

why i was pausing here 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

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

i mean basically the whole rest of the

world benefits from a strong united

states

i feel that's a safe thing to say

so that's my take

the the public voted the president um

basically agreed with the public and we

got

exactly what we bought if you go into a

store and you say i'm gonna buy a loaf

of bread

i've got my whatever bread cost i don't

know four dollars what is bread cost i

have no idea

i don't buy bread um but you give them

four dollars for your loaf of bread

and they give you a loaf of bread what

do you say do you say that was

that was a failure no no

you had money you wanted bread you gave

them money they gave 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 and

more and i'm still gonna 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 all right americans don't

ask for free bread

you know we know it costs something

we're gonna we're gonna 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 uh

extra questions on youtube

somebody said harris had less time than

uh or pence had less time than harris i

saw that

but it's funny how it didn't seem like

that right

the 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 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 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 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 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 or to tout that's true

i saw one expert pundit to say

she only needed to show up and you know

not lose and it would be fine

because the tickets already had 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 um i

would say pence

pence was the more positive message

did i watch the frank lund's focus group

i did not i once shared a shared a car

with uh frank luntz

years ago we both gave a talk at a at

the same place

and we we shared a car back to the

airport

so uh in a weird small world way

i spent some time in a car with him

all right that's all for now and i will

talk to you all