Scott Adams: Unpacking Former President Donald Trump’s Livestream with Elon Musk and how Trump and Kamala will shape the 2024 Election

28:36So I'm trying to remain humble. So I don't brag about any of my opinions, but I think everybody else should be in that same boat. Our leaders couldn't have known some guess right or righter than other people. Nobody did great, in my opinion. And maybe we should be a little more forgiving about those errors as deadly as they were. I agree in the sense that, you know, we didn't, you know, there was the movie about pandemics that suddenly the whole world goes crazy and shuts down and everybody dies. And so we're afraid of this kind of worst case scenario as humans almost biologically are. And so we shut down the world economy.

29:23And my point is, fascism is when government has this obscene amount of control over business. So for instance, Nazi Germany turns all the companies into military weapons-making companies. But this is every country, though. Every country can control its corporations. Right. But I guess some countries do it more or less than others. So the shutting down of making it illegal to open up shop for business has elements of fascism. And it happened throughout the pandemic, no matter who was, whether when Trump was president, when Biden was president. But to your point, we just didn't know, and it was scary.

30:04And hey, if this is when we pull the fascism card, this is when we do it. But what people don't seem to understand is that almost every, if I ask somebody who was a fascist, they'll say Hitler, Mussolini, Mao. Nobody seems to realize these were all socialists originally. Like Hitler was head of the National Socialist Party. Mussolini was head of the Italian Socialist Party. Mao, of course, was a communist. You know, we're talking about Perón, or I mean, Argentina yesterday, or Musk and Trump were talking about how great Argentina was in the 30s and 40s. Well, what happened in the 50s? Perón, a socialist who became fascist, took over.

30:46Like, it's sort of obvious to me that fascism, the roots, in many cases, like let's say 90%, not 100%, fascism comes from socialism. Is that just because claiming socialism is what gets you elected? Yeah, I think it's related to populism. Yeah, so then you were just always a fascist, but you couldn't be your fascist self until you fooled them into thinking, hey, I'm in it for you. Right. First, you have to say, under me, you're going to get everything. and then when you're a fascist, you take everything from some percentage of the population that still keeps 90 % for you. Yeah, I mean, all of our leaders are corrupt when they have power.

31:32I think that's the bottom line. You know, and again, I think this, you know, the other thing about messaging, when Kamala first became the nominee, and by the way, this is not, this is more talking the game-like aspects of campaigning. I was thinking about something you said, which is how Hillary was doing well in 2016 when in the summer when she said about Trump, do you really want his hands on the on the nuclear button? And that was driving her up in the polls. And then she switched to I'm with her, not realizing that 50 percent of the people might feel funny about that. You know, as much as everybody wants to be, you know, for everybody's rights, just men are men, women are women, there's different things going on in the brain and so on.

32:20And I saw with Kamala was using this on with her for a while. I don't see it anymore, though. Yeah. Yeah. There was a time when Hillary Clinton also said that a woman would make a better leader because they're better at listening. And every part of my body just went, oh, like, no. Well, to me, that seemed so sexist that I couldn't even imagine their campaign would last after that. But of course it did. Yeah, that's the overt sexism that they can get away with is kind of shocking.

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34:59And what I heard and then what I read this morning in the headlines seemed to be different. And I'm curious about your opinion on that. So I heard things like, look, it's probably a good idea or it is a good idea to vet people coming into your country to make sure that they're not criminals. It is a good idea to be very worried about countries that have nuclear weapons. It is a good idea to be more efficient about government spending because that causes inflation. By the way, every candidate ever says that. And we'll see whether or not any of the candidates can do something about it. But on and on, I heard kind of smart, common sense things that nobody would disagree with.

35:39But in the headlines this morning, I heard I read a slurring, rambling Trump incoherently talking with an egomaniac, Musk. Musk, who was, by the way, you know, you wouldn't think this guy you would think this guy was like maybe just a smart, you know, analyst. You wouldn't necessarily think, you know, this is a billionaire running a bunch of companies that have done very successfully. It just seemed like two smart guys talking. So isn't it, what am I hearing that these reporters covering it didn't hear? Or did I miss something? Because the reporters are smart too. Yeah, I mean, predictably in the election season, everybody's just going to put it through their own filter.

36:27The part that was really dangerous, and there was a moment when I was listening to it live that I thought it was the end of his campaign. I thought, oh. Oh, wait, I have to guess. Because I have to guess which part that might have been. Okay. Okay, when he was talking about Kamala Harris looking a little like Melania. No, but that was an interesting... Didn't he actually say that she was a very attractive woman when he talked about Kamala Harris? Yeah. Did I hear that? I thought I heard it, and then I wasn't sure I could have heard it right. Or he said that there were pictures of her that were very attractive.

37:04Something like that. It was just an interesting concession to the person he was running against. Now, here's something that not everybody heard. Because apparently, depending on where you were and what you were listening to, he sounded like he was slurring like his dentures were falling out, he doesn't have dentures, or that he was drunk, or that he just had a stroke or something. Now, apparently, that's an audio artifact that is known to happen on Spaces if you're the host and doesn't seem to hit the other accounts, such as Elon Musk was fine. Now, that's what the smart people who have experience on Spaceless tell me, that it's been something that's annoyed other hosts who also sounded the same, and there's a very specific known technical problem that will make a normal person sound like they're slurring, which is my working assumption that that's true because the people who say it's true are, in my view, quite credible.

38:02Now, it doesn't matter what's true. It just matters what the Democrats will make of it. And when I heard that, I thought, oh, my God, I don't know what this is about. I don't know if he just came from the dentist. I don't think he did. But whatever this is, it's going to be all over social media. And that will be the story that there's something wrong with his brain or something. And sure enough, if you sampled the left and right media, the left was all about rambling and slurring. And that was my take as well. I heard the slurring, although I think it was the technology, not the speaker. And the rambling was because of the format.

38:44Elon had a great idea, which is let's do something like a conversation without a specific end time. And we'll really, you'll get to know somebody this way. The problem is that the person he was doing it with is Trump. And Trump is the most famous filler of space of all people ever. So if you don't say, you know, we've got a tight schedule here, I've got to get to a bunch of questions, Trump's got all the time he wants to just keep talking. So he would just start, and he'd just keep going from one topic to another, and he'd get back to the border, and then back to something, and back to the border.

39:21And it didn't seem tight. but if you like Trump, you liked more of it. If you were his opponent, you said, there he is rambling and slurring, and they weren't too far off. Again, the slurring was the technology and I am. And I don't know that it changed any minds. My guess is not a single voter changed their vote because of it. But I give Elon Musk really a lot of credit for trying a new thing, doing it in a different way, knowing that the old ways of getting our information had all kinds of problems, and putting his neck out. I mean, he risked not only the company, but his own reputation. And that I want more of.

40:07I don't think it worked. I think if he had to do it over again, the phone call part of it, you don't do, it's not good for interrupting. and normal conversations have a normal amount of interrupting, like, okay, I get your point. Let's go to the next question. So I think just in terms of controlling the interview so that the audience liked it, it was lacking. I saw Elon just before I got on, asked on X if anybody had done an edited version of something like the best hour of the two hours. So I think everybody's aware that it went a little long. But again, I'm not going to criticize a mistake that was in a brand new thing.

40:50If somebody is going to do a brand new thing and they make mistakes, that's a home run. Because you fix the mistakes next time or you learn something. So in terms of what I want to see America do, A plus. But it had some flaws. I also have to give credit for Elon. and it suddenly became more clear to me than ever that buying Twitter was not a mistake for him. Like at first I thought when he first offered to buy Twitter and then he took the offer back, I think he was just, my initial inclination, which I now believe I'm wrong about, is that he was on this Adderall frenzy and he's just like, I'll buy Twitter for 52 billion.

41:28And then he's like, realized, oh my God, I don't have 52 billion cash to spend like this. but last night he's basically kind of talking it's all the talking points for all his companies like shouldn't we have trains and tunnels and you know sustainable energy with solar and blah blah so everything was like a talking point for his company and he's saying it to the president you know someone who could be the president of the united states and was the president of the united states very smart for him to do like genius but you know it works if trump wins but um you know So I can't remember the last time there was a conversation with a presidential candidate that lasted, you know, two hours like that or two and a half hours.

42:16I can't think of any president. Like, I think Barack Obama could have pulled it off if he was. Like, it reminded me in 2008, Bill O 'Reilly interviewing Barack Obama. So I listened to that because of the contrast, and I thought it was a really well done interview. Both sides expressed themselves well. It only was a half hour or so, so it wasn't like three hours, but I thought it reminded me a little of that. I can't think of other examples, though, really. I mean, can you think of any example from any election? No, but it reminds me of Castro talking for four hours or something. I think it has more to do with the personality.

42:57And he just had the freedom to say what he wanted to say. And if you're Trump, one of the things you know is that reality is repetition. So what people hear the most becomes the reality. I mean, we're not exactly good rational thinkers. So here he is with this gigantic audience that he knew would be record-breaking. And they're listening. So any moment that Elon was going to let him keep talking, he would think, OK, I guess I can keep talking. So he just filled all the space. I mean, you wouldn't expect Trump to do less than that. I mean, one of the things I like about him is, I say this all the time, if he walks past a table that has a bunch of money and it has a sign that says free money, he'll pick it up.

43:44Other people will walk by it. And every time this happens, I'll think, why are you walking past it? That's a free table of money. You know, when he talked to the service workers and said, no tax on tips. It was so simple to pick up the free money that I just laughed. And of course, the Harris campaign were doubly smart. By the way, here's another example of genius. So if you're looking for the Harris campaign, who's the genius behind them? I don't know. But whoever said, you know what? Why don't you just go say you're in favor of that too? Now, in no world did that ever make sense before to simply immediately embrace your opponent's brand new idea.

44:29Never made sense before. And again, if you were in the meeting when somebody brought that up, your instinct would be, okay, that's the dumbest person in the meeting or a genius. And it turned out to be genius. That's three in a row. You don't do that many genius things by accident. So she's got somebody really smart running the show behind the scenes. Well, it's interesting. This brings up the topic of who are quote unquote they. Because always there seems to be, you know, for hundreds of years, people talk about how they really rule the world. There's some mysterious they behind the scenes. and when I've talked to people close to Trump, you know, who's giving him his main advice and so on, people say, people just sort of laugh and say, Trump's his own, you cannot tell, you know, he is gonna come up with his ideas and strategies, he'll make his decisions, he is doing it.

45:32And, but there is this sense that somebody pulled the strings, for instance, getting Biden out of the race, putting Kamala in the race, coming up with these messaging tactics. It is actually courageous in a political game sense to take your opponent's issues and make them your own and give them zero credit. When everyone knows this is his policy, Democrat, everyone knows, but now it's her policy and everyone's cool with that. Yeah, it worked. Yeah, it worked. So there is a they, at least in terms of this campaign. Who are they? So here's how I like to think of the world. This is one of my reframes in my reframe book, that the person with the best idea is always in charge.

46:20So this is from my corporate world. You're sitting in the meeting, and you're the most junior person in the meeting. And all the people who know what they're talking about, the experts, the bosses, they talk, talk, talk, and none of them have a good idea. And you wait until everybody's tired. There's a few minutes left in the meeting. You go, you know, I had an idea. Why don't we do a little small test of this, and in a week we'll have much better information. And everybody gets quiet, and they go, oh, yeah, I guess we could just test it, because that was the best idea. So the person in charge was the best idea person, not the boss, not the expert, not the guru.

46:56The person who said something you can actually do that would work. So in every meeting I've ever been in, after I learned that little trick, I just assumed I was in charge, because if I had a good idea, it would win the day. And if I didn't, I shouldn't win the day. And I think Trump is a perfect example of the best idea. He scans all of the mostly Republican pundits and smart people, and he looks for ideas that are sticky that he could sell that agree with where he's going, and then he adopts them. And we've been seeing this for years. Often you can identify where it came from. You say, oh, I heard that other pundit who's really smart and say that the other day, and now Trump's using a version of that.

47:44That's probably where he got it. On the Democrat side, I think it might be more the paid expert consultants are in the room. And probably whoever had the great idea, or maybe more than one, is just getting more attention. So it might be that who's in charge is the person who had the greatest ideas lately that other people recognized as the greatest ideas. So I think it's just smartest person winning is what I see. I think that's true for, let's say, like the weird, like somebody said it, it caught on and everybody was like, looked around at each other and said, hey, let's keep running with that.

48:22but this concept of hey we need to start making speeches about or at least leak that we're in favor of no taxes on tips that's someone put that into motion like that was come up within a meeting and someone put that into motion and someone had to Kamala had to agree to that like someone in charge had to agree to that and so there's two things there's the right idea man and there's the person who agreed to it, whether it's Kamala or her campaign manager or whatever. And it seems to me these are unknown people. Well, think about how much credibility and or power you would have to have over a presidential candidate to get them to say yes to that.

49:07Yeah. I mean, either Kabbalah Harris is being controlled or she's got a lot of trust in somebody and and she made the right call because some whoever she's trusting on that advice is is nailing it yeah i mean and and again the only other the i could think of something it reminds me of which is obama in 2008 again on the tarp bailouts remember the tarp one failed which was the bailout of the economy congress didn't pass it and it was bush's job to convince the republicans in congress to pass some sort of bailout bill, TARP 2. And it was Bush, McCain, and Obama in an office with all the congressional leaders, and McCain stayed silent.

49:54Obama took Bush's side and convinced the Republicans in Congress to vote for a TARP 2. That might've cost McCain, again, it might've been a factor in costing McCain the election, the fact that he was silent during this time. And Obama did have the courage to side with Bush. so that strikes me as a little bit similar although not not the exact thing i don't know yeah i don't know too much about that story but i do suspect that there's some obama influence on the kamala harris campaign in terms of the persuasion stuff and i think this is what disturbs a lot of democrats former democrats like like let's take the bill ackerman's of the world because i found myself you know agreeing with everything he was saying college campuses.

50:40My daughter just graduated from Columbia. And by the way, I've written constantly about kids, do not send your kids to college, don't own a home. I ended up owning a home and sending my kids to college. And I'm completely ashamed of myself that I couldn't follow my own advice. But I sadly sent my daughter to Columbia. And now you see the unveiling of anti-Semitism on these campuses. Like people think, oh, I'm against, people say I'm against Israel. I'm not against Jews. No, they're really against Jews. And you have these three deans just fired for talking about the Jews and their money and their privilege.

51:25And I feel sad for my daughter that this was the, that secretly the leaders of the college, the educational institution she went to were all kind of thinking this about her, not her specifically, but her generally being a Jewish student on campus. And what is up with the fact that smart, intelligent people suddenly thinking that, hey, Hamas, they're pretty good people. Okay, nobody disagrees that killing women, children, war is all that. No one disagrees on that. But the fact that we're just gonna ignore October 7th and now recent polls, people don't even know what October 7th was. They're just like, hate Israel.

52:07We're just gonna ignore October 7th and Hamas is doing, we gotta just listen to everything they say. Like, where did this come from? And it seems to be a democratic issue. Well, maybe it comes from just the environment in the educational institutions where they're just closing off the outside voices. And, you know, if you take Patty Hearst and you kidnap her and you're the Symbionese Liberation Army, you know, a real story from the past, where they kept her as a captive until Stockholm Syndrome kicked in and she started, you know, siding with her captors and she started thinking that she could rob a bank too.

52:47So that's a well-understood thing that if you're isolated from outside influence, that's how a cult works. A cult has to cut you off from outside influences first. So it could be just the lack of outside influences that they hired a certain kind of person and then you put a bunch of people, no matter who they are, in an isolated place and you get weird results eventually. Yeah, I guess I haven't looked at it that way. It's like a Stockholm Syndrome effect. And there's, you know, James Lindsay has spoken about how professors on these campuses, the difference between the 60s and now is that professors would speak then, but they would just stick to teaching.

53:25And now they're more, professors are more activists. And that's encouraged the students to be more activists combined with the Stockholm Syndrome effect. Well, I think what it used to be when I was young, people could work together and disagree. And they'd say, oh, I like this Republican stuff and you like this Democrat stuff. And first of all, they weren't super different. So part of it is that the distinction has grown. But then it turned into, if you have this opinion, I can't even talk to you or deal with you or you're a monster, you're a fascist. So as soon as the rhetoric got to the point where I don't just disagree with you, you're Hitler, that's when whoever had the most people was going to end up having all the people.

54:11So in other words, if you got to the point where three-quarters of the people were going to call the one-quarter Hillers, the Hillers are all going to go get jobs somewhere else or get fired or not get hired. So once you reach like some kind of, maybe it's a two-thirds majority of one opinion, it's going to squeeze out the others if the people who have that opinion can say, you know what, I don't even think you should have a job. Things got pretty harsh. Yeah, and it's like last night, this guy from the EU, Terry, I don't know his last name, Breton or something like that, Benton, I don't know.

54:50Breton, I think. Yeah, Breton. he wrote to Elon Musk and said, do not do this interview. It'll be, you know, you must censor this. And why, again, we live in a world that pays lip service to free speech. Free speech is a good thing, except, you know, we don't want Nazis, for instance, marching downtown. But even there, the ACLU has protected the rights of the American Nazi Party doing marches in the U.S. But now things are different. Now you really, like, tens of millions of people quit Twitter when Elon Musk took over only because he said we're going to allow free speech. And it, you know, look, I once dated someone who was bipolar.

55:33And the one thing I learned about bipolar is you could never ask, why did you do this? Because it's crazy. There is no actual answer. It's a crazy answer. Something crazy was happening. And I feel like society, maybe I'm just waking up to it or something, but I feel like society has become mentally ill. Well, you know, there's something to that. There are studies that show that something like 62 % of single liberal women are treated for mental illness. So, you know, depression, anxiety sort of thing. So the Democrat Party, which is by far dominated by females and a lot of single females, literally are dealing with mental illness as their primary motivating drive.

56:23Now, that might seem like hyperbole, but if you look at the policies and then you look at the fact that something like two-thirds of them have genuine mental problems, you can see why they'd be just simply afraid that Trump would be Hitler. They're afraid their democracy is being stolen. It's the end of elections forever if Trump gets in. And none of these seem to track with anything we saw from him for the first few years of his term. but they would be symptomatic of somebody who's got a mental problem. Somebody who's worrying too much about the wrong things. But it seems like it's not only, like I have smart friends who come up to, and look, I don't vote.

57:09And I tell people I don't vote. People get very upset at me. I don't care, whatever. But people come, I have friends who come up to me and said, they can't understand, men, women, They can't understand why anyone, what kind of person votes for Trump. And I'm thinking to myself, 80 million people voted for Trump, 80 million voted for Biden. Clearly, there's a lot of people. Like, it's half and half, roughly. And you don't know any of them. And you don't know why any of them. Like you said, there's everybody ranging from Bill Ackman to an evangelical in Alabama to you and other people, Elon Musk.

57:55So why are people so disconnected now from, it's just simple common sense. You see these people every day, they're voting for him. And other people are voting, other smart people are voting for Kamala. So I've provocatively said recently that you can't have a political conversation with somebody who thinks the news is real. You just can't because they will be working under some brainwashed understanding of what's happening. And this works both ways. It's not just one side. You know, so politics is mostly a brainwashing competition. And what's different is the news sources are so siloed that even on social media, I have almost no contact except trolls, paid trolls, of anybody on the other side.

58:46So in 2016 or something, if I tweeted anything political, you know, maybe a third of my comments would be a super disagreement from some Democrat who's mad. Today, the only disagreement I'll get is the very first comment from somebody who's obviously a paid troll. Because they hate me, but they follow me. They don't have many followers. They have an anonymous, you know, all the tells. And they'll be there consistently. But actual human beings who are not paid to be trolls, almost no contact. The algorithm is separated, even on X, that is not trying to be biased. I mean, I don't think they're trying to be biased.

59:26They've completely separated me from any contact with somebody who has a different opinion. And I have to go look for it or somebody has to send it to me or I don't even see it. So I make it a habit to make sure I spend a good amount of time looking at MSNBC and CNN and alternate sources so I can at least get a sense of what's going on on the other side. But most people aren't going to take the time. I do it for a living. It's part of what I do. So I'm going to check both sides just so I don't sound stupid. But if you don't have any reason to check the other side, it doesn't happen naturally. So that's probably the biggest problem.

1:00:03So given all this, all that we discussed, and given the fact that you have been, lucky or not, you've been a reliable predictor of these things, what's going to happen? If I'm going to make bets on Polymarket today, what should I bet on? That's how I vote. I would bet we won't have a result. so here's what I think no matter who wins the other side is going to be absolutely positive something suspicious happened and they will be so mad and they will think that it's the end of the world if they don't act that it's probably going to get dangerous and at least lawfare and lawsuits and all kinds of protests and what not no matter who wins and I don't know that the system can figure out how to solve it because it'll be things like, well, we have this strong evidence that something suspicious happened here.

1:00:58And if you were to certify this election, you know, looks like it's a big problem. And again, this could be on either direction. I think both sides will claim if they lose, whoever loses is going to say it was rigged. And by the way, we have a long history of whoever loses in America says it was rigged. And - But we don't have a long history of prosecuting that. So like Nixon in 1960, Nixon thought Kennedy stole the election. There were dead people who voted in Chicago. Nixon actually took it to court, but he never announced that he was taking it to court. And he conceded the night of the election and ultimately the inauguration happened, came and went.

1:01:39So things have been contested, but sort of respectfully. Yeah, I think January 6th probably changed things. One thing it changed is I think the Republicans would be far less likely to gather in a crowd around the Capitol. I think they learned their lesson that they're going to get hunted down if they do. But there will be enormous problems either way. I think our system is going to be so full of holes and that with all the election observers, there'll be so many claims of irregularity, true or false, there will always be claims, that we won't be able to feel comfortable that the claims have been investigated before the deadline for certifying the election.

1:02:27So I suspect it's going to get kicked to the House, and it might be some really terrible process by which the members of the House pick the president, which I believe is the plan B in the Constitution if we can't get it the normal way. And that would pick Trump, I think. And then we got all kinds of trouble. Yeah. So if I'm not sure if that's the plan B in the Constitution, because the Constitution says if there isn't a majority of the electors, it goes gets thrown to the House. But you still have to have electors. You still have to have an electoral college meet. And what you're saying is the electoral college might not even get certified, in which case, I don't know if there's a prescription.

1:03:14Well, the Supreme Court, of course, you know, we always assume that they're the final arbiter and maybe they would be. But I'm not even sure that the left would, you know, would believe anything that came out of the Supreme Court at this point. So our systems have degraded in credibility to the point where I don't think anybody's going to trust what happens, no matter which way it goes. What do you think the odds are of a landslide? Low. but I will give you that if it's a landslide in either direction, that gives us a comfortable transition of power. Yeah, that's my hope. 10 % chance. Because I look at 1972 where we had something similar happen.

1:04:00There was a national ticket on both sides. It was Nixon Agnew and it was McGovern Eagleton. and Eagleton, there was news stories that he had had shock therapy for depression. Thomas Eagleton was Senator for Missouri. He dropped out of the race. So it's the only precedent I could think of of a already nationally nominated or soon to be nominated candidate dropping from an election. And McGovern picked Sergeant Shriver, a Kennedy relative, and the uncertainty it created. Nixon wasn't a popular president. and he was already being investigated for Watergate, I think he went 49 states to one. McGovern only won Massachusetts and D.C.

1:04:44And I think that was because of the uncertainty generated by the VP confusion. But that confusion, that uncertainty, didn't seem to happen here with the assumption of Harris. You know, my take on what Republicans are calling a coup on the Democrat side is it's none of my business. If I were a Democrat and I didn't like it, well, I would complain. But if you're – yeah, actually, technically I am a Democrat. I'm a registered Democrat. But I don't play for that side. If I played for that side and I didn't like what my side was doing, I'd be really loud about it. But I haven't heard even one person complain who's a Democrat.

1:05:32So if the Democrats are happy that that's how they picked their candidate, or at least they're willing not to complain, it's not really Republican business. I mean, that's your new competitor. You better get used to it. Yeah, I mean, and yeah, I'm fine with what the Democrats did. I don't think it was a coup. I think this was a normal process. I think they saw they were going to lose, so of course they had to pick somebody new, and Harris was the obvious candidate. I'm glad they did not have an open convention or they're not – clearly they're not having one because I think that would create too much uncertainty and confusion.

1:06:07They did the right thing for them. Also, I think it should be noted that their most credible players were probably behind it. So if it's true that two former presidents, maybe Hillary Clinton, Pelosi, Schumer, if they were all on the same side, Those are the ones that the Democrats would trust to say, okay, this is a once-ever situation. We're going to break some rules, but we're going to break them in the service of getting a Democrat elected. It's hard for a Democrat to say no to that. It's not ideal, but given the circumstances, I would trust those people to make that decision for me. And they were smart to do it quickly and not wait for the convention, for instance.

1:06:50And I got to give them credit for that. So it sort of stopped the damage a little bit. And of course, it reversed it. Like now the betting markets are predicting Harris is going to win. Well, well, you know what's happening with the polling, right? I'm watching Rasmussen, one of the big polling companies. Their numbers still say that Trump has a commanding lead and it didn't really change much. But the other pollsters have been silent for several days. and Rasmussen is publicly mocking them. So where's your new numbers? So where's those new numbers? Because they're slightly stale numbers that show Kamala Harris is doing well.

1:07:32And then those numbers drive the betting market. And then the betting market will drive the numbers. So they've created this self-sustaining, you know, building thing. And we'll see if Rasmussen is right. Because if the new, if next week the polls come in and they don't show Kamala Harris ahead, you'll know that they gamed it. You know, I always think of the betting market the way people think of the bond market. Like, it's not easy to invest in bonds. There's no, like, New York bond exchange. You could just go online and buy some bonds. So people who buy and sell bonds tend to be smarter about the economy and investing than the retail speculators and stocks.

1:08:14And the betting markets, These are people who are putting money at risk. So they kind of have to look at everything. They just don't look at the latest polls. I sort of feel they're a little smarter about understanding the messaging and so on. No, I would go the different direction because there's small amounts at play. The bond people are looking at larger amounts. So yeah, they're serious people. But if I put a$200 bet on a betting market, I didn't do any research. Yeah, so you're just saying that might just be a kind of sort of poll, another version of polling in that sense. I'm not even sure if it's anything except people having fun or trying to see if they can guess it right.

1:09:00In my case, that's what I would do. It's like, you know what? If I don't put money on this, I won't be able to hold myself accountable. So I've done a few bets like that. There's all kinds of reasons. I think the betting market is not as predictive as it could be. So your final conclusion here is that it's going to be very close. We won't have a winner. And from my perspective, that means look out below on the stock market because it's going to be like Gore Bush 2000 where the stock market fell over 20 % between November, between election day and inauguration day. And I hope so. I hope so. that would be the easiest buying opportunity of all time.

1:09:44Because one of the things we've learned is it doesn't matter too much who the president is. Having Biden in charge, at least for, let's say, six months, just doesn't make that much difference. So I think if there's chaos and not an obvious transition, the stock market will take a dump. And then I will take every dollar I have and buy in because it'll be back to normal in a month. That would be my guess. No matter who's in charge, it'll be back to normal in a month. That could be. I mean, I always used to think, and I've written about this, that who the president is doesn't matter. But then you start looking at the international, what they talked about last night, what Musk was talking about, how, you know, would Russia have been as confident in Ukraine if there was a strong president.

1:10:31You know, would Iran has been as confident with their manipulation of Hamas and the Houthis and Hezbollah if there was a strong president? And then it reminds me of JFK. Like, would the Cuban Missile Crisis have happened if there was no Bay of Pigs? Like, JFK was a weak president. It started off as a weak president and ended up as a strong one. Jimmy Carter, American hostage crisis, he was perceived as weak. And then the day Reagan became president, Iran had to release the hostages. So it was clearly there was a difference between a weak president and a strong or maybe semi-crazy president. And definitely other presidents or leaders are afraid of the crazy.

1:11:13And so in that sense, it might matter. I don't know. Yeah, I would agree it matters in the longer term and for the big international stuff. But I don't think the stock market's going to matter in any six-month period. I do expect that Trump could actually deliver on some of the crazy claims, like I could solve Ukraine the first day. I think he actually could. Like, what would he do? I wouldn't bet on it. I think you'd just say, hey, Putin, here's the deal. You know this isn't going to go anywhere. You know you're not going to get more. And Ukraine, hey, you know you're not going to get all of that land back that they took.

1:11:52How about this? will just say that we're not going to make Ukraine a member of NATO, and we just sort of keep what you got and go back to our business. How about that, Putin? Because the alternative is destruction. And suddenly, people start getting a little bit more reasonable. Now, there's some thinking that Ukraine's latest attempt to take some Russian territory that's not part of the occupied Ukrainian stuff is just to have some negotiating stuff. So we'll give you back this part of Russia. If you give us this part of Ukraine that you took, I mean, that's what it looks like to me. So to me, it looks like Zelensky is preparing to negotiate.

1:12:35Putin said explicitly he's preparing to negotiate. I think they're just waiting for Trump.

1:12:45And, you know, I want to just quickly mention and ask you about, as you mentioned, you do this for a living. You didn't always say that. You were the Dilbert guy. And suddenly you do do this for a living now. Like you have your coffee with Scott Adams, which I listened to as whatever I'm at my desk at that time, I'm listening to you. and you've been very good at building up an entire platform around your kind of thoughts on current events, particularly politics and your analysis from the prism of whether it's looking at it from a hypnosis point of view or I would say a game theory point of view, you're like the best at this.

1:13:28And eight years ago, you would say, you wouldn't take a side. you were like you were even saying i'm voting for i'm i'm for hillary clinton because i have to be otherwise i could be in danger well that yeah you would kind of play both sides and also you kind of had this thing where if both sides hated you that's how you would get the most observers which i don't think with the new algorithms turns out to be true anymore yeah i think i think you have to be polarized i think i've been hurt by not being more polarizing Like I really try to, I'm not saying you don't do this. I think you do do this, but I really try to understand both sides and have both sides be welcome coming on this show and answering my questions.

1:14:13But I think then it doesn't excite people as much as being polarizing. And what do you think? What's your advice for me? I think if I were more biased, I would have 10 times a bigger audience. So I agree with you completely. One of the things that you and I, I think, both do is try to talk about the tools of how to know what's real. Like, how do you navigate your world? So I'm more about focusing on how you know what's real and how you analyze and making sure it's not a half opinion, it's a whole opinion, that sort of thing. And so I've developed a number of viewers who like that. But that's not going to be 80 % of the world.

1:14:56That's always going to be 2 % of the world. Right. But here's the important part. Somebody asked me this the other day. They said, how many public figures are watching your show? And my answer is all the ones that matter. Not every show, of course. But, I mean, even Trump would watch my show from the Oval Office, I heard. So, of course, he's sampling all the shows, not just mine. But as long as I reach the people who are the thinkers and movers, and I can help them just get a little extra tool, so they've got an extra way to express something, maybe a better way to persuade, something to stay away from, I can just make them a little bit more effective.

1:15:41So I think of myself as a force multiplier, meaning that my impact is on other influencers, and then they have the bigger audiences. I think that's right. And I think you do a really good job kind of looking at the metagame, which is, oh, here's this new message. How did they come up with this? Is it good? Is it bad? You know, is it true? I think the statement, is it true, is a very important prism to view these things, you know, that are in the media. but because you apply it most to what you're interested in, which is for instance, this political election and your views on it, I think that does get, you have become polarizing.

1:16:23Like if it used to be four or five years ago, if I would tell people, oh, Sky Adams is coming on the podcast, people who are on one side would say, why would you have that right-wing sicko on your podcast? Like, and you're always been a moderate in my view. Like it's crazy that anybody would think you're right-wing at all. But it did polarize people. And that, I think, look, it got you, on the one hand, banned in some cases with Dilbert. But in other cases, it built you a platform. You know, I think there's a new movement that I keep talking about. But I feel like people will understand this better.

1:17:02There's a new force. It's not left or right. I call them the internet dads. And maybe I'll put you in that category. So Elon Musk is not left or right because he's said very clearly he's always supported Democrats. He could maybe the next time he will. But he's an internet dad. And if you look at the conversation that he had with Trump, you notice he left out the real red meat stuff. Nothing about abortion. Nothing about religion. Nothing about taxes, by the way. I don't think he talked about trans, did he? because those are not exactly the internet dad issues. The things that, let's say, David Sachs, Bill Ackman, you and I would be in favor of are things that nobody who has a brain should be against.

1:17:52In other words, there's some things like, I think we need border security. That's not really left or right. And of course, shouldn't be. That is dad. That's dad saying, look, there's a reason we locked the car. There's a reason we locked the house. There's a reason to lock the government or the country. So I think the common sense people are leaning a little toward Trump for 80 % of his platform. And I think that's the big change is the common censers are willing to say, you know what? I can't be a Democrat if you can't be a little bit more sensitive to some of these dangers that are obvious. Well, listen, what's the next book?

1:18:37You should write a book called The Internet Dads. Well, you know, I started working on a document. I don't know if it'll be a book or something smaller about how to spot fake news and how to know when you're being brainwashed. And I realized I developed a whole bunch of, you know, little tools and tricks. I'll just give you one. One of my favorites is the two on the nose. You may have heard me say that. You'll hear a story that if there's a popular narrative that says, I don't know, that if you do a certain thing, you'll die. And then very soon after that, there's a story about somebody who did the exact thing and they died.

1:19:17The first thing I say is that's a little too on the nose. That's a little too perfect fit to that narrative. If you just always tell yourself, whenever you see one that's too perfect, almost certainly not true. and then you start keeping attention or paying attention to how often you write when you use the two on the nose thing and you'll be amazed. It's like 90 % predictive. So that's just one tool. There's a hundred more. I like that one. You ever see the movie Minority Report? I think. I don't have a firm memory of it. That's the one where they use AI basically to predict crimes before they happen.

1:19:54So I think Colin Farrell's the detective and they come into this case and they get in a room where there's all this evidence and Colin Farrell says, boy, there's an orgy of evidence here. And then he says, you know, the last time I've seen a case where we go into a room where there's an orgy of evidence, never. Like there's something wrong with what's happening. Yeah, the real world is so weird that a real story stands out because there's something just wrong with it. So take, for example, the Secret Service not fully protecting Trump at the rally. On day one, I said, you know, this could be anything.

1:20:35It could be that worst case thing where there's some inside job to kill Trump. Maybe, maybe. But far more likely, you're going to find out this is a Dilbert situation where people didn't communicate well and they just didn't perform. And then one day after another, it dribbled down. Well, I thought you said you would cover the roof. And I'm like, there it is. There it is. Now, I'm not going to say that's the whole story because I think there's still some room that there might have been some bad behavior. I don't have evidence of that. I'm just saying that from a conspiracy theory possibility, maybe there's more to it.

1:21:13And maybe it's just, maybe some of these secret service just didn't care as much. I mean, that could be part of it. If it had been the most beloved person in the world and everybody felt that way, maybe having somebody watching the roof would have just automatically happened and nobody would have known the difference. So, yeah, I think looking for messiness, that's a good sign of a real story. Yeah, like I always use something I call conspiracy numbers, which is if the number of things that has to conspire together for a fact to be true or for a statement to be true, if the number of things gets greater and greater, it's less likely for this assumption to be true.

1:21:57So if for like 9-11 is the obvious one, if thousands of people would have to agree to be silent until they die, and then even afterwards, no news. Like the conspiracy number for this to be, for 9-11 to be a conspiracy to be true, it's just too high, so it can't be true. And similar with the Secret Service, it's just, it's more like what you just said, is there was a culture of, okay, the head of the Secret Service probably doesn't like Trump, so we're not gonna pay as much attention to details as we normally do, and then bad things eventually happens. You know, the unlikely black swan event happens eventually.

1:22:33And that's what I sort of feel happened. So my new persuasive, but I mean it seriously, thing is that Trump should require his current Secret Service staff, the team, to each of them say in writing that they don't believe the fine people hoax, which Kamala Harris is pushing again this week and Biden pushes, the idea that Trump had ever called neo-Nazis fine people. If you're hearing this for the first time, even though you think you heard it on video, you didn't, because they edited it out the part where he said, just to be clear, I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis. So if you take that part out, you know, people are fooled into thinking they saw it with their own eyes.

1:23:14Anyway, the point is if you really thought he said that would you protect him and the answer is if you're a normal human being and you thought that the guy you're protecting had once actually in the real world praised neo-nazis i'm not sure i'd put in 100 and so i would make every one of them say in writing do you understand that this didn't happen in the real world and then i would go further and I would make the head of the Secret Service say in writing so that every member of the Secret Service could see it, this is a confirmed hoax. We'll link to Snopes, which calls it a hoax. They didn't always, but now they do.

1:23:55And I would make sure there was nobody guarding me who thought I might be a neo-Nazi supporter. Very important. Yeah, that would be a good strategy there. What other strategies? Last question. I know I've kept you here for a while. What other strategies would you suggest to Trump? I mean, Kamala's doing these genius strategies, and I agree with it. It's like unbelievable how she's been doing this. What should Trump do now? Well, it depends on the attack. So if the attack is he's going to steal my democracy and become a fascist dictator, I've recommended that he have lunch with some just ordinary voters, Democrats, who are afraid of him, and film it.

1:24:38and just say, how exactly am I going to steal your democracy? And then they'd say something like, well, you're forcing women to do things with their bodies or not do things. You're controlling their bodies. And then he would say, probably, well, I took that out of my control. So it's the federal government and the Supreme Court is completely out of it. That's what I did. I gave it to the states. There are more women voters in every state. They can have anything they want because half of the men in the state already agree with abortion. So if women by a large majority want it, they will vote in the people that they want or they'll get the laws that they want.

1:25:15So what I did was take it out of my control totally and move it closer to women so women can have the final say. Now, imagine you're sitting there and the president says that to you. You're going to pause. You're going to say, you know what? This is really inconvenient for women who want abortions because it's not going to happen right away, whatever you're saying, if it does happen at all. But you did actually take it out of your control and you gave it closer to the people. That's not a terrible point. So I believe that if he just talked like a human, you know, take out the stump speech and you're just talking to him one-on-one, his personal charisma is insane.

1:25:58I don't know if you've had the pleasure to talk to Trump personally, But if you talk to him personally, you can see why he's president. By the way, I had the same feeling about George Bush the Younger. First time I saw him before he was running for president the first time, I was at an event where I gave a speech and he was giving a speech. And he walks in the room and you could just feel it. You could feel the personal power of George Bush the Jr. And even in that moment, I said, oh, my God, he's going to be a president. And sure enough, you know, you got there. So Trump has that thing. So if you could unleash that thing, that personal charisma, in a very small event with some Democrats, and just film them having an experience, I would love to see that.

1:26:47You know, it could go off the rails. I mean, it'd be risky. They might just go crazy or something. But I think they would be polite. And if he simply told him his side and say, look, Republicans are the ones that want you to have the most free speech. the states have the most power and not me. I'm trying to give away my power. You saw me do it with abortion. And he could make the argument that it's all just made up and the news isn't real. And I think people would go and think about it for a long time. So I think he needs to get down to the Democrat voter level and not be always up in the clouds.

1:27:27Yeah, that is a good approach. Well, we'll see if that happens. There's a lot more fun the screenwriters of 2024 are going to have before this year is over. And I am worried about the close election. I think violence could occur. I think bad things could happen. So we'll see what happens. I mean, Nate Silver makes the point that if Kamala doesn't win Pennsylvania, she only has a 3 % chance of winning the election. I don't know where he gets his numbers but you know it was interesting that she didn't pick Josh Shapiro to be her VP candidate because of that but we'll see if the election is close or not on either side and Scott once again thank you for coming on the podcast and trying to make sense of all this confusion that is out there Thanks for having me it's always a pleasure I love your interview style I tell people, even when you're not listening, that you're my favorite interviewer over these eight years.

1:28:32Nobody does this better. You do this better than anybody, in my opinion. I appreciate that. Thank you. I work really hard at it. I study the greats, so I work really hard at this. Thank you. All right. Thanks, James.

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