Sen. Kamala Harris is running for president in 2020, and there's no question that she's going to beat Donald Trump. But how did she get there? Is it because she's smart, ambitious, and has the right look?
00:04:10.440Maybe somebody's said it once, but I've never heard it.
00:04:12.720But they said that about Kamala Harris, as if that's a negative, that she's ambitious.
00:04:20.480So if you put predator and ambitious and has the right look, but is also the right demographic, I thought she would be a strong matchup for Trump.
00:04:30.080What I didn't see coming in the primaries, and I didn't see this at all, complete blind spot, is that she was terrible at campaigning, just terrible.
00:04:38.960Well, and that was reflected in the result.
00:06:58.380And she could be coached up to a higher level.
00:07:01.040And then when Biden became the likely candidate for the top spot, it was sort of obvious at that point.
00:07:07.620Now, let me offer this challenge to you.
00:07:12.300I think it was – I might have been – I don't know if I was the first or near the first to say that Biden had a mental disability, meaning that there was something happening with age.
00:07:49.480But I think I might have been among the first.
00:07:51.340So if you take the fact that he can't make it all the way but he's likely the nominee, add to the fact that she would be the perfect solution to that and they had some personal connection there and that apparently Kamala Harris was a favorite of some of the old school.
00:08:08.300The Hillary Clinton people were some of her staff in the primaries.
00:08:14.720So it all just kind of made sense that she would be the puppet of the puppet or she would be the double puppet play.
00:08:40.500The real reason is I could just see it.
00:08:42.720I could see it like it was the hand in front of my face.
00:08:45.300Now, probably, that feeling that I could see it, which was identical to the feeling I had when Trump was running, it wasn't that I was predicting it exactly.
00:08:59.440I could just see it just like I was looking at it like it was right in front of me.
00:09:03.520Now, probably, that's just imagination fueled by the fact that the requirements for that to happen were in place and my brain wasn't quite processing it logically, but it presented that little movie for me because it had done the work.
00:12:05.140So James Altucher, friend of yours, wrote a really interesting article about the death of New York and how, unlike the financial crisis or September 11th, now we have bandwidth.
00:12:17.400So there's no reason for the offices to fill back up or people to come back.
00:12:21.340So I'd just be interested to see your perspective on the future of cities in America, specifically New York, but generally just cities.
00:12:27.760Yeah, you know, let me give you some context.
00:12:33.520A long time ago when radio was huge and television did not exist, the television was invented and it obviously was catching on quickly.
00:12:43.680And then soon there was color TV and everybody said, hey, I guess radio is going to go away because why would you have this radio in your living room that you all gather around to listen to the radio shows when you have a television?
00:13:21.280So if you look at New York City and you take the most obvious prediction, the most obvious prediction would be why do we need retail stores at all?
00:13:38.020And now law enforcement has gone away or it's not enough to protect your store.
00:13:42.540So the straightforward walk right down the highway that has nobody blocking you is New York's going to have a lot of trouble, at least with the business part of it.
00:13:55.640But going back to my radio versus television analogy, the other possibility is that New York will find a way to be a different New York.
00:14:03.960So, for example, all that retail space could get picked up by tech companies, just one example.
00:14:12.540And then suddenly it's not so much retail stores, but you've got your Googles and your Amazons maybe, that sort of thing.
00:14:18.840So it's completely unpredictable, more unpredictable than anything.
00:14:23.480What I think is the least likely outcome is that it will go back to the way it was.
00:14:28.340I think it will have to go back to something different.
00:14:30.680But personally, I don't know why anybody would live in New York City at this point.
00:14:37.720And I think that the cities might be coming to a close faster than they would have.
00:14:44.740I think you're going to find that building homes that people can afford at very low incomes in places where there were no cities and no towns before should be the future.
00:14:55.040And that would leave some big questions about what do you do with the stuff that's already been built that nobody can afford to live in.
00:15:02.080And at that point, supply and demand should even things out.
00:15:05.720And then it will be cheap to live in New York and people will live there because it's cheap.
00:15:10.700That might be what happens to it, oddly enough.
00:15:14.980So I don't know if that came anywhere near answering it, but I think in the future, cities will move to small structures, maybe even single-story things that people could build themselves, but are really good to live in and have schools and everything else you need.
00:15:53.740Kamala Harris' pick was brilliant when you said it because I know she just lost and you made the prediction anyway.
00:15:59.960And I said, you know, Scott sees there's free money and he's picking it up because it's like, what do you have to lose?
00:16:07.960If Kamala Harris doesn't get anywhere further, you lose nothing.
00:16:12.520And if Kamala Harris does win big in this, which she has, then you look like a god, right?
00:16:20.480No, I would say that that would have been true with my Trump prediction in 2016 because at the time, nobody thought of me as a political pundit and nobody thought of me as someone who could predict anything.
00:16:36.020But when I got the Trump prediction right, you know, that wasn't as special because lots of you got that right as well.
00:16:43.340I think what was different is I said it in public, which maybe stand out a little bit.
00:16:48.080But with the Kamala Harris one, once I had been established as somebody who talked about politics, if I had been wrong on this one, I would have been mocked forever.
00:16:59.460I would never have been able to turn on my Periscope without a troll coming in and say, why should we listen to anything you said?
00:17:06.040You picked Kamala Harris to be the nominee, and that's the dumbest thing that ever happened.
00:17:14.360I love predictions that are out on the edge because they stand the greatest reward, and that certainly did right there, and I loved it.
00:17:22.320And as for the cities going away, I think the original reason cities became in existence in the first place in civilization was for protection against marauding wild people that were on the outskirts of the cities.
00:17:36.000And I'm not sure that would not go away in the new future with Antifa and Antifa-like groups and marauding people who are looking for stuff.
00:17:48.760I love that point because, yeah, the earliest cities had walls around them, and they were fortified for defense, as you just said.
00:17:56.220But today, we might still want to put the wall around New York and Seattle, but for a different reason, to try to keep all the marauding people on the inside.
00:18:03.800Don't let them get into the countryside.
00:18:06.000I live here in Seattle, and it's not so bad.
00:18:08.680Just to the north end of Seattle, we had some protesters on the corners, and that was great.
00:18:14.920You could go down there and talk to them, and there's nothing really in the areas that aren't right in the middle of the city.
00:18:23.860So right in the middle of the city is where all the protests have always concentrated, so it's not so bad as you might think.
00:18:30.900Once you get out from the epicenter of it, are the retail stores open and functioning?
00:18:36.000The retail stores are open and functioning.
00:18:38.420A lot of them are low in stock because they were raided by some organized criminal activity that went through and just looted them all at once to dilute the police presence.
00:18:52.020They got a bunch of their windows busted in and were ripped off majorly.
00:18:56.400Like Best Pife, for example, was practically cleaned out.
00:18:59.200I went down there to shop the other day, and there weren't any products on the shelf that I wanted, so I had to order them off Amazon.
00:19:04.920So those retail stores are good except for the fact that they don't have any products to sell?
00:21:00.380That would be the most likely outcome, because it doesn't look like the protesters are going to just burn themselves out by making their point and moving on.
00:21:09.220Because the ones who just wanted to make a point about systemic racism, I feel like they made their point.
00:21:15.180There's no more point that needs to be made.
00:21:17.780The ones who just want to destroy everything and tear down, they don't have an end date because there's no reason for them to stop.
00:23:35.560If it's just freedom of speech, I'll die for you.
00:23:38.840That's, you know, a military person might say such a thing.
00:23:41.720But if you're destroying my country, I have a vow to protect it, and I don't see anybody else doing it.
00:23:49.700So the odds of somebody with a military background getting almost activated, if I could say that,
00:23:58.180because remember, if you're in the military, you're programmed.
00:24:00.940You know, you're actually wired differently than anybody else for good or bad.
00:24:06.200You are wired to be a different creature.
00:24:08.760And I think some of that lasts, I would assume.
00:24:11.740I mean, if PTSD can last, I would expect that also the, you know, the rest of the training or experience would have some lasting benefits.
00:24:19.600And it would only take one event, again, I'm going to speak generically, just one event that would make it a really bad idea to go out in the street and be identified as Antifa,
00:24:32.160because they would think it would happen again.
00:24:34.220Now, it might have to happen more than once for people to say, uh-oh, it's a trend.
00:25:29.320But in all likelihood, if there's, let me just say this.
00:25:33.420Listen, these things don't stop without force unless the group that's doing the bad stuff has a reason to stop on their own, and they very much don't.
00:25:43.340The ones who want anarchy only want to stop when everything's broken.
00:25:47.640So only force will stop them, and the government has indicated that it doesn't want to use it, at least the local government.
00:25:55.480And because we don't have a dictator, it turns out we don't have a dictator.
00:27:00.840Well, actually, have you developed that thing where when you look at an artist's profile and you kind of say, oh, I could tell that they're an artist and that.
00:27:12.220Is there anything that you're kind of developing with that, like a theory with why that's so?
00:27:17.280Because I'm actually a rapper in Austin, Texas.
00:27:20.560And I feel like with my background in business degree, economics and all that, I feel like I'm really singled out.
00:27:28.660And I'm just like looking at everyone around me.
00:27:53.360So as you said, if you have exposure to decision-making fields, business, economics, law, medicine to some extent, engineering, any of the fields that teach you how to think, you're probably going to do better in understanding your world and dealing with it.
00:28:10.200And the people who become artists have two problems.
00:28:13.980One is there's a self-selection thing.
00:28:16.400So the people who decide, hey, I think I'll be an artist, it might be because they're good at lots of things and they chose that.
00:28:22.380But it's also a lot of people say, I just don't like math.
00:34:03.160If there is no result from the election by the time the inauguration comes down, I think it would go to the House of Representatives.
00:34:14.860Do you think that's so, and how do you think that would play out?
00:34:18.200Well, I'm no constitutional scholar, but I would think that if we don't have a result by Inauguration Day, that our options would be to either postpone the election or to have it again, or postpone the result in the inauguration or to redo it.
00:34:39.360And I don't know the legality of any of that, but I imagine we could make it pass legal muster because I think the Supreme Court is going to say, no, the Constitution says these are your deadlines.
00:34:52.960But the Supreme Court is humans, not a machine.
00:34:56.620So if you say to the humans on the Supreme Court, but, you know, this year we just couldn't do it.
00:35:03.260I think at that point people just get flexible and they say, well, you know, okay, we're originalists and we don't like to deviate from the Constitution.
00:35:14.100But the intent of the Constitution was to get a good result that people believe.
00:36:08.400So the one and only outcome I can see that would be credible enough to avoid election-related mass unrest is if Trump won by a landslide.
00:36:21.780Or I suppose if Joe Biden won by a landslide.
00:36:26.460So if either of them won by such a margin that even whatever stuff happened with the mail, you could even say, okay, 2% or 3% of that, which would be a lot.
00:36:36.980If you had 2% or 3% fraud in a national election, that would be a lot of fraud.
00:36:43.820But if one of them wins by 10%, you can let it go.
00:36:49.120So anything short of a major landslide, which is not really common in our system, at least lately, is going to be trouble.
00:38:35.940So it's a word like botched where you accept it uncritically.
00:38:39.760If somebody says, well, this manager is not managing as well as this other manager, you might say to yourself, well, I have a different opinion.
00:39:08.200So dark, chaos, botched, any of those words that have in them a sense of nonspecific badness are very good because they don't have enough specific badness to work with.
00:39:23.040So as long as they can keep using these general words about his personality, his credibility, his chaos, they don't have to explain exactly what he did wrong or what they would do better.
00:39:34.300And that's bad for them, you know, if they have to explain the details because the details don't work in their favor.
00:39:42.200What the Democrats want, first of all, they don't agree with each other.
00:39:46.900So if you're a Democrat and you're trying to sell the national unity, hey, everybody vote for this one person, it's better if you don't get too specific because if they do, their own team will leave.
00:39:58.480As soon as they say we're going to do this or that, people who are Democrats will say, ah, wait a minute, that's not what I signed up for exactly.
00:40:06.660I wanted something way more left of that.
00:40:09.160So the Democrats have to hide their intention from their own side as much as they have to make a case against Trump.
00:40:16.000So that word works really well for that, I would say.
00:40:19.060Now, I've often said that Trump has the reverse message, which is law and order.
00:40:25.840Now, law and order is not punchy like, you know, botched or chaos or dark.
00:40:33.100It's a little too boring and ordinary.
00:40:35.700So if the president could come up with a response word and the best play for the president would be to use the word against them.
00:40:44.700Because remember how fake news the president took the gun out of their hands and flipped it around?
00:41:29.400For podcasts, I am a former California person, moved to South Carolina.
00:41:33.700And I'm also an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation, Native Americans.
00:41:40.580And I feel that Native Americans are not being acknowledged in the current climate.
00:41:47.580With mention of the 1619 program and also watching a young girl in Georgetown saying black people used to live here, encouraging white people to move out.
00:42:06.000So, yeah, my tribe is actually from the southeast complex of Mississippi and Alabama.
00:42:10.820So, although I'm a conservative and I'm really against identity politics, I want to know how Native Americans can become part of the conversation of lifting people up or just our general acknowledgement of who we are in our education or economics.
00:42:56.060And I've heard a lot of people since then say that they had a similar situation.
00:43:00.440So I guess it was trendy to say that you were part of Native American, which is part of my answer.
00:43:07.860Native Americans have always had sort of a positive image in the standard, you know, European-based person who came over to the United States.
00:43:19.280So there's always this mythic, you know, noble kind of a thing.
00:43:25.340So people would often say, hey, yeah, we're one of those, too, because it was so positive.
00:43:29.980You like to claim it as part of your identity.
00:43:33.440So you have a little different situation.
00:43:35.560You don't want to have apples and oranges here with the black community.
00:43:38.080But, of course, if you notice last night, as each of the states got 30 seconds to do their nomination of Biden, that there were a number of Native Americans who were selected to represent their state.
00:43:53.100And I only watched it for a little bit, but I think I saw three out of maybe 10.
00:43:58.000And I thought, wow, that's really very high recognition of the, you know, the Native American populations in those states.
00:44:09.060The problem with the Black Lives Matter movement is that if it works, it's self-destroying.
00:44:16.980Because if it works, it would cause extra attention to go to one part of the public, and the rest of the public would say, wait a minute, we weren't in favor of extra attention so much, we just wanted equality.
00:44:30.900So you can imagine that anything can overshoot the mark.
00:44:33.880So I think Black Lives Matter will destroy itself because it has a message that has a timer on it, right?
00:44:43.760Yeah, it's sort of, you can see the fuse is burning, and you're saying, okay, this isn't going to last much longer when the leaders of Black Lives Matter are saying, let's, or even members are saying, let's kick these white people out of their house and give it to black people and stuff like that.
00:45:06.220Is what you're looking for more attention because you would want more resources to go in that direction?
00:45:12.460Or is it more just a recognition that you're looking for?
00:45:15.680I think a recognition, but also perhaps resources.
00:45:21.020Trump has been great for the Native Americans.
00:45:23.080He signed the Murdered Missing Indigenous People bill, as well as allowed tribal lands for us to leave it to other people in the tribe, which previous presidents had not signed.
00:45:37.320So he's done a lot, it just doesn't get attention.
00:45:41.880So as somebody who, let me just say for you and your audience, when I hear people say we're a nation of immigrants, it like kind of bothers me a little bit.
00:45:52.600And I don't, I don't like identity politics, but I'd like us to be acknowledged at the table as just being equal, not being better than or original or anything, just at the table.
00:46:09.000But you know, to my other statement, do you find that there's much day-to-day any kind of discrimination against Native Americans?
00:46:18.460Is that, is that even part of your experience?
00:46:23.140Well, I, I have blonde hair, part of the colonization.
00:46:27.480So there is some discrimination for Indians that don't maybe fit the complete bill.
00:57:42.640Well, I think you just have to dismiss that as the fake news doing what the fake news does.
00:57:49.000You know, the most normal thing in the world is for an incoming administration to have people that they know in the Russia sphere.
00:57:57.520Keep in mind that Russia's objective is to make sure that whoever the administration is,
00:58:03.840or even if it's a maybe administration coming in, that they would give them as much contact as they possibly could,
00:58:10.520because the more contact, the better from Russia.
00:58:12.360So remember, you've got Russia doing perfectly legal things, which is have a phone call, have a meeting, talk to somebody, create a channel.
00:58:21.800So it sort of would have to look like this.
00:58:26.200Under every situation, I believe it would look like this.
00:58:31.420It wouldn't matter what the administration was.
00:58:33.620So the way I would answer it is you realize that whoever is the next administration after Trump,
00:58:38.520whether it's this year or some other year,
00:58:41.280whoever is next is going to have a lot of initial contacts and past contacts with Russian folks.
00:58:49.280So you should first explain it away as normal and say it's going to be like that for every administration regardless,