Episode 113 - How Trump Handles the Children on CNN
Date: 2018-06-21 | Duration: 47:25
Topics
President Trump paced his critics by giving them what they asked for Did the President “cave”? Did the American system of checks and balances work as designed? Is this how negotiating works? Morning Joe’s call for diversity Gaslighting applies to all political parties 95% Consumer confidence, highest ever recorded The economy is driven by psychological phenomena President Trump always leads with a “big ask” Peter Fonda’s tweets Why give him a pass for his disgusting comments? Ana Navarro mocking people not policies “Elite” joke by President Trump at rally last night Are we seeing “happy hate” by President Trump’s critics? Jeff Sessions response to questions List of thinking errors Is it getting more dangerous to be a Trump supporter? DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen getting heckled at dinner
Transcript
[0:10]
Hey everybody, come on in. I’m a little bit earlier than usual, so the rest of you wake up, wake up. It’s time for—it’s Coffee with Scott Adams and the simultaneous sip. It’s the best sip of the day. The other sips are pretty good, but this is the best one. Here it comes, here it comes. Oh.
So, are you all watching how President Trump’s critics are handling the fact that he agreed with them? Now, we all knew that something crazy and strange was going to happen when the President said, “Oh yeah, I agree with you about separating the children, but there’s nothing we could do.” And then he finally decides that he can just—
[1:12]
Then he finally decides that he can just sign something, which is different than what people imagined he could sign, but the idea was, “Hey, you could just make this go away by signing something. You just have to give the order, just sign it, everything will be good.” So, remember what I told you about how it seemed as though the President was taking what I call an adult position to immigration, which is he was making hard short-term choices that were uncomfortable for a lot of people and worst of all, of course, for the families with children who were in cages—which none of us support, children in cages—but it was for a longer-term good. It was to prevent sexual abuse, it was to keep the kids safe, it was to get to a better place in the long run. So that was sort of the adult approach: short-term costs.
[2:13]
People are not going to be happy, but it gets you to a better place. The children’s view was just sign something, it’ll all go away if you just sign something. Now, the “just sign something” idea to make it all go away, spoken by a guy without kids: how hard do I have to agree with you idiots? Just talking about this particular idiot, not the rest of you. How hard do I have to agree with you before you can hear it? Does it matter that I don’t have kids if I still agree with you that kids should not be in cages? Do you really think that that was a useful comment when everyone agrees with you? Can you even—do you even see that everyone agrees with you? Is that not obvious, that nobody likes kids in cages?
[3:13]
Obviously, nobody likes kids in cages. So, and by the way, I’m going to double back to that point. So, you’ve got the children’s view that the President can just sign something, make the whole thing go away, it’s easy, there are no problems, there are no costs to that, just sign something. And then the adult view that it’s not that simple, a lot of moving parts. Even if we tried to do something, it would take a while. So what does the President do when he’s in adult mode, but all of his critics are in child mode? How does he handle that? Now, do you remember pacing and leading? Pacing is when you match the people you’re trying to persuade, and if you match them long enough, ideally you can lead them. So what the President did was he left adult mode, which I did not see coming. I did not see this coming.
[4:15]
He went to child mode and gave them a toy. He just signed something. Now, it’s going to take a while, maybe 24 hours, maybe 48 hours, but eventually the children are going to realize—the children being the critics on CNN and MSNBC, the other critics—eventually they’re going to realize the signing something doesn’t make anything happen. Now, of course, we all want something to happen. Again, nobody wants kids in cages. We all want something to happen, but it takes a while, and children don’t really realize that things take a while. For example, at the very minimum, they probably need extra facilities, right? And to get an extra facility, even if it’s nearby and empty—
[5:16]
—even if it’s nearby and empty, you have to at least sign a contract because apparently it’s run primarily by one company that does this, a private company that does it for the government. So, at the very least, there’s going to be an acquisition process. There’s going to be some negotiating to get the good price. There’s probably going to be some lawyers involved. They’ve got to figure out what’s the best one. And if they find one, they probably have to retrofit it, probably with security cameras. They’ve got to make sure that the kitchens work, that they’ve built the—I hate to say “cages”—whatever you want to call them. So yeah, six months minimum would be my guess, right? But the President, by giving the children—meaning the children the critics, not the actual people who were under 18, but the children in the media—
[6:16]
—he just gave them what they asked for, and they don’t know what to do about it. So I’m watching the criticisms today from the people in child mode, meaning the adults in child mode, and here are some of the things on CNN’s front page. Charlottesville: a rally organizer wants to hold the “White Civil Rights Rally.” Now, I don’t know if that was news or not, but is it an accident that Charlottesville came up again just when the President sort of took care of the media problem by signing that piece of paper? Then there was an article about Ana Navarro mocks fellow conservative. So I looked at that clip, and if you haven’t seen it, this is really good. It’s on CNN’s page and it’s toward the top left, and it was “Ana Navarro mocks fellow conservative.” And when I say mocks, I mean she mocks—
[7:19]
—him as though she is a child, as a little, sort of the Donald Trump “uh-huh” mocking. And she just looks like she’s lost it. Keep in mind that she’s losing it over the President doing what they asked him to do, and she’s still losing it over it. And the complaint is, “Oh, you Republicans flip-flopped,” or “the President caved.” So that’s the other word they’re using on CNN. They’re saying the President caved, he caved. Now, “caved” is one way to say it. Here’s another way to say it: We have a system of checks and balances, including the media. There was a policy put in place by the Trump administration; the media spotted it,
[8:22]
highlighted it, the public weighed in, and opinions were pretty solidly on the side of “do something about these kids separated from parents.” On both the Republican and Democratic side, it was a pretty universally agreeable thought, or at least the majority of people. And then the system worked, which is the only thing that could be done: signing something that says “we’ll take care of this,” but it’s going to take a while. So, in other words, what we watched was a system of checks and balances that worked perfectly. Who is reporting that? Who is reporting that this is one of the best examples you’ve ever seen of something that worked right? Meaning, there was a problem—it was a real problem—the media surfaced it, the government and the public weighed in, and then they did something about it.
[9:24]
Now, they’re doing something about it. I warn you, it’s going to take a while, but the government has at least fixed their intentions. Because in the long run, the intentions were maybe as big a problem as what was happening in the detention centers, because the thought was that what we’re seeing is part of a larger intention to do something far worse. So by taking the intention away, by signing something that says, “Hey, let’s take care of this problem,” the President reversed what people thought was the intention, which was, “Well, my God, it’s going to get to here, it’s already here, but it’s going this way.” And he just reversed and said, “Now it’s here, but it’s going the other way. We’re going to make it more comfortable for these people, not less.” So you watched a system that’s sort of working,
[10:28]
but I don’t think anybody’s going to report it that way. Now, I made the mistake this morning of flipping through the channels. I don’t usually watch MSNBC, and the reason I don’t watch it is because CNN kind of has it covered. If you’re looking for both sides, CNN and Fox give you probably 90% of it. But if you want to pick up some extra, let’s say, understanding or context, it’s good to check out MSNBC as well. I was watching Morning Joe, and if you don’t watch it all the time, it can be jarring because it’s hard to believe. What I watched was—I think there were four or five white panelists, if you count Joe and their regular guests—so it’s the whitest group you’ve ever seen talking about how the President needs to—
[11:30]
—talking about how the President needs to have more diversity, etc. And I thought to myself: Is there no self-awareness whatsoever that they’re a perfect example of a lack of diversity? That show is not too diverse; at least I’ve never seen anybody who wasn’t super white on there. But the other thing that was interesting is probably 75% of everything I saw—over about 15 minutes of watching it—probably 75% was mind-reading. Literally, people saying what the President thinks that he has not expressed, his inner thoughts, and what his supporters feel, their inner thoughts. It was almost an entire show devoted to imagining that they could read minds. As I listened to it, I thought, well, that doesn’t even—
[12:31]
—sound right. Now, I can’t read minds either, so I suppose I could be just as wrong as they are. Anything is possible. But the assumptions they make about how other people are feeling were just crazy. They bordered on a mental illness, at least in the way it looked. I’m not diagnosing them, but just observing them. I would watch it and I’d think, “Well, that doesn’t sound like analysis; sounds like some kind of a mental problem.” Because if you think you can read the minds of strangers—and by the way, what’s in there is just horrible. It’s horrible. Somebody is asking for examples; I may have forgotten them by now. Oh, that’s good—now, I just saw a news bit that—I don’t know if this is true yet, I guess we’ll wait for confirmation then.
[13:33]
North Korea apparently has large supplies of rare earth metals. China has 95% of all the rare earth metals—or at least the ones that are discovered or exploitable—and North Korea just turned up a whole bunch of it, which might change the equation in some way. I don’t know if it’s good or bad; it gives them a little more leverage for sure, but we’ll see. Then there’s somebody mentioning gaslighting. So, let me explain gaslighting. What gaslighting is supposed to mean is when people are lying to you and trying to build an artificial world in your mind with a bunch of lies until you deny the real world. Now, clearly this is—
[14:34]
—both sides doing this, right? Both sides are doing everything they can to create an artificial world of lies that their supporters can live in. It’s not one side; it’s definitely both sides. But imagining it’s only one side is sort of the lowest level of awareness. So let me see if I can give them to you in order. The lowest level of awareness is that you don’t know anything about the world, like a child. You’d be like, “I don’t know anything about how everything works.” Then, as you move up in the awareness, you start thinking that you do. You’re like, “I do know some things, and I know that I’m right and the other people are wrong.”
[15:36]
Usually, by the time you’re a teen or a young adult, you’re starting to think, “I’ve got a bunch of ideas that are right, and the other one’s got a bunch of ideas that are wrong. Those poor dumb bastards, getting everything wrong.” So that’s a little bit better than knowing nothing, but not much. It’s actually not much better than knowing absolutely nothing. Then there’s a higher level where you realize that nobody knows anything. So the news business is sort of stuck in that middle view where they’re pretty sure that their view of the world is the real one and that the other side is gaslighting, but they don’t seem to process the fact that the other side thinks exactly the same thing. Once you realize that both sides think the same thing, you realize that it’s all artificial and we’re all living in different movies of our own making. But to imagine that you’ve got the right one and the other—
[16:37]
—one’s got the wrong one, well, that’s a stretch. Now, I’ve been arguing that the highest level of awareness is that you don’t necessarily believe you’re in the right model of the world, and you don’t necessarily think that somebody else got the right model of the world, but the best you can do is to see if your model of the world predicts. When it does predict, and you can see that it has a good record of predicting—and even that could be confirmation bias, so you have to watch out for that—it’s probably the closest you could get to something like reality, knowing that your model predicts. So I heard some pundit—I think it was yesterday or today—say that it’s possible that the next GDP report could be close to five—
[17:37]
—percent. Any of you hearing that? I’ve heard estimates of 4.8, but it’s the first time I’ve heard five. Yeah, I’ve heard 4.8 before, and maybe somebody was just rounding up, but apparently—I think there was a manufacturers’ confidence at 95% this week, which is the highest of all time. Now, it’s going to get harder and harder to deny that something is working. It does look like something’s working in the economy at least. And so, if you’re looking at which models of the world predict, I had a model that said economics is mostly a psychological phenomenon, and if you get the psychology right, the economy will just be turbocharged. And then I said that this—
[18:40]
—President is the best we’ve ever seen at managing psychology—in particular, the psychology of money, the psychology of investing, and the psychology of the economy. That would be his strong suit. So my prediction was that under a Trump administration, the economy would do really well. Now, I do accept—and I know I’m almost alone in this—that Obama left a very strong base coming off a very weak base. I give Obama and his administration complete credit for taking us from the edge of the abyss to a solid base. But what we’re seeing now is a lot more than a solid base. You’re very much seeing the evidence of the psychology being so positive from some combination of taxes and cutting regulations and arguing about—
[19:40]
—trade, etc. And when we’re talking about trade, one of the things that I’ve said is that the President will do a good job pushing as much as he can. That doesn’t mean he gets everything he tries to get; it means he pushes until he gets it. In all likelihood, with all these many trade agreements and with our economy rushing toward 5%, imagine you’re one of the countries we’re negotiating with, and your economy is starting to stall out a little bit—maybe your growth is down a little bit—and you’re negotiating a trade deal against somebody whose economy is on fire. You don’t want to be in that room. You don’t want to be the one with the weakening and/or not-great economy negotiating against the one that’s on fire, because this economy has all the leverage.
[20:41]
If you’re up here and the person you’re negotiating with—“competitor” is the wrong word—but you can come down to here and you’re still doing great. So you can take a hit that they can’t take. This is all, of course, part of the Trump plan to get the economy as strong as possible, to get the best possible negotiating position. He’s pushing on all these complicated situations. People are saying, “Hey, he doesn’t understand trade” or “he doesn’t know how it works,” to which I say, no, I think he does know how it works. It doesn’t matter that there are people who know more about the inner workings and the detail. What he knows is if you keep pushing against these things and you have the strongest position, you’re probably going to get something. You’re probably not going to get a worse deal. I mean, you could, but it seems unlikely. So it’s the perfect situation—
[21:42]
—for a born salesperson/negotiator, that he has all the leverage and he’s pushing on all these complicated deals. That complexity is going to start working in his favor, because if he keeps things simple—and he will; he’s the President who keeps things simple—he’s just going to keep pushing until somebody on the other side says, “Well, maybe we could change the tariff on aluminum” or something. Then suddenly you’ve made some money on aluminum, and it was just because they needed him to shut up so they could get a deal. Because their economy needs a deal; our economy needs one too, but not as much. So my filter says that we would be exactly where we are here, pushing against all these trade deals. The other countries have too much to lose by going rogue. They’re going to have to play. We need to play, they need to play; nobody really—
[22:44]
—leaves the room in these situations. And if they do, they’re coming back. The other thing my filter says is that the President will always make a huge first ask, and that gives him room to negotiate back if needed and still have plenty of win space, plenty of space to win. By the way, what just happened with his border plan? It seems to me—and stop me if I’m characterizing this incorrectly—that the President made a much too big first ask. Because part of that was separating children from parents and having zero tolerance. That was too big of an ask; even our country rejected that. Even Republicans—not all of—
[23:47]
—them, of course, but many Republicans rejected that. That was such a big ask, so he had room to back off. I don’t know to what extent this was some kind of a plan, but if you see the pattern, every time he “caves,” he’s caving back to a stronger position than he started. He wanted zero tolerance and he wanted it to go to—well, so he asked for zero tolerance on top of penalties for families that were more than the public could take or should take. What did he do? He caved. He gave them back something. He gave them back something that he took. He took it first, and then he gave it back, but he only gave back half of what he took.
[24:48]
He’s keeping the zero tolerance. How does zero tolerance sound today compared to how it sounded a week ago? Just in your mind, does zero tolerance sound as terrible today as it did twenty-four hours ago? Well, if zero tolerance also means kids being separated from parents, that’s awful. But today—it’s going to take a few months probably—but once the children and families are reconnected and that system is working a little bit better, the zero tolerance is not going to sound as draconian as it sounded before. Now, I know you’re going to say, “Wait a minute, did you use these children as pawns?” Probably not. Probably not in the sense that he was thinking, “Oh, I’ll torture some children because that’ll get me something.” I don’t think so. I don’t think it was that simple. I think he just asked for a lot.
[25:50]
It probably didn’t have all the mechanisms in place to take care of the kids, but it created a situation where he could give something back and still end up with more than he started with. He got bad advice, and still ended up ahead. And then the other thing, as others have pointed out, is that the publicity about all of this badness is probably going to discourage immigration, and that was one of the goals. Let’s say a little bit more about Peter Fonda. So, as you all know by now, Peter Fonda did that terrible tweet about Barron Trump and at least—
[26:54]
—one other tweet that was way over the line. I got some pushback on social media, on Twitter, because I said we should give him a pass. But let me explain what I mean by that. He’s 78 years old. He has a long history of substance abuse. And when I read those tweets, they looked unhinged, meaning that it looked like he was either under the influence or possibly starting to lose his faculties a little bit. So my take on it was that there was a medical problem. I believe that his public outburst was almost certainly—somebody’s saying I’m trying to justify his actions. Yes, I’m trying to explain the likely reason for his actions, that his mental—
[27:55]
—faculties were just not all there. So I don’t think you should treat people who are having mental issues the same way you would treat somebody who has all of their faculties. I think it’s a far more likely explanation that he didn’t have all of his faculties. What if they are all there? Well, then you judge him differently. But yeah, he apologized; he’s not that bad off. But I would say that the tweet itself is all the evidence you need that there’s something going on there that’s not quite right. And let’s sip to that. Here’s my caution to you: When I watched CNN and MSNBC, so much of their coverage is about how people are bad. In fact, Ana—
[28:57]
—Navarro’s little outburst—what you really have to say is, it’s great television where she mocks her fellow conservative. It really is all about the guy. She wasn’t really mocking policy; it was personal. It was just about the guy. And yeah, the pretzel stuff. It seems like that’s what it’s turned into; it seems like it’s about people now. So be careful that you don’t become the other side. You’re watching the people who dislike Trump becoming the worst parts of what they didn’t like about him. Does that make sense? So, the way President Trump speaks is disrespectful, and I—
[29:57]
—would say he uses aggressive language about various people who are his critics or political enemies. His tone is what they most object to. And instead of becoming the opposite to create a contrast between how “good” people should act versus how he’s acting, they simply became him. They became that worst part of what they hate. And if you’re looking at this Peter Fonda thing and you’re saying, “F that guy, put him in jail, let’s do all kinds of bad things to him because he said something that was certainly way over the line,” then I think you’re becoming the people that you don’t like. If you can try to rise above it, it’s going to be necessary. Somebody just asked if I’ve seen the Time—
[30:59]
—magazine cover. Let me look at it. Time Magazine… oh, the child. It’s a picture of Trump looking down on a little child. “Welcome to America.” Well, it’s a pretty good cover in terms of what they’re trying to express artistically; in every other way, it’s actually a pretty good cover. Yeah. And so, most of you or some of you heard the jokes that the President made at his rally last night in which he said something to the effect of, “Why do we always call the other side the elite?” And then the President said, “I have a much better apartment than they do. I’m richer than they are. I’m smarter than they are. I’m President.” Now, you’d have to hear him deliver it for the full humorous effect, and the crowd goes wild. The first time I heard it, I actually—
[32:00]
—laughed out loud because his delivery was actually kind of perfect. But I heard that same story being reported on MSNBC, and they acted like it wasn’t a joke. It was like, “That’s just what’s wrong with him. Oh, how could he talk like that?” Did they think it was a joke? And then you watch the audience reaction; it’s perfectly delivered humor. The audience reacts exactly like you would want them to. It was nothing but a joke. It was nothing but a joke, but to imagine it was something else—it’s funny. Now, did you notice how much happy hate the President’s critics had when they had this issue of the families and the children? There was a hatred/joy there.
[33:01]
Meaning, they were really happy to have been right all along in their minds. “Oh my God, we’re right all along. He’s gearing up the concentration camps.” But what did they think today when he just signed two things saying, “Oh yeah, I totally agree with you, we shouldn’t break up the families”? How did they process that? Because they went from, “We know he’s Hitler; when he gets elected, he’s going to be doing Hitler things,” and then 500 days later he hasn’t done any good Hitler stuff. So they’re like, “Well, we’re all disappointed. We expected some Hitler stuff.” I’m talking about his critics now. And then they get this family separation thing, and they’re like, “Finally! Finally we get to be right! After this long desert of being the ones wrong about all the big stuff, we’re finally right that he’s going to round everybody up and put them in—”
[34:02]
—concentration camps.” And then he says, “I’ll sign an executive order and we’ll reunite the families because that’s important.” Now, what do they do? Well, all of their big complaints of Hitler and the Holocaust he just made go away with one signature. It was like, “Yeah, just sign this piece of paper, here we go.” What the hell do they do? So they’re scrambling to find the new thing to complain about. And in other stories of ridiculousness, did you see Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, who apparently is not getting any good airtime these days because he had some issues with bankruptcy in his business and some stuff? He sort of suddenly disappeared from—
[35:03]
—I don’t even think CNN has him on anymore. So his newest move is he is going down to the border and volunteered to give legal advice to 50 families, I guess. I thought to myself, that is just—I don’t know what to think about that. Because on one hand, I totally appreciate the skill that he is putting into play. So, Michael Avenatti—no matter what you want to think of his ethics, or whether he’s made good business decisions in the past, or whether he’s a good person—you can have your own opinions about that, and I have my own opinions. But for the moment, let’s just talk about his skill level. It’s pretty good; the skill level is high. And this latest move is hilariously probably—
[36:07]
—effective in getting him some more airtime. And I suppose that’s going to be good for him; it seems he probably has a future having his own show on some network. So the more attention he gets, the more people will watch his show, the more money he makes. So, as disreputable as some of you might find him, there was a lot of skill there. So, what else is happening? One of the attacks I’m seeing from the Democrats is that the administration had so many different explanations for why the children were being separated in the first place—which, by the way, is a perfectly good criticism.
[37:07]
It is objectively true that the administration did not have one story that stayed the same about why things were the way they were. And part of that is because we don’t live in a one-variable world. Jeff Sessions was asked about whether or not part of the reason for this would be a deterrent, and Jeff Sessions, being the law-and-order guy, basically said—this is my version of it—that every time you tighten the law, you’re creating a disincentive to break the law. This one happens to have children involved, but it’s a universal truth of any tightened law that the point of it—at least one point—is to discourage people from breaking it. So when Jeff Sessions says that, he’s sort of saying just what laws are.
[38:10]
Basically, this is what all laws are. This is why we have any law at all. Here’s another law. But he didn’t say it that way, so it gave the pundits some ammo. Then there was “keeping the children safe from predators,” which is, of course, just true. That one, I’m sure, is unambiguously true. We don’t know how many predators, but does it matter? How many predators would be acceptable? Zero, right? And then I think there were some other explanations about how the President couldn’t just change the law. And here’s the other funny part: People kept saying, “President, you can change the law, just sign something.” So he did. He just signed something. Yeah, but it’s not going to change much in the short run, I don’t think, but it should change things in the long run, and that’s what we hope to see.
[39:19]
We should talk about travel or the meaning of life one of these days. Maybe Eric Weinstein explained the Intellectual Dark Web and why they did it. I saw that explanation for the label Intellectual Dark Web that includes people like him and Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux—I don’t know who else is in there. I believe I’m not on that list. I believe I did not make the list of the Intellectual Dark Web. But part of his explanation was clever, in the sense that by calling it a “Dark Web”—that sounds a little negative—it took away the critics’ ability to put a negative on it, because they started with a negative-sounding name so that you couldn’t worsen it to make fun of it.
[40:20]
I thought, well, that’s actually pretty clever. But long term, it still says “Dark” in it. So I have a concern that the short-term benefit it got by getting a lot of attention—and it did do a masterful job of branding the situation—so short-term it was kind of brilliant; long-term, I worry about that name causing some bias against it. It’s hard to sort that out; it would be impossible to know which of those is the more important factor. But at this point, it did brand a group of thinkers, and that probably has some immediate value. Where’s Kanye in all this? I think Kanye is busy with his number one best-selling—
[41:21]
—album. Here’s somebody who just said, “Anyone agreeing with taking children away from parents is sick.” In what universe do you believe, person who said that, that somebody’s in favor of that? In what universe does somebody want to do that if they have better options? It’s amazing that somebody’s going around with that thought in their head—that some people are in favor of taking children from their parents. There are some things that have to be done, and there are some things you do in the short-term that you don’t want to do in the long-term, but there’s nobody who wants to do it. Prisons are a perfect example; nobody wants to do it sometimes. Or somebody says I’m naive because—
[42:24]
—because there are some people who do want to remove children from their parents. There might be a couple of psychopaths, but it’s not important. It’s the “Fault of One Variable.” I’m starting a list of thinking errors. So, somebody here said that it’s the parents’ fault for bringing them into this situation, and other people are saying, “No, it’s the administration’s fault for having this process.” Neither of them are thinking. Neither of those statements are anything; it’s just noise coming out of a mouth, because you need everything that happened for this to happen. You need the parents to bring them, you need the administration to have—
[43:25]
—this rule, you need oxygen, you need facilities, you need a border problem, you need a United States, you need a Mexico, you need this administration—you need all of it. If you take out any one of those variables, you don’t get this. So to say that one thing is the “fault” is—well, I wanted to complete that thought: The solution and the problem are not connected. It might be the parents’ fault—it could be the parents’ fault that they bring their kids into a situation where there’s a high likelihood of them being separated—but that doesn’t mean it’s the parents’ solution. In other words, that doesn’t mean that the solution is that the parents do something differently, because remember, they’re leaving desperate situations and they have a pretty short set of options.
[44:28]
So you take the solution wherever you can get it. You don’t say, “I identified the magical problem, and of all these variables, every one of them which seems to be necessary for this to happen, I found the one part that’s the fault, and therefore that’s where the solution is.” Well, it could be the fault, but it doesn’t mean that’s where the solution is. “But Scott, isn’t it immoral of the parents, though?” How is it immoral of the parents? Do you think the parents want their children to be separated? My guess is that anybody who comes here is coming from a worse situation to one that they hope will be better, and that’s sort of the end of the conversation on that.
[45:42]
Is it my imagination, or is it getting more physically dangerous to be a Trump supporter? Is anybody else feeling that? I think I told you that I stopped doing public appearances. I’ll still do media appearances, but I would not go in public anymore. I stopped going to Berkeley, where I got my MBA. I was doing a lot of work on campus and trying to help, trying to be part of the community and help the startups and stuff, but once it became unsafe, I done—at this point, I actually started getting some requests for speaking, which I didn’t have for two years, but I’ve started turning them down. I think none of them would have been completed, because once the process starts, there’s always somebody on the client side who says, “Wait a minute, do you know how dangerous this guy is?”
[46:43]
“Yeah, we can’t have him. The audience will revolt.” Yeah, Kirstjen Nielsen, Secretary of Homeland Security, she was heckled in a restaurant, and I believe I would have the same risk. So I’m really staying out of the public; that’s a dangerous time. All right, and I think I’m going to sign off now, and I’m going to talk to you later. Bye.