Episode 599 Scott Adams: Guest Steve Hsu of Genomic Prediction, Predicting Disease
Date: 2019-07-16 | Duration: 53:14
Topics
Guest Steve Hsu, Cofounder of Genomic Prediction Using AI and genomic to detect disease Predictors now exist for about 20 diseases Soon…DNA tests will be required for health insurance policies Or Single payer solution to reduce costs for the afflicted Breaking the chain of disease within families Choosing a low-risk embryo to reduce genetic diseases Downs Syndrome is a CURRENT routine pregnancy test EVERYBODY is a racist? “Racist” isn’t quite landing, it’s losing power from overuse So now…EVERYBODY is Xenophobic! The “racist” claim has become racist and is losing its power President Trump has made “The Squad” the face of the Democrats Now Democrats must embrace or reject them Antifa bomber got almost NO MSM coverage? Existing coverage omits that he was Antifa, why?
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## Transcript
[0:11]
hey everybody it's time for another exciting episode of coffee with Scott Adams best part of the day is the parts that gets your dopamine pumping coursing through your veins making you feel alive live I say it's gonna get better every time and today all you need to enjoy this perfect moment all you need is a cup or a mug or glass it could be Steiner a chalice or a tankard might be a thermos a flask a canteen might be a vessel of any kind but you want to fill it with your favorite liquid and what you want to do then is join me for the simultaneous sip an unparalleled pleasure oh I feel sorry for anybody who didn't experience that so we've got an exciting show I've got a special guest who's gonna be probably more interesting than just about anything you've heard this week give you a little break from
[1:12]
this week give you a little break from the news if I could summarize all of the news allow me to summarize every piece of news on every website everywhere so and so it was a racist that's it pretty much that's the whole story so and so it was racist so that's all the news in a moment I will be inviting my special guest and I say that he's already here so let me bring him on Steve Schuh it will give you a proper introduction in a moment as soon as you're here Steve can you hear me whoops hold on let's try that again Steve can you hear me yes Scott can you I care you yes so for the aliens this is Steve Schuh co-founder of and Steve correct me if I get any of this wrong co-founder of
[2:13]
get any of this wrong co-founder of genomic prediction is that correct that is correct you have an impressive resume which I want to tell to give all the details but you've been to see your vice president for research and professor of theoretical physics Michigan State University educated at Cal Tech in Berkeley you are a Harvard junior fellow held faculty positions at Yale in the University of Oregon you co-founded safe web they used Souls for a whole bunch of money and your scientific advisor at BG I and basically all that is saying Steve is a very smart guy and the topic today which is your your startup is involved with startup it that's the correct name right genomic prediction is the whole name that is the whole name okay and so you're using AI and genomics to predict disease tell us about that well this is a kind of typical AI story that your listeners may
[3:14]
typical AI story that your listeners may already be familiar with so as we develop better algorithms and really importantly as we get access to sufficiently large datasets we suddenly be able we are suddenly able to build predictors for all kinds of complex genetic traits and so what's happened in the last year or two is that new predictors for about 15 or 20 common disease conditions have appeared in the scientific literature including from my research group and what that means is that from an inexpensive genotype the same kind of genotype that you would get from 23andme or ancestry.com we can predict or we can find individuals that are outliers so what we're predicting this into ordinary people language you're saying that the the test itself is inexpensive and easy yeah the readout of your genotype so the measurement of what exactly you have as the
[4:14]
the in specific locations on your genome is now inexpensive in fact the cost to 23andme or to an actual lab to do it is below $50 now Wow and how complete is that in terms of what we can do and what we do do for under $50 do we have the do you map the entire genome or just the good parts so this is an interesting thing so we there are about three billion locations in your genome and we only differ you and I for example just to take two random people we only differ at about one in a thousand places so in most places we're actually very similar to each other are identical to each other on our genome so one out of a thousand out of three billion positions is a few million differences typically between two people and the inexpensive technology called a gene array measures your genetic code at about a million positions of a million places where two
[5:15]
positions of a million places where two people are most likely to differ from each other that's where there's the s genomicists would say the most variation in those locations yeah so it won't pick up every single you know thing that might make a difference but it statistically it gets all the ones that matter basically so places where there's very rare variation like almost everybody is the same at this location but one in 10,000 people has a mutation there the array won't pick that up but the places where like 10% of the people are a and 90% of the people are B or even 98% of the people are a and two percent of the people are beat it picks up that kind of variation all right now what it what are the practical things you can do give us give us some nuts and bolts you've got this technology who's using it and for what so the the practical thing that's become possible just in the last year or so is you genotype a population of people and you say hey I can identify the outliers
[6:16]
say hey I can identify the outliers let's say breast cancer risk I can find the 1% of women that have the highest breast cancer risk based on their genotype and I can identify by them inexpensively and I could for example alter the way that they're screened for breast cancer I could for example screen them more frequently or screen them earlier in life than would be the case for a typical person as they're not been screening for breast cancer risk for a while or was that just a one-off test whereas you can test for an array of things all at the same time so yes we can now test for a bunch of things all at the same time using the same sort of $50.00 genotype but what the reason I chose the example of breast cancer is that there are very rare breast cancer variants called BRCA or brick' variants that only about one in a thousand people have and in that case we've been aware of those dangerous mutations for a long time and we have a
[7:16]
mutations for a long time and we have a well-established way to treat women who have that variant but what I'm saying now is that there are 10 times as many people who because of risks that are spread out more evenly over their genome but which we can now detect that larger group of women can be identified using inexpensive genotyping now so so there's the the simple the simple things you can look for that we always used to know but then there's the spread out more complicated situation which you can now detect with the AI so that's exactly about it
so who's using it and well let me give you what would happen if you could detect it does that tell you if you have let's say breast cancer risk is that telling you to go get a double mastectomy if you've got the highest of the high risk What's it telling you to do in a practical sense sorry I am NOT a medical doctor so this is not medical advice but the American Cancer Society
[8:17]
advice but the American Cancer Society recommends in the case of the bric of variants that if you have one of the variants you may for example start getting mammograms or screening earlier and more frequently than a typical woman and
rising from many different individual genetic variants that we measure through the G array and with this would the main benefit of this be given that the world has limited resources for essentially everything would that mean that we would put our testing and you know mostly our screening resources toward these people who have the biggest risk so would that make a big difference in how many people are picked up early yes so I think
[9:17]
are picked up early yes so I think health systems are going to eventually it may happen sooner in some systems which are for example single-payer systems that like the UK or Taiwan or something like this they may screen the whole population and then they may be able to tell based on the genotype who should be monitored more closely for diabetes or heart disease or breast cancer risk and then who for example at the other end of the spectrum we can identify people that are abnormally low risk and usually low risk those people maybe have you know one tenth or one twentieth the chance of getting a particular common disease as a typical person and fold it go ahead and what happens so trying to think through I know you've had to wrestle with all the social and ethical and moral dilemmas that just naturally fall out of this technology what would happen to health care insurance if we could tell who's going to be expensive from the first place before anybody's even sick yeah
[10:19]
place before anybody's even sick yeah and then to tell who's gonna be expensive right yes in a system like ours this is gonna cause a huge problem because you can have what's caught by the economist called asymmetric information so someone like you might buy your genotype from a company and find out what your risks are and then you might then turn around and purchase an insurance policy without letting the insurer know that you're high-risk or you know maybe you're definitely gonna get Alzheimer's later in life or something and you might that that one policy if you actually calculate an expected value of it might cost the insurance company a million dollars because miss price given your risk right ensures are eventually gonna be driven either to ask for your janay rice policy for you or maybe forces us to go to a kind of single-payer system where all risks are pong so interestingly this technology might guarantee that we have a single-payer insurance situation because
[11:19]
single-payer insurance situation because though because it seems to me that it would be fair to charge somebody more if they had not tested for their their genome risk and just make that as the only divider if you've tested we don't care what the result is you're okay you get the you get the low price or or or if it's a single payer I guess there's no price at all because the government's paying it but they're probably at some point I think we'll see a distinction between people who have submitted to the test and people who haven't because the people who have at least I've given more visibility and more more chance of chasing down a disease and preventing it so if I'm an insurance company I want all things be equal I want the people who have tested right your description is accurate however the issue is that we'll never know who has already secretly tested themselves using say some commercial genomics company and is therefore aware of some hidden risk about themselves that they're not
[12:20]
about themselves that they're not disclosing and then his person's trying to purchase a low-cost policy so it will become very tricky to deal with people who are not submitting a DA's DNA sample when they ask for a price well you're blowing my mind a little bit here because I don't see any way around the government being the only health care insurer once this information is widely available and there's a hundred percent chance that this will be more widely available because it's already here and the price is affordable am i characterizing that correctly yes I agree with you a hundred percent and what's happen is that health systems will want to screen everyone at a population level anyway because doctors actually most of them do to give the best possible care so if you're a doctor and there's a very useful test available you're gonna want it for any patient that comes in for physical right so eventually it'll you know this this is so interesting because it makes every conversation about health
[13:20]
it makes every conversation about health care a sort of a moot point because because we know where it has to go there is easily another way to do it if you look in the scientific literature at the number of papers published on polygenic but these are called the technical term is polygenic risk score or polygenic predictor the number of papers has skyrocketed just in the last year or two and so in this small scientific community of computational genomics it's well known what's happening however policymakers most medical doctors most people out in the world are not aware that we've passed through this amazing transition in our ability to predict risk using genes now I'm trying to get his size on this so let's say we let's say we did everybody's genome just hypothetically we had every adults genome so we could tell who exactly are the big risks for cancer if we had all of that information and then people acted upon it meaning they got more
[14:21]
acted upon it meaning they got more frequent screening they were more aggressive and looking for it maybe some lifestyle changes as well if cancer at the moment is a ten out of ten you know I know I realize cancer treatments have improved a great deal but let's just say it's current state is a 10 and a 10 bad let's say we started genome testing everybody universally tomorrow from a from a 10 and a 10 where would that get us in terms of curing treating remediating cancer well this specific set of discoveries isn't necessarily telling us anything about how to cure cancer but it will improve our ability to detect it early and to focus the detection resource well I'm yeah I'm conflating things not talking in the medical sense but the ones that can be detected early are effectively you know treatable in a way that late detection is not so if you could imagine that 10 and a 10 where you start can you bring that down to an eight or are you talking about
[15:22]
to an eight or are you talking about bringing it down to a a three in terms of how big a deal cancer is to an adult you know I think it is not gonna well as so I'm not I'm not a medical doctor or even a medical policy researcher all I will say is that for a certain segment of the populations of the people who are say top 1% risk for a particular condition the chances that their cancer is detected early will increase dramatically based on this genetics okay yeah this is so there's no way to know until it plays out will you also be able to detect people who have unique immunity to certain things in a way that you could let's say capitalize on that and turn it into a cure is that a thing yes so for example one of the better predictors that currently exists although again this is only in this in the scientific research literature none of this has been deployed at scale anywhere is for heart disease so we're
[16:23]
anywhere is for heart disease so we're actually able to detect people who are almost certainly going to have heart disease and have high risk of a heart attack later in life and people who are almost certainly not going to have heart disease and there are some protective mutations associated with for example being able to eat whatever you want and never art and some researchers are actually looking at the ability to genetically engineer people like mod modify you know and what is the modification process I know I realize this is a little bit saying science fictiony but it's not really that science fictiony because we're just about there is that the CRISPR technology is that stem cells what what are the words that describe what you would do if you wanted to modify an adult so we're talking about using CRISPR technology and actually injecting it to treat the cells in the appropriate part of your body that are involved with for example the plaque buildup or metabolizing cholesterol things like
[17:25]
metabolizing cholesterol things like this this is still speculative because currently using CRISPR an adult has only been looked at in a very narrow set of cases because you have to inject the CRISPR vector in and effect a very large number of billions at least of cells the other alternative is to genetically and your engineer someone when they're still in embryo and then you're only trying to alter a few cells and that that obviously has its own other controversies yeah and we probably don't want to bring talked about that today that's just gonna take us down a different path so what are the one of the other benefits for adults to have this information what what else could you know about yourself besides disease there would be functional and useful for your life make your life better the other aspect this is maybe not necessarily well it'll make all our lives better in a certain way but one thing that all of this technology is gonna change is law enforcement so it's very difficult for a criminal not to
[18:26]
very difficult for a criminal not to leave some DNA at the scene of the crime like you're shooting DNA all the time like individual cells off your skin or your hair etc I'm not I'm not I'm not sure together do they that's always I have no hair okay Steve I'm having some sound issues I can't tell if the audience is having it - yeah there it's getting a little garbled are you in a bad cell phone place do you know I think I lost a lost Steve let's see if
[19:27]
I think I lost a lost Steve let's see if Steve comes back on connection dropped due to too well wait a second and up there he's back let's try this again yes you're back in here you're clear again we missed we missed the last 15 seconds while you were just saying oh so from the genotype that we can easily derive crime scene DNA we can predict traits of an individual like what they look like what their ethnic background is but we can also match them and find relatives so typically in an investigation you'll be able to find a second cousin of someone right away please really want to solve a crime if you know a second cousin the person you've now narrowed it down to so so so in other words if you find some DNA in Denver of at a crime scene you can run it against you know known public records or not or even
[20:27]
known public records or not or even private records I suppose of known DNA and if you find a second cousin you can go to the second cousin and say hey do you know anybody in your family who's from Denver and if they say yes you got a good chance of finding the guy is that about it that's about it and we currently have hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits in this country which if the authorities were serious about solving those crimes in many cases there's gonna be DNA from the rapist in the rape kit and they could narrow it down to a hundred people almost immediately so it's just a question of how serious they are catching this person wait what did your company do any of the rape kit testing so I'm a founder of another company called Ostrom which is 100% devoted to law enforcement and military applications of DNA forensics and that company does does work with law enforcement to catch criminals it could be how many how many untested rape kits are there it's hundreds of thousands Oh oh my god are you telling me that if
[21:31]
Oh oh my god are you telling me that if Trump could somehow get all of these rape kits tested I supposed to see state authority probably not federal but if they were all tested which is probably just a matter of money is that yeah is that the only thing so it's only a matter of money you could probably solve or at least narrow down more than a hundred thousand rape yes there were there was a great paper written by a Stanford economist where he estimated the ROI from processing all these this backlog of rape kits and when you you know it cost about a thousand dollars to run the kit then of course you have to you have to track down the killer so there's still some gumshoe detective work involved but he calculated that you know when you when you catch someone often these people are serial rapist so you're often reducing the overall population of rapists that are out roaming around substantially and so he calculates one of these like society fails an IQ test
[22:37]
now what what do you think is preventing you from happening is it knowledge that it's now inexpensive or is it still budget even though it's inexpensive they still don't want to spend the money at the local level what's what's the holdup well everything has changed so the technologies I'm talking about have only existed for the last year too and so well yeah so it's just ketchup time older system of our enforcement which you may remember from the OJ trial it's at all only captures a limited number of markers from you genome and therefore it's not reusable so so the old technology of the OJ technology would match the criminal to the you know the crime to the suspect if you had the suspect in hand yes but if you don't have the suspect in hand you're not going to be able to find it from relatives or anything else but the new technology does that yes yeah you you caught on extremely quickly yeah that's exactly the issue is in the old days it's like got the guy in the
[23:39]
it's like got the guy in the in the cell you can say was this the guy who left this DNA that's about all you could do with it and sometimes no I was her was the Golden State killer caught with any of this technology somebody's asking that in the comments that's probably the best-known example of this new use of a technology so so he was actually Cobb based on identifying the relatives yes Wow and that's that's a serial killer that's pretty good stuff so who who in the world who would be the most important person in the United States government wise or otherwise who upon hearing this could act upon it in a way that would get these these kits tested is it is it a federal thing there's at all just a bunch of state or even worse a bunch of local city decisions it's all three so whoever you know depending on who who has custody of that rape kits they would determine at what pace these
[24:39]
they would determine at what pace these things are tested now if one person say Donald Trump became aware that there was this huge benefit that could be had just from processing his backlog of rape kits with the newer technology he could probably get it going because at least some of this stuff is in federal hands or he could push the money out to local Wow and what do you think would be the budget to get rid of that backlog of rape kits well if you say I have a hundred thousand kits and it costs a thousand dollars to process a kid that's about a hundred million dollars but you know if you think about what we spend on prisons and law enforcement it's it's not a lot of money oh it's so it would be a thousand dollars to test the kid not fifty dollars so the extra expense here is that typically you're dealing with a very dirty sample here you've got to do all kinds of chemical prep biochemical processes before you can run the you may ultimately be running a 50-dollar genotype or a hundred dollar process at the end but you've got to prep it and clean it and do all these other things it's difficult and dollars
[25:40]
other things it's difficult and dollars would it make more sense for the federal government to send up a lab where everybody sends it in for testing or would it make more sense for every individual latinum State or something to just sort of do it on their own there are great advantages to scale which is why at a tharam which has a 4,000 square foot special lab with air handling and all kinds of cleanroom characteristics you know there are reasons why to have specialists in this kind of DNA processing forensic work all in one place and who can operate at scale and so that's what we did when we invested in this company can you spell the name of a tharam yes its oth our a.m. and a tharam in the Lord of the Rings was the wall that protected ministereth from the orcs and Sauron well you you have demonstrated your geek credentials very well I think I think my audience will appreciate yes so you know you've
[26:45]
appreciate yes so you know you've probably been watching the news and you know that President Trump authorized the big expenses for AIDS drugs to keep people from spreading it I guess and if you spent enough on on those AIDS drugs you could almost eradicate it in the United States just by by making a prophylactic that worked and the the thought that we could take a huge bite ant of cancer and and other disease what are some of the other diseases that would be caught early that you could treat early there are other diseases like type 1 and type 2 diabetes heart disease hypothyroidism all kinds of common diseases generally have some complex genetic architecture and now the AI type work is able to identify people at high risk just from their genotype Wow
Wow so if we had a hundred million dollars at the federal level in a lab and would
[27:47]
at the federal level in a lab and would author and be able to do all the work you'd have to you'd have to gear up tremendously to handle big volume right to handle the national volume you need even bigger lab but you know these things people know how to do right I mean all now pretty mature technology that we're talking about and scaling it relatively so it's something that could get done we can be at processing everything efficiently within a couple years if government were serious Wow and if you talk to any any billionaires to fund this sort of thing because that well so autumn is a venture back startup and among the investors are some billionaire type people of course you know it it is getting a fair amount of traction with law enforcement I think it's bigger obviously it seems like the kind of you have it's very unique because it's the sort of thing where if you're in the
[28:48]
sort of thing where if you're in the police department and you find out that the city next door is using this and you're not you kind of have to use it don't you I mean you can't really hear about it and know that somebody else is using it and yeah you're is it you're bringing public attention to it will put pressure on law enforcement to actually use the best technology to catch people we're talking about here are killers and rapists I mean if there's anything that every American can agree on is that people who commit crimes like that should be caught right whoa yes what what if one of the individuals who are let's say associated with the victim wanted to self-fund the testing with local law enforcement allow that well we have actually thought about creating a GoFundMe or kind of you know patreon campaign where people can donate money to get rape kits or kits taken from Killers process because oftentimes the issue is money law local law enforcement doesn't have the budget to actually do it or maybe that they're allocating the budget differently because they themselves don't understand the new
[29:49]
themselves don't understand the new technology and don't realize how powerful it is Wow well this is this is really amazing so you know the the the three big takeaways here that are just sort of blowing my mind what what is that knowing people's genome and their risk is likely to push us toward a single-payer health care system no matter what your no matter what your philosophical or political leanings are there's going to end up being only one feasible way to have it that's that's a mind-blowing thought of course you know that the future is not predictable in such a straight line but just the fact that that's out there and I don't think anybody outside of you know your industry sees this coming it's it's almost going to guarantee enormous changes in our healthcare situation but it also might lower the cost of some of these bigger problems by catching them early or whatever it would would a raise
[30:51]
early or whatever it would would a raise or lower the cost of health care because on one hand we would be doing massive screening and then massive prevention but when you save people as opposed to waiting too long and then they they die tragically unfortunately people dying tragically from things they didn't know they had is probably less expensive than treating them isn't it or do we even know that a trade-off there at fixed outcome so say you say you don't wanna you're not really trying to change the death rate or incidence of these diseases if you if you're at that fixed outcome you can save a ton of money right so you can catch things earlier and treat them much earlier you get better outcomes at lower cost so it's net beneficial of course you can always spend an arbitrary amount on your healthcare system that's a overall decision that you want to make like you because you could drive down the rate of incidence or the that treatment the cure rate you could increase that by just spending more money but but basically if we wanted health care as good is what we currently
[31:52]
health care as good is what we currently have now you can get it more cheaply by catching all these diseases earlier Wow all right and then it would have a huge impact on on crime so is there anything else that we should know anything I forgot to ask you well the other mind-blowing aspect of this technology is that for people undergoing in vitro fertilization today they can screen their embryos using these genetic technologies and they can make sure that like if they're if they have a family history of type 1 diabetes or breast cancer they can pick the embryo that is a low risk rather than a high risk embryo they can kind of break that chain of inheritance in their family where the different genetic variants that are predisposed the people in the family to breast cancer are not passed on to their their next generation would it be fair to say that those are also the expensive things in the healthcare system yes so the things you could prevent by choosing the the embryo
[32:52]
could prevent by choosing the the embryo is that what you're testing the embryo so the embryo is external to the human being you've got a few embryos and test tubes essentially I'm simplifying and you could test them to say oh of these embryos this one is unlikely to get these horrible diseases and over time if everybody did that you would effectively eliminate those diseases would you not maybe not fully eliminate but you would drive down the rate of incidence in the overall population which would drive down the cost of healthcare overall which could make a single payer quite inexpensive relatively speaking given that the the horrible diseases are also the expensive ones yes you know I mentioned the ROI from testing a rape kit and locking up a rapist in here we were talking about a genetic test that at the embryo level only costs a few thousand dollars say to test ten embryos or five embryos the ROI from that to society if you if you end up say preventing having a kid with type 1
[33:53]
preventing having a kid with type 1 diabetes the the ROI there is phenomenal and it's something government's will eventually figure out I hope so I'm seeing people of freaking out in the comments they're saying eugenics eugenics and what is the my take on all of this is that it wouldn't matter what you thought of it ethically or morally because it's going to happen would you say that's true yes because well let me give your listeners a statistic so currently in the world today 1 million embryos are genetically screen each year worldwide and currently what they're screening against typically is Down syndrome or well-known single gene variants like this brick' breast cancer thing rare variants that the family is known to be carriers for but because the genetic technology is improved everybody can screen and eliminate some amount of risk for themselves so it's going to become not 1 million a year but 10 million a year or or our screen and maybe people even choose to do IVF even if they don't have
[34:53]
choose to do IVF even if they don't have fertility problems so in a sense we're already you know people like to use the scariest word for it because it you know has connotations for every worst thing you can think about but in the sense it would just be doing better what we're already doing because we're already screening for these few things but now we could just screen for more things so exactly I mean down syndrome is about a 1% risk and so people still people already sort of routinely screen against it and so now we're just expanding the set of things you could screen against so what happens when somebody starts screening for height well that's the real slippery slope so the technology currently exists although we don't offer it to rank order your embryos for height because we think that's you know that society's not ready for that kind of thing but for disease risk everybody kind of agrees like nobody wants to have a child that is gonna have you know a short or unhealthy life and so almost everybody agrees it's very analogous to
[35:54]
everybody agrees it's very analogous to Down syndrome we're screening against some cystic fibrosis or some rare genetic disease everybody agrees we don't we it's it's reasonably defensible for the parents to just say well if I have 10 embryos don't implant the one that is definitely going to have early risk of breast cancer let can we have nine healthy ones can we just implant one of the others well it's gonna be a whole lot of questions to be answered in the future and thank you so much Steve issue could you tell us how how most easily people can connect to your company or your Twitter feed or website where where would they find more about what you're doing there are two companies here one is awesome so if you google oh thr a.m. you'll find it and the other one is genomic prediction and you can type in genomic prediction all one word.com and you'll find it great and are you on twitter i am on twitter my handle is my last name underscore
[36:57]
my handle is my last name underscore steve so it's shoe underscore steve but you can just google to type in my name to twitter steve hsu and you'll find me right away okay so last name shoes spelled hsu thank you Steve this was incredibly enlightening it's been a pleasure I and I'll talk to you again soon and have a great day have a great day bye I Wow how about that huh that was interesting let's talk about the news so as I said it turns out everybody's racist my favorite news story from yesterday was President Trump was doing a little press conference thing and somebody asked him about Nancy Pelosi's comment where Nancy Pelosi said that President Trump is not trying to make America great again but rather she said he's trying to make America white again and he was president was asked about that and what did the
[37:57]
was asked about that and what did the president say he said that's racist that's a very racist thing to say now I don't know if you could be a racist if you're a white person talking to another white person I don't know but apparently we've reached a new level where everybody is a racist and I think that Trump whether he's thinking of it expressly this way or he's just sort of feels it instinctively the whole racism claim has become so ridiculous that I think has lost its power or it might be heading in that direction in the sense that so so think about the people who have been called racist just in the past month Joe Biden I mean not technically called racist but Carla Harris questioned his past opinions on busing for example Nancy Pelosi president Trump my favorite
[39:00]
Nancy Pelosi president Trump my favorite is Steve Cortes who's a trump supporter who appears on CNN was accusing let's see what's the name of this guy he just did an interview on CNN with was a hot Ally oh I think he writes for The New York Times and and Ally actually suggested that Steve Cortez he actually said this to Steve Cortes and repeated a few times he goes quote no matter how hard you tried to beat the Latin face of Trump they'll never love you and they kept repeating that they'll never love you it was like super racist but it was to people of color one calling the other racist and again the whole everybody's a racist thing has so jumped the shark I'd be weird we're so in the territory of it's just ridiculous and remember I always tell you that the the slippery slope always has always has something
[40:03]
slope always has always has something that then forms as a counterforce there's always something that changes to make you not slip forever and I I think you probably will be back and forth on this but it feels like we here some kind of a weird racist wall where it all just looks stupid it all just looks ridiculous I think the credibility of any of these claims is zero now part of the reason the credibility of claims of racism have approached zero is that it gets more and more obvious than it's sort of everybody you could find a reason to call absolutely everybody a racist for example a popular thing that the Democrats are saying now is they're saying the Democrats are saying well President Trump is definitely a racist now because of that tweet which of course didn't mention race yeah that's their usual thing he mentions countries and then people say you're really
[41:03]
and then people say you're really talking about race and I forgot my whole point there I was going for something very clever it'll come back to me
that are just looking at your other so the other thing they're doing is they're trying to say that everybody's xenophobic how many people in the United States had to look up xenophobic I think they're using xenophobic because racist wasn't quite landing what do you remember the story of President Trump taking the British diplomat diplomat out of the country he called him he called the diplomat basically stupid and worthless and he kicked him out he didn't actually kick him out but he made it impossible for the guy to keep his job and and sure enough he quit or got fired I forget but that guy was British
[42:04]
fired I forget but that guy was British here's a white guy did anybody say that that was racist no they didn't but if he had been a person of color they would have right so I think we've got to the point where everybody is calling everybody racist just all the time and it's completely lost it's starting to completely lose its power now here's the math the the racism math that the Left got wrong for three years they've been adding example to example of all the reasons President Trump is allegedly a racist individually every one of those reasons is either weirdly off point or literally fake news for example a birtherism is about a birth certificate not really about race it's the same play that the president used when Ted Cruz you know was rumored to have some
[43:06]
you know was rumored to have some Canadian roots so so we know it uses it for that
and we're watching uh I'm just reading your comments was totally taking me off my game today so we're watching people of color calling other people of color racists we're watching AOC call Pelosi racist we're watching everybody be called a racist but because the president has been called a racist for a hundred different reasons right that you know I'm exaggerating but the the left have a hundred different stories which they say all oh he's a racist because of this and this and this and this and this and because of this and this and this so what the president knows math wise is that this latest provocation in his tweet added one percent it added one percent to this mountain of imaginary information that they have to call him a
[44:08]
information that they have to call him a racist adding one percent to it almost certainly is not going to change any votes because the argument only changed by one percent and it wasn't very persuasive to begin with but what the president got for this in return and all the smart people are weighing in today you know Newt Gingrich is saying it you can see it in a bunch of people are saying that the president has successfully put all the energy on the the squad as they like to call themselves and cause them to be the face of the Democrats that's the last thing that Pelosi wants it's a total losing position because they're so unpopular even the squad is unpopular very unpopular even within the Democratic Party so the president's play seems to be completely successful he put all the pressure on the squad made them the story which makes them the face of the Democrats which makes the Democrats
[45:08]
Democrats which makes the Democrats really have no chance of winning and why he traded for that was he added one percent to a thing that was already ineffective all the complaints about the the racism so I would say that was a pretty pretty good play and what I'd love to see is Trump taking this further because he has he you know he's always a be testing things even though if he even if he doesn't think of it that way he throws stuff out and then he sees what the reaction is and if it worked he does more of it so he's testing about this about that one of the things he tested and again this was probably just spontaneous but now it's out there is when he accused Pelosi of being a racist he can kind of watch and see what happens okay was was that good was it bad and I'm kind of loving this I'm kind of loving it because you saw that Steve Cortes was also accusing his accuser of
[46:11]
Cortes was also accusing his accuser of being a racist obviously aoc and the squad or racist I think that's fair to say and what would happen if the Democrat message turned entirely on that what if Trump started calling them racist all the time remember when the fake news was first a phrase you you almost forget that it was used against Republicans and against the president so the two words fake news originally were born as an attack on Republicans and on the president what is it now well now it's the opposite now fake news means mainstream media it means see and that means MSNBC it means all the illegitimate people who are attacking the president the president rebranded that so thoroughly and effectively then it took their little attack and turned it into a land mine that kills them every day I think he may
[47:15]
that kills them every day I think he may have sniffed the opportunity to start flipping the racist thing around because the thing about the racism allegation is it's the allegation that matters the one thing that was proven in the last three years is that as I say often the facts don't matter at all what matters is if you can get your if you can cause your opponent to defend against the accusation you win even if they do a good job if you if they can spend all their time saying I'm not a racist you win it was the position they tried to push Trump into but it just it just flows off him he doesn't for he's Teflon that way as long as his supporters are out under ninety four percent in his corner I think he's in good shape David Axelrod said of the president's tweet and his strategy he said now David Axelrod of course is
[48:15]
he said now David Axelrod of course is has been a campaign strategist expert for the Democrats so he'd be one of the smartest people in in politics I would say one of the smartest people about how to do it you know how to win an election that that would be his expertise and he says above Trump with his deliberate a racist outburst real downer Trump wants to raise the profile of his targets meaning the squad drive Dems to defend them and make them emblematic of the entire party it's a cold hard strategy yeah it's a cold hard strategy that works that works because he wouldn't be talking about it if it didn't and I think there might be a new a new feeling of panic setting in because the president has really tied up 2020 with this stuff I mean it really makes a huge
[49:18]
this stuff I mean it really makes a huge difference all right so everybody's crying wolf about racism until it means absolutely nothing to anybody and then Oh dr. drew somebody's asking me about dr. drew he is scheduled for I think Friday let me check my calendar yeah I'm gonna talk to dr. drew on Friday about the what's called the homeless situation in LA but I think we're gonna learn that homelessness is the easy part to solve the real parts are the the mental illness and the drugs and and diseased everything else so we'll talk about that see if there's a smarter way to think about that we'll do that Friday all right so it turns out the North Korean envoy who was rumored to have been executed by Kim jong-un for doing a bad job negotiating is alive and he'll be negotiating it looks like so that whole
[50:18]
negotiating it looks like so that whole rumor that I guess came out of South Korea was completely nothing completely nothing all right I think those are the main things I wanted to talk about today is there anything else on your mind
I'm just oh yeah so I almost missed the story there was some anti fuh bomber who tried to attack some Border Patrol's facility and it didn't get as much attention as I thought I should it's not in the headlines it just sort of came and went is that because it's anti far now and I'm wondering if that's an anti-fraud thing so we've got a whole bunch of interesting things going on here and I saw some videos today on Twitter of Obama talking about
[51:20]
Twitter of Obama talking about immigrants and children and cages and stuff and Obama sounded actually worse then Trump does you know if you hear an out-of-context you say to yourself man that guy's a badass on immigration but we'll see what happened to Kamala Harris well I think you have to wait for the next debate see if she can make another another move I keep expecting Biden to be taken out by the other Democrats it seems like that's where things are going so we'll see Peter Thiel versus Google I didn't see Tucker Carlson's interview with Peter Thiel I haven't recorded I'll probably watch it today but my my understanding is that the gist of it is that he'll thinks Google is I hate to use the word traitorous because there's a specific meaning but maybe not not sufficiently
[52:20]
meaning but maybe not not sufficiently in the United States corner with this working with China versus the United States so I think there's some definitely something there there's something to that all right I think that's all we need to talk about today make sure you're following bill Polti he continues to give away money to people who have made a good case that they need it on Twitter so follow him at at cult a pul te and you're gonna see a fun show because he spent he's been contacting people who don't know they're gonna get money and then you can get to see their reaction which is very touching and it's spreading people are talking about it all over looking at ways to directly give and so follow that and that's all I got for now I will talk to you all later