Episode 1138 Scott Adams: Trump Taxes, Mail-In Ballot Fraud Scandal, How Trump Wins Without Trying

Date: 2020-09-28 | Duration: 52:06

Topics

• Find my “extra” content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com

Rough Transcript

This is an auto-generated transcript and may contain errors.

Transcript

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• Topic ignorance is key to political attacks

• The tax critics are ignorant or dishonest

• Whiteboard1: 2017 Taxes

• Whiteboard2: Expenses and Revenues

• Project Veritas…Massive Mail-in ballot FRAUD, llhan Omar

• Fareed Zakaria: Election chaos re-elects President Trump

If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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[0:09]

[Music] turn off my ringer get ready for work are you ready to learn something useful you know probably there's nobody who's going to be on this periscope who doesn't already understand what i'm going to teach you because you're smarter than average but there might be a few people wandering in here and it'll be useful to you
you and at the very least you might learn another way to explain it to other people so even if you already know about taxes and depreciation you might pick up a little tip so hang around it's going to be worth it we'll have some laughs too but first how do we get going you know how
how it's called the simultaneous sip and all you need is a copper mug or a glass of tanker chelsea stein i can't think jugger flask vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day

[1:10]

pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day the thing that makes everything better except taxes it's called the simultaneous step and it happens now go
i can feel my deductions increasing well before we get into a little whiteboard lesson on taxes that will not hurt what one bit i'm gonna keep it so simple that that you won't even mind listening to it there's some disturbing news about brad parscale you've all heard it by now i'm not really going to talk about it except to say that we wish him well this is the sort of story that should only be viewed as a medical issue so that's all that needs to be said there's a there seems to be a medical issue and i hope it works out well am loving just loving

[2:11]

am loving just loving from the trash talking point of view uh watching the you know the the president go at her go after biden and vice versa i am loving uh president trump challenging him to a blood test [Laughter] now i would say that the odds of that happening you were where trump and biden both take blood tests before the before the debate i i think it's fair to say that the odds of that actually happening are zero there's no chance it'll happen but because it's such an outrageous thing to to bring up the president can bring it up there's no risk because there's no chance it's going to happen but because he's the president you sort of have to cover it in the news because he just keeps bringing it up and you can't really ignore a thing like that so it makes everybody ask the question and think about it and focus on that

[3:11]

and think about it and focus on that question of how are they medicating uh biden now part of the reason that it's sticky and it's a it's a good attack is because even if you support biden don't you think there might be some pharmaceuticals involved a little bit because even if you support him you do notice the as good days and bad days you can't miss that what causes a good day versus a bad day is it maybe medication is it maybe a natural cycle which would be disturbing as well it's a it's a perfect attack now of course the counter attack on the president is his critics accuse him of uh using adderall now do you know anything about adderall i would say that it should be a rule that every president should be on adderall even if they don't need it

[4:12]

need it now adderall is a very controlled substance because if the wrong person is using it for the wrong reason it basically acts like speed and it could be bad for them but if somebody just hypothetically hypothetically if someone was under a doctor's care such as a sitting president would you want them to be on adderall or to not be on adderall well here's the thing if you know anything about it you probably want them to be on it because they're going to be way more productive and actually smarter that's what it does i don't want to encourage anybody to take an illegal drug if it's not if it's not recommended by your doctor but it is a fact that adderall is not like cocaine or heroin or you know oxycontin or anything it's just nothing like any of those drugs it's not like alcohol or weed it's not a quaalude it's

[5:14]

alcohol or weed it's not a quaalude it's not
not it's not any of those it is purely a performance enhancing drug which has plenty of you know history and science so if it turned out and i don't think that that this is an evidence but if it turned out that the president was on adderall that would be a plus you're just not allowed to say that in public anybody everybody here who's had a little experience with this and has had anything in that family of chemicals you know what i'm talking about so uh it's interesting that ignorance is the the most important part of these political attacks is that you can make an attack as long as the public doesn't understand the topic so right now they can say hey he's on this drug called adderall and 80 percent of the public will say i don't know what that is but

[6:14]

don't know what that is but it doesn't sound good the way you described it and that's it that's all you have to accomplish is that it doesn't sound good just like uh you know just like asking for biden to take a blood test it doesn't have to happen it just has to sound sort of sketchy and damaging and that's it
so matt walsh tweeted today or yesterday trump has had financial records linked to the press secretly recorded conversations leaked to the press and many officials who worked inside the white house have written tell-all books and yet through all of that no crime or actual serious scandal has been uncovered
did you expect that we would get all the way to here and this president would be i mean he's investigated inside and out the last thing that people were waiting

[7:15]

the last thing that people were waiting for was these taxes and i can tell you that i i personally had a conversation with a uh let's say a notable person who i will not
not describe further a notable very smart person who said you just wait when the taxes come out someday those taxes are going to come out and it's going to show all those terrible crimes well taxes are out where's all the terrible crimes if there were any terrible crimes or even crimes you know even little crimes there were there were in evidence in those taxes do you think we wouldn't have heard about it by now because you don't lead with the boring stuff if the new york times had the goods they had something that was like a you know even even something suspicious they would have told you by now don't you think so it turns out that the president is

[8:17]

so it turns out that the president is way cleaner than anybody imagined [Laughter] i have to admit you know i'm a uh you know i'm a complete supporter of the president but even i was surprised that there's nothing there i thought you know any billionaire it wouldn't matter who it is if you take anybody with a real complicated billionaire kind of a tax return and you say all right here hear you public go take a look at it i feel as if you would find something suspicious looking in just about anybody's billionaire tax returns it might not be crimes and it might you know if you looked into it it might not actually be as bad as it looks on the surface but there would be all kinds of stuff there would be flags where you'd say i better look at this a little bit more but apparently trump doesn't have those he apparently has a pretty clean return now the one thing that is being audited and the president

[9:19]

that is being audited and the president has been telling us this for years is that there is a big 72 million dollar deduction that's being debated now is that a crime is it a crime if the irs ultimately says this will be disallowed not really i mean there might be a penalty with it because you know there may be some requirement for that but it is completely routine completely routine for companies to see some gray area thing and say well might as well take a shot it's sort of a gray area we have an argument the irs would have an argument the other way we get that but give it a shot it is not illegal to give something a shot all right you have to understand that that that deduction could be disallowed but it was done publicly in the sense that the irs is aware of it the irs got to look at it and they started to question it

[10:19]

started to question it and apparently apparently there's enough of an argument on the trump side that it hasn't been resolved for years if it were easy to resolve as if you know let's say that there was no argument on the trump side there's just no argument for this deduction i feel like it would have been resolved in less than four years right it wouldn't take four years to resolve something that didn't have an argument on the other side so even if trump ends up not winning the you know that that deduction conversation that's not illegal it's completely legal to take your best shot if it doesn't work it doesn't work but you knew what your risk was here's some of the best tax advice i ever heard this came from my smart democratic friend coincidentally and it was from a friend of his and he recall he recounts this story he

[11:21]

and he recall he recounts this story he said he said he was doing his own taxes because he's he's really smart so he can he knew how to do his own taxes even the complicated stuff but he reached a point where there were two ways to calculate something and it appeared that the irs would allow either one one of those ways he could do it was good for him and the other way was not as good for him but they both looked like they were allowed it was just two different ways to account for the same thing so he asked his friend who was more of an expert on finance he goes what do i do i've got two valid ways to do this one is good for me and the other one's not good for me what should i do his friend gave him this advice do the one that's good for you that's it do the one that's good for you now what if it turned out that the irs said no you know really it should have been that other calculation it's fine you might have to pay a little extra be you know for the the the interest or

[12:23]

be you know for the the the interest or something for something that shouldn't have been a deduction but the irs doesn't put you in jail for having for having a good argument that's an important point that people don't understand it's not cut and dried these are legal things these are illegal things as long as your lawyers can go in there and say look this is the reasoning we used here here's your own rules your rules say this we read those rules and we did this how is that wrong and if the irs says well it is wrong and here's why nobody goes to jail for that all right it's very routine all right so um let's talk more about trump's taxes you should not trust anybody who who makes this comparison if you see this on twitter and you're out you're seeing it this morning all over the place people are gonna say this a typical uh middle-class taxpayer

[13:26]

uh middle-class taxpayer might pay several thousand dollars whatever per year trump only paid in 750.27 so therefore it's totally unfair right no anybody who gives you that comparison and tries to convince you that you've learned something because you compared trump's total taxes to an average citizen they are lying to you or they don't know a freaking thing about taxes those are the only two possibilities anybody who makes that comparison is a flat out liar or they don't understand the field whatsoever there there's no way that that comparison makes sense it's comparing a peanut to an elephant they have they just are different things and i'll explain why all right let me explain for anybody who
who doesn't follow finance doesn't do their

[14:27]

doesn't follow finance doesn't do their own taxes a little simple situation i'm not claiming that this uh equals trump's taxes it's a generic situation right so suppose you've got a company in one year any any year that makes two billion dollars in
in money coming in so that's what they've earned from people paying them for their services or products and they've got an expense of a billion dollars a year that is actual checks and money that they've given out that would leave them since they brought in 2 billion and only put out a billion in expenses that's a billion dollars left over to spend on stuff but if they also bought a lot of assets let's say they bought buildings or computers or vehicles you can do a thing called depreciation depreciation is instead of taking the cost of that thing and acting like you you spent all your money the year that you bought it so let's say you bought up

[15:27]

let's say you bought up you bought a building and it was a million dollars you don't write off the whole million as an expense the year that you bought it the tax law says that you write off a little bit every year based on what the tax law says if it's a building maybe it's 15 years for example and you just spread it out as if it's an expense so if you had a billion of these paper artificial expenses and a billion of real ones the two of them would equal two billion and that's all the money that you had coming in so even though you made a half a billion dollars in cash that's yours to keep you made a half a billion dollars it's yours to keep you got a half a billion dollars in cash on paper you made nothing and you don't have to pay taxes federal income taxes if you made nothing now is that a bad situation is that unfair is that the rich people taking advantage

[16:27]

advantage of a tax loophole nope nope this law about how to how to deal with depreciation and indeed uh
uh depreciation won't be the whole story with trump's taxes there will be other loopholes and things built into the law that he took advantage of but everything that's in the tax law is there because both democrats and republicans in all likelihood thought it was a good idea that all the smart people thought it was a good idea now there are people who argue you should change the tax to a flat tax et cetera so there's always room for debate but the point is this this idea of how to treat taxes even for rich people is not really controversial in in the mainstream of people who understand finance find me a cpa somebody who is an expert

[17:27]

find me a cpa somebody who is an expert on taxes who thinks that this is bad for society you won't find any there's nobody who understands this field who thinks that this is bad or should be changed now when i say nobody you can always find some somebody who will say anything but the mainstream democrat mainstream republican they're all in favor of this there's no there's nobody on the other side of this now the other thing you need to know is that when they say he didn't pay taxes they're usually talking about federal income taxes it doesn't mean that no taxes were paid indeed he paid a bunch of salaries and everybody who earned a salary paid taxes so instead of the taxes coming out of here it went to the people the people had an income they paid taxes and that goes to the federal government they they also probably paid payroll taxes and social security and you know and other related things that

[18:28]

you know and other related things that all goes to some government either local or or federal what about property taxes every big company especially if you're a real estate company have have enormous property taxes what about suppliers he's buying stuff from suppliers they make a profit they use that once they get that profit they pay taxes all right none of this happens none of this unless this happens so why is it that the government and the irs
irs thinks it's a good idea to have a situation where sometimes big companies pay nothing it's a good idea because you really really want this other stuff you want jobs because if somebody has this job the government doesn't have to support them that's a big win you want all these taxes this is exactly what you want now if this lasted forever would that be good what if a big company just never paid taxes they just always

[19:28]

just never paid taxes they just always found loopholes and just never paid taxes would that be good well it actually would be pretty good for the reasons i just told you tons of taxes get paid but it's a second order effect now remember these these suppliers who uh who made money because they sold stuff to the company once they make their money they go spend it again that's called the multiplier effect in economics so these dollars that are generated by this business it's not one dollar this dollar goes to the supplier the supplier buys his own his own supplies that dollar goes to the next person that dollar goes to the next person and the next person every time that dollar changed hands somebody paid taxes maybe sales tax probably income tax if there was a profit there so there's an enormous economic benefit from a company that pays no taxes that's why it's allowed because it's

[20:29]

that's why it's allowed because it's really really good for the world it's not a coincidence that amazon has this situation it's not a coincidence that there are lots of companies that have this situation here's what you need to know for your further lesson in economics with my awkward whiteboard
here's the situation which might be somewhat typical for a company that's not paying federal income taxes if you're if you're a growing business meaning that you're you're plowing money into your business continually it could be that your expenses are going up because let's say you're you're buying a new building you're investing in some infrastructure you're just putting all kinds of money into that now this could be real money expenses or depreciation but it could be going up like crazy at the same time though it's fine your bank will give you loans because your revenue is going up like crazy too

[21:30]

crazy too and the hope is that someday you'll get to the point where you don't have to put in as much every year and you can just start harvesting the benefits a good example this is your cable company the the company that that is digging ditches and putting cable in the ground and connecting one neighborhood after another every time they connect a neighborhood they make money from that neighborhood so that so that neighborhood that the cable company connected is now profitable but the company itself is not profitable only that neighborhood because they have already put in two new neighborhoods that are not yet profitable as those new ones become profitable now you've got three profitable ones yay if you stopped it there you could immediately get your expenses going down while your income goes up hey you're making money and you're paying taxes but why would you you didn't start a company you didn't start a company to get to some point and then just level off

[22:31]

some point and then just level off you started a company to grow forever and the best way to grow forever is to keep getting bank loans to keep getting financing private financing etc as long as your revenue is going up and it looks like it could cross over in the future the banks will give you all the money you want people will buy all the stock that you want you can give financing easily and cheaply now i don't know if president trump's situation is like the one i described but what's important is neither do you we don't know now maybe if i looked at the details of his tax returns i could i could deduce this i'm not sure i could but if the if the news has not described to you if this is a normal situation of a growing company is he is he plowing his money back into assets that are creating jobs and creating other kinds of taxes that's the

[23:32]

creating other kinds of taxes that's the best situation you could possibly have now it turns out that as an attack on the president it's really really effective because how many people how many people understand this little lesson that i just gave you if you were to guess what percentage of the general public understands that you can't compare an average wage earners taxes to a big company and that there are good reasons you can't compare them what percentage of the company do you think or of the of the country do you think knows that i would say 20 percent tops yeah somebody's guessing 20 percent somebody says 5 ten percent is somewhere in that range it's definitely not more than twenty percent but it's probably in the five to twenty percent range now having explained it to you we're good now right everybody who sees an explanation like this you know they didn't used to know

[24:34]

this you know they didn't used to know but now they've seen the explanation oh good i guess that problem is solved we used to be ignorant but now we've been informed so i guess i guess we're all good no doesn't work like that it's not just that twenty percent of the country are the only ones who understand this it is that twenty percent of the country might be the only ones capable of understanding it which is a horrible thing to think but it's true something like i would guess this is true something like maybe twenty percent of the public has the raw intellect and the enough you know context and background and enough of a talent stack to even understand what i just said it's kind of complicated i would guess that there are a whole bunch of people who watch this saw this maybe for the first time some of you and are saying to yourself i think i kind of follow that but i'm a little hazy on the

[25:35]

but i'm a little hazy on the depreciation part i kind of need to see that explained a few more times which would be perfectly normal trust me if you if you go to school for you know economics or accounting or something like that the first time you're introduced to the idea of cash flow being different from income and depreciation being this invisible expense the first time you see this stuff it doesn't really stick you kind of need to you know be introduced to it over and over again before it sticks so as a political attack it's just brilliant but it is completely
it is not good behavior let's just say this the attack on trump's taxes if they were honest players this is what it would look like if the critics were honest okay

[26:35]

if the critics were honest okay we thought we would find a whole bunch of criminal activity here we didn't find any okay that would be the first honest thing they would say because unless they're hiding something you know waiting for later and it seems unlikely they found nothing so the first thing they should say is all those things that we thought were going to be big problems we didn't find any that would that would be an honest statement but instead they've suggested that there are problems when it is not demonstrated that there is here is another example if you look at cnn the way they're covering it they say stuff like this president trump has a 300 million dollar loan personally guaranteed that's coming due so you say to yourself whoa that that's that's bad right 300 million dollar loan coming due sounds bad and then you say to yourself cnn would say and what would you do

[27:39]

cnn would say and what would you do if you needed 300 million dollars and you're the president and let's say let's say russia might be a future place that you think you might get some money what would you do would you be a little nice to russia because it might help your financing later in your own personal life that's the cnn the cnn take let me explain to you what they don't know or are lying about i don't know they either don't know or they're lying a large company with a large loan coming due
due how should you value that what what should your brain do when you hear that there's a big company with a 300 million dollar loan coming due here is the correct way to analyze that so that's it that's the entire analysis there's a big loan coming due in a big company so that is the most routine thing in the world

[28:39]

world do companies pay off their gigantic loans before they're due sometimes sometimes they just refinance the only thing that matters is if the company is producing enough cash to pay the loan if you're a bank and and the
the loan is coming due but the you know the borrower is making plenty of cash that's all you care about you don't care about his income statement you don't care that on paper it looks like he's not making money you care that his bank account is producing cash because you don't get paid with uh conceptual money you're the bank you want actual money if the company is producing actual money and it's enough to service the loan the bank loves you the bank will fight over you the bank will compete for your business they love to give you money so which is this situation

[29:40]

this situation is this a situation where there's not enough cash flow and the president's really in trouble well they've kind of suggested that haven't they they've kind of suggested that's the case but they haven't demonstrated it they've they've produced no evidence to suggest that it's even a little bit of a problem might it be a problem sure sure it might be a problem but in most cases it would not be if they don't tell you does he have enough cash flow to service the loan they have told you nothing the amount of the loan irrelevant the fact that it's coming due irrelevant if you have cash flow that's all that matters what you tell me how much reporting there will be on cash flow there won't be any right there won't be any reporting on cash flow because cash flow is the story that probably makes trump look good

[30:41]

probably makes trump look good when trump talked about his balance sheet before these taxes came out when he was talking about him do you did he ever notice the way he talked he talked about having a strong balance sheet and good cash flow he did not say on paper i have a big income because that would be dumb what you want is the biggest cash flow and the smallest paper profit did he do that don't know because the reporting is silent on his cash flow so far so in other words the people who understand to have a look at this would say
say wait a minute i don't care about any of that stuff there's nothing on the taxes that's really that important what matters is the cash and where's that reporting where's all the reporting on the cash also known as the only thing that matters all right when you see somebody says next explain the ebitda we won't be explaining that today

[31:47]

keep it easy all right um the trump lawyers have said that the quote the new york times story is little riddled with gross inaccuracies now what does that mean when trump's lawyers say that the story is riddled with gross inaccuracies does that mean that they don't actually have the actual taxes it could you could interpret it that way but it could it could mean that they have exactly the right taxes but the way they're interpreting them is so selective that is grossly misleading so the lawyers have very cleverly worded it so it allows two interpretations one they don't have actual taxes it's more of a you know a fake news thing or two they do but they're explaining it all wrong to confuse you i would say the second part is unambiguously true as i just explained but we don't know if they have the real taxes given that the southern district of new york presumably has those taxes

[32:48]

york presumably has those taxes and they hate the president it probably got
got leaked from the southern district of new york which would be a very big crime it's a felony so there's somebody who committed a felony and then and that might actually include the new york times there's some i'm not a lawyer so i can't speak to this but there are some people who seem to suggest that the new york times broke the law by printing it i doubt that they would be in legal trouble i feel as though they would claim that there's enough of a need to know in the public that uh that it was okay we'll see all right the thing that makes this argument so devastating is that the entire protests and you know the the way that the democrats feel is they have this sense of unfairness a sense of unfairness and the sense of unfairness is not based on anything uh objective or smart

[33:48]

smart it's just how you feel so if you have um you know if you have a million dollars and there's somebody who has a hundred billion dollars you find you kind of hate them because you're unfortunately uh we're we're sort of built that way we're built were built to envy and maybe think poorly of somebody who's doing better so because this fits so perfectly into the the democrat world view that there's something you know with unfairness in the world it's really good it really fits their their message pretty well and indeed uh rasmussen is teasing that the president's approval rating took a steep dive last night i think uh or recently so the president's approval did recently take a steep dive these are just the overnights so they might not be you know a long-term effect

[34:50]

joshua ganz who's an economist uh i mention him uh often uh he had this tweet which i thought was funny uh this will be the sort of thing that when you hear it you're gonna say why didn't anybody else think of that you know one of those where you go that's true here it is he says the thing about the new york tax new york times tax story is that trump doesn't have to release all of his tax returns to show it's fake news just one page of one submitted return would get it done so in other words he could just say hey new york times if you think you have my actual tax returns release one page i will allow you to release one page maybe pick one of the pages that doesn't have much on it that's you know controversial and say just just show us page 23 you know about this let's see if it matches mine

[35:51]

uh somebody says read trump tweets does he have some fresh ones that are fun
fun maybe if i have time i'll do that all right so joshua is correct it would be easy for trump to prove that they don't have the real tax returns but i'm not expecting that to happen because my expectation is that they do have the real tax returns but that they're telling a misleading story about them all right um
i wonder this is another one of those cases where all the people who believed that there would be all kinds of crimes in his taxes those people now have to go back and say all right i was wrong about something i was totally positive would be true so i believe that there would not be indications of crimes in his taxes but there would be you know people would imagine they saw them so i think my estimate of where this was going to end up was pretty close if yours was not reassess how good your predictions are

[37:05]

financial illiteracy is sweeping the country of course so everybody's going to be talking about depreciation and explaining it to other people but none of it's really going to matter because we're in a world where it goes without saying at this point do you remember in 2016 when i said that facts don't matter and that people don't make up their mind based on facts do you remember that all right people are begging me to read trump's tweet so there's got to be something going on here that's that's good well let's see what trump's up to
uh he see joe biden announced that he won't agree to a drug test uh bringing up my taxes all the time bad intentions is there something here that's especially good uh
proper shows that i'm only president i have very little debt compared to the

[38:07]

i have very little debt compared to the value of assets
there we go he has very little debt compared to his assets now that's that's the
the finance way of saying that he's not going to have trouble getting bank loans you know
okay i have no idea why you needed me to look at that because i don't think that told me anything right the other big story we'll get to let's see if i said anything i want to say about this oh so cnn's take is that he will be desperate for money and he the only reason he's president is to make money because he needs money to to save his struggling businesses now i don't think that's the case
um i don't think that's the case but let me ask you this what president would not want a billion dollars right or what president would not want to get rich do we produce presidents who don't have

[39:08]

do we produce presidents who don't have any
any any personal ambition or cannot be bribed it seems to me that any president who wasn't already rich is a risk for bribery right wouldn't that be true of every president if you had a president who um you know let's say he needed some money to pay off a loan is that really a big difference with somebody who just might appreciate a hundred million dollars after leaving office i feel like they all have a bribery risk i i don't know that you could really say that one is worse than the other because the the dollar amounts would be so big um all right project veritas uh as you know project veritas uh just came up with an expose of mail-in vote fraud and it looks like a good one meaning that they have uh on video somebody who says that he personally was part of a larger operation in elan

[40:11]

was part of a larger operation in elan omar's territory in minneapolis to collect the the ballots whether they're filled out or empty from let's say senior citizens and other people and to fill them out themselves i guess so
so massive vote fraud appears to be demonstrated and it appears to be demonstrated in a massive way and it appears to be maybe even decisive meaning that it may be the only reason that eulan omar can stay in office is by ringing the vote every time so
that should it should change the story right now in a rational world where one side is claimed there's no such thing as widespread voter fraud with mail-in ballots that's the claim there there they've continued to push that claim nope there's no evidence can't find any widespread

[41:11]

widespread uh voter problems and then you show it to them what what should happen in a rational world it should look like this oh my goodness i sure am surprised my old opinion has to be revised now that we can clearly see that in this one location it was so easy to do we should assume that even though this is the the place that it was spotted we should probably assume it's happened in other places because look how easy it was moronically easy to cheat in this one place minneapolis wouldn't you expect that somebody else in the country has figured this out and if such activity were to happen in tight races well it could be the difference so we should expect that by this afternoon everyone who's been making the claim the widespread mail-in voting doesn't have issues

[42:12]

mail-in voting doesn't have issues every one of them including the fbi and everybody who's looked into it every one of them will be apologizing to the public right
don't you think i mean obviously they found out they were wrong on something that's terribly terribly important and we really really need to know what is true and what isn't and they misled us so now they'll all be apologizing today right that's that's how it works right no no we're we've reached a point where you can just say it didn't happen the the the democrats will simply just act like it didn't happen that's it and
and do you know how they're doing that they're saying project veritas well you know they're they're not credible that's it that's all they have to do they have they have primed their viewers and supporters to the point where they can just tell them anything it doesn't matter what they say they can

[43:13]

it doesn't matter what they say they can just say um let's pick a dumbass excuse from the list uh randomly uh oh we'll just we'll just say the source is bad that's it goes away now because they control so much of the the news business all i have to do is just ignore it that's it and it just goes away it should be one of the biggest stories of the year and they're just going to make it move go away and they're going to do it right in front of you and it'll be incredible all right um and of course every story is something about trump being beholden to putin i guess i guess that's what i guess every story has to have that connection to it um fareed zakaria did a really good job of explaining what could happen that would get trump elected without him doing anything devious even if he didn't win

[44:15]

devious even if he didn't win so i i'd never seen the frame this way so
so you know and i recommend for fareed zakario's show because i find he's just unusually good at explaining things and he's unusually good with his guests so even if you don't agree with him on politics it's worth watching if you want to make sure you've you've seen the whole field here's a real good watch um but he explained it this way and i'll see if i can do as good a job there is a scenario in which because the mail-in votes are coming in late and there's disagreement among the electoral college the people who are in the electoral college if you get to the point where the states just can't agree it goes to a vote of the states and every vote every state gets one vote and there are more there are more republican states so even though by population the democrats have more people

[45:16]

democrats have more people because of this old constitutional rule that just says well if we can't figure it out the normal way if if our attempt to have a fair vote an electoral college and a credible result if it just doesn't work our our fallback position is every state gets one vote and there we go so trump simply needs to create enough doubt about the outcome because of mail-in votes or anything else as long as there's doubt about the income he personally doesn't have to do anything because it's the states that would just do their thing without any involvement from the federal government he would just sit back and say you know it's not up to me i'll just follow the rules wherever they lead i'm just saying that this vote did not look credible to me do what you need to do with that now if enough of the states agree and

[46:16]

now if enough of the states agree and say you know you got a point we we found this irregularity here and there was an irregularity here and there's still votes coming in and we tried the best we could we really thought this would work but in the end we have to admit if you're just being objective it didn't work it's very very likely i'm going to say somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 percent chance that that's how we'll feel after the vote even after a few weeks after the vote we're going to feel like we're not quite sure we believe the outcome don't you think probably a 70 chance you're not going to believe the outcome whichever way it goes you're still not you even if your team wins you're still privately going to be thinking i'm glad i won but i'm not sure i believe it you know that's that's what the count was but i'm not sure i believe it if that happens trump gets reelected

[47:19]

if that happens trump gets reelected and and there's nothing he needs to do he doesn't need to be a dictator he doesn't need to invoke the military he doesn't need to refuse to leave the white house he just needs to follow the rules that the states the states will perform for him it was good to know a good um good addition by for reed to our understanding um i understand that in the uh debate tomorrow uh that chris wallace will not be doing any fact checking would you want the debate moderator to do fact checking i have to think that while you think to yourself yeah you know that would be useful if he did some fact checking in real time while it's happening that could be useful but i don't think it is because first of all nobody would feel it was fair if he did a little more fact checking for one than the other everybody would complain so as soon as he starts fact checking it becomes this whole new thing to complain

[48:20]

becomes this whole new thing to complain about and everybody would say well you fact-checked it but you fact-checked it wrong so you really can't win with the fact-checking so if you don't have fact-checking and especially because there's a time limit you would use up all your time with fact checking if you did it what good are the debates are they any good at all now these debates are unique because the biggest question is whether biden can get through it without having some kind of a mental collapse right so really the only thing we're looking for is joe biden's mental collapse we're not looking for facts we're you know we're not really going to learn too much about policies that we didn't already know we're just looking to see if he can stand up there for 90 minutes and not become a blithering idiot now if i had to put odds on it i would say that the odds are probably better than 50 percent and

[49:21]

probably better than 50 percent and probably a lot better than 50 that biden will have a good night meaning that he'll just blather his biden stuff and he'll just do
do you know from memory he'll just say what he needs to say and he'll probably have angry biden moments where he gets that furrowed brow and and acts like he's indignant and angry about everything but probably won't go so far that he just has a complete meltdown i think there's a solid up up with some odds on it i think there's a 30 chance that biden will have a meltdown that everybody sees and and everybody agrees oh that doesn't look good probably a 30 chance of that 70 chance he actually has a good night and and
and you know he rests up and he's sharp and who knows if they shoot him up with chemicals i think maybe they do maybe they do possibly uh

[50:22]

maybe they do possibly uh i i don't know what the odds of that are but at least at least 50 chance i'd say he gets a little shot in the ass or something um so i think he'll probably be fine i will be watching the debates with christina i don't think we're gonna live stream but i might be uh i might be texting while it's on um he's done debate prep half the month yeah he disappears a lot
lot have we heard yet if uh biden has put the lid on is the lid on yet oh there's a really good bingo bingo board from uh oh my god what's the name of uh john show there uh adam curry john devorak's show uh somebody tell me in the comments the name of their it's a no no agenda so if you look for the no agenda podcast or

[51:23]

if you look for the no agenda podcast or there must be a website or something they have a bingo card of things that biden says and it's pretty hilarious and actually it would be fun to literally play at a home so look for that the no agenda bingo card for biden just google it it'll probably pop up
reporters say he should get mad but they describe him as the nice one yeah we don't know if there's a lid yet
um all right so i think we've done what we need to do today that's my lesson on finance and we will talk to you tomorrow