All right. Congratulations to Pete Buttigieg for his win in Iowa, or what looks like to be a win once they've counted all the votes. I have a lot of good things to say about Pete Buttigieg. So first of all, he might be the smartest person in the game right now, just pure intellect. He certainly has the drive and he's moderate for a Democrat. Seems to be evidence-based. He's not going to do stuff that doesn't have, where the math doesn't add up. There's no science behind it. There's a lot to like about him. You know, I realize most of you are Trump supporters so you can't go that far. But to go from a small mayor, mayor of a smallish city, to winning Iowa, that's really impressive. That is really impressive. I gotta say, congratulations Pete Buttigieg.

Now I've said this before and I know it makes you crazy, but I do think there's something good for society when you get, for example, your first black president. You get two benefits. You know, if the president also does a good job, you get a good president and then you also break through an important social psychological barrier that's very important. I'd love to have a female president someday for the same reason. And I would love to have an LGBTQ president for the same reason. Every time we push through one of those artificial psychological barriers, I think we become stronger as a country because it is our ability to marshal all that diversity and still be a coherent unit with the strongest economy in the world, the strongest military. I mean obviously we make that work. So every time we make that work a little better, in other words we're tuning the psychological engine, if you will, of the country. Because the country runs on psychology. It's not just materials. It's how we think about it. So how you think about your place in the world, how you think about your nation, etc. And I feel like we would have a better feeling in the long run about our country if we've cycled through some people who represent the full, let's say the full talent and breadth of the country. So I'm very pro Pete Buttigieg as a human, as a candidate, etc. But he is a Democrat. I don't know that his policies would appeal to me. I haven't looked at him that carefully.

Let's talk about whether he could win. Apparently he has trouble getting the black vote. How could he possibly win? Has anybody ever turned around a weakness that glaring in nine months? Could anybody turn around the black vote in nine months without actually doing anything? Because keep in mind too, he won't be president. He doesn't have any power for the next nine months so he won't have any accomplishments. What exactly is he gonna promise the black community who seems to believe that they have an issue with him? I don't think it's real by the way. I don't think there's any reason the black community should not like Buttigieg. I don't think there's a reason that I can see. But that's the way it is. So I think that would be hard to get past.

Bernie, I don't think Bernie can win in the general. And I'm seeing lots of, again, very smart people, and I mean that literally, people who are very smart and good at predicting, say that Bernie can win and that we should take him seriously because he's sort of the Democrats' version of Trump, which is the change agent, the one who's going to burn everything down. You know, he's sort of a protest vote, a living protest vote. Here's my take. I do not see the Bernie equals Trump connection because there's something missing. Now I get why people feel there's a similarity, so I understand the comparison. But here's where there's a big difference. And this is the big difference that matters. Trump had policies that were Republican-friendly from the start. Right? So some people maybe had to get talked into his stronger border security stand, etc. But Republicans were largely right there anyway. They were sort of in that zip code and he just consolidated them until now he has ninety-four percent support among Republicans. So Trump had two things. He was the change agent. He was the Molotov cocktail thrown into Congress. And so is Bernie. But Bernie's policies only appeal to half of Democrats. And I don't think the other half are going to get there. Do you know why? Because half the Democrats, and I'm not speaking mathematically here so don't get on me about the next thing I'm going to say, roughly half of Democrats are above average in income. All of the people who are above average in income are going to lose. It'll be good for the people who are below average for a while until the entire economy implodes because he has all the incentives set up wrong. But I don't see a world in which Bernie can win all of the Democrats. And you would need to do that to beat Trump. I think there is going to be a solid twenty-five percent of Democrats who say I'm out. I'm out. I pay enough taxes. I'm out. I don't need to live in a socialist country. I like my health care. I'm out. So zero Republicans will vote for Bernie, I think, or some small number. And I don't think he'd win Democrats. So I think he has no chance.

The even the Democrats talk about Biden fading out. Everybody's talking about it like it's inevitable, like it's just gonna happen. There's no doubt about it. It's gonna happen. And here's my question. Suppose we have a brokered convention, which is not impossible. The odds of that are growing every day. If the smartest people in politics selected their leader from the group that's running for president, let's just say they're limited to the people who are running, who would they pick if they could ignore the will of the people and just pick the strongest candidate to beat Trump? Who would it be? Because I can't think of anybody. I can't think of anybody in this group. I'm going to say maybe Klobuchar. Yeah, I'll put myself in the minds of Democrats. Let's say I'm a Democratic leader and nobody wins in the regular ballots and it looks like it's going to be a contested convention. Who would I pick if there were no other influences on me? You know, I didn't have to answer to anybody. I just want the person who's going to win. Might be Klobuchar. Might be because she hasn't offended anybody and she has a good record and she's a woman. I think that Klobuchar could get basically all of the woman vote that Hillary got and that puts her within striking distance. So I think she's the only one who could get within striking distance. There might be some flaws she has that I don't know about yet. So we'll see what happens.