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Nov. 14, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
54:41
Episode 300 Scott Adams: Why You Shouldn’t Piss Off The First Lady and Anti-Pelosi Democrats
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*Pewds singing* Hey Joe.
Hey everybody.
Come on in here. I am using a different device to broadcast.
Let's see if we can fix that problem of the orientation.
And I also won't turn my camera around and have you look out the window.
Looks the same as last time.
Hey Eric. Hey Shelton.
Hey Richard and Yvonne.
Come on in here. You know what time it is.
Yes you do. It's time for the simultaneous sip.
And if you've got a mug, a cup of glass, a vessel of stein, a container of any kind, shall we call it a chalice, raise your container, filled with your favorite liquids, I like coffee, and join me for the simultaneous sip.
Yes, so I changed devices.
I'm using a different iPad.
We'll see if that makes a difference on the orientation problem.
Now, where to start?
Somebody yesterday was pointing out that health care costs are skewed toward the end of life.
So you end up spending most of your health care money in your final year or two of life because that's when all the expensive stuff happens when they're keeping you alive.
And somebody said, well, you know, what if there was some kind of legal doctor-assisted suicide and then people could leave the If they wanted to, leave earlier.
Now of course that's a problem because you can't have people just dying because they want to because you'd get abuses and stuff.
But it made me realize that in this country we already have completely legal end-of-life suicide.
Did you know that? Did you know that it is completely legal To take your own life at the end of your life if you've got not much time left.
We just don't call it suicide.
We call it hospice care or palliative care.
So if somebody has only got, let's say a week left, a couple weeks left, and there's just nothing you can do, you have the option of drugging them until they're not conscious And not feeding them anymore.
So if you make somebody not conscious, because they're drugged up, and you don't feed them, it's suicide, because the person has agreed to this.
So I think we should get out of the headset of saying, you know, we're not going to allow suicide at the end of life, you know, unless they're in super pain.
We're already way past there.
It is already universally legal and accepted that we can kill people at the end of their life with their agreement.
They have to agree to it.
We just call it a different name and we do it the hard way.
We make them wait and suffer and make everybody suffer and wait and pay a lot of money.
We literally have an end-of-life suicide program right now.
And I've watched a number of people go through it.
So I've observed this firsthand.
We kill people with their agreement in the last week or two of their life simply by knocking them out with drugs and not feeding them.
By choice. They choose this.
It's not something they're surprised by.
And then they have a relatively...
I guess, relatively painless death, but it seems cruel to me.
So all I'm saying is, if we're thinking it's not right to allow suicide, we're way past that.
We already do it.
We just don't do it well.
All right. Somebody reported recently that there was a rise in hate crimes.
Now, of course, there's always a political umbrella over any kind of conversation like that, because somebody's trying to make a point.
And they'll say something like, well, the rise in hate crime must be because of President Trump, for example.
So usually these things have a political purpose to them.
But once again, watch for this trend.
Here's the trend. When you see a report about an increase in violence of hate crimes, whether it's people on the left or people on the right, look to see if the summary is supported by examples that you can see.
Because it almost never is.
Maybe never is because I've never seen it.
I'm saying almost just because maybe somebody did it once.
But even if you looked at the examples, you wouldn't know if it's the same way they measured it before.
Are people more likely to report it?
In the report that somebody was passing around, it said hate crime is up 17%.
And then buried way down in the article, and you had to actually follow a link to even get there, But buried way down in the article is that they added a whole bunch of reporting entities.
Now maybe they didn't add enough entities to make up for the 17%, but they never did any kind of a calculation to let us know if that was the case.
So indeed, the report that said hate crime was up 17% did not demonstrate that.
The article itself did not demonstrate that fact.
It demonstrated that it could have been up And it could have been down.
Either one of those was possible based on what they presented in terms of evidence.
So beware of additional fake news reports.
Yeah, look out for the fake news reports that say hate crimes are up.
Because it's probably the way they're measuring it.
And it's probably out of context, and it's probably not supported by any kind of summary.
So just be careful of those.
Now we have a story about Melania, our first lady, who was apparently instrumental in getting some kind of national security aide, some high-level aide, fired, somebody named Mira Ricardel.
Now, of course, because she's the First Lady and not an elected official, it makes a great headline story because people can jab her about it and say, blah, blah, blah, First Lady this, gossip, gossip, gossip.
What is she doing making national security decisions about personnel, etc.?
Here's my take on On the Melania controversy?
If it's even that.
I don't know who it is. Let me say this without cursing.
If you're dumb enough to cross the First Lady, if you're dumb enough to get on the First Lady's bad side, you're too stupid for the job.
It doesn't matter what else you can do.
It doesn't matter what else you're doing right.
If you're dumb enough to piss off the First Lady, you gotta go.
You gotta go.
You piss off the First Lady, you're just not smart enough for the job.
Secondly, if anybody had a free punch, it's Melania.
Has our First Lady put up with more shit Then, well, Michelle Obama put up with a lot of shit, too.
So First Ladies do put up with a lot of shit.
That's a fact. But Melania has put up with a lot of shit.
I mean, she's put up with shit from her own team, from the other team.
I mean, Melania has put up with a lot without a lot of complaining.
Right? If anybody had a free punch, it's her.
Can you imagine her going to her husband and saying, I'm only asking you for one thing.
She's probably asking for more than one thing.
But my feeling is that if she went to the president and said, I don't ask for a lot.
I'm not asking for a lot.
But I want this one thing.
That's the end of the story.
And should be. I'm perfectly happy with that situation.
Now I saw on a tweet, this looks like it's a screen grab from Fox News, and it showed the radical new democratic ideas.
And it shows these new faces in the House, with Octavio Cortez being the one we know the best, but these are other freshmen, far left, apparently, Democrats.
And the radical New Democratic ideas, now this is a Fox News summary, but I think it's accurate.
So they're saying four bullet points that these radical New Democrats want.
Free college for all.
Free healthcare for all.
Abolish ICE. And some kind of a New Deal for the environment, I guess.
A Green New Deal.
Now, your first impression of all these things is, that's all crazy!
Every bit of this. It's crazy, right?
It doesn't conform to anything you know is possible or practical or realistic.
Right? So therefore, you could just dismiss them.
Because their points are so aggressively impractical.
So you could just dismiss them, right?
What are we doing right now?
We're talking about them.
Who are we not talking about?
Everybody who has boring ideas.
The people we're not talking about are the people who were, wait for it, the Democrats we're not talking about are all the Democrats who were not smart enough to do this.
They're shocking us.
Who does this remind you of?
Who does it remind you of when you see such a big ask?
This is a gigantic ask.
Free college for all?
My God, how much would that cost?
Free healthcare for everybody?
$32 trillion? Abolish ICE? That's crazy!
Green New Deal? I don't even know what it is, but it's probably bad for the economy.
If you're saying to yourself, this is all impractical bad ideas, You are being manipulated.
They are taking the Trump playbook, moving the technique from the right to the left, and employing it with chilling efficiency.
So remember, I always make a big deal when I'm talking about President Trump of separating the technique From the practicality, from the fact checking, from the morality.
You know, it's helpful to look at the technique separate from all those other things so you can see if the technique is good or bad.
The technique is frickin' good.
It's good. That's good technique.
Because we're talking about her.
How many times have I talked about Octavia Cortez, whose name I still can't remember.
A lot. Now, let me take you back to the time that candidate Trump said he wanted to deport 14 million people.
Was that possible?
No, it was not.
Is it more crazy to say you're going to deport 14 million people, or is it more crazy to say you'll get free college?
Which is more crazy?
Eh? They're both crazy, but they're directionally pleasing.
They're directionally pleasing, and it matches a lot of their base.
It gets energy. It gets all of your attention.
And why is it that we're focusing on this group?
The reason we're talking about them is because their proposals are impractical.
That's the magic.
If they made practical suggestions, it would look like this.
You know, I'd like to see more people in college.
The most we could do is maybe crank that up 2% a year.
But, you know, over 20 years, that'd be 40%.
That would sound like something practical.
But do you get any attention if you talk in practical terms?
You do not. So, somebody's saying, so stop talking about them.
That's the point. We can't.
If I could stop talking about them, I would also have to say they don't have good technique, because look how easily I stopped talking about them.
I can't. Their technique makes me talk about them because it made everybody else talk about them, and I'm the one who talks about what everybody's talking about.
The reason Trump's technique works with the media is because when he says something this crazy sounding, they have to talk about it.
And if everybody's talking about it, what am I going to do?
I'm going to talk about it.
So don't be surprised.
When that group makes more headway than you thought.
There was a great story on the Hill about a Texas county who had 19 African-American women who ran to be judges in this one county.
19 African-American women ran to be judges.
And out of 19, all 19 got elected.
All 19. So, remember I was saying how CNN keeps saying that the president, oh it's a coincidence that the president keeps criticizing female black people, and I guess there were three of them that they've mentioned.
Oh, why is it that the president keeps criticizing black women?
And I made the comment, it's more good news than you think, because the president doesn't criticize you until you reach a certain level of success.
The president isn't calling people out who are just voters and saying, oh, see that voter over there?
That voter voted for Clinton.
I hate that voter.
He doesn't do that.
You have to be a successful politician, a business person who's made a billion dollars.
You have to be a senator.
You've got to be a judge. You've got to be pretty, you know, or a reporter for CNN. A very successful career if you can get there.
So I'm just going to emphasize that point.
It's so easy to miss the positive news.
If the President of the United States is criticizing a lot of black women lately, it's because black women are killing it.
They're doing great.
Nineteen black women out of nineteen got elected to judge jobs.
These are good jobs. Anyway, I thought that was something worthy of pointing out.
You know, we get all caught up calling each other racists.
And you lose sight of the fact that below the level of the political discourse, things are pretty much improving everywhere all the time.
As a general rule, just about everything is improving, but slowly.
It's only moments like this where you get something that's just quite obviously a big step forward.
Now, I tweeted yesterday, and it got a lot of retweets, so it must have been clever.
And here's what I said.
If you've never heard the quote That this comes from.
Don't give me full credit for it, because I'm borrowing somebody else's famous quote that's a little different, but I don't remember what it was.
And I'm applying it to our current situation.
And I said this.
America is one country divided by a common language.
One half thinks nationalist means patriot, and the other half thinks it means racist.
Word thinking. Now, my point of that was that Even though we speak the same language, we've found a way to disagree on the same language, like even what a word means.
So half of the discussion in the country right now is whether the word nationalist means a patriotic person who prefers their country over others or a damn white nationalist.
Those are not very close.
Those two things are not very similar in meaning.
And when I put that out there, the response I got from people who were feeling the same thing, the most frequent response I got was, well, our definition is the one that's right.
Our definition is the one in the dictionary, therefore we're right.
If you're thinking anything like that, if you're thinking my definition of the word is right, you are not even in the right game.
That's totally the wrong question.
The question of who's right is completely irrelevant.
You can't be right when people are making up their own meaning for words.
If I've decided that I'm going to call the President of the United States a camel, and I say, I know, I know the definition in the dictionary is a camel, is this You know, animal with a hump and usually in the desert.
But I choose to use the word to mean the President of the United States.
I'm just going to call him camel now.
You can't tell me I'm wrong, because if you look in the dictionary, the camel is an animal, it's not the President of the United States.
Because I just told you I'm adding my own definition to the word.
It doesn't add anything.
There's no logic here.
I haven't made a point.
I should not be winning any arguments by simply putting a new meaning to a word.
Now, it gets more devious when you assign a new meaning to a word somebody's already using.
So that's what the Democrats have done.
And weirdly, it's somewhat successful.
From a persuasion perspective, it has been, I think, somewhat successful to just arbitrarily say, when you say nationalist, you really mean racist.
I wonder if there's any word...
Well, I guess the Republicans do the same thing.
So when Democrats say they like democratic socialism, they're talking about the kind of democratic socialism you see in Europe, in countries that if you ask them if they're happy, they would say yes.
So really, that's what the Democrats are asking about.
But then the Republicans do the same trick on them and say, ho ho, you mean communism?
Or you mean socialism, like the real socialism that's totally socialism with no capitalism?
That's not what they mean.
They mean a capitalist, democratic, slightly more socialist in a couple of areas like health care and And education.
You could argue about whether that's a good or bad thing to have.
Oh yeah, Venezuela. Right.
So actually, thank you.
That's a perfect example.
So when the Democrats say we'd like free health care, you know, and some little democratic socialism, we can see that that seems to work in Europe.
So it's a functioning system in Europe.
But Venezuela had a whole different situation.
It had a dictator. So what the Republicans will do is say, uh-oh, you mean like Venezuela?
So the Republicans turn Democratic Socialist, which we can see works, because it's working in Europe, they turn it into Venezuela, which is a completely different situation.
So the Democrats are just giving it back with this nationalist thing.
Right.
So here's my recommendation.
Don't get into arguments with people who are defining words differently.
I call that word thinking.
If somebody is trying to win an argument by changing the definition of a word, they're not involved in facts, they're not involved in reason, they're not involved in any kind of the rational part of the world.
Now if you want to talk to somebody who's not involved in any rational discussion, Well, just know what you're getting into.
You're not getting into a conversation where one of you is going to win because the other person is not even on the same playing field.
They're not attempting to do anything with logic or reason or anything.
They're just trying to use a word.
Hey, maybe if I change the definition of the word, I'll get in the back door.
Maybe I'll convince people by changing what words mean.
There's no point in engaging anybody on that level.
Benioff compared using Facebook to a deadly cigarette addiction.
Interesting. Now, I haven't seen that quote, but if I take your word for it, anonymous commenter, that Mark Benioff, CEO and founder of Salesforce, has compared Facebook addiction, and I would imagine that would be true of social media addiction just in general, to a cigarette addiction.
I would say add that to the reasons I like Mark Benioff.
That guy's the real deal.
He could be the president someday.
By the way, if Mark Benioff runs for president as a Democrat, he's going to be the president.
I've never heard him say he had any interest in it, so I don't know if he does or not.
But I want you to hear it here first.
If Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, ever decides to run for president, he'll be the president.
You could take that to the bank.
But I've never heard him say he's interested.
Somebody said, why?
Well, I spent a little bit of time talking with him personally, so I got a sense of the person.
And I've also been watching him for a long time.
His capability...
His ability to show empathy, his intelligence, his success, his consistency.
I'm not aware of any scandals.
I'm sure if he ran for president, somebody would find one or manufacture one.
His work is charitable.
He's turned a major corporation into a giving machine with his 1%, 1%, 1% thing.
So Salesforce is already sort of a hybrid company.
Because it's a capitalist country, but it's based on a very strong principle of giving away some percentage of that to the people who need it.
And he's an empathetic character, meaning you can tell he cares.
Remember, Benioff is a guy who...
I forget if he initiated it.
I think he initiated it. A check within his company to make sure that women were not underpaid.
And he found out that to his horror, in his own company, there were actually a number of examples in which he was convinced That women were underpaid.
And he just, in one swoop, he adjusted all of it.
And he didn't adjust the men down.
He adjusted the women up.
Now, that had to be really expensive.
And I don't know if the way you measure these things is really fair.
All right? Because there's always the, how much experience did you have and all that.
But he didn't care.
He just adjusted it anyway.
That's a guy who can win.
That dude can't win when Democrats are expecting women.
He has been so pro-women that he's actually got a better track record with women than most women do.
And he also has more persuasive capabilities than just about anybody else.
So he's a Trump-like character in terms of persuasion and business acumen, but without the provocative parts.
If you took President Trump and removed the provocative parts, I guess the risky stuff, if you took that out, you'd kind of get...
Benioff. And Benioff is probably one of the smarter people you'll ever meet.
So, IQ-wise, he also pins the needle.
You know, it's funny.
I've been saying that the Democrats would never run an adult white male.
But I also was not considering somebody like Benioff.
He would be the exception.
He would be like the Trump-like exception where, you know, before if you said, could somebody run for president who had never held a government job, if you had asked me that question just in general, I would say, hmm, I don't think so.
I think you have to have a little bit of government experience before you can be the president.
But then the exception to the rule was President Trump.
So there's something about his personality that makes the rules not count.
Likewise, I've said that the Democrats are never going to be happy with an adult white male candidate because of the mixture of their coalition.
But Benioff would be the exception.
He does have the capability that he could break through that like it wasn't even there.
How would he handle identity politics?
Better than anybody else has handled it.
Probably. Alright, we don't need to get into too many details on that because I suspect he is not planning to run so we don't need to make a big deal about that.
Talk about Ram.
You mean Emmanuel? I met Ram Emmanuel.
He wouldn't remember it because it was just a random meeting, but I shook his hand once.
Yeah, I don't have much to say about Ram.
Ram.
Don't know enough about him.
North Korea, we've talked about that.
Everything's going fine in North Korea.
The news is reporting it like maybe it isn't, but it's exactly where we should expect to be at this stage.
Let's talk about the Middle East.
I did an afternoon periscope on the Middle East.
I don't know how many of you have seen it.
But I had suggested that the That the elements are lining up for something maybe to happen in the Middle East that would be good.
And I guess the defense minister has resigned over the fact that Netanyahu and Hamas are talking about a ceasefire.
And the defense minister I think wanted to be more hardcore and go after the fighters.
And remember I was telling you yesterday that Hamas needs, in order for Hamas to change its current mode, which seems important for anything else to happen, they need to have something they could identify as a win.
And the reason the defense minister is quitting is because he says it looks like we're letting Hamas win.
And Hamas is celebrating because they think that the defense minister quitting is an indication that they're winning.
Now, you don't want to get ahead of yourself with any of this Middle East stuff because the odds of peace in the Middle East are probably small no matter what.
But I've made the argument that we're closer to being able to get peace than maybe has ever been the case because of the unique characters that are involved right now, the leaders that are involved, how they would work with each other, the incentives, the fact that Iran's losing money and looks like it will just get worse forever.
Israel's getting stronger forever.
There's no way anything's gonna go well.
You might as well just make a deal now.
You've got the right characters.
You've got Saudi Arabia's probably flexible at the moment.
So there might be a way to make a grand deal.
And here's another persuasion tip.
This will be one of the most valuable persuasion tips you'll ever see, and it fits in with the Octavia Cortez persuasion points I was making.
If you had a choice of making either a deal for Israel and Amas to have some kind of a You know, a non-military situation, you know, some kind of a ceasefire, some kind of a peace.
If your choice was to see if you could get that, just that, just Israel and Hamas, you know, not fighting, should you go for it?
Well, if that's the only thing, it's the only chance you have, maybe you should.
But compare that to trying to make a grand plan Where everybody's getting something and giving something from Yemen to Saudi Arabia to Iran to the nuclear deal to Syria to Russia.
Look how complicated this is.
How many countries? If you could make a deal for all of those things, for a grand plan, which would be more likely to happen?
Which is more likely?
The little one? Just Damas and Israel?
Or this big Middle East Complicated and messy.
You can't imagine how all these elements could ever be negotiated and fixed.
Which one's more likely? If you said the simple one is the more likely, you don't understand persuasion.
The big one is more likely.
The big impossible one is more likely.
Why? Because some things that are big and impossible take all of our attention.
We think that things are going to happen if you're talking big.
When you take something that could be small and you make it gigantic, then you have everybody's attention and you have everybody trying to figure out how to make it work and everybody's working toward a common thing.
If you keep it small, people can ignore it, they can wait for it to go away, etc.
So the big win in the Middle East might be And I'm not predicting this.
I'm just saying we're closer than we've ever been to something like a good situation in the Middle East.
It could be that by making it gigantic, like a grand deal, instead of a little deal that's just Israel and Hamas, or a little deal that's just Yemen, we'll stop funding the sides in Yemen, or a little deal that's just...
Iran, why don't you stay out of Syria?
Or a little deal, like, well, what's Russia going to keep on doing with Syria?
Or a little deal. See, there's a whole bunch of little deals.
Little deals are kind of hard, because you have the option of just, eh, it's a little deal, I'll think about something else.
But if you make it a grand plan, To solve all of that stuff at once.
Just everybody put it on the table.
What are the things you have to have?
What are the things you'd give up?
What are the things you'd give? See if you can make a grand deal.
Ashton, go share.
All right.
What gigantic thing would bring the U.S. together?
War.
and Or, let me, and I'm not, obviously I don't hope that happens, but let me tell you something that is confusing a lot of people.
People keep asking me, how can the president be persuasive if his, well the way people say it, the critics usually, is they say, how could Trump be persuasive if he hasn't persuaded me?
And he hasn't persuaded 50-60% of the public.
How can you be persuasive if your approval is only 42%?
The majority of people are not persuaded.
Scott, how can you call that persuasive?
Here's how. We no longer live in a world in which you can persuade the other team.
We don't live in that world anymore.
And there's a reason. It's because once technology allowed us to measure how the effects of headlines and the news were affecting clicks, and those clicks affect profits, once the news became sort of a team sport where they would never,
literally never, try to understand the other side, you lost the ability, probably forever, We lost the ability for anybody to persuade the other team.
It is no longer a thing to persuade the other team.
It'll never happen again, maybe.
The only thing you can persuade, the only thing that's in play, is your own side.
So if you could get to 90% approval within your own team, you should be considered the most Persuasive person in the world.
If anybody could do that on the other team going forward, in the past, both teams had popular people, right?
But if the Democrats can get any candidate in 2020 to get to a 90% approval within their own party, I'm going to say that person is really persuasive.
Bernie Clinton only got half of his own side.
Clinton got most of her side and she got more votes even than Trump.
But there were a whole lot of people on her side who really still wanted Bernie.
That was a special case where she had the money and the name and everything.
But if you take that stuff out, I don't think it's going to be common for anybody to even persuade 90% of their own side anymore.
That's sort of the standard.
I got in the back and forth on Twitter about my predictive abilities.
And one of the predictions that my critic called out is that he said, I'll have to paraphrase this because I don't have it, but he said that I had claimed that when the election happened that the temperature would go down and that the hysteria would go down.
And my critic said, ha ha, That's clearly not the case.
The hysteria has not gotten less, and therefore your prediction that once the election happened, the hysteria would subside, you are wrong.
There's more hysteria than ever, so I guess you're wrong.
To which I responded, during the election, people thought that there were going to be, and I'm not making this up, you remember it, right?
People thought there were going to be concentration camps for gays.
When President Trump got elected, that was an actual belief.
Clearly that's not going to happen.
There were people who thought the entire economy would crash and they were entering a depression.
I don't see anybody worried about that anymore.
People thought that the president would start a nuclear war.
It looks like the opposite is happening.
He might be the safest president we've ever had.
Look at North Korea, for example.
People thought that it would be crazy if he went into these trade wars because then we'd be in some terrible trade war problem.
Not true. Doesn't seem to be a problem at all.
People thought that Roe vs.
Wade would be overturned.
Well, I can't say that it will never be impacted.
But I think people realize now that even if it did, it would just get kicked back to the states and that the conservatives on the court really, really, really like precedent.
So the odds of it changing are actually kind of low.
It might. And, you know, the people on the left have a perfectly reasonable reason to be worried if that's their priority.
But the odds of it are kind of low, right?
It looks like lower now than it really was, although I think some people would disagree about that.
So if you look at today, what are the things that people are worked up about today compared to during the election?
This is one of the best predictions I've ever made.
We're not worried about concentration camps.
We're not worried about depressions.
We're not worried about nuclear war.
I don't even know how worried we are about climate change.
It's probably the same, but it's not really so much because Trump did or did not do anything.
It's just that there's nothing you can do.
So I would argue that the things we will work up...
Oh, and then what about Russian collusion?
Remember, Russian collusion was there was some certainty that the president was actually more aligned with Russia than with the United States.
That was a real belief.
I don't think that's a belief anymore.
Do you? Do you think that even the president's critics still believe that he's working with Putin?
I don't think so, because the evidence has failed to materialize.
So, it might be true that people are still emotionally worked up.
But look at the things they're worried about.
Check the headlines.
Here are the headlines. Compare these headlines to concentration camps, depressions, and nuclear war.
Those are the things we worried about before.
Now here are the headlines.
New White House fury comes from the First Lady.
The top story, the top story on CNN is that the First Lady didn't like somebody who worked at the White House.
Right? Am I wrong about that?
That's the top story. Now, yeah, somebody mentioned the wildfires, and the wildfires are a gigantic problem, but it's not really a President Trump problem, right?
He didn't really cause that.
Let's look at some of the other big stories.
Don Lemon says there's chaos in the White House because of Melania, I guess.
That's the story. Those are the top stories.
Think about that. These are your top worries in the country is that Melania was being to somebody in the White House.
Here's some other top stories.
The singer named Pink.
Pink's husband has a warning for wildfire looters.
That's a top story.
There's a husband of a singing rock star who's warning people not to loot.
That's it. Here are some other top stories.
There's a lot of vote counting in Florida.
And all the right people who want a good result.
Look at even the Florida story.
What's the biggest problem with the election?
Is that Florida looks sketchy.
But what's happening?
It's easy to look at just the negative.
But what's happening in Florida?
Florida is causing us To all scream at the top of our lungs that we want the same thing.
How weird is that?
In Florida, you have two sides that are violently agreeing that every legal vote has to be counted.
If your biggest problem is two people yelling at each other the same thing, hey, I like the color green.
Oh yeah? Well, I like the color green too.
That's our biggest problem right now.
People violently yelling at each other that all the legal votes should be included.
If that's your problem, you're in a pretty good place.
Let's look at some other top stories.
Nothing. Yeah, I mean, basically nothing.
The others are crime stories, local crime.
Now, give me a fact check.
Have I made my case that the things people were afraid of during the election did not materialize, and the things we're complaining about, and yet our emotions are still at a 10?
I will agree with that.
Emotionally, we're still at 10 out of 10.
But the problems we're worried about are absolute bullshit.
They're complete bullshit problems.
What about the caravan?
The caravan...
No matter which way it went, it was probably somewhat unimportant.
We don't need more crime than we have to have, and we have to have rules, and all of the discussion about it is important.
But it's not important like nuclear war.
It's not important like a depression.
Because no matter what was going to happen with this caravan, it probably would have led to some tightening and improvement in the border.
Probably just didn't make that much difference.
Those are our biggest problems.
And they're not much of a problem.
Do you know why healthcare is the top concern?
Healthcare is the top concern because most of the other big problems got solved or are on their way to being solved.
We're not talking about ISIS, so we can talk about healthcare.
We're not talking about the economy, not talking about jobs.
There's a lot of things we're not talking about anymore, simply because they're being handled quite well.
All right. By the way, am I wrong about this?
Am I wrong that the problems that we were worried about, mostly the other side, were worried about during the election were gigantic, world-ending problems, and the stuff we're talking about now is Melania didn't like somebody in the White House?
I mean, these are fundamentally different levels of problems.
Now, the fentanyl problem is still huge, and There is some government action that looks productive in that way, but we weren't talking about those things during the election, and that's not really a political problem to begin with.
Look at other things we're talking about.
We're talking about prison reform.
These are just all positive things.
19 African-American women ran for judge jobs in one county, and 19 out of 19 Black women won their elections in Texas.
I don't know if I can say that enough times.
I'm going to say it three times.
1919 black women ran for judge jobs in Texas and all 19 won.
I could just say that all day long.
I just love the sound of it.
If that's not a positive sign for the country, what the hell is?
If anything, we're going to be talking about How other people can compete with that kind of success.
You gotta give it to black women.
They're killing it. They're killing it.
So, how about some props for that group?
Alright. So, there's a polar bear story.
Um... Prison reform is not happening.
They get trained to work, but nobody hires them.
Well, I think prison reform is one of the toughest things you could ever tackle, which is also a good sign that we're tackling it.
It means that other problems have reached a level where you can put resources into this really intractable, tough problem.
And I think it's like everything else.
You try some stuff, You just push forward, see what works, what doesn't.
If any of it works, you keep pushing.
Well, let's get rid of the racist. ...
All right. Yeah.
I'm looking at your comments, and I heard some celebrity homes burn down in California.
Yeah, that's the sort of...
It's bothersome to me, and probably to most of you, that we talk about celebrity homes being burned down in California.
And I get there's an obvious reason why that's a story, and you can't stop it.
But... You know, there are tens of thousands of people who can't afford.
They can't afford to rebuild.
And it's a major setback in their life.
And they're not celebrities.
So for the dozen or so celebrities we've heard of who lose their homes, those are all the ones who can afford to rebuild.
They'll just build nicer places in different places.
Oh, Blight Authority for California.
Yeah, you know, I've been working with Bill Pulte and you'll see some more of that in a few weeks.
You're going to see some more coming from us.
On what to do with the blighted and cleared land in urban areas.
But it seems to me that the question of how do you build economically so that people can have a high quality life at a low cost?
How do you make a good building that you can live in for a low price?
It feels like that's important everywhere now.
Because look, you've got all these natural disasters where after it's done, you need to rebuild.
And a lot of the people who are rebuilding are not the rich people.
So wouldn't it be great if we had a technology for rebuilding that was very super efficient and low cost?
If you look at the people who are coming across the border, what would the immigration look like if the people south of the border had ways to build really cool, efficient, low cost homes that makes the cost of living much less?
Would they be more inclined to stay where they are because they could build their own home with a kit, for example?
So it seems to me that this big question of how do you design a low-cost life so that people who never will have high incomes can still have a great life like the middle class used to?
When I grew up, we didn't have much income, but we still had, compared to what you could have today, a pretty good life.
It didn't take that much money to have a reasonable job.
My father worked in the post office as just a clerk who stands at the post office window.
And with odd jobs, and he worked some painting at night and weekends and stuff, he worked pretty hard.
And my mother worked a little bit.
But with that low level of income, we had our own house.
We had cars that worked most of the time.
And that world has gone away.
Yeah, maybe it's tiny homes with solar panels on the roof.
But I don't even know that they need to be tiny.
So I think the tiny part is somewhat irrelevant too.
I think we could build homes that are literally kits and that it's like Legos and you could snap it together and that one person, in theory, you could create a home that one person could build with their own two hands.
Just snap it together and you'd make it so the directions are clear and things can only go together one way.
Let me give you one example of how much improvement you could make with home building.
The materials for building homes always come in standard sizes.
Like a floor panel might be one foot by one foot.
Lumber is exactly the same length all the time.
If you were to build a home in which your design required you not to cut anything, You just buy everything off the shelf and your lumber is this long so that the size of your rooms are either this or twice this.
You could probably snap it together pretty quickly.
Now, the current materials, maybe that's not the best idea, but if you designed materials that by their design were meant to snap together, I've got a feeling you could make a snap together home and it would be inexpensive and Maybe better than other homes.
It doesn't have to be worse because it costs less.
It could be better. They already have manufactured homes, but if you've watched the process, it requires heavy equipment.
You need a crane. You've got to transport this house.
And then the house that's built in the factory is built by probably union-type labor and lots of overhead and expense.
What if you got rid of all that?
You could get rid of the factory.
You could get rid of all the labor.
You could have the parts made in the factories and sent directly to the site, and then the people just assemble it.
There was a Sears home that was like this 40 years ago.
Yeah, so imagine how much better we could do if we use that process today with modern, you know, everything we know about modern construction and materials and 3D printers.
You know, I've imagined, for example, that Just imagine this model.
You've got a home that you've designed the community so that you have all the things that community needs.
So you've got your people the same age, you've designed it so it has good security, you've got basically all your social needs are met.
So you want to design the community first, not just the house.
But then imagine that the house All of the building block stuff is a kit.
You can pick it up, snap it together.
And then all the little stuff like the knobs and the faucets and the doorknobs is all 3D printed on site.
So that all the little metal stuff and plastic stuff and the parts and the connectors and stuff, you just print it on site.
So the only thing that gets shipped to the site Is the stuff that comes in standard kit-sized forms.
You snap together. When you're ready to put on the doorknobs, the 3D printer makes you some doorknobs.
You snap them on. Alright.
More on that later.
And I'll talk to you all another time.
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