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Jan. 27, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:01:09
Episode 393 Scott Adams: Democrats Once Again Winning the Game No One Was Playing
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Sunday version of coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm Scott Adams. This is my coffee.
You probably have something like this too.
Might be a different beverage, but I'll bet you have it in a cup or a mug or a glass or a stein.
Probably a chalice, maybe a thermos.
But it's time now to join me for the simultaneous sip.
Raise your mug, your glass, your thermos, and join me.
Ah, good stuff. - Yeah.
So, I keep hoping for different news, you know, a little bit of new news, something we haven't already talked about, but it appears that that's not going to happen, so let's talk more about the government reopening and border wall security.
Now, I heard Rick Santorum say something on CNN with Anderson Cooper that was, it's one of those things that makes you feel bad because you didn't already think of it.
So I tweeted it, so some of you have already seen it.
But think about how mad you are that you didn't think of saying what Rick Santorum said.
And here's what he said.
He said that if you're blaming Trump for keeping the government closed, you can't also blame him and say he's doing the wrong thing by opening it.
Or to put it in his words, if not doing what Nancy Pelosi wanted was wrong, and then he does the reverse and gives Nancy Pelosi what she wants, which is opening the government, they can't both be wrong.
And I watched, if you watch the clip, it's great because Kirsten Powers and Maggie Haberman, who are, you know, big anti-Trumpers, they're sitting there listening to that and they're thinking, yeah, that's sort of a point I don't know how to argue against.
It can't be wrong if you're not doing a thing and then when you do the thing that you're still wrong both ways.
It really exposes what's going on, which is that there's some kind of horse race thing going on that has nothing to do with the good of the country, etc.
So I thought that was kind of brilliant.
Here's the other thing I'm thinking about what people are saying is caving.
The president is caving in.
And I'm thinking, if you were playing a chess game, And you sacrificed a pawn, would the people watching the chess game say, he caved in, he caved, he caved in, woo woo woo, celebrate, celebrate? Or would the people who know how to play chess say, um, you probably want to wait till the game is over, because that chess, that pawn was not very important?
So, do you remember when the President was, candidate Trump, was running for President?
And when he was running for President, he said, if you elect me, I will close the government and not pay 800,000 people.
Do you remember when the President promised us he would do that?
No, he didn't. Nobody promised that.
Nobody promised it at all.
So, if he reopens the government, That's not exactly a big thing, because closing it was never a promise.
Opening it was never a promise.
None of these things were terribly close to the thing that people wanted when they elected them, which was better border security.
Now here's the other thing.
There's another cognitive blind spot here.
That, in a way, is hilarious.
And I think it's a blind spot, but it could be just the other side trying to be persuasive and acting like they can't see the obvious.
But here's the setup.
The Trump supporters say they want a wall.
They want a wall.
But it's also true, and correct me if this is, you know, if you disagree, but hasn't President Trump said from the beginning That it's not one long continuous wall, but that there would be, you know, smart choices based on where you put large structures, etc., and that it would be a variety of solutions.
Is it not true that President Trump has been saying that from the beginning?
Now, he has de-emphasized it for persuasion purposes, so he'll just call it the wall, but when he's pressed, Consistently and every time, he'll say, no, no, not a wall 100% of the way.
So that's always been true, and I'm pretty sure that his base has, at least in the past year or so, has certainly heard it that way.
They've heard that it was never meant to be a continuous, solid, concrete wall.
Now, if the president promised better border security in the form of a wall, and he doesn't get that, But what he gets is an expert panel who says for the amount of money that we can get, whatever it is, five billion or somewhere in that range, whatever that turns out to be, the best way to secure the border is to allocate this five billion dollars the following way.
Some of it more scanning, maybe you do something with adding some judges, You know, because everybody agrees fewer kids in cages and a better system would be good for everybody.
And they might say that what the experts are going to deliver, assuming that they're really experts, is the most cost-effective way to give voters what they wanted when they said we want a wall.
So, how hard is it for Trump to sell the following proposition to his base?
I promised you a wall, we got a lot of money, and the experts said, we can give you something better than a wall.
For the same five billion, we'll build something that's far more suited for the terrain, far more focused, far better use of the money, Because you don't want to be building a wall in places that no wall is needed.
How hard will it be for Trump to sell to his base a better solution, a better solution unambiguously, better solution than what he promised?
So the Democrats have decided that they're in the victorious lane now because they've forced the president into accepting A better engineering solution for what he wanted.
That looks like where we're headed.
It looks like at the end of this, there'll be some money allocated.
There'll probably be some other comprehensive, you know, elements of immigration that might be handled at the same time.
We'll see. But none of them really cared about that much.
It seems to me that the inevitable direction of this is that experts will say, you wanted a wall, here's something a little bit better.
And the Democrats are saying, how is he possibly going to explain to his base that he spent the money better than he promised and got a more effective solution because he listened to the experts?
Is that really a problem?
That's the problem he has?
That's kind of the problem I want.
Yeah, I've heard the phrase, somebody just said, smart wall.
Has the president used the phrase smart wall as something somebody else is saying?
Because it kind of works.
It kind of works. Smart wall is sort of what we're going to get.
And I don't think that's a terrible explanation of it.
Now, here's the next point that I made in a tweet and I made yesterday.
President Trump has never been competing against Nancy Pelosi.
That's not the comparison that makes sense.
He's trying to work with her and she's not helping, which is different from competing with her.
I used this example yesterday.
If I hire a plumber and the plumber doesn't fix my leak, you would not say that the plumber competed with me and won.
You wouldn't say that. You'd say, I hired a guy who didn't do his job.
The president is a higher rank than the Speaker of the House.
He's trying to get her to do her job in a way that he wants, and she's not coming through.
That's not winning. That's not doing your job.
And then I've said, provocatively, that the real comparison that you have to make here is when voters said we choose Trump over Clinton in the election.
A big reason they did that is that Trump's version of border security and immigration was the one they liked compared to the Hillary Clinton version.
Does anybody believe that if Hillary Clinton was president, we would get as much of whatever is going to come out of this, as much immigration spending and as much of an emphasis on it?
Does anybody believe that?
Because you would have to believe that Hillary Clinton would have done as well or better than President Trump getting border security of some form, some kind of smart wall or any other kind of improvement.
Somebody says, wrong.
Good argument. Wrong.
So, a number of people came to me and said, Scott, how ridiculous.
You can't compare A plan, like President Trump's plan, to an imaginary president.
You can't compare him to an imaginary president.
No CEO, somebody said on Twitter this morning, no CEO is compared to an imaginary CEO who doesn't have the job.
To which I say, yes they are.
Every time. Every CEO is compared all the time To the CEO you have in your mind, the one that's the other one.
And the moment that CEO that you have is, in your opinion, less good than the CEO that could have had the job, the imaginary one, you fire the CEO every time.
That CEO is always competing against the imaginary CEO. The CEO is not competing against the secretary, not competing against the The people in quality assurance.
The CEO is only competing against your imagination of what another CEO would do in the same situation.
That's it. If I give you a proposal for an investment, and let's say I'm in a big company, and I say, I want to spend a million dollars and we want to do it this way.
The first thing your boss says, if your boss is qualified, is what's the second best thing we could do, let's say in the same domain, to solve the problem.
And then you say the second best thing.
The second best thing is imaginary, because it's the one you're not going to do.
And the proposal that you made is also imaginary.
When you're considering proposals, You're always comparing two imaginary propositions.
That's the only way it's done.
People are telling me, yeah, I can't compare imaginary things, to which I say, no, that's the only thing you can do, because we're talking about the future.
The future hasn't happened.
If you're comparing plans for the future, they're always imaginary.
That's it. There's no exception to that.
There's no such thing as a real plan that's happened in the future.
That's why it's the future. So, when people say to me, no, no, you can't compare President Trump to the imaginary situation where Hillary Clinton became president, I say, if you learn how to compare things, let's say you took economics, let's say you have an MBA, a lot of people with engineering degrees will confirm that this is true.
It's the only comparison that makes sense.
President Trump now to what you would have gotten if you'd voted for the other candidate.
That's the only comparison that is smart, relevant, and coherent.
Somebody says, I'm moving the goalposts.
All right, here's why that's dumb.
So what somebody's saying is, oh, you're moving the goalposts because now you're saying you're comparing him to an imaginary person.
I have always said this.
So you can't compare what I'm saying to what people who are not me have said at different times who had different goalposts.
You can't compare my consistent goalpost that from day one has always been comparing a president to the imaginary president.
It's something I've said in public.
It is literally written in my book that I just handed in in the first draft.
It has always been my preferred way.
Somebody says, goalposts move yet again.
Try to listen. Try to focus a little bit harder on my words.
My goalpost has never moved.
It has always been the only smart comparison is to the president you didn't get.
If this president gets more security than what you think you would have gotten from the other one, that's the only goalpost I've ever had.
So if your complaint is that someone who is not me had a different opinion, you're not really in the logical conversation here.
Because I'm not really responsible for the opinions of strangers.
I will acknowledge that strangers had different goalposts than mine, which have always been the same.
We'll get rid of you.
So, when you hear me say stuff like this, you can see the critics coming in, and they're just so mad.
But they don't have reasons, do they?
If you're accusing me of moving the goalposts, you're on very thin ice.
Because what you're trying to do is compare my goalposts that have always been the same to some stranger.
I'm not responsible for somebody else's goalpost.
Why would I be? Now, would it have been fun if President Trump had prevailed and Nancy Pelosi had said, my god, I can't keep this government closed one more day, the pressure's too hard, I give you your budget and here's your wall.
That would have been cool.
And unambiguously, I would have said under that situation, hey, I guess he did a good job of negotiating there.
But, President Trump never promised us an open or closed government.
President Trump never said, if you elect me, I will defeat Nancy Pelosi in an immaterial contest.
It was never my goalpost.
It was fun to watch, and I would have enjoyed it if it had gone a different way.
But the way it went gets us to this current situation.
Here's the part That the pundits and the anti-Trumpers especially...
Somebody's calling this BS to spin.
I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry for the people who think this is spin.
If you think it's spin, you're going to have to answer to why is it that all economists and MBAs would compare things the same way I am?
Why is it that my goalposts have never changed?
In fact, it's written, and I've talked about it a long time.
And you would also have to explain why I've been saying since, maybe some of you have a better idea, how long I've been saying that the only way this would end up is with the engineers.
You could say the experts, but the experts and the engineers are the same working group, essentially.
How long have I been saying that this is where it would end up?
So because I'm the one who predicted it, and as far as I know, the first person in the world to say that this is definitely going to go to some expert group, because it's the only way to get out of the political argument.
You have to move it over to the technocrats.
Engineers don't make budgets!
Yes, in all caps.
So somebody says, engineers don't make budgets.
And finally, that's a good question.
So finally I get a criticism that's a good criticism.
Now here's my answer to it.
This working group is going to be a combination of experts about border security, engineers who know what things cost and what's the best way to do things, and then political people who will be the primary ones who are negotiating the budget.
The experts will give them a range of options.
If you spend this much, this is what I'll get you.
If you can spend this much, I'll get you this.
If you spend this much, I'll get you this.
So whoever said, engineers don't come up with a budget, you're absolutely right.
The engineers come up with a cost, and then the political people are going to have to decide how much of that cost they want to commit to.
If they commit to this much, they're going to get this much wall.
If they commit to this much, they'll get this much wall.
But in every case, it's the engineers and the experts who will tell you what's the reasonable way to spend that much money.
So, yes, you're right.
The budget decision is a political decision.
All right. Yeah, and people keep yelling at me, But the engineers can't do it alone.
You have to have experienced border patrol people, and of course that's true.
The correct people to have in the room are engineers, border security experts, the people who actually do the job of border security, And the politicians who are going to make some budget decisions.
Those are the ones who should have been in the room all along, and it was obvious that we would eventually get here.
I'm the only person who told you this is where we would end up.
So if you're telling me I'm moving the goalposts, these have been my goalposts all along.
I am not going to take responsibility for anybody else's bad guesses about what's going on.
A wall is permanent.
So some people are saying that the wall is better because the wall is permanent versus any other thing you do that's not a wall would be not permanent.
Have you heard of a gate?
There's no such thing as a permanent wall.
There's no such thing as a permanent wall.
If the next administration wants people to not be stopped by a wall, Do you think they're going to say to themselves, my God, we built a wall, but what we really want is people to get through it.
I can't imagine any way to fix this.
Maybe open a door.
Maybe stop trying to stop them when they climb over.
Maybe let them lean a ladder against both sides.
A wall doesn't stop anybody unless the human beings want it to.
It's not the physical wall that stops anybody.
It's the physical wall plus the humans who want the wall to work.
If the human said, well, we built a wall, but we don't really want it to work, it wouldn't.
The same day that the government said, we have a wall, but we really don't care about it working, the immigrants would come up with ropes and ladders, they would throw it over the wall, and they would just leave those ropes and ladders there.
Because the only thing that stops people from going over a wall is rigging up some way to get over it that isn't immediately taken down by humans.
If the humans want people to get over a wall someday in the future, they just won't take down the ladders.
They just won't remove the ropes.
They just won't lock the doors.
It's easy to let people through a wall.
So perhaps, somebody says walls work.
You're such on a different conversation here.
Of course walls work in terms of creating friction.
Of course they do. But they only work if the people who built the wall are doing the human part of making the wall work.
Short of that, the walls do not work.
And citizens can overcome the state and remove the letters.
I suppose citizens could do that, but inevitably, if the government stops enforcing border security, it's not going to help you that a wall is there.
It just won't. People will just go somewhere.
where there's no wall.
All right.
Border security is a debt issue, and nothing's going to change.
Well, let me ask you this. Maybe somebody can fact check me on this.
The reason Trump is asking for $5.7 billion in the budget and the reason it's being resisted, correct me if I'm wrong, is that it is not the normal maintenance level Of just, you know, ordinary improvements to the wall.
Am I wrong? That the 5.7 billion is, by everybody's understanding, more than would have happened if the baseline budget had just continued and they had some, you know, ordinary maintenance in there that probably is in the budget.
So what Hillary Clinton had said, oh, we need more than just baseline maintenance that's already in the budget, Let's add another 5.7 billion?
I don't think so.
Probably not. And when we're talking about the 200 miles of new security, how important is that on a 2,000 mile border?
It's only 200 miles.
Well, here's how.
I would look to the 80-20 rule to answer this.
First of all, half of the border, probably you couldn't put a wall there anyway, because there are mountains and there are water hazards.
So you're really talking about 1,000 miles.
So you're talking about 200 miles that you're improving out of 1,000 miles.
Of that 1,000 miles, we should assume that much of it is already secure, at least the parts that were the most important.
I would imagine that the 200 miles that need extra help are the most critical on the border, because why else would they put it there unless those are the critical places?
So probably there's an 80-20 rule going on that if they do a good job and the 20% of the border that's the biggest problem, they'll get about 80% of the benefit.
So does it make sense to spend 20% to get an 80% benefit?
Yeah, of course.
Of course it does.
Talk about the Starbucks guy.
Yeah, so...
I forget his name.
Schultz? Howard Schultz.
CEO, founder of Starbucks, is reportedly considering a third-party run.
And if he did, people think it will suck off votes from the Democrats and cause them to lose again.
And I thought...
I don't see it happening.
It's Howard Schultz, not Charles Schultz.
I don't see it happening because I don't see a world in which Schultz can be so popular for creating Starbucks, right?
It's a pretty popular thing to be the founder of Starbucks.
I don't see him going from the popular founder of Starbucks to the guy who got Trump re-elected.
Do you think he wants to do that?
I just don't see it happening.
Now, I suppose it falls into the category of anything could happen.
Now, if I were him, I would make the following calculation.
The calculation would go like this.
You could hold Trump to 30% of the vote, you could hold maybe the Democrats to 30% of the vote, and he could still win.
So I think the only way he would get in as a third party is if he thought he could split both parties.
So if he did some polling and he said, oh, I can take enough of the Republicans that I can actually degrade both sides and have a plurality.
Now, if he thinks that, that would be, to me it seems, highly unrealistic.
We'll see. Who's Andrew Yang?
I don't know.
Is Andrew Yang the founder of Yahoo?
Yahoo?
Oh, is McAfee campaigning?
Yeah, a lot might depend on Ruth Gator Ginsburg, because if she isn't healthy enough to go on, that is going to definitely focus everybody's that is going to definitely focus everybody's attention on the Supreme Court.
Let me ask you this.
At the end of this three weeks, or in my opinion, it'll probably get extended again.
So I don't think the three weeks is going to hold.
I think it'll get extended. At the end of it, is there anybody who thinks we'll have worse border security than before we started?
Here's what voters are going to look at when they look at Trump.
Tell me which part of this is unlikely.
Okay? Which part of this is unlikely?
It's 2020. We're getting ready for the vote and the re-election.
And the president's supporters know the following things to be true.
Number one thing that's true is that this president promised them a tight border security in the form of a wall.
That's true. The next thing is true It's that he gambled all of his political capital to get it done.
Let me say that again.
While we watched, this president, who other people say is obsessed with popularity, you know, just check that assumption, right?
This president who his critics say is obsessed with being liked and being popular, gambled his entire legacy And his reelection on this one promise.
True or false?
The president gambled everything right in front of us and intentionally to deliver this one thing.
Now, do you think that his base hasn't noticed the risk that he took to deliver this?
Succeed or fail, It looks to me obvious that he gambled it all.
He didn't leave anything on the table.
He gambled it all.
Now, in terms of effort, could he ask for more than that?
Well, of course you want him to succeed, right?
You would like him to get everything.
Maybe you thought he should have done something a little bit differently.
But on the one dimension of did he put his skin in the game, Did he gamble his entire legacy, his personal fortune in a sense, you know, his reputation, his brand, did he gamble at all to give his base the thing he promised him?
The answer is yes. He gambled at all.
Because that's why the Democrats are fighting it so hard.
They're not really fighting it because of the issue.
The Democrats, as has been well reported, Democrats like border security too.
Maybe in a different way, but they're not fundamentally, philosophically opposed to border security.
They're very opposed to the personality of the President and his success.
So the President gambled it all right in front of you, put it all on the line.
Now, no matter what you think, About the wall of border security.
I just don't think you can argue that point.
He put it all on the line.
He gambled everything he had built his entire life to deliver this one promise.
All right, so that's the first thing.
I think he can sell that because it's just unambiguously true.
He gambled it all. Gambled.
I say gambled might be the wrong word.
I would say he maybe gambled, but he He put his skin in the game and he put everything at risk.
Yeah, he risked it all.
Right, better word is risk.
He risked it all to deliver the promise.
How many politicians have done that?
When was the last time you saw a politician who said, maybe not explicitly, but said, well, I made this promise during the campaign and I'm just going to gamble it all on this.
I think maybe Obama and Obamacare, possibly.
That's a good analogy.
So I would not deny that Obama did the same thing with Obamacare, but maybe not as dangerous and not as big a risk.
That's the first thing.
Here's the second thing. At the end of this process, will reasonable people say, even the critics, will reasonable people say, at whatever is the end of this process, That the President improved border security in a cost-effective way?
Probably yes.
I don't see any scenario where he doesn't get substantially more money, something in the low billions, and that they do something that the experts endorse that is actually more efficient and a better use of the money than the wall.
So here are the three things people are going to know.
He risked it all for the voters, the voter form.
He risked it all. Everything he cares about, according to his critics, he put it all on the line for this one promise.
It was that important.
Two, he will get more than Hillary Clinton would have gotten.
And three, the specific form of what he gets Will be, by even his critics' opinion, a better solution, a better use of the money than what he promised.
So he's going to put it all on the line.
He's going to have something that looks like substantial improvement, border security, and he will be able to reasonably argue that even his critics agree he delivered a better solution than he promised.
Which of that is wrong?
Which part of that is not true?
Now, of course, the assumption here is that they wouldn't have this working group unless they planned to get something that wasn't going to happen anyway.
It may not be 5.7.
It may be more money for scanning than it is for walls.
But if the experts say that's how to spend the money, is Trump going to go to his base and say, Well, the experts said we should do it this way, and that would get us the most bang for the buck, reducing crime, reducing immigration.
So I decided to agree with the experts.
Is this base going to say, no, I wanted a wall because I'm so dumb, I cannot accept a superior solution when it's offered?
The big assumption The big assumption that the critics are making is that Trump supporters are so dumb they will not accept a superior solution.
Do you think that's true?
Do you think that Trump supporters are so dumb that when the experts say, a wall will get you something, but it's very expensive, And these other solutions, this bag of solutions, including better scanning and some other things, is actually a better use for the money.
Is this base going to say, no, we are experts at walls.
We are so smart.
We're smarter than the experts on border security.
And we should build a wall instead.
Will they? Somebody says yes.
Well, the answer, of course, is that some will.
Some percentage of his supporters will actually be that dumb.
But I don't think most of them.
I don't think most of them will be that dumb.
So we'll find out.
Now, could President Trump sell his base if he has, let's say, a year to work on before the next election?
If he has over a year to work on, can he convince them that a smart wall is better than a dumb wall?
And can he convince them that there's more border security than there would have been?
And can he convince them that listening to the experts and putting the money where it makes the most difference was smarter than just building a big dumb wall?
I think that's the easiest sale anybody made.
It's the easiest sale anybody could ever make.
Alright, what about the State of the Union?
State of the Union, I guess, is just a wait and see.
So Bernie Sanders is apparently going to run for president.
He doesn't have a chance.
But, you know, the thing I tweeted, I think yesterday, is you can never underestimate the ability of the Democrats to shoot themselves in the foot.
So when we're trying to imagine what's it going to look like when it comes to the election day and it's Trump versus whoever the Democratic candidate is, aren't you imagining that the Democrats just sort of don't make any big mistakes?
They just pick their best person, that person doesn't make any gigantic mistakes, and then they go into the election.
But your imagination of President Trump is that There will be all these weaknesses that they'll run against.
What happened this week when President Trump showed respect for Pelosi, respect for the House, and actually agreed with them to open the government, get back to negotiating, and do what reasonable people wanted him to do?
He's working pretty hard, it looks like, It looks to me that the president has changed his approach for the election.
Let me put it this way. When he was running for election, being outrageous was an advantage.
Okay? Let me say that again.
When he was first running for election and had never been president, the more outrageous he was, it was sort of an advantage.
Because he got all the attention, sucked all the attention away from competitors, etc.
Now he will have been the president for a full term by Election Day.
It's a different game, and it's a different persuasion set of variables.
As president, his best play is to be less outrageous and to be more standard.
So when somebody says, Our president negotiated with Pelosi and then decided that the humane thing to do would be to open the government.
Do you say to yourself, my God, that wild man, he agreed with the Speaker of the House and he opened the government because it's humane and most smart people thought it was about time to do it.
Who's going to say that's a problem?
Right? The most dangerous thing that Trump could do between now and Election Day It's to act normal.
The most dangerous thing he can do is just act normal.
To ratchet down his DEFCON 10 level of flight or fight instinct that people have been in for the last several years, just dial it down.
It's the strongest play.
Because the biggest complaint about Trump is that he's a big old, crazy, unpredictable, impulsive madman.
If he gives us 18 months of not being a crazy, impulsive madman who looks to be a dictator, if he just doesn't be that person for 18 months, it's going to be tough for Democrats to have something to run on.
Because what are they going to run on?
Kind of just health care.
And the health care problem is that nobody knows how to do it.
There's no way to make the money work.
Now, if I were running for president, and especially if I were running as a Republican, but I think I would do the same if I ran as independent or I ran as a Democrat.
If I ran for president, I would probably run as a Democrat, which you're going to hate, but I probably would.
And only because it'd be easier to win.
And I would say the following about health care. - Yeah.
I think that in our modern world, we should make it a goal that we don't know how to achieve.
That's the important part.
We don't know how to achieve it.
And we can't get there just by raising taxes.
But we should make it a goal to get as close as we can to 100% health care coverage for all citizens.
I think that the way to get there is through regulation changes, more competition, startups who are lowering the cost of things, etc.
There are a whole bunch of devices now you can connect to your smartphone to do everything from EKGs to blood tests.
You can test your oxygen, your blood, your EKG, a whole bunch of stuff.
So the cost of doctoring is going to be Potentially dropping fast, and the government could be part of encouraging that without actually creating a department or anything, but just putting attention where attention helps in the capitalist system.
So in my view, the most forward-looking thing to do is to say, it's sort of a moonshot.
We don't know how to get there, but it should be our goal as a just Humane society to take care of each other.
At least where it comes to healthcare.
Now you don't want to go socialist because we know that doesn't work and it turns you into Venezuela, right?
So there's nobody here who says, there's probably nobody on this periscope who's saying, yay, full socialism.
Nothing like that.
If the only way you could get to universal healthcare is just by raising taxes to, you know, $32 trillion more or whatever it is, Then I would say it doesn't work.
So it's not my suggestion that we do it in a way that doesn't work.
The suggestion is we figure out a way to make it work, and nobody's figured that out yet.
But I don't believe that is undoable.
Let me just say I think it's doable.
I think we could get there by being smart, And it might take a while, but it should be a crystal clear goal, whether you're a Republican, Independent, or anybody else, that you would like, without paying for it, without it coming out of your pocket, you should want your fellow citizens to have good health care.
And I think you do, right?
You just don't want to pay for it.
So how can we get there without you paying for it, and maybe even, here's the good part, Maybe even your costs would go down too.
Because if you can figure out, if the government can figure out how to get low-cost health care to people who can't afford it, that almost certainly is going to lower your costs as well.
Because, you know, whatever it does to lower costs for poor people will probably lower costs for rich people as well.
For example, if somebody invents a A gazillion dollars, and if somebody figures out how to make one for a fraction of that, that helps poor people, but it also helps people who were paying for health insurance.
So the best way to help the poor or the low-income get health care is to make it cheaper for everybody.
Don't you want that?
You should want that, right?
It could be that capitalism will get us there, but I think the government needs to be far more part of the process without creating a new bureaucracy.
Part of the process by putting a light on it.
It doesn't cost the government much to focus on things, and focus is probably what will get you there.
Insurance companies, yeah.
There's probably a lot one can do.
By changing regulations and rules and getting rid of artificial constraints and that sort of thing.
Now, I think I told you that I was in favor of New York City, apparently New York City, who's the mayor, de Blasio, wants to have universal health care within his city.
And you know that Gavin Newsom wants to have universal health care in California.
That's probably a much bigger ask.
But I'm totally in favor of somebody trying it.
Whether it's New York City, that's probably a good choice, actually.
Whether it's New York City or some other smaller city, I'd like to see somebody try it.
Let me give you some anecdotes to tell you what What it looks like to drive down health care costs.
I've been involved, and I won't give you details, but I've been involved lately with situations in which the biggest part of the health care problem for a person was to figure out what the heck is going wrong.
So the biggest problem that might take years, in both of these cases it took years, for somebody to find out What their real problem is?
What is the real thing that's causing the problem I've been having for years?
And it seems to me that if we got enough people tracking their healthcare data as well as their lifestyle choices, that you would be able to spot, oh, I have this problem, and all the people who drink grapefruit juice while jogging 10 miles a day have this same stomach problem.
So you can find out, I mean, that's a ridiculous example, but if you have enough data about people, just their lifestyle choices and their outcomes, you'll be able to eventually mine that data and find out, wait a minute, there are all these people who have exactly the same problem I do, and when you look for what we have in common, uh-oh, we just found it.
We also have, let's say, this blood test comes out a certain way, plus we're You know, plus we're a certain age.
You know, there'll be a certain number of maybe genes, right?
So we're approaching the point where information should lower our health care costs substantially.
I mean, maybe if I had to put a number on it, better information would probably lower our health care choices by 40%.
Does that seem like too much?
Think how often you take meds that turned out not to be the right ones and you just get rid of that because you have a better idea what are the right ones.
Suppose you go to the doctor 10 times to figure out what you could have gotten on one try if you had better data.
Probably something like 40% of all our healthcare costs are involved in information.
And information is definitely going to improve.
So I do think...
Okay, let me give you an example of a government effort that could lower healthcare costs, potentially.
Suppose the government made a big push on the information side.
And it might be working with, you know, Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway and Chase, whatever they call it now.
So it might be working with one of these big companies that is good with data and figuring out how to get enough people tracking their data.
Suppose the government said this.
All right, let's put it this way.
Suppose the government said It is going to be a government plan to get to universal healthcare but without raising anybody's taxes.
But we're going to do everything clever we can to get there.
We just don't know how, but it's like a moonshot.
We're going to figure it out.
We're just not going to raise your taxes.
I suppose the government said, all right, We could probably lower everybody's health care costs if more of you were tracking your lifestyle and health outcomes.
If you get enough people voluntarily doing it, you will all have better outcomes.
If the government said that and said, look, here are the ways you can track it, you know, it's not us, it's not a government tracking, and the government actually might not even have anything to do with it.
But suppose the government said, we all want to get here, here's one way you can really help.
How many Americans would immediately go out and get a Fitbit, get some kind of a diary, get an app, and start tracking their health care outcomes if the government said it's an important, like, it's a patriotic thing to do, and we should all be working in this direction, and this is something that you can do right away.
Just track all your outcomes.
A lot of people would do it.
You don't need everybody to do it.
Somebody says Big Brother.
No, Big Brother would be mandatory.
What I'm suggesting is that the government says, we'd love it if more of you would volunteer, but it's not mandatory.
If you do volunteer, we'll get enough data that we can have better health outcomes at a low cost.
All right, only health conscious people would do it.
I think you could get enough of everybody.
Why can't poor people have?
Yeah, and if it's optional, poor people don't have to have Fitbits and poor people don't have to be monitoring anything.
And if it's optional, Somebody says it's not mandatory until it becomes mandatory.
Wouldn't that be true for everything?
Are you afraid of everything that's optional because it might become mandatory?
And if it did become mandatory, would you really hate it?
I don't know. How about the tracking apps offering the option to share it with the government?
I don't even know if it's the government you want to share it with.
You know, I suppose no matter who has it, the government can get to it.
So the government can get to anybody's database, so it doesn't matter if the government has it, I guess.
They can get to it.
23andMe tried and the government stopped them.
You know, I did the 23andMe, if you haven't done this, it's really fascinating.
I did the 23andMe test and they continued to send me updates because they're learning more about what it means to have my set of genes.
So every once in a while they'll send an update and say, oh, we also found that you do or do not have a propensity for this or that health problem.
And they're actually updating as we go, even though I only did one test.
So, to me it seems that 23andMe is already helping my outcomes through information because it's telling me what I do have to worry about and what I don't based on my genetic propensities.
So the good news, for example, is I do not have a propensity for Alzheimer's.
That's good to know. Keep my DNA private.
I don't know that I need to do that.
I'll just tease you that there's a chapter in my upcoming book about privacy, and I think we may get it wrong on privacy quite often.
Let me give you a quick argument.
Years ago, Before gay rights, gay people were in the closet, so to speak.
So if you were gay, you had to keep it to yourself because it would be too dangerous.
Was that a good environment for being gay?
The answer is no, it was the worst because you had to, you know, Your true identity hidden, and if it came out, you could lose your job, people would discriminate.
It was the worst thing in the world.
So if you look at the experience of gay rights, privacy was their problem.
Right? Privacy caused all of their problems.
How did they solve For the most part.
How did gay activists solve their biggest problem of getting equal rights?
They gave away their privacy voluntarily.
So the first brave activist who came out and said, I don't care what you say, I'm gay, I'm out, you know, I'm queer, I'm proud, whatever they said.
Coming out of the closet and giving up their privacy They've solved their biggest problems, right?
Now you're watching the same thing happen with the transgender community.
It's happening right in front of you, and you're seeing a repeat of this.
Transgenders who probably used to, you know, maybe try to, I don't know what the right word is, but maybe not make a big deal of the fact that they change from one thing to another thing and And I don't want to accidentally use the wrong language, because I know there are a million minefields here about saying it in an insulting way.
So I want to avoid being insulting.
But it seems to me that the transgender community is following the gay rights path.
I saw the other day a transgender person who was on the news and was essentially out of the closet.
Somebody who looked like, my guess is, born as a man and was in some part of the becoming a woman officially, I guess.
And again, I apologize if I use any of the wrong language here.
I'm genuinely empathetic to anybody who's outside the dead average of society, whatever that is.
Anybody who's off the average for any reason, whether it's transgender or gay, any other reason, differently abled in any way, I have empathy for all that.
It's no fun to be off the dead average, the boring average.
It's just no fun. It can cause you trouble.
So I have empathy for that.
But I would say the transgender are giving up their privacy as well, and it will have a good outcome.
There are probably as many situations in which giving up your privacy helps you as there are giving up your privacy hurts you.
The worst situation is when some people have privacy and others don't.
So that's your dangerous situation and that's why it's misleading.
If only a few people have privacy and other people don't, that's a real problem.
Because the people who don't have privacy are going to be disadvantaged.
But if everybody in a group, let's say gay people, just to use my same example, if they all or most, it doesn't have to be every one of them, but if most of them give up their privacy, it's like, hey, I'm gay.
I'm gay. That's a good situation.
All right. I personally give out all my passwords to strangers.
Yeah, I don't think you can compare giving out your passwords to...
You know what?
Actually, I'm going to argue with you.
Somebody said you don't want to give out your passwords.
But you know why giving out your passwords is a problem?
Giving out your passwords is a problem because other people don't.
If everybody gave up all their passwords, you wouldn't need passwords.
Now, your first reaction to that is, what?
That's crazy. If I gave out my password, somebody would go get my money.
But if you gave up all your privacy, you would know who got your money.
Everybody would know. So they couldn't do it.
Because you'd go over to their house and say, um, you took my money.
Give it back. Or I'll kill you.
Or the law will come and get you.
So I'm not suggesting this.
But let me just challenge your assumption.
Your assumption is it would be a mistake to give up your password.
I would say I agree, as long as we live in a world where everybody else is not giving up their password.
Hypothetically, and we would never get to this world, but it's just a mental experiment.
If everyone gave up all their passwords, and anybody could check anybody's bank account, anybody could see who took what and put it where, nobody could steal from you.
Because you would know they stole from you.
Right? The reason that people don't commit crimes in a crowd, you know, unless they're crazy or mad or something, but nobody commits a crime in front of lots of witnesses, independent of whether the law is there, because the citizens would take care of it, right?
You know, let's say you go into a crowd of people and you start beating somebody up for no reason.
It's not going to work. The crowd will pull you apart.
So a complete giving up of privacy would make all of your passwords unnecessary.
Anybody who tried to troll you, anybody who tried to pretend to be you, you'd know because they would give up their privacy too.
So it's sort of an interesting test of your assumption about privacy.
And always go back to this test.
If you're the only one who gives up your privacy, that's probably terrible.
But if everybody gave up their privacy, you might not have a problem.
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