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March 19, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
49:40
Episode 456 Scott Adams: Best Week Ever for President Trump, Maybe the Country?
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here.
Helena Handbasket and Tyler and Andrew and Miriam, get on in here.
Today we have fun news.
Sometimes the news is not as fun as it is today, but it's all kinds of fun news today, so it'll be fun.
It'll be fun because the news is fun.
Hello from Granada.
Do you have your container for liquids?
Some call it a glass, maybe a mug.
You could call it a stein, a cellist, possibly a thermos.
But if you're prepared, you filled it with your favorite liquid, I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
Good stuff.
Alright, so I promised you that this was, I was going to talk about one of the best weeks ever for the President's.
But you have to sort of pick and choose your news and read between the lines and forecast a little bit, so I'm going to do that for you, to show you that this was really an amazing week.
An amazing week.
Let me tell you why. Number one, there's a story, I think Cheryl Atkinson reported this, but out of Montana.
So Montana is doing their own experiment with healthcare expenses, and And they actually found somebody who knew enough about how the whole system works that they fired their healthcare insurer for the state healthcare.
So I'm only talking about state employees, I believe.
And they managed to negotiate and find out what real costs were at hospitals, and they managed to cut out middlemen and do a number of things.
And through completely capitalist methods, meaning that there was no socialism involved, all they did is negotiate harder, get better information, push more, find out where the waste is.
They so substantially reduced their cost of healthcare that they went from a deficit to a gigantic surplus.
Now, why is this important?
It's important because they proved the concept.
I've been telling you forever that if you're arguing that you should have this kind of healthcare or this kind of healthcare for the country, that you're not one of the smart people in the conversation.
Doesn't matter which side you're on.
If you're saying we should definitely have, you know, the single-payer health care, or you're saying we should definitely not have it, you're not part of the intelligent conversation.
The intelligent conversation goes like this.
We've got 50 states.
Some of them are going to want to try some different stuff.
Let's let them try.
Let's let them try their own method.
See what works.
Montana tried their own method.
It was a capitalist as opposed to a socialist version of a solution, and it worked.
And it worked really well.
Now, apparently, the bottom line is that there are so many people involved in the healthcare world that are just stuffing their pockets with profits.
It turns out there's a lot of extra money out there that you can just suck out of the system and give it back to the taxpayers.
So, what is the biggest problem in the country?
Well, some would say healthcare.
I mean, it's in the top three no matter what.
One of the top problems in the country looks like the capitalist system where you test things small, the smart way, has already produced a tremendous opportunity.
So other people are going to study what happened in Montana.
They're going to pick the parts they like.
Now what I don't know yet is how scalable this is.
So we'll find that out.
It sounds like it could be, but we'll see.
So it's one of the most important things that's happening in the country, and I think Cheryl Atkinson will be the only one talking about it, you know, as usual.
Because the thing is that it looks like a small story.
But the big story is that anything big, like healthcare, should be tested small.
And if you get a good result from a small test, that's a big story, even though it hasn't become big.
Here's another piece of good news.
Gavin Newsom, no friend to the president in terms of politics.
They might like each other personally, but in terms of politics, Gavin Newsom, Democrat, governor of California, He said that he actually likes President Trump's opportunity zones.
And, you know, he talked about the fact that that's an unusual thing to say if you're a Democrat.
But the opportunity zones are aimed at who?
The opportunity zones are aimed at the poorest of the poor in urban areas.
I think they're all urban areas, but it's the poorest of the poor.
Which would be disproportionately beneficial to minorities and the black population in particular.
So somebody's saying it's urban and rural, which should be better.
But in both cases, it's aimed at the poorest among society, which is very much beneficial to the black community and works against, you know, whatever things people think about this president.
So now you have a democratic governor A credible voice, very credible voice, saying, okay, I don't agree with the president on a whole bunch of stuff, but on this thing that's good for the poor and for black people in particular, just because of the demographic breakdown, he got it right.
That's a big deal.
It's a big deal in terms of how you think about the president, right?
Very big deal. Here's another one.
CNN did a report about a study that said that...
I almost can't say this without laughing, because it's so funny.
34% of Latinos support Trump.
So, of American citizens, 34% of them support the president.
Now, the first thing you should say is, well, wait a minute, that means two out of three do not support the president.
Isn't that the story? Shouldn't the story be that by a margin of two to one, Latinos do not like the president?
That's the story, right? Well, here's the question.
And I pose this same question all the time, but it's useful in a variety of contexts.
If three people are standing in a room and two of those people say, look at the elephant.
And there's an elephant in the room here with us.
It's standing right in front of us.
And the third person says, I don't see an elephant.
And the other two say, what do you mean you don't see the elephant?
Are you kidding me? We're in a small room with an elephant.
It's right there. Look at it.
You know, my friend sees it.
Two of us see it. You don't see the elephant?
If that's all you know about the story, is there an elephant in the room?
More often than not, no, there's no elephant in the room.
Because it is unusual for someone to subtract something from the environment right in front of them.
In other words, if somebody has a hallucination or a false kind of view of the world, they're usually adding something to it.
It's not 100% of the time, but as a general rule, somebody's adding something to the environment that wasn't there.
They're imagining that there's a conspiracy.
They're adding the conspiracy to the situation.
If you have one person in the room out of three who can't see the elephant, there's probably no elephant.
If the other two see it, it's probably because one of them is hallucinating and convinced the other one that he sees it.
So there might be two hallucinations going on, but hallucinations are viral.
That's what causes a hysteria.
You get a hysteria because people feed off the other people's hallucination.
My God, you saw that my neighbor is a witch?
Well, I wasn't seeing it before, but now that you mention it, I'm pretty sure I do see a witch when I look at her now.
So if you have two out of three Latinos saying this president is a monster and he hates us, but you have one third who are looking at exactly the same information And they say, we don't see it.
We don't see it.
We're looking at the same stuff you're looking at.
And one-third of us don't see it.
Generally, that means it's not there.
Now, I can't say that this rule works in every situation in every way.
But follow it.
Keep this rule in your mind.
And tell yourself, okay, you hear a story about five friends going to the forest.
Four of them report that they were picked up by an alien ship and probed.
The fifth one says that didn't happen.
Was there an alien ship?
No. No.
Because the one who's believable is the one who didn't see the hallucination.
They're always the believable one.
The people adding something to the environment are usually the ones who are wrong.
All right. Here's some more.
Did you see the president's tweet?
He retweeted Brad Parscale's tweet in which Brad was mocking Mr.
Kellyanne Conway.
So the husband of Kellyanne Conway keeps saying negative things about Trump, and he said some more stuff recently.
We don't need to know his first name.
He's just Mr. Kellyanne Conway.
For our purposes today, he's just Mr.
Kellyanne Conway. So that's what Brad Parscale referred to him as.
Then the president tweeted, I think he just said, what a loser.
Which, first of all, I love the fact that that's become normalized.
You know, people always say, don't normalize that, don't normalize this.
I love the fact that the president can just mock this guy, call him a loser, and it's now normalized as presidential behavior.
We're not terribly offended.
Nobody's talking about, hey, we've got to get that 25th Amendment thing working because the president called somebody a loser on Twitter.
Presidents can't do that.
My God, a president can't act that way.
Now we're just used to it.
We're completely normalized that the president of the United States tweeted that the husband of one of his closest advisors is a loser.
Totally normal now.
And I don't see any reason it couldn't be because it doesn't hurt anybody.
But it takes this, you know, the job of the presidency and he has literally combined it With a reality TV star mode.
He does it for the entertainment.
Now, the entertainment has a function, which is it moves your attention where he wants it to be.
So it was probably a slow news day, and wasn't much else to tweet, and he was looking for an opportunity to slap down Kellyanne's husband.
But here's the fun part.
Do you think that the president tweeted that Without talking to Kellyanne first.
Now, maybe not that day, but I can guarantee you that the President and Kellyanne at some point recently had a conversation where the President said, look, I'm going to have to hit him back.
You know that, right?
And Kellyanne Conway probably laughed and said, of course.
Well, why would I expect you wouldn't?
Of course you have to get him back.
So, the funniest part of the story is imagining the conversation between the president and Kelly and Conway before it happened.
Because you know they talk about it, right?
So that's the funniest part of that story.
Okay. Here's another fun story, is that Beto had to apologize for his, I guess you'd call it a joke, in which he said his wife is raising the children sometimes with his help.
And people said, what do you mean sometimes with your help?
The man has to be 50% involved.
To which I say, one of them is running for president.
The other one is not running for president.
I would think that whichever one, the man or the woman, whichever one is running for president, might have a little less time.
So what I'm suggesting is that Beto start campaigning with one of those Baby Bjorn things.
You know the things where it's usually the dad when I see it.
It could be the mother, but it's usually the dad.
Where's this little contraption where the baby is attached to your chest?
He should just take that on the campaign trail.
Now, I know what you're saying.
His youngest kid is, I think, nine years old.
Still, he's a big guy.
He could probably strap a nine-year-old.
He's pretty tall, right? He could strap a nine-year-old to his baby Bjorn and just have that nine-year-old just hang in there.
And just walk around with your nine-year-old just strapped to your chest.
It would be amazing.
That's not going to happen.
All right. The ADL, which is, I understand, a left-leaning organization, did a study and they found that right-wing extremist murder...
It was actually down under Trump's administration.
Now, they don't report it exactly that way, because apparently right-wing extremism has been high in the recent years.
So compared to, say, 20 years ago, the rate of right-wing extremism or white supremacy extremism is higher than it's been.
But here's the interesting part.
It was way higher in the last two years of Obama.
So, without exaggerating, it is a fact that right-wing extremism in terms of killing went way down as soon as Trump got elected.
Now, I saw somebody on Twitter saying, oh, yeah, yeah, but that's because the last two years of the Obama administration, you know, Trump was already starting to campaign, at least in 2015.
So really, it was about Trump campaigning in 2015.
To which I say, that's a pretty weak argument.
If it's true that the last two years of Obama's presidency...
Had much higher white supremacy right-wing violence than the first two years of the Trump presidency.
It's kind of hard to pin it on Trump.
Kind of hard.
All right. I saw that Elizabeth Warren came out in favor of reparations.
I don't think she's alone, right?
Maybe you can help me with the names of the other Democrats who have gotten on that position.
But if there's one thing I can tell you that's predictive, we're not going to have the next president.
The next president will not be somebody Whoever said, hey, let's think about reparations.
Now, some of you know that I've actually written about reparation, and I've sort of done the mental experiment of, could you do it?
Is there a way to do reparations which could be beneficial to heal some historical wound?
But here's the important part.
Could you do it without taking it from white people who don't have any money?
It wouldn't make sense to tax white people who don't have anything or have very little to give it to black people because of the legacy of racism and maybe because of institutional racism that persists when the white people aren't doing well.
You know, at least the bottom part of the white people category.
So could you come up with some way to do it where maybe only the richest are taxed or maybe there's only some category of thing that's taxed?
Could you imagine, for example, that let's say we charge immigrants to come into the country and that's the only tax and it goes toward reparations.
So you can imagine a tax Where the only people paying it are people coming into the country from outside.
So you could game the system until there's something that looks like reparations without taking money from white people and just transferring it to black people, which would be the unpopular way to do it.
So, but here's my point.
There is no situation in which somebody, even using the word reparations, can become president.
So if you want to do your predicting of who might become president, you can subtract everybody who said, well, I think about reparations.
I'd give reparations a spin.
Nobody's going to become president with that plan.
They might get nominated.
But there's no way they could ever win the election.
So we have a report about, I guess 60 Minutes did a report about the alleged sonic weapon, allegedly used in, what, the Cuban Embassy in Canada and China or something.
And on Twitter, one of my Twitter buddies said, well, doesn't this show that it's real?
And so I looked at the transcript and I thought, No, it doesn't show that.
What it does show is that there are lots of people who think it's real.
What's missing are a motive because of the weird places that it happened.
What government or person is concerned about the U.S. having embassy personnel in Cuba?
Cuba doesn't want to start trouble.
Cuba would be the last country that wanted to do something like attack American diplomats.
It's the last thing they'd want to do.
What about Russia? Probably about the last thing they'd want to do.
What about anybody? Can you think of anybody who would want to do it?
Even if you go all the way to Islamic terrorists, even they wouldn't do it in those countries.
They'd do it somewhere else.
So there's no motive for it, but you also have strong indications that some number of people who complain of symptoms do not have symptoms that could be traced to anything except chance, just normal symptoms.
So you know some of the people complaining are not the victims of a weapon.
So that would be, you know, a requirement for it to be a mass hysteria is that you can confirm some of the people who believe the weapon was used in them.
You can know for sure that that's not true.
So I think that's the case.
There are some people who are definitely not credible claims.
You would need something like a motive.
Even if you've stretched your imagination, and I can't stretch mine enough to find a motive, you would need to assume it's probably something like a state actor, because it would be hard to build such a weapon, and it would be even harder to smuggle it in, what, three different countries? And set it up and then get away with it.
You would need something like direct evidence.
In other words, not just looking at the people, but, you know, like having on camera somebody running away with a sonic weapon or something.
So, here's the bottom line.
So 60 Minutes has reported Basically, that it's a sonic weapon.
Now, I don't think they go so far as to say it's true.
I think they stop short of that and say, the evidence suggests, you know, that kind of an approach.
I'm going to stick with my original prediction that they will never find direct evidence.
That they might find lots of indirect stuff, like people complaining about things.
They might find people who have brain damage.
But I predict there will never be a direct finding of an actual weapon.
Now, if I'm wrong, add that to my list of wrong predictions.
If I'm right, well, there you go.
The news today says that Devin Nunes has filed a $250 million lawsuit against Twitter.
The allegations are that, I guess, he doesn't like Twitter keeping things up there that are bad for conservatives, but taking down things quickly that would have been bad for the people on the left.
So that's his claim.
I don't know what the fact is behind that.
That's the claim. And then something about shadow banning during the election.
I think that's, or maybe continuing.
So it's shadow banning and it's that of the claim.
Now, I have a strong interest in Twitter not going away.
So the last thing I want is for Twitter to go out of business.
I definitely don't want that.
Most of you don't want that either.
Because Twitter is really...
It's no longer just a product.
It's sort of evolved into the public mind.
It's almost like the public brain is now merged with Twitter.
The thinking that happens in this country is largely informed by Twitter interactions.
And then it becomes the news and then everybody hears about it.
So in my opinion, Twitter is sort of the brain of civilization right now.
So I don't think you want it to go out of business.
Who knows what that would look like.
But I'll make a prediction.
There will be no finding that the senior levels of Twitter were aware of shenanigans with the algorithms.
Meaning that there will be no finding that Jack Dorsey in particular was aware of anybody tinkering with anything for bad purposes.
He's certainly aware that there are lots of people on the left who work for the company.
So that part's already in evidence.
He's said that a number of times.
My best hypothesis, based on my own experience, is that the so-called algorithm probably has a lot of people's fingers in it.
Meaning it's probably a big complicated thing.
And when I say a lot of people, maybe half a dozen.
Maybe a dozen at most.
Could be just two, I don't know.
But maybe half a dozen.
People at Twitter have any control over any variable that goes into the algorithm.
That's just a guess. Now it's only based on...
Experience working for big companies, sort of a general knowledge of the world.
So I wouldn't bet my life on that.
But probably a small number of people have control over the algorithm.
And I think that we may someday find out that one or more of them had their finger on the scale.
But I don't think you'll find that it's senior management.
That's my prediction.
All right Here's a interesting question Of all of the mass murders by gun, so if you were to look at all the mass murders by gun in the United States, how many of them were performed by a current member of the NRA? I've never seen that stat,
have you? Wouldn't you like to know If being in the NRA lowers your risk of being a mass killer to zero, because I think it kind of does, doesn't it?
And this suggests an interesting path that's completely not obvious, an interesting path for reducing gun violence.
And the path goes like this.
I'm just going to throw this out here.
This is an incomplete idea.
Those of you who follow me know that I sometimes throw out incomplete ideas because it changes how you think about things.
And maybe somebody can say, well, your idea is not quite right, but if you added this change, that could actually work.
So what I'm going for is the bad version of the idea.
And then think about it for a while, and maybe there's something you could add to it that would slightly change it into a good idea.
And here's the bad version of the idea.
What if a requirement for owning a gun, or let's say buying a gun, a requirement for buying a gun is you have to join the NRA? Now, you should say to yourself, well, that doesn't make sense, because just the fact that you're forced to join the NRA That doesn't say anything about your intentions, right?
If it's just something you have to check off on the list.
But my belief is that the NRA is sort of a positive brainwashing organization, meaning that they influence their members toward peaceful use of guns.
And even if you were just forced to join, and you started seeing gun safety information, because let's say you got on the mailing list, and let's say you bought a gun, and you're automatically put into the NRA even though you didn't want to be.
Or somebody's saying maybe just for rifles.
All right, but hold that idea.
So you're put into the NRA even though you don't want to be.
Now they start sending you stuff about, oh, for 20 bucks or I don't know how much it costs, you could buy a gun lock, you know, a trigger lock for your gun.
Now this might be somebody who never would have thought of that.
It wasn't really on their radar.
Well, I don't really need a trigger lock, but now the NRA sent it to them.
And along with the article that says it will reduce the number of accidental deaths in your house by, you know, X percent or whatever.
So the person says, huh, all right, I'll get a gun lock.
And now... That guy's teenage kid can't take that gun to school.
And the NRA would have been sort of the force that stopped it.
Because it just educated the gun owner a little bit extra.
Passively. You know, the gun owner wasn't looking to get educated.
Just checked the mail.
And there was a gun lock advertisement.
It made them think about gun locks.
Maybe they get one. So the point is, could you use what we know about the benefits of the NRA, which is they're probably the lowest level of gun violence of any group?
Ironically, right? Now that's because you don't join unless you're already highly disposed toward non-violent use of guns.
That's what makes you join, right?
You're not the bad guy.
But the NRA also has a pretty good idea of what people are up to.
Would being a member of the NRA make it easier to know if you are up to no good?
Maybe you talk to a friend and the friend's in the NRA and the friend says, the stuff I heard from Bob is starting to worry me.
And as a member of the NRA, the last thing I want is for another member of the NRA to go kill a bunch of people with guns.
So, if you were in the NRA, and you knew that your, let's say your brand was now connected to them, and you heard somebody doing something suspicious, maybe they're acquiring too many of the wrong kind of guns, and you say to yourself, well, I know they don't hunt, Wouldn't you be a little more likely to drop a dime?
Maybe inform somebody?
So it's a general statement, and here's the idea.
The idea is that maybe being a member of a club that is dedicated to peaceful use of firearms would have a number of indirect influences that would cause people to use them less for violence.
Maybe. Alright, another topic.
Speaking of guns, there's yet another design in the news of somebody who turned a small drone into a rifle.
So basically, they put an actual rifle inside the drone, and it just flies where it needs to fly, and it shoots the gun and kills somebody.
Now, let me tell you where the world's going.
Here's where it's going.
Pretty soon, those little drones are going to have GPS in them so that even if you jammed the signal, there was still nowhere to go.
So you could jam the connection between the person controlling it and the drone, which is the current technology.
But if the drone were self-contained and just had a GPS on it, I think it would keep going if it were designed to do that.
Secondly, it won't be long before the drone can do facial recognition.
So how long will it be before I can 3D print my own drone and gun?
I could take it out to my porch.
I could say, there's some political leader who's going to be at this geography giving a speech outdoors, and here's what his face looks like.
And I just send my drone from my own driveway at home, and it flies three miles with its gun.
It goes to the GPS coordinates of the person you want to assassinate, and then it starts looking.
And until it gets a face match, it doesn't do anything.
As soon as it gets the face match, it kills.
How far away are we from that technology?
It's kind of here. It's sort of here.
If you wanted to make a plastic gun that could fire one bullet, I think you could 3D print that now.
How much of the actual 3D, I'm sorry, how much of the drone could you print today with a 3D printer?
Well, most of the parts.
You know, certainly all the plastic parts.
All right, so that's coming.
Something to look forward to.
So my guess is that 3D printers will be illegal.
Or at least 3D printers that are that capable will be illegal.
Or your 3D printer can only work by being connected to the Internet.
So imagine that 3D printers, by law, can only work if they're connected to the internet.
And the reason for that would be so that Big Brother can watch what you're 3D printing.
So they would know if you 3D printed a drone gun.
I think that's where it's going.
All right. I have a prediction for 2020.
Are you ready? Here's my 2020 presidential prediction.
Landslide for President Trump.
Now that's a straight-line prediction, and that prediction depends on something that's not going to happen.
So it depends on no big news between now and 2020.
So if everything just went the way it's going, it will be a landslide for the President.
Here are the forces which are lining up, and one new one that I'm going to add.
The forces are that the Democrats are going to be savaging each other for months.
It's going to reduce the amount of negative attention on the president by about half.
And the reason it's going to reduce the pressure on the president in terms of how the news treats him is because the shelf space of the news, the amount of hours that they can spend on stuff, It has to be dedicated to this new thing, which is all these Democrats trying to get nominated.
So because they will suck up shelf space, and because it used to be that 100% of that shelf space was anti-Trump, necessarily, just by math, the negative coverage of the president is going to reduce by half before the election.
Now, of course, that half is going to get vicious.
But it also matters how often you see stuff.
So the frequency of reports is a big part of what makes you convinced that something's true.
The frequency of bad news about the president could go down by 50% just because you have all this other stuff to talk about, and they will be damaging themselves like crazy and trying to get left of each other, etc., until whoever is left will not be viable.
The most likely result of the Democratic primary is the nomination of a non-viable candidate.
What does non-viable mean?
Well, as I said earlier, if one of the candidates that gets nominated has also been strong on reparations, there isn't any chance they can get elected.
There's just no chance.
That's just a complete loser way to go.
Now, on top of that, you can see a whole bunch of positive news for the president, likely.
Now, again, I'm only straight-lining the prediction, like, if things go the way they're going.
So if things go the way they're going, you probably will see the president winding down military in Syria, winding down operations in Afghanistan, getting to a better result in Yemen through our pressure.
You might see...
You're probably going to see stops and starts with North Korea, but I don't think you're going to see them testing another nuclear weapon.
So people are going to say, well, at least we're talking.
So things are going well in that area.
So you're probably going to have one of the strongest presidential performances of all time.
On top of that, I think he's going to be able to put together some health care story that is similar to say, look what Montana did.
We're going to take that model where they reduced their health care expenses substantially and we're just going to try to reproduce it.
Now that would be a strong story compared to the socialist model.
So if nothing changes, It's going to be a massacre.
The president's going to win easily.
But just to make sure that there's no doubt, I'm going to introduce to you the kill shot for socialism.
I've been watching all the experts on TV trying to argue against socialism, and I would say failing.
Failing almost completely.
Because it's hard to argue against You know, healthcare and education and the things that they talk about that are the positives, you know, protecting the economy, etc.
But, are you ready for the kill shot?
Socialism is risky.
Socialism Is risky.
One word. Risky.
Because here are the things that everyone agrees.
The economy is the strongest it's ever been.
The United States is probably the strongest it's ever been.
We are the most stable, powerful, competent country in the history of civilization.
We are at our very best in terms of stability, strength, economics, military, period.
Socialism, even if you believe it's a good idea, is risky.
It's risky because it's a big change to a system that's never been better.
So you're going to have the best system that has ever existed in the history of civilization.
And I think you could quite credibly claim that the United States is that system.
Strongest, best economy, just the best at everything, you know, for the most part.
That's an exaggeration, but very sound.
If you say to voters who are largely older, you know that socialism that they're talking about with that Green New Deal?
There might be something to that.
But it's risky, and it's a risk of complete collapse.
It's really risky.
Now, could you sell?
Socialism is risky.
Well, yes. You say, socialism has killed 100 million people.
Socialism is what gave you Venezuela.
Socialism is what gave you, and you can give other examples.
Now, let me tell you how people have been doing it wrong.
Here's the wrong way to argue against socialism.
Socialism has killed 100 million people in history.
If that's all you say, is that persuasive?
No. Because the first thing I say is, oh, and having universal health care in Canada destroyed Canada?
What the hell are you talking about?
Don't tell me about your socialism killed 100 million people.
I'm looking at Canada and they're doing fine.
They got universal health care.
Right? So it's a ridiculous thing to say.
So the people saying, historically, in these general ways, countries that are completely different and in a different place and time had a bad outcome.
That's not persuasive.
That's just that something different happened in a different place and a different time.
That has no impact The fact that I look at Canada and say, oh, they have universal health care.
What the hell are you talking about?
100 million people dying.
How many people died in Canada because they have universal health care?
Zero? So it's a ridiculous argument.
Unless you have first framed it as socialism being risky.
If risky is the frame...
Then you say, I'm not saying that 100 million people are going to die.
I'm saying that's the way it's usually gone, and that's the risk we're talking about.
If you say, we will turn into Venezuela, people say, we're not frickin' Venezuela.
Alright? There's nothing about Venezuela that really is comparable to the United States.
And again, Canada, healthcare, We're not talking about Venezuela dictator.
We're talking about healthcare.
So, Venezuela, just by itself, is not that persuasive.
Because I think people look at it and go, well, it's just a different situation.
We don't really line up with that situation, so why would we get the same result?
If you start by saying, our current system is really strong and it's producing more people under healthcare, and we've got a lot more we can do, but this is our strongest game, the alternative might have some good points to it.
But it's really risky and could destroy the entire system.
And it's risky because it's such a big change to a system that's working well.
If something is working really well, do you break it?
Now people will say, but it's not working really well.
But they still understand that the United States is the strongest country in the world.
So even if you said, well, there's all these problems in the United States and, you know, the poor people and the difference in income and, you know, these are all true.
But nobody's going to argue the basic point that the United States is the strongest nation in the world on a lot of different levels.
So here's the kill shot.
You don't say capitalism is better than socialism.
That's a losing path.
You say, I don't know if socialism is good or bad, but it's pretty damn risky when you've got something that's working great.
That argument pretty much guarantees Trump gets re-elected, unless there's some new news that we don't know about.
All right. Let's see if we've talked about everything so far.
Yes, I believe we have.
One of these days I'm going to do a breakdown of the Democratic candidates, and I'll give you the persuasion filter on all the candidates.
I'm going to wait a little bit on that.
UBI, by the way, is inevitable.
It's just when that happens.
That's the question.
Just when does it happen? Did I block Taleb?
I did, yes. I blocked Taleb.
Let me mention one more thing.
When people develop products, this is a completely different topic.
When people develop products, they usually say things such as, this will make you more efficient, this is fun, this does a function, it solves the problem.
So we talk about a product in terms of what it does for you.
But we sometimes miss the fact that the objective of life Is happiness, right?
And I ask myself, what products would you create and what products would you choose to use if the way you manage your life is for happiness versus solving problems?
So, for example, let me use Facebook as an example.
Facebook, you can say, solves a problem per se in the sense that That Facebook allows you to share pictures with people, etc.
Allows you to have friends and whatever.
But, does Facebook make you happy?
If you ask yourself, does using Facebook make me happy, then would you use it?
And I think the answer is no.
And when did we get away from happiness being the thing?
Now, I think people would agree that Facebook is closer to a sort of a social requirement or an addiction or something.
But it's not something that you'd say, I want a product that makes me happy.
So I think I'll go use some Facebook.
Now, let me give you the opposite example.
So Facebook is hugely successful because it's addictive, right?
Take my company's product called Approach.
Now, my startup has a few different products.
You've heard about the interface one.
That's the one where you can talk to an expert or you can donate to somebody.
So you can sign up for the interface app and you automatically get a button.
On the app for people to donate to you if you're a creator or an artist.
So that would be an alternative to Patreon, etc.
But one of our products is called Approach.
And it's a little personal app that lets you do what the Uber app does, but without a car.
In other words, you can just tell somebody where you are and then you can track each other on the way to a meeting.
The app is free.
It's called Approach. You can find it in both stores, and it works across Apple and Android, so it doesn't matter which one you have on either side.
You don't need to have the app on the receiving side.
So if I have the app, I can send you a link.
You never have to download the app.
You just click the link and a browser page will come up with a map.
It's not as good as having the app because you can't initiate an approach, but for the purposes of meeting, it's perfect.
Now, let me contrast this.
Do you remember the first time you used Uber and you could tell that the Uber car was coming because you could see it on your app?
Didn't that make you happy?
It wasn't just that you found another mode of transportation.
Uber was not directly just a way to get from a place to another place.
What Uber did was they sold you happiness.
Every single time I look on the app, and I can tell that the car is coming, and I know the name of the driver, I know the name of the car, and I know exactly when he's going to be there, and I can send him a message in case something comes up.
Every time I use that, it makes me happy.
Likewise, every time I meet somebody in my personal life, and I've used this app, both I and the recipient are happy.
We're happy, because this makes me happy.
I can know exactly where people are.
Now, by the way, the app is free, but if you want to brand it the way this one's branded, you can see at the top, it's got a little advertisement for my book.
If you wanted to brand it as a company, so I said Bob's Plumbing, there's an in-app purchase where you just upload your graphic, and then the recipient of it looks like you're a professional business that has your own app.
So if you were a small company that has several service trucks, you could just download this for free, and you could use it for free, and it would make all of your customers happy every time you said you were on the way.
They'd be happy because you were the one service company that actually showed where your truck was, right?
Very much like DoorDash does, et cetera, except a better visual.
So if you know anybody who's got a small fleet of trucks and they don't want to spend any money and they want to make their customers happy, this would do it.
But the larger point is called the approach app.
But the larger point is that we don't really think in terms of what makes us happy.
We think in terms of solving problems.
And maybe we need to step back every now and then and say, yeah, that product would solve my problem, but would it make me happy?
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