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July 23, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
52:12
Episode 606 Scott Adams: Water Thrown at Police, Iran Peace Talks, Predictions, MyPillow Persuasion
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Hey, where is everybody?
Come on in here. It's time for coffee with Scott Adams.
And you know what you need.
Yes, you do. If you're here early, you're probably prepared.
You are the ones who have systems.
Some of you are exercising.
More and more of you, actually. I'm hearing from people We're taking this system to heart, whereas you pick a favorite daily television or podcast show, such as this one, and you make sure you're exercising while you're listening to it.
And then you'll have a little payoff for your exercise, if you like your show.
But, I know what you want.
I do. You want the simultaneous sip.
And it's common. But first, you need something.
You need something. You need a cup or a mug or a glass.
You need a stein, a chalice, a tankard.
You need a thermos, a flask, a canteen, possibly a vessel of some other kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of this simultaneous sip.
Here it comes. Oh!
Gets better every time.
So, Boris Johnson, looks like he's set to be the next Prime Minister.
True story.
About a month ago, a wealthy investor contacted me and said, Hey, who do you think is going to be the Prime Minister?
I think he was going to bet.
So I'm not entirely sure why he asked.
And I said, I don't know.
Who's even running? I have no idea.
I'm not even paying attention. And a wealthy investor said, I'll send you three links of the three top people.
Look at them and tell me which ones are persuasive or not persuasive.
So I looked at all three links.
Two of the candidates I will summarize with the following.
I don't even remember their names.
They were so forgettable. They were non-persuasive.
I looked at Boris Johnson's clip and I said, oh, well, he'll obviously be the next Prime Minister because he has...
I'm not sure that he has Trump-like skills, but at least he has a persuasion game.
You could hear it in just a brief clip.
It was just obvious. And so I said, well, I don't know anything about politics in Great Britain, but it looks to me like Boris Johnson is going to win that because he's the better candidate.
And sure enough, he won. You want to hear another prediction that I got right?
I'll bet you didn't get this one right.
So this is an actual bet I placed on predicted.
So many months ago, I made a bet that President Trump would meet Kim Jong-un again in 2019.
And he did.
Now, one of the reasons that that was a high payoff bet The odds were deeply against it.
It's because it takes so many months to plan such a thing that you'd see it coming from a long way off.
And I said to myself, you know what?
You know what? I think they're going to have that meeting anyway.
Now, I didn't see it the way it unfolded, but I did imagine that they would not need as much preparation as everybody imagined.
And I did imagine they wouldn't necessarily have to have an agenda.
So I won that bet.
I also have bets now that there will be a female candidate for the Democrats, and a separate bet now that that candidate will be Kamala Harris.
And those bets are both, I think they're at about double the value of when I first placed them many months ago.
So we're seeing a lot of news about Trump's I guess ICE is starting the process of rounding up people who have been court-ordered to leave, mostly.
And that's the way it's usually reported.
They say it's mostly people who have committed some additional crimes, beyond immigration, while they're here and the court has ordered them to leave.
And I think to myself, mostly...
What do you mean mostly? What's the other category?
Have you seen any reporting for what the other categories are?
I certainly understand if somebody has committed some serious crime while they were already here illegally, I can see how the court would order them to go home and I can see how we'd want to ship criminals home instead of incarcerating them here at our expense.
But what's the other category?
Does anybody know?
Has it ever been reported?
What is one other reason that they're being deported?
And apparently it's not just because they're in the country illegally, because that would be millions of people, not just the ones targeted.
So why don't we know that?
And we're hearing wildly strange reporting about what's only a few people have even been deported out of thousands.
What's going on? There seems to be a complete news failure on this.
Am I right? Oh, somebody's saying it's people who lost asylum claims in court.
Wouldn't that be a lot of people?
Hmm. Alright, we'll have to find out more about that.
But anyway, it seems to me that the reporting has been very insufficient.
Here's my favorite story of the day.
Trump has decided to come out and explicitly call the squad racist.
That's right. Trump is just calling them racist whenever he can.
Now you say to yourself, if you're a Democrat, ha ha ha, that can't possibly work.
Because as we know, he's the true racist.
Look at all our many weak pieces of evidence that collectively and individually don't mean anything.
But if we put them all together, we convince ourselves that they do mean something.
How about that, huh?
We don't have that going the other way.
But President Trump has decided that they've said enough things that are sort of in that gray area that that's good enough.
How much do I love this?
A lot. It's probably the best thing he could do.
I don't know what are all the bad things he could do, but the best thing he could do is to explicitly and directly and continuously call them racists.
Here's why that works.
Number one, they're racists.
That's why it works.
If they were not racists, it wouldn't work.
Now, keep in mind that the...
That the standard is sort of higher for the left.
People on the right are racist just for existing.
I mean, according to the left, you simply have to exist and be associated with anybody on the right.
And they say this explicitly, by the way, if you're a supporter of the president or even if you haven't condemned him.
for whatever is on their laundry list today that you are a racist just for sort of waking up in the morning and existing and liking the president who's in office so that's a low standard but on the left they've got to actually do some stuff they've got to do some racist stuff in order to be called racist but they have so and I would argue That even if you argue that's not what they're doing,
you can't argue that they don't frame things in racial terms.
And the president consistently frames things in country terms, which other people say, hey, you frame this in country terms, our country versus the other countries, but what you really mean in your secret thoughts is you mean you don't like brown people.
Now, at some point, that just becomes so ridiculous, given that the president's job is to take care of this country above other countries.
If you can't do your job of taking care of this country above other countries without being called a racist, what can you do?
I mean, what's left?
Yeah, somebody's in the comments, somebody's saying that apparently there's a story that Ivanka got an all-white dog For one of the kids.
And people are saying, it's racist because it's a white dog.
When you start seeing racism everywhere, except on your own team, things have just gone to the ridiculous level.
Now, as you know, I had encouraged a poll, or actually an online petition, To demand that the Trump administration release children from those Obama cages.
How many people were willing to sign a petition to release children from Obama cages?
Well, it turns out, not many.
Not that many at all.
As soon as you call them Obama cages, nobody's in favor of releasing people.
And I thought to myself, well, if it's just the name of the cage...
Maybe we do not have an actual rational problem here.
And by the way, I am in favor of getting kids out of cages.
I don't know how to do it in a way that also preserves borders and gets us everything we want and keeps the kids safe from being trafficked.
I don't know how to do that.
I have no idea how to do that.
Nobody else does either, apparently.
I mean, not in the short run.
In the long run, everybody thinks they know how to do it.
But yes, I'm definitely in favor of getting kids out of Obamac ages, however that happens.
Let's talk about Iran.
So, I understand from the news that one of the last loopholes that Iran has, at least for their oil industry, which is a big part of their economy, one of the last loopholes they have for distributing it is being closed.
Something about a Chinese tanker, blah, blah, blah.
But Suppose that's true.
Suppose that the last little bit of hope their economy has is now being squashed.
Iran has a timing problem.
They sort of need to do something sort of pretty quickly because the economy is in a dire situation.
Now, when I was talking about North Korea, however many months slash years ago, I was saying explicitly, you know, you really can't imagine President Trump and Kim Jong-un meeting and having a laugh.
I could easily imagine it, and then sure enough, it happened.
But can you easily imagine the Ayatollah meeting with President Trump in person?
You cannot. You actually can't imagine it.
Somebody says yes, but I actually can't imagine it.
Because I don't imagine that the Ayatollah would put himself in a position where he would even be photographed with someone who is so completely opposite of everything he is.
And especially if the subject, or at least the topic of which they came together, would inevitably...
Be Trump getting more of what he wants.
And Iran, or at least the Ayatollah, getting less of what he wants.
So how in the world could you ever have any kind of an Iranian deal if Trump can never, in a practical way, Trump can't really meet the Ayatollah?
Because I'd love to say, well, the Ayatollah might get flexible and Maybe he'll decide, no, can't see it.
There's no world in which the Ayatollah and President Trump have a photo op and shake hands.
I just don't see it. Now, the problem is that the odds of having peace if the two leaders can't even meet and shake hands is pretty low.
So how do you solve that?
How do you solve the problem that the one thing you need is It's basically impossible.
And I don't have the immediate answer to that.
But I would say that we do have a creative president and he is very...
This president is very good at seizing opportunities.
So there might be something that happens that's a bit of a...
I don't know. Maybe it's an opportunity that arises that he jumps on.
Now, I guess the question would be, is there anybody who is subsidiary or, let's say, somebody who works for the Ayatollah that the Ayatollah would trust to go have the meeting with the President or anybody else and come back with a deal?
And I think to myself, probably not.
Because if you're not the Ayatollah, you probably are not authorized to give up anything.
And if you did, maybe you'd get killed.
So I don't know that there's a mechanism for Iran to even have a conversation about this.
I don't know that they have the type of government, the type of personalities who can get from A to B. And I wonder if it might be useful to call that out.
Would it be useful to say that out loud?
To say, we don't know if Iran has the kind of government that's capable of even having a conversation about peace.
Think about that.
You could challenge Iran to simply figure out how they could develop a system for peace.
Because if you make it peace, yes or no, people are going to say, well, probably no, because we never had it before.
So you don't want to talk about the goal, peace, yes or no.
Or even have a summit, yes or no.
You don't want to put this in yes or no because we're not there yet.
We're at a system problem.
They have a system in which they don't have a mechanism to have even a conversation.
They don't have a way to have a conversation, at least with this president.
Now, I think they did have a way to have a conversation with the Obama administration, do it with lower-level people, Obama is a non-controversial kind of character, blah, blah, blah.
So I think somehow we have to get past the fact that their system and our system can't have a conversation.
So I'd love to see that solved.
All right. Are you seeing the videos, very disturbing videos, of police officers who are making a stop in Harlem, I believe, and the locals are taking buckets of water and throwing them on the police and the police are not responding?
Literally, they're surrounded by mostly young men who are taking buckets of water and dumping them on top of the police heads while the police are just trying to do their arrest and walking away and stuff.
And you watch and the police are not responding.
They're actually being assaulted by And they're just walking away.
They're assaulted. I mean, if somebody throws a bucket at your head, as they did, a plastic bucket, but still, somebody threw a bucket at their heads.
If somebody pours water over you repeatedly in a public place, you are assaulted.
That's a crime. And the police walked away.
Now, I assume that's because the police have very strict rules about engagement, and there must have been something that happened recently, maybe it's de Plasio's administration, that told them to walk away, or they get fired.
But I gotta tell you that what I watched, if they had opened fire, if they had just pulled a handgun and started blasting away at the people with the buckets of water, I don't know, maybe that would be illegal because it would be too much force being used for the situation, but I wouldn't feel bad about it.
And it would have nothing to do with the individual cop and the individual person who would individually be ended.
It wouldn't be about the individuals.
It would be about the system.
You can't really have a...
Can't really have a good system if people can just abuse the police and they can't do their job.
So for the benefit of the system, I would have been okay if a few people got some tough justice that day.
Just saying. I promised you a while ago that if I had a slow news day, I would give you some of the persuasion techniques used in the famous MyPillow commercials.
Have you all seen the MyPillow commercials, mostly on Fox News Channel?
Most of you have.
And I'm just going to run through some of the technique so you can see that the best persuaders, the best salespeople use similar techniques.
So one of the things that Mike Lindell does, he's the founder of the MyPillow is, he does pacing.
Now pacing is when you're matching your audience in some way.
You could breathe the way they breathe, talk the way they talk, agree with them on a topic, that sort of thing.
So you're matching them in some important way.
That's an important part of persuasion.
Because if you match them, and they feel matched, You can later lead them and they'll go with you because they'll say, oh, you're just like me.
I'll go with you a little bit. See where you're going.
So you see that Mike Lindell starts talking about how you...
There's a part of his commercial where he says, you know why they're called down pillows?
You put your head on it and it goes down.
And he says it in a really interesting way.
You put your head on it and it goes down.
Now, the first thing you need to know is that because it's a pun, a play on words of the word down, because down is, you know, feathers of a goose, which are in the pillows, the traditional pillows, he's paced you because you've all had the experience of you put your head on the pillow and it goes down and you wish it had been more firm, which is the type of pillow he sells.
Which, by the way, are good pillows.
I bought a few of them and I was quite happy with them.
They're a good product.
So you have to have a good product or nothing else matters.
So when he talks to you about putting your head on the pillow and your pillow goes down, he is putting you in the movie.
He's taking you out of your seat and putting you into the imaginary scene where you can imagine the feel, the touch, the experience every day of putting your head on the pillow and it goes down.
That is amazing pacing.
He's got into your world.
He said something that you've all experienced.
And you know you've experienced it, and he's put it in a word picture, so you've got a movie in your head of like, oh yeah, here's my head, and it's the pillow, and it goes down.
And because it's a play on words, it's a little stickier.
That's also technique.
When O.J.'s lawyer said, if the glove does not fit, you must acquit, that is technique.
Because it rhymed, it stuck in your head and took on more importance than it really needed to.
Now, While he is giving you the Giving you the pacing so you're imagining putting your head on the pillow.
He's also showing it to you.
So it's visual. He's squeezing it.
He's got some models there who are laying on the pillow, and he's showing you visually.
So it's very, very visual.
Now, of course, it's a TV commercial, so they're all going to be visual.
So that part, TV commercials never get wrong.
That's the most basic thing.
But a lot of people in their normal persuasion may not know to be visual.
Commercials always get that right.
TV commercials always get that right.
And he gets that right as well.
Another thing he does is in order to sell, you must first sell yourself.
So you have to sell who you are before somebody will consider your product.
He does that really well because he has this likable big personality.
And when you see him, you say to yourself, Hey, he's the most ordinary guy.
He's just like me.
He doesn't try too hard to look like he's a rich guy.
He's not wearing a tuxedo.
He's not standing in front of his mansion.
I assume he's got a nice house.
He's not doing anything that takes him out of that mold of being exactly like you.
So somebody says he wears a cross necklace.
If he does, that's a...
That's a pretty strong message, because he runs on Fox News, and that's probably a perfect place for that sort of thing.
Now, the other things he does is he makes it clear to you that a lot of people are buying this product, so you get the sense that you're part of something larger.
Everybody's doing it, and you're influenced by peer pressure.
Oh, everybody's buying these pillows?
They must be good pillows. A lot of people are buying them.
And of course he does lots of statistics of this or that or you sleep better or whatever.
So those are the main techniques.
He makes you like him personally.
He paces you to be just like you.
He brings you into the picture, so he activates more than just your hearing.
He makes you imagine how it feels, what it looks like.
So he's bringing in all of your senses.
And then, if I recall, he's probably got something toward the end where he talks about price, where it sounds like it's a deal.
Now, one of the things that he can't do, it's not as easy to do because of the nature of what he's selling, he can't use the shortage technique.
So he can't really say, act now or we'll run out of pillows.
Now, if that were something he could say, he'd probably throw that in there.
But obviously, he's not going to run out of pillows.
They have factories to make as many pillows as you want.
So he can't use that one, but I'm sure he would if he did.
So those are the main techniques.
And kind of quiet today.
Yeah.
Yeah, any jokes with the people?
Oh yeah, when he talks about his sheets that are made of Giza cotton, and he tells you that they can only be...
Is it the cotton that comes out of one place on Earth?
There's only one place you can get it in Giza?
And you say to yourself, whoa, there's only one place this comes from?
That must be pretty good.
Now what's missing is any sense that he has compared Giza to all of the other places that you can get it.
You can get your materials, but I suppose Giza's got good stuff, and it does make you seem special, and so that part's good too.
Good persuasion. All right.
We better start getting some real news because this summer is starting to get mighty, mighty quiet.
Yeah, if somebody would invent a solution to snoring, the world would be a lot better.
Sure.
Somebody says they're about to propose.
Do you have any advice on being persuasive?
Yes. So here's some persuasion advice for someone who is about to propose.
Number one, never propose unless you already know the answer to the question.
Now, I suppose you can roll the dice and take your chances, but personally, you know, it's 2019.
Don't propose if you don't know the answer to the question.
So that's my advice on that.
Did you see that PragerU did a video tutorial in which they debunked the Charlottesville fine people hoax?
So, PragerU got in on that, so we have yet another Another source that we can link to when people think that that's true, that hoax.
All right. Yes, wear nice shoes.
That's always good. Does anybody else have any other questions?
I'll look at your comments.
It's another strange, strange day because there just isn't anything going on, which I suppose is really good.
Oh, Area 51? So I understand that started as some kind of a prank to storm Area 51 and now it's becoming an actual event.
So I don't have much to say about that except that I think people are just having fun with it and they can certainly have fun with it.
Oh, can you talk about Seinfeld legend Larry Charles?
Yeah, I should ask Larry to come on.
So you probably saw the news that Larry Charles, who is famous for being one of the original Seinfeld writers, he is also famous for being the director of Borat.
He is also less famous for being my co-executive producer during the Dilbert animated TV show many years ago.
So I know him from working with him extensively on the TV show.
And I was alarmed to see that he had made some kind of quote, and maybe it's out of context, so I'm not going to make any assumptions about what he meant or if he was kidding or anything else, but he made some kind of comment about Democrats need to arm themselves because there might be some kind of a real civil war coming.
Now, don't you think I have to talk to him about that?
So I'll ask him if he wants to come on.
In fact, I met with Larry in the past year because he was working on a special which is now on Netflix.
Dangerous Comedy, I believe it's called.
And I was interviewed for that.
I don't think my interview made it.
I think I ended up on the cutting room floor.
I'm not sure yet.
But So I was meeting with him recently, and I have to tell you, in person, in person he's one of the smartest people and funniest people you'll ever meet, and I love him a lot.
And so I think if I talk to him in person about his recent comments, there's probably more to the story than the way it's being presented.
So maybe I'll do that.
I'm considering adding an interview feature to what I'm doing that would be separate from this in addition.
By the way, Netflix is officially...
Demonetizing about 80% of my potential monetization.
Now, I say 80% because what they do is they somewhat routinely and automatically demonetize all of my content at first.
And then there's a process by which you can ask for a human review.
Upon human review, Almost every one of them is then improved, but it takes you more than a day to get it improved and by then 80% of my traffic has already happened because I have content that people watch the same day.
It doesn't have as much meaning because it's tied to the headlines if you wait for the next day.
Oh, I'm sorry. I said Netflix.
I meant YouTube.
So forget everything I just said about Netflix except when I was talking about Larry Charles.
YouTube... YouTube is the one who's demonetizing me.
Sorry. And, but here's the thing.
Apparently they're also demonetizing David Pakman the same way.
He'd be associated with the left.
So whatever it is, it has something to do with political content, and I guess they just don't want it.
I don't know. Or maybe it is that David Backman's not the kind of political content they want even on the left.
I don't know. I have no idea why he's being demonetized because I'm pretty sure his content does not warrant it, nor does mine.
So I don't know.
I can't say that YouTube is targeting me for talking about Trump.
But I'm definitely being targeted for political conversation.
Somebody's asking about...
Kathy Zhu, Miss Michigan.
You know, how you feel about the Miss Michigan story?
I guess she was dethroned for things she said on social media.
She claims those things were not that controversial.
Other people claim that they actually are pretty bad.
You can make your own judgment.
I don't really have an opinion about that story.
I saw some of the tweets, and I would say, yeah, I can see how you'd say that you would think that would be pretty bad.
So that's your personal judgment.
I would say, yeah, personally, I'm hard to offend.
So I wouldn't say that any of it was offensive to me.
But it also wasn't targeting me.
So I imagine if she had targeted me, I'd feel a little differently.
All right. Yes, for my interview series, I would use a different technology than Periscope, because Periscope doesn't have an easy split-screen way.
You can do it, but I'd probably just use a different technology, probably Zoom and do it offline and then publish it.
What's my prediction for 2024?
I don't have a 2024 prediction.
You might see Mark Cuban getting interested.
That would make it a fun race.
But there are a lot of people waiting in the wings.
Let's see. Can I be interviewed?
Probably not. Who do you think will win the next Democrat debate?
One of the women. So one of the women will be a winner.
It will either be Warren or Kamala or both.
The slaughter index is over 100%.
So the odds of Trump winning re-election are pretty much locked down, I would say, at this point.
Michelle Obama, no.
There's zero chance that Michelle Obama will run for office.
Zero chance.
Forget about it.
Nikki Haley has so far not impressed.
She seems to disappear, at least during the debate, she sort of disappeared.
I just don't think there's enough, I don't know, maybe media support for her or whatever it takes.
I don't think Buttigieg has true national appeal.
He might get attention, but he's not going to be the nominee.
It's really down to Warren and Harris, in my opinion.
What has happened to Beto?
You know, the best theory I heard on Beto is that the whole reason that he got a lot of attention was, you know, partly some people liked his look, so he had, you know, charismatic vibe about him.
But the best theory I heard is that the real reason that Beto was popular is just that he was running against Ted Cruz Originally, and people wanted to get Cruz out of office if they were anti-Republican.
And so he got a lot of money and support that maybe you wouldn't have normally gotten, except that he was running against Cruz.
So as soon as you take Cruz away and he's just thrown in the mix with other Democrats and he's running against Democrats, well, he doesn't look interesting anymore because of the contrast.
All right. Yeah, some say he looked like a Kennedy.
I don't know. I just don't think Beto had anything.
Now, remember, I was never predicting Beto would go far.
So I think I'm on point on that prediction.
Someone in the comments is saying a woman president would be disastrous.
How would that be disastrous?
On what basis would a woman president be a disaster?
Unless you're just saying it's because they're Democrats or something, but I don't think there's any basis for that kind of a statement.
All right, I'm just...
Oh, Mueller's coming. You know, the Mueller thing is just summer reruns.
We couldn't come at a better time.
I think everybody's sort of on board with the idea that the Mueller thing isn't going to produce anything useful.
Now, I appreciate the Democrats' play here, because the play is just to get people to talk about it more, maybe to understand some details in the report, and maybe that's all.
But there is some...
Some suggestion...
There is some suggestion that it's going to be good for Republicans because of the types of questions they're going to ask about how the whole thing got started and why it didn't get wrapped up sooner and stuff like that.
So it could be just terrible for Democrats.
But they'll get that story back on the headlines and maybe that part's good.
Um... Alright.
What time is the Mueller thing tomorrow?
I haven't decided if I'm going to watch the whole thing or just pop in and out.
My assumption is that Mueller is going to be so boring that it will be unwatchable.
And he might want to keep it that way.
Because I think he just wants to say blah blah blah until he goes home.
Alright. Did you talk about Boris?
Yes, I did. There was some story about Trump offering to broker a peace talk between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, and then there's other reporting that says, that conversation never happened.
That's not on the table.
I just love the fact that that's even out there.
Even if it's fake news, even if it's just totally untrue, I love the fact that it's just sitting out there That Trump has offered, even if it's not true.
I just love the fact that it's out there that he's offered to mediate that.
Could he do that?
Maybe so. Maybe so.
You know, as sure as I was that Trump would be the wrong, you know, the right person to talk to Kim Jong-un, and as sure as I am that I don't think he's going to shake hands with the Ayatollah, I just don't see him standing physically together, I could totally see Trump working something out over Kashmir.
I could see that.
That is totally within the realm.
In fact, if I had put odds on it, success, probably 60%, you know, if he actually got involved.
You know, the odds of him actually getting involved are probably low.
But if he got involved, and if India and Pakistan said, you know, nothing else has worked, Let's try that.
Let's take a run at it.
Nothing else is working. So, Mr.
President, why don't you see what you can do?
I think he'd have something like a 60% chance of making some progress there, just because of the nature of who he is, etc.
Now, by the way, there's another thing that may happen soon.
It hasn't happened, but could happen.
If the president gets a number of negotiating wins under his belt, it doesn't matter which ones they are.
Let's say something good gets negotiated with North Korea.
Let's say he gets a Chinese trade deal.
Those are just two examples.
Let's say he gets both of those done.
And let's say the new Mexico-Canada trade deal also gets signed.
Let's say all three of those things get signed.
What are people going to say about the president's negotiating abilities?
It's going to start to look like he can negotiate things that other people can't negotiate.
It's going to look like that.
And then suddenly, people who imagined that no solution was possible will start to imagine that things are possible.
Because they're going to say, well, nobody before could figure out how to solve Kashmir.
But also, nobody before could figure out how to do a trade deal with China.
Nobody before could figure out how to do a deal with North Korea, if those things get done.
I'm not saying... We're close to those.
But if they got done, he would have a track record that would become a power in itself.
So the world is sort of lining up these dominoes.
In which the president has once again found the way to be the center of history, the dominoes are lining up that if the first three fall, and it doesn't matter what those three are, if they're all in the category of things that the president has negotiated that other people thought couldn't be negotiated.
If he can do that three times in a row, people are going to say, even his critics are going to say, you know, three in a row...
That's not a coincidence.
One in a row, people can say you got lucky.
Two in a row, they can say anything can happen.
Three in a row, Even the critics are going to say, okay, it looks like he can do things other people can't do.
He's got a negotiating ability there.
So think about how close we are, because he's got a number of things that are sort of in progress that certainly could be negotiated successfully.
I do predict something good with North Korea.
I do predict something good eventually with China, although if they don't clam down on their fentanyl exports, I don't want any kind of agreement with China on anything.
So we're very close to major, major progress in the world.
Somebody had...
Yeah, and my understanding is that...
Did I get this story right?
That pharmaceutical costs dropped for the first time?
And that President Trump's policies are getting credit for that?
Is that true? Can somebody fact check me on that?
I'm seeing some yeses here.
What are the odds that Trump could get pharmaceutical costs...
I mean, think about that.
Would you have predicted that?
Would you have predicted that they could do anything to make pharmaceutical costs go down?
I'm not even sure I would have predicted that one.
That looks pretty unlikely.
Now, I don't know exactly what it was, and maybe we'll be surprised anything could happen next year, but I think part of it was that the Administration sped up the approval of generics.
My understanding is that when the third generic hits the market, if that's the way it works, when the third option hits the market, that the price goes down.
And that simply by speeding up the time it takes to get to that third option of generic, that's enough.
apparently that makes a big difference alright price transparency we're not there yet are we But we're getting there.
So that should make a big difference too.
Can you talk about the evil medication ads on TV and are they using hypnosis?
Oh.
Well, as I've often said, when any kind of pharmaceutical or healthcare ad comes on TV, I turn it off immediately.
I run. I run to my device, to my remote control.
I grab my phone, and I don't want to hear a word of it.
Because if you don't have those health problems, listening to them isn't good for you.
Every time you hear bad news that's unnecessary, and listening to other people's health care problems is pretty optional.
You don't have to hear about the horrible health care problems Or health experiences that other people are having.
And so I turn it off as quickly as possible.
I would think that over time, our news sources would put themselves out of business.
Honestly, when I watch Fox News, I don't know how they stay in business.
And even though their product is excellent, I've said this a lot, Fox News is really well-produced, well-staffed.
Talent is amazing.
But I don't know how they stay in business.
Because it looks like their primary income is pharmaceutical ads.
And they're so obnoxious, I don't know how anybody can...
Handle it in the long run because it's like it's like somebody says hey, do you like ice cream?
Yeah, I do. I love ice cream.
Here's some ice cream It's free and you're like whoa free ice cream.
I like this I'm eating it and then and then they punch you in the head And you go what what the heck?
What's that? Why are you punching me in the head and you say was free ice cream?
And you say but I didn't sign up for a punch in the head now You might say, I like ice cream so much and it was just one punch in the head, I'll keep eating my ice cream.
And then you get punched in the head again.
If you get punched in the head enough, you're not going to take the ice cream anymore.
And watching the news, doesn't matter which network I'm talking about, all the networks are the same, it feels like being punished, like actually being punished for watching content.
Because the advertisements are actually, I find them actually painful.
And I mean that. Like, actually, I have extreme discomfort listening to all these horrible things that are in these commercials.
Somebody asked me something in the comments that I really wanted to talk about, and I was trying to talk while remembering what I was going to talk about, and it didn't work out at all.
Bitcoin controversy? I don't know what that controversy is.
I don't know what you're talking about.
I mean, there are lots of Bitcoin controversies.
I don't know which one you're talking about.
LoserThink will be out in November.
Will be a giant bestseller.
Pretty much guarantee it.
Somebody says the Trivago ads make me nauseous.
I turn off the Trivago ads every time.
There's some ads that I'll let run in the background because it's not worth turning them off.
Oh, I know what I was going to say.
If you didn't see this...
You should see the video replay.
It must be somewhere. But on Fox News, Shepard Smith interviewed the governor of Puerto Rico.
If you don't know, there's, I don't know, a million people in Puerto Rico marching in the streets for days and days demanding his ouster.
Because some emails that the governor wrote were discovered.
I don't know, hackers got them or whatever.
And they just had horrible things in them, terrible jokes about dead people and LBGTQ negative things, etc.
It was just the worst things.
On top of that, There are allegations of tremendous corruption in the government, which is probably a little more noticeable now because they had all this aid after the hurricane and people are saying, hey, where's the aid going?
So those are, you know, it's probably accentuated now.
But if you did not watch Shepard Smith rip that guy apart on national TV, you really have to see it.
Now, typically, I like my news to just be news.
And my opinion can be whatever, whatever, because it's opinion.
But I like the news to just be sticking to the news.
And that's one of the things I like about Fox News.
They're better than other networks at labeling what's news and what's opinion.
Now, Shepard Smith is the news part.
And I like it when he sticks to news.
But now and then, there's a situation which is so egregious That you don't even hold your news people to that standard anymore.
And when you watch Shepard Smith talk to this governor, who clearly was a tumor on Puerto Rico, I mean, he's bad, bad for business.
He's bad for the people.
He's just bad.
It was impossible to imagine that you could have a conversation with him and remain just objective.
And so I would say that Shepard Smith did not remain objective, but he also remained completely professional.
And what I was going to point out about it is, if there are...
I don't know how this works in the news business, if there are Emmys or whatever.
And this is the second time I've said this about Shepard Smith.
When he did the helicopter crash in New York, it was one of the best pieces of live TV you'll ever see in the news context.
He is so good!
But watching him...
To go toe-to-toe with this governor, who was being a little weaselly, was riveting television.
And they just stopped running commercials for a while because it was so good.
I assume that they thought the interview would be short, like most TV interviews, a few minutes.
But it was immediately obvious...
From the first couple of minutes that this was going to be special.
And it was. And you watch this thing and just, you know, I know some of you have your bad feelings about Shepard Smith because he's not as pro-Trump as you want him to be, etc.
But if you just talk about talent, it was outstanding.
Just the amount of talent that That Shepard Smith brought to that interview, the way he couched it, the way he kept the pressure on, the way he asked the questions, it was really just stunning, stunning talent.
So, A-plus to the producers, who never get credit, but they obviously put on an amazing show, but A-triple-plus to Shepard Smith, who, if you don't get an award for that, Somebody needs to nominate that segment because that was, news-wise, that was the best piece of news.
Just pure skill-wise, that was the best piece of news I've seen in years.
It was amazing. All right.
I don't have much else to say, so if you don't have questions and I don't see any, I'm going to go do something else.
Somebody says Eric Finman is briefing Congress on Bitcoin tomorrow morning.
Is that true? I don't know about that.
I'll find out about that. If that's true, I'm definitely going to see if I can watch that.
Alright, enough for now.
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