All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 26, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
53:48
Episode 641 Scott Adams: How to Beat Warren, China Fentanyl, G7, Homes for Low Income People, #HOAX5
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Yes, it's the special Monday version of the theme song for Coffee with Scott Adams.
As luck would have it, I'm Coffee with Scott Adams.
You know, I'm so tired.
Oh my God, I'm tired.
As luck would have it, I'm Scott Adams.
Sometimes I forget who I am for the first few hours of every morning, but I'm pretty sure that's who I am at the moment.
And if you'd like to join in for the ceremony I call the Simultaneous Sip, it's probably something you call it too.
You don't need much.
You don't need much.
And you're probably ready. Because all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a stein, a chalice, a tank or a thermos, a flask, a canteen, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, the Simultaneous Sip.
Go. Blah, blah, blah.
Good, good stuff.
So, let's talk about all the exciting things that happened at the G7 Summit.
And now we're done.
Because there were no exciting things that happened at the G7 Summit.
Oh, there were gossipy little stories about who talked to whom and You know, who had what kind of attitude and blah, blah, blah.
And the Iranian foreign minister made a surprise visit.
Blah, blah. Nobody cared.
So the G7 was a big nothing.
Literally nothing happened.
There's a fake news story today that China's signaled on Monday, meaning today, That it was now seeking a calm end to its ongoing trade war with the US. They are seeking a calm end to the trade war.
And so our stock market went up.
What exactly does that mean?
They want a calm end to the trade war?
Nothing. It doesn't mean anything.
Who doesn't want an end to problems?
You might as well not even have asked the Chinese.
Should have gone and say, hey, we need a quote for our story.
Say something about the trade war.
We wish we didn't have one.
Great. I'll tell that story and our stock market will zoom.
There's no actual news there.
Apparently the Chinese have the same position they always had.
It means absolutely nothing.
So, here's my prediction on the trade negotiations with China.
There will be no trade deal.
Not today.
Not tomorrow.
Not next week.
Not by the end of the Trump administration.
And not by the end of, you know, a second term specifically.
Maybe not after that.
You know, you don't want to say never because never is a long time.
But I don't think that we're heading toward an agreement.
I think we're heading toward a divestiture, meaning just separating our ways.
It'll take a while. Until then, we can just tariff each other and rattle our sabers and stuff like that.
So I say no trade agreement with China is forthcoming.
And here's the surprising part.
You might not know the difference.
You may never know the difference.
There will certainly be individual companies that are going to get hit hard.
And nobody's happy about that.
Very unfair, because companies build a business around a certain set of international assumptions, and they should be able to depend on that.
But apparently in our world they cannot depend on China to be a good player.
Now there's a bigger thing happening here.
I haven't talked about this before.
Yeah, every now and then I have a topic that I think, well this could totally end my career and destroy my reputation forever, but let's do it!
I'm game, if you are.
Let's take some risk.
So I told you I've been reading this great book called American Nations about the founding of this country and some of the cultures and influences during the colonial days and earlier.
What formed the country?
One of the most striking things Is how New York City was formed.
I guess it was the Dutch who were the primary settlers of New York City originally.
And the Dutch brought with them a, let's say, a business philosophy, if that's the best, maybe a business set of...
Manners, expectations, I don't know exactly what to call it, but a belief system and a set of preferences around how to do business.
And the primary thing or things that they held as important were that if you have money, I'll talk to you.
Now, that doesn't sound like a big deal in 2019, does it?
If you have money, maybe we can do business?
That just sounds like, pfft, that's just what business is.
But you have to take yourself back in time all the way to the days when slavery was common.
I mean, if you can even wrap your head around that, that slavery was common.
Doing business with everybody just because they had money, even if they were a different religion, different anything, was a big, big deal.
And it's what allowed commerce to work.
Now part of that is trust.
So it's not good enough to say, yeah, I'll do business with anybody.
The anybody that you plan to do business with has to trust That if you give them money, they'll give you a product.
And that the product will be roughly what it was they promised they'd give you or else they'll make it good.
So a certain set of sort of very 2019 customer-focused ways of looking at things.
Now, I may be over-interpreting a little bit what things were like back then, but the basic idea is that there were a set of assumptions about trustworthiness, about transparency in your deals, and making sure that both sides got a good deal, and in dealing with everybody, If money was involved, that's all we care about.
We don't care about your religion, don't care about anything.
Do you have money? Yes or no.
So that was a super powerful set of ideas that I would argue has powered the United States for a few hundred years.
And when somebody from the United States comes into the room and says, I'd like to make a deal, that person from the United States, no matter who they are, brings with them the entire history of the United States.
Think about that. If you're an American and you go to another country and you want to make a business deal, you're not there alone.
You are there with the entire history of the United States as part of your brand.
And when you go in there and say, I'm going to be good to you, if you make a deal and something goes wrong, I'm going to fix it, the person on the other side, they're going to say, you know, if this wasn't some crazy American saying that, I wouldn't believe that at all.
But I actually believe that these crazy Americans, they understand that making the customer happy is how business grows.
I think I'm going to trust this cat.
I'm going to make a deal.
So it's super powerful that Americans who go to do business overseas bring with them The entire history of the United States, which is in many ways a continuation of the Dutch philosophy that the money can be separated from all of your other bigotry, if I could put it that way.
Now take China.
China is in the midst of, let's say, this long-term shift in brand from communist to capitalist with a dictatorship sort of situation.
I'm not sure what you'd call China exactly.
There's nothing quite like China.
And they're developing their brand.
For which every Chinese business person who wants to leave the country and do a deal is going to be taking with them.
So all Chinese business people will be bringing with them the brand.
Of China and China's history of doing business.
And if you don't trust China, you're not going to trust that individual business person who wants to make a deal.
And at the moment, China is looking pretty...
What would you say?
They're being discredited by their actions in Hong Kong.
Because Hong Kong was a deal.
And it's a big deal.
It's one of the most noticeable...
A high level, everybody knows about it, deals in the history of all deals.
You know, there have been big deals in the world.
But the deal in which the UK turned over Hong Kong and the terms with which they turned it over to China is one of the most notable agreements of all time.
Now the narrative at the moment, and I'm not close to the details, but this would be how the rest of the world sees it, is that China reneged on one of the most high-profile deals of all time.
At the same time, and this is very bad timing for them, it appears that the reason that they won't do a deal with America, and the following statement I'm going to make, I don't know if it's true.
Or accurate or leaves out too much context.
But the way we see it, the way it's being presented to the U.S. public and to, I would imagine, to European allies as well, if they're watching the news, the way it's being presented is that we can't make a deal with China because they won't agree to stop stealing our IP, intellectual property. Now, I'm not saying that accurately characterizes the situation.
It might. I mean, that might be exactly what's going on.
But whether or not that's exactly true, or I would understand it differently if there were more context on it, what's important is this is becoming China's brand.
So the 2019 China brand is, if you buy our Huawei equipment, we will spy on your country.
Imagine having that in your brand.
That your brand is, if you let our products into your country, your national security will be lessened.
What could be worse for your brand?
At the same time, they make a huge international deal with Hong Kong, and apparently they're breaking it right in front of the world.
They're breaking the most high-profile deal you've ever seen.
Right in front of us, they just are breaking the deal.
Eh, changed their mind.
Now, if they had a better reason for it, it would look differently.
Now, you look at, you saw President Trump broke our deal with Iran, but an objective person could look at the Iranian deal and say, why the hell did they make that deal in the first place?
Or they could look at TPP and say, okay, the president broke that deal, but why was that deal even in place?
It was so flawed. We saw the President broke the, at least got out of the Paris Accords on climate change.
But again, reasonable people can say, well, it didn't make any difference.
It just wasn't important that the United States was in or out, because we lowered our output of CO2, other countries didn't, and it didn't matter if we were in the agreement or not.
China is shaping up to be ruining their prospects for competing properly on the international stage.
So let's say you are, oh, let's say Greenland.
I'll pick a ridiculous example.
And no, I don't think that anything I say about Greenland is likely to happen or realistic.
Just an example.
Let's say Greenland has an option of dealing with the United States or dealing with China on some future business, whatever that business is.
Who are they going to trust?
Well, you shouldn't trust anybody.
You should always put yourself in a position where trust is not that necessary, if you can.
But you always have to have a little.
And I would argue that the United States is in a stronger position in terms of the Dutch model of, we're going to do what we say we're going to do, and you can trust us to do a deal.
China's running in the opposite direction.
And it looks very much like China is creating a brand that you wouldn't want to do business with.
And they're going to have to deal with the consequences of that.
All right. So...
The news that China signaled that it might want to, you know, calm down the trade war doesn't mean anything.
They don't show any willingness to work with us.
And therefore, we should not work with them.
We should not. You saw the story that the US, I guess, was the customs people.
They captured something like 23 tons of fentanyl coming in through a Mexican seaport, but it came from China.
That's right. China sent, in one shipment, China sent enough fentanyl through Mexico to end up in the United States.
To kill half of the planet.
I think somebody calculated that over five billion people could die of an overdose from that amount.
Now some people have asked, is that an amount you would send for recreational use?
Is that amount of tonnage what you would expect to see if it was normal drug traffic?
Enough to kill five billion people?
Or is that weapons of mass destruction level?
Because just in quantity, it looks like massive weapons of mass destruction.
I'm not going to suggest any ideas for how to weaponize that.
They have their own, I'm sure.
So, yeah, without making any suggestions how they might use that, should we see that as just a drug problem?
Because apparently China's, some officials said, hey, United States, you should work on your demand and lower your demand.
Yeah, we should lower our demand.
Of course, that doesn't, you know, understand that most of the people who take fentanyl don't even know they're taking it.
So it'd be hard to reduce the demand for something that you didn't know you were consuming in the first place, because the fentanyl gets put in other pills that you think are other drugs.
That's how people die from overdoses.
They don't know they're getting fentanyl in the first place.
If they did, they wouldn't take so much, presumably.
I've got a real question about what 23 tons of fentanyl shipped into this country is intended to do.
Is it intended for political instability?
Is it intended as a trade negotiation tactic?
Is it a weapon of mass destruction?
Is it just to destabilize the entire government?
What the heck is 23 tons of fentanyl for?
But it all gets back to the same thing that China, because it's knowingly shipping this in.
I say knowingly because the government of China knows who makes fentanyl precursors.
They know who they are. We know who they are.
We know their actual names and probably their addresses.
So China certainly knows it.
And they could stop at anything they want.
Just go over there and close the factory, arrest the people.
They could do it anytime. So it's intentional.
And this is not a country that we can do business with.
So I'm going to take China out in the place that it hurts the most.
China is not a country you can trust for business.
Bam. China's not a country you can trust for business.
That's way more damaging to them than saying you can't trust them militarily, which everybody already knew.
Because nobody really trusts anybody militarily.
That's why you have a military.
If you could trust people, you wouldn't need a military in the first place.
But China is no longer a country that other countries should trust to do business.
They're shipping 23 tons of fentanyl into a country that should be their customer for legitimate products.
If you were IBM... And you were doing business with another company and they were buying your IBM products and then IBM said, you know, I think I'll just send a few tons of fentanyl to the employees of your company.
Why? I don't know.
Maybe I don't like your employees.
Would you still do business with IBM if they poisoned tens of thousands of the employees of your company?
No, you wouldn't. No, you wouldn't.
Would you make a deal with IBM If IBM made a deal and then just broke it, no, no you wouldn't.
I think I've told you this story before.
Early in my career, I was a contract negotiator.
So it was actually my job to negotiate contracts with vendors for the big bank I worked at.
And I was negotiating with IBM. They were going to provide the big expensive computers that we needed for our data center.
And I was negotiating that deal.
And they would negotiate.
I would say, okay, here are the things we want in our contract.
And IBM would look at me and they'd say, no, we don't do any of that.
And I'd say, no, we need these things because what would happen if we buy your product and it doesn't perform?
And the IBM representatives looked at me and they said, if it doesn't perform, we'd fix it.
And I'd say, no, no, I need this in the contract.
And they'd say... No, we don't do that.
We're IBM. Here's the deal.
If it needs to be in a contract, you should be dealing with another company.
In other words, IBM was so dependable and had such a track record of doing whatever it took to make the customer happy that putting it in a contract would actually lessen their credibility.
Because why do you have to write it down?
If you don't trust IBM enough that they'll go fix it, don't do business with them.
So what happened? In the end, you know, my boss allowed me to make the deal without getting what I thought were normal contract requirements.
And sure enough, something went pretty wrong.
You know, we got the computers.
I don't remember the exact problem, but something didn't work.
We didn't have the right mix or something.
What did IBM do?
Whatever it took. Whatever it took.
I don't remember exactly, but whatever people they had to send, they sent.
Whatever money they needed to spend, they spent.
And they did it right away.
They did it fast. They did it completely.
They never complained, and they never asked us for extra money, and they never said, look at the contract.
That's it. Would I recommend IBM to another company?
Hell yes! Hell yes!
This happened, what, 25 years ago.
I would still recommend IBM to anybody.
Absolutely. Because they brought with them The history of IBM. If you were, and there were famous stories of IBM employees, who, I think the story, it became sort of a legend, so who knows if it was even a real story, about some IBM employee who once, you know, was trying to fix a customer's problem, and he worked overnight, and he was so exhausted that, you know, he'd been up for 24 hours, so he just, he couldn't fix the problem, but he had to sleep.
And so he went home and took a nap, and he was fired immediately.
Because he left the customer.
Period. Now, I don't know if that story was even true, right?
You know, those stories get exaggerated.
But if you're dealing with a country whose history has that story in it, that they're going to fire their employee, who if he even takes a nap while you still have a problem, that's a company you want to deal with, right?
China? No.
I don't want their Huawei products that might be spying on me.
I don't want to make a deal with them if they can't make a deal with Hong Kong, if they can't keep a deal with Hong Kong.
And I absolutely don't want to do a trade deal with them if they don't have any interest in something that looks balanced.
So China's shooting themselves in the two billion feet they have, I guess.
All right, let's talk about something else.
So, you know, New York Times got busted for cranking up Hoax 5.
So, hashtag Hoax 5, which they got busted for, was they actually planned Literally had a meeting to plan that they would shape the news in the coming year around racism and that they would force stories into that narrative.
And this, of course, was all to make President Trump look weaker so that he could be beaten in 2020.
But have you noticed that after a few that, you know, they fired a few shots, did some articles, But then it sort of got quiet on that Hoax 5 front.
Did you notice that? Got a little quiet.
And it makes me think that it was just too embarrassing.
Now maybe they'll just, you know, they'll pull back for a little bit and wait a few months and then it'll come back stronger than ever.
It might have to depend on natural events in the news that they can...
You know, they can jam into their narrative, and maybe there just weren't any natural stories this past week.
But it really looks to me like they pulled back on hashtag hoax 5.
I'd like to think that giving it a hashtag, hashtag hoax 5, it's got to be kind of devastating.
Because the first thing you have to ask is, what were the other four?
And once you hear the other four, Everything from the Covington to Russia collusion, you know, you name it, to the fine people hoax.
Once you hear that they were all hoaxes, hashtag hoax 5 is pretty dismissive.
So that'll be fun.
Anyway, so keep watching that because it's possible that they're flailing For some other hook, because hashtag hoax5 didn't get them the distance that they hoped.
I tweeted around a couple of stories about concrete houses.
So that company that could 3D print an inexpensive little shell of a home for probably people not in this country, but maybe third world countries, they can now print a whole village.
So they can just line them up and print a bunch of them.
Had a weirdly similar idea.
So Thomas Edison had invented, if you could call it that, concrete homes that you could pour in a short amount of time for a low cost using the same molds.
So I guess you would use the same framework or setup and then you would pour the concrete in and it would...
The walls of your home.
So even Thomas Edison was trying to do this.
Now here is my complaint with both of those processes.
Here's my complaint with Thomas Edison and it is my same complaint with the 3D printed homes.
Here it is.
They're starting with the technology.
If any of you have worked in any kind of a technology business where you're inventing products, You don't start with the technology.
It's great to say, hey, we have a technology, let's see all the things they can do.
That's great. I mean, because that's more brainstorming sort of things.
But they're not starting with what do the people need and then building from there.
Until you see that, you're not going to find this low-end housing thing get fixed.
And I haven't seen anybody even try that.
Now, I'm curious about Kanye's effort.
We talked about that. Kanye built on some of his own property some concrete, let's say, igloo-looking but modern-designed-looking things for low-income people.
Now, I don't know the process that they used.
But once again, it's a concrete structure.
And it makes me wonder if there was some...
I'm concerned that whoever designed it started with, hey, let's build domes.
Because I know one of the requirements was...
Reportedly, who knows how accurate this is, but reportedly, Kanye or his designers wanted to make homes that you couldn't tell were low-end homes.
In other words, if you were to look at them, you wouldn't know if a millionaire lived there or a poor person.
And I like that part. I like that part.
But it's not the critical part.
The critical part is how much does it cost and how well does it work to produce a good living situation.
So my question, I don't have any sense of an answer for this, is did Kanye's design firm start with the requirements or did they start with what they wanted to build?
And then they built it and now they're testing to see how it works.
You need to start with the people.
You need to live with a small family or several small families and you need to write down what they do.
How often do you walk to the refrigerator?
How often do you need to find a broom?
How often do you need to open a window?
Just all the stuff that they do.
And then you build something around that set of functions.
If you don't see that, I don't even know if anybody's trying.
It looks like they're starting with solutions and saying, well, I know how to build things with wood.
Let's make houses out of wood.
That's what it looks like.
So there's a -- I'm going to tell you how to beat Elizabeth Warren or how the president can beat Elizabeth Warren in a moment.
But first I wanted to mention -- so my startup, WenHub, we've got some new features that are worth mentioning.
One of them is, so first of all, WenHub is a mobile app.
It's a free download.
It's called Interface by WenHub is what you would look for.
You just look for Interface.
And It allows you to make an immediate video call to get advice or expertise from anybody on any topic.
So anybody can sign up as an expert and anybody can call them.
What we just added was a feature that you can suggest a time.
So before you had to either catch them when they were online, which was hard, and then we added a scheduling feature so that people could say, I'll be available during these hours if you want to call.
And that helped, but it didn't get us all the way.
And now we just added a feature where the caller can find that somebody signed up, they're not available at the moment, but they can suggest a time, which should vastly increase the number of connections.
And then you can go back and forth on the time until you find one that works.
So that should make a big difference.
And then the other thing we did is we introduced Interface Pro.
It's the same product, meaning you can do an immediate video call with a With an expert, but it's for organizations.
So a big organization can contact us, and we will set it up so that you can have on your webpage a variety of experts.
And some would be scheduled, some might be live.
You know, it could be a variety of available and not available.
And let's say you were an organization...
In the government, and you were going to help explain to people how to apply for government grants and various programs for low-income people.
If you were a low-income person, how would you find somebody to connect to to ask a question, how do I fill out these forms to get a, let's say, a special tax exemption loan, some kind of a government break?
You wouldn't know how. So, but if you can see a button on a webpage, there's a little face there and it said, I'll help you figure out your government programs for no cost because our product allows you to set your own price.
Could be zero if you're the government, could be expensive if you're a lawyer or doctor or something.
So, right now, we can take all of those profiles and make anything they charge, if there's a charge, that's optional, go to the same organization's checking account.
So, you could have lots of advisors, but all of the money would flow to the organization.
So, we can do that now.
You would just go to onehub.com, and you'll see links to ask us how to sign up.
So, some of the uses for that would be people explaining how to use the government services.
Could it be mentors for low-income people?
Could be mental health advisors, could be advisors on senior living, could be medical, legal, construction, how to solve a problem, automotive.
I needed somebody the other day to help me fix a dishwasher.
You know, and sometimes you can fix stuff easily.
Now, it turns out all I had to do was power cycle it.
So if I had found somebody on my app, I didn't.
I ended up paying somebody to come out.
But if I found somebody in the app, they probably would have said, crawl under your sink, find where your dishwasher is plugged in, unplug it, wait a minute, and plug it back in, and it would have worked, because it turns out that's all it required.
It would have been nice if I could have just contacted somebody.
I would have paid $50 for that one minute of advice.
As it was, I paid $110 for somebody to come and unplug it for me.
Yes, I'm that dumb.
So any big organization that wants people to contact them can use this product.
Just contact us. All right.
Somebody was saying On Twitter, that we need to do more for the underemployed.
The people who are working, but their wages are low, it's not good enough for a quality life.
And somebody weighed in and said they need to increase their talent stacks.
And I think that's true.
If you could just do one thing to help the underemployed, the people who have jobs, but they're just not very good ones, it would be, I would think...
To teach them the concept of talent stacks, meaning that they can add another skill on top of what they already have, but it would be a kind of skill that works well with the first skill.
And generally, people can add skills.
There are very few people who can't pick up a new skill.
So if there were just one thing I could teach people, it's find another talent that goes well with the ones you already have, add that, do whatever you need to do to learn that new thing, And you will become more valuable.
Let me tell you how to beat Elizabeth Warren.
So Elizabeth Warren is interesting, and I've complimented her a number of times recently.
I know that makes some of you uncomfortable because you don't want me to say anything good about Democrats.
A lot of you are Trump supporters on here.
But I'm going to anyway, because we're not going to ignore reality.
The reality is that Elizabeth Warren started out, I thought, in my opinion, as a weak campaigner, meaning she just didn't have the charisma, energy, gravitas, reason for being.
I don't know.
There just wasn't any X factor there whatsoever.
But as we've all noticed, she seems to be a learning machine, meaning that she didn't get where she is by accident.
She did not get born into her good situation, being a senator, being a lawyer, going to Harvard.
She didn't get born into it.
She worked for it.
She learned and added to her talent stack all the way.
And what I've observed over the last several months is that her campaign game went from, in my opinion, poor to a pretty solid A minus.
She's not an A. She's not an A plus.
She's not Reagan. She's not Trump.
She's not Bill Clinton.
She's not Obama.
But she's pretty darn good now.
And who knows how much better she could get.
So I would say that Joe Biden is going to...
I think everybody agrees at this point that even the Democrats don't really want Joe Biden to be the nominee.
But... How do you get rid of them?
So I think that even the professionals are sort of letting, let's say, nature take its course.
I hate to say that, with Joe Biden.
I don't think anybody on the Democrat side wants to sit him down and say, you know, Joe, somebody just has to tell you.
That your time has come and gone.
And the best thing you could do is make room for whoever's going to be the candidate.
So I don't know that anybody can sit him down and tell him that, honestly.
That would be a hard conversation for somebody in Joe Biden's position.
So probably people are just waiting for it to happen on its own.
Because it looks pretty certain that it's going to happen on its own.
Nothing would make the Democrats who actually understand how stuff works, you know, the advisors, the top, top campaign officials, that sort of thing.
Nothing would make them less happy than candidate Joe Biden.
I mean, really.
That is a losing hand, and they would just hate for that to happen.
I'm pretty sure. Now, I want to avoid being a mind reader.
I'm making this assumption based on the fact that they can see what we can see.
Sometimes that's not the case.
As we've seen, sometimes we live in different worlds.
But I think in this case...
You're seeing some hints even from Democrat pundits.
You're seeing some hints in their language that they don't trust Biden to go all the way.
And then Bernie, I think, has a cap in his popularity.
But Warren might not.
So Warren, I think, is going to leapfrog to the top position sometime before the primary is over.
So how do you beat her?
Here is my suggestion.
Are you ready? You tell voters there are two situations.
There are people who already have health care, so this is the current situation.
There are people who have health care, and they like it, and there are people who don't.
What Elizabeth Warren is promising is that everybody who has health care already will be worse off, in order That the people who don't have healthcare will be better off.
So that's what she's promising you.
Now, does that seem like an oversimplification?
Because if you're going to universal single-payer, whatever the Warren plan looks like, the only way you can get there is that the people who are already happy with their healthcare are going to get a little less.
So that the people who don't have anything get a little more.
Now, you may say, well, that's not necessarily true.
You might be right.
And you might say, well, we don't know that.
And you might be right.
Or you might say, well, it'd be a little different, but it's not going to be that much different.
Maybe you have to wait a little longer for an MRI, but it won't be that much longer.
You might be right.
But does it feel true on a conceptual level and in a practical, real-world level, does it feel true that everybody who has health care would be worse off?
Kind of does, doesn't it?
So I think that Trump could say, and he would be safe in saying it, if you already have health care and you like it, don't vote for Warren.
Right? Because ultimately people are selfish.
If you say to me, Scott, do you think everybody in the country should have health care?
I say, yes.
Yes, they should.
Everyone in this country should have health care.
If you say to me, Scott, in order for that to happen, you'll have to wait a month for your MRI, should you ever need one, when it would really be good if you could get that over with in a day or two.
But if you're willing to wait a month, then everybody has more resources, and we've all got healthcare.
But your wait goes from two days to a month for some of your more important services.
Are you okay with that, Scott? To which I say, I sure would like everybody to have healthcare, unless it's bad for me.
All right? Now I'm talking as a general person here, not just Scott.
It's hard to vote against your own interest in a conspicuous way.
People do it. People do knowingly vote in favor of social services.
So that's the thing.
It happens. But if you break it down to the simplest thing, if you have health care already and you like it, you're not going to like it as much if Warren is president.
Now, does that first of all ring true?
It doesn't matter. It's precisely true.
Because I think it's, you know, I think it's true in an honest sense, in the sense that anybody who would say such a thing is not a liar.
But, you know, it's a complicated world.
Things are not that simple.
But as a generalization, it's pretty good.
If you already have health care and you like it, you're not going to like Elizabeth Warren being your president.
Because she's going to change that situation.
If you don't have health care and you want to get it, President Trump gives you away, which is, you know, a good economy.
Get a job. Maybe they cover your health care.
Maybe you can afford it if you have a job.
So it seems to me that you could simplify this big old complicated health care thing into that one question.
And that's a killer simplification.
One of the most powerful things you can do for persuasion is simplification and then repetition.
The two things that this president does better than anybody's ever done, you know, at least from the office of president.
Nobody has ever simplified and repeated better than Trump.
Make America great again.
Build the wall. Pocahontas.
All right? Nobody ever, ever has ever been close to as good as this president is as simplifying and then amplifying and repeating.
Nobody. Nobody's even close.
So this is sort of a low-hanging fruit that the big, I would say it's the signature policy of Warren.
If you told me, hey, Scott, what are all the reasons somebody would prefer Elizabeth Warren over Trump?
Well, first of all, people always complaining about the character stuff and, hey, he's lying and he makes me feel bad and he's the orange man bad.
So if you get out of the personality stuff, there aren't that many giant issues that people really care about at the moment, right?
Even climate change.
People say they care about climate change, but I don't really feel it.
I just don't feel it in the general public.
The entire climate change energy is this thin film of people who care about it a lot.
And then there's 99% of the country who just says, eh, I'll take off my jacket if I get warm.
Is that your experience?
I don't know anybody personally who cares about climate change.
Oh, sure. If I asked, if I asked everybody, no, do you care about climate change?
They'd say yes. Some of them would say they care a lot.
Some of them would say it's their top issue.
How many of them act like it's their top issue?
Almost nobody. Almost nobody.
Climate change is a television issue.
Meaning that if you go on television or you go in the media, it's a topic people like to talk about.
Somebody says it's a social lie in the comments.
That's kind of true.
It's sort of like telling people you are really good at recycling.
Oh yeah, it's my top issue because I love science.
I love science.
So my top issue is climate change.
And by the way, I'm not even saying it should or should not be your top issue.
I'm not telling you it is or is not a giant problem.
You know, we've talked about this too much.
I can't tell because it's an impenetrable area for me and I've spent, you know, over a year trying to penetrate it and I can't.
I can't tell what's true. So I have trouble getting...
I have trouble making a priority, a worry about something that I just can't even tell what's true and what isn't.
The fact that There's some vagueness to it in my mind.
Whether there's any vagueness in reality is different, but in my mind there's some vagueness, so I can't really make this my thing because it's too vague.
But healthcare? Everybody knows what healthcare is.
Everybody's got an opinion.
Everybody's been sick.
Everybody has a loved one they want covered.
Everyone's had the experience of waiting too long for some kind of healthcare.
That's real. You tell me that Elizabeth Warren's going to make my healthcare worse, if I already have healthcare, I'm done.
I'm not going to listen to your trade negotiations that I don't understand.
I'm not going to listen to your complaining about the Fed that I don't really understand.
I mean, I, the general public.
I'm not going to listen to your climate change stuff that I'm scared about but I don't really understand.
But I understand my health care, and I understand that I like it.
Most people would say that.
Don't mess with it. All right, so that's the kill shot for Elizabeth Warren.
If you have health care, she's going to make it worse.
Boom. Done. And out.
Let's talk about Kamala Harris, who's, in my opinion, sort of in the fourth position.
Now, the fourth position for Democrats is really like third position.
Because I don't think Biden can be taken seriously as the front-runner, as I mentioned before.
So it's sort of Bernie, Warren, and Harris, who I would say are the serious, likely to be nominated.
And, you know, I was predicting Harris would be the one a year ago.
But have you ever seen a worse campaigner than Harris?
Is that my imagination?
I don't know if I've seen anybody who's worse at this.
You know, we make fun of Beto O'Rourke all the time for all of his, you know, dentist chair stuff and his silly things and he lies about the fine people hoax just about every day and he's just a big old crazy clown and everything.
Even he is better than Kamala Harris.
He's terrible and he's better than her.
Have you read any Kamala Harris tweet?
That didn't sound like it was generated by a, I don't know, a drunken monkey.
I shouldn't use monkey because people take that into context.
A drunken animal of any sort.
So generalize my animal treatment there.
Her tweets, again, I'm not calling Kamala Harris any of these names.
I'm saying that her tweets...
Look like almost not even human being inspired.
It's like a random word generator or something.
You know, we talk about the X factor.
Some people have the X factor where you can't look away.
President Trump has that.
But Kamala Harris has the anti-X factor, which is no matter what she does, it's easy to look away.
You can ignore her so easily.
I don't know. What's up with that?
I swear, she either has the worst advisors or she's the worst candidate of all time.
I mean, she really should have just coasted into the nomination, in my opinion.
In my opinion, she could have just coasted into the nomination just doing...
If she just did a pretty good job, if she just did a solid B +, she would be the frontrunner.
But she can't pull off a B +, or a B, or a B-.
If I were to grade her campaign performance so far, C-, tops.
Maybe a D. But something like a C or a D. And remember, I'm not just insulting old Democrats because they're on the other side from Trump.
Because Elizabeth Warren is the opposite.
She started as a B- and she's already A-.
You don't want to turn your back on somebody who pulled...
A B minus up to an A minus in a few months.
Keep your eye on that one, right?
That shows a learning machine.
That's somebody who can figure it out.
I've often thought that if Elizabeth Warren changed her eyewear, her glasses, her votes, her support would go up 5% in the Democrat polls.
Let me say that again.
If Elizabeth Warren Updates her eyewear.
Just her glasses.
Her support will go up 5% on the Democrat side.
Somebody says, and her hair?
I don't know.
I think her hair is great.
Her current haircut, Elizabeth Warren's current haircut, it's a great haircut.
That's really strong.
I would consider it modern and Looks good on her.
And she's... Yeah, so she has granny glasses.
So she has granny glasses, but the rest of her is not in the same age zone because she's lean and fit and she does have a youthful, you know, youthful persona otherwise.
Other people say they don't like her hair, but I would disagree with you.
I think her hair... It's really well done.
It's actually one of her strong points, I would say.
Just an opinion. No help for the voice, though?
Yes, actually, she could fix her voice as well.
And she would be in the very short list of people who could do that.
So somebody said, you know, she's got a voice that bothers you, apparently.
I've taught you on other periscopes how easily you can adjust your voice with voice exercises.
It's pretty easy, given that campaigning is essentially acting.
When you're giving a speech or you're in public and you're a campaigner, you're sort of acting.
You're putting on a public face.
Can Elizabeth Warren adjust to her act?
If you say no, you haven't been paying attention because she's a learner.
She can definitely analyze her weaknesses and then put systems in place to fix them because you've watched her do it.
And somebody asked about her outfits, her clothing.
It seems to me that she's got sort of a uniform, wouldn't you say?
So she has... Elizabeth Warren tends to wear different things underneath some kind of a fashionable light jacket.
So it's the jacket that gives her a little bit of, you know, professional look, and then what she wears under it is often just plain black.
To me, it works, because it's sort of a uniform.
It fits her well.
It's not trying to be too much.
It's not too feminine.
It's not too masculine. In fact, I might go further and say she might have a professional advising her on that and doing it well.
Somebody says it's a horrible wardrobe.
Keep in mind that a politician of a certain age is not going to look like Melania.
So, you know, if you're saying, if you're imagining in your mind, hey, Elizabeth Warren doesn't look as good as Melania does, that's not really fair.
You know, you have to adjust for age.
You've got to adjust for what job she's running for, has to look a little bit professional.
So there's sort of a maximum of how good you can look if you're running for president and you're above a certain age.
I think she hits it.
I think her look is pretty strong.
All right. She dresses plain, but that's okay because that lets you read into her what you want.
Her clothing choice is neither distracting nor...
It's not distracting either in the good or bad direction.
And that might be exactly where you want it to be.
So, yeah, she has a little bit of a schoolteacher look, so she's not trying to be exciting.
But I don't think that works against her.
All right, that's all I got for now.
I will talk to you all later.
▲
Export Selection