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Nov. 14, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
58:06
Episode 725 Scott Adams: Special Guest Clint Morgan, #Shampeachment
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hello everybody!
Is it a good day?
Yeah, one of the best.
We'll be talking about that in a little bit.
But I know the best part of your day is a little thing called the simultaneous sip.
Now, if you'd like to enjoy the simultaneous sip...
And this is the official one.
This is not the I'm on the road version.
This is I'm in my home office version.
And you're going to enjoy the simultaneous sip and all of its goodness connecting you to all the sippers all over the world.
And after we do that, I'm going to bring on a special guest.
But before that, do you have anywhere near you in your general area one of these things?
Because you're going to need it.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a snifter, stein, chalice, tanker, thermos, flask, canteen, grail, goblet, vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
Your favorite liquid, yeah.
Don't pick your second favorite liquid for the simultaneous sip.
And get ready for the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
The simultaneous sip.
Go! Feel it flowing through your corpuscles.
That's a word, right?
Corpuscle? Alright, Boo.
Hold on, Boo. There we go.
Better lighting. Sorry about that, Boo.
She likes that light. Alright, this morning I'd like to kick it off with something I have never done.
I've never done on this Periscope.
I'm going to bring on a guest.
A special guest.
Let's make sure that he's ready.
I'm going to click him on and then tell you what we're up to.
In mere moments, we will be joined by Clint Morgan, who is going to make an announcement.
Clint, can you hear me?
I can hear you, Scott. Can you hear me?
I can hear you perfectly.
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce Clint Morgan.
Clint, tell us who you are and what you're announcing today.
Yeah, so I am a prosecutor in Harris County.
I'm a Republican, and I'm announcing that I'm running for Congress in the Texas' 22nd District.
Yay! This is my first political running for office announcement on Coffee with Scott Adams.
Who are you running against?
Anybody we know? Right now it's an open seat.
Our current congressman, Pete Olson, is retiring, and so it's a wild and woolly primary on the Republican side.
We've got probably about a dozen candidates by the time it's said and done.
What's the name of your website?
I just saw it's up. ClintforTexas.com.
Can you tell I'm new at this? ClintforTexas.com.
So you can go there if you want to see more about Clint.
Now give us just a quick rundown of your policy preferences.
Where are you on nuclear power?
I am very pro-nuclear power, Scott.
That is the most sensible solution to a lot of problems we've got going on right now.
And I really think if a lot of the environmentalists were more serious about global warming, they would be on board with nuclear power.
Good answer. And where are you on health care?
I know that's a complicated one, but give us just the high level.
What do you think we should do with health care?
Generally speaking, we need to move towards a more transparent system, like our president has proposed on a lot of times.
We need to ensure that people can have policies that match their needs, and we need to ensure that people know the prices when they go in and they try to get health care taken care of.
What sort of system is it where you go in and you don't know what the price of anything is?
Right. Actually, maybe I'll bust this out now, but I've got an idea that would combine that transparency with getting everybody covered.
Do you think it's important to get everybody covered?
How do you feel about that?
I don't think that's as important.
Everybody needs to have an option to have an affordable health care plan.
What about people who, even if it's affordable, they still can't afford it?
Would we leave anybody behind in the just purely capitalist system here?
Yeah, you know, I think ultimately if people are going to be making decisions, I think we ought to have policies that allow them to get...
Low premium, high deductible coverage in case of catastrophes.
But ultimately, this is not for a lot of people.
I mean, for instance, should extremely wealthy people be required to buy health insurance?
Should Donald Trump be required to buy health insurance?
Yes, the requirement part is certainly something that people push back on.
All right. How about border security?
I'm going to guess you're for a strong border security.
Am I right? You're exactly right, Scott.
I'm with our president on this all the way.
And I really liked watching how you documented that he started off with the very big build-the-wall sale.
And he's really moved along to, I think, what most people in America and certainly most people in my district are looking for, which is reasonable border security to keep the criminal element out to reduce drug trafficking.
And what do you think we should do with the cartels?
Military action or not?
If Mexico had let us, yes.
But I'm not sure they will, so we've got to put pressure on them for that.
And how about China's fentanyl business?
Would you do a trade deal with China before you knew that they'd at least put their top fentanyl dealer in jail?
That is a very good starting point for them, Scott.
If they're going to show us that they're getting serious about being a fair trader with America and about keeping Americans safe from their drug dealers, I think that is a very important starting point for them.
Yeah, when you say starting point, you're probably where I am, which is you have to give us that first or we're not going to do the rest of the stuff.
That's just got to be the ticket to the show.
Now, I've got lots to talk about on this impeachment stuff, and so my audience is clamoring for this, but we love that you came on and did this on Coffee with Scott Adams.
Now, I assume you've watched my Periscopes.
Yeah, you know, I don't watch every day, but I watch when I can.
I listen to you in the car on the way to the office for half an hour or so.
I love the stuff you do, man.
You're a big part of what has gotten me back into politics over the last few years.
Well, that's a pretty strong start.
If you're studying persuasion on this periscope or you've seen any of my books, you're off to a strong start.
Just in closing, give me your impression of the impeachment sham so far.
I'm leading the witness. Tell us about the sham.
Yeah, you know, Scott, if I had to use a word for it, I'd say it's a sham.
I've been trying to pay some attention to this, and I think I'm a reasonably intelligent person.
I'm a lawyer.
I pay attention to things, and I don't know.
We've got fourth-hand telephone information about somebody thinking that somebody was thinking when they said, and that's just a peculiar basis to impeach a president.
All right. You know, it's funny.
It must be tough to be an actual, you know, trained lawyer and watch this stuff.
And, you know, I know from at least one of the lawyers who's watching it, don't you want to yell, you know, I object because they're leading the witness.
They're imagining things as you're saying.
Are you watching this thing and just thinking, I object, I object, I object?
Right. I mean, the normal rules don't apply here, so you've got to grasp that.
I think of this as, you know, I'm a lawyer, and sometimes I'll watch an episode of Law& Order, and none of that makes any sense from a legal perspective, but I just like to imagine that New York's a different universe where they have different rules.
That's exactly what's going on here, and none of this is legal in any sense of the term.
This is just a different universe with different rules, and Well, it's producing not the predictable results that we expect from a legal proceeding.
Right. All right, Clint, thank you so much for coming on here.
We're going to get on with the rest of this, and congratulations on getting in, and best of luck.
Thanks a lot, Scott. All right.
Take care. Let's talk about the shampeachment.
You know, I watched some of it.
I was traveling yesterday, coming back from my L.A. tour for LoserThink, which is, where do you think LoserThink is on the bestseller list?
Number five, number five.
The list that this book is on is on the New York Times self-help list, which is actually the very best place to be.
I'll talk about that later. But it's a very good day for me.
So I just found out that the next time it's published, it'll be number five bestseller on the list that matters the most to this book.
Thank you. Quite happy about it.
All right. So I was sort of paying attention a little bit while I was traveling.
My Wi-Fi and my signal kept cutting out, so I didn't catch every minute of the impeachment.
But I thought I'd catch up by looking at CNN's website this morning, just before, and I thought to myself, I wonder if it was bad for the president.
And I read the CNN report, and I was like, wow.
It's really bad for the president.
Listen to some of the things from CNN. Brian Stelter was talking about how it was a damning picture.
Well, this is all from CNN from various sources.
Dramatic new disclosures on day one of the hearings.
Painted an incriminating picture of Donald Trump as a president instinctively willing to sacrifice America's interests for his own.
Wow! And I'm thinking, that sounds pretty bad.
So I'm reading on some more from CNN's website.
Quote, if this is not impeachable conduct, what is?
My God! That's a quote from Adam Schiff, arguing that the republic's values and the concept of an accountable presidency...
We're at stake for future generations.
I thought this was just going to affect us, but it turns out the shampagement stuff, meaning the president's bad behavior, it's going to affect future generations.
Did you know that, how bad it was?
I thought it was only going to ruin my generation and your generation, but future generations are going to be ruined by this.
This is far worse than I thought.
Then we also heard on CNN's website that Taylor and his colleague George Kent, who is, this is the official title of George Kent, he's the blah blah blah of the blah blah blah.
That's his official title.
They also provided testimony to back up the theory that Trump demanded political dirt on Biden.
Oh my God! He demanded political dirt on Biden.
I can't wait to see the quote in which In a political world ruled by facts, Trump's position immeasurably worsened.
Over an intense day of testimony.
My God! Future generations are going to be destroyed and the President's position immeasurably worsened.
This is much worse than I thought.
When I was clicking on and watching, apparently I didn't see all the bad parts.
This was filled with bad parts.
Here's some more. This gets much worse.
At the outset of the hearings, there is no sign yet of a collapse in Trump's Republican support.
Are you kidding me?
How could the Republicans not fold after seeing that first day of testimony?
Don't they know that Trump's position immeasurably worsened?
How could the Republicans still be supporting this monster, knowing that future generations are at stake?
Future generations.
Don't we care about them?
The children? Greta?
Greta Thornburg?
What about her? She doesn't have a chance if any of this stuff is true, which we know it is because it's being reported.
But I haven't even got to the worst part.
Oh, CNN's explaining why so many Republicans aren't getting it.
It says, if you are watching the hearings through the lens of a right-wing media, well, there's the problem.
Somebody's looking at this through the lens of the right-wing media.
Lots of people, importantly.
If you did that, looking through that lens, you probably didn't see a case against the president being built.
You could be blinded by looking through the wrong lens.
You probably walked away thinking the Democrats' case collapsed, which would be ridiculous.
That'd be ridiculous.
That's ridiculous.
So, it turns out that it comes down to this.
Taylor testified that his aide told him a phone conversation Trump had with Ambassador Sondland on July 26th.
Sorry. Let me get back to this exciting testimony.
One day after Trump's phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Taylor's aide, this is getting serious, this is an aide, who was accompanying Sondland to meetings.
So there's a guy who accompanied Sondland in Kiev with Ukrainian officials.
He could hear Trump asking Sondland.
So in other words, somebody was nearby enough that they could hear Sondland's part of the conversation, because he was in the room.
But Trump was on the phone, and I guess Trump was screaming into the phone so loudly that you could hear it elsewhere in the room.
And Taylor testified.
All right, so Sondland, quote, told President Trump that the Ukrainians were ready to move forward, Taylor said.
Missing the bombshell.
Wow, okay, here it is.
Um... House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, by the way, if you didn't know that, asked Taylor if Sondland's statement meant that Trump cared more about the investigations than he does about Ukraine.
Yes, sir, Taylor responded.
So, this is way worse than I thought.
I thought Adam Schiff Was like a regular human with normal powers.
But according to CNN's reporting, both he and this Taylor guy, they have some powers we don't have.
They can actually tell how much somebody cares about something without actually asking.
Now somebody asked me on Twitter, polyguy, at B-O-L-I... You saw that and he asked this question, how do you measure caring?
Is that by weight or by volume?
And that's a good question. The way you can tell how much somebody cares, if they don't tell you explicitly, you don't need to be told.
You don't need to wait for somebody to say, I like this more than that.
That's sort of a loser way to do it.
Instead, if you've got somebody like an Adam Schiff or this guy Taylor...
They can read directly into the minds of the people.
They can see the caring.
And they can see, oh, one is definitely bigger than the other.
Yeah, I can see the caring.
And so they actually have...
What's happening?
What's happening right now?
Somebody's in my mind.
I can feel my thoughts being read.
It's Adam Schiff. He knows I was talking about him.
Oh, God, he's in there. He's got my passwords.
He's got all my passwords.
Oh, God, my secrets.
He has my secrets now.
Oh, Adam Schiff knows what I care about.
Oh, I'm so dead.
I'm going to get impeached, too.
Adam Schiff, get out of my head.
Get out of my head, Adam Schiff.
He's out.
All right.
I think I'm good now.
Adam Schiff was in my head.
With his mind-reading skills, by the way, distance is no impediment.
So Adam Schiff, I got out of there.
Somebody else, somebody else, there's another.
It's Taylor. Taylor's in there now.
Taylor, get out!
Get out! No, that's not true.
Okay, it is true. That memory?
Can you just...
Don't take that one! Don't take that one!
He took the fifth grade.
I no longer remember...
I no longer remember the fifth grade.
It's gone. Taylor got it.
So Schiff gets in there.
He gets all my passwords. Taylor goes in there, takes the fifth grade.
People, these people are stronger than you think.
They have powers.
They can reach through time and space and tell what you care the most about.
Much worse than I thought.
And this is how wrong I was.
Let me tell you how wrong I was about where this impeachment is going.
I happened to catch just a little tidbit early on in which Kent, whose official title is, as you know, He's the blah, blah, blah of the blah, blah, blah to the blah, blah, blah.
And that's a pretty official title.
He said that, in his opinion, Burisma was corrupt and they needed to be investigated.
And how dumb am I? I thought to myself, well, that's sort of the end of the whole champagement.
This is how dumb I was.
I thought, well, if an official person in the government who's neither pro nor anti-Trump, he's close to Burisma, and he says they should be investigated for corruption, well, it would seem to me that the President of the United States asking for that, especially the connection of the Bidens, would be exactly what the citizens of the United States would want to happen,
because we wouldn't want the candidate who's because we wouldn't want the candidate who's polling at the top, Biden, to even be running for office if there's something that's going to take him out.
I mean, I'm sure the Democrats wouldn't want to have a candidate who could be completely taken out of the race should he get the nomination because something in Ukraine happened.
Wouldn't you want to know? Wouldn't you want to kind of find out pretty quickly?
Is something happening over there?
So in my simple way of looking at the world, I thought, oh, as long as the president is doing what the citizens want, and it's one of our top priorities, I can't imagine a higher priority than knowing if the person who's polling at the top of the polls to be the next president, knowing if Ukraine owns him because they've got something on his son, for example.
Do you think they have anything on Hunter Biden?
Let me ask you this.
What are the odds that Burisma or somebody in Ukraine Have some dirt on Hunter Biden.
Any chance of that?
I mean, I don't know that they would, and I don't know that Hunter Biden did anything wrong.
Because you have to ask yourself, is Hunter Biden the kind of person, based on what little we know about him, is he the kind of person who is likely to do something over in Ukraine that maybe would reflect poorly on him or his father?
I don't know what the odds of that are.
But it seems to me that asking those questions, the President asking those questions, that that should be the end of the story.
Had the President been asking for an investigation into Biden's and Burisma, had he asked about that and the people who are experts on Burisma said, what are you talking about?
Burisma is totally clean.
Well, there's no reason to look into that.
Well, I'd say to myself, there must be ulterior motives.
But it doesn't really matter what the president was thinking.
It doesn't matter what he cares.
It turns out that you can't measure how much somebody cares about something.
They kind of have to tell you.
You can't really look into their brains and see that.
And then, apparently, there's also the Ukraine's foreign minister, whose name is Vadim Pristenko?
Pristenko, maybe?
Pristenko, shall we say?
And if you're saying it at home, you should, because it's fun.
Say it with me. Pristenko?
Pristenko? Anyway, he said on Thursday that U.S. Ambassador Gordon Sondland did not explicitly link military aid to Kiev with opening an investigation.
So, I'm not positive, because I don't have all my names and people straight on this story, but But I think that's debunking the aide who overheard the phone call.
Are those the same?
I think those are the same point, but I'm not totally sure.
In any event, it doesn't matter.
Does it matter what the president's internal caring level was?
Would it matter? Would it matter in any way if the president cared more about getting elected than he cared about the Ukrainian people?
Or that he cared about getting the information to the American public?
No. It doesn't make any difference at all.
It doesn't matter. Our system is designed so if our president does, as long as he's doing what the public wants, it doesn't matter what he is internally caring about.
We don't judge people by their internal thoughts.
You judge by what they're doing.
What did he do? He asked some questions that the American public wanted answers to.
Impeach him? Not in a million years.
Now the funniest thing about CNN's coverage, and by the way, if you're not switching back and forth, you're missing the best part of the show.
You've got to check the Fox News, then CNN, and go back and forth, because they are really reporting two different worlds.
And CNN is reporting on how Fox News is reporting it, and vice versa.
And CNN's reporting about why Fox News, all the hosts, seem so confident.
So they're acting confused about why everybody on CNN says there's nothing here and nothing to worry about and nobody's even a little bit worried.
And they just say it's boring and stupid and irrelevant.
And Brian Stelter is trying to work out the reason.
Everybody on Fox News says it's just a bunch of bull and there's nothing there and there's nothing to worry about and it's a waste of time.
Why would they do that?
What possible reason would Fox News have to say that there's nothing there?
Well, I can think of one reason.
There's nothing there.
That's one reason.
But Brian Stelter's Has speculation about why Fox News is treating it that way as they're trying to hypnotize, basically, trying to convince their viewers that there's nothing there.
So see the trick. The trick is, according to Brian Stelter of CNN, Fox News is running a big old con in which they're all pretending to not see all the impeachable stuff.
So in other words, everybody, everybody...
On Fox News doesn't see anything impeachable because they're pretending so that their viewers won't know that there's all this impeachable stuff.
And when I say all this impeachable stuff, I'm talking about the aide who overheard something which has been debunked, which led somebody else who didn't hear it to think that the president has more caring for one thing than another in his hidden thoughts.
How can Fox News not see that?
It's as clear as day. Let me say it again.
Can you believe that Fox News hosts are not picking up on this?
It's right in front of us.
There was an aide that we don't care about who overheard a phone call conversation that has already been debunked by the person who was on the phone call on the other end who told somebody something that made them think that the president cared more about one thing than the other.
In his hidden thoughts.
That's it. How could Fox News not see it?
Clear as the nose on their faces, is what I'm saying.
And by the way, the way you measure how much people care about things, it's by tears, teardrops, number of teardrops.
All right. I had a Funny tweet that for some reason I didn't print out.
But it was hilarious.
Trust me. I wonder where that went.
All right. Well, I don't have that.
So, have any of you been watching the show?
Is it back on today?
Is there more of it today?
I just don't know.
So, here's what I think.
I don't think there's even the slightest tiny little chance that the President could be impeached based on anything we've heard so far, and based on anything we would expect to hear, because I don't know that...
I really don't know that...
I don't think we're going to hear anything new.
So on a couple other topics, did you see Representative Gosar's tweets?
If you missed this, it's one of the funniest things.
So Representative Gosar was tweeting events as they happened from the impeachment trial.
So he had a long series of tweets.
But here's the fun part.
Somebody noticed or found out or somehow they understood that if you looked at the first letter of each tweet in order, the first letter of each of Gozar's tweets spelled out, Epstein didn't kill himself.
Now, I've got to say, that was the play of the year.
It was the tweet of the year.
Because everything about that was right.
So first of all, it was clever because it took a little work to make all of those tweets have that first letter.
Second of all, I doubt that anybody noticed it on their own.
So there was the tweet, but of course there had to be the leak.
So somebody who knew what the story was had to leak it.
So that somebody else could tweet about it.
And then once it was tweeted, everybody could see it and it became viral.
Oh, it's one long tweet, somebody says.
One long threaded tweet, I guess.
But what's awesome about this is that it put in perspective how ridiculous the impeachment is.
Because Gosar's not only tweeting about it, he's mocking it at the same time by just throwing that Epstein didn't kill himself meme in there.
So it was hilarious.
It took the impeachments down to a laugh level where you could just have a joke and you're in on the joke because you know what Gosar was up to.
It was really clever.
In the annals of Tweets, I think that's got to be a top 10 all-time tweeting technique.
So, well done, Representative Gosar.
What else is happening?
So, China's GDP, I guess their manufacturing is down.
Aww. So sorry.
Does anybody think there's going to be a trade deal?
Does anybody think there's going to be a trade deal with China?
Because I just don't see it happening.
I can imagine there's some minor, you know, you take these tariffs off, we'll take these off.
But I just don't see China really doing any of the things that we're asking them to do.
And I don't know that we could check.
So I don't know that there's any way we could know for sure.
That they're not going to do the things that we ask them not to do anymore.
So I just don't see us getting there.
And I'm okay with that.
Apparently the stock market's okay with that too.
Is there anything else happening?
It seems like the news just stopped.
All other news in the country just stopped.
Let me tell you about the best day of my life.
It goes like this.
My first book that was called The Dilber Principles back in the late 90s, I had never written a book before and I was asked to write a book and so I wrote one.
It was called The Dilber Principle and it hit the charts and it just screamed.
I mean, it just went running up the bestseller list and it became very quickly The number two book.
The number one book on the non-fiction side.
The number one book was Dennis Rodman's book, As Bad As I Want to Be.
His little biography. Biography slash autobiography.
And it just sat there for a while.
And it looked like I would never get to number one.
Because his was so dominant, it was just sitting there at number one.
And one day I got a call from my publisher.
And my publisher who finds out about the bestseller list before the public does, and the publisher called to tell me that when the next list dropped, I would be the number one author on the New York Times list.
And I happened to be alone when I got that call.
So I was in a relationship, but I wasn't with anybody.
I was just home. And I got that call.
And I found out that I would be the number one author on the New York Times list.
And I just cried.
Because it was just one of the best days of my life.
Just one of the best days of my life.
Now, it's very difficult to get another number one book.
But because that one was doing so well, my publisher said, can you hurry and put together some stuff that...
Maybe you've got ready or whatever.
And I didn't think I could do it, but I worked very quickly and put together a fairly rapid follow-up book called Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook.
And for a while, my two books were number one and number two on the bestseller list.
And that was a really good feeling.
That was a number one and number two book.
Now, because the nature of publishing is people who have big hits like that almost never have another big hit.
So I was told by my publisher at the time what to expect, that each book that came after that would sell about half as much as the one before.
Sort of a standard rule for non-fiction.
It's not true with fiction.
With fiction, you could just sell as many as you want.
But with nonfiction, if you have a big hit right off the bat, your subsequent books tend to sell half as much and the next one's half as much as that until they're not viable anymore.
And sure enough, that's exactly what happened.
So I got a big book deal because the first one did so well.
And just like, almost like magic, every book followed that exact formula.
Every one was half as much as the one before.
Until you got to the point where writing books didn't make as much sense.
So, that was my Dilbert-y office jokes kind of life.
And as you know, in 2013, I pivoted to writing some books that were more in the self-help category.
And then a little bit on politics.
So I wrote How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big in 2013.
And that became a...
It may have touched the bestseller list for a little bit, but didn't really set the world on fire in terms of the bestseller list.
It is, by many, considered to be the best self-help book out there.
And then I wrote Win Bigly, which was more about persuasion in the political sense.
And then I just published Loser Think, which is more about how to think productively and avoid the little traps that are easy to fall into.
And because this one hit the bestseller list, I got to feel a little bit of that feeling that I felt in the late 90s, that one day that was the best day of my life, and that was yesterday.
I have to tell you that if you spend a year working on something, and you've already got a full-time job, it hurts.
The process of writing an entire book, editing it, rewriting it, editing, rewriting, then there's just a ton of work around the title, the blurbs, the acknowledgements, there's the advertising, the marketing, the re-editing, the contracts.
There's an immense amount of work that goes into producing a book, and then you go on a book tour.
The book tour, as every author will tell you, is just painful.
It's just painful.
Now, there are parts of it which are fun.
I like the people. I loved going on the Greg Goffeld show.
I loved a lot of the interviews, meeting the people.
I got to meet Dana Perino.
I got to meet, hung out with, I had already met, but Dave Rubin, Adam Carolla, Dennis Prager yesterday.
So I'm having a great time.
Because I'm hanging out with all these cool people, but the nature of it is it's just hard because you're crossing time zones, you're getting up super early, you're going all day, you're talking, you've got to concentrate.
It's just really hard, and you're away from home.
So I just completed, and I was actually in the Southwest Terminal, To come home from the second big leg of the tour because it's New York first and then LA because of the media markets.
And I'm in there, and my phone rings, and I almost didn't answer it because I was waiting for my flight, and I'm in the terminal, but I see it's from my publisher, and so I took the call.
And the entire team that worked on the book from editor, publisher, publicist, et cetera, were on the call, and they said they just called to tell me that they just heard that Loser Think would be number five on the bestseller list for the very prestigious self-help category.
Now, you might say to yourself, hey, being on the self-help bestseller, that's not as good as being on the all nonfiction bestseller.
And you would almost be right.
You would almost be right.
It turns out that being on the self-help list is a place you could live for decades.
I You could be on that list for decades.
And in fact, books that are on there right now have just been around forever.
So the self-help stuff tends not to be a big hit and then nobody buys it, which is a lot of books.
A lot of books are, hey, everybody buys it and then they forget about it and move on to the next book.
But with Stephen Covey's Seven Habits, that's still on there.
How old is that book?
Decades old? So it is a really, really big deal to hit anywhere in the top half of the bestseller list for a book.
And yesterday, I felt the weight of all of that year of work and the risk that I put into it to completely develop a whole new career at this point in my life.
So the self-help books, now three of them essentially, if you count How to Fail and Win Bigly and Now Loser Think, they form a trilogy, a body of work, which effectively legitimized my entire career change.
So I want to tell you about this moment.
So I'm ready to fly home and I'm nothing but exhausted.
I'm nothing but exhausted and I get this good news.
And it felt amazing.
It felt amazing.
It was a full body.
Every atom in my body was vibrating in the right direction.
Suddenly, the incredible stress of the last few weeks, and it's really stressful to do all this live TV stuff, Just evaporated.
Just evaporated.
And I got on the plane.
It was just like a short, very short flight home.
And I walked in my house.
Christina was there.
And Christina told me that she had just finished the book herself.
She was waiting for the audio version.
So she just had consumed it and it had just finished.
And then she told me that...
It was one of the best books she'd ever read or listened to.
And I gotta tell you, hearing it from Christina was as good as the first time I heard I made it to the number one of the list.
It was just one of the best days of my whole life.
One of the best days of my life.
And I'm still sort of riding it.
Now, making it on the bestseller list doesn't mean you'll be there next week.
But the beauty of making it onto the list is that you're forever that person.
You only have to hit the list once and then you're a bestselling author.
You're a New York Times bestselling author.
When the paperback version comes out, whenever that comes out, someday in the future, years from now, that will say...
New York Times bestselling author.
So I gotta tell you, I couldn't be much happier right now.
I couldn't be much happier.
And I also spend some time...
I know how this sounds, but if you're an author, you understand you have to do this.
So forgive me for how this sounds, but understand it's part of my job.
I read the reviews on Amazon.
Now, I tend to ignore the one-star reviews because all of my books get at least a few.
The one-star reviews are almost always from somebody who didn't read it.
There are two categories, just trolls who didn't read it.
And then my favorite category of bad review is that it's always a guy.
It's always a guy.
It's a guy who wants to tell the world that he's much smarter than my book.
It doesn't matter which book it is.
Every one of them has had this guy.
It's the guy who comes in and said, I read that whole book and didn't learn anything because I already know everything.
Or words to that effect.
And I always laugh because that guy always shows up.
There's always that guy.
But... If you read the five-star reviews, and it's overwhelmingly five-star reviews, you can see that people are benefiting from the book.
They're getting something out of it.
And that, I've got to say, is the payoff.
The payoff is that people are reading it and rereading it.
In fact, Christina said that she's only consumed one other book in her life that she wanted to immediately reread.
And it was this one. And she swears it's not because I'm the author, but that it's that good.
Well, it doesn't get much better than this, I've got to tell you.
This is...
If you're ever going to have...
And I feel...
Honestly, I feel a little bit guilty that I can't share it.
I can't really...
I wish you could feel the way I feel right now.
Because... You can't feel much better.
Like right now, I'm having just one of the best times of my life.
It just doesn't get any better than this.
So I hope you can get a little bit of a contact high from just hearing about it.
Should it go to number one on that list, we're going to have another little celebration here.
But I've got to tell you, when you work that hard on something and then it pays off, It's a damn good feeling.
You're immortal now.
I am, in more ways than one.
I've said before that my grand plan, I always have a small plan and then a big plan.
The big plan is that I've created enough content that somebody can build the first artificial person robot based on me.
Because I've explicitly approved that.
Here I'm doing it again in public.
I give complete and unrestricted approval for AI experimenters or even manufacturers to after my death.
This is the key part. It has to be after my death.
No copyright restrictions.
You may copy my entire personality and being and put it into your test robot and Because there's so much content that I've created in the public domain.
You could do that easily.
And I'd like to go first because who would be easier?
It would be completely easy because of all the materials out there already.
So Senk is running for a Katie Hill seat.
Isn't that the seat that Mike Sertovich was thinking of running for?
Is it possible? Do I have that wrong?
Somebody fact check me on that.
But could we see a contest between Senk Unger and Mike Cernovich for the same seat?
Please, if there's a divine being, can you think of anything that would be better than that?
Like actually anything.
Could you imagine anything that would be as entertaining as that?
I wouldn't watch anything else.
I would get rid of my television just to watch those two guys debate.
Oh my God!
So I don't know if Mike Cirovich...
I may have my facts wrong, but how much would you pay for that?
Good Lord! That would just be the best show on earth.
Yes, they're both running.
I know Mike's talked about it.
I don't know if he's gotten in.
I would feel sorry for Sink.
I feel a little bit sorry for him.
All right.
Somebody says, hope this makes up for the incoming hit you took yesterday.
Did I take a hit yesterday?
I don't really remember.
I'm having such a good day.
I don't even remember any bad news that may have ever happened before.
How about Deval Patrick for president?
Well, I don't know much about him, but if he's a sort of middle-of-the-ground candidate, he might be dangerous.
He was governor, right, of Massachusetts.
It's painful watching the second debate, somebody says.
You know, I have this feeling that people who have memorable, unusual names have an advantage.
Now, I don't know that there's any science behind that, but I do believe there's something to it.
So people like Sank debate, And Barack Obama.
You think to yourself, oh my god, that's such a disadvantage, Barack Obama.
I think nicknames or interesting names work in your favor.
Because there's something about it that makes it sort of sticky in your brain somehow.
Because you repeat it over your head.
It sounds fun to say.
That sort of thing. All right.
I'm going to give you a preview of an idea for solving healthcare that makes both Republicans and Democrats happy.
Are you ready? Do you think it's possible to make a plan that makes Republicans and Democrats happy?
Let me give you the bones of what it could be.
I've told you before that all the numbers you see about healthcare are probably BS, because if only 9% of the public is not insured, And we're already paying for their healthcare if they have an accident or have surgery or something.
Somebody pays for it already.
So the money to pay for all healthcare to cover everybody, we're only 9% off.
It's just that that money exists in different places.
It exists in savings that the hospital can save.
It exists in your employer is paying it now, but they don't have to pay it later.
So it exists in the system.
Short 9%.
What would be the thing that Republicans want to do more than anything.
In fact, Clint Morgan said it at the beginning of this Periscope.
What they want to do is make prices transparent.
So the main thing that Republicans want is a transparent system.
How much do people believe healthcare costs could be reduced with that one change?
Let's say a law that requires all pricing to be So customers can shop for better deals.
How much would we save?
Now, I've seen ridiculous estimates of 75%.
But I think that's based on anecdotal stuff, that there's sort of one thing that went down 75% that one time or somebody else's experience.
I would never in a million years, with my background in economics, imagine that costs could go down 75%.
In any near-term way.
But, could they go down 9%?
Do you think that transparent pricing would buy you 9%?
I think so.
So in other words, if Republicans got what they want, transparent pricing, it would create the space to cover everybody.
Now you'd still need the right kind of law To be able to claw back the money from the hospital that saves a bunch of money because now they always get paid when they cover people who are not covered because there's nobody who's uncovered.
So that sort of pot could be accessed, I think, if you could figure out what it was.
And employers then would save a bunch of money, but maybe you tax them the same amount that they saved in the short run.
So if you could somehow tax the people who are going from paying healthcare to not paying healthcare, in other words, your employers and the hospitals that are treating people anyway, just they're not getting paid for it, and then you save 9%, you've created all the money you need to cover everybody.
And people could still keep their private healthcare insurance, probably.
So let's say you do this.
You create a system where people can shop for the best deals, but wait for it.
If you do a good job of shopping for deals, you get a rebate.
So imagine that...
I'm just going to throw this out.
Imagine that you had a system where the government insured everybody.
Before you throw up, let me finish the point.
Because you don't know where the point's going yet, right?
So just suspend your judgment for a while.
Just imagine that the government handles the health insurance.
How much would that lower costs?
Well, I would think that the insurance industry would, of course, get decimated.
But whatever their profit level was would inure...
I won't use a big word.
Whatever that profit margin was that insurance companies were making, that should now go to the benefit of the government, in essence, because they would have a lower cost structure because it's not a profit.
But suppose, wait, wait for the end.
You said you lost me at government.
That's the right instinct.
So every one of you who said, I'm out, I'm out, because you said the government has some control, wait for the second part.
And by the way, I'm just brainstorming here, so these don't have to be great ideas.
Here's the second part.
Let's say you, the consumer, can see all the prices, and you can shop.
And if you do the right things, let's say you get the preventative tests, you get some points.
You don't smoke, you get some points.
I don't know if that's a good one.
You join a gym, you get some points.
Now, these are hard to measure, but just stay with me on the concept.
If you do the right lifestyle things, you take the right preventive measures, you get points.
And then maybe you get some money back.
So if you wanted to take real good care of yourself and do all the right stuff, you could actually get money back.
You could get free health care and money back.
Because the whole system is benefited by you shopping for better prices.
So, would you accept a government plan if it had total market competition that's driven by the consumers?
So the government isn't doing so much maybe for negotiating and it's this big inefficient thing.
But all it's doing is allowing the individual people to shop and use market forces to drive down costs.
That would be a system in which Republicans would see market competition driving down costs, individuals shopping for better prices if they want to.
They don't even have to.
And you'd have all the money you needed for a system.
Now, when you're saying no government, you do understand that Medicare exists, right?
So Medicare exists, and nobody's dying from it.
Medicare isn't killing anybody.
Seems to exist. Yeah, the Veterans Affairs, that's a government-run thing.
So there's government and then there's government.
I do not accept the idea that just because the government's evolved, everything goes to hell.
Because we have a system now that works quite well.
You've got your...
Private health insurance for people who can have it.
You've got your Medicare for people who can't afford it, certain ages, etc.
It's kind of working, isn't it?
Except for prices. The only thing that's...
Somebody says, look up Mark Cuban's talk at the recent health conference in Vegas.
I would very much like to have Mark Cuban on here to ask about that.
I know that he was working on sort of a concept, but I'd love to hear what his concept has.
I'm sure it's got some...
Without seeing it, I'm sure that Mark Cuban's plan would have some market price transparency and some market competition built into it.
I don't know, but I'd be amazed if it doesn't.
So, hey, let's make that a task.
I'll go look for that. All right.
That's all I've got for now.
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