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Dec. 27, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
47:21
Episode 769 Scott Adams: All the Good Things to Expect in 2020, and the Simultaneous Sip
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hey everybody!
Come on in.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
And I'm Scott Adams and you're coming in for coffee or possibly your favorite beverage.
It doesn't matter what beverage.
We'll talk about that in a moment.
It's all good news this week.
No bad news happening.
No bad thoughts. No negativity.
What a wonderful, wonderful week it is.
And you know what makes it better?
I think you do, because that's why you're here.
You're here for the simultaneous sip.
And all you need Is it a cup or a mug or a glass?
A tankard gel is just died?
A canteen jug or flask?
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. Yep.
Just as good as I thought.
Never disappoints. So let me start off by saying, I don't know how your week is going, but I've had one of the best weeks my whole life.
Honestly, one of the best weeks of my whole life.
Number one, it's the end of the year and a lot of people are just sending nice messages.
So I'm hearing from people who just enjoyed interacting during the year.
But hearing from a lot of people who say that something I said in my Periscope or something that I read in one of my books had changed their lives.
So all week I'm listening to people say, thanks to you I lost weight, I got a job, I got a raise, I started a new career, and I'm just being sort of bathed in good feelings.
At the same time, I've noticed that all of what I would call the bad trolls on Twitter, I'm not talking about people who disagree with you and get into an exchange.
I'm talking about the ones who are just, you know, the F you and leave kind.
They all left for vacation.
And I thought to myself, have you noticed this, by the way?
That if you look online, the quality of the interactions are far less because people are on vacation.
But it looks like 100% of the good people stayed around and they're just tweeting a little bit less.
But all of the people who look like I always suspected they were paid trolls, you know, actually working on the clock, they're all gone.
So what does it tell you that all of the paid trolls, the ones I suspected were paid, they're all gone.
There's none of them on the internet right now.
But the good people are still here.
So it kind of tells you how not real a lot of the trolling was, because they still have computers, they still have Wi-Fi, they still have plenty of time on their hands.
Nothing changed for the trolls unless they're getting paid and they're not getting paid this week.
Coincidence? I don't know. It could be.
Could be some other explanation, but I can't see one.
But, even more fun, I got engaged this week.
So Christina is now officially my fiancé.
And I got to say, I didn't know how different it would feel until after I asked and she said yes.
It feels completely different.
It just feels completely different, I have to say.
So I may tell you more about that at some point.
I know that you're going to wonder how I asked her.
And the answer is, I put the ring in a box of seized chocolate so that she discovered it.
And a good time was had by all.
So, I've never felt better, I don't think.
This is probably the best week I've ever had in my life, or one of them.
So, thank you for...
Thank you for being a big part of that because you're actually a huge part of that, every one of you, because this interaction that I do with you and the extended interaction on the internet and Twitter and stuff, I don't really do it for the money.
It's not about the money.
There's definitely a deeper meaning, deeper purpose, and I'm glad you're all part of it.
So let's talk about some more good news.
I tweeted about this, but I just want to mention it again because I'll just throw it in the list with my good news.
In 2006-ish, I lost my voice, most of you know this story, to something called a spasmodic dysphonia.
Which meant that I could make noise out of my mouth but I couldn't form proper consonants and sentences without my vocal cords clenching and making it incomprehensible.
So I was told that that was a permanent problem and that there was no cure and that for the rest of my life I would not be able to have a conversation in a normal way.
I wouldn't be able to talk on the phone for the rest of my life.
So that was what the diagnosis was.
I, however, do not like being told that I can't do something.
And so, as has been my lifelong habit, I started something called affirmations, which is when you repeat to yourself or you write down 15 times a day something in particular, some goal that you want.
Now, I also warn against goals, so I like to keep the goals either general, if it's something like money, so that you can make as much as you want.
You don't want to be too specific about that.
But if it's something as specific as you've got a specific health problem, well then be specific.
You want your specific health problem to be specifically fixed.
So for three years, every time I drove my car by myself, which was a lot, I'd be driving around locally, going to the gym or whatever, I would repeat aloud Even though I couldn't form actual clear sentences, I would repeat aloud, I, Scott Adams, will speak perfectly.
Now, what's interesting about this affirmation is that I never spoke perfectly before I had the medical problem.
I had an approximate, you know, kind of a bad nasally voice, and obviously still not perfect.
But I repeated that for years, and eventually I did find a rare, surgical, fairly new procedure that fixed it, and then it took years to rehab it.
After it was surgically fixed, it took years of practice to get it up to actual usable strength.
Where I'm going with this is that yesterday my audio book The audiobook version of Loser Think, my latest book, is sitting at number one in its category, and it's the audiobook that I produced.
So not only did I get my voice back from an incurable problem, But I've also helped a lot of other people get cured of the same problem because I'm part of the outreach.
I make sure that I use the spasmodic dysphonia words in my tweets every now and then so people can find me, find how I solved it, and then they can find their way to the same solution.
So I've probably, I don't know, I may have cured personally just by connecting people to the very, very hard-to-find solution.
I may have cured, I don't know, 50 people?
100? I don't know.
But I do hear from a lot of people who heard about it from me and have gone through with some kind of surgery.
So I just want to say there are very few things that feel better than knowing that years ago you were chanting a specific, literally impossible-seeming goal in your car all alone.
It's the loneliest process in the world.
And I don't think there was one point that I thought I wasn't going to do this.
I don't think there was ever a point I thought I would fail to get my voice back, even though there was no way to do it.
And so here we are.
I've got a periscope that 3.3 thousand people are watching.
Probably a hundred thousand people will watch this at replay eventually.
And I'm doing all of this when I started with not being able to talk.
But I am one stubborn mofo.
If there's one thing you could take away from me, this is my own opinion of myself, the one thing that defines me is I don't like to lose.
And I don't like to be told I can't do something.
And it's motivating as all hell.
And even when it's like really, really bad stuff, like the voice problem was, I just get more motivated.
So that's just me.
Anyway, here's what to look for in the coming year.
If you've been watching these periscopes and watching me for a while, you probably know...
That I can be influential.
I write about influence.
I'm a trained hypnotist, etc.
And many of you have noticed that some of the things I talk about seep into the common consciousness.
Maybe directly.
Maybe it's coincidence.
Maybe it's confirmation bias.
It's always hard to tell. But we're going to continue our ongoing process of influencing the world In positive ways.
So I want to tell you what influence I'm going to focus on for 2020 so that you can watch how things look today.
You know, just take a mental snapshot and then do it again at the end of 2020 and ask yourself if the things that I tried to influence look like they're different.
Now that doesn't mean I'm the one who influenced them, but it's fun so you can follow along.
So here are the things I would like to accomplish.
In a perfect world, I would like to see Democrats and Republicans agree on this, that 100% healthcare coverage, let's call that insurance or just healthcare, is a goal.
And I think that the Republicans fail big time in their persuasion on healthcare.
They really fail big. By not saying it is also our goal to cover 100% of the people.
We want to do it a different way.
Now explain what that is, because I don't think the case has been made.
And if you're not going to make the case, Republicans, that you do want to cover 100% of the people in this country, you just can't take a moral high position.
You just can't.
You're just going to have to admit that the Democrats are better at this, more morally...
Bounded, more biblically bounded.
In every way, they have an advantage.
And if you want to give them the advantage, go ahead.
But it's going to cost, right?
It's going to cost in Congress.
It's going to cost votes for the presidency.
So what I'd like to see is a Republican full-throated statement that you want to get to 100% coverage.
Maybe you say it at the same time you say you don't know how to do it.
Because here's the second part.
The second part is I would love to see the commitment to get there followed by, here's the good part.
You ready? The good part is a public debate about how to get there, not a political debate, not a debate of pundit against pundit, lobbyist against politician, politician against politician, don't care.
None of that is going to fix anything.
We've done that to death.
Here's what we need. In my perfect world, President Trump would say something like this.
Hey Democrats, there's one place we agree on.
Everybody needs health care.
We don't know how to get there.
You've got several plans just within the Democrat side.
Republicans have lots of ideas too.
Let's have a national debate.
A national debate where, you know, actual experts and individuals could propose ideas.
And debate it out in some very transparent way without the politicians.
Let's just let the experts battle it out.
Make it a show. Turn it into entertainment.
Turn it into a website. Turn it into a contest.
Turn it into something that makes more attention.
And then, if you can get some kind of a national consensus on the best approach, and you probably can't.
Maybe you can get it down to the top three.
But you should let the public...
Do what the government apparently cannot do.
And the reason the government cannot do this is that as soon as the politicians get involved, you have the first problem.
They don't know enough.
Politicians are not the experts on healthcare, and you really need smart people to know enough about that area.
It's just not a realm for politicians.
They wouldn't know how to handle it.
And then you add on top of that the political pressures on them, and then, you know, the lobbyists and the money, and you have a mechanism, a system, if you will, that can't work.
So remember I talk about the golden age, which we're entering, being a time when we don't have shortages of anything.
We have systems that aren't perfect, and as we fix our systems, then everybody's going to get enough of everything.
So the system that's broken with healthcare is not Here's the trick.
It's not the healthcare system that's broken, although that's also broken.
What's broken is our decision-making process.
And because healthcare is so complicated and so much money involved, it breaks our government.
Our government was not designed to handle this kind of question.
It's too big and there are too many people with too much money trying to influence it.
The government's the wrong tool.
So you need a new tool.
And as it happens, we don't have to invent it so much.
We just have to use the tools we have, a new system, if you will.
And that system is to get the government, I'm sorry, to get the public directly involved and educated enough so that they can form some preferences based on what the experts put together.
Maybe, let's say, three good packages and each of them subject to further tweaking.
But I think we should have a system where both the Congress and the United States, wait for the good part, here it comes, in which the Congress and the United States commit in advance to two things.
Having a full year of public, public, public debate on healthcare.
Public, public, public. Meaning the public.
Not the politicians behind closed doors.
Not the lobbyists. The public.
That's the important part.
Regular people, just experts, citizens, people who care.
And try to get them over the next year to come up with their three best plans.
It could be two Democrat plans, one Republic.
It doesn't matter.
But just the three best.
And then commit in advance the Congress and the President to be, let's say you don't want to overcommit because you could get three bad plans, but that they would commit to trying to get the top one, whatever is the top most popular one, legislated.
So once the public decides, then we hand it over to the government and say, check it for two things.
One, to make sure it's all legal.
You've just done the little work, the legal work to make sure that you've got something you can execute and it's practical and all that.
But also to make sure that the majority did not steamroll the minority.
That's one of the main purposes of government is to make sure that just because something got the most votes, it's not some discriminatory horrible thing.
So you need a parental check, if you will, on whatever the public does.
But I'd love to see the government commit to letting the public work it out and then the government being a supporting role instead of the leading role because they can't be the leading role.
That just won't work.
Alright, so the first thing I'd like to see in 2020 is a revised decision-making process.
It might not look exactly like I described it, but look in 2020 for something that's a smarter way to decide and let the public get involved.
That's the healthcare goal.
In a perfect world, we'd see somebody suggesting various tests where they could test different things.
Let's talk about the homeless situation.
As you know, probably the most productive voice on the homeless situation right now is Dr.
Drew. And one of the big questions, and it really focuses on this question, I think, the question of involuntarily taking people off the streets if they need drug or mental health, some kind of counseling or support.
Now, the problem is that people have free will, and if they say, I do not want to go into your support program, they don't have to.
And then they die on the street and they make things worse for other people as well.
So the big decision that needs to be made is how, if at all, can authorities be helpful in sort of forcing people to do what's good for those people.
So that conversation is going to get really loud in 2020.
So I'm going to help push that one.
And You won't know.
Here's what we mostly need to fix the homeless problem.
Are you ready? I'm going to tell you something you've never heard.
So as long as you've been hearing about the homeless problem and now you're a little bit smarter because you know it's not about homes.
It's not even about the cost of the homes for the homeless.
It's about their drug problems and their addictions.
I'm sorry, their addictions and their mental problems primarily.
So here's another thing that you've never heard.
The reason we can't solve it is that we don't have project managers.
That's the thing that's missing.
Here's what I mean. Do we have enough billionaires and or government funding to test some different solutions for the so-called homeless problem that really is a people problem?
And the answer is we do. We have billionaires who are literally saying, I got billions of dollars.
If you can give me one good idea, I'll give you some money to test it.
That's easy.
Believe it or not, the money part, remember, that's the mark of the golden age.
We don't have a resource shortage.
What we have is a system problem, and the system is lacking a project manager.
I'm using a project manager, a very loose term.
For somebody who can put together a plan, maybe it's a plan informed by Dr.
Drew's ideas. Maybe it's a plan formed locally here.
There's a Delancey Street project.
Anyway, it's a rehab facility that works really well.
Maybe somebody could say, hey, that one works really well.
I'll be your project manager.
I need a billionaire or a government fund to fund it and then that will be my job to try to implement this in a new state and it will be a test.
I'll make sure that we're measuring everything so we know if it worked.
And then there are a few other project managers getting other money from other billionaires and they do their separate project.
They say, hey, we'll take these blocks in LA. We might need some help from the government suspending some regulations or something because we're just going to test.
Give us a year and we'll tell you what happened.
Now, until you see something like a project manager profession form around trying these social goods and until you hear the names of people and see them on TV saying, hey, yes, I'm running something.
Let me tell you about it.
I already have the money from a couple of billionaires.
So that's what you can see with the so-called homeless problem that's not a homeless problem.
You can see People stepping up and saying, I will be your project manager, and I've got this experience, who can fund me?
And then the funding will happen.
I can almost guarantee the funding.
Even people that I know personally, I probably personally know enough people to fund some studies on fixing the homeless problem that's not really a homeless problem.
Let's talk about nuclear.
As I said before, I think that we've...
We've made tremendous progress, we meaning all of you watching on the internet, Mark Schneider especially, Michael Schellenberger also especially, the people who are sort of our experts helping us spread the word that nuclear technology is not the old nuclear technology that was relatively unsafe compared to anything that we have today.
And that the newer generations, the generation 4, will eat nuclear waste and they're far safer and can be less expensive and all that.
So I would like to see that here's the goal for 2020.
For 2020, I want it to be embarrassing for any public person to say that nuclear is not part of the solution.
It should be something that they know not to say out loud anymore.
We're almost there because I think something like half of the Democrats that are running for president are pro-nuclear or at least open to the conversation, which is the same as being pro.
If you're a Democrat...
And you're saying in public, well, I'm open to listening about nuclear energy.
That says yes.
That means you've looked into it and you know it's part of the solution because some people aren't going to want to go strong on that because of their party affiliation.
But I think 2020 will be the year that when you talk about climate change, you have to talk about nuclear power.
Let's agree on that.
2020 is the year.
That any public conversation about climate change and its risks has to include that the solutions include nuclear.
It'll also include solar and other green energies.
But I think this 2020 will be the year that everybody just understands that that's part of it.
And that's a big, big, big deal.
Let's talk about North Korea.
North Korea is a funny little situation because here's the problem.
We're taking what I would call a military filter and putting it on North Korea and that's the problem.
There was a time in our history when North Korea was a military problem and the right filter to put on it was a military filter.
Hey, they look dangerous.
We better put our military forces on there to counter them.
Military, military. But much has happened.
Decades have passed. President Trump has come into office.
There's a whole different understanding with North Korea in terms of what we want out of them, what they want out of us.
Today, our reasons to have a military filter with North Korea are largely gone.
Because it's turned into a psychology problem that we're using a military filter on.
You can't solve a psychology problem – well, sometimes you can solve a psychology problem with the military, but not this time.
You could definitely change people's thinking by attacking them, but in this case, you have a psychology problem.
And the psychology problem is we don't trust the other.
And that's a hard place to fix, right?
If you don't trust the other, then who can go first?
And that's been the problem you've observed, right?
So North Korea is saying, we don't trust you, United States, but if you go first, and of course we say, we don't trust you, North Korea, but if you went first, and that apparently has no chance of working because there's not enough trust.
You have a psychology problem.
So how do you deal with something that's a psychology problem that we're dealing with with a defense filter?
Well, the first thing you have to do is get out of that filter.
You can't get rid of your military, but you can certainly talk about it differently, frame it differently, approach it differently.
And here's the way I would do it.
Now, this is just brainstorming, all right?
I would say to North Korea, directly or indirectly, Privately or not privately.
You know, the reasons that the United States and North Korea were ever military adversaries just doesn't exist anymore.
That's the high ground.
You just say to North Korea, we are at military, you know, let's say military footing with each other, and it used to make sense.
But would you agree, Kim Jong-un, that it doesn't anymore?
The base reason For us to have any military conflict with them whatsoever, completely gone.
Is there any chance that we want to attack North Korea?
None. There's no chance we want to attack North Korea.
Not any chance at all.
Is there any chance that North Korea really wants or thinks that they're going to take over South Korea?
No. None.
There's not a chance in the world that they think that would be a good idea to try that.
But... What is a genuine risk for Kim Jong-un?
Because I don't think the United States is anymore.
I mean, we don't want to be and therefore we're not.
China, maybe Russia, but China.
Don't you think that North Korea has more long-term risk, Hong Kong, more long-term risk being on the front steps of China?
Doesn't China want to control everything that touches their border?
Of course they do. Of course they do.
Don't you think China, if they had an opening, would try to get more control of North Korea?
Of course they would. I think that we can make a deal with India and North Korea, and the fun part would be to throw it into the same deal.
So here, look at the diversion I'm using.
Notice I just threw India in there.
What's India got to do with North Korea?
Nothing except they're a nuclear power who also doesn't trust China.
Think about this.
Think about the productive combination of India and advanced nuclear power and North Korea, also advanced nuclear power in their own way.
Suppose you said to India and North Korea, you know India and North Korea And we basically do say this to India, I would think, in essence.
You know, in the coming years and decades, wouldn't you rather be on our side?
North Korea, if you had a chance, a choice, of being our friend and actually being somewhat protected by us, and here's the offer we could make.
We could say, North Korea, not only should we not be pointing our weapons at each other, because the reasons have all gone away, But maybe we could help you be a little safer from China.
And here's how you could do it.
You could say, we will protect you, maybe not directly militarily, because we wouldn't want to, I don't know that we'd want to have a military agreement that we protect the territory of North Korea with our military against China.
That might be too much.
But we could say that we'll protect you economically, we'll protect you politically, And if you can maybe work with India to have India make sure that your weapons are either safe or pointing in the right direction, that would make us feel a lot more comfortable.
Because, you know, North Korea, United States, maybe you don't feel too comfortable with us yet, but maybe India could come over.
And if India tells us that they've looked into it, your nukes are secure and they're not pointed at us, We've got something to work with.
We'll help your economy.
Just don't counterfeit our money and stuff like that.
So that would be a reframe in which we would reframe North Korea all the way from being a military enemy that just doesn't even make sense to a hybrid kind of a special military ally without being full military ally.
In other words, just somebody that we commit To protecting the way they are.
And just say, look, we'd rather protect you.
It's cheaper. Fighting you is expensive.
Protecting you from any potential future Chinese, you know, impropriety is kind of cheap.
Let's do the cheap one.
And indeed, if we can invest over there, well, maybe we make money.
Also in 2020, I think that you're going to see more people using the word decoupling and strategic decoupling in particular.
I believe that there is a small but growing voice of which I'm part of to encourage American companies not to do business with China because in the long run it's just to our detriment and even in the short run.
Now, I don't think that there will be a massive sudden unwinding of existing business, and we'll probably need some tariff agreements on the little stuff over time, agricultural especially.
But I think that in 2020, it will be a common opinion in the United States.
Right now, it's sort of a niche opinion, but it will be a common opinion that we should be decoupling with China at the same time we're being nice to them.
I'm pushing hard on the things we have to push hard on, but as long as they're using the Falangun for body parts, which they are, killing them for body parts, as long as they've got concentration camps, they're suppressing Hong Kong and sending fentanyl to us by the boatload, we can't further our relationship with them.
We can only decrease it, and I think that will be happening.
And then I think I'm expecting some kind of more aggressive action against the Mexican cartels.
Now the other thing I'd like to see, I'd really like to see, and let's push for this in 2020, I'd like to see a test of some place in the United States where it makes sense of fully legalizing drugs for maybe a year or a few years, whatever it takes to test it.
How many of you would agree on a test Not the entire country, but just some county or municipality saying, look, we have to test some things that we wouldn't normally be able to test.
We have to temporarily just give us a full suspension of all drug crime laws for this municipality, and let's just run it for a year.
It might be worse.
It might be better. Maybe we learned something.
But here's the thing. I'm starting to lose patience with talking about it.
Are you? Are you all having the same impression?
Talking about the big drug problem and all the stuff coming from China that goes to Mexico that comes here that kills all our people by tens of thousands, I'm kind of tired of talking about it.
If we're not testing it, our government is broken.
Now maybe those tests need to be primarily private enterprise things, but you still need the government to suspend the laws.
And so maybe what we need is not just a drug czar, but a drug czar whose specific job is to temporarily suspend the laws in places where you can test some stuff.
Now another place you might need to temporarily suspend the laws It's about what I was talking about, the Dr.
Drew approach, which is that in the worst cases, people need to be involuntarily, let's say, taken care of.
And that would require changes in the laws.
So perhaps we need some kind of a federal czar who can, at the, let's say, the request of the local governments, because they'd have to be in on it, Can suspend all the laws just for the purpose of testing and just temporarily.
So that's what I'd like to see in 2020.
Could make a gigantic difference.
Somebody says the entire country would be Skid Row.
Well, we have examples in Portugal, for example.
In the comments you see a lot of people mentioning it.
So Portugal tried making drugs legal and all the reporting is that it helped a lot.
Not even just a little. Apparently it helped a lot.
So if you want things to look like Skid Row, keep doing it the way you're going.
If you want it not to look like Skid Row, then try something that's worked before, see if you can figure out what it was about that that worked, and then duplicate it.
But if you're not doing that, if you're not testing, you're not doing anything.
If our government can't tell us, oh, we've got three trials going on and we're testing various variables and seeing what works and what doesn't, if they're not telling you that, then what they are telling you is we're not doing anything and we're not capable of doing anything.
Because how hard would it be to test stuff?
It shouldn't be that hard.
All right. Prohibition is the cause of this problem.
Well, that's what we would test.
So you can certainly take out the cartels by taking their money away, but I suppose they would just turn to other forms of crime.
It's Portugal. What could go wrong?
Somebody says. Somebody wants me to do a How to Smoke Weed episode.
I've got a lot of planning in that.
I have thought about doing a periscope on the topic of how to smoke marijuana if your doctor says that you should.
Now, as you know, I'm a big proponent of marijuana under certain circumstances.
One of them, and the most important one, is that you're an adult.
Marijuana and children, bad combination.
Bad combination. We want to avoid that.
Marijuana and some people who are adults, bad combination.
The thing with marijuana, I'll give you a little preview of it now.
The thing with marijuana is that there are lots of different types and they affect you in lots of different ways.
And then there are also lots of different people with different personalities and different bodies and stuff.
And they all have a different reaction.
So it would be the height of, let's say, irresponsibility for anybody to say that you should smoke marijuana.
That would be the most irresponsible thing anybody could ever say.
Because I don't know.
You're completely different than me.
And if you do it wrong, it might not turn out well for you.
Now, in my case, I have an actual legitimate, believe it or not, medical benefit and it's extreme.
In my case the benefit is fairly extreme.
So in my case it's an easy peasy thing and I don't do it as a party drug.
I've never enjoyed it as something to do with friends except in college.
But it's not a party drug.
It's something that has to do with your larger health situation.
That said, I will do I think I should commit to this.
In 2020 I'll do a A demo of how to do the basics.
So if your doctor says, you know, maybe this would work for whatever condition you have, that you'll have a place to start that your doctor isn't going to tell you.
Because your doctor won't tell you how to do it.
Your doctor will probably just say, do it or don't.
I will give you this one piece of advice.
Don't use edibles. Don't use edibles.
Every bad story I've ever heard about marijuana was from edibles.
Edibles, you can't control how much you're getting, or you can't know, and so that's the dangerous part.
But if you're smoking, it's almost impossible to smoke too much, because you just feel it as it happens, and you say, well, that's enough now.
Somebody says, if Trump has a super persuasion, why did he lose the popular vote?
That's a good question, and let me answer it.
So the question is, if Trump is the best persuader in the history of the world, which I claim, how could he lose the popular vote?
It means he did not persuade most people.
And that has to do with the context.
So the question you're asking is, if the best baseball player could hit a home run and it would go, how long is a home run?
100 yards? I have no idea.
Why can't some people hit a ball five miles?
The answer is nobody can hit a ball five miles.
So when you say, why doesn't Trump convince the half of the country that is already sort of aligned with Republican stuff, can he also persuade the people who are vehemently against all of that stuff?
The answer is no.
The best persuader in the world cannot persuade people who are that entrenched.
That's not a thing.
So you shouldn't ask why he can't do it because it's not a doable thing.
It's not even on the sporting field.
It's outside. It's 100 miles down the road somewhere.
So the summary of that is that the only persuasion that matters these days is persuading your own base to get up and do something and to think and act the way you want.
So everybody's only persuading their persuadables.
That's what the game is.
There's no such thing as persuading the other team.
There's this thin slice of people who call themselves independents, usually.
But even they are not real independents.
If you looked at their voting patterns, there's some segment of them that say, oh, I'm independent.
I would vote for anybody.
But they always vote Republican, and they will again.
And same, you know, some that say, yeah, I'm totally independent, but I always vote Democrat, and I'm going to do it again.
So there really are not many people who are even, you know, in play to be persuaded.
But if you've got a president who has a 95% support within his own party, and you can see that he's changed every part of the political process, think about how many things we think about differently and act differently because of this president, from North Korea to China to trade to the economy to ISIS to everything.
I mean, immigration, there's no topic He hasn't changed or moved the needle on everything.
He's just changed everything. He's changed how we see the media.
He's changed just everything.
So sometimes his influence is directed, such as getting Republicans on the same page.
Other times it's just his effect.
He's a walking box shaker, so everything around him is all getting shooken up, even if he's not focusing on it, because he just has that effect.
So your question is actually an excellent one.
But it is not in play to persuade all the people on the other team.
The best you can do is your own team, and if there's a strategic element to that, meaning winning certain states in the electoral process, Trump did it better.
He won the ones that mattered.
And keep in mind that when you talk about losing the popular vote, you're really talking about losing California, and he didn't really try for California.
California has such a big population, as does New York State, That as long as those are solid blue, Republicans have to win by getting fewer votes and just winning in the electoral process.
All right. Those are the things that I thought I wanted to...
Somebody says, Scott's bullshit has made Dilbert toxic.
Well, thank you for coming all the way over here to scream that in all capital letters.
So we'll delete you so you don't have to ever experience it again.
It's funny, that's exactly the kind of troll that...
Actually, that troll looked like a sincere person who's just probably elderly and yells in all caps.
But the ones who just come in with the insult and leave, I think they're gone.
That one actually looked like a real person who was just a Democrat who didn't like Trump.
I think that's all that was. Do I favor eliminating the Electoral College?
I always talk about fairness and how fairness is an illusion, meaning that it's completely subjective.
What is fair to you is not fair to me.
The thing with the Electoral College is that there's no place to get to fair.
Fair doesn't exist.
You could get to this solution or this solution, But half of the people would say it's not fair because the people who thought it worked against them, whatever the change was, would say, well, that's not fair.
And other people would say, well, what's more fair than a popular vote?
And then other people would say, well, there's a reason.
There's an electoral college.
So there is no objective standard by which to say fair.
And so therefore, it's more of a power play.
So when you're talking about the electrical college versus the popular vote, where that ends up will be wherever the power pushes it.
It won't be because it's fair, righter, simpler.
It won't be any of those things.
And right now, the weight of power...
It's hard to change things.
I think you need a two-thirds majority or something to change the constitution or two-thirds of the states, whatever the process is.
It's hard. So that's why you don't get a lot of constitutional changes.
So I don't think you'll see one because it's too hard and half the country likes it just the way it is because they win that way.
Yeah, the founders wanted a balance of the states versus federal.
Yeah, the reasons are all good, but I don't know that anybody cares about the reasons.
it's just whether it's good for their team I'm just looking at some of your comments yeah Somebody says, I must have watched a thousand of your periscopes.
Well, you know, given that it's the end of the year and I enjoy a lot, if there's anybody else who has gotten anything meaningful in terms of helping their life, and if my books are periscopes, please tweet at me and let me know because that determines what I do in the future.
For example, My decision to write another book or not write another book would be greatly influenced by what people think of the last one.
That's the way it always goes.
Somebody asked me in the comments, can I dump wherever it says fine for dumping?
Can you dump? That's the way I play it.
If I see a sign that says fine for dumping, I think, well, good.
I wouldn't want to dump it anywhere where it wasn't fine to do it.
Somebody says Lincoln only got 42% of the vote.
Well, you know, Lincoln needed the electoral college like he needed all in the head.
Somebody's saying that the idea of deciding to guess something versus merely wanting it was big for some of you.
I would say that was one of my biggest challenges.
One of the biggest changes in my life is always making a distinction between things I wanted and things I was just deciding to do.
I told you the story early on about getting my voice back.
That was a decision. That wasn't just something I wanted.
I was deciding that whatever that took, I was going to do it.
All right. No wedding date set?
No. We'll worry about that.
I didn't want to talk about that the first week of being engaged because that sounds like work.
All right. I think we've said enough.
And I will talk to you all tomorrow.
Maybe we'll get some real news next week.
This is like no news happening now.
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