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Feb. 24, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
53:57
Episode 830 Scott Adams: Bloomberg as the T*rd in the Punch Bowl, Bernie and Fidel, Healthcare

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: Coronavirus worldwide impact Twitter unfollowing mystery and the TikTok app President Trump treated as a superstar in India Why do Democrats see incentives as cruel?      The child's view versus the adult view Explaining Bernie's healthcare plan better than Bernie Bernie, Fidel and despicable news coverage Bloomberg hit piece article on me in 2017 --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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Hey everybody, it's good to see you this morning.
And by that I mean even better than usual.
And that's a pretty high bar.
Because I'm always so happy to see you.
And today, you're probably here to enjoy the simultaneous sip.
I mean, why wouldn't you?
It doesn't cost anything.
It's easy to prepare for.
It makes your entire day better.
It would be really insane not to enjoy it.
Isn't that right, DJ Dr.
Funk Juice? I think you would agree.
And so, let us prepare.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a 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 at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
Go. Just as good as I imagined.
If not better. Well, let's see what's going on today.
In the news, there was a big windstorm up in Oregon, and an Oregon man who was sitting on his couch in his home was crushed by a falling tree.
This ginormous tree that was near his, it looked like apartments, fell over, went right through his roof, and crushed him as he sat there on his couch.
I think he survived.
It looks like they got him out.
But he was in bad shape.
The moral of the story, of course, is you might as well get off the couch because if karma is going to come looking for you, it's going to find you on the couch.
You can't hide on the couch.
No. Karma's coming for you.
Now, I don't know that he did anything to deserve a tree falling on him, but let's assume he did not.
It was bad luck. But still, get off the couch.
It's dangerous there. Speaking of danger...
The coronavirus is spreading to other countries, keeping us panicked, destroying the supply lines internationally, tanking the stock market.
Now, if I were a long-term investor, I would say to myself, this coronavirus is just what the doctor ordered.
Because there wasn't anything that was going to make the stock market go down just for ordinary business reasons because the economy was doing well.
You needed some kind of an external shock to temporarily drive the prices down a little bit.
And then those of you who are thinking of getting in for the long term, it might be a good time.
So I'm kind of watching this thinking to myself, now this would be a good time to load up on some of those stocks I wish I had gotten earlier.
So we're watching that.
Now, I don't know how bad it will get.
If I had to guess, I would say that human ingenuity will work faster than the virus.
You can't guarantee that.
But I think human ingenuity and determination and cleverness will probably get ahead of this thing.
But we're not there yet. There's a scary story coming out of Iran that...
So apparently an Iranian lawmaker...
Who represents the city of, however you pronounce, Q-O-M. Qom?
Qom? Qom?
Qom? I have no idea.
Q-O-M. But there's a city with that name in Iran.
And the guy who represents it said that there had been at least 50 coronavirus deaths in the city.
And accused the country's health minister of lying about the outbreak.
Now, let me say this.
There's no such thing as credible information coming out of Iran, just in general.
You know, if it came out of Iran, you've automatically got to say, well, maybe, but probably not.
So, can we believe this mayor?
Because if we didn't believe him, and why would you lie about a thing like that?
What in the world would this guy have to gain by lying about it?
It's more like, if anything, he might be just wrong, perhaps, or heard the wrong information.
But what if he's right?
If it's true that 50 people died in that one city in just the last few weeks, we've got a real big problem on our hands.
Like, maybe bigger than we have any idea.
But Iran, the larger authorities, are rejecting that and saying there's been a total of only 66 coronavirus infections and 12 deaths.
Wait a minute. 12 out of 66?
Alexa, what is 12 divided by 66?
12 divided by 66 is 0.1818.
0.18.
So let's say 18%.
So the authorities in Iran are saying, correct me if I'm wrong, but they're saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, it's not as bad as you think.
Only 18% of the people who got it died in a few weeks.
What? 18% of them died?
What? Now, if either one of these two reports, which disagree with each other, is true, this is a way bigger problem than I was imagining, and I was imagining it was pretty big.
So, can we believe either of those things, that 18% of the people in Iran died from it?
I mean, if that's true, never leave the house again.
But I don't know if it's true.
I doubt it. Recently, thanks to Chuck Schumer, and I will give him credit for this, the Transportation Security Administration, the TSA, has stopped allowing employees to use the app TikTok.
Now, if you don't have kids in your life, you might not know how big a deal the TikTok app is.
But if you have kids, you probably know it's just gigantic.
And the kids are just glued to it.
It's bigger than Snapchat.
I mean, it's a really big deal.
But you might not know about it if you don't have kids in your life of a certain age.
But a lot of adults are using it too.
And here's the problem. It's a Chinese company.
And here's the second problem.
Are you ready for this? So not only can China the government, presumably, get all of your personal information because it's a Chinese company, and you assume that the Chinese government can get whatever it wants from any Chinese company.
So this TikTok app has got a real problem.
But here's the other issue. When you sign up for a lot of apps, they will ask you for permission to control your social media accounts.
Now, the reason that you think that is, is so you can more easily post your social media TikToks.
In other words, you can make a TikTok and then easily post it to Twitter with a few commands because you've set it up to take care of that for you.
But, let me combine two stories here and see what you think.
As you know, I had reported, and lots of other people reported, That on Twitter, people can follow you, and then for reasons that are still a mystery, you can get unfollowed.
So the person who thinks they followed you and succeeded, they can tell because time goes by, and they see your tweets, and they know they're following you, and then suddenly they're just not.
They just stopped.
Now, I personally asked Jack Dorsey...
If there's an official explanation.
And it's been a few weeks.
I haven't heard back.
Here's my current hypothesis.
And this ties into the TikTok thing.
Because I've communicated with Jack enough on this very topic, unless I'm the worst judge of character in the world, I don't think he has any idea what's happening.
And I'm really confident in that opinion.
Now I know, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, well, anybody can lie.
And certainly there would be an incentive if, you know, if there were something there that somebody wanted to cover up.
But I'm a pretty good judge of people.
I'm not perfect.
Clearly I've made mistakes.
But if I'm wrong about this, I mean, I would just be amazed.
So here's what I know to be true.
I know that it's happening.
Lots of people reporting it's happening to them.
I can check it in real time.
I've seen myself be unfollowed.
It's just clearly, it's widespread.
It's clear. It's obvious.
There's no question, no question that it's happening.
Now, what are the possibilities behind it?
Well, one is that it's some kind of management of Twitter behind it.
I don't think so.
Honestly, they're not acting as if that's the case.
It just doesn't seem like that's...
I mean, I suppose it falls into the category of anything's possible.
But I'm going to rule it out.
I don't think so. I'm seeing the comments.
Somebody says, Scott, you sold out.
Now, from your perspective, that's actually a pretty good hypothesis.
You know, the only source you have...
To know whether I'd been co-opted or bought by powerful forces is what I tell you.
I can tell you that they don't have enough money to do that.
I'm sure that the social media companies have a lot of money, but they don't have enough money to buy me off like this.
There's nothing they can offer me directly, indirectly, In any form that would make me go in public and say what I'm saying now.
There's no amount of money that could make that happen.
Because I'm already rich, right?
So I just wouldn't do it.
It's way beyond my line.
So I think you should find yourself some comfort in knowing I'm not lying to you about this topic.
I hope you can believe that.
In my opinion...
Twitter is not lying to me about it.
Meaning that I think they actually don't know what's going on.
And it's been a few weeks, and if they knew, they probably would have gotten back to me.
So here's my hypothesis.
It's a third-party actor.
And it could be, I'll just throw this out there, more than one third party.
It could be that anybody who has control of an app that asks people to give them permission...
They might be taking advantage of that and making a few changes in your social media accounts that you're not aware of.
Could be politically motivated.
Maybe. Why wouldn't they do that?
Let me ask you this. If you were the nation of China, And you knew that you could change social media quite a bit by manipulating through TikTok the accounts of people who don't really know necessarily that they gave you that permission.
And you could just sort of drop a follow here and drop a retweet there, that sort of thing.
What would people think?
Well, any individual would say, huh, looks like there's some irregularities in my account.
And then they would go trying to figure out why.
And what would they do? They would hit a wall.
Imagine how much access I have compared to just the average Twitter user.
By being a public figure, it's not fair, but I have a lot more access.
What would you do if you were just an average Twitter user and you saw that you had been automatically unfollowed?
I mean, how would you even follow up on it?
What would you do? Tweet about it?
And there's nothing you could do.
That's the end of the line. You would just sit there being frustrated.
You might complain about it, but that's it.
So if you were China, and you could massively change who's following who, who's seeing what, through the apps that you control, wouldn't you do it?
It's sort of the perfect crime.
I think you would. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean that TikTok is doing it, but there are lots of apps that ask for that permission.
And so my theory is that it's not Twitter management.
It's definitely happening, and that it's third-party actors.
Now, it could be intelligence agencies.
It could be campaigns.
It could be other countries.
But I think third parties are manipulating your Twitter account...
And you should go into your phone and look for your permissions and get rid of any of those permissions if you don't want to be part of that.
Alright. I've got a question for you.
Can influence be measured on social media?
And if so, how? So, for example, there are people who have very large social media accounts.
And if they tweet something and it gets a lot of retweets, would you say that therefore they are influential?
Well, maybe.
But it could be just, you know, a cute cat retweet.
It could be just a celebrity set it so people are interested.
So I wouldn't necessarily think that you could measure influence directly by how many people watched it, saw it, or tweeted it.
I mean, certainly those are all factors.
But not alone. I would think that it has something to do with who is connected to whom and the actual path that your tweets follow.
So, for example, does anybody have a big enough view of the social media landscape that they could say, you know, this person doesn't have that many followers, but every time this person tweets something, it gets picked up by all these blue-check influential people.
So could you therefore say, well, unrelated to the number of followers, this is an influential person?
Probably, right?
Let's get rid of that troll.
Goodbye troll. But there are probably other ways to measure such things.
So in other words, maybe you could measure the outcome of something.
Maybe there would be a way to We measure poll results and opinions before and after somebody's involvement.
So I don't know how it could be done, but I suspect it could be done.
Somebody says, LOL, are you referring to yourself?
Yes. Yes, of course.
Now, if you're new to this periscope, you're not aware that I'm a trained hypnotist.
I say it way too often.
And I write on the topic of persuasion.
So being a trained hypnotist and a professional communicator who specializes in influence as a sort of a subspecialty, wouldn't you expect me to be more persuasive than the average person?
Of course. Because practice works.
If somebody plays the piano more than somebody else, the person who practiced the most, all of the things being roughly equal, is going to be a better piano player.
So there are very few skills that are not influenced by practice.
So since I practice and study the field, you would expect I'd be more influential.
So shutting me down, in theory, If I had an opinion that you didn't want to spread, in theory, shutting me down would be more important than shutting someone else down who was more of a consumer.
Less of a creator and more of a consumer.
All right. Somebody said there's a COVID tracker that will blow your mind.
At C-O-V-I-D tracker.
I can't speak to that, but apparently somebody in comment says it will blow your mind.
Probably scare you. Alright, so I'm glad that our government is after that TikTok app.
I think that is exactly the right play.
They're studying it. But the thing they should study is that it gives the government of China the ability to change your Twitter account.
That should be all you need to know.
Would there be anything else you would need to know to ban TikTok?
Right? Shouldn't that be enough?
If the only thing you know is that it's a Chinese company, the Chinese government, of course, can get any data it wants from a Chinese company.
I think we'd all agree that's just true.
And that they can change your Twitter account without telling you.
Those are all true, right?
Did I say anything that's not objectively, easily true?
I don't think so. So if the government of China...
It's controlling our most important asset for election integrity, which is social media.
How do you let the TikTok app continue to be available in America?
Or any other app that does the same thing, that also has a foreign government that can control it?
I think that's a no-brainer.
I think you have to shut down that app.
Sorry to all the people who like it, but there's no way you can let the government of China control your Your American Twitter accounts.
And that's exactly what's happening.
Trump is in India with one of his favorite leader buddies, Modi.
They get along really well.
And this is one of those cases where I say to myself, the Trump haters, what do they say when they watch Trump go to India and being treated as a celebrity, you know, a superstar?
They love him. What do people say about that?
Because the complaints against Trump fall into this weird category of things that are hard to measure.
So here's some of the things that you hear about from the anti-Trumpers.
Now, they're running out of complaints, so they're getting wordy.
They're just using words put together.
To complain about something, but if you looked at the actual real impact of it, there's nothing there.
So here's an example. They say that he's degrading the office of the presidency.
I don't know. Is he?
Is he degrading the office of the presidency?
And if he did, how much money did that cost you?
Did your taxes go up?
Did you lose your job because the president had degraded the office of the presidency?
What actually is different?
I saw a lot of stuff that entertained me, and I'm sure that both sides think that if the other side is in power, they're degrading the office of the presidency, it means absolutely nothing.
They also say that the president is costing the United States prestige and respect around the world.
Have you seen the film coming back from India?
Trump just talked to 110,000 people in a packed stadium cheering for him and their own leader.
And we're talking about trade deals and everything else.
What part of that looks like the United States losing respect?
And if we did, what's that costing us?
Did that hurt our trade deals?
No. Did it...
Did it make me less healthy?
No. Did it do anything?
No. Here's another one.
The president is dangerously expanding the powers of the presidency, and he's destroying our norms and conventions.
Okay. And?
Because my norms and conventions got destroyed, that did what?
Cost me money?
I don't know how.
Made me unhappy?
Well, not if I see it clearly.
Obviously, it's making some people unhappy.
Did it make me late for dinner?
Nothing. They're just words.
They're just words put together.
There's absolutely no meaning to their complaints at this point.
And one of the things that I think escaped much notice, because it didn't get talked about, but might have been really important for the people paying attention, We watched Joe Biden, who was not really the favored candidate by the anti-Trump left press.
We saw, and I forget who it was, but somebody challenged Biden about the kids in cages.
And it was somebody on the left who said, you know, Obama built those cages and he put some kids in it.
Then you had to watch Biden try to explain why his administration putting kids in cages is so completely different than the Trump administration using the same cages and the same set of laws and rules, essentially. There just happened to be more traffic, so there were more of them.
Now, I feel as though putting Biden in that position and making it so visible for the first time kind of made that kids in cages thing a little toothless, didn't it?
Because once it became news on the left that they were Obama cages...
Well, maybe they'll talk about something else when they're complaining, right?
Because we have this problem of the news silos.
Everybody on the right who is consuming Fox News and Breitbart and those sources, everybody who was watching that news was fully aware that these cages were built and used by Obama, and it wasn't Trump's fault that there's more people, you know, caravans, etc., who tried to come across the border.
Trump did everything he could to discourage it.
In fact, no president tried harder to discourage kids from coming here because what are we going to do?
We have to separate them from the adults because we don't know who the real parent is.
Some of them, too many of them, are being trafficked.
What are you going to do?
So I think the Biden candidacy had a weird effect of making Trump look better.
And I don't know that it's something that people will recognize in their thinking.
I think it's just out there.
And now the left sees that probably the single biggest complaint about Trump that really had an emotional pull was this kids in cages stuff.
And it just sort of fell apart when they looked at the fact that Biden did the same thing.
All right. Mark Twain has a quote I like.
I just saw it online.
Those who don't read the news are uninformed.
Those who read the news are misinformed.
So I guess it's always been true.
We think fake news is kind of a new thing, but Mark Twain was on it early.
So I guess the administration is going to push some new rules that say if you have a green card, You can't get welfare-like services in this country.
You have to be able to demonstrate that you can support yourself.
Otherwise, I guess, you'd lose your green card.
I think that's how it works.
But this is another example which I tweeted about this morning, which one of the ways you could distinguish Democrats and Republicans is that Republicans are big on incentives.
So they build systems that rely on people having the right incentives, often selfish incentives, but incentives that are really the energy behind the system.
So capitalism, of course, is built on incentives, etc.
But Democrats seem to see incentives as cruel, meaning if you're forcing somebody to do something they didn't want to do, Or you're giving a penalty for doing something, such as going to a country illegally, that you're just being cruel.
But are those opposites?
I would say no.
I would say they could both be true.
Incentives are cruel.
If you're not a person who can easily get a job and work in a capitalist society, well, your life might not turn out so well.
It's very cruel.
But it's also the only system we know that works as well as it does.
So it could be cruel and kind at the same time, because it could be cruel to individuals in certain situations while still being the best solution for the greater good in the long term.
And another way to look at this is the child view versus the adult view.
The child view is, I want candy.
Well, you know, the adult says you should, you know, have your dinner, go some nutrition, blah, blah, blah.
Don't eat candy. And then the child will hear all those good reasons and say, but I want candy.
I want candy. So that's sort of the view that incentives are cruel.
You know, making people do things or denying them services, etc.
is definitely cruel.
If that's all you looked at is the impact on the individual.
But if you look at the system...
It's the kindest system to the most people, even though individually it could be quite cruel.
So it's an adult view versus a child view.
I'm getting increasingly frustrated with Bernie and the people who want to fix healthcare at being terrible at making their own argument.
In fact, they are so bad that I wasn't entirely sure what the argument was until today.
Let me see if you knew this.
And by the way, at least half of you are going to say, Scott, you idiot, we knew that.
And anybody who doesn't know that, you're not paying attention or you're not too bright.
But let me confess, I didn't know this.
So this is part of Bernie's plan.
Did you know that in Bernie's plan, where there would be universal healthcare, and all you'd have to do is go to whatever doctor you wanted, did you know that you wouldn't lose anything you already have?
In other words, you would just go to your same doctor, except instead of paying with one insurance card, you would just hand him the government card.
But otherwise, your life would be the same.
Yeah, I'm looking at the comments.
Somebody says, right, they knew that.
And then the very next comment is, I didn't know that.
Didn't you imagine, if you're consuming just the media from the right, didn't you imagine that Bernie was going to blow everything up and it was going to be some kind of government program?
But indeed, all it's doing is getting rid of some bureaucracy.
Instead of these big private health insurance companies, just the insurance part, not the healthcare part, but just the insurance part, Bernie's plan would make that industry just go away, which is a big deal if you're in that industry, obviously, or you have stock in that industry.
But he'd just make it go away, and he would replace it with a card that you could just take anywhere.
Go to any facility, make an appointment, here's my government card, and get the same doctor and the same services you would have.
Now, Did I not just explain that better than Bernie ever has?
Somebody's saying, that's BS. We've heard you can keep your doctors before.
No, that was Obamacare.
Obamacare was more restrictive.
Bernie is not pushing Obamacare.
Bernie is saying, let's get rid of all this unnecessary paperwork and overhead and profit from the insurance companies, and how about you can just go anywhere you want And get any service that's available.
You just have to make an appointment, like everybody else.
Isn't that better than the current system?
If you were just a consumer hearing it for the first time.
Here's another one. You have heard, of course, Bernie saying that he would pay for his universal health care.
He would pay it by raising taxes on billionaires and their financial transactions.
Now that's pretty good, right?
If all he's doing is taking a billionaire's hundreds of millions of dollars financial transactions and charging more, well, the billionaire is making, you know, let's say the billionaire makes 12% return instead of 18% return.
Doesn't even notice it, right?
The billionaire can't even tell the difference.
Still a billionaire. I made 12% this year instead of 18% because my taxes were higher.
Whatever it is. So that part of Bernie's plan, I say to myself, that's not bad.
Even if I were a billionaire, I don't know if I would complain about it that much because I wouldn't know the difference.
Literally, I wouldn't be able to tell.
But then there's this other part that Bernie compromises.
Completely screws the pooch on.
And watching him do this wrong time after time again just makes me lose confidence in him.
And I've said this before, I say it way too much because my book Loser Think is entirely about this, that if you don't have experience in different domains, you've got some real gaps in your ability to understand the world, but also in your ability to explain it to other people.
I'm going to explain Bernie's health care plan better than Bernie has ever explained it.
And I'm a little afraid to do this, because I'm going to change your mind.
Now, that doesn't mean I'll change you from not wanting Bernie's health care plan to wanting it.
But I'm definitely going to change a lot of your minds from, that is crazy, to, oh, I didn't know that.
Watch this. So part of the complaint about Bernie's plan is that we'll raise taxes on the middle class.
And even Bernie accepts that's true.
But he waves his hand and says, you know, you'll save some money in other ways.
Is that good persuasion?
Yeah, your taxes will go up, but, you know, I'll save you money because your health care is free.
Is that good? Well, it's true.
It's true, meaning that is the plan he promotes.
Let me give you some numbers on it.
I just heard these today for the first time.
So he wants to add an extra 4% tax, let's say you're a middle class person, on what you make over $29,000.
So the first $29,000, no tax.
No extra tax on that.
And so let's say you've got a middle class family that makes a combined $100,000 of income.
Only the $70,000 of that would be taxed the 4%.
So let's just say that it would cost them $2,800 extra in taxes.
But they wouldn't have to pay their own health care anymore.
How much were they paying?
Well, it depends.
If it's me, I'm paying something like $18,000 a year less.
Right? Because I'm a small business and I pay my own health care.
If I didn't have to, I would save $18,000.
Right? Now, let's say I had a small business and I was only making $100,000 a year.
I would save $18,000, but I'd have to pay $2,800.
Now, because every situation is different, you can't really take an average for that, can you?
Because there are no two people who have the same write-offs and income and all that stuff.
But you should do it anyway.
Bernie should just pick a number...
And do it anyway. And say something like, yeah, you're going to pay $2,800 extra in taxes, but I'm going to save you $18,000 a year if you're a small company.
Now, is that true for your case?
Probably not, because there are no two cases the same.
But how much more persuasive is it to say, yeah, I'll tax you $2,800 a year more if you make $100,000 from a small business, but you'll save $18,000.
Are you in? But what about your health care?
And then Bernie would say, exactly the same, except less paperwork.
So here is me selling Bernie's plan.
You have exactly the same health care services you have now.
You get rid of a whole bunch of paperwork.
You might get dental and vision on top of it.
And you're going to save something like six to one.
Now, Is that better?
Did I do a better job of selling his plan than he did?
Yeah. Now the problem, of course, is if you're a wage earner who has a private insurance plan through your employer, your employer gets to pocket all of those savings because your employer no longer needs to offer health care.
It's optional. They could just stop doing it.
Actually, I think under his plan they couldn't do it, so they would stop doing it.
So your employer could be saving millions of dollars And you're just paying $2,800 more in taxes.
Do you think your employer could get away with that?
If you worked for a small company and you knew that they had just saved millions of dollars because they no longer have to pay healthcare and they didn't give you a raise?
You okay with that?
I don't think you are okay with that.
I think they're going to give you a 4% raise right away because if they just kept the money, you're going to go to another company.
And get the 4% raise from the other company.
I think that the free market would force companies to give immediate raises to their employees so that they can pay for the government's extra taxes because the company just saved that money.
Now, they wouldn't all do it. But you can leave, right?
It's not easy to leave a company, but you could do it.
And I also ask myself, what would this do to competition if you could more easily go to a different doctor?
Does it make competition worse?
I don't know. I'd have to see an argument on that.
Because imagine, if you will, okay, the current situation is, let's say I've got healthcare through Kaiser.
So it's an HMO. That's the healthcare that I use.
Right now, if I wanted to get a second opinion...
From somebody outside of my HMO, it's kind of a big pain.
I wouldn't know where to go, who to talk to.
How does that work? Do I have to pay it in a pocket?
I guess I do. So I just don't do it.
Imagine if I had free health care and I could go to any doctor I wanted.
Would I get a second opinion from some unrelated entity?
Of course I would. It's free.
Why wouldn't I? Yeah, I'd get a second opinion.
So as long as you're getting second opinions and you're shopping, Wouldn't Bernie's plan actually improve competitiveness?
Because doctors would have to perform to get their share of the customers that the government would then pay for.
I don't know. Maybe it makes competition worse, maybe better.
I'm not really so sure. So my point is that Bernie is just absolutely blowing, just as bad as you could blow it, his argument.
And he actually has a pretty good argument.
It's a pretty good argument.
He's just not doing it right.
But if he does, I've got to tell you, if Bernie ever gets his health care argument right, He's going to say the billionaires are going to benefit the most from keeping everybody healthy because that's the workers that they employ, etc.
So for the rich, it's almost like an investment.
They're better off if the citizens have health care.
And then you'd say the middle class, you're going to save more than you're going to spend.
Boom, that's it. That's it.
You're going to save more than you spend.
And if your company doesn't give you back a rebate for all the money they spend, well, they should.
And then what about the stimulative effect?
Bernie should be saying that if I can make all of these companies out there get rid of their health care costs, it's like a gigantic tax cut.
So in terms of the companies that are already paying for health insurance and wouldn't need to, it would be an enormous tax cut.
Why doesn't Bernie say that?
It would be an enormous tax cut to companies that they would probably pass along to their employees because the employees would demand it.
It wouldn't take long for them to demand it.
The union certainly would right away.
Why doesn't Bernie sell it as an economic stimulant?
Anyway, my point is that everything he does about this is bad persuasion, and he's still doing great.
Imagine if he started persuading correctly.
He could probably take it all the way.
There's a story about the anti-Trump press saying that Trump is creating lists of unloyal, disloyal people so he can fire them.
And I'm thinking to myself, why is that a story?
You know, I think Trump was forced to take a lot of disloyal people on his staff because he didn't come to government with tons of connections and a network that he could just move in there and they're ready to go.
I think he made a conscious decision to keep a lot of never-Trumpers just because they knew how to do the work.
And now he's got some time to correct that.
And so if he does, how can we complain about that?
Every president has that right.
Let's see what else we've got going on here.
Did you know that the Obamacare, the ACA, reached its highest favorability?
This is funny. It's up to 55% favorable.
Now, that's, of course, with the mandate gone, right?
I'm right about that, right? The part that people hated the most was the mandate.
And I thought that when the mandate was taken away that it was all supposed to fall apart because it required the mandate to work.
But somehow it's still working.
I don't quite understand why it's not ready to collapse, but I guess it's not.
And here I would like to give another periodic shout-out and compliment to...
President Obama.
President Obama, who I've often said is a gifted persuader himself, he said out loud and in public that when Obamacare was being passed, he actually said it's a bad plan, but the real plan is to get the country a little bit pregnant, meaning that once we had better health care, we would never move backwards.
We would have to fix it if it had flaws.
He said that directly. He actually said in public, I'm going to give you a bad plan, because then your only choice will be to fix it.
And it was the only way to get there.
It was the only way to get there.
And I thought to myself, that's actually really smart.
It's actually one of the best persuasion plays, maybe...
You could argue it's in the top three of all time.
I mean, it is so brilliant, it's invisible.
If I didn't mention it, would you have ever heard that filter on it?
If I hadn't said to you, he intentionally and publicly said, I'm going to do this poorly, now you bastards are going to have to fix it.
He said that, not in those words, but he said it as directly as that.
You can hate your health care, you can hate Obama, you can hate whatever you need to hate in this story, but that worked.
It was intentional, it was brilliant, and it worked.
And now we're talking about the Bernie plan.
I don't think we would have if that hadn't happened.
Now, Bernie's getting a lot of heat from the media on the right because he said things that sounded like a partial defense of Fidel Castro and his Cuban Revolution.
Now, I just hate these stories.
Here's what basically Bernie said.
Sure, Fidel Castro murdered people and we condemn him for all of his bad stuff.
So Bernie's not ignoring the bad stuff.
He said, yeah, we condemn him for all that.
But it's also true, says Bernie, that he had a massive literacy program, and that that actually was good.
So Bernie's saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, there was some murder and abuse and all that stuff, that's real, but there was also some good stuff, and why would you ignore the good stuff?
Now, on one hand, I say to myself...
Anybody should be able to talk that way.
Anybody should be able to say, well, this person is bad for this, but, you know, hey, good on this.
We should all be able to talk like that without this happening.
Without somebody making it look like you're in favor of the bad parts.
So, I would say it's despicable fake news coverage to blame Bernie for acting as though he's praising a dictator when he says in direct words, I'm not.
If he says in direct words, I'm not praising the dictator, why don't we believe that?
Can't we believe that?
I mean, this certainly sounds true.
Why wouldn't it be?
All right. I tweeted about Bloomberg today, the company as well as the person.
Back in 2017, some of you saw it, but Bloomberg, the publication, sent a report out to follow me around because, of course, I'd been saying good things about Trump, and it was just a hit piece.
So it was clearly a designed hit piece.
Now, the worst part about it, and I put this picture on Twitter, is that the photo they ran, it was a big article, you know, a major piece.
And so the photo, the big photo that was, I don't know, half a page or a quarter of a page, showed me exiting my garage in my house, and a hat on the wall, on a hook, that the way it was photographed made it look like a MAGA hat.
It wasn't. But that was the story they wanted to tell.
They wanted to paint me as a MAGA hat-wearing guy.
Now, I've never owned one, and if I had one, I wouldn't wear it, and I would probably throw it away as soon as I got it.
I have no complaints with you wearing the hat.
For me, I would just consider it stupid, because I would be inviting risk that I didn't need.
And if people are offended by the hat, eh, It's a hat.
I don't care. Now, if you want to wear it to make a point about free speech, I have no complaints.
If you want to take that risk, well, I'm not sure it's a wise choice, but that's your choice to make.
So I'm certainly not suggesting that you need to do anything differently.
Wear your MAGA hats, do whatever you want.
It's a free country, and if you want to assert your rights, I'm with you.
Totally. I'm just telling you my personal risk-reward decision is, I'm just not going to bring a risk that has no reward.
The hat... Looks like one of those hats because it's a takeoff on that.
I forget what it actually said, but instead of Make America Great, it was some profession.
It might have been like security or data security or something like that.
It was like Make Data Security Great Again.
And somebody sent it to me.
I didn't buy it. And I thought, I don't want to throw away a hat.
So I put it on that hook by my door.
In case I needed to go to my backyard and didn't have a hat.
I thought, well, just my emergency backup hat.
But look how much of a lie that photo told.
And of course the rest of the story was just a hit piece.
But that photo, we used to say that photos don't lie, you know, pictures don't lie.
But I think it's more accurate to say that they always lie.
Because a photo is an opinion By the photographer, and in this case an editor, deciding which pictures to run.
So really that photo was an opinion that you probably took as a fact, and you probably took it wrong, because you said to yourself, if you didn't read the article, you'd say, oh, there's that Adams guy, he's a MAGA hat-wearing guy.
And that would put me in a certain class of people that I don't, I would not put myself in.
I certainly would put myself as a Trump supporter, but wearing the hat, that's a different lifestyle.
All right. So here's my point.
Back in 2017, I don't believe that Bloomberg, the company, did a hit piece on somebody in the political realm unless the boss was okay with it, either directly ordering it or at least being okay with it as a concept.
So Bloomberg, the candidate...
Has to take responsibility for his company publishing a hit piece on me.
Wouldn't you say? I would say that that's the CEO's responsibility.
Because he sets the tone.
And it's not like they recanted the article or anything.
It's still there. So, here's my point.
Karma can be a bitch.
I don't know if karma is real or it just looks real to us, but in 2017, when Bloomberg, the company, probably with some at least understanding from the boss, decided to screw me in public, I wonder if they ever thought it would come back and cost them anything.
Because it's personal.
It's personal to me.
I'm going to do what I can to make sure that Bloomberg does not get elected.
And it's because it's personal.
I'm not even going to pretend it has anything to do with the country.
I'm not going to pretend it has anything to do with politics.
I mean, I'll talk about all that stuff probably.
But it's personal. And we might find out how much influence one person can have.
Because I've already described him, Bloomberg, as a desiccated turd floating in your punch bowl but wearing a tiny little suit.
Yeah, you can see it, can't you?
If I were somebody in the political realm, I wouldn't want to piss off me.
I might piss off a lot of other people, but I wouldn't want to piss off me.
There are a handful of people you don't want to piss off in the social media world.
I don't know if I'm in that group, but I'm pretty close to it.
So I hope you enjoy the show.
I'm going to make sure I do what I can to destroy Bloomberg's reputation, and it's just payback.
It's just personal, and it's just payback.
And I won't even pretend to make you think it's any kind of noble cause or anything like that, because it's not, in my case.
So that's full disclosure.
I was reading a little bit more on that fake news that we heard the other day that our intel agencies are saying that Russia wants Trump to get elected.
And, of course, people in the meeting were saying, what exactly would be the evidence that you know what Putin is thinking?
I mean, maybe we can tell what they're doing, but can we tell what they're thinking?
How do you know they're thinking they want Trump to get elected?
And I was reading the article, the New York Times had an article about this, and they were saying that those assessments about what leaders of other countries are thinking are more art than science.
More art than science.
In other words, it's literally fiction.
It's art. It's just not based on fact.
It's based on somebody's opinion, somebody who just happened to be in that field, whose job it was to look at this stuff, somebody's opinion that the reason events are going the way we're seeing them is that they know what the leader of Russia that they never met They know what he's thinking.
Now, I can't think of...
I mean, I suppose you have to do that because you have to make assumptions about their intentions.
But how accurate are they?
It can't be that much better than guessing.
And one of the biggest problems in the world, and we see it over and over, is people imagining that they can know the inner secret intentions of strangers.
We're just not good at that.
And I don't think our intelligence agencies are better.
I mean, you would hope that they'd be better, but there's no evidence of that.
There's no evidence that our intelligence services understand the motivations of anybody.
None. There's no evidence of that.
And yet we're making major global decisions based on somebody sitting in a room saying, you know, based on this information, I think that Putin, what he's secretly thinking is...
Man, we've got to stop doing that.
Because we can tell what people are doing.
We can't really tell what people are thinking.
And I'll say it again.
If the alleged plan that Putin is pursuing, which is to damage our democracy and weaken our country as much as possible, if that were a good idea or a good strategy for Russia, wouldn't everybody be doing it?
Right? I mean, there's something wrong with this story.
Because whenever there's something that works, and it's sort of public, doesn't everybody start copying it?
I mean, if Russia can destroy our democracy with all these little tricks, and literally nothing happens but some sanctions they don't care about, wouldn't other countries be doing this like crazy?
Or are they? Why are we only talking about Russia?
Where's China in this conversation?
Where's Cuba? What about Cuba?
Wouldn't Cuba be trying to interfere with American elections?
Or are they? I don't know.
Maybe they are. But this focus on Russia just leaves this gigantic unanswered question, which is, does Putin have an internal thought that messing with the United States works for Russia and In ways that we don't understand, because I don't see how it could possibly be a good idea in the long run.
In the short run, maybe, but in the long run it just looks stupid.
Then why do other countries copy this?
It's such a great idea.
Or are they? We don't hear about it.
Alright, I think that's all I had for today.
And that's plenty, don't you think?
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