Episode 831 Scott Adams: Bernie's "Fact Sheet" on Paying for Stuff, Biden, Coronavirus
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Justice Sotomayor accuses conservative supremes of bias
Anti-Bernie media ramping up
Coronavirus, is there something we are NOT being told?
Bernie's "Fact Sheet" needs SIMPLIFICATION
What motivates Bernie supporters?
"Addict-Town" a place for addicts to live and work
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You know, compared to the coronavirus, That coffee is better.
Way better. So, let's talk about some things happening in the news.
Harvey Weinstein is going to jail.
I find that I don't care about Harvey Weinstein.
I'm happy that the women involved are getting some justice, but otherwise I don't care about him.
So, good for the women.
That's all I've got to say about that.
There's an excellent fake fight happening right now.
And when I say it's a fake fight, I mean it's really just for entertainment.
And it's between two members of the Supreme Court and the President.
So I guess Justice Sotomayor accused, well I guess recently she accused the GOP appointed justices of being too in the bag for Trump.
So Sotomayor is saying that the court is packed with Trump supporters now, and so they're just backing the president.
And then the president heard that comment and also remembered that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had once said something bad about him being president.
And so the president, in his inimitable style, suggested that The two liberal judges, Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, should recuse themselves from any decisions that involve the president.
Now, I could not love this more.
Because first of all, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't affect your life.
It doesn't affect anything.
Because nothing's going to be different because of anything the president said or anything that the justices said.
So there's no downside risk.
It is purely for entertainment that we're watching this.
And the president has this incredible ability to break some kind of expectation or norm just enough that you can't look away.
And here he's doing it again, right?
He's not supposed to be criticizing another branch of government.
It looks like he's being a dictator.
He's having too much influence where he shouldn't.
Maybe he should just stay out of it.
But don't you love the fact that he didn't stay out of it?
From a purely entertainment perspective, don't you love hearing his opinion on stuff he's not supposed to give you his opinion on?
There aren't many things that entertain me more than that.
Every time the president Talks about a topic that all the smart people say he's not supposed to be talking about.
I say, tune in.
Tune in. What do you got to say about that topic you're not supposed to be talking about?
You had me at not supposed to be talking about it.
So none of this makes a difference, but I think it's hilarious that Trump puts that out there that they should recuse themselves.
It's not going to happen, but oh my God, it's just the most perfectly...
Prankster thing to say in this situation.
All right. There's a question, and I guess Howard Kurtz was asking it, and others.
Has the press given Bernie too much of a free pass?
And I think maybe, and usually what they're talking about is the impracticality of what he's suggesting.
But what's going to happen...
When the left turns on him, which you already see happening, you know, a lot of the left has turned on him, what will happen when both CNN and Fox News are saying every day, all day, don't vote for Bernie?
Because that's kind of common, isn't it?
Don't we have, for the first time ever, a common enemy?
I mean, Bernie has done what nobody else could do.
You know, before it was roughly, let's say, 40% of the country Democrat, 40% Republican, and a bunch of people who pretend not to be aligned.
So it looked like we were just this divided country.
But somehow Bernie has given us a common enemy, which is Bernie.
Now, common means that three-quarters of the public are going to say, I don't see how any of this is going to work.
We'd better keep this guy out of office.
Now, a quarter of the public, maybe more, could be 40% before we're done, are going to say, yeah, he's the man, we can make this work, or some version of that.
But I think CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News are all going to be pushing against Bernie for president.
You all know Jennifer Rubin, right?
And you know that she's very anti-Trump.
Probably she's most famous for not being even a little bit subtle about her bias.
I mean, that's probably what she's most famous for, is not being objective.
Which is a hell of a thing to be famous for.
But there it is.
And I looked at her Twitter feed, And it is non-stop anti-Bernie.
And she's going hard at him.
And if Jennifer Rubin, a famous anti-Trumper, is going full out anti-Bernie, he can't be our president, I think there's going to be more of that.
We already saw Anderson Cooper push back on Bernie in an interview.
We saw the James Carville pushing back.
A lot of people pushing back.
But Jennifer Rubin, and I couldn't find the tweet, but I'm pretty sure I saw this, suggested that Biden, who I believe she's backing because she's saying good things about him, She's saying that Biden could juice his campaign up by picking a vice president campaign partner early and a person of color and a woman who has some pizzazz.
So that was Jennifer Rubin's term for it, some pizzazz.
Of course, people on the left attacked her for saying, what?
You're treating these female potential vice president candidates like they're accessories.
They're not there just to add pizzazz.
They're serious professionals.
So, of course, the left is eating itself, which could not be more entertaining.
But here's the interesting part.
Jennifer Rubin suggested two people in particular, Stacey Abrams and Kamala Harris.
As a Biden potential VP pick that he could announce early to give a little energy to his campaign.
Now, is that signaling that Joe Biden is sort of what the, let's say, the elites and the Democratic Clinton machine, whatever's left of it, it's kind of saying that's who they want to win, right?
Because Kamala would be the stealth president, even if she got elected as vice president.
So, I would like to tease you again by saying, if you think the Kamala Harris campaign is over, maybe not.
She might have a way to go to the front of the line.
Now, what would happen if Biden does well in the upcoming states?
What if he does well?
What if he comes out on top in South Carolina and then does solidly respectable on Super Tuesday?
Does that make Bernie still the odds-on favorite?
I think it might change things.
Now, I don't know if Biden has anything left in the tank, because every day we get a new gaffe.
So today's new gaffe from Joe Biden, I guess it happened yesterday, He actually said this as he was closing up his campaign rally.
He said, my name's Joe Biden.
I'm a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate.
Look me over. If you like...
He's not running for the Senate.
That's the punchline there.
And he says, look me over.
If you like what you see, help out.
If not, vote for the other Biden.
What? Look me over.
If you like what you see, help out.
If not, vote for the other Biden.
What the hell is he talking about?
Is there anybody who's not noticing this at this point?
Now, this is actually a direct quote that I copied and pasted from a news article, so I'm assuming they quoted him correctly?
I don't think it's a typo, but he actually said he was running for the United States Senate, and if you don't like him, vote for the other Biden.
Who's that? His wife?
Or is it Hunter? Is Hunter running?
Hunter? Are you running?
So, I don't know.
I just don't see a scenario where Joe Biden looks like a serious candidate.
And when I see Jennifer Rubin saying, hey, how about naming a vice president?
I think that's acknowledging that he doesn't have enough left in his career and in reserve to be president.
It's kind of saying he needs a backup plan, and that might get him over the line.
We'll see. On Monday, the deputy health minister who's working on Iran's coronavirus task force said, He rejected claims that the government was downplaying how bad it was in Iran.
So the guy in charge of the coronavirus response in Iran was saying, no, no, it's not as bad as you think.
And then on Tuesday, authorities confirmed that that guy has coronavirus.
That's right. The guy in charge of the coronavirus response in Iran, who just said in public, it's not as bad as you think, has the coronavirus.
Now, Iran is pretty scary because the numbers coming out of there, and I don't think you can believe anything about numbers coming out of Iran, but what we have is that there are 95 confirmed cases and 15 confirmed deaths.
If that's even close to true, we're in a lot of trouble.
But how reliable is this?
It's not very reliable. Now, I think what we're seeing so far is that the places that have the best capability of reporting have also the lowest reported death rate.
I want to see if that trend continues.
So in other words, the United States, Canada, etc., there are some countries that you would assume would be pretty good at accurately reporting their records, or at least better than other countries.
And that whenever you have a country that's good at reporting, the death rate seems to be, you know, lowish.
But the places that are bad at reporting, or you don't trust them at all, it looks a lot scarier.
So I don't know if that's a pattern that means anything, but keep an eye on that.
All right. Apparently, the Wuhan weapons lab has not been ruled out as a possible cause.
Now, the people talking about this are always very careful with their language, because to say something's not ruled out certainly doesn't mean it's likely.
And I guess the experts are now pretty much agreed that That there's nothing about the coronavirus itself that has any markers for being engineered.
So it doesn't look like it was engineered, but that doesn't mean it didn't come from a bioweapon lab.
Because I'm guessing, I'm no bioweapons expert, but wouldn't you think that a bioweapons lab would have a variety of dangerous viruses and other entities just to study them?
Because maybe they're combining things, maybe they're looking for what they can learn about one to tell them how to design another one, that sort of thing.
So what are the odds that the thing that got out of a bioweapons center was We're something that they didn't design.
Not impossible, but I would say that the evidence is certainly not weighted in that direction at this point.
If you had to bet, I'd say bet on an animal.
But you can't rule out the more exotic possibilities.
Rush Limbaugh is saying, just recently, that it's basically like a cold.
And that we're taking it out of context and the problem, you know, it might not be a higher death rate than every flu we have every year, so we might be blowing it out of proportion.
But, as Mike Cernovich is saying almost every hour on Twitter, the real problem might be what it does to the supply chain, which we're already seeing, which is why the stock market went down.
And that might be the biggest problem.
Now why is it that no other flu has had this effect on supply lines?
What is it about this thing that somebody knows that makes a difference?
So I worry that there's something about this virus that's different and we're not being told.
So that's pretty scary.
Let's see. What else we got going on?
A lot of people are starting to speculate how the coronavirus will change politics, in particular, will have an impact on the presidential election.
And I think it will, but it's going to be hard to sort out the pushes in the polls.
So here are the things that might be affected.
So for one, it makes you think differently about health care.
And you might say to yourself, you know, we would all be safer if all of us had health care.
Because you don't want some person who has no health care to be running around infecting people where, if they had been part of the system, maybe could have been spotted and stopped a little sooner.
So I think Bernie gets a boost any time there's a story that would make you think, it would be better for all of us if everybody was covered.
So that's pro-Bernie.
But working against that is that there's an analogy here that's, I will say, a nature's analogy.
So it's not one that necessarily people are saying, but you can't miss it.
You have a complete ban on Muslim immigration until we can figure out what's going on with terrorism.
Now, how did people react to that?
Of course they said it's just racist because 99 point whatever percent of Muslims are no danger at all, and it would be a great act of discrimination against them if you prevented everybody to come in just because of this 1% or 2% or less.
That might be a problem.
But here's the thing.
Without anybody telling you to compare these things, what's the difference between a population of people who are almost completely innocent But some of them, and you can't tell which ones, have this virus.
Now what's the real difference between an idea virus, like a bad philosophy that would cause you to do bad things, and an actual physical virus?
Well, there's a material-physical difference in the molecules and the particles and whatnot, so there's that difference.
But in terms of how the government handles it, it's strangely the same, isn't it?
And I think that this is going to work in the President's favor, even if nobody besides me ever talks about it.
Because your mind makes these comparisons somewhat automatically.
And the comparison I think people are going to start to make with or without any pundits ever mentioning it is that the coronavirus, in terms of how the public or the government should respond to it, looks a whole lot like a group of people infected with a bad political idea that leads to terrorism.
In both cases, Well, so in the case of the coronavirus, when the president stopped travel from China, what did the public say?
Well, first the public said, hey, that's a little racist.
Wait, how many people are dying in China?
Well, it's still, if you stop only Chinese people from coming in, it's still really racist.
Tell me again how many people are dying in China?
And I think people have talked themselves into the fact that That discriminating against people from China actually makes complete sense, because it's just a health question.
It's not personal.
It has nothing to do with the quality of Chinese people.
We love the Chinese just as much as always.
But there's a statistical risk that's of the moment, and it matters.
So I think you watched an entire population say, no, no, no, don't discriminate against the Chinese.
Okay, it's just for health purposes.
It's temporary.
Until we figure out what's going on, I can live with it.
People are going to start comparing that to the proposed Muslim ban, which again was until we figured out a better idea of what to do about it, which happened.
So the president decided that the right risk-reward place was to just ban countries that couldn't give you a good ID of their citizens.
It's not the same as a Muslim ban, but it's a smart way to get to the most critical element, which is can you identify who's coming in?
So I think the president gains on immigration even if nobody ever makes the comparison overtly the way I just did.
You just can't not compare them.
An idea virus versus an actual virus.
They act so much the same.
I think that The idea of decoupling from China, which started out as sounding too extreme, now looks like a better idea.
Even though the virus is the worst reason for decoupling.
Reasonably speaking, you shouldn't be decoupling your economy from another country because of a virus.
That's probably not the right reason, but it's making people think about it.
So I think that emotionally, because people are afraid of health things and viruses and things they can't see, that's what's scary about a virus, you can't see it.
I feel as though people are going to be more inclined toward going hard at China and decoupling just because of the way this feels, even though logically that wouldn't make sense.
The other thing that's interesting here is that coronavirus is a very rare situation in our world in which we all have a common enemy.
And that's a big deal.
Because you know that in times of peace, governments will invent enemies just so they have something to impose.
So they might invent, you know, some ethnic group is our enemy, because you need an enemy, right?
It's good for governments for cohesion to have an enemy.
But when was the last time we had a common enemy?
Ever? Has there ever been a common enemy for all citizens everywhere on the globe?
Maybe the last time there was a pandemic.
But I don't know that the countries were coordinating, probably not, as well as they do now.
So, there's something to be said.
For battling a common enemy.
Because you're probably watching the news and you're hearing that North Korea is reporting that they don't have any, but of course they probably do.
Don't you actually worry about North Korea?
Like, when I hear that North Korea is getting the coronavirus, or there's no reporting of that, but you assume that it's happening, don't you immediately feel empathy?
For the citizens who are minding their own business, and because of their government, they won't be in good shape to deal with this.
So, you know, you could say that climate change is the common enemy, but people don't believe it.
There are not enough people on that side, but everybody believes the coronavirus is a common enemy.
Can you think of another example?
Because, yeah, somebody says malaria, but even malaria wasn't really coming to the United States, was it?
Yeah. So, don't overlook how powerful it might be to force us to work together.
Let me give you an example. I may have some of this history wrong, so somebody's going to have to fact check me on this.
But around the time, maybe just before the Iron Curtain came down and the Soviet Union dissolved...
I remember that there was some horrible earthquake in Russia, and the United States, even though we were not that friendly with the USSR, obviously, we offered unconditional free assistance.
And I said to myself, I think that's going to change something.
Because the United States and Russia are supposed to be enemies.
But when this natural disaster happened, I mean the Soviet Union, when the natural disaster happened, The United States, this supposed great enemy to the Soviet Union, just said, how can we give you stuff?
How can we help?
And then we did, and I think a lot of citizens donated.
U.S. citizens donated, and a lot of that money went over to help.
And soon after that, the Soviet Union dissolved, and I think at least part of it was they couldn't And this is just my speculation because it might have been just they ran out of money and it was just time to...
You know, there could have been lots of reasons that fell apart.
But one of the reasons, I think, is that the United States no longer made sense as an enemy.
Because what do you do about an enemy who sends you relief when you have a natural disaster?
Is that really your enemy?
So, I've said this before, but Russia and the United States...
Just need to figure out some way out of this psychological stupidity of thinking that we should be or are enemies.
We act like it because we think it's true, but there's no reason for it.
We could just as easily stop acting that way, and nobody would be hurt, and everybody would be better off.
So this common enemy thing might be more powerful than you think on the upside.
That's the most optimistic take I could take on it.
And then what might happen to Iran?
Iran was already reeling, right?
So you know all the problems with Iran.
Can they take one more national disaster?
Iran is right on the brink.
Between the sanctions and everything else, what happens if they've already closed down their borders?
I mean, how does the regime survive?
Or does this strengthen them?
Because they Maybe they want to keep their government if it looks like the government's doing something right.
I don't know if they are.
Let's talk about Bernie. I tweeted this this morning.
I think Bernie is only one interview away from extinction.
But it would have to be the right kind of interviewer.
You would need an interviewer who had some credibility about economics, somebody who clearly understands economics, but also knows how to frame a question right and really pin them down.
And, you know, so I've cheekily said that all it would take is one long-form interview with Maria Baderoma, and he would be out of the race.
I use Maria as just an example of somebody who understands the financial world and also can do a tough interview.
She has the talent stack.
Not everybody has the right combination of talents to even have that conversation.
Does Anderson Cooper?
I think Anderson Cooper was pretty hard on Bernie and did a pretty good journalist job of nailing him down and making him uncomfortable and forcing him to answer questions.
But I don't think Anderson Cooper has the financial talent that somebody like Maria Bartiromo would bring to it, or really any of the CNBC legacy people.
And I wonder if Bernie is trying to make the meek inherit the earth.
Because I've got a feeling that the people who most like Bernie are the people who feel vulnerable.
Makes sense, right? Because he's the one who's going to give you free stuff and take care of your basic needs.
So if you feel vulnerable in society, in other words, you're meek, you're not the go-getter who's trying to win it all in capitalism, you probably like Bernie.
So Bernie is actually helping the meek inherit the earth.
Weirdly enough, that's almost directly what he's doing.
So, that's fun.
But Bernie was forced to put out a little fact sheet about how he's going to pay for everything.
And I want to read to you just this one portion of a larger fact sheet that's filled with numbers and percentages and stuff.
It's way too complicated.
So I'm just going to pick out one part of it and show you how complicated they made it, and then I'm going to tell you what he should say instead.
So this will be a lesson in persuasion, taking a cue from President Trump who knows how to simplify.
He knows who he's talking to, the public.
You've got to simplify.
Here's what Bernie's fact sheet says, and again, this isn't the whole fact sheet.
It's much larger than this.
It has lots of points about different policies and how to pay for them.
But just this one point, he says, and I quote, now watch how complicated this is.
And this is them trying to make it simple.
And still watch how complicated it is.
So the fact sheet says, in 2018, the typical working family paid an average of $6,015 in premiums to private health insurance companies.
Under this option, a typical family of four earning $60,000 would pay a 4% income-based premium to fund Medicare for all on income above $29,000, just $1,240 a year, saving that family $4,775 a year.
Families of four making less than $29,000 a year would not pay a premium.
Now, if you're fairly smart and educated and you pay attention to that, you know what that means.
I would say that sentence is sufficiently clear That a reasonably educated person could read it and really understand what it says.
But it's way too complicated.
Watch this. I'm going to take that whole paragraph with all those numbers.
And first of all, if you're trying to sell something to the public, don't say it's going to save you $6,015 a year.
You could do a little rounding off.
How about rounding off a few of these numbers?
Here's how I would say it.
A typical working family would pay $1,000 extra in taxes to save $5,000 in health care expenses.
See what I did there?
I took their $1,240.
I just said, call it $1,000.
And then I took their savings of $4,775 and said, call it $5,000.
Now, how much better is my explanation than Bernie's?
Won't you remember forever?
Typical working family, they're going to pay $1,000 more in taxes to save $5,000 in health care per year.
Am I right? Did I not just explain Bernie's policy a thousand percent better than Bernie ever has?
All I did was round off and get rid of the stuff that doesn't matter.
Got rid of it. Now he also has a whole bunch of different ways he wants to tax the rich.
And some of them have to do with a wealth tax, depending on what thing he's funding.
Some have to do with taxing financial transactions.
Some of them have to do with more social security tax for the rich people, because it cuts off if you're rich.
After a certain point, he'd like to stop that cutoff.
So basically, he has like five different ways he's going to tax the rich.
Now, one advantage is that if nobody understands exactly what he's doing and nobody can talk to it because it's too complicated, people will just retreat to their biases.
So if Bernie supporters say, you know, that's all kind of complicated and I can't say I follow it all, but he's heading in the right direction.
I'm just going to say that's good.
We'll work it out. Meanwhile, the people who are trying to debunk it are going to try to do it line by line.
Say, ah, what about this complicated numbers?
You forgot to calculate this?
And nobody's going to be able to follow it.
So because of its complexity, it's hard to debunk.
Because you'd really have to get into the details, and nobody can pay attention, nobody understands, nobody would watch.
So it's undebunkable because of its complexity, but it's also unsellable because of its complexity.
So... He could do a lot better there.
Let me give you an example of how you could simplify the taxes on the rich.
I'm not suggesting this is a good idea.
This is an example of simplification only.
It's not a suggestion for how to run the country.
But suppose you said this.
Apparently we pay about half a trillion dollars a year just servicing the debt.
So the national debt Cost taxpayers half a trillion a year just for the interest part.
Forget about paying it down.
That's just the interest. Half a trillion a year.
So suppose you're Bernie and you want to simplify things because it's all too complicated and you say this.
I propose that we will move the interest and the debt burden entirely to the top 1%.
In other words, you'll say, if you're not in the top 1%, none of that national debt will ever accrue to you.
And if you drop out of the 1%, then you don't owe it either.
But you would just say, that's it.
I'm just going to move all of our national debt to the rich.
Here's my reason. It will free up half a trillion dollars a year that we don't have to pay an interest.
And that money can then be used for services or to prevent the debt from going up, I suppose.
Now, this is not really a practical plan.
You probably see all the holes in it.
But think of it as a simplification that just helps them sell a big complicated thing.
If I just said to you, well, here's the deal.
The top 1% are going to take all of the national debt because they're the ones responsible for it, and they're the ones who benefited from it.
So the 1%, you're going to take all the national debt, and that will free up enough money that we can chip away at all these other things like health care and paying down student debt and stuff like that.
So, that's not a good full idea, but it's an idea of how much you would need to simplify this until you could get to, I'm going to build a wall and I'm going to make Mexico pay for it.
I mean, that's a good simplification.
Somebody says, define the top 1%.
Yeah, I mean, if you dig into the details, none of it works.
I'm just saying that as a simplification, it might be good.
I've seen... Various theories about why Sanders' support might be bigger than people imagine, and that therefore he's going to win in a surprise, just like Trump did.
Because people are underestimating the depth of the Bernie support.
And I'm fascinated by the reasons that people are putting on it.
And I guess that there are so many people who support him that they have different reasons, and so it's not one reason.
But here are some of the ones I'm hearing.
One of the reasons people like Bernie is that his supporters just like the fight.
In other words, they like that he's fighting for them, the working people, or the young who don't yet have money.
And they just feel like he's on their side.
And they don't take too seriously his proposals.
So in other words, a lot of his supporters don't believe that he's going to do the things he says he wants to do, because obviously Congress would step in and not do those things.
But they just like somebody who's on their side.
That's not a bad take.
I would say that Trump had some of that kind of supporter as well.
Others say he's a populist.
I actually had to look up populists.
Did you know what a populist was?
Because it's sort of a weird word.
You don't hear it that much.
But I actually had to look it up.
I wasn't sure what it meant. So a populist means someone who represents the common people.
Now, I think that's another way of saying that the common people, since there are so many of them, they're common.
That whatever they want should be the popular opinion.
So if you just say what the common people want, you're a populist, because you're in the majority, I guess.
So I guess people would like him, and that's really the same reason.
He's fighting for the little people.
I've also heard the theory that his supporters just want to blow up the system.
They're just so sick of business the way it's been, that very much like some Trump supporters, they just want to break the government.
Well, I would argue that Trump's doing a pretty good job of breaking the old form of the government.
So I'm not totally convinced that they need Sanders to do that.
Maybe they think they could take it further, but let's say that's part of it.
Then there's the obvious that people like free stuff.
If I were a student with $100,000 of student debt, I might support Bernie.
I might, because it would be in my vast self-interest to do so.
I mean, it's $100,000.
I'll vote for the guy who can give me $100,000 of other people's money.
But I'm going to add one, too.
So here's my addition.
I think there are just people who like to be active and people who don't, politically active.
So no matter the situation and no matter the candidates, I think the same group of voters would be the activists.
Because there are just some people who like to be activists.
And if you took away, if they solved the problem that they were activists about, the day it was solved they would become activists on a different problem.
So I'm starting with the Assumption that people who like to get involved and like to get worked up about things are going to get involved and get worked up about something.
And then they have to choose what it is.
I feel that backing Bernie is a lifestyle decision.
And here's what I mean.
If you back President Trump, can you say so in public?
It's hard, right?
Backing Trump is socially very difficult.
And you have to know that you're going to take a hit to do it.
So, you know, it's a risk.
But what about, you know, can you imagine backing Hillary Clinton?
So a lot of people backed Hillary Clinton.
How do they feel today?
It seems like backing Hillary Clinton was a little bit dangerous.
And maybe a lot of people didn't want to admit, even if they were Democrats and even if they preferred her over the alternative, they might not want to admit.
Because Hillary's got kind of a rough reputation.
But what about Bernie?
Until this week, when a lot of his old videos surfaced where he seemed to be complimenting Castro, or at least that's the way it was spun.
It wasn't exactly that that was happening.
But it was spun that way.
Until then, wasn't he the safest candidate to support?
Let's say you're in your 20s, and your life is social.
You go out a lot, you have friends, you go to work, you're around people all the time, and your social life is very important to you.
You're in your 20s, of course it's important.
And you look around and you say to yourself, everybody who supports Trump is getting mocked.
Everybody who supports some standard Democrat You can also get mocked, you know, a Hillary Clinton type.
But nobody's really mocking Bernie Sanders in the way that hurts.
Certainly he has lots of criticisms, but they're not really the kind that hurt.
He's the safest lifestyle choice.
If you had to tell somebody in public who you supported, you could tell, here's the key, you could tell a Trump supporter that you support Bernie, and what would the Trump supporter say?
Well, I think his economics don't work, but I kind of like Bernie, right?
Even the Trump supporter is going to say, I don't want him as my president, but you're okay.
I can see why you would support him.
I mean, you're not crazy.
He's offering to give you free stuff.
He's fighting for you.
He cares about the little people.
He's been genuine. I get it, right?
You don't really get that response if somebody had been backing Clinton.
You're going to get a darker response than that.
So I think that maybe the most important thing with Sanders is that he's the lifestyle compatible candidate.
You can simply say it out loud and you don't have to worry about the ramifications.
He's unique that way.
I was asking on Twitter what country I should flee to should the United States become a Bernie Sanders country.
Now, am I serious?
Would I really leave the United States if Bernie Sanders became president?
Well, it would depend.
If the Congress flipped, and let's say it was a Republican Congress, well, I wouldn't worry too much about Bernie.
I'd probably stick it out.
But imagine if Bernie gets elected, and against all odds, he goes on to consolidate the Congress.
I'm getting out. At that point, you've got to get pretty serious about getting out if you have any money that you want to protect.
And I was asking, what countries would people go to?
And I said, for safety as well as economics.
And so people said, well, how about the Caribbean?
To which I said to myself, it's not going to be an island.
I said, safety.
I'm not going to Puerto Rico.
I'm not going to an island.
I also would be a little hesitant to be right on the coast, because depending on the coast, you've got your hurricanes.
So I'm not going to go anywhere where there's a hurricane risk.
That's not safe. I don't want to go anywhere where there's a political risk.
There might be a An overthrow or a coup or something.
And I don't want to go someplace where the taxes are too high.
I don't want to go where I'm discriminated against.
And the more I thought about it...
Yeah, Costa Rica...
Costa Rica is smallish and it's got two coasts.
So I'm not sure how safe Costa Rica is, but it would be high on the list.
But the point is, the United States doesn't have any competition.
Because when you actually sit down and say, all right, I can go anywhere in the world, and if it's not going to be the United States, where am I going to go?
I did see Australia and Switzerland mentioned quite a few times.
Australia's not bad. I'd have to look at their tax situations.
Wyoming. All right.
So, there's not much competition.
Let me talk about an idea I want to put out there.
In the comments, I want you to answer this question.
How many of you, and you can just say yes or no, you don't have to add anything if you don't want, how many of you, your lives are negatively impacted by addiction?
Now, it doesn't have to be your own addiction.
It could be a spouse, family member, loved one, friend, co-worker.
How many of you Are being negatively impacted in a serious way because somebody has an addiction and it might be you.
So there's a little delay in the comments, so we'll wait for that.
And the reason I'm asking is because I want to put out a suggestion.
I know when my own stepson was going through his addiction problems, we did a lot of research about what do you do?
Where do you send people?
And the answer is, there's not really any place to send addicts.
There are super expensive places, I mean super expensive, that really aren't going to work for 99% of the world.
And then there are just no other options.
Or there are places that maybe are one home, and you go to somebody's dreary little neighborhood home, and there are some other addicts trying to recover, but it's just this one house.
And as soon as you leave that one house, well, you're back in the real world with all the risks and people just fall back.
So here's my suggestion.
I think we need to build an addict town.
Okay, you're seeing all the yeses coming in in the comments.
It's nearly 100% yes.
I do see some no's.
Okay, not 100%.
But it looks like 80% yeses.
Well, I should wait for a little bit.
Maybe half. So I think some of you are more affected than you know about.
You might not know how much it's affecting you.
But addiction is the biggest problem we have in the United States that's not being handled.
We have big problems, but we know what to do about them.
Even the coronavirus, we know what to do.
We're just doing it as quickly as we can.
For addiction, it's just ruining families all over the place.
It's ruining the economy. I mean, it's just ruining everything.
And the reason I would suggest building an addict town is that you would make an entirely self-contained community that's got its own stores and services and people can work there and live there and just not leave.
Now, if they get a really good control of their addiction, they can leave if they want.
But you make it a place you can go to live, not a place that you're going to spend $20,000 a month to live there because it's an addict treatment place.
Just a place to live. You would get searched any time you came in to make sure there were no drugs.
So there would be no alcohol sold, and you wouldn't let anybody in who wasn't a recovering addict.
So it would be hard to get in if you were a drug dealer, and obviously somebody would try.
Then you'd have to kick him out.
And here's the second part.
The addict town should be built from scratch.
Here's one of the most important things for housing.
And I don't hear anybody talk about this.
I think I'm the only one. The most important thing to get right for housing...
is to be with people who are in the same situation as you are.
So what I mean by that is if you live in a community and you've got, let's say, two small kids in school, the best situation is that you live around a bunch of other people who have kids in school.
Because then they play with each other, the parents take turns driving, you share a lot of the duties, kids always have something to do, somebody to help them with homework.
Likewise, if you're single, Let's say you're single in your 20s.
The last thing you want is to live around a bunch of kids and senior citizens.
So pretty much everybody is happier living around people who are in their situation.
And I think that's true for addicts as well.
Because the last thing that addicts want to do is live in a world where everybody else is going out and drinking.
They can't fit in.
It's very uncomfortable.
So the first thing to get right Is that people who are substantially like you in some important way are the people around you.
That's why a college dorm can be the best lifestyle while being the least expensive, you know, just a little room with two people shoved in it and a shared bathroom, and it's still the best time of your life.
It's because you're around people that are like you and you're doing stuff that you want to do, learning, etc.
This is how it should be designed.
If you design addict treatment from the person or the one house, oh, I'll have one house and people will go here.
I just don't think it's enough.
I think you need to build entire towns and people just got to move and just say, I'm going to live here as long as it takes.
And I'm not going to be an addict here because there's nothing here.
here.
I couldn't be an addict if I wanted to.
And then if you start from scratch and build it, that you can do things like experiment and lower the cost of the housing and try to build a lifestyle that's an ideal engineered situation.
And then people will be happy to live there.
And I think you could actually make it self-sustaining, meaning that instead of paying $20,000 a month to be there, it's just a place you rent.
So it's just a low-cost city.
And you'd have to have a job or a source of income, but things would be cheap there.