Episode 1161 Scott Adams: How Trump Wins the Next Debate, Stimulus Bill Solutions, Investing Advice, Hunter the Gatherer
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Joe Biden's possible health problems
Getting rid of police and prisons
Hunter Biden's laptop
Stalled stimulus bill
Thoughts on Thursday debate
Google antitrust case
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Just as good as I hoped.
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Well, in my defense, I do look a little shaggy today, I have to admit, but it's because Christina cuts my hair, just because it's way more fun than going to a barber, and she is flying her Flying an airplane off to another state today as part of getting her pilot's license.
So this will be her first solo cross-state flight, and she's probably in the air right about now.
So wish her luck.
And if you see me with the haircut, it either means I tried to cut it myself or she came back.
Let's talk about Biden's health.
You may have noticed, if you follow Ali Alexander, He noticed that there were some tells that Biden has that suggest maybe Parkinson's is a problem.
But I read Ali's text and I say to myself, hey, Ali Alexander, you're no medical doctor.
I'm not going to be repeating these slanderous potential medical claims from somebody who's not a medical doctor.
But then, but then, in a twist, I didn't see coming.
An actual medical doctor, and not just any medical doctor, Dr.
Zev Zelenko, tweeted essentially the same stuff.
Now, I don't know if you saw Ali's tweets.
I'm thinking he might have.
But this is what Dr.
Zelenko, and by the way, if you recognize the name, He would be the same doctor who was promoting hydroxychloroquine.
So you can put that in your box where you try to judge his credibility.
And here's what the doctor says.
And again, you all know that you should not be diagnosing people from a distance.
No doctor should be saying that somebody has a specific health problem.
If it's not their patient...
So we all know the warnings, right?
I don't have to go over that.
And we all need to give it a grain of salt.
But here's what Dr.
Zelenko tweeted. He said, Biden has hand tremor, which I've seen on video.
It looks like a hand tremor to me.
I can't imagine.
There might be several reasons for that.
But anyway, so Biden has a hand tremor.
Reduced facial expression.
Botox. Handwriting changes.
He's old. Slow shuffling gait.
He's old. And cognitive changes.
We can all see those, but, you know, he's old.
And then Dr.
Zelenko says he most likely has Parkinson's disease.
He is being used as an avatar who is really running for president.
Elder abuse. So this is coming from a doctor.
Now, I don't think we can conclude that just because one doctor tweeted about Biden that he has Parkinson's.
So I'm not going to say that's true.
But here's my take on it.
He does disappear for long periods of time, and it's really hard to explain that if the campaign thinks he's capable of performing.
So you have to assume that the campaign does not believe he's capable of performing, On a day-to-day basis, obviously.
If he were capable, he'd be out there.
I don't see any exception to that.
But I would have to say that Biden has impressed me so far in terms of at least looking healthy.
When he shows up for a debate or one of these stump speeches, he looks completely healthy, doesn't he?
The only trouble is when he's trying to answer a question or go off the script a little bit, And I even said that his stump speech looks kind of perfect.
I was listening to his kind of standard thing he says about Trump now when he's giving his speeches.
It's super visual.
He's got a really good, let's say, theatrical...
Read to his own material.
So he shows emotion.
He shows empathy.
He shows, you know, certainty.
He shows commitment.
You know, his voice is really good from an actor or political perspective.
And I don't think it was even a month ago.
I feel as if Biden's act, if you will, the one he's crafted into this neat little package he always presents, because he always says the same things.
When he talks about the fine people hoax, he says it's real.
But he says, just imagine them, folks.
Close your eyes, the veins bulging from their neck.
Now, you've heard it a lot of times, but it's very visual.
And if you listen to his whole stump speech, just appreciate how well He has honed it and crafted it, obviously, with lots of expert help, until it's really tight.
It's really tight.
He hits all the notes, very visual, good emotion.
But here's the problem.
And it might be at least part of why we don't see much of him.
I don't think he can do anything else.
Because when you see him nail that canned speech, he's reading it.
And when he does have to do something without reading it, it's usually a little memorized segment from the canned speech.
What would happen if every single time you saw Biden, he said exactly the same thing?
Because that's what's happening.
It's exactly the same.
And that also suggests maybe some mental impairment or a little mental risk that we don't see with Trump.
Trump goes out there, and he's got his written thing he can read from, and he does go to it.
But he's mostly doing stand-up comedy, live without a net, five days a week or something, or whatever he's doing.
How many is he doing?
Like five rallies a day or something crazy toward the end of the election cycle?
So I don't think there's any comparison to their mental acuity.
One can go out there and riff all day long, take the toughest questions from 60 Minutes.
We'll talk about that. And everybody else.
And Biden can't.
And that's got to be pretty obvious to everybody.
By the way, I love Trump's strategy of going just nuts on rallies and public events the last several days before the election.
And here's why that's so brilliant.
Number one, it might work.
You know, that extra work could be the difference.
But suppose it isn't.
It's still a great idea.
Because one of two things will happen.
Either he will win, and if he wins, what will he be able to say about his win?
He'll be able to say he outworked Biden, right?
And everybody will agree.
Because they'll say, well, Biden's hiding.
Trump is not even just doing a normal schedule.
He ramped it up to schedule times five.
I mean, he's really, really killing it in these last weeks.
You're going to see the energy, the commitment, the drive, the hard work.
A lot of stuff you like.
Now, if he wins, he'll always be able to say, that's why.
I outworked him.
That is the best.
If you win in any competition...
If you have the ability afterwards to say, I outworked him, that's just the best.
Because that's everything good about people is in that one statement.
I outworked my competitor.
That's what you like to hear.
Now suppose he loses. Suppose Trump loses.
Still exactly the right strategy.
Because he can leave the field saying, I left it all in the field.
And you would look at it and you'd say, yeah, yeah.
I would say, certainly if you're looking at those closing weeks, he left it all in the field.
You know, and you have to respect that.
And he would leave with the best first term of any president, I think.
You know, I would agree with Geraldo who said that.
So he's got a good strategy of going hard, and it's going to make that comparison to Biden even more stark.
And of course, the way your brain is organized, it only understands things in comparison.
So the more anemic Biden is, and the more he hides, the more beneficial it is for Trump to ramp it up to 10, because then that distance between them is increased, and we only understand our world by difference.
By comparison.
So he's just ramping up that comparison like crazy.
Very good strategy. All right.
Let me take a little detour here to give you some investment advice.
Most of you might not need this.
But some of you might be thinking, I wouldn't mind investing someday if I had a little extra money.
So here's some investment advice.
Now, I don't give a specific investment advice in terms of a company to buy.
So I'm going to give you generic advice, but I'll mention some companies just as examples.
And some of them are ones that I've bought.
Actually, everything that I mention next will be a company that I own some stock in.
So that's full disclosure. So I'm not a financial advisor.
And I'm not a good investor.
So did you hear that?
I'm not a good investor.
If you look at my lifetime track record.
But there are some things that are just generally true about investing that you need to get right.
And recently, I'd say I'm getting those things right.
So number one, you should diversify.
You should not buy one stock or just a few stocks.
Anybody who buys one stock or just a few is putting too much risk in a few companies.
And even if they're great companies, you don't know that they're going to be around forever.
So diversify is number one.
If you get that right, you're in good shape with stocks.
Number two, I learned this tip from a billionaire.
A billionaire said, I only invest in monopolies.
And I said, what?
Because there's no such thing as a monopoly, right?
If we had a monopoly, it would get broken up by the government.
Because it's not legal to be a monopoly.
So how can you say you only invest in monopolies when they don't even exist?
And then he said, but we don't call them monopolies.
We call it the network effect.
What has the network effect?
If you're trying to guess what billionaire, you won't be able to do it.
So don't assume that you can guess who it was.
And here's what the network effect is.
It means that if a bunch of people are using something, you can't leave it because all of your friends are with the other thing.
Facebook is the perfect example.
I don't own stock in Facebook, by the way, except within funds.
And if you wanted to leave Facebook, you could.
I mean, you could go to some other Facebook competitor, but all your friends and family are on Facebook.
So you don't. It's just too hard.
So the types of companies that I would say fit into the category where you could leave them, they do have competition, but it would be so hard that you're not going to do it.
And here's the list of companies that fit that.
Amazon. Amazon.
Is anybody really going to compete with Amazon?
Because once you've got your one-click going on, you're kind of stuck with Amazon, aren't you?
So it's not technically a monopoly, but for all practical purposes, it's not going anywhere.
Apple has competition, the entire Android universe, right?
But once you're in that Apple ecosystem, it's almost impossible to leave.
And I've tried. I've tried a few times to say, ah, in the past I've said, I'm going to get rid of this Apple stuff because I was mad at some product or something.
You can't. It's almost impossible.
Because their products all work together so well that once you get in their universe, it's just easier to have all of their stuff and make it all work together.
Snapchat. If you saw the news today, Snapchat is going nuts.
If you have young kids in your life, any teenagers you know, you know that Snapchat isn't going anywhere.
And in fact, it might pick up some of the TikTok business because they cloned some of that.
So Snapchat, again, how hard would it be for somebody to compete with Snapchat?
Easily. There's nothing that they built.
It can't be built by somebody else.
But the kids are on Snapchat.
They're not going anywhere.
Talk to a Talk to a 14-year-old and say, hey, do you use Snapchat?
The answer is yes. If they're 14, they're using Snapchat.
And would you be willing to get off of Snapchat?
Nope. All of their friends are on Snapchat.
They can't leave. It's a monopoly for all practical purposes for a certain age group.
And that's the age group you want to capture.
Microsoft, same thing.
You can leave Microsoft, but they have such dominance in so many categories, it's hard to imagine.
Twitter. Twitter is another situation.
Yes, there are several other Twitter competitors.
Have you tried any? It's like the most boring thing.
It's like eating a piece of bread with nothing on it.
Because there's not enough people there.
And all the people that you fight with, and the excitement, The retweets, all of the energy is on Twitter.
You could leave, but you're not gonna.
And then Tesla is the most interesting one on the list.
You could argue this one. But I've heard Tesla described as a green energy play.
That it's not really a car company.
It's a company that knows how to store and manipulate energy.
So it's going to have its solar panels, it's going to have batteries, it's going to have automobiles.
At some point, it's really just an energy company and probably a dominant one.
And to the extent that their products work together, you'll be stuck.
All right, so diversify.
But if you had to buy an individual company, make sure that it's a monopoly, meaning network effect.
And then here's the third tip.
All of those companies I mentioned, all overpriced.
Meaning it's too late.
You know, didn't you want to get into these companies?
But now they're sky-high prices.
They've already gone up twice.
It's too late. So here's the third tip.
When there's a major downturn, that's when to get in.
So when we had the coronavirus hit, I took all of my cash that I had available and I dumped it into these companies that I mentioned, the ones I didn't already own.
And the play was that if the entire world fell apart, which is what coronavirus sort of threatened, just everything's going to fall apart, it doesn't matter what stock you own.
Doesn't matter, because the whole world fell apart.
If it doesn't fall apart, there are some stocks that are going to come back faster, and digital ones were obvious, Amazon was obvious because of the social distancing, etc.
So wait for a downturn, and don't buy only one of those companies.
If you're going to buy any of these network-effect companies, buy several of them so you've got a little bit of a diversification.
All right, that's more than you wanted to hear.
I heard that Kaepernick wants to abolish police and prisons.
Does that sound crazy?
Kaepernick wants to actually get rid of the police and get rid of prisons.
How would you replace them?
What kind of a system would you have?
Unlike most of you, I think it might be possible.
But you would really have to change things.
And I would like to suggest just a few ways that you could go about that.
Reason, you know, here's one way.
You can remove the reasons for crime, right?
Now, you couldn't do it in the inner city.
It's probably too hard to just turn the inner city into a no-police zone.
But suppose you were to start from scratch, just pick some place and say, all right, here's the place we're going to experiment.
It doesn't have too many problems, so, you know, it's like a blank field.
Could you create a situation where people just didn't have a reason to commit any crimes?
Because why do you commit a crime in the first place?
Well, you need food or you need resources or something.
What if you could get food or you could get resources and you didn't have to steal?
So you might create a situation where the reason to have crime is much reduced.
It's hard to do, but you can imagine it.
At least you can get close to it.
Or you could have a surveillance state where you could do a crime, but you would get caught 100% of the time.
So imagine if you had a location that had that DNA technology that Othrum uses, where if you did a crime and they got your DNA, they're going to catch you.
If you knew, you knew it with no doubt that if you did any kind of violent crime or sex crime, you're going to leave some DNA and you're 100% going to get caught.
That would reduce crime if you knew you were going to get caught.
And let's say there was facial recognition and video everywhere.
Now, you might not want to live in that place.
I can see that.
But it is a system that would reduce crime.
Here is the ultimate move that Trump could make to own this category.
Here's what you don't want to do.
You don't want to just agree with Kaepernick because your base wouldn't like it, right?
So Trump can't say, you know, that's a good idea.
I think we should get rid of cops and get rid of prisons.
You know that can't happen.
And if there are people who like this idea...
And apparently there are.
A lot of people want some alternative to the police prison state.
Here's what Trump could do.
And I'm not suggesting he'll do it.
This is more along the lines of giving you a persuasion lesson.
Here's what Trump could do.
It's called the High Ground Maneuver.
You've heard of it. And it goes like this.
And before I say it, let's see if you can hit it on your own.
What could Trump say about the idea of getting rid of police and prisons that would be the high ground where he could sort of leapfrog it into a higher level of thinking that even the people who agree with Kaepernick would have to join him at the higher level?
That's the key to the high ground.
It's not a high ground maneuver unless the moment everybody sees it, they go, okay, we've got to go to that.
We've got to take that opinion because it's obviously a higher opinion than our own.
Here it is. I don't know if that's a good idea to get rid of police and prisons, but we should test it somewhere.
Let's see what happens. You see that?
That's the high ground. Now, Trump is never going to suggest that.
I don't think there's any chance.
But if he did, it would completely remove the issue.
Because he would be the one who had the most aggressive idea.
Because it's one thing to say, I'd like the world with no police and no prisons, but that's just sort of an idea.
Trump could actually go ahead of that and be more aggressive and say, you know, People have some ideas.
How do we know if they'll work?
Can't know until you test it.
Let's find a place, ideally not an inner city where they have too many problems.
They just need more police.
But if you could find a place that doesn't already have a lot of problems, let's see if you could build something.
Let's test it small, see what happens.
The moment he said that, he's more aggressive than the left is on their biggest issue.
And he wouldn't have to do a thing.
Because it's not like he's the one who's promising to make the test.
He's just saying, let's test it.
Why are we arguing about it when we can just test it?
And we don't know which of these ideas will work.
Let's take a look.
Test is small. All right, let me give you my wildest conspiracy theory.
Are you ready? Now, if you're new to my periscopes, anytime I go full Alex Jones, I like to tell you that's what I'm doing so that you can put it in the proper context, as in, don't take it too seriously, but see if you can learn something from the topic, okay?
It goes like this.
Someday in our future...
If it hasn't already happened, that's the conspiracy part, someday we are guaranteed to live in a future in which decisions will be made about society and politics and policies and all that, and those decisions will be made by artificial intelligence.
How will you be able to identify a decision made by human beings versus a decision made by artificial intelligence?
As soon as the decision is made, and you hear that decision is made, how would you identify one that comes from machines?
And how would you know the one that came from humans?
Now, your first instinct might be, well, it's not artificial intelligence unless I can't tell the difference.
If I can't tell the difference, that's artificial intelligence.
But I would argue that there might be some ways to tell.
I'm going to use as my example, you saw that Brennan and Clapper trotted down the repeat story about Hunter Biden's laptop maybe being Russian disinformation.
Now, they didn't say they have evidence it is.
They just said it has all the earmarks of a classic laptop.
Russian disinformation plot.
Now, when you heard that, didn't you say to yourself, why are they using exactly the same discredited idea, the Russia collusion hoax, that these exact same people, including Schiff, who took the lie forward, so you've got Schiff, Brennan, and Clapper, the three least credible people on the entire planet Earth, Their credibility has been destroyed by the whole Russia collusion hoax.
These are the most clownish, non-credible people in the world, and on top of them being the most clownish and non-credible people in the world, they used the same lie.
The very same lie that they had just used.
Now, what would a machine decision look like Compared to a human decision in this very example.
If humans made the example, I'm sorry, if humans had decided on that Russia strategy with the laptops, do you think they would have?
Because it makes the main players look like idiots.
It makes Brennan, Clapper, and Schiff look like total morons and liars.
Would those three people have said, you know, I got an idea.
Let's just try the same play again.
Because that strategy doesn't take into account the egos of the humans.
That sounds like something a machine decided.
Because a machine doesn't care about your ego, but it does care about what works.
And is it possible that the machine could have determined something that humans wouldn't know, which is, even though it's a repeat, and even though it's the same characters involved, that it would work?
That it might actually be the best play.
You know, your common sense from, let's say you're a Trump supporter, from your perspective as a Trump supporter, it just looks batshit crazy.
It looks like literally the dumbest thing you could ever do.
Same bunch of liars with the same lie?
Are you kidding me?
You couldn't come up with a new lie?
So that's why it doesn't sound like a human decision.
It sounds like the AI said, if you do this, You're going to be able to move the news cycle the way you want to, convince people the way you want to.
And I can imagine that the Brennan Clapper shifts, say, you know, I don't like this.
It's going to make me look stupid.
But if the AI says this is our best strategy, I still want to win.
So I'm going to do it.
So that would be the tell.
Now, can I tell you that a machine made that decision to trot out the Russia collusion thing?
I can't. Because the other possibility is quite possible, which is that the Democrats are so cynical and accurate, in other words, they're not wrong about this, that enough of their base believes Russia collusion actually happened,
and they have such a stranglehold on the news, that they can simply say the same thing happened as happened before, and their base believes Thinks it happened before.
Even though at least the Russia collusion part didn't.
Now the part that did happen before, of course, is that Russia is always meddling with stuff.
So that part's true. But they could have just said, this will work because the voters are that stupid and uninformed.
But all I'm suggesting is that if you see a strategy that looks crazy to you, and it doesn't take into account the human...
Egos that wouldn't have made a decision like you're seeing.
Someday, maybe not this example.
This might have been just a human decision.
But someday, that's what it's going to look like.
It's going to look like decisions that no human would have made.
Because you look at it and you say, I wouldn't have made that decision.
It would have been too embarrassing.
Computer doesn't care.
Alright, let's talk about Hunter and his laptop.
As I tweeted, and I don't know if anybody thought of this first, but I didn't see anybody else claim credit for it, but I said Hunter was a gatherer.
And he was gathering a lot of stuff.
Not all of it good.
There's a report today that Rudy Giuliani turned over the laptop to the FBI because he found some potentially, allegedly, child porn on there.
And some inappropriate text messages.
Now, the part that they didn't report, and this is a scoop.
You haven't heard this anywhere, so this will be the first time you hear this.
This is why you listen to Coffee with Scott Adams, because I have the scoops.
So those inappropriate text messages that were on Hunter Biden's laptop, what Hunter didn't know is that the entire time he was actually texting with Putin...
That's how good Putin is.
He was pretending to be an underage girl and texting with Hunter Biden.
No, that didn't happen.
But if you were a Democrat, you might have believed it.
All right, so what do you think?
Do you think it's true that there is child porn on Hunter Biden's computer?
I would give you this caution that You probably are not going to hear a confirmation one way or the other, because I don't know that the FBI would tell the public what's on the laptop if it wasn't relevant to some...
I don't know any situation that they would tell you the details of what's on the laptop before Election Day.
So if you were going to make a claim against a competitor or a competitor's family...
This is a really good one.
Because it's the most toxic allegation you could make.
You know, what would be more than that?
Murder, I suppose. But it's the most toxic allegation.
And because of the timing, I don't believe that the Biden camp will have any ability to refute it.
So it's kind of diabolical.
Because if this is not true, it's the dirtiest trick of all dirty tricks.
And we don't know if it's true.
And I'm going to try to maintain a little bit of, let's see, I don't know if it's credibility or lack of bias to the extent that that's possible.
If this had happened in the other direction, if some kind of a claim like this had happened against your candidate, would you believe it was true?
If something like this had happened to Trump or Trump's family, would you automatically think, oh yeah, those pictures are on there?
No, you wouldn't.
No, you wouldn't.
The first thing you'd think is, if I don't see them with my own eyes, I'm not going to believe they're there.
So when I see this, while it's not my job to defend the Bidens, I feel like there's a standard we should all appreciate.
And that standard is, if somebody gets accused of something this bad, child porn, if you get accused of something that bad, you'd better show the goods.
You'd better have some pretty solid proof of that, or I'm not just going to accept it.
Now, I think also, to be fair, the child is not the father, so you wouldn't necessarily say you wouldn't vote for Biden, even if you believe this to be true.
And I think you've got to put a really big question mark on the truth of this one.
If I had to bet, I'd bet against it, actually.
You know, slightly.
I'd say 60-40, it's not true.
But it's devastating because the problem is you don't want a president's family to be blackmailable.
And this is the ultimate blackmailable kid.
Hunter Biden is the most blackmailable human being who has ever walked the face of the earth.
Is there any vice that Hunter has not been accused of?
At least, I mean, this is the only one that I haven't seen evidence of.
But the other stuff, there's evidence.
You know, the cocaine use, the shady behavior, the whatever.
So, how do you...
And I don't know if Trump will go right at this, because it is a blackmail risk.
Now, compare that to the Trump family.
Did you think that we would get to the end of a four-year cycle of the entire Trump family being examined in every way they can be examined, every whistleblower, every rock turned over, and that as of today,
here's... Here's the biggest complaint they found about the president so far that we didn't already know before the election, let's say, is that he's got some smallish bank account in China and that he paid some taxes to China several years ago when he was looking for some licensing deals over there.
That's it. Now, nobody is suggesting that there's anything improper about having a Chinese bank account.
If you're an international company, that's not unusual.
And nobody is suggesting that paying taxes in a country you're doing business is inappropriate.
And it wasn't very much money in the first place.
And that's it.
That's it. After four years of digging, the best you can come up with is that the president has a legal bank account and legally paid taxes in another country.
That's all you got.
And this Hunter Biden thing is a target-rich environment.
So I don't think you can compare them on blackmail risk.
It's pretty clear.
When Biden was, I guess, only once maybe, reporters have got close enough to ask him about the laptop stuff.
And he's answered and says, it's a smear campaign.
If anybody tells you, if you accuse somebody of something, if you accuse somebody of something, and they say it's a smear campaign, what do you assume about the allegation?
That it's true.
Because if somebody says, did you murder somebody, do you say, no, I didn't murder anybody, are you kidding?
Or do you say, that's a smear campaign?
One of those two things sounds potentially true, at least, and the other one doesn't.
Because if you say, no, I didn't commit that crime, could be true.
Might be a lie, but it could be true.
But if you say it's a smear campaign, you just said it's true.
I mean, you might as well just say, no, it's true.
Totally true. So Biden is not handling that well, and that's part of the reason they're hiding him from the public for days, I think.
And so he's got a tough one on that.
We'll talk about the debate in a minute.
I'll give some debate strategies.
All right. What about this stimulus bill?
So I guess the Democrats and the Republicans can't agree.
The Democrats want a big bill that has some extra goodies for Democratic things.
The Republicans want a smaller bill where people just get some money.
The president has suggested that he wants the higher amount, but he's not even going to get Republicans to sign on.
So what do you do?
Here is my strategy and what I would do on this stimulus bill.
If I were President Trump, I would pick a bigger number than the Democrats and a bigger number than the Republicans.
And I would say this.
The part you all agree on is, you know, this base part of cash to send out for the stimulus.
So that'll be in there.
So Republicans are happy, Democrats are happy with just this part of the bill That people seem to agree we'll send out some cash.
On top of that is the Pelosi requests that are kind of poison pills.
These are things that they want to do that the Republicans don't think should be part of this bill because there's sort of all this extra stuff and things for illegal immigrants, etc.
What Trump could do is say, I want not only as much as Nancy Pelosi wants, but I want twice as much As that extra part she wants.
So I want all of the stuff everybody agrees with, and I want all of the money that Pelosi wants, and then I want to double that part.
Here's why. And then you say to the states, spend it the way you want to.
That's it. That's the idea.
You take the biggest amount, because nobody can argue against the biggest amount.
You need to dwarf Nancy Pelosi's number...
And say, look, I don't agree with the way you want to spend it, but can you agree with this?
Let's give it to the states, the whole bunch, just give the whole bunch to the states, and let them spend it the way they want to, because there's no such thing as too much.
Because we're in this weird situation where the risk of doing too little is catastrophic.
The risk of doing too much is just uncomfortable.
There's no competition between which way to go.
And only Trump could do that.
Now, you say, which states?
Here's another modification.
Suppose one of the problems that the Republicans have is that it's some blue states that were going to get most of the money, which seems likely, right?
Probably it was going to go mostly to blue states.
So you say this...
What were you planning to give to those blue states, Nancy Pelosi?
And what would that work out per person?
And then you just say, let's figure it out per person.
And you just figure out each state gets a per person amount.
Not that you give a check per person.
But that's the amount you give to the state, and they can decide how much actually goes to people, and how much goes to anything else that they want.
So that's where I would go.
I would go bigger than Pelosi, and I would say, you work it out at the state level.
Let's just make it fair by state population.
And then you just do it.
Somebody says it should be by headcount, and that's what I'm saying.
It should be by headcount, but the way you get the dollar amount that you divide by the number of headcounts is you take the biggest, biggest number and just say, we've got to do it.
Timing is more important than perfection.
I've told you before that speed is the new intelligence.
If you've got a programmer, you want one that can build something quickly and then reiterate when it isn't good.
It's like, oh, that wasn't good.
Try another one. Try another one.
So a fast programmer is better than one who is really smart but is plodding through to make sure it's just right on the first try.
You don't really want that employee.
And likewise with this situation, if you're in a pandemic and an emergency, speed is more important than accuracy.
And speed is more important than the actual amount.
Speed. If the president says, hey, speed is more important than accuracy, and it's more important than quantity, I'm going to give you the big number, divide it by headcount, let's do it tomorrow.
That's a pretty strong argument.
All right. I saw a news item, I think New York Times maybe, that says a new poll...
It says that 50% of Republicans, or no, 50% of Trump supporters, let's say, believe the QAnon theory that Trump is working to shut down a major network of Democrat-run pedophilia.
So QAnon believes there's some organized Democrat pedophilia ring operating around the country.
And 50% of Trump supporters believe that, too.
Now, I would say it kind of depends how you ask that question.
Because I do think, I would not be surprised, if 50% of Trump supporters believe there are way too many powerful people doing their own pedophile thing.
And that the president is the most effective person going after those trafficking and other rings.
So I think that is true sort of directionally, that there's too much of it, it's a big issue, and they think Trump would be the strongest force for it, and has proven to be, I think.
Actually, the evidence shows that.
But here's the context that's missing from this.
If you hear this story out of context, you say to yourself, man, all those Trump supporters, they'll believe anything.
But here's the context I would like to add.
If you did a poll of Democrats, how many of them believe that Russia collusion was proven by the Mueller report?
Probably 50%, wouldn't you think?
Maybe more? Maybe 75%?
How about this? Do another poll.
How many Democrats believe that the fine people hoax was real?
A lot more than 50%?
90%? So if you show only one poll and it's about Trump supporters, you can make them look foolish.
But if you put it in context and say, oh, it turns out that any group of identifiable people, you can convince half of them of almost anything, it turns out.
That's a different context.
New York, nine, nationally.
Is there anything you see, smell, or feel, or sense in any way that would suggest that Biden is up by nine?
I don't feel it.
Now, we could be surprised.
Anything could happen. But I feel as though I can remember when the fake news at least tried to be real.
Because publishing Biden up by nine, that doesn't even feel like you were trying to tell the truth, does it?
Nor does it feel as though they cared if you knew it wasn't true.
It's like they didn't even care.
Yeah. Yeah. But it's not the only poll out.
As you know, the Trafalgar poll has Trump winning.
So now we have the most credible poll from 2016.
Has Trump winning the election?
Because he's ahead in some of the battleground states.
And the Trafalgar guys do a much more rigorous attempt to find what they call the hidden Trump voters.
And as of today, they're saying, oh yeah, those hidden Trump voters are a big deal, there's lots of them, and Trump's going to win the election.
At the same time, the New York Times says Biden's up by nine?
Those are different planets.
So they can't both be true.
I'm going to bet on Trump already being ahead.
And so let's look at how things are going to look on Election Day.
Persuasion-related concepts to help you out.
First of all, you can see that reality is subjective now in a way that maybe you could never have seen it before.
Because as we're watching the mainstream media disappear, the story about the Biden laptop, you can see that the things we imagine are important in our world are completely assigned to us.
You know, I told you, I've been saying this for maybe over a year, That your opinions are assigned to you by the media that you consume.
You think you make up your own mind, but it's just not true.
And it's observable, measurable, it's obvious.
We just get our opinions from the media, and then we adopt the one that feels right for our team.
And once you realize that, then you start to really understand the subjective nature of reality that somebody else can change your reality just by telling you what to believe, and then you go do it.
So in this subjective reality, it can change really quickly, and it can change based on what's in the headlines.
Because if something leaves the headlines for a while, it's like it doesn't matter.
It's like it isn't important anymore, even if it is.
And the other part is that you can get used to anything if you live it long enough.
So, for example, I would say one of the reasons that all the violence and the murders in Chicago are not being solved is because it's gone on too long.
And we're just used to it.
You wake up every morning and if you see a story that says 50 people were shot in Chicago, it doesn't even shock you.
You just got used to it.
And do you work on the things that you got used to, or do you work on the things that are new and novel and they're setting your hair on fire?
You always work on the new stuff, because it seems more important.
Hey, it's new. People are talking about it.
People are arguing about it.
I guess this is important.
It doesn't mean it's important.
It just means it's new and novel.
So as long as you understand your brain is going to concentrate on what's new and novel, and it's not going to care about what's important, Because we don't know what's important.
We only know what's in front of us and what's exciting us at the moment.
So with those things in mind, check the front page of all of your news sources.
Do this today.
Check all the headlines on CNN, all the headlines on Fox, MSNBC, any news source.
Check all the headlines and see if you can find...
The coronavirus death count for the United States for today.
It's not there. We got used to it.
The biggest problem in the country, coronavirus, by far, right?
I mean, by far, it's the biggest problem.
It's not even in the news because we got used to it.
Now, is 1,000 people a day, I think it's a little under that now, dying?
How big of a problem is that?
That's a really big problem.
It's gigantic.
But how much of your time did you spend today worrying about traffic accidents?
Also a very large problem.
Fentanyl? Did you do something about fentanyl today?
Lots of people die from fentanyl.
So if you get used to something, it just doesn't affect you and it falls out of the news because the news can only run news that you'll click on.
And if you think you've seen that news and you're bored with it and it's just an old story, you don't click on it.
So artificial intelligence is not going to feed you up more of the old stories.
They're going to give you the new stuff.
And as ridiculous as this sounds, the coronavirus being, of course, the worst thing that could happen to Trump, It's sort of becoming not a story, because we just got used to 1,000 deaths a day, and most of us don't even know anybody who died from coronavirus.
And if we do, they're usually senior citizens, and it impacts us differently.
At the same time, I had predicted over the summer that you should not assume that when it comes to Election Day that the United States' performance with coronavirus will look as bad as it did back in those months.
And the argument was that the other countries that look like they did a good job might look like they're doing a bad job by Election Day.
And sure enough, the European Union has zoomed past the United States on the seven-day rolling average of confirmed cases.
They just zoomed past us.
It's not even close.
I think they doubled. So on Election Day, you're going to say, oh, the United States didn't do...
Or isn't doing at the moment.
It did worse in the past.
But at the moment, it's not doing worse than the European Union.
How will that affect you?
Remember, everything is contrast.
Everything is compared to something else.
So our comparison was, we were down here, everybody else was up here, but everybody who was up here is coming down to here, or at least enough of them are, so that you could make the argument of, well, look what's going on.
The other thing that's...
Happening is that we'll have more good economic news, especially close to the election, because we're coming off such a low base, it's likely that any economic news will be positive.
Stock markets, probably good enough.
The Biden laptop story is in the news.
That's going to be big.
And if the biggest story is, you know, a China bank account owned by the Trump Corporation, they're sort of running out of weapons.
Aren't they? That's all they could come up with today is he has a legal bank account in another country.
And then Trump is doing a good job of sucking up the news cycle.
I guess he may or may not have walked down of his 60-minute interview with Leslie Stahl.
And that's just perfect Trump behavior.
Now you might say to yourself, what a big baby.
He can't even handle this Tough interview for 60 minutes.
That's not what's happening.
What's happening is that Trump turned a story of nothing, which is he did an interview, and then the interview itself would be the story, he turned it into a story about how the story was made, which is good for Trump, because then that changes the frame to the fake news is so unfair.
So he's sucking up the news cycles by walking out of this interview.
So now he's got this whole days and days of talking about Trump's behavior and how the media was so bad he couldn't even sit there to listen to them anymore, and that will soften up whatever happens in the interview itself when it airs.
So he's doing a good job of sucking up all the energy there.
All right, here's some debate strategy.
I don't think Trump takes advice from the public about what he should do in a debate.
And I'm going to echo something that I heard Greg Gottfeld say on The Five, which is every time you think you know what Trump should do, you're probably wrong.
And here's the reasoning.
Did you become president?
I mean, did you?
You're so smart.
Are you president?
Because he is.
And he got to be president by doing a whole bunch of things you were pretty sure he shouldn't be doing.
So if you've got a guy who continually does things that you would not have done and you would not advise he do, and it keeps working because he's the president of the United States, can you really be so confident that your genius advice he should adopt versus just being Trump?
Because just being Trump Trump absolutely, unambiguously works.
That's the one thing we can say with complete certainty.
Being Trump works.
Now, that doesn't mean it will work exactly the same for re-election.
So you can't automatically say it'll always work or he couldn't do it better.
You're not going to say that. But you should tamp down your certainty about your own opinion of what he should do.
You know, if you're going to trust the experts, I'd have to say he's kind of an expert on this stuff, right?
Don't we listen to the experts?
Are you an expert?
Did you become president?
Did you beat Hillary Clinton spending a quarter of what she spent?
No, you didn't. You didn't do that.
But if you had done that, if you had beat Hillary Clinton for president spending a quarter of the amount of money she did, I would call you an expert because you're pretty good.
So Trump is the expert on this, and I would say that it's really sketchy to judge him or even suggest things, because you know he's not going to use your suggestions.
But I'm going to do it anyway, because sometimes there's a persuasion lesson in there.
But don't think this is serious in terms of Trump actually using him.
Here are the things I would say if, as we know, Biden is going to bring up coronavirus, because that's Trump's biggest weakness.
But there is also a time limit in this venue, so Trump can make a response that's his best response and then sort of run out the clock.
Here is how I would handle it.
Joe Biden says, you did everything wrong on the coronavirus and look at our bad results.
If I'm President Trump, I say, well, you know, even our experts don't know why some countries are doing much better than others.
That's it. Our experts, who you say we should listen to, don't know why Sweden is doing better.
It's kind of a mystery. We don't know exactly why Germany is doing better, and we don't know why some of the Asian countries are doing better.
We do believe that things like masks and social distances matter, but when you study it, it's just not that clear.
There seem to be a lot of variables, everything from travel to cultural differences, how many black citizens are in your country because they get it worse, what's your obesity situation.
So we actually can't tell how much of that is leadership.
Because, frankly, all of the leaders were following expert advice.
Nobody ignored experts, because, you know, that would be crazy.
So, you can't really tell.
Not only that, but we're doing way better than other countries at the moment.
And he could use the EU example.
So here's the mistake way to respond to the coronavirus charges.
The mistake way is that Biden makes an allegation and then you defend yourself.
Being defensive looks like losing.
If you've noticed, Trump is really smart about not defending and it drives you crazy because there'll be some allegation and you'll say to yourself, okay, if this were me, if I were Trump, I would say why that allegation is false.
Like I would give the reason, maybe I'd give my source, and I would destroy that reason.
And he doesn't do it.
He just leaves the accusation there, and your hair is on fire, and you're like, are you crazy?
You're just going to leave that leg there?
And instead what he does is he goes on attack, which is not crazy.
Because if he makes his attack more sticky than the allegation...
He didn't need to get rid of it.
He just needs to make more noise on his point than Biden made on his point.
He needs to make Biden look worse than him.
He doesn't have to rehabilitate his own reputation on each point.
Now, would you do that?
If I put you in a debate, would you have the brains and the discipline To not ever answer a direct allegation that you know you could debunk, you could debunk it with one sentence.
Could you not do it?
I couldn't. If you put me on that stage, I would fall into that trap every time.
I would just be defending and defending.
I didn't say that. That's not true.
I didn't do that. You're exaggerating.
That's what I would do.
Bad. Bad.
What Trump does is he lays down five nuclear bombs of persuasion and attacks on Biden until you can't remember what Biden said.
Like, what did Biden say?
I don't know. It wasn't as interesting as whatever this was, because Trump just set a jungle on fire.
I mean, that's a lot more heat coming from this direction.
But if it were me, I would say your experts who you love can't tell why some countries are doing better, and that's part of the challenge.
If everybody knew what worked, we'd all have a better outcome, but we're still trying to figure it out.
And would the public believe that?
Would the public say, is that true?
We can't tell why some countries are doing better than others?
And it is true.
If they went and they went and looked into it, they would find out that was true.
All right. Here's the other thing that Trump could do that would work.
You all saw the joke about 50 Cent didn't like Joe Biden's tax plan, so he said he's going to vote for Trump.
And then the joke that went around, for a while I thought I was the first one to come up with it, but I tested this with my Locals audience over on Locals.com.
And I asked them if anybody else had done that joke before me.
And I think the answer is yes.
But also, it was such an obvious joke, I guess, that there were lots of people who came up with it at the same time and probably thought they were the first ones.
The same as I was hoping I was the first one, but I've come to believe that I was not.
But here's the joke.
50 Cent said that with the Biden tax plan, he doesn't want to become 20 Cent.
Now, if Trump uses that joke, even though it's been on social media, the people watching it probably haven't seen it.
In other words, a lot of the Democrats probably have never seen this joke.
If you're on Twitter and you follow the president, you probably have seen it.
But they haven't.
And 50 Cent is not only famous, and he's black, so that helps, but it's clever, and you would just have to report on this the next day.
If your memory...
Here's a good general rule from Dr.
Carmen Simon who says this.
You'll remember about 10% of what is presented.
That's just a general rule.
If it's a PowerPoint presentation, if it's a debate, whatever it is, it's about 10% is going to stick in your memory and be the part that you care about later when you vote.
So the president simply has to manage to the 10%.
He doesn't have to manage to have everything he does better than everything Biden does.
He just has to make sure that his 10% is bigger and hotter and more interesting than whatever Biden's 10% is he leaves you with.
And so I would go with the taxes well compared to other countries at the moment.
Because even if you don't like what Trump did with coronavirus back in March, If he says, at the moment, we're doing better than other countries, your reason to replace him goes, ah, well, okay, at the moment, we're doing better than other countries.
And here's another thing that Trump would never say, but I would.
You know, there's some things his personality doesn't line up with, so you shouldn't even ask him to try to do this sort of thing.
But it would work for my personality.
And I would say, you know, we were all guessing in the beginning.
We were all guessing.
Because even our experts didn't quite know what to do.
You know, we saw with masks there was some uncertainty.
There were other uncertainties.
So yeah, we made some mistakes.
But we have learned from them, just as all the leaders of all the countries have learned.
And at the moment, we're on the right track.
How would you feel about it if your leader said, yeah, we didn't have a choice.
We had to make some guesses.
Everybody made some guesses.
We didn't do a great job in the beginning, but we learned from that and now we've corrected and we're looking good.
That would change everything, wouldn't it?
Because we actually are a quite forgiving species.
But you have to ask for forgiveness before it's offered.
Although that's not a direct ask for forgiveness, it does lay out the case that let's cut everybody a break.
We didn't know what we were doing in the beginning.
We just didn't know.
But we're getting smarter, and we think we have this thing now.
That would be a strong argument, and it's the 10% you would remember.
In other news, the Trump administration is suing Google.
And I guess that's been filed, or it's official.
And it's the largest antitrust case against a tech company in more than two decades.
So it's going to be a big deal.
And here's the essence of the case.
There was a secretive deal under which Google allegedly paid billions of dollars, or allegedly does right now, to Apple to ensure that its search product is a default on an iPhone.
So in other words, Apple will make sure that your search is a Google search and they have a deal that they get paid by Google.
Now, given how big of a monopoly slash network effect Apple is, and given the complexity of your phone, and not everybody knows how to use all their technology, even though you could change that default, how many people will?
We're creatures of habit.
You're not going to have a reason to change it.
You might be happy with the Google results.
So... It's going to be the fascinating case.
I don't know which way this will go, but the issues will be friction.
Do you have a barrier if the barrier is just friction?
Because friction does change behavior, and if there's friction to changing that default away from the Google search engine, is that enough of a legal case?
Can you say you've created enough friction or taken advantage of friction to create a monopoly-like Situation because you've taken advantage of people's lack of knowledge of how to change their default or their laziness.
I don't feel like that's going to be strong enough.
But how about a free will argument where people don't really have a choice because they're so busy and they don't know how to do it and it's not that important to them.
In essence, your free will, if you believe that that's the thing, has been hijacked by these companies colluding with To do exactly that, to hijack your free will.
Is that an argument? I don't know.
I think there are going to be some groundbreaking arguments coming out of this.
Could be interesting. All right, we already talked about Hunter Biden's laptop, if you're joining us late.
I'm just going to look at your comments for a moment, see if I missed anything.
Oh, New York Post is doing a cover on the 50 cent doesn't want to become 20 cent?
Yeah. If the New York Post did a cover on it, I think that increases the odds that Trump might pull that out during a debate.
Because remember, the whole thing you're trying to do is to simplify and leave somebody with a takeaway, the thing they remember.
If Trump does his usual thing, where he says, Biden's going to raise your taxes...
It's sort of conceptual. There's no picture involved.
Then Biden says, well, I'm not going to do that if you're under $400,000, but you're not sure if it's true.
You think Trump might be true, that he's going to raise all of your taxes, but maybe not.
So it doesn't really stick.
You're just going to default to the side that you agreed on.
But as soon as you hear that $0.50 became $0.20, or could become $0.20, you see him.
And you see the 50 become a 20.
The 50 and the 20 almost become a visual at that point.
That's sticky and could make a difference.
All right. Have I flown with Christina?
Yeah, I was saying at the beginning that Christina, my wife, she's taking flying lessons.
And today's her first solo flight across state lines.
She's doing her first long flight.
I have not flown with her.
And I'll tell you why.
Most of her early flying is in what's called...
What do they call it?
Tailwheel... A tail wheel has a little wheel toward the tail as opposed to a tripod, tricycle kind of situation.
A Cessna, for example, has like three wheels that are placed so it's easy to land.
The plane practically lands itself.
But the tail wheels are meant for aerial acrobatics, so the ones doing the barrel rolls and the stalls and the twists and stuff.
And those planes are hard to land.
Yeah, the pits, for example, is one of the brands.
So those are hard to land.
And I'm going to wait until maybe she invites me to get into Cessna.
I'm a little freaked out about the barrel rolls and the hardest plane in the world to land.
So I'm going to wait for the Cessna situation, I think, on that.
But we'll do that later.
All right. That's all for now.
And I will talk to you all later.
How awkward when I try to sign off and the interface doesn't work.