Real Coffee with Scott Adams - Episode 1067 Scott Adams： Portland, The Nation's Ashtray, Teacher Unions Ruining the Planet, Excess Deaths, Trump Reframing

00:00:00.000 Why do I feel so good this morning? Well, I'll tell you. It started out to be a regular morning

00:00:16.360 with just regular stuff, but then I heard a technique for really getting up and getting

00:00:23.680 going, and it was sort of a self-help technique, and I wasn't expecting it really. It came from

00:00:29.340 Joe Biden, and he talked about how when he was in the hospital with his brain aneurysm that the

00:00:35.640 nurses, they, quote, they breathe air into his nostrils. They got him up and going, and so I

00:00:44.520 thought, well, if getting a nurse to breathe air into your nostril gets you up and going and cures

00:00:50.360 you from a brain aneurysm, or at least helps, I got to get some of that. So I hired a nurse

00:00:56.360 who will occasionally just blow some air into my nostrils, and you wouldn't, you'd be surprised

00:01:03.880 how that just fires you up. You feel great. It's like, oh, thank you for that, breathing that air

00:01:11.680 into my nostril. Well, let's have the simultaneous sip, and it goes like this. All you need is a

00:01:19.120 cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen drink or flask, a vessel of any

00:01:23.500 kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the dopamine hit of

00:01:31.280 the day, the unparalleled pleasure. You could say those in either order. And it's called the

00:01:36.240 simultaneous sip, and it makes everything better, including the pandemic, unemployment, racism,

00:01:41.120 yeah, all that stuff. It's getting better now. Go. Yes, so Joe Biden continues to entertain with his

00:01:55.180 unusual statements about nurses blowing, breathing air into his nostrils.

00:02:01.980 I saw a tweet on that, and the funniest part was reading the comments from actual registered nurses.

00:02:12.040 It turns out that if you ask registered nurses, hey, do you ever occasionally, depending on the

00:02:19.760 patient, do you ever breathe air into their nostrils to try to heal them a little bit quicker? Turns out

00:02:26.380 they've never seen that before. Surprise. Never seen that before. All right, let's talk about some

00:02:33.200 of the things. Did you all see the clip of President Trump in an interview talking about

00:02:39.300 his cognitive test? You have to see that clip. Here's what's interesting. He describes the test a

00:02:47.860 little bit, and one of the examples was that would give you a list of items, and you had to repeat them

00:02:53.160 back, but then you would later be asked to repeat them back again after asking a bunch of questions

00:02:58.980 in between. And as the president was describing this process, he would use his example. It sounded like

00:03:06.740 it came from the test itself, and the list was person, woman, man, camera, TV. Now, I have the opposite

00:03:15.680 of whatever is the ability to remember stuff like this. I cannot remember verbatim anything,

00:03:21.900 not phone numbers, not lists. I mean, if I really work at it, I can. So, you know, I got good grades

00:03:28.520 in school because if I study, I can do it. But in a casual sense, I don't really try to remember

00:03:34.880 stuff like that, and I don't. So watching the president just tell the story, and in the process

00:03:40.300 of telling the story, he repeated that same sequence maybe five different times, I think.

00:03:46.660 And each time he said it, as a viewer, just somebody watching it, it just made the rest of my world go

00:03:55.600 away. You have to watch how mesmerizing it is to watch Trump do this sequence of five things

00:04:02.920 approximately five times in different times. And each time he does it, you think to yourself,

00:04:08.580 oh, God, he's not going to get it right this time. Because he was doing it in a live interview.

00:04:15.500 Do you know how much guts it takes to do a cognitive test impromptu to yourself live in front of the

00:04:25.160 nation? The fact that he repeated those five things in order five different times, I'm not sure I could

00:04:31.820 have done it. I don't think I could have even done the interview, much less the cognitive part.

00:04:37.360 Now, what's funny is, of course, he's setting up Biden for, obviously, it would be good for Trump

00:04:46.820 if the media started asking for Biden to take the same test. Now, that would be the kill shot,

00:04:53.960 right? Because one assumes that Biden would not do well on that test. So he either has to deny that

00:05:01.900 he needs it, which would look weird, or he takes it, that looks bad. So it's all good for Trump to

00:05:08.080 bring up this topic. But I would add this caution. And it may be time for a pivot on this. Because

00:05:16.980 there are a lot of old voters. And I think the old voters just don't like it when somebody is honest 0.99

00:05:25.640 about the fact that at a certain age, you lose your cognitive abilities. And I would at least suggest

00:05:32.560 that, you know, maybe time for this or maybe later. But I would I would give him Biden, the Bob Dole

00:05:39.900 treatment that Bill Clinton gave to Bob Dole when he was running against him. Bob Dole was this much

00:05:48.560 beloved senior politician who had been through World War Two, he was a war hero, very popular

00:05:55.740 politician, and Clinton is running against him. And what Clinton did was instead of going at him and

00:06:04.020 criticizing him in the in the most normal way you'd expect, you know, real direct criticism, he

00:06:09.500 basically said, you know, we should respect, we should respect Bob Dole for his war hero stuff. But

00:06:17.520 we're planning for the future, and Bob Dole is planning for the past. So basically, instead of

00:06:23.660 treating him like an equal, which is full force punching, because that's how you treat an equal, 0.55

00:06:29.700 right? If somebody was your, your peer, you wouldn't hold back, because you're equal, you've got to give

00:06:35.760 them everything you can to try to win by a little bit. So you'd put your full force of your your attack

00:06:42.260 into it. But if somebody is maybe weakened, if your opponent is not quite up to your, your level,

00:06:51.560 then it just sort of looks bad if you're beating on them. And I think that was what Clinton got right 0.86

00:06:58.100 by treating Dole as a lovable symbol of the past. Because that framing is pretty devastating.

00:07:06.820 And I think that there's at least that opportunity here, which is for Trump, maybe not yet. You know,

00:07:13.880 there's a timing issue. But maybe yet, I don't know. To just start treating Biden as a respected,

00:07:21.420 but retired politician, someone who who was, you know, tried hard to help the country. But I think that

00:07:31.540 Trump no longer needs to say directly, he that Joe Biden can't put two sentences together,

00:07:38.560 he doesn't know where he is, he doesn't understand the topics, saying it directly feels like a little

00:07:45.320 bit, at least to senior citizens, as maybe you're taking that too far. And he could get the same impact

00:07:53.120 by saying, look, I don't want to be unkind. And especially because, you know, there are a lot of

00:08:01.600 seniors. But I think we all see the same thing. And I think you need to take that into consideration.

00:08:09.600 Because if you treated it gently, I think everybody would still see it. It's the seeing it that's

00:08:15.820 important. It's not what Trump says about it, about Joe Biden's cognitive decline. It's just

00:08:21.940 that everybody sees it. And everybody knows everybody else sees it. So I think it's powerful

00:08:27.960 to say, you know, everybody sees it. It's not even a left or right thing. Everybody sees it.

00:08:36.300 So that's one way to go. All right. According to Rasmussen, Trump has about 30% black support,

00:08:46.180 meaning that likely voters, 30% of black voters would vote for Trump if they voted today over

00:08:54.100 Biden. Do you believe that? Because that's like triple what you'd expect. Now, here's the

00:09:02.100 interesting part. The rest of the Rasmussen poll looks about how you'd expect, you know,

00:09:08.520 the Democrats, of course, voting for Democrats and women, women preferring the Democrat over 0.99

00:09:14.460 Trump and men preferring Trump. So a lot of things you'd expect are just the way you'd expect them,

00:09:19.920 except this one number, which apparently has been consistent, at least in the Rasmussen poll.

00:09:26.160 It's been quite consistent. It's never gone way down or it hasn't fluctuated wildly. It's been

00:09:33.880 sort of like right at that level, maybe climbed a little bit. And if that holds,

00:09:39.480 it's looking pretty landsliding, but we'll see. And I'm trying to figure out why that would be.

00:09:48.560 Why do you think it would be that 30% of black likely voters in this country would support Trump

00:09:56.080 when the fake news is calling him a racist every day? Why would that be? I'll give you a hypothesis.

00:10:04.120 And the hypothesis looks like this. 30% is probably roughly, just guessing, probably roughly the

00:10:14.500 number of people who like things the way they are. Don't you think? I would guess that in any

00:10:21.700 population, 30% of any group would say, you know, I kind of like things the way they are. Let's not

00:10:28.400 change it too much. But on top of that, Trump does not infantilize the black population. And I would

00:10:36.140 think that 30% of any population would appreciate not being infantilized, not being treated like

00:10:45.140 victims, not being treated like, you know, there's just something wrong there. But rather treating it,

00:10:52.940 treating everybody like, you know, you're adults if you're an adult, you're a kid if you're a kid.

00:10:57.300 But that's the only distinction. And I've got a feeling that that's more popular than people

00:11:04.540 realize, but I don't have any data to back that up. So Marianne Williamson, you know, you know her 0.85

00:11:10.060 from the Democratic primaries. She tweeted that that Trump wanting to surge federal law enforcement

00:11:19.380 into Chicago to help out with a crime. She tweeted that if we allow this now, any attempts to stop this

00:11:27.240 dictatorial rise will be forever stymied. And I thought, dictatorial rise? Is that what's

00:11:35.980 happening? Do you feel a dictatorial rise happening? Because I don't feel any of that. I feel like whatever

00:11:44.260 would be the opposite of a dictatorial rise is what we're seeing. Trump is literally letting the states

00:11:50.280 take the lead on a lot of this stuff. I don't think you could get more anti-dictatorial rise

00:11:56.360 than giving the governors and the mayors as much leeway as the Constitution allows. And Trump is

00:12:04.100 giving them that leeway. Now, if he decides to surge some federal law enforcement and Chicago does not

00:12:11.560 appreciate it, he's still just obeying the law. Because the federal forces would only be enforcing

00:12:20.040 federal laws, which he's supposed to do. So anyway, she deleted that tweet. And I don't know if she

00:12:29.160 deleted it because I mocked it, which I did. So I don't know, maybe a lot of people mocked it. But

00:12:38.120 it didn't look like a dictatorial rise to me. How do you think Trump would do if he were to reframe

00:12:51.260 the protests this way? And there's a couple parts to this. One is that the complaint about the

00:13:04.600 Department of Homeland Security forces being involved in the cities is that they're squelching

00:13:10.940 freedom of speech. Now, I don't think they're doing anything like that. Because the protesters

00:13:17.620 have gone well beyond freedom of speech, and some of them are doing vandalism and crime. And certainly

00:13:27.200 nobody in the government even cares about the speech, do they? I have not even heard anybody complain

00:13:33.180 about the speech. We're pretty much all free speech people in this country. You know, if it comes

00:13:39.300 down to it, especially the law enforcement people. That gets drilled into you pretty well, I think,

00:13:44.380 if you're in law enforcement. But how does Trump solve the problem that it looks like he's clamping

00:13:52.420 down on freedom of speech, it looks dictatorial, but at the same time, he really does have an obligation

00:13:58.380 to do what he can to clamp down on crime. It's part of his job. So how does he get those two things

00:14:05.040 right? And I would suggest the following. It could be time to ask for the protesters to organize a little

00:14:16.800 better and maybe encourage the media to take up their voices. So in other words, the president could

00:14:26.160 say, you know, we do want to clamp down on crime, but I hear what everybody's saying about freedom

00:14:31.700 of speech. So here's what I would suggest. I'd suggest that your media sources, your CNNs, your MSNBCs,

00:14:39.520 your Fox News, that they have on representatives of the protesters so that their freedom of speech

00:14:46.880 is not just preserved, but amplified. Amplified. So is there any reason that the president could not

00:14:56.560 be in favor of your regular established media entities amplifying the protesters to make sure

00:15:06.000 that they had their freedom of speech at the same time that the citizens were protected from crime?

00:15:12.160 Now, what would CNN and MSNBC and all of them say about that? Because your first instinct, I think,

00:15:18.960 is hold on, hold on. You don't want CNN and MSNBC promoting all this Marxist stuff and, you know,

00:15:27.020 the systemic racism stuff that requires, you know, destroying the whole system to fix it.

00:15:33.220 Isn't that just going to make it worse? But let me ask you this. If CNN and MSNBC wanted to have

00:15:42.680 those voices amplified, they'd already be doing it. I think that the established people, people who

00:15:50.880 have jobs and all that, people who work for CNN, they don't want the protesters to win because the

00:15:58.200 protesters want to change everything. Let me ask you this. If you're Don Lemon and you've got one of

00:16:04.520 the best, most prestigious jobs in the country, I would say, a media personality on a major news

00:16:11.560 network in prime time, that's like a seriously great job. If you were Don Lemon, and I won't read his

00:16:19.100 mind, so I'll just say, if you were Don Lemon, would you want the system to be radically overhauled?

00:16:24.740 No. I don't think so. Because he's sitting on top of the system. He's the big winner. If you were any of

00:16:32.060 the, you know, well-paid staff of CNN or the management or the ownership, would you want the

00:16:38.520 entire system of the United States to be remade? I don't think so. I don't think you would. And I

00:16:47.240 don't think it's a coincidence that the major news organizations, even on the left, are not fully

00:16:54.940 embracing what the protesters are protesting for. So I don't think it's a risk. Because I think that

00:17:01.360 even, you know, even the CNN staff, even the MSNBC staff would push back. I think they would push

00:17:08.620 back. Now, they're not going to push back if somebody comes on and says there's institutional racism,

00:17:14.240 systemic racism. They would probably agree with that. But if they go further and say,

00:17:20.200 and therefore we have to dismantle the whole system, I think even the CNN staff would say,

00:17:25.960 well, give me some details on that. Because I'm not quite on board with dismantling the whole system.

00:17:31.560 because it's working for me. So, and maybe there's a different model. Instead of encouraging the

00:17:39.280 press to do it, maybe the president could say, hey, let's put together a national, you know,

00:17:46.320 listening committee or something. We'll give us some attention. But the general idea is that the

00:17:52.060 president could promote free speech at the same time he's clamping down on crime. But he'd have to

00:17:58.820 separate what is crime and what is free speech. And I think you'd have to put the burden on the

00:18:03.420 media. And ask, ask, why is it? Let me ask you this. Why do protesters feel they have to protest?

00:18:11.520 The reason you do that is because your voice is not being heard. Why not? You know, why is that?

00:18:17.660 Why are the voices on the left not being heard? Because they have most of the media. If you if you're on

00:18:25.000 the same side as most of the media, and your voice is not being heard. That sounds like a problem on

00:18:32.520 the left, they need to work that out. All right. More fun stuff happening. So the president gave his

00:18:43.260 he's giving his press conferences now about the Coronavirus. He's getting high marks for being

00:18:49.100 realistic about it. It'll probably get worse before it gets better. And high marks for being

00:18:54.140 pro mask. So those so it looks like he's solved a couple of his problems just by being compatible

00:19:02.380 with the, you know, the general mood of the country there, or at least the general mood of his critics.

00:19:10.740 But now he's being criticized for not having the experts as part of the event. Now, when asked why he

00:19:17.020 did not have the experts, the president said that the experts are briefing him, and that the way he's

00:19:23.540 doing it is a concise way of doing it. But of course, that doesn't quite answer the press's

00:19:31.540 question, which is why can't we do follow up questions, etc. with the with the experts. And

00:19:37.580 here's what I would do. I would say, look, we're trying to inform the country, we don't want this big

00:19:44.240 unwieldy thing that nobody's going to watch. We don't want to impose upon the news, you know,

00:19:50.460 the live news networks, that they have to carry this for an hour. You know, we have an obligation

00:19:55.680 to make our our message compact, and something that the news organizations will carry. So shorter is

00:20:03.440 better. And I think in a half hour, half an hour of the president is kind of exactly the right amount,

00:20:10.080 you know, because it isn't really a case of more is better. But the critics do have a point, which is

00:20:17.840 what if they want to follow up with the experts, and they've got a question that maybe they'd rather

00:20:23.340 hear from Birx or Fauci. And I think the president should make them available, but maybe not at that

00:20:29.640 event. Now, I assume they are available. I don't know the details. How hard is it for somebody to get a

00:20:35.200 question to one of them? But perhaps they could even say, why don't you follow up with the experts

00:20:40.880 in writing? So if you give us a written question for the experts, we'll get you back a written

00:20:47.540 response. Is that fair? Is it fair to say, all right, as president, I'm just going to keep it simple,

00:20:53.720 keep my message clean, do the leader thing that the country needs. But if you want to follow up on

00:21:00.240 technical details, it's much better if you do it in writing, so that there's no miscommunication.

00:21:06.040 So give us a written question. We'll give it to Birx and Fauci or whatever experts you want.

00:21:11.880 And we'll get you a written answer. Yeah, why not keep it in writing? Because we all know that the

00:21:18.680 press conferences are about the showboating of the press. So he could say, I could get you all the

00:21:26.020 information you want in a better form than you're asking for it. Because doing it verbally, you get

00:21:31.460 into all this misinterpretation problem. But doing it in writing still could be misinterpreted, but

00:21:38.040 much lower risk. So I think you could say, look, experts can get misinterpreted. So why don't you

00:21:43.960 give them the questions in writing? And I'll give you the big picture. And then you can follow up on

00:21:48.980 any details. They're fully available. Send us your questions. We'll send you some answers.

00:21:53.240 Who complains about that? All right. Am I right or am I wrong that the biggest problem in the country

00:22:05.740 is all one problem? It just looks like lots of different problems, but it's all one problem,

00:22:11.440 which is the teachers' unions have destroyed education. And imagine, if you will, that there

00:22:18.860 were no teachers' unions and that there could be charter schools, there could be competitive

00:22:23.720 schools. And basically, education became a competitive business. Right now, it can't be

00:22:32.120 because teachers' unions don't want that because it's not good for the teachers' incomes in the

00:22:37.980 short run. And so it seems to me that everything from crime to racism to poverty, basically all your

00:22:49.100 biggest problems in the world are being caused by citizens who have not been well-trained. They

00:22:55.920 don't even know their biggest problems from their smallest. Take, for example, all the people who are

00:23:01.680 protesting. Do they seem well-educated to you? Not really. And by well-educated, I don't mean that they

00:23:11.060 did or did not go through some years of school and college. I'm not talking about formal education

00:23:18.080 because a lot of the anti-Fa people actually do have good formal educations. A lot of the Black Lives

00:23:23.480 Matter leaders have good formal educations. But were they well-served? Because I would think that 1.00

00:23:32.600 one of the basics of education is to know your priorities and to know that you're working on

00:23:38.640 what's important and that you have a strategy that makes sense. These would be very important

00:23:43.920 as opposed to just reading and writing, which have their own value, but don't get you to a life

00:23:49.600 strategy. So it seems to me that if you could fix the teacher union problem, you could have good

00:23:57.420 education, and then you would produce citizens who, when they saw these questions about Black Lives

00:24:05.660 Matter and systemic racism, they would be better equipped. Because what they're doing now is

00:24:14.020 complaining about their lowest priority. The lowest priority, and this is me looking from the

00:24:20.380 outside, but do you disagree with what I'm going to say? So, you know, I realize I'm not the one who

00:24:26.020 should be saying this, but I don't know that anybody would disagree with it, which is that the highest

00:24:30.840 priority is education. If you had a whole generation of well-educated Black kids, what does the future 1.00

00:24:42.040 look like? It looks a lot better. It looks a lot better. Because you can have less poverty, that

00:24:48.900 gives you less crime, that gives you better health outcomes, gives you more of a voice in society,

00:24:54.440 you want to fix some institutional racism. Well, now you're in good shape to do that. Because, you

00:25:00.580 know, everything else is working, you know, you've got, you know, the right base, you know, base education

00:25:06.800 and knowledge. So if you don't fix teachers unions, you don't fix education. If you don't fix education,

00:25:14.000 everything else is unimportant, because it all flows from that. And these protests being mostly about

00:25:21.820 the police, I would, I would say it's the smallest priority. And I wonder too, if, if Trump said that

00:25:30.660 directly, would he be burned alive? Or would people say, Oh, yeah, that's kind of true. Imagine if you

00:25:40.000 will, and I think maybe the atmosphere is just too toxic to say this. But imagine if you will, that the

00:25:46.260 president said, Look, I hear what I hear what all the protesters are saying. And nobody wants anybody

00:25:52.420 killed by police that don't need to be killed by police. But it's also your lowest priority. Because

00:26:00.220 the fewest people are affected by that in terms of killed, even as bad as it is. It's your smallest

00:26:07.200 problem. Your biggest problem is education, and maybe crime. So if you don't fix crime, you probably

00:26:15.020 can't get education right. And if you don't get education right, nothing else works. So what

00:26:22.900 would happen if the president just said, I hear you, and that's a real problem, and we should work

00:26:27.880 on it. But do you agree? It's your smallest problem? Yeah, some people will say he'd be burned

00:26:34.820 alive, he'd be burned alive. I don't know. I think there are a lot of people in the middle,

00:26:39.940 the, the, the few people who might be able to go left or right, depending on the argument,

00:26:45.020 I think the people in the middle would say, Yeah, as long as you acknowledge that the police thing

00:26:50.700 is a problem. I have to agree with you, that if you were to rank all your problems in the black 0.88

00:26:57.580 community, it would kind of be the lowest. It would be it would be dead bottom, if you ranked it based

00:27:03.780 on anything, based on number of deaths, based on long term impact, as bad as it is. Now, of course,

00:27:11.460 somebody will watch this and say, cartoonist says there's no problem with police. And of course,

00:27:18.320 I'm not saying that. I'm just ranking them. All right. Have you noticed that? Well, and this

00:27:28.260 problem of not knowing what our priorities, what the priorities are, is it affects everything.

00:27:36.640 Take climate, for example. The people who have been educated for the past 20 years by the teachers

00:27:44.400 unions, and the teachers that they support, believe that climate change is the biggest risk to the

00:27:52.580 world. Climate change. Now, maybe some of you even agree with that, because what could be a bigger

00:28:00.400 problem than the planet itself becoming, you know, unlivable? Well, here's what an educated public

00:28:07.460 would have said. They would have said something closer to what Michael Schellenberger says in his

00:28:12.840 book, Apocalypse Never, which is that poverty is the problem. If you fix poverty, or, you know,

00:28:23.780 put a dent in it, then you're also going to be fixing the climate and the environment. Because

00:28:31.040 poor countries don't make better environments. Rich countries do. The United States has gotten to the

00:28:38.580 point where we can substitute in greener energy, and, you know, we can build a nuclear power plant. But

00:28:45.360 you're not going to build that in a third world country where there's no money, you know, 0.94

00:28:49.480 you don't have the support structure, etc. So to imagine that the biggest problem is the environment

00:28:57.960 and not the economics and poverty is just not understanding the problem. And that's an education

00:29:06.160 problem. And again, you see the same problem as focusing on the wrong thing fairly consistently.

00:29:12.680 Now, how do you decide what's the right thing? Well, the right thing, you'd have to know a little bit

00:29:18.200 about economics, a little bit about comparing things, a little bit about life strategies,

00:29:25.300 you know, the things that are not typically taught in school, but should be. All right.

00:29:32.400 And I do think that teachers are brainwashing kids to give them a victim mentality and a win-lose

00:29:39.240 sort of mindset instead of an abundance and talent stacking strategy kind of a mindset. So probably

00:29:46.680 teachers are destroying the country is my bottom line. All right. As we're watching all these protests,

00:29:54.900 I don't think you should lose sight of the fact that I doubt the protests would be as aggressive as

00:30:01.600 they are if they were not fun. Do the protesters look like they're enjoying themselves? They do,

00:30:09.920 right? If you see the protesters, they're totally enjoying themselves. And I don't know if that's,

00:30:17.140 you don't really protest 50 nights in a row unless it's sort of a lifestyle thing. So the protesters,

00:30:23.860 because they're protesting the lowest priority, and don't, apparently that doesn't seem to matter.

00:30:29.660 Um, it's become sort of like a, uh, when I see the protests, they look like civil war reenactments,

00:30:38.280 where the, the people are more like actors. It's like people, people decided to participate in the

00:30:45.420 protest, but they don't just show up as themselves. They actually take on a role. So the, the black block 1.00

00:30:54.160 people who dress all in black, they literally adopted a role, just like a civil war reenactment

00:31:00.420 would be. Okay. You're the, you guys are the infantry. Uh, you're the cannon guys. So we're slightly different

00:31:06.260 outfits. You know, you're the general. And, and then you see the, now we've got the, uh, the moms. So the moms 1.00

00:31:14.940 are dressing as moms, I guess, and putting on yellow shirts and, and bicycle helmets. And now, now the moms are a new

00:31:23.140 set of actors in this massive role playing thing. But imagine if everybody had jobs. Imagine if they

00:31:31.980 had, uh, entertainment alternatives. If you had a job and you had an entertainment alternative, would you

00:31:40.220 be out on the street? I don't know. Maybe, because it looks like it's fun. But if you have some other

00:31:46.780 alternatives that are also useful or fun, it's going to take some of the energy out of that.

00:31:53.140 And what about the fact that the protesters are probably not having sex? Uh, you, one of the

00:31:58.780 things that we probably won't talk about in this country is that the, one of the effects of the

00:32:04.220 shutdowns and the quarantines and all that is, I think people are having less sex in this country than

00:32:11.280 any time in our history. What's that do to you? It's not good. It's not good at all. So

00:32:19.540 that's a problem. Speaking of Portland, who I've designated the ashtray of the nation,

00:32:26.860 um, Ted Wheeler, their mayor, went down to listen to the protesters and interact with them. He ended up

00:32:33.720 getting tear gassed, uh, accidentally, we think. And here's what this made me wonder. So Ted Wheeler

00:32:43.400 goes and he wants to listen to the protesters. So far, so good. I like it when our politicians

00:32:49.300 actively show that they want to listen to a protest, first amendment protest. So that part's good.

00:32:56.560 But here's the part that is conspicuously missing. Conspicuously missing. Where is the poll of what the

00:33:05.860 non-protesting citizens of Portland want? Do you know? What about the other people? Because I think I know

00:33:17.880 what the protesters want. They're pretty vocal about it. But do you know what the non-protesters

00:33:24.980 want? Where's my poll of the citizens of Portland who are not part of the protests physically in the

00:33:32.880 streets? And do they support continued protests? Or do they support the federal government taking care

00:33:38.980 of it? Why don't you know that? Ask yourself that question. It is such an accessible thing, meaning that

00:33:48.900 there are, you know, polling groups, etc. And you wouldn't necessarily need a polling group. You could have,

00:33:57.200 you know, CNN does these little, not town halls, but they'll have a group of 12 people who are just sample

00:34:04.460 citizens. And they'll just talk to them and say, all right, you sample citizens. There are 12 of you.

00:34:09.860 How do you feel about the protests? Are you for them or against them? But why are we not seeing anything

00:34:15.700 like that? Why is it, why is it that you and I don't have any idea? No idea. I don't even have a good

00:34:24.300 guess of what the citizens of Portland who are not protesting want. I don't know what they want. And their

00:34:32.160 silence makes me wonder if they care. And why do I care if the citizens don't care? Why should I want

00:34:40.920 my federal tax money to go to sending people who are just making people mad and they don't want them?

00:34:48.960 What's the point? So think about how badly you've been failed by your media that you don't know what

00:34:56.780 the citizens of Portland actually want. And I got to tell you, I want to feel sorry for Portland.

00:35:02.860 I just can't. I don't have any empathy for Portland at all. And the reason is, not because I'm a monster

00:35:11.340 who has no empathy, but you don't really want to show empathy for someone who's not asking for it and

00:35:16.460 doesn't need it and doesn't want it. And it's not part of their mindset. If they think they're getting

00:35:21.380 what they want, why am I the one to tell them they're not getting what they want? Sort of up to

00:35:26.680 them. So I don't know. I just, I can't get too invested in Portland unless they're invested in

00:35:36.000 themselves. All right. That's enough about Portland. Do you think the president will have an electoral

00:35:48.380 advantage or disadvantage in getting tough with crime in the cities? So it looks like he's going

00:35:55.540 to surge some troops into Chicago, which is unpopular with the mayor of Chicago. But what about

00:36:03.000 these citizens of Chicago who are not criminals? What do they want? Do you know? No. No, you do not

00:36:10.580 know. You don't know what the citizens of Chicago want, the ones who are not protesters. You don't know.

00:36:17.460 Isn't that the single most important question? Because if the citizens of Chicago are okay with their

00:36:24.320 crime rate, meaning that they prefer that over the alternative of stronger law enforcement, if they prefer it,

00:36:31.360 again, I just won't travel there. I just don't have to go there. I just don't know that it's a

00:36:39.780 problem. But I do think that the president, his instincts are probably right, that as long as he

00:36:47.420 doesn't get too dictatorial looking, as long as he makes it clear that this is only for the benefit of

00:36:54.900 the citizens and to reduce crime, etc. I think it's a plus. But the Democrats are going to try as hard

00:37:02.360 as they can to turn those Department of Homeland Security law enforcement people who really are just

00:37:09.140 trying to do a good job and help the country, turning them into some kind of Gestapo, which is

00:37:15.700 pretty bad. All right. One of the things, one of the problems that Antifa has is the same problem

00:37:23.260 that ISIS had. And prior to ISIS being completely destroyed on the battlefield and losing all of

00:37:29.800 their territory, but not, obviously not their ideology and recruiting. But before they, before that

00:37:37.860 happened, I had said publicly a number of times that ISIS, the worst thing they can do is hold territory.

00:37:44.980 Because as soon as ISIS holds territory, there's something to bomb. You know, you go, oh, okay,

00:37:52.740 that's where ISIS is now. That's their police force. Boom, gone. So if you're a group that does not

00:37:59.680 have as much power as the group you're protesting, you don't want to hold territory. And that's what

00:38:05.940 they're trying to do with, you know, the Chaz and the Chop and the, you know, the various times that

00:38:12.640 they've barricaded streets and they try to hold territory, it just sort of doesn't work. Because

00:38:17.920 that's the point where the larger authority can say, oh, you're all here. You're all standing in this

00:38:24.580 block and you've done some crimes, so we can round you up now. So Antifa has sort of a natural limit to

00:38:34.140 how far they can go because as soon as they try to hold territory, they lose. And I don't know that

00:38:40.600 they can win an election. So it might be naturally gating. All right. There's a, so a new report that

00:38:49.960 the excess deaths in the period that the coronavirus started raging in the United States

00:38:55.800 was about 180,000 to 190,000. So that's how many people have died above expectations for a normal

00:39:05.400 year. Now, given that it's hard to know who died of coronavirus, this is a useful number. But what it

00:39:12.680 doesn't sort out is how many fewer automobile accidents there were while we were locked down,

00:39:19.220 how many fewer accidents of all kind. But it also doesn't count how many people died because of

00:39:25.260 the lockdown, how many people committed suicide or had drug overdoses or were victims of crime

00:39:32.020 because of the lockdown. So that we don't know what the net of that is. But if it looks like the

00:39:38.900 coronavirus lockdown plus the coronavirus killed, it looks like we're definitely going to be over

00:39:45.140 200,000. Now, 200,000 is kind of a magic number because I've told you, I've asked people who said,

00:39:52.700 Scott, Scott, Scott, it's just a regular flu. It's a little bad, but it's a regular flu.

00:39:59.100 And I've asked how many people would have to die from this regular flu before you would say,

00:40:05.520 okay, I changed my mind. This was a big deal. I didn't realize it was going to be this big.

00:40:09.780 And the number I've heard is around 200,000. And it looks like we're going to blow past it.

00:40:15.140 So do the people who said, it's just the flu, do they revise their opinion when it blows past 200,000?

00:40:22.960 Or do they say this because they're not good at analyzing? Do they say, Scott, Scott, Scott,

00:40:28.340 you're counting wrong. 45,000 of them, maybe more, died because of the lockdown. It was the lockdown

00:40:37.560 that killed 45,000 people. That's what they would argue. I would argue that was 45,000 people who died

00:40:44.820 trying to save a million. So I think that the 45,000 who died because of the lockdown,

00:40:52.680 if you were to ask medical professionals, they'd say, yeah, that's terrible. Nobody wanted those

00:40:59.240 people to die, but it's fewer than would have died otherwise. And then nobody will be able to prove

00:41:05.720 it. So you always get to this point where there'll be this question that you just can't prove.

00:41:11.920 Like what would have happened if you'd done the other thing? You never know because you didn't do

00:41:15.680 the other thing. So I guess we'll never have an answer. But I would say that the question of whether

00:41:21.040 the coronavirus is a regular flu basically is answered. It is not. All right. But I know that

00:41:32.140 there will be disagreement with that. Have you heard the biggest Trump criticisms and how generic they

00:41:38.800 are? He's creating chaos. There's no strategy. He's a racist. Have you noticed that, and I say this

00:41:46.900 before, but once you start seeing it, it becomes funnier, that they'll never, they don't blame him

00:41:52.960 for things you can measure. They only blame the president for things that are impossible to measure

00:41:58.520 because that's the only way they can be credible. If they said you ruined X, Y, or Z, we could just

00:42:06.800 look at the numbers and say, I don't know, X, Y, and Z look pretty good. It doesn't look like you ruined

00:42:11.540 them at all. So they have to go with these vague, there's chaos in the administration and he's not

00:42:19.820 passing the fact-checking. And none of it ties back to a real thing that matters to your life.

00:42:26.720 And I remind you again that there are some generic things said about every leader, that there's chaos

00:42:33.940 and nobody's making a decision and there's no strategy. And that's just sort of generic stuff you

00:42:39.220 say about every leader. Tesla is moving its production for its Cybertruck to Texas. I think

00:42:48.880 California is pretty much done because, you know, California was one of the potential places to put

00:42:55.360 that. And it's just not even an option. The fact that Tesla would say, you know, California,

00:43:01.760 thanks for having us. We'll, we'll keep our production facilities that are there for a while, but

00:43:07.640 the state doesn't really work for us anymore. It's a big deal. Probably a bigger deal in the future.

00:43:17.840 Have you noticed that the issue of sports teams and kneeling for the national anthem went from being

00:43:24.440 this big national story to no relevance whatsoever? Yes, people are still going to complain about it,

00:43:33.380 but is there anything in your entire life that's a smaller problem than an entertainment industry

00:43:41.360 that has some of the entertainers kneeling because they want to use this to protest the flag,

00:43:47.400 not the flag, but protest police brutality. Is there a smaller problem in your life than that?

00:43:53.460 It's literally your smallest problem. Not even a problem. It just makes it more interesting,

00:43:58.140 actually. So to me, the kneelers add some interest to a field of entertainment that could always use a

00:44:08.160 little more interest. I don't see that as a problem at all. All right. You heard about the Chinese 1.00

00:44:15.040 consulate and Houston was closed because I guess it was a den of spies. A den of spies. Wouldn't you love

00:44:22.740 to know what's really happening between the United States and China? Do you think that the public has

00:44:31.120 any clue what China is doing to us every day and what we are doing in response or doing to them first?

00:44:38.440 Who knows? There's a whole war raging with China, but because we don't have the kind of casualties that

00:44:47.360 you can easily count. You're like, oh, this guy got a bullet and now he's dead and we'll count him as

00:44:53.000 one dead. But if fentanyl comes in from China, goes through Mexico, gets mixed with some other drugs

00:45:00.060 and somebody has an overdose death, we just say, well, that's the addict's problem. So there's this

00:45:08.500 gigantic deadly war that's, you know, theft and cybercrime and China is sending a probe to Mars and 0.88

00:45:17.840 that's pretty scary because whoever controls space is going to control Earth.

00:45:25.140 So I would just note that you're in the middle of a hot war that is a modern form of a hot war.

00:45:33.460 It's all this cyber information, economic, getting ready for this, lying about this, spying,

00:45:41.180 gathering data, artificial intelligence and all that. So you're in the middle of World War III

00:45:48.640 and it's not even in the news because it's all distributed in a million ways.

00:45:58.360 The Three Gorges Dam is about to break. Yeah, do we have an update on that?

00:46:03.460 I know that they started releasing water, so they're intentionally flooding some of that zone.

00:46:10.640 I would think that China would be able to get out of the way because they have enough warning.

00:46:20.940 Horses on the roof. I don't know what that means.

00:46:25.040 Scott, what state will you be moving to? Well, you know, not everybody has the option of moving

00:46:29.720 because if you have family connections, etc., businesses, it's pretty hard to move.

00:46:36.300 So I might be a holdout because I don't live in San Francisco.

00:46:41.220 If I lived in San Francisco, I would already be gone.

00:46:44.380 But I left San Francisco because I hated living there, you know, 30 years ago.

00:46:49.620 Oh, it's not better now.

00:46:54.380 Yeah, there go our antibiotics.

00:46:56.860 Yeah, if China gets flooded, it could get ugly for the supply chain.

00:47:04.060 All right.

00:47:07.180 Cat on the roof.

00:47:08.760 Yeah.

00:47:09.060 All right.

00:47:11.640 I'm just looking at your comments, and I think that's all I have to say for today, I believe.

00:47:19.800 And we'll talk to you tomorrow.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams - July 23, 2020

Episode 1067 Scott Adams： Portland, The Nation's Ashtray, Teacher Unions Ruining the Planet, Excess Deaths, Trump Reframing

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