Real Coffee with Scott Adams - Episode 1080 Scott Adams： Hey, Grab Coffee

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody. Come on in. Hope you had a great weekend. It's time for the kickoff

00:00:20.240 to the week, the thing that's going to make this just an incredible week. One of the best.

00:00:26.600 One of the best. And all you need, does anybody know what you need to get this kicked off? I think

00:00:33.860 you do. All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or

00:00:39.660 a flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite coffee or beverage. And join me now for

00:00:49.240 the unparalleled pleasure. The dopamine at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better.

00:00:55.800 It's called the simultaneous sip and it's happening now. Go.

00:01:01.400 Ah, that was especially good. All right. For those of you who have been following me for

00:01:07.340 a long time. I have an update now for something that you've been tracking literally for years,

00:01:15.460 some of you. And it is just the freakiest thing. You know, my life is weird in general. All right.

00:01:23.940 When you start getting a little bit famous, everything becomes weird. But on top of that,

00:01:30.380 I have this whole other layer of weirdness, which is this category that I would call things that go

00:01:38.560 my way that really shouldn't. In other words, my statistical sense of what is possible and what is

00:01:48.200 not is completely broken. And let me give you an example. And some of you know the story. So years

00:01:55.340 ago, I had a neurological condition called a spasmodic dysphonia, which rendered me unable to

00:02:02.180 speak. So that if I tried to speak, it would sound like, and it would chop off all the words. And

00:02:09.880 people couldn't understand it in conversation. I couldn't use the telephone for three years,

00:02:14.720 basically. So it was about three and a half years of having that problem where I couldn't speak.

00:02:20.160 And during that time, whenever I drove my car by myself, I did affirmations. Affirmations is when

00:02:27.700 you just repeat or write down. In this case, while I'm driving, I just repeated it down loud.

00:02:33.180 Some objective, some future you that you wanted that was preferred over where you already were. 0.95

00:02:41.200 And I picked the most ridiculous affirmation. I mean, I picked a ridiculous affirmation. And it was 0.92

00:02:50.360 this, that while I had an incurable at the time, it seemed incurable, and it didn't look like it was

00:02:57.680 going to change anytime soon, an incurable voice problem. And my affirmation, which I would struggle

00:03:04.700 to get out, you know, while I drove, was that I, Scott Adams, will have a perfect voice. Now,

00:03:12.360 what is crazy about that is not just that I had an incurable voice problem. All right? I mean,

00:03:19.920 the key word is incurable. There was nothing you could do about it. Nothing. I mean, you could do

00:03:26.000 Botox shots in your neck, but that doesn't give you a good voice. You sound like you're on helium.

00:03:30.980 But the second part of this impossibility is that I never had a good voice before I had

00:03:38.800 that problem. I had a very nasally, kind of, sort of nasally voice at best. I'm doing a bad

00:03:47.220 impression of my own voice. But as you know, recently, I just, this week, I had surgery on

00:03:52.880 my sinus area, and they cleared out some polyps. And I was listening to myself. I was recording

00:03:59.100 something just this morning for the locals' subscribers. And I recorded it, and I played

00:04:06.120 it back, and I listened to it, and I thought, I think I have a perfect voice. And it's blowing

00:04:16.000 my freaking mind. Because this wasn't possible. It's not possible that at age 63, I would have

00:04:27.320 the best voice of my life. Not even close. I mean, I'm talking about levels above the best voice I

00:04:34.140 ever had at age 25. Not even close. And if you told me that any of this was possible in the real

00:04:42.860 world, I just, I really could not have wrapped my head around this. But this isn't even the big part

00:04:52.380 of the story. The big part of the story is, my sense of what is possible is just completely

00:05:00.040 broken. And it has been for, you know, decades, really. Because when Dilbert first took off,

00:05:06.740 I mean, the odds of Dilbert succeeding, you probably know, were one in 20,000 or something.

00:05:16.060 And the odds of me writing a book without having any, you know, prior experience as a writer and

00:05:22.880 having it a number one bestselling book, what were the odds of that? Really? I mean, the odds are

00:05:28.140 really, really low of that. And, you know, I just got married to the most beautiful woman in the

00:05:36.000 entire metaverse. And none of it seems possible. But here's, let me extend this now into the news,

00:05:45.840 so it's more about you and less about me. Have any of you noticed that the things I tend to be

00:05:53.720 persuading toward always seem to happen? Even weird things. And today's a good day to talk about that.

00:06:02.560 How many of you remember, it was probably 2018, that I started saying almost, you know,

00:06:13.080 on a regular basis, that we should decouple from China. Now, take yourself back two years, 0.99

00:06:20.400 and imagine that you heard this cartoonist saying, we should decouple from China. What did you think

00:06:27.240 about that? Didn't you think that was just the craziest thing? If you could pick one thing that

00:06:32.900 wasn't going to happen, it would be decouple from China. I mean, that would be right at the top of 0.87

00:06:39.080 anybody's list of things that just couldn't happen. And now we're doing it. What was the first,

00:06:47.580 the first person you heard tweet or say that TikTok, this enormous platform that's one of the most,

00:06:57.940 if not the most popular thing among kids in the United States, and I said it should be banned in the

00:07:02.920 United States. Did you think that was possible? Really? Did you think it was possible that TikTok

00:07:12.100 would be banned? When you first heard it? I mean, after a while, maybe it started sounding a little

00:07:18.340 bit feasible. And then when the president started talking about it, you were like, yeah, probably,

00:07:22.840 probably so. But that didn't look possible to you, did it? If you're honest with yourself,

00:07:29.200 that probably didn't look possible. And I have to admit that in the beginning, it looked impossible

00:07:37.300 to me. But I've had so many experiences where things that looked impossible eventually fell

00:07:44.460 if I just kept pushing on them long enough. In the case of my voice, 63 years. It took me 63 years

00:07:55.020 of pushing on the same rock to get it to the top of the hill. But damn it, I don't give up. 0.98

00:08:01.080 I've told you this story before. I have a, let's say an operating system within my brain that's 0.99

00:08:11.580 always running. Regardless of what apps are running, there's always also an operating system

00:08:16.420 below that. And the operating system, you all get to program yourself to some extent. Some of it you're

00:08:23.520 born with, but you can reprogram yourself, you know, through persuasion and experience and education,

00:08:29.540 et cetera. And one of the things that I've programmed myself for, and I've told you this is

00:08:36.720 Prisoner Island. And it's a story that's not a real story, but I hold it in my head as my operating

00:08:43.140 system. And it goes like this. Some of you have heard this, that if I were, let's say, convicted

00:08:48.740 for some crime, and I were taken to the island of prisoners where there's no law, you know, it's just

00:08:54.820 the prisoners rule on this island and they can't get off. And you drop me on the island. On day one,

00:09:00.880 they beat me nearly to death. On day two, they beat me up again, nearly to death. Day three, day four,

00:09:07.920 first several months, it's looking bad for Scott. Beaten up, you know, almost to death every single

00:09:14.460 day. But if you come back in a year, maybe three, I'll be running the island and everybody who touched

00:09:23.500 me will be dead. And that's, that's how, that's my operating system. So when I see a problem like

00:09:31.000 an incurable voice problem, I don't say to myself, well, it looks like the prisoners beat me up.

00:09:37.580 I guess I'm done. I wake up the next day and the prisoners beat me up again. And the next day they

00:09:42.880 beat me up again. And every day the operating system is running. It's like, I'm going to get

00:09:49.160 you. I am going to get you. Enjoy today because it's coming back. I am going to get you. And today

00:09:58.260 is just a special day for me because I chased this thing 63 freaking years and never once did I give up.

00:10:07.720 Not even once. Not once did I think, I don't, you know, that I really can't do it. I mean, I,

00:10:15.000 I certainly had a conscious understanding of what's possible and statistically likely in the

00:10:21.860 real world, but I never gave up. And that's because of the operating system. And I think

00:10:27.420 that some of that might be just born with it. I don't know, but I've certainly spent a lot of time

00:10:33.160 trying to enhance it. So maybe if you have a little bit of something that you're born with,

00:10:37.840 you can, you can beef it up a little bit, but I would suggest that you find your own operating

00:10:43.620 systems that work for you, sort of a story. And it's good to put it in a story because stories

00:10:49.440 are so powerful. That's, um, you can actually program your brain with stories. That's why they're

00:10:58.380 so powerful. Anecdotes are so powerful in the news. You, you don't want the George Floyd story

00:11:03.780 to dominate your understanding of a big complicated situation because it's just one situation

00:11:09.400 tragic as it was, but it does because, because stories are what program your brain. So you can put

00:11:17.560 your own story in there. And the beauty is you can just make it up. You know, Prisoner Island is

00:11:23.140 completely made up, but because I see it so clearly, I've, I've held it in my operating system

00:11:30.180 for all my entire life that it's, it's as real to me as if I, if I had experienced it, you know,

00:11:39.440 at least mentally. Um, so the president's looking at banning TikTok, which looks like what that might be

00:11:47.360 is that Microsoft would acquire it. Very interesting, which I think is also a, a fairly

00:11:55.320 brilliant, uh, workaround so that the kids still get their, their TikTok. And it probably would be

00:12:03.120 an election problem if TikTok got killed before election day, because there's so many kids who'd

00:12:08.900 be mad and complaining to their parents about Trump. It might actually make a difference. So it's good

00:12:14.160 that Microsoft is looking at at least taking that over. And I think, um, Facebook's WeChat is also

00:12:21.360 on the table, maybe for banning. And when you think about the fact that, uh, Facebook is banned

00:12:28.440 in China, you know, I don't know if I'd ever really paid much attention to this, this area, but the fact

00:12:36.400 that China bans Facebook, but we had not banned their version of Facebook. What's up with that?

00:12:43.760 To, to, to use the president's phrase, what's up with that? That's obviously something that had

00:12:49.720 to be fixed. You know, either, either China needs to loosen up on Facebook or WeChat's just got to go.

00:12:57.400 You, you can't live in a world where a country will ban your stuff and you're not banning their

00:13:02.820 stuff. You can't live in that world. That's just not a well-balanced world. It's got to be both

00:13:08.720 or none. So WeChat, WeChat has to go. There's just no, I would say that's not on the table for

00:13:15.060 serious discussion. That has to go. That's a, that's a no brainer. You know, it might be difficult,

00:13:22.340 but it has to go. It really does.

00:13:24.120 So MSNBC pundit, can I call him that? Ali Velshi, he might not call himself a pundit. So I won't

00:13:34.540 label him. I'll just say he's a MSNBC person, a host. Would you call him a host of a show? I'm not

00:13:41.040 sure if he has a show or he's a regular guest, but anyway, he says in a tweet, imagine being president

00:13:47.340 and knowing that discussions are actively underway about whether it's going to fall to the Marines

00:13:53.640 or the secret service agents who surround you to remove you from office if you refuse to leave

00:14:00.420 after losing the election. It's hard to believe that a serious public figure would send this tweet.

00:14:08.580 I suppose we're in a world where nothing is, nothing is off the table, but I tweeted back that this

00:14:15.640 sounds like a mental health problem. Now, not specifically about Ali Velshi, but he's talking

00:14:22.320 about other people talking about it. Whoever is talking about President Trump not leaving office

00:14:29.260 willingly doesn't understand anything. That is such a basic misunderstanding of the world we live in.

00:14:39.500 Now, certainly there's a question of, let's say the election is genuinely just

00:14:45.440 messed up. So I can imagine a scenario in which the election is just unambiguously,

00:14:52.120 it's just messed up and nobody even doubts it. You know, the left is sure it was rigged. The right

00:14:59.360 is sure it was rigged. Foreign countries are sure it was rigged. So there is a scenario in which the 0.97

00:15:05.080 election just doesn't work. So yeah, I can imagine some scenario where the president would have to,

00:15:10.740 I don't know, stay on for six months until we have another election, see if we can do it right.

00:15:16.480 I don't know what that would look like. But even that would be temporary. There's no scenario where

00:15:21.220 the president's going to just try to stay, you know, and install Ivanka as his, you know, his heir or Don 0.99

00:15:28.120 Jr. or something. That's not going to happen. Let me tell you why that's not going to happen.

00:15:32.780 Because there's this thing called conservatives. Have you heard of them? Have you heard of

00:15:38.720 conservatives? They like this thing called the Constitution. And the Constitution's pretty,

00:15:46.200 pretty clear about this election business. And if you think that conservatives, you know, as a,

00:15:54.320 there are crazy people everywhere, but as a whole, if you think conservatives would be okay

00:15:59.440 with a president and even their own president, losing an election and staying in office,

00:16:06.780 I don't think you understand what a conservative is. Yeah, that's, that's the opposite of his party.

00:16:15.880 Now, of course, they'd be sad. They might, you know, put up an argument for why he should stay there.

00:16:21.480 But I'll tell you what's not going to happen. What's not going to happen is somebody having to

00:16:26.600 militarily remove the president from the White House. There's no, there's no adult scenario in

00:16:32.880 which that can happen. Anyway, so that does feel to me, and I mean this literally, that anyone who

00:16:42.660 is thinking seriously along those lines may have a mental health issue that they need to deal with.

00:16:49.080 And let me expand that point. Expand that point. We're dealing with Antifa like it's a

00:16:59.080 semi-political movement. I don't know if anarchists are considered political, I guess, in their own way,

00:17:05.980 or anti-political. You got the Black Lives Matter movement, etc. And I would, I would argue this,

00:17:15.940 that especially among the violent protesters, you know, you've seen a lot of pictures of the mugshots

00:17:21.820 of the ones that are causing the trouble, not the, not the peaceful people, because there are lots of

00:17:27.040 protesters who just really want a better world. They genuinely do. And so, and they should be

00:17:32.240 respected for their freedom of speech, as well as their intentions. But when you see the people who got

00:17:38.200 caught, is it my imagination that they all look like they have mental illness? I don't think it's

00:17:46.240 drugs. I mean, there might be some drugs too. But it looks like that we're, we're treating a mental

00:17:52.700 illness problem as some kind of a political movement. Antifa is about 80% mental illness, 0.98

00:18:01.720 in my opinion. Now, Black Lives Matter is not. Black Lives Matter, in my opinion, shows not even a trace 1.00

00:18:10.840 of mental illness. Would you agree? You know, you could say their priorities are different, or you

00:18:17.280 know, what they want is reasonable or unreasonable. Those are all fair questions. But I've never seen

00:18:22.220 anything come out of Black Lives Matter from an actual black citizen of this United States that looked 0.93

00:18:29.800 even slightly crazy. Right? It just seems like different priorities, different understanding, 0.79

00:18:35.820 maybe than you have about whatever, what needs to be done. But none of it looks crazy. It looks

00:18:40.940 completely reasonable for their point of view. Antifa doesn't register that way to me. Because first of

00:18:49.740 all, what the hell is anarchy? What, what is anarchy? Exactly. If you were to sit down, and I don't

00:19:00.320 recommend it, but if you were to sit down with one of the, the Antifa, let's say a leader, or even a

00:19:07.560 member, and say, all right, all right, I get what you're, I get what you're trying to do. But can you

00:19:14.000 describe how that works out for you in the long run? Describe your life after you get what you want?

00:19:22.460 What's it look like? Because I think the government is gone, right? That's the whole point of anarchy.

00:19:29.120 And I think law and order are gone, which means the food supply is gone, which means the anarchist dies.

00:19:37.100 Yes. So the, the anarchists in Antifa, in my opinion, are, have mental illness, and they are suicidal, 0.99

00:19:49.160 but they're not very brave, or, or they're not brave enough, or they don't have whatever it takes 0.90

00:19:54.600 to, I'm not going to, let me withdraw brave, because I don't want anybody listening to this

00:20:01.100 to think that this would be brave to end their own life. That's, that's not the message I'm trying

00:20:06.920 to tell. I'm saying that the Antifa people look like they want to end themselves, but the way

00:20:14.600 they're doing it is by playing out like they're ending the United States. There's nothing on the

00:20:19.880 end of that process that they would want. You know, they're not saying, when we get this, it'll be a good

00:20:26.960 world. It really is just, let's break everything, and maybe I'll get killed in the process. It looks

00:20:33.140 like that to me. So I think maybe it would help us to imagine that Antifa is more of a mental health

00:20:38.720 issue mixed in with some domestic terrorists and some people who have actual plans for power, I suppose.

00:20:51.220 What do you think of the hollow Joe, as I call him, hashtag hollow Joe, what do you think about him

00:20:58.340 debating? And I tweeted yesterday that I think Democrats are slowly waking up to this realization

00:21:06.720 that there are two things that Biden could do debate wise. He could actually have a debate,

00:21:14.180 in which case, I think most people think that would be the end, right? Because Biden seems pretty good

00:21:20.780 when he stays on script. And he has friendly people asking him easy questions, and he's got his

00:21:26.920 notepad. But what happens if you put him in a debate with Trump, and Trump throws him off the path? And

00:21:35.140 how long would that take? It would take one second for Trump to push him off his game, because his game

00:21:42.300 is very narrow now. Like he can only talk about the things he's sort of ready for, prepared for. If you give

00:21:49.440 him anything he didn't prepare for, it's going to be a disaster. And Trump is just going to show up

00:21:55.860 on stage and give him nothing but things he didn't prepare for. It's going to be the most unpredictable

00:22:03.020 situation in the world. So if you're Biden's advisors and backers, do you want to see hollow Joe

00:22:11.500 with his very narrow game that's narrowing every day, get on stage with the person in the world who has

00:22:19.140 the biggest game? Probably the biggest game we've ever seen, with the most variety, the most

00:22:25.520 provocation, the most maddening, you know, just everything. The most energy that anybody's ever

00:22:34.760 brought to this job is Trump. It's literally the worst matchup I could even imagine for Biden.

00:22:42.240 Biden actually could do well against a standard Republican. You know, you just put a boring

00:22:48.900 Republican up there and have him talk and the boring Republican says predictable things.

00:22:55.520 Joe is ready because it's predictable things. Might look okay. You know, the audience might not

00:23:01.240 know if there's anything wrong with him. But you put Trump up there, and the first thing he's going

00:23:06.100 to do is throw him off his game, make him angry, get him flustered, brain shuts down. It's not going to

00:23:12.140 be pretty. But what if he doesn't? Suppose Joe Biden doesn't debate. What happens then? Well,

00:23:21.360 then he loses the other way. Because if you don't debate, I think that's essentially admitting you

00:23:28.340 can't do the job. Right? If you don't debate, and you're running for president, you have admitted

00:23:35.980 that you can't do the job of president. I don't think that there's any way around that.

00:23:41.860 And it's hilarious to watch Joe Lockhart, who used to be the spokesperson for, was it Bush?

00:23:49.740 And he's writing opinion pieces on probably CNN, I think. And his opinion was that Joe Biden

00:23:58.960 should not debate. But here's the reason. Oh, not because Joe Biden is incapable of debating,

00:24:06.760 but rather because President Trump lies so much. Why would you give attention to a liar? 0.95

00:24:13.480 And I'm thinking to myself, well, that's trying a little too hard, Joe. It sounds like the Democrats

00:24:21.680 were just desperate for some kind of a narrative, where it makes sense that Biden doesn't debate.

00:24:29.680 Because if he just doesn't do it, that's really the end of his, that's the end of his chances.

00:24:34.060 But if he, if he could find some BS kind of reason why he wouldn't do it, that has nothing to do with

00:24:40.060 not being good at it. And that's what Lockhart was trying to present. If that was their best play,

00:24:47.500 was that their best play? What Lockhart said that, why would you debate somebody who doesn't pass the

00:24:54.320 fact checking? And I'm thinking, that's sort of exactly who you want to debate. If I told you,

00:25:01.940 hey, you're going to go into a debate, and your opponent is known for not passing the fact checking.

00:25:08.960 Do you say, oh, I'm bringing the facts? Or do you say, oh, I can't deal with that. I'd better quit.

00:25:17.740 I don't want to debate somebody who says things that aren't true, and can be proven to be not true.

00:25:23.280 And the next day, the news will only cover all the lies that he told. I don't want that. Of course,

00:25:29.440 you want that. That's exactly the person you want to debate. So that is the most transparently

00:25:34.440 ridiculous excuse for getting a weak candidate out of a debate. But it was kind of funny because it 0.85

00:25:41.100 was so weak. Here's my prediction. I believe that the polls will tighten before the election day,

00:25:48.700 and not because of anything the candidates are doing. So that's my prediction. The polls will narrow

00:25:55.880 right before election day, maybe sooner. But it won't have much to do with what the candidates are

00:26:03.500 actually doing. It'll have more to do with the fact that the polls were rigged in the first place.

00:26:09.280 And it looks like it's just a repeat of 2016, where the primary polls are showing a gigantic gap.

00:26:17.360 And that's the message they want to send, apparently. But they also still want to be in

00:26:22.400 business as legitimate pollsters. So they're going to have to get rid of the rigging toward election day,

00:26:27.980 so that it looks like, well, we only missed it by 2%. That's not bad. Something like that.

00:26:33.280 So that's the prediction. I saw that there were at least two polls that seem like they're already

00:26:40.240 turning in the president's favor. But they were the lesser known polls, and I'm not going to mention

00:26:46.600 them. I'll just say that there are at least two polls, just in the last 24 hours, that would indicate

00:26:53.200 a dramatic shift toward Trump. But it could be just a difference in the way they measure it.

00:27:00.620 Because the question of whether or not there are so-called shy Trump supporters out there

00:27:06.220 is now getting ridiculously obvious that there are. Now, in 2016, you can be forgiven if you were

00:27:17.060 a Democrat and you did not believe there was such a thing as a shy Trump supporter. But now that you

00:27:24.160 saw Trump win unexpectedly, is it only because the polls were not exactly as precise as they could

00:27:32.220 have been, especially in the Midwest? Is that the only reason we were surprised? Or were there some

00:27:37.920 hidden Trump supporters? So here are the conditions to create a massive amount of Trump hidden supporters

00:27:46.660 that the polls that the polls are not catching at the moment. The first condition is that everybody

00:27:51.760 has to have that model in their head. In other words, if you're a Trump supporter, you have to have

00:27:56.740 it in your head that there's an option. The option is to be a hidden Trump supporter. So just saying

00:28:04.320 something's an option and talking about it makes it more likely to happen. It's just the way we're wired.

00:28:08.900 We are mimics. And if anybody is doing anything, it will cause probably more people to do that thing

00:28:16.560 just because we imitate. So you should expect that all things being equal, there would be more shy

00:28:23.320 supporters this time just because 2016 proved it's a thing. And if it's a thing, it's an option. And if

00:28:31.840 it's an option and it's in the front of your mind, when the pollster calls, it's a little more likely

00:28:38.020 that you'll say, oh, a lot of people are doing this. I think I too will be a little cagey when I

00:28:43.700 answer the poll questions. So then add to that three and a half or more years of the supporters

00:28:54.080 of the president being beaten up on camera. How many videos do you have of a MAGA hat wearing person

00:29:01.920 being slapped around and abused on camera? You've seen it a lot. Now, maybe the left has

00:29:08.340 not seen it, but that's not relevant to this question because the shy Trump supporters have

00:29:13.880 all seen it. All right. Everybody who's a Trump supporter has seen plenty of video, if they're on

00:29:20.840 social media, plenty of video of Trump supporters getting abused and physically. Does that make you,

00:29:28.860 and we all know the stories of people being fired, fired from the Wall Street Journal or quitting in

00:29:34.260 that case? And we've seen how much social pressure there is. So if there are not, if it turns out,

00:29:45.220 I don't know if we'll ever be able to measure it, but if it turned out in the future that we learned

00:29:50.040 that there were no such thing as shy Trump supporters for this election or that it was minimal,

00:29:56.360 I would be amazed. Because every condition to create a lot of them is in place and strongly in

00:30:05.720 place and has been in place for a while. It's dangerous to your career. It's dangerous to your

00:30:11.580 health. You know it's a thing. You know you can easily do it by lying to the pollsters.

00:30:16.840 It's a thing. Trust me, it's a thing. And I believe that the folks supporting Biden are slowly

00:30:27.740 worrying that it's a thing. I don't know that they're convinced. They still might believe the

00:30:34.020 polls. But you know they're worrying about it. It's starting to get in their head. And I'll bet

00:30:40.400 you'll see a lot more about this from people trying to deny it or whatever. But it's definitely

00:30:47.820 in their head. And they also know that Biden can't survive either the debate or the skipping of the

00:30:54.920 debate. So they basically have a dead man candidate walking. Now let's get to the vice president pick.

00:31:02.400 My certainty that it would be Kamala Harris has been challenged recently. But not for the reason you

00:31:12.600 think. Now I do know that there's a lot of buzz about Susan Rice, etc. I have trouble thinking it's

00:31:19.320 going to be Susan Rice as vice president. And the problem is that she's got the worst case of RBF 1.00

00:31:25.800 any politician ever had. And you know what I mean, right? You can look, you can Google RBF,

00:31:32.880 which is basically a resting face that looks unpleasant. Now when she smiles, she looks very

00:31:40.820 pleasant. And apparently, I saw a report that she's smiling more, maybe because she's jockeying for the

00:31:46.240 VP job. But she has a unfriendly look that is frankly scary. 1.00

00:31:55.800 I saw Karen Bass recently on an interview. And I think the Cuba stuff is pretty bad. 1.00

00:32:03.540 I don't think she can get past that. So my guess would be, well, let me give you the big picture.

00:32:11.860 There are two things happening. One is we think that the vice president pick for Biden will be

00:32:16.620 important because Biden may not be a two-term president. Well, actually, he said he would not

00:32:21.600 be a two-term president. And that puts that person in the first spot to be considered as to run for

00:32:28.700 president next time. But here's what's different. I think Biden is failing faster than maybe we even

00:32:37.820 we know. And that his advisors may be calculating this. They may want to pick a vice president that

00:32:45.640 is not Kamala Harris. Wait for it. So that when Biden is replaced before election day, they can bring

00:32:55.360 in a top-tier candidate who's more like the presidential candidate. Because the thing about

00:33:01.760 Kamala Harris is, she always looked like she could be the president, which is what makes her a strong 1.00

00:33:07.800 candidate for vice president. When you think of Karen Bass, do you think, oh, she's already ready to be 0.55

00:33:15.520 president? You don't think that. You're not familiar with her enough. How about Susan Rice? Do you say to

00:33:22.880 yourself, she's ready to be president? I don't think she's been elected to anything before. We don't know 0.99

00:33:28.060 much about her. I haven't seen her campaign. So it seems to me that there's at least a small possibility.

00:33:35.160 Now, I'll put this in the anything's possible category. This is not a prediction. In the anything

00:33:41.820 possible category, one of the reasons that the Biden VP choice might be delayed, which is what we

00:33:48.700 heard, it's going to be delayed again. It could be that they want to pick, they want to put in a strong

00:33:54.620 vice president, but not one who's too strong. Because they might want to save their strongest

00:34:01.220 candidate, which in my opinion is Harris, to replace Biden himself at the top of the ticket

00:34:08.140 before the election. Nobody else has told you that, have they? Which would really blow your mind,

00:34:15.780 wouldn't it? And Harris is still unpredicted as a possible top of the ticket. I don't suggest

00:34:22.840 betting on the basis of what you just heard, but I'll just put it out there. She's still

00:34:28.640 unpredicted. All right. Did you see the new Trump campaign ad? It's really good. It's really,

00:34:38.900 really good. One of the things that people were complaining about is that it's one thing to say

00:34:43.720 bad things about Joe Biden, but what's your positive image, you know, positive message for the country?

00:34:49.260 And the Trump campaign just turned down a really inspirational feeling, you know, pro-optimism,

00:35:00.160 pro-America, everything's going to get better and better. And I think they nailed it, just in terms

00:35:06.440 of the skill that went into the ad. I'd say A+, it's one of the better ads I've seen. You actually feel

00:35:13.660 something when you watch the ad. And that's kind of hard to hit, right? You know, not every political

00:35:21.760 ad makes you actually feel something, but that ad literally, you just feel it. And it feels good,

00:35:29.660 which is the point. Speaking of optimism and feeling good. So when you see the ad, you see a

00:35:37.640 version of Trump that's his best self, in my opinion. Optimistic Trump is the best Trump,

00:35:45.020 which is also my explanation for why he did not get the messaging as perfectly as he could have

00:35:51.800 during the coronavirus. Because the coronavirus situation, the pandemic, absolutely requires

00:35:58.700 something closer to pessimism. You know, that pessimism or a little bit, just a slight pessimism

00:36:06.840 was exactly the right note to sound for leadership in a pandemic. It's like, ah, I got to tell you,

00:36:14.080 it's going to be bad. But you know, we'll get through it. But I got to tell you, it's going to be bad.

00:36:19.080 So that's the message people were, I guess they wanted to hear. A lot of people said that.

00:36:23.620 And President Trump is not really the one. He's just not optimized for bad news. He's optimized

00:36:32.620 for what this campaign ad shows, which is, hey, let's get on board and rebuild this thing. So let

00:36:37.800 me put it in a larger context. I don't believe there's any such thing as a good president or a

00:36:44.600 bad president. I believe that what you need is a president whose talents are the right match for

00:36:52.040 the times. And that's why I was more pro-Obama than probably just about anybody who's watching

00:36:59.380 this right now. Because I thought he was a good match for the times. And I think Trump is a better

00:37:06.360 match for these times, with the exception of the pandemic. He was not a good match to that. So if

00:37:15.000 you say president is good or bad, I think you're missing the larger picture, that they're all good.

00:37:20.280 I mean, by the time you become president of the United States, you're a high-functioning person.

00:37:27.280 You're smart. You care about the country. They're all in that category of smart, capable,

00:37:35.160 successful, care about the country. I think that's all about equal. But they are different in how they

00:37:41.640 fit. So in my opinion, President Trump was not the best messenger. And I'm talking only about the

00:37:49.140 message part. He was not the best messenger for the coronavirus stuff. But as we're getting closer

00:37:55.540 to the other side of it, I don't know when that's going to come, but we're certainly getting closer

00:37:59.460 to the end of it. Who would you rather have as president to rebuild the economy? I mean, think about

00:38:07.860 it, seriously. If you could pick any president, of all the presidents from the beginning of time,

00:38:15.940 you'd have to adjust to make them modern thinking. Can you think of a better president

00:38:22.100 to rebuild us from a pandemic, which basically kept all their assets in place, largely?

00:38:28.820 But we had to think our way through it. You know, you had to try harder. You had to be optimistic.

00:38:36.980 That's what drives the economy, optimism. You couldn't come up with a better president for this

00:38:42.020 moment. Oh, no, not this moment, the next moment. So the next moment we're getting into,

00:38:50.020 that's Trumpville. All right, you are entering Trumpville. You're not in it, because the pandemic

00:38:56.260 is just not his strong part. But man, you don't want Joe Biden to be running the next phase.

00:39:04.340 If you asked me, would Joe Biden have been a good pick for the current pandemic? I don't think so,

00:39:11.540 because I don't think he would have closed China as soon. You know, I think he would have done some 0.81

00:39:15.620 other things wrong. But it wouldn't have been a disaster, probably, except for the closing China 0.98

00:39:20.420 part, maybe. But you don't want him rebuilding America. That's just the wrong guy for the

00:39:26.180 job. I keep reading on CNN that Trump has no plan for the pandemic. And I keep asking myself what's

00:39:35.780 wrong with me that I think he does. Let me tell you what I think is the plan for the pandemic,

00:39:43.540 which seems crystal clear to me. And I don't know why it's not crystal clear to everyone,

00:39:48.660 because we're all watching the same news. I didn't go research it. I just watched the news.

00:39:53.620 Completely clear plan of how the United States is handling the pandemic. Now, do you think it's

00:40:00.980 clear? I'm going to go through it, what I think is the plan. But is there anybody here who would say

00:40:07.140 they don't understand the plan? I want to see your comments when they catch up to real time. So here's

00:40:15.220 what I think the plan is. They were always very clear from day one that keeping our health care

00:40:22.100 system intact was going to be and keeping people fed were the top priorities. Everybody's on board,

00:40:29.380 right? It was very clear. We're going to make sure we feed everybody. And we're going to make sure that

00:40:34.820 the health care doesn't collapse. And then we executed that plan. Did it work? Yeah. Yeah. Not only did it work

00:40:42.900 when things were far more uncertain, but it looks like it's going to continue working. So that's the first

00:40:48.980 part of the plan. Hospitals and food and nailed it. I would I would give our country as a whole, you know,

00:40:57.860 more credit to the health care workers, of course. But the country as a whole for that part of the plan,

00:41:02.820 a plus, a plus for all of you, not just the president. Trump is very clear about wanting

00:41:10.900 to open the schools. How much clearer could the president be that he wants the schools open?

00:41:17.460 How is that not completely clear? Now, the states, of course, have individual, you know, powers that

00:41:23.940 they can do what they need to do. But it's also clear that the president has has acknowledged that the

00:41:30.260 states are the ones to make those individual decisions. But he's giving very clear guidance

00:41:35.300 about the federal priorities. And I believe that that is correct, because states have a slightly

00:41:41.060 different mission than the federal government. The states are not responsible for national defense.

00:41:50.580 President Trump is responsible for national defense. In addition to everything else, states don't have a

00:41:57.300 national defense motive. They're more about making sure you got food and medicine and stuff. And I would

00:42:07.060 argue that Trump from the national defense phase, trying to keep schools open, keeping the economy as

00:42:16.100 open as we can, you know, with some pullbacks as needed. Those things go right to national defense.

00:42:22.580 And the president's completely clear about them. Got to get kids in school, got to keep the economy,

00:42:27.380 you know, humming, which helps to have kids in school. And that the economy is sort of the lifeblood

00:42:35.620 that makes everything else possible. And if you don't, if you, if you break the economy more than it is,

00:42:41.300 then nothing works. Nothing works. So for me, you know, keeping the whole country intact,

00:42:47.700 it makes complete sense that the president's preference for opening the economy, opening the

00:42:53.780 schools with casualties, with casualties, nobody's kidding themselves. There will be casualties,

00:43:02.020 but also casualties, no matter what you do. So I think that's clear. And it also makes, as I said,

00:43:09.300 perfect sense that the federal government has a different view of it than the states. And they have

00:43:14.580 exactly the views you'd want them to have. You want the states focusing on the people. You want

00:43:20.420 the president to focus on the people, but also national defense. So there's your difference.

00:43:27.060 The president has said forever, as have the experts, that we're going to rapidly adjust.

00:43:32.180 We're going to try it, adjust, try it, adjust. Have you seen that happen? Yeah. Yeah. We've tried

00:43:38.500 things and we've adjusted, tried things and adjusted, still doing it. Is that smart? Is that a good plan?

00:43:44.420 Yeah. That's not just a good plan. That's like the best plan. You could get, you come up with a better

00:43:49.700 plan in the face of complete unknowns, come up with a better plan than trying things and quickly

00:43:55.860 adjusting. There isn't one. That's the plan. It's the best plan. It's the only plan. And then, but there's

00:44:03.540 this bigger question about sort of an endpoint. How does this get resolved? Is any of what I've

00:44:10.900 talked about getting us to something that could be described as an endpoint we're trying to get?

00:44:16.820 Because I think that's where the disconnect is. And here's my take. Although this may not have been

00:44:22.580 said explicitly, it seems obvious to me that the priority is to keep the economy alive

00:44:29.540 as long as it takes to get to any combination of herd immunity, therapeutics that really, you know,

00:44:37.540 kick butt, or a vaccine that really works. But the therapeutics and the vaccine are optional.

00:44:47.220 You get that, right? So the plan is to get all three of those things in a good place. Get your,

00:44:53.620 some herd immunity, some therapeutics, some vaccines. We don't know, you know, what that mix will be or

00:45:00.420 exactly the timing. But it's very clear that, you know, with this warp speed process that the president

00:45:07.220 put together, that's crystal clear that we're rushing, I don't want to say rushing, we're speeding

00:45:14.900 the vaccine thing, trying every therapy, funding everything that looks promising, just throwing

00:45:23.380 the kitchen sink at anything that could work. But if none of it works any better than what we already

00:45:32.020 have, if we never get a better therapeutic than we have, if we never get a vaccine, it's still the

00:45:38.660 same plan. We just get there through herd immunity. We get there the hard way. So I don't see how this

00:45:45.620 could be any more clear. Is there any part of this that isn't, number one, exactly what you'd want your

00:45:53.700 government to be doing, and number two, working, in the sense that it's being executed just the way it's

00:46:02.180 described? And number three, it has an endpoint, a very specific endpoint. We don't know the day,

00:46:08.500 but that's the real world, right? You don't know when it's going to end, but it has to have an end.

00:46:15.140 Herd immunity will get there if the vaccines and the therapeutics and everything else does not.

00:46:21.940 Now, here's a prediction that I made that you're already seeing come true in a small sense. We'll see

00:46:27.540 if it's a trend. I predict it will be. In what world can some other country get this under control

00:46:34.260 and keep it there? There is no world, there's no rational, logical way that some other country

00:46:41.300 from the United States, let's say Australia, is going to get the virus under control and keep it that

00:46:48.420 way under current conditions. It's not even a thing. So every time I hear the news talk about some

00:46:54.660 country who did well, I just shake my head and I say, they didn't do well. They did not do well,

00:47:03.220 because they're going to have a flare up. All they did is tamp it down and hurt their economy more than

00:47:08.820 they needed to. We did the opposite. We kept our economy a little more open. We could have tamped

00:47:15.460 it down further, but that was a rational choice. Because all the countries that hurt their economy

00:47:22.340 and closed down to get rid of the flare ups, it's all coming back. Everybody who closed their economy

00:47:30.660 completely to try to get something like zero infections in their country was a complete waste

00:47:36.660 of time, because it's coming back. Until you have some technological breakthrough or something,

00:47:45.380 I don't think it's going to happen quickly enough. So you're going to see flare ups in other countries

00:47:50.580 that by election day will make the president's performance look better by comparison. Because

00:47:56.980 remember that the curves are not timed with each other. So at the moment, Australia is having a pretty

00:48:03.380 bad flare up. And they have somewhat draconian measures. Apparently only one of your members of

00:48:11.300 your household can leave the household can leave the house once a day. What? Somebody says apologist.

00:48:20.100 You must be new here. Miles Carney. So somebody is calling me an apologist. All right, you get blocked for that.

00:48:28.100 But I decided that the lowest level of political understanding is calling somebody an apologist.

00:48:39.940 Well, calling me an apologist would be the lowest level of understanding. All right.

00:48:47.460 So are you following the AI stuff? There's an artificial intelligence program, I guess you could call it,

00:48:55.220 called GPT-3. I think this is Elon Musk's and other people's. And it's available to some people

00:49:05.940 who are playing with it. And you get to see the results. So I've seen the results of a number of

00:49:10.100 experiments. And the idea is that the AI is now so smart that you can ask it to do a lot of different

00:49:19.700 things. And you don't know exactly what's going to come out of it, which is the freaky part,

00:49:25.140 that you don't quite know what it's going to do, because it's sort of making up its own mind to have

00:49:29.460 to deal with your request. And it can do some amazing things. One of the things that was demonstrated

00:49:37.700 is it was writing its own ad copy for a product, to which I say,

00:49:48.900 to which I say,

00:49:52.420 that's pretty freaky, isn't it? Writing advertising copy

00:49:57.700 with AI. Now, what it did was, is I guess they seeded it with one statement about their product,

00:50:04.100 and then the AI gave it a variety of different options that say the same meaning, but they use

00:50:10.260 different words and different emphasis. And there's a second part of that, which is that

00:50:15.860 the AI can then rapidly test it in the public. So now that you know that it can give you different

00:50:22.660 advertisements, you could arrange them on a page differently, you could change the words,

00:50:27.700 it can go test that with a thousand people while you're sitting in front of it. So you could be

00:50:33.940 sitting there saying, all right, AI, fix my advertising. And you'd watch the screen change

00:50:41.460 until there's several different options and maybe photos and arrangements and stuff. And then you could

00:50:48.740 say, all right, AI, go AB test until you have the best one. And it would take five minutes for it to

00:50:57.300 have tested all of its messages around the world, you know, by running ads, just to see what people

00:51:02.420 click on. And it would tell you the best one that would just absolutely rewire people's brains. And it

00:51:09.300 would do it in five minutes. And you wouldn't have to do any work. You would just sit there and say,

00:51:14.260 give me an advertisement, go test it. That's scary stuff. Now, if you're thinking that the

00:51:20.740 robots are going to take the manual jobs, well, of course they will. But they're also going to take

00:51:26.500 the copywriting jobs, the advertising jobs. I think the advertising industries got some challenges going.

00:51:33.540 Do you know Bernard Carrick, Bernie Carrick? Was he the police chief in New York City at one point?

00:51:44.100 And he said this, which is really interesting. He said, must begin looking at who is bailing out

00:51:50.740 these people, meaning Antifa and the protesters. I strongly believe you're going to be able to

00:51:56.740 connect the dots back to their organizers and funders, making this a federal crime.

00:52:03.300 Now, I don't quite know

00:52:07.300 the legal details of that, but I think he's saying that if it's more of a conspiracy looking,

00:52:14.980 what is it that they use for the mafia? What is the rule? There's a law they use for the mafia

00:52:22.260 where if it's more of an enterprise, the feds can go after it than if it's just one person acting

00:52:27.300 alone. So, and I thought to myself, I thought to myself, that is really interesting. Because what

00:52:37.060 if this is a thing? Suppose we do find that whoever is paying for the bail for these people

00:52:44.180 are connected and organized. Does that mean the feds can take down Antifa? I don't know.

00:52:49.380 No. Somebody tweeted a little clip from Marshall McLuhan in 1968. And now, if you're a certain

00:53:00.580 age, you've heard that name, Marshall McLuhan. In the 60s, he was super famous as being sort of the,

00:53:06.500 you know, the intellectual who would talk about how the media, how the media was programming us,

00:53:13.700 basically. And Marshall McLuhan said this, which I'm going to disagree with. He said,

00:53:19.780 when humans face too much information, they resort to pattern recognition. And then he went

00:53:25.700 on to say that, you know, the world is getting more complicated, so therefore people can't sort

00:53:31.460 out the complication, so they just default to pattern recognition. And when I first read it,

00:53:37.780 I thought, I feel like this is half right. I feel like it's, oh, RICO, thank you. It's the RICO laws.

00:53:46.260 I'm wondering if that's what Bernie Kerik was referring to with wrapping up the Antifa people

00:53:52.980 as an organization. RICO, thank you. So, Marshall McLuhan says that when we have too much information,

00:54:00.340 we resort to pattern recognition. Pattern recognition, of course, is confirmation bias

00:54:06.100 if you do it wrong. If you do it right, then you're just being smart. If you do it wrong,

00:54:09.780 it's confirmation bias. And I would like to modify Marshall McLuhan's opinion because I think it's

00:54:15.860 dated. He said this in 1968 and it sounded brilliant and probably quite provocative back

00:54:22.820 in those days. But here's what I think he gets wrong. It has nothing to do with how much information

00:54:28.660 people have. It has nothing to do with how confused you are or how much information you have. We always

00:54:38.100 use faulty pattern recognition. And then we explain it to ourselves as if we had made the decision

00:54:45.620 logically. The only time that we use logic is when the situation is really simple and there's no

00:54:52.340 emotional, there's just no emotional input to it at all. So, I think he was close to the truth,

00:55:01.860 but I don't think it has to do with how much information you're dealing with. I think we're

00:55:05.620 just always, always looking for the pattern recognition and we're not necessarily good at it.

00:55:10.740 So, I tweeted something that I thought I would get more pushback from and I don't think I got any.

00:55:20.980 Imagine what I'm going to say right now that I got no pushback from, that I've seen,

00:55:25.300 and tons of retweets. So, this is very popular with nobody pushing back yet. And I tweeted,

00:55:33.220 it's time for all Americans to join together in fighting our common enemy, the teachers' unions. 0.90

00:55:39.540 And then I provocatively went on, if you think they haven't indirectly killed more black Americans 1.00

00:55:46.420 than the police, you haven't been paying attention. Because education, economics, and safety are leaked.

00:55:54.900 So, my contention is that if the school unions had been doing their job for the last few decades,

00:55:59.860 the education of black America would be far better. It's not that the teachers don't do a

00:56:06.980 good job individually. It's that the teachers' unions prevent competition, which means that

00:56:12.420 there's a limit to how good anybody can be. There's no competition. So, if they had not existed,

00:56:19.220 and there was competition, and education had improved in the way you would expect in a competitive

00:56:24.820 environment, imagine how much better off the black community would be, and everybody who was in a 1.00

00:56:32.020 low-income situation. So, we don't even need to limit this to any group. But because we're talking

00:56:37.780 about Black Lives Matter, I'll just say that the Black Lives Matter people have been duped into pursuing 0.99

00:56:45.220 their lowest priority. They have been duped. Now, imagine even, I don't know, even a month or two ago,

00:56:56.340 that I can say this without being canceled. And the only reason I can say it now, without being canceled,

00:57:02.500 is everyone knows it's true. All right? Until everybody knew it was true, I kind of couldn't say it. And it's

00:57:08.340 this. If you think that the police killing of Black people is a high priority, or even should be, 0.97

00:57:19.540 let's say should be a high priority for the Black community, you don't know how to count. Because the 1.00

00:57:25.700 total number of people that will ever be killed by the police will be a pinprick compared to how many

00:57:32.420 people, how many lives are destroyed by the school unions, the teachers unions, restricting the ability

00:57:40.500 for teaching to become good, better than it is. And they're not even close in terms of death count.

00:57:48.340 We're talking about, you know, education being the alpha problem for everyone, basically for everyone,

00:57:56.420 you know, not just the Black community. But if you don't get that right, the education part, you don't

00:58:02.500 get your economics right, you don't get your good quality of life, you don't get your national defense,

00:58:07.780 the country's done. As bad as the tragedies are in these police incidents, and very much we should

00:58:15.620 work on it. All right? There's, you don't interpret anything I say as we should not try to make that the

00:58:22.020 best situation we can make it and experiment a little bit there. We should. But let's not confuse it

00:58:29.060 for the top priority for anybody. It's not the, if you think Black Lives Matter,

00:58:36.820 that's not the priority. If you think Black Lives Matter, you would, you know, you'd say,

00:58:42.340 well, I hope we do better on this police stuff. Let's, let's talk about the teachers unions.

00:58:47.300 That's when Black Lives Matter. So I don't think I could have even said that directly a month ago.

00:58:55.860 But I feel like, you know, now that, now that the temperature is changing a little bit, and we're

00:59:00.980 seeing that the teachers unions are basically holding our children hostage. Think about, think about the

00:59:06.900 fact that the teachers unions are basically holding our children hostage. It's crazy. All right.

00:59:17.380 Speaking of competition, if you're wondering how much better could education be if you had free

00:59:23.300 markets and competition, I would point you toward Elon Musk's rocket, which his astronauts just returned

00:59:31.940 safely yesterday. And I may have the numbers wrong, but it's something like this. The mission that he's,

00:59:37.860 that he accomplished for less than a billion dollars was something that NASA said would cost 26 billion.

00:59:45.380 So when NASA did not have competition, they were proposing to spend 26 billion dollars

00:59:52.100 to do a thing that once competition was a thing cost 1 billion. That's the size of the potential gain

01:00:01.380 in education. And I think he did it years earlier than NASA was going to do it. It wasn't even close. All

01:00:07.300 right. Uh, those, those are my points for today. Um,

01:00:15.380 um, yeah, just looking at your comments.

01:00:22.340 Can't thrive without addressing the teachers unions. Yeah. So let me tie this back to the very

01:00:27.540 first part of the periscope. If those of you were there in which I said, have you been surprised

01:00:33.940 that some of the things I advocate for happen as unlikely as they seem? And I don't think I've

01:00:41.460 been advocating anything harder than the teachers unions need to get fixed or moved out of the way,

01:00:48.740 or at least stop us from having free market and competition. And, uh, I would predict

01:00:57.380 that you're going to see a lot more pressure on the teachers unions and maybe some alternatives

01:01:02.900 popping up for education. So I'm going to keep pushing on that. Uh, I appreciate it when you boost me

01:01:08.580 on Twitter. If it's some topic you think is good for the good for the country and join me on the

01:01:15.060 locals platform. If you want to see my special extra provocative stuff, it's locals with an s.com.

01:01:23.780 And I will talk to you tomorrow.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams - August 03, 2020

Episode 1080 Scott Adams： Hey, Grab Coffee

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