Real Coffee with Scott Adams - Episode 1139 Scott Adams： Debate Preview, I Explain Trump Taxes to Artists, Ballot Harvesting, Shy Trump Supporters

00:00:00.000 Hokie, California. I'd love to tell you that that's fog, but it's not. The forest fires are

00:00:08.240 encroaching again. These are not too close to where I live, in this case, but the wine country

00:00:14.820 is in trouble. However, that's not our concern right now, because at this moment in time,

00:00:23.520 everything is perfect. Sure, people are having trouble everywhere, but are you right now? No.

00:00:32.600 You're watching Coffee with Scott Adams. Possibly the best part of your day. No, probably the best

00:00:39.660 part of your day. And everything's starting to go really well for you, anyway. Too bad about other

00:00:45.100 people, but you're doing great. And the only way that you could do better is with a simultaneous

00:00:51.120 sip, and all it takes is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen,

00:00:56.000 chug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And

00:01:03.580 join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes

00:01:08.080 everything better, except my air quality. It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens

00:01:14.500 now. Go. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good. Here's the coolest thing that happened

00:01:27.320 yesterday. I saw an advertisement for an electric bicycle for the water. That's my own description

00:01:35.520 of it. They call it a hydrofoil, and it's the Manta 5. And you ride it like a little bicycle,

00:01:43.580 and you pedal it, and there's a little propeller underneath you. And it's just a bicycle kind

00:01:49.340 of a frame, except that it has some kind of floating device underneath it. And it has an

00:01:55.560 electric bicycle kind of assist. And I looked at the video of people just zipping around on

00:02:00.800 that thing. And I thought, you know, the first time I rode an electric bike, and I told you about

00:02:07.760 this, I realized that this is really the future. You spend 10 seconds on an e-bike, and you wouldn't

00:02:16.020 want to do any other kind of transportation. It's just a cool feeling. And I've got a feeling

00:02:21.140 that the electric assist human pedaled vehicles are going to be way, way bigger than they are now.

00:02:28.680 All right, so that's coming. Other big news, the government task force has announced there's

00:02:35.720 now a 15-minute test for COVID. And they're going to make, I don't know, 100 million of them and

00:02:42.240 hand them out. Now, the trouble is, apparently, it still requires some kind of a health care

00:02:47.620 professional to administer it. Why? Don't know. Because apparently, it's not a deep nasal swab. It's,

00:02:56.180 you know, it's toward the front of your nose. It's not the kind that some of you have had,

00:03:01.900 where they stick it up to your brain. So all you do is go rant, rant in your nostril,

00:03:06.680 stick it in a little liquid, no machines involved, and wait 15 minutes. And you definitely need a nurse

00:03:14.200 to do that, right? What? Yeah, somebody's saying it's because of liability. Well, whatever it is,

00:03:22.020 it could obviously be changed. I would say that if there is some kind of law,

00:03:28.500 I don't know, law, regulation, rule, or something that requires a health care professional for that,

00:03:35.540 let's change that today. Is there any reason that by the end of today, that should not already be

00:03:43.620 changed? Because there's no reason for it, right? Can we all agree that whatever dumbass reason there

00:03:49.600 is that you need a health care professional to go rant, rant in your nose? That's it? I'm pretty sure

00:03:56.760 that we can get rid of whatever obstacle that is and make more of them. Now, it's not quite where

00:04:05.580 we need it to be, where you've got like a $1 test that everybody can do at home three times a day.

00:04:10.880 That would be the end of coronavirus if we had that. But we're getting close. Getting pretty

00:04:17.400 close. I don't think it's good enough for contact tracing either, necessarily. But, you know,

00:04:25.200 there are a whole bunch of things collectively that are all working in the right direction.

00:04:31.180 So that's the good news.

00:04:32.180 As you know, you probably heard this, Trump has now been nominated a third time for the Nobel Peace

00:04:40.860 Prize. Three separate nominations. And what's interesting is each nomination is different.

00:04:47.780 In other words, he's not being nominated three times for exactly the same reasons. Three separate

00:04:53.600 reasons. You know, they're related, of course, but he's done enough now that you could have three

00:05:01.060 legitimate nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize at the same time. How would you like to be debating

00:05:10.340 against a guy who just got three separate Nobel Peace Prize nominations? Now, will he win any? I don't

00:05:18.860 know. You know, when I say any, will he win one? I don't know. But three nominations for three

00:05:26.660 completely defendable, defensible reasons is pretty strong. The Portland police are getting more

00:05:36.940 aggressive. One of the things that they're doing is trying to take the shields away from the

00:05:42.320 protesters. I guess they found a big stockpile of shields, and they went in and they took them away.

00:05:48.740 So I was reading about this on Twitter, and my first impression of that was, oh, that's good,

00:05:55.020 because the shields are obviously being used as offensive weapons and makes the protesters more

00:06:02.060 bold, and it's probably bad news, right? You don't really need a shield to peacefully protest,

00:06:09.160 do you? Explain to me why you would need a shield to peacefully protest.

00:06:14.980 protest. And so when I read the comments, I thought, well, those comments are going to agree

00:06:20.940 with me. Why wouldn't they, given that I'm so darn clever and right all the time? So I look at the

00:06:27.740 comments, and I'm waiting for the part where they say, yeah, that's a good strategy. Take the shields

00:06:32.000 away. I think that could make a difference. Maybe everything would be better if we do that.

00:06:37.360 But the comments did not say that. The comments said, well, it's obvious that they planned violence

00:06:42.980 because they took the shields away, meaning that it's obvious that the police were planning

00:06:48.720 violence because why else would they take the shields away? And I thought, okay, the first time

00:06:55.480 I read that, I thought, okay, well, there's always, there's always some idiot, right? There's always

00:07:00.000 somebody who has a weird opinion about anything. And then I read the next one. It's basically the same

00:07:05.520 opinion. Hey, those, those fascist cops taking our only protection away. They're going to kill us

00:07:12.100 with rubber bullets in the head now. And I thought, okay, well, two crazy people. And then I kept reading

00:07:19.340 and they're pretty much uniformly against police removing shields, which are basically weapons,

00:07:27.840 the way they're being used. They're used in a, in a offensive way, not a defensive way.

00:07:34.920 Different worlds. What can I say? But it does seem like a good strategy.

00:07:43.800 So I was chatting with my smartest Democrat friend. I mentioned him often because he's very smart,

00:07:51.520 legitimately very smart and very well-informed, but disagrees with me on everything Trump related,

00:07:57.400 which makes it fascinating. Because when you're disagreeing with somebody stupid or uninformed,

00:08:03.580 well, that's the whole story. There's nothing interesting about that, right? The reason you're

00:08:08.660 disagreeing is that you know some stuff and they don't know anything. So of course you disagree.

00:08:14.620 But when you run into somebody who is actually smart and well-informed and really paying attention

00:08:18.840 and they disagree and you pay attention too, and you think you're pretty smart, well, there's something

00:08:25.580 to learn here. So yesterday, I guess I mentioned something about the shy Trump supporters not

00:08:32.320 showing up in the polls. And my smartest friend, who actually knows quite a bit about this field,

00:08:39.840 said, that's not true. It's debunked. It was debunked in 2016. And when people looked into it,

00:08:47.580 they found that there was no such thing as shy Trump supporters in actuality. There were problems

00:08:53.340 with the polling, but it didn't have to do with people lying to pollsters. And I thought to myself,

00:09:01.060 that's weird, because the news that I've read was exactly the opposite, that it was confirmed and that

00:09:08.360 they found it. And I sent him an article that showed it was confirmed. It was in some major publication.

00:09:14.340 And he said, no, no, no, that was initially. Initially, they thought they existed. But when

00:09:20.600 the deep dive was done, it was confirmed. It was debunked. No such thing as these shy Trump supporters.

00:09:30.620 The very next morning, I see an article that Joel Pollack was tweeting around from Press Stevens in the

00:09:41.340 New York Times, in which he interviewed a shy Trump supporter, someone who wouldn't tell anybody she

00:09:48.760 worked with that she was a Trump supporter and gave her reasons. And it's important for the story. It's

00:09:56.560 not important in any other way, but because every time we tell a story about politics, you have to throw

00:10:02.260 in their demographic information. Someday, we won't have to do that. You know, I think I agree with

00:10:09.420 Martin Luther King. You know, someday, we won't have to throw in somebody's gender and sexual preference

00:10:16.840 and ethnicity, just to tell a frickin story. Right? I mean, nothing really bothers me as much as that, in terms 0.87

00:10:25.760 of, you know, the way we talk about things. But you have to do that. But you have to do that. And so this was a story

00:10:31.580 in the New York Times about a woman who was described as a 50-year-old lesbian who wouldn't want her

00:10:38.340 co-workers and friends to know she was a Trump supporter. And when she was asked about some details

00:10:43.420 of what she liked or didn't like, there was only one thing that she didn't like about Trump. She was an

00:10:49.780 ex-Bernie supporter, and she liked Trump's economics, and she liked a lot about him. But there was one thing,

00:10:56.480 it was one thing she did have a problem with. It was the fine people hoax, which she didn't know

00:11:04.180 was a hoax. She only had one problem with Trump, and it was the thing that never happened, the fine

00:11:11.180 people hoax. Now, as Brett Stevens asks in the article, essentially, I wonder if there's anybody else

00:11:20.400 like that. Is there anybody else out there who is just pretending to not be a Trump supporter but

00:11:27.240 really is? So I ran my highly unscientific Twitter poll to see if I could stir up some people. And

00:11:35.840 here's the question I asked. I said, have you lied to pollsters about your Trump support? Now, the way

00:11:43.640 I worded it was, I didn't say, would you lie? Because that's, that's sketchy. Because people

00:11:50.640 might say they'd lie, but maybe they're lying to me. And when they're actually asked, they might

00:11:55.600 just automatically say the truth. So I, so instead of saying, you know, would you lie? I said, have

00:12:03.640 you lied? Have you actually literally, physically, no kidding, have you actually lied to a pollster

00:12:12.300 about your Trump support? 18% of the people who answered said yes, which in just the few

00:12:21.180 minutes that the poll ran, you know, the numbers are clicking up like crazy. But just in the

00:12:26.420 first few minutes, I think maybe two minutes or so, that came to over 630 people who followed

00:12:34.720 me on Twitter, who happened to see that tweet, who happened to answer it, which is, you know,

00:12:40.240 a very shrinking group of people, 630 of them have actually lied to pollsters. Now, it's

00:12:47.460 a Twitter poll. So can I, can I be sure that these numbers, you know, are reliable in any

00:12:52.760 way? No, no, it's an unscientific poll. But do you think that 630 people within two minutes

00:13:00.700 or so would have lied to me, but would not lie to a pollster? Maybe, right? I mean, possibly,

00:13:11.980 possibly there were 630 people who said, I think I'm going to lie to this cartoonist.

00:13:17.600 Why? What, what reason would you have to lie on my Twitter poll? You know, if it, if it had

00:13:24.740 been an hour later, I would say, oh, maybe trolls have, have spotted it and a bunch of

00:13:30.800 Democrats are coming in to mess up the poll or something like that. But it happened in

00:13:34.880 two minutes. In two minutes, it just lit up with people who said they lied, literally already

00:13:40.640 have lied to real pollsters. Do you think that's fake? It could be, right? It could be. The whole

00:13:48.920 point of it being unscientific is you just can't say for sure it's true. It could be 630

00:13:56.300 liars just sprang up just like that. Maybe. What do you think? I don't know. My belief

00:14:03.600 is that however many of the 630 lied, there's still probably plenty left over to suggest there's

00:14:11.220 a big number there. Now, let me ask you this. In 2016, if you were going to vote for Trump,

00:14:17.360 had he not won, or even if he did win, did you think there was a big risk to the rest of your

00:14:25.100 life? Maybe you thought a little bit, but probably not that much. I don't remember being terribly

00:14:32.580 concerned that my reputation would be destroyed forever in 2016. But 2020? In 2020, you could

00:14:44.300 actually get killed for being identified as a Trump supporter. Let me say that again. You could

00:14:49.860 actually get killed, and at least one person has as far as I can tell, for being a Trump supporter.

00:14:56.940 If I were to, let's say, go to some business or personal thing in Berkeley, California down the road,

00:15:04.620 road. And I was just, I just happened to be there for my own personal reasons. And I happened to walk

00:15:10.620 out the door, and accidentally, I didn't know it was going to happen, but I came into the middle of a

00:15:16.180 BLM protest. Suppose I would, suppose somebody recognized me. Think about this. If I just walked 0.96

00:15:24.460 down the door and didn't know there was a protest outside, I just walked into the middle of it,

00:15:28.580 and somebody recognized me, would I be safe? No. No, I would actually be in mortal danger. My life

00:15:38.100 would be in danger just by walking outdoors, if somebody recognized me. Now, if I go where there's

00:15:45.120 more normal people than in Berkeley, I don't feel afraid. But I can't believe that 2020 is going to be

00:15:51.860 like 2016. Because the level of literal, physical, economic danger in saying you support Trump is

00:16:00.820 through the roof compared to 2016. All right. Here's a little dog not barking situation for you.

00:16:08.380 Watch CNN and MSNBC as long as they're talking about Trump's taxes. And here's what you want to look

00:16:16.680 for. Look for somebody talking about his taxes on one of those two networks who actually knows taxes.

00:16:25.960 I haven't seen it yet. Now, I would guess it's probably happened. You know, I would think at least

00:16:32.180 once they would have had somebody on who understands taxes. But I don't think so. Have you seen it yet?

00:16:39.920 Have you seen anybody on either of those networks who could explain why the tax code is why it is,

00:16:47.200 what it is, and why Trump's taxes are the way they are? I don't think so. And when I pointed that out

00:16:54.940 on Twitter, someone helpfully pointed me to a CBS interview in which they did try to bring on a tax

00:17:01.540 expert. How do you think that went? When the tax expert was asked about all these sketchy looking

00:17:08.940 Trump deductions and why he didn't pay taxes, did the tax expert, someone who actually understands

00:17:16.240 taxes, say, my God, that's a travesty. How can he get it? How can he do that? Some law must have been

00:17:22.980 violated or at the very least something ethical and unethical and immoral happened. Do you think

00:17:29.540 that happened? Nope. The tax expert said, yeah, that's, those are just standard deductions. It's just the

00:17:37.160 way, basically, this is the way you do it. This, this deduction was available. So he took it.

00:17:43.920 One of the things I learned by watching that, and I've been waiting to hear about this because I

00:17:48.840 hadn't heard about it at all, is there, the, the point of the audit is that the, and he is being

00:17:55.160 audited, Trump is, is there was a $72 million tax rebate, I guess you'd call it. In other words,

00:18:03.240 the government paid him $72 million that he had previously paid in taxes. They gave it back.

00:18:10.420 And I didn't know what the situation was, but apparently it was this. Obama, in the Obama era,

00:18:17.460 they passed a law that said you could, you could take into account losses for earlier prior years

00:18:26.200 than before. So the only thing that happened is that Trump initially did not have any way to write

00:18:34.000 off that $72 million. He'd already paid it. It was just gone. It was just money that was gone. But

00:18:39.780 Obama changed the law specifically for companies like his, where they had a, they had a loss and they

00:18:48.180 hadn't, they didn't get the benefit of it because it was too far away. So all Trump did, apparently,

00:18:54.280 his lawyer said, Hey, there's a new law. It totally applies to us. So we're going to apply for this

00:19:01.000 $72 million. Apparently they filled out their paperwork. Apparently the government looked at

00:19:07.000 it. Apparently the government said, yeah, that looks good. And they mailed him $72 million.

00:19:11.660 So if you think that whatever happened there was some sketchy thing, I doubt it. I mean,

00:19:18.740 I'm not even sure why it's being audited because it sounds like it was pretty straightforward,

00:19:22.720 but that's not, that's not the way you heard it from the New York times. Is it?

00:19:27.620 Yeah. Did you hear that in the first 24 hours or so? Did anybody explain to you that all Trump did

00:19:34.580 his, his, his accountants did was they applied for, uh, a rebate that Obama made available?

00:19:42.440 That's it. That's all that happened. That whole part of that story there. Now there may be more to it,

00:19:47.940 which would be the subject of the audit, but it's not in evidence as far as I know. All right. Uh,

00:19:55.160 here are some other things that people who don't understand how finance and taxes work

00:20:00.520 have been thinking. The first thing is, I think that a lot of people believe that when they hear that

00:20:07.780 Trump owes $400 million or whatever the number is, I think that people who don't understand how money

00:20:15.040 works, when they hear that Trump owes $400 million, they think that he's $400 million in the hole,

00:20:23.760 meaning that if he paid back all that $400 million, he would have less than zero money left over.

00:20:31.280 You know, he would use up all of his money to pay off the $400 million. That's not the case.

00:20:36.860 He's just a guy who has some debt. And apparently, according to him, it's not much debt compared to

00:20:44.860 his assets. So like anybody who's got, let's say a good income, but they also have a home mortgage,

00:20:51.440 the home mortgage doesn't mean that they owe more than they have. It means there's a little bit of

00:20:56.380 debt in a larger picture. So that's the first thing that the, the money morons don't understand is

00:21:02.740 that that debt isn't necessarily a big deal. The other thing that I see them jabbering about today

00:21:10.160 is there's some indication that Ivanka was paid a $26 million consulting fee. Now, we don't know if

00:21:19.540 this is true yet, right? But this is the way it's being reported. And it's being reported like that's

00:21:25.820 some kind of an illegitimate write-off that, that he's, he's figured out how to save taxes

00:21:32.480 by paying his own daughter a salary, not a salary, but a consulting fee of $26 million. And that's

00:21:41.160 pretty tricky, right? It saves some taxes there. Yeah. All, all, all the, uh, all the people in the

00:21:48.440 news are pretty sure that looks a little sketchy because, you know, normal people can't do that,

00:21:54.320 right? Well, here's the part they're leaving out. The amount that Trump saved in taxes for his

00:22:03.780 company by paying Ivanka is exactly identical to the amount that Ivanka paid in taxes because she 1.00

00:22:10.800 made an extra $26 million. There's no difference. The government got exactly as much taxes, as far as

00:22:18.160 we know, unless there was something weird going on with their taxes that year. But as long as they're

00:22:23.140 both in the top tax range, which they would be, the taxes just paid a different way, but it doesn't

00:22:30.060 change it. So it's basically a mechanism for, let's say, it's, it's an estate planning mechanism.

00:22:37.600 But how about this? Do you think Ivanka was worth $26 million in one year?

00:22:44.600 I do. I do. Yeah. If you look at what Ivanka adds to the whole operation, you know, both in the White

00:22:56.280 House and then, and then you look at presumably what she added to the whole operation when she was,

00:23:02.080 you know, in private business. If you tell me that that wasn't worth $26 million, whatever it was,

00:23:08.480 you know, I don't know the details, but I would say that's in the range. That doesn't even seem,

00:23:14.720 that doesn't even seem high. But here's the cool part. If Trump could pay Ivanka $26 million,

00:23:22.420 which I think we'd agree was completely optional, right? Optional in the sense that if he was bleeding

00:23:29.240 cash and couldn't pay his bills, would he have paid Ivanka $26 million? I don't think so. So it sounds

00:23:37.100 to me like he had enough cash flow that paying off his debt wasn't going to be a big problem.

00:23:43.120 Because if you can't pay off your debt, I don't know that you would necessarily move $26 million

00:23:48.900 to your kid as part of your estate planning. I think you'd keep it and pay your debts because it

00:23:54.860 would be better to keep the big operation afloat than it would be to temporarily just to hide some

00:23:59.960 money there and hope that that worked out in the long run. So that's the next thing we learn is

00:24:05.240 that probably, at least before coronavirus, which hurt everybody, he probably had enough money to

00:24:10.740 pay off his debt. Now here's the other thing. The accusation against Trump is that if his debt is

00:24:18.940 really big, that he's at risk of blackmail because he'll need those Russians or whoever to pay off his 0.80

00:24:27.320 debt. To which I say, okay, the amount of money that would have to be paid off for Trump, let's say

00:24:34.940 $400 million. Let's just pick a number for a conversation. Let's say that the Democrats are

00:24:40.040 concerned that Russians will pay off $400 million for Trump and therefore he would do whatever they

00:24:47.020 wanted to get them to pay that off. I don't think that's the case. But just say that you're a Democrat

00:24:52.680 and you believe that. Here's the thing. Is there some other politician? Is there some non-billionaire

00:24:59.920 politician, a senator, a president? Is there somebody you can imagine who would not be influenced

00:25:07.300 by $400 million? Because paying off somebody's debt is only one of many ways you can give somebody a lot

00:25:16.700 of money if you were inclined to do that. It's fairly easy to do legally. You just make sure that

00:25:23.200 there's some investment in something that their brother-in-law was investing in. You just make sure

00:25:28.520 that somebody in their circle got a lot of money and it's sort of untraceable. So if Russia wanted to

00:25:35.040 put a shitload of money into bribing an American politician, they don't need to depend on them

00:25:42.580 having debt. That's sort of an irrelevant detail. If you said to Bill Clinton, hey Bill Clinton,

00:25:52.040 I think I can arrange to give you $400 million. And let's say Bill Clinton was clever and he said,

00:26:00.660 whoa, don't write me a check. That would be obvious. But you know what you could do? You could

00:26:06.100 donate to the Clinton Foundation and they give me a pretty big salary and they pay for my jets and

00:26:11.640 stuff. So that would be legal-ish. So why don't you do that? My point is, if you're talking about

00:26:19.560 gigantic amounts of money, which is the only thing you're talking about, if you're talking about

00:26:23.620 paying off Trump bank loans, it has to be a big amount of money. That same big amount of money

00:26:29.040 would be just as influential for anybody. They don't have to be in financial trouble. Nobody says

00:26:36.460 no to $400 million if they can obtain it legally. So the risk of blackmail is just sort of the same

00:26:44.140 everywhere. If you're talking about millions of dollars, everybody has the risk. I would argue that

00:26:50.560 Trump probably has less risk of being bribed because I just don't think he would need the trouble.

00:26:56.740 There's not enough upside. All right. Oh, and it turns out that the $72 million that Trump could apply

00:27:07.620 to for based on his past losses was because of the casino abandonment. So when he got out of the

00:27:13.500 casino business, that was the loss. So we know exactly what the loss was. We know it was a real

00:27:18.100 loss. We know that the casino thing didn't work out. That was real. And we know he applied for it

00:27:23.480 with an Obama regulation. It all looks pretty good to me. I mean, I don't know. Ann Coulter,

00:27:31.300 who I consider one of the smartest people who comment on stuff. Also an attorney, right? Very,

00:27:39.660 very smart. But I don't know how much she knows about finance and tax law, which would put her in

00:27:46.840 good company with 99.9% of the public. But she tweeted today that as an example of how the law allows

00:27:56.960 real estate billionaires to get away with murder, how about fixing the utterly corrupt tax code?

00:28:03.360 So in other words, even Ann Coulter is agreeing that Trump and other billionaires are getting away

00:28:09.960 with something because they're not paying taxes like little people. And she noted that she paid 50% 0.98

00:28:16.160 a year, as do I. And here's the thing I'm not sure she quite understands. What exactly would you change?

00:28:26.140 How would you change that to make it better? Would you, for example, say that if you're a billionaire,

00:28:34.800 you can't write off expenses? Or you can't write off all of your expenses? What would be the justification

00:28:41.020 for saying that billionaires uniquely can't write off expenses? And what would happen if you did?

00:28:48.100 Suppose you said, all right, here's the law. Everybody owns small business. You can write off your expenses.

00:28:53.300 But if you're a billionaire, you can't, or you can't write them off all. What would that do?

00:28:59.680 It would probably change their behavior. There would be certain expenses, because they can't

00:29:03.900 write them off, that they wouldn't incur. They would avoid. And the reason that the tax law exists the way

00:29:10.740 it does is to encourage business and encourage the greater good, even though there's some minor

00:29:17.620 inequities that happen because of it, it's for the greater good. So how exactly would you change it?

00:29:23.060 Would you change the capital gains laws? Because if you do, that disrupts a lot. You know, there's a lot

00:29:30.500 that depends on that. So you could collapse, you know, the real estate business by changing a law like

00:29:36.200 that. You could just collapse the entire business. Is that what you want?

00:29:39.020 How about somebody says a fair tax? There's no such thing as a fair tax. That's not a thing. You can't

00:29:48.220 design a tax system that's fair. If you think that that can be done, you need to look into it. There

00:29:55.100 are only tax systems that can burden some group more than others. That's it. But you can't do something

00:30:01.420 fair. That's not one of the possibilities. Because in the end, people always think that whatever their

00:30:07.740 taxes is are unfair. It's subjective. That's why you can't get there. So if anybody can come up with

00:30:13.620 some specific thing that could be changed that wouldn't collapse the economy or destroy an industry

00:30:19.620 that's vital to the United States or something like that, I'm all ears. But I think there's some kind of

00:30:25.680 the people who don't know tax laws, I think they imagine there's some obvious fix here. It's like,

00:30:32.760 well, it's obvious. It's sort of obvious. This is all wrong. But if you tweak this, things will be fair and

00:30:39.700 the economy will be great. It doesn't really work that way. It doesn't work that way at all.

00:30:50.540 Yeah, the flat tax is a talking point, but it's not. There's a reason that it's never gotten anywhere.

00:30:57.900 It's because as soon as you start digging into the details, it all falls apart. You know, I mean,

00:31:03.600 if it could work, that'd be great. But I think that ship has sailed. There's also the accusation that

00:31:11.280 Trump wrote off his haircuts. And on Twitter, that is being seen as an obvious, unethical thing that's

00:31:18.740 no fair, and it shouldn't be allowed. To which I say, well, there's somebody who doesn't understand how

00:31:25.140 taxes work. Because is anybody suggesting that the $70,000 he wrote off for haircuts,

00:31:33.080 is anybody suggesting that the IRS has disallowed that? They haven't disallowed it. If it's not

00:31:39.740 disallowed, it's allowed. All right? If your accountant is not putting in deductions that get accepted,

00:31:49.920 you need to get a better accountant. But this is an example of a deduction that was accepted.

00:31:56.620 Now, why would his haircuts be allowed and yours would not? Why is it that you can't write off your

00:32:02.520 haircut? Well, let me give you a possibility. Is it possible that there was a contract employee who was

00:32:11.780 part of the cast of, I guess, The Apprentice, because the haircuts were related to his work on The

00:32:17.880 Apprentice? And did that person get paid an actual fee for being on call to play with his hair and to

00:32:25.640 cut it, and probably also to make sure it's in good shape for the camera? That's an employee.

00:32:33.440 That's an employee who probably he paid, as opposed to the production company paying.

00:32:39.340 If you pay an employee, it doesn't matter what they do. It doesn't matter that they cut your hair,

00:32:46.120 or if you pay a contract person. So it probably was a perfectly reasonable deduction in the context of

00:32:52.580 being on a TV show, and in the specific context that Trump's hair is part of his brand. You can't compare

00:32:59.920 that to anything else. All right. And there's lots of questions about family members acting as

00:33:10.860 as project managers and acting as consultants. And Chris Eliza is writing about this as if there's

00:33:18.440 something wrong with it. Almost certainly not. You can hire your family members. There's nothing wrong

00:33:25.860 with that. You can overpay your family members. You're allowed. You can overpay your family members.

00:33:32.980 And in this case, because so much money is involved, it just transfers who pays the taxes.

00:33:38.920 So, you know, if Eric Trump is paying more taxes and Donald Trump is paying less, it's the same amount.

00:33:46.820 It's just moved to a different pocket. In case you didn't know, over at Locals, for those who don't

00:33:54.220 know, there's a subscription service that I'm part of. Also an investor, by the way. Full disclosure.

00:34:00.300 I have a small investment in it. And that's where I do some of my, well, all of the stuff that I don't

00:34:07.280 put on Twitter that's worth seeing. So the provocative stuff, and I'm putting a lot of

00:34:11.400 micro lessons there on success and persuasion, etc. Things you don't see on Twitter. But Greg

00:34:18.460 Gottfeld has joined Locals. So if you want to see the stuff that you're not seeing elsewhere from Greg,

00:34:25.620 go to Locals.com and look for Greg Gottfeld. And you'll be glad you did. So look for that.

00:34:35.620 So the big debate is tonight, of course, I'll be I'll be tweeting. And I was watching a Brit Hume

00:34:42.280 interview. And I hadn't seen Brit Hume use these words before. And he was talking about Biden,

00:34:50.400 and he described Biden as, quote, plainly senile, plainly senile. Do you remember, it wasn't long

00:34:58.620 ago, we were saying things like, well, he may have lost the step. Or we're saying things like,

00:35:06.300 well, you know, he, he doesn't have the same mental acuity. But day before the debate or day of,

00:35:15.240 Brit Hume says he's plainly senile. Now, the reason this is important is that if you if you don't

00:35:22.000 follow Fox News, if you were to rank, you know, the opinion people to the news people in terms of

00:35:28.720 credibility, you know, that the more opinion in the opinion they are, you would say they have less

00:35:34.500 credibility in terms of the factual part. And the more news oriented they are, the more credible they

00:35:40.900 are. So on the, on the most credible end, you'd have Brit Hume, right? You know, Brett Baer,

00:35:47.720 Brit Hume, you know, these guys are considered even by independent people as fair and, you know,

00:35:54.500 pretty much down the middle kinds of players. And even he's willing to go on national TV

00:35:59.540 and say, plainly senile. It's that plainly world word that, that got me, because plainly says,

00:36:06.920 you don't have to talk about it. We're beyond the point where this is a conversation of whether

00:36:12.780 or not it happened. We're, we're completely at a point where it's plain. You know, I see it,

00:36:19.920 you see it, we all see you senile. And I can't believe he used that word, just put it out there.

00:36:26.140 So Trump's strategy tonight. I don't know if he has a strategy per se, but I would guess that he's

00:36:34.600 going to try to get Biden worked up. Don't you think? It seems to me that the most obvious thing

00:36:43.640 that Trump would do is try to figure out how to get under his skin and make him mad. Now, Biden knows

00:36:49.960 that because everybody will be telling him, he's going to try to make you mad. Don't get mad. Don't

00:36:55.780 get mad. So I think you're going to see the Biden over smile. Do you know what I mean by the Biden

00:37:02.700 over smile? It's where he has to listen to Trump say bad things about him and bad things about Hunter,

00:37:10.560 but he wants to act like he's not fazed by it. So he does the over smile. Let me do the over smile

00:37:16.020 for you. It looks like this. Yeah. If you're listening to this on the podcast, it's not very

00:37:24.400 interesting. So he squints his eyes really high and he just does this really fake looking smile

00:37:31.080 that doesn't match the eyes. That's how you know it's fake. So look for the Biden fake smile.

00:37:37.600 And of course, Trump is going to go after Hunter, right? Because that's the most obvious thing that

00:37:43.600 would get Biden worked up. So if Trump is playing it right, he should probably not introduce any new

00:37:55.420 ideas that would be headlines of themselves. Because I think he wants to not make news except for whatever

00:38:03.660 news Biden generates by being, you know, by being tweaked by him. I would love to see Trump make a full

00:38:13.420 throated play for the black vote, which he might. Wouldn't you like to see Trump just say, look, 0.59

00:38:20.920 what have you done for the black population of this country? Now look what I've done and already 1.00

00:38:26.600 plan to do. Look at my portfolio of what I'm doing for black America, compare it to everything you've

00:38:33.500 done and give me a freaking break. These are not even close. We're not even in the same zip code

00:38:40.960 of what I've done compared to what you did in 47 years, which amounted to what putting black people 1.00

00:38:47.420 in jail. That's what you did. So I think Trump could tell a story that would just kneecap the black vote

00:38:55.500 quite factually. He wouldn't have to add any hyperbole at all. He could just lay it out there because

00:39:02.600 at this point it's just factual. And I don't know what Biden does with that except go for the fine

00:39:09.840 people hoax. And here's the thing I know is not going to happen, but I would love for Trump to debunk

00:39:19.060 the fine people hoax explicitly. Now, if Joe Biden brings it up, which there's a very high likelihood he

00:39:28.200 will, what will Trump do if the fine people hoax is brought up? How do you deal with it?

00:39:35.700 Here's how I'd do it. Given that they have a time constraint and so Trump would not have time to go

00:39:42.040 through the whole, well, it's a fake news that they edited this part out, et cetera. If you wanted to get

00:39:47.860 to like the most clean quotable part, I would say, here's what I said that day. I said that the

00:39:56.120 white nationalists and the neo-Nazis should be condemned totally. That's my exact quote. If you

00:40:03.380 look at the tapes that you think I said fine people, you'll see that they cut that out to make it look

00:40:09.180 like I was talking about a different group. So it's fake news. I said this sentence exactly without

00:40:16.940 prompting that they should be condemned totally. Isn't that right, Chris Wallace? Now, Chris Wallace

00:40:25.120 he's not going to do fact checking, but maybe he could help out with the question, if you know

00:40:32.260 what I mean. All right. So there's a, it looks like the grand jury stuff is going to be released

00:40:44.200 on the Breonna Taylor situation. So we're going to get to hear the public is the exact deliberations

00:40:52.180 in the grand jury. I don't know how often that happens, but I think that's a good idea.

00:40:57.740 Transparency will probably help. Um, the, uh, Elon Omar situation with the ballot harvesting

00:41:05.940 is getting interesting, but I'm worried that it's going to go into the, uh, into the, um, the news

00:41:14.200 black hole. What, what would be a bigger story than undercover film of Elon Omar's, uh, campaign

00:41:24.020 people seem to be paid by the campaign, uh, allegedly, uh, collecting all these mail-in ballots

00:41:32.440 and doing sketchy things with them. What, what would be, you know, what would possibly be a bigger

00:41:39.200 story than that? And it's sort of disappearing, isn't it? I, I think the CNN is largely just

00:41:46.580 ignoring it. MSNBC largely ignoring it. Uh, they may have done a mention of it and then just moved on.

00:41:54.180 So it's the, the ability of the news industry to make something go away is the scariest thing

00:42:02.760 that you'll ever see. It's one thing that they tell a story that's not true. I mean, that's,

00:42:09.200 that's annoying and vexing and it shouldn't happen, but you sort of are used to that.

00:42:15.620 But making a story go away, that is actually a true story. It's just making it go away.

00:42:22.720 That's dangerous. That's really dangerous. I saw a suggestion that, uh, one way to promote Trump is

00:42:31.040 to change all your hotspots to Trump 2020 so that anybody who's looking for a hotspot, uh, they're,

00:42:38.180 they're going to run into Trump 2020. So they're going to see a lot more Trump supporters, but they'd

00:42:43.200 be a little bit underground because all you'd see is the hotspot. You wouldn't necessarily know where

00:42:47.460 it came from. I thought that was pretty funny. So if you know how to change your hotspot,

00:42:53.460 change it to Trump 2020. I'm not sure if that would conflict with other people or not.

00:42:58.720 Um, is there any reason why by next election, is there any reason that we won't solve this

00:43:08.520 voting problem? Because, you know, I get that the coronavirus caught us off guard and, you know,

00:43:15.580 so we're not ready to do the, the mail-in ballots as, as well as we would like to be prepared.

00:43:21.080 But by next election, and maybe even by midterm, doesn't it seem to you that we should have this

00:43:28.360 completely solved? And the way to completely solve it, and I can only think of one, is with

00:43:33.320 facial recognition. There has to be a way, both for home, you know, mail-in votes, but also for in

00:43:41.700 person. There has to be a way to use facial recognition to guarantee you're getting the right

00:43:48.700 person voting. Now, the, the company Clearview is, I think, the leader in that area right now.

00:43:57.160 And they seem to be, they do, I think, the best job of, uh, of dark faces. You know, sometimes you

00:44:03.680 get the false, false identifications with some of the, the lesser technologies. I think Clearview

00:44:09.840 is the leader in that in terms of getting actually, actually accurate facial recognition. So in two

00:44:16.960 years, there's just no excuse for not having facial recognition as at least an option or at least

00:44:25.000 something you're testing. Um, all right. Do you believe that the polls are, uh, with Biden winning

00:44:34.740 by a lot? Does that sound right to you? Because it seems that the average of the polls have Biden up

00:44:40.340 by, well, I don't know, six nationally, nine percent in Pennsylvania, something like that. Does that sound

00:44:46.480 right to you? That doesn't even sound close to right to me. Um, but we'll see. We shall see.

00:44:56.020 All right. Um, that's all I got for now. So I'm going to be, uh, watching the debates with

00:45:07.100 Christina tonight. I will be, uh, tweeting as I, as I see things develop. Um, you know, there,

00:45:15.000 there are predictions that this will be the most watched presidential debate of all time.

00:45:20.340 And when I heard that, I thought to myself, yeah, you know, I think that's true. I think this will

00:45:25.580 be the most watched presidential debate, but you know what else it could be. I'm not going to say

00:45:32.300 that this is a prediction, but it is not impossible. It will be the most watched televised event of all

00:45:39.700 time. I'm not going to predict that that's the case, but it's possible because of the, the specific

00:45:48.120 dynamic of, of it being Trump, it being 2020, uh, the stakes seemed so high. And the fact that,

00:45:55.060 um, the real fun here is watching Biden try to keep it together and watching Trump, the world's

00:46:02.080 greatest trash talker, try to set this guy off his game on national TV. Now, if you can tell me

00:46:10.440 there's anything you've looked forward to watching more than that, I'm not sure I believe you.

00:46:16.240 If you, if you, if you told me every sport, you know, literally there's no sporting event I would

00:46:24.120 want to watch more than this. There is also no comedy. I would be willing to watch more than this.

00:46:32.500 There is no first run movie that I would want to watch more than this. This is literally the most

00:46:42.680 anticipated thing on television that I can even remember. I mean, I don't remember anything that

00:46:50.580 I've anticipated this much. I mean, I've enjoyed watching a Superbowl now and then, but you know,

00:46:56.040 those were just sort of routine. I wasn't really, you know, I wasn't really loving it. Uh, I just sort

00:47:02.840 of did it because it was a party time. This might be just maybe the biggest televised event of all time

00:47:13.220 because there's nothing to compete with it, right? TV is awful. What else are you going to do?

00:47:21.000 Why wouldn't you watch this? All right. That's all I got for now. And I will talk to you maybe tonight.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams - September 29, 2020

Episode 1139 Scott Adams： Debate Preview, I Explain Trump Taxes to Artists, Ballot Harvesting, Shy Trump Supporters

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