Real Coffee with Scott Adams - Episode 1158 Scott Adams： Biden's Mansion, Facebook's Bad Fact-Checking, The Sweden Mystery, Mask Controversy

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody, come on in. I didn't see you there. There's still time to get a good seat

00:00:09.580 for the best part of the day. Yeah, how many of you are experiencing a peak moment right now

00:00:17.880 because you just said to yourself, what's the best thing I could be doing right now? And you

00:00:22.460 thought, I could be watching Coffee with Scott Adams. And it's not just watching, it's participating.

00:00:29.080 And in order to participate in exactly the right way, which is the only way you want to do it,

00:00:35.380 all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or a flask,

00:00:40.500 a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the

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00:00:55.960 It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now. Go.

00:00:59.080 Yep, just as good as I thought it would be. I know yours was good too.

00:01:08.160 All right. Starting with the most important news first. I saw a tweet about a product that I have

00:01:17.460 to have. It's a pot for a plant, for an indoor plant, but it's got an animated face on the outside of the

00:01:27.440 pot. And the face tells you how happy the plant is. So if the plant has just the right amount of water,

00:01:35.060 the animated face is smiling. And if the plant needs a little water, it's droopy or dying. And if it's too

00:01:41.020 hot, it does something else. And you have to see the animation of it. Because when you first hear

00:01:47.180 this, you think, well, that's a, you know, that can't be much more interesting than that little

00:01:53.420 singing fish that you put over the fireplace. But I'm here to tell you that faces have an impact on

00:02:02.980 humans. And when you put faces on inanimate objects, or let's say non-sentient objects,

00:02:11.140 they do become important to people. So I did this experiment years ago. I did something called the

00:02:19.440 Dilber Ultimate Cubicle. I worked with a design company called IDO. And for it was just a publicity

00:02:26.500 stunt. But we built and designed an ultimate cubicle. So if you had to work in a cubicle,

00:02:33.520 what would be the best design? So we put in some cool little features. And some of them were just

00:02:37.900 funny. But one of the features was that the guest seat was sort of like an airplane,

00:02:45.440 one of those seats that the flight attendants use, where you just fold it down from the wall.

00:02:51.300 But as soon as you folded down the guest seat, it would start a timer. And at the end of the timer,

00:02:58.280 your phone would ring into your cubicle, so that you could take the call and say, ah, sorry, I got to

00:03:03.520 take this as a way to get rid of your visitor. But one of the other things we invented, which I still

00:03:09.880 think about, because I liked it so much, was an artificial plant, a little flower that was in a

00:03:17.120 little artificial container. And it could sense when you came in the office. So when you would walk

00:03:26.080 into your cubicle, the flower would be wilted, and it would go to attention, like it was happy that you

00:03:31.640 were there. And when you left, it would sense that there was no motion in the cubicle, and it would

00:03:36.720 wilt again. So every time you came back to your cubicle, it would be like coming home to your dog who

00:03:42.940 is always happy to see you, except it's a plant. And it would just go whoop, and it would be happy

00:03:47.580 to see you. And yeah, I know what joke you're making. Go ahead, make your private jokes at home.

00:03:54.020 Okay, good. I think you're done with it. But the general notion of animating your environment,

00:04:03.920 so that things respond to you like people, is really strong. I have to tell you, many of you now,

00:04:10.100 I have an Amazon digital device in my office. But I also have one in all of the major rooms of the

00:04:19.340 house. And all day long, I talk to it. I walk into a room, and I ask it about the temperature. I ask it

00:04:27.220 what time it is. You know, I ask it where my packages are. I ask it to define words. I ask it to do math

00:04:34.960 for me. You know, so all day long, I'll be thinking about the news. I got about 8,000 retweets on this

00:04:43.600 tweet. So I thought it would be worth sharing it with you. Here's what I said. If you took away

00:04:49.820 Trump's excellent instincts, and you took away his clear policies, his entertainer skills, his persuasion

00:04:57.000 powers, you took away his mind, you took away his energy, you'd have Joe Biden. Just just leaving

00:05:04.600 that out there. Here's one of the things I think is a big problem with Coronavirus policy. One of the

00:05:13.680 problems is people don't have the same risk profile. So you can't have one policy that works for

00:05:19.340 everybody. But the other problem is, I'm pretty sure that we're all lying when we talk about the

00:05:28.260 Coronavirus publicly. And here's what I mean. If if you say, Scott, you've got to go make a speech

00:05:35.600 about the Coronavirus. I would say, All right, I'd better say what what is good and proper to say in

00:05:42.580 public. So I would modify my public comments. So they were appropriate for public consumption,

00:05:49.520 which might be different from what I'd say privately. But I suspect that we're all doing that.

00:05:55.500 And it's hurting us. And it goes like this. Publicly, if you say what should what should we do

00:06:01.540 about the Coronavirus, Scott, I would say something closer to this. I'd say, you know, we've got to

00:06:07.780 protect everybody. We've got to do everything to flatten that curve. Safety, safety, wear your masks,

00:06:14.760 socially distance, I would say all the right things. Because I certainly know what I'm supposed to say.

00:06:20.920 It's pretty obvious what the socially correct thing is. No doubt about it, right? Now, I might try to

00:06:26.900 try to nudge people toward opening the economy, but I would be kind of soft about it, right? I'd be like,

00:06:33.600 well, we need to get back to work. But we got to be safe. But we need to get back to work. But what

00:06:40.500 would I say publicly? What would I say privately? Maybe I wouldn't even say it to another person,

00:06:46.120 because it's so ugly. But let's go even more private. What are the things you're thinking

00:06:51.640 that you're not saying out loud to anybody? To anybody? Does it sound like this?

00:07:00.060 You know, I'd kind of be willing to kill a few hundred thousand strangers to get back to work

00:07:06.900 and get back to regular life. How many of you are having that thought? It goes something like this.

00:07:14.800 Yeah, it could even be somebody I know, could be somebody I care about. But I'd still do it.

00:07:21.360 You know, if nobody knew I was the one who made the decision, let's say there was a lottery and the

00:07:29.760 authority to decide what we do with coronavirus is randomly distributed to a citizen. But it's

00:07:37.600 private. Only the person who gets to decide knows their decider. Nobody else will ever know which

00:07:45.820 citizen made the coronavirus policy. And what would that citizen do? There's a very high likelihood

00:07:53.040 that they would not do the same thing they would do if everybody knew their name and that it was their

00:07:58.680 decision. I feel like we humans are far more, I don't want to say evil, because living is not evil.

00:08:10.360 You know, just having a life is not evil. But we certainly would be willing to kill a lot more

00:08:16.760 people than we will say out loud. Now, of course, there's no generalization that that holds for all

00:08:23.940 people. That's what makes it a generalization. So I'm certainly not going to say that every one of

00:08:29.880 you watching this has that feeling. But there's a lot of you. And here's another way to look at it,

00:08:36.240 which I'll bet you are looking at it this way privately. But I'll bet you've never said this

00:08:41.740 out loud. And it goes like this. If you kill a young person, you have maybe deprived them of,

00:08:50.560 I don't know, 60 or 80 years of life. If you kill a 90 year old, you might be depriving them of

00:08:58.660 one or two years of life on average. So if you were to look at the coronavirus deaths

00:09:05.620 from coronavirus, given that they skew heavily toward old people, and you were to count up the 0.99

00:09:11.540 number of, let's say, life years deprived from the total public, you would find that relatively

00:09:18.580 speaking, there weren't that many years taken away from the public, because they didn't have many,

00:09:25.300 it was the older people dying. Now, if you go to war, and you send your 20 year olds off to war, 0.60

00:09:31.060 and a lot of them die, that's a that's a gigantic difference in years that could have been lived

00:09:37.640 that were not. So when we've got this lockdown situation, which we know is going to have a big impact

00:09:44.180 on younger people, if one young person dies, because the lockdown caused them to be sad or overdose or

00:09:53.940 committed suicide or something, if one young person dies, let's say a 10 year old, you may have deprived

00:10:01.760 90 years of life just from that one person. Whereas how many 80 year olds would have to die

00:10:10.160 to equal the number of years that one 10 year old lost? You know, if you start doing the math by number

00:10:18.040 of years, I've seen in the comments, a number of you have had this some form of this thought,

00:10:25.940 but you can't say it out loud, can you? Right? I mean, I can do it because I have no shame.

00:10:32.660 But you can't say it out loud. And I wonder if our policy would be different, if we could be honest

00:10:37.840 about that. Although I'm not sure we should be, because there's part of me that says, our instinct

00:10:44.020 to be good in public is probably one you don't want to lose, you know, your instinct to be nicer

00:10:49.540 in public than you are privately. Maybe we should keep that, right? Because I have some other benefits.

00:10:59.080 All right, Raul Davis on Twitter. He's a CEO branding expert, CEO and branding expert or CEO of a

00:11:09.320 branding expert or something. But he tweets this, is it a tactical advantage for Republicans

00:11:15.760 to have so many Democrats vote early? Because if you know what the Democrats who are voting early

00:11:23.960 are doing, does that give you still enough time to rush in with your funding and your rallies and

00:11:31.140 whatever? If there's some place that looks like it's going to be close, and you think, oh, we can tip

00:11:36.940 that one. Because we know enough about the early votes to know it's close, but we're losing. So you

00:11:43.880 go in and just tip it over the edge. It's a really good question. I don't know the answer, because I

00:11:51.060 think you'd have to know more than I know to know the answer to that. But I think it might be an

00:11:55.140 advantage to go second. There's so many cases where going second is an advantage, strategically.

00:12:02.020 One of the things that's not being talked about, and really should, is that I would estimate this

00:12:10.700 is just sort of, you know, top of my head estimate based on no knowledge whatsoever. But I think that

00:12:19.240 this election, no matter which way it goes, no matter who wins, something along the lines of 20% of the

00:12:26.540 public will be triggered into a fairly severe mental health crisis. And that's not a joke. Dead

00:12:35.220 serious. Completely, completely serious. As soon as that election is over, and we know who won or who

00:12:43.520 is likely to win, it's going to be the biggest mental health crisis we've ever had. And I don't think

00:12:52.120 that's an over-claim, do you? I don't think that's hyperbole. Because if you see what happened in the

00:12:58.960 last four years, that's a big mental health crisis. So, I was just reading one of your comments there

00:13:11.700 about QAnon. We won't talk about that today. So anyway, moving on. We've got a big mental health crisis

00:13:20.420 coming, and I feel as though we need to prepare for it somehow. Now, I've said before, and I'm going

00:13:28.920 to follow up on this point, that I don't think it's just the shy Trump supporters you have to worry about

00:13:34.160 in terms of the polls being somewhat inaccurate. I think you have to worry about the pranksters.

00:13:40.900 Trump supporters. Because I have a really good sense of Trump supporters, I think. Because I feel

00:13:49.700 like, you know, I've lived among them enough, and I am one of them, and I just feel like I have a sense

00:13:57.260 of how Trump supporters on average think. Now, I could be wrong. I could be very wrong. But it's my sense

00:14:05.140 that they all have this common thought. We call it the zeitgeist, if you will. And the common thought

00:14:11.380 is, wouldn't it be funny if we lied to the pollsters, and they had no idea that Trump was going to win

00:14:18.340 again. And the margin that he looked like he was behind on election day was even bigger than the

00:14:25.300 margin in which he overcame and beat Hillary Clinton. Now, part of you might say, I don't want to

00:14:32.280 tell this stranger because nothing is really secure in our digital world. But I think some people just

00:14:40.240 think it's sort of fun to lie to the pollsters. And if you don't believe that's a thing, allow me to

00:14:48.320 read my comments to ask you about that. So I said, it isn't the only, it isn't only the shy Trump

00:15:00.260 supporters, blah, blah, blah. So I made the same point in the tweet. But let me read you some of

00:15:05.000 the comments. Now, keep in mind, this is just a tweet I just sent out a few, you know, a few minutes

00:15:10.820 ago. So I don't know how many people have seen it. But just some of the comments about people who

00:15:17.520 lied to pollsters. I haven't had the opportunity, but I think I would. This is true. Talk to some

00:15:28.500 Friday that told me they've been doing it. I've done this. These are different people who just

00:15:32.860 on my comments. I've done this in the last two polls. Let's see. I did my patriotic duty.

00:15:46.240 A gent in our social circles, blah, blah, blah, did it. In fact, I started doing it with this. 1.00

00:15:53.800 I'm doing it. People are, I was called and surveyed about, I was called and surveyed for

00:16:03.420 about 20 minutes. I made up about half of my opinions. I do that if they ever ask me, count

00:16:09.320 me in the second group. In other words, they do it too. My uncle lied to pollsters. That's

00:16:17.500 exactly what I would do. They deserve it. That'd be me. This is true. I always lie to this because

00:16:25.440 I can. If a poll ever contacted me, I'd definitely lie. They called me. I hung up. Agree 100%.

00:16:34.240 I'm a Trump supporter who has lied twice to pollsters. Why? Because I had time.

00:16:40.080 I had time. Because I had time. That's exactly what I'm talking about. This is the dad joke

00:16:50.080 that they don't see coming. Because the dad joke here is that it's so easy to prank this

00:16:57.960 if everybody is just sort of thinking in the same way. Wouldn't it be funny? And I think

00:17:03.560 there are enough people who at least had the idea in their head of, wouldn't it be kind

00:17:08.040 of funny? It'd be kind of funny if I maybe skewed the polls a little bit. So we'll see if that

00:17:15.500 happens. So I don't know if you know this, but a lot of conservatives are preparing for a civil war.

00:17:26.200 Are you aware of that? I don't know if there are any Democrats who are preparing. But I'm hearing

00:17:34.800 whispers and suggestions and information that suggests that some conservatives, maybe lots of

00:17:44.260 them, I don't know, are literally preparing for a civil war. Now that's not to say they expect it.

00:17:50.880 I think it's just people who like to prepare. You know, Republicans are very prepare-y. Probably

00:17:58.140 there are more preppers who are Republican, do you think? I don't know. I don't know if that's true.

00:18:03.860 I just feel like I have a sense that more Republicans would be preppers. And there's at

00:18:11.260 least one group who's organizing generals by geography. So in other words, they're already

00:18:20.920 organizing who the local warlords will be on the conservative side. I've been approached, but you

00:18:29.860 don't have to approach me to be a warlord because I already am. So if you live where I live in Northern

00:18:37.600 California, and the system goes down, and the government fails, and this is literal, there's no

00:18:47.240 joke part of this, you should rally around me. Only because I'm telling you I'm available. If there's

00:18:54.060 nobody else you know who's available to be a warlord, and I'm going to avoid violence. I mean, I'm not a

00:18:59.880 warlord who likes violence. But if you just want to be organized, and you want to figure out how to

00:19:04.940 survive a civil war or the breakdown of society, I will be happy to be an organizer in my Northern

00:19:12.760 California area. So if you don't have somebody better, I'd be happy to hand over that power to

00:19:19.460 somebody else. Because the odds of being assassinated if you're the warlord are really high.

00:19:24.940 Really high. I prefer not to be assassinated in a civil war. But if you need one, I'm a pretty good

00:19:35.420 choice. Because I don't have a lust for power of that type. It's the last thing I'd want would be to

00:19:42.200 have some kind of government job. And so I'd probably be a reliable warlord just to keep things

00:19:50.980 stable until we recover from the breakdown of society. So that's a real offer, by the way. 100%

00:19:58.600 serious. If you need somebody to be in charge temporarily, because I definitely don't want to do

00:20:04.000 it permanently. I will just automatically assume that role if anybody wants it. All right. USA Today

00:20:14.520 did the most fascinating article. And if you've been following the what I call the very fine people

00:20:22.540 hoax, this is a really good chapter. And I tweeted about this so you can follow it that way. So USA Today,

00:20:29.700 I think it was yesterday, had an article in which they were fact checking the people who said the fine

00:20:36.260 people hoax is a hoax. So that would be me. So they're fact checking people like me. Here is, now how

00:20:44.880 do you think that went? Because the transcript is very clear. So the fine people hoax is a hoax. You can

00:20:52.540 just read the transcript and it's obvious. So when USA Today, a major news organization, goes

00:20:59.660 to fact check it, it's going to be pretty easy, right? Here's the transcript. Boom, we're done. Is

00:21:07.500 that what they did? No, they fact checked the fine people hoax without linking to the transcript, I

00:21:15.040 think. Now part of what they did is they wrote a big convoluted article in which they mixed in stuff

00:21:21.880 about the proud boys, so that you couldn't really tell what they were talking about. It's intentionally

00:21:27.340 confusing. Huh. Why would they make it intentionally confusing when it's as simple as just showing the

00:21:35.740 transcript? That would be as simple as anything could be. And yet, it's really confusing. You read

00:21:43.060 it and you're not sure if they've debunked it or they haven't debunked it. But here's my favorite

00:21:48.140 sentence from this hot steaming pile of shit called an article. It says, a few days after the rally,

00:21:57.860 Trump was asked by reporters about the protest, to which he responded that there were very, quote,

00:22:04.360 very fine people on both sides. And this is in USA Today, yesterday. This is actually in a major

00:22:12.480 publication, this next sentence. And it says, however, some people say they believe Trump also

00:22:20.200 condemned white supremacists and neo-Nazis as part of his very fine people statement. What? Some people

00:22:29.660 believe it? It's the transcript. I don't believe it. It's the transcript. It's not really a case of a

00:22:41.880 QAnon kind of belief. I wouldn't call it religious belief. It's not exactly like believing the aliens have

00:22:52.360 landed and have abducted people. Those, I would say, would be in the category of beliefs. This is a news

00:23:01.640 organization that knows where the transcript is. They can just show it to you. And they lead off by saying

00:23:10.120 some people believe it. Now, what is the implication of saying some people believe it? The only thing you

00:23:18.960 should take away from some people believe it is that it's not true. And if you say some people believe

00:23:27.360 it, before you get to the details of whether it's true or false, are you not trying to tell your reader

00:23:34.560 that it's not true? Because otherwise you would have said something closer to this? Some people have

00:23:41.560 pointed out that that's exactly what the transcript says. How hard would that be? See how easily I wrote

00:23:48.520 that sentence? Some people have pointed out that the transcript shows he clearly disavowed this group.

00:23:56.560 So you have to, if you want to be just amazed at what's happening and how corrupt the media is and how

00:24:07.300 cognitive dissonance is just screwing up heads, because there's a little bit of corruption in the

00:24:13.000 article, I think, or maybe it's all just cognitive dissonance, or maybe it's just bias and they're trying

00:24:20.180 to hide the fact that the hoax is a hoax and they're trying to be accurate while making sure that you

00:24:27.920 didn't understand the point. It's really, it's jaw-dropping when you see how they handled it. Anyway,

00:24:34.880 go take a look at that. Interestingly, Twitter does not make the same mistake that Facebook makes

00:24:44.260 when they fact-checked this hoax. Over on Facebook, there is still a warning where somebody put the

00:24:53.080 accurate quote from the actual transcript, and Facebook put a fake news warning on the actual,

00:25:02.080 exact, accurate quote. In other words, you could just look at the quote. It's exactly the same words,

00:25:10.620 and they put a fake news warning on it. Now, here's the interesting part. Twitter doesn't,

00:25:18.920 and I tested it by tweeting Facebook's, you know, Facebook's fake news and, you know, said the actual

00:25:29.080 fine people thing is hoax. Twitter won't put a notice on that. So what does it mean if Twitter thinks

00:25:38.480 it's a hoax and Facebook is banning it as not true? What happens when your social media platforms

00:25:46.780 don't have the same opinion on the fact? I guess they can just, they can just tell their audiences

00:25:53.460 one, you know, one's not a fact, and the other one is silent on it, allowing you to believe that maybe

00:25:59.220 it is. It's a weird, weird situation we've got here. Are you following the story about the Joe Biden

00:26:07.840 DuPont mansion? So apparently back in, I think, the 70s, the Bidens bought a mansion that had been

00:26:15.740 owned by the DuPonts, and he paid $185,000 for it, which back in the 70s was big money, big money.

00:26:23.140 At the time, he was earning $42,000 a year as a government employee. If you own 42, if you're making

00:26:30.960 $42,000 a year, and the story I read didn't say whether Jill Biden was working then, I don't know

00:26:38.160 if she was being a mom or she was still working, but maybe her teacher salary was on top of that.

00:26:45.900 I'm not sure. But the mansion is this big, sprawling mansion that was described as a money pit that was

00:26:55.160 in disrepair. So the reason he got it for such a low price, so you should not be so impressed that

00:27:01.700 he paid millions of dollars for this mansion, he got it for a really low price. But it was described

00:27:07.340 as a money pit, which he spent 20 years putting money into. Have any of you ever put money into a

00:27:15.060 home? Has anybody ever done a renovation of an older home? How'd that go? Do you have any idea

00:27:24.460 how much it costs to renovate a mansion? Now, renovating a normal house is pretty darn expensive,

00:27:34.400 but maybe you could do some of the work yourself if it's a regular house. Do you think Joe Biden did

00:27:39.260 any of the work himself in his sprawling mansion? I doubt it. I feel like you would have to hire

00:27:46.240 professionals to do that kind of work. The debunk on this, the fact check on this, is that if you look

00:27:54.580 at the price he paid, it's so low and it was such a fixer-upper that it's not really a case of he

00:28:01.620 couldn't afford it. And there's evidence that he was struggling with money at the time, which is more

00:28:06.780 evidence it was a reach for him, but it wasn't that expensive. So it's all okay. There's no evidence of

00:28:13.040 anything that's going wrong here, right? Well, I believe that that fact check depends heavily on

00:28:21.160 people not being good at math and not being good at finance. If I look at a house that cost $185,000

00:28:30.020 and probably needed three times that amount for upgrades, although that would be spread over a

00:28:37.100 number of years, there isn't any way in the world that Joe Biden could afford that freaking house,

00:28:43.160 right? So the way it was reported is here's the numbers. It's obvious this wasn't so outlandish,

00:28:49.580 but I look at the numbers because I have a deep background in looking at numbers. I've told you

00:28:55.540 this before on Periscope. If you have lots of experience analyzing data and numbers, you get kind

00:29:02.620 of a six cents and you can just look at something like this and go, ah, nope. And I would like to put

00:29:09.040 that to those of you who are watching, who have finance experience. Let's say you have experience

00:29:15.540 in economics, finance, maybe you've even had some experience fixing up homes. And I want you to

00:29:22.840 check my intuition. My intuition is just looking at these numbers. There's no way that this is the

00:29:30.200 whole story. Not even close. We're not even in the zip code of this being debunked. Not even close.

00:29:38.700 That's my intuition. So I'm looking at the comments and I'm seeing the people who have

00:29:43.640 that kind of experience, apparently. Yeah, I'm seeing people basically say the same thing.

00:29:52.180 Now, you can't trust that because there are a lot of anti-Biden people here who want to believe

00:29:57.180 there's a crime. And I wouldn't say I want to believe that. I don't want to believe that.

00:30:03.060 And genuinely, I don't want any bad things to happen to the Bidens or anybody else.

00:30:08.040 But I don't see how these numbers work. It doesn't even look close. If you look at the comments,

00:30:15.100 you'll see pretty much mass agreement with my point. I haven't seen anybody yet who said,

00:30:20.880 oh, yeah, those numbers work. Yeah. Yeah, they're not even close to working. Now, if you say to

00:30:28.420 yourself, and I saw this defense, but Scott, Scott, Scott, Scott, Scott, Scott, Joe Biden has been

00:30:36.320 revealing his entire financial stuff, his tax returns. He's been doing that for decades. If there

00:30:43.800 were any kind of financial impropriety, it would be right there. It'd be there in the numbers. And by the

00:30:50.100 way, in the recent years, he did make a bunch of money, but legally, by giving speeches and writing

00:30:55.500 books and stuff, which is true. Well, you know, here's how people bribe rich people. If you didn't

00:31:09.800 know this, this might make your head spin a little bit. Bribery doesn't happen by somebody writing a

00:31:16.700 check to a senator. That's not a thing. I mean, and if it is a thing, they usually get caught.

00:31:23.200 That's why you don't do it. Here's what it would look like to bribe somebody without getting caught.

00:31:30.780 Hey, one of your kids is starting a company. Boy, did that company get well funded.

00:31:37.580 Totally legal, right? You could fund, you could agree to give a loan or to be an investor

00:31:45.900 in a child's company, child of a senator. There's nothing illegal about that. You might even make

00:31:53.300 an investment where you would not have ordinarily made an investment. It might not be in the realm

00:31:58.700 where you usually invest. You could do something that Joe Biden is invested in. Perhaps Joe Biden

00:32:07.160 has invested in some small business, and you know it. Perhaps you could become the biggest customer

00:32:13.400 for that small business. Again, it's completely legal to buy things on the free market, so you're just a

00:32:22.240 big customer. It just happens that the person who's an investor in that company might be a senator.

00:32:28.700 So there are probably a million ways that you can launder bribes to famous people. So you're not

00:32:35.360 going to find it on tax returns, right? You're just not going to find it there. So I don't have any

00:32:42.500 information that says Joe Biden ever took a bribe, but I'm telling you how to find it and what it would

00:32:49.340 look like. That's all I'm saying. I've got a question about health care. I have this nagging

00:32:58.560 feeling that the only reason we can't solve health care, and let's call it health care insurance so

00:33:05.300 the pedantic people don't come after me and say, Scott, Scott, Scott, there's a difference between

00:33:11.160 insurance and health care. I know. I use them interchangeably because everybody knows what

00:33:17.260 you're talking about. But we are talking about insurance, and I wonder if the only reason this

00:33:22.720 hasn't been solved is because the wrong people are working on it. And when I say the wrong people

00:33:28.740 working on it, I feel as though it's a simplification problem, meaning that it's so complicated, the whole

00:33:37.180 field, that if anybody tried to come up with a plan, it would also be really complicated. And if they tried

00:33:44.280 to sell their plan to the public, the public wouldn't be able to understand it, and they legitimately

00:33:49.860 couldn't know if it would be a good idea or not. So I feel as if the problem with health care is that

00:33:56.260 the complexity is sky high, and nobody yet who is good at handling complexity has made that their

00:34:05.000 main job. You know, there are lots of people who are good at handling complexity, but they're not

00:34:09.400 working on that problem. They're working on other stuff, I guess. And let me give you a sense of how

00:34:18.500 simple it would be to solve conceptually, right? It's not really simple, but conceptually it's

00:34:25.400 simple. Do you understand that distinction? In the real world, it would be terribly difficult,

00:34:30.400 but it shouldn't be, and this is why. In rough numbers, I haven't updated this recently, but I'm

00:34:38.140 guessing somewhere around 10% of the public does not have health insurance. I need a fact check on that,

00:34:44.140 but it's somewhere in that range, about 10%. We'll use that for our talking point. All right,

00:34:49.240 so if 10% don't have health insurance, the other 90% do, could you just raise the cost of health

00:34:57.600 insurance to the 90% who do by 10% at the same time you're doing enough health care cost reduction

00:35:06.460 stuff, that it could lower the price by 10%. In other words, you lower the cost of health care by

00:35:13.460 making it more competitive, getting rid of rules and obstacles and free market obstacles,

00:35:21.400 just make it a more efficient system. You could probably squeeze 10% out of it, don't you think?

00:35:27.680 Maybe some of it would come at the cost of highly profitable health care providers.

00:35:33.180 Some of it might be hospitals who are doing this service and not getting reimbursed.

00:35:40.040 You know, there's some benefit there if they start getting reimbursed.

00:35:45.680 So you might be able to find a situation where you say, here's the deal. In three years,

00:35:50.540 we're going to try to lower the cost of health care 10% and move that burden onto the people who have

00:35:55.940 it. They will subsidize the people who don't have it. Maybe you make the subsidized health care

00:36:02.680 not so good that people don't want better health care. So maybe they'll still want to work to get

00:36:09.140 better health care, but they'll have health care insurance. Somebody's saying 9% as my fact check number

00:36:16.920 of people who don't have insurance. So let me summarize this. If the entire health care insurance

00:36:22.820 problem is 9%, are you telling me we can't fix that? Because I think our health care insurance goes

00:36:30.340 up, what, 5% a year? I need a fact check on that too. That number just came out of my butt. But I think

00:36:38.280 your regular health care insurance probably goes up 5% a year, right? I'm just guessing.

00:36:43.720 So adding an immediate 10% at the same time, you're saying the other part of this plan is we're going

00:36:52.480 to go nuts on trying to lower the cost so we can get closer to break even there on those two things.

00:37:00.740 So that's my observation. I feel as though you could simplify this to the point where it should

00:37:09.140 be solvable. I just don't think the right people are working on it. You take a Hillary Clinton who's

00:37:14.420 an attorney and you say, go try to fix health care, you're not going to get a simple explanation

00:37:19.980 or a simple solution. You're going to get the complicated one. And if all you have working on it

00:37:26.300 is lawyers, it's just going to be complicated. So get rid of the lobbyists and lawyers and maybe

00:37:32.840 it's solvable. All right. I guess Twitter has still locked the New York Post Twitter account

00:37:40.620 because they still have that link to the Biden story, the Hunter Biden story. So we're watching

00:37:49.020 that. I'm seeing pundits say that Trump needs a closing argument, something like what he's planning

00:37:59.440 to do in the future to excite his base. Does that track with you? Do you feel as if that's missing?

00:38:06.220 I know it's missing in terms of pundit talk. You know, if I were a pundit on TV, maybe I'd say the

00:38:12.360 same thing. By the way, I will be, I will be a pundit on TV tomorrow, tomorrow, Monday. So I'm rebooked

00:38:19.320 for MSNBC. At this point, it would be sometime in the 6 to 7 p.m. hour, Eastern time. So adjust for

00:38:29.600 your time zone. But Eastern time, sometime in the 6 to 7 p.m. Monday, I'll be on MSNBC, if all goes well.

00:38:37.140 But I don't think that Trump needs a closing argument. I don't think he needs to tell us

00:38:46.840 what new things he's going to do next year beyond what he's already said. Because everything that

00:38:52.460 he's doing is what I'd call a system. So in other words, he's got a philosophy about not starting wars

00:39:01.300 overseas. Does he need to tell us, I'm not going to start any wars in the next four years?

00:39:07.940 He doesn't need to tell us that's an objective or a goal, because he has a system of just, you know,

00:39:14.860 getting out of any foreign entanglements. So I feel like I know what his plan is. Don't do any of those 0.99

00:39:22.100 foreign wars. I don't need him to tell me what he's going to do with China and negotiating, because

00:39:29.060 he's in the middle of doing it, and it probably will take a lot more time to get it done. I don't

00:39:34.300 need him to tell me what he's doing about cutting regulations, because that's a system. Again, it's

00:39:41.940 not something you do and then you're done. It's a regular system where, I don't know if they're still

00:39:47.440 using it, but it was, he'll cut X number of regulations for every new one that's proposed.

00:39:53.740 He's got a system. I don't need him to tell me what he's going to do with Supreme Court

00:39:58.400 nominations, because he has a system. Here's my list from the Federalist Society. I'm going to

00:40:04.260 pick from the list. I get it. I get it. I don't really need much more detail than that. I don't

00:40:10.580 need to know what he wants to do with taxes exactly, because he wants them less. If he can get away with

00:40:18.060 it, I don't know if he can get away with it, but I don't really need him to tell me more about that.

00:40:22.920 I know he'll try, if he can, to lower taxes. So I feel as though that's an empty comment,

00:40:31.480 that he needs some kind of a, you know, a new thing he's doing. The difference between,

00:40:36.940 you know, in my, this is my big picture view, is that Republicans are better with systems.

00:40:42.620 I'm going to create a system and we're just going to keep running this system, whereas the

00:40:47.660 Democrats are more about, we want everybody to be equal, but we don't have a system for getting

00:40:54.180 there that would work. Socialism is a pretty bad system, if you go full socialism, that is.

00:41:01.480 All right. The biggest mystery in the world to me right now is still Sweden and why we don't

00:41:11.400 understand Sweden. Now, you are probably under the impression that Sweden is doing great, right?

00:41:18.300 That they, they didn't close down, they didn't go mask crazy, and although they had a lot of initial

00:41:24.780 deaths, you believe they reached herd immunity. They did not, not even close, and that the current

00:41:32.160 situation is that they have very low, low infection rate. Those are both false. Sweden is about average.

00:41:40.360 They're not, they're not low on infections, and they're not a hot spot. They're sort of in the

00:41:48.180 middle. In order to reach the middle, they, they had far higher deaths, but they also had a freer

00:41:55.700 society. Here's what we don't understand. Why is it not a hot spot? Is it, is it just vitamin D?

00:42:04.480 Because they supplement in Sweden all year round. They take cod oil or something. And so it could

00:42:12.260 be that. Is it social distancing? I've been told the Swedes are just natural social distancers. 0.98

00:42:18.380 Maybe. Is it luck? Is it travel patterns? What is it? And why don't we know it? If we don't

00:42:26.700 understand Sweden, do we know anything? I feel that's the problem. If we don't know what's going 0.98

00:42:33.920 on in Sweden, we probably don't understand this virus enough to know that any of our policies

00:42:40.520 are good policies or bad policies. It's like we don't understand it. The other thing we don't

00:42:47.320 understand, and this has been blowing my mind for months, when I saw some epidemiologist expert

00:42:53.640 on TV, saying that we don't know why any virus goes away. Did you know that? We don't know why

00:43:01.500 any virus goes away. Why is it that the seasonal flu that we get this year will not just come back

00:43:08.020 next year? Do you know why? Because the experts don't know why. And it's not herd instinct, or it's not,

00:43:14.520 it's not herd immunity. It's not. We know for sure that that's not the reason it stops, but we don't

00:43:22.240 know why it stops. And that's what the experts say. If we don't know why a virus burns out,

00:43:29.080 is Trump necessarily crazy for saying it'll just go away? Because that seems to me completely

00:43:35.700 compatible with the best expert opinion on viruses, that they do just burn out, and we don't know why.

00:43:44.100 Now, you could argue that this one's different. Maybe it was engineered. We still can't know for sure.

00:43:49.960 But the Trump statement that it will just go away, I think is completely compatible with science.

00:43:58.580 The part that he got terribly, terribly wrong is that he was optimistic about it in terms of the

00:44:04.240 timing. I don't think he has a reason to be optimistic about the timing of it. But I would say

00:44:10.040 his statement that it will go away and we won't know why is probably dead on. And would you bet against

00:44:17.020 it? If you had to take a bet right now, would you bet against Trump, who said that the coronavirus

00:44:24.480 will someday just go away? Don't bet against that. Now, it might be a year from now, could be two

00:44:32.980 years from now. But I would not take the bet that the only reason it goes away is because we reached

00:44:39.720 some herd immunity with either vaccinations or just people getting infected. I would bet on Trump

00:44:47.960 being right. It's just that his timing was so wrong that I think that's the big problem.

00:44:54.680 All right. Dr. Scott Atlas, whose name needs to be changed, because every time President Trump is on

00:45:05.640 TV and he says, Scott, ah, I go, what? And then he goes, Tlis. I go, oh, not me. And then he says it

00:45:14.660 again, Tlis. Okay, still not me. Still not me. I keep expecting the television to talk about me and

00:45:24.820 it doesn't often enough. But I guess Twitter banned one of his tweets in which he was saying something,

00:45:33.600 he said, I think this is the one where he tweeted, masks work? No. And then he lists LA, Miami, Hawaii,

00:45:41.480 Alabama, and Israel. I believe he's saying that they use a lot of masks in those places,

00:45:48.100 but their infections are still high? I don't know. Is that what he's saying? I don't even know the

00:45:54.940 point of it. And then he says, WHO, World Health Organization, colon, widespread use not supported,

00:46:02.860 meaning masks. So he did this tweet that people interpreted as anti-mask and it got banned by

00:46:11.000 Twitter. But then he later, he clarified by saying that what he said was compatible with

00:46:18.760 current policy, which is current policy is, of course, you should use a mask if you're going to

00:46:24.160 be close to people. But if you're not going to be close to people, don't go crazy with masks.

00:46:30.080 I think he's walking a pretty murky line there. I'm not sure that Dr. Scott Ellis is helping with

00:46:40.280 clarity, but there is something he's helping, which is he's a really good bad cop, right? Because you

00:46:48.660 need a bad cop. And it works really well in a Trump scenario. It was good that North Korea 1.00

00:46:57.380 knew that there were some bad cops saying we should go hard at North Korea, because then Trump could

00:47:03.880 be the good cop. And I think this is another one of those cases. As long as there is a doctor who's

00:47:11.020 an advisor who's going out there and he's, he's, I'll say he's at least pushing against the dogma of

00:47:17.280 masks. He's not saying don't wear a mask. He's very clear about that. In the right situations,

00:47:23.480 wear a mask. But he's pushing the boundary of that. And that allows Trump to not necessarily

00:47:30.400 be the one who's always pushing that boundary. But he does want the economy to open up. So I feel like

00:47:36.780 maybe Dr. Atlas, by taking all the heat, it might be good. It might be good for Trump in terms of

00:47:45.500 persuasion. I don't know if it's good for our health. I don't know if it's good for anything else.

00:47:49.900 I'm not the expert. But persuasion wise, it might work. By the way, if you believe that Sweden has

00:47:58.760 achieved herd immunity, and you believe that the herd immunity is much lower, like 10 or 20%,

00:48:04.500 the, the head expert in Sweden doesn't think they're at herd immunity. So Sweden itself doesn't

00:48:11.680 believe that's what happened. So you should probably not believe that either. My best guess,

00:48:16.760 if I had to, if I had to look at all of these different outcomes in different countries,

00:48:21.820 with all these different policies and different situations, if I'm trying to find something that

00:48:27.620 could explain it, the best explanations would be cultural differences and vitamin D. I feel like

00:48:36.220 we're down to that. It feels like vitamin D and cultural differences about, you know, distance.

00:48:43.360 Might be just that. That's what I'm thinking. If I had to put a bet on it, I would bet on those two

00:48:49.440 things. Somebody says smoking too. Smoking has a, seems to have, some say it's worse, and some say

00:49:00.560 it's protective. Don't they? So I think that's an unknown. And I've heard also that marijuana smoke

00:49:07.560 could be a protectant, but I wouldn't recommend it. I know I haven't gotten the coronavirus yet. So

00:49:15.180 let me say this. If marijuana is a protectant, or they say it protects your lungs,

00:49:23.860 you know, on some level, I feel like it's obvious that it would. Because if you put smoke into your

00:49:33.740 lungs, I feel like it at least would cover some of the surface. Maybe there's less, less for the 0.98

00:49:41.680 virus to stick to if there's a covering of soot on your lungs. So I can imagine it could work either

00:49:49.440 way. I can imagine it could make you worse or make you better. I'm no doctor, so don't take any

00:49:53.720 medical advice from me. All right.

00:50:00.100 Somebody says, man, this guy is really ignorant.

00:50:05.420 Usually when people call me ignorant, it's because they know less than I do.

00:50:09.160 So we'll delete him in a moment. Here, excuse me while I delete that guy. Block. All right. That's

00:50:18.440 all I got for today. And I'll talk to you tomorrow. All right. Periscope's off. All of you YouTubers,

00:50:28.340 you're still with me. I'm just going to look at your comments. Somebody says, most pneumonia is

00:50:34.740 caused by colds. Is it? Colds? Are you just imagining it helps? Yes, I am just imagining that

00:50:47.680 marijuana helps. I don't have any information on that. Clinton Foundation, Charles Ortel. I don't

00:50:55.880 know why you're mentioning him. Is there some new news about Charles Ortel? I don't even know who that is.

00:51:04.740 All right. That's enough for now. I'll talk to you tomorrow.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams - October 18, 2020

Episode 1158 Scott Adams： Biden's Mansion, Facebook's Bad Fact-Checking, The Sweden Mystery, Mask Controversy

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