Real Coffee with Scott Adams - Episode 3059 CWSA 01⧸01⧸26

00:00:00.000 people so my voice is still a little sketchy we'll see if it improves but we'll get as far

00:00:07.920 as we can today in that thing we all enjoy this time we'll do this not much news today

00:00:17.260 but we'll do the best we can come on in and while you're streaming in this would be a

00:00:25.700 perfect time to remind you why you're here you're here for the second day to sip and all you need

00:00:34.140 for that is a cup of monger glasses tank your chalice or stein canteen jugger flasks of vessel

00:00:40.640 of a kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee join me now for the unparalleled pleasure

00:00:48.120 the dopamine of the day the thing that makes everything better is cold that's right the

00:00:53.440 simultaneous stuff happens now

00:00:56.680 so so good well let's check in on the news it's the first day of the year

00:01:10.340 if you don't have your Dilbert calendar believe it or not you can still currently get one

00:01:17.400 at the end of i don't know probably just take a few days you wouldn't miss much

00:01:23.040 well there's a new robotic skin for robots so researchers have developed a neuromorphic robotic

00:01:35.020 electronic skin so apparently the skin that you put on your robot could judge intensity danger

00:01:43.860 an injury risk so do you think that's gonna be the killer app for robots skin would you get a robot

00:01:54.920 with skin just because it's easier at identifying pain it seems mean would be mean to the robot

00:02:03.420 i think it's slightly more slightly more likely that the killer app will be sex because it's no fun to have

00:02:14.100 sex with a robot if you're just banging metal but what if the robot could feel every

00:02:22.020 every sensation are you telling me that if you get the robot soft enough

00:02:28.400 and you gave it a skin so it could it could act as though you're doing something good to it

00:02:34.400 like oh are you telling me that's not the killer app

00:02:39.160 of course it is

00:02:41.040 of course it is

00:02:43.400 but do you know why uh the robot industry keeps talking about

00:02:48.480 hands you know really good hands

00:02:51.200 and they keep talking about um you know stuff like skin but what they're not talking about

00:02:59.440 because they can't do it is real intelligence

00:03:03.840 so we'll see what happens from that

00:03:07.240 there's an article in arts technica talking about how this might be the year

00:03:14.320 that uh ai gets sort of uh i won't say debunked but that the skepticism about ai will

00:03:23.520 you know be a little more obvious so after we've got what two years of ai

00:03:29.120 and it still can't do actual generic reason so but it's got a good hands

00:03:36.560 that could do somersaults it might have good skin but you know it can't get past the hallucinations

00:03:45.760 and uh it doesn't look like there's any way to do it that we know of if there was a way to do it

00:03:51.920 meaning make the ai actually intelligent like we want it to be you would already see it

00:03:59.760 there's no way you wouldn't have seen it by now so uh i think the rest of the world is catching up

00:04:08.000 with what is hype and what is real now i'm going to take some credit

00:04:14.640 for being one of the first people to say after i played with the large language models a little bit

00:04:21.120 i was one of the first people to say uh-oh this doesn't look like you could ever have a path

00:04:27.840 to general reasoning and now i would say that i went from something like you know in the five

00:04:35.600 percent of opinions to more like the 75 percent so i'm going to take a win for that prediction

00:04:46.320 tesla apparently is now going to offer a car rental service in michigan that has no dealers and no

00:04:54.240 middleman and for sixty dollars a day you could probably just go in and get your get your vehicle

00:05:01.440 you probably use an app or something to to reserve it but why wouldn't you do that if i had a rental

00:05:10.320 company near me where i didn't have to talk to anybody at the counter and for sixty dollars i could go

00:05:17.600 make get a self-driving car it wouldn't matter if i had a regular car

00:05:23.360 i would still rent a car because the self-driving car would be so much better

00:05:29.120 apparently it's limited to where i could go and we don't know if there'll be others but it seems

00:05:35.040 like one of the best ideas teslas have

00:05:39.600 renting a self-driving car without the milkman

00:05:42.320 so remember my skepticism about the story that ukraine had tried to kill

00:05:53.600 putin by bombing his residence remember what i said about that i said there's something wrong with

00:06:01.440 this story but this doesn't look right because ukraine would have certainly known he wasn't there

00:06:10.080 so why would you do it and now the wall street journal is reporting that uh you put that according

00:06:18.400 to the us intelligence people there was no attack on his residence that was made up and so uh what

00:06:28.400 they do say is that something was attacked deep in russia but it wasn't the residence it wasn't

00:06:35.040 wasn't even that close so did you wonder about the fact there were never any photos you never saw a

00:06:43.200 photo of the damage now maybe that was for security reasons but you know when i said it was a false flag

00:06:52.160 people question me and maybe you're right about that but there's only one thing better than a false flag

00:07:00.480 it would be a false flag that never happens because then putin gets to claim something happened

00:07:08.800 without any damage nobody died he could just say oh uh let's let's just say he attacked my residence

00:07:15.920 and then he's he's got a uh he's got a little more propaganda from attacking back yeah so i don't

00:07:26.160 think i don't think it was a planned false flag i think it was an opportunistic false flag that once

00:07:35.280 something blew up nearby somebody had the idea hey why don't we say he attacked the residence

00:07:42.000 propaganda propaganda so i saw an interview with the founder of android palmer lucky and he was talking

00:07:56.240 about the risk of china infiltrating your hardware here's something i didn't know there were multiple

00:08:04.720 times we discovered actual wiretap electronics and product samples we were given

00:08:12.000 so apparently china gives them samples of stuff and when we look at it it's literally wiretap

00:08:19.440 and he said the uh the risks apply to everything that's made with chinese components from computers

00:08:26.640 servers phone instruments he said the super micro incident in the united states where certain server

00:08:32.640 farms that had chinese components here's the fun part chinese components smaller than a grain of rice

00:08:41.040 were stealing very sensitive information from the computer and then he asked how many chinese computers

00:08:48.240 exist in critical utilities and infrastructure and military he reckons millions at least millions

00:08:58.880 so here's another example where whatever you thought was how bad it was

00:09:05.120 and the the it that i'm talking about is fraud or debt or anything else as soon as you think you know how

00:09:12.400 bad it was you find out it's a million times worse a million times worse i would not have even been able to

00:09:22.240 imagine that they had put components the size of a grain of rice in everything they shipped

00:09:36.320 so that's uh that's a wake-up call well speaking of that in china uh according to news max trump is saying

00:09:45.200 that we set a world record in attracting investment to the united states and that we attracted more

00:09:53.280 more investment to the u.s than china attract and uh he says that's entirely because of tariffs

00:10:02.720 now i think it's true that the the recent um surge in investments is entirely because of tariffs

00:10:11.120 so i'm going to give him the yes on that but you might remember that around 2018 when i lost my steps

00:10:20.320 on to fentanyl that i started persuading uh as hard as i could that china was unsafe for business 0.83

00:10:28.800 now i think that made a dent um so i think there was a priming that happened so that the businesses

00:10:40.080 were already disinclined to put their money there if they had a choice of putting it somewhere so between

00:10:47.360 the persuasion that china is unsafe for business which was uh it started out as me just saying it

00:10:57.360 and people telling me i was crazy almost nobody agreed there were a few people who knew what china

00:11:04.320 was up to that did agree that china was stealing all of their ip and spying on us and had bad intentions 0.53

00:11:11.600 but for the most part people said scott scott scott yeah there's no way this spigot is going to get

00:11:18.320 turned off there will only be more investment in china and i disagreed so here we are the investment in

00:11:27.680 the u.s seems to be far exceeding that in china at the moment but i will agree that the tariffs are the

00:11:35.440 prime reason for that at the moment so i saw a uh post by a whole by a whole mars on x and it started

00:11:47.360 with uh why do people believe that taxing billionaires which is what california wants to do 0.97

00:11:53.120 uh more is suddenly going to fix all our problems and i've been waiting for this somebody finally did

00:12:00.640 the math so if you do the math and you took the top six billionaires in california uh and you you took

00:12:10.880 five percent of the wealth how much would you get well you'd get about 94 billion dollars

00:12:18.800 that means the deficit the deficit would be 1.7 trillion instead of 1.8 now that that would be for

00:12:26.160 the whole country i think now for california um so there's actually no mathematical way that taxing

00:12:35.600 the billionaires gets us to a some kind of stable situation at best you could bring down the uh the

00:12:44.000 deficit for one year and that's it then you'd be right back to where you are now the fact that

00:12:49.760 roe connor was pushing this idea was really disappointing because as i've said i thought

00:12:57.520 he was one of the smartest but it looks like maybe he's getting talked out a little bit by the people

00:13:03.120 who are clearly smarter than he is and now he's in favor of doing some kind of hearing in california to

00:13:11.840 find out we're all fraudless and i would ask you this when does a hearing ever fix that

00:13:19.920 and apparently this put him in a sharp uh conflict with governor newsom who i read today had answers

00:13:27.360 for all the missing money so according to newsom according to post on acts uh all of those billions

00:13:35.360 of dollars that people say are missing are not missing at all no that's fake news they know exactly

00:13:42.720 where the money is the uh the bullet trains on track and nothing went wrong and all the money was

00:13:51.360 well spent things would be far worse if they didn't have the money so you think that nothing you think

00:13:58.160 nothing got better but he would argue that it would have been much worse without all that money now

00:14:08.080 how in the world can he run for president with these let's say allegations or maybe he just lies

00:14:18.480 you know maybe that just works every time maybe all you have to do is that's not true you just make it

00:14:24.640 enough and that might be enough because we've grown for years with not knowing the truth about anything

00:14:33.920 why would that change now

00:14:40.240 so there's some thinking that roe connor wants to run for president so that will put him in conflict with

00:14:47.120 newsom and uh newsom's gotta hide he's gotta hide from those allegations something well will you be

00:14:56.240 surprised i think the answer is no that the uh that the fraud is worse than you thought according to

00:15:06.640 wall street apes that minnesota has uncovered a new scam where regular homes are being registered as

00:15:13.360 assisted living facilities but their effects who is surprised at that or that they're receiving

00:15:21.600 15 times the payments of other programs they've got these shell companies and uh basically the whole

00:15:28.880 thing is fraud i'm not surprised as i've told you many times now if it's possible

00:15:36.240 to steal a lot of people are involved and there's a lot of money involved there will be fraud every

00:15:44.160 time so this should have been something we could have seen from a mile away here's some more fakeness

00:15:52.880 according to unusual whales on x the u.s ended its 2025 with the largest one-year drop in homicides

00:16:01.920 ever recorded do you believe that do you believe that 2025 was the biggest one-year drop in homicides

00:16:16.480 well

00:16:20.160 um i'm getting some people saying there's no sound but i think they're taking me

00:16:25.120 could one of you who has my texts um text me right now and there's no problem with sound right

00:16:38.800 okay that's all right but it seems to me in our fraudulent world

00:16:46.240 that uh the odds of the data being fake is much higher than the odds that the

00:16:52.240 we set record in reductions of murder what do you think do you think it's even likely

00:17:00.960 that this is true well you know it could be maybe but when we see that every other

00:17:09.440 it seems like every other source of data is vague did we not know

00:17:15.520 did we not know that uh the police department were somehow faking their data i don't know how you'd

00:17:25.680 fake murder but i don't believe it might be true

00:17:32.720 all right here's a here's a take that you couldn't make a couple of years ago but now it's happening

00:17:39.600 um according to a user named taya on x harvard actually put in writing it's a policy of sending

00:17:50.080 white men to the bottom of the pile when considering you know uh admissions etc now

00:17:59.120 um and taya says they deserve everything that's coming but that's not going too hard

00:18:04.480 uh a user named hunter ash who is evidently a white man on x he said if harvard hates my people

00:18:15.920 i want it leveled to the ground they produce useful output but clearly they'll do their best to direct

00:18:23.760 any power those results produce against me so i'm against them we are not obligated to fund

00:18:31.600 our open and explicit enemies wow you know what he convinced me that if harvard uh went out of business

00:18:44.080 tomorrow that i would be better off because because they're literally my enemy they have a very clear intention

00:18:53.360 they have a very clear intention um of destroying the white man demographic forever so why should i ever

00:19:10.240 allow them to make even you know one inch of progress so yes i'm completely in favor of harvard going out of business

00:19:23.840 all right um

00:19:30.000 i saw i post by william wolf on the same topic he said that white guilt has been one of the most

00:19:35.760 destructive forces of the 21st century here's what you couldn't say a little while ago but you can say it

00:19:44.720 now you could say now that um much of the progress of humankind came from very smart white people working 0.56

00:19:57.680 very hard i am not a scientist so i've never invented anything that changed the world right so i'm not taking

00:20:07.680 credit for being a white guy just because other white guys did good stuff nevertheless it is a fact

00:20:16.560 that white guys contributed a lot to you know civilization now not to take anything away from

00:20:24.480 uh some other demographic groups but remember i'm not claiming any kind of credit for being a white guy

00:20:34.640 you know what i did i'm proud of what i did but i didn't invent the microchip you know and neither did you

00:20:42.400 so if you took away and this is what's happening if you use dei

00:20:48.160 to stunt the progress of white men 0.96

00:20:52.080 just purely mathematically you're going to destroy civilization

00:20:56.880 or you're going to degrade it back to a level

00:20:59.920 that we none of us will want to live in

00:21:01.680 so i think you can say that now that the cost of dei is not that it just set back a generation

00:21:09.680 well i would say several generations of white men it's just that i don't think people understand

00:21:17.840 that there was a very small percentage of white men

00:21:21.600 who were responsible for a lot of the problems could somebody put in the

00:21:27.520 fucking comments that the sound is fine so shut the up about the sound please 0.96

00:21:35.040 in the comments just tell these these people that it's working there might be one of the

00:21:39.760 platforms that's not working so if they have to change platforms go ahead and do it but there's

00:21:46.240 nothing wrong with the sound so there's nothing that's going to happen on my end that will change

00:21:50.720 what we're doing okay thank you um have you noticed on x that elon musk has given a new nickname to tim waltz

00:22:05.600 he calls him trader tim trader tim thank you um i think it's sticky and the reason he's a trader

00:22:15.120 he goes beyond whether he's you know just involved in uh any of the fraud but that the fraud would go

00:22:23.280 to somalian terrorists and i do wonder about all of his paid trips to china when he was younger

00:22:30.400 there's no way that that was just innocent there's no way that was innocent travel to china he didn't

00:22:36.880 pay for it and they were obviously using him as a as a tool

00:22:45.040 or worse i mean at the very least he was a tool now let's i i do think that elon is on the right track

00:22:54.560 and there will be two hearings coming up in january 7th the minnesota minneapolis uh

00:23:02.960 uh the minnesota state reps will be talking to who the oversight committee so the oversight committee

00:23:11.680 is going to talk to tim waltz and keith ellison that won't be till february now i'm not sure is has

00:23:20.240 anybody uh had the experience of watching the oversight committee fix anything

00:23:26.880 i don't know if they do has there ever been a hearing or an oversight meeting in which they

00:23:36.480 had a problem and then they fixed it i don't think so so i'm not optimistic that'll make a difference

00:23:43.600 uh unless the only thing it does is uh is make it more obvious okay thank you sound is good

00:24:00.000 all right um but i will say it seems like there's no no possibility that waltz was unaware of the fraud

00:24:10.240 would you agree with that there's not really any chance he didn't know and somebody else pointed

00:24:17.120 the sound a few people did actually that remember when kamala got 1.2 billion dollars to run and it got

00:24:25.680 got absorbed immediately don't you think uh all right now you're just being prickly uh don't you think

00:24:39.360 that democrats also steal from democrats you know what are the odds that democrats are only stealing

00:24:49.120 from let's say taxpayers in general i thought this about soros the soros is almost certainly getting

00:24:56.080 ripped off by democrats and now i also think that the dnc is almost certainly being ripped off by democrats

00:25:05.120 would you agree with that i think you would you know what i'm getting tired of hearing

00:25:15.120 i'm getting tired of seeing people on x say that the fraud we've discovered is quote the tip of the

00:25:21.680 iceberg that doesn't help we're way past that yes of course it's the tip of the iceberg of course it is

00:25:31.600 you don't need to say anymore but i saw mike lee based mike lee he thinks we could cut 1.5 trillion

00:25:39.600 out of the budget if congress stop funding things that have nothing to do with that has nothing to do

00:25:45.040 with congress's powers and i'm starting to think that the 1.5 trillion number which i've seen elon use

00:25:56.400 is now going to be the assumed amount of uh fraud and i think that's true i think elon's persuasion is

00:26:06.560 going to make the 1.5 trillion a year look like the actual number that's being stolen now i don't know if

00:26:12.720 it's bigger or smaller but i think we're good i think at least the right is going to start using

00:26:18.560 that as a presumed low number yeah and elon said it was a low number well you've been waiting for

00:26:26.640 pam bondi to get busy but did you know how much the department of justice under her is actually done 1.00

00:26:35.360 well she's reporting today that they're making progress which i'll tell you about

00:26:42.720 some of my meds could be in dry mouth so i have to stop and sip so according to bondi 60 people have

00:26:54.560 been convicted of fraud and four minnesota scams so far and 98 have been arrested the majority of which

00:27:05.680 are of somali descent but is that enough so the question i ask is how many people should be arrested

00:27:17.440 is 61 of the problem the tip of the iceberg or is 60 60 of the problem so again i can't really tell

00:27:28.880 is that a good score scoreboard is that what you would expect that by now there would be 60 people

00:27:37.760 um just just for the minnesota scams so that that doesn't even count you know all the

00:27:44.480 russia collusion hoax and overthrowing the government and all that but no prominent people yet

00:27:50.800 and if you're like me and i know you are if you don't see any prominent people get indicted soon

00:27:58.800 you're gonna feel like not enough happened um speaking of prominent people

00:28:08.240 so according to just the news the justice department uh still has 5.2 million epstein documents to review

00:28:17.920 and that the department of justice has 400 attorneys assigned to just the epstein review

00:28:26.400 what would you be happier would you be happier if those 400 attorneys were immediately moved to

00:28:35.280 prosecuting uh people who need to prosecute or would you be happier that the 400 attorneys spend their days

00:28:44.000 looking through useless documents that in the end we won't see any good stuff anyway and does it seem to

00:28:51.920 you that the number of epstein documents is increasing increasing instead of decreasing

00:29:00.560 and i'm wondering how in the hell do the epstein documents keep increasing have they have the documents

00:29:07.520 found a way to procreate here's what i think i think if you leave enough epstein documents in a room

00:29:16.160 they will start they will start having sex with each other and then it will produce 0.82

00:29:21.200 offspring which are like the new documents that they keep finding so every time they open the door

00:29:27.840 they're like whoa what have you been up to looks like a lot more a lot more documents in here than last

00:29:34.160 sign so unless the documents have learned how to reproduce this looks suspiciously like an attempt to slow

00:29:44.240 things down until we you know run out of steam so i don't trust anything about the epstein documents

00:29:53.280 i don't trust anything about the epstein documents that i don't trust anything about the epstein

00:29:56.800 well speaking of scams

00:30:01.920 oh i'm all burpy

00:30:08.640 speaking of scams the virgin islands are suing meta because they claim that meta allowed a bunch of scam ads

00:30:18.880 on their platform that scams lots of people out of money and the reason that they allowed it allegedly

00:30:26.960 is because meta made a lot of money by running the ads for the scams do you believe that

00:30:35.520 do you believe that the reason they didn't take the ads down is not because they didn't know there

00:30:40.880 were scams but because they made a lot of money running the ads well apparently a lot of money was involved

00:30:49.520 but that doesn't make us know they're thinking um what they claim is that they had an internal review

00:30:57.840 process that sort of prevented them from taking down more than they did i guess but we'll see

00:31:07.520 all right according to climate realism there's a publication called the laist

00:31:13.280 um that wrote an article last week titled the poor are in a very bad state climate change accelerates

00:31:22.320 california's cost of living crisis so believe it or not even today a publication is claiming that the

00:31:31.360 prices in california are up not because of the policies not because the policies about climate change but

00:31:39.920 because of the climate change itself for which i believe there's no evidence whatsoever

00:31:48.640 it makes me wonder do the people who write those articles know they're foolish yet

00:31:55.680 and they're just trying to fool you or are they actually so far inside a bubble that they think that

00:32:02.880 the prices are up because of climate change do they really believe that really yeah i'm pretty deep

00:32:11.840 inside my bubble but come on i thought we're past that meanwhile along the same lines according to the no

00:32:21.360 trick zone europe is getting ready for more censorship over climate science and energy so apparently they're

00:32:30.480 they're preparing to go hard on censorship if you say something about climate or energy science that they

00:32:39.520 deem not true what how do they know what's true what makes the european union the experts on what's true

00:32:50.480 on climate there are plenty of people who are also experts who say that uh you know it's not the crisis

00:32:57.920 that we thought it was so weirdly europe believes that more censorship of the truth will save the world

00:33:07.280 do they really or is there just one way to control the big platforms in the united states

00:33:14.000 do they really think really that more censorship on that topic is going to be good for us it's weird

00:33:25.840 all right so as you know jack smith that special counsel is that what he was he's being grilled over

00:33:34.080 the alleged lawfare against trump and he was at a house deposition and they asked him uh he was asked at

00:33:43.040 the deposition did you develop evidence that trump was responsible for the violence at the capitol on

00:33:49.840 january 6 and he did not say yes so that's a tell he did not say they had evidence but instead he went

00:34:01.120 with a narrative and the narrative is like this that trump was free to say that he believed the election was

00:34:09.360 rigged that would just be free speech but according to jack smith trump was not free to violate federal law

00:34:21.200 and use knowingly false statements about election fraud to target a lawful government function now do you

00:34:29.440 see what's wrong with that statement his evidence was based on his own ability to read a mind

00:34:39.440 because how would he know what trump believed about the election in my opinion trump genuinely believed

00:34:48.880 as i do that the election was rigged

00:34:51.360 and as we get further and further into you know the post-election environment

00:35:21.360 it does look like he was right so not only was he right but he had every reason to believe he was

00:35:28.080 right but jack smith is defending his team because they could read his mind and find out that his real

00:35:37.920 intent was to overthrow the government and that somehow he knew it was a legal election

00:35:44.320 or a non-rigged election so the word knowingly was always the biggest part of the hoax the january 6

00:35:53.360 hoax i'm gonna call the hoax that there was an insurrection depended entirely on believing that you

00:36:00.720 could read trump's mind and that the things he was saying he knew not to be true even while

00:36:07.840 they looked true to me it looks like he was completely uh accurate and there was there's no evidence

00:36:17.440 whatsoever that he thought that was a clean election none

00:36:24.160 so we'll see where that goes well eric swalwell who you might know as the person who has the worst take

00:36:32.560 in every situation he's running for governor of california and if he becomes governor he promises

00:36:39.600 he'll make sure federal agents are charged with quote kidnapping and assault and will take away their

00:36:46.560 driver's licenses that guy has the worst take on everything take away isis driver's licenses that's just absurd

00:37:05.120 but at least he's consistent all right

00:37:09.600 speaking of consistent you probably know that uh elon's building a giant

00:37:15.440 ai factory called micro harder with two heart two hours at the end to uh to basically crush microsoft

00:37:26.400 so remember what i told you i guess has a hundred thousand super computers in it or will

00:37:33.600 and he's going to train grok so hard that can do what microsoft can do

00:37:38.240 um just by asking it to do it i guess so remember when i told you years ago that smart phones would

00:37:48.720 become just a dumb phone that could do ai and that the phone would just be a screen and a what a some kind

00:37:58.320 of wireless thing and then uh sound and elon confirmed that on one of his podcasts that he sees

00:38:08.800 he sees someday that the phone is has no apps it's just an ai and i think this micro harder is that

00:38:17.440 so when when he was asked if he would build a phone he didn't say yes because i don't think he thinks

00:38:26.400 phones are the future i think he thinks this is his future so there's a non-zero chance if this works

00:38:33.920 works that uh the entire smartphone industry will become whatever elon wants it to and he'll own this

00:38:43.600 and that would just be one thing he did imagine having so many accomplishments

00:38:50.400 that replacing smartphones with entirely new technology uh would just be one of the things

00:38:56.480 he did that's just one thing so i guess the u.s military was it the other day uh did uh strikes on

00:39:07.040 three more alleged narco terrorist vessels they were traveling as a convoy so we took them all out

00:39:14.960 you know i don't know about you but my empathy for anybody else is way down

00:39:21.360 i don't know if it's all the fraud or what it is probably the fraud but when i see that some narco 0.90

00:39:29.920 boat was blown up you know i think there was a time when i might have been thinking oh you know maybe

00:39:37.680 a little more due process would be good or do we have to do it this way because i would just have

00:39:43.360 empathy but now i don't and now i see that when i see that three of them were blown up i'm like yeah

00:39:49.840 why not four four four would be better than three is anybody having that is everybody having that

00:39:56.320 experience that your empathy is way down i don't want it to be but events seem to be taking over

00:40:07.760 anyway over in iran

00:40:12.240 it's been several days of street protests that are pretty aggressive and i guess uh some government

00:40:18.800 entities are being attacked and uh the question i wonder is is this a color revolution or is this

00:40:27.440 entirely um organic do you think iran is having an organic revolution or of course it's our intelligence

00:40:37.920 people with massad you know doing the usual color revolution stuff because doesn't every color revolution

00:40:46.240 involve mobilizing people for the streets but the part that they don't seem to be able to do is

00:40:54.160 controlling the local press so i don't think that's a thing right i don't think anybody's co-opted the

00:41:02.800 local press to say bad things about komeini because they would be killed instantly so it doesn't have as far

00:41:12.240 as i can tell it doesn't have every element of a color revolution but it's got a little bit so it does

00:41:20.560 make me wonder how organic that is

00:41:24.800 all right speaking of health care costs which we weren't but let's how many of you know what a pbm is

00:41:34.160 a pharmacy benefit manager well probably not most of you right some of you've heard of it but i was

00:41:42.720 looking at an interview with uh mark cuban who launched cost plus drugs that would avoid these

00:41:51.200 middlemen so what the pbms are are they're intermediaries let's call them middlemen that

00:41:58.480 manage prescription drug benefits for health insurers employers and government programs so if you're

00:42:06.160 so medicare medicaid so the idea is that they would lower your health care costs while providing a

00:42:13.840 service to the the providers of the meds the reality is it's a somewhat non-transparent process

00:42:24.960 that puts people in the middle of gigantic money flows what would happen if somebody was in the

00:42:32.240 middle of gigantic money flows and you did not have visibility on what they were doing in that middle

00:42:40.480 what would happen well i would argue that 100 of the time the middlemen would find a way to suck up the

00:42:51.280 extra money and not let you know that's what happened so they would pretend you know hypothetically

00:42:59.200 hypothetically they would pretend they were lowering your costs while in reality they would find a

00:43:05.280 bunch of clever ways to siphon off a lot of the money going through so i don't know if i've expressed that

00:43:13.600 correctly but uh mark cuban with his uh his low cost um drug plan the cost plus drugs apparently cuts out the

00:43:25.120 middleman and that is one of the reasons if not the only reason um that he can offer much lower costs

00:43:33.280 costs now do you think you could get the government to remove that middleman process well probably not

00:43:45.920 probably remember there are enough people in the government who are being bribed by the insurance

00:43:50.560 companies bribed by the pbms i just assume there's a lot of bribery going on everywhere um i don't know if

00:43:57.360 the government can fix that because we've known it for a long time but it's really complicated and in

00:44:06.000 complexity there are always highs of fraud i've told you that before right if something has a lot of money

00:44:13.840 involved and it's really complicated somebody's stealing your money and or you know maybe not illegally but

00:44:22.720 in effect so um as mark points out the democrats have no solution for this pbm thing or for or for the

00:44:34.960 cost of drugs just in general now you know that trump there's some kind of trump pharmacy online that

00:44:43.520 you could also get low cost stuff and that might end up working with uh with mark cuban's uh entity we

00:44:52.000 don't know that that's the case but they might have something that they can work with together so

00:44:59.440 good on you mark cuban for for surfacing this uh situation and then actually acting on it because

00:45:08.480 it's one thing to say you're going to do something and it's another thing to actually do it and he's

00:45:14.800 actually doing do you remember when it was a few years ago that uh bezos and uh a few other entities

00:45:25.680 said they were going to try to fix healthcare or at least or at least pharma costs well apparently they

00:45:31.760 gave up because they couldn't figure out how to do it but uh mark cuban has not given up and he's still

00:45:39.200 pushing on that button so good for you mark if there was any way to help i guess i would want to

00:45:53.600 all right i'm i'm always so amused to how many of you know how to cure cancer

00:45:59.200 but the medical establishment doesn't you ever think about that you're just sitting there in your

00:46:05.920 little home and you've decided that if i change my diet my cancer will go away

00:46:12.560 probably not probably not

00:46:19.360 anyway there's a book coming out uh washington examiner's mark judge is writing about this

00:46:27.680 so in march there's going to be a book that explains everything it's called the information state

00:46:35.200 politics in the age of total control so the author is this guy jacob siegel he's a journalist for tablet

00:46:43.040 and apparently what this book does which some people must have gotten a preview of

00:46:48.080 um it explains how uh information was weaponized against the citizens of the united states and that

00:47:01.280 part of the reason that we didn't recognize that we were in this propaganda hoax situation where nothing

00:47:08.880 they were telling us was real the reason we didn't understand it especially let's use as our example

00:47:16.000 the uh russia collusion hoax if if we had seen one claim about russia collusion hoax we might say to

00:47:25.920 ourselves that that's just a claim that's nothing if only one entity had told us that that stuff was true

00:47:34.400 and it obviously wasn't um we might have said oh but these other entities don't say it's true

00:47:42.880 but what happened was for the first time in american history i think that the people who colluded were

00:47:51.360 all of our or what we thought were credible organizations so you had the fake news saying it was true

00:47:59.200 you had the intelligence agencies saying it was true you had the fbi the doj and the entire democrat

00:48:07.200 machine saying it was true i'm talking about the russia collusion hoax now that's what i call

00:48:14.400 laundry list persuasion when you don't have anything that's individually persuasive but you just throw

00:48:22.160 a just a fire hose of claims and then on top of the fire hose of claims you have a fire hose of

00:48:30.080 previously credible entities that gave up all the credibility to go all in on it because they were

00:48:37.360 so afraid of trump so i call that laundry list persuasion so i've explained this before that if you

00:48:46.720 if you say trump did one thing bad people would discount it but if you say he did this and this and this

00:48:54.640 and this and this people assume there's truth in there because there's so much you know there's so

00:49:00.720 much smoke there must be fire but that's not the case that's just laundry list persuasion

00:49:07.760 and i guess this book does a good job of showing how screwed we were

00:49:15.280 well did you know according to let's say new york times that when trump backed off on funding

00:49:24.640 uh weapons for ukraine it didn't stop our involvement that the cia took over and uh

00:49:34.240 they didn't do the same thing that we were doing but they didn't have a funding cut and the cia helped

00:49:40.320 ukraine uh target the the most sensitive russian places they could attack so it looks like um

00:49:51.040 it looks like the cia helped ukraine work smarter not harder so instead of instead of raw

00:49:58.720 raw um weapons and raw military the cia helped them get the you know just the stuff that was affordable

00:50:07.600 and would make a big difference on the russian economy

00:50:16.080 how many of you are surprised that the cia just kept doing what they were doing of course it is

00:50:24.160 of course they did now the indication is that trump was in favor of that so as long as it wasn't obvious

00:50:32.400 what they were doing um he wanted to keep the pressure on putin all right ladies and gentlemen

00:50:42.960 there's not much news happening today a lot of it looks like a repeat every time i turn on x

00:50:50.400 it's another claim of another state with another giant fraudulent thing they just discovered

00:50:56.800 i'm getting tired of it but i am worried that there is no solution for california's debt

00:51:05.280 and that however bad i think it's going to get in california it might get worse

00:51:12.480 now i will say that the one thing we have going for us is the adams law of slow moving disasters

00:51:19.600 i hope that the disaster which is california's debt problem and fraud problem i hope that we've all

00:51:29.360 known about it long enough that somebody's figuring out what to do about it and i don't know what that

00:51:35.840 would be it doesn't look like it's solvable in any mathematical way that i can understand but i would

00:51:44.160 uh expect that maybe in the next year maybe two there's going to be some shock to the system that's

00:51:53.600 beyond anything we've imagined now i don't know what that is it could be maybe we default under debt

00:52:02.000 um what i don't know maybe there's an earthquake

00:52:06.320 uh there's something but whatever it is it's going to have to be big

00:52:16.000 and i don't know if we're ready for it

00:52:20.640 so it could be well i mean what would happen for example if the federal government said here's the

00:52:27.920 deal we're just not going to fund 1.5 trillion dollars worth of stuff we don't know exactly how

00:52:34.000 much is fraud and how much isn't but we can't survive unless we stop doing it what would happen

00:52:42.400 well in theory it would also cut a bunch of things we didn't want to cut

00:52:48.080 or at least we thought we wouldn't but it might be the only way to survive

00:52:52.560 so we might have to throw a whole bunch of poor people under the bus 1.00

00:52:55.680 oh hands you're so fucking stupid um of course i've researched that of course i did stop assuming that i 0.99

00:53:08.640 didn't look into my options stop it

00:53:13.600 all right so no more stupid uh suggestions so i will give you a little bit of a heads up

00:53:29.520 i i talked to my radiologist uh yesterday he was working on the day before new year's uh and it's all bad

00:53:38.880 news so the the odds of me recovering are essentially zero um so we'll i'll give you any updates if that

00:53:50.240 changes but it won't so there's no chance i'll get my feeling back in my legs and uh i've got some

00:53:57.360 ongoing heart failure which is making it difficult to breathe sometimes during the day

00:54:04.080 but at the moment i can breathe and i'm not in any pain um however you should prepare yourself that uh

00:54:15.200 january will be a probably a month of transition one way or the other now i haven't made decisions

00:54:24.880 but uh it was all bad news no good news at all

00:54:29.360 so i will keep doing this as long as it makes sense because i like doing it keeps me busy

00:54:38.480 you know what's weird is that i have much bigger problems than the stuff i'm talking about in the

00:54:43.920 news but i'm so interested in in like what's happening in the world that it's very engaging totally

00:54:53.040 engaging so after the show i will continue doing a robots read news comic which i do every day

00:55:04.000 i try to and i'll try to make some new comics dilbert comics and i'll just act like nothing's happening

00:55:14.000 well i'll just pretend i have no problems

00:55:16.160 uh which is weirder it's easier than you think then i'll take some painkillers if i need them

00:55:24.880 um there's no real limit to what i can take at this point and i will probably smoke massive

00:55:30.080 massive marijuana because it puts me into a stupor that actually feels kind of good

00:55:36.160 in my current situation if i do a full day's work which i plan to do uh i allow myself to uh enter the

00:55:46.880 stupor zone i mean yesterday for example i was you know doing work and watching the warriors game

00:55:55.840 i was a kite it wasn't bad the only thing that's really bugging me at the moment is uh the inability

00:56:05.120 to breathe if i get one of these coughing attacks and that could last hours it could last 8 to 12

00:56:11.840 hours so it's 8 to 12 hours of hell um but it's not always hell so but things are changing fast

00:56:22.160 so i thought i'd give you a little update on that has anybody gotten an update on victor davis hanson

00:56:29.040 because i know he had some major surgery but we don't know what that was about

00:56:32.400 i hope he's doing better than i am

00:56:42.800 yep and i do appreciate all of your thoughts

00:56:47.680 i will probably write down some closing thoughts today just so i have them

00:56:53.760 just so you can see what i was thinking in my in my final glide path

00:57:07.680 he's recovering good

00:57:11.840 good for him

00:57:15.040 well i will tell you that my interest and my empathy for all of you

00:57:19.440 and for americans in general is very high so to my final breath if there's anything i can do to make

00:57:30.000 things better for you i will definitely do it

00:57:42.880 all right we're past the entertaining part of the show

00:57:47.200 and i don't want to get your i don't want to get your year off to a bad uh bad start

00:57:53.520 but uh there'll be more to come all right people i'm going to say hi to the uh locals beloved people

00:58:03.840 privately the rest of you i'll see you tomorrow i think but local supporters i'll be private with you

00:58:23.520 and i'll check out what the how aAtlanta gets from the conference

00:58:25.760 and i'll get good mr

00:58:31.040 and we'll also see you tomorrow

00:58:32.560 and i'll see you Kimberly

00:58:35.840 thank you

00:58:45.200 and you

00:58:47.760 so

00:58:50.400 Thank you.

00:59:20.400 Thank you.

00:59:50.400 Thank you.

01:00:20.400 Thank you.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams - January 01, 2026

Episode 3059 CWSA 01⧸01⧸26

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript