Real Coffee with Scott Adams - Episode 796 Scott Adams： Winning Shampeachment Theater, Mnuchin Versus Greta, Chinese Election Tampering

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, good to see you, coming to you from an undisclosed location where I might

00:00:14.160 be breaking the biggest story of the year. Or not. So we're going to be experiencing

00:00:23.400 two realities at once. It's sort of a Schrodinger's cat of periscopes today. In one reality, you're

00:00:32.720 going to hear the most shocking thing you've heard in a long time. But it might not be true.

00:00:39.700 So I'm going to ask you to fact check it. And you can. This is the exciting part. I'm going to give

00:00:46.380 you the biggest story of the year that might not be true. But you get to check it yourself.

00:00:52.180 Now, each of you individually may not be able to check it. But collectively, there are

00:00:58.360 enough people watching this that we will be able to know if this hypothesis is true or

00:01:03.940 false. And if it's true, it's just about the biggest, no, it would be the biggest story

00:01:09.920 of the year. It would be the biggest story of the year. That doesn't involve violence, I

00:01:15.240 guess. All right. But before that, before that, there's a little thing called the simultaneous

00:01:23.800 sip. Most mornings, I read from my little script for the introduction. Sometimes, if I'm on the

00:01:33.020 road in a secret location, like today, I don't have that with me. So you might have to help

00:01:39.480 me, for those of you who have memorized the introduction to the simultaneous sip. All you

00:01:45.660 need is a cup or a mug. I don't know. Has anybody memorized it? Well, we'll see it in the, let's

00:01:57.760 see if somebody can reproduce it in the comments. Because I know somebody there has memorized it

00:02:03.780 by now. All right. Well, we're not going to make you wait. Let's go directly to the simultaneous

00:02:11.340 sip. You know, it's the best part of your day. It's the dopamine hit of the day, the thing

00:02:15.940 that makes everything better. Simultaneous sip. Go. All right. So here's my big story. Or, again,

00:02:29.400 again, I might just be wrong. And you'll get to check this. You actually will be able to check

00:02:34.340 this. So I was keeping you up to date about the story of Ambassador Richard Grinnell's account

00:02:43.680 where a number of you, including me, we had followed him on Twitter at one point and then got

00:02:49.640 somehow unfollowed. And I had given you three hypotheses for how that could happen. I'm going

00:02:57.640 to add a fourth. And the fourth is pretty darn good. But that's the part you're going to check

00:03:02.840 for me. So I don't assert it as fact. I assert it as something I want you to check for me. And

00:03:08.640 then we'll figure out if it's fact. If it is, it's the biggest thing happening this year. All

00:03:14.280 right. So hypothesis number one would be Twitter management had decided to rig the election and

00:03:22.680 was ordering its employees to put their finger on some accounts. I don't think that's likely. Indeed,

00:03:30.680 I think that's deeply unlikely based on human nature. Because it would be too easy to discover

00:03:38.320 and the risks would be too high for somebody who's already doing well and isn't senior management of

00:03:44.160 a major technology company. It's just not a risk reward that makes any sense from a senior management

00:03:50.180 perspective. So I think the odds that there's somebody in Twitter management who's making a

00:03:55.360 decision to throttle people, very low, very low odds. Then you have the bug concept. Well, maybe it's

00:04:04.040 just a bug that they haven't found out. I also think that's very low chance because it's such a

00:04:10.520 massive bug and it would be an easy one to fix. I can't believe it would go so long and it would

00:04:16.740 just be a bug and somehow it hadn't been fixed. So I would reject the bug hypothesis and the it's

00:04:23.220 coming from management hypothesis. But then you have the, is there a rogue element within the company?

00:04:31.400 And I don't know how to put odds on that, but you can't rule that one out. It's just that we don't

00:04:38.540 have any evidence of it. And probably unless it was a lot of people in on it, it seems like somebody

00:04:46.900 would have noticed, you know, what some programmer who was not, let's say, in on it probably would

00:04:53.160 have noticed. Not necessarily, but probably. So I would say the odds of it just being a bad actor,

00:05:00.020 can't rule it out, but the odds are not high. Here comes hypothesis number four. Here's the one

00:05:07.240 you're going to check. Turns out that when you try to connect some apps to Twitter, you know, to,

00:05:16.000 to make your apps work together, you have to give permissions to the third party app. I'm seeing it

00:05:22.640 in the comments. Somebody's ahead of me. On Twitter, somebody sent me, in fact, let me call them out,

00:05:29.200 Root Esperanzo, Root Esperanzo, on Twitter, sent me the permissions page for one particular app

00:05:38.960 in which the permission, if you didn't read it carefully, and you just said, sure, I give you

00:05:44.820 permission, it would give the third party app permission to follow and unfollow your Twitter

00:05:52.180 accounts for you without your permission. You would give the permission once and then forever the app would

00:05:57.860 be able to do whatever it wanted on your Twitter account. What app do you think it was? Here it

00:06:05.620 comes. TikTok. I'm just going to, I'm just going to let that sit in, just let that sink in for a

00:06:20.280 little bit. TikTok. Do you know who owns TikTok? China. Now, here's what I want you to do. If any of you have 0.96

00:06:36.080 both TikTok and Twitter, or you can actually test it by just, I'm not sure what the condition is when you're,

00:06:44.280 maybe when you're signing up for TikTok, does it ask you to connect to Twitter? Because, so here's the

00:06:55.080 fact check. Fact check for me that part of the TikTok process involves a page that gives you the option,

00:07:04.120 which you might not read the details of, does it give you the option to let TikTok control your

00:07:10.340 follows and unfollows? If it does, it's the biggest story of the year. Am I wrong? And if it doesn't,

00:07:20.700 then I have some questions about who sent it to me. But check it. Just check it, okay? Now,

00:07:30.500 correct me if I'm wrong. I believe that society has been warned about TikTok. I believe we've been

00:07:37.280 warned that the Chinese government might be using apps and technology to, you know, get a little

00:07:43.860 influence that they should not have. So some of you probably immediately picked up another device

00:07:52.280 and said, what the heck, and are looking at this right now. So by the time we're done with the

00:07:55.960 periscope, we might actually have confirmation. Now, somebody says, do I use it? No, I don't use the app.

00:08:03.940 But remember, it wouldn't be me who uses the app. It would be just one of us. So you'd only need one

00:08:13.720 person to, I don't know, if one person has given permission, that's probably all it takes.

00:08:22.080 So I don't use the app. So I'm not vulnerable in that particular way, nor would I. I would never use

00:08:27.340 a Chinese app if I knew I was using it. All right, so go check that. We'll see if that's the biggest

00:08:33.620 thing in the thing. Now, if I were China, and let's say hypothetically, I had some way to influence who

00:08:42.760 gets followed and doesn't get followed, how would you do it? In other words, would you randomly have

00:08:49.320 people who followed and unfollowed? No, you would, you would make a decision about when it makes sense

00:08:54.720 for China. And I think you would pick the people who are the most influential, and also talk on this

00:09:04.000 topic. So you'd have to be influential in general, but also say things that China doesn't like you to

00:09:09.820 say, or be on the party that it doesn't want to win. That would probably include Ambassador Grinnell.

00:09:16.740 If you are China, do you think that the things that Ambassador Grinnell says are things you would

00:09:24.060 like to have greater influence or lesser influence? Probably lesser. Same with me. Who talks

00:09:31.780 sound about China more than I do? Not many people. All right, that's enough of that. Let's talk

00:09:39.680 about some loser think. In the news, Secretary Mnuchin was asked about Greta Thunberg's opinions of, I 0.93

00:09:51.160 guess, what the United States should be doing with its economy and with climate change. And Mnuchin

00:10:00.840 quite cleverly said, let me get the exact quote here, because he was pretty funny. He said, he dismissed

00:10:12.160 climate activist Greta Thunberg saying, she should first go to college and study economics before she

00:10:19.620 weighs in on US policies and how they relate to the climate crisis. So Secretary Mnuchin just called

00:10:29.200 loser think on Greta Thunberg. Was that fair? 100%. 100% fair. So Mnuchin just showed you the way.

00:10:40.900 I'll tell you how everybody's been doing it wrong. How many times have you seen people say,

00:10:46.440 she's just young. She's just a kid. She doesn't know anything. She's just young. She's a kid. Why

00:10:51.580 are we listening to a kid? Right? Unfortunately, that argument is not as solid as you hope. Because

00:10:59.060 her whole argument is that the kids are the ones who are going to pay the cost of our bad behavior,

00:11:04.680 the older generations. So you can't beat her argument by saying she's just a kid when her argument is,

00:11:13.600 I'm a kid. I'm going to have to pay for this. Right? But Mnuchin, he took the smart way to approach this

00:11:25.120 by simply noting that there's an entire domain of knowledge that one would need to have in order to

00:11:31.640 have a useful opinion on the topic. And he simply pointed out that she has never had any access to

00:11:39.140 that domain. She has not been an economist. She has not studied the most important part of the

00:11:46.860 decision. Now I say that economics is the most important part because it's the economics that

00:11:52.980 tells you when to go and how hard to go and what to do. It's one thing for the science to say we think

00:12:00.040 there's a problem. I know some of you disagree, but just work with me here. It's one thing for the

00:12:04.860 science to say there's a problem. But the what do you do about it ends up being a combination of

00:12:11.440 science plus how much is it going to cost. So if you haven't handled the how much is it going to cost,

00:12:17.900 you don't know the trade-offs, you don't know the alternatives, you don't know how to look at

00:12:22.060 things in a rational way the way an economist would. Mnuchin just totally brushed her off in the

00:12:31.140 best possible way. Because it's sort of funny. And it hits you as true. Because as soon as he says

00:12:38.780 it, you go, well, that's kind of true. You really would sort of need to know about economics to make

00:12:44.720 decisions about the entire economy of the United States. We don't delegate that to children. There's a

00:12:50.480 reason. We delegate it to people who maybe have studied economics. So to Secretary Mnuchin,

00:12:58.540 nice play. Nice play. Loved how you did that. And by the way, when you see a little glimpse of

00:13:09.040 things like this, you know, we always talk about how many people have cycled through the administration.

00:13:15.580 President Trump has fired a lot of people, a lot of people have quit. But it seems like Mnuchin's been

00:13:20.460 near a long time, right? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like Mnuchin is one of the people who

00:13:27.980 seems to be able to get along with this president pretty well. And then we see just a little bit of a

00:13:33.480 glimpse behind the curtain to see why that might be the case. Because Mnuchin's framing of Tunberg is

00:13:40.660 the best I've seen. It's absolutely the best. Of every critic who said anything about Greta Tunberg,

00:13:46.680 nobody did it as well as he just did it. There's no way that he and Trump don't get along when it's the

00:13:54.300 two of them chatting, right? Because Mnuchin's got skills. That was really, really good. All right,

00:14:01.440 enough about that. Let's talk about who's winning and losing in the shim impeachment theater.

00:14:07.920 Sure. I have a winner and a loser. Well, I have a winner, I guess. The other side has to be the loser.

00:14:19.300 I declare the Democrats the winners so far. Now, of course, we're not at the end point. But here's

00:14:26.160 why the Democrats are winning and winning hard. Because in the court of public opinion, which is

00:14:35.140 the only one we're talking about, because the Senate, everybody thinks they know where it's

00:14:39.040 going to end up. So it's not a trial in the sense that you're influencing, you know, jurists or the

00:14:44.360 judge, because we know how that ends. But there's a big play in influencing the public. And that's sort

00:14:50.780 of the point. And when you have somebody who is smearing the accused all day long in public,

00:15:00.280 and it's a real complicated situation, and then you have the other side saying it's not

00:15:05.900 true, who wins? You already know the answer to that, right? If all you know, it doesn't matter

00:15:12.360 if it's impeachment or it's a criminal trial, it doesn't matter what the domain is. If you

00:15:17.880 have these two things, well, three things going on, it's a complicated situation that the people

00:15:23.320 watching are having a little bit of trouble following. But one side is smearing the accused

00:15:29.360 just, you know, hours and hours, literally hours of smearing. Smear, smear, smear. And the other

00:15:36.840 side is saying, no, it's not true. Who's winning? It's the smear. The smear is way stronger than the

00:15:45.980 defense in the situation in which nobody can independently tell exactly what's going on,

00:15:51.280 because it's too complicated. And hey, we're not lawyers. And even if we were lawyers, we might

00:15:55.600 still disagree, because we watch the lawyers disagree, right? So under those conditions,

00:16:01.760 having Schiff just chew up TV time with accusations, he's winning. He's winning hard, right? So if you

00:16:10.500 were to look at it from just a stable point today, it's a slaughter. It's a slaughter. I hate to tell

00:16:18.980 you. But Schiff is absolutely slaughtering the Republicans. Now, are the lawyers good? I think

00:16:30.980 so. I think they're very good. I think they're doing everything they can do. It's just that you

00:16:36.940 could reverse the teams. It doesn't matter who has what talent. You know, they're all operating at a

00:16:42.920 pretty high level. But it's irrelevant who the lawyers are, because the smear always beats the

00:16:50.420 defense if nobody can independently tell what's going on. And that's our situation. Now, on top of

00:16:57.180 that, you have this weird situation where the system rewards lying. It's a terrible system. You know, I

00:17:06.540 always talk about systems versus goals. Apparently, we have a terrible system for this Senate trial

00:17:13.780 situation, because lying is not disincentivized. In fact, it's rewarded. So both sides, let's admit,

00:17:22.460 both sides are telling some tales here. But the smear is always going to be. So I would also say,

00:17:31.740 and this is an incomplete opinion, because there might be something I don't know about

00:17:36.420 this topic. But I would say, independent of the the quality and the talents of the White House

00:17:44.820 lawyers, who again, they look very qualified, very good. I would say that they botched the case so far.

00:17:52.800 But I don't know if that's because of them. All right, it might be, this is just speculation. But we hear

00:18:01.320 reporting that the president wanted to defend the case on the details. But we hear that, say, Alan Dershowitz and

00:18:09.920 other smart people are saying, don't even talk about the details. Just say it's unconstitutional. Vote and get rid of it. 1.00

00:18:17.540 Now, what we observe is that the Senate is and the White House's defense is not following the Dershowitz

00:18:28.040 playbook. Would you agree? Can we say that? Can we say that authoritatively? Because Dershowitz has said

00:18:35.640 a few times, hit the constitutional argument, vote and go home. And I completely agree with that from a

00:18:45.640 persuasion perspective. Because it gets rid of all these hours of Schiff, you know, smearing the

00:18:53.300 president. And it doesn't make you deal in the weeds where the accuser has the advantage. So

00:19:01.080 Dershowitz is quite accurately saying, the playing field in which the president has all the advantages

00:19:11.460 is the constitutional argument. He has all the advantages. It's the home court. Take the

00:19:18.100 constitutional argument. Instead, and I don't know the reason, I don't know if it's the lawyer's

00:19:24.800 decision or they're doing the work of their client, the president. For whatever reason, they've decided

00:19:31.040 to climb into the weeds and get down in the weeds. It's a losing play because it's Schiff's home court.

00:19:38.240 The smear beats the defense. And it's beating the crap out of it right now.

00:19:45.660 Now, is anybody really changing their minds? Well, who knows? You don't have to change many

00:19:50.340 minds to change the next election. So there are not that many people involved. But if you change a few,

00:19:56.680 it could make a difference. All right. So I would say that the White House defense is largely botched

00:20:03.440 for not following the Dershowitz plan, which was a solid plan. There might be something I don't know,

00:20:10.860 meaning there may be a reason that the White House lawyers are doing it the way they're doing it.

00:20:15.520 Something that Dershowitz has not called out in a way that I've heard anyway. So I might have a gap in

00:20:21.800 my knowledge. I'll allow that that possibility exists. But so far, it looks like Schiff is winning

00:20:27.480 hard. And that the reason he's winning hard is that the strategy is bad from the White House.

00:20:33.260 All right. Here's a question for you. We keep talking about John Bolton potentially testifying.

00:20:39.680 Let me ask you this. Do you think the White House lawyers at this point don't already know what John

00:20:48.600 Bolton would say? Now, of course, there's some uncertainty because the questioning can take

00:20:53.860 things in any direction. But is there any chance that the White House doesn't know by now

00:21:01.220 what John Bolton is going to say? So if they do know, and it's nothing that's going to change

00:21:09.620 anything, I mean, it might confirm things we've already seen, but I don't know how much difference

00:21:13.680 that would make. But one of the strategies, and again, I don't see them doing this, but one strategy

00:21:22.820 would be, and I think Rush Limbaugh was promoting this idea to put Schiff in the spotlight and just

00:21:29.940 put all the focus on him because he's not really a sympathetic character in general, and he's got a

00:21:35.900 lot to explain. So imagine if the White House defense said, you know, well, we hear Schiff say a

00:21:42.280 lot of stuff and a lot of it is lies. Just make the statement. You know, we're listening to Schiff

00:21:47.360 talk. We're in a situation in which lying is not punished, and Schiff is lying like crazy. What we'd 0.93

00:21:55.280 like to do for the benefit of the Senate and the benefit of the public watching is interview Schiff.

00:21:59.940 Now, what is Schiff going to say when they say we want to interview Schiff? Well, he's going to say

00:22:06.600 he's not a fact witness, and it's just a, you know, it's just a clever scheme. But it's going to put him

00:22:12.420 in the situation of defending not having witnesses. So wouldn't it be productive to make Schiff directly

00:22:21.040 have to defend why he's calling for witnesses but doesn't want witnesses? Because the Republicans

00:22:27.580 would call him and Hunter Biden. So it would be interesting to put him on the defensive about

00:22:35.700 why only he gets to decide who the witnesses are. Now, some of you already knew this interesting

00:22:43.400 anecdote. But did you know that Schiff writes screenplays in his spare time?

00:22:51.080 that apparently he's written screenplays on, let's see, which topics? He's written murder

00:23:01.760 mysteries, a Holocaust story, and a spy drama. That's right. The simulation has served up 0.79

00:23:09.120 to us. Adam Schiff, who actually writes fiction that matches what he's doing in his day job.

00:23:19.280 If you look at the Russia collusion thing, basically, it was like a script written for television

00:23:27.540 that he acted out. And one of the things that Schiff does is he's got kind of a theatrical,

00:23:34.020 you know, way about him, is that he tries to turn something into nothing with the application

00:23:42.240 of acting. So I'm going to give you a demonstration of that. All right, I'll say it first in the way

00:23:50.580 that you would just say it straight. And then I'll say it the way that Adam Schiff says it to make it

00:23:55.780 sound like it's really bad. The first way is, looks like it's a little overcast today, might get some

00:24:04.200 rain. All right? Now here's Adam Schiff giving you the same fact. And it's overcast today. We might even

00:24:17.120 see rain. Rain. Because it's overcast. It's overcast today. Today, people. Today. Not tomorrow. Not

00:24:33.720 yesterday. Today. And it might. I can't say this for sure. But I think we should be worried.

00:24:43.220 It might rain. It might rain. It might rain hard. It could rain for days. Rain. You know, I don't mean

00:24:54.160 to make too much of this, but the Bible talks about rain. And it talks about rain for 40 days and 40

00:25:00.800 nights. I can pray. I pray that we don't see that. But we can't guarantee it. We can't take that chance,

00:25:09.820 people. The Republic is at stake. Because it might, as I said before, it might rain. In my rain,

00:25:21.320 people. My rain. And, yeah, Shatner. It's the William Shatner acting class. But you can see him

00:25:32.880 continuously taking things that don't sound interesting at all, and trying to make them

00:25:37.940 substantial and interesting by his choice of presentation. A couple other interesting facts

00:25:44.040 about Schiff. I did not know that he spent part of his childhood in the town next to me,

00:25:49.660 in Danville, where I used to live. So I actually spent time in one of his childhood towns. I didn't

00:25:55.600 know that. He also runs marathons and triathletes. Did you know that? Did you know that Adam Schiff

00:26:03.700 is actually a really successful athlete? He runs marathons and triathletes? I got to admit,

00:26:13.800 caught me by surprise. But I'm not going to make fun of that, because I actually respect that.

00:26:20.580 So if I'm being fair, Adam Schiff, good job on fitness. I don't love your other job,

00:26:31.760 but on the fitness level, good role model. Keep it up.

00:26:38.760 You saw, of course, that on two occasions, the Democrats in the impeachment

00:26:43.640 situation there showed that hoax clip of the president claiming he could do whatever I want

00:26:51.720 as president. Now, of course, the hoax part of it is he was talking specifically, the context was

00:26:57.000 that he could fire a Comey if he wanted to, because that's in his job description, which it is.

00:27:03.100 But the Democrats have played it twice under the guise of acting as if he's saying it like to be a

00:27:10.700 dictator. I can do anything I want. So they're taking it out of context to make it look like he

00:27:15.920 thinks he's above the law, which is opposite of what he said. Because what he said was,

00:27:21.320 what I'm doing is compatible with the law, and it's true. So literally, it reversed the meaning

00:27:27.560 from I'm following the law to I break the law. Now, it's one thing when you see Schiff and company

00:27:37.100 show that clip, the hoax clip, and try to tell you it's true. Because they're in this persuasion

00:27:43.880 battle, and that's their job. They're persuading. But then I saw that that same hoax clip was

00:27:51.000 mentioned in an opinion piece on CNN. And it made me curious about CNN's internal rules. So

00:27:59.420 they have this designated hit piece writer on Trump, this guy Stephen Collinson. And just

00:28:09.780 about every day or two, he's got an opinion piece in which he says the president is rotten

00:28:14.760 and must be, you know, we're all in trouble. So basically, he's the designated hit piece

00:28:19.980 writer. And so he mentions again, this hoax video. But interestingly, he didn't put an interpretation

00:28:28.560 on it. He mentioned, he mentioned that it was played. And he mentioned what was said. But

00:28:34.960 he didn't say it was, it was edited to reverse its meaning. Nor did he say that the meaning is

00:28:42.500 that it looks like the president is trying to be a dictator. He put it out there without

00:28:47.020 the opinion part on it, which was, oh, damn it. I just lost my, just lost power on my computer. 0.96

00:28:54.900 Damn it. The rest of this show will be a little bit shorter since all of my notes just disappeared. 0.92

00:29:02.320 But I might be able to plug it in, depending if you're patient. So, well, let me, let me do

00:29:09.940 that while you're, while I'm talking. I lost my train of thought. Oh, damn it. I don't have

00:29:17.100 my power. So my question is this. Do CNN's rules allow that an opinion writer who's writing

00:29:28.800 a set piece, you know, not somebody who's talking on live TV, who you can't really edit

00:29:33.520 in, in, in real time, but somebody who's writing a written piece to publish it on CNN.com.

00:29:40.720 Is there anybody in the company who reads it and says, well, you're misrepresenting that

00:29:46.720 fact? Is that, does anybody do that? Because is it, it's one thing if an opinion writer writes

00:29:56.660 an opinion that's, you know, hyperbolic and crazy, but you kind of can tell an opinion.

00:30:02.620 But if you put an actual fact in your opinion piece and the fact isn't true, how, how does

00:30:09.900 CNN editors management handle that? I mean, I don't know what the process is. Do they let

00:30:14.660 it stay? Because even though it's obviously not true, I mean, obviously not true, because

00:30:20.520 you just have to look at the context. Do they let it stay because it's in the context of an

00:30:25.300 opinion? I don't know. I wonder what they talk about. But it makes me think that they

00:30:31.960 might have had that conversation. Because as I mentioned, in the article, it doesn't

00:30:36.260 put the wrong interpretation on it, nor does it put the correct interpretation. It simply

00:30:41.520 mentions it. It looks like it may have been written with a, with an interpretation that

00:30:46.400 maybe got, you know, taken out, or maybe the writer took it out himself, and he wanted

00:30:51.100 just to leave it there for your own interpretation. But there you go. All right. I had some really

00:31:03.520 interesting things to talk about on my notes that just disappeared because it's on my laptop

00:31:09.340 laptop that I can't plug in and I don't have my cord with me. Did I watch the James O'Keefe

00:31:17.720 undercover CNN files? Yeah, the plug is actually, it's not even in the same building. I would

00:31:27.560 have to go outside and go down. Yeah. It's not here. What was the test you were doing yesterday

00:31:36.000 on YouTube? Oh, yeah, I accidentally live streamed on YouTube yesterday. I live streamed a blank

00:31:44.720 screen. But I'm testing a product called Wirecast. That's the software on a Telestream box with

00:31:53.600 a piece of hardware that should allow me to stream to YouTube and do Periscope at the same

00:31:58.760 time and streamed to other services as well. So yeah, if I make you wait for the power cord,

00:32:13.240 it's going to take too long. Let's talk about the coronavirus. So you know about this virus

00:32:21.160 that's coming out of China. And apparently China has closed an entire city. You can't leave

00:32:27.980 the city. And I got to say, if you had to pick one country in the world to contain a virus,

00:32:37.440 I can't think of a better place than China. Because China, it looks like China is willing

00:32:43.000 to do what maybe, you know, a democratic country wouldn't do, which is just to say, all right,

00:32:49.460 starting immediately, nobody can leave this entire city of many millions of people. And I don't know

00:32:54.760 if you could do that in the United States. You could try. But I don't know if you'd get away

00:32:58.980 with it. What's the slaughter meter people are asking? Well, I don't see any chance that

00:33:07.240 President Trump will do anything but win re-election.

00:33:12.140 Who owns the patents to the coronavirus? Yeah. You know, I have to say that my conspiracy theory

00:33:22.980 brain went to, you know, how much of this is human made. But apparently the news today says

00:33:30.200 it came from snakes. So it was, the scientists believe it originally started in snakes and then

00:33:38.780 was transferred to humans. Now, I don't know why a human had sex with a snake. So there might

00:33:47.900 be somebody over in China who's got a lot of explaining. I don't know the mechanics of exactly

00:33:53.740 how you do that. I don't want to speculate. But no, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.

00:34:02.000 Probably happened from a snake bite is my best guess. But at this point, it looks like it can

00:34:06.980 travel through the air, it mutated, and it would be a pretty big problem.

00:34:14.800 Ever see the movie Outbreak? Unfortunately, yes.

00:34:19.140 All right. Did anybody have time to research the TikTok permissions question? Now, it might

00:34:25.500 be other apps as well. So TikTok wouldn't necessarily be the only app that asked for that permission.

00:34:30.840 So let's see in the comments. Has anybody had time to either debunk that? Because if it's

00:34:39.480 not true, I'd like to debunk it right away. And I cannot verify. Don't jinx his wind.

00:34:48.020 All right. The comments are way behind because I said that thing about the... Somebody says

00:34:58.760 it came from bats. I heard that it was other things that came from bats, but this one probably

00:35:05.900 came from a snake. I'm not sure we can exactly tell those things for sure.

00:35:11.200 Bat soup. Somebody says it came from bat soup. I don't know. All right. I'm not seeing any

00:35:22.400 responses yet. It looks like everybody's still talking about that virus. And I don't have

00:35:28.200 much else to do, so I guess I'll have to save that for another day. And I am going to do

00:35:32.020 something else and go talk to you later.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams - January 23, 2020

Episode 796 Scott Adams： Winning Shampeachment Theater, Mnuchin Versus Greta, Chinese Election Tampering

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