Real Coffee with Scott Adams - Episode 836 Scott Adams： The Biden Bounce, Bernie's Math, Iran's Zombie Apocalypse, Uighur Slave Sneakers

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, come on in. I'm glad you noticed that it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.

00:00:16.720 I'm your host, Scott Adams. Today's episode is brought to you by the three amazing books behind

00:00:23.740 me. If you haven't purchased any of those books and read them, well, you're not operating at peak

00:00:31.580 efficiency. Let's just say that. I pity the people who haven't read my books. So don't be part of the

00:00:38.880 people who are left behind. Well, I think it's time. We have enough people here and it's time for

00:00:45.760 the best part of the day, the simultaneous sip. And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of

00:00:49.500 tanker, chalice, or stein, a canteen, jug, or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your

00:00:55.100 favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine at

00:01:01.520 the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip and it

00:01:06.720 happens right now. Yup. Before and after. You can almost feel it. Before the simultaneous sip,

00:01:17.980 the day was okay. But after? Oh, after. Much, much better.

00:01:26.740 All right, let's talk about the stuff that's happening. In my life, I'm up to almost 390,000

00:01:34.800 followers on Twitter. I have predicted that should I reach a million followers,

00:01:42.560 followers. I will effectively control the world. Now, I know you don't believe that, but that's

00:01:48.480 part of the fun. And the reasoning goes like this. That influence is a function of how big your

00:01:58.000 platform is. In other words, how many people know you exist and can hear you. And skill. So it's not

00:02:05.400 enough to have a lot of people following you. Kim Kardashian has that. But she may not be skilled 0.98

00:02:12.200 in persuasion in quite the way that I'm talking about, where the actual techniques and methods of

00:02:19.240 persuasion have worked. But if somebody who has my kind of actual training, I'm a trained hypnotist,

00:02:29.120 if anybody's new to this. And I've been studying and writing about persuasion for years. But if

00:02:34.620 anybody with my kind of skill set ever had a million Twitter followers, my hypothesis is that

00:02:43.400 that person would run the world. And it wouldn't matter if it's me or somebody else. It would have

00:02:48.360 to be somebody who had those skills and had an interest. Now, could Tony Robbins run the world?

00:02:56.580 I think he could. I really think he could. But he doesn't seem to have any interest in doing that.

00:03:03.200 His interests are elsewhere. So you'd have to have somebody who's interested,

00:03:07.640 has the talent stack, and has the followers. And in maybe a year and a half, that'll be me.

00:03:13.960 So you'll get to find out yourself. All right. Speaking of influence, I tweeted,

00:03:19.720 I can't even believe I ever did this. I did something today that if you would ever ask me if I would

00:03:25.900 ever do, I would say, probably not. But I retweeted a Lawrence O'Donnell tweet, in which he was

00:03:37.560 retweeting a clip of AOC giving a little talk. It looked like it was in Congress. And the reason I

00:03:45.380 tweeted it without comment is you really have to see it. And here's the thing you have to see.

00:03:53.100 She's making the case, which I don't agree with, that we should be providing free health care for

00:04:00.840 anybody who comes across the border illegally. Now, her argument is not the one that I

00:04:10.060 subscribe to, which is that it's the most godly, religious, biblical way to treat people,

00:04:17.280 you know, treating everybody well. And while that's true, it ignores the implications and what

00:04:24.040 would happen if we just start giving all our stuff away. It would be very godly, but it wouldn't be a

00:04:29.840 very lasting system. And in the end, it would all fall apart. That said, you have to see how well

00:04:37.300 she makes her case. It's just crazy skill set. Just skill set. You know, forget about whether you agree

00:04:46.600 with it or disagree with it. You just have to see it. It's one of the, it's really impressive.

00:04:52.040 Now, some, I saw online, I was talking with somebody who was saying that they thought it was scripted.

00:04:57.720 Then maybe somebody wrote it for her, and she was just doing a good actress-like job of performing it.

00:05:05.680 To which I say, I'm not sure there's a gigantic difference. Because you would still have to know

00:05:11.600 whose words to speak. You would still have to feel them. You'd still have to be able to perform them.

00:05:16.540 You'd have to remember them. You'd have to really incorporate it into the, you know, the way you're

00:05:21.600 thinking. So I'm not sure it matters if somebody helped her with the speech. Somebody helped

00:05:27.380 Reagan with his speeches too, right? Somebody helps people, you know, leaders get helped with

00:05:32.660 speeches. That's not, that's not today's news. Winston Churchill had some help, I'm sure. But

00:05:39.780 just see it to see the skill level. That's all. All right. Have you noticed that the election

00:05:46.660 has only become about Trump? Now, when I say that, you say, well, duh. It's always, always been about

00:05:55.840 Trump. But listen to the way people talk about the election. The Democrats have completely stopped

00:06:05.040 talking about what good they're going to do. Although Bernie does. He talks about his health

00:06:09.320 care and stuff. But if you look at Biden, Biden only talks about beating Trump. So Biden sees the

00:06:19.500 world in, you know, sort of a binary world. There's Trump, and then there's B Trump. But he doesn't

00:06:28.900 have any kind of a positive message. And there was a, somebody in the crowd who asked him a really

00:06:35.700 good question. Asked Biden what was his passion? You know, what's driving him? What's his, his main

00:06:43.280 calling? Why he's putting himself through all this? And what he said was that he wanted to return

00:06:49.780 decency, let's see, decency and honor to America. That's what Biden's passion, his fire. Yes,

00:06:59.840 that's the question was, what's your fire? It was a good question. He wants to return decency

00:07:05.280 and honor to America. Does that feel like your fire? Does Joe Biden's fire match yours? Because

00:07:15.880 here's the thing, I don't even know if it matches his base, does it? Because when you hear, when you

00:07:24.220 hear the professional pundits, the people who literally get paid to talk on TV, they say things

00:07:30.980 like this, they say, oh, the president is destroying our credibility and our honor and our decency and

00:07:39.840 stuff like that. But that's pundit talk. Have you ever met a voter who is really fired up about

00:07:48.820 America's brand? Not me. I've never met one. Not one that I believed. I mean, I suppose you can find

00:07:58.020 somebody who will say anything. But when the pundits are talking about it, it's because they're paid

00:08:04.040 to talk about, you know, conceptual things and, you know, decency and honor and reputation of the

00:08:10.740 country, blah, blah, blah. I've never met an actual real person like, hey, Bob, have you noticed that

00:08:18.920 your life is worse because the United States is losing its honor and its decency? And Bob would say,

00:08:25.600 you know, I haven't noticed. I haven't noticed. So the great fire in Biden, the thing that's driving

00:08:35.120 him is something that his base hasn't even noticed, literally doesn't have any, any sensation of it

00:08:44.040 being a thing. When you go to the store and you buy some groceries, do you say, oh, I can't complete

00:08:51.460 this transaction because the decency and honor of my country has been so degraded? No, you don't.

00:08:59.560 You just buy your groceries, take them home, unbag them, cook them up and eat them. And you are

00:09:05.720 completely oblivious to the decency and honor degradation of this country because it's never

00:09:10.900 been real. And it's part of every campaign. And it's just blah, blah, blah. So Biden has bought

00:09:17.280 into a world in which there are just two things. There's just Trump and less Trump. He's not even

00:09:23.500 trying to make your world better. It's not even part of the plan. It's not part of the plan. He's

00:09:30.800 not even talking about what he can do to the world that this real, except for this decency and honor

00:09:35.980 stuff. All right. So of course, the big news is that Biden got a big victory in South Carolina. It's

00:09:44.300 probably because he got an important endorsement from a prominent African-American leader there.

00:09:51.520 And a lot of people who voted said that actually did make a difference. So we're in this weird

00:09:56.240 world right now between now and Super Tuesday. And here's what all the smart people who need to talk

00:10:05.540 about the news for a living are going to say. They're going to say, Biden got this great advantage

00:10:11.900 from South Carolina. Let's talk about that and all the things that means because Biden did so well

00:10:17.240 and it's the Biden bounce and Biden's back. And then almost without a period, in the same breath,

00:10:25.320 everybody smart is going to say the same thing. And it doesn't matter a bit. None of it.

00:10:32.940 South Carolina, if you could, if you were a godlike figure and you could take the historical timeline

00:10:39.260 and you could just find that the South Carolina primary, you could just get rid of it like

00:10:44.560 flick, just flick that out of the timeline like it never existed. Nothing would be different.

00:10:51.880 If you were a time traveler and you went back in time and completely changed the results

00:10:57.080 of the South Carolina primary, the entire timeline of the future would be unchanged because nothing

00:11:04.560 could be less important than the South Carolina primary. But it's what happened recently.

00:11:11.620 So we have to talk about it. I'm talking about it. There's something wrong with our brains

00:11:15.900 that we can simultaneously say, you know, this thing we're going to talk about,

00:11:20.920 I know, you know, everybody in the world agrees, has no importance whatsoever.

00:11:25.700 No implications, no ramifications,

00:11:28.140 completely meaningless. Let's talk about it for a week. And we're all doing it. I just did it. I

00:11:35.520 can't, I can't stop myself. What's wrong with us? All right. So the smart people are saying that

00:11:42.540 Super Tuesday will be a good day for Bernie. He'll get California, probably Texas. And that's going to

00:11:49.880 be the end of the end of it in terms of who has the most votes, not a majority, but the most votes

00:11:54.520 going into the convention. And then I think Biden's got an actually pretty good chance compared to other

00:12:04.600 people. And here's a question for you. Name some people who most want Joe Biden to be president.

00:12:13.400 Let me just make a list. Here are the people who, famous people, people you've heard of,

00:12:18.880 who would most like Joe Biden to be president. I'll make my list. Top of my list would be the

00:12:25.400 Ayatollah. Comedy. I think the Ayatollah would like a Biden presidency. Am I right? That's not wrong,

00:12:33.700 is it? Wouldn't you say that feels obvious to me that the Ayatollah would prefer a Democrat

00:12:42.720 and one who's going to be kind of friendly? Now, Bernie might even be better. But I think

00:12:49.200 the Ayatollah would be happy with Biden. What about Hillary Clinton? Happy, because I think she would

00:12:57.140 get a vice president installed who responds to her. So I think Clinton would effectively be a 1.00

00:13:03.640 shadow leader if Biden got in there. So she'd be happy.

00:13:08.180 Okay. I tweeted this morning that I think 75% of the country doesn't want Bernie to get elected

00:13:17.780 because it's 100% of Republicans, or, you know, I'm exaggerating, but it's something like 100% of

00:13:23.820 Republicans. The 100% of Republicans don't want Bernie, but also about half of Democrats. So

00:13:32.800 somewhere in the general range of 75% of the country doesn't want Bernie to get elected.

00:13:39.280 And he's their leader, their best vote-getter right now. And I think the 25% who want Bernie to get

00:13:49.920 elected may have confused him with Obi-Wan Kenobi because it seems like they only want him to do

00:13:57.980 something magic, you know, to use the force. There's something completely disconnected.

00:14:06.620 The Bernie supporters seem somehow disconnected with math and whatever the rest of us think is

00:14:14.420 reality. I guess they have their own reality. But it feels like Bernie has become almost a mythical

00:14:21.380 character who doesn't need to do real stuff. He can be a hologram. You can still worship him as a hologram.

00:14:30.100 He doesn't need to do anything. He can just talk. And Obi-Wan is the only one that can save you from

00:14:36.900 the Darth Vader of Trump. All right.

00:14:40.260 I'm having this image of Elizabeth Warren as Princess Leia and Obi-Wan being Bernie and Darth Vader being Trump.

00:14:53.860 Have you noticed that you can take characters from movies and they so often will map into real people?

00:15:03.340 You can do that with chess as well. If you take, well, that's another story.

00:15:11.580 It's just weird how well the Dilbert cartoon characters map onto a chess set. If you spend a few minutes

00:15:18.680 thinking about it, you can agree each of the characters in my comic strip, you could pretty easily map them

00:15:25.700 to the characters on the chess set. Now, I didn't develop them that way, but it's a phenomenal coincidence

00:15:32.380 that they map so easily to those characters. And I don't know if it's a coincidence.

00:15:37.380 There may be something about chess that speaks to the universal way we sort things in our minds.

00:15:44.260 So it's probably not a coincidence that chess has lasted so long.

00:15:47.180 All right. Let's see. So the big story that's a non-story is that Biden got, you know,

00:15:55.920 a massive amount of the black vote in South Carolina. So people are going to say,

00:16:00.060 Bernie can't get the black vote, but then the Bernie supporters will say he has most of the black vote

00:16:05.300 nationally. It was just a weird state thing. So that'll be the conversation that it won't be

00:16:10.520 interesting. The other big thing that's coming out of this, well, Steyer dropped out. So Steyer's

00:16:16.160 one percent. We'll go to somebody else, I guess. I heard, I heard Jesse Waters

00:16:24.100 on the five, insulting Steyer. And I've been laughing about it for two days.

00:16:35.340 I have this belief that once you see somebody's animal, you can never unsee it. And here's what

00:16:42.600 I mean by that. Have you ever known somebody who, and I'm going to try to make this sound

00:16:49.080 not racist because nothing I'm talking about should be construed that way. So everything

00:16:54.300 that I say next, just assume it's a universal, doesn't apply to any, any one group. But there

00:17:01.720 are times in my life where I'll be looking at somebody I've seen forever, you know, somebody

00:17:05.840 I'm familiar with. And one day, you see them as their animal. Has that ever happened to you?

00:17:14.020 Have you ever looked at somebody and you say, you know, I know you look like a human. But

00:17:21.080 just, just at this moment, I don't know what it is. But you also look like a weasel. I don't 0.55

00:17:28.460 mean conceptually. I mean, there's something about your look or your mannerism. That's a

00:17:35.840 little bit weasel. Now a famous, famous example of that is McConnell looking like a turtle.

00:17:43.540 Now the first time you hear that Mitch McConnell looks like a turtle, can you ever unsee that?

00:17:50.800 No, you can't. You cannot unsee Mitch McConnell as a turtle. I'm sorry. It's all over.

00:17:57.360 So, and I'm also seeing, you know, Bernie as Obi-Wan Kenobi. But who was I talking about? Oh,

00:18:09.220 Steyer. So Jesse Waters says that on the five the other day, mentioned in his little monologue

00:18:17.500 he was doing about the candidates, that Tom Steyer reminded him of a lizard. And once you

00:18:24.480 hear it, once you hear it, it's just there forever. And I didn't know what it was about

00:18:33.860 Tom Steyer that I didn't like. And some of it was about, it wasn't even about the things

00:18:40.520 he was saying so much. It was about his mannerism, his, I don't know, his vibe, his something.

00:18:47.900 But as soon as you see that, as soon as you imagine him as a lizard, because I think he

00:18:53.060 does something with his tongue, doesn't he?

00:18:57.380 All right. So I think Steyer's done. Well, he says he's done. Elizabeth Warren, interestingly,

00:19:05.280 is going to stay in the race to degrade Bernie's chance of getting a majority by the convention.

00:19:13.260 Now, Warren is being misinterpreted by her side, because that's what they do. The Democrats

00:19:22.980 only have one mode. You know, Republicans do this too. I shouldn't say it's one side. It's

00:19:30.220 pretty much both sides. But half of, at least half, maybe more, I'd say at least half of all

00:19:38.100 the jibber-jabber about politics is people misinterpreting what somebody said and then

00:19:44.580 criticizing their own misinterpretation. It happens both ways. Elizabeth Warren is the recipient

00:19:50.240 of that today. So when she said she's going to stay in the race, and then she said, why?

00:19:56.280 Because she's trying to keep Bernie from getting it before the convention. People said, oh, she's

00:20:02.380 just doing it to screw Bernie. And I thought to myself, well, that's not what I heard. That's

00:20:09.960 just your misinterpretation. When I read it, I read it the way a normal person would read

00:20:17.280 it if they were not biased. Elizabeth Warren saying she would stay in the race. Why do politicians

00:20:23.460 say they will stay in the race? To win. To win. Because I think Elizabeth Warren, like

00:20:31.240 everybody else, believes that this will be a brokered convention. Okay, not everybody else

00:20:36.880 thinks that. But if Elizabeth Warren goes into a brokered convention in, let's say, fourth 0.97

00:20:43.140 place, maybe she could build herself up to third. You know, she might optimistically think 0.80

00:20:49.920 that's possible. But suppose she goes in at third or fourth place. Does she believe that

00:20:56.300 she has a chance of being the brokered nominee? Well, maybe. Maybe. She might have enough friends

00:21:05.420 and contacts that she has a sniff that that's possible. But I don't think it's fair to say

00:21:10.260 that she's staying in the race just to screw Bernie. That might be the outcome. But why would

00:21:17.740 that be her motivation? Nobody stays in a race just to screw another person. That's not 1.00

00:21:24.500 a thing. That's a lot of work to be in a presidential race. You don't do it just to get revenge on

00:21:29.960 one of the other candidates. All right. So I think the fix is in for the convention. And

00:21:42.080 we'll see. Somebody says Perot did that? Yeah. Different situation. All right. Here's an update

00:21:51.460 on the rumor. So this was the fake news that was going around, not so much from the news

00:21:58.960 people themselves, but rather from social media. Bill Kristol was one of the several people,

00:22:05.080 prominent people tweeting this fake news. And their version of it is the fake news version of it is

00:22:12.440 that President Trump called concerns about the virus or the virus itself, depending who you're

00:22:20.860 talking to, a hoax. And of course, he didn't. He talked about how the Democrats are framing it as

00:22:26.420 the hoax part, as opposed to the virus itself. So of course, it's a ridiculous, stupid misinterpretation 1.00

00:22:34.640 and an obvious one. And all you have to do is look at the video and it's obvious what he really said 1.00

00:22:40.520 versus what he was reported to have said. So what I tried to do was get in really early.

00:22:49.020 And I don't remember. Help me out on this. Was I the first person you saw call this out as fake

00:22:57.500 news that they were misinterpreting what the hoax part of the virus was? Probably other people were

00:23:04.280 doing it at the same time, because as soon as you saw it, you probably said, ah, fake news. And yeah,

00:23:09.880 I'm sure I wasn't the first. But I tried to get in early. So whether I was first or just early,

00:23:15.960 the point is the same. I tried to get in early and ruin it. Because if you can kill it fast,

00:23:22.180 it might stay dead. But if you don't kill it, and it gets, it's like a virus, you know, if you don't 0.99

00:23:28.080 shut the border, the first time you get a, you get a reported case, it's just going to spread and

00:23:33.060 then there's nothing you can do. That's what happened with the fine people hoax. The fine people

00:23:37.960 hoax became hardened as a fact before people like me and, you know, Steve Cortez and, you know,

00:23:45.480 Joel Pollack started hammering on it just all the time, saying, no, just look at the transcript.

00:23:51.640 It's fake news. So I tried to get this in early to see if I could kill it. And one of the tricks 0.67

00:23:56.580 I used was to say that the only people dumb enough to believe it were artists. 0.95

00:24:03.260 Now, I don't know if that made any difference. There's no way to know. But I know that if I were 0.94

00:24:09.760 one of the people who was inclined to believe it, but before I'd, before I had been, let's say,

00:24:17.080 infected by it, the first thing I saw or, or somewhere near the beginning of my belief system, 0.77

00:24:22.700 if I saw somebody say, only artists are dumb enough to believe it, 0.95

00:24:27.760 just speaking for myself, that would immediately reset my brain. And I would say, oh, 0.98

00:24:34.860 maybe I'll look at this myself. Because I don't want to take sides with just the artists. If I know

00:24:42.220 that the economists and the lawyers and the, and the scientists and the engineers are all going to

00:24:46.620 be on the other side. Now, that doesn't mean that's true. But if the first thing I saw was that only

00:24:54.720 artists believe this, this BS, I would immediately be biased against it. So that's what I was trying to

00:25:00.980 do. I was trying to basically, you know, strangle this, strangle this fake news in its crib.

00:25:08.780 Interestingly, I saw Jake Tapper tweet on this subject. Now, Jake is the most interesting

00:25:18.860 personality at CNN. And he's interesting because I don't, I can't think of an example where he's ever

00:25:28.580 said an outright lie. And you could probably think of some people on CNN, the opinion people

00:25:33.880 who maybe you think have. But remember when the fine people hoax was raging? And when Jake

00:25:42.480 tweeted about it, even though CNN was widely reporting the hoax as true, when Jake tweeted

00:25:48.460 about it, he simply, you know, referred to the controversy, and then connected to the full

00:25:55.500 transcript, or the full video, I think it was, not the transcript. So you can see for

00:26:00.440 yourself. And I thought to myself, okay, okay, I would prefer you went stronger at it and

00:26:08.600 said, you know, this is a hoax. But he did tweet the actual, the full video, which shows

00:26:14.840 it's a hoax, without comment. And at least one time on the air, when one of the guests brought

00:26:21.340 up, brought up the hoax, Jake did add the context. Now, again, without an opinion, he said the

00:26:27.440 context is that the president went on to say, I'm not talking about the racists there. So

00:26:33.900 Jake added that. So we know that the president said clearly, that's not who I'm talking about.

00:26:40.180 So this comes up, very similar situation. It's a misinterpretation of something that the

00:26:47.560 president said, and Jake tweeted about it again, in the same technique, which is, he said, this

00:26:55.300 is what people are saying, basically pointing to the issue, and then just included the full

00:27:02.380 video, so you can see for yourself. Fair enough. You know, I think it is reasonable to assume

00:27:11.400 that, you know, Fox News and CNN and MSNBC, they know who pays the bills, they know who

00:27:17.940 watches the network. And, you know, there's a limit to how far anybody's going to go in

00:27:23.700 the constraints of their job. But I'm going to give him a thumbs up for that. Because he

00:27:31.240 just played it straight, said, here's what they say, see for yourself. So I appreciated

00:27:38.320 that. I'm following a guy on Twitter, who seems to know a lot about Iran. So he's got

00:27:47.020 family there. And we, I saw somebody else, I think it was Balaji Srinivasan, pointed him

00:27:56.260 out as somebody to follow to keep up with the Iran coronavirus situation. We think he's real.

00:28:02.480 I mean, it's hard to know in today's world, but he's had his account for a long time. And

00:28:06.560 he seems to know stuff. So here's what he's telling us. Oh, his name is Ali Osted. You

00:28:14.820 can see him in my Twitter feed. But his, his handle is at A-L-I-O-S-T-A-D. And he is

00:28:24.740 a good follow. And this is what he says about the coronavirus in Iran. Four points. He says

00:28:31.820 the regime hid the initial cases since, number one, it was just before the election and it

00:28:37.220 needed high turnout. Now, I don't know if that's true. So that's an allegation that they

00:28:43.900 had an election coming and they needed high turnout. And it would have been suppressed

00:28:47.760 if they said there's a problem out there. Number two, due to political need, did not stop flights

00:28:54.700 to China. Again, that's an opinion, because we're not inside anybody's heads. But it's

00:29:02.100 a reasonable, reasonable suspicion, right? It's certainly in the category of, yeah, it could

00:29:08.980 be. Number three, sources seem to be cleric students from China arrived in Qom, or however

00:29:17.300 you pronounce Q-O-M. I don't think anybody knows that. But he seems to have some information

00:29:23.580 that it was just a normal, you know, travel from China situation. And apparently that Iran

00:29:30.520 did not close their religious shrines, which of course causes transmission to be greater.

00:29:37.200 But here's the thing. The same observer, who seems to be quite insightful, I can't vouch for,

00:29:47.300 so these items seemed a little opinion-y, but he's got a little more, very opinion-y as opposed

00:29:53.660 to factual. But he's speculating that Iran is going to implode, and that it's going to happen quickly.

00:30:03.080 He thinks that law and order is actually going to break down in Iran, and that it's a matter

00:30:08.960 of days. Now, do you believe that? Do you think law and order will break down in Iran in a matter

00:30:17.240 of days? So this falls into the category of anything's possible. I don't think in a matter

00:30:28.520 of days, you're going to see Iran's social fabric breakdown. I think it's more likely people will 1.00

00:30:35.920 bond together and just try to get through it. And they're not going to want to have, I don't think

00:30:41.080 the Iranian citizens want to have a revolution and a coronavirus outbreak at the same time. 0.53

00:30:47.640 So I think he's wrong. I think that the citizens will say, let's handle one problem at a time.

00:30:53.700 Current problem, emergency. All right? Got to put a tourniquet on this virus. Now, later,

00:31:04.640 later, once we've got a handle on this, it might be a year from now, it might be later,

00:31:08.680 but later, we're going to take a close look at how our government handled this, and then maybe the

00:31:14.840 revolution is odd. But I don't see somebody in the middle of a medical emergency also wanting a

00:31:23.620 revolution. It's the worst possible thing they could do. So as much as I would like to see the

00:31:30.160 Iranian people fulfill their wishes and dreams and have the government that they want, which is

00:31:36.240 probably not the one they have, as much as I'd like that, and as much as I would like it to happen

00:31:41.720 quickly, my advice to the people of Iran is don't do it now. Because the last thing you need is a 1.00

00:31:49.060 breakdown of society at the same time you've got a medical crisis. So I'd say, I'd say no breakdown

00:31:55.140 of society. I think the Iranian people are going to be smart collectively, and I think that they're

00:32:01.740 going to keep their priorities in order, and I'm on their side. So if the citizens of Iran need our 0.98

00:32:10.040 help, I hope we give it to them. I know we've offered. And this is probably not the time for a

00:32:16.060 big change. So Twitter user B Machiavelli, one of my favorite follows, makes this question slash

00:32:28.100 observation. He asked me on Twitter, what are the chances, given their ages, you know, because the

00:32:34.920 coronavirus affects older people more? What are the odds that given their ages that Bernie, Biden, or

00:32:42.660 Bloomberg end up in the ICU? In other words, what are the odds that one of our very senior politicians

00:32:50.620 gets the coronavirus before election day? What do you think the odds are? Well, here's the thing.

00:32:59.120 They can't really stop shaking hands, can they? And I don't want to give anybody ideas, but I think

00:33:06.080 in this case, everybody has the same idea. So it's not like, you know, it's not like I'm going to

00:33:11.580 cause this to happen. People are going to be evil. And the odds or the ability to spread this thing

00:33:20.860 intentionally is easy. You know, pretty soon all of us are going to know somebody who has the

00:33:27.220 coronavirus. Feels like it. It's not going to be hard to send somebody to a rally to shake some

00:33:35.780 hands, right? So one of the things I expect, and I hate that I'm even saying this, is I expect dirty

00:33:42.260 tricks in the campaigns. And there's probably as much chance that they will all get infected than

00:33:49.380 there is that none of them will. So let me say that again. There's as much chance that all of the

00:33:56.960 elderly candidates get infected, all of them, same chance as none of them. It's like a 50-50.

00:34:06.800 So I think it's going to happen.

00:34:12.160 Here's a weird optimistic thought. Are you ready for it? This is a horrible thought

00:34:19.940 on its surface. So I don't want to make light of this. So there's no joke here. But it's actually

00:34:29.400 optimistic. And it goes like this. There's a really good chance that the coronavirus is already in the

00:34:38.160 United States in a much bigger way than has so far been detected. So the number of cases been detected

00:34:45.380 is in the low few dozens. The number of cases that we assume must be active, because you couldn't have

00:34:54.200 a few dozen confirmed, unless certainly there's a larger group of people who also have been exposed.

00:35:01.160 But what is that group? Is it hundreds? Is it thousands? So here's the good news disguised as bad news.

00:35:10.600 If I had to guess, and this is just speculation, I saw somebody on Twitter saying they thought 50,000

00:35:18.640 people were infected in the United States. I think that's probably a reasonable, I'm not saying it's

00:35:25.360 true, but that's a reasonable speculation. That feels well within the, well within the area of if you

00:35:33.240 found out later that 50,000 people were infected already today, you'd probably say to yourself, yeah,

00:35:38.480 could be. But here's the thing. If 50,000 people are already affected, it means it's almost below our

00:35:51.600 notice. Not almost, it means it's below our notice. Which means that if we had, let's say we were less

00:36:01.000 clever, and nobody had ever identified the coronavirus. Suppose nobody ever knew what it

00:36:07.740 was, or that it was special, or that it traveled, that it, you know, was more viral. Suppose nobody

00:36:13.640 knew any of that. And you just woke up every day and went to work, and some of you got a cold, and

00:36:19.920 some of you didn't, but it's winter, so everybody gets a little something. We all get the flu, take a few

00:36:26.120 days off, go back to work, talk about it. You know, you got the flu? Yeah, I got the flu too. It was

00:36:31.120 pretty bad. Had a bad week. Wasn't too bad. Not the worst flu I ever had. Did you hear somebody's

00:36:37.540 great-grandmother died? Oh, that's too bad. How old was she? 85. What killed her? Ah, you know, she, 0.69

00:36:44.360 pneumonia. So it would be really easy to imagine a world in which if we didn't know the coronavirus

00:36:52.640 had a name and it's special, that you could live your entire life and never know it had destroyed

00:36:59.000 the entire country. The thing which I equate to this is climate change. So the people who are most

00:37:10.940 afraid of climate change, they did some economic estimates, and they said that in 80 years the GDP

00:37:16.120 could be down 10% because of climate change. Now what they say is down 10% from wherever it would

00:37:24.780 have risen to in 80 years, which is about 5 to 10 times bigger than it is now. So if it grew by 5 to

00:37:32.140 10%, 5 times or 10 times, and then at the end of that, you know, we saw that, well, we could have gotten

00:37:38.800 another 10% more. We wouldn't notice it. It would both be a multi-trillion dollar problem

00:37:45.980 because 10% of the global GDP is many trillions of dollars. At the same time, you wouldn't notice

00:37:54.520 because you'd gone up 5% before you lost that 10%. You just wouldn't even notice. So it's possible

00:38:01.240 that if we'd never heard of the coronavirus, we would hear that a lot of people in their 80s are dying

00:38:06.840 of pneumonia. And we'd think to ourselves, oh, we'll miss them. It's terrible that they died.

00:38:13.700 But they were 85 and they were going to die. It wasn't going to be that long. So just keep that in

00:38:20.220 mind. If you find out tomorrow that this is already massively taking hold in America, that's good news 1.00

00:38:27.800 because it means you didn't notice. Am I right about that? That's not crazy, is it? That the best news

00:38:36.100 could be that 100,000 people in the United States already have it. Now, we still don't know why

00:38:42.560 people are dropping dead, apparently, in Iran just walking down the street. We don't know why

00:38:49.720 China has a high death rate. And we don't know why the United States has not yet experienced that

00:38:55.720 except one person died who was elderly. Somebody says, Scott's writing off the 85-year-olds.

00:39:05.580 That's not what's happening. So maybe you missed the first part of this when you said that...

00:39:11.180 That... When you said that... Anyway, you probably missed the first part of my periscope when I was

00:39:18.720 talking about misinterpreting people and then criticizing the misinterpretation, which is what

00:39:24.200 you're doing. Of course, everybody cares about every single person. But I'm just saying you wouldn't

00:39:30.120 notice it. Which is different from saying it's not important. All right. I noticed on... I'm going to jump

00:39:43.380 around a little bit. I noticed on Saturday Night Live that the actress which they brought back to the

00:39:52.020 show to play Amy Klobuchar is Rachel Dretsch. And that's the whole story. I'll give you my opinion

00:40:03.200 on it, but you probably already filled it in. If you know who Rachel Dretsch is, she's a very,

00:40:08.340 very funny comedian. Had been on Saturday Night Live in the past. But what she's most famous for, 0.88

00:40:14.660 and here I'm not being cruel because she's accepted this as sort of her brand,

00:40:19.740 but she's sort of famous for looking strange looking and, you know, sort of not attractive. 1.00

00:40:26.780 And I'm not saying she's not attractive. I'm just saying that that's her brand. You know, 0.87

00:40:30.980 that's the comedic... The comedic role she takes is sort of that person. And so they've got that

00:40:38.020 person playing Amy Klobuchar. And there's something about that that is, first of all, hilarious.

00:40:47.180 But second of all, it's just so... It just so gets that irrational part of your brain where you look

00:40:55.380 at her and you look at Rachel Dretsch and you say, okay, she doesn't look like Amy Klobuchar. 0.60

00:41:02.060 Like, if they showed up together at a party, you wouldn't confuse them. They don't look like each other.

00:41:06.500 But you still get it. You kind of get where they're going, which is hilarious. But I also think

00:41:14.560 it's sort of the end of Amy Klobuchar. She's going to get... I think there's a hashtag, you know,

00:41:21.100 hashtag Amy Klobuchar quit or, you know, get out of the race or something. So she's going to have 1.00

00:41:27.320 tremendous pressure on her. Adam Schiff is in the news. Adam Schiff says that... Somebody's mentioning

00:41:37.560 Larry David playing the part of Bernie Sanders. Now think about that. Larry David is an incredibly

00:41:46.220 popular comedian playing a popular politician. It's sort of a compliment. You know, even though

00:41:53.980 he plays him in a humorous way, he doesn't really insult Bernie. He just has fun with his

00:41:58.820 personality. But when you see Saturday Night Live drop the hammer on Amy Klobuchar, that 1.00

00:42:05.820 might tell you where the left's mind is at the moment. All right, so Adam Schiff is back

00:42:10.780 in the news because he has, quote, profound concerns about how the White House is handling

00:42:16.820 the coronavirus situation. So watch how often the criticisms of this president are

00:42:23.860 not about anything you can measure. Just keep that in your mind every time you see

00:42:28.860 a criticism. Every time you see something that the president did well, isn't there a

00:42:35.780 number attached to it? Unemployment. Here's my number. You know, number of people who died

00:42:41.540 from overdoses. Here's the number. It went down. So all of his accomplishments have a number,

00:42:49.140 something you can measure. But all of the bad parts of President Trump fall into the category

00:42:55.900 of profound concerns. We're no longer just concerned. We're profoundly concerned. That's

00:43:03.500 right. The good parts of what President Trump are doing are all things you can measure. But

00:43:09.380 the bad parts, profound concern. And it's a weird kind of profound concern because it's

00:43:15.960 the kind that doesn't activate in the first four years of the president's term. But rather,

00:43:21.180 it only activates in the second term. Now, Schiff hasn't said that, but I think we can all

00:43:27.680 figure that out on our own. If the profound concerns about all the ways that the president

00:43:33.020 is ruining the country, if they could be active in the first four years, the first term, we'd

00:43:39.780 already see it. We wouldn't have to use words like profound concern because he could just point

00:43:45.640 to the stats and say, look, this went in the wrong direction. Chris Matthews got, at least

00:43:55.280 reportedly, was excluded from the coverage of the debates. The thinking is because he got the

00:44:00.920 allegations of him being inappropriate in his language, if not actions. Mostly language,

00:44:07.680 I guess, to a woman who was on the set for a guest. And I try to look at sort of the national

00:44:19.320 consciousness and how do we feel about these stories. Because if a story is about one person,

00:44:24.740 it's just about one person. But your brain can easily start forming patterns where there

00:44:30.880 was no reason for a pattern to be there. In other words, you can see false patterns

00:44:35.260 quite easily. Here's one that's starting to form. The people who have been in the news recently

00:44:43.580 because of sexual improprieties include Chris Matthews. He's not accused of anything sexual,

00:44:52.260 just the way he talked. But it's in that domain. So your brain puts it in that bucket,

00:44:57.840 you know, the Me Too bucket. Then of course, you've got Epstein, you've got Harvey Weinstein,

00:45:04.100 and you've got Bloomberg accused of saying uncomfortable things as well. Again, not accused

00:45:09.500 of doing anything sexual, just his language in the past. Now, what do they all have in common?

00:45:14.960 They're all Democrats. Somebody says, watch out, Scott. Why? Watch out for what?

00:45:23.120 So here's my point. You've got four Democrats in the news for this Me Too-ish behavior. And

00:45:32.360 at what point does the public start? All right, so we've got the anti-Semites coming on board saying

00:45:44.660 that three of the four are Jewish. That is true. It's not relevant. But you're correct in saying 1.00

00:45:54.220 that people will form a false pattern. And, you know, it will give them one more reason to be

00:45:59.180 prejudiced if they already are. I wouldn't make anything out of the religion of the people involved.

00:46:05.620 But it is true that we'll form false patterns. And I think part of the false pattern will be that

00:46:12.880 we'll think the Democrats are the ones who are creepy in the Me Too way, and that the Mike Pence rule

00:46:21.140 is getting smarter every day. Now, do you remember when Mike Pence was first mocked because he said he

00:46:28.800 wouldn't go to, let's say, a meal like lunch or dinner or something with a female colleague unless 1.00

00:46:35.440 he brought his wife? And do you remember how roundly mocked he was for that? How's it sound now?

00:46:44.020 Every day, Mike Pence's rule about not going to lunch with a woman unless he brings his wife

00:46:50.660 gets just a little bit smarter. You know, it's not all the way up to, yeah, we're all going to do that.

00:46:57.680 That's the only thing that makes sense. But it started out as ridiculous, right? The first time 0.80

00:47:03.600 you heard it, even if you were pro-Pence, even if you were Republican, the first time you heard it, 0.99

00:47:10.420 didn't you say to yourself, that's a little bit ridiculous. It's a little bit too far. 0.98

00:47:15.380 Now, what do you think? Now, what do you think? You don't think it's ridiculous, do you? You might

00:47:21.140 not do it. You might think it's a bad idea. You might think that you'd rather not. You might wish the

00:47:26.280 world wasn't like that. You might wish a lot of things. But I'll bet you don't think it's dumb

00:47:31.280 anymore. Now, I've mentioned before that to the best of my recall, I have been following the Pence

00:47:40.980 rule. Now, not as specific as bringing a wife per se, but as specific as I wouldn't have a solo

00:47:48.700 meal or a meeting even with a woman. Now, I've had some awkward situations where, let's say there was

00:47:59.520 some reason to be interviewed or something, and it was just a professional reason. And I've honestly

00:48:05.960 made excuses. I shouldn't say this in public. But I've avoided, I believe, 100% of those situations.

00:48:14.180 And I'm also feeling smart about it. Because, you know, all public figures get accused of stuff

00:48:23.660 falsely. I don't know if you know that, but is it the first time you've heard that? All public

00:48:30.120 figures are falsely accused of sexual improprieties. All of them. I mean, I've told you before about my

00:48:37.900 Canadian stalker. There's a woman in Canada I've never met. She lives in Canada. I live here.

00:48:44.300 But she comes off her meds every now and then and calls people I work with, newspapers. When I ran a

00:48:51.100 restaurant, she called the restaurants and accused me of traveling to Canada to, let's see, what was I

00:48:58.660 doing? I was ransacking her apartment, going through her computer, hacking it, and various sexual

00:49:06.980 improprieties. Now, literally, I've never even met her. Now, how common is it for a public figure such

00:49:15.360 as myself to be accused of that sort of thing? It's almost 100%. Pretty much all of us. And I'm

00:49:22.240 only giving you one example, because that one's so clean. I mean, it's literally somebody I never met.

00:49:27.080 Now, extend that and imagine the rest of my life, right? Being accused of things by people you don't

00:49:37.660 know or things that didn't happen is just the most common thing in the world if you're famous.

00:49:42.460 All right. Kyle Bass, who's a big anti-China regime person, almost as big as I am. Well, he's bigger in

00:49:53.560 terms of his influence, but maybe not in terms of his internal thoughts about it. So he's tweeting,

00:50:01.580 and I guess there's a story in the Washington Post, so it's got some credibility, that China's

00:50:08.020 Uyghurs are being used as slave labor, reportedly, at factories that supply Nike, Apple, and Dell.

00:50:16.760 Now, is it true? Well, any reporting out of China, you have to put a little grain of sand by. And

00:50:25.360 any reporting from the Washington Post, unfortunately, you have to say to yourself, maybe, maybe not,

00:50:31.180 could be political. But here's the thing. The Washington Post typically leans left and is

00:50:38.920 anti-Trump. But this doesn't seem to have any internal political element to it. In other words,

00:50:49.240 I don't think the Washington Post is acting, I don't think it's fake news for any bias reason.

00:50:55.440 It could be incorrect, it could be correct, but I don't think there's any bias being expressed because

00:50:59.840 they're talking about another country, not our internal politics. And they say Uyghurs are 1.00

00:51:06.640 being used for slave labor. Now, I think this is just part of an overall trend in which

00:51:14.600 decoupling, I think, is guaranteed at this point. Wouldn't you say? I think that decoupling from

00:51:22.900 China is guaranteed. It will happen slowly. Maybe it'll happen faster than we think. But I think 0.99

00:51:32.820 it's a done deal now, don't you? Can you imagine a Fortune 500 company, let's say it's year 2021.

00:51:43.100 Fortune 500 company, they say, we're going to, we want to relocate our manufacturing outside the

00:51:48.320 United States. First, do you think you're going to get away with it? Do you think that your company

00:51:54.860 can take the hit of making a decision to move your manufacturing out of the United States

00:52:00.540 in 2021? You're going to get a lot of pushback for that, because the move to manufacture in America

00:52:07.340 is pretty strong right now. I don't think you could make a decision to move your manufacturing

00:52:14.000 to China anymore. I think it's done.

00:52:18.880 Now, all the stuff that's already there, you could easily see people who are already doing

00:52:24.540 business there feeling it's easier to do more business there than to remove it. So you'll see

00:52:29.580 that. But I don't think you're going to see a new business of any scale go into China. You'll

00:52:35.440 still see small companies do it, because maybe they don't have options. I think it's done for

00:52:40.880 the big companies, which means that decoupling is a matter of time. All right. There's a weird

00:52:47.800 situation happening between Syria and Turkey, and I don't know what to make of it. So I'll give you

00:52:54.780 the details and see what you think. So what we know is that Turkey has claimed that they've got

00:53:00.900 into a scuffle with Syria, and they say that Turkey has neutralized within Syrian territory at Idlib,

00:53:09.700 which is kind of close to the Turkish border. Turkey says they've, quote, neutralized more than

00:53:15.600 2,200 Syrian troops, 103 tanks, eight helicopters, and today two jets. So Turkey, whatever neutralized

00:53:28.640 means, so some number of the 2,200 Syrian troops were killed or wounded or made irrelevant,

00:53:35.200 103 tanks, eight helicopters, and two jets. And that's just happened in the last few days.

00:53:41.020 And apparently they're avoiding war with Russia directly. Rather, they're trying to go after

00:53:51.500 Syrian troops, even though it might have been Russia involvement that killed some Turks earlier.

00:53:56.560 Now, here's the part that I'm curious about. The reporting on this, this is from the headline,

00:54:03.020 Tensions Soar. Tensions Soar? If the United States had taken out 103 tanks, 2,200 Syrian troops,

00:54:16.260 eight helicopters, and two jets on another side, would you refer to that as tensions soaring? Or would

00:54:26.120 you say that's a war? How is that not a war? Do you see where I'm going here? 0.92

00:54:31.700 The headlines are treating this like it's not a war. Why is that? I don't know. But here's a question

00:54:41.420 slash suspicion. I think NATO is the issue. Because at the moment that we say Turkey, our NATO ally,

00:54:50.880 is at war, what does that do with NATO? Does NATO have to join the war by agreement? I mean,

00:55:01.120 that's what NATO is, right? If a NATO member gets into a hot war, doesn't NATO have to join?

00:55:08.820 No. Now, I'm not saying they should. I'm seeing somebody saying, no, don't do it. Yeah, I'm not in

00:55:16.700 favor of it either. But I'm wondering if the way we report it in the West is all designed to keep NATO

00:55:22.840 out of it. Because there's no way I don't call this a war. That's a war. 103 tanks? Do you know how much

00:55:31.380 firepower it takes to take out 103 tanks? This didn't happen in an hour? That's a lot of war going on

00:55:38.740 right now. And that's a hot war. It's active. It's a war. But we're going to call this tensions soaring

00:55:47.160 in the headlines? It's got to be because of NATO. If I'm wrong about that, somebody fill me in.

00:55:53.260 But I guess the, and Turkey is making sure that they don't directly fight with Russia, because I

00:55:59.440 think that would trigger it for sure. And we don't want a NATO war with Russia. It's the last thing we

00:56:04.980 want. So I think that's why Turkey is doing that. But they're doing this clever thing, Turkey is, 0.81

00:56:12.440 by opening their northern borders to let the refugees stream through Turkey into Greece and Europe.

00:56:18.760 Europe. And I guess this threat had been made before, that if Turkey doesn't get more help from

00:56:25.320 Europe, they're going to say, well, okay, now you're, now you're having, you're going to have the

00:56:29.640 same problem we do. Now, on one hand, I hate that Turkey is doing this. It's a really messed up thing 0.96

00:56:37.700 to do, because they are intentionally causing Europe a pretty big problem, because Europe is not helping

00:56:46.280 them avoid that same problem. And I look at this, and I think to myself, why is it that Turkey is 0.97

00:56:53.920 responsible for the refugees, and Europe is not? Is it just because Turkey is bordering them? Turkey

00:57:00.560 says that's not, that's not good enough, apparently. Just being on the border doesn't mean we have to

00:57:05.560 take them. I think Turkey is making a move here that from a, let's say, a moral standpoint, and even a 0.66

00:57:16.480 political one, is kind of solid, even though I hate it. I mean, I hate that all the problems that the

00:57:24.000 refugees are going to cause, all the problems that Turkey is causing by letting them pass through to 1.00

00:57:29.160 Europe. I hate all of that. But I have, but I have to admit, if I were Turkey, and I had to manage this

00:57:38.220 situation, I think I'd do the same thing. I think I'd open the border and say, you know, we don't need to

00:57:46.340 be the solution to your problem, Europe. Because Turkey doesn't have the responsibility for these 0.93

00:57:53.300 refugees. They don't. The world has responsibility, you could argue, but not Turkey specifically. 1.00

00:58:00.400 And so Turkey is saying, this doesn't have to be our problem. Watch this. It's actually a pretty good 0.98

00:58:06.340 move. I gotta say. I don't know what Europe does in response, but that's a pretty strong move.

00:58:14.280 All right. So enough of that. I think that's about it for today. Let's see if I missed anything.

00:58:23.300 Oh, Benjamin Netanyahu has a new campaign slogan. Benjamin Netanyahu's campaign slogan is,

00:58:33.100 keep Israel great. Remember I talked earlier about how everything is about Trump or no Trump?

00:58:40.760 The entire world is just a Trump or no Trump world. We've completely stopped talking about

00:58:46.940 things which are not Trump. And even Israel is in it now.

00:58:53.300 All right. I think that's about all I wanted to talk about. You guys got anything to say?

00:59:01.060 All right. So today and tomorrow, I'm going to be testing some new equipment for live streaming

00:59:13.040 a guest. I don't know if it's going to work. But with any luck, I will have a very special guest

00:59:21.060 Monday-ish. Not for necessarily the Periscope in the morning, but later. So I'm going to wait on that

00:59:30.360 because if my technology doesn't work, I have to do a little tap dance here. But assuming everything

00:59:37.540 works, you're going to see some guest interviews that I think you're going to like a lot. So there's

00:59:43.020 that. Oh, you love my audio book. Thank you so much. Bitcoin. Somebody's asking me about Bitcoin.

00:59:49.780 Nobody knows about Bitcoin. So there's that.

00:59:56.520 Okay. Let me give you my coronavirus prediction, and then I will sign off. And it goes like this.

01:00:04.320 I believe the United States is in this race. So our race is to suppress the coronavirus as much as

01:00:14.320 possible so we can buy time. Now, the time that we need to buy is about a year to get some kind of

01:00:22.400 vaccination. Can we buy a year? Well, obviously, Iran can't. Iran cannot buy a year. 0.84

01:00:31.000 Sorry. But can the United States? China can't buy a year. But can the United States? I don't think

01:00:43.140 we can. I don't think the United States will be able to be somewhat free of the coronavirus for a

01:00:49.480 year. I would expect by summer it will be raging. But most people will just have a cold and go home.

01:00:56.720 So that's where I think it's going to go. But let me tell you something that you don't know to add to

01:01:03.880 this coronavirus story. So do you remember in the year 2000, there was going to be the year 2000 bug,

01:01:09.560 and it was going to destroy all the computers. But then the technologists got involved, and they got

01:01:15.120 really focused and serious. And somebody figured out how to do it quickly, maybe more than one person.

01:01:20.820 They built programs to automate the task of reprogramming. Exactly as I predicted they would,

01:01:29.180 and it all worked out great. Now, of course, the medical world is working as hard as they can in the

01:01:36.900 scientific world to try to find a quick response to the coronavirus. Now, if you imagined that this

01:01:44.220 would go the way other things go, you might be wrong, because we've never had this much attention

01:01:50.420 so concentrated on something so important and so time-related. It's a lot of science focused in

01:01:57.740 one place. And there's one development or field of development that you don't know about, and I'm

01:02:02.940 going to tell you because I do. Several years ago, about three years ago, I was working with the

01:02:07.560 Berkeley, you know, the College of Berkeley, the University, for startups that were coming out of

01:02:14.820 the Berkeley world. And I got to see a bunch of startups that you haven't seen. In fact, I invested

01:02:22.320 in several of them. And so I got to learn about something that you don't know about yet. And it's good.

01:02:29.780 And it's this. After 9-11, the government of the United States wanted the government labs to figure

01:02:39.080 out how to quickly diagnose various bioweapons in the field. So the problem was that if you had some

01:02:47.540 suspected bioweapons somewhere, you needed to know as quickly as possible what you were dealing with.

01:02:53.400 And at the time, the technology meant getting a sample, sending it back to some lab, and they

01:03:00.000 tested it in the lab, and it takes however long that takes. So the government wanted the labs to

01:03:07.060 develop a quick, simple, portable way to test for bioweapons. And I assume that any kind of blood test,

01:03:15.760 etc. What came out of that was some technology, specific technology, to make it really cheap and

01:03:23.840 easy. So I don't know the details, but basically there's some microchips involved, and there's some

01:03:29.840 tiny needles in some cases. There's basically a set of technologies that the government labs developed,

01:03:38.540 which are now available to private industry. So private industry can license these technologies for,

01:03:44.680 I don't know, nothing or cheap or whatever it is, because the government came up with it.

01:03:50.420 I've seen these devices, so it's not theoretical. I've seen sitting on a table, several actually,

01:03:59.260 several different devices that you can put on a table, you know, easy to lift, easy to carry,

01:04:04.540 you could probably put it in a backpack and just plug it in. And you can take blood tests right there.

01:04:11.920 Now, the diagnosis part might be a little harder. That might take a special chip, special piece of

01:04:20.160 equipment. But here's the thing that I want to tell you. From where I saw it three years ago,

01:04:27.660 these were already well-developed devices. From those well-developed devices, I don't think it's

01:04:35.720 the biggest leap in the world to customize those for the coronavirus. And here's the other big

01:04:44.480 technological change. The reason that we used to send stuff to China and other places for

01:04:49.740 manufacturing is because they could do it more cheaply. That has changed. What changed is automation.

01:04:56.760 If the best way to build something is robots, then China pays the same for robots as we do.

01:05:04.840 And you don't want it to be made by Chinese robots, because then you have to pay to ship it back here. 1.00

01:05:09.960 So the least cost way to manufacture used to be Russia, I'm sorry, used to be China, because you 1.00

01:05:16.220 could have people do it. But as long as it's robots, the United States is actually the best cost.

01:05:22.480 So here are the trends to look for that could come together really quickly. Robots building test

01:05:31.520 devices, they could ramp up a lot faster than you think. So getting the robots built to build it

01:05:39.680 is going to take some work. But once they're built, they're going to build some machines. And we could

01:05:45.140 do that quickly. And then the second part is the diagnostic part that these new low-cost devices

01:05:54.440 are very close to being able to do. So here's the thing. What I knew that you didn't know until just

01:06:02.220 now is that the physical technology to be able to rapidly test everyone is way better than you

01:06:10.360 imagine it is. We're way closer. Doesn't mean it'll all come together and all work out. It's a little

01:06:16.640 unpredictable. But the technology is right there. So two points of optimism. One, it's entirely possible

01:06:25.540 that 100,000 people are infected in this country that we didn't even notice, which tells you we might

01:06:31.340 not notice it if it gets worse. But also the technology that looks like it's far away,

01:06:36.660 in three months, you're going to see things come online that you thought were impossible. Oh,

01:06:44.360 here's my prediction. My prediction. In three months, you will see technologies, technology,

01:06:52.540 let's say solutions for coronavirus. And it might be only a solution for testing,

01:06:57.260 not necessarily a solution for a vaccine. But in three months, you're going to see things

01:07:02.120 that you didn't think were physically possible or technologically possible. That's my prediction.

01:07:08.640 That's the good news. And I'll talk to you later.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams - March 01, 2020

Episode 836 Scott Adams： The Biden Bounce, Bernie's Math, Iran's Zombie Apocalypse, Uighur Slave Sneakers

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