Episode 836 Scott Adams： The Biden Bounce, Bernie's Math, Iran's Zombie Apocalypse, Uighur Slave Sneakers
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 7 minutes
Words per Minute
146.1803
Summary
In this episode of Coffee with Scott Adams, host Scott Adams talks about AOC's speech on immigration reform, the power of social media, and why he thinks Kim Kardashian may not be as good at persuasion as you think she is.
Transcript
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Hey everybody, come on in. I'm glad you noticed that it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
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I'm your host, Scott Adams. Today's episode is brought to you by the three amazing books behind
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me. If you haven't purchased any of those books and read them, well, you're not operating at peak
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efficiency. Let's just say that. I pity the people who haven't read my books. So don't be part of the
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people who are left behind. Well, I think it's time. We have enough people here and it's time for
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the best part of the day, the simultaneous sip. And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of
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tanker, chalice, or stein, a canteen, jug, or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your
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favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine at
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the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip and it
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happens right now. Yup. Before and after. You can almost feel it. Before the simultaneous sip,
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the day was okay. But after? Oh, after. Much, much better.
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All right, let's talk about the stuff that's happening. In my life, I'm up to almost 390,000
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followers on Twitter. I have predicted that should I reach a million followers,
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followers. I will effectively control the world. Now, I know you don't believe that, but that's
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part of the fun. And the reasoning goes like this. That influence is a function of how big your
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platform is. In other words, how many people know you exist and can hear you. And skill. So it's not
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enough to have a lot of people following you. Kim Kardashian has that. But she may not be skilled
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in persuasion in quite the way that I'm talking about, where the actual techniques and methods of
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persuasion have worked. But if somebody who has my kind of actual training, I'm a trained hypnotist,
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if anybody's new to this. And I've been studying and writing about persuasion for years. But if
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anybody with my kind of skill set ever had a million Twitter followers, my hypothesis is that
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that person would run the world. And it wouldn't matter if it's me or somebody else. It would have
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to be somebody who had those skills and had an interest. Now, could Tony Robbins run the world?
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I think he could. I really think he could. But he doesn't seem to have any interest in doing that.
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His interests are elsewhere. So you'd have to have somebody who's interested,
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has the talent stack, and has the followers. And in maybe a year and a half, that'll be me.
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So you'll get to find out yourself. All right. Speaking of influence, I tweeted,
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I can't even believe I ever did this. I did something today that if you would ever ask me if I would
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ever do, I would say, probably not. But I retweeted a Lawrence O'Donnell tweet, in which he was
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retweeting a clip of AOC giving a little talk. It looked like it was in Congress. And the reason I
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tweeted it without comment is you really have to see it. And here's the thing you have to see.
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She's making the case, which I don't agree with, that we should be providing free health care for
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anybody who comes across the border illegally. Now, her argument is not the one that I
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subscribe to, which is that it's the most godly, religious, biblical way to treat people,
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you know, treating everybody well. And while that's true, it ignores the implications and what
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would happen if we just start giving all our stuff away. It would be very godly, but it wouldn't be a
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very lasting system. And in the end, it would all fall apart. That said, you have to see how well
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she makes her case. It's just crazy skill set. Just skill set. You know, forget about whether you agree
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with it or disagree with it. You just have to see it. It's one of the, it's really impressive.
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Now, some, I saw online, I was talking with somebody who was saying that they thought it was scripted.
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Then maybe somebody wrote it for her, and she was just doing a good actress-like job of performing it.
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To which I say, I'm not sure there's a gigantic difference. Because you would still have to know
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whose words to speak. You would still have to feel them. You'd still have to be able to perform them.
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You'd have to remember them. You'd have to really incorporate it into the, you know, the way you're
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thinking. So I'm not sure it matters if somebody helped her with the speech. Somebody helped
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Reagan with his speeches too, right? Somebody helps people, you know, leaders get helped with
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speeches. That's not, that's not today's news. Winston Churchill had some help, I'm sure. But
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just see it to see the skill level. That's all. All right. Have you noticed that the election
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has only become about Trump? Now, when I say that, you say, well, duh. It's always, always been about
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Trump. But listen to the way people talk about the election. The Democrats have completely stopped
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talking about what good they're going to do. Although Bernie does. He talks about his health
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care and stuff. But if you look at Biden, Biden only talks about beating Trump. So Biden sees the
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world in, you know, sort of a binary world. There's Trump, and then there's B Trump. But he doesn't
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have any kind of a positive message. And there was a, somebody in the crowd who asked him a really
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good question. Asked Biden what was his passion? You know, what's driving him? What's his, his main
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calling? Why he's putting himself through all this? And what he said was that he wanted to return
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decency, let's see, decency and honor to America. That's what Biden's passion, his fire. Yes,
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that's the question was, what's your fire? It was a good question. He wants to return decency
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and honor to America. Does that feel like your fire? Does Joe Biden's fire match yours? Because
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here's the thing, I don't even know if it matches his base, does it? Because when you hear, when you
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hear the professional pundits, the people who literally get paid to talk on TV, they say things
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like this, they say, oh, the president is destroying our credibility and our honor and our decency and
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stuff like that. But that's pundit talk. Have you ever met a voter who is really fired up about
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America's brand? Not me. I've never met one. Not one that I believed. I mean, I suppose you can find
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somebody who will say anything. But when the pundits are talking about it, it's because they're paid
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to talk about, you know, conceptual things and, you know, decency and honor and reputation of the
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country, blah, blah, blah. I've never met an actual real person like, hey, Bob, have you noticed that
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your life is worse because the United States is losing its honor and its decency? And Bob would say,
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you know, I haven't noticed. I haven't noticed. So the great fire in Biden, the thing that's driving
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him is something that his base hasn't even noticed, literally doesn't have any, any sensation of it
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being a thing. When you go to the store and you buy some groceries, do you say, oh, I can't complete
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this transaction because the decency and honor of my country has been so degraded? No, you don't.
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You just buy your groceries, take them home, unbag them, cook them up and eat them. And you are
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completely oblivious to the decency and honor degradation of this country because it's never
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been real. And it's part of every campaign. And it's just blah, blah, blah. So Biden has bought
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into a world in which there are just two things. There's just Trump and less Trump. He's not even
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trying to make your world better. It's not even part of the plan. It's not part of the plan. He's
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not even talking about what he can do to the world that this real, except for this decency and honor
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stuff. All right. So of course, the big news is that Biden got a big victory in South Carolina. It's
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probably because he got an important endorsement from a prominent African-American leader there.
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And a lot of people who voted said that actually did make a difference. So we're in this weird
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world right now between now and Super Tuesday. And here's what all the smart people who need to talk
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about the news for a living are going to say. They're going to say, Biden got this great advantage
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from South Carolina. Let's talk about that and all the things that means because Biden did so well
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and it's the Biden bounce and Biden's back. And then almost without a period, in the same breath,
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everybody smart is going to say the same thing. And it doesn't matter a bit. None of it.
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South Carolina, if you could, if you were a godlike figure and you could take the historical timeline
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and you could just find that the South Carolina primary, you could just get rid of it like
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flick, just flick that out of the timeline like it never existed. Nothing would be different.
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If you were a time traveler and you went back in time and completely changed the results
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of the South Carolina primary, the entire timeline of the future would be unchanged because nothing
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could be less important than the South Carolina primary. But it's what happened recently.
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So we have to talk about it. I'm talking about it. There's something wrong with our brains
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that we can simultaneously say, you know, this thing we're going to talk about,
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I know, you know, everybody in the world agrees, has no importance whatsoever.
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completely meaningless. Let's talk about it for a week. And we're all doing it. I just did it. I
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can't, I can't stop myself. What's wrong with us? All right. So the smart people are saying that
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Super Tuesday will be a good day for Bernie. He'll get California, probably Texas. And that's going to
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be the end of the end of it in terms of who has the most votes, not a majority, but the most votes
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going into the convention. And then I think Biden's got an actually pretty good chance compared to other
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people. And here's a question for you. Name some people who most want Joe Biden to be president.
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Let me just make a list. Here are the people who, famous people, people you've heard of,
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who would most like Joe Biden to be president. I'll make my list. Top of my list would be the
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Ayatollah. Comedy. I think the Ayatollah would like a Biden presidency. Am I right? That's not wrong,
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is it? Wouldn't you say that feels obvious to me that the Ayatollah would prefer a Democrat
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and one who's going to be kind of friendly? Now, Bernie might even be better. But I think
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the Ayatollah would be happy with Biden. What about Hillary Clinton? Happy, because I think she would
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get a vice president installed who responds to her. So I think Clinton would effectively be a
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shadow leader if Biden got in there. So she'd be happy.
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Okay. I tweeted this morning that I think 75% of the country doesn't want Bernie to get elected
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because it's 100% of Republicans, or, you know, I'm exaggerating, but it's something like 100% of
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Republicans. The 100% of Republicans don't want Bernie, but also about half of Democrats. So
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somewhere in the general range of 75% of the country doesn't want Bernie to get elected.
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And he's their leader, their best vote-getter right now. And I think the 25% who want Bernie to get
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elected may have confused him with Obi-Wan Kenobi because it seems like they only want him to do
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something magic, you know, to use the force. There's something completely disconnected.
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The Bernie supporters seem somehow disconnected with math and whatever the rest of us think is
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reality. I guess they have their own reality. But it feels like Bernie has become almost a mythical
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character who doesn't need to do real stuff. He can be a hologram. You can still worship him as a hologram.
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He doesn't need to do anything. He can just talk. And Obi-Wan is the only one that can save you from
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I'm having this image of Elizabeth Warren as Princess Leia and Obi-Wan being Bernie and Darth Vader being Trump.
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Have you noticed that you can take characters from movies and they so often will map into real people?
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You can do that with chess as well. If you take, well, that's another story.
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It's just weird how well the Dilbert cartoon characters map onto a chess set. If you spend a few minutes
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thinking about it, you can agree each of the characters in my comic strip, you could pretty easily map them
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to the characters on the chess set. Now, I didn't develop them that way, but it's a phenomenal coincidence
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that they map so easily to those characters. And I don't know if it's a coincidence.
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There may be something about chess that speaks to the universal way we sort things in our minds.
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So it's probably not a coincidence that chess has lasted so long.
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All right. Let's see. So the big story that's a non-story is that Biden got, you know,
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a massive amount of the black vote in South Carolina. So people are going to say,
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Bernie can't get the black vote, but then the Bernie supporters will say he has most of the black vote
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nationally. It was just a weird state thing. So that'll be the conversation that it won't be
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interesting. The other big thing that's coming out of this, well, Steyer dropped out. So Steyer's
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one percent. We'll go to somebody else, I guess. I heard, I heard Jesse Waters
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on the five, insulting Steyer. And I've been laughing about it for two days.
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I have this belief that once you see somebody's animal, you can never unsee it. And here's what
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I mean by that. Have you ever known somebody who, and I'm going to try to make this sound
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not racist because nothing I'm talking about should be construed that way. So everything
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that I say next, just assume it's a universal, doesn't apply to any, any one group. But there
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are times in my life where I'll be looking at somebody I've seen forever, you know, somebody
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I'm familiar with. And one day, you see them as their animal. Has that ever happened to you?
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Have you ever looked at somebody and you say, you know, I know you look like a human. But
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just, just at this moment, I don't know what it is. But you also look like a weasel. I don't
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mean conceptually. I mean, there's something about your look or your mannerism. That's a
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little bit weasel. Now a famous, famous example of that is McConnell looking like a turtle.
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Now the first time you hear that Mitch McConnell looks like a turtle, can you ever unsee that?
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No, you can't. You cannot unsee Mitch McConnell as a turtle. I'm sorry. It's all over.
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So, and I'm also seeing, you know, Bernie as Obi-Wan Kenobi. But who was I talking about? Oh,
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Steyer. So Jesse Waters says that on the five the other day, mentioned in his little monologue
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he was doing about the candidates, that Tom Steyer reminded him of a lizard. And once you
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hear it, once you hear it, it's just there forever. And I didn't know what it was about
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Tom Steyer that I didn't like. And some of it was about, it wasn't even about the things
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he was saying so much. It was about his mannerism, his, I don't know, his vibe, his something.
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But as soon as you see that, as soon as you imagine him as a lizard, because I think he
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All right. So I think Steyer's done. Well, he says he's done. Elizabeth Warren, interestingly,
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is going to stay in the race to degrade Bernie's chance of getting a majority by the convention.
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Now, Warren is being misinterpreted by her side, because that's what they do. The Democrats
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only have one mode. You know, Republicans do this too. I shouldn't say it's one side. It's
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pretty much both sides. But half of, at least half, maybe more, I'd say at least half of all
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the jibber-jabber about politics is people misinterpreting what somebody said and then
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criticizing their own misinterpretation. It happens both ways. Elizabeth Warren is the recipient
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of that today. So when she said she's going to stay in the race, and then she said, why?
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Because she's trying to keep Bernie from getting it before the convention. People said, oh, she's
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just doing it to screw Bernie. And I thought to myself, well, that's not what I heard. That's
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just your misinterpretation. When I read it, I read it the way a normal person would read
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it if they were not biased. Elizabeth Warren saying she would stay in the race. Why do politicians
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say they will stay in the race? To win. To win. Because I think Elizabeth Warren, like
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everybody else, believes that this will be a brokered convention. Okay, not everybody else
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thinks that. But if Elizabeth Warren goes into a brokered convention in, let's say, fourth
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place, maybe she could build herself up to third. You know, she might optimistically think
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that's possible. But suppose she goes in at third or fourth place. Does she believe that
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she has a chance of being the brokered nominee? Well, maybe. Maybe. She might have enough friends
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and contacts that she has a sniff that that's possible. But I don't think it's fair to say
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that she's staying in the race just to screw Bernie. That might be the outcome. But why would
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that be her motivation? Nobody stays in a race just to screw another person. That's not
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a thing. That's a lot of work to be in a presidential race. You don't do it just to get revenge on
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one of the other candidates. All right. So I think the fix is in for the convention. And
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we'll see. Somebody says Perot did that? Yeah. Different situation. All right. Here's an update
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on the rumor. So this was the fake news that was going around, not so much from the news
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people themselves, but rather from social media. Bill Kristol was one of the several people,
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prominent people tweeting this fake news. And their version of it is the fake news version of it is
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that President Trump called concerns about the virus or the virus itself, depending who you're
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talking to, a hoax. And of course, he didn't. He talked about how the Democrats are framing it as
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the hoax part, as opposed to the virus itself. So of course, it's a ridiculous, stupid misinterpretation
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and an obvious one. And all you have to do is look at the video and it's obvious what he really said
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versus what he was reported to have said. So what I tried to do was get in really early.
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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
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doing it at the same time, because as soon as you saw it, you probably said, ah, fake news. And yeah,
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I'm sure I wasn't the first. But I tried to get in early. So whether I was first or just early,
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the point is the same. I tried to get in early and ruin it. Because if you can kill it fast,
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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
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shut the border, the first time you get a, you get a reported case, it's just going to spread and
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then there's nothing you can do. That's what happened with the fine people hoax. The fine people
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hoax became hardened as a fact before people like me and, you know, Steve Cortez and, you know,
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Joel Pollack started hammering on it just all the time, saying, no, just look at the transcript.
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It's fake news. So I tried to get this in early to see if I could kill it. And one of the tricks
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I used was to say that the only people dumb enough to believe it were artists.
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Now, I don't know if that made any difference. There's no way to know. But I know that if I were
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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,
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if I saw somebody say, only artists are dumb enough to believe it,
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just speaking for myself, that would immediately reset my brain. And I would say, oh,
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maybe I'll look at this myself. Because I don't want to take sides with just the artists. If I know
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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
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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
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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
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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
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is what people are saying, basically pointing to the issue, and then just included the full
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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
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just played it straight, said, here's what they say, see for yourself. So I appreciated
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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
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.
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
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
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.
00:34:12.160
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,
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
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,
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.
00:40:26.780
And I'm not saying she's not attractive. I'm just saying that that's her brand. You know,
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.
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
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
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
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
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
00:47:03.600
you heard it, even if you were pro-Pence, even if you were Republican, the first time you heard it,
00:47:10.420
didn't you say to yourself, that's a little bit ridiculous. It's a little bit too far.
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
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
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
00:52:18.880
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?
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,
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
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
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
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
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
00:57:53.300
refugees. They don't. The world has responsibility, you could argue, but not Turkey specifically.
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
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.
00:59:56.520
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.
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.
01:05:09.960
So the least cost way to manufacture used to be Russia, I'm sorry, used to be China, because you
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.