Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 24, 2026
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Episodes Episode #648 Segments
MainContent Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 648 Scott Adams - Gun Crimes, #FentanylChina

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n't heard before. Why don't we ship home one Chinese student for every fentanyl overdose death? Now some of you would say wait wait you can't do that because then there would be no Chinese students left and we would lose the benefit of you know the cross-cultural exposure and I wouldn't want to lose that. But here's the thing. After we had shipped home 50,000 Chinese students, which would be 50,0…

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before. In other words I don't know that President Trump is departing from the facts in a bigger way than he ever has before. I don't know. Maybe we should keep an eye on it but they're all at that age. Biden, Bernie less so, Warren but Trump, well I think we have to look at that. I feel like that's a fair thing to look at.

You know what I want to suggest? This idea. If you're running for president and you're over a certain age, let's say the age of 70, I'll just pick that as a random age. If you're over the age of 70 and you're running for president here's what I'd like to see. I'd like you to tell me the three family members that you trust to validate that you still have your faculties. So in other words if you're running for president you're over 70 I want you to name three people that the press have access to who are also close to you on a regular basis. So if you're President Trump you might say okay here's the three. You talk to Ivanka, talk to Jared, talk to Don Jr. or whatever. So whoever his three people are, could be family members, and have the press have access to them so that they can ask all right you're watching him do you think there's anything we need to worry about? But also those three should have direct access to the physician of the candidate so that they can give their personal opinion to the physician without it being public.

So I would like to see, now you're saying to yourself oh yeah but they're family members they're not going to say anything. Maybe. Maybe they wouldn't say anything. They might not say anything publicly but I'll bet you a family member would say something to the doctor because if a family member sees the President of the United States doing things that seem out of character I think a family member is gonna say okay I love my father but you know the country's at risk. And I think you could count on family members to of course be biased in favor of their loved one but they're the only ones who might know. They might be the only ones who really are close enough to know. So I feel like we need some kind of a system in which there's a known set of people watching the candidate over the age of 70 and that they could be queried on a regular basis and say are you have you seen anything? Is there anything different? I don't know if that would help but I'd like to throw out that as an idea. Maybe somebody has a better idea.

So what I just wanted to say this about Biden. Why is it that the Democrats have one primary complaint about Trump? There's one thing that they say, well it's not a primary complaint but it's the one that's true. The one complaint that they have about Trump that even his supporters would say well okay that's true is that he departs from the facts. In other words even if you're a Trump supporter certainly you've noticed that the 11,000 departures from the fact-checking. Now you might say to yourself okay at least 2,000 of those are fake news and he really did not depart in a real way from the facts. That's probably true. So probably 2,000 of the 11,000 are not real because that's the world we live in. But that would still leave you 9,000 facts that he departed from. Now most of that is hyperbole and exaggeration and typical politicking but what's interesting is if that was the biggest problem and it's the one you hear the most, people say he's a liar, he lies, President Trump can't stop lying. If that was your biggest complaint why the hell would you run Joe Biden against that? You can't think of anybody who would be a worse matchup. Can he? Biden is literally famous for that flaw. He's actually famous for just making stuff up. Why would you run the one person who doesn't have an advantage in the category that's the one you care about the most? It's exactly the wrong person. Precisely the wrong person. If you took 7 billion people on the planet Earth and set yourself up, who would be the worst person to run against Trump if what you care about are the lies? Who's the worst? It would be Joe Biden. You can't think of anybody who is more famous for a lie.

So I think you have to ask yourself who's making the decisions over there. I doubt there's anybody on the Democrat side who actually wants him to get the nomination including maybe people on his team. I have this feeling and again I have no facts to back this up so this is just speculation. My speculation is that even the people who work for Biden on the campaign at this point are hoping he doesn't get the nomination. I feel like that's the case. That there's probably nobody even close to him who wants him to get it at this point.

All right yeah Obama's not even coming out for him. Biden is there to provide cover for worse candidates. Somebody's saying I don't know. You know the interesting thing about a second term of Trump is that when Trump was originally running for president we had worries of things he might do and the entire attack against President Trump or candidate Trump, the entire attack fell in the category of things we worried that he would do. Well we worry he will round people up and put them in concentration camps. We worry that he will deport 14 million people. We worry that he'll do this, he'll start a nuclear war. But now by the time election rolls around we will have had four years of really getting to know what he is likely to do and not likely to do and it doesn't look anything like what people expected. Now they're gonna twist it and say oh but we knew he would create these concentration camps and sure enough he's putting children in cages just like we told you would happen. Really? It's the same cage as Obama was using. Literally Obama built them. I'm not sure that matters. People will still use it if they can.

So the slaughter meter is at a hundred percent. So there's nobody in the race who could beat Trump and I don't even know at this point if anybody on the Democrat side thinks they can win which is interesting because the polls are just so out. The polls show so clearly that everybody can beat him but does anybody believe those polls? Do you believe those polls? Yeah so I think the first election 2016 was about what people imagined Trump would do. The reelection campaign is going to basically be based on what they imagined that he did. Think about that. The first election was people imagining what he would do if he got elected and now we have four years of hoaxes and so the reelection campaign is already focusing on the things that people imagined he did that he didn't do like the fine people hoax, right? The putting children in cages. You know they imagined that there was some option to that or they imagined that Obama didn't do it. There's it's an entire imaginary scenario of what we imagined he said. Now we imagined he called people shitholes even though it didn't happen. We imagined that he said this that didn't happen. So it's an entire imagination-based campaign. Isn't that always the case for every reelection campaign ever? You know it's a fair question but I don't know if we've had this much imagination about what actually happened. I think we've had more and more difference of agreement. You know the more common reelection is you know you change the tax rate and look what happened. That's not imagination. Or you attack this country and look how it turned out. That's not really imagination. But this election is almost entirely imagination based.

Oh let me tell you about something that is kind of exciting in terms of understanding the future. I ran into a startup. They've been around for a few years called Teachable. So you can find them at Teachable. Teachable just like it sounds. And they allow people to use their tools to create a class on usually one topic. So one topic class. You could put it on their website and you can set your own price and then people buy it and download it online. Now what's interesting about them is that they're already making te

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ns of millions of dollars in revenue so it's a serious company with serious revenue. They've been at it several years and the quality of the courses is really high because for an obvious reason. They just announced that one of their creators, in other words one person who might have created one class content, that made five hundred and fifty thousand dollars in one day. Let that sink in. There wa…

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