Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive October 12, 2026
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ecide to be too afraid, we'll all go basically run off a cliff together. But it takes people like Naval, and I hope that my voice adds to this a little bit, to say this is temporary because it is. I would say the one thing that you could bet on with the greatest certainty of anything you've ever bet on is that it's temporary. Most things are. And so we'll be fine. Just keep your psychology strong.…

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sonable, level-headed guy who has never been crazy. And I appreciated him a lot last night just sticking up for the fact that the president's address, and I'll give my own criticisms so I'm not agreeing with Kasich's view. I just appreciate the independence of it. The fact that he wasn't going to take a side during a crisis when he so easily could have criticized the president because he's criticized the president a lot, right? It's not like Kasich doesn't know how to criticize the president. He knows how. But he chose during this panic not to nitpick something that wasn't worth picking at. So good job, John Kasich. Appreciate the leadership.

Here's a question for you. None of this is going to be in any particular good order today. But why don't we know more about ventilators? Here's my question for the news media, and I would actually like you news media to go out and get a report on this. Who is making our ventilators and how quickly are we ramping up? Why is that not the biggest story? Because it's the most crucial piece of equipment, the thing that will be most in demand if things crest the way we think they will. But who makes them? Do we even make them in the United States? Are they hard to make? If we wanted to suddenly go from making a hundred a week to ten thousand a week, could we do it? I don't know.

So you know in World War II one of the most amazing things was that the United States industry just sort of immediately transitioned into making tanks and the war materials, etc., and did it pretty quickly. I don't know what quickly means in that context but it was quick. So here's a question I ask you. How close are we in terms of the totality of technology from robots to 3D printers to you name it, how close are we to spinning up a factory to make a product that's let's say robot-run starting from scratch? Like how quickly could we build, even if it's a temporary facility? You saw China trying to build these entire hospitals, temporary hospitals, but they built them in like a week. What would it take for the United States with all of its resources in an emergency to spin up a robot manufacturing facility for ventilators? Because you know you could skip a lot of safety stuff. You know it's a temporary building, it's an emergency. Wave all the red t

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ape out of the way. So if you got rid of all the red tape, what could the best engineers with unlimited resources of the federal government, highest priority, working day and night, how fast could we do it? And why don't we have that? Because somebody's doing it right now, right? I mean somebody is making more ventilators I think. Nobody's making new ventilators? I believe they are. And how about…

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