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July 15, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
36:36
Episode 141 - Trump Derangement Syndrome, Mind-Reading, Climate Change and Racism
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Mmm. See, I close my eyes to really...
A good sip of coffee, the simultaneous sip, you should think of it as...
Well, I was going to make a terrible analogy, but this isn't the time.
All right, let's talk about a few things.
I just tweeted a little exchange from Josh Rogan.
He's a reporter for Washington Post, appears on CNN. And he says the following...
And you can put this under the umbrella of Trump derangement syndrome.
So this is Josh Rogin tweeted today, or last night I guess.
Enough with the quote, there was no collusion.
If Trump and his team were useful idiots or fellow travelers for the Russian military intelligence attack on our country, that's bad enough.
What? What?
Let me read it again.
If Trump and his team were useful idiots or fellow travelers for the Russian military intelligence attack on our country, that's bad enough.
So collusion, apparently we're giving up on collusion now, right?
Because if an anti-Trumper says, enough with there's no collusion, And then he changes the description of what is colludy enough.
So he's going to say, well, he's kind of indicating, let's just nudge the goalpost a little bit.
Because it looks like we missed the goal with this collusion stuff we've been hammering for two years, but maybe we could just make the goal a little bit bigger.
A little bit bigger. So now, it's not enough that they're charging collusion, but they can't find any in any kind of a legal sense.
So he's changed the definition of what's similarly bad.
So similarly bad to collusion would be something called useful idiots.
I don't know exactly what that is.
How was Trump a useful idiot when he was running for president and didn't have any power?
I'm not sure exactly what the evidence for the useful idiot part is.
Or, here's my favorite part, or fellow travelers.
For the Russian military intelligence.
What exactly does that mean to be a fellow traveler?
Well, I'll tell you what it means.
Collusion is something that is at least a little bit definable.
You know, if you saw something that was collusion, we probably all recognize it.
And we'd say, oh, okay, that right there, that's some collusion going on.
But it turns out they can't find anything that people would generally look at and agree.
It's collusion. In the Trump derangement syndrome world, in their mass hysteria, they can see stuff.
But the rest of the world, who's not in their delusional bubble, doesn't see the collusion.
So they need something that they can see inside the Trump derangement bubble, but that they hope the people outside the bubble can also see.
And so it looks like they've given up, perhaps, on collusion.
And now it might be something like a useful idiot, which is defined how?
You see, that's the trick.
It's sort of anything you want it to be.
But how about a fellow traveler?
Huh? What does it mean to be a fellow traveler?
So there's a lot of give up in that.
And then somebody challenges Josh Rogin for his statement, and then Josh comes back and says, there is a ton of evidence.
There's tons of it.
That Trump encouraged the attacks and promoted the stolen material.
Denying that is absurd.
And of course, the very next person comes in and says, he did not encourage hacking.
He was joking about finding Hillary's 30,000 emails.
And Josh says, watch him move the goalposts again.
Josh says, Russians didn't take it as a joke.
They acted on his suggestion.
That's the mind-reading illusion.
How does Josh Rogin know what Russian strangers were thinking?
How do you know that?
I mean, I think it's fair for somebody to say, Trump is obviously joking, because we know what a joke looks like.
We can recognize a joke.
And I'm a professional.
I'm a professional at recognizing jokes.
And I tell you, in my professional capacity, that was a joke.
Now, would the president be happy if those emails showed up?
Sure. But I don't think he reasonably...
Well, let me not mind read.
So Josh Rogin turns into the Russians didn't take it as a joke.
We don't know what Russians are thinking.
That's crazy talk.
Now here's another Trump derangement syndrome thing.
My representative down here in California, Eric Swalwell...
Tweeted today that he took a, I guess, a town hall hike.
So he went on a hike with some constituents and he reports that his constituents are worried.
They're very worried about Trump meeting privately with Putin.
Now, why would somebody be worried about that?
What is the scenario That causes worry.
I'm trying to imagine what could go wrong in that meeting that would be worthy of the word worry.
To me, I would say that by far the most likely outcome is nothing.
Nothing important.
That's the most likely outcome.
Probably just a conversation.
Because it's not going to be alone alone.
There will be interpreters.
So as long as you have interpreters in the room, unless you plan to kill them both after the meeting, whatever they say is a good chance they're going to get out eventually.
If not today, someday.
So here's my guess of how that meeting goes.
And this is just a guess, right?
I'm not reading minds, I'm just speculating.
So don't put too much credibility on this, but if I had to guess from my perspective not being in the Trump derangement syndrome, that meeting would go like this.
Hey Vlad, you know, glad we got this chance to talk.
Let's talk about this hacking and all the different problems that we have.
You know, here's the deal.
Being our friend is a good deal.
If you were our friend, you could have a much better economy.
We could cooperate on stuff.
You know, there could be good things happening if you were our friend.
But you put me in kind of a bind.
Because if you try to hack our elections again, First of all, you're going to get caught, because you know we can catch you.
And second of all, I'm not going to ignore it.
Now, the public might not know what I do, but let me give you an example, Vlad, of what's going to happen.
You see the lights in Moscow?
Look out the window. It's evening.
Let's say it's evening. Look out the window.
I'm going to make the lights in Moscow blink three times.
And Vlad goes, what?
But he says it in Russian.
I don't know how you say what in Russian.
He goes, yeah, look out the window.
And now the lights in Moscow go blink and turn off.
It just goes dark.
Then they come back on.
And then they blink again. It goes dark.
And then it comes back on.
And then he looks at Putin and he goes, any questions?
We're done here. Let me reiterate, being our friend is a really good deal.
Nice to meet you.
I'm glad we had this chat.
Now, my guess is that behind closed doors, By the way, have you heard any reports of how tough the president can be behind closed doors when nobody's watching?
Now, we don't know if he'll play it tough or he'll play it friendly.
My guess is that he'll play it friendly, but that his threat will be really good.
My guess is that Trump is going to deliver in person the threat of all threats.
I think he's going to deliver to Putin an offer of a great future if we just stop screwing with each other.
There's just no reason for us to be doing it.
There's just nothing to be gained by us being enemies, really.
But the downside, you know, should you embarrass me again by continuing to mess with our elections, things are gonna get really, really bad for you.
Bad in a way that you don't imagine.
And I think he's gonna leave Putin worrying that somebody on his staff might accidentally hack, thinking it was still okay.
So, I would call a victory in that meeting should be that when Trump walks out the biggest problem that Putin has let me say that I might say this twice just because the point is important when when Trump is done with him privately The biggest problem that Putin should be worrying about when he leaves that meeting is that there might be someone within the Russian,
you know, hierarchy who hasn't gotten the memo to stop hacking the elections.
That should be his biggest problem.
He should think to himself, holy shit, I need to stop this cold and I need to stop it right away.
I hope there's not some hacker who doesn't get the memo and is trying to hack into something in America right now because I'd like my lights to stay on.
So I think that's what's going to happen.
I think Putin will leave that meeting worried.
And if he doesn't leave the meeting worried, then President Trump has not done his job.
But I suspect he will, and we may never know what happens in the meeting.
All right, let's talk about climate change collusion.
Now, in the other movie, of course, they'll just collude, I suppose.
Somebody sent around, I don't know how reliable any of this stuff is, whenever you see a chart or data on climate change, the first thing you should say is, it's probably not accurate.
Or it's taken out of context, or it's a political chart.
It's not really trying to be accurate, that sort of thing.
But an interesting one went around today.
Ten countries with the largest reductions and the largest increases in CO2 emissions in 2017.
And apparently the USA is the biggest reducer of carbon emissions by a long shot.
Interestingly, Ukraine and Mexico are right on that list, and the UK is fourth.
I'm kind of impressed with Mexico.
Aren't you impressed that Mexico is number two, or number three actually, in reducing CO2 emissions?
That came as a bit of a surprise to me.
But the ones that are cranking up the CO2, of course, China, India, Turkey, the EU, etc.
And so I asked myself, why is it that we're not seeing a lot about that Paris Climate Accord in the news?
Is it because the data...
It makes that story a lot less palatable.
You know, if you are a Trump supporter and you're looking at that silo of news, you probably have seen reports, and again, I have no idea how accurate they are, but you should assume Everything you see about climate change is low credibility.
It doesn't matter which position it's taking.
It's all low credibility in my opinion.
But there's suggestion that the temperatures have already cooled.
Now that could be coincidence and it could be bad measuring and it could be false news and it could be lots of things.
But it seems that the The urgency for climate change has really changed, wouldn't you say?
Let me just ask you this.
Would you say it's true that the urgency that at least this country was feeling about climate change has largely evaporated?
So now I'm not talking about the reality of the climate.
I'm talking about how people are thinking about it.
Is it my imagination?
Or the issue just sort of tiptoed off the stage?
It's like, let me do my impression of climate change.
I would like to do my...
Well, I'll do it in the character of Dale.
And it goes like this.
Ah! Ah! The oceans are going to boil!
We're all gonna die! We're all gonna die!
That's a 2016 talk.
Ah, ah, climate change.
We're all going to die. Well, we're probably going to die.
It's dangerous. It's kind of dangerous.
And climate change.
It's hot today.
It's hot today. So, doesn't it feel like that?
Now again, I'm not a scientist, and I don't know if climate change is a problem or not.
I mean, I really would not have the tools to answer that question.
But it feels to me that the public's impression of it went from a 10 and a 10 to, so what's for lunch?
Now, I call this another example of the Adam's Law of slow-moving disasters.
You've heard me talk about it a lot, but every time I see an example, it's worth calling out.
And we've seen at least, I think, three separate technologies in the news that are all promising, and they seem to work in prototype at least.
And they look like they're scalable.
In which, for a trillion dollars or so, we could actually change the CO2 levels fairly directly.
You know, suck it out of the air, sequester it, don't release it at the source, that sort of thing.
When you add that to the fact that the climate itself is not corresponding to the predictions, because it seems to be a little cooler at the moment, and then you add that to the CO2 in this country at least, going in the right direction, then And by the way, there's something that I keep saying on Twitter that people keep complaining about.
It's one of the dumbest complaints, and I just have to call it out.
So when I tweet something about a new technology that somebody has tested and seems to work to take the CO2 out of the air, what does somebody always come in and comment?
And not just one person, lots of people.
They come in and say, The plants need that CO2. If we suck the CO2 out of the air, it'll be bad for the trees and bad for the plants.
That's the dumbest comment of all time.
Because you know what would happen if the CO2 started to get too low and became a danger to the plants?
We would, wait for it, turn off the machines that are sucking the CO2 out of the air.
It's not a problem.
Alright? That's like saying, what if you vacuum your carpet and you never stop?
Well, that would be bad because you would starve to death.
What if you went to vacuum your carpet and you just keep vacuuming forever?
Wouldn't you die?
Because you wouldn't be able to eat?
You'd be vacuuming every day.
No. No, you probably wouldn't die.
In all likelihood, when you got hungry, you would stop vacuuming and go to lunch.
Not the sort of thing to worry about, okay?
So, there's also news reports.
About some technology that looks promising for cleaning up all the microplastic in the ocean.
You've heard about the giant, you know, continental-sized islands of plastic in the ocean, and you say to yourself, uh-oh, that looks like a pretty big problem and it's getting bigger.
But... It's another one of those slow-moving disasters.
It got pretty big, you know, the size of Rhode Island or whatever it is, and that's pretty big.
But, you know, it's not that big compared to the ocean.
And it was sort of slow-moving.
We saw it coming for years and years and years.
And so people developed technology and they figured out what to do with it.
There's a story which I just saw somebody go by that's fake news.
There's a fake news story that Elon Musk donated a large amount to Republicans.
He has already denied it.
It's fake news.
My Twitter, and I'm a little disappointed because my Twitter feed is full of people Saying, did you know Elon Musk donated to Republicans?
He did not.
He has already debunked that.
He donated to Peter Thiel?
I don't think so.
Now ask yourself, why are people going after Elon Musk?
What has Elon Musk done to earn our hatred?
He tried to rescue some boys trapped in a cave, and I hear one of the divers, one of the professionals, is saying he can take his little submarine that he built to try to save those boys and, quote, shove it up his ass.
Because it was just a publicity stunt, says the diver.
To which I say, no it wasn't.
If anything, that was a legitimate try by a lot of engineers.
Who donated their time, probably worked all night, sacrificed, got behind in their work to try to save those frickin' kids.
That's all it was.
But they hate him for it.
Why else do they hate Elon?
Well, they had to make something up.
They had to make up that he was donating to a Republican cause just so there would be more hatred.
What has Elon Musk done To make the world a worse place?
Nothing. In fact, almost everything he does is oriented toward exactly where you'd want things to go.
Solving some of the biggest problems in the world.
So when a guy like him becomes everybody's whipping boy, You gotta ask yourself, what the hell is wrong?
I saw a...
I'm switching topics here a little bit because billionaires make me think of other billionaires.
So apparently Paraguay has eradicated malaria.
It's the... I guess it's the first...
I don't know what the criterion is here, but the first country to do that.
And I think the Gates Foundation might have been involved in that.
I'm not sure. But malaria.
They eliminated malaria.
Good going. So there are some amazing things happening right now.
We've got technology for probably solving climate change if it was ever a problem.
We've got a technology that's cleaning the plastic out of the ocean.
We've got North Korea sending love letters to our president.
Did you read that letter from North Korea to President Trump?
He calls him His Excellency.
That's probably a translation thing.
But malaria is on the retreat.
The plastic is being cleaned up.
The climate's probably in pretty good shape.
We seem to have enough food.
We seem to have enough resources like oil and energy, etc.
But what's our biggest problem in the United States right now?
Besides poverty in general, there's always more poverty than you need, right?
So that's sort of a perma problem.
But let me just do one clarification for those of you who waited this long.
I got into this big discussion because Hawk Newsome, head of Black Lives Matter, Greater New York chapter, Had said that Republicans perhaps should expressly state their rejection of racism and that that would be helpful because some things need to be said.
I agreed with the statement, some things need to be said.
But the problem is if you say, quote, I'm not a racist, A lot of people pointed out, wait a minute, you're pairing yourself with racism, and you've taught us, as I have, don't do that.
If you say, I'm not a murderer, it just makes you sound like, well, maybe he is.
I wasn't even thinking about you being a murderer until you brought it up.
So there's a general rule that you don't want to pair yourself with a bad idea.
But there are some specific exceptions.
Here's an exception.
If somebody says, you colluded with Russia, there is no word that's the opposite of colluding.
I'm innocent. Doesn't sound strong enough.
So you saw that the president said many, many times, did not collude, did not collude, did not collude.
There are some things you just have to say exactly using the word because there's no opposite of collusion that resonates with people.
Now, he did say, you know, I'm completely innocent.
I did nothing. But he had to directly deny the charge.
If somebody says, you know, if the police say, did you murder this person?
You should say, no, I didn't murder anybody.
Didn't do it. So sometimes you can't avoid using the same word.
But let me tell you how to do it right in the context of Hawke's request.
I saw a number of people say, okay, I'll say it.
I'm not a racist. Wrong.
Wrong. That sentence is the wrong way to do it.
And I feel bad because I could have done a better job to explain that.
Here's the right way to do it.
I reject racism in all its forms.
That's the right way.
The wrong way is, I'm not a racist.
Here's the difference. When you say, I'm not a racist, you've brought all the attention onto you and people quite naturally are going to say, well, why are you even saying that?
You must be at least close to a racist or you wouldn't even have to say it.
So the wrong way to do it is to make yourself the attention of the statement.
I'm not a racist.
Instead, You should make your attention the world.
And you say, I reject racism that's out there.
I'm not even talking about myself, because myself doesn't need to be talked about.
I've rejected racism everywhere.
I'm a subset of everywhere, but we don't need to talk about me.
Because not only Am I policing myself?
But I reject racism to the point where if I see it happening, I'm going to step in.
Think about how much stronger that statement is.
You know, look at this difference.
I'm not a racist. Well, you sort of sound like one just because you said that.
You know, you seem a little defensive.
Why do you even need to say you're not a racist?
There must be something that happened that was at least a gray area.
Who's accusing you of being a racist?
You know, so that's totally wrong.
You should say, I reject racism wherever I see it in all its forms.
Make the focus the world.
All right. I'm seeing requests to stop talking about this topic.
And I hope to do that.
I just wanted to make that clarification because everybody was asking me that question online, so that's the reason I clarify.
The Seth Rich Conspiracy.
Let's talk about that.
If it's true that the government's case against the Russians is everything that they say it is, then there's no reason to believe it is, by the way.
Remember, we live in a world now That when your government says something is true and we have plenty of evidence, it doesn't mean anything.
In the old days, maybe we were just simpler, maybe things were different back then, I don't know.
But it seemed like if the government said we have tons of information that this is true, all of our intelligence agencies say it's true, you'd say, oh, it's probably true.
But ever since, I think, Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, and then all the way through everything involving Trump, I think you could see that we just shouldn't make that assumption anymore.
There's no such thing as a credible government statement from our government or any other government.
It just isn't a thing. Now, it could be true, but you can't believe it just because they said it.
Now, the intelligence agencies feel that they're quite confident they know how the hacking happened, which would make the Seth Rich conspiracy theory not valid, at least not valid in terms of the idea that he stole anything from servers.
Yeah, let's call it a theory.
That's correct. Where is Julian Assange?
Is he really out of contact with the world?
Now, I certainly understand how Julian Assange might not have a Twitter account anymore and might not be able to.
Yeah, he's still in the embassy.
But how in the world could he be cut off from communication?
Because doesn't he just need to talk to somebody who has a phone?
Can't he just say, could you send a tweet for me, just say it was for me?
How hard would it be?
He spoke yesterday?
Oh, he has no internet. But he can meet people.
There's no...
Does he have human access?
If he has human access, he has all he needs.
He just tells people to send a tweet for him.
So that part, no visitors.
So he has no visitors and no internet.
Is that true? Only allowed to talk to lawyers.
Well, if he's allowed to talk to his lawyer, then he has access to the world.
Because the lawyer can just say, hey, Julian wants you to send this tweet.
Can't he? I don't know how that would be illegal.
Nobody has heard from him in five months, not even lawyers.
Yeah. Does make me wonder what's going on there.
Quit being so simple.
Does being so simple mean that I'm not buying into conspiracy theories?
Is that what that means?
All right. Why haven't we heard anything?
It's a good question. So I think there's a big question mark on Assange because I'd love to know what he knows about all of this Russia business.
Who do you expect to be indicted next?
Well, are you noticing the robustness of the two-movie thing?
The idea that Trump colluded with Russia morphed into Well, people who know Trump did unrelated things.
And they got indicted for it.
But if you ask people, so has collusion been proven?
They'll say, has it been proven?
Look at all the people who did unrelated things to collusion and got caught.
And then you look at them and you go...
What? I asked you if President Trump colluded with Russia.
And they'll say, I just told you.
I just told you. People who are not Trump did unrelated things and Mueller, who is working on the collusion case, indicted them.
Could it be any clearer?
And you go, what?
Those feel like different topics.
And then they'll change the subject.
Squeeze indictments.
Yeah, they're called squeeze indictments.
When is Lisa Page talking to Congress?
Have Alan Dershowitz on Periscope with you.
I'm That would be interesting.
Except we agree on everything, so I'm not sure I'm not sure if that would be productive because, you know, everything he says on television, he would just probably say to me because I wouldn't have any extra questions.
Paige already did?
Oh, she already did. Okay. All right.
Did I contact Kathy Griffin about being on Periscope?
I have not. I'm thinking about it.
But she would be fun no matter what.
Alright, I'm going to sign off now.
I think I've done enough.
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