All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 22, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
43:47
Episode 192 Scott Adams: Talking About the “Worse Than Watergate” Guy
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello, Joanne and Lori and where are all the guys?
JP, about time.
Get in here. All right.
Erica, Jerry, And your names are going by very quickly.
I'm so tired this morning.
Sorry I'm a little bit late, but it's never too late for the simultaneous sip.
That's how tired I am.
Join me. Alright, now normally when I do these periscopes, I've been up for an hour or so, sometimes two hours.
I've collected my thoughts.
This isn't one of those days.
This is one of those days where I looked at the clock and I said, hey, I better do a periscope because your coffee is getting cold.
Yeah, somebody said their coffee is getting cold.
I've got to do this. So, many of you remember back in the Wayback Machine, back to 2015, when I introduced the concept of That we were watching two movies on one screen.
Think how many times that way of looking at the world has intruded on your thoughts since then.
And have you ever seen a better example than today?
So, of course, we're all watching the fallout from the Manafort and Cohen situation.
And correct me if I'm wrong, But I believe we've entered two distinct Schrodinger's cat worlds.
In one world, the president is surely going to get impeached, if not in legal trouble after he's out of office.
In that world, he's obviously committed a crime.
The evidence is crystal clear.
And there's no doubt about it.
There's just no way this guy can stay in office.
That's one movie. In the other movie, nothing happened.
That's the whole movie, nothing happened.
In that movie, no crimes were committed.
Think about it. Both of those movies are running in full, you know, technicolor.
Just as clear as possible.
A huge part of the country believes that the president has been implicated in a crime that's easy to prosecute.
They've got a witness.
His name is Cohen. He believes he's part of the evidence against the president and the president will certainly be impeached if not in legal trouble.
And I'm sitting in a movie In which I don't see any of that.
Now, I'm not saying there might not be some secret thing we don't know anything about that somebody's talking about in some closed room somewhere.
I mean, I wouldn't know about that.
But if you're just talking about what we're seeing, the evidence that's presented to us, I don't see any legal risk at all.
Now, do you remember when I came on here yesterday?
I was probably one of the first pundits to weigh in.
And if you remember what I said, I said, I'm not sure I understand why this could be illegal.
So I was talking not as a lawyer, because I'm not one, but I said just commonsensically, how could it ever be illegal for a candidate to spend their own money making themselves look more attractive as a candidate?
Whether it was Hillary Clinton spending a lot of money on her wardrobe, or somebody getting some plastic surgery, somebody painting their house, Anything that's a personal expense, including paying off somebody not to talk about you.
So I waited, of course, until Alan Dershowitz weighed in.
And the question to him was, has the president committed any crime, even if everything that's said about him is true in terms of the Cohen, Stormy Daniels stuff?
And what did Dershowitz say?
No. Well, let me clarify.
I don't want to put words in Alan Dershowitz's mouth.
That would be the dumbest thing I could do because he says smart things and I don't about the law.
But what he did say was that if he just spent his own money on Stormy Daniels, that would not be against the law.
But that there might be some complication because the idea was that Cohen spent the money to pay off Stormy Daniels and then Cohen would be reimbursed by the president from his personal money.
And there was something about that that made it illegal.
But it seems to me, correct me if I'm wrong, imagine you're on a jury.
And the case they bring to you is this.
And they say, yes, yes, we agree it's totally legal if the president just wrote a check from his personal account to Stormy Daniels or anybody else.
And let's say the judge and everybody says, yes, everybody agrees, that's legal.
But it became illegal somehow, that I don't understand, because the idea was to finance it essentially in a way that made it hidden so that Cohen would pay it and then Cohen would be reimbursed by the president through legal fees.
And there's some idea that that would make it illegal.
Now imagine if the president, or let's say after he's president, is on trial, and the defense gives you this defense, and they say, the president knew that it was totally legal to write a personal check for personal stuff,
so that would have been totally legal, and then, wait for it, his lawyer recommended That the way he pay for it personally is through this mechanism that goes through the lawyer.
How is the client supposed to know that that turned a legal act into an illegal act if his lawyer did not inform him?
Does the client go to jail for taking his lawyer's advice on, wait for it, his lawyer's advice on On how to do something that's perfectly legal.
Now, if something that Cohen did in his advice about running the money through him made it illegal, even if that were a crime for the client, and I can't imagine it is.
I mean, I just can't even imagine a world where that would be illegal.
How big of a crime would it be For somebody to do something that if they wrote a check directly, it's completely legal.
And their lawyer, who is supposed to keep them out of legal trouble, suggests that they do it this way.
And you as a citizen, you're not a lawyer.
Trump isn't a lawyer. If his lawyer says, I just run the money through me, what would have set off any bells in his mind for him to even imagine that was illegal?
On what planet was candidate Trump, and in this case, client Trump, client of Cohen, how could he possibly known that running the money through Cohen would be illegal if his lawyer said to do it?
And it's not. I don't see how that would be illegal.
If I were the client, if I were the client in that situation, would I know that this had turned it into a crime somehow?
Well, first of all, I don't think it does.
And second of all, even if it did in some technical way, how the hell would I know?
I'm not a lawyer. Now, I think we all agree that ignorance is no excuse.
So the legal system is very clear that ignorance is no excuse.
But what happens if you, let's say you make a mistake on your taxes, and it's something complicated that no citizen would ever really understand, but their high-end tax attorney does?
If a high-end tax attorney says, do your taxes this way, and it turns out to be illegal, how does the IRS handle that?
Do they handle it the same as if the client easily should have known it was illegal?
I don't think so.
Again, I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think it's handled the same.
It might still have to be illegal But if you got your advice from somebody whose job it is to keep you out of trouble, and it was so complicated that even they didn't know it was illegal, you're a lot safer, right?
The person who gave you the advice ends up taking some of the burden off of you because realistically, citizens don't know how to do taxes.
Realistically, candidate doesn't know the intricacies of campaign finance law.
Probably no candidate knows all the intricacies.
So, I would say to you that even in the world that I don't live in, in which this is somehow illegal to do what Cohen and Trump did, even if it were illegal, isn't it the smallest illegal thing you could ever imagine?
Imagine something that first of all, not only doesn't have a victim, hold on, hold on, not only does it not have a victim, It has a beneficiary.
Several of them.
So, Stormy Daniels is a beneficiary.
If things had worked out and they paid her $130,000 and she didn't talk, she would have been a beneficiary.
What laws do you know of where somebody goes to jail for helping somebody and everybody just comes out ahead?
Is there such a thing as a law?
I know there are laws where it's a victimless crime.
But if you're going to rank things, there's a crime where there's a victim.
That's way down here.
That's low, low, low. There's a crime, technically, where there's no victim.
And then the very best kind of crime is where there's not only no victim, but everybody came out ahead.
Nobody lost anything.
What do you call that?
It's as close as you can get to the opposite of a crime.
Everybody just comes out ahead.
Stormy gets some money.
President gets some privacy.
Who came out behind?
Alright. So you'll be watching the two movies develop.
You may have seen, and all yesterday I was waiting for this.
So when the news broke yesterday, I was waiting for CNN to trot out Carl Bernstein.
Weren't you waiting for this?
All yesterday I was thinking, where's Carl Bernstein?
Where's the guy that they bring on to say...
Wait a second.
Where's the guy they bring on to say...
It's worse than Watergate.
It's worse than Watergate.
So, Carl Bernstein has become the worse than Watergate guy.
That's all he says.
No matter what the situation is, it would be, the president got a parking ticket.
It's worse than Watergate.
The president took a phone call.
It's worse than Watergate.
So they trotted him out, and what headline did they run?
I just tweeted it. They run the headline, Carl Bernstein says it's worse than Watergate.
And I thought to myself, can I just write the news now?
What if I just do the news?
I'll tell you what the news is a day ahead of time.
Yep, Carl Bernstein will be on CNN, and he will say it's worse than Watergate.
So, There's your weird news today.
You've got something that shouldn't be illegal, probably isn't illegal, and if it were illegal, it would be the smallest technical crime anybody's ever seen in the history of crimes, because everybody came out ahead.
What the hell kind of crime does everybody come out ahead?
It just sounds like good alliteration, somebody just said.
All right.
Now, how long is it going to take CNN to realize that they don't have anything?
them.
Oh, here's another subtopic here.
So some people are saying that Cohen is accusing the president of being a criminal.
So the way it's being reported on CNN, I think Anderson Cooper said it this way, is that Cohen in court accused the president of the United States of a federal offense, of a federal crime.
Did you see that?
I didn't see anything. I didn't see that in my movie.
So in CNN's movie, Cohen said in public, in court, that the President of the United States committed a crime.
And they're reporting it.
Here's the thing. They're reporting it like that's a fact.
That didn't happen.
Nothing like that happened.
I'll tell you what did happen.
Cohen described...
What the president did, which was directed and coordinated these payments.
If it's not illegal to direct and coordinate those payments of your own money, and it's not, I mean it absolutely unambiguously is not illegal to use your own money for stuff of this nature, then what Cohen accused the president of doing is something totally legal.
So in the other movie, you know, the non-CNN movie, Cohen got up in public and accused the president of doing something totally legal.
Now, what we don't know is...
And how do you not call that fake news?
Is it unfair to say...
That it's fake news when CNN calls it, refers to it as, when CNN refers to it as accusing him of a crime, when the experts are weighing in and saying, um, it doesn't look like a crime.
No. It's not real news.
It's fake news. I think that's a completely accurate label.
I don't think you have to be on one side or another to see how completely fake news that is.
Let me talk about something else that's bothering me about it.
You're watching the Molly Tibbetts coverage, and you know that there's a young white woman who was killed, and the white woman part matters in this story, Who was allegedly killed by someone in this country illegally.
Now that's being used in the news as an example of why we need more walls.
I'm not comfortable with that framing.
Because to me it just feels racist.
Honestly. Now I want to be very careful.
I'm not saying that the people who are talking about this are racists.
I'm not saying they have racist intentions, because if I did, I would be reading their minds.
That would be mind reading.
I'm not a mind reader.
And it is certainly a crime for somebody to come into this country illegally.
And if they come into the country illegally and kill a citizen, that's a really bad crime.
We would like the rate of that to be zero.
So we can all agree that the okay number of people to be killed by people who are not legal citizens, the proper number is zero, right?
So the number should be zero.
We're all on the same side on that.
Nobody wanted her to be killed.
Nobody wants illegal people to come into the country and commit crimes.
100% agreement all over the country that nobody wanted any of that.
But to highlight it, looks racist.
Feels racist.
So if your intention is to get your wall and to not look like a racist in the process, it kind of works against you.
If your intention is to just get the wall and you want to scare people as much as possible, watch how the comments are completely misunderstanding my clear point.
Watch how people are just totally triggered on both sides on the comments.
What I'm talking about is persuasion.
What you're mad about is not what I'm talking about.
So just check your thinking here for a moment.
Understand that we're all in complete agreement.
That this should not have happened.
The right rate of murder is zero.
Wouldn't it be better if nobody was coming across the border illegally?
And the fact that somebody got murdered definitely makes it worse.
We're all in agreement on the facts.
So don't give me a hard time about the facts.
We agree. I'm telling you that if you're trying to convince the other side, the people who don't want the wall, if you're trying to convince them that you want a wall, And that the reason you're doing it has nothing to do with being racist.
This is exactly the wrong way to do it.
So it might be the best way to get the wall if it gets the base fired up enough to elect more Republicans or something.
So I'm not sure it doesn't work.
That remains to be seen.
I mean, it's worked so far.
It got us to this point.
We're closer to the wall than we've ever been.
So you could certainly argue that it has worked up to this point.
But at this point, you know, the Democrats have already at one point offered to pay for a wall under certain conditions.
So under the condition that the Democrats have made at least one serious offer to pay for the wall, should they get some other things, the Democrats themselves have essentially acknowledged that border security matters and they would pay for some kind of it.
I feel like at this point, Focusing on this Molly Tibbetts thing, it's hard for me to understand this messaging.
As a message, It's completely legitimate to talk about how some crime got into the country.
The facts are completely legitimate.
So this is one of those cases where, you know, as odd as it seems, the facts are completely on the president's side.
It looks like this is exactly what happened.
Somebody came across the border, killed the citizen.
The right amount of that is zero.
We should be striving to make that zero, and a wall might help.
But, If all you're talking about all day is the brown guy killed the white woman, that's not registering to me as solid facts, even though that is a solid fact.
It's registering to me as, I feel like you've already won the argument that we need good border security.
If we're still talking about brown guy kills white girl, I feel like that's sending two messages and one of them is very destructive.
So let me say I'm a little bit undecided on the efficiency or utility of talking about it.
It might be that getting people fired up about this stuff gets you your wall.
But I don't think it's free.
I think you're giving away something pretty big, which is the sense of racial harmony.
Nobody is saying that, Scott.
I'm not talking about what people are saying.
I'm talking about how the message feels.
Because if you spend time on, you know, this one person killed this one person, you don't have to talk about their race.
You know, that doesn't ever have to come up.
It's just how people are going to receive it.
So when I talk about what the persuasion level is on this, I'm talking about the irrational level.
If you're going to argue to me about the facts, remember I've agreed with you on all of the facts.
I've agreed with you that it wouldn't matter if the person came across the border was brown or purple or white.
I totally agree with you on the facts that race was not part of the story.
But it's going to feel like that.
And why would you message something that will make things worse if you know it's going to make people feel that way?
You wouldn't if it was your daughter.
Yes, completely ridiculous thing to say.
I agree with that completely ridiculous comment that I would feel differently if my own daughter were killed.
Duh! Of course I would.
What's that got to do with anything?
Everybody feels differently if it's their own kid got killed.
That's ridiculous. Why does it make people feel that way?
We're sort of primed to see things in a non-factual way.
We are irrational creatures.
If you ignore our irrational nature, you can accidentally message things exactly the wrong thing.
No one is saying brown person.
That's a fact.
We agree on the facts.
My point has nothing to do with the facts, because we agree on all the facts.
Yes, we're focusing on the illegal part.
That's a fact. No, I'm not mind reading.
Somebody says you're mind reading. I'm telling you how persuasion works and that people are irrational.
So every time somebody says in the comments...
So here's a little persuasion thing for you.
Watch the comments. Every time somebody points out a fact, there are two things you should know about it.
One, I already agree with the fact and the people saying it know it.
So the facts have nothing to do with anything.
So everybody who is saying a fact, they don't understand the point because they don't want to.
You don't want to understand that the facts have nothing to do with this.
It's just how it feels.
Now watch, there's going to be somebody else who comes up with another fact.
What if an illegal white immigrant?
That would be a fact.
It's irrelevant. Let's see how many more people will be caught in this little bubble.
Was she as likely to be killed by a citizen?
That would be a fact, not relevant.
He was illegal.
That's a fact, irrelevant.
Every fact you say is irrelevant.
If you don't understand that, then you don't know what I'm saying.
But watch how people can't hear this.
So you're watching right in front of you sort of a, I would call it a cognitive blindness.
So somebody just wrote illegal three times.
Illegal, illegal, illegal did it.
That's a fact.
It has nothing to do with my point.
For those of you who can see past what I'm talking about and that I'm not talking about the facts, I'm talking about how it feels to people.
Watch how many people are arguing how it feels by giving me a fact which is a completely different topic and I already agree with them.
This is interesting to watch it in real time.
But if the victim was black, somebody says, well that didn't happen.
It feels you're getting defensive.
I am, because I'm also reacting irrationally, because as many times as I tell you I agree with the facts, it won't stop you from giving me more facts that I agree with.
Alright, I think I've taken this way too far.
Somebody said feelings are relevant over facts.
Why? Oh man, you must be new here.
Yes, feelings are more relevant than facts in many situations.
I'm not saying they should be.
I'm saying that we're irrational creatures and we act that way.
Read my book, Win Bigly, to understand the larger points.
Jogging isn't safe in Iowa.
You know, I had that same feeling, which was, what the hell?
Iowa, I thought, was the safest place in the world.
Scott is mind-reading again.
On what? I'm going to start...
I think I'll start deleting the people who just start spewing out that I'm mind reading.
If you give me an example...
I'll deal with it as something that's true or false.
But if you just start spewing, Scott is mind reading again, I'm going to start blocking you for being a troll.
But if you have a reason, something you think I did that, absolutely point it out.
because everybody does that, and sometimes I do it as well.
No skin in the game here.
or I've got plenty of skin in the game.
Are you kidding me? Who has more skin in the game than I do?
I'm literally at risk of dying.
I have so much skin in the game of these topics that I could personally be murdered if I go into public.
That's not even a joke.
The odds of me being murdered in public because of the things that I say on this Periscope are pretty high compared to the average person.
So if I don't have a skin in the game, nobody does.
Trump haters feel lots of irrational feelings.
That is not a very aware statement.
It would be more aware to say everybody is very irrational all the time.
What's wrong with having feelings?
It's not a question of whether it's wrong to have irrational feelings, because we just have them.
So that would be like saying, is air good or bad?
Well, it doesn't matter. We have air.
It doesn't matter what your opinion of it is.
Don't be a...
You assume you know feelings.
Oh Did I assume I know people's feelings?
When I talk about these things, I'm talking about in the whole, on the average.
I'm not talking about every individual.
If I say the messaging would make people feel something, I don't mean every person feels the same thing.
Which would be mind reading.
All right.
Oh, somebody said...
Okay, there was a good example.
Somebody said that I'm mind reading...
Because I assume that when other people hear illegal immigrant that they're thinking racist.
No, you are actually mind reading because I never said anything like that.
So without repeating it again, the statement that you said about me was you mind reading me because my opinion was nothing like that.
Were you happy that the judge asked the jury about having their names released?
Yes. It would have been a tragedy for the judge to release the names of the jurors without their permission.
And apparently they didn't give permission, but I don't think anybody cares because Manafort was guilty enough.
And I love the fact that the whole Manafort thing is just being conflated with Cohen to make the Cohen thing seem worse.
Nobody's saying that directly, but our minds are conflating the two.
They're just a little too confusing because they happened at the same time.
Now here's another...
I'm glad you waited to the end, so I actually say something useful at the end.
God, I got something in my eye.
Sorry. Here's the one additive thing that I'll say today.
You might see this in the media later because somebody's going to pick up on it.
So part of the criticism we're seeing after the Cohen and Manafort decisions are the laundry list of all of the Trump appointees and people that he's worked with since his candidacy who have been run out of office in disgrace and or got in legal trouble.
And it's a pretty big list now, right?
The number of people who have backed the president or worked for the president or worked on the campaign who got into legal trouble, and then you throw Omarosa onto the list and you say to yourself, my God, I thought the president said he could hire good people, but what about all these bad people?
Here's the correct response to that, because you're going to be hearing it all day today.
Oh, he hires only bad people.
I thought he said he's good at hiring people.
Two things that are very important to this.
Number one, the opposition to candidate Trump spent a year and a half painting him as an insane racist maniac.
Until that was his brand for a big part of the country on both the left and the right.
This is the important part.
Even within the Republican Party, a lot of people said, ooh, I don't want my brand...
Mixed up with his because he's got that whole, they're calling him awful things.
So I'd better keep some distance even though I'm glad a Republican got the job because I didn't want Hillary to get it.
The last thing I want to do is put my reputation in that grinder with this guy after a year and a half of being called a monster and a Hitler and everything else.
So what was the pool of potential people who could work for Trump After the election, the pool of potential applicants was very, very small.
How many African-American high-quality people were willing to work for the president when he got elected?
A few. Basically, only people who were already on the team.
Ben Carson, he was basically already on the team.
So, yeah, the number of people who had crossed that line, given the way he had been framed by the opposition, was basically zero.
Approach is zero. So he had a very hard time just getting the right applicants.
I think nobody would disagree with that statement.
Now, that doesn't mean he couldn't find any.
That just means it was much, much harder in his specific case.
Not like anything that's ever been tried in history before.
Secondly, and I made this point before, the smartest people that I know, when they talk about hiring, they will agree that hiring is sort of guessing.
The skill is in the firing.
So, you hire people who look good on paper, but you don't really know how they're going to perform.
Most of these people are hired into jobs they've never done before.
Is it true or not true?
That most of the people hired into a new administration are hired into jobs they've never done before.
That's just how it works.
Kelly had never been chief of staff.
Most of these people had never been in the cabinet.
So how in the world would you know how they would perform?
You wouldn't. But what you can do is fire people who don't work out.
So if you've got somebody who's willing to fire people as problems come up, you've at least got that going for you.
So nobody would disagree with the statement that Trump is willing to fire people when it's time.
So he's got that working for him.
That helps a little. And then here's the third thing.
The third thing is that how many people work in the Trump administration?
What would be the total number of people who have been hired directly or indirectly by the White House, for the cabinet, etc?
Hundreds? Thousands?
I don't know. A few hundred?
And then how many of them turned out to be bad as a percentage?
5%? What is the total number of people who just turned out to be, at least alleged to be criminals or corrupt or something?
Maybe 5%? If that's true, and you're guessing on whether these people are going to be good, and you're guessing from a small pool of people who would even be willing to work for your administration, If 5% of them turn out to be bad, and you're willing to fire them as you need them, it's not the worst problem in the world.
So you've got to put it in perspective.
And there's also these, I don't know what you would call it in this case, but our focus is on all the bad actors.
So CNN is not going to run a story about the person that Trump hired who worked out just great.
Where are the stories about, hey, Trump hired some people and they do their job.
They're really good at their jobs.
You're never going to see that story.
So, since we only see the negative, your sense of how many of them have gone bad, and the fact, of course, that the press is good at throwing people into the mix.
So now they're including people Who are simply supporters of the president who just had other jobs.
You know, they were congresspeople or whatever.
So now they're throwing them into the mix like somehow that's Trump's problem.
That somebody who supported him had a legal problem that had nothing to do with him.
So keep in mind that the news is sort of trying to package every problem as being a bigger problem.
So you've got three things going on that creates the exaggerated impression that he can't hire good people.
But what's going on is he had a very small pool.
Probably a very small percentage of that total number of people he hired actually were bad.
But maybe more than normal because he had an inadequate pool of people to choose from.
And then there's the other issue of loyalty.
In these government situations, whether you like it or not, loyalty matters because it's an asset.
You have to understand this point.
Loyalty matters for a leader because it's an asset.
The more loyalty you have, the better your operation runs, all things being equal.
But, of course, all things are not equal.
The people who are loyal are not necessarily going to be the most capable.
So you could certainly see situations where you have to preserve loyalty because it's a two-way street.
You can't expect your staff to be loyal to you if you're not loyal to them first.
Loyalty is an asset.
If you destroy that asset, the whole thing falls apart.
So if you don't know much about government and how the world works, and you say, hey, did the president put that man or that woman in that job just because they were loyal and not because they were exactly the right person for that job?
And the answer is yes.
Totally. Why?
Because loyalty is an asset.
If you don't preserve it, you lose it, and then your whole operation falls apart because nobody's loyal to you.
So there are cases where you have to conspicuously choose loyalty over even competence.
But you try to do that on the jobs that won't break the world.
If you put somebody in a cabinet position, Probably the department itself has a bunch of professionals and whoever the boss is, probably they can't break anything.
So if those are staffed with loyal people, sometimes that's a risk management situation where you're saying, I need to preserve my loyalty.
It needs to work both ways.
People need to see that if they work for me, I'll take care of them, and then I can ask them to take care of me.
So sometimes...
I might have to pick somebody who's not exactly the right fit, but I'm going to try to put them in a job that won't hurt anything too much because it's staffed with lots of, you know, career people who make all the hard decisions.
Now, would the president use loyalty for his chief of staff?
Well, in a way, you know, maybe the Reince Priebus thing that didn't last very long But notice that he worked his way out of that situation when it wasn't working out, and now he's got Kelly in that position.
Now Kelly has a very important job.
That's not the job you want to give somebody who's just loyal and doesn't have skill.
Kelly has tremendous skill, and he's in an important job.
So if you look at the important jobs, like, let's say, Mnuchin or something like that, those are important jobs.
Look at Mattis.
Mattis is in an important job.
What is his skill level?
Well, it's very high.
So... My computer has ghosts in it.
Alright, so that's my point, is that this whole, does Trump hire good people or not, has at least four levels of complexity, and if you don't consider them all, how many did you have to choose from, you know, you have to preserve loyalty, you have to be willing to fire, every one of them is in a new job, you don't really know how they're going to perform, you don't really have time to vet everybody's tax returns, you know, you don't have time to do that stuff.
But you can correct as you need to, and he's correcting as he needs to.
So, that's all for now.
I'm going to go do something else.
▲
Export Selection