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Aug. 24, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams

34:15

Episode 194 Scott Adams: Appearing on Fox & Friends, the Bigfoot Test and More

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	Hey everybody, come on in here.
	I hope you have your beverages ready, because it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
	Now, I don't know how many of you saw me on Fox and Friends this morning, but let me tell you, I never sleep.
	Sleep It's for the week.
	Just kidding. I went to sleep early so I could get up early.
	We got a thousand people, and that means it's time for the simultaneous sip.
	Join me, will you? Mmm.
	That's good sippin'.
	So, yesterday, let me tell you a little bit about the process of appearing on Fox& Friends, which isn't that different from appearing on any other of the cable news shows.
	So, yesterday afternoon, I get a text message, and I get an email, and I get a voicemail, and I get a couple of incoming phone calls all about the same time.
	And so I say to myself, what?
	What's going on here?
	And of course it's just the Fox News producers who are doing a good job of contacting me and they're always on a sort of a compressed time schedule so they make sure that they do get you.
	So I started checking my messages and it's Fox and Friends producer asking me if I will appear in the morning the very next day which was this morning.
	And my first thought is, I have to get up really early for that.
	But I asked them what the topic was and it sounded like something fun.
	So I said yes.
	So I wake up at 2.30 this morning.
	Because I like to get up and have my coffee and take a shower and make sure I'm really awake.
	So that at 4am, I can be on site in the studio that's closest to me.
	Now, as luck would have it, there's a brand new remote studio in my town, so I didn't have to go very far.
	And traffic is easy at 4 in the morning.
	So at 4 in the morning, it's just me and the camera studio operator who lets me in.
	And you go in this tiny little room where you've got an image behind you that makes you look like you're someplace important, but you're not.
	You're just in a tiny little room.
	And it's just a camera in front of you.
	There's an earpiece in your ear.
	You're sitting in a chair.
	And that's it. There's some equipment in the room, some lights, no makeup, in my case.
	And you're usually there 15 minutes early or so, and you can listen to the show in your ear, and at some point the producers come on and they do a sound test and they ask you if you can hear, etc.
	Now when you do the interview, you can't see who's talking.
	So you have to kind of know who it is and maybe recognize their voice.
	But you're looking into the camera, but you're not seeing anything but the camera.
	They can see you. So it's something you have to get used to.
	You really have to get used to being able to have a coherent conversation without being able to see the people who can see you.
	But I'm used to that by now.
	So let me tell you about some of the things I said on the interview in case you missed it.
	Most of you probably did.
	I was talking about the fact that whenever President Trump is accused of something that's not a real crime...
	They bring out Carl Bernstein to say it's worse than Watergate because they don't have much else to say about it.
	It's not an actual crime.
	So here are the ones that we've seen so far.
	So there's the Russian collusion that both didn't happen, and if it did, it wouldn't be a crime.
	There's the obstruction of justice that didn't happen.
	He did fire Comey, but the president can fire anybody he wants who's working for him.
	Then there was the Don Jr.
	meeting, which no information was exchanged, but if it had been, it would have been totally legal.
	And then now we have the Cohen stormy situation where the president is accused of doing something totally legal.
	In other words, when Cohen said in public to the court, I guess, that what he did was he arranged the payments on behalf of and under the direction of President Trump, CNN reported that as Cohen said that the president committed a felony.
	But that's not what happened.
	What Cohen did was describe some actions that are totally legal.
	It's legal to coordinate with your lawyer.
	It's legal to pay your own money for an NDA. It's all legal.
	So CNN is literally reporting imaginary news.
	And if you watch in the next few days, watch how people who are the anti-Trump side of the world, watch how they phrase the legal risk for the president.
	Have you noticed that the language is very careful now?
	Yeah, they're either talking about impeachment because it's not a crime, or they're talking about things like, well, the president, he might be in some legal risk.
	Give us an example.
	Tell us what law got violated.
	But you won't hear that.
	You'll hear more like, well, if it's a crime, there's a big problem.
	And if it turns out that it's interpreted this way, it's a big problem.
	Probably not. Anyway, so what I was saying is that when you have this situation where part of the public believes that the president has committed four obvious major crimes, and from their point of view, they can see it. It's just as clear as day that they can see crimes being committed.
	There's the collusion, the obstruction, the Don Jr.
	meeting, the Cohen payments, and they see that as clear as day.
	And then there are other people, let's say Alan Dershowitz's view of the world.
	Let's say the first view of the world is the Carl Bernstein view, in which the president has done many things that are worse than Watergate, way worse than Watergate.
	And then there's the Alan Dershowitz view that nothing happened.
	There were actions, but all of the actions are completely legal, or they didn't actually happen.
	So if you're trying to sort out which of those two is the real one, I always say the same thing, which is you can never really tell when you're in it.
	But if you make a prediction based on your point of view, later you can look back and see if your prediction made sense, because if it did make sense, maybe your point of view was right also.
	So my prediction, based on my movie that I'm watching, is that there's no legal risk of anything we've seen so far.
	For the president. So my prediction would be no legal consequences except endless yammering and lawyers posturing and stuff.
	The people who have seen clear crimes Should predict, and I believe they are, definite impeachment, probable legal problems.
	And now we can just wait and watch and see which of those two worldviews is right.
	But if you're trying to sort of guess which one will be right, I recommend what I call the Bigfoot test.
	The Bigfoot test.
	You could call it the Sasquatch test, but it's the same test.
	And it goes like this. Imagine two hunters go off into the woods, and when they come back, one of the hunters says to you, Hey, we just had a conversation with Bigfoot.
	We shook his hands.
	We had a conversation.
	We were talking to Bigfoot.
	And then the other hunter who's standing right there says, What?
	We didn't do that.
	We didn't talk to anybody except each other.
	There was no Bigfoot in the woods.
	Now, if that's all you know, you're the person listening to the two hunters.
	One says they had a conversation with Bigfoot.
	The other said we were together the whole time and nothing like that happened.
	Which one is telling the truth?
	Well, typically, a hallucination is a positive hallucination.
	In other words, you're adding something to the environment, such as Bigfoot.
	Rarely do you have a hallucination where you subtract something from the environment.
	In other words, it would be easy to imagine that somebody saw something that didn't exist.
	That's routine. But how often does somebody say, walk into your house and say, where's all your furniture?
	What happened to your furniture?
	And you say, I don't know what you're talking about.
	My house is full of furniture.
	And then the person hallucinating says, no.
	No, it's a big empty room I'm in.
	You don't have that kind of a hallucination typically.
	There may be some exceptions.
	But people don't subtract what they're seeing.
	Sometimes they see what they see and then they add a Bigfoot to it, but they rarely subtract the things that are really there.
	So if you have some people who are looking at the alleged crimes of the president and they see them, and yet there are other people looking at exactly the same evidence and it's invisible, there's nothing there.
	Usually the one who sees Bigfoot is hallucinating.
	Now, there are no guarantees, right?
	And analogies are always imperfect.
	But if you didn't know anything else, except that qualified lawyers see nothing, and people who are also qualified lawyers, but let's say they're anti-Trumpers, they do see something, and they keep seeing something time after time after time, when other people are saying, There's nothing there.
	That big foot you see?
	I'm standing right here.
	I'm looking where you're looking.
	There's nothing there.
	Generally, the person who doesn't see it is the one who's sane, and the person who does see it is a little bit crazy.
	Now, speaking of that, There's a very interesting, let's call it a sanity inversion happening.
	I don't think that's the right name, but I couldn't think of a better one.
	It goes like this.
	The anti-Trumpers would have you believe that the following is true.
	This is their worldview.
	And I don't think I'm going to be exaggerating when I say this.
	So the anti-Trumper's worldview is that this president, who is on camera and on record and tweeting more than any president, any public figure ever has, that all of the times he's in public, he's acting rational and under control.
	But when we're not watching and he's off camera, Well, then he's just crazy.
	And it's a darn good thing that we have all these anonymous leakers and anonymous sources, third-party people who don't say who they are.
	I'm glad those people are watching him when he's off camera, because apparently that's the only time he's crazy, according to the anti-Trumpers.
	But the anti-Trumpers themselves, and this is a more recent thing, have taken to becoming crazy in public.
	Accusing the president of treason, that even people who are anti-Trumpers are saying, well, that's a little bit strong.
	You saw Philip Mudd seem to flip out in front of you.
	And again, we're not doctors.
	So when I say they look crazy, I'm only saying that from the layman's perspective, it looks like there's something wrong going on there.
	You saw Maxine Waters suggest that Trump's...
	I guess the political people who support Trump should be hounded in public.
	Well, a lot of people looked at that and said, that doesn't seem stable.
	These ideas don't seem like good...
	Good mental health.
	Again, we're not experts.
	We can't diagnose. We're not in their heads.
	But the look of it is that the anti-Trumpers are crazy in public.
	But here's the fun part.
	They would have us believe that when they're off camera, totally normal.
	Because that's their version of the world, right?
	That when they're not on camera, they're normal.
	But when they are on camera, they seem crazy and they believe in things like Bigfoot that don't exist.
	Whereas they believe that the president is totally normal when we're watching.
	Sure, he's a character and he's entertaining, but it's all within the normal realm of good mental health.
	But when we're not watching, it's a good thing those anonymous sources are watching because that's when he goes crazy.
	Now, as you know, I did have the pleasure of visiting the White House and having a brief conversation with the President in a private setting, and I didn't see him being crazy.
	It's very disappointing.
	I was expecting, you know, hoping for a little bit of craziness, because the anti-Trumpers tell me that that's what happens when the cameras are off.
	But he seemed totally sane and relaxed.
	So that's our weird world for today.
	So let's call that the sanity inversion, where Republicans are only crazy when nobody's watching.
	But Democrats are crazy when the cameras are rolling, but not in private.
	Was he funny?
	We had a good time and it was a light conversation.
	So yes, I mean, he's, His personality is pretty much like you would expect it to be.
	How long have you seen the world this way?
	Well, what I'm describing is a fairly new event.
	Because I think the longer we go, And the president has good results with the country, the economy, etc.
	The longer we go, the more crazy his opponents will get.
	Because I don't know how they reconcile that everything that they've been thinking for three years running is just wrong.
	So in order to reconcile the results they see, which are good, with the predictions they had, which are doom, they have to come up with a story that makes that all make sense.
	So you're seeing people get increasingly diswrought because their worldview is just dissolving in front of them.
	What's his energy level like?
	It's as good as you would think it would be.
	Yeah, his energy level is A+. Why not just update your worldview?
	People rarely do that.
	When people are locked into an opinion and they wrap their ego around it, it's like everything...
	Let's say, take Rosie O'Donnell.
	Do you think Rosie O'Donnell could ever look at, let's say, the president doing a good job and then at the end of the term say, you know, God, I was totally wrong about all that.
	He did a good job.
	Wasn't expecting that. People don't do that.
	People instead will construct a story in which he didn't do a good job, or they'll say that someone else could have done a better job, or that there are some time bombs he's left that will certainly go off.
	And by the way, I believe there are now three types of laws That President Trump has broken, according to his critics.
	The first class of laws that the President has broken are things that don't exist.
	They're actually not even laws.
	So there is no law about listening to some information, or there's no law against firing your employee, there's no law against pretty much anything he's been accused of.
	So that's the first class.
	He's broken laws that don't exist.
	Imaginary laws.
	But there's also the second class, which are laws he's broken that we haven't learned about yet.
	So they're pretty sure that there are things we don't know anything about, like we don't even have a whiff of them, but there might be secret laws he's broken.
	So that's the second class.
	Then the third class of laws that the president is breaking are future laws.
	In other words, there are things he will do in the future that are going to break those laws.
	Sure he hasn't done it yet, but we've been so right for the last three years about everything Trump, this is his critics I'm talking about, that surely they'll be right about this and that any moment now he's going to break a law right in front of us.
	So that's three classes of laws the president is breaking.
	The imaginary laws that don't actually exist.
	The ones we're pretty sure he's broken, but nobody's found out yet.
	You know, if we could only get those tax returns or if only Manafort would flip, we might find out about the secret laws he's violated.
	And then the future ones that, of course, a person like President Trump would certainly be violating laws in the future, say his critics.
	And so that's three complete categories of law-breaking right there.
	You can see why they're so angry.
	That's a lot of law-breaking.
	and ones we've never heard of and ones that haven't happened, but that's three categories of laws.
	Now I'm wondering also if there's some kind of a Trump derangement syndrome, peak derangement that's happening.
	Now, peak, well, let me put this in a general sense.
	In both physics and in society, things keep going until there's something that stops them.
	Just a general statement about the world.
	Things will keep going in the direction they're going until there's some counterforce.
	People sometimes call it the slippery slope or whatever.
	But things keep going in the direction.
	If you're talking about the opinions of the anti-Trumpers, you should expect that that opinion will keep going to worse and worse opinions of the President until there's something that stops it.
	And I would say that the only thing that could stop it is that people within the group say, whoa, wait a minute, not all of them.
	I'm talking about the people who sort of wake up soonest.
	Some of the people will start saying, okay, I think we went a little too far.
	Until you see that, you have not reached peak Trump derangement syndrome.
	But I think we just saw that.
	You saw Clapper say that Brennan's rhetoric isn't helpful.
	Those two guys are sort of joined at the hip.
	And now one of them is saying, you know, he's going a little bit farther than I'd go.
	So that's your sign that you may have reached peak Trump derangement syndrome.
	Likewise, Bill Maher was interviewing Preet Bahara.
	I think I'm saying that close to being correct.
	And Bill Maher used the treason word and Preet walked him back a little bit, saying, okay, I'm a lawyer.
	These mean very specific things.
	So again, two anti-Trumpers and one was walking back the other.
	You saw Philip Mudd seemingly have some kind of a weird breakdown when he was talking to Paris Denard on CNN, I think it was.
	And although nobody was calling...
	Philip Mudd back to sanity, you could see in the host's face, his face was trying to call him back.
	If you haven't seen that clip, you have to watch, I can't remember the name of the host for the show, but he just has this look like, oh God, I hope this stops pretty soon.
	Is this going to go on much longer?
	I hope it doesn't.
	Yeah, so, and then the subplot to that is that Paris got fired for, yeah, it was Jim Sciuto that I was talking about.
	So Paris got fired for allegations about something he may or may not have done in the past.
	Alright, so I think that's peak Trump derangement syndrome.
	So you should continue looking for people who are anti-Trumpers who are checking other anti-Trumpers who have gone a little too far.
	That's how you know you're past the envelope there.
	Because if Republicans say, hey, you guys are going too far, that means nothing.
	They're just going to keep going.
	You need their own side to start calling them back, and that's what we're seeing.
	Lanny Davis.
	So Lanny Davis said one of the funniest things I've ever heard a lawyer say.
	It wasn't intentional.
	And if you didn't hear this, it was hilarious.
	So Lanny Davis said that his client, Michael Cohen, would never accept a pardon from President Trump.
	And I'm thinking of myself, If I ever have a lawyer who tells the only person who can pardon me that he doesn't want a pardon, I'm getting a new lawyer.
	I'm getting a new lawyer really quickly.
	So I've got a feeling that after that TV appearance, I don't know this, right?
	This is just speculation.
	I wonder what the next conversation between Lanny Davis and Michael Cohen sounded like.
	I mean, I don't know, but I'm imagining it sounded a little like this.
	Lanny, I was watching you on TV, and I believe you said that I would not accept a pardon, which would greatly help my family and my wife and, of course, me.
	And Lanny said, no, no, no.
	You don't want a pardon from that man.
	He's a monster. Well, Lanny...
	Maybe we should think about this because I don't like jail.
	Jail is not good.
	I don't want to go to jail.
	And Lanny says, toughen up.
	You don't want to pardon from this monster.
	And then Michael Cohen says, I would fire you if I were the person paying you in the first place.
	By the way, who is paying Lanny Davis?
	Do we know that? Who is paying him?
	The DNC? That's just a guess.
	I don't think we know, do we?
	And I'm not sure that we could know, because that wouldn't be necessarily public.
	But my guess is that Cohen is not paying.
	Because Lanny would be sort of a strange choice, unless there's somebody who is an anti-Trumper who is footing the bill.
	Well, yeah, they have a GoFundMe running, but something tells me that the GoFundMe is just a fig leaf for some billionaire who's paying the bills.
	Usually in a situation like this, you look for the billionaire.
	There's some billionaire who's probably at least guaranteeing that Lanny will get paid.
	Maybe the GoFundMe actually...
	Creates enough money to pay him.
	But I'm pretty sure he's got a backup plan for getting paid.
	You're making this up.
	I I think I said I was making it up.
	Oh, the GoFundMe used to, yes, the GoFundMe could be used to launder.
	So the billionaire could simply fund the GoFundMe and then it just looks like the public was backing him.
	So that's possible. Those are all possibilities.
	Let's talk about Dr.
	Shiva. So many of you saw my periscope yesterday in which Dr.
	Shiva Ayyadurai, I want to say his last name right, who was running as an independent for Senate against Elizabeth Warren.
	Now, one of the things that came out of that was, and I want to magnify this a little bit, because I like the point enough that we should be thinking about it.
	When you're looking at voting for a senator, you're, of course, looking at things like experience and competence, and do you like their policies, and are they in your party, and all the usual stuff.
	But one of the things that we typically don't look at What I'm suggesting might be the single most important thing we should look at is what I'll call Congress's talent stack.
	So when I talk about a talent stack for an individual, I'm talking about the layers of different talents they've managed to package together to make them special and effective.
	Congress needs that too.
	So imagine, if you will, that Congress was nothing but lawyers.
	Now, there are a lot of lawyers, and I don't know what the percentage is, but imagine it's just nothing but lawyers.
	Would that be good?
	I think that almost certainly would not be.
	Because let me ask you this.
	When was the last time somebody said, look, what we want to do is make something more efficient and save money.
	Let's get a lawyer.
	When was the last time a lawyer made something more efficient And found a way to save money.
	Because that's the opposite of what lawyers do.
	They make things complicated so that they can, you know, milk them forever.
	So the instinct of a lawyer is exactly the opposite of the instinct of a government.
	The government's trying to save money and do well for the people.
	The lawyer is trying to get fees and make things more complicated.
	I'm exaggerating.
	And obviously, once elected, the politicians are trying to do the best thing for the public.
	But they've got a lot of training and, you know, sort of lawyerly influence that they're always sort of lawyers.
	But when you saw Shiva's talent stack that included, I think he has something like five degrees from MIT, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, visual studies, medicine.
	He's also now pretty much an expert on politics.
	He's an entrepreneur who's built up multi-million dollar companies and sold them.
	So that level of expertise is largely missing in a Congress that needs to make decisions about stuff where all that stuff's kind of important.
	You'd want somebody who understands, you know, the startups and the healthcare complexities.
	You want somebody who understands social media in order to deal with some of these questions about bias, etc.
	So if you're looking at staff in Congress, One question is, is this person gonna represent my state well?
	And that matters. But you should also think of a higher level, which is, you don't want your Congress to be only a bunch of lawyers.
	I'm not saying they can't do the job.
	I'm saying that it would be like buying, investing all of your money in one kind of stock.
	You could say, well, I have diversified.
	I bought a whole bunch of different oil companies.
	Well, that's not diversifying, even though it's a lot of different companies.
	They're all in the oil industry.
	No investor would do that.
	So we should diversify our Congress in the same way that we're diversifying our portfolio.
	You need somebody who can explain this stuff to the other people in Congress.
	You need somebody who can say, look, I've got five different fields of expertise, and you need all five of them to even make a little bit of sense of health care, to make a little bit of sense of immigration, of trade policy, of any of the big issues.
	Independent of how good a candidate Shiva is, that's a talent stack that you really want in Congress.
	Whether it's him or somebody else, you want those talents in Congress and I don't think we have them.
	When you see somebody like Zuckerberg, and I think you'll see more of the tech people talking to Congress, you see all these old lawyer types trying to understand these tech companies, and it's just a little bit embarrassing.
	Some of them actually do a great job.
	And, you know, thank goodness we have Rand Paul, right?
	Because at least he has a different perspective.
	You know, he's a doctor.
	He takes things from a scientific perspective.
	But why don't we get a real scientist in there or a real engineer?
	You know, one of the things I always say about China is that, you know, you can dislike them on whatever level you want to dislike them.
	But one thing that you have to respect...
	Is that their government for the last number of years has been really kind of awesome in terms of effectiveness.
	Now when I say awesome, I mean doing a good job for the Chinese people.
	It doesn't mean it's awesome for us because we're a competitor in a sense.
	But China's government, although not elected, They are generally merit-based engineers.
	You've got a lot of engineers in the Chinese government.
	And I don't think it's an accident that things are running well, you know, relative to the size of their challenge.
	They've been extremely effective.
	So nobody insults China for bad management.
	Nobody does that.
	And maybe we need more engineers in our government as well.
	Alright. Hoover was an engineer.
	Interesting. I'm just looking at your comments now.
	All right, is there anything you want to ask me before I go?
	All right.
	Looks like not.
	I think I'll sign off now and I will talk to you all again later.

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