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Sept. 26, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
42:03
Episode 235 Scott Adams: Kavanaugh, Corroboration, Korea
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Hey Janice, hey Tyler, hey Joanne, Herbert, come on in here.
Those who come in early get their names spoken out loud.
Hey Kevin, Kyle, Angela, come on in here.
You know what it's time for.
Yes, you do. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
And you know what that means.
It means the simultaneous sip.
Some of you are already ready.
You have your beverage. You've got your cup, your mug, your vessel, your glass.
Filled with the liquor of your choice?
Coffee preferred. And it's time for the simultaneous sip.
Join me. Oh yeah, that's an extra good simultaneous sip.
Possibly one of the best yet.
So, we have lots of news, but also no news.
So there's lots to talk about about this one thing, Kavanaugh, in a couple of miscellaneous stories, but Am I wrong that the news suddenly stopped?
This is one of those moments where you can understand reality a little bit better.
Who are the entities that create news?
And you say to yourself, nobody creates the news.
The news happens and then people report on it.
Not really.
No, that's not the world you live in.
You think you live in a world where stuff happens and then there are organizations that report on it.
No, it's closer to this.
Stuff is happening all the time and the people who report on news ignore 99.9% of it and then they pick This little slice out of all this stuff that's happening, and they say this part, this little piece over here of all the stuff that's happening, that's something we're going to call news.
They don't report on what's happening.
They couldn't. It's way too big.
So they choose what they report.
So who creates news are the people who report it.
They essentially make it news by the decisions of what to talk about and what not to.
There's another entity that makes news.
He's called the President of the United States.
And when the President decides to make some news, he tweets, he makes a statement, he fires somebody, he makes a change.
He times these things to make them the best possible news.
So you have two news creators.
You've got the media, and then you've got the president, largely.
You know, other people can play in this game, but largely they're the two.
What does it tell you that there's no other news than the Kavanaugh thing?
It tells you that the people who make news are choosing not to make anymore, right now.
Because they think this story is a good story for whatever reasons they have for deciding what is their story.
But it also tells you that the president likes this story too.
So it's a very interesting case because usually one side or the other wants to flood the field with their own brand of news, either the president or the news organizations, to control the narrative.
But there's something weird about this Kavanaugh situation in which both sides are happy with this being the only news for a while.
Which means that both sides think it's working for them and against the other side.
And it's hard to know who's right at this point because you can imagine two versions.
One is, you know, on the left they're thinking, man, we've almost stopped this nomination.
This is big. It's our most important thing.
It's the only thing we want to focus on.
If we could just stop this nomination, maybe we could get our own judges in here.
It would change everything. And on the president's side, he may or may not be thinking, I'm not a mind reader, but we can imagine him thinking some version of the left is self-immolating.
They've gone so far off the, let's say, the acceptable path for civilization that they're just destroying themselves and it's good to let it play out.
Who's right? Hard to know.
Hard to know. I would say that if Kavanaugh gets approved and he gets on the court, then you could probably say the president was right, because he got his way.
But if it goes the other way, you've got to reassess.
Let's talk about several stories in the news.
One is that Trump gave his speech at the UN and there was laughter.
And now, of course, the universe is split into two realities in which there are two completely different versions of what happened.
And you're probably all thinking, every one of you woke up this morning thinking, but what does Scott think about this?
Because he's a professional humorist.
And the question in the news is, were people laughing at President Trump when he said that he had done more than any other president and thought that was ridiculous, or were they laughing sort of with him in some fashion?
Here is my judgment.
I have stood in front of many large crowds.
In which I tried to get laughs.
So I have a little bit of a sense of what happens in that dynamic.
Plus, I'm a professional humorist.
So here's my take.
Was he being laughed at?
Or were they laughing because of the sort of the humorous boldness of his claim?
That nobody gets up in front of the UN and says, I've done more than any other president.
It just sounds funny for its sort of boldness, I guess.
It's kind of a ballsy thing to say.
And the answer is both.
Both. What he said was very unexpected, meaning it was a bolder kind of a claim and such a big claim that people had a reaction to it because it didn't fit.
That's what triggers a laugh.
A laugh is a reaction to two things that don't fit.
So here he was standing in front of the world, and suddenly he makes this claim that to everyone in the audience sounds like a really big claim.
It wasn't supported by any facts or anything.
So it was both. There were people who were laughing because they thought, well, that's ridiculous to make that claim.
And there are other people who like him, Who are laughing because they thought, well, it may or may not be true, but it's funny that he would say it.
So it's both.
There was no winner in that one.
Alright, let's talk about, I think NBC News was tweeting that Christine Ford has three people, or four people, who are, quote, corroborating her story.
Quote, corroborating.
Now the lawyers are jumping in and saying, wait a minute, they're not corroborating her story.
They are simply corroborating that she told them her story.
So now the two worlds have separated into, there's no corroboration, you're crazy.
And then the other half saying, yes, there is corroboration, but it's corroboration that she's had the same story for years.
And I would say that that is corroborated.
So if you're trying to figure out what are all the options of what's happening here, remember one of the options was that she just made it up recently to derail the nomination.
But I think the corroboration, as it's being called, is just corroborating that she's told the story before.
And she's told it years before the nomination.
And so it's not a brand new allegation.
It has some length.
So I would say my ruling is that she has corroborated that she's told the story before.
Or at least there's corroborating evidence that she told the story before.
But that is very different from the story itself being corroborated.
Completely different issues.
So it's both corroborating and non-corroborating simultaneously.
It doesn't corroborate that the event happened.
It does corroborate that she talked about the event before this year.
But you notice that the people who are thinking of it as the big corroboration, meaning corroborating that the event happened the way she told it, it's very similar to the Steele dossier, isn't it?
Because the Steele dossier was leaked to the press, and then they used the press reports to say that the dossier was corroborated, because look, it's in the dossier, but it's also in the news.
There's two sources, but it really was always just the dossier.
So, you can't corroborate something that way.
Okay. So, I watch an interest as the two biggest stories of the day, North Korea and Kavanaugh.
I'd say those are the biggest stories happening right now.
Both of them are suffering from the same analytical problem, which is that people are looking for the story in the wrong place.
Let me give you an example.
In the Kavanaugh story, correct me if I'm wrong, the question is, the big story in the news is, is Kavanaugh telling the truth or is the accuser telling the truth?
Right? That's the way the story has been framed.
It's been a story of who's telling the truth.
That is not the story.
That's the way it's been framed.
It's the way you're talking about it.
It's the way social media is lining up.
Is it true or is it false?
That is not the story.
Here's why. There's nothing that could happen whether there's an FBI evaluation or not.
Nothing will change the following fact.
We'll never know.
Right? The base fact is that we'll never know.
We, the public. We and the Senators, the Congress.
We will never know.
So in a situation where there's one thing we'll all agree on, that we'll never agree, and that we'll never know.
The question is, if that's the situation, how do you reach a decision in a context where you'll never know and there's nothing you can do to know?
You can never know, and there's nothing you can do that will change that.
FBI can look into it.
They can come up with more facts that we hadn't heard.
But are you going to believe them?
No. You're going to line up on the same side you were before.
Some will believe you, some won't.
But we'll never know.
So what do you do when you never know?
Well, Lindsey Graham, I think, gave us the foreshadowing of that.
If you want a credible government, the government has to do what is the most credible process, the most credible system.
Now part of that involves listening to the accuser.
But I tend to agree with the people who say the extra research, let's say extra investigation by the FBI, it probably would turn up extra information.
But the odds of that information bringing us to certainty is zero.
The odds of more information allowing us to really know what happened is zero.
There won't be any videotapes.
There won't be any fingernails.
There won't be any DNA. It would just be more people with faulty, presumably, faulty recollections of what happened 35 years ago at best.
There might be, you know, if there was anything like a diary journal entry, I think we would have heard about it.
So, in that situation where we will never know which is the only thing that matters, the only thing that matters, you think what matters is did it happen or did it not.
It doesn't matter.
Have I ever told you That the facts don't matter.
Have you ever heard that before?
Well it's true in this case.
What matters will be the system.
What matters is what system we use to get past our uncertainty.
In the legal system, The process we use is a trial, and if there's not reasonable doubt, that's the system that we as a society have judged to be a credible system, even when it gets it wrong.
See, this is the important part.
A credible system you can still support even if you don't like the decision or the outcome.
That's what makes it a credible system.
It's like, ah, I don't like how that turned out, but I like the system.
Somebody reminded me to talk about Avenatti, which I will.
So, here's how it's all going to work out.
The Senate is going to vote, and if they decide that the allegations are credible sounding, but not proven, and they say, well, unfortunately we have to have a standard that's better than that, we have to have a system that's better than that, we can't have a credible system That is derailed by allegations without a better process.
So my prediction is that should we not hear anything new, if we don't hear anything new that's a big deal, you're going to have Judge Kavanaugh.
And I'll drink to that.
All right. And by the way, I don't even know if Judge Kavanaugh will be a good judge.
How would I know? As if I had any way to evaluate that.
But I will say that I do like a system that works.
And the only credible system now would be to say that the standard of evidence has not been reached.
Likewise, with North Korea.
What is the big question everybody's asking in North Korea?
Will they denuclearize or will they not?
Are they playing us or are they really planning to denuclearize under the right conditions that we can accomplish?
That is the wrong question with North Korea.
The question is not, are they going to denuclearize or are they not?
You think that's the question because that's the way it's been framed.
But that's not the thing you should be looking at.
Here's what you should be looking at.
Does North Korea still have a reason to keep building up their nukes and a reason to keep building up their missiles and a reason to keep threatening us?
That's the story.
The story is, is their reason getting better or is their reason for having nukes degrading?
To me it seems obvious.
They're getting friendly with South Korea.
They're talking about trade.
They're talking about security agreements.
They're going to meet in the United States.
Under any scenario, this is working against their reason.
So their reason was up here.
Forget about the actual having them.
The reason to have them was up here, and now the reason to have them is down here, and it's moving in this direction fairly rapidly.
If you can look at that situation where the person who has a big weapon is rapidly losing their reason for having it, that is real progress.
Because having a weapon is important in terms of the physicality of it.
If you don't have a weapon, you can't use it.
But you've got to work on the reason.
Because we live in a country where half of my neighbors have a gun.
Am I afraid of my neighbors who own guns?
I'm not. Do you know why I'm not afraid of them?
Because they don't have a reason to shoot me.
Kim Jong-un's reason is shrinking to nothing.
And he's getting a little bit pregnant with South Korea, so everything is going in the right direction, no matter how long it takes.
Because the physical part is somewhat irrelevant if you've taken away the reason.
And we have.
Let's talk about Don Lemon.
He said a few things that I thought were interesting last night on his show.
One of the things he said was that fake assault claims, fake sexual assault claims, are rare.
So Don Lemon's claim is that it's rare for somebody to claim somebody sexually abused them and that it not be true.
Is that the case?
Is rare true?
It feels true, wouldn't you say?
I mean, it feels like that would be more the exception than the rule, but how rare is rare?
Is rare one out of a thousand?
Is rare one out of five?
I really don't know, do you?
Does anybody else know? So Don Lemon claimed That it was rare.
I see people saying things in the 40% range, but I don't know.
Yeah, you can't throw in Duke Lacrosse.
You can't throw in your examples where you heard of it being false, because those are anecdotal.
But statistics-wise, what does it mean to say it's rare?
I don't know. But I'm going to accept that it's less than 50%.
So let's accept that it's more likely it's true, if you were just looking at a generic accusation, more likely true than false.
But is this situation like any other?
It really isn't.
You can't really take this situation and lump it in with the statistics of average people making accusations against other average people.
Because first of all, the stakes are through the roof.
The stakes in this case are not just personal justice.
The stakes are the entire country and the laws of the land and, you know, it's the biggest stakes you could possibly have, short of war.
So, let's get rid of the troll.
So the question is, Would it be unusual in this situation for someone to make a fake claim?
So this isn't like a regular claim in which maybe it's more likely it's true than false.
I don't know the statistics.
But in this situation, nothing applies.
Because it's so unique.
So I would say that looking at the general statistics of claims will not tell you a lot about this one because the political element makes it different than all other situations.
So it's non-typical.
Now, here's the other thing that Don Lemon did.
He covered as sort of one combined story Cosby being sentenced for 60 alleged cases of drugging and raping people.
He compared that to the Kavanaugh case.
Now, he did say it's a very different situation.
So on the factual level, he did not stray.
So factually, he was accurate.
He said the case with Cosme is completely different, except that it goes to the question of old allegations, you know, the importance of old allegations, because there were old allegations in both cases.
Now, here's what I find...
Hey, Jake, congratulations.
Here's what I find despicable about that coverage.
And so Don Lemon, let me say to you, it's probably the most unethical and immoral thing that you're ever going to see on TV. To create that association in people's mind between Cosby,
a serial rapist with a high level of proof, enough proof to get convicted, to have him in the same conversation with Kavanaugh is despicable.
So I believe, Don Lemon, you've given up any claim to moral authority.
If you have any. So your claim to moral authority is now evaporated.
I get, and I may agree with you in some cases, Don Lemon, that other people act unethically.
There are other people who are bad.
And when you call it out, I usually agree.
I have to admit, most of the times when you call out bad behavior by other people, I say to myself, yeah, that looked pretty bad.
But this is one of the worst things I've ever seen on television.
Can you think of anything worse than being compared to Cosby when the accusations against you are quite different, a whole different level, and a whole lot less likely to be credible?
So I thought that was horrible.
Anyway, let's talk about Let's talk about...
Oh, somebody was saying that the people who think that Trump wasn't laughed at...
No, here's the thing. Somebody on Twitter was saying that Fox News edited out the laughter around Trump's UN speech, and that if you watched Fox News, you didn't hear the laughter, and therefore you were in an alternate reality.
And my comment to him was...
That the people who believe only the other people are in an alternate reality, those people are in the lowest level of awareness.
A higher level of awareness is one that I hope many of you have already entered, which is to know that being in the wrong reality is our permanent situation.
We're all in the wrong reality all the time.
Here's the best example.
Whatever religion you have, even if it's right, it's a different reality than the other people.
Most of the world has a different religion than you do, whatever your religion is.
We're all walking around in completely different realities.
So if you believe that you've got a pretty good grasp of reality, And those darn other people are the ones who are in their alternate reality.
You are the one who's operating at the lower level of awareness.
The higher level is everybody's sort of manufacturing their own reality all the time.
And all the science confirms that.
Let's talk about Avenatti.
There is a hilarious story about Avenatti right now.
I don't know if it's true, so let's talk about that.
So the story is that Avenatti allegedly has yet another unnamed accuser for Kavanaugh.
And what a coincidence that it's Avenatti, of all people.
And then there comes a story, and I think we'll all drink to this, That somebody on 4chan claims fairly credibly, meaning that the story looks like it's possible.
That doesn't mean it's true.
I'm just saying it's credible.
Credible that 4chan played a prank on Avenatti and had somebody pretend to be a witness, but it was really just bullshit.
And so that Avenatti thinks he has a witness but doesn't have anything.
And that it was just a great troll.
Now, is it true?
Or is it not true?
Well, let me tell you what is true.
You're wondering, are you?
You're wondering which is true.
If you're wondering whether 4chan trolled Avenatti, then here's what I can tell you for sure.
Fortran, 4chan, Did troll Avenatti.
Because one of two possibilities.
Either they really did do the whole hoax, or they have hoaxed people into thinking that they did do a hoax.
Right? I'll drink to that.
So, truth aside, 4chan has hoaxed Avenatti.
One of two ways.
Either they made up the whole story and he thinks he has a witness but he doesn't.
Or they made up a whole story about making up a witness and now we wonder if Avenatti is telling the truth.
Both ways, great troll.
So to 4chan, congratulations on one of the best.
One of the best trolls you'll ever see.
Because no matter what Avenatti says now, 40% of the public is going to say, look at him, he got trolled.
He believes that stuff he's saying.
So, what would you expect if, let's say, if Avenatti had been trolled, and he now knows it.
Let's say he had been trolled, and he's now figured it out.
I don't know that that's the case, so this is speculative.
What would he do? What would you do?
If you were Avenatti, would you say, Oh damn, I totally got trolled.
You got me. I'm running for president, but I got fooled by 4chan.
You got me. Would he do that?
I don't think he'd do that.
What would be his best play?
If you're Avenatti and you did get trolled, what's your best play?
Your best play is to say, I did not get trolled.
And then your next move is this.
But my witness needs a few more days to decide whether to come forward.
Because if he can keep saying that there is a witness all the way up until the vote, then people believe maybe there might be another witness.
So it would be part of the fake corroboration.
So right now you've got Christine Ford, who has some credibility.
You've got the woman who said Kavanaugh exposed himself that one time.
Less credibility.
Everybody agrees that compared to Christine Ford, the second one has less credibility.
And then Avenatti, allegedly the third one, has less credibility than the second one because we haven't even heard who the person is.
But it still works as a group.
So if you think to yourself, well, there's only one accusation, it's easy to dismiss it as maybe not true.
But if you hear to yourself three accusations, Well sure, even if one of them is not true, that would still leave two accusations.
Wait, it's even worse than that.
If even two of them are not true, that still leaves one accusation that is.
The best thing that Avenatti could do if he had realized, and this is speculative, I'm not saying this happened, but if he realized that he had been trolled, he should claim he has not, claim he still has a witness, and then at the last minute, what do you do at the last minute?
Anybody? Anybody?
What would be his best play at the last minute, let's say at the time of the vote?
You got it. His best play would be to say, my witness has decided to not come forward because my witness saw all the abuse that the other people got who came forward.
So you can't expect them to come forward under these conditions.
I tried as hard as I could to get her to come forward.
We worked with her, you know, but I just couldn't protect her.
It isn't a dangerous world out there.
So she had to remain anonymous.
What is it that Avenatti is doing.
It looks a lot like that.
It looks a lot like that that I just described.
So again, we cannot discount Avenatti's alleged allegger.
I guess she's an alleged allegger.
It might be true.
You can't say it's not true.
But at this point, its credibility is sort of in the sewer.
So, yeah, Avenatti is winning.
So Avenatti is winning because he's getting his story out there and when he probably, I'm predicting he'll pull it back at the last minute.
When he pulls it back, if that's what happens, He can still claim it was real.
And he'll just say, I'm not going to give out a name.
That's the whole point. You know, the whole point of it is she didn't want to be public, so why can't I tell you who it is?
I can't tell you who it was.
So he has perfect deniability.
Afinati is 5'4".
Is that true?
Doesn't feel like it's true.
So the stormy allegations seem to have just gone away, haven't they?
So I think that's all I had on my list of things to talk about.
Keep in mind that there's not much news happening.
So there might be something big brewing.
Might be something big coming.
But we don't know yet.
Hey, is it my imagination or is this a light hurricane season?
Do we know that yet or are there still hurricanes to come?
Can anybody confirm that for me?
Do we have a light hurricane season?
Because I'm pretty sure we were supposed to have worse storms forever because of global warming.
Is the president having a low hurricane year or is it too early to say that?
I don't know my hurricane science.
Um... Yes, there's not much news, I would say.
It's still early in the season.
It's over in November. But by now, oh yeah, it's early.
I guess October is the big, big season.
So we'll wait and see on that.
There's one coming, somebody says.
Alright, so it's too soon.
We'll wait on that. But if the hurricane season is light, it's going to be another pro-Trump lucky situation.
So we'll see. Oh, the weed legalization.
Maybe. I'm not sure weed legalization would qualify as big news.
It would be interesting and people would talk about it.
But it feels like weed legalization, I'm all confused about weed legalization because it's such low-hanging fruit.
Here's what President Trump should definitely not do.
President Trump should not wait for the next president to decriminalize marijuana from the federal perspective.
Here's why. Remember I said that Trump was smart to create Space Force?
And my reasoning was, sooner or later, there's a 100% chance that some president was going to create Space Force.
The next one or the next one after.
It was going to happen. There was no way you would not have, someday, a Space Force.
So the smart thing that Trump did is claim credit for being the one who started it.
Because Space Force will literally last forever.
As long as humanity lasts, there will be a Space Force.
So now he's the founder of Space Force.
It was low-hanging fruit.
It was free. There was no penalty.
All he had to do was say, low-hanging fruit, pink, Space Force.
And one thing we know about the president is that he doesn't leave money on the table.
You know, if there's just like a stack of chips laying on the table and it's all his, he's not going to walk away.
He's going to be gathering that stuff up, right?
And cannabis is exactly the same situation as Space Force.
There's a 100% chance some future president will decriminalize it.
Why would he not want that to be him?
Especially since Republicans like states' rights.
And it's very much a states' rights situation.
It's about as clean as you can get.
It absolutely helps them electorally.
So it might be...
Here's my guess.
It might be that he's...
It might be that he's waiting for the midterms to be over so he can save that one for his own election.
Because if he doesn't now, it becomes maybe an issue for the Congress.
People running for office in Congress, Would have to explain it and maybe there are places where they can't explain it and there are individual candidates that it would be bad for.
Maybe they've told them to hold off, that sort of thing.
But he could do it for himself when he's running for office and I think it'd be a lot easier and it would be a cleaner win.
You're saying the sessions needs to be out of the way first.
Could be. You know, if Trump fired Sessions for not going along with decriminalizing marijuana and said it has nothing...
This is funny.
If the president waited...
And fired Sessions over weed decriminalization and just said, no, it's not really about that other stuff.
It's totally about this weed decriminalization thing.
Because we don't want to leave African Americans in prison over weed.
And this Jeff Sessions guy, geez, he's such a hard nose on this.
We need to get rid of him so that we can get rid of our prison population.
It would be hilarious.
And it'll be funny. Let's talk about Lindsey Graham, somebody's prompting me.
So Lindsey recently said something very similar to what you've heard me say, which is that we have to see how the system works and sort of rely on the system with this whole Kavanaugh situation.
So I think that's the right answer.
We have to default to the system we think is credible.
He will do it with prison reform.
Maybe, but he could get two hits instead of one.
Ha ha ha, no pun intended, two hits instead of one.
If he does prison reform separately from decriminalizing marijuana, because they would be two stories, and if you lump them together, it sort of becomes one story.
Will any Democrats support Kavanaugh?
I'm gonna say no. I'm not the best at predicting that, but I think the Democrats have all the cover they need to not support him.
Project Veritas, I don't know which videos you're talking about in particular.
I think I talked about the one video before.
I think pro-pot people live in big houses away from pot smokers.
Well, certainly it's like every other thing that's legal.
It doesn't mean you want to do it or that you want to be around people who are doing it.
It's a separate question.
And the states can figure that out.
Yeah, I'm not gonna handicap which senators vote which way.
That's not my deal.
Oh, I guess Ted Cruz.
Did Ted Cruz get shouted out of a restaurant recently?
That's not a big story, but we should keep it out.
Brett's calendar is out.
Huh. I'll have to look into that.
Alright, I will talk to you all Is the hearing going to be televised tomorrow?
If the hearing is televised tomorrow, I believe it starts exactly when I do my periscopes.
So if the hearing is at the same time as my periscope and if it's televised, I will watch some of it live with you, which means you're going to have to have another screen on because I won't be showing it here.
I'll just be watching it the same time you are.
What I will be looking for Are crazy eyes and credibility.
Crazy eyes and credibility.
Those would be the two things I've been looking at.
Now when I say crazy eyes, I am not going to suggest that you can tell if somebody's telling the truth by looking at their eyes.
So don't over-interpret what I mean by crazy eyes.
And by the way, I don't know that Christine Ford has crazy eyes because I haven't seen her eyes.
But if she does...
And you know what I mean, right?
Some people just have crazy eyes.
It doesn't mean anything about their actual character.
There's no science to it, per se.
But it will be very persuasive.
So people are trying to get the judge of her character, the judge of her mentality, the judge of her mental health.
And they're going to look at her eyes primarily because the rest of this stuff doesn't tell you as much.
They'll look at body language in general, but the eyes are really the rulers of the situation.
So if her eyes seem to people like crazy eyes, she's in a lot of trouble credibility-wise.
But if she's clear-eyed, again, there's no science to this.
I'm just saying how we register looking at people.
You just think some people look more credible than others.
That doesn't mean they are.
But if she has crazy eyes, This is not going to go well for her.
So that's my biggest question, is crazy eyes.
And again, crazy eyes doesn't mean person is crazy, but it can affect their credibility because it affects the way they're presenting themselves.
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