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Sept. 27, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
31:40
Episode 236 Scott Adams: President Trump’s Press Conference and Confirmation Prediction
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Hey, guess what?
It's me and it's not the morning.
Hello, Jonathan. Hello, Coop de Vil.
Come on in here. Yes, I know it's late for some of you, but it's never too late to periscope with me.
So come on in here.
We've got a thousand people already, so let's jump right into it.
Most of you probably saw the President's press conference.
As with all presidential press conferences, what did people think of it?
Well, people who liked the president said it was terrific.
Best job ever.
People who don't like the president said, my God, what a train wreck.
It was like a garbage fire.
So we can't really make any determination about whether he did well or poorly because people just lined up on their team and took their team's side.
What I watched looked really good.
So the parts I saw, I didn't see every minute of the press conference, but I saw the good parts, I think.
And I thought his answers were measured and reasonable, and they gave us some clues about what's coming.
So here's the first thing.
The question of whether the FBI should investigate and whether they should delay things until the FBI investigates is completely unnecessary.
Why? It's because the Democrats have decided how they're going to vote.
What would be the point of investigating if it doesn't have any chance of changing anybody's mind?
Now, if the investigation could develop solid physical evidence, you know, if it was somehow possible to go back 35 years and find the semen, the fingerprint, the camera that was running at the time, well, then maybe you'd have something, because then you'd have physical evidence.
But I don't believe there's anyone here or anywhere in the world who believes that physical evidence exists.
And if physical evidence doesn't exist, what are all the possible outcomes of an FBI investigation?
You talk to people.
Some people say it might have happened or did happen.
Some people say it definitely didn't.
What would that change?
It's exactly our current situation.
the worst case scenario and the best case scenario are identical.
There's no difference.
So why would you do something that takes time and money that doesn't have any chance of changing the vote?
None.
No chance of changing the vote.
Because the only thing you're going to find is more eyewitness or human accounts of something that happened 35 years ago.
Let's say the FBI investigated and found three more women who suspiciously were Hillary Clinton supporters who said, yes, I think something happened.
Would that change your mind?
It would not.
It totally would not.
Because at this point you expect the other side to come up with stories that are either imagined or convenient or something.
Now here's what might make a difference.
Suppose they went back and found a solid Trump supporter as an adult who makes a claim from those days.
If you had a current Trump supporter say, I know I love the president, but I can't live with this.
This bad thing happened.
I might find that a little bit more persuasive.
It's not proof.
It's not evidence. It's nothing like that.
But it would be persuasive.
But it's kind of a coincidence that somehow young Kavanaugh knew to only molest people who grew up to become Hillary supporters.
How do you do that?
I mean, I'm over-claiming here, that's not exactly true, but we haven't seen anybody who's a hardcore Republican who's making any kind of claim about him.
Now, do we imagine that a hardcore Republican would just bite the bullet and say, well, this happened to me, but I'd still rather have the Supreme Court go the way I want?
I don't think so.
I doubt it.
If a potential Republican had the same experience as the people making the claims, I think they'd jump in at this point.
So remember to look for the blank part of the canvas.
Look for the dog that isn't barking.
And the dog that isn't barking is a Republican claim that he did something wrong.
They're all on the same side.
So that's a red flag.
Now, we will never know the facts.
It can't be known.
It cannot be known.
There's no FBI investigation, no kind of investigation that will ever give us the facts.
We'll only have humans talking about it and therefore nobody's going to change their mind because we just decide to believe the humans that we choose to believe.
So the best answer to why do you not want the FBI to investigate is that it can't change the outcome.
It can't. There's nothing that anybody can say that would change the outcome.
And the Democrats have proved that beyond any doubt.
So had the Democrats been a little more mixed...
You know, had there been some Democrats who were leaning for Kavanaugh, some leaning against, then I would say, you know, why not have a little more investigating?
Because, you know, it's only a few weeks, and maybe the people who are leaning in one direction will get a feel to lean in a different direction.
But when people are making decisions based on party, What's the point?
There's no point. There's no point in an investigation.
So I thought President Trump, he said some version of what I just said.
He said it differently, but it was the same point.
Here's the best part of what Trump said.
And here's the master persuader part.
So Trump said in his press conference that it's a con job.
So that's the first good part because he's been called a con artist since the beginning.
So he has a really good opportunity here to quite legitimately, persuasively call the other side a con artist, which will make it less effective when they say it about him.
So he loves to do this, whatever they're calling him.
You know, fake news, fake news.
No, you're the fake news.
So he's really good at grabbing the gun out of your hand and turning it around.
And so he's doing that with this con artist thing.
He's hitting it really hard. So that's good.
The other thing he said was he painted you a mental visual picture.
He said, imagine Chuck Schumer and the Democrats when they close the door.
They go in a room and they close the door and you're all out there outside the door.
And he said, they're laughing at you.
They're laughing at the con job they pulled off.
That is so good.
Mockery is very effective.
Persuasion. If you think you're being mocked, it just throws you into an emotional state where you just need to make that go away.
Because we're sort of organically designed to try to avoid mocking.
That's why we have embarrassment.
That's why civilization holds together.
We are very primed to do whatever we can to avoid being mocked.
And he's now painted a visual movie, and he brought you into the movie.
He brought you into the room and said, there's Chuck Schumer.
There are the other Democrats who made this stuff up.
They're all laughing at you.
They're laughing at you.
Oh my God, that's good persuasion.
Paints the picture, makes it visual, gives you fear, goes right to the base of your head where you're afraid of being mocked.
And he's raised the possibility that you're a sucker and that it's obvious.
Now, here's the thing.
Independent of whether anything's happened 35 years ago, independent of that, Here's what you know.
You know Chuck Schumer is laughing about it behind closed doors.
Right? That part of it, you know for sure.
Alright, we're not reading minds here, but in the real world we live in, when any team gets a good play, you know that they're having a good time about it.
So you know That Schumer and the people who are involved in, you know, the resistance, they do actually laugh about it.
There's almost a certainty that that's happening.
All right. Now let's give me your...
I'm going to give you my prediction of what has to happen now.
And you have to understand the arc of the accusations.
So on day one, when you heard the first accusation, That he had touched Dr.
Ford when they were teenagers against her will and had, you know, threateningly, you know, acted like he was gonna rape her or she believed that.
When you first heard that, That was the highest level of credibility.
So moment one was the highest credibility.
And the reason it has the highest credibility is different from whether it's true or false.
Because when you hear something like that, it's so hard to do.
It's hard to go public. It was a little bit specific.
Nobody remembers what day something happened 35 years ago.
But it was specific about what happened.
So I said to myself, True or false, that is a credible-sounding accusation.
But then time goes by.
So we give it our highest accusation right out of the gate, and that's probably we always should.
We probably always should give it maximum credibility at moment one.
But then other information comes out.
There are things we learn about her, the timing of things, why did this happen, what about this coincidence, etc.
And over time, The circumstantial evidence around it starts to chip away at her credibility.
Then what you needed, and everybody was saying, is, where are the other people?
Where is the pattern of this happening?
If we don't have a pattern, it doesn't look credible.
And that was really taking a bite into that first accusation.
Where's the pattern?
Where's the pattern?
And of course, the anti-Trumpers had to produce a pattern.
So here's what we can say for sure.
If there were no people who had real stories, fake stories would have been produced.
The stakes are high enough, there are enough people in the world, somebody's gonna take a chance like that.
So there was a certainty that there would be more, and sure enough, right on schedule, there's the woman who says, I don't really remember if it was him, but somebody exposed themselves, and I searched my memory until I convinced myself, essentially, I'm paraphrasing, convinced myself that it was true.
Now when you compare that accusation To the original one, which started out gold-plated.
It was the highest level of credibility.
But it decreased a little bit over time.
The second accusation sort of started where the first one had already reduced in credibility.
It was sort of comparable at that point.
Because you probably said to yourself, and she didn't remember it until she searched her memory?
That sounds like a manufactured memory.
So now the second one had the advantage of creating quantity.
So it was still persuasive in its weird way, because it was a second thing.
Even though it was far less credible than the first one was, even after the first one had degraded in credibility.
And remember, I'll keep saying this, every time I say credibility, That doesn't mean it's true or false.
That part we don't know and we never will.
But is the story credible?
Now Avenatti enters the arena.
What does Avenatti's presence do to the credibility of the claim?
Well, he's such a biased player and he's such a trigger That at least for people on the right, his very presence makes whatever happens that he's involved with less credible.
Now, again, doesn't mean it's not true.
It's just that he's not a credible player to the people on the right.
I think he's credible on the left, probably.
So let's say he's sort of half credible.
But then we hear the actual accusations.
About the 10 episodes or so of gang rapes in a party situation in which nobody else has reported these gang rapes.
Nobody reported them at the time.
And the accuser kept going back to these parties until she was actually the subject of a gang rape.
Now that claim started with no credibility.
It's starting place was close to zero credibility.
This is my opinion. This is not anybody else's opinion.
But I think most of you had a similar opinion that the third one was even less credible than the first two.
So it started here, went down to here over time, as we found out more.
The second one started here and hasn't changed much, but it was never good to begin with.
And then the third one is way down here.
Now, two ways to look at that.
One way is that now we've developed something that looks like quantity.
So the anti-Trumpers, the anti-Kavanaugh people can say, well, even if you don't believe one of them, the other two, well, even if you don't believe two of them, there's still one left.
What about all this quantity?
It's a pattern of behavior.
So they've got that going for them.
But here's my take on it.
The third accusation...
Makes it impossible for him not to be approved.
Here's why.
If the government allows this level of credibility to derail their nominee, we don't have a government.
We don't have a government.
So it's a big deal.
It's very destabilizing.
Consider these two outcomes.
One outcome is that Kavanaugh gets nominated.
There's some marching in the streets.
People are unhappy. They complain.
They register to vote.
They do all the things that people do.
But don't you think The left is kind of expecting him to get, kind of expecting that he's going to make it through, right?
And if they're not expecting it today, they have been expecting it for most of the time.
So when something happens that you don't like, but you expected it, and it's well within the system, nobody cheated, it's all well within the system, there's sort of a natural limit on how worked up you're going to get about it.
So the worst case scenario for the anti-Kavanaugh folks is that they're just really unhappy for a while.
But we'll get past it.
What is the downside to the Republican Party if they let these accusations, given the level of credibility to them as a collective, what is the risk to them of withdrawing the nomination?
If you have children around, I would like you to cover their ears.
There are some times when I just have to curse.
And this is one of those times.
So I'm giving you fair notice.
If you have anybody young or if you don't want to hear some cursing, you should cover your ears or turn down the sound.
Because I'm going to curse.
If the Republicans let this level of credibility derail this nomination, they are fucking dead.
They are fucking dead as a party.
Because at the very least, the people who voted against it, who also have an R next to their name, don't have a chance of winning re-election.
Because it's going to be absolute fucking...
Disaster. So if Republicans don't get this through, sure, you could say, well, they nominate somebody else.
But you have to stop this from happening again.
There's a precedent here. The precedent is that you can throw anything up against the wall and you can stop the gears of government.
If the Republicans allow the gears of government to stop over this, there's no forgiving it.
There's no forgiving it.
Now, I think we might forgive the Republicans who voted for nomination or for confirmation.
But the people who vote against it, they can never play in politics again.
They've got to be removed.
You know, legally, right?
I'm not talking about anything but a legal election process.
If the people who are on the fence, who are not planning to retire anyway, If anybody's in that category.
Any Democrat who votes against this, given what Avenatti brought to the party, they can no longer be credible politicians.
And you should expect that the full weight of the Republican Party...
Would be on them, and they would get primaried, and there would be almost unlimited money to defeat them.
And they would just never be taken seriously again.
So those are the two outcomes.
So if you're a Republican, what are you going to do?
Well, there might be some senators who are Republicans who vote against it.
Could happen. But it's a death wish.
Political death wish, not a physical death wish.
And what happens if they vote against it?
Let's say you're a Republican and you vote against Kavanaugh because of these claims.
What happens then?
Another Republican is nominated and you still end up with basically the same kind of person.
Might be female, might be male, but the outcome is going to be the same for the country.
But what will be the outcome for that senator?
Gone. All right?
Gone. No senator who is a Republican can survive this if they vote against him.
So, tell me I'm wrong, right?
Does anybody think anything I said there is not accurate?
So, given Trump's personality, you know what he wants.
He wants it to go through.
Given... That the Republicans want to win.
They can have a win.
It's possible. And they have complete maximum mutually assured destruction going on for their own party.
It would get very ugly for those senators.
So nobody can threaten, especially the female senators who are having second thoughts, because there's a gender issue that's on top of all this.
But in terms of what would happen, there's no question about it.
So this is one of those great tests of the system.
Which I kind of appreciate every now and then that our whole republic gets stress test, stress tested.
And this is one of those times.
So the whole system developed by the founders, you know, hundreds of years ago, these people who were pooping in holes in the ground and couldn't imagine the internet or anything that was coming, they built this system that's still freaking working.
It's pretty impressive.
And this is just a good test of it.
To me, it seems that the system is so strong that we are so, I would say, brainwashed or socialized into buying into the system, you know, the Constitution I'm talking about.
That allowing this candidate for the Supreme Court to be derailed for these reasons that are impossible to verify, if we let that happen, we will have Basically proved the founders wrong.
They thought they had a system with the right checks and balances, but it's possible that they didn't.
Maybe it's incomplete.
Maybe it's not quite right.
But we're gonna find out.
I feel very confident That there's only one way this can go unless we learn something new.
Now, we could learn something new, but if the only thing we learn that's new comes in the form of somebody talking, oh, I remember this or that, then I think Kavanaugh has to get confirmed.
Let me ask you this.
Would you rather have a Supreme Court Justice who is tainted by these accusations He's qualified, but he's tainted by these accusations.
Or would you rather live in a system that stopped him for these reasons?
It's not even close.
I'll take the tainted Supreme Court justice every time.
Tainted Supreme Court justice doesn't sound even close to as bad as the alternative.
Let me tell you something else.
If Kavanaugh doesn't get confirmed, and let's say Democrats come back to power with some minor majority, do you think they're ever going to not have this happen to them?
Because there's sort of a rule that once somebody does something, you kind of got to pay them back.
You know, it's sort of a mutually assured destruction situation.
So Democrats have totally eliminated their ability to ever get somebody approved in the future if they stick with this and if it works.
We just won't have any more Supreme Court justices, I think.
Or at least none that aren't tainted.
Every Supreme Court justice after this will be tainted.
So it's going to be lots of taint.
Taints everywhere. Somebody's saying red wave.
I don't think it translates that way.
I don't think the red wave is going to grow out of whatever happens with the Supreme Court.
I just don't know that that's A equals B. Um...
I'm just looking at your comments now.
So that's all I had to say. I just wanted to get on and talk about what's happening.
I think the president's doing a good job of keeping things in perspective.
I laughed when he said that he's also been the subject of fake claims.
So I can't remember if I said this this morning or I thought of it this afternoon, but I'm going to say it again anyway.
If you were going to ask yourself, For any given person, there's a claim of a crime, whether it's a sex crime or some other crime.
If somebody claims somebody did a crime, what are the odds that it's true?
Just from the claim. You haven't looked at any evidence yet.
There's just a claim. Well, probably you'd say, it's probably true.
People don't really blame people of crimes, you know, too willy-nilly.
They usually take that pretty seriously.
So usually where there's an accusation, there is a crime.
Usually. Not always.
But what about in the case where there's an accusation against a famous person?
Do the stats still hold for famous people?
How many times do you think I've been falsely accused?
I mean, I told you about my stalker, and that wasn't the only issue I've had in my famous life.
But for famous people, and I'm not nearly as famous as Kavanaugh or the president or anything, it is routine.
To have accusations from stalkers, people who remember things, people who thought it was you.
Oh, let me give you another problem.
When I was younger, and Dilbert was just getting famous, it was not unusual for someone to claim they were me to take a woman to bed.
So there were guys who were claiming they were me because most people didn't know what I looked like.
You know, it was sort of early internet days.
So people would go to a bar and say, hey, you ever hear that Dilbert comic?
And if they got somebody to say, yeah, that's a big deal, they'd say, yeah, well, I'm Scott Adams.
I'm rich and I'm an artist, and can I buy you a drink?
And it turns out, I hated to hear this, but it turns out you can close the deal pretty well by claiming you're me.
Now, are there people in this country...
Who believe they had sex with me, remember having sex with me, who I have never met?
Yes. Yes, there are.
How many? I don't know.
But there are some number of people who have a very specific memory of having sex with me that I have never met.
How uncommon is that for a famous person?
Not. It's very common for famous people to have other people imagine they had sex with them.
It actually is a thing.
It happens. So if you're saying, what are the odds that somebody would make a fake accusation?
Well, if you were a normal citizen who wasn't famous, the odds are it probably would be true.
But those odds, I believe, and I don't know if there's any way to measure this, But probably the odds might reverse for famous people.
You know, you always have your Cosby's and such who are going to ruin the whole curve.
But famous men are all accused of sex crimes.
It's just a thing.
If you didn't know that, and you were looking at the situation and thinking, well, nobody's going to accuse somebody unless they probably did it.
Then you're in a completely different universe of probability.
The probability of somebody in that position being accused is very, very high.
Alright. Yeah, it was easier in my case because people didn't know what I looked like.
And by the way, Jim Davis, who's the creator of Garfield, had a big problem with this.
So there was somebody who learned how to draw Garfield, and it was somebody who looked enough like Jim Davis, or people didn't check, that he was actually, apparently he was doing a great job of getting women to bed in Florida, I think it was. I think it was Florida.
So there's two cartoonists, two cartoonists I know of, that have some population of women who believe they've had sex with those cartoonists, and the cartoonists have never met those women.
It's a weird world.
So, blockchain can solve that problem, somebody said.
Somebody said, I had that pulled on me years ago, and now I get it.
Yes, I wonder, how many other women Have encountered a man who claimed to be something else, something more famous or more rich.
Have any other women had that situation?
Wow.
Friend lost everything on a false accusation and tried to kill himself.
That is awful.
It's happened at least twice to me, Janet says.
Yes.
Wow.
I never thought to ask that question before, but it's a good one, isn't it?
Alright, I'm just looking at your comments, and I think I've said enough, and I'm going to go do something else, and I will catch up with you in the morning.
um But, and I apologize for the cursing.
I hope you know it was necessary.
This was mandatory cursing today, so...
Yeah, it does seem like a lot of women are saying, I am Spartacus this week.
Uh... Oh, did I say somebody asked me about my estimate of Cosby being guilty, and I said 40%?
I don't remember ever saying that, but let's say I did.
The moment the first accusations come in, if you're a normal citizen, they're probably credible.
But if you're a star, again, the odds are reversed.
Now, Cosby clearly is guilty because the evidence was overwhelming.
The accusers, exes, say she's crazy and lie all the time.
I would need a fact check on that.
I haven't seen a source to say that.
How does it work for the real Scott Adams?
Confidential information. Alright, I'll talk to you all later.
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