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Nov. 8, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
40:55
Episode 292 Scott Adams: The National Temperature, Jim Acostya, RBG, the Shooting
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Joanne, you are on it.
You must have your coffee ready and your finger poised to push the button.
I appreciate your good attitude.
Tyler Brown, hello.
Dave for Prez, hello.
Dale? Is that a real name?
Hey everybody, it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
Although there's sad news today, there's lots of news today.
So we'll talk more about the less sad stuff.
But before we do, you know what it's time for.
It's time for coffee with Scott Adams.
If you have your cup, your mug, your glass, your stein, your container for beverages, fill it up with your favorite liquids.
I prefer coffee.
And shall we enjoy the simultaneous sip?
Somebody said, is it me or is the camera sideways?
The answer is, it is you, because the camera is correct.
Well, there are so many things to talk about.
We'll start with the big news.
There's another shooting.
A dozen people are dead at a bar.
We don't know enough about it, except that the perpetrator had a long trench coat and a ski mask and guns.
Sounds to me slightly more likely to be a loner who has been bullied in some way, even at 29.
Somebody said they thought he was 29.
But it seems like a loner who got bullied a little bit more than it seems like a political act.
But we don't know. So that's not a prediction.
That's just a state of knowledge at the moment.
So let's wait for developments on that, but we'll talk about other things.
Politics, for example.
Let's talk about Jim Acosta and the press event.
So I'm sure by now you've all seen a million videos of Jim Acosta and And he's at the president's press conference and he keeps talking and the president keeps telling him to stop talking and give the microphone up.
But he resisted when the intern came and tried to take it away.
Now the debate that I'm watching online about did he assault her, did he touch her, did he slap her arm and all that stuff...
It's fine to talk about that if you're doing it for entertainment.
And, you know, I suppose if you're doing it for a get-even with the other side because of Corey Lewandowski years ago, if you're doing it for that, I'm not going to stop you because that's part of the game.
But I think the most useful frame for looking at that whole press event is Is like professional wrestling.
And I'm going to do what none of you did.
I'm going to give Jim Acosta more credit than the rest of you.
So one of the things that made President Trump so successful is that he successfully combines theater with politics.
And he makes politics stronger, in his case.
He makes his position stronger by taking what has to be considered a reality TV type of theatrical sensibility To the boring job of politics.
And when he combines them, it just makes him super powerful.
So, if it's okay to say that about the president, that he takes theater, he matches it with politics, and he makes those two things work better together, and that makes him more successful.
That's what I've been telling you about the president for years.
Now, let's look at Jim Acosta.
Jim Acosta, you've been saying he's showboating, he's crossing the line.
Yeah, he's doing all of those things.
But he's also taking theater and combining it with what we used to think of as news to make it more powerful.
The reason we're talking about Jim Acosta is that he combined theater with the news.
Successfully. Because you're talking about Jim Acosta.
Every person knows his name.
He's the most famous news person now.
Probably, right? He's the single most famous news person in the world.
Because he successfully combined theater with news.
Now, you can hate it.
You can not like it because of what it does, the fake news, etc.
You can find lots of reasons not to like it, for the same reasons that you can find lots of reasons not to like President Trump's combining theater with politics successfully.
If you don't like his politics, then you don't like the fact that he's successful.
But the truth is, the CNN has somewhat publicly abandoned the just-a-news-organization stance.
So he's not really that far out of his approved channel.
So CNN knows that they work for ratings.
Their boss has said specifically, and in public, he said, if we don't talk about Trump, our ratings plunge.
So the head of CNN actually said that.
Yeah, we've tried not talking about Trump, but the ratings go down.
So we talk about Trump.
Now, obviously, since they have built an anti-Trump audience, talking about Trump means talking crap about Trump.
So CNN doesn't pretend to be something it isn't, really.
I mean, in a professional wrestler kind of way, they do.
So when you've got President Trump going hard at Jim Acosta in public, you should see this as two people who understand theater who are both using it successfully.
The President is using it in his way.
Jim Acosta is using it in his way.
So whatever else you want to say about Jim Acosta, I won't talk you out of it.
Your opinion is your opinion.
But I'm telling you, you're seeing him successfully use President Trump's technique, which I have praised for two years, and I'm not going to change my mind just because someone else is using the technique.
Probably not what you wanted to hear.
Yesterday I saw a tweet where somebody alleged that they would use their Alexa.
I have to be careful because when I say that, my Alexa comes on.
And they were saying, who is Jim Acosta?
In the tweet, you could hear somebody that looked like it was the Alexa system.
And it looked like, or sounded like, it was saying that he was a fake journalist.
And I saw that and I said, that's not real.
And I was reading it while I was in the same room with my own...
I want to stop saying the word because it activates my system, A-L-E-X-A. So I thought, well, I'll ask mine and see if it says the same thing.
thing.
So I did.
So I said, "Alexa, who is Jim Acosta?" : Abilie James Jim Acosta is an American journalist who is the chief White House correspondent for CNN : Alexa, shut up.
So when I first did it, it actually said that Jim Acosta is a fake journalist.
That was actually on Alexa.
And I checked again this morning, and then you probably couldn't hear it, but they've removed that now.
So I don't know who got to it.
But it was a good prank.
So hats off to whoever hacked it and made that change.
It was pretty funny. I didn't think it was real, but it was real.
So that's enough for that.
Oh, and then the question of whether Acosta should have been banned and having his White House credentials removed, I would say that's appropriate, but it's also part of the political theater.
And if you're arguing about whether he assaulted the intern or he touched her or didn't touch her, I don't think any of that matters.
You know, it might be fun to talk about it, but none of it matters.
Here's what matters. Acosta was in the president's house, essentially.
And the President of the United States, whose job it was to inform the public and to give all of the press, 60-whatever people in there, time to ask questions, thought that this one person had asked all the questions he needed to ask.
And so he was trying to move on.
To me, the only question is, did Jim Acosta...
Do what the president asked him to do in the president's own house?
And the answer is no. So the president banned him from his house.
I don't see how you could possibly argue with that.
The president of the United States in his own house, you know, essentially his own house.
You've got to do what the president asked you to do.
If the context is trying to inform people, trying to give everybody a chance.
So that's really the only thing that has to be said about that.
There was only one person who was in charge, and that person made sure you knew he was in charge.
I have no problem with that.
Alright, let's talk about Jeff Sessions.
So one of the things that I haven't heard somebody say explicitly, maybe somebody did, is that there could have been no more perfect Timing for the dismissal of Jeff Sessions.
Timing was perfect.
And it's because it came so close to the election, because first of all, it took all of that election talk, oh, the president is losing support or whatever.
It took all the attention onto Jeff Sessions, which was brilliant.
But I've argued that the day after that election, Might be what I call peak bipartisanship.
In other words, it might be the day, the one day, when the opposition was feeling good about themselves because they just won the House.
So, in a sense, if the country is this far apart, for a moment, it was a little less apart because the winners of the House were feeling like they made some progress.
Probably, you know, politics will pull things apart again.
But at the moment...
I'll just block anybody who uses that word.
But at the moment...
It looks like, you know, it was perfect timing to do it because it changed the conversation.
And it was, well, let me explain.
I'll explain that a little better in a moment here.
But the Whitaker, the guy coming in, the opposition to Trump is saying he should recuse himself Because when he was a pundit, he wrote some things about how Mueller should have his funding cut and how his scope should be limited to what his scope is.
To which I say, without the benefit of any legal training, I ask you the following question.
Should you recuse yourself for agreeing with your own boss?
Because that's what people are asking him to do.
They're saying, hey Whitaker, you seem to agree with your boss and you're on the same page.
You've got to recuse yourself.
To which I say, I don't think I know what boss means.
If boss doesn't mean hiring people who will agree with you, what the hell does it mean?
Does boss mean you randomly hire people?
Does it mean you hire people you know will not do what you want?
If you can't hire somebody who agrees with you, what the hell can you do as a boss?
So it's silly Their recusal is even in the conversation.
And I think the Democrats are only doing it because they know that the public can't tell the difference.
They can't tell the difference between a sitting judge, for example, who has to have the appearance of impartiality, versus somebody who's just being hired for a job and they happen to agree with their boss.
That's pretty harmless.
Now, the other interesting thing about this is that getting rid of Jeff Sessions, as the weed stocks showed yesterday when they went up, probably paves the way for the federal government to get out of the weed business.
In other words, for the federal government to decriminalize or otherwise step out of that question.
It would be...
Are you ready for this?
It's what I call the new CEO. The new CEO play.
When there's a brand new CEO, the first thing they should do is something that really sets the tone.
You notice that Pence and Trump did that as soon as they were elected and before they'd even been signed in.
They started traveling to Ford, traveling to Carrier, and they really made a big deal before they were even signed in.
And doing it early is the big part of the thing.
They did a big public Obvious visual thing that was sort of their brand.
And that brand has carried them.
They've been the jobs, fight for jobs brand since then.
So the thing you do on day one matters more than the thing you do on day 20.
That's just how it works, because first impressions matter.
So now that we have a new Congress, in a sense, because we have a new balance of power, It's sort of a new CEO opportunity, again, for President Trump.
So what does he do?
He says, congratulations to Nancy Pelosi.
I think you deserve being the speaker.
Huh? New CEO play.
He's setting the tone. He's setting the tone in a way that will help him in the future.
But even better than that, getting rid of Sessions...
Sessions is a hard nose on immigration.
He's a hard nose on weed.
And weed is the perfect first thing to do.
I don't know if it's going to happen by Christmas, but it would be a great Christmas present.
And I can imagine that the president would maybe find somebody on the left to partner with him, to simply make an announcement that says, look, in the spirit of bipartisanship, There's nobody on the left and nobody on the right who's going to disagree with what we say, which is, let the states work it out.
Because the people on the right are going to say, it's a states issue.
It just doesn't need to be a federal government problem.
Let the states work it out.
And the people on the left are more likely to say, it should be legal anyway.
So there's an opportunity here for the president to do a new CEO move for a second time, because it's a new government.
It's almost like he has a new job.
You know, his new job is to be president of a split Congress.
And if he did something that showed bipartisanship right out of the chute, Faster than you could do an infrastructure bill.
Anything else he does that's bipartisan is going to take a while.
But he could probably make a dent in weed just by a proclamation.
And just say, alright, bipartisan.
Let's get some bipartisan stuff going here.
So that might happen.
We'll see. Because the simulation...
That we live in keeps serving up one interesting story after another.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg apparently fell.
She's age 85 and broke a few ribs.
This is not her first brush with health problems.
She's had cancer a few times.
She's fallen before.
She's had, I think, a heart issue with a stent.
So She's 85 and she fell and she's probably to the point where it's just sort of dangerous to do her job.
We don't know how long she's going to stay in her job.
I hope she heals. I hope she does well.
There's not much to say about that yet, because she could just go on another five years.
You never know. But the news just keeps serving us up new things to look at.
Now, I'm going to go to the whiteboard here to defend something I said after the midterms.
What I said was I thought that the national temperature would come down because there's a shared power.
My critics, of which there are many, came onto Twitter to say, how wrong you are.
It's time for you to eat crow, Adams, because you said the temperature would go down.
But here's a tweet of people who have gathered, some Antifa people they've gathered, You can see it in the comments here.
We told you you were wrong.
No, I'm not wrong.
And I'm going to tell you why you're wrong to think I'm wrong in a minute.
So it is true that there are some organized groups that seem to be organizing to protest one thing or another.
One of them, shockingly and disturbingly, Had Tucker Carlson's home address when he wasn't home, but his wife was.
He's got four kids.
I don't know if the kids were home.
I don't think they were. But think about that.
A crowd gathered in front of his house while his wife hid in the pantry, not knowing if they were trying to come in.
There was some dangerous sounding talk that she could overhear.
Imagine how scary that was.
That It's seriously inappropriate.
But how many people were in that group?
You have to make a distinction between the professional protesters, of which I think these were.
These are the people whose sort of job is protesting.
You know, they're organized, they're part of a group, they can't wait for the next protest.
Those people may protest more than ever.
So my prediction about the national temperature is about voters, about ordinary people.
So I'm going to double down on my prediction that the temperature for ordinary people Not professional protestors, not people who are paid, not people who have an organization with costumes.
So I'm not talking about the costumed professional protestors.
They may be more or less and probably more.
So I'll agree with you on that.
And the Tucker Carlson thing looked like professionals making a political point very, very different from the public.
Let's talk about the public.
And let's go to the whiteboard to make my case.
I believe there is a three-legged stool of Trump hatred.
The three primary things that people hate about Trump are accusations of he's crazy, accusations of he's a racist, accusations of he's a strongman dictator.
And you need that whole stool.
To be as mad as you could be.
And you notice that it's kind of like whack-a-mole.
Every time one of these legs gets sort of disproven by evidence, somebody goes, yeah, well, he's not one of these, but he's certainly one of these.
Well, he's not one of these, but he's certainly one of these.
Did you say he's not one of these?
Well, you make a good point, but he's certainly one of these.
So you need all three legs so people can bounce back and forth leg to leg and still have at least a wobbly stool.
But my point is this, that after the House went to the Democrats, there was this huge check on the President's power, at least in the way that the public thinks about it.
So if the President tried to do something and use his friendly Senate, who were mostly Republican, to get his way, they would now be prevented.
Not just potentially by a Supreme Court, which now leans his way, so that wasn't really the protection that people needed, but now they have a friendly house.
The opposition to Trump has a friendly house.
So I would argue that the dictator leg went away this week.
So if you're just a regular voter, again, I'm not talking about a costumed, paid protester like the ones who went to Tucker Carlson's house, and by the way, should go to jail, in my opinion, surrounding the house of Tucker Carlson's wife, and saying, you know, I'm sure they were on his property, I'm sure they were saying threatening things, that should be jail time.
I hope that it's jail time.
It's very, very serious, and so we should never make light of that.
But, for the regular people, the people who are not costumed role players, They just saw one of these legs go away.
They just saw that President Trump can't make any law he wants.
It will absolutely be stopped by Congress.
So the entire dictator thing just sort of went away by an act of democracy.
The founders have a system, you know, the founders of this country developed a system where when it gets out of balance, it finds balance.
How many times throughout history has the country gotten out of balance and then the next election we bring it back in balance?
It's the most common thing that happens in this country.
So we were definitely a little out of balance.
Nobody saw the...
Well, I won't say nobody, because I saw it.
But people did not see that the president would get elected and also have two houses and a Supreme Court on his side.
People didn't see that, plus a lot of governors.
So when it happened, the country got way out of balance to the right in terms of power, and it just took a couple years to get back in balance.
So I would argue that the Trump is a dictator...
Leg of the stool is gone.
And you saw him, you saw the president putting a nail on that when he went in front of the public and said, he didn't just say, my side lost.
The president of the United States said, congratulations.
Congratulations. You fought well, and Nancy Pelosi deserves to be the leader.
His biggest, certainly his biggest name brand critic, he just praised her for her good work in front of the world and said she deserves her position, and I hope I can work with her.
Not very dictatorish, but this crazy leg...
What about that? We just watched the President of the United States do rally after rally after rally.
And then we watched him do 87 minutes in front of the press.
Now, of course there was the Jim Acosta stuff and the contentiousness with the press, but did any of that look crazy?
Did you see any craziness in all of that public exposure?
Crazy people can't really hide it that well, can they?
If you believed he was crazy, he has used continuous exposure and operating at the very highest level because even his critics will say, you know those rallies?
They're really good.
He's really good in front of the public.
It would be hard to be crazy and to be that good in public that consistently.
In 87 minutes, the president ranged from how many topics did he cover?
He covered all kinds of topics, and when he talked about them, he said completely rational, We're good to go.
What's the first thing you do if you think your boss, the President of the United States, is crazy?
If you were handling him, what's the first thing you do?
The first thing you do is you say, don't go out and give a press conference.
Just say you don't do that.
We'll talk to the press for you.
So obviously his staff doesn't think there's a problem, and he's still the best person on camera of the entire administration.
Not even close.
I would argue that the crazy leg is still there a little bit, but it's really weakened because the way he treated the loss, if you can call it that, of the house, and the fact that he's been in public so much lately and operating at the highest level and not a single slip.
Is that there is not one thing he said in all of those public appearances, ranging across all kinds of topics, not a single thing that his enemy press called out and said, I don't know, when he said that one thing, that sounded, we'll get rid of this person, that sounded wrong.
So I think when you saw the press conference, what was the one thing that the press wanted to ask him?
They wanted to ask him about this leg.
Do you know why they wanted to ask him about this leg and not, oh, that one's gone.
They didn't want to ask him about the leg that's already gone because it's already gone.
And they didn't want to ask him about crazy because all the evidence was in the other direction.
It's all they had left.
You could see almost a desperation in the room and the president Got a little testy there when they were going after this last illusion.
So, let me reiterate.
For those of you who say, Scott, you're wrong.
The national temperature has gone up.
Just look at the people protesting.
I say, most of those protests were probably already planned.
Because it takes a while to get a good protest going.
These are people costumed, paid, and organized for political purposes.
It has nothing to do with the mood of the country.
Antifa is not the mood of the country.
They're a group that has a political agenda and protesting in public seems to work for them.
So they do more of it.
All right. Soros.
So, let's talk about George Soros because apparently if you're a Trump supporter you can't leave him out of any conversation.
You know that I've been asking questions about, can you explain to me why?
Somebody just said Nazis were costumed protesters.
Well, I'm not defending the protesters.
I'm saying they're not representative of the mood of the voters.
They are their own thing.
That's all I'm saying. Yeah, so I'm just going to summarize my Soros opinion for those who haven't seen it.
Soros does fund groups who play on identity politics.
So in that sense, he's funding something that you may consider harmful for the world.
But a lot of people fund them.
It's the entire left is on the same side.
So picking out this one guy who funds them, you could say he's a little more impactful than other people maybe.
But I'm not sure it's the big story.
I think we like to pick on him because he's a visual.
He's a single sort of...
Somebody said he's like a Bond villain.
If he had a different personality and persona, I think he would be treated differently.
Somebody says, I don't think Soros is a micromanager.
That is correct. I don't believe Soros is...
Managing individual protests.
All right. Is there anything else going on we need to talk about?
Oh, let's talk about the president's response to being asked about the word nationalist.
And the president said that's a racist question.
Was that a good response?
To say that's a racist question?
I have to tell you I enjoyed it.
From an entertainment standpoint, I enjoyed that he did that.
Now, my logical facility said, well, what do you mean it's a racist comment?
It's not what a professional journalist should be doing, certainly.
It wasn't like a legitimate news question.
So it wasn't a legitimate question.
But what he did with it, by going on the offense, I kinda liked.
Because he didn't play defense.
I kind of like that he didn't play defense.
He played offense. Now, the logic he used to say that it was a racist question, I'm not sure all the parts of that fit together logically, but it was still perfect because the complaints against him have the same character, meaning they don't quite logically make sense, but they sort of feel like they do.
You follow that? The logic behind the criticisms of the president don't completely fit together, but they just sort of feel like they might.
That's their entire logic.
So when he accused her of asking a racist question, I had exactly the same experience, which is, well, not quite logically a racist, but it sure felt like it.
So he basically gave them back a nice dose of what they've been piling on him for years, and I have to admit, I enjoyed the theater of it.
I enjoyed the The judo of it.
I enjoyed the cleverness of the response.
And I think he sold it with some, what would you call it?
Sincerity. In other words, when he said it, it felt like he felt it.
He felt like, when you say, I'm going to put words in his mouth, which is probably dangerous.
Maybe I shouldn't do that. Let me put it this way.
My understanding of it Was that the reason he said it was a racist question is because it was an anti-white question.
If he had said that's anti-white, it would have been the worst response anybody ever said about anything.
Because in this country, you're not really allowed to say anything is anti-white.
Because if you do say that, you're automatically branded racist.
It's as if you'd said the N-word.
By societal evolution, we've come to the point where defending white people in a country such as the United States...
Would automatically label you as a racist in this country.
Again, logic isn't part of any of this, you know, so there's no logical connection with any of this.
So she said white nationalist?
No, she said nationalist and then she later clarified what she meant by it because there are such things as white nationalist.
So I loved his response, but I'm not going to say it's a logical response.
It is exactly like the way he's been treated, and so that was wonderful because it forced them to wrestle with the non-logic of it in a way that we haven't seen them wrestle with their own non-logic.
So that was wonderful.
Yeah, if you're looking at the videos of Acosta, if you're seeing them in slow motion, they look different.
If you're seeing them from this angle, they look different.
People are saying it's the Yanni and Laurel situation where people are seeing what they want to see.
And I think all that stuff is fun.
But whatever happened, however hard he touched her or didn't touch her, it's not really the story.
Because it was trivial, no matter what it was.
In terms of the contact.
What mattered was, the President of the United States asked him to stand down in the President's house to play by the rules that everyone else was playing by, and he chose not to.
That's the only question.
The question was, did he do what the president asked him in a reasonable way so that other people could have their freedom of press?
That's the whole question.
So I think the White House played it cleverly.
And appropriately, and he deserves his band, but do not feel sorry for Jim Acosta.
He is involved in the theater, not news, and he's getting the attention that you get when you play it right.
So I'm going to tell you that Jim Acosta played it right in terms of the theater he's trying to play with.
I think he did a good job of advancing his career Helping CNN with their ratings, and that's what he was trying to do.
I cannot fault success if somebody is trying to do something very specifically, and they succeed, which he did.
You know, you could dislike him all you want, like a wrestling villain.
He's like a wrestling villain, isn't he?
But he succeeded.
I'm not a fan.
I'm just saying he succeeded.
Alright. Is there anything else we didn't talk about yet?
Somebody is saying that he's narcissistic.
He might be narcissistic, but I don't think you could tell it from this.
What you can tell from this event is that Jim Acosta understands the theater added to something like the news makes it a different animal.
I think he understands that like other people don't understand.
I could be wrong.
Maybe he's just acting on impulse.
that's possible but it sure looks like he knows what he's doing he must have read Winn Bigley Maybe so. All right.
The shooting. Yeah, the shooting we don't know enough about.
So we have to wait and see about the shooting.
And we talked about Tucker, FISA Gate.
I don't have anything to say about that.
All right. I think we're done here.
We'll check the news, find out more about the shooter.
And, oh, let me say one more thing.
So the president said he was asked about Saudi Arabia and the murder of Khashoggi in the Turkish embassy.
And I forget the president's exact words, but there was something like he was going to have a strong statement on that coming up.
So, or words to that effect.
So there was something strong coming up about the Saudi Arabia situation.
I think that might be foreshadowing.
It may be optimistic.
But here's what I think.
It could be that the murder of Khashoggi puts the Saudis in a flexible situation in which maybe if other people are being flexible at the same time, there could be something like a Middle East peace deal brewing.
So don't be surprised if the next 12 months sees something like a Middle East peace deal in which Saudi Arabia's role in it is more productive than you would have imagined.
And that might be what Saudi Arabia needs to do to get back on the right side of history here.
So I'm not sure I'd make that a prediction.
But if it happens, we're going to look back at that statement and say, oh, I get it.
He used the Saudi Arabia thing, which was a tragedy, to find some kind of negotiating advantage to get them to be a little more flexible, maybe with just money.
It might be just how much money they cough up.
But it's probably a positive thing.
All right. That's all for now.
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