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Nov. 11, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
58:27
Episode 296 Scott Adams: Wildfires, The Tucker Test, Forgotten Black Voters, More
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Hey Nicholas, come on in here.
While you're coming in, I'm going to give you a reverse angle so you can see.
If you look out the window today, some of you might know that I was showing you the view out my window the other day.
And all of those low hills that you can see now were invisible even yesterday.
So even yesterday you couldn't see those hills.
It was all smoke. But it looks like today there's either a turn in the wind or maybe the firefighters are more successful.
But I'm far enough away from the fire that I will not be personally affected.
I do know people who have lost their homes or probably lost their homes.
I don't know the details yet.
So, thinking about all those fire victims, the fire is truly horrific.
Let's talk about that a little. So, President Trump, his first mention of the California wildfires was in a tweet which was, Roundly criticized from both the left and the right for being tone deaf.
And in his tweet, he said that essentially he put the problem on bad forest management in California and said that if they didn't get their act together, maybe he would deny federal funds.
Now, Alyssa Milano, A famous anti-Trump critic tweeted back, and I don't know the facts on this, so I'm going to just tell you what he said, and I'll tell you what she said, but I don't know which one is right.
Actually, they both could be right, but I don't know the details.
So Alyssa Milano said that essentially 98% of the forest in California is federally owned.
In other words, it would be the federal government's problem if the forest had not been well managed.
Now, that doesn't make it exactly...
Trump's problem, because I assume that whatever mismanagement is happening is a multi-year thing.
It's not something that happened in two years.
But whether or not Alyssa was exactly right or a little bit right is a little bit off the topic.
It's a good question.
I'd like to know the answer to it.
But I think most people thought the tweet was tone deaf because he was criticizing the state at a time when the state was literally on fire and people were being burned to death in their cars.
So, in terms of tone and timing, it was a complete failure, even if technically there was some point there about forest management that could be done better.
I'm guessing that could be done better.
But I don't know if that's exactly the problem.
I saw somebody comment that the real problem is these fires were on the border between civilization and forest.
In other words, the PG&E lines are what caused it.
So when you put civilization too close to forest, you get bad stuff.
Fires. But in any case, for those of you who say, Scott, you never criticize the president.
I usually don't criticize too deeply on policy stuff because I don't know enough about policy.
But on communications and persuasion, I'm usually praising the president because he usually gets it right and gets it right sometimes so right that you've never seen it that right before.
In this case...
In this case, I don't think there's anything right about it.
So you can add this to my list of things which I'm clearly on record of saying this was not a good play.
Now, the president did follow it up with a more empathetic tweet in which he mentioned the victims and the devastation, and we appreciate that.
But if you're literally sitting in the middle of a I read that tweet while I was breathing the air of vaporized citizens of my state.
So, quite literally, I was breathing in the ashes of the burned-up citizens of my state while I was looking at a tweet criticizing my state's forest management.
Which, by the way, might be terrible.
I don't know if it's good or bad.
So, timing-wise, Timing-wise, not good.
Now, trying to keep it real.
Sometimes the president does amazingly good stuff.
Sometimes a tweet does not land.
Does that mean he should not tweet?
No. No, he should definitely keep tweeting.
And frankly, I don't hate the fact that we get something closer to his real opinion.
I don't hate the fact that it's a little bit human, meaning that you see the flaws, you see the good stuff, you kind of see it all.
But that was clearly a flaw.
I tweeted this morning, one of my followers on Periscope, who's probably watching right now, has pointed out, and I think quite correctly, That there's another one of those cases of the dog that's not barking.
So the midterms came and went, and there's a story that you haven't heard.
And I don't know why.
You haven't heard it from the left.
You haven't heard it from the right.
It's like it doesn't exist.
And here's the story.
The black vote.
I'm old enough to remember, meaning three months ago, when the black vote was important and that people cared.
And if there was an election, there would be lots of reporting about the black vote.
Did the black vote go this way or did it go that way?
Did somebody get more than usual?
I did see NBC had an article By a Republican strategist, pointing out that Republicans were not winning the millennial vote and not winning women, and that it would be a big problem.
By the way, the Latino vote is also not mentioned, nor is the Asian vote just completely not mentioned.
Does anybody even know which way the Asian American vote goes?
Nobody reports that.
Why is that irrelevant?
It feels to me like there are a lot of folks involved.
Why don't we care about their vote?
What is the focus on millennials and women as suddenly the two variables that matter?
So I just put that question out there.
I'm not entirely sure that we should ever even report that sort of thing.
Imagine if you will This is just a thought experiment.
I thought of this right now, so don't assume this is a good idea, but I'll put it out there.
So we do have laws about restricting freedom of speech around very specific situations.
One of those situations is you can't stand right next to the voting booth and express your freedom of speech.
You have to have a certain distance from the voting booth.
So freedom of speech we do sometimes suppress.
For very specific tactical reasons, such as getting an election that's fair.
Suppose we had a law.
I'm not proposing this, but I'll just put it out there.
Suppose we had a law that says that polls cannot report the breakdown of who voted.
In other words, you could do a private poll, so you could privately know if you're a politician, but suppose it became illegal to publish it.
Suppose it became illegal to know which segments of the population were voting which way.
Would that make the world a better place or a worse place?
It's a thought experiment, and I don't actually know the answer to that.
But it seems to me that every time it's reported, every time it's reported, it seems to me it creates a frame of, you know, an us versus them frame.
But if you had a law that says, no, it's just Americans, the only thing you can do, well, maybe you could measure Democrats versus Independents versus Republicans.
But you would never be able to report on gender, and you would never be able to report on race.
What would happen? I think over time, the sides would start to blend a little bit more.
At the moment, if you're a woman, Let's say you're a 19-year-old woman.
And you're trying to decide who you are in the world.
You're not a kid anymore.
You're not a teenager. You're an adult.
And you're trying to get into your adult mindset.
You're trying to figure out who you are as an adult.
What does it do to you when you read the news and all it talks about is that women vote this way?
If you're 19 and every headline says, all the women vote this way, women do this, women do that, isn't that influential?
Doesn't the reporting of the sides cause people to take sides?
I would think yes.
I don't know how to test that.
I'm not sure we could ever make a law out of that because freedom of speech and freedom of the press are too important.
But I just put that out there.
Now I'm watching the Broward County situation unfold and somebody pointed out, let me just, before I leave the question about the black vote, The risk that black voters have is that they become irrelevant by their own actions.
As long as we live in a world where we do report who votes which way, the black vote has rendered itself irrelevant by always voting the same way.
And maybe that's why nobody even reports it anymore.
Or at least since the midterm, it's conspicuously missing from the headlines.
So I just put that out there as an observation.
And I don't think it's unimportant.
Now, in Broward, someone pointed out that when you look at the news on CNN, they're not really talking about Broward too much.
Now, they do report it.
But they report it very differently than you're seeing in the conservative news outlets.
So to the conservatives, there's clearly something going on because there are so many pieces of evidence.
The big piece of evidence is that votes keep showing up and they're always Democratic.
They're always Democrat votes.
Hey, we found a box of stuff.
Let me guess.
More Democrat votes in that box than Republicans?
I'm just going to go out on a limb.
So, it's deeply, deeply suspicious.
But watch how the two sides are reporting it.
CNN is reporting it this way.
No evidence of voter fraud has been found.
And that's sort of true, meaning that nothing proven of any scale has been found.
I think there was something about a box found here or, you know, 12 votes got mixed in with 200.
So there are a few stories like that that would suggest things are imperfect.
But CNN correctly reports, correctly, that there's no proof of some kind of massive voter fraud.
Just a couple irregularities are definitely worth looking into.
Fox News and people on the right and social media are saying, well, it's obviously voter fraud, and they will give you all of the circumstantial reasons why.
Why is it all the votes go the same way?
How could you possibly have this many votes?
Why could it possibly take so long?
Why is it always Broward County?
Why is this Brenda Snipes at the center of controversies?
And then there are a number of things on the street, like a truck that was being unloaded and you couldn't tell the chain of custody, that's a red flag, etc.
So what does this remind you of?
It reminds me of a reverse Russia.
Russiagate, let's call it.
A reverse Russia collusion.
The two networks have just reversed how they cover that.
The Russia situation is CNN continually saying, well, there's no proof of collusion, but what about this meeting?
What about these people who had nothing to do with anything but were convicted?
And they'll give you 10 pieces of evidence That are not evidence or they're not proof of any kind of collusion.
But they feel kind of suspicious if you put them all together.
Meanwhile, Republicans are doing exactly the same thing with the election.
They're saying, well, it's not proof, but look at all this stuff.
It's impossible that all this stuff could be a coincidence.
One of the things I'm writing about at the moment in my book that you won't see for a year or so is how easily you can be fooled By lack of imagination.
If you have a bad imagination and somebody says, look at all these facts.
There's only one thing that this could lead to.
And the only thing you can imagine is the one thing that's been mentioned.
Look, it all means this.
Okay, I can't imagine any other reason this would be true.
But let's take Broward for a moment and see if we can imagine Anything else that would explain what we're seeing?
Can you think of any other hypothesis that would explain everything you're seeing in Broward without massive voter fraud?
But would incompetence always get you more Democrat votes than Republican?
Could it be incompetence that it's always in one direction?
Because incompetence seems like a random thing, right?
Sometimes incompetent would go this way, sometimes incompetent would go that way.
Could it be that it's always incompetent in the same direction?
Because I'm not sure that just incompetent would get you mistakes that only go in one direction.
So what else could it be?
I'm going to give you A hypothesis.
And the hypothesis goes like this.
The polling sites that are run by Republicans are well managed.
That's it.
That's the alternate hypothesis.
The Republican polling places that are managed by Republicans, if there are any, are well managed.
And so you don't see any mistakes coming from that side.
But if you are in, let's say, a Democrat-managed area, and somebody finds a box of uncounted ballots on the floor, it's just bad management.
There was just a box on the floor.
If you see a chain of custody that looks a little lax, it could be just that.
It could be nothing but a poorly managed site in which Democrats are in charge.
Yeah, it's still incompetence, but it's a special kind of incompetence in which Republicans are a little more dedicated about chain of command and making sure everything's appropriate and they're not losing any boxes.
Whereas the Democrats just don't manage the process the same way and they're a little more lax about process.
Now, would that be unusual?
Not really, because what is it about Republicans that defines them as a party?
One of the things that defines Republicans is they're really sticklers about process and rules and the law.
So if you had two groups, just hypothetically, I'll stop right here to tell you I'm not defending anything and I'm not telling you what the answer will be in Broward, whether it's gross voter management or just incompetence.
I'm not giving you my opinion.
I'm giving you a competing hypothesis that you can compare.
So the competing hypothesis is that Republicans are acting like Republicans.
Lots of respect for the law.
They're doing less drugs on the job, right?
You know that's true. There are fewer drugs.
Maybe they're a little bit more process-driven, really making sure every dot is covered.
That would be very Republican.
Democrats are more about the outcome.
I've talked about this before, that Republicans are more about the system.
Is it in the Constitution?
Is it in the law?
What's our system? Democrats are more like, hey, I'd like to get a Democrat elected, or wouldn't it be good if we had fairness?
Or what if we had more income equality?
So they're more goal-oriented without the system that gets you there.
If you took those two groups Who self-identify.
So all the people who self-identify as rule followers, who really, really care about the rules, and then the other group self-identifies as more about the goal than the process.
They're a little sloppy in the process, but they have good goals.
They like a better world.
If you self-identify those two, which of the two are more likely to have problems in the process where they forgot a box of votes.
Which group could have a whole truck full of votes that they forgot to count?
Well The ones that came out of Democrat-managed areas.
So there is a competing hypothesis that just says one group is simply better at it than the other, and that it's because of self-identification, not because there's anything naturally different about the groups.
And that Yeah, of course I'm overgeneralizing.
I'm overgeneralizing in front of you exactly the way that you just identified.
So you have to compare those two hypotheses.
Incompetence that is mostly on one side, so that the incompetence, when you find a vote, it's usually on the side where they lost it.
You've heard the thing that when you're looking for something that's lost, you always find it in the last place you look.
And then it's a joke because the last place you look is where you found it, so you don't need to look anymore.
Of course it's always the last place you look.
Likewise, if all the mistakes are on one side, That's where you find the mistakes.
Alright, enough on that.
On a more fun level, you probably know the controversy about SNL's Pete Davidson made fun of Republican candidate Dan Crenshaw's eye patch.
And Dan Crenshaw apparently lost an eye in military service.
And so when Pete Davidson made an aside about his lost eye, it's like, I guess he lost in war or something kind of trivialized it.
The country pushed back and said, hey, Can't treat a vet like that.
Now, my understanding is that Dan Crenshaw sort of just laughed it off, or he didn't make a big deal about it himself.
He just had a sense of humor about it.
I believe that was the story.
But anyway, last night, apparently, the real Dan Crenshaw was invited on the show to mock P. Davidson to even it out.
I gotta say, whatever you think of Pete Davidson, it was kind of brilliant.
Because he promoted Dan Crenshaw in terms of respect.
So he put him on an even basis.
And then he let Crenshaw have a free punch.
And then after Crenshaw took a free punch, he gave him a chance to have another one.
So I think Crenshaw got three free punches.
To compensate for Davidson's, what he would, you know, obviously he's recognizing as something that maybe stepped over the line.
So, and I'm asking myself, if you're a military person, or even if you care about military people, Is it your belief that people shouldn't do dumbass things, shouldn't make mistakes, shouldn't tease people?
Nobody believes that.
Everybody makes mistakes.
And my standard for how you deal with life, the way I judge people, is not by the mistake.
It's just a loser...
I think it's a loser thing to judge people by mistakes.
Because we all make them.
Especially if they're verbal mistakes, things you said in public that you shouldn't have.
That's the worst way to judge somebody.
What you should do is see how they react to their mistake.
Now, it's a show that only happens once a week, so the 48-hour rule isn't quite as useful.
But in this case, you want to see how they react to it.
And in my opinion...
Pete Davidson's reaction to it was self-deprecating, respectful, completely appropriate.
I will give him A+. And my personal way of judging people means that the original offense is now wiped from the books to never be spoken of again except to enjoy the story.
So whatever you think of these two people, I thought they both accounted very well for themselves.
Secondly, part of the story is how did Dan Crenshaw do What's the right word?
Representing the military.
How did Dan Crenshaw do in the way he responded to it from the start through the SNL? Really well!
Dan Crenshaw, really, I think he brought respect to people with military service.
A-plus from him.
So this is one of those rare situations where everything was done right by two people who I kind of like now.
I mean, I liked them before, but I like them better.
Alright, let's talk about, people keep asking me about this alleged abortion commercial that we see on the internet.
I think it was made a while ago, but for some reason it's floating around.
If you haven't seen it, it alleges to be, and I'm using the word alleges here, it alleges to be a commercial in favor of pro-choice.
In other words, a pro-abortion rights commercial.
Video. Except that the way they go about it is to show a cute baby, and the words over the baby say stuff like, she deserves to be loved, she deserves to be taken care of, or whatever.
And then it says, she deserves to be a choice.
And you look at it and you go, what?
This is a pro-abortion commercial showing an actual living baby who we love?
Now people are saying, isn't this the worst persuasion you've ever seen?
Who could be so dumb to make this commercial?
Here is my judgment on the commercial.
It's fake. It's not real.
So my judgment on that commercial is that it was not made.
It was not made by pro-abortion people.
In all likelihood, it was made by anti-abortion people who want you to think it was made by pro-abortion people.
Now, I don't have proof of that, except that I've lived in the world and I would make a very large bet That it was not made by people who want you to receive the commercial the way it looks.
It was either a mole or it's just a hoax.
Pro-life saves little babies, somebody's saying.
So, somebody saying it was satire.
I don't know because it would be hard for me to imagine that someone thought you would laugh about it.
So, do not treat it like it was a serious commercial meant to be pro-choice.
I don't think that's what it was.
I'm willing to be wrong about that, by the way.
If it ever comes out that somebody can find out the real source of that and all that, then that would be terrific.
But I think it's a fake commercial.
For those of you who follow me on Twitter, and especially if you take the time, and I don't know why you would, to look at my retweets and replies, one of the things you'll notice is how many times critics will come onto my Twitter and say, Oh yeah? If you're saying that about this situation, what do you say about this situation, you hypocrite?
And it never works with me.
It just never works. This morning somebody said, oh yeah, you're saying that people should not have gone after Tucker Carlson?
What did you say when Alex Jones went after the, what was the shooting, the Sandy Hook thing?
And apparently doxxed somebody.
And I think to myself, I don't remember supporting that.
I'm pretty sure I'm consistent that bad behavior is bad behavior wherever it comes from.
Yeah, so people pull the whataboutism on me and it just never works because I think I'm pretty consistent about not liking things that are disreputable and liking things that are good for the world.
I'm sure there will be an exception someday.
Now, Let's get into the dangerous stuff that I put toward the end of my periscopes, because the weak will never get there.
My critics will never go through an entire periscope.
If you're a person who dislikes me, you're not going to sign onto this periscope and wait 30 minutes for me to say something you don't like.
You're going to bail out much easier.
So by this part in the periscope, I'm usually just talking to, for the most part, talking to people who can understand my context.
And you have to understand my full context to really understand anything I say, which is true of everybody.
But probably more true for me because I deal in nuance more than other people.
So it's more important to know my context.
And I've developed something which I call the Tucker Carlson test.
The Tucker Carlson Test.
And it goes like this.
You read something on the internet.
Let's say it's something about the Antifa people who went to his house.
I tweeted an article about it this morning, which is a really good article, by the way.
You should read it. It's somebody who is an observer who watched the entire protest and has some differences in terms of some of the details.
Now, I don't have an opinion about whether Tucker's version of the details is more accurate than this observer's version of the details, but I would say that it's in the details and they're not important details, and that there's a fog of war that happens over these things.
For example, somebody in the crowd did mention pipe bombs.
When Tucker's wife, who was hiding inside and was afraid of who these people were, heard the word pipe bombs, she got worried.
And so it was reported that maybe somebody was talking about using a pipe bomb.
The observer reports that they were talking about the pipe bomber who had been, in their opinion, influenced by rhetoric from the right.
So the reference to the pipe bomb was actually the opposite of dangerous.
Because they were talking about, let's have less pipe bombs, essentially.
I'm, you know, oversimplifying it.
So they weren't saying, let's bring a pipe bomb.
They were saying, you know, stop saying things that might cause people to bring pipe bombs.
But if you're a crowd of masked people outside of somebody's door, and you mention the words pipe bomb, don't expect that to be clear.
So there's a fog of war about the details, but none of the details really change the nature of what happened.
I would say it's essentially the same with or without those details.
But here's the Tucker Carlton test.
I have tested a number of people on the Internet with this test, and they have all failed.
The article that I sent around this morning Also failed.
Because the article does what a lot of the people on the anti-right side do.
They say there was a protest at Tucker Carlson's house, and it's probably because of all the racist things he says.
And then they'll link to something that should show you the racist things he says.
And I think to myself, here's the first red flag.
If somebody, a public figure, and it doesn't have to be Tucker, but just some public figure, if they said something that was racist, wouldn't at least the quote, because it's probably just one sentence of racism, right, that clearly says they're racist, wouldn't that quote be included in the article as opposed to just a link where you have to go look for it?
Ask yourself that, right?
Wouldn't they include the racist quote?
And you see this all the time.
For example, when they talk about the president, they say, well, you know, that thing he said in Charlottesville.
Or they'll give you a little laundry list.
Now, most of them are hoaxes.
As you know, the Charlottesville one is just a hoax.
But they'll give you reasons.
You can at least check them.
And they put them right in the body of the article.
There might be links as well, but they also mention them.
If somebody writes an article about Louis Farrakhan and they say Louis Farrakhan is a racist, don't you usually see in the article because he said this or that about Jews?
It's usually right in the article.
There might be a link to it, but they'll at least summarize it so you know, yeah, I think termites was the offending phrase.
But with Tucker, watch how often they don't mention what it is he said, they just link to it.
And so I said, oh, great.
People keep telling me that Tucker says racist things.
I watch Tucker's show almost every night.
I've probably seen, I'd say I've seen, I don't know, 80 or 90% of all the content he's produced since he's been on Fox and well before that as well.
And I haven't seen any.
So I thought to myself, finally, somebody provided a link.
I'll go follow the link, and I'll find out what it is he said that somebody is calling racist.
Because I really was curious.
I didn't have any idea.
I didn't even have a good guess of what it was.
And I go to the link, and it's a conversation.
They're linking to a video in which he's talking to Mark Stein, a frequent guest on his show.
And Tucker made this point.
That, and I'm paraphrasing, that if immigration is unchecked, it will change your culture, and that shouldn't the people who live here and are legal citizens be the people who decide how or if their culture is influenced and how it evolves?
The question is, who gets to make the choice?
You've heard me talk about this before, right?
Nowhere in the link did Tucker say it's bad to have more Hispanic influence.
It wasn't there. It wasn't even slightly there.
It wasn't even alleged.
It wasn't alluded to. It was a very clear statement.
It's important who makes the choice.
Do you simply let people who don't live in the country decide what your country becomes?
This is not a good or bad.
This is not, we should have less of it.
At no point did Tucker or Mark Stein say, we should have less of this.
What they said very clearly is, who gets to decide?
Is a nation an important entity in which the nation gets to decide how or if it evolves in any direction?
It doesn't matter if it's good or bad or one you like or one you don't.
It's simply who gets to decide.
That was the number one piece of racism evidence against Tucker Carl that he believes the Constitution Should be an important guiding, you know, and the laws of the country should be guiding principles.
That was what they called racist.
Oh my freaking God.
That was it. That was the best example.
Now keep in mind, if there was a better example than that, I'm pretty sure they would have linked to it.
You're not going to link to the bad example if you've got a good example.
So online, I've been giving people the Tucker Carlson test, because quite a few people have commented on my comments, and they've said that he's a racist and he's firing up racist feelings, so he had it coming.
People were essentially justifying the protesters at his house.
And I've been saying to a number of them, Can you send me a link to the one best piece of evidence of your point that he's a racist?
You don't have to send a laundry list.
Just give me your best piece of evidence.
Because if the best piece of evidence is nothing, or a misinterpretation, I don't probably have to look at the second best one, do I? Maybe not, because if the best one is literally an illusion or a hoax, like the Charlottesville hoax, then you can sort of know what the rest of them are likely to look like.
So I call it the Tucker Carlson test, where you get somebody to send you any bit of evidence To support their claim that Tucker has promoted racist anything.
Indeed, if you were to look at it objectively, he more than anybody on Fox probably invites on opposite points of view.
Now, I will say that the points of view he invites on tend not to be the most eloquent speakers.
I don't think he's inviting the best representatives of the other side, but that might be a function of who's willing to go on the show in the first place.
Maybe you can't get the most, let's say, effective speakers for the left just because it's Tucker's show and it's on Fox News.
But I don't think you can find anybody...
Well, here's another challenge.
Find me anybody who's associated with conservatives or associated with Fox News, just associated with the right.
Find me anyone on the right who is more inclusive of viewpoints from the left, who literally invites one on the show just about every single show.
Is there anybody who comes close?
And I find myself in this weird situation of defending Tucker, and that's not my point of this.
My point of it is how we view the world, and are we being rational, and are we being hypnotized, or are we being honest brokers of truth?
All right. I got one more point.
And this one's a dangerous one.
I saw an article, I don't know how credible it is, that Mueller has something like dozens of sealed indictments.
Now, I'm no lawyer, so I don't know exactly what I'm talking about here, but the suspicion is that these sealed indictments are going to be bad news for the president.
Now, if I had to guess and I had to bet on it, I don't think there's anything in the Mueller indictments that will be a kill shot.
In other words, nothing that will remove him from office or cause impeachment.
But there might be plenty of little stuff that is sort of almost kind of bad, but not so bad you remove a president, but some people think it is and other people think it isn't.
So it's likely there'll be something in that messy area where it's ambiguous.
And I thought to myself, what would happen to the country if Mueller actually had the goods?
It doesn't even mean the goods are true.
It just might be a good case.
Suppose Mueller came up with a good case for removing a sitting president and it happened to be this president.
And suppose that case didn't look credible To part of the country.
Now, if it's a credible case against any president, you can usually get enough people to say, okay, we didn't know about that.
If we had known about that, we would feel completely different about it.
But now that you tell us, we're reassessing.
So regardless of what president we're talking about, if it was good, clear, convincing evidence of anything bad, people would kind of get on board with, all right, we've got to make a change here.
But suppose it's murky.
Suppose Mueller has something that's really, really bad, but not exactly credible.
Meaning that the people on the right are going to look at it and say, that's no proof.
That's no evidence.
You made that up. What would Mueller do if he possessed information that would cause a civil war?
It's a real question, isn't it?
Let's say you're Mueller, and I'm going to make some assumptions about Mueller.
My first assumption about Mueller is that he's a patriot.
Now, patriots can be biased, right?
They can be left or they can be right.
But Mueller served in the military.
He's served in these government positions.
Even his critics are pretty positive about him.
He's gone this far without a single leak, without a single misstep that we've noticed.
Mueller is a pretty stand-up guy.
Now, I realize if he comes up with something that the pro-Trump side doesn't like, there's going to be a lot of pushback against him.
But at the moment, I would say Mueller is probably a patriot.
At the very least, he cares about the fate of the country.
You know, he may prefer it going one direction or the other, he may like or dislike the president, but I'm sure he likes the country.
Are you all with me so far?
Would you at least agree that even if Mueller was biased in one way or the other, at the very least, he likes the United States, right?
What would happen if he had some information Which, if releasing it, even if it's true, even if it's true, would cause a civil war.
What would you do with it?
If you were a patriot, and you said, okay, this is my job to release it, but if I do release it, it will destroy the world.
Because if the U.S. goes down, the world's in trouble too.
I mean, the odds of another world war are pretty good.
Um... Would he release it?
What would he do? How would he deal with it?
Now, my expectation is he doesn't have anything.
But suppose he does.
He might be tempted to bury it.
What would you do?
If you were Mueller and you found something that really wouldn't change anything, For the good, let's say, hypothetically, you found out something that would cause a civil war, but if nobody found out, it really wouldn't make any difference.
In other words, life could go on without us knowing this information, and we'd all just be happier for it.
It's like, okay, that just happened in the past, that was not ideal, but it doesn't really change anything.
There are a lot of possibilities here, and one of them is that Mueller has something that could cause an actual civil war.
Yeah. So I just put that out there as a possibility that I haven't considered before.
Are you a Russian spy, somebody says.
Totally. Totally. By the way, if you haven't seen the latest episode of a TV show called Modern Family, it is the funniest thing.
The latest one, I think the description would be something about, there's some suspicion that the characters are having an affair.
So that's the description you want to look for.
But there's a scene in it about Russia that is so frickin' funny.
and you'll understand it because of the headlines.
All right, somebody asked me to ask Alexa, who is Scott Adams?
Thank you.
Alexa, who is Scott Adams?
Scott Dale Adams is the creator of the Dilbert comic strip and the author of several non-fiction works.
Alright, who did that?
Alexa, cancel.
Did you hear that?
You may have missed the punchline.
Somebody changed my name so that my middle name is Dale.
I don't know how they do that. But you heard the other day that somebody changed Alexa in terms of Jim Acosta and they inserted fake journalist instead of journalist.
I don't know how you're doing it.
By the way, I would love to know how you did it.
That was actually really good.
I'm going to do it one more time. We'll check on this to see how long it lasts because it's kind of hilarious.
All right, I'll do it again.
Alexa, who is Scott Adams?
Scott Dale Adams is the creator of the Dilbert comic strip and the author of several nonfiction works of satire, commentary, and business.
His Dilbert series...
Alexa! Cancel.
It's on Wikipedia?
Oh, it's just reading Wikipedia.
Is that what's happening?
I didn't realize that's how easy it is.
You just change Wikipedia.
I just have to look myself up on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia. Yeah.
So it's, you won't be able to see it there, but this is right from Wikipedia.
Scott and Dale Adams.
Okay.
Very funny.
ha ha ha I'll give you full credit for that.
Oh, sorry.
I set off a lot of other people's devices.
this Alright, I think that's all I have to talk about.
that.
Is there anything else happening now?
Yeah, I do need a better picture on Wikipedia.
Yeah.
Am I going to change it back?
No, I'm not going to change it.
I actually don't have any involvement with my own Wikipedia page.
Well, that's not true. I have edited down some.
So in the old days, the old days, I don't know, 10 years ago, people were putting conspiracy theories and just already fake news on my Wikipedia page.
And so there was at least once, I can't remember if I've done it more than once, at least once I've gone on to my own Wikipedia page to correct the things that were just literally just made up, and people pushed back.
And I had this weird situation where people were correcting me about me.
If there's one topic I understand better than other people, it's me.
So that was a weird situation.
Yeah, Avenatti is going after Tucker.
And there's some weird story about Tucker and his daughter and his son being at some golf club restaurant and getting into it with a patron.
I don't know how much of that is true.
But... You're not supposed to edit your page?
Why can't I edit my own page?
Why would that be? I don't see why that should be illegal.
That should be the most legal thing you could do.
Because there are other people checking.
If I edited my Wikipedia page for something completely false, it wouldn't last very long.
because I'm a public figure, people would just change it back.
We should not edit our own Wikipedia pages.
I would...
I don't know what should means in that case.
If it's against the rules, I would question the rule, but I could see why you might have one.
If it's not against the rules, and you're correcting something that's just factually inaccurate, why not?
Oh yeah, let's talk about Trump and Europe and the rain.
So the story, as it's reported, is that President Trump was supposed to go to some cemetery, I guess it was, to honor World War I American veterans, but because of the weather, he did not go.
Now, it's being reported that, therefore, he doesn't care about the military.
So, first of all, it's kind of ridiculous to claim that the president of the United States, this specific president, doesn't care about the military.
Because I don't think we've ever had a president who talked more about the military in positive ways, or did more, really.
So, I consider it such a non-credible...
It's a criticism that it really detracts from the credibility of anybody who says it, first of all.
But here's the other thing. Remember my rule about just because you can't imagine another explanation for the facts?
It doesn't mean it's not there.
It might be a limit of your imagination.
So let me give you an example.
If, let's say the President of the United States was supposed to go to the event, and either he or Melania, I'm guessing she was there and probably she was going to go, suppose one of them had diarrhea.
You know, just normal diarrhea.
They had a stomach flu. What would you tell the press?
Would you tell the press, the President's not going to go to the event because the First Lady has the shits?
Would you? Probably not.
You'd probably blame the weather or something.
So in all likelihood, either the president was up all night because something came up that we don't know about.
So it could have been as simple as, although this isn't simple, it could have been a national security problem That we're not supposed to know about that caused him to be awake all night and at his age and given the importance of his position, it was more important that he get some sleep so he could make good decisions than it was to attend this event because whatever it was that kept him up all night for national security may have been the most important thing in the world.
We would never know that.
They would just say, I didn't go because it was raining.
Now here's your tell.
Your tell that you are not supposed to believe this story is that it's so weak.
Do you see that?
When you say the president didn't go to the event because it rained, there's a wink with that.
Wink. He didn't go to a planned event that was very important because it rained.
Wink. Wink.
You don't hear the wink?
I hear a wink in that story.
If they wanted to give a real reason why he didn't go, it would have been a stronger reason.
The fact that they gave a transparently weak reason It's the wink.
It's a wink. And it tells you that there was something else going on that it's better we don't hear about.
How about there's lots of stuff going on that it's better we don't hear about.
That's probably 80% of his job is working on stuff that we shouldn't hear about right away.
So it is far more likely, if you're looking at this objectively and you're not just taking sides, if you're not just taking sides, he didn't go because it's raining, should be taken as, I don't want to go on the date because I need to wash my hair.
It's supposed to be transparent.
Otherwise they would have done it better, I think.
Now it's possible that, you know, the theory that his critics are putting on it is like, my God, he's been pretending for 70 years to like the military, and finally, we finally know the truth, that for 70 years he's been putting on this show about being supportive of the military, but it was all a trick.
As soon as it rained, he wouldn't even visit a grave.
Okay, is that likely?
Is that really, is that even slightly likely?
I mean, it is in the sense that anything's possible, but it's very, very unlikely.
Compare that to my hypothesis, that he had a good reason, or at least one he doesn't want us to know about.
Could have been a stomach flu, could have been something he had to work on all night.
He could have been having a fight with Melania that kept him up all night.
He could have, you know, almost anything.
All of those choices are far more likely, especially when you look at the wink-wink, weak reason they get it.
It was raining. Can't go out in the rain.
Nobody goes out in the rain.
Wink-wink. Was it a diss to Macron?
I don't think so. That doesn't make sense.
I think he and Macron actually understand each other.
By the way, the Macron tweet in which he said that maybe Europe should have its own forces to take on not only China and Russia, but the United States.
You heard that quote, right?
And you thought to yourself, wait a minute.
France needs a military to protect against the United States?
That's crazy. And you know what the real explanation of that is?
That's not what he said.
Now you're looking at the tweet and you say, well he clearly said that.
That's an exact quote.
He mentioned Russia, China, and the United States as the reason that France needs to have its own military service.
But then somebody said the context was cyber military actions.
Now when you put it in the context of cyber, it all makes sense.
Because one of the things we know is that our allies are spying on us.
They're using cyber against us.
And we're using cyber, I hate to say against, but all of the allies are sort of cybering each other, if you know what I mean.
And we're definitely bugging France.
France is definitely bugging us if they can get it.
So if you're talking about the cyber world, the spy world, It's not a ridiculous thing to say that the United States is one of the forces that France might want to protect itself from.
Because we're definitely in their cyber pants.
And, you know, don't you think Great Britain is in our cyber pants?
Don't you think that Israel and the United States are sort of spying on each other even though we're best friends?
It's kind of the fabric of reality at this point.
All right. Still not a credible statement.
Why would it not be a credible statement to want to keep your allies out of your business?
I think that's a credible statement.
We're certainly trying to do that on our side.
Why wouldn't we? We've already talked about the California fires, and I'm going to sign off now because I've run out of things to say.
Bye for now. Oh wait, did I have a simultaneous sip?
I did not. What the hell is going on?
I showed you the forest fire smoke, and I forgot the simultaneous sip.
You're not going anywhere until you lift your cup, your mug, your beverage vessel, you lift it to your mouth, and you join me in the simultaneous sip.
Now, now we can say goodbye for today, although I might see you later.
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