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Nov. 29, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
37:43
Episode 320 Scott Adams: In the Wrong Time Zone Talking About Trump’s Pardon Talk, His Jail Tweet
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hmm Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum hey robot Nixon misty bikini and the rest of you Dan good to see you abs 88 Tyler Russell Tom how you doing? I am in the wrong time zone.
So I'm a little late.
Slept in. You know, I know that a lot of you think, well, what's it like to be a big famous cartoonist?
You know, what kind of hotel rooms do you get?
And let me tell you, if you're a big time cartoonist like I am, famous guy, even when you're traveling for business, you get the finest hotel rooms.
I want to show you the view I have here in New York.
I'm in a high-end hotel in New York.
The view is incredible.
I'm just going to show it to you.
Don't be jealous. You know, someday if you're a famous cartoonist, you'll get this too.
This is what I get to see.
Now, a lot of people like to look at, you know, oceans and trees and nature, you know, landscapes, stuff like that, but not me.
I like to see the back of your utilities.
Here's my view.
It's a good one. And so, let us drink.
Let us drink our coffee.
Let us have the simultaneous sip.
Raise your cup, your mug, your beverage container, be it a stein, be it anything else, and join me for the simultaneous sip.
Somebody just mentioned Bill Pulte.
And Bill and I will be on Fox& Friends...
Tomorrow morning, Friday morning.
I don't have an exact time for the hit yet.
But we will be talking about Blight Authority and showing some brainstorming ideas about what to do with this space that has been cleared by the Blight Authority.
And more to come.
So the inner cities have a bunch of land that's available for little or no cost because nobody wants it right now.
And the thinking is that if we're smart enough, we can come up with some ideas for productively using that land in a way that's good for the local population.
It's a really tough problem.
You know, you probably saw me tweet around a story about some, I guess it was an architectural college class in which every year they would have a project to try to build a home for $20,000.
Or a low price, whatever it is.
And the latest versions that they have, they're getting better and better.
Each class improves on the last design, and they're getting better and better.
And so their latest thing looks like it would cost about $20,000 to build a small basic home.
Now... Of course there are problems here, and people have pointed them out.
One is that you can't take a nice home and plop it in the middle of a bad area and then put somebody in it who's, you know, who knows what, has a drug problem, doesn't have a job, you name it, and expect that things will work out well.
The house is not the solution.
People need homes, and they need inexpensive homes, and I would argue it's among the biggest problems in the world right now.
If you look at the caravan, if you look at the middle class disappearing, a lot of it has to do with the fact that leading a good life at a low income is next to impossible these days.
So how do you fix the cost of having a good life?
I think the solution will be something that is not just plopping a house in a neighborhood that has bad schools and whatever else.
You're going to need maybe a system design in which you're changing a number of things at the same time, building a community, making sure maybe it's got its own, you know, perhaps a charter school in the middle, that sort of thing.
Anyway, I'll present some more ideas on Fox& Friends with Bill Pulte tomorrow.
And then I'll talk about them after.
Let's talk about the big news that's always President Trump.
Man, can that guy make some news.
Some of my favorite stories, hair on fire stories, yeah, the president has tweeted, my god, he said something provocative.
I didn't see that coming.
So his latest statements that are driving CNN crazy and the anti-Trump press crazy is that he has apparently left it on the table about whether or not he would consider a pardon for Manafort.
Now, of course, the anti-Trumpers are going nuts saying, hey, wait a minute.
You know, you can't be saying that you might pardon him because that will influence him.
You know, you're obstructing justice by just dangling that out there.
You know, you're kind of saying, hey, you play along, Manafort, and maybe you'll get a pardon.
But here's the thing.
Have you met President Trump?
You know, I mean, are you familiar with him?
Have you watched him for three years?
What are some of the basic principles...
That he uses all the time.
Basic principle number one, you don't give up your options.
Is there anything he's more consistent about than don't give up your options?
He says the same thing when he talks to North Korea.
Are you going to nuke North Korea?
All options are on the table.
Are you going to pardon anybody?
All options are on the table.
Why wouldn't they be?
Anybody who gives away their own options before they have to is a freaking idiot.
So when you're talking about what Trump's doing, it's fair to say it might influence something.
That's fair to say. It is not fair to say that therefore he shouldn't do it.
Because the alternative is freaking idiot.
Like, that's the only alternative.
Anybody who gives up an option before they need to, and he doesn't need to, he's the president.
The president does not give away his own power For any reason, you know, unless like a compelling one, and that's not a compelling reason.
So if you see it in terms of his typical pattern, of course he's not going to give away that option.
Now, is it also strategically smart?
Well, it's keeping the, you know, the chattering class chattering.
Gives them something to chew on that, you know, keeps them from talking about something worse, I suppose.
And it does, secondarily, have the strategic impact of making Manafort maybe a little bit friendlier than he would have otherwise been.
Now that's not the president's fault.
The president is simply not giving away an option.
Why should he?
If not giving away an option happens to also have the secondary effect of getting him maybe a little more likely to get what is good for him, I don't know that that's dumb.
Now let's talk about my favorite part of the news yesterday was the president retweeted a meme that showed a lot of Democrats who are sort of his high-end enemies, I guess you could say, from the Clintons to Rosenstein to some of the security consultants, Clapper, those guys.
The deep staters.
And it showed them behind bars.
And what was CNN's reaction to that?
Wow! Hair on fire!
Hair on fire! The president should not be suggesting, like a dictator, that his enemies should go to jail.
But let's look at the big picture.
I saw that meme as a brushback pitch.
In baseball, sometimes if the batter is crowding the box and using psychology against the pitcher by getting real close to the plate and trying to get in the head of the pitcher, what is the pitcher's response?
It's the blowback pitch.
You fire a pitch right at his head because he's going to go, oops, and move out of the way.
You're not trying to hit him.
You're trying to blow him back off the plate.
So what are the Republicans who are still, they're drunk on their victory from the midterms, so what are the midterm drunken Democrats talking about?
Well, let's go after the president with infinite lawyers and infinite investigations until we drive him out of office and essentially overthrow the government of the United States with lawyers.
Alright? Now, if they do that, Are they likely to kick up something that's bad for the president, even if it's not illegal?
It could be just the story is bad, the politics of it is bad, the optics are bad, it's a distraction, it's everything bad.
So what does the president do?
Brushback pitch.
The meme of all of those cats, you know, like the top cats, you know, of being literally behind jail, behind bars, it's visual persuasion.
It's the best, right?
It's fear.
If you can combine fear and visual persuasion, That's powerful on a persuasion level.
I always like to pause and say on an ethical level, you can make your own decisions.
Probably wouldn't be much different than mine.
On the legal level, that's something else.
But on the persuasion level, fear and visual persuasion are solid gold.
So in his brushback pitch, his tweet showing the top Democrats behind bars, does that mean he wants to put them behind bars?
Almost certainly not.
I mean, he might be mad enough at some of them that he sort of, you know, on some level wishes something bad would happen to him, like jail.
Maybe some of them deserve it.
But that's not the point of the tweet.
The point of the tweet...
is to make a mutually assured destruction real.
It's one thing to say, hey you Democrats, if you go after me with infinite lawyers, I also have access to infinite lawyers.
So my infinite lawyers will go after your infinite lawyers if you take that road.
What's the most effective way to say that, which is all just sort of concept-y and concepts don't really hold people's emotions that much?
Well, you take your concept and you put it into a meme, in this case he just retweeted somebody's meme, that shows exactly what's going to happen if the Democrats pursue their path.
And by the way, do you think he's bluffing?
Does anybody think he's bluffing?
I don't. I don't think there's even a little bit of bluff.
I believe if the Democrats go full weapons of mass destruction lawyers against the president, exactly as they have said they will do, he's gonna unleash the dogs from hell.
What's that line that Russell Crowe does in Gladiator?
Unleash the dogs of hell or something like that.
There's some famous line like that that I always like.
Apparently I didn't like that.
Unleash hell. It wasn't unleash hell, was it?
Maybe it was. But now, if you assume that my interpretation is accurate, and I like to think it is, oh, it's at my signal, unleash hell.
Now, one of the things that the anti-Trump media consistently does to mislead you They skip over the question of whether they've done anything wrong.
And the Democrats, all the anti-Trumpers do that.
They'll skip past the question of whether they've done anything wrong, and they'll concentrate on the question of whether they should be punished.
And they'll say, hey, a president should not be coming after us in such a fashion.
That's bad presidenting.
But you're skipping the first part of the question was, was there a reason for him to come after you?
Did the news media do a good job?
And therefore, everybody should say, hey, good job.
Good job, media. You get a few wrong, but mostly, good job.
Was that the situation?
Or did the anti-Trump media become such a deranged, corrupt, anti-country entity that the president of the country absolutely frickin' should be calling them out?
If the leader of the country doesn't call out a horrible problem in the country, is he doing his job?
Isn't that sort of the job?
Don't you elect a president to identify and call out problems and then try to find ways to deal with them?
Yes, you do. So when the president calls out the media for being biased, the first question you have to ask is not, is it appropriate for a president to go after the media?
That's not the right question.
That's the second question.
The first question is, did they do something worthy of criticism?
If the answer is yes, move to question two.
Is it appropriate for a president to call out something that's a big problem to the country?
That's his job!
That's his job!
Of course it's appropriate, if the problem is real.
If the problem is not real, then he's a dictator.
And that's the way it's being presented.
So the media likes to say, well, obviously we're doing a great job, so if he's criticizing us, he must be a dictator.
Likewise, with the folks who are going to come after Trump with all their many lawyers and lawsuits and investigations and this and that, and look at his taxes and you name it, don't go to the second question of whether he should be saying, I want you in jail.
That's not the question. That's the second question.
The first question is, are the people who are mounting this campaign On your side as a country.
In other words, are they doing something that's for the greater good?
If they are acting for the greater good, and these investigations are well-intentioned ways to make the world a better place, then the president going after them and saying, I'm going to put you in jail, my God, even, I don't even have hair, and my hair would be on fire if that were the case.
If the president of the United States, no matter who it was, Was going after, was threatening jail for people who are doing nothing but trying to make the world a better place.
You need to get rid of that president.
But if the president is going hard and threatening an entity which is only a destructive entity, trying to make things good for them at the cost of the country, well then I want my president I want my president to go hard at them.
Now within the law, because the law gives him all the flexibility he needs, he doesn't need to go outside the law.
But if he needs to go outside the bounds of politeness, please do.
Right? Did anybody vote for President Trump for his politeness?
Was that on anybody's list?
Well, let me look at the list.
I got five reasons for voting for this president, but right at the top, you got your politeness.
He always stays within the bounds.
That's what I like about him. He's never rude.
He'll never talk back to people who need to be talked back to.
That's why I like him.
Said nobody. Said nobody.
He literally marketed himself as a candidate by being politically incorrect and by daring to say the things that were true, as far as he knew, that people don't say.
So, you know, my take on the latest news is that the president is doing exactly what at least his supporters think he should do based on their opinion of what he's speaking out against and how corrupt and biased they are.
I did some tweeting, Glenn Greenwald, I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right for The Intercept, and I always like to couch my comments about Greenwald the same way.
I don't like the guy.
There's something about him I just don't like.
Maybe it's because he came after me on Twitter once.
I'm sure that's a big part of it.
But I can't ignore the fact that when he tweets or writes, you really should pay attention to it.
Because he does say things that seem to be following some kind of truth as opposed to following a left or a right.
So I like to say that before Greenwald.
Yeah, Glenn Greenwald.
So anyway, I tweeted today.
He was talking about some fake news coming out of Politico and some fake news about The Guardian.
And you just have to read it.
I tweeted it. He's got a long tweet.
But he absolutely dismantles the media in this country.
And I believe he's as objective an observer of these types of things as you'll ever find.
So if you don't believe President Trump, if you don't believe politicians, if you don't believe CNN, if you don't believe Fox News, whoever it is you don't believe...
Check out Greenwald.
And you can find him on my Twitter feed this morning, retweeted.
Yeah, there are some names that I have trouble pronouncing.
You know, every once in a while when I'm doing these periscopes, I realize I'm going to say a word or somebody's name that I've never pronounced out loud.
So, you're often hearing me pronounce things for the very first time in my life.
Alright, what else is going on?
Is there anything else going on you want to comment on?
I've talked about the Uyghurs.
There's something I don't understand in Yemen.
Have you looked at a map of Yemen?
Let's see if Syria can give me one.
Map of Yemen.
Okay.
Okay, here's Yemen.
Okay, coming up with a map of Yemen, I'll tell you.
Oh, okay. It's a pretty good map.
Can you see it? That's my map of Yemen.
It's the word Yemen on a white background.
Apparently, there's no map of Yemen.
Alright, let's see. Here it is.
Here's better. So, just to let you know what the map looks like.
So, let's see if I can get this.
So, this big thing, Saudi Arabia, and then attached to it on the bottom there is Yemen.
And there we've got Iran over there.
So Iran is sort of backing the rebels, and Saudi Arabia is trying to get control over Yemen by fighting, you know, backing the government that was deposed by the rebels.
And it's a huge humanitarian crisis.
50,000 people have died, and it's just apparently the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world.
Now, here's the thing.
If you're Saudi Arabia, can you live with Iran being your neighbor on the south and being able to reach you with weapons and everything else?
You probably can't.
I don't know how Saudi Arabia Could let their mortal military enemy get a foothold as their next door neighbor.
It's literally the worst thing you can imagine for Saudi Arabia.
But in the past we've been backing Saudi Arabia militarily.
With, I guess, logistics and equipment and stuff.
Somebody says that's a false narrative.
If I've said anything that doesn't pass the fact checking, let me know.
Because I claim no expertise in this topic.
The question is, how can Saudi Arabia ever lose that war?
Meaning, won't they stop at nothing to win that?
Because from a security perspective, it seems like they ought to literally just stop at nothing.
You know, kill as many people as they feel they have to, as horrible as it is, because the risk to them would look like a mortal risk to their kingdom.
Now, and And so the question is, if the United States pulls out, and I guess there's some legislation being considered for the United States to pull out and stop backing Saudi Arabia on this, maybe partly because of the Cheshawgi thing, maybe partly because nothing good is happening in Yemen.
But I don't know how any of this gets us to a good place exactly.
I think it's helpful that Yemen has scheduled some peace talks, but I can't see exactly how us pulling out of helping Saudi Arabia gets us closer to a solution.
I suppose it depends what you think the solution is going to end up to be.
So I'm a little confused on the details of why it would help us to stop backing Saudi Arabia, because Saudi Arabia is trying to limit Iran, and that seems like the same thing we're trying to do strategically.
So I don't quite get the strategy there.
I don't know if it's a bad strategy.
I just don't get it, and I don't know why the reporting doesn't fill in those blanks for me.
Reporting, you say? Who does reporting anymore?
What about Trump's comments on tariffs?
I haven't seen him. What did he say about tariffs?
Sorry, I'm in a different time zone, so I'm less prepared than normal.
He says we're winning on tariffs.
Well, the thing with tariffs is that we continue to see what I call the child frame versus the adult frame.
The child frame always just looks at the near term, give me candy and don't worry about dinner.
Don't worry about my health.
Don't worry about my teeth.
Give me candy because candy feels good right now.
And of course the trade wars are by their design going to hurt you in the short run.
In order to get, you hope, a better outcome in the long run.
So if the president says it's working, that would mean that it's hurting the other side, let's say China, more than it's hurting us.
It does not mean that it is not hurting us.
It does mean that we have to get through this to get to something good.
So we don't know how it will turn out, but it would be shocking if it didn't turn out a little bit better than what it was before.
It would be sort of shocking. As you know, I am not in favor.
of any trade deal with China so long as they are the primary fentanyl producers and they're not acting effectively against their own cartels who are creating the fentanyl that's killing 30,000 people a year, including my stepson this year.
At the end of the deal everyone will be paying more.
That's not a good deal.
Do you think that at the end of the trade deal, both sides are paying more?
I don't know that that makes sense under anybody's definition.
I think the other thing that people say, and I said this before, but I feel like I have to keep repeating it, is that if you go into a negotiation, And your attitude is, hey, I'd better give the other side everything they want or they'll be mad at me.
You're not really a good negotiator.
So, you know, you really do have to assume that you're going to have to push back against a bad deal, even if it means not making a deal, even if it means keeping tariffs forever, that you have to push against a bad deal.
Avenatti. Apparently, he filed a suit without Stormy's permission.
Yeah, that whole Avenatti-Stormy Daniels thing, it feels like stale news, doesn't it?
Even when there's new news about Stormy Daniels and Avenatti, doesn't it feel stale?
It's like staler than Hillary Clinton's back brace.
It's just stale.
Don't care. So I see people prompting me to say something about Cohen.
What's the story on Cohen?
What did he do? He pled or something?
The Cohen thing, I have a little trouble getting interested in as well because we never quite know what's he know, what's going to happen.
It's a lot of just guessing.
I've been ignoring the whole Cohen thing for the most part.
Oh, Roger Stone and Corsi's credibility somebody's asking me about.
Well, the great thing about Roger Stone, and I think this is hilarious, is that by his own description, he's a dirty trickster.
Who does not conform to the truth.
In other words, he uses hyperbole, exaggerates.
And if you asked him, he'd say, that's my job.
And I'm, you know, I'm full of crap.
And that's what I do for a living.
I make a good living doing this.
So, you know, I'm not trying to fool anybody.
I'm the guy who is full of crap.
And then his only legal jeopardy is if you believe that the one time he wasn't full of crap, he said something bad.
He's got this perfect defense that he's unreliable.
I've been thinking of trying to cultivate that.
I've been trying to think about cultivating that defense for myself.
Maybe you should try it.
I want to just start saying a lot of stuff that I know isn't true.
And then if anybody ever, like, says, ah, we caught you.
Why'd you say this to somebody by your email?
I'll say, you know me.
I never say stuff that's true.
Look at all my other things I said that are clearly not true.
Why would you even think this one would be true?
So it's kind of hilarious.
All right, so the part about Corsi...
Apparently he did subscribe to some conspiracy theories, so he's got to worry about that.
But who the hell knows?
Who the heck knows on that?
All right.
Oh, I saw a story that apparently Ivanka has some kind of voice problem.
She gave an interview in which she was sort of hoarse, and there was some speculation that there was some kind of a voice problem, and maybe it's the same as the one I had, the spasmodic dysphonia problem I had with my voice. the spasmodic dysphonia problem I had with my voice.
But I listened to it, and to me it just sounds like somebody who has a cold.
doesn't sound like anything to worry about.
There's a story about even scientists become tribal activists.
Well, I guess that's predictable.
Oh, I understand that China pulled back on the gene editing after it got a lot of bad press.
And people have suggested that pressure on China about their fentanyl could work because public pressure does make a difference.
So I don't know if you've typed hashtag fentanyl into a Twitter search box, but if you try it, fentanyl China is going to be one of your top three hits and should be.
Yeah, gene editing is something that is going to have lots of fits and starts in the world.
In other words, it's going to move forward and people are going to say, hey, and then it'll move backwards a little, then it'll move forwards again, then it'll move backwards.
But there's nothing that will stop gene editing.
If there's one prediction I can give you with 100% certainty, Someday, gene editing for babies will be common.
There's just no chance that that doesn't happen.
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Talk about interrogation techniques.
I talked about that yesterday, about leading the witness into imagining they committed a crime.
It's very easy, very common, and it's easy to make people hallucinate things by the way you ask questions. and it's easy to make people hallucinate things by the Studies said that trying too hard creates harm.
Is it hypnosis? You know, hypnosis, usually when I use the term, I'm usually talking about a situation where you're actually putting somebody under hypnosis in a room and it's one-on-one and you're using the actual techniques of hypnosis.
But when interrogators are influencing people to hallucinate fake memories, they're not using hypnosis...
Techniques at large, they're doing a few things that trigger people.
And those few things are, imagine that you are back there.
Now imagine that it happened.
And when you ask people to imagine, their imagination and their memory starts to conflate a little bit.
So you don't need a whole bunch of technique To cause somebody to have a fake memory.
I think the two components that I've heard that make the most difference are first asking people to imagine, and then second, giving them some kind of comfort that this is what everybody does.
So if you say, you know some people when they imagine, They can come up with memories.
So you have to suggest that it's common and normal for everybody to do this, and you have to suggest that they combine their imagination with their memories.
And if you get them to do those two things...
Oh, and then the third thing is that the person has to want to please you.
So if the person is trying to make you happy, and they're imagining, And you know other people do it.
Those are probably the three materials you need to create a fake memory in something like 70% of the people you do it with.
All right. Yes, it's very much like the McMartin preschool case.
Same situation. There's a new Chinese underwater train.
Well, I don't know what you're talking about, but you have my attention with underwater train.
If you ever wanted to get me to pay attention, just say, underwater train.
And I'm like, somebody made an underwater train?
Did you see that Elon Musk says he's going to, yeah, there's a 70% chance or something that he'll end up living on Mars sometime in his life?
Everything he says is interesting.
All right. I've got to go do some other stuff, and I will talk to you.
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