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Dec. 4, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
31:21
Episode 325 Scott Adams: Dale Reads “MuellerPorn” on CNN.com, Healthcare, France, More
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Hey, Molly.
Hey, Angel.
Angel Savvy.
I'm not sure which one is your first name.
Sharona, you're always quick.
Jeremy, good to see you.
I believe some of you are sitting there with your coffee and your devices waiting for me to come on.
You've learned. That if it's 10 a.m.
Eastern Time, 7 a.m.
Pacific Time, you know what time it is.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
And so will you please join me for what could be one of the best parts of your day.
Please raise your glass, your mug, your cup, your container, your chalice, your stein.
Fill it with your favorite beverages.
I like coffee.
And join me for the simultaneous sip.
Ah.
Good stuff.
Now, I'd like to ask my co-host, Dale.
I'd like to ask Dale to do a reading from a CNN story.
That's titled, Mueller may be poised to lift the lid on his investigation.
Now, as you know, Dale considers any article about Mueller on CNN to be a form of pornography.
And so I thought I would ask Dale to read it in his inimitable way so that we could see the world through his eyes.
If you're Dale, how much do you love this article titled, Mueller may be poised to lift the lid on his investigation.
Let me get Dale for you in a moment.
I'll be right back. Hello.
I would like to read for you today from an article entitled, Muller.
Excuse me. I got a little flustered.
Muller. I'm sorry.
I'll try to read his name again without shuddering in pleasure.
Muller. Okay, I'm not there yet.
Mueller may be poised to lift the lid.
Lift the lid. You know what I mean?
You know what I mean? On his investigation.
Oh it gets better.
It gets better. America may get its most intimate look yet inside Robert Mueller secretive Russia investigation in the next four days with a series of disclosures.
I'm talking multiple disclosures here.
Not just one.
A series. They have the potential to be greatly Damaging for President Trump.
Court filings focusing on Trump's first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, on Tuesday, and his actual campaign chairman, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, on Friday, could offer tantalizing new details of Mueller's Deep dive.
How deep is the dive?
You know what I mean? Is it a deep dive or is it a deep dive into the 2016 campaign?
If the special counsel lives up to his reputation, I think we know what his reputation is, don't we?
His filings will feature surprising revelations.
And rich texture to color the picture he has already painted in indictments and witness testimony of a culture of, wait for it, endemic dishonesty in Trump's orbits about multiple, again, not just one, not just one, multiple, so far, unexplainable ties with Russia.
Here's the money shot. He may also begin to add context and answers to some of the intriguing clues he has dropped in a probe that has so far seen three people sentenced.
One convicted at trial and seven guilty pleas.
And he has charged 36 people and entities with a total of 192 criminal counts.
This is getting close to President Trump.
Wait for it, wait for it.
With each twist of the investigation, a fascinating trove, trove I say, trove, is building of hints and implied connections, odd coincidences, and apparent shady links, shady links, between the key players that is crying out for explanation.
Here it comes.
catch my breath it is now clear that Muller oh is building a layered narrative a layered narrative starting at the edge or he's edging he's starting at the edge of the drama by first exposing
right, exposing Russian election interference, and I'm not making this up, folks, and fingering the culprits I swear to God, I am just reading this.
Fingering the culprits in Moscow's spy agencies.
He has bolstered his story with successful swoops against former Trump aides like Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates.
Showing their ties to pro-Russian figures in Ukrainian, blah, blah, blah.
And here's the good part.
The continuum running through the investigation, showing links between Trump associates and businesses and Russia that has been often subtle.
My God.
Stepping up the pace of his probe since the midterm elections, Mueller has moved in a direction that appears increasingly threatening to the president.
Including his crossing of Trump's red line.
The red line.
Showing interest in his family real estate empire.
This is just too good.
Alright, the rest of it's just boring.
So I think I won't read it.
And... Scene.
Now, have I told you...
That it seems to me that people reading CNN about the Mueller probe are actually literally reading it like porn.
That it just feels good to read these fantasies about how much trouble the president is allegedly in.
And I'll drink to that.
So, you may have not seen, I tweeted this, but most of you probably didn't see it, that the president had authorized, had authorized the...
So, listen to this.
This is a government report.
It says, in October, through executive order, the administration directed the government, the Department of Health and Human Services, to come up with, listen to this, High quality care at affordable prices based on promoting choice and competition.
So there's actually a status report coming out from the government in which, and I didn't know this, but apparently President Trump ordered last year That the government work on creating, they're calling it a healthcare plan, but essentially packaging things that the government can do by increasing competition and getting rid of obstacles,
by choice and competition mostly, to create lower cost healthcare by promoting choice and competition.
Now, the report itself is a lot of big words and concepts, and I don't really understand what they've done, but apparently they've done a lot in terms of chipping away at the market forces that were imperfect.
So I still think the administration has not come anywhere near where they need to be on promoting startups for healthcare especially and bringing down the barriers.
But they're working on it.
So the good news is the government has an effort that seems to be exactly in the right place.
But it seems like a lot more to do and they need to package their reports a little bit better because it's just a bunch of concepts and big words.
It's hard to read. But enough on that.
So it turns out that Canada is having a fentanyl problem that is very large.
As a percentage of the United States, because the population is smaller than the United States, it's fewer numbers, but as a percentage, it's horrible as well.
And they are also talking about getting tough with China.
So even Canada, the nicest people in the world, are thinking that they need to get a little bit tougher with Canada.
And one of their top officials was asked, I forget the name of his office, but was asked if he thought that China was intentionally trying to weaken the West with fentanyl.
And he said he doesn't know.
So in other words, even the governments at the top level, they're not quite sure If China is intentionally trying to weaken other countries with fentanyl, but that it's possible.
They don't rule it out.
That's scary. There's a report today in Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal I think had something too, in which the Me Too movement has made it very difficult for women to pursue their careers because apparently Wall Street and a lot of the finance people they talk openly now about not inviting women to dinner not having private meetings with women not mentoring women and canceling events if women will be there and women have noticed that it will be a huge problem for their careers Now,
as you might know, that when the Me Too movement first started picking up steam, that was my prediction.
My prediction was that it would be a catastrophe for women who were trying to advance in their careers.
And one of the big problems is that if you want to be mentored, and things are in balance right now, most of the top jobs, executive jobs, are held by men in a lot of companies, not every company.
But you're cut off from the people who would benefit you the most.
You can't really have a...
You can't really have a meeting with a woman alone and expect that that will be a safe situation.
Or at least men don't believe it's safe.
I was trying to think the last time...
That I had any kind of a meeting alone with a woman who was not Christina.
And I can't even remember.
It's been years, a couple of years, and it was for whenever the Me Too thing first kicked off.
And that was really the last time I had any kind of a meeting alone with a woman.
And I don't think that I would.
I don't think that I would.
All right.
I haven't been talking or had not been talking about the riots in France.
And apparently there were 36,000 people rioted in France about the increase in the gas tax.
And the reason I hadn't paid attention to it is because it just seemed not interesting.
People don't like taxes, so they protested.
And I thought to myself, that's not really the biggest story in the world.
People don't like a new tax, so they protest.
Blah blah blah. But then somebody told me, I won't tell you who, that the backdrop for this is that the gas tax was specifically designed for reducing climate change.
The idea was that if they taxed gas, people would get more efficient vehicles, it would force them toward efficiency, that would lower the amount of CO2 in the air, and that would have a beneficial effect on climate change.
And so I said to myself, what?
That can't be the story.
Because if that were the story, I would have noticed Because I watched the news, and even though I had only skimmed the stories about the French protest, I thought to myself, wait a minute.
If climate change was behind this whole protest, that would sort of be in the headlines.
Every time you turn on TV, they'd be talking about it, blah, blah, blah, climate change.
And so I was skeptical.
And I said to myself, alright, well, I'll Google it.
And I'll Google and see what comes up.
So I Google it without the term climate change.
And a bunch of articles come up from major publications.
And I read it, and there's nothing there about climate change.
There's something there about gas tax, but no explanation of why you would raise the gas tax.
And I thought to myself, well, so it's not really about climate change.
It's just because the prices went up and people don't like that.
And then I thought to myself, well, what if I Google, you know, Paris, gas, riots, climate change?
And only then...
Did I find an article from a major publication, in this case NBC News, in which they said the context is that Macron wanted to do something about climate change and so he wanted to raise the taxes.
But what he did was he decided to fight climate change by raising taxes on the lower end of the income spectrum.
And it made me laugh because I thought, was there no point where he saw this problem coming?
Where you raise the taxes on the low-income people to make things better for the top 1%?
And so you could argue that You could argue that the real reason the protesters are protesting is just because they don't want to pay more money.
So you could make a story that just says, oh, it's just about money.
But if you leave out why they're talking about money in the first place, which is climate change, you've really missed a lot of context.
And here's the context of the story that I think is interesting.
Climate change itself Might actually be good for income redistribution.
Because I've said this before, the people who are going to lose property are rich people.
Because they're the ones on the coasts.
Poor people don't lose their million dollar home in the hurricane because they didn't have one.
So of course they'll lose what they have as well.
But I've got a feeling that any disruption that comes from climate change is going to increase the number of jobs.
Because people are going to have to rebuild where things knock down.
People are going to have to relocate.
People are going to have to make changes.
Build walls against...
Build dikes and that sort of thing.
So... The interesting thing was that we saw the limit to how much people are willing to worry about climate change.
When you increase their gas tax by 16%, they don't care about climate change at all.
They just care that they can't eat today.
So, that story was shocking in how, I won't say the coverage is biased, Because it's not bias for, well, bias feels like the wrong word for it.
They've left out the important context.
And that context should be in the headline.
It should be, you should lead with, there was a tax, you know, to support climate change, remediation, and France erupted and said get rid of it.
Because apparently they've backed off that plan.
So, it's really hard to read the news and think that you're getting anything like a real picture.
Now on top of that, I'm going to bring this up again because even though I've talked about this a few times, the longer time goes by, the more powerful this point is.
So the point is getting more powerful as I go.
And it goes like this.
My first reaction to the latest climate report when it said the GDP would go down by 10% was that by their own numbers they're saying it's no big deal because we're talking about the GDP in 80 years which will be up many multiples of what it is now and if it was only 10% less than the many multiples it's going to go up you wouldn't even notice.
So my take on it was I think they just told us it's not much to worry about.
Because it's 80 years and it's a very tiny effect, and by then we'll have technology to terraform the Earth.
And then I forwarded an article by someone who actually knows what they're talking about as opposed to me, which confirmed exactly what I was saying, that the math of it suggests it's not a problem.
Now, wouldn't you expect massive pushback?
From what I said and from the article that I forwarded around, massive pushback.
People coming on and saying some version of, Scott, you're so dumb.
You've done the math wrong.
You have not understood the proper context.
Or, you know, ha, ha, ha, look at this graph you missed.
Or something like that, right?
Shouldn't there be people pushing back against Two people in the public eye who said, oh, thanks for the numbers.
You just proved that the biggest problem in the world was an illusion.
Now, I'm not saying that the planet's not warming and I'm not saying that people have nothing to do with it.
I'm not talking about the science, per se.
I'm talking about the projections.
That the most credible projections, this latest report, Said from a financial point of view, which is really the only point of view that captures all the effects, including people dying, because all of this is sort of captured in the finances of it, is trivial. The biggest problem in the world, once you actually do the math, turns out to be trivial.
Who's pushing back against that?
Can you imagine me saying such a...
Such a contrary thing about such an emotional topic and getting no pushback?
Do you see how big a deal it is that nobody's arguing that point?
The biggest problem in the world has just been shown by the people who say it's a problem to be no big deal.
And I called it out and other people have called it out since then.
And nobody's pushing back.
Now, you've watched me for a long time, probably, most of you.
Most of you on here have been watching for a while.
And you see that I get pushback from everything.
Absolutely everything.
There's nothing I can say, no matter how reasonable or no matter how stupid.
There's nothing I say that doesn't get pushback.
Except that. Now, I might be wrong.
Maybe I missed something.
Maybe there's some pushback I haven't seen.
But if somebody's seen something, let me know.
But the pushback is not on the question of whether the climate is warming.
We're not talking about that.
I'm talking about the math of it, the economics.
I believe I've been shown correct on the most important prediction I've ever made.
And the most contrary prediction that anyone ever made.
Do you know anybody who made the prediction that the economics of climate change wouldn't be so bad?
Was there anyone else?
Anybody else in the world who said, even using their own numbers doesn't look that bad to me?
I think I was the first!
Now, other people have said it in the past, but Bjorn Lomborg being the most famous one, and he influenced me.
So I'm going to say that he gets credit for being there first, but I think I was there first in the response to this latest report on the climate.
All right. This is a very small part of the Mueller story, and maybe you missed this, but I think maybe only Fox News reported this, but apparently we know That when Cohen was trying to work out some deal with Russia for a Trump property,
you know, a building in Moscow, that Cohen was trying to make Kremlin connections and the way he did it was he sent an email to the generic Kremlin email.
I don't know what that email is, but let's say it's Kremlin.gov, because it sounds funny.
Now, here is this guy who's all connected, and allegedly the Trump campaign is all mobbed up and connected to the Russian insiders and to Putin.
And Trump's own lawyer, the guy who is allegedly the most connected, he's at the center, he knows everything, the closest he could get To Putin was to send an email to their public email address.
Now, if I were, if I were Mueller, And I'm in the meeting, and it's the first time I found this out.
And Muller's having the meeting, he's like, what do you think?
I can't do a Muller impression because I don't know what he sounds like.
Which is a compliment to Muller because he stays out of the limelight, so you've got to give him that.
Well, we've got this Cohen now.
We'll squeeze him in. We'll squeeze him.
We'll find out about his close ties to the Kremlin and how he contacted him.
Does anybody have any digital information about how he contacted Putin?
And then one of his people says, well, I might have some information.
We discovered that he contacted the Kremlin by email.
Oh, that's great. We got him now.
We got him now. What was in the email?
Well, it said we should work together on a building.
Oh, got him now.
Got him now. Go on.
How did we find this email and who exactly did he address it to?
Well, that's funny you should ask.
He addressed it to Kremlin.gov, their generic email address that you can see on the website.
Ooh, the generic email.
We kind of were expecting that he would use his super secret connections.
Sorry, am I still getting paid?
Scene. So that's hilarious.
All right. Let's talk about the government shutdown that might be looming over funding the wall.
So here's the funny thing about this situation coming up, about funding the wall versus closing the government.
So Trump is saying, if I don't get my funding for the wall, I will close the government.
And here's the interesting thing.
The anti-Trumpers...
Have been saying for two years now that a trade war, nobody wins.
In a trade war, nobody wins.
And here's their argument. Their argument is if you have a trade war and you push the other side, well then they'll have a trade war back and then nobody wins.
So basically they've been saying for two years that negotiating is a loser's game.
That you shouldn't negotiate.
That you shouldn't push against the other side, because what if they push back?
It's a lose-lose scenario.
So that's what they believe about trade wars.
They're of course completely wrong about that, but that's the brand that they've created.
They've decided to die on that hill.
At the same time, in a separate context, They're looking at negotiating with the Republicans and Trump about whether to close the government or give him funding for the wall.
Shouldn't they follow their own advice and give the president anything he wants because nobody wins when you negotiate.
There are no winners.
And indeed they're right. If the government is shut down, that's not good.
It's not good for the government.
It's not good for the country. So if the Democrats are true to their philosophy that you don't want to negotiate because if you do, the other side will negotiate back and then nobody wins, they should just cave in on the wall using their own philosophy of negotiating because if they don't, nobody wins.
It's only five billion dollars, at least to get it started.
Why would they want to negotiate when nobody wins with a government shutdown?
Now, somebody's saying it's a bad example because government shutdown is, of course, not exactly the same as trade.
But I would argue that the reason you think it's not the same is the problem.
The problem is, and the reason that people are wrong on this, is that it actually is the same.
It's exactly the same. So although in terms of the analogies, there are lots of differences, trade is not government negotiation about the budget, and you could list 100 differences between them, but this one thing, the important part, is actually the same.
If you don't push on the other side, and you're not willing to take a penalty for doing so, You're not really negotiating.
If you're not willing to accept pain to produce more pain on the other side, you don't have anything.
You're not in the negotiations at all.
You're just giving them what they want.
So in that way, it's the same.
Somebody says, Trump is done.
False equivalency.
It's a false equivalency.
It's a false equivalency.
I have a chapter in my new book on false equivalencies and how, when people say that, they're usually not part of the reasonable conversation.
It's the beginning of the end for Trump.
Just reading your predictions on the Flynn report.
No, I don't have any predictions on that.
New book. Probably won't see it until October next year.
Beto will not be a force to reckon with.
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