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Jan. 13, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
31:09
Episode 373 Scott Adams: The Turley Hypothesis, CNN’s Border Story
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Time Text
Oh, yeah. - Nectar of the Gods.
Yes, yes, I'm a little bit late.
I know it. I've been working hard, trying to write my new book.
Lost track of the time.
I am in Vegas at the moment.
I do not come here to drink and gamble and have promiscuous sex.
I'm all about the time away from home to get my writing done and eat some good food and that sort of thing.
But right now, you know what time it is.
I know you do.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm Scott Adams. This is the coffee.
You should grab your mug, your stein, your cup, your glass, your container, your chalice, if you will.
Fill it with your favorite liquid, I like coffee, and join me for the simultaneous sip.
You have to be ready.
Whoever said, hold on, you just got to be ready.
You have to be Alright, so it's a little after 8am I think here.
No, it's almost 8.
So, let's talk about an article I tweeted around, you can see it in my Twitter feed toward the top, by a constitutional lawyer, Jonathan Turley.
And I said it was the smartest thing you're ever going to read about the topic of the Russia collusion story as well as the deep state conspiracy story.
Now here's what I love about it.
One of the big illusions of life is that you think you know what reality is, let's say on a specific topic, you've got an opinion and you say, I'm sure I have this right because I can only think of one explanation that would fit all the facts.
So if you're trapped in that mental jail where you can only imagine one thing that would fit all the facts, it's always mind-blowing to see somebody come up with another theory that fits all the facts.
And it's just completely different.
I'll give you a few examples of that today.
So Turley's take on both the Russia collusion and on the deep state, and he doesn't say it as a statement of his fact, he says it as a what if.
So he says, what if the Russia collusion story is not true, and at the same time, The deep state, at least the robust version of it, is also not true.
What if both sides were operating entirely on a confirmation bias, but were otherwise, and here's the great part, we're all acting responsibly.
But they just had confirmation bias.
In other words, what if the FBI, when they went after Trump, under the assumption that he might actually be a Russian puppet?
So Turley suggests maybe they actually just thought that was the truth.
What if the FBI simply thought it might be true?
And they did their best to look into it.
Now at the same time, the FBI could be riddled with people who were biased.
So there's nothing I'm going to say that detracts from the fact that there could be lots of biased people.
But that doesn't change the possibility that the FBI could also believe what they thought.
Because that's the most typical situation, right?
So remember, I'm not mind reading.
I'm talking about Jonathan Turley's article in which he says, what if?
So we're not saying it's true.
We're saying, does it fit the facts as well as the other two theories?
Because the competing theories are that either the deep state set up Trump and that's the whole story, or there's no real deep state and the Trump Organization was involved in some kind of collusion thing.
Turley presents the third opinion, which is both of them are imagining it.
They're imagining different things, but it's all imaginary.
Which one fits the facts the best?
Now, Turley's opinion largely matches my own.
So from the beginning, I've been saying, okay, there are two things I don't believe.
Number one, I don't believe Russia collusion.
Number two, I don't believe the deep state is organized.
Meaning it's clear that there are people with deep opinions.
But don't you think the FBI has deep opinions about everything?
It wouldn't matter who was the president.
There would be people in the organization who had deep opinions about him or her.
So that's actually a normal situation.
Now people are going to say to me, yes, but what about, what about those emails that say we need a, we need some kind of a, we need an insurance policy.
How do you explain that Scott?
How's that confirmation bias?
I'll tell you how. It fits Turley's question perfectly.
It's entirely possible that the members of the FBI, including Strzok and Page, didn't like Trump as a politician, but also may have believed he was a danger to the country because he was a Russian asset.
If they believed that, What would be the most responsible way to act for the FBI? Well, you would have a plan to get to the bottom of it, and you might also have a B plan in case the A plan didn't work.
And that A plan could be your insurance policy.
So I would warn you that whenever you're looking at an email out of context, it's very difficult to know what it really meant.
In the ClimateGate example, you saw another one, right?
You saw the ClimateGate person on the email say, we're going to use Michael Mann's trick, they use the word trick, to quote, hide the decline.
Now, if you see that in a context, you say, my God, it's proof that it's a conspiracy to hide the facts.
But if you know how people talk casually when they know each other, it's just the way people talk.
So your mathematical technique, I'm going to call a trick.
It doesn't mean I don't believe it's real.
It's just a short-haired way of talking about it.
And hiding the decline was the whole point they were looking at it.
They were looking at it to try to explain the decline.
And if somebody in an email to a friend said, let's try to hide this thing with this trick, it doesn't mean what you think it means when you take it out of context.
It could mean that, but the evidence is not there.
And likewise, with the email about the insurance, you don't really know what that was about.
So you shouldn't assume that it meant that they were part of a deep state plot.
Let me be very careful about this.
Neither theory is either confirmed or ruled out.
The beauty of what I'm talking about is that there are now three worldviews which all fit the observed facts.
They all fit.
What we know so far fits all three hypotheses in the sense that none of them are ruled out.
Now, at some point, I expect we will rule out some of them.
Let's make some predictions.
Let me ask you this.
Now that we know that the FBI was legitimately, well, let's not almost say legitimately, now that we know from the New York Times reporting that the FBI opened the investigation on Trump because they were actually concerned That he was a Russian asset.
I think that that's enough in evidence, even in our fake news world, that we could probably say that's true.
That the FBI was actually concerned.
At this point, Mueller has been looking into this for many months.
Let me ask you this.
If Mueller had found evidence that President Trump was a Russian asset, would he still be in office?
Ask yourself that.
You know, we don't know what Mueller has come up with, so we can't guess exactly what he's going to say at the end.
But do you believe there's any chance, even any chance, just any chance at all, That Mueller has discovered that Putin is running Trump and he's decided to wait.
Do you think that Mueller would wait if he had found that out?
Not a chance. Suppose he was 50% sure.
Suppose he just had some solid looking evidence but not solid enough.
Let's say he was 50% sure.
Would we already know that?
Absolutely we would know that.
Because there's no way that Mueller would allow that size of a risk to keep running with the country just hanging out there with the risk that Putin is actually running the country.
At the very least, the topic of even maybe temporarily taking the president out of the playing field and replacing him with Pence, well, we just find out.
Or something of that nature.
So I would say at this point the odds that Mueller can confirm anything like Russian collusion or Russian asset or anything like that is pretty close to zero because nothing we're observing would be consistent with him having strong evidence of that.
Again, we're only predicting the future but we'll see.
Now here's another one.
Another bit of evidence.
So there are two weird contradictions in this whole Russia collusion story.
One of the weird inconsistencies Is that Comey was first blamed for doing something that was bad for Clinton, meaning a few weeks before the election he talked about their open case looking into her emails.
Now, that was unambiguously bad for Clinton, and Clinton will be the first one to tell you that.
But then later, Comey did things which seem unambiguously bad for President Trump.
How does the deep state conspiracy work if Comey's on both sides?
That doesn't make sense.
And so if you look at the Turley hypothesis, it explains Comey's actions perfectly.
It explains that he thought there might have been a real problem with the Russia thing, and he also was simply trying to do his job.
Now, I said when the initial Comey announcement came out about Clinton right before the election, I said something that a lot of people hated.
I said, and I don't know how many other people said this, but it was a very unusual opinion.
I said that Comey is probably doing this because he feels that it's his duty.
And what I meant was he had this knowledge about the ongoing investigation and it would have been unfair for the public to go into the voting booths not knowing what he knew.
Now he didn't know more than the fact that it was an investigation.
He didn't know how it would end.
But he wanted us to know that because if we had found out later Wouldn't you be pretty angry about it?
Somebody's saying they're accusing me of mind reading.
That's the fair question to ask.
Am I mind reading or am I looking at a theory of the world and trying to see if the data fits the theory or doesn't?
Now what I'm telling you is that the The Jonathan Turley theory, which he just suggests, he's not telling you it's true, but he suggests that both sides are just operating in confirmation bias.
Would perfectly explain Comey's inconsistency.
Because if he had been part of a deep state plot from the beginning, it doesn't really explain why he would have damaged Hillary Clinton in such a visible way.
While at the same time, in other times, he's damaging Trump.
Likewise, the Russian conspiracy theory kind of falls apart with the fact that the Russian trolls also made memes that were anti-Hillary.
How can you explain that the Russians were making some pro-Trump memes and some pro-Hillary memes?
Now most of them were pro-Trump, but if your job is to support Trump, why in the world would you ever make some that are the opposite?
That's completely unexplained.
But Turley's explanation does explain it.
It would just say that the Russians were messing with us like they always do, just trying to make the system, I don't know, possibly less dependable, less credible.
That would be bad for us.
Whatever the Russians were doing, maybe they were just testing.
Maybe they were just seeing if they could make any difference.
Something like that. But, now some of you are going to say, but wait a minute, isn't it obvious that Brennan and Clapper are dirty?
Because at least half the country looking at this story, or maybe 40% of the country, is saying, oh my god, it's obvious that those two guys are dirty.
Part of the deep state conspiracy.
Well, consider this.
The dossier It didn't originate with the FBI. They were the recipients of it.
And it was information they didn't know if it was true or not.
So certainly we can agree that the Democrats were trying to take out Trump.
There's no question on that, right?
The Democrats funded the dossier.
The dossier was full of BS. It ended up in the FBI's hand.
It's pretty clear that the Democrats were behind a scheme.
That part's not in question.
And Brennan and Clapper are clearly partisan.
If you were to take Turtley's theory that everybody's just operating on confirmation bias, It's all perfectly consistent with what I just described.
You've got some partisans doing what is good for partisans, and of course they are trying to take out Trump, but they're doing it as partisans.
They're doing it the way every other partisan is doing it, and that isn't necessarily proof of a grand conspiracy.
So, here you have three Theories on reality.
Either it's a deep state setting up Trump with a fake dossier and a fake Russia collusion, or President Trump really is a Putin puppet, or both sides are operating under confirmation bias and were mostly trying to do what they thought was right.
Let's make a prediction.
I make the following prediction.
1. No one will ever go to jail or be impeached for Russia collusion or for being a Russian asset of some kind.
2. There will never be a deep state plot that we have specific, definite knowledge about.
In other words, we'll never have an email that says, hey everybody, let's meet for the deep state or whatever.
You know, something as obvious as that.
We'll get together and try to take out this president for political reasons.
If there's information that the FBI was trying to take Trump out because they thought maybe he was a political puppet, that's a different question.
Or a Putin puppet.
Alright, so here's my prediction.
No convictions and no impeachments on either the deep state side or on the Trump collusion side.
There will be plenty of convictions and people getting fired for doing things they shouldn't have done, for lying to investigators, for things unrelated to the central claim, etc.
Yes, I've explained the Peter Strzok email in which insurance, that word insurance, taken out of context, you should not assume you know what he meant.
And when we hear the context, I don't know if we ever will, it probably is more common than some kind of weird conspiracy.
Yeah, so let me have to look at my notes here.
Oh. So here's another thing I told you the other day.
Remember I told you that the story about CNN asking the local station that was near the border, San Diego station, I guess?
So the story was that CNN asked them if they could talk to somebody at that news station to get information about the border.
And then the story goes that when the local station said that walls work, That CNN decided not to go with it.
So that was the story.
When I heard the story, I came on Periscope and I said, fake news.
The most normal thing in the world is for CNN's producers to reach out, see about doing something, and then not necessarily do that thing that they looked into.
So the number of times that producers look into things is much higher than the number of times that they go with the thing they looked into.
Now, I live and work in this world, so I know, for example, that producers contact me, they'll even do a pre-interview, and then decide not to do that story.
Very normal. And so when CNN was accused of backing off because they didn't want to report, you know, real news, you know me, I'm a big critic of CNN. I'm a big critic of CNN. And I said, that's obviously fake news.
CNN's producer just looked into it and decided not to do it for whatever reason.
CNN's explanation was that they talked to lots of different people and networks and only went with some of them after they looked at all the things that they had.
That was kind of what I told you would be the case.
All right. And some of you are saying, no, no, it's not for no reason.
It's because of bias.
You can't rule out bias, but you would be doing mind reading to assume that's the reason, because it's not in evidence.
Let me put it a different way.
The only thing that's in evidence is that producers were doing what producers do, which is, you know, they check out things and they don't use them all.
That's the only thing in evidence.
If it's also true that the reason they didn't use it is because they didn't think it would fit their narrative, that could be true.
But it's not in evidence.
All right. And some of you are imagining that I said CNN is not biased.
Really? Are you imagining that anything I just said right now is that CNN is not biased?
That's pretty much the opposite of what I just said.
So the Steve King story is interesting because Steve King has given his His response, and he said very clearly and unambiguously that he rejects white nationalism and white supremacy.
And he said it in the clearest possible terms.
And then he also said that all of his actions in his life are consistent with that.
He's got a tough case to make.
I don't see how people are going to understand the comments he's made in the past as being consistent with his clarification.
So I think he's got a big problem there.
Yeah, it looks like that story just sort of went away.
Alright, what else do we have to talk about?
Have I told you my theory about how I think that humans largely, for the most part, can only invent themselves or better versions of themselves.
In other words, that all of our technology that we invent is really an extension of a human.
So, for example, your smartphone is an extension of you just talking to people and communicating in person.
Your car and airplane are extensions of your feet, you know, your ability to walk places, etc.
And now we have this interesting situation in which social media is taking parts of our personality.
So I've said this before that Facebook...
Feels like your heart, you know, it's all about your loved ones and the things you want to remember.
It's about your heart. Twitter seems to be about your brain.
Now, your brain doesn't always work so well, but neither does Twitter in terms of determining truth.
Somebody says they're afraid that the deep state is controlling me.
I don't think you have to worry about that.
So you've got Twitter that's like the mind of the internet, because that's really about ideas.
Facebook is about your heart.
It's really, hey, here's my family, here's something I love, here's some food I love, etc.
And Instagram is sort of like your visual sense.
Instagram is just your eyes.
It's just your eyes.
It's pictures of stuff. So...
It feels as though we are inventing a god-like superentity Which is the sum of all the stuff we're doing.
So, you know, we're developing God-like powers as a total of humanity that's greater than anything any individual can do.
And, you know, we're actually talking about geoengineering, you know, when we're talking about climate change, which I'm not going to do today.
We're talking about changing the clouds and changing the acidity of the ocean and literally geoengineering.
And as we're looking at going to Mars and going to planets that are uninhabitable, there are serious conversations about how to take a barren planet And use our technology that we don't quite have, but I think we've got at least a toe in it, to geoengineer a new planet.
Who is it who can create a planet?
God, right?
As the story goes.
So, one theory that you can't rule out Is that God is both our future and our past.
Meaning that, you know, once humans have invented all the parts of God, you know, the eyes and the ears and the brain and the heart, that there will be sort of a super entity that actually is almost autonomous.
Or it will seem autonomous to us.
And it will be able to create worlds.
And here's the fun part.
It will be able to create life.
I believe it will be able to create life.
Now you say to yourself, no, you can't create life.
We've tried. But we can write a computer simulation and that computer simulation will be characters that, you know, that believe within the simulation they're real and that they're alive and they have a world and we may be in fact one of those simulations.
So it would be hard to imagine anything that is a god power that we human beings won't have in my lifetime.
You know, we're almost there.
Alright. Will we ever fully domesticate dogs?
I like that random question.
There are lots of comments about Christina today.
By the way, if you didn't see, there's a very funny meme about the two of us.
I'll have to tweet that.
I haven't tweeted it yet. You know, I'm pretty sure that somebody asked me if I've smoked weed for every single periscope I've ever done.
And the answer is, eh, only about 10% of them.
Will I do the Joe Rogan show again?
Well, I would always be willing to do it, because it was a great experience.
I think Joe Rogan's, you know, sort of a national treasure for the stuff that he does.
But I've also maybe talked about, you know, persuasion enough, so I would need another book and another reason to come on.
So maybe, but I need a better reason than I have right now.
I can't wait until Kanye goes on Joe Rogan's show.
Can you imagine how great that's going to be?
All right. Oh yeah, let's talk about the Blight Authority.
So there's some good things happening there that I'm not ready to talk about, but I do want to give you some ideas that came out of that process, some ideas about, you know, at least conceptually what to do with some of these blight cleared areas, is and I'll probably do a special periscope on that.
Alright.
Have you been to Detroit?
I have. Alright, so I think that's all I got for today.
Let me check my notes here that are behind my iPad.
My computer just went off, so I think we're done for today.
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