April 11, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
15:27
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| Hey, everybody. Come on in here. | |
| Coming to you today from my car. | |
| Couldn't wait. So I'm in the parking lot at my gym, getting ready to go in, and I thought I would give you a quick prediction related to Julian Assange. | |
| And it's one of these really rare situations where you have a clean setup for predictions. | |
| Because sometimes, you know, you have these complicated situations where you could make a prediction and then, you know, you wouldn't really know which variables really mattered in the end. | |
| But here's the situation. | |
| So the pickup of Julian Assange is a situation like maybe I can't think of ever seeing before. | |
| And what makes it different is Is that number one, it doesn't conform to either political party's brand. | |
| In other words, the whole Assange situation is political, and yet we're not entirely sure which side we're supposed to be on. | |
| When was the last time you saw that? | |
| All right, so hold that thought. | |
| The other thing about it is that it doesn't look like anything we've ever seen before. | |
| The closest thing is some people might say, well, I mean, I've heard stories of spies, but that's not really what's going on here, or is it? | |
| We don't know. So its uniqueness gives us no historical pattern to guide our thoughts. | |
| But here's the fun part. | |
| We also don't have a team guide. | |
| We don't know which side we're supposed to be on. | |
| And so you're seeing the entire country going crazy, trying to quickly figure out what side they're on. | |
| Now, I think that by maybe tonight, by the later opinion shows, I think you might see some sides forming. | |
| And so here's the prediction. | |
| That if you talk to anybody about the Assange situation in the next 24 hours, opinions are just going to be all over the place. | |
| Because for the first time, the first time you've ever seen it, the media has not yet assigned your opinion. | |
| That's what's different. | |
| I can't think of another example, because it's so fresh. | |
| That the media has not decided, alright, CNN, our take on this is going to be X. Alright, Fox News, this is the way we're going on this. | |
| This is the conservative view. | |
| This is what our audience will like. | |
| We don't know yet. | |
| And I don't know if they know yet. | |
| So it might be all over the board for about a day. | |
| But inevitably, they're going to start A-B testing towards something like A position that their audience responds to. | |
| And they're going to figure it out quickly because they can see what gets clicks. | |
| Every time they put a story up, they look at the headline and they say, ooh, this one that was anti-Assange got a lot of clicks. | |
| But maybe only on CNN. Maybe a similar headline over at Fox News on their website gets half as many clicks. | |
| So I think you're going to see that the media will line up toward unified but opposite points of view. | |
| And when they do, all of those independent opinions that you used to see are going to start merging into the two sides. | |
| And you've never seen this in real time, that it's unfolding as we're watching. | |
| So that's the prediction. | |
| You'll see random opinions converging into real time because the news organizations can test what their audience wants to see and that will become the opinion that they solidify on and then magnify out so that they'll be assigning positions to people who have not yet had positions but are on that team. | |
| That's what to look for. | |
| And correct me if I'm wrong, but have you ever seen anything like this? | |
| At least that dynamic, that people don't already have an obvious, predetermined, pre-assigned position. | |
| We just don't know. Now, we're totally in the fog of war on this. | |
| So we have no idea where this will go. | |
| We don't know if anything we've heard is true. | |
| Usually, 48 hours from now, you should assume you're going to hear things that you thought were true that aren't, etc. | |
| So let's just talk about a few things that seem true right now, just for fun. | |
| One is, when I listen to Pompeo, Talk about WikiLeaks being an organization that's acting like a foreign intelligent enemy. | |
| He seems like he's telling you the way he really feels. | |
| In other words, it's very emotional and genuine looking. | |
| So when he talks about wanting to stop WikiLeaks, this is Mike Pompeo, that looks real to me. | |
| That looks like his actual opinion. | |
| So I'm going to say that In all likelihood, there are members of the Trump administration who really want to take Assange down and really want to take WikiLeaks down and maybe even for some of them it feels kind of personal. | |
| But I'm going to say another obvious thing, which is it's unlikely that everybody agrees. | |
| And the person who is least likely to end up on that same position, which is crucifying Assange, The person least likely to end up there is President Trump. | |
| And here's why. | |
| From President Trump's perspective, no matter how directly or indirectly he was involved in making any of this happen, you assume he approved it. | |
| But you don't know if he was driving it or just going along with it. | |
| So we'll find out that stuff later. | |
| But isn't it weird that he hasn't weighed in? | |
| Because until the president weighs in, Fox News doesn't know what to agree with, and CNN doesn't know what to disagree with. | |
| So it could be that the point that matters is the very first tweet from the president that seems to lean in one direction about Assange. | |
| So that gives everybody something to agree with or disagree with, and that probably will determine the two teams. | |
| So I think maybe everybody's got to wait for that. | |
| And it would be brilliant for Trump to not respond. | |
| You know, the guy who understands the show better than anybody ever has. | |
| I think he understands that this is one of those situations where going quiet on this topic will build suspense. | |
| And it could be fascinating just to watch what happens if he just stays quiet just on this topic. | |
| It doesn't have to be forever. | |
| It could be a day. | |
| It could be two days. | |
| But it would be interesting for him to stay quiet on this just to see what happens. | |
| Now, if I were Trump and I were a dealmaker by nature, and I were strategic by nature, I would say that you had just gained leverage over Assange, and if you suspected that maybe Russia had leverage over him or nobody had leverage over him, this would be an upgrade, because now the United States has leverage over somebody who knows a lot of stuff. | |
| Now, if you were Trump, what is your best play here? | |
| Your best play is, since Assange has, in the past, seemed a little bit pro-Trump, Meaning that, you know, Trump and Assange are more likely to make a deal than Assange plus anybody. | |
| Because Assange has been unambiguously, as far as I can tell, kind of pro-Trump. | |
| And he has also floated the idea of a pardon in exchange for information. | |
| Pretty soon, President Trump will maybe even be in the room with him. | |
| Who knows? I mean, anything could happen. | |
| I'm sure the intelligence people would strongly advise against that. | |
| But it's Trump. | |
| He can do what he wants. If you were Trump, wouldn't you put yourself in the same room with Julian Assange pretty quickly? | |
| Come on. Wouldn't you? | |
| You're the president. | |
| You can do any damn thing you want. | |
| You know, you can, at least in this context. | |
| You would put yourself in the room with him, and you would make sure nobody else was listening. | |
| I sure would. That would be close to the first thing I'd do. | |
| Yeah, I know every smart person would say don't do that. | |
| I'd still do it. Anyway, but whether or not the president does that, maybe we should be happy if he followed expert opinion, which I assume would tell him not to do that for a variety of reasons. | |
| But the president has the ability now to find out some percentage of what Julian Assange knows that nobody else knows. | |
| And how valuable is that going to be? | |
| Well, who knows? | |
| Because maybe he doesn't know anything we don't know. | |
| But there's a good chance that even on topics we don't even know are in the news, There's a good chance that Julian Assange knows some really, really helpful things for Trump. | |
| Now, let me ask you this. | |
| If Trump were to ultimately, let's say, not pardon Assange, people would blame Trump for prosecuting him. | |
| It's his administration. | |
| He could pardon him. | |
| He could stop it. | |
| He could make a deal. So they will blame him. | |
| So the president will end up taking the blame or the credit for no matter what happens. | |
| Let's say Assange is pardoned in return for valuable information. | |
| Would anybody not vote for the president because of that? | |
| Well, maybe a few hardcore intelligence people, you know, people close to that community. | |
| But the general public would just hear Trump made a deal. | |
| He got something, and we don't really care what happens to Assange. | |
| The country got something they wanted. | |
| So I think people would not change their vote because of it. | |
| But now let's look at the other way. | |
| Let's say that Trump went hard at Assange and just frickin' locked him up. | |
| Even while Assange was, at least as far as the public knows, offering to make a deal. | |
| And having something that Assange says is worth trading. | |
| Would the public be okay with that? | |
| If what they saw was not everything that could be seen, because the public doesn't know all the good stuff, you know, the stuff under the hood. | |
| But the public would see Trump coming down hard on Assange, and they would think it wasn't necessary, because it would look like Assange had something to bargain with. | |
| That would cost him votes, wouldn't it? | |
| So the fact that they brought him in on what looks like a light charge, which I understand the jail time involved for somebody who didn't have priors for the charge, could be zero jail. | |
| That's right. We may have laundered Assange. | |
| Let me say that again. | |
| This may be an Assange laundering operation, meaning an intentional process to put him through the legal system and have him come out the other end with no jail so that he gets something. | |
| What would he offer in return? | |
| What would he offer in return? | |
| Now, my guess is that this is not all thought out in advance. | |
| I don't think that there's anybody in the administration who has a master plan You know, including the beginning and the end of this whole process and where they wanted to end up. | |
| I don't think that's the case. I think it's probably a bunch of people pursuing the law as they think they should, doing their jobs, having different opinions about Assange and what should happen, having different political opinions. | |
| So it's probably just a whole bunch of people with different opinions. | |
| How many of those different opinions matter? | |
| Only one. It's probably only one person who matters. | |
| Trump and Julian Assange. | |
| Everybody else would only matter if those two people didn't feel like mattering for some reason. | |
| In other words, if the president didn't weigh in, well then he wouldn't matter. | |
| But if he does, he's the only one that matters. | |
| So You don't have to look at anything except what is good for Trump. | |
| Coming down hard on Assange, when it looks like maybe there was some deal, some information to be had, would look like a political mistake to me because it would cost votes that way, but it wouldn't cost him votes to make a deal. | |
| That people just wouldn't like. | |
| But they would not vote for him because of it. | |
| So that's my political opinion on that. | |
| Anyway, so I wanted to put out the prediction that until Trump speaks, it's going to be hard for the media to take sides, and you're going to see more weird, varied, all-over-the-map opinions than you've ever seen on a political topic because people's opinions have not yet been assigned. | |
| And as soon as they are assigned, and it'll happen the moment that Trump makes an opinion on this. | |
| Then you're going to see people take sides quickly. | |
| And when you watch it in real time, it will fascinate you to see how quickly the population can be brainwashed. | |
| So this is sort of a national brainwashing experiment. | |
| You've never seen a setup like this before, where there's no historical pattern to look at that's like The Assange situation. | |
| And we don't already have an opinion that matches up Democrat versus Republican. | |
| It's just so rare and yet it's a very political thing. | |
| Think of one other situation like that. | |
| So you're going to watch in real time how people struggle to have an opinion and then the media will eventually take their cue from the president. | |
| They'll take sides and then they will assign opinions. | |
| It's going to be fun to watch. |
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