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May 31, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
47:31
Episode 549 Scott Adams: Bipartisanship, Charisma, Hallucinations and Brainwashing
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Time Text
aren't you happy that i'm here Right on time. I'm nothing if not punctual.
And so are you. You are so fast in your fingers, jumping in here as soon as I'm alive.
You know you came here for the dopamine.
The dopamine and the coffee.
Is there a difference between dopamine and coffee?
Yes, technically. In a scientific sense, there is.
But in a practical sense?
No, there's not.
Because you're going to enjoy the simultaneous sip with me while feeling that...
Dopamine wash through your body.
It's going to be the start of a great day.
Here it comes. Grab your cup, your mug, and glass.
Get a tankard or a stein or a chalice.
Maybe a thermos. Could be a flask.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure that I call the simultaneous sip.
Ah. All right.
Let me start with the most inspirational story of the day.
I tweeted it, if you want to check it out yourself.
I thought I wasn't going to click this story, but the news was so boring, there's just not much happening, which is the best news you've ever had.
If you wake up and you look at the CNN homepage, you look at the Fox News page, there's not much happening.
That's a good day. So I clicked on a story normally I would not care about whatsoever.
It was about President Trump went to the graduation of the Air Force cadets and he shook a bunch of hands.
That was the story.
And I thought, why am I going to click on a YouTube clip of President Trump shaking hands with a bunch of cadets at the graduation?
And then I read the headline, and it said, a Trump record, 989 salutes and handshakes in 83 minutes, every cadet.
And I thought to myself, okay, well, it's all in the headline.
You don't need to actually watch the video, because the headline tells you he shook a lot of hands.
It's kind of impressive. You know, must have been pretty tired by the end of it.
But I thought, well, I'm bored.
I'll click the video.
You have to click the video.
You just have to click the video.
I can't explain why it's so good.
Somebody says 991, so maybe I got the number wrong.
But you have to see the energy and the charisma that the president has, and you have to watch how he's drafting off the energy of the cadets.
There's this big...
They create almost a creature...
It's inspirational the whole time you watch it.
You could almost watch all 989 of them because the president's energy stays the same the whole time.
It's amazing. He's just feeding off the energy.
And you can see his charisma in a way you hardly ever see it.
Symbiosis, yes. Symbiosis is the word I was looking for.
The stage became this Creature that was operating through symbiosis so that everybody was sort of at this high-energy state.
Obviously, the cadets were excited because they were graduating, but they were also going to shake the hands of the President of the United States in front of their family.
Best energy ever.
The President loves the military.
He loves these people. They're young.
They've got the energy. You should see it.
You know, if I were to describe it, it's just somebody shaking hands with somebody.
But it's inspirational.
It really is. So watch that.
The other funny story is President Trump has announced that he's going to start charging tariffs on all Mexican goods until Mexico can stop sending people across the border.
Now, instantly you know what that causes.
That causes two movies to form.
In movie one, President Trump has actually figured out how to make Mexico pay for the wall.
Now, do the math for me.
There are...
Somebody can help me with...
Let's do this in real time.
What is the dollar amount...
That Mexico imports or Mexico exports to the United States specifically.
I think their total exports are 400 billion and US is the bigger part of that.
So it's somewhere in the few hundred billion maybe, a couple hundred billion a year.
Somebody says 70 billion.
So fact check me on this.
If we got 5% off of the 70 billion a year, it starts getting to be a pretty big number.
But whatever that number is, it's a big number.
Now, as people who understand tariffs and economics will explain, it's not so clean as they pay us money and we go spend that money and everything's good because it raises prices for American goods.
So in a way, America ends up paying for it anyway.
So it's not as clean as that.
But in terms of how the public will perceive it, It's going to look like the president found a way to make Mexico pay for the wall.
This is just the greatest news in terms of entertainment, not in terms of what it does to the world.
And then the second movie, because President Trump can never win.
So winning is not an option if you're the anti-Trump faction of the world.
You can't let him win.
So how could you spin it?
My best guess is that the way they'll spin it is that President Trump is forcing Mexico to put kids in cages.
Because that's sort of what might happen in the short run.
Mexico would have to get tough on the immigrants themselves or pay the price, pay the tariffs.
And what does it mean to get tough on immigrants?
Well, I don't know, but you probably end up having to at least keep some of them detained for a while.
You know, most of them maybe you can just prevent or you could just send them back right away.
But there might be some kind of detainment.
So I think that the anti-Trumpers are going to spin it as Trump forces Mexico to do terrible things to immigrants for money.
Which might be sort of what happens, if this actually happens, and nobody could be happy about that.
But here you have the two movies.
So when this came out, I said to myself, well, this will be interesting.
What does CNN say about the fact that President Trump has, at least the way it feels, not in an actual economic, financial sense, but in a sense...
That he found a way to get Mexico to pay for the wall.
And I thought to myself, well, that will be interesting to see how it plays on CNN's homepage.
Now keep in mind that this is...
Some people are saying the connection is lost.
Let me wait a moment and see if anybody gets a better connection.
So somebody's saying, can you hear me or even see me moving?
Is there any audio?
Seriously? Alright, somebody says it's fine now.
So let's say that was temporary.
So I go to CNN to see how they're covering the news that President Trump may have found a way to make Mexico pay for the wall.
How would they cover it?
Here's how. Here are the top stories on CNN. Something about the spelling bee.
There was a national spelling bee.
That's the top story.
Number two story is something else about the spelling bee.
But those are just the top two stories.
Now we'll get to the good stuff. The third one is something else about the spelling bee.
But, you know, that's just because it's new.
They're not ignoring the big news about Trump getting Mexico to pay for the wall.
It's just further down.
So let's go to the fifth story.
The fifth story is something about the spelling bee.
The sixth one is, well, that's something about the spelling bee.
And then the seventh one, well, that's something about the spelling bee.
That's all of the top stories.
Because the top stories are the top left segment.
That's it. You have to go to the middle column or to the news and buzz, which is sort of the miscellaneous.
It's actually not on there.
I don't even think it's on there. Nope.
It's not even in the news.
They didn't cover it.
But I don't think Fox News did either, so let me check.
I don't remember looking specifically, but let's see if Fox News covered the fact that the president might be I don't see it.
There's some AG Barr stuff.
William Barr, William Barr.
There's John Rich's song that he did with the people on The Five.
It's screaming up the charts.
So it doesn't seem to be something that was covered by either side, interestingly.
So let's talk about something else.
There's a story in the news That probably, and I say almost certainly, well, I'll stick with probably is fake news.
And it's the story coming from apparently an unreliable source It says that Kim Jong-un executed his negotiating team that failed to negotiate a deal at the last summit.
Now, I had to check a number of news outlets to see if they were reporting it at all, because when I first saw it, it was from some sketchy-looking news site, and the first thing I thought was, that doesn't sound true.
So I had to Google it and find out if any major sources are talking about it, and sure enough, Bloomberg is covering it, CBS News is covering it, but they're not saying it's true.
They're covering it as something that somebody is saying and that the somebody who's saying it is known to be unreliable.
Now, if they did not tell you that, had they not told you that the source was unreliable, would you have known it?
Here's what I call the fake news filter.
And it goes like this.
If a story is too perfect, it's almost certainly not true.
Stories that are too perfect rarely are true.
I would say one time out of 20 is a story that's just...
It looks like if you were writing the movie...
This is exactly why you write, oh, Kim Jong-un, he killed his own brother-in-law.
He'll kill anybody. I'll bet he killed the entire negotiating team because they didn't get the answer he wanted.
Just on its surface, you should say there's a 20 to 1 chance it's not true.
Watch how often this little rule works.
Now, in the script writing business, if you spend any time in Hollywood, with creative people, there's a saying that something is too on the nose.
So if you were writing this in a script and somebody said, alright, let's write a script where the dictator kills all of his negotiating staff because he's so evil.
Somebody else in the room might say, eh, I get what you're going for, but it's a little too on the nose.
It's just, it's too perfectly packaged.
It's not messy like the real world.
The real world is messy.
This is a little too clean of a story.
So that should tip you off.
So, I will say that in the 5% chance that it's true, or less than 5%, it would indicate good news.
Because one of the things I've always suspected about Kim Jong-un is that he's more, let's say, open-minded, more flexible, It does seem to me that Kim Jong-un could make a deal that would be good for him and good for North Korea in general.
But it might be very, very bad for that corrupt level of people that basically have been lining their pockets and would be exposed in any kind of a deal that would change things in a big way.
So if you're the thin...
The thin line of, let's say, functionaries or technocrats or generals or whatever that are actually doing well in North Korea because you're taking bribes, you're extorting, whatever you're doing.
They don't want anything to change.
So, could you have a situation where Kim Jong-un says to his staff, go make me a deal?
And they go off and they don't make a deal.
Because maybe... Just maybe the things the negotiators are doing are a little more tough than Kim Jong-un himself would want them to do.
He might actually want a deal, because that's the way he stays alive.
But the people underneath him May not stay alive if a deal is made, because some of them may have to go.
Any change is bad if you're in a good situation.
So I think the news of him executing his staff is almost certainly fake news, but if in the unlikely event we found out it was real, that would be, in my mind, very good news, because it means he wants to make a deal and he's willing to kill his own people until it gets done.
That would be cool. You've been hearing forever that Los Angeles has a big homeless problem, and you've been hearing that it's getting worse and worse, and in a variety of ways, Los Angeles has a big, big homeless problem.
But I did not feel the way I feel about it this morning until I heard some quotes from Dr.
Drew, who was on maybe Laura Grimm's show, I forget.
So listen to the difference.
Here's the difference between just sort of hearing there's a homeless problem, which is sort of a concept, and if you're not there looking at it, it's not bothering you so much.
So you can kind of ignore it, because even though it sounds terrible, it's a concept, and you don't see it, and it's somewhere else.
You don't have to step over anybody because you live somewhere else.
Here's how Dr.
Jew explained it. He said that the bubonic plague...
A pandemic that killed tens of millions of people during the 14th century is, quote, likely, this is according to Dr.
Drew, is, quote, likely already present in Los Angeles, Pinsky added.
Now, how do you feel about it?
How do you feel about it now?
When I said, L.A. has a homeless problem, you said to yourself, yeah, that sounds pretty bad.
I hope they get a handle on that.
Dr. Ju tells you, authoritatively, you know, with lots of good reason to say it, that there's a good chance that the bubonic plague is already there.
Meaning it's just waiting for, you know, three people to get it.
Because there's some number that makes a lot of people get it, right?
Because a lot of people get it if the first people get it, I guess.
Because you've got rats and insects and everything else going on there.
That was such a powerful way to put this in perspective.
Because all the other things you think about, it's like, well, they're sleeping outdoors.
It's terrible. They don't have enough food.
They don't have good health care. It's terrible.
There's a crime problem. It's terrible.
Those things are all really terrible.
But when you throw down with bubonic plague, I change my schedule.
To stop bubonic plague, I'm actually going to do something.
So good work, Dr.
Zhu, for shaking the box and ends up on the homepage of Fox News.
His quote was, complete breakdowns.
His other quote is, no city on earth would tolerate this.
That's the contrast principle.
So contrast is always good persuasion.
Imagine saying that LA is not just having a problem, but it's doing worse in the sense that no city would tolerate this than whatever's the worst city you can think of in the whole frickin' world.
That's good contrast.
And it's not untrue.
It's probably a pretty good description.
All right. So good job, Dr.
Drew, on shaking the public up on that and maybe causing some action.
Speaking of action, I've got a book tour coming up in the fall.
So around November, early November, if things went the normal way, I would probably do a trip to New York City to do a bunch of media for the book, but I would do one other trip to LA to do the LA version of media.
And I heard that story and I might change my mind.
I haven't decided yet, but you tell me that there might be a little bit of bubonic plague in LA. I canceled my flight.
I mean, that's action stuff.
I will take action to avoid bubonic plague.
So LA might want to step it up a little bit.
Let's talk about...
Barr, Attorney General Barr, was asked, apparently in some upcoming, maybe it airs today, some interview, he said that he doesn't consider whatever happened in terms of the Russia collusion hoax, he does not consider the actions treason in a legal sense.
So it's not treason in Attorney General Barr.
General Barr's mind in a legal sense.
He explains it this way, and he's speculating here, but he's saying that sometimes people, quote, convince themselves they're doing the right thing.
Now, I totally agree with that.
My take on this from the beginning has been that they're probably not sitting in a room saying, how can we overthrow the government and take control of everything?
It's about power.
I said from the beginning it's about Trump derangement syndrome.
And that power would be the outcome if, let's say, the Republicans were overthrown, the result would be somebody else would have power, and maybe the plotter's person would have power.
But I think they're real believers.
I believe that the media brainwashed the citizens of this country.
You saw yourself.
The media absolutely brainwashed the citizens.
Now, they were brainwashed into two camps.
Depending on which form of media you're watching.
There's not one side that's brainwashed.
I'm not saying that.
There are two brainwashed sides.
One of them is brainwashed in a more dangerous way.
Now, I would say that the people on the right are brainwashed just in a different way.
Now, I use brainwashed because it's a more provocative word.
We're all influenced, we're persuaded, we have team feelings, etc.
You can use whatever word you want, but for the shorthand, both sides are brainwashed to their own version of the world.
But the difference is that the people on the right were brainwashed productively.
Productively. Let me give you an example.
We teach children to do the Pledge of Allegiance and to respect the flag and all that.
That's brainwashing. But it's productive.
I wouldn't change it.
Because it really does help make the country more cohesive, keeps us safer, probably more productive, probably more prosperous.
So that's productive brainwashing.
We don't want to change that.
Likewise, when President Trump brainwashed his supporters to say, hey, the economy is going to be great, that caused them to go out and invest financially.
And have high confidence and turn it into a reality.
Here we have this great economy.
So there are forms of persuasion slash brainwashing that are totally positive.
And you should do as much of it as possible.
There's another form that's nothing but bad.
And I think that's what happened to the other side.
They were brainwashed to think that the world was becoming some kind of, you know, I don't know, Hitler...
Concentration camps, end of the world, crazy dictator, mad king situation.
Now, if you had been brainwashed to that movie, as a patriot, you would try to change it.
This is the hard part.
In my opinion, people who are in the intelligence services are probably far more likely to be hardcore patriots than somebody who's just working at the dry cleaner.
The dry cleaner person can be a patriot too, but I think there's a strong concentration of really hardcore patriots in the intelligence agencies.
Probably. It seems reasonable.
And I think that although some of them might be just bad apples who are helping their team, maybe somebody like Brennan just wants to get a better job.
There are lots of different people with different incentives.
But I think for the most part, people within the government were genuinely afraid of what would happen if a President Trump came into office, and probably some of them.
Genuinely were worried he was working for Russia.
As crazy as it sounds, in retrospect, I think they still believed it.
Now, somebody's saying it's still treason.
I think, yeah, I mean, you're getting into definition of words, and I wouldn't say you're wrong, because that gets into what's the specific legal definition of treason.
I'm no expert. But consider that they might not have had bad intentions before They may have had bad programming, and by that I mean they may have been, at least some of them, not all of them, may have been legitimately brainwashed into thinking there was something they needed to fix as patriots.
There are other people, such as Clapper and Brennan and Comey, that I would not necessarily be so generous in my assumptions.
I'm not going to tell you I do know what they think, but I'll tell you that The impression is not one of doing something that's good for the country.
It doesn't look that way, but I have no way of knowing what they're thinking.
I saw the weirdest thing happen on Don Lemon's show.
I saw a clip of it today.
He was talking to Kamau Bell.
If you don't know Kamau Bell, he's an African-American...
Comedian, I guess, he's had a show on CNN. Now, the African-American part is important to understand what I'm going to talk about.
So they're talking about a congressman named Steve.
I don't use his last name because I don't want to get demonetized when this video goes to YouTube, later when it's uploaded.
There's some keywords that I want to avoid.
So let's say there's a congressperson named Steve.
And you can Google his last name, who keeps making the mistake, and it's the dumbest mistake, and he just keeps doing it over and over again.
He keeps using the word culture and saying that the US has a superior culture.
And in our immigration policies, we should make sure we don't bring in the wrong kinds of cultures.
Now, he also clarifies separately, but, you know, as part of the same conversation, he clarifies that he's not talking about ethnicity or race.
That everybody's welcome in the United States if they want to play by the same rules, which is the Constitution, the rule of law.
He'd love it if they were religious, I suppose, especially if they were Christian.
He would like it because it means they're buying into a set of rules that are compatible with success in his opinion.
Now, if you said it the way I said it, No, no, no.
We're absolutely not talking about race.
The only thing we care about is people who are following the same set of rules and think those are good rules.
The more of those, the better. But of course, Don Lemon and Kamau, Bell, literally laughed, ha ha ha ha ha, to the point where Kamau put his head down to laugh at how dumb Congressman Steve is That he doesn't know he's being a racist.
And I think that's fair to say that he doesn't know anything he's saying is racist.
Which is separate from whether it is racist or not, which I'll get to.
But clearly he doesn't know it.
He doesn't know it's being perceived that way because he would stop saying it.
He would say it better if he had a better idea that it was being received wrong.
But here's the mind-blowing part.
Kamau Bell explained to me something about racism that I'd never heard before.
And I'm going to ask you if you've ever heard this.
And I think this is one of those situations where it's so productive to make sure you're getting the opinions of other people.
Kamau Bell said, you don't get to decide if you are a racist.
So you personally don't get to decide if you're a racist.
So your opinion of whether you're caring about race, your opinion of what you think about the races is not relevant to whether or not you're a racist.
Guess who gets to decide, according to Kamau Bell?
And he said this explicitly and clearly.
I'm not over-interpreting.
He said that the people who decide if you're a racist are the ones who are offended.
The people whose toes you stepped on.
Think about that.
You're a racist if somebody is offended and says you're a racist.
That's what makes you a racist.
And because Don Lemon and Kamau Bell had decided that, in their opinion, Congressman Steve sounded like a racist, that therefore, by definition, he's a racist.
Because they're African American, They feel that their toes have been stepped on and that the things he was saying were racist and offensive.
And that's the definition.
If they feel it, he is it.
If they feel he's a racist, he is a racist.
And they said that as clearly as I just said it.
To which I said to myself, I've never seen two people confess that they were racist on television before.
Have you? Maybe one person, but I've never seen two people go on television and admit that they're racist.
Oh, did I miss a point?
Because it sounded racist to me.
Don Lemon and Kamau Bell, and I'm not making this up.
I mean, I think probably you feel the same.
When they explained that, That they interpreted Congressman Steve as being a racist because he uses the word culture and he defines it clearly as not being about race.
That he's a racist.
The only way I can interpret that is that they're saying it because he's a white guy.
I can't imagine that if Congressman Steve had been African American, they would say that what he's doing is racist.
Can you? If...
Pick any prominent black politician.
If a prominent black politician had said, we want to bring in people who are compatible with our culture, because that's a good system that's good, would Don Lemon say, oh, look at this black politician.
He wants to bring in people who respect the Constitution and have maybe a religious background that fits pretty well with our background, and ideally speak English.
If a black politician said that, would Don Lemon say, oh, how can he tell he's not being racist?
Of course not. Don Lemon and Kamau Bell, presumably, and again, this is just an opinion, and it doesn't matter if I'm right or wrong, which is the funny part.
It only matters if I'm offended.
Honestly, and I'm not, this is not an exaggeration for a fact, I'm not going to say this, you know, just to make a clever point.
It was offensive to me.
Kamau Bell and Don Lemon felt to me like racists.
So by their definition, that does make them racist, right?
I don't know how that doesn't work.
Anyway, let's talk about something else because I'll get demonetized for that.
Speaking of demonetized, I want to share you a little bit about what I'm doing over on YouTube.
So I'm doing these Periscopes live and then in an hour or so they'll be uploaded on YouTube so people can play it back.
You can also play it back on Periscope.
But I wanted to show you the graph.
Let's see if you can see it.
So, here's, on this side, this is where I started, and this is a graph of my traffic.
You see the traffic was sort of, you know, trailing off for a long time, and then this was a travel day, so I was traveling here, that's the only reason it dipped.
But you can see it was going down, down, down, down, down, down.
Then, with my assistant, we started using the tools that YouTube and experts say will help you with your traffic.
So it's using the right keywords, putting in the right...
basically just doing all the things that one does to become more visible.
And you can see when it started.
So somewhere around here...
We started getting serious about just doing the things one does.
I retweet it and normal stuff.
And you see the traffic?
Sure enough, it grew. Now, I don't know if you can see it, but it shows my total earnings.
You won't be able to see it on the screen.
But the total earnings for, I don't know, two weeks or something like that, is $800.
So my total earnings from monetization on YouTube for about 10 days is $800.
Now, which is roughly enough to pay my assistant who does the production on this.
So, it pays for itself.
And that was the intention.
Now, should that level go up, And I'm having fun using all the tools within YouTube to optimize things and make it more discoverable and everything.
Should it go up, I will use that money to continue to improve the quality of what I'm doing here.
The ultimate would be to get to the point where I could hire an engineer.
And build a studio and do something like Joe Rogan.
Something at that level.
But that's pretty expensive, and I wouldn't do that unless the revenue called for it.
Alright. Something else.
Let's talk about...
Ted Cruz and AOC have found a topic which they agree on.
Apparently AOC... Not apparently, but AOC... tweeted...
I think it was yesterday...
That politicians who retire should not be able to become lobbyists because it biases the system too much.
Ted Cruz saw that tweet and weighed in, yes, he's been trying to get that done.
Would she be willing to work on it?
AOC tweeted back, if you're serious, yes.
To which I said, why did that take so long?
Was this always a topic that everybody agreed on?
You know, is this the first time that the people on the left and the people on the right realize that they have the same opinion on this?
I don't think so. Why did this never happen before?
So, it was one of those summer of love precursors.
We may be entering like a really interesting summer.
I said that last year and I get disappointed.
Mostly because of one event.
It ruined the summer. But this summer looks a lot better.
We might have a really good summer.
And Ted Cruz working with AOC in an honest attempt to make something better in a way that the public can look at and say, yeah, if you do that, that is unambiguously better for the country.
So keep in mind, I've been saying for a long time, That if you underrate AOC's power, you're gonna be surprised.
Now, when I say her power, I don't mean all of her policies are good.
I don't mean that we should elect her president tomorrow.
I'm not saying that you should change her opinion to her opinion.
I'm saying that she has real power because she has the goods.
She has the skill to make stuff like this happen.
And if AOC ends up being the one who can cross the aisle...
Now, remember how only Nixon can go to China?
Only AOC can go to Ted Cruz.
Am I wrong? AOC has such good credentials for being, you know, super left, left, your left, my left, that she can make a deal with AOC and still maintain her brand.
So she's carved out that space for herself where she can get attention and she can get attention at the highest levels and she can cause their work to be more credible.
Somebody says, you are so wrong about her.
How am I wrong that she and Ted Cruz are looking to do something that would be good?
And by the way, for those of you who don't know, AOC, and I only learned this recently, she was actually selected in a talent competition, essentially.
So there was a Democrat organization that was literally trying to find young people that they could groom to be good candidates for offices that they thought they could win with a little bit of backing.
And she was the best of the people who came in and said, you know, I could be a politician.
It's not an accident that That she has super charisma and persuasive skills.
She was selected by smart people because of that from a large group of other smart people.
So if you think it's not talent, you're really going to be disappointed.
All right. There's a story on Fox News that youth sports participation is declining sharply.
Far fewer kids are playing sports.
At the same time, and part of the reason given for that, and this is more of an opinion, is that maybe the reason for that is there are too many parents who are bullies.
You know, they're sort of ruining kids' sports because the parents who are watching and guiding their children are too much of a bully, they care too much, it takes on too much meaning, etc.
To which I say, good.
My opinion is that youth sports are horrible.
Except for a few people.
There are some people who have a much better life, have a much better experience, are benefited in practically every way you can think of by youth sports.
Unambiguously, there's a group of people who are way, way better off because they played youth sports.
I'm not going to say that's not true.
That's just obviously true.
But they're the winners.
They're the people who didn't get a head injury playing football.
Some did, but some didn't.
So definitely there's some people who become the captains of the team.
They become the stars.
They get a history of succeeding.
They date better people.
They have a better social life.
Youth sports are great for some people.
For other people, and I don't know if it's a larger group, but I think it is, Sports are just a horror.
And for the parents, sports can ruin the family.
Now, I have some experience with this, being, you know, I was a parent of a kid in youth sports.
And while we kept it on a fairly, you know, a balanced level, so it didn't tear apart, you know, my family.
It actually was a plus.
So I would say that because my stepdaughter was on a team and she got to play in the first string, And she was, you know, a good athlete.
She was playing volleyball.
It was fun to watch.
She was not the kind of personality that would, you know, be ruined by sports.
I think it gave her some discipline.
It gave her some friends. It was all good.
So for my own stepkid, that particular sporting experience, I'd say probably close to 100% positive.
But every day that I went to one of those volleyball games, I watched as more people sat on the bench than played in the game.
And the people who sat on the bench put in all the work and didn't get any of the benefits.
Well, they got some of them, but they didn't get the same kind of benefits.
They learned that they weren't very good at volleyball because they sat on the bench the whole time.
And then there were all the people who couldn't make the team in the first place, the people who...
And by the way, volleyball is the cruelest sport.
Have you seen the uniforms that high school girl volleyball players play in?
They are disturbingly sexual.
Disturbingly. Like, to the point where if you're an adult man...
And you're in the teenage volleyball girls tournament, where I found myself, you actually just have to stare at the floor the whole frickin' time, because they're walking around like Victoria's Secrets, you know, the sporting edition of Victoria's Secrets.
And the only kids who even go out for that team are the ones who know they're gonna look okay in those uniforms.
Think about it. Think about you're a teenage girl, you're a good athlete, but you've got a few extra pounds.
No way in hell you're gonna go play volleyball unless you've got a really good self-image, which is hard to come by as a teenager.
It's the cruelest thing I've ever seen.
Like I said, it was all good for my stepdaughter because she was fit, she was good at the sport.
It was just all good for her.
But the cruelty of the whole system is hard to ignore.
Now, if you ask me, there is a reason why youth sports is being diminished.
It went way too far.
It got way too serious.
It was too much expense, too much burden on the family.
The families would have to travel out of town every weekend for tournaments.
It's really a bad system.
Conversely, if that's the right word, my stepdaughter also played in, before she was playing on the school team, she played in the recreational leagues, soccer.
Now, she was also good at soccer, and so it was fun to watch the games.
Great fun. But the recreational leagues didn't travel.
They didn't have the pressure.
It was just fun. The recreational leagues, you should do way more of that and way less of the competitive stuff.
All right. I was watching a CNN clip where they're trying to deal with the fact that all of their reporting about the Russia witch hunt turned out to be a hoax.
So if you're CNN, how do you deal with the aftermath of being so wrong about the biggest story for so long?
So wrong for so long.
And I was watching, and it looks like what they're trying to do...
is confuse the audience into thinking that the real issue of the Mueller investigation was to find out what Russia was up to in the election and that they did find out that Russia was up to bad stuff and they tried some legal remedies which won't make any difference but that the Mueller report was a big ol' success because it showed that Russia totally was trying hard to influence the election Now,
when they make that claim, they talk about the indictments of the Russians, etc.
What they don't talk about is what I talked about yesterday.
Can you give us some examples of how the Russians exactly influenced our election?
And the reason that they don't talk about that is that it's not persuasive.
As I said yesterday, I'll just summarize it.
If you look at the troll accounts, they spent $46,000 or something trivial, and the ads themselves are just so amateurish they couldn't possibly have made a difference.
And they weren't even all pro-Trump.
Some of them were pro-Hillary.
So it's not even clear what the Russians had in mind with the ads.
And then the other part was the hacking of the DNC. And it turns out, as I talked about that yesterday, even the Mueller report doesn't say they did it.
It says it appears they did it.
That's not the kind of evidence I need to start a nuclear war with another country.
I kind of need a little more than that.
Now, even if they said, you know, trust us and tell people no, we can't tell you how, I'd be a little more convinced.
But I don't think that the group that told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction can be the same group that tells us, oh yeah, Russia hacked these servers.
It's too easy to hide who's hacking a server.
I can't convince myself that they really know.
I don't rule it down, by the way.
I would certainly not be surprised.
In fact, probably more likely than not.
That Russia did hack the DNC and give the stuff to WikiLeaks.
But you as a citizen do not have evidence of that.
You only have a source that you know to be unreliable.
Let me put it this way. When I told you that the story about North Korea, Kim Jong-un executing the negotiators who failed at the last summit, I said there's probably a 1 in 20 chance that that happened because it's a little bit too perfect, a little bit too on the nose.
I think those odds might apply to Russia hacking the server and giving it to WikiLeaks.
It's a little too neat.
It's a little too on the nose.
Now, it's not as on the nose as the Kim Jong-un thing, which I think you could, you know, that's a 20-to-1 against that being true.
But the Russia hacking of the DNC, if I were to put odds in that without, you know, knowing much about it, 50-50?
And I go to 50-50 whenever you just can't tell.
I don't know. But if you told me that we have high confidence it was the Russians, I don't believe it.
I would say, I mean, it could be true, but I don't believe it because it's not coming from credible sources.
All right. I think I hit everything I wanted to say.
I think I did. So, if you'd like to catch up on these Periscopes, you can do it over at YouTube.
You would just search for the phrase, real coffee with Scott Adams, and it'll pop right up.
And I would appreciate it if you do.
By the way, you could also monetize by giving super, super hearts here on Periscope.
There's a little icon down at the bottom of the screen for people who like that.
Alright. Could be a false flag by, yeah, anything could be a false flag, so I'm not going to talk about that.
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