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June 13, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
28:48
Episode 563 Scott Adams: Why the Press Can’t Tell the Difference Between Treason and Listening
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Hello, everybody.
Come on in here. We've got a new studio set up here I'm trying out.
I'm going to try out a little bit different sound dampening.
So, hoping some of you will let me know how my sound is this morning, as soon as the air conditioning clicks off.
But until then, You know why you're here.
You're here for the dopamine hit.
You're here for that great start to the day.
You're here because you want the simultaneous sip and all that goes with it.
And here it comes. If you've got a cup or a mug or a glass, if you have a stein, a chalice, or a tankard, if you have a thermos or a flask, a vessel of any kind, and you've filled it with your favorite liquid, I like coffee.
Then it's time to join me for the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
Ah. So in a few minutes, around 7.15 Pacific Time, 10.15 your time, or if you're watching this recorded, well, it doesn't really matter.
In a little while, I'm going to be talking to a guest.
Who used to have Trump derangement syndrome, but doesn't anymore.
And so that'll be fun.
But before we do that, let's hit a couple of stories and then we'll hit a couple more.
Number one, President Trump has tweeted the following...
General Michael Flynn, the 33-year war hero, who has served with distinction, has not retained a good lawyer.
He has retained a great lawyer, Sidney Powell.
Best wishes and good luck to them both.
So, reading between the lines, would you imagine that General Flynn has to worry about going to jail?
I'm going to say no, because I think the president is signaling fairly clearly that somebody was such a good lawyer, I mean a really good lawyer, a really great lawyer, that's the kind of lawyer that can get you off on just about everything.
People are saying that I'm looking overexposed.
I wonder if that's because of this.
We'll do a little experiment here and move this away.
The lighting, by the way, is exactly the same.
So those of you who are commenting about the lighting, you're probably thinking to yourself, oh yeah, that totally fixed it, didn't it?
Damn it. So what I was testing was the sound dampening of that thing, but apparently that's not going to work.
All right. So I would expect that General Flynn will get a pardon if a pardon is ever necessary.
But in any case, I don't think you have to worry about him going to jail.
That's the first thing.
The next thing is, you saw the story about Joe Biden saying that if he got elected president, He would cure cancer.
And so there are lots of funny headlines about Joe Biden promising to cure cancer.
Now, I'm going to put that in the category of hyperbole.
Or just, you know, common political talk.
So I don't think that we should, in any real sense, worry about Biden saying he's going to cure cancer.
What he means is he'll put more attention on it and he's optimistic about it.
So that makes a fun headline.
They say Biden says he's gonna cure cancer, but it's sort of like the old fake headlines about Al Gore.
You remember everybody said Al Gore says he's gonna, or he took credit for building the internet.
He says he invented the internet.
That was always fake news.
What Al Gore did say is that he helped get the funding for the early version of the internet and without that it would not have happened.
Or so we can imagine.
And so in a very real way, Al Gore was part of inventing the internet.
He invented the funding for it.
There were a lot of people who were involved in the technology.
But, Gore decided to just sort of go with it and say, okay, you know, maybe I over-claimed about that.
But he actually didn't over-claim.
His role was very important.
Likewise, if Biden were president, he's saying he would put a lot of money into cancer.
It's all the same thing.
So I'm going to be consistent and say neither of those means anything.
But, Biden did have a much funnier statement, one of the best gaffes of all time.
In which Biden was talking to a group, and Biden was looking sort of like a senior citizen who was a little bit confused, and he said, and I quote, this is an actual quote from Joe Biden talking to an audience.
I think I'm either, he was talking about the president giving him nicknames, and he says, quote, I think I'm either low IQ or slow.
I don't know what I am.
Slow Joe Biden?
Slow Joe Biden? So, President Trump has Joe Biden telling groups of people that he's either slow or low IQ, but he doesn't know.
Now, of course, this is sort of out of context when you hear it like this, but just the fact that Biden is making an audience wonder if he had been called slow or low IQ, when in fact he'd been called sleepy, Now, everyone in the world except Joe Biden knows that President Trump called him sleepy.
Everyone knows that.
Apparently the only person who didn't know his own nickname was Joe Biden.
But he took a good guess.
He probably thought, well, if I were going to make a nickname about me, what would I do?
I'd probably go with slow or maybe low IQ. I don't think he was thinking that, but it's just funny that his guesses were worse than the actual nickname.
And then he said he didn't know.
I don't know. What does he call me?
I don't know. I would say that Biden's chances of winning the election are essentially zero at this point.
The chances of somebody else getting nominated and winning the election are slightly more than zero, but Biden says zero.
The other big news is that there's something weird happening in the Gulf of Oman.
You know about this? So apparently two tankers have been attacked with some kind of projectile.
We don't know the details, but apparently they had cargo for Japan at the same time that Japan's Abe is talking to Iran about maybe fixing things in terms of Iran's relations with the world.
And Iran actually showed the film on TV and Iran actually rescued the sailors.
And so Iran's foreign minister is saying that this attack is beyond suspicious.
So even Iran is acting like, um, guys, this is really suspicious and it wasn't us.
Do you believe it?
I think I'm going to say probably true.
So my very preliminary subject to revision later is that probably Iran, at least the government of Iran, was not aware of what was going on.
So that's interesting because it makes you wonder, well, who would be doing such a thing?
I don't think it would be pirates, but who would be doing such a thing?
Now, maybe we'll just find out it was just Iran and they're just lying about it, but there isn't any obvious reason they would do that.
So what's missing is the reason.
So that is very suspicious.
All right. Of course, we'll talk about Trump and him wanting to have information, even if it came from a foreign source.
But I'll do that after I talk to my guests, which I'm going to have on in a little bit.
Here's something interesting.
Jordan Peterson has announced...
He's getting close to releasing some software.
I guess he was involved with it.
Some kind of app that would compete with social media.
Now, I suppose it would compete with Facebook and Twitter.
I'm not sure what else it would compete with.
Yeah, so the name of it is ThinkSpot.
You see it in the comments.
ThinkSpot, one word. And the idea is that nobody would be banned for any kind of free speech unless it was something illegal.
Now, here's the problem.
Here's the problem.
In order for it to make a difference in the world, it has to be commercially successful.
I think you'd agree.
If it's not commercially successful, then in the long run it can't survive.
Now, the social media networks have evolved to where they are because they pursued profitability.
Any new platform that also needs to survive and maintain some kind of profitability to do so is going to find itself moving in the same direction for exactly the same reasons.
So what I don't understand yet, and maybe I will understand this later, is has Jordan Peterson fixed the business model?
Because it's not just about free speech.
There's something wrong with the business model.
And it looks like he's reproduced a business model that has two states.
It either can't survive because too many bad people and racists and stuff will come over and say things that are legal to say but are so bad that they would drive other people off the platform.
So if you don't control that group the way the other social networks have, You end up losing your business model and then there's no platform at all because there's no money to support it.
So that's my curiosity.
And it could be, I mean it could be that maybe you don't have to do anything.
Maybe you just put it out there and maybe people come and maybe they use it.
So it could be that nothing needs to be fixed.
But I have a real curiosity about how you can have free speech and also have a successful business model which you would need to support the free speech.
If the other social media platforms couldn't do it, with all of their resources, all of their experience, all of their, let's face it, they are geniuses.
The top people who work for the social media companies, people making this kind of decision, are literally geniuses.
And they're putting all of their energy into figuring this stuff out.
And they can't. Apparently they can't figure it out.
So if somebody else can, that'd be great.
All right. I'm going to be switching my microphone and seeing if my guest is there yet.
So bear with me, we're going to have a little audio disruption.
And if I've done everything right, something like a new sound will be coming towards you right now.
Alright, let me see if I can...
Oh, yeah, let me see.
Damn it! I just realized that the option isn't showing.
So there's an option here that I'm supposed to be selecting to show a guest.
And that option isn't showing.
So there's something that happened when I was traveling that took off that option.
So, Joshua, if you're listening, this isn't going to work today because I would have to stop it and restart it, which I'm not going to do because it confuses people.
so we're going to have to abort for today sorry about that we'll try to reschedule that again um So there are some options that need to be set before this goes live.
They had always been set permanently, so I didn't have to set them.
But both the notification and the guest feature seem to have turned off for reasons that I don't know.
It wasn't anything I did intentionally, but I see the option doesn't show there.
Alright, so I apologize for that.
We'll get back to that.
Let's talk about the main story of the day.
So George Stephanopoulos interviewed the president and asked him about the topic was Don Jr.
was testifying again and the subject of his original meeting in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer came up and the president was asked about that and the president said that I want to get his exact words.
The President said, it's not an interference.
They have information. I think I'd take it.
If I thought there was something wrong, I'd go maybe to the FBI. If I thought there was something wrong, the President said.
Now, how was that covered by the media?
Well, predictably, the media made a lot of fake headlines.
My favorite fake headline was, let's see, was it BuzzFeed?
Who just had the best fake headline on that?
Oh, so BuzzFeed said, Trump finally told the truth.
He needs Russia to win.
And then the other media is saying, he just put a price on the presidency.
Now anybody can give him some information and stuff.
Alright, so let me tell you, Why the press doesn't understand what's going on in this situation and lots others.
So my book coming out in the first part of November called Loser Think, it talks about this very thing.
It talks about the fact that if you have experience in certain fields, then you have better vision into situations.
So if your only experience, for example, had been in media and communications and being a reporter, you would have a blind spot for business.
So President Trump comes in with lots of knowledge about how the media works, but on top of that, he's also a business expert, you could say.
He's very experienced in it.
Now, here's the difference.
If you talk to an experienced business person and you say, here's the situation.
There's a citizen from Russia who has some information.
Do you want to hear it?
If you're a member of the press and you don't really understand how the world works, you might say, where's that person from?
That's a citizen of Russia?
My God, I have to get the FBI involved.
And so you call the FBI and you say, FBI, I've got a meeting with somebody who's a Russian citizen.
I just wanted to alert you of it.
What does the FBI say?
I don't think they say, uh-oh, we'd better put a sting on this.
We'll get right on it.
Maybe they might, but far more likely they'd say, you can talk to anybody you want.
It's not really illegal to talk to anybody.
Now, actually, they probably would do something about it because, you know, they can't ignore this stuff.
But here's the thing.
If you're an experienced business person and somebody says, I've got this important information, come meet with me.
What do you as an experienced business person make of that?
Well, I'm an experienced business person.
I've had many years of lots of different experience in big corporations, startups, my own business, etc.
I'll tell you what I'd think about it.
It's not real. The first thing you think about it is that something like 75 to 90% chance that the meeting is nothing.
That you'll show up and the topic will be something else.
If you're experienced and you get this kind of an offer, hey, we've got information that will be very valuable to you.
If you're experienced, you say to yourself, that's almost certainly not true.
This is somebody who wants to get in a room with me for maybe another reason, a bait and switch.
The most common thing in the world is for somebody who wants to get in a meeting for you to over promise.
But, just in case, just in case there's some kind of information, an experienced person would say, well, I'll listen to it.
In the very unlikely situation that it's a problem, some kind of national security thing, something illegal happened, well, then I will judge it.
Then, when I have the information, I will judge whether I should get the FBI involved.
The people who are inexperienced in business or just inexperienced in life are saying the opposite.
They're saying, no, no. I would avoid even the appearance of impropriety because you don't want to get information from the Russian government.
What's wrong with that statement?
Did Don Jr.
think he was going to a meeting with Putin?
Did Jared and Don Jr., and was it Manafort, when they heard about this meeting, did they say to themselves, hey, we're going to a meeting and Putin's going to be there and he's going to give us some state secrets?
No. But people responding to the story are acting like that's what actually happened.
So the people who are getting cognitive dissonance because the president is laying some common sense and experience on them that is completely counter to what they think is true and right and smart.
So the president, in this case, is being...
Rational, smart, and experienced.
Of course you listen to it first.
Because it's probably nothing.
Almost 90% or so chance that it's nothing.
So you're not going to get the FBI involved on something that's almost certainly nothing.
Secondly, it wasn't Putin in the meeting.
It was literally somebody your friend knows who happens to be a Russian citizen.
So when Don Jr.
went to the meeting, he thought he had a meeting with a person who just happened to be Russian.
It didn't mean that she got her information from Putin.
It doesn't mean she's a Russian puppet.
If you talk to anybody from Russia who's got at least a college education, Somebody's going to say that they're connected to the Kremlin.
It's just sort of automatic.
Anybody is connected to the Kremlin over there.
But if your friend says, hey, there's somebody I want to talk to.
This is a Russian lawyer.
She's got some information you would find useful.
You don't feel like you're talking to Russia.
You feel like you're talking to your friend's friend.
That's it. It's in the building.
There's a meeting downstairs. Would you walk downstairs Would you walk downstairs to talk to somebody that your friend said you should talk to that as far as you know is just a citizen of Russia?
Which probably wouldn't make any difference.
Now keep in mind that at the time of the meeting nobody had ever mentioned anything about Russia collusion, Russia interference with the meeting.
So you have to take yourself back in time and put yourself in the heads of the people who took the meeting.
There was no indication that something was a big red flag.
So first you find out, and then if it's a problem, you do something about it.
Here's the other thing that the inexperienced people don't understand.
If Russia has some information that they want you to have, they're going to get it to you.
Right? Period.
If Russia has some information that they want you to have, for whatever reason, They're going to get it to you, whether it's that meeting or they leak it to somebody or they leave it laying on a photocopy or whatever.
If Russia intelligence had any information that they wanted the public or even any member of the team to know, of course they're going to let them know somehow.
Of course. So the thing that the inexperienced people are failing to understand The only thing that was a decision, in terms of President Trump's hypothetical of whether he would listen to it, or even Don Jr.'s actual, in which he went to a meeting to see what was up, What they're all missing in looking at this is that this wasn't the one time that this information could be put out.
It wasn't the only way that Russia had to get information to somebody.
Now, as it turns out, they didn't have any information.
But had they had information, that meeting, whether it happened or not, would have no impact on whether the information eventually was disseminated.
Here's the decision that an experienced person would say.
They would say, the information is going to come out if it's useful to anybody.
It's going to come out for sure.
Why wouldn't you want to hear about it soon?
It's going to come out anyway, if it's real, or even if it's a rumor, it's going to come out.
So the president quite reasonably said, and how many times have I told you that the president doesn't leave free money on the table?
This is a free money on the table situation.
Somebody said, I might have something that might be worth something, information-wise, might be worth something.
And so the president said, All right, I'll pick up this free information, but it turns out there wasn't any free information in the Don Jr.
case. They didn't have anything. Anyway, so the president is just giving people a dose of experience and a dose of common sense and a dose of how the real world works.
But the press and most of the public are not experienced, and so they're saying things like, well, only a traitor would listen to information.
That's not true. I would definitely take that meeting.
In fact, somebody says it's against the law.
It's not against the law to listen to somebody talk.
There are no situations in which you can go to jail for listening to somebody talk in your own building.
There's no situation where that's illegal.
And it would be silly to think that could ever be the case.
Now, it might be illegal to act on things, it might be illegal to do something, but there will never be a situation where listening to somebody talk in the United States in your own room is illegal.
Now, people are saying it would have a monetary value, Blah, blah, blah.
But what is the monetary value of information that somebody tells you?
I don't see it as a real problem.
So, the president is getting the media all worked up about that, but...
So look for this bit of cognitive dissonance.
Online you can see it already on Twitter.
When the anti-Trumpers are saying it's obviously treason and any smart person would have alerted the FBI right away, etc.
There is a hallucination in that.
The hallucination is that this meeting happened in 2019.
Or it happened sometime after the word Russia collusion became a phrase.
At the time, nobody had ever heard of any of this Russia collusion stuff.
It was just somebody who happened to be a Russian citizen.
It wasn't about Russia.
So, you always listen to it first, then you decide what to do.
Alright. Diamond and Silk had a great observation that I thought was funny.
So Kamala Harris has said that the president should be investigated, and if he did anything illegal, then the justice system should do its thing.
It's being over-reported that Kamala Harris is saying the president should go to jail or she'd try to put him in jail.
That's not exactly what she said.
What she said was she would let the legal system do what the legal system does, which is exactly the same as saying nothing.
But the Republican press is reporting it like she said she wants to put the president in jail.
That could be the result of the justice system just doing its normal stuff.
But it's not what she said.
What she said is, how about having a legal system that does what a legal system does?
That's all she said. But anyway, Diamond and Silk had a great comment on a tweet.
They said about Kamala Harris, if no one is above the law, because Kamala Harris was saying that the president is not above the law, So Diamond and Silk say, if no one is above the law, why are we giving health care to illegal immigrants?
Now, they say it in a provocative way, but the better question is, if no one is above the law, is that a standard that you would apply to people coming to the country illegally?
Or would you treat them like no law had been broken?
That's a really diabolically clever question because all of the conversation about what the president did or did not do or did he obstruct or blah blah blah is about the president not being above the law.
But the other biggest topic in the country is about tens of millions of people who are breaking our law and half of the country has decided that it doesn't matter.
Now, I'm not giving you my opinion on immigration if it sounded like it.
That's not the intention. I'm simply saying that it is objectively true a large population of this country are here illegally.
And that the people who keep saying nobody's above the law have explicitly said that this group is above the law.
Explicitly. They're saying it in clear language.
I'm not over-interpreting.
They're saying, here's the law.
They violated it.
We're going to give them some rewards for violating the law.
How about some health care? And again, I'm not giving you my opinion on how much immigration we should have and whether they should have health care.
We could talk about that another time.
I'm just saying it's a gigantic trap That every time they say the president shouldn't be above the law, it just kills them on their other biggest topic.
And I think it's funny, or maybe it's illuminating.
I wouldn't say it's funny.
I'll say it's illuminating that the place that I got this is from Diamond and Silk.
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