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Nov. 18, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
28:48
Episode 730 Scott Adams: Iran, Buttigieg, #Shampeachment predictions
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Look at my wrinkly shirt.
Hey everybody, come on in here.
Peter, good to see you.
June, wild man, Simon, what a pleasure.
Do you have what I have?
I hope you do.
Because you know you came here for the simultaneous sip, the best part of the day.
Doesn't take much. Did you bring perhaps a cup or a mug?
A snifter, stein, chalice, tanker, thermos, flask, canteen, grill, goblet, vessel of any kind?
Did you fill it with your favorite liquid like I did?
I like coffee.
And will you join me now for the simultaneous sip, the thing that connects all people?
The dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better?
Here it comes, the simultaneous sip.
Oh yeah, yeah, yep, that's the good stuff right there.
Keep it on the coffee warmer.
It's gonna be just perfect.
All right, so the news is gonna start slowing down quite a bit as we enter the holiday season, so I might have to come up with new things to talk about.
But first, have you sampled My new book, Loser Think.
People are saying it's the best book I've ever written, changing people's lives, changing their brains, reprogramming them, making them better people.
Sometimes that makes them sexier and better looking, but that's anecdotal.
I think you're going to like it.
So make sure you get one of those as a gift for your Loser Think and relatives.
It'd be... Good way to make Thanksgiving a little bit more interesting, if you know what I mean.
So I'm going to make a prediction about the shampeachment.
I suppose the fact that I call it a shampeachment might give away my prediction.
But it goes like this.
In a legal context, and I'm going to extend this to the impeachment process, which is not a legal process.
But the point will stand.
In a legal process, if reasonable people look at the same information, and some of those reasonable people say, well, there's a horrible crime right there, and other reasonable people, just as qualified, let's say lawyers, look at the same information, completely the same information, and say, I don't see it.
I'm looking at what you're looking.
I don't see a crime.
You can pretty much guarantee nobody's going to jail over whatever that thing is.
If lawyers can't even agree, even after they've agreed on the facts, they still can't agree if there's a crime because it looks ambiguous.
Nobody goes to jail for that.
We don't have a system that puts you in jail for things that, well, it might be a crime, but some smart people can't tell.
You just never go to jail for that.
Likewise, with impeachment, the fact that you don't see any Republicans defecting.
Sure, they'll say it was inappropriate, they'll say we shouldn't have done it, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But you don't see any Republicans say, you know, I'm looking at the information and there's an impeachable offense right there.
You just don't see it.
That's all you need to know.
I don't believe there's going to be surprises coming.
Now, if we get surprised with new information, of course that could change things.
But based on what we know now, which seems unlikely to be in the process of changing, I would say it's over.
I would say that the smart money says there's just nothing there, and that's the end of it.
And the Senate will vote, and it will be dismissed.
And it's nothing but a political process, which I think most of you know.
So Jennifer Williams...
Oh, by the way, the generic way to express what I just said is I like to use the elephant in the living room example.
If a bunch of people are in the living room and half of them say, hey, there's an elephant right there in the living room, right in front of you.
You can just reach over and touch it right there.
And the other half say, I don't see it.
And they're in the same living room.
There's no elephant there.
You can pretty much rely on the fact that a hallucination adds things to the scenery.
Rarely, I won't say never, but rarely do you hallucinate that something's missing.
Rarely could you stand in the living room and simply not see the elephant that's standing in front of you.
Anything could happen, but that would be very rare.
So the fact that there are a lot of people who clearly, clearly see impeachable offenses, while other people looking at the same information say, I don't see anything.
It just tells you all you need to know that it will not be impeachable.
So let's say that that's already done.
Here's another prediction.
It's on Iran.
Now, predicting that Iran will have a revolution or they'll change their government is always a dicey proposition because anybody who's predicted that for the last 20 or 30 years has been wrong.
But here's a little predictive piece of information.
So there's some apparently pretty bad economic protests going on in Iran.
Banks have been burned.
Businesses have been burned.
People are in the streets.
And it's mostly about the price of gasoline and oil, I guess, went way up.
The government raised those prices.
So, but here's the predictive part.
Iran turned off the exterior, the external internet.
So you can still use the internet to get the stuff within Iran.
But they can no longer get from the Iranian internet to the rest of the world.
Do you see where this is going?
There are two conditions which guarantee that the Iranian regime will fall.
Two conditions.
One is if they leave internet access for their people.
If you give the people in Iran internet access...
They'll eventually organize, they'll figure out what's going on, and they will change their own government.
So the one way you can guarantee that in the long run, it might not happen tomorrow, but in the long run you can guarantee that Iran will change is if they have access to the internet and a fully unventored internet.
The second way that Iran is guaranteed to change its leadership, whether they like it or not, is if they close down the internet.
There are only two conditions.
They leave it open, in which case they don't have a chance, or they close it, in which case they don't have a chance.
Because the Iranian population skews very young.
Yeah, so it skews very young.
What happens when people who are very young have a taste of the internet, and then the government takes it away from them?
How does that go over?
It doesn't go over well at all.
So I think there are two conditions that guarantee the Iranian regime will change, and those are the only two conditions.
You either have the internet or you don't.
Either way, they're doomed.
It's just a question of how long it takes.
So I think the Ayatollah's age and health will be the big factor here.
He'll probably hang on as long as he's healthy.
But that might not be that long.
Could be a few years. I give them five years.
I give them five years before the Iranian regime turns into something different.
Alright. There's a shocking poll.
A shocking poll.
That's saying that a poll of 16 to 24 year olds found that 28% had never heard of Stalin.
Almost half had never heard of Lenin.
And 70% have never heard of a mousy tongue.
Is that surprising?
No, not even a little.
Here's a question you should ask young people, and when I say young, I'll say anybody under 30.
Anybody under 30, ask this question.
How many people died in World War II for all countries in the world, both civilian and military?
How many people died in World War II? I've been asking this question for 20 years.
30 years I've been asking this question.
What do you think young people say when you ask them how many people died in World War II? Sometimes they say thousands.
Right. Sometimes they say thousands.
Sometimes, and this is rare, they'll say maybe a million.
Maybe a million people.
The correct answer is about 60 million people.
60 million.
If they say a million, you should remind them, no, the Holocaust alone was 6 million.
Now, if somebody says 6 million, they're mistaken because they're confusing the Holocaust with all of World War II. It was a subset.
6 million is just your starting point.
If you count China, Russia, and all those deaths, U.S., etc., Europe, it's about 60 million.
Now, if you don't know that, should you be allowed to vote?
Seems like that should be the minimum requirement.
You know, if somebody had guessed, oh, I don't know, 20 or 30 million, and the real number is 60 million, I wouldn't hold that against them.
Because the difference between, you know, 20 and 30 million dying and 60 million is, of course, double.
But it's the same point that another World War II would be the worst thing we could ever have.
Whereas if you think only a few thousand people died, do you mind another war?
It's only a few thousand people out of 7 billion.
You wouldn't even notice it.
So... The fact that young people don't know that communism and some form of socialism have killed tens of millions of people is certainly a problem.
Somebody says you looked it up and it's 73 million.
I know that number keeps getting raised.
I've never heard 73 million, but it could be right.
Again, it doesn't matter if it's 60 million or 73 million.
It's sort of the same point.
Alright. An interesting thing is happening...
Oh, let's talk more about the Xi impeachment.
So, special advisor to Mike Pence, Jennifer Williams, apparently told the House impeachment dudes and dudettes, quote, Trump's...
The Trump request that Ukraine open a Biden probe was unusual and inappropriate.
Alright, so somebody on Pence's team...
said at the time that the Trump request to look into Biden in Ukraine was unusual and inappropriate.
Now, what is the job of an advisor?
Advisors don't really advise you to do crazy things.
Advisors usually just try to keep you out of trouble, right?
So for an advisor to say, hey, that's unusual and inappropriate...
That's just sort of doing their job.
Now, what would be the personality of an entrepreneur?
An entrepreneur is always doing things that are unusual and sometimes inappropriate.
If you look at some of the major corporations in the world, when they were startups, their founders were doing things that were unusual and inappropriate.
Pretty much all the time.
I'm not going to name names, but if you look into your history of your big tech companies, you're going to find some interesting, unusual, and inappropriate behavior.
So the entrepreneurial mind doesn't have the same number of limitations.
The political advisor's mind is all about the limitations.
It's all about what you can't do.
So are we worried...
That Jennifer Williams had the feeling that this was unusual and inappropriate.
I don't mind saying it was unusual.
Do you? Inappropriate is just an opinion, as somebody is saying in the comments.
Inappropriate is an opinion.
Now, shouldn't you need to back up inappropriate with why?
Isn't the why missing?
Here's the difference between an entrepreneur and a political animal.
Are you ready? Hey, Scott, you can't do that.
That's inappropriate and unusual.
As an entrepreneur, I say, I know that.
But what's the downside?
Well, it's unusual.
I know it's unusual.
That's why I'm doing it.
Because if everybody else was doing the same thing, it wouldn't make any sense.
So I know it's unusual.
Why is it inappropriate?
Well, it's just not done.
Well, you already said that.
You said it was unusual.
Tell me what the problem is.
It's inappropriate.
In what way?
In what way that affects something, or costs me money, or hurts me, my reputation, or something?
Well, it's just not done.
Okay, you're just replacing words with other words.
I'm still not hearing a reason.
So here I'm role-playing an entrepreneur.
If you tell an entrepreneur, That the entrepreneur's plan, which looks like a good plan, except that it's unusual, and other people think it's inappropriate, but they can't tell you why.
Maybe you go ahead and do it anyway.
In the political context, you don't like to do things that are inappropriate.
But in the real world, those are the people who are getting stuff done.
The people who are seeing their, let's say their The people who see their prison walls as illusions.
Those people will do unusual things.
Things that look inappropriate to people in other bubbles.
That is inappropriate. I can't think of a reason why.
But I'm sure it's inappropriate.
All right. So, wouldn't worry too much about the impeachment having any real effect.
Here's something to worry about if you're a Trump supporter.
Pete Buttigieg.
Now, Pete, because he got good high poll numbers in Iowa, suddenly looks more practical, doesn't he?
Suddenly looks more practical.
Buttigieg only needed one thing.
The only thing he needed was for the public to think he had a chance.
Because they want to win more than anything.
So the fact that he polled well in Iowa tells Democrats that he could actually win.
It's the first time they've really felt that.
I would say it's the first time I felt it.
I always thought he had the capability, but he didn't have any kind of momentum.
He hadn't set the table right through no fault of his own.
The polls just weren't there for him.
But now they are.
So you only need that one poll.
To make it look like you're credible.
Now, some have said he might do well in Iowa and New Hampshire, but when he gets to South Carolina with a large black vote, he's going to run into a wall.
Maybe. Maybe.
We'll see. I don't know that the average person, and certainly not the average black person in the United States, I don't think they know much about him.
And the complaints about him are kind of smallish.
I think he fired a black police chief when he took over as mayor, but that was just one personnel decision.
I don't think that really was race.
So he's got minor complaints, but he's a Democrat.
He's always on the right side with all the race stuff.
So, I got a feeling he's going to make quite a play for the nomination, that's what I think.
Compared to Bloomberg, Bloomberg is starting out his maybe running, maybe not campaign, maybe not a campaign, by apologizing for his past decisions on stop and frisk.
There's a good way to run for president.
Well, I'd like to start running for president by apologizing for all the stuff I did before.
It's like what he's most famous for in some ways.
So I don't see the 77-year-old who's starting his campaign by apologizing as being a credible candidate.
Bill Maher had an interesting monologue at the end of his show.
Before they go into hiatus, I guess, they take some time off over the holidays.
And he made a play for people to figure out how to live with each other because we sort of have to.
Here he means the left and the right, the Democrats and the Republicans.
And he said that he would try to tone down his insults of the other team.
I don't know that I believe that, because it's just so much fun to insult the other team, and that's most of his show, so I don't know if he'll be able to stick with that.
But I like the fact... That Marr seems to be softening a little bit.
Softening in terms of, you know, we must eradicate the other side.
And he's specifically come down on the side of, okay, we're not going to eradicate them.
We have to figure out how to live together.
I call that progress.
I've been saying for a while that I think, and, you know, this would be a risky prediction, but it looks like Marr He's on this long, slow journey to being closer to a Trump supporter than a detractor.
He's not there.
But you see these little movements away from the craziness of the left, because surely he's watching the impeachment and saying to himself, okay, maybe I wouldn't have played it that way if I were president, maybe I didn't want the president to play it that way, but it doesn't look like an impeachable offense.
And I got a feeling that Barr is looking at this, and I don't want to read his mind.
I'm just saying that any reasonable observer watching this could start having some doubts about either side if they wanted to.
All right. So those are the things that are happening right now.
Oh, the Prince Andrew story gets funnier.
So Prince Andrew, of course, was associated with Epstein, and apparently the reason that Prince Andrew stayed at Epstein's house even after Epstein was convicted of pedophile behavior is that he said he was just too honorable.
Prince Andrew was just too honorable a person.
What? I mean, it didn't even make any sense, but okay.
So he did such a bad job, Prince Andrew did, that his PR person quit.
You have to do a really bad job to make your PR person quit.
Even the PR person was like, I'm out, I'm out.
I can't even associate with this guy anymore.
And then today there's a further report that Prince Andrew used the N-word in private some years ago.
Now, let me say this about that.
Probably not. Probably not.
I don't believe that Prince Andrew used the N-word in private years ago.
That's exactly the kind of story you should just discount.
Now, I wasn't there.
If anything's possible.
But it's the sort of story you should just flush as soon as you hear it.
Just like, okay, if you don't have a recording, you know, you're going to need, for a claim like that, I need a little evidence.
I don't want to live in a world where people can just say, blah, blah, I'll use the N-word, I'm the only one who heard it.
Yeah, I'm not buying. Whether you said it or not, I don't want to live in the world where people can make that claim without printing good evidence.
So I just discount it.
All right. And we hope he did not.
We hope he did not use that word, but I kind of think he didn't, would be my guess.
If I had to bet, more likely he didn't than he did.
Thank you. Somebody telling me my book is great.
Yeah, there's this weird connection between Andrew and pizza.
Yeah, that's a funny coincidence that the simulation has served up.
Yeah, so Mike Cernovich has been talking about how he wrote articles essentially identifying the whistleblower As a leaker back in 2017.
I looked at the, I re-read what he wrote then and he was totally on it.
I can tell you that back in, at the very beginning of the administration, I was hearing from my sources that McMaster's was sort of the problem and then Time seems to have borne that out.
So I won't use the name of the whistleblower just because you all know it anyway.
I don't need to cause trouble for myself.
You all know the name. And it doesn't look like the whistleblower is credible even a little bit.
Somebody says Tulsi reached 9% on a YouGov poll.
And that would be interesting. And who did that come out of?
I'll have to go take a look at that poll.
So I would expect Tulsi and Buttigieg to both be making a move.
Maybe even Klobuchar.
Because Biden's going to disappear.
And his support has to go somewhere.
All right. I don't have much else to say today.
So... We won't say it either.
All right. I still haven't made a time to talk to Tulsi Gabbard on Periscope, but her campaign did follow up a few times, so I know it's on their list of things I want to do, sort of a scheduling thing.
All right.
What about the stone pardon?
Well, as I tweeted, I think the Roger Stone pardon would be the easiest pardon of all time because the president would be able to completely control the narrative at that point because you're going to talk about that.
You can't not talk about that.
And I think his case for Stone is really good because Stone was lying in a process...
That was a witch hunt.
So if you get caught lying to stop a witch hunt, well, I don't know.
Lying to stop a witch hunt is not the worst crime, and I would certainly see a pardon being in order.
Why not Flynn? I would think Flynn would get pardoned at the same time.
If the president does the pardons, he should do it at the same time.
Because it makes it a bigger story.
And it's a better story if you do it at the same time.
Probably we'll come after the IG report.
I'm starting to think the stupid IG report is just never going to come.
Is there any reason we're waiting this long?
I don't know. Maybe the IG report will be interesting, maybe not.
I'm not going to assume that it will break the world in half.
Let's talk about George Conway.
So Kellyanne Conway's husband, George, who's a big anti-Trumper.
There is something to be said about choosing your critics.
And I've got to say, the President is really lucky.
And that his critics are such, let's say they're not TV friendly.
If your worst critics are George Conway, Adam Schiff, and Nadler, that's a good place to be.
I would want those three people to be my critics.
Because they're so non-sympathetic.
I mean, it's hard to say, yeah, I'm with those guys, because they look like people you wouldn't want to hang out with.
Just reading your comments here. - Yeah.
How can George Conway still be married?
Well, here's the thing.
You never know what the real dynamics of a marriage are.
So I don't judge any of that.
Who knows? There's something about that marriage that we don't understand.
And that's all you need to know.
You don't need to understand it.
I saw a little bit of Barr's speech, just a clip.
Didn't seem too important.
For removed...
Okay, just reading your comments.
Alright, that's all I got now.
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