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Dec. 17, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
40:33
Episode 759 Scott Adams: Schiff, Comey, Impeachment and More Fun
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
It's another beautiful morning, and it's time.
It's time for the simultaneous sip.
Yes, Coffee with Scott Adams begins now.
But the real fun begins after the sip, and all you need for that is, well...
A copper, mugger, glasses, nifter, sign, jealous, tanker, thermos, flask, canteen, grail, goblet, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Simultaneous sip. Here it comes.
Go. Oh, yeah.
That just unleashes the tiger within, doesn't it?
Just like that.
Alright, let's talk about some stuff.
So, in the category of perfectly predictable, let me tell you the most perfectly predictable thing in the world.
Mike Bloomberg is being accused of various frat-like, let's say, male behavior.
What's the best way to say it?
Sort of a Me Too-ish kind of a situation over the course of his career.
Now, do we think those things are true?
Or do we think those things are false?
Well, no way to know.
But it's certainly predictable that we were going to hear of some, right?
Do you think there was any chance that a billionaire at that age did not have some MeTooing in his background?
Any chance at all?
No, not really.
There was no chance that he had nothing.
So how bad is it?
How true is it? Are the individual accusations true?
I have no idea, but we knew that there would be accusations.
Let me tell you what he's accused of.
He's accused of, among other things, one of the accusations that's specific is that there was a woman who worked for Bloomberg who, I guess, got pregnant, and then she alleges that Bloomberg says, kill it. And then she said, what?
And then he repeated, kill it, meaning abort the baby.
Now, do you think that really happened?
I'm gonna say, if I had to bet, you know, gun to head, Scott, you have to put a bet down.
Did Mike Bloomberg ever say to a pregnant woman, you have to kill your fetus?
I'm gonna say no.
Now, there may have been some conversation about the pros and cons of terminating a pregnancy.
That could have happened. Maybe.
Possible. But do you think he actually said that?
I mean, really?
I'm not defending Mike Bloomberg.
I have no idea what he has done or what he's not done.
But just on the surface of it, Does that pass the sniff test?
It does not.
Which doesn't mean it's false, because we can't tell.
But if you're going to ask me what sounds credible on the surface, on the surface, it doesn't even sound a little bit credible.
Here's some other quotes which have been attributed to Mike Bloomberg, which I think you have to take with a grain of skepticism.
Here's one. He's allegedly said, I'd like to do that piece of meat.
Speaking of some attractive woman, apparently.
Quote, I'd like to do that piece of meat.
Do you think that Bloomberg, or indeed, Any man with an education ever said the sentence, I'd like to do that piece of meat?
Maybe. Maybe.
You know, certainly...
And then the second one that he's accused of is that he said to somebody, I would do you in a second.
And it sounds like that was a witticism based on whatever was happening in the conversation as opposed to just out of left field.
Now, do I believe that Mike Bloomberg or any other male who has been in business for many decades...
Would have ever said to a female colleague in a...
It looks like this was probably a joking situation, but we don't know the context.
Has any man ever said to a female colleague, I'd do you in a second?
Yeah. Yeah.
That's probably happened about a billion times.
Not defending it?
I'm not giving you an opinion, not saying it's good or bad.
I can imagine situations in which the people know each other really well, have a history of joking exactly in this way, in which the woman would just laugh.
Because it might be, you know, part of a million things they've said to each other, each of them just as bad.
In the real world, women say things just as bad as men.
By the way, you knew that, right?
You know that the women say things that are just as bad as the men, right?
So, is it possible that Mike Bloomberg could be in a situation in which everybody, both the men and the women, were saying things that would be deeply inappropriate by 2019 standards, but in 1970, whatever, didn't seem that different, because everybody was doing it, men and women.
Could he have said, I'd do you in a second as part of a joke with people he knew well?
Who knows? We have no way of saying.
But certainly you'd have to look at the context and know, did he have some reason to think that the people there would just think it was a joke and wouldn't mean anything?
You don't know. But it was very predictable that he would get MeToo'd and I would imagine that takes him out, wouldn't you?
You can imagine a Republican getting Me Too'd, let's say President Trump, and surviving.
But you can't really imagine a Democrat surviving through the primaries with a big old Me Too thing hanging over him.
I would also expect that if Tom Steyer ever got more traction, you know, in other words, if his poll numbers went up, you would almost certainly see accusations against him.
I'm not saying that they would be true.
But don't you think Tom Steyer, because he's old enough, he's been in business a long time, don't you think there'd be some accusations against him?
Again, I'm not saying he's done anything, and I'm not saying any accusations would be true, but wouldn't you expect him?
You should expect him.
All right. Did you see the video of Adam Schiff doing a town hall?
So he was doing a town hall.
I think the topic was on Armenian genocide.
I believe that was the topic.
But there were some Trump supporters who went there and started shouting, liar, treason, liar, and caused a big ruckus, and they were shown the door.
And I thought to myself, That's 2020, right?
Let me ask you this.
Adam Schiff lied about what was in the secret information that he saw and David Nunes and some other people saw before we did, and he stood in front of the world, he wrote a memo on it, and then he repeated it, and he lied to the world about all the things that we now know he lied about.
He knew he was lying.
He knew that the impact of that lie could be to overthrow a legally elected president.
He knew the stakes, he knew what he was doing, and he knew he was lying, because he couldn't have not known.
Everybody looked at the same document.
So, I'm trying to think if anybody in my lifetime, I think technically I was alive, maybe a baby during McCarthy.
When was McCarthy? The McCarthy hearings, late 50s, I forget.
But I don't know that any politician has ever done anything worse to the country than what Adam Schiff has done.
Can you... Oh, he was 1954?
Okay, that was before I was born.
Can you think of an example?
This is an honest question.
Honest question. Who in, let's say, my lifetime, or yours, who exactly has done something worse to the country as a politician than Adam Schiff?
Can you make some suggestions?
So, we're not going to count McCarthy, because he was before my lifetime.
Somebody says, Bush, if you count the weapons of mass destruction in the Iraq war, you would be right.
You would be right.
I don't know if Bush lied about WMDs.
That's not clear. He may have been just wanting to see what he saw.
But there's no doubt it was a mistake.
The Iraq War and the WMDs.
We know that now. But it might have been just a mistake.
We don't know if Bush was actually lying.
Ali North? Not really.
Obama weaponizing the FBI, NSA, and CIA? That's pretty bad.
Yeah, that was pretty bad.
All right, well, I guess we had quite a few suggestions here.
All right. But I would imagine that Adam Schiff will never again, and I mean never again, as in not even once, I doubt he'll ever be able to speak at a public event where there won't be patriots there shouting him down and calling him a liar and accusing him of treason.
Because, you know, we live in a country where that sort of thing happens, and I can't think of a better reason for that to happen.
So I would imagine that will happen everywhere that he goes from now on.
I think 2020 is going to be lit, as I said.
Rudy Giuliani is making news again.
Apparently he has documents.
He has documents that are going to prove one thing or another.
I'm not going to really talk about in detail what Rudy claims he has, because it's too vague at this point.
Does he really have something?
Does Rudy really have the goods?
Does he have documents that prove people lied and there's some bad action going on there?
Maybe. Maybe.
I don't know. But do you think that Rudy would have done what he did, which is go over there and everybody in the world was saying, Rudy, what are you doing?
Even the president's supporters were saying, Rudy, Rudy, maybe it's time to calm down.
Rudy. I know you're trying to help, Rudy, but maybe a little less help would be good right now.
So even the people who support the president, and certainly the people who don't, I think everybody was saying, Rudy, Rudy, maybe stop doing that Ukraine investigating now.
Maybe now's the time. Maybe now.
This would be a good time to stop.
But he keeps going.
Why? Why?
Why would somebody as smart and as experienced as Rudy Giuliani keep doing something that literally everyone in the world told them to stop doing?
I can only think of one reason.
Well, two reasons if you imagine he's crazy.
If you think he's mentally incompetent or crazy or something, that would be a reason.
But I don't see that.
I mean, when I listen to him talk, he doesn't look crazy to me.
So the only explanation that, well, maybe it's not the only one, but the one that makes the most sense is that he knows more than we do.
That he knows more than we do.
So that's something to keep an eye on.
Maybe not. Maybe not.
We'll find out. But the best explanation for why he's doing something that everybody says he shouldn't do is that he knows more than us.
So he knows there's something there that could be there.
All right, we'll find out. James Comey admitted in an interview with Mike Wallace that there were mistakes made by the FBI, and there were terrible mistakes, and he feels really bad about it.
I guess that was the best play for Comey, because he could no longer say there were no mistakes, and he couldn't not take responsibility because he was the boss.
So I think he had to do this.
So in terms of Comey's strategy, he probably made a lot of sense to finally just say, okay, there were a bunch of mistakes.
Because that's the least bad thing we can say about him.
If he goes right at it and he says, hey, it was just a bunch of mistakes, our process wasn't good, then it doesn't sound so bad as a co-attempt.
Now, I don't have any reason to believe that Comey was personally involved in a co-attempt, but it's certainly smart for him to get out front and frame it as a bunch of mistakes and incompetence, and Let me just stop and every once in a while you get into the details and you lose sight of the bigger picture.
I want you to back up for a moment just for a laugh and look at the bigger picture.
Have you noticed that people that go after the president don't have good outcomes?
I don't know what could possibly amuse me more than James Comey, who has been one of the biggest critics of the president, Having to defend himself from accusations of treason and his best defense is gross incompetence on his part.
How do you not enjoy that?
President Trump has been demonizing this guy forever.
Turns out there are good reasons for that.
And now Comey's best play to not look like he was involved with...
To make him look like he's not involved with something that would be the death penalty, I think.
Treason. His best defense is that he personally is massively incompetent and did a terrible job.
If you ever get a chance to destroy your enemies...
The phase that you will enjoy the most is where they're defending themselves by trying to convince you that they're not really evil.
They're just really, really bad at their job.
You have to enjoy that.
But we are still grappling with the question of whether the Mistakes, quote unquote, were intentional?
Were they part of an organized conspiracy?
Were they individuals acting within the realm of their own bias?
I think that you still have two hypotheses that fit the evidence.
So the evidence, so based on what we know so far, before Durham tells us more, obviously Durham knows more because he disagreed with Horowitz, but we don't know why.
So at the moment, the evidence that's available to us would support the hypothesis that there was an organized conspiracy.
But it also fits the evidence.
The evidence also fits that it was just a bunch of people with Trump derangement syndrome who maybe couldn't yet really see that what they were doing was so bad at the time.
In retrospect, as they look back on it with some distance, they probably look back on their own actions as just guessing.
I have no idea what they're thinking.
But it probably looks worse to them now That it did when they were doing it.
Because it's not that unusual for people in a big organization to cut corners.
It's not unusual to act unbiased.
But it's different if you think you're trying to do the right thing versus trying to do the wrong thing.
If they were trying to overthrow the government and it was just because they preferred their candidate win, it's just because they wanted to keep their jobs or any of those things, well, that's pretty, pretty evil.
But it could have been the other thing.
Somebody says naive, naive, naive.
I'm going to block you for saying naive three times.
That's one of my red lines.
I remind you that you can always say what you disagree with, but just saying you're naive, Scott, will get you blocked.
As you just saw. And keep in mind, I don't know that naivety explains the fact that I'm saying that there are two hypotheses that both fit the evidence.
That's just a fact, right?
Now, it's perfectly fair for you to say one of those is way more likely, in my opinion, for all these reasons.
That's fair. But it's also fair that both hypotheses fit the evidence.
Even if you prefer one strongly.
All right, so we'll find out from Durham.
You know, one of the things about this whole Trump collusion, Comey, FBI, this whole story is that it's complicated.
And it takes a long time To grasp enough of the different moving parts, they can start to see it as a whole.
And I would say I'm only just getting there.
I'm only just getting there.
And when you see it as a whole, and let's say the way that Bill Barr explains it, if you look at Bill Barr's explanation of where we're at, it's really, really bad.
It's way worse than Than I assumed would be the case for most of the time we've been talking about this.
So my current opinion, as I've been moving between, is it just biased, people acting biased, or is it some mass conspiracy where people really do have to go to jail forever?
That needle is moving closer to, this looks like something where people have to go to jail forever.
Now we're still waiting for...
The involvement, or not, of Brennan and Clapper.
To me, I think, if there's a grand conspiracy, those guys are probably part of it.
But, if Durham looks around and he says, no, there's nothing going on, it's just a bunch of people acting biased, but some of them might have to go to jail because they were so biased or they did something so bad.
But that wouldn't look the same as an organized conspiracy Conspiracy.
If it's organized, there's going to be a leader.
So we'll see if Durham knows who that is.
All right. Larry Charles, who you might know as the director of Borat, You might know him as one of the early creative people and writers on The Seinfeld Show.
And you might also know him as my co-executive director on the short-lived Dilbert animated TV show.
So I know Larry, one of the greatest guys in the world, in person.
Politics aside, Larry Charles is just one of the most beloved people you'll ever meet.
And I would concur with that.
Awesome guy. He's been saying some provocative things politically.
And one of them is he predicted that there would be a riot if Trump is removed from office.
If he's impeached and he doesn't leave, I guess.
And I thought to myself, I'll bet that's true.
If Trump gets impeached by the House and then the Senate, no matter what the so-called trial looks like, if the Senate votes to say, all right, it's just a bunch of BS, we dismiss this, I think there could be riots.
Because Antifa is just looking for reasons to riot, right?
So I think that's fair to assume.
That no matter which way it goes, there would be riots.
Now, if Trump is impeached, but the Senate decides not to remove him from office, yes, I think there will be riots.
Antifa would be rioting.
Let's go the other way.
Let's say there is impeachment, and then the Senate surprisingly decided to remove Trump from office.
Now, they'd have to have some new information, because there's nothing at the moment that suggests they would do that.
But suppose they did.
Would there be riots?
There might be.
There might be.
And when I was talking about the Adam Schiff stuff where the Trump supporters were disrupting his public appearance, I was asking myself, what would it look like if Trump supporters ever got mad?
Because that hasn't happened, right?
I mean, Trump supporters complain about this or that, and they complain about snowflakes and social justice warriors and blah, blah, blah.
So it's not that everybody isn't complaining all the time.
But mad is different.
Being actually mad.
Not just politically mad, not yelling at your television mad, but actually mad.
Mad as in a citizen mad.
What would happen? We haven't seen it, right?
I think the bar would be pretty high for Trump supporters to start violating the law in any massive way.
Sort of the way Antifa does.
I think the bar would be very high because Trump supporters are typically not inclined to go out and create violence over politics.
It's just not something that's natural to them.
But there's some point that it could happen.
All right. But I don't predict it.
Have you noticed that Black Lives Matter disappeared?
What happened to Black Lives Matter?
Why were they such a big thing around the time of the election and the inauguration?
And what was the last time you heard of Black Lives Matter?
Now keep in mind, Black Lives Matter wasn't in one city.
They were national.
They were in a lot of big places.
Why did they disappear?
Does anybody have a theory for why they disappeared?
Yes, the funding stopped.
The funding stopped.
Now, was Black Lives Matter funded by American entities or foreign entities?
Foreign entities.
Yeah. So I can't prove that, but I have it on good authority.
Let's just say that I talked to somebody who believes he knows the answer to that question and said with complete certainty that it was funded by foreign money.
So how would you like to be going after President Trump For allegedly, you know, trying to influence the election using another country, Ukraine or Russia or whatever.
How would you like to be making that argument while at the same time one of your biggest protest groups is funded by a foreign entity?
Right? So I have a feeling that funding for Black Lives Matter disappeared because it would be politically inconvenient to be funding something that's affecting the elections like that.
All right. Let's see what else we got.
So, this is fun.
I said yesterday on Periscope that it would be fun to interview John McAfee, founder of McAfee Antivirus Stuff, who is, I think he's wanted in the United States for something, I don't know what. And so he's living in another country, but he's running for president in the United States, which would be difficult since he can't enter the United States.
But he's one of the most interesting people in the world and I asked People, if they'd like to see me interview them, it took all of one day for user Mitch Broderick, who might be on this Periscope right now, hi Mitch, to tweet at McAfee and ask him if he'd be on my Periscope, and then McAfee responded with an email address to schedule it.
So I just emailed him this morning.
I emailed the address to see if I can schedule him.
Sue, we might see that.
That would be fun. I think McAfee is on my very short list of people that I really want to talk to.
Because I can't imagine it would be boring.
Somebody tweeted today that I, Scott Adams, am a British globalist paid troll.
So there's actually somebody who is smart enough to write sentences and use Twitter.
Who has been watching me and has determined from watching me that I'm a British globalist paid troll.
Good take.
Good take. Okay.
Here's the funniest comment from Chuck Schumer.
He was talking about what rules the Senate would have for the impeachment trial, should it come to that.
And Chuck Schumer wants it to be a real trial with real witnesses, with one exception.
He says that Hunter Biden shouldn't testify because it would turn the process into a circus.
Oh my...
Do you think there's any chance in the world that if the Senate has a process that allows both sides to have witnesses, do you think there's any chance that Hunter Biden won't be called to be a witness?
Oh, Hunter Biden's gonna be called to be a witness.
So is Adam Schiff.
So... Wow.
I could not be more entertained by any of this.
But it seems like I think we know which direction it's going to go.
I don't know if the Senate will ultimately have...
I mean, it's kind of a tough call.
If they have witnesses, they might do a better job of showing how bad the other side is, but the other side will have their witnesses too, and maybe something will come up that didn't have to come up, and it could be bad for the president.
So if I were the president's lawyer, I'd say cut your losses, just vote, you don't need any witnesses.
And just treat it like it's a ridiculous process and it hasn't met even the minimum standard of being credible, so you don't need a trial.
Just vote on it. Just wipe it off the table and say, sorry, it was ridiculous.
We can't take it seriously.
But, of course, people then would complain that they subverted the system, but they're going to complain that way either way.
So that's the way I'd play it.
I tweeted out this morning.
You've seen it before, but it's the transcript of the fine people comments from President Trump.
And what I suggested in my tweet is that you print it out.
And keep it with you when you meet with your family for Thanksgiving.
Just have it in your back pocket.
Or take a screenshot and just keep it on your phone.
And I mentioned this before, I think last year, but it never gets less fun.
And the task is this, when your relative starts complaining that Trump is a big racist, ask them for an example.
And then when they mention the fine people thing, which they will, you say, hey, well, let's see exactly what he said.
Could you read this? Read it out loud.
See if you can get somebody who believes that the president called the neo-Nazis fine people, see if you can get them to read it out loud to you.
That's the key. See if you can talk them into reading out loud The entire thing, including the sentences where he says, I'm not talking about the white nationalists and neo-Nazis.
They should be condemned totally.
Now, here's my prediction.
That you won't be able to get any of your relatives to read it out loud to you.
That's my prediction.
If you can, you're going to notice some cognitive dissonance that's really fun.
And then they're going to start saying, yes, but there weren't any people there who were fine people if they were marching with racists.
And then you say, but the news is already reported, New York Times, et cetera.
And I personally, you could actually use me.
I personally have interviewed several people who attended the Charlottesville event.
And they all had the same story, that there were marchers, the neo-Nazis, there were Antifa.
And this is the important part.
There were all kinds of other people who were not marching and were not Antifa.
They were there for their own reasons, some pro, some against.
So you can use me as an authority.
I have interviewed those people.
And And I can guarantee that there were lots of people there for their own reasons, because it's America, and there's no such thing as a big protest without lots of people there with completely different ideas from each other.
It's the most normal thing in the world.
In fact, if Charlottesville had been the only time in this country when people only had two opinions, neo-Nazis and Antifa, and there was no third opinion, That's not even possible.
It's America. You can't get that many people in one place and only have two opinions.
That's not even a thing.
You'll have all kinds of opinions if you have a big group.
It's America. Damn it.
We've got different opinions.
Here's a question for you.
The press is reporting.
You'll probably see a lot of this because it's the end of the year.
People like to do the statistics for the year at the end.
So apparently Trump is now up to, according to the fact-checkers who don't like him, over 15,000 lies since he took office.
15,000 lies.
Now, here's a test for your relatives.
Relatives, can you name any one of the 15,000 lies...
That damaged the country, the way that Schiff's lies about the FISA process, in which he said everything was fine and the Steele dossier wasn't important to that.
All of it was just complete lies.
Which of any of Trump's 15,000 lies was as bad as that one lie by Schiff?
Give me an example.
Was it when he lied about the size of his rally crowd?
Was it when he lied and said that it's the best unemployment in 50 years but it was really only 40?
Yeah, which lie was that?
The one that was damaging?
I've said this many times, but it's worth repeating before you go talk to your relatives, that there are different kinds of political lies.
Some of those lies are things like what you'll do in the future, and you know maybe they won't.
Some of those lies are about how bad the other side is, but they're not really that bad.
Some of it is about how good your record is, but it's not really that good.
You left down some context.
Those are normal political lies, and the president has 15,000 of them, apparently.
But what Schiff did, which is reading the secret documents that he had access to and only the special people in Congress had access to, he went in there, he read them, and then he told the public the opposite of what they said.
At the same time, Nunes was telling us accurately what they said.
So it's not even like we didn't have something to compare it to.
What is worse than that?
I can't think of anything worse than that.
I can't even think of anything this close to that.
Can you? Give me an example.
So, I would say that Schiff...
It's got to be, if there were any kind of award for the most corrosive, worst politician in American history, he'd have to be in the running, right?
Who would be a worse politician in terms of effect on the world than Schiff?
I guess you said Bush before because of weapons mass destruction, which is not a bad point All right, I'm looking at your comments Somebody says Harry Reid.
Joe McCarthy, yeah.
McCain, maybe.
All right, so let's see if Schiff can get voted out of his office because he'll have some competition this time.
All right. Somebody says, what do you think Schiff lies about?
Are you kidding, Nick?
What he lied about was the whole FISA process where he said it was done correctly and that the Steele dossier was not part of that decision.
And now we know all of that was untrue.
Tip O'Neill, somebody says.
Somebody hates on Crenshaw?
What did Crenshaw do?
Have I discussed the Afghanistan papers?
I haven't. But, you know, that fits perfectly in the context of what I'm talking about with there are different kinds of lies.
There's one kind of lie that your government will always tell you.
So you have to kind of treat it as...
Maybe sort of a normal lie, one you should expect.
So that should be different than other kinds of lies.
And yes, Jennifer Barbosa is running against Schiff this next election.
And I've offered to help her because I think Schiff needs to go.
So we'll talk more about her as the year goes on.
But yeah, so it seems that our military and our government was lying to the people of the United States about how well we were doing in Afghanistan.
But is that important?
Because don't we have a history of we always lie to our public about how we're doing militarily?
It just felt like business as usual.
Because I'm not aware of any time...
This is just personal, but I'm not aware of any time I thought we were winning in Afghanistan.
So if they were lying about how well we were doing in Afghanistan, it wasn't a lie that registered with me.
It didn't register at all.
People are asking, is Jennifer Barbosa a Democrat?
She's not. She is an independent.
So she'll be running as an independent.
Apparently there are more independents in that area than there are Democrats or Republicans.
Somebody's asking about the Scott and Christina video that's coming.
We have recorded it.
So Christina interviewed me on a number of topics, including my book.
And we're looking at it now, but the lighting wasn't quite where we wanted it to be.
So we're trying to decide now whether we can adjust the lighting in post or maybe not post it.
Because I wanted this one to be good quality.
so we'll see but it is recorded somebody says did I notice that Black Lives Matter and pirates disappeared at the same time That's funny. It's not true, but it's a funny comment.
Can I play the piano like Christina?
No, I can't.
I don't think many people can play the piano like Christina can.
She does seem to have a special gift.
All right. I will talk to you later.
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