All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 18, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
36:54
Episode 760 Scott Adams: Shampeachment Theater, Peak TDS, Future Crimes
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody!
Come on in here. It's time for another episode of Coffee with Scott Adams.
Featuring the Simultaneous Sip, which is coming up.
Coming up fast.
Coming at you. Coming at you fast and hard.
And all you need...
All you need for the simultaneous sip.
Well, it doesn't take much.
Not really. All you need is a cupper among our glasses, snifter, stye and chalice, stanker, thermos, flask, canteen, grail, goblin, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I'd like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, the simultaneous sip.
Yes, it's that good.
Go! Oh, for those of you who made it to full simultaneity, pretty good, pretty good.
Those of you joining later, I think you'll find that the asynchronous SIP is pretty darn good as well.
All right, so let me do a little check here on how many people are paying attention.
When the discussion started about the About the House likely improving impeachment and then turning it over to the Senate for something like a trial.
President Trump said, yeah, bring it on.
Let's have witnesses and let's have a full trial.
A lot of people who support President Trump said, well, if the president's asking for a full trial, We support it too.
So a lot of the president's supporters, both in the press and in the real world and social media, they sort of joined with President Trump and they were saying, yeah, give us some witnesses.
We'll put Joe Biden on there.
We'll put Hunter Biden. We'll put Adam Schiff on there.
Yeah, bring it on.
Bring it on. Who was the only person that you saw say that you should not do that?
Who is the only person you know who told you from the beginning President Trump should not have a trial because you don't want to introduce new evidence when you've already won the case?
We already know that the Senate will vote the impeachment away.
So why introduce new risk when you don't need to?
Now, do you remember when I was saying that and absolutely nobody else in the world was saying it?
Can we get a confirmation here in the comments so those of you who are new know that I'm not just making stuff up?
Yes. From day one, I said, no, no, no, no, no.
Just voted away.
Don't have a trial. How many of you said, you're crazy, Scott, you're crazy, and even the president is saying we should have a trial?
If you don't get the following thing, You're missing a big part of the play.
And when I say the play, I mean the show.
President Trump knows how to put on a show.
He knows how to do a defense, both legal and politically, but at the same time he's putting on the defense, he's always putting on a show.
It's always intentional, and it's always a good show.
Here's how this works.
And this is some advice you can take with you.
If you are ever accused of something, but it looks like there's not enough evidence to really convict you, you should demand a trial.
Even if you're sure that a trial would show there's no evidence in, you know, there's not enough evidence to convict you of anything, you should demand a trial.
You should demand witnesses.
You should demand that all the information get out under the following conditions.
You've got a lawyer who's telling you don't do that.
Do you see it yet?
The perfect situation, the perfect defense, is that the person who's accused is screaming at the top of his lungs from the start to the finish, I want more witnesses, I want more evidence, I want to prove my innocence, bring me the facts, bring it all the facts, spend as much money as you want, spend as much time as you want, bring anybody in to testify, that's how innocent I am.
As long as your own lawyer is saying, no, we're not going to do that.
We're definitely not going to do that because there's no case here and it would just be dumb to do something when you've already won the case.
So, Lindsey Graham soon after...
Soon after, who was the first in the political realm that I saw, anyway, say, let's not have any witnesses.
Let's just vote this thing away.
And now it looks like Mitch McConnell is on that page, and it looks like that's where we're heading.
Looks like they're going to hear the opening statements, and then they're going to say, okay, fine.
We got it. Voted away.
Now, I heard Greg Gunfield say something on The Five yesterday that has made me...
I've laughed and it's made me angry for almost a day because it wasn't obvious until he said it.
All right, ready? So you're going to have probably the same reaction I had.
As soon as you hear it, you're going to say, well, okay, that was obvious.
Why did I not see the obvious?
And here it is, as Greg explained.
If the Democrats are so sure that they have already shown that the president should be impeached because they had all the witnesses they wanted, all the evidence they wanted, and they're sure they have everything they need.
So why do they need more witnesses in the Senate?
Why are the Democrats even asking for it?
They've already made their case.
Not only that they made it, they're happy with it.
It's exactly what they wanted to show.
They believe that all the evidence that they thought was worth showing in the House, it's all there.
So, remind me again why they need more witnesses?
Because they think they're done.
And if they think they're done, and they've shown all that they need to show, and the Republicans are not interested in seeing more either, because they think it's done as well, Remind me which side wants the witnesses, because both sides say they don't need any.
Both sides say they don't need any, and yet they're arguing about whether they should have them.
The whole thing is just theater.
It's just impeachment theater.
All right. Now, are you mad?
The moment you hear it framed that way, you say to yourself, oh, oh yeah, that's kind of all you need to know.
If they wanted more witnesses, they would have called them.
Nothing new happened in the last week.
They didn't find some new information in the past week.
All right. So, it appears that we have reached the entertainment phase of the shampeachment.
And I made the following tweet this morning that I'm going to stand by.
And let's call it a prediction.
And it goes like this, that President Trump will change what impeachment means far more than impeachment will change what we think of the presidency, because he's a unique character.
Let me give you an example. Did the presidency change President Trump, or did President Trump change what the presidency was?
Trump changed the presidency.
We now understand a whole different range of actions and options and strategies and just his entire approach has changed what the presidency means.
He tweets instead of using, what do you call it, the press briefings, etc., He's changed everything.
So instead of the presidency changing the candidate, which is the normal way it goes, he changed the office.
Did you see him do the same thing to the entire Republican Party?
When President Trump was running to be the nominee for the Republican Party, what did everybody, including Republicans, say?
They said, you're not even a Republican.
You're barely a Republican.
You're so non-Republican, it doesn't even make sense that you're running to be the leader of the party that you have nothing in common with.
What do you say now?
95% approval within the Republican Party, and everybody smart says the same thing.
It's his party now.
He changed the Republican Party into a Trump party.
Now, it may change back when he's gone, but you see this over and over again.
In every situation, the president was not simply the subject of the news reporting on him, right?
That's the way every other president was.
Every other president was, here I am, and then here's the news, and the news is going to report on me, and that's the whole relationship.
He changed everything.
He turned it into fake news, and he started reporting on the news.
Think about that. He changed the news business so radically that it was no longer the news reporting on Trump, it was just as much Trump reporting on the news and essentially delegitimized the entire industry.
Now, in my opinion, it needed to be delegitimized because that was actually the more accurate way to see what was really happening.
But he did that. Could another president have delegitimized the entire press?
I don't think so.
So every time that the president enters a situation, whether it's becoming a Republican, whether it's becoming the president, or now whether he's becoming one of the few impeached presidents, impeachment is not going to change him.
He is right now, even as we speak, changing what the word means.
He's changing impeachment.
Here's one of the ways that this all fits together.
What the president understands, and I've said this a million times, is he knows how to put on a show for the country, for the world.
It's always a show. Now, the show is productive.
Meaning that he's putting your attention where it's most productively put.
He's making you think about border security.
He's making you think about trade with China.
So the show is to move your attention where your attention is most productively suited.
So... So he's doing this all the time.
So part of the show is who he is.
So he's a character, the main character, the most important character in the show.
But what is his character?
His character is the bad boy.
Am I right? Wouldn't you say, if you were writing the movie about this and you were just a dispassionate Hollywood film writer, and you were going to write the story of this, you know, you always have sort of a stereotype idea in your mind of who your character is.
The stereotype is that he's the heel, the bad boy.
He's the bully.
He's the rebel.
He's the rule breaker, right?
That's who he is. That's his character.
Now, what fits the rule breaker better than being impeached and continuing to do his job?
Nothing. There's almost nothing that can make President Trump's story better, better, Than getting impeached and staying in office.
Now being removed from office would obviously be bad unambiguously.
But staying in office while impeached is exactly on character.
And when I say character, I don't mean his actual human being character so much.
I mean the character he plays in the show.
So I think the Democrats are delivering to him Basically a medal that he's going to wear on his chest during the rest of the show, meaning the rest of his term, and that medal on his chest is completely compatible with the character he formed intentionally to give you a show.
It's very much like, you know, don't throw me in that briar patch.
Oh, no. Don't impeach me.
That's the worst thing that could ever happen to me.
Well, it's the worst thing that could happen to someone else.
It just isn't the worst thing that could happen to this specific president in this specific case.
For him, he's going to wear it like a badge.
He's going to use it like a club to beat the Democrats senseless for the next year.
Now, I'm not going to say that somebody's saying 4D chess.
You know, we have fun oversubscribing his luck as, you know, strategy, and I do that too.
I usually, I like to think that you know when I'm doing it for fun.
Because sometimes I'll attribute something that sort of happened out of luck.
I'll say, well, that was his 4D chess stuff.
Some of it's just luck.
People get lucky. But I do believe that his strategic sense is extraordinary.
But this is just a case of him being in the right place at the right time.
They just delivered to him a win that they didn't know they were doing.
I don't think that was a plan by the president, certainly.
And what's making it even better, and when I say better, I mean, again, the show.
To make the entertainment of the show maximum, here's a tweet by Adam Schiff.
And I swear you, if you were to read this without knowing the whole context of everything that's happened, you would be so confused.
Let me just read the tweet.
So Adam Schiff tweets, this is why we had to move forward with articles of impeachment.
Okay, so he's going to tell me why we have to move forward with the articles in Petron.
Here it comes. The threat persists.
Okay, okay, the threat.
Tell me more. Which threat?
The plot goes on.
Okay, okay, Adam. The plot and the threat are persisting, right?
What is the plot?
What is the threat? And your point is, here it comes, and Trump's effort to cheat in the next election, what?
The next election...
Trump's effort to cheat in the next election will never stop.
The president and his lawyer continue to make the case for his own removal.
Well, that's lacking a little bit of detail.
How are the president and his lawyer making the case for his own removal by looking for evidence that would confirm that everything the president did was a good idea?
Okay. But here's the chilling line.
It was the one I just read. Trump's effort to cheat in the next election will never stop.
Literally talking about future crimes that haven't happened?
Mental crimes?
Imaginary crimes? Hallucinated, speculative, hypothetical crimes?
Are you kidding me?
Somebody, John in the comments says, wow, it's like listening to someone describe their dream.
It really is. If you were to say, all right, let's turn this into a movie, and there's going to be a plot in the movie, a place in the movie where the evil nemesis, Adam Schiff playing the role of the evil nemesis, there's going to be a part in the movie where he just becomes a ridiculous character, and the things he said are laughable even to his own team.
Well, this would be it.
They've actually given up on finding past or current crimes.
I'm not making that up.
He's actually decided to...
And you've heard the other Democrats say something similar.
It's not just Schiff saying this.
They've actually...
I guess they've coordinated.
They've coordinated to have the similar message that the real problem is not what he's already done or doing.
That the real problem is that he might commit crimes in the future because he's that kind of guy.
Are you kidding me?
That is so far from what our system recognizes as a problem that it doesn't even look like it's serious.
When I read this, I swear, the difference between this and parity It's completely merged, right?
If I were to do a joke about how ridiculous the Constitution had gotten, and I did a joke, let's say in the Dilber comic, about how people were going to be punished for things they had not yet done, what would you think of that?
You would think, no, Scott, you can't write a comic about somebody getting punished for crimes they have not yet done, because that doesn't sound close enough to reality.
The people will, you know, get it.
Because comics and humor works best when people say, oh yeah, that's what happens.
Yeah, I've been in that situation.
That's when jokes work well.
Who has ever been in the situation where a leader, one of the leaders in the House, is saying in public, shamelessly in public, that he wants to remove a president for what he might do in the future?
That's actually happening right now.
We're living in a world, I think, unless it's all an illusion.
It feels like we're living in a world where this is actually happening.
He's actually saying remove the president because of something he might do in the future.
And by the way, we just spent years looking for his crimes in the past, and we couldn't find anything impeachable, obviously, since they don't have anything impeachable at this point.
Unbelievable. Unbelievable.
Hugh Hewitt summed this up with a tweet today.
I think he nailed it.
And he said, quote, Today may be peak TDS, meaning Trump derangement syndrome.
Starting off that way, more than half of the country is laughing at the afflicted.
But they are oblivious.
Their Twitter feeds reassure them that it is a crucial sign of imminent canonization.
So that is exactly how I see my version of reality.
Now remember, I think reality has a deep subjective quality, even if there's some objective reality that's unavailable to us.
But in my subjective reality, It looks like half of the country is suffering, as Hugh Hewitt says, peak TDS. Because when you start shamelessly saying that the real problem is not what the person has done, but what you imagine they could do in the future, That's no longer attached to the real world, right?
That is no longer attached to rationality, the Constitution.
It's not attached to anything.
It is completely free-floating.
You have this free-floating reality with no connection to any part of the world that I can observe.
And so, just as Hugh is saying, I woke up and started reading the news.
And let me ask you if you did as well.
I read the news as comedy today.
And I've been doing this for a while.
But today, I felt exactly like you, Hugh, had felt.
And I don't know how much is coincidence and how much is the...
Oh, I'm just going to sneeze.
Hold on. I think there are a few more sneezes coming, so bear with me.
So I feel exactly the way Hewitt explained it, although I had not crystallized it in my mind this way.
But today feels like pure comedy.
It feels like pure comedy.
Thank you, everybody. Well, that's a good way to get a lot of blessings, is to sneeze on camera.
So, do the Democrats understand?
Do you think there's anybody who's a Democrat who is waking up to what's actually happening today because if you're a Democrat you should be waking up to the realization and I have no optimism this is actually happening but you should be waking up to the realization that your team just devolved into pure silliness but probably that's not going to happen alright So it looks like we are going to get something like a Senate trial with no witnesses.
The way Mitch McConnell explained it, and I can't believe it took me this long to hear this explanation, I believe that McConnell's interpretation of the Constitution is that the Senate is just supposed to judge the impeachment.
They're not supposed to retry the case because the case was tried in the House.
So McConnell's saying, it's not even our job to retry the case.
That's not even our constitutional duty.
We're supposed to judge it.
So we can just vote on it.
We don't need to have witnesses.
And I thought to myself, why am I just hearing that interpretation?
I mean, I love the fact that we're getting educated on the nuances of the Constitution, because that's not something I knew before.
I didn't quite understand the nuance of that.
I think that Trump is changing the definition of impeachment into a modern definition.
I just tweeted before I got on here.
The new definition of impeachment, modern, is a process by which the party out of power shows the world how they got that way.
Happens most commonly right before a landslide re-election.
You've seen the polls turn, haven't you?
So you've seen the polls just go, you know, they were sort of right down the middle.
Well, maybe we want to impeach them, maybe we don't.
And suddenly they just went boink.
And suddenly the impeachment is just underwater, especially in the swing states.
And apparently the president's approval on the economy...
It has reached a new high today.
How would you like to be the poor Democrats?
You're trying to push impeachment at exactly the same time the stats are coming out that you have the highest approval of the President's handling of the economy since he came in office, and it's been pretty good the whole time.
I mean, handling the economy is the one thing that even the Democrats Grudgingly, you know, not by a majority, but at least grudgingly some Democrats would even say, well, okay, he gets that right.
He's not ruining the economy.
I just don't like this other stuff.
All right. There's not much else going on except this impeachment.
It seems to have wiped everything else off the What's happening to the stock market?
Somebody's saying, stock market, stock market.
Let me check. Well, the stock market's up a little bit today.
In general, it's been way up.
Now, the other problem that the Bitcoin is up today, too, and Twitter.
Twitter's up. So, one of the problems that the Democrats have goes like this.
And it's sort of a, again, it's just luck.
What could be worse than trying to impeach a successful president toward the end of the year, which is also the end of the decade?
Because there's something that happens at the end of the year that doesn't happen the rest of the year.
Do you know what it is?
What happens at the end of every year that doesn't happen too much or at all during most of the rest of the year?
What happens is that the press stops doing new news, because a lot of people are on vacation the last few weeks of the year, and they start doing summaries of how the year went.
That's something you only do at the end of the year.
And how do the summaries of how our year went look for President Trump?
Really, really good.
So the press, because that's what they do every year, they talk about how the year looks.
So they're going to have to look at how did the economy do this year?
How much ISIS is left over?
How many judges got appointed?
What is the rate of flow of immigration?
How many trade deals have we done?
So imagine this conflict.
You are the enemy press and you're trying to get rid of this president, and at the same time you are forced, by tradition and just expectation, and resources to some extent, you're forced to speak continuously about how everything is going well under this president, at the same time you're talking about impeaching him.
It's going to be lit.
Yeah, Epstein, who somebody says?
You know, I saw a replay of...
Somebody was, you know, you're seeing a lot of the compilation clips in which you see the Democrats saying the same thing over and over and being wrong about it for years.
And why am I forgetting his name?
Who was the male host of the Today Show?
Matt Lauer. So in the compilation clips of people talking about the president, I think it was about impeachment, it showed Matt Lauer.
And I thought to myself, has Matt Lauer not been retired for 10 years?
Because my sense of time is so distorted now, but in the Trump era, that I thought there was no way that Matt Lauer was still working during any part of the Trump candidacy or presidency.
And I thought, really?
Just my whole sense of time was completely distorted.
All right. I don't know what else we've got going on, because there's nothing else to talk about except impeachment, and we're beating that to death.
Is there anything else happening?
Oh, so it looks like the budget...
The next budget is going to include many millions for researching gun control.
Researching gun control.
Now, that's almost where we need to be.
I think we do need to research gun control to find out better, to get a much better idea of what works and what doesn't.
But shouldn't we also be testing some things?
Can we not find You know, a state or a county who wants to just do a five-year test and say, all right, we'll make this change or that change.
At the end of five years, we'll reverse it if it didn't work.
But let's just test it. Let's test a few things, see if it works.
I asked in Twitter, would it be legal under the current laws to put a rifle on a drone if you own the drone and you own the rifle?
Could you put your own rifle that you legally own on your own drone that you legally own and make a flying gun if it didn't leave your property, let's say?
Maybe it would be illegal to fly it over your neighbor's property.
Let's say if you had a flying gun and you were a farmer, could you have a flying gun on your own property?
And the answer is no. Apparently there are laws anticipated that and if you're flying you can't have any kind of a weapon basically.
But what that does is it makes me ask this question.
Is that not a form of gun control?
It is, right? It's gun control to tell you that your gun can't fly.
If I have the right to have a gun, Why do I not also have the right to a flying gun?
Now, before somebody says this and makes this bad point, I know it's illegal to hook up an unattended booby trap in your home.
So if you booby trap your front door with a gun so that if somebody opens it, the gun automatically shoots them.
Well, that's illegal because you've taken the human being out of the decision process.
And apparently that's a bad thing.
But with the drone that you've attached a gun to, you can still be the decision maker.
The drone is not making its own decisions.
You're the one who's going to have to push the button to shoot the gun.
Under those conditions, why can we not...
Have a flying gun.
Because the Constitution does not anticipate future designs of guns.
And if my gun can fly, and your gun can't, I have an advantage, right?
So I'm imagining that my flying gun, my drone with a rifle attached to it, is flying, let's say, somewhere over me.
And then I can see the whole field, and I can see everybody.
And if somebody's coming at me, Maybe I can shoot some warning shots or something.
But you can imagine that a flying gun would be a better gun.
And now, you might say to yourself, okay, Scott, that's sort of where I draw the line, because even if you're in favor of guns, maybe you're not so in favor of flying guns.
Flying guns might be more of a problem.
But I think it's fair to say that gun control works.
In that limited case, let's see if you agree.
Would you agree that having a law that says you can't put your own gun on your own drone, don't you think that there's a good chance that that law will be mostly obeyed?
Because it would be hard.
It would be hard for you to rig it up.
Not impossible. You know, do it yourself or it could do it.
Yeah, I mean, hackers can do it, but don't you think that it would be far more widespread if a company could just make it and sell it?
You know, because there won't be that many people who want to attach a gun to a drone.
Now, let's say you think that you need to protect the republic against a dictator rising and trying to take over the country.
Under that scenario, wouldn't you like to have a flying gun?
Yes, you would. Because a flying gun would be more powerful than a non-flying gun.
All right. Can U.S. drone carry North Korean stick?
I don't know what that means. Narwhal tusks on drones.
Yes. If you put a narwhal tusk on a drone, is that legal?
Can you use your drone as a stabby device to just fly right at somebody with your narwhal tusk?
Rule of holes.
You immediately get yourself in a hole when talking guns.
Stop digging. Problem solved.
Blocked. That's my new rule for blocking.
You can always tell me what I got wrong.
That will always be fair.
But, if you tell me I'm over my head, or I'm digging a hole, or I shouldn't talk about a topic, instantly blocked.
Because that's what the internet is.
is people who don't know what they're talking about talking.
Oh, Trump's letter...
Yeah, let's talk about Trump's letter to Nancy Pelosi.
Well, I love the letter just because it was classic Trump and it was insulting.
It didn't mention her teeth falling out, but it could have.
I don't think the letter has much impact.
It was sort of a little bit of a news interest, but it wasn't persuasive.
It doesn't change anything.
Really, it's a nothing.
Now, let me ask you this.
Will we ever get to the point where law enforcement cannot determine who is operating a drone?
Or are we already there?
Are we already at a point?
Well, let me ask you this.
Imagine if you will.
An anonymous encrypted system where you could have multiple drone operators, at least in this limited sense.
Let's say the drone goes up and it hunts down, let's say, a cartel leader.
And there are lots of people remotely and they can all see the drone's screen.
And everybody who sees the drone's screen gets to vote, shoot or don't shoot.
If you vote shoot, you're just one of many people voting, and you have no reason to believe that your one vote is the one that makes the difference.
And it's also untraceable.
Nobody will know if you voted or you didn't vote.
Under those conditions, could you have an assassination drone with a rifle in which you can't identify any specific person who is behind it?
Because maybe there's somebody who built it, but I don't think that's necessarily against the law.
Well, it is if you put a gun on it.
But I'm trying to imagine a situation in which you could have an assassination drone in which you would never be able to find out which human in particular was behind it.
Probably already there. Probably could already do that.
Alright, I don't have anything else to do.
Anything else to talk about, so I'm going to make it short.
I'll let you get back to your day, and we'll watch the proceedings, and I can't wait for the impeachment.
▲
Export Selection