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Jan. 27, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
29:53
Episode 800 Scott Adams: The Bolton "Bombshell" and Coronavirus

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: Bolton "bombshell" Our government is failing us on the CORONAVIRUS situation      SHUT DOWN THE AIRPORTS President Trump's tweet called "threatening" to Adam Schiff Rocket attack on US Baghdad embassy --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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Hey everybody come on in here It's time to talk about all the stuff in the news while having coffee with Scott Adams, and as luck would have it on Scott Adams.
And if you'd like to enjoy simultaneously sipping, it's one of the great bonding experiences of your life, all you need Here's a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamines of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
With a simultaneous sip.
Go. Oh yeah.
Oh yeah yeah yeah.
So, here's a weird thing.
Last night and yesterday, I decided to re-watch the original Star Trek series.
Do you remember the original Star Trek with William Shatner from, I don't know, the 60s or whatever it is?
And I haven't seen it in so many decades.
Then it was like watching it brand new, and I was really enjoying it, because it's sort of a glimpse into the past of how society was, and, you know, onboard the Starship Enterprise.
If you don't remember the original series, I'm watching the first several episodes, re-watching them, and it was just Me Too-ing all over the place.
The entire Starship Enterprise was just everybody Me Too-ing each other.
So that part was hilarious.
But here's the funny part.
So I'm watching...
I've never done this before.
My entire life, I've never sat down to re-watch all of the original Star Trek since I saw them when I was a kid.
And I wake up this morning, and there's a message on Twitter from William Shatner.
My life is so weird.
Because I guess it was yesterday...
He had asked on Twitter, and I follow him on Twitter, and he had asked if people had seen the new Picard TV show.
It's a series, and it's on, I think it's only on Amazon.
No, it's on CBS All Access, which you can see through Amazon and probably directly.
And I think I was probably the first person who responded and said that I watched it, and I liked it.
It was actually really well done.
Better than I thought, actually.
And this morning I wake up to see a tweet from William Shatner saying that Dilbert likes it.
Referring to me, of course, that Dilbert likes it with a smiley face.
And I'm thinking, William Shatner knows who I am.
And I thought, that might be the coolest thing that ever happened to me in my entire life.
And I've had a pretty cool life.
But anyway, I'm just...
I'm just being a fanboy here and enjoying that a little bit.
Alright, everybody's here. Let's talk about the news.
I'm not going to talk about the Kobe stuff.
I think day two should be just about the family.
I just want to point out one positive thing about that.
Everybody feels the same.
It was quite a punch in the gut for the entire country.
But I was watching one replay...
Of where he had said that when he was 15 years old, he made a promise to himself that someday he would be remembered as a talented overachiever.
Now, what he meant was that he would work hard so that whatever talent he had, he would take it to its maximum overachieving level.
And I thought, that's...
Very much what I talk about when I talk about the differences between wanting something and deciding.
Because when I got my original contract to be a syndicated cartoonist, there was a long, long path from getting a contract to actually succeeding.
And I made myself a similar promise.
I promised myself that I would never be able to look back and say that I didn't succeed because I didn't work hard enough.
And I think Kobe made the same promise, that he would never look back and say, I didn't work hard enough.
And it looks like he and I both kept our promises to ourselves.
So I point that out, because it's the difference between wanting something, in which you don't dedicate your life to getting it, you just want it, versus deciding.
Kobe decided...
If you could take away one story from Kobe, it's not about wanting all the things he got.
It was about deciding.
It's a big difference.
And once you get that difference, suddenly life is more approachable.
All right, that's enough about that sad topic.
Today we have a Bolton bombshell.
It's a bombshell, I tell you.
And I feel as though the world had to wait for me to wake up to put this in perspective.
So the alleged bombshell is that Bolton's book manuscript, which is floating around and got leaked, seems to indicate that Bolton had conversations with the president in which the president said, He had great concerns about Ukraine and thought they interfered in the election in 2016,
and that he wanted to withhold the aid until they looked into the Biden-Burisma election stuff.
Now, the way it was being reported until I woke up was that this is bad for the president.
And I kept reading it and thinking, What am I not understanding here?
This isn't bad for the president.
Why is everybody saying it's bad for the president?
Am I missing something?
Two things. Number one, have I not been telling you from day one that the president's lawyers are making a mistake in engaging on the details?
Because if you're going to be arguing the quid pro quo, you're in the weeds now.
And there might be something that comes out that makes your argument a little less strong over time.
And there it is.
So the very reason that I said it was a mistake to get into the weeds just happened.
This is exactly what you didn't want to happen.
Arguing that there was no quid pro quo, and then the most credible person with the most information comes out toward the end of the process and says, oh yeah, there was plenty of it.
I'm no legal expert, but to me that looked like the trap all along, and it looked like the worst strategy to depend on that no quid pro quo thing as that being the key to your defense.
Now, of course, that's not the only key to their defense, because Dershowitz is going to come on today, I think, or tomorrow.
I'm not sure of the schedule. But Dershowitz will argue, we believe, Then it doesn't matter if any of it's true.
It doesn't matter what the president did or did not do.
Even if you stipulated it's all true, it doesn't rise to impeachable.
That's the argument that I've been making since day one.
But it's even better.
I woke up this morning and realized that Bolton had proven the president's case.
Why? If that's not obvious to you, Then you've really been bamboozled, if you will.
And let me tell you how you've been bamboozled.
Jonathan Turley made this observation.
Now, you'll notice that this is similar to things I've said, which is, of course, why I think he's genius.
And he was talking about Stephanopoulos was interviewing Senator Lankford.
And this is what Turley tweeted.
He said, Stepanophilus just asked Senator Langford if he thinks it is okay to solicit a foreign government to interfere in our elections.
See where I'm going with this?
Much like CNN's biased question on Sanders, the question assumed that Trump was asking for election interference and asking for a corruption investigation.
That's right. Jonathan Turley has accurately Because I said the same thing, so I think it's accurate, said that they're using a magic trick.
And the magic trick is to keep presenting things as though the question of why the president was acting the way he was acting is settled.
And the trick is to make you think, well, there was only one reason.
Only one reason. Only one possible reason the president could be doing what he was doing vis-a-vis Ukraine, and that was for his own political gain.
And Turley points out that's not an evidence.
It's an assumption, not an evidence.
John Bolton just filled in the assumption.
John Bolton, if the manuscript is accurate, and if what Biden says, as reported in the manuscript, is accurate, He's reporting that the President really believed that Ukraine had interfered in the election in 2016.
Now, if that is established, and we take that as true, that according to Bolton, it was very clear that the President was genuinely concerned because he said it.
You don't have to read his mind.
He actually said, In words that he was concerned about that he thought Ukraine screwed him in 2016 or whatever.
So now that we have an evidence that the president had a genuine concern about Ukraine, we're done.
We're done. Because that's all you needed to know.
The magic trick was to make you not think about that question.
But the question is, was there any legitimate presidential reason, good for the country, good for the nation, for Trump to press Ukraine?
And the answer is yes. And Bolton just confirmed it, at least indirectly, through the manuscript.
So, given that, I think the defense just got a lot easier.
Now that we know the president had a genuine concern That was outside of his own political advantage.
That's the end of the story.
As long as he had a national interest, there's nothing else to ask.
So I think that we know where that's all heading.
Now, is it my imagination, or is Adam Schiff putting the entire country in danger?
Adam Schiff and Pelosi and Nadler and all the people pushing the impeachment...
Because, correct me if I'm wrong, but our government is failing us right now for this coronavirus.
They are not doing what we know has to be done.
You and I are not experts, but even we know all travel has to be shut down with China.
Even we know that.
Now, has the government done that?
I've not heard that.
Is the government checking people coming from those destinations that are a problem?
Yes. They say they are, and that's very good.
But we also know According to today's reporting, there might be as many as 44,000 people who are carrying the virus who have not yet shown symptoms.
Let me say that again.
There might be as many as 44,000 people who don't have symptoms, which means screening won't catch them.
Shut down the travel.
If our government is not shutting it down And as far as I can tell, they're not.
And they're not telling you why they're doing what they're doing.
Because it could be they have good reasons, and we just haven't heard them.
But if they're not doing one of those two things, shutting everything down, or explaining to us why they're not, there is no argument can be made that the government is doing the work of the people.
None. Now, I don't know who you blame.
Is that just Trump?
Is that Congress?
I don't know. Shouldn't Congress be on the president every day to close the airports?
Shouldn't they be stepping up?
I don't see it.
I don't even see them talking about it.
And so, I think we have a genuine example, and I don't know if anybody could argue this.
Is there any counter-argument to this?
I'm open to it, but I'd like to hear the counter-argument.
What is the argument that says that Schiff and Pelosi and Adler have not put this country at tremendous risk by taking our entire government off the field during a crisis?
This is one of the worst things I've ever seen.
It's one of the worst things I've ever seen any government do.
They have made themselves irrelevant by concentrating on this one political thing while leaving the country exposed.
It's complete fiduciary responsibility collapse.
Complete collapse.
At the moment, we barely have a government.
At least this week, until this stuff is over.
Alright, but...
So let's...
And of course, we have to imagine that whatever is being reported about the severity of this coronavirus outbreak is probably a lot worse.
It's probably worse.
One expert says that it could be doubling every six days.
Doubling every six days.
It doesn't take many days of doubling to get to a global pandemic, and I would argue we're already there, actually.
All right. Let's talk about Trump's tweet that is being considered threatening.
Trump tweeted that Shifty Adam Schiff is a corrupt politician, And probably a very sick man.
He likes to throw that in there.
And then he said, he has not paid the price yet for what he has done to our country.
And of course, he has not paid the price makes it look like he's threatening him from the office of the president so it looks ominous and he's a dictator and all that.
But isn't that the right question?
If you sue somebody, And you lose, you have to pay the legal fees, right?
There's always an expense of attacking somebody and being wrong.
If you kill somebody because you thought they were robbing your house and they weren't, well, you're still in trouble, right?
So, going after somebody and being wrong, which is what impeachment looks like at this point, because we know how it all ends, it looks like something that needs to be punished.
In other words, there has to be repercussions.
Now that doesn't mean, you know, you put him in jail, but there needs to be repercussions.
I mean, there ought to be big ones.
The Russian collusion thing alone, given that Schiff was telling us he's seen evidence that we haven't seen and the president's guilty, I mean, that should be automatically removed from office for that performance.
And then he just does it again?
He just does it a second time?
He does something that anybody should be fired for, the Russian collusion thing, and yet he just gets to do it again.
What kind of system do we have where the guy who made the biggest mistake in American politics that wasn't, let's say, attacking Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, probably Schiff just made the biggest, you know, collectively, the biggest set of mistakes any politician has made in modern history except for that one, the Iraq one. And he got promoted for it?
I mean, that actually happened, right?
I mean, in a sense, he got promoted because he's now the star of the new Ukraine thing.
In what world does complete failure and lying and damaging the country get you promoted?
Well, I guess that's the democratic model.
He gets a participation trophy no matter how well he does.
All right.
Yeah, so the system seems totally corrupt, and let's hope that things get cleaned up a little bit today.
Now, here's some extra questions about this Bolton manuscript.
How reliable is it?
Now, I'm saying that if it is reliable, that's the end of the case, because the president's cleared.
It would clear him. But can you believe what's in the transcript?
Let me give you a little context, because I'm an author, so I see enough of the industry that I have a sense of what's going on.
Now, I have not had the experience that Bolton probably had, because I don't write that kind of book that's a tell-all.
But probably there was some point at which Bolton and his publisher had a conversation like this.
Hey, there are a lot of books about Trump.
You need to stand out.
What's your claim that's really going to make your book get a lot of attention and stand out?
And of course, the obvious thing would be something around the Ukraine situation.
That would be the thing that would sell this book.
Now, I'm guessing that Bolton is not the only author of the book.
This is just a guess.
Probably there's a ghostwriter.
Because unless Bolton has a background as an author, it's probably hard to sit down and write a whole book.
He'd probably get a ghostwriter.
Now the ghostwriter would be working with an editor or two at the publisher.
So there would be at least three authors involved.
There's the editors, the ghostwriters, and then there's Bolton himself.
Is it one of the odds That the way the current draft is written is exactly what Bolton would have written if nobody else had been involved.
What are the odds that the way it's presented is just exactly the way Bolton would have done it on his own?
Low. Yeah, the odds are low.
Because there are two other people involved who are going to want this to be a big book.
Now, of course, he wants it to be a big, big book, too, or else he wouldn't be doing it, probably.
But the publisher really wants it to be a big book.
And those conversations go like this.
All right, do you remember exactly what the president said in that meeting?
No. I don't remember exact words because I don't remember exact words.
Who does, really? So now Bolton has to write about an event in which, in all likelihood, he would not remember exact wording.
He has a memory of basically the idea that happened.
So he words it one way, and then the editor looks at it, or maybe the ghostwriter writes it first, and the editor looks at it, and they say, you know, if you change this sentence a little bit, it really would sell more books.
Now, would that change to the sentence?
This is all speculative hypothetical.
I'm not saying that this happened.
I'm saying that it would be normal in this process That there's a bit of a committee approach to every sentence if the sentence is the bombshell sentence.
So I would say that that little bit of writing that gets to the point of what the president was talking about with Ukraine and withholding the money, etc., is probably a combination of one person's faulty memory plus two other people trying to shade it a little bit so it was the most provocative.
Is it still accurate? Is it?
Could be. You can't rule it out.
It's totally possible that it's a perfectly clear and accurate explanation of what happened.
That's possible. You know the other possibility?
It's not. There's not an accurate explanation of what happened.
How would you know?
Will you and I ever know?
The answer is no. What if I told you about situations where you have a lot of money at stake, and here's the key part, no way to get caught.
What do I tell you always happens when there's a lot of money at stake if somebody does something sneaky or illegal, in this case just sneaky, and there's no chance of being punished for it.
None. No chance.
Suppose it was just a private conversation between Bolton and the president, and it wasn't recorded, and maybe he didn't talk about it directly afterwards, and there's no way to prove it happened or didn't happen.
Bolton would have the opportunity to make a gigantic amount of money by wording the meeting, which cannot be verified, in just the way that makes that book sell.
Do I think that Bolton is the kind of guy who would sell out his integrity to sell a few extra books?
Actually, no. I have no reason to believe that he's that kind of guy.
Do you? Have you ever heard anything in his entire history that would suggest he would just make some crap up to sell some extra books?
It doesn't really sound like him, does it?
I mean, there's one thing being wrong.
You can criticize him for being a hawk.
But I don't know that anybody's ever called him a liar.
It feels like you would have heard that by now, right?
So he's probably quite credible.
But I don't know if he would back the version in the book.
If you put him under oath...
Would he say that exactly the way it's written in that draft manuscript, which might not even be the final thing, would he say that's exactly what happened?
Don't know. Because two other people were probably involved in writing those sentences.
So, we have a mystery.
Will any of this cause more people to be called as witnesses?
I say no.
Because I think whenever Dershowitz talks, he's going to basically say it doesn't matter what the details are, even if everything that is alleged, even if everything Bolton said is true.
Completely irrelevant because, first of all, it was within the job description of the president.
Given that we have evidence he really believed Ukraine was a risk to our elections.
And that's all the evidence.
That's what it says. And that it wouldn't matter because it's not impeachable anyway.
So I don't think there's any chance of calling witnesses.
Although the Republicans might even want it more.
Because if all Bolton has is this, What if this is all Bolton has?
And it completely clears the president.
That's it. Wouldn't you be willing to trade more of that?
Because presumably, if Bolton were called, the worst case scenario is that he says the same thing that's in the book.
Because if there were even worse things in the book, you'd already know about him.
So that's got to be the worst thing, because that's why it leaked.
If that's the worst thing, It basically totally clears the president, because it says the president clearly was indicating that he actually cared about Ukraine, not just the political fallout from it.
That's what we know so far.
Do you have the quote from the book?
I do not. I do not have the actual quote, and I don't know that there is an actual quote.
Maybe somebody can find that.
When I was looking quickly before I got on live here, I was looking for the actual quote, and I only saw paraphrases of it.
So I don't know if we even have the right quote.
So that's the other possibility, is that it's simply being misquoted.
And if you looked at the manuscript yourself, you might say to yourself, that's not what it says, because we've seen this happen over and over.
We saw people look at the transcript of the Ukraine call and people had different opinions.
We know that Schiff looked at the stuff in the SCIF and had a different opinion than Nunes and they were looking at the same documents.
So it's 100% believable that the quote doesn't sound exactly the way people are saying it sounds.
Totally possible. At least 50% possible.
So this is the least bombshell-y thing I've ever seen, but it's all they got.
Yeah, so I understand there was at least one rocket attack on the embassy in Iraq.
I don't know if we know where it came from.
I did predict that even if things settled down a great deal after the killing of General Salmane, that even if things settled down a great deal, that there was a 100% chance you're still going to see random rocket attacks.
Because I don't think that Iran necessarily has 100% control over every rocket that gets fired by every proxy group.
You know, some groups may be more loosely attached to the government, some more.
So there was no chance that it would drop to zero, but if it doesn't get much worse, I think we're in good shape.
I'm still predicting that there will be a Middle East peace plan because we've never had this situation before.
We've never had the people who need to agree so weak compared to the people who want them to agree who are very strong.
We're energy-independent.
We have really strong leaders from Israel to the United States to Saudi Arabia.
Say what you will about, if you like, how they act, but they're strong, decisive, deal-making leaders, and if they can't get this done, it's not doable, because it's the strongest team that's ever been So I think there's entirely a good chance that by the end of this year you're going to see a Middle East peace plan, mostly involving the Palestinian situation, that looks pretty good.
And you might say to yourself, that looks surprisingly good.
And we're down to one person who has to agree.
Just the Ayatollah.
Just one person.
And you have Middle East peace.
That's it. Just one. Have we ever been at a point where only one person has to decide for peace instead of war, and war is disastrous?
How hard would it be to decide you want peace when the alternative is complete destruction?
It's not hard. And I think we're right there.
All right. Scott, a Middle East peace plan will never happen.
Come on, stop the BS. Stranger says in all caps.
You might not know this, but screaming at me in all caps did not make your point more believable.
Now, I'm completely open to the possibility that there can never be a Middle East peace.
If you're saying you believe that based on all the history you've seen, it can just never happen, you might not be wrong.
You might not be wrong.
In fact, the odds probably are in your favor.
But what's different is we've never had this set of variables all in place.
We've never been this close.
And we've never had this strong a team.
Team meaning all the different leaders.
They're all strong leaders.
It's just never been this close with a team this strong who could push it over the line if they wanted to.
I think it comes down to whether they want to.
Honestly. I think if everybody in this story wants peace, they're going to get it.
Alright, that's all for now.
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