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April 30, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
43:20
Episode 944 Scott Adams: FBI Flynn-Flammers, A Slew of Fake News and some Funny Stuff Before Bed
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Oh this would be great ASMR.
If you don't know what ASMR is, you gotta Google.
Let's see what did I get.
Yes, it's Dave Rubin's new book.
It's called Don't Burn This Book.
I will be talking to Dave Tuesday.
And we'll hear more about this, but I'm going to do my homework first.
Hey, how's it going everybody?
What a day! Do you remember maybe a week ago I told you that the next couple of weeks would be insane?
But it would be insane in a good way.
I'm not sure that's 100% true.
But it's definitely true that the past week or so, it's just been crazy.
And, of course, one of the things that's making it interesting is this General Flynn stuff.
Now, I hope you're all up to date on this.
Because there's something so perfect about this day, if you've been following the whole Flynn saga.
Because, you know, early on it was rumored that he was just sort of framed and they were just trying to take him out or get some dirt on Trump.
And I remember when I first heard it, I said to myself, well, yeah, maybe, maybe.
But it didn't seem...
Totally credible.
When I first heard it.
And partly because, who does that?
Who just decides to take out a general?
Because he's part of a campaign.
And part of it is, in the back of my mind, I was thinking, if there's somebody you're going to try to take down, if you had to pick anybody in the world, let's say the United States, and there was somebody you wanted to take down, And it was somebody that if you tried to take them down, you might not have finished the job.
Who would be the worst person to try to take down and not quite get the job done?
Well, maybe a top military trained mind of the United States.
Possibly a general.
That would be a really bad person to try to take out and not quite get it done.
So today the big story is that some of the notes have been revealed.
They had read notes from the time of the interviews and before.
And I think it was lawyer Baker's notes who said, if you haven't seen this story, it's just going to make you laugh because everything is a Dilbert cartoon ultimately.
Maybe it's just my filter on the world and why wouldn't it be?
But I just see the world as this giant Dilbert cartoon where the rest of you see important people doing awesome things because they're strangers.
You know, you always think that strangers are doing awesome things.
It's only the people that you know who are morons and incompetent.
And you say to yourself, why?
Why is it that everybody I know personally is a moron and incompetent?
Well, not everybody, but you know what I mean.
But yet, there are people I don't know Strangers and important jobs, and they're so wildly awesome and competent.
Maybe not every time.
I'm just saying that sometimes it's a little more like a Dilbert comic, no matter where you go.
That's my experience.
There's no level anywhere, no level, where you can get away from it.
Case in point.
Top FBI lawyer.
I think he's an FBI lawyer.
But anyway, he was part of this group that was going to talk to Flynn.
And he writes a note to himself.
And on his note he writes, What is our goal?
Truth slash admission?
or to get him to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired.
Now, if you don't think that in approximately, I think it will be about six to eight weeks, if you don't think there's going to be a Dilbert cartoon about the guy who's taking notes if you don't think there's going to be a Dilbert cartoon about the guy who's taking notes he really shouldn't be taking the notes.
Because for one, he might not get it right, and then there'd be a record of something that might not even be accurate.
I mean, that's a risk. Or, you could be in the middle of a plot to overthrow the government of the United States, and one of your treasonous co-conspirators decides to write a note to himself.
Note to self.
Is this one of these meetings where we're just...
Oh my God.
This guy...
It's like, can you just see it?
Like if he was at the meeting, I guess you...
Can you just see this guy at the meeting?
Question. Clarification.
Just point of order.
I'm wondering if we're committing treason against the United States of America.
And this is our first domino.
Or were we just talking to this guy to try to get him fired?
I'm just trying to get on the same page.
Are we just taking him out?
Just trying to get fired?
Or is this actually connected to our plot to take out the legally elected president of the United States by going through his generals first?
Literally. And the fact that this guy's at the meeting, like, am I exaggerating?
Is this not a Dilbert comic?
There's always this guy.
Can you imagine, like, Brennan and all these other guys who are thinking, you know, I think we got away with it.
They're thinking, Got cleaned away.
Yeah, it was close.
It looked like they were sniffing on our trail there for a while.
Looked like they were getting close.
Nope, we got away.
We got away.
What? They found what?
A note, you say?
What was on the note?
What? You know, it's a bad day to be anybody associated with this, except for General Flynn.
Now, there's a punchline to all of this.
By the way, I've never seen anybody more exonerated.
Like, if there was some kind of Nobel Prize or Nobel Prize for being exonerated and like it was a scale, And some people were a little bit exonerated.
It's like, well, you know, he's not that guilty.
Let's exonerate him a little bit.
You've got to figure that there's a scale of exoneration, right?
Well, this guy just broke the gauge for the most exonerated you could ever fucking be.
But it gets better.
There's a punchline.
The punchline's coming up.
It gets better, I promise.
So General Flynn, who's having what's got to be one of the best days anybody ever had in the history of days, I'm just imagining, he sends a tweet.
I have dubbed this tweet the tweet of the century.
Now, Twitter hasn't been around for 100 years, but still, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this tweet from General Flynn...
Is the tweet of the Sun Tray.
And I hope you can see it.
Alright? So I'll just describe it.
So there's no words. There's no text.
So what you see is just...
You're looking into the woods here.
And keep watching. Oh, that's just the best tweet ever.
I could not enjoy this day better.
So, meanwhile, stock market is up.
You're laughing about that for a while.
Oh.
Stock work is up.
So here's a question that I haven't heard anybody ask.
So it looks like there are three or four therapeutics for the coronavirus that look promising.
And I haven't heard anybody ask if we can take them all at the same time.
Because I have to admit, So far, I'm a little bit underwhelmed by the early information we have about all of it, from hydroxychloroquine to remdesivir, whatever.
The good news on remdesivir is that there didn't seem to be any statistical difference in the death rate, but people were getting cleared of it, I guess, and getting out of the hospital sooner.
And I thought to myself, Yeah, but if it's the same death rate, you might be forgetting one thing that your trial found while you're talking about all the good news is that it didn't make a difference in the death rate.
Now, I don't know what difference it did make.
I mean, I'm happy that people went home earlier.
I'm glad that maybe their cough went away a little bit sooner.
I'm glad that they could breathe a little bit easier, maybe a full four days earlier than otherwise.
But it's kind of about keeping people alive.
So unless there's more to this remdesivir story than we've heard, it feels a little bit exaggerated.
But I would not doubt that it has some effect.
So, my question is, if the hydroxychloroquine has some effect and the interferon has some effect, we heard that.
There was some other thing that has some effect.
Is there anybody smart enough?
Or is there even a way to know?
Because we wouldn't have time to test it.
You know, I don't think we'd be able to test just pumping all of that stuff into somebody and see what happens.
Would we? I mean, maybe we would.
I suppose we would test it at the same time we were giving it to people, probably.
Or is this the sort of thing you could run through a supercomputer and say, well, these kinds of things almost never interfere with these kinds of things, even if you add this other kind of thing?
So, is it the sort of thing we have, AI at this point, that we can at least narrow down the odds and say, well, we can't be positive, but it's a very low chance that these particular things will interact?
So, it could be, and I understand that there's some trials that are winding up pretty soon, so in the next few weeks, I think, We're going to have really good information, and if it turns out we can take these as a cocktail, and I would think it's more likely we can than that we can't, wouldn't you think? If you had to guess, given that the actual medical professionals have been wrong about just about everything so far, we can guess, right?
Let's be doctors for a minute.
If you had to guess...
Let's say there are three or four things that are all sort of pretty good, but not great.
What do you think of the odds that they could all work together?
Oh, you know, actually that's a good point, because here I was assuming that these were new drugs, and therefore there would not be any kind of drug interaction with Documentation.
But of course, yes, they're all existing drugs.
So the fact that they exist already means that the drug interaction documentation has been done.
But those drug interaction things couldn't possibly already know what would happen with that combination.
The odds that that combination Is actually documented?
If there are three or four of them?
They have never been used in that combination before.
Alright. So that's my question.
But it could be we're right on the edge of having something that will take the edge off that virus.
Yes, it will. 59,000 people dead.
And nobody thinks it's going to let up.
So remember, was it only a week ago that people were saying, you know, we told you if it's only going to be 60,000 dead, you know, that's not much worse than the regular flu.
But we're going to be past 60,000 tomorrow.
And we're not in May.
May should have another...
50,000, would you say?
Do you think the month of May will have 2,000 a day, which is sort of what we've had?
Let's say it trails off.
Let's say we did get on top of it, and let's say it averages 1,000 a day when we really get on top of it.
We'd still be pushing 100,000 a day.
In the best success story.
And that's before the summer even starts.
But more likely, we're going to blow through 100,000 well before June.
And unless these therapeutics really stop people from dying, which was my question about the remdesivir, I don't know, it looks like the plan, if everything went according to plan, I feel like the plan is for 200,000 to 300,000 people to die, I feel like, without that being actually said.
You've heard a lot of updates about testing, and it's probably very confusing to you.
And so I did the work of researching it.
So I've dug down, I learned everything there is to know about testing, all the various kinds, the different sciences, the kits, where they're made, the swabs, the shortages.
I've summarized this for you as testing is bullshit.
It's all bullshit. Everything you've ever been told about testing is probably just bullshit, as far as I can tell.
Because there's certainly nothing happening that has any correlation to what you're hearing.
So, as far as I can tell, it's all been bullshit from the start, and I don't see any reason that that will change.
Now, eventually it will change, but I think it's going to be...
I think we're talking months.
Everything suggests that that will be months.
So I don't think testing is going to be the magic bullet, because it's just not going to be fast enough.
Alright. There's a new story.
This is like a classic CNN story.
You judge whether it's true.
So, apparently, the president was shouting at his campaign manager, Brad Parscale.
He was on the phone, and the aides were in the room, and I guess somebody leaked it.
And he was shouting, and he was shifting the blame to Parscale for the lower poll numbers he's getting recently.
And reportedly Trump berated Parscale for a recent spate of damaging poll numbers, even at one point threatening to sue Parscale.
Do you think that happened?
I don't know. I mean, I suppose anything's possible.
And then they say, this is from CNN, it's not clear how serious the president's threat of a lawsuit was.
Well, I'm going to take a stab at it.
Not too serious.
That's my guess. Because I'm no strategist.
I'm no strategist.
But if I were running for reelection, this wouldn't be the optimal time to sue your campaign manager.
So I'm just going to say that maybe the president had that same thought.
It's kind of an obscure thought.
Maybe you didn't think of it, but I think he probably did.
I think he probably did. Probably said to himself, I've got this election coming up.
Probably not the best time to get rid of my campaign manager.
So was there a tense phone call between the president and Brad Parscale?
Could be. Do you think that it was captured by this reporting accurately?
Probably not.
Probably not.
Let me read to you the name of the sources.
Oh, unnamed.
How interesting.
The sources are unnamed.
It's a story about the president flipping out behind closed doors.
How long will it be before the president says none of that happened?
And then Brad Parscale says, that's funny, but none of that happened.
Probably tomorrow sometime.
Now, I don't doubt that the president yells at, you know, pretty much everybody at one time or another.
So that part might be true.
Who knows? So Twitter's mad at Ben Shapiro because He had the audacity to consider the costs and the benefits of reopening the economy.
And for the sin of including all of the costs and all the benefits in his calculation, because people were mad at him for other reasons, I guess, he's the worst person in the world and he wants to kill your grandmother.
That makes sense, right?
If somebody considers all the costs and all the benefits and says they should be all weighed, therefore, logically, he wants to kill your grandmother.
Well, I didn't even know that until today, but I found that on the internet.
I cannot speak for Ben Shapiro, but I can say this.
The adults in the room, the adults can pick who's going to die.
And if nobody else can do it, I guess we have to find some leaders who can.
Because we're coming to decision points.
Do you die from the economy killing you?
Or does grandma get a few years shaved off?
And of course there's risk to everybody else, and there's the organ damage, and there's a million things.
I would guess, without personally asking Ben Shapiro, That if I said to him, Ben, do you think we should consider only some of the costs and some of the benefits, or maybe just look at them all?
I'm just guessing. He would say, well, why don't we look at them all, Scott?
That's exactly what I would say.
I'm just guessing. I'm not reading his mind, so I could be way off on that.
But I'm not.
So, it's just weird to see somebody get pilloried for being the adult.
I mean... I give him credit.
You don't have to agree with...
In fact, I don't know exactly what it is he thinks we should be doing that's different.
But you have to appreciate that somebody can say, here's my choice.
It's going to be tough on a certain class of people.
All things considered, somebody's got to make the decision.
That's the way I'd go.
Now, even if you don't agree with it, you have to respect that, right?
Because ultimately, somebody's going to have to do that.
It'll be the president. But, you know, have some empathy for how hard that is.
And if you're not willing to do it yourself, don't feel like you can criticize the president when he doesn't.
Because he's going to have to do that.
You know? That's a super tough decision.
So it looks like Biden has lost CNN. So Chris Silliza...
Who I would say would be sort of their chief hitman on the political side.
If you want a bad story about Trump, call Chris Eliza.
So he's one of their stars who most often talks about what bad thing Trump has done today.
But he's after the Biden campaign.
So credit to Chris Eliza.
So this would be a fair and balanced approach.
And what he said was that the...
So the New York Times did their look into the accusations by Tara Reade, and they said basically they couldn't prove it happened, and they couldn't prove it didn't happen.
So basically they didn't have a conclusion.
So that was what the New York Times said.
What Biden's campaign has directed...
The talking points to be.
They've actually written talking points with a lie in it.
It actually directed all the Biden supporters to use this lie.
Listen to this lie.
It says, Biden believes that all women have the right to be heard and to have their claims thoroughly reviewed.
In this case, a thorough review by the New York Times has led to the truth, colon, This incident did not happen.
And the New York Times, of course, did not conclude it did not happen.
They just said, well, we don't know.
That's it. So the Biden campaign is quite cleverly, by the way.
If I'm going to be fair and judge it, which I like to do, on its effectiveness as a dirty trick...
Separate from whether it's an ethical thing to do.
Effectiveness-wise, it's pretty good.
It's pretty good.
Because you have to understand, most people are low information.
They're not going to go to the New York Times article.
But by the third time that you hear somebody say that the New York Times investigated and found out it didn't happen, even though all three of them will be lies, By the third time an unsophisticated viewer hears that, it's just a fact.
So they've actually come up with a way to inoculate him with their base, and I think it's a good one.
I've got to say, it's totally solid.
Now, it will be debunked mercilessly.
I mean, CNN is debunking it.
Chris Eliza is directly debunking it and saying that the campaign is just telling their people to lie and showing you the evidence.
I mean, he shows you the actual words.
Pretty interesting. But it's totally going to work.
Very clever. All right.
Here's something I'm seeing a lot of.
People saying that the real reason for the coronavirus shutdown or the real reason for this or that is that they want to control you.
And it's about power.
I don't know that anything about the coronavirus is about power.
I don't get that.
Meaning I'm not detecting that.
It doesn't pass any of my experience filters.
I don't detect any of that.
So I say that just because a lot of what I like to do here is detect BS when I can.
And then you can see later when we find out what's true, you can find out.
But I'm going to call BS on anybody having a motive about the coronavirus except trying to get through it.
I feel like the public is pretty much on the same team.
That we all want the best way through it.
We just disagree maybe what's the best way.
You can ignore the politicians just lying at each other in public.
That's not really anything but a show.
That's for politics. So, you know, I don't know.
I doubt that, at least with the coronavirus and the shutdown, I doubt that anybody had that conscious thought that, hey, this would be a way to control people.
All right. So the Trump War Room, which tweets for the Trump campaign, had a terrific tweet today.
And I will read it to you.
And the timing, the comedic timing is even right, because they leave a space.
And I always appreciate that.
Because when you're writing humor in a tweet, sometimes you want a little timing space.
So it's like, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.
Space. Ta-da!
You know, and there's the reveal.
So they did this really well.
Whoever tweeted this knows what they're doing.
And it goes like this.
Joe Biden is using Crooked Hillary as a character reference.
Space, space, space.
That's it. That's the tweet.
Isn't that great?
Joe Biden is using Crooked Hillary as a character reference.
Space, space, space.
That's it. That's the tweet.
That's sort of a...
What I like about it is sort of everything.
It's got...
In my world, when I write comics, there are times when I'll get my funniest...
The funniest part of the comic sometimes comes before the end.
And when that happens, I do what I call sort of the afterglow, which is sort of just the finish or the dessert.
So maybe the joke happens the last panel, and then the last panel is just a little extra on top of the joke.
And that's what this tweet did.
Because the first part is the joke, and then the second part is, that's it, that's the tweet.
And then you get a little dessert.
Well tweeted. So, correct me if I'm wrong, and I think that your mileage may vary on this.
So last week, it looked like the following three things were not looking good.
So last week, we weren't sure that herd immunity was even possible.
Hydroxychloroquine was taking a hit, you know, for maybe killing people or not looking good, but that was questionable.
And then the remdesivir last week, there was that leaked report that made that look maybe not so good.
So, in a week, we've learned, well, I would say that nothing is certain, because since what we think we know changes every week, So I would be foolish to say that this is the week it all got right.
So let's just say that it's changed.
And who knows if it'll change again.
But Nate Silver, you know him from...
Well, you know him from politics and statistics, so he's an expert on statistics and whatnot.
And even when I disagree with him, which I sometimes do, famously, famously in 2016, he's always smart, and he's always a good read, and he's always got a filter on things that I wouldn't have seen, because I don't have his depth of experience in this field.
And he pointed out that The questions about whether people were reinfected happened to be, by coincidence, but probably not.
The number of people who were showing up as maybe reinfected, which would say herd immunity might not work, happened to be about the same as the error rate on the tests.
So in other words, you could fully explain the anomalies in the herd immunity Just because the tests are not that accurate.
So you would expect, actually, statistically, that you would get exactly the result they got, but if you interpreted it to mean that people had been reinfected, it's probably more appropriate to say there was a test problem, because it was about the same number.
Now, I'll leave you to fact check that.
I'm just passing along that even, I don't know, 48 hours ago, I told you that the odds of herd immunity were only maybe 75%.
Because I was hearing these reports of like, well, maybe not.
But after hearing Nate Silver's reframing of it, I still don't know.
But I'm going to bump up my odds to basically 100%.
You know, you can make it 99 if you don't want it to be 100.
But so I would say that herd immunity is, as of today, And only today, this is the first time I'm willing to say I am positive there's herd immunity.
As of yesterday, I wasn't positive.
Right now, I'm positive. Because Nate pushed me over the line there.
So, and you saw what happened to the stock market, right?
The stock market just went nuts.
So, the stock market thinks good things are happening.
But I don't think any of the things are going to be about testing.
I think testing will just be the disappointment in all this.
There is a video which some of you may have seen.
If you get all the conspiracy theory stuff, some of you are always looking in the right places for the conspiracy theory stuff.
I saw today a video which I'm pretty sure is fake.
So I'm going to tell you that, in my opinion, it looks, I'd say, certainly fake.
So if you see it, I will inoculate you from believing it, okay?
So the video purports to be somebody with a, I don't know, it looks like their phone surreptitiously recording some kind of a lecture.
And, you know, it's not a good picture and you can't quite see the slides too well.
And, you know, the guy talking, you know, he's a little far away because he's up on the front of the class.
And the audio suggests, and I'm only going to give you the high level because I don't actually want to spread the rumor.
Right? So there's something horrible in there.
I don't want to say it because it just makes it worse, right?
So I'll give you a hint so that if you see it, you'll know, oh, that's the one.
So it hints that the military was considering creating a very bad virus weapon.
So that's the only thing I'll tell you, right?
So if you see a grainy video of somebody allegedly showing other military people, hey, we've developed this awful thing, and that's all I'm going to tell you about it, as far as I can tell, it's fake.
It looks very fake to me.
All right.
Did you know that Chinese...
Companies are snapping up oil fields because they're cheap.
So there's some big Chinese developer, I saw this in Jack Posobiec's tweet, that there's some Chinese rich guy who's buying up oil fields in Texas.
And I'm thinking to myself, okay, that sounds bad, but let me ask you another question.
Why do we let them buy anything?
Can somebody answer why we let them buy anything in this country?
I mean, other than products they can take with them.
Because we can't buy stuff in China, right?
If we could, I would say, oh, that's fair.
They buy some stuff here, we buy some stuff there.
But given the relative sizes of the economies and the populations, Don't we all expect that if we wait long enough, China's economy will dwarf the United States just because of math and demographics?
We all expect that.
That's sort of a given, you know, unless something strange happens.
Well, what happens when China is so big that the amount of money that they can spend on stuff is even more gigantic compared to what it is now, which is already massive?
How much of the United States could they buy and just own it?
I mean, they could buy all the good stuff, right?
They could buy all the good real estate.
They could buy all the good companies.
What couldn't they buy if they had enough money?
So the question I ask you is, if we can't buy stuff in their country, and I think that's the case, right?
I mean, I'm not going out on a limb to say you can't buy a nice little piece of real estate in Shanghai.
So if we can't, why in the world do we let them buy here?
Now, I get that rich people like it because they can sell stuff to them.
But really, they're literally buying the country, right?
If they own a piece of the country, they sort of, you know, they've got a lot of control just by being rich and here and landowners.
I know, it seems like a bad idea, says me.
All right, let me make sure that I've talked about all the delightful things that I was going to talk about.
I don't want to leave a thing out.
Because he would feel so used.
Oh yes, I wanted to remind you that...
So I'm moving some bonus content over to Locals, L-O-C-A-L-S dot com.
And I've got a subscription site there for...
I'll be moving all of my video content.
I'll still be doing it here every day, so you still can watch it the same ways.
But if you wanted to find it there, if you wanted to watch it at higher speeds so you could hear me talk faster...
You could do that there. You could message me.
You could see some stuff that you won't see anywhere else.
But best of all, those people who are nice enough to contribute to me on Patreon need not do that.
So if you're on Patreon, feel free to cancel that.
And I know some people have some problems with Patreon anyway.
And if you like, subscribe to Locals.
And cancel Patreon either way, I would say.
So, that's all for now.
If you need to find that link, go to my Twitter.
It's in the profile. You can see that.
Tell us what happened to last night's Periscope.
Oh, it was just a technical glitch.
It just ended.
And if I get that far into one, and it gets a technical glitch, and it ends...
I don't restart because I think, well, 20 minutes is good enough.
Research chlorine dioxide.
I don't know why, but okay.
The China book, Unrestricted Warfare.
Yeah, I'm familiar with that.
Zoom Hollywood Media must be stopped.
Yeah, Zoom apparently has made some changes, but we don't know if they're the good kind.
Yeah, somebody's pointing out that we're always afraid, the United States is always afraid of some other country, you know, eating our lunch.
It used to be Japan, and then Japan just stopped being such a threat.
Then it became China.
And is it possible that China will be like the coronavirus, ironically, and just sort of trail off on its own because everything has a season?
Well, we'll find out.
Meat supply? Yeah, I guess the president ordered the unions and the workers to go back to work, even if it's not safe.
I don't love that situation.
But I don't disagree that the government should use its powers to keep the food supply solid.
So this is one of the, you know, this is a war situation.
You know, when the president referred to this as a war, it really is a war.
And these are commander-in-chief decisions.
And the commander-in-chief basically just told the meat workers that congratulations, you're on the front line.
And they didn't sign up for that.
But none of us signed up for it.
I didn't sign up to be in a higher risk group, right?
Asthma at a certain age.
Nobody signed up for any of this.
So it's not fair.
It's certainly not fair that the meat workers would take a far bigger burden than a number of other people.
Not as big as the frontline healthcare workers, but pretty big.
And it's not fair.
And I think the only thing that we can say is thank you.
Thank you for your service.
This is like one of those weird times when saying thank you for your service makes sense in a non-military context because we are at war and the commander-in-chief just ordered the meat workers to the front lines.
And we should just respect it.
Thank them. I don't think we should stop it, because I think even just the psychology of keeping the food chain solid, I mean, I think the public wants to know that the government is going to do whatever it takes to keep the food chain working.
So I think the public wants to see a little strength when it comes to food.
Maybe not, you know, overshooting the mark with privacy and stuff like that.
Public can get a little antsy about that and should.
But when you talk about the food supply and it's a war, somebody's going to be a victim.
You know, I think we just have to respect them.
That's it. We just have to respect them and thank them.
And on that thought, I would like to wish you A great night.
And I hope tomorrow has as much good news as today, because today was pretty cool.
And I think we're going to be heading into a good situation.
Remember I told you, these two weeks are going to be some good stuff.
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