Episode 380 Scott Adams: Cohen, Beto, Ohr, Kim, Pelosi, Heller

Hey, everybody, come on in here. Gather around. For those of you who are walking on the beach and listening to this periscope, which I understand is a popular thing to do. How's the water? And to the rest of you, I hope you remembered to be prepared for coffee with Scott Adams. Hey, upstate New York. I'm sorry that you're in upstate New York. So let us drink in sympathy for someone who is in upstate New York in the winter. So much to talk about. You're right. Let's get going with the simultaneous sip. Lift your glass, your mug, your stein, your receptacle of any kind of your chalice, if you will, fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me for the simultaneous sip. Oh, yeah. Somebody said talk about Andrew Yang. I don't know if there's a story about that, so I will look into that. All right. So many things. Let's start with the buzzfeed story that President Trump asked Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about their plans for building a Trump Tower in Russia. Russia. I say. Now, here's the context. Number one, buzzfeed is not a credible source. That could be just the end of the story, right? I could just say a source which we know is not credible has a story. Should I even tell you the story? Would it even matter once I've said it's not a credible source and it's anonymous sources? Hey, it's anonymous sources. So the first thing you need to know about it is that it doesn't have any credibility. The second thing you need to know about it is that they're leaving out. When I've been watching the reporting on it this morning, and I think both, you know, both sides are leaving out the most important point. Here's the most important point about that story that's being left out. Now, remember, the whole narrative is that maybe Russia had something on Trump and that they were working together and they were colluding and maybe Trump was trying to make some money off this being president deal. But this story, they're leaving out the biggest question, which is, is there any question that this project would have gone forward had the president actually. Had the candidate Trump been elected president? Obviously, no. Can you, in any your greatest imaginary powers, if you put your full powers of imagination on this, can you imagine that had the president become elected as he did, that they would have gone ahead with building a Trump Tower in Russia? There's not even the slightest chance of that. So the big part of the context that's missing is that this was always about what if I don't get elected? Now if he doesn't get elected, he has no power whatsoever. And that's the scenario in which a Russian project makes sense. Who's saying that? If you don't tell your viewers, hey, the most important thing you need to know is that this was the backup plan. The Trump Tower plan only could have gone forward if he had no power to do anything that Russia wanted. He was just a businessperson who lost an election and obviously wouldn't be running again at his age. Probably. So if you leave that out of the story, what the hell do you have? All you have this buzzfeed non credible story, which would also suggest that there's somebody associated with the Mueller investigation who's leaking. Maybe everything else is leaked. But why would this be the one thing that's leaking? And let me ask you this. If buzzfeed has a source that can tell buzzfeed the details of what Cohen and Trump allegedly said, and by the way, it's just going to come down to he said, she said, even if the reporting is accurate in the sense that Cohen claims this has happened, this still doesn't mean anything, doesn't have any legal jeopardy. There's no real risk here except Cohen, of course. So if buzzfeed has a source this good that they're getting that level of detail about top, top secret Muller investigation, wouldn't buzzfeed also know by now with this excellent source, wouldn't they know by now if Mueller has anything on Trump? Think about it. Could buzzfeed even do this story and have a real source that knows this level of who what conversation happened and yet not know that Mueller does or does not have something powerful un Trump himself? I think the buzzfeed story, you have to see it as strong evidence, not proof, but strong evidence that Mueller doesn't have anything, anything that would have a legal or serious implication? All right, so that's the first thing we of course have to talk about President Trump canceling Nancy Pelosi's flight. But I feel like it happened yesterday after I periscoped and so, so much has been said about it. I feel like I'd just be retreading what other people said. I will simply say that the Democrats attack that it's childish. I don't know that that's so good of an attack because it kind of highlights that Pelosi was being childish with canceling or I guess postponing the State of the Union. So I don't think you're really on strong ground if you say what she did was perfectly reasonable and what he did was childish. To me, it seems like they very cleverly just matched her level of childish. Childishness, which you kind of have to do because. Because you have to give that mutually assured destruction thing where if you go off script, meaning you do something that's non standard politics, we're going to go off script. As much as you want to go off script, one of the superpowers that Trump always employs and is very powerful, it's powerful persuasion to essentially frame him as the person who does this, and that is that however far off the path you're willing to go, he's going to go with you. There's no point at which you can count on the president to stay in the channel. That's his superpower. So if Pelosi says, I think he'll stay in the channel, I'm going to go over here a little bit out of bounds and see if I can attack him out of bounds with this postponing the State of the Union, what does Trump do? He goes, you want to play out of bounds? I love out of bounds. I live out of bounds. Out of bounds is my home court. Let's go out of bounds. How's your flight, Nancy? So it feels like the type of attack. When I say attack, I mean political attack. By postponing the State of the Union, it feels like the sort of thing that maybe they thought was a good idea when they tried it, but it can't possibly work with this particular president because he's just going to go further out of bounds than you. And you can rely on that. That's sort of his brand. So I don't think there's anything you can say about the canceled flight, except that it was hilarious. It totally matched her childishness. He didn't go first, which would have felt different. Really, he didn't go first. And plus, as I mentioned yesterday, it opens up the possibility that they've released the Kraken. And now if Trump doesn't have to do a State of the Union in front of this boring crowd sitting on their hands, or at least half of them, he can maybe do something more interesting or he can just do it later. So he has more options now than he had before, and some of them are better than the original options. All right, CNN ran a very negative article on Beto o' Rourke today on their website. What does that mean? Because remember, CNN gets to decide whose article runs and who doesn't. I don't know if they assign articles in every Case sometimes they probably do or suggest articles. But in any case, CNN gets to decide what's on their site and what isn't. And they have decided that a very negative article about Beto saying that he's only getting this much attention because he's a white male. Boom. So CNN is clearly trying to clear the field for someone. Now, if I had to guess, probably Kamala Harris. So if you see CNN start to pick off the weaker players in the field, or more importantly, the stronger players to get, you know, maybe they don't need to pick off the weak ones, right? But they probably need to pick off the ones that are in the hunt, you know, the people who are in the top five. So you should expect to see a negative Bernie article, a negative Biden article, a negative Beto article. We've seen and we saw a negative article about Gabby, Tulsa, Tulsa, Tulsa, Gabby. And so every time you see a negative article about another Democrat, you should know that whoever is in charge of our thinking is eliminating these choices so that we don't have to consider them. All right? There was a Wall street article, Wall Street Journal article by Kimberly Stressel saying that Bruce Ohr, FBI agent Bruce Orr did tell the FBI that the so called dossier was funded by the Clinton administration or the Clinton campaign and that it was not necessarily reliable because it came from an unreliable source that had not been vetted. And it's the sort of story, when I see it, and I think to myself, wait, is that new? Is that new news? Right. Somebody beat me to it. It's old news. And this whole thing is starting to look like Groundhog Day. Every new story feels like we've already heard it. Even if there's something new, it just feels like the same story over and over again. In this case, it seems to me the way reality is shaping up here as we're learning more and more is that the FBI started an investigation without having strong evidence. Now the people on the right are saying, there it is, there's proof that the FBI is crooked and there's a deep state because they started an investigation without solid evidence. I don't feel like that's a rational attack. Here's why. It's the concept of expected value. Expected value. Do you know how that's calculated in economics and business? There's a thing called expected value where you say if there's a 1% chance that this decision will cost us a trillion dollars, then the value of the decision or the risk is 1% times a trillion. If there's a let's make it easier. If there's a 10% chance, you will earn $100 with this investment, the expected value is 10% times $110. Right. So if you have lots of decisions, that's how you decide which ones to go with. You multiply the odds of it happening times the dollar amount. If it happens, you know, whether it's plus or minus, you still do the calculation. Now, let's say the FBI has two different potential cases. One of the potential cases is that there's suspicion that somebody is committing some kind of a normal federal crime across state lines. And somebody brings them information which is not credible. So the crime is not that big. The alleged crime and the information that it happened is not that credible. The FBI might say, all right, we don't really have anything here. If you could bring me something that's credible, then maybe we'll open an investigation because there's not much to gain with this smallish crime. We're not going to put a ton of resources on something that doesn't even have solid evidence. But suppose you're talking about an allegation that the President of the United States is a Russian mole. What's that worth if it's true? Trillions. Your life, the future of the planet, the nature of the country. It's the biggest possible potential problem. When they had this information, which they knew came from the Clinton campaign, and they knew it was not credible, but there was a lot of it. There was a lot of it. And it came through somebody they knew came through somebody they'd worked with before who had not lied to them before. Now that's not credible information. Still, even though the person who brought it they thought was credible, they knew who he was working for and therefore it was not credible. But if there's any chance that this claim is true, it's an enormous cost. So if you're the FBI and your job is to do your job to protect the country, and somebody brings you a very small chance that something very big might be happening, do you open an investigation and at least see if you can find that there is some evidence? And I think that's defensible. Meaning that if the FBI's explanation of all this is, yeah, we did not have credible information, but this isn't like any other case because the stakes were so high and it was so important to get an answer soon. You couldn't wait if any of this was true, you just couldn't wait. That's pretty reasonable to me, and I know you hate this when I act reasonable because I know most of you have an opinion and it's sort of solid. But. But if you're telling me the FBI looked into it because it was a gigantic potential risk and the evidence was terrible, but you just sort of got to look into it, that's not crazy, and it's not. Not doing your job. And, you know, yeah, I see somebody's mentioning the FISA thing, and the FISA thing maybe didn't have all the information in it, et cetera. But keep in mind, if, if the scenario is that the FBI thought there might actually be something to this, then the rest is paperwork, right? So the entire claim rests mostly on intention. Somebody says you're missing it or taking it out of context, you can give me a reason, tell me what I'm missing and. Or what context I left out. Let me give you, here's the context that I think, that I think addresses your context. If you believe that something is right and you're doing the right thing, then everything you do feels right to you. I mean, it's basic confirmation bias. So if you're saying, well, what about this other thing and what about this text they found, or what about these other things, keep in mind, then once you've decided that there's a deep state, you will of course see lots of evidence of it. If you had decided there's not a deep state, you would of course see lots of evidence that you were right. So the fact that you say, wait, you have to look at all the things, that's not solid thinking, because it wouldn't matter what big complicated thing you're looking at, whether it's climate change or Russiagate or anything in politics, whatever opinion you have is going to be surrounded with confirmation bias. In other words, if you're totally wrong, your opinion will be mostly confirmation bias. And if you're totally right, in other words, you have the right theory, you might have the right theory, and you're still surrounded by confirmation bias even though you're right. So there might be one right thing. And all the rest of the evidence you say, see, see, look at all this other evidence, probably confirmation bias, because that's the way the brain is wired. All right, enough on that. Someone brought to my attention that my periscopes on the, on the subject of climate change, when they're reposted on YouTube, they come with a very prominent link by the video added by YouTube, which is owned by Google. So they add a link to the Wikipedia page saying that climate change is real. And here are all the links. So is it completely a random algorithm change that climate change, when it's discussed in any kind of a skeptical frame, is matched by Google with a link to the most pro climate consensus site you could have, which is a Wikipedia page with all the links demonstrating climate change? Is that completely an algorithmic thing? Because I used the right words, you know, I use climate and skeptic and stuff like that. So it could be just, could be completely an algorithm. Right? They just recognized the topic and then gave the, maybe the most popular link that is comprehensive to that topic. Maybe they pair Wikipedia links with lots of different topics. Maybe. But here's the interesting thing. I'm going to call back to something I said on another periscope, which is why can't we deprogram terrorists who are in the process of self radicalizing? Self radicalizing means getting on the Internet and looking at a bunch of ISIS propaganda and talking yourself into being an ISIS terrorist. If Google can talk skeptics out of their belief of climate science by feeding them persuasive links, aren't we already doing that with the radicals? And could it be one of the big reasons that we're seeing less of it? Because maybe we're now seeing less of it. So first of all you have to fact check that. But it feels like the United States is not having big problems with domestic terror. There's some crazy guy here and there, but it feels like there could be a lot more of it. I guess there's no way to measure because we don't measure, because there's no way to know what it would have been if we acted differently. There's no comparison point. But I have to ask myself, I have to ask myself, is Google using the same thing that they use the same technology they used to pair my periscopes on climate change with a Wikipedia page? Aren't they doing the same thing with the terrorists? If a terrorist tries to find an ISIS site, aren't they going to be bombarded with links and pop ups and persuasion and photos that would move them away from that position? And if not, why the hell not? Why the hell are we not doing that? I think we could be fairly certain it works. Not 100% obviously, but I think we can say with complete certainty that it would work to at least reduce the risk. All right, new topic. Yesterday I did a periscope in the afternoon on just the topic of how to move forward on this wall border security situation. And what I suggested was that we just asked the Democrats for their plan and ask Them to put it on a graphic image so we can see exactly what they want to do compared to what we already have. So it might be a picture that shows the various ways we're protecting the border from here the river does it and here there's a mountain and here there's just some sensors in this one maybe small place. We need some steel slats, whatever. Why don't we just ask them for their plan? Because here's. There's a couple things I left down yesterday. One is if you asked either the Republicans or the Democrats to produce this plan, that's simple enough for the citizens to understand. It's just sort of a picture, you know, with some numbers pointing to stuff. If either the Democrats or the Republicans produced such a plan, I think they would look the same. Here's the trick. I think they would look the same because they're not really talking about different things anymore. And both the Republicans and Democrats would never put out a plan that didn't have pretty widespread approval from engineers and border security experts. In other words, the Democrats could never put out a plan that the border security professionals say, you know, that's okay in this place, but you got it wrong over here. This definitely won't work. And here's why they can't do that. Now somebody says the Border Patrol already has a plan that could be a good way to start. But we don't need Border Patrol's plan because all that matters at the moment is that one of these parties, Republicans or Democrats, goes first and just says this is exactly what it's going to look like. Now, if the Republicans have that or access to it, they're dumb for not producing it. But I think that Republicans have a problem because it's going to show not enough wall. And maybe that's a problem politically. But the Democrats can. The Democrats can simply show us what they would fund and then maybe the Border Patrol can overlay some information on that. Like if you don't put a wall here, you'll get 10,000 crosses a year or whatever in this area. And we know that from the past. So you'd want some statistics on it, but you'd want to see the plan now. The other thing I didn't add is that as you've noticed, the Democrats are cannibalizing each other. Part of this has to do with the run up to the presidency. So the various factions are trying to cannibalize each other to take care of some competitors. But you also see the younger congresspeople versus the older. You see the RPOs and some of the others who are a little bolder, a little more willing to go against their own party, a little more willing to play outside the bounds. And here's the interesting thing. The first Democrat who produces that plan with a picture. The. The picture is the important part. If it's text, it's just never going to get any attention. It's got to be a picture. The first Democrat who produces a high level conceptual picture plan with a budget is the one who gets all the attention. And what are all the Democrats fighting for right now? They're all fighting for attention. There's a desperate kind of, you know, flailing around for the. For a lot of different Democrats to get a little bit of attention because there's so many of them now they have to try a little harder. So far, RPOS is getting the most attention. You call her. Oh, some people don't know that AOC is RPOs, as in the first letter is R and the POS is not point of sale. So once AOC came out as a racist, I started calling her RPOs. And by the way, that's not my opinion that she's a racist. Her tweets are pretty clear on that. So here's my point. There are some Democrat who would have a huge benefit in terms of publicity and in terms of moving the world forward if they just find out what the plan is. Maybe they even start with Border Patrol's plan. That would be a good place to start, right? Start with the plan that the Republicans have. Change it any way that you think makes sense. Show it to the world, show it to Border Patrol and say, what do you think? Get their opinion, put it on it and show it to us. Just show it to the people. Now it seems to me that the government is largely broken and maybe will always be so because of the two sides that the press is taking. As long as the press is treating it as a dog fight and a contest between two sides. And the way you win is to win in public. It's not even the law that's a win. It's the looking like you won that matters. As long as the media puts all the politicians in the situation where they have to look like they won or else they're dead, you can't do anything. That's the opposite of an environment in which you can compromise. So because of the business model of the press, which is driven entirely by the fact that we can now measure exactly who wants to click on what stories and which ones get the Most attention. It's divided the world into a place where you can't compromise anymore because compromise will be spun as well. You lost, you stupid dog. You weak leader, you person who must be working for Russia. So losing is no longer an option for either sides. And now you see what happens. But the media doesn't really control the fact that, you know, somebody can come up with a plan, show it to the country. Whoever comes up with the first picture wins. Let me say this again as clearly as possible. Whoever comes up with the first visual picture of the border with what it is, and then, you know, overlaid somehow what they want it to be and what that will cost doesn't matter which side they come from. Whoever does, whoever goes visual first wins because that will be the picture from which all negotiations will have to spring, because it goes first. So if it goes first, it's locked in your brains. If it's visual, you can't beat it. There's no higher level of persuasion, and nobody's gone there. It's a completely empty green field. All you have to do, any politician, Republican, Democrat, senior, or brand new, all you have to do is walk into that field, hold up your picture, and say, this is what I want. This is what it is, and this is what it will cost to get what I want. And I ran this past Border Patrol, and hey, you networks, you should maybe get some experts on, and let's have them debate my plan. First person to do that wins, and I mean wins for the country and also wins for their brand and maybe wins for a lot of other people as well. It might even be a big win for the potential immigrants if you do it right. All right, so make it visual and you win. I'll make another. I'll tell you what, I'll make another prediction that there will be no agreement until there's a picture. There will be no agreement on the border until there's a picture that the public can understand. A simple picture. All right, let's see. Oh, I would like to offer a clarification of something I said online. Some people believe that I insulted somebody terribly. And I think it's fair to call me out on that. But it's also fair to hear my explanation. And I'll give you some context before I tell you what I got in trouble for. Here's the context. If I said I could hear something and you can't hear it, and I'm like, are you serious? You can't hear that? You don't hear that sound right now, Would it be Fair or would it be insulting to inquire if the person has any kind of hearing problem? I think it would be fair. There's nothing wrong with somebody having a hearing problem, right? That's just a normal thing. I'm pretty sure my own hearing is maybe degraded 10% just by age, so that would be fair. Nobody would say, oh, you're calling him disabled or something. No, you wouldn't. You would say, do you have a hearing problem? Because the question, the point in question is can you detect a sound? Likewise, if I said, do you see that plane up there? And somebody else said, no, I can't see it. I go right there, look right there and the other person can't see it, would it be fair for me to inquire? Or would it be an insult to say, is your vision perfect? Do you wear glasses? Because that would explain why I can detect something that you can't. Now, I would say that neither of them are insults. Now let's get to the question in point. There's a question about the so called climate gate emails in which some of the scientists use the words trick and hide the decline. Now I have claimed that it is obvious to me, obvious and I can detect it easily that that's casual conversation and not meant to mean literally a trick where you're trying to trick people, but rather a publicly used method and people can look at it and that hide the decline was really just a shorthand for the topic. They were trying to explain why some data in the past didn't match. So they're trying to hide it for marketing purposes. Now if you're hiding it for marketing purposes, you're not really trying to make the world a worse place. You're trying to be consistent with a theory that has tons of evidence in your opinion and there was just one little piece that's annoying and the public would get the wrong idea. So you try to de. Emphasize that for marketing purposes. So that was my interpretation. Now I am very good at interpreting words. I'm a professional writer and I read people's, you know, psychology. That's also my domain. That's what I write about and talk about. I've got my second book on that coming, etc. So I would say that I'm a good sensor, a sensor with an S S E N S O R. I can sense when somebody's telling a joke versus when they're serious. And I can sense, because this is my domain, it's my special expertise when, when somebody is talking in casual language versus precise language. And whether that means something. Words and meaning are my domain. I have a special sense for that, as really, I would say any author would. Most authors would share this better sense. And so I got into a conversation on the Internet with. And so Tony Heller came up because his interpretation of the words are that they clearly indicate Tony Heller is probably the most capable climate skeptic. So I've said that his presentation, his research and his persuasion are the best I've seen on the skeptical side. And I've asked people to respond and to figure out what's wrong with his take. And I'm not really getting. I'm not getting the pushback that I was expecting. So I haven't yet found. I'm not saying it doesn't exist. It's too early. But I haven't seen anybody say, oh, it's here. We debunk his claim that the data used to be one way and then it was fudged. So he has a lot of credibility as a technical mind, a scientific mind, an engineering mind, a rational mind. But his interpretation of what trick and what hide the decline meant in that context was wholly opposite of mine. He says they are literal. I say they're not. Now, I asked in the context of that conversation if Tony was on the spectrum, and people said, whoa, Scott, you're way out of line. You've gone ad hominem. Why are you attacking him? Somebody actually used the R word and said, why are you calling him an R word? You know, R E, T, A, R, D. I don't even want to say it. And I actually was surprised. I thought, wait a minute, when did it become an insult to be on the spectrum? Who is saying that being on a spectrum is an insult? Because part of the assumption for that was that his ability to go so deep with the data is part of the superpower that comes with being a little bit on the spectrum. And part of the superpower is what's driving Silicon Valley. It's what you can imagine that Dilbert, my character, my beloved character, has maybe a little bit of it, meaning that engineers and technologists are quite well known for having a higher degree of being on the spectrum. And it's also well known that it's highly associated with great capability. Tony Heller shows great capability consistent with that. He also shows in this one specific example, taking something literal that in my own expertise, I think is clearly not literal. And other scientists have looked into the situation and found out it was not literal as well. So if I ask him, Tony, is your ability to sense literal Speech versus figurative speech as good as mine. Because I'm not on the spectrum. And again, I'm not saying that how awesome I am that I'm not on the spectrum because being a little bit on the spectrum is associated with tremendous powers. It's like a superpower. So I want to be really clear, if I ask somebody if they're on the spectrum, that is not an insult. Not in my world. In my world, the people on the spectrum have invented the whole frickin world. Right? You know, they've done, they've done all of the cool stuff. How many people on the spectrum were involved with creating my phone, for God's sakes? So please don't assume that I think that's an insult. I think that is a totally perfectly legitimate question to ask. Now, he didn't answer the question, so I don't know the answer to it. But I will argue strongly that it's a fair question in the context of asking if somebody can sense something, that if you've got good vision, if you've got good hearing, those are good senses. If somebody asked me, I lost my ability to smell years ago. I have literally zero sense of smell for, I don't know how long, decades or so. And if somebody smelled something and said, scott, do you smell it? And I said no, wouldn't it be fair for them to say, is there something wrong with your nose? And the answer is yes. Would I be insulted? No. No. It's a question about whether I have a physical sensor. I just don't have it. Somebody asked, can I taste? Weirdly, yes. Yes. I've lost 100% of my sense of smell and every common sense and common knowledge is that that's associated with your taste. And the thought is if you lost your sense of smell, you couldn't taste. But I can. And I also can't tell the difference between what it used to be and what it is now. I can't tell the difference, but I also can't tell if it's psychological, meaning that I don't know if I just haven't noticed that I went from really super tasting things to not tasting it so much. But if I have a bowl of soup, it feels exactly like it always felt. It doesn't feel like there's any difference between what happened, you know, how it tasted when I was 12 years old and how it tastes now. Feels like the same experience. So I don't know. So how do you buy Christina perfume? Easily, I don't. What does that have to do with the issue being discussed. So the issue being discussed was whether or not it's fair to ask if somebody is on the spectrum, if the topic is something that would be hard to identify for someone on the spectrum and easier for someone who wasn't just going with the science, not an insult. All right, So the real, the real question about my loss of smell, but yet I can taste is if I, if I were introduced to a brand new taste and close my eyes and somebody said, all right, I'm going to put this brand new thing in your mouth, could I, would I, would I imagine that I could taste it? Or is the visual so strong that if I saw it and it looked yellow, I would imagine it tasted like a lemon or something and it would be an interesting test, But I haven't done that. All right. No, it wasn't cocaine. I've never been a snorter. I tried maybe three or four times. I tried cocaine in college and it literally didn't do anything to me. I don't know why, but I just lost all interest in it. So as an adult, I haven't, or at least after college, I have not snorted anything, haven't done any opioids, etc. All right, Phantom taste buds, like a lost limb? Could be. Yeah, I think, I think that's an entirely open possibility. All right, and I will talk to you later.