Real Coffee with Scott Adams - Episode 1119 Scott Adams： All the New Fake News, People Who Are Bad at Analysis and Don't Know it, Netflix Should be in Jail, Woodward

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, come on in. It's time. It's time for coffee with Scott Adams. I forgot who I was

00:00:17.140 there for a moment. Am I the coffee or am I the guy? Well, it's all the same thing. If you drink

00:00:23.660 enough coffee, you merge with the beverage and become sort of a coffee person. But enough about

00:00:30.960 that. Let us get to the important part of the morning, the part that makes everything better.

00:00:35.700 Yeah, it's called the simultaneous sip and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or

00:00:41.380 gels or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite beverage.

00:00:47.600 I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day. The

00:00:54.820 thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. It happens now. Go.

00:01:03.580 Oh yeah. Yeah. So good. So in my opinion, the funniest thing that's happening right now

00:01:14.120 is that President Trump is experiencing just blistering, withering attacks on, you know,

00:01:23.560 everything he's ever done. And at the same time, he's been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

00:01:32.340 Now, here's the fun part. It would be easy to imagine that any president could get nominated for

00:01:40.260 the Nobel Peace Prize. You know, if you're thinking, okay, who is a good candidate for the

00:01:47.720 Nobel Peace Prize, and they have to give it every year, even if nobody did anything, you say to

00:01:53.680 yourself, well, it's no big surprise that there's somebody in the world who's willing to nominate the

00:02:01.880 president of the United States, no matter who the president is. There's always something the

00:02:06.820 president did that sounds peace-like. But what's different is that Trump has the best case for

00:02:17.160 winning a Nobel Peace Prize that maybe you've ever seen. It's not just marginal. That's what's funny

00:02:26.640 about it. You know, you could imagine a situation in which you'd say, I don't know, you know, the things

00:02:34.420 he's done. I suppose you could make a case for it being worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. But we're not

00:02:42.880 talking about a gray area here. We're talking about the clearest case for a Nobel Peace Prize,

00:02:50.420 maybe ever. Because the beauty of it is that it's not just the Israel-UAE deal,

00:02:59.620 as big as that is. It's also that he managed to get rid of ISIS. He's pulling troops out of

00:03:09.180 everything. He's the first time in 39 years he didn't start a war. And you look at North Korea is 0.64

00:03:19.940 clearly in a better place than it was. Trump is getting, you know, he gets criticized for being

00:03:27.860 too friendly with dictators. But it is exactly why we're not in wars with those dictators.

00:03:34.700 It's part of the process. It's part of an explicit strategy, which he told us in advance,

00:03:41.720 that he was going to be good to the leaders of these other countries, whether they deserved it or

00:03:46.080 not. Because it would be a good negotiating position to treat them with respect. And then maybe you can get

00:03:53.100 something done. And if you look at his total body of work, it's kind of crazy. Because even his critics

00:04:02.600 are going to have to sort of give it up for the international stuff. They might complain bitterly

00:04:08.580 about stuff at home. But the international stuff is really, really solid. So here's the thing I like

00:04:17.660 to keep reminding you. If you have a worldview, or a filter on life, and you're pretty certain that

00:04:24.660 it's the right filter, and it explains your reality well, and you think that other people with different

00:04:30.440 filters on life don't quite see things clearly, the only way you can settle that is by prediction.

00:04:39.220 Whichever of those two filters on reality consistently predicts what happens next,

00:04:44.840 is you got to think that's the real one, or the one that's closest to truth. All of the people who

00:04:52.380 said President Trump would create wars and would be completely useless in international negotiations.

00:05:02.480 How did your prediction go? Did your prediction in, let's say, 2016, did you predict that this

00:05:10.600 president would be not just nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize? Of course, you know, it may be political

00:05:17.280 in terms of who actually gets the prize. But that there would be a completely solid and unambiguous case.

00:05:26.600 And really, you can't even think of anybody who would be in second place. It's the most solid case for a

00:05:32.140 Nobel Peace Prize, maybe of all time. Yeah, oh, Serbia, Serbia and Kosovo. Like, I forgot an entire,

00:05:39.680 an entire major component, because he did so many things. You know, he just sort of drops these little,

00:05:46.520 these little, you know, gold eggs as he's going. And you don't realize how many gold eggs there are

00:05:50.840 until you, until somebody nominates him for a Nobel Peace Prize. And you say, well, what's the

00:05:55.920 justification for that? You go, oh, well, there's that golden egg. That's pretty good. Oh, here's

00:06:01.180 another one. Well, here's another one. And suddenly, you've got a gigantic basket full of golden eggs

00:06:06.880 that you didn't quite realize what kind of a portfolio he'd put together for this stuff. So

00:06:12.160 anyway, my point is that my worldview, expressed often and publicly, was that he definitely would

00:06:21.340 be the kind of president who would get a Nobel Peace Prize. So that was my prediction. In fact,

00:06:28.340 I predicted that it would have happened earlier. I would have thought it would happen in the first

00:06:32.560 term. So my worldview predicted exactly where we are on this Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

00:06:42.640 And anybody who thought it was the opposite, you have to now honestly say to yourself, okay,

00:06:47.800 my worldview did not predict. You could still think you don't like the president for whatever

00:06:54.020 reasons. But you have to admit, one of those worldviews predicted perfectly. And one of them

00:07:02.540 got it completely wrong. There's that's some somewhat just objectively true at this point.

00:07:08.140 All right, there's a big story that I'm going to mention without talking about. Now, I wouldn't

00:07:18.460 normally do that, but you'll immediately know why. There's a big story that Netflix is showing some

00:07:25.220 content that I'm not going to describe, even in general terms. I'm not even going to tell you the

00:07:31.200 category it's in. And there are critics who say Netflix should actually go to jail, actual jail,

00:07:41.720 not a joke, the actual literally physically take a person and put them in jail for just running this

00:07:51.460 content on Netflix. Now, I saw that claim before I saw the clips of the content. And of course,

00:08:01.180 I said to myself, that's a little extreme. Obviously, if it's just going to be on a family

00:08:09.120 entertainment platform, Netflix is sort of for everybody. And they have ratings and stuff. But

00:08:16.460 it's a family entertainment thing. Surely, they're not going to knowingly and intentionally

00:08:23.020 put content on their platform, which a reasonable person would say, you should go to jail for that.

00:08:34.960 Actual, literal jail for putting that on a screen. And then I looked at the content.

00:08:43.020 They should actually go to jail for it. Now, I don't like to even talk about this content. So

00:08:52.320 you may have noticed, I tend to stay away from it. Because it's just so ugly, I don't like to put it

00:08:59.060 in people's heads. But the fact that Netflix, with impunity, apparently, can put content on there that

00:09:07.340 literally, you should go to jail for. Actual, literal, go to jail. You know, and I wouldn't say

00:09:16.060 that about just about anything. I mean, you'd really, really have to try hard to get somebody

00:09:22.860 who's as, you know, free speech oriented. And, you know, hey, let's, let's not get too excited about

00:09:28.360 these little offenses and violations. I mean, I'm always on the side of you're making too much of

00:09:33.940 this. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter if it's a Republican thing or Democrat. Fairly consistently,

00:09:40.500 I'm the one who says, you're blowing this out of proportion. Not this time. Not this time. You

00:09:47.600 look at it as an adult. And you would say to yourself, somebody needs to go to jail for this

00:09:52.540 actual jail. It's mind blowing. All right. Joe Biden continues to, to run his campaign

00:10:03.900 in which I guess the main strategy besides hiding is to reword Trump's policies into angry and confused

00:10:15.040 old man language, but make it a little more boring. And it sounds like a joke, right? Oh, he's not

00:10:22.180 really running for president by doing, you know, nothing but rewording the current guy's policies.

00:10:27.840 Couldn't do that. Could he? Well, what's his, what's his slogan? Build back better. That really is just

00:10:37.580 make America great again, rewarded, but boring. And now that he's doing a buy America thing,

00:10:45.800 trying to convince people to buy America and bring the factories back. And I'm thinking to myself,

00:10:51.400 in other words, exactly what the president's doing. And then there are, of course, his coronavirus

00:10:57.880 recommendations from Joe Biden, which are, I, the president should follow the expert's advice,

00:11:06.320 which is exactly what he's done from day one. So Biden is literally just rewording what Trump

00:11:14.920 is doing and says he wants to do. He's just rewording it into confused, angry old man language

00:11:21.820 and selling it. Amazingly, he's selling it pretty well.

00:11:29.480 All right. One of my best predictions of all time, which I don't, I don't think it will ever

00:11:36.940 get much attention, but in terms of how accurate it was, it's really good. One of my best.

00:11:43.520 And it goes like this. When the pandemic first started, and maybe I said this in February-ish,

00:11:51.240 but it was early on before we knew a lot. And what I said was that everybody would look back

00:11:59.420 at the so-called mistakes that our leaders and experts made, and they will criticize them

00:12:06.140 with the clarity of what we learn in the future. But it will be completely unfair

00:12:12.120 because leaders were only guessing in the beginning because they didn't have, you know,

00:12:17.580 really the knowledge of what to do. And they knew they didn't know. They knew that there were so

00:12:23.020 many unknowns that they just had to do something and see if it worked. And if it didn't, quickly

00:12:30.160 adjust and try something else and learn as you go. And so in my effort to make the world a better

00:12:37.340 place, which looks like it didn't work at all, I tried to prepare the room, if you will. So I was

00:12:45.880 saying it loudly and often, when in a few months from now, you're going to think that we should have

00:12:52.540 made different decisions because you'll be smarter in the future. You'll know what worked and what

00:12:56.840 didn't work. And you will be completely full of shit. Because if you don't know it today, 1.00

00:13:02.680 don't tell me in August what we should have done today. All that matters is what did you know to

00:13:10.380 do today? How did all the leaders in the world do in February? Not so well. Not so well. Because

00:13:19.920 they were all guessing. Were they all bad leaders? Probably not. Were all the leaders in the world of

00:13:27.100 similar quality? Because it seems to me that leaders that you would think are bad in general

00:13:33.340 seem to have, in many cases, coincidentally, got something that looked like a better result

00:13:39.420 than some people you might have thought, well, I thought they were pretty good leaders,

00:13:43.680 but they got a bad result. What you will learn and what the fake news is counting on is that the

00:13:53.380 average person will never be sophisticated enough and never have the, let's say, the talent stack

00:13:59.720 to understand how to analyze this situation. It's hard. I would guess that no more than

00:14:07.060 2% of the public would be anywhere near the capability, and this is not just raw intelligence

00:14:16.260 capability, but experience in analyzing things. That's the important part is the experience.

00:14:22.080 If you don't have the experience analyzing complicated situations, you might think you

00:14:27.980 can do it. Because you might say to yourself, well, I just listened to the news, and there

00:14:33.480 were 10 smart people in a row who said that President Trump made big mistakes. So what else

00:14:41.820 do I need to know? I looked at the news. They seem like smart people. They all seem to agree

00:14:48.060 that the president made these mistakes. Therefore, logically, the president did a poor job on the

00:14:54.660 coronavirus. But here's the problem. 98% of the public doesn't know how to even analyze

00:15:02.940 this situation. So the 10 experts you hear almost certainly are not in that 2%. And you can tell

00:15:10.200 by looking at the way they talk about it. And I've gone through this before, but the fast version

00:15:15.540 is this. Leadership in the end will look like the least important variable in terms of how things

00:15:23.760 turned out. If you can't do your analysis and adjust for, hey, the United States has a high

00:15:29.660 population of African Americans, and they have a worse outcome in terms of ultimately dying

00:15:35.960 from coronavirus. Did anybody factor that in? When they said, how did the United States do? Did

00:15:43.200 they factor in that we have a high population of unusually vulnerable people? I didn't see anybody

00:15:50.120 do that. Have you ever seen anybody do that? Has anybody ever said, we're going to compare you to

00:15:55.620 Germany, but we're going to do this calculation to normalize it so it'd be as if you had similar

00:16:01.180 populations and then see how you did. Have you seen that? No, no, you've not seen that. How about

00:16:09.340 obesity? Gigantic variable. United States has a, sadly, has a fat population. We have an unusually obese

00:16:18.580 population. So if you compare us to a country that doesn't have an obese population or nowhere near it,

00:16:26.480 and you don't do the math to adjust when you're comparing the two, have you compared them? No.

00:16:34.640 No, you haven't compared them. So all the people that you think are the smart people

00:16:39.520 who are going on television saying, look at my graph. Look at Lusitania, Estonia. Look at how

00:16:48.760 Lubrikenburg did. Look how this state did compared to this other state. A hundred percent of those people

00:16:56.320 are idiots. Not in general, but on this topic. There are people who think that because they have a 1.00

00:17:05.120 graph and it's real data that they trust, and the data came from a good source, and they took that

00:17:11.340 good source and they put it on a graph, they think they know something. No. That graph is misleading.

00:17:20.640 It's not telling you something you need to know. It's not providing information. It is reducing your

00:17:27.540 information because it's misleading you. It misleads you into thinking that's enough to make some kind of a

00:17:33.500 decision. It's not. We don't know why some states do fine without masks. We don't know why some places seem to

00:17:42.300 need a shutdown and other places didn't. We don't know why some group activities seem to create a bunch

00:17:50.360 of new coronavirus and others don't. We don't know exactly what anything is doing. It's this big ball

00:17:59.280 of guessing. And I can guarantee you this, that all of the leaders of all of the countries

00:18:07.000 said some version of this early on in the pandemic. This feels like a very comfortable thing to

00:18:14.500 assume is true without knowing and talking to every person. Don't you think that every leader said to

00:18:22.040 themselves pandemic, virology, epidemiology, I don't know anything about that stuff, right?

00:18:32.800 So there might be a few world leaders who are also doctors, but in general, don't you think

00:18:38.220 your Putin's, your Xi's, your Merkel's, everybody, for the most part, generally speaking, don't you

00:18:47.040 think they all said, I'd better just listen to the experts with me so far? That all of the, all of

00:18:55.160 the leaders said, this isn't my domain. I'd better listen to the experts. Then the experts, would you

00:19:01.660 also agree, were largely on the same page worldwide because the experts were really good at sharing

00:19:08.620 information. The internet allows that. And so the experts everywhere fairly soon, I mean, not in day one,

00:19:16.800 but fairly soon they achieved something like a consensus. So all the world leaders looked at

00:19:24.200 the experts, looked at the consensus and said, all right, we could be right or we could be wrong,

00:19:30.460 but it's never going to be wrong to do what the consensus of experts say in terms of a rational

00:19:36.540 decision. It's never wrong. It could be wrong in terms of the outcome because again, even the experts

00:19:42.520 were taking their best shot at it, they were legitimately, you know, honestly and professionally

00:19:48.400 giving us their best work, but they had to guess a little bit, right? You can't fault them if they

00:19:57.260 got something wrong because it wasn't possible to know what was right. It just wasn't possible.

00:20:02.860 So there's my take that only the people who don't know how to analyze things think that they can look

00:20:11.600 at President Trump's performance and say, well, that could have been better. And of course, there's

00:20:17.920 always the fact that anything that's good could have been done sooner, right? Now the president's

00:20:26.320 getting, uh, the big fake news of the day last 48 hours, I guess, is the idea that if the president

00:20:34.360 had acted sooner, a hundred thousand people would be saved. Now, is that true? Number one, we don't

00:20:43.580 know. That's a complete unknown. So anybody who says if he had acted sooner, a hundred thousand people

00:20:50.080 would have been saved. There's no evidence of that. There's no evidence of that at all. Do you know

00:20:55.840 what evidence they use? Somebody ran a model. What, what credibility do you give somebody's complicated

00:21:04.280 prediction model? None, right? If we've learned anything, it's that complicated prediction models are not

00:21:14.420 really credible. So all the people saying, oh, there's a model that says a hundred thousand people or whatever

00:21:20.560 would have lived if he had acted sooner. A, everybody could have acted sooner. B, nobody knew

00:21:26.840 what to do. Uh, uh, C, Fauci says, and I don't think he would lie about this. Fauci says that the

00:21:36.860 president did whatever the experts collectively said he should do. And when they said it, he didn't even

00:21:43.100 delay. He did it when they said things should be done. So your, uh, your situation is that, um, it's

00:21:55.040 really, it's some combination of lying and not knowing how to analyze things. So there's some people

00:22:02.840 saying the president did a bad job who know they're lying because it can't be determined one way or the

00:22:08.920 other. Uh, and there are other people who just don't know. They, they think it's just a fact

00:22:14.100 because they don't know how to analyze things. All right. So, and, and you can see how crazy things

00:22:22.740 get because Woodward got some criticism for if he learned during this telephone interview back whenever

00:22:31.500 it was, if he learned that Trump knew it was more dangerous than he had said, shouldn't Woodward be

00:22:38.920 telling people, you know, shouldn't he immediately blow the whistle and say, Oh, I was going to say

00:22:44.600 this for a book, but it's so important. I need to tell the public because otherwise a hundred thousand

00:22:50.100 people will die. Do you know what Woodward said? He said, that's nonsense. In other words, the people

00:22:57.520 who are believing Woodward's book are holding in their mind, these two things to be true, which can't

00:23:03.860 both be true. That if the president had told the public that it was a big problem and they would

00:23:09.880 take it more seriously, we could have saved a bunch of lives. But if the president told Woodward and

00:23:17.060 Woodward told the president and even had it on tape, so you don't even have to wonder if it's being

00:23:22.420 mischaracterized, it's on tape. If Woodward had given it to the public, it would not have made any

00:23:27.680 difference. Those two things can't both be true. You have to pick. Either Woodward killed tens of

00:23:37.560 thousands of people by sitting on it, or the president didn't kill tens of thousands of people

00:23:45.500 by sitting on it. In other words, nobody knew what to do. You know, you could always second guess

00:23:51.840 after you have better information. All right. One big persuasion mistake Democrats are making,

00:24:00.420 and I don't know if it could be avoided, is that dumping all of these anti-Trump books at the same

00:24:05.560 time. I think there are three more anti-Trump books that are going to hit in the next few weeks.

00:24:11.240 If you have too many anti-Trump books, the audience gets snow blind, meaning that they all feel,

00:24:20.160 they start feeling the same. And if they all start feeling the same, they also feel less important.

00:24:27.760 Because here's a memory trick from the book, from the book guy's name, I can't remember.

00:24:36.360 But the trick is this, that memory is triggered by contrast. So if there was, if you only had one book

00:24:45.420 and it said terrible things about the president, people would really notice that.

00:24:50.160 And they'd be like, whoa, that's a big deal. I don't know if it's true or not, but I can't stop

00:24:55.120 thinking about this book. And I would say the Michael Wolff book was closer to that, right?

00:25:01.220 The Michael Wolff book, if you remember that, sort of was by itself for a while. So it really stood out

00:25:07.580 and became a major news thing. But if you have six books that all make sketchy claims,

00:25:13.640 and inevitably some of those claims in those books will be debunked.

00:25:18.840 If some of them are debunked, and the whole audience says, okay, that one's debunked,

00:25:24.100 but what about these other ones? There's still, it's just not interesting. It's just a big wall

00:25:29.800 of anti-Trump books that in your mind just got put in one bucket and then you ignored it.

00:25:35.380 So I think the books will have less impact than maybe Democrats hope, in part because there are

00:25:43.060 too many of them and they dilute each other. All right. So here's the most interesting part.

00:25:51.580 I often tell you that I think I'm watching the news just like a spectator. And then all of a sudden,

00:25:58.800 the news is about me. And I say, wait a minute, wait a minute. I'm supposed to be watching the

00:26:04.420 news. Why is the news about me? And that happened again yesterday. So the Woodward book, part of the

00:26:12.540 promotion of it is, I guess he's dropping some of the audio tapes of the interviews, and they're

00:26:18.600 getting turned into transcripts and articles. And one of them was his interview, Woodward's interview

00:26:24.440 with Jared Kushner. And Jared Kushner told him that to understand President Trump, there were

00:26:30.960 four books that Woodward should read that really give you the complex picture of who President Trump

00:26:39.500 is. Now, one of those books was the Wizard, no, I'm sorry, the Alice in Wonderland, and specifically

00:26:47.300 the Cheshire Cat. And I had to remind myself, what's the Cheshire Cat's deal? I know he's got a big

00:26:54.360 smile and he disappears. But I didn't know, I don't remember much more. And so I read a description

00:27:00.100 of him. And the Cheshire Cat is described as mischievous, smiley and mischievous. And I thought,

00:27:07.640 okay, yeah, that's actually, if you understand that the Cheshire Cat is mischievous, you can say,

00:27:15.700 okay, that is definitely President Trump, right? You know, he likes a little mischief. He doesn't,

00:27:21.660 it's not an accident that he creates mischief nonstop. You know, it's not like he can't stop

00:27:27.500 doing it. Or maybe he can't. But, you know, that definitely is a pretty good description of him.

00:27:33.460 But that's not the whole person, right? And that would be Jared's point, that you'd have to read

00:27:39.700 four different books to look in four different windows to understand what the interior of the

00:27:44.660 house looks like. So that's one, Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland. But one of the other books was my

00:27:50.800 book, Winn-Bigley. Now, Winn-Bigley, the primary theme of it is that the president is a master

00:27:57.920 persuader and uses the tools of persuasion to great effect. How did Woodward categorize my book?

00:28:08.640 Now, remember the Murray-Gell-Mann effect, the amnesia effect? I talk about it too much.

00:28:15.440 The idea that there was this physicist who noted that when he saw a story in the press

00:28:19.780 about his specialty, he could tell it was wrong because it's his specialty. But the moment he would

00:28:26.480 read a story about something else like the Palestinian situation or anything else, he would uncritically 0.84

00:28:32.600 read it as if it's probably right. Even though when he reads articles that he knows the content or he

00:28:39.780 knows the field, he knows the wrong and they're universally wrong. Likewise, if you didn't know

00:28:48.020 any better and you're listening, you're looking at Woodward describe these books, he described my book

00:28:55.680 as characterizing the president as manipulative. That's a word I never used. And in fact, I went to

00:29:06.140 Paine's to make sure I didn't do that. So the one thing I can fact check, the only thing I can

00:29:12.540 personally check and I can know with complete certainty is wrong. Coincidentally, coincidentally,

00:29:21.120 the only area that I'm an expert in, which is the book I wrote, I know that he characterized it wrong.

00:29:28.100 I mean, as wrong as you could characterize it. Now, do I now say, well, the one thing I could fact

00:29:35.720 check personally was wrong, but I'll bet all that other stuff was good. I used to think stuff like that.

00:29:44.640 Not anymore. Now I know that the odds of me catching that one little thing that was the wrong, you know,

00:29:51.320 a wrong characterization, it's probably all wrong characterizations. You know, there's no reason to believe

00:29:58.160 any of it's right. So here's my definition of manipulation versus persuasion. Now, this is sort

00:30:05.600 of a personal take on it, but I think it works. Persuasion, this is just my own take on it, is when

00:30:16.220 you're persuading somebody who wants to be persuaded, or at least is no worse off for it. For example,

00:30:24.280 if you're a car salesperson, and the customer comes in, the customer knows that the car salesperson

00:30:31.340 is persuading them. They know that. But it's also very transparent. Every part of the technique is

00:30:38.580 pretty well known to everybody. But it doesn't feel like manipulation exactly. It feels like persuasion.

00:30:45.200 It feels like sales. It's a little icky, but you want the car. And on some level, you kind of want to

00:30:52.620 get talked into it, right? I mean, when you go to buy a car, you kind of want to be talked into it.

00:30:59.540 Because you, in many cases, you've decided just for emotional reasons, and now you need somebody to

00:31:04.680 tell you you were smart. So that would be persuasion, where you're not worse off if, you know, unless the

00:31:11.840 salesperson is just a criminal, they're just being persuasive. They're not manipulating you, per se.

00:31:16.820 Okay. But manipulation would be a different situation. And again, this is just my version

00:31:23.920 of it. Manipulation would be where the person who's doing it has something to gain, and the

00:31:29.480 person who's having it done to them has something to lose. So if it's a win-lose situation, that's

00:31:35.180 manipulation. The president, again, in my view, doesn't do that one. He doesn't do manipulation

00:31:42.900 in the context of the presidency, and running for the presidency. What he does is persuasion.

00:31:49.480 So if he tries to persuade you, for example, that there should be a wall on the southern border,

00:31:54.300 he's not doing it to screw you, right? You could disagree whether that's a good idea or a bad idea.

00:32:01.620 But I think you'd all agree that he's not doing it to screw you, if you're an American citizen.

00:32:09.440 He's doing it to help you. So if he persuades you to get a wall, to fund a wall, are you worse off?

00:32:18.180 You could be worse off in the sense that maybe you don't like that policy. But it's not because

00:32:23.060 there was bad intent. It's only manipulation if you have some evil intention. If you have a good

00:32:29.440 intention, but it requires you to persuade people to get it done, you could be right or you could be

00:32:35.500 wrong, but it's still good intention. And that's persuasion. So I would say Woodward's

00:32:41.760 characterization of my book as calling the president manipulative is just flat out wrong.

00:32:48.520 I don't write it that way at all.

00:32:50.840 All right.

00:32:51.100 There's another fake news today. Eddie Zipper tweeted about this. You probably saw the news.

00:33:03.440 There's some version of this. It said that, I think the Hill reports it this way. They said,

00:33:09.600 Trump said that he didn't have responsibility to understand pain of black Americans. And then

00:33:15.340 they give this quote. No, I don't feel that at all. Now, when I first heard this story and I saw the

00:33:23.500 president's quote, I said to myself, oh, I know how they do this fake news. There's some context that

00:33:31.920 they're leaving out. It was obvious by the quote that it had been taken in a context. And once you see

00:33:38.620 enough things taken in a context, especially when it happens to you, you know, if you're the person the

00:33:43.360 story is about, which has been the case for me in a lot of cases, you can tell when something's taken

00:33:49.020 out of context. As soon as I saw this, I was like, oh, they just created some fake news by taking this

00:33:55.480 out of context. The reason I knew it was out of context is they didn't tell you what Trump said

00:34:01.020 immediately after it. And they also didn't tell you exactly what came before it. And I said to

00:34:08.140 myself, I'll betcha, if I heard what came before that, or I heard what came after it, I would have

00:34:15.100 a completely different opinion on this. Wake up in the morning, Eddie Zipperer on Twitter says in his

00:34:22.920 tweet, this is a flat out lie. He goes, the question was, quote, do you have any sense that that privilege,

00:34:30.280 meaning the white privilege, has isolated you and put you in a cave to a certain extent? And that's what

00:34:36.300 Trump was saying. No, no way. Now, I would disagree with Trump. I would say that being the president

00:34:43.760 guarantees that you're taken out of the normal flow of life, right? I don't criticize, you know,

00:34:51.320 Bush, was it Bush senior who said he didn't know what a loaf of bread costs? That's fine. I don't have

00:34:57.480 any problem with the president not knowing what a loaf of bread costs. Everybody understands that the

00:35:03.900 presidency is not like life. It's a completely bubble situation. So I don't think Trump is

00:35:12.980 accurate in saying that, you know, he can understand somebody else's situation. Nobody can understand

00:35:20.140 anybody's situation. But from a politician's perspective, it would be fair to say, I do

00:35:26.740 understand other people's situation, because you want to say that you, you know, you can relate to

00:35:31.860 him in some way. So I don't think his answer was out of lines in terms of what you'd expect from a

00:35:37.620 political entity. But his answer looks completely different if you know what the setup is. So

00:35:46.980 that's just fake news created by intentionally bad editing. All right.

00:35:54.560 Nicholas Kristof writes in the New York Times, that quality of life in the United States, according

00:36:04.440 to some social progress measure, has dropped over the last decade, even while it's risen in other

00:36:11.960 places. And now we're 28th in the world in terms of how good we're doing quality of life wise. Now,

00:36:19.480 here's what's interesting. The article did not speculate or give any evidence of what it is

00:36:26.620 that's causing our lower quality of life. What does that tell you?

00:36:33.640 Is it sort of conspicuously missing from a story if you say the U.S. quality of life has dropped and

00:36:41.140 there are no reasons even speculated? It would be one thing not to know. But it seems like what would

00:36:47.460 be required in a story like this is experts don't know exactly why, but they mention looking at these

00:36:54.740 areas to see maybe this is why. But it's just completely left out. Right? What do you make of

00:37:03.180 the fact that no reasons are even mentioned, even in casual speculation? Here's what I make of it.

00:37:12.100 It's awkward. Meaning that the reason we're doing poorly might have to do with, I'll just pick one

00:37:21.660 example, the teachers unions. Do you think the New York Times would write, well, it looks like the

00:37:28.380 teachers unions are destroying America? Not completely by themselves, but a pretty big part of it. No,

00:37:35.780 no, no, probably not. Now, I don't want to make an accusation or read minds of Nicholas Kristof. That

00:37:42.720 would be unfair. So I'm not going to make any, there's no negative statement about him. But would

00:37:49.460 the New York Times ever say the reason that things are going backwards is because of liberal policies?

00:37:57.760 They can't. If the problem that was driving us backwards in quality of life were even maybe,

00:38:07.700 even maybe related to the political right, would it be in the article? If you could even come up with

00:38:17.300 just a hand-waving reason why this lower quality of life was because of conservatives? Don't you think

00:38:26.740 that would be in the article? I mean, it's, it's so conspicuously missing. You got to ask yourself

00:38:34.020 why. All right. The, the worst take on this whole coronavirus and how the president did is I'm hearing

00:38:48.080 people say some version of this. The public could handle the truth. So the president should have just

00:38:54.880 told us the truth as opposed to trying to, um, calm our fears. It's not the leader's job to calm our

00:39:03.480 fears. We're adults. Just tell us the situation and we'll decide what to do. I think that's the worst

00:39:10.580 take because that's not what leaders do. And I'll give you, you know, another version of this from

00:39:17.100 Lawrence Tribe. You know him from a professor at Harvard and a big Hillary Clinton fan and a big

00:39:25.020 hater of the president. He's fairly famous as a critic of the president. Now remember, he's a Harvard

00:39:30.280 guy, highly educated. And here's what he says. Um, he says about Trump. Uh, oh, well, he quotes Trump

00:39:41.400 saying, I'm the leader of the country. I can't be jumping up and down and scaring people. And that's

00:39:46.640 Trump told Sean Hannity, uh, that I don't want to scare people. I want people, uh, not to panic.

00:39:52.280 And that's exactly what I did. And then Lawrence Tribe calls him out for that, calls out Trump and

00:39:58.900 says this from the guy who screams about carnage in the suburbs. Now the implication here is that the

00:40:05.720 president is getting people, uh, not scared enough about the virus. And that's inconsistent because

00:40:12.960 he's getting us too scared about carnage in the suburbs, which I take within the, within the context

00:40:19.940 I take to mean that Lawrence Tribe thinks that's not a big risk. Here's what's completely bad about

00:40:27.860 this tank. It is exactly the leader's job to dial up and dial down how scared we are or concerned we

00:40:36.800 are about topics. That is exactly a leader's job. In fact, maybe more central to the job of a leader

00:40:44.200 than anything else they do is telling the people they're leading how much to worry about this versus

00:40:52.440 that. And you don't treat everything with the same amount of worry, nor would you be a good leader

00:40:58.580 if you treated the amount of worry by the number of deaths or the number of deaths you could predict

00:41:05.860 or the number of deaths that have already happened. That's not how things work. Here's how leadership

00:41:12.240 works. If you think the public is not worrying enough about something, you ramp up their worry so

00:41:19.900 that they'll put more effort into it. If you think people could panic and maybe do a run on the

00:41:25.640 stores and a run on PPE and there's nothing good that could come from it, only bad could come from it,

00:41:31.800 nothing good, then maybe that's a situation where you want to dial it down. So for Lawrence Tribe

00:41:38.980 to act as though the leader of the country should treat different situations with the same amount of

00:41:47.960 concern. That's the opposite of a leader. The president should treat every situation like its own

00:41:55.980 thing and then say, are you worried enough? If not, I'll raise it. Or are you worried too much?

00:42:02.700 And that's causing trouble. In that case, I'll lower it. That's what leaders do. That's the whole job.

00:42:08.020 Now, this guy, Lawrence Tribe, is teaching children, college kids. And let me reiterate that in my book,

00:42:21.800 Loser Think, I introduced the idea that the amount of raw intelligence you have doesn't really help you

00:42:28.000 in many cases unless you also have a good exposure to different fields. In Lawrence Tribe's case,

00:42:34.100 he may just be a partisan, so he knows he's saying something stupid and he doesn't care if it works. 0.99

00:42:40.160 So you can't read his mind so you don't know what he's thinking. But it could also be that he's a 1.00

00:42:45.640 brilliant legal scholar who doesn't understand how leadership works. Because he's not teaching,

00:42:53.440 I don't think he's teaching any MBA classes. He's teaching the law. So I think it's just a gap in

00:43:00.100 his understanding. I'll give him the benefit of a doubt. The news is so insane now, it's almost hard

00:43:11.020 to wrap your head around it. But there's video of Trump talking to Jim Acosta in March. And the

00:43:18.200 March part is the important part. And which Trump is saying directly and as clearly as you possibly

00:43:25.640 could, that he is purposely trying to downplay the pandemic, because he doesn't want to panic

00:43:33.680 the country if there's no good in that. In other words, if there's no upside from panicking the

00:43:38.900 country, but there definitely would be a downside, he doesn't want to have the downside. So in March,

00:43:45.160 he's saying it in public, in the most public way you could, a press conference of the President

00:43:50.140 of the United States to CNN's primary guy, extended conversation on this topic, very clear. And

00:43:58.320 then when the Woodward book comes out, let's say March, April, May, June, July, August, six months

00:44:07.960 later, the press acts as though it's the first time they've heard that the President is intentionally

00:44:15.360 downplaying the risk, and gives his reasons why. How do we sit here and watch these idiots 1.00

00:44:24.740 pretend that this was somehow new information, when it was the most public thing the President 1.00

00:44:30.960 ever did? When I first heard the Woodward thing, I thought, uh, this feels like not only

00:44:39.700 not new news, but the oldest news you could possibly have. It felt to me like March news

00:44:47.360 when I heard it the first time. And it wasn't until I saw the actual video that I saw this

00:44:52.140 morning, I tweeted it so you can see it too, that I realized just how exactly, exactly, and

00:44:59.620 publicly, Trump had said the same thing to the public. If you say it to the public, in public,

00:45:07.580 as the President, should the public be surprised that he is giving us the cheery version of

00:45:14.220 things? No.

00:45:19.020 As Joel Pollack pointed out in a tweet today, I guess Joe Biden had claimed that over 6,000

00:45:26.280 military people had died from the coronavirus. The actual number is seven. So he missed that

00:45:34.880 by a little bit. Not so much 6,000 as it is seven people. Now, the funny thing about this

00:45:41.800 is that you can add it to the body of Joe Biden lies. Now, you could argue that the Trump number

00:45:52.440 of fact-checking problems is greater than the number of Joe Biden lies. Maybe. But are they

00:46:01.140 the same type? That's the part that the news never tells you. When Trump does, let's call

00:46:07.900 it, let's say he does something that the fact-checkers say is false. Lots of times it's hyperbole that

00:46:15.780 you recognize. Like, oh, okay. Trump said that this has never happened before. Have you not

00:46:23.580 watched enough politics to know that doesn't literally necessarily mean it's never happened

00:46:28.900 before this? Well, it just doesn't mean that. If you're so unsophisticated that you ever believed

00:46:35.060 it to be literally true, at some point you just have to look at yourself and say, uh, okay, I got

00:46:42.180 fooled 20,000 times in a row, but I think this one's exactly meant to be accurate. No. 20,000 times in a

00:46:51.320 row should alert you to a pattern, which is if the president says, I've done the best in this in a

00:46:58.540 hundred years, then maybe it's not a hundred years. Maybe he did a really good job and maybe it's the

00:47:05.660 best in 10 years, which would still be terrific. But if you don't understand that he always talks

00:47:11.480 like that about everything, you shouldn't even be in the conversation. You should just quietly

00:47:18.540 close your Twitter account and just sneak away. Because if you haven't figured out this pattern

00:47:23.980 yet, you're not really at the adult table yet. But the same people who will say, uh, 20,000 fact

00:47:31.400 checking problems with the president will look at Joe Biden basing his campaign on the biggest lie

00:47:37.280 in American politics, the fine people hoax, also pushing the Trump, uh, Trump suggested drinking

00:47:45.060 bleach, one of the most debunked hoaxes of all time. And then, you know, this claim about the military

00:47:53.540 stuff, basically, there are probably dozens and dozens of major claims that Biden has made that are

00:47:59.780 clearly and unambiguously untrue. So anybody who says, I don't like this, President Trump

00:48:07.000 lying business. So I'd better go to Joe Biden. You're the dumbest people in the game.

00:48:15.500 Now, I can, I would acknowledge that you could make a legitimate argument for why you like either 1.00

00:48:21.980 of these candidates. You know, I have a preference, but I think a reasonable, smart person could say,

00:48:27.980 all right, you know, here are my priorities. This is why I think that, you know, Joe Biden with all of

00:48:34.080 his flaws still better than, than Trump. A reasonable person could have that opinion. It's not my opinion,

00:48:41.680 but a reasonable person could have it. Here's what's not a reasonable opinion. I'm going to vote for the

00:48:47.380 guy who doesn't lie. I mean, that's just, I don't even know what to call that. If you haven't noticed

00:48:56.900 that Joe Biden lies, again, you probably shouldn't vote if you haven't noticed that.

00:49:05.500 All right. Sometimes you might wonder, are the hosts on CNN good people who sometimes get things

00:49:14.560 wrong? That would be the best case scenario, right? That the CNN hosts are trying as hard as they can to

00:49:22.780 give you the real news. But like everything, some people make mistakes, you get some stuff wrong.

00:49:29.080 That's, that's life. Or are they intentionally lying to you in a way that is awful? And I think we've

00:49:38.760 got an answer to that. Because if you, you'll see the clip, I also tweeted this today, in which

00:49:46.060 Anderson Cooper and Sanjay Gupta are talking about the virus early on. And they're talking about it as

00:49:52.300 being no more dangerous than the regular flu. Now, I completely get how it is newsworthy to say

00:50:00.980 the president downplayed this early on. And he should have, he should have been more concerned

00:50:06.260 about it. But if you're CNN, and you did exactly that, exactly that, and it's on video, and we can

00:50:14.320 all look at it. You know, you can look at it today, I just tweeted it. And you see Anderson Cooper

00:50:19.160 talking to Sanjay Gupta. Now, again, I do not criticize them for being wrong in March.

00:50:28.240 Because I don't criticize anybody for being wrong early on. Remember, that was my rule,

00:50:34.260 and I'm going to stick to it. So Anderson Cooper was not wrong. Sanjay Gupta was not wrong

00:50:40.880 when they said, hey, it looks like it's no worse than the flu. We should be more worse. You know,

00:50:46.400 they weren't wrong in the sense of being irresponsible, because everybody was guessing.

00:50:52.620 The experts were, I think, genuinely trying their best. You knew that a lot of people were going to

00:50:58.360 get it wrong. I don't hold it against them. But from today's perspective, if they're holding it

00:51:05.900 against, it's the major piece of news on CNN. The biggest piece of news is that they're holding it

00:51:12.180 against the president for telling the public the wrong message early on. It's the same message they

00:51:19.200 told the public early on. The same one. If you don't include that in the story, yeah, we're criticizing

00:51:25.680 the president. But if we're being honest, man, did we do exactly the same thing. The president really

00:51:31.920 messed up on this, just like we did. Here's a video of us making the same mistake. You know,

00:51:37.480 got to be transparent. Nobody's perfect. Wish we hadn't done it. In hindsight, it looks like a

00:51:43.880 mistake. At the time, we didn't know any better. Just like the president. Let us show you how nobody

00:51:49.480 knew what was the right answer in March. That would have been fine. But to simply act like that didn't

00:51:57.380 happen, and that the president was the only one who was wrong in March or February, that is just evil.

00:52:07.480 You can't say that Anderson Cooper is a good person, a good human being, because that is so clearly a

00:52:15.960 case of despicable moral conduct in public that I could not have less respect for that, really.

00:52:25.780 And again, I would be perfectly okay with them if they were simply wrong, and now they know why it

00:52:32.580 was wrong, and they talk about it in context. No problem. Completely forgiven for being wrong.

00:52:39.740 But today, you know you were wrong. Today, how about a little transparency, or else you're just being

00:52:48.200 assholes, really. It's hard to say it any other way. 0.99

00:52:52.480 Right. And so there's some news out of Michigan that Biden is up in Michigan, which would be pretty

00:53:01.440 important, right? One of the battleground states. So, and I think Rasmussen is showing that Biden is up

00:53:08.120 eight points or something, six or eight points, something like that. And that's a lot.

00:53:14.500 But I saw an analysis by Bruce Stanford on Twitter. I don't know who Bruce is, but I'll just give him

00:53:22.420 credit because this is a real good analysis. And he says that although Biden is clearly headed in the

00:53:28.640 polls, here's the experience in Michigan in 2016 and 2018. So we've seen this, the most two recent

00:53:37.080 elections, same experience. And it goes like this. Every undecided vote went to Trump or to Republicans

00:53:45.740 in the case of the 2018 midterm election. Let me say that again. Every undecided vote went to the

00:53:52.380 Republicans. Okay. And I want to make sure that you heard that right. In Michigan in 2016 and 2018,

00:54:01.360 every undecided vote went to the Republicans. Now, I don't think it was every vote. It must

00:54:07.040 been just most of them. But the point stands. If you take out the absolute part, there had to be

00:54:13.680 some exceptions. But what does that tell you about shy Trump voters? The way this is shaping up,

00:54:25.800 and I suppose I could be wrong, right? You know, it's easy to be blindsided and think you're right,

00:54:32.300 and, you know, Dunning-Kruger and all that. So let me tell you that I'm completely aware

00:54:38.160 that I could be very confident in my prediction and my rightness. I'd be wrong. You know, it wouldn't

00:54:44.620 be that big of a, it wouldn't be a shocker in the world of, you know, strange events. But

00:54:50.720 this looks like a gigantic blowout shaping up. It looks gigantic. I could be wrong, but it sure

00:55:01.100 looking like the president's got a victory here coming up. All right. Those are the things I wanted

00:55:08.640 to talk about today. Yeah, the vote by mail stuff. The fact that the mainstream press is trying to

00:55:19.380 gaslight us, if you want to use that term. It's the wrong term, but they use it a lot. The mainstream

00:55:25.540 press wants us to think that it's crazy to think that mail-in voting could be illegitimate,

00:55:34.780 because it's already been done in states for years, et cetera, some states. But this is, again,

00:55:42.400 just being bad at analyzing things. The thing that you should say is, what's different about 2020

00:55:48.400 from any other situation in which we had mail-in votes? And what's different is the incentive to

00:55:54.820 cheat is through the roof. You know, if there is a penalty for cheating on voting, and people don't

00:56:02.520 really care too much who wins, it's like, yeah, I prefer this candidate, but it's not the end of

00:56:08.040 the world if the other one wins. In that case, you would expect a little bit of cheating, because

00:56:13.740 there's just not that much to gain. But there might be a few people who think they have something to

00:56:17.680 gain. But when you talk about Trump in 2020, the press has hypnotized the masses into thinking

00:56:24.720 there's a Hitler in charge, and it's the end of civilization. If you thought that the alternative 0.97

00:56:31.680 to cheating at the election box or cheating on a mail-in vote, if you thought the alternative

00:56:37.560 to cheating was the destruction of civilization, would you be tempted? I hope so. If you're a good

00:56:46.800 person, and you think that you could change or alter the course of history, and that you could save

00:56:53.580 civilization from being destroyed, which is the claim of the mainstream press, basically,

00:56:59.180 wouldn't you cheat? It's the same question of, if you thought an actual Hitler had come to power

00:57:07.500 in the United States, and you could personally kill him, like you could be the assassin, don't you have

00:57:14.260 a responsibility to do it? If the badness is bad enough, you're forgiven for whatever you do about it, 0.92

00:57:24.380 because the badness is so bad that you would be allowed to do bad things to get rid of the bigger

00:57:29.360 bad. So here's my, here's my, I guess the bottom line is that the people who are bad at comparing

00:57:39.280 things are going to act like 2020 is just like any other election. People don't care that much who gets

00:57:46.000 elected. Yeah, we have a preference, but we don't care that much. No, that was Gore versus Bush.

00:57:52.060 Gore versus Bush. People had a preference, but not that much. Trump versus Biden. Oh, that's not the

00:58:02.260 same. That is not the same, because nobody really thought that if Gore got elected versus Bush getting

00:58:09.540 elected, it was the end of civilization. Nobody thought that. But with Trump, they have been

00:58:16.240 hypnotized to believe that's an actual real world risk. So that, and the fact that we don't have any

00:58:22.280 baseline to know what mail-in votes should look like in any given county, because we've never had a

00:58:28.020 coronavirus. We've never had Trump running for reelection. We've, we've never had a press that

00:58:33.480 was this illegitimate. We've never had anything like 2020. So anybody who tells you, history tells us,

00:58:41.800 the history with those several states that have been doing mail-in votes, and the history with a different

00:58:47.880 kind of mail-in vote, which is where you request it, which is much safer. Anybody who tells you that

00:58:52.960 those two histories, or the fact that there was a commission that looked into those histories, and that

00:59:00.040 those histories are telling you what's going to happen in 2020, which has nothing to do with the situation

00:59:06.980 that was common to those histories. Anybody who tells you that that analysis makes sense

00:59:13.220 is either a liar, or doesn't know how to analyze things. It's hard to tell which.

00:59:22.340 So that is what we've got. Did you see the latest Joe Biden gaffes? Oh my god.

00:59:31.980 I don't know how anybody can look at those videos. I'm not sure how often the people on the left even

00:59:38.140 see the the Biden gaff videos. But I don't know how you could look at any of those, and think he's

00:59:44.380 ready. I think it was a Joe Rogan who did the analogy that recently, that Biden was like a flashlight

00:59:52.940 that was low on batteries. And you were taking it on a long hike at night. And you're just getting

00:59:59.660 like a little yellow glow out of your your flashlight. And you're thinking, this might be a bad idea.

01:00:06.140 Maybe I won't take a long hike at night with a flashlight with a dying battery. All right,

01:00:12.060 that's all I got for now. And I will talk to you. Later.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams - September 10, 2020

Episode 1119 Scott Adams： All the New Fake News, People Who Are Bad at Analysis and Don't Know it, Netflix Should be in Jail, Woodward

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