Episode 796 Scott Adams： Winning Shampeachment Theater, Mnuchin Versus Greta, Chinese Election Tampering
Episode Stats
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Summary
If this story is true, it would be the biggest story of the year. But it might not be true. And it's up to you to figure out if it's true or not. Today's episode is a mashup of two realities: In one reality, you're going to hear the most shocking thing you've heard in a long time, and in another, you'll be asked to fact check it.
Transcript
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Hey everybody, good to see you, coming to you from an undisclosed location where I might
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be breaking the biggest story of the year. Or not. So we're going to be experiencing
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two realities at once. It's sort of a Schrodinger's cat of periscopes today. In one reality, you're
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going to hear the most shocking thing you've heard in a long time. But it might not be true.
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So I'm going to ask you to fact check it. And you can. This is the exciting part. I'm going to give
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you the biggest story of the year that might not be true. But you get to check it yourself.
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Now, each of you individually may not be able to check it. But collectively, there are
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enough people watching this that we will be able to know if this hypothesis is true or
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false. And if it's true, it's just about the biggest, no, it would be the biggest story
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of the year. It would be the biggest story of the year. That doesn't involve violence, I
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guess. All right. But before that, before that, there's a little thing called the simultaneous
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sip. Most mornings, I read from my little script for the introduction. Sometimes, if I'm on the
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road in a secret location, like today, I don't have that with me. So you might have to help
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me, for those of you who have memorized the introduction to the simultaneous sip. All you
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need is a cup or a mug. I don't know. Has anybody memorized it? Well, we'll see it in the, let's
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see if somebody can reproduce it in the comments. Because I know somebody there has memorized it
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by now. All right. Well, we're not going to make you wait. Let's go directly to the simultaneous
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sip. You know, it's the best part of your day. It's the dopamine hit of the day, the thing
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that makes everything better. Simultaneous sip. Go. All right. So here's my big story. Or, again,
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again, I might just be wrong. And you'll get to check this. You actually will be able to check
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this. So I was keeping you up to date about the story of Ambassador Richard Grinnell's account
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where a number of you, including me, we had followed him on Twitter at one point and then got
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somehow unfollowed. And I had given you three hypotheses for how that could happen. I'm going
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to add a fourth. And the fourth is pretty darn good. But that's the part you're going to check
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for me. So I don't assert it as fact. I assert it as something I want you to check for me. And
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then we'll figure out if it's fact. If it is, it's the biggest thing happening this year. All
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right. So hypothesis number one would be Twitter management had decided to rig the election and
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was ordering its employees to put their finger on some accounts. I don't think that's likely. Indeed,
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I think that's deeply unlikely based on human nature. Because it would be too easy to discover
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and the risks would be too high for somebody who's already doing well and isn't senior management of
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a major technology company. It's just not a risk reward that makes any sense from a senior management
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perspective. So I think the odds that there's somebody in Twitter management who's making a
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decision to throttle people, very low, very low odds. Then you have the bug concept. Well, maybe it's
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just a bug that they haven't found out. I also think that's very low chance because it's such a
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massive bug and it would be an easy one to fix. I can't believe it would go so long and it would
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just be a bug and somehow it hadn't been fixed. So I would reject the bug hypothesis and the it's
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coming from management hypothesis. But then you have the, is there a rogue element within the company?
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And I don't know how to put odds on that, but you can't rule that one out. It's just that we don't
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have any evidence of it. And probably unless it was a lot of people in on it, it seems like somebody
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would have noticed, you know, what some programmer who was not, let's say, in on it probably would
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have noticed. Not necessarily, but probably. So I would say the odds of it just being a bad actor,
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can't rule it out, but the odds are not high. Here comes hypothesis number four. Here's the one
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you're going to check. Turns out that when you try to connect some apps to Twitter, you know, to,
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to make your apps work together, you have to give permissions to the third party app. I'm seeing it
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in the comments. Somebody's ahead of me. On Twitter, somebody sent me, in fact, let me call them out,
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Root Esperanzo, Root Esperanzo, on Twitter, sent me the permissions page for one particular app
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in which the permission, if you didn't read it carefully, and you just said, sure, I give you
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permission, it would give the third party app permission to follow and unfollow your Twitter
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accounts for you without your permission. You would give the permission once and then forever the app would
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be able to do whatever it wanted on your Twitter account. What app do you think it was? Here it
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comes. TikTok. I'm just going to, I'm just going to let that sit in, just let that sink in for a
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little bit. TikTok. Do you know who owns TikTok? China. Now, here's what I want you to do. If any of you have
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both TikTok and Twitter, or you can actually test it by just, I'm not sure what the condition is when you're,
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maybe when you're signing up for TikTok, does it ask you to connect to Twitter? Because, so here's the
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fact check. Fact check for me that part of the TikTok process involves a page that gives you the option,
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which you might not read the details of, does it give you the option to let TikTok control your
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follows and unfollows? If it does, it's the biggest story of the year. Am I wrong? And if it doesn't,
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then I have some questions about who sent it to me. But check it. Just check it, okay? Now,
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correct me if I'm wrong. I believe that society has been warned about TikTok. I believe we've been
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warned that the Chinese government might be using apps and technology to, you know, get a little
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influence that they should not have. So some of you probably immediately picked up another device
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and said, what the heck, and are looking at this right now. So by the time we're done with the
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periscope, we might actually have confirmation. Now, somebody says, do I use it? No, I don't use the app.
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But remember, it wouldn't be me who uses the app. It would be just one of us. So you'd only need one
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person to, I don't know, if one person has given permission, that's probably all it takes.
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So I don't use the app. So I'm not vulnerable in that particular way, nor would I. I would never use
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a Chinese app if I knew I was using it. All right, so go check that. We'll see if that's the biggest
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thing in the thing. Now, if I were China, and let's say hypothetically, I had some way to influence who
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gets followed and doesn't get followed, how would you do it? In other words, would you randomly have
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people who followed and unfollowed? No, you would, you would make a decision about when it makes sense
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for China. And I think you would pick the people who are the most influential, and also talk on this
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topic. So you'd have to be influential in general, but also say things that China doesn't like you to
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say, or be on the party that it doesn't want to win. That would probably include Ambassador Grinnell.
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If you are China, do you think that the things that Ambassador Grinnell says are things you would
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like to have greater influence or lesser influence? Probably lesser. Same with me. Who talks
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sound about China more than I do? Not many people. All right, that's enough of that. Let's talk
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about some loser think. In the news, Secretary Mnuchin was asked about Greta Thunberg's opinions of, I
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guess, what the United States should be doing with its economy and with climate change. And Mnuchin
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quite cleverly said, let me get the exact quote here, because he was pretty funny. He said, he dismissed
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climate activist Greta Thunberg saying, she should first go to college and study economics before she
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weighs in on US policies and how they relate to the climate crisis. So Secretary Mnuchin just called
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loser think on Greta Thunberg. Was that fair? 100%. 100% fair. So Mnuchin just showed you the way.
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I'll tell you how everybody's been doing it wrong. How many times have you seen people say,
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she's just young. She's just a kid. She doesn't know anything. She's just young. She's a kid. Why
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are we listening to a kid? Right? Unfortunately, that argument is not as solid as you hope. Because
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her whole argument is that the kids are the ones who are going to pay the cost of our bad behavior,
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the older generations. So you can't beat her argument by saying she's just a kid when her argument is,
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I'm a kid. I'm going to have to pay for this. Right? But Mnuchin, he took the smart way to approach this
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by simply noting that there's an entire domain of knowledge that one would need to have in order to
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have a useful opinion on the topic. And he simply pointed out that she has never had any access to
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that domain. She has not been an economist. She has not studied the most important part of the
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decision. Now I say that economics is the most important part because it's the economics that
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tells you when to go and how hard to go and what to do. It's one thing for the science to say we think
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there's a problem. I know some of you disagree, but just work with me here. It's one thing for the
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science to say there's a problem. But the what do you do about it ends up being a combination of
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science plus how much is it going to cost. So if you haven't handled the how much is it going to cost,
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you don't know the trade-offs, you don't know the alternatives, you don't know how to look at
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things in a rational way the way an economist would. Mnuchin just totally brushed her off in the
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best possible way. Because it's sort of funny. And it hits you as true. Because as soon as he says
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it, you go, well, that's kind of true. You really would sort of need to know about economics to make
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decisions about the entire economy of the United States. We don't delegate that to children. There's a
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reason. We delegate it to people who maybe have studied economics. So to Secretary Mnuchin,
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nice play. Nice play. Loved how you did that. And by the way, when you see a little glimpse of
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things like this, you know, we always talk about how many people have cycled through the administration.
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President Trump has fired a lot of people, a lot of people have quit. But it seems like Mnuchin's been
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near a long time, right? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like Mnuchin is one of the people who
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seems to be able to get along with this president pretty well. And then we see just a little bit of a
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glimpse behind the curtain to see why that might be the case. Because Mnuchin's framing of Tunberg is
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the best I've seen. It's absolutely the best. Of every critic who said anything about Greta Tunberg,
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nobody did it as well as he just did it. There's no way that he and Trump don't get along when it's the
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two of them chatting, right? Because Mnuchin's got skills. That was really, really good. All right,
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enough about that. Let's talk about who's winning and losing in the shim impeachment theater.
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Sure. I have a winner and a loser. Well, I have a winner, I guess. The other side has to be the loser.
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I declare the Democrats the winners so far. Now, of course, we're not at the end point. But here's
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why the Democrats are winning and winning hard. Because in the court of public opinion, which is
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the only one we're talking about, because the Senate, everybody thinks they know where it's
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going to end up. So it's not a trial in the sense that you're influencing, you know, jurists or the
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judge, because we know how that ends. But there's a big play in influencing the public. And that's sort
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of the point. And when you have somebody who is smearing the accused all day long in public,
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and it's a real complicated situation, and then you have the other side saying it's not
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true, who wins? You already know the answer to that, right? If all you know, it doesn't matter
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if it's impeachment or it's a criminal trial, it doesn't matter what the domain is. If you
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have these two things, well, three things going on, it's a complicated situation that the people
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watching are having a little bit of trouble following. But one side is smearing the accused
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just, you know, hours and hours, literally hours of smearing. Smear, smear, smear. And the other
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side is saying, no, it's not true. Who's winning? It's the smear. The smear is way stronger than the
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defense in the situation in which nobody can independently tell exactly what's going on,
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because it's too complicated. And hey, we're not lawyers. And even if we were lawyers, we might
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still disagree, because we watch the lawyers disagree, right? So under those conditions,
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having Schiff just chew up TV time with accusations, he's winning. He's winning hard, right? So if you
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were to look at it from just a stable point today, it's a slaughter. It's a slaughter. I hate to tell
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you. But Schiff is absolutely slaughtering the Republicans. Now, are the lawyers good? I think
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so. I think they're very good. I think they're doing everything they can do. It's just that you
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could reverse the teams. It doesn't matter who has what talent. You know, they're all operating at a
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pretty high level. But it's irrelevant who the lawyers are, because the smear always beats the
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defense if nobody can independently tell what's going on. And that's our situation. Now, on top of
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that, you have this weird situation where the system rewards lying. It's a terrible system. You know, I
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always talk about systems versus goals. Apparently, we have a terrible system for this Senate trial
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situation, because lying is not disincentivized. In fact, it's rewarded. So both sides, let's admit,
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both sides are telling some tales here. But the smear is always going to be. So I would also say,
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and this is an incomplete opinion, because there might be something I don't know about
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this topic. But I would say, independent of the the quality and the talents of the White House
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lawyers, who again, they look very qualified, very good. I would say that they botched the case so far.
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But I don't know if that's because of them. All right, it might be, this is just speculation. But we hear
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reporting that the president wanted to defend the case on the details. But we hear that, say, Alan Dershowitz and
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other smart people are saying, don't even talk about the details. Just say it's unconstitutional. Vote and get rid of it.
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Now, what we observe is that the Senate is and the White House's defense is not following the Dershowitz
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playbook. Would you agree? Can we say that? Can we say that authoritatively? Because Dershowitz has said
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a few times, hit the constitutional argument, vote and go home. And I completely agree with that from a
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persuasion perspective. Because it gets rid of all these hours of Schiff, you know, smearing the
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president. And it doesn't make you deal in the weeds where the accuser has the advantage. So
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Dershowitz is quite accurately saying, the playing field in which the president has all the advantages
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is the constitutional argument. He has all the advantages. It's the home court. Take the
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constitutional argument. Instead, and I don't know the reason, I don't know if it's the lawyer's
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decision or they're doing the work of their client, the president. For whatever reason, they've decided
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to climb into the weeds and get down in the weeds. It's a losing play because it's Schiff's home court.
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The smear beats the defense. And it's beating the crap out of it right now.
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Now, is anybody really changing their minds? Well, who knows? You don't have to change many
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minds to change the next election. So there are not that many people involved. But if you change a few,
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it could make a difference. All right. So I would say that the White House defense is largely botched
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for not following the Dershowitz plan, which was a solid plan. There might be something I don't know,
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meaning there may be a reason that the White House lawyers are doing it the way they're doing it.
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Something that Dershowitz has not called out in a way that I've heard anyway. So I might have a gap in
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my knowledge. I'll allow that that possibility exists. But so far, it looks like Schiff is winning
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hard. And that the reason he's winning hard is that the strategy is bad from the White House.
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All right. Here's a question for you. We keep talking about John Bolton potentially testifying.
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Let me ask you this. Do you think the White House lawyers at this point don't already know what John
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Bolton would say? Now, of course, there's some uncertainty because the questioning can take
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things in any direction. But is there any chance that the White House doesn't know by now
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what John Bolton is going to say? So if they do know, and it's nothing that's going to change
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anything, I mean, it might confirm things we've already seen, but I don't know how much difference
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that would make. But one of the strategies, and again, I don't see them doing this, but one strategy
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would be, and I think Rush Limbaugh was promoting this idea to put Schiff in the spotlight and just
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put all the focus on him because he's not really a sympathetic character in general, and he's got a
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lot to explain. So imagine if the White House defense said, you know, well, we hear Schiff say a
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lot of stuff and a lot of it is lies. Just make the statement. You know, we're listening to Schiff
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talk. We're in a situation in which lying is not punished, and Schiff is lying like crazy. What we'd
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like to do for the benefit of the Senate and the benefit of the public watching is interview Schiff.
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Now, what is Schiff going to say when they say we want to interview Schiff? Well, he's going to say
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he's not a fact witness, and it's just a, you know, it's just a clever scheme. But it's going to put him
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in the situation of defending not having witnesses. So wouldn't it be productive to make Schiff directly
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have to defend why he's calling for witnesses but doesn't want witnesses? Because the Republicans
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would call him and Hunter Biden. So it would be interesting to put him on the defensive about
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why only he gets to decide who the witnesses are. Now, some of you already knew this interesting
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anecdote. But did you know that Schiff writes screenplays in his spare time?
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that apparently he's written screenplays on, let's see, which topics? He's written murder
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mysteries, a Holocaust story, and a spy drama. That's right. The simulation has served up
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to us. Adam Schiff, who actually writes fiction that matches what he's doing in his day job.
00:23:19.280
If you look at the Russia collusion thing, basically, it was like a script written for television
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that he acted out. And one of the things that Schiff does is he's got kind of a theatrical,
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you know, way about him, is that he tries to turn something into nothing with the application
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of acting. So I'm going to give you a demonstration of that. All right, I'll say it first in the way
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that you would just say it straight. And then I'll say it the way that Adam Schiff says it to make it
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sound like it's really bad. The first way is, looks like it's a little overcast today, might get some
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rain. All right? Now here's Adam Schiff giving you the same fact. And it's overcast today. We might even
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see rain. Rain. Because it's overcast. It's overcast today. Today, people. Today. Not tomorrow. Not
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yesterday. Today. And it might. I can't say this for sure. But I think we should be worried.
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It might rain. It might rain. It might rain hard. It could rain for days. Rain. You know, I don't mean
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to make too much of this, but the Bible talks about rain. And it talks about rain for 40 days and 40
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nights. I can pray. I pray that we don't see that. But we can't guarantee it. We can't take that chance,
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people. The Republic is at stake. Because it might, as I said before, it might rain. In my rain,
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people. My rain. And, yeah, Shatner. It's the William Shatner acting class. But you can see him
00:25:32.880
continuously taking things that don't sound interesting at all, and trying to make them
00:25:37.940
substantial and interesting by his choice of presentation. A couple other interesting facts
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about Schiff. I did not know that he spent part of his childhood in the town next to me,
00:25:49.660
in Danville, where I used to live. So I actually spent time in one of his childhood towns. I didn't
00:25:55.600
know that. He also runs marathons and triathletes. Did you know that? Did you know that Adam Schiff
00:26:03.700
is actually a really successful athlete? He runs marathons and triathletes? I got to admit,
00:26:13.800
caught me by surprise. But I'm not going to make fun of that, because I actually respect that.
00:26:20.580
So if I'm being fair, Adam Schiff, good job on fitness. I don't love your other job,
00:26:31.760
but on the fitness level, good role model. Keep it up.
00:26:38.760
You saw, of course, that on two occasions, the Democrats in the impeachment
00:26:43.640
situation there showed that hoax clip of the president claiming he could do whatever I want
00:26:51.720
as president. Now, of course, the hoax part of it is he was talking specifically, the context was
00:26:57.000
that he could fire a Comey if he wanted to, because that's in his job description, which it is.
00:27:03.100
But the Democrats have played it twice under the guise of acting as if he's saying it like to be a
00:27:10.700
dictator. I can do anything I want. So they're taking it out of context to make it look like he
00:27:15.920
thinks he's above the law, which is opposite of what he said. Because what he said was,
00:27:21.320
what I'm doing is compatible with the law, and it's true. So literally, it reversed the meaning
00:27:27.560
from I'm following the law to I break the law. Now, it's one thing when you see Schiff and company
00:27:37.100
show that clip, the hoax clip, and try to tell you it's true. Because they're in this persuasion
00:27:43.880
battle, and that's their job. They're persuading. But then I saw that that same hoax clip was
00:27:51.000
mentioned in an opinion piece on CNN. And it made me curious about CNN's internal rules. So
00:27:59.420
they have this designated hit piece writer on Trump, this guy Stephen Collinson. And just
00:28:09.780
about every day or two, he's got an opinion piece in which he says the president is rotten
00:28:14.760
and must be, you know, we're all in trouble. So basically, he's the designated hit piece
00:28:19.980
writer. And so he mentions again, this hoax video. But interestingly, he didn't put an interpretation
00:28:28.560
on it. He mentioned, he mentioned that it was played. And he mentioned what was said. But
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he didn't say it was, it was edited to reverse its meaning. Nor did he say that the meaning is
00:28:42.500
that it looks like the president is trying to be a dictator. He put it out there without
00:28:47.020
the opinion part on it, which was, oh, damn it. I just lost my, just lost power on my computer.
00:28:54.900
Damn it. The rest of this show will be a little bit shorter since all of my notes just disappeared.
00:29:02.320
But I might be able to plug it in, depending if you're patient. So, well, let me, let me do
00:29:09.940
that while you're, while I'm talking. I lost my train of thought. Oh, damn it. I don't have
00:29:17.100
my power. So my question is this. Do CNN's rules allow that an opinion writer who's writing
00:29:28.800
a set piece, you know, not somebody who's talking on live TV, who you can't really edit
00:29:33.520
in, in, in real time, but somebody who's writing a written piece to publish it on CNN.com.
00:29:40.720
Is there anybody in the company who reads it and says, well, you're misrepresenting that
00:29:46.720
fact? Is that, does anybody do that? Because is it, it's one thing if an opinion writer writes
00:29:56.660
an opinion that's, you know, hyperbolic and crazy, but you kind of can tell an opinion.
00:30:02.620
But if you put an actual fact in your opinion piece and the fact isn't true, how, how does
00:30:09.900
CNN editors management handle that? I mean, I don't know what the process is. Do they let
00:30:14.660
it stay? Because even though it's obviously not true, I mean, obviously not true, because
00:30:20.520
you just have to look at the context. Do they let it stay because it's in the context of an
00:30:25.300
opinion? I don't know. I wonder what they talk about. But it makes me think that they
00:30:31.960
might have had that conversation. Because as I mentioned, in the article, it doesn't
00:30:36.260
put the wrong interpretation on it, nor does it put the correct interpretation. It simply
00:30:41.520
mentions it. It looks like it may have been written with a, with an interpretation that
00:30:46.400
maybe got, you know, taken out, or maybe the writer took it out himself, and he wanted
00:30:51.100
just to leave it there for your own interpretation. But there you go. All right. I had some really
00:31:03.520
interesting things to talk about on my notes that just disappeared because it's on my laptop
00:31:09.340
laptop that I can't plug in and I don't have my cord with me. Did I watch the James O'Keefe
00:31:17.720
undercover CNN files? Yeah, the plug is actually, it's not even in the same building. I would
00:31:27.560
have to go outside and go down. Yeah. It's not here. What was the test you were doing yesterday
00:31:36.000
on YouTube? Oh, yeah, I accidentally live streamed on YouTube yesterday. I live streamed a blank
00:31:44.720
screen. But I'm testing a product called Wirecast. That's the software on a Telestream box with
00:31:53.600
a piece of hardware that should allow me to stream to YouTube and do Periscope at the same
00:31:58.760
time and streamed to other services as well. So yeah, if I make you wait for the power cord,
00:32:13.240
it's going to take too long. Let's talk about the coronavirus. So you know about this virus
00:32:21.160
that's coming out of China. And apparently China has closed an entire city. You can't leave
00:32:27.980
the city. And I got to say, if you had to pick one country in the world to contain a virus,
00:32:37.440
I can't think of a better place than China. Because China, it looks like China is willing
00:32:43.000
to do what maybe, you know, a democratic country wouldn't do, which is just to say, all right,
00:32:49.460
starting immediately, nobody can leave this entire city of many millions of people. And I don't know
00:32:54.760
if you could do that in the United States. You could try. But I don't know if you'd get away
00:32:58.980
with it. What's the slaughter meter people are asking? Well, I don't see any chance that
00:33:07.240
President Trump will do anything but win re-election.
00:33:12.140
Who owns the patents to the coronavirus? Yeah. You know, I have to say that my conspiracy theory
00:33:22.980
brain went to, you know, how much of this is human made. But apparently the news today says
00:33:30.200
it came from snakes. So it was, the scientists believe it originally started in snakes and then
00:33:38.780
was transferred to humans. Now, I don't know why a human had sex with a snake. So there might
00:33:47.900
be somebody over in China who's got a lot of explaining. I don't know the mechanics of exactly
00:33:53.740
how you do that. I don't want to speculate. But no, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.
00:34:02.000
Probably happened from a snake bite is my best guess. But at this point, it looks like it can
00:34:06.980
travel through the air, it mutated, and it would be a pretty big problem.
00:34:14.800
Ever see the movie Outbreak? Unfortunately, yes.
00:34:19.140
All right. Did anybody have time to research the TikTok permissions question? Now, it might
00:34:25.500
be other apps as well. So TikTok wouldn't necessarily be the only app that asked for that permission.
00:34:30.840
So let's see in the comments. Has anybody had time to either debunk that? Because if it's
00:34:39.480
not true, I'd like to debunk it right away. And I cannot verify. Don't jinx his wind.
00:34:48.020
All right. The comments are way behind because I said that thing about the... Somebody says
00:34:58.760
it came from bats. I heard that it was other things that came from bats, but this one probably
00:35:05.900
came from a snake. I'm not sure we can exactly tell those things for sure.
00:35:11.200
Bat soup. Somebody says it came from bat soup. I don't know. All right. I'm not seeing any
00:35:22.400
responses yet. It looks like everybody's still talking about that virus. And I don't have
00:35:28.200
much else to do, so I guess I'll have to save that for another day. And I am going to do