Episode 797 Scott Adams PART2： (Continued) Mopey Dick Trying to Harpoon Trump and More
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Summary
In this episode, I talk about what I think of Adam Schiff's appearance on CNN's Hard Knocks, and why I think he's an idiot. I also talk about why I don't think he even believes his own case.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
You know they're saying he used it to dig up dirt and that they're withholding documents.
00:00:06.260
That's all you know, all the details the public doesn't know.
00:00:13.900
What's the president's defense, not for me, but what's the president's defense as so far expressed by his defenders in the impeachment?
00:00:29.120
I think it was something like, your accusations don't have merit.
00:00:39.480
It should have been, there's only one relevant question.
00:00:42.960
Did the president have a legitimate interest in looking to Biden in Burisma?
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Our entire defense will be five minutes that he had a good reason to look into it.
00:01:03.180
And the Democrats have acknowledged that because they say, you know, he believed that there was something there.
00:01:13.020
We all believe that the president thought there was something legitimate in terms of the national interest that should be looked at.
00:01:22.140
I wouldn't defend my president's, you know, confidentiality with their advisors and all that stuff.
00:01:33.260
But if you're trying to convince the public, you need to keep it simple.
00:02:07.140
And as I said before, I recently learned that he also was a – he runs marathons and triathletes and stuff.
00:02:14.780
It turns out the Schiff is like a really good athlete.
00:02:21.500
And I don't want to lose that good part just because the other part is pure evil.
00:02:46.760
Do you think Schiff is really choked up about any of this stuff?
00:02:52.760
I don't think there's a slight case that he even believes his own case.
00:02:55.760
So it's hilarious that he fooled anybody into thinking he had genuine emotion in this.
00:03:08.960
So I've been mocking Schiff for his many cases of loser think, as I describe in my best-selling book, Loser Think,
00:03:25.760
So he makes lots of assumptions about what strangers were thinking and their secret thoughts.
00:03:32.200
He also uses laundry list persuasion, which is bad persuasion because if you don't have one good reason, you have to give ten.
00:03:39.580
And it makes you think, well, there's no one good reason, but if you put all ten together.
00:03:45.420
So he's doing laundry list persuasion, mind reading.
00:03:53.520
Now, because this is a domain in which people are just being advocates, of course they're only doing their side.
00:04:00.300
But, in terms of loser think, showing one side of a decision is irrational.
00:04:07.920
It's not irrational in terms of persuasion, but I'll talk about that.
00:04:13.600
How many times have you seen Schiff say, what other explanation is there except this?
00:04:19.300
Well, if you can't think of another explanation for the facts you're seeing, it could be because there's only one explanation.
00:04:28.000
It could also be because you're not good at thinking up alternate explanations.
00:04:33.580
It could be just a failure of your own imagination.
00:04:36.580
If you can't think of more than one reason to explain the facts you see, the problem might be on your end.
00:04:49.500
He acts like every piece of evidence fits together in this big mosaic, but, in fact, that's not how life works.
00:05:00.240
Now, people ask me, why are you saying that Schiff was winning yesterday at the same time you're saying he's using all this loser think and it's all just irrational babble?
00:05:13.420
When I talk about persuasion, the things that matter the most is what messages are getting through.
00:05:20.400
How much time are you spending on it and what was that message?
00:05:24.260
He's spending a lot of time making at least the people watching the news focus on what he wants you to focus on.
00:05:34.140
The fact that in the process of doing that, he's using exclusively, almost loser think.
00:05:48.800
They're just taken out of context to reverse their meaning.
00:05:57.660
Because my book before loser think was win bigly persuasion in a world where facts don't matter.
00:06:07.400
He's not trying to he's not trying to convince a judge or a real jury who might try really hard to concentrate on facts.
00:06:16.600
He's trying to persuade the public and you don't need good thinking to persuade the public.
00:06:23.060
You just need your message to be repeated a lot, focused on, having emotional content.
00:06:32.340
So his completely irrational loser think arguments are very effective because of how much time he's getting and the fact that we haven't heard yet the rebuttal.
00:06:42.220
I would expect the situation to reverse when the defense is doing its full push.
00:06:59.560
It's an older story, but it's bubbling up again.
00:07:02.760
But there's a man who's suing Don Lemon, CNN host, for allegedly a sexual assault.
00:07:10.080
Now, I don't want to give you the details of it, but let's let's just say something creepy happened at a bar.
00:07:24.900
I don't want to get into the details, but it's a it's it's a creepy accusation if it happened.
00:07:30.480
Now, of course, CNN is quite famous for me to stories as really the entire press is famous for that.
00:07:41.300
But the question for CNN is, when do you believe the accuser?
00:07:46.680
Because the accuser's got a story that on the surface sounds pretty credible.
00:07:54.280
I think there were multiple witnesses, actually.
00:07:56.560
Now, if those multiple witnesses are saying the same thing, and that's the early reporting that they are,
00:08:06.880
Now, I'm very much in favor of innocent until proven guilty.
00:08:11.980
So if he worked for me, if I were his boss, I would definitely keep him on the payroll.
00:08:16.920
And I would also have kept everyone else on the payroll who was accused of things while the trial or the process is working its way through.
00:08:28.760
But if CNN ever did decide to cancel Don Lemon, let's say the lawsuit went someplace,
00:08:40.600
would we ever see this headline, CNN Sours on Lemon?
00:08:48.720
That's the whole reason I'm telling you this story, because I don't care too much about it,
00:08:51.780
other than will we ever see Fox News with this headline, CNN Sours on Lemon?
00:09:00.420
Well, no, I don't hope that anything bad happens to him.
00:09:03.060
I just hope, if something does, that we get a funny headline in it.
00:09:09.520
All right, so there was an interesting poll from National Emerson College poll.
00:09:15.300
And they asked supporters of the various Democratic candidates
00:09:19.780
if they'd be willing to support any Democratic nominee if their preferred one doesn't get picked.
00:09:26.040
So at the top of the list was Elizabeth Warren.
00:09:29.700
So 90% of the people who want Warren to be the nominee also say that they would support,
00:09:42.520
So they're clustered toward the top, around that 90%.
00:09:55.800
Sanders, only 54% of the people who say they want Sanders as their first choice
00:10:01.560
are willing to pick just any old Democrat if it's not him.
00:10:10.880
Yang supporters say that only half of them would support the Democrat if it's not Yang.
00:10:22.460
What does that tell you about who would be the stronger candidate?
00:10:27.060
Well, I think this is sort of upside down from what you think.
00:10:39.120
The reason that Yang has only 50% of the people who say they want him to be president
00:10:45.040
would be willing to support any Democrat is clearly because they're not Democrats.
00:10:51.780
In other words, Yang and Sanders are picking up a whole bunch of support
00:10:57.540
from people who don't maybe consider themselves quite totally Democrat.
00:11:03.460
In some cases, they might actually be Republicans who just happen to like this one guy, Yang,
00:11:09.820
because he's more science-based or whatever it is.
00:11:17.820
That the two candidates with the biggest chance of beating Trump would be Sanders and Yang.
00:11:24.900
I believe that the Democrats, who are just solid Democrats, are just going to vote Democrat.
00:11:32.600
All the ones, even the ones who say, 90% of them say that they would support Warren,
00:11:38.200
but that's their first choice, but 10% of them apparently would not support the other candidate
00:11:45.560
I believe that something like 100% of the people who support Warren,
00:11:49.260
probably 100% of them, will still, no matter what, vote Democrat,
00:12:00.060
where about half of the people said they wouldn't support the other Democrat?
00:12:08.360
doesn't that suggest you would pick up a lot of independents and Republicans
00:12:11.840
that you couldn't get with any other candidate?
00:12:15.900
Well, I feel like I need to be checked on the logic of that.
00:12:21.300
But my logic is Sanders and Yang are clearly signaling
00:12:24.680
that they can pick up people who are not Democrats,
00:12:37.540
I feel like this poll is telling us as clearly as possible.
00:12:42.200
I feel like, I'm not quite confident in my opinion on this,
00:12:45.900
but I feel like it's saying Yang and Sanders are the ones that could beat Trump.
00:12:52.920
There's a study that says one-third of household food is wasted.
00:12:57.420
This is important because I've been saying forever
00:13:00.100
that the way to balance the budget is to figure out
00:13:03.180
how to lower the cost of living a high-quality life.
00:13:07.040
Now, do you know why a third of the food in American households is wasted?
00:13:15.480
But one of the big reasons given is that you have to drive to get the food.
00:13:20.800
In our system, you have to get in the car, you've got to plan it,
00:13:29.220
Well, it causes you to buy more food than you need today
00:13:36.720
Some of it goes bad before you eat the stuff that you like the most.
00:13:40.460
So there's something about your food being far away from where you want to eat it
00:13:47.200
There are other factors, so that probably doesn't explain the whole third.
00:13:50.240
But that's the hypothesis for why it's so wasted.
00:13:53.380
And I saw this in the context of how to design a proper future city
00:14:03.300
So let's say it's 4.30 in the afternoon and you want to eat dinner at 6.
00:14:08.800
You just walk outside, 10 minutes away, there's a market.
00:14:11.660
You grab a bag full of fresh food, and you go eat what you bought today.
00:14:15.180
Okay, so if you designed the way people live to be more efficient,
00:14:26.020
And they'd be not only just as happy, they would be happier
00:14:30.020
because the food that they did eat would be fresher.
00:14:34.080
So I think there's a gigantic opportunity to lower the national debt
00:14:39.980
because if you can lower the cost of living in general,
00:14:43.140
then all of the people who need a little extra help won't need as much help.
00:14:51.840
Here's an interesting little signal of things to come.
00:14:55.840
I talked about this before, but I'm going to add a point to it.
00:14:59.720
So I talked about how the president agreeing to plant,
00:15:03.080
to be part of the trillion tree planting to combat climate change,
00:15:07.480
and the fact that he recently said it wasn't a hoax,
00:15:10.360
strongly suggests that the president is sort of migrating toward the center.
00:15:17.240
The center being, you know, that climate change is enough to worry about.
00:15:23.200
Maybe we can't predict the future too accurately.
00:15:31.180
So you can see the president shifting toward the middle.
00:15:33.720
Now, I said that before, but we also see Democrats starting to embrace nuclear power,
00:15:45.600
Generation 4 is coming down the pike, if we can develop it quickly enough.
00:15:51.240
It doesn't melt down because it's built so it can't.
00:15:54.800
And it eats existing nuclear waste as its fuel in some cases.
00:16:04.780
You know, AOC is saying, it's the end of the world, we're all going to die.
00:16:14.020
But every time there's a new story that says the temperatures are the highest they've been or whatever,
00:16:19.580
it gets a little more convincing that something's happening,
00:16:23.240
whether it's man-made or partly man-made or not.
00:16:25.580
But there is some general agreement that the temperatures look like they're going up.
00:16:32.780
And it looks like Trump is sort of drifting toward the middle,
00:16:36.200
which is absolutely the smartest thing he should do politically.
00:16:45.020
Politically, drifting toward the middle is exactly what you want to do,
00:16:48.840
because that's such a big issue, and it's going to be a big issue for the election.
00:16:52.520
So you're seeing both sides drifting toward the middle.
00:16:57.360
I think it's because we're now recognizing a common enemy.
00:17:01.500
It's the difference between the two sides thinking that the other is the enemy,
00:17:08.420
The Green New Deal people are saying, you Republicans are the enemy,
00:17:13.920
And the Republicans are saying, you Green New Deal people are the enemy,
00:17:18.200
because you're going to ruin our economy and get us all killed.
00:17:20.440
But it feels like this gradual move to the center
00:17:24.960
is because both sides are finally realizing there's a common enemy, the temperature.
00:17:33.860
Now, I'm not going to get into the debate of what's real and what's not.
00:17:37.100
I'm just talking about the politics of it, that it's drifting toward the middle.
00:17:41.980
There was one of the articles on Fox News, which famously is pro-Trump,
00:17:48.800
So Fox News, a very pro-Trump entity, has this headline.
00:17:55.980
Did Trump have a change of heart over climate change policy?
00:17:59.520
It talks about, on The Five, Greg Gottfeld was talking about the same topic,
00:18:04.760
and noting that the president seems, because of the trillion tree planting,
00:18:09.260
it seems he's softened on his position, moving toward the middle a little bit.
00:18:13.660
There was nothing in this article that was negative about climate change.
00:18:22.340
It was just straight-up reporting that this is what The Five said,
00:18:30.180
Now, I feel as if a year ago that would not have looked the same.
00:18:37.360
I feel as if Fox News would have said something a little more skeptical-sounding,
00:18:43.480
because its readership is certainly many of them are in that camp.
00:18:48.920
So it's looking to me like there's something happening there.
00:18:54.080
Now, as you know, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is working on a plan for energy and clean climate.
00:19:02.200
Those two things are really the same topic, and we might see some good stuff coming out of there.
00:19:08.880
And so we're definitely seeing a movement on the Republican side toward accepting at least the risk of climate change.
00:19:20.460
Here's another little thing that's bubbling up.
00:19:23.840
Apparently, the White House has invited Israel's prime minister and his main political rivals to Washington.
00:19:34.480
So the White House has invited Netanyahu, but also his main political rivals,
00:19:40.720
the people who disagree with him, to meet with them in Washington to talk about a potential Palestinian peace plan.
00:19:46.840
Makes sense to me, because if you can't get Israel to agree on a plan internally, well, you're done, right?
00:19:53.840
So step one, get the Israelis on roughly the same page so that there's at least one less thing to worry about
00:20:08.740
I think maybe it's because conditions are changing.
00:20:12.340
And there are apparently massive, hundreds of thousands of people protesting in Iraq to get the U.S. out,
00:20:19.900
and we've said, at least preliminarily, we've said no.
00:20:25.320
So, and also, you know, you're up to date on everything with Iran,
00:20:29.920
and we'd like to have some kind of a nuke deal with Iran that actually did prevent them from getting nuclear weapons,
00:20:40.680
And they're also talking about the White House has delayed a few times their big peace plan ideas for the Palestinian-Israeli situation,
00:20:50.380
but that maybe they're starting to ramp up again,
00:20:54.300
because they wouldn't call Israel in to a meeting if they weren't serious about trying to ramp it up again.
00:21:07.100
Now, if you believe that Iran is the biggest influence on the Palestinians,
00:21:12.700
and let's say Hezbollah, and the anti-Israel forces in general, the proxies,
00:21:19.240
Well, Soleimani is no longer on the playing field.
00:21:22.040
So the main military guy who was causing the main military problems is now off the chessboard.
00:21:29.780
And because Iran did that, you know, semi-fake attack, they've said, well, we're done retaliating.
00:21:37.460
And as far as I know, and maybe the reporting is not good on this yet,
00:21:41.740
but as far as I know, they have stuck to calling, you know, winding, not winding down,
00:21:48.340
but at the moment, the proxies that you would expect to be active don't seem extra active.
00:21:55.440
I mean, I'm sure that there will always be some missiles lobbed toward our allies or us,
00:22:01.740
but it looks like something in Iran is different.
00:22:04.900
Their economy is on the brink, so they're probably more flexible than ever.
00:22:09.180
At the same time, Iraq's citizens, at least a lot of them, seem to want us to leave.
00:22:14.800
What this creates is, for the first time, all of the variables have fallen into place for a big deal.
00:22:26.420
And, you know, of course, the U.S. is not going to offer this unless it's the last thing.
00:22:32.260
In order to get a peace deal, we would need Iran to stand down from its proxies,
00:22:39.580
However, you would need Iran to agree to negotiate on some kind of a deal that had more teeth
00:22:47.120
in return for, you know, sanctions coming off their economy.
00:22:55.560
And this asset just got created out of nothing.
00:22:58.960
It might be that what we have to negotiate is leaving Iraq, which we want to do anyway.
00:23:04.120
The president has created a situation in which he can say,
00:23:17.020
Would Iran consider themselves victorious if they got the United States military out of the Middle East
00:23:24.300
or at least reduced its footprint to something manageable?
00:23:28.560
Iran would actually call that a victory, wouldn't it?
00:23:33.100
I think they could legitimately say it was a major victory if they got the U.S. out of the Middle East,
00:23:44.000
I think that that's a deal under the right circumstances we might be willing to make
00:23:49.020
because we want to leave anyway, but we don't want to leave until it's a good idea to leave.
00:23:53.120
So I'm thinking that we've never had this situation before where Iran is presumably desperate for a deal
00:24:04.740
We have something to give, which is us leaving Iraq, which doesn't cost us much, which is the ultimate deal situation.
00:24:13.560
You want a situation where somebody can give up something that's the key to the deal,
00:24:17.740
but the thing they're giving up didn't cost them much, so it's possible to give it up.
00:24:22.060
It's possible for us to give up Iraq under the right conditions.
00:24:28.020
And then the other thing that's the right conditions is that you've got a dealmaker as a president,
00:24:35.720
Even everybody in the Middle East understands that this president will make a deal.
00:24:44.860
And that gets in their heads, and I think that that actually makes it more likely to do a deal
00:24:50.240
simply because when they think of the president, they think of dealmaking.
00:24:54.660
And we're such simple creatures that if you just say,
00:24:59.380
this guy's a dealmaker, a dealmaker, a dealmaker, if you hear that enough,
00:25:07.660
Just uncritically, you say to yourself, maybe we can make a deal.
00:25:11.780
So just the fact that his reputation as a dealmaker greatly increases the chance
00:25:17.500
that people's minds will be in dealmaking mode.
00:25:23.420
It's just part of the benefit of this president is he brings that with him to every situation,
00:25:28.160
and it takes everybody's mind to dealmaking because they think,
00:25:31.660
well, that's the variable we're dealing with now.
00:25:35.080
But the other thing that we've never had before is the strongest, I think,
00:25:39.980
the strongest leaders we've ever had in all areas there.
00:25:44.480
We have some really capable leaders, and I'm even talking about, you know, Iran.
00:25:57.400
MBS, you know, needs to explain why he's killing journalists.
00:26:04.860
But Saudi Arabia is a solid, you know, ally at this point,
00:26:11.420
and they've got a strong leader who's also a dealmaker.
00:26:14.980
He's willing to do what other people were not willing to do.
00:26:25.800
So we have the most dealmaking, solid, sane people we've ever had dealing.
00:26:36.000
and we may be finding out that his absence makes everything better.
00:27:03.480
so Elizabeth Warren wants to cancel student debt,
00:27:11.980
Why am I being penalized for being good at saving?
00:27:18.940
And it's probably why this whole student debt thing will never work.
00:27:25.300
Oh, people are complimenting me on my Periscope today.