Real Coffee with Scott Adams - Episode 974 Scott Adams： Comparing the Experts to Average Idiots, Who is Performing Better, Unmasking

00:00:00.000 Hey, there you are. I'm glad you could make it. Come on in. Gather around. We've got lots to talk

00:00:12.200 about today. It's going to be a good one. One of the best. One of the best coffees with Scott Adams

00:00:17.280 of all time. By the way, I found out somebody noticed yesterday that apparently I have an

00:00:24.480 IMDB page. So I'm an official show. I've made it. I've made it to IMDB. I've made something of

00:00:33.460 myself. Well, if you'd like to make something of yourself, I know how to start. The best way

00:00:39.160 is with a little thing called the simultaneous sip, and it doesn't take much. All it takes is

00:00:43.960 a cup or a mug or a glass or a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flasca, a vessel of

00:00:48.600 any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I'm partial to coffee. And join me now for the

00:00:54.600 unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, 0.99

00:00:58.080 including the damn pandemic. Go. 1.00

00:01:07.320 I feel my convalescent blood serum improving by the moment. Yes, yesterday I did my periscope from

00:01:17.360 the parking lot of the veterinarian's place. Snickers is resting.

00:01:27.660 She's on restrictions. She's not allowed to jump up on the furniture. So she just tweaked 1.00

00:01:33.140 her back a little bit. She gets a sports injury.

00:01:41.420 She's a very active dog. So I've been through this before. She should be fine. I've got her

00:01:46.780 unpaid meds. Anyway, yesterday I was talking about what we need is a website where you could

00:01:54.520 put in your own personal risks. You know, what's your age, your BMI and all that stuff. And it would

00:02:00.900 tell you your risk of getting coronavirus and your risk of dying. And it turns out that exists. So

00:02:07.460 somebody built exactly that website. I don't know how long it's been up, but I just tweeted it before

00:02:13.080 I got on. So if you want to find it, you can find it at the top of my Twitter feed. So I don't know

00:02:20.660 if it's accurate. I'm not vouching for it, but it's interesting. And I would recommend just giving

00:02:27.820 you a look. Maybe it'll tell you something. So the theme of today's Periscope

00:02:34.820 is the experts. Somebody's asking me how old Snickers is. Snickers is about 12. And that's

00:02:43.780 around the life expectancy for this breed, unfortunately. So Snickers is a senior citizen.

00:02:50.400 But anyway, the theme today is going to be the experts. So we'll see how the experts are doing.

00:02:58.620 Make sure the experts are being experts. So all I did was take headlines out of the news.

00:03:05.740 So I didn't do any research. All I did was just look at the headlines. All right. So here's what the

00:03:14.820 experts are doing in the headlines. CNN has a story about a famed French serial killer expert,

00:03:23.120 Stéphane Bourgogne. So he was a big expert. I guess he had built a reputation as the country's

00:03:31.040 foremost expert in serial killers, writing more than 75 books and producing dozens of documentaries.

00:03:38.740 stories. But turns out it was all fake. He wasn't so much an expert on serial killers as he was an

00:03:49.040 expert at plagiarizing experts on serial killers. It turns out that the foremost expert on serial

00:03:55.180 killers in France wasn't even an expert. He was actually a con man. That's all right. That's your

00:04:03.700 first report of experts. All right. So, so far, expert not looking too good. You know, we're going

00:04:11.500 to be doing a little, obviously a little cherry picking here. So I'm not going to, I'm not going

00:04:15.980 to pretend this is an unbiased presentation. I've told you before, but I'm going to say it again,

00:04:22.420 that one of the most interesting accounts to follow during this era where everybody's obsessing

00:04:28.200 about data and, you know, what are the odds and everything. You got to follow Nate Silver. If

00:04:33.660 you're not following Nate Silver, you're just missing just one of the best commentary as he's 1.00

00:04:39.440 watching the, the common idiots try to figure out data because he actually does this for a living 0.99

00:04:45.100 and he's good at it. And he has to watch as all the people who are bad at it and don't know they're 1.00

00:04:52.180 bad at it. Try to be good at it while being bad at it. Imagine being him. Now, when I look at this

00:04:59.280 stuff with my, you know, tiny little bit of visibility of that world, even I can say, I'm not

00:05:07.100 so sure. I mean, I'm just skeptical. I look at it and go, I don't know, could be right. I'm not sure

00:05:13.680 I'm going to believe it. A lot of things are wrong. So I have sort of the lowest level of skeptical

00:05:19.620 detectors when it comes to data presentations, right? I just sort of generally don't like,

00:05:25.980 generally don't trust them because most of them are fake, but I don't have any special insight into

00:05:31.540 them usually, but Nate usually does. So just a perfect example. And this is just for one day,

00:05:38.500 right? Imagine he's doing this every single day and he's picking out this news story about a surge of

00:05:45.720 cases in Orange County. So there's a story about a surge of cases. So what do you make of that?

00:05:51.180 What do you make of it? It's out of control, right? These Orange County people, they're not

00:05:55.980 quarantining. They're not locking down. They're protesting. No wonder it's out of control in

00:06:01.000 Orange County. And then Nate Silver tweets, you know why there's maybe been a surge of cases in

00:06:08.200 Orange County, California, as this story focuses on? Because they're doing a ton more testing than

00:06:13.780 before. The whole story is just garbage. And he just takes it out with one tweet. Yeah. They don't 0.99

00:06:22.040 mention they're doing more testing. What experts are we supposed to listen to? I mean, here's some

00:06:29.300 expert reporters for a big publication. Was it, I forget who it was, LA Times maybe? And they must have

00:06:38.320 been collecting information from experts. So the expert reporter expertly collects the information

00:06:44.660 from the experts who collect the data. And then they read a story. And what's the public to make of

00:06:50.060 it? Well, wouldn't you believe it? Because experts, right? And then Nate Silver, also an expert, looks at

00:06:58.760 it and says, uh, the thing you left out was the only important thing. The only thing that mattered,

00:07:07.580 you know, in terms of understanding the full context, the only thing that mattered was what

00:07:12.500 effect did the testing have on kicking up new results. And that's not even in the story. My God.

00:07:19.400 All right. Experts so far, uh, two out of three doing poorly. Nate Silver, uh, he gets an A for the week.

00:07:30.740 Here's some more experts in the news business. CNN, um, I think that now that I've tuned you to it,

00:07:38.000 you're probably seeing this everywhere. You've noticed how much CNN does mind reading, right?

00:07:42.780 Where they pretend that a story is their opinion of someone else's internal thoughts. And they sell this

00:07:51.940 as news all the time. And every, you know, it's usually in the opinion context, not in the, not in the

00:07:57.540 harder news. But the fact that it's on, that it's even on an opinion, that it's even on a news site is, is

00:08:04.240 mind-boggling. So here's one. Uh, this is from Stephen Collinson, who's, he's sort of the, and I, and I'm not

00:08:12.120 kidding. I read his content to laugh. So he's trying to be a serious critic of the president,

00:08:19.080 but he has to produce so much critical content every week because apparently that's his job.

00:08:25.620 So no matter what the president is doing, Stephen Collinson is going to write a critical piece.

00:08:31.800 And if there's not actual data to look at to say, well, this is wrong, he goes after the president's

00:08:37.560 internal state. So the title is Trump's rebuke of Fauci encapsulates rejection of science.

00:08:46.120 It encapsulates his rejection of science, which is really sort of talking about his mental state,

00:08:52.280 right? Do we, do we think that president Trump in his, you know, internal mental cognition rejects

00:09:01.200 science? Have you ever heard of anybody who rejected science? That's not even a thing. Who

00:09:08.240 rejects science? People reject individual parts and then they give their reasons. Sometimes they're

00:09:15.960 right. Sometimes they're wrong. But in your whole life, has anybody ever rejected science? That is so

00:09:23.600 not even a thing. And it's a headline. Yeah, it's just part of his rejecting science, which has never

00:09:30.600 existed, can't exist, would never exist in the real world. And then it goes on to say the president's

00:09:38.600 downplaying of the nation's top expert, meaning Fauci, shows that he has always been battling the

00:09:46.380 pandemic that he wants to fight rather than the one that exists. So they have to put this in terms of

00:09:53.580 what the president internally wants. What? How does this guy, who's probably never even met the

00:10:01.140 president, know what the president is currently internally wanting? And apparently he currently

00:10:06.900 internally wants it to be a different kind of pandemic. That's quite the insight. Do you know who

00:10:14.200 else privately and privately on their own mind, do you know who else wants this pandemic to be a less

00:10:21.320 bad one? Me? Is there anybody else who would want this to be less bad than it is? I'm feeling confident

00:10:30.220 that many of you also, like the president who's being criticized here, would want the pandemic

00:10:37.760 to be different than it is. So, which is different from saying he's doing the wrong stuff.

00:10:44.500 You know, if they said he's doing the wrong stuff, then they could show their reasons why.

00:10:49.640 But they're free from the, from showing that he's doing the wrong stuff because they can just say

00:10:54.600 that he's thinking about it wrong. Yeah, he's thinking about it all wrong. As if you know what's in his

00:11:00.640 head. And you look in there and he's not liking science in there. You know, you saw him bragging about

00:11:06.840 his, was it his uncle, who's a famous, famous scientist or a very successful scientist anyway.

00:11:13.920 Some Trump, I mean, Trump clearly, clearly respects science. I mean, he's been taking all of the

00:11:20.880 scientific recommendations. And then when it gets to the school closing one, that's not just a

00:11:26.520 scientific recommendation. That's also a public recommendation. All right, let's see some more of

00:11:32.420 the, the experts. So this, a user on Twitter, Calumet K, don't know who he is. And I did a thought

00:11:44.800 experiment tweet. I was talking about whether we were doing a good job understanding overweight people

00:11:52.700 and the special risks they have. So that was my tweet. And I was wondering aloud whether we were

00:11:58.940 looking at it right. And Calumet says to me on Twitter, coronaviruses have been with us for

00:12:05.400 decades. Look more closely at the data instead of thought experiments and exercise and science

00:12:11.740 fictions. He says to me, so I replied that that was 2019 thinking. In 2020, have we not noticed that

00:12:23.300 the data that the data that we need is unavailable and the data that we have is unreliable. So if you're

00:12:31.340 telling me that we should use the data, don't you also have a responsibility to, let's say, judge

00:12:40.140 whether the data exists and is credibly accurate? Because if you leave out the fact that it doesn't

00:12:50.300 exist, and if it does, the stuff we've seen, is not credible, don't lecture me about not using the

00:13:02.440 data to make my decisions. If you can give me some data that is useful and reliable, do you think I

00:13:10.340 wouldn't use it? Is there anybody who thinks that presented with credible and useful information, I would

00:13:17.480 say, you know, I choose not to use this. I think I'd rather guess. No, I would not do that. And so there's,

00:13:26.600 there are people who seem to imagine that other people are doing something like that. It's a weird

00:13:33.040 world. Anyway. So here's my favorite. So this is my actual tweet that caused a little trouble. And I'll tell

00:13:42.120 you how this went. And my tweet was, how many Americans have died from coronavirus who are under

00:13:47.080 60? And also, here's the key part of the tweet, had a healthy body weight, whatever you wanted to find

00:13:53.820 healthy as low BMI, I guess. And I said, I have a strong feeling that political correctness is

00:14:01.200 preventing us from understanding our individual risks, which could in turn keep the economy closed and

00:14:07.920 ruin civilization. So I was sort of thinking aloud, as one does on Twitter, that maybe the big issue is

00:14:16.020 that we just can't be told. Can I, can I be, I'm going to be impolite for a moment. Okay. I'll need

00:14:24.080 your permission to be impolite just for a moment. It's easier to communicate if we just make that

00:14:31.620 agreement. Um, I am very much against fat shaming. So if what you hear next sounds like fat shaming,

00:14:40.380 let me say as clearly as possible, that's not what I'm doing. No, I'm not cool with that at all. I do

00:14:46.060 think, you know, maybe society has some benefits in encouraging people to live a healthier health

00:14:52.760 lifestyle, but it's not my thing, right? I'm not going to tell you what to eat. Like that's, that's just

00:14:59.240 your personal decision. You know, I wish it didn't cost me more in healthcare probably does,

00:15:04.460 but it's still your personal decision. That's the country we live in. All right. So that's my

00:15:08.120 statement. Now, having said that, let me speak plainly in the vernacular of regular people.

00:15:17.340 Is this a fat problem? Again, no disrespect meant to anybody, but is it a fat problem? Because

00:15:26.540 I told you yesterday, CNN showed a family that tragically all three of them, you know, died

00:15:33.060 and CNN showed their photos and said, you know, they had no underlying conditions. And I looked at

00:15:39.220 the photos and said, I see underlying conditions there. There is obviously, obviously a weight issue

00:15:46.280 with the family. Again, I'm not criticizing. It's tragic what happened. We're not minimizing the

00:15:51.720 tragedy whatsoever. And I'm not saying they brought it on themselves, nothing like that. I'm just

00:15:56.740 saying, can't we talk honestly? They're showing us the picture and, and basically lying to us while

00:16:04.520 they're showing the picture. No, no underlying conditions. And all the experts are telling us

00:16:11.080 that's an underlying condition. So I'm actually wondering, have we ever seen, um, we, I think we have

00:16:19.920 seen statistics of obese patients and how they have a higher mortality. Is that, that that's correct,

00:16:26.740 right? You've seen data about obesity, but have you seen data that would take the entire weight

00:16:33.460 spectrum into account? In other words, if you're, let's say you're carrying 20 extra pounds as an adult,

00:16:40.740 are you a little bit more at risk? Because I don't really know. Do you have to get all the way to

00:16:47.040 obesity before it's, you sort of fall off a ledge and then you're into the dangerous territory?

00:16:51.740 Or is it sort of, you know, scaled? Like is, is every extra pound outside of the ideal BMI?

00:16:58.940 Does it give you a little bit of risk and then it, and it gets much higher, the higher your weight is?

00:17:04.360 Don't know. But I do know that nobody's telling us that.

00:17:08.660 I do know that. Somebody says, are Chinese people obese on average? I would say probably not. Probably

00:17:18.440 not. But they also seem to have it under control, don't they? So I don't know what's going on in

00:17:25.700 China. And this gets back to the fact that all of our data is bad. So my first instinct was to say to 0.90

00:17:31.160 you when somebody said, yeah, but what about China? To say, well, that's a perfect example. 0.98

00:17:35.380 They don't have a big weight problem, and they got it under control. But as soon as I said that,

00:17:42.500 I said to myself, do I really know that? I mean, I think I know that they don't have a giant weight

00:17:48.580 problem, but I don't know how under control it is. I don't really know what's happening in China.

00:17:55.120 But on the surface, it looks like that's compatible. All right. So I made the statement

00:17:59.140 out loud about maybe weight is the thing. And then I got the following criticism from a Dr. Angela

00:18:11.200 Rasmussen, who is a virologist. I can say she is a virologist because I know that that is the correct

00:18:19.500 pronoun because she put it in her profile. So she's a she slash her. So Dr. Angela Rasmussen says to me 0.68

00:18:29.480 on Twitter, maybe you should compare. I'm sorry. No, she said to me on Twitter.

00:18:34.880 I swear I wrote it down. She said to me on Twitter. Oh, damn it. Oh, well, I just tried for 20

00:18:50.800 minutes this morning to copy a piece of text into my notes. And every time Twitter had a bug and it

00:18:57.040 didn't work. But the essence of it is that she mocked me for doing doing a thought experiment when I

00:19:04.080 should be listening to the experts. So she mocked me for being a cartoonist and saying something about 0.95

00:19:10.580 health in public. And I feel as though the public is getting a little testy. Have you noticed people

00:19:18.460 getting a little crabby? Maybe a little quick to respond. And Dr. Angela Rasmussen caught me in one of

00:19:29.140 those moods in which I was not in the mood to be criticized. And I may have gone at her a little

00:19:35.500 bit hard. And I did. And I did this. So after she said that you shouldn't listen to a cartoonist,

00:19:44.860 I tweeted back and said, maybe you should compare my public health recommendations to the coronavirus 0.98

00:19:49.540 experts so far, dipshit. I'm winning by a landslide. Your team is looking like twice eating shit lately. 0.96

00:19:56.820 So the funny part about it was that this expert happened to pick the only cartoonist 0.99

00:20:04.920 who has a public track record of consistently being right when all of the public experts are wrong. 0.64

00:20:12.600 Now, if you're new to the Periscope, that sounds like a ridiculous claim. If you've been watching

00:20:17.300 for a while, I've gone through the list a number of times. First one to call for the closing of travel

00:20:22.260 from China, well before the president. First one to say the masks, the mask story is bullshit. They're 1.00

00:20:28.020 all lying to you. First one, you know, probably one of the first ones to say hydroxychloroquine might

00:20:33.960 not work, but it's certainly not going to be a bad risk management for people. And sure enough,

00:20:39.460 lots of countries are doing it. I mean, you could go right down the list. And either I didn't have an

00:20:47.000 opinion or it was correct and the professionals were wrong. I don't think I've been wrong yet,

00:20:52.340 at least on anything that I asserted as true. So weirdly and humorously, the expert decides to

00:21:00.520 dump on me on Twitter and finds out I'm literally the only non-expert who has consistently trounced

00:21:06.600 the experts in this very field just recently in the last two months. So speaking of Krabby,

00:21:16.000 I saw a tweet on Twitter that just made me laugh because it reminded me of my own response I just

00:21:23.480 told you about. So a troll goes after Emily Campagna, Campagna, Campagna, Campagna, Campagna. I can never

00:21:32.080 pronounce her last name. So you know her from Fox News. She's often on The Five and other Fox News

00:21:37.960 shows. And this guy, Tim, on Twitter says, I don't know why he was even going after her, but he goes,

00:21:45.440 your world is criminal justice? He goes, please, you work for Fox Opinion. So Emily tweets back to him

00:21:52.480 this. Actually, Tim, I'm in my 13th year of practice. Criminal defense and a former GS-14 rank

00:21:59.640 as an acting director in a top 10 federal agency. I've spent more hours in prisons and within the

00:22:05.680 systems than you can imagine. So why don't you sit the fuck down and let the adults talk? 0.99

00:22:14.480 I think it's funnier because you don't expect her, you didn't expect that the F word to come out of 0.99

00:22:19.740 her, but it was sort of perfect. I've been laughing about that all morning. So every time somebody tries

00:22:27.260 to dunk on somebody, they haven't done their homework. All right. Let's talk about Flynn.

00:22:37.480 So Trump is cleverly politically selling this as like the biggest deal in the world. People should

00:22:45.680 go to prison for 50 years talking about the Obama administration unmasking of Flynn. And, you know,

00:22:52.780 that being part of the whole Russia collusion hoax, et cetera. So Trump and the Republicans are making

00:22:58.400 it a story that the Obama administration spied on a political opponent, meaning the Trump campaign.

00:23:06.820 And that is literally what happened, meaning that they literally spied on a political opponent.

00:23:12.900 Like that statement is beyond any, is beyond question. What is in question is if that's the

00:23:22.460 reason they did it, which of course is their defense. So there's no question of what happened,

00:23:28.840 at least the broad strokes, that there was unmasking, these people unmasked them, it happened

00:23:34.840 then, et cetera. But they still would say, no, no, we had a different reason. It wasn't about spying on

00:23:40.840 the campaign. It was about making sure there wasn't any Russia problems. So the president

00:23:45.660 cleverly, because he's the biggest voice in politics and he can make the story sort of, you know, move in

00:23:53.800 whatever direction he pushes it. He's cleverly and appropriately, I would say appropriately within

00:23:59.300 the context of politics, pushing it to be the biggest thing in the world. And the beauty of this

00:24:07.360 is almost breathtaking. Because what he's doing and what, you know, Rand Paul was doing yesterday

00:24:15.620 is they're turning this into the exact mirror image of all the things that they were falsely

00:24:22.580 accused of, which was the Ukrainian phone call and, you know, interfere using the power of the

00:24:29.300 government to go after a political opponent. In the case of Ukraine, it was using the politics

00:24:36.500 to investigate Biden's Ukrainian stuff. So now that the facts have come out on the unmasking,

00:24:44.140 Trump and the Republicans quite cleverly and inaccurately, I think, I mean, it would be as

00:24:50.200 fair as what they were saying. It's just the complete reversal. Now, the beauty of this is that at the

00:24:57.120 same time that the Democrats have to argue that this is not a correct framing of what happened,

00:25:03.220 that things happen for different reasons. It's exactly what Trump was saying. Trump was saying,

00:25:10.440 well, the reason we looked into it is it was a national security concern. Ukraine, Burisma, Biden,

00:25:17.560 national security concern. Yes, yes, it was also, you know, it would have been how convenient that

00:25:24.500 they're also my political enemy. But that's not the reason I did it. And likewise,

00:25:30.080 the Democrats are going to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we did spy on a political campaign, but

00:25:36.140 that wasn't the reason we did it. The reason we did it was all these important political,

00:25:42.800 geopolitical considerations. It's exactly the same. If you don't, if you're not appreciating the beauty

00:25:50.360 of that symmetry, I don't know. I don't know how you could miss it. Sometimes the fake news,

00:25:59.080 just in its randomness, just every now and then will line up with this sort of perfect irony or

00:26:06.420 perfect coincidence or perfect story. And this is just so perfect. It's the exact mirror of what he

00:26:13.740 got impeached for exactly as he's going into election. This couldn't be any better politically.

00:26:22.280 And as I, and here's the other part of it. So I was wondering why they, why we have released

00:26:28.680 the names of the people who asked for the unmasking, but yet we're still waiting for the backup documents

00:26:35.620 that each of them had to fill out to say why they had asked for the unmasking. Have you asked yourself

00:26:41.600 why you didn't see them at the same time? Why did you see the list of people who asked for the

00:26:46.780 unmasking, but we're still waiting for the documents in which those same people said, this is why I want

00:26:53.220 to see it? Well, I don't know. It could be just the most normal administrative bureaucratic thing.

00:27:00.560 It could be that one department had this information and they were done. Other ones taking longer.

00:27:05.980 It could be that one department has both, but one of them takes longer to vet. Somebody had some

00:27:10.440 questions, held it up a little bit, probably just normal reasons. But let me just suggest this

00:27:17.600 possibility. Isn't it better to drip it out a little bit at a time? If you happen to be the

00:27:23.800 Republicans, you're Grinnell, you're, let's say you're Trump, and you've got a bushel basket of

00:27:30.660 little stuff and every one of these little releases is going to be a news cycle. Do you let it out all at

00:27:37.940 once? No, you don't let it out all at once. Because when we saw the names, we got to be

00:27:44.020 outraged. And when we see the, someday I assume we'll see the backup documents that said why they

00:27:50.020 need access. And I think we're going to be all enraged again. So he's going to get two weeks, at least,

00:27:57.340 of coverage for a story that would have been a one-week story if they just dumped it and the news

00:28:02.820 had to process it and get over it. So if you remember during the Russia collusion story and

00:28:09.700 also the Ukraine story, what was the phrase that CNN kept using? You're going to love this.

00:28:17.580 You know the phrase. It goes like this. Drip, drip, drip. How many times did you see CNN

00:28:29.540 say that all the news that was going to eventually get the president impeached? How many times did

00:28:37.340 you say it just keeps coming? Drip, drip, drip. And then the tables turned. And what is CNN saying now?

00:28:49.520 Well, because it looks like the Republicans are playing the drip strategy on them. It looks like

00:28:59.300 they're going to drip, drip, drip, and just drip the piss out of CNN and the Democrats. Now, I don't 0.85

00:29:05.760 know that that's an explicit strategy. I do know it should be. And I do know they're obviously smart

00:29:13.660 enough. It would be obvious enough. If I had to guess, if I had to guess, I think they're getting

00:29:20.480 a little bit of their drip, drip, drip right back, which amuses me on a level I can't even explain.

00:29:28.460 Like, first of all, the fact that they don't brag about it, because I don't think you're going to hear

00:29:34.000 anybody, Republicans, say, yeah, you know, we gave them the drip, drip, drip. But the fact that you can

00:29:39.660 see it happening, and you kind of suspect if you don't know it's happening, and watching them use

00:29:46.600 the same strategy that just tortured Republicans for three years, and just take the gun out of the 1.00

00:29:53.080 hand of the Democrats and use it against them, drip, drip, drip, motherfucker. It is beautiful to watch. 1.00

00:30:03.520 So meanwhile, the Democrats have to sort of build a little wall around their artificial reality,

00:30:08.620 their bubble reality. Andrea Mitchell took a good try on it. And one of the attempts that they're

00:30:15.460 going to make is that this unmasking stuff is so common, there's no story here. And it's so common

00:30:22.200 because it happens a lot, nine, 10,000 times a year. And it's so routine, totally routine, this

00:30:29.000 unmasking. And Andrea Mitchell tweeted, 10,000 unmaskings last year, 17,000 in 2018, necessary and

00:30:38.540 routine. Can people please stop trying to gaslight us? When you hear the word gaslight, that's your tell

00:30:47.180 for somebody building an artificial reality around there. Well, well, well, don't know what happened

00:30:54.240 there. A little hiccup. Periscope gave me a message that said I could just continue with the same

00:30:59.480 Periscope when it was uninterrupted. Looks like it worked. How about that? Anyway, so Andrea Mitchell

00:31:05.280 was building this bubble reality around their little world by saying that the accusations about all the

00:31:12.040 unmasking is just gaslighting. It's just gaslighting. But here's the trick that she's doing. If you didn't

00:31:17.440 catch the trick, it's a good one. It's a good trick. So she's framing it as normal routine

00:31:23.620 behavior. Therefore, there's nothing to see. But here's what she's cleverly doing that's a little

00:31:28.520 less obvious. What's less obvious is that she's ignoring the reason it was done. It is true that

00:31:37.320 it's routine to unmask, which is what she says. So she's just sticking with this one truth. It's

00:31:43.400 routine to unmask. We unmask, nothing to see. What she leaves out is the reason for the unmasking.

00:31:53.700 I see in the comments, somebody is enjoying my show more than more than usual. So good for you.

00:31:59.880 Keep it up. So that's her trick. She doesn't say the reason. Now, so the alleged reason is for

00:32:07.520 political reasons. Of course, they're going to say it's for national security. But that's how they're

00:32:12.640 going to build their artificial reality over at CNN. They'll call it gaslighting. They'll say it's

00:32:17.120 routine. And they will simply not answer the question of why it was done, which is the only

00:32:23.400 real question. So I've been trying to follow this story that the Flynn judge. So as you know,

00:32:33.340 I guess the prosecutor wants to drop the charges against Flynn for all the reasons that you know.

00:32:38.760 But the judge, this is Emmett Sullivan, issued, quote, an unusual order Wednesday. I'll say it's unusual.

00:32:48.140 Appointing a law firm partner to present arguments in opposition to the government's motion to dismiss.

00:32:55.660 So in other words, the prosecutor and the defense have both agreed that this should be

00:33:02.460 let go. And the judge, instead of doing the most normal thing in the world, is like,

00:33:11.060 OK, even the prosecutor doesn't want to prosecute? Well, OK, we're done here. He decides he's going to

00:33:17.780 create this process to retry the case, basically, without a jury. It'd basically just be this guy

00:33:26.200 retrying the case or something. I mean, not technically, but even the fact that there's

00:33:31.300 any new person coming in at this point. And I said to myself, well, I'm no lawyer. I'm no legal

00:33:38.660 expert. Don't know that much about the courts. Is this weird or is this not weird? And so I watched

00:33:46.180 the people who actually know what they're doing, you know, the Mike Cernoviches, people who have

00:33:50.240 legal backgrounds, etc. And I was kind of watching their guidance to see, is this normal? And as far

00:33:58.600 as I could tell, there is nothing normal about this. Am I right? It looks like he's just making

00:34:05.800 it up. It appears that justice has been completely, I don't know, distorted because this judge is just

00:34:15.580 finding a way to keep Flynn in jail. Is that the judge's job to try to find a way to keep innocent

00:34:21.500 people in jail? Dershowitz agrees with you. Yeah, it looks like it looks like this is a complete

00:34:28.480 bullshit thing that he just sort of made up to keep a guy in jail. Now, I don't know if it's any crime 0.98

00:34:35.700 itself, but we have all these weird situations lately. If you ask me, should Emmett Sullivan go to jail?

00:34:44.100 I'd say yes. I would say that based on what he just did to try to create a system out of nothing

00:34:50.520 to send an innocent person to jail while he's in a position of authority and trust is so bad

00:34:57.580 that if it were a crime, and I'm sure it's not, but if it were on the books as a crime,

00:35:04.360 I would say it should be a jailable offense. So he's doing something in full view of the public

00:35:09.740 that just by, you know, chance and the vagaries of history is not illegal. But it ought to be.

00:35:19.420 Shouldn't it? Shouldn't this be really illegal? Or at least banned or something. So to watch somebody

00:35:29.020 do something which I would say is as serious and as ethically empty as this, it should be a crime.

00:35:39.420 People should go to jail for something like this and there will be no penalty. People, you'll either

00:35:43.940 get away with it or it won't. No penalty. Now, the president, of course, has correctly and wisely

00:35:50.580 said that Flynn will be fined. So in other words, the president will back him up with a, I don't know,

00:35:55.860 a pardon or whatever you need to do there. But nobody wants to do that for political reasons,

00:36:00.320 but it's there. So Flynn will be fine. Did you see the story about Senator Richard Burr,

00:36:07.280 prominent Republican who sold a lot of his stock on February 13th while he was getting all these

00:36:13.560 confidential briefings about the coronavirus? And so he's in trouble because it looks like he

00:36:19.840 used his insider information about the coronavirus to save money by selling off his stocks.

00:36:28.340 And apparently his brother-in-law did the same thing, but Burr denies coordinating with him.

00:36:33.940 That part gets a little sticky. Now, here's the thing. If you see this story, you say to yourself,

00:36:39.980 well, that's a slam dunk. It's illegal to use your insider government information in this way.

00:36:46.800 He had insider government information. The dates line up. He traded right after he got the

00:36:52.740 information. Slam dunk, right? Boom. No problem, right? Wrong. This isn't even close to a crime,

00:37:02.780 in my opinion. I will now give you my legal opinion based on my absolutely no legal background.

00:37:10.720 And it goes like this. As long as there's also a perfectly legitimate reason for whatever you did,

00:37:18.080 you're not going to jail. Just in general. As long as there's also a legitimate reason,

00:37:26.060 you don't go to jail because people think you are using mentally the other reason.

00:37:30.740 They can only look at what you did. And if what you did had plenty of public reasons,

00:37:36.240 it doesn't matter if you also had some extra information because you still would have done

00:37:42.920 it. Why do I know that? Because on this very day that Senator Richard Burr was selling all of his

00:37:48.920 stocks, I too, without the benefit of any of his intelligence, was very close to selling all my

00:37:56.360 stocks. And it was because of public information. It was, what, three weeks after I'd, two or three

00:38:04.040 weeks after I'd called publicly for travel to be stopped from China, we knew what was happening

00:38:09.740 in Wuhan. It was obvious that it was going to, it was going to get out. It was already a big story.

00:38:16.360 So I was sitting here thinking, uh, I might want to sell all of my stocks. Now I didn't. I decided not

00:38:24.900 to. But Senator Richard Burr, or yeah, Richard Burr, I don't think he's going to go to jail. I think

00:38:33.260 he's got a lot of explaining to do, but it seems to me that, uh, as long as people like me were

00:38:39.880 looking at public information, which he also had access to, and that was enough to make the same

00:38:45.160 decision he made with the private information, I don't see him going to jail. His brother-in-law's

00:38:51.860 got some questions to answer though. I don't know about that. Um, so there's that. Paul Graham,

00:39:00.760 uh, famous investor, uh, started Y Combinator. He, he has a great Twitter feed. He has lots

00:39:08.040 of little, little good things. He was saying that he told his eight-year-old, this is the

00:39:13.340 advice to his eight-year-old. If you do creative work, try to avoid situations where people with

00:39:17.660 less ability than you can tell you what to do or edit your work. I thought, well, that's,

00:39:22.880 that's good advice. You don't want people with less ability telling you how to fix your creative

00:39:27.320 work. But I, I tweeted back that I call this boss diversification and it's a good advice for you.

00:39:33.780 If you have the option, you want to have as many bosses as you can get. Because if you have one

00:39:40.300 boss, your life is controlled by one person who might not be stable, might not even like you.

00:39:45.840 What could be worse than having the biggest part of your life determined by this one boss who might

00:39:51.360 not like you? So you want to go for what I call boss diversification, which usually means working

00:39:58.020 for yourself, which usually means having customers instead of a boss. Your customers become your boss

00:40:03.520 if you're an entrepreneur, but you got lots of them. So I can have several customers a day fire me and do

00:40:09.500 probably every single day. Somebody says, that's it. That thing you said today is the last day I'll ever

00:40:15.120 read Dilbert. So I get fired about seven times a day. That's just the ones I hear about. I don't know

00:40:20.820 how many times I don't hear about it, but it doesn't matter because as long as there are more people

00:40:25.080 becoming my boss, meaning my customers, they can fire me all day long. But what they can't do

00:40:30.480 is tell me how to change my work. All right. I would like to end on a, I don't know if this is a poem

00:40:41.640 or just good prose, but it's written by Gordana Birnat. Birnat, B-I-E-R-N-A-T. I wasn't familiar

00:40:51.380 with her. She's a blue check. So she's apparently done some things, a writer. And she wrote this 0.70

00:40:57.400 little, I don't know what it is. Is it like a poem without rhymes? You decide. So I just liked it so

00:41:04.540 much. I wanted to end today's Periscope on this thought. It kind of ties into the idea of the

00:41:11.720 simulation, ties into rethinking all of our priorities. It ties into rebooting because the

00:41:19.200 coronavirus allowed us to just sort of pull back and just look at everything. Look at who we are,

00:41:25.700 how we relate to our world, what we want, what our dreams, our ambitions, what's the meaning of life.

00:41:31.120 You know, all these things we're thinking of. And I thought Gordana summed it up well. So let me just

00:41:36.560 read it the way she wrote it on Twitter. Growing up, we somehow become consumers of things,

00:41:44.300 forgetting our original sole purpose as collectors of experiences. Know this, all you truly own is

00:41:53.340 yourself. Everything else is borrowed in the illusion of time and space. Be present.

00:42:01.120 And on that note, have a wonderful day and I will talk to you tonight.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams - May 14, 2020

Episode 974 Scott Adams： Comparing the Experts to Average Idiots, Who is Performing Better, Unmasking

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