Episode 139 - Stzrok’s Body Language, Theresa May
Date: 2018-07-13 | Duration: 38:04
Topics
Strzok was biased…like everybody else Was he fired for the appearance of bias, not actual bias? Strzok’s smirk, did it say “I’m winning”? Baby Trump balloon defense system Trump and May appear comfortable with each other this morning President Trump’s tea with the Queen today
Transcript
[0:12] Hey everybody, come on in here. You know what time it is, yes you do. Today I’d like to give my best Peter Strzok impression. It goes like this: [Scott makes a face]. I think I nailed it. I nailed it. It’s time for the simultaneous sip. Somebody says I look high; no, that’s what I look like when I wake up. I’ve only been awake for a little bit. It’s time for the sip. Oh, that’s an extra good sip. Let’s talk about—I know everybody wants me to talk about Peter Strzok and is he believable, and what about that weird satanic body language?
[1:15] Well, I’m not gonna tell you everything you want to hear today, and I know you hate that, but I’m trying to make sure that I have at least some credibility and I’m not just siding with the team every time. You all by now have seen the GIFs and the video of Peter Strzok making weird facial expressions. For one, when he talked, he tended to look down so that when he was looking up, he looked evil—sort of the evil look. Never a good look. And then there’s that weird little thing where he’s smirking and squirming in his chair. If you see that out of context, it’s especially problematic.
[2:16] What do we make of the smirk and the squirm first? The part you’ve all seen by now, it’s all over Twitter where he goes and squirms a little bit. Here’s my interpretation—you’re gonna hate this—he looks like somebody who knows he’s winning. In other words, he was sitting in Congress and, as bad as you might think he looked, Louie Gohmert looked worse. Congress as a whole looked worse. This is the day that Strzok has been looking forward to in a way, because he probably did want to get his version of the story out. The question is, did he do something that would make him happy now?
[3:18] Of course, he’s not happy about how Congress treated him, but would he have been happy about how he performed? I think that smugness you see is that he feels he performed well. In other words, he doesn’t look like somebody who got caught lying. I got all kinds of pushback yesterday because people don’t understand the difference between credibility and what is true. I don’t know what he thinks now, what he thought then, or what is true, so I can’t speak about what’s true. But I can tell you whether he looked credible or not. I would say the weird body language was terrible persuasion if he’s trying to be liked, but it didn’t look like he was trying to be liked. I saw no indication that he went in there thinking, “I’m gonna turn the public to liking me.”
[4:19] It didn’t look like he went there to do that, and indeed he did not do that. But he looked like he felt like he was winning. I’ll tell you that when he talked about the part of the text where he said “we’ll stop it,” I was looking for the tells of lying. His explanation about when he talked about the Trump presidency—when he said by text to his lover/lawyer Lisa Page, “we’ll stop it”—his explanation was “we” was the people. This was before the election, and surely “We the People” would vote against the president just like the polls say will happen. Is that credible? Here’s what I would look for. I’ve told you some of the ways that liars lie. A liar would say something like, “There’s no evidence that that’s what that means,” or “That could mean anything, you’re just taking it out of context.”
[5:20] Or they might say, “Privately, we said other things.” There are things that liars do that are fairly consistent, which is not a hundred percent, meaning you can’t always detect a lie, but liars do have a pattern that people telling the truth do not do. Do you remember what Peter Strzok’s general approach was? Forget the specific words, but what was his general approach to the question of whether he was biased to the point of not being able to do the job in a professional manner? How did he react to the accusation of being biased beyond the point of being professional?
[6:21] He reacted on offense. He actually made a statement that was quite impassioned and quite angry. He looked legitimately angry and impassioned when he blamed the Congress and all of his critics for even suggesting that his bias would be enough to overthrow the country. If he were a regular citizen—not an FBI agent who is presumably trained in how to detect liars—I would say that is an honest-looking response. If you’re not an FBI agent who’s trained to know what a real person looks like and what a liar looks like, that sort of person could fake it.
[7:23] But a regular citizen who acted exactly the way he did, I would say he was innocent, or at least believed he was innocent, which is slightly different when you’re talking about bias. If he had been a private citizen, his performance would have looked very convincing to me. But you have the extra complication that he’s a trained FBI agent with many years of experience interviewing people and trying to detect whether they’re liars. A person with that much training could very easily pretend to be honest, and that would be a good way to do it: act really angry and attack the attacker the way he did. You can’t really tell anything in his special case because he could be smart enough and trained well enough to pull that off. But if it had been anybody else, I would say that performance looks actually believable.
[8:25] Now here’s the dumbest part of the entire conversation, and this applies to both sides: the anti-Strzok and the pro-Strzok. The dumbest thing people are saying is “he was biased.” Why is this the dumbest thing that anybody’s saying? I know that some of you, probably most of you, believe that’s a true statement. The claim that he is biased is the dumbest observation because, in that particular election, everyone was biased. There was no option of the unbiased agent. That’s not a thing.
[9:29] In normal situations, if they’re going after normal crime, they don’t really have a stake in that crime. They’re just doing their job. Their bias is just toward themselves and toward the FBI and the country. So everything’s fine. But in this specific case of this election—which probably wasn’t the case in past elections, but this one election of Trump versus Clinton—the level of bias for every human who was paying attention was off the chart. To say that this agent has a problem with bias is just not good thinking. Of course it’s true, but it’s also like saying “you’re breathing oxygen.” It’s true, but you didn’t really make a point, because if it’s true of everybody regarding this presidency, then you’re not really saying anything.
[10:30] Who was the agent they could have had on that case? If you show me an unbiased FBI agent, I’ll show you an idiot, because if you were unbiased about this particular election, you weren’t paying attention. And if you weren’t paying attention that aggressively, I kind of worry about what else is wrong with you. My RAS was off, whatever that is. Now, the smugness is a factor in how people perceived him, of course, but it’s not an indication of whether he lied or not. The smugness tells you nothing about the truth of his statement; it’s just something you don’t like. It just rubs you the wrong way. Let me finish the statement: Strzok’s defense against accusations of bias are—
[11:30] There’s a part that you can’t take as being believable, which is that he’s never been biased and he would never do that. That might be true, but you can’t take it on his word because he’s just been accused of that. Of course he’s denying it, so you don’t really have anything to go on there. But he made a specific claim that is at least a little bit falsifiable, which is that the FBI system would have caught any real bias. In other words, he’s making the case that human beings are biased, and that his bias was not at the level that he thought he was intentionally acting on it. But if he had unintentionally acted on his bias, or even intentionally, there were enough other people who saw it and they would have called it down—unless of course they were also in on it, I suppose.
[12:34] But that’s a claim that I think merits some investigation. I’d like to hear from some FBI experts, people who have worked there recently, to tell us whether that’s true or not. Could there have been enough other people looking at his work that any obvious bias would have been pulled out immediately? Now, the IG, I believe they concluded that he was biased. Nobody is arguing that point. Do you know why? Because arguing that point is just stupid. It’s just stupid to argue that he was biased because of course he was biased. Do you know who else was biased? You, me, every single person in the country. So when the IG says he was biased, the IG could have just as well said, “And by the way, the IG is biased,” because that’s true too, probably a lot.
[13:34] Now when Strzok says that he was fired not for his bias but for the optics—the appearance of bias—I rate that claim 100% true. This is one of the few things I could say with complete certainty. Why is it a hundred percent true that he was fired for the impression of bias? Because the texts had been discovered, versus actual bias, because there was no claim by Comey of actual acting through the bias. There is no claim in evidence that something he actually did is proven by bias. It would be completely routine and ordinary to fire him for this appearance of bias, or at least to reassign him. So whether or not Strzok has bias in fact, that is a separate question from whether he was removed from his job for the bias.
[14:35] The only thing they knew is that it looked like bias, so of course he was removed for the appearance, not the actual things he did. So he’s a hundred percent true on that. I think his statement “we’ll stop it” has two explanations: “we” meaning “we bad people within the FBI,” or “we the public.” Given that he said it before the election, and we the public collectively looked like we’re going to surely elect Clinton, that seems like a normal thing to say. “We’ll stop it,” meaning we the voters, versus “we will overthrow the government,” which would be weird and unusual. You’re going to need a lot more evidence for that. Now, people said, “Okay, Scott, pretzel time.” I see what you’re doing with that one example. And if that one example—the example where Strzok said by text “we’ll stop it”—
[15:37] If that were the only evidence, maybe I’d see your point. It could be seen two ways. If it was the only thing in evidence, sure. But what about all the other stuff? You have to look at all the other stuff because you have to see this in context, right? False. Bad thinking. Do you know why you are so angry—most of you on this Periscope—that you’re so angry about the Russia collusion story? Because every piece of evidence is weak, but the anti-Trumpers have summed them all together to make them look stronger. Let me give you an example: “Russia and Trump must have colluded. Here’s the evidence: Don Junior went to a meeting that he didn’t know exactly what it was about, but he hoped that there would be some information there about Hillary.”
[16:40] That is completely legal. Nobody can stop you from hearing information; there’s no law against that. So people say, “There you have it.” And I say, “No, that’s just evidence that somebody went to a meeting because somebody said, ‘I have something that you’d like to hear.‘” That’s not illegal, and it’s not exactly colluding with Russia because we don’t know what he would have done with that information had it been real information. Would he have said the smart thing, which is, “Oh, now I’ve got the information, I’ll go to the FBI and make sure they know that Russia is trying to mess with us”? We never got to that point because they had no information. People will say, “I hear what you’re saying, that the Don Junior meeting, if it was the only thing about the Russia collusion, it wouldn’t be that convincing. You have to look at it in context because keep in mind that Flynn…”
[17:40] Keep in mind that Flynn got in trouble for lying to the FBI and for leaving some meetings with Russians off his thing. You say to yourself, “Okay, if that were the only thing that happened, that wouldn’t look so bad. It’s just Flynn doing some lying and left something off a list, probably not that unusual.” But you have to look at it in context because it was the Flynn thing, but also—see where I’m going? Confirmation bias works like this: the fact that there are lots of pieces of evidence does not strengthen any one of them. Confirmation bias would look exactly like “guilty” such that you can’t tell the difference. If you think you can tell the difference between a big web of confirmation bias and something that’s just true, then you don’t quite understand how reality is organized.
[18:45] Reality is not organized in things that are obviously true and things that are obviously not. Your brain is not up to the task of sorting out truth from fiction; we’re just not very good at it. So the things you should look at is, if you see a whole bunch of reasons but there’s not one of them that’s convincing, you’ve got to tell yourself that’s a toss-up between whether all that evidence means something or is just your confirmation bias. If you believe that the Russia collusion story is mostly a whole bunch of little evidence that’s not really anything, but they summed it all up to look like it was—if you think that’s what happened with the Russia collusion story but you don’t think that’s what’s happening with the Peter Strzok collusion story—then you don’t understand how confirmation bias works.
[19:46] I know that at least 20% of the people listening to this are going to say incorrectly, “Scott Adams says that this one’s true and this one’s false.” I’m not saying that. I’m saying that you can’t tell the difference. Said too much on that. People are telling me, “Let’s talk about Trump in the UK.” Yesterday I tweeted about it. It was a fascinating story, I guess it was in The Sun, in which they reported that President Trump had deeply insulted Prime Minister May about Brexit. If you’re like me, you read that story and you said, “I don’t understand this story.”
[20:46] Because the story was that the UK wants to do Brexit, which is already a complicated topic. I would not claim that I understand it very well. But Trump, according to this report, said that if the UK did Brexit the way they plan to do it—some kind of a weak form of Brexit—that the United States would not be able to do a trade deal with them. I said to myself, “Why?” The claim was we’d have to do a deal with Europe instead of them. Now, I don’t know if the president was onto something true or not. I guess he already walked it back this morning and said, “It’s a complicated situation, but I think we can do a deal with you.” When I heard it, I just didn’t understand even the point or the economics or what this has to do with anything.
[21:47] I couldn’t understand why the United States wouldn’t be able to do a deal. I’m not saying it’s not true, but the reporting was completely empty. It was just empty calories of: “if you do this, we won’t be able to do a deal with you.” Why? What suddenly stops us from doing a deal with Great Britain? By the morning, my question had been answered. The answer is nothing. Nothing would stop us from doing a deal. The funniest parts about that story are that, as I tweeted, apparently President Trump is trying to overthrow the government of the UK and replace it with Boris Johnson, who is just President Trump’s clone. He’s the clone that didn’t come out that well; he was cloned version 1.0. There’s something hilarious about the fact that the UK was putting up this “Baby Trump” balloon to insult our president.
[22:49] Here it is, the UK doing its best job—not everybody in the UK, but members of the critics of the president—putting up this Baby Trump balloon to insult our leader as he goes to visit. And what does he do while he’s there? Not only did the insulting balloon defense system, the IBDS, fail—it did not prevent the president from visiting, apparently it was a bad defense system—but he came in and practically replaced the government with his own clone in 24 hours. Now it looks like—if you saw I only caught the end of the press conference with Theresa May and the president—he actually used the word “apologized.”
[23:50] He said he apologized to Theresa May and said they’d been taken out of context essentially, and that the news report had left out the compliments and made it look worse than it was. And then he reported that Theresa May said, “Ah, that’s just the press,” and then they bonded over how bad the press is. So here’s my take. When I looked at the body language and the way Theresa May and President Trump were acting toward each other after all this nastiness, when they were just answering questions with the press, my take on it was that their chemistry was excellent. Would you agree that toward the end, by the time they were doing their final press conference just an hour ago or so, didn’t they look like best friends? They looked beyond comfortable. They look like they enjoyed each other’s company.
[24:51] Part of it is that Trump used a pickup artist’s approach called “negging.” Have you ever heard of that? N-E-G-G-I-N-G. Saying something negative and then letting her earn her way back into his affection. I don’t know that he did that in some conscious way, but the result of it was that, because there was this awkwardness which he responded to by being the best friend ever—complimenting her, telling her how tough she is, saying what a good negotiator she is—I think in a weird way we came out ahead. Am I imagining that? It feels like he shook the box, like he always does, until he got a situation he liked.
[25:53] He got all the attention. Correct me if I’m wrong, but did President Trump become the most important politician in the UK in one day? That’s what I saw. It looked like he sucked all of the energy out of every other topic and out of every other politician and became the only politician that mattered in the UK for 24 hours. I’ve never seen anything like that. All of the things that he does in this country, he just took over there and did it again. He absolutely controlled the narrative. They’re not talking about anything except what Trump is doing. Insane, right? He just owns the press over there for the time he’s over there. So the entertainment factor here is off the chart. Then I tweeted last night; CNN had a little chyron or label on the screen that said the president would be having tea with the Queen today.
[26:55] When I saw that the president would be having tea with the Queen immediately after this story about how he had insulted Theresa May—and it was this big diplomatic dust-up which probably was more fake than real—I just laughed until I cried. I thought, if this were a movie, can you imagine a better foreshadowing of what’s coming? Because you’ve got Trump, the blunt American who’s coming in and just mixing everything up and violating all their norms. He’s calling Angela Merkel by her first name when he’s over there, he’s arguing about the pipeline between Germany and Russia, he’s browbeating NATO right in front of them.
[27:57] After all this setup, after all this incredibly provocative, high-energy, bull-in-a-china-shop, “shake the box” stuff, the next headline I see is: “Trump is scheduled to have tea with the Queen.” And I just say, I’m in. I am in for tea with the Queen. If you could tell me there was something coming better than that, I don’t know what it is. Now, in all likelihood, absolutely nothing would come of that. In all likelihood, he would just be polite and it would be not much of a story. But the mere fact that it was scheduled to be next was just perfect theater. If you were to understand the Trump presidency as a three-act movie, much the way I described his candidacy, here’s what that three-act movie would look like.
[28:58] In Act 1, something unexpected happens that changes the course of somebody’s life. Act 1 is someone’s life changes in a dramatic way: there’s a death, a marriage, a divorce, or something. In this case, the movie was that the president became president and probably didn’t even expect it himself. So suddenly he’s thrown into this new world, and that’s scene one, where it’s chaos and trying to figure it out and “How do I keep somebody on my staff for 10 minutes?” Scene one is now over. Scene two—sometimes referred to in the book Save the Cat!, which is one of the famous books about scriptwriting—Scene two is often described as “fun and games.”
[30:01] Fun and games in scene two of any movie, especially comedies, is where the star has endured whatever this new change is, and then something happens in a series of scenes where things are going well. It’s like, “Yeah, okay, now this is happening. Here’s a fun scene, here’s a fun scene.” Nobody is in dire danger in scene two; it’s just a whole bunch of interesting scenes that you like to see together. That’s where we are. We are clearly in scene two. Scene two is this stuff where you can’t take your eye off the screen. You’re like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe he said that.” “Oh, that worked out well.” “Oh, I can’t believe he said that about the pipeline.” “Look what he’s doing to NATO.”
[31:02] Look what he’s done to the economy; the economy is good. Look at Kim Jong Un; he’s having a love-letter, although North Korea may be taking a step back, which is completely expected. There’s gonna be lots of one step forward, two steps back for a while. That’s normal business. But we’re in the fun and games part of the movie. Now, if there’s a third act, and if this follows the course of the movie you would expect—maybe it could be the midterm election, but that seems a little early—you could expect that there would be something that looks very bad on the horizon that we would also escape from, and the movie ends on a happy note. So if something looks like it’s really bad coming, whether it’s trade wars or things go bad with Russia, don’t be surprised.
[32:03] Something looks bad every week. In a normal movie, there would be lots of little challenges along the way, but Act 3 is the special one where you can’t even imagine there’s a way to get out of it. That’s what makes it a good movie. What else is happening? Correct me if I’m wrong, but going back to Strzok, did he give an answer on the insurance policy question? And if not, why isn’t the news talking about that? Did I miss it? Strzok did not have an answer for the insurance policy text. Was he asked about it?
[33:05] I also don’t remember seeing him asked about it. Is he coming back? He talked around it. Oh, he said he could not answer because it was part of an ongoing investigation. Right, he didn’t answer because it was part of an ongoing investigation. He was asked and he deflected. That’s interesting. Saying “you can’t remember”—isn’t that really the worst answer in the world if you’re given the choices? Because there are lots of ways that you can answer that wrong.
[34:05] Saying you don’t remember is actually a fairly strong play, because if you don’t remember, that also says it wasn’t important; it was something that wasn’t even on your mind. So the insurance policy part, I think we probably all agree that the insurance policy part is unexplained. When I say that he’s credible on some answers and not credible on others, this would be a not credible one. He does not yet have a credible, believable answer on the insurance policy part. I believe there are other questions about whether you follow an FBI procedure to do this or that, and those are all questions of legitimate credibility. I think people have succeeded before with the “I can’t remember why I said that or thought that” strategy. It’s probably a reasonably good strategy.
[35:06] He really said it meant Obamacare or what? Said it was late at night and didn’t know what he was typing? The defense he didn’t use exactly, but I think I might be tempted to use, is that there are things you say to a lover they just wouldn’t say in any other context. I can imagine, for example, me saying that I would change the world to fix something. That just feels like something I would say to Christina. So if Christina said—actually I’m thinking of a specific example where I actually did say that, but I’m not going to give you that example because I might have actually changed the world in that case—
[36:08] But I could imagine me saying, “If global warming is a problem…” let’s say your lover was afraid of global warming. I could totally imagine me saying, “Don’t worry, I’ll do something about that.” I could totally imagine me saying that because the way you talk to a lover is just not the way you talk to anybody else. “I’ll take care of that for you. I’ll turn on the air conditioning, I got that global warming stuff fixed.” There’s certainly a credibility problem with Strzok, but let’s not get carried away with imagining that every single thing he says must be a lie, because chances are that’s not the case.
[37:09] No, I’m not engaged. Some people saw some pictures that Christina and I posted and imagined that we were getting engaged; we’re just posing for a picture. I don’t think I’ve ever had a lower opinion of Congress than I did after watching Louie Gohmert and his blather. That’s the worst opinion of Congress I’ve ever had. It was already pretty low. I think that’s all I got for today, and I will talk to you all later.