Episode 194 Scott Adams: Appearing on Fox & Friends, the Bigfoot Test and More
Date: 2018-08-24 | Duration: 34:18
Topics
The 3 categories of imaginary laws that President Trump has broken The need to rationalize good results with bad expectations Being locked into an opinion and wrapping your ego around it “The Bigfoot Test” explained “Insanity Inversion” explained Peak TDS, are we there, how to know? Lanny Davis funny statement that Cohen wouldn’t accept a pardon The “talent stack” of Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai (running against Elizabeth Warren) The merit based government system of China, effective
Transcript
Coffee with Scott Adams
I hope you have your beverages ready because it’s time for Coffee with Scott Adams. I don’t know how many of you saw me on Fox & Friends this morning, but let me tell you, I never sleep this part of the week—just kidding. I went to sleep early so I could get up early. We’ve got a thousand people, and that means it’s time for the simultaneous sip. Join me, will you? Hmm. That’s good.
The Process of Appearing on Fox & Friends
Yesterday afternoon, I got a text message, an email, a voicemail, and a couple of incoming phone calls all about the same time. I said to myself, “What’s going on here?” Of course, it’s just the Fox News producers doing a good job of contacting me. They’re always on a compressed time schedule, so they make sure they get you.
It was a Fox & Friends producer asking me if I would appear the very next day. My first thought was that I had to get up really early for that, but I asked them what the topic was. It sounded like something fun, so I said yes. I woke up at 2:30 this morning because I like to take a shower and make sure I’m really awake so that at 4:00 a.m. I can be on-site in the studio.
As luck would have it, there’s a brand new remote studio in my town, so I didn’t have to go very far, and traffic is easy at 4:00 in the morning. At the studio, it was just me and the camera operator who let me in. You go into this tiny little room where you’ve got an image behind you that makes you look like you’re someplace important, but you’re not; you’re just in a tiny little room with a camera in front of you.
There’s an earpiece in your ear, you’re sitting in a chair, and that’s it. There’s some equipment, some lights, no makeup in my case, and you’re usually there 15 minutes early so you can listen to the show. At some point, the producers come on and do a sound test. When you do the interview, you can’t see who is talking. You have to recognize their voice while looking into the camera, but you’re not seeing anything but the lens. They can see you, but you can’t see them. You really have to get used to being able to have a coherent conversation without being able to see the people who can see you.
The Three Categories of Imaginary Laws
I was talking about the fact that whenever President Trump is accused of something that’s not a real crime, they bring out Carl Bernstein to say it’s “worse than Watergate” because they don’t have much else to say about it. It’s not an actual crime.
Here are the ones we’ve seen so far:
- There’s the Russian collusion that both didn’t happen and, if it did, wouldn’t be a crime.
- There’s the obstruction of justice that didn’t happen. He did fire Comey, but a president can fire anybody he wants; Comey was working for him.
- Then there was the Don Jr. meeting where no information was exchanged, but if it had been, it would have been totally legal.
- Now we have the Cohen-Stormy situation where the president is accused of doing something totally legal.
When Cohen said to the court that he arranged the payments on behalf of and under the direction of President Trump, CNN reported that as: “Cohen said the president committed a felony.” But that’s not what happened. What Cohen did was describe some actions that are totally legal. It’s legal to coordinate with your lawyer. It’s legal to pay your own money for an NDA. It’s all legal.
CNN is literally reporting imaginary news. If you watch the next few days, watch how people on the anti-Trump side phrase the legal risk for the president. The language is very careful now. They’re either talking about impeachment because it’s not a crime, or they’re saying the president “might be in some legal risk.” Give us an example. Tell us what law got violated. You won’t hear that. You’ll hear: “Well, if it’s a crime, there’s a big problem,” or “If it turns out it’s interpreted this way, it’s a big problem.”
The Bigfoot Test
Part of the public believes the president has committed four obvious major crimes: collusion, obstruction, the Don Jr. meeting, and the Cohen payments. They see that as clear as day. This is the Carl Bernstein view of the world. Then there’s the Alan Dershowitz view—that nothing happened, or the actions were completely legal.
If you’re trying to sort out which of those two is the real one, you can never really tell when you’re in it. But if you make a prediction based on your point of view, later you can look back and see if your prediction made sense. My prediction, based on the movie I’m watching, is that there is no legal risk of anything we’ve seen so far. No legal consequences—except endless yammering and lawyers posturing. The people who see “clear crimes” should predict definite impeachment and probable legal problems. Now we just wait and watch.
If you’re trying to guess which worldview will be right, I recommend what I call the Bigfoot Test. Imagine two hunters go off into the woods. When they come back, one hunter says, “We just had a conversation with Bigfoot. We shook his hand.” The other hunter, who was standing right there, says, “We didn’t do that. We didn’t talk to anybody except each other. There was no Bigfoot in the woods.”
Typically, a hallucination is a “positive” hallucination—you’re adding something to the environment that isn’t there, like Bigfoot. Rarely do you have a hallucination where you subtract something from the environment. People don’t usually walk into a house full of furniture and say, “Why is this room empty?” They see what they see, and then they add a Bigfoot to it.
If some people are looking at the alleged crimes of the President and they see them, yet other qualified lawyers are looking at exactly the same evidence and it’s invisible—there’s nothing there—usually the one who sees Bigfoot is hallucinating. When anti-Trumpers see something time after time that other people say isn’t there, that’s the Bigfoot. Generally, the person who doesn’t see it is the one who’s sane.
Insanity Inversion
There’s a very interesting “sanity inversion” happening. The anti-Trumpers’ worldview is that this president—who is on camera and tweeting more than any public figure ever—is acting rational and under control while in public, but the moment he’s off-camera, he’s just crazy. They believe it’s a good thing we have all these anonymous leakers and third-party sources watching him, because apparently, that’s the only time he’s crazy.
But the anti-Trumpers themselves have taken to becoming crazy in public. You saw Philip Mudd seem to flip out. We’re not doctors, so when I say they look crazy, I’m only saying that from a layman’s perspective, it looks like there’s something wrong. You saw Maxine Waters suggest that people who support Trump should be hounded in public. A lot of people look at that and say, “That doesn’t seem stable.”
The look of it is that the anti-Trumpers are crazy in public, but they would have us believe that when they’re off-camera, they’re totally normal. They believe the president is normal when we’re watching—sure, he’s a character, but it’s within the realm of good mental health—but when we’re not watching, he goes crazy.
Meeting the President
I did have the pleasure of visiting the White House and having a brief conversation with the president in a private setting. I didn’t see him being crazy. It was very disappointing! I was hoping for a little bit of craziness because the anti-Trumpers tell me that’s what happens when the cameras are off, but he seemed totally sane and relaxed.
So, that’s our weird world: the “sanity inversion” where Republicans are only crazy when nobody’s watching, but Democrats are crazy when the cameras are rolling. Was he funny? We had a good time, and it was a light conversation. His personality is pretty much what you would expect it to be.
The longer the president has good results with the country and the economy, the crazier his opponents will get. They can’t reconcile the fact that everything they’ve been thinking for three years is just wrong. To reconcile good results with their predictions of doom, they have to construct a story. Their worldview is dissolving in front of them.
People rarely update their worldview. When people are locked into an opinion and wrap their ego around it, they don’t change. Take Rosie O’Donnell. Do you think she could ever look at the president doing a good job and say, “I was totally wrong”? People don’t do that. Instead, they’ll say someone else could have done a better job or that he’s left “time bombs” that will certainly go off later.
The Three Classes of Lawbreaking
There are now three types of laws President Trump has broken, according to his critics:
- Imaginary Laws: Things that aren’t actually laws. There is no law against listening to opposition information or firing your employee.
- Secret Laws: Laws he’s broken that we haven’t learned about yet. They’re sure there are things we don’t have a whiff of—if we could only get those tax returns or if Manafort would flip, we’d find the secret laws he violated.
- Future Laws: Things he hasn’t done yet, but certainly will. They’ve been “so right” about everything for three years that surely he’s going to break a law right in front of us any moment now.
Peak Trump Derangement Syndrome
I’m wondering if we’ve reached “Peak TDS.” In physics and society, things keep going until something stops them. Opinions will keep getting worse until there’s a counter-force. The only thing that can stop this is when people within the group start saying, “Whoa, wait a minute.”
Until the people who wake up soonest start saying we’ve gone too far, you haven’t reached the peak. But I think we just saw that. You saw Clapper say that Brennan’s rhetoric isn’t helpful. Those two are joined at the hip, and now one is saying, “That’s a little farther than I’d go.” That’s a sign.
Likewise, Bill Maher was interviewing Preet Bharara. Bill Maher used the “treason” word, and Preet walked him back, saying, “I’m a lawyer; these words mean very specific things.” When you have anti-Trumpers walking back other anti-Trumpers, you’re past the envelope. If Republicans say you’re going too far, it means nothing. You need their own side to start calling them back, and that’s what we’re seeing.
Lanny Davis and the Cohen Pardon
Lanny Davis said one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard a lawyer say. He said his client, Michael Cohen, would “never accept a pardon” from President Trump. If I ever have a lawyer who tells the only person who can pardon me that I don’t want a pardon, I’m getting a new lawyer. I’m getting a new lawyer really quickly.
I’m imagining the conversation between them: “Lanny, I was watching you on TV and I believe you said I would not accept a pardon, which would greatly help my family and my wife and me?” And Lanny says, “No, you don’t want a pardon from that man, he’s a monster!” And Cohen says, “Lanny, I don’t like jail. Jail is not good. I don’t want to go to jail.”
By the way, who is paying Lanny Davis? Is it the DNC? We don’t know. My guess is that Cohen isn’t paying, because Lanny would be a strange choice unless an anti-Trumper was footing the bill. They have a GoFundMe running, but something tells me the GoFundMe is just a fig leaf for some billionaire who is guaranteeing Lanny gets paid. The billionaire could simply fund the GoFundMe to make it look like the public is backing him.
Dr. Shiva and the Talent Stack of Congress
Let’s talk about Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, who is running as an independent for Senate against Elizabeth Warren. When you’re voting for a senator, you look at experience and policy, but we should also look at what I call Congress’s “talent stack.”
If Congress were nothing but lawyers, would that be good? Probably not. When was the last time someone said, “We want to make something more efficient and save money—let’s get a lawyer”? Lawyers make things complicated so they can milk them forever. The instinct of a lawyer is the opposite of the instinct of a government that should be trying to save money.
Dr. Shiva has a talent stack that includes four or five degrees from MIT—electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, visual studies, medicine. He’s an entrepreneur who built multi-million dollar companies. That level of expertise is missing in a Congress that needs to make decisions about healthcare complexities and social media bias.
We should diversify our Congress the same way we diversify a portfolio. You don’t buy only oil companies and call yourself diversified. You need someone who can explain this stuff to the other people in Congress. You need those talents, whether it’s him or someone else. When you see Zuckerberg talking to Congress, you see all these old lawyer types trying to understand tech companies, and it’s embarrassing.
Merit-Based Governance in China
One thing you have to respect about China is that their government has been awesome in terms of effectiveness for the Chinese people. Their government, although not elected, is generally merit-based. You get a lot of engineers in the Chinese government, and I don’t think it’s an accident that things are running well. Relative to the size of their challenge, they’ve been extremely effective. Nobody insults China for bad management. Maybe we need more engineers in our government as well. Hoover was an engineer—that’s interesting.
I’ll sign off now and I will talk to you all again later. Bye for now.