Episode 211 Scott Adams: White House Moles, Spartacus and Prison
Date: 2018-09-07 | Duration: 46:50
Topics
The NYT Op Ed Mole story…let’s look closely at that Stylology: the science of identifying an anonymous writer Lie detectors: Can they weed out who wrote the article? Where are the damning parts of the article? Pulling the South Korea letter from President Trump’s desk Implications of micro-managing POTUS How long can things go great…while approval ratings go down? Elon Musk smoking a blunt with Joe Rogan Medical benefits of marijuana…personally confirmed
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## Transcript
## [Simultaneous Sip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhx5VoA3-Fw&t=4s)
Ba-ba-boom! I'm back, and this time I'll be talking about events in the news, the President—all of your favorite topics. I come with coffee again. In case you missed my first Periscope this morning with Dr. Shiva, you should catch up on that if you want to know a lot about healthcare costs; it was very enlightening.
Now please join me for the simultaneous sip. Grab your beverage, your mug, your chalice. Here it comes. For some of you, that's the second one today. Even better.
## [Cory Booker and "Spartacus"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhx5VoA3-Fw&t=66s)
I'd like to start out by saying that I am Spartacus. You probably saw Cory Booker destroy his political chances by claiming that he was Spartacus, or like Spartacus, by breaking a rule—though there wasn't even a rule broken.
The biggest problem that Cory Booker has is he's sort of googly-eyed. I don't know if you noticed, but on camera, he's like this all the time. I would not like to make fun of anybody's look because we should not be choosing politicians based on looks, except that we do pick politicians based on looks. How they present themselves is indeed part of the conversation, and his wide eyes make me think there's something wrong. He seems too happy and his eyes seem too googly-eyed. It is very convenient that he started off by giving himself a nickname. So, Spartacus and Pocahontas may be running for President.
## [The New York Times Mole](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhx5VoA3-Fw&t=127s)
Let's talk about the New York Times mole—the mole who wrote the story saying there are people within the administration who are managing the President by doing things like taking documents off his desk and other clever things that underlings do to manage their bosses.
There are a number of contexts left out of the New York Times story that would completely change how you see it. You could keep all of the same writing that's in the story, but just add some context and it completely changes.
## [Who Knows More: Trump or the Mole?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhx5VoA3-Fw&t=190s)
The first context is that the person who wrote the story believes that he or she—and I'm going to tell you later I think it's a "he"—knows more about how to run the country than the President. The way it was reported and the way people are talking about it, it's as if that's a reasonable claim.
But here's the context: who would have advised the President to do anything he's done so far? Almost nobody.
## [The South Korea Letter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhx5VoA3-Fw&t=251s)
Let's take the example I finally got to see: the letter that was taken off of his desk. It was a letter to South Korea saying that we're going to cancel our trade agreements because they weren't fair. I believe that was taken off his desk because someone who thought they knew more than the President about how stuff works believed that it wasn't the right time, too much trouble, etc.
Should we assume that the person who took it off the desk was the person who was right? Why would you assume that? I looked at it and I said, "It looks like the usual provocative things that this President does." It looks like exactly what he promised to do, which is to be tough even on our allies for trade deals.
How can you know how it would have turned out had he gone ahead and done it versus having it taken off of the desk? If you have been right about all things Trump from the time that he announced until today, then you might be one of those people who has a pretty good idea how things turn out if the Trump style of management is taken forward.
But if you were someone who was watching President Trump running for office and kept saying to yourself, "Oh, that's wrong, don't do that. Oh no, don't do that... Okay, that keeps working, stop doing that... Okay, that worked, but you're certainly not going to do that... Okay, that worked too," after being wrong for three years straight, why does this person believe they knew more than the President about how things would have gone with South Korea?
It was a President who promised to do stuff like this, got elected to do stuff like that, and so far every time he does it, he makes it work. It would be hard for me to assume that the mole is really working in the interests of the United States. Forget about the issue of whether anybody should be overruling the President in this sneaky way—I think most of us would agree that's a bad situation—but the excuse for it is, "Yeah, we're overriding him, but we're smarter than him." That is not in evidence.
## [Substantive Policy vs. Micro-management](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhx5VoA3-Fw&t=435s)
We don't have evidence that the things he wants to do, the way he wants to do them, don't work. We have lots of evidence that it does work. Now, if they had said, "We're rewriting your tweets or your speeches," that would be a slightly different conversation. But this was a substantive policy decision that is right in the President's wheelhouse, which is negotiating, and somebody took that away from him allegedly.
## [Stylometry: Identifying the Anonymous Writer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhx5VoA3-Fw&t=495s)
Here's a couple of interesting things. I don't know why we don't already know who this is, or at least the administration, because there's something called stylometry. It's the science of studying somebody's writing and then identifying who they are by finding similar writing elements in their other work.
We don't know if the person who wrote it was smart enough to have somebody rewrite it for them to get rid of those tells, but probably not. Probably it's written by the original author. Somebody says "style is easily faked"—not really. You can fake surfacey stuff, like putting the word "lodestar" in there to make people look at the Vice President. But stylometry gets down to how long are their sentences, when do they use adjectives... there's a whole lot of stuff that I don't know that you'd even know how to fake.
## [Identifying the Author's Gender](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhx5VoA3-Fw&t=559s)
Can you tell the gender of the author if you read the piece? Most of you probably saw it. Give me a guess, not based on who you think wrote it, but just on the style of writing.
I've probably received hundreds of thousands of messages in my career from strangers. Very often I don't know who it's coming from until I've started reading it. The number of times that I can accurately determine whether a message is coming from a man or a woman before I see the name feels like at least 90% of the time. My take is there's a male writer, but not necessarily a "manly man." It might be a younger, let's say, non-alpha male. That's just my guess. Male, but not too alpha. Somebody who's not big on hunting. You can compare that against whatever we find out later.
## [Lie Detector Tests](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhx5VoA3-Fw&t=680s)
Rand Paul has suggested lie-detector tests. Let's assume they can narrow down the suspects to a manageable group. Anderson Cooper pointed out correctly that lie detector tests are not 100% reliable; they're not even reliable enough to be allowed in court. Yet lie detectors are used quite widely. I believe the FBI uses them.
Lie detectors do work when people believe that they work. If you know that they don't work, or you've been trained to thwart them, then you're not going to get as reliable an answer. But if somebody thinks you can tell with your magic device that they're lying, their variables will spike because they think it works. It becomes self-fulfilling.
Is that good enough to identify the mole? Not by itself. But consider this: probably more than one person knows who wrote it. The writer alleges there are other people like him or her. The odds of you finding at least one person who is worried that the lie detector works is pretty high. You just have to find one person who thinks the lie detector works, and then they get a signal. The operator says, "Do you know anybody who you believed was involved in writing it?" Bing, bing, bing. Then you've got a name.
If you find somebody who indicates they might know who it is, then you start talking to the people closest to them. You might say, "Hey, does your coworker Bob also know who did it?" Bing. "Bob, did you write it?" "No." "Do you know who wrote it?" Bing, bing, bing. I think you could triangulate on the writer by finding enough people who believe it's real and also know who wrote it. Probably a 60% chance it would make a difference.
## [Are There Actually Damning Parts?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhx5VoA3-Fw&t=924s)
I reread the mole's opinion piece in the New York Times, and I keep reading it looking for the damning parts, but I'm not quite seeing them. I see the opinion of the writer that the President is not fully engaged and not competent, but that's the opinion of just about every underling who isn't getting their way.
In any normal situation, you've got a boss and people suggesting various things. That boss is accepting some suggestions and rejecting others. If you're in the group whose suggestions were rejected, how do you conclude what that situation was? Do you say to yourself, "I had an idea, I suggested it to the President, he shot me down, therefore I'm an idiot"? No, that doesn't happen. People go away and say, "My idea was brilliant. It got shot down. Therefore, logically, since I'm such a genius, there must be some kind of mental problem with the person who turned it down."
That's completely normal employee behavior. Everything that I saw in that mole's article about the President looked to me—and by the way, I am the world expert on employees complaining about their bosses. Seriously, can you think of anybody who has heard more complaints about more bosses than me? It's literally my job for the last thirty years. This complaint about the boss is just routine. Where is the context that this is a totally routine complaint from a disgruntled underling?
## [The 25th Amendment and the News Cycle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhx5VoA3-Fw&t=1108s)
The thing the news has picked up on is the suggestion that early on in the administration, there was some talk among cabinet members about the 25th Amendment—removing the President for being mentally unfit.
If that was talk that happened early on, it's not talk that this same author is willing to say is happening right now. What happened to that talk? The article itself suggests that people were worried early on, but it doesn't say that people are still talking about it. It doesn't say that there are secret people currently talking about pulling that trigger. I think the news has taken exactly the opposite impression from what is written. To me, what's written is they used to be worried about it, but they're not talking about it anymore.
## [Trump's "Unhinged" Persuasion Technique](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhx5VoA3-Fw&t=1233s)
The mole says people are fighting hard to thwart the President's will. There are also reports that he might get mad and yell at people. Do you see where I'm going on this? There are two things reported: the underlings are actively thwarting him, and the President gets mad and flips out on people for not doing what he wants them to do.
Let me say: thank you, Mr. President, for getting in the faces of people who are not doing what you want them to do. I think that's why he was hired. Imagine if you'd heard it the other way—that a group of people were undermining the President and he was fine with it. Would you be comfortable with a President who didn't get unhinged at that kind of behavior?
If you put me in that job, in charge of the well-being of the whole country, and then my underlings don't want to do what I tell them to do—what I got elected to do—what am I going to do to them? By the time he leaves, he's going to wish he had never been born. I am going to be so unglued that he's going to report that I'm unhinged. And you know what I'm going to do to the next one that doesn't do what I want? I'm going to get even more unhinged. I'm going to get as unhinged as you freaking need me to be, because I'm in charge of the country.
When I say the President acts unhinged, I mean it in the same way I would: emphasis on *act*. The President is trying to persuade people to do what he wants and to not thwart him. If you need to ramp up your yelling and your level of intensity to get that done, you do that. Because if you say, "I would really appreciate it if you do what I want," what's that going to get you? No penalty. You need to make a serious penalty for anyone not doing their job.
## [The Strategy of Flip-Flopping](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhx5VoA3-Fw&t=1476s)
Then there are stories of the President flip-flopping—that he'll say one thing impulsively and then say the next thing the next day. How much should we be worried about that?
I'm a little bit soft on that because I'm a big flip-flopper myself. It is my way as well to toss out ideas and see how they're received. If people come back to me with pushback and it's something I haven't thought of before, I'm going to flip-flop. If somebody comes back with an even better idea, I'm going to flip-flop again. I defend it as the smarter way to do things. I'd be more worried about somebody who said, "Here's the decision. You have new information? Doesn't matter. I made the decision."
## [Knowing What Matters vs. Mastering Details](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhx5VoA3-Fw&t=1597s)
The other thing people blame the President for is that he doesn't get into the details—he doesn't have a grasp of the details the way underlings think he should.
Should we be worried about that? The nature of the presidency is that the President is never going to have the details the underlings have. If it's a Jimmy Carter or an Obama, they might dig into the details, but when they're done, would they know what was the *important* detail? It's not really about mastering all the details; it's about looking into the details and picking out what matters.
You've been watching President Trump operate for three plus years. Is he good at knowing what matters? You've never seen anybody better. Do you remember when I told you in 2015 that facts wouldn't matter but persuasion would? Everybody kept saying, "You're crazy, facts matter." Facts matter to the *outcomes*, but if you're trying to persuade people, it turns out you can ignore the fact-checkers 3,000 times while the economy is screaming and the defense looks strong.
Was the President accurate in knowing that moving people emotionally is more important than all of those facts? When he was running, people said the most important thing is how much money you spend or how organized your ground game is. President Trump said, "Nope, the most important thing is how often I'm on TV, how much I can capture your imagination, and how well I've picked my topics for emotional impact." It worked great.
The President consistently looks into the complexity, reaches in, and picks out the thing that matters. He finds the lever. Take the South Korean letter pulled off his desk. The people who pulled it were thinking, "My God, the President doesn't know there are lots of considerations." The President probably said to himself, "I'm just going to push everybody for better trade deals. I'll push everybody, and that will be a better message than if I just push a few people."
The underling decided to micromanage him and say, "I'm going to pull this South Korean one out because it's special." Was it special, or did it detract from the President's big picture? Even pushing South Korea in a delicate time would have sent the message very clearly. South Korea really needs the United States. Were we going to break up over that? Probably not. The President correctly thought it was more important to make a big impression on trade negotiation.
## [Midterms and a Mixed Congress](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhx5VoA3-Fw&t=1965s)
Am I still predicting a Red Wave? I've never predicted a Red Wave. My only prediction was nine months ago: that the midterms would be closer than what people thought back in January.
Somebody's asking if the Congress becomes mixed, would that increase or decrease his effectiveness? I think this President might work really well with a mixed Congress. This is the guy who will talk to Putin, talks to Kim Jong Un, and would talk to the Ayatollah if he were willing. Is he willing to talk to Democrats? Yeah, if he can make a deal. The things that are left to make deals on scream for bipartisanship: healthcare and immigration. I do not predict doom with a mixed Congress.
## [Impeachment and Media Propaganda](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhx5VoA3-Fw&t=2089s)
I have mixed feelings about impeachment proceedings. I don't see any grounds for impeachment. It seems to me that an impeachment proceeding would be such an overreach that it would just be ridiculous. I kind of almost don't mind if Democrats try it, just to take it off the page, because I think other Democrats would squash it. Let the Democrats kill it themselves.
I believe the media, the way it's organized to prefer excitement, has whipped up the Democrats to the point where many of them are irrational. I'm sure you could say the same for some members of both sides, but it really seems like the Democrats are in full TDS—Trump Derangement Syndrome.
How long can we go where the metrics for everything we care about are steadily going up—jobs, economy, defense—while the President's ratings are going down? Don't you wonder if there's some kind of breaking point where even the people who are anti-Trump are going to say, "Okay, we did double our GDP and ISIS is gone"? Healthcare costs are still going up, and I criticize the administration for healthcare quite a bit.
## [Elon Musk and Joe Rogan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhx5VoA3-Fw&t=2337s)
You want me to talk about Elon Musk because he was on Joe Rogan yesterday? The part everyone is tweeting is that Joe Rogan asked Elon if he wanted to smoke a blunt—a tobacco/marijuana cigarette—and Elon took a hit. Elon made a funny face after taking a hit, and that funny face is the one everybody is tweeting around.
Marijuana has now reached such a level of normalness that it's no big deal. When I was on Joe Rogan's show, I also smoked a joint with him. It's not like nobody knows that Elon never did a drug. I don't believe there's anybody who owns Tesla stock thinking, "I'll bet he's never had a drink or smoked a joint."
## [Personal Medical Benefits of Marijuana](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhx5VoA3-Fw&t=2464s)
I still use marijuana medicinally. I don't understand how anybody could use it as a party drug. If I didn't get about twelve extraordinary medical benefits from it, I wouldn't do it.
What medical benefits? It takes care of my sleep apnea—I sleep like a baby. It takes care of my allergies, takes care of my asthma, and removes all my aches and pains. There's even indication it's good for my lung capacity. It helps my blood pressure, my stress, and general inflammation. If you could reduce someone's stress, blood pressure, inflammation, allergies, and asthma and let them get better sleep, what would be the overall outcome? You would be the healthiest sixty-one-year-old you've ever met. Me.
I was asking Kristina if she can remember me being sick in the last two and a half years. You've seen me on Periscope pretty much every day. I don't get sick. Someone says, "Let's see the guns." All right. It's not bad for my age. I make no claims to be fit for a 20-year-old. I only make a claim to be fit for my age.
## [Meeting Burt Reynolds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhx5VoA3-Fw&t=2649s)
I'll tell you my Burt Reynolds meeting and then I'm going to sign off. Probably 20 years ago, I was a guest on Good Morning America. I was in the green room—apparently, there's more than one. There's a green room for people who are not that famous, and then the A-listers get their own private room.
I was there on a day when Burt Reynolds was going to be a guest. I'm in the green room and it's just me and my publicist. Suddenly, Burt Reynolds comes up to the doorway. I have to do my Burt Reynolds impression. He just leans in the doorway, looks in, looks at me, looks at my publicist, looks back at me and he goes, "How you doing?" And then he walks away.
That was my only interaction ever with him. But I have to say, in five seconds he made me like him. He clearly put himself out there and was just being friendly to people he didn't know. I immediately just said, "I like that guy."
I'm going to end on that. I'll talk to you guys later.