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June 14, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
23:06
Episode 99 - Unfair Trade and Bad News Coverage While Drinking Tiny European Coffee
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Time Text
Ba-do-ba-ba. Ba-ba-ba.
Yes, it's the wrong time zone.
I'm coming to you far earlier than you expect.
Most of you are sleeping, but at least you'll have something to wake up to.
And when you do, it will be time for you to lift your beverage, your vessel full of liquid that you plan to drink.
Your cup will be bigger than my tiny little cup.
It's the world's smallest cup.
It's so cute.
All right, simultaneous sip.
Yes, this is weird timing, but I'm going to be on a flight most of today.
And I didn't want to miss this historic day.
So we've got stuff going on in Singapore.
I'm not so sure.
It's a v-neck t-shirt.
That's okay. Somebody's talking about my v-neck.
V-neck t-shirts?
Good. V-neck sweaters means your wife or your girlfriend gave it to you.
It's a whole other topic.
Let's talk about Justin Trudeau's eyebrows.
Have you all seen the little viral video of what appears to be fake eyebrows on Justin Trudeau starting to fade?
Well, if you look at other photos of Justin Trudeau, you'll find that those are just his eyebrows.
So he actually has a two level eyebrow.
There's like a one at the top and then there's like a thicker one below it.
So he actually has essentially it looks like two eyebrows, a thin one and then a thicker one.
But if you look at any of his old photos, that's just the way he looks.
And in fact, one of the ways you can tell that it's genetic is take a look at a photo of Fidel Castro.
If you look at Fidel Castro, he has the same double eyebrow on the same side.
Probably just a coincidence, but he does.
I just looked at that a moment before I signed on.
So, here's the thing I wanted to talk about.
There probably won't be a lot of news out of Singapore until some conversations take place.
But we're all watching the Canadian trade war, threats, you know, war of words happening.
And here's what I want you to look for.
So I challenged people on Twitter yesterday by saying, hey, President Trump keeps saying that these trade deals are unfair.
What's the counter argument?
Seems like an obvious question, right?
If the president says these trade deals are unfair, and he mentions things like, oh, they have a big tariff on milk or whatever, What is the counterargument?
Now what happened was, if you were watching my Twitter feed, it completely triggered people.
Because people were pretty darn sure that whatever President Trump was doing was dumb and wrong and stupid, etc.
And then I simply say, okay, what is the other argument that says that unfair trade deals is actually good for us?
And what people would say is, trade deals are bad.
Look at this article I sent you.
And I'd say, everybody agrees with that.
Even President Trump agrees nobody wants a trade war.
Nobody wants a trade war.
But people will send me that and say, see?
See? What's the matter with you?
Do you have Hold on.
I'm not where I need to be so I've got to improvise So can't you see this link to the article I just sent you this says very clearly that trade wars are bad and Nobody ever wins in a trade war.
And then I say, no, I know that.
That's the part that everyone agrees on.
If you can avoid a trade war, that'd be good.
If you have to have a trade war, that's not good.
Now tell me something that's the counter-argument to why we should accept unfair trade deals.
Scott, you should read up on some economics before embarrassing yourself!
And then I say, but what is the counterargument to why we should accept unfair trade deals?
And then I'll get economics.
Economics 101. No, that's not an argument.
Those are just words that have come out of your mouth.
Look at my link.
Look at my link. No, that's, again, that's just another way to say trade wars are not good.
Stop saying the thing I agree with.
And give me the counter argument, the part that says that unfair trade deals for the United States are in some way good for the United States.
And then I get, Scott, don't you realize that these trade deals are already fair?
And I say, oh, now we're getting someplace.
Now we're getting someplace.
So you're saying that the tariffs that they have on us are exactly the same as the tariffs that we have on them?
No. Can't you understand economics?
Explain it to me.
Why is it fair if they have tariffs on us, on a particular good, and we don't?
Well, you have to consider all of it collectively in variables and things.
Don't you understand economics?
Well, why will the news not actually lay it out in some form that says these are the things that we do to them or what we get from them and let's compare.
Two, this is the collective amount of things which they're doing to us, etc.
And then we see which is better or less fair.
We, the observer, can just look at the data and say, oh yeah, good point.
Now I see your point.
We're doing a few things to you.
You're doing a few things to us.
Those look about equal.
Where's that argument?
Have you seen that argument?
It's the only argument that matters.
Has anybody even tried to do that argument?
No. Here's what you're going to see on TV. The president said that Justin Trudeau is meek and mild.
And then Justin Trudeau stabbed us in the back.
He stabbed us in the back, but he's meek and mild.
Do you know what none of that is?
An argument about why the trade deals are already good or why they are unfair.
Because one of those things is true.
And then when I push people that far, what do they say?
What do they say?
They say something like, Scott, don't you know that there's a lot of judgments involved?
Because you can't just say what's fair because people disagree.
What's fair?
And then I say, well, if people disagree what's fair, then is it wrong for President Trump to say it's not fair now?
Because that's his judgment.
Trade wars are bad!
Trade wars are bad!
No deal. That's the part, again, that we all agree with, including President Trump.
Everybody agrees with what you're saying.
You're not addressing my point.
You're simply saying a thing that all people agree with, Dale.
We don't want trade wars if we can avoid them.
But the President seems to indicate that that would be better than these unfair trade deals we have now.
Can you explain to me why they're fair already?
I am busy, and I need to do something else.
So that's what the conversation has been looking like for the last few days.
And I'm trying to figure out, are the news organizations lazy?
Or are they incapable of simply putting up a graphic that says, look, Canada, here's what you're doing on wheat and maple syrup.
Here's what we're proposing to do for you on steel and whatever else.
And here it is. You can see that, you know, there's more of this, but it's a lower tariff.
And you can see how it all nets out.
And why isn't that fair?
Where's that? Where is that?
And if it turns out that the thing that we're calling fair about the current situation, not we, but the critics of the president, if the situation with trade that they call fair right now is so good, why did they want TPP? Wasn't TPP changing the current situation to make it better?
If everybody else wanted that deal that the president got out of, wasn't that because they thought the current deal was not fair?
It's ridiculous to imagine That we first of all can't put it on a screen and show the country even what we're talking about.
Just give us one simple country.
Just give us Canada.
Just keep it simple. Just say, here's our deal with Canada on these three or four categories.
Here's their deal with us on these different three or four categories, but you can see these are roughly equal, or you can see that they're totally unequal.
Give us the frickin' argument.
Don't tell us who's meek and mild.
Don't tell us who stabbed us in the back.
You know, don't tell us President Trump is evil or uneducated about economics.
Don't tell us he's not looking at the facts.
Here's what's bogging me.
People keep saying, President Trump doesn't want to study the facts.
What are the facts?
It can't be that hard to just put them on a graph and put them on the screen.
Can it? Don't criticize them for not looking at the facts if nobody will even tell us the facts.
And if it turns out that the whole thing is subjective and what is fair is simply whatever you've agreed to, and I think that's the case, by the way.
So here's my larger picture here, having droned on about this for a while.
I believe there's nobody involved in trade, including the professionals, including the advisors, on both sides, who, wait for it, Understand the topic.
That's my claim based on what I can find out so far.
The claim is that nobody involved in the topic of trade between the United States and Canada, just to pick the simplest one, that there's nobody including Trudeau, Trump, any of the advisors on either side and nobody in the media Understands it.
Not even close enough to summarize it.
And watch, you watch for the next few days, and you're going to watch people say any one fact they know.
Well, what about the milk tariff, 270%?
And Trudeau's meek and mild.
That's the closest you're going to get to anybody who acts like they even understand the situation.
Because if either side understood it, they would explain it in a way that was, you know, favorable to them.
In other words, if Justin Trudeau, wait for this, right?
If Justin Trudeau understood the trade situation with the United States well enough to describe it, he would have done it.
If Justin Trudeau could have said, look, the president says this is unfair.
Let me show you on this graph why it's very fair.
Here it is behind me.
Here's milk.
Here's maple syrup. Here's metal.
Here's the situation.
Here's how much we sell.
Here's how much they buy. Here's the tariff.
Here's the net. If he could do that, In the service of proving that it was already fair, he would have done it.
Do you know why he hasn't done that?
He can't.
Because nobody understands the situation.
So, what do you do when you're in a negotiation and literally no one understands it?
What do you do? Do you say, well, I don't understand it, so I guess it's fair.
I don't know. I wouldn't even know which variable to push.
Is that what you do? Well, it's what a lot of people would do.
What do you do if you're President Trump and you're a negotiator?
If you enter a situation where it's all subjective and nobody understands exactly where we are and what would be fair or whether it's fair, if you're in that situation and you're a President Trump, You negotiate.
Because if you can make the strongest case that it's already unfair and the way to fix it is to tweak a variable that helps us, why wouldn't you do that?
That's exactly what you should do.
So President Trump is going into a situation that he doesn't understand.
That the people he's negotiating with don't understand.
They do not understand it.
I mean, only at the highest conceptual level, but they don't know the details.
They don't understand what's happening with their own trade.
It's probably just too complicated.
And so the side that doesn't want anything to change says it's already fair.
They don't know.
There's no way to judge it and they wouldn't understand it if they did.
And then President Trump, wisely, wisely, also doesn't understand it because nobody else does either.
And he says it's unfair.
We need to fix this.
It's the smartest thing you could possibly do.
If you ever find yourself in a situation where nobody understands it, but it's a situation where people expect negotiating, what should you do?
Should you say, gosh, I don't understand this complicated situation.
I guess it's fine the way it is.
Or do you say, nobody understands this complicated situation.
Let's push on a few variables that will help us.
There's only one way to go, and it's the way he's doing it.
Ah, let's drink the tiny coffee to that.
Um...
Um... Somebody just said, it's amazing because I thought Trump was stupid, but now I realize everybody else is stupider.
That is exactly what's going on.
Everybody who says President Trump doesn't understand trade, they're completely right.
Because nobody does.
And trust me, if anybody understood it, they'd be on TV explaining it to you.
If anybody understood it, there would be an article you could tweet me that says, ah, here it is.
It's just laid out. This is what we do.
That's what they do. Here's the bottom line.
It's unfair. Or it's fair.
Somebody said, my voice is like a soft, velvety cat.
That's the nicest thing anybody's ever said to me this morning.
Somebody said, do you understand it?
No, that's my point.
My point is that there's nobody involved in the news organization, privately, as a pundit.
There's nobody who understands it.
Now there are people, and here's what people say.
So the other argument I hear is, it goes like this.
President Trump thinks that the trade deficit is the problem.
That's not a problem.
The trade deficit just means we're getting cheap stuff from them.
Don't they understand economics?
Trade deficit is not a problem.
To which I say, the trade deficit is not the cause of the problem.
The trade deficit is what you end up with because of unfair trade practices, in part.
In other words, part of the reason for the deficit is that they might have tariffs or they might have subsidies, government subsidies, etc.
So talking about the size of the deficit is not trying to tell you the deficit is the cause of the problem.
The president is not saying that.
He's saying that's what you ended up with because you did the other stuff wrong.
If you had better trade practices, the trade gap would be less.
Do you see the people in the news explaining that to the public?
No. What the news will report to you if it's anti-Trump is he doesn't understand that trade deficits are not the problem because they just make our goods cheaper.
No, he does understand that.
And he also understands that if we sold them more stuff, that would be cool.
Right? And we could sell them more stuff if they would lower their barriers or stop subsidizing.
Right? This is one of those cases where 100% of people agree with President Trump, but you're still going to see the enemy press report it as if he doesn't understand it.
And yet he understands it exactly the same way they do.
The same way everybody does.
The trade deficit is what you end up with.
And that's bad because you haven't done a better job of selling them more stuff.
We're not complaining because we're buying a lot of their stuff.
We're complaining because we're not selling enough.
That closes the gap.
All right. Has anyone in the Netherlands recognized me?
No, but Christine has been recognized a few times.
Which is funny.
I'm looking at your comments.
Why am I up this early?
I'm in a different time zone.
I'm in Amsterdam. Right now, I'll be flying today.
Alright. I'm going to sign off.
Would you ever move from California?
Maybe. Someday.
Drink with me.
Let's drink to not understanding trade policy.
Here's another thing that Canada is not calculating in their trade agreements.
Let me ask you if you think this is true.
Does the military of Canada have to be the best in the world to defend Canada?
Nope. Because they happen to be attached to the United States.
And if anybody ever attacked Canada, they would be vaporized by the United States in about a minute and a half.
So Canada gets a pretty good deal just by being attached to the United States, which is attached to the most ferocious military in the history of the universe.
Well, history of the galaxy, anyway.
So there are a lot of connected things.
And you don't hear anybody explaining what those connected things are, but maybe we will at some point.
Yeah, for those of you who are just signing on, the so-called eyebrow gate, where it appears that Justin Trudeau's fake eyebrows are falling off, is not what it looks like.
He just has unusual eyebrows that are sort of too leveled.
There's like a light level followed by a heavier level that goes down into the eye.
And if you look at his old photos, you'll see that that's actually just his eyebrows.
Somebody says, wrong.
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