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Aug. 28, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
38:02
Episode 198 Scott Adams: Flag-Lowering, Chinese Hacking, NAFTA and Google Searches
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Ah. So it's a weird day with the passing of Senator McCain which has turned pretty much everybody in the world into a gigantic liar and a hypocrite as we try to navigate this weird space where you're trying to respect a veteran and somebody who has recently died and respect the family but also people have strong opinions But they're trying to hold back right now.
Hold! Hold!
So that's where I'm at right now, which is...
This is not the time to disrespect anybody.
Let's let the McCain family do what they need to do.
Leave them alone for now.
But I'm watching this... I'm watching the saga of the flag, the half-mast flag, and the saga of the President, President Trump, being not invited to speak at McCain's eulogy, or not invited to give a eulogy, whereas Obama and Bush were invited.
Now, here's the thing.
Is that a problem?
In any way, shape, or form.
How in the world is that not just perfect?
What is McCain most famous for?
He's most famous for the Straight Talk Express.
McCain is famous for being blunt and not tolerating with BS. And then you have a president who is his nemesis in public, nobody is surprised about this, who is the other leader who is most famous for not being politically correct.
If these two people can't be honest with the public, who can?
So what you're watching is two leaders who are known for their bluntness, their honesty, their non-political correctness, Doing what they have always done.
So I gotta say, I actually probably have more respect for McCain because he wasn't a phony in death and that seems consistent with his brand and I'm okay with that.
Likewise, President Trump is not making any effort to pretend he liked him any more than he did or respected him any more than he did.
Would you want him to?
Would the world be a better place if people were less transparent?
I kind of like the fact that both of these people did not relent.
That they were both, at least so far, they have both been exactly who they were.
McCain in death the same as he was in life and Trump continues to be Trump.
This is the least Problematic problem we'll ever see.
So let's hope all of our problems are like this.
So you probably saw the news that apparently a Chinese company with connections to the government, in other words, the government of China, hacked every single one of Hillary's emails from her server during her time as Secretary of State.
All of them. They have all of them.
Now, I heard that and I thought to myself, you know, I've been backing up my computer to the cloud, but this would be a lot easier.
I'm just gonna back up everything to China from now on.
Just let them hold a copy in case I need it.
So here's the interesting thing about this.
So here are the following entities.
That we know with some degree of certainty interfered with American elections or attempted to.
You have China with this hacking situation.
And of course they did other things.
You've got Russia, of course, with their troll forums and more.
You've got Great Britain with their agent, Christopher Steele.
Now, some of you might say, but wait, he was working with the FBI. To which I say, so?
He's not American, right?
It shouldn't count if you're on somebody's payroll.
You're either American or you're not.
Then you've got stuff happening over there with, who was it?
Mark, whatever his name was.
You've got Australia was in the mix a little bit with them talking about reporting on Papadopoulos.
You've got all kinds of, you know, media entities in other countries who are weighing in, trying to affect our elections.
Halper, Mark Halper.
He's American, right?
Oh, Stephan. Stephan Halper, thank you.
Is he American or is he a Brit?
He's American, right?
Yeah, you might have something in Ukraine.
You've got Mexico owning the New York Times.
So have we reached the point, and I just tweeted this earlier, have we reached the point where we can say with confidence yet that the Trump campaign was the only entity in the news that did not try to influence the election?
I mean, illegally. Obviously, they tried to win.
But we have the FBI, the Department of Justice, the CIA, all trying to influence the elections, probably illegitimately.
You've got at least several other countries.
You know Israel, of course, always runs good persuasion campaigns.
It's starting to look like the Trump campaign is the only entity that was not illegally trying to manipulate the election.
They might be the only ones.
And that would be funny and ironic.
We also have the story of Mexico and the United States agreeing, apparently, on trade.
I always worry until the deal is signed.
Sometimes you think you have a deal and then there's some detail.
But it looks like, at least the way it's being reported, is that we have a deal.
Now, what I've been saying all along is that when Trump...
I tried to simultaneously create all these trade problems with all of these countries at once.
A lot of people said, hey, that's crazy because you're creating so many problems all at once.
Well, apparently the people who manage money for a living don't think so because the stock markets are doing great.
And I also said that as soon as you get One or more countries to sign a deal, and it looks like it was a good deal, that the dominoes will start to fall.
Poop, poop, poop, poop, poop.
So Mexico might be the first one, and it's really a great first one.
Because Mexico has two qualities.
One is that they're our neighbor, right?
So it's important to get along with your neighbors.
But secondly, we've had some tense times with Mexico from the Trump candidacy on.
So wouldn't it be great for them to be the first ones to figure out a way to work together?
Now if they do, Canada will probably come online reasonably soon, and then we'll have two in the bag.
Who will be next?
Will it be the EU or Great Britain?
Who will be next?
But at some point, China might be the last one.
Now, if China is one of a lot of countries that are having trade problems with the United States, then it sort of looks like the United States is the problem, right?
You know, what is the common element?
Oh, the common element is the United States is causing trouble everywhere.
But as those deals get signed, Mexico, Canada, etc., as those deals get signed, it starts to isolate China.
And suddenly, China will start looking like the problem because they're the only ones who can't sign a deal.
What kind of a modern country can't sign a trade deal?
Well, Mexico can do it.
I'm pretty sure Canada can accomplish it.
And if China can't, it is not going to reflect well on China.
So it looks to me like things are heading in the right direction there.
And it's possible that history will record...
That Trump bucking all of his advisors and stimulating these trade wars slash negotiations, I think history is going to say it was exactly the right time to do it.
And maybe he was exactly the right president to get it done.
Because he brings with him that deal-maker vibe, and he's so provocative that he shakes the box so much that everybody is scrambling to figure out how to get some certainty in this shaken box.
So it's entirely possible that people are going to say, well, when your economy is doing great, As it is, that's exactly the time you want to push back on bad trade agreements.
Because if things go poorly, it's not going to hurt you that much.
You've got a strong economy already.
It's not going to take you down.
This is exactly the right time.
Now, China, on the other hand, if you believe the reports, and I don't know how accurate any report is about China's economy, there must be some problems with transparency there.
But the reports are that they're not as strong as people think they are, and probably they're going to get flexible at some point.
Now, if they get flexible with China and we get an agreement with China, suddenly North Korea is a little bit more isolated.
And did you notice the way that President Trump handled the North Korea situation?
His message to Kim Jong-un was not just friendly, but super friendly.
Like, I forget the exact words, but he said, you know, for now we have to not have Pompeo visit because we're not making enough progress.
So it was very clear that he's not satisfied with the progress.
But at the same time, he was super friendly to Kim Jong-un, and I think that's real.
I think that they actually like each other.
And it probably makes a difference.
So there's no special urgency with North Korea because as I've said from the beginning, what the president did that is clever and innovative and completely out of the box from at least current recent history is that President Trump removed North Korea's reason for developing nukes and aiming them in our direction at least.
They just don't have a reason anymore.
You don't attack the countries that are trying to work with you, that are trying to help your economy, and are not asking anything that you can't give up.
So it seems to me that we've got time now.
President Trump bought us some time with North Korea.
And he's using it wisely to get China wrapped up and then he'll be in a stronger position and everybody will be to deal with North Korea.
So that looks like it's heading in the right direction too.
And then you've got the president tweeting about Google search returns and that the first things that come up when you Google about the president are all the left-leaning media sites, which is interesting because Fox News is the biggest cable news outlet.
And even though Fox News is sort of, you know, stands alone as the biggest of the right-leaning entities, It's so big that how does it...
How does it not, you know, how does it not come up pretty high on the search and entities or the search returns?
So Google's got some explaining to do and I guess Twitter, Google and Facebook, I guess, are going to be talking to, I think it's the Senate.
Who is it that has the hearings?
Is it the Senate? Anyway, there's some government hearings on all of that shadow banning stuff.
We'll see where that goes.
That's going to get really interesting.
I have a request for a half-time sip, a simultaneous sip, and I am happy to comply because sometimes you need a second sip.
Shall we? Yes, Bruce Ohr is being interviewed.
You might be having the same reaction that I am to watching the news about Bruce Ohr and the dossier and all the things around it.
And I'm thinking to myself, I can't square the fact that that's not the biggest story in the world.
Because it looks exactly like the FBI was trying to change the result of an election.
I mean, maybe not.
Everybody is innocent until proven guilty.
But the news doesn't really operate on the legal standard.
The news operates on the, sure, it looks like there's a problem here standard.
And it's really mind-boggling that the Bruce Orr story is not the top headline on every outlet.
Because we don't know what happened.
That's what we're trying to find out.
I'm not going to jump to condemn an American citizen based on my lack of understanding of what's going on.
Who knows? It could have been a double, triple, reverse spy situation.
You never know. You just never know.
You never know what you don't know.
So on this Bruce Ohr stuff, I'm not gonna say he's guilty of anything, or that his wife is.
But we can certainly say, with complete confidence, it sure looks bad.
It looks really bad.
So how does that stand in the headlines on at least half of the media in this country?
All right. Yeah, and somebody said, what about a second special prosecutor?
And I'm thinking to myself, Well, first of all, would we know if there were investigations going on that were not a special prosecutor?
Would we know if there was some internal investigation going on about Bruce Ohr?
I'm guessing there is.
I'm guessing. But would we know one way or the other?
And does it always have to be a special counsel?
Because it feels like special counsels are just trouble.
Yeah, so we don't really know what's going on there, but I imagine something is going on.
All right.
I'm just looking at your Sessions recused himself on all of the Hillary stuff.
Is that true? I get so confused watching this stuff.
I don't know if you're having the same experience I am, but the complexity of all this stuff is starting to get out of control.
When I read stories that have Well, I'll tell you my rule.
In a past relationship, I had the three name rule.
And the three name rule would go like this.
If she told me a story, They had three names in it.
I would stop her and say, okay, we're done, once you hit the third name.
Because once you get to three names in the story, it's too confusing, and you need to go back and simplify your story.
So you'd get stories like, well, then Bob said this, and then he met Mary, but then he picked up Jack, and then the three of them were driving.
I'm like, stop! Stop!
Stop! That's three names.
I'm positive you can tell this story with one or two names.
You never need three names to tell a story.
If you do, you might be adding too much complexity to this story.
So, I had the three-name rule.
And most of the reporting on all of this stuff is sort of a ten-name situation.
You know, it's just like, oh, this person, that person, who did they work for?
What did they do? I'm losing the track.
So it could be that part of the reason stuff isn't in the news is that it's too hard to report it on TV. So you see it in long form and articles more than you see it on TV. Um...
Yeah, the Game of Thrones rule.
When I watch Game of Thrones, I usually have no idea what's going on.
I'm just pretty sure that there's some king or wants to be king who used to be related to somebody whose brother killed their sister one time with a dragon or something.
I never know what's going on in that show, but I like it just the same.
Yeah, is Bruce Orr going to be on TV? I don't think so.
I think it's a closed hearing, isn't it?
Yeah, somebody's saying it's closed.
So, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it sort of a really good week for the president?
So even with all this McCain stuff, If you're lost in the weeds, it looks like, ah, the president screwed up again.
He did something with not lowering or raising the flag on time.
I don't know anybody who really cares about that.
I'm sure there's somebody who does.
But... The bigger picture is that it made this whole McCain situation, made all of the anti-Trump media, who are all lefty liberal Democrats, made them praise a Republican for a solid week.
You know, CNN is non-stop that McCain was a great guy.
We love that Republican.
Man, he was a good Republican.
And they kind of have to do it because they've set him up as the foil to Trump and they can't really get off of that train.
But it can't be comfortable for them to continually be praising a Republican with their audience who is not exactly pro-Republican.
So we've got the economy doing well, the stock market doing well.
We've got our first trade agreement coming in.
We've got North Korea seemingly under control.
We've got some news coming out of Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, if I'm pronouncing that correctly.
I just realized that's a word I've never said out loud.
Think of all the times you've read Straits of Hormuz, but you've probably never said Hormuz out loud.
So maybe it's Hormuz.
I have no idea.
I'm going to call it a Hormuz.
Iran is making noise like they might, you know, block the strait or they control it or something.
And I was reading, I think it was a retired military person saying that he almost sort of hoped they caused trouble.
Because if Iran causes trouble in the strait and threatens to lock up a third of oil traffic in the world, the entire Iranian navy will disappear in a week, maybe 24 hours.
How long would it take?
I don't know who would be involved, NATO, the U.S., whoever.
How long would it take them to clear 100% of the Iranian threat from the Straits of Hormuz?
And would we sort of come out?
We might come out ahead, wouldn't we?
Because I don't see Iran going to war over that if they were the ones that caused the trouble in the first place.
Or at least going to more war than that would be.
I mean, that would be war. But I think it would be limited to, uh-oh, we used to have a little bit of a navy.
Hey, where's our navy?
Our navy is gone.
Didn't we used to have a navy?
Does anybody remember when we had a navy?
Because we don't have a navy anymore.
So I think, yeah, it'd take about 20 minutes.
So that was the big story about, oh no, we've got problems in the Middle East.
And I'm thinking to myself, if that's your biggest problem...
If your biggest problem in the Middle East right now is that Iran is offering to sacrifice its navy if we want some target practice, that's it.
Basically, Iran is offering free target practice for, you know, live fire training using their navy as the targets.
Now, we might not take them up on that, kind of hoping that no bullets get fired myself.
But that's looking like the biggest problem coming out of the Middle East right now.
What was the news that the fourth leader of ISIS in Afghanistan just got killed?
How deep do you have to go into the ISIS talent before you get someone who's just not the best ISIS leader?
Look at elections in the United States.
Look at the, you know, if we have four elections in this country, and we elect, let's say, four different presidents in four different election cycles, what are the odds that all four of those presidents will be good?
You know, that they'll do the right things, and they're smart, and they'll make the right decisions?
Well, they're all pretty smart.
They can't get elected if they're not.
But usually there's at least one out of four that can't get it done.
And every time I see an ISIS leader or an Al-Qaeda leader get killed and the number two is promoted, I think to myself, you know, the number two person isn't the one who built all of this.
The number two person might be a little less qualified than number one.
Now, it's not impossible that number two is actually better than number one.
But what about number three?
And what about number four?
By the time you get down to your fourth choice, do you still have the same quality of decision-making?
Do they still have the same respect?
Can they still lead with the same amount of emotional persuasion?
I gotta think that the talent pool gets a little bit thinner once you get down to the fourth leader.
Somebody said you get Kiefer Sutherland.
How important are the midterms, in your opinion?
Well, The midterms are certainly important because they will determine how politics look for the next several years.
But which way they go is far less predictable.
I have speculated, as I've seen others speculate, Dana Perino on Fox News has famously said this a few times, that It might be that President Trump could do well with a split Congress.
He might be exactly the right personality because he's not an ideologue.
And we might have exactly the right issues for a split Congress.
So if you think about it, immigration and healthcare are two topics that it would really be helpful to not have just one side ram it through.
Wouldn't it be great for those two big things, immigration and healthcare, that at least just for those two things, We got something that looked more like a little bit of a consensus across the aisle.
You know, speaking of...
So, you know, here's a situation in which we could, you know, honor McCain because he did talk about reaching across the aisle more.
I don't think that's a terrible idea.
So, it's possible we could get a split Congress and it just can't get anything done.
So, it might be terrible.
Could be. I don't know how you'd put an odds on that.
But it's also possible that you would have a Bill Clinton situation where he can do a little horse trading and say, look, you can get this.
If we get this, let's figure out something where we can at least move the ball forward.
Now, I'd like to tease you a little bit of something upcoming.
Some of you saw my Periscope with Dr.
Shiva, the so-called real Indian who is running against the fake Indian Elizabeth Warren for Senate in Massachusetts.
And he recently had a town hall, I think it was, on the question of health care.
And I'm just going to tease you now that I'm going to have him back on.
I'll tell you details later on.
But I'm gonna have him back on to talk about how to approach healthcare, you know, moving toward a solution, in more of a systems approach.
You know that I like systems more than goals.
A goal is, hey, let's fix healthcare.
A system is, what do you do every day?
What's a process that you can just sort of churn ahead and make progress on healthcare?
What's a system to get there?
So we'll talk about that And some ideas that I've already heard from him.
We chatted about this already.
And you're gonna hear some things that'll just blow the frickin' head off of your skull.
You're gonna hear things from Dr.
Shiva that you just haven't heard.
Things that you just haven't thought about that way.
And we're gonna see if we can move the ball forward in terms of at least how the public thinks about some of these things.
I think it's, let me check my calendar.
I think we're going to do that.
On September 7th, a Friday.
So I'll do it the same time I do my other periscopes.
So look for that at the same time I do this periscope, which is 10 a.m.
Eastern, 7 a.m.
Pacific. And Dr.
Shiva will be here on periscope, unless something changes between now and then.
And you really want to check this one out.
If you're trying to understand what's going on with healthcare, it's the first time I felt like I was starting to understand what the problem was and starting to understand what a potential solution might look like.
So that's pretty interesting.
All right. Now, I'm going to pivot a little bit.
You know that I've been working with Blight Authority, Bill Pulte.
And if you haven't checked out the website, blightauthority.com, and the Ideas section, Ideas menu tab, you can see that people are suggesting lots of Ideas for what to do in an urban area.
So we've got all these blighted areas that have been cleared out by the Blight Authority and more to come.
So what do you do with this area that's close to free in terms of the land value?
You could work with the municipalities to get access to it.
So what do you do with it?
Some ideas are coming in.
But I want to play with a few fun ideas As they cross my attention.
And here's one of the most fun ideas that I heard.
Imagine, let's just say it's Detroit.
Just so you have a real place.
It doesn't have to be Detroit.
It could be Baltimore.
It could be any place. But imagine it's a cold climate.
A northern climate.
And imagine that you build on these vacant lots a data center It might be for mining Bitcoin, but it could be any kind of a large cloud thing.
You have automatically the cold weather, in the winter anyway, so that's positive because you've got all this heat that's being released by the data center.
What if you dug underground a little bit and lowered your data center into essentially a subterranean thing, but you took all the heat and you took it to the surface?
And let's say that you use that heat to heat greenhouses above it during the winter.
What if you use that heat to warm the roads?
Maybe you heat some liquid, some water with some antifreeze in it, for example, and you circulate it under the roads in your neighborhood.
You would never need to plow the roads.
So now you have roads that don't need plowing.
You've got greenhouses that have free heat.
And then what about building some homes?
Well, they need some free heat too.
So you could be free heating The homes.
Now at the same time if you're going to build an underground structure you can run some geothermal stuff while you've got the hole in the ground and that allows you also to cool your house in the summer.
So in the summer you turn off the heat from the underground data center and you just use the geothermal that you're using at the same time.
And suddenly you've got something like Free energy.
So imagine if you've got a building site that is essentially zero energy cost and close to zero land cost.
Well, now you've got a place that, you know, you've probably got some good ideas for what to build.
Now, do I know that that's a good idea?
I do not. There might be some engineers or some technical people who say, oh, Scott, what you're forgetting is this or that, or it's too expensive to put the data center underground, or the walls won't hold, or there might be leaks.
There may be entirely good reasons.
Yeah, it might be entirely good reasons why this is a bad idea.
But what I love about it is the idea that if you start from scratch and you just throw out everything you know about the way things used to be done, what could you build?
What could you do using today's technology?
What do you do in the age of smartphone apps when you're designing a community that you never would have done before you had smartphone apps?
A lot of stuff.
The security you could have on your apps, you know, the security for the whole town.
You could alert your neighbors if there are suspicious things and they can look at their phone.
So you could take care of security with apps.
You could probably bring down the cost of owning a car with apps because you just use the app to get an Uber or catch your bus or whatever.
You could bring down Right now, people have cable TV and it might cost you a few hundred dollars a month for your cable.
You could probably get to the point where if you built a community with its own homeowner association Wi-Fi, you could probably get to the point where people just don't need cable TV. They just use their phones and their apps and their Wi-Fi and stuff.
So you could probably get to the point where you have everything from pet care to somebody to watch your child because your app helps you find somebody easily, to rides, to food.
I mean, think of all those things that you could just completely change if you built a community around apps.
So... Yeah, kids are already dropping cable.
Exactly. So if you've got a smartphone and you pay for unlimited data, even with 4G, you probably have everything you need.
By the time it gets to 5G, cable doesn't even make sense.
Alright, so go to blightauthority.com if you have ideas or you know companies that are in the business of designing things.
I've heard of some other companies I might be talking about fairly soon that have some fascinating technologies.
Fortnite Village, that's interesting.
Alright, I'm going to sign off now.
We've done enough, and I will talk to you again tomorrow.
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