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Oct. 13, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
41:16
Episode 259 Scott Adams: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Weed
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Hey everybody, come on in.
Come on in here.
I know it's the weekend, but this is your favorite part of the weekend.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm Scott Adams and you're not, but you can have coffee.
With me. If you got here in time, and if you have a cup, a mug, a vessel of glass, and you've got a beverage in there, well, you're prepared for coffee with Scott Adams.
And it's time for the simultaneous sip.
The best part of the day, at least the best sip of the day.
day.
Here it comes, here it comes.
Everything's better with coffee.
Let's talk about the news from Dana Rohrabacher, California, Congressperson, who says that the administration, the Trump administration, is thinking of legalizing medical marijuana, at least on a federal level, and leaving recreational to the states and getting the federal government out of the weed business.
Now I ask myself, Why would they wait until after the midterms?
That's the report.
The report is that it's not going to happen until after the midterms.
And I thought to myself, well, wouldn't it have been smarter to do it before the midterms?
Because then you get the big advantage that you did something that's sort of good for everybody, and that might help in the midterms.
But I realized That after the midterms is actually the perfect time to do it.
Because before the midterms, you can let the word get out, right?
So you get an initial benefit simply because people hear that you're gonna, I don't know, legalize it or decriminalize it, I guess would be the right thing to say.
So you get the benefit before the vote, Of knowing that it's going to happen, assuming that there's confirmation of the rumor.
But then after the vote, what would be different after the midterms than before the midterms?
Work with me here.
This is actually kind of fun.
What's the biggest difference in the world after the midterms?
Well, the biggest difference is that smart people are saying that Congress will be split.
The smart people say that the Senate will be Republican and there'll be a Democrat majority in Congress.
What can a president get done with a split Congress?
If you're the most divisive character in a long time and you're president, isn't that terrible to have a split Congress?
You know where I'm going with this, don't you?
What will be the first thing you hear about after there's a split Congress?
Weed. What is the one thing you can guarantee both the left and the right will vote for, at least in a majority?
Weed. How will President Trump launch?
Remember I taught you about the new CEO move?
The new CEO move is what you do, the very first thing you do when you take your first day in the job as a CEO. And people like to fire people or, you know, do something big.
Because that sets the tone, sort of like a first impression.
Well, after the midterm, there's sort of a new government.
In all likelihood, there'll be a new structure of government because it'll be a split Congress.
So whatever President Trump does first, Under the conditions of this new government, sets the tone.
It's the thing you'll keep talking about.
Well, he did that.
Well, if you're looking at how this new thing will go, he did that.
So we have something to look at.
We have a precedent because he did that.
What will be the first thing he does?
Well, it's starting to look like about the first thing he'll do is take a run at decriminalizing weed.
And if he does, it would be the exact best timing Of all time.
Because if there is a split Congress, it's the one thing he's almost guaranteed to get through.
You know, unless they mess up the form of the bill somehow.
So the timing of it is spectacular.
You remember that there was word that the government had put the call out to try to find all the bad news about wheat.
That was a news report.
That the government was trying to balance the message.
So it wasn't all good news about weed, but there was some negative news too, just so they had a complete picture.
And when that news report dropped, people said, oh no, Jeff Sessions is winning.
Weed is going to be even more criminalized.
They're going to go after it more than they were.
And I said at the time, hold on, hold on.
What would you do prior to decriminalizing if that was your intention?
Well, what you would do is gather all the information so that when you did it, you had a comprehensive report that was the best of all the science, so that when you made your proposal to decriminalize it, you were doing it based on having done a deep dive.
So that you couldn't decriminalize it until you looked for all the bad news.
And you did a legitimate job of looking for the bad news.
So it looks like that's what's going to happen.
Don't know yet. It's a little early.
But it looks like the way it's shaping up is it will be an after-midterm kind of bill.
It will fly through both houses.
It will set a precedent for both sides working together.
It will show that they can do it.
And then we're going to start looking at things like immigration and health care.
What do those things have in common?
You absolutely can't get them done unless you've got both sides agreeing.
So it would be the perfect setup.
Let's talk about Turkey and Saudi Arabia and this journalist called Khashoggi who allegedly walked into a Turkish embassy In an attempt to get some kind of approval to marry his Turkish fiancee, who I understand was waiting outdoors.
I may have this wrong, but wasn't his fiancee waiting for him outside the embassy?
And allegedly Khashoggi went in there and he was followed by this team of alleged Saudi hitmen who brought a bone saw And there's some audio recording of the deed going down, allegedly. Everything's alleged at this point.
And apparently they killed him and they used a bone saw to cut him up in little pieces.
Probably put him in some kind of suitcases or small, small, carryable objects.
And here's the weird part.
This is so horrible, it's hard to even imagine.
His fiancée is standing outside, probably doing what people do, looking at Twitter on her phone.
While 100 feet away, her fiancée was being slaughtered and dismembered with a bone saw.
And then they put him in packages and probably walked right past her.
So in all likelihood, she saw the killers walk past her with a bunch of suitcases that were the parts of her fiancée, in all likelihood.
Now, they might have gone out of a different door, but same concept.
Now, here's my impression of this.
The first thing I would say is we will never know what really happened.
We might know that the Saudis killed him.
We might know that he's a critic of the Saudi government as a journalist.
So we might know some of the basic stuff.
But it feels as though there's more to the story.
And here's why I think there's more to the story.
It's the way he was killed.
Doesn't the way he was killed make it seem like there was a message involved?
It was either a message to Turkey saying, you know, we'll do whatever we want, including right in your embassy, which is your own soil.
That's a pretty strong message to Turkey, but it would be a reckless one.
It seems like it would be a reckless way to deal with Turkey.
It seems more likely that this is a message about the individual.
And here's what I would ask myself.
Is there anything else about this individual that we don't know?
In other words, is this journalist just a journalist?
Does that seem likely?
Do you believe that this journalist did nothing wrong except write some anti-Saudi leadership articles?
It's possible.
It's possible that he's just a journalist who wrote some things the royal family didn't like, and so they sent a hit team to kill him in the most unusual way.
The way he was killed doesn't look normal, because wouldn't there be a million ways to kill somebody and not leave a trace?
It seems like there's just all these ways you could kill somebody and make it look like an accident, make it look like it wasn't the Saudis, but they chose the one way that looks exactly like the Saudi government killed them.
So I would say look for comments from other countries in the region and ask yourself why it's a little quiet over there.
You know, is it possible That killing this guy was sort of a popular thing to do.
Meaning that there might have been other countries involved that were happy to see him go.
So I don't know that's the case.
I'm not alleging that. I'm just saying that there are some holes in the story that we may never fill.
And we may never know what's really going on here with why they killed him.
But I'm not sure the whole story is just that he's writing opposition pieces.
It might be. It's entirely possible that's the whole story.
I kind of feel like there's more to it.
It just smells like there's a bigger story here.
Maybe we'll never know.
But there's an interesting thing going on here.
One is that, of course, the critics of President Trump are going to use it to say, look what happens when dictators start dehumanizing the press.
So some people are going to say stuff like, well, President Trump says the press in this country is the enemy of the people.
Look where that leads.
It's a slippery slope to the bone saw.
If you criticize CNN, you're on that slippery slope to bringing the bone saw and killing everybody.
Well, that's sort of a stretch.
But here's what it does do.
It might work exactly the opposite.
Because of the power of contrast.
When people are calling President Trump a big old dictator who is demonizing the press, what they're really saying is that he could turn into the real kind of dictator that really does bad stuff to the press, as opposed to the free speech guy who's just criticizing the people who's criticizing him.
But when Saudi Arabia...
Is accused of doing something like this.
Whether or not we ever find out the truth of it is a separate question.
But they're accused and people will believe that Saudi Arabia, a dictatorship, literally used a bone saw to dismember a member of the press while his fiancée waited outside.
That, my friends, is some serious dictatorship.
So here's the ironic part.
It's going to be harder for President Trump's detractors to look at what they've been accusing him of, which is saying clever things about the media that are critical.
So talking in a clever way about the media is what Trump does.
A real dictator Cuts you up with a bone saw inside an embassy while your fiancé is standing outside.
That's about as big a difference as you can get between what President Trump is, a clever tweeter, and a bone saw killer.
Very large difference.
One tweets, one uses a bone saw.
Right! Right!
Versus? Big difference.
So, in a weird way, this could actually work in the president's favor in a way that nobody's ever going to talk about.
It's going to make such a gigantic distinction between just talking about stuff and sending a tweet and dismembering somebody.
Now, even the slippery slope people, who I criticize all the time, things just aren't always slippery slopes.
It's a long distance between tweeting and Bonesaw, alright?
Large difference.
And on top of that, it puts the president on the side of fill-in-the-blank.
President Trump is now officially on the same side as the press.
Hello! You didn't see that coming, did you?
President Trump and the international press, including all of his critics, are on his side now.
Now, it's not comfortable, and they may not want to be on his side, but if there's one person who can stand up for journalists...
Who can do it? Who is the only person?
Let me put it this way.
There's only one person, probably just one person in the world.
I think this is true.
There's one person in the world who could stand up to this kind of alleged crime against a journalist.
Only one. And here's the question.
Saudi Arabia is clearly in the ally category.
We need them.
We have all kinds of strategic interests.
We sell them stuff.
They're part of our network of good buddies, if you could say that, in the Middle East.
They're even friendlier with Israel than we've seen in the past.
They seem productive in a number of ways, especially fighting terrorism.
And here's where it gets sketchy, because the reporting is that Khashoggi had some kind of Muslim Brotherhood connection, which some people would say they're the bad guys, they're the terrorists, or the terrorist supporters.
So, it's kind of an ambiguous situation because the president doesn't like, I'm sure the president, I'm talking about President Trump, doesn't like the Muslim Brotherhood.
But he's got to protect free speech, at least the principle of it.
There's no free speech per se in Saudi Arabia, but worldwide he's got to protect at least the notion of it.
So this is a real dicey one.
What will President Trump do?
It's not really clear.
That there's a good answer here.
Because if the president goes hard on Saudi Arabia, it will hurt our interests.
And if he doesn't, if he doesn't, you know, I don't know how you show your face in public, right?
So you've got two impossibles.
So how do you deal with an impossible?
Well, one way would be to change the facts.
If there's no good solution with the facts that are presented to us, and the facts as they've been presented is that Saudi Arabia did put a hit on somebody, a journalist in a Turkish embassy.
So if those facts were to hold and nothing new came out, That's an impossible situation.
It would be very bad to go hard against Saudi Arabia, given all the other interests.
At the same time, it would be very bad not to, if the public believes that this really happened.
So the solution might be to change the facts.
I'm just putting that out there.
And one way to change the facts would be to change what the public thinks of this Khashoggi guy.
So here's what I would expect.
I would expect that Saudi Arabia, primarily, would start planting stories that would change what the public thinks of this journalist until they no longer think of him as a journalist and they begin to think of him as something more than a journalist, more like a Muslim Brotherhood type of person, for example.
So here's what I'd look for.
I would look for It's seeding of the media for stories that say there's something more about this Khashoggi guy and that maybe this was an anti-terrorist act.
So because if Saudi Arabia could get away with making it look like they were being hard on terror, well, suddenly that's a different story, isn't it?
So, here's what I'd expect.
I would expect the United States to drag its feet and not proclaim anything too soon.
Because that gives the media time to start leaking out stories that change how we think about it.
So, I think the President will probably wait a little bit before he takes a firm position.
But we'll see.
That's just speculation.
Do you ever get tired of talking politics?
You know, the thing about politics is that it changes so much, at least under the Trump administration.
I think I would get tired of talking about politics in a regular administration.
I had literally no interest until the Trump administration.
There was nothing about the entire Obama administration that I found interesting.
And I'm one who says that Obama did a good job.
I know that almost all of you watching this disagree with that.
But let me reiterate my point in case there's anybody new.
I believe that it's a mistake.
Oh, let me put it in this frame.
I think it's true that if you're an American, You have a notion in your head of what a perfect president would be like.
Now you might in your imagination change the gender, you might change the ethnicity, but those are not the important parts.
You have in your mind a personality type, a sort of a professional, responsible, well-spoken, polite, But firm, smart, tough, experienced.
So you've got all these ideas in your mind of what a perfect president should be.
This is a mistake in how we see the world.
I would suggest that rather than getting the perfect prototype of a president, or as close as we can get to it, no matter what the situation is, that we should match the president To the specific challenge of the time, I've said that Obama was actually a good choice to take over during the depths of the economic meltdown.
Because Obama is a very calming personality.
You know that he would look at the facts.
You know that he would dig into the details.
You know that he would be calming.
You know that he would not act rationally.
You know that he wouldn't scare anybody by weird actions.
That was probably pretty important to keep the economy from falling off the edge.
And then he slowly, some would say too slowly, helped grow the economy.
And then when Trump took over, I would say that Trump took over at a time when the economy was solid.
Once the economy is solid, you no longer need the boring president.
The boring president was a perfect fit for the past.
Currently, we have exactly the right president at exactly the right time because he's willing to take a little more risk financially at a time when that's exactly the smart thing to do.
On a risk-reward basis, our economy is so strong that we have a little extra negotiating ability with China.
Take, for example, the Fed raising interest rates.
Why does the Fed raise interest rates?
Well, they raise interest rates because they think the economy is actually too hot.
They literally raised interest rates to slow down growth because it was too good.
Now, if you're Russia, I'm sorry, not Russia, if you're China, and China and the United States are playing chicken, Because we're negotiating hard, but neither one wants to give anything up.
Who has time on their side?
Does China have time on their side?
Because they have a very thin margin between the super growth that keeps them strong and just a little less growth, and they're screwed.
The United States had to...
Just think about this.
I haven't heard anybody say this.
The United States...
is in a position that the economy is so strong that we had to raise our own interest rates to slow down our own economy.
Think about that.
China is looking at the United States and saying, if we just hold on a little bit longer, we're really going to hurt their economy.
And then they read the news and they go, oh God, their economy is so strong they had to slow it down themselves.
China, their only negotiating leverage is that they'll hurt our economy.
Our economy is so frickin' strong that we had to slow it down.
There's nothing that China's doing that makes any difference.
But it sure makes a big difference on their end.
So, when you see that the president, you know, that the Chinese negotiations, the tariff negotiations, are taking a long time, you should say to yourself, good.
That's good, because the longer it takes, the worse their negotiating position is, and ours doesn't change at all, because we don't have an economy that we want to grow any faster.
If it did, they'd just raise the interest rates and slow it down again.
So this president, who's the one who's going to push negotiating, is in exactly the right time Because the economy is so strong and I give him credit for goosing the economy, the extra optimism, the extra energy, the extra positivity.
I mean, this president has persuaded up the optimism which does drive the economy.
So he's done everything he can do to put the country in an insanely good position.
I would say that the economy of the United States right now is obviously better than it's ever been based on metrics, etc.
But even stronger than that, We are on the edge of major beneficial trade deals that would have been impossible with a weak economy.
If our economy was weak, we'd say, eh, we don't want to take any chances with trade deals.
But now we can. We can take all the chances we want.
It's the perfect time for it.
But I would go further now.
So I've said, I've made the case, I know some of you disagree, but let me just finish the case, that Obama, the calming, professorial, lawyerly personality was good when the economy was so shaky.
Trump is perfect when you want to get aggressive on your negotiating and you've got a strong economy and you want to goose it even stronger.
Perfect. Who's right for the next presidency after, let's say, eight years of President Trump?
What would be the right kind of personality?
Let's say we had plenty of money, but we still had problems, so that money wasn't our problem anymore.
We just didn't have good ideas.
We didn't know how to fix the inner cities.
We didn't know how to get income equality.
We didn't know how to make racial equality.
Well, we have equality.
We didn't have racial feelings and get rid of the racial animus.
Well, who would be the best personality for that?
Kanye. If things stay the way they're going, Which is that the economy stays strong.
At the end of eight years, the best kind of president would be somebody who can bring creativity to the process.
That's Kanye.
Somebody who could bring some kind of racial healing to the process.
That's Kanye.
He's clearly set himself up to be the ideal kind of president For the future that we're starting to enter.
If you don't think this guy plans ahead, you're crazy.
Because he's already six years ahead.
He's already becoming the person we need in 2024.
Now I'm not going to predict he wins or anything like that.
It's early for that.
But I'm just making the general case that you should lose your sense that there's an ideal presidential personality.
There isn't. There's only a good fit.
Obama, in my opinion, was a good fit for those shaky economic times.
It was just a good time to have a black president, frankly, because it helped us get past that hump.
This is a really good time to have a President Trump.
Couldn't be better. But the time after him might be time for a different personality.
Somebody says, you're losing your footing.
Do you know how many times people have told me I jumped the shark?
People are telling me I'm high right now.
No, I'm not high. Now, I'd like you to watch something else in the atmosphere.
You watch every now and then I release an idea into the atmosphere and we can see if it comes back.
In other words, there are some ideas that are like idea viruses.
As soon as you hear them, They become so sticky that they'll just live forever.
Sometimes you even know it as soon as you hear it.
This wasn't my idea, but somebody was talking about the idea of calling the Democrats mobs, and then somebody else on Twitter, not me, came up with the idea that the Republicans should be saying, jobs, not mobs.
Now, the first time you hear that, jobs, not mobs, Didn't you just see the entire midterm election shape up?
Because the right are all about jobs.
And you can even see the campaign ad.
You can see the split screen where, you know, on one side is all the job stuff.
You know, best employment, best optimism, you know, best everything on the economics.
And on the other side, it's just a collage of the Democrats screaming at the sky and attacking people in the streets and yelling and wearing crazy costumes.
And you just label them, you know, jobs, not mobs.
It would be such a clean, it would be sort of a killer, sort of a killer framing.
Anyway, when you hear that, you realize, oh my god, that's sort of sticky.
As soon as you hear it, it's hard to get it on your head.
It's sort of a brain glue.
And I tried to do that with another concept, which you've heard already.
I called it cultural gravity.
And cultural gravity is the tendency for the culture that you identify with, whether that's black culture or any other culture, that that culture has a way of holding you back sometimes.
And there are other cultures that are the opposite.
They're propelling you.
I would say, for example, that the Asian-American culture, especially in the United States, let's just talk about the United States, they would have what I would call a zero-gravity culture, meaning that if somebody is doing well in school, it would be rare for somebody in the Asian-American community to say, hey, Bob is doing well in school, ha ha ha.
That's not as much of a thing, right?
If your friend is doing well in school and you're Asian-American, you're probably thinking, I better do well in school too.
This is a good way to succeed.
You watched what happened when Kanye gets a meeting in the Oval Office.
Now, he's a special case, right?
He's not really an example of everybody in the community in many ways.
But you watched that Don Lemon referred to it as a minstrel show.
That is, to me, that's racial gravity.
That's cultural gravity.
Because Don Lemon was saying, stop embarrassing me.
Your success is embarrassing me.
Who does that?
And you saw a number of other prominent black pundits and personalities who were very anti-Kanye.
To which I say, you know that Kanye is not a Republican, right?
He's just willing to talk to both sides.
And you know that he got in the room, and you know that he already probably made a difference for things that you want.
And if Kanye succeeds, you know that your culture does better, right?
Because he's moving to Chicago, he's trying to help the inner cities, and he has access, he has power, he has money, he has ideas.
How is that not good?
How are you not cheering this guy on as someone who not only made it out, but is trying to reduce the gravity on you?
Why do you want gravity on yourself?
What is up with that?
Now, so I propose to you That the words cultural gravity are, it's a weaponized term.
Weaponized in a good way, in a sense.
Because, you know, I see somebody using the word in the comments, envy, that there's envy.
There may be an element to that.
It's possible. So it's possible that envy is some part of the variables involved here.
But you know that envy is not influential as a label.
But cultural gravity immediately tells you what's going on in a way that envy doesn't.
Because envy doesn't say, well, it just isn't as active.
So I want you to see if the phrase cultural gravity catches on.
Because if it does, that's very good news for, I think, the black community in particular.
But we'll see. And let me add some...
Let me be humble about what I can predict about what the black community hears, because I'm not black and I can't really know what they will think.
But it does seem to be that as something that has a likelihood of being a positive, That understanding that there's a thing called cultural gravity and that you might want to find a way around it is probably a good thing.
I don't know the answer to finding a way around it, frankly.
That's the hard part. I think you'd have to be a member of the community to know what that looks like.
Did you see the cheers you got at follow-up AppleTalk?
I didn't see the cheers. I'm just looking at your comments right now.
Cultural drag.
Yeah, drag is kind of good descriptively, but I think gravity, it just captures it a little more.
Jealousy is part of cultural gravity.
You know, I'm not completely convinced that envy and jealousy are necessarily what's going on here.
It feels like it, and it looks like it, but wouldn't you imagine that every group has envy and jealousy?
It feels like that's kind of a universal trait, so why would it only be affecting one group in this way and not the other groups?
Because there's no suggestion, I've never heard any suggestion or seen a reason to believe that the black community would have more jealousy than any other community.
What data would that be based on?
I've never heard any. I've not observed it.
It doesn't pass the sniff test for me.
But again, anything's possible, right?
but I don't see any evidence for that.
All right.
Gravity is something you can feel.
Yeah, gravity equals seriousness.
Now, in this simulation upon which we live, is it weird that the biggest critic of Kanye, his last name, is literally named Lemon?
Like, the guy who's the sourest, the sourest guy on TV is named Lemon.
Is that just a weird coincidence?
Because that's the sort of stuff that makes me think I'm living in a simulation.
I know, I know it's just a coincidence, but it makes you feel that way.
So here's another weird coincidence.
So, Christina and I were hanging out last night and I wanted a smoothie.
So, I've got a certain way I make smoothies and she was going to make one for me to find out how I like my smoothies.
And we opened the refrigerator and all the strawberries that I thought I had for the smoothie had already been eaten.
So, I wanted a smoothie, but I couldn't make a smoothie because I didn't have any strawberries.
So, because I can't make a smoothie because I don't have any strawberries that I thought I had, we turn on TV to watch a show.
And within a few minutes of turning on the TV, there's a mention of somebody who can't make a smoothie because they don't have strawberries.
How weird is that?
That I go from not being able to make a strawberry smoothie to turning on TV and learning about somebody who can't make a strawberry smoothie.
And it's the one ingredient they're missing.
It's the only one I was missing, too.
Now, of course, that is a coincidence, right?
It's just a coincidence.
You know, the smart people, the scientists will tell you, well, don't read anything into that.
What about all the things that That didn't happen.
You didn't notice all the things that were not a coincidence, and the environment is always full of coincidence.
But it sure makes you wonder about the nature of the universe.
You know, if the only thing it does is make you question your environment, question your reality, then it's something useful.
The law of attention, yeah.
So it's just what you, there is something about the fact that you pay attention to the things that you care about.
So you do notice coincidences that you just wouldn't have noticed before.
That's part of it, sure. Show us your recipe.
I'll tell you my recipe for a smoothie, and it goes like this.
Strawberries, blackberries.
You can replay this if you miss it.
So it's strawberries, blackberries, vanilla yogurt, almond butter, protein powder.
I like vanilla flavored protein powder.
And I put a chunk of dark chocolate in it.
Because the dark chocolate works with the strawberries in a way that's crazy.
And then for a liquid, to add a little liquid, I do almond milk.
So it's strawberries, blackberries, yogurt, almond butter, almond milk also.
And a piece of dark chocolate and vanilla protein powder.
And then crushed ice and then it goes in the blender.
The mix is not that terribly important.
So you'll find that You'll find that it's not really sensitive to the exact amounts.
So if you like a lot of fruit, put more in there.
That sort of thing. You don't need to worry about the quantities that much.
Just experiment. Alright.
How do you make the smoothie?
Well, I just told you.
You're the only guy I listen to like this, somebody said.
Well, thank you. And by the way, you're really going to like those smoothies.
Hey, there's somebody else who doesn't have strawberries.
What are the odds that there would be two people who don't have any strawberries?
I just do regular yogurt.
Alright, I think we've talked enough about smoothies.
Obviously, I'm out of material.
And so I'm going to go do some work, as I do.
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