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Dec. 2, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
38:12
Episode 322 Scott Adams: Huge News on #FentanylChina, Trade, Neil DeGrasse Tyson
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Joanne, you're always so quick and Andrew, you too.
You're quick on the buttons.
Come on in here, everybody.
Tyler.
So, I don't know if you're following Twitter or the news, use.
But if you're following Twitter, you've learned some exciting things.
If you're following CNN, you haven't learned anything.
It turns out that CNN has decided to just stop covering news.
Let's just stop covering news.
We'll just cover things that make the president look bad, whether it's news or not.
If we need to make something up, we'll do it.
We're approaching a thousand viewers, and oh, I just realized I forgot to turn on my...
Let me see if I can retweet this while we're doing this.
I've got a setting that kept me from retweeting, or it kept my...
She kept Periscope from showing up.
So... I'm gonna have to retweet it while we're doing this.
Ah, forget it. I'll retweet it after.
Alright. Here's what's going on, if you're not aware.
I did not watch the fight, so I don't have anything to say about that.
So here's one of the most impressive pieces of negotiating and persuasion you will ever see in your life.
And I'll bet you, I'll bet you, That if I didn't talk about it right now, you would never even hear about this.
So, you know, my beat has been to not talk about the politics so much as to talk about the persuasion, which I'm going to do in a moment.
But first, please join me in a, let's say, a celebratory simultaneous sip about the big news about China and fentanyl we'll talk about in a minute.
But before we do, drink with me, will you?
It's extra good today because of the news.
So the news is this, that President Trump at the G20 meeting brought up fentanyl with President Xi, and President Xi has agreed, this is the news, To widen the classification of fentanyl in China so that it is the greatest offense to try to sell it to the United States.
So people are confused about this because they say, wait a minute, are you telling me fentanyl was already legal in China?
Was it legal to sell it to other countries?
And the answer is... China had a defective classification system, which allowed the bad guys to take something like fentanyl, change a molecule, and say, hey, it's something new.
Fentanyl was illegal, but this new thing that's one molecule off...
It's unaddressed. The law doesn't address it.
So in China, you could use that loophole forever, just keep changing it to stay ahead of the law, which is what the bad guys were doing.
In the United States, and I'm speaking very generally because I don't know the details, In the United States, you can classify more broadly so that all these little tricks of changing the molecule or so won't get you to a legal place.
China simply had to do, all they had to do was imitate the same process we use here, imitate the same process.
I'm sure other countries do it.
So it was a fairly simple administrative process.
Legal change that, in theory, nobody in China would really even disagree with unless they were actively trying to support the bad guys.
Now, here's the story that nobody told you.
And if I didn't tell you, nobody would tell you this.
And when you see it, a little light's going to go on and you're going to go...
Ping! The G20 is, as you know, the 20 biggest economies.
The countries are the biggest economies.
The leaders get together and they talk economics primarily, right?
The primary reason that they get together is to talk about economics.
They do talk about other things just because they're in the same place, but mostly it's economics.
And I had been...
Tweeting and talking non-stop for the last month or two about the need to not do a trade deal with China until fentanyl is addressed in China.
In other words, my take was that China is not a partner we can make any agreement with until they do that first.
That is a negotiating technique.
Do you see it? The technique is that you get a deal before you start negotiating the deal.
And the deal that we wanted to get was, of course, the trade war was the big thing.
But because the trade war was a sort of a mortal threat To China's economy and stability.
So the current situation is China has a big problem if they don't get the trade deal done.
And so our president, the best negotiator the presidency has ever seen, and I would argue one of the most persuasive people in my lifetime, Goes to this dinner with President Xi in which so far nobody has even mentioned fentanyl.
Fentanyl was not a headline.
I don't remember seeing it on anybody's agenda because this was an economic meeting.
So our president sits at the meeting.
Cameras go on. President Xi is sitting directly across from him.
Think about this.
It's the most visible meeting on the planet Earth.
No meeting of two people was more important on the entire planet than that dinner between President Xi of China and President Trump and their mutual advisors.
All eyes were on it.
All news was on it.
It was the biggest thing going.
And if you're China, How important is it to come out of this G20 looking good?
Top priority, right?
Now getting deals and stuff is of course always the top priority, but in terms of managing your brand, managing your image, this G20 thing was really, really important for all the players.
And so when President Trump is making his initial comments, What does he talk about?
Well, he talks about the death of George Bush in a very respectful way, in a tone that maybe his critics did not expect.
So he took the story of really one of his rivals, I think you could say, at least a rival family, not George Herbert Walker, but the family, and he was very respectful, very presidential. In other words, didn't make any kind of news with it.
He just treated it respectfully.
And then the president said, we've got a lot to talk about.
We're going to start out with fentanyl.
Boom! Do you see it?
Do you see what President Trump did there?
He put President Chi in front of a camera in front of every news outlet in the whole fucking world.
And then he said, I'm going to talk to him about fentanyl at the G20. What's the biggest topic everybody thought he was going to talk about?
Trade. Trade war.
And the president said, we're going to talk about fentanyl first.
And specifically, he had a specific suggestion, which was for them to classify it differently, which was an entirely practical thing to do.
Now you might ask yourself, why did we even have to ask?
Why was it necessary To ask China to do something so obvious, so simple, and so constructive?
Well, the only answer I can come up with is that they didn't want to do it.
It was either something that maybe politically it was hard, maybe it was leverage.
It might have actually been negotiating leverage.
Maybe it was what people say it was.
It was just another way to attack the United States.
And our president...
Put it right in his face.
President Trump put fentanyl right in President Xi's face in front of every camera in the world.
When he did that, the negotiations were complete.
Now you're saying to yourself, wait a minute, that's before they've negotiated.
Nope. That was not before they negotiated.
That was the negotiation.
Now, of course, people obviously had conversations ahead of time, etc.
But it was clear at that point that no decision had been made.
The moment the president made that the top story, the only clip that is the takeaway from that dinner, it made it largely impossible for President Xi to resist.
This is sort of what the president has referred to as setting the table.
That's a negotiating term.
Loosely speaking, it's a negotiating term.
That he set the table so that when the negotiations start, they're already done.
The negotiation was done before he started.
Now I'm talking about just the final conversation.
Clearly there have been behind-the-scenes, lower-level conversations.
But to get the deal, Our president guaranteed it by the way he played it.
Now ask yourself, is that something that anybody would have done?
Do you think that if you just plucked this president out of there and put in another one, would that president have done that?
Which was exactly the right thing to do on the biggest problem, I think, in the country at the moment.
And to get a good result.
It is something he has a special skill for.
And it's really hard to ignore it at this point, that this is a special skill.
He has a good personal working relationship with President Xi, built on respect.
And he created a situation in which there could only be one outcome.
And it happened to be the good one.
Now, the other part of the news, of course, is that there appears to be something like progress.
It's way too early to say that everything's solved.
But China is clearly...
Bringing some flexibility to the talks.
I guess there's some kind of moratorium on increasing the tariffs, working on some of the deal before then.
So, the headline today should be something like this.
President Trump makes big progress in one of the biggest issues ever by negotiating it.
President Trump was right all along that renegotiating trade with China could lead us to a better place after we took a little pain.
That was always the promise.
The promise was never, well, we'll just ask them to give us stuff and then they'll give it to us.
I don't believe he ever made us that promise.
I'm pretty sure that the promise from the start was, If you let me give you some pain, meaning the country, the economy, if you let me do this, it's going to hurt.
Like going to the dentist.
It's going to hurt. It won't hurt everybody equally.
It's going to hurt some of you way more than other people.
Some of you are just going to get kicked around.
Some of you might even go out of business.
It's going to hurt. But when we're done, you can have a much better situation for the long term.
That, my friends, is leadership.
That's what it looks like. Leadership is not, do you like cookies?
Here's some cookies. That's not leadership.
That's making cookies.
Leadership looks like this.
I'm going to do something that's really going to hurt some of you.
I don't want to do it.
But it's better than not doing it.
I'm going to make the adult decision And it's going to really cause some sacrifice on some Americans.
Like war.
Like a lot of things we do.
And so he took the leadership position.
He said, I'm going to introduce some pain on our side, but you haven't seen pain until you see what happens to the other side.
And I'm pretty sure that we have the negotiating leverage.
I tweeted yesterday, one of the top economists who's good at predicting things, who put it very clearly.
He said, when a customer and a seller are negotiating, If the customer is the biggest customer, the customer has the leverage and shall win in the long run a negotiation.
Because we can get our stuff in other places.
Apparently Vietnam was already scrambling to try to take over some of the production from China.
So we always had a dominant negotiating position while at the same time we were unambiguously suffering from bad trade deals that made sense in the past but no longer make sense.
We were intentionally giving China good trade situation To help them develop, etc.
But now that they're a world power, I mean, as big a world power as they are, it didn't make sense anymore.
So how is the news going to handle the fact that at least from this G20 meeting, the president had some of the best results The anti-president ever had.
Now that doesn't mean the trade deal is all wrapped up.
You should expect lots of friction between now and whenever we get a deal.
You should expect at least once or twice, one or both parties will walk away from the table in principle.
In other words, there should be a time or times between now and the time we get a deal with China in which it looks like it's all going to fall apart.
You're always going to get that.
Yeah, it was the same with North Korea.
If you don't get that, you probably don't get to a good ending.
What a successful negotiation looks like is that somewhere around the middle or maybe two-thirds in, one or both sides says, there's no way we can do this.
We walk away. It's the end of the world.
We cannot negotiate this, and there's no way we're going back.
If you don't get that and then go back and make a deal, you don't really have the deal that you need.
So, yeah.
Hold on. So I'm seeing a lot of people ask me today if I believe that my advocacy on the issue of fentanyl made any difference.
So the question is, is there anything that I did that made any difference to what looks like a very positive first step for something to happen?
And the answer is, there's no way to know.
So let me just say some things about it.
So I'll stick with the things that we can know and I won't try to speculate too much or read any minds or go further than what we know.
What I've been saying for three years is that I have an advantage in predicting what will happen because persuaders and negotiators Work along the same lines.
And if you know how to negotiate, you can look at a negotiation and say, okay, I'm a negotiator, so I'm looking at this negotiation that's happening with these other people, and you can kind of tell how it's going to end.
A negotiator can do that, but someone who doesn't negotiate would say, ah, I can't tell which way it's going to go.
And that's what Peter Schiller said, the economist, when he said that the big customer is always going to win the negotiation.
In other words, he was someone who understood negotiating.
So he's telling you, I know it looks bad to you, but trust me on this.
It only goes one direction.
So my point is that if the president does something that I would have done, It doesn't mean it's because I would have done it.
You can't make that connection.
It is more reasonable to say that people who know how to negotiate, people who understand persuasion, are likely to act in similar ways.
So if you see the president do something that's smart, In terms of negotiating, or smart in terms of leverage, smart in terms of persuasion, it's because he's smart in terms of persuasion.
It doesn't have to be more complicated than that.
If you see me saying we should do X, Y, and Z, and they are also smart in terms of persuasion, it's just because I know what persuasion is.
It doesn't mean that the president, who also knows how to do this better than I do, it doesn't mean that he's looking at me for his guidance.
It just means that this is a smart thing to do.
So that's the only thing we can know for sure.
But I will say on top of that, I don't know if anybody was saying before I did that fentanyl should be tied to trade.
Now, the way it was done, it was negotiated before trade was negotiated, and it was tied to it in a, let's say, a political fashion.
That is exactly how I would have done it.
Now that doesn't mean the White House took an idea from me.
It means that they also recognized that that was the smartest way to do it.
The most leverage that the United States will ever have with China was yesterday.
That's the most leverage we'll ever have.
The most leverage we'll ever have in general on China was yesterday.
Because they need this deal.
And so since they need a trade deal, they will of course be flexible on these sort of related things that weren't the big deal to them.
I don't think China really cares about how much fentanyl they're shipping out.
It's probably not their biggest issue.
But by tying it to their biggest issue, they had to check the box to get to their biggest issue, and that's what the president helped them do.
And in so doing, you notice that President Trump, in their statement, the White House statement, they framed it as a great humanitarian gesture.
So the president, responding in kind, In other words, being a productive partner with China.
Instead of saying, yeah, we negotiated hard and we convinced China to do what we want.
We win, they lose.
It was nothing like that. That would have been dumb.
The president explains it as a great humanitarian act.
Does that help the president later?
Yeah, it does. Absolutely.
Because it shows that the president has Xi's back.
You see that? You see how important that is?
You've seen the president do this a number of times with other leaders.
The president will find a way to demonstrate in public that he has somebody's back, which he just did by classifying this as a great humanitarian thing, instead of saying, what took you so long? Because you realize what took you so long would have been a perfectly valid thing to say.
He chose not to.
He took the productive way.
So, that's good stuff.
And watch and see.
I'll be surprised if you see anybody in the mainstream press in any network say what I just told you.
But when I tell you this, you see it, right?
Give me a little feedback.
Is anything I'm saying crazy?
I don't think it is. You see that how the president played this was kind of genius.
It's kind of genius.
So getting back to people asking me what might my role have been in this.
There's no way to know. But I will say this, and it's what I like best about this presidency.
It feels to me like this presidency is audience participation more than any other presidency, maybe more than any future presidency.
But you can see it, can't you?
You can see that the president and his people, they've got a finger on, or let's say they're checking the pulse of social media, They're watching it very closely.
They're watching what ideas bubble up.
They're watching which hashtags get popular.
They're watching how people talk about things.
They're watching how other people are framing things and how they're setting priorities.
And they're choosing among The things which have their own energy so that they can kind of move them forward.
So my contribution in terms of how I intended it to be was to make it easier for the president to do his job.
That's all I wanted to do.
So my only thing I wanted to do was to make it easier.
And if I can put pressure on China, if I can frame it in a way that suggests some frames, suggests some things that maybe bubble up and become part of the idea set, That they can pick and choose from, then I feel like I've added to the, let's say, the diversity of the portfolio of choices.
So those of us in the public who care about this stuff and follow it, when you're doing your social media stuff, You're creating things that might become viral.
They might become hashtags.
They might be a new way of thinking of things.
You really have to see this as not just an observer.
You are not just watching politics.
You're part of it. And if you've got the right idea and the right platform, you know, your little bit of persuasion becomes part of it in a way that we've never seen before.
All right, so that's interesting.
Let me talk about Neil deGrasse Tyson, famous popular, let's say, I'll call him a famous popularizer of science, which is good.
So Neil deGrasse Tyson has been accused by, I guess, three separate women of Me Too-ish stuff.
And he's also a vocal climate alarmist, etc., whose tweets on climate are frankly dumb.
For a guy who's promoting science, some of his climate tweets are very unsciencey.
But that's not what I'm here to talk about.
He published today a defense, if you will, Pretty long description of his version of what these events really were, so that you could compare it to the accusations.
Now, I'm always going to be on the camp of you have to take all these accusations seriously, and your first impression on any accusation should be, Let's take this seriously.
Let's treat this as if this is completely seriously and find out what we can.
Ultimately, the facts and the law have to rule, but take it seriously.
So with Neil deGrasse Tyson, I follow that rule.
I take it seriously. But then I also take seriously his defense.
You can't take one seriously and not the other.
And I read his defense.
And keep in mind that I'm the guy who talks about persuasion being separate from truth.
The truth of these events, I will never know.
It's unknowable.
We'll only know if there's ever any legal anything.
We might know that.
But we're never really going to know what happened.
It's not knowable.
All we can look at is his defense and the accusations.
And I'm going to tell you that his defense was solid.
You might not want to hear this because some of you sort of oppose him because he's pro-climate change alarm or something.
But if he had to look at it just objectively, his defense was pretty solid.
That's the only thing we know.
Don't take that as to say that his defense is the true version and the accuser is the false version.
I'm just telling you that if you read his defense, it's really well crafted.
And it has detail.
And it's very believable, which is completely different from being true, right?
I'm not going to take his side.
I'm not going to say it's true because it's persuasive.
It's just really well written.
So if you get a chance to read that, it's worth it.
Somebody said, should we believe all women?
Now, I didn't say that.
I said you should take all accusations seriously.
That's very different from saying believe all women.
It's very different from saying believe all people who defend themselves.
We can never really know.
but you can take things seriously or not.
Somebody says, no, you should not take criminal accusations seriously.
You kind of should.
Alright, but we won't argue about that.
Yeah, and he had some kind of funny handshake in that story.
I don't know what the heck that's all about.
Mexico's new president took office yesterday.
Anything about that?
Yeah, the only thing about the new president is it seems that Mexico and the United States are becoming closer.
Now, we just saw that, I guess, Jared Kushner got some big national award in Mexico for his part of negotiating the trade deal.
And you're seeing that Mexico seems to be trying to be as productive as possible about the caravan.
So it feels like we've got some people we can really work with.
It looks to me like the situation in Mexico has improved.
What I don't quite understand is why the Mexican government is helpless against the cartels.
I'd love to know what is happening there secretly, but I don't know, we'll ever know.
Yeah, the new president wants to work with Trump.
As far as I know, the new president of Mexico doesn't have any bad...
What would you say?
He doesn't have a bad history with Trump.
I believe he's trying to be productive.
So there's a good chance we'll be able to work with him.
I like where that's heading.
Somebody's saying it's bribes and payoff.
Yeah, maybe so. Maybe so.
We'll never know. Well, we do know that that's a big part of it, but we don't know how much the federal government is influenced by the cartels.
We know the local governments are essentially owned by the cartels.
Will he cut the border wall check?
All right, so here's something I ask you.
My understanding is that the so-called coyotes and the cartels can charge $5,000 to a migrant family for crossing the border.
This is just a brainstormy idea, and you can take it or leave it.
Suppose we created a separate path for immigration.
And that path was, you pay us, instead of the cartel, same amount.
Yeah, where do they get $5,000 is right.
I've never understood that part.
How in the world do these poor immigrants come up with $5,000 to give the Coyotes?
I don't know how they do that.
Why can't we charge that money and just go into competition with the cartels?
Now we would also do our usual vetting, right?
You don't just let anybody in who has $5,000 because terrorists could come in and MS-13 if they had the money.
You still have to do your vetting.
But why not create a separate line for people who want to pay $5,000 toward the wall?
Somebody says it's $2,500 to $3,000.
All right, let's say we undercut the cartels.
We compete with them.
Let's say it's $2,000 a family.
And let's say, how many families do we let in a year?
Let's say 20,000.
Or let's say there might be 20,000 families if we had a legal way to do this.
Alexa, What is 20,000 times 2,000?
20,000 multiplied by 2,000 equals 40 million.
So 40 million is not enough.
I guess I could have done that math in my head.
But it's more fun if I let the robot do it.
So 40 million a year would pay for a little bit of wall.
But apparently we need a few billion.
So I've been telling you that forever we already know where the wall is going to end up.
Don't you? Or this is similar to my point about if you understand how negotiation works and you understand how business works and you understand a little bit how the world works, the wall of negotiation is only going to end up one way.
It's going to end up a smaller amount than 25 billion.
And we'll build some wall and we'll see how it goes.
There's no way it's going to go any other way.
There's no way that there will be no wall because there's always at least funding to maintain the border and some of that will go toward wall.
So there's going to be some wall.
It won't be $25 billion, because that wouldn't even make sense.
But it does make sense for the President to ask for $25 billion so he can get the best offer.
So you don't even have to wonder how that's going to end up.
You only have to ask when, or how it will be reported, or how it will be framed.
But in terms of what's going to happen, You could have predicted that three years ago.
And you could still predict it, and there's only one way it's going to go.
There's going to be some smaller X billion of dollars.
They're going to build a little wall, and they're going to see how it goes.
See if it stops anybody.
See if they just prop a ladder over it and hop over it.
And then you need to rethink your approach.
All right. Like half a dam?
I think the difference with the border wall and the dam analogy is, first of all, analogies never really work because they're just different things.
But you could certainly tell if people have to go somewhere else.
So if people adjust their behavior to go where there's no wall, that tells you it's not easy to go over the wall.
Because think about it. If the wall is sort of the normal, closest, easiest way to get through, they're going to go over it if it's easy.
If it's not, they're going to go somewhere else.
So we'll just see how it goes. Tunnels.
I think the tunnels will be primarily used by the drug traffickers.
I don't see that the wall will have much to do with drug trafficking, actually.
So I've never been on the team that says a wall is going to stop fentanyl.
I mean, you know, a fentanyl package this big can kill like a million people.
You know, about the size of a baseball.
So somebody on one side can just, like, throw a little baseball-sized package over the wall, and that's like enough fentanyl to kill a million people.
So I don't see the wall necessarily stopping fentanyl, but it might help.
You know, in the small, it might help.
Even Australia has drug-smoking problems.
Exactly. You know, what would happen in the future If immigration becomes just out of control, isn't Australia in a weirdly advantaged situation because they're surrounded by ocean?
So even if it became like, all right, everybody can just migrate wherever they want.
We can't stop it.
There's too many of you. Australia's going to do pretty well.
I wonder if anybody's investing in Australia because in 10 years they're going to be advantaged by being able to control their borders.
Just an open question.
Yeah, they're close to places, but those places need boats.
And it's easier to stop a boat than it is to stop somebody walking.
Oh yeah, Peter Thiel went to New Zealand.
Well, New Zealand, same situation.
Alright, I'm going to stop here and let's drink again to good progress on fentanyl and China.
And maybe trade too.
Ah, good stuff.
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