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Dec. 14, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
41:14
Episode 337 Scott Adams: Mika’s Apology, China, Google, and my Plan for Border Funding
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Oh, Joanne is not the first one in for the first time ever.
Must be sick.
Joanne, what's wrong with you?
But in the meantime, hello Marcus and Les and Stefan and Greenskin and Donna and Tyler.
It's good to see all of you.
We got a lot to talk about today.
A lot to talk about.
It's an interesting day.
So yes, there will be a whiteboard talk in which in a moment when we get enough people, I will give you my plan For border funding that everybody will agree with, meaning Pelosi and Trump.
You think I can't do it?
Well, hell, you're wrong.
Solution is at hand, and you're going to hear about it in a few minutes.
But first, let's talk about some of the minor news.
Number one, Mika Brzezinski has apologized for her insensitive comment about Mike Pompeo being a butt boy.
That term, quite properly being considered an insulting derogatory term for gay activities.
And Mika has apologized to the LGBT community, but not to Mike Pompeo.
To which people say, hey, she didn't apologize to Mike Pompeo.
And I say, that's not who she owed an apology to.
Because apologizing among...
High-level political people, that's not really a thing, because their job is to criticize each other.
The fact that she used an anti-gay slur means that she owes an apology to the gay community, which she gave.
She didn't really owe an apology to a high-level politician for disagreeing with his performance or his skill or his character or anything else.
That's just business as usual.
So they can insult each other all they want.
That's sort of what we elected them to do, to fight hard against the other side.
But throwing the gay community under the bus just for a cheap political comment was over the line.
And so I initiated what I call the 48-hour rule.
The 48-hour rule says that if within 48 hours you realize you did something wrong or you need to clarify, and you do within 48 hours, that your apology and or clarification should be accepted.
Now here's the important part of the rule.
You don't have to believe they're sincere.
Because you can't read minds.
The best we can do is ask for people to act in a way that's compatible with society and the greater good.
And issuing an apology, even if in your secret, darkest brain maybe you don't mean it, should be 100% acceptable.
Let's judge people by what they do, not by what we imagine they are thinking.
Now, a number of you pushed back...
On me today because I tweeted that I accepted Mika's apology.
Now, I think you know that Mika and I would not agree on a lot of things related to politics.
That's not the issue.
Some people are saying that it's a one-sided thing, this 48-hour rule, and if we allow the, let's say, the anti-Trump side of the world, if we allow them to get off With an apology, but they don't allow the other team to get off with an apology.
It's a one-sided thing.
You're basically putting down your weapons and surrendering.
To which I say, you're really looking at it wrong.
Mutually assured destruction is what you do when you don't have any other options.
And certainly going hard at the other side would only make them go hard at you.
So it's just mutually assured destruction and that's what you want to avoid.
But here's the way to look at accepting an apology.
When you accept an apology or don't, that is not a statement about the person apologizing.
That is you deciding who you are.
So all of you get to decide who you are.
You can decide that you're the person who's never going to accept an apology.
But then that's who you are.
If that's okay with you, I wouldn't stop you.
It's not my business.
You get to pick who you are.
It is an ineffective strategy in the long run.
I choose I choose to decide who I am as a person who will accept apologies, even if I suspect maybe it's not sincere.
I'm not going to make that a factor.
I'm going to look at what they do, and if they do the thing that I hope they do, I want to apply to them the same standard I would like applied to me.
If I screw up I want somebody to say, well, he clarified.
I'm okay with it.
If I screw up, I want people to say, okay, he messed up, but he apologized.
That's who I want to be.
You could be anybody you want.
Nobody's going to put pressure on you either way.
But someday when I screw up, and you know that's going to happen, And I apologize, because I would, if it was a genuine mistake.
I want to have the moral authority of saying that you should be at least as good as I have been for the past five years or whatever it is by then, and say, I accept apologies.
I would hope you would rise to my level.
And so, in the short run, if you accept apologies from the left but they do not accept apologies from the right, you lose if you think you're on that team and your team is getting fired and losing their jobs.
And that's bad in the short run.
In the long run, It's the only thing that will save the world.
Because in our hyper-connected social media world, we're all kind of insulting people all the time and we don't always mean it.
We have so much contact and we say so many things that the natural character of communication is insulting people even if you didn't mean it.
And lots of times you did.
So if we don't have some kind of a social rule to handle this without letting it go off the rails, we're really in trouble in the long run.
And so I'm trying to suggest that the 48-hour rule for an apology or a correction is super helpful for the future of the world.
Super helpful. I won't ask all of you to participate.
You only need enough people to participate until it becomes part of the consciousness.
Once it becomes part of the consciousness that it's a thing, there is such a thing as the 48-hour rule, and we do observe that people are saying, okay, even if I may not believe you, you have done the right thing.
I don't care what you think.
You've done the right thing with the apology.
Boom. All right.
China's economy apparently is sucking air.
There's new reports that their growth is stunted and that they've even pulled back on the whole...
China 2050 or whatever date they pulled about them dominating everything.
So it looks like China is definitely getting the worst end of the trade deal and it looks like they're getting flexible.
2025 is it?
And it's starting to look like President Trump's approach to China Is historically brilliant.
Meaning it might be, the way it's going, it's too early to say how it will end.
But if it goes the way it's going, President Trump will have taken his place as one of the most Effective and important presidents of all time.
And we're right almost there.
We're almost at the point where if he were removed for office tomorrow, he would still be the most consequential president.
And I will even go this far.
Once President Trump is no longer president, whatever day that is, Even the other side will adopt his best practices.
Not necessarily the insult part.
But the day that he leaves office, even Democrats will adopt his practices.
And what I mean is tough on trade negotiations, for example.
Tough on the border, for example.
Now let us do a little tour around the world.
And see which leaders are doing a better job than President Trump.
Alright, so we'll just do a little tour around the world and see who's doing better.
Is President Putin doing a better job as a leader than President Trump?
Well, Putin is...
his economy...
Doesn't look so hot.
And his reputation doesn't look so hot.
So I would say President Trump is doing a better job than Putin.
I think that's objectively true.
How about China? China's economy is going down.
The U.S. economy just hit its best employment rate in 49 years.
Now the stock market is down, but I would argue that the reason the stock market is down is because the economy is so strong.
Now if you don't understand that statement, You need to learn a little bit more about economics.
The reason that the stock market is down is because the Fed, sensing that the economy was too hot, too strong, they put the brakes on.
And the stock market is just reacting, or some would say overreacting, to what the Fed has done.
The only bad news in the United States for the economy, keep this in mind, the only bad news for the economy in the United States is the stock market, and the only reason it's low is because our economy is too hot, too good.
It was intentionally slowed down.
China is not intentionally slowing down their economy.
President Trump did that for them.
So I would say that President Trump is certainly presiding over the best economy.
Now what about, let's take North and South Korea.
Well, interestingly, that's probably a tie.
I would say, weirdly enough, that the government of North Korea and the government of South Korea are probably operating at the very highest level right now because they're accomplishing something that most people thought just was impossible even a year ago.
And they're taking down borders, they're building railways, they've got commissioners of unification.
So I would say if you're comparing President Trump's performance as a leader to North and South Korea, they're all doing pretty well.
So I would put them sort of in the top tier at the moment, as weird as that sounds.
What about Venezuela?
Okay, well, Venezuela is a basket case.
What about any country in South America or Central America?
Are there any leaders there who are doing better than President Trump?
Maybe. I don't know of any.
How about Europe? How about Great Britain?
Does Great Britain look like they have their shit together right now?
Not to me. No, they do not look like they've got it together.
Great Britain is suffering. What about France?
France literally just had rioting because they weren't enough like President Trump.
Right? There's no way, if you were to compare Macron to Trump, it's no contest.
Trump is clearly the stronger leader and who made the right choices in this case.
Compare Trudeau.
He's getting slapped around a little bit.
I think the President of the United States is clearly a higher rated leader than him at the moment.
So, if you were to look at President Trump's performance by itself, you have the luxury of saying, well, if some other imaginary president was here, could do even better.
But we don't have that comparison.
There is no other imaginary president.
But if you compare the president...
Oh, Poland. Somebody said Poland is doing well.
I think that's true.
I don't know enough about Poland.
But Poland doing okay.
I believe. I need some fact-checking on that.
So I would say that President Trump, if you compare him to the major other leaders, is looking not only good, but prescient and super effective.
Take the Middle East. Well, I would say, yeah, in the Middle East, Israel's looking strong.
Some of the countries in the Middle East are doing fine, actually, leadership-wise.
But I would say the president is still top of the pack of that group.
All right, enough of that. I tweeted around an article in which Nancy Pelosi...
Was saying something that sounded like the opposite of what she's been saying lately.
Sounded like, she seems to be all over the map on this, but seemed to say that investigating the president or talking endlessly about, you know, the legal stuff, she was downplaying that and saying that maybe we should, you know, get off of that topic and get onto the work of the people.
Now, who knows if that will change tomorrow or whatever, but it's certainly an indication that the Democrats, or at least the Democrats who are somewhere in the middle, think that it makes sense to get stuff done.
They like to get stuff done instead of just fighting, and I think that's smart.
Now let me tell you a bad negotiating technique that Nancy Pelosi used.
Recently she said that building a wall was immoral.
But here's the thing.
In the past, she has supported building some wall and funding it.
Was it immoral before?
The trouble with saying something is immoral is it's hard to change your mind after you've said that.
If you say something is uneconomical and then somebody comes up with a way to make it economical, you can say, oh, okay, we found a way to do it.
Or we have to do it anyway, whatever.
But if you say something is immoral, and you make that your principal stand during a negotiation, you've given away your ability to compromise.
It's actually a really bad strategy.
So I don't know how she recovers from that, but I've got an idea for solving the border wall funding.
I'll get to that in a minute. Um...
Some of you are following my complaints about Google.
Google, if you did a search on my name, Scott Adams, you would find a whole bunch of images, not a bunch, but in the top six images, you would see photoshopped pictures of me photoshopped into a Nazi uniform.
And they were the first thing that would come up on the homepage, you know, if you googled my name.
Well, that's been fixed.
That has been fixed since I complained about it yesterday.
I don't know exactly what happened or who did what.
But the homepage no longer shows those uniforms.
But if you click on images, they're still in the top ten.
Now it could be because so many people were clicking on it yesterday because I made a stink about it yesterday.
It could be that just the traffic that I drove to it is causing those images to come up higher.
So I'm going to wait. I'm going to wait a week.
Remember I said yesterday I was going to wait, see what happens.
Because there was no chance that Google wouldn't hear about it.
I have enough of a footprint and it's a big enough issue.
It ties in with the headlines, etc.
So there was no question that something would be done if they found out about it and wanted to do something about it.
And it looks like maybe they did.
So I'm going to hold off On that because there was an adjustment.
I don't know who did it or why or what's behind it, but it did change.
All right. So that's a wait and see.
I have a correction within 48 hours of my own mistake.
I tweeted yesterday that President Trump was the most pro-LGBTQ president ever.
And a lot of people got on me for that, and I said, well, give me an example.
And they mentioned some transgender examples about the military.
What was the other example?
Something about the military, but basically protections.
And I thought to myself, good point.
I accept that fact check.
And I have to admit that when I write LGBTQ, I sometimes forget what the T stands for.
That's the transgender part.
So if you were to look at only transgender, you could make a case, well, a strong case, that Obama was stronger and that President Trump is less supportive of that community.
Now, Not without reasons, because if you're talking about the military, and I'm not up on the full military thinking about what their reasoning is about transgender, but the military is the one place in society that we allow and even encourage discrimination.
Everywhere else in society, you want to get rid of discrimination wherever you can.
But in the military, since readiness and defense are more important than some niceties, the military takes trade-offs that you would not see in the rest of society.
So the military is making a discrimination decision, it seems, about transgender.
And it must, I don't know the details, but it must have something to do with expense or readiness.
Maybe there's some ongoing treatments that you need, something like that.
I don't know exactly the reasoning, but keep in mind that the military would discriminate against me.
If I tried to join the military, they would say, you're too old.
But everywhere else in society, age discrimination would be a thing, right?
But not in the military. If I had one leg, or I were blind, or I were deaf, I couldn't get in the military.
And I want to avoid the problem of acting like transgender is a medical problem.
So I don't want to say it's a problem.
I think that would be bad form.
So I don't want to equate transgender with being blind or missing an eye or something.
But in terms of medical costs, they both have a medical cost element to it.
But I'm not putting a judgment on it.
I think transgender is a real thing that people have to deal with in their life.
So I guess I'm very empathetic Two people who are transgender, great empathy.
But the military does get to discriminate for practical reasons.
If their practical reasons are not good ones, They need to change them.
If their practical reasons do test out in terms of common sense and expense, then unfortunately they get to continue to discriminate.
So it's a special case. But I will say that President Trump is the most pro- LG president.
He's the most pro-gay and lesbian president.
I think that is objectively true because he's the first one who came into office okay with gay marriage.
I don't think that's happened before.
But the T part of LGBTQ, I would say Obama was more pro- But you have to weigh in, you know, what is the reasoning behind it?
And some of it is just practical.
It's not intended to be discriminatory.
Which doesn't help you a bit if you happen to be transgender.
All right. I would like to recommend that if you've not already got your Dilbert calendars and Dilbert books, if you have not bought your copy of Win Bigley, hurry up.
It's Christmas time. And how about I make a deal?
I'll make a deal with you. I'm going to describe on my whiteboard how to solve wall funding.
I propose that this idea is so solid that the government will adopt it.
That's how strong it is.
That once you see it, you're going to say, oh shit, that's obvious now.
And the wall funding will be done.
If I accomplish this, How many of you will agree to buy a Dilbert calendar or a book or win Bigly?
Can I make a deal?
If I can solve wall funding in the next five minutes, I'm totally serious.
I'm totally serious that the idea I'm going to show you will solve wall funding.
Absolutely. It's over as soon as I show you this.
Alright, many of you are saying yes and therefore I will go to the board.
Here's our situation when it comes to wall funding.
You've got the Democrats and the GOP and they have essentially the same opinion with a little bit of difference.
The same opinion is that both of them want strong border security.
Why do we know that? They say that.
They say it all the time.
Give me some strong border security.
What do they also say?
Some of it needs to be wall and some of it needs to be other.
Do you know what that is? This is two groups that are in complete agreement.
They're in complete agreement.
Does Nancy Pelosi know exactly where to engineer walls and exactly where it would be better to have a fence or electronic means?
No. Nancy Pelosi is not an engineer.
She doesn't claim to be an engineer.
Does Donald Trump, who does know a lot about construction, know a lot about where to build a wall versus where to use electronic means?
No. He does not claim that expertise.
Who knows where to put the wall and where to put something else?
Engineers, engineers.
The solution is...
These two have to stop arguing about how much is wall and how much is not because they both agreed some needs to be wall.
Where do you put the wall? You put the wall where a wall is the most useful way to get the job done.
Where do you not put the wall?
You not put the wall.
That's not a sentence, but you don't put the wall.
Where it doesn't make sense, in those places you put other.
Is it 75% wall and 25% not, or the reverse?
Is it 25% wall and 75% not?
Do you know who doesn't know the answer to that question?
Nancy Pelosi, President Trump.
They're not engineers.
Do you know what makes engineers different from politicians?
Probably a lot of you are engineers or you know engineers.
What is the main thing that makes an engineer different from a politician?
Facts. I would say it more starkly.
Engineers do not lie for a living.
In fact, if you're an engineer and you lie for a living, I hope you get fired pretty quickly because you're a bad engineer.
Engineers Are not going to build the wrong wall for political reasons.
That would be very unusual, especially if it's a panel.
You know, if you had one engineer, maybe you get the wrong one, right?
But if you have a panel of engineers and you say, look, here's five billion dollars.
Figure out where the wall will be and where it isn't and get going.
Do whatever makes sense.
Come up with a plan. And we won't be the engineers because I'm not an engineer and I'm not an engineer.
BAM! This is what will happen.
It might happen right away.
It might happen later.
But there isn't any chance this won't happen.
This will happen.
Because these two are basically in agreement, but they can't get past the political problem of looking like somebody won and somebody lost.
So the solution is some solution in which both can claim complete victory.
Does this allow for both of them to claim total victory?
Yes, it does.
Because do you think President Trump...
Ever wanted to build a wall where it was not economical to do so?
No. He never wanted that.
He wanted plenty of wall.
That's my own words.
And the engineers, I'm sure, would see that he got it.
Suppose the engineers said, look, we've looked at all the options, and we have an even better option than a wall.
And they were credible.
And they went to the president and said, We looked at your wall, we looked at these other means, electronic and otherwise, and the other means are more economical and maybe get the job done better.
What do you say, Mr.
President? Do you think the President is going to say, no, I still want a wall, even though a panel of engineers has shown me how a wall is the least effective solution for maybe parts of it?
There is no way that President Trump Experienced in construction is going to disagree with the engineers.
I'll bet in the history of President Trump's construction business, he's never sat with a panel of engineers who were engineering a building, and they said, hey, if you don't put this column here, your building will fall down.
Do you think there's ever a time when President Trump said, yeah, I hear what you engineers are saying, but don't put a column there anyway, and then the building fell down?
That happens zero times.
If you work in construction, you listen to the engineers.
Period. Period.
There's no exception to that.
Nobody's going to take that liability.
Nobody thinks they know more than the engineers if they're not engineers.
Nancy Pelosi, same story.
So, if they agree to kick it up to a panel of engineers, You should probably try to get some liberals and some conservatives on the panel, but I don't even know if that makes a difference.
Because engineers are not going to engineer a bad solution.
They're not going to engineer feelings into their design.
And if they did, it would be obvious, so they'd have to go back to the drawing board.
This gives both sides a way to say we got what we want.
Dems say we don't want more wall than makes sense.
Bingo! Engineers give it to them.
President says, I want all the wall I can get, but no more than is right.
Bingo! Engineers give it to him.
Both parties claim total success, get their wall, take five billion, probably makes sense.
Doesn't have to be exactly that number, but that probably is the right amount.
Now, now that you've heard it, can you imagine that it will go, can you imagine it will go any other direction?
Now that you've seen this solution, do you think it could go any other way?
I'm buying books, somebody say.
Yeah, it's impossible to see this going any other way, isn't it?
And the weird thing about this is that The parties were already in agreement on the substantive part of it, that we need a bunch of money, that it should be a combination of wall and other things, and that the people who are talking about it are not the ones who know what percentage should be wall.
Pelosi and Trump and Schumer are actually in complete agreement.
And I would think they are also in complete agreement that they are not engineers and should not be making the exact decision of what's a wall and what's a fence and what's an electronic kind of technique.
Somebody says, I see Dems just digging in.
Imagine if you will.
Imagine, if you will, that President Trump or somebody prominent suggests this plan.
Let's kick it up to the engineers and stop being politicians being engineers.
The first person who says that has taken the high ground.
That's the high ground.
I talk about this in Win Bigly.
Whoever takes the high ground ends the conversation.
Because once you have the high ground, people go, oh crap, that's the high ground.
Imagine if you will.
It doesn't matter who says it first, Pelosi or Trump or somebody on their teams.
Whoever says this first has ended the conversation.
Because to disagree with this is just stupid.
Would anybody push back on that?
To disagree with this path feels to everyone who looks at it as stupid.
Now, until you've heard this path, until it's been described, you're all forgiven for not thinking of it.
And in fact, frankly, I didn't think about it until yesterday.
It took me until yesterday to even think of this.
And once you see it, now that you've seen it, Isn't it obvious to you that it's the only way it can go?
It's the only solution, and it's also guaranteed.
It just took somebody to think of it or to say it.
And now it's impossible that it will go any other direction.
So it might take a while.
It might be other words.
It might be maybe not a panel of engineers, but it's going to look something like this.
You know, one of the things that Americans can agree on...
There's so much we disagree on, right?
We Americans just love to disagree.
I don't know if we're the most disagreeable nation on Earth.
If we are, I'm proud of it, because I think it would be part of the strength.
But we love to disagree about stuff.
And there are only a few things...
That we can completely agree on.
If you think about it, the United States doesn't even agree on, let's say, respecting the flag.
You know, you think that would be just basic.
But you can even get a disagreement on that.
But I'm going to say something that nobody disagrees with.
Are you ready? Here's the one thing every American agrees with.
American engineers are awesome.
That's it. It's like the one thing everybody in the whole frickin' country agrees with.
American engineers are awesome.
So let's get some engineers on the job.
Let's get the politicians out of the job of engineering.
What's the plan?
Well, I just described the plan.
*Sigh* Yes, we got this.
See, the engineers are already on the job.
They created the Google algorithm.
They also fixed the Google algorithm.
Apparently. So, I would say that in the next week, you're going to see this idea bubble up.
This is another good example.
Actually, this would be a perfect test case.
If you ever wanted to be a test case for this concept, this would be it.
So I've said before, That the government of the United States has morphed from a republic to something in which social media is really in charge.
Because the politicians can't really go against social media, it would be too expensive.
So if social media forms an opinion that's pretty weighted in one direction, the politicians are going to eventually go that way as well.
And social media is influenced by Usually good viral ideas.
So, if this idea has merit, it will grow.
Because this launch pad of this Periscope is big enough that it always gets to the right people.
So I can guarantee you that there are enough people watching this Periscope who just heard this idea and just said, holy crap, that actually totally solves it.
And they will either tweet it or mention it or retweet it or whatever.
So if it's a good idea, it will grow.
And if it grows enough, it will be impossible for the government to ignore it.
And so this will be a test.
Because I think you've never seen a more unambiguously better idea that's so obviously the solution to this situation.
If this one doesn't bubble up, nothing will.
So this is a perfect test case.
Engineers have the knack.
That's a good callback.
Not everybody knows what that refers to.
And it's scalable.
That is correct. It is something you could start small, And you could see how it goes as you go.
So you could build a little bit of fence, a little bit of wall, a little bit of electronic whatever.
I'm not sure what the electronic fence maybe.
That would be the way to talk about it.
And you can see which ones work better.
And then as you continue building, you take what you learned from the first parts you put in and you say, ah, it looks like the wall didn't work, but the electronic fence did, so we'll do more of that.
Depends on what goal you give the engineers.
The engineers should only ever be given an objective.
Keep people out at this price.
Keep people out of the country at a reasonable price.
Alright. What if the engineers are bleeding heart globalists?
Well, I think you would have to ask them before you put them on the panel, is it your objective to build a border security or not?
The thing with engineers is they're not good liars.
And if you have a panel of engineers and you get a couple people in there that are bad actors, the other engineers will identify them pretty quickly.
What about tunnels?
Well, that's what engineers have to figure out.
They have to figure out what to do about the tunnels.
You know, one of my ideas was we should...
Here's another idea that's not as good as this one.
So apparently the coyotes charge $5,000 per family or something like that to take people across the border.
What if we charged $1,000?
What if we undercut the cartel price?
And if somebody came here with $1,000, they could have, you know, they could have spent $5,000 with the Coyotes.
But if they come here with $5,000, maybe we put them on a fast track and give them a job.
If they pay us $5,000, that would have gone to the Coyotes.
The beauty is that it would starve the cartels.
And it would get people into a legal process and not an illegal process.
And they would effectively be buying their way to some better process.
Now the better process could simply be they don't get citizenship, but they get to work.
Maybe they don't have all the benefits of a citizen.
But you would essentially be using capitalism to undercut the cartels and make their business uneconomical while using that thousand dollars to pay for the wall.
You're welcome. Yeah, and the people who pay us to come in would simply be first in line for the jobs that the illegals would have gotten.
So the people who pay five thousand dollars to a coyote First of all, they've overpaid because it's $5,000 instead of $1,000.
And secondly, they're still illegal when they reach the country.
But the people who pay the United States $1,000, they don't pay the cartels, and they get into a legal process where they're a legal temporary worker, they get their money, they earn it back, etc.
Something like that. Alright, that's all I've got for now.
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