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Dec. 20, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:11:23
Episode 343 Scott Adams: Syria, The Wence, AOC Complains About Fake News and Leaving Patreon
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
Hello, Kate. Hello, Tyler.
Hello, Jeremy, Sharona, Mike.
Get on in here.
You know what time it is.
And surprisingly, there's a lot of news for this close to Christmas.
I was hoping our president would not let us down and he would give us some fresh meat to chew on.
And he did. He threw us a good load of fresh meat.
And if you check CNN today, You'll see that all of the president's legal woes are totally off the page.
Let's talk about that in a minute after we enjoy the simultaneous sip.
Because this is Coffee with Scott Adams.
and if you are prepared, you have your cup, your mug, your glass, your stein, your chalice, and you're ready to lift it to your lips to join me for the simultaneous sip.
Oh, that's good stuff.
So, yeah, lots of stuff going on today.
If you literally look at CNN, the page was covered with Cohen this, and Flynn this, and legal jeopardy, and the new Congress is gonna sue him, and it's lawyers, lawyers, lawyers, lawyers.
And the president just wiped all of that out of the headlines.
With one tweet. Maybe we should get out of Syria.
Gone. There's no other story today.
Now, here's the beauty of the Syria story.
Beauty number one.
We the citizens, we the people, do not know enough to have a qualified, let's say, a useful opinion about Syria.
Here are the things that I would want to know in order to have a better sense of whether this is a good idea or a bad idea.
And I'll give you some context.
Let's say this was a big company.
Let's say it was a Fortune 500 company, and the CEO of this company is Donald Trump.
And the CEO announces that they're going to make some big change in the company.
Doesn't matter what it is.
They're going to add a new product, they're going to subtract a product, they're going to move a headquarters, anything big.
What percentage of the company Including the people who know the most, you know, the people who are closer to the decision.
How many of them support the CEO in any big decision about a Fortune 500 company?
What percentage do you think?
The people saying 90 and 100%, I don't think you've ever worked at a big company.
The people saying 50 and 20 and 40 percent and 30 percent, you have worked at a big company.
Right? So you're seeing more reasonable estimates coming in.
So you could tell the people who have worked at big companies.
Because the people who are saying that half or fewer are going to support the CEO no matter what.
Half or fewer are going to say, yeah, that's a great idea, CEO. And the other half, or maybe more, are going to say, I'm not so sure about this.
Our CEO is crazy.
He's impulsive. He did not listen to the experts.
Why is he not listening to the experts within the company?
So the first context you have to know Is that the ordinary business of being a CEO is making the hard decisions and having often even the majority of your company tell you it's the wrong decision.
So when you see the president, President Trump, make a decision about Syria and then you read the news about all of the top level people who know the most about Syria and you see them saying, my God, it's a mistake.
The first thing you should tell yourself is, that's normal.
And it doesn't tell you whether it's a mistake or not.
Because here's the other thing you learn from watching CEOs in big businesses.
They will make the unpopular decision.
And sometimes it works out.
More often than not, the problem that everybody sees is not as big as people thought.
More often than not, people can just figure it out.
So the president brought the idea up about eight months ago, and everybody said, no, no, no, we can't do it that quickly, it's bad.
And so the president, like any CEO said, then do it in six months.
He waited eight, and now he's saying, all right, I waited.
Time to do it.
And there's still people saying, no, no, no, don't do it.
Now, who is right?
And how would we know?
You can listen to lots of experts say it's a bad idea.
You can listen to Lindsey Graham say it's a bad idea.
But here's the things you don't know.
What you don't know is that any of them are playing bad cop.
You don't know. Because Lindsey Graham could be playing a role, which is, all right, I'm going to make it look like this is hard for the president to do, and I'm going to oppose him.
Because that would give them the greatest leverage in negotiating some kind of a larger thing in the Middle East that I'll talk about in a minute.
So you can't necessarily trust that Lindsey Graham is against the president versus pretending to be against the president because it would be the best thing for him to do.
If Graham were working with the president, The best thing for him to do would be to put a strong front of opposing him.
Because then it looks like that whatever the president is doing, if he's doing it as part of a larger negotiation, it looks like he's giving up more.
That the president is taking more personal political risk because even his own team isn't supporting him here.
So you can't rule that out.
I'm not saying that's the case.
Perfectly reasonable to assume that Lindsey Graham just disagrees.
He's kind of a hawk on these places.
And they don't want to make the same mistake that they made in Iraq.
But the point is, you can't know for sure who's telling the truth and who's playing a role because this is part of a larger negotiation and everybody's playing a role.
They're not just saying what they believe in every case.
The other thing we don't know is apparently there are only 2,000 American troops in Syria.
Do I have that right? How much can you get done with 2,000 troops?
How much were they doing?
How much of those 2,000 troops done in terms of let's say on the ground combat in the past six months?
Now if they're special forces and they have air support You can get a lot done, right?
2,000 people with American air support?
That's going to take out pretty much any nest of ISIS. It would have to be an enormous force for those forces not to be able to take them out.
But how much have they done for the last six months?
Have you seen a report or will you see a report?
When you turn on CNN today, will there be a report that says that of our 2,200 people, somebody's saying closer to 5,000, but we'll see.
So fact-check me on that.
But of our, let's say, few thousand, of our few thousand, how many of them were fighting troops?
And how many of them were support?
Because I would imagine that with 2,000 people, there can't be more than...
300 who are actually combat?
500 maybe?
Somebody help me out if there's anybody who's got a better sense of combat logistics.
Is there kind of a 3 to 1 support to 3 to 1 somebody say?
3 to 1 support For the peoples?
Yeah, so maybe there were 300 to 500 actually firing weapons, right?
So here's the question.
And then of the 300 to 500 who were firing weapons, How many clumps of them were there?
How many were a fighting unit that would go out and do a specific mission?
Is it 50 in a group?
So it's 5 or 10 groups?
How big is it?
If we don't see that reporting, Could you know exactly whether it matters if we leave or not?
If you don't see today some kind of report that says how many actual fighters we had and what they actually did for the last six months, could you really know how important it is to keep them there versus leaving?
Can't really know. So that's the first thing.
And I suspect that we will not have good reporting on that.
Somebody's saying, what an idiot.
I'll get rid of you.
All right, so here's a few other things we know or we don't know about Syria.
The biggest thing we don't know about Syria is whether this is part of a larger conversation.
Is it part of a grand deal for the Middle East?
And I'm going to give you the most optimistic point of view.
Doesn't mean this is true.
But I'm going to paint two pictures, and you tell me if the facts fit picture one or picture two better.
Picture one looks like what CNN will report, which, by the way, is hilarious because the president has made MSNBC and CNN and all of the haters.
The president has made the Democrats the pro-war party.
So he's got all the Democrats because they have to oppose whatever he does.
Arguing that we should keep our military in another country.
And you have the Republican hawk The person that the Democrats were most worried about, saying, why don't we get our troops out of this other country?
We have no business there.
So he's completely reversed the story there.
So that's funny. But here are the two, let's call them two movies.
So one of them is that the president is, as CNN will paint him, a big old impulsive dope.
Who didn't ask anybody in advance, doesn't care about the outcome, is not getting into the details as much as he should, has disagreed with the experts, disagreed with Mattis, and made a gigantic mistake by pulling people out too quickly.
So that's one movie.
Now do the facts support that movie?
And the answer is yes.
Yes. But the facts might support more than one movie, so it doesn't mean that this one's true just because the facts support it.
So the things we know are that there will be lots of people who say they didn't like it.
I'm sure that will be in evidence.
We probably will hear that there are people who should have been consulted who weren't, at least not recently.
He's had six months to think about it, so he's probably talked to a lot of people in the last six months about this topic, but maybe in the last week he didn't consult anybody about making the decision.
So yes, the movie that says he's a big old impulsive dope who didn't ask anybody and he's making a giant mistake definitely fits the facts.
But of course, we don't have all the facts.
I'm just saying it fits the facts that are in evidence by CNN and the people who hate the president.
Now, is there another movie that also fits the facts?
And there is. And this one's interesting.
In the other movie, this is part of a larger strategy.
And let me just kind of tell you all the pictures, all the pieces of the puzzle, and then it might come into focus in your head.
The president, if there's one thing he's good at that even his critics would say, he's really good at knowing what matters.
Wouldn't you say that that's a fair statement?
That even his biggest critics Would guess that he's good at knowing what matters, especially matters to people's psychology.
He knows what's important.
For example, in the economy, he knew that getting rid of some regulations and working on jobs and getting our optimism up would be good.
Those were exactly the important things for him to be working on, etc.
So he's really good at knowing what's important.
That's the first thing. So one movie that fits all the facts is that he's working a bigger play.
That there's just a bigger play in the Middle East.
And what would it look like if the Middle East were shaping up for a grand deal?
What would be all of the variables that would be swirling around and starting to come into place?
Well, one of them would be where does the US designate as the capital of Israel.
So we've already gotten past the Jerusalem is the capital of Israel decision.
Now, part of what the president did there was he took it off the table.
So instead of becoming a big thing to negotiate, he just said, all right, this is no longer a negotiation.
This one got settled.
And it did kind of get settled.
So you would expect to see that get settled if something bigger were going to happen.
You would also expect that Israel's walls would be working.
In other words, that Israel's strength and fate would be more secure than ever So that everybody who opposes them would say, ah, there's just no point.
No matter what we do to Israel, every year they're stronger.
Every year it's harder to attack.
Every year we have less chance of winning.
And that's the case.
The other thing you'd want to see is that some of the Arab countries that are traditionally anti-Israel, whether officially or not officially, would start to move toward Israel and away from the Palestinians and away from Iran.
And sure enough, There may be a factor that the Jashoggi death happened.
I think you'll see that Saudi Arabia will be more flexible because they need to kind of do something good.
And there was a report that Saudi Arabia might either take a trip to Israel or get closer to recognizing Israel, etc.
So you would expect exactly that to be happening if something good was shaping up over there.
The other thing you'd expect to happen is that the Yemen conflict, in which Saudi Arabia and Iran are backing different sides, you would expect that Yemen would have to be talking some kind of a peace for anything good to happen in the Middle East.
And indeed, Yemen has announced that they're planning on peace talks.
And the US has pulled out its air support and is putting some pressure on Saudi Arabia to wrap something up.
So you would expect to see that happening if there was going to be anything bigger happening in the Middle East.
The other thing, and maybe the most important thing, is that you would expect to see Iran Either getting flexible or pushed so hard that they will soon have to be flexible.
And indeed, we're seeing that.
We're seeing that Iran is not advancing on the battlefield, as far as I know.
And we're seeing that Iran is getting bled dry and its economy is falling apart.
Its own population is starting to rebel.
And Iran is going to be desperate.
If not flexible.
So you would expect to see that if things were about to go in the right direction.
So, let's talk about Syria.
Under any scenario, correct me if I'm wrong, under any scenario, wasn't Russia going to own Syria no matter what?
And Russia working with Iran, perhaps, may be taking some responsibility for Syria.
But was there any chance That Russia would leave its control of Syria.
Not really, right?
There was no scenario in which we thought that was going to happen.
So if we get out of Syria, that leaves it to, some say, Russian influence and Iranian influence.
Now of the two, which one is safer for Israel?
Well, Russia is safer.
So if you're Israel, you would want Russia to have more control in Syria and you would want Iran to have less.
If you were Putin and the United States came to you and said, here's the deal.
If you push Iran out of Syria for us, we would really appreciate that and we'll let you do it.
Now I'm not saying that that's the deal.
I'm just painting a picture in which you can start to imagine how everything is connected.
So let's say there was some effort to come up with a bigger deal.
It would look like Russia getting its way.
It would look like Russia having, you know, its way in Syria.
And the main reason, the main way that Russia could have its way in Syria would be if the U.S. gets out and lets Russia dominate Iran, because of course they would.
I can't see a scenario in which Russia would say, you know, you know, Iran is here too.
We love Iran. Iran is our ally.
You know, Iran, why don't you dominate some of Syria with us?
I don't see that happening, do you?
I see Putin increasing his influence until Iran is not really part of the Syrian deal, except maybe sending some money in or something.
So here's the big thing to look for.
Look for what happens between Russia and Iran.
Because if part of the conversation about the U.S. getting into Syria involves more Russia in Syria, then probably Israel could maybe live with that because Russia at least likes Israel.
They don't seem to have any problem with each other.
So I would look for that.
I would argue that with the United States pulling into Syria, which removes, by the way, a huge psychological point of provocation.
If you're Iran, let's say you're Iran and behind the scenes you're getting flexible because you have to.
You've noticed that Iran has not made a lot of noise about we're going to build up our nuclear weapons?
You haven't heard that, have you? Why is it that Iran, who is not shy, is not waving his fists and saying, we're going to build up our nukes because of your economic pressure on us?
They're sort of quiet, aren't they?
Isn't Iran sort of suspiciously quiet?
Makes it feel as if they're actually talking to us, doesn't it?
I feel like they're talking behind the scenes.
So if you were talking to Iran and you were saying, look Iran, what we want you to do is back off of Israel, back off of your support for your proxies, back off of your support for suicide bombers, back off in Yemen.
If we wanted Iran to back off on all those places we care about, what would they ask from us?
What would they want from us?
Well, they might want the US military to get out of Syria.
That might be the main thing they wanted.
And if we only had 2,000 troops there, and if the Russians were going to essentially take care of business whether we're there or not, it could be Part of a larger conversation.
So don't be surprised if you see Yemen negotiated to some kind of a peace deal because Saudi Arabia has pressure from us and Iran has pressure from us and everybody else to make that work.
So you might see Yemen negotiating peace.
You might see Saudi Arabia reaching out to Israel in a way they never have before.
You might see Iran being okay with backing off of its support for Hezbollah and for some of the anti-Israel forces.
You might see them making a deal to not build nukes so that they could rebuild their economy.
And you might see Hamas being isolated by everybody.
So you might see Hamas and anybody who is in favor of terrorism over there, you might see them isolated.
And it might look like a big old deal.
Now I've painted two pictures.
One of them imagines that President Trump is a good negotiator, And that on his team is Jared Kushner, who has been working behind the scenes for something like a Middle East deal.
Now, if I told you that Jared Kushner has been working on something for a long time that was very hard to get, and he's working with President Trump, would you say to yourself, hey, that team can get stuff done?
Well, that team is the team that got you prison reform.
That seemed nearly impossible before Kushner and Trump teamed up.
So we know that Jared plus the president can get stuff done that didn't look like it could be done.
We also saw, and I believe this is right, that Jared Kushner was instrumental in negotiating the deal with Mexico and Canada So the new trade deal.
That was probably pretty hard to do.
So we may have two examples of where Jared Kushner, working quietly behind the scenes, combined with President Trump's instincts and power, can get something done that it didn't look like other people could get done.
Did it seem unusual to you that President Trump would take so much heat For not going hard as Saudi Arabia because of the Khashoggi thing.
Well, you know, we know that Jared Kushner had had, I don't know if he still does, a good relationship with Prince Salman.
And it looked to me like the president was trying to maintain that for larger reasons.
And so, the question I ask you, which of these two movies Fits the facts best.
Movie number one, the president is an impulsive big old dope who ignored all the experts and made a hasty deal that will be a huge mistake.
That does fit the facts, the public facts, right?
The real facts are all below the surface and we don't have access to them.
But what you're looking at and what will be reported in the headlines is gonna look a lot like that, right?
Movie number two, Jared Kushner is very effective, very strategic, and he plus the president are an insanely good team for getting the strategy right as well as the persuasion.
And they've been working on a Middle East deal, we know that to be true, for a while.
And we know that the president has protected Prince Salman, so that tells me he's probably important to something.
He's protecting him because he's important to something else.
That part seems clear.
We know that Iran is weakened.
We know that Yemen is starting to talk.
We know that Israel would not be abandoned by this president.
If you see Israel complaining about the US pulling out, consider that that might be part of the plan.
That they can complain so it doesn't look like the President can easily do this.
You want the President to look like he's making a big personal and political sacrifice by pulling out.
That's the look that gives him the most negotiating power.
Because then you can say to somebody else, look, in order for me to pull out, I will actually risk losing the next election.
That's how much risk I'm going to put into this working out in the Middle East.
Then you can go to the other leaders and say, look, The most important leader here, President Trump, put his own career on the line by pulling out of Syria.
Now, step up. He put his career on the line to support Saudi Arabia in a time when, frankly, they didn't deserve it.
They did not deserve our support.
But he put his career on the line for a larger win.
So that puts pressure on other leaders to step up.
Is Israel going to have to accept something that maybe is less than what they wanted?
Probably. Probably.
To get something bigger, they're all going to have to step up.
Here's what I'd be looking for in the next few months to confirm or disconfirm the theory that the Syria move is part of a larger chess game.
And that would be some kind of movement from Iran.
So if you see Iran, Start to get flexible.
That would support the movie that the president knows what he's doing.
He's working with Kushner.
There's actually a bigger strategy.
And no, he did not ask every expert over there for the military situation, because it could be that Putin's going to take care of it.
And our military would not love that at all.
But I don't care. I mean, personally, do you care if Putin kills ISIS or we kill ISIS or the people we arm kill ISIS? Then the next, I don't want to forget this because it's important, but there's the risk that Turkey will go after the Kurds that we've armed and who have fought on our side for so long.
And it would be a very bad form for the U.S. to abandon important military allies to be slaughtered by Turkey.
But Turkey is a NATO ally.
Now, we don't agree with them on a lot of things, but they are a NATO ally.
Do you think that this president would abandon the Kurds without having a deal worked out with Turkey?
Now, it might be that he still needs to work that deal out and it hasn't been finalized, but it feels like Turkey...
Well, let me put it this way.
If we pull out of Syria...
And Turkey slaughters our allies.
What do you think this president would do to them?
Turkey would be in a lot of trouble.
For one thing, we'd probably kick him out of NATO. I don't know if we could do that unilaterally, but probably could get close to it.
So Turkey would have a horrible price to pay.
If we pull out and they fill the vacuum and slaughter the people that we left or try to take them over one way or the other, they would have a horrible price to pay.
Trump, I think, would just crush them if they did that.
Because it would be a humanitarian crisis.
It would be the sort of thing that an ally shouldn't do.
So they can't be our ally if they do that.
Alright, here's the next topic.
In a humorous news story, a German journalist for Der Spiegel, one of their biggest publications, who is also, here's the funny part, he had been named in a prior year the CNN Journalist of the Year.
So the CNN named Journalist of the Year, who didn't work for CNN, he was another independent journalist, but they named him Journalist of the Year.
It's been discovered that something like 17 out of 60 of his articles were just totally made up.
So CNN named as Journalist of the Year, somebody who literally made up news.
And you can't make up a story like that Well, I guess that was a funny thing to say.
Apparently you can make up a story like that because the CNN's Journalist of the Year made up stories like that.
That's what he did. 17 and a 60 of them were just completely made up.
And he would pretend that there was a protagonist in the story who was a gritty little survivor who made it through this or that tragedy.
But it turns out he was just making it all up.
Or a lot of it. Alright, so that's funny.
The other thing that's funny is Alexandra Octavio Cortez Did not like an article in Politico about her.
And so she tweeted her criticisms, very sharp criticisms, about the fake news media.
She complained that the sources were all secret sources, and she implied that they were inaccurate.
Now, here's what's funny about that.
Number one, is it fair for her to attack the media for this story?
And the answer is, yeah, it's totally fair, right?
Is there anybody who disagrees with her for saying that the media is inaccurate and their secret sources are not credible?
I think we all agree with that, right?
The funny part is that for the past three years we've been hearing That to criticize the media is to be a dictator.
So, we're having this weird upside-down world situation where Trump is a dictator for criticizing the press, and then literally the opposite Trump.
Like Alexandria, Octavia Cortez, she has a lot of the persuasion power.
She's good at that. But in terms of politics and which side she's on, she's the opposite.
So, if criticizing the press makes you simultaneously a dictator, but also the opposite of a dictator, what does that mean about your worldview?
Let me put it in my two-movie frame.
If your movie was that Trump is a dictator, correct me if I'm wrong, wasn't the number one piece of evidence for Trump being a dictator is that he attacked the media.
Am I wrong about that?
Fact check me. I believe the number one piece of evidence is that he attacked the media.
And I've said there are two explanations for that.
One of them is that he's a big old dictator who is attacking the media.
Because the first thing you do if you're a dictator is attack the media, right?
And I do agree that dictators attack the media.
So that is a real thing.
But there was another explanation which I have been presenting for a while.
And that other explanation is this.
What if the media deserves the criticism?
Why do we act as if that's not one of the options?
Because if the media is an honest purveyor of news that just makes some mistakes now and then, it would be very inappropriate for the President of the United States to criticize.
Likewise, it would be very inappropriate for an elected congressperson, even a freshman, to criticize the press if they were honest brokers of fact, even if they made some mistakes.
But I've suggested that our press is nothing like that anymore.
It used to be. But today the press is all about clickbait, it's about supporting a side, it's about being on a team.
In such a world where the press is really just on a team, they're not really objective reporters of facts anymore, under that circumstances, is it valid for a sitting president to criticize them?
Hell yes! Not only is it valid, It would be a dereliction of duty for the President of the United States to not criticize the media the way it's currently constructed.
Their current business model requires them to chase exaggerated stories and to chase rumors and to chase things that don't matter but might make the other team look bad.
So for the President to criticize that Is the most valid thing I could ever think of.
And that is now demonstrated by the fact that AOC, as we call her, Alexandra Octavio Cortez, watching her do the same thing for exactly the same reasons, Validates my movie.
My movie said, no, the problem here is not the president criticizing the media.
The problem is that the media has never been this bad, at least in our modern times.
They've never been this bad, so they do deserve criticism.
I am justified.
So my movie has proved out.
Now let's say you're in the other movie.
Let's say you're in the movie that says the president is a big old dictator, Who can't get anything done, he's incompetent, and he's a racist.
So that was the movie that half the country has been under, right?
Incompetent dictator racist, right?
What has happened this week?
Well, the racist thing's having a little problem because it turns out that both Democrats and Republicans really, really want strong border control.
They want to call it different things, but they're basically in complete agreement.
So if you were criticizing the president for wanting strong border control, what happens to your worldview when the Democrats come out and repeatedly say, no, no, we want strong border control too.
We just want a slightly different technology to get there.
So doesn't the whole the president is a racist because he wants to be strong on the border kind of go to hell when the Democrats take his exact position?
They just differ on the technology?
Because it wasn't the technology that made him a racist.
There was nobody who said, you know, that president wants strong border control.
That part doesn't bother me.
The problem is that he would use a wall instead of a fence.
It's the wall that makes it racist.
Nobody said that.
It was always about controlling the border as well as you could was the racist part.
So the Democrats have now fully embraced The president's position.
They've only disagreed on what to call that thing.
Is it a wall? Is it a fence?
Or is it, as I call it, a wince?
We'll talk about that in a minute.
So that story had to be very confusing for the people who said he was a racist when their best piece of evidence for it is the same thing that their team is doing.
And nobody can dispute that.
Next, we saw prison reform, something that Republicans have stopped forever, but the Trump administration managed to push it through.
Even on CNN yesterday, and it was wonderful to watch actually, I'm watching CNN and the most anti-Trump pundits, including Bill Begala, one of the most anti-Trump people in the world, said, let me just say this, I'm paraphrasing him, He said, let me just say this, I'm a huge critic of the president, everybody knows that, but on this, on this one thing, prison reform, the president nailed it.
The president gets the credit.
He even went so far as to say, yes, Jared Kushner was critical to this, but it's still the president who gets the credit.
All right, that was a very generous thing to say from one of the president's biggest critics and other pundits were saying the same.
They even went so far as to say that there's something about this president that made that possible in a Nixon goes to China way.
Because the president was such a strong on crime personality, it allowed him to negotiate in a way that other Republicans couldn't get away with.
So the crime bill, I think everybody would agree, is primarily going to benefit, or at least disproportionately, will benefit the African American and other minority communities.
So how do you hold the frame that you have the most racist president ever who just did the most human rights act we've seen since?
Since when? Let me put this to you historians and fact checkers.
If you were to look at the history of human rights, There was the end of slavery.
There was the Civil Rights Act.
These are the big things.
And then there have been other things that have moved the ball forward.
Name, what was the last thing that happened that was this big in terms of civil rights?
Was it Lyndon Johnson?
Was that the last big thing that the government did Gay marriage, okay, if you throw that in.
I was thinking specifically of ethnicity, so I wasn't thinking of gender or LGBTQ. I was thinking just of ethnicity for a moment.
It seems that this president just got behind the single biggest civil rights legislation.
It wasn't called that, of course.
But the prison reform is a huge civil rights thing.
Now DACA also would be, and we know that the president would negotiate at least on that if he had a chance.
All right. So you've got that working against the narrative, but here's the other one.
The other one is that he's incompetent.
I don't know if I've said this explicitly, publicly, so maybe you can tell me if you've heard me say this before or if I just thought it.
The thing that I've liked, and liked ahead of time as well, about the Trump presidency, The thing I like best is not that he would break a lot of dishes, because everybody knew he was going to break some dishes, right? Some dishes were going to get broken.
He's going to be, you know, a little more expensive than the normal president.
And sure enough, that's the case.
But the thing I liked about him was that it seemed to me that he had unique talents That could get some things done that were literally just impossible for another character to do.
There was something about the unique blend of talents that he brought to the job that would probably make him not so good on some things.
Let's say the deficit.
I don't think the president's personality and set of talents are well suited to bringing down the deficit.
Would everybody agree? Because Trump is actually most known for using debt to build his empire.
He likes debt.
So while it would be true that the president would be the worst person for maybe helping race relations and feel good, probably terrible for that, He might be the worst person for even healthcare.
He might be a terrible choice for getting healthcare done because it's a real big, complicated thing.
You probably have to dig into it a little bit, into the details.
That's sort of not his deal.
So he might not be good for that.
And the budget is probably not the best for bringing down debt.
But there were other things that he brings to the job that I was hoping would solve some unsolvable problems.
Some of the unsolvable problems include North Korea.
Would you say that there's something about Trump that's special That made him a perfect choice for getting to what looks like strong progress in North Korea?
And the answer is yes.
Even his critics would say, though they be critics, even his critics will say, I think that his personality helped to get that done.
When we look at prison reform, his critics say, you know, I don't like a lot of what he's doing, but I gotta say, there's something about Trump that made this possible.
Those are two big things.
What about tax reform?
You might argue that another Republican could have gotten tax reform, but I don't know.
I don't know. I'll leave that to the jury.
There might be something about the tax overhaul that required a Trump personality, but less of a case in that case.
What about renegotiating NAFTA? What about getting some kind of a better trade situation with China?
Is there something about Trump that makes him uniquely qualified for that?
I think yes. I think there is something about Trump's personality that makes negotiating trade deals far more likely to be successful.
Is there something about Trump that will get the wall built, or at least better security on the border, whatever that looks like?
And the answer is probably yes, because the special thing about Trump is that he was willing to take the heat.
You needed somebody who was willing to take brutal, brutal criticism in order to make the border security a higher priority.
Would you say that the president has made border security a higher priority with or without offense?
I'd say yes.
I would say that there's something special about this president That allowed border security to be a higher priority and probably will get more money.
And it might not be a fence, but there's definitely something that looks like progress there.
That his personality probably had a lot to do with it.
Something that wouldn't have necessarily happened under even another Republican.
So you look at all these things and then you look at the Middle East.
If the Middle East goes the direction that it looks to be going, and this is my prediction, my prediction is that the Middle East is starting to shape up into something that's going to form into a Middle East peace plan.
Is there something about the President's personality that's unique that could get that done?
And the answer is probably yes.
Probably yes. He would put more pressure on Iran than another president.
Important. He would support Saudi Arabia and its leader when nobody else supported him.
Probably important to get some leverage.
He can get along great with Israel like nobody ever did.
Very important. And apparently he can get along with Putin better than other people.
Which is going to be very important in the Middle East.
So is there something unique about Trump That even another Republican wouldn't have that could make the impossible maybe happen.
And the impossible is something like a peace deal in the Middle East.
And I think yes.
So here's a bigger picture that I've made, or a bigger point that I've tried to make a few times, which is that you want the president who can solve the problems that nobody else can solve.
Because you know who can solve the small problems?
The next president.
If the president after this president got a hold of the, let's say the next president Let me draw this picture for you.
Let's say the president after Trump comes into office and ISIS has been solved.
By the way, I forgot to mention that.
Wouldn't you say that the battlefield defeat of ISIS happened quicker and more efficiently because of something special about President Trump and specifically the rules of engagement and he gave them freedom to do it.
He picked Mattis. I think you could make that case.
I think you could say that his personality was important to ISIS. So let's say the next president comes in.
That next president is likely to have the best economy ever, an ISIS that has been largely defeated, a North Korea that's crawling toward peace but moving in that direction, a Middle East that is in a much better shape, trade deals that are already completed, And more favorable.
And a military that's been built up to be more powerful and more effective.
A veterans association that's working better.
I'm not sure if it's better enough, but it's working better.
If the next president comes into office, what problems will that president have to solve?
Well, I would say the biggest problem would probably be getting the debt under control.
Is President Trump the best person to do that?
Probably not. Probably not.
Would the next president be really good at getting the deficit under control?
Well, if we're smart, We'll bring in the president, yeah, race relations.
If we're smart, we'll bring in the next president who can do stuff like whatever is left of healthcare if that needs to be approved, getting the deficit under control, maybe better in race relationships.
So we have the option of getting everything we can get in a Trump.
Accepting that there are going to be some areas where they're just not his strong points by personality, and then you get them with the next president.
I would argue that President Obama was very successful.
I know you hate this.
I know you hate to hear this.
He was very successful in the sense that he was the right personality at the right time, but not for every task.
Obama was the wrong personality to deal with the Middle East.
He may have been the wrong personality to deal with ISIS. He may have been the wrong personality to deal with China.
But he might have been exactly the right personality to deal with an economy that was ready to fall off the edge.
Because he was this calm, cool, lawyer-like guy.
People trusted him.
He had a pretty good mandate from his election.
He was probably good on race relations.
He got us past the hump of having a black president, which was important to the character of the country, I think.
So I would say that Obama has some unique personality traits that were well suited for some types of problems and poorly suited for others.
President Trump is similar but in reverse in that Trump is really strong on the things that Obama was weak on and kind of weak on the things that Obama was strong on.
I don't know that it's a bad thing that we ping-pong between Democrats and Republicans, and I know you hate that too, but it's probably a good thing That this country likes to try one for a while.
Say, ah, eight years is enough of this guy.
Let's try the opposite.
Because he solved all the problems that his personality can solve.
You need a different personality for the next problems.
All right. I think it is hilarious and shows just how clever I am that there's conversation now about whether this particular structure that they're looking at for the border should be called a fence or a wall.
There is literally...
You can't make this stuff up, people.
They're actually considering as one of the top structures to be on the border with Mexico, something that's got slats, these steel slats.
And some people look at a thing that has steel slats that you can look through and they say, well, that's clearly a fence.
But it's made out of steel.
And it's thick.
These are thick slats.
What do you call something that's as tall as a wall, as hard as a wall, and is made of metal?
Well, some people would call it a wall.
Other people would call it a fence.
Did I not tell you that the solution to this was always going to be something that one side could call a wall, at the same time the others could stand there and look at it right in front of themselves and say, that my friends is a fence.
Did anybody else predict that there would be a solution that some would call a wall and some would call a fence?
Because it's the only way to get past it.
I think I'm the only one, and I forwarded an article from CNN in which they're making that case that some people are going to call this structure a wall and some call it a fence.
I think what's happening is that the President is just looking for a different way to get the budget.
He's going to carve it out of different departments.
He's going to find a creative way to do it.
I think the Democrats painted themselves into a corner.
They painted themselves into a corner by saying it was immoral to have a wall.
So now they can't really fund it.
So the president will have to find his funding some other way, call a defense, hand it off to the engineers, let them do something.
All right. Let's talk about climate, just briefly.
I've talked about this too much.
I've told you that the problem with trying to decide what to think about climate change One of the biggest problems is that we are not scientists, so we can't really evaluate the science on a deep level as citizens.
So we can only look at the people who, hey Dr.
Drew, we can only look at the people who have the pro side and look at the people who have the con side and evaluate their persuasiveness.
We can't really go down to the details and evaluate the science.
We don't have access to that, wouldn't understand it anyway.
So when I look at the two arguments, they're both persuasive.
If you look at the climate alarmists by themselves, they'll say, look at my graph, and they'll show you a graph that shows the CO2, and they'll show you the CO2 and warming are perfectly correlated, and that there's this hockey stick growth lately that shows we're all doomed.
And when they talk about it, it's really persuasive.
And then you wait 10 minutes and separately the skeptics come on and they say, no, they got everything wrong.
Here are all the reasons and these are perfectly, you know, credible reasons why they got it all wrong.
And then they will show their chart and they'll say, look at my chart.
It's obvious that CO2 and warming are completely unrelated.
And they'll show you a chart that's completely different from the other person.
And then they'll walk away.
And I'll say to myself, well, that skeptic was 100% persuasive.
By himself?
As long as he's not in the same room with the climate scientist.
And the climate scientist, how persuasive is he?
Totally persuasive.
By himself?
As long as he's not in the room with the guy who's got the other chart.
And I'm thinking, the most basic I want to curse again because this makes me angry, but I'll pull myself back.
The most basic thing our government or our news people could do, and neither of them are doing this for you, the most basic thing they could do is to put those two assholes in the same room and put the camera on.
That's it. Put those two assholes in the same room and turn the camera on.
Because neither of those assholes, neither the climate skeptic with his chart, nor the climate alarmist with his or her chart, neither of those assholes will pretend the other one exists.
Put them in the same room.
Turn on the camera and say, show me your chart.
And they'll hold up their charts and they'll be opposites.
And you say, okay, can you defend why your chart doesn't look like the other chart?
And make them fight it out.
Now, you don't have to make them fight on every point, right?
You don't need them to argue everything about the science and everything about the measurements and everything.
You don't need to do that.
They have literally two completely different charts.
And here's the fun part.
They both say they're from the same source data.
Don't they? Don't the skeptics say, look, I'm using NOAA's own data.
I'm using NASA's data.
It's public data. I just put it on a chart.
Look at it. You can see the CO2 and temperatures.
If you look at historically, if you look at a long enough time frame, you can tell that they're completely unrelated.
So why can't we put those two assholes in the same room and turn a camera on?
Why can't we do that?
Really? It's got to be the simplest frickin' thing that anybody could do on what turns out to be the biggest risk in the world, right?
According to the...
If you were a climate alarmist, you think that the climate is the biggest problem in the world, and that in order to have a chance of survival, The main thing you need to do is what?
What is the main thing you need to do if you're a climate alarmist to save the world?
What's the main thing you got to do?
The main thing you got to do is convince the skeptics.
That's your job one, right?
You've got to convince them.
And in order to do that, you would need to put them in the same room with you so that your data and their data could be hashed out in front of the camera in front of the public.
I do understand why the skeptics can't get in the room with the climate scientists.
That I understand. Because they don't get camera time, the climate alarmists don't want to give them, they say, we don't want to justify your wrongness by putting you in the same room and acting like you have any credibility.
So it makes perfect sense that the skeptics Want to be in that room and want to sit next to the climate alarmist and want to have that conversation.
So I think it's fair to say that one side wants to be in that room with the other side.
The only reason I can think of why that you've never seen that, and by the way, you've never seen that, have you?
You have never seen The skeptic and the believer in the same room in an unscripted way where somebody is just saying, okay, you say this graph, you say this graph, you know, make your case.
You've never seen that. And the only reason I can think of, given that it's the biggest problem in the world, according to the alarmists, the biggest problem in the world.
And they're not willing to solve it by just putting their believer in the room with a skeptic.
That's all it would take.
It would be the most popular television show in the United States.
So you can't say it won't be done because the ratings would be bad, because the ratings would be very good.
Even if it was just a YouTube clip, the ratings and the viewership of that YouTube clip would be very, very good.
So you can't say that this hasn't happened because of money.
You can't say it hasn't happened because the skeptics are afraid to get in the room.
Because they want to get in the room.
They want it badly.
The only thing that's stopping it is the scientists themselves being apparently unwilling to do the one thing That could save the world.
And the one thing that could save the world is to get in the same room with the other asshole.
Right? And turn the camera on.
If you don't do that, you don't believe in climate science.
Let me say that again. For the people who are pro-climate science, if they're afraid to put their person in the same room with the denier and turn on the camera and let the public see them talk about it, if you're afraid to do that for some bullshit reason about you don't want to give them credibility, you're not a believer.
You actually don't believe your own story.
Because if you thought the world was at risk You'd put those people in the same room.
Because it's the only way to convince the other half of the country.
Alright. Let us revisit the story of Patreon and People who are leaving Patreon because Patreon has kicked somebody off the platform.
Sargon of Akan has been kicked off the platform for something he said on a completely different platform a few years ago and was taken out of context so that his inner thoughts were made to be evil when in fact they were the opposite of evil, according to all evidence in the public eye.
So, I have been saying that I have disavowal exhaustion.
I'm just tired of fighting and boycotting and I'm generally anti-boycott.
So generally speaking, I oppose boycotts within the United States.
I think boycotting another country Might be fun and good, but boycotting a company in the United States, man, they'd really have to do something bad.
My threshold for banning a US company is very high.
That said, tomorrow I think I will be giving you an alternative for Patreon, at least for me, and I'll give you an option.
If you would like me to leave Patreon, I will leave Patreon if the other option is appealing to you, okay?
So, I will be leaving Patreon if, when I describe the other option, probably tomorrow, if that seems appealing to you, I will abandon Patreon.
I do think that, and by the way, a lot of people have been saying to me, Scott, you don't understand the argument.
That's never been the problem here.
It's not my understanding of the argument.
It's my priorities.
But the argument is solid that there's a solid argument that Patreon is acting against their own terms of service and not acting in good faith.
So if Patreon is not acting in good faith, And by the way, my own Patreon account went down by, I don't know, 20 or 25% this week.
So staying on Patreon is no longer viable for me because the people who would use Patreon and would be the same people who are likely to support me have left in protest.
So my income on Patreon went down on 20 or 25% this week, and it looks like it's not going to ever go in the other direction.
So for that reason, it doesn't make sense for me economically to stay on Patreon.
It doesn't make sense in terms of being on the right side of history, and that gives me everything I need.
But I'm only going to leave After I've explained to you an option, if enough people are interested in taking that option.
All right. That's like 25 million now.
Actually, my Patreon account is very small.
It's just a few thousand a month.
And I use all of that to pay somebody to prep my videos to move them to YouTube and put them on podcasts and stuff.
So basically, I don't make any money from Patreon.
I just passed that along to my assistant.
Someone would have to explain what could be good, what could be accomplished by leaving.
Well, I think what people want to accomplish is showing that the audience will leave if you violate free speech.
So free speech is violated and the person who is being targeted is not a bad actor, but rather they're just on the wrong side of politics, that the market will punish that platform.
So I think what you're seeing is people punishing Patreon for taking what looks to be a political position to them as opposed to a principled position.
I think if Patreon was taking a principled position, people would not have such a problem.
But yeah, it looks like selective enforcement, etc.
Let's see.
Would you accept donations in WEN tokens?
The answer is yes, and I'm going to tell you more about that, but let me do that tomorrow.
And by the way, wouldn't the perfect situation be that you could...
On Patreon, I'll just tease this a little bit.
On Patreon, if you...
If you donate to a producer, a content producer, usually it's a dollar a month.
Some people do five or ten, but most people are doing a dollar a month.
And your dollar just goes to the, you know, some of it goes to the bank because it's a credit card.
So some of it goes to the bank, some of it goes to Patreon to take their cut, and then most of it goes to the producer.
But once you've paid it, that's it, right?
Your money just left your wallet and went somewhere else.
But if you were to pay someone in utility tokens, For example, if you bought the WEN token at wenhub.com, and you can wait till tomorrow, I'll give you details on that.
If you were to pay a producer in utility tokens, There's a non-zero chance that the tokens that you bought would become worth more than what you gave.
So, tokens are not an investment, so you should not see them as an investment.
But nonetheless, it is true that if you own any kind of crypto token, it can go up in value if the demand is high.
So if more people wanted to watch me on Periscope and more people wanted to use that mechanism and fewer people wanted to use Patreon, that would cause the first people who bought WEN tokens to have tokens that have greater demand after they owned them.
And if you already own the tokens, and then greater demand comes in after you, the value of your token goes up, and there's a market to sell that.
So, latoken.com is an exchange which handles the when.
So, there is the possibility, and I'll tell you how to do this tomorrow.
But in my specific case, I have the option of replacing Patreon with people who want to put a little extra effort into it and buy WEN tokens.
Then nobody takes a cut of that.
It goes directly into my startup.
My startup can help the world in some ways that I'm going to tell you about tomorrow.
We have a big upgrade, by the way.
By the way, the Interface by WenHub app...
It has a big upgrade.
So if you haven't downloaded the upgrade, do that.
The big upgrade is that you could always talk to experts, but before it was only if they were online.
And now we've added a scheduling tool.
So if there's somebody who you want to talk to, but you'd rather schedule it, or it's the only way you can connect, You can now schedule.
Scheduling, by the way, was the first thing our company did.
So we just grafted our other core competence onto interface and now you can schedule.
Are there career counselors on WenHub?
On any given day, there's almost one of everything.
So if there are not, there should be.
So we'll be doing a lot more publicity on WenHub in the coming week.
But anyway, I'll tell you more about how to get a hold of the Wen.
It's the best way to compensate me if you don't want to use Patreon.
And it has a non-zero chance, not a very high chance, but the non-zero chance that the tokens could be worth more than you actually paid.
So that would be cool.
Alright, it's called Interface by WenHub.
You can search for the app on both of these stores.
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