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Dec. 21, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
39:26
Episode 344 Scott Adams: The Wence Funding, Kurds in the Way, Mattis, Gatwick Drones
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here.
You know what it's time for.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
And we've got a lot to talk about.
I was not expecting to have a lot to talk about right before Christmas, but Our president, the entertainer-in-chief, comes through once again with plenty to talk about.
Plenty, I say.
And before we talk about that, would you raise your cup, your mug, your stein, your goblet, your tankard, your container of fluids?
I like coffee.
And join me for the simultaneous sip.
So let's start by talking about that drone that's been closing the Gatwick Airport over in England.
So apparently some so far undetected person operating a drone has been buzzing the airport, which is causing the entire airport to close.
And it really sort of tells you how unprepared we are For the world of drone...
Well, terrorism, really.
Could you believe that there's a major airport that did not already have anti-drone technology?
Now, that is scary to know.
I would assume that all the big airports would have anti-drone technology, but apparently only the military has that, at least over in Great Britain.
So that's a big wake-up call.
Probably it was not a terrorist.
Probably just somebody who's a bad actor.
But we're going to have to watch that.
Alright, let's talk about the fun stuff.
We'll talk about Madison in a minute.
But wall funding.
So I think the news is doing a good job of covering all the elements of wall funding.
Nancy Pelosi said, you'll never get the votes in the House.
And then Trump not only got the votes in the House, but they approved $5.7 billion.
I think he was only asking for $5 billion.
Not only did Nancy Pelosi not count the votes right, Because he actually won comfortably, but they gave him more than he asked for.
That's about as wrong as you can count the votes.
However, the Senate will be a different situation, unless...
Unless...
Here's the most interesting thing about the wall funding.
The most interesting thing is when it's happening.
Because... Don't you imagine that all of these senators, don't you imagine that their family is on the phone with them about every hour saying, all the relatives are here already for Christmas.
You really need to wrap that up and get home.
So the president weirdly has time on his side because I think he cares less about where he is because his family sort of travels with him.
So he doesn't have to go home.
He's sort of always home.
When you're the president, you're just always home because your family's wherever you are, if you want them to be.
I think he's holding Congress hostage, in a way, because they really, really want to get home.
And I don't hear anybody really talking about how much that would influence people's votes.
I really do think people could vote differently.
Maybe not enough to make a difference.
But I do think people would change their votes because their family members are on their backs.
You know, just get this done.
Get over here. But it doesn't look like the Senate's going to pass it, so it looks like the government's going to shut down.
Now, we're going to talk about also matters in Syria in a moment, but there's a larger sort of story here.
It seems to me that the Democrats have inadvertently made the biggest mistake that they could ever make.
You won't hear this anywhere else, so this will be the first time you've ever heard this theory.
And you can judge how much credibility to give it.
And it goes like this.
Do you remember when I made my move into politics and I took some really big risks with my career, with my reputation, with my income, etc.?
The only reason I was able to do that or really willing is because I didn't have anything to lose.
So history and circumstance had put me in a situation where I didn't mind taking higher risks because I could handle them.
Now take President Trump.
If he had been an average president doing an average job, what would be his instinct to be?
If there were enough people saying, hey, you're doing a good job, let's say he had a solid 47% approval rating, would he be as risk-taking as he is when everything's going to hell?
Let me put it another way.
The President's critics have unleashed the weapon of mass destruction.
In other words, the legal challenges on Trump are so extraordinary and so bad that they've pushed him into a situation where he has nothing to lose.
So the critics of the president have pushed him into a situation where if he doesn't do something big that makes a difference, He will lose because they're chipping at him with all the legal stuff and the media is chipping away.
He has to get above the noise.
So there was this baseline level of legal challenges and noise and criticism that was higher than we've ever seen for probably any president, although Obama had it pretty bad too.
And in order for him to get out of that, The one and only way to do that is to do something that's so big it's outside of it, so that this stuff becomes less important.
So they have forced the president to do bigger things than he might have otherwise been inclined to do.
Because if the reporting had been, you know, we didn't support this president, but even we have to agree, things are going well.
If that was the reporting, How big a risk would he take to ruin a good thing?
Probably not very big.
So it seems to me that the sort of accidental effect of the criticism from the left becoming more effective, and I say more effective because now that the Democrats will have some control of the House, and they've already said we're gonna unleash unlimited legal pain What would you do if you were in that job?
If you put me in the presidency, I would put away my list of ordinary tasks.
I would say to myself, okay, here are all the ordinary boring things I was planning to do.
Okay, there's my ordinary list.
Now, let me take out the list of things that will set your hair on fire.
Let me take out the list of things that nobody would even dare to do.
Boom! Bitch!
That's what I'm gonna do.
I'm gonna do this list because doing the other list is a waste of time.
Because if I do the other list of the boring, ordinary stuff, I'm gonna stay below the noise level.
I'm gonna stay below the danger level.
I need to get out of that zone entirely.
And so, I believe the President has been sort of politically pushed into a high-risk, high-reward frame of mind.
And he's taking advantage of it.
He's taking advantage of the fact that the opposition has a boot on his throat.
If you're in a fistfight and somebody gets you down and starts choking you to death and you, you know, And the only thing you could do is reach a gun, you're gonna use the gun, even though it's a fistfight.
They've kind of forced Trump out of his comfortable box, and his comfort level was a pretty big box, to do something that you just wouldn't have even imagined, which is to keep his campaign promise.
Nobody saw that coming.
Nobody saw it coming that he would keep his campaign promise of getting us out of Syria.
Now, let's talk about Syria a little bit.
General Maus, as you know, wrote a scathing letter and quit.
He quit! And people's hair is on fire.
And one of the funny things is, it caused MSNBC to love war.
Glenn Grinwald was tweeting this morning, and I retweeted it, The bizarre thing about this whole situation is that Rachel Maddow, who literally wrote a book not too long ago about how the US should stop being in all these unauthorized wars, is complaining about the president for leaving an unauthorized war.
She literally wrote a book on the opposite opinion.
That's how easily they're switching opinions.
And the world is turned upside down, and the box is shaking like crazy.
So you're seeing, I guess, Chris Matthews came out in favor of the president's action, and you're seeing a few lefties being in favor of it.
I don't know about...
I haven't heard from Bernie Sanders yet, but he probably likes it.
You're seeing the Republicans going crazy.
Let's talk about Mattis.
Now, Mattis' job...
And the president's job are not the same job.
And it should not be surprising that when you hire a war general, meaning a general who is really good at winning wars, that once you've won all your wars, and you could argue whether ISIS is completely defeated or just mostly defeated on the battlefield, but for all practical purposes, we've sort of won all our wars.
And so the guy who's really good at fighting wars doesn't have the same value as he did when we needed to go in and beat ISIS. So that's the first thing.
The second thing is that Mattis, being a military guy, he has no doubt made promises to allies, and as a matter of honor, if he can't keep his commitments to his allies, he resigned.
I don't hate that. I think as a military principle, if you can't maintain what you consider your honor or your commitment to your allies, that resigning might be exactly the right thing to do.
Which doesn't mean the President is wrong.
It just means that Mattis can no longer be consistent with his commitments and with his view of honor, etc.
with what the President So, I'm not entirely sure that we should make too much of the fact that Mattis, who has a completely different set of circumstances, would have such a strong disagreement with the President, who is, of course, carrying out his campaign promise.
Now, it seems like The big discussion is going to turn on the Kurds.
The Kurds and our, I suppose, other allies in Syria that we now feel are exposed and will be slaughtered.
What was the first thing you heard about this story?
Probably the first thing you heard is that some Turkish defense minister or some job like that had announced that when America pulls out that they will move in and slaughter our allies.
The Kurds. The allies in that fight.
Now, 24 hours later, as I expected, that story changed.
Turns out that didn't happen.
So the most critical story that formed your opinion on this doesn't seem to have actually happened.
It was fake news.
What did happen, as far as I can tell, and again, we're still in the fog of war, so, you know, fact check me on this, I could be wrong by tomorrow.
But my understanding is that the defense minister, whoever it was over in Turkey, had made a general statement about defeating the Kurds that was unrelated to whether or not we pulled out.
It was just sort of a general statement, just like all of their other general statements.
So nothing really happened there.
The next thing you have to ask yourself is what would the United States do if Turkey tried to slaughter our allies as soon as we left?
Would we do nothing?
Well, I don't know exactly what we'd do, but it seems like that's part of the details that need to get worked out.
I would say if Turkey immediately, or even soon after, Attacked our allies, who we had given guarantees of safety.
We might have to attack a NATO country.
That wouldn't be good.
But we're in a world where all the choices are bad.
It's a bad choice to stay.
It's a bad choice to leave.
So here's the main thing about the Kurds.
We have 2,200 people there who are mostly advisors.
I do believe that that's enough people to maybe keep the teams apart.
In other words, nobody wants to accidentally kill any Americans because that would be bad for their national interests.
So they probably do serve some kind of a peacekeeping role.
Let me ask you this.
If the main reason that we're still useful in Syria is in a peacekeeping role, whose job is that?
Is it the United States job to be in a peacekeeping role to keep two warring parties apart?
Nope. That is the United Nations.
So Where is the discussion of the United Nations keeping this probable massacre from happening?
Seems like that's right down their lane.
I haven't even heard that mentioned, have you?
Where was the argument that says the United States needs to get between all warring parties?
That's sort of not our job.
Secondly, I'm pretty sure we could say that Turkey, and maybe already have, What do you think is happening privately in the discussions between the United States and Turkey?
I've heard some conspiracy theorists say that in order for Turkey to shut up about Khashoggi's murder by Saudi, we're going to give them something and we're going to give up the Kurds.
That's ridiculous. I'm sure that conversation has never happened anywhere.
But I'll bet the conversation with Turkey goes something like this.
If we pull out And you slaughter our allies, we are going to fuck you up.
So, do you think there's any chance that Turkey has a green light to slaughter our allies while the world watches?
There's no chance of that.
Now, the details of how we could protect the Kurds, if indeed we want to do that, and preliminarily that seems to be what we want to do, There is no way that we have told Turkey, you know, whatever you want to do, that's okay with us.
There's no way we pull out without putting the fear of God, whatever God they want to pray to, in Turkey.
There's going to be, if they move on our allies and embarrass us in front of the world by doing so, much less The bigger tragedy would be the massacre of the Kurds, obviously.
But if they want to do that and embarrass the United States in so doing, the price that Turkey would have to pay for that would be higher than they're willing to pay.
And I'm pretty sure that that message has been communicated by now.
Now, here's the one way that I could be wrong about that.
More ways than one I could be wrong about that.
One way is, are we entirely sure who our allies are over there?
Doesn't it seem to me, doesn't it seem to you, that we can't really tell the difference between the allies and the terrorists over there?
You know, is it true that some of the Kurds are also terrorists?
Is it true that it's just a big mess of sometimes you're a terrorist and sometimes you're an ally, it just depends which direction somebody's shooting?
I don't know if we even know who our allies are exactly.
So that's the other thing you have to realize.
It's not like, hey, here are our friends.
It's probably nothing like that.
It's probably like, well, they did fight on our side, and we did say we'd keep the Turks away, but they've got some issues too that we don't love.
They've got some people in that group.
They've got some objectives we don't love.
It's probably something like that.
So the main thing you need to understand when you're watching all this stuff is that you should assume you don't know anything.
Hold on.
Let me make a message here.
Okay.
Christina's texting me.
Now, so here's what's interesting about this story.
If you watch the coverage of it and the pundits, you're going to see a lot of what I call the half-pinion.
A half-pinion is where you consider only the benefits of something or only the costs.
A full opinion is where you've considered both, and I would say that Trump is making a full opinion, meaning that he's considering the Kurds, he's considering that Israel will have to fight harder, he's considering all of the pluses and minuses, and he's decided to make a hard decision that will be very unpopular to many people.
That appears to be what's going on.
Now watch the coverage.
The coverage, the pundits will be talking past each other without addressing the other's point.
And it goes like this.
The people who are against the pullout will say, if we pull out, we'll be letting down our allies and the Kurds will be slaughtered.
The people who want to pull out will say nothing about the Kurds.
They'll just say, well, war can't last forever.
This was his campaign promise.
We can't be in these unauthorized wars.
you'll find that neither side will address the point of the other, because that would be a full opinion, and nobody can really give a full opinion, because it would look ridiculous, or it would look like it would agree with Trump, which would be even worse for a lot of people.
So, now when Trump threw in the pull-down of troops in Afghanistan, he really made it clear that the U.S. is looking to reduce its footprint. he really made it clear that the U.S. is looking
Now, I've said before that you have to look at the big, big picture, and I think there's a chance for peace in the Middle East because of all the moving parts moving in the right direction, and this is one of them.
One of the things that could help peace in the Middle East is a general impression that the United States is looking to reduce its footprint in favor of the locals taking care of business.
Now, in this case, it's the locals plus the Russians, but as long as the Russians are not against us, in this case, we're in good shape.
Now, one of the things that Matt has said was we have to be clear-eyed about Russia and Why is it that the most logical alliance in the world is not the U.S., Russia, and China?
Wouldn't you say...
That the U.S., Russia, and China can never gain by fighting each other.
That's just the truth, right?
None of us can make an advantage by directly fighting each other.
All we can do are these little stupid proxy wars that don't help anybody.
Because whatever they proxy us, we're going to proxy them.
We'll know what they did to us.
They'll figure out what we did to them.
And all we're doing is biting each other's ankles.
Doesn't it seem like Trump, Putin, and Xi could sit in the same room and say, here's the deal.
Fighting each other with cyber, with proxy wars, and all this stuff just never works.
The only threat that the three of us have is from other smaller countries and from terrorists, basically.
So it seems to me that the three countries that should never be biting each other's ankles are China, Russia, and the U.S. I just don't know what reasons we have, given that we can detect everything they do and they can detect everything we do.
It would be a different situation if we could do things secretly, if China got hacked and they would never know it was us.
But that's not the case.
They sort of always know who it is.
And there's just no profit in the three countries being at each other.
Now, so here's my big picture.
I think that the big picture is that we'll figure out something to do to either protect the Kurds or we'll find out that that situation was more complicated than we imagined and it's not what we thought.
I think that Russia was always going to be the ones taking the fight to ISIS, at least in Syria forever, probably.
Let's put that on their budget.
I think Israel was going to do what Israel was going to do, no matter what anybody else wanted them to do or was doing.
And Israel will pick up its fight in Syria and probably be pretty effective.
Iran seems to be the big loser here.
Now, I know people are going to say, hey, Iran is a winner because the U.S. is pulling out.
I don't think so, because Iran has to deal with Russia and Israel now.
That's not exactly fun.
So, I don't think Iran is a winner.
I think Russia might be a winner, but not in a way that's necessarily going to make us worse off.
We'll see. Now, the other thing to keep in mind...
Is that most of what people are worried about with Mattis resigning is that they believe they can predict the world and it's bad.
Ask yourself this.
Have you correctly predicted anything that's happened in the last three years?
If you have correctly predicted a lot of stuff, then I would say, well, you're probably a good predictor.
But if you have not accurately predicted anything for the last three years, and you're worried because what you predict will happen looks pretty bad, maybe you should be less confident in your predictions.
Here's a truism about government and big business.
Anytime something happens that looks as enormous as a resignation of Mattis, that looks pretty enormous to you, doesn't it?
That seems like a big, big deal.
A month from now?
Well, he'll still be in office a month from now.
A year from now, what are the odds that anybody's going to care that General Mattis left and was replaced by a very capable general Who was probably one of many very capable generals.
Do you think you'll notice?
I don't know that you'll even notice.
One of the things that Mattis had working for him, besides being terribly popular in the service, is that he had a great reputation.
He was fun to talk about and he was very quotable and all that stuff.
But I don't know it's going to make that much difference.
A year from now you probably won't know the difference.
The other thing you have to take into account is that everything seems more tense and more dangerous and more scary because it's almost Christmas.
Tell me this is true or not.
Every one of you is more stressed this week than normal.
True or false? True or false, you're all more stressed because of Christmas and you've got 20 things to do instead of 10 things to do.
Right? So when you're looking at this news story about Mattis, you're taking that frame with you.
You're already, your hair's on fire before any news even happens.
And then you look at something like Mattis resigning and writing this negative letter to the president and you say to yourself, my God, it's the end of the world.
What's going to happen? Blah, blah, blah, blah.
Keep in mind...
That in three weeks, it won't feel like this.
And nothing will have changed.
In three weeks, nothing will be different.
But it will feel completely different in three weeks.
Because the world didn't blow up.
And Christmas is over.
And then we're just talking about who's replacing Mattis.
And we figured out what we're going to do to protect the Kurds or not.
We'll have more visibility on that.
In three weeks...
This won't even feel like anything.
And keep in mind that the business model of the press is to make this seem like a bigger deal it is.
So you've got the Christmas stress.
On top of that, you've got the press whose job it is to get you more scared than is necessary.
And on top of that, you've got a president who's been pushed into a high-risk, high-reward decision-making mode where he can really get some stuff done If things go well.
Every part of that is scary.
And then on top of that, you put the stock market going nuts.
How much should you worry about the stock market going down whatever it's been, 10% or something?
Should you worry about that?
Probably not, because the stock market is It's reacting to all this stuff swirling around.
It's reacting to uncertainty.
My guess is that we're entering one of the best buying periods that the stock market has ever seen.
Now, don't take my financial advice, because that would be crazy.
I'm not really good at financial advice, so let me give you a dose of uncertainty.
Completely earned humility in that regard.
Don't buy stocks because I said it could be a good opportunity.
But the reasons that the stock markets are down matter.
The markets are down because of uncertainty.
There's uncertainty over trade.
There's uncertainty over now Syria.
And there's uncertainty over the presidency because of all the stuff going on.
The trade negotiations will resolve one way or the other.
So that uncertainty will go away.
Syria will get a better look at that.
That will go away. So most of what is our uncertainty is because the news is getting us all excited.
But as long as jobs are good, that's the thing you should look at.
If jobs still look good, The economy almost always does well.
I don't know if there's any...
If there's an economic historian here, perhaps you can give me the rundown.
But has there ever been a time when jobs are great, you know, unemployment is really low, and then everything went to hell?
You see, you know, the first thing that's going to happen is a loss of jobs.
If you don't see that...
I'm not worried about the stock market.
The stock market goes up and down on motion.
All right. Let's talk about the whence.
So did you notice that Sarah Sanders has changed her language about the wall?
So I tweeted this.
She said that it might be a wall or it might be steel slats.
When the president announced, did his little talk before the Farm Bill, he said, yeah, look, if it makes the Democrats feel any better, we'll call it steel slats.
So, if it's steel slats, is that a fence?
Or is that a wall?
Or is it one of the prototypes that sort of steals slats up to a point, and then, so it's hard to get over, there's a wall toward the top?
So remember my weirdly specific prediction.
The prediction that I made is that the border security thing would get solved When both sides could find a way that one could call it a wall and the other could call it a fence.
And sure enough, here it is.
Steel slats.
Some can call it a wall and some can call it a fence.
Now that's not enough to get it through Senate probably, but I'll bet it comes closer than you think.
Somebody says, do you think somebody is paying me To do these periscopes?
The answer is the people.
No, I don't take money from anybody who's an individual or powerful, just from micro donations on Patreon at the moment, but we'll be looking to change that platform.
And if you give super hearts here on Periscope, apparently that turns into money for me.
So those are the ways that I make money in this.
And then in addition to the extent that doing these Periscopes helps me sell books, I'm writing another book.
So my financial interests are completely disclosed.
It's Patreon donations, it's Super Hearts, and it allows me to write books and maybe do better selling them because I have this attention.
So that's my only financial incentive.
But beyond that, I really like it.
I've said this before.
I don't think I'd do any of this periscoping except that I like it.
Yeah, and if you'd like to buy a Dilbert calendar as a gift, that would be a great way to get more of this.
All right, now tell me, who else predicted that the solution to the border would be something that somebody could call a wall and somebody else could call a fence?
I believe I'm the only one in the world.
Am I wrong? Am I wrong now?
All of the language is starting to come together, and both sides are saying, well, well, it's not a wall all the way, but maybe we need a little bit of wall.
I'm not wrong. We're in complete agreement.
They just needed to fix the language, and it looks like they have.
But I doubt, I don't know if the Senate will...
I don't know if the Senate will get this through.
Now, one of the reasons I like calling it a whence Because it's a combination of wall plus fence.
But also, if you're a wannabe illegal immigrant, and you come up to that structure, what's going to happen?
You are going to return from whence you came.
It's the whence, because you must return to whence you came, once you see it.
Alright, what else we got going on?
I think that's mostly the news.
The sonic weapon.
Well, I'm still strongly in the position that the so-called sonic weapon that allegedly affected The people in the embassies, that's not going to be a weapon.
Whenever we figure out what it was, it won't be a weapon.
Alright. I think that's all I've got for now.
Anybody have any questions? There's a new deal.
Oh yeah, there's a new deal with Mexico.
So instead of releasing people into the United States, we release them into Mexico.
So... You know, I've also wondered, I can't figure out why the legal plus, well, mostly the legal, why can't we charge a small fee to all legal entrants from south of the border?
Do we do that already?
Is there already some kind of a fee for just moving across the border?
I mean, couldn't we just put a Put a toll booth on the border where people are coming through legally.
Wouldn't the toll booth pay for the wall if you wait long enough?
A lot of people come through those roads.
Alright. How can I convince my wife that chemtrails are fake?
Well chemtrails are tough because you can't prove a negative.
So it doesn't matter how many airplanes or jets you show are not gassing the public.
The people who believe in chemtrails can say, yeah, well, the ones you checked, but there are those other secret, top secret government planes spraying you with chemtrails.
The chemtrail idea, and the first time I met somebody who actually believed it, I think my brain went into some kind of shock.
Because the first time you see...
It's one thing to see it online, because you see every crazy thing in the world on Twitter.
But it's really shocking to see somebody in person say chemtrails are real.
Because I'd look at them and I'd go, ah...
I can't give you a reason that's not real.
But that's not real.
There's such a small chance...
That the government is gassing us with chemtrails and that somehow, you know, we're not noticing except for the conspiracy theorists.
That would be truly amazing.
Joe Rogan debunked it.
Well, I don't know how you can debunk it exactly.
Because people could just say, well, you only checked the planes that did not have chemtrails.
It's the other planes. Yeah, we talked about the drones.
Alright, Scott, do you predict the government will shut down?
Yes, I do. I do predict the government will shut down.
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