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Dec. 22, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
33:38
Episode 345 Scott Adams: The Steel Slat Barrier, Google Images Update, and Syria
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Jingle bells, jingle bells.
Good morning, everybody.
It's a special weekend holiday edition of Coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm Scott Adams, dressed now as Santa Claus.
You can't tell, can you?
Look, for those of you who couldn't tell who I am, it's me.
It's Scott. Now watch this.
Can't tell. Look, it's me, Scott.
And now, can't tell.
Join me, will you?
Grab your mug, your cup, your vessel, your stein, your tankard.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
Raise it to your lips.
And enjoy a simultaneous sip with your fellow humans.
Oh, yeah. That's good sippin'.
So, how many of you have seen the picture that the President tweeted out of a potential wall design?
Looks like this, which you can not really see.
There's a little car, and then way above it is the steel slat structure with little pointy ends at the top.
Seems like it wouldn't be as good with pointy ends at the top, because you could just toss a rope up there.
So I remember the president talking about having rounded edges, but I suppose if it's steel slats, it's pretty easy to climb.
So, in a weird way, we would get only the strongest Mexicans.
Maybe we would use this new steel slat barrier as a way to make sure that the workers we get Are the most physically fit?
Because I'm pretty sure 30% of Mexicans could climb over that structure.
So it still needs, you probably saw the prototype design, there was steel slats up to a certain level, and then from maybe the top 20%, It was some kind of a smooth structure that was rounded.
So if you tried to throw a, you know, some kind of a grabby thing with a rope over the top, you couldn't grab anything because it was rounded.
I like that. So you will note that the president is now calling it border security.
He's talking about steel slat barriers.
He has intentionally, and he said it explicitly, he's going to use the word wall a little bit less.
And what he needs is strong border security.
Do you see the trap that he has put Chuck Schumer in?
Chuck Schumer just got stuck in one of the best political traps you'll ever see.
And it goes like this.
Play the clip of Chuck Schumer saying, President Trump, you're not going to get, quote, Your wall, unquote.
That's right. Chuck Schumer, with a smile on his face, a smile on his face, which also is part of the story, he smiles at the camera and says, President Trump, you're not going to get your wall.
Meanwhile, the President has quite reasonably said, doesn't have to be something you would call a wall.
What I want is money for border security.
Is there anybody who doesn't want better border security?
Republicans, raise your hand.
Yes, we'd like better border security.
Democrats, raise your hand.
Yes, we'd all like better border security.
Almost all of us. Now, Chuck Schumer has been completely revealed By the president's latest pivot, away from using the word, wall, toward making it more generically border security, but obviously would have permanent structures as a big part of it.
It sort of leaves Chuck Schumer completely exposed, because he's said as clearly as a politician can say, this isn't about the issue.
Chuck Schumer has made it as clear as possible with his own words, and recently, that it's about Trump.
Trump just made it about border security.
If Trump has stayed with, build the wall, and he was still just chanting, build the wall, Chuck Schumer would have a strong case, because that would be a case of President Trump wanting a wall for what would look like ego reasons.
And that would make sense for Chuck Schumer to say, I'm not going to give you your wall for ego reasons.
You can't have an ego wall.
That would be a reasonable thing to say.
But now the president doesn't say wall.
Now he says border security.
Do you know who else likes border security?
Everybody, including Ann Coulter, although she'd like a wall.
So the president has moved off of his, let's say, his politically untenable position, which is, it has to be called the wall, and it's a wall all the way, and it's wall, wall, wall.
So now he's moved off of that.
He's said it directly, right?
So I'm not reading his mind.
I'm not guessing. He said it directly.
And now it's border security, and he's sort of turning it over to the engineers, isn't he?
He wants it to be beautiful, and that's part of the decision, and he needs it to be a little bit transparent so he can see through.
But he's kind of saying, let the engineers build this thing, right?
Meanwhile, what is Chuck Schumer's position?
Chuck Schumer's position is, You can't have your wall, President Trump.
He's created a situation where he's not even trying to make it about the country.
Chuck Schumer's position is I'm opposed to the president because I don't want the president to have a win.
The president has moved from that position all the way to let's get good border security with some permanent structures, let the engineers figure out what it is, just make sure that you can see through it, and it works.
That It's such a reasonable position that even the Democrats are going to wonder why the government is closed over it.
If the government did not have a shutdown, then maybe nobody would notice, nobody would care, it wouldn't put as much attention on Schumer.
But now that the entire argument has left the House, because the House actually voted for more wall than the President asked for.
That's right. They voted for $5.7 billion When he was asking for only five.
So now it's not about the entire, you know, the entire branch of government.
It's just about the Senate.
And it's not about the entire Senate because half of them are on the president's side.
It's really about Chuck Schumer and that damning sentence, you're not going to have your wall.
That makes it so clear That is political and personal about the president, and the president has already publicly and conspicuously left that position that's being criticized.
He's now on the same position as everyone on the country, which is, we're not going to tell you how to engineer a wall.
Just give us the best structure that works.
Give us the best solution that works.
My take on this is that the solution is at hand.
The solution is pretty easy.
You just need a solution where both sides can claim they got essentially what they asked for.
And the president has made that easy.
So the Democrats now have an easy path.
To agreeing and going home for Christmas.
So he's got the Senate essentially hostage while the Senate families are probably saying, Dear, all of your relatives have already arrived.
I can't keep them company and entertain them for another day.
Would you please vote for the steel slat barrier?
And don't call it a wall.
And just come home. So I would say, at this point, the President has a vice grip on victory.
Meaning something would have to change right now for the President not to win this.
Because he's staked out the high ground.
It's security.
It's not a wall necessarily everywhere.
And He's got a budget amount that's reasonable according to the House.
The House already agreed that not only was it five billion reasonable, it wasn't enough.
So he's got the most reasonable position at a time when the government...
Well, let me put it in stark language.
Trump's position...
It matches the rest of the country right now.
It matches Democrats and it matches Republicans.
We want more money for border security.
The most universally agreed on thing.
Chuck Schumer's position matches magical thinking and politics.
And nakedly so.
Nakedly. It's just so obvious that it's about Trump and not about border security.
So Anyway, I predict Trump will be the victor when this all shakes out, but they're gonna have to make it look like everybody won.
Most of you are aware of my, let's say, my unhappiness with Google recently because they were allowing an image of me photoshopped into a Nazi uniform to be one of the top search items.
Well, I complained quite publicly And the hashtag racistGoogle hashtag was trending quite nicely.
And the first page got cleared up in a few days.
But if you Google my name right now under just Google Scott Adams in the Google tab, see what comes up.
First page, no Nazi uniform.
But then hit image, because that was the problem.
If you hit the image thing, there were lots of images of me.
But in the top five or so were these Nazi uniforms.
This morning, they are gone.
So as of this morning, I would like to thank Google for removing those images.
So I did report the images through the process.
So it's entirely possible that absolutely nothing happened except that You know, Google looked at my complaint, said, oh yeah, that's reasonable, and took it out.
It may have just taken a while for it to happen.
So, we have complete and total success.
I'm not going to call it victory, because I'm not going to say that Google wanted those images there.
It may have been just an accident of the algorithm.
But, they are gone now.
And so, shall we drink to the occasional victory Which people can have thanks to persuasion.
Drink with me.
As I've often said, and I'll say it again, I would definitely not want me on the other side of a fight.
Hold on a second.
Had to go visit Dale there.
Yeah. Where's Scott?
So once again, Persuasion wins.
Or maybe it was just Google's process.
We don't know. Oh, let me tie up this discussion about the fence slash wall slash truck jump.
Here, let me give you the kill shot.
Are you ready for the kill shot?
That will reopen the government, fund border security, and get all this behind us.
And it goes like this.
President Trump says something like this.
Chuck, stop making it personal.
Talking about the border security funding.
Chuck, stop making it personal.
Let's vote for border security, turn it over to the engineers, and get home for Christmas.
Boom. That's the end.
That one sentence would end the government shutdown.
Chuck, stop making it personal.
Let's fund border security.
Democrats want it. Republicans want it.
Let's go home for Christmas.
Boom. All right.
And you know that would do it. I'm not predicting he'll say something like that.
I'm just giving you a persuasion example where if he did say that, that would kind of be the end of it.
Or very soon after that.
Now, let's talk about Syria, the big story of the day.
The thing that surprises me the most is that everybody's an expert on Syrian warfare now.
Have you noticed that?
A week ago, if I said to you, hey stranger, what do you know?
Well, you're not strangers, you're all my friends.
But hey friend, Tell me everything you know about the complicated military situation in Syria.
Make sure you discuss the Russians, Iranians, US forces, Turkish and Kurds.
Remember to talk about the Syrian rebels and ISIS. Make sure, and of course Israel.
Get all that in there. Now explain Syria for me.
Go! Nobody would have been an expert last week.
But this week, the president, against the better advice of his top generals and pretty much, I would say, 85% of the country, against everybody, he said, let's pull out. Suddenly, everybody in the country became an expert on Syria overnight.
It's like a Christmas miracle.
A week ago, we didn't know anything about Syria overnight.
Today, we're all experts.
Not only are we experts on Syria, we're experts on military things in Syria.
So we know for sure that it's a bad idea to pull out.
Or we know for sure that it's a good idea to pull out.
But we know, boy, we're pretty certain about this.
So here's my position.
I know I'm often criticized for agreeing with the president too often, and I agree with him usually in the context of his persuasion being on point, which he usually is, or that his strategy in a business kind of a context is solid.
So whenever that's true, I agree with him.
Now, I'm not an expert on Syria, and I'm not an expert on military anything.
So I can't share with you the certainty, which most of you seem to have, that this is either a great idea or a bad idea.
I don't know.
And I'm not sure that any of you know either.
And I also don't think that looking at examples of what happened in Iraq or examples of what happened somewhere else, I don't think those are as informative as they could be.
Because if there's anything that's not like other things, it's Syria right now.
Name the other thing that's just like Syria.
Nothing. There's nothing like this.
Absolutely nothing. So you can't predict it.
But let me say a few things that I haven't heard other people say.
I heard people complain that the president announced this by tweet instead of working through the system in the normal way.
Let me give you...
I'm going to paint a picture for you.
Of what would happen if the president tried to do this, the withdrawal from Syria, if he tried to do it in the normal way.
Here's how this would go.
The president would call in his general and say, I'd like to pull out of Syria.
You know, do some research on that.
Tell me the pros and the cons and get back to me.
General gets back and the general says, nope.
We need to stay there, and it's a bad idea to get out of there.
Now, what do generals generally say about their missions?
If you're a general, and it's your job to, you know, win, let's say, and create...
Let's say you want to create a legacy for yourself.
Let's say your name is General Mattis, and one of the things that you'll be forever remembered for is Syria.
If you're going to tell me what is the main thing that General Mattis' reputation will hinge on, what would it be?
Probably what will happen with Syria long term.
Because if what happened is that General Mattis went in there and fixed it, and then that's his legacy, that's a pretty good way to retire.
But if General Mattis went in there, kicked ass on some ISIS people, and then left and went right back to where it was, a bunch of people getting slaughtered, That is not good for General Mattis.
So under those conditions, somebody is a warrior and they're not done with the job.
If they're not done with the job and...
Here, I'll get rid of that for you.
If they're not done with the job and you're a general, you want to get done with the job.
You also don't want your name attached to something that can reverse.
But that's not necessarily What the decision needs to be.
So just imagine trying to get the right, what the president would consider the right decision through the bureaucracy.
Then let's say he says to his generals, all right, I want to do it anyway.
I understand the risks, but I want to do it anyway.
Go build me a plan.
Three weeks later, he says, where's my plan?
And the generals say, well, we can't figure out a way to do it.
Because if we pull out, the Kurds will get slaughtered and we can't do that.
So the president says, are you serious?
It's now been three weeks or six weeks and you can't even give me a plan to do this?
They say, no, it's hard.
You know, we're still thinking.
Can't make it happen.
At that point, who's running the country?
That's the question you ask yourself.
If the president keeps asking for something, and the people who have slightly different interests, not entirely different interests, but slightly different interests, just can't give it to them, they can't get to yes, what should he do if the bureaucracy can't deliver the thing that the country wants, at least the people who voted for Trump, and the things that he wanted to deliver?
What is the best thing for him to do?
Well, I'll tell you.
One thing he could do is he could tweet that he's going to get out of there, completely bypass the military that has not delivered for him, and fire the most popular general in our lifetime.
That's some serious leadership right there.
Now, I'm not going to tell you that this will work out well, because I don't think that can be known.
But I gotta say, the balls that it took to thwart the entire, you know, let's say military-industrial complex, do you think there was anybody in the military-industrial complex, the people who profit from selling war, do you think there's anybody in that giant, powerful structure who wanted him to get out of Syria?
No. No, I don't think so.
Because more war is better business for all of them.
More promotions, better business.
So, I think the president used Twitter to do what the government couldn't do for him, which is simply communicate what he wanted and make it happen.
So, it's possible that when we look back at this, historians look back.
And it all depends how it goes, right?
If Syria goes well, Or at least not as bad as we thought.
This will look like one of the greatest leadership moves of all time.
Historians will write about this for thousands of years, the time that absolutely everybody told him he couldn't do it, but he decided that, wait for it, we're not a military junta, J-U-N-T-A, is that how you pronounce it, junta?
That we are a civilian-led government.
President Trump just asserted the civilian leadership over the military in a way that had to be done to get to this point.
Now again, I'm not saying that we should have gotten to this point, because I don't know.
Now let's talk about how it is likely to go.
Let's take two conditions.
One condition is we stay there forever.
Is it likely that Syria will turn into a great place with no problems if our 2,200 people stay there?
I don't think so.
I don't think that Syria was going to, in any important way, become better.
Maybe another 10% better.
But it was a permanent expense, a permanent provocation, and a permanent hindrance to peace in the region to keep our troops there.
For that reason, anyway.
So, the plan of staying there did not have an end point, and it didn't have really much of a chance of improving things too much beyond where they were.
Yeah, it might get some more ISIS people who are hiding out.
Yeah, it might protect the Kurds a little bit better than whatever is the alternatives, and we'll talk about that in a moment.
Now, here's the thing.
If the President wanted to pull out of Syria, But he wanted to do it in a way that protected the Kurds.
Do you think he could have done it through the normal process of asking his generals, hey generals, give us a plan where we can pull out and still protect the Kurds?
Because they were our allies.
What would the generals say?
The generals would say, there's no way to do that.
Can't be done.
Because nobody could protect the Kurds as well as we could.
And that's probably true. And we've made a commitment to them.
It's a point of honor that they fought with us, and we said we'd protect them.
And why would we turn them over from our good protection to a less good protection, whatever that looks like?
We would never agree to that.
Now let's say you're president of the United States, and you say to yourself, I do like the idea of protecting the Kurds, and I don't have a plan to do it if we're gone.
Here's how it's going to work.
I'm going to tweet that we're leaving and watch what happens.
Once you've made the decision that you're leaving Syria, suddenly all the options that weren't practical become practical.
This is the magic of leadership.
Once you tell people that it doesn't matter that you tell me you can't do it, I've already decided to do it, suddenly people get creative.
Suddenly, options occur that were not before options.
Suddenly, people get into action, they start making decisions, they get panicked about the Kurds, as they should be, right?
Maybe a little bit of panic about what could happen to our, apparently, our allies might be exactly the right emotion to bring to this.
You should be a little panicked about what's going to happen to your allies.
So, yeah, I think Trump just took the box that he had two years of, you know, waiting for this box to get to the right point so he could shake it, and then he just picked up the box and he just shook the piss out of it.
Now, does that mean that we have a plan for figuring out how to do this right?
Nope. But let me ask you this.
Could we have ever gotten to a withdrawal if he'd gone through the normal process?
I don't think so. I think the normal process would have been too cautious.
It would have said, I don't think we can get there.
Let me give you an example from the business world.
I can't tell you how many times I've said to one of my own lawyers, you know, I use lawyers for lots of different purposes in my business, for contracts and such.
I can't tell you how many times I've said to a lawyer, should I do X? And the lawyer says, well, I'm not going to tell you what you should or should not do, but I can tell you that's a bad risk.
In other words, there is risk.
Something bad could happen.
But I, as the business person, have to manage risk.
It's not enough to say, yes, if I don't do this, I could have zero risk, so zero risk is better than some risk.
What I have to weigh is the benefits.
Against the costs. And so I often overrule my own lawyer, because my lawyer's incentive is not to tell me something that will get me screwed.
No lawyer wants to give you advice and say, yeah, there's only a 10% chance this could go wrong, and then it goes wrong, and then you blame the lawyer.
Say, why'd you tell me to do this?
So lawyers will just say, I don't know how to do this safely.
I can offer no way to do this At a risk that's low enough for me to advise you to do it.
Something probably a little like that happens when the President asks his staff to make any big change.
There's a whole bunch of people who are invested in the way things are who are going to say, oh, I don't quite know how to do that.
I guess we can't get there from here.
I'm sorry, President.
I understand what you're asking, but we've got risks.
We can't do anything because of these risks.
And then the business person says, I know there are risks.
Every path is bad.
I'm going to pick the one that I think has the longest term potential, even with the risk.
And that's what he did.
So, those people who are saying that the president acted impulsively, We're way off base because he's been promising this since the beginning.
And we do seem to have our boot on ISIS at the moment, so this is the time when you should start thinking about it.
Trolls. So the timing's probably the right time to think about it, if not early.
You know, his critics would say it's early, and I would say it's on the early side.
That doesn't mean too early, but it's definitely on the early side of things.
But here's the thing.
We have not fully explored all of the ways to get out of Syria safely in a way that protects the Kurds, etc.
There was an article I tweeted around, and I don't know how reliable this article was.
It wasn't from a source that I know.
But it was a source that said that Saudi Arabia and the UAE Had sent troops in to help protect the Kurds.
It was a November 22nd article, so you should figure it takes a while for things to happen, so probably the Saudi and UAE forces are settled in now in what was described as protecting the Kurds.
Now ask yourself, could the Saudis and UAE protect the Kurds as well as our 2200 advisors?
I don't know. Do you know?
Maybe. It seems to me that the job is really about just getting in the way so that the other party doesn't cause a war with a country they don't want to start a war with.
We were in the way and now the Saudi Arabia is in the way.
Probably it's enough.
Probably. Don't know.
So I would say that I would compare this also to the year 2000 bug.
Do you remember the year 2000 bug?
It had this weird quality about it.
So that was the idea that when the date turned from 1999 to 2000, all of the old computer programs that had not foreseen they would still be in action in the year 2000 would have a date problem.
They couldn't handle the date calculation.
And then the whole world was supposed to shut down because these computers would all glitch at the same time.
But what happened instead?
Instead, Pretty much every one of those bugs got fixed, and all the experts said it couldn't be done.
What was the difference between saying it couldn't be done and completely doing it?
Panic. It was a question of how much energy people put into it, how much creativity, how much thinking, how much effort.
As soon as we were focused on it, because it was really, really important, because the date was coming, took care of it.
We just fixed it.
This Syria thing is very similar.
The president has said, we're getting out, and the plan is either incomplete or nonexistent.
And And what happened was, what do you think is happening right now in the State Department and the military and all the people who do the planning?
Well, what the president did was he put a panic focus on this question of the Kurds.
So now all the people who All the people who care about the Kurds, an entire national focus, an international focus on it.
You've got a lot of people focusing on this problem.
Are the odds good that the Kurds will get some kind of a good solution with that much focus on it?
Pretty good. So again, we can't say that everything will turn out well, but we couldn't say that before either.
So I would say that the president probably did One of the ballsiest things you'll ever see a leader do, meaning that he tweet-managed the government on a military issue because going the normal route probably could not have gotten him there.
Probably normal management would have been a failure because everybody would just tell him why he can't do it.
So instead, he just creates a year 2000 bug.
By ordering it to be done, He creates all the focus and energy that's required for this specific problem to get solved.
So I think that he probably solved it with a tweet.
Probably. All right.
That is just about all I've got for today.
I am going to talk...
I might do another periscope a little later on another topic.
Including Patreon, and maybe including something about Blight Authority.
I want to talk about those topics, but they'll be separate.
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