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Feb. 15, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
37:59
Episode 416 Scott Adams: Border Funding and Emergencies. Fun!
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Hey everybody!
What a fun day!
Stuff happening all over the place today.
It's so newsy that I needed to do a special supplementary periscope to catch you up with the news so you will understand it in context.
Alright, so what we know is that the committee that was working on this border funding bill came up with some kind of a terrible committee-built bill that didn't give enough money for border security, according to the experts and according to the Republicans.
And President Trump has simultaneously announced that he's going to sign that bill and also declare an emergency.
Boom! Which is wonderful for those of us who watch this stuff.
It's terribly entertaining.
Now, I happen to think it's the right move, tentatively.
Now, a lot of people are complaining about the details of the bill, but we're still in a fog-of-war situation.
And the fog of war meaning that we don't really know what's in that bill.
We've heard things. People have read it.
People have made comments. But I think that what's going to happen is that our understanding of the details of it is going to evolve in the next few days.
I don't have a beverage with me.
I just thought I'd pop on here.
So there will not be a simultaneous sip this time.
I will save that for tomorrow morning.
But here are some questions I have.
Let's see how these evolve over time.
Number one, there's this suggestion that the bill says that if a kid comes with an adult, that you cannot send the adult back.
Now, I think...
That goes to the whole separating babies from parents and putting children in cages.
So I think the reason that the Republicans were willing to put up with something that clearly would cause a hole in security, because let's say cartel members use a kid to pretend to be an adult to get into the country.
But I have a couple of thoughts about that.
First of all, it might be It might be a reasonable trade-off because the kids in cages thing was so bad that, frankly, we would put up with a little extra crime.
We would put up with a little extra death to stop that.
It became such a big emotional issue.
And I'm not saying that it shouldn't be.
It's pretty important.
But it might be politically right to get rid of the kids in cages or to do whatever you can to minimize that so that you've at least shown some willingness to be productive on that point.
So the first thing I ask is, does that rule get directly to the not putting kids in cages?
If it does, it's not as terrible as your first impression.
I'm saying kids in cages because that's the way it's reported.
I know you don't want to call it cages.
The next thing I wonder is apparently the bill restricts what can be built and where, and it restricts it to the point of, well, it's a pretty bad restriction.
So one of the restrictions is something about the Texas border and something about local mayors and local politicians being part of the process.
We need to wait a little bit.
I would say wait a little bit to see what that really means.
Because I don't know, and here's a big question, if there's an emergency declaration, but there's also a new law, and let's say the new law says that you can't use the money in this law to build the wall, does that mean that an emergency declaration, which creates its own budget, Would also not be able to build in that same place?
In other words, does the bill say that under no conditions, including an emergency, can anybody ever build a wall there?
Probably not. It probably is restricted to the bill's money, its own money, and so maybe the emergency declaration is just to build the wall in the other places.
Or we might have realized that it was so hard to build a wall there anyway That maybe we didn't need the wall there, or at least it wouldn't help because it's such a big area.
If you don't cover it all, you haven't done anything.
And because of the land use, you know, the land rights issues, it might be the case that even the experts say, well, you know, you can't put a wall everywhere and it's going to be so hard to put it here.
It might be. That's a lower priority than you think.
So again, we're going to wait to see.
On the surface, it sounds terrible that the bill would let in people just because they brought a kid, and people could abuse that.
But it might reduce the kids in cages, which is politically important.
I mean, really important.
It's one of the top issues. And we don't know how much of a barrier could have been built on the Texas border, given all the limitations.
So let's wait and find out what the experts say.
But let me give you some context here.
What the president did, if you look at the arc of things, is that he started with a big ask, and he didn't get it.
He got slapped down pretty hard by the other team.
So what he did was he allowed them to build this working committee That would fail in public.
Now there were two things that were going to happen.
Either they would succeed in the way he wanted them to succeed, or he could do the emergency declaration.
But what was important is he allowed the public to watch The Congress fail.
I mean, just fail hard right in front of us.
Normally we're not watching, right?
A lot of the stuff the Congress does, either they pass something and people are okay with it, or you don't hear about it, it's not important, or something big and complicated you don't understand.
But it's very rare.
That you understand the topic enough.
You know, border security is not complicated compared to other issues.
We understand it enough, and then we watch them working on it, and then we saw what they produced, and we just go, what the?
This is awful.
This is like a sausage nobody wants to eat.
So he's priming the public.
By allowing the right process, you know, the one everybody agrees, Congress negotiating, letting that run out right in front of the public.
While we're watching, they're failing right in front of us.
Very important. And it sets the table.
The other thing that was happening is while they were negotiating and failing, the public was becoming educated about the real risk at the border.
And part of that education is to understand that we really do need It's a process of sort of beefing up everything and funneling people toward the places that it's easier for us to catch people who are up to no good.
So people now kind of understand that in a way they didn't understand it when people were saying wall, no wall, wall No wall, right?
Which meant nothing. You know, all wall never made sense.
No wall never made sense.
So the public was sort of up in this nonsense area arguing just nonsense with each other.
Wall, no wall. And then since then, we've all become educated.
People do now understand that those tall, slat steel structures do do something important.
That they do make people change their plans, that the friction works.
So now you've got two things done.
The President let Congress do its process and fail in front of the public.
At the same time, the public was being educated.
And here's the important part.
The Congress apparently ignored, and that might be too strong a word, but did not take the full recommendation of the experts.
The experts. So what is it that every climate science person wants the government to do?
Listen to the experts.
Listen to the experts.
So it's very hard for the Democrats to say this is the one time you shouldn't listen to the experts.
That's a hard thing for them to argue, so I don't think you're going to see that.
So the president has set up things perfectly.
He let them do their process.
He let them fail in front of the public.
While he educated the public, On what the situation was.
And now he has a free pass.
He has a free pass for the emergency.
And sure, people are going to argue, that's not an emergency.
That's just an important thing that we don't know how to do in another way.
Just like the other 35 emergencies that have been in place for years and nobody even noticed.
It's a tough argument if you're just obsessing on the word or emergency.
Is it an emergency?
Let's do some what I call word thinking, where people will argue about the definition of a word, which doesn't matter.
Because we could change the word from emergency to important thing that we can't get done another way.
And then what would they do?
You wouldn't even have to rewrite any laws.
How about Congress passes a law that says, let's change the name of that action from emergency to doing the thing that we couldn't do the other way, but we better get done because it's important.
Or there's probably a better way to do that.
So the president has by far the strongest hand.
And I imagine if there's some rough edges in this bill, they will either get clarified away or we'll find some workarounds.
Let me give you a real-world example.
Let's say a cartel member takes a child into the country and we catch them.
And now we've got a child and an adult We can't tell if they're related.
I suppose you could tell if you did a DNA test at the border.
I'm not sure if we're equipped to do that.
But the point is, if we know that this person with the child is a cartel member or some other kind of criminal, I'm pretty sure they can be arrested.
Under this law or any other law.
I don't think this bill says, oh yeah, well, you murdered 10 people, but we don't want to separate you from the kid, so carry on, go away.
So I wouldn't worry that we knowingly let anybody in.
I don't think that's going to happen.
Then the second situation is that we don't know if this is a cartel member or a real parent.
In which case, didn't they get in anyway?
Wasn't the old process that we weren't going to separate children from kids and the law doesn't allow us just to push them back on the other side of the wall?
I don't know exactly what's different.
I'm hearing people say that this is new.
But to my ears, it sounds like the current situation.
So I'm probably wrong, so don't take anything I say on this.
My point is that we're in the fog of war.
So pretty much every hot take you hear about what the law does or does not do probably is going to change and evolve and get clarified over the next several days.
So hold your fire until the clarifications start coming in.
All right. Now, some people have said, hey, if the president says this is an emergency, and I think Chris Hayes has already tweeted something like this, wouldn't that allow some other president to say climate change is an emergency?
Uh-oh. If this tool is available for everybody, does the next president say, all right, here's an emergency for you, climate change, get rid of all your fossil fuels in 12 years?
Or whatever. And I don't know the answer to that.
Maybe. I mean, it might.
Maybe it's a risk.
But let me suggest something.
I tweeted around a tweet thread from Mark Schneider on Twitter.
So you can see it in my Twitter feed.
And the topic, let me just call it up here.
And the topic is nuclear.
And the idea is, let me just read some of it for you here.
And the idea was that people don't quite realize that, where is it?
Mark Schneider.
And he's proposing a useful counter to the Green New Deal, which he has called hashtag Green Nuclear Deal.
See where this is going?
If climate change is an emergency, we only have one way to solve it.
There are lots of hopeful things we could do that don't really work in the real world, but nuclear works right now.
If it's an emergency, if it's an emergency, Nuclear has got to be your top thing.
Now, a lot of people don't understand the ins and outs of nuclear, and so what Mark Schneider added to this conversation is brilliant.
So he's experienced in this area.
He's worked with nuclear subs, etc.
And he and I have talked offline.
Well, online, but non-publicly.
And I've asked this question, which is, I don't understand why we can't build new nuclear reactors when the Navy does it all the time, don't they?
Doesn't the Navy build nuclear reactors and put them on submarines?
And aren't they building them all the time?
And I wondered, like, why can the military do it, but the civilians can't?
Like, what am I missing?
And part of the answer is that there are these things called fourth generation nuclear reactors.
And the fourth generation means that we've reached the point where we know how to build the reactor without risk.
Without risk.
So in other words, the new reactors, even if everybody did everything wrong, it still wouldn't melt down.
And they would be smaller, right?
Now, Mark's tweet was inspired by the conversation I had with Naval.
And if you haven't seen that, you really, really need to see that.
I swear it could be the best thing you watch all year.
It just might be that good for a lot of people who are saying that.
And I think that.
So you can find that pinned to my Twitter feed.
It's a conversation with Naval.
And one of the things that Naval said, among his many smart things he said, was that what holds back nuclear technology is that you can't iterate.
In other words, you can't just build one, see how it goes, and say, ah, this one didn't work, let's try another one, the way you do with every other product.
Every other product that works starts as a bad product that just iterates and you keep fixing it and tweaking it until it's good.
But because nuclear is so scary and so expensive and everything, you don't have a way to iterate.
You just gotta say, ah, let's put 10 billion dollars into this and it better work!
First try! So nuclear doesn't have the iterative ability.
Now, what Mark Schneider added with his Twitter feed is, suppose you're building these smaller types of generation four nuclear reactors.
So first of all, your risk is very low.
And secondly, if I interpret this right, one of the things he suggested was that we already have at least three nuclear plants in remote areas.
So we already have locations that are essentially approved for nukes and we can just put other reactors right next to them.
You know, put a couple of Gen 4 reactors and then you could iterate In places that are already approved for it, you can just put one next door because they're in remote areas.
Now, I don't know how practical that specific part is, but the part I like about this is the smaller Generation 4 stuff.
Apparently they're also optimized for different load requirements during the day so they can ramp up and down, which you need to do if you have a submarine.
Some of the older generation ones don't do that apparently, not as well.
So these are some sensationally productive thoughts about how to proceed.
So it starts with this, that you acknowledge that climate change is at least a risk, even if you don't believe the exact predictions, even if you think that there's no risk.
It's still a really good idea to build nuclear energy and to become proficient in that before fusion gets here, if it ever does.
And so, your mind-convincing.
I'm not sure what that means. Alright, people have also talked about Thorium.
I don't know the difference in terms of the trade-off between Gen4 and Thorium.
That's for someone else to decide.
But the bigger issues is there is a way to start small without the risk of Without the normal risks of nuclear, there are locations that would be relatively easy to use within a lot of problems, and then you could iterate them from there until we have a solution.
If it's a national emergency, hey, if it's a national emergency, Let's declare it a national emergency and do the one thing we can do.
So the most hilarious thing that could come out of this national emergency for border security is for the climate folks to start screaming, hey, give us a national emergency for climate.
And then, here's the fun part, have President Trump agree And say, I agree.
Let's have military level rules and regulations because apparently they have a different standard for military development.
Let's put it somewhere where it's not going to hurt anybody.
Let's do it fast.
Let's build a system where we can iterate these things and learn and go at the same time like you do with every other product with this low generation.
Somebody says, look into fifth and sixth generation reactors.
Well, I'm sure we would want to use whatever's the best.
I won't pretend to know what that is.
But the point is, We might get to...
This border security emergency situation might trigger more calls for emergencies for the climate, and the one and only way to make that happen happens to be one that is very sellable.
Once you've educated the public on why the fourth generation, etc., don't have the risks that people thought, suddenly...
Suddenly? Alright, let's talk about McCabe.
So you've heard the news that McCabe has a book out and there's a 60 Minutes interview.
We've only seen brief clips, but apparently he's making news because he says that after Comey was fired, McCabe, who was the acting director of the FBI, actually had conversations with other people in the government About removing Trump under the theory that there was a high likelihood he had been compromised by Russians.
Now, what evidence was he looking at?
I think he would admit that it was not an evidence-based decision.
In other words, there were things that worried him in terms of the clues of things that worried him, but there was nothing like A proof or even a strong evidence.
Now, some of you are saying, my God, it's treason.
He was trying to get rid of this president by using the 25th Amendment based on nothing because there wasn't any evidence of mental incapacity or anything like that, right?
But here's the interesting question.
Here's the interesting question.
What if he really believed it was the right thing to do for the country?
What if he really believed that Russia had Trump in his pocket, and that if he didn't act fast, Trump would use his power to get rid of all the people who might stop him, and then suddenly Putin owns the United States?
What if he thought that was a real risk?
Maybe he wasn't convinced it was definitely true, but what if he thought it was a good 20% chance?
Is that possible?
Is there a chance that McCabe believed there was a 20% chance that Trump was actually a Putin plant?
I think there's reason to believe he might, and not because of evidence.
Here's why.
McCabe, in addition to his job, was also a citizen.
He's also somebody who watched the news.
He's also probably somebody who voted.
What happened when Trump got elected?
When Trump got elected, half of the country went nuts.
They actually went nuts with TDS. And they were searching for the reason to explain the thing they all knew couldn't happen.
They knew it couldn't happen.
It was impossible for Trump to win.
And so it's the perfect setup for cognitive dissonance.
So when Trump won, they had to redefine their world to make it make sense again so that they were smart all along.
That's what cognitive dissonance is.
It's where you have to reinterpret your world, really literally imagining things, until the things you imagine make you seem like you were consistent and smart all along.
Because people don't like to just admit, man, I was the dumbest guy alive.
I missed this by a mile.
People have trouble doing that.
So I would say that the media, the anti-Trump media, could be the villain here.
Because it would not surprise me if the anti-Trump media got people so worked up that when their expectations were violated by reality, that people all over the country went temporarily nuts.
And by nuts, I mean cognitive dissonance.
They saw things that didn't exist.
They imagined fears that weren't real.
They assumed they could read the minds of people.
They thought they saw in the evidence all kinds of things that really didn't add up to anything.
They were just coincidences. So I want to put that out there as the alternative hypothesis.
Hypothesis number one Is that McCabe was just a political hack.
He wanted Democrats to be in charge for whatever reason.
Either high-minded reasons or to keep his job or whatever.
And that he and other like-minded people seriously considered treason.
Actual treason.
So that's the theory one, is that he and a number of other people literally And specifically, with no hyperbole and no exaggeration, considered, talked about, and got serious about actual treason.
Now, what are the odds that that's true?
Pretty good. Pretty good, right?
I don't know if it's true, but the odds of it being true are pretty good.
Compare that to the alternative, which is McCabe was simply exactly like every other Clinton supporter.
And he was just crazy.
Meaning temporarily crazy, meaning having cognitive dissonance from a trigger which is very clear.
The trigger is right in front of you, which is nobody thought it could happen, and when it did, they had to explain it somehow.
And so the way they explained it was they talked themselves into, this couldn't have happened unless Russia did it, and they wouldn't have done it unless they thought they could control Trump, so probably they're already halfway there.
I would say both of these theories Are pretty, pretty good.
And maybe it's some weird merger of the two.
It could be a little of both.
But I don't think...
Here's my general point.
I don't think the media should be let off the hook.
No matter what you think should happen to McCabe, independent of that, the media has to take the hit for this also.
Because I think they created an environment where even if you replaced McCabe with somebody else, the odds of that somebody else taking a very similar path and actually talking about, hey, I'm so afraid of this guy, and there's no other way he could have won, according to my worldview.
It must be a Russian problem, and I'm not going to let a 20% chance that Putin took over the United States go unchallenged.
I've got to do something about that.
That's my job. I think you could have replaced McCabe with another Democrat, just any other Clinton supporter, and I think you might have gotten a similar outcome.
So that tells me that responsibility always goes with the individual, right?
So the way society and the legal system works is it wouldn't matter If the media were the real villain, it's still McCabe's responsibility, right?
He's the one who made the decisions.
So you can't remove responsibility from him, and I'm not suggesting that you should.
But if you're looking for, let's say, at a scientific level, as opposed to a social level, as opposed to a legal level where responsibility is always with the person, from a scientific level, you can just look at all the causes and effects.
Because you're not judging anything.
You're just saying, cause and effect, cause and effect, here's one, here's one.
And I don't think we get to this situation with McCabe without the media brainwashing people to think that Trump was just the worst, crazy, crazy, irrational guy and there's no way he could win.
Without that, I don't think McCabe did what he did.
And I think with it, anybody who replaced McCabe with, who was also a Clinton supporter, probably has those same conversations.
Well, what can we do? How do we minimize our risk?
All right. He was FBI and showed bias.
Did he show bias?
Because when you say he showed bias, you've made an assumption that he didn't believe in what he was doing.
Well, no, you don't really assume that, because you could be biased and then believe your own bias.
Here's what I'm saying, is that if he thought it was true, he didn't act in a way that you wouldn't want him to act.
If he actually thought it was true.
That there was something with this Russia thing.
But how do you know he's biased?
I'm not saying he wasn't because my whole work up there was to suggest that he was.
But I think the furthest you can go is to say he could have been biased.
Because otherwise you're sort of reading his mind and et cetera.
But yeah, I think I would agree with you.
I would agree with you that the likelihood that calling him biased is accurate is very high, right?
Almost certainly. He belongs in prison, some of you say.
Yeah, you know, it's a tough one.
Because I feel different about the prison question based on whether or not he believed it.
Because there's two versions of bad McCabe.
If you allow that...
Let's say you've ruled out that he was a good guy.
Let's say you've ruled that out and you're just saying, what kind of a bad guy was he?
There are two versions. One is he...
Made bad decisions based on being biased and being brainwashed by the media, and that caused him to not do his duty the way we see it.
And the other way is that he just consciously didn't like the president and was looking for ways to get rid of him.
But those two are still, I think those are still equally in play until there's more information that would tell us which one is the one.
I don't rule out either one.
So I'm not ruling out either of those possibilities.
I'm just saying there are two possibilities.
It was more than just McCabe, says someone in all caps.
Yes, it was a bunch of people who felt the same.
I'm not sure where a deep state conspiracy starts and where just people thinking alike ends.
Did that even make sense?
How can you tell the difference between a conspiracy and a deep state conspiracy and a bunch of people who just feel the same?
Doesn't it look the same?
What if a bunch of people really just felt the same?
Scott, stop. He doesn't sound repentant now.
Stop what? What exactly am I supposed to stop?
And why should his lack of feeling repentant have anything to do with what I just said?
If anything, it supports the theory that he didn't think he was doing something wrong.
That's what non-repentant people look like.
Now, also psychopaths, but if you...
Let me put it this way.
If you're feeling certainty about what McCabe was thinking, you do not have a credible opinion.
If you say to yourself, well, I don't like how this looks, and it looks like this, and it's probably this, but I can see how it might be a little bit more he was just wrong.
If you're saying that, then I'd say, well, that's a credible opinion.
Even if you said, I think it's a 90% chance he was just being a political animal and trying to get rid of Trump.
But it's a 90% chance.
There's a 10% chance he just had TDS like everybody else and thought he was doing the right thing.
I would say that's a credible opinion.
But if you say to me, stop even talking about that 10% one, you just are not part of the serious conversation.
Because we don't know.
Alright, I'm going to get rid of this user who yells at me in caps ridiculous things all the time.
So you're gone now.
Alright. Do I believe in absolutes?
I don't believe in that question.
No forgiveness.
us.
All right, Russell, you're getting blocked for the no forgiveness comment.
I don't want to live in a world Where forgiveness is ruled out.
Now, if he did mean to just do a coup, then I wouldn't forgive that either.
But it's a little too early to talk about no forgiveness when we don't know all the facts.
He thought he was doing the right thing?
It's possible. Keep in mind that he's saying this in public.
So he wrote a book and he's telling his story in public With no embarrassment, apparently.
So if that doesn't indicate that he thinks he was doing the right thing, I don't know what would.
That's the best evidence I could think of.
But again, we don't know what he's thinking.
We just know that there are two hypotheses that are still alive.
One that he had TDS, and one that he was just a weasel who wanted to overthrow the government for his own reasons.
It sure smells like a coup, it does.
It smells like a coo.
I agree. Alright.
You're blocking people for their opinions.
Why else would I block people?
Yes, I'm blocking people for their opinions.
That's why you block people.
There are legitimate, credible, useful opinions, and then there are people who just scream their opinions despite the evidence, and they're not productive.
Any predictions for North Korea?
I'll talk about that separately.
Oh, yeah, then Amazon pulled into the New York City deal.
That was interesting.
I hear people blaming AOC for that, but I don't know.
I don't know how much of that was really because of AOC. So I'm going to wait to hear about that.
But I loved the...
Did you see the wording that Amazon used?
The way they worded their pullout in their public statement...
It was really good because they said that this sort of project doesn't work unless you can work closely with the local politicians and they didn't have enough support.
And I thought, pretty good reason.
That's well stated.
Alright, that's all I've got for now.
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