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May 6, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
40:08
Episode 520 Scott Adams: Iran, China, North Korea, Border, Biden
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Hey, Jake.
Come on in here. Joanne, you're early.
Good to see you, everybody.
Grab your coffee. I know a lot of you are still tired because you were up late last night watching Game of Thrones.
And if you're not a fan of Game of Thrones, you are so sick of hearing those references, aren't you?
Well... We're good to go.
So I continue to watch in amazement at the unparalleled incompetence which is our government, specifically in the immigration area.
And I've decided what it is that I want as a citizen.
And one of the great things about social media is that we citizens can say, hey government, this is what I want you to do.
And if other people think that's a good idea, then the other people say, yeah, I like that, that's a good idea.
And if enough people say it, the government probably will respond.
So there is a direct path from an individual with a good idea, or even a good question.
And the government.
But it has to go through this filter of lots of other people agreeing that that's a good question or a good point or worthy of discussion.
So I'm going to toss out an idea.
An idea to get us past the log jam which is our bad immigration system.
And it looks like this.
If you were in a corporation and you had a plan You would have to show that if you spend this much money, you plan to get the following benefits.
So you'd say to your boss, if you give me a million dollars, I'll cut costs by 10% and I'll have my, you know, production will be ready on this date.
Whatever it is.
So give me this much money, I will give you this many results.
Now, that's not the only option.
You could do plan B, which is give me half a million.
I won't give you as many results, but I'll tell you what you'll get.
Or the do nothing.
If you give me nothing, this is what you'll get.
Where the hell is that?
Why is it that you and I have been tortured with stories of immigration?
It's not like we're the ones who are having the bad time.
Let's put our empathy with the people who are trying to get across the border and having huge problems.
So empathy goes with that.
But you and I, as citizens, we're being a little bit abused in the political sense, a smaller way, but we're being abused by our own government.
By lack of competence.
Now here I'm not specifically calling out the Trump administration, but I do think they have the primary responsibility.
Congress can't let them do whatever they want, so it's not really entirely up to the administration.
But here's what they should be doing.
The Trump administration...
Should be giving us the bullet point plans that say, if you give me this much money, I will give you this much crime.
If you give me this much money, I'll tell you how many people are coming across and what it will do to wages at the bottom end.
If you give me this much budget, I'll tell you what the unemployment rate is likely to be among the people that are competing for jobs.
If you give me this much, I'll tell you how many children have to be separated from their parents.
If you give me this budget, I'll tell you how many people will be raped In the coming year.
An estimate. But that's what plans are.
They're estimates. Where's that?
How come? Why is it that we, the citizens, have been subjected to nonstop Talk about immigration and nobody has shown us the frickin' plan or plans.
Why is it that I can't pick the amount of crime that I'm okay with and the budget that matches it?
Why can't I have an opinion on that?
It's because nobody's presented me that plan.
Break it down to maybe three bullet points.
Just show the plans.
This is the Democrats do nothing plan.
Or maybe it's the Democrats do something just for the immigrants coming in who need to be not separated and need to be cared for.
So there could be one plan that's just a humanitarian plan.
It says try to keep everybody healthy.
But don't try too hard to stop the number of people coming in.
So that would be sort of what a Democrat plan would look like, heavy on the humanitarian, light on fighting the crime.
Let's see that plan.
How many rapes do we get with that?
How many murders are we likely to get with a Democrat plan over five years?
What would the Republican alternative look like?
How much extra would we have to pay for the Republican alternative?
And according to the best people who can estimate these kinds of things, I'm not sure exactly who it would be, but according to them, what would we get?
If we threw $2 billion at the border, would it get us from 125,000 rapes down to 75,000?
It's still horrific by any measure, but wouldn't you choose?
You'd choose half if you could choose.
So, if you believe that there's something like difficulty making a decision in the government, there's nothing like that happening.
There's no difficulty in making a decision because there's no decision being considered.
Let me say that as clearly as possible.
If you think the government is having difficulty making a decision, that's not what you're watching.
You're watching no options being presented.
If you just see, oh, give me a budget for a wall, well, you're a citizen, right?
What does a wall give you?
Don't tell me how much wall I'm gonna get.
Tell me how much rape I'm gonna get.
Tell me how many murders I'm gonna get.
Tell me how many people who are citizens are not gonna get a job at the lower end because they have to compete.
Tell me how many big companies, let's say agricultural companies, tell me how they help or hurt the GDP based on different levels of immigration.
There can't be that many bullet points.
So we should be able to say this budget gets you this set of benefits, this budget gets you this set of benefits.
If you're not presenting that, you're not doing anything.
Am I wrong? Is there anybody who disagrees with my statement?
That if the government has not presented to us with budgets and what each of those budgets would do, they're not even working on the problem.
Whatever they're doing might take a lot of energy.
They might be paying people to do things and go to meetings, but they're certainly not doing anything like working on the immigration.
There's nothing like that happening.
I don't see it coming from the administration, and I don't see it coming from the other side.
So let's stop pretending that one of them has the right idea.
We can't pretend that Trump has the right idea on immigration when you haven't seen it.
Build a wall isn't a frickin' plan.
That's not a plan.
Whoever woke up in the morning and said, you know, what would make my life better is, I'd love to see more construction along a desolate area of the country on the border.
Yeah, I'd like a wall.
No, nobody wants a wall.
They want less rape.
They want better economy.
They might want, you know, a number of things like involving crime and economics.
They might want fewer drugs.
They might want all those things.
But nobody wants a wall.
Why the hell are they selling us a wall?
Why is Trump selling me a wall?
I don't want a wall.
I don't want a wall.
You don't want a wall either. If you think you want a wall, what's wrong with you?
You don't want a wall.
You want less crime, less rape, less tragedies, fewer crises on the border, better economics.
Show us what that looks like for the money that you want us to spend.
Stop jacking us around because there's no stupid plan.
It's just making me mad now.
All right. Somebody says, I want a wall.
Well, if you believe that the wall is the end state, like that you want a wall for no reason other than you want a wall, I would suggest you're not a credible player in this conversation.
Let's talk about something else.
There's one thing that I say often, and it always applies, especially in the world of Trump, that a proper negotiation at a high level, you know, when top players are negotiating, some of the things you should expect to see, well, two things you should always expect to see.
You should see at least one walk away, Every time.
You should expect that there will always be one major walk away and it will look like it's not going to work out.
The second thing you should always expect is that there will be some point where it looks like there's no way it can work.
You should always look like there's no way you're ever going to get a deal.
And as soon as everybody feels that, both sides, when both sides realize That their other option is to not have a deal, and that's going to be really, really bad.
Once they capitulate and suddenly sort of give in to the idea that no deal can be made, then they can make a deal.
They have to completely give up their idea that they're going to get their version of the deal.
And until that's done, you don't get a deal where both people, both sides hurt a little bit, but they get a little bit.
So the reason that's important is we're looking at China.
And the president has made some scary-sounding threats about raising the tariffs on Chinese goods from 10% to 25%, which would be super expensive for them.
And the idea is that people are saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, I thought we were getting close to a deal.
Well, apparently not. Apparently we were not as close to a deal as we thought.
So, I would say, do not despair if the stock market takes a dump for a while temporarily.
Do not despair if the news tells you that no deal could be made.
When you're dealing with China and the United States, the one thing you can be sure of is that you're dealing with adults.
You could say whatever you want about the Chinese selling us fentanyl.
Say whatever you want about, and I do say a lot about that.
Say whatever you will about China stealing our intellectual property and trying to dominate the South China Sea.
I accept all of the criticisms about China as being true or true enough.
But if there's one thing we can all agree on, They're adults.
China is sort of the adult in the room, maybe sometimes even more than the United States, I think.
But they have a long-term view.
They are operating for what appears to be Chinese best interests, so at least they're predictable in that way.
And predictable is good. You want predictable.
And they seem to be smart and engaged and all those things.
Now the United States, same thing.
We didn't send the B team.
Nobody sent the people who had nothing else to do to negotiate with China.
So you have a lot of adults in the room who are pushing as hard as they can and they know how to do this stuff.
So it would not be unusual to see something that looks like a complete breakdown of the China trade talks.
Even if you thought we were this close to the end, it would be completely normal for trade talks to blow up and be, you know, everybody go home and say that it's all over.
I don't know that we'll get there, but if we do, completely normal.
The thing you don't need to worry about is that either the United States or China will, in the end, act irrationally.
Because there is just no real risk that the Chinese government, which is adults, and the U.S. government, which is, despite what some might say about the president, they're adults.
They are going to figure out how to get this done.
It might not be as quickly as you want.
It may not be exactly the deal you were hoping for.
But they're going to get it done, one way or the other.
I wouldn't worry about it. All right.
Watching with interest.
And by the way, this same conversation applies to North Korea.
North Korea is, you know, testing some missiles, blah, blah.
But here's the thing.
North Korea no longer has a reason to point their missiles at us.
You know, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that North Korea is largely already solved.
Because it's not that countries have nuclear weapons.
What matters is if they have a reason to point them at us.
And President Trump has completely removed Kim Jong-un's incentive to point any nuclear weapons at us.
Now, I don't know if he's actually deprogrammed his computers or whatever you need to do to make sure your nukes are not really pointed at the United States, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't have a reason to send them our way.
He just doesn't have a reason.
And because the president, very wisely, he's consistently framed the North Korean thing as an opportunity.
Have you seen that? It's really clever, and I don't think the president gets the kind of credit he deserves when he does the good framing.
The way the president has framed North Korea is, Kim Jong-un is my friend, a personal friend, and we like and respect each other.
Amazing. That is amazingly powerful.
Because it almost eliminates the risk of nuclear war.
And Trump did that by himself.
Like, just by himself. Nobody even needed help.
He tweeted a few times.
He set up a meeting. I mean, people helped set up the meeting.
But really, it's 100% President Trump making friends with this one person, Kim Jong-un, and successfully.
They're actually buddies.
Somebody says, I'm being naive.
What I'm not being is naive about the fact that people don't nuke people they're getting along with.
It just doesn't happen.
The other part that the president has done well is instead of talking about it as our army versus your army, he stopped talking that way, he talks about their economic huge opportunity.
It's like, oh, I sure like Kim Jong-un.
I know we can work this out.
It's going to be great for your economy.
That is a really, really, really good Chamberlain.
I think I'm just going to start laughing at Hitler analogies.
It's hard because they make you angry, but whenever somebody makes a Hitler analogy, I just want to declare victory on whatever point I'm trying to make and walk away.
I've said this before, but there are some things you should never make an analogy to because there's nothing like them.
There's nothing like the Holocaust.
There was only one Holocaust.
I mean, there have been other mass murders and, you know, horrific, but there's nothing really like the Holocaust.
There's nothing really like Hitler in World War II. I mean, you could make analogies all day long, but they would just be different.
Different situations.
Yeah. Anyway, I wouldn't worry too much about North Korea.
We'll get there.
For some reason, Kim Jong-un is satisfied with the restrictions on his economy, but probably not forever.
So North Korea is probably limping by and they have an opportunity to do great instead.
So I think they'll take great.
Let's talk about Iran.
So I guess the US has moved a strike force into the region.
So we moved another carrier strike force, I think it was.
And that's mostly just to send a message.
Apparently there was some intelligence suggesting that North Korea was getting ready to do something aggressive, somehow attack American interests.
And who knows if that's true, but sounds like the government's pretty confident about it, or at least they're acting that way.
So, apparently the Iranian economy is in a free fall, and the latest round of sanctions are going to eliminate the last places that they can sell oil.
And I think that this brings into stark relief.
Is that the way?
That may be the wrong phrase.
But we can see, obviously, now the economic war.
It seems to me that we had two choices with Iran, military and economic.
I mean, three choices if you count doing nothing.
But I'm almost positive we're going to get to the same place with economic war with Iran.
As we could with military war, but without all the dead people.
Now, there will still be dead people, because poverty does kill, and the U.S. is inflicting greater poverty on Iran than would otherwise be there.
So people will die, but if you were to compare the military versus the economic option, I think the economic option will work every time, won't it?
Whereas the military option...
It's hard to make that work, especially if you're trying to conquer and hold territory.
It's almost impossible to hold territory these days, because it's too easy for bad people to sneak weapons into a country and have a guerrilla force that's effective.
The death rate still holds at 100%.
That's true. We're all dying.
Alright. Isn't sending ships more of a military option?
Well, as long as we don't fire, all it is is presenting to Iran the two choices.
So you want to make sure that there's a real difference between the options that Iran has.
One option is stop being so much trouble.
And things will go well.
And the other option is, of course, total physical destruction, which is what the strike force tells them.
All right. I saw a poll that I don't believe yet, but did somebody see a poll this morning that Bernie passed Biden on the polling for the Democrat nomination?
Is that true? I saw it and then I didn't see it in the headlines.
I just saw it in passing. Can anybody confirm that there's a new poll showing Bernie ahead of Biden?
Because that would be a fairly enormous swing.
I see one yes.
Fake poll, somebody says there are two.
Polls are no longer reliable.
Let me just do a Quick Google here, Google search.
Poll, Bernie, Biden.
Yeah, all I see is that Biden is leading Sanders by a lot.
Oh, an Emerson poll.
That was April 16th.
No, I don't see any polls.
That looks like a fake poll.
So I guess that was a fake poll.
Somebody said real clear politics?
Let's try. Real clear.
I can't spell. Politics.
Poll. Biden.
Let's see. Let's see the top one here.
Polling down. Biden.
I don't know. It's too hard to find.
So I can't find it.
But here's my take on Biden.
If you watch Biden doing his stump speech, you've probably all seen by now several clips of his most recent one.
And have you noticed that he doesn't match up well?
The thing that you have to understand when you're watching the potential matchups is that people make decisions based on contrast.
So contrast is going to make your decision for you.
You think you're making a decision, but really you're being influenced into your decisions by what contrast is being presented.
So for example, the real estate agent will often show you a terrible house That you can afford, so that when the agent shows you the one you wish you didn't have to spend that much, but it's a nice house, it seems so much better than the one you looked at that was so bad.
So once contrast is set up in your mind, you're manipulated into decisions.
So don't think of yourself as making decisions.
Think of yourself as being subjected to different types of contrasts, and it's the contrast that makes the decision.
It's not really you. So, when I look at Bernie versus Trump, what's the contrast?
Bernie is his own thing.
There's no other politician like Bernie.
Wouldn't you agree? Have you ever seen a politician who you would say, oh yeah, this one is like Bernie Sanders?
Not really. He's his own special character, which I like.
I have a lot of respect for Bernie, by the way.
I don't like his math.
If you were good at math, I might support him.
But his policies just don't add up.
Now, Trump, likewise, is not like anybody else.
He doesn't compare to anybody else.
Good or bad, he's just his own thing.
So if you imagine Bernie versus Trump, Those are just two people who are their own thing.
And that could be a good fight.
Okay? Likewise, imagine Kamala Harris running against Trump.
They're so different. One's a woman, one's a person of color, one is Trump.
They're so different, they would look at them as individuals.
And that's a good contrast.
So the contrast would not be making the decision for people.
It would be a fair fight.
Now consider Biden versus Trump.
I don't know if you see it yet.
Biden versus Trump.
Biden is what happens if you take away all of Trump's good characteristics.
If you take away Trump's personality, his provocation, his risk-taking, his business experience, his experience of being president, frankly, you take away his tweeting skills, his social media skills, his sense of humor.
If you take away all those things that people like about Trump, You get Biden.
And it becomes super, super clear when you watch Biden give his little Trump's stump speech.
Because when you watch Biden give his speech, you are immediately imagining Trump doing it better.
Did you see it yet?
When you watch Biden, you immediately, just automatically, imagine Trump doing Doing that same thing better.
You can't get it out of your head.
Because the matchup is so devastating for Biden.
Biden is what Trump would be if Trump were really sick.
All right? And you can't get that out of your head.
But if you watched Trump's act and then you watched Bernie's act, you wouldn't have that feeling.
You would say, oh, Bernie is just being Bernie.
There's nobody like it.
You can't say Bernie is half of some other Bernie or twice as good as another Bernie.
There's only one Bernie. Likewise, there's only one Kamala Harris.
But Biden, there is another one of those.
There is a Biden...
There's an improved Biden.
There's the Biden that if everything were better, if he were smarter, if he were stronger, if he had more balls, if he, you know, if Biden had fewer gaffes, if he were more interesting, if he understood persuasion better, if you could improve all those things about Biden, well, he'd be kind of a Trump.
That's my statement, and I'm going to stick with it.
If Biden becomes the nominee, which, by the way, I do not predict, so I could be wrong on this, but I'm not predicting Biden will make it to the end zone to even get the nomination.
He is the most destroyable candidate by far.
Have you noticed that Trump always calls him dumb?
He calls him stupid?
I'm pretty sure he means that.
I think Trump genuinely believes, again, I can't read minds, but I think that's his actual opinion.
I think his actual opinion is that Biden is not very smart.
And have we seen Trump say that about too many other people?
I mean, I'm sure he's called other people dumb.
I mean, I know for sure that that's happened.
But does Trump call Bernie dumb?
Nope. Does Trump call Kamala Harris dumb?
Nope. Does Trump call Cory Booker, who has impressive credentials, dumb?
Nope. Does Trump call Buttigieg dumb?
Nope. Yeah, Maxine Waters he calls dumb.
But when Trump calls somebody dumb, You can kind of see it.
Alright? That's not a random insult.
When he calls Biden dumb, you can kind of, even if you're pro-Biden, you say to yourself, well, is that wrong?
I don't know that that's wrong.
So I don't know what Biden's IQ is.
Obviously, he's done well in life.
He did go to law school, but apparently finished toward the bottom of his class.
I don't know if that's important or not.
But when I watch Biden in public, he doesn't seem smart.
Do any of you have the same impression?
Am I the only one who thinks that Biden actually just doesn't seem that bright when he talks?
That's very unusual, because there are a lot of politicians that I would not support and don't like, but they're certainly smart.
Hillary Clinton's a good example.
Did you ever see Trump Even once, have you ever seen Trump...
Oh, I shouldn't say this, because maybe somebody has an example.
So let me make this not an absolute.
I don't believe Trump spent much time calling Hillary Clinton dumb.
Why? Hillary Clinton is not dumb.
She's very, very smart.
Now, she wasn't smart enough to win, as it turns out, but he didn't call her dumb.
And I'm pretty sure if he thought she was dumb, we would have heard it.
Now, he may have said it about some specific topic, but there's no way in the world that Trump actually believes that Hillary Clinton is dumb.
There's no way he believes that.
But he certainly seems to believe it with Biden.
So I think that's important.
And I'm repeating myself too much, in part because I don't have as much to talk about today, because the whole world is going just great.
I don't know if you saw a tweet that I sent out about some quick iteration of fusion technology.
So we're seeing some...
Let me give this some context.
As we're trying to predict the future of climate change and all that, the thing that's hard to predict if you're making an 80-year prediction about the climate of the Earth is what surprises happen.
And sometimes you can smell a surprise coming before you know for sure it's coming.
And one of the ways you can smell it is that, as you know, we've been trying to solve fusion for decades and decades.
And fusion is always the thing that's, oh, it's coming, another 10 years, we're going to have our fusion power, no nuclear waste, infinite power, yay, everything's solved, another 10 years.
And then 10 years come and you say, well, another 10 years.
But something changed recently.
Or is about to change.
We're on the cusp of that change.
And it's AI. So what I learned about fusion is that when they run a specific test, and they're trying to create more energy than they're putting out, that there are so many variables in play, that human beings are not good at figuring out, okay, we tried this, and we also tried this, but we really can't tell which was the better try.
There's so many variables that you don't even know if trying this was even better than this.
It's hard to tell. So it's hard to iterate toward an improved thing if there are so many variables.
But it turns out that artificial intelligence and machine learning, and I suppose you could see the overlap in those, might get us to the point where the computers Can look at all of these variables and make sense of it.
And they can say, okay, this test got you this outcome with this set of variables, and that is closer to where you want to be than this other test with all these variables.
So here's my point.
Fusion might have been this slow, slow, slow development, slow, slow, slow, where it would take not just 10 more years, but 1,000 more years Because it's sort of like a Zeno's paradox.
Every year we close the gap by half as much.
But if you only go half as much, you can never actually get there.
It feels like fusion is like that.
But if AI improves...
And specifically the form of AI that would be helpful in sorting out the fusion variables, you could reach a point where suddenly AI gets to a point that can drive fusion, and suddenly the learning curve changes by a factor of, I don't know, a thousand or something.
So my point is that you could have marginal to no progress on fusion for 50 years in a row, but the day that you get AI that can really sort out the difference between the tests, you might be almost at the end point.
So you could go from no progress to bang, we got it, just by having AI. Now the AI is not ready.
But the AI almost certainly will be ready within 10 years.
It sounds funny even when I say it because I know how many times people have been wrong about fusion.
But it's worth pointing out that the AI part of it has never been the case in the past.
So there might be something very different about it.
All right. I don't have much else to say.
Is there anything else happening? Did I get James Woods' phone number?
Yeah, somebody online was asking me to interview James Woods here on Periscope.
And I said, well, do you have his phone number?
Because I can't reach him.
He's not on Twitter, if you know what I mean.
Let's talk about LoserThink.
So my book, LoserThink, I'm doing the copy edit phase for those of you who are curious about the author publishing process.
So I wrote my drafts that went through a few iterations of editing with my publisher slash editor and now I'm at the final stage In which a copy editor, which is a different level of editing, where they're looking at the sentence structure and choice of words and some fact-checking, minor fact-checking.
And so now I have to read my entire book this week and say yes or no to all the changes.
And man, is it humbling.
There is...
I'll tell you, it is a humbling experience...
It is a humbling experience to be copy-edited because the number of words I've used incorrectly is shocking.
The other shocking thing is how often the copy editor is changing my proper English to improper English.
And I did say that correctly.
The number of times they're taking my proper sentences And turning them to improper.
For example, you know you should not end a sentence with a preposition.
Don't end it with a proposition either.
But, in a number of cases, I would write around that so I was not ending a sentence with of, for example, and then my copy editor would change it back to incorrect.
Now when I say incorrect, I don't mean that.
I mean that there are things that have moved into common usage that works better with my style of writing.
So I'm seeing a few situations in which my writing got a little formal because I was trying to write in the specifically proper way, but the rest of my writing is not that formal, so it was sort of stick out.
So the copy editor puts them back in the same form and makes it a little more common usage and it reads better.
Somebody says, I speak more formally than others.
Is that true? I would not expect that to be true.
But I guess it depends what others you're comparing me to.
Alright, I... And I use conjunctions at the start of a sentence now, too.
Well, I've always done that.
I like sentences starting with and and but, if that's what you're talking about.
Uh... Living a high-quality lifestyle off-grid with Tesla technology.
So somebody's living off the grid with Tesla technology.
I assume that means you have a battery running your house?
Separate battery.
I'd be very interested to hear about that.
Compared to people who say, how come?
Yeah, earlier on this Periscope, I said, how come instead of why?
And as soon as I said it, I wasn't really sure if it was inappropriate or if it was some hillbilly sort of affectation that I picked up when I was young.
Because where I live, if you were to have a conversation with the people in the town that I grew up with, they would not have good grammar, if I may say that charitably.
Somebody has a Tesla solar plus battery for a house for about $30,000 after tax breaks.
I have lots of questions about that.
So somebody else says they grew up saying how come instead of why.
when I hear it, my ear is turning how come into sort of a country or it doesn't feel like proper English, but maybe it is.
Yeah, I'm not going to say how come is wrong.
I'm just saying that I don't know if it's as right as why.
All right, Game of Thrones, I'm not going to talk about that.
It's too boring for the people who haven't watched it.
And I'm going to talk to you later.
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