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May 10, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
34:31
Episode 525 Scott Adams: Drinking Coffee With You and Taking Your Questions
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Hey, there's everybody.
Come on in here. Janice, the rest of you, where are you?
Wake up. It's time for, I think you know, coffee with Scott Adams.
Grab your cup, your stein, your chelis, your mug, your thermos, your tankard.
Good. And if you've got it and you've filled it with your favorite liquid, it's time for the simultaneous sip.
Join me. Ah, good stuff.
So, I saw that Georgia passed the controversial heartbeat bill so that women cannot get abortions if the law holds up.
They would not be able to get an abortion if there was a heartbeat.
Now, I don't want to get into the politics of abortion, but I want to make one comment.
I had said a while back that individual states would have trouble backing off from Roe vs.
Wade. They would have trouble banning abortion because it would be bad for their economy.
So this will be perhaps a test case.
So three Hollywood production companies already pulled out from Georgia.
Or they said they won't work in Georgia.
I don't know if they were there. But what I'm wondering is if you will see that major companies will no longer agree to move to Georgia.
So here's the economics of that kind of law.
Nobody is going to move to Georgia because of the new law.
In other words, nobody will say, hey, I didn't know where I was going to move.
I've got an idea.
I'll move to Georgia because I like that new law.
It's not a law that makes you move there.
You may like the law, you might dislike the law, but you would never move because of the law.
You wouldn't move there because of it.
But a corporation almost certainly could never move into Georgia now because the employees would have too much resistance.
So if you had a normal Fortune 500 company, you'd have, I don't know, 40% of them, 30%, whatever the number is, Would be so incensed about moving into Georgia that the company just wouldn't be able to do it.
So stockholders, employees would prevent that.
So I think Georgia may have just shot their own economy.
But we won't know.
I mean, we might not know for five or ten years.
All right. There's an interesting test case right now, I'll call it a test case, about the dividing line on social media banning.
And as you know, a number of conservative, right-leaning people have been banned lately.
And people are saying, hey, if you're going to be banning people on the right, how about a similar standard on the left?
Now, as you know, Farrakhan, who some people call left, some people call right, I don't know what he is.
He's just sort of his own person.
But he got banned, so people are saying, well, it's not just the right.
There's also Farrakhan, but he's sort of a gray area.
But there's a cleaner case now.
I don't know if you've seen Mike Cernovich is having a problem with a Democrat troll.
The person he named on Twitter is Vic Berger.
And apparently this guy's behavior should, by my reading of it, cross the line to be bannable.
And he's made enough noise about it that certainly the social media companies are aware of this troll.
And so this will be a good test.
If that troll who has been just horribly abusive to the Cernovich family, if he stays on social media and he's not banned, I think we have a conclusion.
So if he stays on there, you have to wait a little while for the process to work.
But if he's still on there in a week, Cernovich's abusive troll, I think that tells you everything you need to know.
And if he's gone, then that would be a good sign.
It means that there's some kind of balance.
Maybe it's a system that's imperfect, but it's crawling toward getting better.
Which would be maybe the best you can do in this situation.
Alright. Those are a few of the things going on.
I tweeted yesterday the President's tweet about the fact that Gilead, if that's how you pronounce it, the drug company that's making an AIDS-preventative drug, that the administration got Gilead to donate 200,000 doses, which would cover I think most or all of the people who could not afford it.
So that would give you a very protected population.
So I look for that story on CNN. Go to CNN. Hey, where are some updates on this story?
Because it looks like a really, really big thing in terms of the President's initiative to eradicate AIDS, at least in this country.
And it's not on there.
So I went over to Fox News and was like, oh well, at least Fox News will have it.
It's not on there. Unless I missed it.
And then I googled it.
And I thought, well, at least we'll have some other news outlets.
And the only one I could find was the Washington Examiner, a very pro-Trump, smaller publication.
And I thought to myself, is this fake news?
Somebody's saying that Fox Business covered it.
Somebody else is saying that the New York Times as well.
Do a search on it.
Do a search on that.
It feels as though it's being suppressed, doesn't it?
To me, it seems like it should have been one of the biggest stories in the world.
So somebody says here, James Woods says he will not be on Twitter until everyone has free speech.
Well, I guess James Woods will not be on Twitter because I'm not sure if free speech...
The good news is, James Woods is the healthiest person among us.
If he's turned off social media, he's probably the better for it.
So if you do a Google search though, which I just did, What you're talking about, the New York Times article about it, it doesn't come up.
I mean, it's not on the first page.
It's the New York Times.
There is an older article about the initial administration's initiative being announced a few months ago.
But I didn't see it on the top page.
So maybe it's just me.
Um... Somebody says they got the New York Times as the first one.
Well, it was the first place, but I think it's an older article.
I don't think it's a newer article.
Anyway, the point is it seems undercovered, but there may be some coverage I don't know about.
Now, think about your world right now.
Think about the biggest problems in the world.
So you've got nuclear power, which will probably solve...
Climate change. People don't realize it yet, but the nuclear industry is revitalized, and there's almost no coverage of it.
But it's probably going to solve climate change and make energy a lot less expensive.
We've got these AIDS drugs that appear to be really, really effective.
So, you know, AIDS is certainly going to be shrinking in this country.
I mean, almost guaranteed, I would say.
And then I told you about a technology in some university lab where they can desalinate water chemically.
So instead of using a lot of energy to push water through a membrane or to steam it off, the usual ways that people desalinate, they can do it just by mixing chemicals, which would be a low energy process.
And they already know how to do it.
There's nothing to be invented.
They just have to You know, engineer it up until it's industrial-sized.
That's the sort of thing that would make water no longer a problem.
So you could solve water, AIDS, and climate change, and we already see the solutions.
Now, it will take a long time for all these solutions to be engineered into the scale that they need to be, but we actually have those solutions now.
They all exist. You don't have to invent anything.
You don't need to invent generation 3 nuclear, which has never had a meltdown, and generation 4 is coming online, and that one can't meltdown even if things go wrong.
So if you get all these things going, you've got a lot of big problems solved.
I was also wondering, and I don't want to jinx anything, but When was the last time you worried about terrorism?
Is it my imagination, or is ISIS and Al-Qaeda completely useless?
You know, think about it.
I don't want to give terrorists any ideas, but if you were a terrorist, couldn't you do a lot of damage to this country?
Just you? If you were evil and you planned and you wanted to do whatever you could, I can't convince myself that Al-Qaeda or ISIS are even trying anymore.
Or are we so good at catching them that we just catch them all?
Because we might be able to catch them all.
It's entirely possible.
That our total lack of privacy has cured, for all practical purposes, may have cured terrorism.
Because it might not get every individual who wants to grab a gun and start shooting, but it might get all of the big plots, you know, the big bombings and stuff.
It might get all of them. So, somebody says, since Notre Dame, well, I'm talking about this country.
In the United States...
You know, you don't hear any news about big, organized, al-Qaeda-like plots.
Why is that? Do we really have such a good handle on it that it's been reduced to almost a nothing?
All right. Yeah, LA had that bust where they found thousands of guns.
I don't know what that's all about. If somebody says we have many terrorist cells across the US just waiting, well, wouldn't you think with all of the incentive that the bad guys have, wouldn't you think there would be more successful attacks?
All right. Yeah, I know the caliphate is destroyed, but they seem ineffective.
So, It almost seems as if terrorism is no longer a big deal.
So you've got the Syrian war has wound down.
You've got North Korea is just trying to get some attention, but they don't seem to be serious about nuking us.
You've got the...
Let me tell you...
Let me make another prediction.
I want to say very clearly...
That you should never get financial advice from cartoonists.
Never get financial advice from cartoonists.
So what follows is not financial advice.
But when you're looking at the China trade negotiations and it brings the stock market down, what would you predict is going to happen with Chinese trade negotiations?
Is there anyone that thinks we'll never reach an agreement?
Does anyone think it won't be solved?
Because even if we don't reach an agreement, we'll just tariff each other until some kind of stable situation is created just from the tariffs.
So there's almost no scenario in which things don't get worked out.
China wants to work it out.
Trump wants to work it out.
It's going to be hard. You always have some walkaways.
You always have some threats.
This might be the most obvious stock buying opportunity that you'll see in a long time.
It's sort of a fake problem.
It's a problem that you talk about, but not a real problem.
Meaning that the US and China will get along.
They will get along one way or another.
Might be a month, might be six months, could take a year.
But China and the United States, we're going to get along.
It's impossible for me to see a scenario where things just unravel and the economy falls apart.
Yeah, it looks like a buying opportunity, but don't get your advice from cartoonists.
Why not no tariffs?
It's a good question. Why not no tariffs?
I think the problem is That when you have a country like China, what they could do in a no-tariff situation is they could dump a lot of products in the United States below cost, put all of the US manufacturers of that product out of business because they can't compete with products that are being sold for less than a cost, and then once all the competition is gone, The only companies existing are Chinese.
They survived because the government was keeping them alive.
And then they can take over the new territory because there's no competition.
So there are ways that might not be the best example.
But the thought is that if you had no tariffs, one of the countries could cheat.
There are a couple of ways you can game the system.
So putting tariffs on people who are dumping...
It prevents them from dumping.
So I'm no expert in this area, but in an approximate way, the idea of having no tariffs isn't as easy or as perfect as it sounds on paper.
I think the funniest thing is that we're selling more soybeans to China.
Now, I'm no doctor, but I definitely avoid soy whenever I can.
How many of you avoid soy for health reasons?
Not so much health reasons, I'm not saying it's unhealthy, but the idea that it does some mimicry with your hormones that you might not want.
I don't know if that's true, by the way.
I'm not a scientist.
But it's in the news.
People talk about it.
I could swear that I could feel it.
I don't know if that's true.
But my impression is that when I ate a lot of soy, I could actually feel the difference in my chemical makeup.
But that might have been psychological.
Yeah, look at you. There's a lot of soy avoiders.
It would be hilarious If we ended up selling soy only to China and it completely changed the nation of...
It just completely changed who they are.
Somebody says that hormone stuff is BS. Maybe.
I don't know. I just know that I feel different when I eat it than when I don't.
And if it's psychological, it's psychological.
But psychology is real, too.
Wow, there's a lot of people who avoid it here.
All right. Does anybody have any...
Oh.
So I saw a tweet yesterday that I was going to retweet.
It was from Kamala Harris.
And... It was one of these lawyerly tweets about what Trump did or did not do, about an indictment or a subpoena, and it was so boring.
I just thought, the big problem with Kamala, have you noticed this?
Nothing she does looks genuine or human.
And it's the lawyer problem.
Kamala Harris is a lawyer, and for all I know, she's really good at being a lawyer.
But you take that lawyer skill set, and it doesn't translate as perfectly to giving a rally speech as you like.
And I ask myself, how could somebody with a lawyer background ever beat Trump in an election?
I feel as if that's the worst trade-off.
Now, was Biden a lawyer?
Can somebody fill me in?
Biden was an attorney before he was a politician, right?
But he's been a politician so long that I would call him a politician at this point, not a lawyer.
So, at least Joe Biden knows how to talk like an ordinary person.
When you listen to Kamala, she just doesn't talk like ordinary people talk.
She's a little plastic.
It looks like she's not comfortable with who she is, which is not saying she's not comfortable, but the way it comes off.
The impression she leaves is that she's putting on a play and it's not believable.
It's sort of the Hillary problem.
When I say it's the Hillary problem, before anybody jumps on me and says, you're being sexist, I mean the lawyer problem.
Hillary Clinton was a lawyer, Kamala was a lawyer.
I feel like there's a precision that you learn with that craft that you need to be a lawyer.
To be a lawyer, you want to use exactly the right words and exactly the right order, because it matters.
To be a politician, it's something closer to the opposite of that.
The politician is not working with precision.
The politician is working with feeling and big concepts and keep it simple.
One of the things Trump does better than anybody is keep it simple.
And watching a lawyer, somebody who's trained as a lawyer, try to keep it simple, is pretty tough.
All right. When I watch Trump, one of the things I ask myself is, I try to imagine myself in the future.
Let's say 10 or 20 years in the future.
In 20 years, what are historians going to say about Trump's technique, his style, really everything about the way he operates?
What do you think the experts are going to say about Trump in 20 years?
I feel like they're going to say he's the best there ever was on a whole bunch of areas.
Now, they may not say, they certainly won't say, he's the best there ever was on all things presidential.
You know, there are always going to be things somebody's better at.
But I think they're going to say nobody was better at a press event.
I think they're going to say nobody was more transparent.
I think they're going to say nobody was more persuasive.
I think they're going to say nobody was ever better, even close, at giving a rally speech.
I think that Kennedy just lost his spot, wouldn't you say?
Wouldn't you say that if you were thinking about all the great presidents, at least in modern times, I didn't hear Lincoln talk, but in modern times you'd say, well, probably Kennedy.
It was the standard for captivating the crowd.
But now I would say that's certainly, it's got to be Trump.
So the things I think that Trump will be remembered as the best president ever would be negotiating, deal-making, putting uncertainty into things.
Oh, the other thing I think he'll be remembered for is the idea of being friendly with dictators.
While negotiating hard on the details, as he is with China right now.
I mean, look at the situation with China and the U.S. I mean, think about this.
One of the things that you don't notice is when problems don't happen.
And there's a problem not happening right now, which should be the only news.
Here's the problem that's not happening.
The President of the United States and the leader of China Are good friends and they respect each other.
Think about that.
We're in the midst of really tough negotiations on economics with some really big, tough, super gnarly problems.
This is exactly the sort of thing that would normally get two countries to hate each other.
Has Trump gotten us to a point where there's no real risk Of leader and leader really, you know, being mad at each other at the same time that we're negotiating like, you know, like demons, you know, below the surface.
It's exactly, exactly where you'd want this to be.
You know, negotiations will turn out one way or the other, but the way it's happening is exactly where you want it to be.
So, I think that Trump will set the standard for how to deal with Countries that are a little bit adversarial but also we're friendly with them.
They're frenemies if you will.
I think he's setting the standard for that.
He's also completely delegitimized the news industry.
And people have different opinions on that.
There are two ways to look at that.
One is, my God, the news industry has been delegitimized and you need the free press to have a good functioning democracy.
It's the end of the world.
That's one way to look at it.
The other way to look at it is that the press no longer is the guardian of the republic.
The press, their business model has shifted because they can measure what kind of things make them more money and reporting the news honestly is not always the thing that makes them the most money.
So the press is legitimately I think the enemy of the people and if that's true At the same time, that they're also valuable.
I think both things can be true at the same time.
I think that the press can be valuable in large part and lots of legitimate, valuable people within that business.
At the same time, it could be so destructive to the republic Via fake news, such as the Russia collusion stuff, the fine people hoax, the...
How many hoaxes have we seen now?
I was going to make a list of all of the press hoaxes, and there were so many of them that just sounded exhausting.
The reason I didn't make a list is because there were so many of them that I could just come up with off the top of my head.
So I think the president has done a valuable service.
In waking up the public about the illegitimacy of the press.
And again, I think you can hold the opinion that a lot of the press is good and valuable and irreplaceable.
At the same time, a lot of the press is legitimately an enemy of the people and they are not working in the interests of the public.
I think those are both true at the same time.
All right. I'm just looking at your comments here.
A Trump just called Joe Sleepy Creepy.
Alright, well I gotta see that.
Let's see. Damn it.
Let's see what Trump said.
I need to read the exact quote.
Okay. Bear with me please.
Talk among yourselves. God damn it.
Whenever I try to find anything while people are watching, it all goes wrong.
So Trump's tweet, he says, looks to me like it's going to be Sleepy Creepy Joe over Crazy Bernie.
Everyone else is fading fast.
So now he's calling him Sleepy Creepy.
The fact that...
The fact that he keeps playing with the nickname, he knows it's world news every time he plays with the nickname.
So he's taking all the attention out of the weekend news cycle.
If you notice, the weekend news is not very interesting.
B-52s just landed in Qatar.
I don't know what that's all about.
But if I were Iran, I wouldn't be too happy.
So, I'm not entirely convinced that Joe Biden is going to make it to the nomination.
You might see a lot happen after the next debate.
So, from the beginning I was saying that Kamala Harris might be the one It was the most risk to Trump.
But the more I watch her, the worse she is performing.
So she doesn't seem to have whatever it takes to capture the attention of the public.
So I think that unless Biden self-destructs, he might make it to the nomination.
We'll see.
I'm not taking any callers because I don't have my right microphone with me today.
All right.
The child videos.
I just... I can't imagine Biden winning.
It feels to me...
I almost feel as if...
It feels as if Trump wants Biden.
Doesn't it seem like Biden would be the best matchup for Trump?
Because you don't want to run against anybody who has a natural contingent.
You don't want to run somebody who has nailed down the black vote or nailed down the woman vote or nailed down the gay vote.
Running against any one of those people would be a little harder.
But running against somebody who's just the bad version of himself, that just feels like the easiest thing in the world.
So I see questions about Kerry and Iran.
Well, so the issue is that Trump has accused John Kerry of Maybe negotiating with Iran or advising Iran against the interests of the United States.
Of course, John Kerry says that's ridiculous.
He's just doing what all former secretaries of state did, which is keep in touch.
That doesn't sound even slightly true to me.
As political lies go, some of them sound ridiculous.
A little bit true. Some of them sound, well, I could see why you'd say that's true.
But when John Kerry says that his conversations with Iran are nothing more than him staying in touch with the people that he was in touch with when he was in office, that doesn't even sound slightly honest.
I can't believe that of all the people John Kerry wanted to stay in touch with, it was the Iranian government and Because they'll be friends forever?
What did he think that was going to be about?
I mean, what did he think was going to happen?
So, I can't quite bring myself to think that John Kerry is actually working in the interests of Iran over the United States.
I can't quite wrap my head around the thought that he would do it and do it somewhat publicly.
Because he's not really hiding the fact that he's visiting with Iran, right?
That's not like a big secret.
His daughter's husband is married to an Iranian VP. So he has some connections over there.
But it would not surprise me.
It would not surprise me if he said some negative things about Trump.
In Iran. How could he not?
If he was talking to people he knows, and he was talking to them privately, I just don't think he was helpful.
So I certainly wonder what's going on over there.
So none of that is good, but I doubt it rises to the level of prosecution.
But none of it looks good.
His son-in-law is Iranian, somebody is saying.
Well, but I don't know that that would make him want to, you know, just the fact that he has an Iranian connection doesn't tell you that he wants to favor Iran over the United States.
I don't think that would be enough.
Yeah. Yeah, shouldn't Americans be allowed to talk to foreign governments?
Yeah. So I doubt it could be prosecuted.
It just seems like a really, really bad thing for him to be doing as a patriot, as an American.
It's hard to square it.
So I just don't know enough about that.
He's trying to salvage the nuclear deal.
What's to salvage?
I don't see how that could be salvaged.
By the way, look at all the deals.
How many deals has Trump cancelled?
He cancelled the Paris Climate Accords, TPP, He canceled our trade deals with China, I guess.
He canceled NAFTA, and he canceled the Iranian nuclear deal.
TPP, yeah. That's a lot of canceling.
And how many of them have worked out worse?
So far, none, right?
There are things that are in progress, and we don't know how they'll turn out.
But as far as we know...
Nothing bad has happened yet.
Has it? So, we'll see.
Alright. Well, I don't have much else to talk about.
I'm going to go do some other things.
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