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July 1, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
37:05
Episode 583 Scott Adams: Iran, North Korea, and Other Places Safer Than Portland, Plus TDS
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Hey everybody, it's a special Coffee with Scott Adams, travel edition.
Yes, I'm on the road, that's why things look a little different in here this morning.
But you know what's never different?
What's never different is the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
Coming to you in a dainty cup today, not my big masculine mug that I like to use.
But whatever kind of a vessel you have, be it a chalice, a stein, or a tankard, could it be a cup or a glass or a mug, a thermos, or possibly a flask?
Fill it with your favorite liquid, I like coffee.
Join me now for this simultaneous sip and the dopamine hit that will get you through the rest of the day.
Can you believe...
That of all the things in the world a hotel would get wrong, the first time they delivered my coffee this morning, it came in a cup that had a hole in it.
Have you ever gotten a coffee mug at a hotel that had a hole in it?
I didn't even know that was a thing.
I kept pouring coffee in it and it kept running into the saucer.
So, it took me two more tries, and I got a better cup, and now I'm good to go.
Good to go! So, if you checked out the stock market lately, it's going crazy.
I can barely handle the speed.
That's my impression of me looking at my stocks.
Because it's all good today. Let's enjoy it while we can.
Apparently it has something to do with China and the tariffs and being good to China and blah blah blah.
Alright, let's talk about the President went to North Korea.
I still can't get over how cool that was.
Now, normally you don't use the word cool when it comes to government.
You don't think of politicians and think cool.
I mean, you just don't think that.
But the fact that Trump even thought of this idea of just stopping by the DMZ to say hi, just the fact that he even considered that, much less the fact that he pulled it off, much less the fact that it will be one of the all-time most famous photographs ever, And apparently did something good for the country and the world.
So that part is great.
But the comments from his critics are the funny part, because there's not much to say that would be sensible and a criticism.
But of course, it's a political season.
People are running for president.
So they have to criticize him, but they don't have much to go on.
So I'm going to read you two criticisms, one from Kamala Harris, one from Elizabeth Warren.
And look how weak these are.
They're just sort of words put together.
Alright, so here's Harris first.
She says, this president should take the North Korean nuclear threat and its crimes against humanity seriously.
You don't think Trump is taking nuclear war seriously?
What? What kind of a comment is that?
Is there anybody in the entire world who doesn't take the risk of nuclear war seriously?
I mean, that's some weird mind reading right there, right?
So she starts off with something ridiculous.
The president should take the North Korean nuclear threat and its crimes against humanity seriously.
Then she says, this is not a photo op.
Our security and our values are at stake.
Okay. Has she noticed that the personal relationship with Kim Jong-un is actually the primary variable that's moving things in a productive direction?
The very thing that is the only thing that's worked, literally the only thing that's worked with North Korea, is the thing that she's criticizing.
It's the only thing that's worked.
Everything else we've ever tried hasn't worked.
He does something that clearly is productive.
We don't know where it's all going to end up, but clearly we're not in fighting mode anymore.
Now we're in how can we be friends mode.
Completely different. Let's see what Elizabeth Warren says.
She says, our president shouldn't be squandering American influence on photo ops.
Notice they're all going to use the photo op thing.
So they're going to try to diminish one of the greatest statesman-like plays of all time.
In the history of the world, this is one of the coolest...
And effective. Political plays of all time.
Befriending Kim Jong Un and then turning that into something productive.
She says it's squandering American influence.
On photo ops and exchanging love letters with a ruthless dictator.
Instead... Oh, okay.
Okay, it's not just criticism.
Warren apparently has a prescription for how to do this better.
All right? So now she said that Trump's just doing a photo op, but the next part of her tweet should be the part where she's got some concrete ideas for how to do this better.
I can't wait for this. And she says, instead, we should be dealing with North Korea through principal diplomacy...
That promotes U.S. security, defends our allies, and upholds human rights.
What does any of that mean?
I believe that's just a bunch of words.
I believe that her solution to defending the United States against nuclear Armageddon is she can put some words together.
That's it. She put words together.
There's not one part of that that tells us what to do, or how to do it, or why it would be different.
It's just words.
Let me tell you where Warren is completely hopeless.
She's an academic.
If I said to you, the President of the United States...
Warren is a successful business person billionaire who will have four years experience as one of the most winning presidents of the United States.
So that's one resume.
So billionaire, successful across multiple fields of business, very experienced, also four years of being the president of the United States, the most successful one.
Okay, that's his resume.
Warren is an academic.
And a lawyer. And a senator who never managed anything.
Are those even in the same category?
An academic?
A lawyer?
I mean, I realize that lawyers often become politicians and they do well.
But I'm talking about the matchup.
If you run anybody who's a successful business person against anybody who's a lawyer, I don't even have to tell you who's running, do I? Successful business person versus lawyer.
Who does the public want to be their president?
Not so much the lawyer, right?
In order to get a lawyer as president, do you know who they have to run against?
Another lawyer. The only way that you get a lawyer as president is to run against another lawyer or somebody pretty weak.
All right. So that matchup is not good.
I don't think...
That Trump versus Warren is a matchup that the Democrats will decide they want.
I think they're going to want to put Harris against Trump, because at least Harris was a badass when she was a prosecutor.
So if you're going to be a lawyer, it probably helps to be a prosecutor, because your own team will vote for you anyway, because you're on their team, but the other team won't think you're too soft.
So Republicans are going to look at a prosecutor and say, well, she's a lefty socialist, but she was tough on crime.
You can't take that away from her.
She was tough on crime.
So I think she looks like a better matchup.
And the academic thing that Harris has is sort of a kiss of death.
The last thing you want is an academic as president.
Now, I realize she's also a senator and a lawyer, and those things count, too.
But the academic part just comes through in her tweet in a way that makes her look like she's an engineer of words.
Trump is an engineer of minds.
So what Trump engineers is your thoughts.
He directly reaches into your brain and makes you think about the world differently.
That's what he does. That's what a salesperson does.
And if you hate the president, that's what a con man does.
So depending on your spin of it, it's all influence.
But he engineers how people think.
Warren engineers words, just sentences.
She's an academic.
She's on sort of this intellectual plane that doesn't help anybody.
All right, enough about that. Here's somebody on Twitter with TDS. And have you noticed that the people with TDS tend to have it in very similar ways?
That is to say, very much like an alcoholic.
If you've ever been around alcoholics, have you noticed there's a sameness to how they act?
I want to see in the comments how many of you have noticed this.
If you've been around more than one actual alcoholic, not just somebody who has too many drinks once in a while...
But actual alcoholics, they have sort of a syndrome, a personality, if you will, that you can tell what they're going to say before they say it.
So alcoholics have a very similar personality that the alcohol causes, apparently.
But the people with TDS have this weirdly similar way of thinking that doesn't seem to be because they read it from other people.
See if you notice this.
Watch how often somebody with TDS will come down on the same point, independent of ever having heard anybody else with TDS say it.
They hit sort of a similar mode, which is how you can tell.
Let me not make a medical diagnosis here.
I'm not qualified for that.
But my observation is, That it looks like a medical, and I mean this seriously, complete seriousness now.
It looks like a medical mental condition, and one of the tells for that is that they have similar symptoms without having seen the other person's symptoms.
They don't seem to be just influenced by each other.
So here's an example.
On Twitter, somebody said, talking about the president, betrayal of the most vital national interest is about as much as it would be possible to have gotten.
So he's saying that the president has betrayed vital national interests.
To which I say, which ones?
What are you talking about?
And then there's an article in the New York Times...
So here's the headline from a New York Times article by Greg Weiner, I guess, or Weiner.
The image of President Trump as a political Robin Hood whose illicit behavior is justified because it serves a greater good is doubly flawed.
So there's some retreat by the anti-Trumpers.
They seem to be beaten down by the facts.
So the facts are economy good, North Korea trending positive, probably do okay with China, trade talks.
All the big stuff is trending the president's way.
Even the border immigration situation, because it worsened so much, even the people who said he was being a hard-ass about having strong border security are probably saying to themselves, well, he was right about this.
If you make it attractive to come here and more people will come, the problem will get worse.
I guess that's true.
So the president is so solid on the stuff you can measure that the TDS people have retreated to a safe space where they'll say bad things about his character or about, you know, they'll say he's lied or he's whatever.
And they're going to use the character attack to say that the ends don't justify the means.
In other words, they're going to say stuff such as, he's talking to dictators.
So, if it's working, you know, it should be measured on the level of whether it works.
So watch the TDS people retreat to character attacks and saying that the ends do not justify the means, that the way he does it is inappropriate even if it works.
Think about that.
People are saying that the way he does it is unacceptable even when it works.
They've sort of accepted the part that it works.
Because if you're saying the ends don't justify the means, you have uncritically accepted that you're going to get the means.
The means don't justify the ends.
If somebody says the means don't justify the ends, they have uncritically accepted that he's going to achieve the ends.
The ends being what?
Good economy?
Peace? Those are the ends.
So they've accepted his effectiveness and they're talking about whether we as moral creatures can accept all of that effectiveness if the price of it is that our feelings may be hurt and that it's doing something to our national character that in some indirect way that we can't quite put together That this indirect badness of his character is going to destroy us in the long run,
even though, sure, sure, it's nice that we have a strong economy and peace all over the world.
That's great. But is it worth all these bad character things that we'll be subjected to?
To me, that looks like TDS. That looks like you've completely run out of stuff.
So watch how often you see character attacks that accept his effectiveness.
What was the thing that I told you?
I said, this is my most wrong prediction I ever made.
So I'm going to accept now, this is my most wrong prediction.
I said that after the first year of Trump's presidency, people would be saying some version of, he's effective, but I don't like it.
Do you remember that?
And I also said that people would be embarrassed to be against him.
Sure enough, I was ahead of the game.
I was way too early, so I was wrong about that.
But we are seeing all of the media say he's effective, but we don't like it.
It's the most common thing they're saying is he's effective, but we don't like it anyway.
So I was early on that.
Here's another prediction I made that I'm going to have some fun with, I think.
Remember, before the first election, 2016, I said that Trump would win in a landslide.
So my prediction was not just win, but I said Trump would win in a landslide.
Now, he didn't win in a landslide.
In fact, he lost the popular vote.
And although many people who are pro-Trump said that the Electoral College was a landslide, others said, well, it's not that landslite-y.
It's bordering on approaching, looking sort of like it could approach landslite-y, but it didn't quite get there.
But what do you think the second election is going to look like?
Yeah. I have a feeling that we might see that landslide after all.
Because things are really shaping up like the Democrats don't have a frickin' chance.
Does anybody think they have a chance as we sit here today?
One of the funniest things that the president has done, and there are a lot of funny things he's done, there are a lot of funny things this president has done intentionally, but one of the things he's done semi-intentionally, is remember everybody said, let's not normalize this behavior?
This behavior was everything he does.
The way he tweets, the way he runs the country through Twitter, and by the way, yeah, I'll talk about that in a minute.
But he insults people, he gives them nicknames, he fights back no matter what, etc.
And everybody said the same thing, all the critics.
They said, we can't normalize this behavior.
Dear God, we can't normalize this.
And what happened?
It got normalized.
It got normalized, right?
Wouldn't you be disappointed if the president didn't tweet a good nickname for Kamala Harris?
Let's say he ends up running against her.
Wouldn't you be disappointed if he didn't have a nickname for her?
Of course you would.
Of course you would.
Because it's normalized now.
So the president has literally normalized all of that stuff that people said, don't normalize this.
And what's the downside?
Let me check.
Let me check my bank account.
Okay. Check my bank account.
Huh. All that stuff got normalized and yet my bank account did not go down.
How about my stocks?
Check my stocks.
Huh. He normalized all of that bad behavior and my stocks are up.
Let's check on North Korea.
Huh. North Korea looks like it's heading in a good direction.
And yet, he normalized all of those insults.
Can we agree now that normalizing that stuff didn't make any difference, except maybe it helped?
Didn't make any difference, right?
In fact, I've actually...
You've probably seen it now.
Have you seen some pundits actually say...
They've actually said some version of, well, he's been running international relations through Twitter...
And it's kind of working.
Have you heard that?
People who are experts are going on television and they're saying that President Trump is running the presidency through Twitter and totally making it work.
Right? You're seeing this, right?
I'm not the only one who's seen this.
People are going on TV, experts, and saying, yeah, okay, he's running the country through Twitter.
It felt like a bad idea.
We were pretty sure that was a bad idea.
But, based on today's perspective, it was a good idea.
Seems to be working. Somebody's asking if I'm growing my hair out.
No, that's just lack of a haircut.
But thanks for asking. All right.
So, I announced on Twitter that I'm going to start muting.
I won't be blocking, but I'm going to mute.
Everybody who makes a comment about Kamala Harris, no matter how clever they think it is, and her dating Willie Brown and how that helped her get a job when she was earlier in her career.
So I'm just going to mute all of you.
So just know that that's the last time I'll ever hear from you if you make those comments on my Twitter feed.
I'm not a prude.
I don't care about it.
It doesn't offend me in any way.
It's just so small ball.
That's the wrong term.
It's so minor league that it offends me.
Please improve your game.
That's all I'm asking. And if you don't want to, that's fine.
I'll mute you. I just don't want to ever hear it again.
Because talking about somebody's sex life 20 years ago, people, it's 2019.
She's competing to run against President Trump.
Are you freaking kidding me that this has any meaning in 2016?
It doesn't. It has no meaning.
It's not funny.
It's not clever once you've heard it.
Once you've heard the clever nickname for her that James Woods gave her, there's no power to it.
It's not persuasive.
Just let it go, please.
All right. So...
Iran apparently is reaching whatever its agreed cap was on what processing nuclear fuel and apparently this would get them closer to nuclear breakout capability and at the same time we see North Korea and there's a report that's been debunked by the administration but you never know Where at least they're floating the idea of letting North Korea remain a nuclear power with some kind of a combination.
Now, given that we're friendly with North Korea now, I would say that's on the table.
I would not think it's first choice for anybody because anything could happen.
Kim could be replaced by somebody else who's less friendly.
It could get in the wrong hands.
You know, there are a million reasons why North Korea and nuclear weapons is a bad idea.
But what I'm going to suggest is that I wonder if technology and better thinking could solve both Iran and North Korea.
So here's what I'm going for.
Both Iran and North Korea have legitimate reasons for having nuclear power and nuclear technology, but we don't want them to have weapons, and we can imagine a scenario in which they agreed not to have them.
And so what I wonder, could you ever have a model where a country has nuclear energy, but just the processing of the spent fuel is controlled by, let's say, Switzerland?
I'll just use Switzerland as an example country of somebody who's independent, who could literally have, if you imagine, let's say, an embassy.
I'll just throw out a wild idea that I'm not claiming is the best idea.
Let's say you put a Swiss embassy right next to the nuclear power plant, whether it's Iran or North Korea.
And the embassy is where all of the nuclear fuel goes.
So it literally goes onto the property of Switzerland inside Iran, or inside North Korea, and it becomes sovereign property, or at least it's on the sovereign country, because the embassy is sovereign territory.
and it's just controlled by a third party who doesn't have an interest one way or the other.
They just don't want nuclear war.
So is that practical?
Because you can say to yourself, well, if this country wanted to go nuclear, they could always just attack this little embassy because it would be a whole army against a little embassy.
But you would see it coming.
It wouldn't happen overnight.
You'd kind of see it coming.
And if such a thing happened, well, that might be the time that you have to attack that country for trying to get that nuclear fuel.
So I think that would give you a pretty good cushion for reacting in time if a country tried to get this fuel for bad reasons.
So I'm just going to throw that out there.
I'm going to throw out another suggestion that's more technological and let me admit that I don't understand this well enough.
I'll just put it out there. But my understanding is that if you co-located a Generation 3 nuclear power plant next to a Generation 4 nuclear power plant, put them in the same location, the Generation 3 would produce some spent fuel, which you wouldn't want to be sitting around because it could be used for nukes.
But the Generation 4 site could use that spent fuel for its own fuel.
So you could take it through Generation 3, which you could build right away, and it's safe enough.
So you could get going with power and productively use this material, and then put a Generation 4, which might take a little more development, et cetera, to get it where you want it to be.
But you could build that up so that the spent fuel becomes its fuel, and then it processes it down to almost nothing left.
So there's a technological solution As long as with maybe an embassy type solution.
So if you can imagine that the nuclear power plant is actually sitting on regular Iranian territory, but the fuel is always immediately moved to the Swiss embassy as an example.
So I'll just put that out there.
There might be some way To allow peaceful nuclear power in a tremendously positive way.
Really good for the country.
And everybody wins.
It's possible. Alright.
Let's see what else we've got to talk about here.
Let's talk about Portland.
So you're all aware that Antifa got violent in Portland and Beat up Andy Ngo and at least one other person got severely beaten with metal pipes on the head and some pretty bad stuff.
Now, I'm very much against boycotts.
I generally resist boycotts about products because that stuff just gets out of control.
If you start boycotting products, everybody's boycotting everybody until there's no economy left.
But I will say that I wouldn't go to Portland under Portland's current situation.
But the reason I wouldn't go is for safety.
So I'm not suggesting that you boycott Portland for political reasons.
Because I think boycotts for political reasons just ends up being a bad idea.
But simply not going someplace because you consider it unsafe is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
So there are plenty of countries in the world that I also wouldn't visit, but I don't say I'm boycotting them, right?
Like, I wouldn't go to Syria, but I'm not boycotting Syria.
It's just too dangerous.
So I'm going to say, clearly and publicly, That I will not travel to Portland.
As long as they allow masked terrorists, domestic terrorists, as long as they allow masked terrorists to gather in large groups and attack people, apparently with immunity because the masks allow them to escape fairly easily, as long as that's legal and allowed in Portland, I'm not going near the place because I would be recognized.
So presumably Antifa wants to hit everybody who says anything positive about this president, wants to beat them with clubs.
I'm not going anywhere near Portland.
And I would suggest that if you have any political leanings toward the president, you should not go to Portland either.
And you should talk about it, because Portland needs to know That they just lost half of their...
And honestly, if you were planning a trip to Portland, I wouldn't go.
So, yeah, people are talking about concealed carry and all that, but why would you cause more trouble for yourself than you need?
All right, so my understanding is that the mayor of Portland is also the chief of police.
Is that true? That sounds terrible.
Oh, let's talk about, yeah.
So, Ali Alexander had been questioning Kamala Harris' let's see, ethnic credentials.
You know, because Ali's African American, but he was saying that Kamala Harris is not technically African American because her Father was Jamaican, etc.
Your mother was Indian, or whichever it is.
It doesn't matter. Of course, I am completely uninterested in this question, because, if you have not noticed, I'm not a legitimate commentator on that topic.
So personally, I don't care what Ali is.
I don't care what Kamala is.
I'm not the one who gets to judge what we call them.
They can figure that out on their own.
But what's funny is that Don Jr.
got some heat for retweeting Ali Alexander's question.
And just asking if it was accurate.
Now he deleted it because it caused a little more trouble than it was worth.
But he was asked about it.
He was asked about it.
And apparently the response that he gave back was a link to CNN's Don Lemon saying exactly the same thing.
So apparently Don Lemon was also questioning Kamala Harris's, I don't know, ethnic credentials or what label you put on her, and he was saying the same thing that Ellie Alexander said, exactly the same thing.
So rather than, so Don Jr., rather than commenting on it, he just sends him a link to CNN saying exactly the same thing, which you, I love the fact that That Don Jr.
has the same sense of humor as his father, and the same sense of humor as the supporters for the most part.
They are the funniest family by far, and they're the two funniest people in a funny family.
So, I can imagine...
Wouldn't you love to go to, like, just listen in on a dinner conversation with the Trump family and the kids?
Just, like, listening in.
You know, if they knew you weren't there so they could talk freely, it would probably be the funniest frickin' thing you've ever attended.
Yeah, and Allie was successful in simply getting everybody to talk about it.
Now, if you're not following Allie...
Alexander, you really should, because you get to watch something being built from the ground up.
So he's a young guy, but he's a young guy who has made really good mentoring connections, shall we say.
And so watching him develop his game is really fun, because this is a perfect example of his effectiveness of Has now gone to the next level.
So he's understanding that what you talk about is the point.
The point is not your logic, what label you put on things.
It's none of that. It's making you focus where he wants you to focus.
And what Ali did, quite effectively, is he made everybody talk about this topic, and it didn't really matter what they thought of it.
He got them to talk about it.
So he essentially controlled the news cycle, at least a corner of the news cycle, by himself.
I mean, think about that.
Ali Alexander probably sitting at home with his phone.
Can you spell his first name A-L-I? I just imagine Ali sitting at home, and he's like, just him and his phone, nobody else in the world.
This is just how I imagine it.
I don't know where he actually was.
But sitting in his home, and he thinks, okay, watch this.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Fires off a tweet.
One guy, one phone, probably his phone, one tweet, And he controlled probably a quarter of the news cycle for a week.
That's pretty good!
So let's give a shout out to effectiveness.
And that's a talent stack.
By the way, I always talk about talent stacks where you combine different skills that maybe you're not the best in the world at any one thing, but if you put together a good Stack them.
You've got something. You're watching Ali do that right in front of you.
It's fun to watch. Alright.
Bitcoin is going crazy.
Let's see what we got here.
Everybody's asking about in the comments.
I just want to see if it's still way up.
It was this morning. Nope.
Bitcoin's back down. So it went up and now it's down a little bit.
Down 12% or so.
But it's jumping all around today.
The when, the value is also gyrating wildly.
And I'll be talking about some things in the coming week, maybe in a few more days, that you'll be interested in if you own the when.
All right. A number of people are adding the interface by WenHub button to their websites, and I'll talk about those.
So those of you who did it, hold tight, and I will be mentioning your websites.
And anybody else who wants to add it, I'll mention you as well.
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