Episode 1471 Scott Adams: I Tell You Why Biden and Trump Both Got it Right About Afghanistan and More Fun
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Mask resistance in schools
Vaccination enforcement
DOJ not charging anyone for "insurrection"?
Why did we lose in Afghanistan?
Closing Bagram, Kabul civilian airport
Biden's withdrawal plan
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Hey, everybody. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, the best part of the day.
Again, again, for four years running.
And if you'd like to take it up a level, I know you do.
All you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice, a canteen, a jug of glass, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure The dopamine hit of the day.
The thing that makes everything better except leaving Afghanistan.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
It happens now.
Oh, that was good.
That was well planned.
Just like Afghanistan.
Well, let's see what we've got going on in the news here.
Lots of interesting stuff.
Ah, interesting stuff.
Interesting stuff that I sent to myself so it'd be right here on my phone with my email that's totally working.
What the f*** is going on?
Hold on a second.
Why in hell did Gmail stop working at the beginning of my...
All right, there it is.
I really sent it. So I really sent...
Ah, there it is. It just appeared.
Takes a long time to email yourself sometimes.
Story number one. Mask resistance.
It's coming.
Mask resistance. And it's starting in San Diego County school districts.
So there's one private school network and one county school district, a district, it's not just a school, it's a whole district, that are making masks optional despite the government's requirements.
That's right. And so I ask you this.
What will be the penalty for the school district and the private school who made masks optional?
Will they be executed?
Will they be rounded up and taken to jail?
Nope. There's no penalty.
Can I tell you something that you didn't realize?
No. It's not up to the government if you wear masks.
It's not up to the government.
It's up to you. The government doesn't have any control of you.
They can't make you wear a mask.
They can't. Now, it is true that if only a few people resist, it's not going to make much difference.
But take a look at the San Diego County School District.
Do you think the police are going to come in and round people up?
Nope. I don't think so.
How many more school districts would it take before they all just say, uh, there's no penalty?
Because guess what?
There's no penalty.
There couldn't be. Now you can imagine they might try to make your life hard, at least hassle you a little bit, if it's just one or two of you.
But if an entire school district decides, eh, master optional, what the hell are you going to do?
So stop thinking that the government is making you wear masks.
That's not happening.
You're wearing masks voluntarily.
Just own it.
You're doing it voluntarily.
You could easily not wear a mask.
Well, you'd be paying the ass if you were the only one, because people would hassle you.
But no, the public is volunteering for this.
That's what's happening.
If you think the government is making you wear a mask, how?
What, do they have a gun pointed at you?
Is there some law I don't know about where I'll go to jail if I wear a mask?
The government isn't making you do anything.
All right. I've always believed that in terms of vaccinations and passports and stuff, it's not going to be the government that makes you do it.
It'll be some combination of economics, insurance, which is also economics, And brand.
Brand protection.
So companies will want to protect their brand.
So here's the perfect example.
Apparently the Las Vegas Raiders are going to require fans to provide proof of vaccination to go to home games.
The Las Vegas Raiders.
Let me take those two things individually.
Las Vegas, where everything's legal and free and the government doesn't bother you, Las Vegas is going to make you...
I mean, something in Las Vegas is going to make you get vaccinated.
Secondly, the Raiders?
The Raiders?
Are you kidding me? Their entire brand is about being pirates and rebels and take your risks and all that stuff.
And they're going to make you get a vaccination too.
So it seemed inevitable that the economics and the insurance of it and the brand and management would require companies to be the enforcers.
So you don't really need the government to tell you to do anything.
These are private companies making private...
Well, they're public companies in some cases, but making decisions about what's good for the brand.
Is that a problem?
You like capitalism, right?
Big government's bad.
Capitalism's good. So capitalism is going to drive the passports, I think, as far as they go.
I don't know how far they'll go. So Chris Cuomo, with impeccable timing, and I don't know if this is a coincidence or not, managed to make his first public statement about the resignation of his brother, Governor Cuomo, and he waited until the biggest news day of the year.
Well, I suppose January 6th was the biggest news day.
But the biggest news day of the summer, wouldn't you say?
The Afghan withdrawal.
It's very visual. It's horrible.
We all want to talk about it.
So he picked just the best time to do it.
Really, he nailed that.
Now, it could be it was just the end of his vacation anyway.
So it might have been just accidental.
But, man, talk about a lucky accident for him.
Took him right off the headlines.
Well, here's a question I saw from Rahul Davis, a CEO branding expert.
And I'll reword it so it's not his exact words, but here's the thing.
We know that there was, don't we know this?
Because it was in the news.
And if it's in the news, it's true.
We all agree with that, right?
That if it's in the news, it's true.
Right. Yeah, I think we do.
So the news told us that on January 6th there was this insurrection, violent insurrection in the Capitol, and that many people have been rounded up as being party to that insurrection.
But here's the troubling part.
Biden's Department of Justice is refusing to charge anybody with insurrection.
They're only charging them with smaller stuff, like obstructing a public meeting or interfering with the government, something like that.
So why isn't the Department of Justice going hard at these insurrectionists?
Why is nobody being charged with insurrection?
As Raoul Davis points out, shouldn't we be investigating the Department of Justice?
Because the Department of Justice is apparently refusing to do the obvious thing that you should do, which is press charges against insurrectionists.
I can't think of anything worse than an insurrection.
So let's put some pressure on the Department of Justice to do their job.
Do their job.
Let's see some charges for all this insurrection.
Wait, wait, what?
What? What?
Are you telling me that no Justice Department anywhere has found any evidence of an insurrection sufficient to charge somebody with?
What? What?
How could that be with all the video and all the witnesses and all the insurrection?
What? What?
So there's that.
Here's a good question.
Why did we lose in Afghanistan?
What the hell happened there?
Now, one theory, and I don't know how much weight to put on this, so I'll just put this out there and let you wrestle with it a little bit.
Reportedly, The US did not want to destroy the poppy fields, where all the opiates came from, because for rural Afghanistan, that's the only way they made money.
So if you mowed down the poppy fields, then a whole bunch of people would starve to death, I guess.
So then we couldn't do that.
But wasn't it those same poppy fields that funded the Taliban?
Or who else funded them?
Was there somebody else?
Was it some other country funding the Taliban?
Because at the very least, they were well-funded, weren't they?
Because they had money and resources to take over a country in a week.
That's pretty well-funded.
Somebody says the CIA funded the Taliban.
I don't think so. At least not recently.
But... So the question is this.
What should we have done?
Should we have just mowed those poppy fields?
Because they couldn't have been that hard to find.
Mowed them with fire, of course.
And just taking care of the resulting economic...
Because you could probably still feed the people somehow and, I don't know, convert them to some other kind of agriculture maybe in the long run.
But apparently nothing works in Afghanistan.
You can't convert any industries.
You can't create any industries.
You can't get the government to do anything.
You can't get the army to work.
There's something going on over there that makes everything not work.
But I think the opiate field part of that might be a big portion of it.
Biden, according to Rasmussen polls, Biden reached a record low approval, 45%.
No surprise.
Have I told you that visual persuasion and scary stuff is really effective?
It's like the most effective persuasion?
I'm sure that this poll was taken before the images of the Afghans trying to flee their country and falling from the airplane as it took off.
This low approval rating was probably before that, I'm guessing, because of the timing.
What's it going to be after?
I don't think it'll be 45%, but maybe.
Who knows? Apparently there are 30,000 Afghans that we want to relocate.
That must be interpreters and helpers and families.
That's a lot of people.
30,000 people.
But if you're worried about 30,000 refugees coming in, these are probably the ones you want.
Now, economically, who knows how much they can support themselves when they get here, but they would be 30,000 people who were working with us and on our side and sort of, you know, they're leading our direction to begin with.
So if we could help these people, I think they would be loyal Americans.
I think that they would be...
I would be proud to have them in this country if they fought with us in Afghanistan.
And sure, you know, there might be some trouble, might be expensive, but I would be proud to have them.
Apparently the Taliban is offering a general amnesty for government workers so they can go back to work without risk of being killed.
Would you trust the Taliban?
No. If the Taliban said, I've got a deal with you, we've got a deal, we won't brutally murder you, just go back to work and we'll pretend you never were on the other side.
Is that going to work?
Maybe. It might.
I have to think that one of the strongest things the Taliban had going for them is their unprecedented level of brutality.
Would you agree? An unprecedented level of brutality.
I feel like that's why they conquered the country in a week.
Because I think the Afghan government and the Afghan army said, you know, we might be able to beat them in a fight.
We might. But if we lose, they're going to slay our family and torture us and execute us.
So losing was a really, you know, bad deal.
Versus just saying, we give up, let's run away.
So I have a feeling that the brutality of the Taliban is what won them the war.
I feel like their reputation won them the war.
Does anybody feel the same?
I mean, they obviously had to move resources into the places they took over, but I feel like nobody fought because they didn't want to take a chance to lose them.
You know, you could take a chance of losing against some enemies and still figure, well, we'll do a peace deal, we'll get on with our business.
Well, I don't know if that works with the Taliban.
All right, here's the provocative part.
I'm going to support Biden totally in his withdrawal, including the way he did it.
All right? I'm also going to support Trump for getting the process moving.
So in my opinion...
Both Biden and Trump were right, 100%.
Now, here's the part you're going to say, Scott, Scott, Scott, it's not about that.
It's about the incompetence of leaving.
And here's where I'm going to surprise you.
I don't think there was any.
Now, there could be, because there's more that we don't know than we do know, right?
But I'm going to tell you that it's not evident, right?
There could have been massive incompetence, certainly.
I mean, I wouldn't rule that out.
But I didn't see it.
And here's what I mean. What would happen, no matter who is the president, when, no matter who is the president, as soon as we said we're leaving, what's going to happen?
The Afghan government's going to start packing its bags.
The only way you could leave that country peacefully and in some orderly way is if the Afghan government was willing to fight and then actually fought.
And that was never the case.
It wasn't the case under Trump.
It wasn't the case under Biden.
It wouldn't be the case under the next president.
There would be no willingness to fight by the Afghan people.
And without that, there was also no way to get out without it being messy.
Here's an assumption I'm going to make.
You can check this assumption.
That the American withdrawal required to some degree that the country wasn't falling apart at the same time.
In other words, you couldn't have all of your defense and structure falling apart while you're trying to get all your assets out.
That would be the most dangerous thing.
You wanted it to stay coherent enough that you could get your important American assets out and then let it fall apart.
And that's what happened.
We got our stuff out, apparently without even telling people at Bagram Air Force Base they were even leaving.
They didn't even give them a warning.
They were just gone. Right?
If you think that was a mistake, I would challenge your assumption.
It could have been. So let me say as clearly as I can, you could be right.
Because I'll bet every one of you is thinking that the pullout was pure, naked incompetence.
And when I look at General Milley, I think, well, that makes sense, because he does look incompetent.
I'm sorry. He must have competence to become a general, I think.
You'd have to be competent.
But he doesn't look it.
I mean, he looks like he's incompetent.
He acts like it when he talks in public.
So it wouldn't be hard to believe that we just effed up the whole thing.
But I think we would have anyway.
I think you could have changed out all the people and gotten the same result.
Because the moment you say you're leaving, the whole country falls apart, the Afghan government leaves, it's going to get wet.
It's going to get wet.
So, if you say that you know that Biden did this worse than somebody else, you're forgetting your lessons from COVID. What did we learn from COVID? The thing we learned from COVID is the only way you know anything...
Is you have to do a randomized controlled trial, right?
And we could argue about metadata and meta-studies.
But for my analogy...
The reason you can't always tell if a drug worked is you didn't do a controlled study, so there's nothing to compare it to.
You know it did well or it didn't do well, you just don't know what the alternative would have been.
Likewise, all we know is what happened in Afghanistan.
We don't know what Trump would have done.
We don't know what President Hillary Clinton would have done.
We don't know what anybody else would have done.
If you are certain...
That the result we got was worse than if we had done something differently?
There's no support for that.
You have an opinion with absolutely no support.
Now, later, later, I'm saying, come on, man.
Now, later, we might find out that you're totally right.
We could, right?
So hear me clearly. You could be totally right, and I could be totally wrong.
But here's my only point.
I'm making my opinion based on observation.
You're making your opinion based on speculation.
And it's baseless.
It is baseless speculation that it would have gone better if we'd done something different.
I don't think there was a right way out.
I think we only had two bad ways out.
Bad slow and bad fast.
And we took bad fast.
Was that a mistake? No.
No, it wasn't.
If you have a choice of bad slow or bad fast, and they're both just terrible, do it bad fast.
Get it over with.
Whoever was president was going to be president when somebody fell off a plane.
Now I'm using that as a representative of something bad was going to happen.
But if somebody was going to fall off a plane...
And it was going to be on film.
The Taliban was going to brutally kill people.
That stuff was all going to happen.
So the part that is the key part that separates your opinion from mine is your assumption about what the Afghan government would have done.
So this is a key point.
The only difference in our opinions, I think, is your assumption of what the Afghan government would have done if we'd done a more planned, phased withdrawal.
I say they would have folded in every case.
In every case, the Afghan government would be packing their bags, because they were pretty dead, and they knew it.
So while it is a completely reasonable assumption, completely reasonable that I'm wrong, Is everybody hearing that?
I want you to hear it clearly, that tomorrow we might find out some information of a specific thing we did wrong that would completely change my opinion.
I'm just saying that as of today, your opinion has no support.
Could be right. You might be right.
Evidence might prove you right.
I wouldn't be surprised at all.
But as long as the Afghan government was going to evaporate as soon as we started leaving...
You didn't really have an option to do it right.
You only had an option to do it fast.
That's what they did. Now, I have to think that the people over there had a little bit of capability.
Meaning that I'm seeing lots of people saying, you are wrong.
Everybody who's saying you're wrong, I hear you.
I hear you, and I even think you might be right.
I'm just saying that you don't have evidence for your opinion.
That's all. David Sachs did a tweet today on this point.
Now, if you don't know David Sachs, a very successful investor, one of the smartest guys around about everything, and he said this in a tweet.
The correct order of operations would be this.
Number one, shred sensitive documents.
Sounds good. Number two, evacuate civilians and allies.
Sounds perfectly reasonable.
Number three, pull out the military, and then number four, announce the end of fighting.
Now that would be a good business order of things, right?
As Jan says, there you go.
That's the way to do it. This wouldn't work.
Have any of you ever worked in any kind of a large organization?
There's no way this would work.
Here's what would go wrong.
Step one, shred sensitive documents.
At this point, some of the Afghans find out you're ready to leave.
Everything falls apart.
You can't get to step two, evacuate civilians and allies, because the entire structure of the country would have dissolved before you got there.
There wouldn't be transportation.
There wouldn't be government entities.
It would just be chaos.
So could you get your military out easily if the civilian support structure was disappearing at the same time?
Well, not easily and not safely.
So it looks like we made a decision to protect our military at the expense of some of the civilians.
And unfortunately, that's what we pay our military to do, right?
To protect us. But not necessarily other countries.
It's not really their job.
So I don't think that would work.
Let me put it down to the individual person.
Let's say you're an Afghan citizen and you've been working with the American presence.
So you worked with the Americans and you know you're pretty much in tough shape if the Taliban take over and you didn't get out.
Boy, people are mad today.
People are mad.
You old fool. You old fool.
The people who are disagreeing have a much different impression of the competence of human beings and the competence of the Afghan government than I do.
Probably you could boil it down to one difference in assumption.
The people who think that Biden got it wrong believe the Afghan government was capable of competence.
Am I right? Because if the Afghan government had been competent, we could have worked with them and done more phased withdrawal, put them in charge, have them cover our backs while we leave.
Thanks a lot for helping us up to this point.
But the Afghan government had no competence.
None. So...
You know, that's our difference of agreement.
So remember, if you're disagreeing with me, you're hanging your assumption on the Afghan government's competence.
That's what you base your opinion on.
And I base it on them being incompetent to the extreme.
That's the difference. And, like I say, I could be wrong.
All right. If you think that what our problem was in Afghanistan is a lack of leadership...
Including the way we left?
You've got a much higher opinion of everything in Afghanistan than I do.
I don't feel like leadership was even a variable.
Remember I told you when the pandemic started?
One of my best predictions, I think.
I told you that leadership wouldn't matter.
And everybody was sure it did.
Everybody. I don't think a single fucking person agreed with me when I said that.
I said leadership wouldn't matter.
You wouldn't see it in the statistics.
Guess what? It's not in the statistics.
You can't find it.
We still don't know why some countries do better than others.
We really don't.
So leadership is always the thing we look to as the magic bullet that made everything different.
We look to it in Afghanistan and say, you know, if we'd had better leadership...
And we look at the pandemic and we say, you know, if the United States had better leadership...
Nope. Nope.
There's no evidence that leadership made any difference in either of these cases.
My long goal of being a musical power and a lyricist is now accomplished thanks to Akira the Don who takes podcasts such as mine and I think Jordan Peterson and some other folks and takes out samples part of what we say in our podcast and puts it to really interesting music.
And if you think that that doesn't work You're wrong.
It works in the same way that Beatles music worked.
Now, if you study the Beatles, you know that part of their magic was that their songs were nonsense.
They didn't make any sense.
The lyrics, you know, the story of the song was nothing.
It was just pieces that they had that they put together.
It sounded good. And once you free yourself from the thought that your song has to make sense, which is what the Beatles did...
And Akira the Don has sort of in the same way made the same kind of artistic choice.
It's different in this case because he's intentionally putting things together that you wouldn't normally put together.
But that's what the Beatles did. They would take things that shouldn't be together, but they sound good.
So they just put them together.
And people would think, hey, you can't put together a lyric from this idea with a lyric from this idea, and then suddenly you're an orchestra, and now you're just drums and guitar.
You can't do that.
But then they did.
And it worked great. So Akira the Don did the same thing in a different way.
You just put together these podcast lyrics, if you can call it that, and put it to a really interesting beat and music.
It's called Meaning Wave.
So if you're looking for it, search for Meaning Wave.
One word. Meaning Wave.
And the album's coming out on September 10th.
And the first single's coming out this week.
Which has got my voice on it.
George Soros tweeted...
Have you ever heard of George Soros?
Anybody? Anybody? George Soros tweeted, I consider President Xi the most dangerous enemy of open societies in the world.
Well, now we've got a fight on our hands.
If you believe that George Soros was actively destroying the United States with his many donations to groups that you don't like, what's he going to do to China?
George Soros just said China is his biggest enemy.
So, I don't know.
I think this is interesting to watch.
If you think George Soros was so powerful that he was a threat to the United States...
Would he be a threat to China?
And what would he do? Does he have any in there?
Maybe they don't have enough freedom that he can take advantage of, but do you think that would stop him?
I don't know that that would stop him.
I think he'd just find a different way.
So, George Soros, enemy of my enemy, let's talk.
Because as much as you don't like George Soros, and okay, you have your reasons, I don't like China even more.
So, George, if you're listening, if I can give you a boost there on taking care of China, let's talk.
Enemy of my enemy.
So Twitter user Anomaly, you all know him, probably.
Makes a lot of noise on politics.
He is still taunting me on Twitter to debate him or to make a better argument for all the times we disagree.
Except it's the weirdest situation.
I don't know that we disagree on anything.
He's imagining we disagree on stuff that we don't disagree on, and he's taunting me in public to debate him on the things that we agree on.
And I don't know how you debate agreement.
And watching other people pour in and come up with imaginary things that we disagree with, oh, well, he says this and you say that, and I say, no, I don't.
I say the opposite of that.
So there's this weird, gigantic, imaginary fight going on between the imaginary me and somebody I've never met, Anomaly, and other people are getting in.
It's like it's become a spectator sport.
It's imaginary, and it has spectators.
I'm not making that up.
I'm in an imaginary battle over imaginary topics, and there are spectators.
There are spectators! What's happening?
What the hell is happening?
Spectators to an imaginary fight.
All right. So, these are just some of the things that are happening today.
And as long as the Afghan thing's going crazy, I don't think anybody has any other news to talk about.
All right. Scott is scared to debate.
Let me ask you this.
Can you even imagine a debate with me and Anomaly?
If you know him from Twitter, some of you do.
Somebody says, Prediction, Millie becomes the fall guy and is fired.
Yeah.
Oh, that's not a bad prediction.
I'm not going to go with you on that prediction because I don't know that he did it wrong.
I really don't. So at this point, I don't know if he can defend himself because everybody's going to believe he did it wrong, but the evidence isn't there.
We have an evidence of the outcome.
We don't have an evidence of the process, and we don't have anything to compare it to.
So judging things based on outcomes is not rational.
You would need to know a lot more about the mechanics of it to know if the outcome is really telling you something.
Scott, debate's too much with the block button.
Well, blocking is part of the show.
You know that, right?
I don't have a cracked iPhone screen.
I have a cracked...
Phone protector. Somebody's blaming me for having a cracked iPhone screen.
Incorrect. Incorrect.
Let me put it this way.
If everything I know about you, I can find out from how long it takes you to put your protector on your phone.
Here's what I do.
I will not hold my phone in my hand...
Except to put the case on it and the protector when I first buy a new one.
I won't even walk around with it in my hand.
I will lay it carefully on a surface, often handing it to the person who sold me the phone and saying, would you mind putting that phone in that case?
And while you're at it, would you slap that protector on it?
Now, if you heard that's the way I handle my new phone, would you offer me a job?
Let's say I came in and asked for a job, and that's all you knew about me, is how I handled my phone.
I would hire me.
I would hire me in a heartbeat.
Now, compare that to the person who I shall not name, who has a cracked real screen and did not put a screen protector on it.
Would you hire somebody who had a $1,000 instrument that they didn't put a screen protector on?
I wouldn't. I would not hire somebody who didn't put a screen protector on their phone.
Period. Period.
I don't even need to look at your resume.
You're from Harvard? That's great.
You didn't put a screen protector on your phone as soon as you got it?
Nope. You can't work for me.
You can't work for me.
That is... That's the bottom line.
And you know what? If you're not the person who paid for the phone...
And you didn't put the screen protector on?
You really don't get the job.
I will make an exception.
I do have a friend who is rich.
And he loves the way the iPhone looks with no protector.
And I think he likes it without the screen protector or the case.
Now, he's rich.
He pays for it himself.
If he drops the phone, he buys another one.
He doesn't bitch to anybody.
It's his own phone. I'd give him a job.
I'd give him a job in a heartbeat.
But if his children don't put a protector on it, Well, I'm not going to hire them, because they're not paying for the phone.
If somebody's paying for it, okay, do whatever you want.
It's your money. But if you're too dumb to put a protector on it when someone else is paying for your phone, that's not good thinking, and you can't have a job with me.
But he's modeling that behavior to them?
Yes, but they know who pays for it.
Okay. Somebody said there's a rumor, I don't believe this, but it's a fun one, a rumor that Steve Jobs would drive around Palo Alto without license plates because he only leased his cars for six months at a time.
Okay, I don't believe anything about that story, but it's funny to imagine Steve Jobs being pulled over.
You know, you're the cop, and you pull over Steve Jobs, and you say, can I have your license?
And, oh wait, you're Steve Jobs.
I guess I don't need identification.
You don't have a license plate.
Yeah, I know. Well, whatever.
I don't even know if anybody would care.
I think if you met Steve Jobs in person, sort of accidentally, because you pulled him over at a traffic stop, you would be so pulled into his reality distortion field, I don't even know if you'd give him a ticket.
He might have done it just for fun to see if he could talk his way out of every ticket, because I'll bet he could.
I'll bet Jobs could talk himself out of any ticket.
Oh, thank you. Somebody said they thought this show was good.
I don't know if it was, but thank you.
He could beat everything except cancer.
Yeah, yeah. Rapid, rapid home tests.
Yes. I saw a link on some rapid tests, but the question is always availability.
I know some exist.
It's always good when Scott isn't talking...
Well, I did talk about masks, but I talked about mask resistance.
So that made you happy.
Oh, your business partner just got tests from Amazon.
So does Amazon have rapid tests?
Is that what you're telling me? Because that would be a big deal.
So New Zealand just shut down the whole country because they had one positive case.
That just happened. Yeah, so do you think New Zealand's handling it right?
Shut down the whole country in one case?
How do they keep the rest of the cases from coming in?
I don't know what their vaccination situation is, but I've got a feeling that the COVID is all over the place there.
