Episode 198 Scott Adams: Flag-Lowering, Chinese Hacking, NAFTA and Google Searches
Date: 2018-08-28 | Duration: 38:05
Topics
The half-mast flag and President Trump not invited to eulogy Now known…Chinese hackers got every single Hillary email President Trump’s trade strategy is making stock market happy Google President Trump…all the left leaning stuff dominates results How is the Bruce Ohr and wife story not the top story everywhere? Straight of Hormuz trouble with Iranian Navy? Talent pool for ISIS leadership as top guy after top guy is eliminated Blight Authority, interesting land use suggestions
Transcript
The Simultaneous Sip
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It’s a weird day with the passing of Senator McCain, which has turned pretty much everybody in the world into a gigantic liar and a hypocrite as we try to navigate this weird space where you’re trying to respect a veteran and somebody who has recently died, and respect the family, but also people have strong opinions they’re trying to hold back right now. So that’s where I’m at right now. This is not the time to disrespect anybody. Let’s let the McCain family do what they need to do and leave them alone for now.
The McCain Legacy and Flag Controversy
I’m watching this saga of the half-mast flag and the saga of the President not being invited to speak yet at McCain’s eulogy, whereas Obama and Bush were invited. Now, is that a problem in any way, shape, or form? How in the world is that not just perfect?
What is McCain most famous for? He’s most famous for this “Straight Talk Express.” McCain is famous for being blunt and not tolerating BS. Then you have a President who is his nemesis in public. Nobody is surprised about this. Who is the other leader who is most famous for not being politically correct? If these two people can’t be honest with the public, who can?
What you’re watching is two leaders who are known for their bluntness, their honesty, and their non-political correctness doing what they have always done. I actually probably have more respect for McCain because he wasn’t a phony in death, and that seems consistent with his brand. I’m okay with that. Likewise, President Trump is not making any effort to pretend he liked him any more than he did or respected him any more than he did. Would you want him to? Would the world be a better place if people were less transparent? I kind of like the fact that both of these people did not relent. So far, they have both been exactly who they were: McCain in death the same as he was in life, and Trump continues to be Trump. This is the least problematic problem we’ll ever see. Let’s hope all of our problems are like this.
Chinese Hacking of Hillary’s Emails
You probably saw the news that apparently a Chinese company with connections to the government—in other words, the government of China—hacked every single one of Hillary’s emails from her server during her time as Secretary of State. All of them. They have all of them now.
I heard that and I thought to myself, “I’ve been backing up my computer to the cloud, but this would be a lot easier. I’m just going to back up everything to China from now on. Just let them hold a copy in case I need it.”
Here is the interesting thing about this. Here are the following entities that we know with some degree of certainty interfered with American elections or attempted to: You have China with this hacking situation, and of course they did other things. You’ve got Russia with their troll forums and more.
Foreign Interference in U.S. Elections
You’ve got Great Britain with their agent Christopher Steele. Now, some of you might say, “But wait, he was working with the FBI,” to which I say, so he’s not American, right? It shouldn’t count. If you’re on somebody’s payroll, you’re either American or you’re not. Then you’ve got Australia in the mix a little bit with them reporting on Papadopoulos. You’ve got all kinds of media entities and other countries who are weighing in trying to affect our elections. Stefan Halper—is he American or is he a Brit? He’s American, right. You might have something from the Ukraine. You’ve got Mexico owning the New York Times.
Have we reached the point—and I just tweeted this earlier—have we reached the point where we can say with confidence yet that the Trump campaign was the only entity in the news that did not try to influence the election illegally? Obviously, they tried to win. But we have the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the CIA all trying to influence the elections, probably legitimately. You’ve got at least several other countries—Israel, of course, always runs good persuasion campaigns. It’s starting to look like the Trump campaign is the only entity that was not illegally trying to manipulate the election. They might be the only ones, and that would be funny and ironic.
Trade Agreements and the Domino Effect
We also have the story of Mexico and the United States agreeing apparently on trade. I always worry until the deal is signed. Sometimes you think you have a deal and then there’s some detail, but the way it’s being reported is that we have a deal. Now, what I’ve been saying all along is that when Trump tried to simultaneously create all these trade problems with all of these countries at once, a lot of people said, “Hey, that’s crazy because you’re creating so many problems all at once.” Well, apparently the people who manage money for a living don’t think so, because the stock markets are doing great.
I also said that as soon as you get one or more countries to sign a deal and it looks like it was a good deal, the dominoes will start to fall. Boop-boop-boop-boop. Mexico might be the first one, and it’s really a great first one because Mexico has two qualities. One is that they’re our neighbor, so it’s important to get along with your neighbors. Secondly, we’ve had some tense times with Mexico since the Trump candidacy began. Wouldn’t it be great for them to be the first ones to figure out a way to work together?
Isolating China and Trump’s Negotiation Style
If they do, Canada will probably come online reasonably soon, and then we’ll have two in the bag. Who will be next? Will it be the EU or Great Britain? At some point, China might be the last one. Now, if China is one of a lot of countries that are having trade problems with the United States, then it sort of looks like the United States is the problem, right? The common element is the United States causing trouble everywhere.
But as those deals get signed—Mexico, Canada, etc.—it starts to isolate China. Suddenly China will start looking like the problem because they’re the only ones who can’t sign a deal. What kind of a modern country can’t sign a trade deal? Well, Mexico could do it. I’m pretty sure Canada can accomplish it. If China can’t, it is not going to reflect well on China.
It looks to me like things are heading in the right direction there. It’s possible that history will record that Trump, bucking all of his advisers and stimulating these trade wars slash negotiations, was exactly the right time to do it. Maybe he was exactly the right President to get it done because he brings with him that dealmaker vibe. He’s so provocative that he shakes the box so much that everybody is scrambling to figure out how to get some certainty in this shaken box. It’s entirely possible that people are going to say, “Well, when your economy is doing great as it is, that’s exactly the time you want to push back on bad trade agreements.” If things go poorly, it’s not going to hurt you that much. You’ve got a strong economy already; it’s not gonna take you down. This is exactly the right time.
China, on the other hand—if you believe the reports, and I don’t know how accurate any report is about China’s economy because there must be some problems with transparency there—the reports are that they’re not as strong as people think they are. Probably they’re going to get flexible at some point.
North Korea and Relationship Management
If they get flexible with China and we get an agreement with China, suddenly North Korea is a little bit more isolated. Did you notice the way that President Trump handled the North Korea situation? His message to Kim Jong Un was not just friendly but super friendly. He said for now we have to not have Pompeo visit because we’re not making enough progress. So it was very clear that he’s not satisfied with the progress, but at the same time, he was super friendly to Kim Jong Un. I think that’s real. I think that they actually like each other, and it probably makes a difference.
There’s no special urgency with North Korea because, as I’ve said from the beginning, what the President did that is clever and innovative and completely out of the box from at least current recent history is that President Trump removed North Korea’s reasons for developing nukes and aiming them in our direction. They just don’t have a reason anymore. You don’t attack the countries that are trying to work with you, that are trying to help your economy, and are not asking anything that you can’t give up. President Trump bought us some time with North Korea and he is using it wisely to get China wrapped up, and then he’ll be in a stronger position to deal with North Korea. So that looks like it’s heading in the right direction too.
Google Search Bias and Social Media Shadow Banning
Then you’ve got the President tweeting about Google search returns and that the first things that come up when you google about the President are all the left-leaning media sites. That is interesting because Fox News is the biggest cable news outlet. Even though Fox News sort of stands alone as the biggest of the right-leaning entities, it’s so big that how does it not come up pretty high on the search returns?
Google’s got some explaining to do. I guess Twitter, Google, and Facebook are going to be talking to the Senate. There are some government hearings on all of that shadow banning stuff, and we’ll see where that goes. That’s going to get really interesting. I have a request for a half-time sip—the simultaneous sip—and I am happy to comply because sometimes you need a second sip. Shall we?
The Bruce Ohr Story and Media Standards
Bruce Ohr is being interviewed. You might be having the same reaction that I am to watching the news about Bruce Ohr and the dossier and all the things around it. I can’t square the fact that that’s not the biggest story in the world, because it looks exactly like the FBI was trying to change the result of an election. Maybe not everybody is “innocent until proven guilty” in the court of public opinion, but the news doesn’t really operate on the legal standard. The news operates on the “it sure looks like there’s a problem here” standard.
It’s really mind-boggling that the Bruce Ohr story is not the top headline on every outlet because we don’t know what happened. That’s what we’re trying to find out. I’m not going to jump to condemn an American citizen based on my lack of understanding of what’s going on. You never know what you don’t know. So on this Bruce Ohr stuff, I’m not going to say he’s guilty of anything or that his wife is, but we can certainly say with complete confidence it sure looks bad. It looks really bad.
Somebody said, “What about a second special prosecutor?” and I’m thinking to myself, well, first of all, would we know if there were investigations going on that were not a special prosecutor? Would we know if there was some internal investigation going on about Bruce Ohr? I’m guessing there is, but would we know one way or the other? Does it always have to be a special counsel? Because it feels like special counsels are just trouble. Jeff Sessions recused himself on all of the Hillary stuff. I’m confused watching the stuff, and I don’t know if you’re having the same experience I am, but the complexity of all this is starting to get out of control.
The Complexity of News and the “Three-Name Rule”
I’ll tell you my rule. In a past relationship, I had the “three-name rule.” The three-name rule would go like this: if she told me a story that had three names in it, I would stop her and say, “Okay, we’re done,” once she hit the third name. Once you get to three names in the story, it’s too confusing and you need to go back and simplify your story.
Stories like, “Well, then Bob said this and then he met Mary, but then he picked up Jack and then the three of them were driving…” Stop, stop, stop. That’s three names. I’m positive you can tell this story with one or two names. You never need three names to tell the story. If you do, you might be adding too much complexity.
Most of the reporting on all of this stuff is a ten-name situation. This person, that person—who do they work for? What do they do? I’m losing the track. It could be that part of the reason stuff isn’t in the news is that it’s too hard to report on TV. You see it in long-form in articles more than you see it on TV.
It’s like a Game of Thrones rule. When I watch Game of Thrones, I usually have no idea what’s going on. I’m just pretty sure that there’s some king or wants-to-be king who used to be related to somebody whose brother killed their sister one time with a dragon or something. I never know what’s going on in that show, but I like it just the same. Is Bruce Ohr going to be on TV? I don’t think so. I think it’s a closed hearing.
The Current State of the Trump Presidency
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it sort of a really good week for the President? Even with all this McCain stuff, if you’re lost in the weeds, it looks like the President screwed up again because he did something with not lowering or raising the flag on time. I don’t know anybody who really cares about that. I’m sure there’s somebody who does, but the bigger picture is that this whole McCain situation made all of the anti-Trump media—who were all lefty liberal Democrats—praise a Republican for a solid week. CNN is non-stop saying McCain was a great guy. “We love that Republican man, he was a good Republican.” They kind of have to do it because they’ve set him up as the foil to Trump, and they can’t really get off of that train. But it can’t be comfortable for them to continually be praising a Republican to their audience.
Tensions in the Strait of Hormuz
We’ve got the economy doing well and the stock market doing well. We’ve got our first trade agreement coming in. We’ve got North Korea seemingly under control. We’ve got some news coming out of Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. I just realized that’s a word I’ve never said out loud. Think of all the times you’ve read “Straits of Hormuz,” but you’ve probably never said “Hormuz” out loud. Maybe it’s “Har-mooz,” I have no idea. I’m gonna call it Hormuz.
Iran is making noise like they might block the Strait where they control it. I was reading a retired military person saying that he almost sort of hoped they cause trouble. Because if Iran causes trouble in the Strait and threatens to lock up a third of oil traffic in the world, the entire Iranian Navy will disappear in a week—maybe 24 hours. How long would it take them to clear 100% of the Iranian threat from the Straits of Hormuz?
I don’t see Iran going to war over that if they were the ones that caused the trouble in the first place—or at least going to more war than that would be. I mean, that would be war, but I think it would be limited to, “Oh, we used to have a little bit of a Navy. Hey, where’s our Navy? Our Navy is gone. Does anybody remember when we had a Navy? Because we don’t have a Navy anymore.” I think about 20 minutes.
So that was the big story about problems in the Middle East, and I’m thinking to myself, if your biggest problem in the Middle East right now is that Iran is offering to sacrifice its Navy if we want some target practice, that’s it. Basically, Iran is offering free target practice for live-fire training using their Navy as the targets. We might not take them up on that—hoping no bullets get fired myself—but that’s looking like the biggest problem coming out of the Middle East right now.
ISIS Leadership and the Talent Pool
What was the news? The fourth leader of ISIS in Afghanistan just got killed. How deep do you have to go into the ISIS talent pool before you get someone who’s just not the best ISIS leader? Look at elections in the United States. If we have four elections in this country and we elect four different presidents, what are the odds that all four of those presidents will be good? They’re all pretty smart—they can’t get elected if they’re not—but usually, there’s at least one out of four that can’t get it done.
Every time I see an ISIS leader or an Al-Qaeda leader get killed and the number two is promoted, I think to myself, the number two person isn’t the one who built all of this. The number two person might be a little less qualified than number one. It’s not impossible that number two is actually better, but what about number three? What about number four? By the time you get down to your fourth choice, do you still have the same quality of decision-making? Do they still have the same respect? Can they still lead with the same amount of emotional persuasion? I think that the talent pool gets a little bit thinner once you get down to the fourth leader.
Midterm Election Outlook and Split Congress
How important are the midterms in your opinion? Well, the midterms are certainly important because they will determine how politics look for the next several years, but which way they go is far less predictable. I have speculated, as I’ve seen others speculate—Dana Perino on Fox News has famously said this a few times—that President Trump could do well with a split Congress. He might be exactly the right personality because he’s not an ideologue and we might have exactly the right issues for a split Congress.
If you think about it, immigration and healthcare are two topics that it would really be helpful to not have just one side ram through. Wouldn’t it be great for those two big things, immigration and healthcare, that at least just for those two things we got something that looked more like a little bit of a consensus across the aisle? In that situation, we could honor McCain because he did talk about reaching across the aisle more. I don’t think that’s a terrible idea. It’s possible we could get a split Congress and they just can’t get anything done, so it might be terrible. But it’s also possible that you would have a Bill Clinton situation where he can do a little horse trading and say, “Look, you can get this if we get this. Let’s figure out something where we can at least move the ball forward.”
Dr. Shiva and Healthcare Systems
I’d like to tease you a little bit with something upcoming. Some of you saw my periscope with Dr. Shiva—the so-called “real Indian” who is running against the “fake Indian” Elizabeth Warren for Senate in Massachusetts. He recently had a town hall on the question of healthcare. I’m going to have him back on to talk about how you approach healthcare moving toward a solution in more of a systems approach.
You know that I like systems more than goals. A goal is “let’s fix healthcare.” A system is: what do you do every day? What’s a process that you can just sort of churn ahead and make progress on healthcare? What’s a system to get there? We’ll talk about that and some ideas that I’ve already heard from him. We chatted about this already and you’re going to hear some things that will just blow the fricking head off of your skull. You’re going to hear things from Dr. Shiva that you just haven’t heard, things that you just haven’t thought about that way. We’re going to see if we can move the ball forward and change at least how the public thinks about some of these things.
September 7th, a Friday, I’ll do it at the same time I do my other periscopes: 10:00 a.m. Eastern, 7:00 a.m. Pacific. Dr. Shiva will be here unless something changes. You really want to check this one out if you’re trying to understand what’s going on with healthcare. It’s the first time I felt like I was starting to understand what the problem was and what a potential solution might look like.
Blight Authority and Urban Innovation
Let me give you a pivot. You know that I’ve been working with the Blight Authority and Bill Pulte. If you haven’t checked out the website, BlightAuthority.com, in the ideas section, you can see that people are suggesting lots of ideas for what to do in an urban area. We’ve got all these blighted areas that have been cleared out by the Blight Authority and more to come. What do you do with this area that’s close to free in terms of the land value? You could work with the municipalities to get access to it.
Some ideas are coming in, but I want to play with a few fun ideas as they cross my attention. Here’s one of the most fun ideas that I heard. Imagine—let’s just say it’s Detroit just so you have a real place—it’s a cold climate, a northern climate. Imagine that you build on these vacant lots a data center. It might be for mining Bitcoin, but it could be any kind of a large cloud thing. You have automatically the cold weather in the winter, which is positive because you’ve got all this heat being released by the data center.
What if you dug underground a little bit and lowered your data center into essentially a subterranean thing, but you took all the heat and took it to the surface? Let’s say that you use that heat to heat greenhouses above it during the winter. What if you use that heat to warm the roads? Maybe you heat some liquid, some water with some antifreeze in it for example, and you circulate it under the roads in your neighborhood. You would never need to plow the roads. Now you have roads that don’t need plowing, you’ve got greenhouses that have free heat, and then what about building some homes? Well, they need some free heat too, so you could be free-heating the homes.
At the same time, if you’re going to build an underground structure, you can run some geothermal stuff while you’ve got the hole in the ground. That allows you also to cool your house in the summer. In the summer you turn off the heat from the underground data center and you just use the geothermal. Suddenly you’ve got something like free energy. Imagine if you’ve got a building site that is essentially zero energy cost and close to zero land cost. Well, now you’ve got a place that you’ve probably got some good ideas for.
Designing Communities for the App Age
Do I know that that’s a good idea? I do not. There might be some engineers or some technical people who say, “Oh Scott, what you’re forgetting is this or that,” or it’s too expensive to put the data center underground or the walls won’t hold. There may be entirely good reasons why this is a bad idea. But what I love about it is the idea that if you start from scratch and you just throw out everything you know about the way things used to be done, what could you build? What could you do using today’s technology?
What do you do in the age of smartphone apps when you’re designing a community that you never would have done before? A lot of stuff. The security you could have on your apps—the security for the whole town—you could alert your neighbors if there are suspicious things and they can look at their phone. You could take care of security with apps.
You could probably bring down the cost of owning a car with apps because you just use the app to get an Uber or catch your bus. Right now people have cable TV and it might cost you a few hundred dollars a month. You could probably get to the point where, if you built a community with its own homeowner association and Wi-Fi, people just don’t need cable TV. They just use their phones and their apps and their Wi-Fi. You could probably get to the point where you have everything from pet care, to somebody to watch your child because your app helps you find somebody easily, to rides, to food. Think of all those things that you could just completely change if you built a community around apps.
Kids are already dropping cable, exactly. If you’ve got a smartphone and you pay for unlimited data, even with 4G you probably have everything you need. By the time it gets to 5G, cable doesn’t even make sense.
All right, go to BlightAuthority.com if you have ideas or know companies that are in the business of designing things. I’ve heard of some other companies I might be talking about fairly soon that have some fascinating technologies. All right, I’m gonna sign off now. We’ve done enough and I’ll talk to you again tomorrow. Bye for now.