Episode 259 Scott Adams: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Weed
Date: 2018-10-13 | Duration: 41:21
Topics
CA Senator Dana Rohrabacher says: After the midterms… Trump will federally legalize medical marijuana Recreational legalization will be a state decision The Jamal Khashoggi controversy and mystery Contrast between an actual dictator and a clever Tweeter One (allegedly) uses a bone saw…the other uses Twitter US economy is so strong, we’re raising interest rates to slow it down China’s economy doesn’t have the same headroom as US A “good” President…is one that fits the times Obama was a good President for his time Trump is a good President for our current time “Cultural Gravity” holds back some groups of people, propels others
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## Transcript
This is "Coffee with Scott Adams" - Episode 259 (October 13, 2018).
## [The Simultaneous Sip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8qAxw7yQ4Y&t=3s)
Oh pom pom pom pom pom! Hey everybody, come on in. I know it's the weekend, but this is your favorite part of the weekend. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams. I'm Scott Adams and you're not, but you can have coffee with me if you got here in time. If you have a cup, a mug, a vessel of glass, and you've got a beverage in there, well, you're prepared for Coffee with Scott Adams.
It's time for the simultaneous sip—the best part of the day, at least the best set of the day. Everything's better with coffee.
## [Marijuana Legalization and the Midterms](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8qAxw7yQ4Y&t=67s)
Let's talk about the news from Dana Rohrabacher, a California Congressperson, who says that the Trump administration is thinking of legalizing medical marijuana at least on a federal level, leaving recreational to the states and getting the federal government out of the weed business.
I ask myself: Why would they wait until after the midterms? That's the report. The report is that it's not going to happen until after the midterms. I thought to myself, "Well, wouldn't it have been smarter to do it before the midterms?" Because then you get the big advantage that you did something that's good for everybody, and that might help in the midterms.
But I realized that after the midterms is actually the perfect time to do it. Before the midterms, you can let the word get out. You get an initial benefit simply because people hear that you're going to decriminalize it. So you get the benefit before the vote of knowing that it's going to happen, assuming there's confirmation of the rumor.
But what would be different after the midterms than before? Work with me here, this is actually kind of fun. What's the biggest difference in the world after the midterms? Well, the biggest difference is that smart people are saying Congress will be split. The smart people say the Senate will be Republican and there'll be a Democrat majority in the House.
What can a President get done with a split Congress? If you're the most divisive character in a long time and you're President, isn't that terrible to have a split Congress? You know where I'm going with this. What will be the first thing you hear about after there's a split Congress? Weed.
What is the one thing you can guarantee both the left and the right will vote for, at least in a majority? Weed. How will President Trump launch—you remember I taught you about the "New CEO move"? The New CEO move is what you do the very first thing you do when you take your first day on the job as a CEO. People like to fire people or do something big because that sets the tone, sort of like a first impression.
Well, after the midterm, there's sort of a new government. In all likelihood, there'll be a new structure of government because it'll be a split Congress. So whatever President Trump does first under the conditions of this new government sets the tone. It's the thing you'll keep talking about.
What will be the first thing he does? It's starting to look like the first thing he'll do is take a run at decriminalizing weed. If he does, it would be the exact best timing of all time because if there is a split Congress, it's the one thing he's almost guaranteed to get through, unless they mess up the form of the bill somehow. The timing of it is spectacular.
You remember that there was word that the government had put the call out to try to find all the bad news about weed? That was a news report that the government was trying to balance the message so it wasn't all good news, but there was some negative news too, just so they had a complete picture. When that news report dropped, people said, "Oh no, Jeff Sessions is winning. Weed is going to be even more criminalized. They're going to go after it more than they were."
I said at the time: Hold on. What would you do prior to decriminalizing if that was your intention? Well, what you would do is gather all the information so that when you did it, you had a comprehensive report that was the best of all the science. When you made your proposal to decriminalize it, you were doing it based on having done a deep dive. You couldn't decriminalize it until you looked for all the bad news and you did a legitimate job of looking for it.
So it looks like that's what's going to happen. It'll be an after-midterm kind of bill. It will fly through both houses. It will set a precedent for both sides working together. It will show that they can do it, and then we're going to start looking at things like immigration and healthcare. What do those things have in common? You absolutely can't get them done unless you've got both sides agreeing. It would be the perfect setup.
## [Jamal Khashoggi and the Bone Saw Contrast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8qAxw7yQ4Y&t=371s)
Let's talk about Turkey and Saudi Arabia and this journalist called Jamal Khashoggi, who allegedly walked into a Turkish embassy in an attempt to get some kind of paperwork to marry his Turkish fiancee. I understand she was waiting outdoors.
Allegedly, Khashoggi went in there and he was followed by this team of alleged Saudi hitmen who brought a bone saw. There's some audio recording of the deed going down. Apparently, they killed him and they used a bone saw to cut him up into little pieces, probably putting him in suitcases or small carryable objects.
Here's the weird part. This is so horrible it's hard to even imagine. His fiancee is standing outside, probably doing what people do—looking at Twitter on her phone—while a hundred feet away, her fiancee was being slaughtered and dismembered with a bone saw. Then they put him in packages and probably walked right past her. In all likelihood, she saw the killers walk past her with a bunch of suitcases that were the parts of her fiancee. They might have gone out of a different door, but it's the same concept.
The first thing I would say is we will never know what really happened. We might know that the Saudis killed him. We might know that he's a critic of the Saudi government as a journalist. But it feels as though there's more to the story.
The way he was killed—doesn't it make it seem like there was a message involved? It was either a message to Turkey saying, "We'll do whatever we want, including right in your embassy, which is your own soil." That's a pretty strong message to Turkey, but it would be a reckless one. It seems more likely that this is a message about the individual.
Is there anything else about this individual that we don't know? In other words, is this journalist just a journalist? Do you believe that this journalist did nothing wrong except write some anti-Saudi leadership articles? It's possible that he's just a journalist who wrote some things the royal family didn't like, and so they sent a hit team to kill him in the most unusual way.
The way he was killed doesn't look normal. Wouldn't there be a million ways to kill somebody and not leave a trace? You could kill somebody and make it look like an accident; make it look like it wasn't the Saudis. But they chose the one way that looks exactly like the Saudi government killed them.
Look for comments from other countries in the region and ask yourself why it's a little quiet over there. Is it possible that killing this guy was sort of a popular thing to do, meaning there might have been other countries involved that were happy to see him go? I'm not alleging that's the case, I'm just saying there are some holes in the story that we may never fill. I kind of feel like there's more to it. It just smells like there's a bigger story here.
There's an interesting thing going on here. One is that, of course, the critics of President Trump are going to use it to say, "Look what happens when dictators start dehumanizing the press." People are going to say, "Well, President Trump says the press in this country is the enemy of the people. Look where that leads. It's a slippery slope to the bone saw. If you criticize CNN, you're on that slippery slope to bringing the bone saw and killing everybody."
Well, that's sort of a stretch. But here's what it does do: It might work exactly the opposite because of the power of contrast. When people are calling President Trump a "big old dictator" who is demonizing the press, what they're really saying is that he could turn into the real kind of dictator that really does bad stuff to the press—as opposed to the free speech guy who's just criticizing the people who are criticizing him.
But when Saudi Arabia is accused of doing something like this, it's a separate question. People will believe a Saudi Arabian dictatorship literally used a bone saw to dismember a member of the press while his fiancee waited outside. That, my friends, is some serious dictatorship.
It's going to be harder for President Trump's detractors to look at what they've been accusing him of, which is saying clever things about the media that are critical. Talking in a clever way about the media is what Trump does. A real dictator cuts you up with a bone saw inside an embassy while your fiancee is standing outside. That's about as big a difference as you can get between President Trump as a clever tweeter and a bone saw killer. Very large difference. One tweets; one uses a bone saw.
In a weird way, this could actually work in the President's favor in a way that nobody's ever going to talk about. It's going to make such a gigantic distinction between just talking about stuff and sending a tweet versus dismembering somebody. Even the slippery slope people—who I criticize all the time—things just aren't always slippery slopes. It's a long distance between tweeting and a bone saw.
On top of that, President Trump is now officially on the same side as the press. Hello! You didn't see that coming, did you? President Trump and the international press, including all of his critics, are on his side now. They may not want to be on his side, but if there's one person who can stand up for journalists, who is the only person? There's only one person in the world who could stand up to this kind of alleged crime against a journalist. Only one.
Saudi Arabia is clearly in the ally category. We need them. We have all kinds of strategic interests. We sell them stuff. They're part of our network of "good buddies," if you could say that in the Middle East. They're even friendlier with Israel than we've seen in the past. They seem productive in a number of ways, especially fighting terrorism.
And here's where it gets sketchy, because the reporting is that Khashoggi had some kind of Muslim Brotherhood connection, which some people would say are the bad guys, the terrorists, or the terrorist supporters. So it's kind of a big situation. The President doesn't like the Muslim Brotherhood, but he's got to protect free speech—at least the principle of it. There's no free speech per se in Saudi Arabia, but worldwide, he's got to protect at least the notion of it.
This is a real dicey one. What will President Trump do? It's not really clear that there's a good answer here, because if the President goes hard on Saudi Arabia, it will hurt our interests. And if he doesn't, how do you show your face in public? You've got two impossibles.
How do you deal with an impossible? Well, one way would be to change the facts. If there's no good solution with the facts as they've been presented to us—as in Saudi Arabia did put a hit on a journalist in a Turkish embassy—that's an impossible situation.
So the solution might be to change the facts. I'm just putting that out there. One way to change the facts would be to change what the public thinks of this Khashoggi guy. I would expect that Saudi Arabia primarily would start planting stories that would change what the public thinks of this journalist, until they no longer think of him as a journalist and they begin to think of him as something more—more like a Muslim Brotherhood type of person, for example.
I would look for seeding of the media with stories to say there's something more about this Khashoggi guy and that maybe this was an anti-terrorist act. If Saudi Arabia could get away with making it look like they were being hard on terror, well, suddenly that's a different story, isn't it?
I would expect the United States to drag its feet and not proclaim anything too soon, because that gives the media time to start leaking out the stories that change how we think about it. I think the President will probably wait a little bit before he takes a firm position, but we'll say that's just speculation.
## [The Right President for the Right Time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8qAxw7yQ4Y&t=1176s)
Do you ever get tired of talking politics? The thing about politics is that it changes so much, at least under the Trump administration. I think I would get tired of talking about politics in a regular administration. I had literally no interest until the Trump administration. Nothing. There was nothing about the entire Obama administration that I found interesting.
And I'm one who says that Obama did a good job. I know that almost all of you watching this disagree with that, but let me reiterate my point. I think it's true that if you're an American, you have a notion in your head of what a perfect President would be like. In your imagination, you might change the gender or the ethnicity, but those are not the important parts. You have a personality type in mind: professional, responsible, well-spoken, polite but firm, smart, tough, experienced.
This is a mistake in how we see the world. I would suggest that rather than getting the perfect prototype of a President, we should match the President to the specific challenge of the time. I've said that Obama was actually a good choice to take over during the depths of the economic meltdown because Obama is a very calming personality. You know that he would look at the facts, you know that he would dig into the details, and you know that he would be calming. He wouldn't scare anybody with weird actions. That was probably pretty important to keep the economy from falling off the edge.
Then Trump took over. I would say Trump took over at a time when the economy was solid. Once the economy is solid, you no longer need the "boring" President. Currently, we have exactly the right President at exactly the right time because he's willing to take a little more risk financially at a time when that's exactly the smart thing to do on a risk/reward basis.
## [US Economy and China Negotiations](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8qAxw7yQ4Y&t=1360s)
Our economy is so strong that we have a little extra negotiating ability with China. Take for example the Fed raising interest rates. Why does the Fed raise interest rates? Well, they raise interest rates because they think the economy is actually too hot. They literally raised interest rates to slow down growth because it was too good.
If you're China and the United States are playing chicken because we're negotiating hard, but neither one wants to give anything up, who has time on their side? Does China have time on their side? They have a very thin margin between super growth and just a little less growth, and then they're screwed.
The United States is in a position where the economy is so strong that we had to raise our own interest rates to slow down our own economy. Think about that. China is looking at the United States and saying, "If we just hold on a little bit longer, we're really going to hurt their economy." And then they read the news and they go, "Oh god, their economy is so strong they had to slow it down themselves."
China's only negotiating leverage is that they'll hurt our economy. Our economy is so frickin' strong that we had to slow it down. There's nothing that China's doing that makes any difference, but it sure makes a big difference on their end. So when you see that the tariff negotiations are taking a long time, you should say to yourself: "Good. That's good." Because the longer it takes, the worse their negotiating position is and ours doesn't change at all. We don't have an economy that we want to grow any faster; if they did, they would just raise the interest rates and slow it down again.
This President is in exactly the right time because the economy is so strong. I give him credit for the extra optimism, the extra energy, and the extra positivity. This President has persuaded up the optimism, which does drive the economy. We are on the edge of major beneficial trade deals that would have been impossible with a weak economy. If our economy was weak, we'd say, "Yeah, we don't want to take any chances." But now we can take all the chances we want.
## [Kanye West and Cultural Gravity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8qAxw7yQ4Y&t=1610s)
Who's right for the next presidency after eight years of President Trump? What would be the right kind of personality? Let's say we had plenty of money but we still had problems. We didn't know how to fix the inner cities; we didn't know how to get income equality; we didn't know how to get rid of racial animus. Who would be the best personality for that?
Kanye.
If things stayed the way they're going, the best kind of President would be somebody who can bring creativity to the process. That's Kanye. Somebody who could bring some kind of racial healing to the process. That's Kanye. He's clearly set himself up to be the ideal kind of President for the future that we're starting to enter. If you don't think this guy plans ahead, you're crazy, because he's already six years ahead. He's already becoming the person we need in 2024.
Lose your sense that there's an ideal presidential personality. There isn't. There's only a good fit.
## ["Jobs Not Mobs" Framing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8qAxw7yQ4Y&t=1734s)
I'd like you to watch something else in the atmosphere. Every now and then, I release an idea and we can see if it comes back. There are some ideas that are like idea viruses. As soon as you hear them, they become so sticky that they'll just live forever.
Somebody was talking about the idea of calling the Democrats "mobs." Then somebody else on Twitter came up with the idea that Republicans should be saying: "Jobs not mobs."
The first time you hear that, "Jobs not mobs," didn't you just see the entire midterm election shape up? The Right are all about jobs. You can even see the campaign ad: a split screen where on one side is all the job stuff—best employment, optimism, best everything on economics. On the other side, it's just a collage of the Democrats screaming at the sky, attacking people in the streets, yelling and wearing crazy costumes. You just label them: "Jobs not mobs." It would be such a killer framing.
When you hear that, you realize, "Oh my god, that's sticky." As soon as you hear it, it's hard to get it out of your head. It's sort of brain glue.
## [Cultural Gravity and the Black Community](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8qAxw7yQ4Y&t=1857s)
I tried to do that with another concept: "Cultural Gravity." Cultural gravity is the tendency for the culture that you identify with to have a way of holding you back sometimes. Other cultures are the opposite; they're propelling you.
I would say, for example, that Asian American culture has what I would call a "zero gravity culture." If somebody is doing well in school, it would be rare for somebody in that community to say, "Hey, Bob is doing well in school, hahaha." If your friend is doing well and you're Asian American, you're probably thinking, "I better do well in school too. This is a good way to succeed."
You watched what happened when Kanye gets a meeting in the Oval Office. You watch that Don Lemon referred to it as a "minstrel show." To me, that's racial gravity. That's cultural gravity. Don Lemon was saying, "Stop embarrassing me. Your success is embarrassing me." Who does that?
You saw a number of other prominent black pundits who are very anti-Kanye. To which I say: You know that Kanye is not a Republican, right? He's just willing to talk to both sides. You know that he got in the room and already probably made a difference for things that you want. If Kanye succeeds, you know that your culture does better, right? He's moving to Chicago, trying to help the inner cities, and he has access, power, money, and ideas. How is that not good? Why are you not cheering this guy on as someone who not only made it out but is trying to reduce the gravity on you?
"Cultural gravity" is a weaponized term in a good way. "Envy" might be an element, but envy is not as influential as a label. Cultural gravity immediately tells you what's going on in a way that envy doesn't. I want to see if the phrase "cultural gravity" catches on. Let me be humble about what I can predict, because I'm not black and I can't really know what they will think. But understanding that there's a thing called cultural gravity and that you might want to find a way around it is probably a good thing.
Someone in the comments said "cultural drag." "Drag" is descriptively good, but I think "gravity" captures it a little more. I'm not completely convinced that envy and jealousy are what's going on here. Wouldn't you imagine every group has envy and jealousy? Why would it only be affecting one group in this way? I've not observed evidence for that.
## [Simulation Theory and Smoothies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8qAxw7yQ4Y&t=2172s)
Gravity equals seriousness. In this simulation in which we live, is it weird that the biggest critic of Kanye has the last name "Lemon"? The guy who's the sourest guy on TV is named Lemon. Is that just a weird coincidence? That's the sort of stuff that makes me think I'm living in a simulation.
Here's another weird coincidence. Kristina and I were hanging out last night and I wanted a smoothie. I've got a certain way I make smoothies. We opened the refrigerator and all the strawberries that I thought I had for the smoothie had already been eaten. Because I couldn't make a smoothie, we turned on the TV to watch a show. Within a few minutes of turning on the TV, there's a mention of somebody who can't make a smoothie because they don't have strawberries.
How weird is that? I go from not being able to make a strawberry smoothie to turning on the TV and learning about somebody who can't make a strawberry smoothie, and it's the one ingredient they're missing. It's the only one I was missing too.
Of course, that is a coincidence. The smart people and scientists will tell you not to read anything into that. But it sure makes you wonder about the nature of the universe. If the only thing it does is make you question your reality, then it's something useful. You do notice coincidences you wouldn't have noticed before; that's part of it.
## [Scott's Smoothie Recipe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8qAxw7yQ4Y&t=2294s)
I'll tell you my recipe for a smoothie:
* Strawberries
* Blackberries
* Vanilla yogurt
* Almond butter
* Protein powder (vanilla flavored)
* A chunk of dark chocolate (it works with the strawberries in a way that's crazy)
* Almond milk (for liquid)
* Crushed ice
The mix is not that terribly important. You'll find it's not really sensitive to the exact amounts. Just experiment.
I think we've talked enough about smoothies. Obviously, I'm out of material. I'm going to go do some work as I do, and I'll talk to you later.