Episode 1471 Scott Adams： I Tell You Why Biden and Trump Both Got it Right About Afghanistan and More Fun
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Summary
In this episode of Coffee with Scott Adams, we talk about Mask Resistance and the Las Vegas Raiders and why the government should not be making you wear a mask to go to the NFL game. Scott Adams is a comedian, writer, podcaster, and podcaster. He's been in the business for over 30 years and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Daily News.
Transcript
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Hey everybody, it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, the best part of the day.
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And if you'd like to take it up a level, I know you do.
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All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or a chalice, a tie in the canteen,
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a jug of glass, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day,
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the thing that makes everything better except leaving Afghanistan.
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Well, let's see what we've got going on in the news here.
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Ah, interesting, interesting stuff that I sent to myself so it would be right here on my phone.
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Why in hell did Gmail stop working at the beginning of my...
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And it's starting in San Diego County School District.
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So there's one private school network and one county school district, a district.
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It's a whole district, that are making masks optional despite the government's requirements.
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What will be the penalty for the school district and the private school who made masks optional?
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Can I tell you something that you didn't realize?
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It's not up to the government if you wear masks.
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The government doesn't have any control of you.
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Now, it is true that if only a few people resist, it's not going to make much difference.
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But take a look at the San Diego County School District.
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Do you think the police are going to come in and round people up?
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How many more school districts would it take before they all just say, uh, there's no penalty?
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Now, you could imagine they might try to make your life hard, you know, at least hassle you a little bit, if it's just one or two of you.
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But if an entire school district decides, eh, masks are optional, what the hell are you going to do?
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So stop thinking that the government is making you wear masks.
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Well, you'd be paying the ass if you were the only one, because people would hassle you.
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But no, it's, it's a, the public is volunteering for this.
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If you think the government is making you wear a mask, how?
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Is there some law I don't know about where I'll go to jail if I wear a mask?
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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.
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It'll be some combination of economics, insurance, which is also economics, and brand, brand protection.
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Apparently the Las Vegas Raiders are going to require fans to provide proof of vaccination, to go to home games.
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Las Vegas, where everything's legal and free and the government doesn't bother you.
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Las Vegas is going to make you, I mean something in Las Vegas.
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It's going to make you wear a mask, get vaccinated.
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Their entire brand is about being, you know, pirates and rebels and, you know, take your risks and all that stuff.
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And they're going to make you get a vaccination, too.
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So it seemed inevitable that the economics and the insurance of it and the brand and management would require companies to be the enforcers.
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So you don't really need the government to tell you to do anything.
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These are private companies making private, well, they're public companies in some cases, but making decisions about what's good for the brand.
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So capitalism is going to drive the passports, I think, as far as they go.
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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.
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Well, I suppose January 6th was the biggest news day.
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But the biggest news day of the summer, wouldn't you say?
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Now, it could be it was just the end of his vacation anyway.
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Well, here's a question I saw from Raul Davis asked this, CEO branding expert.
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And I'll reword it so it's not his exact words.
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So the news told us that on January 6th, there was this insurrection, violent insurrection
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in the Capitol, and that many people have been rounded up as being party to that insurrection.
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Biden's Department of Justice is refusing to charge anybody with insurrection.
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They're only charging them with, like, smaller stuff, like obstructing a public meeting or, you know, interfering with the government, something like that.
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So why isn't the Department of Justice going hard at these insurrectionists?
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Why is nobody being charged with insurrectionists?
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As Raul Davis points out, shouldn't we be investigating the Department of Justice?
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Because the Department of Justice is apparently refusing to do the obvious thing that you should do, which is press charges against insurrectionists.
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I can't think of anything worse than an insurrection.
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So let's put some pressure on the Department of Justice to do their job.
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Let's see some charges for all this insurrection.
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Are you telling me that no Justice Department anywhere has found any evidence of an insurrection sufficient to charge somebody with?
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How could that be with all the video and all the witnesses and all the insurrection?
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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.
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Reportedly, the U.S. 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.
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So if you mowed down the poppy fields, then a whole bunch of people would starve to death, I guess.
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But wasn't it those same poppy fields that funded the Taliban?
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Because at the very least, they were well-funded, weren't they?
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Because they had money and resources to take over a country in a week.
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Should we have just mowed those poppy fields, because they couldn't have been that hard to find.
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And just taking care of the resulting economic displacement?
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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.
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There's something going on over there that makes everything not work.
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But I think the opiate field part of that might be a big portion of it.
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Biden, according to Rasmussen polls, Biden reached a record low approval, 45%.
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Have I told you that visual persuasion and scary stuff is really effective?
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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.
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This low approval rating was probably before that.
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Apparently there are 30,000 Afghans that we want to relocate.
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That must be interpreters and helpers and the families.
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But if you're worried about 30,000 refugees coming in, these are probably the ones you want.
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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.
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So if we could help these people, I think they would be loyal Americans.
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I think that they would be, I would be proud to have them in this country if they fought with us in Afghanistan.
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And sure, you know, there might be some trouble, might be expensive, but I would be proud to have them.
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Apparently the Taliban is offering a general amnesty for government workers so they can go back to work without risk of being killed.
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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.
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I have to think that one of the strongest things the Taliban had going for them is their unprecedented level of brutality.
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I feel like that's, I feel like that's why they conquered the country in a week.
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Because I think the Afghan government and the Afghan army said, you know, we might be able to beat them in a fight.
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But if we lose, they're going to slay our family and torture us and execute us.
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So losing was a really, you know, bad deal versus just saying, we give up, let's run away.
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So I have a feeling that the brutality of the Taliban is what won them the war.
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I mean, they obviously had to move resources into the places they took over.
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But I feel like nobody fought because they didn't want to take a chance of losing.
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You know, you could take a chance of losing against some enemies and still figure, well, we'll do a peace deal.
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Well, I don't know if that works with the Taliban.
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I'm going to support Biden totally in his withdrawal, including the way he did it.
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I'm also going to support Trump for getting the process moving.
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So in my opinion, both Biden and Trump were right, 100%.
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Now, here's the part you're going to say, Scott, Scott, Scott, it's not about that.
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Now, there could be, because there's more that we don't know than we do know, right?
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But I'm going to tell you that it's not evident.
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There could have been massive incompetence, certainly.
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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?
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The Afghan government's going to start packing its bags.
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The entire, 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.
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It wouldn't be the case under the next president.
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There would be no willingness to fight by the Afghan people.
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And without that, there was also no way to get out without it being messy.
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That the American withdrawal required, to some degree, that the country wasn't falling apart at the same time.
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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.
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You wanted it to stay coherent enough that you could get your important American assets out and then let it fall apart.
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We got our stuff out, apparently without even telling people at Bagram Air Force Base they were even leaving.
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If you think that was a mistake, I would challenge your assumption.
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So let me say as clearly as I can, you could be right.
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Because I'll bet every one of you is thinking that the pullout was pure, naked incompetence.
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And when I look at General Milley, I think, well, that makes sense.
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He must have competence to become a general, I think.
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So it wouldn't be hard to believe that we just effed up the whole thing.
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I think you could have changed out all the people and gotten the same result.
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Because the moment you say you're leaving, the whole country falls apart, the Afghan government leaves.
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So if you say that you know that Biden did this worse than somebody else, forget you're forgetting your lessons from COVID.
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The thing we learned from COVID is the only way you know anything is you'd have to do a randomized controlled trial, right?
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And we could argue about meta, metadata and meta studies.
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But for my analogy, the reason you can't always tell if a drug worked is you didn't do a controlled study.
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You just don't know what the alternative would have been.
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Likewise, all we know is what happened in Afghanistan.
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We don't know what a President Hillary Clinton would have done.
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We don't know what anybody else would have done.
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If you are certain that the result we got was worse than if we had done something differently, there's no support for that.
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You have an opinion with absolutely no support.
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Now, later, we might find out that you're totally right.
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You could be totally right and I could be totally wrong.
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You're making your opinion based on speculation.
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It is baseless speculation that it would have gone better if we'd done something different.
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If you have a choice of bad slow or bad fast, and they're both just terrible, do a bad fast.
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Whoever was president was going to be president when somebody fell off a plane, right?
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Now I'm using that as, you know, a representative of something bad was going to happen.
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But somebody was going to fall off a plane and it was going to be on film.
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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.
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The only difference in our opinions, I think, is your assumption of what the Afghan government would have done
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if we'd done a more planned, phased withdrawal.
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In every case, the Afghan government would be packing their bags because they were pretty dead.
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So while it is a completely reasonable assumption, completely reasonable that I'm wrong,
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I want you to hear it clearly, that tomorrow we might find out some information of a specific thing we did wrong,
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I'm just saying that as of today, your opinion has no support.
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But as long as the Afghan government was going to evaporate as soon as we started leaving,
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you didn't really have an option to do it right.
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Now, I have to think that the people over there had a little bit of capability,
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meaning that I'm seeing lots of people saying, you are wrong.
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Everybody who's saying you're wrong, I hear you.
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I hear you, and I even think you might be right.
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I'm just saying that you don't have evidence for your opinion.
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Now, if you don't know David Sachs, a very successful investor,
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one of the smartest guys around about everything,
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and then number four, announce the end of fighting.
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Now, that would be a good business order of things, right?
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Have any of you ever worked in any kind of a large organization?
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At this point, some of the Afghans find out you're ready to leave.
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You can't get to step two, evacuate civilians and allies,
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because the entire structure of the country would have dissolved
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So could you get your military out easily if the civilian support structure was disappearing at the same time?
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So it looks like we've made a decision to protect our military at the expense of some of the civilians.
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And unfortunately, that's what we pay our military to do, right?
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To protect us, but not necessarily other countries.
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What is, let me put it down to the individual person.
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Let's say you're an Afghan citizen and you've been working with the American presence.
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So you worked with the Americans and you know you're pretty much in tough shape if the Taliban take over
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The people who are disagreeing have a much different impression of the competence of human beings
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and the competence of the Afghan government that I do.
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Probably you could boil it down to one difference in assumption.
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The people who think that Biden got it wrong believe the Afghan government was capable of competence.
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Because if the Afghan government had been competent, we could have worked with them and done more phased withdrawal,
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put them in charge, have them cover our backs while we leave.
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So, you know, that's our difference of agreement.
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So remember, if you're disagreeing with me, you're hanging your assumption on the Afghan government's competence.
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And I base it on them being incompetent to the extreme.
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But if you think that what our problem was in Afghanistan is a lack of leadership, including the way we left,
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you've got a much higher opinion of everything in Afghanistan than I do.
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I don't feel like leadership was even a variable.
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Remember I told you when the pandemic started, one of my best predictions, I think.
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I don't think a single fucking person agreed with me when I said that.
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We still don't know why some countries do better than others.
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So leadership is always the thing we look to as the magic bullet that made everything different.
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We look to it in Afghanistan and say, you know, if we'd had better leadership.
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We say, you know, if the United States had better leadership.
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There's no evidence that leadership made any difference in either of these cases.
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My long goal of being a musical power and a lyricist is now accomplished.
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Thanks to Akira the Don, who takes podcasts such as mine, and I think Jordan Peterson and
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some other folks, and takes out samples, part of what we say in our podcast, and puts it
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And if you think that that doesn't work, you're wrong.
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It works in the same way that Beatles music worked.
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Now, if you study the Beatles, you know that part of their magic was that their songs were
00:26:47.340
The lyrics, you know, the story of the song was nothing.
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It was just pieces that they had that they put together.
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And once you free yourself from the thought that your song has to make sense, which is
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what the Beatles did, and Akira the Don has sort of in the same way made the same kind
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It's different in this case, because he's intentionally putting things together that
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They would take things that shouldn't be together, but they sound good.
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And people would think, hey, you can't put together a lyric from this idea with a lyric
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from this idea, and then suddenly you're an orchestra, and now you're just drums and guitar.
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So Akira the Don did the same thing in a different way.
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You just put together these podcast lyrics, if you can call it that, and put it to a really
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So if you're looking for it, search for Meaning Wave, one word, Meaning Wave.
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And the album's coming out on September 10th, and the first single's coming out this week,
00:28:17.640
George Soros tweeted, I consider President Xi the most dangerous enemy of open societies in
00:28:30.420
If you believe that George Soros was actively destroying the United States, with his many
00:28:36.120
donations to groups that you don't like, what's he going to do to China?
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George Soros just said China's his biggest enemy.
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If you think George Soros was so powerful that he was a threat to the United States, would
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Maybe they don't have enough freedom that he can take advantage of, but do you think that
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So, George Soros, enemy of my enemy, let's talk.
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Because, as much as you don't like George Soros, and okay, you have your reasons, I don't like
00:29:33.240
So, George, if you're listening, if I can give you a boost there on taking care of China,
00:29:44.980
So, user, Twitter user Anomaly, you all know him, probably.
00:29:51.260
He is still taunting me on Twitter to debate him or to make a better argument for all the
00:29:59.900
times we disagree, except it's the weirdest situation.
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He's imagining we disagree on stuff that we don't disagree on, and he's taunting me in
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public to debate him on the things that we agree on.
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And watching other people pour in and come up with imaginary things that we disagree with,
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So, there's this weird, gigantic, imaginary fight going on between the imaginary me and
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somebody I've never met, Anomaly, and other people are getting in.
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I'm in an imaginary battle over imaginary topics, and there are spectators.
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So, these are just some of the things that are happening today.
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And as long as the Afghan thing's going crazy, I don't think anybody has any other news to
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Can you even imagine a debate with me and Anomaly, if you know him from Twitter?
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I'm not going to go with you on that prediction, because I don't know that he did it wrong.
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So, at this point, I don't know if he can defend himself, because everybody's going to
00:32:11.120
believe he did it wrong, but the evidence isn't there.
00:32:16.340
We don't have an evidence of the process, and we don't have anything to compare it to.
00:32:20.880
So, judging things based on outcomes is not rational.
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You would need to know a lot more about the mechanics of it to know if the outcome is
00:32:36.660
Scott, debate's too much with the block button.
00:32:53.400
Somebody's blaming me for having a cracked iPhone screen.
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If everything I know about you, I can find out from how long it takes you to put your
00:33:14.000
I will not hold my phone in my hand except to put the case on it and the protector when
00:33:27.920
I will lay it carefully on a surface, often handing it to the person who sold me the phone
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and saying, would you mind putting that phone in that case?
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And while you're at it, would you slap that protector on it?
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Now, if you heard that's the way I handled my new phone, would you offer me a job?
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Let's say I came in and asked for a job and that's all you knew about me, is how I handled
00:33:54.200
Now, compare that to the person who I shall not name, who has a cracked real screen and
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Would you hire somebody who had a $1,000 instrument that they didn't put a screen protector on?
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I would not hire somebody who didn't put a screen protector on their phone.
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You didn't put a screen protector on your phone as soon as you got it?
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If you're not the person who paid for the phone and you didn't put the screen protector
00:34:50.360
And he loves the way the iPhone looks with no protector.
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And he loves the way, I think he likes it without the screen protector or the case.
00:35:13.800
But if his children don't put a protector on it, well, I'm not going to hire them.
00:35:23.780
If somebody's paying for it, okay, do whatever you want.
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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.
00:35:55.080
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.
00:36:02.040
Okay, I don't believe anything about that story.
00:36:04.400
But it's funny to imagine Steve Jobs being pulled over.
00:36:09.780
You pull over Steve Jobs and you say, can I have your license?
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I think if you met Steve Jobs in person sort of accidentally because you pulled him over at a traffic stop,
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you would be so pulled into his reality distortion field.
00:36:40.140
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.
00:36:47.520
I'll bet Jobs could talk himself out of any ticket.
00:37:12.660
I saw a link on some rapid tests, but the question is always availability.
00:37:23.360
Well, I did talk about masks, but I talked about mask resistance.
00:37:30.320
Oh, your business partner just got tests from Amazon.
00:37:38.400
So New Zealand just shut down the whole country because they had one positive case.
00:37:48.300
Yeah, so do you think New Zealand's handling it right?
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How do they keep the rest of the cases from coming in?
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I don't know what their vaccination situation is, but I've got a feeling that the COVID is all over the place there.
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I am going to go do something else, and I will talk to you later.