Scott Adams talks about the Trump administration's attempt to negotiate a deal with Canada and Mexico, and why he thinks it's a good idea to be involved in politics. Plus, Tesla cancels Elon Musk's plan to build a solar panel company in Canada.
00:02:24.920Anyway, he's saying that the tariffs on Mexico and Canada probably are going to be resolved, meaning that there'll be some kind of middle ground, meaning there's some kind of accommodation, meaning we'll figure out how to work with each other as soon as today.
00:02:45.600Now, in theory, that should have been good for the stock markets, but we'll see.
00:02:53.120So in theory, the tariffs, which were big, 25% and everything but energy, I think, they were really just to get some kind of little extra energy for an agreement, especially about stopping the fentanyl trade.
00:03:14.660So one could imagine if Canada and or Mexico said, wait, wait, instead of these terrible tariffs, how about we do a little bit more stopping that fentanyl?
00:03:27.180And then that would be something you couldn't negotiate with.
00:03:29.700So in theory, we'll have some kind of accommodation there, but, you know, it might be optimistic to say it's going to happen today.
00:03:38.120But a lot, Nick, I think, was warning the markets to not, you know, don't incorporate this as some kind of a permanent situation.
00:03:47.860So that was exactly the right thing to do.
00:03:50.080He might be off on how quickly they can resolve it, but maybe not.
00:04:28.260It's also funny to me that people think that it's obvious that Elon Musk has found some way to monetize being involved, disinvolved in the Trump administration.
00:04:40.280If I can give you any business advice at all, it goes like this.
00:04:49.880Associating yourself with Trump pretty much guarantees you lose half of your market.
00:04:56.200Nobody who understands anything about business would have said, you know what?
00:05:01.260You know what would be really good for business?
00:05:03.120It's as if I associate with, you know, half of the country instead of the whole country.
00:05:10.740There was no way that Musk didn't understand that it would be risky just to throw in for once.
00:05:22.680But I feel like the Democrats don't understand enough about business to know that if you're good at business, you wouldn't do this for business reasons.
00:05:34.760The only way it makes sense for Elon to be so involved for business reasons is because he thinks he needs to save the entire country, which, given that it's America, it would have a big ripple effect on the rest of the world.
00:11:10.180Trump starts his speech by saying, quote,
00:11:12.520I could find a cure to the most devastating disease, a disease that would wipe out entire nations, or announce the answer, the answers to the greatest economy in history, or the stoppage of crime to the lowest level ever recorded.
00:11:26.560And, these people sitting right here will not clap, will not stand, and certainly will not cheer for these astronomical achievements.
00:11:37.320Now, these are imaginary achievements.
00:11:38.960But, and then he went on, so Democrats sitting before me, just this one night, why not join us in celebrating so many incredible wins for America, for the good of our nation?
00:11:51.760Let's work together, and let's truly make America great again.
00:11:54.980Now, obviously, they weren't going to do that, because they came there to be protesters and, you know, ruining his flow.
00:12:05.420But, what he did was, he framed them, he basically framed them.
00:12:11.780So, instead of, I'm giving a speech, and they think I'm a big old liar, and so they're trying to, trying to make a point.
00:12:19.140He framed them as not even able to agree with things you, everybody should agree with.
00:12:25.660Now, do you think that they proved, at some time during the night, that the Democrats prove him right, by showing that there were things that anybody should agree with, just anybody should agree with?
00:12:41.220And, did they disagree with that one thing that anybody should have agreed with?
00:13:02.200And, it was when he introduced the 13-year-old boy who had survived, I guess, brain cancer as a kid, you know, had a real tough, tough start in life.
00:13:15.320But, the little kid who, and it's important to the rest of the story, was black.
00:13:21.780And, the kids there with his father, who looked awesome, looked like, I assume that was his father, who looked like, you know, just this great supportive dad who'd gotten him to this point.
00:13:32.820And, I guess the son really liked police officers, wanted to be one.
00:13:36.880And, I think he'd gotten some honorary, you know, police officer badges or something from various police departments who were just being supportive of the fact that he just loved police.
00:13:48.740And, so, Trump comes up with this idea of having him in the audience, telling his story.
00:13:57.460And, there's nothing political about it.
00:14:00.200It's literally just awesome kid, survived a terrible thing, loves the police, and the police showing love back.
00:14:09.020So, Trump announces that they're going to make him part of the Secret Service.
00:14:15.940Now, obviously, these are ceremonial kind of positions.
00:14:19.800And, I think he had that new head of the Secret Service go up there and give him basically an ID, you know, like a little wallet ID thing that says he's part of the Secret Service.
00:14:31.700And, then there was a moment that was the best moment.
00:17:39.200Then, Representative Green, who's a Democrat that you might recognize as the one who always wants to impeach Trump on his first day of office.
00:17:52.720So, he's put in for a bunch of impeachment facts.
00:17:57.360But, he gets up, and I guess he started yelling.
00:18:00.520But, he wasn't microphone, so on video it didn't look like he was making much of a dent.
00:18:55.720And, it looked like Trump was sort of expecting it.
00:18:58.680And, so, Trump stands back and just lets it happen.
00:19:03.180And, then, Representative Johnson, you know, gavels in.
00:19:07.520And, then, he reads something that he had prepared, obviously, that said something like, you know, the members will show decorum in the room, blah, blah, blah.
00:19:23.120And, then, he, Johnson said, you know, essentially, if we can't restore order, you know, the sergeant-at-arms will be asked to restore order.
00:19:36.080Now, that kind of means escort him out.
00:25:27.800But, even a non-scientific instant poll, if it's on CBS or if it's on CNN, you sort of expect it to lean in one direction.
00:25:38.660But, it leaned pretty hard in the other direction.
00:25:41.160So, that whole 80-20 thing kicked in again.
00:25:43.960And, the Democrats found the only thing they could have done, which 80% of the public would disagree with, in the context of being the party that's being accused of always being on the wrong side of every 80-20.
00:26:02.140They created a whole new topic, which is, you know, the disturbance of the president's speech.
00:26:09.980And, they turned it into an 80-20 against themselves, while they're being accused of being the idiots who can't figure out an 80-20 topic.
00:27:11.420But, that one, I felt like, you know, not really on point.
00:27:17.900But, what I've learned is that if you stay in character and you relentlessly stay in character and you just never leave your character, which is what Trump does better than anybody, you can eventually normalize anything.
00:27:33.720And, Trump has normalized his nickname thing to the point where, if he didn't do it, you'd be disappointed.
00:27:42.680And, my best analogy to this is John McEnroe, tennis player.
00:27:49.680So, if you're not old enough to remember, John McEnroe was like a bad boy brat, always complaining about the refs and yelling stuff like, you can't be serious.
00:28:00.120And, everybody loved to hate him because it was just so inappropriate.
00:28:26.500But, eventually, since McEnroe was just always McEnroe, by the time he was playing the seniors tour, he'd have to throw in some complaints, even if he didn't care.
00:28:37.340Because, people expected it, and it was just part of the act.
00:28:41.040So, once you are relentless, and you're authentic, authentic is the thing.
00:29:09.240But, by the time he got to the, essentially, State of the Union that wasn't one because he just started, he's in the most dignified room in the world, doing the most dignified thing you could ever do, which is a presidential address.
00:29:26.760And he starts talking about Ukraine, and how some people want, you know, Ukraine to last forever.
00:32:34.680And then he just keeps going until he gets to, like, people who, I guess it was one person over 300 years old.
00:32:42.180But according to the database, not reality.
00:32:49.020Now, again, it's not my understanding that we know for sure that these are indications of fraud.
00:32:56.180And I've heard an argument that they're not.
00:32:58.740But everybody understands that if your big database of who should be getting money has errors like this in it, you've got a problem.
00:33:08.900Now, the problem might be you need better data, or the problem might be there's massive corruption going on, and this is showing where some of it is.
00:33:18.940But apparently Bernie Sanders did his own response video that nobody wanted.
00:33:25.920And nobody wanted to hear Bernie Sanders.
00:33:28.060He wasn't the official response person, because that was Slotnik, who did it later.
00:33:34.100But Bernie makes his own video, and he decides to focus on the part about the Social Security ages.
00:33:42.080And so Bernie has now joined the crazy eyes part of the Democrat Party, where his eyes are literally, like, crazy.
00:33:53.020And he goes, nobody, nobody who is 150 years old or 200 years old or 300 years old is receiving Social Security checks.
00:34:02.520Now, Bernie, I don't know why I need to explain this to you, but I don't think Trump's point was that we have a lot of really old people in America who are receiving Social Security.
00:34:23.760It wasn't his point that there are real people who are 300 years old who have received a lot of Social Security.
00:34:33.520His point was either the data is bad, and that's a problem, or there might be some corruption indicated by this.
00:34:42.040But the best that Bernie can do is to emphatically remind us that nobody, nobody who is 150 years old or 200 years old or 300 years old is receiving Social Security checks.
00:34:57.440Now, he looked like he was suffering dementia.
00:35:01.260So I'm just going to put it out there.
00:35:06.060I don't, you know, I'm no medical expert, but everybody reaches an age where things don't work so well.
00:35:14.000And I have to say, Bernie looks like he's reached that age.
00:35:18.440So imagine being a Democrat and watching Trump do this, you know, master class in showmanship that was really first rate.
00:36:31.940Now, if you remember what Trump said, he said, you're not ready for this minerals deal because you're still talking about like war lasting forever.
00:38:47.260So most of the speech was more, let's say, I don't want to say anti-China because that feels like the wrong frame.
00:39:03.060But rather, I'd say framing China as the biggest challenge to America in the future, the near future, starting today.
00:39:13.720And I didn't catch anything that was anti-Russian, but I did fall asleep during part of it.
00:39:22.160Was there any anti-Russian stuff in the speech?
00:39:26.400Because I don't think there was, which would be sort of a change from normal presidents lately.
00:39:35.980Certainly, certainly it would be a change from Biden.
00:39:39.620But there was a whole bunch of, again, I don't want to say anti-China, but let's say taking China seriously as the other big power in the world.
00:39:52.180And so he had tariffs on China, and of course, China's going to respond to the tariffs.
00:39:59.340He talked about building a missile defense.
00:40:02.460You could argue that that, you know, includes anybody who might send a missile, but who are we really worried about?
00:40:10.600We shouldn't be worried about anybody attacking the homeland, but I wouldn't mind having a missile defense just in case.
00:40:17.200We talked about the Panama ports and, you know, resting control from China.
00:40:23.940They got a little too much control there.
00:40:26.260He talked about putting a tax on Chinese ships who come into port in America.
00:40:31.540He talked about taxes on Chinese cranes.
00:40:35.020I guess the cranes that load and unload the containers.
00:40:38.140And he talked about putting America heavily back into the shipbuilding business, both commercial and military.
00:40:50.480Now, here's another one of those things where I wonder if this is one of those cases where somebody smart said something and it bubbled all the way up to the presidency and turned it into policy.
00:41:29.380There was a post by, I think it was Balaji Srinivasan, who would be one of the smartest people in the country, frankly.
00:41:35.980And he was talking about the difference in shipbuilding capability of China versus basically everybody else in the world.
00:41:46.340So China has built this massive shipbuilding capability.
00:41:50.740And it's both for commercial vessels and military vessels.
00:41:57.680Now, in that America has sort of deprecated its own ability.
00:42:03.780So I think we have very little ability to build ships at the moment relative to China.
00:42:09.500So if we want to have any influence over the oceans, and that's a big part of the globe is the ocean.
00:42:16.820And if you want to be, you know, selling and buying stuff all over the world, you're going to need a lot of military ability in the oceans.
00:42:26.060So Trump has made that a priority to become a major shipbuilder.
00:42:36.140And I kind of wonder if that came from, you know, one post on X.
00:42:40.200Because it was such a stark and shocking set of data that I'd never heard before.
00:42:48.720I had no idea that we were basically not good at building ships anymore and that China had become really good at it, which is scary.
00:43:01.240So it's possible that that was just one of those things again, or it might be that, you know, maybe a lot of people were aware of it and turned it into a thing.
00:43:14.480So I'm kind of excited about that because to the extent that we can do anything with tax breaks or whatever it is to make shipbuilding big, I think that's exactly the right instinct.
00:43:29.560And it doesn't have to be all for military because, you know, we're going to be, you know, living on the sea and doing a lot in the sea for a long time.
00:43:42.280I saw a summary of Trump's speech by David Sachs.
00:43:46.000I'll just read it because it's a good summary.
00:43:49.820So Sachs said, this was the theme of the night.
00:43:52.560Democrats sat sullen-faced as President Trump described one sensible policy after another.
00:44:00.200Democrats took the 20% side of every 80-20 issue.
00:44:04.260Trump even explained the trap that Democrats were about to fall into, and they still fell into it.
00:44:19.080So Nicole Wallace, after the speech, said, you know, that she had lots of good feelings about the kid DJ, the one who got the Secret Service badge there.
00:44:30.120And, you know, she had the normal good feelings about it.
00:44:33.880But then she goes, quote, about DJ, quote, I hope he has a long life as a law enforcement officer, but I hope he never has to defend the United States Capitol against Donald Trump's supporters.
00:45:12.160And then the response came from Senator Lisa Sleck of Michigan.
00:45:21.640And I didn't know she was a former CIA agent.
00:45:24.560So anyway, she was complaining about the Doge employees having access to tax returns and health information and your bank account.
00:45:35.080But the thing that people get wrong about human motivation, Democrats get this wrong, about human motivation, is when you talk about the richest man in the world, what would be the worst thing you could do business-wise from a risk management perspective?
00:45:59.300What would be the worst thing that the richest man in the world could do?
00:46:04.420The worst thing would be to say that you're trying to help the government with cutting costs, but really you get caught doing something that's the opposite, like stealing.
00:46:16.740That's the worst thing that's the worst thing that's the worst thing that's the worst thing that could happen.
00:46:51.580But nobody in the right mind, who is already in that position financially, would create a situation where everybody's watching, and if he did something insane, like try to use his access to steal money from the government, how could that be dumber?
00:47:12.500So watching people look at one of the smartest people in the country and richest, Musk, and assuming that he would do the dumbest thing that anybody would possibly do in that situation is so pathetically dumb that I almost don't have words to describe it.
00:47:34.800I just shake my head and think, okay, I don't know how you think that that would make sense in his world.
00:47:42.920In fact, if I had to make a list of all the people on the planet that I would trust the most if I lost my wallet, it would be Elon Musk.
00:47:56.320If you dropped your wallet on the sidewalk and he was the first one to find it, the chance of you getting it back with all of the money in it is 100%.
00:48:06.840First of all, he wouldn't let you not get your wallet back, like you'd give it to somebody and say, make sure they get this wallet back.
00:48:14.780And secondly, there isn't any chance he's going to steal any money from it. None. Zero chance.
00:48:19.140So that's how I feel about him in the government. It's hard to imagine somebody who would be less of a risk.
00:48:26.640Now, the Doge employees themselves, I suppose everybody who has access to anything has some kind of risk.
00:48:33.880But, you know, do I have less trust in the Doge people than I have in the government employees who have been there forever and have access to those same systems?
00:48:43.020What would be the reasoning with which I would say, oh, the regular employees of the government are all honest and good people, but the Doge people are not?
00:48:57.800Like, what would be any evidence that we increased any risk to these databases?
00:49:05.520I don't know. There's just no connecting tissue.
00:49:08.520Because it's not like nobody had access until Doge did.
00:49:13.320How many people do you think have access to all of our systems?
00:49:34.220the European Union has postponed its plans to gradually phase out Russian gas.
00:49:42.480So I think you're going to see Europe.
00:49:45.020There seems to be some kind of a acknowledgement that Russian energy is going to be important to Europe and maybe it'll stay that way.
00:49:53.740Now, I don't think that that would happen unless people saw that Russia and the United States were moving toward something that could be a more productive relationship in the future, whatever that looks like.
00:50:07.180Now, I have to, again, I hate that I always have to put all the qualifiers on this, but I don't love Putin.
00:50:19.780I understand that, you know, he is dangerous.
00:50:30.420Now I can just say what I want to say.
00:50:32.260Putin is really good on the persuasion stuff, just really good.
00:50:40.460And the fact that he's been doing joint military exercises with China, I don't think that means he really wants to be in any kind of a joint military action with China.
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