Episode 638 Scott Adams: Trump’s China Tweet on Overstock CEO

Come on in here, everybody. We're going to try this again with better sound. With any luck whatsoever, I'll remind you that complaining about the sound non stop will end the periscope. It's not because I think you're not telling me the truth, although in some cases, the trolls are just trying to derail things. It's not that. It's just that I don't want to do the periscope if everybody's just complaining. It doesn't matter that you're right or wrong. I just don't enjoy the experience, so I bail them. Let's try it again with better sound. And we should do this simultaneous sip again. I know you're not prepared, but if you've got a beverage, let's do this right now. Go. And now you're complete. All right, let's start with overstock CEO. Is it Patrick Byrne? And the question you're all wondering is, is the overstock ex co? He just quit. Is Byrne crazy? Is he lying? And you're probably wondering what's going on, because his story is quite incredible. The basic story is that he says members of the FBI who he names, including Comey and Strzok, asked him to do some counterintelligence, some, you know, some spying, if you will, on Hillary, Trump, Marco Rubio and Cruz, but mostly Trump. Now, is it true? Because it'd be an amazing, changes everything kind of a story. If it is, here's what I feel I can say with confidence. I've watched several of his interviews with confidence. I tell you he believes it's true. So maybe you are already there. But let me say that there isn't the slightest chance that in his mind he's lying, because the way he talks about it is the way you don't talk when you're lying. I'll give you a couple of tells. Now, as far as I know, these tells are not scientific. These are me talking. So take this with whatever credibility or lack thereof you want to put on it. One of the questions that Chris Cuomo asked him, asked of Byrne was, are you going to be able to prove this allegation? He was talking about something in particular, and Byrne, instead of saying what a liar would say, which is, I could have, but my dog ate the documents, or, yeah, yeah, I'll get around to that. He looks at Cuomo and I'm paraphrasing, but he says, basically, I'm not in the business of convincing you. I'm just opening the door. I'm telling you what I tell you what I know that's all I'm doing. I'm not in the business of trying to convince you of anything. And I thought that was a really powerful answer. Because if he believes his story, he's giving enough information by far so that other people can investigate it and find out if it's true or not. He's actually saying, I was in a room with other people. Here are some of the people. Go check for yourself. He named Warren Buffet, for example. The Warren Buffet part could be true without the rest of it being true. Meaning that it could be true. You talk to Warren Buffett, and it could be true that Warren Buffett said, well, if that's your story, you should go to the. Go to the authorities. Which is what I imagine anybody smart would say when they heard that story. But that doesn't mean the rest of it's true. So definitely he's telling the truth. The way he talks about it, the fact that he mentioned names of number of people who would suggest there are lots of witnesses that would tell the opposite story. Even Maria Butina, presumably, would have the ability to verify or not verify a story. So liars don't tell stories that have that many witnesses unless they believe it's true. Now, this leaves open the possibility that he's not connected to reality. So it definitely leaves the possibility that he believes it's true, but he's got some kind of mental issue. In order to get some penetrating insight into that, we would need to know the following things. Has he ever been accused of hallucinating facts before? Because if nobody comes forward in the next, I don't know, two days to say, you know, this isn't the first time he imagined something that wasn't true. If you hear that and maybe hear from more than one source, then, yeah, I think you got to say that it's a little more likely that there's something going on with him and maybe the story is not true even if he believes it to be true. But if 48 hours go by, and that's sort of arbitrary, you know, a few days go by and nobody comes forward to say, you know, on other topics, he has been just as crazy, then I would say the odds strongly favor it being an accurate version of what he believes to be true and may largely be true. But wait for that. So that's the key thing. Wait for other people to talk about other topics, that he may or may not be having a break with reality. The other thing is, I won't tell you where I first heard this, but let's say there's some questions as to whether Maria Butina is 30 years old or is she the age that her pictures without makeup would suggest on the Internet? She doesn't look 30 years old to me. I would guess mid-40s. So another test would be, hey, Patrick, how old is Maria Butina? Let's see if he can get that one right. All right. But I really wanted to talk about the President's tweets on China. I'm going to read them. They're very long, but I really need to read the whole thing because I'm having kind of a moment with this. Maybe you'll have the same. If you've already seen it, you know what's going to come. But if you haven't, this is really big news. So President tweets just a little bit ago, he said, our country has lost stupidly trillions of dollars with China over many years. They have stolen our intellectual property at a rate of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and they want to continue. I won't let that happen. We don't need China and frankly, would be far better off without them. The vast amounts of money made and stolen by China from the United States year after year for decades will and must stop. Our great American companies are hereby ordered. Our great American companies are hereby ordered. Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies home and making your products in the usa. I will be responding to China's tariffs this afternoon. This is a great opportunity for the United States. It is also. Here's my favorite part. I am ordering all carriers, including FedEx, Amazon, UPS and Post Office, to search for and refuse search for and refuse all deliveries of fentanyl from China or anywhere else. Fentanyl kills 100,000Americans a year. President Xi said this would stop it. Didn't. Our economy, because of our gains in the last two and a half years, is much larger than that of China. We will keep it that way. This is the answer to the question why I support this president. A lot of people say to me, scott, this president said something that I'm offended by. Yeah, he did that. People say to me, this president said some things that maybe you think is funny but other people are pretty upset about. Yeah, that's true, Scott. This president may not be paying attention to some of the smaller issues. Yeah, it's true. This president may have made this mistake and that mistake and this mistake and that mistake. This president may have said 11,000 factually inaccurate things Maybe so, but, man, he gets the big stuff, right? And that's what I thought. I thought he gets the big stuff, right? I thought he'd do well with the economy. I thought he'd do well with international relations, at least the, you know, the dangerous ones like North Korea, he has. And I thought he would do well on stuff like this, dealing with China. What other president would have said what this president said? He just called President Xi a liar in public, just said, they're murdering our people, just shut down their mail stuff to the United States and. And just told the citizens of the United States to get behind him. I don't know what it means when he says he's ordering US Countries to look at moving their production here. I don't know that that has a real meaning in terms of ordering, as in the authority to do it. Maybe, I don't know. Maybe in some ways he does, but I don't care. He's speaking to the country as commander in chief. It looks like he's speaking to you as negotiator in chief, and certainly that's part of it, but this is commander in chief. The 100,000Americans a year that are killed by fentanyl, that may be an exaggeration, but it's heading in that direction. That's a security problem. That's a military problem. That's a Homeland protection problem. This tweet, it's about trade, but it's not about trade. This is commander in chief. Commander in chief just told the country to mobilize. Just like World War II, in this case, mobilizing to pull our resources away from a dangerous, murderous. Murderous and on, let's say, unreliable country. He's asking the country to mobilize. Will they. Will the country listen to their commander in chief? Will they understand that this is not an economic request. This is a commander in chief request. Request. I don't know. He says he's ordering it. When the commander in chief tells you to pull your companies back to the United States, do you say, well, this doesn't apply to me because this is just economics and I have the freedom to do this? Well, maybe you could. Maybe you could, as an American company, just say, well, I choose not to take this guidance from the President, but if you choose not to take the guidance, you're taking it as an economic suggestion. It's not. This is commander in chief. If you get that wrong, you're really missing the story. Your commander in chief just told you. If you want to avoid 100,000 people getting killed by Our nemesis, China. Pull your companies back. Pull them all back. Because I'll tell you, when China promised to take care of the fentanyl situation, and, you know, I take this personally because my stepson died less than a year ago from drug overdose and fentanyl was in his system. You know, I take this personally, but that's a military problem. If they say they're going to deal with it and they do, well, that's, you know, dealing with another country productively. But if they say they're going to do it and they don't, it becomes a military problem. And the president is dealing with this in what I consider a military problem framework. He just told American companies to come home if they don't, you know, and some of them will have different risk profiles. You know, not everybody can do. Might be hard, might take a long time. It's going to be tough. But anybody who can do it, I feel, has a patriotic responsibility to do it at this point. Anybody who can bring their companies home or move their suppliers to another country needs to be looking at that pretty hard right now. So let me say it again. Everything you want to say about this president that's negative may be true. Maybe he's offended some of you. Maybe we wish he had spoken differently. Maybe we wish that the country was not divided by not only his rhetoric, but the way it's treated in the news. You need both of them to get a problem. Maybe all of that's true. Maybe he's departed from the fact checking way more times than you think is healthy. Maybe that's true. But people who supported this president from the start, supported him for this reason, this reason not just being China, this reason meaning big, that he can do the big stuff, that he can think big, he can get you a space force, he can pull production out of China. I mean, just think about that. Who else would even talk about that? Who would even say that out loud? Nobody. Nobody would say something this big out loud except him. He's the only one. Who else would talk to Kim Jong Un? Nobody. Who else would say, yeah, I can deal with Putin, you know, we just have to get what we want. At the same time, he's sanctioning the piss out of him. Trump. All right, so I'm going to use this as my answer to the question for all of you who said, you know, why would you, why would you be supportive of a president who makes us so, so angry and offended? This is why. This is why. You're not going to get this from Biden. Certainly you're not going to get this from Biden. You're not. You're not going to get this from a Democrat. You're not going to get it from Bernie. And he's the most hard ass Democrat about the Chinese. You won't even get this from another Republican. There was one person who could write this tweet and one person who could cause some action to happen. I don't know how much action will happen, but that's it. So I'm completely on board. If this takes our economy down, I'm on board. If it makes the stock market fall, I'm on board. If it raises my taxes, I'm on board. If it makes our deficit bigger, I'm on board. Time to do it. China had its chance. There's nobody who can say China didn't have a chance. They had one job. Had they actually done something, even anything visible on the question of fentanyl, I would say let's keep talking to them. But their refusal to move on this thing, which they could do easily and is really just a signal that you are worthy of being part of the public conversation. They failed repeatedly and at the cost of tens of thousands of American lives. For what? To negotiate? Was this part of a trade deal? Negotiation? You're going to kill 10,000Americans every few months until we give you a deal that's not in our interest? Was that the deal? China? Was that the deal? Because if it wasn't the deal, you better tell us what was the deal, because that's what looks like the deal. So if murdering us until we give you a trade deal was the only fucking deal you're going to put on the table, fuck you, China. Fuck you and your whole fucking country. You can all die. Okay, that's a little too strong. You can't all die. I don't need a billion people to die because the Chinese citizens are not the ones making this mistake. But let's say the government of China, fuck them, let's pull our stuff back. Let's. Let's shut down their goddamn shipments of everything. Let's tell the countries, you know, the businesses in this country to try to get their supply chains in order and then just shut them down. I don't even want to take their fucking mail. I don't want to see a package come in that says Made in China. If I see anything made in China from this day on, I'm not buying it. Period. Period. I'm not buying another fucking thing from China. I'm behind the President 100%. Shut him down. If they had done anything on fentanyl, I wouldn't be talking like this. Anything. Anything at all. If they'd said, we're trying, I'd say, well, let's keep negotiating. They're a credible partner. We can deal with them. They're not. They're not credible. They are our enemy. We don't need a nuclear war. Nobody wants a war. But we should not do business with murderers who murder us while looking us in the eye. If you can look us in the eye, China, and murder tens of thousands of our citizens because you think it might help you get a better trade deal, fuck you. Fuck your products, fuck your economy, fuck your fentanyl. The whole leadership of China can just go die. All right, you're dead to us now. No more Chinese products. That's it. Period. We're done. I'm going to be checking everything. Well, I think what we need is some kind of a way to easily check what's made in China so we can just avoid that shit without hurting American companies. So we do need a glide path so that we're not destroying American companies during the transition. But we need to get out of China. Let's just get our stuff out of there. I did see an article. I didn't read the whole article. I've skimmed it, but it was. The essence of it was that it would be really hard and maybe even impossible to move suppliers from China to some other country. It has something to do with the interconnection of things and what companies are connected to what. So it's not like you can just pluck one company and say, oh, let's move this company from China to another country. That would be hard, but we could do it. Do you think there's a product that we can't build a factory for in Guatemala? Do you think Honduras wouldn't like to see a few factories? Pretty sure. Pretty sure they would. So the President has said this, and maybe this isn't the important part, but whatever we can do to encourage those companies to relocate to this hemisphere, specifically Central America, to absorb some of the. Some of the employment so that immigration is less of a problem. Let's do it. We've got two of the biggest problems in the world. One is China, one is immigration from Central America. Let's solve them both. Let's do what we can to move those. Move those manufacturers to Central America. Help the Central Americans, help the immigrants, help our hemisphere and fuck China. Somebody says go smoke a joint and calm down, Scott. Well, I think you would all agree that if China killed your son, you might have an attitude about it, and I do. But China is also killing tens of thousands of other people's sons and daughters. They're doing it intentionally, meaning that they could stop it. They promised to stop it. They didn't. You also saw in the last couple days that the US has gotten tough on Chinese nationals. The actual, you know, individual people in China have. Who were behind the fentanyl. We actually know their names. We know the name. I'll bet we know where they live. I'll bet we know the name and where they live. Of the top fentanyl murderers in China, I've been saying, I think we can kill them. I think we can designate them as terrorists, and I think we can kill them. Now, would that be. Would that cause a war? No. No. China is not going to go to war if we go into their country and kill their fucking fentanyl dealers. They're not. We could take them out right in front of Xi. We could do it in front of them. We could blow this. This fucking guy's brains out. This fentanyl dealer in China who's killing tens of thousands of Americans. We could grab them by the hair, hold them in front of Xi, blow his brains down on Xi's fucking carpet. And Xi would not start a war because he doesn't give a fuck about that one guy. He doesn't want a war because he'd be dead. So let's go get him. If China doesn't want to get him, that does not clear our responsibility for protecting this country. Let's go kill that guy. We could do that. All right. I probably broke a few laws here, so I think I'll cut it short. I'll talk to you tomorrow.