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Aug. 2, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
31:01
Episode 164 Scott Adams: Healthcare, North Korea, Noam Chomsky, Climate Change
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hey Reg Ivanka!
Hi, everybody.
Come on in here. Jeremy, Tyler, JP, Andy, Mustang girl.
Hey, Mark.
Come on in here. Bikini Ninja.
You have funny names, Susie, Rick.
I know why you're here.
I know why you're here.
You're here for the simultaneous sip.
I dare say it's the best sip of the day.
It's a way to get your morning off to the right start.
I'll tell you, I can speak from experience.
I have never died on a day when I've had a simultaneous sip.
Zero. That's my correlation.
In fact, I'm willing to say I will live forever if I just keep drinking this delicious coffee.
And it's time for all of you to join me for the simultaneous sip.
Quick! Quick! Quick!
Grab your mugs, your cups, your vessels, your glasses.
With the liquid of your choice, coffee preferred.
And it's time.
So good.
I hope you're all feeling good.
Take a deep breath. Om.
You know, sometimes you just need to be reminded to relax.
So that's what I'm here to do.
Take a nice deep breath.
Shake it off. Get your muscles loosened and you're off to a good start.
Now we've got a few topics today.
Let's talk about healthcare.
Healthcare, as you know, is a big complicated area and people like me don't know much about it and people like you probably don't know much about it either.
But a few interesting things happening.
One is that the government has apparently approved some kind of telemedicine law.
And again, don't know the details.
But it looks like the government has allowed some doctoring over the internet for rural areas.
And when I saw that, I said to myself, what?
Why does the government have to allow that or fund it?
Why isn't that already happening?
But I think the issue is funding, because they need to reach these areas and they don't have the infrastructure necessarily to do it.
I think there might have also been some laws about it at some point, but I don't know if that was part of the current changes.
Tell a doctor, yeah.
And so that seems like a big deal.
I also see that there are some changes, that the government's made some changes, on something about short-term insurance and how you can extend it from 3 months to 12 months.
Whatever the change was, I don't really understand it, but Rand Paul seems to think it's a good idea.
And when it comes to competition, He's sort of my Alan Dershowitz for competition.
I've told you that on legal matters, I just wait to see what Alan Dershowitz says.
Because if he likes it, I'm probably going to like it too.
If he says it's good, I'll probably think it's good.
But on stuff like this, healthcare, and specifically whether the government's doing something for competition, if Rand has looked at it and he likes it, I'm a lot closer to liking it myself without really understanding it.
And I think most of us are in the same boat.
I kind of trust He's very trustworthy, don't you think?
Rand Paul. I say good things about him a lot, even though I don't agree with him on all of his policy, anything.
I'm just talking about the character of the individual.
He seems like probably the most honest person in the game right now.
He just seems totally straight, which probably is why I can tell there are some things I don't like.
Because if everybody else is lying, you don't know if you like it or not.
But with him, at least you know where he stands.
Yeah, I don't know if he's an idealist or he's practical.
Some of his ideas seem a little impractical.
I can't think of one in particular, but he certainly knows his stuff.
Anyway... I can't get on with his neighbor, somebody says.
Well, a lot of us have that problem.
So, here's my larger point about healthcare.
It looks like stuff's happening, and it looks like the administration is taking advantage of technology and cutting regulations.
Those are the two most fruitful paths.
Compared to the, you know, the Bernie Sanders wing that are saying single-payer and health care for all, and it's going to cost us a few extra trillion to do that.
That plan, while sounds good in theory, the numbers are hard to make that work.
But there may be something with technology and with cutting regulations and And goosing the market that would get us there.
I think I talked about this before.
There was some law or regulation that wouldn't allow a private doctor to have an MRI machine.
And he could charge very little, like $500, compared to thousands it would cost if he went to a hospital.
And it was just like a regulation that doesn't allow it.
And I'm thinking, I'm sure there's some explanation for that, but it's not quite obvious to me what it is.
So, I feel as though there's a potential efficiency gain, maybe 50%, you know, just what it feels like.
Inefficiency gain meaning the cost of healthcare is probably 50% higher than it needs to be for any good reason.
It has to do with the regulations and inefficiency and doing things the old way and not taking advantage of technology and stuff.
Now, that's the big picture is that healthcare might be moving in the right direction.
Then I saw a tweet, Mike Surinovich tweeted the other day, yesterday maybe, about an MIT professor slash scientist who came up with a pill that's sort of like a fountain of youth pill.
Now, if I told you that Just out of context and said, oh, a scientist came up with a fountain of youth pill, your first reaction would be, no, we didn't.
Sounds like perpetual motion.
Sounds like... sounds like bunk.
And probably it is.
But... The credentials of the scientists working on it, plus his board, which apparently is filled with Nobel Prize scientists, have found some kind of gene that you can manipulate, and apparently this pill they've made manipulates it,
so they say. And when you get rid of aging as a problem, You also get rid of a lot of the age-related diseases.
Yeah, Elysium, somebody said in the comments, is the name of the company.
If you want to Google that, E-L-Y-S-I-U-M, Elysium.
Now, it did not go through the FDA. So if you hear these two things, it's a youth pill, and it did not go through the FDA. You should put all of your skepticism powers onto that.
Be as skeptical as you want.
I don't have an opinion whether it's real or not.
I'm just giving you the facts that there's super qualified people who say there's something to it.
But it didn't go through the FDA. So I'm not sure whether it's a good idea yet.
But my point here is if you're trying to predict Healthcare expenses over the next 10 years, which everybody's doing in order to compare these healthcare plans.
How do you factor that in?
What if in three years we're taking live forever pills?
How does that change everything?
Factor in also.
Factor in, you know, about every day you see that there's a new breakthrough in cancer treatment and stem cell stuff.
And these are completely game changing.
You know, somebody says the cost goes up.
It's entirely possible the cost goes up.
But it could also drop by 80%, at least for the big things that you get hospitalized for.
So in the next 10 years, I don't know how you could possibly model the economics of any of this stuff.
Somebody says, you will look more like I do when you get younger.
laughter You know, I've actually said for probably 20 years that I might be the generation That is the first generation that gets to grow younger?
Think about that.
Probably, if you look at the entire future life of human beings, somebody's going to be born into the age where they're growing old and then technology gets there and then they can start reversing.
It's going to happen to somebody.
It might be now.
It might be now. Now, of course, I think everybody's been saying that every year since probably the 70s.
So you shouldn't put too much stock in it, but someday it's going to happen.
And I'm pretty healthy at the moment.
I've said before that I believe I have reversed my aging since I was 40.
Meaning that at age 40, I was in far worse Health that I am now.
Just sort of general health, not anything specific.
And between the ages of 40 and my current age, 61, science has improved.
And science has said, hey, if you eat these foods, if you exercise this way, you will be more healthy.
And so I've taken what science has learned and thrown away the bad science of the past, which was the food pyramid, which actually made me less healthy.
It was all the wrong recommendations for food.
And have figured out how just through diet and exercise and smoking lots of weed, which is really good for some people, but I don't recommend it.
I'm not a doctor, so don't take any medical recommendations from me.
But through trial and error and the improvement of science, I have legitimately grown younger.
I know Aubrey, actually.
We've had lunch. And how did smoking help?
Smoking takes care of most of my smaller problems.
So marijuana, this is just in my case, in conjunction with preventive inhaler for asthma, it completely eliminates my allergies and asthma problems.
So I used to have like two months of a year where it was just a living hell for most of my adulthood.
But it turns out marijuana just makes that go away.
So no asthma problems.
I got rid of my...
I didn't get rid of, but I sleep like a baby despite having some sleep apnea problems, mild sleep apnea, but enough that it was a problem.
Marijuana helps all of my...
Anxiety? I don't know how much I'd have if I didn't.
I imagine it would be more.
So I sleep like a baby and I have no anxiety.
I have no depression.
I might if I were not a medical user.
The major benefit of marijuana is it's anti-inflammatory.
Most problems that people have are inflammation.
There are a whole host of problems you get from inflammation.
One of them is just a simple one, which is you can't work out as much.
If you're all sore and you don't want to work out, you can, but you don't want to.
I have no soreness ever.
I work out Five days a week, typically.
And I never have any soreness.
And my body is as fit and as lean as probably when I was 25.
And that's largely because I now know what to eat and blah, blah, blah.
Okay, so enough on that.
Let's change the topic. Did you see the tweet this morning from...
President Trump about North Korea.
He made a very friendly tweet to Kim Jong-un thanking him for the ashes of the fallen heroes and saying that he knew he would keep his word, which is very...
No, I'm not stoned right now.
Somebody's asking. So the president said that he appreciated Kim Jong-un for giving him the ashes and for doing what he said he would do.
So here's the persuasion parts of that tweet.
When you tell somebody that you knew they would be true to their word, that's really powerful persuasion.
Because it could be that Kim Jong-un is just doing what he needs to do and he's not really thinking of it as a matter of honor, per se.
But the President has framed it as an act of honor.
You made us a promise.
It was something that mattered to us.
You came through in a fairly quick manner.
And that, you know, the President said he knew he could trust him on this issue.
Now that is a really strong way to frame this because what is it that Kim wants?
Well, he wants to be, you know, respected on the international stage.
I mean, he wants other things too, but that's certainly something he wants.
And so in public, you have seen two leaders, and this is the important part.
You won't hear anybody else say this.
You watch two leaders have each other's back.
If you don't get that, You don't know what's happening, right?
Because you might be looking at the, you know, what have they done with their missiles?
You know, are they still working on them and stuff?
And as some people who are smarter than I am have said, of course they're still working on their missiles.
Of course they're still working on whatever because they're still negotiating.
Until the ink is dry, somebody said, on an agreement, of course you keep working on it.
That's the only way that you get to an agreement because nobody's going to make an agreement if you're just giving them stuff.
And you're for nothing in return.
So you shouldn't worry at all that they're doing stuff that we're hoping will stop.
That's just part of the negotiation.
Now, you might say, but that would also look exactly the same if they were just playing a trick on us and they don't plan to give up anything.
And you're right. To us, as observers, it would look the same.
It probably wouldn't look the same to the people who actually know what's going on over there.
In other words, our negotiators and Pompeo and the intel services and stuff, they probably have a different idea of what's going on than the public does.
But when you see a tweet like that from the President, What he's done is he has Kim Jong Un's back.
In other words, Kim Jong Un did something that made the president look good.
He gave him something conspicuous, the ashes of the fallen soldiers, that he knew were important to the president both emotionally and politically.
In terms of, you know, showing that he's made progress, right?
Yeah, somebody said the bro code.
That's pretty close to what's happening.
And so you see these two leaders now in public have each other's back, make each other look good.
Make each other look like there's, you know, some success.
Now we hope that the ashes, you know, are real and when we test the DNA, you know, that we got what we thought we got.
I think that'll be true.
They probably know by now. And maybe there'll be more of them.
We don't know. Now, what will the critics say?
I will let you do the punchline.
So this is, you do the punchline at home.
Alright? What will the critics say about getting the ashes or the remains of the fallen back?
Yeah, I'm saying ashes, but I just mean in terms of the organic matter decomposing.
I think the critics will say something like, Kim Jong-un got everything he wanted.
He's still building weapons and he got respect and all he gave us was some boxes of dirt.
It's going to look like that.
But it's going to be tough to make that claim because those boxes, in all likelihood, have the remains of heroes in them.
So you don't want to be a critic.
It's going to be dangerous to be a critic on this particular point.
I saw a video clip this morning that I thought was interesting.
I don't have the link to it.
But it was Noam...
I may have tweeted it.
I can't remember. But it was a video clip of an interview with Noam Chomsky about current events and about the Trump administration.
And it was really interesting.
Because you might know, Noam Chomsky is no friend of governments, right?
He's not a big fan of the government, just sort of in general.
And he said the Russian stuff was just trivial and...
Barely worth our time.
Now his context, of course, is that governments always interfere with other governments, and if you look at it in context, it's just a whole bunch of nothing, compared to the real problems we have.
Now his example of the biggest real problem, well, two of them, He said one of them is, you know, having a nuclear confrontation with Russia, so we're probably better off if we try to play friendly with them.
And he mentioned previous administrations that probably just made things worse.
I don't know if he's right about that part about the previous administrations.
But it's interesting that Noam Chomsky is saying that the Russia thing is a no big deal.
But he does say that climate science could be lethal to humanity.
Humanity in general.
The same day, somebody had tweeted around some links to some climate skeptics who, if you watch their video, it's very convincing that we don't know what's going on with climate, which does not mean it's not a problem.
It just means that we don't know what's happening.
And then I see another clip of another scientist who's saying, oh, it's definitely, there's no doubt about it, we've got this big problem.
And I think to myself, they're both completely convincing.
The skeptics are completely convincing that we don't know what's happening and that it's ridiculous to think that we can forecast these things.
And then you hear the experts and you think, well, that's pretty convincing too.
So how can they both be convincing?
And of course, the way that that can happen is that the topic is complicated.
And when a topic is complicated, people who know more than you do can pull anything out of that topic Package it any way they want.
It's going to sound pretty good to you.
Take, for example, the healthcare stuff I was just talking about.
The way I described it was as positive things.
It's like, oh, it's positive we did this, positive we did that.
But I guarantee you that I could bring in someone who knows more than I do about this, who would say, you know, both those things are a waste of time.
It'll just make things worse, and here's why.
And when they're done, you'd say to yourself, well, that sounds pretty convincing.
I thought this was good, but it looks like it's actually bad.
And then I could bring in the next expert who would say, no, no, no, that guy's only got half the information.
When you look at all the information, these are great things, and it's all moving in the right direction.
And then you'd say to yourself, sounds pretty convincing.
I believe it. So you and I are kind of helpless in the face of all this complexity.
That's why. That's why I always recommend trying things small.
So if there's anything you can try in one state or try a pilot or anything like that, that's always the way to go.
With climate change, I'm not sure that that option exists.
Do you know where we can find those climate science videos?
The ones that were the skeptics were on PragerU.
P-R-A-G-E-R. PragerU.
I think if you Google climate science and PragerU, you'll find it.
Yeah, it's easier to find the ones that are pro-climate.
Now, it's interesting, I heard one of the skeptics, I forget his name, but he's one of the famous skeptics, talking about the famous 97% of climate scientists agree.
But if you really drill down to what it is they agree on, it's not the models.
When you see a news story, it's always a model.
This model predicts the end of the world.
There's 97% agreement that the climate changes and that CO2 is a component.
I may be oversummarizing this, but that's close to what they agree on, which is quite different from the world is going to end and we know it.
Now, they don't rule out Even the skeptics don't say, there's no problem.
The skeptics say, we don't have a reason to think there's a problem, which is different.
Now, that doesn't mean that the world won't end from climate science.
Even the skeptics are not ruling it out.
They're just saying that you can't rule it in.
Now, I've heard people say under that situation, well, you should just act as though it is a problem because if it might be, you know, it will kill us all.
So just the fact that it might be a problem should be all you need to know to spend trillions of dollars to fix it.
To which I say, bad thinking.
If you had unlimited money and time and resources, it would be good thinking.
You should just toss all that unlimited time and money in that direction just in case.
But we live in a world where we're surrounded by mortal threats.
Unemployment is a mortal threat.
The economy is a mortal threat.
If the economy is bad, lots of people die.
There's terrorism, there's nuclear war, there's you name it.
So in a world where there are competing risks, If there's a risk that might be a problem and it might not be, I don't know.
How much resource do you put toward that when you have real ones that are immediate and you can deal with them?
My take on this is that there are technologies coming online that can modify, suck the CO2 out if we need to.
Humans are extremely adaptable, especially if they see a problem coming.
So I think that in the long run we're better off making sure our economy is operating at peak because if it turns out we've got to pivot quickly and do something about either hardening our buildings against these storms or living underground or whatever, we're in better shape.
Living underground's obviously not a short-term solution.
Somebody wants me to say something that I don't think I want to say.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Oh, how's my app coming along?
Good. I'm going to tell you more about that in maybe, well, maybe next week I'll tell you a little more about that.
So stay tuned for that.
All right.
All right, anybody have any questions?
I've got a few minutes. Oh, let's talk about Q. So you saw that some of the followers of Q, the so-called conspiracy theory anonymous users, attended the last Trump rally,
which got CNN breathing hard because they thought, ah, we can focus on this handful of people and make all Trump supporters look dumb.
Yeah, as you know, I'm not a believer in Q.
I think it is for entertainment only, sort of like horoscopes.
But you're welcome to accept it in any way you like.
Yeah, and there's a lot of talking about the numbers 17 and, you know, I...
You can make anything you want of cue.
My entire opinion is that it's fun.
If you see it as anything more than that, that's on you.
First timer says, do you do this daily at the same time?
Roughly. But sometimes I'm traveling or whatever.
But roughly, yes.
Can persuasion be used on the homeless problem?
Yes, because persuasion can be used on every problem.
So, yeah, I mean, you can't persuade the homeless To go get jobs, probably, because there are reasons that people are homeless.
But you could certainly persuade people to do something about it.
How to fix the problem in San Francisco?
Well, you know, a lot of the problems in the cities are local government problems.
There's just a problem with the government.
So long term, that stuff does get fixed because people will vote out the people who are not fixing it.
All right.
I'm going to take off.
I've got other stuff to do.
And I will talk to all of you later.
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