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Aug. 9, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
38:58
Episode 172 Scott Adams: How to Know the Truth About Q
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Ba dum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Well, well, well The summer of love has not been as much love as I'd hoped, but there's still a lot of it out there.
I'm giving you some now.
It comes with coffee.
You know what the best kind of love tastes like?
It tastes like coffee.
And you can have a little simultaneous sip right now if you were smart enough, clever enough, if you planned far enough in advance.
If you love your coffee and you've got it with you, you know what time it is.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
Ah.
Take a big breath.
Ah.
Exhale. Now, I know what you're thinking.
You saw the title to this periscope and you said to yourself, oh man, he's stepping in it now.
Oh no, don't talk about Q. The world is going to fall apart.
So let me frame this conversation before I get into it.
Number one, the people who follow Q and believe that it is dispensed to wisdom are, in my opinion, Smarter than the average person.
So let's just start there.
And I think that's true, because it tends to be people who like to solve puzzles, people who are smart enough to be on the Internet, people who are smart enough to know what Q is talking about, smart enough to try to put clues together, etc.
Now, I'm not saying all the smart people are on one side.
I'm just saying that, in my opinion, It would be very true that if you were to measure the IQs of the people following Q, they would probably be very high compared to the average.
So that's the first thing.
The second thing is you can't prove a negative, meaning that there's nothing I could tell you that you would say, oh, okay, that's proof.
There's proof that there is nothing to Q. I could never do that.
So what I'm going to teach you to do instead is how to look at situations like this.
So I'm going to give you a general framework which you could apply to the Q analysis or you could apply it to any other situation that might seem similar.
It'll be the same way of thinking.
There is no certainty in this world, but I will give you a framework for trying to decide what you think about Q. Let us go to the whiteboard.
Yeah, you didn't know there was going to be a whiteboard.
Surprise! It's whiteboard time.
Alright. Here are the following factors which you should consider.
I'll go over them roughly in some kind of order.
Let's start with this.
I would say religion has a lot in common.
With people who follow Q. And I don't mean it is a religion.
I mean there's something to learn from the comparison.
For each religion, you'll find lots of smart people who say, the evidence for my religion is unambiguous.
Here's my holy book.
Here are the things it predicts.
Here are the things that's happening.
There you go.
Proof. And how could a billion people be wrong?
The problem is that there is not one religion.
There are lots of religions.
And each of the people in those religions is quite convinced.
Convinced to the point that they would die for their religion.
But they're different religions.
And they believe different things.
So even if one of those religions got it right...
Best case scenario, four out of five people in the world have no idea what reality is because they have the wrong religion.
They don't even know the big question about God or something.
So best case scenario, very smart people and up to a billion of them can be part of an organization that is absolutely convinced the evidence is incontrovertible and still be wrong.
If somebody's right, it means that all the other people who have different religions are wrong.
So just keep that in mind.
Does that tell you anything about Q? No.
I'm not claiming that that, by itself, tells you anything about Q. It's just a framework to keep in your mind about how wrong smart people can be and lots of them.
I mean, we're talking up to a billion could be just wrong and also pretty smart.
Unnamed sources.
Whenever you see a source that is a secret source, what are the odds that it's real?
If you watch fake news, and I'm sure you do.
You know that the unnamed source tends to be the unreliable one.
Now that's not true every time.
For example, Watergate had an unnamed source for a long time.
Eventually that person was named, but for a long time it was an unnamed source and was right.
But the odds are, if you've been paying attention to the world, that the unnamed source most of the time is not true.
Now does that mean the Q is not true?
Because it's an unnamed source.
No, it doesn't mean that. It just means that most of the time when you see a situation like that, it's not credible.
One of the things that I've been asked is to prove a negative.
To prove that Q is not valid or not what they say they are or just in some way illegitimate.
You can't really do that.
Nobody can prove something doesn't exist.
For example, I could prove that a UFO was real if it landed in my yard and I took samples and took pictures and the news crews came.
You could prove that something does exist because there it is.
But you can't prove that there is an alien and you just haven't seen it.
Nobody can prove that.
Or nobody can prove that they don't exist, I mean.
So we have a situation where the people who are not so sure about you are asked to prove it doesn't exist.
Well, that's not a thing.
That's not a thing. Nobody could do that.
One of the things you see with things that are not true is what I'll call the cult defense.
And the cult defense goes like this.
Let's say if you're in a cult, the cult leader will say, people are going to tell you this is a cult.
They don't have your best interests in mind.
Don't believe them when they come and tell you you should leave the cult.
All cults have that in common.
What are people telling you about Jack Posobiec and me and Kirsch Lichter and some other people who are saying Q might not be real?
People are saying Q told us.
Q told us that you'd be saying this.
What is that?
It's the cult defense.
Where do you see that other than in a cult?
Maybe you've seen it somewhere.
Maybe. But I can't think of any place other than a cult.
So this doesn't tell you that Q is not true, but it does tell you that they're using the defense that a cult uses, and a cult is based on something that's not real.
But that's not proof.
That's just we're looking for patterns here.
Let's see what we can learn. Let's keep going.
Have you heard of the Bible Code?
Years ago, and it was quite a few years ago, there was a book called The Bible Code.
And the idea was that the words, as they're organized in the Bible, did more than just tell you what the words were saying, but they were organized in a special way that God had intended so that there were codes embedded in the Bible.
And there were many codes given as examples.
And it would be stuff like this.
This is roughly what it was.
They'd say, if you go to this page in the Bible, and you look at the first letter of each word, and then sometimes there were algorithms like, first you take the first letter of this word, but the second letter of this word, and they would come up with various ways to look at the words that would actually come up with messages.
And sure enough, there would be like full sentence fragments.
And I don't remember any of them specifically, but it might be something like, bridge falls down, 1987.
And then somebody would look in the news and say, oh my God, there was a bridge that collapsed in 1987.
I'm making up the examples.
But the point is that people later found...
That you could run these algorithms against any big book like War and Peace and you get other sentence fragments that look like they came from God.
So the Bible Code taught us that you can find amazing coincidences In things that are just ordinary things that really are not inspired by God, they're not the truth of the world.
So when people say, hey, look at all the things that Q got right, keep in mind that's the same thing that people said about the Bible Code.
They said it can't possibly be wrong because look at all the things they got right.
Last night, I was with my lovely and beautiful girlfriend, Christina, and we were watching a comedian on television.
It was a stand-up act.
And in the stand-up act, the comedian did a thing where she would use a made-up name as if she were talking to a real person.
And she looks at the screen and she goes, blah, blah, blah, blah, Scott.
She's looking right at me in my television and she uses my name.
And of course, Christine and I laugh and go, oh, that's funny.
I'm watching the TV and the person on TV is looking at me and she goes, Scott.
It was just kind of funny.
A few moments later, the same comedian on the same show looked at the screen again and said a different first name for a different male who happened to be Christina's ex, who we would just talk to.
So what are the odds that this comedian would look at the TV and say my name when I'm sitting next to Christina and then say her ex's name that we had just talked to?
What are the odds of that? And didn't use any other names.
Those were the two names.
Now, the odds of it are, in some cases, you'd say, the odds are very low of that very thing happening.
But the odds of some coincidence happening somewhere, in my experience, was close to 100%.
Because you live in a world where coincidences are happening all the time.
You just can't pick the exact one.
So if you see a lot of things happening that look like an amazing coincidence, is that evidence that something is true?
Well, it wasn't evidence that this stand-up comedian was a psychic and was talking to me personally.
But it sure looked like it.
I just know that it wasn't.
Let's talk about the invisible elephant.
This is something I invented on my own, but I think you'll see the truth of it.
If you have two people in a little room, let's say it's a little room with no doors and no windows, a smallish room.
There's only two people in it.
One of the people says, there's an elephant in here with us.
Look, it's right there in the little room.
It's just us two and this giant elephant.
And the other person in the room says, I don't see an elephant.
And the first one says, no, right here, right here, touch it, look, elephant.
And the other person goes, I don't see an elephant.
Which of those two is the crazy one?
The person who positively sees the elephant Or the person who's looking at exactly the same place at exactly the same time and doesn't see it?
Well, pretty much every time it's going to be the person who thinks they see the elephant.
The person who's hallucinating doesn't not see stuff.
So, for example, you've never heard of a hallucination of someone who could see all the furniture in the room except chairs.
Have you ever heard of that kind of illness?
Where you can see everything in the room, but for some reason you have chair blindness, you just can't see chairs?
That's not a thing. If you have two people, one is seeing something and the other is looking at the same stuff and doesn't see it, the person who sees it is the crazy one.
This is a really good rule.
You'll see this a lot. Okay?
There's a bunch of evidence that a lot of people have looked at.
And a lot of people see it and say, this is real.
I mean, how could it not be real?
But a lot of people look at it and they say, I'm looking right at this.
And that was my experience.
I'm looking right at it.
I'm looking at the same thing you're looking at.
And there's nothing there.
I'm not saying that what you're looking at is wrong.
I'm saying there's nothing there.
It's an empty room.
I don't see anything. So you have the elephant in the room situation with Q. Some people are looking at the same evidence and see the elephant.
Other people who are also sane are looking at the evidence and see no elephant at all.
Who is usually the one who's wrong in that situation?
I don't want to say crazy because that's not what we're talking about.
We're not talking about actual craziness here.
But the one who doesn't see it, especially if there are lots of them, is usually going to be the one that's right.
And there's a reason for that.
I'll get to it in a moment.
Now there's a crowd effect.
Whenever you see other people agreeing with you, are you more likely to double down or are you more likely to question your opinion?
Obviously, if more people are agreeing with you and you're part of a group, you convince yourself because the people close to you and doing what you're doing are coming to similar opinions.
That's also the cult effect.
You separate people from others.
That's very important to form a cult.
If you ever want to form a cult, I'm telling you exactly how.
You want to make sure that they lose contact with the rest of the world and that they just communicate with their people who agree with them and it hardens their conviction.
So people who have been following Q are spending more time with other Q people.
They're doing their own Q research and they're hardening their opinion.
So even contra, let's say, evidence that would disprove their point of view, or at least would work against it, they're a little bit more resistant because they're part of the group.
That's just a general statement that when you're part of a group, whether it's Trump supporters or Democrats, it doesn't matter what group you're talking about.
As soon as you identify with a group, you're very resistant to any new information that would disprove your opinion.
What's the difference between reality and confirmation bias?
Well, they are different.
One is reality and the other one is you think something's true but isn't because of confirmation bias.
Can you tell the difference?
You as an individual, do you ever know if you're seeing reality clearly or if you personally are experiencing confirmation bias in which you think you're seeing reality clearly but you're not?
Can you tell the difference?
No. That's what it is.
Confirmation bias is the inability to tell the difference between things you think are true and what is true.
Who among us are subject to confirmation bias?
A hundred percent of us.
A hundred percent of the world, all people, we're all wired that way.
We can't change it. You can't think past it.
You can't be smart enough to see past it.
We're all stuck in this world where confirmation bias effectively is our personal realities because that's what we think is true.
The people in queue who are believers Say it must be true because I could certainly tell the difference between stuff that's true, this stuff, it's obvious, versus confirmation bias.
I would never be so fooled that I would think something is true and be wrong.
That opinion is a failure to understand the basic wiring of human beings.
Your level of certainty about your reality is not any kind of evidence of anything.
It has no evidence of anything.
Because certainty and confirmation bias to us look exactly the same.
If you have an opinion And there are no smart people who disagree.
Well, that's pretty good evidence that you might be on the right track.
That's not proof that you're right, but it would be good to have some smart people on your side.
Let's take smart people and experts.
I'm going to lump them together. There are people in this world whose jobs Are to sort out truth from BS. It's their actual professional job.
They would be such as, you know, FBI, police, reporters, investigative reporters, and to a lesser extent, people like me.
So, one of my hobbies, as you know, and also I do it professionally now, is talking about persuasion and people being fooled.
So I'm kind of an expert.
You could argue my credentials, I suppose.
But, you know, I've done a lot of writing and it's my main topic of professional work.
And I'm an expert at sorting out scams and BS from reality.
Now, does that make me write all the time?
No, it does not. It doesn't mean I'm right all the time.
It doesn't mean I'm even right about anything I say about Q. But it is true that I'm an expert at it, telling BS from reality.
And there are lots of other people who have different types of expertise, but they're also good at sorting out the real from the unreal.
Law enforcement, investigative reporters, etc.
Are there any of those people who believe in Q? There might be, but I'm not aware of any.
Is there anybody at the New York Times who's looked into it and said, yeah, I think this is true?
Is there anybody on any news channel, Fox News, Drudge Report, Breitbart, is there anybody who is an expert at sorting out BS from reality, who is willing to say that Q is real?
Maybe. Because I can't prove a negative, right?
So if there is one and I just don't know about it, that would be surprising and interesting.
My guess is that there is somebody like that, but it's probably like an 85-year-old retired service person who used to be an intel but maybe is losing their mind or something.
If you have that kind of expert, put your own filter on that.
Alright, let's move on.
Economics. I'm an economics major.
I majored in economics. And one of the reasons that I like economics is that it's a predictive kind of a field.
It doesn't predict long term.
It's not good at that.
But you can understand the world better if you understand money.
And if you can imagine that there's somebody like a Q... Who knows things before they happen, what would they do with that knowledge?
Well, the first thing they'd do is they'd sell it.
Because, in theory, whatever it is that Q knows is insanely valuable.
And somebody would buy that.
And if they bought it, they wouldn't want you to be giving it away for free at the same time.
So somebody could make trades based on it.
They could sell the information to opponents, political opponents.
The value of what Q purports to know should be in the many millions of dollars.
So the fact that it's being given away for free doesn't prove it's not real.
Doesn't prove that. But it's very unusual in this world for someone to have something that valuable that they give away for free.
Very unusual. Could happen.
Possible. Very unusual.
We talked about no experts agreeing.
Look for things that are mapped to the past very well, but not predictive.
Somebody mentioned earlier that Q said something like 5 colon 5, and that that's some kind of a, I don't know, there's a military...
Background for what that means.
Q used it and then later the president tweeted five out of five for the election.
And so Q says, aha, see, there's no way that could be a coincidence.
I said five, five colon five.
The president said five out of five.
There we go. That's proof that I'm real.
But here's the problem.
Real would have looked like this.
On this day, the president is going to tweet these numbers.
Had Q done that, I would say, ugh, Q knows what he's talking about.
And somebody's talking about also the plus plus plus tweet.
There was a time when Q put three pluses, plus plus plus, and then there was a tweet where the president had plus plus plus.
Now that's the Bible code, folks.
If Q says enough things and the president says enough things and the world does enough things, you're always going to find something that says, look, that's what I said.
It's just like the...
So the point is, if you see specific and real predictions in which when you read the prediction, you know exactly what's going to happen, that's credible.
So when I told you that candidate Trump, who nobody thought had a chance, was going to get elected, I told you why, because of his persuasion talents, and then you watched it happen.
That was a case of a prediction ahead of the event.
When I told you a year ago that North Korea was probably closer to peace than war, and that things probably could turn Turned good there very quickly, and I described exactly what that would look like.
That was a prediction, and then it happened, and you can say, okay, prediction, occurrence, I can put some credibility on that.
If Q says a lot of things, And then later one of them or more of them you see in the reality, that doesn't tell you anything.
Because the things that Q says are not predictions per se.
They're just lots of things they say and then sometimes reality serves up those things.
That's it. It feels predictive, but it's not.
It's actually matching to the past.
If you study magicians and fake psychics, they do something called a cold read.
Have you heard of a cold read?
It's where somebody pretending to be a psychic says general things that are good guesses.
And a good guess Would be something like, did you have a relative?
I see her.
She's wearing a long white dress down to the ankles.
Her hair is up in a bun.
I think her name starts with an M. Is it a Mary?
Magdalene? And then the person they're talking to go, Meredith!
Meredith! I have a grandmother named Meredith and I have an old photo of her.
And she had brown hair and her hair was up in a bun.
All of these things are guessable, and if none of them had hit any kind of a note with the person listening, the fake psychic would have said, no, it's not a white dress, and it would have just gone on to something else to try to get a hit.
Q is a lot like a cold read.
That doesn't mean it's a magic trick.
But it's suspiciously like one.
And again, you have to look at all of the framework together.
Don't look at any one thing. Then there's the magician's trick.
And the fake psychics could use this as well.
And it goes like this.
If you can get a few things right, people will think the other things you say are also right.
This is very important.
If Q can get a few things legitimately right, people will think the other things are also right.
So in order for Q to absolutely, totally sell itself, it only needed to know a few things.
And then you would think the other things were true as well.
Now, is it possible that Q could have found out a few things that they knew before the public knew them?
Absolutely. Totally true.
Does that mean that everything that Q says is true?
No, those are different things.
So Q might actually have some sources of information that you don't have.
That doesn't mean that they are what they say they are or that all the things they say are true.
It just means they might have a few things that are true which would totally sell you on the rest of it being true even if it wasn't.
Now, if Q were real, if Q were what is presented as being real, would the government, number one, not know who they were?
Q was.
Do you think that's even slightly possible?
That the government doesn't already know who they are?
Of course they do. There's a 100% chance, just based on the way the world works, that somebody in the government, the FBI or whoever does this stuff, looked into it, knows exactly who they are, and decided it wasn't important.
Because otherwise they would either shut them down or they would make an announcement to say don't listen to them or they'd put them in jail or something.
But the fact that the government is completely ignoring this should tell you that they've almost certainly looked into it and don't think it's real.
That should tell you a lot.
Now, some of you remember I left you a little puzzle.
And I thought it would be fun to put the answer to Q in a puzzle.
Because the people who follow Q, they like researching and solving puzzles.
And some people accused me of having a fake puzzle, in which there was no actual answer.
And I said that I might not even tell you the answer to the puzzle, and so you may never know.
But I've decided to tell you the answer to the puzzle.
And I'll remind you what it was.
I gave you three sets of initials, JPKSSA, and I said, find the pattern.
And if you find the pattern, you would know something about the nature of Q. And some people quite cleverly said, Hey, these are initials of three people who have recently come out and said that Q is not what it presents itself to be.
You saw Jack Posobiec, Kurt Schlichter, I don't know if I'm pronouncing anybody's names right except my own, and Scott Adams.
But, just the fact that three people came out and had a similar opinion, is that enough to give you any confidence in anything?
Not by itself. But what is there about the three of us?
Jack is on here and he's telling me I've got to write Posovic.
What is there about the three of us that's different from the common person?
Now, I'm not talking about, oh, we're all white males, blah, blah, blah.
Nothing about our physicality, nothing about our DNA, nothing about our educations, etc.
There's something that the three of us have in common that ordinary people don't have.
Do you know what it is yet?
I'm going to give you a moment to see if anybody got it, because if you did, it would be more fun if one of you got it before I say it.
I'm just looking at your fact-gatherers, blowhards, famous, Tweedlet, we write fiction, high IQs, no, no, nope, nothing.
Experts, no information.
Mark! All right, we have a winner.
Mark, you got it.
The three of us have sources That you don't have.
And what is the other thing about those sources that we all have in common?
We can't tell you what they are.
So the three people who say that Q isn't real, we all have sources that you don't have.
and it's because of the nature of our work so people are always sending me insider information about things usually doesn't have any any use to the outside world often it's just my god that's true I can't believe that so the three of us are in a situation where we're continually getting insider information from all kinds of different people most of the time it doesn't make any difference it's just fascinating but my view of the world And yours are pretty different because I've heard things,
seen things, I know things that you'll never know.
This is undoubtedly true of anybody who does what any of the three of us do.
We're all receiving insider information all the time.
And the nature of that information is I can't tell you that I know it in many cases.
I couldn't even tell you what I know.
But even if I did, I certainly couldn't tell you who told me.
And lots of times telling you what I know would also tell you who told me.
So consider that none of the three of us think Q is real.
And what else did we have in common?
None of the three of us presented information.
Now it might be that none of the three of us have any insider information.
But you wouldn't know. But what are the chances that none of us know who Q is?
If you said one of us has insider information and doesn't think Q is real, I'd say, well, that person could be wrong.
But now there are three of us.
All three of us have really good sources.
I'm just saying, you know, you will never know what we know or who has talked to us or what we can't tell you.
But you should take something from that.
Alright, let's wrap this point all up.
So my point has been that, let me summarize.
The people who follow Q are, in my opinion, above average intelligence.
They also have the right intentions.
They have good intentions.
They're smart. They're good patriots.
They mean well.
I have very high opinion of them.
That said, they're also people.
And human beings are subject to all the same biases and forces, no matter how smart they are, no matter how well-intentioned.
If you look at all of these things together, you'll see the framework that I put on it, on top of the fact that you have to wonder why people who have really good sources about things are all on the same page.
So think about this framework.
It does not mean that I have proved a negative, because I can't.
In this case, it means I can't prove that Q doesn't have secret information that's predicting the future.
I can't prove aliens don't exist.
I can't prove Bigfoot isn't real.
I can't prove the Lake Loch Ness Monster isn't real.
I can't really prove Santa Claus isn't real.
That one might be a little easier because of the physics, but The point is, nobody can be certain of anything, but if you believe in Q, once you have this context, I would say you're believing in something that has a very low chance of being real.
But it might be. You never know.
So if you want to retain your belief in Q, if it's entertaining, if it helped you go down a path of research that you found productive, if it caused you to learn more about your government or have a new appreciation for something, if it helped you bond with other people who are like-minded, I see no harm in any of that.
The point that I did make is that when you put on your Q hats and shirts and attend a Trump rally, you're giving the people you would consider the enemy, the press which doesn't like Trump supporters, you're giving them an easy target.
That's not what you intend.
If the reason that you follow Q is because you're pro-Trump, anti-deep state, then you should live that.
And living it would mean doing what's good for your brand and making sure it succeeds.
That's separate from whether you spend your time consuming Q stuff and researching it and talking with other people.
I see no harm from that.
I've never heard of any Q supporter showing up with a gun to kill somebody.
I've never heard of anything dangerous that came out of it.
And maybe you learned something along the way.
So I already gave you the answer to the puzzle, so you may be joining us late.
So with all due respect, To the Q followers, again, I think you're well-intentioned, above average in intelligence, but you are human beings.
You're not exempt From all the forces that affect all of us.
Just know that. And that's going to be my topic for today.
I'm going to join Bill Mitchell later on his show.
So make sure you join us on that.
Not sure exactly when it's airing, but I'll be talking with Bill Pulte and Bill Mitchell.
And we'll give you some updates on some of the ideas that are already coming out for the Blight Authority and helping the urban areas.
I hope you all join us for that.
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