All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 14, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
42:49
Episode 220 Scott Adams: Puerto Rico, Creepy Porn Lawyer and Other Disasters
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody!
Hey Chris, Joanne, Janet, Greg.
Come on in here. All of you, gather around.
Those of you who are moving slowly this morning, hurry up, hurry up!
It's time. To get ready for the simultaneous sip.
When we reach a thousand, you know what that means.
Yes, you do. Grab your mug, your vessel, your glass, your cup, your chalice, and get ready for the simultaneous sip.
Oh, that was a good one.
So I hope you saw the funniest story of last night.
So attorney Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels' lawyer who's also toying with a run in 2020 for president, unwisely agreed to appear on Tucker Carlson's show.
And it sounded to me like part of the negotiation for appearing in what would be an unfriendly setting.
Was it looks like Tucker agreed not to use his insulting nickname for Avenatti.
Now the insulting nickname, I believe, is Creepy Porn Lawyer.
So Tucker noted that and he did not use the name.
So he talked to Avenatti and said, no, you know, I agreed not to use the insulting name, so I'm not going to use it.
And then...
Whoever is in charge of the Chiron, the little label that runs here, it looks like you're not going to be able to see it too clearly.
If I turn it sideways, maybe you can see it a little bit better.
But right below, Fox News runs a Chiron almost the entire time that Afanati is on screen that says, and I quote, Creepy porn lawyer toying with 2020 run.
What? So, they bring this poor bastard on who agrees to go into unfriendly territory under the condition that Tucker not call him by his nickname.
And he spends the entire time on there underneath a label with his nickname.
Now, I don't condone that.
I don't condone it.
But I can't say it wasn't funny.
So, Norm MacDonald, as some people are prompting me to talk about, said something that bothered people, and then he needed to clarify and apologize, and in his apology he said something else that offended people, so he had to go on The View and apologize for the apology.
But all of it was within 48 hours.
And so I say, Norm MacDonald, you have passed the 48-hour test to clarify and or apologize for what you said.
So his slate is clean.
Oh, it's Friday.
So today's Friday. So his show should be on Netflix tonight, I believe.
So everybody watch Norm MacDonald on Netflix tonight, his new show.
Somebody's asking me if I'm sick.
No, I just have some allergies that always bother me in the morning.
They don't bother me in the afternoon, usually.
All right. I'd asked those of you who are using my startup's app interface by OneHub.
It's a free download.
If they wanted to be a citizen reporter, they could turn it on and they could be paid.
Any amount that they decide they want to be paid, they just list it in the app.
If somebody calls them, they can turn the app around if they're near Hurricane Florence to show us some things that we wouldn't see on the news, give us some extra views.
Only, I think, two people have done it so far.
One I couldn't reach.
Today I reached one, but we got disconnected and I decided to do Periscope because it was time.
I'll probably try that again.
But if you look for keyword reporter or Florence, you may find the same individual on the interface by Wenha Bat.
So if anybody else wants to go on there, they've got a good view of some flooding or something that would be newsworthy, just go on the app and we'll see if we can find you.
I can commit that I'll try to call you.
So if you are near Florence and you can give us a view out your window someplace from a safe place, I will call you and see what you got going there.
Alright, next topic.
So the big scandal of the week is that President Trump has complained that the real death toll from the hurricane in Puerto Rico was some smallish number closer to 18 than the new estimate, which is the 3000.
Now my understanding of the new estimate Is that it goes beyond the people who died, let's say, the day of the hurricane.
And it uses some statistics to say that in a normal period, this is how many people died in Puerto Rico, but during this period, X larger number of people died.
Now a lot of that is being attributed, I say, To the aftermath of the hurricane.
In other words, no electricity, no services, maybe people couldn't get medical care, maybe there were more accidents, I don't know exactly all the causes, but the idea is that the hurricane caused a number of deaths because it took so long to recover from it.
Now, here's my take on it.
So the big controversy is that the president is denying the 3000 number, saying it's closer to 18.
Now we know the president likes to exaggerate a little bit, likes to use a little hyperbole.
So let's say that his, when the president says less than 18, if you translate that to non-Trump language, it means fewer than 100.
So let's say that the president, in essence, is claiming fewer than 100 people were killed by the hurricane.
And the official government toll, and what you're seeing on CNN and most of the outlets, is that it's closer to 3,000.
How do we explain that?
How do we explain that?
Well, let me tell you.
It's the difference between a business person...
And a political person.
The political number is 3,000.
The political number is 3,000.
And I'm going to assume that they counted it correctly.
So in other words, it's presented as an estimate, and it's the difference between how many people normally die in that period versus how many dead.
That sounds like a reasonably good way to estimate something.
So I'm going to say that the 3,000 is somewhere in the ballpark.
It's at least a responsible estimate.
But it's a political estimate.
What was Trump's number?
Trump's number, well, it's in a political context, but his frame on the world, this and lots of other things, is business.
It's a business frame.
In the business frame, how many people died in Puerto Rico from the hurricane?
Fewer than 100.
How can both of those things be true?
How can it be true that in a political sense, 3,000-ish people died, but in a business sense, fewer than 100 died?
Can both of those be true?
Yes, they can.
Here's how. In a political sense, you're looking for who to blame, right?
Whose fault is it?
You saw the same thing with, why did Hillary lose the election?
How many times did you see somebody say, Hillary lost the election because of X? No, it was because of Y, it was because of Z, it was because of A, B, C, D. And there were a hundred things that were the reason Hillary lost.
The real answer is, there was no the reason Hillary lost.
There were hundreds of them.
And if all of those hundreds of reasons that Hillary lost had not happened just the way they did, She probably would have won.
If you were to take away any one of the things Hillary did, take away just the deplorables, take away just her comment about women being, you know, it's time for a woman to get elected, take away just what she said about some topic.
There were hundreds of things that had to happen just the way they happened for Hillary to lose.
So the business analysis, you know, a business frame on why Hillary lost, is that a hundred things happened, and they all had to happen just the way they happened, or she probably would have won.
The political analysis of why Hillary won, politics you say, well, let's find one reason and blame it on that.
And they say, oh, it's because there are a lot of racists.
In the Republican side.
And so it was really a race election.
But that's just one of the variables.
It counts. Race was part of the equation.
But there were hundreds of things.
They all had to happen just the way they did.
A political analysis picks one out of the hundred that will sound the best when you say it.
Let's say it's...
I'm going to say it's racism.
That's the one reason.
That's the one reason Hillary lost.
Now it's ridiculous, but in a political context, that's normal.
You pick the one thing.
Now let's take Puerto Rico.
Is there one reason, meaning the hurricane, that's the reason that 3,000 people died who might not have otherwise died?
Was it one reason?
Was there one thing that happened?
Well, not really. You know, the president's critics would say, well, it's two things.
It's the hurricane plus it's the inadequate response.
But two things.
But those are political reasons.
Here's a business reason.
You ready for this? Here's the business frame.
This would be more of a Trump typical frame.
I'm not saying I'm reading his mind.
I'm saying that a political and a business frame would look different, and it's clear that Trump's opinion fits the political frame better, but beyond that I can't read his mind, right?
So, a business person would say there were many variables which caused these people to die, and they include Terrible management by the locals.
Bad government by the locals.
Because had they had good government, a robust infrastructure, more preparation, better emergency response, more coordination with FEMA, had they been more prepared earlier, There would have been a different result.
So all of those things had to happen in the same way that hundreds of things had to happen for Hillary to barely lose.
All of those things had to happen in Puerto Rico.
It wasn't just a hurricane.
If the hurricane had come through and Puerto Rico was just nailed down, they were ready for a hurricane, their economy was screaming, they had agreed to become part of the United States, their economy was just pumping away, their tourism was hopping, they were knocking down the old sheds that weren't good for hurricanes and they were building new ones that were hardened according to local codes that would require them to harden them from the hurricane.
Everybody on the island knows they live in a hurricane zone, so they would be working as hard as they could with their excellent government and their high economic output to put together an island that could really withstand.
And then they would communicate with the people on the island really well.
The people on the island would know the hurricane's coming.
They would go to their designated hurricane shelters, which their good economy and their excellent management and good government had provided for them.
They would hunker down until the hurricane's over, and the loss of life would be zero.
Zero, right?
If they had good management on the island, they know a hurricane's coming because there's always a hurricane coming.
So, is the problem that 3,000 people died because of the wind?
Was it the wind that killed, you know, and the water that killed 3,000 people?
Well, it was necessary It was a necessary condition of the specific way they died, but it's not the reason.
It's the political reason.
The political reason is you reach into all these things that all had to be true, and you pick out the one thing that makes your opponent look like a jerk.
That's a political estimate.
3,000 people probably did die, but not because the wind was heavy, because they weren't ready.
Let me give you another example.
Let's say I rent a helicopter, I go out over the ocean, I get really high, and then I jump out of the helicopter with no parachute.
I hit the water, I'm unconscious from the impact, and I drown.
What caused my death?
I rented a helicopter, went over the ocean, jumped out, became unconscious on impact, and then I drowned in the water.
And maybe I was alive long enough that, had there been some way to rescue me, that I could have been rescued.
What killed me?
Was it the gravity?
Was it my depression that caused me to want to kill myself?
Was it the impact?
Was it the drowning?
Was it the lack of rescue?
Was it that I'm not very strong, so the impact hurt me the way it might not have hurt somebody else?
Was it the way I landed?
If I'd gone in fee first, it would have been better.
Was it the height that I jumped from?
The answer is, all of those are ridiculous things.
All of those things had to happen For that specific result.
It wasn't one of those things.
It was all of those things.
Analogies are good for explaining concepts.
They're not good for persuasion.
I tell you that about three times a day.
So, if you're looking at the Trump explanation for the hurricane, it is quite reasonable from a business framework To say it wasn't one thing that killed all those 3,000 people.
It was the bad preparation, it was the bad government, it was the level of response which wasn't good enough, no matter who you're blaming that on.
Was that FEMA? Was it the locals who couldn't use the stuff that FEMA had?
Was it their lack of preparation, their lack of government?
Was it that their power infrastructure was bad?
Was it because they didn't have medical supplies and generators in place because they had a bad economy?
I mean, you could just go on and on.
All of those things had to happen.
Let's take another one. Suppose they'd been, suppose Puerto Rico had voted to become a state.
Would anything be different?
Well, maybe. Maybe that would have caused their economy to be better.
Maybe they'd be more tightly integrated with FEMA. I don't know if any of that's true.
But what I'm saying is the number of variables is pretty big.
And to say that 3,000 people died because of the hurricane In my view, which is not a political opinion, I also take the business opinion, which considers all the variables, not just the one you want to embarrass your enemy with.
In my opinion, the 3000 is a valid political number.
But it's not a valid business number.
Business says you look at all the variables.
No exception. In politics you can ignore all the stuff that's inconvenient and just pick the stuff that embarrasses your opponent.
And that's what 3000 does.
But the reasons The reasons have a lot more to do with the situation when the hurricane came.
I mean, 90% of the cause was in place before the wind even started blowing.
You know, it was a situation that it was a disaster, a disaster by its design, and that design came from the leaders.
The leadership of Puerto Rico designed a disaster situation that was guaranteed to be destroyed in a hurricane.
Guaranteed. So I would say that You know, mayors like Cruz, whoever is the, I forget her first name, but her last name is Cruz and she was the mayor of whatever in Puerto Rico.
Trump's biggest opponent.
I would say that she has to take, you know, she and other political leaders, you know, collectively, I think they'd have to take 85% of the blame.
Just, you know, sort of in a general sense, probably 85% of the blame was San Juan.
Thank you. Carmen Cruz, thank you, from San Juan.
I love having the comments here because you're like my extra brain.
You know, I'm technically a cyborg when I'm plugged into all of you people.
Now, when I put it in this framework...
Of the business analysis versus the political analysis.
Did that ring true?
Did that ring true at all?
How many of you heard that and said, oh yeah, that makes sense.
I'd like to see your comments on that.
Scott, do you think we're pretty?
I do. So a hurricane hit in Wilmington.
I believe the death toll will be low.
Why is the death toll low in Wilmington?
Why was the death toll low in hurricanes last year, the ones that hit the mainland?
Was it because the wind didn't blow as much?
Was it? No.
It's because there was a different level of preparation, different situation, different management, different everything.
So that's my point on that.
Alright, so I'm going to skip, leave that point for now.
Apparently Kirsten Powers of CNN She said on one of the, maybe on Jake Tapper's show, I'm not sure which show it was, she said that Trump supporters, or I think she was talking about Fox News viewers that overlap, she said that they live in an alternate universe where Puerto Rico never happened.
You know, the Puerto Rican disaster never happened with the hurricane.
Now, of course, that's hyperbole.
She doesn't mean that literally alternate universe, and she doesn't mean literally that they think Puerto Rico didn't have a hurricane.
But what she's saying is that they're experiencing an alternate universe.
That's half right.
That's half right.
And I'll give her credit for being half right.
I always...
I'm going to be careful here before I insult everybody watching.
When somebody says that the people in the other news silo are in an alternate universe, to complete the thought...
It would be more accurate to use my analogy, two movies.
Because when you say there are two movies on one screen, you are not indicating that one of them is the right one.
If you're just saying two movies on one screen, you're not saying, mine is the right one, ha ha ha, and you're living in that weird other world where your movie is all wrong.
So mine is depersonalized.
But when you say the other side is in an alternate universe, you're kind of saying, well, we're in reality, and they're in non-reality.
That is a low level of awareness.
The higher level of awareness is to realize that you're both in an artificial reality.
And here I'm not talking about whether reality is a simulation.
I'm talking about the fact that both sides, in general, not every person in the world, but both sides in their generic sense are experiencing different universes.
And I don't think either one of them is real.
In the sense that they correspond to physical reality and they understand what's happening and everything else.
They both seem artificial to me.
Now, which side is crazier?
Which side is crazier?
People on the right who are experiencing their movie or people on the left who are in a different movie?
There is one side that's usually crazier.
They're both crazy in the sense that they're both divorced from reality sometimes, right?
But it seems to me that the side that's in power, in this case Republicans, are less crazy because they're in power.
You know, that reality works out well if you're in power.
If you're getting the stuff you want, you know, you're getting your judges, you're getting your economy, etc., you don't need to imagine a different world.
You're living in exactly the world you wanted.
It's the one you expected.
It's the one you voted for.
So the group that's in power and getting what they want is experiencing something a little bit closer to the facts.
The side that's out of power is crazier for the entire time that they're out of power.
So I think the situation is reversed from when Obama was in power and the birthers and the other crazy stuff was happening on the right.
So right now, the Trump derangement syndrome was really just Obama derangement syndrome when he was in power.
It's very similar.
It just doesn't seem like it because you're in one of the movies.
But from my perspective, I haven't been against Obama, so I didn't experience the same thing, but I observed it.
I observed the craziness being very similar But it's not the side that's crazy.
It's whether or not you're in power at the moment that seems to be the activating thing.
I tweeted around or retweeted Jordan Peterson's tweet, which was a NASA story, where NASA is talking about how the Earth is becoming greener.
There's way more greenery for the last 35 years, and it's very substantial.
And they said 70% of it, they estimate, was based on higher CO2. CO2 is good for fertilizing your plants, apparently, if that's the right word.
I'm not sure if fertilizing is the right word.
But here's the thing I'm having trouble understanding.
Why, when NASA did the story about how much greener the Earth is getting, and remember it's a lot greener, like it's a big effect, very easy to measure, and they also know this is because of CO2. They believe 70% of it is from CO2. And that seems reasonable because commercial greenhouses actually pump CO2 into it because it's so good for plants.
So there's not really...
I don't believe there's any scientific disagreement that more CO2 causes more greening and it's good for the plants up to some level.
We don't know what that level is.
So that's all true.
So here's my question.
Which one of the planet, or which one of the climate models predicted that?
You see where I'm going on this?
Which one of the planet models, the climate models that predict climate change, which one of the many models that we're looking at to figure out how the world goes, predicted that much greening?
I'm thinking maybe some of them did.
I'm not willing to say none of them did, because I don't know the answer to the question.
But if they did predict it, why didn't NASA leave that out of the story?
Remember I always tell you to look for the negative space.
Look for the thing that's missing.
NASA is talking about CO2. It's a story.
It's a story about climate change.
It's a story about CO2, and it's coming from NASA, who's very involved in the question of measuring climate change.
Under those conditions, Saying that there's been a major change in greening caused by CO2. How do you do that story and not mention that the model said it would happen?
How do you leave that out?
Could it be because the models don't predict that?
And if they don't, aren't they missing an enormous variable?
Now I'm not saying that the greening would be enough to compensate for any warming.
But I also don't understand how you could go through such a period of things being better on the way to things being worse.
I suppose it's possible, right?
There's got to be some level where CO2 is just too much.
But how long does that take?
Because what would happen if we go through a period where the Sahara starts greening?
Which, by the way, is possible.
I don't know if you know this, but there are plans for legitimately greening the Sahara and other deserts.
We know how to do that now.
What would happen if things just got greener?
Would the world be worse off?
I mean, this seems like pretty good stuff.
Or let's put it another way.
At what point does it become dangerous for humans at the same time it's great for plants?
Is that a thing?
Who is more sensitive?
Humans? Who can adapt and we can wear jackets and we can put on sunscreen and we can be indoors and we can have air conditioning and stuff.
Who is more sensitive?
Plants or humans?
I actually don't know the answer to that question.
You know, it might be humans.
But I got questions.
This greeting thing seems to work against my understanding of how things are supposed to be working scientifically.
Alright. Again, if anybody wants to be on my app at Interface at WenHub, please.
Please do that.
Somebody... Yeah.
So I looked at a number of people who are using the interface by WinHub app.
I want to give you a sense of some of the experts that are on there.
I took screenshots of some of them.
So we've got a senior elderly advisor.
So if you've got an elderly person who wants to know, okay, what are my options for taking care of an old person?
What kind of homes?
What kind of insurance? What kind of services?
So you could find that out.
You know Justin Dorey, a professional skier who can coach you if you want to be a professional skier.
We've got a life coaching conversation, parenting of special needs.
These are the experts on Interface by WenHub app.
You can learn to play drums or a guitar.
There's a citizen video journalist.
So it doesn't say the topic, but somebody who will turn on their phone if you call them.
You can learn about cryptocurrencies.
There's somebody on the interface by Wenhebap who promises to explain why people voted for Trump.
Which is actually a really good idea, right?
Because if you watched the Google video, there was a whole room full of people at Google who just didn't understand.
I don't think they understood how Trump won.
There's somebody teaching music, piano, guitar, Green buildings, Photoshop, business in Asia, discipline, life coaching, drums, Microsoft Excel.
DJing. There are a couple of people who will teach you to be a DJ. Appliance repair.
That would be handy.
Medicine, pediatrics.
There's an interpreter.
There's an Arabic-English interpreter.
So, you know, there are apps that will do interpreting, but sometimes you want a person.
Suppose you're in a situation and you just need an interpreter.
You could just go here and say, okay, talk to the phone and he'll tell me what you're saying.
There's Jewish studies, guitar, startup funding.
Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Landscape.
These are experts you can find who are live.
Maybe not at the moment, but yesterday they were live.
Traveling in Israel. Let's say you were planning a trip to Israel.
There's an expert who has traveled to Israel and can tell you what to do or not do.
Cosmetology. Opiate addiction treatment.
Somebody on here who has some experience with opiate addiction and treatment.
If you're brand new into that category, let's say you've got a kid who's got a problem or something, wouldn't it be good to start with somebody who knows what they're talking about?
And then Donovan Loomis, I talked to him on Periscope, and he's an expat who's living in Korea.
So he's a Korea expert, essentially, just because he lives there.
Please explain money exchange on NinjaFace.
Yeah, I'll give you the quick version.
So as of the 15th, which is tomorrow I think, you'll be able to trade the WEN, which is the token that works within the app on an exchange.
If you don't know anything about cryptocurrency, you can ignore all of it.
Just use your credit card and just pay in regular money.
So we just have two paths.
One is crypto, one is money.
regular fiat fiat money fiat exchange fiat fiat currency what do you say after fiat?
And so you can trade our own tokens within the app and then you can exchange them on latoken.com.
That's one exchange it's on.
For other currencies, you could exchange it for Ethereum or Bitcoin, for example.
And then you could take it to something like Coinbase.
And if you've got...
I think Coinbase changes your Ethereum and Bitcoin to cash.
So there are a few big exchanges.
That can change crypto into cash.
The smaller exchanges can only change crypto into other crypto.
So in the short run, as you're building up your WEN tokens, which could go up in value, but we don't call it an investment, and you should not either.
If you're building up a store of them in the short term, you would have to go through two exchanges to turn them into cash, but they're more for people who want to hold on to them anyway.
In the long term, it'll be easier to turn it into cash.
So the more people who use the app, The more liquid everything gets.
So there's a correlation between how many people use the app and how valuable the WEN tokens are and therefore whether or not exchanges will like to carry them and everything will get easier to exchange as the take rate goes up.
So LAToken.com will start trading I think tomorrow is the first trade day.
And then the price of the WEN will fluctuate.
You assume it fluctuates a lot on the first day.
So it could be much lower than what it was inside the app.
It could be higher. We don't know.
There's no way to predict that stuff.
In the long term it will stabilize.
And as more people use them and the demand for the app goes up and the demand for the tokens goes up, then the potential for it to go up in value tremendously is very high.
But it's not an investment.
Does the app allow PayPal?
Not yet. So we've got a number of things we need to upgrade.
And if people buy the WEN token that they can get at interface.wenhub.com or they can buy them on latoken.com tomorrow.
So as long as people buy a lot of tokens, that will provide financing for the team to continue upgrading the product.
And I think that's all for now.
This is similar to Google Hangouts.
Google Hangouts, I don't believe, has a way to make money.
So what Interface by WenHub does is it allows you to set your own price for the connection.
So you've got something to offer, and it could be just conversation.
But it also could be an expertise.
It could be that you're on site at a disaster.
People just want to see what you see.
So if you have any reason to charge for your time during a video call, it doesn't matter what the reason is.
You just set your price. People either like it or they don't.
Alright. Why not take cash?
We do take cash now.
So the last upgrade this last week adds a credit card option.
The credit card option though, we take a cut and the bank takes a cut.
So it ends up about 20% from the experts cut.
If they take crypto, they keep the whole thing, but they accept the risk that crypto is a little less liquid, and they might have to go through some exchanges, and the value of it, certainly in the short run, is going to be quite, what would you call, variable.
Could be much higher, could be much lower than the price that you paid to acquire them.
Can WenHub be used to learn to cook meth?
Unfortunately, it can be used to learn anything.
How do you make money on this?
So when people make calls using their credit card, the startup takes a cut of that.
We don't take a cut if you use the WEM tokens that are built into the system and you can acquire on exchanges.
But because we own those tokens, as founders we hold on to some tokens, If other people use them, if other people are buying and selling them, and their value, you know, it establishes a value, then the tokens that we hold go up in value.
So we make money whether you use credit card or whether you use tokens, but in very different ways.
One is more reliable in the short term.
The other is more hopeful, but is possible.
Who owns the content?
Well, the content is not recorded.
The content is live.
It's you talking to somebody on video live.
So we don't hold any of your content nor do we see it.
It's like a phone call. Talk about Kavanaugh.
Well, there's some magical accusation against Kavanaugh, but we don't know what that is, so I'm going to wait on that.
That's a wait and see. How does law enforcement monitor a WenHub?
No comment. But it's a private transaction, so it would, you know, If they wanted to monitor it, I suppose law enforcement can do anything they want, but it's intended to be a private conversation between two people.
Just how private?
Well, it's as private as you could expect by any digital communication, meaning it's designed so that nobody can see it.
In other words, we don't have any backdoor on it.
We can't see your phone call.
We don't look in on your calls.
We don't have that capability, nor would we want it.
But, like everything else in the world, if the CIA or law enforcement said, give us a back door to that thing, I suppose we'd have to.
But that hasn't happened.
So somebody says, so it's not private at all.
It's as private as any digital communication could be, meaning that at the moment nobody has a reason or the capability to look at it, but nobody can say that can't change in the future if the government says they won't look at it.
Is content recorded or stored?
No, it is not.
It's just like a phone call. As private as FaceTime, exactly, or Skype, exactly.
No end to encryption.
Not in the sense that you're asking, no.
No, it's not meant to be for super secret breaking the law.
It's not for that. Alright, that's enough for now.
I'm going to go do something else.
▲
Export Selection