All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 20, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
40:42
Episode 227 Scott Adams: Kavanaugh, Healthcare by Innovation
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody.
Come on in here. Come on.
Get in here. It's time for you know what.
If I seem tired, perhaps it's because I am.
So last night, Christina and I went to watch the show by J-Lo.
I'm in Vegas right now, leaving in a few hours.
So we went to watch J-Lo, and oh my God, does she have a talent stack?
That woman has so many talents put together, singing, dancing, choreography.
She knows fitness.
She knows beauty, apparently.
It was quite impressive.
But before we get to that, let us have coffee with Scott Adams.
Raise your mug, your cup, your chalice, your glass with the beverage of your choice.
I like coffee.
And join me for the simultaneous sip.
Ah, that's good stuff. - Dershowitz is coming on Fox.
Good. I'll probably watch that if I'm not on here.
So, I tweeted yesterday a little summary of a story that I want to share with you because everybody's talking about Kavanaugh.
Kavanaugh seems to be the only news.
And people are mistakenly lining up behind one of two opinions.
They're taking the opinion that he's definitely guilty of charges by Professor Ford, I think it is.
And then another side is saying, well, he's definitely being set up and none of this happened.
I think there's a third possibility, which is the most likely one.
It's the one that fits the facts the best.
And I'll tell you about that in a moment.
Now, before I get into that, I should tell you that there's no way we're ever going to know.
It is completely unknowable what happened 35 years ago.
But people will act as though they know.
So if you're seeing people act positive that it's just obvious, oh, it's just obvious that it's one way or the other, he's either guilty or not, there's something wrong with them.
And if you happen to be one of those people, there's something wrong with you too, I hate to tell you.
Because the third possibility is that the accuser believes something happened That maybe didn't happen.
So that would be the third possibility, a false memory.
But in order to judge whether a false memory is a crazy, crazy thing that you should just toss out or something to consider, Wouldn't you first need to know how common it is to have a false memory?
And then on top of that, how weird would it be to have this kind of false memory?
If it was a false memory, it could have been an event that never happened.
How weird would that be?
Or putting a different character for the accuser.
In other words, what are the chances that she remembered a different person?
That would be really weird, right?
Because the one person that you're going to remember is your accuser.
If you're going to remember anything, you're going to remember somebody who did something bad to you, right?
Well, let me tell you my story.
And it was during my first job as a bank teller.
I got robbed at gunpoint while working.
It was a robber who had the gun in the pocket, you know, where they pretend you don't know if it's a finger or a gun, but you don't want to take a chance.
So, you know, he holds up his pocket with the coat pocket with an indication of a gun.
So I start handing him money, as is the requirement of the job.
If you get robbed, you're supposed to give them the money.
And I made sure I I got a good look at him because I knew I would be asked to describe him as soon as he left.
And sure enough, he left and the FBI shows up soon after, I think within an hour, and they interview me to ask me to describe the guy who robbed me.
And I described him this way.
Basically, I described him looking like a version of me.
Somebody who is about my age now, 60s, with a grey stubble and short, sparse grey hair and a long black trench coat.
Remember, I was in my 20s, so if I described myself, I was describing myself decades in the future.
So this is who I described.
And then the FBI went and they looked on the video from the security cameras and they contacted my boss and said, we need to talk to him again because the person that he described we can't see on the video.
So they actually took me down to the secret FBI headquarters, and they said, you know, describe that guy again.
And I described him again, and they said, all right, now watch this video.
And they had a hand crank so they could move the video frame by frame.
It's very old technology.
And they showed me a guy on the film, and they say, is this the guy who robbed you?
And the person they pointed to looked like a young Clint Eastwood.
Six foot something, thirty something, this was a young Clint Eastwood, thirty-ish something, big mustache, full thick head of hair, and a sport coat.
Alright, so basically there wasn't one part of this guy except the race that I got right.
And when I saw him on the video, they said, is this the guy that robbed you?
And I said, no, that's not even close.
And then they said, keep watching.
And they backed it up until he was actually robbing me.
So I actually had a perfect, confident memory Of a person who had robbed me one hour before who was not even close to the person I saw on video who actually did rob me one hour before.
Not even close. This, by the way, is not that unusual.
So it was around that time that I started taking classes in hypnosis.
and you learn that there are lots of experiments that have been done exactly like this and the experiment is that a professor usually will will have somebody come in and pretend that he's disrupting the class or robbing somebody robbing the teacher right in front of the class and then as soon as the robber leaves they have people describe the robber and it's all over the place he had a gun he didn't have a gun he was a You know, he was black, he was white, he was Asian.
Completely different explanations.
So once you learn how common it is to have false memories, really, really radical false memories, then it changes how you see the world.
And you realize that people are inventing their history.
They're not remembering it.
That's important to know.
People don't remember their history.
They sort of invent it.
They concoct it as they go, and it changes over time.
So the history you remember, the one you construct in your head, actually shifts over time.
Now the question is, could you remember a different person, a whole different person, in an event that you were in, and it's somebody you actually know?
What if it's somebody you know well?
Could you get that person wrong in your story?
Well, let me tell you.
I remember once talking to my brother years ago, and I brought up some story from our childhood.
I don't remember right now what it was exactly.
And I said, do you remember the time I did XYZ? And my brother looked at me and said, you didn't do that.
That was me. So I had a memory of doing something That was actually my brother doing something.
It wasn't even me. I had a complete memory of something I'd never been involved with.
It was actually another person.
How unusual is that?
Here's the weird part.
It's not unusual.
Yeah, and somebody's saying maybe my brother was wrong.
It ends up being the same point either way.
Either I or my brother Had a complete false memory.
And in this case, I defaulted to his memory because he actually has a good memory and I don't.
So once you realize how common it is to have a false memory, then you have a different view of the world.
Now let's take this case of the allegations against Judge Kavanaugh.
One of the things you would look for to see if there's a false memory is you would look for something that would have reminded the accuser of Judge Kavanaugh even though it wasn't him.
So now I'm going into speculative territory, but it's more about showing you how a false memory could be formed.
To have a false memory, it helps if there's a trigger.
It's very well documented that, let's say, investigators talking to somebody who's a witness can lead the witness, sometimes without even trying, to create a false memory and plant it in them.
And the way that goes, it works like this.
You'd say, were you there during this crime?
Whatever. Yes, I was there. Did you see the defendant, or no, yeah, did you see the accused Punch the accuser.
And if the person had never seen a punch, the question itself can trigger a false memory.
So if the witness had never seen anybody punch anybody, but the investigator made the mistake of saying, okay, did you see the accused punch the accuser with his right hand after the altercation?
The question can actually implant an immediate false memory.
It's well documented. It's easy to reproduce.
There are famous cases involved this.
The McMartin preschool case had an entire preschool bunch of kids, I don't know, dozens of them, who all had false memories implanted by the same investigators.
We know that to be true.
So, you need a trigger to make it easy for a false memory to form.
It's not the only way it can happen, but it helps if you've got some kind of plant.
And here, allegedly, the story about Judge Kavanaugh, who by the time the accuser was talking about the story, in recent years anyway, was already a judge.
Judge Kavanaugh.
A judge. Judge Kavanaugh.
Who was the other person, she says, was the witness?
A person whose name, whose last name, is Judge.
Now, if you've got a memory from 35 years ago, and one of the people who's the main player is this guy whose name is Mark Judge, then maybe that part's true.
This is just speculation. I'm not saying this happened.
If you had somebody who you think was there named Mark Judge, and one of his friends, that also was somebody you sometimes see and hang around with, is somebody who became a famous judge, could that be enough to plant a false memory that the other judge was involved?
And the answer is yes. That would be one of the things you would look for.
How could somebody have a completely different person in the story?
Well, it may have been suggested by the fact that there was somebody named Judge, and this other Judge Kavanaugh became a famous judge.
It would be a weird coincidence that there are two judges in the same story.
But also totally possible.
So let me reiterate every few seconds in this story that there is no way to know if the accusations are true or not.
We'll never know.
Can't know. But if you were going to rank the likelihoods of things, I would personally put false memory at the top.
That doesn't mean it's true, but if you're going to say, what are the odds of this or the odds of that, it would be the most typical way something like this could happen.
Now, the reason that I imagine if you were to look at the two competing hypotheses, To say, how likely are they?
One of them says that he did this attack and that there are no other witnesses.
She didn't mention it.
And Judge Kavanaugh has no history of anything like this.
And you know that people who get accused of this sort of thing tend to have more than one accusation.
And it's been a while. You would have seen other people come out of the woodwork.
So it's possible he did it.
And it's possible it was a one-time thing, or that there are other, you know, maybe you did other things and nobody came forward.
But it would be a little unusual, right, for someone to have a one-time, never mentioned a guy's name, years later, a lot of coincidences, but totally possible.
You can't rule it out just because, you know, it's unlikely.
Then there's also the possibility that That he didn't do it and that the accuser is just pure lying.
She's just making it up for political purposes.
The only point of it is to stop this nomination from going forward.
Well, here's the problem with that.
Even if they stop this nomination, the next thing that's going to happen, I assume, would be that...
The next thing that's going to happen is that I would assume the Trump administration would nominate...
Who's the woman who was Amy Barrett something something?
Coney or something? But anyway, they would just nominate a woman, Amy Barrett.
She would get nominated and her politics would presumably be similar to Kavanaugh's.
So it's very unlikely that even if it was a scheme to stall this thing, that it would be a good plan.
Secondly, the person who hypothetically, you know, if in your view, in the view of many of you, the people who think she just flat out lied and made up the whole thing and knows she's doing it, You'd have to also assume that she was willing to throw away her life, and here's the hard part, and the life of her family.
Her family's, I don't know what her situation is, kids, husband, whatever, but her family doesn't come out well.
And there was a reason that she wanted to be a little anonymous at first, because it's dangerous.
She actually had to leave her home already because of death threats.
She would have known This was going to happen.
Any adult who's paying attention, any adult who's, especially if she had TDS, if she had trauma derangement syndrome, she would of course know in her mind that there would be a lot of blowback.
So is it possible That somebody would just make something up for political reasons, something we've never really seen like this, and would take the consequences not only for herself, but on her family.
Is it possible somebody would do that?
Yes. Right?
Anything's possible. It's not impossible.
There are no facts and evidence that would make that an impossibility.
But it seems unlikely to me.
So here are your three possibilities.
A false memory. Implanted possibly by the family therapist.
Do you remember that this came up for the first time with a name on it during some kind of couples therapy?
When you've got a therapist and they're saying who was in the room, what was his name, Mike Judge, who was the other guy, can you remember him?
Well, I'm not sure, but you know, I'm not saying it went that way.
I'm just saying that's one way it could go.
So false memory.
In my professional experience, it's common.
How common? Well, how many times have people gone to jail for a false identification?
Pretty frequently. How many times has it been rape?
Pretty frequently, right?
False identifications are very, very common.
How many people think they were abducted by aliens, taken on the ship, probed, and brought back to Earth?
A lot, right?
Turns out there's a lot of them.
Now, you could say, well, maybe there are really aliens doing this.
Probably not. Probably it's more likely that it was a false memory.
Alright, so a professional, someone who knows what I know, somebody who knows about how memories are formed, etc., would probably agree with me that the most likely thing that's happening here is a false memory.
And if they don't agree that it's the most likely, they would agree that it's a routine thing.
The other possibilities are, still could be true.
Could be true he did it.
Could be true she's lying.
Both possible. In my opinion, a little less likely.
Now I know some of you are saying, dude, don't be so naive.
Don't be so stupid.
Of course the answer is X. And then there'll be just as many people who are saying, dude, don't be so stupid.
It's the opposite of X. All right.
Your certainty is your indicator that you're wrong, meaning that you could be right by chance.
I mean, you might be certain for reasons that you shouldn't be certain and also right, but you shouldn't be certain.
All right. Let's jump to the conclusion.
Given that we'll never know the truth of it, what should we do?
What should we do? We need to do, and I think we will do, we meaning the country, We'll do the thing that is most credible for the system.
So if you can't know about the individuals involved, you can't know.
You just can't know what they did or didn't do.
You have to default to a system for dealing with these ambiguities that is a system that all Americans would look at and say, ah, even if I don't like the way this went, the system they used to get there is credible.
And there is one system that is totally credible in this country, which is that you're innocent until proven guilty.
So there's only one way it can go unless there are new information that comes up.
But given what we know now, And unless we have new information, there will be a vote and he will be confirmed.
Because the system is more important than any individuals.
That's why even guilty people sometimes get away with it, because you want the system to be dominant over even individuals.
That's the only credible way to have laws.
Alright. Is it my imagination Is it my imagination, or does it seem like the difference between the GOP and the Democrats is mostly becoming about women?
Issues that are important to women.
And sort of a female-centric view of these two parties.
Partly because of the abortion question, right?
That's a big one. And maybe that more than anything else.
But it seems to me that the brand of the two big parties, and I remind anybody new, I'm not a Republican, I'm not a Democrat, I'm not anything.
So I'm talking about others.
It seems to me that the GOP brand In terms of their relationship with women, is as protectors.
So the GOP is sort of protective of women, strong on law enforcement, family units, things like that.
Things that go to safety, physical safety.
Strong on immigration, meaning strong on border control because of safety.
You will hear the GOP talk more about, you know, let's import fewer people who might have a higher ratio of crime or something in there.
So GOP seems like protectors.
The Democrat brand Seems to brand men as abusers.
So the Democratic brand is that men are abusers by their nature.
And the GOP brand is that men are protectors by their nature.
Does it seem to me that those are the ways the brands are lining up?
Now, I warn you, That this is not my opinion of what things should be.
I'm not saying one is the good one, one's the bad one.
I'm just saying that that's how it seems to be evolving.
It seems to be evolving that if you are a man and you're a member of the Republican Party, then you and the people in the Republican Party think of you as a protector Or someone who damn well ought to be a protector.
That's the feeling about what men should be.
And on the Democratic side, it seems that men are abusers, future abusers, past abusers, likely abusers, or probably abusers.
So, I don't know how men can join the Democratic Party.
Because, correct me if I'm wrong, but you'd have to hate yourself a little bit if you're a man and you're also a Democrat.
Am I wrong about that?
Wouldn't you need to hate yourself a little bit if you're a man to be a Democrat?
Because you know damn well the Democrats are not going to run a man for president.
There's no chance that a man will be nominated to run against Trump in 2020.
Am I wrong about that?
Is there any chance a man will be the Democrats' candidate?
There's no chance, right? If you were black and you said to yourself, the Democratic Party is my party.
They care about me more.
If you're black, does the Democratic Party care more about your ethnicity or more about your gender?
If it came down to a choice, and they had to make a decision, and the Democrats had some laws they needed to pass, one of them was better for women, and one of them was better for African Americans.
Let's say they're both good and morally acceptable laws, but just the nature of them, one skews one way, one skews the other way.
Which way would they go? Yeah, I think they would follow gender every time.
So, if you're black, And you're a Republican, and you're a man especially, what do Republican men think of a black Republican man?
He's a protector.
Protector. What do the Democrats think of you if you're a black Republican man?
Probably an abuser. Now, of course everything I'm saying is gross generalizations that don't hold up for you or me or any particular person.
I'm talking about the brand, right?
So the brand can have its own life independent of lots of the individuals within it, and that's what I'm talking about.
So it's not about individuals, it's about the brand.
So I don't know how they can win with that brand.
It seems to me a completely unwinnable brand at the presidential level.
Let's talk about turnout.
It seems to me that turnout in the midterms or the midterm elections will be mostly about turnout.
And the Republican brand Again, you know, see if I'm wrong.
The Republican brand is about doing stuff.
About, you know, getting off the couch and actually going and doing stuff.
And it feels like the Republican turnout for the midterms is going to be really high.
I heard, I saw a study that said that Republicans were, what was it?
Less concerned about the midterms or something like that.
It was some kind of a poll that showed that maybe the Republican enthusiasm would be low for the midterms and that would be a really bad sign because it means they wouldn't go vote.
I'm not sure that's who Republicans are.
Here's who I think Republicans are.
They're people who just know what they need to do and then they go do it.
It's not so much even motivated, right?
Motivated is almost the wrong word.
When Republicans do stuff, it's because it needs to get done, right?
The Republican thing is, well, it needs to be done, it's hard, but it needs to be done.
It doesn't matter if it's hard.
It doesn't matter if it's inconvenient.
It doesn't matter if I had better things to do.
Those things don't matter.
It's the right thing to do.
So I'll do it.
That's sort of the Republican ethic.
So I think anything that shows a lack of Republican enthusiasm for the midterms is probably misleading.
Because it's not enthusiasm that causes Republicans to vote.
It's because it's the right thing to do.
And that's a pretty strong force.
On the Democrat side, they're going to have to be driven by enthusiasm.
And their enthusiasm is going to have to tell them that they're going to make a difference.
And what are they trying to change?
The economy is great, North Korea is going well, etc.
Now, the one thing that I've criticized the current administration for is health care.
I've made a few other criticisms as well, race relations, etc.
But health care, I've always thought, was a glaring hole in what the Trump administration was doing.
It was just glaring. Like, really?
You can't have some kind of a coherent plan that at least could be compared to the alternative?
And yesterday I tweeted that it turns out the administration is doing exactly what I've been suggesting for a while.
Not because I suggested it, but because presumably they think it's a good idea too.
And let me show you my tweet.
Turns out the administration...
Alright, so here's the tweet from...
So, Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Hargan announces collaboration to accelerate innovation and investment in healthcare.
So, in other words, Health and Human Services is organizing to get all the healthcare startups To be part of a collective, it's voluntary, but a collective so that the government can help the country focus its energy on these healthcare startups and these innovations that could lower healthcare costs.
Now, they don't specifically talk about lowering costs, but you know that's got to be, if not the top objective, one of the top objectives.
Probably the top objective.
So, it turns out That the Republican plan for healthcare is already better than whatever the Democrats have.
Because bringing down the cost is the only way Bernie can get what he wants.
Do you get that? Here's the high ground maneuver on healthcare.
Bernie and Cortez and folks on the far left would like universal healthcare.
We can't afford it.
Or if we could afford it, and you could argue that we can't afford it because we're a rich country and other countries do it.
But it's going to be expensive enough that it probably can't get done politically.
So even if you can afford it, but it can't get done politically in this country, how do you change that?
And the way you change it is by radically reducing the cost.
Perhaps having, you know, I like to call it the poor person's plan.
You know, that's bad branding, but you know what I mean.
A health care plan for people who don't have much money that's maybe more experimental.
It involves, let's say, telehealth, pay-as-you-go, some kind of, you know, crisis insurance, etc.
So you should do that stuff first, and then if you can lower the price at least for one channel of people, maybe it's not lowering the price for everybody.
Maybe it's just lowering the price for the people who don't have insurance.
Maybe it's just that.
Now it's at least a competitive plan, and I like that.
I also tweeted yesterday some details about what the big companies, Amazon, Chase, and Apple, and whoever else, things are doing to fix healthcare on their own.
So they're going to take big bites out of some of the parts of that.
Apple just announced a watch that has better sensors for your heart.
So now your wearable devices keep getting better and better and they'll be able to know your health care situation right away.
There's a big insurer who just announced that the only kind of health insurance is John Hancock.
So listen to this. This was yesterday.
John Hancock, one of the oldest and largest North American life insurers, will stop underwriting traditional life insurance and instead sell only interactive policies that track fitness and health data through wearable devices.
So they're not even going to sell regular life insurance anymore.
So this is life insurance, not health insurance.
But you can see how the concept would apply to health insurance as well.
So they're going to use your health tracking device to know that you're doing or not doing the right things and adjust your insurance based on that.
So apparently you can control your own insurance costs by your lifestyle.
So if you want your insurance to go down, go to the gym.
Eat less, I guess.
I can't track that yet.
So we're seeing lots of stuff happening on healthcare that's pretty exciting.
Somebody asked me, did Dr.
Shiva help with this Health and Human Services stuff?
Not that I know of directly, but if I haven't told you this before, a lot of people watch this podcast, watch this Periscope.
It seems to me that the ideas that I've talked about certainly have gotten to the right people.
Whether or not that's the reason Health and Human Services is doing what they're doing, or that they just know it's a good idea too, we shall never know.
But it's a good idea, just the same.
Yeah, we don't have the white paper yet.
Have you noticed-- or let's talk about North Korea.
Um... If North Korea goes ahead and dismantles their nuclear sites, and there's some ambiguity, it feels to me there's some ambiguity about what it is that North Korea decided to dismantle.
Was it the missile site that's the only one that could send a nuke?
Or is it the actual nuclear facilities on large?
It's not entirely clear what they've promised yet.
But I will tell you this.
If Kim Jong Un comes to the United States, it will be to announce full denuclearization, I think.
Not guaranteed.
Yeah, anything could happen and they could have the trip and things change at the last minute.
But it seems to me that things are shaping up so that Kim Jong Un's trip to America only makes sense To put the final dot on an agreement.
So I think when Kim comes to America, there's going to be an announcement.
That doesn't mean they've already decided to do that, but that's where everything is shaping up that the trip to America is the big deal.
Here's my question. Let's say Kim agrees and work commences on dismantling their nuclear sites and there are third-party observers from other countries, probably not Americans.
And we've got pictures and the satellite pictures show that the nuclear sites are being dismantled and there are plans for commerce and all kinds of good things with North and South Korea and long-term plans and the Olympics they're going to try to get in 2032.
Suppose all of those things are happening In six months.
What will the critics say about it?
Go. What will the critics say if North Korea is dismantling its nuclear program and we're watching and it appears to be real according to the observers?
What will Yeah, I saw the right answer there.
They're going to say, he's being played.
President Trump is being played.
Sure, they're pretending.
They're pretending to dismantle these nuclear sites.
But really, they're hiding them in a mattress somewhere.
Yes, they've already moved their nuclear weapons and they gave them to Syria to hold.
You're going to hear every explanation of how it didn't really happen.
While it's happening.
While it's happening, so this is my prediction, that even while North Korea denuclearizes, while it's being watched by independent observers, confirmed by satellite, in every possible way confirmed, the people who hate the president will say that it's not actually happening.
They'll just say it's not happening.
So you watch that.
They'll say Obama did it.
And this is one I think that we don't have to worry about that, but maybe.
Maybe.
Yeah.
Well, hiding it in China would be fine.
Hiding their nukes in China or hiding their nukes in Russia would be a perfect situation.
In fact, that would be the best situation.
let China take care of it, because they know how.
Somebody says they've already moved to China.
Well, if the nukes are in China, that's the best case situation because China knows how to handle nukes and it doesn't create any additional risk for the United States.
So what about that trade war?
So I hear there's a trade war and if there's a trade war and it's getting really bad, what would you expect to see?
What would be the implications of a really bad trade war?
Oh, I know.
It would be that stocks are doing poorly.
Well, let's see. Nope.
I'm checking my stocks.
Stocks seem to be way up.
Huh. Huh.
How is it?
That stocks are way up.
Somebody says prices will go up, and that may be true, but it still wouldn't explain the enthusiasm for stocks, because the stock market is apparently assuming success at this point.
All right. Isn't something odd about the stocks?
There's always something odd about the stocks, but I don't know what you mean in particular.
All right.
I'm just looking at your comments for a moment.
Jack Ma reneged on a million jobs.
Yeah, I saw that article. Who knows how real that is?
And who knows how long they will be reneging?
It seems like they could change their mind in a heartbeat.
Navarro was right and China didn't do that much.
We'll see. Somebody's asking my take on Elon Musk.
About what? What in particular?
I'd need a specific question.
How real are we?
Well, I've talked about that before.
All right. I think I've said enough.
I've got some things to do today.
▲
Export Selection