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Nov. 11, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
28:04
Episode 295 Scott Adams: The Smokey View From My Side
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Hey everybody. Come on in here.
We're going to take a look at the view out my window.
As you may or may not know, there are forest fires.
And none of them are especially close to me.
But, so you see where there's that row of lights, little yellow lights, sort of right in the middle.
That's at the base of a big ridge.
The entire ridge is completely obliterated by smoke.
So, in this neighborhood, we don't open our windows and we don't go outside.
So we've got an air quality warning.
So we don't go anywhere.
Focus. Focus.
There we go. Heh.
You thought it would be pot-related?
Well, what are the odds of that?
Alright, hold on. I'm gonna put you down and turn you around here.
Bear with me. So, yeah, it's dangerous to go outside.
The fires are so intense.
As I said, I'm not really near any in terms of danger of catching on fire.
But I actually don't know how far away I am.
I think it's probably in the 50 to 100 mile range, something like that.
It's probably the closest one.
By one of those air quality readers.
Do they have those? There was no Blexit in midterms.
My understanding is that the youth did not show up to vote.
Do you remember my tweet very early on Election Day?
And I noted that it just seemed like There were a lot of old people, but not a lot of young people in line.
And I realize it was also that time of day when there would be more old people.
But it just seemed to me that with people with different schedules, etc., that there would be a good chance that the young would not turn out.
Can I evacuate quickly if I have to?
The odds of it making it all the way to me, it would have to burn down a lot of residential, it would have to burn down half of Pleasanton before it reached me.
So I guess it's possible, but my house was built to be almost fire resistant.
Well, totally fire-resistant, but it's almost fire-proof.
So I don't think there's anything external in my house that could even catch on fire.
so it would have to be exposed to something actually burning for a long time.
So, I see in the news that the Wall Street Journal is reporting, and I know this is a big surprise to a lot of you, but apparently and I know this is a big surprise to a lot of you, but apparently President Trump, when he was candidate Trump, he actually knew that his lawyer was arranging payments
I know that's a big shocker to all of you, but it's top news on CNN. And I think if they're going to be fair about reporting that story, they should put right up at the top what the potential penalty is.
Because I think the potential penalty is something like a traffic fine.
You know, there's just, you write a check from the campaign.
It's not even a personal fine.
I think it's a campaign violation.
So they should say that at the top.
It turns out that the president did exactly what everybody assumed he did for all the reasons that you assume people do those things.
And we're really going to get it now.
And when we do, there will be heck to pay Somebody who's not even him will have to write a check.
I think that's the whole story, right?
But we'll see if it gets any bigger.
I saw that Rod Rosenstein praised Whitaker as a perfect choice for that job.
Did you see that? So Rosenstein, who gets passed over for the job of acting AG, praises Whitaker, who has basically taken control from him for being a perfect choice and just great.
And I'd love to know if Rod Rosenstein has a good sense of humor in private.
Wouldn't you love to just be privately talking to Rod Rosenstein and say, you're just screwing with us right now, right?
You're just screwing with us?
I feel like he'd say, oh yeah.
Yeah, I'm just screwing with you.
But what are you going to do?
Way to Cook is his boss at the moment.
So, because he's not stupid...
He's not insulting his boss for no good reason.
All right.
And is it the simulation talking to us that he, somebody was saying this on Twitter, that what's the name of the woman who's being accused of voting irregularities in Florida?
Her last name is Snipe.
S-N-I-P, Snipe, which is just a perfect name for a theatrical villain.
But even better than that is that the headline news is that, I'm not making this up, Trump used Pecker to keep a playmate quiet.
That's just what happened.
I'm just reporting the news.
So, they're saying the new AG isn't legit.
Yeah. Does it seem to you that if you're willing to pay enough for lawyers, you can declare that anything is not legit?
Doesn't it feel like that? You could just take any random politician out of the government and say, uh, all right, you, over there, minding your own business, just pluck them out and say, I'm going to dangle you in front of 15 of the best lawyers in Washington.
Let's see if they find anything.
Dangle, dangle, dangle. I feel like, oh, it snipes with an S. I feel like I feel like if you have enough lawyers, just everybody's going down.
There's just no exception.
How would you break into the simulation?
Good question. It really depends who's running the simulation.
So, if I told you my way that we can check if we're a simulation, there's a way to check I don't have the final details, but here's the concept.
One of the ways that you could confirm it, sort of the ways that you'd have to do a lot of different experiments to really confirm an Einstein theory.
You'd want to go at it from different angles and make sure they're all consistent.
If we're a simulation, in other words, if we're software creatures who have been designed to think we're real, Then we live in a world in which the present can change the past.
Because you would not create an artificial world in which the past exists in fullness.
You would write the past as the present requires it.
So if you find a box of photographs in the attic, and we'll say nobody's ever seen them before, or maybe it's just because you've never seen them before, and you open them up.
I guess it would have to be, if nobody alive had seen them, And you find some new evidence of the past, because you found a photograph, you found a fossil or something.
At that point, the past writes just enough to keep the whole script working.
It wouldn't create the entire thing.
Somebody's saying nihilism, but not at all.
Because we would be no different if we were simulations or if we were real.
All the same rules would apply.
We would just be made of different stuff.
I'm addicted and bored of the news at the same time.
I'm having exactly that feeling.
I'm having the feeling of being bored by the news just lately, because some of the news is after the midterms were exciting, but after that it got a little...
exciting for another day, and then today it seemed like, ah, just ordinary stories today.
I can't tell if I like the new angry Trump who's calling reporters stupid.
I know I'm entertained.
I'm definitely entertained by it.
I saw Joy Reid say that the president is, you know, She was raising the fact that the president had insulted three black women recently.
Now, unless you're paying attention, he also started out by insulting Jim Acosta and then his co-worker at the same network.
But anyway, he started with two adult white men and tore into them, and then he just kept going.
Here's how the pessimist and the optimist see this story.
So Joy Reid, playing the part of the pessimist in my example, says, oh, the president insults three black women.
Coincidence? That's the pessimistic view.
Here's the optimistic view.
There are three black women who have excellent jobs with access in the White House.
The reason that three black women got insulted recently is that all three of those women are super accomplished.
They have great, great jobs.
They got... They got close enough to the insulter-in-chief that they got insulted like so many other people, including Jim Acosta.
So it's literally true that you could look at the same situation and say, oh my god, it's terrible.
Look who he's insulting. Is this a coincidence?
Maybe it's not a coincidence.
Maybe black women are just killing them lately.
They got great jobs.
If you're standing next to the President of the United States and asking him a question, You've got a good job.
Congratulations. You've made something of your life.
Most of the world would wish they were you.
So let's at least consider the context that nobody's getting insulted unless they get on the radar.
And welcome to the radar.
It's actually a weirdly positive sign when the insulting is well distributed.
It seems to me it's a pretty good sign.
Should I learn hypnosis to learn persuasion?
I can only tell you that I think it helped a lot.
But I also did that first.
I may have been biased by the fact that I took hypnosis before I learned more levels of persuasion.
And by the way, Joy Reid can only ask the question and send the tweet because she's killing it.
She's got a really good job.
Her career is going great.
So congratulations to Joy Reid for her success.
All right.
I didn't have much else to say.
Does anybody have any questions?
Well, I've got a few minutes here.
People like welcome to the radar.
I'm already hypnotized, somebody said.
I'm going to take a Dale Carnegie course because of you.
That will be one of the best things you've ever done.
You know, you might be in that Dale Carnegie course and thinking, I don't know what I'm learning today.
You may have a little skepticism during it, but I'll bet you it will be one of your best decisions.
What's my favorite color?
green.
A lot of my favorite things are green.
Where's the bomber story?
So, you know, this latest shooter, whose name I don't want to use, the Marine, this one is one where I haven't heard people say that there should be more armed guards there.
Because this guy was a trained killer.
And if you're a trained killer, a few security guards aren't going to stop you because you just do them first.
So this guy's kind of an exception when it comes to mass murders.
I'm in need of Suboxone, but it's $500 a month.
Okay.
I wonder if that's...
It sounds like you're in need of health care insurance.
I assume that would be covered.
I wonder how big a problem that is.
I wonder how many people who are addicts are having problems just paying for the Suboxone.
That'd be a good question.
Predictions on who's getting fired?
I do not.
How's the drumming going?
It's coming along. My goal for learning to play the drums was not that I would ever be good, but I can do some stuff now.
Just a little bit of stuff, which is fun, getting better.
Did you feel vindicated with perpetually defending Trump when you met him?
I wouldn't put it that way. What I would say was it would be, it was probably one of the most shocking telemarketer call.
I was just saying that meeting the president was, had to be the most interesting thing I've ever done.
So I guess that's the way I processed it.
Zinke, he may have some career changes coming up.
We'll see. I just don't know the details of those stories.
Oh, finish your box of pictures scenario.
So the idea is that if we live in a simulation, the present could write the past, but only as you need it, because you wouldn't build the past just in case somebody needed it.
You would conserve resources in all likelihood.
So if you can find a way to change the past, you know you're in a simulation.
And I would argue that the double slit experiment in physics might be an example of just that.
Is Trump going to legalize pot to be bipartisan?
I would predict yes, unless there's some obstacle that I'm not aware of.
So there might be something that has nothing to do with politics and nothing to do with persuasion.
There just might be something, I don't know, that's holding back.
Now that Sessions is out of there, I don't know what that would be.
So it would be the right play, because it would control the conversation, it would be bipartisan, it would be easy, it would be fast, it would show something's happening.
So it pretty much has everything going for it, and it's very Republican.
It's kicking it back to the states, letting the states decide.
This term, you think?
Honestly, I don't know why it doesn't happen before the end of the year, except that just the generic reason that there's not much getting done between now and the end of the year.
It may be that there's just not much work that gets done in Washington.
So from that sense, it would be a perfect Sort of a filler story.
My guess is that by now the White House has a bunch of things that they can slot into the dead spaces between now and the end of the year because it won't be as much real news.
It'll be more sensational stuff and gossipy stuff.
So that's probably on the list.
Can the president actually legalize it?
Well, all he'd have to do is come out in favor of legislation.
I think that would be enough.
I think that Congress could pass something pretty quickly.
Wouldn't we be better for 2020?
Honestly, I think people are going to be mad if he waits to 2020.
Because there isn't anything stopping it.
And it would just make more sense politically to get a bipartisan win going.
so you can argue you've done something.
Trump versus beta.
Beto. You know...
I haven't spent much of any time at all looking at Beto on video.
It seems like he's just got that good voice and that, you know, he's tall and he's got hair.
But I just can't see Democrats running, you know, running a tall, good-looking white male.
It just doesn't feel like that would keep their whole party together.
North and South Korea are moving all the mines on their border.
Is that new?
Or is that just part of the general denuclearization of the border?
Do you remember any time the media has been this biased and unhinged?
No, not even close.
And there's a reason for that.
And the reason is that the business model of the media rewards angry people.
And that just wasn't always the case.
So now that we can measure how angry people get, you really are obligated as a business to make people angry, because that's where the money is.
I think the thing that might break capitalism is the fact that you can measure...
So here's a late night, sort of a Friday question.
What would happen if people get better and better at persuading?
And we can measure just how well somebody gets persuaded by any particular message.
Let's say we just keep getting better and better at it.
At some point, The idea of free will will be completely eliminated because we'll know, okay, this message going to this person under these conditions under this time is definitely going to flip them.
And then you watch the person go blink and they make a purchase or whatever it is you try to convince them to do.
The moment you can see the entire chain From the persuasion technique through to what it does to the person and then watch them change their behavior.
At the moment, we can move 5 or 10% of the people if you do things right, but we're going to keep getting better at it.
Once you can move something like 80% of the people to make whatever choice you want just by changing the lighting and the message and the words you use, then our entire understanding of free will will be obliterated.
So, what happens then?
I think at that point, when your persuasion gets strong enough, wait for it, what happens when your persuasion goes from weak, let's say persuasion was weak in the 50s, and then, you know, through the 70s and mad men and, you know, that era, they got better and better.
And now that we can measure things, we can test really quickly what works and what doesn't, and we're better at creating visual stuff and fear and all that.
And now we're the best we've ever been, in terms of a society's talents.
What happens if it keeps getting better?
Because there's nothing to stop persuasion to get more and more powerful.
As long as you can measure things, It will continue to get better.
So, at what point does it become illegal?
If I told you I know how to make, out of 100 people, I know how to make 70 of them, do whatever I'm suggesting, assuming it's legal, you know, and it's not something crazy, but if I could make 70 out of 100 people, I don't know which 70, but just on average 70 of them, I could make a specific decision.
At that point, it's illegal, isn't it?
You're going to have to make it illegal because it's just brainwashing at that point.
So persuasion is only legal, wait for it, because most people can't do it well.
I'm probably already at a point where I should be illegal.
Let me put it this way.
If the law understood how persuasive I am, and I don't think it ever will, if the law could kind of recognize that, I think it might be illegal.
The only reason that it's legal is that you can't specifically measure what impact I have versus what impact anybody else has.
As long as other people are also trying to persuade, you only need one person to be making a difference and you can't tell who it is.
I'm watching your comments and saying, Are you trying to persuade us?
Vanity? Well, let me tell you what I base this on.
So after the election of 2016, I asked on Twitter how many people I had persuaded to vote for Trump who had not already been there.
And I think around 1,500 people responded that I had changed their mind and changed their vote.
Now that's how many people responded.
Usually there's a multiplier, you know, if x people said something there's usually, you know, 10x who actually felt it.
So given the number of people who had any contact with me through Twitter or whatever to have potentially persuaded tens of thousands It's on the border of where it should be illegal.
And the reason it isn't is because nobody can be sure.
You can't measure it.
And I can't either, by the way.
So if you're wondering if my head is too big, I don't know how big my head should be either, because I don't have any kind of an accurate sense of how persuasive I actually am.
All right. What do you think of Darren Brown?
I haven't really watched him enough.
People always ask me, and I'm not sure why people ask that question.
He's a good hypnotist.
I'm not sure what else there is to say about that.
This camera angle makes my head look bigger.
Well, good.
Isn't the beauty of capitalism that it accounts for?
Well, that's a big question.
I don't know. I think this will be my least interesting periscope.
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