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Nov. 12, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:03:14
Episode 297 Scott Adams: The 2020 Competition, North Korea, Lawyers Against Trump
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Hey everybody Come on in here.
You know why.
I think you do. Because it's time for something.
It's time for coffee with Scott Adams.
Always bring a coaster.
Never put your beverage On your nice furniture without a coaster.
Unless it's glass.
And even then, you don't want to clean your glass.
But anyway, I diverge.
You didn't come here for house cleaning suggestions, did you?
I think it's time to raise a mug, a cup, a glass, a beverage container, and join me for the simultaneous sip.
Now some people asked me in the comments here, how is my house?
I think that's a reference to the fire.
I'll give you another view out the window.
As you can see...
But as you can see now, that's what my view looks like.
Keep in mind that everything above those tree lines is normally 100% visible.
So we still can't really go outside.
That's not an option.
And it's a weird world, because when you can't go outside, your world gets very small.
It's almost like it's the dead of winter or something.
But the fire is still a comfortable, I don't know, 150 miles away from me, and you can see how much smoke is here.
So imagine the poor people who are closer to it.
I understand that there are several celebrity types who have lost their homes.
There's a lot of controversy about what the government, state, and or federal should have been doing or could have been doing about these fires.
There's a big question about climate change.
I saw an interesting graph by Bjorn Lomborg.
Now Bjorn, if you don't know him, is not a climate skeptic, but he is lumped in that category.
Because he dares to bring rational thought to the discussion.
And I'm not even making that up.
What I just said is literally true.
That there's a guy named Bjorn Lomborg who is considered a science doubter simply because he brings rational thought to the discussion.
Oh, Lomborg, okay. Yeah, Bjorn Lomborg.
And specifically what he brings to it is that it's not enough to look at just the science.
Once you think you know what the science tells you, you have to also look at the economics.
So by simply saying, hey, you also have to study the economics, he's considered a science doubter.
He doesn't doubt the science.
He doesn't even doubt it.
He's just saying, but you haven't done the economics completely, and you have to do it completely or you don't know anything.
Which is pretty close to my view.
Now, he just produced a graph that showed that the biggest decline in CO2 production was from the United States in this past year.
And the reason was a little bit coincidental because I guess there was a shift from coal to shale gas.
And I guess shale gas is far better for the CO2 emissions than coal.
So the fact that the free market is doing its thing, that's suggesting that the Paris Accord didn't make much difference because the United States was the biggest decline in CO2. Who was the biggest increase in CO2? China.
What is killing more people than anything else according to the climate believers?
The climate, right?
Forest fires and hurricanes and such.
So the climate believers, and I'm not doubting this.
I'm not an expert on science and I can't tell you if the forest fires are worse or the drought is worse or the hurricanes are worse.
I don't know that.
But smart people are saying that climate change might, whether it's human-made or not, that's the secondary question, but it seems to be getting worse.
And if you buy into that, you have to buy into the fact that fentanyl China is killing the United States in Three different ways.
One, stealing all our technology.
Two, sending fentanyl here and killing 30,000 people a year.
And now three, apparently they're destroying the atmosphere in ways which will destroy our country and our economy and the world while starving and killing their people.
So I think there's no doubt anymore that China is the biggest threat to the survival of a country.
And they may not even be necessarily trying to do it intentionally.
But Fentanyl China is not, in my opinion, a credible trading partner.
And we shouldn't make any trade deal with them until we get what we want.
So I'm in favor of no trade deal at all.
Let's just keep tariffing them.
Let's make it hard for them to operate.
And maybe they'll stop killing tens of thousands of people in our country.
You can always hope.
I saw a article on CNN that says that there's a new poll about 2020 frontrunners for president on the Democrat side.
Who do they say is the frontrunner on the Democrat side?
Oh, here's a big surprise.
I'm so surprised.
It's Kamala Harris.
Who told you that Kamala Harris would be the chosen Democratic candidate for president?
I did. When did I tell you that?
Long time ago.
Months and months and months ago.
Why did I tell you that?
Well, who was the front runner on the polls?
You have to admit that this is kind of funny.
It's funny that for months and months and months we've been told that the front-runner on the Democrat side is Joe Biden.
In what universe do the Democrats put an old white man on the top of their ticket?
In what universe was that even a little bit possible?
Let me tell you what, universe.
None. Was there one serious person in the world who thought Joe frickin' Biden was going to be the frontrunner when it came down to the, you know, actually voting time?
Who really thought that?
And for months, I've been watching these...
I'm trying not to curse as much as I want to.
For months, we've been watching this weird pretend reporting Where people on the left would look at us, you know, the rest of the country with a straight face and say, well, I think this has to be done with Dale.
I think Dale has to do this.
Yep. The front runner for 2020 for our team is Joe Biden.
I totally mean it.
when it comes right down to it we're totally going to vote for the really old white guy who says embarrassing things all the time and maybe he touches people the way they don't want to be touched that's totally our brand come on was there was there anybody who believed and i mean this seriously anybody was there one person on the planet earth And as 7 billion people,
was there really even one person, even Joe Biden, who thought that Joe Biden would be the Democrats' choice to run for president?
On what planet was that even a little bit possible?
Alright, so now the world has gone back into balance.
Kamala Harris was always the threat.
She was always the threat.
And she will rise to the ranks until she's, unless we have some new surprise that we didn't know about her.
Let's talk about North Korea.
There's an article in the New York Times saying the dumb old Trump administration fell for it again and North Korea has all these secret missile making plants that are ramping up.
So let me summarize what I just said.
The New York Times, who was instrumental in creating the Iraq War.
Am I wrong about that?
Was it not New York Times reporting that, to a large extent, mobilized the country to go to war against Iraq?
I'm right about that, right?
And now they're mobilizing us to go to war with North Korea with similarly not good information.
What kind of credibility should you give to the New York Times when they say there's a country that maybe we need to bomb because it looks like they're building weapons of mass destruction?
Right. Yeah, the New York Times is not a credible news source for this kind of story.
I would imagine that they're credible for a range of different types of stories.
There may be a whole universe of things where the New York Times is completely credible, completely accurate and a high standard, but I don't think it's about politics, and I don't think it's about what countries are building weapons to go kill us.
For that, they are the enemy of the people.
They have proven that.
So do not believe anything you see coming out of the New York Times about whether or not we need to go to war.
That, my friends, is not credible.
Now I'm seeing some reports that the Democrats are looking to lawyer up and bury the Trump administration with lawsuits.
What do you think would happen if they do that?
What do you think will happen if the Democrats decide to go full WMD and actually execute on all of their plans to bury the administration in lawsuits and discovery and indictments?
Well, number one, they will certainly lose in 2020.
I suppose they would hope to be running against Trump And have him weakened by then.
But you know what they say, if you try to kill the king, you better make sure you can do it.
And how sure would the Democrats be that even with this massive blizzard of what they're going to send against the president, how sure are they going to be that they could take him down?
Because if they don't take him down, Guess where Congress goes back to?
If you want to give the Republicans a total stranglehold over the system, just go full lawyer.
Because there's nothing that the voting public loves more than wasting their frickin' time and ruining their own country with lawyers.
Can you think of anything, maybe taxes?
What is it the Republicans, and even Democrats, I suppose, hate more than taxes?
Lawyers! The Democrats are going to turn their entire party into Avenatti.
They're actually, you know, I make fun of the Democrats for having the worst strategies you've ever seen, like to the point where they're laughably bad.
Can you imagine the room when they did this strategy?
Let me take you into that room now.
Imagine, if you will, going back not too far, a few days ago probably, in which the Democrats were huddled and trying to figure out how to improve their brand.
I believe it went like this.
Well, what are we going to do to improve our brand in the 2020 election?
What is a good role model?
Somebody who is very popular, charismatic.
Somebody who we would like to emulate.
I've got it. Michael Avenatti.
Wait, is that his first name? Michael?
I don't even know his first name because we just call him Avenatti.
Let's go with Avenatti.
He was so popular Doing bullshit, legal stuff against the president, we should just follow that model and expand on it.
We should all be Avenatti's.
Instead of saying, I am Spartacus, let us say, I am Avenatti.
No. I am Avenatti.
No. I am Avenatti.
Because if you're going to help your brand, you want to go full Avenatti.
Full Avenatti. That is our strategy.
Yes! Yes!
We finally got a winning strategy!
People love him, right?
We're right about that, right?
People love him? And all he does?
Yes! I thought so!
Everybody in the room is agreeing with me.
Full Avenatti! Full Avenatti!
this scene.
I believe that is exactly what the meeting looked like.
Thank you.
May have been more or less fist pumping.
What is Avanadi's first name?
I literally don't know his first name.
By the way, I had a brief interaction with Avenatti on Twitter.
I don't know if anybody saw that.
But we went easy on each other.
So Avenatti came into one of my Twitter comments recently.
And I don't remember the topic.
It doesn't matter. But he made some semi-humorous anti-Trump comment and I made a somewhat inoffensive joke about it.
Mike, so it's Michael.
Alright then. So, the Democrats have their plan for total self-immolation.
The question is, how successful could you expect them to be?
Well, here's what I would say.
If you're the President of the United States, I think you should just ask the public what they want.
You should just say to the public, We can either have a government that does nothing but sue each other.
And believe me, if they do try to tie up the president, if they try to stop the president with just legal tricks, there are some things which you can guarantee will happen.
Number one, they'll get killed in 2020.
That's a guarantee. Number two, and by the way, apparently they're so dumb that they're going to do it anyway.
Number two, you can guarantee that Republicans will respond with absolute devastating career and life-ruining kind of tit for tat.
And it won't be just against one person.
The Republicans will try to take out the entire Democratic hierarchy, every top politician, and even probably just popular backers like celebrities and stuff.
So if the Democrats do, as a strategy, go full lawyer, full Avenatti, what you can guarantee is that the Democratic side will be devastated by what the Republicans will do to them.
Because they kind of have to.
They have to have that threat of mutually assured destruction.
And since the Republicans will, or the Democrats will primarily be aiming at the President, And the President will at least be a little bit insulated by the office and armies of lawyers and stuff like that.
But the Democratic field is wide and deep and unprotected.
And they're all going to get sued into bankruptcy and destruction.
So we're probably at the verge of the Democrats driving the country into complete ruin.
by the Avenatti approach to governing.
That's what it is, right?
It's the Avenatti strategy.
Let's call it what it is.
They're going full Avenatti.
Now, when you see, who's the guy on the Democrat...
I can't remember his name.
Who's the Democrat who's going to be behind all this?
The one who was talking too loudly on the train.
Remind me his name.
He is not a sympathetic character.
Yeah, Schiff, he's part...
No, the other guy. Who's the guy who was talking on the train?
Nadler. Jerry Nadler.
Here's the other thing that the Democrats get wrong.
Jerry Nadler...
is not a sympathetic character so if he becomes the face of your Avenatti attack you're doing something wrong because that makes him the sort of the the focus of your party and he's an old white guy and if you're an old white guy and you're trying to be the face of the democratic party and Schiff has the same problem right If they become the face of the Democratic Party,
what's that do to the Democratic Party?
Is that who they want to be their standards-bearers?
Nadler, Schiff, and Avenatti?
Three white guys? I got a feeling that that's not going to be popular on their own side.
I don't know if they've done any studies on that.
So, anyway, finishing up.
If Nadler and Schiff and those guys decide to go full Avenatti as their governing plan...
I think, first of all, they underestimate how protected the president is.
Meaning that the president can just say, I'm not going to give you any information.
Can you imagine the president just saying, I'll tell you what, I'm not going to give them any information until I leave office.
Just period. I'm just not going to give them anything.
Because if I do, The government will be crippled.
And it's clear that the people don't want that.
After I'm out of office, then we can see how much of this matters.
But I've got a feeling he might just say, I'm just not going to give you anything.
That's it. Now what about Mueller?
And what about this guy Whitaker?
I don't know if you read Whitaker's bio, but at least part of his biography associates him closely with, and I guess he was paid by, a company that was accused of being, credibly accused, of being just a scam company.
So if there's nothing else that bothers you about Whitaker, that should bother you a lot.
And it's a different situation, I would say, than, you know, somebody's going to say, hey, isn't that like Trump University?
My take on Trump University is that that was a licensed deal, essentially.
And the person who licenses, even if they do a commercial for it, they really don't know what's happening in the company.
So it's completely believable that Candidate Trump, President Trump, Private Citizen Trump had, I guess, hundreds of entities that were licensed or businesses under his control.
He would do little commercials for lots of them.
The odds that Trump actually knew what Trump University was doing that got them in trouble are pretty low.
It's pretty low that he actually understood what was happening there.
Because that's just not how licensing deals work.
I've licensed, you know, I personally have licensed to hundreds of companies.
I don't know what they do.
Oh, you just make sure that something about the license looks good, but if then you license it and that company goes off and does terrible things, it's not like you're checking all their work.
All you did is license a character or license a name.
And indeed, I'm currently working with lots of companies.
You know, publishers, my syndication company, a number of other companies.
How much do I know about what they're doing that I might not like?
Not a lot. Not a lot.
But in the case of Whitaker, he was actually a lawyer, and he had a sort of a key role in that company.
So I would say there's very little chance that Whitaker is going to remain in the job, especially the way Trump has talked about him lately, saying he doesn't really know him.
There's nothing else you really need to know.
If you're trying to predict what's going to happen to Whitaker, the president's saying, well, I don't really know the guy.
There's not much else to talk about.
By the way, did you know that you can give me super hearts?
If you don't know what super hearts are, they are down by the comments.
There's a little heart that's got little lines coming off it.
If you press that, that would give you the ability to...
Send me tiny amounts of money to say thank you for your content and can you put it on more platforms?
So the money that I make from the Super Hearts and the money I make from the Patreon account, which is at Scott Adams Says, that money is very small, but it goes toward just putting this content on different platforms.
So all it does is spread the message.
It doesn't make me rich.
So if you want to do that, that's how you do it.
Yeah, so down by the comments section on the comment line, there should be a little icon of a heart.
If you push it, you'll see some options for how to use those.
And thank you. Thank you for all of those who you did.
Now let's talk about What else you wanna talk about?
Oh, so I'm saying that, let's talk about the election.
So remember I told you the thing to worry about with all this election allegations is that we were very much in the fog of war.
And if there's one concept which can be very, very useful to you, It is how to understand this fog of war stuff.
Now the fog of war...
Where that saying comes from is that in war, it's very hard to get information about what's really happening because there's a fog and complexity and people are lying and you can't get information.
So the first reports out of any kind of a war zone tend to be unreliable because of the fog of war.
But this also applies to almost any political news.
Almost any political news We'll also have a fog of war quality because the world is a complicated place now.
And when it's complicated and there are people on both sides and there are lots of people reporting and there's people making up stuff and the first version of events gets misreported and somebody didn't hear something.
So you should have expected that everything coming out of Broward County about the recount, no matter where you heard it, whether you heard it from someone you trust, I would say in this context, Marco Rubio would be completely honest About what he believes is happening.
So I don't think that Marco Rubio is telling any lies here.
He seems like a pretty straight shooter when it comes to stuff like this.
I'm not going to say that every single thing he's ever said passes every fact check.
But on stuff like this, my impression is that Marco Rubio is completely straight in terms of reporting this.
Which is different from saying he's right.
Because he's also in the fog of war.
He's reporting on things that look questionable, and they're certainly questionable.
So it's completely honest to say, hey, we're hearing this, we saw this, we don't understand why this could be, this seems unusual, et cetera.
So you should certainly pay attention to that, and it makes perfect sense that there's a serious investigation and people are trying to get to the bottom of it.
That said, I don't believe we've found anything that qualifies as proof of manipulation beyond the trivial yet.
I think there was something like 12 votes that got mixed in with 200 or something, but you can't really count that.
As meaning something about the whole.
Of course there are small errors.
Nobody's questioning that.
But, you know, or 22, somebody's saying, but if it's small numbers, that doesn't mean anything.
If it's really tens of thousands, you really got to look at that.
So somebody's saying it's untrue.
So I made a statement that there's nothing of significance that has been proven for voter fraud.
Somebody immediately said that's not true.
This is my point.
We're all looking at the same stuff and we're seeing completely different versions of it.
We don't know which is true.
Whoever it is who's positive you've seen something that tells you absolutely there's a big problem, you don't know that.
You just know what some news source told you, some pundit imagined, somebody hallucinated.
You don't really know anything.
It's total fog of war.
I also don't know anything, because I'm in the same fog that you are.
It is important to take everything you hear so far about Broward with a gigantic grain of salt.
I would say that they are no more, everything you hear out of Broward for a while will be no more dependable than the New York Times.
Talking about Iraq or talking about North Korea, it's a very low standard of dependability.
That said, could there be a massive voter fraud?
Very easily. I would say the odds that Broward is actually a case of exactly what it looks like.
And, you know, I'm not immune to the fact that it looks even to my eyes, as much as I'm trying to be objective and not jump to conclusion.
I have the same reaction most of you do, which is, well, it certainly looks like there's massive voter fraud, but looking like it is very different than it actually being there.
So it is possible, in fact, it is likely that it could look like massive fraud without it existing.
It could look like that.
So just wait.
Shall we have a second simultaneous sip?
Ah.
Alia Alexander and Laura Loomer have the evidence.
Well, are Ali Alexander and Laura Loomer two people who understand the situation in Broward well enough and have enough access that you should trust them during the fog of war?
Now, no offense to either of those people, but it wouldn't matter who you replace them with in my example.
You could take them out and put in whoever you want if you like somebody else better.
We're not in a place where you can believe anything.
We're just not there. Um...
Yeah, other people are saying they don't have any evidence.
So the thing you can be sure of is that some people will say they have the evidence and some people will say they don't.
So what do you know?
If you know only those two things, you don't really know anything, which is my point.
Yeah, so a ballot box was found in a closet.
What does that tell you?
That tells you something about one ballot box.
If they were trying to change an election that had, I don't know, a difference of thousands and thousands, would they do it by putting one ballot box in a closet?
Not likely. The example that you give of, oh, they found a ballot box in a closet, that operates against your theory, not for it.
If they found a warehouse full of ballot boxes, well, you'd have a really good point there.
If they found one ballot box in one closet, you don't know anything.
Yeah, I know some of you are saying, well, what if there are many closets?
Well, that is speculation.
Check the other closets.
Yeah, of course, you'd want to get as much information as you can.
But if all you know so far...
Is one closet, one ballot box that argues deeply for incompetence, probably at a minor level.
It does not argue for conspiracy.
It argues against it.
Because it seems like it'd be a lot of work to have one ballot box and one closet in lots of different places.
Because the problem with that conspiracy is you'd have to have What, hundreds of people in on it?
And hundreds of people would have to coordinate their one box in their one closet and wait for the secret signal.
All right, take your box out of the closet, everybody.
Drive to the rented car.
That's a stretch. So my take on the Bella box and the closet, yes, it raises questions, and I'd like to know the answers to them, as would you.
But it's not evidence of massive fraud.
It's evidence of one box and one closet.
That's what it is.
Now, of course, you should wonder if there are other closets with other boxes, but until that comes into evidence, all you know is one box and one closet.
Why are boxes being misplaced, somebody says.
So far, one box.
So you should ask, not why are boxes misplaced, but why is box?
Why is that one box in the whole frickin' country misplaced in the closet?
Well, probably lots of things got misplaced that day, but they probably don't add up to much.
Micro-fraud. Now, as hard as I'm trying to convince you that you haven't seen evidence that you should consider reliable yet, and I'm trying pretty hard to take you to that place, I still have the same questions you do, which is that, given what we've seen, it does look like massive fraud to me.
It looks like it to me.
But that's different from it being true.
I spent much of yesterday talking to people who had seen ridiculous things and thought they were true.
I'm not even going to tell you what topic it was.
But let me say I spent much of yesterday talking to people deeply hypnotized who believed they had seen things that literally don't exist.
And were convinced by evidence that wasn't evidence.
They had seen an orange and thought it was a banana right in front of them.
And they are absolutely positive that their version of reality is correct.
So just being positive that things look fishy and there's no other way you could explain it doesn't mean anything.
And by the way, one of the topics in my upcoming book called LoserThink is How a lack of imagination can really hurt you.
I don't know when was last time or if I explained this before.
Somebody's asking me, how do you explain X?
That is a perfect introduction to my point.
Thank you. Let me say something that you're going to hate.
If your argument for why you believe something is, quote, how do you explain X unless this is true?
If that's your version of understanding the world, then you have one of the worst ways to understand the world anybody had.
Let's say you put two people together.
Oh, let me give you a specific example.
So, somebody said to me, if Q is not real, you all know who Q is.
If Q is not real, how do you explain that a photograph that the president tweeted, I think, had as its file name, DoitQ?
How do you explain that, Scott?
How do you explain that? Now, here's my point today.
If you're asking the question, so, oh, how do you explain that, unless...
You're almost always hallucinating.
Not every time.
But when you hear that set up, you almost can walk away from the conversation.
If that's true, how would you explain this?
How would you explain this? When somebody asks, how would you explain, you think what they're saying is these facts line up to tell one story.
That's not what's happening.
When somebody says, how do you explain this?
Unless, here's what they're actually saying.
I have a bad imagination.
That's how you should hear that.
Whenever anybody says to you, well, then how do you explain X? The first thing you should think is, this person I'm talking to has a very bad imagination.
That's mostly the problem.
Most of the time.
Now sometimes, how do you explain X does actually mean that there's only one explanation and you can get a conviction, etc.
But in the real world, outside of the court system, how do you explain x?
Almost always, and I'm going to say 9 out of 10 times, simply means you have a bad imagination.
So let's go back to my example.
So somebody who was a Q follower said, well, if Q isn't real, how do you explain that the president tweeted something that had as a file name, do it Q? How do you explain that, Scott?
Explain that to me. Try to explain that to me.
All right, here's my explanation.
The President of the United States doesn't name files.
Do I need to go on?
The most obvious explanation is that somebody else named the file, and then somebody who thought it was funny, and maybe there are Q followers or whatever, and they thought, well, this is funny.
I'll just name it this file and stick it in there and see what happens.
Or the president just tweeted a file and didn't know what the file name was because it didn't matter.
Or, it's a complete coincidence, and the file names all had random letters, and there's a lot of people tweeting a lot of stuff, and somebody was going to do something that had a cue in it.
And something else that made sense.
So, if you can't imagine...
What the other explanations are?
That's a failure of imagination.
Or a typo.
Somebody said it could just be a typo.
If you can't even imagine what the other possibilities are, you haven't proven that something happened.
You have proven you have a bad imagination.
Do people get that?
Is that point clear?
Because it violates almost everything that the average person operates under.
It's almost the opposite of your worldview for most people.
And I will further make this point.
Imagination, the ability to imagine, is, if it's like every other human capability, probably, you know, fits some kind of a normal curve.
And by that I mean most people have a normal average imagination.
The ability to imagine is just sort of normal.
Some people have an extraordinary ability to imagine.
Other people have no ability to imagine.
Indeed, we learned recently that there are a lot of people in the world, quite a few, as a percentage it's not that many, but enough that you probably know one, who literally can't imagine things visually.
There are a whole bunch of people who don't have visual imagination and didn't know it.
Some people were asking recently, wait a minute, are you saying that you could imagine what it would look like walking through a room that you're not in?
To which I say, yes, I can imagine that, almost like it's real.
My personal powers of imagination are obviously commercial grade, because what I do for a living is imagine things and write them down and make them interesting.
So I've not only been working on my imagination forever, but I feel like maybe I was born with some kind of advantage.
You know, it's just one of the random things that happens.
Sometimes you're good at things, sometimes you're bad at things.
And I feel like I was born with some, you know, natural capacity for imagination, which I have honed over 30 years of career in which I use my imagination commercially every day on a lot of different topics, much of a visual.
So if you say to me, Scott, how can you explain if this is true, this must mean X?
My first reaction is, okay, it could mean this or this or this or this.
It could mean this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this.
Because I have a really good imagination.
And I'll guarantee you that we'll just get rid of all the people who say that.
And I guarantee you that people who have less, let's say, practiced imaginations cannot come come up with 10 alternatives that are more likely than whatever the dumbass thing that people are thinking.
I usually can.
I usually can look at a situation and come up with ten stories about what it could have been that's not the story somebody believes.
If you can't automatically come up with multiple explanations to explain every case of, well, if this is true, how do you explain it?
If you can't come up with ten right away, the problem is your imagination.
It's not imagination, it's critical thinking.
Is it? Yeah, I'm tempted to say that the problem is a lack of critical thinking.
And when I write about it in my book, I will actually put it in that context as well.
But what I'm saying is that in some cases, you really cannot imagine an alternative.
Let me give you an example.
Let's say you watch somebody walk into a room.
You'd have to come up with a constrained example.
But there are certainly cases where you have, let's say in the context of a court case, there are certainly cases where the evidence is somebody's on a video, the DNA is there, you've got a picture of them, you've got their DNA, you've got 10 witnesses, and they've confessed.
Is there really a second alternative in that case?
It's not a question of critical thinking.
It's a question of, as I describe that situation, you literally can't imagine another explanation.
I have a good imagination.
I can't imagine if all of those pieces of evidence were true and it's on video and you've got DNA and all that.
I can't imagine any alternative to the fact that it's exactly what you think it is.
So, Look for situations which are constrained, like a court case.
Those are always good for understanding what limits of things are.
But in the wild, in the real world, Almost every time in the real world, there's not enough information to rule out lots of alternative explanations.
The real world is messy.
We're really bad at understanding.
Let me give you an example.
Here's an example I'm writing about in my book.
So I'll give you a reason.
My car is very dirty.
So for a rich guy, I have an unusually dirty car.
Part of it is that it's the kind of car where the brake pads are always messing up the wheels, so two days after I get it washed, it looks filthy anyway.
But my car is very dirty.
If you saw my car, and you saw that it was very dirty, and you knew it was my car, what assumption would you make about why my car is dirty?
What possible reason would a rich guy who has the money and the time, I could easily take care of this?
Lazy, right? If you knew me, you'd know that I have money, so you wouldn't think I was poor.
You might think I was too busy.
You might think I was lazy.
You might think I'm saving water.
I'll bet not one of you can come up with a real reason.
Right. So watch how you're all imagining different possibilities.
None of you have the right reason.
Here's the reason, and this is a cautionary tale about the limits of imagination.
The real reason my car is dirty is that the self-car washes where you get gas and then you can clean your car, those are what I would be using if I were washing my car on a regular basis.
Maybe I'd get it detailed at different times, but basically I would just use the car wash.
The reason I don't do it, I have a fear of public instructions.
Did anybody see that?
Did any of your hypotheses be, well, Scott has a fear of public instructions.
Nobody guessed that.
Here's what I mean.
If I drive into the car wash, and somebody, you know, in the line of cars are behind me, and I pull up to this unfamiliar situation where there are all these instructions, there'll be, you know, five different options, and, you know, pull your car up here, and don't do this, you know, do put your brakes on, don't put your brakes on, remember to take this down, take your keys, hit this thing, push this button.
For whatever reason, one of the things I know about myself Is that I'm too literal in a lot of situations.
So in other words, if I read a sign that says, wait here, I'll never leave.
And other people will say, no, no, obviously the sign means you wait here until it's time to go.
And I would say, well, that's not what the sign says.
The sign says, wait here.
Why would I drive forward When the sign says, wait here.
So that's a dumb example, but I have real problems interpreting public directions, because they're often written so poorly.
And here's what is in my mind that's completely irrational, except that it's based on experience, so it's not that irrational.
That I would get in the middle of this group of people who just want to wash their cars, and my car would get stuck.
Or something would happen after I'm in the middle of the line where for whatever reason I can't figure out how to make the instructions work or the right way to drive into the car wash and then something weird would happen.
Now, every one of you should be saying to yourself, Scott, what you're explaining is not rational, and how many different ways are there to solve that?
There must be a hundred ways to solve that, Scott.
You could take somebody with you who knows how to do it.
You could just do it when the traffic is low.
You could maybe read up on it.
Maybe you could Google about it before you go.
Maybe you could talk to the person in the, you know, the little attendant and have the attendant show you how to do it.
All true. And yet, the reason my car is dirty is because I have a fear of public instructions and embarrassing and inconveniencing other people.
It's not the embarrassment exactly.
So if you think it's about embarrassment, that's slightly wrong.
It's a fear of inconveniencing other people.
It's the same reason I don't like to golf.
The main reason I don't golf, if you said, Scott, why don't you golf?
You probably would never guess my real reason.
It's the same reason.
I don't like to be the person who shanks one and loses a ball and makes the foursome behind me angry because they're waiting to play.
I can't abide the situation of inconveniencing other people.
To me, it's just about the worst thing and the feeling in the world.
So I only point this out not to show you that I'm weird, but to show you that in the real world, when you don't have a constrained situation and every possibility is possible, that a lot of the reason for stuff is completely invisible to the average person.
No way you would have known why my car is dirty.
But you would have thought you did.
I'll bet most of you would have bet money on it.
It's like, okay, I can bet money on this.
He's lazy. Or I can bet money on this.
He likes the environment, so he's just not washing it.
You would have come up with lots of ideas, but you wouldn't have come up with the real one.
So the real world is full of unimaginable complexity, which we imagine we can understand and we can't.
So when you're looking at this Broward County situation, when you're looking at the President of the United States, is he colluding with Russia?
Any of these big questions, you simply are not equipped, including me, and I would consider myself...
Easily in the top 1% of people who can imagine stuff effectively.
Probably easily, just because I do it for a living, right?
People who do anything for a living are going to be in the top percentages.
All right, so there you go.
That's my point. Don't let your lack of imagination be confused with a certainty about what is the only explanation for something.
And by the way, most of the Q believers are suffering from exactly this.
The Q believers are not looking at positive evidence or like proof, I guess I'd call it, not evidence.
They're not looking at like positive logical proof.
They're mostly saying, well, how can you explain this?
And unfortunately, there are lots of explanations for whatever this is.
It's a coincidence. It was not really predicted.
It was just, it was a good guess.
There are lots and lots of ordinary explanations because the Q thing is exactly like a hoax.
So here's the thing. If somebody is doing something that looks exactly like a hoax and has all the characteristics of a hoax, and your take on it is, well, how could it not be true?
If that's your take, it just means that you've not been exposed to enough hoaxes.
Because if you've seen enough of them, they're kind of obvious after a while.
I personally have studied hoaxes.
It's actually a field of interest.
I've studied how to do magic because it's how to fool people.
I've studied hypnosis because it's how to fool people.
I've studied persuasion because it's essentially the same thing.
So I've studied field after field after field.
I've looked at mass hysteria.
I've really looked into them.
I know what a scam and a hoax looks like and they have a very distinctive characteristic.
Q is one of those.
Now, if you're telling me, how do you explain this file name?
How do you explain this, Scott?
The answer is, I could give you 10 explanations.
And they're all, every one of the ones I can imagine may not be true, but they're all more likely than Q is magic, but he gets a lot of things wrong because that helps you do your own research.
If you just say it out loud, One of the ways to tell you you're in a hoax is to just say out loud what it is.
Just use the words and say it out loud.
Well, I believe that there's a mysterious person named Q who claims to have secret information to predict the future.
We know that much, if not most, of those predictions are not true.
But he's still doing it because it helps us learn to do our own research.
Did I say anything that wasn't actually a good description of Q right there?
I don't think so.
I mean, it's pretty easy to go to the internet and Google Q prediction failures and to get a gigantic list of the things that weren't true.
If your entire belief system is based on how important it is to do your own research and you have never Googled Q failed predictions, I'm not sure you've done your own research, if you know what I mean.
Let's drink to that.
Everybody, simultaneous sip with me one more time.
Yeah, somebody said climate change.
And I'll say this again because it fits into the context.
The science of climate change is probably pretty solid.
I'm no scientist, so if the bulk of scientists say, hey, we got the chemistry right, we got the physics right, I would say, yeah, probably.
Probably true. But the second part, the modeling, if you're just talking about the modeling of the predictions of climate science, it's presented in exactly the form of a hoax.
Does that make it a hoax?
Well, not necessarily.
But if you're trying to convince me that something is true, Don't package it exactly like a hoax.
Here's what I mean.
I've said this before. There's a common hoax that people who study hoaxes, people who study scams, and I have, all know.
And it works like this.
You send out 10,000 emails with three different recommendations for stocks.
You know, everybody gets only one, but they're different ones.
Some of those stocks go up, and then next week you send only to the people who by chance got the emails with the right predictions, and you say, well our last one was right, here's another prediction.
Some of those predictions, you know, because they do more than one prediction to that same group, some of those might be right.
And then you've got two, totally by chance, that went up.
And then you winnow that group, and now you've got maybe ten people.
You send them, you know, two different predictions.
Half of the ten get one that goes up.
You got lucky. So there's a small group, maybe five people, who just got three amazing predictions in a row.
What they believe is that you really can predict.
So when the fourth one comes through and they say, we'll give you the name of this fourth one if you give us $10,000, what does that person think?
They think you just got three in a row and these were very unlikely.
So definitely I'm going to give you $10,000.
This is like free money.
I've never been so sure of something in my life.
That's a very famous scam.
It is exactly what climate models are.
Climate models are people saying, okay, if it's not in this general zone that we're all agreeing, what would you do with that model?
If I decide to do some climate modeling and I come up with something that's way out of the range, it's way too low or it's way too high, what happens to my model?
Does it get added to the model and then they just increase the range and say, well, now our range is this big?
No, that doesn't happen.
That doesn't happen because climate models are the exact model of a famous hoax, which is you just throw away the ones that are out of the range.
So if it doesn't fit the range that you're pretty sure must be right, you tweak it until it does.
Because you can't give funding if you're the person with the only climate model that doesn't fit everybody else's range.
That doesn't work.
So if you're trying to sell climate change with models, just know you're using the form of a hoax that is impossible not to recognize as a hoax form, even if it's true.
Which is an important point, because when you call me a science denier or a climate science denier, keep in mind that I didn't just do that.
That didn't happen. Nothing I said was denial.
What it said was, the way it's messaged and packaged Is identical to a hoax.
Now, if that's unimportant, you don't really study these things.
Because it does indicate that the great likelihood is that they don't know what they're doing, or it's accidental, or people are influenced by money, etc.
Now, here's another thing that people would say.
They would say, well, how do you explain that the great consensus of climate scientists and all their peer-reviewed articles are all on the same side?
How do you explain that, Scott?
Give me one good explanation.
Can you give me any explanation of how all of these people who are science experts would be on the same side, Scott?
Explain that to me.
Explain that to me. To which I say...
What's wrong with your imagination?
I can give you lots of explanations for that, and they're all more likely than yours.
Number one, something like 70% of peer-reviewed studies turn out to be unreproducible.
Meaning that, in general, if something is peer-reviewed, what should be your opinion of it?
If something is peer-reviewed, your opinion of it should be, it's probably not true.
Because 70% of the peer-reviewed studies are not true.
Now, if there are lots of studies, that of course adds to the credibility.
But, suppose you also add money to the system, and people have, you know, they have money on the line.
Is it science denial to say that all those scientists could be wrong or biased or in a hallucination because money is involved?
Well, if you believe in science, you would believe in the science of incentives, the science of psychology, the science of how people act the way they do.
That's science too, right?
If you really believe in science, you should be a skeptic on climate science, because there are two sciences involved.
One science is climate science, and you should not ignore that.
You should listen to what they have to say.
But there's another science, which is the science of psychology and how people are influenced by peer pressure, by clues in the environment, influenced by money.
And that's science too.
If you choose this science and you reject this science, you can't claim to be pro-science.
If you are skeptical, it means you've accepted that the scientists have done the work and they know more than you do.
But you've also accepted that the science of psychology and the way humans work and the way people come to believe things that aren't true, plus the entire history of science in which we've seen many cases where the consensus of scientists were wrong.
I used nutrition as my best example.
When I grew up, all the scientists who were nutrition scientists were on the same side.
They were all wrong.
There were plenty of peer-reviewed journals.
They were all wrong.
Why were they all wrong?
Because there was money in the system.
The food manufacturers were funding the studies and they were telling the government to tell you they were real.
So if you are not old enough to understand that science has a history of being this certain and also this wrong, Then you don't understand science.
So the science denier is the one who is positive that climate science is exactly what the climate scientists say.
They understand one-third of the science that you need to understand.
They would have to add an understanding of the social sciences, psychology, incentive, how money changes things, how people can be fooled, how peer-reviewed things can get peer-reviewed even though they're completely ridiculous.
You'd have to understand that part of science, too.
And you'd also understand the history of science in which it is a common phenomena.
A common phenomena for so many scientists to be on the same side and wrong.
It's common.
If you don't know that, that it's common, then you say things like, well, Scott, explain to me why all of the climate scientists be on the same side.
Come up with any explanation.
Go! Go!
Give me any explanation how that is possible.
And the answer is, I have a really good imagination and I believe in science.
Science itself tells us to be very skeptical about this situation.
Everything in science is consistent with what I just said, that if you understand how brains work, and that's science too, you should be very skeptical of the models Because the models fit the exact form of a hoax, a well-known hoax, a very well-understood, well-known, common hoax, same format.
All right, that's enough about that.
Do I seem like I'm in an aggressive mood lately?
I've been accused of being a little too aggressive lately.
Somebody says yes.
And I'm going to sign off now.
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