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Nov. 26, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
42:24
Episode 317 Scott Adams: Lying Pictures, Chinese Super-Babies, Senator Hyde-Smith
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Yes, I'm a little late this morning.
Took me a little extra time to find my coffee.
You know, if you don't have your coffee, sometimes you can't find your coffee.
You might be wondering why I've got one cup in my hand and one coffee mug over my shoulder.
It's because I like coffee.
You should too. And hey, you know what time it is.
It's time for the simultaneous sip.
It's time for coffee with Scott Adams.
It's time to grab your mug, your cup, your container, your chalice, your stein, your beverage holder.
Lift it to your lips and join me for the simultaneous sip.
Now, as you know, it's the holiday season and the news is getting squirrely and less fun in some ways.
In other words, the news is not big anymore, but there's still lots of it.
So let's talk about the news that's not that big, but there's lots of it.
You may have heard that Eric Bolling, who lost his son to an opioid overdose, I believe, is having an event with Melania at Liberty University talking about the issue.
And I'm just going to call that out to give some kudos to both Eric Bolling and to Melania for raising this issue.
So the higher its priority goes, the more likely we're going to get something productive done.
So good work by Eric Bolling and by Melania, who is definitely being best.
All right. Have you ever heard that pictures don't lie?
There's a photo on the front of CNN, their page, Where there's a photo of a woman with two young children and she's running in fear from a cloud of...
What is it?
Smoke? Tear gas.
So there's tear gas. She's at the border.
She's part of the caravan. And...
She's running from the smoke.
And... It's a scary picture.
Now... Did you see the picture before they cropped it?
This is a cropped picture.
I saw the original before it was cropped.
And if you see the wider picture, it's narrowly cropped, so you can just see the gas and the woman with two young girls running in fear from it.
Now, first of all, distance-wise, the gas looks to be maybe I don't know, 50 feet away?
And it's just a little cloud of gas on the ground, and it's just tear gas?
Somebody says it's not gas, but whatever it is that the police use to disperse groups.
Somebody says it's a smoke bomb, not a tear gas.
Oh, I wonder if that's true.
Could be. It could be just to scare people into running, so that would be even smarter, probably.
But here's the thing.
I saw the picture before it was cropped.
And in the background, there's something like several hundred young men trying to climb over the wall and invade the country.
Now, I know you don't call it invading because they don't have weapons and they're trying to escape their country and stuff like that.
So I get you can play with the words and not call it an invasion.
But this is one of those clear situations Where photos lie.
And more than that, it's an intentional lie.
You know, sometimes a photo can be misleading.
Sometimes you can interpret it wrong.
But in this case, it's obvious that a decision was made to crop out all of the things that would refute the photo itself.
So that, my friends, is a lie.
That's fake news, even though the photo is photographing an actual event.
These are real people, and I do feel sorry for them.
Can you imagine having two young kids and being essentially homeless in a different country, and you don't know if you can get into this one?
So from an empathy perspective, I've got plenty of empathy.
So I would like to see a good outcome for these folks, as well as everybody else.
But the photo is a lie.
Because the real story that the photo would tell, if you saw it, was that just a very few people are even female or children.
I don't know what the percentage is, but that photo would make it look like they were literally the only ones there, and the rest were men.
That's not true. That's just what the photo would look like if they hadn't cropped it.
Somebody has prompted me to talk about...
Apparently Alan Dershowitz has predicted...
That the Mueller report will be politically, quote, devastating for the president.
Politically devastating.
And somebody asked me, hey, are you going to change your opinion on the Mueller thing now that Dershowitz says it will be politically devastating?
And the answer is, no, because that was always my opinion.
Does there anybody who thinks that the Mueller report will not be politically devastating?
I don't believe there's anybody who's on any side of this who believes anything else, do they?
I certainly agree with Dershowitz that there's no legal risk that we've seen.
In other words, there's nothing we know of, directly or indirectly, that would suggest that the president is in any legal risk.
But if you put enough lawyers on something, and you have them talk about it long enough, and they produce a report for non-lawyers to read, it's going to be filled with stuff that they can jabber about.
Almost exactly like the president's tax returns.
If you said to me what will be the outcome of the president releasing his tax returns, Which, by the way, I don't think he's going to do, but suppose he was.
What would be your prediction about that?
Well, my prediction would be there's nothing illegal in there, and it would be politically devastating.
Not because there's anything illegal in there, but because it's so much to talk about, so much to be taken out of context, so much to be spun the wrong way, so much to be misinterpreted.
So when Dershowitz says the...
It will be politically devastating, whatever comes out of the Mueller report.
Doesn't everybody think that?
You don't have to be the finest legal mind in the world, which Dershowitz might be.
It's just sort of obvious.
Of course it will be politically devastating.
Now, let's put politically devastating in context.
Politically devastating for a normal politician would mean that's politically devastating.
What does politically devastating mean in the context of President Trump?
It's Tuesday.
That's it.
In the world of President Trump, politically devastating just means something to talk about for a week.
And then there'll be more news.
Do you know how much news the White House will generate at the same time that the Mueller report comes out with its political devastating stuff?
You're never going to see so much progress made in this world than the week that that report comes out, because it'll be trying to take the energy off of the report.
So unlike a normal politician, Who faced with something politically devastating, Would have to crawl under a rock or would have to, you know, just give up or something.
I think the smart money says, and of course there's no way to be certain about any of this stuff, but the smart money says that Trump will just create so much activity at the same time that you can't look away from that the Mueller report will look boring by comparison.
While Trump cannot make the Mueller report go away, and he can't make its conclusions any less politically devastating in terms of the content, he can certainly make them boring.
So I would look for that.
So compared to whatever else he's going to be doing that week when that report comes out, the report is just going to look tedious.
Trust me on that.
So, Alexandria Octavia Cortez, back in the news.
Surprise, surprise. She made some reference to the Holocaust and the caravan or something.
I didn't even have to read it because it doesn't matter what she said.
What matters is how people react to it.
And the way people react to it is, how could she say that?
She's so stupid!
That AOC that we can't stop talking about, that person we're obsessing about, she's so dumb.
Wait, what is she trying to do?
Oh, she's trying to make us only talk about her?
Never mind. Of course!
She's saying provocative things.
Did he think that was going to stop?
Does it matter whether her analogy is a good analogy?
Nah, doesn't matter.
Does it matter that it might be factually inaccurate?
I don't know if it is.
I don't even know what she said. Nah, doesn't matter.
None of that stuff matters.
All that matters is that you're talking about her.
Now, I know I'm gonna get in trouble for this next thing, but I don't know.
What is it about me that can't keep out of trouble?
There's a white supremacist writing for CNN. Let me see if I can find his opinion piece.
Now you're probably saying to yourself, wait, what?
What did you say? There's a white supremacist?
It looks like it's already taken down.
Oh my God, did they already take this article down?
It looks like... I'm sorry.
I don't mean to be ignoring you for a moment.
Huh. It looks like they got rid of it 10 minutes after I read it, which would not be the wrong idea.
So let me explain what it was.
I'm not even going to give the name of the person because apparently CNN is too embarrassed about this opinion piece that they even took it down.
It didn't last that long.
Maybe they were going to take it down anyway.
No way to know. So the point of it was that Fox News is using AOC as their new whipping person, according to this white supremacist who is writing for CNN, that Fox News was doing it to get all of its white watchers, white people watching it, all worked up about the invasion of brown people.
And so that was his point of view.
But here's why I'm calling the author, whose name I won't use, a white supremacist.
I'm actually using his own definition.
So the way he defined it in terms of the content of his article was that it would include himself quite clearly.
So his definition of a white supremacist goes like this.
If you say, I'm not talking about race, But there's a cultural thing that has to be considered about immigration, then you're a white supremacist, if you're white.
And if you're obsessing with race, instead of talking about things other than race, you're probably a white supremacist.
Now the article itself did exactly those things.
It talked about culture as being separate from the question of race.
That's exactly what the author used as a definition of somebody who is a racist.
And is a white supremacist.
So the author was modeling the behavior that he was labeling as white supremacy.
And I think maybe it's possible that somebody at CNN caught on to that.
Now, of course, the point of the article was to paint some, I'm not even going to use their names, but he pointed out some hosts at Fox News who he said were complaining about the, quote, browning of America.
Have you ever heard, probably most of you have seen Fox News, have you ever heard a host of Fox News complain about the browning of America?
No. No, you have not heard that.
If there was ever a Fox News person, a pundit or a host, who ever complained about, using this word, the browning of America, Bam!
I believe that they would end the broadcast in the middle, wouldn't they?
Like, I don't even think that show would get to the end of the hour.
They would be yanked off the air.
They would, like, put a commercial on, and they would yank them off the air.
I'm pretty confident that that would be the case.
I mean, maybe they'd go to the end of their show.
But they would definitely be fired.
Like, fired forever.
If anybody on Fox News used that term or even that concept, if anybody even referred to that, they'd be fired in a hot minute.
Who used that word?
A writer for CNN. So simply talking about these topics is what makes you a white supremacist, and the author was talking about these topics, and so by his own definition would be including himself as a white supremacist.
So I guess I'm not too surprised that that article is no longer at least featured on the front.
All right. I had to mention that.
Next, there's a story that I'm not sure how true it is yet, because there are some denials on this story.
But there's a story that a Chinese hospital has been involved in creating a gene-edited baby.
I'll just let that sit there for a while.
So the hospital seems to be denying it, but there are reports that it happened, that a baby was born with some gene editing.
The specific editing that is alleged is that the baby has been created to be resistant to HIV. Think about that.
A baby who is gene edited To not be able to get AIDS. Now, I don't know if it's true or if it's something that's so close to being true it's going to happen any day now.
But what does that say about the next 80 years?
Let's say you're looking at the economic impact of climate change.
Let's say you're looking at that.
We'll talk about that in a minute too.
If you try to look at the economics of the world and you're saying, hey, in 80 years we'll have a 10% hit on the GDP from climate change, even if that's true, who knows what's true in 80 years, but even if it were true, what would it do to healthcare costs if the babies born in the next 10 years can't get diseases?
What would happen to the total health care cost in 80 years if all of the babies born, let's say, 10 years from now and onwards are all gene edited so they just can't get the worst diseases that cost too much money?
What happens in 100 years If you have one country that is all gene edited, because let's say it's a developed country and their rules allow it, but they have a competing country that has no gene editing, either for religious reasons or because they don't have the economics to do it, what would be the defense implications of that?
Because one virus could wipe out one country and not have any impact on the other one.
Because the other one would have all gene-edited babies that can't get whatever disease that is.
Does that become a defense problem?
There are a lot of implications here to think about.
My take on gene editing is that it's guaranteed, meaning that because it can be done and people will want it and there's money and, you know, it has all the qualities will make it a guaranteed trend.
There isn't the slightest chance This is one of those things you can predict with 100% certainty, which is rare.
Usually things have, well, 80% chance this will happen, but gene editing is 100%.
There isn't the slightest chance that in the future, when it becomes easy to edit a baby's genes in the womb, I guess not in the womb.
They must do it in the test tube before it gets in the womb.
But once it's possible and practical and affordable, It'll be legal somewhere.
So if you have the money to do it, you might have to...
Let's take, for example, let's say the United States says it's illegal to do gene editing.
I don't know if we will, but let's just say that for a thought experiment.
If the gene editing happens in the embryo and, you know, in the egg and the sperm, let's say that's where it's happening.
It's in a test tube. It's not in the person.
Can't we just ship that stuff offshore, 12 miles offshore, do the gene editing offshore, and then ship the package back to the United States, put it in a human being?
Would that still be illegal?
Because the gene editing didn't happen in the United States.
So if you're thinking to yourself, we will have laws that will stop that gene editing, good luck with that!
Good luck with that.
I don't see any way laws can stop gene editing.
It's gonna be here.
All right. Will they edit for super athletes?
Of course. They will edit for intelligence, for health, for performance, maybe for happiness.
And all that stuff. But you know, even before that, I think one of the biggest Here's my prediction.
One of the biggest improvements in health outcomes that you're ever going to see will be when we've got big data on what everybody's eating and doing.
So if you had complete data on the population and you say, okay, all the people with this kind of genes are eating this kind of food and doing this kind of exercise and breathing this kind of air and they're having this kind of problem...
But if they take this kind of drug it works, but if they take this kind of drug it doesn't work.
As soon as we have big enough data about what works and what doesn't work in the real world, It's going to be the biggest change in healthcare since maybe washing your hands.
I mean, what are the biggest changes in healthcare?
Probably the discovery of germs, that sort of thing.
But the moment we can tell that, uh-oh, a person with your DNA shouldn't be eating strawberries, not when you've got a cold, stuff like that.
I'm just making that one up.
But once we know that stuff...
Yeah. Will everybody please stop saying Gattaca?
We all know there's a movie called Gattaca where there's gene editing, blah, blah, blah.
The only reason I resist your hundreds and hundreds of comments about Gattaca now and in the future is that the world...
Doesn't really conform to movies like that level.
It may tell us a little bit about the future, but probably not a lot.
So Gattaca exists, but it is not useful or worthy of mention.
I note that you are thinking about it, that's all.
Hello, hello.
Oh, let's talk about Cindy Hyde-Smith.
Now, if you're not following the story, Senator, or I guess she's running in a...
Hold on, let me answer that.
So, she's said some things that are considered racially insensitive.
So apparently in 2007 she said some good things about somebody who was the last remaining daughter of the Confederacy.
And she said something about if somebody invited her to a public hanging, she'd go to the front row.
Indicating that she would do anything this person asked, just in a colorful way.
So people are saying, wait a minute, you're running against a black candidate.
How can you even mention public hangings?
And then they said, how can you glorify the Confederacy when that was obviously a racist situation?
And let me give you my opinion on this.
Usually I have a cleaner opinion.
Usually, if you watch me long enough, I'm usually in one direction or another, and I can commit.
But the Cindy Hyde-Smith stuff...
Oh, and then there's also reports that when she was a kid, she was sent to schools that were created specifically so she didn't have to go to an integrated school.
So, it's easy for me to explain away any one of these things.
If you look at any one of those things individually, they're all meaningless.
They really are. Whatever she did as a child, I don't care.
It wasn't her decision where to go to school.
So I used the 20-year rule, which is anything that happened 20 years ago, I don't care.
Then her use of the word a public hanging, I would consider dumb.
In other words, it was a mistake.
It was a dumb mistake, but it was a mistake.
And then the way she handled the references to the Confederacy, I would consider possibly something that locally didn't sound like a mistake, but perhaps nationally sounds like a bigger mistake in terms of politics.
But it seemed dumb to me.
So I've got really mixed feelings.
I've got mixed feelings, which is, is she doing things which you can unambiguously say are racist?
And the answer is, no.
No, she's not.
So there's no evidence presented which a reasonable person should say, oh yeah, there's some racist stuff going on there.
Has she done things that don't come across as racially, what would be the best word?
Does she seem racially tone deaf?
Yes. So it does appear that she is not sensitive to something that the country is very sensitive about.
Should that matter? Probably.
Probably. You know, it's one thing to not be a racist versus being racist.
That's important. Are you a racist?
Yes or no? That matters a lot.
But then you secondly have to ask the next question.
The next question is...
Can you treat this topic the way the country wants it to be treated?
If you're a representative of the country, and the country clearly has an opinion of what's in the acceptable zone and what isn't, of course there are lots of disagreement in the middle, but broadly speaking, people want their leaders to speak in a certain fashion.
Has she done that?
I think you can make an argument that she's fallen down on that.
So I suppose you could make a partisan argument that you'd rather have a Republican and all that, and that you're not too concerned about her political incorrect approach.
But somebody says the GOP should be embarrassed by this candidate.
Yeah, that's sort of what I'm saying.
I'm saying that this is not something you should be too happy about.
But that's way different than saying she's a racist.
Somebody says, check her record.
I have not looked at her record.
Which way does her record indicate?
Does her record indicate that she's got some problem with race or that she's been on the right side of that?
I don't know the answer I only know what's being reported.
So I don't have an opinion about whether she should be re-elected.
So if you heard it, if that sounded like an opinion, I don't have one on her.
I'll let the great state of Mississippi decide who they want to represent her, but I don't see anything that, at least on its surface, looks racist to me.
It does look terribly tone-deaf, and that should matter as well, but matter in a different way.
Climate change, yes.
Thank you for reminding me.
So I continue to be amazed by this latest report on climate change.
And I talk about the fact that we're all watching two separate movies on one screen.
And I ask myself, is the climate report like a magic trick?
Now a magic trick, one of the ways that you can trick somebody with magic is you get them thinking in a certain pattern and then they can't notice something that's out of the pattern.
Like if people expect something to be true, Their brain can't process it when it's the opposite.
There's a famous video of this where somebody did an experiment where there are, I think, four or five people bouncing a basketball in a circle, like they're each tossing it to each other in the circle, and the viewer is asked to count how many times they throw the basketball to each other.
What you don't notice, because you're counting them throwing the basketball, is that a man, I think it's a man, dressed in a monkey outfit, comes into the circle and starts throwing the basketball and then walks away.
Like, literally, somebody in a monkey outfit walks into the small group of four or five people and starts...
Oh, is it a bear? Maybe it's a bear.
And starts... Contributing and then the people who watched it didn't notice the person in a bear outfit.
There are only like four or five people in the picture and one of them is dressed like a bear.
And people couldn't even see it.
They were, I like to use the phrase, cognitively blind, meaning that their eyes were registering it, clearly, because it was right there, a big part of the picture, but their brain made it invisible, because they weren't expecting it to be there, and they were focusing on something else, which was counting the number of passes.
And so it feels like that with this climate report.
So the climate report came out and the headline said, a new devastating climate report comes out.
It's dire consequences and catastrophe.
So that was how the climate report was framed, right?
Now every other climate report you've seen, I think, or at least the ones that CNN would report on, Say the same thing, right?
It's dire. It's the end of the world.
Climate change is going to kill us.
So the new one comes out, and your brain is so primed.
Here comes another one.
It's dire, it's dire, it's dire.
And so you see it as dire.
But I didn't see it that way.
Why is that? Is it only because I'm primed in the other direction?
Because it could be. I could easily be the one who's experiencing cognitive dissonance.
I can never rule that out.
Because if you're the one experiencing the cognitive dissonance, you can't tell you're in it.
That's what it is. If you could tell you were in it, you wouldn't be having it.
So maybe it's me.
But let me propose this.
I don't know in any world in which a 10% Impact on GDP over 80 years in a context of the GDP probably going up 700% that it's 10% less than it could have been.
So the report I don't believe said that in 80 years our GDP will be 10% less than it is today.
That's not what they said.
Fact check me on that.
They were a little vague about what that 10% means, but I think all they did was count up the dollar impact if it happened today and said, wow, that dollar impact if it happened today would be 10% of our current GDP. Was it something like that?
But the impact isn't happening today.
It's happening, you know, spread out over this 80 years.
So when I read the report, I said to myself, my God, this is the first time we've seen a credible, comprehensive report that says the worst case scenario is no big deal.
A 10% hit to GDP in the context as I understand it, and again, I want some fact checking on this.
I could be totally wrong. But it seems to me that what they're saying is it's 10% less than it could have been.
Meaning that Over 80 years, it might go up 750%, but it could have gone up 803%.
Would we even know the difference?
In other words, if you could fast forward into 80 years from now and just appear 80 years from now and look around, would you say to yourself, my God, everything's fallen apart?
I don't think so. I think if you could time travel to 80 years from now and look around, you'd be in a flying car, all of your diseases would be cured, and poverty would be eliminated.
Yeah, there might be a hurricane or two more than usual, but we would be so good at dealing with them that there would be close to zero deaths from any of this stuff.
So, when I heard this report, That the worst case scenario is a 10% less GDP over 80 years when GDP will go up like immensely during that time.
I said to myself, wow, I can stop worrying.
What did you say to yourself?
Did you say to yourself, It's another dire attack.
I guess things are worse than we thought.
Because the information didn't say that.
It said exactly the opposite of that.
So did you see the monkey with the bear?
I guess it was a bear with a basketball.
Or did you not see the bear?
I saw a bear with a basketball.
Just as clear as I saw it when I watched that video after they told me the bear was there.
The first time I watched it, I didn't see the bear either.
But after I knew it was there, I could see it clear as day.
And when I see this climate report, it looks to me like the worst case scenario, if you did nothing, is no big deal.
But since we won't do nothing, we'll actually do a lot in 80 years, and the pace of technological change is probably so vast that our brain can't even process what will happen in 80 years.
The odds of this actually being a problem, in my mind, has fallen from, ooh, there's a really good solid chance this is gonna have some big, big problems.
That's where I was. Regardless of what percentage is man-made, in my mind, I was thinking, yeah, this could be a big problem.
I agree that this could be a big problem.
After seeing the report, I think it said it's not a problem.
Now, of course, there's a trick to this.
I can only feel comfortable if I'm confident that everybody else is remaining worried.
Because it's the remaining worried part that makes them innovate.
It makes them invent things.
It makes them work on making sure we can manage the climate.
It makes them, you know, harden against future earthquakes.
So I do want the rest of you to worry.
I'm not telling you you shouldn't worry.
I want you to worry as much as you want.
Please worry. Because the more you're worried, the more comfortable I am.
Because the right people will be worrying and therefore doing all the things we need to do to remediate against that problem.
You're old, you don't care.
That's a valid point that my lifespan suggests that I don't have to worry about what's going to happen in 80 years.
You're completely right about that.
However, I'm not so sure I won't be alive.
Because I would be 140 and it is completely within the realm of Reasonable expectation that rich people can kind of live forever.
You know, if it's not in my lifetime, it might be the lifetime after mine, when being rich means you just sort of don't have to die if you don't want to.
Well, we'll see if that becomes the case.
Why would you want to be 140?
So that's an excellent question.
So somebody said, why would you want to be 140?
And let me give you some context on that, because I love the question.
Why would you want to be 140?
Who would want that? Let me ask you this.
Did you ever think when you were 20 that you would want to be 61 years old?
Like when you tried to imagine, what would it be like?
To be over 60, holy hell, that would be...
I might as well just die.
Because if you're over 60, your body's falling apart, you're not doing anything good, it's over, blah, blah, blah.
I have unambiguously the best lifestyle I've ever had at my current age.
There is no age younger...
That I had a better situation on every dimension.
And I'm including health.
I have the best health right now that I've ever had.
Now you're saying, but that's completely different, Scott.
I get it. The 60 is the new 40.
But you're talking about 140.
And my point is, you can't predict what 140 looks like.
In the old days, you could.
In the old days, you could say, all right, I know exactly what an 80-year-old is going to look like because an 80-year-old looks like every other 80-year-old who's ever looked like that throughout history.
But not today.
Today, 140 might be perfect health.
You cannot rule out, and in fact, I would think the odds are actually pretty good, that in 80 years, Somebody who's over a hundred years old might feel exactly the way I feel today.
Completely possible.
Remember, we're doing gene editing.
I don't know what's possible if you can mess with the operating system.
Once you can change my operating system, stem cells, gene editing, immunotherapy, What would kill me besides a truck?
And if a truck kills me, by then I will have ported my consciousness into a computer.
I'm not even sure you can kill me.
In fact, I would go so far as to say there's more chance...
Let me say something provocative to end this periscope.
If I had to look at the odds and place a bet, and you were going to bet on one of these two possibilities, one of them is that I will die And I'll just be dead.
Someday, just like everybody else.
No different than everybody else.
I'll get old.
Eventually I'll die.
That's one possibility.
The other possibility is that I'll live forever.
In some form or other.
Either my biological body will be continually renewed by, you know, tweaking the base code or I'll port my personality to machines and live forever in some form.
I would say the smart money says I live forever.
If I had to bet, it's probably a 60-40.
I think there's a 60% chance I'm already immortal and a 40% chance I'm not.
In 20 years from now, when you ask me again, I'll bet my odds of being immortal are closer to 100%.
Now, you're all saying, I'll pass on that, I don't want to live forever.
And keep in mind that the happiest people are generally women in their 40s and 50s.
Could you imagine, for those of you who are women who are watching this, imagine when you were 16 or imagine when you were 20 years old and you thought to yourself, what would it be like to be in my 40s and 50s?
Wouldn't you assume that it was worse than being 20?
Like, just common sense doesn't, you know, the fact that you got kids and your health is going away and your sex life isn't as good, you don't have the freedom, you're working a job, you got all these problems of being older.
Wouldn't you just assume that women in their 40s and 50s would be less happy?
But the studies show the opposite.
That that's actually your happiest years of your life, is that 40 to 60 range for women.
And in fact, they stay pretty happy into their older age.
So you can't predict how you will feel when you hit that age.
And I'm looking at this from the perspective of, if you told me that this age would be, I would be the most, probably having the most influence in the world, Having the most money, the best health, best personal life that I've ever had, I would have said you're crazy.
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