Dec. 28, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
26:37
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| Hey everybody, come on in here. | |
| It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams. | |
| I'm Scott Adams. | |
| You're probably not, but I know why you're here. | |
| It's for the simultaneous sip. | |
| And let us enjoy the simultaneous sip. | |
| Raise your glove. | |
| Raise your glove. | |
| Man, I gotta drink more coffee. | |
| Raise your mug. Your cup, your glass, your tankard, your stein, filled with your favorite liquid. | |
| I like coffee. And join me for the simultaneous sip. | |
| Oh yeah! So I'm coming to you using my phone device instead of my iPads, which are failing me. | |
| Maybe I need to upgrade their software. | |
| We'll figure that out. All right. | |
| First topic is, New York Times had a story about they may have found the doctor who may have diagnosed Donald Trump with bone spurs to keep him out of the military. | |
| The doctor himself is dead and left no records. | |
| But his daughters think they sort of remember he might have said something about that. | |
| So that's what passes as a story at the New York Times, that they may have found that doctor based on the fact that he's dead and there are no records whatsoever, but his daughter sort of maybe they think they remember it. | |
| And oh, by the way, they're anti-Trumpers. | |
| So that's not even a good try at a real story. | |
| John Brennan, famous ex-CIA head, Tweeted the other day that the world is more unstable economically, geopolitically, and what was the other word? | |
| But anyway, saying that it was a much more unstable world. | |
| And I questioned that, and I asked for a fact check. | |
| Is the world more unstable than it has ever been? | |
| Because to me, it looks like it's more stable than it's ever been. | |
| There are some statistics My cat is here to visit. | |
| If you see a tail go by, my cat seems to have a different plan for me. | |
| Okay, boo. Move along. | |
| Live periscopes, folks. | |
| Anything can happen. | |
| So there's a statistic, and I can only give it to you roughly, that I think extreme poverty was covering 40% of the world during Reagan's administration. | |
| 40% of the world was in extreme poverty. | |
| Now that number is about 9. | |
| And they think that extreme poverty will be eliminated maybe in another 10 years. | |
| So think about that. | |
| We've got a handle on AIDS. We don't really have a big war that's threatening us. | |
| We're winding down several wars. | |
| The economy is at an all-time high. | |
| The stock market bounces around based on the headlines. | |
| But employment's the best ever. | |
| I would say race relations are the best ever if you don't have a television. | |
| If you didn't own a television, well, let's say, if you had never looked at the news, if you've never seen the news, would you think that race relations are worse or better? | |
| If you didn't watch the news, you'd probably think it was better. | |
| Because if you look around, If you look around, there are more mixed-race couples getting married. | |
| More people have friends with people who are different than themselves. | |
| Far fewer cases of racial discrimination, etc. | |
| You don't even hear much about it. | |
| I mean, obviously, whatever racism there is is way too much. | |
| Everybody agrees with that, I think. | |
| But I think on almost every dimension, things are better and more stable. | |
| And it's amazing that there's somebody who is the ex-head of the CIA whose perception of the world is that everything is worse. | |
| When in fact, I think everything's better. | |
| Like, actually, literally everything. | |
| Can you give me an example of something that's worse? | |
| Oh, the debt is worse. The debt is worse, but it's not as bad as it's ever been. | |
| In World War II, I think it was even higher as a percentage of GDP. But we don't have a solution for that, so that's bad. | |
| Yeah, if he had just said, our national debt is too high, I would have said, good point. | |
| Or it's growing too high. | |
| It's not even too high yet. | |
| It's just growing in the wrong direction. | |
| All right. So that was crazy. | |
| Apparently there's a number of parts of the fake media are reporting that when the president visited the troops in Iraq... | |
| That they brought campaign Make America Great Again hats with them to sign, and maybe it was a violation of some kind of law that the president shouldn't be campaigning with the troops or something. | |
| Who knows what law that is? | |
| It doesn't even matter. Because it turns out the real story is that a lot of the military had their own Make America Great Again hats. | |
| There were so many of them. | |
| That the media assumed they were handed out. | |
| Just think about this. | |
| Just for a moment, just enjoy this thought. | |
| So many members of the military were pro-Trump to the point of owning their own Make America Great Again hats and having those hats with them during deployment. | |
| You can't take your whole Can't take your whole house with you, right? | |
| So one of the few items that the people in the military in Iraq had with them were Make America Great Again hats. | |
| And so the president quite politely signed them. | |
| So imagine you're a member of the fake news business and you see so many red hats in the military and your head can't process it. | |
| So you have cognitive dissonance. | |
| So cognitive dissonance happens when your observation of the world doesn't match your internal model of the world. | |
| And so their internal model is there can't be that many people who support the president. | |
| So if there are this many hats in the same room with the military of all people, they must have been handed out by the campaign. | |
| With no evidence of that whatsoever. | |
| And apparently the story as it's being reported by the military, and of course that could be wrong too, but the current story is that they had their own hats. | |
| There's a story in The Federalist that I tweeted out yesterday, I think. | |
| Molly Hemingway's publication. | |
| She works for that publication. | |
| Molly Hemingway being the star of that publication. | |
| Anyway, she tweeted it out and the story was... | |
| Now, most of you watching this probably do not have a deep understanding of the Middle East. | |
| I also do not have a deep understanding of the Middle East. | |
| Or even a shallow understanding, really. | |
| But here's what I know. | |
| The tiny country of Qatar, Q-A-T-A-R, for those of you who have only read the word and wondered how to pronounce it, I don't think I'm pronouncing it right either, but let's call it Qatar for now. | |
| You may pronounce it any way you like. | |
| So apparently they're aligned with Iran and aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. | |
| And it turns out that they were the puppet masters for Cheshawgi. | |
| So they were influencing what he would write for the Washington Post. | |
| And so he was writing, they were trying to influence him to write anti-Saudi Arabia stories. | |
| So it turns out, assuming this reporting is correct and it looked credible to me, it turns out that Chashoggi was a foreign influence guy working essentially for Iran. | |
| So he was actually, he was whatever is the opposite of a journalist. | |
| Now, I think everybody, you know, that was the word on the street, right? | |
| So people already were We're saying that, hey, he's more of a propaganda guy. | |
| He's not so much a journalist. | |
| And people were saying he writes opinion pieces. | |
| He's not an investigative journalist. | |
| And we understood that part. | |
| We understood he was writing opinion. | |
| But now they've apparently uncovered some messages where Katara was actually guiding what he wrote and he was serving them. | |
| So the Washington Post was literally, and I'm not making this up, the Washington Post was literally colluding with Iran. | |
| Because Qatar and Iran are on the same side. | |
| They're allied. And this guy was on their team. | |
| He was working directly for Qatar, apparently, according to the reporting. | |
| So they were actually colluding with a foreign enemy of the United States. | |
| Apparently there's no doubt about the facts, right? | |
| So if there's any new facts or anything that contradicts what I just said, somebody let me know. | |
| All right. I floated an idea on Twitter yesterday just to see what people thought. | |
| And people puked all over my idea. | |
| But as usual, people were not complaining about my actual idea. | |
| They were complaining about their own misinterpretation of my idea. | |
| And here was the idea. Suppose you could adopt all of the blocks on Twitter of somebody else. | |
| So let's say you knew that I block a lot of people who are just trolls. | |
| And you wanted to never see those trolls because who wants to see a troll? | |
| So you would accept all of my blocks and then you would never see the people that I've already blocked. | |
| So you don't have to block anybody that I've already blocked. | |
| And people howled and they said, No! | |
| No! If you do that, then it will put people in more silos than they've been in before. | |
| They will only get to see the opinions they agree with. | |
| To which I say, I don't think you understand my idea. | |
| I don't block people for disagreeing with me. | |
| Indeed, I did not block the people who disagreed with me on this very point. | |
| I didn't block any of them. | |
| The only people I block, you know, maybe there's an exception, but it would be trivial. | |
| The only people I block are people who don't have anything. | |
| They just come in with insults or they say racist things. | |
| That's it. Now, every now and then I'll block somebody by accident because I blocked the wrong person. | |
| One of the problems on Twitter is sometimes people will respond at a comment and they'll be unclear about who they're insulting, whether it's me or somebody else in the thread. | |
| So sometimes I do block people by accident, but Honestly, it's not important. | |
| Of the thousands of people that I interact with, if I accidentally block a few civilians that didn't need to get blocked, it doesn't really change what you hear. | |
| You're still going to hear all the entire panorama of opinions, even if a few of them got blocked accidentally. | |
| So, there's some people here saying that I blocked them accidentally. | |
| So, even with that, do you think it would really restrict what opinions you hear? | |
| Because I'm not restricting opinions, except by accident, and that's a trivial amount of blocks. | |
| Just so you understand the idea, if you were to accept all the people I blocked as also blocked by you, you would not miss any ideas from the other side. | |
| There's no content from your side or opposite opinions that you would ever miss. | |
| Because I block trolls, plus a few apparently accidental blocks that don't really change much. | |
| Alright, and then other people, a number of people accused me of being a snowflake and being as bad as the left for being anti-free speech. | |
| To which I say, apparently the experience of blue check people like me is very different from the experience of the casual civilian who uses Twitter. | |
| The casual person on Twitter probably doesn't see too many trolls because nobody really needs to troll the average user on Twitter. | |
| The trolls come out almost entirely for the blue check people and the people who are making noise about something political. | |
| So people like me are just inundated with trolls all the time. | |
| All right. You put yourself above us, low-life civilians. | |
| In, what would you call it? | |
| In visibility, yes. | |
| I'm not doubting your quality of life. | |
| I'm not questioning your value as a human being. | |
| But it's objectively true that some people get more attention than other people. | |
| Yes, it's almost 2019. | |
| Some people are wondering why you use civilians. | |
| I'm using civilians as opposed to the professionals. | |
| So I'm sort of in the professional class and most people are not. | |
| How am I going to kick ass in the new year? | |
| Well, well, well, well. | |
| Okay. Here's my first prediction for the new year. | |
| The stock market will end 2019 higher than it closed today. | |
| So higher than it closes today, you'll see the stock market at the end of 2019. | |
| But I don't know how much higher. | |
| It'll just be higher. I predict... | |
| That somewhere, maybe around summertime, the China trade wars will start to be largely settled. | |
| Now, it could take longer to actually get documents signed or whatever, but I'm going to say by summer, trade war with China will be largely worked out. | |
| I'm going to say that the Middle East is going to get really, really interesting in 2019. | |
| You're going to see stories out of the Middle East that will be mind-boggling. | |
| And mind-boggling not necessarily in the bad way. | |
| So you might see some mind-boggling alliances, agreements, and outcomes that are really just surprising, possibly in a positive way. | |
| Let's see. I believe that Mueller's report will have something for everyone, meaning that the lawyers on both sides will argue that it proves everything they've been saying. | |
| So there will be a Mueller report sometime in 2019. | |
| The Democrats will say, see, there it is. | |
| Look at all that impeachable stuff right there in that report. | |
| It's in black and white. Mueller wouldn't have it wrong. | |
| There it is. Meanwhile, the Republicans will look at exactly the same information and they'll say, there's nothing in there. | |
| There's no crime even described. | |
| I guess we're done here. | |
| There was nothing there. | |
| So your two movies will continue. | |
| Somebody says Gordon Chang says the China stuff will take a long time. | |
| I agree. It could take years To work out everything. | |
| So when I say that by summer, most of the trade stuff will be worked out, that's what I mean. | |
| Sort of an 80-20 rule. | |
| I think we'll be 80% where we want to be by summer. | |
| The last 20% could take literally forever. | |
| Impeachment. There will not be an impeachment. | |
| There might be an impeachment process. | |
| So there's a non-zero chance that the House will maybe try to get something going. | |
| My prediction is the odds of impeachment close to zero based on what we now know. | |
| Now if something new comes up, then of course everything has to be reassessed, but at the moment I will say no impeachment. | |
| Let's talk about the wall. | |
| I think that now that everybody's agreeing it's a fence wall and not just a wall and not just a fence. | |
| It will be part fence, part wall, and maybe it will be a structure that some people will call a fence and some people will call a wall. | |
| Steel slats, let's call it. | |
| Something will get funded and something will begin to be built in 2019. | |
| So that much for sure. | |
| And I think that the big break, which I've already predicted, which could happen today or even anytime in the next week, somebody is going to have to say the word engineers. | |
| And then the conversation is over. | |
| Because right now you have politicians who are not engineers trying to determine an engineering decision. | |
| If you have two people who don't know engineering arguing in public about what is the best engineering decision, it's a tie, right? | |
| So people just back their own side because we're not engineers, most of us are not. | |
| So we're looking at two politicians making an engineering decision and we're just saying, oh, I'll just back my side. | |
| As soon as either side, either Pelosi and Schumer, Or President Trump, any one of those three, as soon as one of them says the word, engineer, it's solved. | |
| Because the moment one of them says, okay, we're just politicians, let's agree to fund it and kick it up to the engineers. | |
| Let the engineers decide where it's a fence, where it's a wall, and what kind of a fence wall it is. | |
| The moment you do that, the other side looks stupid. | |
| Because right now they're both stupid in a political way. | |
| So neither side is stupid in an IQ way, but in a political way, they're both arguing a stupid side. | |
| It is stupid to say it should be a wall. | |
| It is stupid to say it should be a fence because politicians are not engineers. | |
| They don't make that kind of decision. | |
| It's not their job. It's not their expertise. | |
| There isn't the slightest chance they're getting it right. | |
| Soon as one of them says the word engineer, they go to the high ground. | |
| Wait for that word, engineer. | |
| As soon as engineer is whispered, you're going to have yourself a solution coming soon. | |
| Now, I'm going to do a little demonstration of something fun in a moment. | |
| Hold on, don't go anywhere. Alright, I'm back. | |
| So I bought, I bought a, well actually Christina got me a printer for Christmas and it's a Tango, an HP Tango printer. | |
| And I printed out the directions for the printer for when you hook it up to your Amazon system, whose name I will not say. | |
| A-L-E-X-A. The reason I'm not pronouncing it is that a lot of you have those systems, and if I say it out loud, it will activate your system. | |
| So in a moment, I'm going to say something to my A-L-E-X-A, and I'll give you a warning so that you can turn down your sound. | |
| Now what I'm going to say will make nothing happen at your house unless you also have a Tango printer. | |
| If you don't have a Tango printer, nothing will happen. | |
| So here's the thing. | |
| When I raise my hand like this again, when I put my hand up, it means I'm going to be saying something that will activate your A-L-E-X-A. And when I put it down, it means it's safe to listen again. | |
| So here it comes. | |
| So as long as my hand is up, if you don't want your A-L-A-X-A to trigger, turn off your sound. | |
| Here it comes. Alexa, ask my printer I have sent today's comics to your printer. | |
| So it's sending today's comics to my printer. | |
| Now here's the funny thing. | |
| I get this printer and I open it up and there's directions in it on how to print Dilbert. | |
| And a couple other comics as well. | |
| So it's actually in the written directions how you can talk to your printer and make your print a Dilbert comic. | |
| Now it takes about a minute and in a minute I'll turn my camera and you can see it printing out. | |
| It's kind of cool. You can tell it to print stuff like lined graph paper and you can tell to print just print out a piece of paper that you can use as a list. | |
| It's kind of cool. Somebody says, how does an engineer determine the acceptability of a solution based on probability? | |
| I think the answer was in the question. | |
| So the question was, how does an engineer, this is talking about the fence wall, how does an engineer determine the best solution in the context of probability? | |
| And the answer is, that's what engineers do. | |
| You just described what an engineer does for a living. | |
| They make decisions in the context of probability. | |
| That's what they do. | |
| And when they can, they reduce probability, or I'm sorry, they reduce risk by testing small. | |
| Yeah, engineering is all about probability. | |
| That's right. | |
| That's their gig. | |
| That's their game. | |
| I'm not entirely sure that my printer will actually be printing those comics because I did move it and plug it in again, so it might not be connected to the Wi-Fi. | |
| All right. | |
| I think we're done with today. | |
| Thank you. | |
| We will follow the news and see what else is happening. |
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