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Jan. 2, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
54:09
Episode 359 Scott Adams: AOC, AGW, TDS, Ye, and Coffee
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Hey everybody!
I know some of you come just for the humming.
This would be the humming portion of my presentation.
I'm not even sure if that's humming.
That's more like making a noise.
There's no name for what I do.
Hey Norm! Those of you getting your coffee, still getting dressed, commuting to work, taking a run on the beach, you know who you are, Joel.
Good morning. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, and you're in time to catch it live.
Yes, it's time for the simultaneous sip.
Grab your mug, your tankard, your stein, your chalice, your glass, your cup, your container.
Fill it with your favorite beverage.
I like coffee.
And join me for the simultaneous sip.
Well, for a time with not much news happening, there sure is a lot of news happening.
So let me get to all the important news fast.
There's some news about Trump and Romney.
Getting after each other.
Here's my analysis of that.
Romney? Don't even care.
I can't get interested in Mitt Romney, can you?
I've never seen a human being who can suck energy out of the environment.
It's like you could put him into a black hole and he would just make it vanish, like all the energy I'm sure that doesn't make any sense in a physics perspective.
But you know what I mean.
I'm just saying Mitt Romney is the most boring person in all of politics.
Let's talk about people who are way more interesting, way more interesting than Mitt Romney.
Did you see Kanye's tweets from yesterday?
They were pretty good!
So Kanye's back and he's tweeting That he's going to be wearing his MAGA hat.
He's Trump all day long.
That was one of his tweets was just Trump all day long.
And the most provocative one, he said, and this is Kanye's tweet, not my words, he said, blacks are 90% Democrats?
Sounds like control to me.
Just when you think He's done with politics and done with Trump.
He comes out with the most provocative statements yet.
So here's the funny thing about that.
So yesterday, Christine and I are taking down Christmas decorations and lights, and we had a lot of them.
So we worked for several hours in the afternoon taking down lights and packing things up.
And while I was working and ignoring the news, It turns out I was one of the biggest news stories in the country, completely outside of my awareness.
So because Kanye made the news, he was covered in the Washington Post, and when he talks about this topic, the news brings me in and they bring Candace Owens into the story.
Because there's a history of Kanye retweeted some of my periscopes, and of course he's retweeted good things about Candace.
So, while I'm taking down my Christmas decorations, one of the biggest stories in the country is about me.
I mean, it was about Kanye, but I was a big part of the story.
It's just weird. There's no point to that.
It's just a weird experience for me.
How serious is he?
I think he also tweeted 20-24 like he's running.
And then the other news, apparently he and Joe Rogan are getting ready to do a podcast, which I think we could predict that if Joe Rogan does a podcast with Kanye, It might be the highest rated podcast of all time.
It might be.
Because can you even imagine not watching it?
You know, if I told you, hey, Joe Rogan has a podcast with Kanye, are you interested?
Hell yes, you're interested.
You're going to watch that podcast.
So that's coming up.
I don't think they have a time for that yet.
But, oh my God, that's going to be fun to watch.
I think I will watch every second of that.
I think you saw that Elizabeth Warren and Beto O'Rourke and I think Kirsten Gillibrand all have copied AOC's technique of doing a live stream from their kitchen.
But they didn't all do it right.
That's the funny part.
So the more we watch AOC's persuasion game, the more fun it is.
Now I know, I know, she may not have the politics you like.
I'm not supporting any of her politics.
I'm just saying that she's got the persuasion game.
Because she's made three of the most important Democrats absolutely just imitate her.
That is a sign of persuasion.
If you can make your competitors, and they're kind of competitors, imitate you, you're doing something right.
Now here's what Elizabeth Warren did wrong.
Apparently she was going for the folksy, I'm just like the middle class, I'm just like you, I think I'll crack open a beer.
Now I don't doubt Then maybe she sometimes has a beer.
I mean, I don't think it's necessarily, you know, lacks any kind of genuineness.
But I don't think that's what the future leader of the country or a wannabe leader of the country should be leading with.
If you're trying to be a role model, and the thing you're running against is the bad role model of President Trump, Do you want to lead by drinking poison in public?
Alcohol, at any level, is just not good for you.
Why not just light up a cigarette?
We talk a lot about character.
And, you know, whether President Trump is the right role model and character for a president, but I don't think you can say enough for the fact that he doesn't drink alcohol and never has, and that he does it for the right reasons.
I think that's a big, big, big deal.
And I think that drinking a beer when you're running for president, drinking a beer on camera, you know, what you do in your own time is your own time.
But in terms of the message that you're sending about who you are and what's okay to do, that is the wrongest message I could ever imagine, associating yourself with beer.
And I get that maybe it makes her more relatable to some people, but it feels like a mistake to me.
It feels like a persuasion mistake.
Then my favorite was Beto O'Rourke.
Now, he was a little less genuine.
Coming from the kitchen.
And he was wearing his v-neck sweater.
Some of you who have been watching me for a while know that I often make fun of men in v-neck sweaters.
And here's why. A v-neck sweater is usually, not every time, but usually something your wife dressed you in or your girlfriend.
Men Typically, if men are single, they don't buy a lot of V-neck sweaters.
It's just one of those things I noticed a long time ago, that whenever I got into a relationship, sooner or later, my girlfriend or wife would buy me a V-neck sweater.
It was sort of like something you do to sort of brand your man as domesticated.
So I have a...
I have a rule against v-neck sweaters.
I like v-neck t-shirts.
Still okay. Because your girlfriend or your wife doesn't buy you a v-neck t-shirt.
At least not with the intention of, you know, managing your look.
So, Beto O'Rourke has no chance of winning the nomination because he's an adult white male.
And they're not really very popular in the Democrat Party.
As Kanye pointed out with his tweet yesterday, the Democrats are no place for black men.
I think the Democrats still have a strong case for black women.
So if a black woman votes Democrat, I would say that makes sense.
Democrats are often clearly biased toward the female-centric types of topics.
So if black women vote for Democrats, I would say they've done their homework and they're voting their self-interest and that makes sense.
If black men vote Democrat, I have to wonder if they've done the research.
Because I think that's the group that isn't being served by the Democrats.
And they should at least look into the alternatives, which is what Kanye is saying.
And by the way, one of the things that makes Kanye special is that he's identified the most important source of power.
As long as the black voters always vote in the same direction, they don't have any power.
All they're doing is an automatic vote.
The moment their vote is in play, both sides have to compete.
Right now, they don't have to compete.
There's no point in competing.
So, Kanye has correctly identified a source of power that's being left, you know, just abandoned.
And there's no reason for it.
All right, let's talk about...
Temperature adjustments.
I tweeted, just moments before I came on here, I tweeted an article written by some people who seem to be very knowledgeable.
It's Berkeley Earth is the organization.
And the author of the article was personally involved with climate change, temperature management stuff.
And so one of the questions you often hear from the skeptics is, about climate change is that the history of temperature has been adjusted.
And those adjustments tend to be all in the direction that makes it look like it's getting warmer at a higher rate.
And why is it that the adjustments are never in the other direction?
Ask the skeptics.
Now, I don't know, first of all, that they're always in one direction.
That's what the skeptics claim.
That's not my claim. So I thought, well, this would be interesting To see a scientist actually explain their side.
You know, somebody who's pro-climate change in the sense that they're with the majority, and they actually have worked in the field, what would they say to defend about all these adjustments?
So here's the first thing you need to know about temperature adjustments.
There have been a lot of them, right?
So it's not a few temperatures here or there, not just a few stations.
It's a main theme of the temperature history is adjustments.
So adjustments are normal, common.
A lot of it is happening.
So it's not a minor point.
So if the adjustments are wrong, then all of climate change predictions are wrong.
If the adjustments are accurate, meaning that their estimates come in pretty close to reality, then it's very important because it would indicate that the Earth is warming at a higher rate according to the majority of scientists.
And so we should know that, right?
So I dig into this article, and you should too, by the way.
It's one of the most illuminating things you'll ever see on the topic.
And I tweeted it, so you can find it in my Twitter feed.
And I just tweeted it, so it'll be toward the top.
So what they talk about is the reasons for why they have to make estimates.
And some of the reasons are this.
In some cases, they moved measuring devices.
And it turns out, in a lot of cases, there are quite a few cases where they had the measuring instrument in one place, but for various reasons they had to move it to some other place.
And then they had to do a manual adjustment to correct for the fact that the location was different.
They also changed the devices.
So the type of measuring device, you know, there's the old type and the modern type, you know, in just simplifying this.
And there are cases where the old one was replaced with the new one.
And then again, they had to make some adjustments to correct for that.
And then, of course, there are...
You know, the concrete urban island effect, right?
The fact that if your measuring device is somewhere in the woods, and then over time a city is built around you, this is the oversimplified version, then the heat from the city itself and the concrete would influence your measurements.
So even though the world didn't necessarily get warmer, except on that little island, it might over-represent the warming.
So you have all these good reasons Why the past data had to be adjusted.
If you dig into what method they used to adjust it, and you start reading how they've done it, it's a judgment.
That's it. So, So you probably thought that the climate temperature data that everyone is using, the skeptics are using it, the climate scientists are using it, you probably thought that's a pretty close estimate of what the actual temperature was.
But once you learn how it was done, it's completely unreliable.
And keep in mind, here's the important point.
I'm reading A pro-climate change opinion of why the estimates are reasonable estimates.
And when I'm reading that, it is so not persuasive that these are good estimates.
If you've lived in the real world and you read how they actually make these estimates, you cannot believe that these are real numbers anymore.
And again, I'm not reading the skeptics.
I'm reading the climate scientists themselves or somebody who was involved in it.
Hold on a second. And it completely changed my opinion of these adjustments.
Because if you've lived in the real world and you've ever adjusted numbers, as I have, I've done lots of financial projections in my prior careers, and if you're estimating temperature, You're not doing science.
Because estimates are allowed in the data corrections, the fact that they're allowed at all, and it's very complicated, and there's lots of personal incentive to get a certain answer, the credibility of the temperature data It's close to zero.
I actually thought before I read this article, defending the data, I thought probably it was pretty good.
But when you read it, it's like, oh my God, you have to read it yourself.
I can't, I'm not gonna describe it.
Just read it yourself.
And if you're over, I'm gonna make a prediction.
If you're under 30 and you don't have much real world, let's say business experience, you might read this article and say, that seems reasonable.
Scientists made estimates.
They probably make estimates all the time.
They know what they did.
It's peer-reviewed.
It's probably pretty good. If you're over 30, and the more over 30, the better, and you have experience with big companies and how numbers are estimated and how people make projections and how the human brain works and how big organizations work, if you have that level of experience and you read this article about how How temperature is estimated in the past?
You will not believe in climate science anymore.
I don't believe anybody with real-world experience can read how this is done and would believe that it is even a little bit credible.
Now, this is a big problem because, as I've said before, I'm still on the fence About a firm opinion about climate change.
I think I agree with the vast majority of both skeptics and scientists and the fact that the world is probably getting warmer.
I think they can figure that out.
There must be enough different sources that they can figure that out.
And that CO2 has a role.
I just don't know how big it is.
So, you really have to read that article.
Alright, some other things that are related to that.
I had pinned to my Twitter feed a challenge.
Four links that are, two of them are pro-climate change being a problem and two of them are from skeptics.
And the challenge was to read both sides and decide who you thought was credible.
And I included a Bloomberg article there because I had some graphs showing how well CO2 fits the temperature curve, whereas other things like volcanoes and sun activity and tilt of the Earth do not, according to NASA, which is what Bloomberg was reporting.
And then I read an article that I think I just retweeted that this morning, in which somebody who knew more than I do, dug into the Bloomberg reported numbers and completely debunk them.
And, you know, with an argument that I can't judge independently.
But if you were to look at the Bloomberg numbers and then the last thing you looked at was the article debunking how they calculated it, the debunker is way more credible.
Doesn't mean it's true, right?
When I talk about credibility, Today or any other day, credibility is not about what is true.
Credibility is, when you hear it and consume it, do you believe it?
The critics, again, and this is the thing that's been bothering me the most, this is the most important problem in the world, say the people who are on the side that it's a problem.
If it's the most important problem in the world, and in fact, Bernie Sanders tweeted, I think yesterday, That we should treat climate change like a world war.
Like that's how much of a problem it is.
That's how much resources and attention we should give it.
If it's that big of a problem, why is it that the people who say it's not a problem are so much more convincing?
Which again, does not mean it's true.
Let's talk a little bit more about this.
I was communicating yesterday with a very smart person who invests in green tech.
And I won't tell you who it is, but it's a name you would have heard of.
Somebody who really knows investing and really knows how the world works.
So a very smart, knowledgeable, high-end, top-level investor type person who said to me, That green tech has more promise economically and even in terms of timing than nuclear power.
It creates more jobs, and it gets you to a greener, stable place than even nuclear power.
Now, the reason, of course, is that nuclear power plants take so long, and their real cost, I think, is underestimated, is the argument.
So that the benefits of green tech are maybe underestimated and look real good for taking over the majority of the But nuclear is overrated, too expensive, could take decades to complete.
And in the meantime, if you had really put a focus on green technology, you'd have this big, safe green technology industry before you could have your first new nuclear power plant.
Is that true? Don't know.
How would I know? I could Google it, but I'm not sure I would know I would believe what I'm seeing.
Now let's compare that.
So that's one very knowledgeable, very successful person who has invested personally large amounts in green technology, which also means he's biased.
Now that bias may have happened before the investment, but you can certainly say that after somebody's invested in an area, if they say that area is good after they put their money in it, unfortunately you have to discount the opinion because there's too much money behind the opinion.
So it might have been a clean opinion before he invested.
He looked at all the data.
It was the best thing to do.
Put his money into it.
But unfortunately, you and I are looking at it after the fact.
So the investment's been made.
So I go, I want to believe this.
It makes sense. I don't see a particular hole in it because I don't have the knowledge to find any holes in anything like that.
But you have to discount it because there's money involved.
Now look on the other side. Bill Gates, this is another story from today, Bill Gates wanted to build a new type of safer power plant using depleted uranium or something.
A new type of technology that's not like the old nuclear plants.
But he was trying to build it in China because the regulations are too severe in the United States.
So China would have allowed him to use this technology.
The United States would have tied him up in regulations forever.
So they just couldn't get there from here.
So he wanted to do it in China.
But here's the problem.
The trade war ruined his idea.
Because apparently he can't get it done in China now because of the trade tensions.
And he can't get it done in the United States because there are too many regulations.
And so I tweeted...
What a lucky situation.
At the very time that Bill Gates, one of the smartest investors, is saying that nuclear power has a great potential, which, by the way, is the opposite of what the other investor that I just talked about says.
Now, Bill Gates is putting his money behind these nuclear plants.
So I've got two people who I would consider at the very top Of being straight players, like straight-talking, credible, smart, successful in various fields, like really, really top-level thinkers, completely opposite opinions on nuclear.
But they've also put their money behind their opinions.
So if the opinion came first and then the money, Maybe that means something different than they're talking about things they've already invested in.
So that's a problem because they have money in it, but it's also a positive thing because if they didn't put their own money behind their own opinions, well, maybe you shouldn't take them as seriously.
So there are serious people who have serious money on opposite bets.
One betting that green technology will always be better than nuclear, at least in our planning horizon, and the other that nuclear is the savior and we better get behind it.
Now it turns out that President Trump is the most regulation cutting president of all time.
I think that's probably true.
Don't you? You know, you can fact check me on this.
But probably we have the most regulation cutting president of all time.
At exactly the same time that Bill Gates, who is no Republican.
Bill Gates is not a Republican.
I don't think he identifies with the party, but you have to assume he would lean more left on a lot of things.
So he and Bill Gates suddenly have an opportunity to do something that nobody else could do.
How long have you been hearing that it's too hard and too expensive to build a nuclear plant in the United States?
One, because of the technology and the risks, but two, because of the regulations.
We've been hearing that for decades, right?
Who are the two people in the world Most capable of overcoming those obstacles.
As luck would have it, President Trump, the most regulation-cutting president of all time, and Bill Gates, the most effective, smartest, you know, billionaire investor, trying to help the world guy of all time.
If those two Can't get a nuclear power plant built when China just turned them down, and the smartest thing we could ever do is take that project on in the United States.
If those two characters can't get that done, then it just can't be done.
So if President Trump and Bill Gates can't get a new type of nuclear reactor built, a safer type that Bill Gates is promoting, if they can't get that done, Then I would say that the green tech investor is absolutely right.
If those two guys can't get this done, it can't be done.
I shouldn't talk in absolutes, but the odds of it getting done go way down.
Somebody said Elon Musk.
I'd love to know what Elon Musk's opinion on the new technologies for nuclear...
I'd love to hear his opinion on that, but I don't know what it is.
Now, on the same topic, There's a report that Lockheed has a new patent to build small-sized fusion reactors because they've got some kind of a special technology that they claim, and apparently have patented, that will control the reaction, which is the hard part.
I'm no nuclear scientist, but I guess the hard part is figuring out how to magnetically control, you know, contain the reaction.
And they say they have some novel way to do that.
Now, It's reported like they've already figured out everything they need for fusion and some skunk works and we're just finding out about it now and they could just go build this thing and plan to.
I think we have to be a little skeptical about anything you see on this topic because it's always being reported by reporters and reporters are not nuclear scientists and they tend to get a little optimistic about these stories.
So I'm going to say I like that You know, it's being worked on by Lockheed.
I like that they have a patent and that they're enthusiastic about it, but I don't know what the odds are that they could actually get it done.
All right. I will reiterate my claim.
I'm going to make the most arrogant claim you've ever heard.
Are you ready for it? I've probably said plenty of arrogant-sounding things on my periscopes and in my writings, but I doubt this will top them all.
This will be the most arrogant thing I've ever said.
Climate change, and the risk of it, is one of the biggest problems in the world, or not.
And you need to know the answer to that because you can put massive resources in one direction or the other, and those resources will be so massive and the risks are so big that you could argue it's the biggest thing we need to know in the world.
Now the people who say it's not a problem, wouldn't you like that to be proven?
Wouldn't you like it to be proven that it's not a problem so that we can invest in all the smart ways that you would if it's not a problem?
So you'd like to know how big of a problem this is.
I contend that I'm literally the best person in the world to get that answer.
So there's my most arrogant statement I'll ever make.
And it's only an accident of history and circumstance.
I'm in a very unique situation.
And here it is.
My specialty is explaining complicated things in simple ways.
So first of all, nobody can help you if they can't do that.
The best scientist in the world is useless To the political conversation if they can't simplify it and say it persuasively.
So I have that skill, maybe as good as anybody's ever had it.
I'm literally, for 30 years, I take complicated things, I put them in simple sentences in cartoons and blogs and in Periscope.
It's what I do best. So there's that.
Secondly, I'm in another unique situation in that I really don't have a firm opinion about whether climate change is a big problem or not.
I'm honestly on the fence.
So can you find many people Who have spent as much time talking about it and looking at it, who really don't have a firm opinion yet?
Because you kind of need that, right?
You need somebody who's not clearly in a camp.
Now, I've talked mostly about the skepticism, and I've said that it's more persuasive.
But I'm always careful to say that being persuasive is completely different from being true.
And I know that.
Which is important because somebody who's trying to help you get to the answer needs to know the difference between something that's persuasive and looks exactly like confirmation bias and something that's true.
And I've offered my services for free to do it on camera if I could find some experts to do it with me.
And I've suggested that the best format for that would not be a debate But a hosted conversation in which I would act as a referee.
And I would say, you say X. What do you say, critic?
Critic says, here's my answer, and I cut him off.
I say, no, no, you're not answering the question.
You've got to answer the question.
And if you're not going to answer the question, you don't get to talk anymore.
So you need a referee, not a debate.
You know, you need somebody to be questioning both sides.
So I offered to do that.
I don't think it can get done because I don't think you're going to put two people in the same room.
But I will make this claim.
Until the global warming people who are most concerned are willing to address the most powerful skeptical complaints, Don't expect the public to get on your side.
If your approach to how to motivate people and how to politically persuade people to do the right thing as you see it for climate change, if that involves avoiding the strongest arguments from the skeptics, which, if looked at alone, are more persuasive than the argument for climate change.
Again, doesn't mean they're right, Completely different topic.
But they are more persuasive.
The skeptical argument, the good ones are more persuasive.
Now the skeptics also have lots of bad arguments.
I would say the worst arguments are that it's just the sun causing it.
That's a bad argument.
You know, the earth wobble, volcanoes, because they can kind of measure that stuff.
And they can see that it doesn't fit the graph, etc.
So there are a lot of bad arguments from the skeptics.
But the good arguments are really good.
They're really good. Doesn't mean it's true, just means they're more persuasive.
Now, let's talk about, when I talk to people who are alarmed about climate change, I'll make the skeptics argument, they'll make the pro-climate change argument, and you end up in sort of a tie.
Because I'm not a scientist, and whoever I'm talking to is usually not a scientist.
And you get this situation where you kind of can't change each other's mind, and it makes sense that you couldn't.
So often the climate alarmist types will default to the risk argument.
And the risk argument goes like this.
If there's even a 1% chance...
That climate change is a calamitous risk.
Shouldn't you go hard at it?
So that's the argument.
Yeah, we can't tell for sure if it's a extinction event, but if there's even a small chance that it could, you know, not decimate, but really take out a big part of the earth, you got to treat that seriously, right? Here's my response to that.
And yes, I'm going to double whiteboard you.
There's a big reveal on the back.
Wait for it.
Wait for it. All right.
Trying to get the glare off here.
So, here's the...
Economists would call this way of thinking an expected value calculation.
And I'm going to show you what it is, and I'm going to show you what's wrong with it when it's applied to climate change.
My opinion. And by the way, I could be wrong about this, so...
If anybody wants to jump in and correct me, I would welcome that.
So this is climate change risk management.
Now, here's the math that you have to understand, and then I'll tell you what's wrong with it.
So the math of it is, if you had a 1% chance of something costing a trillion dollars, or it wouldn't matter if you were saying, does it cost you a trillion, or does it give you a trillion dollars of benefits?
The math is the same.
So if you have a 1% of a trillion, It's worth $10 billion.
If you had a 99% chance of making a billion, it's roughly a billion because it's 99% chance.
If you had these two choices and you had to pick one, let's say it was an investment.
One of the investments would be a 99% chance of making a billion and the other one would be a 1% chance of making a trillion, which would be worth 10 times as much as this on average.
Which one do you make?
Which way would you go if those were your two choices?
Here's the trick. If you only ever had one choice in the world, there were no other things you ever had to do.
There were no opportunities missed.
There are no other decisions.
The smart person takes the 99% chance of making a billion because billions is a lot of money.
It's probably all you need. But Suppose you were making hundreds of choices over dozens of years.
If you had a portfolio of choices, lots of different choices, you might take the 1% of a trillion because there are so many of them that you only need one out of 10 to come in for it to be as good as this.
So if you have only one decision ever, you probably want to take it.
It looks like...
Okay. But if you have a portfolio of decisions, you want to use this logic, because over time, if you could be good at your estimating the risk, that's going to pay off.
Now, let's go to the back.
So let's apply this to climate change and see if it works.
The problem is...
You've got a portfolio effect that I just described, which is if it's only one decision, you would take the 99% chance of getting a billion dollars.
But if you're making lots of decisions, use the expected value calculation, because over time you'll have enough winners to pay for the losers.
But you also have this issue of when to start.
Because addressing climate change is not just a binary, do everything you can right away, or do nothing.
And that's the way we treat it, but it's not like that.
Because the other option that might make a lot of sense is to wait five years, maybe wait 10 years, and then your technology options will be far greater.
So if you started 10 years from now, you might finish quicker.
You might get a better result because you saved your gunpowder, so to speak, kept it dry until you could really make a difference.
If we spend a trillion dollars today to battle climate change, It might make a little difference, but we don't really know how to make a big difference.
Ten years from now, we might have a better idea of what's causing climate change in case that changes anything, but we might also have new technologies.
There are technologies for scrubbing stuff out of the atmosphere, etc.
So when to start is not built into the expected value case unless you explicitly do it.
Then there's the opportunity cost.
We don't live in a world that has exactly one extinction risk.
You have all kinds of things that could take out mankind.
Let's call it humanity because it sounds less sexist.
We might have asteroids heading our way.
Shouldn't we spend a trillion dollars to build asteroid direction-changing missiles with nuclear tips so that we can identify them and shoot up a missile and maybe change their course so it doesn't destroy Earth?
What are the odds that we'll be wiped down by a meteor?
Is it more or less than the chance of global warming?
Chance of war?
Couldn't we spend way more money on the military to reduce the chance of nuclear war even smaller?
So shouldn't you make the same argument for spending hard on climate change?
Isn't it exactly the same argument for spending hard on the military?
Because they both take your risk from, well, 1% chance will be destroyed to smaller.
What about the risk of cyber attacks?
Couldn't we spend enormous amounts of money to take whatever risk we have, which is pretty big, down to a smaller risk?
Because if the power goes out, we're really screwed.
And that's the risk of cyber attacks.
What about a pandemic?
Couldn't we prepare the world with huge investments so that if the next incurable pandemic comes up, everybody has a process.
They all go into their secret hidey holes to avoid exposure.
You know, we've got an advanced process for figuring out how to build a cure for it, etc.
So, if you have lots of risks that you can't quite judge how bad they are, but they could all take you out, and you have a limited amount of money, you can't spend unlimited amount of money on a number of different things.
You just don't have the money.
So when you say of climate change, Yeah, we don't know the exact risk, but because the risk is close to like an extinction event, it would be so devastating to the world if it's true, don't we have to treat it like it's true?
And the answer is not if there are other things that are also the same level of risk and also could be minimized by using that exact same money, because we don't have unlimited money.
All right, so those who say that risk management is the reason that you should go with the climate change alarmists, even if you don't quite believe they're that credible, I don't think that thinking holds up.
It only holds up in a philosophical way, but not in a real-world way.
All right. There's an article in The Hill, switching topics, in which They describe the world's worst 2019 and it's all Trump's fault.
I tried reading it, but it read like mental illness.
When I read the long articles from the Trump derangement syndrome folks, I don't know if this is your experience, but I used to read them as a political opinion.
And I used to read them as, okay, maybe I don't agree with everything here, but it's an opinion.
It's just an opinion.
But it doesn't look like an opinion anymore, does it?
Doesn't it look like mental illness to you?
Now, I'm no expert at diagnosing mental illness, but I will tell you it sure looks that way.
It just has all the tells for actual mental illness.
And I was reading an article just the other day in which a real doctor was saying that Trump derangement syndrome is really messing up people's mental health.
Now, here are the facts we know.
Professionals, meaning doctors, therapists, and psychologists, are confirming, they're confirming That there is a mass mental illness going on.
Right? I'm not wrong about that, right?
You can fact check me. It is true.
We've seen lots of articles and there's lots of data now to say that people are legitimately having mental illness because of the President Trump experience.
And we should take that seriously.
Now, if we've already confirmed from the experts that there is this mental illness going on, What are we supposed to make of articles written by the people who have this mental illness, apparently?
Again, I'm not a doctor, but if you're reading an article that looks more like mental illness than it looks like an opinion, at the same time that the experts are saying, yeah, this mental illness is real and there's a lot of it, and it's affecting massive amounts of people, why would we assume That that's not affecting the people who are writing articles.
Have you noticed that disconnect?
Because the anti-Trump media is selling you two stories that are funny when viewed together.
The first story they're telling you is that President Trump is making people crazy, like actually mentally ill.
We hope it's short term, but actually mentally ill.
And at the same time they're reporting that, They're running articles by these people who are clearly mentally ill.
Again, that's my opinion.
Has nobody noticed that they're saying the experts agree there's a lot of mental illness around how people are seeing this presidency?
Oh, let's run an article by one of the people who has the mental illness.
That's what the Hill article looked like to me.
But I could be wrong.
I could be wrong.
All right. How can TDS be stopped?
Oh, well, interesting question, and I'm glad you asked.
If you're President Trump, what is your best strategy, given that you have infinite Critics biting at your ankles.
So you're the president and there's a million little cuts.
They're trying to get you with this Cohen thing.
They're trying to get you with a little Russia, get you with a little Manafort, get you with a little, you're impulsive, you fire too many people.
What do all of these complaints have in common?
There's a common thing about all of the complaints about the president.
The common complaint is, or the common thing that they all have, is that individually they're not that important.
There's just a lot of them.
If you looked at any one of the things about President Trump that the critics are coming up with, it's like, hey, collusion, well, not really, and it wasn't a crime anyway.
So there are all these things that aren't quite a big problem, but there's so many of them.
So what do you do if you're President Trump and your problem is not one problem, not two problems, not three, but like a hundred of them, but they're all small.
The best strategy is not to do a solid good job.
That is not the best strategy.
He's capable of that.
He could just be a solid president, but it wouldn't make the critics go away, as we've seen.
His best bet is to swing for the fence.
And that's what I predict you will see in 2019.
In 2019, you're going to see Trump take on some challenges That you didn't even think were take honorable.
For example, I think things with North Korea are going to look really good in 2019, and people, even his critics, are going to say, you know, we doubted him, but honestly, I don't know if another personality could have gotten this done, and it matters. I think you could see him swing for the fence in the Middle East, and I would argue that that's already begun.
I think he's looking for a bigger outcome in the Middle East than just, you know, a little improvement around the edges.
I think he's swinging for the fence in the Middle East.
When I mentioned the The Bill Gates situation with nuclear power and the fact that we have the only president who's famous for cutting regulations and the biggest obstacle is too many regulations.
President Trump could swing for the fence and just say, I hear all you people complaining about climate change and you hear us saying that there's a lot of skepticism.
But we could probably all agree that clean, safe nuclear energy in the United States Could help everybody.
So he might swing for the fence on that.
He might swing for the fence on something like healthcare, but I doubt it.
Doesn't seem like it. So I would look for him.
And of course, suppose President Trump gets the trade deal done with China and it looks good.
Because it's kind of going in that direction, right?
Sort of looking good.
So if this president gets a trade agreement with China that protects our IP, at least better than it was, and he gets peace with North Korea in 2019, and he works something out with Putin that's, let's say it's productive in the Middle East, All that little stuff about the president is going to not amount to anything.
So the best strategy against your opposition having a million small complaints about you is to do some things that are so big you just stop caring about the little stuff.
Now here's an idea that I saved for the end of my periscopes.
And I want to put this out here.
I think this is a terrible idea.
But I can't figure out why.
And I also don't have the details.
And the idea is like this. If you imagine that one of the biggest problems to the country, and therefore the world, because as the United States goes, the rest of the world tends to go, is our debt.
Let's say you're including student debt, personal debt, government debt, etc.
But let's just look at student debt and government debt.
Let's say you think those are the biggest problems in the world.
Could you, under any circumstances, eliminate that debt by creating an official United States cryptocurrency?
And I'm not sure exactly the details of this, but the whole point of a cryptocurrency is that you create value out of nothing.
That's what Bitcoin is.
Bitcoin is not based on anything.
It just has value because people think they can spend it.
Now, here's the most interesting thing you'll ever hear about crypto or even currency.
The reason that money has value, or let's say, the reason the US dollar has value is...
In part because people want it.
But why do people want the U.S. dollar?
One of the biggest reasons that the U.S. dollar has value is that the U.S. government will always accept it in payment for taxes.
There will always be taxes And the U.S. government will always take the U.S. dollar in payment.
So as long as the U.S. government guarantees that it will take dollars, dollars always have value.
Suppose the U.S. government said, we're going to wipe out debt by just creating a bunch of money.
We'll just create this crypto and we will accept this crypto as payment for some kinds of things.
Let's say we'll accept it for student debt.
Now, I'm pretty sure this idea has gigantic holes in it, but here are the basic facts.
The US government could create a cryptocurrency that is solidly based on something that won't change, which is the government will agree to accept it for paying your taxes.
If you do that, you're not Bitcoin anymore and you're not a regular crypto.
You are something with strong backing.
Couldn't you create something out of nothing, and couldn't it be big enough to pay off student debt, for example?
Let's just say student debt.
Let's say...
So anyway, I think there's some way to do that, but I'm pretty sure that I don't have the details right.
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