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Jan. 7, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:02:15
Episode 364 Scott Adams: RPOS, The Steel Barrier and Climate Persuasion
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Hey everybody!
I am trying out my new microphone on a different device that wasn't working before.
So if we have any technical difficulties, don't say I didn't warn you, but if we get kicked off of this periscope, I'll just come back on with a different device.
So, good morning.
I know why you're here.
You're here to enjoy the simultaneous sip.
Please join me.
Raise your mug, your cup, your glass, your chalice, your stein, your tankard, if you will.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee and join me for the Simultane News set.
Well, as many of you know by now, on 60 Minutes, the woman who I call RPOS went the woman who I call RPOS went on and said that the president was definitely a racist sending secret racist messages.
So I've decided to stop calling her AOC and I'm just going to go with RPOS. The first part of RPOS is racist because she's decided to go full racist.
Now, a lot of people have been asking me, Scott, no, you want to be RPOS, not RPOC. RPOS. Why?
Because crap is not as provocative as shit.
So here's what I suggest.
So a lot of people have asked me, Scott, what is the persuasion response to RPOS? And I've been saying, well, there's not much you can do, and, you know, I haven't really engaged in that at all.
A lot of people have come up with clever nicknames for her, like I see one going by on the comments, occasional cortex.
But here is my first persuasion advice.
If you call RPOS stupid, it has no persuasive power.
This is the most important thing I can tell you.
Calling her stupid or ignorant or uninformed has no persuasive power.
Do you know why?
Because the people who follow her agree with what she says.
So you can't diminish her power by calling her stupid when the things she says are in complete agreement with the people she's primarily trying to get on her team.
So the calling her stupid part, it just will never get any traction.
Keep in mind that the Democrats called President Trump stupid for three years right in front of us.
They said he was ignorant.
He didn't pay attention to the details.
Did it make any difference to you?
If you were a Trump supporter and then you heard the other side say that his ideas are stupid, like, oh, it's stupid to have a fence or a wall.
Oh, it's stupid to cut taxes.
Did that have any impact on you?
None. None.
So stop calling her stupid unless you're just talking.
If you're just communicating with a friend or something and it's your opinion, that's fine.
But if you're trying to persuade, stupid gets you nothing.
It's completely inert.
But here's something that might not be.
So Here's a question I would ask her directly if I were in the media.
And she's going to get interviewed a lot and not all of the people who interview her are going to be on her team.
So there will be opportunities for, let's say, unfriendly interviewers to interview her.
I think she'll probably go for that.
She probably won't just limit her interviews to one side, although obviously she'll favor them.
And here's the question I would ask her.
I would ask her If given her tax preferences and her climate change ideas etc, her green ideas, does she favor a transfer of wealth from white and Asian Americans to other ethnicities?
That's the question that has to be asked.
Ask her directly.
Directly. Do you favor a transfer of wealth from white and Asian Americans to other ethnic groups?
I want to hear the answer to the question.
Don't you? Because she's gone full racist now and now it's on the table.
Now before she called President Trump a racist, I would say race wasn't in the question, and I would have stayed away from it as well.
And I think you've noticed, right?
I've talked about RPOS quite a bit, and I've never mentioned race, have I? I thought one of her strengths was that she wasn't that person.
But now that she's sort of revealed herself to be race-centric, In a fairly, you know, deliberate and conscious way, then I think the question is fair.
So it's sort of like a court where if the other side brings up a topic, then you can ask questions about it.
And I think that's the question.
So does she favor a transfer of wealth from white and Asian Americans to other groups?
And how do you answer that question if you're her?
Now, if you're a Republican, it's an easy question, right?
No. No.
I would not prefer any policies that transfer wealth based on ethnicity.
That would not be a good idea.
But it's going to be kind of hard for her.
Let's talk about this story about, you're gonna have to help me with the facts because I'm unprepared.
Who was the, was it a Special Forces guy who's being charged with murder for killing an ISIS fighter in a way that is considered inappropriate apparently?
What exactly, what branch of the service was he in?
He wasn't a Marine, he is a Special Forces?
So the first time I heard that story, I said to myself, well, this is an easy one.
Oh, a seal. Somebody's saying seal.
All right. So a seal, and he killed an ISIS prisoner, or he's alleged to have let the prisoner go and then killed him or something.
And when I first heard that, I thought, I thought, killing ISIS is sort of what we hired him to do.
And my first thought was, even if the circumstance is a little gray, I would definitely favor the seal.
If there's any gray area at all, Or even if he killed this prisoner after releasing him, knowing that the prisoner would become dangerous and kill more people on our side, even if he sort of crossed the line a little bit and killed somebody who was himself a killer and was likely to kill again, I was going to say, yeah, I think I'd still rather side with the seal.
But then I heard yesterday that he was turned in by other SEALs.
So in other words, it was the other SEALs who said he crossed the line.
And now it's not really a question between a SEAL that I love and respect and an ISIS fighter that I wanted dead and I didn't really care how it happened.
Yeah, now it's a SEAL on SEAL crime, or accusation anyway.
So that changes it entirely.
Kill jealousy? I don't think so.
I think that the only thing that could have changed my mind was that the other SEALs were the ones who said this crossed the line.
And I think from their perspective, they probably have good reasons.
I haven't heard them yet, but I'm going to say that we should take that seriously now.
Of course, wait for the evidence to come out.
But I'll take it pretty seriously.
Now, excuse me.
I will be on David Pakman's show later this morning, and I think he's going to divide it into two parts, so the sum of it is tomorrow.
If you don't know David Pakman, his podcast is popular, and he's a super anti-Trumper.
And we're going to be talking about all the usual stuff.
So you might want to catch that.
I'm going to do that at...
I'm going to record it at...
Let's see.
I guess it would be noon Eastern time, but I'm not sure exactly when it airs.
I'm not sure if it airs live or it's taped or what.
But anyway, look for that.
David Pakman, P-A-K. Now, let's talk about, I've been taking you on a journey On the climate science topic, except I'm not taking the position that either side is taking.
There's generally the alarmist side, and then there's the denier side, and I'm not on either of those sides.
And the angle that I'm taking on this is as a psychological phenomenon.
So I'm going to study what is stupid on both sides.
and what makes sense on both sides and I'm going to try to see if there's any way we can get to anything even close to a reasonable opinion given the information that's available.
Here's what I found so far.
The first thing I can say with confidence Is that the people who tell me, hey Scott, you should do your own research on climate change, you know, the internet has it all, go look for it yourself, and you will come to a clear conclusion.
Those people are the wrongest people of all.
So if anybody says that a citizen who is, you know, let's say an educated person who's really committed to researching it on their own can get to the bottom of it by looking at all the public sources, That's not a thing.
I know, because I've been doing this for weeks.
So for weeks, I've been looking into it, and you can't get to the bottom.
What you can do is convince yourself you got to the bottom of it.
That you can do.
And the way you can do it is follow either of the silos.
If you read mostly the climate scientist majority opinion, it's completely persuasive.
As long as you ignore the other side.
But if you say, all right, well, I'll spend five minutes on the other side and see what the skeptics say, you're going to walk away saying, oh, shit.
The skeptics are exactly as persuasive.
Exactly. They are just as persuasive, which is different from being true, different from being right, But persuasion-wise, identical.
Let me tell you how generally it goes.
So if you're researching it on your own, it goes like this.
One side makes claim A, and you say to yourself, okay, if they're making claim A, let's see what the other side says about it.
And then you read the other side and they say, oh, claim A is false, and here's my chart showing you that it's false.
What do you do with that? I can't go look at the measuring devices.
I can't go tune the satellites and find out for myself.
What do I do with it?
I've got two authoritative people showing me two charts that are just opposite.
What do I do with that?
And you say to yourself, Scott, you idiot.
Just go look at the public sources and you can see where they got their data.
If it came from an authoritative source, such as NASA or the IPCC or something like that, then you believe it.
And if it came from somewhere else, don't believe it.
And I think, okay, that's a good idea.
I'll find out if their source is good.
They use the same source.
They use the same source and produce completely different charts.
What am I supposed to do with that?
I can't tell which one is right.
It's the same frickin' sources.
Now, part of it is that the deniers like, you know, the people who are not alarmists, let's say, like to use satellite data, which apparently measures the upper troposphere.
But I say, how good is that?
Because apparently 90% of the warming happens in the ocean.
Are you telling me that a satellite in space Can read the temperature below the depths of the ocean in a way that's so accurate we can tell if the temperature is going up by a degree in 10 years, or whatever it is.
I just don't believe that.
Now, if the argument is, oh no, we're not measuring the ocean, but if you measure the upper troposphere, that will at least tell you if things are getting warmer or cooler without directly measuring the ocean.
So I say, okay, let's say that's true.
And again, notice how quickly I get out of my depth, which is my entire point.
There is no such thing As a well-informed, educated citizen trying to get to the bottom of climate change.
It's just not a thing.
And I'm showing you how it's not a thing by walking you through this.
Let me give you my perfect example.
MIT climate expert, I guess he's recently retired, but Richard Lindzen.
If you don't know, MIT is the smartest of the smart when it comes to science.
In this country, maybe the world, if you can go to MIT, you're one of the smartest people in the world.
If you can be a professor at MIT, you're really one of the smartest people in the world.
This professor worked in exactly the area.
That they study climate stuff.
So one of the smartest people in the world at the highest level credential, MIT, etc.
So that's his qualification.
And I'm watching a video one of my Twitter followers sent me and said, look at minute 25 in this video.
And there's Richard Lindzen, And I had criticized him for an earlier video he did on PragerU where I said he ignored the primary claim of climate science, of the majority.
The primary claim is that the rate of increase, not just that it's getting warmer, that doesn't mean anything because the climate's always changing.
So if it were just getting warmer, Nobody would care, or at least they wouldn't be caring about CO2. But the fact that it's going up at a high rate, I said, because Richard Lindzen ignored that, he's not credible because he ignored the primary claim.
And then somebody showed me a video where he did address it directly.
And I thought, okay, now that's back on persuasive territory.
If you don't address the primary claim of the rate of increase, you got nothing as a critic.
And so he shows, this is Richard Linson, it's a video of him giving a presentation, and he shows on his field, on his chart, the hockey stick claim with the temperatures, and then he puts next to it The curve for 1919 to 1940.
And it's the same.
So 1919 to 1940, the CO2 from humans was of course much different than what we have in modern times.
So if it's true that the rate of increase between 1919 and 1940 was the same as our recent increase, If that's true, and CO2 wasn't much of a factor then, doesn't that completely disprove the primary claim of climate science?
And the answer is, only if you stop there.
So again, no matter how deep you go, it's turtles all the way down.
So if I stopped my research there and said, okay, the main claim is that it goes up like this, and now here's a perfect example where it's recent enough that we're pretty confident about the measurements of the temperature.
It's happened before without the CO2 being much of a factor.
We're done, right?
The entire argument is over if you stop there.
But is there also a rebuttal to why there used to be a curve, and now there's a curve, and now we're blaming CO2, but we didn't blame it before?
Can the global warmest people explain that?
And the answer is, of course they can.
Now, have I heard their explanation?
Not yet. But I guarantee you, I guarantee you they can answer that.
I just don't know what the answer is.
And if they answered it, I guarantee you that Richard Lindzen would say, well, they got that wrong, and here's why.
And if he said that, I guarantee you the climate scientist would say, no, he's criticizing us wrong, and here's why.
You can't get to the bottom.
There is no bottom on this well.
And I promise you that's true.
Now here's some other interesting things.
And again, I'm only going to be talking about the persuasiveness of the argument because the science of it, the truth of it, is impenetrable, even if you try really hard.
And here are some other things.
So apparently one of the problems with Michael Mann's theory of the hockey stick curve Is that there was some earlier period that had to be explained.
So there was an anomalous earlier period, and if he couldn't explain it, then his theory would be bunk.
But if he could find a way to explain it, then his theory would stay.
And the way he found, then again, I may have this wrong.
So if Michael Mann hears about this or somebody who knows his work hears about it, I would invite you to correct me on this point because I'm about...
I think I'm 75 to 80 percent sure I'm right about this, but I need a fact check on this.
I believe that he used tree rings to confirm his theory.
In other words, he looked at the rings on old growth trees And he determined that they were consistent with his theory.
And that was sort of like a big point.
He got those tree rings right, that agreed with his theory, so now it's all consistent in the past, it's consistent in the current, and he's got a nice consistent reason for his curve.
And then I read this morning that the tree ring experts said he was wrong.
So Michael Mann's a climate expert, but there are also apparently such things as, you know, tree ring experts.
And the tree ring experts said that whatever this clever thing that Michael Mann did was just wrong.
So here's my question.
If allegedly 97% of climate scientists agree, And that means something.
Now, of course, I don't think it's 97%, but let's say the majority.
If the majority agree in science, that has some weight.
Doesn't mean it's true.
They can be wrong, but it has weight.
You have to take that seriously.
But don't we also take it seriously if 22 tree ring experts tell the climatologist he got it wrong?
That matters, doesn't it?
And there's a great sentence here.
I'm going to read you this part from Ars Technica.
It talks about this situation.
There's something about the tree rings being off by a year.
I'm looking for the exact quote that made me laugh.
Here it is. By using a simple model of tree ring growth that simulates artificial records.
So far, do you know what that means?
I don't know. So Michael Mann used a simple model of tree ring growth that simulates artificial records.
In other words, he used the simulation to validate his simulation.
Does that sound reliable?
Maybe it is. Again, I'm not a scientist, but if you tell me that somebody used a simulation to validate the problem with their simulation, I'm immediately going to ask some questions.
And then it says, Mann and his colleagues found that taking into account, taking this into account, could produce hypothetical reconstructions that better match the climate model predictions.
So he found that he could make a simulation which the dendrochronologists, these are the people who are the experts on tree rings, many of the dendrochronologists who compiled these tree ring records took offense.
To the idea that they hadn't noticed such an important error in their field.
So in other words, Michael Mann alleges that he made a scientific breakthrough of enormous importance in the field of tree rings that was both obvious and all the expert on tree rings hadn't yet noticed.
Possible, right?
If you assume that he also made a huge breakthrough in climate, why wouldn't he be smart enough to make a huge breakthrough in tree rings?
Can't rule that out, right?
But I would note that when we're talking about the science of climate being settled, That the dendrochronologists may disagree.
And I'm pretty sure they're scientists, right?
They're experts. So at least the tree ring people have a little disagreement with one of the main supports of climate change.
So here's what they say.
Many of the dendrochronologists, the tree ring people, who compiled these tree ring records took offense to the idea that they hadn't noticed such an important error.
After all, researchers always cross-check tree ring records with other trees in the area to look for issues like skipped rings and growth variation between individual trees.
Twenty-three of those scientists submitted a comment to Nature Geoscience about the Mann, Fuentes and Rutherford paper.
In it they outlined what they felt were flaws in the method of the paper.
And then they go on to question it.
So here's my question.
If the tree ring people don't agree with the primary foundation of the Michael Mann graph, and they are scientists, Can you say that it's settled?
Because this article, if it's true, sounds credible, the article does, would say no.
Now, let's stay on climate change, but I'm gonna change the topic a little bit.
Now, keep in mind that one of the things I'm looking for, as I'm studying this turtles all the way down on climate change, is I'm looking for any one thing You could look at and say, okay, if this is true, then what the climate scientists are saying is probably also true.
But if it's false, they're almost certainly wrong.
Like, is there sort of one thing that you could go to?
And I would say one of the one things would be Richard Lindzen's graph that says that the rate of increase we're seeing is common and it's happened before CO2 was a big problem.
Is that true?
Why can't we find out if that's true?
It seems like that would be something that we could determine.
But then I ran into this argument.
So apparently the satellite images show an extended period recently.
Where there's a plateau in the warming.
I think a 17 year pause or something like that.
Now the pause appears to be in the satellite data.
Again, I'm open to all fact checking on this.
So the satellite checks the lower troposphere.
So it's checking the atmosphere for temperature.
It's not checking the ocean.
And it's not checking the land directly, it's checking the air.
And according to that, there was a 17-year pause.
What do the climate experts say explains a 17-year pause while CO2 is going up and CO2 is the main driver of climate?
What is their explanation for the pause?
Do they say satellites can't measure stuff?
I don't know if they say that, do they?
Or do they say...
Well, I'll tell you what they say.
They say that 17 years isn't long enough to determine anything.
Just let that soak in for a little while.
So one of the ways that the...
Satellite-measured 17-year pause in temperatures increasing, as explained, is that 17 years isn't long enough to get the full trend.
You need something closer to 30.
You know, 30 would be kind of convincing.
So if you're looking at, say, the average of this 30 years and this 30 years and this 30 years, then you could draw a line that was pretty good.
But they acknowledge that in any 17-year period, you might have some anomalies there.
Let's say that's true.
What is the most common thing you hear about climate change?
The most common argument you hear for climate change is, wait for it, That the temperature has gone up precipitously in the last 17 years.
Now I'm making up 17, but we're talking about recent years.
So whether you say that's recent 10 years or the recent 20 years, it's all the same argument.
The entire climate change argument is sort of predicated on the fact that what we're seeing in our recent 10 years is telling us something very important.
At the same time, They're explaining the way the satellite pause in temperature for 17 years by saying that's not long enough to really say anything.
You have to look at bigger periods.
So they can't both be right, right?
Now again, let me go back to my context.
My context is not that I'm giving you good information about climate science, because I know that's not happening.
You should not take anything I say as good information about climate, for sure.
I'm coming at it as a concerned citizen who's legitimately trying to figure out what's going on so that I could contribute to the political direction, I guess.
And I can't get to the bottom of it and I cannot form an opinion with the information that I have.
And these are the reasons.
So here's what I'd love to be an outcome of this.
I'd love an outcome to be boiling it down to, let's say, Let's say six good skeptical claims.
And I don't have the six yet, but I'm starting to form them.
If you could boil it down to just six good skeptical claims instead of the 25 or 50 that you hear all the time.
And imagine that the climate experts, suppose they could explain away, in a satisfying way, the six strongest claims.
Would you be willing to say that the 25 other claims you have that are weaker maybe don't mean that much?
Would you be willing to do that?
And likewise, if the experts can't explain maybe the top three or top six, or let's say they can only explain three of the top six claims, if you have three strong skeptical claims that can withstand the best challenge from the scientists, That would mean something, wouldn't it?
It would mean it's not as subtle science as you think.
And I don't know which way it would end up.
I don't have a prediction right now.
I suspect that the climate scientists could explain all of the skeptical things if you gave them time to do it and if they were interested in doing it.
But I think we can get it down to a few claims that are the strong ones.
Now let me give you an example of a weak claim.
There's a claim that all of this climate stuff is really a big ol' scam and the reason for the scam is that there are globalists who are using it as a smokescreen to transfer wealth from, I guess, rich people to poor people.
Is that the transfer?
Do I have that right? So it's a globalist scheme and that the whole climate stuff is completely made up.
Now, I would consider that one of the dumbest opinions.
So that one doesn't pass any sniff test by me.
Here's what's wrong with that.
In order for that to be the case, that climate change is nothing but a clever scam, all of the scientists working on it would have to be in on it.
Somebody says the IPCC admitted it.
Well, I've seen a meme in which the picture of a guy I don't know is, what do you call it, when you put words on top of it, and somebody put words on top of it that appear to be a quote from him saying that that's what they're all about.
Maybe you've seen it too?
You know that those are usually just made up, right?
It's either out of context or made up, or he's just a critic or something.
It is very unlikely that the IPCC said that.
And I know you have a source for it, right?
And you're going to send me a source that's a quote taken out of context.
If you can't send me a video of somebody saying it with full context, I'm not going to believe that's true because it's ridiculous on the surface.
And it's ridiculous all the way down.
The scientists working on climate change are not doing their job to satisfy a secret cabal of people cleverly running the world through a fake scam called climate change.
Al Gore is not part of a secret, clever plan to get something else done by climate change.
That's the dumbest opinion on climate.
And believe me, there are a lot of dumb opinions on climate.
Let me give you another one.
Here's another terrible opinion on climate.
This one's not dumb as much as uninformed.
And it goes like this, that people are still building on the coast, and people are still getting loans and getting insurance for living on the coast.
And therefore, they can't be that worried about sea level rising because they're building there and they're putting their money exactly where you would not put a house if the sea level was rising.
That's a terrible opinion.
It doesn't understand banking.
It doesn't understand insurance.
It doesn't understand, most importantly, Rich people!
So, first of all, people are not that smart to connect dots.
People are not good at managing risk.
So, if you have nothing but the normal situation where people are just bad at making decisions, You would still have plenty of people building on the coast.
If all of the smart people who believed in climate change, and let's say they're all right in this hypothetical, they're all right, climate change is bad, sea level's going up.
If you took all of those people who would have built on the coast and moved them inland, how many people would be left?
A lot. There are so many dumb people in the world that if 80% of all the smart people decided not to build on the coast because of climate change, there would still be millions and millions of people who are not smart enough.
You'll always have people who will do dumb things.
There's no exception to that.
You have so many people that if 99% of the dumb people, I'm sorry, if 99% of the smartest people moved inland, there would still be plenty of people to buy real estate on the coast.
And there would be plenty of banks to make them loans and plenty of insurance companies to make bad decisions and give them insurance.
Now on top of that, you don't understand how rich people work.
If you're a billionaire and you want a beach house, you don't really care if it's only going to last 25 years.
It's not financially important to you and maybe it won't be underwater because the sea level goes up in different ways in different places.
And if you're a billionaire, you just throw away that house or you have insurance or something.
Now, why does a bank give you a loan for that house?
Well, the bank also is not terribly worried about something that'll happen in 30 years.
Secondly, people who are rich enough to buy on the coast often don't need loans.
They just pay cash.
If I bought a beach house, I probably shouldn't tell you this, But, well, I guess I can tell you this.
I did once buy a condo right on the beach.
And did the bank give me a loan for my condo that was right on the beach?
This was in Maui.
I don't have it anymore, but a while ago I did.
Did the bank make me a loan for my beach property?
No, they didn't.
Because I paid cash.
Because that's what rich people do.
I just paid cash.
So, would an insurance company give me insurance for a place on the beach?
Even in the context of climate change risk?
Yes, they would. Because insurance is renewed every year.
They will give me insurance for as many years as they're confident that next year won't be that much different.
Which probably could be years and years and years.
Alright? So, if you're saying that people wouldn't buy on the beach if climate change were real because the banks, the insurance company, and the rich people themselves would make different decisions, completely wrong.
That is completely bad analysis.
There will always be people on the beach because even if the smart rich people left, the dumb poor people would come and say, hey, free beach.
I think I'll build here.
You know, I can get at least 10 years out of this.
So that is the worst argument.
It's the worst argument is that people wouldn't build on the beach.
And by the way, when you dig into the climate change stuff and you try to do your own research, like that really works, you'll find two facts that I have so far not been able to negotiate.
One of those facts is that the sea level is definitely rising.
And the other fact is that the sea level is not rising.
Those two facts are both out there and can be found from credible sources if you do your own research.
Who is it who said that there's no evidence of the sea level rising from climate change?
Do you know what source that was?
The IPCC in 1990.
said they didn't have evidence of sea level rising because of CO2 in 1990.
And by then, certainly they were paying attention to climate change.
So maybe they found it recently?
What I'm saying is that you can search forever and you'll just find competing versions of truth and you will not have the capability or the time or the expertise to figure out which one is right.
And indeed, if you had the time and you had the expertise, you would be like the two people who have different opinions.
Because apparently having the expertise does not make everybody come to the same opinion.
So there's nothing you can do to get down to the reality.
You can't get there from here.
So the idea that people can read tree rings.
Oh, and here's the other problem with tree rings as a temperature proxy.
Apparently people can look at tree rings and just have different opinions.
I mean, just think about that.
Imagine you're looking at a tree ring and you're trying to tell the temperature in, you know, 1990 from a tree ring.
You look at it and you go, oh, looks like it was kind of a sunny weather that summer.
I mean, I do get that the tree rings are approximate, you know, stories.
But are they ever really gonna be good enough to tell the temperature a hundred years ago?
I don't know, I'm skeptical.
All right.
I'm just looking at your comments here for a moment.
Yes, and then there's the issue that there can be Oh yeah, I talked about this yesterday.
So the medieval warm period is explained away because one part of the world was unusually warm while another part of the world was not.
Now, have you ever seen a map of where all the temperature gauges are around the world?
Excuse me. If you've seen the map that shows the globe and then there's a little red dot for where all the places are, we have terrestrial monitoring and including in the oceans.
I think it's like 95% in the United States.
Am I wrong about that?
95% of the measuring devices are just in the United States, and the rest of them are just a dot here and there around the world, and a few other concentrations.
And if that's the case, so here are the two facts we have.
That the terrestrial measuring devices are the primary argument for climate change.
Because the satellite stuff is a little more ambiguous because it shows that plateau, etc.
But we also know that the medieval warming period was localized.
There was one part of the world, say the climate experts, That got much warmer while other parts of the world got much colder.
And then you look at a map of where all the temperature measuring devices are and there are these enormous parts of the globe that are not measured.
How do we know those aren't the cold parts?
I mean, could we really measure 10% of the Earth and be pretty confident that there are no big warm or cold spots that we missed?
It just doesn't make sense to me.
But again, when I say it doesn't make sense to me, what I mean is you can't get to the level of understanding it as a citizen.
I'm not saying that there's no scientist who can explain it.
I'm just saying I can never get there.
Because I'll just find another scientist who says the opposite.
And then I can't tell the difference.
Alright. That's where we are for now.
Fame question. How often do you get recognized in public?
That's an interesting question and a good change of topic.
Oh, we're going to talk about the steel barrier in a moment.
I get recognized in public far more now because of these periscopes.
So prior to doing the periscopes, it was rare.
I would say close to never.
But sometimes if I checked into a hotel, sometimes it would recognize me my name.
But before doing periscopes, almost never recognized by sight.
And now if I travel, the odds of me being recognized in public now are high.
So I do get recognized in public.
Let's talk about the steel barrier.
As I have been telling you for now a few months, the only way this will ever be settled, this border wall slash fence situation, is when we can come up with a solution that is neither wall nor fence, but is both.
And the steel barrier is a wince.
It's sort of a wall-like fence.
The wince. At the moment, we're still in the stupid zone.
So the stupid zone is where politicians do engineering and tell you what a barrier should look like and where it should be, etc.
So we have to get past stupid to get the government opened.
Now when I say we have to get past stupid, I don't mean that the people who are involved are stupid people.
But what they're telling the public right now is clearly stupid.
They're engaged in negotiation, they're engaged in public opinion building, they're engaged in persuasion.
So the people doing the stupid stuff are not themselves stupid.
President Trump is not stupid the way he's running this.
He's actually running it pretty well, in my opinion.
And Pelosi is not stupid.
She's doing her job pretty well, and that's exactly why there's a problem.
You have two people, if I may say so.
Pelosi and Trump are...
She's a good nemesis.
She's a solid, solid politician, and the reason we're stuck is that they're both so good.
But... The current view of both of them for public consumption is just stupid.
Because in no world do you let politicians make engineering decisions.
So they do need to figure out how to get from stupid to let the engineers do it.
And that gap they've not figured out yet.
And maybe it's not time to figure it out.
Because remember, it's not just about making an engineering decision.
It's about the politics of it.
It's about who wins. It's about 2020.
It's about all that stuff.
But you're not going to see an end to this until somebody suggests the bridge.
And the bridge might be something like a budget with some restrictions built in.
So for example, they could say, we'll give you the 5.6 billion or whatever number they end up with.
But it's not fully approved until the engineers have brought us a proposal.
That explains what's wall and what's fence.
You're done. Because both of them can claim victory, send it off to the engineers.
The engineers will come back guaranteed with something that looks like a variety of solutions across the border, depending on the need and the eminent domain and a whole bunch of other things.
And then when it comes back, and that might be months from now, both sides can say, well, we're not going to go against the engineers.
And they say, put this steel barrier in some places and do other solutions in other places, and let's do what the engineers say.
That will give both sides the ability to claim victory.
And if you don't get to the point where both sides can claim victory, you don't get to anything.
So, look for that.
When they start talking about how to budget it with restrictions, and the restrictions being that the engineers have to come back with a specific proposal that will be approved when they have the proposal, that's when it gets serious.
Now it's just politicians trying to convince the stupid public of a stupid point.
Now I tweeted yesterday That there's this weird disconnect on the Democrats' opinion about the wall.
They say two things about it.
Number one, the wall will not work.
Number two, walls are immoral.
But if they don't work, who exactly loses?
It's just a waste of money, right?
It can't be true Simultaneously, that it's immoral and it doesn't work.
Unless you're assuming that the intentions of the people who want to build it are immoral, and that's not in evidence.
I'm pretty sure the intentions are people want to stop crime, control the border, you know, all the usual stuff.
They can be right or they can be wrong, but it's not immoral.
They just want a wall.
So, Nancy Pelosi has painted herself in a corner with this immoral thing.
And here's the way you should get out of it.
Somebody needs to ask Nancy Pelosi if all forms of border control are immoral.
And sort of drill down on that because the opinion falls apart because she said she's in favor of border control and if the slash wall that's being considered is this steel barrier that you can see through, is that an immoral fence or whence or wall?
I would show her two pictures.
One or three, maybe.
A wall, an existing fence, so we have less impressive fences right now.
I'll show her a concrete wall, a fence that we don't have, a fence that we do have, and then the wents, you know, the steel structure.
Show her those three pictures and say, which ones are immoral?
Is it just the concrete one?
Or are the others a little less immoral because it's easier to climb over?
I would just get her to some specificity in that.
Because if that's her primary objection, she wisely did not make the case that it's too expensive.
I think she said that, but she's not dying on the hill of it's too expensive because the budget is so big compared to this ask.
So she's painted herself in a corner.
I think we should show her three pictures.
Concrete wall, steel lattice thing, and existing fences that are already on the border, and let her judge the morality of each of those solutions.
I would like to see your answer.
Let me tell you the dumbest argument for a wall.
I think my value to you is that you can trust that if something doesn't make sense, I'm gonna call it out, no matter which team it is.
So there's something that the Trump team says that is ridiculous.
It's the worst argument for a wall, and I'll bet every one of you have used this argument.
And the argument is that they built a wall on El Paso or wherever it is and it took the illegal crossings down to zero.
I'll say it again just so you know what the setup is.
So the argument is that the walls work because we built a wall and I think it's El Paso and it took the illegal crossings down to zero.
Wherever it was. It doesn't matter where it is.
The argument is the same.
Is that a good argument? Somebody says, I live there and it's true.
It's true and it's stupid.
It's true. As far as I can tell, they built a wall and it stopped illegal immigration down to zero.
Here's why it's stupid. You don't think those people just went somewhere else and crossed?
Do you think the people walked up to a wall that's, you know, let's say it's five or ten miles long or whatever it is.
You know, it's just a little piece of the border.
Do you think people walked up to that structure and said, ah, there's a wall here in just this little place.
I guess I can't cross the border.
I guess I give up.
Now somebody's saying the friction argument.
The friction argument is that whenever you put up some friction, you change behavior in every field.
It doesn't matter if you're talking immigration, gun control, whatever.
If you make it harder for somebody to do something, then they're going to do less of it.
Does it really make it harder to cross the border if the people who are likely to cross the border talk to other people and they say, oh, we used to go across El Paso, but now they have a wall there.
So now when you want to go across, just go down there.
Totally wide open. The argument for a wall slash border only works if you're doing all of it or all of the easy parts.
If you have a fence across all of the easy parts, you have a strong argument.
It doesn't matter if you have a whence or a wall or whatever you have.
But if you have a strong border control on all of the easy parts to get across, that's a strong argument.
If that looks like a reduced immigration, I don't think I'd even have to look at the data to know that that was a good idea.
Because if all that's left are the hard parts to get across, That's friction.
That's real. But if you've got a border that's this big, and you've built a wall that's this big, and you found that zero people across that little wall, that little area out of all this, you don't know a freaking thing.
You don't know anything if all you know is this little piece of wall stopped people from going over the wall.
Because you don't know if they just went to the other places and walked in.
And I certainly did, right?
So, I hope that gives me a little bit of credibility with you.
Damn you stink, somebody said.
I hope that gives me a little bit of credibility.
Because dumb is dumb, no matter which side it comes from.
And that whole wall argument being 100% effective, if you build a little bit of it, is just dumb.
Now, is it wrong for them to say it?
No, it isn't.
Because the border control people and President Trump and his administration are in the business of persuasion.
Now, if a full good border security were a bad idea, I would say, my God, they're being dumb and they're using evil persuasion to get a bad result.
Then I would not be in favor of that.
But if they're persuading in a way that is, as I like to say, directionally correct, then I'm generally okay with it.
And it is directionally true that walls work, That's directionally true.
It is directionally true that if we had enough border security and it was better, we could reduce immigration.
I think that's just absolutely true.
We don't need, but that very specific thing, we built a wall in El Paso and it took immigration down to zero, that's just ridiculous.
People just obviously just learned to go around the wall.
So there's that.
I don't see any chance that the government will reopen really, really soon.
It feels like both sides need to take this as far as they can because they both need to explain They need to explain why they didn't fight hard enough if they lose.
So both sides have to just take this longer.
So anything that happens in the next few days maybe, it might even be weeks, I don't know, probably doesn't matter because neither side really wants to solve it.
We're not calling her AOC for those of you who are joining.
I've changed her nickname to RPOS, racist piece of shit, because she's gone full racist.
She's gone full Hawk Newsome, white people are bad, with her latest comments on 60 Minutes.
So now I think she has to be challenged on that.
So I have personally, just to make this as clear as possible, I was amused and appreciated Her persuasive power and her ability to get attention, etc. But now she's crossed a red line for me, which is calling half of the country racist.
Because when you say that Trump is, you're really saying that his followers are as well.
And so RPOS is dead to me.
But I don't mind talking about her.
The specific thing I'd like to talk about her more is I think Nancy Pelosi must be challenged to explain her.
So Nancy Pelosi has to explain why there's somebody in her party who is making Nancy Pelosi look like a chimp.
Sorry. RPOS is getting all the attention.
She's doing everything that is essentially, she's moving the brand of Democrats and Nancy Pelosi looks like a weak, really ineffective leader because she's letting that happen.
So the fight should be between the Democrats because Pelosi is just being totally kneecapped by RPOS and she's making And I don't know if Nancy Pelosi is saying these things about President Trump at the moment.
I'm sure she has in the context of politics in the past.
But you don't see Pelosi going after Trump as a racist lately.
Am I wrong about that?
Doesn't it seem that Pelosi is trying to be productive and trying to make stuff work?
Whether you love her or hate her, it seems like Pelosi generally wants to make things work.
She wants her version of things to work.
But she seems like on the productive road, not the unproductive road.
And I think Trump and Pelosi can get on the same road eventually.
But she's being kneecapped by her own side.
So she's going to have to get our POS under control if she wants to be effective.
All right.
Am I surprised by RPOS?
Not really.
90% of Democrats agree.
Yeah, I didn't say it wasn't popular.
Polarcy apologist.
Just...
Well, she got a new nickname today.
I think she has to answer for that every time she speaks forever.
She's gonna have to answer why does she want to take money away from white people and Asian Americans and transfer it to other ethnicities.
And if she doesn't want to do that, she should say it directly.
All right. Oh, my interview with David Pakman is at 9 a.m.
my time, which would be noon Eastern time.
But I'm not sure when it airs.
I'm not sure how much is live and how much is recorded.
But I'll link to it as soon as there's a link to it, so you'll catch that.
All right, that's enough for me.
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