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Jan. 10, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
31:44
Episode 368 Scott Adams: Keep me Company During Power Outage. Ask Me Anything
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Hey everybody, come on in.
I need you to keep me company during the power outage.
Not sure how long it'll last, but when the power comes on, I might go do something else.
And so the power has been off for a few hours in my neighborhood.
Somebody Ran an SUV into a power pole, we think.
There was a big accident nearby, so that's probably what it was.
I'm coming to you from my man cave.
I'd show you around, but you wouldn't actually see anything.
So I'm playing...
What is the name of that scary movie?
I might use this every time I do Periscope now.
I like the look. Do I have a hot girlfriend or the hottest girlfriend?
Is your question. And the answer is the hottest girlfriend.
And trust me when I say there was no other answer to that question.
It happens to be true though.
Let's talk about Trump.
I only was skimming the news this afternoon, but I understand that he went into the meeting and said, handed down some candy and then said, if I sign the government back into action, if I approve the budget, will you give me the wall or something like it?
And Blair Witch, yes, it's Blair Witch.
And apparently he walked out.
Let me ask you, was that the right play?
Was that the right thing to do?
I'm going to argue that it was exactly the right thing to do.
That he didn't need to stay in the room once they said there's no negotiating on this point, because it was the only point.
So I thought the Democrats actually did a good job Of the best case they could under the circumstances.
Because keep in mind, the Democrats have an extra level of challenge.
Because the Democrats have to make a case for why they're against the thing they're for.
Literally. Because they're for border security using whatever mechanisms you need, wherever they are.
And They're arguing against it.
So they had a tough position to argue from.
So what they did was they said, hey, let's separate these things.
We can improve the budget and open the government.
Hey, we'll just negotiate this other thing separately.
Now, the beauty of that method is that it depends entirely upon the people that they're persuading being stupid or at least ignorant and not paying attention to what's going on.
Because there's no logical reason that the government budget is tied to the wall.
It's not logically connected.
Trump just said, we're going to see how much pain you're willing to take to get the wall, and you're going to see how much pain I'm willing to take to get the wall.
Now, it's really interesting because Trump is in a position, and I think you'd agree, where he can't give in.
He actually can't. If he does, he's got a lot of explaining to do, and I don't know if he can dig himself out of that hole.
But, Nancy and Chuck, very cleverly, what is the term for it when you're playing chicken and you're driving at each other with cars?
In order to win a negotiation at this level, they had to convince Trump That they would stay in it longer than he would.
And they know that he's really going to stay in it.
So how do you convince them, how do you convince the country that you're going to stay in it longer when you're actually arguing that you don't approve of your own opinion?
How long can you stay with the position that you don't approve of border security with a variety of mechanisms that the experts tell you they need?
That's a tough position when you've approved it in the past.
So they're depending on the public, not understanding how negotiating works.
So of course there's no logical reason that the government has to be shut down because they haven't figured out what to do on the border.
They're just not connected. Trump is connecting them simply to give them pain.
And if it means that much to them, Then they will do more damage to the government than you will.
But it's a really bad bet on their end.
Because I think Democrats can negotiate and get something out of this deal and still look like they won.
So they can, you know, it's possible for Pelosi and Schumer to give a little more and still look like winners, still look like they were bipartisan, etc., But they cleverly did this.
They painted themselves in a corner.
And the analogy I was trying to make, when people are playing chicken and they want to act like they don't have the option of turning away from the other car at the last minute, isn't there something they do?
Like they put a brick on the steering wheel or they throw away the...
Is it that they throw away the steering wheel?
Is that what they do? Yeah.
Anyway. My analogy is bad, but the...
But what Schumer and Pelosi did was they threw away the steering wheel.
So they publicly said it's immoral to approve this wall the way it's being described.
Now once you've said it's immoral, and you've said it a whole bunch of times, how do you change your mind?
You can change your mind on a budget negotiation, but you can't change your mind on a moral issue.
So when Pelosi painted it as a moral issue, It was like she took the steering wheel of the car and threw it out and said, you know, come at me, Trump.
You still have a steering wheel and you're the only one who can turn this car so we don't kill each other.
So I'm going to say, now I've said this before, but...
Anybody who underestimates Pelosi is maybe making a big mistake, because she does seem to be good at this.
I don't know exactly how good Chuck Schumer is.
I don't get the feeling he's the strong member of the party.
Do you? Let me ask you the question directly.
When you look at Schumer and Pelosi, and if you've been watching them both for a while, who's the power The power person in that power couple.
It's her, isn't it?
He feels so...
Here's what it is, I think.
When Pelosi is doing her political persuasion, you can know that it's just persuasion, as in the case of The Wall.
You can know that she doesn't mean what she says, but she still looks like she does, right?
Fact check me on that.
In your opinion, does Pelosi look like at least she believes, you know, it's a convincing story that she believes what she's saying.
When Schumer talks, I don't believe he believes it.
Because he doesn't sell it.
There's something about his, I don't know, his demeanor, his words he chooses.
And today, for example, wasn't it Schumer and not Pelosi?
I may have this backwards, but you can test me.
Wasn't it Schumer who said that, and Trump said that Mexico was going to pay for the wall?
Because when you talk about something else that's not connected, you know, the decision of whether they should pay for the wall is completely disconnected from his campaign promise that he'd make Mexico pay for the wall, which was never the important part, right? I don't think anybody, even people who voted for him, well, probably some, but Let me ask you this.
Most of you probably were Trump supporters, Trump voters.
And let me ask you, how many of you believed that candidate Trump literally meant he was going to make Mexico pay for the ball and that it might happen?
So you have to believe both things.
You have to believe that he meant it literally, like they were going to write a check.
And he had to believe that he was actually going to get that done.
How many of you believe that?
Because I don't see it as a big reason that people voted for him.
So the comments are a little lagged here.
So people are saying that...
Yeah, some people are agreeing with me that Pelosi seems like the stronger player there.
Yeah. But at the moment, you're seeing sort of a clash of titans, and it looks like a tie to me.
And usually I have a stronger opinion about the way things are going to go.
You know, if you're going to bet money, and don't do this by the way, Don't bet money on the next thing I'm going to say.
I've heard from a number of people who've...
I probably shouldn't tell you this, but I'm just going to be honest.
I've heard from a lot of people who won a lot of money betting on Trump to win because they followed my blog.
I know one person who won $100,000, others $10,000.
You know, pretty big bets.
And I want to tell you that I was pretty sure about that happening, but I'm, you know, less sure of this following prediction.
But I also don't see anything that's wrong with it.
You know, anything could happen.
And here's the prediction. Trump is going to give something closer to what he needs Then Pelosi will get closer to no barriers being funded or a low budget.
So I think that Trump wins for the reason that he can't lose, meaning he can't allow himself to give in because it would be sort of a fatal blow.
But Pelosi can.
Pelosi is trying to tell us That she can't back out by painting herself in a corner, but she really can.
And my guess is they'll have to pretend that they both won and somebody just needs to say the magic words.
Let the engineers figure out where it's fence and where it's something else.
Let them tell us the budget and let us just agree that we're going to go with the experts and get on with it.
So I'm sure there's some way to do a version of that.
So, in other words, since it's become a personal contest between Pelosi and Trump, Trump can't lose.
He can't let himself. He just can't.
And Pelosi...
Has painted herself in a corner, threw away the steering wheel.
The only way they can get past it is to turn it over to a third party.
But as it turns out, that's exactly what you should do in any rational business sense.
You should ask the engineers to make sure that they have a rational budget and a rational set of solutions.
Now, you're going to tell me that Border Patrol lights...
Now you're going to tell me that Border Patrol has already done the analysis and Border Patrol has decided where there will be fence and no fence.
But I'm not sure that people see the Border Patrol people as totally free of politics.
Because you can never be sure if they're saying what they're saying because their boss is Trump.
So there's always a little bit of bias that's built into who's willing to say what in public.
And yes, but if you say, let the engineers decide, it's still really Border Patrol.
They're just talking to the engineers.
So the engineers would be, you know, capturing the specs.
And then Border Patrol would say, well, here's a place we need a wall.
And then the engineer would say, I hear what you're saying.
But from a physical perspective, you just can't get a wall there.
So let me give you some suggestions for what would work.
So if Trump is still selling...
And I'm not sure this is exactly the case, but I'll just say it in the conceptual.
If Trump is still selling the idea that Border Patrol has figured out where they want wall and where they want fence and other things, they're still not the right people.
They are the right people who know where the problem is, and they also would know What has worked before?
Has this wall worked? Has this fence worked?
So they would know all that, and you couldn't get there without using all of their expertise.
So they have to be the users in this case.
So the users, Pelosi and Trump, let's put it this way, speaking in business terms, Pelosi, Schumer, and Trump are not the customer.
They're not the user.
The user is Border Patrol, the people who do that job.
But Border Patrol is not engineers.
So they need to describe as best they can what they think needs to be done and where it needs to be done.
But you need an engineer to say, you know, this works or this doesn't.
All right. Alexa, turn off Man Cave.
I'm having trouble connecting to the internet.
Take a look at the help section in your Alexa app.
Looks like I've got to reboot a lot of stuff in my house.
I've got a lot of rebooting to do.
So I'm going to get to that.
I'm just looking at your...
I'll stay a little bit longer and look at your questions.
Army Corps of Engineers...
Yeah, I guess, would the Army Corps of Engineers be the right engineers?
I suppose they would. But is it really...
Do they do civilian stuff?
I don't know. Yeah, you'd have to carefully choose the engineers, that's true.
All right, you want to hear...
You want to hear the freakiest...
The freakiest stoner hypothesis you've ever heard?
Do you want to hear something that will just blow your mind?
But only if you've been drinking or smoking or something.
Alright, here's an idea I've been playing with.
This is brand new and I wasn't going to break it out yet because I haven't thought about it enough.
But the idea is this. If we are a simulation, meaning that this world...
It was built by other creatures who may themselves have been programmed by other creatures in a never-ending turtles all the way to the bottom way.
So if we are a simulation, I have speculated that every simulation has some, let's say, physical constraints, such as memory and how fast you can process things, etc.
So that if we know that's the case, that if we're simulated, We would find constraints.
You know, where would you look to find the constraints?
And some of the ones that I've speculated are, and this is the part I've talked about a few times before, but I'm going to add a twist that's fun.
So I speculated that some of the things that you wouldn't be able to see if you were in the simulation is the edge of the simulation.
So in other words, you can never walk to the edge and then get on the outside and look in.
So that would be, you know, a natural part of being in a simulation.
And sure enough, our laws of physics make it literally impossible for us to get to the edge of the universe.
Because the universe is expanding faster than we can get there, and then we have the speed of light limitation.
Why is the speed of light a limitation?
Well, nobody knows exactly why.
Maybe we'll figure it out someday.
But it's just programmed.
And so that's one thing.
So they would do that to conserve resources.
But here's another thing that a programmer would do to conserve resources.
The programmer would not design the entire universe in full because the people who are the subjects of the simulation, you and I, the people, would never see a very large percentage of it.
We would never experience it.
So let's say there's, you know, a planet, 100 million light millers, you know, light years away.
We'll never see it.
So they don't need to render it.
The simulation doesn't need to build it until somebody comes along that might look at it exactly the way software is designed today.
So here's the thing.
If you could prove that history is built on demand instead of already existing, You would go a long way toward proving we were a simulation.
All you would have to find is that the history gets written in the present.
In other words, if you're digging in the dirt and you find something, that history gets written at that point, but if you hadn't found it, the history of the thing in the dirt wouldn't have been written.
So, this might explain why we can't agree on climate change.
Because there could be not an objective history.
Because if we're a simulation, and if you know simulation theory, you know there's a billion to one chance that we are.
Because however many original species there are, they will create probably lots of simulations.
And then the simulations will be smart enough to program their own simulations all the way down.
So, yeah, and Elon Musk agrees.
Smartest people I know think this is likely as well.
So could it be that the reason we can't agree what was happening in old Earth is because there was nothing happening?
Could it be That the reason we can't resolve why the things that you're looking at and the things that I'm looking at are telling completely different histories.
I mean, literally, I'm talking to people all day long today, because I've been taking calls on my company's app interface, which is working great, by the way.
So I just advertised on Twitter that I would argue with people about Climate change.
And I got to talk to a whole bunch of interesting people who knew more than I did on a lot of stuff.
But I'm talking to people who say it's very clear that the temperature went up.
And other people saying, look at the data.
Well, you know, just look at the data.
It's public. The temperature went down.
Now, how can it be true that in 2019, the smartest people in this topic Don't seem to be all on the same page.
Now, I realize I'm talking to more skeptics than the average person would, so it's skewed that way.
But I can't yet resolve this simple question if the temperature's going up or down over time, you know, let's say in the last hundred years.
It's actually trickier than you think when you talk to the people who are, you know, the more credible skeptics.
Now, when I say credible, I always make the distinction that that doesn't mean that they're right.
It just means that the way they present it, you know, you can ask a lot of questions and still walk away saying, hmm, that's not bad.
My preliminary assumption about the skeptics and the, let's say, the alarmists in climate is that the skeptical arguments are at least 70% bullshit.
At least 70% of what people claim, because there are a whole bunch of skeptical arguments.
I'd say 70% of them can just easily be dismissed.
For example, the solar cycle one.
Does smart people check that the lines don't line up?
That's sort of the end of the story.
But it's feeling to me that within climate science, even if you assume that the primary claims are true, that CO2 is raising the temperature, At an alarming rate, and that's a big problem.
Even if you accept that, I still think about 20% of it is bullshit.
Now, these are my preliminary estimates, and I'm just going to do this continuous deep dive, and every time I surface a little nugget of something that I think I learned, I'll just share it with you.
Probably toward the ends of my periscopes, so that people who don't want to hang in for that part can bail out.
But the one theory that can't be ruled out is that there is no objective history.
And therefore, until the skeptics who are the most credible and the...
Oh, here's the other thing.
Have you ever been amazed that the experts won't have a debate with the skeptics?
And the skeptics are all willing?
Like, yeah, I'll do it.
Now, the reason, of course, is actually a good reason.
So I would say the climate scientists, when they say we don't want to get on the stage with the skeptics, that's a smart reason.
They're actually acting completely rational.
And the reason is that it could only degrade their credibility.
I don't think there's a way to win.
But isn't it interesting that we can't resolve the history and the one and only way that it could be done would be to put There are probably, I'd say there are no more than six people on the planet that would represent the most knowledgeable experts, say three of them, and the most knowledgeable skeptics, let's say the best of the three of them.
So there are probably six people in the world who all know each other, at least by reputation and by work.
They all know who each other are.
They can all connect with each other.
Millions and millions of people would tune into it.
It would be the highest rated...
Don't you think it would be one of the highest rated television shows of all time?
Am I wrong about that? If there was an actual legitimate debate, I think it would be one of the biggest, most ratings, bonanza shows of all time.
But isn't it interesting that the only way that the history could be resolved and then written...
Which would be a big burden on the computer, because it would have to write all this, you know, the history about temperature, and really probably model the entire history if it hasn't done it already, that the simulation prevents those six people from ever being in the same place when somebody's watching.
So if you think about it, the simulation needs to preserve its resources.
And again, this is just for fun.
You can believe whatever you want.
So if we're in the simulation, it's trying to conserve its resources in a variety of clever ways.
And one of those clever ways might be to never let the skeptics and the climate scientists get in front of the public and solidify one of those two histories.
So there you go. Because we're a simulation and it saves resources.
Was the blackout caused by global warming?
It was not. It was caused by, I am told, an SUV running into something that was all bad news.
Have I heard of Gad Saad?
I have.
I don't know much about him.
By the way, is it my imagination or did Trump raise the initial bid from 5.6 up to 5.7?
It seems like it went up, didn't it?
Somebody's asking, does Crenshaw have persuasion gain?
Yes. Crenshaw has the full package, it looks.
I would say that Just from what I've seen of him in public, and it isn't a ton, but it's enough to get a sense of the person.
I've seen a lot on Twitter.
Yeah, he's got the full package.
I would say so. If it's a simulation, who cares about climate change?
Well, if it's a simulation, all of our experiences will be You know, as if we're real.
So, you care whether you're real or a simulation.
There would be no difference.
Do you have solar panels?
Yeah, solar panels don't help you in a power outage.
Unless you have batteries, which is rare.
When am I smoking a joint with the president?
I don't think that's going to happen.
Is Stéphane Molyneux legit?
Well, does legit mean the same as right about everything?
I don't think it does.
So, I would say Stéphane is legit in the following ways.
I believe he's honest to a fault, meaning that anytime he gets in trouble, it's because that's his actual opinion.
I think he's one of the most rational, logical people around, and since he lives in a world that isn't like that, he causes massive cognitive dissonance in people, and they imagine that what he's doing is far worse than what is actually happening.
In other words, he triggers them to the point where they make assumptions about him That are out of bounds, in my opinion.
Same thing that happens to President Trump.
Anybody who triggers people with their honesty, they're going to get the same treatment.
By the way, let's talk about, then, is it Congresswoman Tulebi?
What is the name of the The woman who called Trump a mother effer?
Is it Tlaibbi?
Something like that? She's getting a lot of airtime, isn't she?
Don't you see her in the news all the time?
Now ask yourself, was it a mistake?
Was it a mistake to say what she said and to know it could probably be reported or caught on film or something?
Doesn't look like a mistake.
And when it happened, I thought to myself, you know, that could work out for her.
And sure enough. And I've taught you about the CEO first day move, where if you're the new CEO, the first thing you do is, you know, you change something, you fire a bunch of people, you reorganize.
So you want to leave that first impression if you're the new boss.
I don't know how to pronounce it exactly.
And I think that...
Do you say congresswoman?
Congressperson? I don't even know what is the right...
the proper phrase.
But... Let's say representative.
So representative...
Talabi...
She made a first impression...
As the most aggressive person in Congress.
Will that ever work against her?
Probably not. Probably not.
I mean, she's got a lot of, you know, other impressions she's going to make, so things could change.
But that first impression will never leave her.
And it really is a good one for politics, especially if you're a woman.
Now, ask yourself this.
How many sexist men are there in the world who think to themselves, well, the women in politics are not as tough or whatever.
I never talk to anybody like that, by the way.
I'm in California, so that probably makes a difference.
But I literally never meet anybody, male or female, who think that a woman can't be president or any of those older views.
But you know they exist, right, in the country.
There are clearly people who still have, let's say, more classic views, who think that maybe a woman who's a new member of Congress would not be that tough.
Well, she just slayed that opinion.
She just slapped it off the table before she was even sworn in.
Tell me that that's not good politicking.
Because that was good, good politicking.
She got like two or three persuasion things right before she even started.
You know, one was sucking the attention out of the room, the other is doing something that's a little inappropriate, and then what I was describing, setting the first impression as sort of the toughest, meanest politician.
It's nothing but good for her power.
And she got a lot of, you know, airtime, etc.
So I think it's all good.
Anyway, I'm going to go find Christina.
And we will rejoice that there are lights.
And I will reset all my digital clocks.
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