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Jan. 14, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:07:26
Episode 374 Scott Adams: Russia, DeBlaisio, Gabbard, Jeff Bozo, FBI
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here.
I see the facts are safe.
And I see that that's somebody's actual username facts are safe.
Hello Donna Evirus Joe Yvonne Miriam and Max Missy and Piggott.
What kind of a name is that? Diamond and Andrew and all the rest of you.
I know why you're here.
I know why you're here.
You can try to hide it, but I know why you're here.
Does it have something to do with coffee?
Yes, it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm Scott Adams and it's time to Grab your mug, your cup, your glass, your stein, your beverage container.
Put your favorite liquid in there.
I hope it's coffee. And join me for the simultaneous sip.
Oh, that's the good stuff.
So my life is getting weirder than it used to be.
So this is the 30th year of the Dilbert cartoon comic strip.
And so for most of my adult life I've been fairly famous, but I've also been invisible.
If I went out in public, unless it was local, nobody would recognize me.
It was sort of a perfect deal.
I could be famous, And nobody recognized me.
I had everything. Perfect situation.
But, now that I'm doing these periscopes, it seems that if I go to the grocery store or anywhere else, I get recognized.
I was walking down the street last night in Vegas just taking a walk after dinner, or before dinner, and it seemed like a lot of people were looking at me.
More so than any other time I've ever noticed.
And it makes me wonder how much my visual recognition is changing.
Alright, let's talk about Jeff Bozo, as the president has so named Jeff Bezos.
So if you saw the president's cheeky tweet about Jeff Bezos' divorce, he said that Jeff Bezos, that there was some reporting by a competitor.
So the first funny thing is that he calls, the president calls the National Enquirer a competitor to the Washington Post.
And then he goes on to say that, you know, without naming him, saying that the National Enquirer has a better track record on the facts, which is hilarious.
Now, of course, everybody knows that the National Enquirer has some past relationship with the president that's good.
And so I think the president is just enjoying this way too much.
And then he said something interesting.
He said that he hopes that the next owner of the Washington Post does a better job.
And I thought to myself, wait a minute, who gets the Washington Post and the divorce?
Now, wouldn't his wife get half of it?
Right? Now, it makes me wonder, is there somebody, yeah, there's no prenup, right?
So I would think that his wife would get half of the Washington Post.
Or something like that.
Anyway, so I'm wondering, is his wife dating yet?
I'm not asking for myself.
But somewhere in the world, there's, I think, a single woman, Jeff Bezos X, who might own half of the Washington Post or soon might.
And if she doesn't own half of the Washington Post, she could certainly buy her own newspaper if she wanted to.
And I wonder if there's any Republican who's saying, I think I'm going to start, you know, maybe make a call, see if I can date that woman.
So, depending on who our next romantic partner is, I'm talking about Mrs.
Bezos, this is, now I can't even say it without thinking of Bozo, so I'm completely ruined on that now.
But if she marries a Republican, it will be hilarious.
Somebody's saying it will be sold.
Who will buy it?
It'll be very interesting.
Alright, let's talk about some other people.
You know Mayor de Blasio of New York City has said that he wants to have universal health care in New York City, and he's trying to make that happen, including for all non-citizens who are living there.
And you might also know that California's Gavin Newsom has announced that he'd like to work toward some kind of universal healthcare in California.
Which is a pretty good reason for me to leave California.
Because I can't imagine what that's going to cost me.
But here's the thing.
I think that de Blasio's Now, let me say this as objectively as possible.
I don't know much about de Blasio, so I don't have a plus or a minus opinion of him.
He's sort of a non-entity to me in California.
So I don't have an opinion on him.
I just know he's a Democrat, he's progressive, so most of you are not fans, I'm sure.
But here's the thing. I've been talking for, since you've been following me, I've been saying that the smartest thing to do is to test things small wherever you can.
So shouldn't we all be happy that de Blasio wants to test this?
Test the idea of universal healthcare in New York City.
Now, I don't believe he's asking the government to pay for it.
So, if they run up a bill, I don't know that it's my problem.
If they can't pay for it, I don't necessarily think I'm going to have to pick up the difference.
So, I'm actually pretty happy about it.
And I will go further than that and say it's probably the best move by a potential candidate for president who is a Democrat.
Now, I don't know if he'll ever get to the point where he can implement it.
Because it might be that it's just simply too hard.
But the fact that he's taken such a bold step is to his credit.
Because, in my opinion, somebody needs to try this damn thing.
And New York City seems like, really, almost the perfect place to do it.
Because, you know, it's the size of a country.
And it's still, you know, manageable.
And probably has very capable management compared to other cities.
Can somebody fact check me on that?
Would it be true that New York City has a more effective government than most other places?
Somebody fact check me on that.
I have no reason to think I'm right except that, you know, they're big.
They probably attract more talent.
So, there you go.
So kudos to de Blasio for even trying and I think the country should be happy that we might have a model that we can look at and say that failed miserably or that succeeded better than we thought or we learned something now we can try it again a different way.
So I am A-plus on de Blasio taking a run at that and just see what we learn.
Let's push on it. I'm increasingly convinced That, especially within the age of robots, you know, we're getting close to the point where the robots are going to take a lot of the jobs.
Nobody doubts that will be the case.
And when that happens, you're going to have a lot of people with lower-paid jobs, and how are they going to afford healthcare?
I think we're heading toward a future Where universal healthcare is almost a guaranteed outcome.
It's just a question of how long you wait.
And I think if he gets ahead of it, that would be useful for the country.
Even if it doesn't work, we'll learn something.
Alright, let's talk about Russia.
So I think we see the endgame on the Russia collusion.
Did I see Naval's tweets about city-states?
I did not, but I'll go look at that.
So here's what the endgame for the Russia collusion investigation looks like, and I would argue that at this point it's obvious.
In other words, I could be wrong, but to me it looks obvious how it will come out, and here's the thinking.
You already knew that we live in a world where the outcome of anything like this will be that both sides will claim they were right, right?
So you need a situation in which both sides can claim credibly, see?
We were right all along.
The Democrats will be able to claim that they are right about collusion.
At the same time, the Republicans will say, see, no collusion.
So you'll have to maintain your two-movie world.
And it turns out that the question about the interpreter's notes might get us there.
Because we might reach a situation where, at the end of it all, Mueller will say, okay, we did not find any smoking gun.
We found a whole bunch of coincidences, we found lots of contacts with Russia, but none of them amounted to anything.
And then the Democrats will say, yeah, you didn't find anything because Trump destroyed those interpreter notes.
And if somehow we saw those notes, then in that case, we certainly would have found all that collusion because Trump would have been talking about it.
So the end of this all will be a disagreement about whether anything was proved.
Republicans will say, it was proved nothing happened, and Democrats will say, aha, he destroyed the only evidence that would have shown him guilty, his personal conversation with Putin.
And the fact that he destroyed him is proof.
Proof, I say, that he's guilty.
So, here's Representative Eric Swalwell, who is my representative in California, and he tweeted this.
He said, talking about Trump taking the interpreter's notes, and he says, destruction of evidence is consciousness of guilt.
Now, from a lawyer talk perspective, he's saying that if an accused person destroys evidence, that's strong evidence of consciousness of guilt.
But doesn't that apply to Hillary?
Yeah, you beat me to it.
So if that standard is something we should pay attention to at all, then you'd say, uh, he's not the first person who took evidence off the table.
There's a better example.
Alright, but here's the second part.
I'm just shaking my head this morning when I read this.
Anyway, this is such an example of loser think, the next thing I'm going to say, that I actually have screenshotted and I'm including it in my book on how to not think stupid.
So, Representative Swalwell, his latest tweet will be part of my book because it's such a bad idea of thinking.
Now, to be fair, He may not be the one having the bad thinking.
He may just hope that the people reading his tweet can't tell how stupid it is, in which case it would be kind of clever.
So we don't know if Swalowo is being clever or stupid, but we know what he's saying next, and I'll read it to you, is very stupid.
And he says this, Please show me evidence that Trump is not working for Russia.
This is a representative in Congress, somebody who's actually elected and representing the country.
And he says in public, please show me evidence that President Trump is not working with Russia.
Now, if there's anybody on this periscope who doesn't understand that you can't prove something doesn't exist, That's not a thing.
That's not a thing.
You can't prove that he didn't.
You could prove that he did and you could fail.
In other words, you could try to prove it and then not succeed.
But you can't prove something didn't happen.
So, given that he is a lawyer, I have to assume he's hoping that his readers are stupid.
So that gave me a laugh.
Alright, I was reading an article on Fox News this morning by Greg Jarrett, a well-respected commentator and best-selling author and lawyer, and he wrote an article in which he says that the FBI's motivation was That they wanted, quote, a vengeance.
That the FBI wanted vengeance, and that's the reason that they opened up the investigation on President Trump.
Is that in evidence?
Do we have in evidence that the FBI was thinking, argh, vengeance, vengeance will be mine?
Nope. Nope, we do not have that in evidence.
It's possible.
It's totally possible.
And in fact, I can't prove it didn't happen because I can't prove a negative.
But when you read an article, and it doesn't matter what news site it's on, if somewhere in the first paragraph the writer tells you that they know what a stranger is thinking, You don't need to read the rest of the article.
You can just stop there.
So I hope you can see that I'm being fair about this criticism that I say often, which is you can't tell somebody's internal thoughts from a distance.
You can only look at what they did.
It's all you can do.
It's all you can do.
And I'm going to be fair about that on both sides.
If Fox News does it, I'm going to call it out.
When CNN does it, I call it out.
Alright. There's the question of whether President Trump has been tougher on Russia than other presidents.
So CNN was fact-checking that.
You will not be surprised to find that CNN determined that that was not true.
And they did kind of a clever job of weaseling their way to that conclusion.
So the piece I was just looking at on their website, a smarmy commentator says, you know, is it true, let's fact check this, that President Trump is tougher on Russia?
He starts out by talking about all of the coincidental, or not, he would suggest not coincidental, contacts between Russians and the campaign before and after the election, I guess. What's that got to do with the president being tougher on Russia?
So in other words, in making his case about whether Trump was tougher on Russia or not as tough as other presidents, they lead in with a big description of all the contacts that the campaign has had with Russians.
That's not the topic. It's just persuasion.
It's just to make the case that they're convincing you that something sketchy is happening.
That's a different topic.
So when you see such heavy-handed persuasion in trying to disguise itself as some kind of news, you just want to throw it up in your mouth when you see it.
Alright, let's talk about Tulsi Gabbard.
Let me see your opinions of whether Tulsi Gabbard will be the nominee for the Democrats.
I can tell you conclusively the answer to this question.
So Tulsi Gabbard, Who is a veteran.
That's great. She's got some interesting ethnic combination in her, which is excellent.
A good plus for a Democratic candidate.
How interesting. You're all saying no.
I thought some of you would say yes.
All right. Well, it looks like we're getting a yes or two.
Somebody asked me if I'm friends with Alan Dershowitz.
No, we've never had any contact.
Here's why she will not be the candidate.
I was just watching CNN's coverage about her announcement.
Do you know how CNN covers Tulsi Gabbard?
Keep in mind, she's on their side, meaning that she's a Democrat.
How did...
How did CNN, who loves them some Democrats, how did they cover Tulsi Gabbard?
They called her anti-gay.
Now, if CNN decides that you're not going to be the candidate, you're not going to be the candidate.
The way the world works is, of course, not the way people imagine it works.
I think people have an imagination that, you know, citizens are making up their own mind by looking at the news or whatever, but nothing like that's happening.
The reality is that a small number of people decide what kind of news coverage the major medias are going to promote.
And I'm talking about the heads of the networks, the heads of the big newspapers, etc.
So a very small group of people decide what the public will think.
Because if you've noticed, it's very rare to find somebody who doesn't have an opinion that's either exactly what CNN says, exactly what MSNBC says, or exactly what Fox News and Drudge say, you know, and Breitbart.
So, there's no such thing as citizens with independent opinions.
That's just a myth of democracy in our country, or a myth of the Republic, I guess.
And so CNN has quite clearly signaled that Tulsi Gabbard is not going to be theirs, because instead of saying, well, she evolved on the question of gay marriage.
Because that's what happened, right?
She was anti-gay marriage, and then she changed her mind, as a lot of people did.
She wouldn't be the one person who evolved, as they say, President Obama did.
I don't know who else, but probably lots of people.
So how did they describe someone who evolved from where they didn't want people to be to where they do want people to be?
Which is pro-gay marriage and pro-gay in other sense.
How did they describe her?
They described her as anti-gay.
So there isn't the slightest chance That given the way CNN has chosen to frame her, that she can get nominated.
They've already taken her off the field.
So it's obvious to me that CNN has someone else in mind.
Don't know who yet, but definitely someone else.
That part I can tell you with complete certainty.
Alright. If your volume is not high enough, I can't help you.
So, Christine is asleep in the other room, so I'm speaking low.
Alright, let's talk about some more about Trump taking the notes from the interpreter during his meetings with Putin.
Now, what does it tell you that Trump took the interpreter's notes from his discussion with Putin?
Does it tell you, my God, he must be colluding?
Well, that's possible.
Can't rule it out, right? Because we don't have any information one way or another.
My assumption is that it's deeply unlikely.
Here's why. Here's why it's deeply unlikely that what Trump said to Putin is problematic.
Unless I'm missing something, Fact check me on this.
Don't you think Mueller has talked to the interpreter?
Is there any chance that Mueller has not talked to the interpreter?
And is there any reason that that wouldn't have happened?
Now I understand why Congress maybe shouldn't talk to the interpreter, you know, because they might want to subpoena the notes too, but can you see any reason that Mueller would not have talked to the interpreter when in fact the interpreter was the person who would most know about the interaction with Trump and Putin?
How come we haven't even seen that reported?
Have you seen it reported whether Mueller has talked to the interpreter?
Have any of you seen that reported?
Because it would be big news if he hasn't, and it would be big news if he has.
It's big news. So somebody says he has, but I don't know that that's in evidence.
I think you might be assuming.
Alright, here's my conclusion.
You can tell how the Russia collusion part of the investigation is going to go, because if there was anything to it, Mueller would already know what the interpreter said, and Mueller would have every digital electronic information that you could have on anything.
He would have already acted.
If this risk of the President of the United States literally taking the allegation, which is ridiculous on its surface, but the allegation is that the President of the United States is taking orders from Putin, if Mueller had found even a little of that to be evidence-based, he would have acted.
There isn't the slightest chance he would let that situation linger.
I don't even think that they would wait necessarily for the political process to run its course.
It would be far more important for him to go to, I don't know who you go to, who would you go to?
So here's a question.
If the FBI knew that a president was colluding with a foreign power, Would they wait for the entire legal process to do its thing, or is there somebody they could go to to make an immediate step that's like a temporary step where maybe somebody's, perhaps they're temporarily removed or temporarily the vice president takes over or something like that?
Is there any kind of process for that?
I don't know how that works. But anyway, the point is, I'm sure there is.
Congress, perhaps, yes.
And if Mueller had found anything, you would have already seen some kind of action.
And you haven't seen it, so I don't think there will be.
Now, how concerned should we be that the President didn't want the notes of the meeting ever known?
I would say that...
Now, correct me on this also.
Isn't President Trump...
Someone who doesn't use email and doesn't text because he doesn't want conversations recorded in any context.
Is it true that the president prefers verbal conversations and no notes and nothing written down?
I believe that that's always his preference.
So if you look at the context of President Trump, who doesn't like anything in writing, then this is just more of that.
Now, if you also look at the context of President Trump, what does CNN say about the fact-checking of his typical conversation?
Does CNN say, yes, everything he says is real and just what he means?
No, they don't. They would tear apart anything he said in that conversation, take it out of context and turn it into the worst things in the world.
Now, if you're President Trump, do you think you might have Lied a little bit to Putin?
If you're President Trump, do you think you might have flattered him for effect?
If you were President Trump, the master persuader, might you have said something during that meeting that you didn't quite mean, but it might have gotten you to someplace you want to be?
Could he have used hyperbole in that meeting?
Might he have said a fact that's not true?
Could he have promised something to Putin that he didn't really mean to give him?
Could he have said, here's a big opening ask, but I'm trying to negotiate to hear?
Could he have convinced Putin to work with him and maybe in exchange actually literally ask Putin what he want in return?
Would it be treasonous for the dealmaker in chief to sit down with Putin and say some version of this?
Look, here's the deal.
We don't need to be enemies.
Tell us what you want.
I'll tell you what we need, like legitimately, what the United States needs, what our big interests are.
Let's see if we can just figure this out.
So if that conversation happened, would that be treasonous?
I say no. I say that's just doing your job.
You're talking to another leader and you say, look, we could give you this, but you're going to have to give us this.
And this means a lot more to us than whatever this is.
If he said something like that, there's no way you want that conversation to get into the public.
No way! Because it wouldn't sound right in a context.
In the context of a long, let's say, complicated negotiations in which the president is trying to create a personal relationship with Putin, etc., you don't want any Any of that conversation ever in public.
Because the president's trying to build trust.
He's trying to get some kind of chemistry going.
He may have said things which weren't exactly true.
He may have floated some ideas that just were worth talking about, but you don't want to get people too excited about until you've played around with them a little bit.
So, is there a reason Aside from collusion, where the president would not want those notes to be public.
And the answer is yes, the obvious reason.
The obvious reason he doesn't want those notes out is that he doesn't want any notes out of any conversations he has.
Period. Why would this be different?
And this one especially you wouldn't want out because its importance to national security is important, you know, to our very survival could depend on this stuff not being taken in a context.
So if the president had not destroyed those interpreter notes, That would have been a mistake.
The smart thing to do was to grab those notes and make sure that you personally, personally held them in your hand and that nobody else, even your best, most trusted, maybe Ivanka could see them, but that's about it.
So was that smart for the president to take personal responsibility to remove those notes from the table?
Very smart. I would say that's not just smart, that's very smart.
And in fact, if he hadn't done it, you could go so far as to say it would be stupid.
A person whose philosophy is you don't want these private conversations taken out of context, especially this one, you would certainly do exactly what it is alleged he did.
All right. Let's see, some other points I was going to make.
So there's a criticism of the FBI that they started an investigation over Trump with no evidence whatsoever.
And I've heard some people say, hey, that's pretty strong proof that the That the FBI was just out to get the president and it was just all political because they started an investigation with no proof.
But now we're hearing some quotes from the people who were involved, like Lisa Page, etc., and Jim Baker, the attorney.
And they're saying stuff like, we really didn't know.
We didn't know if there was something wrong, but there were all these coincidences That the coincidences were enough to get our interest and that's why the stuff was opened up.
I would say that's a pretty good reason.
Imagine if you had a strong hunch that there was at least 20% chance that the president was a treasonous spy working for Russia.
Let's just say you thought, oh, these look like mostly coincidences.
Probably an 80% chance there's just nothing there.
Wouldn't you say that, based on what you've heard from the FBI, doesn't it feel like even they thought there was an 80% chance there was nothing there?
Because remember, Strzok said, it looks like there's no there there.
And then we know from the conversations they were saying, well, I don't know, maybe there's something there, we just better look at it.
To me, it looked like they were just covering their bases because if there was something there, it was a big deal.
So there was a low percentage chance of something there, but if it was there, it was worth a lot.
Do you know what that calculation is called?
An expected value.
If you were trying to compare risks, one risk to another risk, the accepted way you do it is you multiply the odds that you think it's true, or the odds you think something will happen, times the dollar amount.
So a 10% chance of something costing $100, you would value it as being worth $10.
That's 10% times $100.
What is the dollar value, if you could put it that way, of a small chance that the President of the United States is a puppet of Russia?
Like, that's a big, big, big, big deal, right?
So it doesn't really matter if the FBI thought the odds of it being true was small.
That small risk times the big, big, you know, possibility of that It's still big.
A 5% chance of the country being sold to Russia is big.
So did the FBI have to look at that?
I kind of say yes.
I kind of say yes. If the people in the FBI got together and they talked about it, they said, I don't think this is happening.
But you kind of can't rule it out based on a few of the coincidences and the conversations with Russians and stuff.
So I would say the most likely explanation, at least for the rank and file, you know, I'm not saying the leaders were thinking the same way, but for the rank and file, they gave a perfectly good reason.
There was a small chance of a very big problem, expected value calculation, you gotta look into it.
Somebody says, you're being kind of stupid.
Well, thank you for that insightful comment there.
So whoever called me stupid, I guarantee you, is mind reading.
All right, Scott McCabe, Strzok, Scott.
So I think what you're saying is, I can feel most of you wallowing in the confirmation bias.
And the confirmation bias here is that, wait a minute, there's not just one explanation for why the FBI looks crooked.
It's not just one thing.
Look at all these things.
Look at the email. Look at Comey.
Look at all these other people.
Your argument, let me put it this way.
The argument that the FBI got together and plotted to take out the president, and that was the only reason they were doing it, for political reasons, is as solid as the argument that the president actually is a Putin puppet.
And when I say by as solid, I mean both of those theories, and this is the John Turley frame on it, so I'm stealing it from him, both of those explanations have lots of confirmation bias coincidence built into them.
The things we do know are that the Democrats obviously were trying to take out the president.
No, I'm not stoned, but thanks for asking.
All right. Let me close out by, as I often do, tell you my current stage of looking into the climate change situation.
For those of you new, I am on the fence about how much I should be worried about climate change.
I have been digging into it for a few months, and here's my preliminary, which could easily be revised, but my preliminary judgment on climate change is That both sides are full of shit.
Now, not 100% full of shit.
So it seems to me that the more I look into it, it's pretty obvious to me that the majority of the skeptical arguments are just complete tinfoil hat stuff.
So the ones that are ridiculous, This is my preliminary judgment.
The ridiculous skeptical claims are that the climate scientists forgot to account for the sun.
If you're still believing that all the climate scientists in the world forgot the sun when they were measuring the climate, you should not be in the conversation.
If you have some specific thing they did wrong about the sun, I'm not sure I can evaluate that.
But if you really believe that the climate scientists who are looking at the climate forgot the sun, that's not a good opinion.
You should not be in the conversation if you think that.
Secondly, the famous graph that shows in ancient times that the carbon rate and the temperature were not correlated, if that's your argument, that we have lots of historical information that CO2 and temperature are not correlated, you also have been fooled.
By the side you think you're on.
That graph is a fraud.
It's one of the most popular graphs that you'll see from the skeptics, and it's quite easily debunked.
And the way it's debunked is that, and here's the funny part, the graph leaves out the solar effect.
In other words, the skeptics are leaving out the sun.
So it's the very thing that the climate scientists are doing is leaving out the sun.
But it's the thing they do to prove their point.
They leave out the sun. And when you put the sun into those graphs, suddenly they all line up.
The next thing that, in my opinion, and I feel this quite strongly, The Climategate is just BS. It's nothing but stuff taken out of context.
The way people casually talk sounds worse if you take it out of context than it would mean between two people who know each other.
So Climategate has been researched.
The people who looked into it found that there's nothing to look at.
Here's another one.
I was looking at it, following the debate between other people who were getting into it on my Twitter feed, and one of them says, okay, why is it that Michael Mann, the famous climate scientist who created the hockey stick, why is he hiding his data?
If it's real, Why would he hide his detail?
Data. And of course there was some Canadian case where somebody was trying to get him to show the data or something like that.
And here's what the pro-climate alarm commentator said.
He said, here's a link to all of his data.
It's public. So the skeptical claim is that Michael Mann is hiding his data and the response to it is, here's a link to it.
You can see it yourself. It's public.
Which of those claims seems stronger?
The one that says he's hiding it or the one that says, here's a link to it.
Go look at it yourself. I think the link is more persuasive.
So we can't even tell the most basic fact.
Is he hiding his data or is this a link to his data?
Now, that's just a sample of the BS on the skeptic side.
On the scientist side, there's also a bunch of BS. And that is involved with the models and the financial calculations about what's going to happen 80 years in the future.
Modeling this level of complexity for even 10 minutes is probably close to impossible.
But modeling it 80 years in the future is just persuasion and ridiculousness.
So the modeling part of the climate scientist claim is ridiculous.
And here's the worst part.
I don't even think it's necessary.
If it's true that we can observe that the temperatures and the CO2 have already sharply turned up, why do you need to even model that into the future?
How hard is it to convince me that if the temperature keeps going up at this rate, everybody's in trouble?
Right? You don't need the models.
The models are just taking a strong argument and weakening them.
Let me say that again.
The climate science argument is really, really strong until you talk about the models.
And once you throw the models in there, they're so clearly ridiculous that it degrades the other arguments by association.
And I think that's one of the big problems with climate as an argument.
One of the skeptical claims is that CO2 doesn't have the physical properties, I guess might be the wrong word, that scientists claim.
In other words, it's not going to do what people says it does, which is cause as much warming as it does.
It's not an important element of the warming.
But I would think that might be the easiest thing that scientists could test.
So that skeptical argument seems the weakest, maybe.
That's really weak.
That scientists can't figure out how CO2 works.
Because I think we've known that since the 1800s, and there have been lots of tests from lots of different angles to find out that CO2 really is a greenhouse gas, etc.
So when skeptics say, no, it's not a greenhouse gas, it doesn't matter, it's It's trace.
Somebody says they have tested it and it doesn't do what they say.
The odds of that being true, that statement you just made, are so close to zero that I don't even know what to do with it.
It could be true. All right.
The big issue is what, if anything, can we do about it?
Well, I'm writing about that in my new book.
I think there are five or six companies that are up and running, startup-type companies, that are already building ways to take CO2 out of the air in bulk.
So you've got several companies already working on that.
The other issue is what if all the warming is real and it really is CO2 and we know that things are going to go up?
Are we better off working like crazy to try to change that or just keeping our economy strong and mitigating any problems as we see it?
Nobody knows the answer to that.
Now, I suppose the big issue would be not just warming, but whatever it does to the oceans.
So I think the wild card here, if you told me that the temperature in 80 years would be, what do they say?
Two degrees warmer or something?
Four degrees warmer? I'm not sure I would notice.
Would you notice, let's say if suddenly the average temperature in your town went up by three degrees?
Would you know? Would you know the difference?
If the average temperature went up three degrees, would anything be different in your town?
Somebody says they would notice.
I don't know. Because I don't think I would notice.
It's going up a degree, right?
I haven't noticed that. But the risk, I would think, as a non-scientist, is that if you ruin the chemistry of the ocean, You've got a real problem, right?
If the heat reaches a point where you ruin the chemical balance of the entire ocean, well, I think we're probably all dead.
So that's not a question of, you know, let's get a little more air conditioning.
That's more of a question of a yes-no for survival of the planet.
But I don't know if science quite understands what the ocean is doing.
And let me go on record as saying, I don't believe that scientists can measure the temperature of the world.
That doesn't pass the sniff test to me.
Do you? How many of you think that science can accurately measure the average temperature of the world in a way that you can really tell if it's going up or down by a degree or two in ten years?
I don't want to be the person who says the Wright-Bullett brothers can't fly.
I don't want to be the person who says we can never put a person on the moon.
I don't want to be the doubter.
But I'm just looking at it from the outside.
There's nothing I've read, and I've read a lot, on how things are measured, etc.
You know, for example, tree rings.
Do you believe you can tell the temperature 100 years ago from a tree ring?
I don't believe that.
I don't believe that at all.
Do you believe that we can measure the temperature of the ocean like the average temperature of the ocean?
I don't believe that. I do not believe the scientists, no matter how hard they try, with current technology anyway, can measure the temperature of the ocean.
I don't believe it.
Now, I could be wrong about that, right?
Couldn't we be wrong?
Because we're not scientists.
So let's apply.
At the same time I'm saying that I can't wrap my mind around it.
Like, it doesn't pass the sniff test to me even slightly.
It's also true at the same time.
You should put some humility on what you know and what you don't know.
Let's make sure we don't lose our humility about what we can know about what science can do.
Science can surely do more things than I assume they can do.
But if I had to bet somebody saying ice core proxies are better.
Are they? How do you know your ice core proxies are better?
Now, if the reason we know that is because we have, let's say, land-based thermometers from 100 years ago, and we've got some ice core samples from 100 years ago, and you look at the ice core samples and you look at the thermometers and, hey, it's about the same, and you can reproduce that, Then I'm willing to say, okay, we could probably go back 200 years with ice cores and probably still good.
But can you go back a million years?
Can you go back a million years and take an ice core sample and pull it out and say, hmm, according to this ice core sample, it was about 78 degrees that year on average.
Can you do that?
Really? Can you do that?
Because I don't think you can do that.
Take carbon dating.
Carbon dating is real.
I don't think there's any doubt that it basically works.
Can you tell me how accurate is carbon dating?
Does somebody have the answer to that?
If I do a carbon dating, does it tell me, oh yeah, This tree went to seed, or let's say the seed sprouted, and it was the year, it was a Tuesday.
How close does carbon dating get you?
Because I got a feeling, yeah, I got a feeling that these ice core samples sort of get you in the ballpark.
Am I wrong about that?
Am I wrong that they're not exact?
It seems like we've got all of these bad measures that are being used to validate the other bad measures.
So in other words, you hear people say, well, how do you know the ice core samples are accurate?
Well, you check them against the tree rings.
I'm making that part up.
I don't know if they do that. And then you say, well, how do you know the tree rings are good?
Obviously the tree rings are good because we checked it against the coral decay or some damn thing.
So you've got a whole bunch of Not so accurate ways to measure things that are all being used to validate the other not so accurate measurements.
And it just doesn't feel like something science can really do.
And that's an argument that I don't think that they've done a good job of making.
So I'd like to be talking to it.
Now, bottom line, is CO2 dangerous to the planet?
I would say that science has the better argument at this point, that CO2 is dangerous if it keeps going up, that it does force the temperature.
I would say that the, again, since I don't know if I can ever know what's happening, I'm just trying to give you my current sense of the credibility of each argument, given that both sides have a good, healthy dose of bullshit, and I'm trying to work my way through the BS to get to something good.
So here's what I hold as the best current skeptical arguments, or not a skeptical argument.
Here are the things that I want confirmation of.
So there's the Richard Lindzen, he's a skeptic, argument that the current rise in CO2, not the current rise in temperature, not CO2. So he argues that the current rise in temperature is precedented before there was much CO2. And that you can look at the official graph, it's not even his graph, it's just the official graph, and you can see it right there in the graph.
Look, it did this before in recorded history.
Is that true? Can somebody fact check that simple point?
Because it's such a simple point, it should be the one thing we can actually get to the bottom of.
Is it true that the official science-approved numbers show that the temperature has risen this rapidly in the past?
True or false? Can somebody get me a link that tells me that's true?
Or at least produce the graph?
And then is there an argument for that?
What do the climate scientists say when somebody says, look, your own graph disproves your own argument?
Then what do the scientists say?
I'd like to know the answer to that question.
So that's outstanding.
So I don't have a decision on that.
That's an outstanding argument.
And then there are a number of Tony Heller arguments.
Tony Heller, who writes as Steve Goddard and blogs on climate, he has the most robust Skeptical claims, because his framing is that he's looking at NASA's own numbers, he's seeing how they've adjusted them, and that it's obvious that there's something going on there that's not scientific.
But I don't see the counters to his arguments.
So I would say the Tony Heller arguments about the data not being reliable, I would say that those arguments stand at the moment because I have not yet seen a counter to them.
So it looks like the comments just turned off on their own somehow.
Oh, they're in the back. Yeah, and Tony Heller shows the newspaper articles that show that the data must have been different in the past because it was reported differently than it's reported now.
But Tony Heller's arguments are only questioning the rate of warming.
It gets to that, right?
Yeah, the Tony Heller arguments question the data and they get to the question of whether it's really rising or not.
So that's an open question.
I would say I have not seen a scientific debunking of his claims about the evidence.
The only debunking I've seen is that there's a claim about all of the adjustments are in the same direction and then a climate scientist shows a graph that shows that's clearly not the case.
So I've seen a debunk on the question of all the adjustments being in the same direction, and it appears that they're not, but I would guess that Tony Heller would have a response to that response, so I would say this one's still open.
That's an open question.
The next thing that I would say I can't get to the bottom of...
There is good evidence you are correct.
Water is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2.
Alright, so here's another bad skeptical argument.
So the bad skeptical argument is that water vapor is the thing that matters, not CO2. Because for every little bit of CO2, there's this much water vapor.
And this much water vapor is a greenhouse effect too.
So this is bigger than this.
Therefore, the scientists are looking in the wrong direction because CO2 is this much, but water vapor is this much, and they both affect the temperature.
That's a terrible argument.
It's complete ignorance about the argument.
So it's actually, that argument ignores the actual climate, the climate scientists claim.
It's not even on the same page as the claim.
The claim as I understand it, and again I want you to fact check me on this, is that CO2 changes how much water and how much cloud formation there is.
So the claim is that the water is the big mover of temperature and that the amount of water in the air is largely determined or enough determined by the amount of CO2. So the question is, not is water a bigger effect than CO2, Everybody agrees with that.
Everybody agrees with that.
Everybody. Both sides agree.
The water, the clouds are the big controllers of the temperature.
But the claim is that CO2 is what's driving the amount of water in the atmosphere.
Am I wrong about that? Is it positive or negative feedback?
Well, that's out of my That would be out of my range.
So the question of whether CO2 causes cooling or warming, I've heard people say that because apparently you're getting in some a little bit more complicated modeling in science to determine just exactly if that's good or bad.
Because I guess it depends what kind of clouds you're creating with your CO2. Are they high level or low level?
It makes a difference. That part I don't think we non-scientists could determine.
Prove a rise in temperature is bad.
Okay, here's the other terrible, terrible argument.
The terrible arguments on the side of the skeptics are that more CO2 is better.
It's a terrible argument.
Because if it's true that CO2 is causing temperature to go up, somebody's saying, can you prove that higher temperatures are bad?
Yeah, I can. Here's a little test for you.
Put your hand on the oven and then slowly turn it up.
Or here's better. Put your hand in a pot of water and then slowly turn it to burning so that the water is heating up while your hand is in the water.
And then ask me, ask me again, can you prove that more heat is always bad?
Yes, I can.
Because your hand will burn off.
Anybody who says that more heat is good, it's just a stupid argument.
It's stupid to say more heat is good, because while it might be good, Could it get an extra degree?
Maybe 2 degrees is better.
It could be that 5 degrees just makes everything better.
What about 25?
At some point, clearly, there's too much heat.
So the climate alarm point is not that a little bit of heat is going to ruin the world.
Nobody's claiming that 1 degree will ruin the world.
It might even be better.
I think even the scientists would say, yeah, it might even be better.
A little more CO2, get a little more greening.
Yeah, it's fine.
But what happens when you get five degrees?
Does the coral all disappear?
Does the chemistry of the ocean change?
Do we generate super hurricanes?
Does it cause massive droughts that kill millions?
If your argument is, Prove to me that a little bit of heat is a bad thing.
That is the dumbest argument.
Honestly, it's just the dumbest argument.
Nobody's saying that one degree is going to ruin the world.
Two degrees, maybe not so bad.
But there's some amount of heat, some amount of heat, that's going to be a problem with the chemistry of the Earth.
Nobody could doubt that, right?
All right. You seem to be making up your own argument.
Well, who's going to do it for me?
If I don't make up my own argument, I don't know how the hell.
Global warming or climate change, what a joke.
So, some people think that because they changed it from global warming to climate change, that therefore they've shown their argument is empty.
No, not really.
That's just marketing. Just marketing.
If your argument is that global warming is the problem, but you know that the public is going to see that there are records being set for cold in some places while records are being set for hot in other places and that what matters is that the average is going up,
if that's your situation and you're trying to convince the public that there's a problem, You would, from a marketing perspective, change the name of what you're talking about from global warming, which would be confusing, confusing, to climate change, which is easier to explain.
You say, yeah, the average is going up and the climate is changing.
Sometimes it'll be colder than normal.
Sometimes it'll be warmer than normal.
That's our theory.
All they did is change the marketing.
That does not tell you anything about the science.
The fact that they changed the names doesn't tell you anything about the science.
It's just marketing.
Oh, yes.
So there's funny.
So the president has some funny tweets about Elizabeth Warren.
He was mocking her video where she was doing a live stream and she drank a beer and then her husband comes in and the president's tweet was mocking her for saying, you know, I'm glad you're here.
And the president was saying, And the president was saying, of course, if they live there, why wouldn't he be in his own home?
Now, of course, none of this is important in a political sense.
It's just funny.
It's just funny that the president would continue hammering on Elizabeth Warren.
He's having a good time with his critics this week.
And then we talked about Jeff Bezos.
Alright, anything else happening?
Somebody says we cannot affect the globe in such a way because it's so large.
That's a ridiculous statement.
It's obvious that humans can affect the planet.
That's obvious. We talked about de Blasio.
So, do you know how many fusion startups there are?
How many startups have different approaches and have enough of a good idea that they got funding to build small fusion reactors which would save the whole planet, change everything, literally just the whole society and civilization would change?
How many? Ten.
There are ten different startups, and I would assume more will be coming, that have different approaches for how to control, I don't know, the plasma or whatever the hell they're trying to control there.
There are ten of them.
Now, let me ask you this.
Do smart people work on fusion power startups or dumb people?
If you were to look at the employees who are working on fusion startups, would they be some of the dumb people in the country?
Or would they be the smartest people in the whole frickin' planet?
Yes, you are correct.
The people working on the fusion startups, if you were to put their IQs against the IQs of, let's say, Facebook or the IQs of Twitter or the IQs of Google or anywhere else, the average IQ of the scientists working on fusion startups is just through the roof.
So the smartest people in the world Think it can be done.
Let me say it again.
Most of you believe that fusion is not practical because, you know, we've been talking about it for years.
It's sort of the flying car of energy, right?
It hasn't worked yet, so I guess it won't work in the future.
But keep in mind, compare your IQ and what you know about fusion power To the people who have started startups on Fusion Power, whose IQs are probably, you know, clicking 160 or something apiece.
I mean, the smartest people in the world disagree with you.
The smartest, most knowledgeable people on this topic disagree with you.
Now, of course, you can find tons of smart people who say they can't do it, but who would you bet on?
Let's say you had 50 scientists who say something can't be done.
And then you have 50 scientists who have put their own careers and skin in the game to work on it to make it happen.
Which group do you bet on?
Do you bet on the people who say they can't do it?
Or do you bet on the people who say they already figured out how to do it?
I'm going to bet on the startups every time.
Now you wouldn't bet on any one startup.
But 10 startups?
What are the odds that none of the 10 can get to the next level?
Which in this case, the next level would be, you know, economic, you know, an economic power source.
What are the odds? All 10 of them?
And probably by, you know, the end of the year, maybe there are 20 of them.
There are going to be a lot of startups working on this.
I don't think they're all going to fail.
They could. It's not impossible.
But they could. Alright.
That's all for now. I'm going to talk to you later.
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