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Jan. 19, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
47:28
Episode 381 Scott Adams: Buzzfeed, Wall Negotiations, Needle Parks, More
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here.
It's the morning, but don't let that stop you from having a good time.
Because some of us are morning people.
The rest of you, well, I hope you do as well as you could.
And one of the ways that you can catch up to the morning people is with a little thing I call coffee.
And it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm Scott Adams, your host.
And I'm about to enjoy the simultaneous sip with many of you, those of you who are prepared.
Please raise your mug, your glass, your container, your chalice, your stein, your cup...
Put your favorite liquid in there.
I like coffee And join me now for the simultaneous sip So many fun things in the news Let's start with BuzzFeed.
Now, I like to remind you what my prediction record is.
Now, this isn't quite a prediction.
But I want to remind you that when the BuzzFeed story first broke, that Michael Cohen had said, blah, blah, blah, it doesn't matter what he said because it wasn't true.
Or at least it's fallen apart.
And when I talked about it on Periscope, was it yesterday?
I stressed to you that BuzzFeed is not...
is not a credible source.
Did I not? Did I not stress several times, remember, it's BuzzFeed.
They're not a credible source.
And then by today we find out the whole story has fallen apart.
And I was just watching a fascinating clip on CNN. And it was Anderson Cooper talking to Jeffrey Toobin and I forget who else.
And They were taking it pretty hard because the mainstream media ran with that story with a lot of, if it's true, but if it's true, and if this is true, there's big stories.
But to their credit, and I like to give credit where credit is due, Jeffrey Toobin especially said, make no mistake about this, this is just a bad day for the media.
Yeah, Brian Stelter, that's right.
He was the third person there.
And I think all of them realized, and Maggie Heberman was there too, and I think all of them realized that the media has a big, big, big credibility problem, and it got a lot worse yesterday.
But again, Remember, I told you from the jump, this is not a credible source.
So I'm going to take a little bit of credit for calling out the unreliability of the story from the jump.
Okay? Now, why did I think it was not a credible story?
Number one, the authors have a little sketchy past.
Number two, it's BuzzFeed.
That does not necessarily work with the facts all the time.
And number three, it fit perfectly with the narrative of the side that was reporting it.
Oh, surprise! Number four, nobody else could confirm it right away.
Number five, it was a Mueller leak.
Are there Mueller leaks?
Remember what I said? If somebody has a source in the Mueller organization that would give them that kind of detailed leak, remember what I said?
They would also know What the general outcome of the Mueller investigation is going to be.
Anybody who has a source that good who is going to give up something that private Would have given up more.
And by now BuzzFeed would be reporting on basically the result of the whole thing.
And of course they're not.
So that was another red flag.
And then of course the whole fact that it was an anonymous source.
So you've got anonymous source.
Fits their narrative perfectly.
Nobody else can confirm it.
It's BuzzFeed who is unreliable.
The authors are unreliable.
If you didn't see this one coming, you can't see anything coming.
Because this one was broadcasting from a long way around.
Hey, fake news coming.
We got some fake news coming.
But a lot of people wanted to believe it.
Alright. That's enough on that.
You probably noted that a lot of people got the talking points about the Pelosi flight to Afghanistan being cancelled at the last minute by President Trump.
And the standard reaction was, it's childish.
It's childish like a fifth grader.
It's such a childish thing to do.
I don't think that worked as well as they hoped it would.
Because it was also reported simultaneously that it was a tit-for-tat.
But it was a tit-for-tat for something childish, which was postponing the State of the Union.
So who could possibly listen to the Democrats saying that the tit-for-tat response It was childish, but not the original, you know, who started it.
Now, like most of us, I think we're watching this as entertainment, right?
We're watching it as an entertainment show.
It was sort of the perfect reality TV response to the reality TV, you know, provocation, which is the cancellation of the whole deal.
Do you remember that I told you, I don't know how long ago, I said that the kill shot for Nancy Pelosi's statement that the wall is immoral, what did I tell you the kill shot would be?
The persuasion kill shot.
Does anybody remember it? Because I'd like to ask you, because in case anybody is coming into this late, they can get some confirmation that I'm predicting things ahead of time.
The engineering question is, we'll talk about that separately, so that's a different kill shot.
I'm talking about specifically the question of whether a wall is moral or immoral.
What did I tell you was the best response to that?
Well, let me remind you, since it doesn't look like anybody's going to get the right answer.
I told you that the kill shot was to start asking other Democrats to defend the statement that some wall is immoral and some are not.
And what did you see?
You saw the media start to ask the other Democrats, do you agree that this wall is immoral?
Because it's a completely unsupportable Now, Pelosi could probably get away with it because Pelosi is an advocate, right?
So when you see the head of the party, you know, one of the leaders of the party, when you see them say something crazy, you say to yourself, well, their job is advocate.
You know, Nancy Pelosi's job is not fair and balanced presentation, right?
So you can't really hold it against her to say something that outrageous.
It's something the president would have done.
It's something that somebody who's a leader and an advocate does.
But the problem is she created a standard that the people below her who are just, many of them, who are actually just trying to do their job, they're going to have to defend this ridiculous standard that there's such a thing as a moral versus an immoral kind of barrier when all of these people have voted for barriers of this type in the past.
So you saw people asking about it and that whole moral immoral thing has just started to, I don't know, rot.
You know, it didn't go away.
It just started to rot from within.
Like it just doesn't stand the test of time at all.
You put a little sunlight on it and it's like...
It's like an old vampire.
It's starting to crumble. Anyway...
So, the president apparently has a speech today at, I guess, 3 p.m.
Eastern Time, in which he's going to offer, reportedly, you know, anything could happen between now and the time the president goes on the air.
But reportedly, the president's going to make some kind of an offer to have something for both sides to chew on.
Now here's a rule of negotiating.
And if you've never heard this rule, it's a really important one, but it's not common sense.
So this is a non-common sense, really smart rule about negotiating.
You don't, quote, negotiate with yourself, unquote.
Let me tell you what that means.
What that means is, let's say you and I are negotiating, and I come to you and say, I will give you a million dollars for whatever it is you're selling, and we're negotiating.
If you say, no, that's no good, what you don't do if you've been rebuffed from your first offer is make a second offer.
That's called negotiating with yourself, because you're the one who offered a million, and now you're the one making the next offer, which is lower.
That's referred to as negotiating with yourself.
It's a classic mistake that people who don't negotiate make.
You've watched that the President is very good at not doing that.
It's a rock-bottom, basic, most important thing you can do.
You never make an offer and then just make another offer.
You just don't do that. It's bad persuasion, bad negotiating.
So you've noticed that the Democrats haven't really made an offer.
Not really, right?
Because they've said, how about nothing?
How about immoral?
And the immoral response isn't really a counteroffer, is it?
It's more of like, we're not going to talk about it?
We're not negotiating? Now, the mistake would be that Pelosi would trap the president into negotiating with himself.
And if he were not The master persuader that I believe he is, he would be going on television tonight and negotiating with himself.
In other words, she's creating a situation because the thing to keep in mind here, we always have to keep this in mind, Is that Pelosi is pretty damn good at what she does, right?
She knows this space.
Whatever else you want to say about her, she's got an A-game and she brought it.
And she was trapping the president into negotiating with himself, which is weak and stupid.
The President is now going to give a speech in which he's alleged to be making a second offer, or at least a new offer that we haven't seen before.
That could be construed as negotiating with himself, if that's what's going to happen.
So let me make one suggestion, and I'm not going to predict that the President will do this, but it's by way of making my point.
Suppose the president went on the air and made the following offer.
And he said this, I will reopen the government when the Democrats give me their plan for the border in a way that has a budget and shows exactly what they plan to do and where.
Because this is not negotiating like I've just decided to go down on my price.
It's a specific offer that the public will understand as reasonable.
So imagine this. The President says, we all want to open the government.
I will open the government if all you do is show me your plan and then we will negotiate from that plan.
We will start with your plan and then we'll show it to the people.
We'll have Border Patrol look at it and then we'll see how different is your plan from ours.
Now the key to this Is that there was never much difference in what the left and the right actually wanted.
Nothing I said would make sense if you knew you were really far apart.
Because if you were really far apart, they would just say, oh, okay, how about something way over here, and then you wouldn't be anywhere.
But because we know they're close, and especially the rank-and-file Democrats are like, yeah, we like border security.
We just want to do it in the smartest, most humane way.
Now, who among you Who disagrees with that statement?
So here's the Democrat position on border security.
Yes, we want good border security.
We want to do it in the smartest, most economical, and humane way.
Who disagrees with that?
Who disagrees with that?
Nobody, right? So when you force them to actually put some meat on their proposal, and you offer that you'll open the government if they do it, What voter is going to look at that offer and say, well, that's just playing games?
Who is going to say that's an unfair offer?
Who is going to say that the Democrats should sit tight and not even say what they want while 800,000 people are eating tree bark because they can't afford to buy food?
Who thinks that wouldn't work?
Because you know it would.
It would put all of the pressure on the Democrats.
If they brought a plan, it would reveal basically the bad will behind everything they're doing at the moment, which is they're not that far off from what everybody else wants.
Now, to their credit, And I'm going to give the Democrats a very big compliment right now.
To their credit, they have killed the wall.
I think that even Republicans at this point, because we've all learned more, there's something about this process that's very educational.
On day one, when the President said, build a wall, cross the whole thing, solve all these problems, I have to admit, I thought to myself...
I don't know. Why not?
Why wouldn't you have a wall?
I'd have to look at the details, but it seems reasonable on the surface, right?
But the further you dig into this, and the more reasonable people get involved, you realize that walls make sense in specific areas, and they simply don't make sense economically or on any other level.
In other areas.
And that if the engineers get involved and the experts, they'll tell you where to put a wall.
El Paso is a perfect place.
Because when you're separating Juarez and El Paso, I think those are the two places that are both populated areas.
And you need to slow people down pretty severely because otherwise they disappear into the other populated area.
But if you've got a big empty space and you can see the whole thing with a drone or from towers or you can put some electronic sensors there, if anybody tries to cross, you just send out your border patrol and they just pick them up.
So, there's nobody here who disagrees with the general concept that the engineers and the experts should make the decision.
We want a solution that's humane, but it also has to work.
You know who has that plan?
Probably Democrats. Do you know how similar that would look to the Republican plan?
Probably not that different by the time it's done.
But it would give everybody a reason to move forward.
So again, that's not my prediction of what the President will do.
I will say with some confidence it would be the best thing to do.
I'm completely confident about that part.
But here's what to watch for.
Watch for the president avoiding the problem of negotiating with himself, one way or another.
That's his biggest challenge, right?
At the end of this, the president can't have a win and can't even have a good path forward if at the end of this the enemy is saying, well, it looks like they tricked him into negotiating with himself.
He's not much of a negotiator, is he?
So it could be that all he's going to do is throw some variables into the mix.
So he might say, here are the other variables.
Here's how we want to approve workers.
Here's what I want to do with H-1B visas.
Here's what I want to do with Path to Citizenship and DACA and all that stuff.
So it might be that he's just adding variables.
Now that would not be a case of negotiating with yourself.
Because I've often said, if you have an impasse, Oftentimes the only way you can get past an impasse is by adding variables.
You need extra stuff to make a deal.
So he may just be adding extra stuff, and that would be perfectly fine.
Would not be a case of negotiating with himself per se, because he probably wouldn't offer anything that hasn't already been on the table before.
All right. Here's an update on the question of open borders.
So there was yet another article in the New York Times by someone who said, yeah, let's think about open borders, you know, because they're economic benefits.
I want to give you just a little bit of a tour, you know, a very short one, of open borders.
Now, there are people who argue, and they have good economic arguments, so on a conceptual level, just a conceptual level, not a practical level, but on a conceptual level, open borders actually make sense.
Wait for the practical part before you throw up in your mouth, okay?
If it's just a thought experiment, and you say, well, in a perfect world, Open borders.
Because the argument is the free flow of labor and everything else is just always good.
Basically, it's an argument for capitalism and freedom.
And whenever you have better capitalism and better freedom, you almost always get a good result, right?
So on a conceptual level, open borders, totally conceptually reasonable thing.
Unfortunately, we don't live in a conceptual world.
We have to survive in the real world.
So he says, my God, man, have you gone insane?
Wait. Wait to the second part.
You must be new here.
Wait to the second part. In the real world, The countries that are next to you are not equal on all variables.
Their economy could be in the toilet.
They could have more crime, for example.
I'm not saying that's the case. But there could be a terrorism risk.
Some people have a terrorism risk.
Some don't. Maybe the other countries have loose requirements about who gets into their country, which would be a pathway for anybody else to get into the country.
And then the biggest variable is if there's a country that has lots of social services, let's say free health care, retirement, whatever else, and they're next to a country that doesn't, how does that work out?
Wouldn't all the people in the country that doesn't give them free stuff stand up and start walking toward the country that does?
Right now, the number of people who come in from Mexico is putting, some people think, a burden on the employment of the citizens.
That's with all the effort we can put into reducing the number coming in.
What would happen if that number, what happens if it's 20 million people a year?
Where do they live?
Do they live on the street?
Do they make camps on the roads?
Do they clean up after themselves?
From a practical perspective, let me put it another way.
Open borders probably is a really good solution for countries that are largely similar.
The more similar the countries, the more open borders makes perfect sense.
Because let's say, you know, you're France and Germany or something, and I don't know if this is the case, but let's say that they have similar social services, and let's say they're both similar targets for terror attacks and anything else.
Well, it kind of doesn't matter that much, right?
The terrorists are already in one of the countries, and they're happy to attack that one.
Maybe there'll be a little more in your country, but, you know, you probably have the same risk anyway, you know?
So when you see the open borders people, and here's my statement that I think is just my opinion alone.
I don't know if anybody else has this specific opinion.
But my belief is that the people who talk about open borders literally don't mean it.
In other words, if you put a camera on them and say, do you believe in open borders?
They say yes, and here are all my arguments.
But I believe if I took that same person off camera, in private, and I said, look, I hear what you're saying.
You know, on a conceptual level, it does make sense to remove friction.
That's good for everything. But, in a real world, You know, in a practical world, tell me how this looks to you.
What would keep 50 million people from just entering the United States?
And what would the United States look like if 50 million people came here and said, give me some health care?
Or give me some whatever.
So... My belief is that the people who are claiming open borders, let's say the intellectual class, I'm not talking about the people who are activists and working with immigrants, they just have a self-interest.
So there are two kinds of open border people.
There are the intellectuals and the economists and the philosophers.
I believe that in private, none of them would support open borders.
They would only support it on an intellectual basis, not on a practical basis, because they wouldn't be able to describe how it could work in our specific case.
Whereas the activists, they don't really care about the greater good as much as they care about their activism and about their cause.
And by the way, there's nothing wrong with that.
The whole point of activism is people are advocating for their group, and we allow activism, we allow free speech.
So I'm not saying there's anything bad about that.
But it's not in the interest of the people who might be living here if those activists win and the borders are thrown open.
So I would like to make this challenge.
If there is a, let's say an intellectual, as opposed to an activist, who can make an open borders case and would like to come on to a Periscope with me, I would love to talk to you and maybe you could educate My audience.
But you have to be maybe somebody who's written on it.
I don't want just somebody who's got an opinion.
I want somebody who's put some real skin in the game on this topic.
And I think you would watch their idea just fall apart in front of you.
So I predict nobody's going to take me up on that who has the right credentials.
But we'll see. And by the way, if they have a good argument, I'm going to change my mind.
I know you don't like that, but if they have a good argument, I'm going to change my mind.
I'm kind of new to the topic, so maybe there's something I haven't thought about.
Alright, here's another topic.
We know that foreign countries like to meddle in other countries' elections.
We know that any time there is a politician that would do good things for you versus one that would do bad, if you have money, you're going to try to get that money to the person who's going to help you, assuming you're a big entity with a lot of money or a billionaire or something.
Now, what does that predict?
About the Mexican cartels and Democratic candidates and Democratic elected officials.
Could we not predict with 100% confidence that the cartels have already have or will soon start funneling money toward Democrats?
Because why wouldn't they, right?
If you're a Mexican cartel and you've got a lot of money and you have lots of mechanisms to feed that money through shells and people and different things, wouldn't you identify the politicians that are closest to the border and wouldn't you find a way to get them money?
It's hard to believe it's not already happening.
I see a number of you are saying it's already happening, but I don't know any specific cases.
But whether or not it's already happened, it's kind of guaranteed, isn't it?
So it seems to me that we've created this super dangerous situation where Democrats and Republicans have this stark difference on how to deal with the border.
It's the stark difference that opens it up for the cartels.
Because the cartels can say, whoa, we didn't create the stark difference, but now that it's there, let's have more stark difference.
Let's start supporting some people who really want to open that border or whatever.
So... I would think there's a high likelihood that in the next couple years, let's say, we're going to have a major story of a name-brand candidate, a Democrat, who is accepting, maybe unwillingly, not unwillingly, but maybe unknowingly, accepting money from cartels.
I think that's going to be a future story.
And my argument is not...
That Democrats are bad and Republicans are good.
I'm not coming from that position.
I'm just saying that one of those two parties has a position that the cartels are going to like.
And people support the politicians that do things they like.
I don't know what would stop this from happening.
Alright, last night on Tucker Carlson's show, there was a segment on the idea of safe needle places that you can get a safe injection if you're an opioid addict.
And the idea is that if you can move the addicts from getting their drugs on the street, where they're going to get the wrong kind of stuff, they're going to do overdoses, they're going to have unsafe needles and all that, if you can get them into a legal...
Safer environment. They're still going to do the drugs.
Because you don't have a way to stop that easily, but at least they'll do it in a way they don't get overdoses while you're trying to figure out how to deal with it.
Now, on Tucker's show, I think this was Tucker's point of view, and I hope I don't get it wrong.
I hate to paraphrase other people's opinions, because if you lose some nuance, you're not doing anything good for the world.
But I got the sense, when he was talking to, I guess, Mark Stein, that both of them were the opinion that this was a bad idea, And that we should go stronger at getting people off of drugs.
And that the energy should be on getting people off of drugs, not on making a safe place where it's easy to do them.
Here's the problem with that.
And I just sent a message.
I just DMed Tucker on Twitter.
I don't know if you'll see it or not.
But unfortunately, I have some experience in this realm.
As most of you know, my stepson died a few months ago from a fentanyl overdose.
And we dealt for years with his teenage addiction.
And here's what I learned. That is a real key variable that did not come up in Tucker's conversation.
There is no way to get somebody off drugs.
That's the end of it.
There is no way. Nobody has an idea.
Well, let me make an important distinction.
If an addict has decided to get off drugs and really, really wants to, and they have the incentive, and they go through processes and they do the right things and they do rehab, they can get there.
But the problem is the ones who don't want to get off it.
And that was the case with my stepson.
And my situation was very similar to he had friends who were in the same situation.
So we knew the parents of his friends whose kids were also addicted, etc.
And the big problem was...
That they didn't want to stop doing it.
They liked it.
And there was nothing you could tell them that would change their minds.
They would all prefer to run away from home with no money and no resources.
Because the drugs are so good that if you say to a 16-year-old, look, you 16-year-old, if you keep doing these drugs, I'll take away your phone.
The 16-year-old will say, drugs are better than my phone.
Okay. And you say, I'll take away everything else you have.
And the 16-year-old will say, I still like drugs better.
We will disown you from the family, the 16-year-old will say.
Yeah, drugs still better.
And in fact, it's not even close.
You're not even in the ballpark yet.
Do you know how good these drugs are?
The reason that these drugs are killing 72,000 people a year just in the United States from overdose is because they're so good That there's nothing you can offer to take away or to give them that comes close to what the drugs are doing.
It's not even close. But here's the real problem.
At least in California, maybe there's some state where it's different.
You cannot control another person's body if they don't want to be controlled.
The exception being prisoners who have committed crimes.
You can put them in jail. But if somebody has not committed a crime, or let's say has not been committed, it's not the committing of a crime, but if they've not been convicted of a crime, there is no way Anybody, including the parents, can touch their body.
And if you can't touch physically, you can't hold them, you can't handcuff them, you can't tie them up.
If you can't physically stop anybody because it's illegal, the kid can just stand up and walk out the front door.
There's nothing you can do.
Legally. Suppose you try to physically constrain him.
Well, it would get violent, whatever.
But in the end, you can't keep a kid handcuffed forever.
As soon as the handcuff comes off, they walk out the door.
Now you can commit somebody who's like a danger to themselves.
There's a process where they can be hospitalized for a short time and even tied to a bed.
And of course, you'll find that many, many parents of addicts have actually done that.
They've actually taken their addict kid, committed them, and they get tied to a bed.
Literally tied to a bed.
They can't even move their arms. And, you know, they give them all good medical treatment, etc.
But what does the addict do when the time that that is legal expires?
They get up, they walk out the door, and they do drugs.
Why? Because the drugs are better than their alternatives.
They like it. It's their choice.
There's nothing you can do to stop a human being from taking drugs.
So, back to the free needle exchange thing.
When you say, I would prefer that we spend our energy getting them off drugs, you have to understand there is no path to that.
If the people wanted to get off drugs, they also wouldn't need this needle exchange thing.
They would be working through a system.
They'd be in rehab.
They'd be doing what they needed to do.
If they don't want it, you can't make them want it, and you can't make them do anything.
So, for those people, you only have a choice of, essentially, addict death or this needle exchange thing which keeps them alive long enough Maybe they can come on their own, you know, on their own, they decide life is better, you know, a life without drugs.
And most of them won't.
So, I wanted to add that piece of information that if you assume that you can help these people who don't want to be helped, You've missed the most important variable in the entire conversation.
The drugs are better than anything you could take away from them.
The drugs are better than any penalty that you could give them.
The drugs are better than their family.
Everything they love, the drugs are better.
Alright, let's talk about And I like to end on these climate discussions.
Now, you may have noticed that I've created a little bit of a kerfuffle on the internet with my, so far, at least a little bit balanced discussion of climate.
Because you've never seen a balanced discussion of climate.
And it makes everybody mad.
Both sides are hating me at the moment because they're like, oh, you said that one thing about my side, but they're both saying it right now.
So, apparently I got the attention of Judith Curry, who most of you know as maybe the most prominent skeptical voice in climate.
I don't know if she would label herself that way, but she doesn't agree with the mainstream.
And she addressed one of my tweets.
So I followed her.
I didn't realize she was following me on Twitter.
And I'm imagining that I might invite her to come on a Periscope because she would be a good voice.
Now here's the interesting thing.
The thing she...
She responded to, as I tweeted, that it is literally impossible for a citizen, people like me, who are not climate scientists, to understand the debate.
And I've been proving this every single day.
So every single day the following thing happens.
I'll take a climate claim, you know, doesn't matter what it is, something about ice or sea water or temperatures, whatever the claim is, and I'll say, here's the claim.
Here's a really credible sounding, at least sounding, critic.
And they say that this is all BS and they show their work.
So you see the claim and you think, well, that's pretty convincing.
It's all the scientists are on the same side and they all say this.
Then the critic comes in and goes, okay, here's what they did wrong.
It's obvious. I'm using the same information they are.
I told you what they did wrong.
I told you how to fix it.
I'm laying it out here.
There's nothing hidden. Look at my work and you can tell clearly that the climate scientists got this wrong.
And then I look at the skeptic and I'm like, huh, that is very convincing.
And then the scientist, or somebody who's on the same side as the scientist, comes in behind the skeptic and they say, ah, this skeptic, they're always saying crazy stuff.
Here's five other things they said that weren't true.
And by the way, here's why they're wrong in this case too.
Because they did something wrong or they're doing something with the numbers, etc.
Now when the scientist comes back in, they are totally credible.
Because I can't judge the scientist, I can't judge the critic, and I can't judge the scientist again when they come behind the critic.
Now what happens after the scientist comes back the second time and says the critic was wrong?
The critic comes back in.
And the critic says, no, your objections to my criticism are off base, and here's why.
And then you read them and you say, okay, those sound like pretty good reasons.
To infinity. Whoever talks last in any narrow topic on climate science, you believe whoever just goes last.
And so Judith Curry was agreeing with my general statement that we citizens cannot penetrate the topic.
I would say with certainty now, this was a suspicion that has now moved to a certainty in my mind, That you cannot do your own homework and get an answer on climate science.
That it just can't be done.
And it's because the ping-pong between the opinions will be infinite and you'll always, always get to a point where you don't understand what they're saying.
So even if you, let's say you start at the top and the claim is something just dead simple.
Sea level is rising too quickly.
Just a dead simple claim.
Critic says, no it isn't, because this or that.
Scientist comes in and says, yes it is.
You forgot to include this or that.
By about the fourth iteration, they're going to be talking science.
And you're gone.
They're going to be talking about words you haven't heard, concepts you're not aware of, context you don't fully understand.
So if you think you can follow that chain to a conclusion, and you're not a scientist working in this field, That is just a hallucination.
What happens instead, and it's quite obvious to me at this point, is that people have a bias, or they're willing to have a bias, I guess, and they simply go down the chain of, you know, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, until they're exhausted or they can't find the next reply.
And when they can't find the next reply, they say, okay, the last person I read, that must be the one.
I don't exactly know what they said or why, but that last person who talked was pretty smart.
So really, the people who think that they have good opinions and that they've researched and they've come to their own independent opinion, total illusion.
All they've done is they've come down to the bottom of the chain and they don't know what the next response is or it hasn't happened or they don't understand it.
There's no thinking going on in the public.
None. No thinking.
It's an illusion that we're giving ourselves based on the fact that we don't have the capability of understanding the argument.
Now, what's funny is Judith Curry said she agreed with, you know, in a broad way, she agreed with the statement that it was hard for the citizens to penetrate the topic.
And she said, this is why, you know, I put it in simple form, and then she connected to a document that That is just on the question of whether the sea level is rising in a way that's unusual.
Now, how many pages do you think her simplification was?
So here's somebody who agrees with me that the topic is too complicated for the average person.
So she simplifies it and she sends me a link to it and then I read it.
72 pages.
One question. Is sea level rising?
Yes or no? Or I mean, is it rising in an unusual way?
It's the unusual part that's the important part.
Because apparently the sea level's been rising for a long time.
72 pages to answer the question, is sea level going up?
Or do we know? Now, I'm pretty smart.
But I also don't have infinite time.
So I skimmed it.
You know, I looked at the executive summaries.
I looked at a few charts and stuff.
But that 72 pages of simplification were so far above my ability to really judge them for credibility.
Didn't help me at all.
Didn't help me at all. The other thing that I know for sure is if I took her her document, which by the way was completely credible, meaning that I looked at it and I thought, huh, this is a smart person who knows this topic.
The things they're saying must be easy to check, so you wouldn't say something that was wrong that was just so easy to check, right?
So completely convincing.
And her point was that we don't have a signal of human involvement so far that we can sort out from the natural variations to know whether CO2 is making the ocean rise so far.
Which is different from will it happen in the future, but so far.
But I also know that if I took her 72-page paper and handed it to any scientist who's working in the field, specifically, you know, ocean, sea level stuff and climate science, they would look at her paper and they would say, Well, here are all the things she got wrong, or the things she didn't consider, or why there's some context that matters, or the study that she didn't mention.
And I would read the new one, and I would say, okay, that looks pretty good.
I can't really judge it.
I'm not a scientist. I don't know if any of the claims are true.
But they sure look good.
And I'm sure that if I said, hey, Judith Curry, this scientist who has good credentials just said that your 72 pages has some flaws and it's wrong, what would she say?
Do you think there's any chance she would say, oh, darn, good criticism.
I changed my paper.
I changed my mind. No, there's no chance of that.
She would tell you, With 100% certainty, she would go in and say, no, that scientist got it wrong.
I say in the original paper, and he's ignoring what I said, and what he's saying has already been debunked by this paper, so I'm actually right after all.
Et cetera, forever.
The scientist would disagree, she would disagree.
You cannot penetrate this topic.
Here are the current outstanding questions about climate, and if anybody has anything to add to this, I would love to see it.
I think I called for this on Twitter already, but I haven't seen it.
So there's a skeptical notion that the CO2 does affect temperature, But that its effect tapers off, meaning that the first amounts of CO2 do affect temperature, but it starts to make less and less of a difference the more CO2 there is.
That seems like maybe the simplest thing that you could test.
Do you think even that simple question We could look at what the scientists say, and then look at what the skeptics say, and again, how each of them respond to each other.
Do you think we could even find out the answer to that simple question?
I don't think so. And it's the basic question that's driving this entire thing.
No, I don't think we can.
Well, let me put it this way.
I'm not claiming that science doesn't know the answer.
I'm claiming that we non-scientists will never know if science knows the answer.
We could know maybe how many people are on each side, but when we look at the arguments, we're helpless.
We can't judge the arguments.
And so I hear some of you flailing around in your own hallucinations.
So here's somebody who's hallucinating and you can tell from the comments.
Somebody said, CO2, think of it as a tiny oscillation and it can only absorb so much, right?
If you believe, whoever said that comment, if you believe you have a grasp on this topic, I guarantee you you're hallucinating.
Because you do not.
If I put you in a room with a bunch of climate scientists, do you think they would say, oh, Bob, we didn't think of this tiny oscillating thing.
Nobody had mentioned before the idea that CO2 might have a maximum and might be saturated.
This is the first time we've ever heard that argument.
Do you think that's going to happen?
No! They're going to tell you why you're full of baloney.
And then you're going to find a skeptic who says why they're full of baloney, etc.
forever. You cannot penetrate this topic.
That's enough on that.
We might need to double back when the president does his speech because it's gonna be fun time.
I'm so interested to see what he says about all this.
Oh, can I end with a little story?
It's about the simulation.
So, well, I'm going to tell this story another time.
I'm going to end here for today. And I will talk to you maybe this afternoon.
I'm not sure. Talk to you tomorrow, at least.
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