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Jan. 22, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
41:14
Episode 385 Scott Adams: My Apology for Saying Toddlers are not as Wise as Adults,
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Hey Irv.
Hey Anne-Marie.
Bye.
Come on in here. Gather around.
For those of you who are exercising right now, those of you who are walking on the beach, you know who you are.
Those of you who are on your treadmills, those of you who are driving, those of you who just are pretending to work but you just put your earphones in, I'm talking to you.
I know why you're here.
Yeah, I do. I know why you're here.
You're here for the simultaneous sip and the wisdom.
But first, the simultaneous sip.
Hey, Eric. Grab your mug, your chalice, your vessel, your glass, your container, your stein, if you will.
Your thermos. Fill it with your favorite liquid.
liquid I like coffee and join me for the simultaneous sip.
Oh, extra good.
That's some extra good coffee right there.
So...
So, before I get to my apology, second apology in a week, I'm just apologizing like crazy here.
I don't think I've ever made so many mistakes in one week.
It's just apologize, apologize, apologize.
Let's talk about Kamala Harris' slogan.
So here is the inspirational slogan from the strongest contender from the Democrats.
For... Sorry.
Second word is the...
Sorry, I'm napping a little bit.
People. Put it all together.
it's for the people.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
So that's pretty inspirational.
Apparently she'll be running for the people.
For the people.
That's us. Good enough.
So somebody said to me, Scott, why do you think that Kamala is the biggest threat to the president when her slogan is so persuasion weak?
It looks like they, you know, dropped a sandwich on a typewriter and just took whatever happened.
Typewriter? Let's call the keyboard.
Let's update these references, please.
Dropped a sandwich on a keyboard and took whatever it said.
How about four of the people?
Sounds good to me. But here's my caution to you.
Imagine that you're a high-level advisor and you want to work for one of the high-level candidates.
Do you jump in early?
You don't, right?
The people who are good at this, the people who are good at coming up with slogans, the people who are good at You know, shaping a candidate.
The people are good at messaging.
I don't think they're really involved yet.
I think at this point, each of these many Democrat candidates probably have some people who were close to them before, maybe one extra person.
But they don't really have the A-team yet.
So what you should expect, much like Hillary's experience, she started out persuasion terrible.
But by the time you got close to the election, she was really, really good.
And almost certainly because the quality of her advisors went from terrible to world class.
I wouldn't expect the best advisors to jump in this early.
I think they would hold back a little bit, see who the frontrunners are, maybe try to pick a winner and be on the winning team, because that would be the home run play.
So don't make any judgments about Kamala Harris' persuasion game yet.
We can see that one thing she is clearly working on, which is fun to watch, is that most of the people who are pro-Trumpers were saying early on, she's cold, she has no personality, she's got no smile.
But now you see that all of her tweets, her videos that she's making, she's dancing, she's eating a sandwich, she's being part of the people, she's smiling, she's got a lot of personality.
If you see a montage of her on CNN, it will be laughing, smiling personality.
So she is being, you might say, manufactured from whatever you thought of her before into something better.
Now I'm not saying that that's being a big fake, because remember, they're running for president.
The entire game here is to present a package that's essentially marketing, it's essentially persuasion, that isn't exactly who you are, but it's who you're selling.
So that's not an insult to Kamala Harris to say that she's finding her brand and firming that up as we go.
But it'll be fun. Fun to watch.
So yesterday, we had this weird...
Experience of it being Martin Luther King Day, and all the country was talking about is racism, but not in a good way.
Everybody was talking about it in the bad way, like there's too much of it, and you're a racist, no, you're a racist, you're a racist, no, you're a racist.
And so if you looked at the president's tweets...
The president was tweeting all the right stuff about racial justice.
And society was all acting like a bunch of racists.
So the weirdest thing that happened yesterday on Martin Luther King Day is that you can make an argument that the least racist adult...
No, the least racist human over the age of 16 in the entire country...
Was President Trump.
Now here again, I'm not talking about anybody's inner thoughts.
I'm talking about how they acted.
You watched huge proportions of the population just be flat out racist on Martin Luther King Day.
The only person who was flat out open, diversity, let's all get together, It was President Trump.
He was tweeting all the right things while the public was going nuts on each other for calling each other racist.
So that was different.
So some of you may have noticed the trouble I got into yesterday on Twitter.
And I made the mistake of saying that the 16-year-old boys...
It should not be taken seriously or should not be part of the decision-making when it comes to big political issues, and especially if those issues have to do with a woman's decisions about abortions.
And there was much pushback on that.
And people said to me, wait, there are children on the other side.
Okay, that's not really a reason.
And then people said, but these kids care.
Okay, caring's not much of a reason.
My argument was that there's no minor whose opinion is good enough to influence national decisions, meaning that children are not wise, they are not well-informed, and their opinions are not worthy that we should allow them to influence in any way, even by marching and Marching events to influence the national opinion about what we do about politics.
Totally wrong.
I was totally wrong.
And I offer you my unreserved apology to anyone who saw me disagreeing with them.
So my opinion in the morning has completely reversed and I'll tell you why.
The basis of the opinion Is that children are idiots compared to adults, right?
So I'm not saying children are bad people.
I'm saying they're not quite people yet.
They have unformed brains.
They don't have much knowledge.
They don't have much wisdom. And I thought to myself, hey, you wouldn't want to add stupidity.
And here, again, I'm saying this with love because I was once young and stupid.
Most of you were as well.
But why would you add what you know is the lowest quality of thinking to such an important political decision or any political decision?
But during the course of the day, I completely reversed opinion because I watched one adult after another so frickin' stupid that, and I'm not joking about this, this is not sarcasm, this is not satire.
I'm giving it to you completely straight.
By the end of the day, the people who were arguing that children should be part of the political process won me over by being so stupid on Twitter that I had to agree that the quality of the decision-making could not be degraded by having a toddler vote.
Do I mean that as an exaggeration?
No. Not even a little.
Do I mean this to be funny?
Well, it is funny.
But I don't mean it only to be funny.
I'm giving it to you absolutely straight.
This is my honest opinion.
Sarcasm is off.
Satire is off.
And by the way, I would never tell you that if I were really being sarcastic.
I'm actually telling you the truth.
Yesterday was such a massive clusterfuck of stupidity like I've never seen.
I've never seen as bad a set of thinking on all sides coming at me from every adult that I honestly changed my mind.
This is not a joke.
I changed my mind.
We should let toddlers vote.
Now obviously we're not going to change the Constitution, so it's not going to happen.
But the point is, the adults that I witnessed yesterday, the quality of their thinking was so poor that quite honestly, no joke, no joke here at all, quite honestly there's nothing that you could add to that that would make it worse.
And it's also obvious that the children are being brainwashed early by their respective sides, their religion, their parents, the community, whatever.
We're all being brainwashed early.
And for the most part, the opinions that we lock in as teenagers, they tend to stay with us.
So those kids who were subject of all the attention yesterday They probably are locked in, don't you think?
Now, somebody said, can the children protest in public their support for the right of life without influencing politics?
That's a good example of why I say toddlers should vote.
Let me give you some of the ideas, some of the things that people said.
Some people said to me, People attacked me all day on Twitter and they said this,
those kids are not trying to affect public opinion by going to an event whose only purpose is to affect public opinion.
And I saw that from the first few people and I thought, my goodness, how can you contradict yourself in the same sentence?
How can you say they're going to a political event that is obviously for affecting political opinion?
They're not marching for fun.
They're trying to affect political decision making.
So if you don't understand that, you're not any smarter than a toddler.
Quite literally. Because a toddler wouldn't be able to make that distinction either.
Here's some other things that people said.
So number one, people said political marches are not intended to influence decisions.
Okay, any child is as smart as that.
Any child is as smart as that.
Then people said to me, but Scott, why is it okay for children like David Hogg to influence the gun debate?
To which I say, you're agreeing with me, not disagreeing.
So there were a whole bunch of people who attacked me by agreeing with me.
Okay? If you can't tell the difference between agreeing with me when I say children should not be part of the decision making and then you say, oh yeah?
What about these children who are part of the decision making?
No. That's what I'm saying.
Children should not be part of the decision making.
It doesn't matter if the topic is guns or Or abortion.
Now remember, I've changed my opinion since that opinion.
Because when I saw how dumb people were, and they thought that somehow the gun reference was a counter to me saying that children shouldn't be part of the decision making, when in fact they were agreeing with me hard, and I thought, well you know who else couldn't tell the difference between agreeing with me and disagreeing with me?
Children. Children are equal, in apparently this sense, because they too would say random things that didn't make sense, as all the adults were yesterday.
Not all of them. What else did they say?
People came after me when I said that children shouldn't be part of the decision-making process, and they said, my God, why are you saying children shouldn't have free speech?
No. Nobody said children shouldn't have free speech.
We'll get rid of you. Goodbye.
Damn it. Missed you.
So when I said that children are not as wise as adults, a lot of people said, how can you say that they shouldn't have free speech?
I didn't say that.
Didn't say anything even close to that.
Do you know who else can misinterpret what I say and then attack me for something that's ridiculous because I didn't say it?
Children. Children can do that.
Children are just as good as adults at misinterpreting what people say and then criticizing them for their own hallucination.
Children can do that.
They don't have to wait until they're adults, apparently.
What else did we hear yesterday?
People were mad at me yesterday and they said, Don't you know you should never trust CNN? Number one, For the last three years, I've done nothing but criticize the fake news media.
So if you're telling me to not trust the fake news media, you're not smarter than a child.
That's my brand, telling people not to trust.
I wrote a book on it. I've written countless blogs on that exact point.
What I did was not trust my own eyes.
I looked at the video and I thought I saw enough.
That was my mistake and that's why I apologized.
But the people who say, you shouldn't trust CNN no matter what, here's what's wrong with that.
And it was usually matched with you should not watch it.
If you're telling me that the smart thing to do is only to listen to one side because the one side is telling you all the truth, you're not smarter than a child.
Let me say it again. If you came after me yesterday and said, you should never listen to both sides because that one side gets things wrong.
The one side?
Really? Just the one side is getting stuff wrong?
So you should just ignore the other half of the entire conversation?
If that's your opinion, You're not smarter than a child.
And so why should children not vote?
Because they can do that well, easily.
That's a very low bar.
Children can definitely do better than that.
Toddlers can do better than that.
The other opinion I heard is that people said to me that my apologizing for a clear mistake was terrible and the reason I should not have apologized for what was a clear mistake was because that's how the left wins.
Now keep in mind that my correction and apology went from the side that I didn't want to win And I corrected myself to the team that I was likely wanting to support anyway, which was Trump supporters and people wearing MAGA hats and stuff.
So I actually changed my opinion from my unusual one to one you would expect me to have if you've been watching me.
And people told me that that's why the left is winning, because I corrected myself as soon as I saw that I'd made an error and the facts had changed.
If that's why the left is winning, I don't understand the world.
Could a child have an opinion as dumb as, apologies is why the left is winning?
Yes, they could. Any child could have that opinion.
Totally as good as an adult.
Now here's my favorite one.
People told me, That if you just do your own research, Scott, you wouldn't have to be apologizing all the time.
Just do your own research.
Don't leap in with an opinion.
Do the deep dive.
On what? Everything?
Should I do research on everything I see?
Everything? Aren't there some things that you look at and you go, okay, there's no reason to research that.
You have to kind of call your shots, don't you?
I don't have infinite time to research every claim of fact.
Neither do you.
If you think that's reasonable to say that people should have researched everything, you are not smarter than a child.
Let me tell you what research gets you.
Here's a perfect example.
I had used the climate science example where every time there's a claim, There's a skeptical counterclaim, and then you go back to the scientist and say, what do you say about that skeptic?
And then he says why the skeptic is wrong, then the skeptic comes in and says why the scientist is wrong.
Until they get to something you don't understand, or you can't verify.
And then when you've got to the bottom of that well, where it's so dark that you just don't even understand the conversation anymore, you end up defaulting to wherever you want it to be anyway.
And when you're done, what do you tell other people?
You say, I did my research.
I went down in the well.
You didn't go down in the research well, so I'm smart, but you are not, because I went down in the well.
All people do...
When they research things that experts understand and citizens don't, is they find a level that they're happy, that they don't want to do any more research, and then they just default to whatever they were going to believe anyway.
And then they say they did research.
Could a child do that well?
Yes. A child can be fooled by thinking that they know something.
It isn't hard. So then we saw this situation with the Covington Catholic School, and you saw the well in progress.
So the first level of the well was, these boys are a bunch of racists doing bad things to this Native American guy.
Whoops! Skeptics come in and say, nope, here's the full context.
Those kids were heroes.
Not heroes, but they were good kids.
How long did it take for somebody to come in under it and say, here's a picture of those same kids wearing blackface at a basketball game that is approved by the adults in the school?
Full stop.
Half of the country yesterday believed that they saw a photograph of kids in the modern era, like right now, Wearing blackface at a sporting event in their school with the administration's approval.
Now how hard was it to figure out that didn't happen?
That that was not true.
How hard was it to figure out that was not true?
Well, it took about half a day, and then Mike Cernovich, probably other people, tweeted out the context, which shows that they always pick a different color to wear as a theme for these games.
It was a blue day, a white day, a black day.
Some of the kids wore black clothing, and sometimes they colored their face.
It all had to do with the theme.
It had nothing to do with wearing blackface.
You probably shouldn't have had to even need to wait for the clarification, because that was sort of obviously fake.
So, somebody came in below, Mike Cernovich, and says, aha, I can go deeper in the well than you can and prove that your blackface photo was faked.
What happened after that?
Did the other side give up?
No, they didn't. They came in under him and said, here's a video in which these kids are sitting on a bench and some nice maybe 16-year-old girl or so walks by and they all started yelling and hooting.
And so therefore, they are actually bad kids after all.
All right? Now, it could be that we'll never learn any more about that situation.
But, if you had to bet, You would say somebody's going to say, wait a minute, that's not even the same kids.
Or they're going to say, wait a minute, that girl was actually an activist.
Or they're going to say, wait a minute, they were actually talking, they were yelling at somebody across the street.
It just looked like it on the film.
Something like that. But the point is, it is a complete illusion that you can keep studying and you can keep researching until you get to the truth.
Alright? You can't.
Generally speaking, you can't.
You can't know if gun control works.
You can't know if abortion, blah blah blah.
You can't know climate science.
You can't know any of these stories in the news.
And now there's a story about a Brazilian troll who started the whole thing.
I'll talk about that in a moment.
So, one of the reasons that I don't vote, in addition to not wanting it to bias me, Is that I've said that I can't know what the right decisions are on the important stuff.
So I take myself out of it.
But I'm going to be consistent with my larger long-term philosophy.
And people who said that children should be involved in the political process, Totally proved their point to me yesterday by showing me massive amounts of cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, and outright bad thinking, to which I cannot make a case that children would do worse than that.
I can't. Alright, so the news story is, That the original viral video, the edited version, came from some kind of maybe a Brazilian-related troll.
So in other words, there's somebody not in the United States who has a very active troll account who created this situation and then other trolls magnified it.
Now, it's too early to know that I have any of the facts of this right.
Okay, it could completely change.
But here's my question.
Do we have yet another situation where a foreign entity is messing with the United States?
And if it's Russia, isn't it pretty anti-Trump?
Maybe it is Russia.
Why is nobody blaming Russia?
So I don't think the Brazil connection tells you it's a Brazilian.
You know, we don't live in a world that would say that because the traffic or the profile comes from there, that doesn't really tell you it's coming from there.
But we are just at the beginning of finding out who it was because it was somebody who was pretty, pretty good.
Pretty good. It was a pretty good thing.
Alright, somebody prompted me to talk about RPOS. Now, I'm not I'm trying to talk less about her.
For those of you who are new, RPOS is my name for AOC. Because once she came out as a full racist, the R stands for racist.
The POS does not stand for point of sale.
You can figure it out.
So once she came out as just being anti-white people, then...
Then, you know, I just have to label her evil.
And I was trying to ignore her, but you just won't let me.
So, there's a video of her saying that because of climate science, we're all going to die in 12 years.
What did all of you adults, who are way smarter than children, So what did all of you adults who are so much smarter than children think about that when she said, we're all going to die in 12 years?
Did you say to yourself, good lord, she's anti-science and dumb?
Is that what you said? Or did you say to yourself, she's the female Donald Trump and the truth of that is not important at all?
If you said to yourself, my goodness, she's stupid, Well, I think that's what children might have said.
So let them vote.
If you said to yourself, she understands that hyperbole is the reason that she's the most famous Democrat in the world, and so doing more of it is smarter than doing less of it, and you saw a perfect example of her doing it really, really well, and it's the reason we're talking about her,
it's the reason she got the front-page news, and then she went after Aaron Sorkin quite well, actually, and caused him to basically back down and apologize, in a sense, If you're watching her act and you're saying that she's dumb, I say children can vote.
Because whatever that is, it's not dumb.
It's not dumb.
Somebody said she's not as clever as Trump.
I would say that's true.
And it's also true she's not as old.
Because there is a certain level of wisdom that you're going to get just by being around a while.
So wait. Wait until she's 70.
Do you think she'll be smarter at 70?
Probably. Probably.
Alright. Somebody says, ignorant is not dumb.
In this case, you have to tell yourself that she really believes we're all dead in 12 years.
There's nothing you could tell me that would make me believe she really believes that's true.
Let's see.
She's not as good as I think.
If she's not as good as I think, why are we all talking about her?
That's the point. She knows nothing about economics.
Man, oh man. She knows more about economics than almost every one of you.
Because she understands that persuasion and economics are the same.
She understands the hyperbole, what it is.
She understands what the first offer is.
She knows how to get from here to there.
If you believe that she really doesn't understand these economic concepts, or even that she cares, I think that would be some mind reading and would not be in evidence.
Alright, I don't want to talk about her anymore.
Yes, I am talking about her.
See, the whole point is, if you are a master persuader, it doesn't matter how badly people want to ignore you.
The whole point is that even I, with my great desire to ignore her, find that I can't.
That's my point.
If you're missing that, you're missing the show.
She has a degree in economics, somebody said, that is correct.
So if you're arguing that the person who has a degree in economics and also understands hyperbole is saying things that you don't think are exactly correct, you've got to be careful about that.
Somebody says she knows as much about economics as Paul Krugman.
Now, I don't think that's technically true, but it is true that his prediction of the economic future was no better than a child's.
She said if we're short on money, we can print some more.
She's right. If you're short on money, you can print some more.
You can't criticize her by saying things that are true that she said.
Now you can say inflation, etc.
But keep in mind that Warren Buffett said the same thing.
So when you're criticizing AOC or RPOS for saying if you run out of money you can print some more, you're not that far from what Warren Buffett said.
So think twice.
Alright, enough about her.
I don't think there's anything else happening.
It seems like that was the only news.
Oh, let's talk about North Korea.
There's talk of the summit coming up.
It is really...
It's really just mind-boggling to watch how CNN covers the North Korea situation versus the more Trump-friendly media.
On CNN, they say that we've actually lost ground with North Korea because North Korea got the summit, They got to keep all their nukes and they're probably even building more of them.
Therefore, North Korea is just winning.
They've played us.
The president is a big old dupe.
Here's what they don't report.
The president took away their reason to ever attack us.
He took away the reason.
He made friends with Kim Jong-un.
Probably convinced them that we don't have any real reason to ever attack them unless they attack us, which was the key point that had to be made.
And so if you're CNN and you fail to report that this president did something I've never seen a president do, Can you think of any case where the United States was in a military confrontation or a pre-confrontation and then somebody just took away the reason and just said,
oh, how about we just don't be like that and then convince the other side to just stop being like that because there was never any reason for them to be at each other's necks anyway?
Have you ever seen that happening?
I mean, I'm not a historian, so there may be some case where somebody else talked their way out of a nuclear war.
Talked their way out of a nuclear war.
Possibly one of the greatest accomplishments of any president in the history of frickin' presidents.
How does CNN report it?
Well, it didn't get anything done.
So there's your two worlds.
That might work if Trump were president for life.
Well, I don't see the next president coming in and re-declaring hostilities with North Korea.
It's possible, but I don't see it happening.
What was your simulation comment you didn't want to make a few days ago?
I forget. Zakaria called the summit a victory for Trump?
I don't know if you're talking about the first one or the upcoming one.
Are we still in the golden age?
Absolutely. So here's a question that kind of gets to that golden age point.
You know, I think I talked about this before, that extreme poverty in the world went from, I don't know, 30-some percent under Reagan to now it's down all the way to 9 percent.
Just immense progress in the world in a way that we've never seen before.
And there's all kinds of progress and basically every level of humanity there's progress at the moment.
So yeah, it's definitely a golden age situation.
But here's the key question on climate change.
If you had a trillion dollars to spend Let's call it an extra trillion dollars, but it's not really extra because it would be deficit spending.
Let's say you had a trillion dollars and you could use it any way you wanted.
Now, in our case, the United States could probably borrow another trillion over years and we could still pay it back.
So if we had an extra trillion, would you be better off spending the entire trillion on trying to get green energy and get rid of coal and work on climate change as aggressively as possible, or would you spend that trillion dollars directly benefiting the poor, the 9% who are literally starving to death?
Which of those two plays is better?
Would it not be entirely immoral to throw the poorest part of the society under the bus to keep the rich people's beach houses intact?
I'm oversimplifying, of course.
But can anybody tell me that the moral choice Is to take a trillion dollars away from the poor, maybe not directly, but in terms of slowing down the economy.
If you slow down the economy, the people at the bottom suffer the most.
Let's say working on climate change aggressively might kill 100 million people.
In other words, doing all the right things that the green people want to do might kill 100 million people.
Whereas if you took the trillion and kept the economy humming, everybody's boat raises a little bit, more people come out of poverty because capitalism does that, and then 100 million people don't die because they have health care and they have food.
Which was the moral choice?
Now, it seems to me that we've got a fighting chance of keeping the economy strong and then figuring out how to suck the CO2 out of the air.
There are half a dozen companies who can already do it.
Each of them are trying to become more efficient.
Over time, they will be. Seems to me that it's hard to make a case For one of those being the moral situation.
You know, it seems that the most moral path is whatever is most directly beneficial to the poor.
And unfortunately, coal and oil and fossil fuels and all those things fit that.
Now, one of the questions that I have as an open question is, what would it take...
What would it take to get us from our current situation where nuclear is essentially impossible because of the regulations and how long it takes?
What would it take to move this from a place where nuclear isn't practical, at least in new plants, it just takes too long, it's too expensive?
What would it take to change that?
If we said, let's do a Manhattan Project to make commercial nuclear power safer and more efficient.
What would that look like? Could we just try harder and remove some regulations?
Is there any way to get there?
I wonder. And I don't know.
Well, there might be, but I wonder.
Mini reactors.
Yeah, it seems like, Yeah, and what about...
Here's something I don't understand.
Why is it that we can have nuclear power on submarines, and the submarines just seem to operate fine and forever, and if we were to build a new submarine tomorrow, couldn't we put a nuclear plant on it?
Can somebody explain to me?
This is a real question, by the way.
This is not an opinion, it's just a question.
Is it true that we could build a nuclear sub tomorrow and put a brand new nuclear power plant on the sub?
Is that true? Because if that's true, and at the same time we can't build one on land, what's different?
So that's an open question.
I hope somebody can answer it for me.
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