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Jan. 30, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:02:35
Episode 396 Scott Adams: Weather, Border Barriers, Schultz, Kamala, Crime
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Hey everybody!
Fresh Millions, how you doing?
Come on in here.
Oh yeah, I got my dragon energy on, you're right.
You noticed. Dragon energy?
Or is it coffee?
What are the odds...
That I would have a Periscope show called Coffee with Scott Adams at the same time that the founder of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, is in the news.
I get to drink coffee while talking about coffee.
Yeah, it's the best day ever.
And let us raise our mug, our glass, our cup, our container, our chalice, our stein, our thermos, if you will.
Fill it with your favorite beverage.
I like coffee. And join me for the simultaneous sip.
Oh yeah. That's a good one.
So, as you know, Kamala Harris did a A town hall meeting with CNN in which she said, in her preferred healthcare proposals of the future, that maybe private insurance companies would just go away.
And then a day later, she said, well maybe not go away maybe they can stay around and everybody said my god she's just changing her mind she did not think this through she uh she's a flip-flopper get her get her because she changed her mind because she got better information and she clarified her thinking kill her what what kind of world do you want to live in do you want to live in the world Where somebody says something that's not a good idea in public,
and then they just have to stick with it even after everybody tells them it's not a good idea?
Is that what you want?
You don't want that world.
You're living in a perfect situation if a politician says something in public, the public rises up as one and says, oh, I don't think you mean that.
And then they change their view and say, no, okay, I'll go with the public.
Is that a problem?
That's the opposite of a problem.
That's things going in the right direction.
Now, how much grief should we give her for not having healthcare all thought out?
Well, maybe a little bit, but does it really matter at this stage?
I mean, it is so early that nobody really has their policies completely thought out.
They're all going to change. They're all going to morph.
Do you remember when candidate Trump said in public, when asked, do you think that women who seek illegal abortions, not legal ones, but illegal ones, should be punished?
And the president said yes.
Now he was a candidate then, but he obviously was not aware of the argument.
And the argument was that even though in that hypothetical scenario, if a woman were getting an illegal abortion, so we're not talking about legal abortions here, but illegal ones, if she got an illegal one, Trump thought, well, of course, if you break the law, why wouldn't you be punished?
So his first thought was just sort of the common sense thought.
And then people said, no, no, if you do that, it's going to be worse than if you punished them.
It actually would make the world a worse place, because it would be punishing the woman who's kind of the victim already.
So he heard the argument, and the very next day he said, change my opinion.
The woman should not be punished, only the doctor.
Now, do you hate President Trump for listening to a better argument, listening to the will of the people, and then conforming to it?
I don't know how you can be mad at that.
It's pretty normal that people have a hole in their thinking, it gets filled in, and then you go, oh, okay, that's my new opinion.
Better thinking, better data, stronger argument.
I changed my mind right away.
That's a pretty good sign.
That's not an analogy.
Somebody said it's not an analogy.
It's a real thing that happened.
I'm not saying they're identical.
I'm saying that it's normal for people to change their minds.
So, while I know you all want to find many reasons to jump on Kamala Harris.
Changing her mind about some detail of healthcare two years before an election is not really the thing you want to go for.
Now, if you want to go for her opinion on abortion, or if you want to go after her for her opinion on healthcare the way it currently stands, that's all fair.
But changing your mind to a better opinion?
That's something we'd want more of, not less of.
So I wouldn't I wouldn't make a big deal about that.
All right. I'm fascinated what you thought.
For those of you who watched the Kamala Harris Town Hall or any clips from it, so if you saw any clips from that, what did you think of her charisma?
Because you may have seen that Morning Joe was slobbering all over her performance, saying that she filled the stage and she looked like a president and all of that.
Yeah, so I'm wondering, I'm just looking at your comments.
So most of you are saying no charisma, bad voice, Hillary 2.0, etc. - Hello, bro.
And that was also my impression.
My impression was an almost startling lack of charisma.
But... Do you think that it's being received exactly that way by her supporters?
I'll bet not. I'll bet her supporters were looking at exactly the same movie we were of her town hall and they were saying, man, look at that command to the stage.
Look at her competently answering all these questions.
Look at her going from topic to topic and having a confident, strong opinion on it.
My guess is That this is entirely a bias-based opinion.
So, don't make too much of the fact that you don't think she has charisma.
Because she's not really talking to you, let's say if you're a Trump supporter.
She's really talking to her base.
And if they liked it, if they liked it, it might be okay.
You know, I made the same point.
With the videos, she did the video of her laughing and dancing and telling us what her favorite songs were and stuff like that.
And I said, don't use your own reaction to that to guess what other people are reacting to.
Because probably that helped her, even if it looked a little cringeworthy to people who were biased against her.
Alright, let me talk about Howard Schultz.
I didn't think that Howard Schultz was going to be interesting.
But I'm pretty wrong about that.
So you can never really know what the news will decide is the story they can't release on.
And Howard Schultz apparently is on a book tour.
So if you go on a book tour, there's probably nothing better you can do than saying you might run for president because then you get all the attention in the world and his book will sell a lot and he doesn't ever need to run for president.
He can just sort of threaten it and then he's forever the person who could have been president.
So saying you might run for president is probably a pretty good plan.
Running for president is a different decision.
My prediction on Howard Schultz Is that running for president would destroy the Starbucks brand.
And that's not something I think he could do.
And I say that because he's built it.
It's his baby.
And it's a public company, right?
Yeah, it's a public company.
So he's got stockholders that he's obliged to.
I'm sure he has much of his own fortune still in the stock.
It would be...
A terrible disservice to the people who work at Starbucks and the stockholders and all the people who depend on them to destroy the brand.
And it would destroy the brand.
You're already seeing Democrats saying that they won't go to Starbucks in France.
Here's my prediction. He's going to make noise about it.
He's going to give us our opinions.
He's going to sell some books.
We'll probably see a lot from him.
But in the end, it would be too much of an ask for him to destroy his brand.
Now, you might say, well, what about Trump?
Trump had the same situation, right?
He had a famous brand.
He knew that running for office would make half of the country hate his brand.
And he did it. So why wouldn't Howard Schultz do the same thing?
Well, here are a few reasons.
Number one, there's nobody quite like Trump.
So you can't really compare anything he does to anybody else, because he just doesn't make ordinary choices.
Yeah, and somebody got ahead of me in the comments here.
The bigger thing is that the Trump brand is a family business.
In a family business, he's got a little more freedom.
He can do whatever his family is okay with, and he's okay with, and it's a different level of risk than taking down a public company.
And I would say that probably Trump has a bigger appetite for risk, just in general.
And he's, you know, he's probably substantially older than Howard Schultz.
You know, it's sort of his, you know, big final act, you know, probably.
So there's a different situation.
But I love watching CNN continually cover Schultz in a negative way.
So I think today there were either two or three negative stories about Schultz on CNN. Let me see.
I'll just call it up. Analysis.
This is CNN's homepage. Analysis.
Howard Schultz is the answer no one is looking for.
I haven't read the article.
But that's the headline on CNN. The answer no one's looking for.
Then there's Colbert roasts Schultz presidential bid.
So they go to Colbert to help mock Schultz out of the office.
So that's two headlines on Schultz and he's not even in the race yet.
Alright, so one of the things that Schultz is doing is by being a reasonable Democrat, he's sort of making the rest of them look foolish by comparison.
And you know what I mean, right?
So if Schultz comes in and just says, Howard Schultz, and just says a bunch of reasonable things that even maybe a Republican could like a little bit, you know, for example, he came out and said, of course, you don't want to get rid of insurance companies.
So he's sort of making his side look bad, and it's going to drive MSNBC and CNN crazy.
And even funnier, I'm watching the Fox News treatment of Howard Schultz.
How do you think Fox News is treating Howard Schultz, who presumably would be on the other side from Fox News?
They're being kind of nice to him.
Fox News!
Pretty, pretty nice to Howard Schultz because they'd love to see him in the race because he probably would guarantee a Trump victory.
I'm not sure I'm going to say that yet, but that's the thinking.
All right. Speaking of health care, I'm going to throw out a health care...
Plan for you, okay?
I might throw out some other healthcare plans as time goes on.
And the context for anything I say about healthcare is that I'm no healthcare expert, but it does seem to me that we're locked into too few choices.
We've got, on one hand, Medicare for all, And on the other hand, let the market do it.
And we don't really talk about much else.
Every once in a while, a little bit.
But I want to throw some ideas in here that are sort of so far out of the mainstream that they might make you think a little bit.
It might improve the portfolio of ideas, even if you don't like my idea.
It just makes you think differently.
Suppose... The government sponsored.
Maybe they don't manage it, but maybe they just allow it or promote it.
So don't get hung up on whether the government is behind it or not.
They could just be promoting this.
Let's say there was a low-cost healthcare plan for people who wanted to give up all of their privacy But, without their name on it.
So, in other words, let's say people wanted to give up all of their healthcare records, as well as all of their lifestyle choices, as might be measured by, you know, a Fitbit, or sensors, or their smartphone, or, you know, maybe they fill out a survey now and then.
So the idea would be that, in return for free healthcare, you would give up all of your privacy, but here's the key.
It would all be encrypted without your name.
So that you'd be giving your healthcare information, but your name would not be attached to it.
And that information would be available to other researchers.
Now, why is that a good idea?
First of all, let me say, Anybody who reacts to this by saying it's a stupid idea because you wouldn't give up your health care, you wouldn't give up your privacy, that would be a stupid response because it's optional.
So if you say, my God, I would never give up my privacy, therefore it's a bad idea, you're not even in the same conversation because nobody's saying it's mandatory.
It's purely optional in return for free healthcare.
You don't have to do it if you don't want to.
But suppose you have that.
What would be the value to the country for not only having more people in healthcare, But the value of that information.
Well, let me give you an example.
Let me give you an example.
I am personally aware of several situations in which people had very long-term serious medical problems that they could not figure out what the problem was.
Once they did figure out what the problem was, there was an easy solution.
But it could take years and years of not knowing why you have a problem.
And I'm being generic here because I don't want to give away anybody's health secrets.
But had we had a big database of all the things that people were doing, all the health problems they had, and all of the things they tried to solve it, The problems I'm talking about would have been solved in an hour.
So instead of decades or years to solve a lifelong major medical problem, it could be solved in an hour if we had enough data about what other people are doing to solve the same problem.
Because somebody's going to hit on it by accident, right?
Somebody's going to be eating more leafy greens.
Somebody's going to give up their cat.
Just a lot of people doing a lot of stuff.
So if you had big data, you could find that.
So the first thing I'm going to state is that giving away healthcare lifestyle information without your name attached to it.
It's all just encrypted.
Nobody knows it's you. But in theory, somebody could connect the two someday if they tried hard enough.
So that's the privacy risk.
Probably would have tremendous value that would lower healthcare costs For the other people.
That's the key. Alright?
So if one group gave up all of its health care information, and then we can learn, for example, that, hey, if you have this problem, you should eat more vegetables, whatever, whatever the answer is, that all of the other people who did not give up their health care information still benefit from what we learned.
So it could lower everybody's health care costs.
Here's the second part.
Suppose you were in this low-cost health care plan, and you had to always agree to the following.
That if you needed certain types of hospital tests, and let's say just non-invasive ones, so if you needed, say, an x-ray, if you were in the free health care plan, you had to agree to get two x-rays.
One using the normal technology, and another using a startup's technology that was looking to build, let's say, the low-cost version of the x-ray, or the low-cost version of an MRI, or the low-cost version of a lab test, or the low-cost version of a skin test.
So for almost everything that's got a big margin of profit, there's a startup already working on the alternative.
But the alternative is not yet approved.
And you don't know if the alternative is going to be as good as the original.
Might the alternative miss some things that the original could have done better?
So for a while, what is best to get the new stuff into production is to test it in parallel with the old one.
So somebody comes in...
Guinea pig. Non-evasive.
All right? A guinea pig would be somebody who took a drug.
Nothing I'm saying would cause any kind of a change in the customer.
So nothing I'm suggesting would change the body or the health of the customer.
They would simply have a choice of you get the regular x-ray but then just walk across the room to the other room and we'll give you the alternative x-ray and you'll have two x-rays.
So it takes a little longer, but nobody's touching your body.
You're not taking a drug.
You're not having anything removed from your body.
Just non-invasive stuff.
And then who would pay for your tests?
The startup. So the startup needs to test their technology.
So the startup could pay for your startup test and also pay for your x-ray.
Your standard x-ray or your standard test or whatever it is.
So now you've got two things going on that are free for this low-cost healthcare.
You give up your privacy.
You report on some of your outcomes.
You have to take two tests in only the cases where there is a non-invasive test and there is a startup locally.
If there isn't one, then it's just free.
And then lastly, maybe some kind of, you know, what do you call it?
Crisis healthcare for the real expensive stuff, which would be lower cost.
So I just throw that idea out there.
I'm not saying that's a good idea, but it's different than what you've heard.
So it might stimulate somebody to come up with a better idea.
I want to talk about...
Here's a question, just a thought experiment.
One of the things that people say about immigrants, whether they are legal or illegal, People say, and I would imagine this is probably true.
Anecdotally, it looks true to me, but I can't prove it.
They say that the crime rate with immigrants, both legal and illegal if you put them together, is lower than the crime rate among the citizens who are legal citizens.
Or among the non-immigrants.
Now, some people are saying it's false.
Some people are saying it's true.
That isn't my point for today.
I'm just saying that that's a conversation.
I don't have the data.
Anecdotally, it feels like it's true.
Okay, so many of you are calling BS on it.
I'm going to have to call BS on your BS, which I wasn't planning to do.
But here's the argument.
A lot of the immigrants in this country are college-educated folks who came over to get jobs in tech.
The people who came here from India with advanced degrees to get jobs in tech probably have a low crime rate, wouldn't you think?
I'm pretty sure that's true, right?
So people who came here for jobs with high educations, did everything legally, of course they have a lower crime rate.
That would be the same as if we looked at our own college-educated people with high-tech jobs.
Probably a low crime rate, right?
Secondly, having worked in the restaurant industry for a while, I did come into contact with vast numbers of people who You never know, but you assume some percentage of these have fake documentation.
So I assume I've come into contact with lots of people who are not legal.
One of the things they all had in common is they like to stay out of trouble because they had a double penalty, crime and deportation.
So it was far worse You know, you didn't even want to get caught for speeding because you would be deported or you had that risk.
So, anecdotally, again, this is not based on data, but anecdotally, it looked true to me that the immigrants seemed to be minding their own business pretty hard, you know, trying to stay out of trouble.
Now, which is not to say that there isn't plenty of crime or too much.
One of the dumb things that people like to do is if there's a number of something and there's also a percentage of that same thing, you just ignore the one that doesn't go your way.
So the Democrats are ignoring the number of crimes that come in through illegal immigration.
Acting like the number of crimes doesn't matter as long as the percentage is low, which doesn't make any sense.
Because if somebody murders you, You don't really care that the rate of murder is low, do you?
You kind of care if you got murdered.
So if you can reduce crime, it shouldn't matter that much.
It shouldn't matter that much that the percentage is low, if you can just make it go away.
But here's my provocative thought.
If I were to say to you here are two populations, which of them is likely to have the lowest crime rate?
Are you ready? Who has the lower crime rate?
People who wear MAGA hats or people who don't?
I'm just going to let that sit there for a minute.
If you look at the crime rate of the United States, If you look at the total crime rate of the United States, including all of the legal residents and all of the illegal ones too, you could throw the immigrants in there just to lower the crime rate according to the people on the left.
Who do you think has the lowest crime rate?
People who wear MAGA hats, Or people who have never worn a MAGA hat?
Think about it, right?
I almost guarantee you that the people who wear MAGA hats are the least likely to cause trouble.
Now, I can't prove that, but it feels true, doesn't it?
And doesn't that, it kind of changes your whole, just putting it in that frame, just completely changed the argument in your head at least.
Now, of course, you know, people who hate the mega hats are certainly not going to buy into that argument.
But I want some of you to try it out.
And I'll tell you what made me think of this.
Um... No, I'm not going to tell you what made me think of this because I just realized it could be misinterpreted, so I'm not going to tell you.
So try that out.
Try out the notion that people with MAGA hats have by far the lowest crime rate.
It doesn't even need to be true.
It just feels like it probably is true.
And it's funny. And by the way, I'm going to say at the same time At the same time, I'm going to say that if you wear your MAGA hat in public...
Oh, let's talk about this.
So there are three things that got conflated when people were talking about people who wear MAGA hats and the Covington kids, etc.
And that provoked the comparison to when women are told that they should not wear provocative clothing...
Because some people will say, oh, if you're dressing like that, you must be asking for it.
And then it was also compared to Trayvon Martin, who was wearing a hoodie, and then people said, oh, if you wear a hoodie, you're going to be looking like a criminal, so maybe you're asking for it.
So there are three examples in which somebody said, well, if you do that, you're asking for it.
They'd say, if you wear your MAGA hat, of course you're asking for trouble.
If you dress provocatively, you're asking for trouble.
If you wear a hoodie, you're asking for trouble.
Now, here's the bad thinking on all three of them.
And we do this for a lot of topics.
We tend to conflate the legal responsibility, in other words, who goes to jail for what, with common sense.
And we act like somehow they're the same thing.
And they're not. Legally, if somebody attacks you for wearing an article of clothing, which is a totally legal article of clothing, from a legal perspective, that is 100% the responsibility of the attacker.
0% of legal or moral responsibility is assigned to the victim.
And should be.
The person with the MAGA hat should not be blamed if they get beat up.
The person dressing provocatively absolutely should not be blamed, legally or morally.
If they're attacked, even though they were dressed provocatively.
And likewise, the person in the hoodie, or let's just say somebody who's dressing in a way that other people say looks like a gang, and if they get in trouble, it should not be, not even any, it should be zero responsibility, legally and morally, of the person who wore those clothes.
Because those clothes are for sale.
You can wear clothes.
They're legal to wear clothes.
But... A separate question is whether it's smart.
If you're going to do your own risk management, is it good risk management to wear the wrong gang colors in the wrong neighborhood?
Well, it's legal.
It's legal.
But you're gonna get your ass kicked.
So you need to separate risk management From what is morally and legally okay.
It's totally morally and legally okay for me to wear red in the Crips neighborhood or whichever is the bad one.
I forget which way gets you killed.
It's either red or blue. But is it good risk management for me to say, I'm going to go into this gang neighborhood and I'm going to wear whatever I want because legally and morally, legally and morally, I get to wear whatever I want.
And then they kill you. And you say, darn it!
Didn't you know that I'm legally and morally able to wear whatever I want in your neighborhood?
And the person who killed you said, yeah, I didn't care.
So, here's my point on that.
Arguing who is legally and morally at fault is all well and good.
We're probably all on the same side on that.
But, You still have to talk about risk management.
It's your life you're risking.
So I would say, if you're wearing your MAGA hat in public, given the current state of politics, you are inviting risk.
But if somebody attacks you, that's completely on them.
Morally, ethically, legally, it's on the attacker 100%.
It's not on you. But if you wear your hat in public, You have increased your risk, so don't complain to me if somebody attacks you.
I'm on your side, but you're also a dumbass.
If you thought it wasn't going to happen, you're a dumbass.
Now, having said that, There are certainly going to be some people who are going to wear it almost for that reason.
To make a point, because they think they want to extend their, let's say, freedom.
And if you're doing it for that reason, I'm okay with that.
If you're wearing your MAGA hat with the understanding that your risk is higher, and you're doing it to make a point, you're doing it to make a political statement, you're doing it to broaden the rights for other people who might want to wear that hat, if that's important to you, I'm all for it.
But just know your risk.
All right. I saw that Byron York used an interesting term for Democrats.
He's calling them border barrier deniers.
That denier term tends to be, it just creeps into a lot of things and it really works.
And I was thinking about You know, the Democrats like to accuse the Republicans of being science deniers on a number of fronts.
And they're not wrong, by the way.
The Republican side does have far less, let's say, belief in Science that's maybe the harder to demonstrate kind of science, right?
If you can't demonstrate it in the lab or demonstrate it with math, it's tougher to get Republicans to buy into it.
I think that's generally true.
But I was looking at the things that Democrats deny.
And being a wall denier, It just feels kind of stupid, doesn't it?
How can you be pro-science and deny that walls work?
How is that?
And the anti-vaxxers are science deniers as well, essentially.
But they also deny capitalism.
If you're a Democrat, yeah, they're economics deniers, right?
So it seems unambiguously true that capitalism has produced everything that the Democrats want to steal from people who have money only exists because there was capitalism at one point, right?
Like, you can't even have socialism until somebody made a bunch of money to steal.
I'm simplifying it just for fun.
But the only reason that people are talking about raising taxes on the rich is that we had some kind of a system that made people rich.
As soon as you take away the money of the rich, you don't have that system anymore.
I would definitely leave the country.
Let me say this as clearly as possible.
If my taxes go to 70%, I'm leaving the country.
That's a promise.
If my taxes go to 70%, I'm out of here.
I'm freaking out of here.
And why wouldn't anybody?
What person in their right mind would pay a 70% tax?
We forget that in the old days, when there were 70% tax, there were all these write-offs.
So it wasn't really 70%.
You'd do all these write-offs and clever things until it was down to like 30% or something.
But if you don't have all those write-offs, and it's just 70%, I'm finding me a new country.
And that's completely serious.
I don't think we'll ever have a 70% tax on at least my income, but I wouldn't stay around for that.
Who the hell would? All right.
Let's talk about the worst arguments on climate.
Are you ready? Now, this is a public service.
And I realize that I'm talking to mostly people who are skeptical about climate science because that's the type of crowd that has been attracted to my periscopes.
And my personal opinion is that 60% of everything you hear on both sides, both the climate scientists and the skeptics, around 60% of it is to me transparently ridiculous.
What I don't know Which side has the 40% that's true?
I haven't figured that out yet.
So, in other words, one of the two sides, the skeptics versus the majority of climate scientists, one of those two sides is probably completely right.
Meaning that either things are warming up because of CO2 and it's going to be dangerous, or not.
One of those two is right.
But what I know is that the majority of what we see In the arguments, and here I'm only talking about the argument, not the underlying reality.
But in terms of the argument, my current conclusion is that about 60% of everything we see from both sides is just flat-out ridiculous.
So I don't know what to do with that yet.
I'm still digging down. But let me tell you the most ridiculous arguments about climate change.
Are you ready? If you're using any of these arguments, you need to go deeper or get out of the argument.
Because these are just dumb arguments.
Okay? Number one, I've seen this five times in 24 hours.
Just random people on Twitter.
People saying, the temperature has always changed.
Historically, it's always going up or it's always going down.
Therefore, the fact that the temperature is going up means nothing.
That, my friends, is the dumbest argument in all of this, in the entire topic.
That is the dumbest argument.
Let me tell you why.
Yes, temperature has always gone up and always gone down, but scientists will tell you exactly why.
They'll tell you how much CO2 there was in the past.
They'll tell you the, you know, the position of the Earth, which makes a difference.
They'll tell you about, you know, what the Sun was doing.
And they'll put all those things together and they'll draw a graph and they will explain completely Through lots of different proxies, how the temperature is understood, why it did what it did in the past.
Now, you've probably seen the skeptic chart that shows that CO2 and temperature were moving in different directions, or they're not correlated, right?
Most of you have seen that?
There are famous skeptical charts that show that CO2 and temperature were not correlated in the past.
Those are fake. If you believe there is a chart that's a correct one showing CO2 and temperature and a phase, you've been duped by a fake chart.
The reality is that if you put in the correct variables that science knows very well, that they're actually correlated.
So don't be fooled by the fake charts showing CO2 and temperature not correlated in the past.
That's been completely explained.
with a high level of precision by scientists.
Secondly, the reason that they think there's something different about today compared to the fact that temperatures were always going up and down in the past, what's different is that they can account for all of the variables that have been going on for hundreds of thousands of years and those same variables Don't explain the next hundred years unless you throw in man-made CO2. So the CO2 change is the only thing that scientists can find that existed forever that's anawak and correlates perfectly to the temperatures going up.
Now keep in mind, I'm not telling you I'm taking a side in the argument, because I can't get to the bottom of it.
I'm just saying that if you're saying temperatures have always gone up and down, you're so far from a good argument that you should abandon it.
There might be good arguments for skepticism, but this isn't one of them.
You should just abandon it right away.
The other Let's see, here are the worst arguments.
The next worst argument is that warming is good.
A bunch of people were saying yesterday, so what if the earth is getting warmer?
Warm is good.
Now, that is maybe the dumbest argument of all time.
Would somebody please...
Answer in the comments so that I'm not the first person that you hear this from.
Why? It's a dumb argument to say, what's wrong with warming?
Warming is good.
Please, in the comments, will somebody tell me why that argument is dumb?
There is obviously a limit.
Thank you in the comments.
And somebody else gets credit also for saying it's the rate of warming.
So we're not talking about it goes up two degrees and stays there.
We're talking about it just keeps going up until all hell breaks loose.
If you take a live lobster and put it in a cold pot of water and then turn up the heat, does the lobster say, hey, warmer is better?
Yes, it does. For a little while, and then the lobster gets boiled.
So if you're saying that warmer is better, you should just not even ever talk about weather.
If somebody says, what's the weather today?
You should say, I prefer not to say anything.
If you're going to stick with that argument that is so bad, That there's no limit to how much warmer it can get and it's still better.
Hey, it's better, it's better.
Yup, the warmer it gets, still better.
Okay, all the crops died.
The oceans have, you know, the ocean has risen.
It makes me crazy when people say warmer is better because obviously there's a limit and nobody says it's going to stop.
I mean, nobody on the climate science says it's going to stop.
It's going to keep going. Here's the next one that is a bad, bad argument.
I mean, so bad, it's like I slap myself in the head.
Because these are arguments in which you don't need to know anything about climate science to know these are bad arguments.
Here's another one. CO2 is plant food.
Tell me why that's a terrible, terrible argument.
It's true.
Now tell me why it's a terrible, terrible thing to say.
It's like, it's just dumb.
It's true. CO2 is essential and they actually pump it into greenhouses.
Why is that a dumb argument?
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
It's true.
why is it a bad argument?
Oh my God.
I'm not.
Okay, well, apparently I have to tell you after the answer to this.
I thought this would be a little more obvious.
Here's the problem.
CO2 is good for plants.
Everybody agrees. Scientists agree.
Skeptics agree. If the CO2 keeps rising, What happens to the temperature?
Eventually it gets too hot, according to the scientists.
Now again, here I'm accepting that the science is true, which I can't validate.
I'm not a scientist.
But I'm talking about the argument.
We can't get to the truth, but I'll just talk about the argument.
The argument is that as CO2 goes up, there's a place where it's great.
And then there's a place where there's too much.
And the too much might not directly affect the plants, but it will affect the temperature, according to the scientists.
Again, that's the part you might disagree with.
But the argument is that as the CO2 goes up, the heat goes up.
And that if there's too much heat, you've got a lot of problems.
So anybody who says CO2 is plant food, stop talking.
Just stop talking. If you can't follow that chain of logic to more CO2 causes more heat and eventually there'd be too much heat and then you've got problems with everything.
If you can't follow it to that simple place, you should just stop talking.
Alright. Then there's the argument that the temperatures haven't actually gone up and that they're just being measured wrong and that the scientists are part of a big old plot.
I'm going to say, tentatively, that that's probably a terrible argument.
Now, I've seen a lot of the Tony Heller stuff, and I would say he's one of the most capable of the skeptics.
So he seems to go the deepest, has the most sources, presents his argument in the most coherent way.
But, I'll just tell you where I am on this.
I don't believe...
That with all the scientists working on this and all the ways that they have to measure temperature, that I don't believe that scientists can't figure out if the temperature is going up in an unprecedented way.
It feels to me Like, that's the sort of thing they could figure out.
But I'm not convinced yet.
Because, you know, for example, if 90% of the temperature change is in the ocean, how do you really measure the temperature in the ocean worldwide and get an average?
So it doesn't feel to me like...
Like I'm as confident as the scientists are in terms of our ability to measure things.
So I'll say that's still an open question.
All right. So let me summarize.
The terrible arguments against climate science that you should never use are it always changed in the past.
That's a terrible argument because we know why it changed in the past and those things don't explain why it's changing in the present.
CO2 does.
All right. CO2 is plant food?
A terrible argument.
Because the point is, more CO2 raises the temperature, and it's the temperature that's the problem.
Nobody's arguing that a little more CO2 isn't good for your plant.
They're arguing that your plant will fry.
So stop saying CO2 is plant food.
Everybody agrees with that.
It's not thinking. And...
What's the other one?
Oh, and then the other argument...
Apparently there's like a conspiracy theory argument that the real reason for climate change has to do with socialism.
And there's always some quote taken out of context from some obscure or semi-obscure person who was involved with the United Nations from some other country who said something like The real reason for climate science is to redistribute wealth or something.
I don't believe any of that stuff.
And here's why.
Even if it's true that there are some bigwigs in some international organization that would like to see income redistributed, even if there are some intellectuals who think that, there isn't the slightest chance That that thinking is so common within the climate scientists that all the climate scientists are part of this worldwide conspiracy.
That is so ridiculously unbelievable that I can't even get near that opinion.
Somebody saying, it's true, it's true.
Well, keep in mind, That we all believe conspiracy theories.
We're all taken in by them.
Just different ones by different people.
And I will say with...
I would be willing to bet that among the scientists, not talking about any intellectuals who are in the UN or part of the IPCC or whatever, not talking about those guys.
The actual scientists...
I'm positive that they don't go to work saying, how can I fake these numbers to get a little more socialism?
That's not happening.
The scientists of the world, certainly not the scientists of the United States, are not going to work and making up fake numbers to redistribute their wealth to other people.
Because scientists make good livings, right?
The top scientists who are studying things, you think that they go to work every day and make up data and completely discredit their own field that they've chosen so that they can secretly have this clever plan that they've colluded with people in the UN who we've never heard of.
It's all part of a plot to Figure out a way to transfer money from the scientists to other people.
It doesn't pass any sniff test.
It really doesn't. All right.
I know some of this is tough love for some of you.
Probably something like 40 to 60% of you have embraced the arguments I just told you were terrible arguments.
I'm trying to help you.
I'm trying to be constructive.
You need to release on the obviously bad arguments.
Let me tell you the arguments that are good in terms of criticizing climate science.
Here's the good argument.
The science is probably pretty solid, not 100% in my opinion, because I can't really penetrate it, so I can't give you an independent opinion, but probably pretty science, meaning that CO2 raises temperatures, etc.
But the projection models and the economics that they do on top of those should be seen as marketing.
Not science. They use scientific thinking to make the models, but you really have to look at the projection models as how the scientists are trying to market their beliefs, the things that they've discovered.
So if you were to look at, let's say, a product, and the product works really well, Would you judge whether the product works by the fact that the marketing campaign is transparently BS? Well, no you wouldn't. Because it's typical that the marketing is a little bit of BS, even if the product is entirely good.
So my best working belief, which is also subject to change, is that the basic idea that CO2 is causing us a problem And we should worry about it.
Probably true. But they can't sell that.
Because it just sort of lays there.
So instead, they add a marketing level on top of that, which is the hockey stick pictures and the graphs and the predictions and the talk of doom and the pictures of the oceans rising and all the things that they do and here's a dead polar bear.
That's all the marketing. So when I look at the science, I'm really looking at the marketing.
I'm not really looking at the science.
I can't penetrate the science.
I've never seen the science. Science is something that somebody told me they did.
I can't see it. But I can see all the marketing.
And the marketing is transparent BS. So even if the science is right and CO2 is a problem, temperatures are going up, we need to worry about it.
Even if all of that's true, What we see of it is just clearly marketing.
Likewise, the skeptical arguments that warming is good up to any level, or the CO2 at any level is good, those are just ridiculous.
So if you're part of the team that's saying, hey, I don't care how warm it gets, that's just nice.
Or if you're part of the team that says, CO2 at any level is good, it's good for plants.
You're not credible.
You just really should stop talking about the topic.
Because those are embarrassing opinions.
Because you don't even need science to know they're embarrassing.
Because nobody is claiming that the temperature is going to go up one degree and stay there.
Nobody makes that claim.
Nobody would make that claim.
You're arguing against your own imagination of something ridiculous.
So I'm trying to clean out the ridiculous arguments on both sides as best I can.
I don't know how deep I'll be able to get in terms of penetrating the actual science, but don't believe the models and don't believe that CO2 is plant food so it's all fine.
And I wouldn't believe the international conspiracy stuff.
Let's talk about the phrase, settled science.
That's sort of word thinking.
I call it word thinking.
You take a word and you try to make an argument, but really all you're doing is playing with the definition of a word.
What does settled science mean?
When people say it's settled science or it's not settled science, they're trying to win the argument by defining a word.
You know, the settled part.
That's not how you win an argument, or it shouldn't be, because both sides agree that science is never really settled because you could always have a new discovery, right?
And science is often surprised, and they often think they have the right answer, and then they revise it because that's science.
So if you're arguing that something is settled science or is not settled science, that's a dumb argument.
Both sides. Both sides.
Those are opposite sides. And I'm telling you, both sides are stupid arguments.
Because we all agree, if you were to just remove those words, we'd all agree that we could be surprised.
The scientists would agree with that.
The scientists would say, as far as we can tell, we're very confident about this, but that's happened before.
Science has been very confident about things and then found out it wasn't quite what they thought.
Totally common. So if you're even arguing at all that it is settled science, or it's not settled science, or even if you're just mocking them, just don't even talk like that.
Because it means nothing. We're all on the same side that we could be surprised.
All right. I know you hate it when I talk about climate science because I criticize both sides.
So it doesn't matter which side you're on.
You probably just got a little triggered by this.
But I'm trying to improve the way you look at it.
I don't have a conclusion I'm trying to steer you toward.
I'm just trying to help you get past the ridiculous stuff.
Alright. So some of you like it.
Well, let me ask a question as I'm seeing some mixed opinions.
Do you like it when I talk about climate science in the way that I talk about it?
Talking about the quality of the arguments, talking about the persuasion, talking about the marketing of it.
Okay, so some of you do like it.
Looks like more of you like it than not, or at least you're being nice to me.
Okay. Somebody says, I don't.
For the people who say they don't, is it because, and I would like to, I would actually like to understand, for the people who don't like it, I'd like to understand why.
Is it because just the topic isn't interesting in general?
Is it because you think I'm wrong?
Or do you think it's dangerous in some way?
So for those of you who don't like it, give me an idea of why.
Which would be fair, by the way, if you've just heard too much of it.
I'm not going to argue with your reason.
I just want to hear your reason. Makes me think and I'm a scientist.
That's like the best...
That might be the best compliment I've ever received.
Somebody just said that they're a scientist but they like this conversation because it makes them think.
That's exactly what I'm trying to do.
I'm trying to get out of the science level because I don't understand the science level and to talk about how it's presented, how we process it, how we argue it.
It's unsolvable.
I'll bet it's not unsolvable.
The other thing about the predictions about climate science is that the IPPC, I always get that wrong, is there two C's or two P's, but if it's really only a 10% hit to GDP over 80 years, that's pretty manageable and in 80 years we're going to have a lot of technology to change the world
no one is giving up their lifestyle style.
Yeah, Lomborg, who is famous for being the, let's call him an economist, I don't know if he calls himself an economist, but that's the domain he plays in, showed that in a survey of the world, That climate change was like toward the bottom in terms of what the world cares about.
If you talk about citizens.
Citizens all over the world, it's dead last in the things they care about.
Because what people want are jobs and water and less crime and things that affect them right away.
And it would be insanely cruel To those people who are trying to climb out of desperate poverty into something more survivable to make that harder.
It seems far more ethical to let as many poor people climb out of desperate poverty to, you know, at least survival or maybe have a good life level.
Get as many of those as you can through a strong economy.
And then, if the people toward the top are being challenged because they're losing their beach homes and, you know, the GDP is down 10% compared to what it should have been, so your 401k is a little lower than you hoped, Let those people eat it.
People like me are probably going to be paying for whatever the problems of climate science are because we're the ones with the money.
Poor people are not going to pay the bill to move beach houses.
Poor people are not going to be paying the bill to clean up the hurricane, at least not in the tax sense.
It's going to be rich people.
So if we don't deal with climate science and we keep our economy humming at the maximum, it's going to be raising people from desperate situations to less desperate, and then someday we're going to have to pay for that.
But it won't be these people.
The people who rose up to a survivable level are not the ones who are going to pay the bill in 80 years.
It's going to be the people who've made tons of money and they can afford it.
Alright. I'm going to end here and I'll talk to you later.
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