All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 8, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
45:45
Episode 407 Scott Adams: Warren’s Apology Tour, Bezos Exposing Pecker, Healthcare, Green New Deal
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey Brad, come on in here.
Everybody, it's time.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm Scott Adams. And you are probably prepared with your coffee.
We'll be back to our normal time, maybe tomorrow or the next day.
And until then, please raise your cup, your mug, your glass, your stein, your chalice, your thermos.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
and join me for the simultaneous sip The weather is great, it's my last day here in Hawaii heading out in a few hours Back home. Hi everybody.
Let's talk about some of the things that are happening in the news.
Have you all watched the cringeworthy Elizabeth Warren apologies for cultural appropriation?
It is so hard to watch.
She seems too sincere and too surrendery about the whole issue.
And I kind of get the main point, which is something I didn't know, by the way.
So we learned something.
We did learn that tribal affiliation is up to the tribe.
So you can't just say, I've got a certain genetic composition, therefore I'm a Cherokee or anything else.
I guess it's just up to the tribe to decide who's in and who's out.
And that makes sense, because if it were not up to the tribe, then anybody could just say, hey, I'm a Native American too, give me some of those sweet, sweet gambling benefits, or something like that.
But, yeah, I think her political career is completely toast.
I've told you before, just a reminder, that her situation is identical to my own.
Which is that my parents told all three of us kids that we had substantial Native American blood.
And so I grew up believing that.
And I believed that until one year ago when I did a DNA test.
And my percentage of Native American blood, zero.
Zero. But here's what I think she did wrong.
What she did wrong was the way she handled it, of course.
But I don't think she's handled it with the sense of humor that it called for.
Don't you think a sense of humor was necessary?
And apparently she doesn't have one.
Remember I told you that one out of three people don't have a sense of humor?
The smart way to play this would have been to consider it as funny as the people watching it.
She should have paced the public.
Because the public thinks this is hilarious.
And she should have just agreed.
Say, yeah, I got totally taken.
If you can't trust your family, who can you trust?
And then the questions about whether she used it to get ahead.
She's totally blowing that.
Because the correct answer is, when I thought it was true, the system allowed me to say it.
And why wouldn't I? Let me make a confession to you today, right here.
Remember I told you that I grew up believing that we had substantial Native American blood in my family, so my siblings believed that.
When I was ready to apply to colleges, At some point, there was a box to check, and I thought to myself, huh, what would happen here if I check this?
I think it was American Indian was the phrase used back then.
What happens if I check this box?
Because it doesn't say what percentage.
So there was a place where you could self-identify, and it didn't have any requirements.
You just had to say what you were, and that was it.
And so I thought, what if I check this box?
And so I checked the box and what happened was a few weeks later my mailbox was full with full scholarship offers.
Full scholarship to college because I checked that box.
Now, when the scholarship offers came in, I thought to myself, what the?
This can't be right.
And then I looked at myself in the mirror and I thought, I don't think I can take these full scholarships because Even I don't feel like a Native American, I don't feel like anybody was discriminating against me.
So from that point on, I no longer checked that box and did not accept any of the things that were offered because of it.
But I'll tell you, checking the box back in my childhood opened up the heavens and you got free stuff.
So if you tell me that as a low-income guy who was trying to make it in this world, that if I see a form where I can check a box honestly, meaning I actually honestly believed I had legitimate reason to check that box, And I could get ahead because of it, and I could take advantage of the system in a way that the system was designed to take advantage.
It was designed for that.
If you can check the box honestly, you get to have those benefits.
I don't think there's anything to apologize for.
Now, in my case, it was a step too far and I wasn't willing to take advantage of that.
But I'm not sure I would hold it against her if she honestly believed that she had that in her background.
She wasn't rich either, was she?
All right. Let's talk about contrast how she handled it with how Jeff Bezos handled the National Enquirer outing him for his girlfriend while he was still married.
Apparently the still married part is not the big problem because I guess he and his wife had already, you know, decided they were splitting.
So having a girlfriend was not the embarrassing part.
The embarrassing part was that the private messages and some private pictures came out.
Now, what Bezos did is instead of just apologizing and doing whatever people normally do in that situation, He totally confessed, wrote a public letter, and outed the National Enquirer for, as he says, trying to blackmail him.
Those are his words.
And he handled it perfectly, in my opinion.
So I like the way he put it, which is, if someone like him Can't take on a blackmailer, as he calls it.
Who can? That's a pretty noble-sounding persuasion.
And I just like the fact that he just went right at it.
He didn't apologize and he didn't defend his personal actions.
Nor should he. Nor should he.
It's none of our business. But I love the fact that he went directly at it.
So he gets an A-plus for handling his crisis.
PR crisis, I guess.
Whereas, Elizabeth Warren gets an F. Um...
Alright, so the funniest part were the headlines, because the CEO of the National Enquirer, his last name is Pecker, and since the subject of the story were these alleged exposed pictures, shall we say, of Bezos's manhood, that the headlines were Bezos exposes Pecker.
Possibly the best headline of all time.
You can't get better than that.
National Enquirer didn't do anything.
Alright. Today's my travel day, so I'm done with vacation today.
Alright, what else we got going on?
As we're talking about healthcare, and especially in the context of socialism, One of the questions I ask myself is how long will it take before somebody on either the pro-universal healthcare or the anti-universal healthcare side produces the graph or the statistic that just puts it all in context.
Here's what I'd like to see.
I'd like to see somebody inform the public In a way that the public understands for how much of a cost healthcare is.
And it might be just, we just need two numbers.
One number might be the, let's say, the total amount of taxes that we pay now.
And then the other number is how much do we have to add to that to pay for universal health care?
So just give us two numbers.
current amount of taxes collected, and then how much we would need to collect in order to pay for the AOC version of a Green New Deal or whatever we got going on there.
Montana, the state went and reduced healthcare costs for the entire state.
I don't know what that means.
I mean, I know what the words means, but I don't know anything about that story.
10,000...what?
Alright, so the other thing that the...
Let's talk about this Green New Deal for a moment.
I don't know anything about the Alex Jones versus Joe Rogan thing, but I'll look into that.
The thing with the Green New Deal is that as ridiculous as it sounds on the surface, it's part of a Longer-term persuasion in which things which seemed ridiculous not long ago now seem like just a bad idea.
So watch the evolution from the things that are part of the Green New Deal going from absolutely crazy, crazy stuff to, well, we don't want to do that.
Yeah, they're softening up the country.
So it's a Trump play.
So they're asking for so much that anything they get is going to look like a good idea or going to look like a win.
So we're all getting primed and they're doing a really good job of that.
Oh man, it's raining.
All right, so I see socialism expanding in this country no matter what.
In And if it doesn't happen in the next few years, it's certainly going to happen when robots take all the jobs.
So we're heading toward a day where that universal income, whether you work or not, is going to come.
So, those of you who say, my god, that's a crazy idea to pay people even if they don't want to work.
I would say it might be a crazy idea, but it's one that's going to come.
It's only a question of when.
I think it could be 50 years away, could be 100 years away, but it could be 25 years away.
As soon as the robots have the jobs, we should have enough stuff for everyone.
As long as some people don't want much.
We can put up with people being unwilling to work.
Have you ever worked in a job where half of the people are making things worse and half of the people are doing something productive?
The half of the people who are doing something productive We'd be just as happy if the other half just didn't do anything.
We really don't need everybody to do something.
The robots will be doing enough for us.
But I think we'll get to a point where there'll be two tracks in this world.
One track, you can live a reasonable quality life on free income and free healthcare.
But you won't have much.
You'll have the most basic phone.
You won't have your own transportation.
So it'll just be lots of stuff you won't have.
And the people who want that stuff, that extra stuff, are going to still work.
So I think we're heading toward that universal income sooner or later.
It might be 50 years away, but we're going to have that.
Alright, did you notice that there are two headline stories today about bodies being stuffed in suitcases?
I can't even make that up.
There are two headline stories about bodies being stuffed in suitcases.
One is the Cheshogi thing is coming up again because there's more evidence that the Crown Prince had wanted him dead.
So it became a headline again today.
And then there's some woman who was tragically murdered who was also stuck in a suitcase.
Like, how many stories could there be about dead people in suitcases?
That's a weird thing.
Yeah, so part of the Green New Deal is that they want to do away with air travel in favor of ground travel with railroads and some kind of high-speed railroads.
And I don't know, I'll listen to that argument.
Obviously you're not going to have a high-speed railroad across the oceans.
Or maybe you can.
I don't know. Maybe somebody figured out a way to do that.
But I don't think so.
Oh, here's another question for you.
Let's say you accept that climate change is coming and that it's dangerous.
So let's say you've accepted the notion that it's going to be a problem for the world.
One of the things I'm wondering is will it be an equal problem for all countries?
Because I'm starting to think that the United States is going to make a profit on climate change.
Other countries might be in a lot of trouble.
But I feel like the United States is going to make a profit on it.
And here's how. If we get to the point where, let's say, things are not that bad in this country, the United States, but there are other countries that desperately need to solve climate, we'll probably be selling them a lot of stuff.
China's going to need some CO2 scrubbers and a lot of things are going to need to be remediated and people are going to have to buy things to replace stuff they lost.
I'm wondering if we're heading toward a situation where the United States, because we're real good at figuring out how to make profits on stuff, I wonder if we're going to make a profit on this while maybe the rest of the world is suffering.
Because it wouldn't be the first time we figured out how to make a profit on change let me put it in more general terms anytime there's a big change Whatever that change is, you have to spend a bunch of money.
So if the climate changes or the industry changes or just anything big changes, somebody's spending a lot of money.
And it makes me wonder if the United States will be so far ahead of this that we'll be selling all this green tech and carbon scrubbers and You know, ocean maybe desalinization, maybe fusion.
So it'll be interesting to see if we make a profit on it.
Alright, I tweeted out today another example of what I've been teaching you about climate change, which is that the idea that you and I, as citizens, can do our own research on climate and come to a reasonable result is an illusion.
It's an illusion that you can do your own research as a citizen and come to an informed decision on climate change.
It can't be done. I tweeted another example of that.
It's on the basic question of whether historically CO2 and temperature moved in lockstep and specifically whether or not the CO2 came first before the temperature changes.
Because there are two schools of thought.
One is that CO2 is driving the temperature and the other is that it is not.
If you look at the climate experts, they'll say, yes, we've figured out the past.
You talk to the skeptics, they'll say, no, you got the past wrong.
You talk to the experts again, they'll say, no, skeptics, you think we got it wrong, but we included more than you think, so it's actually right.
And then I just tweeted again Tony Heller's response to the response to the response, which is completely convincing, which is the problem.
Both sides are completely convincing, if you're listening to the right critics.
Some of the skeptics are not convincing.
They're just terrible.
But the Tony Hellers, the Richard Lindzen, the Judith Curry, there are several skeptics who, if you listen to them last, they're completely convincing.
But then you listen to the response to the response to the response, and you can flip back and say, oh, okay.
The other side is more convincing now.
But there's no end to it until you reach a point where you don't understand what they're talking about.
And then, what do you do?
So, there is no situation in which citizens can figure out the truth of this.
Lord Moncton would be one of the least credible.
Will Happer, I would put him on the Low credibility scale, which is different from being wrong.
I want to make a careful distinction.
When I talk about credibility, it means when you listen to them, do you say, oh yeah, they sound believable, even if they're wrong.
I would say that Moncton is not even slightly credible, even if he's right.
He might be right. I don't think I'm going to start ranking them all.
But there's a pretty big difference in credibility.
Alright. Climate alarmists are seeing something that others are not.
Good point. So I remind you of the Bigfoot rule.
If there are two people Standing in a field and one says hey look it's Bigfoot right in front of you and the other one says I don't see him.
Now, in my example, let's say Bigfoot is not hard to see.
He's just standing 10 feet in front of you, according to one of the people.
So one of the people says, it's Bigfoot right there in front of me.
And the other one says, I don't see any Bigfoot there.
Which one of them, which one of them is more likely sane?
The sane person is the one who doesn't see it.
And so it's generally true that the person who sees a positive thing that someone else doesn't see, and they're looking in the same place, you can almost always believe the one who doesn't see it.
So long as they have the same information, the same point of view.
In climate change, We're seeing that the climate alarmists are looking at events and records being set and saying, well, there it is.
There's the signal. The signal is clearly visible.
At the same time, the skeptics are looking at exactly the same stuff and saying, no, it isn't.
The signal might be there.
We're not saying it will never be there, but it's not there now.
So you have two sides looking at essentially the same data One sees a lot happening and the other sees nothing.
I would side with the people who see nothing.
But that doesn't tell you whether climate change is real and or dangerous.
It just tells you that the signals might be, you know, over interpreted at the moment, which is completely different from there are no signals.
So I don't think you can make too much of the fact that somebody sees something in the current environment because most of climate change is about what's going to happen in the future anyway.
The climate is so complex, I do not believe we have the tech to predict it.
All right that that reminds me of a I wanted to talk about how you would persuade.
Let's say you were a climate scientist and you wanted to persuade people that there was a big problem.
The worst way to persuade is to do these complicated prediction models because by their nature they're not believable.
So people who have experience in the real world see a complicated model that's predicting what's going to happen in 80 years and we're automatically out.
It's like, okay, I'm out. If you're going to make your case with a complicated model predicting something I know can't be predicted, I don't want to hear anything else you have to say.
So the prediction models are bad persuasion for people like me.
Probably good persuasion for half of the country.
But for people like me, as soon as I see that model, I'm like, okay, there's something BS about that.
If you can't make this case without that model, I'm not so worried about it.
So here's how they should have done it.
They should get rid of the models and they should just say, in the past hundred years the temperature has gone up whatever, a degree or whatever it is.
We know all of the things that cause temperature to change and we don't find any of them to be correlated except CO2 in the past hundred years.
So we know all the factors and we've looked at them all and the only one that's correlated is CO2. And it's going up one degree in, say, 50 years or whatever it is.
Then you say, if it kept doing this, we're going to be absolutely dead, but we don't know if it's going to be in 20 years or 100 years.
We can't tell. Now, if you come to me and tell me that story, and say, we've narrowed it down, we know all the reasons, and there's only one possible thing left over, and it checks all the boxes, and we've already seen it raise the temperature, and the amount we're spewing into the atmosphere will almost certainly raise it more, and we're gonna be dead, we just don't know if it's in 20 years or 100.
Now, you give me that argument, And you're going to scare the pants off me and then suddenly I don't have anything to argue with.
That would be a solid argument that I would find persuasive.
But, as soon as you show me the hockey stick and start talking about how you knew what the temperature was 10,000 years ago, I start saying, well, do you really know what the temperature was 10,000 years ago?
Here's another explanation which I heard recently.
You've probably heard that the land-based temperatures have been adjusted.
And that if you didn't adjust them, it wouldn't look like so much warming has happened.
It's the adjustments that are making it look like the warming has happened.
And then you look into that story a little bit more about why they were adjusted.
And here's what I think is the story.
I'm not 100% sure I've got this right, but this is what I think so far.
There were lots of land-based thermometers.
Some of them happened to be where cities or airports grew up after the thermometer was there, which means that the temperature around that would be warmer.
Because of all the concrete in the airport or the city around it.
So scientists noticed that some of those thermometers were being influenced by things around them.
So they took those thermometers and moved them so that they would be away from these warming centers.
But what do you do with the measurements from those thermometers that were wrong?
You've got years of wrong measurements now, but only for some thermometers.
Well, apparently what they do is they look at the other thermometers and they say, for example, okay, the other thermometers that are in this area that were not affected went up by one degree.
So let's just adjust this other one and say that if it had not been next to an airport, probably would have gone up one degree also.
Because you don't need You know, millions of thermometers, you know, a sample is probably good enough and I'm sure that they know what that sample looks like.
So, once you do that, You've got a new set of adjusted temperatures and the skeptics say that's no fair because those are not real temperatures, those are adjusted temperatures.
So the question you would ask yourself is, what does it look like if you were just remove all of the adjusted thermometers?
If you just took all of the adjustments and threw them away and ignored all of those thermometers forever, What would it look like?
What it would look like is the curve that scientists publish.
It would look exactly like the hockey stick.
So we know, or this is the scientist's argument, that although many of the thermometer temperatures have been adjusted, that even if you took them out of the question, you still get the same answer.
So it doesn't matter whether they were adjusted or not because the adjustments are public.
They're well understood.
All they did is use the averages of the other thermometers that were nearby.
Pretty solid method.
Now, have I explained that correctly?
I guarantee you that a skeptic who knows more than I do will say, Scott, you just explained that wrong.
And that the real thing they did is X. Furthermore, I guarantee you that as soon as the skeptic tells me why I got it wrong and gives me a persuasive reason why I was wrong, the person who does the measurements is going to come in and say, no, no, the skeptic got it wrong because this is what we did.
So you can't really get to the bottom of it.
As an ordinary citizen, you cannot get to the bottom of this.
Now the other thing that people say is that the satellite measurements that we've had since 1979 are the good ones.
And you can ignore all the land-based thermometers.
You can ignore all the buoys.
You can ignore all of the ice core samples.
You can ignore all of it and just look at the satellites.
But here's the problem.
The satellites only measure atmospheric temperature.
Which is only about 10% of where CO2 warming seems to go.
Most of it goes in the ocean.
So if the satellites are measuring the atmosphere and the atmosphere is not showing a problem, that probably doesn't mean anything because the warming wasn't going into the atmosphere anyway.
Or at least 90% of it wasn't.
So pretty much everything that the skeptics say is easily debunked, but everything that is said in the debunking is also easily debunked, etc.
forever. So they have infinite debunking possibilities both ways.
All right. Compare the temperature of your pool to the outside air.
Well, if the result is that the atmosphere should eventually reflect the ocean temperatures, then would it be true that 90% of the heat is going into the ocean?
Can those things both be true?
The atmosphere should reflect the ground temperature.
But would that be true if 90% of the warming ends up in the ocean?
I don't feel like I can square those two things Then there's a question of the coral So one of the stronger arguments for climate change being the problem is that the coral is bleaching.
Bleaching means it turns white because there's stress on it and that the Great Barrier Reef in particular is turning white.
It looks like it's going to be dead pretty soon.
Countering that, Is apparently that there are some corals that are more resistant than others.
Yeah, so I'm getting there to the debunked part.
So there are skeptics who debunk the coral stuff by saying there have been lots of bleachings in the past and coral is very hardy and it knows how to adjust in real time.
It doesn't even need generations to adjust.
It can adjust in real time to changes in temperature.
But There are people who debunk the debunkers on that.
I have to think though, that since we do know how to seed coral, and we do know how to find cooler water, it feels like we could fix that.
It feels well into the category of fixable problems because if the coral doesn't fix it itself, we could give it a little boost.
Take some coral eggs and spray them where it's a little bit cooler.
Or at least we can breed the more resistant ones in the lab and then seed the original area with the more resistant ones.
The Coral Bleaching Netflix documentary is hoaxerific.
And somebody else says, it's the acid, it's not the warming.
Well, there is some dispute on that, but I don't think the climate scientists believe there's a dispute.
Yeah, the Australian professor who published a paper about the good health of the reef was fired.
But that doesn't mean he was right.
It's easy to say he was fired.
He must have been a whistleblower.
Well, maybe.
Two reasons he could be fired.
One is there's a global conspiracy or he was wrong and they were embarrassed by it.
is one of those two things.
All right.
Affair.
Is there anything else I should have been talking about today?
So I heard that the committee that's talking about the border security...
Oh yeah, we'll talk about that.
So the committee that's talking about border security apparently brought in the experts.
I don't see a report on that, but have the experts already informed that committee?
Because I want to see if the media reporting on this border security funding committee, I want to see if they're doing an honest job.
Because I want to see a picture of what the experts produced, And then I want to see what they come up with.
And I want to see what's the difference.
Oh, yes. We'll talk about my book cover.
So, if you don't see pictures of what the teams are coming up with, then they're just worthless.
Complete waste of time, which I expect.
I don't expect any kind of agreement to come out of this working group.
All right.
Nancy is not holding the meetings.
I don't know what that means. So, I want to tell you a funny story about my upcoming book cover.
I don't have pictures to show you, or maybe I do.
Let's see if I have a picture on my phone to show you.
We'll go low-tech here.
So, we tried a number of A number of pictures and came up with this one.
Let's see if I can find an angle that you can see this.
Probably not. You're not going to be able to see it.
Sorry. You'll have to take my word for it.
There's a... Oh, let me take down the...
Take down the brightness.
See if that makes a difference. Oh, that helped.
Okay. So this is the one I approved.
So this is the one I'm going to go with.
You're seeing a version in which Brian added a hand.
So the hand is not part of the design.
That's just to show what it looks like.
And here's what's funny about this.
So I had a blue color.
That was like similar to the blue in the bubbles and then I had an orange cover and I showed people two different covers and I said, do you like the orange or do you like the blue?
And the vote was kind of split.
There were people who wanted blue, there were people who wanted orange.
So I said to my editor at the publisher, I said, hey, people like, some like one, some like the other.
Is there any way we could do two covers?
Could we have one ISBN, which is like the social security number for a book, but can we have one identifier number but two different covers and people can buy the one they want?
Now it turns out that's impractical for a number of reasons, so for publishing reasons it just doesn't work.
But I was unclear in describing it.
So when I said, can we have two covers, I said it in an unclear way and my editor interpreted it as, can you combine the two colors?
Can you combine a cover that has orange and blue?
And so they came back with a cover that was combined.
And it turned out that was the good one.
Now you can't really see the color is washed down on here.
So this is more of a vibrant orange than what you see, the back cover.
So here's the fun part of the story.
The winning design was completely accidental.
Because it wasn't what I asked for, but what I got was better than what I asked for.
So the designer, taking this new direction, which was a complete miscommunication on my part, came up with the best one yet.
So anyway, you can't see it clearly on the phone because the colors get washed down here, but people seem to be liking it.
So that was the psychology that went into it.
Put a coffee ring on the cover.
Yeah. Yeah, maybe I should have put some coffee on there.
That would have been a good idea.
Alright. Anything else happening?
Anything else you want to know about?
All right.
Designers are like that, somebody says.
That was a happy accident.
Oh, Schiff colluding with Glenn Simpson.
So apparently we know that Adam Schiff had a brief conversation with the guy who put together the dossier.
But we don't know if that was a substantive conversation.
They just happened to be at the same event.
So I just don't know how any of that matters at this point.
Volcanoes. Somebody's saying, have we considered volcanoes under the ice caps?
Because if the volcanoes are warming up the Earth, that could be what's going on here.
And I don't know the answer to that.
Do we have a way of knowing What kind of volcanic activity is happening everywhere under the ocean?
Is that a thing? Do you know that?
McAfee's clone thing?
Is McAfee cloning himself now?
I can't wait.
So I'm going to try my first split screen with Bill Pulte on Monday.
So we're going to get an update on the urban blight, and I'm going to show you some ideas for what to put there.
And some of those ideas might have an implication for climate change.
Everything's connected. It's an indirect connection, but I think you'll see what I mean.
Nadler and the Acting AG. I'm not really paying too much attention to that, except if I were the Attorney General and somebody asked me to testify at Congress, I'm pretty sure...
I'm going to answer your CBD oil question.
I'm pretty sure I would resist testifying to Congress at all costs.
What is the penalty for not testifying or for showing up and just taking the fifth?
Is there any kind of penalty if you just show up for Congress and say, I agreed to show up, but I'm just going to say I'm not talking?
To me, it would be flat-out stupid Just flat out stupid to answer even one question in front of Congress.
I guarantee if Congress ever calls me in front of them, I'm not going to answer any questions.
Would you? Would you answer a question in front of Congress?
It would be the dumbest thing anybody ever did.
I would figure out what is the penalty, and it's probably better just to take the penalty.
Yeah, so we'll see what happens there.
Somebody asked, is CBD oil a hoax?
I wonder that myself.
But probably, and here's my provisional opinion, subject to change.
My provisional opinion is that CBD oil is probably effective for a range of things.
So my guess is, based on everything I've seen, the CBD oil has been tested enough that we know it does have a certain number of benefits.
And anecdotally, people talk about it all the time.
But, probably, People are claiming too much.
Probably people are claiming too much about CBD oil.
But that's just my provisional opinion.
But I think it does have benefits, yes.
All right, just looking at your comments. - The Art of the Dale.
That would have been a funny title.
Alright. I think we've said everything we need to say for now.
▲
Export Selection