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Feb. 27, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
49:09
Episode 432 Scott Adams: CNN Opening Capone’s Vault (Cohen Testimony), Climate Hijinx
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
That's me and you're you.
That's all we need. No, that's not all we need.
We also need a beverage.
I like coffee and if you like a beverage And if you like the simultaneous sip, grab your cup, your mug, your chalice, your stein, your thermos, if you will, and join me for the simultaneous sip.
Oh, thank you for that super heart.
I appreciate that.
Well, there's a lot of news.
According to CNN, President Trump is deviously denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula to distract from Michael Cohen's testimony.
I'm not even making that up.
That's an actual headline.
Or an article.
It's an article in CNN's page that he's literally using North Korean denuclearization as a distraction from Michael Cohen.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong.
It seems like we already know what Cohen's going to say because it's been reported.
But here are some immediate observations.
There's this conspiracy theory that there's nothing in my cup.
And yet, you can see that there is.
Ah, delicious.
So, does it seem to you that this whole Cohen testimony It's a lot like Geraldo opening Al Capone's safe.
Do you remember that story?
This is many years ago.
Geraldo had an exclusive special in which he had discovered Al Capone's safe.
And he opened it on live TV only to find that there wasn't much in there.
I love Geraldo, but that was a funny event in his life.
And now we're watching the Cohen bombshell.
And I happened to turn on TV late last night and see Don Lemon and his assembled panel talking about what they knew already Cohen was going to say, because I guess there's some release of a statement or something.
And I kept waiting for the bombshell.
Did you do that?
Did you have the same experience I did?
It's like, oh God, there's a bombshell coming.
Where's the bombshell?
And he kept reading things as if they were bombshells.
Except the only thing bombshell about it was the way he was reading it.
And so, to give you a demonstration of Don Lemon or anybody else's CNN, reading the bombshells from Michael Cohen, I give you Dale.
Dale, can you come over here?
Okay. There are bombshells.
Bombshells, I say. From Michael Cohen.
Let me read a few. This is going to be big, folks.
Michael Cohen is going to testify that Donald Trump uses hairspray.
Whoa! What does this mean for impeachment?
Panel? Anybody?
This is the big one. This is what we've been waiting for.
This is something we never knew before.
This is new. Bombshell.
Bombshell. And scene.
Is it my imagination, or is everything that has already been revealed about what Cohen's going to say, all the stuff we already knew?
Let me give you an example of some of the bombshells.
I'm not even making this up.
If you came into this without actually knowing that this is real, you would not believe that I'm giving you the straight story.
One of the bombshells is that Michael Cohen once saw Don Jr.
say to his father that a meeting had been set.
That's it. That's the bombshell.
Now, it happened to be around the same time frame as Don Jr.'s meeting with the Russian lawyer.
But I don't think that's much connecting material there.
Because do you know what?
Campaigns do more than any other thing.
What's the one thing a presidential campaign does, in terms of the way it spends its time, more than any other thing?
A meeting? What is the most common thing that Donald Trump does during his day?
A meeting?
Do you know who else had a meeting with Donald Trump?
Even I had a meeting with the President.
Meetings are kind of what you do.
That would be the opposite of a bombshell.
I personally witnessed Don Jr.
breathing oxygen.
Oxygen, I say.
Probably related to the climate disaster or something.
I don't know. It seems like a bombshell.
I don't know why. But he was breathing.
I saw it with my own eyes!
My own ears! Bombshell!
Scene. Let's see.
What other bombshells?
All the rest is the stuff we already knew.
But then CNN likes to throw in that Cohen has a, quote, racist allegation.
That'll be some new thing we hear.
Now... I watched Don Lemon read the statement that Cohen is going to present.
And it was curiously missing a racial allegation.
Or... Don Lemon decided not to mention an allegation of racism from Michael Cohen.
Oh, I don't think that happened.
I don't believe that Don Lemon would have skipped that part of the story.
And yes, CNN is still reporting that there's some kind of racist bombshell coming.
But why don't we know what that is already?
Maybe it's still ahead of us.
We'll see. But here's the funniest thing of all.
Did you see the Matt Gaetz tweets about Cohen?
You think things have gone to the greatest extreme you'll ever see on Twitter.
Every once in a while you'll see a tweet and you'll say, well, nobody's going to go further than that.
Like, I don't think anybody will do a tweet that's more outrageous than that one.
And then you wake up in the morning and you go, well, let's see what's on Twitter.
Ah! Somebody topped it.
Somebody topped it.
So, in case you didn't see it, Matt Cates mentioned on Twitter, I say mentioned, CNN is reporting it as threats and intimidating witness, that maybe it was time for Michael Cohen, according to Matt Gaetz, to talk to his wife and his father-in-law about his, quote, girlfriends.
Now, I don't have any personal information about Michael Cohen's girlfriends, but let's just say somebody does.
I'm sure somebody does.
Somewhere somebody has it.
I doubt he would have tweeted it otherwise.
Now, is it over the line for...
Oh, and then he also wondered if Cohen's wife would stay with him while he's in prison.
So I've never quite seen anybody tweet that somebody's wife is going to be banging another guy when he's in prison.
That's as extreme as I think I've ever seen on Twitter.
I mean, that's really taking it to the edge.
And as soon as I saw that, I thought to myself, oh my God, Gates is going to get...
He's going to get just destroyed by the press.
Because they're going to say that's way over the line.
You know, it's threatening.
It's everything else. And then I watched him defending it.
Defending his tweet.
Oh, he's deleted it, somebody says.
But it doesn't matter because he already got the press.
And so when they asked him to defend it, he said, and I'm paraphrasing, well, Michael Cohen's already lied to Congress.
He's already lied to Mueller.
He's lied to the police.
He's lied to I don't know who else.
And then he said, shouldn't we also know if he's lied to his family?
Because it's part of the context of knowing whether we can trust what he says about the president.
And I thought to myself, that is simultaneously the dirtiest trick I've ever seen.
At the same time, it's kind of valid.
Meaning that if we're trying to judge, is he credible?
It does count.
You don't want it to count.
You know, you would like to live in a world where none of that stuff ever comes up, and it doesn't matter, and it's not directly related to the questions, so let's just forget about it.
But it does kind of count.
It does count. To me, it looked like a case of mutually assured destruction, meaning that Michael Cohen is so destroyed at this point.
I'm not happy about that, by the way.
I can't be happy about anybody's life being destroyed.
Matt Gaetz just snuffed out whatever was left of any hope this guy had of getting out of college, getting out of jail in a few years and returning to his happy life.
It doesn't look like that's going to happen, which is horrible, but it can fairly be said that Michael Cohen brought all of it upon himself.
So Matt, from a perspective of persuasion, and now we will depart from the moral and ethical framework, and I'll trust you to put your own moral and ethical filter on this, but that's not my expertise unless I'm wearing my Pope hat, so I'll just talk about the persuasion element of it.
So Matt Gaetz got the entire country, including the anti-Trumpers, to focus on how many times Cohen has lied and in how many different fields of endeavors he's lied.
We all just talked about how much Cohen was a big old liar across all kinds of different fields, including cheating on his wife allegedly, according to Matt Gaetz.
It was probably one of the most successful persuasion plays you're going to see all year.
Now, somebody said that Matt Gaetz deleted his tweet.
Well, I don't know if that's true.
I kind of hope it is.
But the tweet did everything it was supposed to do.
It made the entire country focus on Matt Gaetz.
And what did CNN and most of the news say about him?
They called him a close confidant of the President.
Now, if you're in Congress, and you're a young guy or a young woman, and the news all over the country is reporting that you're a close confidant to the President of the United States, does that work for you?
Yes, it does. It works for you really well, because it shows that you're not just one of the Congress people, but you're connected to power in a way that they're not.
And then also, I have to say...
And again, we're talking about persuasion only.
You can put your own ethical and moral filters on what I'm talking about, and I'll trust you to do that.
But just in terms of the effectiveness of the persuasion, it turns out that Matt Gaetz is really good on television.
And so when they tried to sort of corner him to make him, I don't know, walk back his tweet or his comments, not only did he not walk them back, But he just, he had a base-clearing home run in competently explaining his point and making it actually relevant to the news and defending it.
Now, you could argue that he still shouldn't have done it and moral and ethical concerns are bigger, and I'm not even going to get into that argument.
But boy, did he hit a home run, both for his career and for his objective, I guess, which was to decrease Cohen's credibility, what little he had.
Now, let's give you an update on the Charlottesville hoax.
For anybody new, the Charlottesville hoax is CNN and other anti-Trumpers still reporting the fake news that President Trump called white supremacists fine people.
Of course, that didn't happen.
It's widely reported as fact, and it just didn't happen.
What did happen is that the president, referring to people on both sides of the Confederate statue issue, said there are good people who hold both, you know, fine people on both sides, meaning that there are people who can hold both opinions and still be fine people.
Not referring to the racists, who he specifically disavowed.
But CNN still reports it as if he said they were fine people.
Fake news. So, catching you up, I have made a number of public statements that it's fake news.
And then Joel Pollack in Breitbart, writing for Breitbart, made a big article calling Chris Cuomo a liar.
A damned liar, those were his actual words, in a tweet that I retweeted.
It's got over 2,000 retweets talking about CNN, calling them out, and Joel's quote actually tags Cuomo.
So I would say there is zero chance that they are not aware of this criticism.
Don't know for sure, but I would say that the odds of them being unaware of it are close to zero.
And so we waited.
And I gave you a challenge.
I said, watch how we will be ignored.
And can you imagine that there would be any other situation in which someone as prominent as me, and again, you know, I'm not super prominent.
I'm sort of, you know, low-level prominent.
But prominent enough that if I say something outrageous, it makes news.
I am a source of news if I say anything provocative or outrageous.
And you've seen it a million times.
A few times a week I'll see an article about me, something I said, and it's in the mainstream media, etc.
And I predicted that it would be completely ignored, even though it's amazingly provocative.
I'm calling a major story, a major story, I'm calling it fake news.
Right in public.
And I'm not being challenged on it.
Because nobody can challenge it.
To challenge it would be to dismantle the entire anti-Trump machinery.
It would lay bare How nakedly partisan they are, even more so than people already understand.
I think people understand that CNN is partisan.
They understand that Fox News is partisan.
But they don't quite understand the degree of it.
The degree of it is still shocking and not visible to everyone.
And when the Charlottesville hoax falls, and I think it will, I think that will someday be called one of the biggest hoaxes of all time, it's going to change people's mind about how big the problem is.
So it will size it, but it won't change people's general idea of it.
So it's now day two.
Day two, no reaction whatsoever.
No pushback.
No sending us a link to show why we're wrong.
No telling us that we're crazy.
No saying that we're illegitimate commenters.
No argument whatsoever on something incredibly provocative.
That's the dog that doesn't bark, ladies and gentlemen.
That is the blank space in your composition of your portrait.
It's the part you need to pay attention to by its non-existence.
All right, let's talk about North Korea.
I looked at the initial photos, I think they were probably the first photos of Trump and Kim, and I thought that Kim looked ill.
Did anybody else have that impression?
So Chairman Kim, in the initial photos where they were shaking hands for the camera, he looked He looked like he was struggling a little bit.
He was sweaty, but I don't think that was a problem.
It looked like he was a little unhealthy or something.
Somebody said scared or nervous.
Maybe. I mean, maybe he was nervous.
It's possible. But he looked ill.
Now, when I saw the pictures of the dinner, he looked like he was feeling better.
Yeah, it was a long train ride.
He probably didn't sleep much, etc.
Now, I was also looking at the chemistry between Trump and Kim as they were just sort of having some minor interactions.
And unlike most of you, although like some of you, I suppose, I got to spend some time, just a little bit, with President Trump in the White House.
And I got to experience his sort of focused charisma.
Mostly when you see the president, he's broadcasting his charisma.
In other words, it's one person, the president, talking to millions of people.
And so that's one mode.
But you haven't seen his focused charisma, meaning it's just you and him, one-on-one.
And his focused charisma is pretty frickin' strong.
It would be hard to be in his presence alone and not feel like you're with somebody who's got some extra gear.
He's got that charisma thing that you just, I don't know if you're born with it or you develop it, but he definitely has a lot of it.
Somebody says he healed Kim by touching him.
That's pretty funny.
But anyway, my reaction was it looked like the two of them have a genuine personal connection.
And someday, assuming things go well with North Korea, and I think that they clearly are, that's my opinion, someday...
Someday, I think people are going to say that his genius was understanding that this was a personal problem disguised as a military problem, disguised as a political problem.
And maybe it just never was.
Maybe it was just a personal problem and he was the first one to understand it correctly.
I think that's how history will write this story.
All right. So we'll wait to see about all that.
Now, let's talk about climate change.
I told you I'm doing a deep dive, extended deep dive on climate change, and so I'll give you periodic updates and I'll do them at the end of my presentations.
Now, Keep in mind that when I talk about climate change, I'm coming at it from a different window than most.
I'm coming at it from an ignorant but smart person who has a great incentive to understand the topic.
And I have found so far the preliminary conclusions.
The preliminary conclusion is that both the climate scientists majority and the skeptics are lying a lot.
Which is why both sides find it easy not to change sides.
Because both sides can look at the other and say, well, you're clearly lying about that, so why would I trust anything else?
But it's both ways.
There are enough skeptics who are simply ridiculous.
That the climate scientists can look at them and say, look, you guys are ridiculous.
Here are five reasons, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
These are all ridiculous. And they're right, right?
A lot of what the skeptics say is just flat-out ridiculous.
My favorite ridiculous skeptical argument, somebody said name one, I will, is that the climate scientists have forgotten to include the effects of the sun on warming.
Now, I don't have to be too deeply into the details of climate science to know, without even looking into it, that these scientists who study climate and warmth did not forget To include all aspects of the Sun, from the solar flares, to the tipping of the Earth, to the distances of stuff.
I guarantee you, if there's one thing I will bet my life on, is that climate scientists did not forget the Sun.
Okay, so that's one of the things that these scientists point at and mock them correctly.
But there are things that the skeptics say about the other argument that I have equal problems with.
All right. So I wanted to ask you this question.
So we've all been watching the news.
If you're still on this periscope, you have at least a little bit of interest in climate science and understanding it.
Let me ask you this.
The most basic question about climate science, climate change, right?
Here's the most basic question, and I want to see if you can answer it.
Have we already seen evidence of climate change in extreme weather?
Now extreme weather would be everything from hurricanes, to droughts, to rainfall, to flooding.
I might be forgetting some, but extreme weather.
All right, so let me ask you, most basic question, Have we seen evidence of climate change already in extreme weather?
Now, most of you are climate skeptics, and I'm seeing that almost all of you are saying no.
So let me read to you CNN article from today.
So this is brand new. This is today's article on CNN. And I'll just read you the first sentence from the article.
It says, The extreme weather that comes with climate change is becoming the new normal.
So normal that people aren't talking about it as much, and that could be a problem.
So the article goes on to say that people are getting complacent about all these weather extremes.
So here's the sentence again.
And what I'm going to talk about is the exact wording of these things.
So pay attention to the exact wording.
First sentence on CNN, on this article, the extreme weather that comes with climate change.
Does that indicate to you that climate scientists, the consensus of climate science, have detected extreme weather that is directly because of climate change?
It sort of indicates they have, right?
If you were to read this, and you'd never read anything else, you'd say, oh, the extreme weather that comes with climate change.
Therefore, we know climate change causes extreme weather.
But you know what's missing?
Human-induced.
It doesn't say the extreme weather that comes with man-made or man-inspired climate change.
But your brain fills that in, doesn't it?
So if you read this, you think to yourself, my God, humans are causing climate change, climate change is causing extreme weather, and we've already seen it.
That's the feeling I would get from reading this.
How much of that is close to the truth?
Well, so I did a Google search, To find out the answer just this morning, I thought, well, this will be easy to check.
I'll just do a quick Google search.
I'll look for the most credible sources, and I'll see what the most credible sources say about whether or not extreme weather is already evidence of climate change.
And I wanted to break this down for you.
So I looked at the IPCC report.
On climate change?
And I'm taking that as my most authoritative, let's say, government approved source, if you will.
So here's the difference between what the climate science majority, let's say the climate scientists, whether it's a consensus or a majority, Versus skeptics.
So the climate science majority would say that CO2 is the main driver of our increase.
It's the main driver of the rate of increase in warming.
Whereas the skeptics would say it's a minor driver.
So that's the main difference.
The skeptics don't say CO2 has no impact.
They say it has a minor impact.
And then the climate science majority seems to say that extreme weather is evidence of the theory.
It's predicted, and then if you see it, that would be evidence.
And the climate skeptics would say, there's no evidence of that.
There's no evidence. So let's see what the IPCC report says, and I'm taking this from Carbon Brief, a website who is just quoting the IPCC report.
So this is the official word, and now we can see if the skeptics, or I'll put this up so you can see it while I'm reading it.
Let's see if the skeptics or the climate science majority is closer To the IPCC, the official climate, the most credible report.
So here it is, a quote from the IPCC. States that it is, quote, very likely, at least 90% certain, humans contributed to the increase in hot days and decrease in cold days.
For heat waves, it's likely at least 66% certain that human activities were a contributing factor.
So it says that there's a 90% chance that humans contributed to the increase in hot days.
Does that match the climate majority, or does it match the skeptics?
It's a trick question, because it matches both.
It doesn't say that that's the only reason the temperature is going up.
It does say that humans contributed to the increase.
Contributed is the position of both the skeptics, most of them.
There are some skeptics who wouldn't say this.
But the majority of skeptics would say, yeah, it contributed, just not that much.
So, so far the IPCC is compatible with both The skeptics and the climate majority.
But let's go on. With other types of extreme events, changes in past trends and any human contribution are harder to spot.
Harder to spot.
So if you're not just talking about heat waves, the other extremes are harder to spot.
Let's go on. It says, take hurricanes, for example.
There's no clear pattern suggesting how they've changed the world.
So hurricanes apparently do not have a clear pattern of changing because of climate.
Who is that closer to?
Well, that's closer to the climate skeptics who say that we can't see the signal in extreme weather.
At least we can't see the signal of man-made climate change in extreme weather.
And so far the IPCC is agreeing.
All right. But there are certain, scientists have identified certain parts of the ocean, like in the North Atlantic, where the number of intense hurricanes has increased.
But keep in mind that the sentence before that said, there's not a pattern yet.
But there is one place that they're increasing, but they don't say that's evidence of man-made climate change or even climate change.
It's just something that's happening.
And it says drought trends also differ from region to region, with a global picture unclear.
So droughts don't seem to fit a pattern which they can identify as a fingerprint of man-made climate change.
One extreme missing from this picture is flooding.
So that's another indicator.
At the moment, scientists don't have enough data to make conclusive statements about changes in the last few decades or to make predictions about the future.
So the IPCC, their conclusion, if it's being presented correctly on this website, and if it's not, I hope somebody will fact check me.
But the IPCC report is compatible with Climate skeptics.
Because climate skeptics agree that CO2 has some impact on warming.
And the IPCC says that too.
And the skeptics say we can't see the evidence in the extreme weather conditions.
The closest the IPCC gets to that is to say that warming That there is global warming, but they don't say what, you know.
Anyway, you get my point.
So my point is that even the most basic question of have we seen the global warming sort of up in the air.
So let's return to Tony Heller.
So you might remember that famous skeptic, I got a sign on this computer.
Tony Heller, famous climate skeptic.
I asked him for his top five arguments against the climate science consensus.
And I'm going to do them in order in no particular schedule.
But today let's talk about his second point, second of his five points.
I think this is Dellingpole's writer, named Dellingpole, who summarized Tony's five points, and here's the second one.
If the case for global warming were as strong as these experts say, the debate would be over by now.
So I don't buy that part.
So Tony Heller is saying if the evidence were as strong as the experts say, the debate would be over.
My observation is that debates are never over, no matter how much evidence you have.
So I would disagree with that part.
But let's read the second part.
Talking about the climate alarmists, this is Tony Heller saying that all of their apocalyptic predictions have failed miserably.
What reason do we have to believe them?
So Tony's point is that predictions from the past have failed miserably.
Now, he gives lots of examples, but my problem with Tony's analysis is that a lot of them are from, you know, individual anecdotal things such as news reports in which the news reported some individual or some small group said that there was going to be this or that and it didn't happen.
I don't know that you could demonstrate that there was ever a climate consensus prediction And that it made a specific, that the entire consensus made a prediction that did or did not happen.
I don't know that that's true.
I do know that there are lots of individuals.
Al Gore would be one, different groups.
So there have been lots of predictions made in the past that have not come true.
So Tony Heller, I believe, is correct in saying that many people have made climate predictions since the 70s, even before that, and that they have been incorrect.
And Al Gore has made predictions that are incorrect.
But did all of their predictions match the climate consensus?
In other words, was there such a thing as a climate consensus prediction?
Squirrel just came up to my door.
Squirrel? I feel like a dog.
I literally just got distracted by a squirrel.
Squirrel? And so I don't know that you could say that the climate predictions were all bad, because there must have been a lot of them.
Now, if there were a lot of them, and some of them were this high, and some of them were this high, some of them are going to be true.
So I would say that you cannot say that the predictions of the past have been correct, and that you probably can't say they've been incorrect, because you serve apples and oranges and squirrels, right? You're sort of all over the board.
So I will accept Tony Heller's argument, That there have not been predictions in the extremes that have come true.
There have been predictions about temperatures, there have been predictions about the poles and the ice, and those are separate questions.
But on the question specifically of apocalyptic predictions, we have seen nothing apocalyptic.
We've seen things edging up, you know, the temperatures edged up.
We've seen ice melting, according to the scientists.
But my life's about the same, and your life's about the same.
So even if they're right about the direction, Tony Heller is correct that nobody has been right yet.
About the apocalyptic part.
That doesn't mean they will never be right about that.
But that's the point.
Now, if we give Tony Heller the win on the, your predictions of the past have been more wrong than right, and I think that that's a fair statement, does that disprove the risk of climate change?
No, it does not. It does not.
So Tony's point I take as valid, but it's not a stake in the heart.
It just means in the past we've made bad predictions.
It doesn't mean that there's no problem.
It doesn't mean that those disasters are not ahead of us.
It just means they haven't been right yet.
So Tony Heller gets the victory on point two.
For correctly pointing out that we are bad at predicting and science hasn't made many other bad predictions and therefore their credibility when it comes to any future predictions should be seen in the context of all the failed predictions and that should inform your sense of how likely that is.
So I'll give them the win on that.
But It's far from proving that climate change is not a problem.
Those are different.
He can get the win on the individual point, but he's far from getting the win on the big picture, okay?
You can't sort this out this way.
Not gonna work trying to balance this.
Well, you left out the reason.
Now, a lot of people have criticized me for the way I'm entering this conversation, my lack of understanding, my giving credibility to any of the doubters, etc.
And I would say this.
You don't know where this is going.
So don't judge this process in the second inning.
So my deep dive on This climate issue is beginning.
It's not ending. And so if you think you can judge how it went based on the first few innings, I think you're going to be wrong.
So my current view, for those who don't know, is that I don't know if I should be worried about this climate stuff or not.
I do know both sides are lying, and they're both lying a lot.
I'm not talking about any person, but the team on both sides are just full of BS. And so if somebody's trying to make us decide on one of those sides, they need to pick their best champion and fight it out from there.
Now, the funniest thing about climate change is that the, I guess, the House convened some kind of a climate change panel.
Did you see that story?
And the Democrats didn't show up to their own climate change panel, the most important issue in the entire world.
And the Democrats were just busy, so they didn't show up.
But it gets better. Because so few Democrats showed up to their own meeting, The Republicans, who are not big on climate change, the Republicans outnumbered them, and so one of the Republicans made a motion to cancel the meeting,
and there were enough Republicans in the room to vote, so they just canceled the meeting and walked away, and it became like this amazingly embarrassing thing for the Democrats.
They're pushing this Green New Deal But proving at the same time, well, they don't really mean it.
They are no more serious about this than anybody else.
Now, they're no more serious than the public at large, which apparently is not that concerned about it because climate change ends up pretty low on the list of our priorities, according to recent polls.
Was AOC there?
I don't think she was.
Now, I talked yesterday to Dr. Shiu, Shiva, one of my favorite guests on my periscopes, and he has agreed to come on and give us some climate change information in a way that you probably haven't seen before.
It's very unusual to have somebody who can understand a topic at the depth that Dr.
Shiva can, because he's a multidisciplinary and sort of a genius in about five different fields of technology and science.
And so I'm going to invite him on here.
We'll connect today and pick a time.
And I just want to get his insight, because it won't be like anything you've seen before.
Almost everybody else has a different take on this, so it'll be interesting to get his, and I'll invite him on soon.
All right. Somebody says, I predict you will end your climate research where you started it, as undecided.
Maybe. I would say that's a definite possibility.
Somebody says, all who oppose nuclear power do not believe in climate change.
That's not exactly true.
It could be that there are a lot of people who don't know enough about new nuclear designs.
So I think the people who are worried about the climate but don't want nuclear are probably maybe under-informed about nuclear's current safety potential.
How much of your research into climate change is a long-term inside joke with yourself?
Let me say that I am certainly not above running a long-term prank on the public.
It's not outside of my comfort zone, and it's certainly not something I wouldn't do, but in this case I'm not.
I'm not even sure what that prank would look like.
And if there's one thing I can promise you, if you ask me if I'm running a prank and I give you a direct answer, no, I am not running a prank.
This is not an inside joke.
If I tell you directly, you can always count on that to be true.
Because if I'm running a prank and somebody calls it out, I'm probably going to admit it.
I'm not gonna directly, I would never directly deny a prank once somebody found out it's a prank, unless I was just running it for another five minutes or something.
Exactly what a prankster would say.
I like that some of you are not so sure about that.
I like that uncertainty in you.
My prediction is you will go left if Bernie's seat will believe.
I don't know what that means. Yes, somebody says admitting the prank when it's called is the rules.
I accept that as a rule.
If you're running a prank and people catch you, you should come clean.
If not that minute, at least fairly soon.
Because the fun is over once you've been outed.
Scott, man, it's difficult to earn people's trust when you've lost it.
That's true. And I would never suggest that you should have trust in other people's opinions.
If any of you still have this experience of something called trust, you should lose that.
If somebody can't convince you with their argument and their evidence...
Do not depend on their trust as the tiebreaker.
That is a bad strategy.
So I would ask none of you to trust me on anything.
You should listen.
I won't use the should word.
I would ask you to listen to my arguments.
I would ask you to fact check me as aggressively as you like, because unlike maybe other people who do this in public, I don't mind being wrong.
I know it doesn't seem like that because I aggressively defend my opinions.
And you watch that.
So if you see me aggressively defend my opinions, you would get the impression that I don't like being wrong.
But I kind of like it.
Because every time you find out that you thought something was sure, certain, and you find out you were wrong, your understanding of the world just goes wrong.
And you can understand how easily you can be fooled.
So understanding how easily you can be duped is one of the most valuable things you'll ever experience.
So if you told me, Scott, you've been saying X forever and now science has proven you wrong, I'd say, cool.
That's like the best thing.
Here's another skeptical thing that somebody's saying in the comments that's one of the terrible, terrible skeptical arguments.
Somebody is saying, you tell me what is the ideal temperature.
Scott, if you can't tell me what the ideal temperature of the Earth is, then why are we worried that it's changing?
We don't know if it's going to a better temperature.
That's one of the worst skeptical arguments.
And the reason is that the skeptical argument is that it will keep getting hotter until the system breaks down.
Saying that you don't know what the ideal temperature is is not even on the right question.
You're so far from even understanding what the issue is that you're talking about, you should never say that.
I used should again.
Let me put it in non-should words.
The reason I complain about the word should is that people use it as a substitute for giving a reason.
Well, you just should do that.
Well, why? If you can't give the why, you know, you should skip the should.
And I will say that if your argument is we don't know what the ideal temperature is, you make yourself look stupid to people who understand the topic.
So I won't say you shouldn't do it.
I'll say that when you do it, you look stupid to people who understand the topic, because it's among the worst of the arguments.
And now you've been informed that the question is not finding the ideal temperature, but rather the general statement that no matter what the ideal temperature is, there certainly is something that's too warm and that can break down the, you know, we don't know what that level is, But there's some level that things break down.
There's no doubt about that. Yeah, Cohen is talking about...
Alright, so I think we all need to watch the Cohen stuff.
I'm going to do a little drawing while I'm watching that.
If anything interesting comes out of that, I might jump back on Periscope.
But I don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no.
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