All Episodes
Previous Next
March 2, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
36:46
Episode 435 Scott Adams: The “Nearly News” Headlines
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello, everybody.
Come on in here. If you're wondering why I so often wear this same shirt, it's not because I wear this shirt every day.
It's because it's my office shirt.
I've got a couple of office shirts.
When it's a little chilly in my office, I like it a little cold, so I put on my office shirt because it's just the right temperature.
Alright, if you're here and you've got a mug, a cup, a glass, a chalice, a stein, a thermos, and you have a liquid in there, chances are you came for the simultaneous sip.
Coffee with Scott Adams.
Please raise your container full of your favorite liquid.
I like coffee and join me for this simultaneous sip.
Now, if you're following the news, you may have noticed that there isn't any.
There's no news.
I always get up and I check CNN and check Fox News' site because that gives me sort of a solid grounding of the left and the right.
But today there wasn't any news.
Oh, there was almost news.
There were things that were nearly news.
Let me give you an example.
Here are some of the nearly news stories.
There's the story that President Trump believes Kim Jong-un when he says he didn't know about Otto Warmbier.
Now, that is almost news.
Well, the problem is it didn't happen.
The fact that it didn't actually happen takes away from the fact that if it did happen, that would be news.
What did happen is the President said he would take him at his word, which was clearly diplomatic speak for, I'm not going to make this an issue.
But the news, instead of interpreting it in the obvious way, really, really obvious way, is reporting it as though people are saying, The President believes Kim Jong Un.
What's wrong with this President?
Is he a traitor? Does he side with North Korea?
Does he like Kim Jong Un more than he likes Americans?
No. None of that is happening.
None of that is happening. It's a complete fake news story.
Let's talk about Jared Kushner's security clearance.
So, oh, there's big trouble in this news.
Big trouble. Turns out that the president ordered security, the intelligence people, whoever it is, that checks out the security clearance.
He ordered Jared to get security clearance without going through the normal channels.
Wow. Bombshell.
It's a bombshell.
Well, when I say a bombshell, I mean it would be a bombshell if it were illegal for the president to do that.
But it's legal.
Still, if you consider all the terrible things Jared Kushner has...
Okay, he hasn't done any terrible things.
But if he had done terrible things...
Which he hasn't. And if it had been illegal for the president to order him to get a security clearance, and if he hadn't later passed his security clearance when they got around to it, because I'm sure they vetted him anyway, then it would totally be a bombshell.
But none of those things happened or are true.
So it's nearly news.
It's close to news.
It's in the adjacent property with news.
But it's not quite news.
What else we got going on here?
We've got an opinion piece by...
What's his name?
Why am I forgetting the most famous person on CNN? Anderson Cooper.
In which he talks about the president's leadership as being, and I quote, alarming.
That's big news.
We've got a president of the United States, somebody who's got his finger on the nuclear button, and his leadership is alarming.
It's alarming. Why?
Because he's made more progress with North Korea than anyone else?
Because the economy is humming?
Because China is probably going to come up with a better deal for trade?
What exactly is the alarming part?
Are we alarmed by all the good things happening?
See, that would be news if there were anything alarming.
But there isn't.
What else we got?
Oh, we have the story about AOC calling out the president's differing property values.
For property tax reasons, one assumes.
And in one context, he said his property was worth a lot.
In another context, he said it was worth much less.
Well, that's big news.
That's alarming.
Bombshell! Well, unless the things that President Trump did were completely legal and typical of people in his situation, which they almost certainly are.
Now, we don't know the details of that story, but the most normal thing in the world is you have a low value for the property of a business, but the value of the business is the property plus the cash flow plus the goodwill, which would be very big compared to the small amount of the property, which is the amount you pay property taxes on.
Now, I don't know if that's exactly what's going on.
But I'm pretty sure that when we dig down into it, some tax accountant is going to say, oh yeah, that's just the way we do it.
That's just the normal way people do it.
So if any of those things were illegal, bombshell.
Big news. And that would be alarming, alarming.
But in all likelihood, there's nothing there.
It's like the Cohen testimony.
Man, it's going to be a bombshell if he said anything that got the president in trouble, but he didn't.
In fact, he was exculpatory and made everything that the anti-Trumpers thought for the last three years ridiculous.
Let's see what else we got on CNN. Let's see...
Why the U.S. may not get answers it seeks from Mueller.
Well, that would be a big problem.
Imagine if Mueller did this whole investigation, spent, you know, what, tens of millions of dollars, took all of her attention for years, and what if the public didn't see the full report?
That would be a big, big problem.
Well, unless there was nothing in it.
If there was nothing especially important in it, Well, then it wouldn't be.
It would be close to news, but it wouldn't be news because it would be simply not hearing about things that didn't matter anyway.
Then there's a story that Hannity may have bought himself a subpoena.
So there might be something that Sean Hannity maybe almost did that could have potentially gotten him subpoenaed.
It probably won't happen.
But if it did, it would be very adjacent to almost news.
And if it does happen, probably it won't make much difference in the whole world.
Hannity will just talk to some people and it will go away.
But, almost news.
And of course then there's the big story on the CNN homepage about the scientists are thrilled to spot a huge spider eating an opossum.
That's news. The only thing that would be better would be if a huge spider attacked a hiker and the hiker wrestled with the spider and killed it with his bare hands.
Only to later find out it was actually a very small spider.
So, I'm finding that there's no news today and so I would like to change the subject to your favorite topic.
Yes. Climate change.
Don't beg me. I'm going to do it.
I know how much you love the climate change talk.
But I want to show you the type of graph I saw the other day.
So, you all know what hindcasting is?
Hindcasting is when you have a prediction model.
And you want to know, hypothetically, if you had had a model in the past, would that model have predicted the past?
So that's hindcasting.
So this is today. And this is a model of climate change.
And you see this kind of model, right?
Where they say, in the past, all of our models would have fit the actual temperature change.
But that part's easy.
So there's nothing special about that because you would throw away any models that didn't fit the past.
So the minimum your prediction model has to do is be consistent with the past.
So they throw away everything that isn't and they get this range and then it's today.
And then they say, okay, the future is harder to predict than the past.
Duh. And so the uncertainty increases as you go out.
So this gets wider and wider.
But here's my question.
This is supposed to convince me that the predictions have so far been good and there will probably continue to be accurate predictions.
But that's sort of the opposite of what I see here.
What I see is this part is irrelevant because it's the past and the models did not predict the past.
They simply were forced to conform to the past.
And then suppose you knew that the past looked like this.
How hard would it be to predict that the future is going to be somewhere in this area?
Isn't this area kind of super easy because you have all this history of these slight changes in the temperature?
What are the odds that it's going to suddenly go boop or just suddenly go boop?
Probably not because it's been smooth-ish changes over time.
So this first several, you know, let's say decade, do you need a model?
Do you need a complicated prediction model to know that your temperature is going to be somewhere in this range?
Probably not, right?
Probably not. You don't need anything.
You just say, it looks like it's going to be in here somewhere.
Now this is the part of the future that's easy to predict.
This next part, where you start getting 10, 20 years into the future, nobody really thinks you can predict that.
So you end up with the past which is irrelevant, the next 10 years which you don't even need a model to predict, and then the stuff after that which no model can predict.
It's the most useless graph I've ever seen, which is presented as proof that climate change is the big problem that everybody says.
For any of those of you who are new to my climate change discussions, I'm not taking a stand one way or the other.
I'm involved in a long-term project To see if I can discern what's true and what isn't.
So I'm approaching it like a, let's say, a motivated citizen who's not a scientist, who's just trying to understand what's true and what isn't.
And I'll tell you, every time I see a graph like that, it's anti-persuasive.
Show us your camera stand.
It's just a little tripod. It's a tripod about that high.
Anyone think warmer cities means warmer earth?
Well, cities should be warming up the earth because of the concrete, etc.
Oh yeah, so AOC apparently has a list of Democrats who are voting with Republicans and she doesn't like it.
That's almost news.
That almost matters.
Doesn't, but it almost does.
So, let me ask you this.
My regulars on Periscope here, you've noticed that I've started to persuade fairly heavily on the topic of Nuclear.
Specifically, Generation 4 nuclear designs, which have essentially zero chance of meltdown, because they're built so they can't meltdown.
And also, some of those designs burn nuclear waste.
So you can actually reduce nuclear waste with these new types of designs.
And if you were to follow, let's say, the South Korea model, the reason South Korea has successful nuclear power is that they standardized on some designs so that they could lower cost and it's easier to train people and you can have some economies of scale and all that.
So if we were to do all of those things, Nuclear would be really the only solution that anybody's talking about that could work.
Now, let me ask you this.
Have you seen a story about that on the major media lately?
And why not?
Can you think, when was the last time you saw...
I did see...
So I did see Michael Schellenberger on Tucker Carlson's show, and he was talking about nuclear.
But you don't really see it covered as news, per se.
And I'm wondering if part of the problem is that nuclear doesn't create news.
There are lots of these articles about some company or startup or scientist had a breakthrough, and somebody thinks something will be good.
But there are all these boring little...
Incremental technological advances.
There's nothing that makes Generation 4 nuclear a headline.
What it needs is some politician to turn it into a headline.
You saw, for example, that, let's see, Andrew Yang, running for president as a Democrat, He's talking about his main focus being robots taking jobs and AI and the technological threats.
Now because that's his primary focus, that brings attention to a topic that's not creating news per se.
So he's the news.
The topic doesn't get as much attention for being as dangerous as it is.
Likewise, there's some guy whose name I don't remember, some politician who just entered the race, to make climate change his primary objective.
So that's his thing.
He's the guy who says, I'm just going to make climate change my number one thing.
No, he made it into news.
So climate change is in the news anyway, but he made it more news.
Jay Jansley, people are telling me.
Washington governor. So, let me ask you this.
If one of the Democrats...
One of the, I don't know, 20 Democrats who are going to run, if one of them said, I don't know if climate change is exactly what the scientists say, but I know Generation 4 nuclear is the solution either way, because we need it for economic development, we need it for reducing pollution, we need it for lots of reasons, as well as being competitive in the world.
So I'm going to be the Generation 4 nuclear guy, but I'm going to be a Democrat.
How fast would that person get elected?
It feels like that would be a winning platform.
Because it would be against type.
But the argument would be solid.
So your perfect situation is to be the man who bites the dog, the thing that doesn't fit, the stain on the tablecloth, the Donald Trump in politics.
The person who doesn't fit, that gets the news.
So if a Democrat came out and said, look, it's Generation 4 nuclear.
This is going to be my main thing.
And I know you don't like it, but let me educate you.
It's safe.
It's smart. It's the only way to go.
All the smartest people agree.
Let's get this done.
That would be a tough package to beat.
That would be a strong package.
Now, the question you might ask yourself is why...
Yeah, somebody's saying here, Trump is bringing nuclear, it's just not being covered.
Well, I don't know what it means to bring nuclear.
So I talked yesterday about, I mistakenly said Department of Defense, but Department of Energy, Rick Perry, I was watching my playback yesterday, I said Department of Defense when I meant Department of Energy.
It has funded, through the government, a test bed where they can quickly iterate these new designs for nuclear without all the approvals and the time lag and stuff.
And that turns out to be the biggest thing that needed to be done.
If they do it right, and if it works, it's part of an excellent system for iterating that technology.
But it feels like It feels like the president is just, and this is weird, I never believed I would say this, but it seems like the president is not taking enough credit.
Whoever thought that would happen?
This little thing...
Unless there's something about it that's not so good and I just don't know it.
And that's possible, right? There might be something about this Rick Perry thing for testing the nuclear designs that's not as optimal as I want it to be, but I don't know what that is.
And in any case, Trump should be hyping the bejesus out of that because it's so unambiguously smart And so unambiguously the right play, it'd be tough to mount an argument against it, and it's a solid accomplishment in terms of building a system that can get us out of climate change.
The funniest thing that Trump could do...
Let me tell you the funniest thing Trump could do, which would also be very effective and save the world.
It would be funny and it would save the world.
Trump could bring together his climate people and have their meetings where they're trying to update their understanding of climate risks.
I guess Happer is the head of that.
And the world, meaning the anti-Trumpers, Would be looking at that as like a joke process.
Because they would say, alright, the fix is in.
You put a denier in that important position.
Whatever they talk about it doesn't matter.
Because in the end they're going to say climate change is a hoax.
And then you do nothing about it.
So that's what everybody would expect.
But what if...
At the end of that, something more nuanced came out of it.
As in, there might be a risk, but in any case, we should go crazy with nuclear, because if you think there's a risk, this is the best solution.
And if you think there's not a risk, it's still the best thing you should be doing, energy-wise.
We should be doing it no matter what you believe about the climate.
So if the president went gung-ho on the new designs of nuclear as a solution to climate change, how would he lose re-election?
Could you do it?
You'd have to try pretty hard, wouldn't you?
If you went pro-nuclear and sold it as safe designs, and you explain to people it eats nuclear waste, it doesn't create it, it eats it, I don't know how you could possibly lose it.
Now, of course, I could be surprised.
There might be something about it that somebody says sufficient uranium.
Are you worried about the uranium one deal selling all our uranium?
One of the things people don't understand about uranium is that it's a commodity.
Not as much a commodity as, you know, say dirt.
But it's a commodity in the sense that you can buy it.
So if Russia buys some of our uranium, we can go to Canada and buy some of their uranium, because they've got plenty.
We could go to Australia and buy some of their uranium, because they've got plenty, and it's for sale.
You can just buy some more.
So somebody's saying, is there sufficient uranium globally?
And the answer is, I think the answer is almost certainly.
You can always get more of it.
It's not like we've dug up all the uranium.
You're saying people don't believe it's safe.
They have been brainwashed. That is correct, but that can be changed.
That could be changed.
Because remember, the climate alarmists, people who are worried the most about climate change, they are pro-science.
Pro, pro, pro-science.
They are very, very pro-science.
Once you've taken that position, you're going to have to object to nuclear using science.
And unfortunately, the science is not on their side.
The science is... Pro Generation 4 nuclear.
Somebody says, can you convince Elon?
What does Elon Musk think about nuclear?
Let's see. It's a good question.
Nuclear power.
Will that come up right away?
No, it's a question on Quora.
Which is, what does Elon Musk think of it?
He feels the efficiency of existing nuclear has been improved and that we should build more nuclear plants.
So what's to convince?
So Elon Musk is apparently on the same side as 100% of the people who have looked into it.
I don't personally know anybody who's looked into it who has a different opinion, which is weird.
Because, yeah, so when people use the Fukushima meltdown and the Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl and stuff like that, let me tell you the worst defense.
Let's say you're pro-nuclear.
Pro-nuclear.
And people say, yeah, but what about Fukushima and Three Mile Island and Chernobyl?
The worst defense would be to say, turns out nobody died.
Or the death toll was immaterial.
And if you compare that to the number of people who died from pollution and from standard other sources of things, there are actually millions of people who died from burning coal because it pollutes, etc.
That's a terrible defense because in order to answer that by saying, oh, those disasters didn't kill many people, you're making people think about those disasters as if somehow that's a continuing problem.
The correct way to answer that question when somebody says, what about all those disasters in the past, is to say, oh, you're talking about a different technology.
That technology was faulty, and it still didn't kill anybody.
The new technology can't do those things.
If everything goes wrong, it can't do that.
You could have literally just everybody walk away from the job, have an earthquake, It still wouldn't melt down.
It's designed so it can't.
Now, when I say something can't melt down, keep in mind, you know, I'm not a nuclear scientist.
I'm just parroting what I've heard.
You know, maybe there's some chance, but evidently the chance is very low.
And apparently the Pacific Ocean is fine as well.
Now, you wouldn't put one where...
I don't think we would locate a nuclear plant in a tsunami zone, so probably we can figure out how to avoid that stuff.
Somebody's mentioning the MyPillow guy here in the comments.
If you would like lessons in persuasion, watch the MyPillow commercials on Fox News.
And I was thinking of actually doing a special Periscope just calling out all of his technique.
Because you'll see every good sales technique In those commercials, they're actually...
Yeah, Mike Lindell is the owner.
He does his own commercials. Those commercials are a master class in how to sell stuff.
I mean, he has every technique packed in there.
And man, does he do it well.
And if you think about it, it's an improved pillow.
How do you get that rich selling a darn pillow?
I mean, that's pretty amazing.
Now, I will say, in fairness, I have purchased some of his pillows.
So I bought a few MyPillows, and they're better than regular pillows.
So he has a real product, and the real product does what he says it does, which is it's far better than a regular pillow.
But still, the way he sells it is just exceptional.
He's so good at it.
And if you don't know the techniques, you wouldn't notice how many of them he packs into that 30 seconds.
How many pillows did he buy?
I think I bought two or four of them, I can't remember.
Somebody left their pillow at a friend's house and the friend won't give it back.
Uh...
Now I'm starting to see people pushing back on green energy because of the so-called density.
Meaning that if you build a nuclear power plant, you might need X number of acres for your plant, and that won't be that much.
Compared to, if you needed to have the same amount of energy using solar, you would need square miles and miles and miles of solar panels or miles and miles of windmills.
And so you end up chewing up a lot of Mother Earth To create very little energy per square foot compared to nuclear.
So that's part of the trade-off that people haven't quite appreciated yet.
What are the techniques?
Well, I'll do a special periscope on it.
I don't want to give you a bad preview of what I might do later.
My new book I still have to finish writing it.
I'll be working on that hard for the next few months.
So it's mostly written.
I'm in the editing and rearranging and punching up phase of the book.
So the basic book has been accepted by my publisher in the sense that it is a book and it will get published.
But still...
I'm still punching it up.
Now, you know the feature on Periscope that lets me add a guest.
Right now I turn that feature off.
Because the new release, I understand, which should happen next week, I don't know what day next week, but that should allow me to do the guest feature at the same time that I've got the Twitter notifications on.
At the moment, and until next week, you can't have both of them at the same time.
And so I wasn't using the guest feature because I didn't want to turn off the Twitter notification.
But this coming week, those two will work together, I understand, and we'll have some more guests.
Do your new books make up for your lost income?
No, they don't. They're not even close.
What brand coffee do you recommend?
I don't recommend coffee.
I'm not a foodie, so I can drink any kind of coffee and I'm fine with it.
I have Andrew Yang as a guest.
He would be interesting. Yeah, Andrew Yang, Victor Davis Hanson.
I prefer guests that you haven't already seen a lot on television.
I prefer people who have something to say that is a little bit different than what you're seeing every day on television anyway.
Do I appreciate espresso?
Espresso. Yeah, it's alright.
Lomberg would be great, except he basically agrees with everything I say.
I will invite Van Jones.
I've been kind of waiting for the right topic.
And I think I have some ideas.
No, Taleb I would not invite.
Um... I don't know who Randy Carlson is.
Did I see the Alex Jones Joe Rogan podcast?
I did not see it, but everybody is telling me I need to see it.
I'm hearing it from everywhere.
So I have to assume that that's worth watching.
All right, Gordon Chang.
I love Gordon Chang as an expert on China and North Korea.
I don't know that he would come on my Periscope, but he'd be an amazing guest.
What I really want to do is bring people on who don't agree with me.
And so it's a little bit less interesting to bring on people who I know what they're going to say and it's compatible with everything I think and maybe you've already heard it.
Swalwell. That's a possibility.
Eric Swalwell would be a good possibility.
Now I've met him a few times and we have friends in common and stuff so I could get an invitation to him.
Larry Elder, he'd be interesting.
But I'd need a topic.
Oh, Alex Epstein, I probably will invite him.
Yeah, I think he'll be high on my list.
What about Greg Gutfeld?
Yeah, if he wants to. Don Jr.
would be great. Mark Schneider, I probably will invite Mark Schneider to talk about nuclear.
Alright, so that's what's coming up.
And I got nothing else. Oh, somebody said Chris Cuomo.
So, now how long has it been?
Since I and also Breitbart said in publicly that the Charlottesville hoax was a hoax, specifically the part where there are claims that the president called white supremacists fine people, which simply didn't happen.
He was talking about people on both sides of the statue question more generally.
And then the press illegitimately said, oh, he's talking about white supremacists being fine people.
So I call that a hoax in public all the time.
And I've been experimenting this past week to see if I could say something that outrageous and be completely ignored by the anti-Trump press.
And they did.
Completely ignored by the anti-Trump press.
Imagine saying something that outrageous.
Imagine picking any other major headline that they've been reporting as a fact for years.
Years! As a fact.
And a notable person, whose name is least well known in much of America, says it's literally a hoax.
Imagine them not reporting on that.
I showed you that as an experiment.
I did that right in front of you.
Oh, Ed Latimer would be a great guest.
If you're not following Ed on Twitter, you're really missing a good show.
Ed is one of those guys.
I'm talking about Ed Latimer, L-A-T-I-M-O-R-E. You should follow him on Twitter.
Every day he produces content that I like.
Every day. That's very rare.
I mean, his tweets are so delicious.
They're just so well written and provocative, and they sort of challenge you, but not so much that you don't like it.
It's really good stuff.
Alright, those are good suggestions.
I see you making good suggestions, and I'll try to do some of those people in the future.
Michael Moore would be great.
You know, part of the problem is I don't know how many people would be willing to talk to me if they're not on the same page with me.
▲
Export Selection