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March 16, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
55:23
Episode 453 Scott Adams: Vetos, White Nationalists, Bernie’s Head Injury, Beto the Hacker
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here.
It's time for a coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm Scott Adams. And you are probably ready with your coffee.
Unless you're running on the beach or you might be on a treadmill.
You might be running for the coffee maker right now saying, I better grab this quick, quick, quick, pour my coffee.
It's almost time for the simultaneous sip because it is.
And please join me now with your cup, your mug, your stein, your chalice, your thermos, fill it with your favorite liquid.
when I like coffee and join me for the simultaneous sip.
Ah.
So let's talk about the news in no particular order.
Ah.
So there was a headline that caught my attention on CNN. And it was a conversation between two of the CNN hosts, Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo.
And the headline was, if you want Trump out, vote him out.
I think this is from their conversation after the show maybe two days ago.
So this is a headline in CNN from the two hosts.
If you want Trump out, vote him out.
Isn't that a weird headline for a news organization?
Because it's not talking about other people.
It's not even news about anything outside of CNN. So it's Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon talking to each other, two CNN hosts, And then they say, well, if you want Trump out, here's the way to do it.
Does that sound unbiased to you?
Now, what kind of news organization starts with, well, if you want to get rid of the president, let me tell you how.
Here's the best way to do it.
I know you want to use the impeachment, but let's just use the voting thing because I got your back.
We'll make sure that people vote for the other side.
That's not even trying.
That's not even trying to be objective, but I guess nobody's surprised.
Of course, many of you are following the saga of my attempts, and Joel Pollack is attempting as well, to get CNN's attention, to see if they'll stop reporting the fake news, the worst fake news maybe of the century, I don't know.
I was wondering, is the Charlottesville fine people hoax the best hoax of the century?
I'd like to see if anybody else has a better suggestion.
And you know, I'll tell you what I might do.
Maybe we should run some kind of a poll.
I think I'll run a Twitter poll right after this.
And I'll ask people what they think was the best hoax of the whole century.
In my mind, the Charlottesville Fine People hoax might be the best one.
Well, the Russian hoax, yeah.
Yeah, the Russian hoax might be the best one.
Gosh, there are a lot of choices, aren't there?
Can you think of any hoaxes prior to the current political situation?
Gulf of Tonkin, maybe?
Yeah, WMDs in Iraq?
Yeah, I guess that still wins, right?
But you know, the WMDs in Iraq was more about just being wrong.
And there are slight differences in the fake news.
Some fake news, people are just wrong.
They just have the wrong answer.
Some fake news is intentional.
For example, I would say that the Russia collusion fake news is just intentional.
In other words, the news organizations, in my opinion, I'm not inside their heads, but what it looks like is the anti-Trump news organizations knew that they didn't have anything, but they...
For profit reasons, shaded it like there's probably something there.
So I would say in that case, that was a conscious decision by lots of different people who knew what their self-interest was and sold the Russian collusion or a little oversold it, but they knew what they were doing.
They knew why.
They knew it wasn't true, didn't follow the facts, but they were willing to go with it anyway.
Whereas, here's my hypothesis about the Charlottesville fine people hoax.
If there's anybody new joining us, the news often reports that Trump was talking about the neo-Nazis when he said there were fine people in Charlottesville.
But if you look at his actual quote, he specifically exempts them from that.
He talks about them specifically and says they're not part of the fine people.
And that part is just not reported, so they report it like he was calling racist fine people.
So I've looked into this a little bit, and based on my insider knowledge, if you will, of CNN, here's my best guess.
I believe that they and many of the citizens have an actual false memory, which is a little different than From normal fake news, and more interesting really.
A false memory is sort of like people who are sure that Nelson Mandela was dead because they remember it, or people who are sure that some other celebrity died because they remember it specifically, but it never happened.
So there are other things like that where people remember Very specifically, a thing that didn't happen.
And I think that what is happening with CNN's continued reporting of the fake news, that they actually believe it happened.
So, my best hypothesis, and I've got some pretty strong backing for this, don't ask me how, but my hypothesis is that CNN actually believes it, And they believe it because they actually remember it, even though it didn't happen.
Because when you talk to the folks on social media, the most common thing that you hear from them when you say that it's fake news and that it's a hoax, the most common response is, I heard it with my own ears.
And then you show them the actual quote, and they can see with their own eyes That what they heard with their own ears, or they think they remember hearing with their own ears, didn't happen.
So there are a whole bunch of people who have an actual memory of an event that never happened, and you can know for sure.
Let me ask you this.
In your personal life, since the dawn of text messaging, so only since text messaging became part of our natural fabric of life, How many times have you had this experience?
You're having a conversation, usually with a loved one, might be a family member, and one of you makes a claim of something that happened or did not ever happen.
In other words, you're texting back and forth, and one of you says, but you said you were going to throw me a birthday party tomorrow.
Whatever the claim is, it doesn't matter.
And the other person says, no, that never happened.
And then you look back through the text messages and you find out for sure.
And you find out that one of you had a false memory.
How many times since the dawn of text messaging have you personally had the experience of having a false memory that you could prove to yourself beyond a doubt you had a false memory because you could go back in the text message and actually see very clearly that you remembered something backwards.
Twice this week to me.
Just this week.
I think two times this week I've had the experience where somebody went back in a text message and found something that they remembered very specifically that just never happened.
Now, before text messaging, Yeah, so you can see in the comments here how many people have had that.
Before the dawn of text messaging, how would you have solved that conundrum where there's the two of you and you have completely different memories?
Somebody said women do it routinely.
It's not just women.
If you think it's just women, you have an additional cognitive thing you need to work through.
Because... Let me back up and put it this way.
I often think that the way you can understand where people are in their journey to greater awareness is that people who say I'm right and you're wrong probably are at the lowest level of awareness.
The people who say we both might be wrong are at a higher level of awareness.
So I always keep that in mind.
So anybody who's 100% sure the other side is 100% wrong, we're probably operating at the lowest level of understanding of just how the world works.
So one of the things I told you is that our understanding of our place in reality would change fairly quickly and in the age of Trump.
And one of the things that's changing is our understanding of false memories.
Now, it's always been a thing for, I don't know, my whole life, I've been seeing stories about false memories, and I've been hearing this great story of a false memory, and every once in a while there'll be a big story about a false memory.
But here's what's different.
Since the dawn of text messaging, you can find out how often it happens.
You couldn't know before.
Before, if a scientist came on and said, hey, false memories are common, What would you as an audience member say?
Yeah, I'm sure they're common.
For other people.
I don't have any false memories, but I'm pretty sure other people are having those false memories all over the place.
Look at those other people. Man, I guess the problem is other people are stupid.
That would have been a perfectly reasonable conclusion 20 years ago.
Twenty years ago, if you were supplied with many examples of people who had false memories, you'd say, ha ha ha, those idiots!
But now you have text messaging.
So you've had the experience over and over, and email too, you've had the experience of proving to yourself that your memory can be opposite.
And once you learn that your memories are often false as well, your understanding of reality changes.
So anyway, my assumption about CNN is that the reason their reporting is so sticky on the fine people thing is not because they think it's a clever political ploy.
It's good for their side politically, for sure, but that's not probably Probably.
Not the base problem.
The base problem seems to be that they remember something that didn't happen.
Now, when you show them the actual transcript, I have no idea what happens in their heads.
Because imagine you're a CNN host, and somebody says you've been reporting fake news for two years.
And they of course say, of course I'm not.
I remember it happening.
I'm reporting what happened.
That's as clean as it can get.
And then you show them the transcript and they can look and they can see that it didn't happen.
It's right there in the transcript.
It could not be more clear.
What would their brain do when presented with that?
Well, I'll tell you what they won't do.
Oh, I guess I've been wrong for two years, let me correct that.
There isn't the slightest chance that can happen, because we're too cognitively ingested.
There is what I would call a cognitive expense to admitting you're wrong in public about something that's so important, and you've said so many times, the cognitive expense To say you were wrong after all of that is overwhelming.
So you should not expect CNN to change because brains are just not that flexible.
This is a real scientific phenomenon.
And I think that someday there will be scientific papers written about how people could be so wrong about their memories on the fine people stuff.
All right, enough about that. So Trump vetoed the attempt to stop his executive action on wall funding.
I'm going to call this a huge win for the president, even if the Supreme Court knocks it down, which I think they won't.
My guess is that they won't knock it down.
They might, but he wins either way.
And here's why.
So remember that the The controversial part is that he was...
I think my point is he still has budget to build wall either way.
So he'll start building some wall no matter what.
If the Supreme Court says, oh, this part of that funding you can't have, he'll still be on his way to building wall.
He's still got the budget request for the following years.
There's plenty to fight about.
CNN website report is where the dossier, I don't know what that's about.
So my point is that Trump has proven to his base that he will go all the way to the mat for the wall.
I think that's all he has to do.
I think that his base will be happy that whoever, you know, if there's somebody else who might replace him as president, Who's a Democrat, there's almost no chance that the Democrat will do more than Trump has done and will do for the border.
And those will be the only choices for president.
You'll have President Trump who tried hard, even if he didn't get you what you wanted.
You can see the effort, you can see the risk, the political capital, you know, the effort, the creativity.
I mean, he tried everything. It's all there.
No Democrats can do that.
In fact, at least one of them wants to take down some wall.
Beto. So...
Do you know that Beto means veto in Spanish?
Did you know that?
Beto is Spanish for veto?
No, that's not true.
But you could convince a lot of people it was.
So there's no truth to that.
But the people who don't speak Spanish are going to say, yeah, they probably use a B instead of a V. I'll bet that is what that means.
Yeah, beto is veto.
Now what's clever about that from a persuasion point of view is that no one likes a veto.
So even if the only thing that happened was you started repeating those words in your head, beto, veto, no.
Beto doesn't mean veto.
Your brain will lose the doesn't because your brain sees, you know, the concepts and the people and the things.
It doesn't retain as well the connecting words like don't and isn't.
It just forgets those.
I'm exaggerating a little bit.
But if you force people to say in their heads, Beto and veto, And it makes you wonder how to pronounce Beto.
You'll forget. Is it Beto?
Oh, it's Beto.
Is it Vito?
Vito Beto.
And then you'd be mispronouncing his name, apparently.
I've been mispronouncing his name for the whole time, I guess.
Let's talk about the president's reaction to New Zealand and the A horrific shooting in the Muslim mosque.
49 people, I think, is the death count.
Horrible. Probably one of the most horrible things that's ever happened anywhere, if you don't count the 50 beheaded heads that they found in ISIS territory recently.
But just one of the most horrific things.
And then the president had a new chance To say the right thing.
So it was a brand new opportunity for President Trump to say the right thing on race and on Muslims and to maybe reset our belief about the president.
So you would never ask for this opportunity, but it happened.
And it was just a new time to totally reset and say, this is President Trump.
This is what he thinks about this.
And he's right with the world.
And the world had a very specific idea what they wanted from their president.
You know, we all had an idea, you know, what is it you're going to say that would be in the category of the right thing to say?
You know, it's a big category.
So there's like the right things to say, big category.
And then there's the wrong things to say, another big category.
So how hard is it to land in the right area?
In other words, if you have a big area that would be the right things to say and a big area that would be all the wrong things to say, is it really hard to land somewhere in the middle of the right things to say?
I don't think that's hard.
The President, however, did not land in the category of the right things to say.
He squandered another opportunity to make things better and, in fact, made things worse.
Let me tell you how.
So, one of the reporters asked the president if he was worried about a rise in white supremacy movements around the world.
Okay? Now remember, so you're the president and somebody says, are you worried about the rise of white supremacy around the world?
And keep in mind that an avowed white supremacist had just killed 49 Muslims in a horrific attack.
And you're the president, and somebody says, are you concerned about the rise of white nationalist violence?
There's a big field of right things to say.
Yes, for example.
Yes, I'm concerned.
Yes, we have to look at this.
Yes, we should be looking at this problem.
Yes, it could be a problem.
Big, big category of right ways to answer that question.
And what did the president say?
Nothing in that category.
That big category of right things to say?
Nothing in there.
He said no.
He said it's a small problem.
He said specifically he said he was blaming a small group of people, quote, with very, very serious problems.
In other words, he minimized it.
Man, that was wrong.
That was so wrong that maybe his biggest mistake since I've been following him...
Remember I said that when Sarah Sanders had a chance recently in a press conference to correct the record on the Fine People hoax, and she missed it.
And I said, that's just about one of the worst missed opportunities or mistakes you've ever seen.
Within a week...
The president gets this underhanded, soft pitch, just like, hey, are you concerned about white supremacy after a white supremacist just killed 49 Muslims?
Here's a softball. We'll do it a little slower.
Here, we'll do it really slow.
Get ready. Get ready to hit it.
It's going to be really slow. Here you go.
Here you go. And the president did this.
He let it go. It was the softest pitch anybody ever sent his way.
All he had to do was say, damn right I'm concerned.
Hell yes, I'm concerned.
Now, why didn't he?
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
There's a twist to my story.
Before you get mad at me, there's a twist.
So you say to yourself, okay, now how do I interpret the fact that he had such a soft pitch and he didn't even swing at it?
One interpretation is he loves those white nationalists.
Maybe he's one of them.
Maybe he doesn't want to make them mad.
Maybe he's secretly a big old racist and he just can't bring himself to say something bad about a guy who killed or a category in which one person killed 49 people, 49 Muslims.
So it plays into the worst thing you could think about him.
But Why'd he do it?
Is it because he's dumb?
Is it because he didn't see it coming, like it was a clever trap?
Is it because he's a big old racist and he doesn't care if you know?
Is it any of those?
It's something else.
Here's what it is.
And I'll bet none of you saw this.
All right, tell me in the comments if any of you saw this.
The reason he minimized the rise of white supremacy is...
Let's see if you can get the answer.
What is the reason that President Trump minimized the rise of white nationalist violence?
Somebody saying never apologize.
That's not it. Not worried.
Not it. They want to blame Trump for it.
Thank you. Somebody got it right.
Watch how many of you did not realize why he got trapped.
Here's the trap.
The assumption is that white nationalist violence is because of President Trump.
So the unstated setup to the question is, you, President Trump, are the cause of white nationalist violence.
That's the understood part.
Now, do you think it's going up?
Because if the president said white nationalist violence is going up, they would then say, the news is the president takes responsibility without taking responsibility for the rise in white nationalist violence against Muslims.
They would have reported that the president admitted that he's the reason that Muslims got murdered in New Zealand.
That's what they would have reported.
Was it dumb for him To play down the rise in white nationalism.
Probably he blew the call.
So probably he blew it.
But there was a way to handle it without blaming himself.
He could have said, it's very troubling, and we cannot tolerate violence against Muslims, something has to be done about it, but let's not blame the United States, or let's not blame me for it.
So he was trapped by the question.
Because either way he answered the question, he was going to be wrong, and he was going to be wrong in a big way.
So if you heard that and you said to yourself, there is no other reason that he would minimize the white nationalist violence, there's no other reason except that he must be a racist, you're missing the most obvious reason.
The most obvious reason he minimized it is because they're fucking blaming him for it.
They're blaming him for it.
Of course he's going to say it's not that bad.
What the hell would you say in that situation?
If you got blamed for mass murders, you'd say, well, I don't know that they're going up, necessarily.
Maybe not that bad.
So the bottom line on that is that he completely blew it.
on that question. And you can't be happy about that.
But, don't believe that was a simple question.
That was a question that he was going to get hammered either way.
There was no right answer for him politically.
But he still blew it.
Alright. Let's see.
Yeah, I was going to say something I don't want to say.
There's a trend I just saw in the news toward honeymooning alone.
Have you heard that?
They use the honeymooning alone headline just to make the story sound interesting, but the larger story was couples who were traveling or vacationing alone.
So there's a growing trend toward people traveling alone, even if they have a partner.
And the idea is that people don't like to go to the same places.
They don't like to do the same stuff.
And this is part of a larger problem, which has to do with the amount of choice we have.
In this country. So if you went back a couple hundred years and you said, okay, it's 7 o'clock at night and we don't have electricity and we're living on the farm, there weren't many things to do.
So the family would probably look at each other and say, what do you want to do?
And they'd say, I don't know.
How about somebody hum and the rest of us will square dance or something?
And everybody goes, well, I don't have a smartphone.
I don't have a radio. I don't have a TV. I don't have the better idea.
So somebody hum and the rest of us will square dance.
And then the family's like, and they're square dancing away.
And suddenly they're busy and they're having a good time, etc.
Because they had no other choices.
There was just nothing else to do.
Fast forward to modern times, I have a million choices of things to do with my time.
Just on my phone alone, I've got unlimited, like, literally infinite things I can do just in the thing in my pocket, not to mention my other sources of entertainment, the places I can go, the people I can see.
So I've developed very specific preferences about the food I want to eat, the movies I want to see, The entertainment I want to consume, etc.
So if you put any two people in the same room and you say, all right, you two, decide what you want to do with each other.
It's not easy anymore.
Try to find two people in the world who want to watch the same TV show or the same movie at the same time.
Now, you can find people who want to watch the same movie, but try to find them if they want to watch it at the same time.
It's not easy anymore.
Try to take anybody out to eat.
If you've just met, it's easy.
Because you don't try to get too picky the first time you go out to lunch.
So let's say you're having a lunch meeting with some associate.
That's easy. You just say, oh, meet me at the Italian place because everybody eats Italian.
It's just easy. But if you're a couple, you never want to eat at the same place at the same time.
You might both like sushi.
You might both like Italian food.
You might both like Chinese food.
But do you want it at the same time?
Never. So what's happened is we've created a world with so many choices that we've become very picky about what we do and when.
And then you throw two people together and you say, all right, the rule is that you have to do something together because you're a couple.
Couples do things together.
What do you want to do? And you can't find things that people want to do together anymore.
It becomes almost impossible to be a couple and also do things together.
Let me ask you this.
I want your relationship advice.
Let's say you're a couple.
Doesn't matter if you're married, living together, whatever.
But you have to be in the same household.
And you think to yourself, let's say it's a weekend or whatever, and you think to yourself, I think I would like to go do something with my spouse.
So you go find your spouse, and what is your spouse doing when you find them?
Well, in every case, your spouse is not just sitting there.
Nobody in the couple is just sitting there thinking, I hope somebody comes and asks me what I'm doing, because then we can make some plans and we'll do something.
They're always doing something.
So you find your spouse, and your spouse is, let's say, cleaning the garage.
And you say, hey, do you want to go for a drive?
And your spouse says, yeah, sure, that'd be great, as soon as I finish the garage.
Well, how long will that take?
Well, I don't know. So you say, come find me when you're done with the garage.
So the person cleans the garage and goes and finds you and says, hey, I'm done with the garage.
Let's go for a drive.
What does the spouse say?
Well, I just started watching this show.
How about after the show?
And then the other one says, I don't want to watch that show.
So I think I'll go run a chore.
And then the TV show is done.
And then you go, all right, where are you?
I'm done with my TV show.
Let's do something. And you realize your spouse is at the store.
So you wait for them to come back to the store.
But since then, you've started dinner.
So you can't drop what you're doing because you've already started boiling.
But you see where I'm going, right?
In my experience...
Two people can almost never be on the same page because somebody is always doing something and they need to finish it.
And you're not just going to wait.
So you end up doing something and then, you know, etc.
Do you have this problem?
Shooting is great to do together.
Yeah, that actually is a good thing to do together.
No, this is not an issue about me and my relationship.
This is an issue about every relationship and every person.
It's a generic. Oh, the point is that being a couple is far harder than it ever was before.
Because before, you didn't have options.
Like, if you got married, it would probably be hard to find somebody else to marry anyway.
So you might as well stick with what you got.
Today, you've got the internet.
You could find other options, etc.
And there's too many choices.
So it's hard to be a couple.
That's all I'm saying. All right.
Let's see. What else is happening?
Oh, so the Beto news, Beto O'Rourke, is that apparently he was a member of a hacker's group when he was 18 and under, a teenager.
And, you know, the hackers, of course, can do illegal things, but not necessarily.
So hacking doesn't necessarily mean you're doing illegal things, but probably.
So, and then I guess he admitted that he was part of the hacker group because he could unlock features of games, he could break games.
So basically, we know that when he was a teenager, he was a professional thief of intellectual property.
So Beto has acknowledged that he was actually a thief.
Because he stole intellectual property.
Now here's the interesting thing about that.
Everybody knows that, you know, people of a certain age probably downloaded some music or stole some games or whatever.
It's so universal that you would just assume anybody in an age group probably did a little bit.
But suppose you're trying to be a Democrat.
And to be a Democrat means that you have to be okay with Hollywood.
Is Hollywood okay supporting somebody who was a professional thief of Hollywood material?
So if you job, you know, he was basically, you know, a serial thief of Hollywood property.
Now, I say Hollywood just to stand in for entertainment.
It may have been more video games, but it's all intellectual property.
And he was acknowledged to be a thief of intellectual property.
Now, of course, everybody in his age group, most of them anyway, are in the same category.
But because he's famous for it, you have to wonder.
Now, the other thing is that his, I guess his hacker name was...
Psychedelic something?
Warrior? It doesn't matter what the second word is, but it was psychedelic something.
And so somebody said, I wonder if he's ever dropped acid.
Let me tell you something.
Let me ask you.
If you've seen Beto, has he done hallucinogenics?
Has Beto O'Rourke Ever done LSD or other hallucinogenics?
Go. Anybody who's ever done hallucinogenics will have an advantage in answering this question.
What do you think?
Do you think he's done hallucinogenics?
I'm going to say, if there's anything I could ever bet on that I would make a large bet, I would say yes.
Now, if you think this is going to be a criticism, well, you're wrong.
I'm not. It would not be a criticism, and in fact, I might even prefer it.
It might be a plus.
Let me tell you why I feel...
This is why I feel he's done hallucinogenics.
Maybe you could say in the comments.
What evidence do you have That he's done hallucinogenics.
Now, some of it might be just the way he talks, right?
So he's got sort of a surfer, skateboarder kind of a way that he talks.
And so that alone would make you biased toward thinking, oh, well, he's done some hallucinogenics.
I'll tell you what tells me he's done hallucinogenics.
What tells me is that he doesn't seem to see The barriers that other people see about himself.
That's always the tell.
So here's the tell for somebody who's done hallucinogenics.
They think their barriers are artificial.
Think about it.
The people who think that the barriers on their own success are artificial, meaning that he can break through them, and in this case, he could become a president With a very light resume.
Now, do you think that Beto thinks he could become President of the United States with such a weak resume?
Yeah, he does.
He totally does.
He totally thinks that he could be President of the United States with a weak resume and his lankiness and his weirdness and everything like that.
And you know what? He's not entirely wrong.
So one of the tells for somebody who has experienced hallucinogens is that they see the world around them as somewhat artificial, meaning that they know it's a construct of their own mind.
Once you realize that your experience is to a large extent a construct of your own mind, then you can start removing barriers.
So you can say to yourself, yes, it does seem in the normal world That it would be impossible for me to become the President of the United States with my resume.
But I've taken hallucinogens, and I know that this barrier I'm looking at just right in front of me, I mean, it's as obvious as anything.
What could be more obvious that you can't become President of the United States if you don't have a good resume?
That's pretty obvious, right?
Not if you've done hallucinogens.
It's not obvious.
Meaning that you can see more possibilities.
So my take on Beto is that he has done some hallucinogens because he acts like a person who doesn't seem barriers.
That's my take. Now, could be wrong.
Could be wrong about anything.
Let me tell you how weird my world is.
Let's call this the Candace Owens effect.
I'm going to give this a name.
Because, you know, any kind of effect always has a name.
I like to put a famous name on this.
I'm going to call it the Candace Owens effect.
And the way that goes is that you think you're a person who talks about the news, and then you just become the news.
So the New Zealand shooter had this long...
What do you call it?
The document he read.
What do you call it? Manifesto.
So the New Zealand shooter wrote a manifesto in which he mentioned Candace Owens, among other things.
And I'm thinking, poor Candace Owens.
She's just minding her own business, trying to do well for the country, managing her career, got a lot going on.
She's got speaking opportunities.
She's got her new show, which is great, by the way.
Her new show on PragerU is terrific, the one I saw anyway.
She's just minding her own business.
And then she sees in the news that there's a mass shooting in New Zealand, and it's the biggest news in the world.
And she's just watching the news like anybody watches the news.
And she's like, oh, this is horrific.
Probably having the same thoughts everybody else is like, oh my god, this is just the worst thing.
And then as she's watching the news, the news starts talking about her.
Imagine what that felt like.
She's watching the news.
About something that seems like it could not have anything to do with her.
And suddenly she's in the middle of the story.
Just minding her own business on the other side of the world.
And suddenly she's in the middle of this New Zealand mass murder story.
Anyway, so I'm going to call that the Candace Owens effect.
Where you think you're an observer of the news, but suddenly you are the news.
And how many times have you seen that happen with me?
I will talk about the news and then I get sucked into the story because I said something that was either interesting or quotable or whatever.
So I had a version of that today.
There's a, in the climate change conversation, one of the big names on the, I don't want to call him the skeptical side because that's not quite what his deal is, but you've heard of Bjorn Lomborg.
He talks about the economics and the risk management of climate change.
So he's not criticizing climate change on the scientific part.
So he's not saying that your science is wrong.
He's saying that your own estimates, science, are for not much of a problem, which is a point I made, which is why I've tweeted him before.
And so when I watch the story about climate, I'm looking at these names of peoples and then I start talking about it.
But I opened my Twitter this morning and I've got a message from Bjorn Lombard.
So I think I'm just watching the news.
And then Bjorn Lomburg sends me a personal message.
And I'm thinking, well, how the hell is it?
I'm in this weird world where I think I'm an observer, but then I'm somehow sucked into the story.
Now, in this case, it was in a very minor way.
He wrote a tweet thread, which I... Which I just tweeted.
And his tweet thread was in response to the children who left school and went on a school strike to protest not enough action on climate change.
And it's a long thread in which he's making the case that the real risk, if you're just talking about risk management, is way overblown.
That they're just doing the numbers wrong, and it's pretty obvious to see that.
And when I say they're doing the numbers wrong, I mean the way it's reported.
So if you take the IPCC's own estimate of how bad things are going to be, if you just hear the news report it, you say, my God, that sounds bad, the way you reported it.
But if you actually look at the IPCC's numbers, what it forgets is that the standard of living increases no matter what.
I mean, it's pretty guaranteed because it's been going on forever.
But the human experience just gets better and better.
And even if there's a part of it that is getting worse, it's going to be dwarfed by how much better things are.
And the classic example of that Is that the deaths, the human deaths from things like floods and hurricanes and natural disasters used to be sky high because you couldn't see them coming, you had bad structures, and there wasn't time to get out and you just got hit and, you know, thousands of people are dead from the hurricane in the old days.
But now we have warning, we have better buildings, we have better roads, we have transportation, you know, and so people just get out.
And likewise, if you get injured, the odds of dying from your injuries are now lower because we have good health care, etc.
So if you look at the graph of people who died from natural disasters, it used to be sky high and it's gone sharply down every year.
So right now we have the lowest risk of dying in a natural disaster of all of humanity.
Like way, way lower.
It's not even close. It used to be way up here and now it's way down here.
My one criticism with Bjorn is that I don't feel like he gives enough attention to the other side's best points.
So you always have to be suspicious if somebody is attacking the weak points and not the strong points.
So the weakest point of the climate Crisis, if you will.
The weakest argument is that they've done a good job of calculating what the economics will be in 100 years.
That's a terrible argument.
Hey, we know what the economy will be doing in regards to climate change for the next hundred years.
That's a weak argument because nobody can make that kind of an estimate.
It doesn't account for technological change.
It's just a ridiculous argument.
So Bjorn mostly goes after the ridiculous part of their argument.
But there's another part of the argument that I haven't seen him go after, and that would make sense, because that's not his domain.
And that is that the climate will get so bad that, economics aside, you can't live on the planet.
So that's the real problem.
So it's gone from, this will be very expensive.
You know, that used to be what I worried about.
My God, the economics of climate change are terrible.
And then you realize that we'll probably have the wherewithal to get people out of danger before they die, even if things do go bad, because we've got roads and early warnings and money and all those things.
But it seems that the climate change argument is starting to maybe focus a little bit On the issue of, say, the coral dying, and things that allegedly, and I know there's disagreement on this, but things that allegedly would be impossible to come back from.
In other words, that the environment could no longer be self-sustaining, so it wouldn't matter how much money you had, because you couldn't spend it, you'd be dead, because the climate would be unsupportable, you couldn't grow food, etc.
So, I don't know how likely it is that those things will happen.
My sense of it is that's a pretty low risk.
But I wanted to read you a quote from an article that I think I tweeted this morning.
But this is the first chapter from an article, and it's in Quillet, and it's about climate change.
Listen to this first paragraph.
The fact that belief in climate change in the U.S., Tends to correlate with political affiliation.
And that's true, right? People tend to line up Republican and Democrat on their belief about climate change.
So the fact that climate change in the U.S. tends to correlate with political affiliation should tell you that we are not objectively interpreting the science.
That does tell you that, right?
Now, what's the low level of awareness way to interpret the fact that That people think they're looking at science, but it's obvious that they're just lining up by political parties.
What's the low-level way to interpret that?
Well, the low-level way to interpret that is that one side are idiots, right?
So that's the way most of us believe, right?
Both sides, the Democrats and Republicans, to the extent that they have different views on climate change, mostly they think the other side are idiots.
That's the lowest level of understanding about your reality.
Here's the higher level.
We're not making decisions based on facts and reasons.
The fact that both sides are lined up by political preference is a very strong indication or confirmation of everything that at least psychologists know about human beings.
It is a complete illusion that people are making decisions based on the facts as they know them.
So, for example, one side will say, well, 97% of scientists agree, so I'm taking that side.
So it sounds like they listen to some facts and say, well, that's a pretty good fact.
I'm going to go with that.
But nothing like that has happened because that same fact Doesn't work in the other political party.
If facts made any difference, the same fact would have the same impact for both political parties.
So the only thing we can know for sure is that both sides are ignoring the facts.
So the lowest level of understanding of your reality is, man, those people in the other political party are idiots because they can't see the truth in these facts.
But both sides are thinking that about each other.
If that's where you are, saying that the other side are idiots because they can't see the truth of climate science, whichever side you're on, you think you have your truth, you're at the lowest level of awareness about your own reality.
The higher level is that neither side are using the facts or the reason.
Now, that doesn't mean that some scientists are not using facts and reason, because they're trained to do that.
They have checks and balances in terms of peer review and trying to duplicate experiments, etc.
So even though half the time they can be wrong in science, the stuff that's right tends to be sticky and stays around for a while.
The only rational opinion you should have about climate science is that you can't trust anybody.
You can't trust the science.
You can't trust your interpretation of the science, which is more important, is more to the point.
There is uncertainty.
So the question is, what do you do when you can't know?
So that's where it gets interesting.
If you're talking to somebody and they say, you know, you can't know.
So is there any path that you would take under the condition that you just can't know?
If it's a problem, small problem, big problem, end of the world, tiny problem, you just can't know.
So what do you do under that situation?
Well, as luck would have it, we do have paths That would be independent of who's right.
And, of course, Generation 4 nuclear would be that path because they're safe from meltdowns, and they're economical, and it wouldn't be hard to start building them.
Apparently, the United States is building, or US companies are building, four nuclear reactors in China.
So we know how to make nuclear reactors.
Like, that's something we know how to do.
So there is a path to remediating the risk of climate.
You've got the CO2 capture technology that the government has now funded some studies, funded some research into carbon capture, so that takes the carbon directly into the air if we ever need to.
And then the government is also funding a nuclear fuel, flexible fuel test facility so they can quickly test the best nuclear fuels to build these new types of reactors that don't have a risk of melting down.
So those are two things that the government is doing right now that are directly on point.
Because you don't have to decide.
You do not have to decide who has the right answer about climate.
You can actually ignore that question because the answer is the same both ways.
You want your flexible nuclear fuel.
You want to get as good as you can at that technology, no matter what.
No matter what, you still want that technology because it's so economically important.
It's going to have an impact on pollution in general, on energy, whether we can have electric cars, just everything.
So that would be the highest level of awareness, I would say, is to argue it on the level of you just don't know, but there might be a big problem, and the path is the same no matter what.
The path is the same no matter what.
If somebody isn't saying something like that, they're not really using any kind of logic or reason to get to their decision.
All right. I think that's all for now.
Does anybody have any questions? I've got some exciting announcements coming out about my startup, WinHub and Interface, and I think you're going to like it.
So we've got something exciting coming on that, and I just have to confirm a few things before I can announce it, and then we'll have some fun.
You can capture CO2, but you have to put in more energy in than you get out.
Not if you use nuclear.
So if you had a nuclear option for taking the carbon into the air, you probably would be economical.
But I don't need to answer that question.
You know, it's important that people are working on trying to figure those, to solve those economics.
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