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March 18, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
59:57
Episode 455 Scott Adams: Aspirin, The Rise of White Supremacist Violence, False Memories
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Hey everybody!
I'm glad you're awake and I'm glad you're here because it's the best part of the day!
It's coffee with Scott Adams and you are about to enjoy the unparalleled pleasure of something I call the simultaneous sip.
To enjoy it, you probably need to have a glass of mug, a stein, a chalice, perhaps a thermos.
Maybe a glass. Filled with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Delicious.
Alright, here's your question of the day.
I want to see your answer in the comments.
There's a startling rise in white supremacist, white nationalist violence in this country.
How many people died from white supremacists in 2017?
I don't have the 2018 number.
But how many total people in the United States were killed by white supremacists?
Go. You can't look it up.
Actually, it's more fun if you just give me what you imagine the number is.
Your best guess, the total number of people who were killed by white supremacists in 2017.
Go. I see zero.
I see 42.
Now, neither of those are right.
Now, remember, I'm talking about 2017.
2018 might have been 42.
I don't know. The number is...
18. 18 people.
18 people were killed by white supremacists in 2017.
Now, I don't know if 2018 and 2019 are looking worse, but let's say they are.
Let's say they are.
But if you're going to size it, roughly 18 for the full year of 2017.
Now, let's determine how much of a problem that is.
Okay? Let's put it in context.
So there were a total of 18 people killed by white supremacists.
How many people died from just accidents?
Just all kinds of accidents put together in the United States in one year.
161,000.
But there were 18 people killed by white supremacists.
I'm not minimizing that.
We should drive that to zero.
And if it's doubling or something every year, well, you've got to worry about it.
But I want to put it in context, because context matters.
You can never be wrong with context.
How many people died from opioids last year?
72,000.
How many died from white supremacist violence?
18 in 2017.
How many people died from suicide in this country in one year?
27,000.
How many people died from shark attacks?
In one year, let's say in the United States, just Americans, how many Americans were attacked by sharks, not dead, but attacked by sharks, about the same as the number of people killed by white supremacists.
So roughly speaking, shark attacks and white supremacist violence, about the same size.
How many people died on bicycles?
Bicycle deaths in the United States.
I only have a 2012 figure, but it's probably not that different from 2019.
Not much has changed in the world of bicycles.
But in 2012, the total number of bicycle deaths in the United States was 722.
That means that the bicycle in your garage If I've done my math right, is 42 times more likely to kill you than a white supremacist.
Let me say that again.
The bicycle in your garage is 42 times more likely to kill you than a white supremacist.
I know I'm playing loose with the numbers, but you get the idea in terms of the scope of things.
How many people were killed by their pets?
In the United States, how many people get killed by their own pet?
Typically a dog.
So this is mostly dog maulings.
The number of people in the United States killed by their pet per year is 20 to 30.
That's just dog deaths. You could probably add in a few others for other animals.
But there are more people killed by their pets Every year in the United States that are killed by white supremacists.
Now, let's say you're the President of the United States and people are blaming you for the rise in white nationalist racist violence.
And a reporter asks you in public, hey, is there a big uptick in white nationalist violence?
Should the president say it's a big, big deal, or should he downplay it?
Which is what he did.
He downplayed it.
Well, if you say it's a big deal, you've just allowed the illegitimate press to say that you're the cause of massive white supremacist death Because you said it's going up.
Because they're the ones who have said it's your fault.
So if you say it's going up, and you let stand the idea that it's your fault, you've just admitted inadvertently that you're the cause of an uptick of terrorism.
Would it be smart for a president to admit, when it's not true, to admit that he's the cause of terrorism?
Probably not, right?
Probably not a good play.
Have you noticed a trend in when the president talks about groups or organizations or countries?
Have you noticed a trend about the way he talks about them in public, whether it's white supremacists, whether it's ISIS, whether it's any other group?
Have you noticed a trend?
The trend is, here's the pattern.
The president minimizes.
The president minimizes.
The president minimizes any group he doesn't want to have more recruits.
So when the president says that ISIS is, you know, they're on their way out, they're defeated, let's say that's not 100% true.
Is it good for the president to say ISIS is basically beaten, even if it's only 90% true?
Yes. It's exactly what you want your leader to say, even if it's not 100% true.
Because ISIS depends on some sense of success to support their recruiting.
You can't do recruiting if you're a shrinking group that's being destroyed every day.
You can only recruit if you're this spunky little group that the United States can't even beat.
So when the President talks about ISIS, he minimizes them, because that's what's good for our side.
When the President talks about white nationalists and those terrorists, he minimizes them.
Because you don't want them to have recruits.
Now what about when he talks about the crime that's coming across the borders?
The criminals coming across the borders are not recruiting.
They simply are criminals.
There's no organization which is the organization of illegal immigrant criminals.
There's no sense of recruiting that is important to that story.
So when he says a lot of crime coming across the border, he uses hyperbole.
He exaggerates the amount of crime because that's how you focus on it, that's how you take it seriously, that's how it gets funding, that's how it gets a priority.
So look at the president's pattern.
Well, the president is not improving recruiting for MS-13 by saying that he's destroying them every day and ISIS is picking them apart and they're being deported.
But when you're talking about crime in general, He is exaggerating it because that's what gets resources to fight it.
When he's talking about the white supremacists or ISIS, he treats them largely the same by minimizing them because you don't want to make it look like that's something that's growing.
That doesn't help you.
Now, should the president give a speech in which he speaks out against white supremacy?
Should the president do that?
Well, I have mixed feelings.
Somebody's saying, no, no, he should not do it.
The problem is that the press has sort of ruined that option.
The reason the press has ruined that option is that they've set him up so it would look like he was forced to do it.
If it looks like you're forced to do it, it doesn't come across as sincere.
Likewise, no matter what the president said on that topic, they would say, why did it take so long, and why did you say it wrong?
So there's probably no winning path there, because they're just going to say, you should have said it earlier, and you said it wrong when you finally did say it.
No matter what he says, they're going to say that.
And they're going to say, we forced you to do it, so it's not sincere.
Now, between now and 2020, It might be a good idea for him to let the current situation get a little bit of distance so that it does not look like he's being forced into it.
In other words, wait until the headlines have changed from white supremacist violence, because you know they will change.
It'll be something else in the news for a while.
I would give it a few months, and then I would, if I did it, so I'm going to put an if on this, If I were the president, and if I wanted to come out with a strong statement against any discrimination against Muslims, if I wanted to do that, I would do it as sort of a surprise.
I would just wait a couple months, and then when there's nothing pushing it in the news, and everybody thinks that the news is no longer pushing the president, then and only then, When it just looks like a good idea, he would be free to do it.
Now, he probably could write it so that they at least say he said the right things.
That could probably be done.
You know, if it's a written speech, you've got lots of people looking at it, you could make sure that it was the right stuff to say.
But I noticed that there are people criticizing him for not being able to say nice things unless they're on a teleprompter.
So you're still open to the, sure, he can read a speech, but unless we hear it in his own words extemporaneously and feel the emotion in it, we just think he's reading the words.
So he would have to match anything he read from a teleprompter, he would have to match it with a good dollop Of his own off-record, not off-record, off-teleprompter comments.
So he would have to say it like a human being in front of the world for anybody to accept it.
So should he do it?
I think there's a path there, but not right away.
The sooner he does it, the worse, probably.
But if he wants to do it before Before it becomes a bigger campaign theme, he's got lots of time to do it.
All right. So you notice that the news will often take whichever side is the bad side for the president.
So in the case of the white supremacist movement and whether it's growing or shrinking, if you say that it's doubling from last year, That's very misleading, because that could just be one terror attack.
All it would take is one highly effective, horrible terror attack, and suddenly the number of white supremacist deaths, you know, people that they've killed, would double or triple.
So you have to be careful when you're starting from such a tiny base.
So I think it would be fair for the president to say, In terms of all of our other problems, it's one of the smallest.
But we're not going to treat it like the smallest because it could grow.
And problems that could grow are different than problems that are static.
So you could treat the white supremacist increase, assuming that there is an increase, you could treat it as a high priority.
You know what else you could do?
You could declare an emergency.
What if the president declared an emergency?
I just thought of this at the moment.
I'm not sure this is a good idea.
But suppose he declared an emergency to get resources to combat the rise of white supremacy.
How many heads would explode if he declared an emergency?
Because the other side would have to either argue that it's not a big deal, Or they'd have to say he did the right thing.
It's not obvious to me why you couldn't do that.
If the country cares, if they want more resources on it, and I've heard it said, and I don't know if this is true, but I've heard it said that maybe there are not enough resources On dealing with the rise of white supremacy.
And that might be true. There might not be enough resources on that.
So why not declare a national emergency to look into it?
Okay? Alright, new topic.
My understanding is that the New Jersey City of Newark is looking to do a trial, I guess it would be a test maybe, of universal basic income.
So one city, Newark, It is looking at just giving money to people who don't have an income or are below some income, and just to see how it goes.
What is your feeling about that?
Most of you will say, my God, that's a terrible idea, giving money to people for nothing, and it's a slippery slope, and pretty soon we'll be giving all of our money to everybody.
That would be the worst way to look at it.
All right? Here's the right way to look at it.
If you can test it small, you should do it.
That's the smartest position for just about anything.
It doesn't matter if you're in corporate America, it doesn't matter if it's your personal life, it doesn't matter if it's the government.
This statement is true across all realms.
If you can test it small, do it.
If you're saying, don't try that because it's dumb, you are the dumbest person in the conversation.
If you say that testing something small is dumb, you're the dumbest person in the conversation.
Testing things small is pretty much always a good idea because you're limiting what could go wrong.
Your testing is small. So when you see somebody testing something that you think is a terrible idea, your first impression should be good.
There are only two things that could come out of this.
Either I'm wrong, which would be good news, because we found a new thing we can do.
So wouldn't it be great if you thought universal basic income was a terrible idea?
Somebody does a test and it worked out great.
Wouldn't you be pleased?
What's the other thing that would please you?
You thought all along it was a bad idea.
Somebody did a test and it clearly didn't work.
Now you're a genius.
You knew all along. You should always be in favor of the test.
Now, if you lived in Newark and your taxes might be influenced by it, well, maybe you think something different, right?
Because that's a different situation.
But if you're not in Newark and Newark wants to do this, or some majority want to do it, Let them do it.
Let's talk about aspirin.
So the news today is that aspirin may not be such a good idea in terms of taking a baby aspirin preventively just in case you get a heart attack if you're, let's say, over 50.
Now, you should always talk to your doctor.
Don't listen to cartoonists about medical advice.
There are some situations where your doctor will tell you to keep taking the aspirin, and it usually has to do with having a pretty verified risk of heart attack.
But if you have a healthy heart and no special markers for risk, the newest information based on, I guess, three new studies is that aspirin might do more bad than good, meaning it could make you bleed more, But it's not adding enough in terms of preventing heart attack damage to be worth it.
Now here's the interesting question.
What percentage of scientists believed you should take an aspirin last year?
What percentage?
Now I've asked this question before and there's this weird false memory thing that happens.
I thought That that was the standard recommendation.
In other words, if you had asked me a year ago, I would have said, yeah, pretty much all scientists and all doctors say you should do that over 50.
I thought it was close to a universal recommendation.
And I think I said that on Periscope, and somebody said, that's just not true.
And then you start researching it, and you find you can't really find You can't really find any number that says that it was always true that the expert said you should take a baby aspirin.
So that's actually probably a false memory that I had.
So I probably have some kind of a false memory, and some of you do too, that aspirin was...
Basically universally recommended by the experts.
I think if you dig into it, you'll find that the scientists were a little bit more mixed.
So that's an open question.
Could you find how many scientists or how many doctors were pretty confident about that in the past?
I don't know what that number would be.
I would like to invite...
Anybody onto this Periscope as a guest, you can just click the option that says you want to be picked as a guest to join me.
Specifically on the question of the 97% of climate scientists being on the same side.
So if you believe that 97% or even 100% of scientists are on the same side on climate change, I want to talk to you.
To see if I can reprogram your beliefs.
So this is an offer to reprogram anybody who believes that 97% of scientists are on the same side when it comes to climate change.
I want to talk to you live if you believe that's true.
All right. What do you think is more dangerous?
The rise of white supremacists or the press?
So I've told you that white supremacists killed 17 people in 2017.
So that's their death count.
Let's say it doubles. Maybe there's 30 or so people killed per year by white supremacists, which is way too many.
Way too many. But let's compare it to the death toll from the press.
So here's some things that the press has done.
The press gave us weapons of mass destruction.
Now, you could say that really that was the government fooling the people, but I would argue that if the people were not on board with war in Iraq, it couldn't have happened.
So the press, by promoting the fake news that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, probably caused the death of millions of Iraqis.
And X thousands of Americans.
So I'll say the press has killed, say, three million people or whatever it is in Iraq.
I don't know what the number is, but something in that range.
What about the press?
Let's say, how about the press, the way they treat climate change?
If climate change is real, Real in the sense that it's a dire emergency and human caused.
So that's what the press has been promoting.
If that's true, then it's also true that they have not been promoting the only thing that could fix it, which is new designs of nuclear power, the so-called Generation 4, that don't have a risk of meltdown.
And don't really have much of any other risk, and we know how to make them, you know, we should iterate a few more times, but we also know how to iterate.
So if the press is telling us we're doomed, but the solution they're pushing, something like a Green New Deal, would make things worse, then the press is putting the entire planet at risk by not By not focusing on the only solution, which is nuclear. So I would say that the press is putting, let's say, another billion people at risk of death.
If the press is accurate about the risk of climate change, then they are complicit in killing, in the future, maybe a billion people and destroying the economies of the world.
So that's on them.
But the white supremacists, maybe 20 or 30 people, they'll kill.
What about health care?
Do you believe that health care is unsolvable because Congress can't work it out?
That's what it looks like, right?
It looks like Congress can't figure out how to improve health care.
And that's true.
But why?
Why is it that the Congress can't settle health care?
Well, I would propose it's because they don't have the public behind any particular solution.
So Congress can't really act without the public being in favor of what they're going to act in, at least in some majority way.
What is the public's opinion on health care?
Well, the public has been split into two camps by...
The press and those two camps can't get together.
One says some kind of universal healthcare, one says anything but that.
You can't put those together.
If the press...
We're reporting on all the things that, let's say, capitalism can do to lower healthcare costs.
If the press were reporting that the current administration is actually doing quite a bit to increase competition for drugs, for example, if that had been a big story, that's what you'd be thinking we should do more of.
If the press were focusing on the startups that are looking to lower, let's say, the cost of lab tests, The press that will lower the cost of MRIs.
I'm sorry, the startups that will do that.
If the press was treating the healthcare issue in a productive way instead of a split the sides way, probably we would have better healthcare.
So let's say the press kills 100,000 people a year by treating healthcare wrong.
So that would be another body count for the press.
Let's look at the border wall and border security.
Here we have a case where Republicans want better border security.
Democrats want better border security.
The same. Republicans want to listen to the experts when they decide how to spend their money on border security.
The Democrats want to look at experts to see how to spend their money on border security.
Same. But what did the press do?
The press turned those two sides that are basically the same, and for all of history until recently, they worked it out.
There has been border security funding in the past.
It was no big problem, because both sides wanted it.
Both sides wanted to look at the experts to figure out how exactly to do it.
But the press made it impossible this time For the Democrats to say yes to anything the Republicans wanted, because the press had split the country.
So the press wouldn't even let border security improve, which of course would save lots of lives.
Because the less crime that comes across, the less people are victims of crimes.
Now, I know what you're going to say, but what about the percentage of crimes?
Because the people coming across have a lower percentage of crimes in general than the citizens.
I don't care about the percentage.
If I'm dead because somebody killed me who was an illegal immigrant, the last thing I'm going to say with my dying breath is, Well, at least the percentage of crime is low compared to the average.
That's the least likely thing I'm going to say.
So let's say that the press is responsible for crime coming across the border because they're the ones who are stopping the solutions.
So I could probably go on.
But I would say that the press is an emergency situation if you look at the death toll, whereas the white supremacists are a potential gigantic problem that is at the moment a small one, and you should probably be serious about the small problems that could become big problems.
Maybe an emergency declaration would be just the thing.
All right, if you're following my ongoing saga, In which I've been talking about the fake, or let's say the false memory, that the President once said that the racists in Charlottesville were fine people.
So that's a false memory that is shared by at least half the country.
Now, people have been asking me recently, why are you calling that a false memory when it's just obvious that the Democrats and CNN and MSNBC, it's just obvious that they're just flat out lying about it?
It could not be more obvious because here's the document, here's what the president said, and then here on the same day, in the same statement, he specifically excluded the The racists from being good people, and he specifically condemned them totally.
So there's no question about the facts.
The facts are unambiguous, not in question when you actually look at them.
Nobody questions them. You can look at the video.
You can look at the transcripts.
And still, people say that it's not there.
So you say to yourself, okay, the only explanation...
For how somebody can look at the transcript that says, I'm excluding the racists, I condemn them totally.
The only way you can interpret condemn totally as they're fine people is if you were going to just lie about it.
Here's a little bit of understanding about reality that maybe you need to catch up.
It's very unlikely That people are looking at it and simply deciding to lie when there's such a clear public record of the opposite.
It's not the sort of lie that most people would even think to take on because it's so easily disproved.
Here's the far more likely, and I'll put it in terms of likelihood.
You can never know what's in the mind of every person.
The greatest likelihood, and this is freaky, is that people can look at the statement And even as they're reading the statement, the sentence that debunks everything they believed is true, even as they're reading it, it's disappearing.
So in their minds, they're erasing the new information at the same rate that is coming in.
Or they bring it in, and you can observe that they'll act like they've never seen it within 60 seconds.
So I did a demonstration here on Periscope in which I showed you somebody who...
I don't think there's the slightest chance that the person that I deprogrammed on Periscope was lying.
Because you could tell by the way they expressed it, they deeply believed in their own false memory of the event.
And then when it was proven beyond any doubt, because you can just read the transcript and it's as clear as it could be, They have a mental reboot.
Their brain just shuts off for a minute, and that's typical.
If you're a hypnotist, it's something you've seen a lot.
They'll say that one sentence is a lie, which is sort of ridiculous.
So I would say, based on my experience as a hypnotist, and based on also, here's the important part, I do have some insider information about CNN. So you should assume I have some sources, and my sources tell me that they actually believe it's true.
In other words, CNN is operating from the same false memory as the people they're talking to.
That is not a lie.
It's actually they think it happened, so they just say it.
Now, my best guess for how this false memory was formed Is that the president said two different but related things, and people are conflating them in their mind.
One thing he said was that there were some bad actors on, quote, both sides.
When he was talking about both sides in that context of the bad actors, he was specifically talking about the racists, And specifically talking about Antifa.
Now, he got in trouble for acting as though they were somehow morally equivalent, which is just sort of the idiot's way of arguing.
If you want to look like an idiot, accuse someone else of making a moral equivalence that they're obviously not making.
Now, the president was obviously not comparing Nazis to protesters.
He was saying, quite honestly and quite truthfully, there were bad actors in both places, and you can't let people get away with being a bad actor.
It doesn't matter that one's up here and one's down here.
He's the law and order president.
The law and order president doesn't say...
Well, you are a murderer, but you only beat somebody badly.
So those are not equal.
Murder is not the same as, you know, assault.
Those are not in the same category.
So I guess the assault's okay.
Nobody says that.
You say they're both bad.
So anyway, the president said that both sides were bad actors or had bad actors among them.
That part's true.
Separately, and on the same topic, he said that there were fine people on both sides.
But then he went on to clarify that that context, when he was talking about fine people, he said specifically, I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white supremacists.
I condemn them totally.
So he changed his context from started to talk about bad deeds done by Antifa and bad deeds done by the Nazis.
Then those were the two sides for that context.
But in the same conversation about the same event, he changed the meaning of both sides.
He told you he was changing it.
He said it specifically.
He said, I'm not talking about the Nazis in this context.
But there were fine people there, the context meaning protesting the statues.
So I think that's where the false memory comes from, is that they're conflating the two conversations as if they're one.
That's probably where it came from.
I doubt there...
It would surprise me if there's any major personality or producer at CNN who is literally thinking to themselves, well, I know this isn't true.
I know this isn't true, but I'm going to put it out like it is because I don't like that President Trump.
Could be possible.
You can't say that doesn't exist.
But in all of my experience of false memories, persuasion, hypnosis, and then my personal contacts, as well as all of my observations and interactions online, it very clearly appears that people have a false memory.
And I've yet to see solid evidence that somebody was just lying for effect.
I haven't seen it yet.
But it could exist.
There could be people doing that.
Alright, let's talk about the president slamming on John McCain.
We live in this weird world where we can't have nuance about anything.
It's like it's not allowed.
So we're not allowed to think that Senator McCain was a war hero and generally effective senator.
At the same time, he was a completely destructive, I would say bordering on traitorous actor in his final years of life.
So I would say that all the scorn that the president is sending at McCain Completely, completely valid.
As long as you're allowed to think that he could be a war hero in his youth and a total douchebag in his final year of life, those are not mutually exclusive.
You could do something that's just the worst thing ever a year before you die, and that doesn't change the fact you were a war hero.
We can keep that. Let's keep that part.
Why not? So, the funniest part about this is, of course, the President was once deeply criticized for criticizing McCain because he was thought to be above criticism.
So, even though the President told the same joke that Chris Rock would tell in his stand-up comedy, About preferring people who didn't get caught.
Literally, it's a crisp rock joke.
But people kind of thought, okay, McCain is too holy.
He's too much of a hero.
You can't really criticize the hero.
That's just wrong. But now it's clear that he was not so much a hero in his later life.
And that if the reporting is true, and you never know, you never know what's true these days.
But if the current reporting is true, and he was behind passing the Steele dossier along to the media, well then he was just a bad actor.
And I think the president is having fun.
Well, let me put it this way.
When I was reading the president's tweets about McCain, I immediately got this cartoonish image of the president using McCain's dead body to flog his living opponents.
It's like he's using McCain as a club.
It's like, let's dig him up and use him as it.
I'll just beat you guys with McCain's dead body.
Here, how about that? I told you, I was right in the first place.
Not so much a hero now, is he?
I guess the facts came out.
I'm going to beat you with McCain's dead body.
And of course, people will say, how can you say that?
How can you say that?
How can you be so disrespectful?
And the answer is, he did not earn my respect.
McCain earned my respect as a war hero, and I'm glad to give it.
As a politician in his later years, despicable.
All right, let's talk about...
So, what will be interesting about our current time is that someday in the future...
People will have a false memory that President Trump colluded with Russia.
Now, what's the primary evidence that Trump colluded with Russia?
Obviously, Mueller doesn't have anything, or we would know by now.
But people will still say, well, okay, maybe Mueller didn't have anything.
But just, you know, look at this Papadopoulos guy talking to a Russian, and that Russian was connected to the Kremlin.
Look at Don Jr.
and Jared going to that meeting, and there was that Russian lawyer there, and well, she was connected to the Kremlin.
Have you noticed the pattern?
That if anybody who has any connection with Trump talks to any Russian, that that Russian is described as having connections to the Kremlin.
Okay? Now, let's take that as a given.
Hold that in your mind.
Every contact with any kind of Russian that had anything to do with the Trump universe, those Russians are described as connected to the Kremlin.
Now, separately, there's the Steele dossier.
In which British ex-spy, ex-spy, there's no such thing as an ex-spy, you should know that first.
He went to Russia and got Russians to give him false information about Trump.
Now, the only Russians that we've heard of that don't have a connection to the Kremlin are Christopher Steele's Russians.
Do you believe that the only Russians in all of these stories that coincidentally are not connected directly to the Kremlin are the ones that Christopher Steele talked to?
What are the odds?
Seems to me that every Russian who can afford a suit is connected to the Kremlin, according to the news.
Oh, but not the ones that Christopher Steele talked to.
What were they? Were they bellhops at the hotel hotel?
I don't think so. Have you ever heard who Christopher Steele talked to?
I've never heard it reported.
Do any of you know this?
Who exactly did Christopher Steele talk to that gave him Russian information?
Because he must have talked to somebody who was attached to the Kremlin.
Steele admitted getting the story from a CNN blog post.
Some of the story, but not all of it.
There was something about that.
He talked to Hillary.
All right, but ask you that.
Why is there no obvious reporting that Christopher Steele talked to a Russian who had a connection to the To the Kremlin, when they all seem to be connected to the Kremlin.
But that one's missing. All right.
Here's another false memory test about climate change.
If I said to you, which of these statements do you have a memory of?
Okay? I'm going to give you two versions of reality, current reality, and you tell me which one you remember to be true.
Version number one of reality...
Is that climate change models have predicted accurately.
That's version one.
Version two, no climate change model has ever predicted accurately.
They can't both be true, right?
Those are opposites. Climate change models have predicted accurately to our current situation, or no climate change model has ever predicted accurately.
Now you can say, what are you predicting?
Is it sea level rise?
Is it melting of the ice?
Is it the heat on the land?
Is the heat in the ocean?
Is it the storms?
What exactly are you predicting?
And I'll say anything. Let's say anything.
It doesn't matter what exactly they're predicting.
There are two versions of reality.
One, that it has predicted accurately already.
And two, it has never reported accurately already.
Guess which one is true?
I've been studying climate change for months.
Do you know which one is true?
I'm going to tell you which one is true.
Which of those two versions is true?
You're going to hear it for the first time.
Neither. Neither.
I don't think either one of them is true.
I don't think anybody's compared predictions to reality.
I just don't even know if anybody's done it.
Now, I could easily be wrong by this, wrong in this, and probably am.
I would say I'm probably wrong about this.
More likely wrong than not.
But here's the larger point.
I have been studying this for months.
That's the one question that matters.
Have their predictions ever been right?
The only question that matters.
All of the other stuff is good to know.
Right? It'd be great to know if they did this right, or how did they measure this, was there a mistake with this, etc.
That'd be great to know.
But really, there's just one thing I want to know, and I don't know it.
I don't know it.
Have you ever seen it reported on the news?
I haven't seen it. When was the last time you saw the news report?
Here was the prediction.
Here's exactly how they got it right.
Damn, they're good at predicting.
Or the opposite.
Here are all the predictions.
Here are all the outcomes.
And you can see that none of their models worked.
You haven't seen either of those stories.
So could you, as a citizen, Have a meaningful opinion on climate change.
No, you can't.
You can only imagine you do.
You can only imagine you have a rational opinion on climate change.
Because you've never even seen the only fact that matters.
Have their predictions worked or not worked?
Now some of you have mentioned Tony Heller.
Tony Heller often talks about historical predictions that have not worked, and there are a lot of them.
There are a lot of climate predictions from the past, if you go back to say the 70s and 80s, lots of predictions that didn't work.
But it doesn't matter how many didn't work.
If you had a thousand models that didn't work, But you had one that did.
That one that did is the one that matters.
The other ones are just bad models, right?
So I only need to know the one that works.
It doesn't matter how many times Tony Heller tells me some individual scientist or some individual prediction was wrong.
It's totally irrelevant. I only need to know, is there one that's right?
I don't need to know how many were wrong.
And I don't know that.
All right. I tweeted that apparently most opinions on climate change line up by political preference.
If you're a Democrat, you think climate change is a dire problem and we should do something about it.
If you're a Republican, by a big majority, you don't think it's the problem that's being reported.
Now let me ask you this.
If people's scientific opinion, coincidentally, Matches very, very strongly to their political side Is anybody really looking at the science?
It's a question that answers itself.
The fact that people have lined up by political party as opposed to just people disagreeing.
If what you saw was half of the Democrats were disagreeing with each other and half of the Republicans were disagreeing whether it's a problem or not, you'd say to yourself, oh, well, it's not about political allegiance.
People have actually looked at the news and they've come to different opinions.
But you can know with certainty that that's not what's happening.
Because people have just lined up by political parties.
So your opinion that climate change is either settled science or completely a hoax, wherever you are on that, or if you're anywhere in the middle, your opinion is an illusion of knowledge.
You do not have You have an illusion of knowledge that is almost certainly given to you by the press on your side of the political spectrum.
I know it's hard to hear, but it's true.
There's another study that says people who drink sugary sodas don't live as long.
And apparently people who even drink, you know, diet versions of the same sodas also have bad health outcomes.
Now, toward the end of the study, it said something like, well, we don't know if it's a cause and effect.
But there's a very strong correlation.
If you drink soda, you don't live as long.
Now, let me ask you this.
Is it your experience that people who drink a lot of soda take care of their fitness and have a good diet otherwise?
It might be the dumbest study I've ever seen, because it's almost a perfect correlation.
If you drink soda, which is very near the top of the things you wouldn't do if you wanted a healthy diet, It's very unlikely that you're eating everything else right and exercising and doing all the other things that are good for good health.
You're probably not sleeping right.
You're probably not eating right.
You're probably not exercising.
Now, of course, there are people who are doing everything right except drinking soda.
But guess what?
Nobody studied them.
I don't think there's a study that says, okay, of the people who are doing everything else right, as far as we know, they're exercising, they're sleeping right, they're eating all the right foods, and they're eating organic and all that, the only thing they do wrong is they have a couple of Diet Cokes every day.
Do those people have worse health outcomes?
I don't know. Maybe.
I mean, my sense of it is that diasoda is probably not good for you, but it's the most ridiculous study to say that that correlation should be then translated into your mind to some kind of causation.
All right.
Is there anything else we haven't talked about?
I'm going to take some calls from people who believe that scientists – 97% of scientists agree that...
Alright, so I'm pulling my microphone so I can take some calls.
That's the only way you can hear the caller is if I pull my microphone.
So, looking caller who believes the scientists all agree on climate change.
Let's see if...
This guest is one of those people.
Hello guest, can you hear me yet?
I hear you. Hello, Lynn.
Is that you, Lynn?
Yes, that's me. Now, do you believe that 97% of scientists agree on climate change?
All right, this is going to be a loaded question.
So I believe that they believe That 97% of them agree on it.
However, I also have done some studying on scientists cooking books to make it appear that we are in a climate change and it started in 1939 when they said that It was getting hotter when in actuality it wasn't and so all those people in the Midwest started moving to the coast.
So I think that they believe what they're putting out there to be true when in fact it's false.
All right. I'm looking for somebody who believes that Climate change is real because the scientists say it is.
So thank you for your comment.
Let's see if I can get somebody to take that position.
My guess is that nobody is going to take that position.
That there will be literally no one who is willing to back up the 97% figure for climate sites.
Alright, caller. I've done an informal survey of the scientists that I know.
Scientists don't tend to believe things in black and white.
They tend to make a judgment based on their preponderance of evidence.
They accumulate evidence for hypotheses.
And I can just say as someone who's made climate change videos for Al Gore, and still am a big fan of your work, that the polar ice caps are verifiably melting.
The seas along the coast are verifiably rising.
Our Navy is preparing for the effects of the rising seas, so it looks to me like there's a problem.
That the earth is warming.
That's my answer. Okay, but do you think that 97% of scientists are on the same page on climate science?
Has there been a poll of scientists?
Maybe I don't qualify for your question.
I mean, have they polled scientists?
Well, yeah, they've been polled at least six times.
I think if you go to Wikipedia, you'll see six different polls, and they're all 990s to 100%, basically.
Do you believe that's true?
I believe it if you say it, unless you're asking me if you want to deprogram me because I'm believing a false...
Well, it looks like I'm not going to give anybody who actually believes in the 97%.
And here's why you probably should not.
Even the skeptics are in that group.
So if you combine the people who believe there's a problem with the people who don't and you add them together, what do you get when you add all the people together?
About 100%. So the way the question is formed is, do you believe that humans are creating CO2, which causes warming?
Pretty much every scientist is going to say, yes.
But the second question they don't ask, which is, how big of a deal do you think it is?
That's the part they leave out.
So the reason the 97% is like the primary thing that the press reports is You know, they understand polar bears, yes or no.
97%. Hey, everybody's on the same side.
Well, the reason everybody's on the same side is that they literally added the skeptics and the people who believe together.
If you add all the people together, you almost always get 100%.
And that's what happened.
Now, I'll let you go, callers, and I'll just continue on this point.
And thank you for the call.
So think about that.
Now let me ask you this. The climate science is really based on, not based on, but let's say, depends on Measurements.
In other words, there's somebody measuring the ocean, there's somebody measuring the ice, there's somebody measuring the temperature of the ocean, somebody measuring the temperature on land.
How many people in the whole universe are involved in just the measurement part?
How many people are climate scientists who are directly involved in measuring?
Because they're really the only ones who sort of know what's going on.
They have the best idea whether their measurements are crazy or if they've fudged things or if they've exaggerated.
So I would say if you're looking at all climate scientists, almost none of them have been directly involved in the most basic part of climate science, which is measuring the temperature over time.
If you haven't been involved in that, then you are simply believing the people who did.
So in other words, you don't have 97% of scientists who have all personally done every part of climate science and come to the same answer.
We're not talking about a group of people who all went out and put out their own thermometers, they all went out and they personally measured the ice.
They're all depending on a very small group of people.
We're involved in, say, satellite measurements, land-based thermometers.
It's got to be a pretty small population.
All right. So, the 97% thing is ridiculous.
I've stuck my microphone back in.
I don't know if that'll make a difference or not.
So, since I don't know if you can still hear me, but I hope you can.
Don't you need a pretty big talent stack also to have a clue?
Yeah, you would have to have talent across multiple fields to be a climate scientist who had a solid opinion of things.
You'd have to know at least a little bit about a lot of different fields.
That's probably rare. I would imagine there are more scientists who are in a silo than there are scientists who are pretty good at a whole bunch of different fields.
I would think that would be rare.
All right.
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