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March 31, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:19:02
Episode 475 Scott Adams: Obstructing Hoaxes, Biden and Bernie, Healthcare, Russia, Hamas
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Hey everybody, come on in.
Gather round.
We still have empty seats up front.
Tyler and Beth, come on in.
Good to see you guys and gals.
And we got lots to talk about.
Oh yes we do.
But can we talk before we enjoy the simultaneous sip?
I don't think so. I think it's time for coffee with Scott Adams.
That's me. Grab your cup, your mug, your chalice, your stein, your tankard, your thermos.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
when I like coffee, and join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Ah.
So the news is funny news again today.
I like it when there's lots of news and it's all the funny stuff.
You know, there's no terrible tragedies going on.
That's a fun day.
So, John Brennan tweeted the other day that, sure, he accepts, he says the country should accept that there was no collusion found.
By the Mueller report.
But there's still this question of obstructing justice.
Still the obstructing justice question.
So I retweeted that with my question.
Can you obstruct a hoax?
Is it illegal to obstruct a hoax?
Now, the people who know more than I do, the lawyers, said to me, it absolutely is.
Even if you are not guilty of the crime, if you actively do something to block the investigation of the crime you did not commit, you could still be guilty of obstructing justice.
Now, when I heard that, I applied, immediately, I applied the Dershowitz rule, If you don't know the Dershowitz rule, it goes like this.
Don't believe anything you hear in the news about the law until you hear Alan Dershowitz's opinion.
Because for whatever reason, he's literally the only TV lawyer who's even trying.
And when I say he's the only TV lawyer who's even trying, I mean that all of the other TV lawyers Are so obviously in the bag for one side or the other that they're just advocates.
So you can't really take the advocates seriously.
They could be right.
I mean, I'm not saying an advocate is always wrong, but you can't tell.
That's the thing. If they're in advocate mode, which all of the other lawyers are, You can't tell if they're selling you something or if it's true.
You just can't tell. But when Dershowitz talks, since he has such a clear track record of taking whichever side the law is on, so he'll side with the Democrats if the law is on their side, he'll side with the Republicans, but only if the law is on their side.
He's the only person who's credible who's a TV lawyer.
So I saw him talking about it, and he said the following.
He confirmed that you can be found guilty of obstruction of justice, even if the underlying crime didn't happen.
And you knew it didn't happen.
But, and here's the but part, he points out that you would rarely be convicted for that.
That it's technically against the law, but the odds of being convicted for obstructing Justice that actually wasn't justice at all, because you were innocent.
Sure, the justice system still has to check.
I understand that they have to do their work.
But he said, rarely prosecuted, or maybe it was rarely convicted.
It was one of those two things, but they end up being similar.
Now ask yourself, in this situation, this specific situation with President Trump, if he had Oh, and by the way, as Dershowitz also points out, it can never be obstruction of justice for simply the president doing his job.
So his job description gives him certain powers, and if all he's doing is exercising his power within the Constitution, that can't be obstruction, according to Dershowitz.
Now, so the president firing Comey, for example, is just part of the president's job.
He hires and fires.
So that alone probably could never be a question of obstruction of justice, according to Dishwitz.
And I imagine he has the better opinion on this.
But beyond that, beyond that, let me ask you this.
Is this simply a case of the president being accused of obstructing Something like justice, or a justice process.
Is that all that's happening here?
No. This is a special case of this.
And this is why I'm curious about it.
The special case is that the hoax was perpetrated by the very people who were investigating it.
That's not your normal situation.
Your normal situation is that the justice system is just doing their job, and it happens that you're not guilty.
There's no precedent for the hoaxers, the people who made up the hoax, to be the very group that is investigating the hoax.
If you tell me that a jury is going to find anybody guilty For investigating a hoax that the person who obstructs is the boss of the people who are doing the hoax.
That's important.
He's the boss of the people doing the hoax.
He knows it's a hoax because he's the one who knows what he did.
Nobody else knew, but the president knows exactly what he did or did not do.
So the president isn't wondering if it's true.
He knew, at least in terms of his own involvement.
And But given that the people investigating were the bad guys, you can't tell me that any jury in the world would find a boss guilty for firing somebody who is perpetrating a hoax against the boss.
And I get that there's the obstruction of justice element that doesn't apply to just being a boss.
But in this specific case, There isn't the slightest chance that this could be illegal in a way that he could actually be convicted.
Now, I don't know if there's some automatic stuff where you have to go through indictments or whatever.
If the evidence had been strong enough, maybe there's some automatic, you've got to go through the legal process.
But realistically, realistically, do you think you could find 12 citizens who would say, yeah, he knew it was a hoax, By the way, all he was doing was his job, hiring and firing, and the people doing the investigation were running the hoax.
Under those conditions, no jury can find that guilty.
None. None.
So, any thought that the obstruction of justice charge is, first of all, possible as a risk is like zero.
And secondly, that, well, it's just ridiculous.
So, I wouldn't worry about it.
Let's talk about Who's running the world?
I've said two things that people take as contradictory, and I thought I would clear them up.
One thing I've said is that our opinions are assigned to us by the media.
In other words, if you run into somebody at a cocktail party You have a couple of drinks and you make the terrible, terrible mistake of talking politics, something you probably should never do in public anymore.
It's just bad. It's just bad, especially in a work context.
Don't talk politics.
It's bad for your career.
But if you did get in this conversation, what do you think the two of you would be talking about?
Here's what you should watch for.
The two of you will be talking about What you saw on TV, meaning what the people on TV are talking about.
Think about all the things that happen every day and are happening in politics in the country.
This gigantic basket of things that happens every day.
But what would you be talking about at your cocktail party?
You would be talking about today's headlines in this little corner of this little bit of all the things that happened.
Would it be true that that little bit you're talking about is the important stuff?
Not a chance.
Not a chance.
Because it's just a little part of all this big ball.
It just happens to be the fun part.
There's a rumor.
There's a sex scandal.
It's the most unimportant part.
And you'll think to yourself, my God, this is the most important thing happening.
Because the news industry convinced you it was.
It's all they're talking about. If you turn on the news and all they're talking about is the Steele dossier, for example, you think the Steele dossier is the most important news in the world.
And when you go to your party and you're talking to your friend, you're talking about the Steele dossier.
Now, in that case, it actually probably was pretty important.
But the point is, nobody really has opinions that don't match the news.
And that's not an accident.
You could do the following experiment.
Let's say you took a bunch of people who had been following the news, and then you asked them what's important, and then you would write it down, and you would find that what they said was important was very close to what the news says is important by how much they cover it.
Then do a second experiment where there are people who have never watched the news.
And you just give them all the information straight with no opinion.
It's just straight reporting.
Somebody said this.
As far as we know, somebody did this.
No opinions on it.
What would the control group who had not been influenced say about the news if they had been presented it just straight with no opinion?
It would not look...
Anything like what the group who watches the news thinks.
There would be a complete disconnect.
In fact, let me give you my classic example.
You remember that the news has been illegitimately promoting the hoax that the president called the racists in Charlottesville fine people.
Now if you look at the transcript, you can see that he specifically excluded them in plain words without prompting.
So it was always fake news.
But it was widely reported.
Now, if you ask anybody in the country, did the president call the racists fine people, probably 85% are going to say, yeah, I heard it with my own ears.
85% of the left.
The people on the right never took it in that context because it wasn't meant in that context.
In other words, they understood that he was talking about the non-racists.
Now, suppose that story had been reported without any spin.
And the person in the control group simply heard the president's speech.
And the president said that there were fine people on both sides.
And then you saw the president continue on and say, I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white supremacists.
They should be condemned totally.
What would the control group think happened?
Nothing. They wouldn't even know that any news had happened.
Because what they would have heard is something that is obvious, and they agree with it.
They would have heard that there were some good people there and some bad people there.
And they would have thought nothing of it.
They would have said, oh, some people were bad, some people were good.
That would be the end of it.
You would have no thought beyond that, except that there were some bad people there and some good people.
That's it. You would not take that to the next level unless the pundits had led you there.
So the thing they say is, they'll say, but then they were marching, how could there be good people there if they were marching with neo-Nazis?
How could anybody be a good person and also marching with neo-Nazis?
But that didn't happen.
There's no reporting that that happened.
And indeed, it turns out, by weird coincidence, I don't know if I've told you this yet, but weirdly, I've actually encountered two people who were at the Charlottesville event who dislike the racists as much as the rest of you do, and were there for the historical monument preservation reasons.
So I actually personally know two people.
And were they marching with the racists?
No, they weren't.
They were just in a different part of that very large area, and they watched it, or I think at least one of them got there late and didn't even see it.
Now, the argument for the historical preservation person was it's sort of like ISIS taking down statues when they conquer territory.
It's not a question of whether you agree or disagree with the statue, but it has some historical significance.
Now, I disagree with that.
I think they're offensive and should be taken down, but it's a reasonable opinion.
So the point is, on Charlottesville, if it had just been reported as fact, nobody would have even thought it was a story at all.
And you see that with lots of other stuff.
So, my point being that people do not have independent opinions on politics.
They get it from their news source.
Now, I've also said, provocatively...
That we're in a weird period of time in which, because of social media, a good idea can bubble up from just a person.
Just a person on the internet simply has a good idea.
Puts it in a post, puts it in a tweet or a post, and other people say, hey, that's a good idea, and they forward it.
So we're in this weird place where a good idea can change the world.
And it doesn't have to come from Thomas Edison, whose job it is to come up with good ideas.
It could just be you were sitting on Twitter and you thought, huh, this would be a good idea, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, and suddenly you change the world.
Now it has to be a good idea.
We may have seen something like that happen in the very last few weeks.
Specifically, my favorite nuclear expert, Mark Schneider, has been working.
I've talked to him a bunch and he's been tweeting a lot and doing some periscopes to try to educate the public.
On the fact that the generation four types of nuclear technologies solves the problems of the bad nuclear technologies of the past.
In other words, they don't melt down, they're easier to make, etc.
And we've done a lot of talk about, you know, both I and Mark, about the need for the U.S. to get serious about trying to figure out how to test and iterate these designs until the U.S. have a solution for climate change, if climate change is really a problem.
And even if it's not, it's still exactly the same thing you'd want to do.
And Bill Gates is on board with that, as I tweeted recently.
So... Did Mark Schneider save the world?
Now, probably there were other people thinking along these lines, and maybe it's possible that the administration was going to do whatever it did just on its own.
It's possible. But I can tell you that there are senators and congressional representatives who follow my account.
And they would have seen, probably for the first time, as most of you did, well, just make the assumption that people in Congress are regular people and their blind spots in the world might be kind of similar to the rest of the public.
How many people in Congress understood Generation 4 nuclear power to be an obvious path and really the only path?
How many of them knew that a year ago?
Do you think a year ago that people in Congress understood that the new kind of nuclear technology doesn't have the risk of the old stuff, and it's just the obvious thing to do?
Probably not. But there are a lot of people in the White House, a lot of people in Congress, a lot of people in the media, a lot of people follow this periscope.
So because Mark has knowledge and good ideas about nuclear potential, because the internet exists and because I like those ideas and I boosted them.
And by the way, I'll be talking to Mark on Periscope again on Tuesday, I think, next week.
And it's entirely possible that Mark was an important part of the process of information flow To get people in the government to say, I didn't really understand this.
And now they do.
So, I think it's compatible, the fact that we get our opinions from the news, but the news wasn't really giving us an opinion on nuclear, was it?
I don't remember the news doing a lot of specials on nuclear potential or anything.
It was just sort of this big empty spot.
So because it was a big empty spot, it allowed a knowledgeable person who had good intentions to enter it and make potentially a world...
I mean, a really fundamentally world-changing difference.
Now, we'll never know how much influence any one person had on this, but I'll at least put out the possibility that one person has created a chain of events that will change the world in one of the most positive ways the world has ever changed.
You know, since the moment we realized that washing our hands was good for health, it's that big of a potential difference.
And I'll give you links to Mark, if not today, then at least on Tuesday.
On Wednesday next week, I want to give you a heads up.
I'm going to do another 80-20 periscope, if you don't know what that is.
It's where I spend 20 minutes teaching you 80% of what you need to know about some topic.
The topic will be how to be a writer.
So I'm going to do a special Periscope, 20 minutes, 20 minutes long to tell you 80% of what you need to become a professional published writer.
I'll teach you the basics very quickly of how to write well, and then I'll tell you the...
The things you need to know to actually get published and how to work your way up to get attention.
So you'll learn all that on Wednesday.
I'm not sure when I'll do it on Wednesday, but it'll be recorded so you can play it back anytime you want.
There would be no need to see it live.
It would actually be better recorded because you can start it where you want and fast forward if you need to, etc.
So that's Wednesday. Here's an interesting thought.
You know, when we talk about Biden being the leading candidate, or at least he was, I guess he lost his place to Bernie now because of the latest news, but we often talk about the advantage of all of his experience.
And I would like to propose the following thought, that in 2019, Well, let's just say from...
I'll expand that time.
For a long time now, it has been an advantage to not have experience when running for president.
If you look at Obama, one of the things he had working for him is the very thing that people thought was working against him.
What people thought was working against Obama is that he did not have a legislative record.
He just hadn't done much before becoming president.
Turns out, that's the very best place to be.
Because if you haven't done much, there's not much to criticize.
Now, if you look at Biden's record, it's just so long that you can absolutely always go back to an earlier time when whatever he was saying or doing or whatever his policy preferences were, were out of whack with modern days.
So basically, anybody who's got a long history, and you can dig into that history, it's accessible to us, is going to get the Kavanaugh treatment.
They're just going to make up stuff.
They're going to find things you did that you would never think were good ideas today, and they're going to act like you would think it is a good idea today.
So I would say that Biden is the weakest candidate, even though he's polling at the top.
He's the weakest candidate to run against Trump because it's such a target-rich environment.
Now compare that to Beto.
Let's attack Beto's past decisions.
What are they? I have no idea.
I have no idea what Beto has done before.
Probably nothing.
So I would argue that when we talk about Beto not having experience, we're seeing it upside down.
His lack of experience is what makes him Obama-like.
Also, his lack of experience is what makes him Trump-like.
So Trump was the continuation of this trend, where it's easier to get elected if you haven't done a lot in politics, because everything you did in politics is going to be targets.
So if we take that filter, Bernie, the interesting thing about Bernie is that he's been vetted because he ran before.
So we kind of think we know all the bad news about Bernie.
There's not much else to come out.
So if Bernie were younger, He would be really dangerous in terms of a candidate against Trump.
But I tweeted this morning, if you haven't seen it, the photo...
Well, I'll call it up in my phone just in case somebody hasn't seen it.
So most of you saw the photo of Bernie with his head injury.
He hit his head on a shower door, I guess.
And... He's a trooper.
I'll give him credit for this.
So he just, you know, went right out and he was campaigning and stuff.
But the problem, Bernie, is it created a file photo of Bernie with a head injury.
And now I'm watching Fox News hilariously pair his head injury.
So let's see if I can lighten this up a little bit so you can see it better.
So Fox News is hilariously comparing his head injury or juxtaposing it.
So here's the head injury, and then they put it next to his crazy-ass socialist opinions.
So they are hilariously matching pictures of him with a head injury with his socialist opinions, which they would think are, well, the sort of thing you might do if you had a head injury.
So, now the worst part of the head injury, aside from the fact that it so perfectly fits the narrative that his policies are crazy, is that it makes him look old and feeble.
If you hurt yourself on the shower door and you're 25...
Nobody thinks anything of it.
They just think, eh, the ground was slippery.
People have accidents.
It wouldn't mean anything. But if you slip and hurt yourself that badly at his age, Your mind immediately goes to, I don't know if he's going to make it through the whole term.
Yeah, it feels doddering.
Next, if you do hurt yourself and you have a heterogeneity, don't put a gigantic bandage on it and go out in public where people can take pictures of it before you run for president.
Not a good look.
So, I don't think Bernie has a chance because he looks...
I hate to say this because I respect him a lot.
I have a lot of respect for Sanders' accomplishment, how he's changed the topic, how far he got against Hillary, the fact that he didn't make as big a deal about it as he could have after he got screwed by Hillary's team.
There's a whole lot to like about Bernie.
There's a lot to like about him.
But unfortunately, his time came and went.
And I think he missed his window, so he would be a weak competitor against Trump.
So, I would expect...
That Kamala Harris will end up rising through the ranks as the white men get picked off by the rest of the party.
Because there are plenty of people who want to pick off the white men, you know, the Bernie, the Biden, the Beto, the three B's, because they don't really represent what the party represents anymore.
But I don't know that there's anybody in the Democratic Party who's gunning for Kamala Harris.
I don't know that there's any natural part of the Democrats who say, oh, we can never have a person of color, a woman who's been a senator for our candidate.
That person doesn't exist.
So I think Kamala still has a straight line to the nomination.
It just doesn't look like it at the moment.
But when the Democrats get done taking out the white males, It'll be Kamala.
All right. That's my prediction.
So, are you watching all the big news about the military action and the deaths between Hamas and Israel?
What? You're not watching the news about Israel and Hamas and the demonstrations and the attacks?
Neither am I. And that's my point.
Have you ever seen less news about military action against Hamas?
What's it mean?
I'll tell you what it means.
It means the world has given up on Hamas.
It means that even the other Arab countries, they don't give a flying flick About Hamas.
They don't seem to have any support.
And so I think that's the news.
So again, this is, you know, the real news is the stuff that's not in the news.
Like the fact that it's not in the news makes it news.
And that is that I believe all empathy is gone.
There seems to be almost a universal global disinterest in Hamas.
So I think Israel's, and I would go further and say, Israel's security depends on having a legitimate military enemy, wouldn't you say?
Because, let's do a thought experiment.
Let's say that every enemy of Israel put down their weapons, held hands, and said, we're done with all military action.
We would like to live in peace with the nation of Israel.
So, you know, we just want to be good neighbors.
Some of us would like to be able to go back to live there again with no problem.
We just like to live in peace.
Would that work for Israel?
Well, in the short run, it might.
Well, let's say somebody says they're lying, but let's say they're not.
Let's say, you know, this is just a mental experiment.
I'm not saying this is possible.
I'm just saying, what if they did?
What if they did?
Well, it would be very hard for Israel to stay a Jewish state, wouldn't it?
Because the natural demographics, the natural immigration, just the natural flow of things would eventually create a non-Jewish majority over time.
Which would essentially change the nature of Israel to the point where it wouldn't make sense.
At least it wouldn't make sense the way it's currently structured.
So, I ask you this.
Isn't the best case scenario to have an enemy that is weak That's their best case scenario.
So having Hamas do things that even the rest of the world says, ah, don't do that.
And then having Israel push back with something like force that's in at least the neighborhood of the force that was used against them is probably their ideal situation.
Because how hard is it for Israel to keep the Golan Heights given that It has a legitimate security concern.
It's easy. As long as there's some kind of a legitimate threat against Israel, they can increase their territory.
They can stay strong.
They can stay a Jewish state.
So Hamas is sort of doing exactly what Israel needs them to do.
I don't know if anybody thinks of it that way, but if you imagine what would happen if there were no resistance, Well, I'm not sure that Israel would remain a Jewish state 40 years from now.
So, that's just a mental experiment.
By the way, just to be perfectly clear, I support countries doing what they need to for their national interest.
Israel does a really good job of pursuing their national interest, and I never have a problem with that.
If it's a legitimate national interest, it wouldn't matter who it was, Israel or anybody else.
I think you have to expect that that's a reasonable thing to do for every country, including ours.
I would like to quote one of the funnier things I saw on Twitter today, and I don't know if this is an original joke But Charlie Redmond tweeted it at me, and he said he was talking about Bernie Sanders.
And so this was his tweet about Bernie Sanders.
He said, never trust a man who combs his hair with a balloon.
It's pretty good, isn't it?
Sanders combs his hair with a balloon.
You can totally see that.
Alright. In our excitement about the Mueller investigation, I found that I, and apparently a number of other people, had forgotten how the Russia investigation started.
Because it's widely believed that the Steele dossier was the beginning of the Russia investigation.
And then I'm hearing other people say, no, no, you fool.
The Russia investigation into interference with the election started well before the Steele dossier.
So I thought, I can't remember how all this started.
So I asked the question.
Somebody tweeted me a link to Wikipedia.
And let's say Wikipedia has the accurate information.
So does anybody remember?
So I'm looking at your comments.
The most important thing in the news, but do any of you remember how it started?
No, I haven't seen anybody have the right answer yet.
No, it wasn't the Papadopoulos thing.
I think the Papadopoulos thing followed.
It wasn't Carter Page.
So it wasn't Papadopoulos and it wasn't Carter Page.
See, now look at, isn't this interesting that most of the people in the country are watching the news and the most important thing in the news wasn't McCain, wasn't Flynn, wasn't Hillary emails, it wasn't any of that, wasn't the dossier. Somebody has the right answer.
I guess you probably went to Wikipedia and looked it up.
The answer is James Clapper.
Let me read to you And now look at this through the filter of what we now know, alright?
Now we didn't know what we know now when this news was first reported, so you have to put a different filter on it based on what we now know.
Here's from the quote from Wikipedia.
In January 2017...
Wait, that can't be true.
Um... Well, okay.
It looks like I got the wrong part.
So I guess I still don't know how it started.
I still don't know how it started because the Wikipedia entry is so confusing.
I thought I had captured the paragraph that explained it, but when I read it, it's 2017, so that can't be right.
So I think I have to...
I just have to stop...
Stop in my tracks because I just did this whole setup where I was going to tell you you don't know how this started and then I was going to tell you how it started and then I read it again and I realized I had a date that doesn't make sense.
So I literally still don't know how it started.
I just read up on it.
I read up on it just now and I still don't know how it started.
Does anybody know how it started?
All right, but I was trying to pivot to this point.
We have taken it on faith that the Russians have interfered with the election.
And the evidence for that is not the Trump involvement because that was all cleared.
So there was no collusion.
But there is solid evidence, we are told, of the following.
The Russian troll farm made ads that were trying to sow division.
They had fake accounts that tried to create some racial divisions.
And what was the other thing they did?
Oh, they hacked Podesta's DNC email.
So those are the solid evidence that Russia...
Well, let's look at those pieces of evidence.
Number one, if you saw the actual ads created by the troll farm, you would think that they were made by high school kids, and their total impact compared to the whole election completely belies the story of Is that the right word?
Be lies. I've been learning some new vocabulary words lately.
I'll try not to use them in public.
But if you actually look at the actual ads, it's completely obvious that this was not a sophisticated spy operation.
It just looks like some high schoolers made some memes that had no talent in them whatsoever, and they tweeted them out, and some people retweeted them.
That's it. Now, if that's the best that Russia can do, What would be the smallest thing they could do that we would still say is interfering in our election?
Let me give you an example.
If one day Putin was visiting with his family and his 12-year-old nephew said,''Uncle Putin, do you mind if I make some memes against Hillary Clinton?'' And Putin, looking at his 12-year-old, says, sure, go ahead.
Make some memes against Hillary Clinton.
I don't care. And then his 12-year-old makes some memes, and they get retweeted 100 times.
Would you say that Russia had interfered with our election?
Well, apparently you would.
Because they literally, Putin gave the order to a 12-year-old.
The 12-year-old made one meme.
It got 100 retweets.
That's interference. Now, you say to yourself, Scott, Scott, Scott, you're giving me this stupid, trivial example, which is so unlike what really happened, I don't even need to think of that, because the real thing happened.
Let's just talk about the real thing.
Well, the real thing was a lot closer to the 12-year-old with one meme, because it was so weak, than it was to anything else.
So, the point is, Yeah, maybe they interfered.
And then the conclusion is that they interfered to get Trump elected.
But they also interfered to sow discord.
So they were just sort of sowing some discord and stuff.
It wasn't even focused.
So it was a tiny little effort.
Very poorly done and not even really focused because some of them were anti-Clinton.
It doesn't really make sense.
But I don't doubt that it happened.
I just doubt that it was a Putin plan because it was so weak that either Russia is way weaker than we think they are, that they don't even have any real hackers.
I don't know. Then the other thing that we know to be true, so this is known facts reported by all media, That Russia was behind the hacks of the DNC server.
How do we know that?
Because our intelligence people told us.
Who were the intelligence people who told us that?
Doesn't matter. Do you trust any of them?
Our only information that Russia hacked us comes through the very organizations that have no credibility.
Do you remember when we heard the 17 organizations agreed?
And then later, and I think I might have been the first person to tell you, that isn't a thing.
If you hear the 17 organizations agree, you don't need to know the details to know that's not true.
Why? If you have any experience with big organizations, you know that they didn't duplicate the work.
There were not 17 organizations doing independent research and coming up to the same conclusion.
That doesn't happen anywhere.
That's not even a thing.
It was obvious from the first time I heard 17 organizations agree that likely a few people did some work And said, what do you think of my work?
And the other organization said, well, you're the FBI or you're the CIA or whoever you are.
Why wouldn't we agree?
Of course we agree. And then it turns out that it was Brennan who had handpicked people from four organizations.
So it was never 17.
That was a lie. It was more like four.
But those four people were handpicked by one person.
If one person handpicks four people...
Is it really for people's opinion?
Or is it the person who picked them who knew who to pick?
Well, it's kind of down to one person.
So if you're going to believe that Russia hacked us, you're kind of down to one person's word for it, and it happened to be the most obvious liars in the world.
Clapper and Brennan. Now since then, I believe other people have probably confirmed it, right?
So they were the starters, but you would have to also say other people have confirmed it.
Those other people who have confirmed what Brennan and Clapper think that they confirmed, the other people who agreed with them also didn't do the work.
I don't believe...
We've seen anybody who did the work.
We're only taking the word for people who are known to be not credible.
So that which we are accepting as fact that Russia interfered with the election, it is a fact that they had a trivial, tiny, weak influence on some memes that could not have made any difference.
That's probably true.
The hacking...
It might be true, too.
But we as a public should not believe it's true.
It is not in the realm, in the category of credible things.
It could be true, right?
Being credible or not credible is just how you think about it, independent of whether it's true.
But believing it is sort of a sucker's play, even if it's true.
You would be believing it for the worst possible reasons.
You just got lucky if you believed it and it was true.
All right. So, I have big questions about Russian interference in terms of how it's reported.
It's probably trivial, but if the United States is seeing that they're doing other things that are non-trivial, wouldn't you assume that we're doing the same stuff back to them?
I mean, not election per se, but We're doing cyber operations.
I would hope so. So let's talk about healthcare.
I heard a Republican advisor type on TV the other day, I don't remember his name, but he was saying that the president made a strategic error in taking on healthcare and Obamacare so early when he should have milked his victory over the Mueller stuff.
And I thought to myself, Yeah, I understand the point politically that he had to win so he should milk that as long as possible.
But he's also still the president, right?
Could you support this president if all he did this week was milk the Mueller report?
We sort of hired him to do work.
And health care is sort of right at the top of the work we hired him to do.
So if you're telling me it's a strategic mistake for the President of the United States to work on one of the nation's top priorities instead of enjoying his week of victory, I don't respect that opinion at all.
Because I think he needs to work and do real things.
Now, the criticism I'm hearing is that the president has added the administration to some lawsuit that could get rid of Obamacare.
Now, if that gets held up by the courts, if the courts uphold the getting rid of Obamacare, people are saying, how could the president be so reckless and stupid To get rid of Obamacare while having no new plan.
Oh, he talks about a plan, and he talks about the Republicans being the party of healthcare, but that plan doesn't exist.
It's just sort of a hope for a plan.
So how could he be so stupid to get rid of the thing we have, even if it has problems?
How could he be such a bad leader that he would get rid of it without having anything to replace it?
That, my friends, is an illegitimate story.
That is complete fake news.
Because there is no world in which the president would get rid of the thing we have without having something to replace it.
That's not going to happen.
Even if Obamacare gets thrown out, the government is still not completely incapable They're going to say, okay, the court has overruled it, but we don't yet have a replacement.
Until we have a replacement, we'll just keep going the way we're going.
You know, there might be some tweaks to it or something.
But basically, basically, the entire government of the United States didn't all become, you know, blithering morons.
There's nobody, there's not, you couldn't find one person probably in the government who would say, oh yeah, just...
Just drop this Obamacare like a rock.
It doesn't matter if we have anything to replace it.
We'll just get rid of it. Nobody thinks that.
And the news, the anti-Trump news, is reporting every day, oh, what an idiot.
This requires the Dale treatment.
He's so stupid.
He's going to cancel the Obamacare healthcare and have no plan to replace it.
Said all the dumb people, all the smart people said, of course he's going to not do anything drastic until he can have a substitute.
Of course! We shouldn't even have that conversation because nobody is that stupid.
There's nobody that stupid.
All right. So, I saw a story that there are a record number of young men who are not having sex.
So, in polls, apparently men are just, I think 28% of men in their 20s are just not having sex.
And people speculate, all right, what's going on?
What's happening? And I think the answer is, it's a whole bunch of things.
It's a whole bunch of things going on.
And so I'll just list a few.
One of the things going on is that people use almost, I would say almost exclusively at this point, dating apps for hookups.
If you're in your 20s, you're using an app to find partners.
Now, it was recently reported, I think Mike Sordovich tweeted this, that if you're a woman and you can have any guy you want, right?
Let's say you're on Tinder and you're a woman, you know you can kind of have your pick, right?
So what woman is picking an ugly guy?
None, right?
There's no woman who's saying, yeah, I'm going to get this ugly guy.
Rawr! That's not happening.
So because women get to make the mating decisions, meaning that men are largely ready to go, and it's up to the women to say, yeah, I'll pick this one, I'll pick this one.
Why in the world would any woman on Tinder pick somebody from the bottom 20%?
It just would never happen.
So the bottom 20%, if they are relying not on personal contacts so much, but dating apps, how in the world would they ever have sex?
The dating apps have completely eliminated their ability to find partners.
Because the guys in the top 20% are getting all of the women.
So the guy in the top 20% is having sex five times this week with five different women.
Because they're picking him.
They're like, ah, I like that guy.
Right? So that's one thing.
The other thing, as the story I read, reported that more men are living at home.
And apparently... And this is under-reported, I think.
There are more men living with their parents, adult men, than there are women.
So women are actually more successful at getting out of the house.
And I thought, I thought, I'm not sure I knew that.
Did you know that?
Because I would say that that would be one of the most important metrics of how the genders are doing.
It looks to me like if women are far more successful, and apparently it's a big difference.
Women are far more successful at getting out of the house and taking on a life of their own.
And it makes me think there might be no...
Is there a more important metric than that?
Is that a metric?
It feels like that's the main metric.
If you literally can't graduate from childhood to adulthood successfully, nothing else is as important as that, is it?
I mean, except health, and health is pretty similar.
So I would say that women...
At this point, you have a commanding advantage, if you use that metric.
Now, I'd need to know more about why that is, to understand that, but it seems like a commanding advantage for women.
So women, more women are going to college than men, more women are leaving the house than men, you know, leaving the parents.
That's pretty good for women, I gotta say.
Yeah, I'm not going to get into the debate about salaries.
But the other effects, which I've talked about before, is the quality of the porn.
And you don't see anybody talking about this except me, so probably for a good reason.
Porn has existed for decades.
But in the past, the porn was just sort of generic because people were all looking at sort of the same thing.
But now, because there's so much, that people can pick the exact kind of porn they want.
And the difference between the exact porn you want and just pretty good porn is probably pretty big.
I mean, think about it.
Think about the best food you've ever had Compared to the average of food, right?
The average of food is sort of, it's food, I liked it, it's okay.
Compare that to the best food you've ever had, right?
So right now, that's what we've done.
We've gone from porn was, that's pretty good.
I like this porn, it's good stuff, to, oh my god, this is the best thing I've ever seen in my life.
In theory, Having more of it and having it more searchable should create that situation, the long tail, where your very specific preference you can find.
Under those conditions, would a certain group of men even bother going out of the house?
Maybe not, because there's a crossover.
There's a crossover.
At some point, the digital version is just better for some number of people.
If you're not in the 20% of men who are getting all the women on Tinder, if you're in the bottom 20%, what's the best time you can have on a Saturday night?
And I'm not saying this as an insult.
I'm not putting anybody down.
I'm just saying that the trend of digital sex, if you will, has done this.
It went from, man, this is pretty good stuff, a lot of people like it, to...
Totally available, fairly accepted in society now compared to before.
So that's a big factor.
Anyway, there are a number of other factors.
Let's talk about climate change.
I saw a tweet from Tony Heller, famous climate skeptic, who asked if I've sort of given up on chasing down the climate change truth.
For those of you who are new to this, my current stand is the same as my stand has been for a while, which is I don't believe a citizen, a non-scientist, can understand climate change well enough to have a real opinion.
An opinion that's not just ridiculous.
Now you could be right.
But it would be by accident because you really can't tell if the skeptics or the scientists have the better argument.
And so I've been doing this deep dive for months and trying to find the one, if I could, find one metric or one measurement or one fact or one thing that you could say, all right, if this is true and we prove it's true, then we're really in trouble with climate change.
Or likewise, if we prove it's not true, whatever this one hypothetical fact is, if we can say this is not true, then there's not much trouble, right?
Not much risk. So I've been looking for that thing.
And the most recent update is that I saw somebody who was a climate skeptic say the following, and I put this out here for people to comment on, that there are 31 or so major climate models That belong to, I think, 31 countries.
So every country seems to favor a certain model.
They're a little bit different, but I think 30 of them, roughly speaking, somebody says over 70, but there are probably 30 or so that are the important ones.
But the point is that almost all of them are similar, or at least they're in the same zone, right?
There's a lot of variation in the zone, but the zone is all up.
So it wouldn't matter which of them was right, they all show a story of, my God, we're in a lot of trouble.
So I believe all climate scientists would agree with what I've said so far, that there are lots of different models, that they all show danger, so it doesn't matter which one's right, they all show danger, except, and here's the fun part,
the Russian model. So the fact that I've asked to be checked is, is it true that the only model that has actually hindcasted right, meaning it fits the past, as all the models do.
So all the models that you see fit the past.
But there's only one It fits the past and, it's the and that's the important part, has also fit recent measurements.
So the claim, which I'm asking people to fact-check, is, is it true that the Russian model is the only one that's worked?
And if that's true, if that claim is true, is it also true that the Russian model, the only one that works...
Also shows there's no big risk from climate change because it's way out of the range of the other ones.
So I put that out there.
And if it had been like every other claim that the skeptics make, it would have been debunked immediately.
In fact, there are two Twitter users that are very active in my feed.
They copy me on all the climate stuff.
And I'm watching them slap down the skeptics like a bad movie.
It's sort of like watching either one of them work on Twitter.
It's like watching a...
An old kung fu movie where Bruce Lee is killing hundreds of people at a time.
But even though it's 100 to 1, Bruce Lee is still winning every fight.
Well, for the vast majority of the skeptical claims, I'm watching the two Bruce Lees slap down all the skeptics so hard that it's almost hard to watch.
I mean, it's sort of a bloodbath.
So there are two Bruce Lees who know enough about climate.
They're not even scientists.
Neither of them are scientists.
All they do is they take the scientist's argument and they just match it with a skeptical claim and they say, well, I just debunked your claim with science and they can explain why it works, etc.
But this one claim about the Russian model I put out there To total silence.
Total silence.
Now it could be that somebody's answered it and I haven't noticed it.
So if there's anybody out there who's seen a response to the Russian model fact check, somebody who would say it's not true, can you tweet it to me?
So my stand on all this climate stuff is going to be the same.
It's going to be that it is never settled in my mind.
So science can be settled-ish, and I know you'll all come in and say, science can never be settled.
By the way, there's nothing that bothers me more about the whole climate situation than people climate-explaining to each other things they already knew.
Do you see this phenomenon?
How many times has somebody said on Twitter, but science can never be settled.
Okay, who did you think didn't, who did you think doesn't know that?
Even when scientists say it's settled, a hundred percent of the world knows that it could still change if they had new information.
Because that's how science works.
We don't need to keep explaining the same thing to each other, because we all know that.
There's nobody who doesn't know that no matter how certain science is, if they get new information, it could change.
Nobody doesn't know that.
Stop explaining it to me.
Please. The other thing that people seem to claim explain to me is they say, science Is not consensus.
That's not how it works.
The 97% of sciences, it does not work by consensus.
Who are you telling that to?
Is there anybody in the world who believes that science works on consensus?
Nobody believes that.
You're arguing against some imaginary person.
Literally nobody believes that science is consensus.
They do believe that That on the persuasion front, that it means something that most of the scientists are on the same side.
But they're taking it as persuasion.
Yes, it is persuasive.
That all the scientists, or so many of the scientists seem to be on the same side.
That's persuasive. But nobody says, that's science.
It's just being persuaded by numbers.
All right. So, here's where it stands.
I've made two fact challenges to climate scientists, and so far they have let me down, which means that the current winning argument is skepticism.
The current winning argument on climate are the people who say it's not a problem.
That doesn't mean they're right.
Got to be very careful here.
I'm not saying they're right.
I'm saying that argument-wise, they have the high ground now.
Until somebody can debunk either the Russian model being the accurate one, or they can debunk my second challenge, Which is that the so-called unprecedented rise in temperatures is matched with an identical curve earlier in the century when there wasn't as much going on in terms of CO2. There was less CO2, but we had the same thing.
Now, I've heard the arguments for that are something like, well, volcanoes and pollution, but honestly, those are such weak arguments.
That it just puts into question the entire theory, frankly.
So those are my two challenges.
The stronger one is the Russian model one, and I haven't heard a response.
So I'm not saying that these are true statements, that the Russian model is the only one that's accurate, and it says there's not much warming problem ahead.
I don't know that that's true, but it is a winning argument until somebody knocks it off the top spot.
So the skeptics have the top spot, and so Tony Heller, to answer your question on Twitter, I have not dropped the trail, and your team is solidly in the lead until you get knocked off.
If somebody knocks off that belief, then I change my mind like that.
Alright. Anything else going on?
I see a number of people are signing up to be guests.
Let's see who's on here.
Let me write a guest.
Hold on and see if I can keep my sound working if I do this.
You'll tell me if my I've changed, just changed microphones.
Alright, I'm going to invite Perry, just for no reason.
Let's see if this works.
Perry, are you there?
Perry? Hey!
How's it going? Did you have a question?
Yeah, so first a comment, which is, thanks for having this little chat at the end, like the sweet spot every time, because I've heard you be a little bit self-conscious about it, like maybe this is a waste of time, but this is the reason why I started paying attention to you,
honestly. So the climate question would be, What happened to your sort of line of thought where you were pointing to trust the experts broadly, where you were kind of hinting to Trump, like you were hinting at maybe Trump should translate the trust the experts from the wall to climate,
then trust the experts, you know, from the wall to nuclear, and kind of, I saw you drawing a good circle, like a complete circle there.
Are you still on that line of thought, or...?
Well, I might have to answer offline if we have a baby crying problem.
You can take me off now.
Let me answer offline.
So it's a good question.
When do you trust the experts?
I'll give you a rule. Trust the experts when the situation is simple.
And don't trust the experts when the situation is complicated And the experts have a financial incentive.
So that's a pretty good rule.
Now, if you take a look at the experts talking about border security, I would say border security is a relatively simple thing.
Does a wall work?
Does it not work? Where do we put a border gate?
That sort of thing. So an expert on border security, probably pretty reliable.
Probably pretty reliable.
An expert on, let's say, telling you how to invest.
Investing is terribly complicated.
There's so many companies involved.
If an expert tells you that they can pick stocks for you better than random chance, don't trust them because it's a big complicated field, finances, and everybody involved who's the professionals, they have a financial incentive That's their own financial incentive.
It's not your financial incentive.
So in finance, you generally don't want to trust the experts, except for the experts who are telling you that this is a better investment than this generally, such as if they tell you that index funds, stock index funds are better than picking stocks, that's sort of a high-level general advice.
You can trust that.
But if the expert says, buy stock in Enron, As my expert once did, and I did invest in Enron, don't trust that.
If your expert says, very detailed, I think you should put your money into WorldCom, a company that went out of business, don't do what I did and say, well, you're the expert.
I guess I'll put some money in WorldCom, because that didn't work out.
They went out of business. But if they say put it in an index fund and just leave it there, that's pretty good advice.
Now let's take that to climate.
Is climate more like border security where it's a simple situation and the border patrol people, the experts, don't really have a financial interest per se.
They want to get the job done.
I don't think any of the border security people make money if the government builds a wall.
So no financial interest.
Climate is a lot more like the financial example, where it's a big complicated thing, and you as a citizen cannot determine who's right and who's wrong, and there's gigantic money influences in it.
If you ever put those two situations together, you should not trust the experts automatically.
Now, I'm going to add automatically, because sometimes the experts are right.
And in the case of climate, if the experts are right, the majority of them, the climate scientists, well then you're doomed.
So this is one that you've got to take a little more seriously and dig into it a little bit more and see if you can figure it out because the fate of civilization is in the balance.
Maybe. So that's exactly why I'm doing a deep dive.
To answer that question, can we trust the experts?
In a sense, I'm doing a fact check on the experts.
And because I can't understand the experts' complete domain of expertise enough to say, well, you got that right about those tree rings.
I mean, how would I know?
But I can ask them about specific claims and say, is this true or not?
So if it's true or not true that the Russian model is the accurate one, that would tell us something.
We wouldn't need to be experts ourselves to look at that and say, you can't explain why the only model that works is the only one that you're ignoring.
Is that true? Because if it is true, the whole thing is blown apart.
And if it's not true, it's just one more time that the skeptics were wrong.
So it makes a difference.
All right, let me take another...
Caller here. And you can ask me anything you want.
I'm going to pick people who have some kind of a profile picture.
So that will be my preference here.
Alright. Invite my guest.
Are you there, guest? Hi.
And do you have a question for me?
It's another climate sort of question, if that's alright.
Sure, anything. Well, I've been thinking lately and keeping up with your whole adventure in this, and it kind of occurred to me a couple days ago, and you could shoot me down here if you like, but it kind of occurred to me there's only one way forward, and the debate may not matter that much, because on one extreme you do nothing, and you have the risk of climate change being a real problem.
And also, roughly half the planet believes that it is a huge problem anyway.
So they're going to be upset.
The other extreme is like the Green New Deal, destroy the economy.
Like, we have to solve it now.
So, no other one seems to work.
Excuse me, I'm getting a cold.
But the other way would be the center where we keep the economy intact and just have a societal consciousness that we're going to keep going towards greener energies.
And that seems to be the only way forward.
And then, in that case, the debate of right or wrong may be the wrong way to frame it.
Yeah, you're not too far from the Bill Gates approach, which is to develop safe nuclear technology because that would be the right answer no matter what's happening with climate change.
And you would do it as fast as you could no matter what's happening with climate change.
I mean, you would do it just to get rid of normal pollution.
The thing that I think is always undermentioned, I guess, is We talk about India and China creating most of the CO2, most of the pollution.
And we say, why should we do something when they're not doing something?
Because whatever we do wouldn't make enough of a difference.
But here's the interesting thing.
If you fast forward, the pollution in China is actually so bad that it would destabilize the regime.
So China and India For their own domestic stability, are getting closer and closer to the point where they're going to have to treat it as their top priority.
So I don't think we have to worry that either China or India will get more polluted forever until the world ends.
Because for their own purposes, having nothing to do with the rest of the world, if the people can't breathe walking down the street, which is literally, they're wearing masks and stuff now, If they can't fix that, I don't know if the regime is going to be stable.
I was just going to say, that seems to kind of speak to my point, because it seems like they're operating on my first extreme that I mentioned, which is like doing nothing, and they're kind of proving that it's unsustainable.
Well, no, let me fact check on that.
My understanding is that China is going harder on developing nuclear technology Maybe that's not true.
But I did recently hear that some development is happening over there for nuclear, and that is their only solution.
So probably they're already working hard to get nuclear because there's no other path.
Yeah, but I also am struck with how I've never heard that before today.
China, I only get the image of people being unable to breathe in Beijing.
I had no idea that they were actually trying to advance nuclear.
Well, it's brand new news.
I think the news was only a week ago.
And it had to do with the new type of reactors, the Generation 4.
So, thank you for your questions.
Alright, take care. Alright, bye.
Let's take one more.
Or maybe more.
So, we need... Let's get Colleen on here.
Colleen. Colleen, can you hear me?
Hi. Plug for you is that your book, How to Lose at Almost Everything and Still Win, is very popular in our house and sharing it with extended families, so thanks.
Thank you very much.
I'm calling about your comments regarding Russia and the...
The fact that they, the non-fact that they, quote, meddled.
And I wanted to ask you about the fact that, you know, we've all been talking and rolling our eyes about CNN and MSNBC, but don't you think it's more dangerous, the lies that Fox And rather, well, they are lies because they have kept the entire narrative as this demonization of Russia when there's no evidence that Russia meddled.
And they've known, you know, Lee Stranahan's been reporting for two years, Ukraine colluded.
And they were even convictions, but Fox kept that from us.
And their primary audience is President Trump and his base.
And I feel like everybody needs to know that that is actually more dangerous of media because they're targeting the base.
And so everybody just is assuming Russia meddles when there's a reason behind these lies, even from our...
Well, but it is true that Russia...
Did the troll farm stuff...
You agree with that, right?
That doesn't mean it was the Russian government.
Right. It does not.
But you agree that the troll farm stuff happened?
I'll agree that there were some ads out there on both sides and puppies and all that, yeah.
Yeah, you know, I don't hear Fox News hitting the Russia thing too hard, but they do report it as there was real Russian interference, which is almost certainly true, but I think you have to put it in which is almost certainly true, but I think you have to put it in context of how trivial it was, at least the parts that we know about, but also that our allies
There's no way that Russia interfered more than Great Britain.
Absolutely. The UK and Ukraine was what really did impact our elections.
Manafort was fired because of a fake dirt given to Alexandra Chalupa from Leschenko in the Ukraine.
I mean, beyond anything that Trump was ever accused of.
And for two years, Fox knew that and did not...
They needed to still push the anti-Russia thing.
Well, it's hard to...
It's hard for me to comment on this because I don't know the facts of the Ukraine stuff, but I will take your comment.
I will accept your opinion that the Ukraine stuff was underreported.
That might be true. I can't add much to the conversation because I don't know the factual background.
But thank you for calling.
Thanks. All right.
I'm going to end here and I will talk to you Oh, before I go, let me tell you again that my drum instructor is now on the Interface by WinHub app.
So if you want to take drums, you might look him up.
His name is Michael.
Search for drums, then look for Michael.
You'll find my drum instructor, and you can schedule some time with him.
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