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April 6, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
51:28
Episode 482 Scott Adams: TDS, Chelsea Handler, New Trump 2020 Ad, AOC’s Accent, Immigration
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Hey everybody!
It's time for...
I'm doing my announcer voice.
Gotta work on the announcer voice.
It's time now for...
Coffee with Scott Adams!
Yay! Alright, gather around.
Grab your mug, your cup, your glass, your vessel, your stein, your tankard, your thermos.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me, please, for the simultaneous sip.
Somebody named Suave Eater says, my technique doubled your salary.
You would not be surprised.
To learn how many people have contacted me privately and said that I have doubled their salary.
That's a real thing, by the way.
I don't know exactly which technique people are talking about, since I have two books that would do that same thing.
One of them was How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, which teaches you how to combine average talents to be special.
I hear from a lot of people, That they used my book and had tremendous career success, doubled their salary, fell in love, all kinds of stuff.
And then people who read Win Bigly learned Persuasion, and then I'm hearing from a whole different crowd...
That they negotiated for a big raise or they convinced somebody to do something that was good for them.
So you'd be surprised how many people contact me on a regular basis and tell me that I did something like doubling their salary.
It's fairly common and it feels really good.
All right, you all want me to talk about AOC and her speech in which she allegedly took on what some people are calling Some kind of a...
What's the right word?
I'm trying to use a word that doesn't make me sound like a racist.
A black...
She spoke in a...
Is it a dialect? Or an affectation?
So the accusation is that she tried to talk like her audience who were African American.
And she was giving some kind of a speech.
Uh... Yeah, I don't know.
I can't even think of what's the polite way to even talk about it.
Accent doesn't seem right, does it?
Accent? Is that the right word?
Yeah, it seems like every word you use to even describe the situation says a little racist.
So, let me apologize in advance if I've offended anybody by not using the right words, simply because I don't know.
But, 100% of the people I've seen...
Talking about it. Have said AOC is pandering and this is way over the line and it borders on racism to adapt the audience's speaking style as maybe she sees it when in fact the audience is probably all different people who speak in all different ways.
Here's my take on it.
You're not going to like it.
I'm sorry. I want to join you in hating all things AOC. I would love to be with you on that.
I'd love to say every damn thing she does is a nightmare and a mistake and she's stupid and nothing she does is right.
But it's just not true.
I just can't get there with you.
She does know how to do this stuff.
Whatever you think of her...
Of her policies, she certainly knows how to handle the public.
She certainly knows how to be a politician really, really well.
If you saw her wine-drinking, furniture-building video livestreaming she did recently, just this week, I think, in which she was chatting and drinking wine and putting some shelves together, some furniture or something.
And a lot of people sort of mocked it.
And I looked at that thing and I thought, damn it, she's so good at this.
So good at this.
It really was good.
And the thing I like best about it is that she was saying that people were complaining about her getting facts wrong.
So she had some facts wrong.
I forget, something in the news wasn't terribly important.
And she said that she's 29, and she's still learning, and she's gonna get some stuff wrong, and then she'll figure out how to correct it.
And I thought to myself, that is so damn disarming.
That is so disarming.
When she says, I'm 29, I'm gonna make some mistakes, I'll fix them.
It's really, that is exactly the right way to approach that.
Especially if she's trying to convince younger people.
But let's get back to this accent.
Here's my take on it.
Definitely not racist.
And definitely not anything to worry about.
So it falls into the category of nothing to see here.
Now, I did listen to the video, and it's very much not her normal speaking voice, so there's no question about it.
Yeah, there's no question that she's putting on a voice for that crowd that is not the voice she uses in her normal politics.
But here's the filter I put on it.
Have you ever had a friend, or maybe you could say this is you.
I had a friend once who was raised in Texas, but she had no Texas accent.
No Texas accent at all.
Until she gets a phone call from her father, who still is in Texas.
And when she picks up the phone, She has a thick Texas accent for the entire time she's talking to him, and then she puts down the phone and it goes away instantly.
Now, how many people do you know that I just described that they don't have an accent in their normal life, but when they talk to the people that they grew up with or where they're from, they just sort of pick up the accent?
It's the most common thing in the world.
So her excuse, which you don't know in context, is that this speech was given, I guess, in the Bronx, or at least something that felt like home.
So she was using her home accent at home.
Now, was she thinking about it consciously?
Probably a little.
But probably it was also a little bit automatic.
In other words, just the situation, the people, the other people in the room that she probably talked to before she went on stage, and it probably just got her in the mode, and she just started talking the way she would have talked, you know, normally to that group.
So, here's my judgment on that.
Nothing to see there.
Any accusation that that is some kind of a sign of racism is completely misplaced.
All it is is a normal thing that would happen to a normal person.
Completely explained by the facts and evidence.
You don't need to imagine any new facts.
Just the facts and evidence.
Completely explain it.
Yeah, somebody says my wife's English in the US. The same.
Right. It's a completely normal situation.
Now, because it's a political world and we're entering this political season, I understand if people want to make fun of it and it becomes part of the conversation and people will send it around and have their opinions on it.
It might even be a little bit influential to somebody, but I doubt it.
So, to remain credible, which is my primary goal, I think I've told some of you before, people sometimes ask, why do I even do this?
You know, why am I even talking on Periscope and tweeting and talking about politics?
And one of my sub-objectives is to become credible, because there are so few people like that.
If I were to ask you, who is the most credible person talking about the world and politics?
You'd probably just say somebody who's on your side.
And the people who agree with you all the time are the least credible people in your life.
If there's somebody in your life who just always agrees with you on politics, they have no credibility at all.
The only credible people are the people who can be sometimes on both sides.
So, it's a very small group, and I would like to try to become part of that group, so that when I disagree with you, you'll say, damn it, I still disagree with him, but I know he's not lying to me.
That's what I'm going for.
I'm going for, I still disagree with you, but at least I know you're not, you know, lying to me.
Alright, so enough on that.
Chelsea Handler was on Bill Maher.
I'm going to talk about the Chelsea Handler TDS Awareness Scale.
So you may know that Chelsea Handler has been one of the most vocal and often obscene critics of the president.
So much a critic of the president that it looked like mental illness to all of us.
And I say that not as a put down.
I say that as an objective observation.
To most of us who watched her after the election and for a year or so, it looked like, you know, we're not experts.
It's not up to me to diagnose people's mental illness.
I'll just tell you how it looked.
As a non-expert, it looked Every bit like actual mental illness.
It didn't look like politics.
And you probably saw lots of people who were in that same situation.
Well, on Bill Maher, I guess it was last night, she admitted that she did go into quite a tailspin after the election.
And she said that she sought a psychiatrist's help for about three weeks after, and that she was in quite a bad mental state.
Now, point number one, I give her respect for saying this on television.
So she actually confirmed largely what we observed.
And here's the interesting part.
She took responsibility for it.
Very unusual.
You know, maybe with the help of her psychiatrist or whatever.
And she even...
Speculated, and I'm going to put less certainty on it than maybe she did, but she speculated that it was actually sort of a response in some ways to childhood discomfort or uncertainty.
I guess her brother died when she was nine or something.
So she had some childhood situation that was very...
What's the right word? She lost her mooring.
She wasn't connected to the world a little bit.
It was uncomfortable.
Didn't know her place for a while.
These are my own words. I'm doing a bad job paraphrasing her, so just assume you're hearing an approximate version, not her version.
And that she thought that the Trump election triggered past traumas.
And she basically was taking some responsibility for that.
Now, she wasn't saying everything Trump does is not bad suddenly.
She was saying that her reaction to it was out of place to the actual thing that she doesn't like, which she still doesn't like, but her reaction was out of place.
It was exaggerated.
And it made me wonder about the bigger question.
I've told this story before, but before the election, I remember sitting in a restaurant, and there was a table next to me, and they were talking about Trump and the election.
And there was a woman who was talking about how much she disliked him.
And I watched her in physical fear.
She had a fight-or-flight reaction that she was describing at the table next to me, but I could actually see it.
Like her body was in fight or flight.
She was in complete mental distress that is not anything I've ever seen in a political conversation.
And what I wonder, based on listening to Chelsea Handler, is how many people were triggered by Trump to be reminded of an entirely separate trauma in their lives?
For example, if you were a woman and it had, let's say, sexual assault, you know, any kind of sexual abuse problem any time in your life, who is more likely to trigger that?
Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump?
Now, even though Donald Trump wasn't there, and you've never met him, and he was never the cause of any of your problems, who is more likely to remind you of it?
Well, he is.
You know, love him or hate him, he's more likely to remind you of a man who wouldn't take no for an answer.
That's sort of his brand.
Trump is a man who won't take no for an answer in any way.
So I could totally see how that would trigger people.
And likewise, people have racial feelings.
You can imagine how they would be triggered as well.
So it makes me wonder how many people were triggered.
But on top of that, let's look at the other side.
How many people have said that Trump reminded them, felt like a father figure?
There were a whole bunch of people who were Trump supporters.
Probably male and female, who feel as though he's emblematic of a strong father figure who is flawed.
Nobody says he's not flawed.
He's got his flaws, but his strength and his consistency for some people compensate.
So it's like a father feeling.
It's a comfort. It's a safety.
He's going to take care of us.
So I just put that out there, that maybe Trump is not even about politics.
Maybe we're fooled to think that how we feel about Trump has anything to do with politics.
There's obviously a team element and people line up for their teams.
So maybe the way people vote was always going to be just what team they're on.
But how they feel about him is not politics.
The way you feel about Trump...
It's not because of his policies.
It's something about him.
And it's something about maybe your past or what he triggers, because he's a good influencer.
And this brings me to the TDS awareness path.
And it goes like this.
If you are at the lowest level of awareness about yourself and your reality, and you have a bad feeling about Trump, Probably, you're going to say, that's Trump's damn fault.
Trump is doing this to me.
So this would be the Chelsea Handler situation.
Trump, he's what's making me mad.
He's the problem.
Trump is bad.
As you move up the awareness scale, you get to where Chelsea Handler apparently is, which he's saying, I still don't like Trump.
I still don't like his policies, and he's definitely doing stuff That I don't like, but now I understand that my reaction to him, my reaction, is something about me.
Now, when I say my fault, I mean, it could have been things in her past that were not her fault, but still she's understanding.
It's just not all about him.
Sometimes it's about you.
Those people who move up the awareness scale, To hear, say to themselves, wait a minute, none of us would be feeling the way we feel, except for the way the media unfairly and illegitimately describes it.
You could take anything in the news that is triggering people about Trump and do this, here's a thought experiment.
Take whatever you saw in the news on any topic about Trump, something he said that was outrageous, anything, and just imagine if it had been explained in the news without opinion.
What if nobody had ever offered an opinion and they just said what he said?
You could take anything.
Take his shithole comment.
Let's say somebody reported that Trump said that some of those countries are shitholes.
And let's say no pundit ever offered an opinion on that.
How long would that be a story?
Ten minutes? That's it.
There would be no story. It's only a story because of the way people talk about it.
Same with Charlottesville.
If he had simply come out and said his words, I think there are some good people on both sides.
I think there are some both people on both sides.
But by the way, I'm specifically not talking about the Nazis, the neo-Nazis and the white supremacists.
They should be condemned totally.
If the public read just the facts, I'm not talking about those racists.
They should be condemned totally.
Would they think that the president had just supported them?
Nobody would think that, because the words don't say that.
It wouldn't be there. So, once you realize that the way you feel is not just about Trump, and it's not just about you, those are factors, of course, but mostly it's about how the media has framed it.
Once you understand that your opinions are not your opinions on politics, you have your own opinions on life in general and, you know, your personal life, etc.
But on politics, there is no such thing as people having an opinion that's sort of their own opinion.
Complete illusion.
Nobody has an opinion that they didn't get from their preferred news sources.
You won't find it. Find somebody who's got a unique opinion you haven't heard on the news.
You can't find it. And then the next level of awareness, people who have read my book, Win Bigly, are already there.
And you know that the way the media frames it is also not a coincidence.
It's because there are powerful influencers.
There are people who have created messages that have weapons-grade power.
If you remember when Hillary Clinton was saying that everything Trump did was dark, his speech is dark.
His vision for America is dark.
And I pointed out in Winn-Bigley that that framing is not normal politics.
That was a professional's work.
I, of course, have my opinion of who Godzilla is.
We've never had a confirmation.
Never had a confirmation.
But if it's who I've identified, it would be the strongest persuader in the world, the person who knows the most about it.
So if that's true, or even if it's other persuaders, the point still stands.
There are a small number of persuaders Who the news takes their cues from.
You remember, everybody in the news said...
Childini is the person that I speculate was Godzilla, meaning an advisor to Hillary Clinton.
Yeah, Robert Childini wrote Influence and Persuasion, the two books that are sort of the Bible of Influence and Persuasion.
So... That kind of framing was picked up by everybody in the media, the anti-Trump media, and they all started saying dark at the same time.
It's dark, it's dark, it's dark.
The media didn't start that.
They got it from a persuader and from the campaign.
But mostly the persuader gave it to the campaign, the campaign gave it to the media.
The media started talking and people flipped out.
So, I'm going to give Chelsea Handler credit for leaving the first phase of TDS, where she thinks everything is Trump's fault, moving to the second phase where she says, hey, some of how I feel about this has more to do with me than it does with Trump.
She needs to go two more levels.
She needs to go to understand that the media gave her her opinions and that the media got their opinions.
From a very strong persuader.
Or maybe more than one.
Now here's the irony.
Chelsea Handler was saying this on Bill Maher's show.
Chelsea Handler was talking to Bill Maher.
Who is more responsible for Chelsea Handler's feelings about Trump?
Is it Trump?
Is it Chelsea Handler herself?
Is it Bill Maher.
That's right. You know the old saying?
The best trick the devil ever played was convincing people he didn't exist.
Chelsea Handler was sitting next to the person who caused her all of her mental anguish and didn't know it.
She was actually talking to her personal Satan and didn't know it.
So she's not yet at the level of understanding where she knows.
And of course, when I say Bill Morris or Satan, I mean that he's a stand-in for people who had sold an impression of Trump to the world.
And because he sold an impression of a monstrous Trump, and because she bought into it, She became mentally unstable.
He was her problem.
Bill Maher caused her mental illness, and she talked to him, telling him it was something else right in front of you.
If you watched that and you couldn't see that, if you couldn't see that she was talking to her personal Satan and didn't realize it, then you're probably somewhere down here.
Once you move up to the media's fault, you can tell that Bill Maher is part of the problem.
Again, I'm just using him as a stand-in for people who had similar opinions and were in the media.
I will say this about Bill Maher.
Let me give him a compliment.
I'm trying to be balanced in the sense that if I... If I criticize anyone, I like to throw in something positive.
One of the reasons that Bill Maher is unusually powerful is because he doesn't always take the opinion of one side.
You've seen on a number of occasions Bill Maher get in a lot of trouble for not slavishly picking the side of some political party.
And because he's known for that, that's sort of his brand, he's going to say what he thinks is Doesn't matter if you like it or not.
That's his brand. And that makes him credible.
Because if he has an opinion, you know it's not just automatic.
You know that there's some thought behind it, even if you hate it.
Now, I don't agree with a lot of his opinions, but I will give him this.
They are a lot closer to independent opinions than anybody else you're going to see on TV, for the most part.
Not anybody, but...
All right. Let's talk about 2020.
So, there's a common feeling that if the economy is as strong as it is now, there's no way that President Trump could not get re-elected.
That it's unprecedented to have a strong economy and a president who can't win re-election.
To which I say, you know what else is unprecedented?
Everything. Yes, it would be unprecedented.
Maybe not like 100% unprecedented.
I don't know the exact statistics.
But the idea that a strong economy predicts re-election has been true forever.
But there's nothing that's the same about the Trump administration.
Everything about it...
It violates some kind of pattern that we thought wouldn't get violated.
I mean, the very fact that there's a non-politician who became president without any practice.
He had no practice being a politician.
His first job as a politician was president of the United States.
We can't look to the past the way we could before.
You know, before you would have said, all right, Hillary Clinton raised this much money, Trump had this much money, well, that's all you need to know.
The person who raises this much money is always going to win the election.
And then it didn't happen.
So I would suggest that the rule about the economy being predictive is a very strong rule and may still be predictive.
But don't get comfortable with that.
Because what you have here is that the economy is getting baked into people's taken-for-granted assumptions.
By 2020, here are the things that people are not even going to think about anymore because they're not a problem.
They're not going to think the economy is a problem because it probably won't be.
They're not going to worry about ISIS. At least the caliphate, because probably not much there.
They're not going to worry about North Korea because they haven't been testing anything for two years.
Let's say that things go the same way that they're going.
They're not going to worry about, you know.
So a lot of things that Trump has accomplished, he's not going to get credit for by 2020.
Yeah, it won't count against him.
But they're just gonna feel comfortable that those things are just taken care of.
You don't need to elect Trump to solve the problems that he already solved.
So his value as a president will go down because of his success.
I know this doesn't make sense, but he's so successful that he knocked out all the big problems that he would be good at handling.
What might be left, in terms of problems that the country thinks are the big ones, Could be the things that he's not the best person for.
What happens if Trump solves...
This is just a thought experiment.
What happens if Trump solves every problem that's a big problem except healthcare?
Now, I'm not saying that that's going to happen.
It's just a thought experiment.
What if he solves every problem by healthcare?
Would he be the best choice for a president in 2020?
Answer... Maybe not.
Because what is there about Trump that tells you he'd be the best one to solve health care?
Nothing, right?
There's nothing about anything he's done that would suggest he's the best choice for health care.
Now, he might not be the worst choice.
They might still come up with a good plan before the election.
Maybe the cutting of regulations and those things are very important.
But you don't necessarily think, you know, strongman-Republican When you think, who's my best choice to solve healthcare?
So he may be a victim of his own success.
He might actually be the most successful one-term president in history.
That's entirely possible.
However, a lot will change between now and then.
Maybe he comes up with a healthcare plan, maybe he doesn't.
But I would be looking at healthcare as the unusually high variable, higher variable than it's ever been before.
All right, let's talk about...
Oh, Tucker Carlson asked a question on his show that was a real mind-boggler.
And it's a mind-boggler because I think I've asked the same question, but he did a much better job of putting it in context.
And the question is this, for the people who don't like President Trump's border security plans, how many immigrants is the right number to let in?
And I thought, wait a minute, we don't know that?
You know, I know that there would be maybe competing studies, and people would have different opinions, but if you disagree with the President's approach to the border, and you don't have in your mind a number of people, you know, a number of immigrants that's the good number, and above that is too many, and below that maybe it's too few.
If you can't put a number on it, you're not actually in the conversation.
If you can't put a number on it, or even a range, maybe the range is, well, up to a million is great.
I can't be more specific, but let's say up to a million a year is actually, we need that.
Now, keep in mind that I believe everyone who's informed about immigration would say that we do need immigration.
I think everybody agrees with that, right?
And part of it is because...
We may not be breeding fast enough.
You need a certain number of young people to pay taxes and take care of all the old people that are coming.
So we do need to young up the country.
It's a critical security safety purpose.
You have to young up the country.
I think all the experts agree on that.
The question is, how many, how soon, what's the flow, where do they come from?
Those are good questions. But I would contend that if you run into anybody who says, President Trump is making a mistake on the border, whatever that mistake is, in terms of immigration, You should ask that person, can you give me the number of immigrants that's the right number?
Because if you can't, you don't have an opinion about immigration.
All you have is you're joining a team, and you have mindlessly repeated what you heard on television.
Television will not give you that framing of, let's be smart, Let's talk to the best economists.
Let's look at other countries.
Let's come up with an equation that says this number or this range of numbers is healthy.
And then once you reach this point, beyond that, we don't know if that's healthy or not.
And then beyond this point, definitely bad.
Because if you said, let's let in 20 million people a year, pretty much everybody would say, whoa, that's too much.
We can't handle 20 million a year.
If you said, let's let in 10 people a year, everybody would say, sure, just 10 people.
So where between 10 people and 10 million people Do we want to be?
Because we can design a system that gets us there if we know what the target range is.
So I say this until I'm, you know, passing out from talking too much, but the border issue is a problem of what do the experts say and then how do we get there?
If we don't know what the experts say and all we're talking about is how to get there, but we don't know where we're getting, What the hell are we doing?
Think about this.
If you don't know how many you want to come in every year, how can you develop a system that gets you there?
You can't. We're talking about the system completely independent of the specifications for the system.
No engineer does that.
If you're an engineer, you start with, what do you want to accomplish?
What are you trying to accomplish?
If you say what I'm trying to accomplish is to get rid of crime or drugs, you haven't told the engineer what the engineer needs to do.
The engineer is not working with two variables, crime and drugs.
They're not. They're working with all the variables.
And one of the big ones is that immigration is a positive.
How much positive do you want?
And how much crime and drugs are you willing to put up with to get the positives of immigration?
Give me a range.
Give me a number. If you can't do that, you're not in the conversation.
You don't need to agree or disagree with somebody who can't give you that number.
If somebody can't give you that number, they're not even educated enough To have the conversation.
You should just excuse yourself from the conversation after you've asked them what their number is.
And when they avoid the question, as Tucker's guest did, when Tucker asked his guest, the guest was a Univision, I guess it was Enrique Acevedo.
He's a Univision anchor.
And Tucker described him as an advocate for immigration.
I don't know if he described himself that way.
But the expert was good on television.
Very knowledgeable about the situation, when asked what is the number that you want to have for immigration, only could change the subject.
And it was fascinating.
An expert, an advocate, somebody who's really close to the question, wouldn't even put out a range.
And that's how you know it's a legitimate conversation.
Let's talk about my continuing deep dive into the question of who is full of it on climate change?
Who is lying more, the skeptics or the scientists?
I have a new finding.
So remember I had challenged the climate alarmist folks on two questions.
One of the questions I have an answer on.
And I'm going to share it with you. Now, one of the claims of climate science, as I understand it as a non-scientist, is that CO2 is the problem because the rate of increase in the temperature recently is unprecedented.
So, would most of you agree that that's the claim?
That the claim is not that it's getting warmer, Nobody's saying climate is a problem simply because it's getting warmer, because everybody understands climates go through phases, and if this is the warming phase, that doesn't necessarily mean that humans are evolved.
So just the fact that it's getting warmer, no scientist says that means anything, just by itself.
It's the rate of warming.
It's the rate of warming that makes it scary, because it's unprecedented.
And I said, Why do people keep showing me official climate change graphs of warming over time, which clearly show on the graph that our current slope is not unprecedented?
Because you can go back to, I don't know, it's the 40s or something, and just look at it, and it's the same slope.
Same slope. You can just look at it with your eyes and say, uh, wait a minute, your whole claim...
Is that recently there's a high slope, and that wasn't the case before, but then you showed me a picture, and there's that high slope right there.
The very thing that's your primary claim is falsified by your primary graph.
What the hell am I missing?
So I said, how do you explain it?
So I did get an answer to that.
And the answer goes like this.
There have been other times in even the last hundred years when the temperature's gone up at the same rate.
Let me say that again. Climate scientists agree that our current rate of increase in temperature is in fact not unprecedented.
What I thought was the primary claim of climate science is not.
It is not a claim that the temperature rise is unprecedented, because their own graph shows it's not.
But they explain the other rise by saying that other things were in play.
And the other things were volcanic activity, and the other things were, I guess, ozone layer, other greenhouse gases.
So there were other variables that were also important back then.
But in current times, those other variables have calmed down.
So the only one that would explain the current increase is CO2. But let me, and then one of my favorite climate scientist explainers, who's not a scientist, but he does a great job of finding studies and putting things in layman's terms, he sent me to an article that explains this, explains how the variables were different in, say, the 40s.
And here's some of the language from it.
It says, the first slowdown, which might have been the one prior to the 40s, but the first slowdown, the nominal pronounced cooling, Was probably dominated by natural ENSO, IPO cooling.
Probably. So in other words, when the scientists are explaining prior levels that had some cooling, they said probably.
Is that the way it gets explained to you?
When the scientists say that the world is going to hell, do they say probably?
We probably know what's going on here.
You know, you have to find that word probably in a lot of scientific text.
Now, that probably was about one cooling period.
So they're not saying that probably explains all of it, just this one period.
So it says...
Warming was mostly, and now it's talking about 1951 to 1975.
They're talking about that period.
It says the warming was mostly offset by natural cooling owing to a decline in the AMO and increased volcanic forcing.
Mostly offset.
Mostly? Okay.
Does... So basically, and it goes on to say that once you've included other greenhouse gases, once you've included pollution, once you've included volcanoes, and once you've included El Nino events, then it all makes sense.
And that none of those factors explain the current situation.
Here's the problem.
Here's the problem as a non-scientist looking on, and we're trying to understand what's true.
Do you feel lied to about the main claim of climate scientists?
Because I do. I've been believing for years that the primary claim of climate science is that the temperature currently is going up at a rate that's unprecedented.
Absolutely untrue.
Apparently that is not what the climate scientists think.
So, Now that I know I've been lied to for years about the primary claim of climate scientists, and when I say lied, I don't mean that there was any particular person who said, ah, I'm going to tell something that's not true.
I think maybe it's because they tried to simplify it, possibly.
The most charitable explanation...
Is that people were trying to simplify all of these variables and to say, well, it's unprecedented.
But really, they meant unprecedented in only the sense that this is the only time we see CO2 being the main driver.
So that was a big clarification that I've not heard before.
Once you throw that in, It's a lot less persuasive, isn't it?
Because let me reframe everything I've just told you, and I'm not going to try to add any new facts.
I'm just going to frame them a little bit differently.
We used to think we knew exactly what was happening to change temperatures in the past hundred years.
We used to think we knew.
It turns out we were wrong.
So we had to go back and we found extra variables, which when we plug them in, it fits.
We're now looking at the most recent years, but this time we're sure it's just this one variable.
If they were wrong the last time, Not the last time, but when they looked at the past about what was driving temperature then, and they had to go look for new variables because there weren't enough to explain what they were seeing.
They stopped looking for variables when plugging them in got their graphs to fit the past.
Today, they've got this one variable and they're pretty sure that they have all the other variables under control.
How would they know If there's a variable they're missing.
Because in the past, they were missing variables, and the only way they figured it out is that the temperature and the prediction were so far different.
That's the only way they knew they were missing variables.
What if they're missing variables today?
Because today we're looking at more of a prediction.
You can't say, hey, your prediction is wrong in the future, so you better add some variables, because you don't know if it's wrong.
We're talking about the future.
So, given that we know they had to add variables in the past to make it all make sense, how confident can you be that they have figured out all the variables that are currently affecting things?
Well, it completely shoots my confidence out of the water.
If they had to add variables to explain the past, and they don't need to add variables to explain the present because the present hasn't really turned into the future enough, like we haven't seen the difference between what we say the temperature should be and the predictions because the future isn't here yet, I'm going to say that it's looking sketchier.
But I will say That the question of why there is that rate of increase has been answered.
So asked and answered.
So I would say that that has been answered.
I'm down to one challenge left for climate science.
And I haven't heard a response to it.
It's possible that somebody answered it online and I didn't see it.
So if somebody saw an answer to this, please let me know.
The skeptics say, or some do, that the Russian prediction model is the only accurate one so far based on recent temperatures and recent predictions.
It's the only one that is accurate.
And it's the only one, out of 31 or so, it's the only one that doesn't predict a problem with climate change.
It predicts warming, but not the dire warming that all the others do.
And I've said, is that true?
Because it's a claim, but like every claim in climate science, I don't know how much you can believe it.
So, that's still an open question.
If it's the only model that is predicted accurately, I need to know that.
So if anybody knows that, let me know.
Alright. Any other questions?
That is the end of the topics that I wanted to talk about.
The 97% came from papers.
You know, the problem with the 97% It is not just the problem that I hear people complaining about.
People say that when the 97% of climate scientists who agree with anthropomorphic global warming is not just in the methodology, not just in how they identified who these scientists were, but the question they asked.
If the question had been, do you believe that the That there will be dire consequences from climate change.
I think you get a different percentage than asking just does it exist.
Asking does it exist would include all the skeptics.
Or most of them. The vast majority of the skeptics say, oh yeah, global warming is real.
The greenhouse effect, that's real.
That's all well demonstrated.
We just don't think we can predict it and it doesn't look like it's going to be as bad as you say.
So I'd like to know how that question was asked.
And I'm also really curious, why has nobody ever done a survey asking the right question?
You know, sometimes you just wait for things to happen because you think it's obvious.
It's like, well, if nobody likes the 97% question, why doesn't somebody just ask the right question?
You know, do you think it's an emergency?
All right, so let me hit one more topic here.
The debate about whether we should pursue generation for nuclear or we should go for solar as the primary way to address climate change risk or potential risk.
So which way is the most economical way to go?
Solar or Generation 4.
If you said either one of them, you failed the test.
Because since both of them are, for the most part, they're funded by private industry, I'm sure there's a government element on there, but most of the money is probably coming from private investors.
If that's the case, the answer is obvious.
You do both as hard as you can.
If anybody says do solar and not generation 4, well, that's just dumb.
If anybody says do generation 4 and don't do solar, well, that's just dumb.
That's dumb. Because if climate change is as big a problem as people say, you better do every frickin' thing you can do and right away.
Anything short of that is not believing it's a problem.
And likewise, if you say, well, let's just do the one of them, or one of them we think will be better in the long run, so let's just do that one.
The world doesn't work that way.
You'd be lucky if you went as hard as you could at all of our solutions.
You'd be lucky if one of them worked.
You know, because it's a complicated world, and even things you think should work don't always go the way you think.
So you should do everything you can So long as it doesn't become a resource shortage.
If you have only one pot of money and you're going to use it up, then you have to pick.
You've got to be a little smarter about what things you do.
But as long as we can do both, it's not a debate, is it?
It shouldn't be a debate at all.
There's no question we should do both.
Says me. All right.
Solar isn't nationally practical or economically.
I have heard from, I guess, two billionaires who are putting serious money into the green energy field that would disagree.
And they would say that given the rate of improvement and given various things, that green energy actually will become the most economical.
I would say I don't agree with that or disagree.
I would say it's unknowable.
If you were going to do a long-term economic analysis of solar, which would include battery storage, or some kind of battery storage, it doesn't have to be a physical battery, it could be energy, it could be pumping water up a hill, any kind of storage facility.
So if you were to analyze that over 80 years versus all forms of nuclear over 80 years, You would be an idiot.
Because nobody can tell the economics of either one of those things in 80 years.
It is unknowable which of those would be the smart one in 80 years.
You just can't know. So you do them both.
And you see which one wins.
Alright. That's enough for now.
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