All Episodes
Previous Next
April 15, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
30:50
Episode 493 Scott Adams: Cher’s TDS Cure, Bad Studies, Omar’s Death Threats, Pelosi
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello, Andrew.
Come on in. Where is everybody?
Are you in church?
Are you sleeping late?
Come on. Oh, there's Dan.
There's Chris.
Good to see you, Nancy. Dale.
And Nacho Dollar, Lyle, Beth.
Come on in. Grab your container filled with liquids.
It might be a cup or a glass or a mug.
It might be a stein or a flask.
It could be a tankard or a chalice or a thermos.
I like mine filled with coffee.
But whatever you've got in yours, it's time to join me for the simultaneous sip.
Oh, it's going to be good.
Here it comes. Good stuff.
So, the news continues to be hilarious unintentionally.
And the hilarious thing about it is that the reason that there's so little actual news happening right now...
Have you noticed that?
I've talked about it for a few days.
That the news...
Just got kind of quiet.
And if you think about it, there's a perfectly good reason because most of the press exists to say bad things about the president.
And that requires them to say bad things about the world that he could have fixed or he ruined or he broke.
But pretty much everything's going the right direction.
If you were to look at the number of bullets being fired by the United States or at the United States, is it more or fewer than when Trump took office?
Probably far fewer bullets and bombs.
So war is far less.
In the age of Trump, far less.
Probably, I don't know, when was the last time in history the United States was involved in less war than it is right now?
You know, we're involved in a lot of countries, but the number of bombs and bullets is probably pretty low, historically speaking, for the United States.
And, of course, the economy is zooming and there's nothing to talk about except things that are good for the president.
Pretty much right down the line.
It's all good for the president.
But it gets even funnier.
Because there are some sort of evergreen complaints to make about the president that the news can always rely on.
The most reliable thing that the news can say about this president is that everything the president does is racist.
What did he do in the last 24 hours?
Well, he tweeted support of Tiger Woods.
Tiger Woods being a person of color.
That's right. The president was tweeting what a great champion he was and rooting for the black guy.
What can the press say about that?
Well, it doesn't really fit with their whole he's a racist kind of thing.
What else is in the news?
Well, we've got Herman Cain, President Trump's nominee to be at the Fed, And Herman Cain is getting some pushback from Democrats.
Herman Cain is black.
Who is it who opposes the nomination of this qualified black man to a high office?
Democrats. Who is promoting the career and good work of this black man?
President Trump.
What the hell are they going to say?
They got nothing to talk about.
There's just nothing to talk about.
Do you remember NFL kneeling?
It's over, right?
The NFL people were kneeling and now they're not.
Or at least nobody's talking about it.
Just sort of went away.
What else we have going on?
Oh, it's awkward for the press to talk about the Mueller report, because it didn't go their way.
Worse yet, it's hard to talk about Bob Barr, because Bob Barr said there was spying, and it's time to investigate the investigators, in effect.
Absolutely everything is going the President's way, so they can't really talk about it the way they would like to.
What about... What about Pelosi and the Democrats?
Well, the only news about them is that Pelosi is insulting other Democrats by saying that there are only five people in the AOC wing, and she's basically minimizing them.
That's not bad for President Trump, is it?
What about climate change?
Have you noticed that things have gotten a little quieter on climate change?
Do you know why things are quieter on climate change?
Because Trump solved it.
Now, I know very few people in the world will agree with the fact that I just said Trump solved climate change.
But he did. Yeah, somebody says how.
What many people don't know, because the press is completely not reporting it, Is that the Trump administration is, based on their actions, pro-nuclear.
Specifically, not the old kind of nuclear that was dangerous and nobody wanted.
Well, some people wanted it, but it was more risky.
But the new generation for nuclear technology that is free from risk of meltdown.
It's designed so that's not even an option.
And it uses nuclear waste from older sites as its fuel.
It's everything good.
And apparently, I think Canada's already put one in operation.
Other countries are building them.
So the Generation 4 is definitely coming.
It's coming in other countries.
It's coming here. And it is absolutely the right solution for climate problems.
And it's probably right in two different ways.
And by the way, I haven't heard anybody talk about this.
So the two ways that generation four nuclear solves climate risk, and by the way, it doesn't even matter if the climate is a risk, because you would still do generation four nuclear anyway.
But one way is that it could replace carbon sources of energy.
That's the obvious benefit.
But the other benefit is that there are technologies, in case we need it, I know some of you say, we don't need it.
But in case we need it, we might need someday, 10 years, 20 years, to directly remove any extra CO2 from the environment.
Now, you don't want to take down so much that the plants die, so you've got to be careful with it.
But we would be careful.
And the big cost of removing CO2 is energy.
If you've got cheap energy, suddenly it becomes a lot more economical and possible to start sucking CO2 directly out of the air.
If you have nuclear energy, suddenly you can desalinate oceans.
So if climate change was going to cause some disruption because of water being in the wrong place or not enough of it, Well, nuclear kind of solves that too, because you can just desalinate a bunch of seawater.
So the Trump administration has some things going.
They've authorized a test site for nuclear fuel of this new kind, etc.
So it seems that there is motion, and apparently it's bipartisan.
Both the Democrats and the Republicans agree that this is a way to go.
So climate change has largely been...
solved in the sense that we have a practical way forward that almost certainly will be the right way.
And it was the Trump administration, because they were not caught up on the psychological fear of nuclear, apparently.
All right, so that's going well.
What else is going well?
So, I'm a big critic of the president when it comes to health care.
I believe that the President has not done enough on health care.
I think the Republicans have not done enough.
And I think the Democrats have not done enough.
But here's what's interesting.
Have you noticed that the press, who leans very heavily to Democrats, have you noticed that the press does not support, as far as I can tell, based on the way they talk about it, the way the pundits talk about these things, It appears that the press on the left does not support the healthcare programs on the left.
Am I wrong? Just watch how the press covers the healthcare topic.
They'll talk about it, and they'll say, Bernie wants this, and maybe AOC wants this, or whatever.
They'll talk about it, but the press is not on board with those plans, because they can't bring themselves to tell a lie that big.
Because, you know, in the sense that we don't know how to pay for it, and the Democrats are not suggesting a way to pay for it that adds up.
So, even healthcare, which should be the weakest point for the President, is not as weak as it should be, because even the press can't take the other side.
Because nobody knows what the heck to do.
Meanwhile, the administration is actually doing a few good things in terms of market competition.
So they're dropping some regulations that might actually make a difference.
The ability to pool small businesses together to buy healthcare, that's new.
That's something the administration allowed.
The creating associations across state lines, that's new.
The improvement in the rate of approvals for generic drugs, that's new.
That came from the administration, and it directly has an impact on lowering drug prices.
So even the very worst topic for this president, health care, It doesn't look much better for the Democrats.
It's just a bad topic that nobody can solve.
But the fact that this president has not solved it, per se, is not looking that bad compared to no other plan to do anything.
And the fact that they are doing things that kind of work.
Then you take the other biggest problem that this president has had since day one.
His other biggest problem was immigration.
And what was his sort of meta-theme?
The big theme was that if you don't control your border, you lose your country.
And if you don't make it a negative to try to get in, you'll get more people trying to get in, and it will just get worse.
Now I would say everything the president has said could happen is happening right in front of us.
The press can no longer say That border security doesn't matter the way they used to say it.
It's obvious it matters now.
And then the President's clever plan to invite these sanctuary cities to take all the immigrants has had the desired effect, I think, of making people think about the reality in a way that they have had the luxury of not having to think about it in real terms.
You always have the luxury of just talking in high-level terms about, we should be nice, we're a country of immigrants, blah, blah, blah.
But there's no meat on that.
It's just a half-pinion.
A half-pinion is when you just look at the benefits of something and you ignore the costs or vice versa.
But Trump...
Calling their bluff, if you will, to move everybody to a sanctuary city does make them think about the reality of it.
And take, for example, some of the most basic things that people on the left want.
Well, one of the things they want is to preserve the character of their neighborhoods.
That's sort of something the people on the left want.
It's like, hey, let's not change our neighborhoods.
Let's keep the character of the neighborhoods.
Well, all that's going to change if you bring in any outside population, no matter how awesome those people are, Just having more people who have a different background is going to change the nature of your place.
So I think you're going to see people starting to worry about traffic, people starting to worry about, you know, an assault on their systems, etc.
So I think that the President's argument about immigration has now been proven a lot closer to being the adult opinion than the other side.
You may have seen, I've seen a number of you trying to prompt me to talk about this, that even Cher, who is one of the more famous critics of the president, even Cher is saying, wait a minute, wait a minute.
If you turn all these immigrants loose into Los Angeles, what happens to the 50,000 people in Los Angeles who don't have jobs?
By the way, can you hear me, or are you hearing only...
Background noise. I can't tell if I'm being overwhelmed by the background noise right now, but tell me if I am.
So even Cher has basically said, hey, maybe we should rethink this and take care of the people we already have, as opposed to bringing in new people.
And so I'm starting to wonder...
I'm starting to wonder if the president's clever persuasion move to say, hey, we'll move them to the sanctuary cities.
I wonder if that made a difference.
I wonder if it moved the dial.
It sort of feels like it did.
Anyway, so yesterday I made a special point to listen to a speech by Pete Buttigieg.
I'd seen only clips of him answering a question here or there.
I'd seen photographs of him.
I'd seen written words from him.
But I had not seen him speak.
And so I was very curious because he's getting all the attention.
He's moved up to, is he third in the poll or fourth?
So he's now in the leader group.
And so I said, well, okay, I'm going to have to pay attention to it now.
I'm going to start listening to Mayor Pete.
So I listened to his speech.
And I've got to tell you, he definitely has some charisma.
I would say that Mayor Pete has more charisma probably than anybody else he's running against.
I mean, Bernie has his own thing going, but he's sort of not as interesting and young and, you know, he's a little less provocative than...
Bernie's old and white and straight, so he's just not as interesting.
So I'm going to say that Pete Buttigieg, here's my...
I'll give you my review of him as a candidate.
Very, very smart.
Very smart. I love the fact that he's gay and a veteran.
That is such a powerful combination.
Because if you're conservative, veteran almost trumps everything else, right?
Everything but crime.
You know, if you're on the right and somebody says, this person's a veteran, You pretty much have a good impression of that person unless they've committed a crime.
You know, that's sort of the line people would draw.
So he's fascinating as a checking off the box.
He checks just the right boxes at just the right time to be dangerous.
But here's my overall impression.
His speaking style It's mostly empty, clever phrases.
He has more empty, clever phrases than anybody you'll ever listen to.
Now, because they're clever, they're fun to listen to, and they're fun to repeat, and they'll be very tweetable, very quotable.
But they're completely empty.
And it's just sort of a Here's a clever concept.
Do you see what I did with those words?
Yeah? You see that? Watch this.
Here's another one. I'm taking this and I'm transposing it next to that.
I'm referring to this and I've made a pretty intellectual connection between those things.
How about that? Huh? Huh?
And the people in the audience are like, damn, that's clever.
That is clever.
I'm so glad we have somebody who's smart and clever, cares about the country.
I love this.
But here's the thing. It's just all empty.
It's like background noise.
I don't remember a single frickin' thing he said.
I have no memory of anything he said.
I only have this general impression.
I remember there were clever words in it.
That's it. I remember there were clever words.
Now, somebody says like Jordan Peterson.
No, completely different than Jordan Peterson.
Jordan Peterson, if you listen to him, he will take the top of your head clear off.
I've never seen anybody, speaking of Jordan Peterson, I've never seen anybody...
Who could so quickly just scramble your brain in real time.
I mean, he's a professional. He knows how to do that.
Psychologist and an expert in communication.
So that's a whole different deal.
I would not compare in any way Jordan Peterson's intellectual conversations, which I would put at a 10 in terms of being accessible, right?
Jordan Peterson is the most accessible to the ordinary people intellectual.
That's a very rare place to be.
There are intellectuals who are probably smarter and know more, but they can't communicate the way he does.
All right, let's talk about Andrew Yang.
So Andrew Yang has once again gone full racist.
And It's sort of shocking because he's getting away with it.
He made a quip at a public event recently in which he said he was the opposite of President Trump.
And then he went on to explain what that means.
He said the opposite of Trump is that he's an Asian who likes math.
Is that okay?
Is that okay?
Because that sounds pretty racist to me.
Because, you know, the implication, of course, is that Asians are better at math and Trump is a white boy who doesn't care about math or isn't good at it.
Now, Yang didn't say what I just said.
Those are my words, not his.
But how does he not know that it sounds like that?
How does Andrew Yang not know that to my brain...
It just sounded racist against white men, or white people, I guess.
So I want to like him because he's got a lot of good ideas.
Smart guy, got a lot of good ideas.
I want to like him, but it's not going to get there that way.
All right. So let's talk about...
So anyway, the news is...
Sort of quiet because Trump is succeeding at a level that we've never really seen before.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Have we ever seen a president as successful as President Trump already is?
Because remember, war is down, economy is up, climate change, we have a plan to solve it.
I mean, it's pretty good.
And even healthcare.
The people who need hospital care get it.
They just don't have any insurance to pay for it.
So even healthcare, people are largely covered.
They're just, you know, the economics of it are not right.
Anyway, I want to talk about two studies that make me laugh whenever I see them because people believe they're true.
The first one is, well, only one of them is a study.
The first one is That moderate drinking is good for you.
Because when they do a study of moderate drinkers, they find that they live longer, apparently.
Now, if you see a study that says, we've divided the world into two categories, the moderate drinkers, and then the people who are not moderate drinkers, which one of those would you expect to live longer?
Well, the people who are not moderate drinkers, Include people who have diabetes.
It also includes alcoholics.
So if you were to take any group, let's say, people who play bingo, people who have red hair, if you could take any group in the world and compare them to the group that includes all the alcoholics and all the people with diabetes, wouldn't they have a better life expectancy?
You know, just the redheads.
All the left-handed people in the world will live longer than whatever category has all the alcoholics and all the people with diabetes in it.
So, when I see that study, it makes me laugh because, to me, it's the most obvious fake studies.
I think it's been studied more than once.
It's so obviously fake, but it's entered the world as something that's been shown lots of times to be true.
All right.
Yes, and people who have major health problems don't drink moderately.
So the entire category of people who are already unhealthy happens to be in the other group.
So of course the moderate drinkers are going to look like they're healthier because they didn't have any problems to start with.
Now the other one that makes me laugh Somebody says, you appear to have confirmation bias against alcoholism.
I do.
The other one is not a study, but maybe there's some study I don't know about.
More of a common belief.
So how many of you have this common belief?
That women prefer men who are jerks And men often prefer women who are the B-word.
How many of you believe that's true?
That men are attracted to women who are kind of, you know, the B-word, as in B-I-T-C-H, and that women are attracted to men who are jerks?
I'm seeing, I'm looking at your answers.
So I'm seeing some no's.
Yeah, the bad boys, so to speak.
I'm seeing some yes's and some no's.
The ones who say no are by far the more aware people.
Here's what's really going on.
Power corrupts.
And the more power you have, the more corrupt you will be.
And who has more power in the dating world?
The people who have the most power in the dating world are the people who look the best, the people who are the most attractive.
So if you're either an attractive man or an attractive woman, do you need to try as hard?
You don't. If you're very attractive, can you be a jerk to other people and they'll still want to be with you?
Yes, you can. So I think that when you observe that it seems that women like bad boys and it seems that men like women who are unkind to them, it's just an illusion.
Because the only people who can be unkind and still have somebody with them are very attractive people.
If you are unattractive and also unkind, you're probably not in a relationship.
Anyway, those two studies about the alcohol being good for you in moderation and people liking people who are bad for them are just completely, you know, illusions as far as I can tell.
Somebody says wrong, it's called game.
Well, that's part of it.
But the total number of men who actually play that game is pretty small.
If you're talking about nagging, Alright, so, I believe that that is all the news that is fit to print.
Nothing much else is happening.
And so, I will keep it short today, and let us enjoy the fact, except for Charlize Theron, somebody says, let us enjoy the fact that everything is working well.
Let me revisit a few things I said.
The worst prediction I ever made, and one that people retweeted with the phrase, this did not age well, I think I predicted that by the end of the first year of the Trump term, that it would become embarrassing to be a Democrat and to be opposed, embarrassing to be opposed to the president.
So I predicted that after the first year, things would go so well for the president that everybody who'd been against him, it would just be sort of embarrassing.
Well, that first year came and went, and people retweeted my tweet and said, well, this didn't age well.
You sure missed this one.
Man, you missed it by a mile.
Turns out it took two years to enhance.
At this point in time, It's got to be a little embarrassing to have opposed the president.
Because if you opposed the president, you thought the economy would go bad, you'd get us into a war, you thought that he was wrong on immigration becoming a problem if we don't deal with it, and you thought that he was a Russian puppet.
Basically, if you had been against this president for the last three years or whatever, you were wrong about everything.
You were just wrong about frickin' everything.
And as you're watching him be the president who made prison reform happen, and he's promoting Tiger Woods, and he's trying to get Herman Cain into a higher office, and you're watching the action, you have to be shaking your head and saying, what did I believe to be true for the last three years?
All the evidence, all of the evidence, Is against everything I believe.
Let's take any belief. One of the beliefs is that he was literally mentally unfit.
Is there anybody who's looking at what he's done over the last few years, in terms of accomplishing things, who can honestly say, oh yeah, the last three years clearly show he's mentally unfit?
I don't think anybody's holding that in their head anymore, except as a cheap political attack.
People thought he was literally Hitler.
Hasn't worked out that way.
So there's almost nothing that I can think of that people's original view of the world that managed to survive two and a half years.
So let me say it.
If you're not embarrassed at being anti-Trump for three years, if it doesn't embarrass you to have been wrong about literally everything, You name it.
Just everything. If that doesn't embarrass you, well, congratulations.
You've learned how not to be embarrassed at things that should embarrass you.
Anyway, I can leave it at that.
▲
Export Selection