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April 24, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
48:39
Episode 505 Scott Adams: TDS, Dopamine, Climate Crazies, Russian Interference, Bernie
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Hey everybody, I'm a little bit late this morning for no particular reason.
I just wasn't paying attention, which happens often to me.
But now you're here.
Now we're all happy.
It's all coming together.
Looks like your morning is going to start out well.
Thanks to a little thing I call the simultaneous sip, and it's coming at you soon.
You got your cup, your mug, your glass, your stein, your tankard, your chalice, your flask, your thermos.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for this simultaneous sip.
Well, so the news continues to serve up nothing interesting.
Okay.
And when it's interesting, it's stuff I don't talk about too much.
So I don't talk too much about the mass killings.
There's not much to say about them, unfortunately.
They're just tragedies.
But the fun political stuff has sort of slowed down, have you noticed?
So I'll just hit some of the nuggets that fell out from today's news.
So apparently President Trump criticized Chris Cuomo and his show in a tweet.
And Chris Cuomo replied.
And he said he first of all accepted the criticism.
I think the criticism might have been about ratings or something.
So he accepted him.
And then Chris Cuomo went on to criticize the president the following way.
Chris Cuomo noted...
All of the things that are going really, really well under this president.
Now, of course, he had to throw in that it was probably Obama that got things going and maybe it's just all luck.
But he did note that this president has one of the most successful first two and a half years of any president.
Those are my words, not his.
But he noted that the economy was screaming and, you know, unemployment's good and terrorism is down.
So he noted all the intensely good stuff happening.
And then he said, the president must be incompetent.
Here again, I'm paraphrasing.
Because his approval is below 50%.
And Cuomo said, how can you have a president with so many things going right, all the big stuff, the economy and terrorism, etc., and he can't get his approval level over 50%?
The implication being that that's the president's fault.
Do you see what's wrong with that?
The president's approval rating...
It's not being driven entirely by the president's actions.
It's being driven by how CNN covers him.
If they simply cover the actual events, instead of acting like he was some kind of demon who would come to the world to destroy all mankind or humankind, if CNN and the other news If the news covered him in even the least objective fashion, his approval rate would be 75%.
And by the way, I'll stand by that.
I'm going to say that again.
If the news covered this president objectively and just said the facts, and they could include saying that he doesn't pass the fact-checking, they could certainly criticize him for mean tweets.
Those are facts. But if you just covered what actually happened, and you didn't make up stuff like the Charlottesville hoax, you didn't make up stuff like mocking the guy with the bad arm that didn't happen, if you didn't actually make up news, He probably would have an approval of 75%.
And I'm not exaggerating.
I think that's how high it would be.
Now, of course, we've never had a president who had a press that only reported the news.
There's always criticism of the president, no matter what.
So, you know, probably Obama would have had a higher approval also, you know, if nobody ever criticized him and just reported the straight news.
So it works both ways.
Anyway, it's hilarious to see that one of the biggest changes from, you know, earlier U.S. history is that it used to be there was the news and then there was the stuff they reported on and that you can imagine those two things as separate things.
They're the things that are actually happening in the world and then there are news organizations which talk about those things, but they're different things.
Today they're the same thing.
Today the news is what the news organizations are creating.
So they're not looking at it and talking about it.
They're actually making it.
The news is the news.
The news industry manufactures the news now.
It's no longer reporting it.
It's creation.
It's art. It's persuasion.
So that's very different.
Alright, in no particular order, some other things.
Have you noticed that Bernie Sanders has become the voice of reason?
Maybe on both sides, but certainly for the Democrat side.
It seems to me that Crazy Bernie was always the one who was way off in his socialist fantasies and he couldn't pay for stuff and it was all very pie in the sky.
But because AOC and the other lefties have gone so far left, that when he talks, you say to yourself, okay, here comes the crazy stuff, and then he talks and you go, why doesn't that sound crazy anymore?
I was pretty sure he was crazy a few years ago.
Did he become less crazy?
Now, I'm still not saying he knows how to pay for any of his plans.
That part didn't change.
But they asked him about impeachment.
And unlike many of the Democrats who are jumping on that impeachment bandwagon, Bernie says, no, I'm more concerned about the issues.
Let's not get distracted.
And by the way, if we do get distracted by that, probably it's going to be good for Trump and you end up getting more of Trump, not less.
So the strategy won't work.
And I listened to that and I thought to myself, Okay, every part of that made sense.
What's going on here?
Why am I agreeing with Bernie so aggressively?
Strategy-wise, I think he found the exact right lane.
He found the nuance.
And so it's interesting to watch Bernie become the voice of reason.
That's how much our mental model has moved, that he just stands out as a beacon of reason on the left, which is probably bad news for the left.
Because if your most reasonable person has gigantic plans that can't possibly be practical in terms of how you pay for them, under the current way he suggests them, Then that's the problem for the Dems.
All right. I'm going to talk about some of the dumbest things I hear on social media.
Now, it's mostly on social media.
I suppose you hear them on the news a little bit from the pundits.
But these are the dumbest things that I hear on social media.
What is Trump doing?
I guess this is on the news as well.
The critics of the president say, what is Trump doing to stop Russian interference in the next election?
That might be the dumbest political comment in the world.
Because what exactly is he supposed to do?
What exactly are you supposed to do?
Wouldn't you assume that the people working on cybersecurity are doing everything they can to make sure it's hard to hack, it's hard to get into the voting machines?
Don't you believe that all of the states have now been alerted to the dangers and are doing everything that they can individually to make sure that they have secure voting processes?
Isn't... Aren't all of the social media platforms who were part of Russia's interference last time, are they not all completely aware and working with this administration to know what the risks are and figure out how to deal with it?
Of course. Of course they are.
That's obvious. You don't have to get a report on it.
Of course they are. Why wouldn't they?
Everything suggests that that's happening.
Now, what exactly could you do Beyond protecting yourself, which I assume is done.
What is it that people...
Here, let me get rid of this, Joel.
Goodbye, Joel. What is it that people imagine he should be doing that we could also observe and we would know he's doing it, which is a big thing, right?
Because, well, if we sanction them, we'd be sanctioning them for what they already did.
The question is, what are we doing to stop them from doing it again?
So, how do you stop them from doing it again in a context when they're going to do it again?
There isn't really any question that they're going to try to do it again, is there?
They might just try to be a little more clever about it.
But it seems to me that all the big countries interfere with each other whenever it makes sense.
And so, here are the things I would add to this.
If our CIA is making sure that Russia is paying a price for what they've already done, would you and I know about it?
Would you and I know that the CIA just stuck a pole so far up Putin's ass that it's sticking out of the top of his head?
Would we know that?
We shouldn't know that.
And shouldn't we expect that our CIA, our cyber people, are putting the screws on Russia?
Don't you think that we have crawled into their systems so extensively that we can make the lights blink when we want to?
Now, how would we, the public, know about any of that?
Because that's where all the action should be happening, right?
It should be happening under the hood.
Everything that the president should do or could do, let's say 75% of it should be out of our view, and the president should not be bragging about it.
So if you're going in public and saying, our president is not doing anything about Russia interference, I say, that might be true.
That's possible. But how the hell would you know that?
If he is doing it, you're supposed to not know it.
That's how it works.
Now, what about the credible threat that if Russia interferes again, that this president will make them pay a price?
Do we have a credible threat?
I think so.
The most common criticism of this president is that he's unpredictable.
Which happens to be one of his strengths.
Do you think that Putin is sitting over there saying that he could mess with the United States, be detected, which probably would happen, probably would be detected.
Do you think Putin thinks he has a free pass?
Does that even make a little bit of sense?
Maybe. Maybe.
You can't say he...
I can't read his mind.
But does it seem likely to you That Putin is thinking, ah, they didn't do much to me last time, a little bit of sanctions, nothing.
I'm just going to interfere again because this president will never do anything to me.
I don't think there's any chance that's true.
I would say that the most the president can do is already happening.
Which is he's created a persona, a brand, in which the one thing you can be sure of is that just because he said you were a nice guy yesterday doesn't mean he won't kill you tomorrow.
Don't you know that's true?
If there's anything you could depend on with this president, it's that it doesn't matter how much he complimented you on Tuesday.
If he needs to kill you on Wednesday, he's going to kill you on Wednesday.
It's one of the things we like about him, right?
I'm not wrong about that.
He could love you on Tuesday and kill you on Wednesday, and I'm pretty sure Putin knows that, because we know it.
How would he not know it?
So, that's the dumbest comment, is that Trump isn't doing anything.
It seems to me that the most he could do, the very most he could do, Is to say something in public, and maybe he will between now and the election.
It's kind of early to do it.
Maybe it's not too early. Anytime now.
He could say publicly, look, here's the deal, Russia.
If you mess with our elections again, there's going to be a specific response, and it's going to be economic, and you are not going to like it at all.
Now, that might help.
But I also think Putin already knows that.
So even that message would be primarily aimed for domestic consumption.
It might make a little difference.
I might be happy if he did that, but I don't know if it makes a big difference.
All right. I continue to be fascinated, changing the topic, by Glenn Greenwald's tweets about the old Russian collusion and Mueller investigation.
As many of you know, Glenn Greenwald, who is associated with the Intercept, has been saying since the beginning that this Mueller investigation was going to be a big nothing.
And then when it became a big nothing, He was doing his victory laps, which were also very interesting to watch.
Now he's criticizing the press and the Democrats for acting as though the Mueller report said the opposite of what it said.
So I think Glenn is puzzled and, maybe puzzled is the wrong word, frustrated, sounds like a better word, with the fact that we all waited for the facts, the facts came up, came out, and nobody changed their opinion.
People just saw whatever they wanted to see, independent of whatever was on the page of the Mueller report.
So the Democrats are continuing to report, as though it said, completely opposite of what it says.
And now, of course, to be fair, it could be that I'm the one who's hallucinating.
But we can tell for sure that nobody changed their mind because of the report.
At least I've never heard of a single person, have you?
Have you seen even one person who said, you know, man, I got all that wrong.
Turns out there was just nothing there.
Have you heard even one, I mean literally, one person?
A friend, a co-worker, a pundit on TV, even one person?
I have not. Who predicted that nobody would change their opinion?
Me. Me.
Somebody said Woodward.
I believe Woodward said from the beginning that when he wrote his book he found nothing Nothing to worry about.
I'll have to look up Bob Woodward, but I think he never believed there was anything there, and the Mueller report would have confirmed what he already did.
So, I predicted the most unlikely...
Think about how unlikely that was before I predicted it.
Imagine, if you will, oh, Matt Taibbi.
Could be. Could be.
Yeah, I'd have to look more about what he said in the beginning, but I think he might be the one standout there.
Think how unlikely my prediction was.
So think about, first of all, I predicted that Trump would win in 2015.
Very unlikely. But to be fair, to be fair, a lot of people also predicted Trump would win.
So I wasn't alone.
I was sort of alone in describing it the way I did, and there weren't too many people who wanted to say it in public, but there were other people.
So I wasn't alone in that, but it was a hard prediction.
But how much harder was it for me to predict that the Mueller report would not change any opinions?
Except maybe Matt Tybee.
That one was harder to predict, wasn't it?
Yeah, and I committed to it.
All of my predictions I committed to.
So... It's funny watching Glenn deal with this because you can see his...
I would say, even though I'm no fan of Glenn Greenwald, as a person, I think he's kind of...
He can be kind of a bitch.
He and I have mixed it up on Twitter a little bit.
So when I compliment his work, you should know that that's genuine because I don't like the person so much.
I don't have a positive feeling about the person, but his work is really good.
Can't take that away from him.
Secondly, watching him as a free thinker, and you can spot them, the people who actually seem to be following the data.
Watching him learn that the entire world completely ignored information that was critical information and watching him come to understand that that's the world he lives in is kind of fascinating.
All right. Jordan Peterson tweeted around, and I retweeted it, an article about how the world is greening.
So apparently the Earth is substantially greener, more trees, more plants, more bushes, than it was ten years ago.
And the attribution is that there's more land for agriculture and that the Chinese and India especially were planting trees and they were actually doing this for the result they got.
They were trying to plant more stuff to work on pollution and climate change, I guess, too, and all that.
So... You can check my Twitter feed and you can see the details.
I just tweeted it so it would be near the top.
Oh, I love that somebody said CO2 is plant food.
Because I was just going to talk about that.
All right. So, interestingly, the report I just said about how the world is greening, I read it quickly, but I didn't see anywhere where they said CO2 is contributing to the greening, which seemed conspicuously missing.
Isn't that the most obvious thing?
CO2, good for plants.
The big story is there's too much CO2, according to the scientists.
But even they would agree the plants should be growing more because of the CO2. So it's weird that that was not in the story unless I just missed it.
It was just one sentence or something.
Alright, let me tell you the worst opinions about climate change.
And I'm going to say this because every time I mention climate change, my Twitter feed is filled with the worst opinions.
Now when I say the worst opinions, I don't mean that they're on one side or the other.
So what I'm going to say next has nothing to do about which side you're on or which side is right.
What I'm going to talk about as the worst opinions are the opinions that don't make sense on any side.
They're just by themselves.
They don't make any sense.
One of them is warming is good.
And that whenever through history we've seen warming periods, those warming periods were associated with great gains in civilization.
People ate better, there was more wealth.
So warming is good.
How many of you have that opinion?
How many of you have the opinion about climate change, specifically, that warming is good and the warming that we will experience from climate change is also good because in the past it was good?
So I'm looking at the comments.
You see lots of disagreeers.
But plenty of people saying yes.
Now, for those of you who are saying yes, does it bother you that you're seeing so many people saying that doesn't make any sense?
Alright, let me...
Yeah, lots of you are saying warming is good.
Let me tell you why, and I don't know how to...
I don't know how to be polite about this.
Those of you who are saying warming is good, do you not have a concept Of too much.
You know there's civilizations, I don't know if this is true, but you've heard that there were early civilizations who didn't have a concept of zero.
But it seems that there are lots of people in today's world who don't have a concept of too much.
They don't know what that means.
Or they can't, maybe they can't hold it in their mind.
Let me explain this to you.
The more CO2 you have, the warmer it gets, according to the scientists.
Now, if you're arguing that CO2 doesn't cause warming, that's a separate argument.
But the debate is that more CO2 creates more warming.
Do you actually believe there's no limit to how warm it could get and we'd still be happier?
Let me put it in these words.
How many people believe there's no such thing as a limit to how warm it could get?
In other words, all warming is better forever at any rate.
How many of you will commit to that?
Please commit to me in the statement that you believe that there's no amount of warming that will ever be bad and it will always be good to infinity.
Anybody? Anybody?
You got really quiet there suddenly, didn't you?
Because as soon as I say that, all the people who said, oh, warming is good, you realize that there was a gigantic gaping hole in your thinking, which is we're not talking about it going up a little bit and stopping.
The whole point is that it won't stop.
That's the whole frickin' point, is that it's not going to stop getting warmer until we're all dead.
Now, you could argue that the science isn't complete, that we'll figure out ways to get around it.
Those are all different arguments.
But if your entire argument about climate change is, warmer is better, you're not really part of the reasoned conversation.
You should never say that again.
So all of you who are hearing me now, never say in public again, warming is better.
It makes you look like an idiot to other people.
I'm not saying that's my opinion.
Other people, reasonable people, will look at you and say, oh, frick, what is wrong with you?
Nobody's arguing that a little warming isn't good.
That's not even the conversation.
The argument is that if it keeps getting warmer, there'll be a point when it's not good anymore.
You all agree with that.
Stop saying warming is good.
All right, here's the other one. Here's the other worst argument about climate change.
And again, I'm not taking sides on what is true and not true about the science.
I'm just saying that no matter what side you're on, the following thing is the worst argument.
It goes like this.
CO2 is plant food.
It's the same problem, right?
Yeah, more CO2 should be good for the plants.
We all agree with that.
Scientists agree with that.
But more CO2, if the theory holds, creates more warming, and the warming will kill you.
So if your entire argument about climate change is CO2 is plant food, CO2 is plant food, you're not part of the conversation.
You're saying something that other people, smart people, are looking at and saying, oh my god, oh my god.
Nobody's arguing the CO2 isn't plant food.
You're simply stating a fact of no importance to the argument.
Somebody's saying warming is better.
So, some warming may in fact be better.
But that's not the debate.
So if you're saying CO2 is plant food or warming has been good in the past, you're saying things that smart people think are stupid because you're not even on the right topic.
But you could certainly argue that the science has issues.
You could certainly argue that we'll figure a way to take care of it.
There are lots of arguments to be had.
But please, never say to me again, On Twitter, the warming is good forever at any level, and the CO2 is good no matter how much you have.
Because those are like not having a concept of zero or not having a concept of too much.
There are people signing off because they're so mad that they realize their thinking doesn't work.
All right. Here's the other one that you should stop saying.
Because it's just the worst argument.
Stop saying there used to be more CO2 in the past.
The reason you should stop saying that, and the argument is, well, there was way more CO2 in the past than there is even now, so clearly CO2 can't hurt you.
That is just an uninformed argument.
There was more CO2 in the past, but scientists have a very good understanding of why the other variables were different in the past, such as the sun was not as bright, or there was a different amount of ozone, there was a different amount of other chemicals in the atmosphere, which we know, or there was more volcanic activity, depending on what you're looking at.
So it is true that you could have lots of CO2 in the past without it getting too warm.
Because the other variables were different.
So stop saying there was more CO2 in the past if you're trying to argue climate change.
Because everybody who understands a little bit about climate change labels you a moron when you say that.
Because that is the most debunked skeptical argument.
Here's another one you shouldn't say.
I'll just say I disagree with this one.
If you believe that you saw in the ClimateGate emails a smoking gun, you have to explain why I've looked at the same emails, and it's obvious there is no smoking gun.
So if you can't explain that, and by the way, I'm not...
I'm right on the fence on climate change because I can't really evaluate science, especially a science I'm not involved with.
So I'm not trying to sell you my side because I don't have a side.
Just keep that in mind.
So why is it that the guy who doesn't have a side and is a professional writer And literally an expert, and knowing what words mean in context, why is it that when I look at those Climategate emails, I see absolutely nothing?
Because the words to me are just casual talk among people who know what they're saying.
Now, they do show intent...
Intent to be consistent with the thing they think is true, which is the climate is warming.
There is intent to explain away things that they can't explain, but there is no intent to a great conspiracy to hide the facts.
That's just not there.
All right. Let's change the topic.
Daily Beast is reporting that some 12,000 Boy Scouts were victims of sexual abuse.
12,000!
12,000 Boy Scouts, victims of sexual abuse.
That's the ones we know of.
What is the multiplier of ones we know of to ones we don't know of?
Four? Is it 50,000?
50,000 people?
Kids who have been sexually abused?
Let me tell you My experience when I was a kid.
I was a scout for a little while.
There was a guy in my town who always volunteered to work with young boys on sports teams, you know, Little League and stuff.
And I always thought to myself, that's weird.
He's not a parent.
He's just a guy who volunteers to work with kids all the time.
He loves kids. He also was a Boy Scout leader.
Again, didn't have a kid in Boy Scouts.
He just liked to join all these organizations to help out wherever they were young boys.
Now, I'm not going to make any accusation about this particular guy, but I will make the following claim.
Anytime you've got a situation where you have collections of young people, And the people leading them are volunteers, or at least they can volunteer for the job and try to get that job.
You're always going to have massive sexual abuse.
Because who in the world wants those jobs more than a pedophile?
The pedophile is going to be the most motivated, the one who will take the lowest pay to do the job, the one who will suffer the worst conditions to do the job.
You should expect that over time, and I hope this isn't too much of an exaggeration, If you were to fast forward and nothing changed about the Boy Scouts, I'm not saying this is the case at the moment, but if you simply extend out the current forces and variables, you should get to a point where 100% of the Boy Scout leaders are pedophiles.
Right? Because the pedophile will put up with more trouble, will go to greater lengths, will work for less money, because they're getting paid off a different way, unfortunately.
So if you wait long enough, the entire Catholic Church should be pedophiles, and the entire scouting organization should be pedophiles.
In the same way that I assume that most shoe sales people who work with women are probably guys with foot fetishes.
Because they would work for less, and they would try harder, and they would put more effort into getting those jobs.
Over time, incentives are always predictive.
Incentives are always predictive.
You've created a situation with the Scouts and with the Catholic Church that pretty much guarantees it attracts a certain type of person because they would have the greatest incentive.
And nothing stops that.
It's hard to find any example where incentives that are that strong and that clear don't drive behavior.
I mean, you should expect it.
Alright. That is pretty much what's going on.
I'm going to hit one other topic that everybody hates me for because I thought of a better way to explain it.
I've been arguing about transgenders being allowed to play sports in the gender that they have ended up in.
And I note that pretty much everybody who argues against me first assigns me an incorrect opinion and then get really mad about the incorrect opinion.
So I thought it must be the way I'm explaining it that is making people hear it differently than I'm thinking it.
So I'm going to try to give you the best explanation I can that would make me the most immune from somebody misidentifying my point.
Here's my point. All sports currently are a giant pile of crap.
And by that I mean sports, they work to deify the people who are good at sports who were just born lucky with a good genetic combination and maybe the right family situation so that they could excel.
Sports deify people who just By luck,
we're born with the right stuff. Still, most of what I experience is losing.
If I were in a tournament with lots of teams, my team probably won't win.
If I join a team, I'm probably not going to be the best one on it.
I might not even get to play.
I might sit on the bench. If you've been experienced watching sports, especially school sports, it's mostly about humiliating people who are bad at sports.
There's nothing fair about sports.
They're designed to be unfair.
By their design, by their intention, they're mostly about creating big categories of losers where there would have been none before.
I'll say that again. Sports creates losers where there would not have been any losers, and far and away, mostly losers.
We tend to deify and celebrate the winners, but is winning as sports important?
It's not. Sports are really just some weird thing we play out because it feels good.
Alright, so here's my point.
Sports are this big, unfair, cruel pile of shit.
That's the current situation.
If you were to add on top of that a little extra unfairness, it is like adding shit on top of shit.
So if you tell me that adding shit to shit makes the original shit worse, I say, you can't really make shit worse by shitting on it.
So when you say to me that adding transgenders ruins sports, I say, it does introduce a new set of unfairness.
But it's a new unfairness on top of a completely unfair thing that's designed to be completely unfair.
Some people just have advantages.
It's probably not you.
So my only argument is that adding shit to shit doesn't change the original shit.
If you're starting with the point of view that sports are clean and fair and wonderful, and you're adding a little taint to them by this little bit of unfairness that you perceive in transgenders, well then I would say you're welcome to that argument.
But my argument is not that we're starting out with a good situation and adding an imperfection.
I say we're starting with a huge pile of unfair, humiliating bullshit, and we're adding a little more humiliating bullshit on top of it.
It's still just a pile of bullshit when you're done.
So I say that the social benefit of treating everybody equally is a greater gain than adding some shit to some shit, which is irrelevant.
All right? Seinfeld did it better.
Once you're wet, you're wet.
I'll buy that analogy.
And somebody says, but it's only unfair to women.
Again, it's already completely unfair and shit.
Adding a little more shit doesn't change the original shit.
So... So your argument is that sports don't matter, so who cares?
I didn't say they don't matter.
Have you noticed...
One of the ways you can tell that an argument is solid is that the people arguing against you have to create an imaginary argument to be angry about.
And you're going to see that in the comments.
I'll pick one out here.
somebody pick somebody said who hurt me you are hypocritical About what? You are unfairly talented at creating comic strips.
That's correct. Totally unfair.
Oh, let's talk about Kim traveling to Russia.
This could be a good thing.
Could be a bad thing. There's no way to know.
But Chairman Kim is visiting with Putin.
I guess that's happening today or something like that.
And I've got a feeling this could be good.
Because the thing that Kim wants more than anything else is security.
And if Kim gets a guarantee of security from three countries, Russia, China, and the U.S., he might be able to To convert his nuclear program into, you know, just an energy program.
So this is probably an important step.
Now, the cynic would say he's just trying to get Putin on his side so he doesn't have to give up any nukes.
That may be. Could be.
But I would think that Russia, China, and the United States would all agree on the following point.
That if those three countries can guarantee the, let's say, the safety of North Korea, that that's a pretty good argument for you don't need your nukes anymore.
But you'd need all three to be on the same side and to keep each other in line.
Maybe there's some way that the three can guarantee it with some kind of sanctions against each other if they don't or something.
I don't know. There may be some way to guarantee it.
All right. Watch the recording.
You literally just said sports don't matter.
Well, let me clarify then.
Sports are not...
What's the best way to say it?
They matter to people because people say they matter.
So that's just an observable fact.
People act as though sports matter, so in their minds they do matter.
So that part's true. It is also true that if you don't play sports, you can still have a good life.
There are plenty of people who don't participate in any sports, and they don't really miss it.
They don't. So I think you could say that if you could snap your fingers and nobody could remember the sports even existed, it wouldn't matter.
You just wouldn't care.
You wouldn't even notice it was gone.
So in the sense of what does a human being need in life, et cetera, probably doesn't matter.
But we do treat it as the way it matters.
So that's the clarification.
Losing also motivates people to be better.
Sure. And that's a good reason to add transgender athletes.
Because if you add a transgender athlete, then everybody gets the character-building experience of losing.
Instead of just a few people, you get a few more people losing.
So they get even better character, right?
Right? Because that's our clever workaround for the fact that sports are a giant humiliation engine.
It's really about humiliating the people who are not good at sports.
That's mostly what happens.
For every few people who it definitely helps their life, it definitely does help their life.
There are some people Who are absolutely better off from sports.
And a lot more people who are just humiliated by learning how unqualified they are for sports.
All right. Oh, let me answer this question directly.
One of the things I get all the time on a number of topics is that when people don't agree with me, they imagine I have motives that are not obvious.
Meaning they imagine...
That what I'm really doing is just trolling.
And that it's not my real opinion.
I just want to get the clicks up, etc.
I don't know.
I don't know if I've ever done that.
It's not something I'm doing now.
And certainly, at no time in my Periscope life, have I ever claimed to hold a position that I didn't really claim.
I just sort of don't do that.
It wouldn't be interesting.
I don't know why I'd do it.
It feels like it'd be a bad risk-reward.
So just don't think about that.
If I tell you my real opinion, it's my real opinion.
I've got the FU money.
I don't need to mess around.
I couldn't gain enough attention.
I don't know how I would gain enough by pretending to have an opinion I didn't have.
So I don't do it.
And then other people are saying, well, he's...
He's just gonna say this crazy thing and then he's gonna, you know, he's gonna twist it around at the end.
He's got some agenda. Not really.
My agenda is the same theme I always have, which is that we are irrational creatures and most of our perceptions and our opinions and our decisions are irrational.
And so when I point out points of irrationality, sometimes it's about other people.
Sometimes it's about you.
And when it's about you, you think, well, that can't be true.
He must be just saying this for a fact.
But when I say it about other people, you say, oh yeah, he's nailing it.
Scott is so on this, talking about that other person.
But when he talks about me, I'm sure he's just kidding.
He can't really mean that, could he?
So he says, gaslighting is beautiful.
Gaslighting is not a thing.
It's not a thing. If you think somebody's gaslighting you, it means you're experiencing cognitive dissonance.
Maybe not every time, but that's the most likely explanation.
If you think that somebody is intentionally trying to make you insane to doubt your belief in reality, well, maybe there's somebody who has done that somewhere, but no, that's not a thing.
There are just people who There are people lying.
There are people persuading.
There are people who are wrong.
You know, there are all kinds of things.
But there is no gaslighting.
If you imagine that there is, you experience a cognitive problem.
Yeah. The reason that people...
Let me be as clear as possible.
Cognitive dissonance can be identified By people coming up with weird explanations of things.
So if I say, here's my reason why I think something's true, and it doesn't ring true, you say, no, no, no, you got it wrong, here's my reasons why it's wrong.
So there's no cognitive dissonance in that, you just hear some information, you have a different opinion, you disagree.
But if I nail it, or somebody else does, and they say something that it just looks true, But you don't want it to be?
What do you do? What does your brain do when you're presented with a truth that you really, really don't want to be true because it would ruin your entire worldview?
You come up with a strange explanation for how this incongruity could exist.
And the one you see the most is, well, they must be gaslighting me.
So anybody who says that gaslighting is happening...
almost certainly is experiencing cognitive dissonance about something, and they're presenting it because they have this weird opinion that doesn't make any sense, doesn't fit any facts.
Isn't gaslighting just a negative term for persuasion?
So, No, it's more than that.
Because gaslighting comes from a Hitchcock movie, and the idea of it was that you would make somebody think they were actually crazy, make them actually doubt their ability to understand the world.
It's not just persuading them of something new.
Persuasion is down here, and gaslighting would be like this.
Persuasion, first of all, could be completely ethical.
Ordinary persuasion is ethical, if you're an ethical person.
Gaslighting is, by definition, an unethical, horrible thing, and nobody's doing that.
All right. That's all for now.
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