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May 17, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
56:06
Episode 532 Scott Adams: Heartbeat Bills, Trump’s Income, China Trade, Immigration
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
That's me. And you probably know who you are, so that's enough for the introductions.
Let's get on to the main event.
The little thing I call the simultaneous sip.
And it works like this.
You grab your cup, your mug, your glass, your container, your tankard, your stein, your chalice, if you will.
A thermos or a flask will do.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Ah, that's good.
That's good stuff. I'm going to check here to see who is asking to join as guests.
Alright. It's not working.
So, we've got lots to talk about.
Lots to talk about.
Let's start with my favorite story of the day.
President Trump released information about his income in 2018.
Now, that's big news.
Because if the president didn't make money, he would look like a big old fraud.
And worse, if he made more money as president than he had made when he wasn't president, that doesn't look good.
So he had two ways to lose.
One way is if he didn't make much money, or he lost money, and then he'd be a fraud.
And the other way is if he made money.
He would look like a criminal because, whoa, you're making money as president?
That doesn't look good.
So where does it come out?
He made $434 million.
So it turns out he did make money in 2018.
$434 million in one year.
But here's the fun part.
It was just slightly less than he made the year before.
Nothing. Did they say revenue?
Somebody is correcting me and they're saying revenue.
I read it quickly and let me check to make sure that that is correct.
Look at this loss piling up year after year.
Oh, that's interesting because the way CNN reports it is very...
Misleading. So they report income of at least $434 million, but they did not...
doesn't show expense.
Anyway, for our purposes here today, it doesn't matter, because regardless of what his expenses were, the income is the part that people would be questioning.
So if the income was terrible or the income was too high, he would be pilloried Pilloried, but not hillaried.
And as luck would have it, the actual number is exactly the number that you can't criticize.
If it had been even 1% higher than the year before, people would have said, oh, I don't know.
That 1%, I don't know if that would have been there if he hadn't been president.
But by being just a little bit under, it's the only place you could be where you're unambiguously being a billionaire.
That part's true. No doubt about it.
In fact, his income last year, his income in 2018, was roughly the amount he inherited.
Isn't that true? Didn't he inherit something like 400 million?
Now, I think you'd have to multiply that up for adjusting for time, but that's a pretty good year.
Pretty good year.
Who knows what his net income was?
So yes, it was reported as income, but without knowing his expenses, we don't know what that means exactly in terms of his net.
All right, I'm just babbling today.
I just slept late, so I'm barely awake right now.
Let's talk about the Alabama abortion law, and I would like to brag about myself for a little bit here.
Can you believe it?
Hard to believe. Here's a picture from CNN. And a lot of people...
Oh, no, this is from The View.
You probably saw this similar thing.
It doesn't matter if you can see it well.
You see The View. They were talking about the Alabama law.
You can see behind Joy Behart is a picture of all the people who were involved in making the law.
What is interesting about every person involved in making the abortion law is they're all men.
Every one of them is a man.
So the view is making the point that the law that they don't like on the view about abortion was made entirely by men.
Now, do you remember, some of you do, my abortion stance?
My abortion stance is to recuse myself from the actual decision about what the laws are or should be.
I do that because of this.
The whole point of showing that it was all men who made the law is...
What is the point?
What was the point of showing that it's all men who made this law?
The point is to delegitimize the law.
Think about how that matters.
This is literally a law about life and death, and there's no real right answer.
And I say there's no right answer as someone who's looking at it from, you know, let's say a narrator's point of view.
Obviously the people who have strong opinions believe they have the right answer.
But when I say no right answer, I mean people will not agree universally.
Who is being harmed?
Who is not being harmed?
What's a life? What isn't a life?
When you have that situation, it's the most important of all decisions.
Literally, it's a question about life and death of a baby.
You can't get more important than that in terms of our psychological makeup.
In that situation, the best you can do is to have a credible law even if people disagree with it.
So whatever you end up with whether it favors one side or the other in the abortion debate if where you end up is not credible It's your worst situation.
Because then society has unrest as well as whatever problems you're having on the topic itself.
So, part of the reason I recuse myself is, in a very small way, to not be a participant in making the law less credible.
Because credible matters almost as much as getting it right.
Because it's what holds society together.
Society has to agree, yeah, some of us don't like that law, but I get how that law came about.
The people involved are the right people.
They looked at the right information.
Darn it, I wish they'd gone a different way, but at least I'm in a system that ran the way I would like a system to run.
This is not the way anybody wants a system to run.
Remember, this is the systems versus goals question again.
The system isn't working.
A system where only men decide on abortion in some state, that might be the worst system ever designed.
Now, many of you are saying, Yeah, people are saying, women voted those men into office, women largely agree with what the men agreed.
That's all true. But that doesn't go to credibility.
Those are true things which do matter.
But they don't change how we think about it, because in the end it was still a bunch of guys who had to vote.
So, I don't encourage other people to change their minds on abortion.
I do not try to change minds on abortion.
And I don't ask you to recuse yourself if you're male.
But I feel it's the most useful and honest thing that I can do is to not be part of that question because it gives women slightly more control if men recuse themselves.
So that's the smallest thing I can do, but it's...
It's sort of the right thing to do in my personal opinion, and I completely respect anybody who wants to have a different opinion.
All right. I tweeted around this morning a great article by Joel Pollack in Breitbart, in which he talks about how both the left and the right seem to be agreeing on trade with China.
And he mentions Tom Friedman, who most of you will recognize that name, but he's far from being pro-Trump, but he's come out and said directly that Trump might be the exact right person for negotiating with China.
And that the country has been educated by Trump, essentially, by Trump's actions.
The country has been educated by On the situation with trade with China.
Don't you think that early on in the process when Trump was running for office and he kept saying, China, China, China, China's giving us bad trade deals, don't you think that the Democrats mostly said to themselves, eh, it's probably not that bad?
Don't you think people thought he was exaggerating?
At least his critics.
Don't you think that they thought, eh, maybe you're being a little racist here?
Why is it you want to go hard against China, but you're not talking about England?
So everything about what he started out saying sounded shady.
People didn't believe it.
They didn't think it was as big a problem.
Now, I do think that there were a number of working-class people in the Rust Belt who probably cared about this more than others, but the country in general.
I'm not sure that people quite bought into it as being A, as big a problem as he said, and B, something you could ever potentially make better with a trade war.
Because what do they say about trade wars?
100% of people on the left.
And I think I'm right about that, right?
100%? Something you could almost never say?
Could you ever say that 100% of anybody agrees about anything?
It's the rarest thing.
But I think 100% of the Democrats, And maybe half of the Republicans thought that a trade war would immediately be the end of civilization, that our economy would crumble, etc.
And now we're right in the middle of a pitched battle.
I mean, we're really in it right now.
We're deeply into a trade war right now.
And what's happening to our economy?
Records. Records.
Records. We're just hitting record after record of insanely good achievement.
This is without anything good happening yet in China.
In fact, it's all bad so far.
But Trump has also proven that we could live forever with tariffs.
If we had to, it would be unambiguously bad for certain populations.
Sometimes the costs would probably go up.
And then over time, the economy would adjust.
Factories would go up in Guatemala, that sort of thing.
So, Trump has been shown to be not just right But, oh, God, right.
You know what I mean? Not just a little right, not, oh, yeah, now that we're in it, I see your point, Mr.
President. He's not slightly right.
He's not a little bit right. He's as right as you can be.
And people on the left, who would call themselves his biggest critics, have been largely silent.
Wasn't it Chuck Schumer recently?
Who basically decided to be solidly on Trump's side with the China negotiations.
Now, I would like to pat myself on the back again, and I would invite many of you, if not most of you, to pat yourselves on the back, too.
And it goes like this.
Ready your arms. Get ready to pat yourself on the back.
How many of you knew from the jump That President Trump, a President Trump, should he become...
Get your hand ready. Get your hand ready.
Should he become president, back when I think most of the people watching this were supporters, did you not know that he was a unique character who would bring us some things that nobody else could bring us, some important things?
China trade, for one, very important.
Did you not know that he could bring important benefits, but...
You knew he was gonna break some dishes, right?
You knew he would break dishes.
You knew your fine china was not safe.
You knew your sensitive little ears were gonna get hurt.
You knew people would complain.
You knew there would be a little civil unrest.
You knew people would be tense and unhappy.
You knew people would call him racist.
You knew people would call you racist.
But you know what else you knew?
You knew that he was a unique character who could solve some problems that maybe other presidents just couldn't solve.
Pat yourself in the back.
Oh, feels good.
Feels good. You knew that.
I knew that.
That is the only reason I've ever been supportive of this president.
It comes down to that.
It comes down to, I'm going to eat a mile of mud.
Oh, I'll keep this PG. So the PG version is, I knew that I would eat a mile of mud.
And on the end, I was confident that we would get to a good place we couldn't have gotten to without eating a mile of mud.
So I ate a mile of mud.
Most of you did as well.
And so pat yourself on the back for that, for seeing things closer to the way they really are.
All right. Let's talk about immigration.
So the president announced his immigration plan, at least a plan for some portion of immigration to move to a Lottery system with points, some kind of a point system.
And I don't know about you, but I have two completely opposite feelings about it.
See if you have the same thing.
On one hand, when it's described and the president says, yeah, we're just going to have a merit-based system and it's going to be very similar to what Canada and most other countries use.
Now, when he says it that way, they say, oh, our system is going to be like Canada?
Well, Canadians are great people, right?
Is there anybody who has a better reputation for being nice people than Canada?
No. If Canada is doing it, it can't be cruel.
It can't be bad.
This is something frickin' Canada is doing.
Canada is like our conscience.
Do you ever have a little conscience?
You know, one of the things you can ask yourself if the United States is looking to do something bad, and you say, ooh, United States, I don't know, is that good?
That might be a little bad.
What do you think? Ask your conscience.
And Canada is like your conscience on your shoulder, and you go, what do you think?
What do you think about this?
What? You do it too?
All right. We're safe.
It's okay. Canada does it too.
So that's my first reaction.
My second reaction is, I hear the details, and we're scoring people by these various levels of quality, like, you're better if you're younger.
Well, I understand why, because people will have more economic value if they're coming in when they're qualified and they're working age and all that, so it's the best economic situation for the United States.
So it all makes sense.
But when you hear it, it doesn't hit your ears right.
Are you having this too?
You hear it and you say, that doesn't sound good that we're saying that educated people are somehow better than people who didn't go to college?
People who are younger are better in some way?
And the answer is yes.
They are economically, on average, They would add more to an economy than someone who didn't have a certain set of qualities.
Objectively speaking, we all understand it, and we know why Canada does it.
Canada does it.
But when you hear it, it doesn't really hit the ears right.
Are you right? Would you agree?
Does anybody have the same impression?
I'm not saying we shouldn't do it.
In fact, I think we should do it.
I do like the merit-based system because it's good for the country that has the system.
Canada's system is very good for Canada.
Why shouldn't we have one?
So I get it, and I support something like it, but, man, it doesn't sound good.
And, of course, the Democrats, who are very consistent on this point, if there's something that is good but doesn't sound good, Are they going to be in favor of it?
Can you think of any example?
Maybe there's some example of this.
But when you say, I got a policy.
It's a big important policy.
I won't even tell you what the policy is.
You don't even know what the policy is.
I won't even tell you the topic.
I'll only tell you two things.
It's a good idea.
Guaranteed. Everybody would say so.
Canada would agree. It's a good idea.
You don't even need to know what it is.
But I'll also tell you that while it's unambiguously a good idea, it doesn't sound good.
The words you use to describe it will remind you of things that are bad.
This isn't bad. There's nothing about this is bad.
But it's going to remind you of things that are bad.
Can the Democrats do that thing that's unambiguously good, but the way it's talked about will sound bad?
They can't. They are blocked from doing a good idea which can't be described in words that sound good.
Nuclear energy, somebody said.
Democrats cannot favor nuclear energy, no matter how unambiguously smart that would be, and it would be unambiguously smart, because when you talk about it, the words about it don't feel right.
Because you say stuff like nuclear waste and meltdown and you use the scary words and then you just don't feel right.
Chernobyl, etc. The wall, yeah.
The wall is a perfect example.
The wall makes perfect sense according to probably 100% of border security experts everywhere in the world.
I don't know if it's 100%, but probably something like 100% of all experts would say, of course you need a board.
Obviously you need a wall or a big fence or something.
But in some places, it's obviously you need that.
But can the Democrats support it?
Even if 100% or something like that of all border security experts would say, duh, of course you need some wall, some places.
No, because talking about a wall doesn't sound right, doesn't hit your ears right.
You say, ooh, a wall?
Those are our friends in Mexico, which they are, right?
It's an allied nation, the Mexican people are amazing people.
I love the Mexican people.
Why would you put a wall between yourself and people you love?
That doesn't make sense.
So the Democrats are limited By the words that are used and the feelings that are evoked by any topic.
And you'll see this time and again.
All right. Let me see what Fox News is up to.
I like to do my CNN Fox News test, where I look at the headlines of one and then the headlines of another and see if there's anything in common.
Because, you know, it's two different movies.
Your Fox News is different.
So, yeah, it's like a whole different world.
None of these stories were on CNN. But none of them are terribly important either.
Sort of a no-news day.
Let's see. AG mocks contempt push as circus.
That was to uncover Russia probe origins.
Okay, so that's a headline on Fox News.
Is that even news?
That's like barely news.
Because doesn't it feel like you already knew that news or it's the same news you've already heard?
Listen to this.
The attorney general talking about Barr mocks contempt push as a circus and vows to uncover the Russia probe origins.
That's basically what we already knew.
Nobody ever thought that Bill Barr thought it was a good idea to hold him in contempt.
I'm sure he's not in favor of that.
And, of course, we already knew he was going to look into the origin story.
So the best part of the origin story, or Bill Barber, looking into the origins of the Russia collusion thing, sorry, is that the so-called deep staters are turning on each other.
So, watching Comey and Brennan And probably, I guess, Clapper will get into it.
Isn't this going to be kind of fun, watching them go after each other, after watching them go after the President for two years?
It's going to be kind of fun.
Now, it shouldn't be fun.
It should not be a good thing.
We should not be happy.
We should not be happy that there was ever any kind of thing that we could even construe as maybe sort of a plot against the president.
But it's going to be sort of fun to watch them try to eat each other on the way down.
Now, I will maintain my original view or something close to it.
I think I've shifted a little bit, so I'll acknowledge that.
When this whole deep state stuff first emerged as a, let's say it was a conspiracy theory at first, which has evolved from a conspiracy theory, or so I thought, about this deep state, to once we really get to the bottom of stuff, it looks a lot like, well, maybe that was no conspiracy theory after all.
We still don't know.
My original statement, or original thoughts, and you can fact check me on this because maybe I've been less consistent than I'm going to present it, but I think this is largely the evolution of my thought, was that when I first heard there's a deep state and they're working against the president, I thought to myself, Well, you know, there's always an embedded bunch of people who don't like whoever the incoming president is, especially since the other party had been in power for eight years.
So I didn't think it was anything noteworthy.
Sure, sure, sure, there are people who are not going to like a Republican president.
And yes, yes, yes, maybe they don't like this particular Republican president more than they've disliked others.
But I didn't think there was anything there.
Sure, there were individuals acting in individual ways.
But that's not a conspiracy.
So my original view is that it wasn't really a conspiracy in the sense that people were having meetings, and Hillary Clinton was the ringmaster, and they'd use secret apps to communicate, and they'd say, all right, if you do the dossier, I'll have my reporters report it, and then we'll get McCain in here, and Comey's on board.
We've got Clapper, we've got Brennan.
They're going to run cover for us on the media.
I don't know that it was ever that.
Does anybody think it was that?
Because, let me say as clearly as possible, I'm not ruling that out.
There was a time early on when people were saying, deep state, deep state, when I completely rejected that.
And I just said, no, this is just so obviously not some big conspiracy where there's some ringleader, you know, Hillary's pulling the strings and all that.
But the more we learn, the more an image starts to take shape of something that looked, if not that, maybe jarringly close to that.
I don't know how close it will be to that or if we'll ever know everything, but it feels like a lot of people who understood what the other people wanted and would do and what their interests were, it felt like a lot of people just sort of knowing what to do.
Would you accept that framing?
That rather than a plot with a plan where they see all the way through from the beginning to the end in some kind of a plan, rather it was just a lot of people who knew exactly what to do.
So I don't know if that's a coup.
Is it a coup? If just a whole bunch of people independently, maybe they've talked to one or two of each other, but they all just sort of know what to do.
Because whatever is bad for the president is good for them.
So I don't know how organized this is going to look.
Probably no more organized than Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
Bam! Goes the dynamite.
Okay. Let's see what else we got here.
Rush Limbaugh says the anti-Trump conspirators are beginning to rat each other out.
Oh, that's just what I said. And then Hannity says the deep state officials are running scared and they are now turning...
I swear to God, I didn't read that.
Before I went into that whole monologue there, I didn't realize that there were two headlines on Fox.
They're smaller ones. I didn't see it when I first looked.
In which that actually is the story.
So that's fun and exciting.
All right. I want to see if we've got a...
Caller on here.
Let's see. I was talking to a fellow that I want to bring on, and I want to make sure that he's on there before I do this.
Please stand by, talk among yourselves, and I'll make sure he's either on here or not.
Oh yeah. Oh no, it's a different Josh.
I'm looking for a different Josh.
He had some device issues.
And, well, I guess we'll do that another day.
All right.
Sorry.
Bye.
For some reason, somebody's not getting an option on their phone.
Alright, I need to go do something this morning.
So unless you have a question, I'm going to run away.
I'll give you a few seconds for questions.
I will look at your responses.
I have no idea why I have 3,000 people watching this.
Did something happen today that I don't know about?
Can anybody explain why I have twice as many followers with absolutely nothing to say this morning?
Well, I think we should have another simultaneous sip while I'm looking at your comments.
Join me now. Oh yeah, the new SAT rules.
So, the SAT is going to have, what do they call it, a adversity score.
So, in addition to your actual score of the test, you will get to say how abused you are in your life and what your adversity is.
So, I think part of it is where you grew up and, I don't know, your income of your family and some other things.
I thought to myself, what is the difference between the SAT rules on adversity and merit-based immigration?
Now, obviously on the surface there are completely different things and one is trying to rule people in and the other one is maybe a different kind of filter, but they both have the same quality.
They have the same quality that we're judging people Judging people based on a bunch of criteria which may not be within the control of the person necessarily.
So the more we can measure people, let's say China's So China has this big program, I forget what it's called, where they can do a permanent, ongoing measurement of a person's social qualities.
So your trustworthiness, your reliability and all those things, somehow they're all going to be factored in.
And this is the beginning part of the machines taking over.
If you don't see this, you're going to be very surprised and disappointed in about 10 years.
The one way that human beings have something like the illusion of free will is that you don't know what we're going to do.
And we have a wide variety of things we can select from, and nobody can predict what we will predict for any individual.
So it gives us the feeling that we have control.
Oh, I have decisions.
I'm going to make a decision here, I'm going to go over there, etc.
But once all of our systems, from SATs to immigration to...
You know we're going to have some version of the Chinese social credit score thing.
That's common. Whether the government does it, or whether there's just a website that does it, you will definitely have websites that rate people as how good they are at lovers.
You know that's coming.
There will be a website where you can find out how good somebody is at making love before you get involved with them.
You know that's coming. And we will eventually have ways to rank people so specifically that we will eliminate free will.
Do you see it coming?
Because right now I have free will.
To go apply for a job anywhere that I think I can get hired.
Largely by duping the person who is interviewing me into thinking I have maybe more experience and more qualifications than I do.
So in my current world, that is not the world I'm about to describe, in my current world, I can cheat the system a little bit.
I can say, yeah, I'm not qualified for that job, but I'm going to try anyway, and then maybe I get that job.
I can say, Yeah, the person I want to date is way too good for me, but I can not tell that person about some of the bad things about me until they're hooked.
I can cheat the system.
I can date somebody who's too good for me because I might, you know, draw them in and get them hooked before they find out about all the bad stuff.
Oh, sorry, I'm an alcoholic.
I didn't mention that, did I? Now fast forward to a point where everybody is ranked for everything.
You know that's common. You will know exactly if somebody is qualified for something before they walk in the door.
You won't even need to have an interview for a job in the future.
You will not need an interview for a job because your employer will already know.
Who's the best? A list will come out and the system will just rank all the people.
It'll say, you're looking for somebody who has a high social score, somebody who has been on time a lot, somebody who's not been through a lot of, let's say, marriage problems, somebody who's got a certain number of kids or doesn't have kids or is going to have kids.
We'll be able to rank people so completely that they won't need to interview.
Now, once you don't need to interview, your ability to say, alright, well, maybe I'm not quite qualified for that job, but I think I'm going to try to get it anyway.
Someday I might become qualified.
It's all gone. You will no longer have choices on who you date, where you work, or even maybe where you spend time.
Because your choices will become constrained because the systems, collectively, will know so much about you that they will prevent you from doing things that other people should be doing instead.
So... So the long-term eventual impact of everything from the SAT's adversity scores to immigration with scoring your merit to the Chinese system to social media in general and all of the other things we can measure.
People know exactly what you do, what you love because of your online activity.
They can tell. They know what your fetish is.
They know everything about you.
Those things, collectively, will make the decisions for you, what you're going to do, who you can talk to, who is willing to have a conversation with you.
We're not that far away from walking up to somebody at a party, and your little badge goes beep, beep, and the other person's badge goes beep, beep, and you realize there's no point in talking.
Think about that.
You'll get to the point where you can meet a stranger and you can look at your phone or your ring will buzz or your watch or something and you'll say, there's not even any point.
There is no point in the two of us even having a conversation because we know it's not going anywhere.
We know we're not going to be friends.
We know we have no information to exchange.
We know we have no potential use to each other whatsoever.
We know that one of you has a good sense of humor and the other doesn't.
No point in talking. So, in the same way that the more we can measure, here's an analogy, but it's a bad analogy, but it gets you close to the idea.
I've said for a long time that the reason that the news is largely fake news, and that the public is completely bamboozled about what's happening in the world, is because we can measure the success of a headline or a story in the news.
Once you know exactly what gets the most clicks and you have a business model that requires you to make money, you're a public company, you have to do the thing that gets you the most money, as long as it's legal.
And it is legal to cover some stories and not others.
There's nothing illegal about saying, we'll cover this story, we won't give this story as much attention.
Completely legal. So it created these two worlds because we could measure things so well.
If you couldn't measure, people would just be putting out stories and you would just hear lots of stuff and you'd have to make up your own mind.
But now, you're only going to see on Fox News things that they know their customers are going to click on.
And you're only going to see on MSNBC the types of stories that their customers are going to click on.
Your free will has been eliminated when it comes to looking at the news and making decisions.
So we no longer are presented with news and then we use our reasoning such as it is and our illusion of free will and then we come up with something that feels like a decision.
We've left that time.
We're currently in a time where the news decides their audience and then within that audience they can make them think and adopt any position that they want.
They can make you adopt whatever political position they want.
How do I know this? Easy.
Talk to anybody at a party about any political thing that's in the headlines.
And you will find that their opinion matches exactly the consensus of the pundits on the side that they associate with.
Nobody has their own opinion.
You won't find people who say, yeah, you know, CNN says this, Fox News says this, but I have a whole different take on this.
And it's something they didn't hear from somebody else.
It's not even a thing.
Or if it is a thing, it's so small now that you could get rid of it with a rounding.
We are mostly NPCs that have been programmed with the dominant point of view that the news organizations have determined will make you click the most.
Your opinion is whatever is the most clickable.
It's not because you thought it was smart.
It's not because somebody else thought it was smart and told you.
It's not because you used your free will.
It's not because you used your good judgment.
It's because somebody had decided that these stories get a lot of clicks.
They stimulate the part of your brain that makes you act.
And that became your opinion.
You think you have an opinion, but you don't.
You don't. We used to have something like opinions, but that time has left.
Anyway, so where we're heading is that the illusion of free will will shrink and shrink and shrink as machines are better and better at measuring things relative to our human experience.
The better the machines are, the better the Chinese system, the better the SATs, the better the immigration merit-based thing, the better that we can do job interviews without somebody even coming in.
We know everything about them.
The more social media we have, the more health records we have, the more we know about people The smaller their world will get.
You might not notice it for a decade, but it's just going to shrink and shrink until the only things you ever do are the things that the machines collectively, all the machines, all the systems, all the software, the only things you'll be doing in the future are the things that the machines decided We'll stimulate your dopamine and and get you to a better place The machines will decide what you do and if you don't believe me Let me let me draw you a little word picture here Obviously there are lots of health apps and and health monitoring apps and we'll have more and more of them for your phone eventually You will know exactly,
because your phone will tell you, or some technology that's personal technology, it will tell you when you're dehydrated.
It will tell you when you need a drink of water.
Because being human, you sometimes forget that you're thirsty.
You can go a while before your sense of thirst kicks in, way beyond the point when you should have had a drink of water.
What will happen I made myself thirsty just talking about it.
What will happen when your phone knows before your brain does that you're thirsty?
Well, the first time it happens, you're going to say, ha ha ha, that's funny.
My phone says I'm thirsty, but I don't even feel thirsty.
And then you say, but just for the heck of it, I think I'll take a drink of water.
Very quickly, you will find that the machine is so right so often, or at least if you can't tell, you're still going to trust it because it's been right before.
You will start doing what your software tells you to do because it's so good at it.
We're not there yet, but we're very close.
If your software could tell you, hey, Scott, you're a little low on salt.
Have a chip. Hey Scott, have a drink of water.
Hey Scott, if you don't exercise in the next eight hours, you will start to lose muscle mass.
Hey Scott, Maybe you've gained a pound because you ate a little bit too much bread.
Here are some suggestions to eat things that you like just as much.
You like these things.
Here they are. Can I order them from Amazon?
They'll show up on your doorstep.
Very quickly, and it's going to happen quickly within just a few years probably, Your phone or your software, your systems, will make decisions for you that are so much better than the decisions you could have made on your own that you will start to delegate your decision-making responsibility to the machines.
It's going to tell you when your estrogen is high, you ate too much soy.
It's going to tell you when you need a little shot of competition to bring your testosterone up.
It will know all of these things.
And it will know them before your brain knows them.
And you will very quickly learn to trust the machines because they will be good.
They will know that if you do X, you're going to get a hit of dopamine and you need it.
It will know that better than you know it.
And as soon as you see that it's true, that every time you follow the machine's advice, you get an output that you say, I got a treat.
Feels good. I feel like I did get that little bit of dopamine.
You will be quickly addicted to the advice of the machines, and every illusion you ever had of free will will be out the door.
You will effectively have merged with the machines into some kind of large social thing which is part organic, you know, the sum of human beings and their muscles and their brains and stuff, and part machines, but the machines will be the free will part.
The machines will be effectively deciding What the humans do.
Now, can the humans ignore the machines?
Yes, they can. But they won't get away with it for very long, for a variety of different reasons.
People can ignore the machines, but it won't feel good.
It won't get you a job.
It won't make you money.
It won't get you a girlfriend or a boyfriend.
So people can ignore the machine advice, but doing so will so consistently give them a bad result that you'd have to call those people more like mentally ill than free spirits because they would just be continually doing things that weren't good for them and they weren't good for anybody else.
Those people we call crazy.
We don't say, well, look at that person who has free will.
We don't say that. We say this person's crazy.
They're doing all the wrong things.
All right. Somebody said their phone just shocked them.
I don't know if that was a joke or it did.
Continuous glucose monitor already doing it.
Correct. Correct.
Your continuous glucose monitor is literally telling you when to eat and to some extent what to eat.
And if it knew what was in your refrigerator, it could do the second part as well.
Look at all the homeless people.
What about them? But we'll understand you're changing climate.
So I like to keep saying this because it's so provocative that people can't hear it.
And when I say people, I don't mean the people here.
The people on the left can't hear some things because they have cognitive blindness.
To even being able to hear a thought that's so contrary to their worldview that they can't incorporate it.
They just have to reject it and act like they couldn't hear it.
And that's the idea that whether or not climate change is a big problem or not a big problem, It doesn't matter to the question of whether you do, if you go hard on nuclear energy.
Because whether climate is a problem or not, you still should go as hard as you can on all of the energy sources.
Go hard on solar, go hard on wind, go hard on nuclear energy.
Which is way safer than it used to be, to the point where it's ridiculously safe at this point.
You know, so safe, there's never been a problem for the new generation of nuclear plants.
I mean, think about that. There's never been, not even one, problem in a generation three nuclear plant.
Every problem that you know about was other generations of technology which had known problems.
We're at Generation 3 with zero events, and we're already developing Generation 4, which would make a meltdown physically impossible.
Like, you couldn't even make it happen if you wanted to.
So, when you tell somebody who's against, or somebody who's a climate change, let's say, What would be the right word?
I don't want to say alarmist because that's a biased word, but somebody who believes that climate change is an existential problem for the world.
If you say to them, well, whether that's true or not, I guess you would agree that we should go hard at all of the energy sources because even if you only needed them just for development, Even if you only used all these new sources of energy for developing Africa, for developing underdeveloped countries, for example, you'd still do it as aggressively as you possibly could because it's the smartest thing to do.
And people who are on the left just can't hear that because it's the thing they want more than anything, climate change solutions, and the solution's already here.
Nobody wants to hear that their biggest problem in the world is effectively solved.
Now, when I say solved, I mean that there are all the usual obstacles, the public, the long approval times, everything for getting nuclear built.
But those are all easily solvable problems.
You just have to have enough of an emergency.
The problem with paperwork and public...
Public pushback for where you put a nuclear site and even where you put your nuclear waste.
Those are big problems that have kept nuclear from succeeding in the past, but they're all easy to solve.
It's not like we ran out of land.
It's not like people couldn't accept nuclear.
If it became a big enough emergency, we could put them anywhere we wanted.
If it became a big enough emergency, suddenly we'd have enough places to store stuff, which it turns out is not a big problem.
The storage of nuclear waste, in our minds we think it's a big problem, but it turns out it's not.
It's actually closer to a minor problem.
So, we're in a world where, I don't even know why I started that, but I'm sure I had some kind of a clever point I was working toward, but most of you won't even notice.
So the point is, there's some cognitive deafness and blindness on nuclear energy, because our biggest problem in the world is kind of already solved.
Now, things might need to get worse before they get better.
In other words, people need to become more frightened by climate disasters so that suddenly they get a little bit flexible about where you put that nuclear plant.
But that's going to happen.
It seems like that's inevitable.
Now, how quickly can we build these nuclear plants?
Is it quickly enough to get ahead of this problem where it seems like the next 10 or 12 years are going to be important It's important to get going strong.
I'm not saying 12 years the world ends.
I'm not using the AOC thing.
I'm saying that in the next 10 or 12 years, you better be going pretty quickly at whatever you think your solution is.
Nuclear, it's kind of tough to get up and running in 10 or 12 years because everything takes so long.
But we could probably get it done if we wanted to.
If we wanted to, we could get some nukes up and going and some plants under development.
And I'm guessing that if we get nuclear going like crazy within the next 20 to 30 years, probably fine.
You know, there could be big expenses from climate change, but we'll have a big economy.
We'll be able to adjust.
The number of people who will die from climate disasters will probably continue to go down.
It goes down every decade because we get richer and smarter, we can predict things, we can recover, we can build stronger buildings and all that stuff.
So probably even if the climate gets worse, Life on Earth will continue getting better, probably.
So we probably have 30 years of maybe the climate degrading in ways we really, really wish it wouldn't, but probably not so badly that once we have enough energy up and running through nuclear and other means, we'll probably be able to weather that pretty well.
Alright, I actually was going to sign off a lot earlier, but I was greatly influenced by this little number.
It might be opposite from you.
So where I'm pointing, at least on my screen, my screen might be reversed.
But down there, there's a little number that says 3.3.
That 3.3 is roughly double what my normal traffic is.
And you watched in real time as my ability to measure who comes in and who doesn't completely changed my behavior.
Did you notice that? Because I was going to sign off, and then I said, well, there's twice as many people watching this for reasons that I don't quite understand.
Maybe because of the immigration thing?
I don't know. And so, harking back to my earlier point, The fact that this can be measured and I get a dopamine hit for having a bigger audience, and I can feel that.
The feeling I get when I see the number go up is very noticeable.
It's not some vague, subtle thing.
I can feel it. So, did I decide to stay and do this periscope longer?
Was that my decision? Was that free will?
It looks like it, right?
It looked like I made a decision and I had some data, but not really.
Not really. Because when this little number went to 3.3, I can promise you, it eliminated the option that I was going to stop.
It eliminated it.
Suddenly, it went from, I think I'm probably going to stop, and nothing changed except this little number, just this little tiny number in the corner of my screen, and that was enough to completely alter my behavior.
That's the world that you're entering, where you're going to feel for a while as though you still have free will, and very rapidly you will learn Wait, every time that little number goes up, my behavior is similar.
So did I decide to act that way?
I know I could have decided to do something else, but I always decide to do the same thing.
Am I in charge?
Or is that little number in the corner in charge?
Am I only doing this now instead of having discontinued earlier?
Is it because there's some blue check person who just tweeted out this periscope?
Is that what happened? Did somebody somewhere else decide that I will continue doing this because they tweeted it?
And that made my decision for me?
Yeah, I think at this point maybe other people are just noticing That the number is big, and so they're coming to see what's happening.
And then they find out nothing's happening.
Alright. Let's see what time it is.
Oh, it is time for me to go.
I've got to run.
Alright, that's all for now.
Thank you for joining me in larger numbers than usual.
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