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June 12, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
49:04
Episode 562 Scott Adams: Sleepy Joe, North Korea Execution Sites, Robots Building Homes, Mexico
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Hello everybody!
Come on in here, gather around.
It's time for the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous hip.
And you, the smart fleet of finger people, are here.
Now some of you wondered why you had not gotten a notification of my Periscope last time.
Let me move this up a little bit.
There we go. And I noticed this morning that the notification button had been unselected.
So, I have one more piece of confirmation bias, probably, to add to the question of whether or not there is something called shadow banning.
Because I certainly did not intentionally turn off the Twitter notification button.
But it's off.
Now typically once you've selected it, it stays on unless there's some condition that turns it off on its own.
Because I've had that happen a number of times.
So I've turned it back on.
Most of you should see it this morning.
And that means you're just in time for the simultaneous sip.
And you know how that works.
You need a cup or a glass or a mug.
You need a stein, a chalice or a tankard.
You need a thermos, possibly a flask.
Any kind of a vessel to hold your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. Join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Ah. So, did you ever wonder what it would look like if you were me and you left your soul and you could float above yourself and look down at yourself from above?
Well, you don't have to wonder anymore.
Here you go. This is me.
I've now left my soul and I'm floating above my lifeless body that you can see down here.
And, how cool is this?
Yes, you can see my breakfast.
I just ate it. Let's have another sip.
But I know you want to look at my face.
Why wouldn't you, really?
Come on now. There we go.
So, let's talk about the news.
Did anybody watch both Joe Biden's sleepy speech at the same day that President Trump held forth a longish press conference on the lawn?
Oh my God, the contrast!
The contrast!
It was really amazing.
So you saw Sleepy Joe who looked like literally he was sleepy.
And he looked so sleepy that even an MSNBC correspondent called it down at the time.
And if NBC is telling you you look sleepy, I think he said that he was delivering prepared He prepared a speech, but he was doing it without much gusto, which is the way that MSNBC says he's sleepy.
So that's the first part that's funny.
Now, if you looked at the backdrop of Joe Biden's It's some little boring room with a boring group of people who didn't seem very energized.
So it's sort of gray, dull, boring, white background.
And then the same day, they switched to the president, who's standing in front of these green trees, this green lawn, and you can hear Air Force One behind him.
His golden hair is blowing in the breeze.
It looked like one of those movies that starts in black and white, and then as the movie progresses, it slowly turns into a full-color movie.
If you looked at the Biden stuff and then go directly to the Trump talk, one is operating at no voltage.
There's no color.
There's no energy.
There's no nothing there. It just lays there like a turd.
And then you see Trump, and Trump is just like bristling with physical and, you know, social energy, I guess you'd call it.
His backdrop is incredibly life-affirming, you know, green and lush and, you know, the wind is blowing and the hair is actually...
Even the sun, the way the sun was bouncing off the president, it made him glisten.
I realize how this sounds when I'm saying it, and I'm exaggerating a little bit, but you have to see the two pictures side by side, and it's this amazing contrast.
But I tweeted that yesterday was the day that the experts, the pundits, Realized that President Trump took out Joe Biden with one word.
With one word.
Trump has ended Biden's chances and that word of course is sleepy because even if MSNBC is starting to see it you know that Biden is probably trying to respond to it.
The funny thing is that if you call Joe Biden sleepy and he's worried about his energy because he's a certain age right If you were Joe Biden's age, it would be a legitimate question, how much work do you want to do every day?
How many events, how many hours do you want to be talking to people?
So you know it's in his head that he has to act like he has energy.
But he's also trying to sell himself as the bland option.
If your entire marketing campaign is, I'm not going to be exciting like Trump, I'm going to be normal.
I'm going to normalize things.
Watch how normal I am.
Well, you can't really ramp up the energy on normal.
So he's got a campaign theme that forces him to be boring.
And he's got a boring personality and not much energy.
And the president is just bristling with it.
So I don't see any chance that he could win.
Here's the funny part. Apparently in Biden's speech last night, he started off the speech with the fine people hoax and said that he believes the hoax.
He doesn't call it a hoax because he still thinks it's true.
But he believed that the president actually called the neo-Nazis fine people in Charlottesville, which didn't happen.
The president said the opposite.
Anybody who checks the transcript or watches the full video, not the misleading edited version, can see that.
But apparently there was a heckler in the audience.
And the heckler stood up and heckled him and essentially fact-checked him, I believe.
I didn't hear the tape, but I think the heckler fact-checked him on the fine people hoax, which is hilarious.
Now, I sent around a tweet after I heard that.
And here was my tweet.
I said I'm worried about Sleepy Joe Biden's health after seeing him on CNN today, the part I was just talking about.
I said his energy is super low and he thinks the fine people hoax is real.
Hashtag Sleepy Joe.
Now, and that got retweeted by Don Jr., so it kind of went viral.
It has a few thousand retweets.
Now, here's why I worded my tweet the way I did.
I'm sort of tired, and maybe I'm past it.
I shouldn't say I'm tired, even though I am tired.
I'm past explaining why the fine people hoax is a hoax.
It's in the transcript.
Anybody can read it themselves.
There's no mystery to it.
But I've decided to call it a medical problem.
Because when Biden does it, it does look for all the world like he's not quite capable.
Because he literally launched his campaign on the most obvious, easily debunked hoax In the United States.
Nothing could be debunked more easily than looking at the transcript and seeing that the transcript is the opposite of the hoax.
That's about as easy as you can debunk something.
And he says he's launching his campaign on it.
Now, I am actually worried about him because his campaign is starting to look like elder abuse.
Whoever it is who is pushing Biden in front of the public with that level of capability is not doing him any favor because I don't see any way he makes it to the finish line I mean in terms of being president and he just doesn't look like he has the energy or the or the vitality to pull it off so here's how you know you've hit a nerve and I've learned this for the last several years on Twitter Whenever I say something about Democrats or anything positive about the president that hits a nerve where people can see it's going to make a difference,
might move the needle a little bit, the professional trolls come out.
So right after Don Jr.
retweeted my statement about Biden believing the fine people hoax and having a potential medical problem, the trolls came out.
So the moment that got retweeted, my Twitter feed went from completely sane because I've been blocking all the bad people, like just no negativity at all, just people making comments.
They don't all agree with me, but at least they're making polite comments.
And then the moment that tweet went out, bam, I got hit with all the trolls who act the same.
So these are the trolls who just come in and say, what about Trump's lies and, you know, he's not going to leave office and he's crazy.
But most of them are just insulting me or my credibility or whatever.
So, apparently the Sleepy Joe and there's something wrong with his health attacks are very effective because they unleash the trolls.
That's how you know you're over the target.
So that seems to be the winning attack.
Alright. The President, if you looked at what the President did in his press conference, it was brilliant communication style from beginning to end.
So his energy was high, he held the room, he controlled the questions.
He used lots of visual persuasion.
He was pointing to his head, and he kept saying that he wanted to run against Biden because he goes, Biden is the weakest mentally.
He's mentally weak, and he would point to his head when he talked about it.
When Trump talked about the Mexican immigration deal, he takes it out of his pocket.
Apparently, it was actually in his pocket, the deal, and he holds it up, and so it becomes a strong visual.
If you watch Trump for five minutes, you're going to see him using simplification, energy, clarity, repetition.
You know, he repeated the weak-minded thing.
He repeated several times so that we'd know that was the thing that he wants you to repeat later.
So every good technique...
That the most skilled presenter would try to train you to use, you watched President Trump use right in front of you, right after Joe Biden didn't use much of any of those techniques.
So I'm going to predict that someday after the president is out of office, even his critics will say that he was the best communicator of any president, hands down.
Now, they won't be able to say that until he leaves office, because, you know, while he's in office, people just take sides.
But once he's out of office, I predict that even his critics will say he's the best communicator we've ever seen.
Better than Reagan, by far, yes.
By far, I would say.
Apparently Bill Maher has said in public, and this is just mind-boggling.
I'm pretty sure that people who dislike the president see lots of things they think are mind-boggling by supporters of the president.
So it works both ways, and I'm aware of that.
But from my seat, when Bill Maher says he's been predicting since the beginning that if Trump loses re-election, he won't leave office.
He'll try to stay and become a dictator if he loses the election.
I retweeted just before I got on here.
Somebody on Twitter said he would take a $1,000 bet from anybody that Trump would leave office whenever he's done.
I think that's the nature of the bet.
So whether he loses re-election or he just turns out after the second term, the bet is $1,000.
For anybody who wants to bet whether or not the president will leave.
So this fellow is betting that the president would leave if it was time to leave.
I will probably make that bet too.
I wouldn't do it publicly.
But if I find somebody in my personal life who will bet me $1,000 That Trump will try to stay in office if he loses the election.
I'm going to take that bet.
Now some of you already know that I won $500 betting against a Republican who bet that Obama would not only lose re-election for his second term, but that he would stay in office and become a dictator.
So I've actually won this bet once.
American presidents Don't stay in office and try to become dictators.
It just doesn't happen.
And the reason it doesn't happen, even if they wanted to, is because it just wouldn't work even a little bit.
You know, the United States, our citizenry, our government is so well trained that there wouldn't be...
I don't think any president could find one...
I don't think a president, literally, could find one aide who would go along with the plan.
Do you? Do you think a president, any president, could find even one aide who would say, yeah, let's do this?
I don't think so. Why?
Because that aide has family.
There's nobody who doesn't have family.
So anybody who has a family knows that if they were to help a president, doesn't matter who the president is, if they were to help that president stay in office as a dictator, their family would be dead By that afternoon.
Of course. Of course.
This is the thing that everybody always misses about guns, because people on the left like to say, well, you know, your little guns will be no use against the weaponry of the military of the United States once the dictatorship is formed.
You know, you can't compete with the military.
To which I say, nobody's competing with the military.
No, the people with guns in the United States would go directly after the families.
They would go after the families of anybody who was in the military on the side of the revolution, anybody who was in politics on the side of the revolution.
They would all be rounded up ten minutes after the coup attempt.
So nobody in the world could be part of a U.S. revolution Unless they were willing to watch their own family be slaughtered.
I mean, it would be on the internet in about five minutes.
So I'm not suggesting anybody do any of that stuff.
I'm just saying that's how it would go, and there's no way around that.
So no, there's no chance of a U.S. president in any world that looks like our world now.
Couldn't happen. All right.
So the polls, apparently the polls are suggesting...
That Biden would destroy President Trump in an election.
He'd beat him in all those important swing states and even the other Democrats would beat the President.
Everybody can beat the President according to the polls.
What does that tell you about the polls?
Doesn't your common sense tell you that there isn't any way that those polls could be accurate?
It's kind of ridiculous because there's nothing like an election that's actually started yet.
Whatever opposition research there is that exists on the Democrats hasn't been dumped yet.
Think about that. The opposition research against the Democratic candidates hasn't even been dumped yet.
We don't even know what the election looks like until that happens.
We also don't know what other successes and or non-successes President Trump will have between now and Election Day.
So there could be all kinds of stuff happening.
Let me tell you the strongest argument for re-electing Trump.
Are you ready? The strongest argument for re-electing Trump is China.
Because even if we got somebody in who wanted to be tough with China as a Democrat, it's sort of a do-over.
If we let China time out this president, they will time out the next one, too.
Let me say that again. If China is allowed to simply weigh down a president who wants to get tough on them, and they just say, four years is not that long, we'll just wait.
If he loses re-election, it's only four years, we'll get somebody who's easier to deal with, and then we'll go from there.
So if the citizens of the United States don't re-elect the president, China will win.
And China knows it, and I think you know it too.
The only way China doesn't get what it wants, in terms of the trade deals, and we do, is if Trump gets a second term.
Because I don't think China wants to wait a second term.
Because a second-term president is going to be pretty tough.
I don't think they're going to want to go something like eight years or seven years or whatever it is without a trade deal.
So that's the strongest argument.
If you want the United States to get a good deal with China, Trump's the only way to go at this point.
I saw the news reported that Kamala Harris says that if she gets elected president, she'll try to put Trump in jail.
Meaning that the Department of Justice under her administration would, she says, presumably pursue whatever against the president.
Now, I think she has to say some more provocative, yeah, desperate stuff to get some attention because she's not getting any attention.
If you've seen any of Kamala Harris' tweets, they look like they were designed by a cardboard robot.
If somebody ever made a robot that was made on a cardboard and thought like a cardboard creature, it would make Kamala Harris' tweets.
They just lay there.
I've never seen...
There's so much boringness in her statements and in tweets.
They literally just lay there.
I don't know if it's the lawyer in her.
I don't think so, because other lawyers seem to do okay.
I would like to suggest the following thoughts, speaking of lawyers.
Speaking of lawyers, Do you think President Trump could ever lose against somebody who had been a lawyer?
It seems to me that the last thing the Democrats should do is run a lawyer against Trump.
If there's anything that Trump has done more than anything in his career, it's beat lawyers.
Who has beaten more lawyers than President Trump?
Nobody.
He's like the lawyer slayer.
The last thing you want to do is run a lawyer against him.
So let's talk about...
Now, I've said I don't think that the Democrats are expecting to win in 2020.
They'd like to, but I don't think they expect to.
So I think that they...
They probably only want to run a candidate who doesn't have a good chance of winning in 2024 because they don't want to ruin a good candidate, put that person through the cycle and then have them ruin for 2024.
So it looks like it's just a big old American Idol situation where they're campaigning for 2024 and it doesn't matter who they nominate because that person's going to get slaughtered.
Somebody's asking me to comment about Andrew Yang.
So... Andrew Yang is interesting, and here's why.
He seems to be the only person who's, first of all, suggesting new ideas that actually sound new.
Some of the politicians do, let's say, a Green New Deal plan, and even though it's newish, it sounds like things you've heard before.
Whereas Andrew Yang has ideas that you just haven't even heard before.
I don't even know if they're good ideas.
I can't tell. But I think he's a valuable contributor to the process.
So for that reason, I'd like to see him get on the debate stage and introduce some new ideas so that we can kick him around and maybe 2024 is looking good.
By the way, Andrew Yang in 2024?
That's not a bad idea.
People are asking me about the Jon Stewart thing.
Honestly, I watched a clip of the Jon Stewart thing.
I have all the same empathy that you do.
It seems that the Democrats and the Republicans actually agree that what Jon Stewart was saying was valid and that the first responders for 9-11 should get their money to be helped throughout their life.
So there doesn't seem to be any controversy on the question.
What people are talking about is Jon Stewart's passion and his persuasion and his performance.
I'm sure they were all good because everybody said they were good, but there's not much meat there.
We already knew that Jon Stewart was good.
Now keep in mind, What was the thing that Jon Stewart was most famous for?
The thing he was most famous for is being one of the best persuaders slash communicators in the world.
He was widely understood to be one of the most effective communicators in the world.
So we kind of missed him because when he left The Daily Show and he dropped out of the news every day, You sort of forgot how good he was.
And it's the same effect you're going to have when the president ever leaves the office.
And he will leave the office.
I'll bet $1,000.
Someday, anyway. As soon as Trump is gone, you're going to have the worst...
Hangover from trying to watch regular politics by regular politicians.
The boredom will make your head crack and explode.
And Jon Stewart kind of reminded us how good he was at this stuff.
And that's about all I'm going to say about that.
All right. There is an interesting story.
About a robot that assembles homes and of blocks that snap together like Legos.
What have I been telling you forever?
I've been telling you that the future of low-cost home building will be blocks that snap together like Legos.
Now, there's a video of a big robot arm that's building the whole house by putting the blocks where they belong, and that's That's very, I would say it was impressive, but here's the thing.
If you were a low-income person who had the ability, or let's say if you were a low-income person and you were going to live in a home that could be built by a robot, that means it's going to be a simple home.
It will almost certainly be one story because you have building codes and problems when you go up the second story.
And if you were that poor person who could possibly live in a home that was so cheap that a robot could build it in a few hours, wouldn't you prefer building it yourself and not paying the robot?
Think about it. If the blocks simply snap together, you'd want to do most of that work yourself.
So it seems to me that the better model would be you put a neighborhood together, you bring the homeowners together, maybe after they've done their day's work or something, whenever they're available.
You train them.
Maybe you have one supervisor and say, see this pile of bricks?
Alright, today your job is to pick up a brick, one at a time, put it over here in this wall, and all you're doing today is you're going to build this wall.
Same as your neighbors, they're building an almost identical wall over on their plot.
I'm teaching everybody how to build one wall today, that's all we're doing.
Hey everybody, we just carry these bricks over, put them here, you built one wall.
And in a few weeks, with no robots whatsoever, just one supervisor who's saying, put these bricks here, tomorrow I'll tell you where to run the pipe through the bricks, you could build a whole community without a robot at all.
And that's got to be cheaper.
So I think the key is standard plans that can be...
See, here's the key.
You want to have some kind of a...
A set of plans for one story, snapped-together bricks, that one individual, working alone, could build most of it.
There might be some things, such as some plumbing and electrical, perhaps, that one person can't do.
But maybe that too, because even the electrical and the plumbing Could be kit.
You know, there could be plumbing where things only fit together one way and it's easy.
You don't even need a tool. Possibly.
So I think we could get to the point where we could design a pre-approved design that maybe, let's say, hypothetically, the federal government tells all the states and municipalities that they have to accept, as building code ready, any of these structures, if they meet the plan, the standard plan.
And then everybody poor can build a house just by...
Just by snapping bricks together.
So I'd say it's definitely coming.
I don't know if the robots are going to be the answer to that or not.
There's a report. There are two interesting reports out of North Korea, and I don't know if any of this is coincidence.
So it seems that there might be The first thing you should say about any news about North Korea, about secret stuff in North Korea, the first thing you should say to yourself is, it's probably fake news.
It doesn't even matter what it is.
Whatever the story is, if it comes out of North Korea, And you don't have a picture and a hundred credible witnesses, just assume it's not real.
But the stories coming out are That there are these North Korea execution sites.
That there are hundreds of places where all these executions have happened and it's all very horrible and sometimes the children are made to watch and at one point they were ceremonial but now they're used for terror.
I'm not going to say that there are no execution sites in North Korea.
I'm certainly not going to tell you that there have been no executions in North Korea.
But I wouldn't believe this story.
I'm not saying it's false.
I'm just saying it's not credible.
It doesn't meet the minimum bar for credibility.
It's so on the nose as fake news.
That it's probably something exaggerated from something that's true.
In other words, there might be something true in the sense that there are sites where people are executed.
It may be less true what the circumstances are of who gets executed, how many people have been executed under a Kim versus the past.
So I wouldn't believe the details, but maybe the general idea is true.
The other story is that the famous story of Kim Jong-un ordering the execution of his half-brother.
You know the story where the two women touched him and they had different chemicals.
When the second one touched him with the second chemical, he died and she died, I guess.
But now it's been revealed, when I say revealed, could be fake news, you don't know, that the half-brother was a CIA asset.
How does that change the story?
Think about it. How long have we been told that Kim Jong-un is so evil that he would kill his own half-brother?
That was the story, right? Where do you think that story came from?
The CIA, right?
Is it not true that the CIA, or at least the intelligence services, and certainly blessed by the CIA, have been telling the public for how long That Kim Jong-un is so evil he killed his own half-brother.
Well, it looks like he probably did kill his own half-brother, but if the current news is true, his half-brother was literally a traitorous spy working for the CIA. Now, if that's true, that changes the story a little bit, doesn't it? Because if a leader is executing a confirmed spy, that's sort of what leaders do.
Maybe we would have put them in jail for life or something, but I would expect most countries, probably the majority, I would guess the majority of countries in the world, Would execute a confirmed spy, a traitor.
I think that's standard practice.
So now think about Kim Jong-un from that frame, after you've been thinking of him in the he's so bad he would kill his own family member frame.
Who told you that?
The CIA. So there's a lot about Kim Jong-un that may be just fake news from the CIA. Well, I think that's obviously true.
So the president, if I heard his comment right, I believe he said that he got a personal letter from Kim Jong-un.
He did not reveal the details, but he said it was warm and friendly.
His relationship is still good.
And Trump said he said two things that are newsworthy.
One, he said he'd like to see North Korea with Kim Jong Un as its leader, doing great things with the economy.
So he said as clearly as possible, That his vision, Trump's vision, is North Korea with Kim Jong-un in charge, doing things that are helping his own country.
I don't know that we've ever said that before, and that is probably the important thing to say.
That's what gets a good relationship.
The second thing he said is that, and I think he was referring to the report that the CIA had turned his half-brother.
Trump said something like that wouldn't happen With me in charge.
In other words, he was assuring Kim Jong-un that the bad spying on his regime of flipping his family member would not happen under Trump.
Who knows if you can make a commitment for what the CIA will do, It wouldn't be the CIA if we told people what they were doing.
So I'm not sure you can take that at face value because we're talking about the CIA. Yeah, it was Brennan's CIA. Was it?
Was Brennan in charge when Kim's half-brother got killed?
So people are asking me my thoughts on Tulsi Gabbard.
I haven't Weighed in on her because I haven't spent a lot of time looking into her because her polling is low.
If she makes more of a dent in the field, poll-wise, I'll start talking about her a little bit.
But at the moment, she's too low in the polling for me to get too serious.
All right.
I'm just looking at your comments.
All right.
Alright, that's about all I have for today.
Yeah, yesterday's video is not on Periscope.
There's a story, but it's not interesting, so I'm not going to tell you.
But don't worry about it.
Nobody got shadow banned in terms of that video.
So the video that is not on Periscope in the archives, you can find it on YouTube.
In fact, you can find any of these Periscopes on YouTube if you just search for...
Real Coffee with Scott Adams.
And that's where you'll find a high-quality replay.
And some people prefer the YouTube replay interface.
All right. Somebody says Chernobyl is worth watching.
Yeah, you know, my understanding is that the Chernobyl movie is factually so inaccurate that it might be worse to watch it than not to watch it.
My understanding is that if you watched it, you would come away with probably a permanent sense of fake news.
In other words, you wouldn't understand what happened at Chernobyl if you watched the Chernobyl miniseries because it is riddled with inaccuracies according to some experts.
Oh, yes. So there's a miniseries from, I guess, Netflix on the Central Park Five.
You all know the story about the Central Park Five.
There were five young men who were blamed for raping and brutally beating a jogger in Central Park.
It became a big story in the 70s, and Trump did a full-page ad in the New York Times saying that maybe bad people should be executed.
Now, he didn't mention the Central Park Five, but it happened at the same time, so people assumed that that's at least what sparked his thinking about executions.
They were exonerated or found not guilty anyway.
They were not found guilty for that specific crime and they were released.
That made people say, that president must be all racist because he said that innocent people should be executed and they happen to be black.
Well, of course, all of that is fake news.
Number one, he never mentioned race any time that he was ever talking about it, not directly and not indirectly.
Race, he never mentioned.
He only talked about crime the way he still talks about crime.
There's no story there.
Trump talking about crime and being tough on crime is no different than what he does now and had nothing to do with the ethnicity of the people.
Secondly, there was just a news story recently that the prosecutor, so there's a woman who was the prosecutor for the Central Park Five, she said that she agreed with a decision to release them for the specific crime of the rape and the beating of that she said that she agreed with a decision to release them for the specific crime of the rape and the beating of that woman, but woman, but she says that there was plenty of evidence that they had been involved in assaults and theft and rioting, I guess was her word,
so that the activities in the park of rampant crime, there was some amount of so that the activities in the park of rampant crime, there was some amount of evidence that they So she was not in favor of them being released on everything, but I guess they had been so smeared by the crime they had not committed that it looked like justice to release them for the other things.
I I don't know. Maybe that looked like justice at the time.
I'm not going to judge it because I wasn't there.
But it's fake news that the president did something racist.
If you look at the facts, you don't see any even mention of race.
It's just about crime. And the people who think the Central Park thing was about race are, in fact, racists.
Because they're injecting race where there was none, at least in terms of the president's candidate.
No, I mean pre-President Trump's comments.
There was no discussion of race until the racists added it later.
All right. So somebody's asking me, who would I bet on?
If Justin Bieber fought Tom Cruise, because that's actually a thing.
Justin Bieber has challenged Tom Cruise to some kind of a fight in the octagon.
I would go with Tom Cruise...
Because I think you have to go with strength over two inches of height on the skinny guy.
So my guess would be if Tom Cruise and Justin Bieber had fought, that Tom Cruise would go directly into his body and finish him off in about a minute and a half.
I think it would be a short fight.
I think. I don't know.
I mean, Tom Cruise is in his 50s, but if he's as fit as he looks, it looks like he could just move into his body and just take him apart.
Yeah, age matters, but it's not going to matter if...
If Cruz got his hands on Bieber, if they got into a close situation, I think it would only go one way.
Alright, that's about all I got for now.
I've got a travel day.
I'm going to go home from Vegas today.
Oh, let me tell you a story.
You want to hear a Vegas story?
So, the day before yesterday, Christina and I were doing a little minor gambling at the casino.
And when I say minor, I mean we don't gamble big dollar amounts.
So, Christina goes to one of the tables for blackjack.
And she played 12 hands in a row.
And if you know anything about blackjack, the house and the player should win around 50% of the time.
So the house wins a little bit more often, but it's close to about half.
So if you know how to play blackjack, you would expect you'd win about half the time, but a little less than half.
That would be normal, right? Of the hands.
You would lose most of the time if you kept playing, but on any given hand, you would expect to win about half the time, a little under half.
So what do you think are the odds of losing 12 hands in a row?
Then that's all we played.
What are the odds that at a table with just the one player, Christina, and one dealer, what are the odds you could lose 12 in a row?
Of course it happens.
Can somebody calculate the odds on that?
Somebody do the math and give me the actual number.
On that. How many decks?
Multiple decks, but they were using a shuffling machine.
So the shuffling was, somebody said 4,001?
0.02%?
So it looks like the engineers are weighing in.
So the odds are 1 in 4,000.
Okay? Now, so there was a 1 in 4,000 chance that would happen.
How many times has that happened in the same casino?
Well, I've watched it happen several times in the same casino.
Now, not 12 in a row, but something like 10 out of 12 loss routinely in the same casino.
I won't mention it. Now, here's the fun part.
One of those 12 hands, she actually won.
And the dealer cheated.
And when I say the dealer cheated, it was probably an honest mistake.
But the dealer busted, which means the dealer lost, and then the dealer took Christina's money.
And he picks up the cards, and Christina says, wait a minute, you lost that hand.
You just took my money, and you lost.
And the dealer's got the cards in his hand.
He goes, no, no. I beat you fair and square.
And she goes, no. Call the supervisor over.
Let's see this on video because there are video cameras watching every table.
So the supervisor comes over and the dealer says, Noah, I did it right.
Look. And he puts down the cards to show which cards he had and which cards she had.
Except he takes one of his cards, the card that busted him, and puts it on her pile.
And I was watching, so I know what he did, because when he picked them up, he had them mixed up, and when he puts them down, he puts them in the wrong order.
So the supervisor comes over, and she looks at the cards, and she goes, well, no, he won.
Look at the cards. And I said, those are not the cards.
He put his card on her pile.
So she was polite and professional, but it was obvious that she didn't believe us.
So I said, well, play it back in the video.
Let's see. So they play it back in the video.
We had to wait like five minutes for them to get the replay and play it.
And of course, they reversed it.
And they apologized profusely, said, oh, we're so sorry.
You're 100% right.
You know, they saw it the way we described it.
And they reversed it.
So we won. So Christina lost 12 hands in a row, but one of them, Wasn't even a loss, but they still played at a loss.
But here's my interpretation of what happened.
This dealer had just, basically, he'd won something like 11 in a row against one player.
There's only one person at the table.
When the 12th one happened, he was so conditioned to winning every single hand that he couldn't even count.
In other words, he didn't even imagine that she could win.
It wasn't in his, I don't even think his mental model allowed that she could win a hand.
So when he lost, he just collected the money just like the other 11 times.
It was sort of freaky.
So we said to ourselves, we have never seen anybody win in this casino.
It's a high-end casino.
It's one of the good ones. So we said, let's walk all the way to the inexpensive part of town where the odds are better and see if we can win over there.
So we took a long walk through the 100-degree heat to get some exercise, and we end up at the, let's say, a lower-end casino on the far end of town.
So we play the slot machines where we lost basically every penny we put in at the other casino just was like a reverse ATM. So we sit down at this slot machine in this other casino and the next thing you know we make $800.
We won $800 like in five minutes.
So we're like, oh my god, we won nothing at that other casino.
So we take our $800 and we say, I wonder what'll happen at the blackjack table.
So Christina goes to the blackjack table and gambles for, I don't know, 45 minutes or an hour or something like that.
Comes out ahead, just a little bit, but she gambles for an hour, wins more than she loses, and, you know, we called it a night.
So the difference between the casino and the poor end of town and the casino at the rich end, I'm not going to say that the games are fixed.
I will just say that the experience of it is identical to as if the games were fixed.
So I want to be careful about that.
I'm not alleging that said casino that I'm not mentioning has fixed games.
I'm just saying that I don't know how to explain it, except the weirdest set of coincidences that seem to happen every time we come here.
I mean, it could be a coincidence every time.
So I don't know how to explain it.
But that was the experience.
Anyway. No guessing on the name of the casino?
That wouldn't be fair.
Because as I say, there's nothing here that I can confirm in any way.
Just the experience of it is as if one of the casinos was legitimate and the other was not.
But I'm sure that if somebody checked into it, it would all be fine.
Did she play perfect basic strategy?
Yeah, I mean...
We did the hit on the right times and don't hit on the wrong times stuff.
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