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May 2, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
28:12
Episode 949 Scott Adams: Fun Thoughts Before Bed
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum.
Bum bum bum hum bum bum bum bum-- ow, I just hit my elbow on my computer.
Hey everybody, come on in.
It's time for the evening edition of No Coffee with Scott Adams because you don't need any caffeine now.
No, what you need is to cleanse the palate of your brain of all those bad and destructive ideas, all that tension, all that stress that you've been dealing with all day.
Let it go. Tonight, just good thoughts for the rest of the night.
For example, did you know that the remdesivir got approved by the FDA for some kind of immediate use?
That's pretty good.
And did you hear that Kim Jong-un apparently attended, at least the report is, that Kim Jong-un actually attended I think yesterday, the opening of a fertilizer plant.
Now, what it didn't say is that he attended as a guest or did he attend as the actual fertilizer.
So that part was a little unclear.
So we still don't know exactly what's going on with Kim Jong-un.
So hold on to that thought.
I'd like to show you...
Well, actually, if you haven't heard Alex Jones, the clip that's going around about cannibalizing his neighbor, have you all heard that?
Well, you're going to hear it.
So this is Alex Jones talking about how if things get bad, he's totally going to eat his neighbor's ass.
I'll admit it.
I will eat my neighbors.
I'm not letting my kids die.
I'm just going to be honest.
My superpower is being honest.
I've extrapolated this out and I won't have to for a few years because I got food and stuff.
But I'm literally looking at my neighbors now and going, I'm ready to hang them up and gut them and skin them and chop them up.
You know what? I'm ready. My daughters aren't starving to death.
I'll eat my neighbors. See, my superpower is being honest.
I'll eat your ass. I will.
I'm a combat model.
Optimus self-sufficiency.
Probably the leader.
The point is, is have you thought about that yet?
Because I'm somebody that thought I could fix this, and I'm starting to think about having to eat my neighbors.
You think I like sizing up my neighbor, how I'm going to haul him up by a chain and chop his ass up?
I'll do it.
My children aren't going hungry.
I will eat your ass.
That's what I want the globalist to know.
I will eat your ass first.
I will eat your ass.
Oh, Alex Jones, thank you for that.
Oh, God almighty.
All right, so...
Do you follow Juanita Broderick on Twitter?
So she's accused President Clinton of rape, I think.
But she's pretty witty on Twitter.
And she says, there's one positive outcome to Biden being the Democrat nominee.
We won't have to hear him continually bitching about why he lost.
He won't remember. This is Juanita Broderick, who's unloading on Biden.
Alright, I have a recommendation for you.
If you're trying to figure out this little coronavirus stuff, and are you a little frustrated, as I have been, that you keep seeing these charts and graphs, and you're not quite sure if you should believe any of it?
Because I'm at the point where it doesn't matter who shows me the chart, doesn't matter what context I see it, doesn't matter what sources are named, the first thing I think is, I'm not so sure about that.
No matter what it is, it's just my first instinct is like, probably not, you know?
If I had to bet, if I had to bet without knowing anything about your data, you're just showing it to me for the first time, I don't even know where it's from, you say it's from authoritative sources, you've named your sources, here's the URL, I can check it myself, I get it.
Still, I'm not so sure.
So all of our data is just crap right now.
Everything is just ridiculous garbage.
But it's not stopping people from being certain that they can read these entrails and that they can make something out of it, like horoscopes.
So everything that we think are these data-driven decisions, well, in principle, Yeah, we're making data-driven decisions hypothetically.
Yeah, we're making a lot of data-driven decisions in our imagination, and we're also making data-driven decisions in the future.
But I'll tell you what we haven't done yet is make a data-driven decision, because how could we?
All the data is just crap.
And the most frustrating part is watching people so certain that they can compare one country to another.
And here's one of those situations where I wanted to call BS on it.
I mean, I tried. But there's some topics that I can't penetrate because I don't have standing.
Meaning that, why would you believe me if I said that somebody's data is wrong?
Like, really, why would you believe me?
It wouldn't make sense. Unless I could point to something specifically, and often I can't.
I just look at it and I say to myself, I don't know what's wrong with this, but I definitely don't trust it.
So that's sort of where I am.
That's not very helpful. So I recommend following Nate Silver.
You all know Nate Silver, right?
Famous for statistics and 538 is his website.
And he, of course...
For conservatives, we've loved to, I say we because I'm in this conversation, we've loved to make fun of him because he famously predicted that at one point that there was only a 2% chance that Trump could win the presidency, so I predicted there was a 98% chance he would win.
Now, that worked out well for me, and then people said, haha, Cartoonist gets it right, statistician gets it wrong.
And of course, I played to that because it was fun to talk about it that way.
But that's not exactly what happened.
Because, as I will say often, and it's worth saying again, what Nate Silver does is tell you the odds, which is not the same as telling you what's going to happen.
So for example, when I gave you the odds that I think it's a 60% chance that the hydroxychloroquine is not all it was cracked up to be, 40% chance it is, I'm not predicting that it's not.
I'm telling you the odds.
40% is a pretty big chunk.
So if it goes in the other way, you can't really say that the person who predicted the odds was wrong.
Because even in the case of Dave Silver, he did say there was a 2% chance that Trump would win.
And sometimes 2% happens.
That's how statistics works.
So I've of course had fun because that went my direction that one time.
But if you're trying to understand the graphs that you're seeing and the statistics, especially the ones comparing countries, he's the best one to follow.
Because he doesn't get too technical, and he just says, you know, I don't think you can compare these.
Here's why. This looks like it's misleading, and here's why.
And I think he does the best job of that.
Now, if you do follow him, Nate Silver, N-A-T-E Silver.
And he said, Nate Silver 538 is on Twitter.
And he's the most famous statistician, if I can call him that.
I'm not sure if he uses that label for himself.
And he was sort of warning people on Twitter not to compare us to Sweden.
And even that there's a peril to compare us to any other country.
But what Silver was saying is that you can't really There's nothing that's jumping out as statistically true about the decisions that we're making versus other countries.
Because it seems that people are doing all kinds of different things and getting sort of similar results.
So that's sort of the insight that I was looking for.
Like, that's what I was feeling.
But when he put it in words, you know, because he's smarter about that stuff.
When he put it in words, I was like, oh, yeah.
Yeah, I'm seeing that.
Everybody's doing all kinds of different things, and yet the outcomes are pretty similar, with the few exceptions of the hotspots.
If you take out the hotspots, as he recommends, everything looks about the same, no matter what you do.
And what's that tell you?
I don't know if it tells you anything.
But it's worth noting that it doesn't, well, the context that he was talking about, if I can, I hope I accurately convey this, the context is that everybody who says, if you do x, you'll get a better result.
And Nate is pointing out that people are doing all kinds of things, and no matter what they do, they're getting similar results.
So it is almost certainly true that whatever you thought was that thing that needed to be done probably isn't the thing.
Because if there were some one variable that was jumping out as the thing to do, then the people doing that would have great results.
The other people wouldn't. It would be obvious.
So follow Nate.
He can sort it out for you.
I was right after a few days or a day after I was telling you that the president was really hitting his groove in talking about the coronavirus, because I said that he'd found this new discipline, where no matter what the question is, or no matter what he's going to talk about, He first says, you know, losing even one life is too much.
It's a tragedy for the victims.
And then he'll go and make his point.
And that inoculates him because he first shows empathy of how bad things are for everybody.
And then he talks about his point.
And I said, you know, that's keeping him out of trouble.
So apparently, he lost that discipline today.
And He made one comment about the number of people who might die that being in the, I don't know, 60, 70, 100,000 range.
And I guess the context was he was saying that we're doing pretty well.
And so Joe Walsh, who's the anti-Trumper, gets on, and he's all offended on Twitter that the president could act like it's a victory to lose 100,000 people, or words to that effect.
And I thought, God, That is the lowest level of punditry and politics.
It was so obvious.
It's sort of like something a sixth grader could have done.
You know, just waiting for all these common, hackneyed, overused attacks.
Did he forget to say in front of the sentence, this one time out of a thousand, that every death is too much?
Oh, there was this one time, yeah.
There was this one time he didn't say it before the sentence, and so that means he's a monster who wants 100,000 people to die, and he's a narcissist, and he only cares about himself, because it was that one time.
I mean, seriously, Joe Walsh.
I mean, seriously. And I'm not even bothered by it because his opinion disagrees with mine, or I don't think it's appropriate or something, or even that it's harmful.
Because it's so ridiculous, because it's totally inert.
What it is is so boring that I just think you should never talk in public again if you're that boring.
It's like, really? That's the most obvious thing to say?
It's dumb? Nobody believes it?
Anyway, let's talk about something fun.
I spend a great deal of time in my garage trying to invent things that are totally impractical.
And I want to run through something just for fun to make you think about something that maybe you can improve on.
And here are two known technologies that I've melded together.
So for example, one way, if you look at this as the left side and the right side, these are different technologies.
On the left, we've got a lake that pumps water up to a mountain reservoir.
And then when you need electricity, you let that water flow back down through a generator back into the lake.
Now, of course, that alone would not be a good system because the energy it would take to pump it uphill would almost certainly be more than the energy that you could create pumping it down.
So this would work if you have some other source that is not dependable at night and the only thing you're trying to do is give a little night electricity.
But how do you get that? Well, there's another technology called a heat chimney, and it has to do with the fact that heat wants to rise.
So if you had, for example, let's say this is a mountain.
So on the left of the mountain you've got this reservoir and this system of storing water That you can later release to create energy through a generator.
But on the other side, you've got air.
So you're heating the air, and it doesn't have to be a hot house, but I drew it that way.
Imagine there's like a mile-long hot house.
The sun is... It's going through the glass and into the stone surface, heating it up.
That hot air has to go somewhere, so it goes up this long tube, turns a generator, similar to how a windmill would work, but you know, a generator.
And then the air goes out into the atmosphere.
Now the second thing that this can do, and it's been, and by the way, I'm not inventing this.
These are existing things.
I'm just sort of putting them together.
One of the things you could do is use this hot air system to scrub the air to remove pollution.
I think you could remove CO2. I'm not sure about that.
But you can at least scrub the pollution out because forcing things through a filter is sort of the way you do it.
At least one way to do it.
So, if you could create a system that would have hot air going up, that would operate most of the day and night.
So you could actually get that to work through most of the night because there's always a differential between the valley and the top of the hill.
So as long as there's a differential, you've got an airflow.
So one of these will work all night and that can create enough electricity maybe to help pump some water up if you've got some extra.
And then the two of these can feed a town.
Now forget about whether this would work exactly.
There's a larger point here.
The larger point is I think that the future is building inexpensive places to live in which you've designed the entire town.
This is almost never done.
Design is usually limited to the The specific, let's say, industry.
So, for example, a builder and an architect might design a house, and they might maybe design a little neighborhood, but they're not designing the whole town.
Towns sort of get built up over time most of the time, so you just do what you can given the constraints.
But if you started from scratch to build the most efficient, well-designed city, That was the perfect place to live.
Everybody would want to be there.
You don't even need a car.
You've got free electricity or it's close to it.
And you've got good weather.
So if you were going to locate this new town that will be the future town that's well designed, so it's really inexpensive, but great.
Both of those things.
Yeah, and somebody's saying in the comments, nuclear.
You could do something similar Simply by having nuclear power, let's say generation 4.
So in all these cases, you're deciding on your location, you're making sure you've got the right kind of weather and temperature for what you're trying to build, and you make sure you have a water source and an energy source.
So let's say you can find lots of places that meet this test in the United States, where you could build a city.
Then how would you do it?
I think it needs to be some kind of massive coordinated wiki sort of situation because there are so many skills involved.
That's why it's never been done, I think.
I think it would take so many different kinds of engineers to coordinate.
It would be hundreds of them. It would just be really hard.
But once you got it going, probably each of the modules could be adjusted.
For example, some of the engineers might be doing waste treatment.
Some of the engineers might be just making sure everybody has Wi-Fi.
But those are all little modules.
So you could always say, okay, we've got a better way to do the Wi-Fi.
We've got a better way to treat the waste.
And you trade those out.
But the point is, you could design a city that was super cheap and super good at the same time.
Somebody says it sounds horrible.
What about this would sound horrible?
It's something that literally hasn't been designed yet.
All right. So then solar will only be four times expensive as current electric generation.
Well, I'm not here to argue the pros and cons of the different power sources.
I'm just saying that it's fun to think through the ideas of how you could go about that.
And I'm pretty sure that if you designed a town really well, It would be better to live in than anything that anybody lives today and way, way cheaper.
And I think that that's the future that's going to happen.
Once you have the design finalized, you don't need the engineers anymore.
That is incorrect.
Sounds like you have not worked around technology.
You never don't need the engineers because things are continually breaking and needing upgrades and fixes and problem shooting.
You might need fewer of them.
Well, probably not even that.
You always need the engineers.
So he says, Germany has done that.
Well, I'd be interested to know when that happened.
Because we could do it now way better.
What is the value of money in a future that doesn't require it?
Well, that's a big question there.
You need someone managing the back end.
Yeah, you definitely need somebody managing the whole thing.
You forgot about power transmission lines.
Yeah. Well, you could use power transmission lines, but you lose a lot of power.
Scott loves campus housing.
I love alternative housing.
So I'm not trying to put any of you in any kind of special housing.
You know, the conservatives who are in my audience are so primed to look for socialism wherever they can find it that you see it even where it isn't.
So if I say, hey, you can do anything you want, live anywhere you want, but also some other people might want to choose these kinds of options, that's not exactly socialism.
Everybody can choose anything they want, and if the market wants cheap housing, it will have it.
Yeah, there's lots of net zero housing, but I believe that the cost of building that stuff and the fact that they use solar panels and stuff, there are a lot of disadvantages of those.
Typically, when you see something like a zero-energy house, all of the design was done by the builder.
But is that the best way to have electricity?
Is the best way that each house generates its own?
Maybe. But if you had designed the whole city, maybe you have one place that generates electricity, be it a central site with, let's say, nuclear or something else.
All right. Interesting comment.
Is the herd management goal large-scale campus life?
I don't know what that means. Hemp bale houses are the best, somebody says.
You know, I looked into all of those alternative building things when I built my house.
Now, this was 10 years ago, but some things haven't changed.
And people kept telling me, you know, use these hay bales.
Some kind of, I don't know, different hay bales and you put them in your walls and you build up the thing.
But you start looking into all these alternative technologies and you find stuff like, yeah, this hay is really good insulation.
It doesn't cost much.
It's not really that hard to build, but it'll be filled with rodents.
And I think the straw becomes less effective as an insulator over time.
I don't know, something happens to it, it degrades, or bugs get in there and eat it.
So it turns out that if you actually, yeah, if you're trying to build your hippie house, you won't be happy in five years.
Bugs will eat it, yeah.
So there are a lot of these new technologies.
And then the other problem is that you would never get code approval, you would never find a builder who knew how to build it.
Yeah, they all sound good, but if you try to build anything that's not standard stuff, It doesn't happen.
Now, here's my other idea.
My other idea is that you design a bunch of rooms that are standard designs, but they're the best ones.
Because you've seen a million different kitchens, right?
But it's not true that they're all just as good.
There are some designs for how you design a living room, a bedroom, etc.
that are just better. There's no doubt about it.
Some room sizes are better.
So you come up with, you know, you do a bunch of testing and you come up with the sizes that are the best.
You might have a few varieties, you know, two or three different choices, but they're all standardized.
And they're also one foot square sizes.
So if somebody wanted to build it themselves or keep the construction costs down, every part of the house, you'd never have to cut anything.
Because the whole town would have access to one-foot square pieces for the floor, let's say, for the ceiling, let's say, maybe for the walls.
And it doesn't have to be just one-foot squares, but the point is that there's no situation where you'd ever have to cut any material.
Everything could be built by taking it and just putting it where it belongs, because all the rooms would be designed to be the exact size of existing things.
And that alone would probably lower the cost by 30%, 40%.
Somebody says the best room designs become dated pretty quickly.
I agree. And that's why you would want to have the option to redesign your home fairly easily once it's been built.
And if everything is modular, you could take out your floor and say, hey, I think I want this to be a different kind of room and Put in a different floor without cutting anything.
Nothing would ever be cut. How much is Lego paying me?
Yeah, I'm being paid by big Lego.
You know, I don't know if modular homes will ever be as...
The trouble with modular homes is that they require that the labor happens in the factory.
And if the labor turns out to be the expensive part...
I think you could find situations where people could build their own homes, maybe not the hard parts.
You know, there might be something that they can't do, like framing it or the basement.
But for all the walls and floors and stuff, the homeowner could build it themselves.
All they need is the pieces.
Do you like vertical farming?
I don't know that anybody's figured out how to make it economical.
I actually have an investment in an indoor farm company.
It's doing well, actually.
Don't build where there is freezing and thawing.
Yeah, that would be one of the main concerns.
Correct. What happened to geothermal?
So geothermal is a perfect example of a technology that works better if you design the city.
Because if you try to do geothermal for your one house, it just isn't economical.
But if you were trying to do geothermal for an apartment complex, or let's say a college campus or a city, you would do it efficiently because you would have common systems and stuff.
And you would do it once before everything got built.
So that's why you designed it from scratch.
All right, that's all I got for now.
You've had enough of me today.
Somebody says they built their house and it was a nightmare.
Yeah, have you seen the Elon Musk tweets today?
People are wondering what's going on.
He said the Tesla stock was too high so it went down.
He said his girlfriend's having his baby on Monday.
He said that he's selling all of his property and his possessions.
And people are saying, what?
What's going on?
I don't know. Maybe we'll never know.
But that's all for now.
More swearing before bed, please.
Not tonight. I'm in a good mood tonight.
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