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May 28, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
37:59
Episode 1001 Scott Adams: Twitter Fact-Checking, Ballot Harvesting Malarkey, The Poorly Educated, The Future of Space
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Hey everybody, come on in.
It's time for the evening edition that I like to call No Coffee with Scott Adams because it's much too late.
Yeah, and today we have one of the best evenings ever.
Of all time. Things are starting to look great everywhere in the world.
Let me tell you about it. All the good news and stuff.
Yeah. Well, we had a sort of launch interrupt us today.
Were you all watching with excitement as we were going to watch the Elon Musk rocket take off?
Of course, NASA is involved, but they're not They're not celebrities, so we'll call it the Elon Musk rocket.
I was so excited for that, weren't you?
I was worried, I gotta say, not totally feeling safe, but I was really excited about it.
Now apparently it's postponed until Saturday.
But here's the thing.
I don't think I ever realized this before.
Because now it seems much more real.
I mean, the fact that there are actually people in the capsule and they've got a time to send them up there.
Now it seems more real.
And I don't know if you realize this, but Elon Musk is going to be the richest person in the universe.
Because I don't know what SpaceX is worth now.
You know, Elon's share of it.
But there's a few things that I didn't know about space.
And one of them is, it could be really profitable.
Like really, really, really profitable, like nothing on Earth has ever been profitable.
Apparently all you have to do is land on one asteroid and start mining the rare materials, and you've got like a trillion dollars per asteroid.
So there's a lot of money just floating around up there if you can get to it.
Then the other thing I heard today, I don't know the details, but it sounds really exciting.
I think it was, it might have been Dana Perino's show, but I saw somewhere there was an expert, it might have been another show, saying that one of the benefits of being able to get into space is that apparently 3D printers work really well in space.
So well that you can 3D print human organs as long as you're in space.
Did you know that? Like, that came out of nowhere.
I was like, what?
Are you telling me that all you needed was to be away from gravity and you solved the problems of printing human organs?
Now, I've got to think there's more to it.
But there was at least somebody willing to say that on television.
I thought, wow, there's a lot of money up there in space.
So it kind of makes sense that Bezos is trying to do something, that Elon Musk is trying to do something.
Because whoever gets the space first with an actual business model and ability to do multiple trips and stuff, We're talking multi-trillions of dollars of net worth.
I mean, the kind of money that you would never ever see on Earth.
So, that's fun.
And I have to tell you that I tweeted before I knew it was going to be scrubbed, I tweeted that the stock market will probably follow the direction of the rocket.
In other words, if the rocket is successfully launched and everything goes well, I think the stock market is just going to Feel the animal spirits, if you will.
That's a phrase used for economies.
Because economies operate on how you feel about stuff.
Literally the animal, well not literally, figuratively the animal spirits.
And I don't think there could be anything better for the You know, the psyche of the American public than to launch some people into space and get it right.
That would be really, really exciting.
So, if we get this right over the weekend, I would want to own stock on Monday.
I don't give financial advice that was not financial advice.
More like a prediction.
I don't know. Is that good enough to stay out of trouble?
Because I think you can predict where the stock market's going as long as you don't advise people to do anything about it.
And I don't advise you to do anything about it because nobody's good at predicting the stock market.
And as soon as you think somebody is, that's when you lose all your money.
I continue to be impressed at what I see as a creative explosion.
You're seeing it too, right?
The amount of creativity that people are generating...
Because they had time to rethink everything from scratch.
It's really amazing.
Most of you know I started a community on the Locals platform where I'm putting a lot of my stuff that you don't see here.
So everything that I do that's non-Dilbert and maybe some Dilbert stuff will be over there.
But I wouldn't have done that.
I was thinking about it.
I probably just wouldn't have executed if life had just gone on.
But once I could rethink everything, and I was faced with the end of my career as well.
And I've got to say, it's very motivating in a creative way, even though you would not choose the path.
It just opens up all your creative energy.
And I've probably had more creative output in the last two months than any time in my life.
So it's been tremendous for me.
I think other people are having the same experience.
I don't know. So you can find my other stuff at locals.com.
And you can find the link to that at the top of my Twitter profile.
So there are a number of businesses that are doing great.
I just read that RV sales are doing great.
What? So people are buying RVs.
Presumably people are thinking less about flying.
I'm guessing. So bicycles are doing great.
Everybody in the delivery business is doing great.
Zoom and the online conferencing is doing great.
There's a whole bunch of telehealth businesses that are doing great.
A lot of people are doing great.
So I have a really good feeling about the recovery.
Let's talk about the Twitter fact-checking.
The big story of the day.
You're all following that, right?
The Twitter fact-checking.
So the president tweeted to the effect that mail-in voting would invite a lot of fraud.
Twitter's fact-checkers in a new program decided to label that as something that needed to be fact-checked, and then they fact-checked it as not true.
Now, there are a few problems with that.
You might see them right away.
One of them is that it is true.
So if your very first fact check on the president, you didn't even get it right because it is true.
It's obviously true.
Now you could argue the extent of it.
You could say it's not enough to make a difference.
That would be an argument. You could say it's no worse than the current system which has its own problems.
That would be an argument.
You could say, it's not perfect, but we have ways to fix it, and I think we'll be alright.
That would be a good argument.
But you know what's not a good argument?
That mail-in ballots are not subject to fraud?
Really? Really?
Because I'm no evil, super-genius criminal, but even I can think of a few ways that I can game that system.
If you can't think of six ways to game that system, you're not even trying.
So I asked this provocative and perhaps a philosophical question, and it goes like this.
If you give your mail-in ballot to someone else, let's say you give it to your friend to mail it for you, and you don't watch them mail it, did you vote?
Now your first impression is, well yeah, because my friend would obviously mail it, so yeah, I voted.
You know, stop being so clever.
Angels dancing on the head of a pen.
You're just trying to find something out of nothing.
Am I? Am I? Because here's the way I see it.
Your friend has both his own ballot and your ballot, and he's walking to the mailbox.
Your friend knows who you voted for.
It's your friend. Your friend knows who you voted for.
Sure, there are some people who don't know who their friend voted for.
But mostly, your friend knows who you voted for.
Even if it's not who they voted for.
They know who you voted for. Certainly for president.
So your friend has his own ballot and your ballot in his hand and nobody's watching and there's the mailbox to mail them.
Your friend gets to vote twice.
Once when your friend puts his own vote into the mail and the second time when he decides yes or no to put your vote in the mail.
Because your friend gets a second vote.
You think you voted, but you didn't.
Unless your friend decides that your vote is the way your friend wants it to go, for whatever reason.
Maybe they just like fairness and they don't want to ruin the system.
But the point is, in a very real, practical way, you didn't vote.
Your friend voted twice.
I'm not wrong. It's just one of those things you have to think about for a little while.
Alright. So, as you might imagine, Twitter's getting quite a bit of pushback.
The President is saying that he's going to sign some kind of an executive order about the social media companies.
I can't imagine what that would be.
Facebook already said that they don't want to be in the business of fact-checking anything.
So, I don't know.
I don't know what the executive order is.
There will be much jabbering about what is legal and what is not.
The president will be called a dictator.
A dictator because he's ignoring the Constitution.
That's what his critics are already saying.
And then other people will say, exactly how are you going to monitor or regulate them?
Don't you need Congress?
Can you just make the FCC do something?
Apparently it's not set up so that's an easy thing to do.
So we don't know what this year will be, unless it's already come out while I'm talking.
But here's what I think could be an unintended consequence of the Twitter fact-checking.
Are you ready for this?
Here's some unintended potential consequences.
Number one, I doubt the system will stay the same.
So the first part of this...
Prediction is that Twitter's, you know, the first attempt at a fact, sort of a fact-checking banner, I'm sure it's not going to stay the same.
In other words, it's sort of an A-B testing situation.
They tried something, they got a lot of pushback, surely they will try something else.
And probably pretty quickly.
Here's what I would assume will be the way it'll shake out.
I think they're going to have to, somehow, in the interface, Make it possible to see the other side.
So I think they can get away with doing a fact check that says this fact is not true if they're also prominently, and prominently is the part that's important, right?
It's got to be equally prominent to say, and here's the counter-argument.
If they show both arguments, are you happier?
Or are you less happy?
Oh, I know what you're going to say.
You're going to say, no, that doesn't work.
Because that's a lot like when the fake news will run a story for a week and it's the biggest headline, a million people see it, and then when they recant it later and they say, oh, we got it wrong, nobody sees the correction.
So you're saying, oh, it's going to be one of those situations where, yeah, on paper they showed both sides, but really it's the fact-checked banner of That people are going to notice.
I mean, that's the part they'll remember.
Not some other little thing that says you can look at the other argument.
But here, here's the unintended consequence.
Let me ask you this.
Conservatives, do they usually see both sides of the argument?
Yeah, they do. Conservatives and Republicans usually see what the mainstream media is saying because they're ubiquitous.
You can't miss it. But then they also see what Fox News and Breitbart and anybody that they think is on the right is saying.
So conservatives are not going to be seeing new information.
And I'm generalizing here, right?
Every person is different.
But I'm going to make a generalization that conservatives won't see anything new because they already saw both sides.
But, do you know what might be happening?
Somewhat accidentally?
Somewhat accidentally, we're going to end up in a place where the left is going to be exposed to the entire argument for the first time.
Now, that hasn't happened yet.
And in fact, you're seeing the opposite, which is just one side, the fact-checking.
But I don't think that that situation can last.
So I think you're going to have to see something that ultimately gives some appreciation that there's another argument, even if it's not the one that Twitter thinks is correct.
And once both arguments are in the same place, it'll be the first time.
Now, there is an app that does it.
I think it's Ground News.
There's an app that shows both sides, and it even tells you where everybody is on the spectrum, so you can tell if it's a left source or a right source or in between.
So it exists, but it doesn't exist on the scale of Twitter.
So if Twitter started showing both sides of arguments, what would that do to the entire half of the country, who I call the poorly educated, Regardless of whether they went to college or what college they went to or anything else, they're poorly educated because they only see half the news.
They don't see the conservative half, which explains what they're missing.
So, one of the unintended, completely unpredictable outcomes of this Twitter thing is that after the tension and the fighting and the back and forth is done, You might have way better information for the people on the left, which would be very good for the people on the right, because it's the first time that their arguments would be seen.
So don't assume this is heading for a bad place.
It could. It could easily head for a bad place, right?
There are a hundred ways you could think of that it would all go off the trail, you know, go off the tracks, and we wouldn't have anything like free speech and It just gets worse and worse.
You can imagine that. But I think far more likely that there will be a natural inclination just to correct.
And I think you're going to see something good come out of it.
But wait, we'll see. Of course, the country is all worked up, as they should be, about this horrible...
Video of the police killing the African-American gentleman by putting the knee on his neck and he was complaining.
You all know the story. But here's the thing.
Can anybody tell me the statistics of how many police killed white people in traffic stops?
Because I kind of need to know that, to have an opinion that is worth anything.
Because if you don't know that fact, do you know anything?
Because to me, that is the difference between do you have a police training problem or do you have a racist problem?
That's kind of the big dividing line, right?
There has to be a statistic that says the police killed X number of white people in this many stops.
Because you'd probably want to know the number but also the percentage of Who got killed when they got stopped for some other reason.
Now, if that number is zero, well, I got some real questions about the police.
Don't you? I mean, I got a lot of questions.
If they don't kill anybody else, don't you have a lot of questions about the police?
You ought to. That would be worst case scenario.
But suppose, and I don't know what the statistics are, and that's my point.
Somebody says a 61-year-old white man shot dead by state troopers four miles from my house yesterday.
Yeah, you have to be careful with all the anecdotal stuff because, you know, was he armed?
Was he coming at the police?
You just don't know. But the point is, the point is, if you don't know that, I don't think you should have an opinion.
Do you? Do you think you should have, obviously, you can have an opinion on that specific situation.
You could certainly have an opinion on that.
You know, there's nobody who thinks that that turned out well.
But can you have an opinion about the police being racist or not, whether that's the problem or it's more just a police problem?
Can you have an opinion on that that means anything?
Without knowing how many of the other ethnicities are having the same problem, and is it as bad?
Is it the same? Just don't know.
Just don't know. I'd like to know that.
But I would note that while we're looking for all the bad news, because that's what we do, we're always looking for the bad news.
Ah, the bad news.
And so we're watching this tragedy...
And we think that we're divided.
And there's this gigantic illusion happening in which there's no division whatsoever.
There's no division whatsoever.
I don't think the country has ever been more unified on one story than...
I'm pretty sure every white person, brown person, black person who sees that video has exactly the same freaking opinion.
I'll bet every police officer who looks at that has a pretty similar opinion.
Although, actually, they may shade it a little bit because they know more about processes and stuff.
So I'll take that back. Maybe the police would have their own different opinion.
But I don't think there's a white or black difference on this.
Do you see it?
Because... Let me speak as a representative, very white person, meaning I look about as white as you could possibly look.
No white person has come to me, privately, publicly, or in any way, and said anything other than what I just said, which is, this is horrible, those police need to answer this.
I have not seen anybody on the other side.
So why are we not treating this Like a unifying event.
It's a tragedy.
We all get that.
But it is a unifying event.
It's a unifying event.
There's nobody on the other side.
How do we not see that?
How is that invisible to us all?
It's the most unifying thing that's happened in a long time that wasn't called the coronavirus.
So we can find bad news everywhere.
I mean, obviously, the tragedy itself is horrible news.
But the way we're responding to it as a society, I think you should be proud of.
I think you should be proud of it.
It's my opinion. All right.
So 100,000 people are dead from the coronavirus in the United States alone.
1,535 of them died today.
On average, since it started getting bad the last few months, 900 a day have been dying.
Let's round that off to 1,000 per day.
If we've got 100,000 now, what will it look like in 90 days Let's say at the end of August, if it stays at 1,000 a day.
Well, that would be 190,000 dead, and that's just August.
We're not even talking about the potential second wave that may or may not happen.
Dr. Fauci says it's not guaranteed, but something to worry about.
Aren't we easily going to cross 200,000?
Or does it...
Yeah, obviously 90,000 if it's 90 days at 1,000 a day.
Somebody says, and you believe flu death statistics?
No, if you're new, I do not believe flu death statistics, meaning I don't believe the regular flu statistics, because I've never met anybody who died of the regular flu.
I just don't believe, I don't believe 50,000 people a year are dying of the regular flu.
And, you know, there was a doctor who looked into it, I talked about this on a different periscope, and apparently they don't count those deaths.
They're not counted. So we actually don't know how many people have died of the regular flu.
They do like a statistical thing and say, oh, it looks like there were extra people dying during the flu season, so there must have been flu deaths.
But we don't know. Somebody says, check the curve, Scott.
You're misinformed. Check the curve on what?
I don't know which topic you're talking about.
Are you saying that it won't be a thousand a day?
Because my understanding is that we're managing the curve to flatness.
Because it's unlikely that opening up everything is also going to make the curve go down much.
But we're just trying to make it not go up, right?
So if we're managing it to stay flat at about a thousand a day, how do we not get to 200,000 deaths sometime into September?
Um... Nursing home crisis, somebody says.
Yeah, it could be that the nursing homes are not part of the daily death toll anymore, are they?
Because don't we have the nursing homes kind of under control now?
Somebody says 3 million dead in the U.S. by November.
I don't think so. Alright, and we still haven't seen the net, have we?
Now, this would be a good time for everybody who made predictions about the coronavirus to kind of check their work.
So let's do that.
The thing I think I got the most wrong on the coronavirus situation is, early on when we did the initial shutdown of the economy, And I told you it's going to be no big deal, because you could easily shut down the economy for a month, and we get right back to work.
And then I thought, well, maybe it's going to be six weeks, but still, get right back to work.
But I didn't see how long it would be.
So I did not anticipate that they would keep extending it.
So I would say that my predictions on A quick recovery from a quick shutdown were completely wrong because they extended the time.
So I was wrong about that.
My estimate of the death toll was based on the fact that human ingenuity would come up with some solutions fairly quickly and that the net The people who didn't die in car accidents and other things would end up somewhat compensating for the people who died of the coronavirus and that we wouldn't lose that many people net.
And I'd actually said 5,000 net.
Now we don't know what the net is, but if it's 100,000 coronavirus, it's probably 50,000 net at least.
So my number would be way off by a factor of 10, and I might still be the closest estimate, weirdly enough, even that far off.
And I'd also predicted that the suicide rate would actually drop under the assumption that we're locked down for only a month or so.
But of course, the longer we go, That would reverse.
So my prediction was based on a shorter lockdown.
Alright. Oh, there's somebody saying that the Central Park dog story is a Covington Kids 2.0.
So is there something completely different about that?
We don't know. I wouldn't be surprised.
Yeah, Minnesota's got fires and looting.
So that's not going well.
So the 5,000 net deaths was based on the assumption that there were a whole bunch of other deaths that we would be avoiding.
So that the gross, I said, would be 50,000.
But even as bad as my estimate was, it's going to be closer than most experts, I think, when it comes out.
All right. Your book behind you fell.
Did it? Did that happen on camera?
Did it happen while you were looking?
Tell you some Biden jokes.
I don't have any good Biden jokes.
But I'm going to tell you about the future.
Would you like to hear about the future?
So, two things.
There's a place called the Faroe Islands.
I've never heard of them. F-A-R-O-E. I guess it's a tourist destination.
I have no idea where. But I just saw a website where they're giving remote tours with a local.
So they'll...
I don't know exactly how they do it.
I think they put a camera on some local person's head and then you can control where he goes.
So you can actually send a local...
Out walking on the island and looking around and looking at the sites and you just sort of control where the local goes.
It's like a human robot or something.
I don't know the details but I thought it was funny and creative.
So my prediction has always been that you'll be able to take a vacation by operating a drone in a place you want to see.
So in other words, if you say, I'd like to see the Great Wall of China, someday you'll be able to go onto a website and just log on to a drone, and you'll just be able to control your own drone.
And you just take it up and look around on your screen and take a look at the Great Wall of China.
I know, maybe China's the last place that would allow that, but the point is, I think people will be taking remote virtual vacations, or really just sightseeing, not a vacation, By a drone that they operate from where they are.
I think there's a latency problem, so maybe that doesn't work.
Here's the other part of the future that I guarantee you is coming.
So, during the lockdown, I went to buy myself a new bicycle.
And I thought, hey, I've got to look at those new electronic bicycles.
They've got a battery that's built in.
To the bike, and you still have to pedal, but the battery gives you a little boost on hills.
And I'd read a little bit about them, and they sounded interesting.
And I thought, huh, I will look into this electronic bicycle situation.
So I ended up getting one.
Here's how long it took me to make the decision.
The bicycle shop guy, and of course it was all coronavirus rules, and this was a couple weeks ago.
It's all coronavirus rules, so I'm the only one in the shop.
I pick out one, and he lets me take it for a test drive in the parking lot.
So I take this e-bike into the parking lot, I do a circle, and I come back and I say, I've got to ask you one question.
Has anybody ever taken a test drive on an e-bike and not purchased it?
And he laughed.
He laughed. And he said, there's something called the e-bike smile, which he said he couldn't see with me because I had my mask on at the time.
He goes, the people who do the test drive on the e-bike, when they come back, their smile is wrapped around their head.
Now, I got to tell you, you don't quite understand how fun this is.
If you've never rid one, if you've never ridden one, Hold your judgment.
Can I ask you that? Can I ask you that if you haven't written one, just assume, as I did, that you don't understand it.
Please assume that.
Because there's something really cool coming.
There's something really cool coming.
So here's the deal.
So I've been riding this around for, you know, like I said, a couple weeks.
And the one thing that happens every single time is that my attitude Just completely transforms.
My attitude just goes into positivity and I feel great.
I feel free.
Just everything.
It's amazing.
The feeling you get is not the feeling of a motorcycle.
It's not the feeling of a bicycle.
Those are both good, right?
People like bicycles.
They're great.
People like motorcycles.
They're terrific. This is better.
This is better.
I've had a motorcycle.
I know what a motorcycle feels like.
Here's why it's better. A motorcycle is a little bit boring and scary at the same time.
If you're going down the freeway on your motorcycle, you should be pretty afraid of something out of your control killing you at any moment.
And that never really goes away when you're on a motorcycle, unless, I don't know, maybe it does for some people, but it never did for me.
At the same time, it's also fun, but there's not much you can do.
You don't have a lot of freedom of what you can do, you gotta obey the laws, etc.
And you have this big helmet on that's, you know, covering your whole head so you're not really even outdoors, basically.
And then a bicycle, of course, is wonderful.
But if you have a lot of hills, and I live where there are a lot of hills, it limits what you can and cannot do.
With the electric bike, I charge it maybe once a week.
Once a week! And you can go up any hill easily.
You still have to pedal, so you always have a feeling of control.
But here's the fun part. The sensation you have...
Is that you're super strong.
And yes, the price was just about what you're guessing in the comments here.
So it's pretty expensive.
Now the batteries, here's the part that tells you what the future looks like.
You can go forever on these.
You actually will just sort of never get tired.
You can just ride it forever. Uphills, downhills.
So distance just goes away.
The other thing is that the quality of the batteries is improving all the time.
So the price is going down, the power is going up.
I guarantee you that the future is small, personal vehicles.
Now, I don't know that the Segway is quite the form that people are going to want, because it's sort of bulky, and you can't ride it on the sidewalk, you can't ride it on the street too easily, it just doesn't belong anywhere.
But bicycles... Belong everywhere.
I can take my bicycle everywhere.
I can take it in my house if I don't want it to be stolen.
There's no place I can't go with my bicycle.
My prediction to you is that these electronic assist vehicles, be they bikes or trikes or who knows what they will be, they're really going to be big because they're great.
They're just great.
And also, as I was saying before, it makes you question the subjective nature of reality.
Because if every time I'm on it, I'm happy, it kind of tells me that it's not my life that made me unhappy in the first place.
Somebody asked how heavy it is.
First of all, the battery is easy to remove.
It just comes right off.
But one person can lift it and put it in the back of an SUV. It's heavier than a regular bike.
You wouldn't want to do a lot of biking without the electronic assist turned on.
It's a Trek.
T-R-E-K. Yeah.
Does it feel unreal?
Yeah, it does. It does.
It feels like you're in a dream and it's a good one because you're super strong.
And not everybody knows that it's an e-bike, because if you look at it, you wouldn't know.
It just has a little bit of fatter bar.
One of the main support boards is a little fatter because of the battery.
That's it. So there are tons of bikes and people walking around where I live.
So I like to pedal fast up really steep hills and make people think I'm strong.
It never gets old.
Good brakes? Yeah, the brakes are fine.
It's actually a really well-made piece of machinery.
Can you ride it in the rain? Yes.
Apparently you can ride it in the pouring rain without any risk whatsoever, according to the salesperson.
And the battery is enclosed and doesn't get wet.
Do I go biking with Christina?
Not yet. I'll have to try to talk her into it.
Biking is one of those things that it's a little bit better alone, don't you think?
Because part of what makes a bicycle so much fun is the freedom of it that literally when I'm riding around my neighborhood, I just say to myself, I think I'll go this way and just go left and look at a new neighborhood and If you're riding with somebody, you're sort of trying to communicate with them at least a little bit and ride.
It sort of doesn't mix as well.
Yeah, biking improves your mood every time, somebody says.
Sky should go Oprah on us tonight.
You mean like there's an electric bike under your seat?
What model is it?
I forget the model number. Alright.
That's all for now. So, here's the good news.
Your social media is going to get better.
Your economy is getting better.
Electronic bikes are going to be everywhere, and you're going to love them.
That's the good news.
It's all good news from here on out.
It's going to be a great summer.
A great summer.
And, yes, we did set a new wedding date, but we're not telling you what it is.
But I'll be getting married pretty soon.
Pretty soon. Very small.
We will not be violating any regulations.
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