My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
National Guard sleeping on a cold concrete garage floor
Biden's landslide popular votes vs low approval rating
TDS getting worse?
AOC and Ted Cruz weird respect for each other
Climate change risk?
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You just put in these little things and then you just push that button.
Now you might ask yourself, why did I have to push that button several times before it worked?
I don't know. That's the way I'd design it, wouldn't you?
If you were designing a coffee maker, wouldn't you make a button that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, but doesn't tell you why?
So I've used these coffee makers quite a bit, and I find that randomly pushing it for 30 or 40 minutes will actually get it to work sometimes.
So that's how I do it.
I just start randomly pushing buttons.
Half an hour later, you've got yourself some coffee.
It's a good system. Alright, let's see how it tastes.
Now, the coffee maker has two settings.
One for these tiny little cups of some kind of coffee material that no one should ever put in their mouth.
The other is for a big cup of coffee.
You know me. I like a big cup of coffee.
So, here's my coffee cup.
Here's that little bit of coffee that it puts in there.
Any coffee cup.
And I guess that's all I get.
I'm not allowed to have a big cup of coffee.
That's just not one of the options.
Sorry. All right.
Don't wake up Christine.
All right, I know what you wanted.
What you wanted was for me to turn my damn camera sideways, right?
Was anybody yelling, Boomer!
Boomer! Turn your camera sideways, you fool!
Well, you should have. That's exactly what you should have been doing.
So, I did everything I could today to try to make it here on time.
And if the software I were using had something like a button that would say, go live, or you're the host, or something like that, that would have been cool.
But it took a little monkey work to hit the right button there.
I still don't know why.
When I use the software tomorrow, I'll have no idea why it worked this time, but it didn't work before.
So it'll be like the coffee maker.
I'll be randomly pushing buttons and hoping something happens.
Alright. It's about 5 in the morning here.
I'm in Bora Bora in French Polynesia.
Christina is sleeping.
If you don't know, I'm here on my delayed, belated honeymoon.
And this resort is hilarious because I feel like it's maybe 5% full.
So we went to a remote place and ended up with almost nobody else staying here.
We're practically alone on an island.
Anyway, that's not why you're here.
Wouldn't you like to simultaneous sip?
Yeah, all you need is a cup or mug or glass, a tank or chalice or stein, canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid I liked, coffee.
Even if it's just like a little bit in a tiny cup, I like it.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine here today that makes everything better.
It's called Simultaneous Sip, and it happens now.
Go. Ah, that's good.
That's good stuff. All right, so let me tell you what's the most bothersome news story lately, which is probably a bad statement about me because there have been far worse things in the news, but not anything that bothered me as much.
Do you ever feel bad about that?
You'll see a story about some, you know, giant massacre in another country and you'll read it and you'll say, oh, that's interesting.
It's a giant massacre.
And you should probably feel more than just as interesting.
And then there'll be some other story in the news that if you were to be objective and actually rank how bad it is, it wouldn't be nearly as bad as that, you know, giant massacre.
But it might bother you more.
That's what's happening with the story about the National Guard that we're being forced to sleep on the floors.
I feel like I took that just personally.
You know, there's some things that you can say, oh, that's my government did that.
You know, my government made a mistake.
But when you need any part of the military to work domestically, and then you make them sleep on the floor, That is wrong on a level that is just mind-boggling.
This morning my head was like locked in some kind of a, what the hell are we doing?
And the thing that I guess is the most annoying If the citizens of this country had been aware of it, let's say locally, probably 50% of the people who lived locally would have said, are you kidding me? Here's my key.
Well, not literally a key, but come on over.
You can sleep in the extra room.
I'll sleep in the couch. You can sleep in my bed.
I'll sleep on the couch. You know, you would easily get half of the citizens to say, are you kidding me?
Our military is sleeping on the floor?
And you're just talking about a night or two, right?
Bring them over. I got room.
I would have opened my house.
Absolutely. I'll bet at least 75% of the people watching this would have said, I'll take one.
You know, you're not taking them all.
But if you live locally, yeah, I'll take two or three.
They can sleep at my house.
I wouldn't hesitate a moment to do that.
So I think the thing that bothers me the most is that there was somebody in a command situation who, well, just blew it.
I mean, somebody's got an answer to this.
All right. What would you expect Joe Biden's approval number to be in his first week as president, or even, let's say, first day?
Wouldn't you expect, given his record landslide number of popular votes, more than Obama, and that the population of the country is bigger, so that's the biggest part of the explanation probably, but he had, according to the election results, massive, massive popular vote.
Really impressive. And then I've been watching the news coverage.
And according to CNN and New York Times and CNBC, Joe Biden is not just doing well.
He's doing great.
Not only is he doing great, but Jill Biden?
Jill Biden finally brought some style to the White House.
You thought Melania brought some style to the White House, but you haven't seen anything until Dr.
Jill Biden shows us how it's done.
So given the fawning news coverage and the gigantic popular vote, what would you expect his starting job approval numbers to be?
I'll give you some context.
I think Obama was over 60% his first week as president.
Over 60%. It's hard to imagine that's even a thing, right?
I think it was around 65%.
Trump, people forget, his initial job approval was in the mid, 55, 58, somewhere in there.
It was in the mid to high 50s.
But what will Biden's approval be?
It's got to be 70%, right?
Because, I mean, I've never seen the president more popular going into office.
So if the approval polls for his first week We're lower than you'd expect.
What would that tell you?
I know what it would tell you.
Don't say it out loud.
You'll go banned. I think it's not going to prove anything, obviously.
The approval numbers don't tell you what the popular vote should have been.
It doesn't work that way.
But it would be an interesting question, wouldn't it?
If his approval was not stratospheric.
I suppose it could be argued that people were just ecstatic to get rid of Trump and, you know, it won't come through in the job approval numbers.
But it is a question.
And Rasmussen has a poll coming out.
I think some people saw it earlier.
Paul Bedard, I think, in the Washington Examiner's already reported on it.
It's not looking like Joe Biden's first approval number is going to be over 50%.
Does that make sense to you?
What would be the explanation for why Joe Biden's initial approval wouldn't be over 50% when Trump's was and Obama's was way over?
It'd be kind of a question, wouldn't it?
Kind of a head scratcher.
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
Yeah.
And be careful.
You might be inviting a Scott.
like that.
Well, if there's ever a need for the National Guard to deploy to my town to make me safer, they could definitely stay at my house.
I could put up quite a few people in my house.
All right. Mostly what Biden is doing is reversing Trump stuff.
But does it bother you a little that it seems to be framed that way?
That what he's doing is just reversing all the Trump stuff?
I think that's a problem.
Now, it seems like he needs more of a mandate than just doing whatever is the opposite of Trump.
And it feels like he's going to overshoot the mark.
Because clearly there are some things that Trump did that if you're a Democrat, you absolutely do want it to be reversed.
I'm not saying I want it to be reversed.
I'm saying that a Democrat would.
And it makes sense that if you win the election, you get to reverse what the last person did.
Trump did the same thing, of course.
Practically erased Obama for four years.
So Biden gets to do the same thing.
But here's the thing. What if he takes it a little too far, and he just sort of automatically reverses anything that Trump did?
That'd be kind of obvious, wouldn't it?
Instead of, you know, leading or being the president, just doing the opposite of what Trump did, no matter what it was.
And with the Keystone Pipeline project that Trump approved and Biden killed, it feels like that was one of those.
Because the majority of the country was in favor of the pipeline.
So what would be, you know, Biden's, I guess, justification?
Now, of course, there's an environmental reason.
They have an argument.
It's a strong argument. If that's your priorities over jobs, for example, that's a strong argument.
But it feels, because the pipeline is more popular, more than half of the country is in favor of it, it feels like that was just being opposite of Trump.
Doesn't it? Does it feel like he really genuinely didn't want the Keystone pipeline?
If you could talk to Biden personally, and somehow you could know he was being honest, would you really think that he canceled that project because he has a strong feeling about it being a bad idea?
I don't feel like that. It feels like he canceled it because Trump approved it, doesn't it?
You know, and it's just part of the larger package of undoing everything that Trump did.
So he has to watch out from going too far.
And I think the pipeline is at least on the border of going too far.
We'll see if he does any more than that.
Now of course the single most dangerous sounding thing, we don't know if it will become dangerous in the long run in reality, but dangerous sounding thing that's happening now, is Biden and his helpers in the news and the social media folks have Painted this picture of a massive,
what would you call it, a white supremacist domestic terrorist network of organized people.
Do you think that's real?
How much do you think it's a true statement that there is a substantial organized white supremacist, an emphasis on the white supremacist part, In this country, to the point where that's our biggest problem.
Now, I have to admit, I would have bias because if such an organization existed, it would be unlikely they would target me, right?
That would be the whole point of them being a white supremacist organization is that they wouldn't necessarily target somebody like me.
So I can't say that I'd have the same feeling about it if they were intentionally targeting some other group of people.
Or if they were intentionally targeting me specifically, I'm sure I'd have a completely different opinion about it.
But objectively speaking, it looks completely made up.
Now, I hope it is.
Well, I hope in the sense that I don't want there to be a large organized white supremacist domestic terrorist problem.
I don't think any of you want that.
I think I need a drink of coffee.
Yeah, that helped. That helped.
But the way it's being talked about is people are putting together in their minds, let's say they've constructed a network of all these little individual things, which are true, you know, individual problems and individual militias, I guess, and individual organizations are definitely the real deal bad stuff.
But imagining that they're somehow networked together in some kind of massive conspiracy feels more crazy than political.
Do you have that feeling?
Does anybody share that?
That when they talk about how the size of the problem and how organized they are with each other across the country, that part doesn't sound real to me.
I mean, I hope it's not real.
And if it is real, it's definitely a big problem.
But it doesn't feel real.
Maybe it's because I don't have any specific contact with it.
I mean, I don't know anybody who has that philosophy.
I don't even know them online.
I don't even know them on Twitter.
But, you know, there's enough reporting to assume that they exist.
But how big could it be?
You know, it doesn't pass the sniff test.
And it could lead to pretty big problems if people buy into it.
Now, the thing I did not expect is that TDS would get worse.
Did you? I kind of have to say, I blew that prediction.
Now, I still could be right, but we might have to wait six months instead of one week.
And the...
I guess there's nothing else to say about that.
All right. Is anybody surprised that I haven't been canceled yet?
I'm a little surprised about it.
If I'm being honest, I thought that I would at least get some kind of a suspension by now.
Have you seen me say anything that would be cancelable?
Because I do try not to do that.
I actually... Believe it or not, I'm almost a reflexive rule follower, even rules I don't like.
Now, if a rule is just blatantly ridiculous, I'll, of course, violate that as anybody would.
But I'm generally a rule follower by nature.
If there's a sign that says, stand here, I'll stand there.
If there's a sign that says, do this or do that, I'll do that.
You know, I don't fight every little rule of society.
But it does seem to me that following the rules of the social media terms of service is not hard.
How hard is it to not threaten somebody with violence?
I feel like I can do that pretty easily.
Hey, look at me. I'm doing it right now.
Watch this. Not even threatening anybody.
By the way, it looks like the sun's starting to come up a little bit.
It's starting to look kind of nice here.
give you the full view this is quite a place there's your little moment of Zen Now, if you haven't heard my nightmare stories of how hard it is to get here, two-plane rides in a boat, delays, coronavirus tests.
I mean, it's really hard to get here, but totally worth it.
All right. So I should probably...
I should probably apologize to you for the low quality of the shows that are going to come out here.
Let me tell you what's different process-wise.
Normally when I'm in my normal time zone, I get up at 3 or 4 in the morning because I hate sleeping.
And I've got plenty of time to look at all the news headlines.
But I woke up just minutes before I went live here in this time zone.
So I'm less than prepared.
So what are the other stories?
The big story, of course, is that whole National Guard thing, and then Biden's job approval, which is going to be a real head-scratcher if it's not through the roof, and it looks like it's not going to be.
I'm in Bora Bora.
Trump gave permission to use the hotel in D.C. Does he own that hotel?
Or is it a license deal?
Yeah, it's a Dale Carnegie one.
You're right. Yeah, I talked about this.
The ability to talk to a live audience without preparation is a learned skill.
And you're seeing it right now.
So Richard Barris says that the popularity, or no, the approval of Biden will be about 47%, somebody's saying in the comments.
Let's see. The story about Hunter overheard on the White House YouTube livestream talking about a plea deal.
Oh, really? I haven't seen that story.
That must be a new story. So somebody in the comments is saying there's something overheard on a hot mic.
There's a new audio illusion of...
There's some audio of Biden talking to himself, it sounds like, and somebody thought he was talking into his earpiece or something.
But as he's walking past the Marines, you can hear him say, either, salute the Marines, which is what some people on social media thought he said, salute the Marines, and then he doesn't salute the Marines.
So you're thinking, did somebody say that in his earpiece?
That was the... I think fake news that was going around is that somebody was telling him what to do, salute the Marines, and that he was just repeating it out loud as he heard it, salute the Marines, and then he didn't do it.
So that was one version of the story that I think is the fake version.
But when I saw the story, I listened to the audio, and I clearly heard him say, salute the Marines.
Then I saw somebody else retweet it and say, I clearly heard him say, good-looking Marines.
And I said to myself, he didn't say that.
I just listened to it. But I had been primed by the tweet.
So I had been told what I would hear, and then I listened to it.
I clearly heard it. Just as clear as day.
Salute the Marines.
The moment I saw the other version, Where somebody said, no, he said, good-looking Marines, as he walked past them.
And I listened to the same audio just five minutes later, and he said as clear as day, good-looking Marines.
It's the weirdest thing.
So I always point that out to remind people that you live in a subjective reality.
And that's a perfect example where I completely changed my subjective reality by two sets of primings.
One primed me to see one reality, the other primed me to see a different reality.
And I saw both of those realities, or I heard them, and then I lived in that world of that reality for a while.
Instantly and effortlessly and actually wasn't trying.
It just happened. Two completely different realities experienced both perfect.
There was nothing wrong with either.
There was no gray area.
Nothing ambiguous.
Two clean realities experienced one after the other and one of them isn't true.
Probably both of them are not true in terms of some base reality.
But that's freaky. Yeah, it's like the blue-white dress and Yanni and Laurel and all those things.
All of those things should serve to remind you that when you're looking at politics in particular, you're really just...
The things you think are your opinions are largely not.
Hate to tell you. But those things you believe are the opinions which you cooked up in your own head based on your own free will and your common sense.
Nothing like that happens.
Nothing like that. Not even close to that.
What happens, probably, for the vast majority of you, meaning well over 90% of you, is that you got primed by something, just the way I got primed to hear salute the Marines, and then you heard salute the Marines, because you'd been primed for it, and then you incorporated that into your reality, and when somebody said, no, no, There's a different reality.
It was good-looking Marines.
You said to yourself, oh, you crazy person.
I heard it with my own ears.
Watch. I'll go listen to it again.
All right. I'll humor you.
I'll go listen to it again.
Listen to it again. Still says clear as day.
Salute the Marines. So I guess I was right, and you're some kind of crazy, deranged person or lying or something.
I don't know what's wrong with you.
That is most of politics.
Now, when you hear that the first time, that people don't make their own opinions That their opinions are effectively assigned to them through this priming process.
The first time you're exposed to that idea, you just think to yourself, ah, that's not true.
I'm pretty sure that's not true, because I have my own ideas.
I make up my own mind.
Got to my free will in here, so anything you say otherwise, that's crazy stuff.
Totally crazy. Eventually you realize that that's the only way the world works.
You get primed, you believe something that isn't true, you go on with life, and you can still reproduce.
As long as you can make children, your species is fine.
That's it. If you can reproduce, or enough if you can, it's all you need.
So you can walk around in an illusion all day long, it doesn't hurt anything.
It hurt anything in terms of the long-term survival of the species, which is all that the species cares about.
That's some cold, cold-ass coffee right there.
So AOC has some kind of weird love-hate relationship with Ted Cruz.
Have you noticed that? They're sort of tweeting love-haters.
I can't read minds, and so what I'm going to say next should be seen as purely my impression and speculative.
I wouldn't put too much weight on this at all.
But I feel as though Ted Cruz and AOC I have a deep respect for each other, but they have different philosophies, so they're sort of public enemies, you know, tweeting things at each other and sometimes agreeing, sometimes disagreeing.
But I kind of like it, because even when they disagree, it feels more like they're playing.
They're playing hard, because, you know, especially AOC, she can go after Ted Cruz pretty hard.
But it still feels, it's just got this element of gamesmanship to it that I kind of like.
Both of them are, in my opinion, among the best communicators for their parties.
AOC, you could argue that she might be the best on the left.
Forget about her policies.
You might not like them. But in terms of how effective she is as a communicator, maybe the best they have.
Ted Cruz, same thing.
He'd be top five in the Republican Party in the ability to communicate and make a case.
So I think they have some weird respect.
Just guessing. I think they have some weird respect for each other.
And it makes it more fun to go after each other because it's like a worthy adversary kind of situation.
But I noticed...
So AOC went after...
Ted Cruz mocked the Paris Treaty, the climate treaty, and he said something along the lines of, you know, we're trying to make Paris happy, blah, blah, blah.
Now, when Ted Cruz tweeted that, you know, there's no point in making Paris happy, he didn't mean literally Paris.
He didn't mean we're only talking about the city of Paris because it's the Paris Treaty, right?
Any smart person who saw his tweet would understand completely that he didn't mean it as a literal thing.
It's like, ah, stop making Paris happy, just...
Do something for the United States.
So AOC retweets Cruz and does this thing where she plays dumb and acts as though he was saying it literally, that Paris is what we care about with the Paris Climate Treaty.
And I thought to myself, I'm not sure what I'm seeing here.
Because as you know, I usually give both, you know, Cruz and AOC the benefit of the doubt of being, you know, even if they say something that isn't exactly on point, you think they know what's on point, right?
But maybe they're shading their communication for their side.
But AOC tweets that, you know, does Ted Cruz think the Geneva Convention was about Geneva?
Now, as a joke and as a social media, you know, jab, that's pretty good because I think at least, I don't know, 75% of her followers are going to think it was a good point.
It wasn't a good point.
It wasn't even slightly a good point.
But politics, about half of it, has evolved into this weird thing where you intentionally Act as though the other side is not speaking figuratively.
You take them literally, and then you pretend that that was a real thing that happened.
Oh yeah, Ted Cruz thinks the Paris climate thing is about Paris.
And then you just act like that was true.
And you respond to it like it's true.
And then your followers, who maybe are not as clever as you, think, oh man, Ted Cruz is pretty dumb.
That guy actually thinks the Paris thing is about Paris.
So, normally I'm more certain when I'm scoring one of AOC's tweets for, you know, just persuasion, not politics.
But I don't know how to score this one.
Because I think she knows that he was speaking figuratively.
But it's a weird world where you can't be 100% sure.
So if what she was doing was intentionally just painting to look like a dope, and it was just a gamesmanship kind of opportunity play, it's pretty good.
Because so many of her followers will think she made a good point when she made a ridiculous point.
So if that's all she was doing, I guess that was okay.
I mean, you know, in a gotcha kind of way, it was kind of funny.
But it was sort of absurd that half of what we consider politics is just intentionally imagining the other person said something they didn't.
Just intentionally imagining it and, like, acting like that's true.
So that's pretty... That's pretty bad.
All right. In the comments, somebody says, AOC knows her base.
I feel like that might be all that's happening.
She just knows her base.
And she knows it'll work.
All right. I'm seeing in the comments somebody saying she isn't very bright.
And I disagree with that vehemently.
You can say a lot of things about AOC, but if you think that her actual native intelligence is not high, I don't know what you're looking at.
She's one of the smartest people in politics.
You know, I don't like her politics, but I don't think there's any doubt about her intelligence.
She could easily be president and handle that job, and might be.
You know, if you had to pick 20 years in advance and make a prediction, I'd say her odds of being president someday, probably a solid, I don't know, 30 or 40 percent, which is pretty high, if you count someday her entire career.
Um... Alright, she's one of the smartest people you notice in politics.
That's a good point, yes.
Let me take your comment.
She makes you notice her, which is part of what makes her smart, in my opinion.
But yes, there are people in the government who have almost certainly higher IQs on paper, but they're not as effective.
So what's that mean?
If somebody has practical intelligence, Meaning that they have a kind of intelligence that gets them far.
That's pretty good. Now, biggest news, in my opinion, the biggest news in the world happened yesterday in a tweet.
But because we're not good at knowing what's important and what's not, it will be treated like a comical oddity when it's the most important thing that happened.
It was Elon Musk tweeting yesterday, I think it was yesterday, that he would offer a $100 million prize for the best carbon capture technology that somebody comes up with.
Now, carbon capture technology already exists.
There's a bunch of them.
I wrote about them in my book, Loser Think.
And some of them will actually suck the carbon right into the air and then turn the carbon into products.
They can turn it into jet fuel in one case.
I think somebody can turn it into some kind of solid.
It could be a building material or something.
Sometimes you can turn it into rocks and bury it.
There's a bunch of stuff you can do.
I think somebody else turns it into industrial CO2 because greenhouses actually use it on their plants and I think it's used in soda or something else.
So you've got a bunch of uses for the CO2 that you can suck out of the air.
Now the genius part of what Of what Elon Musk did, first of all, he's got $100 million he can spare.
I love the fact that he didn't do a $1 million prize.
You know, the X-Prizes, the so-called X-Prizes are a million dollars for this.
I think one was 10 million, right?
I think there was a 10 million X-Prize, maybe for space or something.
But he goes to 100.
Could have gone to a billion.
He could have gone to a billion, but I don't think there would be an extra benefit to that, right?
At a hundred million, you kind of top out for your benefit.
A few hundred million extra wouldn't get you any more inventions, I don't think.
So he just says, I'll throw a hundred million dollars at this thing.
If nobody comes up, well, I guess he's got to give it the best invention, so somebody's going to get it.
But here's the interesting thing.
A good carbon capture technology would pay for itself.
Do you know how important that is?
Suppose you made a device, and you personally, and I'm going to make a prediction here, okay?
I believe that someday there will be a consumer version of carbon capture.
Something like a little device that you can buy from Apple or somebody.
You can just set it in your driveway, plug it into your external...
Maybe you don't even have to...
Actually, it probably doesn't even need to be outdoors.
I don't know how this works.
Yeah, you'd have more CO2 outdoors, or would it be just the same indoors?
Can somebody tell me, do we have the same amount of CO2 indoors as outdoors?
Why don't I know that? Anyway, wherever you put it, you can put it somewhere and just suck the CO2 out of the air.
So you've got your own consumer, say it costs, I'll put a price on it, $1,000.
And not everybody can buy it, of course, but people could, they buy it.
And it mines CO2 that has monetary value.
It mines it right out of the air.
Would you buy something for $1,000 that would make you $10,000?
You just buy it, plug it in, and it just starts making you products.
Now, what that product is is to be determined.
But here's my prediction.
Someday, there will be a carbon-capture device that consumers can buy that will turn CO2 into something you can put in a 3D printer.
Right? Because 3D printers have this problem where you need material.
It has to be like whatever the equivalent of the ink is that the 3D printer is printing has to come from somewhere.
So you have this problem where you have to ship stuff.
To the 3D printer, which largely takes away half of the benefit of what you could get if you didn't have to get stuff, material, shipped, produced, and shipped, and brought to where the 3D printer is.
Wouldn't it be great if your 3D printer could produce the physical material to print out of the air?
It might happen. I think there's going to be a point where you can suck the CO2 directly out of the air, chemically turn it into 3D printing material, and print yourself a new phone case or something.
Print yourself some furniture.
Print yourself some building material and add an addition to your house.
How would you like to be able to make a brick?
Just print a brick.
You wake up in the morning and the CO2 is sucked out of the air.
Your personal CO2 thing got all your CO2 and you wake up in the morning and you look into your device and there's a brick.
It's your own brick.
You just made a free brick by sucking CO2 out of the air and forming it into something.
And then you put your bricks in a pile and when you have enough of them, you build a new room in your house.
Or something like that.
All right.
Somebody says, I call bullshit.
Yeah, I wouldn't...
Let me say that I do not have the technical background to know that you could turn CO2 into 3D printing materials.
You'd almost certainly have to add other chemicals or something.
So something would have to be shipped no matter what.
But maybe the heavy stuff doesn't have to be.
Somebody says you couldn't use carbon for a brick.
It'd be too soft. Well, I think that's what the rest of the chemical process does.
Meaning that almost certainly there's something you could add to a brick To make it harder, I would think.
And I'm hearing the sun is the primary climate driver.
Let me say this.
You've watched the Russia collusion hoax, right?
So you know that half of the country can be fooled by something as ridiculous as the Russia collusion hoax.
You watched also the people who believed in the Q conspiracy where by today Trump has rounded up half of the Democrats and put them in jail.
According to the Q people.
Now, you saw that lots and lots of people believe that.
In fact, there are lots of people who are watching this right now, based on experience, who actually still believe that Q was a real thing of value and they're confused why the predictions didn't happen.
You understand that people will believe anything, right?
And it's not just other people.
I just gave you an example with that, you know, the example of the Marines and, say, salute the Marines who are good-looking Marines.
I just gave you an example of me doing it in real time.
I'm not really as crazy as I look.
I'm sort of normal-ish.
And I can be completely pushed into a hallucination, as I told you with that Marine story.
In a moment. It's just like this.
And I'm in a hallucination.
A whole reality that didn't exist.
Heard something with my own ears that didn't happen.
Twice. Because I still don't know what really Joe Biden said.
I only heard two things I thought he said.
Who knows if any of them are true.
So, I would say this to you.
Those of you who are still on the...
Well, here's another example.
A lot of people believe the pandemic was no worse than the common flu.
If you still believe that, you need to check your...
just everything, right?
The coronavirus is real.
And any doubt that a reasonable person could have had, that time has long passed.
You know, early in the pandemic, it was actually a reasonable question when people were saying, hey, is this virus really?
Is it really worse than a regular virus?
Or is this a trick? We live in a world where that's a perfectly reasonable thing to ask at first, all right?
At first, it's completely reasonable.
Now, but it's not now.
It's not reasonable now.
And I would say this about climate change.
And I do this to be helpful.
I'm not trying to win a debate.
I don't want you to feel bad.
I'm not trying to get one over on you.
I don't want you to be wrong while I'm right.
I don't want any of that.
I mean, those things are good too, but I don't need them at the moment.
I want to help. If you've enjoyed this live stream or any of my content for the last few years on politics, I want you to just look at how often I've called bullshit on something that was bullshit and been right.
And then compare it to how often you've done it.
And then been proven right.
There's some things you think you're right at, but the proof isn't there.
But look at the things you know you got wrong and you know you got right.
Compare it to mine, especially on the big hoaxy things.
And then I just want you to consider this.
If you're one of the people who thinks that climate change is fake and that the sun is driving it and the scientists are lying and all that, The first thing I'll tell you is that if you're talking about the predictions of doom, then I'm a complete skeptic.
Meaning that the 80-year predictions of doom are just not borne out by their own estimates.
For example, The UN's official estimates of what would happen to the economy over 80 years if we don't address climate change effectively is that there would be X percentage change in the GDP 80 years from now.
Now the UN's own numbers say that the amount of that GDP change would be trivial.
That's actually the official number.
Now the news reported that trivial number as the end of the world.
Because they can't understand simple concepts.
The simple concept they can't understand is if somebody says that you're going to take a hit of, say, 10% to your GDP, if you're not good at understanding things, you'd say, wow, a 10% hit to the GDP, that's pushing you close to depression level.
It's not quite, but More 20% unemployment and stuff and GDP fall.
That's more your depression area.
But you're really in dangerous territory, right?
With a 10% hit to your GDP, that would kill a lot of people.
But a 10% hit after 80 years is a 10% less than something that's going to be five times bigger by then.
That 10% that you could have had that you didn't get because you didn't address climate change, you wouldn't even notice Because things went up five times since then, but it could have been five times plus a little bit more.
You wouldn't know.
There would be nothing you could observe looking around that would say, well, you know, I guess I have less money because of climate change.
Nobody would have any sensation of that.
Now, things would definitely be different.
There would be areas that you might have to move people, would it be too hot places?
For every benefit of more plants growing, there might be somebody who has some problems.
So all that would be true, but the net effect after 80 years, according to the UN, the most official body talking about this, Is that it would be trivial.
But the news reported it as a catastrophe.
Because they just can't understand simple concepts.
And by the way, I'm not the only person who's saying that they got it wrong.
You know, you listen to Bjorn Lomborg, for example.
He's in this field of work.
And he says exactly the same thing.
It's like, uh, you just looked at the numbers wrong.
Your own numbers say there's no problem.
And that doesn't require any interpretation, by the way.
What I'm doing is not like a narrative or an interpretation.
It's exactly what the numbers say.
I'm literally just telling you what they say.
I'm adding no spin.
I'm not adding my extra context.
Nothing. I'm looking at their own frickin' numbers.
Now, if you didn't know that, and most people don't, that their own numbers say that, at least on an economic sense, even they don't say there's a risk that you would notice.
There is a risk. You just wouldn't notice it.
In the worst case.
Their own worst case, you wouldn't notice.
So, and I even am more optimistic than that because there's a whole bunch of innovation between now and then.
Elon Musk's Offer of $100 million for a carbon capture device.
Perfect example.
He may have just moved that up 5 to 10 years.
Maybe 20 years.
That one tweet by Elon could have brought us 20 years closer to having a technology that just takes care of us.
So that's where we're at.
So I only say this stuff to tell you that You can't get much more skeptical than me.
I'm a really skeptical guy.
And I'm telling you that while I'm not a scientist, and it is perfectly possible that science can get really, really wrong on even stuff that they're sure about, I don't think they got it wrong with CO2. It seems to me that that's sort of in their wheelhouse of science.
There's a lot of science stuff like the psychology and the social sciences that is barely science.
And so that stuff I automatically am skeptical of.
Literally every study of anything, if it's a study, I go, maybe not.
Every time there's a Even a randomized controlled study, if there's only one of them, my first impression is maybe, but maybe not, right?
So I'm naturally super skeptical, and you should be too.
But with climate change, The basic chemistry of CO2 coming from humans and CO2 adding to the heat and that being a problem for all the obvious reasons, a little bit of heat maybe just makes your plants grow better, but a little bit more than that, you got a problem.
So here's my take on it.
I feel as if the time for being skeptical about whether climate change will change things enough that we should address it, it's kind of over.
Now, anything's possible.
It could turn out that the whole thing was a major, complete hoax.
It's possible. We've seen things that people, smart people, believe that turned down to be hoaxes.
Lots of them, actually. Plenty of examples.
But I think in this specific case, if I were going to put a personal bet On just the scientific question of whether human-made CO2 substantially changes the temperature to the point where we'd have big problems if we don't address it.
And everything I say assumes that we will address it, so it won't go unaddressed.
If I had to put a bet on it, I would say Strong, close to 90% certainty that the scientists got that right.
That's kind of where I'd come out right now.
Now, if your certainty is 100% certain that it's fake, that's not smart.
And again, there's no other way to shade that.
Because these are things which should not be spoken of in certainty.
Likewise, if you say, Scott, you said there's a 90% chance that climate change is exactly what the scientists who do that work say it is?
Only 90%, Scott?
Oh, Scott, it's 100%.
That's stupid.
That's literally just stupid.
Because Even if you worked in that field, I'm not sure you could put 100% on it because there is enough of a history of things that science was positive about that turned out not to be real.
Now, climate change has the additional quality that you can look at it from so many different angles and you can test so many different things that the odds of by now that it's not real is low.
So, my take is probably 90% chance that the scientists got this one right.
I'm gonna put a 10% maybe not, not based on some smart idea I have about the sun or something like that.
By the way, the scientists have heard this sun idea, they looked into it.
If you believe that the scientists forgot to consider the sun when they were thinking about how the earth gets warm, you're not sophisticated about science.
They thought of the sun.
They thought of that.
Secondly, if any part of your argument against climate change depends on the fact that There used to be, back in Earth's earlier days, far more CO2. You're not really paying attention to the argument.
Because while it's true that apparently in the past there was much more CO2, it was also true that other things were different and they compensated for that.
Now if you haven't heard that before, and I forget what the other things were, maybe the sun was not as The sun didn't have as much power then, whatever it was.
But there is a known obvious reason why we could have had more CO2 in the past.
But if we had that much today, it would end us because the other variables have changed in that time as well.
So the two biggest arguments you hear are actually ridiculous.
The science forgot to think about the sun and sunspots and solar differences.
Of course they did.
And they've looked at it a lot.
And they've studied the hell out of it.
And there's no correlation.
And likewise, they know exactly why CO2 in the past was okay at a high level and why that same level wouldn't work now is well known.
There's no mystery to any of that.
But the critics typically look to those two things as their arguments.
And there's no argument there.
There's just nothing there.
So I would ask you, If you would ever like to see the return of conservative politics, you're going to need to think about this climate change opinion really hard because it's killing you.
Let me put it in the most concrete terms.
If you would like to see more conservative Supreme Court judges, And by the way, if anybody's new to my live streams, I'm not personally a conservative.
But I do appreciate, I'll say this directly, just because it's offensive, so it's funny.
I'm not a conservative.
I identify left of Bernie in terms of social stuff.
But in economics, I like what works.
And that can be sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right.
But it just has to have some, you know, good thinking behind it.
And if it works, it works for the greater good.
So that's the first thing you need to know.
But I know my audience is highly skewed toward Trump supporting people and conservatives.
And I will give you this advice.
If you want to succeed, you need to fix this problem of appearing to be the anti-science people.
That alone is just killing you.
If you want to get a conservative judge, you need to get right on climate change.
Now, you don't need to go all the way to Green New Deal AOC, because that doesn't make sense.
Now, remember, I told you I'm left to Bernie, but the Green New Deal is crazy, right?
I could be left to Bernie and still say, uh, this doesn't make sense, right?
Because I could do the math. I identify left of Bernie, but I like conservatives as people.
If I had to choose somebody to hang out with, conservatives are nicer to me.
People on the left are horrible to me.
So I, of course, am biased toward people who like me, and then I like them back.
That's the way that works. So, if you're wondering where I am, because part of my communication depends on you knowing where I'm coming from, right?
You're not going to take anything from me unless you know exactly where I'm coming from.
What's my motivation? Who's paying me?
Nobody's paying me. And my motivation is this.
I like a country that's closer to deadlocked.
I like a Congress that can't get much done, where the Democrats are as strong as the Republicans.
We're kind of close to that, but not quite there right now.
I like thinking that if you have 48 years of a Democrat rule, you're more likely to get a Republican next time.
But I also like that if you have 48 years of Republican rule, you're more likely to get a Democrat next time.
I like the seesaw.
Because you get, you know, what the Democrats can do well, and then the Republican can fix what they broke, and the Republican does what they do well, and then the Democrat comes in behind them and fixes what they broke.
It's actually not a terrible system.
So when I give my conservative audience members advice, I really mean it.
I want you to succeed.
I want you to get a president in there eventually, right?
Whether it's in four years or eight years.
You need balance.
The worst thing in the world is that either side gets too strong.
Let me put it this way. If the Republicans had a lock on all the forms of government, I would be arguing with the left to see what they could do to do a better job, to make it more competitive.
So this would work either way for me.
I like balance.
I don't like one side to have too much power.
And the most important thing that I think conservatives need to do is to Is to become at least perceived as more pro-science.
Now, I don't think that conservatives are necessarily less scientific than people on the left.
Because, you know, they got their own topics in which you look at them and you say to yourself, I'm not sure that's science.
For example, the projections about the climate change.
The economic part is not science.
So if you're skeptical about that, that's perfectly reasonable.
So my advice to you is this.
You should get right on climate science, and I think getting right is that the odds are 90% that the scientists got this right in terms of the chemistry, the physics and chemistry, but not the 80-year prediction.
That part, I think, will be different.
Somebody says, I want to see what my critics are saying.
Somebody says, Republican presidents were not conservative.
Okay, well, I hear what you're saying, but I think you get my larger point.
John says, so you've joined the reprogramming Republican groups, Scott.
Okay, that was the comment I was looking for.
Now, Do you think that I want to reprogram Republicans to be more, what, woke?
You might be new to me, but if you think I'm arguing for wokeness, you haven't really watched my content very much, because I think the wokeness stuff is as ridiculous as you do.
But I will say that I do like referring to people In the most respectful terms, and I'm happy for people to tell me what that is.
If they want me to use those words, I am more flexible than most of you are about referring to people the way they'd like to be referred.
Just politeness, right?
It has nothing to do with wokeness.
It's just politeness.
So I like being polite.
Wokeness is another issue.
I'm not as crazy about that.
But politeness makes sense, and treating each other well makes sense all the time.
So, when somebody says you joined the reprogramming Republicans group, don't you think Republicans want to do that themselves?
Don't you think that each group should be looking to improve its game?
Didn't the Democrats reprogram themselves to win this next election?
I mean, they changed what they're doing, they changed their strategy.
What I'm suggesting is that you change your strategy.
You don't have to change any of your, well, I guess you'd have to change some opinions on climate change if you want to be effective at it.
But anyway, my point is, if you want to be effective, I just told you how.
You need to have a more nuanced opinion on climate change and stop talking about the sun and stop talking about how CO2 used to be more.
If you think those are good points, you need to get a little bit better informed.
There are good arguments, just those two are not anywhere near the good arguments.
Somebody says, if Democrats cheated in the election, then cheating is a good strategy.
That's true. Cheating in the American election system is, I'm going to say unambiguously, a good strategy.
Because there's no indication that it doesn't work.
Right? Now, I'm not saying that the election was, let's say, I have to choose my words really closely.
I'm aware of no proof that this or other elections were rigged or stolen or fraudulent.
But nor would I be, because I don't get to personally audit anything, and I don't believe anybody who tells me that things are fair or unfair.
I don't believe either side.
So yes, I would say that while it is illegal, and should be, that if Republicans are not looking to cheat in the next election, Why not?
Right? I mean, if you believe that the Democrats did, then you also believe it's possible.
If you believe that they did and it's possible, why wouldn't you try to do the same thing wherever you could?
Now, maybe it's who controls those cities that makes the difference.
Maybe you can't. But as a strategy, it makes sense, yes.
As a thing that good people should do, it doesn't.
Christina doesn't like to appear on the live streams.
Let me just look at your comments here.
A Venn diagram for the simulation hypothesis and the God hypothesis.
So someone's asking me if the, effectively, if the...
Let's see, how do I get rid of this light problem here?
Maybe that. That's better.
Someone's asking me if God can be in the simulation theory.
The simulation theory meaning that we're all software and we were just programmed by some earlier intelligent being.
And the answer is there's no conflict with this.
So simulation hypothesis assumes there's someone who is smart enough to create us as a software simulation.
And Whether it's we're a simulation or there's something you want to call a God of the Bible or a God of other holy books, it would look the same.
You know, so the real differences would not be substantial.
All right. Is Mindless Biden part of the comedy by the simulation?
Well, was it Politico?
There's somebody who's already started to turn on Biden about his cognitive ability.
Was it Politico?
I forget where I saw the story, but the story is that Biden would have to work really hard to memorize talking points.
So he'd really, really have to work hard to memorize them so he could just spew them.
But I don't believe any stories of personal accounts about Trump, you know, anybody who was in the room and says this or that happened, I feel as if I should do the same with Biden.
So if you hear a story that somebody says, I was in the room with Biden and this or that happened, it might not be any better than the stories about Trump in terms of reliability. it might not be any better than the stories about Let's see. Would Biden Jr.
be more appealing if he had another round of hair implants?
Okay. Just looking at your comments here.
And how about...
Alright. Looks like we're done here.
And I'll try to do better live streams when I get back to the United States.
But for now, this is Coffee with Scott Adams from Paradise.
