Episode 1001 Scott Adams: Twitter Fact-Checking, Ballot Harvesting Malarkey, The Poorly Educated, The Future of Space
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
149.96205
Summary
SpaceX's rocket carrying humans into space has been scrubbed, and Scott Adams is here to tell you why you should be worried about it. He also talks about the stock market's reaction to the news, and why he thinks Elon Musk is going to become the richest person in the universe.
Transcript
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Hey everybody, come on in. It's time for the evening edition that I like to call
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No Coffee with Scott Adams because it's much too late.
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Yeah, and today we have one of the best evenings ever of all time.
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Things are starting to look great everywhere in the world. Let me tell you about it.
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Well, we had a sort of launch interrupt us today.
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Were you all watching with excitement as we were going to watch the Elon Musk rocket takeoff?
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Of course, NASA is involved, but they're not celebrities, so we'll call it the Elon Musk rocket.
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I was worried, I've got to say, not totally feeling safe, but I was really excited about it.
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But here's the thing, I don't think I ever realized this before, because now it seems much more real.
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I mean, the fact that there are actually people in the capsule and they've got a time to send them up there.
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And I don't know if you realize this, but Elon Musk is going to be the richest person in the universe.
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But there's a few things that I didn't know about space.
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And one of them is, it could be really profitable.
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Like nothing on Earth has ever been profitable.
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Apparently all you have to do is land on one asteroid and start mining the rare materials.
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And you've got like a trillion dollars per asteroid.
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So there's a lot of money just floating around up there if you can get to it.
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Then the other thing I heard today, I don't know the details, but it sounds really exciting.
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I think it was, might have been Dana Perino's show, but I saw somewhere there was an expert.
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Saying that one of the benefits of being able to get into space is that apparently 3D printers work really well in space.
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So well that you can 3D print human organs as long as you're in space.
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Are you telling me that all you needed was to be away from gravity and you solve the problems of printing human organs?
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But there was at least somebody willing to say that on television.
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And I thought, wow, there's a lot of money up there in space.
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So it kind of makes sense that Bezos is trying to do something and Elon Musk is trying to do something.
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Because whoever gets the space first with an actual business model and, you know, ability to do multiple trips and stuff, we're talking multi-trillions of dollars of net worth.
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I mean, the kind of money that you would never ever see on Earth.
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And I have to tell you that I tweeted before I knew it was going to be scrubbed.
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I tweeted that the stock market will probably follow the direction of the rocket.
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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.
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Because economies operate on how you feel about stuff.
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You know, literally the animal, well, not literally, figuratively the animal spirits.
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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.
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So, if we get this right over the weekend, I would want to own stock on Monday.
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I don't give financial advice that was not financial advice.
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Because I think you can predict where the stock market is going as long as you don't advise people to do anything about it.
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And I don't advise you to do anything about it, because nobody's good at predicting the stock market.
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And as soon as you think somebody is, that's when you lose all your money.
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I continue to be impressed at what I see as a creative explosion.
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The amount of creativity that people are generating because they had time to rethink everything from scratch is really amazing.
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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.
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So, everything that I do that's non-Dilbert and maybe some Dilbert stuff will be over there.
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I probably just wouldn't have executed if life had just gone on.
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But once I could rethink everything, and I was faced with the end of my career as well.
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And I've got to say, it's very motivating in a creative way, even though you would not choose the path.
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And I've probably had more creative output in the last two months than any time in my life.
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I think other people are having the same experience.
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And you can find the link to that at the top of my Twitter profile.
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So, there are a number of businesses that are doing great.
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Presumably, people are thinking less about flying, I'm guessing.
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Everybody in the delivery business is doing great.
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You know, Zoom and the online conferencing is doing great.
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There's a whole bunch of telehealth businesses that are doing great.
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So, I have a really good feeling about the recovery.
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So, the president tweeted to the effect that mail-in voting would invite a lot of fraud.
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Twitter's fact-checkers, in a new program, decided to label that as something that needed to be fact-checked.
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So, if your very first fact-checked on the president, you didn't even get it right.
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You could say it's not enough to make a difference.
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You could say it's no worse than the current system which has its own problems.
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You could say it's not perfect, but we have ways to fix it, and I think we'll be all right.
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Because I'm no evil, super-genius criminal, but even I can think of a few ways that I can game that system.
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If you can't think of six ways to game that system, you're not even trying.
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So, I asked this provocative and perhaps a philosophical question, and it goes like this.
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If you give your mail-in ballot to someone else, let's say you give it to your friend to mail it for you,
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and you don't watch them mail it, did you vote?
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Now, your first impression is, well, yeah, because my friend would obviously mail it, so, yeah, I voted.
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Angels dancing on the head of a pen, you're just trying to find something out of nothing.
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Your friend has both his own ballot and your ballot, and he's walking to the mailbox.
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Sure, there are some people who don't know who their friend voted for.
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But mostly, your friend knows who you voted for.
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Even if it's not who they voted for, they know who you voted for.
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So your friend has his own ballot and your ballot in his hand, and nobody's watching,
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Once, when your friend puts his own vote into the mail.
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And the second time, when he decides, yes or no, to put your vote in the mail.
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Unless your friend decides that your vote is the way your friend wants it to go,
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Or maybe they just like fairness, and they don't want to ruin the system.
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But the point is, in a very real, practical way, you didn't vote.
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It's just one of those things you have to think about for a little while.
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So, as you might imagine, Twitter's getting quite a bit of pushback.
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The president is saying that he's going to sign some kind of an executive order
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Facebook already said that they don't want to be in the business of fact-checking anything.
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There will be much jabbering about what is legal and what is not.
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A dictator because he's ignoring the Constitution.
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exactly how are you going to monitor or regulate them?
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Apparently, it's not set up, so that's an easy thing to do.
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unless it's already come out while I'm talking.
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But here's what I think could be an unintended consequence of the Twitter fact-checking.
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Number one, I doubt the system will stay the same.
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So, the first part of this prediction is that Twitter's,
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In other words, it's sort of an A-B testing situation.
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Here's what I would assume will be the way it'll shake out.
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I think they're going to have to, somehow, in the interface,
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So, I think they can get away with doing a fact-check
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and prominently is the part that's important, right?
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Because that's a lot like when the fake news will run a story
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So, you're saying, oh, it's going to be one of those situations
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do they usually see both sides of the argument?
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usually see what the mainstream media is saying,