Episode 1513 Scott Adams： Today's Show Will Be Mindbendingly Awesome
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
148.9651
Summary
In this episode, we talk about the Supreme Court and why it's not as popular as it used to be, and what it really means to be a good judge. And we discuss the dopamine hit of the day: The Single Sip.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Point checklist, 13 of them checked, one of them not checked.
00:00:08.780
That would be the one where I turn around and take my notes off of the printer, which
00:00:15.020
So it looks like you're going to be watching me print my notes.
00:00:19.300
I don't know what could be more fun than that, really.
00:00:22.440
But it's going to be a great show today, I promise you.
00:00:25.280
By the way, I'm working on some kind of a drum sting to open up the show.
00:00:40.760
You're probably familiar with the Tucker Carlson opening.
00:00:46.800
And I'm trying to do something like that, like five seconds of a drum, some kind of a
00:00:59.780
And I've got 10 days of feeding her through a tube and medicating her.
00:01:06.480
Let me tell you how complicated it is to be my age and have a sick cat and a full-time job.
00:01:15.320
Let me just give you a sense of the complexity.
00:01:20.080
Now, you've probably had enough medical problems yourself that you know it's just a gigantic
00:01:30.100
There's just so many decisions and medications.
00:01:31.980
But I've got a cat with five different medications with five different schedules, and I'm counting
00:01:37.320
the food as a medication because it has to be injected.
00:01:44.160
If you're a certain age, you've probably accumulated a number of just ordinary medications.
00:01:49.620
I've got one for acid reflux, one for blood pressure.
00:01:56.140
And so I've got something like 13 medications with different schedules between the cat and
00:02:05.340
13 medications on different schedules every day.
00:02:32.220
I mean, I don't want to build it up too much, but I'm feeling it.
00:02:37.860
And all you need is a cup of margarita glass, a tecarchel, a stein, a canteen jug of a flask
00:02:51.900
The dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
00:02:58.160
If you haven't tested this yet, you've got to do a little A-B testing.
00:03:16.800
I pity the people who have not taken the simultaneous sip, because their lives are impoverished
00:03:27.560
Well, Rasmussen has a poll that says the Supreme Court is not too popular these days.
00:03:35.120
Only 10% think the Supreme Court is doing an excellent job.
00:03:40.020
So you only have 33% approval for the Supreme Court.
00:03:43.880
Now, if you had to look for one, let's say, identifier or signal that the country might
00:03:53.740
be in a little bit of trouble, I would look at the popularity of the Supreme Court.
00:04:06.440
I don't know if doing a good job is the right question for the Supreme Court, because the
00:04:12.940
Supreme Court is unique in that their entire purpose is to make decisions that you know
00:04:19.360
most of the country is going to hate, or a lot of the country is going to hate, not
00:04:23.820
So maybe the question should have been, if anybody's listening to this from Rasmussen,
00:04:32.040
I'd love to see this question put in terms of credibility.
00:04:37.940
Now, that's a little bit different than coming up with the right answer according to you.
00:04:43.140
If you're willing to trust the Supreme Court, even if you don't like their decisions, then
00:04:54.280
I feel like they're credible still, even though biased, right?
00:05:00.100
Because I don't think that they would do something that's, like, ridiculously bad.
00:05:03.700
They would do things you don't like, but a third of the country thinks is awesome.
00:05:10.620
So I feel like their credibility would be higher than their approval, because the approval
00:05:14.660
is really about, do you agree with their decisions?
00:05:25.780
So Balaji's on my very short list of people that everybody should be following, because
00:05:31.180
there aren't that many independent thinkers in the world, and there are even fewer independent
00:05:35.500
thinkers who come up with ideas that you haven't thought of yourself.
00:05:44.740
I think his Twitter is just at Balaji, B as in boy, A-L-A-J-I.
00:05:52.500
And he tweeted this morning, employees should start demanding a 90-day cool-down period in
00:05:59.160
their contracts, such that they can't be precipitously fired due to passing social media
00:06:19.800
You know, if you buy into the idea that employees should be organized, at least in some important
00:06:31.360
This feels like a just basic, right down the middle, union requirement.
00:06:40.480
I don't know if unions just maybe didn't think of it, but this seems like basic, really basic
00:06:51.220
Because I don't think this is, the thing that I like about this idea is that the moment you
00:06:57.000
hear it, you wonder why it's not already being done.
00:07:01.360
You know, as soon as you hear it, you're like, uh, really?
00:07:04.820
This is the first time we've even talked about this?
00:07:11.380
Unions, maybe you could do something about that.
00:07:17.220
You might remember that after Trump lost the election, I was predicting that you would
00:07:29.160
Do you remember what happened to me when I said that?
00:07:33.220
People said, oh my God, Scott, you are way on crazy town left field.
00:07:40.900
And I'll tell you one thing that's not going to happen.
00:07:43.900
Nobody's going to be hunting Republicans, that's for sure.
00:07:51.600
An Antifa member, Benjamin Varela, allegedly, well, not allegedly, but he was charged with
00:08:05.060
Was the anti-mandate protester probably Republican?
00:08:08.860
Or at least, would this Antifa member believe that this person was probably Republican?
00:08:16.720
So is this a clear example of somebody on the left literally hunting a Republican?
00:08:24.240
Looking for somebody to shoot, and then shooting them because of their point of view.
00:08:37.960
They're not going to be allowing women to go to a Taliban, or to the Kabul University.
00:08:46.800
And I assume this would apply to other universities, or maybe it's the only one.
00:08:50.900
Are there a lot of universities in Afghanistan?
00:08:56.400
But the Taliban says that women will not be allowed until they can Islamic it up.
00:09:04.060
So they will be allowed later, they say, but not until they can make the environment somehow
00:09:12.280
But in the meantime, they have a good solution.
00:09:17.760
It's sort of like, well, I'll tell you what it's like after I tell you what it is.
00:09:22.560
They're going to use male lecturers for the women, so women will be able to attend classes
00:09:31.280
But there aren't enough female lecturers, so they're going to hire men, but since it would
00:09:37.460
be apparently un-Islamic, according to the Taliban, to have the men teaching the girls
00:09:48.000
So the man will be there in person, but behind a curtain.
00:09:52.840
And I thought to myself, I don't feel like I'm nearly as inclusive enough in my live stream
00:09:59.420
here as I could be, because I realized how the women in Afghanistan would not be able
00:10:13.040
So I wanted to give you an example of what I call Taliban Zoom.
00:10:20.780
So the Taliban is going to do a version of remote learning, except it's a little bit of
00:10:28.320
a simpler model instead of the technology and stuff.
00:10:41.080
And you can't see me, but trust me, I am totally behind this curtain.
00:10:49.360
I'm behind this curtain, giving you a Zoom class.
00:11:08.620
Here's one of my weirdest predictions that looks like it might come true.
00:11:15.260
By the way, how many of you know the inside joke of the plaid blanket?
00:11:22.000
If you know the inside joke, don't tell anybody.
00:11:29.580
I mean, you can refer to it, but just don't give away the reveal.
00:11:35.320
It turns out that Bitcoin miners are looking to nuclear power plants to power their Bitcoin mining.
00:11:43.800
Now, those of you who don't follow cryptocurrency, here's the quick lesson.
00:11:48.180
In order to create a new Bitcoin, which is created through a process of brute force computing,
00:11:58.040
where it follows an algorithm, a formula, if you will, and only once every, you know, who knows how long,
00:12:05.360
it depends on your computing power, you can discover a series of, I don't know,
00:12:11.180
let's say a series of bits that Bitcoin recognizes as a coin.
00:12:18.780
So, in other words, you can kind of discover Bitcoins hidden in the math.
00:12:25.320
I'm giving you the real idiots version of this, you know, so the crypto people are going crazy right now.
00:12:32.140
But just for the, you know, the every person explanation, Bitcoins are hidden in math,
00:12:38.700
and in order to tease them out and own them, you have to do something called mining,
00:12:44.220
which is running a powerful computer or network of computers for long periods of time,
00:12:50.020
and the more Bitcoins are found, the harder it is to find the next one.
00:12:53.880
So every Bitcoin that you find creates a higher challenge for the next available one.
00:12:59.740
So you've got to get more and more computing power.
00:13:02.420
And you take so much computing power to find a Bitcoin now that it's a drag on climate.
00:13:10.400
The climate is actually at risk if you accept that humans are causing climate change.
00:13:16.300
So there's so much energy that they need that they're talking to,
00:13:18.860
the Bitcoin miners are talking to nuclear power plants to use their excess nuclear power.
00:13:24.340
Because I guess even nuclear power plants will generate a little bit more than they need.
00:13:32.520
So power plants are going to have more power than they need on a regular basis.
00:13:37.500
But of course, it'd be easy to turn off the Bitcoin part if you ever got in trouble, right?
00:13:44.000
You put the Bitcoin mine close enough to take advantage of the nuclear energy capacity,
00:14:00.900
Can Bitcoin ever become big enough, in terms of its economic potential,
00:14:11.360
In other words, is there anybody right now who's putting on the drawing board
00:14:15.700
a combination nuclear power plant, maybe Gen 3 or Gen 4,
00:14:22.200
right next to, or at least close enough, to a Bitcoin mine?
00:14:27.540
Is anybody looking to build both of those at the same time?
00:14:30.540
Because wouldn't the Bitcoin mine actually pay for the whole power plant?
00:14:39.300
If you were to do a project that had, let's say, I don't know,
00:14:42.260
10 to 20 years to build a proper nuclear plant,
00:14:45.700
if you knew it was going to take you, let's say you got it down to 15 years,
00:14:49.480
you were doing great, which I think is a stretch.
00:15:03.100
you could pay for the entire nuclear plant just with Bitcoins?
00:15:08.040
I'm thinking not, because I think that 15 years makes it so hard to get a new Bitcoin
00:15:15.560
that even a nuclear power plant wouldn't be enough to get you a new one.
00:15:31.480
Is there anybody who knows enough about this area to tell me that that's crazy?
00:15:37.080
Is it crazy that one Bitcoin could be worth $15 billion 20 years from now?
00:15:45.760
Because we're only using fractions of them anyway.
00:15:48.980
Anyway, I'll just put that out there as an interesting thing that might be happening.
00:15:52.920
Russell Brand made news today by being not crazy.
00:16:05.580
Did you know that you could make news, national news?
00:16:15.720
He's trending all over Twitter for simply being aware of the news.
00:16:21.140
Apparently, he is aware of the news that Hillary Clinton was the real person behind the Russia conspiracy.
00:16:27.780
Not Trump colluding with Russia, but rather Hillary Clinton was actually the architect of the Russia conspiracy collusion thing.
00:16:38.420
And Russell Brand did a show with Glenn Greenwald, who's, I would say, the most important voice on this topic lately.
00:16:47.280
And the big news is that Russell Brand actually accurately reported a story that the left is largely blind to, but the right largely knows.
00:17:01.460
We know that Russell Brand identifies with the left.
00:17:08.420
And why is it so unusual that he can simply see a story that's in the news?
00:17:18.700
He's simply objectively looking at the news, and he actually can see it, and he can talk about it.
00:17:28.580
How many people could hear that news, that Hillary Clinton was always the one behind the Russia collusion stuff,
00:17:44.420
Because if you are so committed to a side, it's just hard to change.
00:17:47.540
You'll find some weird rationalization why it really was Trump talking to Putin after all,
00:17:54.820
even though there's no evidence of that whatsoever.
00:17:57.660
So, yeah, Bill Maher is another one who's awake to these things.
00:18:04.200
What makes a Bill Maher or a Russell Brand capable of avoiding cognitive dissonance or confirmation bias in this case?
00:18:18.760
What have they done or what do they have that allows them to be immune?
00:18:24.200
They've actually got immunity to cognitive dissonance.
00:18:27.680
Well, I don't know, but I'll give you a few, some speculation.
00:18:31.040
I mean, some of them might be genetic, you know, their brain is just built a different way.
00:18:39.100
Number one, think of these three people who all have the same quality.
00:18:43.720
They seem to be able to actually just objectively look at stuff on left or right.
00:18:47.940
Bill Maher, Russell Brand, and I'll throw Glenn Greenwald in there.
00:19:02.620
So they do have enough of a history of contrarianness that they can be consistent being contrarians.
00:19:12.820
It wasn't what I was looking for, but that's maybe better than my answer.
00:19:27.320
Was Russell Brand ever fired from the mainstream?
00:19:47.140
Why can they be fact-based, and why can they be honest, but other people are in cognitive dissonance?
00:20:10.120
I mean, if I had to guess from, you know, Bill Maher and Russell Brand, I'd say, you know, if I had to guess, probably more yes than no.
00:20:41.760
Now, we can't know what's in their head, right?
00:20:44.980
So we have to do it observationally and say, does that look right?
00:20:49.060
Because we're just guessing what they're thinking.
00:20:51.180
But if you look at Bill Maher, Glenn Greenwald, and Russell Brand, I would speculate, I don't know this for sure, that they're unusually free from worrying about being embarrassed.
00:21:07.440
It has something to do with the jobs they've chosen, right?
00:21:10.100
If you're not afraid of being embarrassed, you can say anything.
00:21:15.060
So you don't have to worry about covering up for that thing you used to say to make it all sound like your ego is intact.
00:21:21.460
And you were always smart, even if you were dumb.
00:21:24.200
They also have chosen jobs in which proving that they have been wrong is actually an asset.
00:21:32.040
I've chosen a job, if you can call whatever this is, a job, sort of.
00:21:37.620
I've chosen one in which if I am completely wrong about something in public, like really seriously wrong, that's content.
00:21:49.380
I would love to find out how wrong I am about something I've always thought was true.
00:21:56.100
So am I likely to suffer cognitive dissonance when I'm exhilarated to find out I'm wrong?
00:22:09.940
So bear with me that I'm trying to teach you a concept that may not apply to any of these three individuals.
00:22:17.940
But I think that the things that give you immunity to cognitive dissonance is you have to learn to be excited when you're wrong in public.
00:22:37.340
It helps that you've survived a number of shames and embarrassments, as I have.
00:22:41.780
So I do think that there is a formula for being free of cognitive dissonance.
00:22:48.580
And whether these people did it intentionally or it's just how things turned out,
00:22:53.740
you have this small group of people who literally doesn't seem to be affected as much by the things that are affecting other people.
00:23:02.240
Now, here's another one I'm going to add to this.
00:23:11.040
If it was a trailer for a movie or was it just a video meme, I wasn't sure what it is.
00:23:19.560
But the nature of it is Joe Rogan talking on his show, and they're taking clips from it,
00:23:25.620
in which he's talking about how freedom is the basic operating system that makes everything work in the United States.
00:23:32.960
And as soon as you start taking freedom away, then everything falls apart, like the thing that makes us great.
00:23:39.720
Now, what makes the video strong is the way he does it.
00:23:55.260
Does it feel to you that there's some kind of a 1776 kind of thing forming?
00:24:08.760
So you had your Washingtons and your Jeffersons and your Hamiltons and your Franklins and stuff.
00:24:20.080
Like, if you had to map, who are the, like, the founders who need to reset the United States?
00:24:32.840
Because it feels like we need a tuning, doesn't it?
00:24:38.380
We're like an instrument that was really in tune for decades.
00:24:50.080
Which, can you map today's, let's say, the independent pundits?
00:25:00.760
Because as awesome as Alex Jones is in many ways, as an entertainer, et cetera,
00:25:05.840
I don't feel like he quite fits this model that I'm talking about.
00:25:14.080
But could you map the current pundits, the voices that you hear, the independent voices,
00:25:50.700
You could almost see that there's a thing forming.
00:25:59.960
Now, I have a last name which has some historical relevance to the revolution.
00:26:15.060
But isn't it interesting that there's something forming that seems to be the right counterbalance
00:26:22.660
to whatever looks like is the tuning problem with the country?
00:26:33.000
Now, those of you who are watching on YouTube right now, you didn't know there was going to be a whiteboard, did you?
00:26:42.320
Yeah, yeah, you would have been twice as excited if I told you that up front.
00:26:47.680
People and locals already knew it because they get a preview before you do.
00:26:54.660
There is a gigantic, wide path open for a candidate who wants to end the division in the country
00:27:07.340
and to bring us to, let's say, a new level of 1776-like freedom.
00:27:15.580
And I'm going to suggest that there exists, completely by coincidence,
00:27:24.700
that most of our divisive topics have a middle ground that both sides would agree to.
00:27:37.140
If I told you that given the huge disparity and, like, the divisions in this country,
00:27:42.940
you'd say to yourself, my God, we're separated and it's getting worse.
00:27:51.080
That sometimes you can't tell the difference between being on the edge of disaster
00:28:03.320
We have blundered into a situation, just blundered,
00:28:07.080
into a situation in which a middle-of-the-road candidate could satisfy everybody.
00:28:15.360
A middle-of-the-road candidate, and I don't know who it would be.
00:28:18.100
I mean, I'm not talking about a Trump, obviously.
00:28:20.760
I'm not talking about Bernie Sanders, obviously.
00:28:26.080
And let me tell you what that would look like, all right?
00:28:31.840
On the left, you've got people who say the election was fine, stop complaining.
00:28:36.040
And on the right, you've got people who say it was a fraud.
00:28:42.080
So how could a candidate who wants to bring the country together come up with a plan that makes the left and the right happy?
00:28:55.180
The one thing we can agree on is that we didn't agree about the last election.
00:29:00.580
We can all agree that we didn't agree about the last one.
00:29:07.040
And I'll make it my main thing to have election reform instead of rules that guarantee the states have to do it right.
00:29:16.440
They can still do things differently, but they have to meet a certain standard of auditability.
00:29:27.160
The one who says, you know, whether you think that 2020 was fair or unfair, it's also over.
00:29:48.560
You've got people on the right say, hey, it's a hoax, or it's no problem at all.
00:29:54.420
How could you possibly integrate it's a crisis with it's not a problem?
00:30:02.120
Because it's the same solution whether it's a hoax or not.
00:30:09.420
So you're going to do nuclear energy as hard as you can, no matter what.
00:30:13.380
You don't even have to decide if climate is real.
00:30:16.680
Just find the middle path and say, look, I'll make both of you happy.
00:30:27.820
We have to do the same thing whether climate change is what you think it is or not.
00:30:39.740
The public just wants an infrastructure bill, according to polls.
00:30:47.720
Be in favor of infrastructure only, not the big one that's going to change society overall.
00:30:54.740
And satisfy the people who think it's just a giant power grab by just saying, oh, it's just infrastructure.
00:31:01.260
Now, would you be able to get that passed through Congress?
00:31:06.320
But if you ran for president on trying, you would look pretty attractive.
00:31:13.480
The public says, can you just give me a bill that's on this topic?
00:31:23.240
Just take the view that the public already has.
00:31:30.980
We've got the right who likes their homeschooling and having their freedom to teach their children the way they want.
00:31:40.700
But then on the left, you've got the people who believe in systemic racism.
00:31:50.920
They all agree that the teachers' unions are the problems.
00:31:55.500
The left and the right have different issues, but they both have the same solution.
00:32:15.020
In fact, I think it's so easy to unify the country that we're blind to it.
00:32:23.760
We have different views of what's going on, but weirdly, the solutions are the same.
00:32:45.340
I know you've warned me you're sick of vaccines.
00:32:50.440
How could you bring the left and the right together on vaccine mandates?
00:33:02.040
Just take the government out of it and just leave it to insurance.
00:33:14.920
Insurance companies will decide how much risk you can take.
00:33:22.820
The obvious thing that would happen is insurance companies would charge a different premium for vaccinated versus unvaccinated people.
00:33:30.280
Now, they probably should do something for people who have natural immunity as well.
00:33:35.560
But I'm pretty sure that the government could just walk away from this question.
00:33:40.780
And the insurance industry would just say, well, you don't have to get vaccinated.
00:33:54.920
Insurance companies are just going to do the math the way they want to do it.
00:34:00.680
How about my opinion that I should not have to pay more for car insurance just because I'm a male?
00:34:11.360
But I don't bitch about it too much because the insurance company did their math.
00:34:15.620
They have to provide insurance in a way that they can make money.
00:34:22.220
So get the government out of the business and let the free market decide what we do.
00:34:40.920
The right would rather just have competition and do what you, you know, you're on your own.
00:34:45.800
I feel like there's definitely a middle ground in which we say our objective is to get everybody insurance.
00:34:52.680
We don't know how to do it in a way that makes everybody happy.
00:34:56.200
So I think there should be a poor person's plan.
00:35:05.480
Mostly it would look like removing regulations.
00:35:11.520
If I said to you we're going to insure all the poor people and you're going to pay for it,
00:35:17.540
I like poor people having insurance, but I don't want to pay for it.
00:35:20.400
But if I said to you that poor people would have insurance just by removing regulations,
00:35:31.040
The regulation against telehealth over the phone across borders.
00:35:39.180
Then suddenly you have all kinds of competition for doctors because they can do it over the phone.
00:35:44.920
Now there's still a physical manipulation part.
00:35:47.480
Somebody has to give you the shot or put on the Band-Aid or set the bone or whatever it is.
00:35:59.080
The regulatory change is that maybe nurse practitioners or nurses can do a lot of the physical stuff
00:36:05.560
that's maybe a little bit more than they did before.
00:36:08.340
Maybe while the doctor's also still on the phone.
00:36:12.300
But it seems to me that if you made use of, let's say, excess capacity,
00:36:18.040
which is, let's say, getting an MRI at midnight,
00:36:21.540
do you think that the demand for MRIs at midnight is the same as it is during the day?
00:36:28.720
So if you're a poorer person, maybe you've got to get the 2 a.m. MRI.
00:36:35.840
So the point is, a middle-of-the-road candidate has all the space in the world
00:36:42.440
to create solutions that the left and the right go, hey, that's not bad.
00:36:48.100
Now, I don't know that there's any candidate who could pull this off.
00:36:50.920
I don't think that this stuff is compatible with the left or the right.
00:36:54.180
I feel like a Republican could pull it off better.
00:37:15.080
You've got to do better than please stop, really.
00:37:21.820
Just give me a little taste of what you don't like about it.
00:37:34.000
California dismissed 124,000 marijuana convictions,
00:37:44.700
because they smoked some marijuana and got caught.
00:38:11.220
gets six times more clicks, at least on Facebook,
00:38:33.400
So two-thirds of misinformation comes from the far right.
00:38:40.500
Two-thirds of misinformation comes from the far right,
00:38:45.680
according to CNN, according to some study about Facebook.
00:38:59.220
How does that jibe with what Bill Maher was just recently talking about,
00:39:05.180
that people on the right are far better informed about the risks of COVID?
00:39:13.980
How can it be true that 68% of the far right posts are misinformation,
00:39:19.100
but the far right is far more informed, better informed?
00:39:40.800
The conservatives don't believe everything they click.
00:39:49.500
the conservatives are clicking like crazy on false information.
00:39:56.880
Because in the end, they have better information
00:40:00.740
Well, after looking at way more misinformation,
00:40:04.340
they still have a clearer idea of what's happening.
00:40:08.580
Does that mean that they're filtering it better?
00:40:13.620
Is it that it's only a small number of conservatives
00:40:19.120
It could be that there's like a small active group of far right people
00:40:24.240
and it doesn't really affect the average that much.
00:40:47.220
It says that the average yearly homeschooling cost for homeschooling
00:40:58.460
You know, count the time of the parents, et cetera.
00:41:00.700
But average public school cost $10,000 to $15,000 per student.
00:41:07.840
So, you know, like 10 times as much for a public school.
00:41:14.980
So he says, imagine what would happen if you used that money for homeschooling.
00:41:18.800
Now, I don't think it's quite that clean, right?
00:41:27.200
100% of the mental and emotional problems of children
00:41:35.280
100% of the emotional and mental problems of kids,
00:41:57.220
You know, sometimes a teacher, but that's like 1%.
00:41:59.460
It's like almost entirely bullies and bad behavior.
00:42:06.060
Now, the homeschool kids don't get much of that, do they?
00:42:09.960
They don't get the continuous bullying and criticism
00:42:12.280
and, you know, attacks on your self-esteem and everything else.
00:42:18.460
If I said you're going to go to an environment,
00:42:44.460
School is a guarantee that 20% of your classmates
00:42:53.080
And every kid is being destroyed by these, you know, 20%,
00:42:56.580
it might be more, it could be 50%, of monsters.
00:43:01.380
Every kid in every class is being destroyed by bullies.
00:43:10.500
You know, you can bully people in a massive, pervasive way.