Scott Adams talks about the benefits of coffee, fake data, and the future of the human race. Scott Adams is a comedian, podcaster, writer, and podcaster. He's also the host of the popular podcast "Scott Adams Live" on Comedy Central and the creator of the podcast "Coffee with Scott Adams" and "The Scott Adams Show."
00:05:55.960Like, everything in the news looks like, oh no, the world's going off the rails.
00:06:01.220But, working against that is if you read the science news.
00:06:06.660The science news is really, really promising across just the broadest array of things from energy conservation to smarter looks at climate change to battery technology to solar cells.
00:06:30.080I've got some more of them I've saved for the end.
00:06:33.340Meanwhile, as most of you probably already know, today's the three-year anniversary of those 13 American soldiers who were killed in the so-called botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.
00:06:47.260Now, I realize that I'm supposed to make this a political statement about the Biden administration, but if you don't mind, I'm going to skip that and just say, you know, that we appreciate the service and we're feeling some things for the families and that we're just going to show our respect.
00:07:07.080So, let's skip the politics, kind of respect for the fallen, and move on.
00:07:16.780IBM is shutting down one of its facilities in China.
00:07:20.080I don't know how many they have, but they're shutting down their research and development.
00:07:24.100That would be the first thing I would shut down in China.
00:07:26.880If you have a research and development outfit working for your company and you decided to put any part of it in China, you're just sort of giving away your research.
00:07:40.700You know, there's nobody who thinks that the Chinese government isn't all over all the communications and, you know, putting in spies and every other thing.
00:07:48.760So, yeah, the last place in the entire world that I would ever put a research and development department would be China.
00:07:58.640I mean, Ukraine is right up there, but China.
00:08:08.880Apparently, SpaceX is working with some private individuals to do a spacewalk.
00:08:15.060So, they're going to launch them up in one of the SpaceX rockets, and I guess it's being funded by some billionaire.
00:08:23.960And the mission is called Polaris Dawn, and two of the four people who are private citizens, I guess, are going to go up there, and two of them are going to walk in space.
00:08:41.880Can I make a request from my audience?
00:08:45.060If I ever become a billionaire, and any part of that lifestyle starts with me trying to do adventurous things like walk in space or navigate a balloon across an ocean, you need to stop me.
00:09:25.840Well, congratulations to Megyn Kelly, who's getting a lot of attention today.
00:09:29.780Semaphore is reporting that her show, the Megyn Kelly show, her YouTube channel, has 2.3 million subscribers, had 117 million views in July, and that's more views than the official channels for NBC, CBS, Sky News, and BBC.
00:09:48.000But what I don't know is, are they only comparing the YouTube channels, or are they comparing the entire network?
00:12:12.400He is, I guess he left his five-day vacation with a billionaire.
00:12:17.700And now he's going to go to his Rehoboth beach house in Delaware.
00:12:23.500And there's a video of him laying on the beach, stiff as a board.
00:12:28.220And I don't want to say that Biden's not doing well, but they did add to his entourage.
00:12:35.740And now part of the permanent staff is a taxidermist who just travels with him in case, in case he's needed.
00:12:44.340I saw the picture and it's possible he's already acted, but just a taxidermist.
00:12:50.980Meanwhile, the attorney general in Texas has announced major election fraud raids.
00:12:56.940So Ken Paxton, attorney general in Texas, he's launched this major effort.
00:13:04.660They've got search warrants, et cetera.
00:13:07.040And they're going after these organizations, these nonprofit groups, nonprofit, nonprofit groups.
00:13:16.840I've got a feeling that the people who are managing those nonprofit groups are making a profit from somebody.
00:13:24.680And it says a number of nonprofit groups, this is according to Natural News, have been setting up booths outside of driver's license centers in Texas to register people, which you could do inside when you're getting your driver's license, I suppose.
00:14:17.300Now, why do we need to fix a system that's already pristine?
00:14:25.700Every day I look at the news and every single day there's another state that's going after election cheaters or they're adjusting the election laws.
00:14:35.720I think at this point there have been maybe hundreds of adjustments to the thing that was already perfect.
00:14:44.300Why would you keep fixing the thing that wasn't broke?
00:16:20.180Let's say you are a Democrat, and you say that mean old Trump convinced the Republicans to turn down that immigration bill that was bipartisan, by the way.
00:16:34.340It was bipartisan, so who can turn that down?
00:16:37.120I mean, both sides, representatives from both sides said yes to it.
00:16:40.800But then when it was voted, the Republicans mostly voted against it.
00:16:44.220So is it because mean old Trump said, don't vote for that thing, I'd rather run on the issue than fix it?
00:16:54.820Now, if you said to a Democrat who said that, hey, it's Trump's fault, he's the one who turned down that bill that would have fixed everything.
00:17:03.040Do they know what the counter-argument is?
00:17:06.280Now, what's important is, I'm not saying the counter-argument is the right one.
00:17:31.300What do you think was in that bill that caused, for most of you, you're probably Republican voters, what do you think your team, the Republicans, why do you think they turned it down?
00:17:54.800Yeah, so I'm looking at the comments, and it's very obvious that many of you have a pretty good notion, at least directionally, you're aware of what the problem was.
00:18:06.700So directionally, the first thing you need to know is it wasn't a clean bill, meaning it wasn't just about immigration.
00:18:14.420They packed a bunch of foreign funding into it.
00:18:17.380So you had to be in favor of another bunch of money for Ukraine and another bunch of money for the Middle East and something else.
00:18:24.800Why would you, if it was so important to the Democrats, why would they put a bunch of stuff in it that was going to be controversial?
00:18:34.260So that would be enough to turn it down, in my opinion.
00:18:37.440If you're trying to solve this one problem, but you've got to put a bunch of bullshit in it, what's the point of being bipartisan if you have to throw the pork in there?
00:18:47.100Do you know why pork, you know, the things that are unrelated to the thing, do you know why the pork gets put into a bill?
00:18:52.920Well, the reason you put the pork in is to get the other side, usually, to agree to it.
00:21:07.500Now, the specific way it did it was by adding the asylum checkers.
00:21:12.260So the people that you check in with and decide whether or not you get asylum.
00:21:16.640So what they increased was the conversion of people we would call illegal into people we call legal, but they're exactly the same people doing the same thing.
00:21:26.820They're just walking through a different doorway.
00:21:28.840Now, how many Democrats could explain what I just explained?
00:24:13.180Now, if they say it's because they're evil and it's all political, you'd say, do you want to hear what they're saying is the counter argument?
00:24:21.880Notice how I didn't say it's my argument.
00:24:24.260Do you want to hear what the Republicans were saying is the counter to that?
00:24:26.940Because most people will say yes to that because they'll know if they don't know that, they're going to be on shaky ground and they're going to look stupid.
00:24:36.200So all you've offered is, can I tell you what other people say?
00:24:40.820It's the other people say it that's the part that keeps you safe.
00:24:44.500Say, I don't know what to think, but I'll tell you what the other people say.
00:26:39.840When voters are asked to think about race or gender, Harris' lead grows significantly, while support for her and Trump are virtually tied when they are not made to think about it.
00:28:01.480I think there's a real one that shows Trump is up by three.
00:28:04.740I call it real because I agree with it.
00:28:07.920So at the same time, somebody says Harris is up by seven.
00:28:12.080Another poll is saying Trump is up by three.
00:28:14.360None of them are believable at this stage.
00:28:17.200The polls are just sort of entertainment between now and the last month.
00:28:22.440In the last month, they might start getting serious because they have to make sure that they're credible pollsters when it's all done.
00:28:30.160They can be crazy and fraudulent now, but toward the end, that's the only part they'll be judged on is the actual result and their actual most recent polling before the result.
00:28:41.760So that's the only one they have to get right to stay in business, which is wild.
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00:29:45.180And then he says, why did Harris turn down Fox, NBC, and CBS, and CNN?
00:29:49.160So he's basically trying to create a picture where Harris is the one turning things down, and the only one that they have left is the super biased one.
00:30:01.580So why would he accept the one super biased one when Harris is turning down all the others?
00:30:08.520Not that they would be less biased, but it's a pretty good political attack.
00:30:15.960It won't be decisive, but it's a good one.
00:31:58.860Now, that does seem to be the actual weird case that the Democrats ran a convention in which they pretended they needed to fix all the problems from the current administration, which is their administration.
00:32:12.820But they sort of acted like it wasn't their administration and maybe it was sort of Trump who was involved all along.
00:34:31.720And observationally, it seems like they are just packed with this dark triad personality types.
00:34:40.880They all seem to have ended up in one place, most of them.
00:34:43.880And so when I see that their entire campaign is based on gaslighting and projection, it just looks like mental illness.
00:34:53.760It looks like David Plouffe has weaponized the mental illness of his own base, which, again, is brilliant.
00:35:02.760It's brilliant because I hate to say it, but the Democrats' persuasion game is just crazy good at this point.
00:35:13.640The fact that the race is even close is just a freaking miracle of persuasion.
00:35:19.260So, you know, I don't like their policies and their personalities in many cases, but damn, you're doing a really good job of the most evil persuasion I've ever seen and effectively.
00:35:33.180Now, let's take it down to a specific anecdote.
00:35:37.440Now, of course, anecdotes, you know, are not good enough to make the case, but if you make a general case and there are no examples of it, that would be a weaker case.
00:35:46.420So I made a general case that they seem to be filled with mental illness and they're using gaslighting and projection because those are the main tools of the mentally ill, at least the dark triad personality people.
00:36:54.260I think the sister might be, I'm not going to say she has dark triad personality, but she is part of a party which seems to be operating on not the best mental health perspective.
00:37:44.560I mean, it seems like you could just say, well, it's not my choice, but good luck.
00:37:48.740That seems like the healthy thing to do.
00:37:50.580But anyway, apparently Kamala Harris is using her latest ads.
00:38:02.780She's showing Trump's border wall to make it look like it was her border wall.
00:38:07.560That's a gateway pundit who's reporting that.
00:38:10.440So imagine the guts of running a campaign about how good she's doing at the border and showing Trump's border wall as part of your good job.
00:38:18.440Remember I said gaslighting and projection?
00:38:29.780Well, there's a report that Boeing employees are, quote, humiliated that the little upstart SpaceX is going to be the one going up there and rescuing their astronauts that are stranded on the space station.
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00:46:08.700They haven't used them yet for this, but they can do kamikaze attacks.
00:46:14.540You can just have the kamikaze dog run at them and explode, I guess.
00:46:19.940But they're equipped with cameras and remote sensing and all kinds of things.
00:46:27.060And they can trigger Russian booby traps along the front lines.
00:46:32.080So the robot dog explodes instead of a person.
00:46:35.540Now, it seems to me that we're heading toward an inevitable situation where all of the fighting is robots.
00:46:42.760And then once we get to a situation where all of the fighting is robots, we're one step away from that Star Trek.
00:46:52.780Do you remember the Star Trek where there was an advanced civilization where instead of having real wars, they would run a computer simulation of who would have won?
00:47:04.080And instead of having the war, the people who would have lost based on the simulation, if the simulation says, well, it looks like you would have lost 1,000 people in this battle, 1,000 people have to volunteer to be killed in this suicide machine because it's more civilized than the actual war.
00:47:24.900Well, what happens when you've got two armies that are fully roboticized and AI driven?
00:47:34.400Wouldn't the robots know who's going to win?
00:47:37.960And wouldn't they be able to calculate how many humans die as a process?
00:47:42.900We're very close to the point where the robots don't need to fight because they could just exchange data, you know, hypothetically.
00:47:52.260The robots would be able to know which side would win because they would just say, all right, we don't have enough robots in this domain.
00:48:01.160They will attack in that domain because that's the obvious place to attack.
00:49:25.140And then over time, everything becomes, you know, less of what it was.
00:49:30.620So entropy is the impulse that the universe has, for whatever reason, toward taking things that are fully formed and turning them into their constituent parts.
00:49:45.400Now, if that's true, and this is the big if, that it applies to information, you would expect that information, too, would become more disordered over time instead of more ordered.
00:50:02.480Now, here, the big if is, you know, does what happens with matter apply to what happens with information?
00:50:08.260But that was one of the assumptions that went into this.
00:50:12.060It's a hypothesis, I guess, hypothesis that information should go the same way as physical stuff.
00:50:21.960I don't know why, but the idea is that information is physical in some way.
00:50:26.020And the idea is that since information becomes more ordered over time, at least within our human systems, it would suggest that things aren't the way they look.
00:51:18.420Now, I think of it not in terms of just saving homes, but if you had a gel that you could put on something and make it unburnable, couldn't you create a firewall?
00:51:32.200Couldn't you just surround the fire with this gel and make a really thick border around it with the gel?
00:51:40.020Well, it depends how toxic the gel is, I suppose.
00:51:43.900You know, the gel might be more toxic than the fire.
00:52:15.400That's the way society has gone so far, is that we have less of stuff, even if the danger is higher, because we're better at taking care of it.
00:52:23.680And that, ladies and gentlemen, brings me to the end of my prepared thoughts for today.
00:52:31.440I did notice just before I got on that the Israel stock market seems kind of strong, you know, historically.
00:53:12.820But, if you look at my Dilbert comic today, which I took off of, I took it out from the paywall, you will see that Dilbert's company is being, let's say, accosted by an activist named Robbie Starbuck.
00:53:35.260Now, it's based on the real Robbie Starbuck in the real world.