Episode 659 Scott Adams: Coffee Time!

Hey, everybody, come on in here. I know, I'm late again. Trying to fix about 25 problems and then get off to the recording studio again. So today will be my third day of recording the audio for my upcoming book, Loser. Think so. I'll probably make it short today. Save my voice. Part of the reason I have to do the recording over three days is because I lose my voice after a few hours. So let's talk about some stuff. So the most mysterious thing happened with one of my blog posts. Some of you know the story, but let me give you an update. Oh, but before, before that. What am I doing? What am I doing? Crazy. You think I was gonna not have the simultaneous sip? No, no. Here it comes. Get ready. All you need is a cup of mug or glass of stein, the chalice, tanker, thermos, flask, a canteen vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. Join me now for this sweet smelling, sweet tasting coffee. And if you're trying to resist me by looking at your cup of tea as it sits there and telling yourself, I'm not going to have a simultaneous sip, I'll get you. I'll get you. All right, so some of you know, my sense of smell returned yesterday. Let me just give you an update on that and I'll talk about some other stuff. After 12 years of not having a sense of smell, I figured out what it was, or my doctor did, gave me some meds to shrink some things in my sinus eustachian tube area. And I could smell for the first time yesterday. So I went shopping at the grocery store and, oh, my God, when you lose your smell for 12 years, you get deconditioned to how much smell there is. Or let me put it this way. When you have your sense of smell, you get immune to it after a while. In other words, you can still smell things, fine, but it's not overwhelming because your brain is putting a little bit of attention on your smelling and a little bit of attention on your vision and stuff. So everything's in balance. But if you haven't been able to smell for 12 years, when it comes back, it comes back overwhelming. Like, I can smell fricking everything. Yesterday I went shopping. I'm walking through the aisles of the grocery store and I feel like I could smell. I could smell the labels. I mean, I could smell the people. I could smell the shelves. It was overwhelming. I had to get out of there because there were so many smells. And, you know, you're, you know, we're, we're Evolved from animals who had a lot of. A lot of reason to be able to smell. So it's a pretty overwhelming sense. And right now, for example, I'm just full of odor from this room, and it's just my coffee. Yes. And I did yesterday morning, I did sniff Christina for the first time. I liked it. I liked it. You know what else is weird? I sniffed my dog for the first time. I've never smelled my dog. And I gave her a sniff, and I thought, well, I could have gone another year without sniffing that. That was not a good smell. But. So that's all good news. But I want to talk about that. I want to talk about. I've got this link to the Fine People hoax blog post that for mysterious reasons, was the only link that seemed to stop working. Now, what's special about this one link is that it debunks the widely. The widely misunderstood Fine People hoax. And I have for the past year and a half, been spending some part of almost every day pasting that link as a response to every place in the Internet where the hoax appears. So every time somebody says the president called neo Nazis, fine people out, put that link there so that people could see that that's not true. Thousands of them, literally, if you count the retweets, thousands and thousands of this link. And it's one of, you know, I'm one of three primary people that have been trying to debunk this thing. So Steve Cortez and Joel Pollock and I have done a lot, a lot of linking and tweeting to try to debunk it. But all of my thousands of links that are out there as a protection against the Fine People hoax, because everywhere it appears, soon after you can see the debunking that I put there, all of those links became corrupt, all of them, because they're all the same link. So once it became corrupt now, people said, hey, it's. Your certificate is expired. That's all it is. It's problems on your side. But you can go to the pages. So all the pages work. If you go there directly. It's just the link broke. Now, it might be because we migrated it to another site, but we haven't seen the problem on any other page or link yet. Unchecking that, if it turns out that all of the old links are broken, then that would be because of the migration to the new site, and that might be the case. So we'll figure that out. But here's what's interesting. Here's what's interesting. So the Link that's broken went through Bitly, so I shortened it with Bitly. I'm no technology expert, but I believe that the following is true. I believe that my shortened link goes through Bitly's servers to be expanded to its real link. So then you're redirected to the site. I assume that's how it happens. What if Bit Ly or anybody who's shortening a link decides to corrupt the link? And I'm not saying that Bit Ly did this, by the way. I'm sure that Bitly did not do this. So let me be clear. I'm not, I'm not complaining about them. They have a good service. I use it all the time. But it shows you that there could be bottlenecks where an entire history just got erased in one day from the entire Internet. Because that link was essential to debunking one of the biggest, most important country shaping hoaxes that have have ever happened. It was a very important disbelief or belief that had to be debunked. And there was one link. You just break that link and the entire history just disappeared. And by the way, I don't think we can get it back. Whatever the problem is, it's likely that 18 months of my work putting that link everywhere just disappeared. Think about that. Think about that, right? All disappeared. The entire history of all that work is gone, everywhere on the Internet, because it was all through that one link. That's a wake up call. So anyway, I'll figure out what the problem is there. I have a fun little experiment I would like to suggest for someone else to do. You've probably seen the campus as a campus reform or campus humor or somebody. They do these on the street interviews where they put the microphone in the face of unsuspecting people and say, what do you think of this policy? And they think it's a Trump policy. So they hate it. But then the reveal at the end is, no, this was Hillary Clinton's policy, or this is Bernie Sanders policy or something like that. So the point is that the person on the street has a strong opinion on things only when they know who it comes from. But they actually don't have opinions on the idea itself because they don't even understand it in most cases. I would love to see this experiment using the flyers from the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville from 20 whatever, 17. I would love to see somebody take that flyer for Unite the Right and change only the name of Unite the Right, only the title, and change it to Unite Antifile don't change anything else. Well, you'd have to change the location and date, but keep all the imagery the same, including the list of speakers. Because here's what's interesting. The tip off that the flyer was for and about neo Nazis was that the list of speakers were people associated with various, various groups. If you didn't know the name of the speakers, you would have to figure it out from the imagery because the, the words did not say, hey, it's a bunch of neo Nazis, come join us. It didn't say that. You had to kind of figure it out. And I would love to see an experiment where you change just the title. You could probably even keep it as Charlottesville and nobody would even know the difference. Just say it's Unite Antifa. Keep the imagery the same, show it to somebody with all the names of the racist speakers still on it and say, is this something you would attend? I'll bet you there's something like 20% or more of the people who were asked that question would say, hell yeah, I'm going, I love Antifa. We've got to do something about all the Nazis. So one of the main complaints people had when I said that there were not all bad people at the event, people said, how could you possibly not know it's a neo Nazi event? How could you possibly look at those promotional materials and not know it's clearly a racist Nazi event? And here's my answer. Have you ever met people, you know, like humans? Show a hundred people anything, a tweet, a statement, a quote, a mathematical fact, a picture. Show 100 people anything, anything, and you will get different opinions about what they saw. Some people will see a completely different image, some people will read it backwards and say it's the opposite of what you said. If you show a hundred people the Unite the Right rally for racists, I guaran frickin t you, 20% of those people won't know it was a Nazi rally. Guarantee it, because that would be true of any experiment with 100 people. Why? Because have you met people? People? That's how we act. All right, the big story of the day is Trump fired John Bolton. And of course it's hilarious because who would the people on the left, the anti Trumpers, who would they hate even more than Trump? There's only one person who was in the, in the, the realm of, you know, dislike by the left, and it was John Bolton. So how will CNN and the anti Trumpers, how will they cover a story that involves Trump doing something that they probably wish he would do. How would they cover that story? Well, they're covering it as bad for Trump, of course. So even though they. Even when he does something that they wish he would do, it gets bad coverage. But I'm going to give you my spin on this. Are you ready? You have not seen this yet in the news. In the news, North Korea is talking about meeting again and talking about reaching a deal. Now, that alone is not. Not that surprising or important at the moment. But here's the key thing to that. North Korea is demanding, as part of what they want from the negotiations, a security guarantee. North Korea wants a security guarantee. Now, you don't know exactly what that means or what that looks like, but let me ask you this. Is there any world in which you could imagine North Korea wait for this? Because it's the first time you're going to hear it. And until you hear it from my mouth, well, just listen to it. If you're North Korea, could you ever sign a deal that said the United States will give you security guarantees while at the same time, Bolton had his job right? There is no world in which North Korea should accept or should believe that the United States is serious about security guarantees as long as Bolton still works for the administration. So why is Bolton leaving now instead of, say, closer to the negotiations with North Korea? I'll tell you why. Because you don't want those two things to happen at the same time. You don't want people to do what I just did. Tell you why Bolton has to leave. Bolton is leaving, in my opinion, probably for a variety of reasons. It's never just one thing. But I would think that the main trigger is that North Korea said, look, you need to give us something so that we got something out of this. The main thing we want is security guarantees. And there's nothing you could put on a piece of paper that we would believe while that guy's still working with your administration. And you know what? I would say the same thing. If you were North Korea, would you agree to something that said, we'll maintain your security, you know, we won't attack while Bolton is still on the staff? Absolutely not. I wouldn't sign it. You know, Kim Jong Un, he's not an idiot. He's not going to, you know, you wouldn't sign that. It'd be crazy. So I believe that Trump, somebody says you're mind reading, and you're exactly correct. I'm speculating is what I'm doing. So mind reading would say that. I know this is the case, and I can read his mind. What I'm doing is connecting dots and speculating. So speculating is not saying it's true, but I have a strong hunch that North Korea's negotiating situation is primarily what's behind this. Now, I would assume there are also other forces. I heard that Bolton complained about Trump wanting to meet with the Taliban, that sort of thing, but I don't know if those things would have been enough, because ask yourself this. Do you think that Trump just found out this week that Bolton does not agree with him on a lot of stuff? Right. I always thought that Bolton was there for a specific purpose, to represent that strong voice where Trump could be the good cop. So I always thought Bolton was there as a bad cop and to represent the strongest military opinion, and then Trump would represent more the voice of reason, and it would be sort of a good balance. But I think the North Korea situation tipped it. That's just my speculation. And I think that the bad cop, good cop doesn't work anymore because Trump and Kim have a personal relationship. You can do the good cop, bad cop when you're dealing with a nemesis, but as soon as you become friendly or you're on the way to becoming friendly, good cop, bad cop isn't the model anymore. So it could be the. Bolton just didn't fit with the new model of what Trump wants to do in North Korea. Anyway, that's my guess. One of the best things that happened this week, and I mean that seriously, like, actually, one of the best things, is that Alyssa Milano and Ted Cruz met to talk about guns. Now, I want to say only positive things about this story, because most stories, you know, there's always something bad you can find about. And I, you know, I could. I could dig a little and say, oh, Alyssa Milano, she's not a serious politician. And they didn't come up with any solutions and stuff like that. I could find something bad to say about it, but I don't want to do that today. I like to focus on the good. So I would like to give complete props to Alyssa Milano. Didn't see that coming, did you? I have great respect for Alyssa Milano because she's not like other actors and celebrities who just sort of tiptoe through the political stuff. She's not a tourist. Excuse me. She's putting in real work. She's putting in real reputation. She has real passion, and she's really trying to make things better in a variety of ways. Now, I don't know if her political skills are where they need to be. I don't know what her long term objectives are, but what I see is it looks genuine and passionate and selfless. Meaning that it doesn't look like she's doing it for her own purposes. It looks like she has external help the country, help the world, help people kind of motives. I love that. I also love that she agreed to meet with Ted Cruz, who in her view of the world would be sort of like, you know, Satan incarnate. And amazingly, when I just watched a little video clip of her meeting with Ted or actually interview afterwards, and she was actually couched it that way, she was saying that she almost didn't expect him to be human. Now that's my paraphrase. But she had come to the belief that he was almost a kind of a caricature monster, not quite like a regular person. Or else he couldn't hold the views that he has. So he makes an offer to meet with her, which I thought was brilliant. And by the way, Ted Cruz, I gotta say, he wasn't my choice for president, but he's killing it as a senator, don't you think? He's like one of the most effective senators out there. He's just killing it. So great job for Ted Cruz. A lot of different areas. Also, he's probably the second funniest tweeter, wouldn't you say? Ted Cruz has turned out to be, unexpectedly, one of the funniest people on the Internet. So props to Ted Cruz for doing a good job. Props to Milano, Alyssa Milano, for doing a good job. I don't believe that they came to any understanding about what to do, but the fact that they talk to each other like human beings was amazing. And there was a quote that I picked out of that Alyssa Milano, and this was so telling. She was talking about how she explained to Ted Cruz about some, I don't know, 18 month old baby who was hit by shrapnel. And she was saying that she was explaining to Ted Cruz that no baby should ever end up with shrapnel in his chest. And then Alyssa Mulatto said that she believed that Ted Cruz was understanding that. And I thought to myself before the meeting, did you think that Ted Cruz didn't understand that it would be a bad thing for a baby to get shrapnel in his chest? Because that's what she said. Now I'm not mocking her because that's not the point. The point is she represents a, you know, a body of thought with a lot of people in it who has such a low opinion of Ted Cruz that they could somehow imagine that he was dispassionate about shooting babies, literally shooting babies. They thought that he would maybe not care about that or not have the normal human empathy that anybody would have in that situation. So I would say the meeting was very productive because, first of all, it showed people could sit in the same room and be polite. It showed her that he has human compassion. And I would never have guessed that was important, but apparently it is. Apparently there are people on the left who literally believe that anybody who takes money from the NRA is a heartless, soulless monster who is ignoring the obvious way to reduce violence. But I think she learned that maybe he's a human being who's smart and caring and actually has a different opinion of how to get to a safer world. In his case, maybe, you know, more. More guns in some situation, maybe something else. I've got a question about the Chinese economy, About how China is doing economically because of the. Comically, because of the tariffs. Am I seeing opposite stories, or is it just me where somebody will say, well, China's really going to. You know, they're going to hell. Their economy is sinking. But you can't tell because they're propping it up temporarily, so it's, you know, they're hiding it, but it's really in bad shape. And then others will say, you know, it's not so bad. It's not so bad. They just scrambled my sound. All right, looks like the audio is gone here. Can you hear it at all? Or it's just garbled? All right. Some people are saying it's good. If you're having audio problems, just sign off and sign back on. Because if it's good for anybody, it means that you need to sign off and sign back on. So I have a question about the Chinese economy. Do they need us? Do they not? Are they getting serious? I believe that every report you see that China is getting flexible about negotiating with us is fake, meaning that China is not getting flexible and that there is no immediate chance of a deal. And when I say no immediate chance, I mean not now, not next year. Something would have to change fundamentally. They're not going to have a deal unless we have something about intellectual property, unless we have something about ending fentanyl. As long as you have that, the top dealer of fentanyl is still alive and we know his name, and China knows where he lives, and he's still just going to work and making fentanyl and sending it to the United states and killing 50,000 people a year here through his Fentanyl. As long as that guy is still alive, there's no deal. There's no deal. That guy needs to be literally dead or don't even talk about a deal. And I don't think they're going to kill him or they would have done it already. So no deal with China. Not soon, maybe not ever. And we should just decouple and move our manufacturing elsewhere. Over time, I saw a little bit that says AOC has a $20,000 student debt. Now, here's the question. If you have a lot of student debt, and 20,000 is a pretty serious student debt, if you have a lot of student debt, should you be allowed to vote on the question of forgiving student debt? Now, in some sense, all politicians are voting on tax rates, and taxes affect us all. So Congress is always voting on stuff that influences themselves. So you can't really get away with that. But it does feel a little wrong that somebody who has a big student debt would be in Congress voting to expunge her own student debt. You know, I, I just think that's going to be a question in the future. Somebody saying Trump won't show his taxes. Are we past that? Let me ask you this. Is there anything that could be in those taxes that would make any difference? I mean, I can't imagine what would be in there that would make any difference. Oh, let's talk about the story of the spy. So the story of the spy, the US Spy who allegedly was in the Kremlin and had to be extracted because allegedly they were afraid that Trump would give him away and he'd be captured and tortured and killed. So that's the story that came to us through, I believe cnn was it New York Times and maybe NBC. I think those were the sources. I may have one of the sources wrong, but at least CNN and Lee Stranahan, Strahan Stranahan, who, sort of an independent investigative journalist, kind of a guy, he had an interesting theory about what's really going on there. And I'm not going to say the theory is true. I'm not going to say it's false. I will just say that the theory fits all the observable evidence the best. So that doesn't mean it's true. But there are a lot of things that can fit the evidence the best. And then later you find out there was other evidence that if you had known about it, it would have changed your mind. But here's his theory on it. His theory is that somehow this spy, who apparently was a real person who used to be there, but now is not, used to be near the Kremlin, but now is not that he was somehow involved in an alleged Brennan Clapper scheme to brand the President of the United States as a traitor. So, in other words, there's speculation that this spy thing has something to do with the original Russia allegations, Russia collusia allegations, and that the spy, by getting him out of there, somehow it helps Brennan and Clapper get rid of some kind of evidence. I don't know what. What that would be. And I thought to myself, well, that's not impossible. And by the way, Lee, I hope I'm. I'm accurately summarizing the point, that Brendan Clapper and possibly this alleged spy who was. Who was extracted, were somehow in on building the Russia collusion hoax. So I'll just say that it would explain just about everything. It would explain, for example, why Pompeo says the story is fake, that the facts are wrong. It would explain why maybe they had to get him out of the country to get him someplace that, you know, they could control him better and make sure that he didn't talk. And it would certainly explain, you know. Well, it would kind of explain everything. So it's a good speculation. I don't know how likely it is to be true, but I like it speculatively. All right, Scott's Dumbest Arguments about Cotton Control Blog. What about it? Are you asking me to talk about that? Are you saying that the link is broken? Does my sense of smell make me sleep better? Somebody asks, I don't know, because the thing that the meds. I'm taking this prednisone. Oh, let me talk about this. So I'm taking this drug called prednisone, and it's having some delightful and interesting effects on me as a person. So the first thing I want to say is that I don't believe there's any such thing as who you are at a core level. I don't think there's such a thing as who you are. All there is is what you are at the moment. So if your chemical state changes, you're that person. So you're the angry person when you have the right chemicals to be angry, and you're a happy person when your chemicals are in the happy range. So what's interesting is that for the two weeks or so that I'm taking this drug, which is what allowed me to get my sense of smell back, is shrinking some. Shrinking some harmless polyps in my nasal whatever. And, yeah, somebody's saying it's addictive and it's dangerous. I know all the warnings. I'll get to that. So I'm on this drug, and I have to tell you, it literally turns you into a different person. And the warnings tell you that's going to happen. They tell you it could affect your mood. They tell you it could affect your thoughts, it could affect your sex drive, it could affect your energy, your sleep. Just a whole range of things that can influence. And I gotta tell you, I'm feeling all of that. So here's what it did to me. First of all, it acts like speed. So somebody says, your mood seems great. Yeah, because I'm on speed now. I don't know if it affects everybody the same way, but for me, I don't need much sleep, and I'm wide awake and productive and doing a ton of stuff every day. So it's really, really good that way. Hasn't affected my libido at all. Hasn't. But it is giving me some strange thoughts. So yesterday, some thoughts intruded in my head, and I said to myself, huh, haven't had those before. So I hope they're temporary. And somebody says, my skin looks bright. I believe it makes me. Oh, and here's the funniest thing. So yesterday I got my hair cut by Christina. So it's obvious that doesn't take much work to cut my hair. So Christina cuts my hair at home with just, you know, the clippers and stuff. And she's cutting my hair, and she says, you're growing back your hair? And I said, what? She goes, yeah, all the places that were totally bald, they all have new hair growth. You're growing back your hair? And I said, well, that can't be true. She goes, yeah, up here where it used to be like a big bald spot. And she would know. She goes, it's like half the size it was a week ago. And I said, that can't be true. And I reach up and like, what the hell's going on here? I got all this hair that I literally didn't have a week ago. And so I'm literally regrowing my hair. Now, before you go out and get prednisone, let me warn you that hair growth is one of the known side effects. But I assume it's temporary, so I'm pretty sure it's temporary, right? It's totally growing my hair. I could feel it. There's no doubt about it. It's substantially different. And it's literally filling in the bald spot. But a week from now, it'll Reverse. And that's not real. But it was kind of fun that I would get my sense of smell back and regrow my hair in the same week. The other thing it does is it makes you strong as hell. I'm trying not to push that, but I went to the gym and I can't even get tired. I doubled my workout at the gym. I doubled it. I literally doubled my workout. And I only stopped because I ran out of time. That's it. I ran out of time. So I wouldn't push that because it doesn't seem like it's healthy to push my body just because I have some drug in it that lets me do that at the moment. So I'm going to pull it back, but my God, it makes you strong. Do I have better taste now with smell? Yes, substantially now. I thought that I had a sense of taste before, even when I lost my sense of smell. But I believe that could have been a placebo. Because I've learned that what you can detect, even if you lose your sense of smell, you can still detect sweet, sour, salty, the basics. But now on top of that, I can detect the specific flavors. And here's something I wasn't expecting in the past, I don't know, five years or so or less. I started eating sushi. So my entire life I was disgusted by it and could never eat that, or sashimi, mostly sushi. And Christina turned me onto it, and then I started loving it. So yesterday I thought to myself, huh, I've never tasted this food before. I lost my sense of taste. So it's a food I've been eating for three years that I have no memory of because I'd never eaten it before those three years. So there was no mental thing that could be influencing me. So I thought to myself, huh, I wonder what it'll taste like now that I can smell it. And I throw these little crab cake sushi in my mouth. It tasted like turpentine. Oh my God, it was the worst freaking thing. Yeah, it's all fishy and turpentine. Y and ah, Now I did it without the wasabi because I wanted to see, you know, the native taste. I didn't want to overwhelm it. So it turns out, and this is not a joke, I don't enjoy the flavor of my favorite food because it was literally my favorite food. And I guess the only thing I was picking up was the salt and the wasabi or something. I was getting the sting, the texture, and then the salt of the soy sauce. And it was great because I love this thing. I love the texture and I love the salt. So it was like, this is my favorite food. Now it's got protein in it. It looks pretty healthy. I love this. But it turns out that when you can smell it, not so good. All right. I hope that reverses. We'll see. That's all I got to say for today. I'm going to save my voice a little bit and get ready for the recording studio, and I will talk to you later. Yes. The prednisone is short term for those of you who just asked.