Episode 671 Scott Adams: 3D Printed Guns, Invisible Biden Support, The Singularity Delicious Coffee

Hey, everybody, come on in. Grab a seat. It's time for coffee with Scott Adams. Luckily, that's me. You came to the right place, because that's what you're looking for, even if you didn't know it. So before we get going here, before we start the best part of your day, I know what you need. You need a cup or a mug or a glass of stein, a chalice, a tankard, a thermos, a flask, a canteen, a cradle, a goblet of a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I'm partial to coffee. Let's go for that simultaneous sip. Join me now for the dopamine hit that makes the rest of your day great. Go. So I updated my phone, got myself a nice iPhone 11 the max, and I usually skip a few new phones. I don't. I don't get the new phone as soon as it comes out. I usually skip a few generations. So I actually skipped from the phones that require you to put your fingerprint on to the phones that recognize you by face. And I gotta tell you, it really sort of changes how you feel about your phone. So now that I no longer need to put in any kind of password, don't need to use my thumb, my phone is basically aware that it's part of my body, in a sense, because when it's near me, like my car does, if I have my key in my pocket, I come near my car and the accent lights come on. My car knows when I'm near it, which is freaky, but now my phone does. So I pick it up and look at it, and it comes alive because it knows who I am. And here's where I'm going with this. You've heard of something called the Singularity. Now, the Singularity is what all the smart people are afraid of. People like Elon Musk are afraid that someday computers will get to the point where they're so smart and they can program themselves that they'll go from something that humans program to be predictably what we want them to do, to something that will. That will learn on its own and program itself. And it will almost instantly become nearly omnipotent, because the computers will have such capability that no human could be a competitive species. Now, here's the thing. I believe that that day is coming when computers will be able to learn and increase their own knowledge and connect to other computers and learn everything that's ever been learned. So I think that's going to happen. Here's why I'm not as Afraid as some people. I believe that by the time we get there, the difference between human and computer will largely have vanished. Yeah, you didn't see that coming, did you? That's right. I'm not worried about the computers becoming sentient and wiping out people, because at about the same time they become sentient, they will actually be people. So I think by then we will have done an experiment in which we can move your consciousness into a machine. And then here's the fun part. Imagine if we could map your brain and move your consciousness into a machine and have the machine run for a little while, have some experiences on its own, and then could you put those memories back in the person? I'll bet we can someday, one way or another. So I think that we're going to lose this distinction between a cold, lifeless machine and a human who has this spark of life and a divine soul. Once we realize that the computers can do everything our divine soul can do, we might not believe in divine souls so much. So I'm not worried about the simulation because I think humans and computers will merge into a combined species. And by the time there is such a thing as computers that can learn and become infinitely smart, so will I. I will be a human who is part computer. You know, the, the guts of my phone will become more and more integrated with who I am, whether, whether I'm connected to it or not. It'll be part of who I am. And the moment all computers become sentient, so too will that part of me. So humans are never going to give stuff away to computers because we will be computers for all practical purposes. So that's my prediction. You may have seen that in the news that Jordan Peterson checked into a rehab facility. Now, I have a lot of feelings about that, strangely enough, one we wish him well. Apparently he got on some benzos, Klonopin, I think it was his wife had some cancer and things got tough and he got an addiction. But he's getting help. So here are the things I would say about Jordan Peterson. If ever there were somebody in the world that you thought had. Had it figured out. You know, I'm talking about life, like how, how to do life, right? It felt like it should have been him because he's literally the most productive advisor of how to live of anyone on Earth at this moment. You know, Tony Robbins has his own own deal. But in terms of someone describing to you what life is all about, describing to you how to live it, well, he's literally probably the most famous living person for telling you how to do things right, and he got addicted and he had to go into rehab. So here's what I take away from that. People need to understand that addiction is not a choice in the normal way that we think of choice. That once, once the addiction becomes who you are. In other words, once you've added a certain type of addictive chemical to your, you're no longer a person who takes drugs. You are a person who is part drug. That's who you become. So if the old Jordan Peterson could have said no to drugs once he took them, presumably thinking it was a temporary situation, once he took them, he became the drug. So it would not be fair to say, hey, Jordan Peterson, you're so good with your advice for other people, why don't you just, you know, toughen up and stop taking those drugs? Doesn't really work that way. Doesn't work that way. He, he's not a person who takes drugs. He's a person who is part drug. He's, he's part chemistry, and that chemistry includes the drug. Now that's who he is. Now he has to become a different person and that's what he's working through. So I have only positive feelings about this. Weirdly, it's, it's tragic in a number of ways. He's working through it, but we wish him the best. He probably has the strongest signal to noise ratio of anybody you're ever going to watch. I was just watching one of his videos for maybe the third time. You've probably seen it, this video where somebody asked him a question about climate change and he starts slowly and then he sort of gets, he, he gets up to speed and it's sort of breathtakingly smart, I guess, I don't know another word to put on it. And I say smart not in the way that it's going to be, you know, intellectual conversation, but rather he simply breaks down the topic in a way that people don't break it down. So you can kind of see the landscape the way he describes it and you go, oh, okay, I'm starting to see it now, the way you're describing it. So here's the thing. Jordan Peterson is one of the most useful people in the universe, meaning that when he talks and people listen to it, they become better people. It actually is that powerful. And you've seen lots and lots of people who said he's influenced in one way or another, but now he's doing it again. Certainly this is not a path he would have chosen, one assumes, but because he, he sort of Public confessing his addiction. And then he's doing the thing that you need to do, which is get help. He is once again becoming a role model for people who may think, well, do I have a weakness? Or, you know, what's going on? Jordan Peterson was a, you know, a rich, successful, smart, capable guy who knew exactly the risks of the drugs. He knew exactly. He knew exactly the risks before he put them in his mouth. He's not. He's not a tourist. He knows the landscape. Did it anyway. So that should tell you a lot about the nature of addiction for those people. People are always telling me, hey, it's not China's fault for shipping us fentanyl. People just have to stop taking it. Well, you know that when you say that, it shows that you don't know what addiction is. Nobody intentionally gets addicted. Nobody makes a choice to become an addict. Maybe somebody does, but it's pretty rare. All right, I wanted to get back to my phone. So I had the experience when I opened my phone. You all know this to be true, that Apple makes a big deal about their packaging, and they make the experience of opening up your new product, your new iPhone, a sensual, delightful experience. And you don't realize how delightful it is unless you do what I did, which is I. I bought some accessories. You know, a screen, you know, screen protector and a case. So I had three things to open. One was the iPhone case. And then the two other products I just mentioned. I'm opening the iPhone and I. First, I take it on this box. It's just like this nice, solid, soft. I mean, it actually feels good, the box, and it seems to be covered with cellophane. I'm thinking, ah, Apple, have you made a cellophane covered thing? Am I going to have to get scissors to get through this? And then I notice no, there's a little. Little cellophane tab. You just pick it and it goes just this nice feel and sound as it comes off the box. Then the box is, you know, naked, and. And you've got to take the top from the bottom, and the top is as deep as the box, and you start pulling it up, and you feel the box just sliding over the bottom. Like, I swear to God, it's a sensual experience. And I take it out and I see my phone, and the phone is beautiful. You know, the design, it's a marvel of engineering. And I. I don't know if there were even any directions in there. Maybe like one sentence of directions or something. How to load your new phone. And it's All I needed, all right, now, that was my iPhone experience, right? At the same time, I've got these other two packages. So I pick up the first package. I'm like, well, let's see how hard it is to get into this. And I can't. I ended up chewing through the package like a beaver, with my fingers, not my teeth. Like, I think I ripped off an inch. By the time I'd opened the second package, which was as bad as the first, I hated the companies. I hated the company. So I barely paid attention to who it was because I didn't want to have somebody specific to hate. Apple seduced me. My first impression with his phone was so positive that I feel like I can forgive it for any future errors, which it might have. That's why Apple is a genius, you know, collectively and other companies are not. So they gave me that good first experience, and it was just amazing. And then these other ones, I had to actually chew through the packaging until I hated their freaking guts. I just wanted those companies to die. And that was my first impression of the product. Then I put on my case. So I just ordered a random case at the same time I was getting the phone and didn't really think too much about it. In the first case, not this one, the first case was a clear plastic. And I thought, oh, I'll get a clear one so I can see my phone better. But the clear one is also slippery. Who makes a phone case that's slippery? Like, I would try to set it up, you know, lean it against something, and it would just go, voop. And I'm thinking, are you freaking kidding me? You make phone cases and you never once saw what would happen after you put it on your phone. It's completely useless. So, of course I had to buy a new one, which is this one, which has a rubber case so I can set it up and it won't slide down on the table. Anyway, that's the difference between good design and bad design. On Monday, Dilbert is going to look a little bit different in your newspaper, and you're going to say to yourself, what's going on? Why does Dilbert look completely different? It's going to look different for a week because I have a guest artist. That's right. Jake Tapper of CNN is my guest artist for one week. We did this once a couple years ago, but we're doing it again, and we're doing it for charity. Now, before you say, hey, he works for cnn. I don't like that network. Let me tell you that it's for a veterans charity, specifically homes for our vets. What they do is they find homes, they facilitate in a variety of ways for the most severely wounded veterans. These are the people who really need a special kind of a home and have a need for some help. I would ask you to, for the sake of the veterans, to put aside any, you know, any political feelings you have about who's on what side or whether you agree with CNN or Fox News or any of that. Let's. Let's show the better part of being human, which is Jake and I are working on this to try to see. It's in his Ford auction. The publicity this week will tell you if you want to bid on it. So you could buy Jake's original art along with the signed final. The way it runs, he'll sign it and I'll sign it as well. I'm having it framed right now. So we're getting those together and then we'll put them up for auction. Anybody who wants to bid on them, the money will go to a very deserving veterans organization. Now, we have not announced this yet, by the way, so I'm saying it. I'm saying it here because I saw one of the local newspapers announced it just so their readers didn't get surprised and complain. So it's sort of out there a little bit. We'll start our publicity for that tomorrow. But look for that, and you might like it. I'm having this online conversation with 3D gun advocates. Advocates? Nah, just people who are talking about it. I guess one of them is an advocate who's doing a lot of 3D gun making. And the conversation online on Twitter goes like, this guy says, I can totally make a gun with my 3D printer. Somebody else says, no, you can't. That's not a thing. You fired a few times and it'll melt down and it can't take it. Then the guy who says, I can make a gun with my 3D printer posts a video of him shooting one of the many guns he's made on his 3D printer. And it looks like it works pretty well. Now, when I say 3D printed gun, there apparently there's still some components which you have to get a different way. Some people say you have to get a barrel separately. Some people say you can for certain rounds. Maybe you don't need that. So there's a technical argument about what is and is not possible. But I'll tell you, if you ever get in. In an argument with somebody who says 3D guns can't be made. A good way to end that argument is to post a video of you shooting your 3D gun. A lot of rounds. So there's definitely such a thing as 3D guns. Now here's the controversial part which I have injected into the conversation. What I say is that in the future, the. Because it will be too dangerous to have people printing off their own guns. I've argued that the government will restrict 3D printers from printing guns or possibly the companies themselves. You know, it doesn't have to be the government. It could be the company themselves. Now I'm seeing it right here. So people are saying, bs, bs. You cannot restrict. Meaning that it would not be technically possible to restrict what you make on a 3D printer. I would argue that the only thing, the only people who think that you can't restrict the type of Designs on a 3D printer are people who do not have experience with technology. Meaning that they're not people who have ever worked in software development, not anybody who's ever worked in that realm. Anybody who's worked in the software development realm can quite easily see how it could be done. Let me explain how. The first thing you need to release on is that 3D printers in the future will be exactly like they are now, just, you know, maybe more capable. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the 3D printers that exist now, yeah, you probably couldn't restrict anything. They can just get a pattern, put it in the machine, print it. But I almost guarantee that where we're going with this and somebody's screaming, but you can hack it. Scott, I'll get to you. I'll get to your bad opinion about hacking in a moment. No way to control it. Can't be done. Let me explain how it can be done. Have you heard of the iPhone? Probably you have. Have you heard of the App Store? Probably you have. Somebody says, quit attacking the second amendment. I'm going to block you for putting a opinion into my acting as though that's my opinion when it's not. All right, have you ever. Do you know anybody who has illegal apps on their iPhone? Some of you are going to say, yes, I do, but not many right now. Compare that to how many people. Compare that to how many people have illegal music. You probably know a lot of people who have downloaded illegal music. Probably you've done it too, right? So people said to me, scott, have you never heard of Metallica? You can try to prevent people from downloading things to their 3D printer. But Scott, Scott, Scott, you Can't do it. Look at Metallica, look at music piracy. Can't stop it. Apple did. Apple stopped it. All you have to do is do the same thing. Now why is it that music couldn't be stopped, but Apple can totally stop you from having an illegal app? For most of you, some of you might be a high end techie who can do a jailbreak and you, you know, you've got some little weird app you're running. I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying, do you know anybody? Do any of your friends have apps on their iPhone that didn't come from Apple? No. Here's the difference. Music does not contain code. Music cannot change the device it's playing on. Right? You download music and put it on whatever device you're playing it on. All the device can do is play it. The device is not changed by the introduction of the music, it simply plays it. That's different than an app. An app is software. If you download software to a device, whether it's a phone or any other device, that software tells the device what it can and cannot do. So here's what the future almost certainly looks like. It looks like an app store for designs for your printer. And chances are you will only be able to efficiently. I'm not saying that a hacker can't break it, but if the only people who can make a 3D gun are very highly incented hackers, I'm not too worried about 3D guns because there's always somebody who can hack anything. But there aren't many of them. Just like I don't even know anybody who has an illegal app on their phone. I don't know anybody. Chances are I will never know anybody who personally used a 3D printer, hacked it. So it didn't need to use just the special designs that come from the manufacturer and made a gun. Guaranteed it's going to happen. But if you don't understand how. If you don't understand how friction works, I don't know how you understand your world. And you see this argument in every realm. Somebody will say walls don't work because there was that one guy who crawled over a wall one time to which I say, I'm pretty sure walls work in the sense that it makes it harder to get over the wall. And sometimes that's all you need. You know. How about gun control? Does gun control make it impossible to get a gun? No, but it adds some friction and that friction could reduce some amount of damage, possibly, potentially. Don't know it's hard to measure. Somebody says it's pretty easy to build your own 3D printer. Okay, that is just ridiculous. It depends what you mean by pretty easy. I will acknowledge that somebody with hacker like skills could put together a 3D printer and find their own designs, somehow put it there and make a gun. It just isn't going to be common. So that's my argument, that the 3D printers, and let me put it this way, in all likelihood, the printers that will be the good ones are going to be made by companies like Apple. Sooner or later, the 3D printer industry will consolidate just like tech always does. There might be three major printers and you're going to say to yourself, you know, I could make my own and it will be about 20% as good as the one I could buy from Apple. If I want a 3D printer for general purposes, I'm going to get the Apple 3D printer. It will restrict me from making a gun. I'll be okay with that. Right? If I'm a hacker, I'm going to have the crappy printer. Probably it's going to be lower quality, it's going to break after a few, few uses. It might, it might require a special kind of, you know, whatever the goop is that gets printed. You can have a lot of problems with your hacked 3D printer. So I'm not worried about it. All right, so Elizabeth Warren has pulled ahead in the Iowa polls. She is statistically tied, but nominally she's a little bit ahead of Biden. That's a big deal. That is a big deal because psychologically it's telling people, hey, maybe Warren is the one. And then I. So I did a little poll on Twitter just this morning. Some of you saw it. And I realized that I've. I don't believe I know a Biden support. Right. I just don't know that I know any Biden supporters. So I did a poll and said, do you know any? Because if something like 20 or 30% of all Democrats are favoring him, you think I'd run into one like at a party, maybe a relative. And so I did the survey and 89% said they don't know anyone who's a Biden supporter. And it makes me think that people are voting for Biden, you know, as the some way to beat Trump. But there's absolutely nobody who would be willing to say it in person. I would love to have a conversation with somebody who's actually following the news, not somebody who isn't paying attention. So he's actually current with the news and have a private conversation where nobody else is watching and have them tell me that Biden is their. Is their guy. I don't think that's ever going to happen because I don't know that that person actually exists. You know, obviously somewhere in the world those people exist, but they might be so uncommon that you'll never meet one. How weird is that? Somebody was, somebody was mocking me on Twitter just before I got on and saying, oh, there you go again, Scott. Judging the world by what you personally can see, or worse, that effect. And they were saying, they were mocking me for saying that there's no such thing. Long time ago I said this, that there's no such thing as somebody who really is in favor of open borders. And their point being, it's obvious now that there are lots of people in favor of that. To which I say I've never met one. You would have to have me in a private conversation with nobody, nobody listening in. So, so that we're not judged by anybody watching us in a private conversation. I want somebody to tell me that they're in favor of open borders. Now. Now, when I say that, I don't believe it's a thing. And some of you are saying, I've met somebody or I've seen somebody in the news, you know, or this governor or this. So some of you believe that you've seen these people. Here's what I believe. I believe you've said you've, you know, of people, maybe even talk to people who have said things somewhat like that. There are definitely people who have said things which a reasonable person could interpret as meaning that they're in favor of open borders. But I'll bet if you put them in the room with me and nobody is listening, I'd say, do you. Do you approve of open borders? Let's say they said yes. What would my next question be? Do you also approve of universal health care? Probably they're going to say yes. And then I say, you do know you can't have both, right? Which would you prefer? Because if you have universal health care and open borders, everybody who wants health care just walks over the border and gets it. And then he can't afford it eventually, so it's guaranteed that it can't work together. You can have one or the other. And so when I say I've never met anyone that, as far as I can tell, is in favor of open borders, unless you have that specific conversation in private, I'm not willing to believe it yet. Just not willing to believe that such a person exists, because I want somebody to look me in the eye and say, yeah, I think those both can work just fine. I don't know anybody could say that with a straight face because some of you have say you met him, but maybe I feel I'm more persuasive than you are and I could talk them out of it in about a minute and a half. All right, that. That is. Oh, I had one more point. As I've often said, fear is a great persuader. So it's always good for a politician. I won't say good, let's say effective. I don't want to put a moral judgment on it. It's effective for a candidate to scare you that some bad thing will happen unless they're elected, elect me or will be attacked, or one thing or another will happen. So it's very common and we don't think too much about it because it's just part of the nature of. It's the. I'm sorry, just read a comment that threw me off. What was I talking about? Oh, fear. So it's very common that politicians use fear to persuade. But when I was watching the youth strike, it was what climate strike. And the youth were out there very afraid about the future. And I thought to myself, it's probably fair to frighten an adult. If you're trying to frighten them into action and you believe that the way you're frightening them is productive, a little bit of fear might be a good thing. I mean, it might be an effective thing. I'm not going to say it's a good thing, but when you intentionally scare children to get a political result, that's just immoral in my view. Now, morality is sort of subjective, but I can't see a scenario in which someone with an underdeveloped brain should be scared to the point of mental health issues, which is what's happening. Actual mental health issues. So adults are scaring children into mental health issues, and probably not legitimately, because if you add together the fact that nuclear energy plus carbon capturing scrubbing machines are coming online, we get a lot going for us. And I've got a pretty good feeling that we're not going to have a calamitous effect from climate change. So, yeah, just everything about that screamed of child abuse. It really did. Somebody saying child abuse in the comments, I didn't want to use that phrase, but when I read it, I thought, yeah, that looks like child abuse. Scaring children to the point of mental illness for what Children don't vote. They don't invent things, you know, and then using them as a tool to convince other adults. Probably just about the worst thing you could ever do, you know, torturing children for the benefit of a political outcome. How bad is that? Pretty bad. Huh. Anything else going on? I talked about Jordan Peterson earlier. Just reading your comments now. Yeah. Wow. Who's in charge of Israel, by the way? Is Netanyahu still there? I'm not paying attention too much. Probably matters. So I understand that Iran is perhaps going to suggest some kind of a peace, I don't know, some kind of a deal in the upcoming UN meeting. Do you think that Iran is going to offer any kind of a deal that doesn't start with get rid of the sanctions? It feels like that's just their starting point. First, give us everything we want. Second, we'll think about giving you something. Somebody says teach you something from loser think. Well, actually, I just did. I just didn't label it when I was talking about how friction always works. It is loserthink to say, but there's that one hacker who could hack it, or there's that criminal who could just steal a gun, or that's the motivated drug dealer who can get over the border wall. Every time you're talking about the exceptions, you're just in the wrong conversation because everything has somebody who can beat the system. But we create laws and systems and standards and all that because it will stop a lot of people. You know, we have laws against what? Thousands of different things. And it doesn't stop people from doing those crimes. Laws are not intended to stop people from doing crimes. Fences and walls are not intended to stop all people under all conditions. Any kind of a limit on 3D printed guns would never be intended to stop every person who could ever make a 3D printed gun. That's not a thing. So every time you argue that, and it involves a whole lot of different topics every time you argue, but what about the exception? You're not even in the conversation. That's loser think. Loser think is to treat the exception as if that's as important as the main thing. One is less important. And if you don't do all the costs and all the benefits, you're not being very productive. Oh, somebody's asking while Jake Tapper is doing my comic strip. So if you're joining late, Jake Taffer is going to be my guest artist for Dilbert for the coming week. This coming week. I actually asked him that. I asked him, I said, I said, hey, do you think I could maybe read the news. You know, you be a cartoonist now. As soon as I asked, I realized that that wasn't going to be practical. So we're not going to do that. That conversation just ended. But I might. I might do it anyway because I could just read the news here on Periscope. So thinking about putting on a suit and tie and doing Jake's job on Periscope for one day, I'll just read the CNN news, just the headlines, and just be a newscaster for a day. But it wouldn't be. I don't know if it would be as fun as it sounds in my mind, so maybe I won't. But, you know, while Jake and I are doing this, we're just going to focus on helping the vets and just try to do a good thing and raise some money for them, put some attention back on them. Might be good for them. That's all we're trying to accomplish. And politics can take a. Take a back seat for now. All right, that's all for now. And I will talk to you later.