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Oct. 10, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
41:24
Episode 254 Scott Adams: Nuclear Power, Kanye, Cultural Gravity
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
Come on, come on.
You know, I can see all of you now.
Thanks to the new upgrade on Periscope, I can actually see all of you.
Hey, how's it going? No, I can't really see you, but for a moment there you thought I could, didn't you?
Have you ever considered that listening to my periscopes in the morning are like having a talkative friend who you're in a conversation with on FaceTime, but you don't have much to say, so you just let your friend run on for a while?
Feels kind of like that, doesn't it?
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Yes, you do. It's time for the simultaneous sip.
Grab your mug, your cup, your chalice, Your glass.
Your vessel full of liquids.
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But if you don't, another beverage will suffice for the simultaneous sip.
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Good stuff.
Well, it's a weird day in news.
It feels like the news went from being all Trump-centric To being nothing about Trump suddenly.
Did you notice that?
I'm looking at CNN's homepage and I'm like, where's all the Trump stuff?
It's like, I guess we don't do Trump stories when everything's working out well.
So the news is so good for Trump that he's been erased from CNN. They're not even going to talk about him this week.
Alright, so let's talk about some other things.
I'm not going to say much about the hurricane, because I don't have anything to add to a natural disaster.
I hope we're ready. I hope the people in the panhandle have taken all their precautions and gotten out of town if they need to.
But other than that, there's not much to say about it.
Let's talk about my pinned tweet.
So the tweet I pinned is my Periscope.
I did a Periscope yesterday afternoon, if you haven't seen it, with a persuasion lesson wrapped around explaining my app, the interface app, in which you can immediately talk to an expert.
Wouldn't it be great if every time there's something in the news and the headlines, somebody who's an expert in that topic could just log on to the app in case the media wants to find an expert.
So lately we've been talking about nuclear power.
There's an article in the Wall Street Journal I'm going to talk about in a minute.
There have been at least two breakthroughs reported.
One breakthrough is some bacteria that might eat nuclear waste.
They've actually found the bacteria that might neutralize nuclear waste, which would be amazing.
There's also a breakthrough in MIT in reducing the heat that comes out of the reactors, which has all kinds of cost and efficiency benefits, apparently.
But wouldn't you like to talk to an expert?
It'd be great if somebody who is an expert on building nuclear power plants Just logged onto the app.
It's a free app. And then anybody in the media who was looking for an expert could just search for nuclear.
So the thing that I keep saying about climate change Is that the climate change experts tend to look at the costs of it, but not the opportunity costs.
You know, what happens to all the things you couldn't do because you spent all your money on this?
They also tend to leave out nuclear as an option.
And if it's true that climate change is going to just be the worst thing ever for the world, no matter how much you hate nuclear power plants, the worst case scenario is one of them melts down.
Maybe a couple of them melt down over time.
But isn't that way less bad?
Depending on where you place these sites.
Assuming you place them intelligently so that when they melt down, if they melt down, if we're using technology that even does melt down, that it wouldn't be the biggest deal in the world.
It seems to me that's not even close.
How big a problem that would be, a nuclear meltdown of a power plant, especially a new one, right?
If you built a new plant, the odds of it melting down, I think, would be much lower because of what we've learned.
But it feels like the risk of that would be so much less.
So somebody's saying Japan, and I think that's the perfect example of what not to do.
Japan put their nuclear power plant in a place that was at risk for a tsunami.
They knew that risk was there.
Why don't we not do that?
Somebody says thorium is a game changer.
Other people say fission is not that far away.
Maybe that's true.
So I'm reading this article in the Wall Street Journal.
I tweeted it. You can see it in my Twitter feed if you want to read up on it.
Where a Nobel laureate, a Nobel Prize winning laureate, Says the same thing I said, which is you're not really considering the opportunity costs, and if you haven't included them, you have not analyzed it.
And if you do, you come to the opposite conclusion.
The opposite conclusion.
That's a pretty bad mistake, that you come to an opposite conclusion.
So, my take on climate change is that the Whether or not the problem is exactly what the climate scientists say, I'm not really the one who can analyze that, but what I can say is that the way we debate it is fraudulent.
Because if we're ever talking about climate change and we're not talking about the only practical solution, which is to go nuts on nuclear and do it fast, get the government involved reducing some regulations so we can build plants faster, that sort of thing.
If we're not doing that, we're not really taking climate change seriously.
So the weird thing about the climate change folks is that their dream of a green world with green technologies like solar and wind, by pushing climate change as the fear factor that gets you that green technology, they've done exactly the opposite of what I think they want.
What I think they want is a world with no nuclear power, but is also green.
But instead, they're going to cause the opposite.
Because if they alarm the world enough on climate science, and I think they have, so if the climate change If fear gets high enough, it kind of guarantees nuclear power because it's literally the only solution anybody has that would get you a reasonably fast solution.
Let's talk about Kanye.
So I'm seeing a lot of people forwarding around on the Don Lemon Show on CNN and Bakari Sellers, who's an African-American pundit who's on there a lot.
And Bakari said some mean things about Kanye.
But one of the things he said was that his problem with Kanye is that this is Bakari Sellers saying this about Kanye.
He was saying that his problem is that anti-intellectualism isn't cool.
So he's sort of mocking Kanye for not doing his homework before getting involved in stuff.
And I tweeted that That's the sort of thinking that gets Kanye elected in 2024.
So let's talk about Kanye, because wherever he is, it just makes you think of all different topics.
Think about that.
Think of how many things you think about when you think of Kanye.
Now it's this growing universe of things you think about because his influence is just expanding like crazy.
The first thing I thought about when he was accused of anti-intellectualism is how does that intellectualism work out?
The intellectuals said that Hillary Clinton would be president.
They said the economy would fail.
They said that all of our allies would hate us.
Trade would be bad.
There'd be nuclear war.
Pretty much everything the intellectuals told us would happen, including what Bakari Sellers, the pro-intellectual pundit, was predicting, every one of them was wrong for the past three years.
Who were the people who were right?
Anti-intellectuals. Anti-intellectuals have been right about everything for about three years straight.
Now, I suppose it depends how far you take your definition of anti-intellectual.
If you take that all the way to dumb, I don't know how right the dumb people were, but I think even the dumb people, the people who are literally low IQ, Here, I'm not insulting.
I'm just saying that if you measure people's IQ, there's high ones and low ones.
I think even the low IQ people were smarter than the intellectuals for the past three years.
Maybe they were just lucky.
Maybe they were just lucky, but they were right about a lot of stuff.
So I had a few feelings about this.
First of all, Calling Kanye anti-intellectual is sort of part of the package of accusing him of being a unprepared celebrity as opposed to someone who's been chugging away in the government realm for years.
And I call that loser think, which might be the title of my new book.
Loser think is a way of thinking That consistently gives you bad results.
And let's take the difference between the way Kanye apparently thinks.
I can't read his mind, but we'll just look at what he does as an indication of what he thinks.
What Kanye does is he breaks out of his small field and he tries things for which he is totally unqualified for.
How qualified was Kanye before he became Kanye?
Even Kanye wasn't qualified to be Kanye.
I mean, in the sense that he had never been a famous rapper, and then he became one.
You know, is that even the right word?
Or is it hip-hop artist? Or just artist?
Or just artist, I guess.
And then he decides to be a designer.
What was his experience for being a designer?
Nothing. Nothing.
And now he's one of the most successful designers.
What is his experience for anything?
Kanye is not stopped by his lack of beginning knowledge.
So beginning knowledge is the key here.
How much knowledge did President Trump have about being president before he was president?
Not much.
Just like everybody else.
Because nobody has practice being a president until they're the president.
How much does President Trump know about the job of being a president right now?
Two years into it?
A lot! He figured it out, right?
He brought his own tools into the job and figured it out.
So who do you want?
The person who can figure it out.
A Trump, a Kanye, lots of other people, right?
People who are willing to change fields.
It's one thing to be a celebrity and just talking about politics, and people don't have a lot of respect for celebrities who just talk.
But Kanye's not just talking.
He's literally getting ready to meet with Jared Kushner and with the president on one of the most intractable problems In the entire country.
Which is how to put convicted ex-cons back to work.
How to reduce our prison population.
These are really hard problems.
And Kanye walks right into it.
Because you know what's missing?
Do you know why that's such a hard problem?
Well, one of the reasons probably is a lack of creativity.
In other words, we probably don't have yet the right ideas.
To get us the right result.
Or if we do have the right ideas, and I know that Jared Kushner has some plans about reducing the prison population and putting people back to work.
If we have a good plan, and we're having trouble selling it, selling it, selling it, who would you want on your side to help you sell it?
Kanye frickin' West, now known as Yee.
Or Ye? Is it Ye or Ye?
I don't know how to pronounce Y-E. So I guess Ye.
So if you're asking me, who was being one of the most productive people in the country this week?
Think about it. Ye.
I'm still having a look.
Here's my problem with saying Ye.
Yay feels like, even though he's officially announced that's what he wants to be called, I have trouble with it because I associate it with people who know him personally.
Because it seems like the people who have known him personally call him Yay for a long time.
And to me, I don't know him personally, so it feels like, I don't know, it just feels too personal.
But if that's what he wants.
So who's being one of the most productive citizens in the United States this week?
Yay! Right?
He's meeting with Jared.
He's bringing attention to one of the most intractable problems in the world.
He's talking about bringing some manufacturing to Chicago, his hometown and future new town.
He's moving, apparently. Who is bringing all that attention to the issue?
Does all of that attention help Jared refine his ideas if he needs to?
Probably. Probably.
You bring that much creativity into a topic and suddenly people start thinking of stuff.
It's contagious. Did it bring more attention to it which will help him sell it?
Absolutely. What did Bakari Sellers do that was productive this week?
He criticized the most productive citizen in the nation.
Now when I say he's the most productive citizen in the nation, what I'm talking about is The fact he's not an elected politician, right?
There are lots of elected people who are doing good work.
But as an unelected person, who's doing more for the country this week, like right in front of our eyes, than yay?
He's done an unambiguously positive thing by bringing attention to a major problem.
And Now, of course, when you talk about politics and you talk about left and right and CNN and Fox News and all that, Bakari Sellers is on a team and he's criticizing Kanye, who he's feeling is either not on his team or maybe more of a MAGA fan, etc. I don't think that's the case, by the way, but he's criticizing him.
Who do you see supporting Kanye the most?
What identifiable group of people are most supportive of Kanye?
Ye. It's a trick question.
The people most supportive of Ye as being a positive force in the world are white supremacists.
Now, I don't mean that literally.
Exactly.
I don't literally mean white supremacists are supporting Ye.
What I mean is that Trump supporters, and they've been branded, of course, as all a bunch of white supremacists.
So if you're on the left, how do you square the fact that there's a panel of black people criticizing Ye every day on CNN and the people who are unambiguously positive about him Is the party that that panel of black people have branded as white supremacists?
How do they explain that?
How do you square that?
Because if I look at my Twitter feed, you know, there's some people who don't like Kanye, some do.
But unambiguously, there's more positive than negative.
How do you square that if you think all Trump supporters are white supremacists?
Why are they so positive about Yeh?
Well, I'll tell you.
Because he's not against them.
He doesn't present a threat.
He presents more of an opportunity.
More of a, hey, this could be good.
What's he bringing to the table?
I like new ideas.
But let me talk about something that might get me in a lot of trouble.
I'm developing a concept.
Maybe somebody already has a name for it, but I'm going to give it a name.
I'm going to call it cultural gravity.
Cultural gravity.
Meaning that if you're a product of a particular culture, No matter which culture that is, and you want to rise above the average, be more successful in whatever way you measure that, if you want to get out of your culture, your culture has a certain gravity that's sort of sucking you back in, right? And that gravity works on a lot of levels.
It's what people say, it's their history, it's bias, it's how much money and connections they have in that group, There's the attitudes, it's the family structure and all that.
But every culture has a different gravity.
And it feels to me, and by the way, what I'm going to say now, I first heard from African Americans.
So if I didn't tell you that first, you'd say, hey, white boy, why are you talking about things you don't know?
So as best I can understand it, this is an argument made by very thoughtful African American people who are trying to make a difference.
And the idea is that the black community has a high cultural gravity.
Now, by analogy, you see it with this Bakari Sellers and Kanye West situation.
Here, Ye is doing something that is unambiguously positive, bringing attention to this serious intractable problem of, you know, prisoners and ex-cons and getting them jobs and putting them back in the productive flow.
He's doing all that stuff this week.
And what is a far less successful black man doing?
He's dragging him back.
He's trying to drag him back, drag him back.
And you see this all over the place.
The number of times you see other black Americans trying to sort of drag back black Americans who are either too white or they're not playing the game the right way or They're doing something they don't like.
It just feels like there's a lot of cultural gravity.
Compare that to, let's say, the Jewish culture.
And this will be obviously a stereotype, so I'm not going to say this.
I'm not going to pretend this applies to every single person in any of these groups.
Nothing I'm saying is universal.
But it seems to me that the narrative, the story, The stereotype for the Jewish community is, you know, why aren't you a doctor, or marrying a doctor, or are you a lawyer, or are you a professional?
Now that's the opposite of cultural gravity.
That's almost like cultural propellant.
It's like if you want to rise above the average, everybody's looking at you and saying, can we help?
What can we do to help you rise above the average?
If I talk about my own experience, Being a white kid in a relatively low-income country setting in upstate New York.
So it was very rural, 40 people in my graduating class, 97% white probably.
And it became kind of clear even in my youth That I had the potential to maybe do something.
So for most of my school experience, my teachers had sort of identified me early as somebody who might be able to do something.
And I had the opposite of cultural gravity.
I felt the culture lifting me.
I always felt that.
I always felt that the people around me who were primarily people like me, you know, white people, who didn't have much money, I felt support, like an actual cultural support, all the time.
I don't know if I ever felt anything different.
I can remember, you know, a little bit when I was in grade school, people would call me a nerd or something, They would call me a nerd because I had high grades.
But it was never really cruel.
It never bothered me.
Like, it never really felt like I was being bullied.
Because it was always said with almost a compliment element to it.
When somebody would say, you brainiac, you nerd.
It never was mean.
It was kidding.
Maybe there was some envy in there.
But it never seemed to be designed to hold me back.
So I felt that my culture had no cultural gravity.
As soon as the cord was cut, and the cord was my youth, so when you're young, you can't go that far, right?
Because you're a kid, you've got to get through school and stuff.
But the moment the string was cut on the balloon, there was nothing stopping me.
I had no cultural gravity.
Everybody seemed to be rooting for me within my cultural.
And I hear from smart African-American leaders that one of the biggest problems in the black community is some kind of cultural gravity that's sort of holding you back.
And you see this with Bakari Sellers' comment.
Now, I think this is a special case because it's politics and it wouldn't matter what color any of them were, you know, the left is going to be against the right.
But it reminded me of this.
It felt like Bakari was holding Kanye back.
And I saw a radio interview recently.
I forget who the DJ was, but it was someone who knew Kanye from the old days, and they'd come up together, knew him before he was super famous, before he was famous at all, actually.
And as they were talking during the interview, I kept saying to myself, I feel like he's trying to hold Kanye back.
He's not saying it, but I can feel the cultural gravity, because he kept saying stuff like, Why can't you be the old Kanye?
We like the old Kanye.
Go back to the old way.
And I'm thinking to myself, everything that that old friend of his was saying, the person who was very identified with the culture, they were literally friends back in the day, everything he was saying felt like cultural gravity.
I don't know if it's jealousy.
Somebody's saying jealousy.
I don't know if that's it.
That's the simple answer, right?
It's simple to just say jealousy.
But why did I not experience any jealousy?
Why did my culture not produce any jealousy that I could register?
It was almost entirely you go.
I mean, I feel that from my earliest experience that people were saying, you know, you go, boy.
Do what you can do.
Make us proud.
Go forth. Don't you feel there's something very different about Kanye?
Hell yeah! So the comment there was, don't I think there's something very different about Kanye?
Yeah, that's why we're talking about him.
He's about as different as you can get.
But the most distinguishing characteristic of him right now is he's made a stand against cultural gravity.
Now he refers to it as a mental prison.
And I don't love prison analogies.
So it makes sense and it works for him and stuff, but just personally, prison isn't the analogy I want in my head.
But he's rejecting, publicly and at great personal and professional risk, he's rejecting cultural gravity.
He's looking to get bigger and to make more of a difference and to help more.
And who's holding him back?
It's not white people.
You're not seeing a lot of Trump supporters say, Hey, Kanye, stop trying to be useful in a positive way to change society.
Stop doing that with your anti-intellectualism.
You don't hear white people saying that.
You hear white people say, go Kanye.
Let's see what you can do. Let's knock it out.
Let's see what you can do. Totally rooting for him.
Not everybody thinks he's the right person.
Not everybody's rooting for him.
But it feels like White people are more lifting and more supportive of his change of topics to more of a political realm.
Alright. I don't know what to do about that, by the way.
So first of all, I don't know if it's true.
And secondly, I don't know what to do about it, if it is true.
So, you know, according to people who know what they're doing and have, you know, come out of those environments, it's true.
But I can't verify it from my own experience.
All right. There was an article that a poll was done one year after the Me Too movement got going.
So it's been about a year of Me Too.
And one of the disturbing results is one that I predicted a year ago, which is that executive males are avoiding meetings with women.
So apparently there's a pretty big shift in behavior, not a universal one, but big enough to be problematic, In which executive men are just trying to avoid contact with women.
Think about the enormity of that problem if you're a woman.
Just think about what you lose if you can't go to lunch with your CEO. Just the two of you.
Because a guy can do that.
Any guy can go to lunch with the male CEO. But now, I don't know if the CEO is going to say he can go to lunch with Let's say a youngish woman.
I don't think he can.
Right? And I asked myself, if I were a CEO of a major corporation, and let's say an assistant vice president, a woman, said, hey, can we go to lunch to talk about X? Would I do it?
Or would I have to invite another man, or at least invite another person?
I'd probably have to invite a man.
But then I'd think, oh no, if I invite the man, he's going to say something sexist, and then I'm going to get dragged into it.
So I can't even invite another man to be sort of my chaperone.
So I have to invite another woman, and then I think, ah, now it's going to be two women.
If they team up and say, I did something, I'm dead, because now there's a victim and a witness.
That's worse! So you're the CEO, and you say, what's the only safe thing to do?
The only safe thing to do is be busy.
Or to make it a larger group.
But you're not going to get the same bonding and networking as a one-on-one lunch would be.
I don't know if the trade-off is good or bad, because the Me Too movement clearly is producing some amount of positive awareness, some amount of positive behavior change, but there's clearly a cost.
I don't know how to weigh them, but we should be aware of them.
That doesn't mean we need to go backwards.
We just need to be aware of it.
All right. One more comment about anti-intellectualism, because it's too delicious.
The people who would, I guess, say they're pro-intellectualism, Bakari Sellers, maybe some other people on CNN, haven't they been wrong about everything for three years?
Who are the people who have been right about everything for three years?
The anti-intellectualism people, the Trump supporters, have been largely right about everything for about three years straight.
At what point do you notice?
When do you notice?
So, generally speaking, I favor people who jump into fields that they're not experienced in and try to figure it out.
So I'm very permissive and forgiving of those people because they're the ones who change the world.
You want the person who hasn't done it before but is a creative force of nature to get in there and shake the box and let us all watch and just see what comes out of it.
I don't think we should be against science, of course, but that's not what people mean, I think, when they say anti-intellectualism.
They'd like to mean that, but I don't think they do.
Take, for example, climate change.
What do the intellectuals say about climate change?
Pretty much the intellectuals say the same thing.
As a majority, the intellectuals say the same thing about climate change.
It's a big problem, and we better act aggressively and spend trillions of dollars.
What do the anti-intellectuals say?
They say, you're forgetting the costs and the benefits.
If you haven't included nuclear power in the calculation, you haven't really even considered the problem right.
Who is smarter in the example I just gave you?
The intellectuals who completely ignore the costs and the benefits of climate science and just look at the costs.
And the costs are not even well calculated.
They're just sort of a wild guess supported by horoscope-like models that have a big range.
The anti-intellectuals are saying, hey, it looks like you're leaving out some big things like how much it would affect the economy, How much it would cost to remediate problems caused by climate science versus making them go away in the first place, how long it would take, the benefits of nuclear power versus the cost of nuclear power, technological innovation.
Who is saying all those things?
All the smart stuff is coming from the anti-intellectuals.
I'm not wrong about that, am I? So that's the irony, is that the smart people are the anti-intellectuals in so many cases.
Not every case. There's still plenty of people who believe in the flat earth, and there are plenty of people who have crazy ideas and don't trust science when they should.
There's plenty of craziness on both sides.
I'm not saying dumb people all join the same political party.
That's not the case. Alright, I'm just looking at your comments.
Somebody says it's urban versus rural.
Maybe. I mean, it is certainly that also.
Science advances one death at a time, somebody said.
I don't know who said it, but it's kind of...
It's a cool saying.
Candace Owens. What about Candace Owens?
Is there a question attached to that?
Every solution comes with a new set of problems.
That's probably true. Somebody says vaccines are bullshit.
You don't know. If you're saying that...
Not to change the subject too much, but let me make the general point.
Whoever says that...
That vaccines are bullshit is not really smart.
Whoever says vaccines are definitely good and there's no reason to be concerned, not smart.
The smart range is somewhere in between those two extremes, which is, and you know who has the smartest view on this?
I hate to tell you, but the smartest opinion I've ever heard on vaccines in terms of the risks versus the benefit was expressed by President Trump.
And if you remember what Trump says about vaccines, He says that they have been tested individually.
Now, this isn't his own theory.
He's obviously heard it somewhere.
It's a popular way of thinking.
The idea goes that we have tested each vaccine individually, and that individually they look like good ideas.
But what we haven't tested is what happens if you give a number of vaccines to the same person.
So that's what Trump said, that there's a risk which has not been analyzed.
To which I thought to myself, is that anti-intellectualism?
Is it anti-intellectualism to say the very thing we're doing is the thing that's never been tested?
Which is what happens when you combine a bunch of vaccines in the same person.
Now, I'm not going to tell you that that's bad because I've never studied it and I don't have any skill to study it.
But I do agree it hasn't been studied.
And if it's true that you should study one vaccine, if a new vaccine comes in, if it's true that the FDA should study that vaccine, isn't it also true they should study it in combination?
Because what are drug interactions if not that?
We test drugs one at a time, and then when they interact with another drug, we say, whoops, it looks like this aspirin doesn't work with that other stuff.
But we didn't test that because it would be impossible to test every drug with every other combination of drugs.
It would be too many combinations.
So we just kind of put that drug out there, tested in isolation, largely in isolation.
And then when it kills somebody or gives them a side effect, you say, what else were you taking?
Well, we better put this in the database.
Maybe we've got a problem here. So the president has the most realistic view on this, which is, why would you trust Something this important that hasn't been tested.
Is that anti-intellectual?
I don't know. You know, you might say politically it's smart because he has it both ways.
It's pro-science, and it's also slightly anti-vaccine without totally committing to it.
So politically it's brilliant, but it's also perfectly a commonsensical point of view.
And by the way, I had never heard that point of view.
I had heard it in a different realm.
I had a friend a number of years ago who was trying to convince me to eat more organic food and to avoid anything in a package, anything that has any kind of additives.
And my opinion had always been, all of this stuff has been tested, right?
All of these additives have been tested.
There's no reason to think that, you know, just because my jelly has a food preservative in it that it's going to kill me because it's all been tested.
And my friend said this, They haven't tested it all together.
And I thought, how the hell did I not ever think of that before?
So her point was this, that if the only thing you ate that had an additive was that jelly that you have, you know, once a week, probably wouldn't be a problem because your body could easily handle whatever little extra thing it was adding to it.
But if everything you eat Has an additive.
It doesn't matter that every one of those things has been tested in isolation.
Because what they haven't tested is what happens when you give yourself a whole bunch of different additives from different sources of different types.
I don't know.
Does it hurt you?
Somebody says you look great for 65.
I'm 61, damn it!
But that was funny. They do test vaccines altogether.
I don't believe that. There's no way that they test vaccines altogether because I don't think you could test them on humans like that.
There's a limit to how much you can really test about the combinations.
Yeah, and the test is children.
That makes it harder. Why is the lifespan in America so much higher than before?
I believe it stalled, didn't it?
I'm not telling you that vaccines don't work.
I'm not an anti-vaxxer.
I'm an anti-intellectual.
I'm not an anti-vaxxer.
I'm an anti-intellectual.
Meaning that I don't know.
How would I know? All right.
Well, I don't know much about this category of the additives and how dangerous they are and the vaccines and how dangerous they are.
So I'm going to end here and I'm going to sign out.
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