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Oct. 14, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
30:44
Episode 260 Scott Adams: The President’s Portfolio, a Systems Idea
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Hey everybody. I'll bet there aren't that many people who are already awake.
At least not in my time zone.
Hey Pat, come on in here.
The rest of you can watch this on replay.
But the early birds, you're...
Kanye's live now?
Doing what? Good morning, good morning, good morning.
Do you have your beverage with you?
I hope you do.
Hey Jason. Hey everybody.
It's time to grab your mug, your glass, your cup, your vessel, your stein, fill it with the liquid of your choice.
I like coffee.
And join me for the simultaneous sip.
So let's talk about this Khashoggi thing some more.
So Khashoggi was the journalist who was allegedly slain by Saudi security forces, cut into pieces with a bone saw, and his body removed from the Turkish consulate.
Now, as I've questioned before, You always have to wait with this sort of thing because there's always going to be more to the story.
It just didn't quite make sense the way we heard it.
It sounded a little too fantastical for us to really have understood everything about this.
And we're still waiting so we don't know what else we'll learn.
But there's kind of an interesting question that's a sub-question about this.
The journalist who was killed Is a Muslim Brotherhood proponent.
And the Muslim Brotherhood, as I understand it, the current incarnation, promotes a peaceful transition, a democratic transition, to Sharia law and an Islamic world.
So at least in their public face, the Muslim Brotherhood is a non-violent way to conquer the world for the benefit of Islam.
And I'm wondering how we in the West should look at something like this alleged murder, should it become confirmed?
And somebody's saying, are you insane, non-violent?
No, I'm not insane.
You're bad at listening.
I said their public face...
And their public pronouncements are non-violent.
What they're doing behind the scenes, I have not addressed.
So if you believe they're doing something behind the scenes to support Hamas or support other terrorist groups, you would be agreeing with some of the Middle Eastern countries who also consider them a terrorist group.
But if we're just talking about Khashoggi, I've not been presented with any information, at least in the press, that would suggest that he, in particular, is in favor of any kind of violence.
So I've not seen that suggested, and I think I would by now, right?
But he was a Muslim Brotherhood person, and I think it would be fair to say that there are members of the Muslim Brotherhood who do not favor violence.
But what they do favor Is a view of the world that's, by Western standards, very anti-women.
And perhaps even more anti-LGBTQ. So anti-gay, anti-LBGTQ. I can never say that right.
And anti-woman.
So when we're watching this, and we're saying to ourselves, How much trouble does the United States want to get into for what looked like sort of a Middle East, you know, internal problem?
Because I'm not sure we want to take this guy's side, do we?
You know, how much do we want to support the person who would change our system to something we would consider a form of slavery for women?
Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily everybody's interpretation, but by Western standards, what Khashoggi was pushing was kind of a women, second-class citizen...
Baby-making slavery situation by Western eyes, right?
Obviously, within the Islamic community, they have a very different opinion of it.
So the interesting question is, if I take my own judgment out of this, so I'm trying to describe this without infecting it with any opinions of my own, because I don't really have strong opinions on a lot of the stuff in the Middle East, because I don't have the full context for things.
But it's an interesting question.
How much do we in the West, and we in the West are 50% women, and then you add on to that the LGBTQ community, and that's a majority, right?
In the Democratic West, most people, as in more than 50% of our population, is either a woman or a gay man.
Because if you add the half, roughly half that are women to the, you know, 10% or so that are LGBTQ and half of them are men, it's something like 55% of the West are women and gay men.
Something like that. So it's a majority.
How much should that majority in our democratic society care about two proponents of Sharia law and one kills the other?
Because it's somebody who's arguing with my estimates.
You can argue with the estimates.
That's fine. But it's the same point.
There's a clear majority in the democratic countries of people who are either a woman or gay man.
If you add those two categories together, they're more than 50% of the population.
Everybody agrees with that. So it's not clear to me how much risk the West should take over what's kind of an internal squabble between two sides that we shouldn't like either one of them too much because of what they would do with the topics of women and gays in particular should they get their way.
And then you have this weird situation where I don't think you could argue that Saudi Arabia has a more enlightened More enlightened, let's say, approach to women and gays than the Muslim Brotherhood.
I don't think you can necessarily make that case.
But in terms of the public, we see this bin Salman guy looking like a reformer.
You know, women can drive.
I think there were some other smaller changes there.
So at least he's heading in the right direction.
So in terms of how it feels to us, it's going to feel like at least Salman had something going on there that was the right direction, even if we don't like where he's at.
He had dirt on the regime.
Somebody says that Khashoggi had dirt on the regime, which I've heard is true, but we don't know what that was.
Anyway, but it does feel like a little bit of an internal problem, and I'm not sure how much the United States should embrace it as our problem.
Let's talk about systems versus goals.
You know that I wrote a book called...
I'd have failed almost everything and still went big, in which I talked about having a system, something you work on every day, that gives you a good result, but you don't necessarily know exactly how it's going to end.
So a system is something that improves your odds of a good outcome, but you don't know exactly where it goes.
Versus a goal, which says, we will have single-payer health care.
I'll just use that as an example.
So a goal would be single-payer health care.
So it assumes the exact answer.
Or something like an exact answer.
As opposed to a system, which would be a way to work toward a better healthcare situation, but you don't know exactly how that works out.
That's what a system would look like.
Let me suggest some new ideas here.
I'm going to throw some ideas into the mix.
I've talked to you already about how Kanye did something much bigger than the press realized or reported.
What Kanye did was suggest what he called ideation centers in urban areas, and that would be a center where you would work with the local folks to come up with ideas.
For solving things.
If you come up with an idea, ideally you want to be able to test it in maybe one city or one community within the city, but something small that you can test.
So the ideation centers would create ideas, You'd package them so that you've got something, an investor, let's say a billionaire who just wants to help.
Or even the government that just wants to help and they've got some money.
Do a small test.
If the small test works, you implement it.
Now what makes this a system is you don't know what the thing looks like.
You don't know what ideas they're going to come up with.
It's a system. We don't have a system.
Kanye is operating at a higher level than anybody who's criticizing him.
That's my take. Because this doesn't exist.
And it's exactly what needs to exist.
Not a solution.
A system for creating solutions and testing them.
As many solutions as you can come up with to test.
But I would extend this idea And say maybe we should do even more of it.
I'm going to take health care as my example and I'm going to introduce this idea that I just made up.
So you won't find this anywhere.
This is just a mental experiment term I made up.
The president's portfolio.
Now what I mean by the president's portfolio.
It's not that the president is going to be investing in any stocks or anything like that.
So it's not that. It would be a portfolio of startups or companies that are working for the betterment of the United States as a whole.
So most startups are just trying to make money.
Let's say you're a game startup.
You just have to make money.
It doesn't really make much difference to the United States, except in some general way it might help the economy.
But there are other startups that would dramatically lower health care costs.
There are startups that would get you dramatically better results in health care.
There are startups that are working on the systems, the databases, the processes that would greatly reduce the amount of complexity, for example.
So, the president's portfolio would be, and this is an idea, not a real thing, and the idea would be that the president, working with a team of people who would help him vet what's in the portfolio and what isn't, would be a list of companies, and this is one example for healthcare, the healthcare companies that are startups, That would really make a difference in the cost of healthcare, if they worked.
And the idea of the president's portfolio is not that the president invests.
So there's no investment.
He's just spotlighting.
So it would be a spotlight that says, look, if you've qualified, because your startup is a serious one, and let's say there's some criteria such as you have to at least get some money from a high-end venture company.
So if Sequoia or some big venture company has already put money into you, And it could be demonstrated that you're for the benefit of the larger society, not just making money.
Then you could be in the president's portfolio.
What would be the advantage? The advantage would be the spotlight.
So the billionaires who want to help would know exactly where to look.
They'd say, oh, I'll go to the webpage with the list of startups that are part of the president's portfolio.
And, you know, I'd like to do something good for the country, and why not maybe make some money at the same time?
So the billionaire goes here, looks down the list and says, wow, there's a company that if this works out, they're going to be able to make an MRI that costs you $10 instead of hundreds of dollars.
So I'm going to invest in that.
Might not work, but if it does, The whole country, maybe even the whole world is better off.
Now, I use healthcare as my example because that was a clear example where spotlighting the companies that can bring down costs would be very important.
But this could be any category.
It could be climate change.
What are all the companies working on things that would make a real difference to climate change?
Wouldn't you like to know? Wouldn't you like to know that there are a dozen companies that are looking to capture CO2, scrub it out of the air, make maybe a better nuclear plant?
Wouldn't you like to know? What is the small portfolio of companies?
That are going to fix our biggest problems so that our billionaires can be weaponized to make a difference.
Right now if you've got a billion dollars and you want to help the world, what the hell are you going to do?
So this is the genius of the Gates Foundation.
When Bill Gates decided, and here I'm, you know, I don't want to read his mind, but it seems obvious from the facts.
It seems that Bill Gates said to himself some version of this.
I have all these billions of dollars.
I want to help the world.
How do I do it?
It's actually hard because you don't know where to put that money that the government can't do it better.
That it can really make a difference.
What do you do? So Gates created the Gates Foundation, whose primary job, as I understand it, is to figure out where to put his money.
Because the figuring out where to do it is the hard part.
That's sort of the sign of the Golden Age.
So the Golden Age, as I define it, is the time we're in where the biggest problems are the way we think about stuff.
We don't have a resource shortage.
We have an idea shortage.
Kanye, understanding that we're in the golden age where we don't have a resource shortage, we have an idea shortage, we have a systems shortage, we haven't organized into the right systems, has suggested a hugely important idea that the press has completely overlooked.
A place to create ideas and package them so you can put them in front of the billionaire or put them in front of the government and say, here's this idea, the community is on board, we've packaged it, we've looked at the economics, can we get a billionaire to do a small test?
Likewise, on healthcare, I'm greatly annoyed when I watch the debate about single payer.
The debate about single-payer goes like this.
Yes or no.
That's the whole debate, right?
Yes, single-payer or no.
But is there a smarter middle ground where you can find a way to do a small test?
We should never be saying no to big ideas.
Let me say that again.
We should never say no to big ideas.
Instead we should say, can you test it?
Can you test it small?
Now that doesn't mean looking at Europe and seeing what they did, although that's useful, right?
Could you, and I don't know if this is true, could you pick a state?
Could you pick a county?
Suppose you could pick a county.
And say, alright, we're just going to test single payer in this county.
For the next three years or whatever, you're all going to be on a single payer.
The government will artificially lower your drug costs.
In other words, we'll subsidize them to give you the impact of what it would be if we had negotiating power on a country-wide basis, which we don't have yet because this is just a test.
So if the experts said, well, if you could negotiate the prices down 30%, you'd really have something.
So you just artificially do a test where you force the prices to be 30% lower.
See what happens. Now that particular test might be a stupid idea.
It takes people who are working in the area to come up with what a good test looks like.
But if we're saying yes or no to any kind of a healthcare change, it feels like the wrong process.
The right process to me sounds like, can you test it as small?
If you can test as small, you don't have to say yes or no, right?
We should get out of yes or no.
If there's one change that Kanye can bring to the world, It's to get us out of yes-no.
We're not a yes-no world.
We should be a systems world where we're continually trying new ideas, packaging them in a way we can test them small, see how it does, and then make a separate decision whether you want to go big.
So yes, no is just an unproductive way to address these big things.
All right.
Competition in health care is a failure, blah, blah, blah.
Well, I would imagine that there are lots of things you could test in healthcare and other ideas.
And by the way, the ideas that I'm suggesting here, these are all the normal ideas in the business community.
So everything I'm describing here is the very way that it's the exact way that capitalism works.
So capitalism works great, Because they think of ideas, they test them small before they decide to go big.
Now the government does that in some cases, but I would think that should be the standard form.
If you're a Republican and you're saying no to any other healthcare idea from the left, that's just the wrong approach.
The right approach is, can you test as small?
If you can't test as small, then you can say no.
If you can, then you should be saying, you know, put together a package and let's see if we can test it somewhere small.
Alright. R&D suffers with universal.
We don't know that, do we?
We don't know that.
We do know that there might be some kind of a trade-off.
But we don't know what the trade-off looks like.
So when you say stuff like, such as, innovation will suffer, I think that needs to be tested.
It is fair to say that if you took the profits of the You know, the healthcare businesses, if their profits reduced, it probably would come out of R&D. But that doesn't mean there wouldn't be something else jumping up to replace it.
you know, some other entity.
All right, please talk about persuasive systems are or are not.
Yeah, so systems generally fall into what I call the high ground maneuver.
So the high ground maneuver in persuasion is something that takes you out of the weeds of the details and brings you to a level where everybody in the discussion says, okay, that makes sense.
And you saw me do that right in front of you.
So if you said, is single payer good or bad?
Is this particular change to healthcare good or bad?
Is this changing this rule or this regulation?
Would that be good or bad?
The weeds is yes, no, or what's the trade-off?
The higher level is, we don't know.
Let's run a test.
So the run a test is always the high ground.
It would be unusual to come up with an example, it's hard to think of one, in which it's better to start big before you've tested as small.
And everybody recognizes that, right?
Everybody's sense of the world, their common sense, if you want to call it that, is going to recognize that testing small before you go big just makes sense.
We have tested communism.
Well, nobody's suggesting communism, so...
How does that play into improved immigration system versus the wall?
So the wall is exactly the same situation as this.
We are currently in the process of replacing some parts of the existing border with better walls because there is funding for improvement.
So for upgrades, they have some funding.
So we will soon be able to see if those better walls cause people to go to other places In the short run, you assume that they just moved to a different place to get across the border.
If that happens, that would be a validation that the wall, at least, is hard to scale.
If the wall is put up in some locations and people are just jumping over it easily, or just throwing their fentanyl over the top, well, then you've learned something you didn't know.
So the wall, because the wall would take so long to do, It's a natural, just by its nature, you're testing it before you get to the big implementation.
You can always cancel the budget if the first bunches of wall didn't make any difference.
What about scaling ideas from the test phase?
Different outcomes possible?
Yeah, so there's certainly some art and skill to developing a test that really does tell you something about the larger implementation.
And there's certainly a risk that the test looks good on small but doesn't work in bad because you can't scale it.
There's something about the scaling.
So there's no clean answer other than it's always better to test because you'll be smarter than if you didn't.
But you could still get the wrong answer.
That's always the possibility.
Can you suggest how a person could find employment in something like an ideation center or...
Well, you would have to have the right skill set.
There's a firm in San Francisco called IDEO. And they're sort of a design ideation center, you could call it.
I've worked with them before.
And what they do is if you come in, you're a corporate customer, and you say, I want to design a new computer device.
It doesn't matter what you're designing.
They do design for all kinds of stuff.
And they'll put together a team that makes sense for this project.
So they might include an engineer, might include a designer, might include an architect.
So they'll pull together...
High-level people who've got, you know, PhDs and they've graduated MIT and some really smart people.
And they'll put them together in a diverse little team and they'll very quickly run through ideas.
So to answer your question, how would you get a job at an ideation center that doesn't quite exist yet?
You might start by becoming one of those things.
An engineer, a designer, something that makes sense For being on that kind of a team.
and then you have something to pitch should the ideation centers come into being.
What if you have a patent already?
I don't know what you're talking about.
So the answer is it just depends on the details.
All right, I'm just looking at your...
Somebody said diversity is the enemy of the group.
Not exactly.
I believe that there are tests that show that the most effective group is one where somebody is very smart and the other people in the group are not necessarily that smart.
The worst thing you could have is a group with five really smart people who are kind of similar.
Because they would all have their own opinion of what to do, but they're all smart and they don't want to give up, so they would just fight with each other.
So sometimes you're better with one smart person, one person who knows a certain skill, somebody who has a certain point of view.
That's why ethnic diversity is useful in all kinds of realms, because if you're building something to sell it, In one way or another, either politically or commercially.
If you're looking to sell something in the general public, you want as many different opinions before you commit to the expense.
So ethnic, gender, diversity, all of those different diversities are useful because you get the perspective without the expense.
All right. Small tests tell us nothing about how corrupt it will be once it's large.
You're right. You can't learn everything from a small test.
But you can often learn if there was something there that just doesn't work.
So you can find out if there's a big, obvious idea why something won't work.
What about the middle class?
I don't understand the question.
At some point, there has to be unity in goal.
There can be unity in process.
There can be unity in what the system is, and there can be unity in what the criteria is for an idea that gets through the system as implemented.
Yeah, the Kanye comment about math, basketball, is not as crazy as it sounds.
In fact, if you literally looked at any of the stuff that's being reported as crazy from Kanye, every bit of it has a perfectly good explanation, which he actually presented in most cases there.
So even the stuff about the hydrogen airplane and Stuff like that.
Those all had a solid basis in reason.
It's just that the press doesn't like reporting the good news.
Did somebody say that Kanye is periscoping?
Keep saying cultural gravity.
Yeah, so the...
I've been getting lots of feedback from people who are responding to the concept of cultural gravity.
I don't know if it's just because people like it because it makes them feel innocent from any problems.
When you think that cultural gravity is part of the problem in urban areas, that your own community is preventing you from success, it sort of relieves you, the observer, from any guilt.
It's like, well, looks like they're doing it to themselves.
So I worry That it could be taken that way, as opposed to taking as a useful way to look at the situation.
Something that has a practical, functional element to it.
Kanye was live earlier.
He did a live stream on Periscope, huh?
But he's not even on Twitter anymore.
But he was Periscoping?
Maybe so. Yi's mind control scope from last night.
I'll do that. I will watch Kanye's periscope from last night.
Run with cultural gravity.
Yeah, I'm going to stick with that for a while.
I'm going to be testing that one and see if it gets any weight.
Oh, he's back on Twitter.
Good. Okay, I'm definitely going to watch Kanye's Mind Control Periscope.
That's got to be great. Can't wait.
All right. I think we've said everything we're going to say.
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