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Oct. 18, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
31:26
Episode 265 Scott Adams: Saudi Arabia, Bill Gates Solving Climate Change
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Yes, it's not your imagination.
I am up early today.
I've got to do some things during my normal periscoping time.
And so, those few people who are also awake get first take on the simultaneous sip.
We're going early this morning.
Probably have a small crowd, but it's going to be worth it.
Raise your glass, your chalice, your mug, your vessel full of beverage, and enjoy the simultaneous sip.
Oh, that's good stuff.
For those of you who are keeping track, Christina and I are back together.
I won't say any more about that.
But let's just say, misunderstanding solved.
So, that's the good news.
But I want to talk about some other stuff.
Let's talk about Saudi Arabia and what I call the half-pinions.
So this is a term that I coined myself.
A half-pinion is half of an opinion.
And we see this in a lot of different areas where somebody will say, hey, we have to consider just the costs, or we have to consider just the benefits, when in any reasonable world you would consider both the costs and the benefits, and you would see which one is greater.
A half-pinion says, I'll just look at one side of that.
And you're seeing that with Saudi Arabia.
And it looks like this.
In order to demonstrate a half-pinion, I'd like to introduce my co-host, Dale.
Dale? Dale, can you come over here?
I'd like to talk to you about the situation in Saudi Arabia.
Okay. Fine.
What is your question? So, Dale, it seems more and more obvious that Saudi Arabia was involved in the brutal murder and dismemberment of a writer for the Washington Post.
What should we do about that?
There must be consequences.
There must be consequences.
We cannot allow that moral situation to go on.
There must be consequences. Well, Dale, There would also be costs to applying those consequences.
So give me an idea of what exactly the kind of consequences you're talking about, because then I could look at the costs and the benefits.
Because then I would know, oh, you're talking about not selling arms to Saudi Arabia, for example.
And then I could look at the ramifications and how that would affect our economy and our ongoing interests in the Middle East.
So is that what you're saying, Dale?
I'm saying there should be consequences.
There should be consequences.
I do not think the brutal Saudi dictatorship should get away with this.
Well, I'm not disagreeing with you, Dale.
I'm just trying to understand your full opinion.
So, yes, we don't like this and it should be discouraged, but what exactly are you suggesting that we do about it?
Should we attack Saudi Arabia?
Should we give them an economic sanctions?
I have someplace else to be.
Seen. So, correct me if I'm wrong.
Hasn't the entire conversation looked like that?
The only person who is talking about the costs and the benefits is President Trump.
The crazy guy.
So the guy who is supposed to be the crazy one in the conversation, the one who's, you know, he's biased, he's got, you know, all kinds of issues, according to his critics, he's the only one who said, yes, you know, we really need to get to the bottom of this, but keep in mind, we have these huge investments, they're an important ally for the Middle East.
He's the only one saying there are costs and there are benefits.
So I think the members of the media need to be a little more vigilant about nailing people down who are getting away too easily with saying, I think there should be consequences.
If you can't say what you think those consequences should be and also kind of visualize what would happen if we applied them, you don't really have an opinion.
Now, let's talk about How guilty we think MBS is.
Is that the right MBS? So I'm talking about the crown prince.
Now we're learning that at least a few members of the alleged kill team were close members of the prince's entourage.
You know, they were part of his security detail.
And so the thinking is, well, it would be impossible...
For the Crown Prince not to have been aware and not to have authorized this operation.
To which I say, it's possible.
You cannot rule out the fact that, yeah, Mohammed bin Salman, MBS, you can't rule out the possibility that he did know every part of it and he authorized it.
Definitely possible. But let's put some context on it.
If you look at some of the biggest stories about Our government, the government of the United States, some of the biggest stories have been underlings doing things that the leader didn't want them to do.
There were leakers.
There were people who talked to the press for fire and fury.
There were people who started rumors that were not true.
There were allegedly people in the deep state who were working against an elected president.
It seems to me that in the United States, it is more the rule than the exception that the members of the government are doing things that the president doesn't know about and really, really wouldn't like because they're acting against the president.
In a big company, it is very typical for a CEO to be blindsided by something the staff does.
It's not every day, but it's a normal situation.
Let me give you an example.
When I was working for the phone company, when I also was doing Dilbert, and Dilbert had become a big deal.
By then it was already a famous property, and I was in all kinds of news stories, and part of the story was he works for Pacific Bell during the day, but at night he draws a comic about the workplace, so that was sort of the hook.
And I knew the, I think it was the CEO, not president, CEO of PacBell.
He had contacted me because he was just a Dilber fan.
So ordinarily I was too many levels down in management to ever talk to the CEO, but I had contact with him.
I'd met him. We'd had some conversations because he was just a Dilber fan.
Well, one day, my boss decided to ask me to leave.
It was a friendly conversation, and I had offered that I would leave whenever they needed me to.
So soon after, my boss essentially fired me, but it was a friendly firing.
I get a call from the CEO who was just talking about some Dilbert stuff.
I guess he saw a comic he liked.
I forget what it was. And I said that I had just been fired.
And here's the CEO, who's a fan of mine, and he's just finding out that his underling fired me.
Now, was that unusual?
Not really. Because it's typical in a big company that the CEO knows a little bit of what's going on, the big stuff, and then there's this whole universe of stuff that's been delegated.
But you ask yourself, that doesn't really apply to the big stuff.
The CEO clearly knows the big stuff.
Well, does he?
Let me say this.
If, hypothetically, MBS, the Crown Prince, had said to his security staff, we've got to silence this critic.
Figure it out. I don't need to know the details, but just make sure this critic is silenced.
Obviously, the first choice is to buy him off or to bring him into the kingdom, to co-opt him.
That's always the first choice.
But if you need to get the second choice, figure it out.
Just make it happen.
So there's an entirely good chance that the Crown Prince gave a general order that the specific guys who murdered this guy and dismembered him were interpreting in their own way.
So it could be both true that the Crown Prince didn't know exactly what was going to happen.
He may have known the universe of possibilities, but there's probably a good chance he didn't know the details.
And that would make sense also because he would never want to be in a position that any recording or digital communication came up that tied him to any kind of a crime.
And it seems to me that would actually be the more normal situation.
Would it be more normal that the security services tell the boss of all the wet work they're doing?
Or would it be more normal for them to say, look boss, just, you know, we'll take care of it.
Just don't ask too many questions.
I don't know. So we'll have to grapple with that.
But let's get out of the half-pinion territory and have full opinions if we do it.
Now, something very exciting.
This is very exciting.
This is like one of the most exciting things, disguised as something that's not exciting, that you've ever seen.
And it's huge.
So what I'm gonna tell you is one of the best things that's ever happened to Civilization.
You just don't realize it yet.
And here it is. Bill Gates has announced that he's part of what he calls the Breakthrough Energy Ventures, B-E-V, Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
That's putting more than a billion dollars into promising companies that can work on various elements of climate change.
Wait, wait, wait. I know what you're saying.
You're saying climate change is a hoax.
So this is all nonsense, right?
Well, we're talking Bill Gates here.
So when Bill Gates says climate change is something that's dangerous and we have to work on it, the first thing I do is I say, okay, here's my IQ, here's Bill Gates, and we disagree.
If that doesn't make you stop and say, what's wrong with my thinking?
I just don't think you're a rational player.
If you can see Bill Gates disagreeing with you on something that involves science and business and technology, and he's got a firm opinion and it's different from yours, you should frickin' listen to it.
It doesn't mean he's right. But if you're dismissing Bill Gates, who has really looked into it with his IQ, with his resources, and he has a different opinion than you do, take that seriously.
Doesn't mean he's right every time.
But here's the thing.
His approach appears to be independent of whether there's really carbon going into the atmosphere from humans, whether it really makes a difference.
So his approach is mostly to improve the technology of things that we would want to do anyway.
So I'm pretty sure that his approach, and I'm going to describe it in a moment, and this is the innovative part, I believe his approach would be compatible with a Trump approach, compatible with everybody else's approach, because it's really just making transportation and industry more efficient.
Okay? So even if Bill Gates is completely wrong, About climate change, about the risk, about the role of man.
Even if he's wrong about all of that, everything I'm going to describe is still a really, really good idea.
That's frickin' Bill Gates, right?
Bill Gates finds a way to win, no matter what.
So if climate change is real, this is a good idea, and I'll describe it in detail in a minute.
And if climate change is not real, we still want to do all of this stuff.
Because you want your energy costs to go down, you want to be more efficient, you want to pollute less, right?
So all of those things we want independent of whether climate change is as the scientists have described.
So let's get that straight. Here's the approach and I want to see if you can recognize this approach.
Those of you who watch my Periscopes, tell me if you recognize what he's done.
So he's created a fund of private investors, and they're looking at companies that are specifically in the business of addressing things that would be important to climate change, but would also be important if climate change wasn't a problem, because we'd still want to have lower-cost transportation, we'd still want to pollute less, etc.
So the first thing he's done, and see how familiar this sounds, is he broke the problem down so that you can see which portions of, you know, activities are causing the most problems.
Here's his breakdown. He says that 25% of, now he's talking about climate change and carbon, but it'll translate into the other things I was talking about.
25% of the problem is electricity and renewables.
24% of what's happening with climate change is cattle and agriculture.
21% manufacturing, 14% transportation, 6% buildings.
Just the technology used into making building materials is bad.
And then there's a final 10% that's miscellaneous.
So the first thing Bill Gates has done is he said, these are the biggest causes, these are the biggest problems.
Here's 25% of it, here's 21% of it, et cetera.
Now he's identified, here's the fun part, he's identified startups and technologies that address each of those categories.
So you could tell, oh, if this company works out and does what it says it's going to do, it could affect the 25% or it could affect the 16%.
You would know exactly what part of the equation you're working on.
There's no government involved in this.
There's no government funding, at least that's not part of the system.
There might be some government funding, but it's not important to this.
So he's created a portfolio He's drawn attention to it with his Bill Gates magic, because whatever Bill Gates does, people pay attention to.
And then he's funneled all of this billionaire money into the companies that could most quickly make a difference to the climate.
And if climate isn't really the issue, they would most quickly make a difference to more efficient transportation, less pollution, and all those things that are good.
Think about how good this system is.
He's identified and simplified the situation.
He's got a system that works whether your base assumptions are right or wrong.
You could have the wrong assumptions about climate change and this is still a genius idea.
It's a genius system.
Now, a goal would be, let's do something about climate change.
Well, what do you do? A system is, let's go through this system, let's identify the companies, let's make sure they have funding and sunshine and attention, and let's do it as quickly as possible.
We don't know which of these companies will be the ones that make a difference.
That's why there are a lot of them.
It's a portfolio approach.
Now, the reason I was so excited about this is this is identical to the idea that I gave on Periscope just a few days ago.
My domain was healthcare, and I was suggesting that there be something called the President's Portfolio.
The president's portfolio is exactly this idea, except branding it with the president's name instead of having Bill Gates being the lead voice on it.
But it's exactly the same.
And the idea was that we would look at healthcare costs We would break them into their categories exactly the way Bill Gates did and say, for example, this percent is from hospital care, this percent is from medication, this percent is from doctor fees, doctor visits, whatever. So whatever that is.
Then you would find all the startups.
That are working on reducing costs in those areas.
You would list them. You would put them in a portfolio.
You'd make sure that people knew that these companies would have the greatest chance of working on this percentage of the costs.
And then you would just shine a light on them and you'd say, hey, billionaires, you have plenty of money and you want to help.
You just didn't know how.
I just told you how.
Okay, Bill Gates just showed us the way.
He just showed us the way.
When I was saying this on Periscope, I got the feeling that some people were saying, ah, that's an okay idea.
But when Bill Gates does it, it suddenly takes it to another level of credibility, right?
It's not talk.
He's already done it.
I was talking about it.
He did it. But we should take this model and extend it to other categories.
Healthcare is the obvious next place to do it.
In fact, maybe Bill Gates will do it.
But the idea of the president's portfolio, this was my branding for it, was that the government is not investing.
They're just doing exactly what Bill Gates did.
They're chunking up the problem to make it convenient to know where the big costs are.
And then he's identifying companies that work on it.
All right. I probably got way too nerdy on that, but I think you get the idea that we don't need the government to be investing and solving the problems and doing the thinking.
We might get some help from the government in identifying companies where private investment can flow to save our big problems.
Very, very exciting.
All right. Those were the two things that I wanted to talk about this morning.
I will have to get going later.
I'll be talking to Adam Carolla later and tomorrow Ben Shapiro, so I've got to go down and talk to them.
I'm not sure when those things air yet, but I'll let you know.
I'll tweet them out when they do.
You just described grants.
Nah, not really, because grants are really a government program, government funding.
So what I described is very much different than grants.
Yes, the soft cover version of Win Bigly is coming out at the end of the month, just a few weeks.
And so I'm doing another small PR tour just to talk about that again.
So, by the way, By the way, have you noticed how much of the things that I wrote in Win Bigley, for those of you who have read it, have become the common way of looking at the universe now?
Have you noticed that the things that I talked about that seemed radical and just ridiculous just two years ago are now common knowledge?
One of them is this two movies on one screen thing that I talk about too much.
But you see that the normal press talks about this now all the time.
So the regular, the mainstream media, and everybody else has come to the realization that That we're not always disagreeing on even the same topic.
We're actually in different movies.
So we're imagining the other side in this caricature that doesn't exist, and they're imagining you in a caricature that doesn't exist with facts that aren't true.
So you're both living in these artificial realities, and you can see that people get that now.
The other The other thing that I said back in 2015 that now is just becoming common understanding is that the things that President Trump does are really, really persuasive.
And the things that people thought were crazy and, you know, just all the bad things they thought about him are now generally considered To be smart and effective.
There's still a disagreement of whether he should be doing this stuff, but I think there's now complete agreement that it works.
I also told you in Win Bigly that you can get used to anything and that you have to really watch that effect.
The getting used to things you didn't think you could get used to.
And that it changes everything over time.
And never was it more obvious than with the latest tweet by Trump about Stormy in which he called Stormy Daniels a horse face.
Just put your head back four years ago.
Before President Trump.
And imagine if you could have imagined that the President of the United States would send a tweet talking about the porn star he allegedly had an affair with and calling her a horse face.
You could not imagine it.
It would literally be unimaginable.
But, since we can get used to anything, By the time that the horse face tweet came out, I don't know if he had the same reaction that I did, but I laughed because of the audacious of it, because it was obvious the president was trying to distract attention and he was trying to control the news, which he did quite effectively.
But it didn't seem shocking, right?
Four years later, we actually got used to the fact that we could wake up in the morning and see a tweet from the President of the United States calling a porn star horse face.
And everything about that just seemed like, yeah, that could happen.
That seems pretty normal.
So I called that back in 2015, said you're going to get used to it.
You also see that Trump's critics are trying to imitate him, but they can't figure out what the active ingredients are.
So the critics of Trump, the Democrats, let's say, are looking at what Trump did, and they're saying, all right, we've got to use the good stuff.
Whatever he's doing that's working, we're going to have to copy that.
But they don't know the active ingredients.
The active ingredients are technique, persuasion, visualization, asking for more than you think you can get, controlling attention, branding people with clever little names that stick.
They have a lot of technique built into them.
So those are the active ingredients.
But if you don't know that world and you don't understand persuasion, and I think that's true for most of the Democrats, what you're looking at is somebody who just looks crazy and spontaneous and you don't understand anything he's doing.
Nothing that Trump does makes sense to people who don't understand technique.
They don't understand branding.
They don't understand persuasion.
And so the Democrats have quite hilariously tried to imitate the least Active part of what Trump does, and in fact, the only part that's bad, which is the being mean, being a bully, being too aggressive.
It's the only part of what Trump does that's sort of the, I would call it the unpleasant side effect.
So as much as I appreciate the president's technique, I think it's fair to say it's got rough edges.
So instead of the Democrats picking the good parts, they pick the rough edges.
They pick the only part that you shouldn't copy.
It's the only part. You should copy all the other stuff, and if you get some rough edges too, well, maybe live with them, because sometimes it just comes with the rest of the stuff.
But to only copy the rough edges and say, let's be bad to people in public and let's go way too far Is hilariously ineffective.
Anyway, so I think that Winn-Bigley has not only stood the test of time, but has documented it before it happened.
So some people write history books.
I wrote a book that described both the history, the present, and what was gonna happen next.
Nailed it. Ah, never split the difference.
I have not read that book.
All right, just looking at your...
They copy you, but no credit.
You know, the other thing that I started saying early on was that Trump was playing 3D chess.
And then the people who wanted to counter that message, because it was positive for Trump, they countered it with sarcasm.
How many times have you seen a critic say something that really is addressing me?
And it says, well, I have to bring in Dale to do this.
Well, I don't think he's playing 27D chess.
Dale is 3D chess.
3D chess was the original thing.
I know it is funnier if I increase the number from 3 to 27.
He's not playing 27 D chess.
So you know you have something if even the critics can't stop saying it, right?
If the critics can't stop playing with your own branding, then you have effective branding.
So you can see that everywhere now.
Yeah, 45 D chess, exactly.
Somebody says you're just rambling and defensive.
Two movies, one screen.
Am I going to write another book like God's Debris?
It might be impossible to write another book like God's Debris.
It might be impossible, I don't know.
I have been thinking about writing a book in which people realize they're in a simulation, but I feel like that would look too much like the Matrix.
It wouldn't be a book where real people are plugged into a Matrix.
It would be that there are no real people, that we are just the Matrix.
And if you can figure out the Matrix, you can hack it, and then you would have powers within the simulation.
All right. Will there be mobs?
Talk about the Time of Kings story.
Yeah, that would be interesting.
How many people thought that when I first started talking about this simulation, which was also around 2015, how many of you thought that that would become common conversation?
Have you noticed that the talk about us being in a computer simulation went from sort of a fringy, strange thing to the way a lot of smart people talk?
Coincidence. Have you ever seen a UFO? I have.
I have seen a UFO. I don't know if I've seen an alien, but I've seen flying objects that I couldn't identify.
Trump said he will close the southern border.
Well, I don't know about that.
Yeah, this caravan could not work out better for President Trump.
The timing of it is insane.
Some say it's still a strange thing to talk about the simulation you say.
Tucker Carlson had an anti-weed segment last night.
I didn't see it. You know, the anti-weed people I think are well-meaning, but they may be expressing half-pinions accidentally because the half-pinion on marijuana is wouldn't it be great if it never existed and nobody ever had it and nobody would ever get lazy and nobody would ever have a problem with it?
And I think that's certainly half of the question.
But the other half is what are they getting out of it?
I would say we probably saved my life.
But I don't think I'm normal.
So I think that my personal impression of weed is that it doesn't have recreational value in the normal way, but it has a lot of health benefits.
So I don't recommend it for recreational use.
I don't use it for partying.
I've never used, well I won't say never, but not since college, have I used marijuana as a party drug.
I only use it for the benefits.
Alright, I'm going to Talk to you later.
I've got to go off and do some stuff.
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