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March 29, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
55:14
Episode 473 Scott Adams: All the “Ridiculous Bullsh*t” in the News Today
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here, NPC Otter.
That's kind of a funny name.
Ryan, good to see you.
Gather round. There's still a chair left.
A couple of seats up front.
Everybody, come on in.
Make sure you have your beverage.
Okay, I see somebody has their chalice.
Ready? Ready?
And it's time for a little thing we call the Simultaneous Sip.
And if you're prepared, you already have a glass of mug, possibly a thermos, a tankard, a stein, a chalice.
You filled it with your favorite liquid, and you're ready now to join me for the simultaneous sip.
Ah.
So, let's look at the news.
Ah.
Here's a mental experiment for you.
I'm not suggesting this happen.
I'm just saying, if it did happen, imagine this.
Imagine if somebody wanted to create a hoax in which they were making the case that Adam Schiff is an agent of Russia.
How hard would it be?
Now, I'm not saying that Schiff is an agent of Russia.
I'm not making that claim.
I'm saying, what would that look like?
So the first thing you'd ask is, has he ever had any conversations with any Russians who are associated with Putin?
And you already know the answer to that.
All of the senior politicians in Washington have had multiple contacts, With high-ranking Russians.
Check. Contact with high-ranking Russians associated with Putin.
Check. Next, if you looked, could you find some suspicious advertisements or anything connected with Russia in regards to Adam Schiff's last election?
Well, I bet nobody's looked.
Has anybody looked? If you did look, Would you find that any trolls from Russia had made any ads?
And how many ads would it take?
Because remember, the entire Russian troll farm operation, here's something that they don't say when they report the news.
They say, Russia interfered with the election.
True. Russia had a troll farm They sent out a bunch of ads that were negative for Hillary Clinton.
True. And then they stopped there.
You know what else is also true?
The ads were so poorly made that they look like a high school effort.
Anybody who understands anything about influence would tell you they're completely inert.
The other thing they don't tell you is there weren't that many of them, really, compared to all of the other messages going on about the election.
And the last thing they don't tell you is that there were also ads against Trump.
So how exactly do you explain the fact that the Russian troll farm made memes that were anti-Trump?
Well, then you say, well, okay, Russia was trying to not get Trump elected.
He was trying to just sow discord.
To which I say, those are different.
Those are different things.
Sowing discord actually makes some sense, I suppose.
And that would explain why there are ads on both sides, Clinton ads and Trump ads.
But does what I just described, which I believe passes all the fact-checking, have you ever seen any expert say, I've looked at the Russia ads and these would work?
You've never seen that, because there's no expert who would ever say that.
Nobody ever says, the Russians tried to interfere, but when we looked at the nature of their interference, just talking about the troll farm here, it was so amateurish And for whatever reason it was attacking both sides, then I'm not sure we can conclude anything from it.
That would be close to the truth.
So anyway, if you were trying to frame Adam Schiff or any other major politician in the United States, couldn't you find lots of contacts they had with Russians?
And then you would look for other information, such as...
You would try to find out if they had ever tried to influence anything for you or you'd ever tried to do anything for them.
So could you find anything that Adam Schiff ever did that you could define as positive for Russia?
Do you think you could look at Adam Schiff's record and find anything that looks like it's sort of soft on Russia or good for Russia?
Well, how about the most obvious thing?
The most obvious thing.
If it's true, as our intelligence agencies have said, that the thing that Russia likes more than anything is to sow discord.
Who is sowing more discord in the United States than Adam Schiff?
Is there anybody who is sowing more discord than Adam Schiff?
No. Adam Schiff has been involved in a plot to dismantle the United States for the last two years.
Compare that to anything Trump is accused of.
Let's compare these two things.
Adam Schiff spent two years destabilizing the United States, a nuclear power, and got really close to succeeding.
That's what Adam Schiff did for Russia.
Here's what the Trump campaign did.
Don Jr. went to a meeting.
I'll say it again in case there's any nuance left.
Adam Schiff has spent two years almost successfully dismantling the stability of the United States in nuclear power.
That's what Adam Schiff did.
And nobody's questioning that statement.
That's exactly what he did.
The Trump campaign, there was a time they went to a meeting and nothing happened.
Those are not equivalent.
They're not even close.
So if the evidence of collusion is a combination of how many Russian contacts you've had, plus what you've done that Russia would like done, it's not even close.
I'll bet Adam Schiff has way more Russian contacts through his whole career.
Probably way more contacts than Trump or Trump's campaign did.
So wouldn't it be true he'd have way more Russian contacts?
I mean, I don't know if it's true, but don't you think it's true?
Because I would think it would be true of any professional politician at that level.
They probably all met a lot of Russians.
And all the Russians seem to be connected to Putin.
And certainly it's true that what he's done is way better.
For Putin than anything that the Trump campaign did.
Not even close. They're not even in the same ballpark.
Anyway, I say this not because I think Adam Schiff is guilty of anything with Russia.
I say it so you can better understand how it could look exactly like anybody was guilty of colluding with Russia.
You could kind of randomly pick anybody and make the same case if you look hard enough.
Now, and of course, people arguing against this would say, well, it's different, because Don Jr., just to pick one example, he intended, we know that he intended to get information at that meeting with a Russian lawyer.
To which I say, it's still the United States, and it's still legal to walk into a different room in your own building, which he did.
That's where the meeting was.
It was in Trump Tower. It's still legal to walk into a room in your own building, you know, the company's building in this case, and listen to something that somebody says.
That's never illegal.
That is never illegal.
Speaking of which, I'm going to brag about a prediction.
Now, I may have said this only once, so I'm going to need some witnesses who saw me or heard me say it.
Was there a point when talking about obstruction of justice and the charges against the president?
Do you remember me saying...
That there's no way that he could get convicted.
And here was my reasoning.
My reasoning was that professional lawyers, people who really went to law school and know what they're doing and have done this for years, looked at the case and looked at the evidence and said, I don't know, some say that looks like obstruction.
But other qualified lawyers look at exactly the same information.
Nobody's questioning the facts.
And said, that doesn't look like it to me.
Now, what did I tell you is always going to be true if high-level lawyers can't even decide if it's illegal or not.
It's one thing to differ about the facts, but the weird thing about this case is that both sides were looking at the same facts and were satisfied that they had the facts.
Nobody was guessing or speculating about information that was yet to come.
We felt we all had the same information.
So in the situation where professional, qualified, experienced lawyers, some say it looks like a problem, and some say it doesn't look like a problem, which way will that always go if you have lawyers as good as the President of the United States?
It will always go to not guilty.
It can't go any other way.
Because you don't live in a country where half of the legal profession can look at a case and say, you know, I can't even really tell.
I mean, I'm looking at the law.
I'm looking at the facts.
And man, I'm a professional.
I just can't even tell if that's even a crime.
There's no way anybody in that kind of situation goes to jail.
No way. Our legal system It has its flaws.
It has its flaws, but that's never going to happen.
I don't think you'll see that.
Now, when I say it's never going to happen, certainly it could happen to a poor person who doesn't have good representation.
But if you have, you know, if your lawyer is the Supreme Court, I'm exaggerating a little bit, right?
Not technically.
But given that the president has made appointments to the Supreme Court and that they're conservative-leaning, I will say in a hyperbolic way, the president's lawyer is the Supreme Court.
And they probably like him more than they dislike him.
Now, he also has some of the best lawyers in the world, or at least access to the best legal minds in the world.
So the odds of that actually being a...
A legal risk to the president.
It's always scary, of course, but there was no real chance that he could get in trouble for that in the end.
Now, with that context, what do you think about Mueller's decision to punt the obstruction call to Barr?
Think about it. With the understanding that the best lawyers in the world can't even tell if it's against the law, did you want Mueller to make the decision?
Think about it. You didn't want Mueller to make that decision, in the end, because...
All right, people are saying that it was cowardly and chicken.
I'm not entirely sure, because what we know...
Here's what we know about Mueller, okay?
Very experienced, certainly understands the law, and very smart, and as far as we can tell, as far as we can tell, honorable.
As far as we can tell, a patriot.
I don't have any counter-information to that.
Everybody says the same thing.
If all of those things are true, and you assume capability and good intentions, so I assume both of those things about Mueller, High capability, especially with his staff, etc., and good intentions, meaning he wanted to have the fairest result.
By kicking it over to Barr, he sent a very clear message.
And the clear message is that the law itself is not clear.
That's the message.
So the message that Mueller sent to Barr and indirectly to the rest of the country is that a professional lawyer In fact, some of the top lawyers in the entire country can't even tell if this is against the law.
That was actually a cleaner message than if he had just said we didn't find evidence that the law had been broken.
I actually prefer the way Mueller did it, because Barr's decision is a no-brainer.
Barr is the boss.
When you've got a situation where it's so ambiguous, your very best thing to do is to kick it up to the boss.
And if that boss could kick it up again, that boss should.
If Barr had a boss whose job it was to make legal decisions above Barr, what should Barr have done?
Should have kicked it up, right?
But there was nobody for Barr to kick it up to.
He was the top legal person, and then the next one was the president, and that doesn't count.
So, Mueller's decision to take an ambiguous situation that even lawyers can't tell if it's against the law, and kick it up to his boss, A+. 100% exactly what I would have wished him to do, you know, had I looked at the situation and understood it that way.
Enough on that. So, you saw the President...
Override Betsy DeVos on the Special Olympics.
So the story is Betsy DeVos was going to cut, I don't know, 18% of the budget for Special Olympics, which was just the government part.
Her argument was that the private industry would take care of the rest of it.
I didn't realize how many people were involved in Special Olympics.
There are 272,000 kids Involved in Special Olympics.
I had no idea. If you had asked me, I would have said 5,000.
That would have been my guess.
5,000. Oh, was it 18 million it was?
Or was it 18%?
I'm looking at your comments.
Anyway, but the point is, it doesn't matter at this point.
The president, when he was caught going to the helicopter and the press was asking questions, he said that he's decided to override his people and to reinstate the funding.
Now, here's the great thing about that.
I was laughing when I saw it.
I didn't expect it.
But he made exactly the right play.
So first of all, Betsy DeVos has also issued a statement saying that she too wished Special Olympics could always be funded and it always felt that way, but she was just trying to do her job basically with the budget.
So it's a little awkward for her, but she's handling it.
Here's what I love about it from the President's point of view.
The story started out this way.
The story started out as Trump is a monster who doesn't like kids who would be in the Special Olympics.
So that was the headline he walked into in the morning.
But, sensing an opportunity that his own staff was really the ones who were making those decisions, he publicly overrode the decision.
And said, no, I disagreed, so I completely changed that.
So it completely changes the story to Trump is a champion of Special Olympics.
He took a headline, which was, Trump hates the Special Olympics, to Trump is the savior of the Special Olympics.
Now, not exactly.
And of course, the Democrats will just say, ah, you just screwed up.
Should have been one decision the whole time.
But in terms of what the public saw on camera, because we're far more influenced by, you know, an anecdote than a concept...
The concept was something in the Trump administration was going to cut the Special Olympics, but it didn't happen.
It's sort of a weak concept.
The stronger part is the visual of Trump overriding his own staff to fund the Special Olympics.
That's the part you're going to remember.
So politically, he took a total losing hand and just said, well, let's see what happens if I do this.
Right? Well, that worked.
So that was cool.
And it's not a big enough story that it'll last forever.
So he got a win out of a loss.
If you saw his speech last night, what was the best applause line?
There were two words he used, that if you have children in the room, cover their ears.
Cover their ears.
Put in your headphones. Naughty word is coming.
So Trump, in front of this rally crowd, I would say that Trump looked more relaxed and in the pocket, you know, in terms of his job.
He was in the pocket.
And it was really fun to watch.
I only watched the first part, and I had other stuff to do.
But he refers to the...
He refers to the whole Russia collusion stuff as, quote, ridiculous bullshit.
Now, this president can swear in public better than any president has ever sworn in public.
I'm sure he's pretty good at it in private, too.
But in public?
Have you ever seen anybody swear in public better than this president?
See, now, the beauty of it The beauty of it is that that line, it sort of taunts the anti-Trump press to report it.
What do the citizens of the United States think about the occasional use of the word bullshit in a context where it's totally the right word?
He's not just throwing in swear words because swear words are fun.
This is the part you have to catch.
He does occasionally throw in a naughty word.
So it's not like he's never done it.
But if you think about it, he's careful about when to use it.
He uses it to draw attention to stuff.
And he uses it just enough that it seems like something new, so it draws your attention to it.
Whereas if he did it a lot, it would be too much.
So his perfect use of an inappropriate term and putting the word ridiculous in front of it is what really sold it.
By the way, if all he had said is the Russian collusion investigation was bullshit, that would have been weak.
It just would have been a swear word.
But he says in his perfect delivery, ridiculous bullshit.
It was the most convincing public cursing I've ever seen.
Like, it was authentic.
I know I'm making a big deal about something that seems like a small deal, but it really was so well done that I had to call it out.
Sorry, allergies this morning.
So, you saw the news that there's a prison reform effort.
Put together by Meek Mills and Jay-Z. And I guess it got funded to $50 million, including Robert Kraft.
He was one of the funders.
So he probably needs to fund a few things to stay on the side of the angels at the moment.
But Van Jones has been hired to head it up.
So it's going to be a professional organization dedicated to prison reform.
I don't know exactly what they're going to do, but I like everything about it.
And I like that Van Jones is the leader.
I think that could produce some good stuff.
So that's just a congratulations note.
Here's a question for you.
How long has it been since President Trump Created a new outrage.
Think about it.
Now, I'm not talking about an executive order or the emergency order, because that's just politics.
I'm not talking about canceling Obamacare, because that's over-reported.
He wants to keep existing conditions, etc.
So I'm not talking about just the politics.
How long has it been since Trump just said something that people went...
My God, you can't say that.
Prior to midterms.
Right. Prior to midterms.
That's what I think, too.
Yeah, the Golan is just politics.
I don't know that the McCain comments qualify anymore.
When he was originally talking about McCain...
It seemed like he was banging, you know, he was saying terrible things about a war hero.
And then later, later it seemed like maybe McCain's hands were a little bit dirty, because not only did he have a, you know, down vote on Obamacare, getting rid of it, but he...
You know, he had some involvement with getting that dossier to the press.
Now that involvement seems to be indirect or maybe not at all, because now we know that Lindsey Graham actually advised McCain to give the dossier to the FBI. And it was somebody that was on McCain's staff who took it to the press.
So we don't know that McCain necessarily was behind anything going to the press.
But it gave the President an opening to criticize him, and it doesn't seem to me that the McCain criticisms really caught the public's attention.
That was my impression, wouldn't you say?
Because it seemed like just more of the same, and McCain had it coming a little bit.
So anyway, my point is that the President said, after the midterms, that maybe he would try to tone it down a little bit.
And I would say that maybe he has.
Or maybe we just got used to him, or maybe it's something in between.
But he's gone a long time without creating a brand new story of outrage.
Am I wrong about that?
Fact check me on that, but it just seems like that hasn't happened lately.
Alright, let's talk about how to fix everything.
Let's say you wanted to fix healthcare.
You wanted to fix the prison system, prison reform.
Let's say you wanted to fix education.
And let's say you wanted to fix the budget.
Let's say you wanted to fix all those things at the same time.
And let's say you wanted to do reparations, slave reparations, slavery reparations.
And let's say you wanted to do that in a way that did not make anybody mad.
Sounds impossible, right?
How in the world could you do slave reparations, slavery reparations in this country, without angering a huge amount of people?
Can't be done, right?
Well, challenge accepted.
Let me suggest something that would solve a whole host of problems by solving one thing.
I just want to put that out there.
Suppose the president said...
We need at least one high-quality, free education program.
So we don't have to change all colleges.
We just need to create one guaranteed free path to college for everyone.
For everyone.
So here's my plan.
If the only thing you fixed...
Was the cost of a good college education, or let's say training as well, so it's not just college, it's any kind of career changing.
If you were to make that all free, could you do a lot less with health care?
Yes. Because if you're training people better, you have gone a long way toward getting people jobs, and then they can afford health care.
Or they work for a company that pays for their healthcare.
So if you were to fix the college slash career training thing and make that free for everyone, you would make a huge impact eventually on healthcare costs because people would be working.
And when you're working, you can at least have a chance of affording it.
Let's take slavery reparations.
If you came up with any kind of a plan that transferred money from people who had nothing to do with slavery to people who may or may not have even been descended from slaves, nobody's going to approve it.
Well, I won't say nobody, but it won't get public approval.
Enough of it. So you can't have anything that's like a direct transfer of wealth from one ethnic group or many ethnic groups to another.
That will never fly in this country and shouldn't.
But suppose you said, as part of slavery reparations, we're going to make it college free for everyone.
For everyone. It will have no impact on rich people because they were going to go to college anyway.
But for everybody of every ethnicity, it would be free.
That, I think you could consider a form of reparations.
And I'm going to use Hawk Newsome's insight that I think he borrowed from somebody, but I liked it.
Somebody says, I'm turning off now.
You haven't even heard the argument.
Why would you turn it off before you hear the argument?
I like the people who are so close-minded.
I'm not going to wait till the end where I hear all the argument.
I'll just hear the first part, and I'm done.
Don't you trust me that by the end of this, it's going to sound better than it sounds now?
Don't you think I can sell this a little better than I have yet?
You don't think there's more coming?
Come on! First day on Periscope.
So, here's the thing.
If you fixed education in this country, it would go a long way toward fixing race relations.
It would go a long way to fixing health care, because more people would be working.
It would eliminate future college debt, because you wouldn't need it if you didn't want it.
It would reduce our debt, national debt, because even though the college would cost a lot, the amount it would add to the economy eventually would probably be far greater.
There are few things that are more valuable than putting somebody to work.
Let me say it this way.
If you had a choice between giving all of you who already have jobs a 10% raise or A few of you who don't have jobs go from unemployed to employed, which is better.
It's way better for the total economy to take somebody from unemployed where they cost money to employed where they're creating value.
That's the big gap.
Going from unemployed to employed is an enormous economic leap.
Getting a raise is really good, but that's a smaller impact.
So, you can take care of prison reform, because people would have education and more options.
So if you fixed healthcare, I'm sorry, if you fixed only education, made it free, widely available, and covered trade stuff as well as regular college, you would solve almost all of the other big problems in the country.
Until the robots take over and then none of us have jobs and then we're all dead.
Somebody said college is BS except for STEM. I think that insight is not only correct, but could be a key part to making college free.
So the first thing you should do to make college free is acknowledge what the commenter said, which is the current form of college, is not only expensive, But it's way poorly designed.
If you look at the classes that people have to take to get some kind of a degree, there's always some garbage in there.
You could design an accredited school, maybe it's a government accreditation, for a free path.
Now that path might include a lot of online training, so it could look like anything.
All right. Apparently, last night on Martha McCallum's show, a guest, Marie Harf, was on and said, once again repeated the fine people hoax.
And I haven't seen the clip, so if anybody can tweet me the clip, I'd like to see it.
But apparently Martha McCallum did not...
Oh, somebody's...
You're still on the education thing.
So I didn't do a good job of summarizing the point.
The point looks like this.
There are some things you can spend money on and you've just lost your money.
But there are other things you spend money on and you get it back.
So it's not an investment per se, but it's a good use of money because you put a little money here, but you gain a lot of money there.
Education is more like that than almost anything else.
If the government just said, all right, we're just going to Have a bigger deficit or raise your taxes or whatever you're going to do, but everybody's going to get free college.
Maybe it's online.
Maybe you can't all go to Harvard, but there's some kind of free college and training.
If you did that, the idea is that the benefit to the overall economy would be so enormous, maybe in 10 years, but it would be so enormous, That the national debt would go down overall because people would be working.
Healthcare would cost less because people would have jobs, they'd have income.
So the idea is that $1 spent on fixing education would create $10 for the economy.
So that's the key point.
If it's not true that investing $1 in education It gives you back $10 in the economy, then I'm not in favor of it.
So that's the only thing you have to ask yourself.
Is it true that putting a dollar into education so that everybody, especially the lower-income people, can get a real education or real job training, whatever that looks like, is it true that a dollar spent on that creates $10 in economic benefit or something that's a multiple of $1?
So just check that one point, because if the one point is true, Then all the rest of the argument holds together.
And if it's not true, none of it holds together.
So just fact check me on that one thing.
That's it. All right.
So I was saying Martha McCallum had Marie Harf guest on and she repeated the fine people hoax.
If anybody has that clip, send it to me.
Because once again, somebody says wrong.
If it is wrong, then I would certainly reassess my opinion.
So we've got to keep staying on that find people hoax.
I tweeted out yesterday, some of you saw it, that if you do a Google search on, quote, find people in Charlottesville, that's your search term, Google will kick up the debunking of the hoax in the third spot, so it's near the top.
So I think the first two links talk about it like it really happened, but then the third link, fairly easy to notice, calls it a hoax, so at least it's in the top page.
So I'd like to get it to the top spot, so I'm going to keep hammering on it, but at least it's at the top page.
And thanks to Steve Cortez, by the way, because his article in Real Clear Politics is the link that made it to the third spot.
So without Steve Cortez's article, that would not have happened.
So good work from Steve on that.
That really helps the country a lot, in my opinion.
The President made a claim last night in a speech that this is the first year That pharmaceutical prices have not gone up.
Is that true? I did not see any fact-checking on that.
So I went to CNN page to find out, because it would be a big headline, the president lied about pharmaceutical costs.
And I didn't see it.
Maybe it's there, or maybe it's coming.
But can somebody do a fact-check on that?
Is it true that drug prices did not go up in the past year?
Is that true? Because it doesn't feel true, but he said it in very clear language, and I did not see it fact-checked.
So, somebody check on that, because that's enormous.
That is enormous, if it's true.
And if it's not true, I'd like to know if there's anything that's true-ish in that category that he was talking about.
All right. Let's talk about Speaking of education, I've told you that I'm taking drum lessons online.
Part of the reason I wanted to take drum lessons online is to experience online training in a real situation where I really wanted to learn something And that was the only method I was using, other than practice.
So, my drum teacher is now on my company's app, the interface by WenHub app.
And I want to point anybody to him who wants to also take a drum lesson, because I can vouch that it's been very good for me, and he's a good teacher.
His name is Michael, and if you go to the interface by WenHub app, where you can contact an expert and pay them for their time in real time by a video call, I'll just put in drum, drum, drum, drum, drumming, Search for drums, and then there are a whole bunch of drum teachers.
I'll just tell you which one was mine.
Let's see if he's still on there.
He may have signed off.
Oh, there he is. Michael Anitzberger.
So if you wanted to use my drum teacher, just use the keyword drums and look for Michael Anitzberger.
And he's set at $95 an hour.
You'll see other drummers are cheaper.
I would suggest that he might be worth it compared to the lower cost drumming people.
And you can also schedule him.
So he's got his schedule on there so you can schedule him.
And I would hope that if you support the app, the Interface by OneHub app, it will go a long way toward making it easier to find information about a whole host of things.
So this past week, we had an expert on the Interface by OneHub app who was advising people on cancer clinical trials.
Now think about this.
Let's say you have cancer, and you're going to your cancer doctor, and maybe you've got a cancer specialist.
And you say, are there any clinical trials I can get into for my type of cancer that doesn't respond to regular treatments?
Would your regular doctor know about available cancer clinical trials that you could get into?
And the answer is no.
Because not every doctor is following that field of all the clinical trials.
So our expert was taking calls the last few days.
He's still on there. You can just search for cancer.
And he advises people how to find clinical trials.
Now imagine trying to Google that yourself.
It's basically un-Google-able, at least in a comprehensive way.
Yeah, most people would not be able to know how to find the right...
And the other problem is that the trials are really specific to types of cancer.
So matching your cancer with a specific trial is no easy thing, but it can be done if an expert knows the field.
So that's the sort of benefit...
That the interface by WenHub app should bring, and I hope you'll support it.
I will also tell you, just out of total fairness, that the value of the Wen token that's integrated with the app, so we've created our own crypto, not crypto, but let's say a blockchain token, That you can use to pay people within the app or cash, so you can just use regular cash if you want.
But the value of the tokens could be going up.
It's not an investment, and you should not listen to cartoonists telling you where to put your money.
You should never do that.
But there's a lot of activity, and we're going to be doing a major...
A series of marketing for the app.
And in theory, if the app is successful, the value of the tokens would go way up.
And so this would be the time, if you thought it was going to be successful, This would be the time to own those tokens.
No guarantees. Not an investment.
Don't take financial advice from cartoonists.
But it is nonetheless true that this would be the part of the life cycle that if it were going to go up, you would have wished you had gotten in there.
All right. North Korea seems to be stumbling.
In terms of our conversation with them.
I would suggest, and I don't know if this has happened yet, and maybe I've said this before, that the stumbling block seems to be how do they keep their nuclear program while also getting rid of their nuclear program.
So there's one sticking point that people can't quite figure out how to get past, and I've got a suggestion.
And the suggestion would be that the United States or South Korea propose that they transition the nuclear expertise that they have for weapons Into domestic, maybe a test bed for generation four nuclear power.
Now generation four is the stuff that doesn't melt down.
It's easier, so you don't have the risks that you have with traditional old nuclear.
And if they have a bunch of nuclear experts, and this part you'd have to fact check, but I'm assuming that if you had expertise in nuclear weaponry, A lot of that should cross over to domestic nuclear purposes.
Now, one of the benefits of North Korea is that it's already a terrible, dangerous place, and the Kim family can make any regulations they want about anything.
So, in theory, you should be able to get a nuclear power plant, a Generation 4 plant, up and running in North Korea faster than you could do it anywhere else.
Simply because Kim can say, what do you need?
Well, we need a bunch of land in a certain kind of place.
It needs some power, and it needs whatever it needs.
And Kim could just say, okay, you got it.
And so North Korea could become a world power, In becoming experts in designing and exporting safe, small nuclear power.
And so here's why this idea is appealing.
Generation 4 nuclear power is appealing by itself.
North Korea is a unique place where they could speed through the regulations to build them.
It's hard to do in the United States because of all the regulations.
Next, it gives an off-ramp For Kim, in which he comes on ahead with his nuclear program.
Now, you might say to yourself, yes, Scott, but a nuclear weapons program is for a completely different purpose than domestic nuclear power.
Those are not the same thing, and maybe it's not directly transferable, just a little bit of overlap with the expertise.
So it's not really like the nuclear weapons can just sort of evolve into peaceful nuclear power.
But it doesn't need to.
It's the story.
So what I'm talking about is not so much the practical variables on the ground, but rather the story.
If I say to the public, we have this, we built this nuclear capability for weapons.
We no longer need these weapons because now we're working well with China and the United States and South Korea.
This would be Kim's story.
We don't need those weapons, but we don't want to give up our national pride, our national asset.
So we're going to transition this to become the greatest domestic, you know, safe nuclear power company in the world.
That story is a story of winning.
The story of we built nuclear weapons and now we have to throw them away because somebody big told us to is a total loser story.
You can't give Kim an off-ramp to doom and then wonder why he doesn't play ball.
Don't give anybody an off-ramp to doom and expect good results.
You've got to build an off-ramp to something that works.
Now, the president has quite cleverly, and the first smart person who even got into this conversation, in my opinion...
Has made a big deal about talking about the economic potential of North Korea.
So he's already set the table that where we'd like to see North Korea go is richer and more successful.
And I think that's true.
To add that extra element of could you become our testing ground where even we benefit from what you do with nuclear weapons?
You know, Chairman Kim, can you help us?
Do you feel that? Feel the difference between, Chairman Kim, get rid of your nuclear assets, the gem of your entire nation, the greatest accomplishment of North Korea.
Why don't you throw them all away, because we're big and we'll punish you if you don't.
That's the message we have going now, right?
Compare that to, Chairman Kim, we've got this huge problem.
It's called climate change.
Or at least the experts say so.
And even if you don't like the climate change problem, we need a lot of energy to power the world.
In order to power the world, we need energy.
We can't seem to figure it out.
The whole rest of the world Can't seem to figure out how to build some Generation 4 reactors.
I'm exaggerating because they are being built in China, etc.
But we need you.
We need North Korea to get us to Generation 4 in the most effective way.
So can you help us with your gigantic nuclear assets and the fact that you have the ability to cut through red tape in North Korea?
Can you help us How does that story sound?
There's no competition.
That story is an off-ramp That the experts are going to say, and they would, well, you can't just transition from nuclear weapons to Generation 4 nuclear.
They're practically, you know, they're 98% different things.
It's just 2%, maybe some of the experts are easy to transition.
Doesn't matter. It's about the story.
And the story takes advantage of the fact that the public doesn't know anything about nuclear anything.
And to the public, if you said, hey, public, they're going to transition their nuclear assets to safe nuclear, what would the public say?
Sounds great.
Sounds great. Because the public can't tell the difference between nuclear weapons and Generation 4 nuclear plants.
That's why we don't have them.
If the public could tell the difference between a safe Generation 4 new nuclear design and a nuclear bomb, you know, if we knew the difference, we would already have Generation 4 nuclear plants all over the place.
All right. Let's open it up to questions.
That's all I had today.
Open it up to questions.
What's the most interesting thing I said today?
Oh, Chicago. Yeah.
The smaller story is...
I don't know, it's a little played out, but apparently Jussie Smollett has been nominated for a so-called image award.
So he's been nominated for an award for the good image that he's creating.
I hope he wins because that would be hilarious.
Somebody said, why is AOC persuasive?
But Beto is not.
Beto is persuasive.
Beto is persuasive by definition, meaning that you have seen him succeed, and you have watched him persuade people.
So I haven't watched his technique so much, except I've talked about his arm movements probably do help him, and the standing on the tables and the standing on the cars probably helps him.
But it also helps that he's a Sort of an engaging, you know, white guy and women like him and all that.
So he is persuasive, but he's not AOC persuasive.
He's whatever's the rung just below her, I would say.
You're going to get attacked for your reparations.
Now, that's interesting.
So somebody says, I'm going to get attacked for my reparations.
Now, I just called reparations We're free college for everybody.
Everybody, not black people.
Free college for everyone.
How is that going to get me in trouble?
It should get me in trouble for free college.
The fact that I said, it's essentially...
Oh, I forgot. I didn't finish a point.
So I see why there's an air gap there.
I wanted to borrow...
I think I got interrupted. I wanted to borrow Hawke Newsome's...
He had a good way of framing something.
And I think he borrowed it from somebody.
But the idea was that when you help African Americans, you end up helping everybody.
Because if, in his view, if the African American situation is the most dire, if you help that, then you've helped anybody who's in a similar situation, because everything's connected.
And I'm doing a bad job of explaining that, but the idea is That if you just help the poorest people who have the least options and get them trained and get them employed, that everyone wins.
So you could call it reparations, but who would object to reparations that helped 90% of non-black people?
You know, 90% of the benefit would go to non-African Americans.
Who would object to that?
Now, you can object to it because it costs money, but then it's just a budget question.
And it gets back to, is it a $1 expense that makes $10 in economics?
So you have to answer that question.
I'll get rid of whoever told me I'm doing a bad job in all using all capital letters.
I Somebody says it is not reparations then.
Okay, so let me do a better job, because I see I'm not connecting my thoughts well enough.
So your criticisms, I think, are valid, because I'm not doing a good job of connecting the thoughts.
The thought is this, that we wouldn't embark on the free college thing, except that one of its benefits Is the same kind of benefits of reparations.
So it's a replacement for reparations.
So it would not be fair to say that free college is reparations.
It would be fair to say we have several problems from economics to health care to racial relations.
We're going to solve all of them the same way.
And so if you say, this isn't reparations, it makes reparations unnecessary.
And it's informed by reparations.
In other words, it's listening to what people are saying about reparations.
It's coming up with a plan that affects all ethnicities equally, because it's only the poor people.
That's all ethnicities.
And it directly addresses the problem because it creates a success path for everyone.
Alright, that's my story.
I'm sticking to it.
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