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April 5, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
34:52
Episode 481 Scott Adams: 97% of Scientists Love Gen IV Nuclear, Theron, Mueller, Solar
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here.
I'm a little slow today.
I don't know what's getting into me.
I've been sleeping lately.
But you know what time it is?
Yeah. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
I am Scott Adams. You probably are ready.
And if you're not, you've got a few seconds to get there.
Grab your mug, your glass, your thermos, your stein, your tankard.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Ah, so sweet.
So sweet. Well, did everybody see the President's tweet about Joe Biden?
It's another terrific meme.
I'm not sure if we're supposed to know who the meme maker is or not, so I'm not going to say anything about that.
But remember when people said, we can't let President Trump normalize this or that behavior?
And he would say outrageous things that politicians are not supposed to say.
And people would say, ah, don't normalize that.
We can't get used to this kind of behavior.
And when I saw him tweet the hilarious meme of Joe Biden giving his sort of explanation speech about all of his touchiness, And in the meme, you can see another Joe Biden come up behind that Joe Biden and put his hands on his shoulders and sniff his hair.
It's like the funniest thing.
And I'm thinking to myself, it feels totally normal.
So the President of the United States tweets this meme mocking Joe Biden.
And I looked at it and I thought, I don't know, I'm used to this.
I mean, I loved it, so it was still funny.
Yeah, it was Carpe Duncombe.
I think everybody knows that, who made the meme.
And I thought to myself, totally normal.
And in fact, someday we'll have a president who is not Donald Trump.
It's going to be so frickin' boring.
I don't know if I'm even going to follow politics after Trump.
Because I've never really been that interested before.
I went through eight years of Obama.
I didn't even watch the political news.
I mean, I just completely didn't care.
It was not entertaining.
Things have changed.
So I hope we get a few more years of entertainment.
All right, let's talk about Pete Buttigieg, who, because his...
I guess his fame and importance in the race are rising...
So he's going to start getting harder attacks.
One of the clever gotcha questions was somebody asked him, apparently in the past, he had said in public, in response to somebody asking, do you think all black lives matter?
He had fallen into the trap.
At some point in the past, he said, thinking it was a good answer, all lives matter.
Only to learn later that All Lives Matter is a trap that makes you look like a racist.
That's right. If you say everybody is equally important, You're a racist, according to the rules that I didn't make.
These are the rules made by whoever, I guess whoever says black lives matter, the same people say that if you respond with all lives matter, you are diminishing the original point that black lives matter, which indirectly means you must be a racist.
So Pete Buttigieg ends up saying he regrets it.
So what you're seeing here is a pattern.
Now, I'm completely uninterested in the question of what lives matter and whether that's an insult to anybody or not.
That's just boring. I am interested in the fact that from now until Election Day, people are going to be hounding Democrats for apologies, for everything.
And the older you are, whoever gets into the race, if you're an older politician, let's say Bernie or Biden, you probably are going to have more things to apologize for.
So I think the Democrats...
Are eating themselves with the apology tours.
And when they're done, the Republicans will be happy to keep eating them by continuing to make them apologize.
Which is hilarious.
Let me put it this way.
If you have the bad luck to be running for president against a sitting president...
Well, you know, I'm sorry, because running against a sitting president sometimes works.
If you're sort of a weak-feeling president such as Bush Sr., it might work.
If you're Jimmy Carter running against you after your first term, it might work.
But running after President Trump, running against him, when he's got a one-term under his belt, That term might have produced the strongest economy in the safest country of all time.
And he's famous for not apologizing.
It's like his brand.
Not apologizing.
That's my brand. And you're going to run against that guy.
That guy?
Of all the people in the world, you're going to run against a guy running for a second term with the strongest economy, the strongest military, The safest country in the history of countries.
And he's famous for not apologizing.
And you're going to bring your weak little apology game against that?
Good luck. Good luck.
Alright. So there was a hilarious quote that I think is probably going to get me in trouble.
Oh, somebody asked, what is the slaughter meter?
The slaughter meter is at 50%.
Because the president gets an F for healthcare, and he gets an F for climate change.
Now I know half of you just, no, maybe 90% of you just said, what?
What? He doesn't get an F for climate change, because climate change isn't even real.
Wrong. Half of the country thinks it's real, which is the important part.
He's a politician. He's the leader of the country.
Half or more, not more than half, right?
I don't know what the percentage is, but more than half, think it's real and think it's the end of the world.
You don't really ignore that, especially when you have Generation 4 nuclear as a clear path, or even solar.
You could go crazy with solar, and you would be producing good stuff Without hurting the economy.
So to have a clear path that would deal with climate change, and it would also be the same path, even if climate change isn't a problem.
Cheaper energy, less dependence on other countries, these are obvious paths.
And the fact that the administration is not pushing this obvious path Whether or not climate change is the giant problem that a lot of people are saying, doesn't matter.
It's the same path. If you're not helping the country down the only path, the only path that makes sense, that's enough.
It's not like there were multiple paths, and I think one path is good, somebody thinks another path is good, well, it's hard to know who's right.
If you only have one path, and you're not going down it, That's an F. So, President gets an F failing grade for climate, even if it's not a risk.
Politically, it's an F. Healthcare?
Where is the President's healthcare plan?
Doesn't exist. He's punting it to 2020.
That's an F. That's a failing grade.
So, the slaughter meter is at 50%.
It's a toss-up.
I don't think he can necessarily...
He's definitely not going to win in a landslide if he doesn't fix those two things.
But here's the good news.
Both fixable. They're both fixable.
He can at least have a plan that he can talk about for after the election.
So that's fixable.
And he's got enough time to do it.
And getting on the right path for Generation 4 nuclear...
Surprisingly, the administration is actually doing the right things.
But for reasons that baffle me, and maybe it's purely political, maybe they don't know how to talk about nuclear without getting in trouble, for whatever reason, they're not packaging them up as accomplishments.
They're actual, real accomplishments.
I've never seen an administration...
Tell me if you think this is not a true statement.
I've never seen an administration have a higher ratio of actually doing useful things and not bragging about it.
And of all administrations, the Trump administration, you'd expect to be the braggiest, you know, the one that would do the best job of showing people what they've done.
Rick Perry is apparently doing a bunch of good stuff with nuclear.
He's set up that rapid testing for nuclear fuel for the new technologies.
Apparently he's done something to push for the carbon sequest...
the carbon filtering stuff where they can suck the carbon out of the air.
He's worked on that somehow.
So they've done things that are actually exactly the right things to do, and you wouldn't even know about them except for the press release that comes out of the energy department.
The president doesn't even talk about this stuff.
So that's a failing grade on that, but easy to fix.
All right, so I did a tweet yesterday that I'm so proud of.
I'm not always proud of my tweets, but this one I'm very proud of.
And I'm going to read you the tweet.
So this is from me.
I tweeted it yesterday.
And I said, 97% of climate scientists...
Wink, wink, wink, wink.
Alright, so 97% of climate scientists agree that Generation 4 nuclear power that is safe from meltdown and eats nuclear waste from older reactors for energy is the only way to combat climate change in time And at the needed scale.
That's right. I said that 97% of climate scientists want nuclear power.
What did people say when they saw that tweet?
Well, most people knew what I was doing.
They knew what I was doing and they liked it.
But some people said, where'd you get that statistic?
Where'd you get that? I'm not so sure I believe that statistic.
Now, if you've been following my persuasion lessons for the last couple of years, you know that because it's 97%, and obviously it's designed to match the 97% of climate scientists who say that climate change is man-made and problematic, so it's intentionally matching that number.
Is it real?
Well, here's the funny thing.
It might be low. I don't know what the real number would be, but it might be low.
And here's what I mean.
If you were to actually go to climate scientists, and you were to say, you know, here are all our options.
Let's say you believe that you've got this problem coming.
Here are all the things we could do.
And I'm going to explain to you Generation 4 nuclear and what the potential is, how low the risk is, etc.
Now what do you do? Do you let the planet die?
Or, do you agree that this is an obvious path we should be on?
I actually think that 97% of climate scientists would actually say yes.
Now, you might have to explain to them something that's outside their field.
If they're not up to date on nuclear developments, they might say, no, nuclear is risky.
But then you would just say, well, let me explain to you why.
Maybe you're not up to date on this.
And after they heard the explanation, I actually think they would all say yeah.
So the magic of the tweet is that it makes people disagree.
So let's say somebody is a climate change alarmist type, and they see that 97%, the first thing they're going to say is, that's BS. That's BS. I don't believe that.
And that's what I want them to say.
Because in the process of debunking it, which I am inviting people to do, of course, that's the whole point of it, in the process of getting people to think about it, focus on it, and debunk it, they will be educating themselves.
On Generation 4 nuclear possibilities.
That's all I want.
I just want them to focus on it.
I want them to get a little mad.
I want them to be skeptical where that number came from.
I want them to doubt it.
I want them to dig into it to prove me wrong.
And then I want them to become educated.
Because it might be 100%, not 97%.
Smart people are debating me.
Mostly online and sometimes offline, saying that the real solution is solar and that the only way to get to a good situation quickly, quick enough, is the same argument I'm saying for generation for nuclear, the stuff that's safe from meltdown and uses nuclear fuel for nuclear waste for fuel.
Other people are saying the same argument, except they're saying it for solar.
Solar is the only thing we can ramp up quickly enough.
We basically know how to do it.
You know, we could just start, you know, just putting these things out there as fast as possible, and that's the only way we could do something fast enough to make a difference to climate change.
And the people who are saying this are smart, serious people who have looked into it.
But I ask you this.
I have not looked into it.
So I'm not an expert on solar.
I'm not an expert on nuclear.
But here's what I am an expert on.
Bullshit. If there's one thing I know, it's bullshit.
For much of my corporate life, I spend time making financial projections.
You know, what would this technology do at this time?
What would it cost to buy this technology?
Will it pay for itself? That sort of thing.
So, the analyses that people are making about solar and the ones that they're making about nuclear, they both have one important variable.
The most important variable in both of those analyses, which one's the good one, solar or nuclear?
What's the most important variable in both of them?
Stuff we don't know is going to happen?
Surprises. They both require a surprise.
They both require something to happen faster than you think it ought to.
We're to discover, let's say, in the case of solar, it sort of requires developments in battery technology that I don't believe are on the table.
Now, we have lots of optimism that we can figure out how to get to battery storage that's economical and that could be scaled.
I believe we have some ideas You know, probably a lot of things in the lab that look promising.
But we don't know.
We don't know how to get enough battery storage to make solar work.
So that's just a big question mark.
Can we solve that?
Pretty good chance.
Yeah. I don't know when, and I don't know at what economical, you know, level.
Same with Generation 4 nuclear.
We have all the basics.
You know, we know the basic ideas, and we know a number of different ways, because Generation 4 is sort of an umbrella.
There are a number of ways to get to a safe, economical thing.
We don't know exactly which one's the most promising.
It would require some iteration.
So if you're comparing nuclear to solar, both of them being, you know, how do you go crazy with them and really get to the point Where it takes over the power grid.
If you're telling me that there's somebody who's smart enough to know which of those two plans is economically and environmentally the good one, I will tell you that you're a person who's never done that kind of analysis.
If you've ever been involved in that kind of analysis, which I used to do for a living, I don't mean on those topics, just on technology in general, you know that when you're looking at 80 years, And really, I suppose you'd be looking at 20 years with both of these, because that would be the key development times.
You can't estimate them.
You really can't.
Anybody who tells you they know which one of those is the good way to go is just guessing.
Now, given that you can't really know, which one should you put your focus on?
So I'm going to ask an economics question.
For you, it's a world of limited resources, and let's say you believe it's an emergency, we've got to have one of these two technologies.
Which one do you go with?
Give me an answer in your comments.
You're all economists now, you're all in charge, and you know you can't tell which one's going to be the good one.
There just isn't any way to know, but they're both very promising.
Which way do you go?
Why nuclear? All right, there is one person here who's been paying attention.
Some of you fell for the trap.
As Greg Guffeld says, you fell into the prison of two ideas.
I trapped you.
I intentionally made you think that picking one of them or the other one was somehow smart.
It's not. If we had a world where there was only a little bit of money, And if you used that money for one of those, you didn't have any money left for the other.
In that case, you have to make a choice.
Which one would you pick?
I'd probably go nuclear because it's my sense that they're a little further along in how to have a complete solution.
Whereas solar, I don't know where they are battery-wise, but that's probably just my ignorance.
However, we do not live in that world.
The nuclear development for Generation 4, as far as I know, is not being slowed down by a lack of money.
There seems to be a lot of funding for Generation 4 nuclear projects.
So money doesn't seem to be what's stopping them.
Likewise for solar, companies like Google, you know, and really anybody who likes the environment and wants to broadcast their involvement with the environment, it's going to be easy.
To get private investments, even massive private investments, for big solar projects because they're just so lovable.
So in a world where private industry is massively willing to invest in solar and massively willing, and we can observe this, we don't have to guess, they're doing it right now, massively willing to invest in Generation 4, you don't have to choose.
That's the beauty. You don't have to choose.
In fact, it would be dumb not to do both.
Now, somebody here has the exact right answer, which is, do both of them small.
That's always the way you should be thinking.
You should say to yourself, wait a minute, if I built, you know, let's say a massive solar power plant, and it worked, then maybe I would reproduce that and make, you know, a hundred of them.
But you don't have to wonder if a hundred work.
If you have the funding, build one.
Likewise, with the Generation 4 stuff, there are several models.
There are several ways to go.
They need to iterate. You don't have to wonder which is the right one.
Build the best one you can.
See if it has a problem.
See if you can do better. Iterate.
So as long as you stay small until you have your model worked out, you don't have to ask the question, which one is the one to go with?
Do both. Stay small.
Use private money. The government should do a better job of focusing on it and maybe removing regulations where it is necessary.
So the government can do a big job of focusing resources, but mostly private industry.
There are a few things that the government probably is uniquely suited for, such as Rick Perry's project for the testing of the different nuclear fuels.
So, we don't have to answer the question which is the good one.
If there are smart people willing to invest in both of them, and smart people who say this is the one, and other smart people who say this is the one, you do both.
There's no question about that.
Now again, if President Trump said, look, we've got two promising ways forward and two competing sets of ideas.
I'm going to focus on both of them and make sure that they both get as much oxygen as they can to do the best they can and effectively compete against each other for who has the best solution.
That would be an A-plus presidential performance as opposed to the F that he's at right now.
Alright, this is just funny.
Changing topics. Charlize Theron.
Everybody know actress Charlize Theron.
If you know who she is, you also know that she's famous for being attractive.
So she is a famous and famously attractive actress.
I believe that's still okay for me to say in the era of Me Too, in the era of Joe Biden.
Because that's her brand.
You know, those are the roles she gets.
That's sort of what she's famous for.
And she was interviewed recently, and she had this quote.
Apparently she's been single for ten years.
She's been single for ten years, so she's no longer dating Sean Penn, but she was.
And somebody asked her about that, and she said, quote, It's not a long shot.
The context was having somebody date her and get married is not a long shot.
Theron said of someone courting her, somebody just needs to grow a pair and step up.
I'm shockingly available.
So shockingly available is the way I interpret it, meaning for somebody who is beautiful and has a good job, it's shocking that men are not stepping up.
Here's my advice.
For Charlize Theron, if you ever want a serious man to be your boyfriend, don't say sentences like this.
Never say, somebody just needs to grow a pair and step up.
If you were a single man, would you date somebody who ever used that sentence?
I wouldn't. Because there's something in that sentence that tells you everything about what it would be like to be with her, and I didn't like it.
I didn't like it at all.
I mean, if your invitation for somebody to date you Is literally a sexual insult.
Something about your genitalia not being sufficient.
You know, we're done.
We're done. We don't need to go to the second sentence.
Charlize, you have disqualified yourself with your first sentence.
You never even got to the second sentence.
Anyway, that's my dating advice right there.
I guess...
What's his name? Trey Gowdy was doing a TV interview and he was making the point that he thinks that Mueller punted to Barr on the question of obstruction because there was some ambiguity in what a president can and cannot do legally.
So let me just read the quote.
So this is from Trey Gowdy.
He says, so I think what Mueller was saying is that we don't know The department's position on whether the president can obstruct justice or not.
In other words, talking about the Justice Department, I guess.
So we don't know whether the president can obstruct justice or not.
In other words, they don't even know, can that even be the law?
And then he said, that's for you to decide, we're going to punt it to you, meaning punt it to Barr.
And so the question was, the reason that Mueller...
Did not conclude whether the president had obstructed or not, is that it wasn't a fact question.
Remember, this is what I've been telling you for a while.
It's not a fact question.
It's a question that multiple lawyers, who are all good lawyers, could look at the same facts, have no question about the facts, and say to themselves, I don't even know.
I can't even tell if this is illegal.
In this special case, because it's a president, Acting within the bounds of his legal responsibilities.
I don't even know if that could ever be called.
Like, we don't know.
So Barr, being apparently the smartest person in the conversation, looked at the facts, whatever the facts are, looked at the fact that the law is unclear, and then made the only If the law can't even decide if it's illegal, as in this case, if trained lawyers don't know if it's illegal, that's the end of the conversation.
That's the end of the conversation.
If they don't even know if it's illegal, you don't need to go to the details.
You just say, oh, that is our situation.
Smart people can't even tell if it's illegal.
That is the end of the conversation.
Nobody in this country at that level, I'm talking about the president or anything that's in the news especially, might be a different standard for poor people with bad lawyers, let's be honest.
If you have a bad lawyer, you're poor, maybe you get screwed in this situation.
But if you're the president, you can afford a lawyer, you're in the public eye.
We do not live in the country, nor will we ever, Where somebody's gonna get punished for something that smart lawyers can't even tell is illegal.
That can never happen in our system.
It would just, it would be a violation of our, such our core Like American values.
That you couldn't get one person in a jury to go with that.
Because the lawyer would say, look, I'm a lawyer.
Here are these other lawyers.
We don't even know if this is illegal.
You, the juror, let me ask you this.
Do you want to live in a world where you could go to jail for something that trained lawyers and even some judges couldn't even tell it was a crime?
You give me that jury...
You give me what I just said, I get zero people voting for a conviction.
And they don't even need to know that the facts of the case are.
I'd say, let's ignore the facts of the case.
Just look at the fact that the biggest experts in the country don't even know if this is illegal.
They can't even tell.
And they're looking at all the facts.
There are no facts in dispute.
What do you say, jury?
Zero people in that jury vote guilty.
Zero. Every time.
There's no question about this.
This is like the cleanest legal situation you'll ever see in your life is an unclear situation.
Because the lack of clarity is what makes you know exactly which way it has to go.
It can only go one way.
Let's talk about the IRS. So apparently...
Old Nads and the Dingleberries are continuing their decades-old attacks on Trump.
I guess Nadler's been after Trump since way before Trump was even in politics, back in Manhattan.
And they're going after his taxes.
And the total bullshit excuse that they're using is that they have oversight over the IRS, which is true.
They have the legal ability to ask for the tax returns of any citizen, apparently, and apparently that's true.
But the excuse that they're using is that it's their oversight job, and they want to make sure that the IRS is really doing its job with Trump's taxes.
Now here's the problem.
Nobody in the world on either side, no lawyer anywhere, thinks that this is legitimate.
They might think it's technically legal.
And as far as I can tell, it is.
It looks like it's technically legal.
But there is nobody on either side who thinks it's legitimate.
There's nobody who thinks this is a proper use of the system.
Under those conditions, what can we predict will happen?
Well, I don't know exactly if the president...
Can control physically his tax returns.
Meaning that if there's somebody in charge who has access to them, who decides to give them up, I don't know if the President can physically stop it.
But I can tell you that the...
Revolution. I can tell you that the President has good lawyers.
And I can tell you that something that is so overtly It's an overtly obvious, nobody's even trying to hide it, inappropriate use of the law as a punishment tool and as a political attack.
Doesn't that have to go to the Supreme Court?
Do you see any world in which that does not go to the Supreme Court?
One way or the other. It's going to get to the Supreme Court, right?
Supreme Court, at the moment, sort of leans Trump's way.
And apparently he's trying to also rush through Trump's nomination for the chief of the IRS. He's trying to get his guy into the job.
He's kind of hurrying up.
Hey, hey, Senate, would you mind maybe moving the head of the IRS to the top of the approval list?
No reason. No reason.
Just thought that would be good to get that done.
So, here's my prediction.
The President's lawyers can stall indefinitely on those taxes.
They can come up with one reason after another why there's some reason that they can't give it out.
Now, I don't know if the legal challenges will be enough to stop some employee of the IRS who has the secret password And physically could give the taxes to Congress.
Because that person might just say, I don't want to get a lawyer.
And if Congress, who has the authority, is asking me to do something, I'm just an employee.
I'm not going to take this to the Supreme Court.
It's my job to do these things under these conditions.
The conditions have been met.
Congress told me to do it.
I've got to type this in and give it to them.
So it could be That the lawyers objecting might not be enough.
Maybe they get them anyway.
But here's my prediction.
That we'll never see his tax returns.
My prediction is you'll never see the tax returns because the president has good lawyers too.
And he probably doesn't mind that as a campaign issue.
Because I think, you know, there's some things you look at and you say to yourself, well, that's a fair attack.
That's fair what the other side is doing.
I don't like that they're doing, but I can see why they're doing it.
That's fair. I don't think there's anybody in the country who sees an illegitimate attempt to get the president's taxes for no specific reason.
No specific reason, just as a way to attack him and remove him from office.
I don't think there's anybody on either side who, in their quiet time, thinks that's legitimate.
So it's actually a pretty good campaign topic, I think.
All right. I think that's all I got.
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