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April 8, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
28:25
Episode 484 Scott Adams: Hoaxes, AOC, Immigration, Nuclear Power
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Hey everybody, I've got a little technology problem today, so if the sound is not as good, you don't need to tell me.
Because I already know it.
Coming to you from my phone instead of my iPad.
My iPad is not working for reasons unclear.
But, in any event, you're here now.
And you're here in time to enjoy this simultaneous sip.
Grab your cup, your mug, your vessel, your stein, your cellos, your tankard, your thermos, fill it with your favorite liquid, and join me now for this simultaneous sip.
Oh, that's good sippin'.
So, there's an interesting quote from ex-Senator Bob Carey.
Bob Kerry was famous for being a blunt, a little bit too honest senator, a Democrat.
He says of his fellow Democrats that they are, quote, suffering from two major delusions.
He actually uses the word delusions.
So this is important.
So there's an ex-Democrat, an ex-senator, Bob Kerry, who's calling other Democrats delusional.
His two examples are, the first he writes in an op-ed is, quote, is that Americans long for a president who will ask us to pay more for the pleasure of increasing the role of the federal government, in other words, socialism.
So he thinks the first delusion is that there are enough people in the country who want socialism.
But the second one, he says, quote, his second delusion is that Americans were robbed of the truth When Special Prosecutor Rob Mueller and Attorney General Barr concluded that President Trump did not collude with Russia.
And he doesn't think the full report will change any.
So they're under the delusion that they were robbed of the truth.
Which is funny by itself.
Now, what I think is interesting about this is that it does seem As though citizens are waking up to the fact, on both sides, that they have been duped by their media.
And I'm going to give you a very annoying demonstration of that.
I wish, if my iPad worked, I would be taking calls.
Actually, I'm going to wait on that.
Because I need to take calls to do this right.
But let's just say that there's a big delusion on the right that I'm going to amazingly debunk for you, but I can't do it on my phone because the microphone doesn't work on my phone, etc.
All right, let's talk about Secretary Nielsen quitting or being fired from Homeland Security.
One of the things I tell you about this president that I really like about his technique Is that when we're in a situation where he can't figure out how to move, you know, he gets sort of trapped by the options.
It's like, well, if you go this way, it doesn't work.
If you go this way, it doesn't work, and you have no options.
So what does Trump do in any situation where the situation is frozen and there are no real good options that are enough for everybody?
He shakes the box.
He takes that box and he says, these variables don't work.
Shake, shake, shake, shake, shake.
How about now? Nope, still not there.
Shake, shake, shake, shake, shake.
And by replacing Nielsen, he's simply introducing new variables.
So if you're looking at it on the simple level, you say, well, how good was she?
How good is the replacement?
You know, did you get a replacement?
Who's as good as the person you got rid of?
That's sort of the low-level way to look at this.
The higher-level way is that the variables we had didn't work.
So he just shook the frickin' box and changed the variables.
Now one of the things that apparently, reportedly, who knows how real this is, reportedly, the president has suggested a number of terrible ideas for the border.
One of them was to get rid of border immigration judges.
In other words, if you don't have any judges, You're not going to slow up the system because there's nobody waiting for a judge.
So he said, just get rid of them and just don't have any amnesty, apparently.
Now, that would be, I think, illegal, and it would be very unwise, according to the people who disagree.
But he sure shook the box, didn't he?
He took some variables that were not in play, not in the conversation, shook, shook, shook, shook, and now we're talking about it.
Now, it could be that his initial idea was no good.
But that's the lowest level of thinking about this situation.
Every time he shakes the box, every time he asks a ridiculous question, he's giving us the bad idea.
And when he introduces the bad version of the idea, it makes us all focus on the topic.
And there might be somebody who has a good idea.
So I've actually literally taught this technique a number of times on Periscope and in my books.
In Hollywood, it's called the bad idea.
Where you don't know how to solve a plot, for example, let's say you're a writer, and you don't know how to fix the plot.
So instead of sitting there saying nothing, if you're in a team of writers, somebody will propose the bad idea.
Say, well, okay, this is the bad idea, but suppose an alien came down and did something, and people will say, that's stupid, it's not even a movie about aliens.
But that does make me think about an outside force coming in.
So what if it were the army?
And then suddenly you work from the bad idea to a good idea.
It's a specific brainstorming technique.
The president, every time he throws out a ridiculous idea that gets reported to us out of context, we only see it out of context.
We say, that might be the dumbest idea.
Is he uninformed?
Why would anybody say something so off the wall and ridiculous and impractical?
And the reason is, It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter that the idea is off the wall and impractical.
It only matters that he's changing the focus.
He's changing the variables.
He's shaking the box. He's getting everybody thinking about it.
He's getting us thinking about it in new ways.
He's introducing new ways to think about it.
And that's a very productive process.
Maybe somebody will come up with something.
All right. So that's enough about the border.
Kim Jong Un has released some new propaganda videos.
They are astonishingly non-threatening.
In other words, he was doing a bunch of propaganda in which he's climbing a mountain and visiting some factories and stuff.
But here's the best part.
It was reported, and obviously we do not believe this to be true, but that Kim Jong-un climbed the highest mountain in North Korea.
And he reported, allegedly said, according to the press, in North Korea, he said that the feeling was more powerful than nuclear weapons.
So he said the feeling that one gets from climbing the highest mountain in North Korea is more powerful than nuclear weapons.
Read between the lines.
Do you see it yet? This is Kim Jong-un softening up his country for the notion that being smart and having character and being dedicated is more powerful than nuclear weapons.
So he's demoting the power of his own nuclear weapons.
Because that's how he transitions his own population to, I told you it was a good idea to build this nuclear capability so that we could become the Generation 4 testbed for the world.
I don't know if that'll happen.
But some version of, hey, nuclear weapons are not the answer.
They're just on the way to the answer.
It's just part of the process of getting to the answer.
The real answer is character and brains and working together and, you know, diplomacy.
So that appears to be the story that they're starting to craft and maybe test it out a little bit.
All right. I keep hearing on Twitter some of the most loser-ish advice that you will ever see.
And I've said this before, but it's one of those things that you need to remind people every now and then.
And the topic is this.
When I'm talking about climate change or nuclear power or any of that, I'll often get people who come in, usually people on the left, sometimes the right, And they will say to me, or anybody who listens to me on Twitter, they'll say, ha ha ha, so you're getting your science now from a cartoonist.
Ha ha ha ha ha.
How stupid of you to listen to a cartoonist about science.
Oh my God, what's wrong with you?
And here's my reaction to that.
What was President Trump's experience in being a politician before he became the most powerful politician on the planet?
Or even the most powerful politician maybe in the history of civilization?
You know, you could argue.
Done. He had the wrong kind of experience.
It didn't matter. What kind of experience did AOC have before she ran for Congress?
Bartender. Did a little, worked on a campaign, I guess.
Bartender. Now she's the most important voice, I would say, on the right.
So she did that from Bartender.
Then you have my contribution to the climate change slash nuclear stuff.
I climbed into the climate change argument enough to find out this critical point, that no matter the truth of it, you know, the underlying truth of the science and how bad it is, no matter the details, it still has one solution.
Go hard at green technology at the same time you're going hard at generation four green nuclear technology.
There isn't really a second good option.
There's only one option, and it also doesn't matter the details of whether climate change is a big problem or not.
The path forward is identical.
Now, who came up with that before I did?
Lots of people, right?
There were probably lots of people, especially people who knew Generation 4 nuclear stuff.
They knew that that was a smart path forward.
But it wasn't well known.
So what did I add to the process?
Well, I added my voice.
I added a dissemination of that truth that a few people knew, Mark Schneider being among them, a key voice in this conversation right now.
And by the way, if you go to the interface by WenHub app, my startup's app, you can find Mark, who is an expert in nuclear power, And you could ask him some questions yourself.
You'd have to put on an alert or wait for him to be live, but you can connect with him through the app.
Anyway, the point is that when people change fields and go out of their field, Often you get the best stuff, right?
You could come up with lots of examples of people who left their lane.
It's like, oh, this is what I'm good at, but I'm going to leave this lane for a little while to do this other thing.
And that other thing quite often turns out to be the good thing.
So it's very common.
But I want to put a bow on this by saying this.
By a weird set of circumstances, something that you could never have predicted, The most important person in the world to save the planet is, fill in the blank, name the one person in the world who with one tweet could save the planet.
And it's not President Trump, although in this case he could go a long ways, but there's somebody better than President Trump, yeah, better than Bill Gates, AOC. I'm going to tell you a tweet that AOC could send, just one tweet and nothing else, just one tweet, how she could save the planet, potentially.
Okay? And it would look like this.
If AOC tweeted, if we're considering, you know, green energy, we should look hard at Generation 4 nuclear because it's safe from meltdown and eats nuclear waste for its fuel.
So imagine that one tweet coming from AOC. If it comes from me, a certain number of people see it.
If it came from the President, half of the country would discount it immediately, just because it came from the President.
If it came from AOC, who would discount it?
Who would discount that tweet as being nonsense if it came from AOC? Well, it wouldn't be the people on the right because they're already there.
The people on the right already like nuclear as a solution.
The people on the left would be seeing it for the first time.
And they would be seeing it from a source that they consider the most credible source in terms of, let's say, an emotional, honest connection to environmental and global warming issues.
So somebody that they really would trust, right?
It's a different message if it comes from a different person.
The message and the person are always connected.
You can't disconnect them.
So, by a weird sequence of events, If it's true that climate change is a catastrophic risk, there's really one way to address it, and that would be with Generation 4 nuclear and development.
At the same time, you're going hard at wind and solar.
You wouldn't do one at the exclusion of the other.
It wouldn't make sense. So this bartender, 29-year-old ex-bartender, Whose strength is not nuclear stuff.
Her strength is not science.
And she's only learning politics in the last few years.
She's good at it, apparently.
Has created a situation in which she's uniquely could actually save the planet.
I'm not even exaggerating now.
There are two ways you can save the planet, because if you're wrong on climate change in either direction, and you do the wrong thing because you were wrong about where climate change is heading, if you make the wrong decision, it's catastrophic two different ways.
One is if you put too many restrictions on things and you hurt the economy.
Well, that could kill hundreds of millions of people.
If you damage the economy of the planet because you're chasing something that didn't need to be chased, Let's say, try to solve climate change when maybe it wasn't going to be a problem.
At least some people in the world have that worldview.
If you get that wrong, 100 million people die just because poverty kills people.
If it is the problem that the scientists say, and it's as catastrophic as many people are saying, and you don't address it, there too, you're killing 100 million people.
So AOC, a bartender, A bartender is now the most important voice in science.
And that's not even a little bit of an exaggeration.
She just has to send one tweet with something like those words to mention Generation 4.
It would have to have Generation 4 in it, not just nuclear.
But if she crafted the right tweet, she would actually save the world.
Tell me I'm wrong.
I'm not wrong. So when cartoonists get involved in things, when bartenders get involved in things, when real estate developers get involved in things, sometimes we're out of our field and sometimes we're doing the wrong stuff.
But it doesn't hurt to shake the box.
Because when you add me to any situation, it changes the variables.
You take any stable situation and you throw AOC in there, You just add AOC to any situation, bam, new variables.
She shakes the box.
Can't take that away from her.
Alright. Here's another way to explain The potential of generation for nuclear.
And I'm just going to test this out as a persuasion test.
Suppose I said to you, I have a technology for reducing the risk of existing nuclear plants.
Think ahead. Some of you have already just connected the dots.
As soon as I said that, you just said to yourself, holy shit.
Is that true?
Well, think about it. So the information I have is this is preliminary, and so this would need to be fact-checked.
But my current understanding is we have something like 98 older technology plants in the United States.
And Mark Schneider can help me on the fact-checking here.
My understanding is that those 98 plants As you might imagine, they're located in places where you need a lot of electricity.
If you were to simply say, let's add a Generation 4 plant to the existing sites, you would first of all speed up the approval process, because it would be an existing site, so the don't put it in your backyard situation would not be any worse.
It would just be more nuclear in a place there's nuclear.
But, Generation 4 has a unique characteristic, which is that it eats the fuel from the other plant.
In not every case, but in some cases.
So you would reduce the risk of transporting that fuel, because it would never leave the site.
You would just take it from the old plant that's next door, put it in the new plant, and it becomes fuel.
Now, I'm so oversimplifying that there may be actual technical reasons that this can't work.
But in concept, it looks to me like you're co-locating a Generation 4 on the same site because presumably the older generation stuff had to have a lot of land around it because nobody wanted to build right next to it.
So I would think there's almost always room, physical room, next to an existing plant.
If you add a Generation 4, or maybe you keep adding Generation 4, could you de-risk the existing site?
In other words, could you sell Generation 4 nuclear as a way to reduce the risk of existing nuclear plants?
So that's the part where I don't know if I've reached too far.
But I don't think I have.
And I don't know that every plant would work for this.
But it does seem that we have a grid that largely is in place.
We know where the power is needed.
It's where we already have nuclear.
We could add some more nuclear and probably blanket the country a lot faster than people assume.
At the same time, we're reducing the risk.
At the old plants.
Now I also assume, and here I'd ask Mark for some advice as well, I assume that if you put an old nuclear site next to a Generation 4 nuclear site, you get the benefits of cross-training.
In other words, if the same company is running both of these, or at least, you know, they're working together, then the people who already have the old technology experience can get trained on the new technology experience and vice versa.
So, you know, it probably is helpful to have new people learning about the old stuff as well.
So, there is a path forward, and all it would require is one tweet from a bartender to save the world.
There's not much more going on today, is there?
I said this yesterday, and I think it's still true.
Have you noticed that the news has gotten really slow?
The immigration problem is sort of the only thing anybody's talking about, right?
What kind of a world do we have when the biggest problem...
Let me put it in those terms.
President Trump...
has not only solved all of the big problems, meaning, you know, ISIS doesn't have a caliphate.
North Korea is not at least aiming their weapons at us with malice at the moment.
We're negotiating with China.
It looks like we'll have some kind of a deal there.
We've got fentanyl that's illegal.
The economy is booming. I could go down the list, but you know the list, right?
So pretty much most of the big problems have been solved.
The immigration problem is a weird, double-edged problem.
Because keep in mind that the immigration is a humanitarian crisis, it's an emergency, whatever word you want to put on it.
It's terrible for the people involved.
It's a tragedy. It's a catastrophe for the people involved, the people immigrating.
But It also tells the story of people dying to get into the United States, literally.
They're literally dying to come to the United States.
The United States is running so well that people are dying.
Literally dying. No joke.
You know, nothing funny about it.
They're actually dying to move here.
I don't know if there's a better endorsement of a country And I don't want to celebrate on the backs of people who are suffering, but it is nonetheless a fact and an interesting way to look at it that the country is running so well that people are literally risking their life to come in here at any cost.
So let's drink to a country that's so strong that people want to join.
I will say again, What I said before, which is anybody who's talking about immigration and cannot give you a number of people that they want to let in per year is not really talking about the topic.
You should not take anybody seriously on the left or the right if they can't give you a number of people that they think is the right number to let in.
Because we absolutely need young people and we need workers and we need new blood.
So we need that.
But if you don't have a number or even a range of, you know, well, a million a year or half a million a year, some kind of number, you're not part of the conversation.
You can't be part of the conversation if you haven't offered an opinion on the most important number.
Because it's not about immigration yes or immigration no.
Nobody's arguing that.
It's everybody arguing the same thing.
There is a right amount and a right way to have immigration, but mostly it's about the amount.
And there's a wrong way and a wrong amount.
So what's the right amount?
If nobody has that, don't pay attention to what they say.
It doesn't matter if they're on the left or the right.
Don't pay attention to them.
All right. Next time you see me on Periscope, probably tomorrow, I'll have my microphone working and I'm going to do a little demonstration of how some of you are suffering from hallucinations.
So I'll be looking for some volunteers and in real time, I'll show you that you're hallucinating.
It will trigger you into cognitive dissonance.
And so be brave if you're one of my volunteers because you're going to be suffering cognitive dissonance in public.
But I'll take some volunteers and we'll do a demonstration and it's going to kind of shock you, I think.
This one's going to be easy.
It will be so easy to make my case and it will be so opposite of what your worldview is that it's going to be shocking.
So wait for that.
All right. That's all for now.
And, oh, no, one more thing.
I saw Ben Carson announced that apparently private businesses have offered up to $25 billion for their urban areas' economic zones.
So, in other words, he's getting some good interest in people building and taking advantage of the government, incentives to build in the inner cities and the bad places.
So you've got that going on.
At the same time, you've also got the First Step Act, and you've got the best unemployment for minorities, etc.
And I wondered if it's time to have a campaign ad that says, in the last two years, President Trump has done the following things.
And just list all the things which are absolutely good for African-American voters.
You know, the president has done these things, you know, from unemployment to the First Step Act to, you know, several other things that would fall under that umbrella.
In that time, the Democrats have done nothing.
Nothing. He actually has real accomplishments, and if you put them on the list, you'd say, huh, those are actually four real things.
Those are real things.
I think there's also a lot of progress in retraining.
So training for people who need training for jobs is good.
So I think there might be, I don't know, but there might be five or six policy things that have come out of the Trump administration or accomplishments that are very directly beneficial to the African American community.
I'd like to see them batched up, you know, at least make the argument.
They should at least make the argument.
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