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May 12, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
57:50
Episode 527 Scott Adams: Summer Fake News, Wall Construction, Iran
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Well, let's try this again.
Joanne. Hey everybody.
My sound will be a little different today.
Because I'm coming to you on my phone.
My iPad crapped out for some reason.
I didn't want to say your name.
Oilers Rebuild 3.
What kind of a name is that?
Alright, good morning everybody.
Sorry to tease you like that, because you know it's time.
It's time. It's time for the simultaneous sip.
Grab your cup, your mug, your glass, your stein, your chalice, your canker, your thermos, your flask.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
Join me now for the simultaneous sip.
So, let's try this on my phone and see how far we get.
I realize the sound will not be as good, but I can't fix that.
So I note that the president is shifting money from the defense budget, from Afghanistan budget, I guess, to start building, I don't know, 80 miles of wall or something like that.
So, could we say that the president is building the wall now?
I'm going to have to actually...
I'm going to actually have to...
I'm sorry, I just saw something that was very disturbing in the comments.
Let's just talk about that.
So there's a troll named Vic Berger, who apparently has been after Mike Cernovich for a while.
And now he's turned on me because I tweeted about that.
So I'm seeing the troll and the troll's trolls, I don't know if they're his troll accounts, starting to focus on me.
So we don't know how far this will go yet.
But my guess is, since this particular troll has at least some history of going too far, I'm sure I will soon find out.
Which is sort of the last thing I wanted to think about today.
Happy Mother's Day, yes.
Happy Mother's Day to all of you.
So, what I was going to say is that the President's going ahead and building his wall, or at least he's getting that started.
And so, I'm looking at the news today, and I'm looking for all of the bad stories about the President, and they've sort of disappeared.
The headlines on Fox, the headlines on CNN, there's some little gossipy stuff and some fringe things and there's some legal mop-up stuff that nobody quite cares about.
There's who should or should not appear to talk about something that's already been talked about and who could be indicted but they probably won't and what if something really were a crime but it isn't and All of it is sort of devolved into this weird, boring soup of legalese and details that nobody thinks are important.
Because no matter what happens from this point on, is there anybody left who thinks that lawyers are going to take out this president?
Because it doesn't look like it to me.
It doesn't look like it to me.
So... The news has just gone soft.
They don't have anything to attack the president with because things are going so well.
So here's the question.
What happens this summer when the news is naturally slow?
So this summer the news always gets slow because people go on vacation and there's just less happening.
I don't see how the mainstream media can survive unless they gin up some kind of new scandal to get them through the summer.
So what you should be looking for is some gigantic new piece of fake news about the president or about the president's circle.
So look for something gigantic and fake that can be talked about endlessly in the what was he thinking, we think his intentions were bad, etc.
So it's going to be interesting to see what they cook up.
I really look at the news now as...
And I mean this not in a jokey sense, but as a reality show.
Because I think they actually run that way in quite the literal sense.
And it seems to me that they need to introduce a new element to the show.
So the news just ran out of things to talk about.
And somebody's asked me if I purposely compete with the Sunday talk shows.
No, I always do this at the same time.
No matter what. Speaking of boring, CC Cups did a little piece for CNN in which she talked about why is it that Kamala Harris can't get any traction?
She's getting enough attention, not as much as the top three, but she's getting enough attention that it's interesting why she is not breaking through.
And have you seen any of Kamala Harris' tweets.
Here's what she's doing wrong that I don't know if she knows how to fix.
And it goes like this.
I'm guessing she was a very good student in school because she's gotten as far as she has.
So I'm guessing it's fair to say she was a very good student.
And I'm sure that the way she speaks and talks and the vocabulary she uses...
Very good for a college student.
Then she became a lawyer, and I would say that the way she talks is probably very good for a lawyer.
If you're a lawyer, it probably makes total sense to talk in a precise way, professional way, and you see that in her tweets and when she talks.
Probably makes perfect sense for a lawyer.
As a senator, especially a senator who we see on television grilling people in these hearings, She's probably just about right for a senator.
I like a senator who speaks in specific, has a precision to his or her language, understands the details, gets under the hood.
Somebody you know can really grasp the intricacies of topics.
I think she probably has a really good personality for that, probably a really good mind for being a senator.
So, my compliment to her is she was probably an excellent student, probably really good at her lawyer job, seems to be quite competent at being a senator, but man, oh man, does she not have presidential skills.
She is seriously lacking in that next level, connecting with the country at large, being interesting, being provocative, We're really just not being boring.
She doesn't know how to unlawyer.
And if she tries, it looks like she doesn't know how to do it.
So, for example, when we see her trying to be carefree and show some personality, it doesn't quite register as genuine.
Because it looks like maybe she's trying too hard to not be a lawyer, but it's not quite coming across as authentic.
So I think her biggest problem is that she doesn't know how to be anything except the things she's really, really good at.
And I would imagine she's really good being a senator.
Probably good as a lawyer, good as a student.
But she doesn't have the people's touch, or even close.
Which is interesting.
So, have you noticed that there's not much Joe Biden talk lately?
What happened to sleepy Joe Biden?
Did he... Did he take a week off?
Am I wrong that Joe Biden is the number one polling person, the most important name, who's against Trump?
And I didn't see any news about him yesterday.
And I didn't see any news about him the day before yesterday.
And I can't remember the day before the day before yesterday.
It feels like the last thing I remember from Joe Biden was Several days ago.
And, yeah, the only stories about Biden are that Giuliani almost took a trip but didn't.
Think about the quality of the news.
One of the biggest stories in the headlines is that Rudy Giuliani almost took a trip but then he didn't.
That's it. That's the whole story.
That's the news.
There was a guy who almost took a trip but he didn't.
Yes, and of course everybody's delighted that the president went with sleepy-creepy.
I think he didn't want to go with creepy alone, but when he adds them together, sleepy-creepy, I don't know if that's a keeper, but it does turn it into its whole new thing.
Because the problem that the president has is if he goes after the creepy, hands-on stuff with Biden, then he's opening up an attack for the, you know, grab him by the you-know-what, So I think the president has to combine sleepy and creepy into sleepy-creepy so that you don't automatically think, well, what about the president?
Has Trump ever touched anybody who didn't want to be touched?
There's no evidence of that, but that's where the conversation would go.
So the biggest problem on the Democrat side is massive boredom.
And the last thing we heard about Biden was all of the cool people in the Democratic Party criticizing him for not going far enough.
So I don't know if Biden has any room to maneuver.
Let me put it this way.
It looks like Biden's approach to climate science is the following.
And tell me if I'm wrong.
Tell me if I'm reading this wrong.
It seems that Joe Biden's approach to climate science or to climate change will be to say it's the biggest problem in the world, a problem that could end, you know, could be an extinction event.
So I think Biden will agree with people who say it's top priority, biggest problem in the world.
But the problem is that his approach to the biggest problem of the world is, well, let's go slow.
Let's ease our way into this a little bit.
Don't go too far.
It's the biggest problem in the world.
It could kill all of humanity, but let's tiptoe in.
Let's be cautious about this.
Now, I'm not even saying that's the wrong thing to do, because I'm not sure anybody knows exactly the right thing to do.
But how does Biden sell it's the biggest problem in the world?
We're going to take an average-sized swing at it.
It could kill us all.
Let's take a run at it.
Let's be cautious.
Let's keep our powder dry.
His message is not fitting.
It's not self-compatible.
He can't say it's the biggest problem in the world and that he's going to approach it in a medium energy way.
It's just going to look low energy.
It's going to look sleepy.
So yeah, everybody just wants to talk about the Alfred E. Newman tag that the President gave to Buttigieg.
That story was fun, but of no consequence.
Buttigieg is not, he's not polling high enough to be too relevant to the final outcome.
Let's talk about something else.
Trump is saying to Iran, essentially, hey Iran, call me, let's talk.
So, you're going to see the President doing, again, the same technique that he's used with Russia, used with North Korea, used with China.
And the technique, if he's successful in doing this, I think maybe he won't be, but if he's successful in getting a direct conversation with the Ayatollah and his leadership team, mostly the Ayatollah, I guess, he's the only one that matters,
If the president actually successfully sets up a meeting with the Ayatollah, he's going to probably be nicer to the Ayatollah than what those of us watching think is appropriate, because that's the play.
The correct play is to be respectful in person and super tough in terms of how you're actually dealing with Tariffs and military and whatever else that you're negotiating.
Some people are going to say he's colluding with Iran.
But the thing to look for is the consistency of his method, which I think will become the method that all presidents in the future have to answer to.
In the future, anybody who doesn't play it the way the president is playing it now, which is being good to the dictator no matter what they've done, being respectful so you can So you don't have to deal with any new problems that you've created yourself.
You know, you take care of the ego, take care of the respect, and then you can be as tough as you want as long as you're transparent about it.
If you're saying, yeah, I like the leader we got along, but we've got to do these tough things because I protect my country, he protects his country.
That's the way it works. It's been, I think, a tremendously valuable way to frame dealing with other countries.
All right. So...
I read that no Democrats have read the less redacted Mueller report that's available to people in the SCIF. If you're not familiar with that term, the SCIF, there's some kind of a secret secure room at the Capitol where people who have authorization to see top secret stuff Top secret is probably the wrong word, but what's the word?
Secret stuff. So they can go there and they can read the original documents, but they can't copy them and they can't take them out of the room.
So there are several Republicans who have gone down to the SCIF. Classified, yes, is the right word.
So they can read classified documents there.
So the Republicans have seen the less...
The less redacted version.
I don't know how much less redacted it is, but it's less redacted.
No Democrats have.
No Democrat who is allowed to do that has gone in and looked to see what got redacted in the less redacted one.
Now, I ask you this.
Are they really interested in what's in there?
Isn't it obvious to you that they don't care what's in it?
The fact that they wouldn't be interested enough to have even one of them, not even one of them, you know, draw straws, hey, one of us, maybe one of us should look at this thing, see if there's anything there.
Not one of them was interested enough to even look.
Now, you can say to yourself, well, why should they bother until they've got the fully redacted one, the fully unredacted one?
Why would they bother looking at one that's a little bit better when they can hold out for the one that's completely non-redacted?
To which I say, they could do that, but they would sure as heck want to see the one that's in between if they were interested.
They're clearly not interested.
And if they're not interested, it's because they know there's nothing there to see.
There's no scenario in which they would not look at the Extra unredacted one if they were curious.
They have no curiosity about this whatsoever.
Unreacted sounds like a double negative.
So there's a tweet I tweeted around this morning from Akira the Don on Twitter.
And Akira the Don, who's a DJ among other things, was saying that he can see the limits of free will, I'm paraphrasing, because when he's DJing, he can see in real time how he controls the mood and even the actions of the crowd.
So by his selection of music, according to his tweet, he can put people in sexy moods or happy moods or a variety of moods.
And he can watch it happen in real time, and he's actually moving the whole crowd all at once.
And then there was some young person, based on the profile picture, looks young, who came in and called BS on that and said, my goodness, it's like you don't believe people have free will.
People are not being programmed by your music.
They're doing whatever they want.
To which I say, that is such a young opinion.
There's some opinions that are smart.
There's some that are dumb. There's some that are experienced or mature or some or less.
This is one of those situations.
I'm going to get rid of the people who say there's no audio.
Because I assume that they are trolls.
Alright. Let's go back to where we were.
Oh. Sorry, I'm just scrolling through to get to the...
Yeah.
So, anyway, I would like to come down on the side of music is a drug.
It's an audio drug.
You put music in your ear, it changes your physical body chemistry, it changes the way you think, and it even changes your decisions.
Now, it doesn't change every person the same way, so there's some unpredictability to it, but it definitely changes behavior.
So I'm agreeing completely with Akira the Don, as long as we agree that it doesn't mean it changes every person in the same way, and there's nothing that can be done about it.
But it does influence crowds for sure.
And it does it very quickly and very powerfully.
Yeah.
And I would think that music would be among the most potent primers.
If you hear music from something that reminds you of something good or bad, it's going to put you in that mood.
You're going to be primed for love or primed for not love.
Primed to fight. Alright.
It looks like...
Oh, apparently NPR. I didn't hear it.
I don't know if it was NPR radio or NPR television hit, I'm not sure which it was, but apparently NPR had a piece on Generation 4 nuclear.
So connect the dots.
NPR, very left-leaning, did a piece on Generation 4 nuclear.
I didn't see it, but nobody really does a piece on Generation 4 nuclear unless it's pro.
As far as I know, there's no anti-argument whatsoever.
Because for one thing, it's not in the market enough that anybody would have anything specifically bad to say about it.
Let's go back to the top of your comments here.
So what's important is that you can see that NPR being...
There we go.
NPR being, let's say, a representative of opinions on the left-leaning part of the world, if they're starting to notice that Generation 4 nuclear is the way to go, that's a big, big deal.
It's a big deal.
Because they have a lot of credibility on the left.
So we'll see if that spreads to the other countries.
I know that NPR stands for National Public Radio, but they do have at least one television segment that I've seen.
I'm not sure what network. It almost makes me think that Trump is not talking much about nuclear because he doesn't want people to oppose it.
Somebody said, do you travel mostly for vacation or work?
I actually like to do writing when I'm traveling because I'm not doing my other work and I'm not distracted.
It's a good time to write, so I combine them.
All right. Will I go to D.C. for the July 4th celebration?
No. I like the fact that things are going so well in this country that one of the controversies is that president is He's planning our fireworks for the Fourth of July.
And I'm thinking, that's your problem?
Your problem is that the President is getting involved in planning the Fourth of July celebration for Washington, D.C.? That's it?
That's our bad problem for today?
Have I always been an early riser?
Since college, yes.
I think there's a genetic component to being an early riser.
But I definitely enjoy that part of the day the best.
The morning is my favorite part of the day.
Favorite restaurant in Vegas?
Don't really have one. Do I go to bed early?
Not really. Last night I got four hours sleep, which is sort of typical for me.
Five hours is sort of my normal sleep.
And then every once in a while I get sleep deprived and I'll sleep in for six hours.
If I get six hours sleep, sometimes I'll have a headache all day from oversleep.
Do I nap?
I have, but not often.
I can. I can fall asleep literally anywhere.
Christina was taking embarrassing pictures of me on the airplane on the way out here because apparently I fell asleep and my head went back and my mouth opened and She took humorous photos of feeding things to my open mouth while I was sleeping on the plane.
Alright. Do I snore?
I do. How do you keep notes on different topics?
Well, in terms of the topics that I'm going to talk about on Periscope, I just make bullet point notes in a little open document.
That's all. Do I dream?
I do not. No, I do not.
Well, I do not remember my dreams.
Get a CPAP.
I've been checked in on.
I don't snore enough for a CPAP. I'm at the low end of that.
Still predicting Kamala for the nomination.
I'm going to stick with the, for now, I'm going to stick with the prediction.
I have to say that I did not see how bad she would be at this.
It was not obvious to me from the start that she would be an amazingly bad, like really bad politician at the national level.
I didn't see that coming.
But it's hard for me to believe that Joe Biden can make it all the way through.
And the reason I have it hard to believe that the reason it's hard for me to believe Biden will make it through is that it seems to me that the Democrats are basing this on electability.
Does it seem to you that they've made a monstrous miscalculation?
Am I wrong about this?
Correct me if I'm wrong.
The Democrats thinking that Biden is the most electable might be one of the greatest miscalculations we've seen in recent years.
I'm not wrong about that, am I? I mean, I could be.
None of us really know.
But it seems to me he's the most beatable candidate by far.
I put him on my list of least effective candidates.
And here's the problem.
He's not going to excite Anyone.
There isn't one single person on his own team who will be excited.
He's like an old pair of shoes.
People are putting on their Joe Biden old pair of shoes and saying, ah, these are broken in.
I like these old shoes.
I like how they feel.
They make me feel comfortable.
But that's it.
Biden only makes them feel comfortable.
Do you turn out the vote for He's comfortable.
He's like an old couch that somebody's been farting into the cushions for 30 years.
It's comfortable, but the cushions are full of 30 years of farts, if that's what you want.
I stole that from a...
What was the show with the mafia?
I forget. Anyway, I stole that line.
I sleep less than sleepy Joe.
Probably true. So, yeah, Joe Biden, you know, it could be that Joe Biden is the one who will keep Howard Schultz out of the race because there were so many ways for the Democrats to lose.
If they run one of their exciting and more, let's say, more left-leaning people, the Green New Deal people, If they run one of the Green New Deal candidates, Howard Schultz might enter the race.
And if Howard Schultz enters the race, they have no chance of winning.
All the smart people say he will drain off Democrat votes.
I don't know if that's true.
Sopranos, yes, is where I stole that line from about the couch cushions.
I don't know if that's true.
But let's say smart people say it.
I don't have a reason to disagree with it.
So if they run somebody who's too far left, Howard Schultz gets in, and then they lose.
If they run somebody like Bernie, I don't know if people have enough confidence in Bernie to get across the finish line.
But Bernie is the only one who's left enough, but even Bernie isn't as far left as some of them could be.
He's left enough, and he's exciting because Bernie actually gets a lot of people excited.
But I can't see Bernie getting to the finish line, partly because I can't see him getting nominated.
I think the Democrats will do whatever they have to do to keep him from being nominated.
So Biden almost looks like they're not trying.
Have you ever had the feeling Sometimes the team knows they're going to lose.
Do you think the DNC is looking at this situation and saying, yeah, I think we can win this?
Do you think the DNC looks at the economy, looks at the world, looks at Trump working on eradicating AIDS, working on prison reform, getting rid of...
Essentially, terrorism isn't even part of our consciousness anymore.
Trump took terrorism out of our minds.
Think about that.
Terrorism is a crime in which people, of course, are killed and injured, but mostly it is by design an act of what the terror does to the minds of the population of the ones who did not get directly affected.
So terrorism is an attack on the minds of the country that's being attacked.
When was the last time you worried about a terror attack in this country?
Can any of you even think of the last time you worried about a terror attack in this country?
Now, I'm not saying that there won't be any.
I'm sure there will be lone wolves and people with guns and somebody's gonna run a car into a crowd.
It's gonna happen. But do you worry about it?
Do you spend any time worrying about it?
Because if you don't spend any time Worrying about terrorism?
Trump defeated terrorism.
Think about it. We assume that there will be more terrorist acts.
There will, in fact, be bad things happening in this country in small ways, maybe some larger than small.
But we don't think about it anymore.
He actually took it off our minds.
Now, you could argue that Obama did that, because I think How much we worried about it was decreasing in a steady way.
But it seems to me Trump just extinguished it in terms of its mental impact on the citizens of the United States.
He did not extinguish the risk.
The risk still exists, and there will be actual acts of violence.
But mentally, we are cured.
The patient is cured.
We, the public, Are not worrying about it.
It's not part of our political decision.
It's not part of our calculations for anything.
It doesn't make us uncomfortable.
It's just not in our top worries anymore.
All right.
Anybody have any questions?
That's about all I can think of for now.
Need to interview Andy.
No. He's a pretty interesting guy.
And where's Antifa?
Is it my imagination or has the marching largely stopped?
Can anybody tell me if that's true?
Let me ask you this.
When was the last time Black Lives Matter staged a major protest?
Do you even remember?
I can't remember.
I mean, maybe they joined other protests, but when was the last time you saw a massive Black Lives Matter event?
Because it's hard to keep that going when the president just refuses to do racist stuff.
He's Israel's best friend.
He did prison reform.
He brags about unemployment levels for minority groups.
I mean, it's just sort of hard.
Sort of hard to keep it going, isn't it?
Go to Portland. Yeah, so Portland is just sort of its own thing.
But in terms of the country at large, it sounds like it's a Portland problem.
You know, my take on it is that there's a Portland problem, but there's not a national problem.
All right. They'll be back when the weather is good.
Isn't the weather good enough?
I mean, they can always march in California.
The weather's great here. They got jobs.
Yeah, if Antifa gets jobs.
Antifa's only on the West Coast, somebody says.
Is that true? Yeah.
So, sometimes the news is the non-news.
This is one of those weeks where the news is what Oh, thank you for reminding me of Alyssa Milano.
Yeah, so the news is that there's not much news, and the Antifa, the Black Lives Matter seem to have gone quiet for a while.
So Alyssa Milano, as many of you already know, has tweeted that women should go on a, quote, sex strike and not provide sex to their guys or guy.
until women have control of their bodies meaning in terms of abortion laws and is it my imagination or has Alyssa Milano done something that people have tried people have tried to do what Alyssa Milano has accomplished Alyssa Milano found a way to bring the country together because if there's one thing that everyone in the country can agree on It's that Alyssa Milano should have less sex.
Are we on the same page?
So, apparently she believes so.
And people who agree with her, the people on the left, would say the same thing.
But weirdly, the people on the right are totally on board with this.
Yeah, Alyssa Milano should have way less sex.
We're on board with that.
So we finally found one thing that can bring the country together.
Our combined, passionate, Agreement that Alyssa Milano should have less sex.
I'm on board with that.
I don't even have a counter to that.
I'd say, you go girl.
The less sex the better.
Now, I'm seeing people referring to some historical examples where the sex strike actually worked.
So, let me say this just so you You can hear me acknowledging history.
Sex strikes do work, apparently.
There are actually, I think, two or three historical examples in which women did go on sex strikes, and it did change history.
So I'm not saying it won't work.
I'm not mocking it for its effectiveness.
I'm saying it's the one thing we can agree on.
Alyssa Milano should have less sex.
Now, I started to tweet about it, but I can't tell you how many times I wrote a tweet, and then I deleted it, and I wrote it and deleted it, and never sent one.
And there are a couple reasons for that.
One, there are so many jokes I want to make on this topic that I couldn't narrow it down to my top ten.
I mean, there are just so many things you can say.
I just didn't know where to start.
Second, I feared all those things that were obvious to me to say other people would be saying and so I would just be you know get lost in the crowd of people saying obvious jokes about the thing that has obvious jokes.
So I didn't want to be part of that.
But let me say this about that.
The people on the right, I don't know if they could be more entertained Trump supporters might refer to the anti-Trump males as beta males.
I've heard people say that.
I'm not saying that.
I'm just saying that that's in the political realm.
That's the point of view that is very popular in the Trump supporting world.
That the men on the left, maybe they eat a lot of soy.
Maybe they're not as dominant as Men may have been in the past.
I don't have a scientific opinion on that, just telling you what the point of view is.
And so to the people on the right, the hilarity of women on the left refusing to have sex with the only people that they were considering worthy of sex anyway, which is men on the left.
It's hard to avoid Noting how naturally funny that is.
Because Alyssa Milano giving up on having sex with Democrats who are male would be sort of like me saying I think I'm going to give up eating bugs.
Yeah, I didn't like eating bugs before but I'm going to give it up as a boycott.
Or sort of like Giving up drinking your own urine.
Sure, I didn't like it in the first place, but I'm going to give it up for boycott.
I don't do that, by the way.
This is a humorous example.
So the other reason that I didn't do a funny, snarky joke about this topic is that there's not much you can add to it that would make it funnier.
Than it is just by itself.
And I don't mean that, you know, it sounds like I'm making a further humorous attack on it.
I'm not. I'm saying quite literally the fact that Democrat women are trying to find a reason.
They're looking for an excuse to not have sex with Democrat men.
Because let's face it, they weren't having sex with Trump supporters.
That wasn't happening anyway.
So the only people they're boycotting are the people who maybe they were not so crazy about having that much sex anyway.
Just saying. So that's just, it's hard to add to that with humor.
But I also wondered, you know, every time there's any kind of a political movement in this country, what's the first thing we ask about the movement?
Whether it's Antifa, Black Lives Matter, it doesn't matter what the movement is, the political parties, any candidates.
What's the first question we ask about any group movement?
Question number one, who is funding it?
Who's the sponsor?
Who's the money people behind the scenes?
And I was thinking to myself, who could be the money behind, here I'm just joking, but who could be the money behind Alyssa Milano's call for women to boycott sex?
I say follow the money.
Who would make the most money from this?
Somebody saying Soros?
No, it's more obvious.
Who would make the most money from the Alyssa Milano boycotting sex?
Oh, it's too obvious.
Come on, somebody.
Don't make me say it.
There you go. Pornhub.
Somebody said RedTube, you get partial credit.
Full credit, actually.
Yes. I'm not saying that Pornhub is sponsoring this.
I'm not saying that Alyssa Milano is taking money from Pornhub.
I'm just taking an example from CNN. CNN simply asks questions.
They don't make accusations.
They do it this way.
They say, I'm not saying that Alyssa Milano took money from Pornhub To turn all Democrat males into porn watchers because they're not having sex.
I'm not saying they did it.
But what if? What if they did it?
Would it be illegal?
If she did it, should it be disclosed?
If she took money from Pornhub to promote porn watching through her boycott of sex, what would that do to the country?
So... Anyway, so those are some of the funny thoughts I had about that.
I'm going to say something that I said before that I'm going to say again.
You know, everybody makes fun of celebrities when they get involved in politics, and there's a good reason for that.
Celebrities have a long history of not being, let's say, credible, not being well-informed, not really being in the right field.
But whatever you think of Alyssa Milano, I'm going to give her full respect for being effective and for being genuine.
I believe that everything she does is coming from a place where she actually believes the world would be a better place if they did what she would like the world to do.
So I can fully disagree with Alyssa Milano, but I have to say I respect her.
I respect her in a way that I do not respect Celebrities who just sort of tiptoe in and have an issue and then leave.
She's a political activist who is having great success capturing people's attention.
So if I'm going to be objective, when she did this sex boycott thing and we all laughed, ha ha ha ha, that's such a funny idea.
Here are my ten reasons why this is funny.
And why it's not going to work and all that.
But what are we talking about?
She essentially captured the imagination of the country and made us talk about her and her political opinion on abortion rights, on choice, I guess.
So Am I going to criticize her for successfully capturing attention on a topic that she thinks is important?
No, that's a home run.
That's A-plus business.
That's AOC, Donald Trump, President Trump.
That's top-level persuasion.
Do you think that Alyssa Milano thought that necessarily all the women were going to go on a sex strike?
She might have thought, well, maybe.
But I don't think that was the major point.
I think the major point is that she's smart and she knows that such a provocative idea guarantees press.
And so it guarantees attention on the things she wants attention.
That's an A+. So, again, I join you in mocking celebrities who tiptoe into politics and they're just tourists.
And I think there was a time when you could have legitimately said Alyssa Milano is one of those.
But I think she's proven herself.
I think she's proven herself as a, let's say, a sincere voice who knows how to get attention.
And attention is at least, I don't know, half of the game.
So you can disagree with her politically, but on her intention and her effectiveness, A+. It's A to say it.
Because I know you don't want to hear it, but you've got to give credit where credit is due.
You're making me want to talk about climate change, somebody says.
Climate change is solved.
Now, I don't think the country will ever see it that way, at least not in the current era.
Historically, we might look back and say that's when it got solved.
But I say it's solved because the path forward would be the same toward a solution as it would be if we didn't have a problem to begin with, which is going hard at green energy sources while going hard at nuclear technology and trying to clear out the obstacles to that.
We would do the same thing, and we're doing those things.
So I don't see any...
I don't see any chance that this won't work out well, honestly, because if you look at the new technologies that are coming online, I don't know if you saw it, there was a story the other day about some bush, like an actual, I think it's a bush or a tree, a small tree or a bush, I don't know where the difference between a bush and a tree, I don't know where that dividing line is, but there's some kind of natural bush that has a weird quality that absorbs way more CO2 than other plants.
And people are saying, well, if you just stop cutting the forests and if you just plant this plant, you're going to go a long way toward taking a bite out of climate change.
Now, not in terms of a solution, but it could take a quarter or a third of the problem away.
We've seen developments with reforestation.
There was a TED talk about, I don't know if he's a researcher or scientist or whatever, But they did experiments, and they've done them for years, so they know how it works out, where they just introduced livestock on the border between a desert and a non-desert area.
They just say, let's put some cows there.
And they let the cows eat the vegetation on the part that has vegetation.
But of course, they're cows.
So they wander into the desert part a little bit, because they're right on the border.
And they do their pooping in the desert.
And then the desert carries seeds and nutrients, and pretty soon, and you can see it happen pretty quickly.
In a matter of just a few years, the vegetation will spread into the desert.
And you can actually reforest deserts by just letting the cows wander around on the border between the vegetation and the forest.
Turns out that's all you need to do, and it's pretty quick and it's pretty effective.
So, somebody said you think it was goats.
It might have been goats. I think you're right.
It could have been goats. But it's the same process.
So you got that.
You've got several companies who are developing technology to suck the CO2 out of the air.
The reason it's expensive is because the energy is expensive.
But we're also developing fusion and generation four nuclear.
And we've got generation three that's never had a problem.
So the cost of scraping the CO2 is probably going way down.
And by the way, if you were to...
Let me suggest this.
Suppose somebody came up with a project that co-located a Generation IV nuclear at the same site as either a closed or an older nuclear site that was already approved.
So you add generation 4, but you also add, at the same site, a bunch of CO2 scrubbing machines that use a lot of power.
So it would be right at the source of the power.
And there's another technology for...
There are several technologies for scrubbing CO2 out of the air.
One of them uses heat.
What do nuclear power plants produce in too much quantity?
Heat. So I don't know.
I'm speaking through my butt here.
But if a nuclear power plant creates tremendous amounts of heat, and there is a technology that's already up and working that uses heat as essentially the fuel, if you will, uses the heat as the engine for cleaning the CO2. So you could co-locate CO2 scrubbers,
Generation 4 nuclear, at a site that's already approved for nuclear.
Would the green people object to locating Generation 4 nuclear where it can use the fuel, the spent fuel from the older nuclear, so you don't have to transport it, it's right on site?
Would they Would they want to reduce the risk of the existing nuclear site by having another site there that has less risk and uses their nuclear waste?
Maybe. And if you said we're going to put a bunch of CO2 scrubbers here too and use the heat from the nuclear plants, would the green people object to that?
It'd be hard to object because the site is already approved.
And you're explicitly putting in equipment to take the CO2 out of there, as well as producing clean electricity.
It'd be hard to say no to that.
So I think we're, I think the climate change has already transitioned from, wait for my profound thought, profound thought alert coming.
Hold on, hold on.
Let us have a simultaneous sip.
I'm going to warm up my coffee.
I want to get you ready for the profound thought that's coming.
Coffee it up. Get ready for this.
Join me for the second simultaneous sip.
Profound thought. Here it comes.
Nuclear energy has moved from engineering to persuasion.
And we know how to do the persuasion.
So, problem solved.
Because, you know, it's going to require a lot of work.
There's still uncertainty.
But for the most part, nuclear has always been the answer.
We just needed to be able to act on it.
We needed to get our psychology right so that nuclear could do what it needed to do.
And if you count the psychology of The fear that people have been experiencing with the climate change risk, we started with, hey, nuclear is too scary, but the people on the left and scientists have introduced a new fear that's far greater than nuclear.
Let me put it this way. How many nuclear plants would you be willing to accept melting down In return for dealing with climate change effectively.
Let's say you're the greenest person in the world and you think climate change is a big ol' problem.
And I said to you, I'm sure we can take a big ol' bite out of it with nuclear energy.
But I guarantee you that X number of nuclear plants will melt down over the next 20 years just because you can't drive risk to zero.
How many nuclear meltdowns would you be willing to accept in return for largely solving climate change?
Think about that question, because I want you to ask that of your friends and co-workers and relatives and see what they say.
I don't think they're willing to answer the question.
But the most you could imagine would be three, five, something like that, Because the industry is so safe at this point, the Generation 3, the ones that they have in France, have never had a problem. There has never been a Generation 3 nuclear disaster.
It's the old technology.
So if I said to you, we're going to build a bunch of Generation 3, and then as Generation 4 comes online, we'll be building those too.
But it's going to be 3 and 4.
And I said to you, we've never had a meltdown of Generation 3, and certainly not a 4, because these are new.
And they're designed to be far more resistant to any major problems.
So if I said to you, we can solve climate change, but you must accept that there will be a few nuclear meltdowns, guaranteed.
What number makes you say, yeah, I will accept this many nuclear meltdowns over 20 or 80 years, I'll accept that many in return for saving the earth from climate change.
What would the number be?
Okay, the music just came in here.
That's freaky.
I don't know what that's about.
Well, a nuclear meltdown is probably going to affect only the people in the local area.
And they're not going to die Even with a nuclear meltdown.
The problem with a nuclear meltdown is usually pretty well contained and it makes the area unusable for a while, but the people largely have enough notice to get away.
So it's the problem of the actual panic of getting away that's going to hurt people as much as anything.
So let's say that the most That you could ever imagine dying from all the nuclear disasters over the next hundred years might be a hundred.
I'm guessing that it can serve the number of all the people who would die from all of the nuclear accidents from new plants.
So I'm only talking about plants that you built starting today.
The total number of people that might ever kill?
A hundred. And it's probably closer to zero.
Well, let's say 100. If I told you that 100 people would die over the next 80 years if we go strong on nuclear, but it would almost certainly solve our climate change risk, how many green people would say, yes, I'll take 100 people?
They should, because the climate risk, of course, is catastrophic.
100 people is very low, and it probably would be zero.
I mean, if you had to bet, you'd bet fewer than five.
I would. But, let's say 100 just to be conservative.
Almost anybody would take that risk if they understood risk.
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