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June 6, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
34:55
Episode 556 Scott Adams: The Coming #GoldenAge of Energy That Will Change Everything
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Hello everybody.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
It's your place to get your dopamine hit.
And it comes with caffeine this time.
Caffeine. Dopamine.
It's like a marriage made in heaven.
It's like chocolate and peanut butter.
It's like any two things put together.
And you came to the right place for it.
Today is going to be a great day.
In fact, it's part of a great age.
I think the golden age might be here.
Oh, sure, sure, we'll have some problems, but we'll work through them.
We'll talk about how great things are when everybody gets here.
But first, let us lift our glass or cup of rug.
Could be a stein, chalice, tankard, vessel.
Could be a thermos, might be a flask.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for...
the unparalleled pleasure of this simultaneous sip.
Ah.
So let me tell you some things that are amazing today.
If you check the headlines, you'll think you are in Reverso world, you know, where everything's backwards.
Let me give you an example.
In the news today, Jim Acosta is praising, or yesterday, was praising President Trump's speech for D-Day, the 75th anniversary.
Totally praising it.
What? Where am I? Have I awoken in a dream?
At the same time, over on Fox News, Tucker Carlson was praising Elizabeth Warren's economic policy.
True story. Do you know why he was praising her economic policy?
Because it was pretty good.
Do you know why Jim Acosta was praising President Trump's speech in Normandy?
Because it was a really good speech.
What's happening?
We're seeing everybody from AOC to Biden to Murkowski to, of course, the administration talking about the potential of nuclear energy.
What? It's the solution to what many would see as the biggest problem in the world.
I'm going to be talking a little more about that in a bit.
How about... Pretty amazing.
Pretty amazing. Alright.
Kim Jong-un is criticizing his top officials lately.
For not being good enough.
Now, it doesn't seem that he has, at least he hasn't executed his people who are negotiating, but one of the hypotheses is that the new loosening of Let's say loosening of contact between North Korea and South Korea is probably letting into the country a lot of movies and culture and stuff, probably on thumb drives and, you know, small devices and things.
But the thinking is that Kim Jong-un knows he can't survive information.
If information gets into the North, it will make clear that they're not doing things as well as other countries, and that's a real problem.
So Kim has started to criticize publicly his own people for not doing a good job.
He's making sure that when the public finds out that things aren't working well, he wants to make sure that they know who to blame, which suggests that he knows information is coming.
Now, it's a lot of dots I've connected here, so I'm not going to try to get into the mind of somebody on the other side of the world, but I do think that there is some truth to the fact that he can't stop the information from getting in, and the more that gets in,
the more he's going to have to explain, and that's probably good for us because he's going to need to improve things, and there is one path to improvement, and it's through negotiations with the U.S., Even Robert Downey Jr.
has started a foundation to try to fix climate change and maybe pollution.
It's a little unclear what he's up to, but he's putting his money behind it.
Now, what's the first thing you think of when you think, oh, Robert Downey Jr., an actor, wants to clean up and fix climate change.
It's going to be something dumb.
Not so much. Not so much.
He loves nuclear energy.
That's right. Robert Downey Jr.
is pro-nuclear energy, but he's also pro-nanotechnology and robots and other stuff, and he's putting his money behind it.
To which I say, how about that?
How about that? There's something I can respect.
So, when you see a world in which Jim Acosta is praising the President for being so polite and so well-spoken, and you're seeing people on both sides say nuclear energy is great, you're seeing a Hollywood actor do something that's clearly good.
Now, who knows if it produces some breakthrough, but if you're not trying to get a breakthrough, you're not going to get one.
So, pretty amazing stuff.
All right, what else we got going on?
So I was reading about Russian collusion in...
Oh, wait a minute. No, I wasn't.
I looked at the news today and there's nothing about Russian collusion.
There is a little thing about Pelosi wanting to see Trump in prison.
What do we know about that story?
We know that it's a quote of something that somebody said...
That wasn't recorded and was reported to us by people unknown.
What is the reliability of an unknown source repeating what somebody said in a meeting?
Reliability? Zero.
Zero! No reliability.
Now, it's possible that she said something like, we're going to play it for, you know, we're going to do the election.
It's possible she said something that sounded like it, but it's not possible that that's exactly what she was thinking.
Well, it's possible. It's unlikely.
Here's what I think was happening, as others have suggested.
She's trying to find some way To find a middle path between two groups that don't really have a middle.
One doesn't want to impeach.
One only wants to impeach.
So how do you find a middle between these two opposites?
Well, it seems the way she's doing it is she's going to say, hey, the thing that's even better than impeachment is to vote him out of office and then put him in jail.
So if you're talking to the hardcore impeachment people, you say, look, I'm harder core than you are.
All you want to do is impeach and that's not even going to work.
What I want to do is beat him in the election, which could work.
Maybe. Could work.
And then once he's beaten in the election, the legal system can't protect them, and we can do what we want.
Now, if she's saying that to her impeach crowd, pretty smart.
Because she's saying, no, I'm not less hard on the president than you are.
I'm much harder. That's a very good argument.
It's a high ground. She's saying, have a little patience.
We'll vote him out of office, then we do whatever we want with him, because he's not protected by the office anymore.
Now, that doesn't mean she believes it.
That doesn't mean that she would really pursue the president or want to after he was out of office.
What it does mean is it's a good way to control the people who are on the fringe.
While at the same time, the people who don't want to impeach can hear her say, hey, let's not impeach.
Let's just try to beat him in the election.
And that's exactly what they think.
You know, you can worry about that separate question of whether there's some legal thing sometime in the future.
You don't have to worry about that.
It's a separate question. So, did she say, did Pelosi say something like, we don't need to impeach him, we'll beat him in the election, and then, you know, I want to see him in jail?
She might have said something approximately like that, but I wouldn't take that too seriously.
That sounds like managing her base.
But the more important, larger thing to keep in mind is that it's hearsay, it's somebody that you don't know who said something, interpreting what somebody said in a meeting.
Probably untrue.
Let me correct something that...
Let me correct a fact from prior conversations here and on Twitter.
You may know Joe Concha, who I mentioned, he tweeted something from The Hill.
And the Hill article said that the President was praising white nationalists at Charlottesville, which is not true.
So I had some criticisms about promoting that fake news, but I want to correct, it is not Joe Concha who said the fake news.
He tweeted a story written by somebody else that had a line in there that said that the President was praising white nationalists.
Now, I do have a question why it was tweeted, but I do not But I do not put any responsibility on, nor should you, on Joe Concha for writing the article.
It wasn't his article. And I don't know what he thought about that particular line in it, but I just want to correct the record.
If you thought that Joe Concha believed the president was praising white nationalists, there's no evidence that he believes that.
In fact, he has apparently said the opposite in public a number of times.
So I want to correct that.
Just for accuracy, there's a story out of Japan.
There's apparently some kind of a movement in Japan, a big national, a lot of people signed a petition to make high heels no longer required slash desirable for working women in Japan.
So the idea is that women in Japan are saying, hey, don't make us wear high heels at work.
And I have to admit, do this experiment.
Mentally, bring yourself into the future 50 years mentally.
So just go, imagine 50 years into the future.
Do you believe in 50 years there's any chance that women will routinely be wearing high heels at work?
Probably the odds of that are zero.
I mean, maybe, but I would say in 50 years the odds that women routinely wear high heels at work is probably zero.
Right? For all the obvious right reasons.
Now, When you do that experiment where you put yourself 50 years in the future and then you look back, and you look at this age, you look at 2019, doesn't it feel weird that women wear high heels?
Doesn't it feel like wrong on every level?
I mean, high heels literally are sexualizing.
Women, the reason you wear heels is because they're flattering to your legs, and the reason you do that is because that's one of the signals for sexual attractiveness.
Now, why in the world is that a work requirement?
It's a work requirement to make your legs look good at work?
Think about how that's going to look to us in the future.
In the future, we're going to look back to that and say, I can't believe that seemed okay.
Like, how was it that we were in the Me Too era and everything else, and everybody was just okay with that?
Now, let me say, I want to give you my personal opinion.
I'm a guy. Do I like seeing women in heels?
Yes, of course I do.
Do I think that women in heels are more attractive?
Well, it depends, right?
It depends on the woman, blah, blah, blah.
But yes. Absolutely.
Do I think they make women look sexier?
Of course. A lot.
But do I think women should have to wear them for work?
For work?
Are you freaking kidding me?
That's still a thing?
Like, doesn't it already feel like we're...
It feels like it's a bit of the past that followed us and we didn't notice?
You know sometimes you step on the toilet paper and it's stuck to your shoe?
And you walk out of the restaurant or whatever and you've got that long string of toilet paper stuck to your shoe?
The high heels thing feels like that.
It feels like society has walked way past The point where having women wear sex objects to work could make any sense at all.
And yet there it is.
It's like the toilet paper stuck to the shoe.
At the same time, I love high heels.
So I will feel bad when they go away.
But they're going away. All right.
I'll feel good for women, though.
For women, it's going to be terrific, I would think.
Now, there is one...
There is one reason for heels that makes sense, which is it adds height.
And height actually is pretty correlated with success and with confidence and all that.
So if women want to wear them because of height, that's not a bad reason.
That would at least have scientific backing, but I think the trade-off is pretty bad.
All right. Let's talk about censorship of conservatives.
So the latest is Steven Crowder.
Was demonetized on YouTube.
I keep wanting to get really engaged in this topic.
I keep thinking that somebody's going to get kicked off a platform or demonetized, and I'm going to say to myself, now you've gone too far.
You've crossed the line now, big social media.
This one was way over the line.
And I keep waiting for the story.
And I think, oh, here's one.
Steven Crowder. Because I've been on his show and there was nothing, when I was on his show, there was nothing that sounded even vaguely like it'd be a problem.
I've watched many clips of his show and I've never seen anything on a clip That looked even vaguely like a problem to me.
So I thought to myself, here's the one, Steven Crowder, you can't possibly think that he and his show should be demonetized.
I'm going, I'm going to go deep this time.
And then I look at the clip, the clips that got him kicked off.
And unfortunately, it's really anti-gay, ugly stuff.
Now, he's doing it jokingly and in the context of humor, but the humor is at the expense of gay people in general.
Now, what am I supposed to do with that?
How am I supposed to take his side?
Seriously. This is like a frickin' trap.
I feel like the left have this perfect trap where they can go after people Who have a video record of saying something that's clearly beyond the terms of agreement or the terms of service.
And then what am I supposed to do?
Am I supposed to argue that they shouldn't have guidelines?
Am I supposed to side with the person who said things that I disavow about...
And keep in mind, And I did watch it.
And I do know that he was talking about a specific journalist.
The specific journalist he was talking about is one of the worst people I've ever seen in my life.
So the person that Crowder was going after, and who ultimately, I guess, was behind getting him demonetized, the person from Vox...
I'm not even going to say his name because he's just a horrible, horrible human being.
But none of that has to do with being gay.
I don't think that comes into anything, right?
There was nothing along those lines, nothing on the topic that had anything to do with anything.
So somebody's saying he was using that guy's own words.
It doesn't work that way.
You can say things about yourself that other people can't say about yourself.
So here's the thing.
I want to defend Steven Crowder.
I want to defend his right to say things that other people find offensive, just sort of as a general free speech thing.
I don't want to endorse anything he said.
I just want to say that he should be able to say what he said.
But here's the thing.
What YouTube did was they demonetized him.
They didn't take him off the platform.
As long as he's on the platform, he still has Complete freedom of speech.
He just isn't monetized.
And here's the issue.
Does YouTube, or any other platform, have a legitimate right to service their advertisers in a way that the advertisers are buying something that's of value, which is an advertising platform that doesn't cause them any trouble?
If what YouTube is doing is saying our advertisers do not want to pair their ads with this content, I say, well, that's sort of a free speech issue too, isn't it?
Because if you're an advertiser, you get to have your own free speech, and your free speech is, hey, I don't want my brand associated with this kind of content.
Why can't the advertiser have that right?
Of course they can.
If you have the right to associate, you also have the right to not associate.
You have the right to not pair your content with somebody else's in a commercial platform, voluntary way?
Of course you do.
So when YouTube says, this content we don't monetize because our advertisers would not like it, and they're buying a service, and that's not the service they're buying, I've got a big problem criticizing that.
Because if you criticize that, I mean, you're criticizing a pretty basic Part of capitalism, a pretty basic part of free speech.
So where I am on all of this stuff is that you should all diversify.
So if you haven't already opened alternative social media accounts, I would recommend you do that.
That doesn't mean quitting the traditional ones that have all the traffic and you've got all the energy over there.
Don't quit them. But make sure that you've got a backup and make sure you've diversified across platforms.
It is the best you can do.
And at the same time...
And at the same time...
And by the way, for those of you who would get angry at me because I'm not going to...
I'm not going to risk it all to defend Stephen Crowder or any other individual who gets banned, you have to think about this a little bit more strategically.
If everybody goes off and gets themselves banned because somebody else did something that advertisers don't like, I don't know if that's the fight you want to be in.
And having watched the clips that got Steven Crowder kicked off of monetization anyway, I looked at them and I said to myself, okay, that's not a slip of the tongue.
It's a repeated behavior.
He did the same thing that anybody would have known would have been a problem.
Anybody who did what he did should have known this would get him in trouble on the platform.
Know why he didn't? I'm not in his head.
I have no idea why he did what he did.
Don't know. But it's not for me to defend his actions or YouTubes.
All right, but I'm going to keep watching this because there's a real issue here.
But I don't want to confuse it with things that are just business.
Because that's not a problem.
Alright, let us talk about the coming golden age.
I'm going to call it a nuclear age.
So I'm going to give you a new term.
I believe we are entering the nuclear age.
Now I know what you're saying. Oh, how can we be entering it?
We've been in it forever. We've had nuclear power forever.
Decades and decades.
What do you mean we're entering it? Well, here's my argument.
I'm going to start with a general concept.
And the general concept looks like this.
For a technology, it's often common that a technology would start off as not being useful, and then we would develop it and develop it until it became useful.
So it would cross the line into being useful.
But if you further develop it and you keep going, you might reach a point where you have another turning point where it doesn't become just useful, it actually transforms society.
Let me give you an example.
Telephones. Telephones started out, you know, the day they were invented, there was nobody to call.
What good was a telephone when only 100 people in the world had them?
Not much good. But they kept improving and improving, and more people got them.
And then you started to have flip phones.
You had a phone that didn't have a screen on it, but it was a little flip phone.
You could make a call anywhere.
You could be anywhere and still make a call.
Well, not anywhere. You had to be near a city, and you had to have coverage.
But it was a pretty big deal.
When we went from landlines to cell phones, That was a big change into the useful zone.
Now, you could say we were useful with landlines, and it just got better and better with the flip phones.
But then smartphones came along.
Smartphones are not just a better telephone.
It's a complete rearrangement of society.
Because now everything's an app.
The things I used to call, I could do on an app.
You know, the fact that it has a screen, and it could do so many functions.
It's barely even a telephone.
The thing I do least with my smartphone is make a phone call.
That's the thing I do least.
So phones went through a few stages where there were long phases where they were getting a little bit better, but then when they reached some turning point where it was like, shh, it changes everything.
It's possible that when we get G5 everywhere, the faster speeds, that it might do this again.
I mean, there might be a whole other level where you've got enhanced reality in your glasses and all kinds of stuff.
Now, let's get to nuclear.
Nuclear energy started, of course, the first day the first nuclear energy was designed and the first nuclear plant, let's call it Generation 1, whatever that was, Wasn't that useful to the world.
It had to get a lot better.
Generation 2 was better.
Generation 3. So we're sort of here on nuclear.
Except people will say, wait a minute, it's been decades and decades, and nuclear plants are, you know, some of them are closing.
It doesn't seem like we have any momentum.
What's up with this? Well, the problem is that you couldn't iterate nuclear.
Nuclear energy technology easily because it was hard to build a nuclear plant and then see if it worked and then, oh, how can we improve this and then build another one?
But we are very close to an inflection point with nuclear energy.
That would be the Generation 4 plants.
I would say the Generation 3 and 4 are right around this corner.
This is about where we are.
So, what's going to happen when we have lots of small Generation 4 or maybe someday fusion?
But we can just talk about more standard fission nuclear for now.
I think we're approaching...
Another point.
What happens when nuclear energy is widespread and they figured out how to standardize the designs so that you can lower the cost and get approval more easily?
Now keep in mind Shrinking them and standardizing the design fixes a lot of stuff.
It fixes the economics, because you're always making the same nuclear plant.
It fixes training, because it's the same plant, you're just reproducing it.
And it makes it a lot easier to get approval.
Because the approval is the same as the last time.
You don't have to look at a whole new plan.
You say, ah, it's the same as last time.
So we'll just put another one in a new place.
So there's a lot going on in terms of the ordinary engineering of nuclear.
Now, let me give you another analogy.
I worked at the phone company back in the days when it was landlines.
And the first cell phones were developed.
And then I was also in the group within the phone company That was first developing the smaller cell phones, which became the flip phones and the little regular cell phones.
During that time, one of the things that the engineers explained to me is that there was nothing stopping us from going where we were with landlines to a point where everybody had a phone in their pocket and could call anybody from anywhere.
They told me it is purely an engineering problem, meaning there's nothing that needs to be invented out of nothing.
It's known engineering problems and iterating to find the best of them until you get something great.
All of the engineers who worked in this field said there's nothing that's going to stop this from happening.
It's just time and iteration.
Likewise, With nuclear energy, if you talk to the people in that field, they will tell you there is nothing that's going to stop this from happening.
The slow improvement in nuclear is going to have an elbow, and it is going to go crazy.
We don't know when.
It could be in 10 years.
It could be in 20 years.
But the odds of it happening are more like 100%.
Unless, you know, I suppose if aliens visit and bring us a new technology, you know, energy source, it could make a difference.
Now, here's why this matters.
I'm going to make a statement that will haunt you forever.
The statement is this.
Money is simply a way to store energy.
That's the thought that will haunt you for a while.
Money, you know, currency and bank accounts and credit cards and all those, anything that's money is a way to store energy.
And that everything that we care about and need to do is about moving energy.
Everything you build is focusing energy somewhere.
Everything you move is energy.
Everything you do requires energy.
The world is energy that's being rearranged and moved and focused.
That's what it is. If you think about that, then you understand that when we get to the elbow where energy becomes way, way cheaper, everything changes.
We're not talking about small improvements.
When you get to the point where we're putting, let's say, Generation 4 smaller nuclear online, and we're just cranking them out, boom, boom, boom, boom, as the cost of energy goes down, which is what would happen, you get all these transformative benefits that are not...
Here's my cat coming through.
These are not incremental changes.
Sorry about this. She's knocking the screen right now.
You don't get incremental changes.
Let me give you some examples. The reason that we don't like to grow food indoors is because you have to use a lot of energy.
It takes energy to move the water there.
It takes energy for the lights.
And that's actually a lot of energy to artificially light it.
You need energy for desalinization, depending on where you are.
And if you are shipping food, you need energy for that.
So growing food is sort of an energy problem.
Not 100%, but very much an energy problem.
If you have cheap energy, you have cheap food, you've got desalinization, you've got water everywhere, you've got heating and cooling is cheaper, so you don't have to worry about staying warm or staying cool.
You've got irrigation, because that requires energy, and even construction.
Every component that goes into building your house, from the bricks to the walls to everything, required a lot of energy expense to create it in the first place, to dig it out of the ground, to manufacture it, to create it, to ship it to your place, to put it into the construction.
All energy. You take energy out of the equation, or you take it down from what it costs now to 10% of what it costs now, let's say in the best case scenario, suddenly you don't just have a slightly better gas bill or energy bill.
I'm not talking about, hey, my electrical costs went down, or hey, isn't it great that some extra people in the third world country got electricity?
It's way bigger than that.
We're talking about making it basically cheap enough for somebody who doesn't have a job in one state to simply get in a self-driving car and drive to the other part of the country fairly cheaply because the energy costs would be approaching zero.
So here's the big picture.
In the future, it will be impossible to simply tax our way to a fair and just society because there won't be enough people making money to tax them so heavily that you wouldn't crush capitalism in the service of trying to provide for the poor.
So taxation, under the current set of variables, can't get us there.
But if you can reduce substantially the cost of a good quality life, such that instead of costing $100,000 a year to have a family of four in a suburban area, maybe it costs, and even that's low, but maybe it costs $50,000.
Maybe it costs $25,000.
You should be able to get the cost of a good life way, way down simply by starting with energy.
So, I propose that we're entering a golden age in which nuclear energy will drastically reduce the cost of most of what we do.
So that most of what we do completely transforms into a far better world.
So, that's the thought.
Money is just a way to temporarily store energy that can be released again when you give somebody else your money for them to do some work.
So that's the situation.
So here, consider, if you will, the people on both sides of the aisle, from AOC and Biden to Rick Perry and the energy group and the Trump administration.
Pretty much everybody's on plan right now.
That iterating nuclear technology and getting serious about it is the way to go.
It is the way to deal with climate change.
It is the way to deal with our national debt.
Because again, you'd be making things cheaper for people.
You don't need to tax as much if everything becomes less expensive.
So even things like healthcare become way more affordable if you don't have to pay so much for the other stuff.
So Nuclear energy could be the biggest transformative change in civilization in the coming few decades, and everybody's on board.
I don't see anybody who's against it who's actually looked into it.
So even the politicians are on the same side.
So you're looking at a situation forming that is one of the most positive things That civilization has ever seen.
And here's the fun part. There's almost nothing that can stop it from happening.
Because remember, it's just engineering.
We don't have to do much differently.
Maybe the lawmakers need to make things a little easier and maybe get rid of some regulations, but it seems there's some will to do that.
So there doesn't seem to be any problem To get from where we are to way less expensive energy and widely available and completely transforming society because of it.
It's going to happen.
10 years, maybe 20 years, but nothing's going to stop it.
I think I will leave it on that high point.
And I remind you, if you want to see this in replay, you can just go to YouTube and Google Real Coffee with Scott Adams.
It'll pop right up.
And that's all for now.
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