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June 15, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
50:10
Episode 566 Scott Adams: Who Will Win Democrat Debates, Odds of War With Iran, Foreign Influence
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here it comes, here it comes, here it comes.
Is it my imagination, or does it get better every time?
I think it does. I think it does get better every time.
So, here's a random question.
I'm thinking of doing an ASMR video to literally help you go to sleep.
Now, I am a trained hypnotist, and so I have a feeling I could do this well.
But I don't know if anybody wants it, so I'll put that out there.
You can tell me on Twitter if you want that.
Alright, let's talk about foreign influence.
I wrote a book called Loser Think that comes out in November that covers this topic so perfectly.
I wish, I wish, I wish the book were already available because the news could not be more perfectly fitted to the book.
But there's always good news.
There will always be more news that fits that book because it's about bad ways to analyze things and what to avoid.
And there is no better example than this question of President Trump and his answer about foreign influence and whether he would talk to the FBI and what he would do there.
Now, there are two parts to this.
Number one, should President Trump have done the ABC interview in the first place?
Was that a mistake?
And two, did he handle the actual interview in the best way?
I think you could...
You know, I see why people are saying it was a mistake to do an interview with an unfriendly outlet.
But he's also the President of the United States.
And so the President of the United States, it's one thing if he focuses more on Fox News, but I think it's sort of a problem if he doesn't ever do the other media.
So I think he has to at least give them a little bit of love.
Now, did he handle the question correctly?
Objectively speaking, I would say no, and here's why.
People who have media training, and I was amused to watch Chris Wallace of Fox News say this directly, he was saying that the most disciplined politicians, and he used, I think he used, what's his name, Mitch McConnell, as an example of a disciplined interview subject, because he won't answer any question directly.
He'll just say what he wants to say, no matter what the question is.
And Chris Wallace was saying, well, that's frustrating for the interviewer, but it certainly makes sense because Mitch McConnell avoids being taken out of context.
He can't be misquoted because he's not saying anything that could be misquoted.
President Trump plays it completely the opposite way.
He says plenty of things that could be misquoted, and they are.
But I'm just going to give you my personal opinion here.
Your opinion, might agree, might not.
I'm not trying to change your mind.
I'm just going to give you my personal opinion.
This is President Trump's approach to this interview and the way he answered the question.
For me, just my personal impression, Is why I like him.
The way he handled this, for me, was all a plus.
I acknowledge that it was a mistake in the sense that people miscovered it and turned it into fake news so easily.
He could have avoided that by saying nothing interesting.
And here's the best part.
He could have avoided it by being less transparent.
What I like about it is he was completely transparent, and he schooled the country on how to be smart.
Now, the country didn't get the lesson.
I was watching a clip from Bill Maher last night.
Bill Maher is actually saying some version of this.
He says that the president said that if a foreign power gave him some help, that he would not go to the FBI. That's what Bill Maher...
That's how he framed it before he made jokes about it.
That is exactly not what happened.
That's just fake news.
That is unambiguously as close to you as you can get to the opposite of what happened.
What actually happened was that President Trump said, and his very first statement was, I'd probably do both, meaning that I would listen to the information, and then if it were important in any way, I would tell the FBI. That's not the way the fake news is reporting it.
And even Bill Maher, who would be no friend of fake news, certainly he would never intentionally...
I don't think Bill Maher...
I've been watching him a long time.
I see no evidence that he would ever intentionally...
Repeat a story inaccurately.
I just don't think he would.
There's just nothing that would suggest he would do that.
There's no incentive. It's not what his brand is.
Nothing like that. So I think he actually came away with that impression because he watched the news.
But let me put this in the context for you.
We're going to go to the whiteboard. Let's say this question of a Russian citizen offers you some information, because that was the original case, the Don Jr.
meeting in the tower. It was about a Russian citizen offering some information.
Now, the fake news has tried to turn that into, what if the Russian intelligence agency's Offer you information.
So the first thing they do to turn it into fake news is they change the example, the hypothetical.
But let's go to the whiteboard and I'll show you why President Trump's answer was the smart answer.
Let's say you've got a situation where you've got a Russian citizen who offers you some information.
What are your objectives?
So the moment this situation arises, there's a Russian citizen.
Not the intelligence agency.
You don't know that.
It's not Putin. You don't know that.
The only thing you know on moment one is it's a Russian citizen, and they're offering you some information that might be useful to you because it's bad about your opponent.
What are your objectives?
Objective number one, protect the country, right?
That's always objective number one if you're a presidential candidate.
Avoid blackmail.
You don't want to get in a situation where you can get blackmail.
You want to get the information, of course.
Don't you want the information?
Of course you do. And you don't want to waste the FBI's time.
So compare what all the smart people are saying Trump should have done to what Trump says he would have done in this hypothetical.
The smart people say, tell the FBI before you listen to the information.
That accomplishes step one, protect the country.
It works. Avoid blackmail?
Definitely. Because you've told the FBI, you're clean.
You avoid that blackmail.
But you didn't get the information.
And you probably, 95% likely, you wasted the FBI's time.
Because 95% of the time, when people say, I have information for you, it's just BS. It's not useful.
It's something you already knew.
It's meaningless. They're just trying to get you in the room.
And in fact, that's what happened.
President Trump's technique was, well, first I'll listen to it, and then I'll decide.
And if it's a problem, I'll share it with the FBI. His approach protects the country because the FBI is informed.
It avoids blackmail because he immediately told the FBI. Right?
There's no blackmail if you told the FBI what happened.
He gets the information.
Bing! And he doesn't waste the FBI's time because he vetted it first.
He goes to the meeting, the hypothetical meeting, and he says, what do you got?
Oh, you got nothing. There was a 95% chance it was going to go that way.
I don't waste the time of the FBI. So you've got all the smart people in the world telling you that this is smarter than this.
What do I keep telling you about this president that makes him different?
There's a boo the cat's tail.
She likes to participate.
What I keep telling you is that this president can find free money on the table and pick it up.
And others don't do it for reasons that are unclear.
She's trying to steal the show here.
So, in my opinion, there's no comparison between the dumb way to handle it, in which you leave money on the table, you don't get the information, and you probably wasted the FBI's time.
There's no comparing that to what Trump said.
So, if you were to look at what Trump said...
From a logical, rational point of view, which I know nobody does, but if he did, what he did was the smart adult way to handle this, unambiguously.
It's not even close.
The smart way to handle it is to find out first, and then deal with it.
All right, but, so here's my summary of that.
From a standard political frame, the president did not handle this situation right because he created a situation which he should have been able to see coming that allowed things to be taken out of context.
But it's also, and I'm going to say this as clearly as possible, it's also what I like about him.
He was completely transparent.
People say you shouldn't answer a hypothetical question, to which I say, I don't know.
I see what trouble it got him in, but I kind of liked it, because it taught us something.
It was transparent.
He opened up his brain and said, look inside.
If you don't like it, you don't like it, but here's what's in here.
This is complete transparency.
If this were to happen again, this is how I'd handle it.
How do you not like that?
How could you ever live with a president who won't do that for you?
I mean, seriously. It felt like he was doing it for the public.
In other words, the public actually wanted to know the answer to the question.
So Trump says, you know, I don't want to read his mind, but based on his actions, I assume he heard the question.
He thought, yeah, the public would like to know the answer to that, so I'll just give him an honest answer.
I can't dislike that, no matter how much the press wants me to.
All right. Let's talk about Iran.
The interesting thing about Iran...
We have the strangest situation of two countries, the United States and Iran, and arguably the other countries that are involved, but let's just talk about the US and Iran.
In which we have a war-like situation.
They're presumably doing some stuff in the Gulf that is military, attacking some tankers and causing some trouble.
And we're moving some assets in there.
So it looks like it's a military confrontation.
But what's weird about this military confrontation It's that there's nothing that both countries want less than war.
There's nothing they want less than war.
I would say the odds of the U.S. and Iran actually having a full-scale war, I mean, there could be a missile attack here or there, but the odds of a full-scale war with Iran are pretty close to zero because we don't want it and they don't want it.
And we want war far less than we care about the alternative.
The alternative is these low-level skirmishes.
So how do you get out of this situation?
Because normally you would solve this situation with a war.
If you can't solve it any other way, it would just turn into a war, the war would happen, somebody would win, and then you've got a solution, even though a lot of people are dead.
So I would like to suggest an alternative framework.
Now, I'm not suggesting that Iran will hear this and say, oh, that's a good idea.
We'll adopt this way of thinking.
But it is an escape hatch.
So you might have to try a bunch of different escape hatches.
But you have this situation where both parties are locked in.
So you have to give them an escape.
There has to be some way out with honor.
That's the important part.
So Iran has to get out of their situation with some kind of honor, respect, religious, let's say, religious integrity intact.
That's sort of a solid requirement.
You're not going to see them budge on that.
That would be the last thing they would want to budge on.
Yeah, and the U.S. wants to get out of it looking good, too.
So what would be an escape hatch?
For both countries, where we both came out looking good.
And here's the idea. I brought this up, I don't know, over a year ago, but it's worth mentioning now because of the recent events.
I would suggest this.
That I would suggest to Iran that they should catch up with modern technology, essentially, and bring their war to a war of ideas.
In other words, Instead of saying, Iran, stop trying to spread your power and your message and your religion with military means, and why don't you trust your God?
Trust your God and do it through information.
Put your best argument on the internet, open up your internet, and let your people see the options and trust your God.
So this is the key statement.
We'd like you to trust your own God, that you don't need to use military weapons, because that's the old technology.
Here's the context.
When the only military weapons available were swords, Islam, When it was spreading, used swords.
Because swords were the weapon that you could use to spread Islam.
When weapons improved to the point where you have explodey things and guns and missiles and stuff, at least the terrorist part of the Islamic community, not Islam in general, we're just talking about the extremists, they updated their weapons.
So you don't see ISIS using swords.
You see them using modern weapons.
But I would suggest that we've now passed through that phase and we're entering a new phase where the best way to spread Islam, should you want to do that, should you want to do that, the best way to do that would be through ideas and through the internet and that that channel is open for them.
They have complete ability to spread their religion through the internet.
If They trust their own God.
So that would be the key statement.
If you trust your God, open up the internet.
Let your country see your opinion.
Let your citizens see what other people are thinking.
Take your best shot.
We're saying we surrender.
At least information-wise, we surrender.
If you have some information...
All of our channels are open.
We will hear everything that you have to say.
In fact, I would be interested in it.
I'd love to see the argument. So, the escape hatch for Iran, since neither side wants anything to do with a full-scale war, and these little back and forths are not really getting it done, the escape is trust your own God.
Trust Him that He provided you the weapons you need when you needed them.
When you needed swords, you had swords.
When you needed bullets and bombs, you had bullets and bombs.
Now we can see clearly and unambiguously that those weapons won't work.
Swords won't work. Bullets and bombs don't work.
Because there will be economic pressure on top of you that will make a difference.
What works today? What works today is economic growth.
And messages and communication and ideas on the internet.
Those are the weapons of today.
So instead of saying, Iran, we will kick your ass, which is obvious, because we will if we get in a war, say, why don't you join us in the year 2019 and bring your message to the people and simply open up your communication.
So I would make it a war of ideas.
That's my idea. Have you noticed?
I'll bet you have.
It seems to me that the Trump administration keeps doing good things in healthcare in terms of smaller administration rule changes, etc., that are making things more competitive, you know, more generics coming online, more competition across straight lines.
And then there was another big announcement yesterday about healthcare, and I think it was covered by nobody.
Does anybody even know what the big announcement on healthcare was?
Because I don't think it was covered.
I looked on all of the news sites today and didn't see it.
Did anybody see it? So, can anybody give me a hypothesis?
HRAs. What's an HRA? Because I looked at the news and I didn't see it?
Oh, it's small business healthcare, right.
So I guess the change was that small businesses can deduct the cost of their health care.
That was the change. All right.
Here's what I worry about.
I worry that because the news industry is wholly owned by the pharmaceutical companies, that the news will be unable to report progress in reducing costs, especially of pharmaceuticals.
If your entire revenue depends on pharmaceutical commercials, can you run nonstop stories about how the president is beating the prices down on pharmaceuticals because they're too high and too unfair?
You can't.
The one area, should you be surprised, yeah, there's no media coverage on health care.
And let me tell you why there's no media coverage on it.
Because it's positive for the president and it's bad for the pharmaceuticals and the people who advertise on the news.
As long as that's true, I don't know if you're ever going to hear about anything good happening.
So watch for that.
It's a giant black hole.
There was a story that I thought should have gotten more attention.
I think it's true. Somebody fact-checked me on this.
The story was that Mexico is planning to fund their immigration deal with the United States, which would require them to spend some money to put some extra troops on their southern border to keep people from crossing through Mexico into the US. And the story was that Mexico planned to sell the presidential airplane For $150 million to help fund that.
Now my first question is, is that true?
Is Mexico really going to sell the presidential airplane to fund this deal?
So let's say it is true.
What would that tell you about Mexico?
Because on one level you'd say to yourself, my goodness, President Trump is the best negotiator ever.
Not only did he get them to do it, but he got the president to sell his own personal airplane to do it.
So the president will be taking the bus so that President of Mexico will be taking the bus or something.
Not really. But that's kind of a funny story.
But let me tell you...
How I interpret that.
Here's how I interpret that story.
The way I interpret it is that Mexico, the president of Mexico, would rather sell his own personal presidential airplane, not personal, but the presidential airplane, the president of Mexico would rather sell his presidential airplane and all of the humiliation that comes with it, rather than deal with the cartels on the northern border.
Think about that. Because the alternative was that Mexico could secure its own border and we haven't heard much about that, right?
Mexico actually can't secure its own northern border because the cartels own that territory.
They can't admit it and they can't do anything about it.
Those are the two things that you could do.
You can't talk about it and you can't act on it because the cartels are too powerful.
He was willing The president of Mexico was willing to take the humiliation of selling his presidential airplane to avoid even talking about the cartels.
That's what I saw.
Now, am I over-interpreting that?
Because the fact that the cartels are not even mentioned, we have a major immigration negotiation with Mexico, and nobody mentions that the cartels own the northern border.
It's not even a topic.
And in order to keep that out of being a topic, the president of Mexico had to sell his private, not private, but the presidential airplane?
Or JAN, I guess. I don't know.
What I see there is that the cartels are running Mexico.
That's the only way I can read that.
Now let's talk about something else fun.
I had suggested that there might be a way to determine when social media platforms are shadow banning you and that the method might be to have multiple social media accounts and see if they move in lockstep or in different ways.
If they moved in lockstep, it would probably tell you there was just something about your content.
Maybe it's something about the season.
Maybe it's a rainy day.
Maybe it's a slow news day or a fast news day.
If all of your traffic moved in lockstep across different platforms, you would say, okay, I'm not being banned because those platforms would not be so clever that they would do it all in the same way in the same days.
And if you are being shadow banned on a platform, what you would expect to see is that one would stay the same, business as usual, and one would go boop, suddenly down.
That's what you should expect to see if somebody's playing games with your traffic.
And so I suggested that there would be a way to build some kind of a rough sensing device to find out when you're shadow banned simply by comparing your traffic across your multiple platforms.
And I also suggested that you all have multiple platforms for this purpose.
I want to show you What happened when I did this?
So there's an app called Social Blade that allows you to just put in any address and you can track yours or anybody else's Twitter and Instagram or YouTube traffic.
I think Instagram, but at least YouTube.
Oh, so you can do YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, or Instagram.
And you can compare them.
So I'm going to show you two weeks.
I'm going to compare my traffic.
On Twitter, with my traffic on YouTube.
And keep in mind that they're very similar content.
So the content I put on YouTube is literally the stuff I made on Twitter.
So they should move in lockstep if, for example, there was some kind of a summer lull or something.
Alright, so I'm going to show you the graph.
Here's a graph of my...
Let's see if I can make this...
Bear with me, I'm going to take down my screen illumination.
And then you'll be able to clearly see this or not, but I'll describe it in any ways.
All right, so here's my Twitter traffic.
Now, you can see, starting over here, that I've got...
Let's see if I can get a good picture on this.
Damn it. It's going to be hard.
Yeah, I can't.
Well, I'll describe it to you.
So you can see I'm getting a lot of traffic.
And then there's one week that on Twitter, my traffic is up and down.
Then there's one week for the entire week, five days, it just flatlines.
And then after a week, it goes back to normal.
But somebody said, just put it close.
Does that help? Oh yeah, it does.
Thank you. Good advice.
So here...
Here, I'm sorry, right there.
See that week? Notice that that week doesn't look like anything else.
Even the low week is not even close to that week.
So right here, my Twitter traffic went to almost nothing in terms of new users for a week.
So what happens if I look at...
So that's Twitter. What happens if I go over to YouTube...
And look at, same thing.
So, same graph.
And here's the YouTube traffic.
And over here is where you would expect to see that week where there was a solid week of nothing.
And it isn't there.
There are down days, which is normal.
I think there's mostly the weekends.
I think the weekends just go down and then pop back up.
But as you can see, As you can see, Twitter traffic went down for a week, but my YouTube traffic did not.
What's that mean? Well, it could mean that there was something going on over at Twitter.
Now, here's the next thing, which I haven't done.
There was one other week in which Twitter had that low traffic sometime in the past few months.
And I think it was because of the same topic.
I think there was one topic in which I am especially dangerous.
There was one topic that I could actually change the world.
And you know what that is, right?
There's one topic that's the alpha hoax.
It's the hoax that all the other hoaxes depend on.
And I am the most dangerous person in the world to that hoax because I've hammered it like it's Like it's a rented mule.
And I'm not going to give up on it.
Now, when I hammered on that, I think those are the two times that my traffic just disappeared.
But I'm not positive.
So I'll say that that's just a hypothesis, not any kind of confirmed anything.
So, if you wanted a sensor that would find out if you're being shadow banned, the first thing you do is monitor your different platforms to see if they move in lockstep or not.
Then the second thing you would want, which I haven't done, is to find out if when there's an irregularity, if there are also keywords or hashtags or topics, That were in common.
Are all of your low days on the same time?
All right. You probably tuned in because you want me to predict who's going to win the first Democrat debates.
Are you ready for that? A number of you are telling me that the periscope here got cut off just as I was talking about that.
But it looks like most of you are back.
So let's talk about the And is it a coincidence that I get cut off at exactly those times?
All right, so as you know, there are going to be two teams of Democrats on two different nights doing debates on June 26th and 27th.
So because there were so many candidates, I guess four of them got dropped off, but the rest of them are going to be in two teams of ten, I guess, it looks like.
So, because of the groupings, which they say are random, let's say that they are, you have an opportunity for some people to get some attention, and the specific groupings, who's in each group, is going to make a big difference in who can succeed.
So that tells you a lot.
So the first thing you do is you look at the groups and say, okay, what do I know about this group that's special?
And here are some general statements.
So here are my predictions.
Number one, the more you see of Biden, the less support he will have.
So prediction number one is that Biden's polls will go down after the debate.
Because people will see new people that they didn't know before, and they're going to start to learn about the new people.
So for every person who likes a new person...
Probably it's going to come from either Biden or Bernie.
So the second prediction is that Bernie's poll numbers will go down.
So I see Biden and Bernie being injured by the debates because everybody knows them.
I don't see any way that Biden is going to have a breakout night or that Bernie will have a breakout night because we just know too much about them.
So there's no upside for them.
It's only downside. But for the new names, they still have a lot of clutter to break through.
So you have to ask yourself, who is capable of breaking through the noise?
So in the first ten, I'll just read off who's in the first ten.
You got Cory Booker, Elizabeth Allen, Beto O'Rourke, Amy Klobuchar, John Delaney, Tulsi Gabbard, Julian Castro, Tim Ryan, Bill de Blasio, and Jay Inslee.
Of that group, in the first group, the two who will have a good night are Elizabeth Warren, and a wild card is Tulsi Gabbard.
So I'm not going to predict that Tulsi Gabbard will break out.
I'm going to predict that she's a wild card, meaning she could, but she hasn't made any noise so far, and Meaning that she just doesn't seem to have a lot of support for reasons I don't know exactly.
So I'm not going to say she's going to break out.
I'm going to say she's the interesting wild card.
But I think Elizabeth Warren is going to have a great night.
And the reason is she's a good debater.
She's very policy-wise.
And if you're on a debate stage and you want to hit the facts, you want to look smart, right, she's smart.
If you watch Elizabeth Warren talk, you're going to come away with she's experienced, she's smart, She's a woman, and man, does she want to put Donald Trump in jail.
She's going to come up in her polling.
That's my prediction for the first group.
Let's talk about the second group.
The second group has Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Kirsten Gillibrand, Michael Bennett, Marianne Williamson, Eric Swalwell, Andrew Yang, and John Hickenlooper.
This one's interesting because it's the Biden and Sanders group.
Now, remember, I think that they only have a bad day ahead of them.
So here's my first prediction.
Kamala Harris will find her poll numbers go up because Kamala Harris is not as well known, but she's solid.
So people are going to see a person of color.
They're going to see a woman. They're going to see that she can speak like a lawyer.
She can talk to the facts.
She will probably handle herself well, and she will be sort of introducing herself to a lot of people who just don't know enough about her.
So I think her poll numbers will show an improvement.
Pete Buttigieg is a wild card.
I ask you this.
How likely is it that there are any LGBTQ people in the United States who are likely to vote who don't already know who Pete Buttigieg is.
It seems to me that Pete Buttigieg probably has 100% support from, let's say, the LGBTQ community, the ones who are going to vote, the ones who care, right?
There's not much room to grow in the community that is, you know, sort of automatically on his side.
And I think he could make a dent by being clever and news-making.
So he does have that ability.
So Buttigieg is one of those people who can say something interesting enough that he'll get a lot of coverage.
And the media likes him.
So he's good for clicks.
So I think Buttigieg is my wild card for the second group.
So there are two wild cards.
One is Tulsi Gabbard, one is Buttigieg.
They could go either way.
So I don't have a prediction which way, but they're the most unpredictable people in their respective groups.
They could get a bump. But here's my big prediction for the second group.
Andrew Yang is going to surprise me.
And here's why. Now, first of all, I don't think that Andrew Yang is at a place where he could become president.
I don't think his resume looks solid enough for people to put their full trust in him as a president yet.
Maybe someday. But what Yang can do that most of the people in the debates can't do is say something you haven't heard already.
Think about it.
Everybody in these debate groups, almost every person, is going to say something you've already heard.
Now, it might be news the way they say it, and they might use more provocative.
You know, they might be a little more provocative.
They might be, you know, maybe they'll say worse things about Trump than you expected.
That could make a little news. There are lots of ways to make news by being a little bit out of the box.
But Yang is the only one who can say something that will just make you go, oh, I haven't heard that before.
And it will be newsmaking, and it will be interesting.
So, Yang is the most interesting person at the debates who's not Buttigieg.
They're the two most interesting people.
And I think Yang is going to see his poll numbers double or triple, and it will be at the expense of the leaders, Biden and Sanders.
All right. But I don't think Yang quite has the gravitas, et cetera, that people are going to want him to be president.
So there's my prediction.
Bad night for Bernie.
Bad night for Sanders. Good night for Elizabeth Warren.
Good night for Yang.
Good night for Kamala Harris.
And the two wild cards are Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Buttigieg, who could surprise, but maybe not.
All right. Those are my predictions.
For those of you who have stayed around, I'm going to talk about how to fix everything in the future.
So I have a, I guess, a hypothesis or a belief, I'm not sure what it is, that most of the future can be fixed with good design.
Design. So we don't always design things well, but when we do, it changes everything.
If you look at the success of Apple, for example.
The success of Apple isn't really just technical greatness, which they have.
It's design.
Design is what makes you...
I've raved about this before, these little earbuds.
The freaking design of these things is so insanely good...
That you fall in love with this product.
I mean, you just love it.
I don't want to travel anywhere without this.
Every part of this is so well done that it makes you actually love it.
Now imagine that idea taken to fixing a whole bunch of other societies' problems.
I'm going to throw out an idea where design can fix a whole range of problems in society.
I'm not saying that this is the best idea in the world.
I'm saying it'll make you think about design as a solution in a way you haven't done before.
Somebody in the comments is saying, hooray for engineers.
Exactly. Engineers already have the ability, with designers, etc., and scientists, we have the technical ability to solve almost all of our major problems if we design correctly.
We already have the technology, the people, the well, the money, all the other things.
It's just design. Here's the example.
I'm not going to talk too much about my argument for these, because I want to give you a bunch of ideas all at once to let them percolate.
What is one of the biggest problems with adding nuclear power plants to the United States?
Well, one of the biggest problems is that nobody wants it placed in their neighborhood, right?
So the first thing you know is that a big obstacle to nuclear power, especially the newer plants like Generation 3 has never had a meltdown, Generation 4 won't even be possible to have a meltdown, but we need some more developments in that area.
But what's really stopping you is nobody wants it near them.
So, if we were to start with a blank slate and design, how would you fix that?
Let me suggest this way.
The people who would be willing to live near a nuclear plant should be the people whose risk would go down.
Is there anybody you can think of in the United States who, if you move them from where they are to living near a nuclear plant, so that's the point, is that you're moving people to where the plant is.
If you did that, who would have less risk?
Answer, everybody who grew up in a bad part of town.
Anybody who came from an inner-city, dangerous, crime-infested area, if you were to take them from that area and say, look, we're going to move you to a place that there used to be nothing, but now we're building a nuclear plant.
It's a Generation 3 or a Generation 4.
The odds of a problem are minuscule.
The odds of getting killed where you are is very high.
So the first thing you know is that if you move people who are at higher risk than nuclear could ever even suggest, that you've improved their lives because you've greatly improved their risk situation.
Now, imagine that you build your nuclear plant and it's to power other people, but you build what I'll call poor town.
P-O-O-R. Poor town.
Now, poor town would be a place, a city, a community, an area that's built around a nuclear plant.
And the people moving there have to have low income.
But otherwise be, you know, capable of working, etc.
So you can move there.
Now the first thing you're going to get is you've got away from your crime.
And there's plenty of science to suggest that moving your location, getting out of a bad place, and getting in a new environment makes a gigantic difference in your ability to succeed.
That's well proven science has demonstrated that many times.
So the first model is instead of trying to fix people where they already live, How about just moving them out of their environment to a new place in which they can be part of building this new place?
So you got your nuclear power, which means that the people in poor town are going to have very low energy costs.
When you have very low energy costs, you can also have Seawater desalinization.
Because the big expense of desalinization is the energy it takes.
So you build a desalinization plant next to a nuclear power plant.
They work really well together.
And you put a pipe in the ocean, and you've got all the water you want, and the desalinization turns it into clean water.
So now you've got cheap water, you've got cheap energy, and then you start using these Lego-like building technologies where you've designed the best homes and you've got pre-approved designs.
So you say to the poor people moving in, the bricks are free.
All you have to do is put them together, but you have to do them in one of these approved designs so that we don't have to have a design process.
We don't have to worry if the roof is going to fall down.
These would be one-story homes, not much risk.
You can build them yourself.
And the bricks are going to come from the tunneling and the underground work that we do.
So the bricks are free.
So all you have to do is come in, build your own home, build it as big as you want as long as it's part of the approved designs.
So now you've got cheap housing, cheap water, cheap energy, and you've got a whole bunch of people who didn't have employment before they moved there.
Suddenly, it's a great place for somebody to put a farm or a business around there because they've got access to all these people who have low housing costs.
And low crime, and they're willing to work, so you've got a good workforce there.
It's a good place for a company to relocate.
Now, if you were to design your new community with lots of video cameras and, you know, access to security and stuff, you could get rid of crime and all the expense of it.
If you designed the place right, you could reduce the cost of transportation to practically nothing.
I mean, if you build underground tunnels for bicycles, Everybody could get everywhere with almost no problem whatsoever.
What's the problem with riding a bicycle?
It's the weather, right?
You don't want to be above ground.
You don't want to have hills. If you had underground tunnels for every kind of bicycle, You can wear a business suit and bicycle for miles because you'd be on a flat surface and no weather, and you could just have one of those lean-back bicycles that you don't even have to sit on a regular bicycle seat.
So if you designed from the beginning to make a community that was for poor people, And you can relocate them from where they used to be and into this town with some kind of vetting.
They contribute.
Oh, here's another thing you could do.
So indoor farming, what's the big expense for indoor farming?
The big expense is labor, and this town would have lots of inexpensive labor, so that part's covered, and energy, because it takes a lot of electricity to keep the lights on and everything in your building and to keep the temperature right.
But if you're located next to a nuclear power plant, your energy is cheap, or it could be if that's how you designed the whole thing.
So now you've got cheap food, and it's the good kind.
It's not fast food.
It's just good food that you're growing there.
You've got cheap water. You've got cheap energy.
You've got cheap housing.
And you can imagine this concept taken to everything else.
Maybe you put in a hospital there so that you've also got good health care.
Maybe use it to test some health care solutions, et cetera.
Somebody says, what incentive?
What incentive for what?
It would be a commercial enterprise.
The nuclear industry would be happy to participate because they would not only be creating energy for the town, but they'd be selling it outside the town.
So I think everybody wins.
They'd have a place to put their energy, a place to put their plant, somebody to sell it to, etc.
And everybody would have jobs eventually because it would be a perfect hiring pool.
All right. So, I'm not saying this is the greatest idea in the world.
I'm making a general statement that design will save the future.
And design specifically will take the cost of living a quality life from so high that ordinary people can't afford it down to the level where ordinary people can't afford it.
And that's an engineering design question.
Alright, but more importantly, I think that these designed places...
It could be way more fun to live in and more satisfying.
I like to use the example of my college dormitory experience.
One of my best living situations was a college dormitory, which on paper should have been the worst because I didn't have a house, I had a little room, etc.
The reason that my college experience was the best living situation I've ever had is because it was designed from scratch to be exactly that.
I loved not having to shop for food, prepare food, do dishes.
I would just walk a few steps away to the cafeteria and they'd do all that for me.
So having a central cafeteria might be a really good way to lower costs for a community.
You don't even need a kitchen.
And the other thing that was good about college is that the transportation was free.
Because I could walk everywhere that I needed to walk.
There wasn't anywhere I needed to go that I needed a vehicle.
They designed it so I had free transportation.
The other thing that I had for free is entertainment.
Because it was designed to be a place where people would naturally meet and they're naturally the same age, they have the same interests, they're all in college, you had unlimited entertainment.
Because you were in the right place with the right people doing some kind of a common stuff.
So design, the way it's been applied to college...
The same concept of design, not the same model, but the idea of designing could be brought to the real world outside of college.
And I think you would have the most awesome poor town you ever had.
And when I call it poor town, I'm being a little bit ironic.
It would be something specifically for poor people to move there and be able to regain their life.
Maybe there's even classes and education and stuff so they can really rebuild.
So, anyway, that's the idea.
I'll put that out there just to percolate, and I will talk to you.
Oh, let me say one other thing.
If you haven't used Interface by WinHub, it keeps getting better experts all the time.
That's my startup's app.
And Joshua Lysak, who was my guest here yesterday, is on that as an expert on ghostwriting and getting published.
One of the most frequent questions I get is how to be published, how to write a book.
And so now you have an expert who, for $50 an hour, which is very reasonable, very reasonable, you can call him and talk to him in person, and you know you're getting expert advice from somebody who's done it a number of times.
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