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Sept. 10, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
30:51
Episode 658 Scott Adams: Oops, I’m Late. Coffee Time!
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
Let's get ready for one of the best coffees with Scott Adams you've ever experienced.
And that's saying a lot. I mean, how awesome is this?
For those of you exercising right now while you're listening to this, good for you.
You have found a system that works.
Because you love coffee with Scott Adams.
And it's going to make you love your exercise if you combine them.
Oh, it works. Speaking of coffee, you might want to join me for the simultaneous sip.
And if you do, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a stein, a chalice, a tanker, a thermos, a flask, a cantina, a festival of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Now, sometimes I tell you that when I take the simultaneous sip, it's the best one ever.
But I think today might be a better argument for the best sip of coffee ever.
And here's why. Some of you know, I was talking about this the other day.
I lost my sense of smell completely around 12 years ago, I think.
And when I say completely, I mean no sense of smell whatsoever under any conditions.
And I didn't know why.
I just figured maybe with some allergy meds I'd use, I didn't really care because I didn't mind not smelling all the bad smells in the world anyway.
But I discovered recently, as I said on a previous periscope, that I've got some harmless little polyps somewhere in my eustachian tubes up in my sinuses, and that's the probable cause of my lack of smell.
And so my doctor gave me some prednisone and some antibiotics.
To kick it out. And so the polyps are allegedly going to shrink because of the meds.
And the idea was that I might be able to smell again.
I might regain my sense of smell.
And I didn't know how likely that was.
But I woke up this morning and I fixed myself a big pot of coffee.
Well, a cup of coffee.
And I was sitting here in my office and I started thinking, What's that sensation that's happening in my head?
There's something happening, and it's in my head somewhere.
It's like a sensation.
And then I realized, it was the coffee.
And I wasn't just smelling the coffee, because I gotta tell you, if you go 12 years without smelling anything, you can smell a cup of coffee From across the room.
I mean, I'm like a frickin' bloodhound right now.
It was overwhelming.
I mean, I can smell this coffee like it feels like in every pore of my body, you know, from a distance.
And I wasn't sure if it was a phantom sort of a sensation.
I thought to myself, I wonder if that's the coffee?
And I actually didn't even, I was having trouble recognizing the smell.
It had been so long since I had smelled coffee that I sort of forgotten what it smelled like.
So I put my nose up to it and I went, oh my god, I can smell.
Ah, somebody's way ahead of me.
Somebody says, smell your girlfriend for the first time.
And then he leaves her.
Yeah, I guess that's the risk.
That is literally what I'm waiting to do.
So I'm waiting for Christina to wake up and get going.
Because we've been together now for, what, three years or something?
Three and a half years? And I've never smelled her.
Think about that. I've never smelled her.
You know, everybody has sort of their own smell, in a sense.
I guess I'll find out what she smells like in an hour.
So, let's talk about something else.
The news is all kind of boring.
There's some kind of probable fake news going on about the Russian spy.
Are you following that story?
I'm kind of only barely sort of paying attention to it because it just looks exactly like something that's not true.
And I believe the government has denied it, but, you know, you can't really trust denials about spy stuff.
I just don't think it's true.
That there was some spy that they were afraid that Trump's carelessness would get that spy detected and it was somebody who could take pictures of Putin's documents?
Really? We had somebody in the Kremlin so deep that he could take pictures of Putin's documents and that's being reported on CNN? I don't know.
None of that sounds true to me.
It could be true. It could be true.
But it doesn't sound true, and certainly the credibility has to be questioned.
So we'll see. I guess that's just a wait and see.
I want to talk about a couple of things.
Yeah, some people are saying it was, you know, a bread and clapper propaganda thing.
Eh, maybe. Who knows? I want to talk about two things.
Number one is nuclear, and number two is a student mentor app.
I was trying to come up with an idea.
Let's talk about the app first.
I was trying to come up with an idea for combining some of my favorite things into one solution.
Now, I don't know how practical any of this is, so I'm going to use you as my audience To be my co-designers.
This might turn to nothing, but maybe it's good.
And the idea is to create an app so that disadvantaged kids can get direct help from someone who is not their parent and not in their circle.
And it would be an app.
Well, here I started designing a little bit.
Let's see if I can push this back a little so you can see it.
Bear with me. Bear with me.
Let's get a little distance here.
So what I started with is just the requirements, you know, the specs.
See if I could come up with something that makes sense.
So it would be a student mentor app.
And it would have the following functions.
That's just a first start.
Maybe it needs more. One would be a video introduction by the student.
So you can see it's a real student.
And you can see their passion.
You can see what their desire is.
And they would just put a little video in the app, say a one-minute video that says, Hey, I'm Bob.
I'd like to go to a charter school, but I can't afford it.
Or, you know, I would like to pay for my book supplies or I need a laptop to do my homework.
Something like that. Then you'd want an administrator.
Here it is. Some kind of administrator to vouch for the student, ideally also a video.
Somebody in his school, let's say a principal, just holds up his ID and says, yes, I'm the principal of the school.
I know Bob. He's real.
Take a look in his app.
Then the app would allow mentors to sign up either to give advice or funding.
So the funding would not go to the child.
The funding would go directly to the entity.
So the entity might be a charter school.
It might be they need some school supplies.
So the money goes directly to the school supplies.
So the child would never get money.
So you remove some of the opportunity for scams by making sure that the money goes directly to where it's needed.
In return for this generosity, those mentors and or helping funding those people would get the report card.
So you'd see how the kid is doing.
You would also see all of his social media or her social media accounts so you could follow their life.
So the links to those accounts would be in the app.
So you can go directly from the app and check out your kid, see how he's doing, see if he needs some advice, etc.
You would also have some information potentially about the kid's lifestyle and health.
Does the kid get enough sleep?
Is the kid eating right?
Because you might have some advice in that domain as well.
And then, of course, mentors could offer advice if they think it is needed, or the kid could ask for advice.
And also a good source for networking and job offers.
So here's how networking works.
People prefer people they already work with.
Right? They prefer people they know that they've had some association with.
So if you were a mentor who had contributed money to some kid, let's say a high school kid or maybe a young college kid, and you had watched their progress and you were happy with what you had done, and then that person says, well, now I need a job.
Wouldn't you help? Because it's somebody you know.
And presumably they've done the right things, they've, you know, they've taken advice, they've grown.
And if you watch this progress and you like it, well, you don't want to hire somebody you don't know.
This is somebody you sort of know by the time you follow them.
So even if you're not hiring, you might know somebody who is.
And so you would, through the app, you would have developed a network that normally the Ivy League people get, but it's harder to get for other people.
Yes, and somebody's saying in the comments, successful professionals like to help other people get started.
So if somebody was trying to become an engineer, for example, and you were an engineer, you're probably more likely to be helpful and want to give them a leg up and give them an opportunity, etc.
So here's the fun part.
Now, everything I'm talking about is just brainstorming, right?
This is not a real app yet.
I'm just saying it could be.
You could couch this in the, let's say, you could frame it as reparations.
And here's why.
Now I know what you're saying to yourself, what, what?
Why would this app be reparations?
Because it wouldn't be limited to black people, obviously.
The app would be available for anybody.
So why would you call that reparations?
And I'm going to take really just the smartest thing I've ever heard on the whole, let's say, What do you call it?
The whole situation of racism.
It's just one of the smartest things I've heard.
And it came from Hawk Newsome from Black Lives Matter.
And what he said was, you can't really help black people in this country unless you help everybody at the same time.
It's sort of, they're just too connected.
If you did something that was aimed and targeted at helping the black community, As long as it wasn't limited to the black community, it would help everybody else who was in the same situation, no matter what they were.
So they could be, you know, white or brown or any other color.
So suppose you took this app and you said, we're going to design it so it's perfect for the African American community who might need more mentors, who might need more funding, who might need more connections, might need more advice, might need more positive influences.
So you design it for one community and then is that not going to work for everybody else?
Of course it would. Of course it would.
Because that's exactly everything that a poor white kid needs.
It's exactly the same thing that a poor anybody needs.
But you could design it specifically to help black students, and it would just happen to be good for other people.
That is exactly the way we do most things in this country.
Most things we do just for the public helps everybody.
So you could very cleverly get to a point where anybody who has the drive And a smartphone.
Can get what they need.
Because there is a tremendous untapped potential for humans helping other humans directly.
You're seeing this with...
You're seeing that sort of impulse and that instinct in in and out philanthropy.
So what Bill Pulte is doing is sort of proving that humans have this untapped desire to directly help a real person whose real face they can see.
Which is different from just giving to a charity that goes into a big box and administrators administer it, which is good too.
It's good too. Somebody's saying, not my kids.
I should mention that you probably need some parental monitoring to it.
So, for example, the app might have a feature where any messaging that goes into the app also is copied to a parent so that the kid can't sign up unless the parent is on board and sees all the messages.
So there would be some risk.
And you'd also want to limit it to maybe kids that are 16 or 17.
You know, you might want to have an age limit just so you're not exposing people too young to adults.
But again, it should be monitored by the parents in all cases.
So that's the idea. I put that out there.
Who knows if that will ever become useful.
I'd like to change the topic now to nuclear.
I'm going to my whiteboard to turn it around.
I tell you, it was one of the best inventions in the world when I came up with my idea of the double-sided whiteboard.
Hell yes! Double-sided whiteboard.
Here we go. I thought you were watching me, but I had my camera.
All right. Here's a little thing I've been working on.
On the question of climate change and nuclear power.
It seems to me that there are two sciences involved.
One is the science of climate change.
And as you know, famously, most scientists say that climate change is a big risk.
But the second science is nuclear energy.
And I would...
I would believe, and this is subject to fact-checking, but I believe this is a safe statement, that people who are experts on nuclear power, not just scientists in general, but ones that are experts on nuclear power, are pro-nuclear power.
Probably almost in the same percentage as people who are climate scientists are worried about climate change.
It's probably about the same percentage of support.
So those are the two sciences.
You would be a science believer if you thought that climate change was a risk and you also thought that nuclear power was the only viable solution.
So that would be a person who believes in science.
A half believer would be somebody like Elizabeth Warren who believes in climate change but doesn't believe that nuclear is the way to go to solve it.
And then there would be, let's say, a science denier who doesn't think climate change is a problem and also Doesn't think nuclear power is a good idea.
So, I thought it would be helpful to say, to just put this in the sense of, who is compatible with science?
If your brand, your personality, the person you want to be, is a person who is compatible with science, this is the way to do it.
Right? Otherwise, you're a half-believer, which, it just sounds stupid.
Or at least uneducated.
Let's just say it's uneducated.
And uneducated is actually too strong as well.
I think it would be better to say your knowledge is out of date.
So if you had out-of-date knowledge, you would think nuclear energy was too risky.
If you had up-to-date knowledge like Yang and Cory Booker, you would be pro-nuclear energy as they are.
So, now, I'm not taking a position on climate change by showing you this chart.
All I'm saying is that this is where science is, right or wrong.
I'm not saying that the scientists are all right.
I'm just saying where they are.
So if your brand is to be compatible with the scientists and the majority, now you know which box to be in.
I wanted to run by you something I've been working on here, which is the best arguments for nuclear.
You want to hear it? Let me give you my best arguments for nuclear.
Number one, consumer costs.
You can lower the cost of energy, and that's like giving everybody a raise, and it's especially good for poor people.
There are very few things that would help poor people more than cutting their energy bill in half.
So nuclear is the best, fastest way to get that done.
Makes your businesses more competitive because it lowers their costs so it can compete internationally better.
Helps the environment.
It's the cleanest energy that we have in terms of pollution.
Climate change.
As I said, if climate change is a big risk, nuclear is sort of the only known solution, according to Bill Gates.
According to Andrew Yang, according to Cory Booker, they would say it's a big part of the solution, not the one part, but an essential part.
So even if you don't believe climate change is a problem, it's still the right path, because you still need cheap energy, and we have an increasing demand for it, and you want it to be clean.
What people don't generally understand is that the risks of nuclear energy have dropped dramatically in the last decades, and that the generation of three plants that are the common ones that are being built today have never had a major event.
Never. There's never been one.
All of the major events you know are earlier generations.
And the so-called generation four, the stuff that's being developed now, will be built fail-safe, so that even if you lose power for an extended time, it just sort of softly shuts down and doesn't cause any kind of an event.
Political risk.
I learned this recently.
Apparently there's a big risk if you get out of the nuclear energy industry.
Let's say the United States decided to get out of nuclear over time to wind it down.
Our nuclear energy industry would then not be able to support any other new country who wanted to go nuclear.
And you know there's going to be a lot of countries that want their own nuclear power.
Saudi Arabia, for example, is asking for it.
I think some other Gulf country is asking for it.
Because even if you have a zillion gallons of oil right beneath you, You would still rather have nuclear for your own power.
You'd rather have nuclear for your own power and sell the oil to somebody else because you don't want to burn that oil in your own country.
So there's a huge risk if we let those new countries go into the, let's say, the hands of China and use their nuclear technology or Russia and use their nuclear technology because that will bind those countries together in a way that you can't break If Russia becomes the primary,
let's say, source for the nuclear technology in some other country, they become sort of an ally, and there's not much you can do about it.
Those countries could be our allies, at least, or more of an ally, if they were more dependent on us for their nuclear technology, and we could make that happen.
One of the risks that I hadn't thought of until recently is that as we're militarizing space, which is inevitable, we'd all like to say, oh, let's not militarize space, but we're doing it anyway.
So you could talk about how you shouldn't do it, but it's a waste of breath because we're going to militarize space.
So Space Force is doing that.
China and Russia are both looking at it, of course.
And here's the risk.
If China and Russia are advanced nuclear nations, let's say 20 years from now, they're going to control space because we're not going to be racing around in space with windmills and solar power.
Nuclear will be the energy source for space competition, and we don't want to cripple our nuclear industry, which would be important to developing the talent and the resources for space.
So we'd be giving away space militarily if we wind down our nuclear resources in this country.
It's an indirect thing, but it's pretty definite that it would happen.
And we would effectively be surrendering the country.
It's just that the surrender would be sort of a timed surrender so that 20 years from now, you'd look up in the air and we'd be surrounded by...
So we'd say, well...
Whatever you want, China, because we got nothing.
We'll shoot a windmill at you or something.
No, I'm exaggerating, of course.
It's not as dire as that.
But when you're looking at military risks, you don't want to leave such a huge, gaping hole.
That you know is a gaping hole.
You've got to plug that hole.
So those are the main arguments, and I would argue that it's the perfect time for the President to make a strong stand on nuclear, because the Democrats are split on it.
So if President Trump goes out strong on nuclear, As the risk management approach to climate change, he could actually say, you know, people disagree on climate change, but it doesn't matter because nuclear energy is still what you should do aggressively, no matter what. If it fixes climate change, great.
If climate change is not the risk we thought, great.
Somebody says, Mike Schellenberger, look him up.
Yeah, I'm talking to Mike, so we're in conversation on this extensively.
In fact, what I'm talking about now, I'm going to be sharing with him fairly soon.
So, just to make sure that I've got the facts right.
I want to have him give me a fact check.
I'll run it by Mark Schneider, too, just to make sure I've got my facts right.
So... So I was watching President Trump's rally yesterday, and I felt sorry for Democrats.
I really did. I really felt sorry for them.
Because you see him control a crowd, and you see the energy he brings, and how entertaining he is, and how into it the crowd is.
And then you imagine any Democrat trying to pull that off.
All the Democrats are boring, but they seem about twice as boring compared to him.
The contrast is just brutal.
It is brutal.
So I don't know how much of a route this is going to be, but let me say this as clearly as possible.
I feel confident that President Trump will win re-election, no matter who he runs against, etc., unless there's some big surprise that comes up later.
And we can see CNN maybe working on some surprises, real or not.
But climate change is the big issue, right?
And guns.
It seems to me those are the two ones.
Here's what probably will happen before election.
Number one, I think the Trump administration will do something about guns, probably with background checks.
You may have seen Joel Pollack's suggestion to trade more robust background checks, to strengthen the background checks and make them more universal.
In exchange, I hope I got that right.
So the idea is that the gun owners would get a little something, which is the ability to take the rights they already have in their own state to do a concealed carry and just go to another state if they're visiting and keep it up while they're visiting.
That's not a big concession.
Because remember, nobody gets the concealed carry unless they jump through a lot of hoops.
So if somebody has jumped through some hoops and they come across a lion on vacation, it's not the biggest risk in the world.
But in return, maybe there would be more robust background checks.
Seems like a good compromise.
Now, there might be some kind of other deal like that, but I do imagine that Trump will do something and probably sign it.
Mitch McConnell's waiting for Trump to say what he would sign, and that tells me there probably will be something he would sign.
It's probably already been sort of hinted at.
So if guns become less of an issue because Trump does something, that leaves climate change as the other big one.
And like I said, if Trump goes strong on nuclear power and comes out really full-throated on it, It's going to split the Democrats in half and it will force them to debate between now and Election Day the pros and cons of nuclear.
And here's what that will do.
The Democrats, you're not going to get them all to like nuclear.
That's just not going to happen.
You're not going to get all Democrats to like nuclear power.
It can't be done.
It's just too big of an ask.
So if you get them to debate it, you're going to split them in half.
Because some of those Democrats are going to say, okay, you've got a pretty good point about this nuclear stuff.
And I have been saying for five years that climate change is my biggest issue.
And the Republicans are offering the only solution to my biggest issue.
And let's say Warren or Biden, let's say Warren or Sanders are the nominee.
Who are you going to vote for if your biggest issue is climate change and the only person who's offered you a solution is Trump?
It's kind of a tough vote, isn't it?
Right? Now let's say it goes the other way.
Let's say we're all surprised and Yang or Cory Booker get nominated.
Let's say they're the nominations.
They're pro-nuclear.
Right? So they're not going to be able to take your votes.
They're not going to be able to take Trump's votes if he's also pro-nuclear.
So he would have a strength against the pro-nuclear people.
He would have a greater strength against the anti-nuclear people.
You can't possibly lose.
It's like the most winning play that there has ever been.
There's never been a more winning political play than to go strong on nuclear.
And here would be the angle.
The angle is that the people who are against it have out of date knowledge.
Why do you think Cory Booker And Andrew Yang are in favor of nuclear as part of the solution for climate change.
And why do you think that the other candidates are against it?
Is it because they've all looked into it and they all have the same information?
Nope. It's because Yang and Booker are two of the smartest people in the race.
Warren is very smart. Let's face it.
She's very, very smart. The others are pretty smart, too.
But Andrew Yang and Booker Maybe the smartest.
And they've looked into it.
And when your smartest people look into it, and they update their knowledge, and they say, yep, nuclear's the thing.
Yeah, let's do more nuclear.
That means your party's in trouble.
Because if the only people who are against it have out-of-date knowledge, and that seems to be the case, it's not so much a difference of opinion, it seems to be a difference of knowledge.
And what I'd love to know, and here's like a key fact that I don't have, but I speculate that the people who are experts on nuclear energy are all in favor of nuclear energy, or at least...
As many are in favor of that as there are scientists who believe climate change is a crisis.
So that's kind of fun, isn't it?
Let's see, there was something else I was going to update you on.
Oh, so I did my first day of recording for LoserThink yesterday, and I'll tell you, it is a tough day in the studio reading my own book all day.
The good news is I kind of like my book, so it's fun to remind myself what I wrote in there.
My voice sort of fails after a few hours, so I spread it over three days.
Today is day two.
So I'm not going to go too much longer today because I want to save my voice.
I need to. And that's all for now.
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