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Oct. 9, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:01:46
Episode 688 Scott Adams: Is California a Third World Country, Kurds, Bill Gates Saving the World
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bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum hello Tyler come on in here everybody Get in here while the lights are still on.
Because I'm in a third world country right now.
It's called California.
And in California, we don't have electricity all day long.
No, we have electricity.
Sometimes. Sometimes we don't.
Sometimes you can walk down the street and not step in human feces, but not every time.
We're not some first world country here in California.
But I've got electricity now for, I'm told, another few hours.
So my electricity is scheduled to go off sometime around noon my time.
And here's the catch.
There's no estimate of when they plan to turn it back on.
Could be hours.
Could be days. Are you frickin' kidding me?
Well, I'm gonna drink coffee and enjoy it anyway, and if you'd like to join me, it doesn't take much.
All you need is a copper, a mug, a glass, a tiny chalice, a tanker, a thermos, a flask, a canteen, a grail goblet, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for this simultaneous sip.
Mmm. Oh yeah.
Do you feel the dopamine? Can you feel it?
That's pretty good. It's pretty good.
So we got lots of things to talk about today.
Let's jump right in.
But before we do, I would like you to join me for a special moment.
I've been sort of bringing you along on this journey.
In which I've been telling you about my whole book writing experience, and I wanted to share this moment with you.
The moment is this.
So I got this box from my publisher, which I understand to have in it the first printed copies of my new book.
Now, if you've never been an author, you don't know how exciting it is.
No matter how many books you write, It is very exciting to see for the first time and hold it in your hand the actual printed final book.
And so I thought I would open up my package and share with you my special moment.
So let's see what we got here.
We've got bubble wrap.
It comes with a little note from my publisher.
It says, Scott, congratulations on your finished book.
Bum bum bum bum Amen.
Here it is.
Available for pre-order now on Amazon and everywhere else that you can pre-order a book.
Get yours now. It'll actually be on shelves on November 5th, but if you pre-order it now, it's good for me.
Now, it's good for me because it boosted up the bestseller list, and it's good to get there early.
Now, compare the final, in all its beauty, to what we call the uncorrected proof.
So this first version is what gets sent out To writers and reviewers and people who might say good things about it.
So this one comes out early and it's like 98% accurate.
And then this one follows.
Look how much better the final is.
It's shiny. It just looks so much better.
Anyway, I hope you all do your pre-orders of that.
Let's talk about...
Let's talk about...
The news.
Number one piece of news is Turkey and the Kurds.
Here's what you need to know.
We have no idea what's going on over there.
If you have a strong opinion about Turkey and the Kurds and Syria, you probably shouldn't.
Because we really don't know what's happening.
It seems to me that the biggest problem over there is that there's no such thing as just Kurds.
If there were just one thing that were the Kurds, then we might all have the same opinion, or at least we'd have wise opinions.
But it turns out you got your bad Kurds and your good Kurds.
Did you know that? You got your bad ones who are terrorists or trained terrorists.
You got your good ones who fight terrorists.
Well, we love the good ones.
We don't feel so strongly about the bad ones because they were sort of training terrorists or they are terrorists.
And apparently there's no dispute about the fact that there are some good Kurds and some bad Kurds.
So let's agree on that.
Now, if we could... Support all the good Kurds, the ones that fought with us.
I'm sure we would do that.
But we don't know exactly what's going on or what Turkey is exactly doing or why they're doing it or exactly what we're doing and what Assad is doing and exactly what the Russians are going to do.
Because apparently the Syrians have announced that they're in the fight, basically.
The Syrians are going to oppose Turkey.
And what we did was get our 50 military people out of the way.
Now the part that people don't seem to be grokking, which we're just learning, is that Turkey was going to go anyway.
Apparently Turkey was going to do what Turkey was going to do on the border, whether our 50 people, who were not terribly important to their plans, were there or not.
So what the president did is not give them the green light.
Rather, they were going to do it anyway, and he got out of the way.
So in other words, there was no reason for our troops to be there, because they weren't going to stop what was going to happen, but they could get hurt.
So there just wasn't any purpose for them to be there.
If you understand it in those terms, and by the way, that could turn out to be wrong.
It could easily turn out that what I just said has no factual basis because everything is sort of still fog of war and it's all moving parts right now.
So there's one future where Turkey simply creates a safe zone and the Kurds who are already in that area are not too happy about it.
But we might be happy that there's a safe zone created.
Apparently Turkey was tired of waiting for the United States To be productive in creating this safe zone.
So they just said, well, there's going to be a safe zone.
You're either part of the problem or you're part of the solution, America.
So maybe, you know, get out of the way.
So we don't know if Turkey's version of a safe zone is really just a kill zone for Kurds, or are they really just trying to protect their own border?
And they don't have ambitions of wiping out large populations.
Certainly people are going to get killed because it's a military action.
But I'm very confused about who's doing what and what will happen.
Will this pit Russia against Turkey?
If it does, kind of glad we got out of the way.
Will Turkey cross the line And risk their entire economy to kill X number of Kurds that they can get their hands on.
Maybe. I did a little unscientific poll on Twitter and asked people, do you think Turkey will essentially sacrifice their entire economy to get some advantage in wiping out the Kurds, just in that one area?
It wouldn't solve their Kurd problem.
It would just be a certain group of them.
Would they trade their entire economy for a certain group of Kurds?
Or are they smart enough not to do that?
And they might get close to the line.
They might kill more people than we think should be killed or we would want to be killed.
They might guess more bad guys than good guys.
We don't know what that's going to look like.
Or are they just calling Trump's bluff?
Do they think it's a bluff?
Maybe they say to themselves, you know, we're never going to get a chance like this to kill so many Kurds, so maybe it's worth the risk of calling his bluff.
Oh, let me pause right here for a conflict of interest statement.
I have a large investment in Turkey.
Now, it's just a stock investment, and it's specifically stock in the Turkish mobile phone company, Turkcell.
Yesterday, when all the American stocks were down, Turkcell was up, of all things.
President Trump was threatening to obliterate their economy like he's done before, and the Turkish mobile phone company stock went up.
Today it's down a little bit.
It's just a percent here or there, so it's no big deal.
So anyway, my conflict of interest statement is that I have an investment there, which if the president goes through with his threat to whack their economy, is going to be very bad for me.
Not change my life bad, but for that particular investment.
Really bad. It's an investment I've had for years that I got simply because mobile phone companies always succeed in the long run if they have kind of a monopoly.
And Turkey is an educated, growing economy, but they've had problems, you know, obviously government problems and now this.
So there's a big, I certainly would not recommend that you own that stock, nor would I recommend that you sell it, because you should not take any financial advice whatsoever from cartoonists.
So having said that, my interests financially are opposite of what I'm going to say right now.
Even though I have a sizable investment in a Turkish company that would be just really hit hard if Trump moved against the Turkish economy, I'm in favor of it.
You know, if we make a threat like that, the United States does, you have to go through with it.
You have to pay that debt.
So the challenge has been made, if Turkey crosses the line, we will break their economy.
That's going to hurt me.
I'm not going to like that.
I'm going to hold the investment anyway, because it's a very long-term investment.
You know, it's sort of the 20, 30-year investment.
But I don't like it.
But I still think we have to make good on the threat.
And I would bet, if I had to be a betting person, that they will cross the line.
And that we will have to crash their economy.
I'm not going to say that's 100%, but I'd say we're looking at probably a 70% chance that the Turkish economy will be obliterated.
Probably a 70% chance.
Because I don't see them holding themselves back, and I don't see Trump not making good on the threat.
So I think the die is cast in the sense that they will go too far and we will crash their whole frickin' economy.
That's what I think. 70% chance of that.
30% chance is in the, God, anything could happen.
Because once you've got the Russians and the Syrians in there and Iran will be in there and who knows, you know, a couple of different Kurd groups, Turkey, anything could happen.
All right. Let's talk about impeachment.
There's a new story today about apparently John Solomon.
It has this scoop that the US government knew Ukraine was planning to look again into Burisma holdings.
In other words, somebody in the US government, don't know exactly who, knew that somebody over in Ukraine, in the prosecutor's office, was planning to look into Burisma long, many months before President Trump brought it up, that the phone call brought it up.
So that would sort of change how you look at the situation, but probably won't change it that much.
And here's why.
When you say that the US government knew, what does that mean?
Does it mean Trump knew that Ukraine was going to look into Burisma?
Is that what it means?
No. It means some, at least one person, At least one person in the whole world was aware that Ukraine was taking a second look at Burisma.
So it doesn't really change what the president knew or said unless there's additional reporting that says even Trump knew or even his advisors knew and should have told him.
But that's not in evidence.
All we know is that somebody knew.
So we've got some dots that aren't quite connecting here, but might.
Maybe later they will connect.
And what does it mean that they were thinking about looking into it, or they were looking into Burisma?
Is that the same as saying that they were looking into the Biden participation in Burisma?
It's not. It's not.
And it's probably not that unusual for a major company to be in the target sites of the prosecutor, especially in Ukraine, where there's so much rampant bad behavior.
So, on the surface, it feels like it's important to know that when the president asked Ukraine to look into Burisma, it should be important to know that months ago they had already decided to do it.
But does it really matter if the president didn't know it or if what they were going to look into wasn't exactly about the Bidens, which was our primary interest, meaning the countries as well as the president's, or that they weren't actually acting on their preference to look into it?
It's possible they said, yeah, we're going to look into it and just didn't put any resources on it.
So I would say that this new reporting is important.
It's part of the puzzle.
Good to know. And good work by John Solomon getting that scoop.
But I wouldn't over-interpret it as being some kind of a kill shot for one side or the other.
I think it's more of a, hmm, that's interesting.
Let's find out more about that.
Until we do, it's hard to have an opinion on it.
Apparently we're pulling out of the Open Skies Treaty.
Which I didn't even know existed until yesterday.
And you're probably saying to yourself, what exactly is the Open Skies Treaty and why are we pulling out of it?
Well, it has something to do with sending surveillance aircraft over other people's territory.
And the idea is that we're all safer if we can all keep an eye on each other.
So even Russia, for example, would allow that we would have some kind of high-level surveillance flights spying on their country.
They might be doing the same thing with us.
Everybody's looking at each other.
Probably keeps you safer.
You know, a watched situation is going to be a little bit safer than if there's something you can't keep an eye on.
That was the thinking. And apparently we were pulling out.
Why are we pulling out?
I don't know. Beats me.
Was something going wrong?
I looked at the reporting this morning.
I didn't see any reason.
Now that doesn't mean there's no reason.
One assumes that there is a reason.
But I don't know what it is.
So if you have a strong opinion about whether we should pull out of the Open Skies Treaty, you might be reading different news than I am because...
Because I don't see the reason yet.
And, of course, there's always accusations that Russia is cheating because they wouldn't let us fly over some zone.
But I don't know how not having a treaty is going to make that better.
So I don't quite know how that all fits together.
All right. Trump announced that the U.S. is putting visa restrictions on Chinese officials.
Who are responsible for, quote, brutal suppression of Muslims.
So those sanctions are on individuals in China who somehow are complicit in detaining the Uyghur Muslim minority over there.
Now, could there be any better thing that the president could do for re-election?
Is the president...
Using this issue just to get re-elected.
Because what could be better for the president than to be vocally and visibly supporting a Muslim minority?
Yeah, it's pretty good, right?
It's pretty good.
Because it works against the whole idea that he's anti-Muslim.
He's putting U.S. interests on the line to protect a Muslim minority in another country.
I mean, how do you explain that if he's anti-Muslim?
It's hard to explain.
Because remember, he's good buddies with President Xi.
It would seem easy for Trump to agree with his good buddy.
I better get rid of that problem.
But instead, he's decided to back the Muslim minority.
How do the Democrats process that?
How does that make sense in their movie?
Now, in my movie, it makes perfect sense.
Because in my movie, he was never anti-Muslim at any time.
And sure enough, he's acting in a way today on this Uyghur situation, which would suggest he's not anti-Muslim.
So my movie is completely consistent.
But how is the other movie doing?
Where he hates Muslims, but he's putting America...
American interests on the line to protect them in another country.
It has no strategic value to us whatsoever.
And he's putting America's interests on the line, you know, to support them.
So politically, it's brilliant.
It might also be good in terms of our trade negotiations, but I'll tell you what it's really good for.
You know what it's really good for?
It's really good for cats on the roof.
Now, if you don't know the cats on the roof, I'm going to use this...
I guess you'd call it a...
It's based on a joke.
But it's an interesting concept that the joke represents.
And the joke is that, you know, the brother says the cat's on the roof.
And, well, I'm not going to tell the joke.
But there is a joke it's based on.
And the reference to cats on the roof is a way to tell somebody without telling them the bad news right away.
You're softening somebody up for the bad news later, which is the cat died.
But you don't want to say, the cat died.
So you say, oh, the cat's on the roof.
We're trying to get it down. Oh, the cat fell.
It's at the vets. The vet's working on it.
And then, you know, the third day, say, the cat didn't pull through.
It didn't make it. And then the punchline of the joke is that, you know, your mother's on the roof.
So softening you up to tell you that your mother's going to die.
I feel as though when the president goes hard at China for the Uyghurs, it has political benefits, it has just moral benefits because it's supporting a beleaguered group, but it's also a little bit the cats on the roof, meaning that the president is softening up this country, the United States, for decoupling.
Decoupling Is happening.
I mean, we're watching it.
So you don't have to ask yourself, will we decouple from China?
It's happening. We're doing it right now.
You're seeing companies move away from China.
You're seeing companies that, unless they're crazy, they're not going to move into China.
What American company that depends on stockholders could move into China now?
It would just be the worst play ever.
So decoupling is happening.
It may not be cut the cord on day one, but we are decreasing our reliance on China over time, and that's decoupling.
So when the president throws this Uyghur thing in there, it's good on lots of levels, morally, politically, but it also softens up the local people, the United States citizens.
It tells us that we're leaving.
You know, it's sort of like, better find your phone, because we might be leaving soon.
So, cat's on the roof.
Similarly, I made that joke because Bernie Sanders came out and he gave a little press conference where he was not looking to Too healthy, but he was standing and walking and talking.
And he said that he was, of course, going to pull back on some of the rigors of his campaigning schedule.
Now, how do you interpret that?
I don't see any future in which Bernie works hard and goes all the way and gets the nomination.
I can't believe that Bernie necessarily sees it.
But he also just doesn't have the kind of personality we're quitting, even for a reason that other people would say is a good reason.
He doesn't really have that quitter personality, which is partly why you like him, right?
I have a very positive opinion of Bernie for his hard work, his consistency.
He doesn't seem to have been, you know, hit by too much in the way of scandal.
And I believe that he is passionate and believes that what he's promoting policy wise would be good for people.
So I have a very high opinion.
Bernie on a lot of levels, which is different from saying I think that his plans will work.
But he's moved the entire Democratic Party in his direction.
It's an amazing accomplishment.
Amazing. And I think that someday everybody will have health care and education will be free, one way or another, maybe just through normal capitalist ways.
But someday somebody's going to say, you know, Bernie pushed us there a little bit faster, made it a higher priority.
But I tweeted it and I said the cat's on the roof and people unfortunately interpreted that as me meaning that Bernie wasn't going to live that long and that's not what I meant.
In that context, the cat's on the roof meant that when Bernie says I'm going to pull back on my campaign schedule a little bit, of course, he's sort of softening us up.
For understanding that he's going to put a maximum fight into it as much as he can, but you should sort of expect him to look at the poll numbers fairly soon.
It's going to take a few more poll results.
He'll probably wait until there are a few more poll results, and then he'll say, you know, I'm not polling well, and I don't have the energy to change it.
So this is a good time for me to drop out.
I just think he's looking...
All I think Bernie wants to do is to go out on his own terms.
Now, has Bernie earned it?
Has Bernie earned the right to go out on his own terms?
Yeah. Yeah, he has.
He put in the work. Bernie earns the right to go out on his own terms.
So if he wants to stay in for a while and have sort of a graceful exit that's determined by the poll numbers, I feel flexible about that.
I would not criticize him for that.
I think he earned that right.
All right. One more thing about Turkey.
A lot of people have what I would call a half-pinion About Turkey and the Kurds.
A half-pinion is where you're only looking at either all the costs of something or all the benefits of something.
And you're just ignoring the other half of the equation.
And so the people who say, we should not be pulling those 50 people out, what are they suggesting instead?
Because remember, there's a 400-year history of the Turks and the Kurds being at each other's throats.
Are we going to stay there for hundreds of years?
Is that the alternative?
Because if it is, then we should be able to say that.
So if somebody says, I think it's good that we pulled out, they can say the cost is, there's a risk to the Kurds, that's a pretty big cost to the United States as well, because if the Kurds get wiped out, It's going to look like we're unreliable as allies, and that could hurt us later.
That's a big deal. But the people who say we should stay, they make, first of all, the mistake of thinking it would stop the Turks.
I don't think it will.
That was the whole point.
Our military has sort of announced, essentially, the official word from the government is Turkey was going to do their thing either way, and our 50 people were just not going to be the factor that stopped them.
So better to get them out of the way.
But for those who think it would have made a difference to keep them there or think that we should put more people there so that Turkey really is stopped, what is your full opinion?
Because you can't say let's keep them there until Tuesday.
You kind of have to say for hundreds of years.
Because whenever we leave, it just goes back to Turkey attacks the Kurds and vice versa.
So I don't know that there's a valid opinion that says stay unless you finish the thought and say stay probably for hundreds of years.
If you can say that with a straight face, well that's a full opinion.
Now, there's sort of a mid-range there where you say we should stay until the situation changes in some way that we can get out.
But if it doesn't change, we will stay there for hundreds of years.
Is that what we want to do?
If it is, people should be able to say that and just say, this is my full opinion.
We should stay, and if we have to, for hundreds of years.
That's the other opinion.
That's the opposite of we should get out of there.
All right. Let's talk about interfering in China's domestic affairs.
Are we interfering in China's domestic affairs when we sanction people for their treatment of the Uyghurs?
Now, I'm in favor of that.
I'm all in favor of the sanctions and whatever else we do to China.
But are we interfering with their domestic politics?
At what point do you say that's not legitimate?
Is this such a bad situation that it's an exception?
Is it an exception?
I don't know. It certainly seems like it's going to make a difference.
It certainly seems like it's designed to manipulate their political process.
How is that not meddling?
It's like the most meddling thing you've ever seen in your life.
And why is it that when we do it, we don't even notice that it's meddling?
It's like we don't even notice.
We're meddling the piss out of everybody.
And guess what? They're meddling right back.
I don't know. We're a meddling world.
I don't think there's any such thing as no meddling.
All right. I'd like to tell you how Bill Gates is fixing the world.
And I think I'm completely serious about this.
But you'll decide.
You should watch this special on Netscape called Inside Bill's Brain.
So it's called Inside Bill's Brain.
It's a three or four part documentary about Bill Gates.
And it's a very positive presentation of Bill Gates.
And I was wondering why Bill Gates gave so much of his personal time to this project.
Because it's obvious he spent a lot of time with the interviewer.
And did lots of interviews and he walked around with them and spent all kinds of time with them.
And that seemed opposite of what I imagined Bill Gates was all about.
Now obviously he does lots of public events, but it seemed unusual that he would do one that's sort of about him.
That seemed completely off brand, didn't it?
And did you wonder about that? It's like, why would Bill Gates be such a big part of this project on a thing that's just sort of about him?
Just the opposite of how you imagine him.
He just is more about business and getting things done, not about self-aggrandizement.
And then I watched it.
And then I understood. And so, on its surface, there's way more going on than you think.
So here's the deal.
So most of it's focused on his current life as a philanthropist and the Gates Foundation.
There's not so much about his Microsoft past.
If you want that stuff, that would be some other content.
So they talk about his spending billions to try to build, you know, toilets that don't need running water for the third world and sewage processing.
It's hard to watch that part of the documentary because they show you a lot of sewage.
It's more than I wanted to look at, but it's important to make the point of how important it is.
Apparently there were just lots of people dying in Africa from diarrhea.
The diarrhea was caused by the fact that their water source and their toilet source were the same place.
As awful as that sounds, right?
Their sources of water and their sources of bathroom was literally the same place.
So they were picking up all these bugs because of that unhealthy situation and because they don't have access to good medicine.
Just people were dying from diarrhea.
So Bill Gates took on probably the hardest problem in the world.
The most disgusting, unpleasant, thankless, Problem anybody could ever work on.
And he's made some progress, but it's a big problem.
He did develop a toilet that met those specifications.
They built a waste processing plant that doesn't require electricity or running water.
Amazing. And they've actually installed it in one city in Africa, and apparently it works.
So what it does is it creates its own electricity from the waste that's put into it.
It uses that electricity to process it, and the only output is drinkable, clean water.
amazing.
But, and then the other thing he's working on, Bill Gates, is eradicating polio, which turned out to be a much harder problem for a variety of reasons.
But he's, you know, putting billions into it.
He's dead set on getting rid of polio.
It just is way more work than it looked like.
And he's going to put in the work.
But that's not what I'm talking about.
Those two efforts are amazing.
And if that's all he ever did, he's just a treasure to the world, Bill Gates is.
If all he did, like you and I are doing that, if all he did was eradicate polio, if all he did was bring clean water to these places in Africa that otherwise wouldn't because of the waste, those are gigantic.
But there's something bigger.
He's doing something much bigger.
And I didn't understand the Netflix special until I put all the pieces together and it looks like this.
Bill Gates also has been working on developing, through his company TerraPower, a Generation 4 nuclear plant that would fix all of the problems of traditional nuclear power.
Those problems are it could melt down.
So they made a design that can't.
If it loses power, it just turns off.
It can't melt down. By its design, it doesn't have the ability to melt down.
Secondly, it uses for fuel spent waste from other nuclear reactors.
And it could use it for hundreds of years.
Just the stuff that's already waste.
So it reduces nuclear waste.
It doesn't have the risk of meltdown by design.
And, you ready?
It's economical.
That's the trifecta.
Now you say to yourself, great, let's start building them.
Remember, this is completely designed.
So it's been designed on supercomputers and stuff.
They have to actually build it.
But it's completely designed.
There's no stuff left to design.
So Bill Gates was planning to build the first one in China because China is very pro-nuclear.
They're building a lot of their own.
And he got approval to do it in China.
And then... Trade war.
Then, President Trump declared a trade war with China.
And that nuclear project got killed because it just isn't possible to do it in China right now.
It's the most important thing in the world, if you believe in climate change.
If you don't believe in climate change as being a problem, it's still the most important thing in the world.
Here's why. If you could bring down the cost of electricity and provide it to all the people who don't have it, especially the poor, then what you do for poor people and for the economy in general is huge.
And what it does for reducing pollution, because you can get rid of your coal plants and the ones that are really killing people, is gigantic.
We're talking about saving millions of lives.
Even if there's no climate change, because if you get rid of the polluting sources, I think there were 800,000 people a year or something are killed by coal, if you just sort of generally calculate how much extra pollution it is and how many extra people die.
There are just millions of people dying from pollution and more millions of people dying that didn't need to from poverty.
And having low-cost energy would go a long, long way toward reducing poverty.
So here's our situation.
And you're probably starting to connect the dots a little bit, but let me finish the picture.
So Bill Gates does a special that's unusually personal and completely out of character.
Why? Okay?
So, connect the puzzle.
Why does he do this special?
And then you find out that his plan to save the world, you know, I'm exaggerating, but maybe not much, by having clean, safe, economical, nuclear power, has been thwarted by politics.
What is the one thing that Bill Gates is really good at?
It's not politics.
That's not his strength.
What he did is what he's good at.
He put a ton of money into a risky thing that was entrepreneurial, it required innovation and technology, and damn it, he made it work.
He actually made it work.
Bill Gates invented clean, economical, safe nuclear power, and he can't get a test site running.
Now, just to be clear, we don't know that if he built it, it would work just the way it was designed.
It might take an iteration or two to get it right.
But they're pretty confident they got it right, or close enough that a few tweaks will get you there.
So, now do you understand why Bill Gates allowed a very personal Netflix special about him?
He used this To solve the politics.
So here's what happened.
He puts out this special and he simply makes it entertaining and he puts a lot of personal stuff in and so we'll watch.
So then I turn it on and I watch.
And I say, are you freaking kidding me?
That the only thing stopping us from having economical, safe nuclear power is that he can't get through the licensing process in this country?
And then I said to myself, well, how can I help?
And so I sent a message to Mark Schneider, our resident nuclear expert slash advocate, and I said, do you know anybody at TerraPower I could talk to?
Maybe I could help. Because if all we need to do is convince people to do something differently, well, I'm good at that.
Maybe I can help. And so Mark contacted somebody on LinkedIn who's an executive at TerraPower with the intention of asking him to connect with me.
Now, I haven't made that connection.
I don't know if I will.
But look at all the dots lined up.
Bill Gates solved the engineering and the economics of safe nuclear power.
And he can't get the licensing in his own country.
He had to go to China to even get approval.
Now, do we have a president who could solve that problem?
Yup. Now, you say to yourself, oh, Scott, Scott, Scott.
Nobody can solve that problem.
Even a president couldn't solve that problem because the problem is just a problem with red tape and it's the states and it's not really a federal problem anyway.
It's about the states and it's the bureaucracy and their reasons and variables and even the president couldn't solve it.
It's that hard to solve.
Well, we don't have a normal president.
We are blessed or cursed, depending on your point of view, with the most unique president in the history of presidents.
And there's one thing that this president can do that other presidents can't do.
What he can do is the stuff you can't do.
Who was it who could move our embassy to Jerusalem?
Nobody. And then Trump did it.
Who could get elected president with no experience in politics?
Nobody. Well, but then Trump did it.
Who could remove our troops from Syria?
Nobody. It's impossible.
Well, Trump just did it.
Who could start a major trade war with China and convince this country that maybe we should stop doing trade with them at all?
Nobody except Trump just did it.
How many times do you have to see something that can't be done and then watch Trump do it right in front of you?
He's the president who can do it.
So here's what it comes down to.
You and I, because you're part of my system right now, you and I are going to try to find somebody at TerraPower to talk to.
Maybe you find somebody.
Maybe I find somebody. And we're going to find out if we understand the problem, right?
Because that's the first thing.
You know, I want to understand if the real problem is that there's an entity or groups that are dragging their feet.
If we can find a person whose job it is to make this happen and they're not getting it done, that person probably needs some help.
Maybe they need a bigger staff.
Maybe they need more freedom from mistakes.
Maybe they need somebody to do some kind of an executive order to clear out some paperwork.
We're going to find the person, and it might be just one person, maybe a few, but maybe just one.
We're going to find the people or person who is stopping Bill Gates from solving the biggest problem in the world.
If you think it's climate change or even if you don't, we just still need clean power.
So Bill Gates found a way to weaponize the topic just right.
Because it's hard to...
imagine how hard it is to change people's minds about nuclear power.
Imagine how hard it would be to break that red tape.
The way to do it is to focus an immense amount of energy at exactly the right point, like a laser.
You got a lot of energy, but it's no good unless it's focused.
And what Bill Gates did Just by doing the Netflix thing, I'm pretty sure that his real intention was not self-aggrandizement.
In other words, I don't believe that Gates did it, Bill Gates, so that we would have a better impression of Bill Gates.
Now, it did have that effect.
I mean, you watch that special and you come away thinking, he might be the greatest person who ever lived.
He might be the smartest, too.
You actually will think that when you walk away.
You think, I don't know, he might be the greatest human of all time.
I actually went away from the special thinking that's like, well, you know, it's kind of hard to rank all humans, but he might be the best of us.
He might be. And he just created a situation where if we help, In the right way, we can solve his last remaining problem, which is he can't get it approved in the United States.
I think we can do that for him.
He set it up.
I mean, he set it up.
All we have to do is execute.
So let's find a TerraPower executive who will talk to us, confirm exactly where the problem is, and then we'll do what we can to put the energy from the government.
If President Trump could be helpful, I know that he would at least listen to the story.
Now, here's the fast way to do it.
Put Bill Gates...
And Trump in a room together with nobody else.
Just, you know, there could be other people.
But, you know, the point is those two people in a room to talk nuclear power.
Don't you think that Bill Gates sitting in a room with President Trump could get a nuclear plan approved?
I mean, maybe they have to put it in someplace remote.
You know, maybe it's not the ideal location or something.
But don't you think they could get that done?
I think they could. So, that's positive.
Those of you who are following me on Twitter might know that I keep triggering this cognitive dissonance trap and then watching people fall into it.
And the trap goes like this.
Piers Morgan was saying something on Twitter that I responded to about transgender athletes.
And I keep saying this.
I say, wouldn't it be better if instead of having leagues for women and leagues for men and then the transgenders are something we have to fight over, wouldn't it be better to just say anybody can play at whatever level their abilities allow?
So that would mean that the only people who play in the NBA are are very tall, best of the best men.
And all the rest of the men in the world don't get to play in the NBA. So, 100% of women would not play in the NBA under that model, and 99.999% of men would also not play in the NBA. Now, there would be no women's league under this model.
It would just be leagues, and if you were lower down in the leagues, And some of them might have men and women and transgender athletes, etc.
And it would be fine.
Because whatever league they're playing in would be competitive with the people on that team.
Now, what is the biggest complaint that people say when I say what I just said?
Which is get rid of men's sports and get rid of women's sports and just have as many leagues as you need so everybody can find a slot where they work.
What's the biggest complaint?
People say, Scott, you idiot!
I got called an idiot about 20 times this morning alone.
You idiot! You idiot!
Scott! Well, no, I have to go full Dale on this.
This is what they say to me when I say, don't have men's and women's teams, just have as many leagues as you need so everybody can find one that they fit into.
They say to me, don't you know, Scott?
That men are biologically larger than women?
Scott, if they're playing on the same team, the men will just hurt them, and it won't be fair.
To which I say, that has nothing to do with my idea.
Because in my idea, you don't join a team except the one that you won't get hurt, and the people are roughly as good as you are.
They might be men, might be women, could be anything.
They're just the same level.
So what do people say when I say, no, no, no, there wouldn't be any women's team that has a transgender athlete on it.
There would just be teams.
What do they say? Scott, Scott, don't you understand that men are bigger than women?
I don't know what to do with that.
I can say a thousand times, yes, my preferred solution is that everybody plays with people who are their same level.
In all cases. And somebody will still say, I'm an idiot, because then a 200-pound man will be playing against a 100-pound woman.
To which I say, no!
Never! That will never happen, because they wouldn't play on the same team.
So, the reason that I enjoy this topic is because it triggers people like crazy.
And the triggering, I find amusing and educational, Because you watch where their blind spot is, and they can't see it, but it's easier to see from the outside.
And here's the blind spot that triggers people.
There has never been any good reason for male and female separated leagues.
So that's the reason that people can't see what's so obvious in front of them.
So they're not disagreeing or agreeing with my opinion.
They actually can't see it.
Because they're starting from a place that there must be male sports and female sports.
And somebody said, the whole reason for that is so that women don't get hurt.
They're not competing in these male sports and getting hurt.
And I said, that's not the reason.
In the comments, tell me the reason for male and female sports.
What's the reason? Why is the reason we have it now?
Because I said we'd just get rid of it.
The reason is just politics.
The reason is power and politics.
Women as a group wanted it.
So there were enough women to get what they wanted.
What if all the men who are under five feet tall decided to organize and say, no, every school and every professional sport should also include People who are under five feet tall and we want our own league because we can't compete with large men and we can't even compete with large women.
We're under five feet tall.
So shouldn't we have our own league?
To which I say, well, it makes as much sense as anybody else having their own league, but you don't have the power.
The only reason that short men don't have their own sports leagues is because they don't have any power.
They're not organized. Nobody cares.
At all. So, once you dispense with the fact that there should be male sports and female sports, there was never a reason for that.
And now, people say to me, but Scott, that means that a woman can never win first place.
How is that fair? That the only person getting first place, like the best of the sport, is going to be a guy.
How is that fair? To which I say, How is it fair now?
I'm not in first place.
If I become a professional boxer, do I have a chance of being first place?
If I join the NFL, do I have a chance of being on the team?
99.999% of all men can't make the team, if we're talking about the high-level teams.
And 100% of women can't.
Is there really a problem If men and women are so similar that 99.999% of men are in this situation, that's the same as 100% of women?
Is that? It's different.
I mean, it's different by.001.
But still, there are only a few special people who get to be number one at all.
Does it really need to be a number one man and a number one woman?
And secondly, the market would adjust, and you would still have the best woman in the world.
People, I use the Serena Williams example, so I'll use that.
Let's say we got rid of men's tennis and women's tennis, and it was just one ranking.
That would put Serena at, let's say she's number 400 in the world.
Maybe it's 1,000, whatever it is.
Do you think there would be no interest in watching Serena play if she was exactly the same person she is now?
But instead of being number one in the women's league, she's number 600 in the league.
I think there's still a market.
Because whatever reason you wanted to watch her play before, why does that change?
I would think it would be exciting to watch a woman compete, whether she's competing against a man or a woman, if you're handicapping it in your mind for the fact that That you know that if it were Nadal or a man that they would be even better.
Now, let me give you this analogy.
When my stepdaughter used to play soccer in high school, I would go and watch those games, and they were super entertaining.
More entertaining than professional sports.
I loved watching high school and junior high girls compete.
It was great. It was every bit as fun and entertaining as watching a professional man's team play.
So why would that change?
Like, I would still enjoy watching them play at any level.
So, yes, it would be worse for a very small number of women, the ones who could be the best in their sports, it would be worse for them to instead of being number one, To be number 600.
But do you care?
I mean, if it's, let's say, better for some transgender folks, but worse for Serena Williams, it's about a push.
I don't know. Seems about the same, fairness-wise.
Anyway, I haven't seen it yet in the comments, but I guarantee you, There's somebody in the comments who's going to say to me, Scott, you're so stupid because that means large men would be playing with small women and hurting them.
No. No.
Not saying that.
All right. Somebody says it would be worse for all women.
How? Tell me one way that it would be worse for all women.
Again, I'll use my stepdaughter as an example.
She did not play on the school team.
She played in a recreational league.
And so, instead of sitting on the bench on the school team, she got to play every game and do well against people her level in a recreational league.
Was that bad for my stepdaughter that she didn't get to be on the school's team sitting on the bench?
No. She made friends.
She had discipline. She learned sports.
She had teamwork. She got every benefit you could get at the level she was playing.
It was competitive, fun to watch.
It was everything. There was nothing missing.
Sure, there are a few people who would not get to be the star of high school on the team.
Who cares? Just the one person who didn't get that, right?
So yeah, I won't say it's unfair.
I will say it will be different.
And some other people would get advantages and some others would not.
So we sort of fetishize sports like they're far more special than they are.
They're not that special.
You can have a recreational league that you play just for fun and you get all the benefits.
All of them. In fact, better benefits because you're more likely to play the entire game than if you try to get in the competitive sport.
Only a few people get to be starters.
Alright, somebody says, which is better for self-esteem?
By far the recreational leagues.
There are some people who would have better self-esteem by competing at the highest level on a woman-only team.
All the rest are better off playing on a team with people that are friends and the same level.
So, the only reason I like this topic It's because it triggers people into a hallucination of what I'm saying so that they can maintain their disagreement.
But the thing that causes the blind spot is that they can't see there was never anything but a political reason that there were ever two different leagues, one for men and one for women.
It never made sense from the beginning.
It was simply something that people wanted.
So they got it.
They had the power. They wanted it.
They got it. And I'm not even saying there's anything wrong with that.
I'm just saying that, you know, Well, let me be more clear about that.
There are things that make sense at a certain time and place.
I think it was good and beneficial that women got their own leagues and then got to compete and got to be athletes and all that.
So I think the way it is, and the way it was designed to be, totally positive.
I also think you need to rethink things now and then.
And we've reached a point where everybody understands that women can be athletes, right?
It wasn't long ago that the idea of a woman playing a sport would just seem like in a place.
But we're not in that place.
We're way beyond it.
Now everybody understands there are male athletes, female athletes, transgender athletes.
They're just athletes.
So once your society has moved past the question of, hey, can a woman play a sport?
Oh, I didn't know women could play sport.
Whoa! Once you've moved past that into everybody plays sports, then you can design a system that doesn't have to solve a social problem.
Having female-only sports has solved a social problem that is solved.
So you don't need to solve the problem that is already solved.
We already understand.
Women can play sports.
Duh! Alright, once you get that, it's all easy.
Okay, that's all I got for now.
I've got to go do a lot of work because my electricity is going to go off at noon, apparently.
Literally. I live in this stupid third world country called California.
And I'll tell you, we don't know for sure if the electricity will go off.
It has to do with It has to do with how much wind there is and some other place of the state.
But if it does, we have to get rid of our governor.
We have to change our government.
If my power goes out, I'm suddenly going to be very active in California politics, which I've never cared about.
Never cared about it.
But if my power goes out today from bad management...
I'm going to get real interested in the governorship.
Not running, but getting somebody in there who can do the work.
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