Episode 254 Scott Adams: Nuclear Power, Kanye, Cultural Gravity
Date: 2018-10-10 | Duration: 41:28
Topics
WSJ climate change article says include opportunity benefits CNN, Bakari Sellers calls Kanye “anti-intellectual” “Cultural gravity” holds people back, trying to hold back Kanye Me too movement unintended result Male Executives are avoiding one-on-one female contact President Trump’s opinion on vaccine safety
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## Transcript
## [The Simultaneous Sip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkIi6a0M2lo&t=6s)
Hey everybody, come on in here. I can see all of you now thanks to the new upgrade on Periscope. I can actually see all of you. Now, I can't really see you, but for a moment there you thought I could, didn't you? Have you ever considered that listening to my Periscopes in the morning is like having a talkative friend who you're in a conversation with on FaceTime, but you don't have much to say so you just let your friend run on for a while? It feels kind of like that, doesn't it?
It's time for the simultaneous sip. Grab your mug, your cup, your chalice, your glass, your vessel full of liquids. I like coffee; you should like coffee too, but if you don't, another beverage will suffice for the simultaneous sip.
## [The Erased News Cycle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkIi6a0M2lo&t=68s)
It's a weird day in news. It feels like the news went from being all Trump-centric to being nothing about Trump suddenly. Did you notice that? I'm looking at CNN's homepage and I'm like, where's all the Trump stuff? I guess we don't do Trump stories when everything's working out well. The news is so good for Trump that he's been erased from CNN; they're not even going to talk about him this week.
I'm not going to say much about the hurricane because I don't have anything to add to a natural disaster. I hope we're ready. I hope the people in the Panhandle have taken all their precautions and gotten out if they need to, but other than that, there's not much to say about it.
## [Nuclear Breakthroughs and the Interface App](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkIi6a0M2lo&t=128s)
The tweet I pinned is my Periscope I did yesterday afternoon. If you haven't seen it, it has a persuasion lesson wrapped around explaining my app, the Interface app, in which you can immediately talk to an expert. I had said wouldn't it be great if every time there's something in the news and the headlines, somebody who's an expert in that topic could just log on to the app in case the media wants to find an expert?
Lately, we've been talking about nuclear power. There's an article in The Wall Street Journal to talk about in a minute. There have been at least two breakthroughs reported. One breakthrough is some bacteria that might eat nuclear waste; they've actually had the bacteria that might neutralize nuclear waste, which would be amazing. There's also a breakthrough at MIT in reducing the heat that comes out into the reactors, which has all kinds of cost and efficiency benefits, apparently.
Wouldn't you like to talk to an expert? It'd be great if somebody who is an expert on building nuclear power plants just logged on the app. It's a free app, and then anybody in the media who was looking for an expert could just search for nuclear.
## [Climate Change and Risk Assessment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkIi6a0M2lo&t=251s)
The thing that I keep saying about climate change is that the climate change experts tend to look at the costs of it, but not the opportunity costs. What happens to all the things you couldn't do because you spent all your money on this? They also tend to leave out nuclear as an option. If it's true that climate change is going to just be the worst thing ever for the world, no matter how much you hate nuclear power plants, the worst-case scenario is one of them melts down. Maybe a couple of them melt down over time, but isn't that way less bad depending on where you place these sites?
Assuming you place them so that if they melt down—if we're using technology that even does melt down—it wouldn't be the biggest deal in the world. It seems to me that's not even close to how big a problem that would be. A nuclear meltdown of a power plant, especially a new one, would be much lower risk. If you built a new plant, the odds of it melting down would be much lower because of what we've learned.
Somebody is saying "Japan," and I think that's the perfect example of what not to do. Japan put their nuclear power plant in a place that was at risk for a tsunami. They knew that risk was there. Why don't we not do that? Somebody says thorium is a game-changer. Other people say fission is not that far away. Maybe that's true.
## [Climate Change and Opportunity Costs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkIi6a0M2lo&t=313s)
I'm reading this article in The Wall Street Journal where a Nobel laureate says the same thing I said: you're not really considering the opportunity costs. If you haven't included them, you have not analyzed it. If you do, you come to the opposite conclusion. That's a pretty bad mistake there.
My take on climate change is that whether or not the problem is exactly what the climate scientists say, I'm not really the one who can analyze that. But what I can say is that the way we debate it is fraudulent. If we're talking about climate change and we're not talking about the only practical solution—which is to go nuts on nuclear and do it fast, get the government involved in reducing some regulations so we can build plants faster—if we're not doing that, we're not really taking climate change seriously.
The weird thing about the climate change folks is that their dream of a green world with green technologies, like solar and wind, by pushing climate change as the fear factor, they've done exactly the opposite of what I think they want. I think they want a world with no nuclear power that is also green, but instead, they're going to cause the opposite. If they alarm the world enough on climate science—and I think they have—it kind of guarantees nuclear power because it's literally the only solution anybody has that would get you a reasonably fast solution.
## [Kanye West and Anti-Intellectualism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkIi6a0M2lo&t=436s)
Let's talk about Kanye. I'm seeing a lot of people forwarding the Don Lemon show on CNN. Bakari Sellers, an African American pundit who is on there a lot, said some mean things about Kanye. One of the things he said was that his problem with Kanye is that "anti-intellectualism isn't cool." He's sort of mocking Kanye for not doing his homework before getting involved in stuff. I tweeted that it is probably that sort of thinking that gets Kanye elected in 2024.
Wherever Kanye is, it just makes you think of all different topics. Think of how many things you think about when you think of Kanye. It's this growing universe of things because his influence is expanding like crazy.
## [Intellectuals vs. Real-World Results](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkIi6a0M2lo&t=497s)
The first thing I thought about when he was accused of anti-intellectualism is: how does that intellectualism work? The intellectuals said Hillary Clinton would be President. They said the economy would fail. They said all of our allies would hate us, trade would be bad, and there would be nuclear war. Pretty much everything the intellectuals told us would happen, including what Bakari Sellers was predicting, every one of them was wrong for the past three years.
Who were the people who were right? Anti-intellectuals. Anti-intellectuals have been right about everything for about three years straight now. It depends how far you take your definition of anti-intellectual. If you take that all the way to "dumb," I don't know how right the dumb people were, but I think even the people who were literally low IQ—I'm not insulting, I'm just saying if you measure people's IQ—I think even the low IQ people were smarter than the intellectuals for the past three years. Maybe they were just lucky, but they were right about a lot of stuff.
## [Loser Think and Kanye’s Career](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkIi6a0M2lo&t=621s)
Calling Kanye anti-intellectual is part of the package of accusing him of being an unprepared celebrity as opposed to someone who's been chugging away in the government realm for years. I call that "Loser Think," which might be the title of my new book. Loser Think is a way of thinking that consistently gives you bad results.
Take the difference between the way Kanye apparently thinks—I can't read his mind, but we'll look at what he does. Kanye breaks out of his small field and he tries things for which he is totally unqualified. How qualified was Kanye before he became Kanye? Even Kanye wasn't qualified to be Kanye in the sense that he had never been a famous rapper, and then he became one. Then he decides to be a designer. What was his experience for being a designer? Nothing. And now he's one of the most successful designers.
Kanye is not stopped by his lack of beginning knowledge. How much knowledge did President Trump have about being president before he was president? Not much, just like everybody else, because nobody has practice being a president until they're the president. How much does President Trump know about the job of being a president right now, two years into it? A lot. He figured it out. He brought his own tools into the job and figured it out. Who do you want? The person who can figure it out.
## [Prison Reform and Selling Ideas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkIi6a0M2lo&t=745s)
Kanye is not just talking; he is literally getting ready to meet with Jared Kushner and with the President on one of the most intractable problems in the entire country, which is how to put ex-cons back to work and how to reduce our prison population. These are really hard problems and Kanye walks right into it.
One of the reasons this is such a hard problem is probably a lack of creativity. We probably don't have the right ideas to get us the right result yet. If we have a good plan and we're having trouble selling it, who would you want on your side to help you sell it? Kanye freakin' West.
Now known as Ye—I don't know how to pronounce Yee, so I guess "Ye." If you're asking me who was being one of the most productive people in the country this week, think about it: Ye. My problem with saying "Ye" is that it feels like I'm associating with people who know him personally. It feels too personal, but if that's what he wants...
## [Kanye’s Impact vs. Critics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkIi6a0M2lo&t=865s)
Who is being one of the most productive citizens in the United States this week? Ye. He's meeting with Jared, he's bringing attention to one of the most intractable problems in the world, and he's talking about bringing manufacturing to Chicago. Does all of that attention help Jared refine his ideas? Probably. You bring that much creativity into a topic and suddenly people start thinking of stuff. It's contagious. Did it bring more attention to it which will help him sell it? Absolutely.
What did Bakari Sellers do that was productive this week? He criticized the most productive citizen in the nation. When I say he's the most productive citizen, I'm talking about the fact he's not an elected politician. As an unelected person, who's doing more for the country this week right in front of our eyes than Ye? He's done an unambiguously positive thing by bringing attention to a major problem.
## [The Support for Kanye](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkIi6a0M2lo&t=926s)
When you're talking about politics and the left and right, Bakari Sellers is essentially on a team and he's criticizing Kanye, who he feels is either not on his team or more of a MAGA fan. What identifiable group of people are most supportive of Ye? It's a trick question. The people most supportive of Ye as a positive force in the world are "white supremacists." Now, I don't mean that literally. What I mean is that Trump supporters have been branded as a bunch of white supremacists.
If you're on the Left, how do you square the fact that there's a panel of black people criticizing Ye every day on CNN, and the people who are unambiguously positive about him is the party that that panel has branded as white supremacists? If I look at my Twitter feed, there's more positive than negative. Why are they so positive about Ye? Because he's not against them. He doesn't present a threat; he presents more of an opportunity. I like new ideas.
## [The Concept of Cultural Gravity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkIi6a0M2lo&t=1114s)
I'm developing a concept—maybe somebody already has a name for it—but I'm going to call it "cultural gravity." If you are a product of a particular culture, and you want to rise above the average and be more successful, your culture has a certain gravity that's sucking you back in. That gravity works on a lot of levels: it's what people say, it's their history, it's bias, it's how much money and connections they have, it's the attitudes, and the family structure.
Every culture has a different gravity. What I'm going to say now I first heard from African Americans. This is an argument made by very thoughtful African American people who are trying to make a difference. The idea is that the black community has a high cultural gravity.
By analogy, you see it with Bakari Sellers and the situation here. Ye is doing something unambiguously positive, and what is a far less successful black man doing? He's dragging him back. You see this all over the place—the number of times you see other black Americans trying to drag back black Americans who are either "too white" or not playing the game the right way. It just feels like there's a lot of cultural gravity.
Compare that to the Jewish culture—and this is obviously a stereotype, it doesn't apply to every single person—but the stereotype for the Jewish community is: "Why aren't you a doctor, or marrying a doctor, or a lawyer?" That's almost like cultural propellant. It's like if you want to rise above the average, everybody's looking at you and saying, "What can we do to help you rise?"
## [Personal Experience with Cultural Gravity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkIi6a0M2lo&t=1300s)
If I talk about my own experience being a white kid in a relatively low-income country setting in upstate New York—very rural, forty people in my graduating class—it became clear early that I had the potential to maybe do something. I had the opposite of cultural gravity; I felt the culture lifting me. I always felt that the people around me—white people who didn't have much money—offered actual cultural support all the time.
I can remember in grade school people would call me a nerd or a "Brainiac" because I had high grades, but it was never really cruel. It never felt like I was being bullied because it was always said with almost a complement element to it. Maybe there was some envy in there, but it never seemed designed to hold me back. I felt that my culture had no cultural gravity. The moment the string was cut on the balloon, there was nothing stopping me. Everybody seemed to be rooting for me.
I hear from smart African American leaders that one of the biggest problems in the black community is this sort of cultural gravity holding you back. You see this with Bakari Sellers' comment. I saw a radio interview recently where the DJ knew Kanye from the old days. As they were talking, I felt like he was trying to hold Kanye back. He kept saying stuff like, "Why can't you be the old Kanye? We like the old Kanye." Everything that old friend was saying felt like cultural gravity. It's simple to just say "jealousy," but why did my culture not produce any jealousy that I could register? It was almost entirely "You go, boy. Make us proud."
## [Rejecting the Mental Prison](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkIi6a0M2lo&t=1489s)
The most distinguishing characteristic of Kanye right now is he's made a stand against cultural gravity. He refers to it as a "mental prison." I don't love prison analogies personally, but he is rejecting cultural gravity publicly and at great personal and professional risk. He's looking to get bigger and make more of a difference.
Who's holding him back? It's not white people. You're not seeing a lot of Trump supporters say, "Hey Kanye, stop trying to be useful." You hear white people saying, "Go Kanye, let's see what you can do." They are totally rooting for him. It feels like white people are more supportive of his change of topics to a political realm. I don't know if that's true, and I don't know what to do about it if it is true, but that's my observation.
## [Unintended Results of the Me Too Movement](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkIi6a0M2lo&t=1734s)
There was a poll done one year after the Me Too movement started. One of the disturbing results is one that I predicted a year ago: executive males are avoiding meetings with women. Apparently, there's a pretty big shift in behavior in which executive men are just trying to avoid contact with women.
Think about the enormity of that problem. If you're a woman, think about why you lose if you can't go to lunch with your CEO just the two of you. A guy can do that. If I were a CEO and an assistant vice president who was a woman asked to go to lunch to talk about business, would I do it? I might feel I have to invite another man, but then if he says something sexist, I'm dragged into it. I can't even invite another man as a chaperone. If I invite another woman and they team up and say I did something, I'm dead because now there's a victim and a witness.
The only safe thing for a CEO to do is be busy or make it a larger group, but you're not going to get the same bonding and networking as a one-on-one lunch. The Me Too movement clearly is producing some amount of positive behavior change, but there's clearly a cost. We should be aware of it.
## [Smart Anti-Intellectualism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkIi6a0M2lo&t=1918s)
Haven't the people who say they are "pro-intellectualism" been wrong about everything for three years? Generally speaking, I favor people who jump into fields that they're not experienced in and try to figure it out. They're the ones who change the world. You want the creative force of nature to get in there and shake the box.
I don't think we should be against science, but that's not what people mean when they say anti-intellectualism. Take climate change: the intellectuals say it's a big problem and we better spend trillions of dollars. The "anti-intellectuals" say you're forgetting the costs and the benefits. If you haven't included nuclear power in the calculation, you haven't really even considered the problem.
Who is smarter in that example? The intellectuals who completely ignore the costs and benefits of nuclear and just look at climate costs—which are just a wild guess supported by horoscope-like models—or the anti-intellectuals who are saying you're leaving out how much it would affect the economy or the benefits of technological innovation? All the smart stuff is coming from the anti-intellectuals. Am I right about that? That's the irony: the smart people are the "anti-intellectuals" in so many cases.
## [Trump’s Opinion on Vaccine Safety](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkIi6a0M2lo&t=2105s)
Whoever says vaccines are definitely good and there's no reason to be concerned is not smart. The smart range is somewhere in between. The smartest opinion I've ever heard on vaccines in terms of risk versus benefit was expressed by President Trump.
Trump said that vaccines have been tested individually, but what we haven't tested is what happens if you give a number of vaccines to the same person at once. Is that anti-intellectualism? We test drugs one at a time, but it would be impossible to test every drug with every other combination. We just put the drug out there, and when it kills somebody or gives them a side effect, we ask what else they were taking.
The President has a realistic view: why would you trust something this important that hasn't been tested in combination? Politically, it's brilliant because it's pro-science and slightly anti-vaccine without totally committing to it, but it's also a common-sensical point of view.
## [Additives and Combinations](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkIi6a0M2lo&t=2288s)
I had a friend years ago who was trying to convince me to eat more organic food. My opinion had always been that all these additives have been tested. My friend said, "They haven't tested it all together." If the only thing you ate that had an additive was jelly once a week, it wouldn't be a problem. But if everything you eat has an additive, it doesn't matter that every one of those things has been tested in isolation. They haven't tested what happens when you give yourself a whole bunch of different additives from different sources.
Somebody says I look great for 65. I'm 61, damn it! They do test vaccines all together? I don't believe that. I don't think you could test them on humans in every combination like that. I'm not telling you vaccines don't work—I'm not an anti-vaxxer. I'm an anti-intellectual, meaning I don't know. How would I know?
I don't know much about this category of additives or how dangerous vaccines are, so I'm going to end here. I'll talk to you later. Bye.