Episode 265 Scott Adams: Saudi Arabia, Bill Gates Solving Climate Change
Date: 2018-10-18 | Duration: 31:29
Topics
Half-pinions on Saudi Arabia and Jamal Khashoggi Weighing the costs as well as the benefits of our actions Bill Gates innovative approach to solving climate change Same approach can be used to solve healthcare costs
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## Transcript
## [The Simultaneous Sip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr2o9unYFQE&t=4s)
Pam-pam-pa-pam-pa-pam! Yes, it's not your imagination. I am up early today. I've got to do some things during my normal Periscoping time, and so those few people who are also awake get first take on the simultaneous sip. We're going early this morning, probably have a small crowd, but it's going to be worth it. Raise your glass, your chalice, your mug, your vessel full of beverage, and enjoy this simultaneous sip.
Oh, that's good stuff. For those of you who are keeping track, Cristina and I are back together. I don't want to say any more about that, but let's just say misunderstanding solved. So that's the good news.
## [Saudi Arabia and Half-pinions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr2o9unYFQE&t=69s)
I want to talk about Saudi Arabia and what I call the "half-pinions." This is a term that I coined myself. A half-pinion is half of an opinion. We see this in a lot of different areas where somebody will say we have to consider just the costs, or we have to consider just the benefits, when in any reasonable world you would consider both the costs and the benefits and you would see which one is greater. A half-pinion says, "I'll just look at one side of that."
You're seeing that with Saudi Arabia. In order to demonstrate a half-pinion, I'd like to introduce my co-host, Dale. Dale, could you come over here? I'd like to talk to you about the situation in Saudi Arabia.
"Okay fine, what is your question?"
So, Dale, it seems more and more obvious that Saudi Arabia was involved in the brutal murder and dismemberment of a writer for The Washington Post. What should we do about that?
"There must be consequences! There must be consequences! We cannot allow that moral situation to go on. There must be consequences."
Well, Dale, there would also be costs to applying those consequences. Give me an idea of exactly the kind of consequences you're talking about, because then I could look at the costs and the benefits. I would know if you're talking about not selling arms to Saudi Arabia, for example, and then I could look at the ramifications and how that would affect our economy and our ongoing interests in the Middle East. Is that what you're saying, Dale?
"I'm saying there should be consequences! There should be consequences! I do not think the brutal Saudi dictatorship should get away with this."
Well, I'm not disagreeing with you, Dale. I'm just trying to understand your full opinion. All right, so yes, we don't like this and it should be discouraged, but what exactly are you suggesting that we do about it? Should we attack Saudi Arabia? Should we give them economic sanctions?
"I have someplace else to be."
Correct me if I'm wrong, hasn't the entire conversation looked like that? The only person who is talking about the costs and the benefits is President Trump, the "crazy guy." The guy who is supposed to be the crazy one in the conversation, the one who's biased or has all kinds of issues according to his critics, he's the only one who said, "Yeah, we really need to get to the bottom of this, but keep in mind we have these huge investments; they're an important ally for the Middle East." He's the only one saying there are costs and there are benefits.
I think the members of the media need to be a little more vigilant about nailing people down who are getting away too easily by saying, "I think there should be consequences." If you can't say what you think those consequences should be and also visualize what would happen if we applied them, you don't really have an opinion.
## [MBS and the Plausible Deniability of Leaders](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr2o9unYFQE&t=315s)
Now let's talk about how guilty we think MBS is. I'm talking about the Crown Prince. Now we're learning that at least a few members of the alleged kill team were close members of the Prince's entourage. They were part of his security detail. The thinking is that it would be impossible for the Crown Prince not to have been aware and not to have authorized this operation.
To which I say: it's possible. You cannot rule out the fact that Mohammed bin Salman, MBS, did know every part of it and authorized it. Definitely possible. But let's put some context on it. If you look at some of the biggest stories about our government, the government of the United States, some of the biggest stories have been underlings doing things that the leader didn't want them to do. There were leakers, people who talked to the press for *Fire and Fury*, people who started rumors that were not true, and allegedly people in the Deep State who were working against an elected president.
It seems to me that in the United States, it is more the rule than the exception that members of the government are doing things that the President doesn't know about and really wouldn't like, because they're acting against the President. In a big company, it is very typical for a CEO to be blindsided by something the staff does. It's not every day, but it's a normal situation.
Let me give you an example from when I was working for the phone company. I also was doing *Dilbert*, and *Dilbert* had become a big deal by then. It was already a famous property and I was in all kinds of news stories. Part of the story was: "He works for Pacific Bell during the day, but at night he draws a comic about the workplace." That was the hook. The CEO of PacBell had contacted me because he was a *Dilbert* fan. Ordinarily, I was too many levels down in management to ever talk to the CEO, but I had contact with him. I'd met him; we'd had some conversations because he was just a *Dilbert* fan.
One day my boss decided to ask me to leave. It was a friendly conversation, and I had offered that I would leave whenever they needed me to. Soon after my boss essentially fired me—but it was a friendly firing—I get a call from the CEO who was just talking about some *Dilbert* stuff. I guess he saw a comic he liked. I said that I had just been fired. Here is the CEO, who was a fan of mine, and he's just finding out that his underling fired me. Now, was that unusual? Not really, because it's typical in a big company that the CEO knows a little bit of what's going on—the big stuff—and then there's this whole universe of stuff that's been delegated.
But you ask yourself: "That doesn't really apply to the big stuff. The CEO clearly knows the big stuff." Well, does he? Let me say this: if hypothetically MBS, the Crown Prince, had said to his security staff, "We've got to silence this person. Figure it out. I don't need to know the details, but just make sure this critic is silenced." Obviously, the first choice is to buy him off or to bring him into the kingdom to co-opt him. That's always the first choice. But if you need to go to the second choice, figure it out. Just make it happen.
There's an entirely good chance that the Crown Prince gave a general order that the specific guys who murdered this guy and dismembered him were interpreting in their own way. It could be both true that the Crown Prince didn't know exactly what was going to happen. He may have known the universe of possibilities, but there's probably a good chance he didn't know the details. That would make sense because you would never want to be in a position where recording or digital communication came up that tied him to any kind of a crime.
It seems to me that would actually be the more normal situation. Would it be more normal that the security services tell the boss of all the wet work they're doing, or would it be more normal for them to say, "Look, boss, we'll take care of it. Just don't ask too many questions"? I don't know. We'll have to grapple with that. But let's get out of the half-pinion territory and have full opinions if we do it.
## [Bill Gates and Breakthrough Energy Ventures](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr2o9unYFQE&t=626s)
Now, something very exciting. This is one of the best things that's ever happened to civilization, you just don't realize it yet. Here it is: Bill Gates has announced that he's part of what he calls the Breakthrough Energy Ventures, BEV. That's putting more than a billion dollars into promising companies that can work on various elements of climate change.
Wait, wait, I know what you're saying. You're saying "climate change hoax," so this is all nonsense, right? Well, we're talking Bill Gates here. When Bill Gates says climate change is something that's dangerous and we have to work on it, the first thing I do is I say: okay, here's my IQ, here's Bill Gates' IQ, and we disagree. If that doesn't make you stop and say, "What's wrong with my thinking?" I just don't think you're a rational player. If you can see Bill Gates disagreeing with you on something that involves science and business and technology, and he's got a firm opinion and it's different from yours, you should freaking listen to it.
It doesn't mean he's right, but if you're just dismissing Bill Gates, who has really looked into it with his IQ and his resources, you should take that seriously. Here's the thing: his approach appears to be independent of whether there's really carbon going into the atmosphere from humans or whether it really makes a difference. His approach is mostly to improve the technology of things that we would want to do anyway. I'm pretty sure his approach would be compatible with a Trump approach, or anybody else's approach, because it's really just making transportation and industry more efficient.
Even if Bill Gates is completely wrong about climate change, about the risk, and about the role of man—even if he's wrong about all of that—everything I'm going to describe is still a really, really good idea. That's Bill Gates, right? Bill Gates finds a way to win no matter what. If climate change is real, this is a good idea. If climate change is not real, we still want to do all of this stuff because you want your energy costs to go down, you want to be more efficient, and you want to pollute less. All those things we want independent of whether climate change is as the scientists have described.
Here's the approach. Tell me if you recognize what he's done. He's created a fund of private investors looking at companies specifically in the business of addressing things that would be important to climate change, but would also be important if climate change wasn't a problem because we'd still want lower-cost transportation and less pollution.
The first thing he's done is he broke the problem down so you can see which portions of activities are causing the most problems. Here's his breakdown. He says that:
* 25% of the problem is electricity and renewables.
* 24% is cattle and our agriculture.
* 21% is manufacturing.
* 14% is transportation.
* 6% is buildings—just the technology used in making building materials.
* The final 10% is miscellaneous.
Bill Gates has identified the biggest causes. Now he's identified startups and technologies that address each of those categories. You could tell, "Oh, if this company works out and does what it says it's going to do, it could affect that 25% or that 14%." You would know exactly what part of the equation you're working on. There's no government involved in this. There might be some government funding, but it's not important to this system. He's created a portfolio, he's drawn attention to it with his Bill Gates magic, and he's funneled all of this billionaire money into the companies that could most quickly make a difference.
Think about how good this system is. He's identified and simplified the situation. He's got a system that works whether your base assumptions are right or wrong. Right now, a goal would be "let's do something about climate change." Well, what do you do? A system is: let's go through this process, identify the companies, and make sure they have funding, sunshine, and attention. Let's do it as quickly as possible. We don't know which of these companies will be the ones that make a difference; that's why there are a lot of them. It's a portfolio approach.
## [The President's Portfolio for Healthcare](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr2o9unYFQE&t=998s)
The reason I was so excited about this is that it's identical to the idea that I gave on Periscope just a few days ago. My domain was healthcare, and I was suggesting that there be something called the "President's Portfolio." The President's Portfolio is exactly this idea, except branding it with the President's name instead of having Bill Gates being the lead voice.
The idea was that we would look at healthcare costs and break them into their categories exactly the way Bill Gates did. For example: this percent is from hospital care, this percent is from medication, this percent is from doctor visits. Whatever that is, then you would find all the startups that are working on reducing costs in those areas. You would list them, you would put them in a portfolio, and you'd make sure people knew these companies have the greatest chance of working on this percentage of the costs. Then you would just shine a light on them and you'd say, "Hey billionaires, you have plenty of money and you want to help, you just didn't know how. I just told you how."
Bill Gates just showed us the way. When I was saying this on Periscope, I got the feeling some people were saying, "Yeah, that's an okay idea." But when Bill Gates does it, suddenly it takes it to another level of credibility. It's not talk; he's already done it. We should take this model and extend it to other categories. Healthcare is the obvious next place to do it. The government doesn't need to be investing; they're just chunking up the problem to make it convenient to know where the big costs are.
## [Win Bigly and the Two Movies Phenomenon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr2o9unYFQE&t=1180s)
I will have to get going. I'll be talking to Adam Carolla later and tomorrow Ben Shapiro, so I've got to go down and talk to them. I'll let you know and I'll tweet about when those things air.
The softcover version of *Win Bigly* is coming out at the end of the month, just a few weeks away, so I'm doing another small PR tour just to talk about that again. By the way, have you noticed how much of the things that I wrote in *Win Bigly* have become the common way of looking at the universe now? Have you noticed that the things I talked about that seemed radical and just ridiculous just two years ago are now common knowledge?
One of them is this "two movies on one screen" thing that I talk about too much, but the normal press talks about this now all the time. The mainstream media and everybody else has come to the realization that we're not always disagreeing on even the same topic; we're actually in different movies. We're imagining the other side in this caricature that doesn't exist, and they're imagining you in a caricature that doesn't exist with facts that aren't true. You're both living in these artificial realities.
The other thing that I said back in 2015 that now is just becoming common understanding is that the things President Trump does are really, really persuasive. The things that people thought were crazy and just all the bad things they thought about him are now generally considered to be smart and effective. There's still disagreement on whether he should be doing this stuff, but I think there's now complete agreement that it works.
I also told you in *Win Bigly* that you can get used to anything and that you have to really watch that effect—the "getting used to things you didn't think you could get used to." It changes everything over time. Never was it more obvious than with the latest tweet by Trump about Stormy Daniels, in which he called her "horseface."
Just put your head back four years ago, before President Trump, and imagine if you could have imagined that the President of the United States would send a tweet talking about the porn star he allegedly had an affair with and calling her a "horseface." You could not imagine it. It would literally be unimaginable. But since we can get used to anything, by the time that the horseface tweet came out, I don't know if you had the same reaction that I did, but I laughed because of the audacity. It was obvious the President was trying to distract attention and control the news, which he did quite effectively. But it didn't seem shocking, right?
Four years later, we actually got used to the fact that we could wake up in the morning to see a tweet from the President of the United States calling a porn star "horseface," and everything about that just seemed like, yeah, that could happen. That seems pretty normal. I called that back in 2015; I said you're going to get used to it.
You also see that Trump's critics are trying to imitate him, but they can't figure out what the active ingredients are. The Democrats are looking at what Trump did and saying, "All right, we've got to use the good stuff. Whatever he's doing that's working, we're going to have to copy that." But they don't know the active ingredients. The active ingredients are technique, persuasion, visualization, asking for more than you think you can get, controlling attention, and branding people with clever little names that stick.
Those are the active ingredients. But if you don't know that world and you don't understand persuasion—and I think that's true for most of the Democrats—what you're looking at is somebody who just looks crazy and spontaneous. Nothing that Trump does makes sense to people who don't understand technique. They don't understand branding. They don't understand persuasion.
So the Democrats have quite hilariously tried to imitate the least active part of what Trump does, and in fact, the only part that's bad, which is the being mean, being a bully, and being too aggressive. It's the only part of what Trump does that is sort of the unpleasant side effect. As much as I appreciate the President's technique, I think it's fair to say it's got rough edges. Instead of the Democrats picking the good parts, they picked the rough edges. They picked the only part that you shouldn't copy. You should copy all the other stuff, and if you get some rough edges too, well, maybe you live with them because sometimes it just comes with the rest of the stuff. But to only copy the rough edges and say, "Let's be bad to people in public and let's go way too far," is hilariously ineffective.
I think that *Win Bigly* has not only stood the test of time but has documented it before it happened. Some people write history books; I wrote a book that described both the history, the present, and what was going to happen next.
## [Simulation Theory, UFOs, and Q&A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr2o9unYFQE&t=1672s)
I have not read *Never Split the Difference*.
The other thing that I started saying early on was that Trump was playing 3D chess. The people who wanted to counter that message because it was positive for Trump countered it with sarcasm. How many times have you seen a critic say, "Well, I don't think he's playing 27D chess, Dale!" It's 3D chess. 3D chess was the original thing. I know it's funnier if you increase the number from 3 to 27, but he's not playing 27D chess. You know you have something if even the critics can't stop saying it. If the critics can't stop playing with your own branding, then you have effective branding. You can see that everywhere now. 45D chess, exactly.
Am I going to write another book like *God's Debris*? It might be impossible to write another book like *God's Debris*. I have been thinking about writing a book in which people realize they're in a simulation, but I feel like that would look too much like *The Matrix*. It wouldn't be a book where real people are plugged into a matrix; it would be that there are no real people—that we are just the matrix. If you can figure out the matrix, you can hack it. You would have powers within the simulation.
How many people thought that when I first started talking about this simulation back in 2015, how many of you thought that that would become common conversation? Have you noticed that talk about us being in a computer simulation went from sort of a fringy, strange thing to the way a lot of smart people talk?
Have I ever seen a UFO? I have. I have seen a UFO. I don't know if I've seen an alien, but I've seen flying objects that I couldn't identify.
Trump said he will close the southern border. I don't know about that. This caravan could not work out better for President Trump; the timing of it is insane.
You say Tucker Carlson had an anti-weed segment? I didn't see it. The anti-weed people, I think, are well-meaning, but they may be expressing half-pinions accidentally. The half-pinion on marijuana is: "Wouldn't it be great if it never existed and nobody ever had it, and nobody would ever get lazy and nobody would ever have a problem with it?" I think that's certainly half of the question. But the other half is what they are getting in return.
I would say weed probably saved my life, but I don't think I'm normal. I think that my personal impression of weed is that it doesn't have recreational value in the normal way, but it has a lot of health benefits. So I don't recommend it for recreational use. I don't use it for partying. I haven't used marijuana as a party drug since college. I only use it for the benefits.
All right, I'm going to talk to you later. I've got to go off and do some stuff. Talk to you later. Bye.