Episode 2466 CWSA 05⧸06⧸24
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 8 minutes
Words per Minute
139.9269
Summary
In this episode of Coffee with Scott Adams, host Scott Adams talks about MIT's discovery of a way to vaporize water without heat, and the growing use of nuclear energy in the 21st century, and how it could change the world.
Transcript
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
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It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and there's never been a finer time.
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If you'd like to take this experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with
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their tiny human brains, all you need for that is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice
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of stein, a canteen, jug or flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing
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It's called the simultaneous sip, and have us now go.
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Well, I'm coming to you on two separate devices today.
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I had a little technical difficulties, so there will be no live rumble or live acts.
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I'm coming to you on two separate devices on YouTube and locals with one microphone.
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Now, you may be wondering why I'm wearing a different T-shirt today.
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Of course, it's the Coffee with Scott Adams official merchandise.
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But more importantly, I'm trying to make some distance between me and Scott Galloway, because
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every time I see him, I can't tell the difference between us.
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He's a bald guy with glasses, and he's wearing a gray T-shirt.
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And I thought, I'm going to have to do something to get some distance.
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So I've decided to change my name from Scott Adams, which is just confusing with Scott Galloway.
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So I've changed my first name to Knott, and my last name to Galloway.
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So now it'll be Scott Galloway and Knott Galloway.
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And I will just go as Knott Galloway from now on.
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If there are two Scots, you're never going to tell us apart.
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All right, MIT made an astonishing discovery, they say, that light can vaporize water without heat.
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So apparently they found that if you shine the light at a 45-degree angle, and you do just the right things,
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and you sacrifice a toad to the moon, or whatever they do in science, I'm not really much of a scientist.
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I think they sacrifice toads, but I don't know.
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But anyway, they can vaporize water without creating heat.
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Now you might say to yourself, Scott, that is the least important, nerdiest thing you've ever said in your entire life.
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Why does this have any meaning to me whatsoever?
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Well, some people are saying it might be good for desalinization.
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Wouldn't that be amazing if you could just shine a light on some water, and it would desalinate salt water?
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So that's actually something that might be happening.
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And if you could imagine, if you didn't need heat, and all you needed was light, imagine how efficient that would be to desalinate.
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Just hold in your mind the possibility that you could take desalinization costs down to a fraction of what they are.
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You'd have unlimited clean water for almost no cost.
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You'd just shine light on it at just the right angle and desalinate it.
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So it could be a gigantic thing from a nerdy little thing.
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They say it might also have some clean energy application.
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The head of Bechtel is talking about how nuclear is becoming a thing.
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So I like to report on this trend because it's probably maybe one of the most or the most important thing, whether we have enough electricity.
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And apparently there's 30 countries are considering or planning nuclear programs.
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20 more have signaled interest, a bunch of new power plants are going up, and a bunch more are in the plants.
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Isn't it funny that we think we're a bunch of reasonable creatures, human beings, and we look at the costs of things, and we look at the perceived benefits, and we compare them logically, and we come up with our plans.
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So nuclear energy went from the scariest thing in the world, so therefore you've got to close them all down, and you can't do it, right?
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Now, the fear was not based on, apparently, good information, because people were afraid of the waste.
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Turns out you could just store it on site, put it in a barrel.
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And people were afraid of it's going to melt down.
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But it turns out that the modern nuclear designs have never melted down.
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There's never been a current model of nuclear that you would build today.
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It was always earlier versions that we knew had obvious problems.
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So we went from nuclear is the scariest thing in the world, and therefore must be closed down, to climate change is the scariest thing in the world, and you've got to do everything you can to avoid it.
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And what can you do to avoid climate change disasters, say the alarmists?
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Well, you could get a lot of nuclear power plants.
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So we started with the wrong reason for banning nuclear, which was that it was presumed to be more dangerous than it was.
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So basically, the anti-nuclear was just based on fear.
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But now that's been completely reversed, and it wasn't because we got smarter?
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It's because we found something scarier that also probably isn't true.
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So we went from, you know, the nuclear waste is going to kill us.
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And then, you know, it's going to melt down and all this.
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So we went from a fake scare against nuclear to a, probably, fake scare against climate change, which completely reversed it, just in time for AI.
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There's not a damn thing we do that makes any sense.
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We're literally just chasing people with scare stories, and then people are running away.
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Did you ever hear that, the old thing, two wrongs don't make a right?
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So first we had the wrong that nuclear was a bad idea, but we fixed the wrong idea about nuclear by coming up with an even wronger idea about climate change risk.
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We got our nuclear energy back just in time for robots and AI?
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It was the two biggest wrongs we've probably ever made, probably in the history of humankind.
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It'd be hard to find things much wrong than those two things.
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The Christy Noem story just keeps getting better.
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So it seems like only a few months ago we were talking about her as being a good candidate for VP for Trump.
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And then it turned out, allegedly, she was having an affair with Corey Lewandowski, which is sort of really bad if you're a Republican running for office.
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And then there was a thing in her book that said she shot her own puppy, and that wasn't really good.
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This is the best terrible news, because it doesn't really hurt anybody.
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So apparently, Christy Noem has a book about her own life, which claims in the book, this is a quote from the book.
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I remember when I met with North Korea dictator Kim Jong-un.
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I'm sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants, parenthetically.
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So then she's asked on a news show, did you meet Kim Jong-un?
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It was written in her book, and I guess it got published with a whole fake story about meeting Kim Jong-un and staring him down.
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And she had to go on TV on a book tour and explain why her own book she hadn't read, because she clearly had not read her own book.
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Because she wouldn't have left it in there if, you know, it's such a glaring thing that didn't happen.
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You wouldn't accidentally leave in a story about meeting Kim Jong-un when everybody knows you can fact-check it.
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Apparently, she went on a news program and suggested that, or maybe it was the book,
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that suggested that maybe Commander of the Dog should be shot, too.
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Now, I worked on a farm for, you know, much of my younger days.
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And if you've been around farms, especially dairy farms and, I guess, other kinds of farms,
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you see a level of real-world decisions that you don't have to see in other jobs.
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So ending the life of an animal is not an unusual thing on a farm, even your dog, right?
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But, you know, it's well within the normal farmer behavior to kill a bad dog.
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Unfortunately, I'm not in favor of it, of course.
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But, you know, people do what they do on the farm, and, you know, they're tough decisions.
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But then she, it's the talking about it that's the problem.
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If you're trying to be a national politician, don't ever mention shooting your own dog.
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There may have been good reasons to shoot her dog.
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And certainly don't mention that you want to shoot the president's dog,
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But the real question I have is, do you think the ghostwriter maybe should be looked into a little bit?
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How exactly does a ghostwriter make up a story about a North Korea Kim Jong-un meeting?
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Did they look at their notes and say, hmm, according to my notes, you met with Kim Jong-un?
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And then just wrote it down and nobody checked?
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It looks like somebody was trying to take her out,
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and they put something in her book knowing she wouldn't read it.
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And I have some questions about, who was that ghostwriter?
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but he's using it to advertise his own services.
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Ghostwriting services will not let you say you shot a dog in your book.
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I'm better than the other ghostwriters who would let you say you shot a dog.
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that mental health problems are way up 40% nationally from 2019 to 2023.
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I wonder if anything happened between 2019 and 2023,
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And the biggest increase is generalized anxiety disorder.
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I do talk to a lot of people who have some kind of generalized anxiety disorder.
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I would say that the reasons for it are all pretty obvious.
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the only problems you had were the ones that were local.
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all you knew about was what was happening to you.
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Because you didn't have any telecommunications or anything.