Back to episode — Episode 326 Scott Adams - China, Mass Migration, Peak Climate Change, Fusion Power, Misandry
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I would like to start off with a tweet from my president. I'm calling him my president today because I like what he did in this tweet and what he did that he's talking about. I will just read it to you if you have not seen it. This is a tweet from this morning from President Donald J. Trump. It's a two-parter. He says one of the very exciting things to come out of my meeting with President Xi of C…
← Previous segment →Now let's read some more of my, so I've got another tweet. I tweeted out about nuclear fusion. If you don't know, nuclear fusion is that long-promised technology that's always promised but never arrives. And the idea is that instead of nuclear fission, which we have now, which is wasteful and dangerous in some ways, that you could create unlimited energy in a fairly safe way through a different technology called fusion.
Now the reason that we've never been able to create these so-called fusion reactors is because apparently the biggest engineering challenge was the magnets. So the way they have to contain the reaction is through enormous magnetic fields because it's the only way to contain it. And apparently there have been breakthroughs recently in materials, you know, in the material science that would create new types of magnetic materials which at least on paper they think they can engineer something in the next three years to refine the engineering to the point where it can reach this level of magnetic strength to hold the reaction in. Now that, as I understand it, is the last of the engineering challenges. And on paper it's pretty close to working, meaning that it might be just some fiddling with the engineering of it. So whereas it used to be science fiction, meaning somebody had to invent something that didn't exist in order for fusion to work, at this point it looks like everything's been invented.
Now I told you this maybe a year or two ago that I know somebody who's a major investor in this space, somebody who's actually investing in fusion and one of the smartest people you'll ever meet. His name, but you know, hugely successful, richer than God type of person, who told me privately that, now wasn't involved, it told me privately that fusion is reduced now to an engineering problem. Meaning that the science has actually been solved if they can get these magnets to actually work in an actual engineered way.
So I would liken it to building, let's say somebody decided to build a building that's twice as tall as all current buildings. Well we don't exactly know how to build that building. Probably the architects would have to play with the engineers. They'd have to adjust things because you wouldn't do it exactly like the existing buildings and just make it taller. You probably have to do extra engineering to make it strong enough. But we know how. If we wanted to build a building that was twice as tall as all existing buildings it could be done. It's an engineering problem. It's not a science problem. So it looks like fusion has been reduced to an engineering problem and we might see something in ten years.
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Now fusion is a big game-changer because what happens when you have self-driving cars and unlimited cheap energy? You see all those people rioting in France. They were wearing the yellow vests. So those are the yellow vests that everybody who drives for a living in France wears, whether they're truckers or cab drivers or whatever. All of those people are going to be unemployed. All of them. Becaus…
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