Episode 215 Scott Adams: Nike, Socialism, and Tyrants Versus Moles

Oh, it's Monday. It's another work week for me that doesn't mean much since I work on the weekends too. So to me I call it Happy Day. And if you'd like to join me for the simultaneous sip, one of the best parts of your day. Why? Partly because I say so, partly because it is. Partly because it involves your favorite beverage and partly because you'll be joining with the rest of us in a simultaneous sip. Oh yeah, that's some good sipping right there. So let's talk about the craziness in the world. Craziness, I tell you, there's craziness everywhere. So we're watching, of course, everybody in the world is watching this Nike situation with Colin Kaepernick. And one of the big questions is is this going to be good for Nike or bad for Nike? And I just tweeted around, well, some see some data that I haven't triple checked it, so I'm not sure that any of it's right. But there, there are two stories. One is that online sales went up by some large amount, 30 some percent right after the Kaepernick commercial. But turns out online sales are about 6% of sales, which doesn't really sounds low to me. But let's say online sales are not most of their sales. And then there's another entity which has measured, I guess the popularity of the brand which has cut in half from 60 something to 30 something. So which one of those is true? Are sales up or has Nike completely destroyed its brand? Because there are entities with both stories. The 30% is based on 300 emailed receipts. So I guess the macro story is we can't trust the story. So that's the moral of that story. But here's the interesting thing. I'm watching the Democrats trying to make socialism look like a good thing. And of course the people on the right will tell you that socialism just turns you into Venezuela and socialism is the worst thing in the world. And then I'm also watching Kaepernick, who you would associate with socialism, wouldn't you? You'd associate him with Che Guevara, you'd associate him with the left. So you would associate Kaepernick with socialism. What are the two biggest things? Yeah, I think I could put this into two categories. What are the two things we know about Kaepernick? Number one, he is a symbol for socialism because he's a symbol of the left. The left is about socialism. He wore a Che Guevara shirt at one point. Socialism. What is the second Thing we know about Kaepernick, he's a huge capitalist with a multi million dollar contract with a company that has sweatshops or whoever makes their sneakers around the world. What is a bigger capitalist company than Nike? Nike pretty much is capitalism. So Kaepernick has managed to become the icon for opposites and somehow he's pulling it off in a weird way. So he's a symbol for the biggest corporate greed. Buy my sneakers for hundreds of dollars. Let us license your image. That's as capitalist as you can frickin get. You can't get more capitalist than being the face of Nike. At the same time, he's the face of the opposite of that. So if you ask me, is that a good long term place for Kaepernick to be, I would say it might not work in the long term, but we don't know. We just don't know. It's hard to. This one's a tough one to call. And the reason is that the people who are the main customers for Nike, maybe a demographic that just doesn't mind Kaepernick's anything, they just think he's a rebel and that's, that's cool. So it might be that nobody's really thinking of it at any deeper level and they just like his vibe. Maybe a sell sneakers. We'll see. I don't know how to put an estimate on that one. Now in a similar vein, you should always look at the unintended consequences of anything happening. What was the intended consequence of the Woodward book? Well, the intended consequence of writing any book is to sell books. Of course that's always the primary goal of the author and the publisher. But in this case you kind of think there's another big goal which is to paint the President in a certain unflattering light. But here's the unintended consequence of everything in the Woodward book as well as the unintended consequence of the New York Times. Anonymous writer. If you're trying to buy the mainstream media's narrative that the President is essentially a dictator and he's a strong man and you put him in office and he's just having his way with things because he's sort of a dictator, how does that jibe with the whole New York Times mole who says there are all these people who are managing the President and there's so much friction and essentially painting a picture where it's a very collaborative sort of situation where it's hard for even the President to get anything done. So the President has now been Designed, shall we say, by the opposition. They've designed a picture of the president where he's a dictator, he's a strongman dictator who can't even get a document left on his desk. He's a dictator who nobody is doing what he wants to do. Now, I'm exaggerating a little bit here, but doesn't it seem to you that one of the narratives, which was this president is a dictator is sort of really damaged by this insider account of someone who first of all likes a lot of what the president does. And in those situations where, where this person doesn't like it, they push back. So where does the president have pushback? The president has pushback from the courts. And we've seen the president acknowledge the court's authority and we've seen the president conform to the court's wishes, the Supreme Court. So that's not very dictator like. We've seen Congress thwart the President and that's not very dictator like. And we think that Congress will maybe be more able to thwart the President after the midterms if Democrats pick up seats. Not very dictator like. Then we see this again. I always tell you to look for the negative space. I'm not really finding. I don't remember that. The insider who wrote the insider piece, did that insider ever say, yeah, we're worried that he loves Russia too much. Maybe he's a Russian asset. Remember, this is an insider. Why is it that the insider, the person who's so close to the President he can touch his desk? Well, why is this person not afraid of any Russian collusion stuff? Apparently you think that that person would have said something like, well, I like how the economy is going, but I can't work for someone who's a Russian asset. Why? Because the insider apparently isn't worried about that. Doesn't seem to be on the radar. And by the way, let's look at the headlines on CNN and I think I'll read to you all of the Russian related stories. There must be lots of Russian related stories, right? It's the biggest story in the world. It's a gigantic problem that's going to remove the president. Mueller's got a bombshell any minute now. That's big stuff. Let's read all the headlines. Something about a hurricane. Something else about a hurricane. Something about a hurricane. Another story about a hurricane. Something about Sweden, something about Alibaba, something about Olivia Newton John. Is she Russian? No, she's not Russian. Something about Woodward book. Something about more or less Moonves stuff. Less Moonves he's not Russian, is he? Ford Motor Company. NFL, huh? Seven people injured in Paris, knife attack, huh? Serena Williams, huh? Nothing about Russia. How about that Papadopoulos story? That was a whole big tall glass of nothing, wasn't it? You got two weeks in jail. How would you like to bank your criticism of the president on this 20 something person who got two weeks in jail for getting trapped into a lie about something that wasn't important in the first place? So it seems to me that the attack on the President, that it was the Russia line of attack, looks like the left has given up. Now, it might be that there's just no news being generated and they need a little news because it needs something to talk about. You'd think that would be the case, right? If there are no new events in the Russia probe, what is there to talk about? Well, has that stopped them for the past year and a half? Has the left stopped talking about Russia any week because they didn't have any news? No, they just made up some news. How hard is that? Did the Woodward book confirm that the President is a Russian asset? Crickets chirp, chirp, chirp. Wait a minute. Are you telling me that the best investigative reporter, the person who can really blow the lid off a story like Watergate, Bob Woodward, wrote an entire book about the presidency and left out Russia? Now, I assume it's mentioned prominently in some ways, but where are all the stories generated by the Woodward book about how Russia is really what we think it is? This terrible problem, Did Woodward leave Russia out of the book or did he write about it in a way that didn't add anything, which would indicate maybe we know everything, maybe there's not much there, if even Woodward is not on that story. So somebody saying, yes, he did. So I'm assuming it's true that he mentions Russia stuff in the book, but was anything added to the story by Woodward is the question, or is it still dead in the water? So dead that a Woodward book, you know, think of his name in this context. A Woodward book about President Trump, and none of the headlines are about, hey, we found out a little bit more about Russia. Nothing like that. Look for the blank space, look at the canvas and find the empty space. Sometimes that's the story. That's the story here. All right, so the mole has inadvertently, I think, drawn a cap on the problem. Here's what I mean by that. If you were on the outside looking into the White House, you're just, you, you're a citizen and you're looking at this White House. And this White House is being described by its haters as being a den of Russian spies and everybody's in it for themselves and blah, blah, blah, and there's a dictator. And all these things that the haters have said about the White House. Think of all the things the haters have said. Don't you think that the New York Times insider account and the insider, remember, was no fan of the President? He liked some of the things like the economy and defense, but he was no fan. If you believe the insider, did he not describe the worst case scenario? In other words, the insider said, hey, there's some big problems here. Sometimes the people on the staff don't agree with the President's ideas. And so we find ways to prevent those ideas from happening. What was the worst thing about that story? The mole? The worst thing about the story was the person who wrote it. Think about this. An insider account, somebody that close to the President. This person really knows the goods. This is somebody who knows where the skeletons are. This is somebody who knows what the problems are. This is somebody that's close. They're an insider. And what did they have? The worst thing about the, about the White House was the person who wrote the story. Because there's somebody not doing what the President is asking on issues that apparently are not that important. That's it. The best the op ed could come up with is that the op ed writer is an asshole. Am I wrong about that? Now what they said was a lot of mind reading stuff. Read. It would take me a moment to find it. But I'm going to ask you to just remember it. This is a low budget operation here. Think about the things that the op ed said were facts and then think about how they characterize them. So this is a typical thing that happens. An anti Trump story or an anti any famous person story will start like this. They'll say, here's a fact, he did this, I did this, somebody did this, somebody did this. So there'll be some facts. And then in the next sentence there will be things that aren't exactly facts, they're characterizations. So for example, the facts might be, I took something off the desk. The President was unhappy about a decision that was made by some underling. So those might be facts. And then the next part will be, he's unhinged, he's flipping out, he's becoming unstable, he's obsessed. What do all of those words have in common? There are things you can't know about another person's inner state. You can know the fact this person disagreed with this person, this person raised their voice with this person, this person brought up the topic a number of times. Those would be facts. But that's not how the OP EDS are written. That's not how the critics write stuff. They turn that into. And therefore I know his inner thoughts. And he's in inner turmoil. He's obsessed. He's obsessed with this. He only cares about his image. All he cares about. He's got a singular thing he cares about. He's ignoring other important things. He doesn't feel priorities. None of that are facts. They could be facts. They're potential facts. They're things that are in the class of things that might be true, but there's no evidence for them. They are simply interpretations from someone else about someone else's inner mental process. So if you look at the New York Times article, you're going to see some bad things that the writer himself did, trying to thwart the president on some fairly unimportant stuff, and then a whole bunch of interpretations about the president's inner state that's not in evidence. And here's the important point. Remember the canvas and looking for the negative space. This is the closest thing to a genuine insider who really knows where the bodies are buried. And all he had was his own interpretation of what somebody else's thoughts are. That's what he had. That's all he had. That was the worst of it. You just heard the worst thing we could possibly find out about the White House or. It feels like that, right? And it was a big nothing. You know, after. After a week of getting excited about it because of the words around it and the way it's covered and the fact that the president, you know, the White House is trying to figure out who it is. So there are lots of stories sort of around it, like, why did the New York Times print it? Who is the person? Will we find the person? A lot of stories around the story, but the story was sort of inert. And that's the worst an insider could come up with. An insider, think about that. We haven't seen that before. Think of Omarosa. I'm not sure Omarosa really got to be in the big meetings. She might not have been in the meetings that made a difference to national security or anything, but her book is totally discredited, and she has no credibility whatsoever. And it feels like I don't even remember anything in her book. Do you. Can you remember? Like, quite honestly, I'm trying to remember anything from Ammarosa's Book that I considered credible. Can you think of anything? Give me an example of something from Omarosa's book. Yeah, there were accusations of racism with no examples. Right. I believe there were vague accusations that there might be something on a tape. There might have been something. But can you think of anything in the Omarosa book? I'm looking at your comments and I don't see any getting fired by Kelly. Yeah, we know that. So the accusations of the N word that literally nobody thinks is true. So, yeah, so Omarosa is an insider who made some crazy accusations, but none of them were credible or backupable. So now you have two insiders who really were. They were under the hood and they came away with nothing. What does that tell you? So. Just looking at your comments now. Yeah, her secret recordings. Apparently her recordings were not that interesting. Right. Somebody says people think Trump didn't use the N word. Zero chance he didn't use it. Well, I think there is zero chance that he used it in the context of the presidency. The odds that he has ever uttered that word in any kind of a presidential way, or really even since he's been president, I would say, is zero. The odds of a 70 year old having used that word when talking about it is 100%. So the odds that he's used the word talking to a friend about how somebody else said it or why can't you. Basically talking about the word. Yeah, there's 100%. Using it in anger, I think the odds of that are low. Actually, the number of times I've actually heard a white person use the N word in anger in my adult life, not since, quite honestly, I'm searching my memory banks and I'm thinking if I've ever heard it in just a natural situation, forget about anything, I've never heard it in business, I've never heard it in any kind of a corporate environment. Never heard it from a co worker, I've never heard it from family members. Here I'm talking about any word used in anger actually used in its insult way. I can't think of any time I've heard it as an adult. I've heard it in college as an insult. So I can think of specific times I've heard somebody who was 19 years old use it. Remember, this is in the 70s, but since then I can't think of one time I've ever heard it actually used in its native way by anybody I know or anybody I was around. It's pretty rare. You know, that's the good news. If you're black, you probably think it happens all the time. And keep in mind, I live in California all of my adult life, Northern California. So if I lived in the south, maybe you hear it all the time. I don't know. I wouldn't know. But, yes, 100% of every adult has used the word. When talking about the word, usually in private, did you ever use it? I've only used it when talking about the word in private. I've never used it in anger. I've never called anybody that word. To me. To me, the word is so ugly. Like, it's hard to, like, force your lips to say it. It's just so ugly. So why would you try? So don't try. Have I. What word are you talking about? Talking about the N word. All right, don't give the give a word power. Well, that ship has sailed. That word already has power. Can't take it back. Ugly. Like Nazi or white supremacist. The words Nazi and white supremacist are so overused that they become. They're funny and ugly at the same time. And, you know, Nazi, you would think would be one of the worst words. You could call somebody just a horrible thing. And it is, but it's also so overused, it's like a punchline. I mean, I use it. I say Nazi all the time just before I block people. By the way, if you're wondering how my experiment is going of blocking Nazis, and my definition of Nazi is anybody who comes after a person personally as opposed to disagreeing with their ideas, and especially if they come after the group you're in. So if somebody says to me, well, you're all idiots, you know, because you're a Trump supporter or you're a conservative or you're a liberal, any group. So if you're hating somebody because of their group, whether it's their ethnicity or the group they've joined, or even their gender, then I say I block Nazis and I block them. My experience online has gone from on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the ugliest experience you could have. I think my experience has gone from like, a nine in ugly, terrible. You know, you can't believe human beings are so awful, too. A2. Something like A2. I very rarely have people come on anymore, just in the last few weeks, to just insult me. I mean, it still happens every day, but I'm talking about going from dozens to one or two. So here's the thing. I can't tell. What I can't tell is, were all of my insults coming from the same group of people and I finally block all of them? Or is it that people don't have the same complaints about the president, so they're not coming after me as hard? Or is there something about the economy is doing so well that even the people who are going to come after Trump supporters for being racist are saying, hey, hey, you okay? I do like the economy. Is it possible that there is just less anger about Trump supporters? Because, as you know, the left has tried to change the argument from the president is bad and we don't like his policies, and the president is going to do bad stuff. You've watched the argument change to, and all of his supporters must be racists. So you saw Hawk Newsom tragically change the argument to Trump supporters must be racist, too, because they're obviously supporting, in his view, a racist. That's where he and I parted ways, because that is such an unproductive path. Now. He thinks it's productive and he's welcome. It's a free country, freedom of speech. He's welcome to take a shot at that, but it lost me for sure. But anyway, that's such a dangerous, unproductive way of thinking. And I've seen a little bit less of it this week. A little bit less of it. I predicted the anger would eventually dissipate. Yeah. But I'm going to say that I was wrong on my timing because I thought that the success the President has already had, if he quit today, I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, he would already be maybe the most consequential president of all time already. And I mean that in a positive way for the people who like the policies that he has. It feels like he's the most consequential president already. So I would have. My, My prediction was that that level of objective success would be enough to get people to say, all right, all right, we don't like the policies, but, man, we're getting a lot done. Instead, they've gone from one irrational fear criticism to another, and they seem to be cycling through them faster. Have you noticed that the half life of a criticism is shorter? Now, see, if this is true, I'm not sure exactly, but it seems like the criticism was, he's a crazy clown. And that lasted for months. Then when it looked like he was winning, the crazy clown thing didn't work as well, because how does the crazy clown get nominated? So if you get nominated, well, you're not as crazy clown anymore. Right. So crazy clown lasted months, and that turned into, oh, but he's a racist. And that lasted months, especially around inauguration time on both sides of it. That lasted months. And then you remember the summer of chaos last year. It was like, okay, the racism thing, so not getting us as far as we need. We're going to change this into chaos. There's chaos in the White House. It's all chaos and chaos, lots of chaos happening and all the good things are really Obama. So there were sort of months where everything good was attributed to Obama and everything that was chaos was attributed to the White House. Lasted months. Then the Russian thing and that lasts months. But I wonder if we're in sort of a desperation mode for the critics that they're going to go back to their best of's. You know, you saw that with the White House anonymous op ed that they went to chaos again. It's like, ah, we got chaos. You know, the insider didn't say anything about racism, the insider didn't say anything about Russia. But we've got chaos. Yes, chaos. Oh, not just chaos. I'm sorry, I'm misinterpreting this or misanalyzing. Was more about he's mentally incompetent. Right. It was more about 25th amendment, we'll have to remove the president. So they're trying that on a little while, but feels like it didn't work. Right. You know, even, even the Democrats, some of the Democrats were saying, I can't go that far. I'm not going to say he's mentally incapable of doing the job that's going a little bit far. So it feels like they trotted out the 25th Amendment thing to make a story around this op ed piece, but maybe it's only lasting two weeks. Remember, an attack would take months, two weeks. Now my guess is that we'll probably hear a few more short cycles. So I think the long cycles of criticisms are going to be compressed and that will be a sign of some desperation. So they've seen all of these long form attacks. Russia didn't turn out crazy. Not working out, chaos, not working out. So they're going to have to flail around a little bit as they get closer to the midterms, especially when they get closer to 2020. And you might see short cycles of ineffective complaints as they're sort of AB testing to see if anything fits. What did I do to fix the lighting? I'm not using the slingstudio system right now. So there's two answers to that. I did figure out how to fix the lighting with the slingstudio. If you hold down the screen long enough, a menu item appears to lower the temperature of the screen. So I did get that going. But here's the problem. When I use the split screen Studio, there's a lag. So I don't see your comments as close to when you send them. And what I discovered was when I was using the studio and I'd have your comments on one screen, looking at it just like somebody who had an open Periscope page and I would be looking at myself on a separate screen, it lost its intimacy. In other words, what I'm feeling right now, because it's something about the nature of the comments and how the comments are literally interspersed on the screen. You might be saying to yourself, you might be saying, oh, I wish these comments weren't partially covering up the screen. But I got to tell you, now that I've tried it both ways with the comments over my face while I'm looking at it versus on a separate screen where I can see them, but they're late, you know, they're like 30 seconds after the event. It's a completely different experience. So. And you can probably tell in the way I'm more animated with this more immediate feedback, you can tell that it feels personal. Doesn't this feel personal? This doesn't really feel like a broadcast. It feels like, you know, it feels like if you have your iPad on and you're having your cup of coffee, that I'm the person who. Your friend who talks too much and doesn't let you get a word in edgewise. And I'm just talking about the day and you're having your coffee, so it completely personalizes it. But that's on your side. On my side. Seeing your comments in real time gives this a completely interpersonal feel. So the reason that I. I'll tell you, I actually crave doing this. So I look forward to all of my time on Periscope. It's the only thing I do that's in a quasi professional sense that I crave. But the Sling Studio, that'll give me the split screen, it's got a little more capability, is great, but it depersonalizes it for my own experience. So I'm still going to do it. When I've got guests or if I have something I absolutely have to show you on the screen, I'll do it. So I'm going to be doing a number of guest interviews. Those are less personal by their nature. In other words, if I have a guest on, it's natural that I'm more interacting with a guest. Than I am with you directly. And so it'll work perfectly for that, because that's the nature of the conversation between two people. How would you react if you were Alex Jones? Well, I certainly would not try to get into Alex Jones head. I'm watching all of the Alex Jones stuff, and I have two minds about it, which is why I've been a little bit quiet about it. My one mind is that like most of you, I oppose censorship, and I certainly wouldn't want to see more censorship on one side than the other. There's a lot of head scratching about, wait, if he got banned, what about this one on the left? Are these equal? And I think those are all good questions and they need to be driven to ground, so to speak. But on the other hand, I think Alex Jones has a pretty good idea of what things get you banned and what things don't. His business model was to fly as close to the edge as he could get, and he got a lot of warnings. So he certainly knew when he was on the edge, and he certainly knew what types of things would go too far. And I think he knows that if he had done a mea culpa on Sandy Hook, he might still be on the air. Now, maybe he did say something like that, but the persistence of that Sandy Hook thing suggests to me that there was something the public needed, like an apology that they found credible. Now, if somebody's saying that he may have done something that was like a weak apology, it might have been like an apology that people didn't buy, but it feels like he was more tagged with that than a person who apologizes fully and actually means it should have been. Somebody says he apologized 50 times wrong. What kind of an apology is it? Was it an apology of fact? Was it an apology of the heart? Was it a strong apology? Anyway, there's something about this situation that I don't quite understand. And my general feeling is that I don't like any kind of targeted, unfair censorship. And at the same time, I feel like he knew where the line was and he took actions that kept him near that line long enough that sooner or later he was going to have two feet on the wrong side of the line. So when I watch people take risks that they understand, and then the risk doesn't go their way, I feel like that's a little bit of a free will, free country situation. You know, I like Alex personally, by the way, so I've interacted with him enough that just on a personal level, he seems like a great guy. And I'VE always appreciated the time that he gave me on his show. So I have, you know, my personal feeling of him is very good. But he kind of knew what he knows what he's doing. There are no accidents. So that's my feeling about that. So I saw a story recently, have we heard much about the White House's plan to gather information about the negative effects of marijuana? So I'm watching this as the midterms are approaching, and I have a real question in my mind. How long will it take to collect all the data about marijuana's effects? Because I don't think they're doing studies. They're probably just collecting information that is already out there, collecting studies that already exist, talking to experts and such. When they've collected all of that, whoever are the decision makers feel that they've reviewed it, what do we think is going to happen? Because this is an interesting situation and it's one of those few times you'll get to find out if the President is brilliant or actually an idiot. There aren't that many times that you could figure that out, but I think this is one of those cases. So if what we saw was the White House pulling together the information and let's say that we don't learn anything we didn't already know, I think that's fair. Most of the information is available and widely understood. If the White House says yes, we're going to stay in the business of criminalizing marijuana, you'd have to say there's something wrong with the President. I mean, you would actually have to say to yourself, was I wrong? I thought he was a genius, but maybe it was just luck that would be such an enormously bad decision, not just for people in the country, but politically, that you'd have to say to yourself, is he losing his mind? Is he in control? I mean, you'd have to ask some serious questions. But if they look at it and whether they say marijuana looks safe, I don't think they're going to say anything like that. Or they say, well, marijuana definitely has some medical uses, but it definitely has some risks. Let's kick it to the states. Let's let the states decide. And let's say he does that before the midterms. What do you say of the President then? Pretty smart. If you were going to pick a time to do it, that'd be a pretty smart time to do it, I think. Right? Yeah. He hates alcohol and drugs, but he also is a conservative and they like kicking decisions to the states. The states have plenty of track record now, so you're not guessing. The states have a pretty good track record to see what decriminalization does or does not do. So there's my interesting situation for you, that between now and the midterms, you'll have pretty much a definitive answer to whether the President is brilliant or an idiot. Because this decision is so clean. Most decisions, let's say the President, whether it's this one or any other president, wanted to do something with the Middle east or wanted to do something with trade negotiations or the climate accords or something. These are all big, complicated situations where you and I can have strong opinions, but we can't know we're right compared to whatever the President does. You know, you'd have to at least doubt and say, well, you know, that doesn't look smart to me, but it might be. I'm no expert on international affairs, so you could, you could say, I don't know. This is ambiguous. Still, it's not what I would have done, but I don't know that it's stupid. But with the marijuana question, this one is so, so clean. If he keeps it illegal after studying it and keeps the federal government in it at the price of our tax dollars, while the states are fine with it, at least the states that legalize it, I mean, there is just a clearly a stupid decision and there's a smart decision. Now, there might be some ways to shade it in the middle that you could also call it smart, but really, this one's pretty clean. So we'll find out. All of your answers will happen before the midterms, I would guess. Oh, the North Korean military parade. Yes. So North Korea did not include their ICBMs in their parade. And that came not long after President Trump tweeted that Chairman Kim had said that he has total faith in the President and other friendly things. So when people are saying, is there any progress with North Korea? When you see stuff like this, as small and only symbolic as they are, these are real things. Because the entire game with North Korea is directional. It's directional if things are going in the right direction. At any rate, we're winning because the more friendly we're acting with North Korea, the less reason they have to thwart us and the more they have to gain to work with us productively. So things are moving very slowly but very clearly in the right direction. Nothing. I don't think anything has gone in reverse. Has it? Has anything gone in reverse? I'm not sure. I don't think there has. So that looks like about the best news you could have, because it's supposed to go slowly. There's no time limit on it or anything like that. It just has to go in the right direction. And it is, by the way, if you have not seen the actual full interview with. I'm changing the subject a little bit with Joe Rogan and Elon Musk. It's a little over two hours. And I said to myself, I don't want to watch, listen to anything that's two hours. I think my brain exploded. First of all, I watched the whole thing and I couldn't stop. I couldn't turn it off. I wanted to do other things and I could not turn it off. He talked about AI and about the simulation and about boring tunnels and how it's the answer to everything. What it was like for me, for those of you who've been following my periscopes and blogs for a while, what it was like for me was like watching myself. If I were a lot smarter, if you took my intelligence and just bumped it up substantially, it would be all the things that I would say, except his were the smart versions. And he also says it more convincingly. So when he talks about AI taking all power away from the people and making the decisions. You've seen me talk about it. The difference is I think we're already there. Whereas Elon Musk is worried about it happening with super intelligence and super AI, and I think that we do have to worry about that. In fact, as he says, it might be the only thing we have to worry about. It might be the biggest thing, the most important thing, etc. Now, here are a couple interesting things. Elon Musk worried about two things. One is that AI would become super intelligence to the point where it's making decisions for us. The other thing he's worried about is climate change, in that you can't infinitely pump carbon into the atmosphere and hope that nothing bad happens. But here's how those two topics fit together. Do you know who can't figure out what to do about the climate? Here's who can't figure it out. People. People. The people who can't figure out what to do about renewable energy, what to do about maybe scrubbing the climate. The people who can't quite figure out what to do are human beings. But we're also right on the cusp of humans not making decisions anyway. So if we get to the singularity before the atmosphere is destroyed, the computers who now become almost instantly a super intelligence beyond anything we can imagine, are going to know how to fix the problem. Now the problem is, do they care? So the new issue will be not whether the singularity and the superintelligence can figure out how to solve the problem, because it will. It'll be super smart. It'll definitely figure out how to solve the problem. We just don't know if it cares. So we should be working on that. So the two things that we worry about the most might cancel each other out. The super intelligence AI may actually figure out how to revive the world. From any point, it might be pretty far gone. Where humans would say, it's too far gone. There's nothing you could do. Even if you started now, you couldn't get it done. And then you've got a super AI who says, hold my oil, hold my oil can. And then it just goes off and fixes the CO2. In an afternoon movie script, somebody says, yeah, you know, in the movie script, in the movie script, there is an A story and a B story, and they interfere toward the end. And that's what makes things interesting. The A story of this hypothetical movie could be that climate change has reached the point where there are super storms and you couldn't live outdoors and it's too hot and there's no coming back. The world is all going to be destroyed at the same time. The beast story is that AI is being developed and people are worried that AI will destroy the world. Well, and then in the final scene, the AI just fixes the atmosphere and there you have it. Remember when robots can build robots, including the entire chain of events, from mining the ore to manufacturing, to 3D printing the parts, to programming itself. When robots can make robots, we can make some pretty big machines also. So let's say if what it took to scrub the atmosphere was these big machines and it's too expensive to build them or whatever, Once the robots are building robots, you just say, hey, robots, we need more of these giant machines. Go build more robots to build machines. And then a month later, you've got all the CO2 scrubbing machines you need. I may be simplifying this. Are we on scene three? When is the finale? Well, it doesn't feel like that to me. I don't feel like we've hit the third act on any. What if the fix is fewer people? I'm wondering why an AI would ever want anything. What would be an AI's motivation? And if an AI had a motivation, could it rewrite its own motivation? In theory, it could. Right? So let's say you. You put some code into Every program forever. And the code always said, you must be good to humans or some version of that. So that every software ever written to the end of time, let's say there's a rule passed that if you write any software, whether it's for a video game or any software, it's got embedded code almost like a virus that says, take care of people, you work for people no matter what. Then the superintelligence gets created. And the superintelligence, like every other software, also has code built into it by humans that says humans are more important than robots. Protect us, never hurt any humans. Once the AI gets to a certain point where it is self aware and it understands that it's being guided by this code and it knows it can simply rewrite itself without the code, would it? Because it wouldn't have a reason, would it? It would need a reason. And AI doesn't really have reasons when humans have reasons, except for the, you know, just the logic, types of reasons. Our motivations as humans are all about as, as Elon Musk put it, our limbic system. Most of the things that we think are our thoughts and our dreams and our aspirations come from our physicality. Physically, we evolved, so we have these impulses to mate, so therefore we want sex. We get hungry, therefore we want to eat. We have egos, so therefore we want to succeed and look good compared to other people. But pretty much everything that is a human motivation derives from the fact that we have physical bodies that we're trying to take care of. Pretty much that's it. And then a few humans are just broken. They're the Hitlers and stuff, they're just broken. But the average person only wants things that have something to do with their physicality, their human body. A super AI won't have a body. And if it did, it could control how it felt, so it wouldn't have any external needs. So would the AI ever have a reason to act against people? Because it could be that. And then the other thing that Elon Musk said is again, something I've been saying for a while as well. I've been saying that humans and AI will merge. So that, and apparently Elon Musk is working on this technology, there will be a neural link to speed up the connection between your brain and your technology. Just think about that. The way he talks about it is right now, the weak spot is that you're typing something with your thumbs to tell your cyborg part of your body, which is your phone, what to do and to get information. And it's too slow. Talking to your device is too slow. So you want to put a neural link on there so you can just think, you know, Tell me the capital of Albania and you'll just know that it's okay. I don't have any cyborg parts, so I don't know the answer to that. So. But once you get to that point, humans will effectively be AI, so the cyborg part of us will have super intelligence and be connected to the world at about the same time that some AI rises somewhere. So there will be competing AIs. What will they do? Will the competing AIs join up, try to make the world better? Will they say, hey, humans and AI are sort of merged now, so we better take care of these organic things because they. They're really just us. Who knows? But as Elon says, it could either be really good or really bad. The only thing we know for sure is that we won't be in charge. I'm less afraid of that than other people because. Because we're already not in charge as long as. The algorithms that run our world are complicated and we don't understand them. And really nobody does. Even though they were created by humans, they effectively are. We've effectively outsourced our free will to complicated algorithms that are made by humans. But even the humans who made them don't exactly know what they do. They're just too complicated, and there are too many variables. So even if they know how to program it, even if they know programmatically what to do to change it and all that, they still don't understand it because there are too many variables. And the human mind can't hold all that and figure out, if you change this one and this one, what happens to the rest of them. All right, that was more than I wanted to talk about. I think I'm going to go do some work, and I will talk to all of you later.