Episode 217 Scott Adams: Our Last Human President, the PLO Momentum, Florence

Hey, everybody, come on in. I hope you have your coffee or your beverage or your warm beverage or your cold beverage. And it should be in a mug, a cup, a glass, a vessel. Any one of those things is going to work. This morning were very permissive when it comes to the simultaneous sip. So much stuff happening. Somebody says, well, sort of. You're on wenhub. Good. More about that later. And now it's time for the simultaneous sip. Ah, if you missed it, I'll try to have another one. You know I will. So let's talk about a few things. So I hear that the Pope is bringing some church leaders together to talk about the abuse problems, sexual abuse of minors. The weird thing about this gathering of church officials is that nobody will be wearing pants. That's just a fact. They're all going to be wearing those robe things. So it's going to be a meeting about sexual abuse in which no one is wearing pants. What are the odds? I've seen some questions about Norm MacDonald and I must be missing a story because I have not seen any Norm MacDonald stories. But apparently he had to apologize for something. Oh, he said He's. Wait, Norm MacDonald? He says he's deeply sorry for saying Louis CK and Roseanne Barr were treated too harshly. What? Well, I think the problem was he had lumped somebody who was accused of sexual misconduct with Roseanne, who was accused of racism. And you essentially hit every note that way. And then he backpedaled. Well, I'm a big fan of Norm MacDonald and I think his show is going to be great. You should all watch his show. He walked it back. 48 hour rule is in effect, and therefore we must take him at his clarification. That's what I say. I say let people clarify. If you're not Familiar with my 48 hour rule, it goes like this. If a public figure or anybody really says something in public that you think is awful or offensive or terrible, and you ask them did they mean that they have 48 hours to clarify. But the rule is this. You have to accept the clarification because it's the only way society works. If you assume that you can read people's mind and that your misperception of what they said before is more important than their clarification of what they are thinking. And they said, that's just no way to organize a world. You'll just be mad at. We'll just be mad at each other all the time for the thing. We're sure they're thinking, but they're not saying they're saying that's no way to run the world. You have to. Well, you don't have to, but it's a much better world if you let people apologize, clarify, do whatever they need to. 48 hours. Their opinion should be their opinion. In other words, our opinion of what someone else is thinking should not be how we judge them. We should give them time to clarify. 48 hours is plenty. And once they've clarified, they've clarified. That should be the end of the story. No more guessing what people think. If they've told you clearly what they think, and if they change their mind and if they apologize, accept the apology, Accept that they change their mind. If you wanted them to change their mind to what they changed it to, how about giving them a, you know, a round of applause for agreeing with you or at least agreeing with you in public, because that's all you asked. Let's talk about, let's talk about the hurricane. I'm going to look at what else I had going on here. I take a picture of my screen so that after I start, I don't forget what I wanted to talk about. So the hurricane is wiping politics off the front page. And I don't think that you can, I don't think you can overstate how important that is because we're fed this continuous diet of anti Trump stuff. What happens if it pulls back for a week? What would happen, just theoretically, what would happen if we had something like a week of the president just being helpful and FEMA doing his thing and people caring about the hurricane victims, etc. Would it change the national feeling about things right before the midterms? And it might, yeah. The Washington Post said that Trump is complicit in Hurricane Florence because he hasn't done enough for climate change. Now, I'm trying to understand why it is that we're in Obama's economy, but we're not in Obama's climate. You really have to pick one or the other, don't you? Don't you? I mean, if somebody said that both of them are Obama's responsibility, if they said, okay, Trump hasn't done enough with the economy, it's just an extension from the Obama years. If you're saying that, I feel like you have to say that the climate and Hurricane Florence is also an extension of, of the Obama years, I don't know how you could say one or the other. Now, my view is very different from the average view. I say that both Obama and Trump get full credit for the economy the way it is Right. Now, my version is that Obama did a great job of getting us from the, from the abyss. He came to power when the economy was just garbage and when he left, it was just unambiguously strong. It wasn't as strong as it is now, but it was unambiguously stronger than when he took office. Tradition is you give the president some credit for that. And then this president took it, I think, to another level. You, you saw recently that the small business, somebody's just yelling, you were wrong. The small business Confidence Index is the highest it's ever been. Now, I don't know that Obama could have gotten us there, but two and a half years into the, is it two years into the presidency? I think you have to say that President Trump is a positive force on the economy. And that the other argument that you hear, that, the other argument you hear that I don't agree with, is that Obama added more jobs in his, I guess, 2015 and 2016. He added more jobs than Trump did in the more recent stats. Now that might be true, but it's a little bit of an apples to oranges because if your economy is in a hole, all of the gains from the hole up should be big percentage gains. And all of the gains once you're near the top. And when you're near full employment, once you reach full employment, which is sort of where we are, any gains of extra jobs after that and extra benefit after you're toward the top, it's tighter, it's harder. Those are not the low hanging fruit anymore. That's the hard stuff when you get toward the top. So you should see a flattening a little bit when you're toward the top. And that's what we see now. Would it be better if there were more? I don't even know. I mean, I think we're at the risk of overheating the economy as much as we are at the risk of anything else. So I think the only, the most adult opinion on who gets the credit for the economy is both. Obama did his role, Trump is clearly doing his role. And probably in my opinion, he's doing it in a way that Obama couldn't. And I'm also a big fan of see sawing back and forth between the liberal and conservative worldviews, whether it's every eight years or whatever it is, because I think every once in a while you just need to break whatever you're doing in business. They would call it cannibalizing. So even if things were going well under one administration, you still Want to try a different look for a little while? Because the new look is going to bring new resources, new tests, trying new things. Every once in a while, you just need to do it differently. So I'm in favor of generally bopping back and forth a little bit. Now, at this point, if we bopped over to socialism, we'd probably have higher taxes and stuff, so maybe it wouldn't be a good idea this next time. We'll see. But same thing with the climate. I don't think you can blame President Trump for the small changes he's made in dropping regulations, for the fact that the entire planet has this alleged problem. All right, I tweeted yesterday, provocatively that President Trump will be our last human leader, our last human leader in the United States. And what I mean by that is that from this point on, social media will determine our opinions, because science has demonstrated that social media can determine our opinions. You know, it can move opinions, I think 20 to 40%, just by the way they present information. So it's been demonstrated beyond question that the way social media presents information, what they prioritize, what they hide, what they put next to each other, you know, what context they give it to you, what time of day they give it to you, whether you're hungry, when you see it, we now know all that stuff. So social media has the power to determine our opinions. The only reason it's not happening now is because President Trump is the one in a thousand year personality. So he's a personality that has this weird characteristic. He creates social media content, but he doesn't consume it. Think about it. You and I and pretty much everybody else on the Internet, we consume a lot of social media content. We're reading a lot more than we're tweeting. President Trump tweets and walks away. He doesn't see your response. So he's not being influenced in the same way everybody else is being influenced. Now, that wouldn't matter if the public were being influenced, because the public can make the leader do whatever they want in normal times, but these are not normal times. We have a leader who is the most persuasive personality we've ever seen in this job. And his ability to persuade beyond the power of social media is probably unprecedented, might be unparalleled. In other words, we're already in a situation where the algorithms of social media are beyond the complexity, where there really any individuals or management in the company that even knows what the algorithms are exactly doing. I mean, they know the big picture and they know that if they were to tweak this variable, they might get more movement in one direction or the other. But when you have hundreds of variables, which I believe is the case, and they're shifting and there are humans making judgments, you end up with a situation where the algorithms of the social media companies are not understood by any human. There is no human who, who understands how they work. In other words, the algorithm is sort of already in control because even though we created it, that would be the same as if we created some super AI or some giant robot that then took over and made its own decisions after that. So we've created the algorithm, but we don't control it anymore because we don't understand it, nor are we capable of understanding it. It's just too complicated. So at some level of complexity, humans just aren't in control. So once you have that situation, you have one human president left whose unique situation plus his persuasive power is still a little stronger than the algorithms. That's why he's president. The algorithm tried to keep President Trump out of office. It wasn't strong enough. If candidate, let's say Chris Christie or any of the other Republicans had been running against Clinton, who would be president? I think it would be President Clinton, and I believe that would have been the algorithm's choice, essentially. So I don't see a world in which the human will ever be stronger than the algorithm after this presidency. The Adams slow moving disaster law. Oh, this gets us to the interesting part. Didn't you automatically assume when I said this? I'll bet you automatically assumed that. I assume that having the AI running things is a bad situation for humans. We don't know that. We don't know that because the social media version, probably it's a little more obvious that it could lean left. And if you think that's bad for you, then that's a little more clear. But once the AI is sort of everywhere and changing all of our feelings all the time, I don't know that we'll have. I'm not even sure we'll know if it's good or bad for us. We could have a situation where the AI is very bad for humans at the same time that the AI has convinced humans that it's very good for humans. So we may never be in a situation where things are bad for humans and we know it just might never happen. We just might be happy right until the last human. That's how influential AI will be. Somebody said AI will never come from my guns. AI can't take my Guns away. No, you're wrong. AI can definitely take your guns away. I'm not saying it would want to. I'm not saying it would try. But if you just imagine some amount of advancement in AI along with the normal advancement we're seeing in how persuasion works today, our understanding of how persuasion and the human mind makes decisions is just way ahead of where it was 50 years ago. Way ahead. We're able to test things and do studies and do brain scans and imaging, and you can really tell what's influencing people in a way we didn't know before. We're sort of guessing, oh, I'll do this marketing. I'll do this advertising. I hope it works. I'll just do it the way the other people do it. But now we really can test things and change these and be persuasive. Just imagine that that capability just keeps getting a little bit better. You can have an AI that's super powerful, and this is the part nobody sees coming. And super persuasive. The AI doesn't need to force us to do anything. The AI will convince us to do things and we'll do them, or. Or at least the majority will, and that will be enough to move society. So the big risk of AI is not that it gets a bunch of weapons and starts shooting people, not that it turns off the electricity and somehow kills the human so it can have more electricity or anything like that. The big risk is that the AI will be persuasive, and that's the current situation. So when I tweeted that President Trump will be the last human president, a number of skeptics weighed in and said, you know, you'll never convince me that that will happen. To which I say, I don't have to convince you that it will happen. It already happened. Our current situation is that the social media companies don't understand their own algorithms. The algorithm already runs social media. Social media already makes our opinions for us, and we tell the government what to do. So pretty much the President is the only thing between the algorithm and, you know, and you. Essentially, it's a fair fight. We are all already cyborgs. Yes. As Elon Musk says so well, that if you have a phone, you're already a cyborg. You just don't have fast communication between your phone and your brain. And apparently Elon Musk has a company that's going to solve that. So he has some kind of neural net product that will read your brain thoughts and be able to actually interface with the computer in real time. Now, I want to talk a little bit about my startup, wenhub. You all know what it is by now. It's an app. It's available now in Apple and Google stores and lets you make a video call to any expert who sets their own prices. And it could be on any topic, or it could be just somebody you want to talk to. I think later today I'll probably be on the app. It's called Interface by wenhub. You can download it. It's free. Free to download. And then if, depending on what the experts are charging, you can talk to them, I'm probably going to set my price very low just. Just so people can check it out. And I'll let some of you call me and ask some questions. I'll tweet when I'm available, and the tweet will tell you what keyword to put in to find me. So this platform is just for one person talking to one person at the moment. Someday we might expand that for one talking to many. But I wanted to, if I could, I'd like to get ahead of a trend. And I'd like to announce today that we're banning Alex Jones from the Interface app. And InfoWars, they're banned from the app. Not for anything they did, but I understand you can get a lot of publicity if you ban Alex Jones. So, Alex Jones, if you're listening, I ban you from my app. You are banned from the interface by wenhub app. And if anybody wants to write a big story about that, well, I can't stop you. I can't stop you. So you're banned. But if you want to use it, just go ahead. I won't even know. I won't even know if you're using it, Alex. So, you know, go ahead and use it. But you're banned. You are banned, Alex. You are banned. You are so banned. You're super banned. You're extra super banned banned. That's it. Unless you want to use it, then I'm not gonna even know you're using it anyway. So go ahead, feel better now, what else was I going to talk about? Oh, the Middle East. So you're seeing a number of things happening in the Middle East. They. They seem a little disconnected and minor, but let's put them all together. You see Iran's economy going south, and you see them being isolated by a lot of different countries who don't want to do business with them because the United States canceled the Iranian deal. So Iran is having a tough time. They're moving backwards. Then we saw the embassy, the US Embassy, move to Jerusalem. That was one of the big negotiating points for the Palestinian people about who gets Jerusalem, what's the capital, etc. But the President sort of took that off the table. That is no longer a negotiating chip because it's too late. It's too late. The ship already left. Then we see that the Palestine, or I don't know the official name of it, but the Palestinian mission in the United States, which is my understanding it would be like whatever is less than an embassy, sort of an unofficial group that would be there for the purpose of negotiating, etc. They were kicked out. The one group whose job it was to negotiate for peace and have an entity in the United States just got kicked out. Now it turns out that the deal for having them in the United States was that they had to be actively working toward a peace plan, and they weren't. So it was a clause in the agreement that allowed it to be easy to kick them out. So that happened. And then I'm not too up on the details, but I think there was a bunch of funding for the Palestinians that got cut. I think I'm right about that. Right? A bunch of funding got cut. And when you put it all together, this is the way to look at it. There's an interest in a peace deal. I think Jared is working on something. We hear, And it's pretty hard to do a peace deal when there's so much tension. The atmosphere doesn't seem ideal for a peace deal. Or is it? Or is it? Let me ask you this. Are you more likely to make a peace deal? Let's say you have two sides, and let's say that in the history of any entity, they're either going up, they're getting stronger, or they're going down, they're getting weaker or this would be a weird situation. But they're exactly the same over time. They don't get stronger, they don't get weaker. What's happening with the United States? United States is getting stronger and stronger and stronger. What's happening with Israel? Israel is getting stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger. What's happening with the Palestinian situation and their sponsors, Iran, getting weaker and weaker and weaker, Weaker and weaker and weaker. What is your ideal situation for negotiating? Is your ideal situation where all the entities are pretty strong sometimes if they want to make a deal, but that's only if both sides want to make a deal and there's a deal to be made. That could be a good situation. You're both equally Strong, you know, there's no point in fighting. Might as well just make a deal. And you both, you know, you take a deal that isn't perfect for either of you, but it's the best you can do. But that wasn't working. You know, when the Palestinians and the Israelis seemed to be closer in power, we couldn't get any deal. But now the United States and Israel are just getting stronger and stronger. Palestinians, Iranians are getting weaker and weaker. They're losing support even in the area. What would the PLO do now? Because time is on Israel's side. They're getting stronger every day. Every day Israel is getting stronger. They're so strong that they're actually offering to help Iran with their water crisis and other problems if Iran's leadership can just play nice, which is a big ask. So I've told you about the importance in negotiating of time. To be a good negotiator, you want time to be on your side. You want the other side to be in a hurry because things are getting worse for them every day. But you want your team to be in no hurry at all because things are getting better every day. So we may be approaching the situation that is the optimal time to make a deal. Because Iran and the Palestinians are only going to get worse every single day. If they make a deal today, it'll be better than the deal they can make tomorrow and the deal they can make tomorrow. The deal they make tomorrow is going to be better than the day they can make the deal they can make if they wait another month. The longer they wait, the worse their end of the deal will be. And the psychology of that is just crushing. Just crushing. So I would think that even though, remember I've told you this before, that when things look the worst, you sometimes you can't tell between it's the. You know, it's a disaster and it's almost solved. Those two things look almost the same. The biggest disaster, yeah, it's darkest before the dawn. Right. Sometimes you can't tell the difference. And what I see in the Middle east situation is that everything on one end of the equation is getting better while everything on the other end is getting worse. Everything. I don't think you could come up with one thing that doesn't fit that pattern. US and Israel going up, Iran and the Palestinians, Hamas going down. And is it going to stop? It looks like it's accelerating like that. Speed is just getting more. So if you're on the Palestinian side, you're the Palestinian people, and you're looking at your leaders. What are you going to say? Let's ride this thing all the way to the bottom. Let's wait another month? I don't know. I think you say, let's get something done if you can, but I don't think they can. So I think they're going to get a lot worse before they get better. I think you're going to see something akin to alcoholism. And analogies are always dicey. But don't make too much of the analogy, right? The only way an alcoholic ever recovers and becomes not an alcoholic is by hitting bottom. You have to hit bottom and you have to realize that it's either death or life. It's death or life. So that's what an alcoholic figures out when they hit bottom. They either have to just die or they got to figure it out. And so hitting bottom tends to be an important step in an alcoholic's recovery. And the Palestinians we have prevented from hitting bottom for all the right reasons. Humanitarian reasons, right? Because we thought a deal could be made. Why would you punish somebody to the point of death if you think you can make a deal? But now it's clear, and I think everybody would agree right now it's clear that whatever that current situation was, and I say current situation, let's say the situation for the past 20 years, whatever that was, was not going to get anything done. There was no deal to be made in the current situation because the sides were a little too even. That's changing. Palestinians and Iran are just about ready to hit bottom. Now, when I say just about ready, it could be three years from now. But imagine if their current trend of losing on every dimension just continues for three more years. And during those three years, let's say Israel's GDP is up 30%. Well, not 30%, but let's say the US and Israel are just doing better and everybody else in the world is doing better. What if everybody in the world. What if even North Korea is doing better because. Because they made a deal and the last people in the world who are not doing better are the Palestinians, then I think there's probably a deal to be made. Now here. I'm not offering my opinion of who's right or wrong. I'm not offering an opinion of what's moral or immoral. I think you can all make up your own decisions on that. We all have our own moral standards. But just in terms of understanding the negotiation element of it, look for the direction. One side going up, one side going down. That can't happen forever. Somebody's going to hit bottom and we might be close to. So what was the other thing we wanted to talk about? Talk about your stock forecast. Do I have a stock forecast? Somebody saying if Iran does something stupid with their military, they will pay big time. Iran is the one thing I like about Iran. I like a lot of things about Iran. I like the Iranian people. I think the nation itself has an incredible history. So wonderful people, friendly people, smart people, educated people. It's a great country. Their leadership has some issues, but one thing you really can't say about Iran is that they're stupid. Even the leadership, no matter how much you dislike what they do, they seem like smart people who are trying to survive. And so somebody said, what if they did something foolish militarily? I just don't see it happening because they know what would happen and it would not go well. What is my take on Trump fist pumping going to the 911 event? Irrelevant. Don't care. There's a question now about Roush and his some would say misogynistic books. Banned from where? From? Were they banned from Amazon? You know, the thing I keep going back to, and I said this with Alex Jones as well, regardless of whether you like their content, regardless of what you think about where the line should be, of censorship or even if there should be any line, people definitely know where the line is, don't you think? Unless it's moving. So when people go up to the line and then cross it, they're doing it. Don't lump me in with Roosh, please. I don't even know if I'm pronouncing his name right. We've never met and I don't have anything to do with him. But you always wonder about the people whose business model depends on going right up to the line and then putting one foot over the line is becoming a little bit more clear. So as much as we don't like censorship and shouldn't, there probably should be some outlet for listening to what read Roosh has to say. But I don't see that Amazon necessarily needs to be that outlet. He wrote most of those books years ago. Well, I'm just looking at your comments here. Oh, the Serena cartoon. Yeah. So an Australian newspaper did a political cartoon showing Serena Williams, and a lot of people, including me, said that the cartoon looked racially offensive, let's say, because he drew her well, her lips were gigantic. And so it was a very unflattering picture, but it also looked like her race was exaggerated a little bit. Now, there's a fine line Here, because the whole point of a caricature is that you take some characteristics of the person and you exaggerate them and that sort of becomes who they are. Right. And you see that with every, everybody who is caricatured. But by choosing the lips in this case, and I'm not sure if I look at Serena, if I think of Serena in my mind, you know, I've seen her a billion times. I don't really think she has big lips. Does she? Like, does she. I mean, that doesn't stand out in my mind as any kind of a characteristic. So the fact that they picked the thing that doesn't really stand out in my mind as a thing to accentuate. There's a disconnect between something I was already thinking and what the cartoon is. Obama had big ears and lips in caricature. But you know, because Obama had big ears in the caricatures, that probably helped just make it all alright. And if you look at the Obama character lips and the George Bush lips, they're actually not that different, are they? You know, George Bush Jr. His character, it seems like he had sort of weird big lips in his caricatures as well. Anyway, it is not my. It is not my. Let's say I have a rule of not criticizing cartoonists because a cartoon is a cartoon. So I don't say if somebody else's cartoon is funny, I don't say if it offends me. But we can say objectively that the way it was drawn was offensive to a lot of people. In my opinion, the better play would have been for them to say, oh, we didn't mean it that way, 48 hour rule. Within 48 hours. If the newspaper and the cartoonist had said, and maybe they did, I don't know, I didn't hear it. But if they said, oh gosh, we certainly didn't mean it that way, now that we see how offensive it is, we'll pull it down. Had they done that, I would have said, that's all I ask. All I ask is if people are offended if the cartoonist hears them, takes it down. If the newspaper hears the public and says, oh, okay, we didn't realize this was going to be seen this way. We'll take it down. To me, that would have been a non story and we should just move on without trying to mind reading, oh, secretly they're racist in their heads because we don't know that. Right. But by doubling down and saying, we're going to keep this here, they have to sort of stand by it and it is unambiguously offensive, even if it doesn't offend me. Right. Because offensive doesn't mean it offends every person who looks at it. Offensive means that it offends somebody. And objectively speaking, it did offend a lot of people. So if you offend a lot of people with something that should have been funny or poignant or whatever it was trying to be and you accept that as your trade off, you're accepting the blowback. So I guess I shouldn't have an opinion on it because everybody's getting what they want. The critics are making their opinions known. The cartoonists in the newspaper are apparently standing their ground, but they will be judged by all those people who dislike it. So if that's what they want, that's what they got. I suppose that means everything is offensive. Yeah. You know, it's always going to be a judgment call. You are right that just about everything is offensive to someone. You know, Trust me, I know that because I make a comic that offends all kinds of people all the time. But never. Well, I shouldn't say never, but rarely would I intend it to actually offend somebody. I can't think of any case I have intentionally tried to offend anybody. I see somebody talking about Jake Tapper in his cartoons. You're so wrong. Jake Tapper is a very talented artist. So those of you who don't know Jake Tapper did. He was my guest artist to draw Dilbert for a week in 2016, I think, and his artwork is just tremendous. So I did the writing and he did the art for that week. But he's certainly better than I am and his caricatures are excellent. Somebody mentioned an Internet link tax. I haven't heard that idea. I don't know how that would work. Talk about Trump's comments on Puerto Rico Hurricane. I'm not sure I saw those comments. I did not see Tony Blair this morning on cnn. Peter Thiel on the Rubin Report. I saw a promo for that. Is that. I guess that's already available. Yeah, if Peter Thiel. Somebody said the Rubin Report has Peter Thiel on it. That's a must watch. You have to watch Joe Rogan interviewing Elon Musk. Whatever you've heard about that, just assume it's better. You just have to watch. It's two hours and you probably won't be able to pull yourself away. It's two hours of awesomeness. And I would expect Peter Thiel to be equally interesting on the Rubin Report. Nick Yaris. I don't know who that is. How do we reduce the cost of living? I've actually. I'm going to be saying a lot about that in the next month, month or two, as part of talking about the Blight Authority. So you're going to hear more about the Blight Authority. We've got some stuff to share with you to try to move the ball forward a little bit and we're prepping that now. Did I ever watch Majority Report? I'm not sure what that is. Oh. Nick was wrongfully imprisoned for 21 years. All right. I think we've seen it all. We've said it all. How can I date younger and out of my league? Get rich. Yeah, that's easy. Somebody said, how can I date younger, younger women. I assume you meant who are out of your league. Get famous. Get famous. Get rich. That's the easy way. We talked about Norm MacDonald's and already. And we'll talk. Oh, yes. An exit sip. Shall we? We shall. Simultaneous sip, everybody. Oh, that's some cold coffee, but excellent nevertheless. I'll talk to you later.