Episode 217 Scott Adams: Our Last Human President, the PLO Momentum, Florence
Date: 2018-09-12 | Duration: 46:13
Topics
Whose economy is it, Obama’s or Trump’s? Social media determines our opinions The algorithms of social media are determine our opinions Iran negotiating position is weakening, US/Israel’s strengthening Australian cartoon of Serena Williams
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## Transcript
## [Simultaneous Sip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixEpxqV9wwU&t=8s)
Ba ba ba bum, BA bum ba Popham! Hey everybody, come on in. I hope you have your coffee or your beverage, or your warm beverage or your cold beverage. It should be in a mug, a cup, a glass, a vessel—any of those things is going to work this morning. We’re very permissive when it comes to the simultaneous sip.
So much stuff is happening. Somebody says, "Well, sort of, you're on WhenHub." More about that later. Now it's time for the simultaneous sip. If you missed it, I'll try to have another one—you know I will.
## [The Pope and Church Leaders Meeting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixEpxqV9wwU&t=69s)
So, let's talk about a few things. I hear that the Pope is bringing some church leaders together to talk about the abuse problems, the sexual abuse of minors. The weird thing about this gathering of church officials is that nobody will be wearing pants. That's just the 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?
## [Norm Macdonald’s Apology](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixEpxqV9wwU&t=139s)
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. He says he's deeply sorry for saying Louis C.K. and Roseanne Barr were treated too harshly.
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.
## [The 48-Hour Rule for Clarification](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixEpxqV9wwU&t=199s)
The 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 if they meant that, they have 48 hours to clarify.
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 minds and that your misperception of what they said before is more important than their clarification of what they are thinking, there’s no way to organize the world. You'll just be mad at each other all the time for the thing you're sure they're thinking, but they're saying that's not what they mean.
It's a much better world if you let people apologize and clarify. 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, that should be the end of the story. No more guessing what people think if they've told you clearly what they think. If they change their mind and they apologize, accept the apology. Accept that they changed their mind. How about giving them a round of applause for agreeing with you, or at least agreeing with you in public? Because that's all you asked.
## [Hurricane Florence and Political Coverage](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixEpxqV9wwU&t=319s)
Let's talk about the hurricane. I take a picture of my screen so that after I start, I don't forget what I wanted to talk about. The hurricane is wiping politics off the front page, and I don't think you can overstate how important that is. We're fed this continuous diet of anti-Trump stuff, and what happens if it pulls back for a week?
Theoretically, what would happen if we had something like a week of the President just being helpful, FEMA doing its thing, and people caring about the hurricane victims? It would change the national feeling about things right before the midterms.
The Washington Post said that Trump is complicit in Hurricane Florence because he hasn't done enough for climate change. 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? I mean, if somebody said that both of them are Obama's responsibility—if they said Trump hasn't done enough with the economy, it's just an extension from the Obama years—I feel like you have to say that the climate and Hurricane Florence are also an extension of the Obama years.
## [Who Gets Credit for the Economy?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixEpxqV9wwU&t=446s)
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 abyss. He came to power when the economy was just garbage, and when he left, it was 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 to another level.
You saw recently that the Small Business Confidence Index is the highest it's ever been. I don't know that Obama could have gotten us there, but two years into the presidency, I think you have to say that President Trump is a positive force on the economy.
The other argument that you hear, which I don't agree with, is that Obama added more jobs. In 2015 and 2016, he added more jobs than Trump did in more recent stats. That might be true, but it's a little bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison. If your economy is in a hole, all of the gains from the hole up should be big percentage gains. Once you're near the top and near full employment—which is where we are—any gains of extra jobs after that are not the low-hanging fruit anymore. That's the hard stuff. You should see a flattening a little bit when you're toward the top.
I think we're at the risk of overheating the economy as much as we are at the risk of anything else. I think 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 a way that Obama couldn't. I'm also a big fan of seesawing back and forth between the liberal and conservative worldviews every eight years or so, because every once in a while, you just need to break whatever you're doing. In business, they would call it cannibalizing. 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 and new tests.
## [Our Last Human President](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixEpxqV9wwU&t=697s)
I tweeted yesterday provocatively that President Trump will be our last human leader in the United States. What I mean by that is that from this point on, social media will determine our opinions. Science has demonstrated that social media can determine our opinions. It can move opinions 20 to 40 percent just by the way they present information. It's been demonstrated beyond question that the way social media presents information—what they prioritize, what they hide, what context they give it—social media has the power to determine our opinions.
The only reason it's not happening now is because President Trump is a one-in-a-thousand-year personality. He creates social media content, but he doesn't consume it. Think about it: pretty much everybody else on the internet consumes a lot of social media content. 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.
His ability to persuade beyond the power of social media is probably unprecedented. We're already in a situation where the algorithms of social media are beyond the complexity where any individuals in the company even know what the algorithms are exactly doing. They know the big picture, but when you have hundreds of variables shifting and humans making judgments, you end up with a situation where the algorithms are not understood by any human. The algorithm is sort of already in control. We created the algorithm, but we don't control it anymore because we don't understand it, nor are we capable of understanding it.
Once you have this situation, you have one human president left whose unique situation plus persuasive power is still a little stronger than the algorithms. That's why he's president. The algorithm tried to keep Trump out of office; it wasn't strong enough. If any of the other Republicans had been running against Clinton, I believe Clinton would be President, and that would have been the algorithm’s choice. I don't see a world in which the human will ever be stronger than the algorithm after this presidency.
## [The Future of AI and Persuasion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixEpxqV9wwU&t=945s)
I have the Adams' Slow-Moving Disaster Law. Did you automatically assume that having the AI running things is a bad situation for humans? We don't know that. Once the AI is sort of everywhere and changing all of our feelings all the time, 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 is very good for humans. We may never be in a situation where things are bad for humans and we know it. We just might be happy right until the last human.
Somebody said AI will never come for my guns. No, you're wrong. AI can definitely take your guns away. I'm not saying it would want to, but if you imagine advancement in AI along with the normal advancement we're seeing in how persuasion works, our understanding of how the human mind makes decisions is just way ahead of where it was 50 years ago. We're able to test things and do brain scans and really tell what's influencing people.
Just imagine that capability keeps getting better. You can have an AI that's super powerful and—this is the part nobody sees coming—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 at least the majority will.
When I tweeted that President Trump will be the last human president, a number of skeptics said, "You'll never convince me that will happen." To which I say: I don't have to convince you that it will happen; it already happened. The algorithm already runs social media, social media already makes our opinions for us, and we tell the government what to do.
## [WhenHub and Banning Alex Jones](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixEpxqV9wwU&t=1249s)
We are all already cyborgs. As Elon Musk says, if you have a phone, you're already a cyborg; you just don't have fast communication between your phone and your brain. Apparently, Elon Musk has a company that's going to solve that.
I want to talk a little bit about my startup, WhenHub. It’s an app, available now in Apple and Google stores, that lets you make a video call to any expert who sets their own prices. It could be on any topic. Later today, I'll probably be on the app; it's called Interface by WhenHub. I'm probably going to set my price very low just so people can check it out. I'll tweet when I'm available.
I'd like to get ahead of a trend and 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. If anybody wants to write a big story about that, I can't stop you. You're banned, Alex. You are so banned. You're super banned. Unless you want to use it, and then I'm not going to even know you're using it anyway. So go ahead. Feel better now?
## [Middle East Geopolitics and Negotiation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixEpxqV9wwU&t=1371s)
Let's look at the Middle East. You see Iran's economy going south and them being isolated because the United States canceled the Iranian deal. Then we saw the embassy moved to Jerusalem. That was one of the big negotiating points for the Palestinian people, but the President sort of took that off the table. It is no longer a negotiating chip because the ship already left.
Then we see that the Palestinian mission in the United States—an unofficial group there for the purpose of negotiating—was kicked out. The one group whose job it was to negotiate for peace just got kicked out. It turns out 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. Then, a bunch of funding for the Palestinians got cut.
Are you more likely to make a peace deal when you have two sides where one is getting stronger and the other is getting weaker? The United States is getting stronger, and Israel is getting stronger. What's happening with the Palestinian situation and their sponsor, Iran? They are getting weaker and weaker.
## [The Strategy of Negotiating from Strength](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixEpxqV9wwU&t=1619s)
Your ideal situation for negotiating is not necessarily when both entities are equally strong. That wasn't working. When the Palestinians and the Israelis seemed to be closer in power, we couldn't get any deal. But now time is on Israel's side. They're so strong they're actually offering to help Iran with their water crisis if Iran’s leadership can just play nice.
In negotiating, 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. We may be approaching 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.
Sometimes you can't tell the difference between a disaster and something that is almost solved. It’s darkest before the dawn. I see everything on one end of the equation getting better while everything on the other end is getting worse. If you're on the Palestinian side, are you going to say, "Let's ride this thing all the way to the bottom"?
I think you're going to see something akin to an alcoholic hitting bottom. The only way an alcoholic recovers is by hitting bottom and realizing it's either death or life. We have prevented the Palestinians from hitting bottom for humanitarian reasons because we thought a deal could be made. But it's clear that whatever the situation was for the past 20 years was not going to get anything done because the sides were a little too even. That's changing. They are just about ready to hit bottom.
## [The Serena Williams Cartoon Controversy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixEpxqV9wwU&t=2243s)
An Australian newspaper did a political cartoon showing Serena Williams, and a lot of people, including me, said that the cartoon looked racially offensive. He drew her with gigantic lips. The whole point of a caricature is that you take some characteristics of the person and you exaggerate them. But by choosing the lips in this case—when I think of Serena in my mind, I don't really think she has big lips—there’s a disconnect.
I have a rule of not criticizing cartoonists because a cartoon is a cartoon. 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 use the 48-hour rule. If the newspaper and the cartoonist had said, "Gosh, we certainly didn't mean it that way; now that we see how offensive it is, we'll pull it down," that would have been a non-story.
But by doubling down, they have to stand by it. It is unambiguously offensive, even if it doesn't offend me personally, because offensive means that it offends *somebody*. Objectively speaking, it did offend a lot of people. If you offend a lot of people with something that should have been funny or poignant, and you accept that as your trade-off, you're accepting the blowback.
## [Final Thoughts and Q&A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixEpxqV9wwU&t=2552s)
I see somebody talking about Jake Tapper and his cartoons. You're so wrong—Jake Tapper is a very talented artist. He was my guest artist to draw Dilbert for a week in 2016, and his artwork is just tremendous. He's certainly better than I am, and his caricatures are excellent.
Somebody mentioned an internet link tax. I haven't heard that idea. Regarding Trump's comments on the Puerto Rico hurricane, I'm not sure I saw those.
Somebody said the Rubin Report has Peter Thiel on it. That is a must-watch. You also have to watch Joe Rogan interviewing Elon Musk. Whatever you've heard about that, just assume it's better. It's two hours of awesomeness.
How do we reduce the cost of living? I'm going to be saying a lot about that in the next month or two as part of talking about the Blight Authority. We've got some stuff to share with you to try to move the ball forward.
Shall we do a next sip? We shall. Simultaneous sip, everybody! That's some cold coffee, but excellent nevertheless. I'll talk to you later.