← Zero Hour with James Poulos
Zero Hour with James Poulos
Ep 89 | Trump’s Great Awakening: Why Americans Rejected Wokeness | Scott Adams
00:46:42
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- [00:01]
James Polis
Your data is like gold to hackers. They'll sell it to the highest bidder. Are you protected? McAfee helps shield you blocking suspicious texts, malicious emails and fraudulent websites. McAfee Secure VPN lets you browse safely and its AI powered tech scam detector spots threats instantly. You'll also get up to $2 million of award winning antivirus and identity theft protection, all for just $39.99 for your first year. Visit McAfee.com, cancel anytime terms apply. Hello, human resources. The legend Scott Adams is here to tell us whether we're all just still living in Dilbert's world. My name is James. Welcome to Zero Hour. La la.
- [01:04]
Scott Adams
La la la la.
- [01:09]
James Polis
He is Scott Adams, the founder of the classic Dilbert comic. I guess the creator, you could say he's calling in a podcaster, a comic strip artist. Trulia da Vinci of the modern age. Scott, thanks for being here with us.
- [01:20]
Scott Adams
Da Vinci of the modern age. I like that. I might require everybody to say that from now on.
- [01:25]
James Polis
I think you should, but be sure to credit me first. Okay, so let's get into it. You have been really at the forefront of kind of cultural commentary about corporate America for a long time. We've seen since then, the Office. The office reboot. I think they're doing another reboot. Office space. More and more people coming to realize that corporate America has become kind of this huge, sprawling behemoth that makes life kind of miserable and sad and hilarious all at the same time. Human resources departments taking over corporations, it, you know, really ultimately became almost an election year issue. With that kind of culture threatening to take over the rest of America, do you feel vindicated? Do you feel like now there's light at the end of the tunnel? Are we still trapped in Dilbert's world?
- [02:10]
Scott Adams
Well, you know, when I heard that maybe 1% of federal workers even come to the office, and there must be some, some version of that in corporate America where people are just not coming in and, you know, enjoying their life a little bit more, playing with the dog and maybe doing two jobs at once. So I think everything's up in the air now. So the old Dilbert world is still in place, but with AI plus remote work plus robots, who knows where this is going to go? So it's going to get a lot of fun. But I'll tell you, the thing that launched Dilbert is when I worked at a bank, it was all kinds of craziness. And then when I quit the bank and went to work at the phone company, I actually thought all the craziness would be behind me because I thought, well, there can't be two companies that have all these big company problems. It turns out it's all of them. So the experience launched Dilbert when I realized there couldn't be two companies that are so exact, unless this is something that's happening everywhere.
- [03:16]
James Polis
And it was, yeah, it's definitely up in the air. You got Doge, Department of Government Efficiency coming online soon. Obviously, though, a lot of people are going to be threatened. You've got. You've got major vested interests, you got corporate America, all these NGOs that are kind of part of that world. Do you expect that there's going to be a lot of blowback? Is there going to be a counterattack?
- [03:35]
Scott Adams
There has to be. It seems like there's so many people whose livelihoods will be affected, you know, their funding. I would expect that the blowback will be enormous, but the, the people working on it, you know, Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk and all the other people they're going to bring in are literally the highest functioning people we've ever seen in America. So if they can't do it, then it's undoable. But I do have a lot of confidence that they're going to get it done.
- [04:09]
James Polis
Yeah, this is maybe a little spicy, but why not? I mean, I don't think there's really any arguing that so many of those human resources jobs, so much of the administrative jobs, really, you know, oftentimes dominated by women, and some might even go so far as to say that kind of strategically, as America and the elites are trying to figure out how to get maximum women into the workforce, you kind of have to create a new class of jobs in order to have that kind of transformational change in the economic structure of the country, whether it's knowledge work or bureaucracy, you know, whatever you want to call it, whatever buzzword attaches to it, you know, you know as well as I do there are even books out there about sort of BS jobs and things that are just kind of designed to get a certain kind of person into a certain kind of job, even if they don't end up doing much. Are you. Are you feeling a sense out there? Are you encountering people in your life who, who have a feel for this kind of gender dynamic? And do you think that there's going to be a sort of revolutionary turn coming up here if we end up getting rid of or sunsetting a lot of those jobs that are so heavily female oriented?
- [05:08]
Scott Adams
You Know, I'd never heard that hypothesis before that. So. So is your theory that the jobs were created in the first place just to get more female or other minority jobs, is that.
- [05:23]
James Polis
Yeah, well, you know, like, like most things in this area, I think there's this kind of sliding scale between the full blown kind of conspiratorial attitude where this is all designed and it's part of a plan and the guy get together and they create these rooms and it's sort of grand strategic or you know, you can come all the way over to the other end which is, look, these are macro forces. It's sort of late capitalism. If you want to come at it from kind of the left wing side or if you're calling it the right wing side from, you know, oh, the family isn't maximally productive or we're trying to get away from strong men in charge. All these forces kind of push in the direction of, you know, turning the corporation into something that is more of a, of an emotional, an emotional center than say the family or say the church. You know, when you're, when your society is sort of drifting in that direction and you've got people at the top of the stack trying to figure out how to just continue to generate more money or more productivity or whatever, you know, it's not just going to be widgets forever. It's not going to be General Motors and Ford being the powering the arsenal of democracy. It's going to turn into something else. And so what's that something else going to be? Well, it's going to be something this little softer, a little more, you know, eq, a little bit more more abstract. You're not cranking out material parts. It's not industrialization. It's sort of this post industrial sort of touchy feely kind of thing. And that's what's happened to the universities and that's what happened in corporate America. And you know, any way you slice it, I think it's, it's, it's going on.
- [06:48]
Scott Adams
So my, my Dilbert take on that if I put the Dilbert filter on it, is that every manager wants to have more people reporting to them. So there's just this natural impulse for everybody to just add subordinates and it's easier to add subordinates in these cushy jobs. Like, well, there's somebody who needs to work on this project and do this thing and then you combine that with DEI and just the natural push toward diversity and those two factors that every manager wants more people reporting to them. Because that's good for their career. And then you add DEI and you end up with a, you know, a lot of women in certain kind of jobs that were added later. So I think that kind of happened naturally. But to your point, that's a good one. If it turns out that the jobs that are replaced first were heavily dominated by certain groups, that would change the culture. And it makes me wonder if that's what happened at X, because at X, I think they kept the engineers, they got rid of everybody who wasn't, you know, literally working on something that would create a new feature or product. And I'd love to know if that turned it into a mostly male, completely different personality for the company. I'll bet it did.
- [08:06]
James Polis
Yeah, there are certainly signs. I think they axed up to 90% of the folks in that building. And, you know, sites site's still up, still running a lot of load. You've been on X a lot. You've said a couple of interesting things about Trump and sort of, you know, a little bit of handicapping, a little bit of predicting going into the election and now coming out. Seems like you were, you were pretty vindicated relative to some of the other people and in fact, some of the other experts and pollsters who are out there predicting a much different outcome. Just walk us through your experience. You know, how confident did you feel that he was going to pull it out? And, and coming out of that, you know, watching what seems like this huge preference cascade where more and more people across generations are kind of stepping out with the red hat on and suddenly saying, like, you know what? I felt this way for a. Is Trump mainstream now? And did you feel that energy going in?
- [08:57]
Scott Adams
No, the, the, what has happened in the last month or so is something I don't think anybody saw. It's, it's like a common sense broke out. And I think that's the thing that's uniting people. It's like, well, there's some things that just make sense, like we can't have a $35 trillion debt or 36, I guess. So you just have to fix that. That's not even political. So. And we want fewer wars, et cetera. So a lot of stuff that we're dealing with that I think people just woke up and said, wait a minute, this isn't even political. We all want less crime. It kind of doesn't make sense to have an open border, even if you're a Democrat. So I think maybe the wokeness just got pushed to the point where it just broke and Then when some people who were prominent kind of associated themselves with Trump and made it easier, I mean, Elon Musk, you know, hitching his card to that probably made a huge difference because I think that just said, oh, you can be smart and you could also be in favor of some of these things. And what you saw is the smartest people were going first. I mean, this seems like to be smartest and bravest. And when you see the smartest and the bravest go in the same direction and then you see Trump, you know, missing the bullet and doing fight, fight, fight, staying in there, beating all odds, you know, just, you know, seemingly vanquishing everything against him, it was inspiring. And I think that even people like Mark Zuckerberg were saying, you know what? You have to, you have to feel that. And I think that what Trump did was recognize the moment and turn it into an emotional thing that the entire country felt like, hey, we need to be on the same side and we need to be more reasonable, more commonsensical. You even hear that phrase being used by Bill Maher used it the other day on his show. He says, no, we have to be more commonsensical. And I think I'm at a point where I'm not even going to call that Republican anymore because I think we may have weirdly passed into this at least temporary, non political point where you can have John Fetterman say good things about the Doge effort. You can see Ro Khanna, you know, prominent Democrat, saying, you know, I'll help. And you know, you see people like David Sachs being brought into the administration. These are super capable people. And, you know, RFK Jr. The, the, the amount of common sense, smart, brave firepower that all got concentrated in one place, honestly, it feels like 1776 just resurrected or something. It feels like the energy from the founders just sort of got transported into the present and people took their roles and operated accordingly. So, no, I didn't see that coming. The one thing I did predict that I'll take some credit for is that after he lost and January 6th happened, that I predicted that he would be more popular every day that he was out of office. And I don't think that was a common prediction. But sure enough, I also predicted that Biden would go down in history as the worst president. And there was a survey today that says he's ranked the lowest, at least in that survey. So those two things I did see coming. Trump rising, Biden falling. But wow, I didn't see the common sense breaking out.
- [12:38]
James Polis
Yeah, I mean, it's Fascinating to me as a guy with a political theory diploma hanging on my wall somewhere at home. Politics used to mean, and maybe even, you know, traditionally has meant for, for many centuries or even longer, practical solutions to on the ground challenges that ordinary people in the course of their shared lives encounter. And that's not what people have come to think of politics as. They've come to see politics as, you know, just sort of quasi Machiavellian, you know, maneuvering and finding ways to take advantage of those around you and just kind of be a survivor and corruption and, you know, everything that's summed up in that idea of the swamp and what we're seeing now. You know, people, people always saw Trump, I think, as a survivor or someone who was looking out for himself and, you know, almost in a, in a funny way was always able to kind of slip these traps that were laid for him. But probably not until the attempted assassination did they really get a feeling for like, well, wait a minute, maybe this guy actually does have some courage to him. Maybe there is a courageousness that's kind of been, been dormant in there and now is, is open for everyone to see. I mean, I know talking with tech folks, that was a big moment for them where they felt like maybe their own, you know, they could stick their neck out in a way that they weren't accustomed to doing. They're, they're used to taking business risks. They're used to, you know, taking flack for sort of going off in a direction that, that maybe others didn't understand or appreciate, but activating that kind of, of political courage in the sense of a, of a founding, in the sense of the founders, you know, pledging your, your sacred honor, sort of the catchphrase from, from the founding time. And there has been a little bit of that. I was in one of these, you know, closed door kind of strategic meetings that, that happens in politics and media world from time to time back in January. And what I was feeling, and I sort of said this, as I said, I think a lot of people are hungry for a new kind of purple America, one where the political divisions aren't as sharp. Not in the sense of, you know, Barack Obama who stands up there and says, oh, divisiveness. No, no, no, there's. There's something else here. And when you see the coalition that Trump put together, when you see figures like Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. And these other guys, guys out of Silicon Valley who many of them weren't even really that particularly politically active, you Know, they, they put a little money here, put a little money there, try to, try to keep friends. You know, they're in California. It's, you don't want to make enemies who are out to sink your business. If you can manage it in California. That coalition that's coming together really does, I think, hearken to this idea and maybe it's been romanticized for a while, but I think there's some real public sentiment behind it that surely there's a way that we can find this new kind of political center of gravity in America because if we don't, then how are we going to actually attend to these severe problems that just keep mounting? You mentioned the deficit, the debt. That, that's one of them. Government spending itself in a bankruptcy and that's excluding all the off the books money that's, that's floating around out there. Obviously all the health stuff, you know, mental, physical, it's really dramatic. And, and so I'm feeling like, you know, my, my own little prediction of, of a new purple America. Most people think that if you got the only way to get to purple America is through blue America. And what we found is that actually the road maybe runs through a much redder America. When you look at that big redshift on election night, do you feel like Americans are hungry for a return to that kind of, of center of gravity where everyone feels like at least in some sense we're on the same kind of page?
- [16:04]
Scott Adams
Well, I saw a interesting post on X the other day where somebody said that the Republicans didn't win this recent election, that the 1995 Democrats did, because that's when Trump was a Democrat. That's when I was associating with Democrats. RFK junior Elon Mus. You know, you could go on. And that to me feels like a breaking of the frame. Like even, even the red, blue, purple feels like even the purple doesn't quite fit the situation. It's more like a whole bunch of people who said everything's broken, we're going to have to fix it. And by the way, one of the things I like most about America is that we're not tweakers. So well, I mean, some of us are, but we don't like to just make small changes to things over time where, you know, some cultures might resist a big change to anything. We will tear apart anything, we will throw away anything if we need to fix it. And I think all of our institutions sort of at the same time reach some kind of bureaucratic like, I don't know, Constipation, where everything seems broken and corrupt simultaneously, and some of it is just learning about it. So maybe it was always this way, but I feel like there's a movement toward re. Engineering, sort of the Elon Musk view, which is, you don't say, how do I fix this thing? You back up one level and you say, do I need that thing? What problem am I solving? If I were going to do it today, would I use that, or would I do something completely different? And that's the kind of thinking that Doge is going to bring. But I think that that's going to infect every other part of the. The world by example.
- [17:53]
James Polis
Let's talk about that 1995 framing for a little bit there, because it's an interesting year. You know, I remember the 90s and the early 90s, not a very inspiring time. A lot of people were bombing. You had this recession, kind of this big hangover from, from the Reagan years. You got George H.W. bush in there. He, he did win. There was a lot of support for him, the Gulf War, but it burned. And there was that feeling that sort of like the establishment had become this thing that was alienated from the people. And even going into that, that 92 presidential campaign, right, where you had the 12 dwarfs of these Democrats running around and no one thought that they had the, the gravitas to become president. And then Bill Clinton pops up and just a very strange moment. And then, you know, so quickly you go from that. You know, here's, here's Bill Clinton with his sunglasses on, playing the saxophone on Arsenio hall. And within just a couple of years, you've got Fight Club and the Matrix and the Internet and cyberpunk, and really just a dramatic transformation from that kind of early 90s to late 90s. And you, you pulled out 95. And, you know, I don't, I don't want to make too much of this, but I've always found it fascinating how quickly things transformed in the 90s. And I wonder, you know, is. Is that 95 era something that you. A stable point? I mean, that era didn't last long in the 90s. Quickly, soon thereafter, we went from people coming from the left saying, hey, George H.W. bush doesn't know how much a gallon of milk costs. We need to get back to the interests of regular, ordinary Americans. And then within a couple years, they were all being compromised by Jeffrey Epstein. So can that moment last? How do we make that kind of moment last?
- [19:41]
Scott Adams
Well, I'd first point out that the Clinton administration looked a lot like today. I mean, he was closer to a moderate Republican than he would be like a Democrat.
- [19:52]
James Polis
Triangulation, that was his thing.
- [19:54]
Scott Adams
Yeah, he wanted closed borders, et cetera. So there's that. But I think honestly, the DEI push may have been something that broke everything. Because as soon as you say merit is not your primary, you know, variable, everything breaks. So what I'd been noticing even before this political cycle is it seemed like nothing worked. Like you couldn't call a company and get something fixed. You couldn't make basic things in life work. Everything was broken everywhere. And part of it was complexity and adding too many people and bureaucracy. And part of it was probably taking the, taking your eye off the ball of merit and making identity the primary thing that can't possibly get you a good result.
- [20:47]
James Polis
Yeah, I think that's right. I was texting with someone who shall remain nameless a while ago, and they, they relayed a conversation where a friend of theirs who was actually on the left was saying early on in private conversation, you know, this, this whole trans thing, you know, if we lose here, if we, the left lose on this thing, we might lose everything. And for my friend, who is more on the right, you know, he was confused by that. He's like, well, wait a minute. You know, this stuff is craz. You know, maybe you're wrong about this other stuff, but it's not as crazy. So what do you mean you're going to lose everything? But you know, fast forward to today and you know what you're saying about dei, and I think it plugs into the trans thing as well, where they did sort of go so far out on that limb that it was credibility destroying. And there are still folks out there who are, you know, willing to kind of go to the mattresses on this stuff. But the center, you know, the pendulum is really swung against them and that's come at a huge cost to their credibility. So when you look at the way that ESG has, you know, even, even Wall street, corporate America's backtracked on esg. There's a lot of, lot of backpedaling on dei, even now, even, even at colleges and universities backtracking on, on the trans. Trans issue, how far back are they going to have to backtrack before they can start scraping their, their own coalition together? Do you think DEI is really going to disappear?
- [22:10]
Scott Adams
Well, I think it'll disappear from the federal government and then it'll be easier for the big companies with it and want to save some money and get rid of it. They'll, they'll be able to say, well, the federal government says it's just discrimination, so, you know, they're going to come after us if we keep doing the thing that even the President says is discrimination. So I've got a feeling it's going to decrease because every, everything that's too much eventually, you know, gets knocked back. So there's sort of a pendulum effect there. So I think we'll be in better shape. But yeah, I think the Democrats as a party have an almost impossible task because the only thing they had going for them is the whole identity thing. And if that falls apart, what's, what's plan B? I don't know how you pivot from that to something else.
- [22:59]
James Polis
Yeah, I think about this too. And, you know, the best that I can come up with so far is, is something like the following bottom drops out of dei. The feeling that cutting off your kids genitals is the future, that kind of dissipates. And so Democrats looking around, what's the handle for them? And I think the handle is to turn against capitalism and turn against technology and to say, look, everyone wants to make money, that's fine. New inventions are good. Okay, that's fine. But we overproduced this class of knowledge workers and we got so alienated from the soil and from working with our hands and from supplying, you know, putting food on the table, healthy food for ordinary people, we got away from that stuff and really repudiating the legacy of that kind of, you know, new labor, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, neoliberalism, you know, which was, hey, everyone can get rich. It's going to be a bonanza. Do whatever you want in your private life, actually do whatever you want in public life. You know, as long as everyone's just kind of making money, it's all going to be fine. Democrats, I think, might find themselves in a position where they say, no, no, now we're the only way to sort of save a recognizably human life. We're not going to let the robots take your jobs. We're not going to send your kids off to college and they learn a bunch of nothing. That, that just turns them into a really, you know, bitterly egomaniacal barista. I feel like that's kind of the direction that they have left to go in, because Americans do know that we've all sort of been miseducated and, and misinformed by our elites and, and that's going to take a lot to unwind.
- [24:52]
Scott Adams
You know, the most predictable thing that would happen is that the parties would have to disagree on everything important because they just need to disagree. But who is going to be the party that's anti robot, anti AI? Somebody's going to be anti those things and probably the Democrats. But I think that that would be again, limited to like, you know, 20% of their base. So they're going to have the same problem again, that there'll be 20% completely impractical, ridiculous things like let's be the only country that has no robots and AI and everybody who has common sense will say, well, if China has AI and robots, we're not going to be able to survive that. So that's a crazy idea. So I think the Democrats are more, let's say, accepting of people with non commonsensical ideas within their midst as part of their large, I don't know, large, whatever you'd call it, trying to get a large tent and. But it can't work. The one thing the Republicans do better is that once they decide what works, it attracts people and they go, oh, that's a good idea, that worked. That's why Trump works. The reason that Trump is more popular is because the stuff he did worked and people liked it. So that's the model that can work. But if the Democrats keep rolling out things that are absurd, just ridiculous ideas. So there's no way that that can, you know, picks up power over time.
- [26:25]
James Polis
Yeah, I think that's right. You know, it may well be that if, if we're looking at a near term future where the Democrats are really reduced to this kind of weird remnant that can't figure out how to, how to grow the tent again, as you said, the real conflict is going to be simply over, you know, how much are we going to allow technology to rule us rather than the other way around? You know, on what basis are we going to say, yeah, we shouldn't do this, or this actually, you know, leaves us worse off as human beings or this kind of gets, you know, this, we're sacrificing our form of government, we're sacrificing our way of life for the sake of these machines. How do we avoid that, that kind of outcome?
- [27:01]
Scott Adams
Well, the interesting thing is what happens when AI gets smart enough and credible enough, they can tell us which policies are good and which ones are bad. Because, because right now Grok can apparently look at a court case so it can look at the transcript and it could decide what the verdict would be. And it does pretty well at predicting. But what's going to happen when some politician Comes out with a policy, you can plug it into any one of your AI apps and it says, well, this will never work. And here's the reason.
- [27:32]
James Polis
Yeah.
- [27:33]
Scott Adams
Can a person go forward when the AI says this can't possibly work and gives reasons? So it could be that we have to basically bow to the AI because it would look ridiculous if he didn't, because the AI doesn't have any wrong opinions at some point. We're not there yet, but we could be there in five years.
- [27:54]
James Polis
Well, right. I mean, ultimately it is up to us, after all. I mean, is, is that country still America?
- [28:02]
Scott Adams
Well, America has changed quite a bit, you know, over the. We're always something different, which I like about us. But I think it's inevitable that if AI becomes AGI, the level above the large language models, and maybe that's five to 10 years, but when it's unambiguously smarter than we are, how are we going to ignore its advice? I just think we will just get lazy and say, well, I don't really have to think about it. AI just told me what, what to think about it and hasn't been wrong yet. So eventually what you think is your free will is really going to come into question because you're going to feel like you have free will, but then you're going to look at all the choices and opinions you had for the last year and you're going to realize that they all came from AI and you'll think, well, it makes sense because AI is smart. Why wouldn't I adopt that opinion? But then where's your free will?
- [28:58]
James Polis
Yeah, well, I mean, the answer to that might be that smarts isn't everything. I mean, you look around at super intelligent people and some of them are doing the right thing, but some of them are, are over in that Bill Gates corner of the world and, and some of the smartest people seem to be the easiest to, to delude about, you know, visions of a new age and transcending our humanity and all religions will become obsolete. I mean, those people don't seem to be capable of producing correct answers just because they're very intelligent. Right.
- [29:28]
Scott Adams
Well, that's because they have human motivations. If you take the human motivation out and you're not trying to impress anybody, you're not trying to get sex, you're not trying to work on your legacy, any of those things, then if you're just talking about what works and what doesn't, AI is going to look a lot smarter than Bill Gates very soon.
- [29:50]
James Polis
Yeah, maybe we're Already there. I think some of this is generational, too, in an interesting way to me. Growing up in the world that the boomers created, boomers did a lot of fun stuff. I mean, I don't think there's any question that the culture was, you know, a lot more vibrant and a lot more sort of creative energy going on than what we've got now. Even though, yes, the Internet opened the floodgates for people to come in and sort of say, do what they want. And, you know, there have been benefits to that, but there's also been, I think, a lot of. A lot of disappointment and a lot of sort of, you know, economic energy being sucked out of. Of creative industries. But when you look at the boomers and you look at sort of their aspirations, I think there was this. This. It's. It's hard to describe for people who, you know, are too young to kind of. To understand it. You know, a lot of those boomers watch Star wars, and they're like, this is correct. This is spiritually true. This is my religion. The Force is real. We're. Our destiny is in the stars. There's just going to be this kind of progress toward this new age. And when you look at AI from that standpoint, that kind of fatalism toward technology that you're. You're kind of talking about does seem to be this kind of unstoppable for. But if you're too young for all that and you go back and, you know, you're. You're a teenager and you look at Return of the Jedi or whatever, to see these Ewoks running around, you're kind of like, I don't. You know, this isn't. What do you mean? This is true. Like, this is just another goofy. You know, this is like a Marvel movie. The younger generations don't look to the movies and confuse what they see on the screen for real life. You know, even. Even the younger generations looking at TikTok, you know, they do it with a certain distance, a certain kind of critical eye. And I think for digital natives who are growing up with the technologies, as they advance, they're, you know, they're not afraid of them, and they're willing to engage and maybe even understand that they engage maybe to a degree that's. That's not particularly healthy. They know what it means to overdo it, to become addicted to the technologies. I think they also understand that, you know, this is not a place to go for ultimate answers to the ultimate questions about why we should bother, you know, getting out of bed. In the morning or having sex or having children or getting married. You know, those things have to come from somewhere that's a little deeper and richer than that kind of sci fi ideology.
- [32:08]
Scott Adams
So this sort of gets us into the national brainwashing conversation. I'm of the opinion, and for your viewers who don't know it, I have a background as a trained hypnotist, so I tend to see things through that filter. I don't think a country can succeed unless the government is brainwashing its citizens to be good citizens and operate the way the country wants them to operate. Now that's brainwashing. And if you said, are you in favor of brainwashing? I'd say, well, no. But I don't think any country can succeed unless it, let's say, trains or conditions its population, act in a way that's productive for the country. So what happens when movies are no longer a thing? Which I think is already the case because we know that the CIA and the government was always giving us war movies to make us more patriotic and join the military and have families and be good people instead of bad people. The good people usually won in the movies. What happens when movies are no longer a thing and AI is the thing? I mean, the government is already, according to, I think Mark Andreessen was saying this has already said, look, we're not even going to let startups in the AI space succeeded because we want a small number of giant companies that we can control because AI will be the way you control the population in the future. We don't have movies, maybe TV won't be there. You know, Instagram isn't doing it. So I think the inevitable thing is that AI will be a government manipulated media and that's, that's going to be our new brainwashing source.
- [33:51]
James Polis
Yeah, I mean, there's just so much here. I'd love to know a little bit about how a trained hypnotist draws the line between consent and lack of consent in brainwashing people. But you know, as far as the AI taking the place of television as the sculptor of the psychological environment that we all swim in, I read my McLuhan and that seems very congruent with the kind of things that he was talking about. But I also think, and he mentioned this a little bit as well, one of his lesser read books, this opens a huge opportunity for, for art to regain its kind of, you know, traditional or classical role in human society, where it's not propaganda and it's not engineering, it's this other Thing that, that activates a different part of, of the mind, of the heart, maybe even of the soul. And, and right now, you know, you look around for great art and for artists who are really trying to connect with people, whether it's through film or through some other means, to have that soul connection and to experience that kind of reawakening of the fact that life isn't just about being lazy. It's not about passively receiving the stimulus that's being administered to you. There's a higher or deeper register of our existence that we need to tap into and recognize in order for us not to just become the equivalent of, of robots or animals or clones. I think that's back on the table. And, you know, and I think ultimately that's good news.
- [35:19]
Scott Adams
Yeah. You know, I've predicted that AI will not be great at producing commercial art. Now, one of the reasons is it would be unlimited, so the supply would be infinite. So anything that has an infinite supply is going to be low value, commercial wise. But on top of that, my hypothesis is that the only reason we are drawn to art in the first place is through our mating instinct. In other words, the artist is exhibiting something that would make you want to mate with them. It's like, my goodness, you can make this statue, you know, you can make this music. I would know your fingers are doing things on that guitar that I don't think I could do, you know, so I should mate with you and maybe get some of those capabilities. So if you did the best song in the world and AI made it, people wouldn't buy it because they know AI is just AI. But if you thought it came from a person, you think about the artist when you were absorbing the art. And that's the payoff is thinking about the artist. So certainly there's no AI that's even close to humor. And you would think humor is almost a formula. I mean, the way I do, it's almost a formula. But AI is not even close. They're not even in the zip code of being funny. And part of that is I think you need to have a personality to make humor work. If you watch a stand up comedian, they usually have a Persona, you know, like, you know, I get no respect or, you know, Jerry Seinfeld talking about ordinary things of life and being annoyed by things that maybe other people think are magic and special. And, you know, he's just annoyed by them.
- [37:01]
James Polis
Donald Trump, his Persona is a huge part of, of his humor and his effectiveness as a humorist.
- [37:06]
Scott Adams
Yes. Yeah. And he plays against his type. He makes fun, makes fun of his own, you know, brand, etc. So the AI can't do that. So if you're not thinking about the artist, you can't enjoy the art. So that's, that's my hypothesis. So you're never going to have human musicians replaced by pure AI, except maybe for elevator music or something that's, you know, low cost.
- [37:31]
James Polis
Yeah, it's really fascinating. I mean, you know, I'm friendly, if not outright friends with a lot of these tech guys who get on X every day and say, oh no, like this is going to be amazing. You know, AI is going to take over everything. It's going to give us superpowers. And I'm like, you know, maybe the real phenomenon here is that AI is going to make ordinary human capabilities suddenly seem attractive and mysterious and fascinating and important again.
- [37:56]
Scott Adams
Yeah, actually that's exactly what could happen. It could make humans more special. Yeah. Because to get bored with AI that doesn't make any mistakes and has no personality, you're just going to crave something human and different and unexpected.
- [38:11]
James Polis
Oh yeah. I mean, you go all the way back to ancient Greece and you think about the gods on Mount Olympus and they wrestled with boredom and they got up to trouble because they had this kind of godlike existence and nothing was really too difficult or too hard. And that's where kind of mischief comes from. But that's also where art comes from and where sort of rediscovering the depth, depths of people's personalities and taking people seriously as individuals comes from too.
- [38:35]
Scott Adams
Yeah. And also human art, you know, one of the things we forget is that most of it is thrown away because most art is not anything that anybody wants to look at. So, you know, we've got that working for us. We got 8 billion people just feeling around in the dark and every once in a while we hit a home run. I suppose AI could do some version of that, but it just because it's not human, it won't, it won't, it won't touch us.
- [39:01]
James Polis
Yeah. Something that's especially fascinating to me in this area is we do have a four year time period here where it's going to be Trump unless, God forbid, something even more bizarre and unanticipated happens between now and then. It's a relatively short window and we are going through these wrenching technological transformations and people have a vague idea of what's in store. But I still think many people are going to be shocked to discover what's around the corner. It does seem like, you know, if we're not just refounding America from scratch, we are kind of going back to this kind of founding moment where we're refreshing and renewing and sort of resetting America back up on. On a different footing. Like you said, not afraid to tear away that which can be discarded and replaced with something hopefully stronger and more stable within that period of time. If, if our art, our public art, our sense of who are we and what is this world we're living in, if that doesn't catch up up, I think a lot of people are going to be left behind, and I think that's going to be bad for the country and bad for the people. And so one way in which technology, something like AI might be able to help us kind of bridge that gap is not by flooding the zone with that. That kind of overly stylized digital art that is now becoming a kind of unflattering cliche, but giving. Giving creators the ability to just produce good art that speaks at a soul level with large numbers of people at a slightly faster rate. You know, sometimes the great classics of the Western canon, maybe Those takes maybe 5, 10, 15, sometimes even 20, 25 years to produce one of those works. And, yeah, there's integrity to that. And. And, you know, far be it for me to say, you know, come on, artists, you know, hurry up. Like, you got to get War and Peace done a little bit faster. But we do have this short period of time, and it would be good if art was able to catch up and artists were able to produce this kind of body of work that would allow people to understand in maybe a deeper or more accessible way what exactly it is that we are doing to ourselves and sort of where the risks and pitfalls and where the rewards might be.
- [41:11]
Scott Adams
Yeah, there's an idea that artists always come before technology. In other words, that you can find some artist was already experimenting with something that later somebody thought they invented. And so there's a robust theory that art is always forecasting technology and bigger changes. So we'll see if that continues.
- [41:34]
James Polis
Well, you're part artist, part technician, cartoonist, hypnotist, and you've made these a couple forecasts, made some predictions. You predicted a big Latino boost for Trump and some other stuff recently that you were really zigging while others were zagging right now. What's cooking in that brain of yours? Do you have more predictions that you can share?
- [41:58]
Scott Adams
Well, the big variable, the one that really interests me is what is Doge going to do with the payments that we can't cut the things that people are expecting, their Social Security and stuff. And that has to be. Somehow we're going to have to rethink our lifestyles or how everything's organized, because I don't think we'll just be able to say, yeah, let's cut 50% of that. There's no way to do that. So we're going to have to either change how much things cost, which might be one way to go. Maybe you could opt out of receiving Social Security if you buy into a new city where everything's cheap anyway. So there might be really creative, fundamental things that we have to do to get out of this $36 trillion problem.
- [42:50]
James Polis
Do you think that bitcoin is going to be a part of that?
- [42:54]
Scott Adams
I'll tell you, I've asked this so many times of people who know more than I do about crypto, which is a lot of people, and the best answer I've gotten is that the only thing that's likely to happen is that the value of bitcoin, let's say, as the main crypto, will probably continue going up. At the same time, the value of a dollar will continue to inflate away to nothing. So it's not that you will use crypto to pay off the debt. That wouldn't work because it would just be adding more money to the system. But it might be the only thing that has value. So I don't like to make investment investment advice, but if you have a sizable portfolio and you don't have any bitcoin, I think you have to explain why. Because just as a hedge against money becoming worth almost nothing, you should have at least one other thing that might have value later. So it does seem that diversification, which is the one thing I do recommend, almost requires bitcoin at this point.
- [44:02]
James Polis
Sure. All right, well, we got a few minutes left. Time for maybe one more prediction.
- [44:07]
Scott Adams
Wow. One more prediction. I think that what RFK Jr. Is going to find out about the food business and the pharma business, as shocking as it has been so far, I think our heads are just going to be blown completely off. I think he is so right in general. He's not going to be right on every claim or every suspicion, but we're going to find out things that make us want to execute people. I don't recommend it, but I think the anger in this country is going to be something that would be unprecedented. And we're going to find out that people with neckties were doing very bad things for a very long time. Way More than we suspected. That's my guess.
- [44:50]
James Polis
You know, I think you're absolutely right. In a world where, you know, perhaps the top healthcare CEO in America can be shot in cold blood, maybe warm blood, you know, people. People's tempers are running high. Obviously assassination is not the answer, but you can see it boiling. And I think, you know, we are gonna be shocked by that. That. Want to be sure to flog one thing before you go. You might have it handy. It's a. It's a beautiful and handsome calendar. The 2025 Dilbert calendar fits in the palm of your hand. Oh, very thick, very nice. Tell us where we can grab that.
- [45:25]
Scott Adams
You can only get that@dilbert.com there's a. A link to sales. So it's not on Amazon and it's not in stores because I wanted to make it all in America and so I had to cut out as a middleman to make everything work for that. So it's made completely in America for the first time. And this is the first calendar that has a comic on the front and the back of every page. Because after Dilber got canceled worldwide, it's a subscription only product now, but if you want to see what the naughty ones look like, they're on the back of every page.
- [45:58]
James Polis
Very patriotic. The department of Dilbert efficiency obviously in full effect. Scott Adams, thanks so much for joining us.
- [46:04]
Scott Adams
Us, thank you. Thanks for having me.
- [46:08]
James Polis
All right, that's all the time we got. Till next time around. I am James Polis. This is Zero Hour and may God have mercy on song.