Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
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MainContent Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 2841 CWSA 05/16/25

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e to invest, and it probably is. It's probably the best place to invest. That would be amazing. So I can quibble about what the real number is and how big it is, but what he's done is make everybody think in that way. Meaning that if he visits your country, you better open your wallet, and I think people will. So not only did Republicans think he did a great job in the Middle East, but Fox News a…

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y're thinking when they answer the question? So that would be yet another reason why you can't trust the polls on any of this.

But here's what I do think. I think the opinions in the region would be so far all over the place that if you propose any kind of two-state solution that even the people who said they were in favor of it would be opposed to it because of the specific way you said you wanted to do it. All right. Two-state solution. But who's in charge? Where is it? Which real estate are you talking about? I don't think you could ever get much of an agreement on that. So I'm going to assume that Trump will either stay away from that question, as in this is your problem, not mine. But I don't think he's going to come out strong in favor of a Palestinian two-state solution. Just a guess. I don't think he will. I could be wrong.

Well, as you know, there was what's being called a top Iranian official, but really is an adviser. He's well connected, but I don't know if he's a top official. He said that Iran would be willing to make a deal with Trump in which there would be some limits on their uranium enrichment and there would be some agreement not to make nuclear weapons and there would be some kind of an inspection to make sure that didn't happen and they might destroy their existing stockpiles but I don't think that gets close to what the US wants. So the US not only wants something in the nuclear realm as part of the deal, but they also want Iran to stop supporting their terrorist proxies, you know, Hamas and Hezbollah. And I haven't seen that even discussed. So would we make a deal if they were going to just keep funding Hamas? Doesn't feel like Trump would. So we're pretty far away on that.

And then Steve Witkoff recently said that what the Trump administration wants is a full dismantlement of Iran's nuclear program. So that would include three main nuclear facilities completely dismantled. I think if I'm right, Iran wants to continue having the ability to refine uranium, but they would keep their refinement well under the level that you could make a bomb and that there would be some inspections on that. Now, I don't know if that would ever be enough because it would still leave them with the ability to kind of semi-rapidly change their mind and make a bomb. And I don't think Trump's going to live with that. So Trump actually said that there are important talks that are happening right now and he had some optimism that maybe something will happen. But the alternative that Trump has laid out is that he will just turn off oil sales from Iran. Now, right now, Iran is still selling oil to China mostly. I guess we would embargo that or stop those ships in the water or something, but that would happen next if we don't get a deal. Apparently oil prices have fallen in part because of Trump's comments about Iran. And so yeah, so if oil prices fall, that would also mean that Russia gets less money to pursue their war. I don't know if it'd make enough of a big deal that Russia would want to make a deal, but that's happening.

All right. Let's change the topic to AI. So according to Fortune, a bunch of CEOs are saying that only a fraction of AI initiatives are delivering a return on investment. Now you know that I've been more skeptical than most people about what AI will ever be able to do. And I've been skeptical that companies will be able to use it in production because I don't think they figured out how to get rid of the hallucinations and they don't know how to make it reason yet and figure out things that it hasn't encountered before. It's just not good at that. So that seems to be a thing.

Now, at the same time that the CEOs are saying, "Hm, this has been a little underwhelming," Meta, one of the big players in AI, they've apparently delayed their rollout of their flagship AI model, the next level. And the insiders are saying it's because they don't think it is enough of an improvement, and there's a lot of insider fighting and stuff. So it's sort of suggesting and other people are saying the same thing that AI might be plateauing meaning that there will always be new models coming out that are better than the last one but they're not going to be twice as good. You know the next one might be 3% better. I'm just making that up. But that would suggest that AI is reaching its total potential with the current technology. So even if you build a bigger data center and you train it even harder, there might not be that much extra that it can go to.

Now, if it's true that the CEOs are saying it's underwhelming and it's not really paying back and it's also plateauing, what is that telling you? That would be some bad news. But then I see some big breakthroughs that AI is doing. For example, Google's DeepMind AI is able to come up with algorithms that humans were not capable of coming up with. To which I say, wait a minute, are you telling me that in the real world benefit of AI, the only thing they had to talk

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about this week is that it could come up with some algorithms that we couldn't come up with? And then I say, what would be those algorithms? And how are those changing the world? Well, AlphaEvolve, I guess that's the flavor of AI that's doing this, came up with more efficient algorithms for several kinds of computations. Several kinds, I say several kinds, not just one, several kinds. For example,…

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