Episode 149 Scott Adams: How the White House is Executing a Brutally Effective...

Hey, you're probably wondering, what am I doing talking to you this time of night? Well, sometimes I just feel inspired, and I got a really fun topic. Something. Something I think you'll find quite interesting. Who's calling me? Bald Prophet. I like it. I could go with that. Bald profit. Don't make that a thing, please. So I was just watching cnn, which I like to do, get. Get all sides of the. Of the world, watch a little Fox, watch a little cnn. And I was watching Chris Cuomo's new show, Primetime, I think it's called. And the first thing I want to say is that Chris Como puts on a good show. If. If you separate yourself from, you know, do you agree with the guests or, you know, disagree or not separate from whether you agree. It was a really well produced, well performed, entertaining, and useful show. But I saw something that just made me go, what? There's something happening here that you just have to see in real time. And I thought I would narrate it. So there's a big kind of perceptual narrative shift happening, a battle of ideas, if you will. And I just want to narrate it while it's happening. Okay, so remember I told you that when the President started explaining that he meant wouldn't instead of would. And my first thought was, is that really much of a difference? It just seemed like if you knew one of them, you probably knew the other. So they just didn't seem that different to me then. In any event, it seemed like an unimportant thing compared to bigger things. And so what you're watching is that, first of all, CNN and let's say the enemy press to President Trump are using up all their shelf space talking about the meaning of words and whether or not this word was meant and was it appropriate. Then they added the word no because there was something he said. It looked like he said it in stage voice, but it was interpreted that he said no to the question of whether Putin was still trying to hack or hack the country with cyber operations. But all of these things have something in common. They're very small, or what I call the weeds. So the weeds of this would be, hey, he said would. Did he mean wouldn't the weeds would be, hey, is he insulting our intel agencies at the same time he's saying good things about Putin? Yes. Does the President insult everything that he doesn't like? In other words, does he criticize everything he doesn't like? Well, yes. Did he criticize the intel agencies and that part of the world before lots of Times has he criticized Putin for cyber stuff and meddling? Yes, you've seen the videos of him doing this several times. But when he was standing in front of the world next to Putin and trying to make some kind of an ally and of Russia, he went easy on him. Now, is that a big story or is that a small story? It's kind of a small story because it's sort of about how you feel about it. You saw a lot of people saying, I'm humiliated. I'm sad to be an American. I'm so embarrassed. Is embarrassment a big problem or is it a small problem? Is one bad meeting that literally wasn't the end of the world is one bad meeting. If that's what it was, I wasn't there. I don't know if he had a good meeting or a bad meeting, because a lot depends what happened when they talk privately, and a lot depends on what happens after that. But if he had a bad meeting, is that a big problem or a small problem? Now, here's the part that gets interesting and the reason that I got excited to want to tell you about it. And it's the White House's communication strategy, I assume. All right, so I'm making an assumption that this is strategic. I understand. Is Bill Shine just on the job recently? Maybe that has something to do with it. But if you watch the supporters of the president, they're executing a flawless high ground maneuver. Now, I've described to most of you have been following me and reading my books and stuff what the high ground maneuver is. Now, the high ground is if you're in a debate and the other team is in the weeds, and the weeds are all the things I just discussed. Would, wouldn't. Did he say no to her or was he talking to somebody else? Wait, I feel embarrassed. Did he have a bad meeting? Weeds, weeds, weeds, weeds, weeds. And the White House is taking a higher level of concept, which, when you hear it, you can actually feel embarrassed that you were even talking about the other stuff and using up all your shelf space. I'm using shelf space as a metaphor for the time that CNN spends talking about stuff. So if they're spending a lot of time in the weeds, they don't have much time left over for anything important. And maybe, maybe that's the White House's advantage. I don't think that was intentional, but it certainly works to their advantage. So here's what the White House is saying. Yes, President Trump. I'm paraphrasing. Yes, President Trump was trying to be friendly with Putin that was obvious. And the reason is that Putin is central to fixing things with North Korea, denuclearizing Iran, Israel indirectly, the Palestinians fairly directly, actually Syria. And they're just one of the most important strategic partners you could ever have, if you could have them as a partner. So here's what made me laugh when I saw it on Chris Cuomo's show. So here's a compliment to Chris Cuomo. It was a really good show. I haven't watched a ton of them, but when I do, he does a good job. And what I like the most is that he represented as the devil's advocate side of an argument. Chris himself. Cuomo described quite accurately what the White House's message was. In other words, that we need Russia for these big things, denuclearizing and these various things. Now, anybody who hears denuclearizing kind of knows that's more important than. I felt a little embarrassed that day. We had a bad meeting. Did he say would or wouldn't? Wait a minute. Hey, I think he insulted somebody. Nah, I wouldn't have said it that way. Weeds, weeds, weeds, weeds, weeds, weeds, weeds. Nuclear Armageddon. That's what the White House is telling you they're working on. Now, when you hear that, do you say to yourself, no, that's a bunch of BS there. That's just a story to distract. Oh, wait a minute. Yes. In fact, Russia is central and critical to pretty much most of the denuclearization that is even possible in the world. That is even possible. Yes, they're important. Now here's the interesting thing. What do you not hear as a criticism of Trump about Russia? And usually you hear this in lots of other contexts. You hear this. I don't hear anybody saying, you don't have a strategy. Right. Strategy is pretty clear. Be okay with Russia, try to get a good start, put a severe penalty, and make it credible that something really, really bad could happen. If we go the direction we've been going, offer a gigantic carrot which opens up the entire field for denuclearization in all the hottest areas. It's a very clear path. And here's the part that I just realized today, actually, I don't know why this wasn't obvious to me before. Let's say you have two general approaches to dealing with Putin. One is the hard ass approach. That could be greater sanctions. Don't talk to them, don't meet with them. The hard ass version. And then there's the, the velvet glove. Let's say the velvet glove is like, yeah, we're not. We don't love a lot of things you've done, even very recently. Very, very recently. We don't like it. But look how good it would be if we would, you know, play together and not be each other's enemy. Because there's nothing in that. It's just not profitable. Right. I'm a business person, you're a business person of a different type. Putin, let's do what's profitable. And what's profitable is pretty obvious in this case. And it's not being each other's enemies. So there are two ways to go. Hard ass or the velvet glove. And here's what I realized just today for the first time, if you do them in the order of being a hard ass first and it doesn't work, you can't really go the soft version. Because if hard didn't work, it's kind of awkward to say, all right, well, we. Just kidding about turning off your lights. Didn't mean it. Yes, we crashed your economy, but friends, friends. So you can't really do it in that order. You can't go hard first and then say, well, going hard didn't get us anything, just made everything worse. They're cyber attacking us like crazy now, worse than ever. So let's try to be friends now. That's a bad strategy. But look at Trump's strategy. He's taking the risk management optimized path. He's doing the cheapest, most reversible thing first, which is to put all of your laundry out there. Look, you mofo, we don't like any of the stuff that's happened. You know, we're not going to ignore it. It's there. But I can downplay it. Right? You know, I can do that. So he's. So he's giving him the velvet glove first. Now, will that work? Well, there's a perfectly good. I think reasonable, reasonable people could say, no, I don't think the velvet glove will work. And, you know, the reason is. Reasons, reasons, history. You don't know Russia. They're going to just do what's good for Russia. You know, maybe they don't know what's in their best interest. You could make an argument that being friendly won't work this time any more than it worked when we tried it before. Although I'm not so sure we've ever tried it. I feel like maybe on the surface we have before tried to be friends, but probably we're always poking them like crazy beneath the table. So I don't know if anybody's really tried to stop poking them under the table. I don't know if we'll try that this time either. At the moment, we're poking them pretty hard with the sanctions and I'm sure our cyber folks are doing their job. But the point is Trump is taking the right risk management approach. He's doing the thing that you can try first. If being nice to them doesn't work well, we're going to know it pretty quickly. Right. It's sort of obvious what it looks like when they're not cooperating. If we can tell that they're trying to hack us all the time, we'll just look. Well, looks like the velvet glove didn't work. I guess we got to go with plan B. Plan B is terrible. Going tough on Russia is sort of terrible. But if it's the only option, if the other one doesn't work, it's the only option. Right. So look at what the White House has presented. First of all, the best risk management plan, which is first, see what you can get with cooperation. Keep your foot on the, you know, on the gas pedal in terms of the sanctions until you know what you're working with here. You know, make sure that your threats are credible because, you know, we're actually carrying out some of our threats as we're talking to them. Nice. So that's a pretty credible threat. You know, a very credible threat is one that you're executing at the moment. You're shaking hands and saying, love to be your friend. That's pretty credible because imagine what we would do if we weren't friends, which is exactly what Trump said today. All right, so and getting back to the Chris Cuomo anecdote. Anecdote. Yeah. Chris had a guest on. The guest was an anti Trumper who was going to come on some dried up senator who, if you imagined like a dandelion who's all dried up since. I don't remember who it was, some congressperson. Just imagine a dried up dandelion on the split screen. And then there's Chris Cuomo, good looking guy. And then there was the dried up dandelion. And the dried up dandelion was going to say how terrible it was that the Helsinki meeting didn't go well, in his opinion. What Chris Cuomo did was, as I mentioned, just, I would say very clearly and very honestly describe the White House's position of being nice to Putin for these strategic nuclear advantages and that these may be a bigger priority than some of this other stuff. And all he did was present it as the White House's argument and his guest went into full reboot. What he said after that I don't even have to talk about because it was so weak. His argument just fell apart because Chris presented the White House's high ground position. Yeah, we're going to make a priority here an adult decision to take care of nuclear Armageddon first. There's other stuff we care about. We don't care about those things less because we're working on higher priorities. There's just some stuff that's more important. All right, now you'll see the anti Trumpers doing the false equivalency thing where they say, but President Trump threw the country or the intelligence agencies under the bus and praise Putin. Well, that's an interpretation, I would say. I think it would be more fair to say President Trump insults everyone sometimes when they're in the room. When I say insults, I mean criticizes, sometimes insults. But criticizing is the point. He criticizes everything, absolutely everything. I'm pretty sure he's criticized everybody and everything when they were worthy of criticism. And so he just did more of it, but he did it at the same time he was standing next to Putin. Is that the biggest problem in the world? Is that the high ground? No, it's sort of in the weeds. Doesn't really change much. I don't think Putin went back and said, ha, ha. The press says that he shouldn't have said that while he was talking to me. I don't know. He told us exactly what we already knew, that the intel agencies are sometimes, sometimes not reliable. People are asking you to block that guy. Some of these are unblockable. So the ones you see that are the terrible comments, they come on and I think what they do is they make the comment and immediately log off. So that when I go to block them, it's not active and I can't block them. Or there's something else going on, just so you know. So I would if I could. I've tried a number of times. They're unblockable. So watch how many times that the critics of the president say something like, how can he compare Trump? How can he compare Putin's credibility to our intel? He wasn't doing that. He was criticizing something that was not completely reliable because there's a chain of custody thing with those servers. It's a legitimate question. And he said it before. And he's also criticized Putin when Putin isn't standing right next to him. So he's pretty transparent in all this stuff. Now, there was another thing I Heard on also Chris Cuomo's show, he was reporting on the fact that at some point recently, and I haven't heard the clip, the President said something like, the biggest enemy of the country is the press. Did he actually say something like that? And the reaction was that, oh, my God, who could say that? Because the press is the guardian of our freedom and everything. Well, that's sort of a dated opinion. I think it was true that the press was the guardian of our freedom, but I think we're a little smarter. And the business models have encouraged different kinds of behavior. So now the free press isn't really guarding the democracy. They're just on a team. And that's both sides, right? It's not like one side is not on a team. So at this point, given my opinion, the people don't really form their own opinions. They just think they do. Most of the public's opinions have been assigned to them by the press. And I'll say that again because I like saying this. People hate to hear it. Most people's opinions have been assigned to them by the press. They don't know it, they don't feel like it, but it's, you know, if you look at any citizen's opinion, find me a citizen's opinion that doesn't pretty closely match what one of the major sides, the left or the right, is promoting. People don't have anything like independent opinions. Now, in that world where people's opinions are being assigned to them, the press has insane power. You're watching a press which is very close to dethroning. That's the wrong word. Removing from office a sitting president, that's a lot of power. And if they were to do that, imagine the chaos and what that could mean for the whole planet. So the statement that the free press is the biggest enemy of the people is hyperbolic. But the free press is the biggest risk to the people. It's not the biggest enemy because I don't think they do anything they do to be an enemy. I don't think that even the worst anti Trumpers, at least the ones in the press, I don't think they're saying to themselves, I hate this country. I'm going to do everything I can to undermine it. I don't think it's anything like that. I think that they have a different sense of what's best for the world, best for the country, what is fair, and they're pursuing it in a dangerously effective way. Now, there's no law against being effective, certainly in the sense of the press, but they are so effective that they can move the population's opinion and they can move it to a good place, which I'm sure that they think that's exactly what they're doing. But the possibility or the risk that they don't know what is the best place to move it could be very dangerous. Take a look at this Russia situation. If the press had simply said, oh, it looks like the President didn't have a great meeting. I'm glad he clarified what he meant. They could have reported it that way and then just move on to the next story, but they didn't. Now, what is the outcome of the press taking such an aggressive clickbaity, you know, frame on what the President did that it's, you know, it's virtually evidence of that. You know, they've had the pundits on saying it's evidence that, you know, you can be sure that Russia has dirt on Trump and stuff like that. Now, that's the sort of thing that could actually rip the Republic apart. In the old days, I think you could say, you know, you know, even if the press went rogue, they don't have so much power that they could end the Republic, and probably they didn't have that much power. I don't think Walter Cronkite could have ended the Republic. Do you know why? Because he didn't have a B testing, or at least not as robustly as we do. Now, the reason that the press went from a benign source of information to, holy crap, it's dangerous. Now, it might be a force for good, but it's also a big, risky force because it has so much power. And because they can a B test every message, every headline, every story, they know exactly where to head for your amygdala. Is that the part of the brain? I don't know anything about brains, but. But the part of the brain that just tweaks your emotions and makes you crazy, and they can find that through technology. Walter Cronkite was just reporting the news. The press today is half information, half propaganda, and half Frankenstein science. The Frankenstein science part is that they know how to reprogram your damn brain. Like, actually literally. So when I say the press knows how to program your brain, I'm not. That's not figurative language. They're actually physically changing the pathways in your brain, and they have learned how to do it at an insanely effective level because they can test every message and then adjust quickly to the. To whatever works best. So if the President says the free press is the biggest enemy of the people. They're not enemy by intention. I wouldn't believe that for a second. But the level of danger they pose by being able to reprogram the public within 24 hours is very, very dangerous. So there's certainly something to worry about there. All right, I believe that's all I wanted to talk about today. I'm glad I could get on here and talk all of you off a tree, but the off a limb, off a ledge. I'm talking off of something. But here's the macro message for some of you joining in late. I have proposed that the White House is playing what I call the high ground maneuver, saying that we're playing nice with Russia to, to make sure that we're good with nuclear proliferation in all the hot spots in the Middle east, et cetera, and that the high ground maneuver always wins. So I've made this claim in my book, Win Bigly, that in any conversation where the high ground is present versus weeds, the high ground wins every time. And what I was watching today on the news is I was watching the slow turn. There was like this giant battleship of, my God, this president is a treasonous traitor. Everything he's doing. And didn't it feel like even 24 hours ago, it was like a battleship that was just. Couldn't be turned? Like, oh, no, something really bad's happening here. And then suddenly he did this wooden, wooden thing. And all of a sudden his enemies, instead of being on a battleship, they were lost in the weeds and they used up all their shelf space. At the same time, the White House was cranking out a high ground persuasion play, which is, let's take care of the nukes first. That's our high priority. Everybody recognizes that as a better priority if you can get there simultaneous with doing things in the best order that they should be done. First you meet, you know, see what you can do, try to be friendly. You have a second meeting. And so the second meeting, by the way. Oh, and I also have told you a number of times. So here's the prediction before I move on. The prediction is that the high ground play will. Will take this out of the news because it's just such a stronger message. Anyway, I think I forgot what else I was going to say. I'm sure I'll remember it in the morning. Oh, yeah, there's the Russian NRA spy. I don't know if you love the Russian NRA spy story as much as I do, but. You all know the story, right? So if you haven't heard her talk so she's a Russian spy who sounds like Natasha. She says she's got a thick, original Russian accent and she's a woman with NRA guns. And apparently she was the girlfriend of some guy who looks like the human model for Dilbert's boss. And apparently she was complaining, complaining about having to. Sleep with this guy. And apparently how she got as much access as she did is that, first of all, she's a young female and she's in the NRA and she's Russian and she's got that accent. And she said that she wanted to bring some kind of NRA to Russia so that maybe Putin could have an nra. And I think. I realize that Russia and the GRU is. They're master spies and that they've got a pretty strong game and their cyber department is pretty awesome and stuff, but we've now seen some of their work, allegedly for their advertisements on Facebook. That looks like something like a high school class. That wasn't the good class. It wasn't the smart kids who did a class project. It was so amateurish, the advertisements on Facebook. But now we see this. They're sending their Best Buy into the nra. Now, I have to think the NRA would be a pretty good, legitimate Russian target, right? So if you're going to. So if you're going to try to penetrate the NRA and use that as leverage for something you're going to send your best spy, you're not going to send Natasha bangs a lot. So I think the total outcome of all of this Russian spy stuff, I think the total net effect is that an ugly guy got to bang this Russian spy for, I don't know, a year or two, and all she got was NRA membership. I'm not sure who's the winner here, but I think Dilbert's boss gets the check mark now. I don't know. I don't. I don't know if anything will come of it, that maybe she actually did something that was more damaging than we know. But. But if all that's happened is what's been reported. Dilbert's boss shoots and he scores. There's something else somebody asked me about. What was it? Somebody else asked me about something here that was funny. They might have. You know, it's possible that we may have overestimated Russia. It's possible that we have slightly too much of an opinion about how good their crack spy network is. First of all, they can't even kill somebody in England without making it obvious who did it. It's like, did they ever have a conversation where they're like, can you at least try a little bit not to make it look like it was Putin? Can you put a little bit of effort into making their death look slightly accidental? A little vague doubt perhaps? Now, it still works just as chillingly, because if a critic of Putin dies in an accident, it still sends the same message to all the other critics of Putin. But do you have to do it the only way? It's obvious it was him. It makes me wonder if Putin gave the order in sort of a general way. Don't you wonder how that meeting went? It's like Putin has a meeting with his master spies. He goes, these dissidents, we must kill them, take care of it. And then that's all he says. You just got to kill and take care of it. And then Putin's. He's reading his phone a few weeks later, and he's checking the news, and he's like, they used what? Are you freaking kidding me? I said kill them. I didn't say kill them and pin it on me. What kind of master spies are you? You've totally botched it. You've totally botched it. You were supposed to make this look like an accident, not put my fingerprints on the corpses. That was not my plan, but thank God you're the only incompetent ones I have in my operation, because I've got some guys in the cyber operations who can hack things and influence elections. Never get caught, no detect. What? Okay, so our cyber guys do get caught. What? Okay, they get caught every time. So that's actually sort of like you guys who poisoned and left my fingerprints all over the crime scene. And the cyber guys left my fingers all over the crime scene, too. But don't worry, I have an undercover agent who's going to penetrate one of the most important organizations in the United States. It's something called the nra. Now, these are the gun supporting people, and they're very influential in the Republican Party and in politics in general. And so if we can get our secret undercover agent in there and start influencing things, you know, things are going to be looking pretty good in the spy business. Pretty good. So I'm going to. I'll just let you guys take care of it. Can you take care of that? Make sure you pick our best spy and just go penetrate the NRA and make sure that there's no way this can be traced back to me. All right, cyber guys. The poison guys. Crimea. I'm just really bad at not leaving clues. But will you just this one time, not leave a direct trail back to me? And the spy chief says, all right, I got it, I got it. We're doing this. And then a year later, Putin's reading his phone, reading the news. They seem to have caught somebody with a very thick Russian accent penetrating the NRA. Do you know anything about that? Yes, Mr. Putin. President Putin. We sent our best agent, Natasha Bangs, a lot, and we think she has penetrated their outer perimeter. And what exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean she's maybe flipped a senator? Has she turned anybody? Well, turned might be an exaggeration. Let's say she's working with somebody who's slightly almost connected with Republican politics, or used to be. But she's turned him into one of our agents, right? Well, I wouldn't call it turning him exactly. Well, what exactly did she do to him? Well, this is awkward. She slept with him, like, a thousand times, and then she flipped him? No, it was more like he flipped her. Shut up. Shut up. I don't want to hear this. You're disgusting. I don't need the details. You're fired. So it's possible that Putin has a crack team of master spies from top to bottom, and they're doing great things for Russia, but I don't think they're sending their best, if you know what I mean. And I think you do. Crack team. I never talked about hating success. I forget the context of that. Maybe you'll have to remind me in the morning. All right, I'm going to sign off for now. I just had to join you for that. And I will talk to you later.