Episode 257 Scott Adams: The Kanye Meeting, 13th Amendment and Turkey

Hey, everybody, get in here. Hello, Allison. Hello, Unix, Tyler, Flea. What kind of a name is that? I can't read all of your names because some of them are silly. I just read the ones that sound like real names. Edward, Melissa, Howard. Good morning. Hello, Susan. Hello, Rick. Come on in here. You know what time it is? I know you know what time it is. Don't even need to look at your watch, because when you see this. Hey, Brian. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams. Do you have your coffee? Do you have any kind of a beverage? Do you have a cup, a vessel, a mug, a chalice? Fill it with beverage or enough to sip, bring it to your lips, and join me for the simultaneous sip. Oh, I feel like the simultaneity was extra good today. Did it feel like that to you? There was a little note of hickory and maybe just a little note of simultaneousness. Simultaneity. There's probably a word in there, and I don't know it. All right, all right, all right. Let's talk about Kanye meeting with the President. We've had a little time to digest it. Now, remember, I introduced yesterday, I think it was the idea of cultural gravity. Cultural gravity. The idea that it's hard to get away from your culture. Now, that could be good if your culture is all positive, but it could be bad if there's something about your culture that you'd like to escape and differentiate yourself because your culture pulls you back. And I watched this happening with Kanye with great alarm. I don't know if there are very few things that have disturbed me as much as watching black people come after Kanye, because Kanye visited the president and was trying to make a positive difference and. And may have already done so. So my perception. And I realize we're living in different movies, but I'll just say it's. My perception is that Kanye had legitimate important issues that were of vital importance to his community. Let's say his community. In this case, Kanye's community is the world. But just in the context of this conversation, let's talk about inner cities and the African American community. Connie is bigger than that for this conversation. And he met with a bunch of urban leaders apparently, who knew what. They knew the issues and understood them, and they helped coach him. He brought one of those issues, the question about stop and frisk, to the Oval Office and in front of cameras and in front of the world, told the president he didn't think that was a good idea. The president said, well, you know, I'm flexible. Have you ever seen him say that before. So it would be difficult now for the President to go hard on this idea of stop and frisk. Now that Kanye, he stood in front of the world and all the cameras gave love to President Trump, said how much he loved him, where's his hat? And then says to him in front of the world, I'm talking to a bunch of people from the community and they say this is a bad idea. I don't think you understand how powerful that is. He created a situation where his influence went from Kanye high. Already just being Kanye, he has influence, but by engineering this situation where he's in the Oval Office on camera, the entire world is watching, he puts this out here and what was President Trump going to say to that? Was he going to disagree vigorously with him in that setting? No way. It wasn't even an option. Kanye created a situation in which his influence went from really, really high, Kanye high to oh my God, we haven't seen this before except from President Trump. I mean, you were seeing some world class influence going on. And now what would be the reaction to that from people from his community, people who would benefit from his actions, people who would like to have a greater say in the Oval Office, people who would like to bring the country together, people who would like issues such as stop and frisk and potentially prison related things, People who have these very high on their priorities. What reaction should you have expected from the people who embrace the exact same issues that Kanye is making a big dent in simply by the attention he gets? You would expect, wouldn't you expect full out support? But that's not what you saw. You did not see full out support. You didn't see anything like that. Instead, CNN immediately weaponized its African American staff, meaning the on air personalities, and they first brought on Don Levin. It wasn't during his show, I think was Anderson Cooper brought him on. I forget who. But Don Lemon gave a fairly long and impassioned response in which he was embarrassed by Kanye. Embarrassed, that's a powerful word because it's one thing to disagree with somebody on policy, but I don't think he disagrees on policy. It's one thing to say somebody doesn't have the, you know, the background or the knowledge that's always fair, you know, that's a fair comment that somebody doesn't have the background, maybe they should know more, etc. But Don Lemon referred to it as a minstrel act. That's kind of personal, isn't it? You know, I'm not black obviously, but I would feel that that was a pretty deep insult, and that it was an insult about my color, you know, about my culture, about my DNA. And to me, you know, those of you who are saying it's racist, I never buy into the black people could be racist against other black people. I don't even know what that means. So. So I don't buy into any of that. So it's not a racist thing at all. It felt like cultural gravity. It felt like here was Kanye who had worked himself into a position where he was unambiguously able to make a difference and in a positive way that the people from his community, his culture. I'm not sure if he'd call it his culture anymore because he's super rich, but from the culture he was trying to represent urban, black, poor people in general. And here he was being dragged back. It's like, no, you can't do that. Let's talk about all the things you did wrong. He didn't talk about anything. He did right. He got in the room. He got in the room. Kanye was in the room. Talk about doing something right, that's as right as you can get. You know, when President Trump said he would talk to Kim Jong Un, people said, I don't know. I don't know. But getting in the room with him was probably the most important thing that will help North Korea go in the right direction. So Kadia does the same thing. He gets in the room. That's, you know, showing up is what, 90% of the thing. And he didn't just show up. He raised. He raised issues, and he probably made a difference in how we look at those issues. Personally, I didn't know much about stop and frisk. It's not. Not something I pay a lot of attention to. But now that Kanye has said he talked to the people who are in the community, and they hate that idea, I'm biased against it. All right? I could still change my mind if somebody had a good argument or something, but. But I'm kind of biased against it. And it's because Kanye did a good job of representing it as briefly as he did. It was still powerful. And then I read another article on CNN from one of their other. She's a person of color, but I don't know exactly what her ethnic mix is. It looks like she may be African American, but I'm not sure. And so she also writes a hit piece against him. Well, let me actually call that up. So I'm looking at it. It's so, so rude of me not to use the actual Name of the writer. Let's see if I can find that quickly. Analysis. Why Kanye's lunch with Trump was a disaster. We must all work together to be better prepared. And this is written by Nia Malika Henderson, one of CNN's regular correspondent types. And she does the list persuasion. She goes, here are some ideas west raised. And the context of it is that these ideas are just crazy crap. All right? So she has to put them in a list because individually, none of them look crazy enough. So she has to do list persuasion. So here's her list of crazy things. He did bring Trump factories and Yeezy ideation centers to Chicago. Ideation, meaning a place where you come up with ideas and you create more of a design creation. Is that crazy? To bring factories to the city? He's trying to support his own hometown and talking to the person who has influence over such things and then saying that bringing them in with his own resources, he would have skin in the game. Easy would bring in his own ideation centers. Is that a good idea or a bad idea? Well, sounds good to me. Sounds really good to me. Right? Then says, his MAGA hat makes him feel like a superhero. So of course they take that in a context. So it sounds crazy right now if you put it in context. Kanye talks about how it made him feel his armor was on. He used Superman as just a way for us to imagine it. Now, who else do you know who uses very visual persuasion? President Trump. Right. So Kanye doesn't just say, I feel stronger with my hat on, because that would be weak concept talking. He says, I feel like Superman. Boom. The image of Superman pops in your head. The image of Superman's cape that's red, like the hat pops into your head. That's how you communicate. Try to forget that. You can't. You'll remember for the rest of your life that Kanye said he's like Superman with his hat on. It's instantly memorable. That's what he does, right? That we should make the dopest, know, the flyest cars. So again, he's just talking about America should make the best stuff. Let me put this in context. America makes cars. Cars. But they're boring, right? American cars are boring. Yeezy makes footwear. Footwear is boring. Except Kanye's footwear. If you've seen them, you know, his sneakers or whatever you want to call them are actually way above ordinary footwear because of design, in the same way that Tesla is way above regular cars because of design. Kanye saying, why aren't our cars designed better Right. We could sell a lot more cars overseas, especially if ours were better designed. Is that a good idea or a bad idea? It's a really, really good idea. That idea is so good, it's beyond good. It's actually a glaring hole in our capitalist system that I'd never even noticed. Well, I had noticed. I have actually noticed that cars are not well designed, except for the Tesla. And I always wondered what's up with that. Kanye is calling out this huge opportunity which is to make better design cars. So you want them more, you sell more, they're just better cars. That's actually a pretty good point. They make it look dumb. Here he says school is boring. Kids should be playing basketball while they're doing math. Now of course, if you put it out of context, people are going to say, how do you play basketball and do math at the same time? Well, that's not really the point. The point is that school is boring. It needs to be redesigned, rethought something to wake you up, keep you interested. Alright? That's what it means. Kanye described it in a visual way. You can imagine somebody bouncing a basketball and trying to do math, right? Once again he goes visual. Watch how many times he goes visual. You can't get it out of your head. It's quotable. And here's the important point, it's a little bit wrong because you really, you'd have trouble playing basketball and doing math at the same time, right? So your brain says, well, that's a little bit wrong. But then you remember it because it's visual. You see somebody playing basketball, you put yourself in the scene, you imagine yourself playing basketball and doing math. It's brilliant. It is brilliant Persuasion that CNN is trying to make look like it's silly because they take it out of context and put it in a list. He said that time doesn't exist. Well, here he is agreeing with Einstein. So Einstein said that time is a persistent illusion. Kanye says time doesn't exist. CNN could say Kanye and Albert Einstein have the same opinion on time, because that's true. Kanye and Albert Einstein have the same opinion on the nature of time, but they left Einstein out of the story. They just put it on this list with these other things. So it makes him look dumb, right? He literally said one of the smartest things. I mean, he didn't come up with it himself, but he just said one of the most well understood concepts in physics, that time is sort of an illusion and they make it look like it's dumb. But I think the context there might have been. Let's get going. More of a. Had a little more to do with. We should get going. Stop worrying about the future. We only have today. That's more about time. He said Trump and Colin Kaepernick wearing Make America great hats at the Super Bowl. Again, visual Kanye, instead of saying, let's see if I can get the president and Kaepernick to get together, which. Well, actually, that would be a little bit visual, but he took it to another level. He made you imagine the two people and then you imagined the hats on their heads. That is great. Persuasion. He painted a picture and he brought you into it. And it's a little bit wrong again, right? Because imagining Trump and Kaepernick, even though that can happen, it's like a real thing that could happen and should happen, it's a little bit wrong. So you can't not think of it. All right, so again, powerful, out of the box. Interesting, important. It would make a difference. It's visual. You're seeing pure genius here that cnn, because they don't understand anything he's doing, are writing it off as a bunch of crazy stuff. All right, let's keep going. Stop and frisk is bad. So they. They narrowed down his whole stop and frisk thing from. I talk to a bunch of leaders in the community. I'm bringing you their message because I'm in the room. I'm in the room and they're not. So I talk to them. I got their best thinking. I present it to you. Here it is. That was really important and probably changed the nature of the debate in that moment. How does CNN summarize an important change in event for the African American community? Just one bullet point. Stop and frisk is bad. That's it. That's all they're going to say about that. Right? Next, the solution to police brutality is love. Well, of course, if you treat it as an absolute, as in, well, he's saying that the only thing you need to do is love. Well, then it looks silly, right? This is what I call the absurd absolute, where somebody makes a reasonable point and then the critic takes the reasonable point and turns it into an absolute. So it looks silly. Would it help police brutality if there was just more love? Imagine, if you will, that every time a. And this is just a thought experiment. I'm not suggesting this will happen. Imagine, if you will, that every time a police officer saw an African American young person, let's say. Because that's where more trouble happens with the young. So let's say every time a Police officer saw an African American. The African American made eye contact and say, hey, I love you, man. Thanks for keeping us safe. Now, I'm not saying that will ever happen, but just go with me on the analogy. Would that make black people safer in subsequent arrests? If every time a black police officer encountered a black citizen and the black citizen looked him in the eye and said, good morning, officer. Thanks for keeping me safe today, I love you, man, what would happen? What would be the logical outcome of showing positive affection toward the police? You know what the answer is, right? You know that they would be safer because police officers being biased like everybody else would say, oh, I'm arresting one of these people who keeps acting nice to me, right? It absolutely would make a difference. But if you turn it into, like, that's the only thing you need to do, like, that's the one step, hey, how about love? It just sounds silly, right? It's not silly. It is not silly. Is actually a very active thing you could do. And you could do it tomorrow, right? It'd be pretty hard to convince black people to do that. But if they did that, if they did that, it would be insanely persuasive. Insanely persuasive. It's one of the best ideas you've ever seen. But because people aren't going to quite, you know, embrace it, I don't know how effective it could be. The salute is true. Something about an Iplane. So he did talk about the President should have the best airplane, but here, this was more in the context of design and making America greater and the fact that America should have the good stuff. We should have well designed cars. The President should have the most awesome airplane. Because if the President looks good, we look good, which is what Kanye said. I'm thinking that's pretty reasonable. The President should have not just a good, ordinary plane. The President's plane should be like crazy good. Now it's crazy good in terms of his engineering, but we don't see that part. So Kanye is suggesting that be a little more obviously awesome because it makes a better message. The President is supporting is, you know, presenting himself as the image of the United States. Perfectly reasonable. Perfectly reasonable idea, right? Opening up industries and tax breaks, of course, you know, for the inner cities. Industries and tax breaks might be part of the problem, but even a bigger part of the problem, the thing that the inner cities are missing is this is a lot of people don't realize this. They're not lacking money, which is the weird thing. There's plenty of money, private and Public to invest in cities. We're not out of money. We're out of ideas. So giving tax breaks and trying to spur industry by itself, it doesn't help at all. Right. If all you did is go to the cities and say, hey, you know, we're gonna give you tax breaks, you got nothing. Tax breaks don't get it done. You need also an ideation center where the community can look at the ideas and say, yeah, if we did this, the community would be totally on board with it. And by the way, we've modeled it. We built a prototype, we tested it, and it looks like it could even make money or at least be neutral. So Kanye has looked at a big problem in which people have tried to pick off little pieces of it. Like, people say, let's just do something with taxes, but you don't have all the rest of the parts, you know, playing with the taxes, but nobody has an idea what to do gives you nothing. Kanye is saying, I'm going to bring attention to Chicago first, but cities in general going to bring attention. So he did that. We're talking about Kanye now. We're talking about the things Kanye cares about. He just brought attention. That's step one attention. He's talking about tax breaks. Important, but not enough. Right. You need the attention. You need the tax breaks. What's the part missing the ideation centers? The part that Kanye says he'll bring? The ideas. We're missing the ideas, and we're missing ideas that are integrally tied to the community. It's not enough to have an idea that somebody who doesn't live in an inner city has. I can come up with ideas that I don't know if they're good or bad. I don't know if the inner city would embrace them. So you need the ideation center in the city. You need in part of the community. You need a Kanye type level of. Of power put into it. And then you're starting to look at. You're starting to see all the components. Who came up with a full suggestion of components that you need to fix the inner cities? Nobody. Freaking nobody. Nobody came up with that before Kanye did. Kanye is the first person you've ever seen who explained the entire solution in conceptual terms. You need the energy. He brought the energy. You need the tax breaks. We could get those, but they're not enough. You need investment. He can bring investment because he brought the energy. You need ideas. He said he's bringing that. It's the biggest thing that's missing. And he said, I'll bring it. He's bringing the biggest thing that's missing. What did CNN report? Did CNN report that one of the most important things that's ever happened for the urban world just happened yesterday? No, they saw the circus, they saw a minstrel act. According to Don Lemon. They misreported this to the point of, I don't know, it's like a fiduciary misstep, I think. And there's something about liberals distracting black people by focusing on racism. So look how CNN dismisses this. So what Kanye said was he reframed the question of should Kanye be in the room with somebody that other people have said is a racist, meaning the president, you know, is that even. Okay? So that's the setup. How does Kanye respond to that? He doesn't say the president's a racist, The President's not a racist. He basically says we live in a racist world. Am I going to let racism hold me back? Me being Kanye, that's the best reframe you've ever seen, right? For this topic. He took the responsibility out of the environment. He just sucked all the responsibility out of it. It's not about President Trump. It's not about your opinion of me. It's about me. And he says, if it's about me, I reject it. I'm not going to be. I'm not going to be limited by racism. It's one of the best answers you've ever seen. How did that get reported as one sentence? One frickin sentence that they. And then they mock him for being a minstrel act. This is disgusting. Like the way the CNN tried to apply cultural gravity on Kanye because he was really. He was succeeding. Is frightening. It's disgusting. It's immoral. I'm not sure that they think of it that way. So I won't put any intentions in their heads. Who knows what their intentions are. But the effect of it is. The effect of it is it's really ugly. All right, so watch. Watch others from the black community try to put some cultural gravity on Kanye. Watch how much they try to pull him back from succeeding. Now, as far as I can tell, the only people who are speaking out on Kanye's side here are white people. Because, correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most white people root for black people to do better? And I say most, I don't know, 90% or something. If you could go to white people and say, look, white people, there's a magic genie who just appeared and you've got a yes, no, Question here. Could you do something? If you say yes, they'll help African American community do better. I think almost all white people say, yeah, we want them to do better. Of course we do. Why wouldn't we? And especially Republicans. Republicans are all about the Constitution and the Bible. And both of those documents say to treat everybody as you would treat yourself, treat everybody equally. So of course, white people want Kanye to succeed. They would like black people to succeed, but we don't know how. White people don't know what to do. They don't know how to do it. Kanye apparently is taking a big bite out of the problem, and he might know how to do it. He's describing the problem in terms of a system and a process. Let's put these things in place and let it run. I'll put my ideation centers there. We'll bring in some investment. Let's see what we can do. Try some small trials. So the other thing that they're going after him for Kanye, this is, is Kanye has said we should revoke the 13th Amendment. And this, of course, is being revoked, reported with puzzlement, like, what the hell does that even mean? And mockery. So he's being mocked for not understanding history. And I think it is a fair statement that maybe the point is not that clear. But that's what I want to talk about. So I will confess that I'm not a constitutional scholar, and when anybody talks about any of the amendments, I always have to look it up. So I've got to see the exact words, right? So here's the 13th amendment that Kanye has said in public a few times should be abolished. So here's what the amendment says. That he wants to abolish neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, where the party has been duly convicted shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction. So the way the critics are reading this is the first line that slavery is banned. And they're saying, wait a minute. Why is Kanye opposed to banning slavery? That's the way it's being reported, right? Have any of you even understood what his point was? Why would you get rid of the amendment that gets rid of slavery? Wouldn't that be like saying slavery is okay? Wait a minute. How does that make sense? Did Kanye not take a history lesson? What's going on here? All right, that was my first impression because I was taking it off news reports. Now let's read this amendment a little bit better. Do you think the 13th amendment bans slavery? It doesn't the 13th amendment says slavery is okay. Let me say that again. The 13th Amendment puts slavery into the Constitution. It doesn't ban it. It says it's okay. Let me read it again. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude. Except. So it's the except part that's the problematic part. Right. So this is what the amendment says is okay. You can make somebody a slave. This is. Our Constitution says this. You can turn somebody into a slave if they've been convicted of a crime. Did you know that our Constitution says you can have slavery. All you have to do is convict somebody of a crime. Do they have to be guilty of the crime? Nope. Here's the fun part. The person convicted of the crime doesn't have to be guilty. They just have to be convicted. What would be a good way to get a lot of slave labor convict a lot of people who either had minor crimes or weren't guilty. What is the situation in the black community? Well, a lot of people getting picked up for drug crimes and everything else. So, in effect, this prison system has become, at least by analogy, not in a literal sense, but like slavery. And I'm thinking to myself, this is extraordinarily clever, but I don't think it's sunk in. And we'll see if. We'll see if Kanye takes this point further, because it's provocative. It seems to me that he's doing a Trump move here. The Trump move is to do something so provocative that you can't look away. And even though the provocative thing might not be technically, historically exactly accurate, it moves your mind to a new place. And that new place is where he wanted your mind. So it's where he moves your mind. That's the thing. It's not the details of the historical accuracy. You know, it's not the. What does this mean? It's not the details. It's where did he move your mind? And where he moved my mind is this conversation. I'm now talking about the fact that I didn't know that the Constitution of the United States doesn't just allow slavery. It specifically spells it out as okay. Did you know that? I didn't know that. Did you know that the Constitution of the United States approves of slavery? You just have to have a conviction. How hard is that? Now when he says, we got to get rid of the thing that says slavery is okay under the right conditions, I'm on board. I'm on board. And I don't think it's necessarily that important that the words in the Constitution get changed he's moving your mind to a place where you're imagining that the prison system, which is really what he wants to change the prison system, the. The sort of. The institutionalizing of black youths en masse. He's saying that needs to be rethought, and he's doing it by pairing the idea of slavery with it in a way that actually is pretty good, if you're serious about trying to understand the point. It's a pretty good point. But you should take the 13th Amendment approach, that he's taking this as more of the persuasion. It's more about how to move your mind into a productive place. If you're just looking at the prison problem from the outside and you're not a prisoner and you don't know anybody who is, what do you say to yourself? You say to yourself, well, yeah, it'd be nice if it was better. Maybe somebody else can work that down. It's just not my top priority. Right. But now what happens? Now, Kanye has told you that you live in a country that explicitly approves of slavery, and there's a disproportionate number of black people who are in this essentially slavery situation. Now, you could argue it's their own damn fault, you know, if they committed a crime and they got caught. Okay, that's why the analogy is not perfect. Right. Analogies never are, but in terms of how it moved your mind, pretty powerful. All right, so. So we watched probably one of the most amazing feats of persuasion that you're ever going to see. You would think that the media would be able to recognize it by now. They've had three years of watching Trump do it essentially the same place. And by the way, you do recognize that Kanye's approach is so similar to Trump's way of operating that I don't think it's a coincidence. I think Kanye is actually learning. I think Kanye is picking up. He's picking up, you know, systems and processes and priorities and ways of operating from just watching them. Somebody's reminding me that Pastor Brunson has been freed from Turkey. This is interesting because. So Turkey jailed, this guy was apparently a Christian and might have been trumped up charges, so to speak. And I loved the way President Trump treated this. Now, if you didn't follow this story, let me summarize it for you. Turkey takes an American pastor, puts him in jail now because he's an American Christian. Of course, the Christian leadership in the United States sort of took up the cause, and it seemed like it was a political thing, more so than any kind of actual crime. What did President Trump do when Turkey took a Christian and put him in jail and put their finger in the eye of the United States? Now, keep in mind, this is one person, just one person. What did President Trump do to Turkey for putting one person in prison for what looked like illegitimate reasons? Did the President say, well, I'm not going to burn any bridges over one person? Did the President say, well, we'll try really hard but know it's just one person didn't do that. He basically slapped enough sanctions on Turkey that my investments in Turkey, which, full disclosure, I have some investments in a Turkish cell phone company, totally crashed. So my investments in Turkey went down, I don't know, 65%. And when it went down 65%, you can see the entire economy of Turkey was just, just stomped on for one Christian who happened to have an American passport. President Trump was willing to take out the entire frickin economy of Turkey for that one American. And do you know what I say? I had a lot of money on the line because I've got big money invested in Turkey, not as a percentage of my portfolio, but it's a large amount. And I got crushed on that investment. I hope it'll come back. But I got crushed. And I thought, holy cow, this could actually. I decided to write it down, but I thought to myself, this could actually go to zero. I think he would have taken the entire economy out and you know what? It would have cost me a tremendous amount of money and I would have been okay with it. Because it's not really about that one American. Right? The fact that he was willing to coldly and calculatingly take out the entire Turkish economy, who by the way, is a NATO ally. It's a NATO ally and he was willing to crash the entire economy over one American. He has my total support. Total support. If it happens again and there's one American in some country that, you know, shouldn't be there, is the next country going to make a mistake like this? Because what did Turkey get out of this? Turkey got a crashed economy and they still released him. What's the next country going to do? Do you think another country is going to grab an American and keep him for no good reason? Well, if they do, goodbye economy, because we know what happens now. And the thing I loved about this especially is it didn't seem like Trump was making a big deal about it, did it? Like there wasn't a lot of talk, you know, Trump said, you know, clearly you got to give this guy back. Here's your sanctions. Then he just stood back and waited. I've told you about how Trump likes to put time on his side. So as soon as he put the pressure on their economy, he just said, all right, now it's up to you. Now it's up to you. If you want an economy, you know what to do. But we're out of it. We're no longer part of your decision. So if you want to keep this guy, it's at the cost of your entire economy. Do what you need to do. And then he just waited. Now, I'm sure there was a lot going on under the hood, but the president himself just said, take an American, lose your economy. Okay? Now, I'm going to go work on other stuff. I love that. I'm going to go work on other stuff. It's your entire economy versus one American. You decide what you want. Do whatever you want. All right, that's enough for today. I'm going to go do something else, and I will talk to you later.