Episode 281 Scott Adams: Kanye, Jon Stewart, Trump’s Latest Ad and the Coming Insanity

Hey, everybody, come on in here. You know what time it is? Yes. I was flying yesterday and I did not get to do my periscope. I missed it. I hope you miss me a little bit. So is it time for the simultaneous sip? I believe it is. I believe it is. Do you have your cup, your mug, your vessel, your glass, your stein, your container? Does it have the liquid of your choice? I like coffee. Join me for the simultaneous sip. Yes. My voice is all better. Those of you who heard me losing my voice the other day, it's because I. I don't. You know, it's weird, but most of the talking I do in any 24 hour day is right here on Periscope. So you're used to seeing me talking, but 90% of my day is just sitting in front of my computer thinking, hanging out with Christina. We don't do a lot of talking. All right. As you know, I've been on my book tour for my book When Bigly now out in paperback. If you don't like to read it in English, you could read it in whatever this is. Or Korean or German or whatever this is. Yes. You have many choices. I think that was either Chinese or Japanese. I'm not sure. But Win Biggly is doing great. It's in paperback now. So those of you have been waiting for the lower price. It's here. And you know what time of year it is. It's time for your 2019 calendar. All right. If you don't have your Dilber calendar, it's time to get it. Enough about that. Let's talk about the important news of the day. You know, the really big stuff, such as Kanye West. I missed a day, so I'm a little behind on the news. But most of you know that Kanye is pulling back from politics because he says he did not help design the Blexit T shirt and hat and logo. So he's. Because it was, I guess, a suggestion that he was the designer. He wanted to pull back because he felt used. Now, my take on this is that it would be very unlikely if Candace or anybody else intentionally said, hey, let's just claim that Kanye designed this and it's his. So I don't think anybody did that. It just sounds like a miscommunication. So the actual event is less important than the bigger picture. Were any of you surprised that Kanye pivoted away from Republicans? Think about what he said he wants to do. He wants to run for president in 2024. If Kanye really wanted to run for president in 2024, how long should he keep being more friendly with Republicans than Democrats? Well, not too long. He better sort of pivot over to the Democrats because that's the only party he could get elected in. So as popular as Kanye is with Republicans, he's popular because of, really his style, the fact that he's willing to embrace President Trump. So he's popular for reasons that don't have anything to do with policy. On a policy level, it feels to me he's going to be more likely leaning Democrat. So there's no way he would run as a Republican. But what is the very strongest package you could create going into a presidential election? Well, you saw President Trump do it. He used to be a Democrat. He used to be a Democrat. Now he's a Republican. You saw Mike Bloomberg do it, right? He used to be a Republican, and then he became a Democrat. To my mind, the strongest positioning, the strongest setting the table for becoming president is that you used to be on the other side, or at the very least, you used to be really friendly with the other side, because what is the thing that people care about most when they're voting for president? Are you on my side? Can you understand my side? Have you ever had an appreciation for my side? It's one thing that you don't agree with me. You know, it's. It's routine that somebody doesn't agree with you. Somebody says, Reagan. Did Reagan also switch? Was Reagan a Democrat? He was. Right. He also switched. Because what that does is it allows the other team to say, well, I don't love everything about your policies, but I still like you. And if I still like you maybe more than I like the one running for my own party, eh, this time I'm going to go over and vote the other side. So somebody says. So he was pacing us, in a sense. Yes, in a sense, he was pacing the Republicans because he was agreeing with them in their support for President Trump as a person and, you know, and not damning him as a crazy racist and stuff like that. And he was also. So just to be clear, I don't. I don't want to. I want to make sure that I'm not putting any opinions into Kanye. His opinions are just for him to express. So if I've said that accidentally, I think I got close to saying that, you know, we'll pull that back a little bit. We don't know what he's thinking. We can only observe what's happening. Okay, so what's happening is he's doing exactly what you would do if you were really smart and planning to run for president in 2024. So what you've seen this week was consistent with being brilliant if you plan to run for president in 2024. Now, here's the. Here's the other element. It would also be consistent with not wanting to run for president in 2024, because in either case, he wants to demonstrate his independence of thought so he can be pro president Trump as a person and as a, you know, wanting him to look good as a leader because he represents the country. So that's essentially what Kanye said. But he can also, you know, he's a free thinker, and he doesn't have to stay in any camp longer than he wants to. So I like that about him. I would say that my opinion of Kanye went up a little bit because it is the time to pivot. He needs to live in the community that is primarily anti Trump. So for practical reasons, for professional reasons, for personal reasons, and even if someday he runs for president, political reasons, it was important for him to show some independence, which he just demonstrated in a graphic way. Now, the actual source of the dispute, if you could call it that, I'm not sure dispute is really the right word, but I think there was a miscommunication about the logo. Probably is not the important part of the story. Probably not. All right, let's talk about the campaign ad that President Trump is running that CNN is labeled on their top left of their page. So, as I've taught you, the top left of a news page is the news that the news organization has judged is the most important news. So CNN's most important news just a few days before the midterm, is Trump campaign releases racist ad. Now, here's the thing. That's an opinion. It's purely an opinion that it's a racist ad, and they're actually reporting it like it's news, and then they don't show the ad. So it's the most important. The most important news is that the ad is racist and they don't show it. At least. Yeah, I didn't see it right below that. What is the second most important thing in the CNN news? You're gonna love this. The second most important thing. So it's the top left of the page. The second one down. It's a. Don Lemon says, this is Trump's ad, and here are the facts. So in other words, Don Lemon, who just came out as racist, he literally just came out on TV publicly as a racist who's got a problem with white men that really happened. It sounds like I'm exaggerating, but please, if you think that sounded like even a little bit of an exaggeration, just Google Don Lemon. White men. You'll see the video in which he says that the real problem in this country, you should really hear it in his own words, because I don't want to accidentally mischaracterize it, but his essence is he has a problem with white men as the problem in this country. Now, I'm not going to fact check that. I'm just saying that he said that. And by the standards of this country, that would be racist, as I understand what the word means, with someone who's biased against a particular race or gender in this case, too, because he made it male. So he's talking against Trump's ad that CNN has labeled as racist. The ad itself, if you haven't seen it, I'm not going to play it. But the ad itself shows a cop killer who I guess must have come from south of the border. And the cop killer is in court being, I guess he just got convicted for killing two cops and he's laughing and saying that he wished he'd killed more. And it's translated from Spanish, so you can tell that he's, you know, wasn't born in this country. Now it's just one guy. And then it shows other criminal types in the the caravan, etc. Now, is it racist to show one guy who accurately did come across the border and then killed two cops? Is it racist? Can facts ever be racist? I guess that's the question I would ask you. Can facts ever be racist? I guess they could be, depending on how you organize them. Right? If you organize them. So you left down other facts. And it created a misleading narrative. But I didn't see anywhere in the ad this suggested that everyone in the Caravan was a cop killer that wasn't there. In fact, I would think any reasonable adult looking at that ad would say, oh, there are some bad people in this group, and we don't know how many. I don't know how you could come to any other conclusion except that some of them coming across the border, whether it's in the Caravan or just the general immigration, that some number of them are committing bad crimes. Is that racist? I get how they take it. Now. They're comparing it, of course, to the Willie Horden ad back in the George Bush era. And I don't remember exactly the Willie Horton ad itself, but the sense of it was that Willie Horton was an African American man who had committed Some kind of crime. He got out, I think, on some kind of early release, and then he killed somebody. I think that's the basic idea there. And I don't remember the ad itself, but I guess I had more racial. You know, it was trying a little bit harder to make a racial case, but I'm not sure that that applies so much. When you're not talking about. You're not talking about domestic actors and you're not talking about necessarily one country, you're talking about a whole region. You're talking about crime that's coming in. Nobody doubts crime is coming in. They just may disagree about how much of it or how much it matters. But it's interesting that CNN reports as news their opinion. Have you seen anything like that before? Who reports as news something that's clearly an opinion? Even if the opinion is right, it doesn't even matter whether the opinion is true or false. I'm saying that. How do you report that as news? It's very much an opinion. All right. The other amazing and funny thing is, did you all see the Jon Stewart interview? So Jon Stewart, who was from the Daily show, as you all know, he sort of disappeared from the news, and he came back and he essentially was saying that Trump is triggering the media and that the members of the media are taking it personally. And because they're taking it personally, they're falling into his trap and overreacting and putting all the attention on what he wants. And I read this article, I just saw it for the first time, and my article, see if you had the same reaction I did. My reaction was this, Sorry, I know you love it when I clear my throat on periscope. I had the same reaction to Jon Stewart's comment, which is, uh, oh, their only smart guy came back. Did you have that impression? It feels like he's the only person who understands what's going on, who's also a Democrat, I guess. I think he would. He would classify himself as a Democrat. Have you heard anyone on the entire anti Trump, the Democrat side, have you heard anyone say what Jon Stewart just said, which is so obviously true and matters and frames it correctly and could possibly help them recover from their Trump derangement syndrome? And here's the best part. Jon Stewart is not suffering from Trump derangement syndrome. He's actually looking at it from the outside. He's on the inside of the political bubble, and yet he gave you a view of what it looks like from the outside. How many people on the left have the intellectual capability to do what Jon Stewart, who is a political comedian, I guess, for a living, or was. Pretty unusual. All right, so credit where credit is due. Jon Stewart just completely accurately framed the problem on the left. And I don't know if they can hear it. That's the other interesting thing. So it became viral, which means it got a lot of attention because it was unique, because it was from him. Things he does is more interesting. You know, he gave us a new look, is something that we were used to seeing, the old looks. But his. His take on it was that the media is taking it personally and that that's causing, you know, a lot of their problems, is that they're falling into his. They're falling into Trump's trap because they take it personally. And I think it was brilliant. And you got to give him credit. Oh, you know, somebody. Michael Moore. Okay, I will give you Michael Moore as another person who does seem to understand what's going on from both the inside and the outside. I'll give you Michael Moore as well. But I think Jon Stewart is another higher level of credibility because Michael Moore understands things. He understands Trump better than, I think, almost anybody on the left. That would be true. Which I think to his credit, because Michael Moore understands a certain segment of the population that Trump also understands. So I think whatever you want to say about Michael Moore's politics, etcetera, he certainly understands this topic. Bill Maher, somebody saying Bill Maher now. I think Bill Maher is in the Trump derangement syndrome category on this topic. He seems to be taking it personally. I believe there's actually some bad blood between Bill Maher and Trump. In the past, there was some kind of interaction they had that wasn't good. So those are your big stories. Let's see what else is happening on CNN that a week before the event, they think better. Bob Woodward on Trump. We are being had. He's doing things to distract us from policies. So Bob Woodward is sort of agreeing with Jon Stewart that Trump is having his way. By the way, did you see the clip? Oh, I hope you saw the clip of when. What was it that Trump did? Oh, when Trump announced that he wanted to end birthright citizenship with an executive order. And of course, the experts, I think, you know, 90% or 95% or 99% of the experts are saying you can't do that. But CNN realized that it was a distraction from other issues and that it was a positive distraction. In other words, if Trump was successful distracting people and making them think about birthright citizenship, it was a real good last thought going into the midterm election and they knew they were being had and they couldn't stop talking about it. If you haven't seen that clip of the CNN hosts saying, he's just tricking us to make us talk about this. And then the co host would say, but we're talking about it. It's working. We can't not talk about it. But he's tricking us. We know he's tricking us and it's working and we're still doing it. But it's the news. What are we going to do? It was freaking hilarious because they were so unhappy. They were so unhappy talking about the news because the news is what the president says. It's just always what the president says because he's the president. And so they had to report it, but boy, did they not want to report that. It was one of the funniest things you will ever see to watch them essentially sabotaging themselves on live TV because it's not the message they want out there. All right, now I'm going to make a fun prediction for the midterms, and it's primarily because I don't think anybody's made this prediction. So people are saying the Senate is probably going to go Republican. So I'll go with that. I'll just go with the experts on that. So if I'm right or wrong about the Senate, you know, don't put that on my permanent record because I'm just going to agree with the experts on this. I don't have any special kind of insight on it. But in the House, the House we imagine is supposed to go to the Democrats. That's what the experts have been saying. Some people are saying, well, you know, maybe there's some hidden Trump supporters, etc. I was on Maria Barmas Baderil Mose show yesterday morning and I made this prediction if the midterms and I'll talk about the House race in particular, if the midterms and the House race go the way everything else has gone in the Trump era, what will be the outcome? Let's see if you can guess it. What will be the outcome of the House race if it goes like everything else? See if anybody else comes to the same answer. It's going to take me a while for you to. Somebody said a surprise. I'd say, no, not quite. It might be a surprise, but you're almost there. Here's the answer. It's going to be a photo finish with an ambiguous ending. So if it's like everything Else we won't know who won on election day. Here's what I mean by that. Let's say it comes down to a majority of one to three. So one of the sides wins, but by a majority of just one or two or three representatives. Yeah, so. So if it's just that close, what do you think people are going to say? They're going to say recount. They're going to say there's something that happened in that district that's fishy. Wait a minute. How come there were more votes in that area than there are people? Wait a minute. Why was one of those polling places closed early? Wait a minute. Why are some of the votes missing? Wait a minute. Did Russia have anything to do with the election in this area? So I'm going to categorize this as a fun prediction, meaning that I don't have a ton of confidence in it. So when I get this one wrong and you put it on my permanent record, just know that I didn't have a lot of confidence in it. But for fun, if it's like everything else, it's going to be something like a tie in the sense that it will go one way or the other, but there will be something ambiguous, some gray area, some dispute, so it won't feel like it's done. That is my prediction. So my prediction is an ambiguous photo finish with different photos for different finishes, just like everything else. Can there be a tie? Well, I don't mean any tie literally, but I mean, the result was so close that the ambiguity would make the difference between which way it went. So that's essentially a tie. Yeah, because if you think about it, the primary. So Trump wins the primary, but he has to go to the convention. And there's still talk that they're going to try to take it away from him. So you think Trump wins the nomination, but you're not really quite sure because they might take it away from him. Then he wins the presidency. But now there's all this question about Russia stuff, and it's like, well, we're not going to let you stay president. So it's sort of ambiguous. Then he goes for the Supreme Court nomination for Kavanaugh, it's like, well, he's easily going to get in. Well, maybe not. Well, he's in, but maybe we'll claw him back somehow. So it's just one thing after another that you think is done that isn't done. Now, I've also made the following prediction, and it goes like this. In the year 2018, does any adult have an expectation of privacy in the digital domain. In other words, does any adult believe that they have actual privacy, meaning that no one can ever find out what they're doing on email or text or answering a poll. Do people think that they have privacy when they answer phone call a poll? Most probably think they have enough, right? Most people think, well, I don't care if I have privacy or not. I'm voting for this way or voting for that way. I'm just telling you my reasons. I don't care if anybody knows that. But some people, maybe 5%, maybe 5% will say to themselves, there's no such thing as privacy. There's no way my life is better if people find out I'm a Trump supporter. So there's a very high likelihood that something like 5% of the people answering polls are just flat out lying. They're lying just in case. Just in case they really don't have any privacy and just in case they got on a list somewhere where somebody would hunt them down and kill them for being a Trump supporter. Now, I'm not saying that any of those risks are real. I'm saying that if you have, you know, a hundred people and all hundred people of them believe that privacy is no longer really a thing. I mean, not if the government really wants to find out who you are. Some of them, I think, might lie. Then. The other factor is turnout. I've predicted the, what I call a jaw dropping Republican turnout. Now, it might also be that the Democrats will have incredible turnout. So I don't have any kind of a prediction. On the Democrat side, I suspect it'll be high, but on the Republican side, it's really going to be high. It could be record setting. So that's. My prediction is jaw dropping surprisingly big. And here are a few of the reasons. Unlike some midterms, I'm no historian, so I don't know if it's all but most midterms. Midterms are usually not just about the president, but this president is special in which everything is about Trump. So even if it shouldn't be about him, if it's not about him, it's still about him. I think 2/3 of the people voting have said it's sort of a, it's sort of a vote that's about the president in their minds. So with that many people who think it's about the president, and you've got a president with 90% support, 90% support on his own side, and what matters most is how many of his own side goes to Vote. How many of them are actually activated to stand up? Have we ever seen a situation in which a president with this much persuasion, power, at the height of his popularity within his own pole, has gone out and showed you a tremendous amount of energy of his own? This is very important. Make sure that you take away this point. More than anything else I said today, the President, by going to rally, rally, rally, rally, is demonstrating his own level of energy. What does he need voters to do? He needs them to model him, he needs them to pace him. He needs the voters to ramp up to his level of energy because that's what gets you off the couch. He's bringing these record breaking political crowds into an arena and he's showing you how much fun they're having together. Do you remember all of the, all of the video of all the Democrats who were in big crowds having fun together? I don't, I don't. I've seen, you know, pictures of Biden, you know, talking and you know that there's a crowd there. I've seen pictures of, you know, Kamala Harris and there are not many people in the audience. So the Democrats are either small groups or unhappy groups, angry groups. Am I wrong? If you were to characterize all of the Democratic get togethers, whether it's the street protests or the, you know, going to talk to one of their political leaders, they're either angry or they're not. Many of them, right. That's sort of the vibe. Trump is showing us one image after another of enormous Republican crowds. And what's the one characteristic that all of the Trump crowds have in common? Happy. Happy. High energy, happy. And they like to win. Take those three. High energy, happy. They love the collective feel of it. They love being part of something. This is very important. The Trump people really feel part of something that's positive. They can feel the love with each other, etc. So there's this enormous high energy positive thing which is being modeled directly on the leader, that they have a 90% approval of President Trump, his ability. And here's the bigger point I'm getting to. President Trump, the most influential person in a hundred years, just has directly asked the people who like him best to actually go vote. Now all politicians ask you to go vote, but you've never seen it done like this before. You've never seen him model it, move your energy up, make you part of a group, make it the most fun thing you did. You know, this year you went to that event, other people are watching it, saying, I wish I was in that crowd that looks like it'd be funny to be there live, etc. He's created this whole feeling of what it's like to vote for him and it's all positive, it's high energy and it's great. And it's especially would be entertaining if the Republicans came from behind again because it would be another surprise win. It would be like the best day they've ever had. I mean, you can put yourself into that future, can't you? Can't you imagine that you voted, say you're a Trump supporter or you voted Republican. Can't you imagine what it feels like watching the results come in and then feeling a victory? It would feel amazing. So I think Trump's persuasion on turnout will be the best you've ever seen. The Democrats, of course, are highly incented, but they're incented by anger. They've got, you know, they've got some fear, they've got some anger, you know, they've got, it's a bench, it's a whole bunch of negativity. Does negativity get you to go somewhere? And by the way, who is asking the Democrats to vote? Think about it. You know who's asking Republicans to vote? President Trump. 90% support, most influential person of all time. Who on the Democrat side is asking them to vote? Because the ask matters. It's not enough to just get people in the mood to vote. You have to directly to close the sale. You have to say, here's what I need do this. Now all the Republicans are doing that. They're of course saying their vote, you know, going sign up. They're making a big deal about it. But it's all distributed across people who have various levels of approval within the Democrats. Like no matter who it is on the Democrat side, it's going to be somebody who only has 40%, you know, high level approval within the group, etc. So they don't really have a spokesperson who has any kind of persuasive quality whatsoever to get them out there. But still they're very motivated. I think they'll do fine in terms of turnout. All right, so there you have my predictions. It's going to be a fun election night. I'm also going to go on record as saying that if the Democrats do take the House, that President Trump will get stronger, not weaker. So remember that. So there is a prediction that I'm confident of. It's sort of an if then prediction. So if the Democrats take the House, President Trump will get stronger, not weaker. And the reason is that he's uniquely qualified and capable of working with both sides. If he doesn't need to work with both sides because he has a narrow majority of Republicans, he's maybe not going to try so hard, and the Democrats will try harder to resist. But if the Democrats had some power, meaning they had the House, they would have to play a little bit productively. If you have no power, you don't have to be productive. If you do have power, you kind of have to be productive, and that means working with a president who's not on your side. So it seems to me that both immigration reform and health care are two areas in which the only way something is going to get done is if both sides agree with it a little bit and both sides are unhappy. The only way you get health care and the only way you get immigration is if both sides are unhappy. And the only way you get to both sides are unhappy is with a deal that both sides have some responsibility, both sides have some power. So Trump has two ways to win in this election. One way to win is if he gets full, stronger Republican control. The other way to win is if he doesn't. I'm sure he has a very strong preference to do it the straight way and just get more Republicans there. That would be first choice. But he does have two ways to win. It has a lot to do with what's left. He's sort of done good things for the economy, he's done good things for North Korea, etc. You know the list. But now let me make another point. I've said that one of the things that Trump does right all the time and his opponents do wrong all the time is Trump gets the visuals right. So he's talking about immigration at the same time that there's this great, I'll say great, but let's say powerful visual thing. The caravan itself, and then the wall itself is visual. And then he shows a picture of a cop killer on his commercial, and that's visual. So Trump is visual. Visual, visual, visual. And he picks also a topic that can be visual. What do the Democrats have? Health care. Now imagine your picture of health care. You can't do it right. Imagine health care. I don't know. What am I seeing? A doctor. You don't. There's no. There's nothing. You can't imagine health care. It's a concept. People just don't get activated by concepts. Now, you can imagine maybe you're writing the check or something, but that's as close as you can get. Imagine, let's see what else? Let's say climate change. Climate change. You can show weather, but I'm not sure people are quite connecting all the dots. Climate change doesn't have a good visual either, or at least they're not taking advantage of it. And partly is because they're scientifically. They're trapped in their own scientific bias. The Democrats would say that climate change is settled science from their point of view, that the scientists, the consensus is on their side. So they would not want to be anti science to sell the fact that they're pro science. So it wouldn't make sense. And one of the things that they really can't really do is show anecdotes. You don't prove science by showing that there was a hurricane that time because there were hurricanes in all times. So they do have a visual they could use, but they can't really use it because their brand is trying to stick to the facts. You know, they don't want to depart from the facts on climate science. That would be problematic. All right, has anybody heard from Q lately? Did Q just go away after Jack Posabic essentially laid bare their entire history? Has Q gone away? I haven't heard about them lately. It feels to me it's W now. And did I have anything to do with that? I mean, Jack had the most to do with it. But, Scott, you have all that wrong. Yeah, it seems to me that Q went away. All right, so I'm going to claim victory on correctly identifying Q as not a deep state actor. I haven't seen the Trump hospital video now. So people are saying that Jack killed it. Yeah. I mean, Jack had the goods on him. So whatever people think about him that changed would have come through Jack's work. All right. But it helps always to have other voices that are on the same side so that you can say, oh, other people think that, too. Is Win Bigley going paperback? Yes, thanks for asking. Win Biggly came out in paperback yesterday or day before. So you can get your Win Biggly paperback. So I don't know what happened to Q, but we don't hear from much anymore. Trump hospital video is epic. Let's see if I can find that right now. Well, I won't do that while you're waiting. Oh, Q disappeared 30 days before the election, somebody said. So it might be that Q needs to stay quiet to keep off the radar for a little while. That would not be the wrong thing to do. You're wrong about Jack. All right, Q was compromised back in April. Did I arrest anybody last night? Oh. So we had a good time last night. Christina came over. We had lots of trick or treaters. It was very fun. Yeah. There's a new chapter. Oh, somebody says, is there a new chapter in the Kindle? I don't think the Kindle version has a new chapter. I believe we just put that in the softcover. But the, the new chapter is an update on my predictions so you can see what I got. Right or wrong? Winn Bigley has always been on Kindle. Yes. If you're talking about the video where he's visiting after the synagogue attack, I haven't seen that yet. All right. I've said enough. I've got nothing left. I'm going to go look at that video and I will talk to you all later.