Episode 39 - Tasteless Jokes and Iran

Date: 2018-06-18 | Duration: 30:35

Topics

White House Correspondents Dinner, 2018 Michelle Wolf Sara Huckabee Sanders Iran prediction Short term Iran bad news may open up long term opportunities Big impact thinkers, Kanye, Candice, Hawk Newsome

Transcript

[0:05]

Youuuuu-tu-tu-tu-tube bum-bum-bum bum-bum-bum! Hey everybody, gather around. Come on in here. I’m sorry I’m late. I know it’s a little bit late for a “Coffee with Scott Adams,” but will that stop us? It will not. We’re better than that. We don’t need to drink coffee just early in the morning; we can drink it all day. Let’s be free thinkers. Kanye, let us do that now. And now, the simultaneous sip of whatever you have handy. Good stuff.

So let’s talk about a few things. Did anybody notice that Kanye retweeted Hawk Newsome’s tweet? Now, Hawk, leader of Black Lives Matter Greater New York Chapter, tweeted about this shift that’s happening—and I’ll paraphrase—but a shift toward love.

[1:05]

It’s not too far from Kanye’s philosophical persuasion, and Kanye retweets. He also retweeted Emma Gonzalez, the student—she’s probably a teen-ish anti-gun activist—and so people immediately said to me, “Did you see this? You said you like Kanye, but now he’s tweeting this anti-gun activist. Do you still like him?” To which I said, “Yes.” That’s why I like him. It’s not about guns, but in fact that his message is: “I can talk to Trump, I can talk to Emma Gonzalez, I can retweet Scott Adams, I can retweet Black Lives Matter, Hawk Newsome.” Kanye is above this. He’s already left the building. He’s above “Do I like this person’s opinion?” He’s above that.

[2:09]

Let’s go with him. It’s a good place to be. Hawk Newsome’s going there. I’m going there. Come on, it’s a good place to be. Let’s lead with love and see what happens.

Let’s talk about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Everybody’s blabbing about Michelle Wolf’s comedy routine and was it funny, and was it too harsh, and was it insulting, was it awkward, and all those things. I think everybody has covered everything they need to say, but because I am a professional humorist, I feel I can’t not comment on this. It’s sort of obligatory. So here’s my opinion on the whole thing: jokes are jokes. Jokes are jokes. We shouldn’t allow them to

[3:10]

intrude into our other feelings if we can prevent it. Now, the problem here is that there’s a relationship between how naughty you can be—how offensive, how dirty, how awful and evil you can be—and how funny you are. In other words, if you’re really, really funny, you can say awful things to people and people will just say, “Okay, I get it, that’s pretty funny.”

Let me give you an example. I ran into my stepson just by coincidence at my gym. He’s an adult, and he was telling me that his friend and him were talking about some comments they saw about me. There was somebody on Twitter, I think, who described me as looking like a toilet brush with a mouth. Now, it’s an insult.

[4:15]

It’s talking about my appearance. It’s as bad and terrible an insult as you can make, but it’s also funny. Right? And it’s funny enough that even I laughed at it. It’s like, “toilet brush with a mouth”—that’s pretty good. I don’t like that it’s about me, necessarily, but it’s pretty good. So both my stepson and I laughed about it just because it was clever enough that it sort of went into a new category where it became art instead of just being mean.

Michelle Wolf, when she’s doing comedy in front of a mixed group—meaning the people watching it, at least on TV, are some conservatives, some liberals, some women—there’s no way that her humor could be as funny to every person there.

[5:15]

Some people reportedly thought the whole thing was hilarious. I’m not going to doubt that because humor is subjective. I can tell you that for most conservatives and in my own opinion on it, some of it was clever. It didn’t quite hit my personal laugh reflex, but it was clever. Was it also mean? Well, here’s the thing: had it been funnier, I’m not sure we’d care. In other words, if everybody had thought it was funnier, we would have just laughed and said, “Haha, it’s a joke, everybody makes fun of everybody.” The President has made fun of people, people make fun of people, just let it go. But there was something about the way she did it and something about the proximity.

[6:17]

If your target is sitting right there five feet from you, it just feels like you’re being mean instead of funny. So the physical distance had something to do with how we felt about it. I would say it was a totally unimportant night. We shouldn’t draw any conclusions about it. A comedian intentionally was outrageous for the reasons that artists become outrageous. I can’t hate that. I can say that maybe she didn’t execute as well as maybe even she wanted to. I don’t know, I don’t want to read her mind, but I’m sure it could have been a little bit better. But no big deal.

I think that it reminded me a lot of the time that President Trump was sitting stoically in the audience at that same event, and he was the butt of just vicious jokes about him, and he didn’t laugh. He just sat

[7:19]

there. I felt a little bit the same watching Sarah Huckabee Sanders sit there and take it. What I mean by that is I came away from it with an even more positive feeling about her than I already had, which was very positive. Keep in mind that whether you’re a liberal or a conservative or anything in between, there’s one thing we’d all agree on: Sarah Huckabee Sanders has the hardest job in the whole freaking world.

Now, I know you can say being Secretary of State sounds pretty hard, or a lot of jobs sound pretty hard, but being President Trump’s spokesperson and a woman does make it harder. Let’s be honest about that. It does make it harder because of the topics that he talks about or has been blamed for that make it a little extra.

[8:20]

Not only is she doing the hardest job in the world, but she’s doing it really well. I think even her critics would say she does a great job at the hardest job in the world. So how did she come out of this whole thing? Classy. Better. No real damage. The way she handled it was just classy, like everything else she does.

I’ll just let that go. I heard just a moment ago that Iran is looking to get out of the nuclear deal and nobody is quite sure of what’s going on there. So that’s the news of the day. Big question mark. We’ll find out what happens about that.

What about the Conway jokes? Yeah, the jokes about Kellyanne Conway are vicious and not

[9:20]

sufficiently funny. They’re not as funny as my “toilet brush with a mouth” insult that somebody used against me, but it’s the same standard. If it’s funny enough, I give it a pass; if it’s not, it just looks mean.

So there’s a big announcement by Netanyahu at 1:00 p.m., so that would be my time in 49 minutes. There should be some big news on Iran. I’m going to make a prediction without knowing anything. Are you ready for this? A prediction about Iran without knowing anything. Presumably, I’ll be wrong because I don’t know anything. Here’s the prediction: whatever Iran does is going to look like it’s making things worse, but it won’t.

[10:21]

Meaning that our first impression will be, “Oh darn, this doesn’t look good,” and you wait a few weeks and you’re going to see that it opened an opportunity. I don’t know what the opportunity is. I don’t know what Iran necessarily is complaining about. That’s my primary generic prediction: it’s going to look like trouble today, maybe, but it might look like an opportunity because chaos does that.

If you notice, one of the best statements I saw about President Trump’s negotiating strategy is that when things are sort of stuck, he’s willing to turn over the card table. Just throw the table and say, “Okay, we’re stuck, let’s blow up everything and see what we can do.” This is probably one of those situations where blowing it up—the demolition phase—might be the most productive thing that could

[11:22]

happen. I don’t know that it matters if Iran blows it up or Israel blows it up or we blow it up, but probably the status quo just needs to be put in question. I think that we have the President, the team, the leadership—we’re in the right place in the world, the right timing, the zeitgeist. A lot of things seem to be lining up to make people a little more creative and maybe get past some mental blocks that we had before.

So I’m looking for short-term bad news that we will eventually start to realize opened up some opportunities that maybe we didn’t have before. Watch for that in very much the same way that the “fire and fury” comments looked like bad news short-term, but then they opened up an opportunity.

[12:22]

How to be pro-Trump in the tech industry without risking your career? Easy: don’t do it. Just pretend. Pretend you don’t have an opinion.

Can I help Jim Acosta? Oh, the caravan. The caravan story is another one of these fog of war situations. Do you really know what’s going on there? Like, who exactly is organizing the caravan? Who’s in it? What do they really want? How much is real? How much is fake? How much danger are they in? Why doesn’t Mexico take them?

[13:23]

It’s just a whole bunch of gray area, weird, vague. I don’t know quite what to make of it, but the big picture seems to be that this is designed as a challenge to Trump that I believe he’ll be up to the challenge.

Now, one of the things that might happen—just speculating here, speaking aloud and thinking through—imagine if the caravan succeeds in what I believe is their goal, which is to have lots of people essentially surrender and then be processed as… what’s the word they want to get designated so they can stay in the country, essentially saying that they’re in danger if they go back? Asylum. Thank you. So they want to get into the

[14:24]

asylum pipeline system to see how they can do in that. But here’s the thing: putting that many people this publicly into the system will probably make the system look like a system that doesn’t work or is at risk. My guess is that the asylum seekers, because they’re doing this so publicly and in numbers, might have the wrong result from what they’re hoping for. In other words, it might make Americans say, “Wait a minute, we have a system like that that could be so easily exploited? Let’s change that law.” So the asylum system is likely to either tighten up or go away because of this big public display. I’m not sure that that helps anybody. So we’ll see how this plays out.

Somebody said here, “Do some research or shut the hell up.”

[15:26]

Because, as I admitted, I’m talking without the benefit of knowledge. If you’ve read my book Win Bigly—which it seems you haven’t—you would know that I don’t believe any of us really understand any of the big questions. So talking without the benefit of knowing all the details is just the way it’s done. It’s the way everybody’s doing it. I wish I could do it with full knowledge, but how would I get it?

Somebody says the Golden Age is not happening because the left won’t let it in. Correct, they will try. But the Golden Age is already upon us. The key is North Korea. When North Korea comes in, it’s going to be this big, enormous mental rubber band that somebody snapped,

[16:28]

and suddenly we’ll realize that just maybe a lot of the things that we thought were impossible were only impossible because of the way we thought about it. And if we thought about it differently and acted a little bit differently, maybe all things are possible. Not all things, but I think we could make great strides in the Golden Age.

In unrelated news, I just tweeted the moment I came on here a link to a blog post I just put up in which I am doing a little fact-checking on my critics. As you know, when Kanye retweeted my Periscopes, I became the focus of negative attention because people don’t like the idea that I could be any part of something productive, I guess, if I’m associated with Trump in any way. And they dug out every rumor and false fact about me and they

[17:29]

printed them. So I thought I would address them just in case anybody wants to know. The reason I wrote it is I’m not sure it’s an interesting blog post to read—maybe for some people—but I didn’t write it for that reason. I wrote it for the purpose of being able to refer to it. So if you run into any people who are saying, “Yeah, but that Scott Adams guy who believes this and that,” you can refer them to the blog and fact-check them. That’s what I’m using it for.

Let’s talk about Joy Reid. My only comment about Joy Reid is: what’s happening? Does anybody know what’s happening? Some people are saying

[18:30]

she just said some homophobic things and now she’s saying that she has no memory of writing it, maybe somebody else wrote it or hacked it. Interestingly, I saw Rachel Maddow come out with a full unambiguous endorsement of Joy Reid, which was interesting. It’s hard for me to imagine Rachel Maddow fully endorsing someone who had ever said, even allegedly, those things. Now, it could be that Rachel Maddow doesn’t believe the accusations; could be she didn’t think any of them rose to the level of being important. The few things I saw look like they might have been a little

[19:31]

overblown in terms of their importance, but they were offensive nonetheless. I’m having a hard time caring about that topic, except that it’s more evidence that literally everybody in the public can be taken down. I don’t think anybody’s safe. I get taken down. Kanye is too big to be taken down, but Joy Reid?

Will Hawk Newsome be part of the era of dragon energy? Well, I’ll tell you: there are three Black thought leaders who have emerged. You’ve seen Candace Owens, Kanye West, and Hawk Newsome. I think those are three of the

[20:32]

most productive voices you’re ever going to find. And Thomas Sowell—except Thomas Sowell has been around long enough that he doesn’t have the current energy that the other three names I mentioned have. Larry Elder as well. Yeah, there are plenty of people who have been on the same side as the three people I mentioned in one way or another, but they haven’t had the impact. The three I mentioned are big-impact thinkers who have changed things more so than even the more academic, long-time people who have been saying similar things. They just haven’t had quite the impact as the three I mentioned.

Anything else happening? I think I’m going to get ready to figure out what’s going on with

[21:37]

Iran and with Israel. My commitment to you is that if North Korea continues to go on the right path—and I hope it will—there might be something interesting happening in the Middle East, something positive and something enduring for the first time.

Now, I know people say, as they’ve said in North Korea, “The last time we thought we had a deal, they said they would denuclearize and they changed their mind, so history repeats.” To which I say: when was the last time President Trump was president? This is not history repeating. There’s never been a President Trump. We haven’t been in this situation.

Let me say it as

[22:40]

plainly as possible: take any normal situation and then compare it to that situation, except you’ve added President Trump to the mix. Is it the same situation now? Not really. It’s a new situation because he changes the reality when he enters the picture.

Do you think we would be better friends with the East other than with Europe? Well, let me tell you one of the things that President Trump has gotten right consistently about Europe. Have you noticed that President Trump is sort of the Insulter-in-Chief? He’s insulted just about everybody. But when he’s been dealing with Asia, especially our allies, and then even when North Korea started

[23:44]

becoming flexible, the one word that would describe how he acts is “respect.” The way he has treated the East is with respect. He’s used respect as almost like a physical tool. It’s so tangible, it’s so palpable that that’s what he’s doing. Showing ultimate respect to President Xi was absolutely necessary to get us where we are. Likewise South Korea, likewise Japan, etc. He hasn’t missed a step on that. His consistent application of respect in that area is on target and works perfectly.

Now, does he need to show the same style of respect for Russia, Great Britain, Germany, other countries? No, because

[24:45]

the culture is different. Is there anybody in Great Britain who can’t take a joke? Well, there’s probably people who can’t take a joke everywhere, but let’s face it: we in the United States could make terribly disrespectful jokes about Great Britain all day long, they would make some jokes about us, we’d all laugh, and we’d have a beer. It just doesn’t mean the same thing in some cultures as it does in others.

So I think President Trump is clearly making a distinction: where respect has a function and it’s important, he sticks to it very diligently. And where it doesn’t matter that much, it’s more of a free-range situation. That’s the law of the jungle. It’s “let’s show dominance and power.” If it’s a free-range situation with people who are not hung up on the

[25:46]

absoluteness of respect, he uses a different approach, and so far that’s worked.

South Korea’s president says Trump deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. Well, I don’t know how you could argue it if we get to a good result. It’s still too early to say we’ll get there. I hate to get ahead of myself, but you have to talk about a Nobel Prize. I mean, what would be a bigger accomplishment than denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula? Come on. Forget about war with North Korea as a risk, but their proliferation of nuclear stuff—my God, it’s the biggest thing in my lifetime. The Iron Curtain coming down was a big deal, but we weren’t fighting with them

[26:49]

at the time. Is there a tweet from the President about meeting at the DMZ? Let me check that. Sometimes you guys say stuff in the comments here that… alright, so here’s the newest tweet, four hours old:

“Numerous countries are being considered for the meeting, but would Peace House/Freedom House, on the border of North and South Korea, be a more representative, important, and lasting site than a third-party country? Just asking.”

Oh my God, that’s the greatest. Let

[27:49]

me tell you why I like that so much. Do you remember what I’ve been saying about the meeting place? It’s not just wherever is the most practical place. You should pick the meeting place based on the symbolism, based on the message that the meeting place sends. The President is suggesting the DMZ and the Peace House because it would be historic, it would be a visual, it would send a message.

Now, the downside of that is that it is also famous for being a war zone and it’s probably not as visual as, say, Switzerland. I had been pushing Switzerland as an option because if you get in your head “North Korea, Switzerland,” the more you pair those two ideas, the

[28:49]

more likely you’re going to get a result that makes North Korea a little more like Switzerland. Persuasion-wise, the place you do it is going to change the result. It just does. The President is the first person who is not me to point that out. Fact-check me on this, but has anybody else that you’ve seen discussed the meeting place in terms of the message that the meeting place itself sends? Have you heard anyone else discuss that but the President and me?

The negotiation isn’t just the negotiation; it is also the

[29:50]

location. That’s a variable. Somebody said Switzerland is thinking like a Westerner. I think that’s a fair criticism, except that Kim Jong-un went to school in Switzerland. So if it were a random neutral country that’s closer to the West, I think your criticism would be spot-on. But because he already has a connection to it, that makes sense.

And then we might talk again later. Talk to you later.