Episode 173 Scott Adams: Kanye on Kimmel, The Makeup Artist Mug Shot, BLM Not Voting, More

Date: 2018-08-10 | Duration: 26:25

Topics

Woman with great makeup skills in mug shot after weed bust NFL kneelers…again BLM encourages not voting Censorship of InfoWars by big tech… Big tech has demonstrated monopoly powers Twitter, the only responsible entity here Kanye lives his public life as art Artist pasting Trump decal stars on Hollywood walk of fame

Transcript

[0:06] Well, I look lovely in this color of shirt. I just noticed I think it accents my eyes. Come on in here—Janet, Tyler, JP, I see you, Tom, Donna, Carrie. Make sure you’ve got your mugs, your vessels, your glasses, your cups, and they’re full of the beverage of your choice. Yes, the best sip of your entire day is coming up, and you know how exciting that is. Join me now for the simultaneous sip.

My favorite story in this slow news day—today is a super slow news day, and you’ll know by the stories that I talk about. The first one was: did you see the story on the Fox News website about the woman who was busted for marijuana, but her makeup in her mug shot was so good that there was a viral campaign to free her so that she can give makeup tips?

[1:07] Did you hear that one? I saw the headline. There was a mug shot and it was so good people were asking her for tips. I thought to myself, well, I don’t know anything about makeup, but you have to see it. You won’t be able to see it on my screen there, but I opened it up and I thought to myself: how good can her makeup be if over 200,000 people forwarded it or tweeted it or whatever they did to ask her for makeup tips? I opened the picture and I thought, holy cow, she’s really good at makeup.

[2:09] Because I don’t know anything, and even I can tell her makeup is amazing. She’s doing something with her eyes that matches her shirt and I’m thinking, oh my God, this was really good. It looks like she’s going to have a career out of getting arrested because she’s so good at makeup, which is hilarious.

Apparently, there were some—I didn’t watch football last night—but apparently, there were some players who either kneeled or just raised their fists in the air. A few people protested, and the President’s response was predictable but not that harsh. Remember how originally the very first comment that I think really got everybody’s attention was when he was at a rally and he was in rally mode? His rally personality is the attenuated one; it’s like bigger than real life, it’s more theatrical.

[3:10] In his rally personality, the President said something about, “You should fire those sons of…” and today his complaint is going all the way to just, “Hey, be happy. Chill out, be happy, just play the game. Costs a lot for those tickets.” The tone of the complaint went from Defcon 10 to, “How you doing? How you doing today? And maybe we shouldn’t… think about it, take it under advisement.” So even the President couldn’t get worked up about it. It was so irrelevant.

Now, I have a prediction that I think will agree with probably many of you: I can’t see football lasting in the long run only because of the head injuries.

[4:11] Head injuries are really bad, so I’m not minimizing that. It’s a big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big problem that we’re treating like it’s just an obstacle. I can’t imagine that there will be football in 20 years. That would be surprising, unless they figure out some new technology to protect heads.

I tweeted just before I got on that Hawk Newsome has announced that at least his folks, who are part of Black Lives Matter Greater New York area, are talking about not voting. They’re actually promoting that Black Lives Matter not vote for the perfectly good reason that neither side is giving them what they think they want—well, what they do want.

[5:14] You don’t “think” you want something; you just want it or you don’t. And I thought to myself, well, that is interesting. Because if all they did was change their vote—sort of silently, just go to the polls and vote differently—I don’t know if it would make that much difference. But declaring that you won’t vote in a context where African-American voters were not always even able to vote—they didn’t even have the right to vote for our entire history—that’s kind of a good play in terms of getting attention and making the point. If you counted up the total number of Black Lives Matter folks who will be part of this, I don’t know how big that would be, probably not gigantic. But in terms of getting attention, it’s really clever and probably will get some attention.

[6:16] I saw it in an article, so obviously the press likes this, and that’s part of the game: you’ve got to get attention before you can persuade. Somebody says there’s no valid point for Black Lives Matter. Yeah, their brand has not been as useful as you’d think. The trouble is that the brand is divisive. It’s hard to promote togetherness from a brand which is seen as divisive by its nature. So that’s a tough barrier to get past.

What else is going on today in our slow news day?

[7:18] That was an old article from two years ago? I don’t think it was an old article. 48 hours is up—oh yes, thanks for reminding me. For those of you who don’t know, I have the 48-hour rule. When somebody in the public eye says or does something that is provocative, I say: wait, wait, wait. Let’s just wait 48 hours. The public is demanding clarifications, and maybe they’ll give it, and we should accept the clarification. It’s just a better world if you let people clarify. You don’t jump on their first statement and say, “Oh, I know what you mean, and it’s the worst thing in the world.” Just give them 48 hours. Let them clarify.

The big tech companies—Apple, YouTube, and Facebook, I believe—have not made any comment with specificity about why they dropped InfoWars.

[8:19] Now, it’s a brutally effective move on their part because InfoWars was unpopular with most of the country, probably the majority. They had specific things to point to, and some of those specific things had to do with children, which is sort of the ultimate nuclear weapon these days, speaking of the Sandy Hook incident. So anything that has to do with children becomes just more nuclear. Excuse me, I’ve got to wipe my nose.

The 48 hours are up, and I said that I would hold my primary comments until it’s over because they haven’t clarified. So now we live in a world in which the big tech companies can evidently collude.

[9:20] It was either they talked about it ahead of time, or two of them were fast followers of the others, or more of them—I guess Spotify is in it and some others. So it’s actually several platforms. They either colluded by talking in advance or they just followed each other’s lead, which ends up being the same thing.

And I say: can we live in that world? Would you be okay living in a world where the big tech companies can not only addict you with their technology—literally turn the society into blithering, addicted robots—but can we have them then closing down parts of speech which they find unpleasant or untrue or whatever it is that is offensive about them?

[10:22] Are you willing to live in that world? Nope, you are not. Neither am I. I am not willing to live in that world. And so, the big tech companies have now crossed the Rubicon. Does everybody know what that means? They crossed the Rubicon. That’s one of those statements you hear on TV all the time, but if you don’t follow history, you don’t know what it means. I’m not sure I entirely remember the details, but something about Caesar. Before he was a dictator, he was a general and he was outside of Rome on the other side of the Rubicon River. It was said that if he crossed the Rubicon River, it meant he either had to conquer Rome with his army and become the dictator, or he would be killed because he had to either win or die.

[11:24] Crossing the Rubicon means you can’t go back. Canceling InfoWars is crossing the Rubicon. They can’t really go back from that, and they’ve entered a world where the public can’t put up with it. Several things could happen at this point. One of those things is that it could be that the Right will take out some big company on the Left. In our world, where mutually assured disaster is the only thing that ever works—well, that’s an exaggeration, but sometimes mutually assured disaster is the only thing keeping things stable.

I’m never in favor of boycotts and going after commercial enterprises. I just think it’s bad for society. So this is more of a talking about the alternatives than a recommendation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you see some largish—not largish, but let’s say on the small end of large, like InfoWars was.

[12:27] InfoWars isn’t Fox News, but it’s still large. I wouldn’t be surprised if you see some left-leaning media site taken down by people on the Right who just need a scalp, whether it’s Huffington Post or something like that. I don’t know what it would be; Gawker’s already gone. I don’t know if that’s going to happen. I’m not sure I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that, but what recourse do any of us have? It’s an awkward situation because many of you don’t want to be on the side of defending InfoWars because that gets you associated with whatever bad thing that you believe they did.

[13:28] So what are you going to do? Well, it seems to me that the only choice is some kind of regulation. What’s clever about what the tech companies did is that in a Republican administration, regulating companies is what nobody wants—at least the group in power doesn’t. So what do you do? Right now, I don’t think there’s any recourse. But let me say as solidly as I can that I recommend government oversight. I think that in terms of maintaining freedom of speech, even though these big companies are private companies and as private companies they have rights and they can do what they want, I think we’ve reached a point where they’ve demonstrated monopoly power.

[14:29] If the big platforms can get together and knock somebody off who is not violating the law and not even violating their internal rules—at least in a way that they’ve explained—isn’t that a monopoly? If that’s not a monopoly, what the hell is a monopoly? There’s no such thing as a monopoly if that’s not one. And it seems like that is one thing that a Republican administration can break. They can break a monopoly.

So I would say at this point, the government does have to be involved and it does have to insist. I’m not sure what they would insist. Maybe there’s some independent oversight. Maybe there’s a team of judges that looks at cases like this. That would be the easy solution—some kind of regulatory group that just looks at the exceptions.

[15:29] Let everything do what it does, but if there’s an exception, let it go to a Free Speech court or some new thing with three independent judges who just look at it and say, “All right, we don’t like it either, but it’s Free Speech, so you’re back on the platform.”

Now, credit to Twitter—some of you may not want to hear this—but Jack Dorsey did decide to keep Alex Jones and InfoWars on Twitter because they had not violated Twitter’s published guidelines. So the hero in this story is Twitter. You probably didn’t see that coming, did you? Twitter decided to break with the pack and come out in favor of Free Speech. Can’t hate that. You cannot hate that.

[16:32] Now, in terms of shadow banning, that’s a more complicated story, and I think that’s a wait-and-see. The idea is that Twitter is working to be more transparent about their algorithms, and they’ve hired some outside people to help them with that. There was some pushback because at least one of the outside people is so anti-Trump that it looked like it couldn’t possibly be anything but another way to block conservatives in disguise. But I say wait and see because transparency is a big part of what Twitter says they’re working toward.

If the people working on it are partisan, but what they come up with is transparency, I’m okay with that because there’s no such thing as people who are completely nonpartisan. We should just give up on the hope that you can hire somebody who doesn’t have an opinion about the President of the United States. It’s not really a thing anymore.

[17:32] But you can find somebody who’s willing to do their work in public—somebody who’s willing to say, “All right, here’s what we can show you with the algorithm. Here’s what we’ve done. Look for yourself. You can see in your search results that that’s roughly what’s happening.” So you can tell that we’re doing what we said we’re doing.

If we get to any kind of situation like that with Twitter, then you’re going to have to say what you watched was Twitter being the only responsible corporate entity in terms of InfoWars and the way that was treated. Twitter was the only responsible entity, the only one who respected the Constitution on that question. I’m not going to defend everything Twitter’s ever done; I’m saying on that question, they’re the only ones that defended the Constitution indirectly because all they were doing is defending their own rules and keeping the integrity of the platform, which I appreciated.

[18:33] So I say, given that Twitter broke with the pack and defended Free Speech and defended the transparency of the rules and said, “Here are the rules, here’s what he did, transparency says we’ve got to keep them on the platform,” and they did—as long as that’s the case, I think you’ve got to do a wait-and-see. Give Twitter a wait-and-see about their transparency. Be as critical as you want after you see what they come up with. Give them a little time to work it out. But I think you’ve got to say that the recent evidence—the way they handled InfoWars—suggests that they have more of a commitment to honest debate and Free Speech than the other platforms.

Let’s talk about Kanye.

[19:35] How many of you saw the interview with Kanye West on Jimmy Kimmel? I think it’s available all over the internet today. If you haven’t seen it, you should watch it just for the entertainment value because Kanye West is so freaking interesting no matter what he does. We’ve said this before: he’s a different kind of artist because he’s not someone who just creates art; he’s someone who lives it. His life, everything he does—from the shirt he puts on to the things he says to the projects he takes on—it’s all art. He’s the most comprehensive artist, maybe of all time. I didn’t realize that he started as a visual artist, in other words, someone who paints or does graphic design and that sort of thing.

[20:35] He’s a visual artist, a clothing designer, a producer, a music maker—makes beats—and then the way he lives his life, the way he interacts with the public, every part of his life that we can observe is art. It’s amazing. But you have to watch his interview with Jimmy Kimmel because the two of them have a good chemistry and it’s just great to watch. So don’t miss that if you have a chance to watch it.

Somebody said that I’m on the “Kanye Kool-Aid” since I got retweeted. You are incorrect. I got retweeted because I was on the Kanye train. I was on the train first and then he retweeted me.

[21:48] Somebody said, “Is Kanye so successful because of his mental illness?” It’s not a cause-and-effect thing; it’s more of a correlation thing, I think. There’s lots of evidence that artists have minds that are put together differently than other people. I think if your mind is that open and you can see the world that clearly, as artists have to, I’ve got a feeling that in order to have those capabilities, there’s probably some instability that just comes along with the package. It’s sort of like driving really fast will get you to your destination sooner, but with more risk of crashing. It’s probably something closer to that.

There’s a request for a simultaneous sip, and I, being a man of the people, have decided to do just that.

[22:50] All right, somebody just reminded me of my favorite story I completely forgot about. Did anybody see that? Well, you all saw the story that President Trump’s star on the Walk of Fame—Walk of Stars, whatever it is, the Hollywood Walk of Fame—that bad people were pickaxing the President’s star. They tried to replace it and I think it got pickaxed again.

So some artist came up with these—what would you call them, enamel? No, not enamel, these laminated stick-on stars that look exactly like the Star of Fame and went on that big long sidewalk that has lots of blank squares and just stuck dozens and dozens of these vinyl decals.

[23:52] They’re vinyl decals. Now you have to see the pictures of it, because even in really clear pictures, they really look like they’re actually stars built into the concrete. The reproduction of them is so good that it’s just sensational. As a political prank, it’s freaking fantastic. It’s just wonderful, and it also sets a precedent. It seemed like that one situation where the Trump supporters were getting the worst of it. It’s such a tiny, small, unimportant thing, the little star on the sidewalk, but it seemed like the only thing that was clearly working in favor of the anti-Trumpers.

[24:52] And then somebody comes along with vinyl decals and completely changes the equation, which was hilarious.

I don’t have much else to say today, but I will give you another shout-out to go check out blightauthority.com, which is already getting lots of comments. That’s the website that is collecting suggestions for what to do in those areas in the urban centers that have been cleared by the Blight Authority nonprofit. Now you’ve got this basically free land in these inner cities, and we’re collecting ideas about what to do about them. The better your ideas, the more chance something might happen.

Let’s talk about Space Force. You saw the suggestions about what I guess the public is being asked to vote on, what the decal for Space Force should look like or the logo.

[25:53] Something tells me that—I’m going to put out a prediction here—I think the public will come up with a better logo. I think watch for the public to come up with a better one.

All right, I’ve got to sign off now and I will talk to you all later.