Episode 188 Scott Adams: The Anti-Trump Loop Pause

Date: 2018-08-20 | Duration: 37:47

Topics

Anti-Trumpers embarrassed by other anti-Trumpers CNN and MSNBC want you to think past the sale in their coverage Mollie Hemingway’s observation of the anti-Trump complaint “loop” Rant on product design deficiencies, lack of real world testing Reverend Sharpton and RESPICT, why we should give him a pass Jack Dorsey comments on Twitter shadow banning

Transcript

The Simultaneous Sip

Hey everybody. Hey Jeremy, come on in here. The people who come in first have a chance of hearing their own name. Tyler, and Kyle, and Amy, and Donna, and Savannah, and JP. If you get here early, sometimes I say your name. When you get to a thousand users, then you get to enjoy the simultaneous sip. If I look a little tired this morning, that’s because I’m a little tired this morning. Time to join me for the simultaneous sip… Oh, that’s good.

I told you there was an interesting thing happening with the coverage of the President. It seemed to me, and I gave you three examples yesterday, and there’s at least one more today.

Anti-Trumpers Embarrassed by Other Anti-Trumpers

Did all of you see the Phil Mudd interview on CNN with Paris Dennard? Dennard is his last name; I forget his first name—a Trump supporter. The net of it is that Phil Mudd was yelling, “Get out! Get out!” during an on-air interview. He was yelling at somebody to get out. He seemed to be melting down.

Well, that was the fourth example of what appeared to be anti-Trumpers who were embarrassed by other anti-Trumpers. If you look at the host who was trying to monitor this situation, he had that look on his face like, “Oh, this guy’s on my side. What do I do? I want to stop him, and I’m embarrassed, but this guy’s on my side.” Paris Dennard—yes, that was his name—did a very good job on that interview, by the way. A very good job staying on message.

So we saw, if I could remember my examples: Preet Bharara, another Trump disliker who cautioned Bill Maher back from saying “traitor.” He was like, “Well, that’s not helping. Goes a little too far.” We saw Clapper actually come out against Brennan’s rhetoric—not against Brennan or his message, but against his rhetoric—and said the rhetoric wasn’t helping. Did you see that coming?

The Mirror Effect

It seems to me that something interesting happened in the last week. What I think it is is that the anti-Trumpers are starting to hold up a mirror to themselves. Now, the way the mirror works is that you don’t see yourself exactly. In this case, what you see is someone who is on your team who has gone too far. You’re watching them and you’re saying, “Do I look like that? Because I’m on this person’s team, and they’re definitely going too far. I’m not sure I want to be on this team because it’s a little bit embarrassing.”

I’m going to claim partial success on my prediction, which I got wrong early on when I said that in the first year, I predicted that anti-Trumpers would become embarrassed at their opinions. I thought the reason would be that things would be going so well that people would just be embarrassed that they thought it wouldn’t. But it’s very clearly embarrassing at this point. Am I wrong? I might be reading too much into this.

Here’s one of those points. If I can teach you anything, here’s one of those moments where you have to check yourself and say, “Is this confirmation bias?” Everything that I’ve described so far totally could be, and I wouldn’t know the difference. So I’m going to ask you to do a little conceptual fact-checking on me here. Somebody says, “Still too early.” “Still too early” is a reasonable comment, but I’m feeling it right now, and it looks like it might be part of a trend.

Mollie Hemingway’s Observation of the Loop

There’s a second part of the story that gets more interesting. I forget who said it first, but I saw Mollie Hemingway—she might have been the one who noticed it first—that there’s something like a “loop” going on. I hope that was Mollie’s comment; there might have been somebody who also was in this story that I’m forgetting.

She noted how the anti-Trumpers go through certain loops. The loop is: “He’s a racist, he’s a racist,” and then he does something for black employment, and then they get off that for a little while. Then it’s: “He’s a colluder, he’s a traitor, he’s a traitor,” and then if that’s not working out and Mueller isn’t coming through and there’s no evidence and it’s not looking like there’s going to be anything in that, then they get off of that loop a little while. Then they get on to the: “Oh, he’s crazy, he’s insane, he’s losing his mind, he’s mentally ill.” It looks like they were trying that out yesterday.

Here’s the situation: it looks like anti-Trumpers are becoming embarrassed at their own team. That’s what it looks like. It looks like they’re flailing around to find the next loop.

CNN’s Page Layout and Media Coordination

It’s not so organized that there’s really an order that comes down from the top and then they all do the same thing. It absolutely was that organized during the campaign when Hillary Clinton started saying, “It’s a dark speech. Dark, dark, dark.” All the anti-Trumper networks and pundits said “dark” at the same time. That one was very clearly a memo. The memo came down; they knew what to say; they all said it at the same time.

With this loop situation, it’s a little more free-range chickens. They’re looking at other people and saying, “Okay, looks like on MSNBC they’re going for the ‘crazy’ thing. We’ll try the ‘crazy’ thing.” But they haven’t quite settled on it.

Here is the good part. I’ve taught you that if you’re trying to figure out what a news organization thinks should be the big story, it’s always at the top of their page and on the left. The top left is where the important stuff is because that’s the way we read. You’re going to look at the top left first. Whatever they put in the top left is what they want you to know. Every single time I’ve talked about CNN’s page, what has been in the top left? You already know the answer. The top left has been: Trump did this, Trump is outrageous, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.

Let me read you all the stories on the top left of CNN: something about the Vatican, something about the Pope, something about justice for the dead but not the living. But Trump isn’t mentioned. I don’t know what that is. Something about a cardinal, something about priests, and something else about the church. Trump is not on the top left of CNN. Is that a coincidence? It’s not a coincidence because they’re out of ideas, and they’re reloading, and they don’t know where they’re going next.

John Brennan and Thinking Past the Sale

I think that the Brennan thing—going full “traitor” and then losing his clearance because of being erratic or going too far—they tried to ride that hard. They tried to turn that into, “My God, it’s the First Amendment.” But here again, CNN is trying to make you think past the sale.

Let me explain this. All of the coverage from CNN and MSNBC about Brennan losing his security clearance said something like this: “It’s bad for freedom of speech. It’s chilling. He’s trying to stop Brennan from talking.” What does that make you think past? You always have to see what they’re making you think past.

If they’re talking about whether it’s chilling to free speech, they have made you think past the question of whether it was true. If Brennan was an absolute bad character, a bad actor—this is allegedly—and he was trying to bring down the President with total BS, wouldn’t that be the story? Wouldn’t that be the story if the ex-head of the CIA were part of the Deep State and part of a plot to take down the President? That’s the story, not the fact that that guy allegedly lost his security clearance.

Do you know one of the reasons that you might lose your security clearance? Trying to overthrow the United States. That would be a reason. Let’s say a hypothetical person who had security clearance became an actual traitor and tried to overthrow the United States. Let’s say in my hypothetical we know this is true. Should that person lose their security clearance? Yes, they should. Would anybody argue that? Would they say, “But what about the traitor’s free speech? What about the traitor’s ability to get a job? Are you trying to discourage other traitors in the future? Are you trying to shut them up so they can’t complain?” No, nobody would say that because they would say that’s of course how you treat a traitor. If somebody’s trying to play a coup for no compellingly good reason, that person needs to lose their security clearance, and that is not a question of free speech.

If you watched all of the coverage on CNN, it was all making you think past that question, making you think past it as though Brennan had a good point and he was not a traitor trying to overthrow the country. Now, do I personally know if he is or is not a traitor trying to overthrow the country? No. How the hell would I know that? That’s why I’m saying “alleged” every four or five words here, because I would not make that claim without pretty solid information. I would need a lot of information and I’d have to be really certain of it to say that somebody was trying to overthrow the country, and I don’t have that.

Confirmation Bias and the Collusion Narrative

What we do have is a series of facts and evidence that certainly do paint that picture. But if I’ve taught you anything—and here I’m getting back to confirmation bias—is it possible that John Brennan could be not a traitor and not trying to overthrow the country? Do the facts suggest that’s possible? I’d say yes, it’s possible. If you ask me, “Does it look like that?” No, it doesn’t look like that at all to me. It looks exactly like the evidence clearly suggests he was part of a small group of people who were trying to change the election because they didn’t like the outcome. That’s what it looks like.

But you can’t take the fact that there’s really a lot of suggestive evidence for that case; that doesn’t make it true. Remember, the other side is seeing something exactly like this for President Trump. If you’re an anti-Trumper, you’re saying the same thing I just said, but you put a different name in there. You would say, “Well, look at all the evidence that the Trump administration was colluding.” Now, I don’t think that happened, and I don’t think the evidence shows that at all.

In fact, when you look at the Trump situation, what is the first thing that the Trumpers say? Usually, your first evidence is your best evidence. What’s the best evidence that people present when they say, “Yeah right, the Trump administration was colluding with Russia”? The best evidence was that lawyer who had a meeting once. As I’ve said other times, if she had done what she promised, it would have been totally legal. Which is: give the Trump campaign information about Hillary. If she had done it, totally legal. But she didn’t even do it. That’s two full levels away from being illegal. Two full levels. And that’s their best evidence that Trump colluded. And the other one was the joke he said about, “Hey Russia, if you can find those emails.” Literally a joke.

Expertise in Jokes and the Fox News Story

I’m seeing some pushback, by the way. Did you notice I became part of that story? I have the strangest life because I’m literally just sitting here in my office, all by myself in California, and I’m talking to you on my iPad sitting in front of me and talking about a story, and the next thing I know, I am the story. I look on the Fox News site and there’s a big story about me and how I have declared that Brennan couldn’t take a joke or didn’t recognize a joke when Trump said, “Hey Russia, if you have those emails.”

I stand by that with complete confidence. What’s funny about it is that people question my capability to recognize a joke. I have written a joke a day, at least one and most days more than one, for 30 years. Let’s do the math. Hey Siri, what is 365 times 30? The answer is 10,950. So yeah, I’ve written somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,000 jokes that became comics. If you add on top of that the books I’ve written, etc., I’d say I’ve written 12,000 to 15,000 jokes. I’m kind of an expert on it. I have literally written chapters and books on how to construct jokes. I used to have a thriving speaking career in which I mostly presented jokes or humor. People ask me if I was a good expert at recognizing a joke, to which I say: yes.

Rant on Product Design and Testing

I’m going to switch topics. This has nothing to do with anything except I’m going to vent a little bit about something that’s been driving me crazy. You see this? It’s made by Jackery. It’s an extra battery for your phone. I’m going to make a complaint about this product, but it’s a complaint about most electronic products, so it’s not just about these people.

Here’s the general complaint: people make products and they don’t have anybody test them. Not anybody, before they go to market. Why do I know that’s true? Let me explain. If you have a smartphone for which you would use an extra battery, would you be using that smartphone in a bright light every time you used it? No, you would not. In fact, many times you use a smartphone, it’s in the dark.

What would be the dumbest thing you could do to design a product that you use in dark light much, if not most, of the time? What would that look like? Would it look like something that has a black button on a black surface? No, you would not. That would be the dumbest thing you could ever do. The dumbest product you could ever make is one that is meant to be used in low light that’s a black product with a black battery.

But am I done yet? Oh no, I’m not done. The great thing about this is that it purports to have two cool jacks, which is a very good feature, by the way. One is for iPhone, and then the other one I use for my micro-USB for my headphones. So it’s a very good feature that you have both of those. But here’s the thing: when they’re both in, how do you know which side is the one you want at any given minute? Well, it’s very clearly labeled up here in a way that you can’t see in the dark.

So now they made it symmetrical and identical, so in the dark, you can’t even feel which way is the right way. Not only that, but the front and the back are identical in the dark. The edge is identical. And it’s worse: the bottom, where there’s nothing you want, is the same shape as the top, where there are two or three things you want. Now, how many times when I want to use this do I have to go, “Oh no, it’s this side… no, it’s this side… no, it’s this side”? How many times do I have to do that? Every freaking time. Every single time.

Bose Headphones and Design Flaws

I have a little bit of the same complaint with my iPhone, but at least with the iPhone, I can usually find that the fingerprint thing is a little different than the top, and the front is different from the back. So I’m like, “Well, that’s better.”

Here’s the next problem. In order to charge this, you need to use this little micro-USB. If you’ve ever tried to put a micro-USB into a micro-USB slot in the dark, what do you find? How many times do you put it in upside down? Half the time. All you’d have to do is make this device a little bit different on one side than the other so that you can tell the top from the bottom and the left from the right reliably in the dark. Then they put the USB right below the micro-USB. So if it’s in the dark, what are you doing the whole time? You’re shoving your thing into the USB, which is the wrong hole. Everything about this product is designed wrong. But it looks cool in the light. If you show this to somebody in the light—“Hey engineer, look what I made”—the other engineer says, “Hey, this is perfect. I love this feature. It’s even got a flashlight built in.” This is great in bright light.

Most of the products in my house have the same problem. Here we have an excellent product, by the way; I highly recommend them: Bose wireless speakers. But wait, do I use these in the light half the time? Half the time I use them in the dark. If you’re going to use them in the dark, would you put black buttons on a black surface? Well, in this case, it’s not so bad because you can find them easily if you have them on right. You know that the buttons are back here and not back here, so you can learn that. But what’s the problem? Half the time you put them on backwards. Why? Because yes, they are labeled left and right somewhere, but I can’t find it because I can’t really tell what’s left and what’s right. Who tested this stupid thing? Nobody. Nobody ever tested this product because if they had, the engineer would have watched them do it and said, “No, that’s not right.” Then the engineer would have said, “Oh, let’s make it so it’s more obvious what’s the left and what’s the right.”

Then let’s say you want to charge it. Here’s a black hole on a black surface which you can’t tell is going to be on this one or on this one. So it could be this one or this one, and it could be upside down or right side up. It takes me two to three tries to figure out which side the hole is on. Nobody tested this product.

The Untested Outdoor Umbrella

Nobody tested this product. I bought an outdoor umbrella recently. It’s a cantilever, meaning it’s a big, sort of a flat umbrella that you unroll. Once I unrolled it, part of it is that the little arms you stick into a cloth holder for the arms, and that’s what keeps the umbrella on the metal structure. As I was putting it together, I looked at these little cloth holders and I thought to myself, “Wow, it looks to me like even a slight bit of wind would just rip these little cloth holders right off.”

I walked out the other day and, under a very slight wind, the umbrella ripped itself apart. Exactly what it looked like as soon as I looked at it. I saw, “Well, this doesn’t look like it’s very sturdy. Looks like even just a light wind would just rip it apart.” And a light wind came and ripped it apart. Now, you can’t tell me that whoever designed that umbrella ever put it outdoors. Nobody ever tested that outdoors because if they had, they would have seen it rip apart in a week. It was never tested.

If you’re an engineer and you’re making a product and you’re testing it in the light, and your boss says, “You don’t need to test it with actual users in the dark; why would you do that? It works perfectly well in bright light,” say to your boss, “Well, you should have watched this Periscope.” I hope I’ve saved all of you some future problems because this is the sort of Periscope that engineers will probably pass around.

User Interface Design Experience

I’m a little bit monomaniacal on this point because I used to work in a user interface design area in the phone company. Somebody said, “I lost all respect for you for this.” I wish I could tell you how many times in my life somebody told me that they had lost all respect for me. You should spend like a minute in my brain. It’s like the texture of my life is somebody being very disappointed in me.

I’m glad that at least somebody likes me for it. I used to watch the user interface tests. If you haven’t seen user interface testing, it’s very important, and you don’t need many people. You could bring in five customers just to hand them the product and say, “Use this product” or “Do with it whatever you want,” and you just watch them.

If you had ever done user interface testing where the engineers stand behind a two-way mirror and they just watch the person and they say, “Okay, now turn down the light and hand them the battery,” they would see them doing this. Every single person would have done that, and they would have changed it. So you know that they didn’t do any testing.

Al Sharpton, RESPICT, and Giving People a Pass

Was it Al Sharpton? I think it was Al Sharpton doing a video of Aretha Franklin—a tribute video—and in the end, he made a call out to her famous song, “Respect,” where she spells it out in the song. Except he spelled “respect” wrong: R-E-S-P-I-C-T.

Now, as you might imagine, the internet was crazy because he spelled that word wrong. I am not going to jump on that train. Here’s why: it was the same week that the President spelled “counsel” wrong in a tweet, as he has spelled other things wrong in a tweet. I, too, have spelled words wrong in tweets. I, too, have said equally dumb things on Periscope.

The fact that he spelled that word wrong—I give him a pass. This is a version of the 48-hour rule because there’s nothing really to clarify other than the word was spelled wrong. He doesn’t need to clarify that he meant it that way, because obviously he didn’t. But I think that’s the sort of thing we’ve got to give people a pass for.

When I was in my 20s, spelling something wrong was the worst problem in the world because you would always show it to somebody who would make sure it was right. A spelling error was considered just a horrible problem. Today, I think it makes more sense to say that we don’t use editors for social media and for a lot of things we do. We just do them, and we put out our raw thoughts. You’re seeing me do it now, and this is live and unplanned. What are the odds that I’m going to do or say something stupid in this very Periscope? Pretty good. Pretty high.

What was it I did the other day? Let me give you a perfect example. I said in public that I didn’t believe that the First Amendment specifically mentioned freedom of the press. Now, most of you who saw that thought, “My God, how stupid of you.” In public, what I was thinking—which was wrong—is that freedom of speech just included that, so it didn’t need to be spelled out specifically. But that was just wrong and stupid. It’s just a hole in my education, a little bit of ignorance that I had hanging out there that people corrected me on in public.

Do I think I’m an idiot because I didn’t know that and lots of people did know it and it’s certainly something I should have known? Not really. I talked yesterday about how to deal with your embarrassment and your shame. My total shame and embarrassment for being that stupid in public lasted about half a second, and then I just said, “Well, there I was being stupid in public.” Then I didn’t think about it again until I was looking for an example here.

I would say give Sharpton the same pass you would give yourself. This is one of those Golden Rule situations. We’re all stupid in public. Everybody is stupid in public. If you spend as much time talking in public as Al Sharpton does, and as I do, and as the President does, you’re going to say stupid stuff. That doesn’t make you stupid; it just means that if you talk long enough, you’re always going to say something dumb. I don’t think people were upset about the misspelled word; I think they just saw it as an easy line of attack. But it’s a cheap attack.

Jack Dorsey and Twitter Transparency

Let’s talk about Twitter. Jack Dorsey was doing some interviews on the question of what Twitter is doing about shadow banning and censorship and whatever words you want to put on that. The basic situation is that it’s under study, meaning that there are efforts going on to figure out how to do it better than they’re doing it, how to be more transparent in those situations.

I typically say if you recognize the problem—remember how I told you the best way to handle a situation is that first you have to restate the problem—Jack did restate the problem. He said he understood that they are left-leaning. He understood what the issue was. Then I said you should also take responsibility, basically apologize, which he did. He literally said, “That’s on me,” meaning him. He told us what he’s doing about it, which is a number of things. They’ve got an outside group that’s studying it, but they’re looking deeper into the entire architecture of the system to see if the whole liking and retweeting and the way it’s organized even makes sense anymore, which is very interesting.

Now, I see some of you saying that he doesn’t mean it, he’s lying, blah blah blah. I say the evidence does not suggest that. The evidence does suggest that conservatives are getting edited in a way that others are not, but it doesn’t suggest that he personally is tweaking that algorithm or that he doesn’t want to fix it. I don’t think that’s in evidence.

Twitter gets a pass from me for not completely banning Alex Jones, for example, and clearly saying the right things and acting on it and treating it with some dignity—meaning that the issue is important and he’s clearly taking it seriously. So that’s a wait-and-see for me. I know you want to pile on Twitter, but I’d say give Twitter a little time. They say they’re working on it. If you don’t like how it comes out, then you can criticize. But if they’re saying words like “transparency” and they’re acknowledging that they lean left and that they need to figure out how to fix this, I’ll let their ingenuity percolate a little bit. They might be able to come up with something. We’ll see.

Potential Solutions for Twitter Feed Curation

“Algorithms will never fix it.” I think you’re right; I don’t think algorithms will ever fix it. I think it’s going to have to do more with people choosing what they see and maybe a little bit better labeling of things.

Let me ask you this: if your Twitter feed went by and every tweet had a color code next to it to tell you, among other things, that other people think it’s fake news? Let’s just say if it was color-coded orange, it means that other people have ranked it fake news. That doesn’t mean it is, but you would be at least alerted that some amount of the public has ranked it as fake news. Maybe it’s only ranked fake news by other news organizations; maybe only blue-check people can rank something fake news. That would seem unfair to people, but I’m just throwing out some ideas.

I would like to see all the information and then have a choice of deselecting it. If I got used to seeing the oranges and every time I saw an orange it was fake, I’d say, “Oh, that orange again. It’s totally fake. Don’t show me any more orange stuff.” As long as I have that choice and I know what other people thought about the tweet, I feel like I’d have everything I needed.

Then, if they block stuff because it’s violent or suggests actually racist, violent, or stuff about children—there’s some level beyond which we all expect a little bit of editing. It feels like you could get there pretty easily, but I don’t know.

Blight Authority and House Tour Teaser

I’m going to try hard to do a second Periscope today that I tried to do this weekend but I couldn’t get there. It will be a house tour and I’ll be talking about blightauthority.com, where I hope all of you have gone. There are a lot of ideas coming in, flowing in, about what to do about these blighted areas that have been cleared or need to be cleared in the inner cities.

When I show you my house, let’s all agree that my house is not a model for what to build in the inner cities. You get to see the rich guy house, but I’m going to use it as sort of a talking point to tell you what kinds of things to think about if you’re building a home. You’re not going to build it the same way obviously because there’s an income difference, but I’ll give you a bunch of ideas that maybe you haven’t heard before. I’ll try to do that today. I will talk to you later.