Episode 195 Scott Adams: Twitter, NK, Prison Reform, Mob Boss, Impeachment Porn

Date: 2018-08-25 | Duration: 39:05

Topics

Jack Dorsey (Twitter CEO) upcoming Congressional testimony Lanny Davis “bombshell” a couple days ago…now debunked David Pecker National Enquirer “trove” of dirt on President Trump Dismissing Mark Levin’s impressive talent stack as just a “right-wing radio host” Implications of all the anti-Trumpers suddenly saying “mob boss” North Korea cheating on their sanctions, Pompeo trip cancelled Jarred Kushner prison reform bill “Impeachment porn” concept…demonstration by Dale

Transcript

Intro and Memes

Boom-boom-boom-boom! Hey everybody, come on in here. Did all of you see there’s a couple of great memes? Carpe Donktum has a great one that I tweeted yesterday—you’ve got to check that out—about who’s scarier: the accused or the accusers.

Also, check out if you haven’t seen the funny video of Sarah Sanders with words added to her lip-sync during a press briefing. You have to watch that. If you don’t do anything else this weekend, go to my Twitter feed or you could just Google it. There’s a Sarah Sanders meme video in which words are added to her lips, and it is the funniest freakin’ thing you’ve ever seen in your life. Do not miss that.

The Simultaneous Sip and Hypnosis Tips

We have lots of things to do, but probably nothing more important than the simultaneous sip. It’s the weekend, and I know a lot of you have your coffee ready, your tea, your beverage in a vessel—a cup, a mug, a glass—and you’re ready for the simultaneous sip.

By the way, would you like a little hypnosis trick? I know you do. Actually, that was a trick too. One of the techniques of persuasion is that you anticipate what someone is thinking and you say it just as they think it. So when I said, “Would you like a demonstration, a little lesson on hypnosis?” I knew a lot of you thought, “Yes, I do.” Then I anticipated what you were thinking and said, “Well, I know you do.” Here it is. It’s always good to anticipate what the other person is thinking. That’s a technique.

The other technique I was going to mention: have you ever noticed that when I do the simultaneous sip, I often make it permissive in terms of what beverage or what kind of a vessel you’re keeping it in? Is it a mug, a glass, a cup, or another kind of a vessel? And is your liquid coffee, tea, or any other kind of liquid? That’s actually a standard hypnosis trick because you want as many people as possible to say, “Oh yeah, that’s me.” You don’t want anybody to say, “Oh darn, I’ve got a cup of tea, I can’t play along.” Whenever you can, be as permissive as possible in trying to pace the people you’re trying to make like you.

Jack Dorsey and Social Media Transparency

That was your bonus tip of the day. I noticed that Jack Dorsey is going to testify to Congress about all this social media conservative shadow banning, allegedly. What caught my eye is that Twitter is being treated differently than Facebook and Google—and Apple, I suppose—in that people are starting to distinguish Twitter for at least saying the right things about transparency and being willing to talk about it.

In fact, you saw Jack actually say in an interview recently that they understand that Twitter is left-leaning. I think a lot of people said, “What? Oh, that seems refreshingly honest.” Now, that’s a long way from everybody getting what they want, but it’s a really good step. If he’s talking about transparency, admitting that they have a bias, and admitting there’s a problem they need to fix, he’s admitting that the algorithm needs to have smart people looking at it to make sure that they have the best product they could have. That seems to be making a difference in terms of the public’s opinion of what’s going on here.

We’ll see what comes out of the Senate hearings on September 5th or 6th. You’re going to get a lot more clarity on what is or is not possible and what everybody’s thinking about that. The only point I was going to make is the contrast principle. It seems to me that Jack has successfully put some distance between how Twitter is handling things and how the other big tech companies—Apple, Google, YouTube, and Facebook—handle things. That’s smart.

Trump’s Legal Risks and the Lanny Davis “Bombshell”

Let’s talk about Trump’s many legal risks according to his critics. We’ve gotten this far to this day in history, and for almost that entire journey, what people have been saying is, “Trump is dead. Any moment now, this will kill him.” Well, okay, that didn’t kill him. “But this is going to end him.” Okay, that didn’t end him either. “But this next thing… this next thing!” Okay, that’s not working either. “Okay, we got something else!”

How many times have you seen me come in front of you, writing a blog post saying, “No, I wouldn’t worry about this as much as you think you ought to. This is probably not as big a deal as you think it is.” I think we might be in one of those situations again.

The qualifier on this is that there are more variables in play than there ever have been. You lose a little bit of ability to predict as there are more variables. There are more people who have immunity, more people talking, more lawyers, more everything. That always introduces risk, and you can’t ignore that.

But let’s look at a couple of things that look like the big risks these days. I saw Bret Baier talking about this. It wasn’t too many days ago that Lanny Davis, attorney for Michael Cohen, was saying Michael Cohen had evidence that President Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr. and the Russian. But now it turns out that’s just not true. It’s just simply not true. So one of the biggest things you were worried about if you were a Trump supporter just a few days ago just wasn’t true. It just went away.

The National Enquirer “Safe” and David Pecker

David Pecker of the National Enquirer allegedly has a safe—or it was a safe, but maybe it’s moved now—of Trump-related secrets that the National Enquirer has bought and put on the shelf just to protect the President. People are thinking, “Oh man, if we could get to that treasure trove of stuff!”

Well, here’s what I think. Do you imagine that any of that alleged treasure trove has anything to do with anything except personal behavior? Do you think it has anything to do with crime? Probably not. This seems very unlikely because the National Enquirer doesn’t even buy stories like that, really. I mean, I suppose they have, but they’re more about who’s seen with whom and who had plastic surgery and that sort of thing.

My guess is that there’s a treasure trove of nothing—meaning more stuff like the things we already know. There might be more of it, but it’s not going to change the inner base’s opinion of anything, even if we had access to it. Even if Mueller’s team had it, they would just say, “Well, that’s exactly what we thought would be in this treasure trove, but it doesn’t really help us. It has nothing to do with anything legal.” My guess is that the National Enquirer safe full of secrets is about as important as Geraldo’s Al Capone safe. It’s probably all hype and nothing but a lot of wishful thinking going on there.

Allen Weisselberg’s Immunity

Then what else we have? Oh, we have Allen Weisselberg, the CFO of the Trump Organization. He’s been there since Fred Trump. He’s the one who knows where, as they say, all the skeletons are. He knows where all the bodies are buried. “Oh no, he’s granted immunity! He’s going to give it all up! It’s the end of the Trump Organization!” And then it turns out probably he just had limited immunity to talk about Cohen-related stuff, which probably would be a big nothing because I think we already know what’s going on there. So probably that’s a big nothing.

Now, suppose it turned into a big something. Let’s say it started small and you just have limited immunity about Cohen, and that was no big deal, but suppose they used that somehow to leverage something to get more access to the Trump private company statements, documents, tax returns, and all that. Would that be the line that the President had drawn for just firing everybody? I believe it was.

But more importantly, it doesn’t matter what anybody said in the past. Do you think it would be a line? People are talking about tax evasion, but the IRS looks at tax returns. How could you be involved in tax evasion on some obvious illegal scale when you file your tax returns every year and you know that the IRS is looking at them pretty carefully? It seems to me that would be a tough thing to do. I suspect that there’s nothing big there that is intentional. Any big company’s going to have some errors because there’s a level of complexity beyond which there’s just always an error. But that doesn’t mean it’s much risk. We could be in that situation where there’s a lot of nothing about nothing.

Mark Levin and Diminishing Talent Stacks

Now, what caught my eye this morning was an article that says, “Trump is latching on to a popular right-wing talking point about Michael Cohen that experts say is nonsense.” The talking point they’re referring to is from radio host Mark Levin. First of all, they describe Mark Levin as a “right-wing radio host.” I don’t know if that’s how he would describe himself.

The description of Levin, I’m going to guess, is not fair. Levin is not just a radio host; he’s a television host and a radio host. I’m guessing he has books; he’s probably an author. Yes, I think so. How about we call him, instead of a “right-wing radio host,” an author, television and radio star, conservative, and constitutionalist? That might even be closer. Oh, it’s “Levin” [Luh-vin], I thought it was “Levin” [Leh-vin]. Okay, we’ll call him Levin. I’m being corrected in the comments here.

The article starts right off by diminishing his resume from insanely impressive—one of the best resumes you’re ever going to see in your life—to a “right-wing radio guy.” And is he a lawyer? Yes, that would seem to be true.

Here’s the argument about Levin’s arguments. Levin—and Dershowitz, notice that they don’t mention Alan Dershowitz in this. Do you know why? Because it’s a little bit harder to call Alan Dershowitz a “right-wing” anything. They cherry-picked. Levin isn’t the only person saying this; he’s just the one that they can label a little bit more easily. Where’s Alan Dershowitz? Leaving Alan Dershowitz out of this story is clear bias. And by the way, I’m reading Business Insider, owned at least in part by Jeff Bezos, so just so you know your source.

The argument here is Levin’s argument—and also my argument and Dershowitz’s argument—is that it can’t be illegal to spend money on stuff that makes you look good just because you’re running for office. For example, I’ve said: would it be illegal for Hillary Clinton to improve her wardrobe if she was doing it just for the campaign?

The article just makes the assumption that Cohen can demonstrate that the only reason they were doing this payoff is because of the election. How could you possibly demonstrate that? The article makes an assumption that is completely unsupportable, and then they build their argument on that unsupportable assumption. Since Levin and other people don’t make that assumption, they get a different answer.

The assumption is that there could be something that is only to make you look good for one reason, and that just doesn’t exist. It would be a standard which could never be applied because there are lots of things that make you look good for multiple reasons. One is to look good with your wife; another is to look good just because you like how you look in the mirror. Let’s say you got your teeth whitened. There’s no way this could possibly be an enforceable law. But you don’t see that argument in this article because there’s either some TDS or maybe some well, probably just TDS going on. That’s the two-movies situation. It all revolves around that assumption that somehow there could be this class of things that are only good for making you look good for one reason. That’s just not a thing.

The “Mob Boss” Framing

Let’s talk about the new attack. Some have noted—Joe Concha, I saw him tweet about it—that if you were to Google the term “mob boss,” you’ll find that all the anti-Trumpers are suddenly using the phrase “mob boss” all at once. They all got the memo.

Now let me ask you this: why would the anti-Trumpers start calling Trump a mob boss? What advantage does that have? Well, let me tell you what advantage that has. The mob boss is the one who is, first of all, subject to a RICO investigation, which would be a more intrusive, dangerous investigation. So it might be trying to influence the investigation somehow.

But more importantly, a mob boss is—wait for it—the person who doesn’t have any evidence against them. The mob boss is the one who whispers to the lieutenants, “Go do this bad thing.” Then, if the crime is committed, the only people who have fingerprints on it are the people who committed it, and they can’t attach it to the mob boss.

Calling Trump a mob boss is an acknowledgment that there’s no direct evidence of Trump being involved in something criminal. You wouldn’t bother using this particular label unless you had already conceded there’s no direct evidence of Trump being involved in anything illegal. You just wouldn’t do it. If the anti-Trumpers are looking for a way to get him impeached, which is a lower standard than any legal problems, they would try to reframe him as a mob boss so that it would make perfect sense why there’s no evidence of any crime. A mob boss is the only thing you can think of where we all agree that they’re a criminal but there’s no evidence. That’s what makes them a mob boss. Otherwise, we just call him the guy who murdered somebody or the guy who committed a crime. You wouldn’t need to give him a special name as somebody you can’t get any evidence for.

The Bigfoot Hallucination

I would say that “mob boss” is the new Bigfoot here. Bigfoot is what you see—you know that if some people are seeing Bigfoot and some are not, my general argument is the one who sees the positive hallucination is the one that’s got a problem. So if somebody is seeing a mob boss and other people are looking at it and saying, “Well, I don’t see it, just don’t see it,” chances are the one who doesn’t see it is the one who’s got the clearer vision. It’s the one who introduces an illusion into the reality. “Oh, he’s not just a president, he’s a mob boss.” Something that’s like a new thing added to the environment is usually the hallucination.

The way I like to say it is: have you ever heard of somebody having a hallucination where they walked into their living room and they couldn’t see the couch? Everything else was there, it just looked like an empty room; there was no furniture in it. That’s not how hallucinations work. They don’t subtract things from the environment; they add things. They add a ghost, they add a UFO, they add Bigfoot, they add the Loch Ness monster. So look for who’s adding something. It’s different if you’re adding something that everybody can see, but if you’re adding something that only half of the people can see, probably that’s a Bigfoot situation going on there.

China and North Korea

Let’s talk about the China and North Korea situation. As you know, we’re having these tense discussions with China about trade, but at the same time, we’re trying to get something done with North Korea. It seems that China was letting North Korea cheat on its sanctions, as they may have been tied into our negotiations on trade. President Trump just took that off the table by saying that Pompeo was not going to go back to North Korea right away.

Apparently, there was some talk of Pompeo going and meeting again because there hadn’t been enough progress on denuclearization. That probably has to do with China getting a little permissive with North Korea to possibly put a little pressure on the United States on trade. The President has done what any good negotiator would do. There was a variable in the negotiations that was problematic, which was North Korea, and so he just took it off the table. He said, “Oh, well, okay, North Korea isn’t testing any weapons, we’re kind of in a steady state there. Let’s just take it off the table and let’s get this China stuff taken care of first.”

By putting them first—this one and then this one, instead of “let’s do them at the same time”—the President decoupled them. So it was exactly the right thing to do. But of course, it’ll be reported as another crazy, unstable sign of things not working. But of course, it was exactly the right thing to do.

Jared Kushner and Prison Reform

Did I watch Brennan on Maher last night? I did not, but I might go back and look at that because that sounds like it would be interesting.

I saw a report that you all know Jared Kushner is working on prison reform. There’s some kind of a big prison reform bill where the emphasis is on training people who are in prison so that when they leave, they have a skill, but that training would buy them credit toward an earlier release. I think I have that right—there are probably more details, so don’t bank on what I said about it.

But for today’s purposes, there’s a big prison reform bill to shorten sentences and let people out in some productive way. A report I saw—I don’t know how credible it is, but it won’t matter for this purpose—was that the President thought it would be better to do it after the midterms. Does that sound right to you? If there’s a prison reform bill, and apparently there are some Republicans who are not quite on board and that may be the issue, but does it make sense to you that you would do a prison reform bill after the midterm? I can’t see that argument. It seems like before the midterm, and October in particular, would be exactly the time to do it.

How in the world does that not get pretty much the whole country saying, “Whoops, that’s not what we thought.” This is a President whose probably single biggest problem—if you don’t count the attacks which are about his finances and campaign reform—is race relations. Prison reform is such a direct contradiction of that impression that his critics have that I can’t imagine any good argument for waiting. Now, I often caution you that one’s lack of imagination should not be confused with a reason, and this is a perfect example of that. I don’t know a whole lot about this topic.

From the part I can see, I’m just expressing my lack of understanding. Is there any reason to wait? Even if you tried and failed before the midterm, it feels like the trying would be important. If you saw the President get behind a prison bill, there are so clearly benefits to the Black community and the Hispanic community disproportionately because there’s a disproportionate number of people in prison in those groups. How in the world would that ever look wrong? How could that possibly be a bad idea? I just don’t know.

There might be a reason. When I say I can’t imagine why there would be any reason to wait on that, it might be that I just don’t know what’s going on and they don’t quite have the votes or there are a few things they need to take care of. But the big picture is that it would be an enormous wasted opportunity to wait. Even if you put it forward and it failed on the first try, it just feels like the right thing to do. Get it out there, show where your priorities are, and if the Democrats want to shoot down prison reform right before an election, let them have it.

Impeachment Porn

Let me just wrap up the whole President Trump jeopardy thing. How high do you see the President’s jeopardy—legal or impeachment jeopardy—right now compared to the past? Some people are saying ten, but a lot of people are saying zero. Zero and low seems to be 25%; some are saying very high and higher.

Do you notice how different these opinions are? The middle has just disappeared. There’s almost nobody saying, “Well, it looks like about an average amount of risk.” People are saying zero, and people are saying, “No, no, it’s a ten. It’s much higher, it’s the worst it’s been.” The opinions have just diverged, and those are the two different movies. No longer do we have a shared movie in the middle. We’re either tens or zeroes on every topic.

We’ve been through this cycle many times where it looks like the end of the world, and then a week later we think, “Okay, that was nothing,” or “No, I guess we heard that story out of context, that was nothing.” It seems to me that at least half of the country is enjoying something that can only be called impeachment porn. I don’t think that description is too far off.

Imagine, if you will, my impression of a Trump critic who’s watching the news—which is mostly fake news these days—talking about the President’s risk of impeachment. Tell me what this looks like. All right, here it comes. This is Dale, the presidential critic, reading a story about the President maybe being impeached:

“Hmm, I think I’ll look at the news today. I hope there is some news about the President maybe being impeached. Let’s see what we got… Oh! There’s some news! Oh! Oh! Oh! I hope there’s another story! That was a good story!”

Now, tell me I’m wrong. The people who have for three years been edged on this idea—and they have been edged for three years—it’s like, “Oh, any moment now, the President’s just out of here. He’ll probably be fired or arrested or he’ll be impeached or he’ll be out of office.” Imagine being edged for three years and then you finally see an article by Chris Cuomo that says, “Oh, he’s a mob boss.”

You can’t tell me—and I mean this in all seriousness, this next point is dead serious—you can’t tell me that the anti-Trumpers don’t almost certainly receive some kind of physical, mental, psychological pleasure when they read an article that tells them that the President’s going to be impeached any minute now. It absolutely is impeachment porn at this point.

I would not use a term that aggressive unless I meant it literally. I mean that literally. When an anti-Trump critic reads that there’s this new thing, Weisselberg is talking, Cohen is talking… every time they read one of those stories, I believe there is a full-body experience because they’ve been edged for three years about this thing that could be good if only we get that impeachment-proof evidence. Oh, so close!

There’s no way that this is not a physical pleasure at this point. So when I call it impeachment porn—you know, it might be a dry orgasm, but there is something going on that is very analogous to a physical release. And you know it! No, there’s nobody here who’s even doubting this for a moment. They’ve been edged for three years on this topic. There’s no way that reading about an impeachment coming doesn’t make them physically respond. Guaranteed.

Republican Turnout and Loss Aversion

Let’s call that impeachment porn. Let’s see if that sticks. Your brother is pissed off all the time, but I’ll bet he’s a lot happier when he reads about impeachment. Now, I have to admit that I have a little mixed feelings about this impeachment business because having impeachment hearings would be kind of entertaining in a reality-show kind of way. Even though it’s completely unproductive, it would be very entertaining. I think that in the end, probably he would prevail, but it would be fun to watch, and I can’t ignore that. But I don’t wish it; I certainly don’t wish it on him. It would be bad for the country, bad for the President. Don’t want it.

Impeachment fever. Somebody said Clinton’s impeachment caused his approval to go up. Let me run this idea past you: would Republican turnout be more or less if the risk of impeachment were higher? Let’s say the risk of impeachment is high, higher than it is now. It looks really, really high if the Democrats win power. What would that do to Republican turnout?

My theory is that people hate losing something more than they like winning something. The Republicans who thought they had something wouldn’t want to lose it. Look how much the Republicans have to lose. If the Republicans lose, they don’t just lose their President; they don’t just lose the policies that they like; they don’t just lose all of that stuff, which is enormous. They lose something personally.

If the President is impeached, who gets to write history? History is written by the winners, right? And history would record that President Trump and all the people who supported him—such as me—were garbage, and isn’t it good that their movement was stopped just in time?

If you want to go down in history as the movement that didn’t succeed, don’t vote. But if you don’t want your reputation to be written in the history books as the racists who tried to take over the country but were beaten back, then you’re going to need to ride this out and make sure that this President secures some things for all the people in this country—including prison reform, including better employment for African Americans and Hispanics and other groups who have been disadvantaged in the past.

If you want to get to that better place, you’re going to have to vote. The downside for not voting this time if you’re Republican is pretty freakin’ big. I’m actually considering voting just for my personal safety. As you know, I haven’t voted in the past many years. I voted when I was much younger, but possibly for my own physical safety, I might have to vote. I would just vote straight Republican for safety alone. I mean actual physical safety.

Blight Authority Outro

All right, I think that’s all I got for now. We’ve said enough; I’ve got some work to do. Before I go, make sure that you check out blightauthority.com. We’re racking up lots of ideas for what to do in urban areas, and if you’d like that effort to continue, please retweet the site blightauthority.com and go check it out. People have put some great ideas for what to do with those urban areas. See what you can do to help out, and then I’ll talk to you all later. Bye.