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June 13, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
30:36
Episode 103 - WAKE UP, PUNCHY
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Hey everybody!
Wake up, Punchy!
That's my new catchphrase.
I think that's everybody's catchphrase now.
And when I say wake up, Punchy, I mean wake up and get ready for the best part of your day so far.
Coffee with Scott Adams.
And it starts with the simultaneous sip.
And that goes like this.
Ah, that's some good simultaneous sipping.
So, once again, Our president, our nicknamer-in-chief, has given one of the most classic nicknames we've seen yet for Robert De Niro.
His new nickname, Punchy.
Now, having watched De Niro's, let's say, reactions to the president lately, I thought to myself, What would happen?
And by the way, I knew nothing about Robert De Niro except what movies he's been in.
Didn't know anything about his personal life.
And I said to myself, what would happen if I googled his name and alcoholism?
And sure enough, you get all kinds of hits referring to his drug and alcohol abuse.
And I thought to myself, here's the most drugged-out, violent guy who is criticizing a guy who's never had a drink or a drug and was literally in the middle of making peace with North Korea.
So it wasn't that long ago where people imagined, you know, the people who were opposed to the president, imagined that they were the good people.
They were the people who were well-mannered.
They were the people who didn't say hateful things.
They were the good people.
They were the ones who loved each other.
They loved peace.
They loved those kinds of things.
But the President, Candidate Trump, at the time he was a Candidate Trump, he's the opposite of our niceness.
He's a ball of hate and darkness and every other ism that you can think of.
But what happened? While no one was watching, complete reversal.
De Niro is, it's almost like he's taken on the role of whatever was the worst thing people imagined about candidate Trump.
Everything that you imagined about candidate Trump is that he would stand in front of a crowd and start swearing and insulting a world leader.
That's what people worried about President Trump.
And De Niro did that.
And he seems unstable.
Yeah, when you look at De Niro, I'm not a doctor, so I'm not going to diagnose his mental health.
But he does have a well-documented history of drug abuse, alcoholism, bad behavior.
That part seems to be objectively true.
And so he's become...
The exact thing that the other side imagined Trump would become while Trump was becoming nicer and making peace.
Now, of course, President Trump had to punch back because he's a counter-puncher.
And I think I laughed for half an hour after I saw Wake Up Punchy.
It was just the perfect way for the President of the United States to end a humorous little jab back.
Tweet. So I don't think you can take the president's tweet too seriously.
It wasn't written to be serious.
It was written just to give a little poke back and to entertain his base, which it did very, very well.
Now all of you, I think, are watching the reactions to the president's Trip and the generic agreement that they made to make things better.
And this morning I'm reading that the President said that we're already safer, essentially.
I forget what words he used.
But that the risk of war has now subsided and that we're safer than we were before.
His critics want to argue that point.
But here's the thing.
You don't really go to war with people that you're having nice conversations with and offering to give them money.
When was the last time that a country said, hey, if you let us, we can make your country wealthier, and we're not really asking anything in return, except in the normal capitalist way, if we invest, people would expect a return.
But we just want to help.
How about that? We just want to help.
When was the last time somebody nuked a country that was offering to help them?
That's not a thing. So when the president said we're going to stop our war games, that was as close as you can get to a declaration of peace.
Because that shows that both parties are willing to sort of step back in very small ways because everybody can just redo everything they've claimed they've stopped.
It would be easy for North Korea to start testing missiles.
It would be easy for us to start doing war games again.
So none of this It's totally important in a physical realm, but psychologically, it just shows that we're no longer on a track to war.
And as long as we're not on that track, and here's the important part, we don't have any reason to get back on it.
There's no reason. What reason would you imagine that North Korea would say, now, let's go make our nuclear arsenal twice as big now, Why?
What possible reason would they have to do that?
Likewise, what possible reason would we have to attack their country or something?
There's nothing to gain.
So we've taken a situation where you had two countries that didn't quite understand the motives of the other, didn't understand if the other was crazy or not, didn't understand if there were bad intentions or good, didn't really know.
And then what do we know this week?
Well, Kim and Trump have a much better understanding of the other.
President Trump has said that he trusts Kim, and he thinks that Kim trusts him too.
Now the skeptics, I believe when they heard that President Trump said he trusts Kim...
I believe that the critics probably threw up in their mouths upon hearing that, as in, oh my god, how could he fall for this?
Doesn't he know the history of North Korean promises?
Yes, he does.
Of course he does.
And does President Trump have 100% trust in his own mind that Kim will do the right thing?
Well, we can't read his mind.
We don't know. But it's unlikely it's 100% because there aren't that many things that are 100%.
More likely...
Trump is willing into existence a situation that's better.
And what he would like to will into existence is a situation of trust.
So what is the very best way to receive trust?
Tell me? Tell me?
Anybody? Anybody?
What is the best way to become trusted?
Give trust.
Exactly. Psychologically speaking, the very best way to get trust from someone who is reluctant to give it is to give it to them first.
Now because we're the larger country with the larger military, giving trust first is a little bit easier.
And it's a little bit more leaderly to go first there.
Now keep in mind that trust can always be taken back.
And that that doesn't mean that we, you know, give up on inspections or give up on, you know, making sure that we do what we need to do to document things or work in the right direction.
But in terms of what you say, you know, when asked, do you trust?
The exact right answer was yes.
Every other answer was the wrong answer.
Because in private meetings, on both sides, they can express whatever doubts they have in private.
That makes perfect sense.
There was one right way to answer that question, and Trump hid it, which is, yes, I trust him, and I'm sure he trusts me as well.
Because that actually creates, he's creating that world.
He's not predicting it.
He's creating it by just defining it as true, and then living in it, and letting Kim live in it as well.
Uh, Colbert refutes me nightly.
Well, that's his job.
Why did he praise Kim Jong-un?
Same reason. Praising Kim is one of the ways that Kim will feel comfortable with the President.
It's one of the ways that Kim will learn to trust him.
It's one of the ways he'll have a good feeling.
Because remember, people don't use the facts to make decisions.
They use how they feel about things to make decisions.
So Trump is making Kim feel comfortable.
By complimenting him for the things he's doing right.
He's simply not focusing on the past.
Both leaders have said explicitly, they've said explicitly, let's let the past go.
And at this point, it looks like the president has things right where he wants them.
If you say to yourself, hey, but what about concrete promises of getting rid of their nukes and everything else?
We definitely want all that stuff.
But ask yourself, is it easier for North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons when we're trusting them in public and complimenting the leader And offering to help and stopping our war games that are provocative.
You know, is that a better situation for him to go back to his own people and say, look, I think we've got something good here.
Here's our one opportunity, according to that video I just watched.
Let's make something happen.
Now, it's very important.
This is why you want a Bolton on the team.
The value added of Bolton is that nobody thinks he would have done any of those things I just mentioned.
In other words, Bolton is the badass, he's the bad cop, and he's not going to be pleased until we have verification and we have real legitimate denuclearization in progress.
And I don't think the Trump administration ever wants to be in a situation where later Bolton says, hey, I told them to do it this way and it didn't work out.
So I think they have the perfect set of assets in place for a good result there.
Now, I wanted to...
To put out one idea that apparently there are many ticklish, you know, sensitive elements to making peace with North Korea.
And one of them is the number of people who are alleged to be in prison camps.
And I've heard some people speculate that you can't loosen up the North because it would bring to light all the people who are in prison camps, and there are so many of them, it would be a big disruptive thing.
And so I ask myself, what would be the best way to handle that?
Because that does seem like a legitimate problem.
And here's my solution that I'll propose.
Suppose that Chairman Kim said the following.
In order to release the past, I'm going to pardon all of the people who are in prisons or work camps for political reasons that were not legitimate crimes.
Let me say it differently.
So, as opposed to normal crimes like murder and theft and stuff, suppose he said, I'm going to forget the past and I'm going to pardon everybody who's in the gulag for criticizing the regime.
And this pardon will apply to anybody who did anything bad in a political context.
Do you see where this is going?
It's a self-pardon.
So in other words, pardoning everybody who did anything wrong politically would include all the people in the gulags who are only there for political purposes, but it also includes himself.
Right? And it includes any family members or top aides.
Now, of course, you'd have to say that from this day on, if you do anything bad, that's a new problem.
But to forget the past, he's going to have to pardon himself, his family, everybody close to him, and at the same time, everybody in the gulags.
But what happens when you release a few hundred thousand people into the public who don't like Chairman Kim.
It's dangerous, right?
So here's the second part of the plan.
I'm just proposing this as a thought experiment.
By the way, anybody who's new to my Periscopes should understand that I don't believe I know what I'm talking about.
You know, I talk about these sort of things to, let's say, improve the diversification of the idea portfolio, just to get some more ideas flowing.
That doesn't mean I have the right ones, but I can help you think in a new way.
Sometimes. Alright, suppose the second part of this idea is that those people who are released from the gulags are released to South Korea.
Right? Because the people who come out of the gulags are the ones who are anti-Kim.
And having them in his territory at the moment they're released could be a little destabilizing.
So how about the first group that gets to cross the border and gets to enjoy the fruits of South Korea?
Suppose they were the people from the gulags.
But you want to do this quietly.
You want this to be an agreement between South Korea and North Korea.
Keep the United States out of it.
You want South Korea to fund this process because these people have to be taken care of.
It wouldn't be that hard to give them a better lifestyle right off the bat than whatever they were doing in the gulag.
So, you could create a situation where the people who were punished for their political crimes actually are the first ones who get the added benefits of the South Koreans' embrace.
Now, why would South Korea be the one to be involved with this and not the United States or China or anybody else?
Here's the main reason.
You want to keep it on the down low.
You don't want to make a public thing, or a big one anyway.
The news should know.
It should be reported. But once it's reported that the people in the gulags have been pardoned and released to the South, we should, by mutual agreement, just stop talking about it after that.
Just stop talking about it, because it's not going to help anybody.
The best thing we can do is take that pressure off of North Korea and just keep it quiet, keep it on the down low, keep those people out of the news.
You could even have a law that says, you know, temporarily, it could be like a one-year law or something, where you say, South Korean media, you're not allowed to talk to the people from the gulags.
You just can't get their personal stories for one year.
Whatever. It might be longer than that.
And you say the reason is for privacy.
We respect the right of the press, but there's a real privacy issue here for those people.
They don't want attention and it would not be safe for them to get it.
Because they might still have people they love in the North.
South Korea could probably pull that off because they would understand the importance of, let's say, keeping a respectful position toward North Korea.
They probably understand about keeping things on the down low.
They would understand that this is just being helpful and we don't need to make things bad.
We're just trying to help these people in the gulags.
at the same time we're trying to make life easier for North Korea so that they can do their denuclearizing and they don't have an unstable country at the same time.
So I just throw that out there as an idea.
Getting people to not talk would be hard.
Yes, but you could ask the major publications to back off.
And I think South Koreans would largely want You could just say, hey, this is a one-year moratorium.
Just give them some privacy.
It's not about the news. It's more about the privacy.
And you could also report The facts so that you haven't glossed over anything.
You could do a press release that says, these people were in these gulags for the following reasons.
Life was brutal in a variety of ways, but now they're here.
Just stick to the facts.
You don't have to sensationalize it more than it is.
Northgate defectors have a great difficulty fitting into South Korea.
Exactly. Yeah, you would not simply release them into the wild.
You would need an extended period where they're in something like, you know, resettlement camps that would be much better than a gulag.
and then maybe pair it up with South Korean families or whatever you need to do to integrate them.
All right.
It would create reunification pressure.
I think a better way to say that would be a small step toward reunification because on some level everybody likes it, reunification, if it doesn't happen right away and it happens in a comfortable way.
So everybody likes it in concept and that would be one way to make a small step in that direction.
Yeah, the 100-year plan for reunification.
I still like it.
Trump just nominated by Nobel Prize by Norwegian lawmakers.
You know... I'm not...
I just don't know it's helpful at this point to be talking about any kind of Nobel Prizes.
I think that's something that I'm guilty of, of jumping the gun on that stuff, because it's sort of the wrong focus.
It's fun. It was fun to talk about, and it would be tremendous if someday events justified that.
But at the moment, probably just gets out of the facts on the ground a little bit.
Now, I want to tell you about, I don't have the link, but it was the New Yorker magazine who wrote an article, and you've seen a number of them like this, about the video that President Trump shared with Kim.
Now, you may have seen my periscope in which I said it was brilliant persuasion and it got everything right.
And here's what people are getting wrong about that video.
And I hope those of you who read my book You probably anticipate what I'm gonna say.
So the people who criticized the video said things like this.
They said, well, it was weird.
That's not a reason, right?
Weird? That's, I don't know, just a label you put on it.
It doesn't say it doesn't work or anything.
People said it was, you know, cringeworthy, weird, over-the-top, you know, it's so much like a movie.
So, if you look at the critics, they'll have lots of insult words for the style that was used.
Tell me, those of you who have been following me for a while, tell me what they're missing.
Tell me what they're missing when they label that.
They dismissively label, and I don't mean just that they don't understand persuasion.
So they obviously are missing the technique in it.
But what are they missing in the big picture of this thing?
Yeah, they're missing a reason.
That's true. They're missing any kind of reason.
and they just sort of assume that you agree with them and then they put interesting words on what they think you already agree.
You know, you're saying a lot of things I'm watching your comments. A lot of your comments are true, and you're pointing out the good technique that's in the video.
And that's all accurate.
It makes you think past the sale, past peace to how good peace will be.
It's visual. It does all those things.
But here's the big part that people miss.
And the funny thing is, This is the thing that Trump gets right all the time.
And people who criticize Trump don't understand and get wrong all the time.
And I'm going to work up to it, alright?
Do you remember when President Trump was first campaigning and one of the big complaints was that he spoke in something like a sixth grade vocabulary and just was so simple and, well, simple, I guess. Do you remember how the smart people criticized that?
And probably for about a year, people kept saying, yeah, you know, he's talking like a sixth grader.
That's bad. And then he kept winning, you know, and became president while talking like a sixth grader.
And about that time, people like George Lakoff, who is a linguistics professor at Berkeley, started saying things like, um, no, That talking like a sixth grader is really the most effective way to talk.
Trump was talking in a way that the audience was perfectly suited to accept.
In other words, his style of talking was designed to be perfectly compatible with who he was talking to.
You notice that when the president has children in the Oval Office, he speaks to them like you talk to children.
When he has punchy dinero going after him, he talks to him in a way that is a little bit, you know, punching back and humorous, etc.
So he takes exactly the right tone.
When he meets with Kim Jong-un, he goes into a diplomat, almost a grandfatherly diplomat mode where he seemed to be embracing the younger diplomat, just about the right tone.
What do the critics miss about the video that President Trump showed to Kim?
What they miss is President Trump did not make a video to show to the New Yorker magazine.
He didn't make a video to show to the New York Times.
He didn't make a video to show to the Washington Post.
He didn't make a video to show to his critics.
He didn't make a video to show on national TV. He didn't make a video that he thought would be shown in the theaters.
He made a video for one guy.
Was that the right style to pick for that one guy?
You know it was.
Because you've seen the video that that one guy produces.
We've seen the stuff that comes out of North Korea, right?
We've seen the type of language that North Korea employs.
We see the videos that they make.
Did President Trump's style in his video look a little bit familiar?
Yes. Why am I the first person to point out that when you make a product, the product should be designed for the customer?
The customer!
Or in this case, the audience.
He had an audience of one person.
One person. And we know enough about that one person.
We're assuming that there were enough people who have studied Kim, his profile, they know what the North Korean vibe is, they know what kind of things resonate, etc.
This was designed for that one person.
And if you say to me, hey, that's not the way we Western people like to see our videos, that seems weird.
I don't know. It just looks a little racist to me, you know, to criticize the video because it assumes that everybody is going to respond the same way to the same style and type of video.
That feels a little not inclusive.
It feels like you're not taking into account the legitimate cultural differences that a North Korean leader, the way he views the world and the type of media that he absorbs and the styles of things that he thinks feel right and what feels wrong.
I'm no expert on North Korea, but to me, it looked like that video hit the sweet spot of exactly the audience they were going to, an audience of one.
Now ask yourself, who else told you what I just told you?
Who else said, of course it looks weird to us.
It's not for us.
You know what? Do you ever watch a children's cartoon on TV and you say to yourself, this children's cartoon does not appeal to me.
Do you know why? It wasn't made for you.
You know, when I watch a show like The Notebook or some teary, crying, ridiculous movie, do I go into that movie and say, they made this movie all wrong.
What's wrong with them?
Don't they know that this movie is not compatible with me?
Yes, they know that.
They didn't make that movie for me.
They made it for people who like that sort of thing.
When I watch a boxing match, I don't like boxing.
They just don't enjoy it.
Do I say to myself when I watch a boxing match, hey, they're doing this boxing match wrong because I don't want to watch it.
I do not. I say to myself, I'll bet they know who likes to watch this.
I'll bet they made a boxing match designed for the people who watch boxing.
Anyway, I think I made my point.
I'm going to need to go in a minute and do some other things.
But it will be quite hilarious today to watch the criticisms.
I think it's valid to say we want to get to a point where we have complete validation, verification that their nuclear risk is over.
But if you ask me the best way to get there, the best way to get there is by developing trust.
Because what's the biggest problem about denuclearizing North Korea?
Definitely trust.
They're not going to do it if they don't trust us.
And we're not going to be happy they're doing it if we don't trust them.
Everything the president has done so far is to deal with the core problem.
The core problem was always psychology.
The core problem was, do you trust that we don't want to attack your country?
It's just not something we care about.
Do we trust that they'd rather have a successful future than to keep nuclear weapons for what?
For no reason. So that's what the president has set up.
It's going to make it a lot easier to get to the end because of the good platform he's created here.
Alright, that's enough for now.
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