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June 14, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
42:56
Episode 90 - Introducing The Summer of Love 2018
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here. Gather around.
It's Friday!
But it's more than that.
It's more than Friday. It's June 1st, 2018.
And do you know what happens?
In the morning of June 1st, 2018?
Well, one of the things that happens is the simultaneous sip.
It goes like this.
You lift your mug, your vessel, your container of delicious beverage, coffee preferred, but not required, for the simultaneous sip.
Oh, that's good simultaneous sippin'.
Well, let's start with a few stories.
One of the stories is a couple of tweets by Secretary Pompeo, Secretary of State Pompeo.
And one of them says, POTUS has made it clear that if Kim Jong-un denuclearizes, there is a brighter path for North Korea.
We envision a strong, connected, secure, and prosperous North Korea that maintains its cultural heritage, but is integrated into the community of nations.
Which is all nice talk, right?
He's just saying, hey, we look forward to this all working out.
It looks great. But it gets even better.
So here's the tweet right after that.
Also, Secretary Pompeo.
And listen to the tone and the persuasion in this next tweet.
The proposed summit offers a historic opening for POTUS and Chairman Kim to boldly lead US and DPRK into a new era of peace, prosperity and security.
Our countries face a pivotal moment in which it could be nothing short of tragic to let this opportunity go to waste.
Wow! That is so good!
Let me tell you what I like about this.
Number one, it elevates...
Well, I'm not going to say elevate.
I'm going to say it treats the President of the United States and Chairman Kim as peers in this context.
So look at the first sentence.
The proposed summit offers a historic opening for the President...
President Trump and Chairman Kim, so it puts them in the same sentence, to boldly lead, this is both of them, they're both boldly leading the two countries into a new era of peace, prosperity, and security.
So they're both leading, they're both doing something that's important for the world, for their countries.
This is something that presents a potential for Win-win.
You notice that the language is no longer in, we're going to get what we want, even if you don't get what you want.
Now it's all win-win.
And then he does something else that I've noted the President does well.
I wouldn't be surprised if President Trump is co-author of this, or at least influenced the way it was put together.
In this last sentence, our countries face a pivotal moment in which it could be nothing short of tragic to let this opportunity go to waste.
So, it's described as an opportunity, something we have in our hands, and it would be a tragedy to let it go to waste.
Oh my God, that's good.
Because here's why this is good.
If you say to somebody, I'm reading a tweet from Secretary Pompeo, two tweets from yesterday.
And what's good about this is that sometimes it's powerful to say, hey, we have a good thing we could get.
If you work with us, we can go from where we are to something good.
That would be okay persuasion.
This is better than okay persuasion because humans are wired to care more about something they might lose than to care about something they might gain.
Because something you have is automatically valuable to you and you'll fight harder to keep it than you will fight to get a new thing that you've never had.
We're just wired that way.
So the way Pompeo words it is that we already have a thing, which we do.
This is real. He says it would be nothing short of tragic to let this opportunity go to waste.
Oh my God, that's good!
That is so good!
This is exactly the right message.
Because the point is, we've never been in this good a situation before.
We've never been this close.
So that makes it something you have that you could lose.
Now, how easy would it have been to do this wrong?
Wrong would be We don't have anything yet.
We've decided nothing yet.
Don't be fooled that we're close.
We could be walking away any minute now.
This could all fall apart.
Don't get your hopes up. That's the normal way, right?
So the normal way is don't get your hopes up.
We don't think anything's necessarily going to happen.
The future is unknowable.
And that did make sense before we got close.
But now we've got it in our hands.
Kim has it in his hands.
Greatness. I'm talking about, you know, what is the correct title for him?
Chairman Kim. Alright, so listen to this.
So I told you before that President Trump's tone about North Korea is one that we as a A public should adopt.
This is one of those cases where whether you are for the president or against the president, he is the commander of chief.
He is close to something that could be amazing.
And he's clearly signaling with his own tweets, his own statements, this is President Trump.
And now you see Secretary Pompeo picking up the tone and amplifying it.
This is the tone That you, the public, should be taking.
Get out of your we win, they lose mode.
Get out of they win, we lose mode.
Just lose it. Because that doesn't get you to the finish line.
The finish line looks like this.
That doesn't mean we can get there.
But that's what it looks like.
It looks like talking about Kim Jong-un as Chairman Kim.
So I'm going to take the lead.
And I'd always wondered what's the best way to refer to him.
So I would ask the rest of you to consider taking the lead of our president, taking the lead of the Secretary of State.
And when you refer to Kim even in tweets, call him Chairman Kim.
Because at the moment, we all have something to lose.
We don't want to lose it.
We're that close. Let's show some respect.
I've made this point before.
We've never been in a situation in the history of the world In which public opinion was so tied to the government's actions.
And that's because social media is so powerful.
It's because we have a president who's a populist.
He's really tuned into the will of the people.
He gets criticized for watching CNN and Fox News, probably more Fox News than CNN. But for staying connected to the people, So directly.
Between the tweeting and the watching TV, I've always said those are exactly the way you stay in touch with popular thought.
I think in the future that will be considered one of the smartest things the president did, which is stay connected in that way.
But the other part of that connection is that as the public moves, the president is influenced.
Don't think of this as the president influences us because it works both ways.
We're doing stuff collectively.
It influences him.
He does stuff. It influences us.
We're sort of like one big unit of leadership right now.
And if you don't do your part...
You're missing the situation.
The situation is, what you and I do now actually does matter, and I'm not sure that ever mattered before.
Chairman Kim is watching it through his people, etc.
Does Chairman Kim look at American public opinion to decide what kind of a deal he could or should get?
How much can he trust?
A deal that we make.
He's absolutely looking at American public opinion.
He's looking at the way we talk.
He's looking at the respect we show.
So let's get on board.
Clear, clear leadership from President Trump and Secretary Pompeo.
And again, I'll say Obviously, the country is very divided.
Country is very divided.
You can't take, you know, that's just a reality.
But when it comes to this stuff, you know, a deal that could be historic for the country, don't think about it.
It's good or bad for the president.
Don't think about it. It's good or bad for anybody but, you know, the society.
All right. Now, with that little bit of positivity...
Let's talk about some things that are less positive.
You are all aware of the story of Samantha Bee who said some things that people found quite disturbing about Ivanka Trump.
Now, you may say to yourself, and I'm going to call this the old way of thinking.
You probably said to yourself, our side took out Roseanne for reasons that you don't think are valid.
Our side better take out Samantha Bee for the same reason.
If we don't fight back just as hard as they're fighting, they'll walk all over us.
I'm going to challenge that thinking.
I'm going to challenge that thinking.
At this point, probably the best thing that you could do to help Roseanne is to not go after Samantha Bee.
And I would like to propose that we all take a moment, step back from the battle that is this pitched left-right battle, and just reassess whether the battle still makes sense.
We're not really in campaign mode anymore.
There was something about this last election where people never got in a campaign mode.
And so we still want to fight as hard as we can because we think that is the right strategy.
It's not just that we're mad.
You know, both sides. It's that we think it's the right strategy to get something we want.
I would submit that that was the right strategy during the election.
Fighting hard, pointing out the flaws on the other side, that's election talk.
That's when you take off the gloves, that's when you're supposed to fight.
But when there's a winner, when the boxing match is over, you're supposed to shake hands.
The handshake never happened.
We're still locked in campaign mode where we're going at each other.
So I would suggest this.
If you want Roseanne to be forgiven, you know, if forgiven is the right word, forgive Kathy Griffin, forgive Michelle Wolf, forgive Samantha Bee, and let's talk about Sarah Silverman, all right? I'll talk about her in a moment.
I'm going to suggest that the best, smartest, strategic thing that Trump supporters could do for the summer is to be nice.
And I would suggest that you should be nice in a specific way, which is that go after people's ideas as hard as you can.
But don't go after people.
Give up the boycotts.
Just don't go after people.
So that's my suggestion.
Let's make this a summer of love.
Yeah, somebody just said we won.
The war is over.
President Trump's in office.
The other side has some reasons to be mad.
They didn't get their way.
The people who support the president are looking at record unemployment, Record good unemployment levels.
Wages are up. I saw that today.
Things are going in the right direction with North Korea.
We hope they'll go well. If you're a Trump supporter, it's time for you to lead.
Don't follow. If you're attacking the left in the same fashion that they're attacking you, you're following.
Why? This isn't the campaign.
You can take it up a level.
You can get out of that mode.
You can take the lead of President Trump.
Ask yourself, what was the last time President Trump was sort of a jerk in public?
Of course he fights hard on the issues, of course.
But have you not noticed A genuine turn, really only the last 30 days or so, in which the president has taken on a more, what would be the term?
Nice? A nice tone?
You know, he's done some pardons of people.
You know, the Jack Johnson pardon.
You don't do that for any other reason than to inject some niceness into the world.
So he's sort of on a nice campaign with North Korea because it's functional.
He's being nice in office in general, I think, because it's functional.
The president, I've said from the beginning, knows when to crank up the insults, when to crank them down.
You have watched it yourself.
When North Korea was in a battle of words, he matched it.
Now we're in a different phase.
If you don't believe the president can control how he insults and what mode he's in, just watch this.
You just watched him go from super high provocative statements to, hey, let's all get along.
We can help you get rich, be our friend.
And by the way, one of the Patterns that the president hasn't yet mentioned, but I think it's important, is a lot of people are saying to themselves, well, would it pay North Korea to be friends with the United States?
And I would say, look at our track record.
When any country says, we are your friend, as opposed to getting rid of nuclear weapons, that's a different thing, right?
If somebody just gets rid of their nuclear weapons, but they're not our friend, Well, they're not our friend.
But if you're Japan, you get rid of your military for the most part, and you become our friend, it's all good.
Germany, they didn't just surrender after World War II, they became our friend.
Being our friend, the United States, is a super good deal.
And I don't think that pattern has been quite reinforced as much as it is.
And I think that you're seeing this with Iran as well.
The overtures from the United States and even Israel.
By the way, if you saw Netanyahu's video, I tweeted that yesterday, in which he was making a super-friendly gesture toward the Iranian people, Blaming essentially their regime for any problems that they have.
It was a direct call for friendship with the Iranian people.
Now, let me ask you this.
Is being friends with Israel in that region a good deal?
It's a really good deal.
It's a really good deal.
Is being friends with the United States a good deal?
It's a really good deal.
So that's a pattern we should reinforce.
Let's talk about Sarah Silverman.
There was a tweet this morning that people called my attention to in which she said, and I want to get the exact words, Sarah, I think she was responding to somebody else's tweet.
And she said, so this is comedian Sarah Silverman, she said, racists rarely think they're racist.
Just like cults don't know they're cults, just like groupthink, zombies who say stuff like coastal elite, libtards, snowflake, feminazi, SJW, etc., don't know they're sheep with an inability for critical thought, or original thought, in my opinion.
Now you say to yourself, oh, that's awful, that's awful.
Well, let's go to the whiteboard.
Here's what I see happening.
I see a progression of people's understanding of the reality they live in.
And I see it in these phases, roughly speaking.
Phase one is where you say my side is all good and the people on the other side are evil or dumb.
Some combination of ignorant, evil, dumb.
This is the lowest level of awareness.
If you think that your side is doing all the good stuff and the other side is doing all the evil, dumb stuff, at least in terms of American politics, I'm not talking about the Nazis who were in fact just evil, but in the normal course of ordinary citizens who are not breaking the law, we think our side is good, the other side is evil and dumb.
This is the lowest level of awareness.
Sarah, I think Sarah Silverman used to be here, by the way, and maybe only a year ago.
Sarah has now moved to this level, in which she said, my side is good, and your side is not evil and dumb.
They're deluded.
Believe it or not, that's legitimate progress.
Now, I'm saying deluded, and the words she used were People don't realize they're being racist.
So she's moved from they're dumb and evil to they're sort of hypnotized.
They're in an illusion.
They're deluded. Now you can say to yourself, well, that's not true.
But that's not my point today.
The point is not whether something is true or false.
The point is this is a higher level of understanding of the reality that you live in.
It's not quite there, but it's a movement in the right direction.
The one after this, where you say your side is good and the other people are confused, they're in sort of an illusion, is Yanni and Laurel.
We've been teased with this reality, and it's sort of the reality that I've been trying to explain to you for as long as you've been listening to me, that we are all experiencing our own little movie.
My movie isn't the true one, it's just the one I'm experiencing.
Your movie isn't the true one, it's just the one you're experiencing.
So I don't criticize you for being deluded, evil, or dumb, because I know neither of us are seeing reality.
Neither of us are seeing reality.
We as human beings don't have access to it.
We did not evolve to the point where we can see things clearly.
We're not even close.
So to imagine that your team has that power, but all the people on the other team somehow lack that capacity that you evolved to have, is not a high level of thinking.
Every bit of science, psychology, scholarship agrees with what I'm telling you right now.
People experience their own reality.
That's different from saying there isn't a base reality.
I'm just saying that we can't see it.
Nobody on either side can see the base reality.
And I would say that there's a slightly, at least the potential for a yet higher level of understanding in which you can learn to spot the triggers.
Because if you can learn to spot the triggers, you have at least some chance of knowing which person has departed from reality, the base reality if there is one, the farthest.
And I would say that the way to operate in this reality where nobody knows anything, for sure, is to use prediction as your best guide.
So if your Laurel predicts that other people will also hear Laurel, well that would be a good prediction and maybe you should stick with that filter on reality.
But if you know that some people are going to hear Yanni and some people are going to hear Laurel, I guess that would be a prediction too.
And it would be pretty close to what you would actually experience if you predicted that.
So, here's my larger point.
It's time for the, let's say the right, to take some leadership.
You have been following up to this point.
And you've been following the people that you criticize the most.
You've been following the left.
You've been matching them.
You've been doing that hypocrisy thing where you say, oh, why are you criticizing this when you were so bad the other day?
Well, first of all, it's almost always true that whoever is criticizing you did not take that specific position you're saying everybody on that other side took.
People are picking and choosing to make it look like the other side.
All of them, 100% of them are all hypocrites because there was one person who had this opinion in that group and another person who had this opinion and therefore they're all hypocrites because two different people had different opinions.
That's not how it works.
Let's get past the hypocrite stuff.
Here's what you say if somebody says, you know, you have bad manners.
If somebody says you have bad manners, you should say, first of all, look at what you did and say, wow, is that bad manners?
Why is somebody saying that?
And if you did, the best, most strategic, valuable, useful for your benefit is to say, what are you talking about?
And then if it looks like you have bad manners, you say, oh, what can I do about that?
See if I can fix it. Here's what never helps.
You had bad manners yesterday.
That never made anything better.
So if the moment somebody says you have bad manners and all you do is parrot them back, oh you had bad manners yesterday, they're the leader and you're the follower.
That would make sense if they were smarter, better, more awesome than you.
You probably should follow people who know more than you.
Let's say an ethical framework that you admire.
So sometimes you should follow people.
There's nothing wrong with that.
In fact, it's very helpful.
But keep in mind, who's the leader and who's the follower in this situation?
If somebody tells you you're bad and you just pare it back the same thing they said, you know, you're bad too, yesterday you were bad, or worse, or worse, somebody says to you, you have manners, and you say, oh yeah?
Well, somebody who has some similar beliefs than you do, some similar beliefs as you about politics, that other person was bad yesterday.
What? What? What?
How does that move you in the right direction?
How is that any kind of leadership?
So I propose that the folks who are Trump supporters, people who are on the right, take some leadership.
And take advantage of this summer to just be nicer.
Stop going after people personally.
And even if they go after you, Respond with, you know, if you happen to be Christian, maybe there's a Christian way to respond.
If somebody criticizes you, how about admitting it?
If there's something there and say, okay, I was pretty rude there, and back off.
It makes sense to see the people who are out of power, per se, be a little bit meaner.
We wish that were not the case.
But the side that's out of power is going to be a little meaner.
That isn't the right.
And so, if you'd like to take things to another level, just understand where you are on this progression and where you don't want to be.
You don't want to be here.
Sarah Silverman has already taken it up a notch.
And I saw people turn this around on her.
In fact, I did that with my own tweet.
So my retweet of her comment was that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Now that's not an insult about her.
That's an insult about how people And it would apply to anybody.
If you're locked into a filter, that's all you're going to see.
So I was directly criticizing her idea that there's one side that can't see what movie they're in.
Because she's not wrong about that.
She's only half right.
The reality is that both sides are in their own movie.
If you see me on Twitter going after somebody personally, let's say their looks, or calling out something they did 20 years ago, call me out on it.
Point it out to me.
If you see me do that, Do a little self-policing here, right?
Likewise, you may notice in the coming weeks and months that I might do some friendly reminders to people who would normally be on my side.
So if I see you going after somebody personally, their looks, if I see you imagining you know their inner thoughts, I might point it out, but don't take it personally.
Because the point is to try to get the people who can change most easily to get them to change.
The right can change more easily because they're the group that's getting more of what they want.
It's easy to be nice when you're getting what you want.
The left is going to have a hard time and they're going to need some leadership.
And if you want to provide some leadership, Keep in mind, we're no longer in the world where the only person who is a leader is the president.
We don't live in that world.
Social media has made everybody influential in different ways.
So you can step it up.
You can be nice even when they're not nice to you.
And it would take away the biggest club that they have on the left.
You make it safe for the left to be mean.
There's a reason that Samantha Bee probably won't lose her job.
We don't know yet, but probably won't suffer too much for her comment.
And the reason is this.
You made it easy for that to happen.
Now, I think she should keep her job, by the way.
That would be my preference. I would hope that you would also hope that.
So you should hope that she keeps her job as you hope that Roseanne comes out well, if you believe that in both cases there was somebody who just was a comedian, who went over the line, maybe didn't quite realize the impact of their words.
When somebody like Roseanne says, I think she's now saying that she was on Ambien, and at one point she said she thought, she didn't know that Valerie Jarrett was anything but white.
Now when she says that, does that make sense?
Well, yes it does actually.
You could take either one of those explanations and that would make sense.
You put them together and it definitely makes sense.
Because part of the degraded thought process might have been the Ambien.
So is it a good enough excuse that you thought she was white?
Probably not, right?
Because she thought she was at least Persian, I believe she thought.
So just the fact that she's got anything in her that would raise the question is just bad judgment.
So either of those excuses by themselves is kind of weak.
You put them together, they're actually pretty good.
But here's the larger point.
I'm not going to ask you to read anybody's mind.
Don't read Roseanne's mind.
But when somebody tells you, I did something stupid, I'm really sorry, here's why I did it, and the reason that you hear sounds, that's a reasonable explanation.
Just accept it. You don't want to live in a world where somebody who apologizes, shows their work, and does what they can after the fact.
You don't want that to be worth nothing.
Because once you make it worth nothing, you don't get it anymore.
People respond to incentive.
So if you take away the power of an apology, By not accepting it, not taking people at their word for what they were thinking, you devalue it.
And if you want to live in that world, that would be one way to do it.
All right. Both apologized, one was punished.
Yeah. Here's the error.
Don't equate those two situations.
Do not equate what happened to one and what happened to the other.
First of all, if I've taught you anything, it's that analogies are useless.
So you're making an analogy.
Hey, Samantha Bee had this.
Roseanne had this.
Analogies never work.
The obvious reason in this case is that one was allegedly racism.
I don't believe it was.
But people believe that, so they act on their belief.
And the other one was a woman insulting a woman.
Now, I didn't make the rules.
But the existing rules of our society is you can insult yourself.
So a woman can insult a woman.
Chris Rock can insult black people.
Roseanne thought she was insulting another white person according to her version of events.
It would have been less of a big deal if that had been the case.
But that little bit of ambiguity and ethnicity is a big, big problem.
Alright. Prediction about Iran.
Here's my preference on Iran.
Let's move away from the board here.
I think you'll see the presidency.
I think you'll see the president taking a similar approach with Iran as with North Korea, and similar only in this one limited way.
I think that he's going to clearly emphasize the good future they could have, being our friends, Versus how bad things will be if they're not.
So look for that contrast-related persuasion that we're seeing with North Korea.
Now I call it persuasion, but I don't mean that in some kind of weird, manipulative way.
Because what they're saying is just the truth.
It's not manipulative to point out the truth that the other person understands as the truth.
That the world could be amazing With our enemies becoming our friends, because they just don't really have a strong reason to be our enemies.
And things could be terrible as enemies.
Terrible for them, terrible for us.
Alright, so I think you see that.
Now here's the thought process that could get us to a good place with Iran.
Now, on one level, economics drives our choices for a lot of stuff.
So, you know, Iran's economic future might be enough to drive them in the right direction.
But usually people need a fake because or a better reason or a change in something in order to move their minds to a new place.
And here's the frame that I've been playing with, and I'll test this out with you.
It seems to me that Islam does not prohibit you from using better weapons.
So if what you're trying to do is, let's say, spread Islam, in the old days it was spread by swords, they didn't have the internet, it was the only way you could spread Islam.
Today you see the more radical elements, you know, ISIS, etc.
They're still the minority, but you see them trying to spread with weapons.
Now, in the old days, when Islam spread with weapons, what was the result?
Well, quite often, the result was more Muslims, because they would conquer an area, convert people, and so you would start with this strategy, oh, we'll use our swords, To conquer places and then we'll have more muzzles.
And that worked for a long time.
Fast forward to lately.
What has happened lately when Islam tries to advance through weapons?
Well, if you look at Syria, the answer is there are fewer muzzles.
In other words, there are just so many people dead that there are just fewer people.
So the strategy of using weapons to spread your religion went from the very best strategy and really the only one that would work back in the old days to currently normal weaponry even if it's good weapons missiles whatever just don't work so if something stops working I'm pretty sure no matter who your god is that they would suggest using better tools because it's not about the tools God
didn't care if he used a sword or a gun or a missile.
That was now specified.
So I think the higher level of thinking is that now that ordinary physical weaponry just doesn't work, that the only thing that does work in a battle of ideas is the internet.
And here's the frame that I think could take Iran to a better place.
It goes like this.
We don't want to get involved With any of Iran's internal anything.
We don't want to promote a revolution.
We don't want to demand change.
We don't want to take sides.
We want Iran to take care of Iran.
But here's something everybody knows.
We know and they know. Iran has two forces that will create change.
Tons of young people, like a very disproportionate percentage of young people in Iran.
Youth always leads to change.
Number two, they have access to the Internet, and that's not going to change.
So if you have access to the Internet and you have tons of young people, change happens.
So instead of saying, Iran, you should change your evil regime, I think that just stiffens resistance.
Better, Iran, we would like to be friends with you.
Please take care of your internal changes in a way that keeps everybody safe.
It's your business.
Change is going to happen.
There's no alternative to that.
The forces that cause change are in place.
There's nothing that can change it.
I did see just recently that the number of protests in Iran, an observer who said, without the benefit of science, just observationally, that there were more protests happening in Iran right now than at any time since perhaps the revolution or something.
So there are things happening in Iran that are just going to happen whether we or Israel or anybody else cares or is involved, has an opinion.
It doesn't matter.
Change is happening and there's nothing they can do about it.
There's nothing anybody can do about it except prepare for it.
So here's the frame I would take.
Change is coming.
It's yours to make.
It's not us.
We just wish the Iranian people well, but we'll tell you that being our friend is a really, really good deal.
And we hope that at the end of this change, if there's any way we can be part of it, if there's any way we can be a useful part of whatever Iran wants to become, we're there.
If Iran would like to stay true to its principles and would like to spread its ideology, We invite you to the internet, and we will make sure that our social platforms do not prevent your speech, unless it's prevented the same way we prevent our own speech, which is there's some violent types of speech which is prevented for us as well.
So, Iran, put down the weapons that don't work.
They used to work.
They don't work anymore.
And take up The weapon that does work.
The weapon of ideas.
The internet. Let's be part of the conversation.
And if your God is supportive of you, your arguments and His will, as it is expressed through you on the internet, should be enough.
In the old days you didn't have the internet.
You had to use a sword if you wanted more Islam.
That's not the case. Now you have the internet.
Make your case and we'll help you make it.
Free speech is a big deal.
So as we enter the Summer of Love, I would ask you to consider policing your own opinions.
Take some leadership instead of following the other side.
Take the leadership of your President and the Secretary of State, who have modified their tone to fit the situation.
There might be a time in the future where going mean is exactly what you want to do.
In fact, it might be during the election.
And sometimes there's an actual utility to going tough on the other side.
And that's during a campaign in particular.
So let's take our gains.
Let's feel happy about what works.
Let's offer to some countries that have been our traditional enemies that being our friend is a really, really good deal.
That's all I have for today.
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