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June 14, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
24:19
Episode 100 - Singapore Summit Progress
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Hey everybody!
We've got something fun to talk about today.
Well, we always do.
But today we've got that Singapore summit to talk about, to unpack a little bit.
But before we do that, you know what happens first.
Oh yeah. I'm back to the mainland, babies.
I'm back and I got big coffee now.
Big American coffee.
Let us drink the simultaneous sip.
Oh! That's what victory tastes like.
Alright, how many of you saw a segment on CNN yesterday in which Chris Cuomo was interviewing Dennis Rodman?
And Dennis Rodman was wearing a Make America Great Again hat for the entire interview and talking about how much he loved his two friends, Kim and Trump.
It was one of those great moments in television because I'm sure CNN didn't want to spend a lot of time on a black man wearing a Make America Great Again hat.
Not since Kanye has anybody caused that much trouble wearing a hat.
But it was impossible to take the camera off him.
Say what you will about Dennis Rodman.
And by the way, I think he probably deserves a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
I believe that's the highest civilian award in the United States, unless you're in the military.
So I think Rodman has genuinely done an important thing for the country, for the world, and for his friends.
And it's fun to watch him because Rodman seems to be at a place in his life where he's just trying to help.
And he's actually doing it.
Unlike most of us, he's actually helping.
So poor CNN had to stay glued to Rodman, who was insanely...
Interesting, as he is all the time.
He's never less interesting.
And Dennis was doing his thing and it was just sort of a great TV moment.
Well, let's talk about, first of all, how did the leaders get along?
We all watched, I guess, the same clips of the handshakes and the joking and the laughing and the smiling and the more handshakes and the pats on the back and stuff.
If you looked at Trump's body language, He was in full seduction mode, I would say.
Meaning that the president was trying hard to make sure that the chemistry worked.
Now I think Kim probably had the same incentive.
I think he wanted the chemistry to work or else he wouldn't have been there.
And it looked like the two leaders were definitely a little bit uneasy.
You all picked that up, right?
They were not completely comfortable.
I would say some of that, maybe most of it is just the moment and the bigness of it and nobody wants to do the wrong thing.
But some of it is the language.
It's hard to bond immediately and in a productive way through the interpreters.
It takes away your timing, your jokes, and everything.
So I think both people were trying to push past The language difference.
And so you saw them trying hard to do that and succeeding, I think.
My visual impression is that they did push past it and that they did succeed and they did create a relationship, if you will.
Now, the statement that came out of it Was, I would say, compatible with expectations that the administration had more recently set.
Because the current thinking is, you don't make these deals in one day.
It's a process. But let's get the process going in the right direction.
So in terms of, did they get the process moving in the right direction?
Yes. Unambiguously.
This, to me, looked like the process moving in the right direction.
Now, some people have said, didn't Kim get the win because he got the photo op and he got in the room with the President of the United States and, you know, the things he gave away were not that, not irreversible.
In other words, everything that Kim has, you know, quote, given up, it would be somewhat reversible if he wanted to.
So didn't he get the photo op and you can't reverse history?
So that really happened. Here are my observations.
Number one, did you hear Chairman Kim's, I think maybe among his first things he said when he got in contact with Trump, he said, and I don't know if any of you caught this, he basically said what Kanye's been saying.
He said it's time to break free of the, he didn't use these words, but he essentially said it's time to break free of the mental prison of the past.
Now, maybe that's an accident.
Maybe. But maybe they watch American media, and why wouldn't they, right?
They should be watching it. Just for their own strategic purposes, they should be paying attention.
And if they were paying attention, it would be hard to miss...
How powerful the whole Kanye, Candace situation was.
And the major theme that came out of that was releasing the past.
You know, don't be a prisoner of the past.
And Kim volunteered that.
And then today, we saw President Trump echo that.
You know, he said in his own words again, he said, you know, the past is the past.
I'm trying to paraphrase as best I can.
Basically, don't let the past...
So those are my own words, but basically he was saying that.
So now both of them have joined the same frame, which is rejecting the failures of the past, and that really means both sides, right?
So both of them are saying, we don't need to blame, we don't need to look back, we don't need to obsess with what didn't work in the past.
It's a new day. Now, let's talk about the fact that they met it all before having a verifiable progress.
Now, sure, there were some small things like the missile testing suspended and blew up some entrances to the entrance and exits to some testing caves and that sort of thing.
But... But what he got was the FaceTime and the respect in the top stage with the President.
And my take on that is sort of the Robert Cialdini take on it.
Now, this is not something that he said.
This is from things I learned by reading Cialdini's books.
The fact that both leaders met each other in person, and then turned to the world, the world that includes both North Korea and, you know, the U.S. and everybody else, and the fact that they said in public, personally, and looked into the camera and said, we're going to denuclearize, and at our end, we're going to help guarantee their security.
When you state these things in public in that kind of a situation, It makes you commit to them, even if you weren't that committed before you said it.
So in other words, the fact that they said it turns both leaders into that person.
And I hope I'm clear on that.
It doesn't matter what they were thinking before they said it.
The fact that they said it turns them into it.
Because you become, and there's research that backs this, you become the thing that you present.
So people are not, there's no such thing as somebody who is themselves on the inside, and then, you know, I'm being true to myself, and then I tell the world who I am.
That's the simplistic version of people.
We're not quite that We're not quite that straightforward.
We're kind of a continual feedback system.
So the specific experiment that I'm thinking about to make this judgment, this was also in the book Influence, I believe.
Cialdini's book. They did a test where they asked people to write a paragraph on an opinion that they did not hold.
So they were asked to write a paragraph supporting a position that was not their own position.
They actually had a different opinion.
Then they check back with them in a year and they say, hey, what do you think about these topics?
And they find that the people who wrote an opposite opinion came to embrace the opinion that they wrote about.
With nothing else happening.
So the only thing that happened was they, in front of other people, they committed to a position, and then they reverse engineered their brain over the next year until they believed that they actually had that position.
Now, that sort of thing, yeah, it's commitment and consistency.
So people like to be consistent, especially when other people are looking.
We like to be consistent in our own minds with ourselves, but it's far more important if we've made a commitment in public, we need to be that person.
We need to be consistent. I mean, it's one of the reasons that people don't admit they're wrong.
You saw the president joking about that.
He said, if things don't go well, I won't admit it.
Which was hilarious.
So, if you're looking for what is the real progress here, because we don't have a verifiable agreement, we don't have details of agreement, and of course we all want those things.
The real progress is that both of these leaders turned to the world and said, world, this is who I am.
This is what I say.
And the world said, boom.
Boom. The world loved it.
If you stand in front of the world and say something that the world universally, like to a person, there might not be one person in the entire world Who disagrees with getting peace with North Korea.
So those two leaders came up.
They're going to get praise for what they've done.
They will, you know, in both of their home courts, people will be shaking their hands and patting them on the back and saying, man, I feel like something happened, something important, and you did it.
So these people, President Trump and Kim, are now being committed to the positions they've made in public, and that does matter.
Now, compare to the past, where you had leaders who never actually had any communication directly, you know, Kim's father and grandfather, with American leaders.
And any communication was, tell a guy who tells a guy who tells somebody in China who talks to a diplomat, who talks to a guy who talks to the president.
Now, if that's the situation of your communication, then changing your mind is a lot easier.
It's a lot easier to say, well...
You know, I said that, but you're not doing what I want you to do, so that gives me the freedom to not do my side.
So it's a big, big, big, big, big deal in terms of getting a good outcome that the leaders met in public, and more importantly, Even more important than their personal relationship is that they said it clearly and unambiguously and they're on the same page and they said it in public.
The public has a lot to do with this outcome.
That may not have always been the case.
Pre-internet, that may not have been the case.
But at this point, the public is in the room.
The public is a player, and we should take that seriously.
So the document they signed, I believe, was a bit generic statement that they wanted to denuclearize the peninsula and that the U.S., I think they said the U.S. would provide some security I think they said the U.S. would provide some security guarantees, et cetera.
So we'll see how that goes.
Now, one of the things that people say is, How can you trust that North Korea will denuclearize?
Because it was the nuclear weapons that got them to this place that they are.
Why would they stop using something that worked?
And here's where the person-to-person meeting and the public statements come in.
You don't need nuclear weapons to defend against your allies.
Right? So President Trump has simply changed the frame.
He changed it from a frame of, hey, we're at war with you and watch out.
That's a frame where they need nuclear weapons.
And if they agreed to give up nuclear weapons in the context of being at war with the United States, you should expect that they don't mean it.
You should expect that it's a strategic thing to say, yeah, yeah, we'll get rid of those nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, making some more nuclear weapons.
That would make perfect sense in a context where we're at war with them.
President Trump has changed the frame, and Chairman Kim has changed it as well.
They appear to be on the same page.
And especially Kim's conversation with Moon in South Korea, the friendliness there, the two of them have created a peace frame.
Now, within the peace frame, first of all, who wants to change that?
There's no way that the United States is going to have peace with North Korea and then say, you know, that peace is working out, everybody's peaceful, and there's no nuclear weapons, but let's go do something dangerous and start a war or something.
We're not going to do that.
So as soon as you hit that peace frame, that gives Kim the ability to denuclearize with only something to gain and absolutely nothing to lose.
So this is the first time anybody ever changed the frame.
Before it was always, yeah, we hate you and we're at war, but why don't we just lay down our weapons anyway?
Who's going to believe that?
Change that to, hey, can we invest?
Let's be friends. Let's shake hands.
Let's sign some agreements. Let's get on the same page.
Let's stop talking about the past.
Let's stop talking about the war.
Let's do the best possible thing.
That's the headset everybody's in now.
In that headset, cheating doesn't make sense for North Korea.
So don't expect North Korea to do what doesn't make sense.
Before, it didn't make sense necessarily for them to give up their weapons.
Today, the situation is different.
It does make sense. It makes complete sense.
And choice number two doesn't make any sense at all.
So it's getting easier now because of that personal relationship.
Sorry.
Now, I know there's going to be a lot of chatter today.
I'm watching my clock because I have to get off in a few minutes to do something else.
There's going to be a lot of chatter today about how the critics of President Trump will cover this.
How will the networks that are not his friends say this went?
And predictably, they'll say stuff about, you know, there's no details in the agreement, and Kim got his meeting, and we haven't gotten any denuclearization, and that sort of thing.
So you can see all that stuff. It may be my imagination, but I thought in the last few days online, on Twitter, that the level of vitriol and insult for Trump supporters and anybody who says anything good about him is higher than I've seen in a while.
Instead of trailing off because good things are happening, You'd expect people to say, oh, okay, I'm not going to criticize the president this month because good things are happening.
It went the other way, didn't it?
Just in the last few days, it looks like it just went spiked.
And here's the tell I want you to look for.
Remember I tell you, tells for cognitive dissonance.
So if the president is getting a good result here, and it looks very positive to me, the people who are as big as critics are going to be thrown into a mental distress, the likes of which we haven't seen since the election.
But this one might be worse.
And I'll tell you why this one might be worse.
Winning the election, people still had a mental trapdoor that they could escape from that thought that was so painful.
And the trapdoor was, wow, I guess there are more racists in the country than I assumed.
And then quickly after that, oh, I get it, Russia threw him the election.
That's why. It was about Russia.
So they had an escape path.
The North Korea situation is leaving them only speculative escape paths.
In other words, instead of saying, yes, there are racists and far more than we thought, or yes, Russia helped, those are affirmative, specific things.
Here they have to talk about, well, something might go wrong because there was that other time something went wrong with different people in a different situation, and we think that maybe the president's ego and his urgency to get a Nobel Prize.
So they're going to be talking in these weird, speculative, imaginary ways about things that have gone wrong or could go wrong.
So they don't have a good trap door.
Not one they can just walk out.
They have to conjure up an imaginary door just to get out of the room in their head.
And I think it's going to cause a tremendous amount of distress.
Here's the tell. For that cognitive dissonance.
And you're going to see this on Twitter.
Look for the Twitter responses that are the laundry list of Trump criticisms.
So instead of saying, This thing will work.
Instead of talking about one thing or one problem, you're getting the laundry list.
Have you seen it yet? I saw it all the last 48 hours.
My Twitter feed is full of the laundry list.
The laundry list goes like this.
Somebody says, hey, President Trump may have good progress in North Korea where nobody had it before.
And then the critic says, he's a conman, racist, misogynist, crazy, mentally unstable, liar, corrupt, And there's about three other words on there.
But if you see the list, and nothing on the list looks directly related to the topic, that's your tell.
So look for the lists, and the lists will be, oh, he's corrupt, he's xenophobic, he's a bigot, he's a liar, he's a con man, he's a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So list tells all week.
Projection. Somebody says it's projection.
I don't know if I've said this on Periscope yet.
I've said it a lot of times otherwise.
I don't know that projection is a real thing.
I really don't.
I get that there's some psychological concept where people project their own issues onto other persons as if the other person is thinking it, but it's only because they're thinking it.
And I'm willing to accept that there are some situations where that's a real thing in the real world.
But mostly, mostly I think we imagine projection.
I think people just use whatever complaint they have handy, and once in a while it looks to us like projection.
I think that's all that's happening.
Somebody says, projection is real.
I caught myself doing it.
Well, here's my proposal to you.
If you find yourself doing something that looks like projection, in other words, you're assuming the other person is the same as you, that doesn't mean you're projecting it.
It could just mean you think the other person has that opinion.
It doesn't necessarily have to mean because you had it.
You probably can't imagine anybody having any opinion that isn't something like something you've thought at one point or another.
I guess this is a better way to say it.
In a sense, everything is projection.
Because you can't understand another person and what they're doing unless you sort of project yourself into them and say, okay, if I were in that situation, that's how I'd act if I had these inputs or whatever.
So, I guess a better way to say it, instead of saying, I don't think projection is a real thing, I think a better way would be to say, it's everything.
It's the only thing we do.
And therefore, it's not worthy of being called out.
Yeah, bad pattern recognition can be the trigger for projection.
Alright, I'm going to wrap this up in a moment because I've got some other business coming in.
Would CNN have attacked Rodman for more mental issues if Anthony Bourdain had not recently taken his life?
I don't think so.
I think people are being pretty generous to Rodman and he earned it.
So I think people are just well behaved when it comes to Dennis Rodman, and I think that's appropriate because he may have done an amazing thing for the world, and I think he needs that Presidential Medal of Honor, assuming things go well in the next couple of months.
Alright, I'm going to talk to you maybe again later today as events unfold.
But for now, I've got to do some more stuff.
It's great to be back in your, well, in my normal time zone.
And let's drink a toast to what we hope will be a long, prosperous path with North Korea.
So this is to North Korea, to the United States, and the rest of the world.
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