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June 18, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
21:59
Episode 26 - Kanye Showed the Way to The Golden Age
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I hope most of you are already home from church or you're awake after sleeping in.
Whatever it is that you're doing.
But whatever it is, you know what time it is.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
That's me. You know who you are.
Grab your coffee and let's share a simultaneous sip.
I'm drinking to the golden age.
Let me tell you about the Golden Age.
I've been talking about this coming for a while.
And maybe you've noticed that the universe seems to be serving up more surprises than normal.
It started about the time of President Trump's ascension from the time that he announced he was running.
And it seems to be continuing all the way through the North Korean progress.
In each of these cases, what we're seeing are things that we didn't think were possible.
This is important to my point.
We keep seeing a series of things that don't seem possible based on our old thinking.
I'm going to give you a little chalk talk in a moment, and I'm going to tell you how we're seeing more signs of the Golden Age.
Now the golden age I define as a time when everything is largely going right.
You know, all the big stuff is heading in the right direction.
Nothing's perfect. We're heading in the right direction.
And part of that golden age is the realization that many of our problems are psychological and not physical.
A physical problem is you have a plague and you don't have a vaccine or a cure.
That's a physical problem.
Most of our problems now are the North Korea type of problem.
Where they're afraid that we're going to attack them, but we don't really want to.
It's a misunderstanding. Maybe there's a way they could have security.
So in other words, a President Trump comes on the scene, and probably the one thing that defines Donald Trump, let's say the human, not just the office, probably one of the things that defines him better than anything, Love him or hate him, he has one defining trait.
Well, he has several, I guess.
But one defining trait of Donald Trump is that he doesn't see limits on what he can do.
Apparently he doesn't see limits on his marriage, what level he can rise to in society, how much money he can make, what industries he can get into and succeed, what things he can say on Twitter.
He's simply someone who doesn't see the same mental barriers that others see.
Now, what have most observers been saying about President Trump for two and a half years?
It goes something like this.
You can't do that.
You can't say that.
Hold my Diet Coke.
I'm going to do that.
Watch. Watch me do that right in front of you.
I'm going to give this guy a nickname.
I'm going to insult this person.
It'll all work out. And it seems impossible until you start seeing it all work out.
The economy is blazing.
North Korea is starting to go in the right direction.
And if North Korea goes, this will be your biggest signal for the Golden Age.
Because it will be the most conspicuous problem.
Here's the important part.
If North Korea goes in the right direction, denuclearizes, and everybody's happy that they really actually did it, It will be the biggest probably success story in history in which it was a psychological problem that was solved with psychological means short of war.
In the old days we just went to war.
So we just killed each other until somebody said, okay, I give up.
This was always a psychological problem and is being solved largely.
The sanctions are vaguely quasi-military, but largely a psychological solution.
This is a big deal.
I'm going to tell you about another big thing that's happening.
Some of you have seen that Mike Cernovich recently has been noting that there just seems to be something in the universe.
That's happening. You know, maybe it's the simulation we like to say, but whether it's something happening in the simulation or whatever filter you want to put on it, it feels like there's something big happening.
And I think a framework to see this big happening stuff is that people are breaking out of what I call their mental prisons.
The people are realizing that there were things that used to hold us back, that used to limit what we could do and what our danger was and what our opportunity was, that much of these were psychological.
And once we get to a higher plane of sort of understanding how You know, how reality works, and how people actually think, and how we're not really rational, and we're also not as crazy as we like to think the other person is.
So let me give you the best example of that recently, so you can see that there might be a pattern developing.
Yes, we're going to the whiteboard.
It's whiteboard time.
Alright, aren't you glad you tuned in for this very special Coffee with Scott Adams?
I don't know.
Let's have another simultaneous sip, and then I'll take you through this.
You're going to like this. Oh, that's good.
Alright. So...
We humans have developed a number of prisons of the mind.
Things that we just imagined to be our limitations were imagined to be true and it limits what we think is possible and it limits what choices we make.
Here are two of the biggest ones.
I talk about this a lot.
One is the false belief that history repeats.
It doesn't. It never does.
It just looks like it because we have this pattern recognition brain.
So anytime we see anything that reminds us of another thing, we say, well, there it is.
History repeating again.
But that's not what's happening.
History can't repeat because all the variables are changing all the time.
So you can't ever have the same starting point you ever had in history.
History never repeats.
Ever. If you think it does, you're in a mental prison.
If you think it doesn't, do you know what happens if you think that history doesn't repeat?
Then you can become President of the United States without ever being a politician.
If you believe that history repeats, you don't even try.
President Trump is not in a mental prison.
Did he think that North Korea was unsolvable?
Nope. Did he think he couldn't negotiate trade deals?
Nope, he didn't think that. Did he think he couldn't give people nicknames and win an election that way?
With other stuff, of course.
Nope. Did he think that nobody could talk about immigration without being labeled a racist and therefore their life was over?
Didn't seem to bother him.
He consistently shows you that history doesn't repeat.
Where do you get that?
Well, probably.
It traces back to the same place I got it.
The power of positive thinking.
Remember, his pastor when he was a kid was Norman Vincent Peale, who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking.
The power of positive thinking is very close to this.
It's very close to thinking, to the belief that you're not in a mental prison.
History doesn't define you.
You can get out of that little mental prison.
Here's another one that I like to look at.
This is another mental prison.
That the problem has to be the solution.
Now this will require some explaining.
But it's a mental trap, it's a prison, if you think that the only solutions are things that are closely related to the problem.
I'll show you how that works in a real-world situation.
First, some context.
When slavery was the problem, you could say that white people were essentially the problem for slavery, right?
And it required white people to do something massively different for slavery to go away.
So in this case, the problem and the solution were very similar.
It was white people. White people were the problem.
White people had to change.
Then we fast forward to the civil rights era.
Again, even though everybody was involved in the civil rights, right, you know, every group and gender and everybody was involved in that, but the people who had to change the most, the people who had to pass laws, etc., were white people.
So white people were kind of the problem, and white people were kind of the solution, too.
But when you get to what I would call the last mile, there's what I call the last mile fog.
In these earlier situations, it was very clear what had to be done.
You have to get rid of slavery.
You have to change the laws.
You have to prosecute some people who violate the laws.
So it was fairly clear what to do, what the problem was, etc.
But now you get to this last mile where things are way better.
But still, lots of things could be far better than they are.
And I'll give you an example of what I mean by the fog.
The fog is where people don't even quite agree what the problem is.
So I saw, I think it was Sean King was tweeting around yesterday, some statistics showing that, I hope I have this right, an unarmed black man Has something like four times more chance of being shot by police in an inappropriate shooting, whatever name they put on that.
But an unarmed, remember, nobody has a gun in any of these examples, but an unarmed black man has a four times greater chance of being shot by police.
Now, I lingered on that a little bit because I know many of you are throwing up in your mouths right now because you disagree with that being true.
So you actually disagree on whether the statistic is correct.
Now, I don't know if it's correct or not.
But I know that a lot of you are saying something like this.
Some version of this you're probably thinking.
The people watching this periscope.
You're thinking to yourself, but wait a minute.
Wouldn't it be true that the greatest number of unarmed people in general are going to be shot wherever there's the highest crime?
So wouldn't you expect that if you're in a high crime neighborhood, unarmed people who are innocent are going to be shot at a far greater rate?
So wouldn't the poverty rate really be the main variable here?
And unfortunately, if more black people are in bad neighborhoods, they're in high crime neighborhoods, of course, more innocent people of all types are going to be harmed for all reasons.
Now, does that explain, away, Sean King's statistic?
I have no idea.
But nobody else does either.
I've never seen that debated, have you?
I've never seen an article where somebody gave that statistic and then also gave the other side and said, well, but have they controlled for this variable?
Maybe they have.
I don't know. But you don't know either.
So that's my point.
There's this fog about this last mile and, you know, what do you do about it?
We're coming to a point that I think will define the golden age, at least in some ways.
Let's see if you can, does that help you see this better?
In which we're separating the problem from the solution.
And what I mean by that is sort of the philosophy you're seeing from Candace Owens, and you can Google her if you're not familiar with her.
She's a conservative African-American woman who's become a very important voice because she represents a point of view that you don't see as much as you probably will in the future.
Now what's interesting is And what I mean by separating the problem from the solution is that the conservative view, which Candace holds, is that society has done what it can do.
Meaning that white people have done what they can do to make the laws as close as possible, to enforce the laws, etc.
And that the last mile, no matter No matter whose problem it is, no matter who causes the problem, this is what's different.
It doesn't matter if white people are or are not the cause of the last mile problem.
They can't fix it.
They can do what they can do, but they're not really the solution.
So Candace's, I would say, realization is that the problem and the solution are disconnected.
And if you're still locked in the past, thinking that white people have to do something much different, you're going to be missing your opportunities.
That you're thinking about it wrong, and therefore your solutions will be suboptimal.
Let me say I'm doing the best I can to represent someone else's opinion just so I can tell the full story.
I apologize in advance for summarizing it and maybe to the point of being slightly inaccurate.
I hope I'm not doing that. But the basic idea is that the conservative view that Candace seems to be a good voice for is that Only the people who have the problem can fix it.
It's not the people that did cause it or you think caused it.
It doesn't matter because they can't fix it.
They're helpless to fix it.
They would if they could. Probably would.
Just can't. Don't have all the tools.
Now there are things that can be done with funding and laws, etc.
So there are lots of things that can and should be done.
But the conservative view is that the big gains are how the people think about the problem themselves.
In other words, Candace is saying that we're in the golden age already and that the biggest problem here is the way we think about the problem.
Because if we think about it differently, we can get to a better place.
What was the big news of the week?
Kanye West, who is famous for saying things like George Bush doesn't care about black people, for getting on stage with Taylor Swift and making a statement that Beyonce should have won and that probably racism was part of the voting.
So somebody who has Strong credentials for being an advocate for African Americans and against racism.
So Kanye has good credentials from that point of view.
What did he tweet?
He tweeted, I like the way Candace Owens thinks.
Seven words.
And he ripped a hole in reality.
With seven words.
Because Kanye is supposed to be over here.
And Candace is supposed to be over here.
And they're not ever supposed to say the other one said something, right?
That's not supposed to happen.
But Kanye did it anyway.
Kanye Knows history doesn't repeat.
He's not a prisoner of the mind.
He knows that the problem is not the solution.
Whatever you want to say about Kanye's politics, and I don't even know what his preferred politics would be.
I'm not even sure what party he would run for if he ran for president at this point.
Whatever else you want to say about him, and I don't know enough about his actual management skills or political ability, but He did something that you could rarely see.
He actually just altered reality.
He just made the entire conservative Twittersphere just go something like this.
It's like your head just went.
What did I just see?
Did I really see this?
Now forget about which of these views you like the best.
That's not even the story.
Forget about whether you think Candace has everything right or everything wrong.
That's not the story. The story is that these two people that shouldn't be in the same conversation, in seven words, Kanye just changed that.
And he just freed a lot of people from a mental prison.
Kanye, in seven words...
Unlocked a mental prison.
And is bringing you to the Golden Age.
Alright. So that's my sweeping analysis.
And I think that we may see more and more examples of things we just didn't think were possible Becoming routine.
And that that would be as much because we're thinking about things differently than because our technology is getting better or we're getting smarter.
I think we're going to be just thinking that a lot more is possible than we ever thought before.
And that a lot of our barriers are just mental prisons.
And Kanye just showed you how to get out.
Love them or hate them.
He did that for you.
So, yeah.
So, Iran is next, right?
If North Korea works out, and I think it will, it's time to talk to Iran.
Because why do we really have a beef with Iran?
We're in mental prison.
We're in the same mental prison as Iran.
Maybe we can help each other get out.
Because we don't need to be problems for each other.
We just don't. Alright.
Give me some feedback on this Periscope.
Is this the sort of stuff you like or not?
Somebody said, is there a second whiteboard?
I have two whiteboards in my house, yes.
One's in the garage and one is in my office.
Okay, good.
People seem to like it.
That's what I like to hear.
It takes a while for the comments to catch up.
I'm getting a lot of super hearts.
That's great. Alright, as I always say, my Patreon account is for people who want more of this kind of stuff, because I otherwise don't have advertising or anything on here.
And I like to do it, so if you'd like to support it, go to Patreon and look for Scott Adams Says, and it's like a dollar a month, or whatever.
Alright, thank you everybody.
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