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June 18, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
29:43
Episode 37 - North Korea is the Key to the Golden Age
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Hey everybody!
Come on in. Gather around.
We're going to be talking on a beautiful Sunday.
The weather is good enough today.
And it's time for...
Simultaneous Sip with Scott Adams.
That's me. Good stuff.
Somebody's asking me for relationship advice.
Well, I'm not exactly the person you want to ask for relationship advice because my track record in that department is not stellar.
But, happy to tell you what I know sometime, not today.
Let's talk about a few things.
First of all, I did get to hear the entire Kanye and T.I. song.
I liked it so much that I tweeted about it in glowing terms, so much so that people asked if I was being sarcastic.
I gave such a nice glowing review of the song, which I really like.
I like it on lots of levels.
I like it inside the song, outside the song.
I like how it affects society.
I like how the timing is right.
I like the lyrics.
They're beautiful. I like how it shows two competing emotions that matter to us.
You know, they're integral to what we're thinking about, what we care about.
You watched Kanye create this situation, which was the perfect environment for a song, And then he put a song in it.
I don't know how to be...
Let me just be frank about this.
I don't know how to be an old white guy and like that song as much as I do.
Because I like it not just musically.
I like it in the sense of art with a capital A. You know, Kanye...
It seems to me, he doesn't produce art, he lives it.
He is the art.
What he does, what he changes, the people he touches, how he makes you feel, how it changes the world, how it changes your perceptions, how it changes the way you think, who you love, what you can do, what you can't do.
That's the art. The art is not the song.
In his case. In most cases, the artist's song.
Yeah, it's a nice song.
I like it. It's catchy. I think I'll hum that song.
Maybe I'll download it to my iPod.
That's not what's going on here.
The song is really, you know, great.
Like on every level of, you know, musicality.
At least for the non-musical mind such as myself, he hits all of my notes.
So, I love it, but it's a much bigger deal than a song.
He's just taken the world and put it in real time into a musical focus point.
I don't know, have we ever seen anything like this before?
I'm thinking of maybe Elton John's song about Princess Di.
But even that took a while, right?
There was a length of time between Princess Di dying and Elton John writing a song, which did in fact do a similar thing.
It captured our feelings about it.
But here's what's different about that.
Elton John didn't kill Lady Di.
I don't mean that as a joke.
What I mean is that his song was as an observer.
He wrote an observer song about a current event that was very important to us, so it was very powerful because we thought about it, etc.
Kanye took that to a whole higher level.
He didn't just write the song as an observer.
He was the situation.
He created the change and then he sang about it.
And then he included his biggest critic, not biggest, but, you know, a good, let's say a good representative critic to say anything he wanted to say in Kanye's song.
You've never seen anything like this.
This is way bigger than a song.
All right.
Enough about that.
Let's talk about North Korea.
it.
I tweeted a link to my blog posts about North Korea starting from about a year ago.
Let me frame that up for you.
I had been talking starting from a year ago and through several blog posts and many periscopes.
I had been saying that the situation in North Korea that looked impossible to solve was in fact a psychological problem, not a physical problem, and that a President Trump would bring to the situation a set of psychological persuasion tools which were ideal for this exact situation to solve an unsolvable problem.
Because it turns out it was never unsolvable.
It was always solvable.
We just had to change the way we thought.
President Trump did that.
He changed the way China thought about it, its place in the world, its brand, its reputation, its friendship with the United States, its trade situation.
China's way of thinking about North Korea changed to the point where what was the biggest issue with China helping with North Korea?
It feels like ancient history, even though it's just a few months ago.
The biggest problem was that China was worried about this influx of refugees.
Where did that problem go?
Well, it turns out, if you do things right, it was never that much of a problem to begin with.
It was sort of a psychological worry that probably just didn't need to be one, as we're learning.
We believed A year ago, that Kim Jong Un was not a character that we could deal with, that he was crazy, that he was afraid of this or that or whatever.
We could never deal with this crazy guy.
As of today, we know that we were totally wrong.
At least that's the way it looks.
Kim Jong Un looks like, first of all, a serious player.
And second of all, doesn't want to die in a fireball.
And third, sees a way to a better economy and a good situation.
And he's taking it completely rational.
He seems to be somebody who's not only rational, but we can really work with.
At least that's, you know, as of today.
Anything could change tomorrow, but as of today.
Now... So I put together my blog post to show my thinking on the topic, and the way I framed it is that in order to do something, if you're a human being and you want to do something, it doesn't matter what it is, the first thing that you need before you do something is you have to imagine it's possible.
So, if I think I want to walk out that door next to me, I have to first imagine, oh, that's a door that can open, I have arms and legs, I can walk over there, I can open it.
You don't do anything you don't imagine.
So, I'm not going to try to walk through the wall, because I can't really imagine that.
I'm not even going to get up and try.
So we had this North Korean impasse where we couldn't imagine getting to the place that we're at right now, which is everybody's talking nice and seems to legitimately want a solution that doesn't involve dying.
So for a year, I wrote blog posts, which I knew would be seen in the White House, not necessarily by President Trump, who I assume is not reading my blog, but I do hear directly from members of the administration in key roles that they are seeing my blog posts.
So I knew that The imagination I was adding to the process would at least get to the White House.
I speculated, and I have no way of knowing, but it seems a reasonable assumption, that when North Korea started scouring, at least there's a press report that says that North Korean operatives were trying to talk to Republicans and talk to people to try to figure out how President Trump thinks.
And I thought, well, let's see if I can persuade them as well.
Now, if your job is that you've been sent by Kim Jong-un to the United States, either physically or virtually by reading the media, and your job is to scour the media and try to understand President Trump, well, if that's your full-time job, and I imagine it would be, You're going to come across my writing, because it's one of the top 50 maybe voices that people are used to hearing in the United States.
I have a unique take on the president, so they're definitely going to look at the different takes.
They may ignore the 10 people who say exactly the same thing about the president, but they're definitely going to Notice the person who got a lot of attention for saying something different that also turned out to be the best predictor of what happened.
So, in all likelihood, both North Korea And the administration saw the body of my writing, or at least some of it, maybe just even one of them, in which I described a situation that is identical to today.
And that situation is where North Korea would just give up their nuclear program in return for security guarantees.
Now what would have ever made you think that was impossible before?
Psychology. You would have imagined that Kim Jong Un would simply not think that could work, and therefore he wouldn't even do it.
You would never even consider accepting a security guarantee in return for economic growth, living, and all the benefits that come with peace with the United States.
I think when you draw the picture of it and you make the case that it's entirely doable, it might be the easiest thing to do because it doesn't involve a war, etc.
It requires somebody like a President Trump to come into the situation and simply make everybody involved Think differently for the first time.
And as their brains are being scrambled and they're thinking very differently, they're looking for a new way to imagine the future.
And I provided at least one way to imagine you could get to a point where there's a better solution.
You would be entirely within a reasonable opinion to say, Scott, you were imagining that you had any impact on this at all.
To which I say, maybe.
It could be that I had no impact on anything.
There's no way to know.
Here's the things that we do know.
We do know that I wrote a number of blog posts that describe this situation.
I know, you don't know, but I'll tell you, that it was always my intent to allow people to better imagine a peaceful solution that is the sort of thing a President Trump is uniquely qualified to make happen.
I don't think any other president could have gotten us to this point.
So, my attempt was to help the process.
There isn't any way to know if it made any difference.
Now, I'm going to implore all of you to take this suggestion for making this North Korean situation the best it could be.
And here's my recommendation to all of you.
We should not frame this situation.
Let's say it gets to a good end and North Korea gives up its nukes.
I believe it would be a mistake on the part of pundits and the citizens and certainly politicians to frame this as Kim Jong-un back down or he blinked or President Trump won or we beat them.
Those are all unproductive framings.
This is a very big win for North Korea.
It's the biggest win you can even imagine.
Imagine going from spending all the money on nuclear weapons, which were just going to end with them being destroyed and starving to death.
That was their other plan.
Their new plan is prosperity and peace and security and joining the nations of the world and presumably having internet and being able to see the relatives and everything.
They had everything to win.
Kim Jong-un also has a lot to win.
Because even if you imagine he's got lots of skeletons in the closet, things that dictators do that nobody's happy about, assuming all that's true, even with that, if he pulls this off, and it looks like he will, Kim Jong-un will be a legendary figure.
His reputation in the world Will be amazing.
I hate to say it, right?
Because you don't want to hear that, but Kim Jong-un is going to come out of this Like a legendary figure.
I'm saying legendary because I don't want to compliment him, but clearly this is worthy of praise because it would be a tremendous thing for North Korea.
Now you could argue he should have done it earlier, etc.
There's plenty of room for criticism, but on the big decision, is he doing it right?
Looks like he is. It really does.
So I think the productive way to look at this is everybody coming to their senses.
President Xi, superstar.
Kim Jong-un, on this question, superstar.
President Moon, South Korea, superstar.
President Trump, superstar.
Nobel Prize. I think it should be shared, maybe with two, three, or even four recipients.
The Nobel Prize committee may say, we can't give this to President Trump, our heads would explode.
But they could give it to Moon, Kim, Xi, and Trump.
Seems fair to me.
And I think that would be the best way to frame it.
So, I've said before that I believe this is the...
North Korea could be the introduction to what I call the Golden Age.
The Golden Age is when all the big stuff starts going in the right direction.
But more than that, the more defining element of that is that we start realizing that a lot of our big problems, maybe all of them, are psychological and mental in nature.
And if we understand that, they're easily solved as North Korea is being solved.
Take that thinking to Iran.
What was our biggest problem with North Korea before?
They'll never give up.
They'll never give up their nuclear weapons.
You know, Kim is crazy.
Turns out none of that was true.
He wasn't crazy and he would give up his nuclear weapons.
The most central things That people universally believed are true.
You didn't even find people on the other side of that argument.
Just weren't true.
They were actually illusions.
Now, that was my take on this from the start, that there are some illusions preventing us from a good result.
Now imagine that you create that new knowledge for society.
The new knowledge that we almost had a nuclear war over something that was a psychological condition.
That's important to learn because the world is learning it right now.
We're learning that we almost nuked ourselves over a psychological glitch that we thought things were true that just weren't true.
Take that to Iran.
What do we believe about Iran?
You may have seen my periscope in which Joel Pollack, senior editor-at-large from Breitbart, was explaining the Iran situation, especially about the nuclear deal.
And one of the assumptions that is a general assumption made by, again, People on all sides.
This is a universal assumption.
And the universal assumption is that the leaders of Iran would prefer death and the destruction of their own country, death to their family, death to all their friends, that under certain situations they would prefer that because it satisfies some religious predictions.
I want to be the first one to say I don't think that's true.
Now, as I've said before, Israel has a different situation than the rest of the world.
Israel has to treat it like it's true, because the words coming out of Iran sure sound like they're talking that way, right?
Iran certainly says stuff about eliminating Israel.
If you're Israel, you treat that like that's dead certain.
There is no wiggle room from Israel's perspective.
Well, but that's different from saying it's true.
So as long as Iran is acting the way they're acting, Israel has to act like it's a mortal threat and it's immediate.
Period. But suppose Iran could stop acting that way.
Is there anything that would get them to that point of view where we could see, as we're seeing with North Korea, that the impossible suddenly starts looking possible?
I'm going to start writing probably more about Iran for the same reason I wrote about North Korea.
I want to at least see if we can get to the point where we can imagine something good happening over there.
That doesn't make it happen.
The imagining isn't enough, but it's a necessary condition.
And I would postulate that what got us from impossible to now almost solved in North Korea was only the mental shift that said, I think we can make this work.
Because until President Trump thought he could make it work, Why would he do anything?
Why would President Trump have done any of the things he did unless he thought he could make something work?
So obviously he believed it.
Take this back to The Power of Positive Thinking.
Norman Vincent Peale, who coincidentally was the pastor in President Trump's church when he was a kid, and he was also a big influence on me as the author of that book, The Power of Positive Thinking.
So, when I saw President Trump become president, I said to myself, I think he can solve this North Korea thing.
And by the way, I thought that before he was elected.
Let me do a little aside here.
I have been shat upon for the past two and a half years for saying positive things about President Trump's skill.
People say to me, can't you see what he's doing to how people feel and the racial divide and the sexism and whatever other criticisms they're saying about him?
And I would say, well, but I think he can do good things.
All that's true.
People are feeling more racially divided.
That's all true. And that's all bad.
But I was hoping that his special tool set would give us some wins that we just couldn't get with another president.
This is the main one I was thinking about.
Terrorism, economy, North Korea, those have always been my top three.
So I thought, well, we can at least...
At least get those big three wins, but it might be expensive in terms of racial feelings and other feelings that have been stirred up.
Now people have said to me, Are the ends justifying the means?
That's the bumper sticker response to that.
It's like, yeah, you know, I know you think he can do some good stuff, but do the ends justify the means if it's so expensive to get there?
To which I say, yes, yes.
If you gave me a choice between making you feel that the president is a racist or being destroyed in a nuclear fireball I choose making you feel uncomfortable.
I don't like that those are my choices, but they were my choices.
My choice was to make other people feel uncomfortable, or at least be part of the movement which would end up that way, which could never be comfortable.
Why would I feel happy about making other citizens uncomfortable?
I could never be happy about that.
But I believed He had a skill set that could get us some big wins that a Clinton could not give us.
We're seeing now that play out.
I believe he's goosed the economy in a way that the mental game of the economy, he's played right.
He's made us feel optimistic.
There's lots of feeling that the reduction in regulations, the changes in taxes, the negotiation with trade, we're feeling this overall positive feeling that gets translated into the economy.
Jobs get better.
Great. ISIS, he put the boot on him.
Mattis and a lot of the other countries, of course, and our allies.
It wasn't just us, but he was part of a productive outcome there.
And then North Korea might be the big one.
So if you're asking me, do the ends justify the means?
Assuming North Korea comes in the way it looks, I gotta say yes.
Now, allow me to officially apologize to everyone in the country who has been offended by this process.
The process meaning that President Trump, anything he's ever said, everything he's ever done, anything that people on the right have said or done, they would offend The people were legitimately offended.
I'm not going to say they shouldn't have been offended.
There's plenty of stuff that could get people offended.
What I'm saying is, my intention was that we would always get to this place, and it's a bigger win, and the price to get there, I'm sorry to say, came a little bit Came quite a bit out of the comfort of my fellow citizens.
And to you, I apologize.
I apologize that you had to take that burden and that you take it still.
You are accepting a burden that you did not ask to take.
That was pushed on you.
And I, for one, apologize for that.
But I also appreciate it greatly.
I appreciate that the country held together.
And that we got to this point.
So I think Iran also has a potential, I can imagine it, solution.
And it comes from these two assumptions, which are not true yet, meaning they're not validated to be true.
They may be true or false, but they're not credible or validated yet.
These are the two assumptions I'd like to push on Iran.
One, that they're crazy and would ever prefer death to all of their families and friends and themselves and the country.
For anything. I would push against that assumption.
I would also push against the assumption that there's no way to solve it as long as you have the unsolvable problem of Iran wants Israel to go away, etc.
I'm not positive there's no solution to that.
I should bocce predict Iran.
Let me drastically change the topic for a minute.
Did you see the...
Well, let me come at this from a different angle.
Let me tell you what a good day would look like for any of you.
Imagine waking up in the morning.
It's just an ordinary day.
You wake up in the morning.
You get your coffee.
You do what most of us do.
You pick up your phone. And you see what's new today.
And the first thing you see on your phone is that the President of the United States has just tweeted a job recommendation for you.
Imagine waking up and the first thing you see in the morning is the President of the United States just wrote a tweet making an unsolicited job recommendation for you by name and named you personally.
That's what happened to Greg Guffeld this morning.
So because the White House Correspondents Dinner apparently was not a rocking success, and the humorist who worked that job did not get good reviews, at least from the president, at least from the right.
I don't know how the left felt about it.
So the president suggested that Gregg would be a better choice for the White House Correspondents Dinner.
And I was thinking, what would it be like to be Gregg?
Wake up in the morning and you're like, have some coffee, see what's on the phone.
What? That must have been a cool moment.
My recommendation for Greg is don't take that job.
Do not take that job.
If you do, we'll all watch.
We'll support you. But I just don't know if that's the best place to be.
All right.
What else we have going on today?
Michelle Wolf, that was her name?
The humorist? And Michael Wolf was the guy who wrote the book?
Wow.
It turns out the president doesn't have much luck with wolves.
All right.
I think we've seen everything we need to say.
We've seen everything we need to see and we've heard everything we need to hear.
And that's it for now.
Everybody have a great day.
Check out my blog post if you haven't seen my North Korea blog posts over the years.
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