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July 6, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
36:09
Episode 130 - The Zombie Apocalypse (Democrats), Rocket man and coffee
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Hey everybody!
Come on in. Gather around.
I've got some extra chairs over here.
Somebody can sit on the back.
Dog Bird will move.
But before you sit down, make sure you have this secret elixir.
Doesn't matter which elixir you have.
Could be coffee, could be tea, could be a cold beverage, could be ordinary water, which I call the tears of your enemies.
But whatever you have, it's going to taste extra good because of the magic that I call the simultaneous sip.
By now, you've all scurried to grab your cups, your mugs.
You're thinking, my God, my God, I've got to get it in time.
This time, this time, I'll finally make it in time for the simultaneous sip.
Well, this is your day.
Here it comes. That is some good simultaneous sipping.
All right. First topic of the day.
We're seeing quite a lot of press on the question of how we're treating each other, about civil discourse, and how our politics has made mostly people on the left So agitated that they're suggesting physical acts.
Now, a physical act could be, you know, protesting in the streets, could be snatching the Make America Great Again hat off of somebody in a burger joint.
It could be crowding around somebody and shouting them down in a public restaurant, etc.
And certainly there are people who are directly calling for violence or speaking in violent terms.
Now, the conversation about this is completely, completely on the wrong topic.
The topic is not and should not be civil discourse.
What is polite?
What is appropriate? If you're talking about that, you're missing the entire story.
And you're probably thinking to yourself, what are you talking about?
That's pretty important, civil discourse.
I'm in favor of civil discourse.
Unless the Nazis are really taking over.
In a situation in which the actual Nazis are actually taking over the country, I'm not signing up for any civil discourse.
So the problem that we're having right now is not that people are being impolite.
If you think that's the problem, you're missing the big problem.
The big problem is that people think they're living in a country where actual Nazis are taking over.
They believe it to be true.
Now, if it were true, then everything that they suggest, which is aggressive and even downright violent, would be completely called for.
So if you're saying that isn't called for, you're on the wrong conversation.
If you say these people should act more polite, you're in the wrong conversation.
That conversation doesn't happen Or shouldn't happen or is completely irrelevant.
Because the problem is their actual belief.
It's not their behavior. Because the behavior just follows the belief, right?
The behavior is the outcome of the problem.
The problem is that they literally, literally believe that they're in a dangerous, immediate threat situation.
And when I say immediate, I mean their bodies are actually, this is the anti-Trumpers primarily, they're in a continuous, apparently, Fight or flight situation.
Like they feel that at any moment, you know, things are going to turn violent and the dictatorship will break out and all of that.
So when the press is covering this, it's, you know, of course they have to cover if somebody does something violent or threatens.
There was a story, Alan Dershowitz apparently Heard that some host of a party on, I think it was Martha's Vineyard, said that if Alan Dershowitz came to her party, she would, quote, stab him through the heart.
Now, I don't believe that she meant that literally.
I don't believe she would actually pick up a knife and stab him through the heart.
So we can't get too carried away with hyperbole.
But it is true that that type of thinking...
Starts putting people into a, hey, I guess it's okay to talk like this because I hear everybody doing it.
So as soon as you hear everybody doing it, you can worsen the situation until something bad happens.
So the talking about it does make a difference.
The actions do make a difference.
But the big story is that they're acting on a belief that is pretty wacko.
So the big challenge is how do you get people out of that belief?
And the only way is through actions which violate it.
So in other words, you have to have enough counter examples to whatever it is that they're hallucinating that they can't hold the hallucination anymore.
Or that talking about their hallucination in public would make them feel stupid Because other people know that it's been debunked already.
So getting there is a problem.
And part of the problem is that the model of the news industry is that violence and conflict are better news than people getting along.
So we all have this heightened sense of how bad things are.
Because we see the examples of the bad stuff over and over again.
So there's this tiny little bit of bad behavior going on in the country, really very tiny bit, which is all we see.
So we're completely focused on the tiny bit of bad news.
So what can you do about that?
Well, let me throw out some ideas.
One, you could create a, let's say, a meme, which was nothing but Trump supporters doing things that clearly are not racist and not dangerous.
And nothing else.
I mean, you'd have to make it entertaining enough that people want to watch it.
One is short, but entertaining.
And just put that out.
I'm going to block the trouble.
And just put that out to give people counterexamples.
Now, I saw on Twitter, and I just retweeted it, so let me read the actual tweet.
From someone who is a MacArthur genius.
So this tweet is from a woman who is literally a MacArthur genius.
You know, recognized as an actual genius, which is important.
Somebody named Stephanie Mikus.
She's got a blue check. And she said, I effing hate this president and I don't feel even remotely safe around him or his supporters.
Most women I know feel this way too.
And it's real and it's affecting us.
So the part that is real I'll take her at her word, is how they feel.
So the part that's real is certainly how they feel, because I doubt she would just make this up, right?
Doesn't mean that everybody feels this way, but people she knows actually feel that they're not safe, that they're not safe around Trump supporters.
Now, in your world, Can you imagine any safer place for a woman to be than at a Trump rally?
Have you ever heard of a woman getting hurt at a Trump rally?
I suppose if the woman was causing trouble herself, there might be something.
But a woman who was just minding her own business, what are the odds that you would be in danger at a Trump rally?
Because the men at a Trump rally would make short work of anybody who caused trouble.
In fact, the most dangerous thing you could be is a Me Too person at a Trump rally.
The violator would be in the most danger.
So that's my view of the world.
My view of Republicans are the sort of protecting class, especially if you're Americans.
Obviously, they have a preference for Americans, which is a separate topic than what she's talking about.
So somehow...
This artificial danger that people feel, and the feelings are real.
You have to treat the feelings as if they're reality, because that is their reality.
How they feel is their reality.
And it's not good enough to say, well, you got the facts wrong, or you're being such a snowflake, or our policies are good.
There's almost nothing that is the right answer unless you're actually going directly toward what made them feel that way and what could you do that would be visual and violate that belief.
So, let's be thinking about that.
What would be the way to not do that?
Now, let me tell you one of my methods I've been A-B testing on Twitter.
And I'd like to recommend it.
Okay? Oh, yeah.
I referred to the zombie apocalypse in the title of my periscope here.
And it's sort of the way I'm starting to feel.
You know, just sort of a fun...
Fun is the wrong word.
But... Yeah, it feels like a zombie apocalypse because the folks who are so angry are not dealing with anything that, from my movie, looks like thinking.
So it looks like a mindless mob who are coming for the people on the other side.
So, you know, in my framing of things, that doesn't mean that they're crazy and the other people are awesome.
So I'm not talking about good or bad.
I'm talking about two different movies.
In one movie, people are just trying to help the country and do the best they can and do what's right.
But the other side, the zombie apocalypse people, think that these guys are Nazis.
And I'm not saying there aren't a few Nazis in the group, but of course everybody gets defined by their worst elements.
So it's easy for the people on the right to think that the people on the left are all Antifa people and think the rest of them are white supremacists or something.
So we define each other by our worst, most extreme members.
But it feels like a zombie apocalypse, doesn't it?
Because they're coming for us, it feels like, and yet there's no sense of reason.
You couldn't be able to reason with it.
But let's talk about some ways to deal with that that do not require reason.
Because reason is an empty weapon.
You can't kill the zombie with reason.
You can't stop the zombie and say, hey zombie, hold on, hold on.
I know you want to eat my brains.
I know that. I get it.
I get it that you want to eat my brains.
But look, it won't turn out well for you.
I have this flamethrower right here.
So maybe you should just logically go eat something else because I got the flamethrower right here.
I'm going to turn you into an ember.
And the zombie goes...
And then you have to kill it with the flamethrower.
So what's better than that?
The flamethrower is sort of last resort.
We don't want to get to flamethrower.
We want to figure out how to make the zombies Maybe change direction.
You know, there's a thought among people who try to stop stalkers from stalking that you can never stop a stalker from stalking because it's just too deeply embedded in who they are.
But you can make them stalk somebody else by making it harder to stalk, you know, your client.
So it might be that all of this anger just needs to go somewhere.
You can't get rid of it.
It may not be something you can dissipate.
You might just need to redirect it.
At the moment, the United States weirdly doesn't have a common enemy.
Think about that.
Just think about that thought.
The United States...
Doesn't really have much of an enemy anymore.
There's nobody who's an organizing principle who would say, there's no outside threat that's so big at the moment that the people in the United States would say, well, let's just stop fighting with each other.
We've got to deal with this outside threat.
Now, you probably don't want an outside threat, so you don't want to create one.
Yeah, all of our smaller threats are either sort of conceptual, like China wants to dominate in the next hundred years, but things are going okay now, and ISIS is, of course, a problem, but they haven't done much lately.
It doesn't feel like an existential threat today, thankfully.
So we've got this gigantic weaponized zombie apocalypse with all this energy and reason isn't going to change them and there is no external threat big enough to unify the country for the external threat.
So what do you do?
I don't know the answer, but I think you have to A-B test your way through it.
I made one suggestion of showing Trump supporters just doing things that Trump supporters aren't supposed to be doing.
Simply showing Trump supporters as nice people It's a big deal.
I understand that one of the Supreme Court nominees, Amy Coney Barrett, is that her name?
She's got seven kids and two of them are adopted from Haiti.
Let's see more of that.
Let's see more of the Amy Barretts with the kids adopted from Haiti.
There must be millions, literally, Tens of millions of examples of Trump supporters acting like normal people and not like the monsters that they imagined.
But let me tell you my little trick.
Some of you have seen me do it on Twitter.
And it goes like this.
I had the sudden realization after being called a Nazi...
You know, 900,000 times.
Half of the people on here have been called a Nazi in the past year or two.
So I get it more than most because if you talk about the president's persuasion game, people come on and call you a Nazi and that word are different.
And here's the thing about calling somebody a Nazi, and it took me a while to realize this.
Whoever says Nazi first wins.
That's it. That's the realization.
Whoever says Nazi first wins.
Wins on social media.
And here's why. Because the other person is defending why they're not a Nazi.
The game is over before it starts.
If you're defending why you're not such a big Nazi, there's no path to victory.
The best you can do is be a Nazi who did a bad job of explaining that you're not a Nazi.
The moment you're labeled, the game is already over.
So what I've been doing on Twitter is that whenever anybody comes after me personally, and here's the trick.
If they come after my ideas, I deal with them fairly about the ideas.
I might have some sarcasm or something, but basically I'm dealing with the idea, not the person.
If they come after me or any group that they think I'm associated with as people, If they come after me as people, like as a person, something's wrong with my brain, something's wrong with my character, you know, anything like that, I say immediately, I block all Nazis, goodbye.
And then I block them.
So I go Nazi immediately as soon as it's personal.
Because when it's personal, you have an argument that going after somebody's politics or their opinion, fair game.
You can go after my opinions all day long.
I might even enjoy it.
I might even change my mind.
But if you go after anything about my character now, Anything personal, or even if you malign a group which you believe I'm part of, whether that group is white males or Trump supporters or any kind of group, as soon as you're demeaning a group or a person as a person, you're close enough to Nazi ideology that I go Nazi first.
Immediate Nazi. So if they say it first, then I just block them.
Sometimes I actually call them a Nazi while blocking them.
So if somebody says, hey, you're Joseph Goebbels today, I'll say, I block all Nazis.
Boop. Goodbye.
And what would you feel like if you're on the other end of being blocked as a Nazi?
Just think about it.
Just put your mind in the head of the person who just got blocked for one comment and One interaction, got called a Nazi, and was immediately blocked.
And it was for a good reason.
The good reason is you came after me personally.
Nothing to it, right?
Now here's why I think this was worth A-B testing.
Number one, it will apply to just about every single person on social media on the left.
Because almost everybody on social media on the left who's active, not the casual lurkers, but the people who are active, they're interacting, they're saying stuff, they're all going to cross that line eventually.
And by the way, the people on the right cross that line all the time.
So I'm not saying that the left are the people who are making personal insults or generalizations and the right is not.
It's bad everywhere.
I wouldn't even go so far as to say it's worse on the left than it is the right.
I have no reason to be able to measure that one way or another.
It's just terrible on both sides.
But, as long as the right has the power, and this is key, and they get personal, They are monsters.
Make sure you hear this correctly.
If you don't have power, and you're attacking people, their personalities, etc., you're annoying, but you're not a monster.
You're just like, oh God, another person calling me names.
But, if you have the power, your party's in power, And you call somebody something personal, you're a freaking monster.
Don't lose that distinction.
Before Trump got elected, most of the people on here are Trump supporters, I'm guessing, you were the underdogs.
The underdogs can get away with a lot of stuff.
Right. You can punch up all day long.
The underdogs were after Hillary Clinton.
The Clinton machine was running the country.
So you could be as bad as you wanted.
I don't recommend being bad, but you could be bad and the other side would just say, yeah, it's those people being bad again.
But the moment you're in power, you can't do that shit.
You can't do that.
So if you would like the situation in the country to change...
There's an easy mechanism to do that.
It's easy to do individually.
It's hard to get everybody to do it.
But individually, you could just stop going after people personally and stop maligning groups as groups, as in, they're all snowflakes, that's how liberals think, or, well, you're all socialists, you're all Antifa, whatever that.
Just stop doing that stuff.
Just go after the point.
Go after the rules.
But understand that the underdogs are still going to be coming after you personally.
However, you can block them the first time it happens.
You never give them two chances.
Just say, I block all Nazis.
Goodbye. And keep it simple.
Just say, I block all Nazis.
Goodbye. And then you block them.
Eventually, you would block...
Most of the bad people on the left, and you would just stop seeing it.
So I've been blocking aggressively for the last few weeks, and what happened was the amount of hatred that I was exposed to went from this big to something more like this.
It's still pretty big, but it's probably down by 75%.
And it's not because people are less angry or less inclined to do it.
I just blocked them.
So instead of seeing five insults where I try to insult them back and be clever and engage them or make my point or anything like that, I can reduce it by 80% just by blocking it on the first one and not hearing the next four insults.
So... If you want to get to a better place, just remember that the Republicans are in power.
And just get off of the personal insult game.
Now, you're saying to yourself, but what about our president who's personally insulting people five times a day?
That's his job.
And he's not insulting random people.
He's insulting his political opponents.
They're in that contest.
For them it's fine.
For them it's exactly how they should be playing this game.
For us We're the spectators.
If you're watching a football game and the people in the game are hitting each other hard, that doesn't give you the right to hit the person in the stands next to you really hard because you saw a good role model down in the field.
You're the spectators.
So let Trump be as aggressive as he likes.
That's why you hired him. You hire your lawyer to do lawyering for you.
You don't hire your lawyer to do lawyering for you and then go do the lawyering for the lawyer.
You hire him to do that or her to do that.
All right. That's a weird analogy.
So try that.
So I recommend in the spirit of A-B testing, try my technique of the very first moment you see a personal assault or a group condemnation that you call them a Nazi and block it.
Don't give any more reason.
Just say you block all Nazis.
Goodbye.
And first of all, note how you feel when you do it.
The first time I started doing this, My initial reaction was, oh, I really want to engage with this person more.
I really want to use my great arguments and my persuasion and my superior knowledge of the facts to make an idiot out of them online because I'll show them.
But that never was satisfying.
No matter how many times I tried to do that and even felt that I succeeded, I would think, man, I showed them.
Look at this. It's a public record.
The entire world can see that I have now bested this evil troll and that record will be there forever to their shame.
But then you watch the troll and they'll be like, well, I guess you're backpedaling now.
And you'll be like, what?
What backpedaling? And then they'll mischaracterize you and call you a Nazi again, and you can never win.
So there's no winning by engaging.
But I did learn that each and every time I block them with my little, I block Nazis goodbye, I block all Nazis, that I actually get a little boost of, ah, because I know I won.
How do I know I won?
Because I went Nazi first.
Whoever goes Nazi first wins!
And then I also closed down the conversation, and I also turned a mirror on the person so that they can see in the mirror, oh, not all of them are going to recognize it, but they're going to say, okay, what was it that I just did that was so bad that got me blocked on the first try?
Oh, I got personal.
So I always feel like that's a complete victory and you'll feel good if you do it.
Is this a reverse Godwin's law?
Well, not exactly, but I see what you're saying.
Now let's talk about Little Rocket Man.
And the news is that Pompeo brought with him a signed by the president, Elton John's CD of the song Rocket Man, because allegedly the president asked Kim Jong-un if he'd ever heard it, and he said he hadn't.
And so he sent it to him.
I don't know, but this might be one of the most clever things anybody ever did in the history of diplomacy.
Because remember I said that when President Trump called him Rocket Man, that that probably took them out of the head space of ego and I'm gonna crush you and it's all war into a head space of, okay, this is kind of funny.
You know, you insulted me.
I insulted you. Let's have a good laugh.
Let's have a beer. And you're starting to see that come through in this, that this gesture is clearly trying to soften the Rocket Man joke to, you know, he's not walking away from it.
The president isn't, because that would be sort of the old way to do it.
It's like, oh, I walk that back.
Instead, he's just saying, all right, I know you.
You know me. This isn't going to be a problem.
Let me tell you where this came from just so you understand it.
You might even like the song.
And by the way, the Rocket Man song is not insulting to the star of the song.
The Rocket Man in the song is a heroic character who just happens to be out in space and may not be able to get back.
Just someone who loves his family.
So, in terms of a feeling, and by the way, here's the best part, which you won't hear anywhere else.
Have you heard of the book, Presuasion?
So, I've got it on my bookshelf up there somewhere, I think.
So, Presuasion...
Is where you just sort of set an attitude for something that could be in a totally different topic before you talk about the thing you want to persuade somebody into.
What does the song Rocket Man make you feel?
Anybody? Anybody?
Tell me what the song Rocket Man makes you feel.
Sad? Isolation?
Lonely.
Lonely.
Isolated. Yeah.
Mostly lonely.
Mostly alone.
Rocketman is all the way out in space with no friends.
Completely lonely and isolated.
But, but, President Trump is offering to be his friend.
Under the right conditions.
The conditions have to be met.
Denuclearization, for example.
Now, notice also that NBC reported and the alleged intel sources were saying that Kim Jong-un was clearly cheating on his agreement to make fewer missiles and denuclearize and he was building facilities and stuff like that.
Do you think that's true?
Well, it might be. He might be saying, well, we're in negotiations.
The best thing I can do is to keep building because then I have something to negotiate away.
It's more of a visual anchor that says, yeah, I really am building these missiles.
Watch me do it. You can see it from space.
And so that gives me a stronger negotiating position.
It doesn't really tell you That they plan to never comply?
It doesn't tell you that.
It tells you that they might want some negotiating leverage.
So notice how the President and Pompeo are very gently approaching this.
And when was the last time you saw President Trump approach anything gently?
It's rare, right?
He wouldn't do it unless he had a pretty good reason.
Now it's also instructive to watch that President Trump can do things with subtlety when it matters.
When it doesn't matter, there's no subtlety at all.
But when it does, apparently he can do that.
And this is a good example of that subtlety.
So here's my take.
I don't see any signs from the people who actually know what's going on, the President Pompeo.
I don't see signs from them where they are ratcheting up the rhetoric.
You might expect them to ratchet up the rhetoric if they had also confirmed that North Korea is not playing with them honestly.
So either they can't determine that that's the case, or they've decided that ignoring it Is the better strategy.
Because if Kim is doing it primarily for negotiating leverage, which they might know, they might, probably not, but they might, then there would be no reason for them to ramp up their own rhetoric because that could make things worse, but it probably couldn't make things better.
Does Kim get a pass for anything he's done in his country to his own citizens?
Well, this is the tricky part, and the part where I wonder if Kim's generals are on board with whatever Kim is doing.
Because it would be easy to imagine some kind of an agreement in which the Kim family is absolved from any historical accusations, real or not real.
You can imagine them working on a deal where they are not targets of any future revenge, I guess, or legal process.
But would that extend to his generals?
And if it extended to the generals, would it extend to all of them?
And would it extend to the majors?
How far would that go?
Because there's probably a lot of You know, behavior that needs to be addressed in general.
So it's possible that the generals or the military are seeing that they would be thrown under the bus even if Kim came out okay.
So there may be a part of this negotiation which is really tricky, which is how do you get the people who have the power but legitimately feel like giving it up would be the end of their lives, how do you get them to believe that they have a better path?
So that might be part of the diplomatic dance right now.
We'll see. Would they let it go this far?
They might. Alright, I think that's all I got for today.
And... Remember to mind your manners on Twitter.
You're the party in power.
Time to start acting like it.
Maybe you stay that way.
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