All Episodes
Previous Next
July 9, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
36:08
Episode 133 - The Epidemic of Trapped Children, SCOTUS, and Coffee
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
This is why people like me should never dance.
And if they do dance, they should not use their hands in any way.
Because if you let me dance without any instruction I end up going like this.
It's not a good look.
I was born without any sense of musicality or rhythm whatsoever.
I have to deal with that. Now, I'm seeing a fascinating story in the press about China not wanting to buy our soy because of the trade wars or some kind of tariff on our soy.
And I thought to myself, this could be a strategic mistake.
Because I think it's in our advantage to send as much soy over there as we can, if you know what I mean.
In fact, we should be sending a lot of soy to North Korea.
Let's get everybody all soyed up.
Now, let me give you an update on my mission to make the world a better place by labeling everybody a Nazi.
I know it sounds weird, But I think it's working.
So here's what I've described before as my plan that whenever on Twitter someone makes any kind of a personal attack, it doesn't matter what it is, if it's personal, I just say, I block all Nazis, goodbye.
And then I block them.
And what I found is that, first of all, instead of that continuous negative reaction you have on Twitter, where somebody says something about you, and you cleverly make a rejoinder, and then they say something else, and then you go, ah, I got him this time, and then they say, ah, I got him this time.
And then you go back and forth, and all you do is you get worked up over it.
Compare that with the third or fourth time you block somebody by saying, I block all Nazis.
Goodbye. And I keep it that simple.
Just say, you don't need to give a reason.
Just say, I block all Nazis.
Goodbye. Block. And you start enjoying it.
So the blocking is actually enjoyable and it makes them go away.
So you don't have to see them ever again.
And I would suggest that having A-B tested this enough now, that you should try it.
Instead of engaging, the first moment, the very first time, never let a second time, the first time somebody goes personal, Or calls your candidate a Nazi.
Say, I block all Nazis.
Now today, I blocked somebody who called me a Nazi first.
It was some old Salon article that they dug up full of ridiculous things.
And said, well, you know, you're a fascist and a Nazi.
Down in the old days, I would say, well, give me an example of what you mean by that.
And I will show you how your example is non-factual.
If you are defending yourself against a charge of being a Nazi, you've already lost.
You don't want to be the one in the argument who's saying, I'm not a Nazi.
That's the loser. It doesn't matter what anybody else says.
You want to be the accuser, not the accused.
So the first moment somebody calls me a Nazi, I think, well, that's a personal attack.
Who makes personal attacks?
Nazis. Goodbye.
Block. Now, the best part of this idea, I thought I left it somewhat understood.
I thought it might have been obvious, but it's probably worth calling out.
If you call the left Nazis and immediately disengage, it's the disengaging that makes this work.
Don't call them a Nazi several times over and over.
That just makes things worse.
And it's just sort of ridiculous.
Call them a Nazi once, cut them off, and move on.
And what you'll find is that it makes your reactions or your own life much more positive.
And it has to have an impact on the other side.
If you are the other side, the people calling you Nazis for the last two and a half years, what is it you think is your best insult?
Well, it's the one you're using.
So the people using the insult obviously think it's effective and that it's the worst thing to be called.
Mirroring it back as quickly as possible and then leaving the room will have an impact over time.
So I recommend that.
Alright, as I'm being reminded, it's time for the simultaneous sip.
Some of you who have been here for nearly a few minutes Waiting for the moment, the best moment, the moment when you can simultaneously sip and feel as though you are one with all the other sippers.
Here it comes.
Oh, yeah.
That's some good sipping.
Now, yeah, you got to go Nazi early.
Call him a Nazi and block him and out.
Winner! When do you find out how good it feels?
The first few times you do it, you're going to say to yourself, well, that wasn't very satisfying.
I really wanted to argue with this person.
But by about the third time you do it, you're actually going to feel that it feels good.
It, like, actually feels good.
Try it. You'll be amazed.
Now, we've got the Supreme Court nomination will be announced at, I guess, 9 p.m.
Eastern Time, if I have that right.
And depending on what I'm doing there, I don't have any plans, so I think I'll be live.
So I might join you live on Periscope when the announcement is made.
Now, let me make a prediction about the announcement.
Here's a prediction. When President Trump is able to have this much of our attention, he's not going to waste it.
You know something's coming, right?
So the Supreme Court nomination is so important and so newsworthy that basically it will be one of the most watched television events of all time.
And so he's engineering it that way to be, you know, prime time.
But while he's doing it, of course he'll be talking about his nomination.
But here's the thing you should look for.
It probably won't be the only topic.
So he's smart enough to know that the Supreme Court nomination is going to be such a big deal.
That whatever else he says during the same announcement, little speech or news, I don't know if he's talking to the press or just making a speech, but he's got the entire world listening and it's going to be good.
So you can guarantee that there will be other topics covered.
So the one thing I'm pretty sure of is that it won't just be about the Supreme Court.
Once everybody's watching, there's no way he's going to waste that.
And whatever, you know, if he's smart, He's not going to do a laundry list.
The worst thing he can do is say, here's all the 15 things we're thinking about.
It would all just get washed out.
Everything would be equal. So I'm looking at the Supreme Court nomination, at least one other really provocative or good hit at his critics.
Possibly, you know, and probably that.
Something about his critics. Probably about immigration, I would think.
And maybe one other topic.
Because that would be about the most, you know, three would be sort of the maximum to get the most coverage on, you know, concentrated on your points.
So I look for one or two other major topics just to be addressed in a very quotable way so that his message gets amplified.
All right.
Wow, is that true?
Beijing ordered the state media to stop making aggressive statements about Trump?
Have you noticed that there's a bit of a...
Oh, I don't know, a bit of a change in the atmosphere.
I just tweeted an Andrew Sullivan article.
He's no big fan of our president.
He's a conservative gay man, but not a President Trump fan, to say the least.
And he just wrote an article to say that really the only way out of our current situation is build the effing wall.
And I think people are going to start coming around to that.
Somebody said Sullivan is not conservative.
He's sort of on both sides, wouldn't you say?
Yeah. But I believe he has labeled himself conservative in the past.
Fact check me on that, but I think he definitely has one leg in both worlds, which makes him interesting.
Anyway, so my point was that I think people are going to start saying, oh yeah, there is no option to the wall.
So I think people will be more convinced of the wall because of all of the stuff that's happening that that should play very well into the president's preferences.
Now you're also seeing, correct me if I'm wrong, in the very beginning conversations about the trade war, Let's say several months ago, when the President kept talking about trade war kinds of things, didn't it seem to you that the experts were, it felt like they were 98% against it?
Check my assumption here.
And this is an assumption based on just how it felt.
I'm not sure what the reality is.
But am I wrong that the experts seem to be 98% against any kind of a trade disruption, trade war?
Wasn't that true just several months ago?
And now are you watching the master persuader at what he's done?
What is the current thinking about whether a trade war is...
I don't want to say winnable, because I don't think that's...
I don't like using war terms exactly, because what you're trying to do is to get a stable, long-term deal that works for everybody.
So I don't like to see that as winning so much as balancing things.
Yeah, it seems to me...
That's somebody, that people are starting to find the high ground.
Do you remember when the president said, you know, he would say stuff like, we've got a half a billion dollar, you know, trade deficit.
And what did all the experts say?
Let me tell you what the experts said a few months ago, when the president would say, we have a 500 billion trade deficit with China.
They would say...
Do you see the president doesn't even understand how trade works.
He thinks the trade deficit is some kind of a measure of how the trade is going or something.
He doesn't understand basic economics.
Scene. What are people saying now?
The people who are the smartest people in the conversation, what are they saying?
They're saying something like this.
If you're the one with the big trade deficit, meaning us in this case, you have all the leverage when you're negotiating a trade deal.
Right? So the smart people started out by saying trade deals bad, trade deals bad, trade deals bad.
And then when the president started threatening trade deals, what did the stock market not do?
It didn't go down.
So everything that the experts thought was true was like, no, if you do the trade deal, the stock market's going to blow up, everything's going to blow up.
Don't do that. And then Trump did it anyway.
And the stock market said, okay, well, whatever.
It just shrugged.
So all of the early assumptions about the trade deal, we can now say, the first half, right?
Nobody knows how it all ends.
You know, I'm not predicting exactly how it's going to end.
I'm saying that the first part was the announcing it and getting tough and getting serious about negotiating them.
And the first part, didn't all the experts say that's when the economy is going to start, the stock market will go into turmoil and all that?
And what happened? The stock market in China went into turmoil, but ours did not.
Do you know why?
Because we have the leverage.
We have a half a billion dollars or more apparently leverage because we buy more of their stuff than they buy of our stuff.
So now the smart people are saying, oh yeah, you'll probably win this.
You know, if winning is the right term, will probably come out okay because we had the leverage and the deals were in fact not good deals.
So correct me if I'm wrong, the smart people who are willing to talk in public have gone from trade deals are a terrible idea, this is craziness, the world is going to end, nothing good could come from this, to, oh yeah, we sort of have all the leverage here, why wouldn't we try to get a better deal?
So we'll see. But I think the President's persuasion on this has been right on point.
Trade deals? I thought it was trade war.
Yeah, I don't like to call it a war.
Alright, have you noticed A weird trend.
There's a reason for this.
Maybe. It might be indication that we live in a simulation.
Or it could be reticular activation.
You know how when you notice something for the first time ever, that then you start noticing that same thing over and over again?
And you say to yourself, how can I go my whole life and I never noticed that thing?
And now everywhere I look, there's one of those things again, or I'm hearing that word again.
Once you notice something, your filter is set, and then you can notice it all the time.
What are the odds that the biggest...
Think about this.
The biggest problems in the news are all the same problem.
Children being trapped.
Think about it. Am I wrong that all of the news is about children being trapped?
Children being trapped in cages at the borders.
Children being trapped in caves.
The young people in the Democratic Party are trapped in a mental cage.
A mental prison.
And if we're being honest, most of the Antifa protesters, etc., they skew young.
It's more children in cages.
Yeah, it's a whole lot of somebody fell in the well, as somebody said.
No cages at border, that was Obama.
Why is it that nobody can handle the nuance of the fact that Obama was putting people in cages, but not as many of them?
That the big thing that changed is how many it was happening to.
You know, it went from a smallish problem to a really big problem.
Trump's latest tweet about China?
What do you say about China?
Let's say...
Trump...
Twitter...
Let's see what we got here.
Oh, this is a brand new tweet, 12 minutes ago.
I haven't read it yet, so I'll read it to you.
This is from President Trump.
I have confidence that Kim Jong-un will honor the contract we signed, and even more importantly, our handshake.
The handshake.
That's like a big deal.
I'll talk about that. So he mentions the handshake.
We agreed to the denuclearization of North Korea.
China, on the other hand, may be exerting negative pressure on a deal because of our posture on Chinese trade.
Hope not. Oh my goodness.
That's a good tweet.
You know, remember how...
All the experts and the smart people said, well, once Trump is president, he should stop tweeting because nothing good could come from that.
Can we now say with certainty that the tweeting is a functional thing that he uses in a geopolitical way?
At least it's a tool that does exactly what he wants it to do.
Because look what he's done.
He just gave...
More honor to Kim Jong-un by saying that he expects Kim Jong-un to honor his handshake.
Promise. Look at that.
Right? So he just said, China, not acting honorably.
Maybe. He doesn't say for sure, but his words are, China, on the other hand, maybe...
Exerting negative pressure on a deal because of our posture on Chinese trade.
Hope not. So he's putting China in the lower respect category than Kim Jong-un because as of now, his assumption is, the President's assumption, as he lays down here, is that Kim Jong-un is actually an honorable, well, let's not say honorable, but let's say a person of his word.
He's treating them as a person of His word.
Now let me tell you how big a deal this is.
This is one of the strongest persuasion techniques you will ever see.
And the weird thing is that I'm going to use an example from a TV show called Babylon 5.
I was a guest actor on that years ago.
And let me tell you about this one episode where there was an alien ambassador.
Alain, I think her name was Alain.
And the alien ambassador was attacked by assassins who tried to assassinate her.
And when she recovered and she asked her loyal right-hand person, you know, who was it who attacked me?
Do we know who it is?
The right-hand person lied to her.
Because the attackers were her own race of aliens.
And he knew that she could not be an effective ambassador.
Yeah, Delanne was her name.
And her right-hand person, right-hand alien, I guess, believed that she would never be a good representative of her own species, of her own planet, If she ever knew that her own people tried to kill her.
And so he lied to her.
So here's the persuasion lesson.
Delenn's assistant, the ambassador, the alien ambassador's assistant, was persuading her into a more effective role, making her a better ambassador By changing her opinion of her situation.
And you see a similar thing here with President Trump.
This is a key point here.
What it looks like in the tweet is that President Trump and his critics are going to say this.
They're going to say, President Trump, you are so gullible to say publicly that you believe Kim Jong-un.
How gullible can you be?
How could anybody believe that?
Totally missing what's happening here.
There's something way bigger than that.
What the president's doing is he's helping define Kim Jong-un as an honorable person.
The president is the biggest part of of Kim Jong-un's reputation in the rest of the world right now.
Kim Jong-un's reputation in the rest of the world, to a large extent, is going to be determined by how President Trump frames him.
He has chosen to frame him as somebody he can work with, somebody who is very capable, and someone who will respect a handshake.
How big a deal is that?
It's really, really big.
Because it's not just being nice to somebody you're negotiating with.
That's sort of the lowest level of understanding.
It's like, oh, of course he's being nice.
He's negotiating with him.
What he's doing is he's creating him.
He's creating a Kim Jong-un that so far had not existed as a brand.
And if Kim Jong-un likes this brand, then one would think he would.
Who would not like a brand as a person who could be trusted?
Trump is giving him face.
Somebody just said that in a comment.
President Trump is creating for Kim Jong-un a solid brand that would allow him to sort of emerge on the world scene in a credible way, but Here's the fun part.
It's something to lose.
Right? President Trump has created out of nothing a brand for Kim Jong-un.
Which is really strong.
It's a really strong brand.
A person whose handshake can be trusted, a person who's so young and capable that he took over a country.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know about the bad things he's done.
We're not ignoring any of that.
We're just talking about real politics here, right?
And the president has now created an asset, this brand, for Kim Jong-un on the world stage that can now be taken away.
Should things go bad?
Now, I think actually things probably won't go bad in the long run.
It's sort of a long process.
There'll be lots of ups and downs, and there should be periods in this process where it all looks doomed.
If you don't reach a point where it all looks doomed at some point, you're probably not really negotiating that hard, and I'm sure they are.
And now the president has taken this brand he's created because he got a twofer in this tweet.
He has helped create Kim Jong-un's brand so it's solid and useful and something he can lose, but also something he can use.
In other words, he's trying to become a credible player in the world stage so that somebody would invest in North Korea.
How is somebody going to invest in North Korea if they feel like Kim can't be trusted to keep a deal?
It's pretty important.
Capitalism and investment doesn't go to North Korea unless North Korea creates a brand of being dependable and keeping their deals.
So the president is elevating Kim for completely practical reasons.
He's creating in him somebody that he can deal with.
And by the way, this is working both ways.
You saw the reports that North Korea started taking down its anti-American, anti-Trump propaganda.
So Kim is rehabilitating America and Trump internally in his country, the same way that Trump is rehabilitating and creating a brand for Kim.
They're bolstering each other's brand because both of these people really understand how this stuff works, apparently, because they're doing all the right stuff.
And it was an opportunity for Trump to put China on the defensive because they were not acting as honorably in this situation, allegedly or maybe.
The president put it in the sort of the conditional, like, you know, if they're doing this, that would be bad.
All right. So, when you see the amount of work that this tweet does, that's when you start realizing how important this tool is.
And by the way, this would be a good time to remind you of my new theory of political power.
The political power can be calculated by multiplying a person's persuasion quality, let's say on a scale of 1 to 10, Trump is a 10, times the size of their platform.
In other words, how effectively can they get their message out?
He's got over 50 million Twitter followers and, of course, the media of the world following him.
So if you've got the best persuader and the biggest platform of all time, You should get the best result of all time.
And I think that's what you're going to see in North Korea is the best result of all time.
You're seeing the economy having the best results of all time.
Those would be predicted by the fact that you have the top persuader of all time with the biggest platform of all time.
And, you know, he's persuading in rational ways that make sense for the country.
Talk about the video he tweeted yesterday.
Oh yeah, there was a hilarious video the president tweeted, I think I retweeted it, showing all the people who thought he would lose the election and then showing the change on the night of the election.
And it was, if you lived through it, it was hilarious.
If you were on the other side, it wasn't.
Oh, let's talk about Elon Musk's submarine for kids.
So I guess eight of the 12 kids are already out, which is amazing and inspiring.
And it was done by divers who are insanely brave.
But... Elon Musk, to his credit, in one day apparently built an underwater submarine for one person that you could put a kid in it and then the divers could bring them through the cave.
Now, I see somebody here had the same reaction I did, which is, you're not putting me in that damn little tube.
You know, I would rather stay in the cave and just drown.
I'm not getting in the tube.
Now, I hope...
That part of the tube process would be to give a Valium to the kid before you put him in the tube.
Yeah, that was a small-ass tube.
Now, I love the speed, the thought, the effort.
I love people coming together and building this.
They probably stayed up all night for nights doing this.
So I'm very impressed.
I would say they've shown the best of humanity.
It was doing the right thing and doing it quickly with the most qualified people in the world to do that sort of thing.
So, you've got to say, it's pretty, pretty impressive.
Now, it may turn out that they don't use that technology to get it done.
May I suggest, if they had a little extra time, the technology that I would have used, now that it's too late to actually do it.
Here's the technology I would have used if I had more time.
I would replace the kids face masks that presumably they're going to use scuba, face masks, etc.
with virtual reality goggles that have an actual model of the cave the entire way That is built by one of the professional divers going through first with, let's say, a sonar.
And the sonar just maps the actual cave dimensions so you know where's the water and where's the cave and how big it is.
And then you feed that into your program.
Put that on the kids' faces because when they're actually in the cave, they'll be in mud.
But you could have...
Somebody said there's no visibility.
Correct. So you would map it with sonar.
So you just go through with a sonar device and map it, you know, as you go, and then you feed that into your software, put the 3D goggles on the kids, And then the kids would actually see a world that can't be seen, but would actually be to scale and exactly in the right place.
So that when they were going through the mud, what they would see is actually swimming through clear water.
And when they reached out to the next place they had to climb over a ledge, it would actually be there.
They just reach out and touch the ledge.
And, you know, it wouldn't be exact, but you could get close enough to say, oh, yeah, here's the ledge, and if I just go up here, here's the hole I need to climb through.
Now, how quickly could you build something like that?
I don't know. And I don't think anybody's going to build one in advance because the odds of this happening again are pretty small.
But if you think about it, we're probably...
Five years away, maybe, from a point where that could have easily been done.
In other words, there would be enough code existing and there's, you know, a sonar device and you could just say, oh yeah, I'll just use the API from the sonar device, feed it into my program, I'll have a world built in a minute and a half.
How many of you have ever used a virtual reality device?
I think I'm going to give you a demonstration of a virtual reality device that I have right now.
Well, let me show it to you. I'm going to turn my camera around here for a moment.
So in my office...
You can't really see it.
But you can see, let's see, if my hand comes out here.
You see this? There's a little sensor up here and one there.
And then this computer is my 3D, or not 3D, but VR computer.
And so that little area...
...zone, and I'll give you a demonstration.
You'll be able to see on the big TV what I can see through the goggles, so you'll get a sense of what that world is like as it's coming.
I'll give you a demonstration of that one of these days.
It's the Vive. Yeah, it's the Vive system.
Vive? Vive?
I have a different computer for VR, yes.
So it's a computer that was built, it's like a high-end gaming computer that I got as a kit with all the VR stuff so I didn't have to build anything myself.
It all came as one.
And I'll tell you the biggest thing about it is that you do experience the virtual reality like it's real.
You actually have the same feelings in your body as if it's real.
And once you've experienced that, you realize what's coming.
Alright. That is all for now.
I'm going to sign off.
And I might talk to you tonight during the President's announcement.
▲
Export Selection