Oct. 19, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
21:56
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| Hey everybody! | |
| Get in here. | |
| Today will be the best coffee with Scott Adams you've ever seen. | |
| Now I don't want to over promise but I think I can deliver today. | |
| And you know what that means. | |
| It starts with a simultaneous sip. | |
| Today, from a tiny little cup. | |
| Grab your cup, your vessel, your mug, your stein, fill it with a beverage of your choice, lift it to your lips with me, and enjoy the simultaneous sip. | |
| Oh, that's good stuff. | |
| So let's start with the fun part. | |
| Some of you saw that President Trump tweeted the hashtag, jobs not mobs, last night after he tested it out at the rally. | |
| Apparently he got a good enough response at the rally that it turned into a tweet. | |
| And some of you saw the hashtag sort of developing on social media. | |
| I should tell you that I am not the originator of it, but I was one of the people who helped to popularize it. | |
| We can see this amazing situation where something is created on the internet, an idea, and I think it took six days For it to be created on the internet by somebody I don't even know. | |
| I just saw it somewhere and repeated it. | |
| Ali Alexander had a post talking about mobs and whether that was good by itself and he was suggesting some improvements to it. | |
| I chimed in copying what I saw on the internet which was that somebody had said jobs not mobs and it turned into a hashtag in about 10 minutes and Took six days from a good idea to the president's mouth. | |
| Have you ever seen anything like that before? | |
| There is something truly special about this time where a good idea can start anywhere and it can go anywhere In six days, and that probably was a long time, right? | |
| So just think about the world you live in, where if you've got an idea, just as this random unnamed Twitter user had, and I wish I could give them credit, but I was not smart enough to note who said it first. | |
| I just saw it on the internet in somebody's comment, and I thought, oh, that's good. | |
| That could go somewhere. But think about that, and now I'm going to dovetail into the coolest thing you've ever heard in your life. | |
| I don't like to oversell it, but here it comes. | |
| It's going to be the coolest thing you've ever heard in your life. | |
| Top ten, maybe. | |
| It goes like this. | |
| I'm going to bring together a bunch of concepts that you've heard before. | |
| Wait for the big reveal, because it's a good one. | |
| It goes like this. | |
| Have you ever heard the saying that never let a good crisis go wasted? | |
| I'm not sure who said it. | |
| It might have been the mayor of Chicago. | |
| But the idea is that sometimes, if everything's going to hell, it creates an opportunity. | |
| Oh yes, Rahm Emanuel. | |
| Who weirdly I met one time in a hallway. | |
| Sort of a small world situation. | |
| I met him once. Years ago. | |
| And so that's your first thing. | |
| Never let a good crisis go to waste. | |
| And the Saudi Arabia thing is a crisis, right? | |
| Nobody knows what the heck to do. | |
| So that's the first thing. | |
| Now here's another concept that I've told you a few times. | |
| That the edge of doom... | |
| Looks amazingly similar to the edge of victory. | |
| Sometimes it feels like you're on the edge of losing everything. | |
| It's just the worst possible moment. | |
| It's sort of darkest before the dawn situation. | |
| And we're often confused by those two situations because they look so similar. | |
| The edge of doom and the edge of victory. | |
| So think about that. | |
| We'll get back to that in a moment. | |
| So here's our situation with Saudi Arabia. | |
| Saudi Arabia seems to be guilty of murdering a journalist in their embassy. | |
| Now, I think we all agree that if it had not been a journalist, we would not be talking about it. | |
| It's the fact that it's a journalist that makes it a story because it's no longer about one critic being murdered. | |
| It's about free speech. | |
| It's about journalism. | |
| It's about the press. | |
| And so that pretty much guarantees, yeah, he's a columnist and opinion writer, but still he's part of the press. | |
| And this pretty much guarantees that it will stay a story and will stay a priority. | |
| So it's not going to just go away. | |
| But it is true that every story's temperature comes down from its highest peak. | |
| And the highest temperature, talking about the public opinion on the Saudi embassy thing, started sky high. | |
| But over time, everything gets a little bit less attenuated. | |
| So President Trump is waiting, as his critics say, for Saudi Arabia to come up with a credible excuse that he can maybe accept so that he doesn't have to punish Saudi Arabia in some fashion. | |
| But let's talk about that. | |
| Is there any way to punish Saudi Arabia? | |
| Could we punish them militarily? | |
| No. There is no chance that we're going to militarily do anything with Saudi Arabia. | |
| They're an ally. Could we penalize them within their political system? | |
| Well, I don't think so, because they don't really have a political system that's really penetrable from the outside. | |
| Could we punish them economically? | |
| Well, in theory, yes. | |
| But the only way we can do it is by hurting ourselves just as much. | |
| Hurting our interests, having less influence over them because they're not buying our jets and therefore they can, you know, if they get their jets from China, China has influence over them because they need parts and service and stuff from the country that sells them the stuff. | |
| So if we can't do it militarily, we can't do it politically, we can't do it economically, What do you do? | |
| Because you also can't do nothing. | |
| So here's your setup. | |
| You can't do something, because you can't think of what to do, and you can't do nothing. | |
| Who are you going to call? | |
| Who do you call when you can't do something, and you can't do nothing? | |
| Because of the way people will regard it. | |
| The way people will think about it. | |
| That's right. You would call a master persuader. | |
| Because somehow you have to solve the unsolvable psychological part. | |
| The psychological part is that they have to be punished, assuming that the charges hold up and it looks like they will, and they have to not be punished. | |
| The only way you can do that is to find a solution that parties can look at the same thing, the same events, and some people can say, man, they got punished good. | |
| And other people, such as Saudi Arabia, can say, completely legitimately, we did not get punished. | |
| How can you come up with a solution that is punishing them and also totally not punishing them? | |
| Can it be done? | |
| I'm going to tell you how. | |
| It goes like this. You want Saudi Arabia to do something that they don't want to do, but that could be construed as something so positive that it's a penalty without being a penalty. | |
| Here's the idea. | |
| You say to Saudi Arabia, we need you to recognize Israel. | |
| We need you to fund the recovery of the Palestinians. | |
| So that's your bill now. | |
| The Palestinians you own financially. | |
| We may throw in Saudi Arabia that we're going to let Saudi Arabia guard the Temple Mount. | |
| Now, I don't know a lot about the Middle East, but I understand that there's a big discussion about who gets to guard the Temple Mount. | |
| And is it the Temple Mount? | |
| I think that's the right thing. | |
| Now, remember, don't let a crisis go to waste. | |
| The Saudi Arabia situation is a crisis. | |
| It's created in Mohammed bin Salman. | |
| A need to do something. | |
| And the something he needs to do has to be bigger than murdering and dismembering a journalist, an opinion writer, whatever you want to call him. | |
| It has to be bigger than dismantling and murdering and torturing somebody who's a member of the press. | |
| What is bigger than that? | |
| Not many things, right? | |
| Oh, is it the Al-Aqsa Mosque? | |
| I'm sorry. As you can tell, I'm not any expert on the Middle East. | |
| But suppose you came up with this situation. | |
| Saudi Arabia, we need you to do something big, and we need you to come back to the member of productive nations. | |
| And this is the time to lean on them to get something done that's much bigger than this. | |
| And Middle East peace is achievable. | |
| Maybe because of this. | |
| Maybe because of this. | |
| You don't want a crisis to go to waste. | |
| So we've never had more leverage on Saudi Arabia. | |
| Oh, El Aqsa is on the Temple Mount, okay. | |
| So thank you for that clarification. | |
| We've never had more influence on Saudi Arabia at the same time that we have good relationships with them, or we did until this. | |
| At the same time that Saudi Arabia has been friendlier to Israel than anybody else. | |
| At the same time that Saudi Arabia and Israel would like to form a block against Iranian influence. | |
| At the same time that Saudi Arabia has to do something That to some people would look like a huge penalty and to others would look like a victory. | |
| Think about it. Now I know that some of you are sitting home a little bit stunned right now because for the first time, probably for the first time in your life, you might have even got a little tingle on your arm because you might have realized that for the first time in your life this could actually happen. | |
| And there might be never a better time. | |
| So that would be my suggestion. | |
| And by the way, this is not my suggestion. | |
| I've asked the person whose idea this was whether I can reveal the identity and I haven't got an answer. | |
| I wanted to do this periscope before I got an answer. | |
| But let me check and see if I have an answer. | |
| Because I'll give credit where credit is due. | |
| Once I get an answer. | |
| So again, it's not my idea. | |
| But it came up in a conversation that I had recently. | |
| And I'll just reiterate it for those just joining. | |
| We've got this bad situation with Saudi Arabia. | |
| You never want to waste a good crisis. | |
| So it might be a chance to do something big that you couldn't do under ordinary circumstances. | |
| We need to come up with a situation that is a penalty for Saudi Arabia if it turns out that they are conclusively behind the murder and people expect that to be the case. | |
| At the same time, it's a penalty for Saudi Arabia. | |
| It has to be not a penalty for Saudi Arabia. | |
| So they have to win and lose simultaneously. | |
| And recognizing Israel would do it. | |
| It would take all the energy out of the question about the chachogi, it would move it to something bigger, and it'd have to be much bigger to take the energy away from that story, because that's pretty big. | |
| And they could throw in maybe funding the Palestinians' recovery, whatever that looks like. | |
| I'm sure it's expensive. And you could throw in letting them be the official country to guard the Al-Aqsa Mosque, if I'm getting the words right. | |
| Yes, if somebody is clarifying, it's not the Temple Mount, but just the Al-Aqsa part of it, because that would be the Muslim part. | |
| Now, if Saudi Arabia were to agree with that, would it not look like They had done something they didn't want to do, it was hard, it was risky, it was a penalty, but it's also good for them. | |
| They could get the credit for the win, at the same time it's a penalty. | |
| There are very few times that you will see a situation that lines up just this way. | |
| Alright, I have my answer. | |
| So I'm looking at a message from the individual whose idea this was, and I asked if you'd mind if I mentioned him or her, and the answer is ambiguous. | |
| If it would help, but not necessarily. | |
| All right, so here's what I'm going to do. | |
| I'm not going to give you the identity unless this gets some traction. | |
| I may rethink this, but rather than distract you, so I won't distract you by putting another name on it. | |
| Let's just keep the idea clean. | |
| If it gets some traction, there's a record of the conversation so that credit will go where credit is due. | |
| All right. | |
| All right. | |
| Do you see this as a possibility? | |
| Sounds okay. | |
| Not going to work. | |
| Well, you know, if you're President Trump and you see an opening like this, you're at least going to bring up the topic, aren't you? | |
| Because it's at least good enough to put it on the table. | |
| And I think we have a strange group of players right now. | |
| You've got, in my opinion, you've got the strongest players in Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel that you've ever had. | |
| If you look at the leadership of those three countries, it's the strongest The strongest three we've ever had. | |
| They're all deal makers. They're all smart. | |
| They're all innovative. | |
| They're all willing to try new stuff. | |
| They're all willing to take a risk if it's the right kind of risk. | |
| So we've never had the right people like this before. | |
| It's just sort of perfect. Alright. | |
| Just looking at your comments. | |
| What else is going on today? | |
| There are some other stories. Let's talk about the caravan. | |
| I think everybody's got the same take on the caravan. | |
| The immigration as an issue used to be a concept. | |
| So if you were talking about too much illegal immigration, you would use statistics and you'd say, well, the crime rate is this, and there are X number of people, and they're bringing in crime. | |
| But if it's just a concept, it's not very persuasive. | |
| Concepts are not persuasive. | |
| Images are persuasive. | |
| If you see a picture of something, it's persuasive. | |
| And so the human caravan has put a picture on immigration just when the Republicans would benefit the most. | |
| So, I don't know who organized the caravan, but it was almost like it was made for Republicans. | |
| I can't imagine anything that would be more positive for turning out the vote and for turning some people on the left against them, because the caravan looks scary. | |
| Now, before you jump on me and say, racist, racist, racist, it's scary because they're just a lot of people. | |
| It's not because they're brown. | |
| It's not because they're coming from south of the border. | |
| I know somebody's going to say that. | |
| It's not that. But if you put a whole bunch of males, and the pictures I saw were more male than anything else. | |
| I only saw a few pictures, but they seemed like they were 90% male. | |
| If you see a bunch of able-bodied male folks in a big crowd coming your way, you don't feel good. | |
| You think, uh-oh, this looks dangerous. | |
| So independent of what it actually is, the way it's going to feel and look and just play in terms of our psychology, is very pro-Republican at this point. | |
| You may have seen I tweeted an article in Breitbart by Joel Pollack in which I predicted that it would be the highest turnout we've seen in who knows how long for the midterms. | |
| I think Republicans Might be setting a trap. | |
| And it might be the same trap that they set for the presidential election, which is to understate their future actions. | |
| If there was anything that could describe the Republican brand, it would be something like they're more action than words. | |
| So I think you're going to see more action than words in a way you've never seen before. | |
| The Republicans are going to like winning and they're going to like how they feel if they can get another surprise win. | |
| Now, I'm still not predicting a win. | |
| Only because I don't know enough about the details of the specific races and stuff. | |
| I'm not predicting a loss. | |
| I'm just assuming that the experts know more about it than I do at this point. | |
| But that the turnout will be extraordinary. | |
| Now, it may also be true that the Democrats have an extraordinary turnout. | |
| So that's the part that's unknowable. | |
| But I think Republicans are going to surprise. | |
| All right. Okay, I think that's enough for now. | |
| I'm going to sign off. | |
| We may see President Trump be the first double Nobel winner. | |
| Because there's totally a possibility that sometime in 2019, the president will wrap up North Korea and have a workable Middle East peace plan. | |
| It's totally possible now. | |
| You could have never said that before, but it is totally possible now. | |
| All right, I'll keep you on that positive note. | |
| And wait, before we go, let's drink to that. | |
| Let's drink to, hashtag, jobs not mobs. | |
| Let's drink to peace in the Korean Peninsula. | |
| Let's drink to maybe peace in the Middle East someday. | |
| Let's drink to... | |
| Let's drink to more winning. | |
| And I'll talk to you later. | |
| Oh, two simultaneous sips. |
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