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Dec. 15, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
53:44
Episode 757 Scott Adams: Artists Versus Economists, Shampeachment, North Korea
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hey everybody!
Come on in here!
What an amazing day it is.
We have achieved the Golden Age.
It's here. It'll be more obvious in retrospect, but let's be happy.
It's here. And to celebrate the Golden Age, Simultaneous sip.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Simultaneous sip.
Go.
Oh.
Could it get much better than that?
Well, we'll see tomorrow, because it gets better every day.
So I'm a couple minutes late for the Periscope because somebody sent me a tweet about the Turkish military has ordered a bunch of drones with machine guns.
That's right. So the drones are not the big jet-type drones, but rather the propeller types.
So the drone looked to be about maybe this big.
It had a machine gun that can hit a 6-inch target from 650 feet away.
Now, it was only a matter of time before drones got machine guns.
Apparently these drones can also work in combination so that one operator can operate three drones and target the same target.
Imagine if there were hundreds of them.
If you send hundreds of drones into a battle situation, I don't know that they would lose So, the world is definitely going to be a different place when these drones become more widespread.
But one thing that I can imagine happening is this.
Stay with me a little bit and see if you can connect the dots here.
I think you're going to see mercenary armies.
That are just drone operators.
And possibly paid by some kind of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin or something.
So it's untraceable. I think you're going to see just lots of people who have their own drone and decide to take on, you know, the cartels in Mexico or anything else.
Terrorists. But drones with machine guns.
You're going to see a lot of them, and there's almost a 100% chance that you will see drones with machine guns doing a terrorist attack in this country.
Pretty much a 100% chance.
Now, I hope there aren't many of them, and I hope we can figure out how to minimize it, but it's going to happen.
As I've long said, I think in the United States, outdoor mass activities where lots of people go to a stadium, I think that that probably has a short timer on it.
Probably it won't be forever that you can go to a place with lots of people because of terrorist attacks.
So that part's not the golden age, but so far it hasn't happened, so looking good.
Jonathan Turley, professor and legal scholar, asked this question by tweet.
At what point does someone apologize to Carter Page?
Well, that's a really good question.
Because at this point, doesn't everybody agree that Carter Page was a victim of our own government?
And also a victim of the partisan news media.
Doesn't Carter Page deserve like a lot of apologies?
Now, I don't know if he's going to be suing anybody.
I think Papadopoulos is suing.
But if anybody ever had a lawsuit...
Even though...
I'm not even sure if it's legal to sue the FBI or anything.
I don't even know what the legalities of that are.
But Carter Page deserves the biggest apology anybody ever got in the history of the world.
Now that we know that Carter Page had productively cooperated and helped both the FBI and the CIA... Oh, somebody says Carter is suing.
Good, I hope so. Knowing that he was actually not just not a Russian spy, but he had actively worked with our intelligence services in the past a number of times.
When you throw somebody under a bus who has worked for your team with little or no compensation for it, Just for the good of the United States, and you throw that guy under the bus, I think you need to go to jail.
Right? I would say that at the end of this, whoever was running Carter Page probably is a candidate for jail.
Assuming that they knew exactly what they were doing, which is hard to prove.
So, here's a strategy for the Democrats.
I know you always get upset when I give advice to the Democrats because you say, why are you giving them advice?
But trust me, The Democrats are not capable of taking good advice.
So I'm going to tell you what they should do now, but watch them not do it, because not so good at doing the smart thing.
All right, so here's the problem that they've gotten themselves into with this impeachment.
They had to do the impeachment, or at least try to do it, because there were so many Democrats who wanted it.
So it would have been bad to not do it, or at least attempt it.
But having done it, They've completely discredited themselves and probably are going to put all of the Democrats who are sort of in Trump parts of the country, they're at great risk of losing.
So at this point, the House could actually be flipped.
By this impeachment, because it's such a sham.
It's such an obvious sham that there are probably a number of people who like...
Who is the Democrat?
Drew. His last name is Drew.
Just changed a Republican because of this to try to protect himself, I'm sure.
So here's the strategy that the Democrats in the Senate should pursue.
Are you ready? Actually, I suppose they could do it in the House, too, because the full House hasn't voted on the impeachment articles, just the judiciary, as I understand it.
Here's what they should do.
Instead of sending it to the Senate, where it will obviously be killed, if they know it's going to be killed, here's their best strategy.
They should vote 100%, every Democrat, against impeachment.
And they should give one reason for it.
Only one reason. They should say, we still think he's guilty of all these things, because they've said it for so long they can't take that back.
But there is one thing they can say that 100% of the world will agree with.
Are you ready? They would agree that impeachment has to be bipartisan.
And they haven't achieved their own standard for impeachment.
Because remember, Pelosi and other Democrats, even Nadler has said it in the past, they're on record, and I believe that they would say it today as well, that impeachment has to be bipartisan.
So it's one thing that the Democrats went through all the process, because they could say, well, you know, our base wanted it, which they did.
And it exposed all of what they would consider the bad behavior of the Trump team, which it did, at least their version of it.
You know, not so much in reality, but in terms of impressions, it dug up a lot of bad feelings about the president.
So that was successful from their point of view.
If they take it all the way to a vote...
They will have damaged the Constitution, set a dangerous precedent, and probably lost the House.
Because it's going to be probably just a slaughter in the 2020 election if they go ahead and vote on party lines.
But... If they were to reverse course and say, let's all of us vote against it on the first vote, they would protect all the Democrats who are in those districts where their seats are not so safe because it's sort of Trump country.
Would the Democrats be able to retain some credibility by voting against their own impeachment because it didn't meet their own standard?
I think they could get away with that, because it wouldn't meet their own standard.
They've said as clearly as anybody has said, and every scholar agrees, that if it's not bipartisan, it's not a good idea.
That's the Democrat standard as well.
So they have a complete...
Trap door escape.
They painted themselves into a corner, but it's a corner that's got a little trap door.
And the trap door is to vote opposite of what they want.
And they're free. Because they can still claim all the badness of the president.
Say, look, we demonstrated our case.
But... The standard in the Constitution, the standard we would like to support going forward, is it's got to be bipartisan.
We know we can achieve that, so we will vote 100% against it based on one criteria that is not bipartisan.
They could do that.
Will they? Let's call that the I am Spartacus approach.
You know, I am Spartacus, everybody said they were Spartacus because Spartacus was going to be executed.
So everybody said, no, I'm Spartacus.
No, I'm Spartacus. Well, this would be an I am Spartacus play.
Every Democrat just vote against impeachment and then no individual Democrat vote.
Has to worry about the vote in 2020.
That won't happen because it's too smart.
So don't expect him to do that.
All right. Chess master Gary Kasparov.
Tweeted the following. Now, if you don't know who Garry Kasparov is, he's a critic of President Trump.
He's also a critic of Putin.
And he thinks that President Trump is pro-Putin.
So since he hates Putin, he hates Trump as well.
I'm oversimplifying, but that's the basic lay of the land here.
And here's his tweet. He says, an indication how Americans still cannot comprehend Trump and Trumpism.
So this guy who's not an American, he's a Russian, is saying there's an indication of how Americans don't comprehend Trump and Trumpism.
So right away, he's on shaky ground because he's not an American, but he believes that from his perspective as a Russian, He has a good insight into the mind of Americans.
Okay, so even before I read the rest of the tweet, there's something wrong here.
I mean, there's something deeply wrong in the very first sentence.
But it goes on. So he asked this question.
He says, why do you think he will leave in 2024?
You know, meaning Trump.
Why do you think he'll leave office if he gets re-elected and then 2024 his two terms are over?
Why do you think he will leave? Do you think it's because everyone before him did?
Gary Kasparov asks.
Is it because the GOP would finally stand up to him?
Kasparov asks.
Are you willing to risk your democracy on that bet?
Kasparov asks. So Kasparov believes that Republicans, who are essentially, you know, it's almost one-on-one that they're the supporters of Trump.
He thinks that Republicans believe that the Constitution of the United States is just a suggestion.
Think about that. Garry Kasparov, a Russian, is telling Americans what we think about Trump.
So he's explaining our own mindset to us.
And he believes that Republicans think that the Constitution of the United States is just sort of a suggestion.
That whole two-term thing?
Maybe, maybe not.
That's what a chess genius thinks.
Now, is there anything that could be more wrong than imagining that Republicans think the Constitution of the United States is, well, it's just a suggestion.
As many terms as the president wants, I mean, he's a good president, so why wouldn't we have him as a dictator?
I can't even imagine...
Like, if you sat down and said, all right, let's write, see if I can, just as an exercise, I want to write the most ridiculous prediction.
There is no prediction more ridiculous than Republicans supporting an enormous breach of the Constitution of the United States, one that's not ambiguous.
Now, I will confess, That the Constitution has some perceived ambiguity in it, and there's plenty of places that people can argue what it means or what it should mean, and we do.
It's what the Supreme Court is there for deciding.
But there's nobody in anywhere in the country, not one person, who thinks there's any ambiguity about the president having two terms.
There's nobody thinks it maybe means three.
Kasparov, what the hell is wrong with you?
And this leads me to my next topic, which I've gotten people really mad on Twitter.
I call it artist or economist.
And it's a game I've been playing on Twitter in which I look at the quality of somebody's thinking as expressed in their tweet.
And I try to guess, if I click on their profile, if it will say they're some kind of artist.
Could be writer, musician, whatever.
Or Economist, which is really just a stand-in for one of the fields where critical thinking is taught.
And so I give you some examples, because I've been playing it the last day or so, just to see how it goes.
Now, I hope that you've been doing that too.
I hope you've been trying to look at just the most ridiculous thinking, and then just click on the profile and see what kind of job background they have.
This of course is something that's inspired by my book, LoserThink.
The main point of LoserThink is not that artists are dumb and economists are smart, nothing like that.
They're both smart and in fact can be geniuses in their own field.
The only point is if you don't have a little bit of exposure to a number of fields, You have a blind spot in how to think about your world productively and you wouldn't know it.
So the fact that you wouldn't know it is the important part.
Because the fact that you don't know you have a blind spot is what makes you say things in public that don't make any damn sense.
Because you don't know.
You just don't know that you don't make any damn sense.
But an economist might, a scientist might, a lawyer might.
There are professions in which they would spot it immediately.
Let me give you some examples.
Here's a tweet from Brie Newsom Bass.
A blue check person, didn't know anything about her.
And she says the following.
I'm going to keep saying this to you all.
Trump is being impeached.
However, when the Senate refuses to remove him, he will effectively be a dictator.
We then have an entire year of Trump dictatorship and a slim chance of having a free and fair election.
All right. So now that comment is so irrational that I said to myself, huh, artist.
I click on the profile.
What's the first word in the profile?
Artist. Artist.
Now again, I'm not saying that Brie Newsome Bass is dumb.
Far from it. My understanding is she's a very successful artist.
So art is one of the many ways in which you could have genius.
She may actually be a genius within her field.
My only point is that if you don't have exposure to other fields, you don't know what you don't know.
Let me give you another one.
Here is somebody who tweeted at me, based on this idea, laughing my ass off at the idea that economics departments teach critical thinking.
So there was somebody who tweeted at me, laughing, that learning economics would teach you critical thinking.
Now, I'm not saying that economics is critical thinking.
I'm saying that you pick up a number of thinking, let's say styles and techniques, When you study economics, for example, you would learn what a sunk cost is and how to analyze it.
You would learn how to compare things rationally as opposed to looking at one thing and saying it's good or bad.
You'd say, well, compared to what?
That's an economics style of thinking.
You would also know that money received in the future Would have to be discounted back to the president to know how much it's actually worth today.
Very basic stuff. Those are just some simple things.
Supply and demand. Very basic stuff.
So, who would tweet at me in public and suggest that understanding economics doesn't teach you any critical thinking?
What kind of person would tweet such a thing?
Would they be an artist?
Or maybe an economist.
Is it an economist who knows exactly what economics is and is criticizing it?
Or is it an artist who doesn't know anything about economics?
I click on it.
A student and contributing editor.
Anthropology student and contributing editor.
Contributing editor means writer.
Artist. Okay.
Here's one. I'm not going to tell you who tweeted it.
Just see the rationality of the tweet.
Every elected Republican knows.
Okay, so first of all, the first part of the sentence, every elected Republican knows.
You know that whatever follows that is going to be bullshit, right?
So every elected Republican knows that this president is guilty of countless impeachable offenses.
Countless. But they, along with many white evangelicals and white supremacists, have made a pact with Putin.
That's right. Republicans and white evangelicals and white supremacists, they love their Putin, so they made a pact with Putin.
But unlike a pact with the devil, this one can be unsigned, meaning that it could be reversed.
Now, what kind of person makes a tweet like that?
Is it an engineer?
Is it a scientist?
A Economist, somebody with good critical thinking skills, or click on the profile.
It's Rob Reiner, writer and producer, artist.
All right. So after I explained to my critic on Twitter with this tweet, I said economics teaches, the person who said that it doesn't teach you critical thinking, I said economics teaches how to compare things, the value of money over time, sunk costs, and that sort of thing.
So I was giving her three examples.
Of things you would learn when you studied economics that would help you understand your world and think better.
So somebody comes in after my tweet explaining three specific things that obviously help you think better.
I don't know how you could doubt that.
And he says, that's what critical thinking means, folks.
It means, and then he says, parenthetically, squints at wiki entry.
It means sunk cost, folks.
So this is somebody mocking me for suggesting that studying economics teaches you how to think better.
Is this somebody who understands economics?
Is this somebody who's a scientist or an engineer, perhaps?
Click on profile, profession, writer.
All right. I got a...
Message from Joel Stein, who wrote a book recently called In Defense of the Elite or something.
Anyway, I'm a chapter in that book, and he tweeted at me.
He said, hey, I'm confused because you told me when I interviewed you that economics is bullshit, but now you're all over Twitter saying economics teaches you how to think better.
Explain that. Joel Stein is a writer.
And so I did explain to him, and I explained it this way.
If you're talking about economic projections over 80 years, that's complete bullshit.
And lots of the economic theories and models have now stood up over time.
That's all true. And it's also true that you can study economics and then you don't really go forward and do a lot of economics.
But it does teach you how to think critically.
So forget about the prediction models that are ridiculous.
It does teach you how to think.
Likewise, well, I'm not going to make that analogy yet.
Joel Stein, a writer.
He was confused about why economics could help you think better.
It's a blind spot. Rachel Maddow is making the argument, as Joel Pollack points out in his excellent article in Breitbart, That Rachel Manilow and others are taking the Ukraine hoax.
I guess, I'm not sure I would call it a hoax.
It's more of a making something out of nothing.
She's tying that to the Russia collusion to prove Russian collusion.
So the thinking here is that if the president withheld aid from Ukraine, the real reason, the real reason was not just investigating Biden, but the real reason Was to help Russia so that Ukraine would be less defended.
Now, apparently the thinking here from Rachel Maddow and others is that even though every part of Russia collusion has been debunked, There's still sort of a pattern that's been created, and that the Ukraine thing adds to the pattern.
So it's a pattern made up of things which are all individually debunked, and yet it forms a pattern.
Now, I don't know if Rachel Maddow has studied economics.
Or engineering or science.
She is ridiculously smart and well-educated, so I have to think she had a little exposure to those things.
Now, when you talk about somebody who's a pundit and an advocate on television, things they say you don't have to assume they mean, because they're making a case more than they're telling you the news, but...
That doesn't seem rational to me.
I've got a feeling that Rachel Maddow does not have experience with some of the critical thinking fields.
But in her case, she's a special case because she's an advocate or a pundit for a side.
So you don't expect them necessarily to stick to the facts.
Let's see. Somebody else tweeted, economics aren't real.
I think the point being that economics don't help you think better.
And I clicked on his profile.
He is a writer.
Here's somebody else who tweeted at me who said, I haven't met many economists capable of critical thinking, sir.
So he's a polite guy.
He's somebody who follows me. Might be on this periscope right now.
Now, if you're an economist or a scientist or an engineer and somebody says this statement, I haven't met many economists capable of critical thinking, you say to yourself, is that evidence that Sort of anecdotal, isn't it? And moreover, if you are not yourself an economist or trained in critical thinking, how would you know the economists are not capable of critical thinking?
Because you would be judging them against your own opinion of what good critical thinking is, and maybe you haven't studied it.
Here's the thing. Everybody believes that they're good critical thinkers.
Everyone. Everyone.
But only some people are.
And it's only the people who've studied it, for the most part.
I suppose you could be some kind of natural genius or something.
But critical thinking, you have to learn.
It's not something that you're just born with.
So this person who said, I haven't met many economists capable of critical thinking.
And he ended it, comma, sir.
So I'm going to be polite to him because he was polite to me on Twitter.
But I clicked on his profile, and he's a writer.
Alright. Here's another one.
Ah, never mind.
I got enough of those. So, has anybody else played that game yet?
Has anybody played the artist or economist game yet?
Somebody says Duke Krugman.
So, Krugman is a special case.
Alright, Krugman's a special case.
Because he's an advocate.
So again, like Rachel Maddow, like Sean Hannity, like Krugman, there are certain public figures that you just have to say, well, even if they thought they were wrong, they might still make the best case they can for their side.
So they're a little different than just people on Twitter who are a little more authentic, I would say.
So Krugman, the thing that Krugman was wrong about was an economic forecast.
What did I just tell you?
Economics is not so good for economic forecasting.
That's the part that Krugman gets wrong.
Because nobody can do it.
It's not even a thing. But, if I said to you, can Paul Krugman, if he wants to, and if he wants to is the important part, could he look at an argument or a situation with good critical thinking?
And the answer is yes. Yes.
In his private moments, If there's no political element, nobody's watching, and he's just looking at some information, probably better than most people, because his economics training would indeed give him that skill.
All right. I tweeted that there are no undecided senators on the Xi impeachment question.
There are only shitty actors with lemon faces who want you to believe they are, quote, solemnly agonizing over the decision.
I've said this before.
Politics is all BS, and you expect that.
You know people are exaggerating, and you know they're lying, and you know there's hyperbole, and you just expect it from basically every politician.
But what you don't see as often is people who are literally trying to act.
Usually when a politician says a lie, they're just their usual self.
So if President Trump says, it doesn't matter who it is, whatever politician, when they lie normally, they lie with their normal personality, their normal attitude, their normal presentation.
But what's different with this impeachment, champ-peachment stuff is that the Democrats literally need to practice lying With the right face to pretend that they think it's serious.
None of them think it's serious.
It's just to get rid of Trump.
It's a convenience. It's a technique.
It's something they thought would work.
But there's certainly nobody who believes their own solemn face, which I call Lemon Face, named after Don Lemon, who makes a certain kind of face when he talks about the president or his supporters.
Like the sour, it looks like a lemon.
You know, I just sucked on a lemon.
President Trump and his supporters.
So that's the main thing.
Every time you see a story about an alleged Democrat who has not yet made up their mind, they are lying.
They are lying.
There's nobody who hasn't made up their mind.
Because it's not really that complicated.
It's fairly straightforward.
So there's nobody who hasn't made up their mind.
They're all liars.
Alan Dershowitz got a little TV time.
In which he demolished the second of the two impeachment charges.
He just wiped it off the table.
And here's Dershowitz's point, which until you hear it, it's not so obvious, but after you hear it, you go, oh my God, why did I need Dershowitz to tell me this?
It was right there.
You and I could have seen it just as easily as Dershowitz did, but we didn't.
What does that tell you?
It tells you that being a constitutional scholar gives you a better view of the field.
Because Dershowitz saw it.
He saw it clearly, he saw it immediately, because he has the right background.
Alan Dershowitz does not suffer from loserthink.
Now he's a writer, a very successful writer, writes a lot of books, has a new one out, I hear it's good.
But he also has, obviously, a broader exposure to things because when he thinks, it's always good critical thinking every time.
Here is his point, and it goes like this.
The second impeachment charge was that it was obstruction of Congress.
And the idea is that the president was not submitting his people and, I think, his documents as requested to the Democrats.
Now, the president and his team said, well, let the Supreme Court decide.
And the Democrats said, heck with that, we're just going to make an impeachment point and go with it.
Now, Dershowitz's point, which is obviously true after you hear it, is this.
The Supreme Court, on a totally different matter, just decided that they would hear the question of whether President Trump's tax returns could be made available to the Democrats on their investigation.
The fact that the Supreme Court has recognized in a very direct way that this dispute between the impeachers and the president can be decided by the Supreme Court.
We know that because the Supreme Court just said, oh, we'll decide.
So you don't have to wonder anymore Is it the Supreme Court's job?
Because the Supreme Court just told you it's their job.
And when the Supreme Court says, yes, this is our job, that's the end of the conversation.
It's their job. Because they get to say what their job is.
Their job is to say what their job is, in a sense.
That's not exactly true.
So Dershowitz is completely right.
The precedent is as clear as day.
The Supreme Court has just ruled that the second impeachment item is bullshit.
Now, they didn't rule on the impeachment item.
They ruled on something that's so close to it because it's literally the same question.
Can the president refuse to give something to the same group of Democrats for the same reason?
It's done. That one's off the table.
So what that leaves them with...
What that leaves them with is...
Let's see.
So if obstruction of Congress is off the table, that leaves them with abuse of power.
And the abuse of power is asking for an investigation into Burisma.
Which... Democrats have admitted in the public, you know, the attorney that was representing the Democrats, Johnson, I think it was, said that Burisma was absolutely worth looking into.
That's it. That's the whole game, folks.
The whole game was, did the president have a legitimate national interest in looking into the Burisma thing?
And the people who want to impeach him just said yes.
At their own hearing.
It's not even like I had to go look for a document.
I didn't look for a tweet he made a year ago.
Nothing like that. It was the actual impeachment hearings where the main guy representing the Democrats said unambiguously, yes, that was worth looking into.
There's nothing left.
All they have left is, why didn't they do it sooner?
Do you know who has a chapter in their excellent best-selling book about why it's stupid to say, why didn't you do it sooner?
This guy. Because why didn't you do it sooner applies to everything.
That's what you say when you've got nothing left.
Why didn't you do it sooner?
Now similarly, why didn't you do it with other countries?
And the answer is the same. If the president could have done this sooner, Or have done it a different way.
Wouldn't he have done it?
It's somewhat obvious that getting on the phone with the president of Ukraine is not the first thing you do.
That's not the first thing you try.
Obviously you try it at the lower level, and obviously that wasn't working.
Otherwise the president wouldn't have been involved in a job that was properly delegated to the underlings if they could get it done, and obviously they couldn't.
Let's talk about Greta.
So I know a lot of you have turned against Saturday Night Live because they're liberal bent, but you've got to give it another shot.
I would... I would suggest that you take a second look at Saturday Night Live because you're not really seeing the absolute left-leaning humor that you used to see.
They have definitely staked out a middle position where they're mocking both sides.
And I think they're doing a really good job.
I would say this is one of their strongest seasons, at least on the political stuff.
I don't watch the rest. But on the political stuff, really good.
Here's an example. SNL just made fun of Greta Thunberg or Thunberg or whatever it is.
And, you know, you just saw in the news, everybody was saying, how can the president...
You know, mock Greta.
What kind of a monster is President Trump for a mean tweet about Greta?
She's only 16.
How can you do this? And then Saturday Night Live has Kate McKenna playing Greta.
Now, again, it wasn't like some kind of a dark insult to her.
It was a playful version of it, but it was still making fun of a kid.
Any way you look at it.
So I think SNL kind of took the president's side without taking sides.
What I mean by that is they've obviously, because they didn't, agreed that Greta is fair game, as long as you're being gentle about it.
I think we would all agree that being 16...
Does tell you that your attacks should be a little moderated.
I think that's fair.
But she did get in the octagon by herself, and she has performed like any adult, and she can obviously take it.
I mean, the only reason that she is as famous as she is is that she does seem to have a lot of the qualities that an average adult would have, meaning toughness, motivation, all that stuff.
So I think it's perfectly fair for Saturday Night Live to have a little fun with her, same as it is with the president.
Let's talk about North Korea.
North Korea just sent a signal to the United States That is the best thing I've seen yet.
I'm going to read the sentence, and I want you to see if you can find the hidden signal.
Okay? North Korea is frustrated by what it perceives, and so this is a paraphrase, but I think it's accurately paraphrasing North Korea's opinion.
It perceives the lack of flexibility and creativity from U.S. negotiators.
Read between the lines.
What does it mean when North Korea is signaling that there's a lack of flexibility and creativity?
Creativity is the key word here from U.S. negotiators.
What do you think that is telling us?
Asking for a better deal.
Well, that's obvious, yes.
There's a way to get there.
They're willing to negotiate, and they think that the only thing missing is creativity.
When people say that, they want a deal.
You don't say a lack of creativity unless you're still in the constructive part of your thinking.
If you've given up, you say different stuff.
You don't give the people that you're negotiating with a clear signal of what it would take.
And he's saying, how about some creativity?
Now, I'm going to make a statement that if history repeats, my critics will take out of context.
And out of context, this will sound crazy.
In context, not so much.
And here's the claim.
If you give me a week with the North Korean negotiators, I'll get you a deal.
So that's the part my trolls will take out of context.
And they'll say, oh, cartoonist thinks he can make a deal.
Why does he think he can make a deal?
Why does he think that?
Here's why. North Korea has told us that creativity is what's missing.
I believe that is exactly what's missing.
We are approaching them the way we normally approach them because all the people doing the work are probably standard people doing standard stuff.
Standard people are not capable of creativity.
Creativity is something that's rare.
President Trump is capable of creativity.
And you saw that when the president said, I'll just go meet with Kim Jong-un.
I'll stop by and we'll walk over to the DMZ and shake hands.
What would you call that if not creativity?
That's creativity.
Trump did what other people couldn't imagine.
He simply imagined it, and then he executed.
That's creativity.
The reason that the negotiations are failing is because the only two creative people aren't talking directly.
Kim clearly has some creative ideas because he's using that word.
He's like, let's be creative.
President Trump is completely capable of being creative.
He's proven it already.
But he's not directly talking to Kim.
So you've got all the people in between who don't know how to be creative trying to solve a creative problem.
You can't send uncreative people to solve a creative problem.
And Kim has just called it out.
He just said, basically he's saying that you got the wrong eyes on it.
Wouldn't you say? When he says they lack flexibility and creativity, he's talking about the negotiators specifically.
He's really saying...
That if you had better negotiators, we would already have a deal.
Do you know what? I 100% agree with Kim Jong-un.
I don't want to.
I didn't wake up this morning and say, huh, I think I'll take sides with North Korea over the United States of America.
I don't want to. But on this point, I'm close to positive that he's right.
That the thing that's missing is creativity.
Let me give you an example.
This is something I said before, but I believe that creativity involves reframing our relationship with North Korea the following way.
If we're trying to simply disarm them, like Libya, while at the same time we're in a state of war and we have our army on their border, should we expect them to negotiate?
No. I would not expect North Korea to offer a deal under the current situation.
I wouldn't. So why would he?
I don't even think he should make the deal.
If I were Kim Jong-un, I would say, I'm not making this deal.
You've offered me nothing creative.
So I would suggest the following.
That we end our formal state of war that's been in place for decades, I guess, and just end it.
That is very creative in terms of a first move.
But I suppose the negotiators would say, no, you can't give him something until he gives us something.
That's the way to failure.
You have to reinterpret the entire situation away from what it is into a new frame you can solve it in a new frame you can't solve it in the old frame and that's where everybody's stuck here's the new frame you ready?
North Korea is a natural ally of the United States That's it.
North Korea is a natural ally of the United States.
Now, of course, we would like them to be better on human rights and all that other stuff.
But we're also allies with Turkey.
We're also allies with Saudi Arabia.
They do some shit we don't like, but they're also natural allies.
North Korea, their biggest risk is China, obviously.
You don't think China is the biggest risk to North Korea?
What is the biggest risk to the United States?
Well, China. China is a natural adversary to North Korea, and they seem to be a natural adversary to the United States.
If our negotiators are trying to simply find a stable peace with North Korea, they're idiots.
That's too strong. They're probably very smart people, but they're not creative.
A creative deal, and I swear to God, I can almost see it in the word creativity.
I think Kim Jong-un is saying, offer us a deal to be your ally, and we'll point our nukes in the other direction.
Now, I don't know how you could be sure that North Korea would actually target China, but I've made this point before.
We're also not sure That Israel doesn't have their nukes targeting the United States, except that they would have no reason.
So simply having no reason is the best assurance you could have.
North Korea right now has a very good reason to point their nukes at the United States.
They have a good reason.
Let's take it away.
If we keep them with their good reason to have nukes, why would we ask them to get rid of them?
That's not even a smart negotiating.
You have to take away the reason.
That's what President Trump had the creativity to do by saying, let's talk.
Let's just take away the reason.
I'm your friend. We can talk.
We can work this out. We can make North Korea rich and prosperous with investment.
That is creative.
Whatever the negotiators are doing are just doing what lower-level people think they can do within their realm.
They're not really authorized to be creative.
Do you think that there's any negotiator who would have the authority to say to North Korea, you know, maybe we're aiming low.
Instead of just not fighting, why don't we join teams?
Because you've got a strong team.
You've got nukes, for God's sakes.
How would you like to have a country with nukes on your team on the border of China?
Well, I suppose South Korea qualifies, but why not another one?
So here's what's wrong.
That's the bottom line.
The bottom line is that I believe that when Kim uses the word creativity, he is saying to us directly, Make me an ally, because that's what's left, right?
You know, Amir, you do this, we do this, never is going to work, it looks like.
Do something creative.
Take a bigger risk.
All right. I think that's all I wanted to talk about.
Is there anything else happening?
Scary thought, North Korea as an ally.
Well, is it a scary thought that Saudi Arabia is an ally?
Is it a scary thought that Turkey is an ally?
You know, is it a scary thought that Mexico is an ally?
Think about it. Mexico is full of cartels sending us crime and fentanyl, but Mexico is an ally, right?
So, I think we have to change the frame and say, what would it look like with North Korea just to be on our team?
Because we should be building our team.
If we believe that China is the long-run risk, then our team should have Russia on it.
We should have Russia on our team.
Russia is a natural ally to the United States.
We have no common borders.
We have no reason to be at war.
We don't have any reason to be pointing nukes at each other.
Russia? What's the reason?
There's none. They're not going to be attacking Europe.
Now, I'll agree that if Europe were a soft target, you might have an opportunistic Putin thing.
But we're not going to make Europe a soft target.
I don't think that's going to happen.
But I think we should be moving Russia and North Korea into our at least militarily allied side because they're natural allies.
They aren't stopping the nuke program.
Right. So the point is, there may be no path that gets us to a non-nuclear North Korea.
But we don't worry about nuclear powers that are our allies, because they're just not pointing their nukes in our direction.
Now, we could also help them move their...
Oh, and the other thing I said the other day, let me say more about that.
I was jokingly, but not jokingly, just to sort of shake the box, saying that it would be fun for the United States to surrender to North Korea.
Because if we surrender, then Kim has a victory, and he can go tell his people, all right, our nukes worked, we did everything we want to do, let's make friends with them now because we've defeated them militarily.
Could you make a statement that Kim could interpret that way but wouldn't be exactly that?
I think you could. I think you could word a peace declaration that would say, for example, it would say, we're recognizing that North Korea is so strong that it would be unwise for us to get into a military conflict with them.
And thus, we would like to surrender.
Well, no, don't use the word surrender.
And thus, we would like to offer a complete cessation of military, whatever.
If we said something worded sort of that way, could Kim say, yay, they surrendered, even though we don't use the word surrender?
Probably. Because that's one of the ways to slice this thing.
You want to give both sides a different story that's based on the same set of facts.
It's hard to do, but that would be the example.
So you declare peace.
You say it's because North Korea is nuclear and very strong.
You say it. Because it's true, right?
That's a true fact that we don't want to get in a fight with them.
You could also say we would prefer to be allies.
And Kim can say, look, we built up our nuclear power, we stared them down, they backed down, and they had to declare peace because they were afraid of us.
Would that be wrong? Not really.
That would be close enough to true.
So I think that would be one way to go.
Anyway, when the negotiators...
Are accused of being not creative enough.
That is your signal that Kim wants a deal.
He just wants a little more creativity.
Let's see if we can give that to him.
All right. And I'll talk to you.
Oh, there's a question on here.
When will the Periscopes with Christina start?
We're planning to record one today, which probably will be recorded.
But we've planned to record it a few other times and run into technical and other difficulties.
So we'll see if we can make it work today.
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