Episode 133 - The Epidemic of Trapped Children, SCOTUS, and Coffee
Date: 2018-07-09 | Duration: 36:14
Topics
Strategy for dealing with personal attacks: “I block all Nazis, goodby” Supreme Court nomination…likely to include one or two bonus topics Experts said: MUST avoid trade wars, have opinions changed? Reticular activation - Noticing something everywhere once it’s on your mind Kids in cages, kids in caves, kids in mental cages (Democrats) President Trump’s persuasion play and the importance of HONOR Elon Musk’s team creating tube for cave kids rescue
Transcript
[0:06]
Pum pum pum pum pum pum pum pum pum pum pum. 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. 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.
[1:09]
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. Here’s what I’ve described before as my plan: 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.
What I found is that, first of all, instead of that continuous negative reaction you have on Twitter where if 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, “I got him this time,” and then you go back and forth and all you do is you get worked up over it—
[2:15]
Compare that with the third or fourth time you block somebody by saying, “I block all Nazis, goodbye.” I keep it that simple. 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.
I would suggest that, having A/B tested this enough now, you should try it. Instead of engaging the first moment—the very first time, never let there be a second time—the first time somebody goes personal or calls you a “candidate Nazi,” say: “I block all Nazis.” Today, I blocked somebody who called me a Nazi first. There’s some old Salon article that they dug up, full of ridiculous things, and said, “Well, you know—”
[3:17]
“—you’re a fascist and a Nazi.” 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.
[4:20]
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. What you’ll find is that it makes your reactions, your own life, much more positive. 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, right? So the people using the insult obviously think it’s effective and that it’s the worst thing to be called. So mirroring it back as quickly as possible and then leaving the room is going to have an impact over time. I recommend that.
[5:22]
As I am 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, you’ve got to go “Nazi” early. Call them a Nazi, block them, and you’re out. Winner. You’ll 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—
[6:24]
—that it feels good. It actually feels good. Try it; you’ll be amazed.
Now, we’ve got the Supreme Court nomination will be announced, I guess, 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time, if I have that right. Depending on what I’m doing there, I don’t have any plan, but I think I’ll be live. I might join you live on Periscope when the announcement is made. 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 knew something’s coming, right? The Supreme Court nomination is so important and so newsworthy that basically it will be one of the—
[7:25]
—most-watched television events of all time. So he’s engineering it that way to be primetime. 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. 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. It’s going to be good. You can guarantee that there will be other topics covered. The one thing I’m pretty sure of is that it won’t just be about the Supreme Court.
[8:27]
Once everybody is watching, there’s no way he’s going to waste that. If he’s smart, he’s not going to do a laundry list. The worst thing he could do is say, “Here’s all the 15 things we’re thinking about.” It would all just get washed out; everything would be equal. I’m looking at the Supreme Court nomination and at least one other really provocative or good hit at his critics, possibly about immigration, and maybe one other topic. Three would be sort of the maximum to get the most coverage concentrated on your points. I look for one or two other major topics just to be addressed in a very quotable way—
[9:28]
—so that his message gets amplified.
Wow, is that true? Beijing ordered the State media to stop making aggressive statements about Trump? Have you noticed there’s a bit of a change in the atmosphere? I just tweeted an Andrew Sullivan article. He is no big fan of our President; he’s a conservative gay man, but not a President Trump fan, to say the least. He just wrote an article to say really the only way out of our current situation is build the effing wall.
[10:30]
I think people are going to start coming around to that. Somebody said Sullivan is not conservative. He’s sort of on both sides, but I believe he has labeled himself conservative in the past. Fact-check beyond that, but he definitely has one leg in both worlds, which makes him interesting.
Anyway, my point was that I think people are going to start saying, “Oh yeah, there is no option to the wall.” People will be more convinced of the wall because of all of the stuff that’s happening. That should play very well into the President’s preferences. Now, you’re also seeing—correct me if I’m wrong—in the—
[11:30]
—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 98 percent against it? Check my assumption here. 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 all seemed to be 98 percent against any kind of trade disruption or trade war? Wasn’t that true just several months ago?
And now, are you watching the Master Persuader and 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—
[12:30]
—winnable. I don’t like using the war terms exactly, because what you’re trying to do is to get a stable, long-term deal that works for everybody. I don’t like to see that as winning so much as balancing things.
It seems to me that people are starting to find the high ground. Do you remember when the President would say stuff like, “We’ve got a half-a-billion-dollar 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—”
[13:31]
“—the trade is going or something.” He doesn’t understand basic economics. What are people saying now—the smartest people in the conversation? 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.
The smart people started out by saying, “Trade deals bad, trade deals bad, trade deals bad.” Then, when the President started threatening trade deals, what did the stock market not do? It didn’t go down. Everything that the experts thought was true—they said if you do the trade deal, the stock market’s going to blow up, everything’s going to blow up. Trump did it anyway, and the stock market said: “Okay, man—”
[14:34]
“—whatever.” It just shrugged. So all of the early assumptions about the trade deal, we can now say the first part—nobody knows how it all ends, I’m not predicting exactly how it’s going to end—but the first part was announcing it and getting tough and getting serious about negotiating. 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 in 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.”
[15:36]
If winning is the right term. We’ll probably come out okay because we had the leverage and the deals were, in fact, not good deals. 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?”
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.
[16:39]
Have you noticed a weird trend? There’s a reason for this; it might be an 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, then you start noticing that same thing over and over again? 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?” Once you’ve noticed something, your filter is set, and then you can notice it all the time.
What are the odds that 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—
[17:40]
—children being trapped in caves. The young people in the Democratic Party are trapped in a mental cage, a mental prison. If we’re being honest, most of the antifa protesters, etcetera, skew young. It’s more children in cages. It’s a whole lot of “somebody fell in the well.”
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? The big thing that changed is how many it was happening to. We went from a smallish problem to a really big problem.
Trump’s latest tweet about China—what did he say about China? Let’s see—
[18:43]
Trump’s Twitter. Let’s see what we got here. Oh, this is a brand new tweet twelve 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.
“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. Remember how all the experts and the smart—
[19:43]
—people said 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? It’s a tool that does exactly what he wants it to do. 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.
He just said China’s not acting honorably, maybe. His words are: “China, on the other hand, may be exerting negative pressure on a deal because of our posture on Chinese trade. Hope not!” So he’s putting China in—
[20:47]
—the lower respect category than Kim Jong Un because, as of now, the President’s assumption as he lays it down here is that Kim Jong Un is actually a person of his word. He’s treating him as a person of his word. Let me tell you how big a deal this is. This is one of the strongest persuasion techniques you will ever see.
I’m going to use an example from a TV show called Babylon 5 that I was a guest actor on years ago. Let me tell you about this one episode where there was an alien ambassador—Delenn, I think her name was. The alien ambassador was attacked by assassins who tried to assassinate her. When she—
[21:51]
—recovered, she asked her loyal right-hand person, “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. He knew that she could not be an effective ambassador if she ever knew that her own people tried to kill her. So he lied to her.
Here’s the persuasion lesson: Delenn’s assistant was persuading her into a more effective role, making her a better ambassador, by—
[22:56]
—changing her opinion of her situation. Do you see a similar thing here with President Trump? What it looks like in the tweet is that President Trump—and his critics are going to say this: “President Trump, you are so gullible to say publicly that you believe Kim Jong Un. How gullible can you be?” They are 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 Kim Jong Un’s reputation in the rest of the—
[23:56]
—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 the lowest level of understanding. 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—and one would think he would; who would not like a brand as a—
[24:57]
—person who could be trusted?
Trump is giving him “face.” Somebody just said that in the comments. 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. President Trump has created 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, I know about the bad things he’s done; we’re just talking about realpolitik here. The President has now created an asset—this—
[25:59]
—brand for Kim Jong Un on the world stage that can now be taken away should things go bad. I think actually things probably won’t go bad in the long run. It’s sort of a long process with lots of ups and downs. 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.
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, but also something he can lose. In other words, he’s trying to become a credible player on the world stage that somebody would invest in. How is somebody going to invest in North Korea if they feel like Kim—
[27:03]
—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.
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—
[28:03]
—because they’re doing all the right stuff.
It was an opportunity for Trump to put China on the defensive because they were not acting as honorably in this situation, allegedly. The President put it in the conditional: if they’re doing this, that would be bad.
When you see the amount of work that this tweet does, that’s when you start realizing how important this tool is. This would be a good time to remind you of my new theory of political power: political power can be calculated by multiplying a person’s persuasion quality—let’s say on a scale of one to ten, Trump is a ten—times the size of their platform. In other words—
[29:04]
—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. I think that’s what you’re going to see in North Korea—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 with the biggest platform, and 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 showing all the people who thought he would lose the election and then showing the change on the night of the election. If you lived through it, it was hilarious. If you were on the—
[30:06]
—other side, it wasn’t.
Let’s talk about Elon Musk’s submarine for kids. I guess eight of the 12 kids are already out, which is amazing and inspiring, and it was done by divers who were 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 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 now putting me in that damn little tube?” 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. That was a small tube.
[31:08]
I love the speed, the thought, the effort. I love people coming together building this. They probably stayed up all night for nights doing this. I’m very impressed with Elon Musk as well as his entire team. They have 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. You’ve got to say it’s 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? I would replace the kids’ face masks—presumably, they’re—
[32:09]
—going to use scuba face masks, etc.—with virtual reality goggles. They would have an actual model of the cave the entire way that is built by one of the professional divers going through first with listening sonar. The sonar just maps the actual cave dimensions so you know where’s the water, where’s the cave, and how big it is. Then you feed that into your program and put that on the kids’ faces.
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. You just go through with a sonar device and map it 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—
[33:12]
—in the right place. So when they were going through the mud, what they would see is actually swimming through clear water. 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. 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.”
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 from a point where that could have easily been done. In other words, there would be enough code existing and 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, and I’ll have a world built in a minute and a half.”
[34:17]
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. Let me show it to you. I’m going to turn my camera around here for a moment.
In my office, you can’t really see it, but you can see there’s a little sensor up here and one there, and then this computer is my VR computer. So that little area is the zone. 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. Yes, it’s coming. I’ll give you a demonstration of that one of these days. It’s the Vive system.
[35:19]
It’s the Vive system. I have a different computer for VR—a computer that was built 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.
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. Once you’ve experienced that, you realize what’s coming.
That is all for now. I am going to sign off, and I might talk to you tonight during the President’s announcement. Look for that.