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June 16, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
39:52
Episode 75 - “Obstructing Justice” is thinking past the sale, plus Iran and North Korea
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Sing along with me, everybody!
Bum bum bum, bum bum bum And if you are well prepared, you already have your coffee.
It's time for the early birds to enjoy the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
Mmm.
Oh, that's good stuff.
Okay.
So, let's talk about obstruction of justice.
Now, obstruction of justice is a phrase you're hearing a lot.
People are accusing President Trump of obstructing justice by suggesting that somebody should investigate the investigators.
Do you know what's tricky about that?
Here's what's tricky about it.
The phrase obstructing justice is making you think past the sale.
The sale is that there's some justice going on.
The thinking past it is whether he's obstructing or not obstructing the justice that they made you accept uncritically.
Here's another way to look at it.
If somebody is obstructing justice, That's bad.
If somebody is obstructing injustice, that's good.
So as soon as you allow somebody to say he's obstructing justice and making you debate whether or not he is obstructing justice, they have made you uncritically, in a sense, accept that there was some justice going on.
Now part of why that works is that it's the justice department.
So people are conflating the justice department and the justice process with justice.
Justice. And they can be very different.
If your Justice Department is serving up injustice, should you allow them to keep doing their injustice because they are the Justice Department?
Or, if you are their boss, might you try to call them out on their injustice?
In the Justice Department.
Well, I think it's obvious that if it's real injustice and the evidence suggests that it's at least worth looking into, it is the President's job and obligation to do that.
And by the way, the President has a little thing called freedom of speech.
Do I care that the President is giving us his actual unvarnished opinion in a tweet?
No! That's why he got elected!
That's the sort of shit that got him elected.
His honest, unvarnished opinion and full transparency of at least the way he's thinking.
So the way he's thinking is fully transparent.
You've got to like that part.
And if that leads us to something that looks like injustice, I think we'd recognize it.
But certainly I like the idea that the President can speak out against injustice, even if the injustice is happening inside the Justice Department.
Alright, let's talk about North Korea.
I saw an article last night that I didn't see a confirmation for yet, but I haven't checked the other news sources, that North Korea was back on for the summit.
Did anybody see that?
Or was that fake news?
I'm not sure yet.
So it says they're back on.
So I wouldn't assume that the summit is really back on.
I think there might be a point where we either cancel it ourselves, the US, or we go there and walk out.
So I think President Trump might actually go there just to walk out.
I don't think that was something anybody wanted or planned on, but I think that's very much on the table.
So my old thinking was that they wouldn't have the summit unless they had largely agreed on everything before they even got there.
My new thinking is that the visual of President Trump walking out, or at least the story of him walking out, It might be fun.
It might be actually the useful part of the process.
So I'd say this might be an exception.
Normally you don't have the meeting until you have some agreement.
He might. He might have a meeting without an agreement and just walk out.
I think that's entirely possible.
South Korea's...
I don't have evidence to back up what I'm going to say next.
It's just a feeling.
It's speculative. I want to see if you have the same feeling.
Does it feel to you that maybe the president of South Korea may have played both North Korea and the United States?
I'm not going to say that happened.
I don't have evidence to say that happened.
But it's starting to look...
Like, South Korea isn't the, let's say, the straight player we hoped they were.
Don't know that's true.
Don't know that.
But it's starting to look that way.
So keep an eye on that.
Now, it could be just wishful thinking.
It's possible that Moon has all the best intentions, and he's trying to get both sides a little bit pregnant.
Now, if he did that strategically, meaning he wanted to fool both sides toward the middle, which he could have been doing.
He may have been playing at a level above what we assume.
He may have actually been trying to get both sides a little bit pregnant on this peace thing.
And then they get together and they realize, holy crap, we weren't even talking about the same thing.
But now they're talking.
So it's possible that Moon is more clever than we assume and that his game was to fool us into talking.
Because once you're talking, then you have new options.
So it's possible. We don't know what's going on yet.
And I think any kind of speculation about what's really happening or who's really agreed to what or who's really made an offer that they don't intend to keep, it's largely guessing at this point.
Let me give you my prediction of what is the default path for North Korea.
It goes like this.
You should assume that North Korea, no matter what, no matter what you believed about their intentions, they were going to reach a point where they would push back or resist as hard as possible, because why wouldn't they want to keep their nukes and get all the benefits, too, if they can? So they're going to try to get everything and give up nothing.
Nothing important, anyway.
And we're going to try To get our best deal as well.
So everything is so far kind of the way you'd expect it to go.
So here's my prediction.
I believe North Korea will not agree to whatever our terms are for getting rid of their nukes ahead of benefits.
So they don't want to go first and then give up their nukes and have nothing for it.
But they sort of have to at least start giving stuff up or else we're not going to give them anything in return and their economy is going to be in trouble.
Now, if China keeps North Korea alive by allowing these sanctions to be broken across their border, it seems like the next play for us is to go after a Chinese bank.
Now, before you go after the bank itself and close it down, because you would put that bank out of business and it would be a major international economic punch in the stomach, before you do that, there's a step before that.
And before that is just trying to cajole China into doing the best job it can.
But if that doesn't get it done, the next step is you go after the bankers, not the bank.
So you go after the leaders of the bank, individually.
And it seems to me we probably could get to them because anybody who's rich enough to own a bank or be CEO of a bank also has a lot of international dealings and if you suddenly put a clamp on that, that's going to be a pretty big cost.
So that would be the next thing I would expect.
Some serious sanctions on Chinese bankers.
If that doesn't work, I think we'll shut down a Chinese bank.
Now, shutting down a bank is serious, serious stuff.
But it's the difference between, I talked about this on a different periscope, it's the difference between wanting something and deciding to do something.
What we want is for North Korea to get rid of their nukes.
But wanting it doesn't make it happen.
What we've done, I believe, at least President Trump has done, is decide.
When you decide to get rid of them, then you do whatever you need to do.
So the fact that it would be a gigantic problem for us if we shut down a Chinese bank is no longer an obstacle because we're going to do whatever it takes to shut down North Korea's nuclear weapons.
So once you've decided, then you're just taking the path of least pain.
And war is the biggest pain.
And then below that is shutting down the economy of China, temporarily.
I mean, nothing lasts forever.
But starting a gigantic economic freefall that might be pretty dramatic is absolutely on the table now.
Now, if we had simply wanted North Korea to denuclearize, we might say, ah, we don't want war.
We can't shut down the Chinese bank.
I guess there's nothing we can do.
That was the old way of thinking.
That's when you just wanted it to happen.
But once you've decided, and it looks like we have, it looks like President Trump has simply decided, and here's why I think he has decided.
Because whatever happens in North Korea determines everything else that happens after that.
It determines the Middle East.
It determines how we deal with Russia.
It determines how we deal with trade deals.
It determines everything.
So we don't have the option...
of failing with North Korea.
This is really critical.
We used to have an option.
Our old option was, well, we want things with North Korea, but we could sort of fail.
We could put it off, kick the can down the street.
But at this point, we've tied our North Korea success to all the other things we want to get done.
Our credibility is at stake.
So now we don't have that option.
So one side in this conflict has the power, which is us, and doesn't have the option to fail.
North Korea doesn't have the power, doesn't have the option.
China has a lot of power, but they definitely have the option of backing down.
It's just very painful.
We don't have that option.
Because it would be devastating for us.
So the option of taking on a Chinese bank, I think, went from close to unthinkable to closer to probable.
I would say the odds of us taking on a Chinese bank now, probably over 50%.
I'm not quite ready to predict it because there are lots of things that could happen, but certainly over 50% at this point.
Now that doesn't mean that the bank will go out of business, but it certainly won't be able to do any business as long as we're putting the pressure on.
So I think that's next.
Let's talk about Iran.
So I have this fascinating...
Well, I guess, is it a question?
A mystery. A fascinating mystery about Iran and the Middle East.
And it starts with this framework.
You know how I've told you that when When there's one explanation for a thing that happens, that one explanation might be true or false, but it's probably people objectively looking at the story, and there's no cognitive dissonance going on.
So when there's one explanation for something that happens, even if it's wrong, there's probably nobody under cognitive dissonance.
But if you see lots of explanations for the same thing, We're good to go.
If you have one answer, you could be right or wrong, but it's not cognitive dissonance, probably.
If you have everybody who's looking at it and they all have different reasons for stuff, that means our brains are just not connecting with the base reality.
If you look at the Middle East, the question that I find the most interesting is, why is there a problem?
What is the base problem?
And here are some of the explanations I've heard.
I've heard it's something about Islam, meaning that the Koran or the Muslim leaders just have a religious interpretation that doesn't allow Israel to exist, or something like that.
So that's one set of explanations.
One is that it's economic.
The Palestinians in particular are oppressed economically, and if you just solve that, that would make a lot of things right.
And economically includes water rights, the right to use highways, the right to trade, and the right to free travel and all that.
They're all tied up with the economy.
Another explanation I hear is that it's all about humiliation.
That the Palestinians, Hamas, the Gaza residents, that they've been humiliated for so long that they're just acting out of the need to get out of the humiliation.
Maybe. I've also heard the explanation that comes probably more from me than from other people, that there's an excess of young men.
And men are biologically less valuable than women because our biological sort of priority is to reproduce and to survive.
Women are more valuable because they have the babies and you don't need many men.
To have babies. So whenever you have excess men who are not mated, maybe that causes a problem.
Again, I'm only listing all the different ways that people have said, well, here's the base problem.
I'm not saying that any of them are the ones that are the important one.
So only in that very limited sense am I saying that women are more valuable than men, just reproduction biology-wise.
And that whenever there are too many men who are not involved in the mating process, their energy and their resources can end up going in the wrong direction.
So that might be part of what's going on in the Middle East.
Somebody says land.
Now land can be both an economic concern And it can also be a fairness concern.
You know, hey, it's not fair.
We lived there. We got kicked off.
But it's also an economic concern.
Where's our reparations? But it's also a religious concern, as in, hey, this land, God gave it to us.
No, God gave it to us.
Somebody is saying envy, that there's an envy issue.
I don't know. So now, how many reasons have I left off?
Somebody is saying quite provocatively that it's an inbreeding problem.
I don't know exactly what that means.
So I understand the base assumption is that the culture over there, there's a little bit more marrying cousins, but I don't know how that plays out in terms of why that means there's problems in the Middle East.
Yeah, I know what inbreeding is, but if inbreeding is the problem, you would expect that the people, let's say, within each country are just fighting each other all the time, too.
You know, if somehow that's...
Yeah, if lower IQ is a problem, they'd be fighting with each other, not just with Israel.
Of course, they are fighting with each other to some extent, but I don't think that gets us enough of a reason.
But let's throw it in the mix.
So we'll throw in all the reasons.
So let's not be critical about what is the real reason.
Let's just throw them all in there.
Some people are going full racist and saying on here, I'm seeing comments that say it's an IQ issue.
I don't think so, but let's throw that in the mix with all the other possibilities.
Yeah, why didn't the West Bank riot?
That's exactly the right kind of question to be asking.
You look for the differential.
Alright, so, can you see that there are lots of different reasons being offered?
How come we don't know what the reason is?
How do you solve a problem when you don't know what the problem is?
So, here's another hypothesis.
The other hypothesis is that this state of war and the feeling that Israel must be destroyed is something that's good for the leaders But bad for the people.
In other words, it could be that in order to stay in charge, the leaders have created this enemy and said, we can help you fight this enemy.
So maybe it's only about the leadership who have then persuaded the less informed masses to follow their lead.
So it could be just a government organizational problem that the leaders can only stay in power by doing the wrong thing.
So that's just another interpretation.
So how many interpretations are we up to now?
Do we have six different reasons?
What does that tell you?
If you have several different reasons for the same phenomenon, what's the real reason?
I will sip my coffee with you simultaneously.
With all of those different reasons offered, Yeah, somebody got the right answer.
Let's simultaneously sip to the right answer that I'll tell you after I sip.
The right answer...
Perhaps. So when I'm talking about the Middle East, even if I don't say this often enough, you should always interpret anything that looks like certainty on my part.
I want you to mentally add that this is speculative and that I don't know what I'm talking about.
I'm under-informed about the Middle East, as I believe everyone is.
So the difference is, I don't believe there are well-informed people about the Middle East.
I think there are people with more information, but I don't think anybody's even close to really getting it.
Not even close.
And the reason I say that is that even the experts would disagree about what the frickin' problem is.
How many experts do we have in the Middle East who can't even agree what the base problem is?
Alright, so under those situations, I think cognitive dissonance is...
The problem. What would be a trigger?
So when cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias, when you suspect those are what's operating, what you always look for to find out if you're right or not is a trigger.
What would be the trigger for cognitive dissonance in the Middle East?
Go. Tell me what would be the trigger.
Now the trigger would be something that you thought was true that the environment is showing you is not true.
So something you believed you absolutely was sure about is discovered to be not true.
What is it that's happening in the Middle East that's making people think that they were completely wrong about something And they can't explain why they were wrong.
I haven't seen it yet.
So I'm seeing lots of suggestions going by.
Somebody said Saudi Arabia siding with Israel.
That's not quite true yet.
I mean, they're moving in that direction.
But that was the right way to think.
So you're looking for something that doesn't make sense.
To mostly the Muslim folks who would like to destroy Israel.
I haven't seen the right answer yet, which is weird.
Nobody? This is weird.
There it is. Okay.
Somebody got it. Israel's success.
Israel's success.
You know why that's a trigger for cognitive dissonance?
God doesn't want Israel to succeed.
Right? If you're a Muslim, what is the one thing you're sure about?
You know, you might have a lot of things you're not sure about.
But what's one thing you absolutely know to be true?
God doesn't want the Jews to succeed if you're, you know, let's say you're, let me not take that, somebody's gonna take that into context, so let me clearly say I'm talking about other people in the Middle East who are anti-Israel.
They're thinking to themselves, Well, there's no way God could be supporting this horrible situation of Jews doing great and their homeland is thriving and we're doing horrible.
How does that make sense?
How in the world are all the bad guys winning and have been winning since 1950-what?
You know, the Jews, specifically Israel, Are on something like, how long has Israel been around?
Somebody give me the, yeah, 1948, sorry.
Duh. How did I not remember that?
Yeah, so 1948.
So the Jews are on a 70-year win streak.
70 years consecutively winning.
Like, Israel has gotten stronger, more prosperous, and larger for 70 consecutive years.
At the same time, their enemies say, but God's on our side, right?
Any minute, that's going to kick in.
God? God?
God? God?
There's 70 years, kind of waiting, any minute now.
It's going to kick in, right? So that's your trigger for cognitive dissonance.
Now turn it around.
Is there a trigger the other way?
Is there something that the nation of Israel is seeing and believes to be true That they do not see happening in the environment.
The Jews think, and again, when I say something like the Jews think this, that doesn't mean every Jewish person thinks this, right?
So mentally adjust in your heads whenever I make a general statement about anybody.
Please adjust in your heads that I mean people in general, not every person.
Do Israelis think they're the chosen people in some sense?
Do Israelis think that God is on their side?
Or at least not against them?
They do. So the Israelis are living in a world that is completely consistent with their beliefs.
It's like, hey, God helps us when we do the right things.
We think we're doing the right things.
Things are going pretty well.
A completely consistent worldview and observation.
Now, they might be asking, why is everybody trying to kill us?
But, you know, they probably understand that for a variety of reasons.
People have enemies. So none of that is terribly triggering.
But if you live in a world where you're pretty sure your God is on your side and then you observe a 70-year unbroken losing streak, you are in deep, deep cognitive dissonance.
And so the question is, how do you fix it?
Well, here's how you don't fix it.
You don't fix it.
By fixing the fake reasons that people give.
So, for example, you know, I started by saying that everybody has all these different reasons for why there's trouble.
It goes from, you know, polygamy is the base problem, creating too many men who are angry and they have nothing to do but fight.
The economy is the problem. Humiliation is a problem.
The religious doctrine is a problem.
The leadership is a problem.
We have all these theories about what the problem is.
The way you don't solve the problem is by fixing any one of those.
Because they're not really the problem.
The problem is cognitive dissonance.
The problem is that Islam is seeing itself losing when that's not supposed to happen.
Alright, so you have to work on that.
Now I don't have an answer for that yet.
But in terms of my thought process, I'm taking you on sort of a journey with me in which we're all trying to learn as much as we can about what the heck is really happening over there with Iran and everything else.
I doubt that we will even get close to understanding that region, but my starting proposition is that nobody understands it.
Because if you're talking about all those six problems for why there's a problem and you're working on all those six, you're not even on the right field.
The field is that there's a cognitive dissonance issue.
And if you're not dealing with that, you're not even in the right conversation, it seems to me.
Now, again, I'll give you the warning or the caution that I'll try to interject frequently.
I said that with a level of certainty that you should not assume is true, right?
Everything I say about the Middle East is preliminary, subject to change tomorrow.
I'm just trying to work my way up to some kind of an opinion.
Is there an Islamic authority that can negotiate with Israel?
Yeah, I wonder about that myself.
Within the Middle East Islamic culture, how many specific people Would have to change their minds about Israel in order for the public to say, oh, our leaders have collectively changed their minds.
I guess we can change our minds.
I don't know the answer to that.
It seems to me that there's a Shia leadership, a Sunni leadership, and then there are factions within each, and everybody's sort of looking to their own leader.
But I wonder how many there are.
Could it be that if you got Khomeini in Iran, if you got him and you got a couple of Saudi leaders, would you be 80% there?
I don't know. Somebody says thousands, but I suspect that thousands still report up to just a few, right?
That's the whole point of the system.
So, if you're going to try to break this cognitive dissonance, I would suggest that you need to change something big.
Oh, here's another point I wanted to make.
Do you remember, maybe a week or so ago, I was talking about how things with North Korea had changed when we broadened the topic.
So when the only topic in North Korea was nukes or no nukes, nukes or no nukes, It was a stalemate.
They wanted nukes.
We want them not to have it.
Well, that's the end of the conversation.
But when we brought in the conversation to, you know, first of all, there's sanctions.
That's the obvious part. But also to the talk of reunification and, you know, sort of a bigger picture thing, we had more variables to work with to get closer to a deal.
So the first thing that we did with North Korea was reframe it as a bigger issue, which helps.
And I said that a similar strategy for the Middle East might be how you get past the Iran problem.
Because Iran was the same thing.
Nukes, no nukes.
Nukes, no nukes.
It was too simple, not enough variables.
It's hard to make a deal with only limited variables.
So what did you see Pompeo say yesterday?
He said, well, we'd like to expand this to include the topics in the whole area.
Everything from support for rebels that we don't like, etc.
And we want to do it in terms of a treaty.
So Pompeo just did what I told you is good negotiating form.
If you can't make a deal with the limited variables that are on the table, the very first thing you do is you shake the box...
So President Trump always shakes the box.
So you know that Iran deal?
We don't have that anymore.
And then everybody's running around, hey, hey, somebody shook the box.
What do we do? What do we do? And then he says, it's no longer just the box.
It's this now.
It's a treaty. It's about the whole area.
It's about Israel now.
It's about Hamas.
It's about Yemen now.
It's like if we don't get a bigger deal, the little deal is useless.
We don't even need the little deal.
So why are we thinking small?
See the big picture? So Pompeo did two things right.
And three things if you count the president canceling the deal in the first place.
First, he shook the box.
Then he expanded the scope of what this thing will be and started calling it a treaty.
So now it's not a question of that little, you know, just the nukes or not.
Now we're talking treaty.
That's good form, got more variables to work with, more levers, more buttons.
And then he also high-grounded it.
He said, let's not talk about the little bullshit.
Whether or not you're doing a nuclear program, yeah, that is our biggest concern, but it's a big picture.
Let's big picture this.
Let's get a real solution that can last.
Let me give you a treaty when we're done, because a treaty won't be reversed by the next president.
So everything that Pompeo did and everything that Trump has done so far is perfectly on form.
Now, that doesn't mean it ends well.
We don't know how it ends.
But those are the steps you should do.
Shake the box, increase the scope, take it up to another level.
You know, the high ground.
Let's go for peace.
Let's not go for some little BS, little agreement that you're just going to cheat on anyway and you're still going to try to destroy Israel.
Somebody says, do you fear facts about IQ? So somebody is asking me to talk about the IQ issue in the region.
Here's the thing. We observe that people with all different IQs can be helpful and not helpful.
So until it's demonstrated, and I've never seen that, that that's really the problem, Then it is simply something interesting to talk about.
But I haven't seen that be the issue.
For example, there's no suggestion that the leadership is suffering from some kind of a low IQ problem.
And the leaders are kind of making the decisions over there.
So I don't see an IQ problem playing out in a way that would somehow be useful.
So whether or not there is some measurable difference, I prefer to ignore because I think it's just a distraction.
The population has to be functional.
at all.
Well, here's the thing. Is it true or not true that there are plenty of successful people in the Middle East and that there are countries and regions and cities where people are just doing fine?
And the answer is yes.
So it doesn't seem to be predictive in the way that you think it is.
Yeah. So somebody's saying that...
So let's add that to another...
So rather than make it IQ, let's just say...
Let's take it out of that provocative area and put it on culture.
There's clearly cultural differences.
And that could be part of the problem too.
There's a vacuum of power to counterbalance Israel.
Is there?
I don't know.
All right.
So I'm looking at your questions.
I think I had one other topic I was going to talk about, but I've already forgotten it, so it can't be important.
We'll solve the Middle East sometime soon.
We're getting closer every day.
What if we took Jerusalem and turned it into a city-state?
It won't work because the current combatants are treating Israel as it's all ours or it's all yours.
And that, again, you back it up to the cognitive dissonance.
If... If the cognitive dissonance can be solved, then all of the other things that look like problems end up being solvable.
But you've got to solve the cognitive dissonance first.
And I don't have a solution for that yet, but I will.
We're working on that. All right.
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