June 17, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
12:51
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| Hey everybody. | |
| Come in here quickly. | |
| Going to talk about one topic today. | |
| Going to be fairly short, I think. | |
| Unless there's some new news that just happened in the last two minutes. | |
| While you guys are all pouring in here, let me just check the headlines. | |
| Doesn't look like anything... | |
| It doesn't look like anything big new. | |
| Alright, so many of you probably... | |
| Many of you probably watched Benjamin Netanyahu's presentation about the Iranian nuclear program, which they got somehow with their spy network, got a bunch of documents from Iran. | |
| And let me score his presentation for Persuasion. | |
| Alright, I've told you before, if you've read my book, Win Bigly, you know that some of the strongest persuasion, or really the strongest persuasion, bar none, is fear. | |
| So when you're talking about your nemesis has nuclear weapons, the fear goes up to a DEFCON 100 immediately. | |
| So on the fear persuasion, pretty good, because nuclear war is sort of an ultimate fear. | |
| Secondly, I've told you that visual persuasion is very important. | |
| Netanyahu used tons of really good visual persuasion. | |
| I would say that the quality of his visual persuasion was perfect. | |
| It would be hard to imagine it better than it was done. | |
| So, two strong dimensions of persuasion, he just nailed those two. | |
| Now he also had repetition. | |
| So you saw that even though he used different evidence, he would go back to the pattern of, you know, here's Iran saying they're not doing this. | |
| Here's the documents showing they are. | |
| Here's another Iranian leader saying, we've never had nuclear weapons. | |
| Here's more documents showing they are. | |
| Now what's interesting, if some of you were on the Periscope in which I had a guest, Joel Pollack, senior editor-at-large for Breitbart. | |
| He knows a lot more about this area than I do and most people do. | |
| And he was sort of explaining the layout, the canvas over there. | |
| What's the situation with Iran and the nuclear weapons? | |
| And I asked the following question. | |
| I said, can you give me some historical context for how often does the Iranian regime make a public claim, which they sort of stake their reputation on, and then we find out later it's false. | |
| And when we were talking, we didn't really have any research on it, so we couldn't come up with any examples. | |
| But it was the important Because here's why this is important. | |
| If you think that the Iranians are credible when they make a public claim, and that they had said, we want to get rid of our nukes, we're playing along, you could get away with having a bad actual deal. | |
| Because as long as their intentions were good and they were honest dealers, if you needed to tweak something you could because they're being transparent, etc. | |
| But if it turns out that the Iranian regime just lies, just blatantly lies about important things that matter to us, then, and here's the important thing, It kind of doesn't matter how good your deal is. | |
| Because you could have the tightest deal in the world, but if the people who make the deal don't plan to keep it, it just doesn't matter how good that deal is. | |
| They're going to find a way around it. | |
| Likewise, if they're honest brokers, you know, if they're honest players, you could have a sketchy deal and it'd probably still be okay because everybody has the right intentions. | |
| So understanding the level of their credibility is completely important for whatever happens there. | |
| So, Netanyahu did a great job of showing that their credibility for promising to do something is close to zero, at least on this issue. | |
| Now, let me say as clearly as I can that just because it's persuasive Doesn't make it true. | |
| There's a difference. | |
| There are things that are very persuasive that aren't exactly true. | |
| And it wouldn't be impossible to imagine that we could learn some context later that changes things. | |
| Let me give you the counterpoint. | |
| To Netanyahu's presentation without saying any of it's false, because as far as I know it's not. | |
| I think everything Netanyahu said is probably true. | |
| But let me give you the other frame for it. | |
| There was a little bit of conflating what Iran had done in the past With what they're doing now. | |
| So it was a little conflating there. | |
| But what I heard, I think, is that Iran used to lie about having a nuclear program, but clearly did. | |
| The documents show that quite clearly. | |
| But... It appears that at least the biggest parts of that may have been wound down, or maybe we could visit them and find out. | |
| So it's not as clear what the current situation is. | |
| Netanyahu did make a good argument for the head of the illegal atomic program being cleverly transitioned to just another department with another name, but carrying on the work perhaps in secret. | |
| But that evidence was a little less demonstrated, right? | |
| And we conflated our mind the clear evidence that they were doing it and they did lie. | |
| That part seems unambiguous. | |
| That gets a little conflated with, what exactly is happening right now? | |
| Now, as I've said before, if you're Israel, you have to treat it like it's a mortal threat and everything Iran says is basically a lie and that they're developing nuclear weapons to wipe you out. | |
| So Israel can't really treat this like there's some doubt or maybe we don't know. | |
| They kind of have to treat it like it's dead serious because it is for them. | |
| And maybe for other people as well. | |
| My guess is that this presentation annihilated any possibility that the Iran deal can be salvaged in some form that looks just similar to what it is. | |
| So I think that killed the Iranian nuclear deal. | |
| But I also saw some I also saw some evidence that Iran was pulling out of the deal themselves. | |
| But I'm not sure. | |
| That's a little fuzzy, what's going on there. | |
| But it's fair to say that the... | |
| Well, you could almost say that the deal is already pulled. | |
| For all practical purposes, the Iranian nuclear deal is kind of over. | |
| And I'm not sure that's bad because we needed to negotiate a better deal. | |
| And if you start with one that people think is 80% done, you're a little less flexible than if you just wipe the table and say, all right, starting from scratch, let's build a deal that we can all live with. | |
| So probably we're ahead. | |
| Just scrapping what we had to be able to start in on something that makes more sense. | |
| But time will tell. So my grade for Persuasion on Netanyahu's presentation is A+. If it were a different type of presentation, let's say later, where they were talking about the bigger picture. | |
| It wasn't appropriate for this presentation. | |
| But later, it would be useful to do the contrast principle where you say, if you keep doing what you're doing with nuclear weapons, it's going to be a catastrophe. | |
| But look what happens if you don't. | |
| This other world is awesome. | |
| You know, Iran can be, you know, their economy can zoom, everybody's happy, nobody's going to be killed. | |
| So later, and maybe not too much later, you want to start drawing the two pictures. | |
| One where things go wrong, one where things are wonderful. | |
| Choose one. All right. | |
| Look at Kanye's recent tweet. | |
| I will do that. | |
| I may have already talked about that, but let's see what Kanye is up to in the last five minutes because, you know, things change. | |
| Things change fast. | |
| So he's got a Candace Owens drawing on his whiteboard. | |
| Oh my God, he's got all kinds of stuff going on here. | |
| There's almost too much to talk about. | |
| Wow. Okay. | |
| So he's just got a lot of stuff going on right now. | |
| How many heads explode if Trump solves both North Korea and Iran? | |
| It's totally possible now. | |
| Somebody says, Netanyahu's been screeching about this since the 90s, trying to get us into a war. | |
| Well, I'll tell you what's clearly different from yesterday and from any time up to this point, that the evidence he presented today Feels conclusive. | |
| If you had any doubts about what Iran was doing, and I did, I kind of assumed they were up to no good but didn't know the extent of it. | |
| Looks like that's proven now. | |
| Alright. Yeah, the last thing Israel wants is a war with Iran. | |
| That would be an enormous problem. | |
| How was I left of Obama on gay marriage? | |
| Somebody is asking me. Well, my understanding is that Obama was a little bit slow in accepting gay marriage. | |
| So I got there before he did. | |
| And I was left of Obama on marijuana because he was slow on that. | |
| And I was left of Obama on abortion because he would want it to be legal and I would want women to make the decision and men to recuse themselves, which is as left as you can get. | |
| So those are some examples. | |
| By the way, I was referring to a post I put on my blog trying to fact check the critics who were having some opinions about me that seemed inaccurate. | |
| Alright, that's all I've got today. | |
| Save for this afternoon. |
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