Oct. 16, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
20:29
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| Alright, if you're getting in here early, you are going to enjoy the rare treat of a multiple simultaneous sip. | |
| I don't do this often, but when I do, It's gonna fry your brain. | |
| Grab your cup, your mug, your vessel, your stein, your glass, fill it with the beverage of your choice. | |
| I like coffee and raise it to your lips for the simultaneous sip you know there's more where that came from Well, let's talk about Saudi Arabia and the crown prince. | |
| Mohammed bin Salman? | |
| Let's just call him the Crown Prince. | |
| Yes, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. | |
| So, what you're wondering is, did he lie to the President? | |
| Did he lie to President Trump when he said he didn't know anything about it? | |
| And did President Trump believe him? | |
| Well, let me give you some answers to the question. | |
| Now, I can't read minds, and I wasn't there. | |
| So I can't know with 100% certainty what this situation is. | |
| But I'm going to describe to you an alternate theory compared to the two you've heard, and you decide for yourself, if I'm wrong about this, I would be so surprised. | |
| We'll never know, but if I'm wrong, I would be really surprised. | |
| So first of all, if you watch CNN, they're using careful wording, but they're saying things such as, President Trump seems to believe Saudi Arabia's denial. | |
| President Trump Believes. | |
| I don't know if they've said believes directly or they say he seems to believe or he acts like he believes. | |
| Prince bin Salman. | |
| Does that mean that President Trump believes him? | |
| No. President Trump has never said what he believes. | |
| That is not an evidence. | |
| What President Trump has done is he said that Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, denies it. | |
| So he's simply explaining what he said, and he's not adding his opinion. | |
| So do we know the president's opinion because he hasn't spoken it? | |
| And the answer is, this is diplomacy. | |
| In diplomacy, you never know what somebody's opinion is. | |
| You only know what they're doing. | |
| All right, so here's the explanation of what I think happened. | |
| There are two stories or two versions of reality out there, and I think they're both ridiculous. | |
| One is that The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia didn't know anything about this, the situation with Shashoghi being allegedly killed and dismantled and put in plastic bags and removed from the Turkish embassy. | |
| So it seems impossible that you wouldn't know. | |
| On the other hand, how likely is it Well, and the other story is that he did know. | |
| So he's not saying he knows, but the other story is that he's just lying. | |
| So you have two versions. | |
| One is he totally knew because of course he knew it was a major deal. | |
| He's the head. They know everything that's going on. | |
| The security service isn't going to act without approval. | |
| So of course he knew. | |
| And then the other is, you know, he didn't know. | |
| It was some kind of rogue activity. | |
| It seems to me... | |
| That both of those hypotheses are possible. | |
| They're both possible. | |
| But compare it to the version I'm gonna give you now. | |
| So here's the version that I think is most likely, and it's based on just knowing how any big organization works. | |
| And Saudi Arabia is a big organization. | |
| Here's how it works. | |
| You could call this the Dilbert filter. | |
| You have a boss. | |
| Who has an opinion about his critics. | |
| He may or may not have spoken specifically about Cheshuggi, but everyone around him, including the head of his security forces, etc., would absolutely know What he thought and felt and preferred about the fate of his critics. | |
| They would know, for example, that his first choice would be to co-opt them, to find a way to buy them off, find a way to maybe nudge them, maybe threaten them softly, maybe incent them in some way, maybe bring them into the inner circle, but to somehow control them. | |
| So they would have known that in a general way, Prince Ben Salmon wanted to control his critics, and the first choice would be peacefully. | |
| Of course, right? | |
| If you could do it peacefully, why the hell wouldn't you? | |
| So that part seems pretty reasonable, right? | |
| And it's reasonable that his security forces would know his preferences. | |
| Now, is it likely... | |
| That the prince was involved in detailed planning of a murder. | |
| Do you think he ever sat in a room and said, look, we're going to need two planes, you know, make sure they can't be tracked. | |
| We've got, you know, put together a team. | |
| I've got a list. | |
| I want you to bring, you know, Ahmed and, you know, Bob and, you know, I don't know what their names are. | |
| But here's some good guys. | |
| You're going to need maybe a cleaner-upper, a fixer. | |
| You're going to need a trigger guy. | |
| You need maybe a torturer, you know. | |
| But you can't really see that, right? | |
| You can't imagine... | |
| That the Crown Prince was involved in detailed planning. | |
| And so far, I think we're all on the same page. | |
| It's very unlikely he was involved in detailed planning. | |
| But it is also 100% likely that his security forces know what his preferences are. | |
| Now, what is the price of failure if you're a Saudi Arabia security force and you know the boss Wants you to find a way to make your biggest critic ineffective. | |
| Well, failure is kind of a bad deal, right? | |
| You don't want to be the underling that failed, even if there was no direct order. | |
| You know you're supposed to make these things happen. | |
| You don't need details. | |
| So here's what I think. | |
| I think it is ridiculous, not impossible, but very unlikely That the prince knew there was a plan to kill this guy in the embassy and cut him up and remove him. | |
| That doesn't seem likely, and the reason is that I don't think he's that dumb. | |
| It's the sort of thing an underling decides to do because the underling is trapped. | |
| In other words, the underling needs to make something good happen with Cheshogi, but all of the peaceful co-opting mechanisms are either ineffective, or they know they won't work, or they've run that to the end. | |
| And They know that they might only have one chance to physically get a hold of him on Saudi soil. | |
| And the embassy is Saudi soil. | |
| So it feels exactly like an underling decision. | |
| Somebody high up enough that they could put together a team and they had the budget and all that. | |
| But could it be true that the prince had no idea this was going to happen? | |
| Answer? Absolutely. | |
| Absolutely. Now, it could be just a simple case of deniability. | |
| You know, it could be that he did sort of know the broad strokes. | |
| He might not have known the day. | |
| Maybe he didn't know the details. | |
| But I think it's even more likely that he just told his underlings to take care of it. | |
| And he probably didn't have a deadline, probably didn't have a specific plan, probably didn't want to hear a specific plan if his underlings had one, you know, if it was something he might not like. | |
| And my guess is that when he describes this as a rogue operation, that's close to true, meaning that they did not have orders from him. | |
| At least not specific orders. | |
| And when he says it was an interrogation that was botched, is that accurate? | |
| Well, if you're the prince and you told your guys, take care of this critic, but make sure you've done everything you can to do it in a peaceful way that doesn't have any blowback. | |
| And then you hear, imagine you're the prince, and you hear the news that a team of your guys just got caught dismantling a prominent critic in your embassy. | |
| Imagine how he felt when he got that news. | |
| Do you think he said to himself, oh my god, I got caught? | |
| I'll bet not. | |
| I'll bet he said, oh my frickin' Lord, or however they swear. | |
| I'll bet he said to himself, if anybody had told me they were even going to try this in the embassy, that he probably would have called it off. | |
| So when he calls it a botched interrogation, it's definitely botched from his perspective, and I doubt he gave specific orders. | |
| But is he completely in the clear? | |
| Well, if he suggested that they take care of this problem and he didn't want to hear the details and he knew who he was talking to, in other words, he was talking to people who, when you say take care of somebody, they know how to take care of them, if you know what I mean. | |
| Is there any precedent for this defense? | |
| Yes, there is. And I have a personal connection to it, which is weird, I know. | |
| A coworker of mine, back in my corporate days, Mike Goodwin, wrote a book about his father's experience in World War II. He was a Navy flyer and he was shot down and captured by the Japanese. | |
| So this is World War II and it's the middle of the war and he's captured by the Japanese. | |
| So my coworker put together the story of how his father was beheaded for entertainment for the troops. | |
| The Japanese troops would take out some Americans and just, it was sort of like they didn't have entertainment, so they would tie him to a pole. | |
| After they'd make them dig their own grave and then they'd whack their heads off and then the head would fall into the thing and then they'd kick the body in. | |
| It was sort of a ceremonial fun thing that got the troops going. | |
| Now, when the war was over, the people who ran this prison camp were, of course, brought up on war crimes. | |
| And what was the defense? | |
| Of the war crimes defender. | |
| What was his defense? | |
| It was this. He said, we got an order from the top that said to, and I think the word in Japanese was shobun, S-H-O-B-U-N. I might have that wrong, but I think it's shobun. So the order was shobun, which is something like, take care of them. | |
| See the problem? Take care of them is completely context-dependent. | |
| So the people who murdered the American prisoners for entertainment... | |
| It's Shogun, somebody's saying. | |
| Shogun, that might be right. | |
| So the people at the camp who murdered for entertainment said, we were just following orders. | |
| Our boss said, take care of him. | |
| So we took care of him. | |
| What else would that mean? | |
| Of course that's what that means. | |
| And then when the boss was put on the trial, he said, predictably, I just said, take care of him. | |
| It's a prison camp. | |
| We take care of him. I didn't know they were going to kill him. | |
| Now, because it was a war crime and because the Japanese were on the losing side, there wasn't much doubt about which way the verdict was going to go, if you know what I mean. | |
| So they were found guilty of war crimes and punished somehow. | |
| But there is precedent for the idea that there could be ambiguity From the top guy to the people who were, you know, using the sword. | |
| So it's almost certainly going to morph into one of those situations where I would say that the odds that the Crown Prince authorized this specific act, meaning the murder of this guy in the embassy, I would personally put close to zero because the cost benefit would just be stupid for the Prince. | |
| Alright, so here's an important consideration, right? | |
| The Prince's cost-benefit analysis is different from an underling's cost-benefit analysis. | |
| Because the underling can not only get fired, but executed, right? | |
| I mean, if you really mess up, It's a bad penalty. | |
| So you're going to do anything you can to get the job done, and you're going to take a higher level risk. | |
| So if you told me that an underling who had great pressure to solve this problem or wanted to stand out or did something else, if you told me an underling took an oversized risk, and this was definitely an oversized risk, I would say, I can see that happening. An underling would have pressure that might cause them to make an unwise cost-benefit decision that might have been actually just their best choice for the underling. | |
| But if you're telling me that the crown prince Knew this plan and knew that this guy was going to be dismembered in the embassy, I would say there's very little chance of that. | |
| Because his cost-benefit analysis was different. | |
| And I'm pretty sure that he would be better off keeping the critic than to have any chance that this would happen. | |
| And if you tell me We're going to dismember somebody in the middle of a city with all these witnesses, 20 witnesses or whatever. | |
| By the time you count the staff in the embassy, plus the 15 people who went in, you know, plus the girlfriend who was on the street, there's a ton of witnesses, right? | |
| It's all kinds of witnesses. | |
| So if you tell me the crown prince took that chance and thought that was a smart play, you also have to tell me he's an idiot. | |
| Is he? Now, if the news was that the crown prince was just an idiot, then I'd say, well, you know, idiots do idiot things. | |
| But the evidence is exactly the opposite. | |
| The evidence is that he's actually a skilled operator, albeit young. | |
| So it just doesn't make sense as something that, you know, even if you factor in youth, it doesn't make sense for him to do it. | |
| but it makes sense that an underling would do it. | |
| He was a potential political rival and they wanted him gone. | |
| Yeah, I know that they had some benefit from having him gone. | |
| That is not in dispute. | |
| What I'm saying is that the cost-benefit analysis of doing it and the way they did it would not have made sense for the leader, but it might have made sense for an underling who was kinda rogue. | |
| But kind of not rogue, because the underling thought they were doing what was best for the leader, just the leader didn't specifically ask him to do that. | |
| That would be a perfectly reasonable explanation of any large organization. | |
| Now ask yourself, has anybody explained this to you that way? | |
| Let's get some feedback. | |
| Now that I've explained it that way, am I wrong that everything makes sense? | |
| Now that doesn't mean I'm right. | |
| I'm just saying that this explanation I gave you fits the data, fits what we know about the world the best, which doesn't make it right. | |
| There could be some other explanation or some combination of explanations. | |
| Right, doing it on their turf is not smart, and that's the key to my opinion. | |
| There's a a what? Alright, it's more plausible. | |
| Yeah, and the... | |
| I'm just looking at your comments. | |
| Yes, probably wrong. | |
| False flag. You know... | |
| It's directionally correct. | |
| Was horse face to distract from the Saudi Arabia thing? | |
| I would say yes. | |
| I think it's never one thing. | |
| I think the President's tweet about Stormy Daniels and the Horseface comment I do think it was meant to change the focus to something silly and also focus on the fact that he won the court case at the same time they were beating him up for saying an insulting thing. | |
| So yeah, that was intentional. | |
| But I also think there are other reasons. | |
| One is that he tweets on things that matter. | |
| He tweets on anything that's a victory. | |
| So it's never one reason, but certainly that was one of the benefits. | |
| Somebody says he clearly could not order the assassination of a high profile person and deny it. | |
| I'm saying that all of the possibilities that have been discussed are actually plausible. | |
| It's plausible that the prince ordered the hit and then just lied about it. | |
| It's plausible. But you have to compare the odds of it to the other alternatives. | |
| And the odds that he had nothing to do with it Not even indirectly or in a vague connection, this also seems low. | |
| But the odds that he expressed a preference and an underling botched something seems pretty likely. | |
| Alright, I'm going to get off now and do something else. |
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