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Nov. 21, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
14:28
Episode 310 Scott Adams: The Difference Between the Child Frame and Leadership Using Saudi Incident
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Hey everybody, come on in.
It's time for a bonus, unexpected, coffee with Scott Adams.
You don't need coffee for this one, but it would help.
I've got my special prescription strength coffee.
You might have just the regular stuff.
But it's time for the simultaneous sip of whatever you've got handy.
So I couldn't wait until tomorrow to talk about the president's statement about Saudi Arabia.
Okay.
And I wanted to point out how amazingly well done it is.
Now, when I talk about the technique People sometimes say, hey, what about the ethics?
What about morality? I want to assure you from the start that my ethics and morality are probably almost exactly the same as everybody else's.
In other words, nobody likes murder.
Nobody likes critics being chopped up with bone saws.
Nobody condones it.
So we're all on the same page about the morality of it, okay?
And I'll get to the strategy of it, but I wanted to start with how really well done the President's statement is from a persuasion communication perspective.
And if you haven't seen it, I'll just give you the first few sentences here.
So it's from the Office of the Press Secretary for a media release today.
It said, statement from Donald J. Trump on standing with Saudi Arabia.
So the first thing is, the title says, you know, it gives away the content.
We're going to stand with Saudi Arabia.
But then the very next sentence, all by itself, is America first!
With exclamation mark.
And then he goes, the world is a very dangerous place!
What he did here is a variant of the Steve Jobs technique of making sure that we stop thinking in the small and started thinking in the big.
Remember when Steve Jobs had the problem with antenna gate?
The phones would fail if you held them a certain way.
It was terrible for Apple phones.
But when Steve Jobs finally talked about it, he did not say, Apple phones have problems.
He said, all smartphones have problems.
We want to make our customers happy.
Here's what we're going to do. It's the perfect way to approach it.
The president used a variant in that by making sure that he said America first, right up at the top.
So before you read a single word, Of the statement, you know where it's going, right?
He's going to give you a statement of what's good for America that may not be as good for other people, you know, optionally.
It might not be bad for anybody else, but we'll see.
And then he says the world is a very dangerous place.
That's where he's changed the frame.
So the question is not this incident, it's the bigger picture.
And then he goes on to say very clearly that we have economic interests and we have strategic interests and working with them is more in the benefit of the United States than getting on their case too hard.
We're on their case a bit, and individuals are being punished.
But in terms of the leadership, in terms of the Crown Prince, it's sort of a standoffish...
We can't know exactly what happened, but wink, wink, everybody knows what happened.
So the first thing that's funny about the news coverage is that they're acting as though the president is the only person in the world who doesn't know that Saudi Arabia planned this operation.
Of course he knows.
He knows everything that everybody else knows.
Some people are saying, hey, he's doubting the CIA's assessment.
No, he isn't. No, he isn't.
He's not doubting their assessment.
We don't know exactly what the president is thinking.
I'm going to give you my best description of what the smartest strategy would be, but we don't know what people are thinking.
So it seems very unlikely that the only person in the world who doesn't think that the Crown Prince was behind it was the President of the United States.
Maybe, but it seems very unlikely.
Far more likely is that he's looking at it strategically instead of through what I would call a child's frame.
Let's see if I can get the shine off of that.
So here's a little diagram of the two strategies.
So the Saudi incident, of course, is Khashoggi being murdered in the embassy in Turkey.
There are two ways to go.
You can immediately go, we know you're behind this, and we're going to go hard at you, and we're going to punish you, and we can never work with you.
That's sort of the end of the path, right?
You're kind of done in terms of progress.
Or, you could take this path.
You could pretend as though you could never be sure who ordered it, even if you are sure.
You could certainly, from a political and diplomatic perspective, say, you know, we've got bigger issues, we'll never know.
That's all we can say for sure, is that we'll never know the details.
If you do that, you have an option to leverage the Saudi interests and our interests to get something maybe that looks like progress in the Middle East.
There are a number of ways that that might express itself.
I'm not going to say Middle East peace because that seems like too big a reach, but there could be substantial progress on Yemen, things with Iran, maybe something with Hamash, something with Israel.
Now, there are two things that could happen if we try to leverage Saudi Arabia.
One is that we have a big success.
It's not terribly likely because it's the Middle East, right?
It's hard to get a big success in the Middle East.
But if we don't get a big success, or at least if we don't get the Saudis to get on board with whatever our plan is, and we get no help, then you just go back to phase one.
It might be 30 days later.
It might be 90 days later.
But you just say, well, we finally got all the information we need.
It really was the Saudis.
And now we've got to punish them.
So the smart play here is to keep as many options on the table as possible.
So you hear somebody saying, Scott looks foolish defending Trump.
Whoever said that this looks foolish...
Can you tell me that you prefer the other path?
Do you prefer the path where we don't have a chance of leveraging Saudi help?
If you do, just say that.
Because I think that whoever said that has taken what I call the children's frame.
The children's frame is where, first of all, you're not seeing the big picture.
You just want candy before dinner.
So a child says, I want candy.
And then the adult says, hey, you have to look at the big picture.
Candy might be bad for your teeth.
It's bad for your diet. It's too soon before dinner.
You won't eat enough good food.
There are lots of good reasons not to eat candy.
What does the child say?
I want candy.
So the children's frame...
Is anybody who doesn't understand this, basically.
So what the president did, and I've been saying this from the beginning, that if you understand persuasion, and negotiating is a subset of persuasion, if you understand negotiating and persuasion, you're in better position to predict coming events.
What did I tell you was the smartest way to play this?
So I've been telling you this for a few weeks, right?
That the smartest way to play it is to react with a little bit of uncertainty and to keep our options open because that gives, you know, the crown prince is gonna kind of owe the president one.
And it's a big one.
Wouldn't you rather have somebody owe you if they're the most important, you know, player to get all the dominoes in row?
I mean, they're not the most important in the world, but they're important in that area.
So, the president has found a way To keep all of his options open.
Now when you say, but is the president ignoring his CIA? No.
Because this is just theater.
This is just pretend.
The CIA's assessment of who did it is either right or wrong, but it doesn't matter.
It just doesn't matter.
It wouldn't matter what the CIA thought.
This is still the way to go.
The other way is stupid.
Or, you know, if you take the insults out of it, you could say that it's sort of a childlike frame where you're not looking at the big picture, and all you're saying is, I want candy.
In this case, candy is, hey, we have to be on the side of ethics and morality.
We can't be on the other side of morality.
The trouble is, there's no way to be consistent with this view.
The president's position can be completely consistent through as many presidencies as you want and on every topic.
When he says America first, that is a crystal clear message that, you know, maybe there's some difference in the details of how you get there, but it's a crystal clear standard Which includes the fact that being a good moral player sometimes is the best way to go.
So I'm not saying that you always, my critics will look at this and say, let me give you an impression of my critics.
This will be my critics responding to this video.
Oh, Scott! So you're saying that morality doesn't matter anymore.
Doesn't matter. So you're just saying anybody can kill anybody.
Morality doesn't count.
There's a reputation in the world.
Doesn't matter. Is that what you're saying, Scott?
Is that what you're saying? Same.
No, Dale. That's exactly what I'm not saying.
What I'm saying is that adults look at all the costs of an option, and they look at all of the benefits.
The morality dimension is a big part of the costs and the benefits.
It's a big part.
It's just not the only part.
So, Dale...
Don't tell me that I forgot about the morality or that I don't care.
It's all in here.
So, here's the thing that I keep saying.
If you have certain types of background, you have a business background, you've negotiated, you know, persuasion.
If you've been a lawyer, for example, there are certain types of professions, and maybe even engineering.
I would say that even an engineer would have seen this fairly quickly.
And I don't know what kind of education you have where looking at just one variable in a big complicated decision gets you to your answer.
What kind of education tells you that you can look at one variable and ignore all the other things such as nuclear war?
If you go this way, you might say, we have preserved our moral standing.
If you go this way, you have a non-zero chance of eliminating the risk of nuclear war.
Those are not similar.
One of those things is way better than the other.
All right. So I thought I would just...
Christina's just got her piano tuned, so she's testing it out.
Is it good that Trump can't listen to the tape?
Trump is absolutely right.
He should not listen to the tape.
There's no chance that listening to the tape for just the president should change any decisions.
The worst case scenario is that the president listens to the tape and that causes him to change his decision.
You definitely don't want that.
So I think he's playing it right.
There's no upside.
There's only a downside to listening to that tape.
Am I high?
I'm not. What do you think of Trump calling paradise pleasure meaningless?
Slip of the tongue. What about the Yemen factor?
Well, apparently Saudi Arabia would like to solve Yemen too.
And Iran's situation is getting more dire.
Apparently we're putting ever more pressure on Iran's economy.
So Iran might be kind of close to wanting a deal of some kind.
We'll see. Alright, that's all I had for this afternoon.
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