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June 21, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
31:31
Episode 573 Scott Adams: Fixing the Iran Situation For You
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Hey everybody, yes, I'm a little bit late today. - Okay.
Life got in the way.
Sorry it took me so long to get here, especially when things are heating up with Iran.
I feel like I can't go away for one morning.
Leave the world to run itself?
My God. So once everybody gets back in here, we're going to have the little thing I like to call the simultaneous sip.
I know some of you are addicted, and you didn't want to wait, but...
You waited, and it's gonna pay off.
Here's the payoff.
Grab your cup, your mug, your glass, your stein, your chalice, your tankard, your thermos, your flask, your vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
It's still the morning where I am, so I'm having coffee.
Join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Ah, still delicious.
All right, so just a little update on me.
I had a little dog emergency this morning.
I think she'll be fine.
Don't need to talk about that, but that's all that was going on.
A little dog emergency.
Should be okay.
So let's talk about Iran.
Let me start with what you should believe and what you should not believe.
We'll start with what you should believe.
So based on what we've heard so far about the Iranian situation, about the downed drone, and about the attack that was on before it was off, here's what you should believe.
Okay, we're done with that.
So that's all the stuff you're supposed to believe.
Nothing, basically.
We're still in the fog of war.
Everything you hear from Iran, you should not believe.
Everything you hear from your own government, don't believe it.
Not yet. Now, mostly because we're in the fog of war, and because part of this chess match has to do with managing the public's opinion, and I would not ask my government to To immediately tell me all the facts exactly as they know them to be true at this point.
They have a bigger objective.
The bigger objective is handling this situation with Iran.
So, if you and I have gotten some information that wasn't exactly correct, don't be too surprised.
If everything we know about this situation turns out to be false, don't be too surprised.
Here are the things which I think are especially, let's say, not credible, but could still be true.
So I'm not saying these things are false.
I'm saying can't know for sure.
Here's one. We heard at one point that we're claiming that our drone was in international waters.
When it got shot down, Iran is saying, hey, that drone was over our territory.
Which one of those two things is true?
Well, we don't know.
But one of the possibilities is that it was over Iranian territory, and by the time they got around to shooting it down, it had crossed into international territory, and they shot it down anyway.
Maybe. We'll never know.
Another possibility is that there were two aircraft.
One of them was in their territory, one was not.
Maybe things were a little confused, maybe one was a little stealthy and the other one wasn't.
Maybe they shot down the wrong drone.
I'm not saying that's likely.
What I'm saying is that the odds that the story that we have right now being exactly right Not that high.
It could be that...
Well, so let me go on with things that you shouldn't necessarily believe yet.
Could be true, but keep an open mind.
We heard, didn't we hear last night that the jets were already in the air and they were going to attack?
But I think this morning we heard that there were no assets that had already been launched.
Well... What does that mean?
Maybe we have jets that are always in the air.
So are they launched or not launched because we always have jets in the air?
Don't know. So we don't know if it was launched and he called it back or if we had not quite launched and it was, you know, maybe some assets were in the air just checking out the situation.
Don't know. And maybe we'll never know.
The president speculated that there might have been a rogue general who launched the attack and might be in big trouble with his boss.
Most people recognize that as offering an off ramp so that Iran could claim it was an accident and back down.
I heard again this morning from an article on Fox News that there is some reporting from, of course, anonymous sources, which should not be trusted.
Saying that that's exactly what happened and that one of the possibly the reason the attack was called back is that the president may have learned that his instinct was correct and that Iran was very mad at one of their generals.
Yes.
Don't necessarily believe that to be true.
It could be true. I mean, it's totally within the realm of things which could be true.
But don't necessarily believe it.
And then there's the story that the reason the president reversed the attack that was planned was because he heard at the last minute that there would be 150 casualties.
Maybe. But do you think that an entire attack was planned and nobody mentioned in the first several minutes of that conversation the likely number of casualties?
Does it sound likely that the president didn't think to ask that question and no one offered it until the last minute?
Maybe. Not likely.
So I would say that almost all of the facts here fall into the category of maybe, could be, maybe some of them are true, maybe none of them are true.
Don't know. I think it's probably true that a drone got shot down because Iran says it's true and we say it's true.
So if you have it from both sides, that's probably true.
So I think maybe that's the only thing you can be sure of.
We had a drone, they shot it down.
We both say that.
Alright. Let's talk about the interesting things.
The first thing you have to know is that we probably tested their defenses.
Right? And we did it for free.
So we tested their reaction to an imminent attack.
Which they probably would have had some sense of what things we are likely to attack.
So it was sort of obvious that we would go after some stationary structures, such as military, you know, radar, etc., and missile batteries.
So they probably responded to what they imagined correctly was an imminent attack.
Somebody says it's not free.
No, the drone got shot down.
That's a separate sunk cost.
Can't get that back.
But once the drone is gone and you can't get it back, you have a new set of decisions that are not based on that cost that you can't get back.
That's in the past now. But we had an option to threaten an attack and see how they responded.
Here's another way that they may have responded.
Do you think that the Ayatollah slept above ground yesterday?
Do you think that the Ayatollah was just in his Ayatollah headquarters, sleeping in his normal bed last night?
Probably not.
Probably not. He probably spent the night in a bunker, and maybe the last few nights.
It's possible...
That we threatened enough military action so that we could observe where he went.
So one of the things we may have learned is where the Ayatollah goes when we are this close to war.
So we don't know how much we learned out of this exercise, but you have to at least keep the possibility open that we either did what we did to find out how they would respond without the intention of going through with it, Which would also explain how it leaked like crazy.
Did you notice all the leaking?
It was just like this giant sieve of leaks telling them that we almost attacked but changed our minds at the last minute.
Maybe that's what happened.
Or maybe it was always intended to be an almost attack.
Because if you stage an almost attack, look at the benefits you get.
Number one, you test their responses.
Very, very important.
Because it weakens them and it tells them, oh crap, they know exactly what we're going to do because they just saw it.
They watched it themselves.
They know exactly what we do when we're this close to an attack.
Number two, do we know...
And then there were the leaks.
So we got essentially the benefits, some of the benefits of an attack, without the cost of an attack.
It didn't cost us money to attack, and it didn't cost us lives, and it did not make things worse.
Here's what it did.
And what you're seeing is a replay of the Kim Jong-un play that ultimately succeeded in getting talks going.
Here's the part that nobody but me will describe to you in detail.
Two weeks ago, when the Ayatollah thought about military action, it was a concept.
It was a concept.
Hey, military action.
Wow, that would be bad. I sure don't want that.
It was a concept.
When Kim Jong Un was talking about, you know, building his nukes and threatening the United States, the idea of war was sort of a concept.
President Trump took that concept and with three words, fire and fury, as somebody's saying in the comments, he turned it real.
Kim Jong Un had to spend however many days it was imagining himself Dying in a ball of fire along with everybody he loves and everything he cares about.
He had to live with that as a reality.
So he had to imagine every day watching looking out the window and seeing the nuclear fireball coming toward him until he evaporates.
He had to imagine hearing the screams of his loved ones as they die.
President Trump Gave that gift to Kim Jong Un of that vivid, this is happening right away.
This is real now.
Kim Jong Un responded exactly like somebody should respond.
Let's talk.
And that produced, at least at the moment, something that looks a lot less dangerous.
Last night, the Ayatollah was probably in a bunker.
And probably his whole family was not.
I don't know what kind of family or loved ones or lovers or best friends he has.
But while he was in that bunker, he had to think about the fact that the people he loved, who were above ground, might be evaporated in the next 24 hours.
He had to live thinking, this might be the last thing I ever see, is the walls of this bunker.
He had to live with a vivid thought of the entire nation of Iran going up in flames.
In minutes, his mind was that, oh my frickin' Allah, I've ruined everything.
I took it to the edge.
And this Trump guy that we can't predict is going to evaporate my entire country, and he's not even going to look back.
He's not even going to say sorry.
He's going to frickin' turn this into a parking lot, and it's on me.
That's what the Ayatollah was thinking last night.
Am I wrong? Now, I'm not a mind reader, but it seems safe to say that if you were the leader of a country, and you took it to the edge, and then it looked, at least for a number of hours last night, it looked like you had gone beyond the edge, and you had destroyed your entire country, killed everybody you care about, and doomed yourself to the last hours of your life in a bunker, like Hitler.
That's what he had to live with yesterday.
Courtesy. Of the most persuasive president we've ever had.
Now, the president, by creating, let's say, the narrative, because we don't know what's true and what isn't, and at this point, I'm not sure that's important, because we do have a war of ideas that's happening, all right? This president, by saying, I called it back because there would be 150 casualties.
What do you make of 150 casualties?
Well, if we said that 150 people were going to die in the country of some mortal enemy, we might say that's acceptable because we're getting rid of nuclear weapon risk and, you know, it's somebody else's citizens that are dying,
etc. But what do you make of it if you're a citizen of Iran, and you know that this is a top priority for the United States, you know that Iran just shot down your very expensive drone, and you know that your government is talking about ramping up their nuclear program, sort of hinting at that very directly.
But then the President of the United States says, I called it back because I wasn't willing to let, wait for it, 150 citizens of Iran, who we love, suffer for it.
Think of that message.
You're a citizen of Iran, and who knows how much news gets through, but I think they have VPNs and they have ways to get news into Iran, even though their internet is restricted.
The citizens of Iran Just learned.
No exaggeration.
What's coming now is not an exaggeration.
They just learned that the President of the United States cares more about their lives than their own leader.
True? That's not an exaggeration, is it?
Because one of those leaders decided to not injure those Iranian public.
The other leader is injuring them every day.
He's starving them with bad policies.
He's bringing them into wars with other places.
He's doing everything you could do to make the average citizen of Iran worse off.
The President of the United States just took sides.
The President of the United States just took sides with the public.
Think about it.
It's very powerful.
At the same time, the President has given Iran an off-ramp by floating this idea that there could be a rogue general He's allowing Iran to say, yeah, that's what it was.
It was a rogue general.
Yeah, we didn't mean this to happen.
He has set the stage for negotiations for the first time.
We've never been here before.
We've never been to this exact place where we went up to the edge of war and And the President of the United States said, I'm going to protect your citizens better than you are.
Let's talk. It's big.
This is really big.
Now, the other possibility that you can't rule out is that the President got a phone call last night.
He might have gotten a phone call.
Well, maybe we'll never know.
But we can imagine that there are things we don't know about this whole situation.
One of the things that could have happened is that Vladimir Putin might have picked up the phone.
Putin might have said, holy crap.
Look, I know we got our problems.
But nobody wants a war with Iran.
Not good for Russia.
Not good for the United States.
Not good for Iran. Not good for the Middle East.
Not good for anybody. I will do something for you that I wasn't willing to do before.
What is that? We don't know.
Could be working more productively in the Middle East.
Could be talking Iran out of their nuclear program.
Could be anything. Or, as somebody's saying in the comments, the next thing I was going to say could be President Xi.
China could have picked up the phone and said, holy crap, hold on.
We can do something about this that we have not offered before.
We'll put a little more pressure on them.
We'll cooperate with the sanctions a little better.
Just don't do this.
Maybe. You don't know.
But here's the thing. We don't know if any phone calls like that came in.
Or how about Israel?
What if it was Israel? What if Israel called up and said, look, I know you want to do this.
We've been taught, you know, we would love to put some more pressure on Iran.
But if you pull back, you will be compatible with the message from Netanyahu for the past year or so.
And Netanyahu has been saying, we love the people of Iran.
We want to help you.
We want to help you with desalinization.
We want to help your economy.
You just have to do something about your government.
Could have been Netanyahu.
He might have picked up the phone and said, hold on, hold on.
If you pull back, we might have the best situation for a compromise you've ever seen.
Worth a shot. Now, suppose we decide to simply do some sort of retaliation.
Let's say Iran doesn't immediately respond in anything that looks productive.
So that we need to ratchet it up.
What would that look like? What would it look like if we ratcheted up?
Well, we could find maybe something to bomb that didn't have any people.
I don't know, maybe something that just costs them a lot of money, but we already have the sanctions on.
So I would think the cleanest thing to do is just figure out a way to ramp up the sanctions.
Now, I imagine that there are allies and frenemies of ours that are breaking the sanctions, and we could put the pressure on them more than we have.
Now, say, for example, hypothetically, China or some other country...
Had been not, let's say, not abiding by the sanctions.
Now, a week ago, they could have kept cheating and cheating, and we could have said, stop it, stop it, stop it, and nothing would have happened.
Because they don't care about stopping it, we're talking, it's just talk.
But now, war is on the line.
China doesn't want a war on Iran.
So now you say to China, look, here's the deal, and I think you can tell we're not bluffing.
Put the sanctions on, make them real, or Iran starts losing assets and people, and it's going to hurt.
At this point, we can push our allies and our frenemies harder than we could ever push them before.
So once again, the president has created a leveraged situation that he just didn't have last week.
It's a whole new game.
Everything is different today because of the exact way that this was handled.
And again, I'm not going to say this was always the plan.
It could be something that developed and opportunistically or because he got a phone call or because he had second thoughts for any reason.
It may not be some grand four-dimensional chess all the way through.
But I think for whatever reason, accident or genius, we did get to the right place.
This is sort of right where you want to be.
Let me take this to the productive level.
So, how do you get Iran out of their confrontational...
Stance toward the United States.
I've suggested this before, but the timing always matters.
There's no such thing as a good idea.
There are only ideas that are perfect for the moment.
Let me say that again.
There's no such thing as a good idea.
There are only ideas that fit perfectly with the time and the moment.
So this is an idea that I've mentioned a number of times before.
Which sounded, maybe at best, interesting.
Because the time wasn't right.
Now it's the same idea, I'll tell you in a moment, but the time's right.
And it goes like this.
This is the arc of war.
Let's see if you can see that.
Step one, kill.
Step two, economic war.
Step three, a war of ideas.
The old way to do war was to kill humans.
The new way to do war, the 2019 version, is economic sanctions.
Because the world is so interconnected, the sanctions are devastating.
You know, if you get enough people to say, yes, this country is bad, it's devastating.
But economic war probably is not quite what we need to get to the end zone with Iran because of the religious requirements that must be satisfied.
So there's a higher level Need that needs to be addressed.
Iran is not just about military.
Iran is not just about economy.
Iran is very much about their belief system.
If you don't address that, you haven't addressed the whole stack.
And here's my suggestion.
I think we should challenge Iran directly to a war of ideas.
I think we should address them directly and say, if you trust your God, you have confidence in your God, let's take our disagreements to the internet.
Let's take it to the war of ideas.
Because killing people doesn't work anymore.
It just doesn't work.
Crushing economies Could work if you did not have a religious, say, framework like Iran does, where apparently at least the administration would rather die than be productive.
They'd rather die.
So if somebody would prefer starving and dying, then threatening to kill them and threatening to crush their economy isn't as powerful as it should be.
They need an off-ramp.
They need a way to say that they could win.
And I think that the way to do that would be to threaten to open up their internet for them unless they open it up themselves.
So we could say, for example, look, Garan, there's one thing we want from you.
And just surprise the heck out of them.
We want you to free up your internet.
We want you to let your people Have access to the world.
Now think about that.
Just think about the change in frame.
Think about we were almost in a shooting war.
And you would expect that the response to that would be, we will crush you militarily.
We will take out your assets.
We will bomb you.
That's what they expect, right?
They also probably expected a full military attack last night.
But what they got was, uh-oh, we don't want to kill your citizens.
That's not what we're about.
Pull back. Let's talk.
At this point, the stage is set for the...
Probably the best chance we'll ever have.
We should say to them, we're looking out for your people.
We don't want to determine what your people have.
It's not up to us to decide.
But we want them to have access to the world.
We want you, the government of Iran, to open up your internet.
Now think of that as a response.
We might have to do other things too, with tightening the sanctions, etc.
Probably more military threatening, just to make sure that threat stays real.
But it would be very interesting to say, what we want is dialogue.
But not just between the government and our government.
We want dialogue between the people.
We want your people to have the freedom that everyone else has that has the internet.
Now, it seems to me that that sort of freedom would get us to the place we need to get, because their own citizens would control their government on their own.
But they probably need a little access to information, etc.
To do that, I think opening the internet for them would be a big deal.
Now, I also wonder if there's anything we could do technologically to open up their internet for them.
Without their agreement, because that might be the worst thing for them.
You know, there's a reason that the regime doesn't allow their citizens full access to the Internet, and the reason is they think it's a threat to the regime.
So, I think it would be important to address that.
All right. The other thing I wonder is, if it's true that we find out there was a rogue general who shot down that drone, Could you assume that the rogue general was on the side of the Ayatollah?
Think about it.
If there were a rogue general who took it on himself, an Iranian general, to shoot down the drone, knowing that that would provoke an attack, is that general working for the Ayatollah?
Or is that general working for himself?
Meaning that maybe that's a general who doesn't want an Ayatollah.
That's the question that the Ayatollah is going to have to figure out.
Was this really an accident?
Was it really somebody trying to help the realm?
Because it looks like you shot down a drone and almost got the Ayatollah killed.
Because that doesn't look like you're on the same team.
Maybe we'll find out the answers to that.
So anyway, just summarizing, don't believe anything you hear about this yet.
But I think this president has, either by grand design or by good instinct in the end, created the best situation we've seen to get to the table.
The Ayatollah has taken the idea of war from a concept to, I had to sleep in a bunker last night and wonder if everybody I love will be dead by morning.
That was his evening.
The Ayatollah's evening was wondering if everybody he knows will be dead by morning.
That's a good way to...
To key up some talks.
Now, the other wild card here is that Jared Kushner has been working on, I guess, the framework of some kind of a larger Middle East deal.
And I tell you often that if you can't solve a situation, one of the best ways to solve it is by introducing variables.
So rather than saying it's a contest between us and Iran and their nuclear program and this drone, say, look, Iran, The small ball stuff isn't the problem.
The problem is the larger situation.
So let's talk about the larger situation.
Let's get out of the weeds of us.
Let's get into the larger conversation about Hezbollah and the Palestinians and Israel and all the rest.
And the proxy wars in Yemen, etc.
I'm going to tell you that this is very much like the darkest before the dawn.
This might be the most productive situation we've ever seen with Iran in recent memory.
So I'm going to say that there's some good that's going to come out of this.
It might have been accidental, but that's our situation.
All right, I'm going to go do something else.
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