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Sept. 17, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:00:15
Episode 665 Scott Adams: The Guy Who Saved the Planet, #TwitterPhilanthropy, Pancakes, Iran
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Hey everybody!
It's the best part of your day.
It's a special part of the day.
It's the day when you get to have a simultaneous sip, not just with me, but with all the people around the world watching this at the same time.
Feel connected to humanity.
Feel the dopamine surging through your body.
Feel your day getting better.
Just sitting there with your cup of beverage.
And you know, it doesn't take much to join in.
It's easy. Everybody can do it.
You don't need much.
You know what you need. All you need is a cupper, mugger, glasses, dine, a chalice, a tanker, a thermos, a flask, a canteen, a grail, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I'm partial to coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of this simultaneous sip.
Well, today I have a special guest.
It's a little update to something you know about.
I was working with Bill Pulte to give away a little bit of his money, $1,000, and I was experimenting.
So if you don't know, Bill Pulte, and he's at Pulte, P-U-L-T-E, is doing sort of a long-term moving experiment in which he's attempting to Redefine philanthropy or create a new model for philanthropy on the internet.
Hashtag internet of philanthropy.
And he asked me to try an experiment.
So the experiment was up to me, but he just said, how would you like to give away some of my money?
Do it the way you want to.
See what happens. So the nature of this is experimentation.
We're going to see what's happening. Here's what I did that's different.
I tried to create a system as opposed to a goal.
And the system is that I wanted to see if we could do more than just give money to something or somebody who needs it.
That would be great. That would be a goal.
What's your goal? Give some money to somebody who needs it.
But what's a system?
The system would be something where everybody involved gets something out of it, and so you'd want to do more of it.
So giving money once is great, but creating a system where more people might give more money in the future, well, that's better.
So I wanted to experiment with that, and what I did was explicitly selfish and unselfish Invisible at the same time.
So that's my system.
I wanted to do something that was selfish, meaning that I personally, as the giver, in this case I'm giving away Bill Pulte's money, but it's an experiment.
As the giver, I would give something out of it.
So that I would be incented and others would who were in my situation to do the same thing later.
The person who gets the money or entity gets something out of it so they like it.
So far you have two winners.
And then the third part I was experimenting with is the audience.
So breaking the fourth wall and getting the audience involved.
So you're the audience. So now you're watching the experiment.
You're going to help me evaluate it.
Maybe somebody will someday decide to do something similar.
But here's what I did.
I wanted to promote the idea that's in one of my books about talent stacks and systems over goals would be great.
Two ideas I think are powerful.
They're associated with me, so that's the selfish part.
If somebody liked that idea, they might be more likely to buy my book.
I'm putting that right out there, right?
There's nothing hidden. That'd be great if people bought that book.
That's good for me.
What would I do if people bought my book?
Well, I'd have more money. I'd probably give more money away, you know, sort of a virtuous circle.
So I have selected from among people who say that they had some involvement in the talent stack in a school setting.
On Twitter I said, hey, is there anybody using the idea of a talent stack out there?
And I will give them the money and that will be an excuse For me to show that the talent stack is catching on.
Maybe other people will hear about it.
Maybe other teachers will hear about it through this.
So I'm trying to get secondary benefits, third-level benefits, fourth-level benefits.
So it's a gift.
It's philanthropy. But I'm looking for a big play, right?
By making a system that gives visibility, spreads an idea that's very powerful.
And so I would like to introduce you to the winner, Mr.
Gomez, Junior Gomez.
Say hi. And Mr.
Gomez, should I call you a junior?
Either is fine. Okay.
Well, I'm going to call you Mr.
Gomez, just out of respect and to reinforce that you are a teacher.
Where are you teaching? I teach in Southern California in Linwood Unified.
And tell us about where you first heard of the Talent Stack and how you teach it to your kids.
Well, I heard it from your periscopes.
I started following you around 2016, and I started hearing your periscopes, and you were talking about the talent stack.
It's something that teachers kind of do, but you take it to the next level.
In teaching, we call it modalities, where you're teaching different forms of learning.
Some students are very artistic, some students are very this or that.
With the talent stack, I incorporate it by telling students that they don't have to be the best at everything.
They just have to work on different abilities, and you put them together to And how do people respond to it?
So the first time a kid hears that they don't have a cap on where they can go, if they use a simple model of just stacking skills together which is very approachable, does it blow kids' minds?
Do you think they get it? Are they too young?
What's the feedback you get from the kids?
I couple that also with personal stories.
So I tell your story where you're first to say you're not the best artist, you're not the funniest person in the room.
So it makes it approachable.
So sometimes they see success as not attainable.
This is a low-income area.
So they have a lot of mental roadblocks.
So this helps you take those down.
You know, I might be biased, but you sound like the smartest teacher I've ever met in my life.
And I'm not even joking about that, by the way.
Because, you know, obviously I'm biased because you've been influenced by some of the things I'm saying.
But the fact that you've picked up on exactly all the right stuff and applied it in exactly the right place and exactly the right way, it's pretty impressive.
It's pretty impressive, I gotta say.
You impressed me.
So you've received your money now, right?
Yes, already created to good use.
Thank you so very much.
We're doing a project this week.
It's with posters.
And those easel pads are quite expensive.
But thank you.
I would have just bought it out of pocket.
But thanks to you and thanks to Mr. Polti, I was able just to pick them up and not have to be sticker shocked.
That is terrific.
And I thank you a lot for being part of understanding that getting the message out about what you're doing could be the most powerful thing that we do today.
Because if more people get this idea, it's just so motivating to know that there's a real impact.
easily approachable way out.
I also love the fact that you said you combined the concept with stories, because as a teacher, you know, it's the story that works.
It's the story that works. Yeah, so you are my favorite teacher of all time.
It's official. I think you're brilliant, and I love what you're doing, and I'm glad that you could join us, and thanks so much for even contacting me and telling me that you're using this stuff.
I think it's just a great way to start today, just hearing this story.
Thank you very much.
I'm going to sign off with you and get on with stuff, but thanks so much, and we will talk to you later.
Bye for now. All right, doesn't that make you feel good?
Alright, so you don't have to answer me right now, but just evaluate how I've tried to systemize this process.
I'm being overtly obvious as much as I can, so there's nothing hidden.
This is partly for me.
That's what makes it a system.
Because I would want to do this again if it works.
If I get good feedback from it, I'm going to say, huh, I gave away $1,000 and it turned out good for me.
Well, wouldn't that be great?
Then I'll do it again. Somebody else gets $1,000.
And then the fourth wall, as I said, that's really the important part.
If I can use philanthropy to spread an idea, the idea is far more powerful than $1,000.
And look how much attention that idea is going to get for $1,000.
And that's all Pulte, because I wasn't going to do this.
Bill came up with the concept.
He's the one who's testing it.
For the record, by the way, we paid him with PayPal.
Because I know there's going to be somebody here, some critic who says, you're collecting names.
I think it's all a data mining scheme.
And it's some kind of scheme with Jack Dorsey and the Cash App.
So just to take that off the table, we just said, I'll just pay with PayPal.
We'll just take that conversation off the table.
Alright, let's talk about something else.
Let's talk about the guy who saved the planet.
Have you ever had a fantasy that you could save the planet?
I have that one all the time.
More when I was young, you know, when you were thinking if you were Superman or something, it was like, oh, save the planet.
No, it wasn't Trump. It wasn't Trump.
Here's my thinking.
Now, of course, there's a little bit of hyperbole in this, but let me tell you where I'm going.
Let's say climate change is a big problem.
The world is going to be destroyed.
If somebody could fix climate change, well, at least half of the world would say, you fixed climate change?
Well, you just saved the world.
So a little bit of hyperbole, but you know what I'm talking about.
Now, let's say you didn't believe in climate change being a problem.
Obviously, the climate changes, but it could be a problem.
Well, even then, you still need nuclear if you want to be a successful country that can feed all of its people and meet all of its obligations and do what our world needs to do.
You still need nuclear because we don't have another path that can get us all the way there.
And so yesterday, or was it yesterday, the day before, recently, CNN just did a big...
Piece that was unabashedly pro-nuclear.
It was pro-nuclear in a very specific way, which is what caught my attention.
It would be one thing to see an article that says that somebody who's always said nuclear is good is still saying it.
Hey, get some nuclear.
That would have been one thing and it would not have been impressive.
But instead, the way the article was framed, it talked about how nuclear used to be scarier.
But the public is not up to date.
So check this framing.
The framing is that it used to be dangerous, but the public doesn't know how well the industry has evolved and gotten to a point where those same dangers Not so dangerous.
It also explained that the only people who have ever died from a nuclear energy accident were in Chernobyl and everything about that is different.
They didn't even build it with a containment dome or whatever it is.
So if you compare anything to Chernobyl, that's an invalid comparison.
But if you look at the other so-called disasters from Fukushima to Three Mile Island, whatever, nobody died.
Nobody. Ever. Zero.
You have zero deaths.
But what caught my attention about the article is that it was CNN. It's the type of article you would fully expect to see on Fox News.
Conservatives and Republicans are pretty much pro-nuclear and have been forever.
But getting CNN's crowd, getting the left, the Democrats, to be on board is a big deal.
I think it made a difference that Andrew Yang and Cory Booker were both pro-nuclear.
You can't ignore that, right?
Because once your side is saying it, and here's the catch.
Who are the two smartest people among the Democrats?
If you're just going to measure pure brain power, the two smartest people running for president, well, it might be Yang and Booker, right?
I don't know if you know Booker's credentials, but he's a lot smarter than you and I are, that's for sure, academically.
So somebody's saying, Warren, I think you could throw her in the mix.
She's obviously very, very smart.
Yeah, they got a smart guy.
Somebody's saying Buttigieg is really smart.
Okay, you got me. You got me.
Buttigieg is very smart too.
They have some really smart people there.
You can't take that away from them, right?
But the way to save the earth was that the people on the left, the CNN crowd, had to move their minds to where the right already was In both cases, they both needed to be more educated.
But it looks like that's happening right now, meaning that it looks like CNN, by the fact that they had even run this article and the nature of it and the specific way it was framed, as things used to be bad, but you don't realize that we're going to educate you.
Things are actually much safer with modern technology.
And I'm going to credit Mark Schneider as being...
Probably the most influential voice on social media.
Now, of course, Michael Schellenberger, he has to get gigantic credit.
I'm not going to rank them in terms of who's more effective.
So they're doing their different types of persuasion.
I would say Schellenberger is a little more emphasis on current Generation 3 stuff, things we can do right now.
Mark Schneider has a little more emphasis on Generation 4 and what's right around the corner.
We're not quite there with the design everybody loves, but that's where we need to push to.
They're very productive as a pair.
One grounding you with what we can do right now, one taking your mind to thinking past the sail, if you will, from do you do nuclear to which type.
I feel as if they've moved the dial.
Those of you who have been watching this unfold over maybe two years, would you agree?
Would you agree that first of all, Mark Schneider and Schellenberger are the two most effective advocates for sure?
And that the two of them are sort of a perfect pair, even if they may have some differences and preferences on the margins.
But basically, one's telling you what you can do now.
One's telling you where your mind is going to go.
Very, very good double punch.
And I, of course, have been trying to be as helpful as possible, boosting the signal.
Wherever I can, I try to...
Help frame things so that the message has the most power it possibly can.
But I feel like some kind of corner recently turned.
Have you noticed that when I've been pushing on nuclear, I get very little pushback?
You know, and I'm not the expert or anything, but even when I'm promoting nuclear, if you look in the comments, it's very unusual for any topic.
To get as little pushback as any of us are getting on nuclear.
Think about it. Think about how lack of pushback there is when anybody who is pro-nuclear just lays out their case.
You don't really see people even with much of a problem.
Somebody says it's because I block people.
Yes, that one person I block every two days is totally changing the situation.
All right, so let's talk about something else.
There are some stories that are horrible and entertaining at the same time.
And I feel like I will be a terrible person if I were to reveal how entertained I am at a story about death.
So, you know, you've been warned.
But there's a story today about apparently three teenagers with masks were approaching some rural home in Georgia, I think it was.
Georgia? Yeah.
And I think they were armed as well.
As the three masked teenagers approached the home, The neighbor opened up fire, which is totally legal, I guess, because he was protecting his home.
So the neighbor opens up with fire.
And then, I don't know if we have all the facts, but it sounds like this is what happened.
Looks like there was a handgun involved with the first series of shots.
And then some witness was saying that soon after that, they heard an AR go off.
So apparently the neighbor...
I heard some gunshots and came out and they just blew away the three kids.
I'm calling them kids because they were teens.
I don't know how old they were. But they were teenagers and they were coming to rob this guy's house.
And the guy laid down fire with his handgun until his neighbor could come over with the AR and finish the job.
And here's the part.
They killed all three of them.
And the homeowner and the neighbor were uninjured.
Their property was protected, and they just murdered all...
Not murdered. It was self-defense.
But they killed all three of them.
No charges filed.
That's the punchline.
These two neighbors just riddled these three idiots with bullets, literally just shot them to pieces in their front yard.
No charges filed.
Now, that's the sort of story...
They can reduce burglary rates.
So those of you who are people who remind me every day, it's like, Scott, Scott, when you talk about guns, you forget.
I believe the burglars had some kind of firearm.
It was a little unclear in the story, but there was something about return fire, so I think they did.
So people say, Scott, Scott, you're always forgetting the murders that didn't happen.
Because somebody had a gun.
And I don't forget that.
But you can still talk about the net.
If the net death is high, you'd still like the net number of people getting killed by guns to be lower.
It doesn't matter that both numbers are very high.
You're talking about you'd rather save more people than kill them.
So it's still a goal to reduce gun deaths, even though I acknowledge that certainly the existence of defensive weapons Of course, reduces the number of some kinds of crimes in some cases.
All right. The New York Times story is getting...
It's just getting sadder.
You know the story. The New York Times ran a story, I guess it was based on a book, which talked about somebody accusing Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh of exposing himself in some high school situation.
And what the New York Times left out of the story is that the alleged victim One refuses to comment, so they don't have any comment from the victim, and the other witnesses say it didn't happen.
No, not witnesses, because it didn't happen.
But the friends of the alleged victim say that the alleged victim say it didn't happen, or she doesn't remember it.
That's it. Not that it didn't happen, but she doesn't remember it.
Now, that, of course, is completely exculpatory information.
Had it been in the original story that there's no known victim, That would be pretty important, right?
And the victim has no idea what you're talking about.
That's important. Now, the update...
Well, first of all, a hat tip to Molly Hemingway, who was the one who caught that discrepancy.
I believe she saw the book and noticed that the article was not compatible with it.
It left out a key point. And I thought to myself, if Molly Hemingway had not noticed that...
Would anybody else have noticed it?
What if nobody noticed?
Think about how close we were to something truly awful.
If that rumor had been allowed to just sit out there, that was truly awful.
And the only thing, like 7 billion of us in the world, right?
We're going about our business.
All 7 billion of us, we weren't going to do anything about it.
But thank God, Molly Hemingway did something about it, right?
Because it changes the whole nature of the thing.
It put the New York Times in, I would say, almost a death spiral of lack of credibility.
That's too much.
They're not going to go into business because of this.
But that's a really big deal.
I've been saying for a while that if you were to make a, let's say if you were to pull together an all-star team, Let's say an all-star team of, let's say, Trump supporters, if we can say that, she'd probably be the captain of the team.
I would say Molly Hemingway is the most effective communicator on the right.
Would you agree? You know, not counting President Trump himself.
But for those who are, let's say, on the supportive side with the president, I would say she would be the most effective communicator.
If you combine both her ability to speak in public and communicate, so she has all the top-level skills, but on top of that, she seems to have the best knowledge and ideas, too.
You're mentioning a number of other names, and they're all strong in their own way, taking nothing away from them.
I think she would have to be the captain of the team.
If you were forming a team, I think all the people that you just mentioned, yeah, Byron New York is great, Kim Strassel, amazing.
Yeah, there are a lot of other people, but yeah, Candace, etc.
But I think if they were to sit in a room and had to pick their own captain, I think they'd pick her.
I think they would pick her.
So anyway, compliments to her.
My point is that the latest update on this story is that the writers...
are blaming the editors so the writers are saying that information wasn't there but the editors took out a sentence that had the name of the alleged victim because as a policy the New York Times would not show the name of the victim and so when they took the sentence out that the victim's name the speculation from the writers is that they cut too much and it got a little bit too much context And had that story going in the way they originally wrote it,
it would have had all the right context.
Now, let me give you some context from my experience to get a sense of the odds of that explanation being correct.
So the first thing you need to know is that the explanation that somebody did something dumb is always the best explanation.
If you have multiple competing explanations, one of them is it's a clever scheme to take over the country, or it's a conspiracy theory, and the other explanation that fits the facts is, well, somebody made a mistake.
Usually, it's the simple one.
Somebody made a mistake.
Usually, that's all it is.
But let me give you Some context.
So I've worked with the New York Times editors before.
I've worked with Wall Street Journal editors.
I'm working with them right now, actually doing something that might appear in the Wall Street Journal, if I'm lucky.
So I've worked with the top editors in publishing and in newspapers for most of my career.
Here's what I know that you don't know.
There's a really big difference Between an editor who's working for a top publication, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc., than there is from someone who just knows how to be an editor.
There's a big difference between my publishing editors at Penguin and the top-level people.
I'm saying they are top-level people, to be clear.
So the top publishers, my publisher, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, those editors are the ones fixing the mistakes for the writers.
And the writers are very qualified, right?
So just so you understand this, the writers for any of those publications, those top levels, are the best writers in the world.
That's how they get to be in the best publications in the world in terms of, you know, all the ways we measure best publication.
Not counting the fake news question, right?
But otherwise, best publication.
And the editors are way better than them, because the editors are the ones that are fixing people who are already really, really good at what they do.
In my experience, that would be very unusual for an editor operating at that level to make that mistake.
Not impossible. So I'm not going to tell you, oh, that didn't happen.
But if you try to weigh the odds, Was it an honest mistake versus did somebody say, you know, I just kind of like it better without that information?
Both of those seem unlikely, which is interesting.
The odds that they intentionally looked at that and said, I think we'll put this in without the context that changes it completely, feels actually hard to believe.
In other words, I don't believe it.
But, how likely is it that it was just a mistake?
Possible. It's possible.
But pretty darn unlikely, in my experience.
And when I say it's unlikely, it would be like, you know, it would be like you handed Michael Jordan, now let's say, let's say you handed Shaquille O'Neal a basketball while he's standing directly below the hoop and he can reach up and he can just put it through the hoop And you say to yourself, all right, Shaquille, it's your job.
There's nobody playing defense.
You just have to take the ball and just reach it up and just go like that and drop it through the hoop.
What are the odds that you can do that successfully?
Now, it's not impossible that Shaquille's drunk or crazy or playing around and he goes up there and he hits the rim and it bounces out.
It could happen. I'm not saying that that could never happen in any world no matter what.
But in terms of the difficulty level, analogies work to make a point.
Analogies don't work to make an argument.
So the point is how simple it is.
So that editing event of taking out that sentence and still making sure that all the context was there was so simple To do right, it was like Shaquille just tried to drop a ball into a basket with no defense.
Might have been a mistake.
You never know. All right.
Are you watching Pancake Gate?
The funniest story of the day.
There's some relative of Trump's who's claiming that when he visited his, I guess, ancestral home where his mother lived in Scotland, however long ago it was, That he forgot somebody, his husband had died, and then stole some pancakes by putting, stole, they use the word stole, he stole pancakes and put them in his pocket.
That's right. There's a story in Newsweek that President Trump, when he visited relatives, grabbed a pile of pancakes and put them in his pocket.
Now, I don't know.
If somebody says, with syrup?
Why not? Why not?
It doesn't make the story any less ridiculous.
So let's say I had syrup on it.
Let's say I had syrup and there were strawberries on it.
Let's say it was a big stack.
And let's say the only way he could fit it in his pocket is if he squashed it all up and just fit it in his pocket like that.
Why not? Because the story itself is so ridiculous.
There isn't the slightest chance it's true.
There's not the slightest chance.
Now, if he, quote, stole some pancakes, let's define steal.
Did he see that there was a big spread of food and more than anybody could eat?
And did he not, for example, That, I don't know, Barron or somebody was hungry and might like a pancake.
Did he put them in a plastic bag and take a little to-go pancake for, I don't know, his kid or whatever, for someone else?
I don't know. Maybe.
But I've got a feeling that the way it's expressed as he's a pancake stealer who puts pancakes in his pocket, that's probably not the most accurate story you've ever read today.
All right. If any of you are losing connection, just sign off and sign back on.
It'll be fine. I promise you.
Shane Gillis, comedian who made the offensive remarks about Asian Americans.
So he lost his job over that because the tape surfaced.
You remember that Andrew Yang had said, and he reinforced, I guess he did another interview, He said that comedians should be treated differently.
I like that answer.
I like that answer.
I do agree that comedians should be treated differently.
And that if a comedian crosses a line, you shouldn't treat it the same if they're doing it in the service of thinking they're funny and they just miss.
Because missing a joke is not like being a racist.
They're very different, right?
I was thinking about this Shane Gillis guy because I saw a little recording of the offensive thing he did.
And I was mentally comparing it to Dave Chappelle's stand-up comedy.
And I thought, what's the difference between the types of things that Chappelle said?
And not only did he not lose his job, Chappelle, but he was critically acclaimed.
And a lot of people, including me, are calling it one of the greatest performances of comedy of all time.
I mean, it's actually one for the ages that was that good.
So why does Chappelle get away with it?
And this poor guy, Gillis, gets fired before his first day of work on Saturday Night Live.
Here's the difference. Chappelle is funny.
Chappelle is funnier.
That's it. You can get away with all kinds of stuff if you're funny.
Because if people laugh, they say, oh, I get it.
You're being offensive.
To make me laugh. It did make me laugh.
I get it. I'm laughing at myself for treating seriously the topic when you were just trying to make me laugh.
So it's a laugh. When you looked at the old tape of Gillis saying the comments he said, you couldn't even tell he was trying to be funny, really.
I mean, I don't know if he was, but if he were, if he was, if he was, he failed.
So that's a comedy rule, and it's one that I follow with my comics.
I'll often draw a comic in draft form, and I'll look at it and say, oh, that's going to make somebody mad.
That's going to offend somebody. And then I ask the second question, how funny is it?
If it's funny enough, I'll offend people, because only the truly humorless people are going to be bothered, and you can't help them, and there's nothing you can do to help them.
But if it's funny, I will defend it because it's humor.
And if people are laughing, I'll say, see?
That's what I was trying to do.
See those people laughing? That's funny.
That's why I did it. So it's not about the offense, but the offense is part of the juice.
It's part of the energy of it.
So it's using something people would recognize as offensive, but repurposing it into a joke, which is the art of it.
Chappelle does that like Maybe nobody's ever done.
And Gillis just doesn't do it.
So he got fired. Maybe he will learn.
Let's talk about Iran. Now let's talk about...
So a Twitter user, Tim Zeraland.
I may be pronouncing it wrong because it starts with an X, his last name.
He's at X-E-R-I-L-A-N-D. But I tweeted this today so you can see it.
And he tweeted a Nike ad that Kaepernick is in, in which it's one of the Just Do It ads, and one of the main themes is this skateboarder who's trying to skateboard down a long set of railing, and he keeps falling off onto the concrete and getting back up until he makes it work.
And the essence of the commercial is how amazing this guy is because he doesn't quit.
You know, he falls off the rails and he just gets back on and does it again.
And somebody took my, this Tim Zerland, took my audio from when I was talking about it on Periscope and dubbed my audio over the commercial so you can see the visual of the commercial but you can hear me talking about how dumb it is.
And it's actually pretty well done.
So take a look at that.
You won't know that it's my voiceover when you see the tweet.
You actually have to play the tweet to know it's me.
And then somebody mocked me by saying...
In response to that tweet, somebody on Twitter said to me, sounds like he had a fun childhood as opposed to the famous skateboarder.
So he was saying the skateboarder is, you know, living his life, just doing it, having a good life.
People like me probably did not have a good childhood.
To which I responded, which one of us had more concussions?
Just letting that lay there for a minute.
I could say more about that, but I think I said it all.
I would be willing to bet the very large amount of money that said skateboarder has brain damage.
Maybe not the kind that keeps him from going to work.
But certainly the kind that will affect his life in a way that he will not like.
The entire ad showed him skateboarding on top of a rail falling repeatedly on concrete without wearing a helmet.
Without wearing a helmet.
Without wearing a helmet.
He had no helmet. This was Nike.
They support sports.
They showed somebody playing an extreme sport with obvious risk of head injury with no helmet.
Totally despicable.
All right. And I have no concussions, so how about that?
Let's talk about Iran.
So the Iranian situation with the attacks on Aramco oil facilities is, of course, we're just now pulling out of the fog of war.
So in the fog of war, it looked like the Houthis in Yemen launched some kind of sophisticated drone attack That flew many miles into a neighboring country and did, with pinpoint accuracy, take out much of an oil facility.
Now when I heard that, I said to myself, that sounds like something I didn't think could happen.
And the current situation, the updates are, it probably did not happen.
In fact, the Houthis are probably taking credit for something they did not do because they would not have that capability.
Number one, it looks like it was not drones.
Had it been drones, I would have said, yeah, maybe they could do that.
They would have had to get the drones from somebody else, meaning Iran, but maybe they could do that.
But apparently they were cruise missiles.
Now I don't think the Houthis have cruise missiles and it looks like preliminarily they were launched from Iran and that they were launched on a path that was intended to disguise where they came from.
In other words, they headed in the wrong direction before the right direction.
Reportedly, some of them did not succeed and blow up at their destination.
But rather have been captured intact, which some people are saying would give whoever found them enough information to know where they came from.
Is that a thing? If you find an unexploded cruise missile, does it still have in its memory, I guess, information about where it came from?
Does it store that?
Because it seems to me if I were going to send a cruise missile, the first thing I do Is erase, or at least have a program in there, that it would erase any mention of where it came from.
Is that... That's not a thing?
You know, really?
They're making cruise missiles, these sophisticated devices, and when it lands, if it's unexploded, you can tell exactly where it came from?
Maybe. I'm not going to rule that out, but I'm surprised to hear that.
So here's what's developing.
So there's still some uncertainty about whether Iran was involved.
But maybe we'll nail that down, maybe we won't.
And so the question I ask myself is, what exactly would Iran be trying to accomplish by doing this?
And I'm a little bit confused on the motivation.
Aren't you? If you were the Iranian supreme leader, and you wanted to guarantee that your country got destroyed and bad things happened to you, while making not much impact whatsoever on your enemies, this is the sort of thing you'd do.
Because what exactly did Iran think would happen?
Let's say, hypothetically, we determined it was them.
How do we explain the motivation?
Because I don't get it, do you?
So I certainly understand if they thought they could not be detected, if they thought they could not be detected, then I suppose anything you do to a mortal enemy is fair game.
But if they were not detected, were they trying to make it look like the Houthis had more power than they do?
In exactly what way were they trying to influence Saudi Arabia?
See, that part's missing, right?
Because what would you reasonably expect to happen?
There were two possibilities.
If the Houthis ended up, let's say, incorrectly being blamed because they took credit for it.
I think taking credit for it is probably something that the Iranians asked them to do, don't you think?
Just speculating. But would the Houthis take credit for it just for no reason?
Not for no reason, but would they do it for their own reasons?
Do they have an internal reason to take credit for it?
Because it feels like they don't.
Because it would just make...
Would Saudi Arabia angrier or would it make them want to?
They're certainly not. Let me put it this way.
If the point was for the Houthis to convince Saudi Arabia to stop supporting the government in Yemen, I would think that would work the opposite, right?
Because how could Saudi Arabia abide by allowing the Houthis to, let's say, prevail in Yemen If they're the ones who just took out their oil refinery and they're right on their border.
I don't see any situation in which the Houthis said, huh, you know what would be good is to attack a major infrastructure within the country that we're right next to.
Here's some terrorist advice.
Don't attack a major installation of the country you're right next to if it's a much bigger country.
That just feels like bad strategy, right?
So certainly anything they do within Yemen feels like it's contained, but I don't get the strategy.
Now, it could be I'm just not seeing it.
So maybe in an hour, somebody will go on CNN or Fox News and say, here's why they did it.
It makes perfect sense. And I'll say, oh, okay, I didn't think of that.
But I haven't heard it yet.
So I can't see the Houthis thinking it would be in their self-interest, and yet they took credit for it, which suggests...
That the Iranians might have asked them to take credit to, you know, to conceal what they did.
So then here's the thing.
Why would Iran want to cause this much damage with the high risk of being detected?
You have to think. If they were cruise missiles, do they really think we're not going to detect cruise missiles?
I mean, I feel like we could do that.
I don't know. It looks like we will.
Why would they do something that has such a high risk of being caught and really isn't going to change the balance except make it worse for them?
I don't see any situation in which Iran could have plausibly considered that this action would have helped them.
Can you? In the comments, am I missing something huge?
Somebody says putting bombs on tankers is nuts too.
No, because the bombs on the tankers were so minor that they could and were almost ignored.
We did a cyber attack, but there was nothing kinetic there.
So it seemed to me that when they did the threatening the shipping, that felt like more negotiating, didn't it?
Because they didn't try to kill anybody.
They were just trying to remind us.
That shipping is at risk, right?
So it's sort of like they reminded us.
Somebody's saying it has to do with Bolton, and if Bolton's gone, they feel like they can do anything they want.
Really? Do you think the Iranians are so unsophisticated that they think that Bolton was the difference between what's going to happen in Iran?
I don't think so. I doubt it.
And by the way, if Bolton...
And they thought there was less chance of war, wouldn't they be trying to negotiate instead?
Because it feels like negotiating without Bolton would be a better play than doing anything with Bolton.
So here's where I stand.
The official story is that Iran is behind it, and probably behind it.
I don't understand it.
Do you? Because short of having some motivation that can make any kind of sense, and remember, whatever you think of the Iranian leadership, so far they've done things which can quite directly be tied to their self-interest.
You know, you can see what do they want, what do they do?
Okay, doing that makes sense if this is what you want.
But this latest thing, somebody says an oil price increase, so it would make their own oil.
Could that be the play? But that would be a terrible play.
Because again, the odds of being detected are so high.
So how do we explain this?
Even if I were to speculate, like try to get in the heads of the Iranian leadership, are they thinking that they will simply cause enough trouble that everybody will back down and just let them have their way in the Middle East?
That's not a thing, right?
They couldn't possibly think that, could they?
They would have to think that escalation is met with other escalation, especially since there are so many people calling for that specific escalation.
Were they trying to do it to get a result in Yemen?
And again, the fact that the Iranians obviously would be the technical backing for even if the Houthis did something, how does that help them?
Because it would still be obvious it came from Iran.
So I don't get that.
And how does... And how does a partial attack on a sovereign country, Saudi Arabia, how does a partial attack ever make sense?
Because I know when we do it, we're usually bombing some country that doesn't have the facility to fight back.
Saudi Arabia has a lot of facility to fight back.
It just doesn't make sense on any strategic, military, political, negotiating level that I can understand.
So, yeah, but you know, that price increase in oil, that's such a temporary thing.
I don't see that they would do something that would risk being eradicated, you know, risk total war on Iran.
I don't think they would risk it for six months of higher oil price.
Does that make sense?
Somebody says they're doing it to bring on Armageddon.
If you wanted to bring on Armageddon, you would try harder, right?
Blowing up half an oil refinery, how hard is that even trying?
They would try harder than that.
They have a lot more weapons if they were going to empty the magazine.
I'll try to use the right gun terminology.
I know the pedantics here get all over me.
So they would have emptied the magazine.
If they wanted to just get killed in the process, because the oil refinery does not guarantee that they get destroyed in an end-war Armageddon situation.
But if they'd done more, they certainly could have made it happen, and they could have done more.
Somebody says it's personal, like a feud.
Well, here's the thing.
That would suggest that Iran has, for the first time, just suddenly started being irrational.
in their international relations.
That would be a change and it would not be explained by anything.
Could it be explained by the Ayatollah actually losing his faculties?
Let me introduce a new idea.
Here's an idea that I believe is the only idea in terms of explaining the situation that can fit all the available facts.
Are you ready? The Ayatollah has been trying to skateboard on a railing.
That's it. Got brain damage.
Ordered some crazy stuff.
He's the supreme leader.
They couldn't stop him.
Now, of course, that's a semi-joke, but the real point is he is of a certain age.
Can somebody tell us in the comments?
Remind me how old he is.
Open up another device and check that out.
How old is Khomeini?
And notice how well I pronounce that, Khomeini.
That's because I just did my audio book and I had Khomeini's name in there and it took me 20 minutes working with my audio editor to figure out how to pronounce that correctly.
All right, so he's around 80. So how many people at age 80 still have all of their faculties?
Now, if you're in the United States, you've got the 25th Amendment, and we have a process for a comfortable and elegant way to replace somebody who's lost their mental faculties.
How's that work in Iran?
If you're the Iranian leader and you've started to lose it, there's some point at which anybody will be replaced.
There's some amount of craziness where even your friends and relatives will say, okay, you're going in the closet now.
There's nothing left of you.
We're just going to put you in the closet now.
But what happens in the first 25% of that journey?
Let's say you're 80 years old and you're starting to lose it.
You're not all the way where even your friends and allies are going to say, okay, it's too far.
We have to do something now.
What if he's still in complete power and he's lost 25% of his brain processing power?
How unusual would that be if you're 80 years old?
Unfortunately, not unusual.
So if I had to pick one explanation, it goes like this.
Supreme Leader Khamenei is reaching a point of declining mental capability and this is the most visible signal of it.
It could be telling us that internally, the Iranian leadership is having some tough decisions they need to make.
Because imagine this, even if you thought that Khamenei was not, let's say, obviously mentally defective.
Let's say you had a meeting with him and you didn't detect anything that was that different, but then you walk out of the meeting and you find out by reading the international news that the guy you just had a meeting with probably just ordered a massive drone attack on a neighboring country which would almost guarantee that you personally are going to get killed.
You personally, the person who just left the meeting, because you're also a high-level Iranian official or you wouldn't be having meetings with the supreme leader, and you're kind of dead now.
If it turns out that this sparks a war, of course the leadership would be in the most peril.
The soldiers would be bombed first, but that would be just to get to the leadership, and they would be kind of dead.
If you were one of the leaders around the Ayatollah, what would you think of, presumably, the leader's decision to launch this attack if that's what happened?
What would you think of that?
Would you think that was mentally capable?
Some might, but not all of them.
So here's my guess. My guess is that internal to the Iranian leadership, To the degree that they also believe that Iran launched the attack, maybe they don't believe it, but I would imagine they're starting to believe it.
They should be having conversations about getting rid of the top guy and what that looks like.
So I would almost guarantee that there are serious conversations in Iran going on right now about a change in leadership.
And that's my...
So that's my best speculation, is that this attack, if it's proven that it's Iranian, and we don't see any other clear motive, that it's actually just a mental problem, and that the Iranian people might actually just need some help.
Because remember, I say this often, Iranian people are pretty awesome.
I mean, everybody says that, right?
As a country, they produce great people, highly educated, well-meaning.
Many of them live in this country.
I know tons of Iranian immigrants and second generation, and they're just awesome people.
So I would love a future in which the United States and Iran could freely travel and we're getting along great and everything.
So I feel like we're solidly on the side of Of the Iranian population.
And it turns out they're pretty pro-Western themselves.
And they're not big fans of their own leadership.
But as long as their leadership was at least mentally capable, you know, they could, apparently, they could put up with it.
Or at least, you know, they're willing to put up with it versus whatever the alternative is, which could get ugly, a revolution.
But now...
Would they still be willing to put up with this?
Because if you're an Iranian citizen and you believe that your leadership just attacked a major oil facility in a neighboring country that is bristling with American military technology and you're surrounded by enemies who would just love to take you out and are just looking for a good excuse and you just gave it to them and you're the Iranian people and you say, who's going to pay for this? Who's going to pay for this mistake?
Mostly the Iranian citizens.
This is a mistake by the Iranian leadership that puts at risk what?
Half a million, would you say?
If there were a full-out war with Iran, would it kill half a million Iranian citizens who are trying to mind their own business?
Probably. I mean, it would be in that range, right?
I mean, somewhere between 50,000 and half a million, wouldn't you guess, would be the The cost of war with Iran, depending on how quickly we could get to their leadership.
So it feels like the war is on.
So let me say that again.
It feels like the war is on.
But here's the twist.
The United States is on Iran's side.
Not Iran's leadership side, but on Iran's side.
The United States is actually siding with the population of Iran because I think, again, it's speculation, that the citizens are just saying, we did what?
How many times do you think the Iranian citizens, the ones who are paying attention to international affairs, how many times do you think they were silently in their coffee shops or hookah bars or whatever they do, their cafes, and how many of them just read that news and they looked at each other and they said, We just did what?
Because they realize what just happened.
They realize that their leadership just took it too far.
And how would they explain it?
You're sitting in the cafe.
Are you saying, I'm so glad we gave a black eye to our enemy Saudi Arabia.
Do you think? Maybe.
I don't know. Could be.
But I think a lot of them are sitting there saying, holy cow.
Ayatollah, you had one job.
You had one job.
Don't start a war with the United States.
Let me explain this more carefully to you, Supreme Leader Khamenei.
This is every Iranian citizen talking.
We like that you're working on Keeping the country running and stuff like that.
Those are all important jobs, but those are mostly delegated.
The Supreme Leader is not picking up the garbage.
That's mostly delegated.
There are local elections and stuff on that stuff.
He basically had one job.
Supreme Leader, you had one job.
Don't start a war with the United States and you're sitting in your cafe or wherever and you turn on your phone and you see the news That your supreme leader did the one and only thing he's not supposed to do.
He had one job. Don't start a war with the United States.
It looks like he might have just done it.
We don't know how this will shake out.
All right, that's all I have to talk about today.
I hope that you have all pre-ordered my book, Loser Think.
Early opinions are stellar.
People are liking it. Everybody's telling me it's going to be a gigantic bestseller, and I'm sure they're right.
You can pre-order it.
Just go to my Twitter feed or just Google LoserThink and go to your favorite bookseller, and you can see it there.
Available for immediate pre-order, delivery November 5th.
Those asking, will there be an audiobook?
The answer is yes. I have already recorded the audiobook, and it will be available for pre-order as well.
Thank you to those who have already pre-ordered.
I know you want me to talk about corn pop, but I just can't get interested in that story.
Maybe tomorrow. I'll take a look at it.
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