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Jan. 4, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
41:53
Episode 777 Scott Adams: What Happens Next With Iran Because Nothing else is Happening
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Hey, come on in here everybody.
I see you gathering around, reaching for your vessels of which beverages will soon be contained, in which beverages will be contained.
Well, you're probably here for the simultaneous sip and for My analysis of Iran, because who better to analyze the Middle East than a cartoonist?
But first, you're here for the simultaneous sip, and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
The simultaneous sip.
Go. Shivers.
Total shivers.
So, yesterday there was news in the afternoon, I guess, about some major attack in Iraq.
And today the news is nobody's aware of any major attacks in Iraq.
What the hell was that?
What the hell was all that news about some major air attack on some group?
It looks like maybe it just didn't even happen.
That's the world we live in.
Crazy. Let me say more about what Lindsey Graham has done for the country.
And for the world. Sometimes the smallest things are the most important things, because it's just exactly the right thing.
I think Lindsey Graham has done something really important.
It doesn't look important, but it's something really important.
Like, so important, it's civilization altering.
That important. And maybe you didn't even notice it.
And this is what he did. And I'll contrast this to what is normally done.
What is normally done when two countries are at each other is that you make vague threats about wiping the other one off the map.
You saw it with President Trump when he said to North Korea, there will be fire and fury.
Well, what the hell does that mean?
Well, it just means some kind of war.
We kill a lot of your people.
Kind of generic.
Now, in the case of Fire and Fury, it was really good generic, because there's fire, there's fury, really making them sort of visualize the carnage that's coming.
But Lindsey Graham...
Did something so much smarter, because Iran's a different situation, they don't have nukes yet, so you can handle it differently.
He said now a couple times, or probably several times in public, that the next target in Iran will be the refineries.
Now, he didn't say it as directly as I said it, next target, but he said it clearly, and he said a few different times on a few different news shows, If Iran causes more trouble or retaliates, the refineries could be blown up.
And here's the beauty of it.
Do you think that Iran believes they could protect their three refineries?
I think there are three. I doubt they think that.
There's no way that Iran thinks that if the United States wanted to destroy their three refineries, that it would take more than a few hours to do it.
So, the threat is specific, and here's the good part.
Because we took out Soleimani, it's credible.
If we had said last week, hey, we might, somebody's saying there's 11 refineries, so we'll have to fact check that.
But whatever the number is, we can certainly take care of 11 or 3.
So here's the thing.
He's got this very specific threat that would not have been credible even one week ago.
Am I right? One week ago, if we'd said, hey Iran, if you do anything else against us, we'll take out your refineries, which will end your economy.
One week ago, that was not a credible threat.
Today, 100% credible.
President Trump created a situation where the next threat is 100% credible.
Lindsey Graham has, I think, is probably the architect of the idea that we should be this specific.
You've never seen this before, have you?
Historians, fact check me.
When was the last time you saw something this specific as a, here's your price, you know, here's the menu, here's the menu, and look in the menu.
Right here it says, you retaliate, that's your menu choice, and then over here is the price of it.
It's all of your refineries.
No human deaths.
So Lindsey Graham is not promising we'll kill even one person in Iran.
Why? Because we like Iranians.
The pure fact of it is that if you put an American and a typical, you know, westernized Iranian in the same place, they're going to have a good time.
We love Iranians. We want to kill zero Iranians.
All right? We're talking about the public.
So Lindsey Graham even tells them where the bombs are going to be.
You know, if Iran attacks something, let's say there's some damage from an Iranian attack, some kind of revenge attack, and let's say it even comes from a proxy, but we know it's Iran behind it.
Wouldn't you think that the people working at the refineries would say, um...
Break time and get out of the refinery.
Now, we can't guarantee that every person will get away from the physical refinery.
So you might have casualties.
But we certainly told them as specifically as we possibly could, those refineries will disappear under these very specific conditions.
There's some retaliation.
That's it. It's very clear.
So here are the things which are special about this.
Clarity. You've never seen this kind of clarity before.
Clarity is very persuasive compared to something vague will happen.
You better watch out, because vague things will happen to you.
That doesn't necessarily stop anybody.
But if you're that specific, and again, I've never seen this.
So I need a historian to tell me, as somebody says, Wikipedia says there are 14 refineries.
We'll figure out how many refineries.
But it's also, it's probably true that there are three big ones.
If it's like everything else in the world, There are some of them that are the important ones.
So probably if you took out the big three, that would be the end of the economy.
Just guessing. But that would be a typical situation.
So Lindsay's got the specificity.
It's a non-human target, assuming that the humans who work there are smart enough to get out of the way.
I think we'd probably even give them warning.
It's non-human. It's economic.
It's an economic attack.
So we've just told them that we will attack them economically in a non-human place.
Have we ever seen that?
Never before. Now here's the other beauty of it.
A refinery is a visual.
I've told you too many times that persuasion works best when you can put a picture in somebody's head.
When the picture you put in somebody's head is there will be consequences.
Well, that's not a picture.
What are the consequences?
But if you tell me your refinery will blow up I can picture that.
Now, I don't know exactly what a refinery looks like, but you've got a picture in your mind, right?
You see the buildings and the pipes and the big pipes going everywhere, and you've got big tanks and stuff.
So your brain automatically sees a refinery and sees it blow up.
That's really good.
Amazingly good persuasion.
And here's the best part.
Lindsey Graham is one of the few people, maybe Marco Rubio also, but Lindsey Graham was golfing and advising the president on this Soleimani attack, and so Iran, when they hear Lindsey Graham say, your refineries are next, do they think that that's pretty reliable?
Yeah. Yeah, Lindsey Graham was just sitting in the golf cart With the President of the United States who just killed Soleimani.
Yeah, if Lindsey Graham says your refineries are next, that's pretty reliable.
So you have everything going right in this threat.
You've never seen a threat this good, I would say.
Am I wrong about that?
That we've never seen a threat This well-constructed.
It's a well-constructed threat.
Specificity. It's visual.
There's no Iranian people who have to get killed.
I mean, it could happen, but you don't want that.
You want them to, you know, get out of the area.
And it's credible for the first time.
I've never seen anything this good.
Now, let's get into the heads of the Iranian leadership, okay?
Now, I've introduced the idea, which is starting to catch on.
Not necessarily because of me, but the idea is starting to grow in popularity.
And the idea is this.
Soleimani might not have been so popular within Iran, certainly not within Iraq.
He might not have been so popular, and there may have been elements who were happy if he left.
So that's sort of a growing thought.
Have we seen massive demonstrations of the Iranian public?
Now, we saw mourners who were chanting death to America who were actually part of the funeral procession.
So, of course, you can get a few thousand people who were part of the mourners' procession to chant death to America.
But what is the, let's say, the average public saying right now?
What does the average Iranian think about this?
Do you think the average Iranian, who does not want war, thought that Soleimani, who was doing nothing but creating war, do you think that they were happy about him?
I have a feeling that Iran, behind closed doors, is saying, well, maybe we wouldn't have chosen this path, but now we're here.
Now we're here.
It might be an opportunity.
So I was looking at, again, the...
The threats from Iran.
Here's another one. So here's the newest threat.
Now keep in mind that since this is the biggest news, all of our news organizations are actively looking for Iranian officials to say threatening things.
So if there were any high-level Iranian officials saying threatening things, we'd probably know it because we're looking for it, right?
So here's the latest one.
So Abu Hamza, this is CNN's reporting.
Commander of the Revolutionary Guards, I think it's CNN, in the southern province of Kerman foreshadowed a possible attack on, quote, vital American targets located in the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation.
So here's what this commander of the Revolutionary Guards in the southern province, did he get that?
He's a commander of one part of the Revolutionary Guard.
He's not an Ayatollah.
He's just a commander of one part, just one area, of the Revolutionary Guard.
And that was the best we could get.
For an authoritative Iranian revenge opinion, right?
It's kind of weak, isn't it?
He's just a local commander of the Revolutionary Guard.
And here's his threat. He says, quote, The Strait of Ormuz is a vital point for the West, and a large number of American destroyers and warships cross there.
Abu Hamza said, according to a Reuters report, vital American targets in the region, he goes on, have been identified by Iran since a long time ago.
Some 35 US targets in the region, as well as Tel Aviv, are within our reach.
That's it? The closest they could find to an Iranian threat was a local commander Who says that we know what assets the United States has in the area.
Wait, that's it?
He just says that we know what assets you have, meaning what ships are in the area?
That's it? That's the best threat?
This is sounding a lot like no threat.
Am I right? Am I misjudging this?
That the Iranians are really, really holding back on the rhetoric.
Why would they hold back on the rhetoric?
I think they're reassessing the situation, possibly, as an opportunity.
Now, an opportunity for peace, that is.
Now, let's say that you go inside the Iranian decision-making system, Behind closed doors.
Let's say you're in the meeting.
Presumably there are meetings, right?
So I think the Iranians are getting together and they're trying to decide what to do.
How does that conversation go?
Imagine the conversation, the private security conversations at the top of the Iranian leadership.
And they say, you know, Lindsey Graham just credibly said that if we retaliate, We're going to lose our refineries, which means we'll lose our economy, which means that the public in Iran is likely to overthrow the government.
Do we want to take that chance?
Now, people, people, this is a perfect test of your worldview.
I've been saying very unpopularly, very unpopularly, I've been saying for years that the Iranian leadership is not insane.
I've been saying that they're actually pretty smart about pursuing their self-interest.
And indeed, even all the stuff that you've seen lately, if you're being objective, Iran is killing it lately.
Meaning that Iran has spread its influence to completely dominate Iraq, a country that was at war with them just a few decades ago.
Iran has completely expanded their influence.
They've got all these proxies.
They're the biggest problem in the Middle East to us, which means the most powerful thing.
So the Iranians have not only acted rationally, In my opinion, from the start, but successfully too.
Successfully and rationally.
So my worldview is that the Iranians are rational decision makers.
And that everything they've done so far backs that up.
Now we have a situation in which they either can act in revenge or not act in revenge.
Which of those two is the rational path?
Well, I would argue that the rational path is no response.
Or maybe, maybe they have some proxy do something just to test and then try to deny that they had anything to do with it.
Oh, they were rogue. Maybe they could find some gray area where it's not obviously an Iranian attack.
Maybe. But here's my prediction.
The Iranians do believe at this point, and they should, Lindsey Graham's threat is credible.
Would you agree with that?
That behind closed doors, the Iranian leadership is looking at what Lindsey Graham is saying and looking at what Trump just did, killing Soleimani, and they believe it's credible that That the refineries are next.
And that anything they do is going to trigger the end of their economy.
Don't you believe they think that's true?
So I think they're rational decision makers who are going to say, oh crap, this is definitely not going to work.
Our next move is just not going to work.
So if they're crazy, this is what will happen next.
A rocket attack on Israel.
So if you want to test your worldview, see if there's a rocket attack on Israel.
Now, I'm not going to count a few stray rockets, because you can't discount the fact that there's just a local Hezbollah person who shot some rockets and maybe didn't have the blessing from Iran.
So you might see a few.
But if Iran is crazy, which many of you have said, many of you said it's a death cult, they're irrational, they're crazy.
If that's your view, you should expect their next move to be a military move against the United States.
Am I right? That would be the most irrational thing you could do.
If I'm right, and the Iranians are rational people, Who have always been rational, never left that path, they will act rationally again, because that's who they are, and they will not attack because they believe they will lose their refineries, and that's too much. All right, so put down your bet.
All of those of you who have been on the side of Iran is irrational, I would think you'd be willing to bet again that they will act irrationally once again.
And you could be right, right?
This will be the test of the theory of whether they have an irrational death cult and everything is all about dying as long as they get Israel too.
So, if you put yourself in the Iranian's position, the only way I can see something like a major retaliation, again, I'm going to say major, Because I do expect, it seems likely, there's some individual Hezbollah commander who's going to fire a rocket.
That just feels like that's going to happen.
But from the top, like a big attack, like on a warship, an attack on the homeland, an attack on a major U.S. base, an attack on Israel proper, I don't think so.
I do not think so.
All right. Let's talk about something else.
Let's talk about...
Oh, and then the other thing to look for is the missing outrage from Iran and Iraqi citizens.
Now, some of you, I'll bet you had the same experience I had yesterday.
So yesterday, I was getting private messages from people.
People were privately telling me that they know people in Iran or Iraq and that the people that they know personally were behind closed doors celebrating the death of Soleimani.
Did any of you get messages like that?
I got zero messages from people who said they'd heard people they know are unhappy about it.
But I did get several messages from people who said, yeah, I know a guy.
I know somebody over there.
I see one yes.
Oh, actually a bunch of yeses.
Look at all the yeses going by.
Yes, I did. Yes, saw that.
Yes, yes. Saw on Twitter.
Some people saw it on Twitter. Oh, I think most of you probably just saw some tweets on Twitter, but I don't know how many of you heard it privately.
But privately, I heard they were celebrating.
I heard zero stories of anybody who was unhappy, except for like mourners, but you expect the mourners to be unhappy, of course.
Look at all the yeses. I don't know if that's really meaningful, because you may have just seen it on Twitter.
All right. One of the things that the administration is saying is that killing Soleimani was really about stopping future attacks.
Can you explain to me why killing the top guy would prevent future attacks?
Now, threatening the oil refineries might prevent future attacks, but if the only thing you're doing is killing the leader and he's replaced five minutes later, do we think that the replacement didn't know what the plan was?
Is the replacement not on board with the plan?
How does that work?
So I think this is one of those cases where, I'm going to be honest, I don't trust the official story.
So the official story is that we knew there was some specific, credible, large-scale attack in the Middle East against U.S. assets and that killing this guy stopped it.
I'm going to go on record and say I don't believe that.
I just don't believe that's true.
Now, I'm not saying it's false.
I'm saying that it falls into the category of things you should not automatically think is true.
So just because people you like and respect, and most of you probably, you know, most of you are probably Trump supporters and you think that Mike Pompeo is doing a good job.
I do. To me, it looks like Pompeo is doing a great job, actually.
But just because you think he's doing a good job and you trust him, This might not be one of those situations where your government feels a necessity to tell you exactly what's going on in a perfectly accurate way.
Now, I've said this before.
We'll say it again.
Your government does not owe you the truth when it comes to national defense.
You might not like to hear that, but I'll say it again.
Your government does not owe you the truth On the topic of national defense.
They do owe you a good national defense.
They do owe you that.
But, if they have a choice between lying to you, which gives you the best national defense, or telling you the truth, which puts you in trouble, which do you want them to do?
If Mike Pompeo is your guy, you trust him to do what's good for the United States, Do you always want him to tell you the truth?
I do not.
I do not ask of Mike Pompeo or President Trump or the next president or the one after that.
I do not ask them to tell me the truth all the time.
I want them to tell me what keeps me safe as long as they have a good idea that that's the case.
A little bit of shading the truth Might have a national defense purpose, and I'm okay with that.
It doesn't matter what party is doing it.
All right. Gallup had a poll about trust in the media.
We assume that means trust in the news.
And here's the results of the Gallup poll by party affiliation of who trusts the news, all right?
69% of Democrats trust the media.
69%, more than two-thirds.
Of Republicans, it's only 15%.
And then 36% of independents.
Now, 15% of Republicans say they trust the news.
Now, what's funny about that is I always laugh.
In any poll, 15% of people don't know what day it is.
It doesn't matter what the question is or who you ask.
15% of the people just don't even know their own name.
So the fact that 15% of Republicans trust the media is like zero.
It's a lot like zero.
Because remember, 15% will say fucking anything.
I'm sorry. Slipped out.
15% of any group will say anything.
Just anything.
15% will believe they are ghosts.
15% will believe they died yesterday.
I mean, anything. So, Republicans basically have close to zero trust in the news, whereas Democrats have been as high as, like, 76%, I think, at one point.
And they're still pretty high, 69%.
Now, what explains that difference?
Can you explain the difference?
Well, part of the difference...
Is that Republicans see the news on both sides?
Isn't that the big difference?
I would say the big difference is that the Democrats see the news only from their own silo of news.
So if they turn on CNN, and then they switch the channel to MSNBC, it's the same news.
So why wouldn't they think it's pretty reliable?
Every time they turn on the news, they turn on NPR. Same news as CNN, same news as MSNBC. You'd think that one of them would be saying something different if it were wrong.
So all the news they see, their entire silo, New York Times, Washington Post, it all agrees.
Why wouldn't they? If all the news you saw agreed with all the other news you saw, Wouldn't you think it was probably credible?
I think I would.
But most of you watching this Periscope and most Republicans also watch Fox News, also read Breitbart, also see the Drudge Report, also see other stuff.
And they also see social media, which is also somewhat, but not as much, siloed by political preference.
In that case, it's self-siloed.
I guess in both cases, it's self-siloed.
But Republicans see both sides of the news.
Republicans know that the fine people hoax is a hoax.
Democrats don't even know that.
Imagine if you lived in a world in which you didn't know that the most important story of the presidency was actually fake.
Suppose you didn't know from the start that the Russia collusion thing was BS. It would be so easy to imagine that the things that are being reported on the left are actually true if you never saw the counterpoint.
Because they look true in isolation.
Anything looks true if there's no counterpoint.
So, I don't know how Democrats can possibly defend Trust in the media, other than they're not paying attention to both sides.
Now, what's also interesting about the Gallup poll is that they show the graph lines over time.
And the graph lines, the Democrats have, apparently for years and years, the Democrats have had more trust in the media.
Makes sense, because Fox News has existed for years and years, and not everybody's watching it.
But if they are, they're going to have a different opinion than the people who are not.
And what happened in 2016 is that the lines were sort of always this far apart.
It's like, every year it's about this far apart.
Democrats have more trust.
And then it hits 2016 and it goes, boop, opposite directions.
I mean, just grossly opposite directions as soon as 2016 hit.
Why? Of course, President Trump's election.
And specifically, the fact that the news on the left became complete fake news.
I mean, it just turned into nothing but bullshit as soon as the president was elected.
And that's an exaggeration, but it got a lot worse once the president was elected.
All right, so let's talk about some of that BS news.
Have you heard that there's an impeachment going on?
Have you heard about that? Yeah, there was an impeachment.
And there's some more news on it.
I know a lot of you didn't even know it because the Iranian thing just wiped it off the news.
But CNN is desperately trying to keep this thing alive.
And I'm watching their opinion columnists online.
It is actually kind of funny.
I mean, it's actually funny.
Literally, I'm laughing because I'm thinking about their situation.
I'm not just laughing at what they're writing.
I'm thinking about their situation.
Imagine if you're the official CNN opinion person, like this Collinson guy, whose job it is to write an anti-Trump opinion piece every day.
And they're focusing on the impeachment because that's what's big in that category.
So imagine the poor guy having to write another impeachment article When absolutely nobody cares this week.
Because we've forgotten about it.
It's old news. We've got this Iran situation.
And... Poor guy has to write an article.
Alright, so here's the best he can come up with.
Um... Here's from one of the opinion pieces on CNN. The praise or condemnation President Donald Trump is drawing for the latest U.S. actions in the Middle East in no way diminishes the power of the legal bombshell that just exploded in the United States with new evidence of his behavior regarding Ukraine.
So some emails have been discovered of the staff talking about stuff that makes it look like Trump Knew or ordered the withholding for personal gain.
That's the CNN version of it.
Not the real version.
That's the CNN version. But this poor guy who has to write an article to keep people's attention, he has to say, he starts off with saying that, you know, the stuff in the Middle East with Iran in no way diminishes the power of the legal bombshell that just exploded in the United States.
To which I say, yeah, it did.
Yeah, it totally diminished that bombshell.
Your bombshell was like a dust bunny that's under the bed and stays there.
That's your bombshell.
Your bombshell is a dust bunny under the bed that just stays there.
Because nobody cares.
Am I right? It feels like literally nobody cares.
I'm not even sure if the Democrats care anymore.
It just feels like they don't care.
But there's a new category that they've invented.
All right, so in another opinion piece by another CNN opinion person, they're talking about the emails and the decision to withhold funding from Ukraine.
And this one writes, as the clock ticked toward a disbursement deadline, AIDS increasingly raised the legality of the issue.
Legality. My God, there's going to be something in here about somebody breaking a law.
That's where it looks like it's heading, right?
Bombshell time. Are you ready?
Here comes the bombshell. And rightly so.
The decision didn't just run against the national security.
Uh-oh, here it comes. It violated the law.
And like, shoot.
Wait, what violated the law?
And then you dig into it a little bit, And when the article says it violated the law, they don't mean something that actually happened.
The it violated the law Was the possibility that they would have withheld it past the congressional deadline.
So once money is distributed, or once it's proved, I guess, there's some deadline in the future, months in the future, in which if you haven't done it by then, you violated the law.
Now here's the key part.
It didn't happen.
In other words, they did not go past the deadline.
Going past the deadline is the only thing that would have turned the legal actions into illegal actions.
And they didn't do it.
So, CNN has created a new category of criticism.
Wait for it. Here it is.
Past potential crimes.
I'm not even making this up.
So the president is being criticized today on CNN for something that happened in the past that potentially could have been a crime if they had done something else instead.
It's a past potential crime.
It didn't happen, but if it had happened, it would have been in the past.
A past potential crime.
That's all they have.
They have a hypothetical past potential crime.
My God! Can you get lower than a past potential crime?
Because up until now, they've been focusing on, we think the President might do something in the future that's bad.
That's a future potential crime.
A future potential crime Could happen.
That's the big difference between a future potential crime and a past potential crime.
A past potential crime can't actually happen because it's not the past.
And the deadline for that crime to even happen is gone because the situation is gone, right?
The money was already distributed.
So, someday I want to have critics Whose only complaint about me today is a past potential crime.
That didn't happen.
All right. What else we got going on here?
I think that's about it.
I believe we've covered it all.
So put down your bets on Iran.
I'm going to double down on my bets.
That Iran is rational.
So, I see no major military action by Iran based on the theory that they're rational.
And we'll see what happens.
Now, let me give you the ultimate optimistic thought.
Are you ready? Here's the most optimistic thing you'll ever hear in your life, probably.
Optimistic to the point of being crazy.
Peace in the Middle East is impossible, right?
We'd all agree. There's nothing, it's just impossible to have peace in the Middle East, because you've got thousands and thousands of years of fighting, you know, the people are on teams, and you just can't imagine that changing.
Here's something that's also true.
There's only one person who needs to change their mind, To make peace.
Just one person. It's actually down to the Ayatollah.
I would have said last week, if I'd known it, I wasn't as smart last week, but if I had been smarter last week, I could have said, well, there are probably two people.
One of them is Soleimani.
If he wasn't on board, because it looks like he had a lot more power than any of us thought, because we're learning more about him, in my opinion, he was actually running around.
Because the guy with the gun, the one who has the military, that's the guy who's in charge, even if not officially on paper.
My guess is that Soleimani was really the last person preventing peace in the Middle East.
Because Iran is the big problem, and their support of the proxies is the other problem.
But if Iran suddenly today said, you know what?
How about just peace in the Middle East?
It would only take one person.
Think about that.
Thousands of years of fighting in the Middle East, and it's come down to, this is real, thousands of years of fighting, and it's down to one person, the Ayatollah, He just has to say, you know, maybe not.
That's it. That's the end of it.
We have never been this close to complete peace in the Middle East.
Now, somebody says naive.
Now, I'm not naive in the sense that, you know, there wouldn't be smaller disputes and stuff forever.
But in terms of countries at war, we're kind of down to just Iran.
If Iran decided to be good, obviously that's not going to cause everybody, the Palestinians, to be happy with Israel, etc.
But it would be down to local terrorist acts and, you know, murders here and there.
A rocket gets fired, that sort of thing.
But you're down to just one country, one guy, one person.
And that one person just got the path cleared.
Because Soleimani was probably the biggest obstacle to Iran doing something peaceful, because there's no way he was going to be okay with that.
Maybe. You may have a situation where Iran can do something so historically meaningful, it would be just crazy.
Just crazy. I don't think Turkey's going to cause war.
There's some questions about Turkey.
I think Erdogan would be happy just running Turkey.
All right. Yes, Sadat about the one-man theory.
Yeah, so he did get whacked.
That's the truth. But we're close.
All right, that's it for now.
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