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Jan. 7, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
54:46
Episode 780 Scott Adams: Iran and the Funeral of the "Stupidest Person in the Middle East"
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Tiger juice. So, seems like we've got some more Iran stuff to talk about.
Somebody says, your face looks good.
Well, that's the first time I've ever heard that.
I assume you mean the lighting is good, which would be reasonably true.
So, let's talk about a whole bunch of different angles on the Iran-Solomani death and see if we get any smarter.
Number one, the biggest question of all is whether killing Soleimani made us more likely to have some kind of war situation or less.
Here's my way of framing that.
I say that with Soleimani alive, we had 100% chance of death and war.
With him dead, we have probable chance Death and war.
That feels like an improvement.
We went to 100% chance of absolutely more stuff like we've had every day, which is he was planning more death and destruction to America, more conquest, more trouble, more problems.
So I believe we went from 100% chance of problems to almost certainly problems.
It feels like a slight improvement.
If I were just a gambler and an odds maker, I'd say, yeah, that's probably at least a 5% improvement.
Now, of course, the risk is that something would ramp up quickly and be bigger than whatever would happen if he was just running wild in the Middle East.
But I don't see that happening.
I don't see that happening.
I'll tell you why in a minute.
In no particular order, Tucker Carlson is taking, let's say, a unique or interesting stand because he's departing a little bit from some of the other opinion people on Fox News.
And one of the things he tells us, and I agree with this, is that we just spent three years finding out that our own intelligence services are all a bunch of liars.
And not just a little bit.
I'm talking about some serious, serious shit.
You know, the Russia collusion thing being a key among them.
And then, of course, we have the weapons of mass destruction situation in which the intelligence people all failed.
So, Tucker asked quite recently, why in the world would we believe them when they say that killing him stopped imminent attacks?
Imminent attacks that we're not going to be telling you about.
Is that credible?
Should you believe that our intelligence services were on the ball and they knew there were credible imminent attacks?
The answer is no. No.
You should not believe the intelligence services opinion about the imminent attacks.
Absolutely not. There's no credibility.
Now, I would love to live in a country Where when your intelligence service tells you something's happening, you say, whoa, that's probably true.
But we don't live in that country.
I mean, we just have to be realistic.
We live in the opposite country.
We live in the country where we absolutely cannot trust our intelligence services.
Now, that's different from saying we shouldn't have killed him.
Completely different. I don't believe that we had good intelligence on specific imminent attacks.
What I do think is that we had a history of this guy doing nothing but attacking and setting up more attacks.
If you have a history of one guy who's doing nothing but setting up a continuous series of attacks, Do you need an intelligence agency to tell you that there will be more and that they might be imminent?
You do not. You do not.
So while Tucker is completely, I think, smart, sane, reasonable to say we should have zero trust in our own intelligence agencies on this kind of question, you're completely right.
But you don't need them.
If somebody's been doing something on a consistent basis every day, You can reasonably assume he'll do more of it.
So the question of whether we know there are imminent attacks is completely irrelevant.
His track record up to the day he died was he was doing that stuff.
That's all you needed to know. I tweeted cleverly yesterday that in order, you know, people talk about the proportionality of the attack.
You know, they did some bad stuff.
They killed an American contractor who wounded some service people, attacked an embassy, and then people are saying, hey, is it proportionate to take out the head of the military?
To which I say, the only way that that could be proportional is if we killed that same bastard 600 times.
That would be proportional. That's how many Americans he's responsible for killing, right?
So if you killed that same bastard 600 times, we'd be roughly even.
So no, it's not a proportional attack.
We'd have to do a lot more to make it proportional.
You know, that's obviously just the joke version, but still.
What the hell went on with that story about the letter that went to Iraq saying we were going to pull out?
What the hell was that all about?
I looked for the story in the headlines today and it's completely left the pages.
What the hell was that all about?
Now, I see somebody here saying in the comments, very similar to what the pundits are saying, that that is an indication that the White House is in disarray.
It's chaos. Nobody's in control.
All the smart people have left.
It's not that.
It's nothing like that.
Do you think the president ordered the draft letter to be written and delivered to Iraq?
No. Do you think a lot of people were involved with that decision?
No. All we know is that at least one person did something.
That's all we know for sure.
There was one person who did something and it was done.
Now, if you and I knew not to send that letter, don't you think a person working for the administration should have known it too?
Somebody says, was it false reporting?
Ah, I like your thinking.
Did it really happen?
Did it? Because it sort of left the news.
And it left the news without finding out who did it.
So whoever said, did it really happen?
That is indeed the right question.
Because there might have been something that happened that wasn't that.
It could have been, for example, I'll just throw out some brainstorming ideas.
It could have been that they thought, hmm, we might have to get ready for this possibility.
And because we prepare for everything, we always prepare for the yes and the no, they just prepared for it.
Because they thought they might have to later.
And then somebody was an idiot and sent it to Iraq.
Could have happened. I mean, it could have been nothing but, you know, just some administration person didn't know it was a just-in-case letter.
So we don't know about that, but I'll tell you what it's not.
It's definitely not an indication that the entire administration is a mess.
It's nothing like that.
It's exactly one person who may or may not have made a mistake, or maybe it was just misreported.
That's all it is. Do you think there's any administration, whoever you imagine was your best administration of all time, do you think there were no people in the administration who made a mistake?
Even a dumb one.
That was a pretty dumb mistake, but if it happened.
Now, we're all watching the news of the stampede, it's called.
They called the Stampede of Solomon's Funeral.
So, some kajillion people showed up for the funeral, and there was a stampede, and 40 of them died, and 213 were injured.
Now, I don't know how to react to that.
Because my reflexive reaction is deeply at odds with my sense of self, if you know what I mean.
So my preference for who I am as a human being, dealing in a world with other human beings, would be that my only reaction to this should be shock and feeling bad for the people who were injured and killed.
But on the other hand, It was a whole group of people who want me dead.
I mean, I think they were chanting death to America.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
And I did not have a reaction to this which I'm proud of.
And I can see that many of you are having the same reaction.
I don't think there's any situation where you should be happy about somebody dying.
Right? I mean, unless it's actually a terrorist.
But should you ever be happy about anybody dying?
And a lot of you had the same reaction when you saw this.
You thought, well, that's a million people chanting death to me, and some of them died.
I don't know what my reaction to that's supposed to be.
All right. So, how many people live in Iran?
80 million or something?
What percentage of them were in the street protesting?
Now, when you count the fact that there's sort of a cultural thing where protesting in the street is a thing, where it's not as much in other countries, I don't know.
The number of people we saw, was it meaningful?
Don't know yet. But let me tell you the best take on all of this.
If you haven't seen it yet, it's really worth reading.
Now, I don't say that about a lot of things, right?
Every now and then I'll say, you know, Matt Taibbi wrote something and you should definitely read it.
There aren't too many articles I'm going to tell you you should absolutely read.
But this is one of them. And I tweeted on it, so you can find it through my Twitter thing this morning.
Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times, and I know, I know, I know, as soon as you hear the name, you're saying, I disagree with him on climate change or whatever it is you disagree with him.
But just bear with me.
The article is, first of all, well written.
He's a great writer. And it's completely novel.
It's exactly opposite of what everybody else in the world wrote.
And here's Thomas Friedman's take.
This is a quote from the article.
One day they may name a street after President Trump in Tehran.
Why? Because Trump just ordered the assassination of possibly the dumbest man in Iran and the most overrated strategist in the Middle East, General Soleimani.
Have you heard that opinion before?
Haven't we only been hearing that he's a brilliant strategist and he's just amazing?
And he certainly got a lot done.
Not gonna argue.
But Friedman's argument is that the Iran nuclear deal, the year that they made the deal, their GDP went up, their economy improved, they had finally some kind of peace with the world, they were on a track To make Iran really, really grow and prosper and just good things.
And then, Soleimani took that gain and turned it into endless proxy wars, which got him killed, crippled the Iranian economy, Bought them nothing in return, except control over some regions that they're probably going to wish they didn't control, because it's not so easy to be in charge of that kind of a place.
Not too cheap, either.
And so I wonder, remember, Friedman knows what he's talking about when he talks about the Middle East, so he's a guy who's dug in a little bit.
And I've got to admit, his take is not only does it ring true, And it passes my sniff test.
Imagine, if you will, let me do a little thought experiment for you, okay?
Here's a thought experiment.
Let's say our next president after President Trump's next term.
So let's say in five years, six years, five years I guess, we've got a new president, and I won't name the president, it's just a hypothetical president.
So we get a hypothetical president in the United States five years from now, and that person starts a bunch of wars we know we don't want to be in.
Starts a war in Sweden to conquer Sweden.
Starts a war to conquer Iceland or Greenland or whatever.
Starts a war to, I don't know, take over France.
And let's say we're succeeding, but we're also killing a bunch of people that didn't need to be killed.
Conquering territory that didn't need to be conquered.
It's successful, but just a lot of people are being killed and there's not any real reason for it.
And then imagine that a foreign country came in and assassinated our future hypothetical president.
And that future hypothetical president, because of all the wars and all the people he killed for no particular good reason, had driven our economy down by, let's say, 20 or 30 percent.
What would you feel about that?
Let's say an enemy country took out the one guy who had completely ruined your own country.
How'd you feel about it?
Gotta be honest.
I'd be okay with it.
Totally honest.
I'd be okay with it.
Now, I'm not making any kind of analogy to any kind of normal-ish president, because even President Trump It's well within the normal category for being a president.
So we're not talking about somebody who does things you don't like.
He's not doing what you think you should do on climate change.
I'm not talking about that kind of situation where you just disagree with him politically.
I'm talking about somebody who was actually Hitler.
If in your own country a Hitler arose and some other country killed him, how would you feel about it?
Well, let's ask Germany.
Germany, how do you feel about the fact that we killed Hitler?
Do you feel bad?
Probably not. Probably not.
How does Libya feel that Qaddafi was killed?
Do they feel bad?
Probably not.
Now, the big difference is that There are some leaders which everybody would agree are bad.
So certainly there's nobody in Germany who thought that Hitler did a solid for Germany.
Pretty much everybody agrees, okay, that's just thoroughly bad.
Yeah, I know, there's always somebody who's on the other side, but generally speaking, people are going to say Hitler was bad, even if you're living in Germany, and maybe especially if you're living in Germany.
But this guy... Soleimani is a little bit of a mixed bag.
There are people who think he's bad.
People think he was great.
Thomas Friedman has shown us the way.
We have the greatest brander in chief of all time.
No matter what you want to say about President Trump, can we all agree on one thing?
He's the best brander, the best nickname giver.
He can make you focus where he wants you to focus.
He has those skills. Even his enemies would agree.
Thomas Friedman has shown us how to brand this thing.
And the branding is, we should brand Soleimani as somebody who destroyed Iran.
You know why?
Because Soleimani destroyed Iran.
That actually happened.
Does it pass the sniff test?
Here's another thought experiment.
Put yourself into the head of an Iranian, just an average Iranian.
Probably you didn't love the regime to begin with.
I don't know what the percentages are, but I'm guessing that there are more people who are not delighted with the regime than there are people who are radically in favor of it.
If you gave them this argument and say to them, before Soleimani did all of his stuff, you were a growing economy and everything was going good.
When he did his stuff, which was create all these proxy wars and spend all your money and ruin your economy, are you better off?
Is there anybody in Iran who would answer the question, oh yeah, what Soleimani did made us better off?
Right? You could even love the guy and think you're not better off.
All you have to do is use the Ronald Reagan thing.
Are you better off now?
Or would you have been better off without any of that stuff?
Because you know what it would look like.
It would look like a growing economy, at peace with the world.
And you might still have had a lot of influence on Iraq, if that's what you wanted, because that wasn't the biggest deal for anybody.
So I think the way that the United States should play this is we should take Thomas Friedman's very wise take on this.
That instead of calling him this genius strategist that it's a good thing we got rid of him, we should be talking about him as the guy who ruined Iran for the Iranian people.
I believe we could sell that.
And by sell it, I mean it's true.
I don't mean sell it as in make up a fake story and see if we can get idiots to believe it.
The Iranian people are really smart.
You know, you're not dealing with dumb people here.
It's a really well-educated, smart society, and I think they're going to see the same thing we do.
That they are worse off because he was doing what he was doing.
So, let's take that.
Gordon Chang brings us back to reality, and I want you to do me a fact check on this.
So Gordon Chang, he's more known as an expert on China and North Korea, but he makes this statement, and I've been waiting to see somebody say this, and I don't know why we needed a China expert to say this, But when I say it, you're going to say, why isn't this the only thing we're talking about?
And here it is. So Gordon Chang says, here's objective reality.
I think he's responding to somebody talking about what is objective reality.
He says, here's objective reality.
Iran was violating the nuke deal by blocking IAEA inspections.
It would have been an abrogation of President Trump's responsibility if he had certified compliance.
Isn't that the only thing that matters?
Why doesn't that come up every single day when we're talking about Iran?
Because we're having this weird disagreement about whether Iran had been complying with the nuclear deal.
But this one fact, and I invite you to check this fact, because I'd like to know that this is a solid fact, and it's coming from Gordon Chang, he knows what he's talking about, so I think it is.
Is it a fact that Iran did not allow the nuclear inspectors to inspect the places that they wanted to inspect?
Now, it's possible that they just didn't want the nuclear inspectors to be spies, and so maybe they were over-asking so that they could look at some military sites that weren't really nuclear sites or something like that.
So Iran might have an argument about why they did it, but is there any argument that they did it?
And I'd like to know that.
Can somebody confirm that for me?
Is it true that they were not allowing nuclear inspections?
And now, on top of that, you have to add that Israel found that trove of nuclear documents to show that during the time they were saying they had no nuclear weapons program, they had a very robust nuclear weapons program.
So if you know that exactly the same cast of players Have a verified, confirmed history of lying about this exact question.
Are you developing nuclear weapons?
No! We're not developing any nuclear weapons.
What? And then Israeli spies actually captured and brought home the actual physical documents, you know, CDs, documents that they captured showing that that was all a lie.
Now, it was after that that the nuclear deal was made.
But you're making a deal with people who have a history of lying about this and having a great incentive to lie about this.
It's the very thing that they should lie about, right?
I mean, if you're a rational country, if you're going to lie, well, this would be the thing to lie about.
We would do it, too. If the situation were reversed, I think you'd probably want your government to lie about it, right?
In the military world, it's okay to lie, because lying is just another weapon of the military.
So from the Iranian perspective, if the nuclear weapons were part of their military, well, lying about them is just another military weapon.
Why wouldn't they? So if you have a situation where they have a history of lying, and then on top of that they have blocked the nuclear inspectors from looking at the Places that the inspectors wanted to look and thought that they should look.
Can you ever say that they have certified compliance?
The answer is no.
You kind of can't.
So that's a good point.
All right. Rand Paul has a take on this.
And he basically thinks it's a big mistake because he says it's the death of diplomacy.
And Rand Paul says he can see no possibility that this could lead to any kind of negotiations because diplomacy is sort of dead now.
Well, maybe.
I would like to be the contrarian here.
I'm going to use a technique I've talked about before.
Now, this is something I learned in hypnosis class.
In hypnosis class, I learned that people tell you what they want Without knowing that they told you.
In other words, their choice of words reveals what they really want, even if they don't mean to do it.
So sometimes you can read the way they word things, the way they focus on things, and come to conclusions that they did not intend to tell you.
Here is a perfect example.
You ready for this? So, this is from...
I wish I knew which this came from, but it's one of the news services that said this.
That Ayatollah al-Khamenei said in a rare appearance before Iran's National Security Council, so I guess he doesn't appear in front of them a lot, but he said that any retaliatory attack on American interests in the Middle East should be carried out openly by Iranian forces themselves The New York Times reported.
Okay, so the New York Times reported that.
And I guess there were three sources that said the same thing from the meeting.
So they have reliable reporting, says the New York Times.
And he says the bold order deviates from Iran's usual tactic of hiding behind proxies in the region.
Now read between the lines.
Okay? So Khomeini is saying that unlike the days of Soleimani, That, quote, any retaliatory attacks on American interests should be carried out openly by Iranian forces.
Read between the lines.
What is he telling the proxies to do?
Stand down.
He's telling the proxies to stand down in favor of Iran openly And with no hint of hiding anything, retaliating themselves.
But wait.
Read his exact words.
He did not say, we are going to retaliate.
He didn't say that.
Look what's missing.
What he said was any retaliatory attack on American interests should be by the Iranian military openly.
If this is reported correctly, and of course there's always a question about that, what does it mean if he's telling the proxies to stand down and he's saying that if we attack and if there's any attack, what does it mean if he's telling the proxies to stand down and he's saying Yeah.
Let me ask you this.
Do you think Iran is going to openly, with their military, in an unambiguous way, attack an American interest?
I say no. I say no.
Because if Iran's military openly attacked an American interest, we would respond in a devastating way.
And there isn't the slightest chance he wants that.
So, if this reporting is correct, the Ayatollah just said, no response.
That's what he said. He said, no proxies, because we want to make...
If there's any attack, it should not be with proxies.
Stand down. If there's any attack, it's going to be direct, but there's no chance of a direct attack, because it would be suicide.
The Ayatollah just said no response.
Has anybody else said that?
Now again, the wild card here is whether the New York Times reporting About an Iranian meeting is accurate.
I mean, who knows? There could have been other things he said that would change my mind.
But if we were judging it just from these words...
Is Rand Paul right?
That diplomacy is dead?
Because Iran just said retaliation is dead.
Not in those words.
But if they're saying the only way we're going to retaliate is directly...
And there's no chance they're going to do that, really...
I think they just said no retaliation in the only way that you can say no retaliation without looking weak.
I think they just said, we're not going to be weak.
We're either going to retaliate the proper way where you know we did it, or we're not going to do it.
Interesting. So there's this big question about whether the president was impulsive Or decisive.
So people are arguing about his inner mental state.
Now, of course, that's ridiculous.
And whether it was impulsive or decisive, that's something you decide after the fact, right?
If everything works out right, as the article I was reading this from, I wish I could credit it, but I forgot to write it down.
Yeah, so you'll decide after the fact whether it was just decisive, because everything worked out in the long run, or was it impulsive and everything didn't work out in the long run.
But here's my take on this.
There are a lot of people in the world who do not have experience making important decisions.
President Trump is a person...
Who has made countless big decisions involving construction, his own life, company, millions, billions of dollars, etc.
On a smaller scale, I'm also a person who has made many, many business decisions in the Dilber world and otherwise in my corporate life that involve millions of dollars on the line.
If you do it this way, you can make millions.
If you do it this way, you don't.
So I also have been involved with lots of big decisions.
A lot of people who are reporters have never lived in that world.
Most of their decisions are just about their own life.
They're not making big decisions except, oh, how do I word this article and stuff like that?
So I would argue that the people who are trying to decide whether this was decisive or impulsive are people who are not experienced at big decisions.
And that if you're experienced at big decisions, there's something you know that people who are not experienced at big decisions don't know.
And it's this.
A lot of it is guessing, right?
If you're involved in really big decisions about the unknown, if we go down this path, I don't know.
But we go down this path, well, I also don't know.
I have two paths, and I don't know.
That's what the nature of a very large decision looks like.
Small decisions can also be ambiguous, but they have small stakes.
Here's the thing that I've learned.
You can think forever about something and it doesn't help you that much.
Alright? That's what people who make lots of big decisions about big stuff eventually learn.
On Florida, how people justify defending Trump.
Alright? We'll get rid of you.
I like to get rid of anybody who says that all we're doing is defending Trump.
I came down pretty hard on him, and I'll do it again today.
This is one of Trump's worst weeks, persuasion-wise.
Now, whether or not the killing of Soleimani was good or bad, we'll all learn that in the future.
But when he said that he would go after cultural sites in Iran, that's just a mistake.
How the hell would I defend that?
Now, the way he defended it was saying that, you know, all targets are on the table, basically.
You know, why would we say any targets are off the table?
Well, all right. But you don't need to offend the public in Iran.
That's the last thing you want to do.
It was completely unnecessary to throw this cultural...
There might be some culturally important targets to Complete mistake.
There isn't the slightest way that I could justify that as anything but a mistake.
So if you come on here and say, everything you say is defending President Trump, I'm just going to block you for being stupid or uninformed.
All right. Anyway, back to my point.
People who make big decisions know that the difference between being decisive and really thinking things through and being impulsive is not that big of a difference.
Because usually you're making decisions with just so many unknowns that you couldn't possibly know which is the right decision, and you end up looking at a few variables that you've decided over the course of your life are more predictive than other variables.
So, if President Trump looked at this gigantic, complicated system with a million variables, and he peered into the million variables and said, you know what?
There's probably only a few that will ever matter.
How long would it take him to do that?
Not very long.
Because he probably looked in and said, look, if we let them go on, and we don't make a strong statement, It's worse.
So it could be that no matter how complicated this all is, there aren't that many variables that are the ones you're going to use, and they're probably not that hard to analyze.
If we don't stop it, there'll be more of it.
Do you want more of it?
Because we can stop it, or we can have more of it.
It's complicated, but do you need to be a Middle East expert To make some of these decisions.
I don't know. Impulsive and decisive and well-considered, they aren't what you think they are for people who make big decisions a lot.
They need to look for the variable that matters, and then once you have it, sometimes that's all you need.
Now there's talk about what North Korea is learning from this.
One thing they're learning is that President Trump is willing to Carry on a threat.
So if you're North Korea, you don't have to wonder if President Trump is a killer.
He's a killer. He just picked a specific person in the world and killed him.
On his own, really.
I mean, he ordered people to do it, but it was his decision.
You know, we're not hearing that there were a lot of other people recommending he do this.
President Trump literally just killed a guy.
Intentionally. So if you're...
I could say more about that, but I don't want to.
So Kim Jong-un knows that he's dealing with somebody who's a killer.
So that's probably good.
But would he be less likely to give up his nukes now?
Because now he's like, oh, this guy's a killer.
I better keep my nukes.
Maybe. That's one way it could go.
But I think what Kim should learn is that Trump killed a guy because he killed an American.
And Kim is not in the business of killing Americans.
Sure, out of warm beer, but I don't think Kim personally ordered that.
I think there were some jailers who might have been bad players.
So I'd be very, very surprised.
I'd be amazed. In fact, there's almost nothing that would make me believe That Kim ordered Warren Beer to be, you know, killed.
Or at least beaten until he died.
I doubt it. All right.
So I think Kim can take away from this that if he hurts one American one time, it's a whole new ballgame.
That seems to be the message, or should be the message.
But if he deals with us...
Fairly. Doesn't hurt American interests.
Well, there's something to be gained here because we don't have any interest whatsoever in any kind of war in North Korea.
We don't need to kill anybody up there.
Let's see what else we got going on here.
Here's something that One of Iran's top guys, Zarif, tweeted on Sunday.
He said, a reminder to those hallucinating about emulating ISIS war crimes by targeting our cultural heritage, blah, blah, blah.
So, a top Iranian used the word hallucinating.
They also used the word bigly recently.
They've used the words bigly and hallucinating.
Let me ask you this.
If you were the Iranians, wouldn't you be following the media in the United States to find out all the different views of President Trump?
You're trying to understand him as a leader, so you're reading all the different opinions of him, the pros and the cons.
Are the Iranians following me?
What do you think?
Those of you who have been watching me for a while know why I'm asking this question.
I can't tell.
So there's no way to know, of course.
But I'm seeing lots of opinions going by, yeses and nos and Blah, blah, blah.
Well, here's my take on it.
If I were Iran or North Korea or Israel, I would very much know the competing opinions about Trump.
And I would certainly want to know the one that predicted the best.
Right? Because if you're in another country, all you care about is being able to predict.
Right? You want to understand who the president is, and then predict how he will act.
That's the whole game. Prediction.
If you had been following American media and opinions on this president, who would you follow for your best take on predicting?
It's kind of me.
So, I have to ask the question, is there anybody in Iran who's following my...
My books or my podcasts?
I don't know. But if you're listening, Iran, let me say this.
You have an opportunity that you've probably never had before.
I think Soleimani probably was as big a problem to Iran in the long term.
And I do accept Thomas Friedman's take on this, that Soleimani was the dumbest person in the Middle East, in terms of how things turned out.
He hurt Iran in a way that Iran will take decades to recover from.
If Iran wants to be the great country that they can be, have been and will be, America is really ready to be your friend.
We sort of really want to be friends with Iran and other countries, and don't have any reason not to be, as long as your adventurousness is curbed.
And it seems like the general who is in charge of adventurous stuff is no longer with us.
So there may be an opportunity here for something amazing.
And as I often say, peace in the Middle East, There's one guy away.
One guy. The Ayatollah, Khamenei, he just has to decide that Iran doesn't want to be adventurous and militarily take over Israel.
He just has to decide.
And everything else will work out.
So we've never been closer to something amazing.
Let's talk about a few other things.
It's not all about Iran every day.
Chelsea Clinton reportedly made $9 million from sitting on a corporate board of some company that invests in internet companies.
And most of it was stock.
95% of it or something was that she got stock as part of that and it went up.
$9 million?
$9 million?
How does that look right?
Oh, one other thing about Kamene.
It's being reported that he openly wept over Soleimani's casket.
Can somebody find me a photo of Kamene openly weeping, and here's the important part, with a tear?
I want to see a tear.
Because we've seen lots of pictures of, there must be some cultural Iranian thing that I don't quite understand.
Have you noticed the pictures where they're all like this?
The hand goes up, it's like...
And they seem to be grieving in a very similar way.
But the pictures that we saw were a close-up of the Ayatollah, but there were no tears.
What does it mean to weep without tears?
Find me a picture of a tear.
You can change my mind about the direction of Iran if you find me a tear.
If you can't find me a tear on Khamenei's cheek, it means he's glad he's gone.
I mean, he knew this guy a long time.
Given the long time they worked together, if somebody that close to you died, Wouldn't you shed an actual tear?
I mean, you've experienced death in your life.
It's real tears.
A co-worker dies.
It's real tears. Right?
So, find me some tears.
Somebody says they saw them, but I need a confirmation on that.
Alright, here's my prediction for the future.
Are you ready? The future is the ring.
And by that I mean an actual ring that goes on your hand.
This one's a prototype.
I believe that the future interface will be that you'll have a ring that works with your smartphone.
So let's say it's got some Bluetooth to your smartphone, so the smartphone is your brand.
But that you use the ring to control your environment.
So that you could, for example, look at a light, point to it, snap your fingers.
Your ring would pick up the snap, because it's got a little speaker in it.
You'd go, and the lights come on.
You'd point at your television, snap your fingers, and lights come on.
You want to raise the volume?
Go like this. And the ring would be in a position in space where you'd know it's rising and lowering.
Now, this particular ring has a feature on it.
By the way, I invested in a company years ago that made this prototype.
And there's something special about the prototype.
So it has some smarts on the top.
But the prototype has this button on the side.
And what's special about it is that you can reach the button with your thumb.
So you won't accidentally hit this button very much.
In the normal course of life, you're not going to hit the button.
But it's easy to reach.
This particular one was made by a company called RingGuard I think they're no longer around.
I don't know what happened to them.
But they got a patent on this.
And this was for defense.
Basically, it was an alert.
If you were jogging and somebody grabbed you, you could just go bink.
Because nobody could...
People can grab your arms, but you'd still be able to go bink.
Before they got you. So this would send out an alarm with your location and stuff.
That was the idea of the company.
But I'm just talking about the ring as an element to the future.
All you need is something you can touch to activate it, and it can become your mouse on the world.
And the fact that you can wave and point to things and snap your fingers, you can show up and down, you can show left and right, you can swipe with it.
You should be able to do almost everything in the future with your hand.
So this is my...
Somebody said, if I want to find a girl that looks like Christina, point a ring at the piano.
Exactly. That's what I did.
But, so here's my prediction.
Very soon, you're going to see industries formed the same way you saw a lot of watch industries.
You're going to see ring-based stuff.
It needs to have a speaker in it.
Oh, here's the other thing.
Here's the other biggest thing.
The biggest thing... Is that most of us, a lot of us anyway, are getting these digital assistants in our home.
If you have a digital assistant, and I'm intentionally not using the name of Amazon's digital assistant because I don't want it to come on.
Let's say you tell your digital assistant to play some music.
And it's playing some music and then you want to change it.
It's hard because you're across the room and you're yelling at your digital assistant, Hey!
You know, cancel! You have to walk right up to it.
So, wouldn't it be good if you had a little speaker in your ring, and when you wanted your digital assistant to change the channel, instead of walking across the room and screaming at it, or taking, I think you could take your app out and fire up your phone and find the app, you know, you could do it that way.
But wouldn't it be good to say, Change song, next song, turn on lights.
So it might be that your ring is just the easier way to control your environment.
And if your environment is controlled by voice and other people are in the vicinity, wouldn't it be good if you could whisper it?
Wouldn't it be good to say...
Somebody says, Richard in Florida says, already exists.
Oh yes, I meant this would be a microphone, not a speaker, if I said that wrong.
It would be a microphone, not a speaker.
Telepathy. All right, I'm looking at your comments.
So, I suppose some are saying that you could do it with a watch, but I would have seen it by now.
Alright, that's what I'm expecting.
Rings, rings everywhere.
And I will talk to you later.
Oh, I want to give you, before I go, can I give you an update?
I told you the story about using an app called Go Trashy.
And it allows you to find somebody who will take away your garbage.
And we use the app and unfortunately the person who took away my garbage was all my Christmas stuff.
And it was this gigantic pile the size of an automobile basically.
They took it away and the operator dumped it on the side of a public road.
Which caused somebody to go through the garbage, find my identifying stuff, and call me home and say, there's a gigantic pile of your garbage on this public road in Oakland.
To which I said, what?
So we contacted the app maker, GoTrashy, but not until we had hired another company to go pick up the trash.
And they charged us $400.
So we charged $100-something for the first people to pick up the trash, but they just took it and dumped it on a public road.
And then I paid another company over $400 to go pick it up from that public road and dispose of it properly.
So Christina contacts the GoTrashy app people and sends them the bill.
Sends them the bill for the other trash company, their competitor, and says, you should pay this bill because it was your guy that...
That caused the problem. What do you think happened?
The app maker, I think it was somebody, probably one of the founders, contacted us and said, absolutely.
And they said they would pay for it.
They apologized. They said they were horrified.
They said it's never happened before.
They not only reimbursed us for what we paid through their app, But they agreed to pay over $400 for the other app.
And so, let me say this as clearly as I can.
The Go Trashy app, A+. And if you want to use an app for removing your trash, I recommend them.
Now, there's a famous principle involved here.
Some of you know it. I used to own a restaurant, a couple of restaurants.
And we all know this truth.
If you complain in a restaurant, and the restaurant makes good, whatever that is, maybe they comp your meal, maybe they give you a free dessert, whatever it is.
If the restaurant makes good on your complaint, you are more likely to go to that restaurant, not less likely.
The best customer is one that is unhappy, And then gets satisfied.
So go trashy.
This is a perfect example of it.
I was deeply unhappy at an outcome, but it wasn't exactly their fault because it's an app in which lots of independent contractors can be part of it.
It's not like they could vet every person.
It's not like they know what everybody's going to do.
So they can't completely control what other people are doing.
But they can certainly make it right.
And they made it right perfectly.
I would say that's A +, and I recommend their app.
So in return for them doing an excellent job of customer service and of really as good as you can do.
Fixing a problem is as good as you can do.
It's my absolute standard for what makes a person a good person.
We're all making mistakes.
So if you judge people by their mistakes...
Yeah, they got rid of the guy, of course.
Yeah, he's no longer part of the app.
That was also part of it. I don't judge people by the mistakes, because then we would all hate each other, because we're all making mistakes all the time.
But you can judge people by how they respond.
And how they responded was perfect.
So A +, use Go Trashy app.
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