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Jan. 8, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
55:41
Episode 781 Scott Adams: Iran's Military Magic Trick, The Golden Age, What Comes Next
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
We got stuff to talk about, don't we?
Yeah, lots of stuff.
Turns out there was news all over the place last night.
There was news in the sky, news in the ground, news everywhere.
And you can't really enjoy the news until you've enjoyed Coffee with Scott Adams, but luckily you're here, I'm here.
You have almost everything you need.
And when I say almost everything you need, if you want to enjoy the simultaneous sip, you're also going to need a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like my coffee.
And somebody says I interrupted them listening to my book, Loser Think.
That's a lot of me.
That's too much of me. You gotta choose.
Alright, get ready.
It's time for the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
The simultaneous sip.
Here it comes. Well, by now you're all caught up on the events of last night.
So there were a few dozen, I don't know, or maybe 15 missiles Or 22 or something, it doesn't matter.
But there were a bunch of missiles that Iran shot from their territory into Iraqi territory, and specifically a shared Iraqi territory.
U.S. and might have been some other countries there, but they shot at a base.
And despite all of those missiles, were there 22?
I think they shot at a few different places.
22 missiles and all of them missed people.
22 missiles and they all missed people.
Now, remember if you will, that Iran recently attacked oil facilities in Saudi Arabia.
How good was their attack on Saudi Arabia?
Pretty darn accurate, wasn't it?
So, one thing we know for sure is that Iran has the capability of an accurate attack.
But last night, their attack was not accurate.
It was whatever is the opposite of accurate.
There is speculation that it was intentional.
What do you think?
Was it intentional that they missed?
Well, let's back up a little bit and start at the beginning.
The beginning is, check your filters.
This is one of those check your filters moments.
Now, if you've been following me for a while, you know what I mean.
For those of you who are new, what I mean is that we all have different filters on life.
We're all in our own little bubbles.
We see the world subjectively, some from the filter of the left, some from the right.
And I always suggest what I call the persuasion filter.
Now, sometimes I depart that filter, but the point is, whatever your filter is that you're using to predict, make a prediction.
And write it down or tell somebody.
I talk about that in my book, Loser Think.
Because if you want to see how well you understand the world, or let's say how well your filter interprets the world, prediction is the only way you're going to get there.
Everybody has a filter that can explain the past, or so they think.
But predicting the future, that's where the winners and losers get separated.
So compare your predictions to, let's say, mine.
Let me tell you what things I said, and then we'll compare it to what happened.
I said Iran is a rational player.
A lot of people say Iran is just crazy, they all want to die, they make irrational decisions, nothing they do makes sense.
I said, no, we have decades of experience with Iran, and every time they're rational.
Now, they're rational within their belief system of what it is that they want to accomplish, so there's an Islamic kind of umbrella over all this stuff, but within that, it all makes perfect sense.
Now, it might be some strategies that work, some strategies that don't work, maybe their preferences are different than ours, but it all made sense.
Everything they were doing had a reason, had a path, was a good try at least.
So I predicted that they would act rationally.
So far, so good.
I also said, and I don't know, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't know if anybody...
Has said this directly except me?
Well, probably lots of people in the public have said this, but can somebody fact-check me on this?
Has anyone else said what I said?
Let's say someone who's in the public eye, somebody who's an expert, a pundit, somebody who's seen in the news.
Has anybody else said what I said from the beginning, which is that the Ayatollah got a promotion To the top spot when Soleimani died.
So what I said was that if you've got one guy who's got a Koran, that being the Ayatollah, and another guy who's got control of the entire military plus the intelligence services, who's the boss?
It's always the guy with the weapons.
It's always the guy with the intelligence services.
There's no exceptions to that.
Iran wasn't the exception.
We apparently have been living under some kind of fiction that Khomeini was the top guy in Iran, but it's pretty clear he wasn't.
So whatever Iran had been doing a week ago was because the guy who's dead wanted it to happen.
In the real world, the guy with the weapons is in charge.
Now, we don't have confirmation of that, but the basic idea is that Khamenei was happy that Soleimani got killed.
Now, let's look at the evidence to see if it tracks with what we've seen.
We saw Khamenei crying in public over the death of Soleimani, but the close-up shows no tears.
And we know that there's something about the Iranian culture where there's almost a theatrical crying that you do at mourning situations.
So, apparently it was that.
No tears. Now, I'm willing to be fact-check on that.
If somebody has... If there's another photo of him actually shedding a tear, then I would actually modify my opinion.
That might be different. Um...
So, let's see. I said, I predicted that Iran would not attack in any direct way that could be attributed to them.
In other words, the proxies might do things that were sort of a gray area, but we wouldn't be entirely sure if Iran ordered it.
It would be some kind of weird gray area.
Well, that's not exactly what happened, although I think we'll still see some proxies get involved because they're at least semi-autonomous.
But Talk about a gray area.
We got the best gray area ever.
And, well, let me give you one more thing I said.
Another thing that I've been saying, I've said this with the North Korea situation, I said it this time, and I remind you always that being on the brink of war Looks exactly like being on the brink of peace.
Because when you're on the brink of war, that's when everybody gets focused.
That's when everybody's serious.
That's when everybody realizes you're out of time.
That's when everybody realizes you can't mess around anymore.
So being on the brink of war looks exactly like being on the brink of peace.
There's no difference. And so I don't know who else was saying that we were on the brink of peace, but I think I'm the only one.
And again, Will somebody fact-check me on that?
Was there anybody in the public eye who said this is shaping up like the best thing for peace we've ever seen before the missile attack?
Is there anybody else who said that in the entire world, at least in the public?
I don't think so. I think I'm the only person who said that, that we were really close to peace.
We'll talk a little bit more about that.
There's something that...
I have a private label for it called the...
I call it the magic trick.
Now, a magic trick, by its nature, is that you believe something that's impossible happened, such as a rabbit appeared in a hat.
Well, that's impossible, but it looks like it happened.
That's what a magic trick is, right?
In international politics, you sometimes need to do a magic trick.
And the magic trick in this case was to do the impossible.
So Ran was tasked With doing the impossible.
That's the situation they were in.
Here's the impossible situation.
Iran had to strike back the United States.
They had to. It's built into their culture.
The government needed it for domestic purposes.
They had to. They had no choice.
They had to strike back.
But at the same time, they had to not strike back.
They had to strike back.
But they also had to not strike back because the whole country would be destroyed.
It was pretty clear that Trump was going to take out their major facilities if they went too far.
So what is the solution to you have to do something, but you also have to not do something?
And they're both absolutes.
There's no wiggle room.
You have to do it and you have to not do it exactly the same time.
It's impossible. So what do you do?
You do a magic trick.
And the magic trick is you attack without attacking.
You want to attack in the way that you can tell your domestic audience, man, we slapped them around.
We slapped that American public around.
Not the public, but we slapped the military around.
Man, we slapped them in the face, which is what the Ayatollah said.
He said we delivered a slap in the face to the United States.
And the United States said...
That's it. Because it feels like you deliberately missed us.
Because we know you can aim.
We just watched you aim at Saudi Arabia's facilities, and there's not much left of them.
So all of those missiles, all of them missed?
That feels a little deliberate.
Now there's also some reporting I'm not up to date on, so maybe you can fill me in, but there's some reporting that we got some warning.
The warning might have been a general warning, so that would have been good enough probably, but it might have also, I'm just going to say might, it might have been a specific warning, sort of a back-channel warning that says, you know, if you're at this base, maybe get in a bomb shelter.
Maybe you don't go out into tarmac so much.
Maybe stay away from that road out of the base.
Just stay away from that area.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Americans had direct warning that there was going to be a magic trick.
So the magic trick has been pulled off.
How rational do you need to be To pull off a magic trick this good?
I mean, it's not this good in the sense that it's fooling us, but it's this good in the sense that it looks like it worked.
Now, is Iran rational?
Would you at least agree with me that this was rational?
It's probably the most rational thing you've ever seen in your life.
Good luck finding a solution to this situation that would be more rational This is the most clever, rational thing you've ever seen right in front of you.
It's actually kind of impressive. So, here's the...
If you've watched me for a while, you know that I like to take big risks on my predictions.
I especially like the ones that are contrarian because they mean the most.
Meaning that if you take a strong contrarian view and it turns out to be right, such as predicting that Trump will be president, that sort of thing, that means more than something that was a 50-50 anyway.
You know, if something is a 99-1 and you take the 1, that probably means more than if it was a 50-50 and you got lucky, you were on the right side.
So, as soon as the missiles flew, we had the news that the missiles were starting to land, but before we knew anything about the damage, I tweeted this, Operation Symbolic Revenge has started.
Now, I just noted the time of that, because I want to see if anybody else...
And again, comparing predictions is what we're doing here.
So some will be wrong, some will be right.
I'm not saying all of mine are right.
I'm saying that the process of seeing which are right and which are wrong is very important for you as well as me.
And so I did that at 7.19 Eastern Time.
I don't remember when we first heard that there was no deaths.
But that's how early I predicted that it was a symbolic act.
Now, symbolic means not intending to kill people, right?
I mean, obviously that's what it means.
So how were my predictions?
I got wrong that, so far, I think I'll still be right, but I got wrong that there would be ambiguous proxy attacks.
I don't know that we've heard of any.
I think we're going to see more of those.
I mean, I think going forward, if only because Iran doesn't control everything all the time.
I mean, there must be independent groups who just want to, you know, send a rocket into Israel for their own purposes, no matter what.
So probably we'll see that.
But from the beginning, I said that we're closer to peace.
And that Soleimani is probably the problem?
Think about this, will you?
The officials in Iran have called their attack proportionate.
Just wrap your head around that.
Iran, let's say, I'm going to call them a rival, not an enemy.
I don't like Calling Iran the country an enemy, because they're not.
There's basically one person in the country who's making some decisions we don't like, the top guy, and then there's, you know, 70 million Iranians that we think are pretty cool.
So, Iran is not the enemy.
I like to, I always like to clarify that, no matter how clear you think it was before.
You know, you can't clarify that enough.
I think I over clarified and forgot my point.
But, Yeah, I did forget my point, but I'll circle back to it.
Here's some other things that are fascinating about this.
Somehow, this week, Iran and the United States solved each other's biggest problems, or some of their biggest problems.
Did you notice that?
Now, it seems to be somewhat accidental.
Somewhat coincidental, but it's kind of weird that all of our problems got solved simultaneously, and here's what I mean.
What was Iran's biggest problem, or biggest problems?
Number one, the internal protests.
This is the sort of thing that makes the internal protests slow down, doesn't it?
Because the Iranians are saying, uh-oh, maybe at least for now we're all Iranians because there's some danger.
It should be a normal response, right?
If your country is potentially under attack, that's a very focusing thing for nationalism.
So we've accidentally, probably just temporarily, but accidentally taken the steam out of any Iranian protests.
So that's good for Iran.
Secondly, we got rid of Soleimani.
Who I believe was Iran's biggest problem, and this is just my speculation based on evidence I've seen, probably also the Ayatollah's biggest problem and certainly the biggest problem for the citizens of Iran because he was causing all the trouble.
At the same time, Iran seems to have solved our biggest problem, which is that we didn't have a good path out of Iraq.
Now we do. Suddenly we have a path to leave Iraq.
Now I don't know if we will.
Maybe we'll leave some bases.
I think we've reached what I call the Sundance Kid phase.
Do you know what the Sundance Kid phase is?
If you've ever watched the classic movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, there's an opening scene That is very famous among scriptwriters because in terms of the script, it's considered one of the strongest scenes ever written.
So it's famous for writers as well as just moviegoers.
And the scene involves Robert Redford who plays a character called the Sundance Kid who's a renowned gunfighter.
But not everybody knows him by face because it's the Old West so you don't have photographs.
And he's in a card game, and he gets accused of cheating.
He didn't cheat, but he gets accused of cheating by some rando on the other side of the table.
And unbeknownst to the person who accused him of cheating, he just accused the best gunfighter in the West of cheating, which means this guy's going to be dead in a minute unless he reneges on his accusation, unless he recalls it.
And Butch Cassidy, seeing the situation evolve and not wanting anybody to die, tries to intervene.
He's not playing. I don't know if he was at the table or he just walked in or something.
I can't remember the scene exactly.
But Butch Cassidy is like, no, you don't understand.
You don't want to do this.
And he tells the random guy that he's dealing with the Sundance Kid.
So suddenly the guy who's accused him of cheating just realized that he's seconds away from being shot to death.
If he keeps up his accusation.
And the Sundance kid looks at him and he says, essentially, I'm butchering this, but he says that he won't leave until the guy asks him to stay.
And the guy's kind of confused.
And the Sundance kid just says, ask me to stay.
You have to ask me to stay.
Basically, he's giving the guy a way out.
And the guy finally understands what's going on, knowing he could be shot to death in a moment, and he says...
Will you stay? And the Sundance Kid, in just the greatest movie scene ever, he goes, no, I've got to go, thanks.
Takes his chips and he leaves.
So, the point of that story being that the Sundance Kid couldn't leave until he was asked to stay, because his honor depended on that, that it was his decision.
Likewise, the American presence in Iraq is a little like that.
We'd love to leave, But not until they ask us to stay.
Now, who knows how this will go, but if the Iraqi government could find its way to ask us to stay, we might be a little more willing to leave.
I don't know if that's the case, because we have lots of strategic purposes to be over there, I suppose.
I just don't know what they are.
Given the number of bases that we have in the general area, How much do we need bases in Iraq?
I don't know. So I suppose we're there to protect them from Iran.
I don't know. That didn't work.
So we may have accidentally solved each other's biggest problems.
And I think we know it.
Because we've got a legitimate path out of Iraq.
And we've educated the public about what the situation is.
And the Ayatollah...
Kind of came out ahead. Oh, here's the part I forgot.
Circling back to it.
So Rand said that their attack on our base was proportionate response to us killing the head of their military.
What? What the hell does a proportionate response even mean?
If that was a proportionate response...
I don't even know what proportion it means anymore.
We killed the number one guy in their country.
He was the leader of the country, effectively, because he had the power over the Ayatollah because he had all the weapons.
We killed the top guy in their country.
They sent some missiles into the desert.
And then they said, we're good.
Proportionate. What does that tell you about Iran's opinion Of Solomon A. It tells you they don't care he got killed.
That's how I read it.
I can't read this any other way.
When they say that that was a proportionate response, it could be just because they're trying to avoid war.
That would be a good reason, actually.
But I can't see them calling it proportionate.
I feel as if they might say something more like, well, it's not proportionate, but at least we're happy for now.
But calling it proportionate sort of makes Solomon A. looks like he wasn't that important in the first place if the equal response was sending some missiles into the desert.
Don't see it. Here's another good prediction.
Jack Posobiec, when it was very early in what looked like an attack, He tweeted this.
Initial reports always overstate military activity.
Take a deep breath and wait for confirmed damage assessments.
Now there's a tweet that really aged well.
I mean, it was only a few hours until we knew that there was no human damage.
But that's an experienced tweet.
Initial reports always overstate military activity.
Keep that... Just keep that in mind.
That's always overstated.
I believe the Iranian press at one point reported that 30 Americans were killed.
Maybe NBC reported that.
Somebody reported that and of course pulled it back later.
Here's an update on What I criticized President Trump for, quite aggressively criticized him, for saying that we might bomb Iranian, quote, cultural sites.
And I said that was a gigantic mistake because that's personal.
You don't want any of this stuff to be personal.
That's the last thing you want.
And saying we'll bomb the things that, you know, have meaning to your heart and your soul and your culture, that was just, I said, just a mistake.
Just a flat-out mistake.
Now, other people have suggested that the real reason for that was to tell Iran that they can't hide their good stuff in their cultural sites, because we're going to bomb it anyway.
That might be true.
In fact, I would say that's likely true.
I would say it's likely true that the purpose of what Trump said was to warn Iran that there's no safe place to hide any stuff.
Don't put your good missiles in the mosque because the mosque will disappear.
If you want to keep the mosque, you know, put the missile somewhere else because the missiles are going to disappear either way.
It's up to you whether it's in a mosque.
I think that's productive.
But I think maybe the cost of it was too high in terms of how the Iranian public would take that.
So I'm going to still put that in the mistake category, but it wasn't a mistake that didn't have, let's say, a purpose.
There may have been a military purpose that was accomplished by that at the expense of some public impression.
We'll see if that was a good trade-off.
I don't know if there's any way to measure that.
Khomeini said the U.S. should leave the region because military action like this is not sufficient.
What is important is ending the corrupting presence of America in the region.
So they still want America out of the region, but, you know, just because it's corrupting?
I mean, that's a pretty weak statement.
So there's that.
One of the reasons I predicted that we would avoid all-out war with Iran will sound funny in retrospect.
Now, I suppose we could still have all-out war with Iran, but it certainly doesn't look like it's heading that way.
And the weird thing is that we were on the brink of war, or so many people thought, over our agreement.
I've never seen that before, have you?
Normally when you have a war, it's because you disagree on something, who owns something, you know, or somebody wants to capture somebody's resources or its revenge.
So there are reasons for war, but have you ever seen people fight a war because they completely agreed on something?
What I mean by that is that Iran mostly wants the United States to leave Iraq At the same time, the United States wants to leave Iraq.
I mean, at least the publics do.
How often do you get a war when you both violently agree on the main point?
The United States wants to get the hell out of Iraq.
In retrospect, now you look at it and you say, okay, now that the fear and the emotions are down, when you're looking at it from the perspective of history, you're going to say to yourself, was it really likely we would have an all-out war over an agreement?
Over a disagreement, yes.
But over an agreement?
That's weird. Now, the details of how we would leave and when are certainly up in the air, but basically we're on the same page.
We want to get the hell out of there.
So, here's what I'd like to see somebody turn into a meme for me.
Maybe you could tweet it at me.
I'd like to see the death count from Soleimani.
So here's the number of people that Soleimani is responsible for their deaths.
Directly or indirectly, he's responsible.
Apparently, since he was the head of the military, he's responsible for something like 1,500 Iranian citizens who were protesters being killed by the regime.
So that would be 1,500 Iranians that Soleimani killed in his own country.
There were, of course, the passengers in his car, some Iraqi, some not, but he's certainly responsible for the deaths of the people in the car indirectly because he was a target.
Forty Iranians died mourning the death of Soleimani, so that's 40 Iranians who didn't need to die, except that Soleimani lived.
If you hear some noise, my cat's going crazy in the background.
Then you have this tragic story of the Ukraine airline That, coincidentally, crashed after takeoff from Tehran at about the same time the rockets were being fired.
Okay, is that a coincidence?
I don't think that's a coincidence.
Eventually, we're going to find out that Iran shot down their own airline.
And on it were, I think, 76 Iranian passengers and a bunch of Canadians who were victims as well.
So that's 76 Iranians that probably would not have died except for Solomon A. having once lived.
And then how many Iraqis?
have died because of something that Soleimani didn't.
It's a big number, right?
We don't know. I don't know what that number is.
So I'd like to see the death count of non-Americans, you know, just sort of a list of people who, mostly Iranians especially, but Iraqis and Iranians, who died because Soleimani was who he was.
You know, either directly or indirectly, how many died.
It's a big number. We should be looking at that.
Ian Bremmer, who you might know from Twitter and from various news programs, he's often in the news as an expert.
He's a political scientist, author, columnist at the time, and president of Eurasia Group.
All of that means that he knows what he's talking about in international events.
And he tweets this.
This doesn't, he said, this doesn't mean it's the end of US-Iran conflict.
There's no mission accomplished.
But for everyone who thought killing Solomon A was going to lead to war, no, it established red lines and deterrence.
If US now wants to engage in diplomacy, there's a real window.
There it is.
There's a real window.
We're closer to peace than we are to war.
And at least there's one expert in international stuff who is recognizing that and trying to call it out.
Joe Biden called Trump quite, quote, dangerously incompetent for killing Solomon A. Does it still look like that this morning?
Do you think the Democrats can call Trump dangerously incompetent if what we got was this?
This looked a little more like amazingly right on target.
It looks like history is going to absolve Trump for taking out Solomon A. Too early to say.
But if I had to predict, I would say that this will be, taking out Soleimani, I think is going to be Trump's greatest international success, if it leads to something good with Iran.
Now, there are two paths that Iran could take.
We don't know which path they will take.
One path is that they, the scariest path, is that they say, oh, let's not fight anymore, we'll just go back to the way things were.
But the way things were, Is that they will develop nuclear weapons, and they would keep funding proxies to attack Israel and anybody else we like.
The smartest thing they could do, is if they intended to be that bad actor going forward, is to say, no, no, no war now.
And the United States would probably agree.
And then they would just go back to business as usual, which would be as dangerous as it was before.
So that's a good chance.
That they'll just go back to, you know, what they were doing before.
But there's another possibility, and that possibility has to do with the fact that Soleimani was the main obstacle to a better world.
So the Ayatollah, well, let me put it this way.
War is a young man's game.
Conquest is a young man's game.
Now, if you're a historian, I'd like to hear some exceptions, but mostly my understanding is that younger guys, you know, in their 50s, 40s, etc., tend to be the ones who are creating war.
And by the time you get to 80, you're starting to think, well, you know, it's not the last thing I want to do before I die.
Do you think the Ayatollah wants to be on his deathbed, which can't be that far away, I mean he's a pretty old guy, do you think he wants to be on his deathbed having brought Iran into a major war?
Probably not. Do you think Soleimani would have been happy bringing Iran into a major conflict if there was some chance that he could gain territory and power and all that?
Maybe so. So I think that the difference is, if somebody says it's a testosterone difference, I think you're right.
The younger males have more testosterone and probably more aggressive tendencies in general.
So my guess is that however warlike Soleimani was, and remember, I think he was the top guy until he got taken out, I doubt that Khamenei at his current age and the current situation is itching for violence.
Probably not.
He might be. I can't rule it out, right?
So I'm going to say this is sort of a toss-up.
There's a 50% chance that nothing will change and Iran will just keep doing bad stuff and develop a nuclear weapon.
But there's at least a 50% chance that the Ayatollah wasn't quite on board with whatever Soleimani was trying to get accomplished.
Now, given that Iran has...
Has, let's say, responded with an almost purely symbolic attack.
Could they be convinced to take their jihad, their war, their, let's say, their revolution, Islamic revolution, could they be convinced to take it to the internet and the war of ideas?
Could Iran be convinced now, now that their most warlike general is off the field, could they now be convinced that they can have the war they want, the revolution they want, but take it to the field of ideas?
If they can't convince people that their ideas are better, through the internet, through conversation, through debate, through persuasion, if that doesn't work, they're going to have to question the power of their own god.
Because if God can't let you win a debate on the internet, well, he's not helping you as much as you want.
Let's talk about that plane.
So the plane killed, so tragically, and what are the odds that it would be a Ukrainian flight?
It's Ukraine International Airlines.
I don't know what to say about this.
All last night, people were tweeting at me and messaging me about the simulation.
You know, I always talk about code reuse because the same events and stories repeat in ways that you think, well, that can't be repeating.
There's no reason that could repeat.
And obviously, the fact that it's a Ukraine airplane that went down with Iranians on board makes everybody say, what are the odds That it would be a Ukrainian airline.
Of all things.
What are the odds of that?
Now, I'm not going to say that's proof of the simulation.
I'm just going to say, wow, that's weird.
There was an Iranian official who tweeted just the Iranian flag.
As you know, when President Trump did his action against Soleimani, the only thing he tweeted that evening was an American flag.
And some top official in Iran sort of paced him, meaning matched him, by an Iranian flag when they attack back, when they symbolically attack back.
And I thought to myself, that's actually a pretty good sign, because that is a conversation.
When people are in a conversation, They tend not to kill each other.
It's when the conversation stops that you have to get worried.
And when Iran sort of mocks the president, I don't know if it's mocking or meeting him halfway.
No, what would it be called? I guess matching his messaging by tweeting their own flag.
I feel as though that's a conversation.
Meaning that they're being interactive with us.
As long as they're being interactive, meaning that what they do is because of what we do and they're following our communication and they're matching it and stuff, those are all good signs.
Those are the signs of somebody who wants to get a deal done.
Now, I may be reading too much into that because it might have been just one Iranian official who thought it would be a funny tweet or a provocative tweet or something.
So it might have been just that. But the things you look for...
Are where they're matching your conversation.
You want to look for signs of engagement.
Like if we pull, they push.
If you're attached by a string.
Let's call it a string theory.
If you feel attached by a string, that's a good sign.
How would you like to be a Democratic candidate for president this week?
Because you almost have to hope for the failure of American foreign policy for any chance to win.
Because let me tell you, if the next several months what comes out of this is that Trump makes progress with maybe even the nuclear stuff, I don't know that that will happen.
That would be the hardest ask, but it's possible.
And we may be in the best place we've ever been with Iran, at least in recent decades.
So if that happens, what do you do if you're a Democrat running against them?
Do you actually end up at home saying, I wish those missiles had killed somebody?
What the heck are you doing?
And that must be the most annoying thing, that things are going so well.
And I think they are going well.
Here's a question I have about that jet that went down.
Now, it's being reported, at least in one publication, I think, Daily Mail I saw at the UK publication, that there were, quote, holes in the fuselage, meaning looking like it had been hit by some kind of explosion or something.
Which would indicate that it was taken down by a military action, accidentally, presumably.
I don't know that I can look at holes in a wreck, because, you know, it's basically, there's some holes, you know, in the fuselage on the ground, and I look at that and I go, I don't know, does that mean, does it mean what it might mean, or does it mean nothing?
I don't know. Seems like if your whole plane gets destroyed, there could be holes in the fuselage that would look like something else.
But here's my question.
Why was the airport open?
Why was Tehran's airport sending planes into the air at the same time they were sending missiles into the air?
Wouldn't it have been just sort of good military, I don't know, Good hygiene to say, immediately call the control tower.
You don't want to tell them in advance, right?
But the moment the missiles are launched, shouldn't the first phone call be to your own airports and say, close down, close down, close down, military action.
We'll get back to you, but stop all planes.
So that's just a question.
I don't know enough about the situation, but why was the airport open?
The main airport in Tehran?
Like, I don't understand why that was open.
Now, I assume that we're going to find out that Iran shot it down.
Don't you? Wouldn't you assume that that's what we're going to...
You know, even if we don't have it confirmed, maybe they'll never give us the black box.
That seems possible. But why was the airport open?
I don't know. So I think we're on a weirdly good path.
I don't know when the president's going to talk.
Maybe he's already talking. But when the president talks, we're going to know a lot more about that.
Let me talk about some other stuff.
Every time YouTube demonetizes my videos, because these periscopes get downloaded and then uploaded to YouTube in an hour or two, But every time that YouTube demonetizes me, I'm going to tweet a commercial for one of their competitors.
So I'll just do this forever, so you can ignore the tweets after a while.
But there are several competitors.
One of them is Rokfin, R-O-K-F-I-N. And my content is already on Rockfin, but you have to be a paid subscriber to see it.
Bitshoot, B-I-T-C-H-U-T-E. Bitshoot is a competitor.
And something called LBRY.TV. Library.
LBRY.TV. So those are competitors to YouTube.
I like to give them some attention whenever YouTube demonetizes me, which they do every day, for no reason, by the way.
YouTube doesn't give any reason, and I know there's no reason, because every day we ask them to review it manually, and every day they reverse it.
So if there had been reasons, they wouldn't reverse it.
But they do reverse it every time, so I know there are no reasons except, let's say, corporate reasons.
Let me give you some good news.
We reported today that the cancer death rate declined 29% from 1991 to 2017, including a 2.2% drop from 2016 to 2017.
The steady 26-year decline is driven by long-term drops in death rates for the big cancers.
29%. That's pretty good.
And I think that we're not even close to where this could go.
So we've got a really big foothold on cancer.
Here's another one.
Apparently, we know now from studies that the risk of Alzheimer, at least the symptoms of Alzheimer, can be cut in half by mental and physical activity.
In other words, if you keep your mind active and your body active, your risk of Alzheimer is half.
Or at least half as much impact.
Think about that.
Half. Just by being active.
Now, of course, that's my mantra.
If you've read my book, How to Feel at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, you know that I'm big on staying active every day and keeping mentally active.
I believe that's why I am mentally like a teenager.
Always active. And then the most fun story of the day, there's a British man who Attempted to burn down his synagogue.
That's not the funny part. There's nothing funny about burning down the synagogue.
But in this particular case, there's a security video of him putting the gas through a window he broke, and then he throws in the match, and the match lights it up, and the whole thing blows back in his face and catches his hair on fire.
So look in my Twitter feed.
If you want a guilty pleasure, It's harder to get a more guilty pleasure than watching a synagogue arson catch his own hair on fire.
There are very few things that you will enjoy more than that.
Unless you're a good person.
Apparently I'm not a good person because I enjoy that too much.
Somebody's mocking me.
Not me, but somebody's putting British man in quotes.
Yes, there may be more information on who that British man is, but we don't know that now.
So, oh yes, and then apparently there's some kind of success with the Nick Sandman and the The Covington kids, he was one of the Covington kids, and he sued CNN, and apparently he's making some success there, but I don't know the details.
Yeah, CNN's settled.
That's the report.
But remember, settling does not mean guilty.
Settling does not mean you've admitted you're guilty, anyway.
We don't know how much the settlement is.
Probably we never will.
I imagine that'll be confidential.
25 million? Maybe.
Reported settlement was 27 million, somebody saying in the comments.
I don't know if we'll ever find that out.
I would be skeptical about the reporting because I'm pretty sure they're not allowed to talk about it.
So anything you hear would be somebody who's not allowed to talk about it, and maybe they're not so credible.
Somebody says they settled to prevent having internal documents released in discovery.
Well, that would be a good reason. The other reason to settle is you think you're going to lose.
You don't need to worry about the document thing.
It could be just sufficient that if you took it to court, you would lose more.
So they decided to make it go away.
Yeah. All right.
But that story, you know, those stories don't interest me as much because they're really about one person, you know, one person's situation.
And those are less interesting than things that affect all of us.
All right. There's an Amazon Alexa loop, a ring to wear and control.
Is that a thing? Yeah.
Somebody, because I was talking about using, it's funny, I had it in my hand, a ring to control things, and somebody's acting as if that already exists.
I'm going to see. Loop.
Oh, my God. It looks like it might exist.
Wait, did this just get introduced?
This is brand new.
This would be weird. Oh, my God.
There it is. Introducing.
You can't see it.
Let me bring down the temperature on this.
There it is. There's a picture of the Amazon ring for controlling things.
I'm having kind of a freak out moment.
Yeah. Did this go out today?
Like the day after I talked about it?
Someone made it yesterday.
Oh, somebody said I heard about it last week.
Yes, it's Tech Week in Vegas.
It's been out for a while, somebody says.
Okay, well, I hadn't heard of this, but...
So I think it doesn't count as a prediction because I predicted the past, apparently.
But if you look at Dilbert Comics from decades ago, you'll see that I predicted the ring as the controlling device...
Now, let me say something else about Amazon's digital assistant, whose name I will not mention because I have one behind me.
I don't want to trigger it. I've been living with the Amazon digital assistants in different rooms and sort of living that life where you've got basically a robot that you can talk to at any time.
And I got to tell you, I am completely addicted to it, meaning that when I travel, I'll sometimes be in a hotel, And it won't have a digital assistant.
Actually, the high-end hotels actually do have an Amazon digital assistant, sometimes Google.
So the high-end hotels are putting them in the hotels.
But when I go to a hotel, and I'll be standing in the hotel room, and I'll start to talk to the computer, and there isn't one, and I'll really feel the lack of it.
In other words, several times a day...
Let me tell you one of my greatest uses for the...
for the device is asking it what time it is.
Because there are lots of times when you have your hands full, your phone is on the other side of the thing, you're doing something, you know, you're in the bathtub, there's just some reason that you can't get to something that'll tell you the time.
Asking at the time, asking at the weather, asking at the hours of stores, I'm talking to the thing all day long.
So I go through my life talking to the computer in my house like I'm on the spaceship Enterprise and I'm talking to the computer.
I gotta tell you, I gotta tell you, it's the future.
It is clearly the future.
I will also tell you that if your only experience with a digital assistant is Apple's, And I won't say its name either, but S-I-R-I. If your only experience is the Apple product, you don't know what a digital assistant can be.
The Apple product is kind of terrible compared to the Amazon digital assistant, at least if you talk about the phone version of their digital assistant.
It's a whole different deal.
Amazon really is good at it.
Really, really good.
The Amazon digital assistant...
This is the future. You know, you live with it a while.
Now, I imagine that Google's product is probably pretty good, maybe as good, maybe better.
But if you live with it for a while, it's just obvious everybody's going to have one.
It's obvious. All right.
How are we doing here? I think we've done it, right?
Stay on live during the presidential announcement in five minutes.
Well, I like to keep these periscopes to an hour or less when I can do it.
So I'm going to take my leave and then we can all watch the president's address.
Here's what to look for in the president's address.
If the president is on his game, and I think he will be, who is better at rising to an occasion?
Who is better at rising to an occasion?
Well, this president is the best ever at knowing what a moment is.
You get what I'm talking about, right?
The president understands the show.
He knows when the third act happens.
He knows when there's a moment.
Nobody's ever been like this before.
He has the best combination of talents, you know, the political plus the showmanship, reality TV. Historians will someday say that was exactly the right experience for being president on top of other experience.
But this is going to be a moment.
And I think one of the reasons that the president waited a little bit, he really needs to get this right.
This address is likely one of the most important public statements that will ever be made by any president.
Now, it could be, you know, sort of a big nothing.
That's possible. But in all likelihood, the way he handles this, the very next thing he says...
Will be determinative a great deal to the entire Middle East and to this country and to politics in general.
This is a big, big moment.
Let me tell you what Trump probably knows that not everybody knows yet.
What he probably knows is that this is an opening.
And let's see if he takes it.
So what I would look for is for him to go a little bit tough on Iran to make sure that they know we can still be tough, but look for him to open a door.
So there's going to be a tough statement of, you know, you better not do that again.
We have a big military.
You're in trouble. So you're going to see a little bit of a threat, but expect him to open a door and say, hey, No better time to talk.
Let's get it done. That's what I expect.
He might go a different way, but it's going to be a moment, and I would not miss it for anything.
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