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Jan. 9, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
47:00
Episode 782 Scott Adams: Iran and Impeachment Because Most of our Real Problems are Being Solved
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Alright, well, there's not too much new to talk about.
This is one of those weird news days that follows the big news events where you just run out of news.
I'm sure there are important things happening, but they don't seem important because the other news is so big.
So, we'll run through a few things.
First of all, one of the questions that people always ask me is, how can you be a Trump supporter, Scott?
They often try to shame me by saying stuff like, Scott, you're smart.
How can you be a Trump supporter?
Which, of course, is just another way to insult me.
And I always have the same story, but the story doesn't always sound as...
Clear and, let's say, rational as it does this week.
So here's my story, and it goes like this.
There's no such thing as the ideal president.
Each president brings a different package of skills to the office.
And if that package of skills happens to be a good match with this situation, Good match with the times.
Good match with the specific challenges.
Well, then it looks like you got a good president.
But it's really only a good president who's perfectly matched with the current challenges.
And what I've said about Trump is that he's like a hundred year flood.
He's the candidate that you only get in the rarest situations you could ever have a President Trump.
And the rarest situation is that he also had the skill to become president on top of whatever other skills he brings.
So, what I've said is that there are a certain set of problems that become ossified, just sort of stuck.
And if you've got a certain set of problems that have been stuck, and they've been stuck for years or decades or something, maybe you can't fix the stuck problems with the same president who was pretty good at, let's say, getting you out of economic decline.
Or maybe the same president who was a good wartime president.
Or the same president who is really good at, I don't know, social services or bringing, you know, less division to the country.
You could think of a lot of things you want your president to do.
And they'd all be good at certain subsets of that.
But every now and then, and maybe it's every hundred years, you really need somebody like Trump who simply just changes all the variables.
Yeah, he's the ultimate box shaker.
Ask yourself if anyone else would have done what Trump did with Iran.
I don't think so.
Right? Can you imagine any of our standard presidents being presented with a range of options about what to do with Iran and picking kill their top guy?
Who else would have picked that option?
Nobody. Literally no one would have ever picked that option.
He's the only guy.
That's the point of a Trump presidency.
Nobody says he's not going to break any dishes.
Nobody says he's not going to make people angry.
Nobody says he's not going to scare some people.
Nobody says it's cost-free.
It's going to be exciting every time you add Trump to a situation.
And that excitement can translate to, I'm afraid, I've got risk, I've got PTSD. So he's definitely a changer.
And every now and then, you need somebody who can make the choices, simply make the choices, that no one else could make.
And he's certainly that guy.
Now, I would go so far as to say, just to complete this, That the president who follows this president doesn't need to be anything like him.
And maybe that's good.
Somebody was saying about Kanye for 2024.
It might be that this president breaks free some of the big problems.
I mean, let's just imagine.
Imagine, if you will, that we get some trade deals with China, but mostly we decouple.
That's good. Suppose we reach some kind of better or less lethal understanding with North Korea and Iran.
Maybe the only thing that changes is whether we're at each other's necks, but that's big.
If there's some kind of stable situation there and they're not our enemies, that's pretty good.
So you can imagine a time that the president after this one would be best if they had a different set of skills for whatever the new problems are.
So that's just the point.
And I think that the taking out Soleimani is the central best example of why every hundred years you need a Trump president.
You need a Trump every hundred years to just break the stuff that was frozen.
You know, you got that pipe, you can't get it open.
Sometimes you just got to take the torch and just cut the pipes off.
So he's that guy.
And so far it seems to be working out on some of the big issues.
All right. So it looks like Have you heard there's this thing called an impeachment trial?
It's not a real impeachment, and it's not a real trial, and it really has no importance to anything whatsoever.
But it's the top headline.
How did it come to be that our top headline is something that's not even real?
And by not real, I mean it's not much of a trial if you already know how it ends.
It's not much of a process If everybody knows what the end state is, and you don't need any of the in-between states to get to the end state.
There's no mystery in this one.
Unless something new happens, and if something new happens, well, that would be news.
But unless something new happens, it's the impeachment that isn't an impeachment for the trial that isn't a trial, and the witnesses that won't be called for the decision we already understand what it's going to be.
There's almost nothing there.
It's like a bowl of soup, except you put the spoon in and there's no soup.
You got the bowl, you got the spoon, it's lunchtime, you've got everything but the soup.
And we're all just like taking big spoonfuls of nothing.
It's like, ah, I got another bite full of nothing.
How much more nothing is in my bowl?
Well, according to CNN, it's full.
That's a lot of nothing. Why am I not getting filled up?
I keep eating the nothing.
Do you eat soup or do you drink it?
That's a big question. Alright, so impeachment is so boring, I don't even have anything to say about it except that it's boring.
Tomorrow if I talk about impeachment, I'll probably talk about how boring it is.
Okay, somebody reminded me about the story about Paul Krugman.
Alright, so Paul Krugman, famous winner of the Nobel in economics, And also a big anti-Trumper who's famous for some bad predictions.
One of his bad predictions is that Trump would tank the economy upon election.
That didn't happen. So there are a lot of Trump supporters who are not big fans of Paul Krugman.
So that's the context you have to know before I tell you the rest of the story.
So if you haven't heard, Paul Krugman tweeted And this is the part that's got everybody scratching their head.
Why would he tweet this?
That there had been some hack with his computer and that someone else had been using his IP address to make it look like it was him and downloading child porn.
I'm only going to use that phrase once because I get demonetized enough.
So he tweets that they've discovered this on his computer and they're looking into it.
And of course, as one, the internet said, why did you tweet that?
Isn't that exactly the sort of thing you shouldn't tweet?
Because if we never heard about it, it didn't happen.
And wouldn't it be better if we never heard about it?
So, I would like to surprise you all.
And by the way, he did an update later where he said he thought it was not a hack, but rather it was some kind of a scam where maybe somebody said they hacked him or something like that.
So he withdrew his original tweet and thought it was maybe some kind of a scam contact he got, I guess.
We don't know the details. Doesn't matter.
Here's my point. Allow me now to do what you don't expect.
I'm going to defend Paul Krugman.
When he's right, he's right.
When he's wrong, he's wrong.
I'll try to call him out equally.
I have nothing against Paul Krugman.
He's a brilliant guy who got a few predictions wrong.
He's on the other side.
But I'm sure he doesn't want what's worse for the country.
None of us do. So we're all Americans.
Let me defend Paul Krugman here.
Some people said, why would you bring up the fact that That your computer had been associated with the worst crime you could possibly imagine, when we didn't even have to think about it or know about it.
And here's your answer.
The answer is because Paul Krugman is smart.
At least in this sense, he's smart.
I would have done maybe the same thing.
And here's why.
He was presented with two impossible choices.
Remember, he works for a newspaper organization, the New York Times, and they were looking into it for him.
Probably, I don't know if it was on a work computer or something, but the New York Times was involved, and the police were involved, and he's a famous person.
Here's the question. What were the odds that this story wasn't going to get out some other way?
Well, maybe. It's possible the story would never have come out, and in that case, we would just never hear about it.
Maybe. But it might.
It might leak.
How would you like to have to catch up to a story after it leaked by somebody else?
Suppose the story came out that there had been an investigation of this material, which I'm not going to say again, on his computer.
And then, after the story comes out, Paul Krugman would be forced to defend it.
Oh, no, no. It was a hack.
No, it was a hack. It was a scam.
Would you believe it?
What would be your credibility of that story?
Well, if you heard his defense sometime after you heard the accusation, you'd probably say two to one, three to one, the accusation is correct.
Just automatically.
Just your brain would go there.
Because we're sort of primed to believe that anyone who's accused of anything, doesn't matter what the crime is, you're sort of poised to believe three to one, four to one is probably true.
Not necessarily. Still innocent until proven guilty.
But three to one, four to one, probably true.
Now look at it the way he did it.
It was so crazy To come out and be the first person to tell the public that this story is even happening, that your first impression is, oh, well, it is sketchy.
It's a little sketchy.
And, you know, you get a little suspicious when you hear the topic in general.
If you pair any male adult with this topic, which I'm not going to mention again, you automatically think, well, there's maybe something to it.
But the fact that he went first...
Went public, and you knew it was an embarrassing thing to bring up at all, biases me to think that there's, you know, four to one, ten to one, whatever, that it's not true.
That it had nothing to do with him, but rather that he's telling a real story about something that happened to him.
So, he had two terrible choices.
One, he could go public himself, which was terrible, or he could not go public himself and take the risk that somehow it got out another way.
Way worse. Way worse.
So, he basically had a choice of, you know, his leg was trapped in the bear trap and he could chew off his own leg to get away, or he could stay in the bear trap and die, maybe, if nobody found him.
He chewed off his leg to get away.
I can't fault him for that.
He had two horrible choices, just horrible choices.
I think he took the one that had the best risk management balance.
So I defend Paul Krugman for going public with it.
It was kind of ballsy, and I think he correctly read the risk management of it.
What do I always tell you about economists?
I always tell you economists are good at looking at the comparison.
If you do not look at the comparison, you say, what the heck are you doing, Paul Krugman?
Why would you say this in public and make us all think this about you when we never had to think it?
And the answer is, he compared it to the alternative, which was worse.
Economists. Gotta love them.
Ted Cruz...
accused some of the Democrats of being apologists for Iran.
I hate that word.
I hate it when people call me an apologist for anything, and I hate it when Ted Cruz uses it against the other side.
I just...
I think that's...
It's a good...
It's a good, let's say, persuasion word, because...
It probably has some impact on people.
So persuasion-wise, it does have an impact.
It's one of those words that really bothers the people who hear it.
I know when I hear it, it bothers me.
It's not like other insults, because it's not true.
When somebody insults me about something that I feel is a little bit true, it kind of never bothers me.
You know what I mean? But I don't have to tell you how many times I've been called old, ugly, a boomer.
You know, I've been called a lot of things.
But when somebody says, hey, you're ugly, I think to myself, well, that's not totally untrue.
And then it doesn't bother me.
But when somebody calls me an apologist...
When I know that I'm doing a pretty rigorous job of trying to look at both sides, calling out the negatives and the positives, it really bothers me because it's not true.
So, likewise, when I get called a racist or anything that's just not true, that bothers me more than something that I say, well, okay, that's just your opinion.
I can see why you'd say that.
So, I hate that word.
We should ban it. The other thing that...
The other thing that Ted Cruz is talking about, he got challenged on this claim that Obama gave $150 billion or $1.8 billion to Iran.
Are you as confused as I am?
I had to go Google this because I didn't know what the hell was going on.
So here's what's confusing me.
There are two things I hear in the news all the time, not from authoritative sources, but people on Twitter, etc.
And they say something like this.
Obama gave Iran $150 billion.
Also, separately, Obama gave them $1.8 billion.
And I say to myself, wait a minute.
Which is the number? Is it 1.8 billion, which doesn't sound like that much, you know, in the big scheme of things, or is it 150 billion, which totally sounds like a lot?
How many of you know, did we give Iran 1.8 billion, or did we give them 150 billion, or did we give nobody anything because it was their own money and we just allowed them, we stopped stealing it, basically? Two different things.
All right. Thank you. Oh, some of you are actually way more informed than I am.
Good. Well, this is actually good.
I'm actually impressed.
I'm impressed with how well informed all of you are.
So most of you are giving the correct answer, which is it was two separate things.
Although they're similar in the sense that it both had to do with money to Iran.
They used to be blocked, but now it isn't.
So the 1.8 million was the actual physical cash that we directly gave to them.
The 150 billion was more conceptual.
Meaning that around the world, there was 150 billion.
It wasn't all us, the United States, blocking it.
It wasn't all clear if it was all free and clear, or some of it was related to debt.
And once the economists look at that 150, it starts shrinking.
So it's not, oh, well, 150 is the highest net.
Other people say the estimate is not 150, it's more like 100.
And then other experts say, well, yeah, even if it's more like 100, it probably won't all get unblocked because it's a series of different reasons and situations.
So maybe some of the 100 billion will get unblocked.
Iran put the estimate at 35.
So that 150 billion turned into 35 billion when Iran talks about it.
But when people use hyperbole, they pick the biggest number, 150.
What's the real number?
Is it between 35 and 150 billion?
Does anybody even know?
All right. But these are big numbers.
Let me put this in context.
The GDP of Iran is 450 billion.
That's the 2017 number.
So it's somewhere in that area of under 500 billion.
So if the amount that we gave them was just the cash, that would just be.004 of their GDP. Wouldn't mean much.
If it was 35 billion, as the Iranians say, it would be 7% of their annual GDP. Now you're talking some serious money.
And if it was 150 billion, it's like a third of their entire GDP, and then that's serious, serious, serious money.
Now what Ted Cruz was challenged with Is that that money went directly to bad uses, such as funding their proxies, etc.
Now, he was challenged, and whoever was interviewing him challenged him and said, basically, you know, this is my own words, but basically, how do you know that money, that specific money, went to the proxies and all the bad uses?
Like, how do you know that?
To which Ted Cruz said, and I love me some Ted Cruz sometimes, because whether you agree with Ted Cruz or not, whether you think he should be president or not, he's a really smart guy.
We can all agree on that, right?
He's one of the smarter guys in the Senate.
And his answer was that money is fungible.
How many of you know what that means?
Without looking it up, Tell me how many of you know what he meant when he said, money is fungible.
It's an economics term, and you don't hear it a lot.
I use it when I want to show off, but I only use it when I know I'm going to have to explain it, because most people don't know what the word means.
Somebody said Friedman said it.
Yeah, so let me explain what fungible means.
Fungible means that it could be used for anything.
Meaning that oil and cash are both fungible, meaning that if you have some cash, you can spend it for anything.
If you have some oil, the oil can be sold to anybody.
Everybody buys oil.
So a barrel of oil and a pile of money are called fungible because they can use for all kinds of different purposes, not just one purpose.
So that was Ted Cruz's answer that money is fungible.
But it was a clever answer because the reporter probably didn't know what it meant.
What are the odds that a journalist understood this economic term that is fungible?
Because it made the question go away, which is kind of brilliant, because it was a smart answer.
People probably had to look it up.
When they did look it up, they said, oh, well, okay, that's a good point that money is fungible.
But here's what they won't catch in the argument, is that it wasn't an argument.
Because it was actually an argument against what Ted Cruz was saying, not for what he was saying.
In other words, Ted Cruz debunked his own argument and still made it look like the opposite of that, because people don't know what fungible means.
If you know that fungible means money can be spent for anything, that was the reporter's point.
The reporter's point is this money went to Iran, it went in their central bucket of money, their budget, and then separately, always separately, and this is an important economics term, completely separately there was a new decision.
What do we want to spend our money on?
Not just that money, but all of it.
What's our budget? So in a real sense, that money did not go directly to malign activities, but it is true they had a little extra money.
So it is only true that Iran is a certain size, they have a certain budget, and if you add a little to it, they've got a little extra money.
It's not so true that that money went right to Hezbollah or something.
But in an indirect way, I guess it did.
Now, this is one of those arguments that people try to shade and they try to win with persuasion.
If you try to win with facts, it's just we released some of their own money, it went into their budget, and then they made some decisions about what to do with it.
We don't like some of their decisions.
Could they have done everything that they did anyway without that money that we gave them?
And the answer is, yeah.
Yeah, they could have. They could have done everything they did without that money.
They just would have had to cut the budget somewhere else or found out another way to make money.
All right. Nobody cared about that.
Now, how about this briefing on how imminent the attack was if we had not taken down Soleimani The Pompeo and Trump had said that it was obvious that we had intel that there was imminent attacks coming, so it's a good thing we took them out because it saved us from those imminent attacks on American people and assets.
But, of course, we the public cannot see the secret, secret, top secret, skiffy-like information, so we are relying on the people who have, the very special people who can see it.
Some of the very special people who can see that information include, much to the unhappiness of the administration, Rand Paul and Senator Lee.
Rand Paul comes out of the secret, secret, skiffy location and says, I didn't see any evidence of an imminent attack.
I was there. I was in the secret skiff room.
I don't know if it was the skiff.
It was wherever it was they did the briefing.
I'm just throwing that skiff in there because it's a funny word.
So he comes out of the meeting saying, nope.
There was nothing in that meeting that said there was an imminent attack.
It was just generalities and stuff I've read in the newspaper.
Who do you believe? Who do you believe?
Do you believe Mike Pompeo, who said, oh yeah, definite information about imminent attack?
Or when he showed all of the information, and others did, to Rand Paul, Rand Paul said, nope, no information there.
I'm looking at it, I'm listening to you, and I'm seeing no information.
Who do you believe?
Well, the quick answer is Rand Paul.
Let me say this.
Rand Paul is rapidly becoming a national treasure.
You need dissenters of that caliber.
He is the highest quality dissenter that we might have in this country.
Although, you know, I'm not going to muddy this up by saying that there are some on the left who are good dissenters as well.
I won't name names. But Rand Paul is a high quality dissenter.
And what that means is that even when I disagree with him, he looks like he's honest.
Even when I disagree with him, he's got a reason, and it's solid, for why he's on the other side.
That's high-quality dissent.
I love it, even when I disagree with him.
Now, somebody's saying, Rubio believed it, etc.
All right, let me get back to my analogy.
You're going to be sick of this one.
Two people are in a room, closed room.
One of them says, look at that elephant.
The other one, in a small room, looks around and says, there's nothing in this room, it's just us.
There's no elephant.
Which one is right?
It's the one who doesn't see the elephant.
Not 100% of the time, but it's a pretty reliable rule.
Hallucinations are positive, they're not subtraction.
The person who doesn't see the elephant is not subtracting an elephant from their environment and not seeing it.
But it is very common for somebody to add an elephant and see something that isn't there.
Seeing something that isn't there is common.
Not seeing something that is there when you're looking right at it.
I mean, Rand was in the room, heard the same stuff, saw the same stuff as everybody else, didn't see it.
Who do you believe? Let's say there are 90 people who see it and one doesn't.
Who do you believe? If it's Rand Paul, I'm going to go with Rand Paul.
Meaning that at least he has a good argument that it's not there.
Now, there could be some subjectivity because these things always are.
Now, here's where I disagree with Rand Paul.
So again, I just love the hell out of the fact that he's so good at this.
Being a dissenter, a patriotic dissenter, let's say.
And I would say an ethical dissenter, too.
Here's where I disagree with him.
It doesn't matter a bit whether that evidence was solid or not.
It has no impact on anything.
The fact that Soleimani had 20 solid years of doing that kind of thing is all the evidence I need that he might do it again.
Do you need more?
Here's your situation.
Solemni has a 20-year record of doing this sort of thing, and he was doing this sort of thing recently this week, and the rate of this sort of thing was increasing.
Do you need more evidence?
Do you need evidence of this specific future thing he was going to do?
I sure as hell don't need any of that.
Why would you need that?
You don't need that. So, of course, we had all the justification we needed to take him out, and the President made the right call.
I think, you know, maybe they tried to bolster their case a little too hard by saying that, you know, it was imminent threat.
Maybe they felt they needed to say that for the public's benefit, but for my benefit, you did not.
For my benefit, his track record told you everything you needed to know about the likelihood of future attacks, and it was high.
That's it. That's the whole story.
The likelihood of future attacks was high.
Without any information about future attacks, that's all you needed.
How surprised are you that the initial reports that the Ukraine airline that went down after taking off from Tehran during the missile attack, or shortly after I guess, how surprised are you that Ukraine has withdrawn its initial opinion that it was a mechanical failure?
Surprise! Nobody.
I don't think we have to wonder if that got taken down by an Iranian action.
Because it happened over Tehran, so it wasn't us.
It wasn't the Russians. It was in the airspace near Tehran.
Tehran? I can never pronounce Tehran.
So sooner or later, we're going to find out that probably some missile defense went wrong, which is horrible.
All right. At the end of yesterday's...
We'll get to this later.
Uh... What do you think of Trump's slurring of his speech during his statement about Iran?
Was that yesterday? Time has just changed for me.
Yeah, it was yesterday. It seems so long ago.
Was it yesterday? It feels like yesterday was so long.
But I guess it was. So when Trump did his statement about Iran, And he slurred some words.
Several words, actually, he slurred.
And it was very noticeable.
You couldn't not notice it.
And I didn't see much reporting about it on the news.
There's probably a little bit. But you saw on social media, people were brutal.
And often in the comments, if you said anything positive about the outcome, the comments would be, oh, but he's slurring his words.
He's obviously losing it.
What's wrong with you?
How can you not see it?
To which I responded, he was literally up all night preventing World War III. And he's in his 70s.
If you're in your 70s and you're up all night, literally, I imagine, I can't imagine he slept.
I mean, could you go to sleep? If you were the president and you had maybe just created World War III, I don't think you go to sleep.
Not that night.
Maybe later, but not that night.
So, you show me a guy in his mid-70s who can stay up all night worrying about personally starting World War III. Personally.
Like you personally.
Hey, looks like you started World War III. If you can get to sleep that night, Well, there's something wrong with you.
You're probably a sociopath.
I mean, you would have to be a sociopath to get to sleep that night.
And so, if he slurs his words during a rally, I'm going to worry.
Because you know he's going to plan for a rally.
You know he's done it a million times.
He's not nervous about it.
You know he got a good night's sleep.
But in this case, you know he did not have a good night's sleep.
And he acted exactly like a guy Well, let me put it this way.
I joked on Twitter that if you're up all night worrying about starting World War III, it would make you the energy equivalent of Jeb Bush by the next day.
And you notice that during his speech, he was very subdued and low energy.
He looked exhausted.
And he should have been.
He should have been exhausted.
Wouldn't you be more worried if he had been well-rested?
I mean, just think about that. Imagine he had looked completely well-rested after an evening in which World War III was on the line.
Wouldn't that be a little more worrisome?
I don't want a well-rested president when World War III is on the line.
I don't think World War III was ever on the line, but the stakes were high.
All right. Have you noticed?
There's probably no better example.
At least so far, of how our republic has shifted.
So we used to be a republic.
I say this a lot.
We were formed as a republic, but social media has kind of taken over the role of what the government used to do.
Now, of course, Trump alone apparently made the decision about taking out Solomon A., but that's one of those secret things that the public couldn't participate in anyway.
And should. But, the decision after that about how to respond, whether to go to war with Iran, etc., isn't my imagination, or was the decision made by social media?
Think about it. Was the decision made by social media, and I'm going to even narrow that more, was the decision to go to war with Iran, or how we deal with them, etc., made by our politicians directly, Or was it made by Twitter and the Twitter users?
I would argue that Twitter made it impossible to go to war.
I don't think the president wanted to go to war anyway.
But in terms of who's running the country, it felt a lot like it was Twitter.
Now, you could say the news organizations are a big part of it, and they are.
But even the news organizations, in my opinion...
Follow Twitter. They follow the dominant voices on Twitter of dominant opinions.
It seems to me that for the big decisions, Twitter is evolving into sort of a national brain system.
In other words, there's almost like a mind forming, which is the collection of all the Twitter users.
And I'm not counting Facebook and Instagram because there are different kinds of platforms.
The political stuff really gets concentrated on Twitter.
So it's the political mind, anyway, of the country.
And Trump...
To his credit, and I say this is a positive, is very tapped into what social media is saying and very tapped into what Fox News and other news are saying.
But I would argue that the news follows social media now.
They break the stories, but how they talk about the stories often gets informed by how people are responding to the stories on social media.
If they want more of this or less of that, they get the response.
So, just look for that.
Look for that, that Twitter has formed a national brain, which is the sum of all its parts, and that it's running the show.
And that our government has to be responsive to it, can still make decisions that the social media doesn't care about or can't know about because it's secret, but the amount of decisions that our elected officials are making, let's say independently, is shrinking, whereas the influence of Twitter as a whole, as a brain if you will, is increasing.
Yeah, Twitter is global but in terms of what I'm talking about, it tends to operate more nationally.
At the end of...
I just have to bring up this topic again because it's blowing my mind.
So if you watched my periscopes from a few days ago, I was talking about how, in my opinion, I was predicting that the future was wearing a ring and the ring would have a little speaker in it that you could talk to your digital assistants and everything.
You could control your environment and that everything was going to go toward a ring.
The very next day...
Apparently, at CES, Amazon announced this ring that works with their digital system and has a button and has a little microphone in it.
And what are the odds of that?
I mean, that's been blowing my mind all day.
Anyway, I just want to point that out.
That was sort of the simulation winking at me.
Let me summarize this whole...
Situation with Iran.
This way. I believe that more and more people are going to be saying what I said very early on in this.
That Salamone was the real power in Iran.
And that the Ayatollah was sort of unable to overrule Salamone because Salamone owned the security services and the entire military and had the loyalty of the troops.
And And my guess is if it's like every other situation where you've got two powerful people, they both wish that they had been the one in power.
I've got a feeling that Khamenei does not have the same hardline instincts as the guy we just took off the field.
And if I had to guess...
I'm gonna guess that he's gonna be more flexible.
Now, there's reporting, I don't know how reliable it is, that Iran has already told their proxies to stand down.
Now, it might be they're only standing down for now, so you don't know that that's permanent, of course, or even that they can control them 100%.
But everything is looking positive.
Everything that's currently happening, Looks very, very positive in terms of Iran and the United States being able to work something out.
But it also has to be said that if Iran had no intention of being positive whatsoever, this would be the perfect time to fake it until they can, you know, just get the current tensions behind us.
So you can't tell yet if they're faking it or it's real, but everything they're doing is consistent with something positive at least being possible.
So I'm not going to rule it out.
And here's the other overriding consideration.
Kameni is 80 years old.
I don't think age can be ignored.
Because when you're 80, you're thinking about your last play.
You're thinking about your legacy.
Does Kameni want to die, or even be in his final year of life, with a situation where he's at war and he's destroyed his own country?
Probably not. Does he want to be at peace, both in his country and with himself, in his final years?
Probably so.
War is more of a young man's game.
And the young man was just taken off the field, the general.
I have a feeling that age alone may have mellowed this guy.
And I think that the death of Solomon A., which I believe he did not mourn, Remember, it's a big tell that they consider us even after we took out the number one or number two guy in their country and all they did is send some missiles into the desert.
That's it. And then they said, we're even.
Does it sound like an Iranian trait to give up Does it sound like an Iranian trait to say, oh, you killed our most important guy.
Eh, we threw some missiles into the desert.
We're even. Does that sound like something they would do if they really, really cared about this guy that we killed?
It doesn't. It's not mind reading.
It's speculation. It's very different.
Mind reading says you know what they're thinking.
Speculation means... You know, you're just doing the odds.
Well, they're probably thinking this, or they might be thinking this, and here's the evidence why I think that.
Speculation is fine. Mind reading, where you're sure you know what they're thinking, is just crazy.
So it's the certainty that's the problem, not the speculation.
Speculation is always fine. So, my speculation is that this might be heading in a positive direction, because Iran is not acting in any way like they give a shit that this guy's dead.
The size of the crowds doesn't mean anything.
It really doesn't. It's the way the leadership responds that matters.
All right, so I think we're adding in a positive way.
Did Khomeini soften when he got older?
Well, we also don't know who was running things when the last Ayatollah was in charge.
So I got lots of questions about that.
And by the way, remember, in speculation, you're only playing the odds.
So if you say to yourself, there was another old person who stayed hardcore until the end, well, that could be true.
We're only talking about the odds.
That most wars tend to be started by...
Actually, that's a good question.
Let me ask this question.
Alright, here's a good question for historians.
Are there any historians watching?
Answer this question. Name an 80 plus year old leader who has started a war that wasn't already started.
There are probably plenty of wars that were underway.
What about Japan's Yamamoto?
How old was he? So, are there examples in history of 80-year-olds starting wars?
World War I? Who was it who was starting the war in World War I? I'm not sure that there was one person who started the war.
Brezhnev in Afghanistan.
Was Brezhnev 80?
Yeah, there are not many 80-year-olds.
I thought you said history wasn't predictive.
It is not. History is not predictive, but it can teach us things.
So certainly we can learn, let's say it's not history, that's more like science.
If you did a study and you found that all the butterflies did this or that, it might tell you something about future butterflies.
If you do a study about all the people of a certain age, and things only happen at a certain age, that's not so much about history, that's more about people.
So what I've always said is that people are people.
But history doesn't repeat, necessarily.
I mean, it could by accident, but not necessarily.
Ho Chi Minh, he didn't really start the war, did he?
So that's just a question for the historians, and for now, I will...
I see people saying World War I, but can it be said that there was one person who started World War I? I don't know.
Alright, it's a question for the historians.
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