All Episodes
June 22, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
57:13
Episode 1035 Scott Adams: Let's Talk About Bolton and Stuff

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: Attacking statues Ivy league colleges with strong connection to racism, slavery CNN Fake News starving for gripe worthy topics John Bolton doesn't seem smart Boltism jargon review ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody!
Come on in. Can somebody tell me what the hell time it is?
Serious question. There's no joke here.
I don't know what time it is.
Can somebody tell me? Is it...
Seriously, what time is it?
Alright, well, I thought I had another hour.
But I'm having a bit of a...
Apparently the time is not different in Arizona.
I've been here for, you know, half a day.
Got here yesterday. So I'm in the free state of Arizona.
Oh my God.
Alright, so true story.
I got here yesterday and Christina said, you know, the time is an hour different.
And I thought, really?
It's an hour different?
And I thought, I didn't know that.
But it turns out it's not an hour different.
The things I don't know.
All right, well. I don't have my cheat sheet with me to do the proper toast, but I'm going to do the, and believe it or not, I have not memorized it.
I can't memorize things.
But I would like to join you in the simultaneous sip.
Will you join me in the simultaneous sip?
All you need is, well, you know what you need.
Cup, mug, glass, all that stuff.
Go. You know, if it wasn't for a message from Joe Manico on Twitter, I wouldn't know that I was supposed to be on here.
Now, it's not exactly my honeymoon, for some of you who know.
I was supposed to get married in May, but of course that wasn't really a good time to get married.
So both our honeymoon and our marriage plans keep changing.
So we're just going to...
I think we're going to go asynchronous.
So I'm wearing the ring and we just decided we're married.
So yesterday we just looked at each other and said, why don't we just say we're married?
We've got a marriage license.
If you have a marriage license and you have rings and you've agreed to get married...
What exactly does the ceremony do?
We're still going to have a ceremony, but we're still figuring out where and when.
Yes, as somebody was answering in the comments, I did vaguely have it in my mind that Arizona was only half of the year.
They had a time zone change, and I didn't know if I was in that half.
However, let's talk about the news.
That's why you're here. You know you are.
So, are you as amused as I am by the statue stuff?
You know, on one hand, you're probably alarmed because, you know, all these statues are coming down and all that, but on some level, does this not remind you of a Star Trek episode?
So, think about the statue stuff, and think about the fact that the country is in something like a civil war.
Between roughly the left and the right, sort of, but not really.
So we've got this sort of weird virtual civil war, but instead of attacking each other, the left is attacking statues.
And you know that the right is going to attack some statues eventually, right?
You know that somebody on the right is going to treat this like a chess game, and they're going to say, hey, The left is taking all our pieces.
They took our Washington, our Jefferson, our Teddy Roosevelt, and they're going to say, well, what statue can we take?
So this morning I tweeted that don't be surprised if the right treats this like a chess game, just like the left is, and goes to take one of their pieces.
It won't be a person.
It'll be a statue.
Now, I cheekily said that the right would be coming for their King.
And I capitalized King.
I capitalized King.
And people still didn't understand what I was talking about.
Now, somebody said, hey, Martin Luther King was actually a Republican or whatever.
None of that matters. None of that matters.
And by the way, I'm not recommending any statues being taken down.
I am opposed to offensive statues.
But I'm also opposed to taking them down by mob rule instead of some more civilized way.
But I also recognize that if the civilized way wasn't working, well, they are just statues in the end.
You know, if somebody tears down a statue that half of the country is deeply offended by and they couldn't get it done in some other mechanism, and they tried, I don't know if anybody tried, but if they tried the other mechanisms and they didn't work, It's just a statue. It's not the hill I'm going to die on.
But you know that the country is always worried about the slippery slope, and if they take down this statue, they'll take down this and they'll take down that.
I'm pretty sure that eventually people associated with the right, or not even on the right, it might be just people who want this to stop, are going to say, look, you can either have it all, or you can stop now.
You see the choice? You can either have it all, in other words, get everything you want, which is that anybody who has a sketchy background can have a statue.
And the right might say, let's play by your rules.
We accept your standard.
So, you would expect that they would take down Martin Luther King's statues.
Now, I'm not in favor of that, obviously.
I'm not in favor of any of the statues being taken down by You know, citizens acting on their own.
But it's going to happen.
And maybe that'll be enough for people to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, maybe we've gone too far.
But here's the thing.
If we allow that what's happening is somehow acceptable because of the historical offense, you're going to have to go after the Ivy League colleges.
Because, as it turns out, as people are saying in the comments, I think Yale is named after a slaver, a slave trader.
I think New York is named after a slaver.
Princeton is named after a dictator, literally.
Harvard is named after a slaver.
Now, in what world would it be okay...
To leave those colleges with their current names.
I think Leland Stanford was a, you know, for Stanford University, I believe he was a massive racist.
And I think that's documented.
I don't think there's any question about it.
So Harvard, Yale, Princeton.
Princeton's different because that's a dictator, but who likes dictators, right?
Now, suppose you had a statue to somebody who had been accused credibly of Me Too stuff.
Could you keep a statue to somebody who was actually kind of famous for Me Too-ing?
If that's the standard, it's got to go.
It has nothing to do with whether you liked or disliked anything else that Martin Luther King did.
Is there anybody who dislikes it?
I mean, if you're talking about the primary message of Dr.
King, I don't think there's anybody in the left or the right who disagrees with the The basic philosophy.
But if we're judging the people in their entirety, standard is a standard.
So we'll see how...
I think the people maybe more associated with the right are just trying to stay out of it.
Have you ever been more impressed by the political right in this country?
I've never been more impressed.
And this is again one of those situations of the dog that isn't barking.
So here's the dog that isn't barking.
Something like 40% of the country associates with the political right, conservatives.
Conservatives have entirely just stepped back and said, let's just watch this, let it play out, see if some of the energy will come out of it, play it cool, you know, load your gun, clean your gun, don't use your gun.
Don't provoke. Just be ready.
Sort of standard conservative thought.
Don't do anything crazy, but be ready.
Very conservative thing to do.
So I'm actually amazed that things have gone as far as they have gone with almost a complete absence of the political right being on the street.
And when they are, they don't seem to cause trouble.
Nor do they seem to be the recipients of trouble.
I mean, maybe some minor skirmishes, but nothing important.
Okay, that's pretty funny.
Somebody said, what about the Clinton Library?
Yup. Yup.
The Clinton Library, it's got to be on the list, right?
Again, I'm not in favor of the library being...
Removed or taken down.
I'm not in favor of any of them being taken down.
But if you're going to be consistent, you kind of have to go there.
So let's see if the country wants to go there.
I'm down for that. Anyway, the reason that this is the Statue Wars is like a...
By the way, did anybody else make this connection that the Statue Wars situation is basically a giant chess game because they are just like giant chess pieces.
They're literally like giant chess pieces.
They're two teams and they're moving their chess pieces.
In this case, the left is capturing a bunch of pieces from the board.
And how simulation weird is it that the statue you would first think of as being like the primary The primary respected statue on the left is Martin Luther King, and his last name is literally King.
And that the right, almost certainly, you should just assume that somewhere somebody is planning to take their king.
They're actually going to take their king.
Now, I don't know if it'll happen.
I don't want it to happen.
But I'd be kind of surprised if somebody didn't take a run at it.
Now, here's why it's like a Star Trek episode.
One of the first original Star Treks, one of the most provocative episodes that just has stayed with me since I was a kid, is there was two alien species that the crew of the Star Trek encountered in which they were embroiled in a war.
But they decided ages ago that they didn't want to have a war with real destruction.
Like they didn't want to destroy their cities and their stuff.
But they knew that you couldn't win or lose a war unless people died.
So they would fight the war with simulations, just a simulated war.
And then when there was a result, the losing team would have to volunteer X number of citizens to be suicided.
Basically, they go into some machine that vaporizes them.
So that everybody is just sort of civilized, agreeing, ah, darn, we lost the simulation.
I guess 40,000 of our people have to go into the suicide machine.
And they decided that, you know, it was just better than regular war.
Because you couldn't get rid of war, people wouldn't ever let you get rid of war.
So if you couldn't get rid of it, what is the most civilized way you could do it?
And that's what the Star Trek imagined, is a civilized way you could have an actual war.
And the reason that it stuck with me so long is that it is logically impeccable.
Meaning that the solution these two alleged or imaginary...
Alien societies came up with is actually a hundred percent better than regular war.
There's no doubt about it.
But it's so awful that you can't imagine it, which is what makes a good episode.
So anyway, in a different way, it's not a perfect analogy, but when I see the left and the right fighting with statues like a giant chessboard It feels to me like that Star Trek episode where we figured out how to fight a civil war without the normal consequences.
It just feels like that.
I just can't get that out of my head.
All right. CNN's fake news is hilarious today because they don't have much to work with.
When the news doesn't serve up good red meat about the president, they're going to take whatever meat they have.
So if CNN does not have, you know, Prime steak that they can chew on to criticize the president.
They'll take hamburger, if that's all you got.
And all they had this week was hamburger.
Here's the first one.
About half of the stories...
I think something...
I'm exaggerating, but by far most of the articles and opinions and stories on CNN.com are about Trump's rally...
Audience size.
Now, is there anything less important than that?
In the whole world, is there anything less important than a campaign was hoping that lots of people would show up?
Some people expected that a lot of people would show up.
But we're in the middle of a pandemic, and here's the part that they never mention.
Have you heard anybody mention this, or is this the first time you'll hear it?
The original rally was going to be on a Saturday night.
It got moved to a Sunday.
How many people who would go out on a Saturday night would not go out on a Sunday night because it's a work night?
And the answer is a lot.
Now, I don't know if that had anything to do with the attendance, but it's a pretty big factor.
I would have gone on a Saturday.
Maybe I had my sitter lined up.
You know, I didn't have any plans on Sunday.
But Saturday was marked out.
And then the president says, oops, that's Juneteenth.
Let's move it to the next day.
Well, not everybody has such a flexible schedule that they can just move it.
So that's got to be at least part of it.
And I don't think I've heard anybody say that.
That's got to be at least 20% of the explanation is that they moved the date.
You can't move a date and expect all the people to show up.
Anyway. So there's no story there whatsoever.
We're in the middle of a pandemic.
You didn't get a good attendance at a place that would probably kill you because people wouldn't have masks in their shoulder to shoulder.
There's just no story there.
But they're trying to make something out of it anyway.
And then the other thing that they're trying to make something out of nothing is when Trump said that we should reduce testing because it's making him look bad.
Now, the fact that Trump's advisors and folks have to tell the media that he wasn't serious.
No, he's not serious that we should plunge the country into a health nightmare of which we fully understand so that he can look good temporarily.
He didn't really ever say that.
I mean, he didn't mean it.
He said the words jokingly.
But the fact that they're making news about something that is obviously a joke.
I mean, what else could it be?
So there's that. So I was looking through John Bolton's interview transcript, you know, because I didn't see it live.
I just wanted to read it because it'd be faster.
And he's the dumbest guy.
I am actually really shocked.
That somebody with his level of intellect as comes through on the transcript.
The only thing I know about John Bolton really is a few public surface-y things, a little bit about his resume, but I don't really know too much about him besides that.
But when you read a long-form interview where he gets to, you know, actually talk and explain some things, my jaw was dropping.
And it wasn't that I disagreed with him so much.
It wasn't that my opinion is different.
It's that he doesn't seem smart.
I don't know if he ever was.
But when I say smart, I don't mean in the book sense.
I'm sure if we did a test of who knew the most leaders of the most countries, he would smoke me, right?
Who would know the history of blah, blah, blah?
He would smoke me. So I'm not saying he lacks knowledge.
Probably knowledge-wise, he's one of the more knowledgeable people around.
So he's very knowledgeable.
But I'm going to walk through some of the things he said in the interview to tell you how stupid they are.
Alright? So, no particular order.
Here we go. Um...
Here's something that I always joke about this as the creator of the Dilbert cartoon.
I can't tell you how many comics I've written, because it's quite a few, on the subject of there's always that one dumb employee who says, but what's our strategy?
Have you been in that meeting?
You'll be in a meeting, and you're talking about stuff, and you've made some decisions, and then there's that smart, dumb person And I think that's what Bolton is.
He's a smart, dumb person.
I think somebody else has a name for that.
But the smart, dumb person in the room says, excuse me, boss, what is our strategy?
And everybody just goes, um...
And they don't know how to answer it because the smart, dumb person has taken the high ground, but it's a fake high ground.
There's no such thing as strategy.
Strategy isn't a thing.
It's a thing we think is a thing.
That's why the smart dumb people bring it up, but the smart people don't.
The smart people know that a strategy isn't a thing.
There are some obvious things that everybody knows you want to do.
For example, does the United States have a strategy?
Well, whether you call it a strategy or not, Would we all agree that the United States wants to be prosperous, wants to have good trade deals, wants peace, wants to influence other countries, doesn't want to be in big wars?
I could go to that list, and it would be a pretty long list, and you would say, yeah, yeah, that's what we want.
Those are all the things we want.
And then you'd say, well, how do you get them?
Well, here's the thing.
If the environment is changing every day and every moment, what's your strategy?
You can't have a strategy when things are changing all the time every moment.
There are some basic things you can do that after the fact you can label them a strategy.
For example, the United States has a pretty high priority on education.
We think it could be even more, but wouldn't you say the United States tries to educate its population?
Is that a strategy?
Kind of. Kind of.
You could say that's a strategy.
But since everybody agrees and it's obvious, do you call it a strategy?
Or is it just something that's obviously good to do?
The problem with the people who say you have no strategy is they're smart dumb.
There's no such thing as a strategy.
And if you had one, it would either be so obvious that it would be, you know, not worth saying, or it would change every five minutes.
So you'd have to rewrite your strategy.
All right, all right. We just found out something new about North Korea.
I guess, you know, change your strategy.
So all the smart dumb people say, my boss had no strategy.
All right, what else does he say here?
And here are the different ways that he says it.
So these are quotes from Bolton from his interview.
There really isn't any guiding principle, like a strategy basically.
There isn't any guiding principle that I was able to discern other than what's good for Donald Trump's re-election.
Now let me ask you this.
Do you think there's ever been, in the history of the United States, I'm just speculating, has there ever been anybody who said a Democratic president, doesn't matter which one, pick your Democratic president, who has ever said, I don't think that president has a guiding principle or a strategy?
Probably every single time.
Probably every time.
My guess is there's no such thing as any prominent leader who does not have people saying there's no strategy.
There's no guiding principle.
There's no strategy. It's like saying air exists.
There's air. It just doesn't mean anything.
Then here's another quote from Bolton.
I don't think the president fully understood all of the implications of what he was doing.
Number one, does anybody understand all of the implications of what they are doing?
No. No.
Nobody understands all of the implications of what they're doing.
What kind of a criticism is that?
How about you? How about you there in the comments?
Do you understand the implications of everything you're doing?
And if you don't, what's your strategy?
What kind of guiding principle do you have for your life?
Again, these are all nonsense words that you can literally just say about anybody in every situation.
And it's mind-reading.
So the bigger problem is that Bolton says, I don't think the president fully understood all of the implications.
Well, it's mind-reading on top of the fact that it's something that nobody could do, understand all of the implications of what they're doing.
And then he says, Bolton says, and I think what he shows is a couple of things.
Number one, that foreign policy and defense policy are not motivated by philosophy, grand strategy, or policy.
Isn't that just sort of true all the time?
Why is this special to Trump?
Let's look at this again.
Do you think that our foreign policy and defense strategy have ever been motivated by philosophy?
Grand strategy or policy?
Okay? Let's take them apart.
Have our defense policy ever been motivated by philosophy?
No. No.
What philosophy?
The philosophy that you need a strong defense so people don't mess with you?
Like what? What kind of philosophy are we talking about?
Is there any country in the world who wouldn't like a strong defense if they had the option?
No. How much strategy do you need to talk about to decide whether you want a strong military?
What kind of philosophy is that?
Or how about the grand strategy?
Is a grand strategy different than a strategy?
And is a grand strategy different than a philosophy?
Is a grand strategy different than a philosophy that's different than a guiding principle?
Yeah, it's all jargon.
If you didn't know how the world really works, in other words, if you had not sort of lived in the corporate world, you'd never been in government, you would easily read Bolton's words and say, whoa, this is a guy who knows what he's talking about.
He's talking about philosophies, grand strategies, policies.
These are things that President Trump never even, he can't even conceive.
He can't even conceive of these smartitudes.
But indeed, Trump is clearly the smarter person in the room.
And I would die on that hill, by the way.
I would die on the hill that if you looked at street smarts, sort of general decision-making, ability to understand people and the world, the ability to look at complexity and figure out how much you really need to work with, etc.
I don't think Bolton is anywhere in the category of Trump.
Say what you will about Trump.
He's a He's several levels above what is indicated in this transcript.
You know, if you take out Trump's jokes and hyperboles and stuff, you end up with a solid decision-making, but you don't get that here from Bolton.
All right, and then the other thing he says, philosophy, grand strategy, or policy?
Is our defense policy not motivated by policy?
This is actually his sentence.
If you break down the sentence, he's actually saying, He doesn't think our foreign policy and defense policy are motivated by policy.
What? What?
That isn't even anything.
You can't even disagree with it.
It doesn't even mean anything.
Yeah, our policy isn't motivated by policy.
Oh, yeah, that's probably a good criticism of the president is that our policy isn't motivated by policy.
I don't think policy is supposed to be motivated by policy.
It doesn't work that way.
Alright, let's see what else he said.
Bolton said, I could see even before my first day when I would go over to talk to Trump and others that this was not like a White House I had ever seen before.
It was not functioning in the same way as any of the three previous presidents I had worked for.
Now, this is a form of criticism that I call the My God, it's different from what I'm used to, and therefore it must be bad.
Is there any criticism in this statement?
It feels like a criticism, right?
Because you make the leap of assumption that's not present.
He's simply saying that the Trump White House operated differently than any other White House.
Is that bad?
I think it's why he was elected.
I'm pretty sure people voted for Trump to get a White House that didn't operate like any prior White House.
It's pretty much exactly what they voted for.
And you'll see this kind of...
This is very much a CNN lefty kind of thing.
Actually, I take that back.
The right uses this all the time.
How often do you see people on the right criticize the left...
But there's no criticism in the criticism.
And it sounds like this.
Well, that's the oddest thing.
Well, that's non-standard.
Well, I haven't seen that before.
Anybody who's criticizing something by its uniqueness or its newness without reference to anything wrong with it is just not somebody you should listen to about anything.
It means they're not even...
Having a brushing association with reality or the truth or trying to convince you or persuade you, it's just noise.
Alright, here's something else that Bolton says.
The President should read extensively the material he's given.
It's not clear to me that he read much of anything.
Is this a true statement?
The President should read extensively the material that he's given.
Would you agree with that statement?
Do you think the president should read extensively the material he's given?
And then Bolton went on to complain that the president would talk to advisers outside the little ring of advisers in the White House and he would get external opinions and that Bolton didn't know where these opinions were coming from so he couldn't kind of deal with them or control them or it caused chaos.
Who's the idiot in the room?
So you've just heard this criticism.
So Bolton says, and let's accept that this is true, because I think this is true.
The president should read extensively the materials he's given.
It's not clear to me that he's read much of anything.
I feel like we've heard enough reporting from enough different people that we could agree he does not do a deep dive on the reading.
Okay? So let's take that as a fact, just for conversation purposes.
It's a fact that the president does not do a deep dive on the details of the reading.
Who's the idiot? Who's the idiot in the room?
Bolton. Bolton.
Do you know why the president should not, this is my opinion, this is my advice, should not do a deep dive on the reading and then ignore his outside sources of information?
Because the people who give him the write-ups are not trying to inform him.
They're trying to manipulate him.
You know that, right?
Everybody in the White House, any White House, every White House, every corporation, every organization, the write-ups that are given to the boss, whoever the boss is, president, CEO, doesn't matter, whoever does the write-up, is not trying to inform the boss.
They're trying to manipulate them.
They're trying to move them to a certain conclusion.
Now they may not say that.
They might show both sides.
But the way things are written is for the purpose of getting a result even if they swear in a Bible that that's not the case.
Nobody can write a long detailed thing Without leaving out some things that maybe should have been in there, emphasizing some things that maybe they think are kind of special.
What is the worst thing that a president should do to be a good president?
Let me read John Bolton's advice.
This is the worst thing you should do.
The dumbest thing you could do if you were the president would be what Bolton says, which is, should read extensively the material he's given.
If I could give any president, any CEO, one piece of advice, it would be this.
Do not read extensively all the materials you are given.
It would be the dumbest thing you could do.
Now, imagine you're the president.
You've got a zillion decisions in the most complicated world that you could imagine.
How much of all the decisions that a president, any president, needs to make Can be kept in any human being's mind and sort of processed well?
And the answer is, not much.
As a percentage of everything a president needs to do, you could pick the most genius president, let's say Bill Clinton.
I think Bill Clinton and Obama, very high IQ people.
You would say, I think you would agree, you know, Harvard educated, whatever, that these are smart people who can hold a lot of detail.
Did it matter? Did the amount of detail that Obama could master, did that translate directly into better decisions?
And if so, can you point to one?
Can you point to a decision that was better because any president did a deep dive on the reading, the reading material, and the background and the historical significance?
No. No, I don't think he can.
I doubt that's ever happened in the history of the world.
The you didn't look at my write-up is what the low-level, smart, dumb people say in every organization.
Every smart, dumb employee of every corporation says, I tried to tell the CEO, but he wouldn't listen.
I couldn't get his attention.
He seems motivated by his own career.
As far as I can tell, he doesn't even have an interest in strategy.
Every smart, dumb, worthless employee says that about every leader.
The only way you could survive the president's job, and I have the least little, let's say, an opening into that world.
In other words, there are probably only a few of you here, percentage-wise, it might be a lot in numbers, but Percentage-wise, very few of you who are watching have had a career or a job that I would say would be as complex as the president's or even as complex as mine.
Because at any given moment, I've got three careers running simultaneously and all of them have thousands of variables.
So I live in a world that is so unbelievably complicated that the only way that I can navigate it Which I do successfully, I think, is that I pay attention to the least amount of information I can.
So the way to survive immensely complicated situations that are just ever, ever complicated, they don't ever simplify, and you've got to find a way to navigate through this all the time and make the important decisions.
You really have to find the smallest bit of information that can get you to a good decision.
So it could be, bring my two advisors in who have different points of view.
Give me ten minutes arguing, and you listen to them, and you go, ah, ah, ah.
Let's say you're the leader.
You're listening to them, and one is, I'm going to pick two people, randomly.
You don't have to agree that these are good characterizations, but just go with me here.
Two advisors come into the room.
One is Peter Navarro, who I think is kind of brilliant, actually.
If you listen to him talk, you don't think he's smart-dumb.
When you hear Peter Navarro talk, you think, I think he's smart-smart.
Smart book-wise, smart street-wise, smart reality-wise.
So Peter Navarro is smart-smart.
So he comes into the office with John Bolton, who is smart-dumb.
And the President's sitting there, and Navarro, and let's say they're on different sides of some topic, and Navarro says, here's my argument, here are the three things you need to know, two of them are really important, Mr.
President, focus on these two things.
The other things are important, but not nearly as important, these two things.
Can the President hold two things in his head?
Sure, sure.
Peter Navarro just broke it down for him.
Peter Navarro did the deep dive.
Peter Navarro, in this example, told him what the two important things were, and then he wants to check this, so he asks Bolton.
Bolton says, nope, totally disagree.
Here are all my reasons, blah, blah, blah, my reasons, and here are my two reasons, or three reasons, why I think Peter Navarro is wrong.
Now what's the president do?
He's got two opinions, and they're opposites.
They're opposites. Well, does the president say, let me go with the smart, dumb guy, or let me go with the smart, smart guy?
How hard is it to agree with the smart, smart guy if the alternative is the smart, dumb guy?
It's not hard, right?
You listen to Navarro's summary and you go, okay, that's what I need to know, all right, and how do I frame this?
All right, got it. That's about as deep as you can go.
If you're the president. Now, the bigger the issue, the more time you want to spend and the more people you want to talk.
So I've highly simplified it.
But if you think being president is a process of reading all the materials, you've never lived in any kind of a complicated world.
Because reading the materials will mislead you and take way too much time.
You need people to break it down for you, to give you the argument the way the news will make it.
To give you the argument the way President Xi might see it.
You can break these things down into pretty simple elements.
And while I do think it matters some of the context, so you know what the other side is thinking, why can't your advisors just tell you that?
Suppose you've got Bolton coming in saying, ah, the president, he doesn't read my materials, and so he doesn't know that, I'll just pick a random example, that he doesn't know that North Korea traditionally says X but then does Y. Why can't he just tell them?
You're in the room. Just tell them that.
Say, you know, president, historically they say X but then they do Y. They've done it seven times.
Why do you have to read that?
Who needs to read that?
You don't have to read that.
All right. What else does Bolton say?
He said...
Bolton said, quote, I thought that it was almost impossible to sustain a consistent, coherent policy over time.
Do you know what situation...
Makes it impossible to have a consistent, coherent policy over time?
Every situation.
Every situation.
Nobody has a consistent policy over time.
They always change.
It changes with the facts.
It changes with a better argument.
I don't know. You should always be waking up every day and saying, did the policy that we were doing yesterday, does that still make sense today?
Did anything change?
Here's something that Bolton claims in his book.
So the interviewer asked, you say in the book that Trump asked General John Kelly if Finland was part of Russia or thought Venezuela is really part of the United States.
Come on. The president did not ask anybody if Venezuela is part of the United States.
If you're dumb enough to believe that, you're dumb enough to believe anything else in this book, which would be a strategic mistake.
So can we agree that there isn't the slightest chance, really zero, There aren't too many things I would give a 0% chance of being true.
Somebody says, are you sure?
Yeah, so what I'm saying is, most things I say, well, you know, 90% chance it's true.
Yeah, 95%, 98%.
If I'm really, really sure of something, I might say 99%.
But let me break with tradition for a moment.
Let me break with tradition.
The President, 100%, did not ask if Venezuela is part of the United States.
And if you think there's any chance that happened, you should not watch my periscopes, because you're not going to understand anything.
There's no chance that happened.
So, if you know it's in the same sentence with Trump asking if Finland was part of Russia, Now, how do you feel about the Finland one?
Now, if the Finland one had been by itself, and that had been the only allegation, he asked if Finland was part of Russia, here's what I would have assumed.
I would have assumed that he was asking if Finland was sort of under the, you know, maybe virtual sway of Russia.
He may have asked something like that.
You know, are they...
Part of the circle or something like that.
Now, I can see that being possible, but did Trump actually ask if Finland was officially a part of Russia?
No. No.
No, I won't put 100% on that.
So I'm going to be consistent.
Can I say with 100% certainty that the president did not say, hey, is Finland part of Russia?
No. He may have said the sentence, but that doesn't mean that he meant it literally part of Russia, as in Putin is the head of Finland as well.
It could have been, you know, are they on their team, on this particular question?
Are they a satellite of influence?
Which, by the way, I don't know the answer either.
Is Finland in the circle of influence from Russia?
I don't know that. Do you?
Can anybody answer that question?
I actually don't know the answer.
Somebody says, many Finns speak Russian, but dislike Russia.
I think you'll see in the...
Somebody says, was he being sarcastic?
Well, we don't have any evidence of that, but you can easily imagine him saying something like this rhetorically.
So... Imagine if somebody says, you know, we could do this in this country.
Oh, no, we can't do this in this country, you know, because Russia has too much control of that other country.
But we could put, let's say, a missile defense in this country.
But we can't do it in Finland.
Okay, here's a hypothetical.
I'm not assuming anything like this happened.
It's for your imagination to imagine something that could have happened that would sound like this but was different.
So it's just hypothetical, just for imagination.
Imagine they were talking about where to put a missile defense thing.
And some people are tossing out some countries.
Well, how about put it in Czechoslovakia, you know, blah, blah, blah, yes or no.
Not Czechoslovakia, but Czech Republic, whatever it is there.
And then let's say somebody said Finland, and then it was rejected.
So you're the president, and you're listening to people debate what country, and somebody says, how about Finland?
And then somebody says, no, no, you can't do Finland.
Can you imagine the president saying, rhetorically, what, is Finland part of Russia?
You see it? What, is Finland part of Russia?
In other words, it would be rhetorical to say, why couldn't we talk to Finland about taking a missile defense or a NATO base or whatever the fuck they were talking about?
So you can imagine lots of ways it could have been interpreted differently.
But we weren't there, so we don't know.
Then Bolton says, but there was an unwillingness on the part of the president, I think, To do systematic learnings so that he could make the most informed decisions.
Was John Bolton actually inside the president's brain?
And he could find out that he was unwilling to do systematic learning.
Maybe he thought that systematic learning was not the way to go.
So he might have been unwilling to do it systematically.
Now what does systematic mean in this context?
In this context, it means that John Bolton wanted to manage the president.
He wanted to be the one who gave the president materials that were approved by John Bolton, which of course would support his side, and he wanted the president to spend a lot of time looking at the materials that John Bolton gave him.
The president decided not to spend a lot of time every day looking at materials that John Bolton gave him.
Is that because the president is defective?
Could be. That's one interpretation.
That's John Bolton's. Here's another interpretation.
The president didn't think that systematically looking at materials from John Bolton would help anything.
And he might have been right.
Okay. And then the interviewer says, but are you saying that all the decisions the president made were driven by re-election?
Here's what Bolton said.
I didn't see anything where that wasn't the major factor.
That wasn't the major factor.
Now, how often is the president's actions...
Disconnected from his reelection or even his legacy.
How often does a president do something that is clearly bad for reelection but good for the country?
Please name all the examples in the comments.
I'd like to see in the comments all the examples historically where a president did something that was clearly bad for reelection but good for the country.
Go. Crickets, crickets, crickets, crickets.
Somebody says Lincoln.
That's a little more complicated.
I think Lincoln had a game plan with everything he did.
Yeah. The atomic bomb?
No, that was good for re-election.
Economic shutdown?
No. The alternative was worse.
There basically is no situation...
Obamacare? I don't know.
I don't think so.
The lockdown... I think every single decision is compatible in the sense that the presidency is pretty transparent.
If the president did something that was just clearly not for the country, I think we would have noticed that.
So, it's a ridiculous thing.
Alright. Here's something else Bolton says.
He continues on.
It was not something that started with a strategy of how do we want to see the threats from China and Russia resolved on arms control, for example.
What does that sentence mean?
Like, what does that actually mean?
It's just jargon, isn't it?
We didn't start with a strategy on how do we want to see the threats from China and Russia resolved on arms control, for example.
Well, I'm no expert on arms control.
But let me throw out some assumptions.
We would like them to build fewer weapons that could kill us.
Am I close?
Is that the whole strategy?
Because I think the strategy of arms control is that we negotiate and try to have fewer weapons.
Is it deeper than that?
Am I missing something? If the president tries to negotiate with another country for arms control, is that obvious what the strategy is?
All right. Then Bolton says, the president over and over again seems to think That a good personal relationship with Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, the Ayatollahs, Erdogan of Turkey, was equivalent to a good relationship between the United States and their respective countries.
And you know what?
Trump's right. Trump is right.
Now, Bolton used the word equivalent Which nobody would use, and of course the president does not think they're equivalent, because nobody would.
To imagine that the president is the only person in the world out of 7 billion who would have this opinion, because you know nobody else would.
Nobody else in the world would think a personal relationship with anybody, even a dictator, was equivalent to a good relationship between two countries.
Nobody would think that.
But Bolton is alleging that the president is the only person who would think that.
Maybe, but pretty unlikely.
But here's what I would say about that.
I think the president has been proven right, not in terms of them being identically equivalent to the country's relationship, but there is no doubt that the president's, let's say, respect for Xi allowed him to negotiate harder.
Now he realizes that that didn't work, but it was certainly worth working on.
If you're going to negotiate with somebody hard, first you make them your friend because you can go harder that way.
If you're going to push somebody on trade or push somebody on weapons or anything else, first treat them with respect so they don't have an irrational reason to hate you.
So the president is smart enough about negotiations that he wants to remove the personal reasons to say no.
Is that equivalent to a relationship between two countries?
Of course not.
Nobody thinks that.
Not the president.
Nobody would think that.
But can you do a good negotiation until you've set some boundaries of respect So you don't want President Xi to be over there negotiating and thinking to himself.
You don't want him thinking to himself, I can't make this deal because I need to save face.
You can't have Putin say, I can't give Trump what he wants because it's going to make me look like I gave in to this guy who's pushing me.
Right? But you could imagine that President Xi or Putin or anybody else, they could make a deal that looked good for their country, and was good for us, and what didn't get in the way is any personal animosity between the leaders, because that would just be a distraction.
So for Bolton not to understand the importance, and I think Trump is a really, maybe he'll be the only president who will ever do this, But he is just smarter about human beings.
It is way smarter to treat somebody with respect if you're going to push them hard.
In fact, if you treat somebody without respect and push them hard, you should expect to get your ass kicked in some fashion, virtually or actually.
All right. Is Netflix going to make a movie based on the Bolden book?
Well, who knows?
Uh, thank you, Becca.
So I'm in Arizona right now.
And it's pretty freaky.
Because, you know, everything's open here.
There are masks everywhere, but everything's open.
so it's a whole different world alright I'm just looking at your comments here it.
Is Hollywood done?
I don't know. When was the last time you enjoyed a movie that wasn't a biography?
I just think movies are dead.
Forgetting about the political correctness aspect of movies, You know, that's a small pressure on some of the classic movies, etc.
But... No, I'm not playing golf.
Sorry, I just lost my train of thought.
Pascal says a digital thing is coming.
What's a digital thing?
Alright. Any statues taken down in Arizona?
I don't think that's going to happen in Arizona.
It's a pretty well-armed state.
So we'll see. Somebody says Hollywood is done.
I think Hollywood might be done.
You know, if you look at the Me Too-ing, I don't know how Hollywood could survive all the Me Too stuff.
Somebody says they like Marvel movies.
You know, I did like the Super...
Super powers types of movies, but they're kind of old.
Am I writing another book or your wedding vows?
You know, most of my extra energy is going into the locals platform, so I'm putting my extra energy and content there, and there'll be more over time.
I'm just sort of working it out over there, what that's going to be.
Export Selection