Episode 105 - Immigrant Kids, OIG Report, Being Friends With Chairman Kim

Date: 2018-06-15 | Duration: 48:54

Topics

Separating parents from children…bad, yes, everyone agrees What’s your alternative? Why aren’t critics offering an alternative they would prefer? OIG report, clear example of two movies on one screen 500 page report guarantees everyone can see what they want to see My prediction that Comey was being “a patriot” with his Clinton email actions Alan Dershowitz opinion on Comey’s actions contains an element of mind reading Should Lynch have made the decision (proper protocol) rather than Comey? Would there have been worse repercussions if Comey had followed proper protocols? OIG report exonerates Comey, although he broke the rules President Trump’s impromptu meeting with reporters outside White House this morning “Biscuit on nose” analogy for the MSM POTUS handling of the kneelers Trump Foundation investigation Crimea…reasonable questions Why do we care if Russia has Crimea? What do the Crimean people want? If we don’t know…shouldn’t we ask? California split-up,  should they?

Transcript

[0:06]

Pom pom pom pom pom pom pom. Hey everybody, it’s time to come in here and gather around. Make sure you have the beverage. If you don’t have a beverage, ask somebody to get one for you because you don’t want to miss anything. If there’s anybody else in the house, say, “Hey other person, I’m busy right now. Could you bring me a beverage fast? Hurry, he’s about to do the simultaneous sip.” I like to make some urgency about this. You just got so happy. Let’s go with the simultaneous sip. Are you ready? It’s going to be a good one.

Wow, someone just said I slurred my words. You are so right. I am so tired right now. I have not had enough coffee, but I’ll get there. I’ll get there. Let’s start by talking about the illegal immigrants being separated from their children.

[1:07]

As you know, children are being separated from their parents when they come across the border as a group. The parents are being processed separately from the kids, and then the kids go to a facility that looks a lot like a camp or a dorm room. Here are the questions that I find missing in this whole situation. First of all, I think that 100 percent of observers would agree that separating parents and their kids is bad. We shouldn’t pretend that there’s somebody on the other side of that. If the only variable we were looking at, and nothing else mattered, we were just looking at one variable, separating children and parents unambiguously is bad. In that situation, what you would expect is that the people who are complaining about it the most would say, “Here’s our alternative.” Have you seen that?

[2:09]

What exactly is the alternative? Is the alternative to keep them in jails by family? So you’d have special jails where mom and dad and the kids could be in the same jail or processing center or holding center. Maybe jail is the wrong term, but is that the alternative? If that’s the alternative, how long would it take to build facilities like that? Or do we just push them back over the border and just say, “Okay, don’t come back”? Or do we just let them into the country? What exactly is the alternative? Now, I’ve been waiting to weigh in on this because I expected to hear the alternative. Somebody would say, “Separating children from parents is bad. Here’s what we should do instead.”

[3:12]

Where the hell is that? I would like to believe that option B exists. I think the problem with shipping them back is that they just come back. If you just push them over the border and said, “All right, here’s the wall, get on the other side,” wouldn’t they just walk to the part of the wall they can get back and just come back? I don’t know that deporting works, does it? Because if there’s no penalty for coming across the border, why wouldn’t they just try again at a different place? I’m not saying I understand the situation, so let me be as clear as I can. If it looks like I’m giving you an opinion on this, you’re mistaken. I don’t have an opinion because the biggest part of the story is unreported: what the hell is the alternative? Is it just a money problem?

[4:14]

If we had enough money, could we build facilities where the parents and the kids would not be separated? How long would it take to build them? Where would we build them? What were we doing before? The entire reporting landscape on this story is so missing that when somebody like CNN or any of the haters say, “My God, look what we’re doing to the children,” I just say you have no credibility until you’ve reported the alternative. We understand bad things are happening to people—things you wouldn’t want to happen to yourself, things you wouldn’t want to happen to your own kids. Everybody gets that. There’s not one single person watching this story who thinks that separating parents and kids is good if you’re looking at it in isolation. I just need to know the alternative, and then I’ll give you an opinion. Until then, I’m not going to criticize the current method beyond the human part, which is we’d want everybody to be comfortable if possible, if it’s practical.

[5:15]

Anyway, I don’t have an opinion on that because nobody’s given me the alternative and I don’t think any of you know the alternative either. Shall we talk about the OIG report now? By now, all of you are aware of my “two movies playing on one screen” explanation of reality. Boy, do you see it? You see it in some situations far more clearly than you see it in others, and the OIG report is just an ideal test case for how people are seeing the world differently while looking at the same set of facts. Now, what’s interesting about the OIG report is that it’s written very clearly and it looks like it’s very well done, by the way, in terms of the quality of the work.

[6:16]

It looks like it’s a good job. You don’t get to say that that often. You don’t get to say about your government bureaucrats, “Wow, that was good work,” but the OIG report looks like good work. It very clearly lays out what they know, what they studied, and what they found. We’re all looking at it and we’re seeing our own movie. It’s kind of amazing but also very predictable. If you had asked me—I’m not sure I ever offered an opinion to this—but if you had said, “Hey, it’s going to be a 500-some-page report,” that’s all I needed to know. I would have said that means everybody’s going to see whatever they want to see. In other words, when you have that many facts, they’re all irrelevant. They’re all irrelevant because our brains can’t process that much. Since we can’t process that much, we default to a movie we can process. It has nothing to do with the facts because our brains can’t hold that stuff.

[7:16]

But that said, the report is out there and everybody’s having a good time trying to interpret it. I’ll put my spin on it. Some of you may recall that when Comey first came out just before the election and talked about Hillary’s email, people said, “Comey, what are you doing? What are you doing, Comey?” I said that it looked to me like Comey was being a patriot. I said—and fact-check me on this, some of you heard me saying it—I said that Comey was probably taking a bullet for the benefit of the voters. The way I described it was, it would have been a bad idea to withhold information he had because the voters needed to know it.

[8:19]

They needed to know that they weren’t going to prosecute, but they did have a problem. In other words, what Hillary did with the email server was a problem, but it wasn’t a prosecutable problem in his opinion. He wanted to get that out before the election because if he hadn’t… and I hate this, but I’m going to disagree with Alan Dershowitz right now. I hate this. You know that my legal outlook on everything is, “Well, what did Alan Dershowitz say?” As soon as Alan Dershowitz tells me what to think, I say, “Well, that’s my opinion too,” because he just keeps being right. He’s just the smartest, most experienced person in this game. But I read his opinion about Comey and about the OIG report, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t have a mind-reading element to it. I wasn’t expecting that. You know what I mean by the mind-reading element?

[9:20]

There’s a part where you talk about what happened and what we know is true, and then there’s a part where you say, “But the reason he did this was he was thinking selfishly or he was thinking about this.” Alan Dershowitz’s take on Comey is that Comey was trying to protect himself, that he was being selfish when he spoke in public about Hillary’s email before the election, and that what he wanted to do is make sure he was protecting his own reputation. I believe I’m characterizing Alan Dershowitz’s opinion correctly. I hope I am. I thought to myself, “I don’t think that’s in evidence.” I don’t think there was any part of the OIG report that had evidence of Comey’s interior thoughts.

[10:20]

Certainly, if there were, it was not an interior thought about his own personal protection. I believe the evidence showed that he was looking to get what I predicted was the most credible outcome in a very messy situation. Here’s what Comey did: Comey violated the rules of his organization by making a decision without running it through the normal process, which would be to have the Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, make the decision. So he made the decision without her and therefore broke some rules. Now, I said that he’s doing that intentionally. He knows he’s breaking the rule, but the alternative might have been a less credible system. The idea was the Attorney General was too connected to the Clintons, and therefore letting her decide would have created a non-credible situation.

[11:21]

Having him decide was still a credibility problem, but it was less than if the Attorney General had done it. So if he had followed the rules and done what he was supposed to do, we would have had a worse outcome. I actually believe that’s true because if the Attorney General had made any kind of decision there other than, “I’ll do whatever Comey tells me to do,” if she had made the decision, that would have been a terrible situation. It would have been far more trouble. So he broke the rule, he took the arrow in the chest. I think everyone agrees he knew he was doing that. It wasn’t like an accidental breaking of a rule; it was an obvious rule he knew he was breaking. In so doing, he was protecting the credibility of the FBI and the credibility of the election.

[12:24]

He thought—now this part is in public record—like everybody else, he thought that Hillary was going to win. When I say everybody else, I mean the people in this story. So he thought, “Well, we want an election that’s credible, so I’m going to put out all the bad news so that nobody thinks she got elected accidentally,” and that the people actually made a decision based on the best knowledge they had. So you’re saying… I saw in the comments somebody said, “You’re mind-reading.” That’s a fair comment, but let me put some frame on here. In all cases, we’re guessing why he did what he did, but I think the record shows there’s evidence that he was trying to protect the credibility of the FBI and the credibility of the election. I think those things are actually in evidence.

[13:25]

I don’t think there’s evidence that it was all about Comey, that he was just trying to keep his own reputation. In my opinion, the OIG report—I know you’re going to hate this—it kind of exonerates Comey. It doesn’t exonerate him from breaking the rules, and of course he’ll have to answer to that, but in terms of did he do what I would have wanted him to do in that situation, the answer is yes. I would have wanted Comey to break the rules to keep Loretta Lynch out of the decision, still tell the American people what he knew so that the outcome would be as credible as it could be. To me, he made the right decision. Now, that doesn’t mean every decision he’s ever made, I can’t speak to that. Someone said, “You’re blind because you agree.”

[14:26]

Well, I’m putting my thinking out here in public and you can disagree with any component of it, and that might get me to change my mind. Let’s look at the components. Was it better for the public to have the information? Nobody said you disagree with that, do you? I think everybody would agree it’s better we knew what they knew at the time. More information is better; I don’t think there’s any argument about that. That’s the first thing I’m saying. The second thing I’m saying is that he consciously decided to break a rule because if he didn’t break the rule, the credibility of the system would be worse. Now, you could say, “Was that the only thing he was thinking? Was he also selfish?” I’m not speaking to that, but I’m saying that he broke a rule to protect the rules. It’s a very unusual situation. It had to do with the unusual fact that Bill Clinton had been on the plane with Loretta.

[15:27]

When you throw that into the mix, you just can’t let Loretta Lynch make the decision. He took it away from her for the benefit of the FBI, probably for the benefit of Loretta Lynch too—she was better off out of the decision—better off for the voters, and he took a bullet to do it. That’s my opinion. All right, now as to the various people who had terrible opinions about the President, that stuff doesn’t bother me in the sense that they were biased. As many people have said before, it is childish and unrealistic to assume that people in the FBI don’t have human biases and opinions about politics. In fact, I would expect people in the FBI to be more involved in political opinions than other people because they’re closer to it. So I don’t care that they had strong opinions, and I don’t care that many of them were anti-Trump.

[16:29]

But the text messages that said things like, “No, we’ll stop it,” or “We’ve got another plan,” I would caution you: don’t assume you know what that stuff means. Now, it looks the same to me as it looks to you. When I look at those text messages, I think to myself, it’s hard to think of any other way to interpret them other than the FBI agents thought that their own actions could stop the President from becoming a President. But let’s put on some humility for a moment and imagine that we don’t know everything that can be known, we can’t read minds, etc. Just imagine: could there be other reasons that they would say exactly what they said? There might be—not things you like, but not exactly the way you interpreted them.

[17:32]

I would say if I were their legal counsel, I would feel pretty comfortable that I could put another interpretation on that stuff. Let me give you an example. I can tell you for sure that people said to me during the election things like… let me say this a different way. In the context of two lovers talking, you speak to a lover in a way that is completely unrelated to the way you would talk to anyone else. So when someone says, “My God, I think there’s going to be a nuclear war with North Korea,” I say, “I’ll take care of that. I got that.” In fact, I’m pretty sure I actually said that when Kristina and I were thinking about going to Hawaii. It was right during the worst part of the North Korea tensions when they were threatening to nuke us.

[18:34]

Hawaii was tragically one of the closer targets, and Kristina was concerned about this being not a good time to travel because Hawaii might be a target. I’m pretty sure I said something like, “Now, I’ve got this. I’ll take care of it. I’ll make sure North Korea doesn’t follow us.” Now, I don’t know if I used words like that, but it’s the way you talk to a lover that is just different than the way you talk to other people. So if I were Peter Strzok’s lawyer, I would say, “Hey, this is just lover talk. He just said, ‘Yeah, I’ll stop it.’ That doesn’t mean he’s actually working on stopping it; it’s just sort of a way people talk.” So there’s that. Then there’s the “insurance policy.” Here’s the other spin of that: suppose Strzok believed that the Russian collusion story…

[19:37]

Although they couldn’t find evidence in the beginning—I know he expressed skepticism at the start, but this was no longer the start, right? So in the beginning, he said, “I’m not sure there’s anything there.” Later, after he’d looked into it a little bit, he may have thought there was something there. So what if Strzok actually believed that through normal legal means the FBI would find out stuff about Trump that would disqualify him? That’s not illegal. It’s not illegal to think that your investigation will turn up something because of what you’ve already seen. It’s the simplest defense in the world. All he has to do is say, “Based on the hints I’d seen, and the people we were talking to, and the kind of connections Trump had, and based on my own experience, I could just sort of smell there was something wrong.”

[20:37]

“So I was pretty sure we were going to find something that was disqualifying, we just haven’t found it yet.” If you give me that defense and I’m sitting on the jury, I say to myself, “Maybe, maybe not, but it’s definitely reasonable doubt.” That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to imagine what’s happening, and it would also explain those texts. So here’s my caution: don’t necessarily think that my alternative explanations are true, but don’t be trapped in the trap where just because you can’t imagine anything else and another way to interpret those texts, that doesn’t mean there isn’t another interpretation. We’ll see. So I’m not telling you that they’re innocent; I’m not telling you they’re guilty. I’m telling you that your level of certainty based on the texts is probably a little overwrought.

[21:40]

Is that the right word there? Occam’s razor. Somebody’s saying “Occam’s razor.” You may have missed my Periscopes in which I say that Occam’s razor isn’t… do you know what is the simplest explanation for everything? It’s whatever I think. I always think my explanation of events is the simple one, but the person I’m arguing with thinks theirs is a simple one too. So if you’re using that standard, you’ll always be confused because everybody thinks their explanation is the easy one. Do you want an example? Here’s one: how did the universe come into being? What’s the simplest explanation? One word: evolution. One word: evolution.

[22:41]

That’s the simplest explanation. How about you? What do you think? God? Okay, turns out there are two simple explanations. Which one’s more simple? Evolution or God? Well, I’ll tell you, it depends which side you’re on. If you believe in God, and God created the universe and set everything in motion, do you think that’s the simple one? If you think there is no God, you think evolution is simple. It’s one word; I just explained the whole universe in one word. What could be simpler? Or Big Bang, right? Now let’s talk about what else was in the news. Did you see that there was just great television this morning? I caught it live. Apparently, the President wandered out onto the lawn and wandered into the news cameras and had a half-hour interview with Fox News, which was hilarious because it was a thing where you’re training a dog.

[23:42]

You make the dog hold the biscuit on its nose. It has to just stay there and it can’t eat the biscuit, and then you finally say, “Eat it.” I felt like the President was doing that with all the news that was not Fox News. So you have all this big gaggle of reporters, but he spends a half an hour talking to just Peter Doocy, the whole half-hour complimenting Fox News and their great ratings and what a good job they do. Meanwhile, CNN is over there with, “I’m gonna get that biscuit.” Then later, the President wanders into the larger gaggle of reporters and they’re yelling questions. There was one kind of humorous thing he said during the Fox interview that the other reporters heard.

[24:43]

He was talking about Chairman Kim and he said, “You know, he was a strong leader.” I’m paraphrasing, but the President said something like, “He gives his people an order and they sit up straight, right?” When Kim gives his generals an order, they sit up straight, and then the President jokes, “I wish my people would do that.” So he gets into the larger group and somebody asks, “What did you mean when you said you wish your people would sit up straight?” meaning they were implying that he was saying that he wanted to be a dictator like Kim. The President looks at him—and this was like one of the greatest live interview situations—the President looks into the group of all these reporters. In response to the question, “What did you mean about sit up straight?”—literally the least important news item that was happening.

[25:44]

Not only was that the least important thing that’s happened in months, but it was obviously said in jest. Somebody says, “What did you mean by that comment?” and Trump—if you saw it live it was great—Trump looks into the group and he goes, “Who are you with?” and they go, “CNN.” He goes, “CNN,” and let’s out a laugh at him. He goes, “It was a joke.” So not only did he spend a half hour talking to the friendliest news organization, Fox News, while all the rest of them were like the dogs with the biscuit waiting, but when they finally get their chance, an important question to ask the President on the same week that we’ve got big news in North Korea, the unemployment rates are at 44-year lows, the OIG report is just out… what do they ask about? Let me tell you what they ask about.

[26:49]

“What do you mean when you said they would sit up straight? Is that like a dictator thing?” Is there anything else happening this week that might be worth talking about? I can’t think of a thing. You know what we should talk about? Not the end of nuclear, no. Not the best economy ever, no. Let’s talk about posture. Let’s talk about posture. I can’t think of anything else important. [Music] All right, so what else is happening? There’s so much news. I actually had trouble collecting my thoughts for this Periscope because just since the last Periscope yesterday, I feel like so much has happened. I was just overwhelmed. I was actually exhausted yesterday, and I think it was actually too much news.

[27:52]

Did you see the clever thing that Trump did with the NFL kneelers? Trump offered that if they had ideas of who to pardon—people who had been treated unfairly—that he would pardon them. Then he reported today in his impromptu news conference or interview with Fox News, he said that no one has suggested any people that he’s seen yet. Maybe his staff has seen them, but he hasn’t seen it yet. The implication was that it was all a fake protest because the moment he offered to help, they had nothing. Now, here’s the trick: the protesters were not protesting people who are in jail. That was some part of the larger tapestry of things they were protesting, but they were protesting police brutality, which happens before you’re in jail.

[28:54]

The issue was not people unfairly jailed; that was never the NFL’s issue, although certainly there must be people unfairly jailed. There must be plenty of them, and it would be good if somebody could get them out even if it’s under these weird situations where the President asked them for something that was a little off-topic. But he’s now managed to frame the NFL kneelers as people who asked for something and when he offered to give it to them, they didn’t have any suggestions. Now, that’s not exactly what was happening with the NFL kneelers. Colin Kaepernick was not protesting specifically people in jail for long terms with names and stuff. That’s not what he was protesting. It was more about institutional racism; it was very specifically about the police brutality. Does Hawk have anyone?

[29:55]

I actually asked Hawk for some names and he said he’d get me some. Now I have to warn you in advance, so let me tell you what’s coming. I don’t know it’s coming, but it might. One of the things that Hawk Newsome, head of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York—one of the things he tweeted at the time was that when President Trump was pardoning folks, he said that there are some Black Panthers who have been in jail for decades, I guess, and he suggested that there might be some of them who were also candidates for a pardon. I’m not sure if “pardon” is exactly the right term in that case, but I told Hawk… because this is sort of my brand, so to speak, is that I’ll talk to anybody and I will listen to any argument.

[30:57]

In this very specific case, if there’s something that the black community, the African-American community in particular, if there’s something they want that Republicans are not paying attention to or they’re not hearing it right, I would help interpret. Meaning I would help, in particular, help Hawk Newsome get his message out just to make it the strongest possible argument. Because if the strongest possible argument doesn’t persuade anybody, well, at least I’ve done my job. I’ve done what I can do as a team member in America. If members of my team, in this case the black community, want something and they’re not getting it, I’m going to help them at least express it in the most persuasive way. That’s as far as I can go. I’m not a politician, but I think that’s fair.

[31:58]

I would want someone to do the same for me. If I couldn’t make my case in a way that somebody needs to hear it, I would hope that somebody would help me translate and say, “Okay, the best way to phrase this so it’s persuasive for the group you’re talking to is this way.” So I’ve offered to do that, to be sort of a universal translator for people who want to make their case more persuasive. I don’t know if Hawk is going to give me some names that are really pardonable because… somebody just said “no release for violence.” As soon as Hawk offered that, I said, if they’re in jail for violence, that’s probably a non-starter. I think you’d all agree if they’re in jail for violence, it’s probably a non-starter.

[33:00]

But if there’s somebody in jail, just for example, for something that was… let’s say they were… they tagged along on something in which somebody got hurt. Let’s say that the penalty they got for just tagging along, even though they weren’t personally involved in the hurting, maybe it’s two or three times longer than the average. Just hypothetically, if there’s a situation like that, I’ll listen to that. I will listen to that. “Accomplice,” yeah, it depends how much of an accomplice they are, right? If somebody just turned 18 and they made them drive the getaway car, I’ll feel a little bit… the getaway car driver, exactly. I’ll feel a lot differently than if they were actively involved in the crime. Sometimes you have to do something that’s so out-of-the-box just to shake things up.

[34:02]

If you have a situation that’s not working quite the way you want, you see President Trump do this all the time: he just goes and he does something you’re not supposed to do. He just shakes the box until the variables change. Given that the country has this huge problem right now with race division and a lot of people accusing the President of being literally a racist, it’s a huge problem. If there was a way to shake the box to maybe get the variables to line up a little differently, that’s a shake worth shaking. If there is a case of a Black Panther who wasn’t directly involved in murdering anybody or hurting anybody, who got a prison sentence that by today’s modern standards looks excessive—like a fifty-year sentence for something you might normally get ten for—I’m going to look at that and I’m going to look at it seriously.

[35:02]

Because if this President—just hypothetically, and by the way, I don’t think this is going to happen, it seems very unlikely that you’re going to get a Black Panther pardoned—but if it happened, it would be the biggest box-shake we’ve seen yet and heads would explode, but in a good way. So my commitment to Hawk is just as a friend and teammate trying to be helpful. I will make the argument if he gives me some names that are legitimate. If there’s an argument for them being treated more harshly than someone else, I’ll take that argument. If we federally legalize weed, do all the people in jail on weed charges get released? Well, I don’t know that the people in jail on weed charges are there for federal offenses. I would imagine most of them are for state offenses. I’m not knowledgeable enough, but it does seem like that has to be at least considered. I wouldn’t want anybody in jail for something that just became legal; that doesn’t make any sense.

[36:03]

Can Trump spin decriminalized weed as reparations? I don’t think he would; it’s kind of a stretch. Oh, the Trump Foundation—you’re talking about the charity? Yeah, there’s news that the state of New York is moving against the Trump charitable organization. Here’s another situation where we, the viewers, don’t have any facts yet, at least facts that are useful to us for making decisions. Yeah, the timing is very suspect. What are the odds? What are the odds that this case comes up just at the time that the Russian investigation is coming to a close and there doesn’t seem to be anything bad there?

[37:05]

It does seem like it’s intentional that they just needed to fire up something new that’s complicated and sounds bad and people won’t be able to judge it. The fact that it’s been sitting there for ten years and they haven’t moved yet, that should tell you something about it right there. Then there was a report in The Hill, I think it was, that reported that the President asked in some closed meeting, “Why do we care that Russia has Crimea?” and I think part of that was that they speak Russian. I guarantee you that was taken out of context. But here’s what I’ve asked about Crimea—and I don’t know what the President said or what he’s thinking there—you should assume that whenever you hear a story about a “secret source” saying the President said something crazy in a meeting, just don’t believe any of that. It might be true in some cases, but it’s not credible.

[38:07]

I mean, you might as well just make up stuff and try to get lucky because listening to that kind of report is crazy. But if I were in the room, I’ll tell you what I would have asked. Here’s what I would have asked: “So, why do we care that Russia has Crimea?” I have exactly the same question right now. And part of that question—again, this would be all the context that would be removed in order to make the President sound bad—the first question I’d say is, “Is there anybody else like Crimea that we need to worry about that Russia might think they own?” Mentioning that in Crimea they speak Russian is actually a fairly important variable, but it’s not the only variable. I’m sure the discussion was not about that one variable.

[39:08]

When you see The Hill report that he asked, “Why do we care about Crimea? They speak Russian,” that has all the hallmarks of something taken out of context. The larger context being there are a number of variables, and the fact that they speak the same language is probably an important one because it’s one that allowed Russia to say, “Well, they sort of belong in our camp.” I also didn’t see in the reporting: what did Crimea think of this situation? Russia thinks they still own Alaska. That’s a perfect example. Since Alaskans do not speak Russian, Russia wouldn’t have any argument for it. If you said to Russia, “Hey Russia, we need you for a lot of other things in the world, and if Crimea is the thing that’s holding us back, do we in the United States care too much about Crimea?” The first thing I want to know is what Crimea voted.

[40:12]

Somebody said Crimea voted 85 percent to join Russia. You don’t believe that, do you? I can’t believe that anyone would think that Crimea’s vote to join Russia would be an actual objective vote. Of course that was rigged; that seems obvious to me. But it might be true that they still have a majority that want to be Russian. I just don’t know. So if I were in that meeting, I’d be asking the same questions. Like, what did the Crimean people want? Is there something about Crimea that’s special that doesn’t apply to anywhere else? In other words, do we have to worry about Russia trying to absorb Estonia? Is Estonia next? Well, probably not because they don’t speak Russian, so there’s less of an argument about their Russianness. Crimea River. Is Crimea waking NATO up?

[41:14]

Well, that’s really what Trump was pushing on. The standard thinking feels like old thinking, and the standard thinking was that Russia was expansionist and was going to gobble up its neighbors. It sounds like Trump was pressing on that to find out: is there a situation in which they definitely would push to take over a neighbor versus a situation in which they definitely would not? Maybe the language of the population is one of the key variables. I’m sure it was. So if you ask me, it was a perfectly reasonable conversation to have, and if it was in the context of pushing against the experts to see how they reacted, that’s exactly the way you want him to talk.

[42:16]

How many times have we seen this reported where he’d ask a question which, taken out of context, sounds outrageous? But if you put it back in context and you realize he’s talking to his generals and he needs his generals to give him the argument that he’s going to use. Do you remember the one where it was reported where he asked his generals, “Why don’t we use nuclear weapons in Syria?” Do you remember that? First of all, who knows if that even happened. But second of all, if you put me in that meeting, I would ask that question because the generals would say, “Here are the reasons you don’t want to do it.”

[43:20]

Since the President kills too many people, whatever the reasons, you take those reasons, and when somebody asks you, “Do you plan to use a nuclear weapon in Syria?” you say to the press, “No, because of these three reasons.” Asking your generals to give you the defense, which then becomes your defense, is perfectly legitimate for a President to ask in a closed meeting. But if you take that question out of context, you can make it look like he was promoting nuclear war in Syria, which in my opinion is so close to ridiculous that it’s just not believable on the surface. Do you even need to ask that question about nukes? I think you do, because the issue was the small ones. Consider one small nuclear weapon.

[44:20]

Again, I’ll be taken out of context, which is the problem here. I would have asked the question because you don’t know how small you can do a nuclear weapon and you don’t know… would that be a game-changer? Obviously, it hastened the end of the war in Japan at great cost. But if he used a nuclear weapon to take out 40 percent or 60 percent of all ISIS fighters with one bomb, at least ask the question. Now, I’m sure the answer is, “No, don’t do that.” The reason being the cost of that is way beyond whatever benefit you get. Well, how do you know that if you don’t ask the experts? I would ask and I would get their answer, and then that’s the answer I would use when people ask me if I was going to use them.

[45:20]

The Japanese question, of course, is complicated by historians reporting they probably would have surrendered anyway. How was the weed in Amsterdam? I don’t know if I told you the story before, but I accidentally bought a joint in Amsterdam. It’s all legal there—or I think it’s not legal, it’s just tolerated—and I accidentally bought one that had tobacco in it and it just about took my head off. I have never felt like that. I took a couple of puffs and I couldn’t find the ground. I was trying to put it out just on the curb, on the ground, and I actually couldn’t find the ground. I’ve never had anything like that. I smoked tobacco accidentally that was mixed with the marijuana. Noam Chomsky—somebody sent… apparently somebody emailed Noam Chomsky and asked him what he thought about North Korea, the current situation, and he was surprisingly positive about President Trump’s progress. That was interesting.

[46:22]

I’m just looking at your comments here. Can you talk about California? I think you’re asking about the plan to divide California into three parts. That’s one of those situations where I don’t think anybody understands it. In other words, what would that do?

[47:24]

Nobody knows if their part of California would be the good part. It’s hard for me to have an opinion on that. I just don’t think anybody understands it. Well, I guess I do have an opinion: given that nobody understands it, don’t do it. If we can ever reach a point where we actually understood and could predict with some confidence that if we did these things we’d get these good results, then I’d say go ahead and do it or at least consider it. But given that we don’t really know, you don’t shake the box. That’s a good analogy, somebody saying, “Do you just shake the box in California?” Yeah, it’s not a bad argument, but it seems like it would be terribly disruptive in a way that is different than the way President Trump shakes the box. Let me make the difference.

[48:25]

When the President shakes the box, he’s usually shaking our ideas. The thing he’s shaking usually is the way we’re thinking. When you talk about California, you would shake the box to turn it into three states instead of one, but that’s physical. It’s a lot of work and complexity and friction. That’s a different kind of shaking the box; that’s the kind you want to avoid until you have a little more certainty. All right, I’m done for now and I will talk to you later.