Touching the Fence: NATO, Congress, Trump TV, and the Psychology of Consequences

David: You know that moment when everyone can see the rule, but nobody's quite sure it still has teeth? a boundary isn't just the line somebody wrote down. It's what happens when somebody crosses it. Russia touches NATO airspace for forty two seconds. Congress votes on war powers but stops short of forcing the issue. the White House decides who gets to watch. Different stakes, same learning process. Everyone's finding out which parts of the fence are actually live. This is Shrink the Nation. Let's go. Alright, hey, welcome back to Shrink the Nation. I'm David. I am a board certified psychiatrist, over twenty years in the military. And tonight I am having myself a small pour of the Ebom William's bottled in bond.
Rob: it's a good one.
David: It is. I'm gonna go with that and see how the rest of my evening goes.
Rob: hey, it's Rob, also board certified psychiatrist, also military experience. different from David. I'm also old. So I've got whatever he's got, probably add a decade and a half and you got me. Maybe just a decade.
David: Alright. So Robbie, Russia flew a military helicopter into Poland this week. not for an hour, not twenty minutes, forty-two seconds. Got about three hundred meters across the border and then back out again. Poland's military decided to look at this and basically said, Yeah, we think they're testing us, which immediately made me think of Jurassic Park. So kind of like that Raptor enclosure,
Rob: it
David: only NATO.
Rob: It flows. It flows.
David: Yeah. So because Raptors didn't necessarily think that they could take out the whole park, they just decided to walk up to the electric fence, touch it, get shocked, move twenty feet down, touch again, figure out which parts were actually live. Now the important caveat, Robbie, before you give me that look, we know
Rob: Uh-huh.
David: we know where the helicopter went. We don't know what orders were given by Moscow. So this could have been deliberate, it could have been a navigation error. Poland's interpretation, though, and Poland's interpretation is Poland's interpretation. But it does give us a useful question for everything we're going to talk about tonight, which is how do people, organizations, and governments learn where the real boundary is? Because the written rule is one thing, Robbie, But what happens when somebody crosses it is what actually teaches behavior. and this one is actually Robbie's idea, so for once I'm gonna let the old man the room explain my metaphor.
Rob: Yeah, I'm not even gonna try. you and your metaphors. actually on this one though, I'm gonna say it flows. it isn't terrible. however, there is one important caveat that electric fences don't get frightened, don't get confused, and don't shoot back. so there is an element here of probing, but there's a little more danger associated with it because we are talking about a human element on the other side. So I read about this and this isn't the first. earlier this month some Russian drones came into NATO airspace and there have also been talk for the last six weeks or so that intelligence states that Russia is considering challenging NATO for reasons that are not entirely clear. my gut instinct on that, which usually requires additional analysis because as it turns out, my gut doesn't have much nerve tissue or a brain. My gut instinct is why would a country who cannot even defeat Ukraine, who has messed up a war in which they were clearly the superior military, or at least they had superior military power, superior military numbers. They cannot defeat Ukraine. Why would they pick a fight with NATO? And it struck me as irrational. My sense is, though, that if we talk through this, there might be a rationale behind what looks to be irrational.
David: Yeah, I think though the question assumes that the objective is to fight NATO when maybe the objective's a little bit smaller. So what if they're just looking for information and they're looking for how quickly does Poland react? Like who scrambles? Who calls them out? Who condemns it? Who ends up minimizing this? Does NATO end up behaving as one alliance? or twenty something governments have an argument in some sort of group chat about this. So you don't necessarily have to believe that you can beat NATO if you're Russia to think that you can learn something from touching that fence.
Rob: Exactly. And that's where we're getting to what felt like an irrational activity may have a rationale that is not unsound. so in a non human system, there are hard and fast rules. if we were designing this as a video game, enemy incursion into NATO. it triggers what is it, Article five of NATO? so if we were designing a video game, the rules basically say that if there is an attack on one, there is an attack on all by article five. And most famously, the only time that article five has actually been called into action was after the attack on the World Trade Center. So it resulted in NATO mobilizing to support us in Afghanistan. And by the numbers, even though the numbers of soldiers that they contributed were smaller, their countries are smaller. some of the nations lost statistically a higher percentage than we did in that conflict. So that would be the video game idea. you cross into NATO airspace, you will be met with overwhelming response. This is not a video game though. this is a human system, and human systems are a hell of a lot more complex and a little less predictable. So what would rationally say, look, if you can't win a war against Ukraine, you don't go poke a bear. That would be stupid. but what they are doing is a controlled incursion into NATO airspace, a controlled threat. And really what I think they're trying to highlight is that the United States is not with you. that's what I think they're trying to do. They're trying to basically drive that wedge that this administration has begun. a little deeper and make it a little more known to the our NATO allies that we're not going to support our treaty. And there is rationale to that. And it reminds me of von Klausowitz that war is politics by other means. This is a political end. from a psychological standpoint, this is achieving a political end That actually would put Russia in a more powerful and a more positive place, even though it is a risk to them. They are taking the risk that the United States is not going to support NATO. they're taking the risk that Poland didn't shoot that helicopter out of the goddamn sky. Poland certainly has the capability to do so.
David: I guess what's actually kind of interesting from that perspective would be that the greater risk wouldn't be that Poland shoot the helicopter out of the sky. I think the greater risk is that it doesn't, because if you're Russia from that perspective of trying to prove that the US isn't with you, I think having a twitchy pilot come in that you don't control and shoot down the helicopter three hundred meters in, forty seconds in, as they're trying to leave, would be something we'd be much more likely to condemn Poland for, not Russia. You'd almost say, Who are we gonna fault in that circumstance? And you'd probably fault the pilot who shot down the helicopter that they can easily claim, well, Their navigation got screwed up, they accidentally entered the area, they were leaving it, you shot them down. That's an act of aggression on your part, not ours. To which point then the US would almost certainly say, Calm down, Poland. Calm your tits, right? Not this is Russia's fault because they've been touching the fence everywhere.
Rob: never witnessed them, but I hear Poland has beautiful breasts.
David: The entire country.
Rob: that's what I've heard. I I've actually never been to Poland, but
David: It's the pierogi that does it, yeah.
Rob: Yeah. When you eat enough of it the potato cheese ones, yeah, they'll they'll they'll
David: Yeah, a potato cheese pasta dish. I think that definitely would lead to some fantastic
Rob: Yeah, yeah. That
David: breasts.
Rob: yeah, talk about carbloating. Holy shit. you make a good point that's where things get so complicated incursions into other nations airspace are not uncommon. we actually end up having Russian aircraft and Chinese aircraft push into our airspace in Indo PACOM. I won't say regularly, but it certainly has happened in the last several years. people hear about these exercises? Like just recently we minimized an exercise that we had planned in Korea. So why do we do these exercises? Well, there's two reasons to do exercises. One is certainly the training value that you're training your soldiers to do something that under normal circumstances you don't do. The other value when you're thinking about sort of geopolitics and the potential of war is that a mass mobilization for training looks very much like a mass mobilization for invasion or for war. So, the Chinese are really good about this, that they are constantly doing exercises in the Strait of Taiwan. They do them all the time, to the point that at some point, one could theorize, it's not an exercise and it pushes forward. However, from the Taiwanese standpoint, they won't know when it's an exercise and when it isn't. And if the Chinese do this over and over and over and over again, it desensitizes them to preparation. So when they push into the NATO's airspace on one hand, could it be Pilot error, I suppose. we hear about pilot error. I will say that between technology and the training of most pilots, that seems less likely to me. it's possible. it's an excuse that could easily be used. however, these incursions into NATO airspace could also get us to the point where we're just like, all right, fuckers did it again, and start to not take it as seriously, at which point it's the one that's actually serious. So desensitizing us to these pushes into NATO airspace. and sure, I wouldn't want to have been that pilot. they were the sacrificial lamb. if Poland would have had an itchy trigger finger, the likelihood would have been that they would have been called out for being too quick on the trigger. And it probably would have worked in the Russians' favor.
David: Yeah. but that brings up the potential for the rules of engagement anyway. So just the fact that you can respond doesn't mean that the correct decision is to respond maximally at that point, which is really common in the military, something that we see especially in war. Just because we could do something doesn't mean we should.
Rob: yeah, you're right. Rules of engagement are established in order to transfer sort of a political thing down to the lowest common denominator, which is the eighteen year old with their finger on the trigger. And those rules are established to determine when you can use lethal force, when you can fire. so Like, in Iraq, we had some pretty well developed rules of engagement, particularly during that time where we had transferred from taking over the country to winning hearts and minds. So we went from a war standing to something that we called coin doctrine. So coin stood for counter-insurgency. The counterinsurgency doctrine was we are not fighting a war. We are trying to quell an insurgency, a popular uprising. And in order to do that, you have to appeal to the average person. You have to win hearts and minds. And that hearts and minds is more of a Vietnam terminology. We called it coin. General Petraeus, was the author of much of this doctrine. rules of engagement got pretty tight. now here's the problem. The tighter your rules of engagement get, the more risk you incur. So one of the things that we've seen recently is Pete Heggseth talking about rules of engagement that we were no longer going to have these rules of engagement that were basically not aggressive enough. And as he was talking, as an Iraq vet, I actually could empathize with him because I do recall the rules of engagement being so restrictive that you were in a convoy and a vehicle was speeding at you and you had to do like 13 things to include firing warning shots before you could act the whole time knowing that you might have a thousand pounds of high explosive barreling down on you. Now, when you're 18 years old and you're the rear vehicle, you're on the 50 cow and the rear vehicle on a convoy, having the potential of, several thousand pounds of high explosive coming barreling down the road at you. is Psychologically tough. So are you going to go through all the steps? so you know, I'm sure, I'm absolutely sure that those I don't know them. I've actually served with folks from Poland, I've served with folks from Latvia and Estonia, not in those environments though. So I was not in their home country. I do not know what their rules of engagement are, but I guarantee you they have a standing set of orders that establish their rules of engagement for situations such as this.
David: What this actually reminds me of is a lot like working on an inpatient psych And you have this standing order set.
Rob: The high explosive?
David: the testing boundaries. but you have this standing order set that for most patients when they first come into the hospital overnight or whatever, and you have certain medications that can be given in these emergency situations. it's not every patient, but there are those few patients who sort of like to test the water and see what they can get away with before they start getting medications. but more specifically which medications are on that standing order list and what they need to do to get the ones that they want. it would always be a pep peeva mine, you'd come in the next morning after a patient was admitted or whatever, and maybe it was somebody that you saw all the time. But you would go and look at like, okay, what medications did they get? And you would see that there was an order for what we call a B fifty two, which is Benadryl, Atavan, and Haldol, and you would see that that person had received Not the B fifty two, but they'd received oral Atavan. And you would say, wait, what happened? why did this person just get one of the medications and why was it given to them in pill form when you normally give these medications as an injection if they're very psychotic or they just can't be controlled and they're dangerous to themselves as an others. And the nurse would say, well, when we told them that we were gonna give the injection, they calmed down enough, but they were willing to take the one pill. And you're like, So you basically just gave them Atavan? I didn't order Atavan, I ordered medications if they couldn't calm down, but they calmed down enough. And so we see that all the time. It kinda got to the point where I just stopped putting the Adavan in there because I knew that some patients just really wanted the Advan and they would do anything to get it, including acting out when they certainly didn't need to.
Rob: Yeah, in general, relax, I'm just provoking you has a fairly poor track record as a de escalation tactic. so yeah and they are. they're provoking NATO.
David: interesting thing about
Rob: Looking for the Adam.
David: Yeah, exactly they're just looking for the Ataban. How do I get the Ataban? so the interesting thing about deterrence is that eventually written rules aren't enough. Somebody has to believe that crossing that line will actually produce some kind of consequence. And that does get
Rob: Yeah.
David: much stranger when those institutions that are responsible for enforcing the boundary isn't NATO. It's Congress. Because this week we also got to watch the US argue again about who actually owns the decision to keep fighting war in Iran. So last week we didn't really get a chance to talk about this, but Congress ended up leaving town while we still have a war going. there was a Republican member who was trying to force an impeachment vote against the Secretary of Defense, and the members were complaining that they weren't getting satisfactory answers from the Pentagon. And then today, right before we started to record. The Senate actually gave us another piece of information. They voted again on whether the president should have to end the Iran war unless Congress actually authorizes it. So that vote failed forty nine to fifty, which means that this isn't a story where Congress had no opportunity to act. They did. Congress just keeps getting opportunities to define the boundary. So the question is what is everyone learning from what Congress is actually doing?
Rob: is nothing a reasonable answer on this one? I think what we're seeing is that this distribution of responsibility is happening so evenly that nobody has any. it's kind of like what we were just talking about. So restraint is ambiguous. so what they're doing is ambiguous. they're putting no boundaries on this. They're certainly not exerting their constitutional role as one of the checks and balances in our government. so what we're left with, we walk away from this still not really knowing what to even call this thing, even though by all reasonable observation, it's a war. Congress has a role in it, but they're refusing to take that role. Now, are they refusing to take it up because they don't want the political responsibility? or are they refusing to take it up because they don't want to buck the administration? this is right along party lines. this is falling out exactly Republicans one side, Democrats other side. why aren't they exerting any of their constitutional authority?
David: this particular vote was four Republicans siding with the Democrats. it was Collins, Murkowski, Paul, and Tillis all voted with the Democrats, except for one Fetterman who voted with the Republicans. And that was you would say the deciding vote as to making this fail. there's been fourteen times that Congress has considered an Iran War Powers resolution since these hostilities began. There were two that were approved. the House voted six times with three votes favoring an end of the conflict. one resolution actually cleared both chambers, but the White House didn't do anything, just didn't change its policy. what's interesting here, coming from the perspective of just being frustrated by that, it's not that Congress isn't doing something because they are doing something, they're just not doing anything that would actually end this conflict, even when both sides agree. that it should be ended because they don't take it any further than that. it's like exercising your right to limit the executive branch, but not realties. Like we're gonna tell you that you can't do this thing, but if you don't, whatever. or we're gonna just make it to where we don't actually have to vote on it by leaving early. it's really confusing, I think, if you're if you don't know what's going on, or even if you do.
Rob: So yeah, I guess the equivalent of yelling at your three year old, to stay out of traffic, but not actually making a move to prevent them from running into traffic. at the end of the story, the kid gets hit and you can say, Well, I told him not to. And it's sort of what we're seeing. I mean that this is really classic avoidance and avoidance does have a purpose. It does relieve anxiety. and the ones who are voting to do something, they can say, well, we said stop it. But, do they really want to actually put a hard stop on this? Because putting a hard stop on it is actually going to result in an outcome in the long run they'll be criticized for Iran wins is basically putting a stop to this. Iran takes control of the Strait of Hormuz. We walk away with egg in our face. It's not a problem they created by any means. They didn't ever get to vote on this. in fact they've been largely kept in the dark about what's going on. This was started Unilaterally. so now you can vote. You can say, I voted to put an end to it, but functionally, the vote that would really count, which would be, taking away the dollars, no they're not doing.
David: what this reminds me of, is the show Severance, where everything that goes on inside the building is completely separate from everything that goes on outside the building. So there's a House Congresswoman named Ashley Hinson, who is running for the Senate in Iowa. And she's voted Six times against the House efforts to curtail Trump's authority, including a week before she started to complain that this war needs to end quickly. who authorized this when she was talking to her constituents about gas prices? And so it's like this legislative any votes on these war powers To keep them going. Then she steps outside, it's campaign Audi time. She gets off the elevator outway and says, Jesus Christ, who keeps authorizing this war? Gas is so expensive. And it doesn't really prove that she's lying in either role. It's just it's funny because those different environments really produce very different selves for this person.
Rob: when you say it doesn't prove she's lying in either role, she's clearly lying in one of the roles. I don't know which role. I don't know if she's lying in the outie role or the any role. I don't know. But she's lying in some role and really, functionally, she's treating her constituents as morons. she goes and does something that she realizes most of them are not even gonna look up.
David: I think that's it though. I think you were calling out what the reality is, is that as you're campaigning on something, you're expecting the people who are there supporting you to just trust the thing that you're saying and not actually go and check you. Because people don't. I think we've seen this over and over and over again that the reality that people are looking at right now is the reality that they're gonna accept. And we live in this echo chamber of news and information that as long as the news I'm reading doesn't call out the person for the bad behavior. I'm gonna assume that they're correct.
Rob: this is a ridiculously obvious scenario in which the quote unquote private, it's not private. the record is public, but there is a understanding that the average individual is not looking this sort of thing up. But I have seen this my entire life where someone is voting one way and then they go out and tout what they're doing. and there's a disconnect there. And it absolutely is relying on, low information voters. And actually I wouldn't even say that. you could be a moderately reasonable information voter and you just don't know this one. just from a human standpoint, when someone looks at you and tells you something, most of us want to believe them because it's almost unthinkable that they would lie in such a blatant fashion and she is lie in a blatant fashion to her constituents.
David: But isn't it kind of beautiful in some ways when you think about it psychologically? Because the place that it puts you and I is that we cannot definitively say where she's lying. We can only call out the fact that what she is saying is not Equal across the board because she is saying this war needs to end. These gas prices are too high. She's not saying I never voted not to end the war. She's not saying that. she's saying the thing right now that we all kind of agree with.
Rob: Yeah, so if she gets called out on it, I guess she could say, Well, it does need and gas prices are too high. there's still, a lack of internal consistency there. it smacks
David: Yeah.
Rob: of dishonesty. It has the scent of dishonesty. Smells like bullshit. I don't know if it's a big steaming pile of bullshit, but it smells like it. I'm probably not gonna step in it just to be on the safe side.
David: There's something kind of brilliant about what she's doing and how she's doing it at this point in time, Because you and I can look back and see that she has voted six separate times not to end the war in Iran. But now Congress is on a prolonged break and they're not going to come back until after the election. so now in her role as a campaigner, she's saying this war needs to end. But she doesn't have an obligation at that point or even the ability To demonstrate that what she's saying on the campaign trail is now her new truth. Because we can't say that she's lying. and we have no way to prove to anybody that she's lying or that she's telling the truth, because there's not gonna be a vote until after the election, at least, for her to prove that, well, that's what I meant. So if you believe the war needs to end badly enough to campaign on ending it, what obligation do you have to use the office you currently hold to try to end it? 'Cause she is still a city congresswoman. She thinks the war needs to end.
Rob: Yeah.
David: so how do you and I say that she's lying if she changed her mind? it's a genius move. It's brilliant. you'd almost bet that as they were walking out the door a couple of days early before the Heg seth vote, to say, All right, team, let's get out there and campaign on ending this war. Because you can't. It's too late. there's not gonna be another vote until after the election. And the next vote after that's two years away. Nobody's gonna remember that you campaigned on one thing and then didn't do it. I'm watching a very frustrated Rob right now try to wrap his brain around the fact that they fucking got
Rob: No.
David: you.
Rob: I know, I mean you're highlighting a potential or not a potential, a weakness in our system. this is the thing that has perpetually frustrated me. It frustrates me about this administration, it frustrates me about politics, is that most of us do live by a code. Now it's not to say that we have written it down or whatever. but a vast majority of people believe in telling the truth, being internally consistent. when we fail to be internally consistent, it causes a certain amount of angst because it is important to us on an individual basis, we do tend to just naturally assume it's important to everyone else. So when someone tells us something, we do believe it. It's a natural human thing. you don't expect to be lied to. the only people I've ever met who expect to be lied to are people who are liars. because that's what they do. And it doesn't occur to them that other people don't do it. It's just the vast majority of people are not inherently liars. and when you are on a public stage, it amplifies it. So theoretically, if you're a fundamentally honest person, put yourself in front of one person, you'll be honest. Ten people, the drive to be honest is going to be even higher. 100 people, thousand people, 10,000 people, the drive to be honest, because what you're gonna lose, you're gonna lose it in front of more people. So if you're willing to play this game, yeah, you've got an advantage. She's got an advantage. she's willing to be internally inconsistent. She can live with that, apparently. it doesn't create any angst in her, or maybe it does, but she's still willing to do it the means justify the ends. And it's frustrating. I mean it's incredibly frustrating.
David: so what does Congress now then learn from testing this boundary, which is our job is to
Rob: Well I I think
David: yeah.
Rob: The last fifteen years, maybe even a little longer, Congress abjugated their responsibility and they've learned that it doesn't affect their ability to get reelected. they've learned that they can actually go out and campaign on Congress is a do nothing Congress, send me there and I'm gonna make a difference. and they can participate in the do nothing congress and we are at a place where and we've talked about this multiple times but our legislative branch is just not engaged in doing its job and it's truly interesting that part of the Constitution when they were building this thing they built it on this presupposition that these branches would protect their own power. They weren't expecting humans to be perfect. That's why we have checks and balances. What they failed to maybe anticipate was a different kind of power. The power is getting re-elected. The power is being close to power, to being in the room where the decisions are made. it's not actually exerting the authority granted to you by the Constitution. and we've talked about this, that they've become internet celebrities. And it's the platform in which you can get attention. you can get likes and you can get followers and all that without really having to do your job because doing your job puts your job at risk. Taking a stand, puts your job at risk. Being honest, puts your job at risk. bucking your party, puts your job at risk. So they've learned not to. it's absolutely operant conditioning, psychologically. they've been conditioned that if you want to keep your job, this is the game you play. Unfortunately, it does not involve actually doing the hard job of Congress, which is opposing the president. when the president became the absolute one hundred percent leader of his party, I don't know. but that's where we stand right now.
David: Beautifully stated. So there is another way that institutions avoid confronting uncomfortable outcomes. And so instead of changing the decision, you change the definition of success. And that brings us to maybe my favorite psychological mechanism this week, because it explains everything from government bureaucracy to hospital administration to why every terrible video game player thinks they carried the team. So organizations need metrics. You cannot run ICE, a hospital, a military unit, or even a McDonald's entirely on vibes. the problem is that the thing you can count isn't always the thing you actually care about. So once leadership starts rewarding numbers, human beings become really, really good at producing that number. So ICERS reached record levels this summer. Deportations did not rise proportionally. So Reuters recently published an internal look at another DHS operation where officials were literally being given numerical throughput targets while searching voter roles for non citizens. what happens when the scoreboard becomes the mission.
Rob: yeah, so you and I we've spent a life in medical systems and something that I often say to medical students and residents is that if you want to understand the health system, understand how the health system is funded. because what ends up happening is the funding streams dictate how we function. And This is connected, trust me. I'm gonna work my way there around the mountain. but if the system decides it's going to pay for certain things, guess what things become the priority in that system? Guess how the system gets built, gets focused on. So the payment system is there, That's all of a sudden becomes the priority illnesses that we treat. In this case, the payment system, quote unquote, is arrests. So when you incentivize arrests, then the individuals on the other side making those arrests are going to do a very predictable thing. They're going to maximize their arrests. How do you do that? Well, you go to find the people that are the easiest to find. are they the ones that need arrested? No, because they're easy to find. They're the ones that are actually following the rules and doing the right things and putting themselves in the right lists and whatever, whatever's asked of them. They're doing it. That makes them easy to find. Are you gonna go get the ones who are the most dangerous? No, you're not gonna fool with that. That takes time, that takes effort. that's going to actually reduce the number of arrests. So by putting the incentives on a singular number, arrests, you're incentivizing arresting, probably, the wrong people, which then translates out into the fact that actually deportations have not equally risen because as then it turns out they work their way through the legal system. Yet another example of how we're dumping on the legal system. And the legal system says, no, we're not doing this.
David: the interesting thing about increase in arrest and what you draw attention to is that law enforcement, whether it was C V P or ICE or your local police department or whatever, they've always been trying to go after the really bad criminals, the rapists, the murderers, all that, that mission was always there. whether they were legal citizens of the United States was irrelevant because you had a murder on your hands. Let's go get that guy. But what changed, seemingly, was that you had a president who ran on this idea that all of the non citizens were also rapists and murderers and everything else. And so when he wins the election and he has been promising that There's millions of people who are murderers and rapists and all this, and we're gonna get rid of them. And says, I want to see millions of people arrested and deported. Well, these agencies, they were already trying to get those people. And it turns out, Robbie, that it's actually kind of difficult to find people who are guilty of these crimes. Because they don't want to be found. Weirdly enough. And so they were already using their resources
Rob: Stunning.
David: to go after them. so what do you do instead? You incentivize a number and just like you said, it shifts their priority to just fulfill those quotas, to fulfill those numbers.
Rob: So I used to see this in the command world. the art of determining what your Cub commander update brief was going to consist of. So determining which questions that you were going to ask, because the reality is you meet on a monthly basis with your Dan Trace units, they present their metrics. You have to select which metrics. are important. Now, part of that is the metrics coming from on high. So your boss, in division commander is asking for certain metrics. So you need those, and then you get to come up with the metrics that seem to be important to you. But it shifts the priorities of everybody when you're asking for certain numbers. And I cannot tell you how many times the act of asking for certain numbers ended up shifting the priorities so much that it got the way of actual conducting the mission, the job of wartime readiness. so yeah, you have to be cautious what numbers you're gonna look for because guess what? Your people are gonna give them to you. They're gonna make those numbers happen.
David: Well, I think anybody who's been in the military has had the experience of the computer based trainings, C B Ts, after twenty plus years, I can't say I've done a lot of C B Ts In the amount of time that it says you have to take to do them, because you can usually just kind of get through them quickly. You've done them a million times. you know what they're gonna ask, and you know the answers. So you go through them. But every commander, what do they care about? do they care that your unit can actually do the function? Or do they just wanna make sure that there's a nice little green bar? under that category. And it's the green bar. And it's kind of funny you look at medical especially because there's this annual physical health questionnaire, the PHQ, that we'd have to do. And In order to complete it, you might need medical to actually have some involvement with it and take a look at it and do something with it. And when you're in a medical unit, what's your priority? Your priority was always to make sure that all the other units had their PHQs completed, you were definitely a limiting factor in whether or not they could be completed because you had to do something with them. And so What happens? the head commander comes in and has all the other lower level commanders looking at a PowerPoint and they have the numbers on it didn't matter if medical if their PHQ nine completion was it even have to be the lowest one. If it just wasn't the highest one, it was like super embarrassing. To the medical commander, how are our PHQs so low? And you're like, Well, sir, we're the ones doing them for everybody else to make sure theirs are high. And so we don't actually have time to do ours because we're trying to take care of everybody else who might get deployed. so what would you do? You'd stop seeing people for like two days and you would only see the medical people to make sure that your number was high. And what did that end up doing? It will push your numbers up and it pushed their numbers down because then they weren't getting theirs done. and so
Rob: Yeah. So there everybody prepare to drink because there's a book. there's a book by James Scott. called Seeing Like a State, How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. and this is what his book's about. how when you are in control of a large organization. in order to understand who your people are, whether it's a nation or a military branch a city insert whatever, that you have to choose metrics. And by choosing those metrics, you fundamentally shift how people behave in order to get you your metrics. It does not necessarily translate into you understanding anything. It doesn't translate into better mission function, doesn't translate into better health. It's just these are the numbers. So, in my civilian world, we have all kinds of numbers we're measured by, across mostly CMS, Center for Medicare, Medicaid. they have all these gadzillion numbers that we have to measure. So we come up with ways to measure them. and ways to complete them. are we meeting the intent, the spirit of these numbers? I often don't know, but we have ways of getting our numbers into that green zone. in order to meet those numbers. But it is truly just meeting those numbers. I don't necessarily think it ends up translating into better care.
David: I think psychologically that and I've spent enough time in big systems to understand that once you invent a metric, somebody's eventually gonna figure out how to satisfy that metric without satisfying the larger question. are they really cheating the system when they respond to those incentives? Because responding to those incentives is the system. we create the incentives to reach the metrics because we want to reach the metrics. So is that cheating or is that just playing the game that's in front of us?
Rob: no, it's the fundamental challenge of leadership. it comes down to developing your metrics and finding what actually matters and you said it best first. all things that can be counted don't necessarily count and those things that can't be counted don't necessarily don't count. I do not know who said that quote. I wish I did, because everyone would have to drink again, but it is a quote that absolutely stands the test of time. so not even a little bit. You're not cheating if you figure out how to provide the numbers that the system wants. You're doing what the system wants. You're absolutely engaged in the process that the system wants you to engage in. it just doesn't end up With the end result that was maybe envisioned.
David: And I think that's the ultimate question that we have is well, was the vision of the metric based on even something that's real to begin with? So when we look at the ICE numbers, they're trying to hit a certain number of arrests and deportations based off of this. factually incorrect assumption that there are way more murderers and rapists and every other terrible thing that you could be who are here illegally than there really are.
Rob: I mean it you know, it's
David: But is that ICE's fault or is that the fault of Donald Jeremiah Trump?
Rob: well you may be giving him too much credit in thinking that he actually developed any kind of metrics. I don't think he did. I think the metrics came from a lower level. but no, it's not the objective, it's just the scorecard. The scorecard ends up being one thing, the objective is something different. the objective is let's get dangerous people out of this country. They don't belong here, let's get out of the country. the scorecard is how many arrest
David: That's always been the objective.
Rob: Yeah, ha and then now the scorecard is really
David: That's always been the objective. The objective was always that. The change the I do think
Rob: Well yeah, that's not changed. I I realize
David: he I do think he created the metric because he said he came up with a fake number that said, This is how many dangerous people I'm gonna get out of this country. the number he made just wasn't real. And so he created an incentive, which is appease me by getting rid of a number of people. And What did they do? They figured out a way to get rid of a number of people. he's just not asking, Hey, wait, are the people that you're getting rid of the people that I need you to get rid of? Or are these grandmas nonas and nonas that you're getting rid of? he's not asking that question. He just wants a number and that's what he's getting. And that's what he's gonna sell. We've gotten rid of this many million people.
Rob: Well, and even the number what was it? It was like a million a month or some craziness. I mean, how how long can you t first year?
David: No, they wanted a million in the first year. They wanted to get rid of a million people in the first year. it was like six hundred thousand or something.
Rob: it's a lot of people.
David: It is a lot of people, but as we saw
Rob: That that's that's filling up Michigan Stadium. Making everyone leave, filling up again, making everyone leave, times six. that's a lot of people.
David: It is a lot of people, but was it all the right people?
Rob: Well no. I mean clearly
David: I mean he still he still thinks Ebrego Garcia has thirteen or whatever tattooed on his hands because somebody gave him a Photoshop picture of the guy's hands. I always
Rob: Yeah.
David: wondered why his attorney didn't just say, Can we just let this guy meet him and show him that he does not have MS thirteen tattooed on his fucking hands? It would
Rob: Shake hands.
David: take two seconds. And if you're Donald Trump, why wouldn't you just be willing to meet the guy for twelve seconds to prove that wait, you're right.
Rob: Well, but but because he has very he has very small
David: Small hands.
Rob: hands that bruise. They bruise really bad. So You know, he he's got a pr
David: Could you imagine if that actually happened? He would they would just say that the guy had the tattoos removed. That's all they would say, is that his lawyer paid for tattoos to be removed, the tattoos that he never had.
Rob: I'm sure. I'm sure. when you bruise as bad as he does and you have such tiny hands, you don't shake hands with everyone. Come on.
David: This is also the poor guy that senator was meeting him down in El Salvador, was it? was meeting him
Rob: I think that's where they sent a bunch of people, yeah.
David: Yeah, as he was meeting him in El Salvador, they set up margaritas 'cause they weren't drinking, but they put margaritas out there to just show you was having a good time or some shit. I don't know. This timeline, Robbie. All right. So once you've understood that the number you choose can shape the reality people think you're looking at, a related trick. You don't change the number, you change who controls the camera. Which brings us to Trump TV.
Rob: God.
David: So we did talk about last week the White House banning CNN, MS Now, and Politico. Then all the television networks did something pretty remarkable. When CNN was supposed to provide the shared television pool feed and they couldn't get the other networks declined to even replace them. then the White House launched something that sounds like I invented it for this podcast, but I did not. Trump TV, the Essentials Station. A 24 hour White House stream of Trump speeches, appearances, and selected highlights, which gives us a distinction that I think matters much more than whether you call something propaganda. There's a difference between being observed And being displayed.
Rob: Yeah. that distinction does most of the work here. you can show me nothing but authentic footage still leave me with a badly distorted understanding. there is a difference and when the person who is wanting to be displayed is controlling the display, you're getting significantly different data. than when it is someone who's there to observe. so, the whole concept, it's smacks of North Korea with lower production value, as it turns out.
David: I have talked about before and I will talk about again. I like to play Overwatch. But if I were to just take
Rob: I know.
David: highlights of plays of the game make a whole channel That was just dedicated to that, Robbie. I would look like a goddamn top 500 player. Cause that's all people would see is me making baller move plays. It would be authentic. And I think I just came up. I mean, I'm gonna call it David TV.
Rob: And it would be authentic. I mean what you're you're showing is authentic. You're still not top five hundred.
David: I'm gonna call it David TV. No. David TV. you're not allowed to spectate any of my matches anymore. You just, I'm gonna launch it. David TV.
Rob: l
David: Twenty four hours a day,
Rob: let me
David: just my plays of the game, all three of them. You can just over
Rob: W let me warn you.
David: and over again.
Rob: I believe there was a Dave TV at one time. If you knew this reference, I'll be stunned. Yeah, David Lee Roth. David Lee Roth had a Dave T V. So I think you should be cautious. you might be treading in on copyrighted material here. However, I get your point. Yeah. You
David: No, it'd basically be the same thing. It'd be basically be the same thing. me and David Lee Roth are basically the same person. I mean, I'm not gonna I'm not
Rob: Well I'll yep
David: gonna say that I am David Lee Roth, but I'm also not gonna say that I'm not.
Rob: But I'm not going to say
David: For our tens of listeners.
Rob: that I'm not. Right. yeah, this
David: I can neither confirm nor deny that I am David Lee Roth. That's all I can say, Robbie. Shimidab.
Rob: Yeah, David said jump. might as well jump. yeah. sure. Yeah, no, you make a point. you can certainly show yourself being authentically good and not be good. you can't pull that off, particularly when you are in control of the editing and the selection of what's being shown, one of the funny things I did see with this outcome is I think Trump was at his was like showing off his new helicopter pad that he's made a big deal out of and no one was covering it, Well who was covering it was one of the second rate ridiculous networks that aren't real networks and they've got shitty equipment. So the sound was off. And Trump was literally screaming into the wind. you couldn't hear a thing he was saying. He was just screaming into the wind about something. And I thought, this is ridiculously apropos of where we sit right now on this particular space time continuum, in this universe, this reality, which I'm convinced is not reality prime. I don't know how I got in an offshoot. Somehow I made some bad decisions at some point and I am in an offshoot from reality prime and this is the one that I get to deal with with you.
David: Know that it's weird that an 80-year-old man scream into the wind and nobody hear or care what the fuck he's saying. I mean, I think that's actually probably the most real thing Trump has ever done. I did see some pictures
Rob: Probably.
David: recently that do get scrutinized maybe a little bit too much, where you have Trump like screaming something at the Marine pilots for Marine One. I don't know what he's saying, but I give him the benefit of the doubt on that and what I assume is that he's yelling at them because it's so fucking loud that they can't hear him anyway. And so he's not wearing headsets, right, when he's doing it. So my guess is he's like just peeking in and saying like Thanks for the ride but they can't hear him. and they get a picture of him screaming at these Marine One pilots but I bring it up because he used to get on Obama's case for yelling at the pilots and I'd say, yeah, he's probably learning that when you stand in a helicopter and the blades are moving and you try to speak to the pilots, they can't fucking hear you unless you yell. And probably can't hear you even if you are yelling. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe
Rob: You know, speaking speaking of things
David: he is pissed or something on.
Rob: Well, speaking of things that he would get on Obama about, something that I just observed in the last day. so Xi Jinping, the leader of China, is in the States right now. He flew in. I think he landed at Andrews Air Force Base. And interestingly Trump went out to meet him. And it was the first time since John F. Kennedy went out to meet I believe it was a British prime minister, or might have been a royal, I don't know. But presidents don't usually go to the airport and meet visiting dignitaries. they come to the president and it's an image thing, it's an image control. And you know what? We all control our own image. I'm not even criticizing that. The fact that he went there says something, that he went there to meet a dictator from a communist country. the thing that actually really troubled me though was that the airplane comes up and the Chinese leader and his people are waiting on the airplane. And they had military members rolling out the red carpet on their hands and knees, smoothing this fucking thing out for the Chinese. And it just sat poorly with me that they had military members bowing before the Chinese contingency. And Trump there meeting them like they're doing him a favor by coming, it was a really bad look in my mind. And for a man who's so image conscious, I'm so stunned by it. And I'm also just perpetually stunned by how deferential a man who's not deferential to almost anyone, he's deferential to Putin and Xi Jinping. Why? Why is that? That doesn't make sense to me.
David: He's deferential to everybody when they're in the room. Mom Donnie just had a great time visiting with him. I mean, you would assume that after the guy's been calling everybody on the planet a communist and all the talking heads are talking about communists, that he probably wouldn't want to be doing all this with communists in his mind, actual communists. or that he wouldn't be hanging out with the democratic socialist that he calls a communist, but he's deferential to whoever. you've said it a million times. It's not internally consistent. There there
Rob: It's not.
David: but he doesn't care. he doesn't care that he's not internally consistent because he's never been internally consistent. and I think what is really interesting about that Robbie, is that his supporters create consistency for him through their retelling of the stories of what they're seeing. They create some kind of consistency to that inconsistency, which is cognitive dissonance as we've spoken about a million times as well, who do you feel worse for now? I mean don't you kind of feel bad in some way of the mental anguish that this man puts his supporters through, all the
Rob: Ha ha ha.
David: all the intellectual yoga that they have to do in their minds to make him appear consistent? That's gotta be rough.
Rob: I'm impressed by their resiliency.
David: Sticking with it.
Rob: just I'm impressed by the resiliency. I really am. how many boneheaded things that defy any reasonable explanation does he have to engage in before his followers stop thinking he's engaged in four dimensional chess. I don't know. We haven't got there. We're getting there. I mean, his approval ratings dropped to like 32% from the 33% where
David: Down from thirty three.
Rob: it was setting. we're getting there, but there is a solid group that really the idea of releasing it is less comfortable than maintaining the dissonance of saying he knows what he's doing, he has a plan. there's consistency here, he's working to it, he's a genius. that has to be rough, but for that group it's rougher, it's harder for them to release this, to go a different direction. anyway, God bless
David: we sit here about it, like been you just got me thinking, like, it's actually really difficult to sort of corral all of the things that we look at and we talk about with this administration, and then to try to condense it down into just a couple of topics when you're presented with just dozens of examples of Illogical, irrational behaviors every single week. It's so hard to just condense it down to like one psychological mechanism or just one story, even. But could you imagine how much harder it would be to try to make all of what he's doing sound coherent? Like the real people doing the work here are the media personalities who back this behavior that's work. That's gotta be work to spend hours a day talking about how wonderful this guy is and how even though he's kissing Xi Jinping's boots, how that's a good thing that's gotta be tough. my heart doesn't go out to them because they do it for
Rob: Well the
David: money, but but it's gotta be difficult. Like you gotta you gotta you gotta
Rob: They do it for money. They do it
David: really like shake as you're brushing your teeth, looking in the mirror. Like do even brush your teeth in the mirror anymore? I think that's the first thing I'd be asking, like
Rob: It's just
David: Ben Shapiro, do you look in the mirror or you just smashed them all years ago?
Rob: either we've been doing this too long, or all the topics we've talked about just keep circling, but we've talked of this. there is an internal consistency to him, and that's self-aggrandizement. That's it. that's all it comes down to. it's propping up the ego, it's making himself look big and strong. And for whatever reason he does become deferential with dictators. he wants to be part of that group. He wants to be accepted. I mean he becomes the outsider real estate guy in New York who wanted to be a part of high society and was never really accepted because he ate well done steaks with ketchup. he's never gonna be accepted. He's crass. he is not elegant in any fashion or form. but he wants to be in that group with the dictators of the world. Outside of that, it's self-aggrandizement. He just wants to be looked at as special. there's something really sad about that. It does smack at some experiences in his life that have left his ego so fragile. it's unfortunate for him. it's unfortunate for us because the pathology is so massive that he got to where he is. it's slipping. It's slipping. It slips every day. Just a little bit more and a little bit more. he's gotta be feeling it. It's gotta be. we've never done this, and I think we have the technology to do it, but my speculation is that if we were able to look at his late night bleats, compare the content of those bleats. and the timing of those bleats, we could probably put together a pretty solid psychodynamic picture of what's going on in that nog and his underneath all of that hair.
David: one of the things that we see is that when he is doing something solely to boost up his own ego and he has even the semblance of awareness, self awareness to know that what he's doing is not going to work or at least not work long, he builds in a protection to that. by shifting the blame of its failure before it occurs. I mean, great example is the 2020 election. actually the great example for him is every election where he says that it's going to be stolen unless I win. but the most recent example and the one we're still building off of was when he said that CNN, MS Now, and Politico wouldn't be allowed to participate in the press pool anymore. He even said, Well, they're gonna sue, it's gonna go to a judge, and this judge is really unfair, so he's probably just gonna let him go. and the truth is, yeah, because he appeared to be violating their first amendment rights. and what happened? Well, the judge at this point gave them a fourteen day injunction to where they were allowed to get their credentials back, there was a multi-hour period that they did not get their credentials back. they asked the judge to order them to give and then eventually they got it back. And so now those reporters are allowed back temporarily, but it doesn't look good. and nobody thought it looked good. And nobody thought this was a great idea. this is not evidence that the same behavior has taken place before, but when Obama was president, there was a like very specific person that they said, No, Fox News, you may not interview this guy. and all the other news stations cried foul because it was, and the administration backed off. I do think it's funny that the New York Post cited that as basically Obama doing the same thing. you might argue that those were not equivalent. but you might argue you you might
Rob: No, it wasn't a whole network. It was an individual.
David: yeah, you might argue, well, it wasn't you may not be in the press pool, it was you may not interview this one person. not you may not come at all to the White House and we're gonna take your credentials. I mean You could argue that they were equivalent, I suppose, but it would be difficult. being shown reality and being allowed to observe reality are just not the same information environment. Trump TV, this is something that I haven't seen anybody talk about. And I really do wonder why. And I think it brings me back to Trump's amazing ability to create a distraction with. information that's so ridiculous that you almost have to accept part of it because you're so distracted by the ridiculousness of it. And so Robbie, the White House called it Trump TV. Why didn't they call it White House TV? Why didn't they call it presidential television? Why would the White House trying to produce a 24-hour highlights of the president create a channel called Trump TV. That's fucking weird, right? Like it's on brand, I didn't see anybody talk about that. Why has nobody talked about how crazy it is that they didn't call it POTUS vision? They called it Trump TV.
Rob: Well that's the fascinating thing about him is he's always saying the quiet part out loud. most people have more sense than that. this banning of CNN and MS Now and Politico is a great example. one of the main reasons that the judge found in reinstating them was Trump's own words his lawyers had a chance to put together some case in which it was about national security. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. they cited stories from these networks that were months old and had nothing to do with their White House reporters, but you know, whatever.
David: No but no. No, they cited stories that they had provided to Politico specifically on a phone call I think the Washington Post came out and said one of the specific cases that they cited as being a reason this was violating national security was because Politico had reported that an anonymous senior official Had provided certain information. And as it turned out, whole bunch of networks were on the phone call that Politico was on when they said, you may cite this, but you may only cite this as an anonymous senior White House official. And then they provided the information. So they cited information that they had given to them. And they had used correctly as a reason that they were violating national security. I So yeah, but the quiet part out
Rob: Well at at any rate.
David: loud, yeah.
Rob: yeah, so ultimately his bleats, he stated specifically he was banning them because they were giving him bad press. I mean, he said it out loud. there was no secret to it. He in his own words, in his own stupid way of bleeding all caps and, stream of consciousness. he said it out loud and it is really difficult. I would hate to be one of his lawyers. it would be a nightmare that they're spending all this time coming up with these avenues to argue these things and he's behind them screaming out loud the shit that they don't want him to say. It's funny. That's what it is. Bizarre.
David: think we two weeks ago we talked about it. all of his allies were trying really hard to say this isn't a war. This isn't a war. And so what does he do? He gets up on stage and says it's a fucking war. And it's justified. And so
Rob: It's a buck and wall.
David: I think what even touching on kind of the angle that we're at here is that What has he found? He's found that for him, no part of the fence is on. There is no electrical part of this fence. Now the question we might have is has he discovered that the fence doesn't shock him because he keeps touching the fence and it's not shocking him, which might be part of it. Or has he discovered that all he needs to do is press somebody else up against the fence? They'll take the electrical shock. And it won't affect him at all because if you're an attorney who's obviously making bad faith arguments in a court, that's gonna come back to haunt you. if you're one of his political allies and you're saying, No, let's not stop this war, and then your constituents are saying the fucking gas prices are killing us. And you're voting for him to not have any accountability, who's ultimately getting hurt by it? It's not him. I think that's the ultimate loophole for him is that he pushes other people up and has them do the dirty work, and they're the ones who get burned. But shit, didn't that also happen after his first presidency? mean, who worked for him that was close to him that didn't end up getting in trouble for the shit they had done while trying to protect him or trying to do what he said.
Rob: Well, this group's cool because they're gonna get a global pardon. anyone that's come within what, three hundred meters or whatever he's said. I dunno doubt he said meters. that would have been smart.
David: No. Three hundred feet or something of the White House. I don't know. Five hundred feet of the White House. We gotta go visit the White House
Rob: is s something. Yeah. So
David: soon, Robbie. You and I let's go visit. We were there, there's a picture. so but
Rob: Yeah. You said it. You said I got a pardon.
David: this is one version of institutional control, who gets to observe you. But there's a harder version, and I think it speaks to what you just said. So what happens when an outside institution doesn't just want to observe what you did? They want to judge And then so your answer is you have no legitimate authority to judge us. so this last story needs a bit more care because we're talking about civilian deaths including children. There was a UN fact finding mission that reported last week that found reasonable grounds to believe the US strikes on a primary school in Minab and a sports facility in Lamard constituted war crimes. That's not a criminal conviction. It is not an ICC ruling. a UN fact finding mission is investigative, not judicial. but separately, the Trump administration has been escalating this long running campaign against the ICC, the International Criminal Court, which the US has never joined. So those are different institutions, different legal questions, different timelines. But the psychological question isn't did America get convicted of war crimes? It didn't. The question is what accountability looks like when the institutions being scrutinized reject the legitimacy of the outside institution doing the scrutinizing.
Rob: then it's worthless. I mean, you know, it
David: Is it?
Rob: it's like playing a game that you're not accepting the rules. So let's imagine a football team and every time the referees throw a flag, they just say no. it invalidates the whole act of refereeing. So, does it invalidate it from a philosophic or an ethical standpoint? No, not at all. but does it invalidate it from a functional standpoint? Yeah, it's totally invalidated that you have to take the rules seriously for the rules to matter. so calling foul, if you don't take the rules seriously, makes them irrelevant.
David: It's interesting because The US is not a Rome statute member, right? Like American officials have long objected to ICC jurisdiction over nationals of non member states. So we've maintained that. But that doesn't mean that what they're saying isn't on serious. It's just saying that we aren't necessarily
Rob: No.
David: gonna go along with it for now. I mean, could you see the US maybe post Trump deciding that they are going to participate in assigning Rome statute member?
Rob: I could see it. I could see it as a all right. Theoretically, Rob as a human feels like there is right and there's wrong. and I think being held accountable is important in general. being held accountable psychologically is important for us as humans that we need to be accountable. if you're not accountable, then you have absolute power and absolute power corrupts absolutely. so am I necessarily against it? I'm not. there is a reason though politically why we have always elected not to sign off on this and that it Potentially limits us. I think we've always made the argument that we are a moral actor. That's been the argument. We're a moral actor. And, lately, if someone listens to our show, it probably sounds like I'm frequently criticizing the United States. I absolutely believe in the values, in the history. what this nation was built on. I think that fundamentally we have done more good in history than the opposite. so there's a leg to stand on to say that we have lived our values, not perfectly. no one is. and a nation, something as big and hungry as a nation is certainly going to fall short in lots of different ways. We've fallen short internationally, we've fallen short internally on many occasions, in general I think we stand for something that is bigger than ourselves and that is valuable and good and that's kind of where we fell prior. It was like we don't have to sign off on this because we've always been the good guys. And through much of history we have been. We've been the good guys. now could I see this changing down the line? Sure. I could see in this post-Trump environment after all the problems that he has created our sense that fuck this gentleman's handshake that we've been getting by with forever we've got to actually have some hard guardrails we've got to change the system it can't be gee we're counting on people to do the right thing And we're counting on the American voter to hold them accountable to that. We have now proven that's a pipe dream. that's smoking the hopium. so I could see us maybe signing off on something like that in the future.
David: do you think though it says more to stand by the traditional path of saying we're not part of the ICC, we just don't care? Or does it speak louder to actually actively try to dismantle the ICC and try to get the other states that are part of it To leave it. Because I feel like there's a difference between saying, Yeah, that referee really blew that call. And saying, Why do we even have referees? You know, my players keep getting called on this thing. Let's get rid of referees. maybe we haven't considered it to legitimate, but why are we afraid of it then?
Rob: theoretically we shouldn't be. in the military, we Put a lot of emphasis on educating our young officers on what it is to be a soldier. And professional soldiers exert violence professionally, not because we enjoy it, not because we get a kick out of it, and not indiscriminately. There are rules. there's a risk. and we teach our young officers that the risk is worth it that yeah doing it the right way is riskier than indiscriminately killing and we believe in that we really do we teach and we lecture and we try to live by it now as Mike Tyson said, all plans sound good until you get punched in the mouth. So war brings out the best and the worst in people. But fundamentally what the ICC does it comports very closely with what the military believes I don't know why we're not, other than for political reasons.
David: Yeah. I
Rob: But folks, I'm not a legal expert. I didn't stay at a holiday inn last night, so I can't even claim that. I realize there's reasons why we're not and I'm sure because it would open us up to certain risks or obligations.
David: But if your response to external accountability is, well, we'll just police ourselves, then quality of the self policing ultimately becomes the argument.
Rob: Yes, absolutely.
David: So all the
Rob: If you believe in something, then you should be comfortable allowing policing from the outside. that's an internally consistent stance. we strive to be internally consistent on this show. that would be the internally consistent stance.
David: So these stories are obviously not equivalent. A Russian helicopter crossing in a NATO airspace is not an immigration arrest. Congressional vote is not a press credential. A press access fight is not a strike that kills kids. What connects them is this learning process underneath them. Russia crosses a boundary, watches the response. Congress has constitutional authority over war. but the executive learns from the authority Congress actually exercises. Bureaucracies are told what success looks like. People inside those bureaucracies adapt their behavior to whatever leadership measures. The White House tried to control which observers had access, independent media organizations pushed back, and today a court actually supplied a consequence. And when an international institution claims authority to judge military conduct, the United States is arguing not simply about the judgment, but whether that institution has the right to make the judgment at all. Different stakes, different institutions. Same behavioral question though. What does the system teach you when you test defense? Because the rule book matters, the Constitution matters, treaties matter, regulations matter, professional ethics matter, but behavior learns from consequences. A boundary that's written down but never enforced teaches something. A metric that rewards the wrong behavior teaches something. A leader who asks for dissent but punishes dissent teaches something. A news system where the subject controls the camera teaches something. An accountability system that promises an investigation and It never finishes it, teaches something. And restraint isn't always weakness. Sometimes restraint is the smartest possible response. Sometimes investigations genuinely take time. Sometimes a metric is useful. sometimes the outside referee really does lack jurisdiction. The difficult part is going to be distinguishing disciplined restraint from offense nobody actually intends to electrify. And maybe that's the thing worth watching the next couple of weeks. Not what everybody says the boundary is, but watch what happens when somebody else touches So if you had to reduce all this to one idea from an actual series book before I ruin it with more Jurassic Park, Robbie, what is it?
Rob: I had to reduce all this to one serious book.
David: One bottle.
Rob: I guess what jumps to mind is Thomas Shelling's book, The Strategy of Conflict. in the book he highlighted concepts such as threat that leaves something to chance and brinkmanship, tripwires, and what we're talking about really here is pushing yourselves out beyond boundaries, and then what happens? And each time you do that, you're testing something. there's Potential outcomes that are terrible. But if you don't receive those outcomes, there's a learning that occurs that tend to promote further breaches of said boundaries. And that's where we're at. You were talking about how restraint is not cowardice necessarily. Sometimes it's the right choice, but restraint is ambiguous. Are they showing restraint or are they afraid? And it creates a challenge. and for the person that's pushing the boundaries, what are they perceiving? so that would be the book that I think would sum this up the best.
David: Awesome. Nice job, Robbie. Bring a little political theory to the end of this. I bring Overwatch or bring Velociraptors. It's why this works.
Rob: And velociraptors. Yeah.
David: All right, you got a prescription?
Rob: I do, I'm prescribing consequence Z for leaders who keep testing boundaries because the last fourteen warnings were apparently decorative. Consequence Z begins working when someone with actual authority does something mildly inconvenient. Side effects may include congressional attendance, accurate dashboards, discovery that the journalist you banned has been let back in. Do not take consequence Z if you are allergic to oversight. Ask your doctor if blaming the referee is right for you.
David: I like it. my prescription might be the most serious and helpful advice I could ever give on this show. If you are a Russian pilot, Carry your own GPS with you and update those maps before you take off.
Rob: Just download the Google Maps, folks.
David: I think I just I just saved some Russian pilots ass when they get sent into Poland.
Rob: Yep. No doubt.
David: They're not gonna get blown up by Poland.
Rob: Putin does not care about you.
David: Not at all. Not at all. All right. I think that's it. Thank you to everybody. follow us on socials. Go to our website, shriekenation.com, check us out. thanks for sticking around. And I'm gonna cue up this music, and we are out.