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July 16, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
20:28
Episode 142 - Talking about Russia
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here.
Let's talk about Russia.
Join me for the theme song.
Yeah, I got a little late start this morning.
Sorry about that. I know you had your coffee ready.
It might be a little bit colder than it was before, but it's still time for the simultaneous sip.
Get ready. Join me.
Oh, that's good stuff.
Now let's talk about Russia and Putin.
As you know, the anti-Trumpers have already tried to frame this as Trump going over there and being a sucker.
And Putin being the clever operator, the smart one, he's going to completely dupe our president who doesn't see it coming.
That's the funny part. The funny part is that apparently everyone in the planet sees that Putin is playing Trump.
Except Trump. For some reason, he managed to become the President of the United States and still, according to the anti-Trumpers, he's the only one who doesn't know he's being played by Putin.
Now it seems to me that a more objective frame on this is that there are two leaders who are very persuasive, who are meeting, and may try to play each other.
Because that's why they're there.
They literally decided to meet, to play each other.
Now, of course, when you say play each other, it sounds bad.
The other way to do that would be talk.
And they're going to feel each other out and they're going to see what's what, etc.
Now, as I was watching a clip of their first meeting, I was struck by a few things.
First of all, It does seem to me that the body language was not all that positive.
So it's starting out with very stiff body language.
What's that mean? Well, it means that they're not primed to just be best friends.
So if something good comes out of this, it probably won't be because of chemistry.
Now, they may develop some chemistry during the course of the time that they're in the same place, but at the moment, not much.
Somebody just mentioned the language barrier, and that's where I was going to go next.
Can you think of a country in which the current leader speaks English fluently and they're also a big problem?
In other words, does the United States have any enemy countries where the leader speaks perfect English?
Canada doesn't count.
I'm talking about somebody who has a military posture.
Syria. Well, I'm not sure Syria was directly our problem.
Syria is definitely not trying to pick a fight with the United States, wouldn't you say?
Syria has never attacked the United States.
Yeah, well, North Korea doesn't speak English.
I don't believe that Kim Jong-un speaks English.
Iran doesn't speak English.
Yeah, you know, I think it seems to me That, yeah, you can't count our allies, because even if we're having words with our allies, they're still our allies.
It seems to me that this language issue is a big deal.
And it seems to me that when you're dealing with countries that don't speak the same language, it's problematic, because you can never bond.
You know, what's the thing I tell you is the most important part of bonding?
It's pacing. So acting like the person in some way.
Now you can still act like them.
Physically, you can agree with their ideas on the small.
But it really helps to know the language.
So persuasion doesn't work nearly as well without that.
So that's a limit with Russia.
Now when I watch all these Russia stories, to me there's always something missing.
And I want to see if it seems like it to you.
When we hear that Russia is messing with us, or has messed with us, let's just take the last several years.
Maybe let's take Obama administration through current Trump administration.
Why is somebody out here just yelling at me to stop lying?
What is wrong with you?
Take the current administration.
And the Obama administration.
So there are many allegations about why Russia has tried to mess with us.
At the same time, Russia is small and we are, you know, relatively bigger.
Except militarily where we, because of the nuclear weapons.
Alright, we will block you for just screaming things that make no sense.
And the thing that's missing is why.
Right? So we take it as a given that Russia is continually looking for ways to mess with us.
But what's always missing is why.
Why? Now, you probably think to yourself, well, I know why.
I know why.
I know why because they always mess with us.
Well, that's not really a reason, is it?
That they always have, and so they always will.
Is that a reason?
Are they trying to destroy the United States?
Are they trying to destroy the United States?
Because here's what I'm talking about in the size difference.
So Russia, if you could talk about the economy, and even the size of their standing army, I suppose.
U.S. is gigantic.
Dominates the scene militarily, and Russia is tiny.
Does the tiny country really, think about it, does the tiny country want to destabilize the government of the biggest military power in the galaxy?
Do they?
Would anybody really want to destabilize the government of the biggest power in the The galaxy?
That feels like the very worst thing that anybody could do.
Now you say to yourself, yeah, yeah, yeah, but they want to just destabilize us a little bit because then they get some advantages.
Such as? What would be some of those advantages?
Does it make us a little slower to react to them or something?
Can we compare those small advantages they might get by making the United States a little less effective, let's say, to what advantages Russia would get by simply being a trading partner and a friend?
Those aren't even close, are they?
Is it even close to how much benefit Russia could get by simply playing nice?
There's a huge upside to that.
Complete stability, economic growth, zero chance of a military problem.
There's everything good about playing nice.
But playing like jerks to us doesn't make sense with the information that we have been given.
So it makes me think, wait a minute.
There must be some information that we have not been given.
Tell me what that is.
What is the information that has not been given by the news on either side?
And there's a reason for that.
What is the information that has not been given?
That the news doesn't...
Well, the reasons, right.
Maybe Hillary did it.
You're getting warm. Here's why it makes sense to mess with the biggest military, biggest economy in the world.
Mutually assured cyber destruction.
Retaliation. Pushing back.
What do you do when a bully messes with you?
Let's say you're Putin, and you could say he's a bully, and that would be fair, but what would Putin do if an even bigger bully started pushing him around?
He'd push back.
But he would push back proportionally, wouldn't he?
He wouldn't push back so hard that we would attack.
That'd be crazy.
But there's no way he's going to let us mess with his politics, mess with his internet connections, mess with him in a cyber way.
There's no way Putin is going to let the United States do that without pushing back in kind about the right size.
Now, if you throw that into the mix, and it would make sense that our press doesn't talk about that, because, you know, even if we knew, we probably wouldn't talk about it that much, right?
So even if our press understood that we do these things to other countries, including probably our allies, right?
Everybody's telling me to knock it off, or maybe they're talking to somebody else.
I can't tell in the comments. But doesn't it feel to you like there's a piece missing, which is what is it that makes Russia want to do this?
Now, let's add this to another piece of the puzzle.
The President wants to meet with Putin and talk privately without anybody there.
What types of things would the President of the United States and Putin want to say to each other That they would not want witnesses to, especially the press.
What kinds of things might they want to talk about?
Somebody said the truth.
That's exactly right.
There might be exactly two people in the world who could speak the truth to each other.
And the only people that could do that would be Putin and Trump privately.
There's nobody else who would be authorized, and the authorized is the important part, there's nobody else who would be authorized to tell the truth and would also know the truth.
They're the only two.
They gotta get rid of the witnesses.
Now what can they say once they're in the room privately?
How about some form of this?
Why the hell are you messing with us?
Why the hell are you messing with us?
Give me one good reason that Russia and the United States need to be enemies.
And then Putin probably says something like, I didn't start it, but I'm not going to let you do it just any way you want.
I didn't start it.
And then Trump says, well, you know, maybe you did start it, but...
You know, that was before Obama, then Obama started it, and then you kicked back, and then we kicked back.
Now we're sanctioning you.
Now you're probably going to do some more things to our elections.
Who wins? There's no endgame there.
The only thing that both of them want to do is stop doing it.
And in order to do it, one of them in that room has to say some version of, yeah, we're doing it to each other.
How about we just stop?
Remember what I told you that, yeah, you stop first won't work for either person, right?
Neither Trump nor Putin would respond to, how about you stop first?
It's not going to work.
There's some things you can't say in public, as in, yeah, we're doing it too.
And you can only say it in private.
So has anybody ever done that before?
Has anybody ever put Putin in a private room and said, is there some reason that we need to be screwing with each other?
Because I don't see it.
Are we trying to destabilize China's government?
Is the United States trying to destabilize China?
I'll bet not.
I'm sure that China and the U.S. have lots of cyber this and that going on.
But the reason we would not try to destabilize China is what could be worse?
What would be worse for the United States than a destabilized China?
Good Lord, that would be pretty bad.
So we don't want to destabilize them.
We don't want to destabilize Putin.
Obviously, we'd be happier if he's not poisoning his dissonance on our allies' soil, for example.
So there are certainly things we want from him.
But I also like the fact that Trump is not going to let the little stuff get in the way of the big stuff.
I hate to say that poisoning dissonance in Great Britain is little stuff, because if you get killed, it's pretty big stuff to you.
But in the larger picture, You're either going to deal with a Putin or you're not, and it's going to come with some pretty, pretty, pretty rough edges.
There's a press conference going on right now.
Let's see if I can tune to that on my handy phone.
I'll tell you in a moment if there's a press conference.
That was a commercial on mine.
So here's what I would expect.
I don't know that we'll ever hear what came out of the meeting with Trump and Putin.
They might, if they're smart, they'll come up with some kind of a Middle East plan.
Because imagine if Putin and Trump decide to play for the same team.
And I don't mean in the collusion way.
I mean in the Middle East.
Suppose Iran...
It gets further isolated because North Korea is talking to us nicely, and let's say Putin starts playing nicer.
It isolates Iran, right?
And then suddenly Iran needs to play nice as well.
So in terms of the order of things, it's perfect.
You do North Korea first, you do Putin second, you do Iran third.
That's exactly the right order.
Now, you see that, right?
You see that Gordon Chang says President Xi might be gone?
I don't know about that.
I'll look into that, because whatever Gordon Chang says, I take seriously.
U.S. is a nation of laws and Russia is not.
Well, but Russia has a leader, and he can certainly make whatever happens that he wants happen.
Yeah, he's president for life, president she is.
All right, so have you watched the Russia collusion narrative?
And here I'm not going to name names.
Let me just... I want to offer a clarification.
Some of you saw I was tweeting with Josh Rogin, a columnist for the Washington Post.
He appears on CNN frequently.
And I made a comment about his tweet.
Now Josh Rogan, not Joe Rogan.
And I referred to him, I lumped him with anti-Trumpers, and he said that he wasn't an anti-Trumper.
So he's a columnist for the Washington Post and appears on CNN, but he's not an anti-Trumper.
So I thought to myself, and that was one of his complaints.
So I thought, well, I'll take a look at his Twitter feed.
And I'll see all the balanced stories in there.
But there are not any balanced stories in there.
So I'm not going to say that he's a balanced opinion person, but opinion people don't need to be balanced.
So there's nothing wrong with him not being balanced in terms of his opinions, because that's what an opinion is.
An opinion... Is taken aside, essentially.
So that part's okay.
But it seems like it's slicing it kind of finely to say, yeah, I work for an anti-Trump organization, and I appear on an anti-Trump network, and I only tweet articles that are negative about Trump, but I'm not personally anti-Trump because I've not said something so directly.
Which I take. I take as...
I'll take that correction.
I take the correction that he has not personally written about collusion before the election.
Now his other complaint is he said he had never written about collusion, but in fact I was referring to his tweet in which he talked about collusion.
But his distinction was, it was pointing to an article that was talking about the current days, talking about current time, not before the election.
Some people say the collusion part is the part that happened before the election, but my take on the collusion The collusion claim is that I thought most people making the claim assumed that it extended past the election to current times.
I thought the entire narrative was, oh, Russia helped Trump get elected, and now he owes them something.
So it's sort of an ongoing, rolling collusion.
So, to Josh's point, he asked for a correction.
So I'll make that correction, that when he used the word...
Collusion. He was referring to an article that was talking about the after the Syria story and our dealing with Russia.
And that being the collusion narrative.
So that's my correction.
But it was kind of a small one.
Alright. Am I distracted?
Yeah, a little bit.
Alright. I'm going to sign off and watch the press conference with the rest of you.
All right, and I'll talk to you later.
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