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July 18, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
41:12
Episode 146 - Scott Adams Explains the Potential Good News About Russia
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I'm going to say your names as you come in.
Hello, Amy Huber Smith, 21, and Grog Monkey, and Piano Rules, Spice Racks.
Good to see you.
You know what time it is?
Yeah, it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
This will be one of your more special coffees with Scott Adams.
And it starts with something I like to call the simultaneous sip.
By now you've been running to grab your mug, your vessel, your cup, your container of liquids, your preferred beverage.
I like coffee.
Join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Now you might be wondering why I'm standing here next to a pool table.
Well, I'm going to give you an example on a pool table and then take it into the real world and talk about Russia.
Everybody's talking about Russia.
You gotta get in on this.
Let's talk about Russia.
But before we do, observe this pool table.
Now you may not be able to see it that clearly.
But imagine this were a game of eight ball.
This is a game in which you either have the striped balls or the solid balls, and your job is to sink whichever balls are yours before the other person, and then get to the eight ball and sink that last.
You will notice that there are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven striped balls still on the table.
Let's say this is midway in the game.
But there are only two solids on the table.
And the idea is to sink your balls, either stripes or solids.
So who would you say is ahead?
Who's ahead in this game?
Is it the one with two balls left?
Or is it the one who has to sink all seven of the balls?
Well, if you don't know pool too well, you would automatically say, well, obviously the person who has already sunk five of their seven balls is way ahead.
That seems obvious, right?
But if you've played pool, you might know that the position of the table is far more important.
You might notice that those two balls would be very hard to sink Given their position.
You could maybe get one of them, but setting up to get the second one would take a lot of skill.
Could be done, but it would take a lot of skill.
Whereas if this were my shot, most of my shots are pretty well lined up.
Okay, that wasn't a good example.
But with a little bit of skill and with nobody watching, the balls that are in better position give you more of an advantage.
So I used to play pool for many hours when I was young, and one of the things that would frustrate people is that I would always finish the game by singing the last, say, five in a row.
So it would look like I was on the verge of losing, Until I would win.
And the general lesson here is that we humans generally can't tell the difference between almost losing and almost winning.
Can't tell the difference.
Yeah, I can't let that go.
Let me sink one ball before I go.
So... The general point in chess is a very similar situation.
If you're not very good at it, at the game, you can't tell the difference between right on the verge of losing and right on the verge of winning.
They look the same if you're not very experienced at pool.
So I used to win my games by playing for position instead of playing for maximum ball sinkage until it was time to run the table.
Now, let's take that lesson to something you've been hearing a lot about.
It's called Russia.
Have you noticed how many moving parts there are?
There are so many moving parts in this whole Russia situation.
It seems like Russia's connected to everything.
I mean, here's an example. We need Russia's help with North Korea.
Russia is the big topic of election interference.
Russia is involved in Syria, which means Iran.
They're meeting with Israel, which means indirectly.
They're sort of in the Palestinian question.
We know that our relationship with China is influenced by how we're dealing with Russia because those are the three superpowers.
China is flexing its muscle, building its military.
So Russia's military being the third of the big militaries is important in that story as well.
We're talking about Russia's various transgressions from the poisonings in Great Britain to taking over Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
I don't know a ton about those topics, but they're in the news.
Of course, we always worry about budgets, and the military budget is a big part of any budget.
Now, if Russia Did everything that we in America and President Trump wanted them to do, look at the range of things that could be fixed.
Because their involvement is kind of crucial to all of these things.
And if they decide to be our enemy, well, all of these things might get a little dicier, a little harder, maybe impossible.
And now look at the leverage.
So everything in green here is leverage that President Trump has developed over Russia.
Now some of it is by his doing and some of it is just by the situation.
But let's look at a few of the things that are in the category of leverage over Russia.
You've got President Trump has apparently authorized weapons sales to Ukraine to defend against Russian advancement, apparently.
We've got economic sanctions, which apparently are cutting pretty deeply.
Iran is up there.
Somebody's asking me about Iran.
Iran's up there as well. There's the pardon, as I call it.
Now, I mean a virtual pardon of Putin, meaning that Putin has done things that we don't like, and we can either forget the past, I'll call that a virtual pardon, or we could look toward the future.
So we have the potential that the president could, in essence, issue him a pardon for past behavior simply by not addressing those things.
That's what we've seen so far.
Of course there's mutual terrorism support.
We probably give them more support than they give us.
I don't know if that's true, but we probably have more capability than they do.
So we probably give them more than they give us in terms of terrorism help.
There's military spending.
We're such a big economy, the United States, that the military spending that we do, if Russia tries to keep up, remember they're one-tenth of our size, they would go broke.
So if we spend enough on our military, they either have to give up, just forget about trying to be on par, or they have to spend themselves into ruin.
So that's another leverage.
Prestige. You saw the critics say, hey, President Trump has given a bunch of prestige to Putin by having this meeting at all, and by being nice to him, he's given him all this prestige.
And he has. But it's also a prestige that can be taken back, just as it has in the past.
Why did Putin need to be given prestige in the first place?
Well, because he didn't have it.
You know, he was sort of on the outs with the world, and the President sort of gave him a little bit of a public pardon and a little bit of prestige to be there.
This prestige can be taken away.
That's leverage. Putin probably likes prestige.
He wouldn't want to lose it.
There's a German pipeline from Russia.
Russia would like the pipeline.
It would give them leverage over Germany.
It would give them another source of income.
And the president has decided to put a little pressure on that.
Pressure on Germany, maybe a little competition.
I don't know how real any of that pressure is, in terms of whether it will make any difference, but they probably feel it.
Psychologically, it's one more thing they have to worry about.
There's a nuclear treaty that apparently Russia wants.
We want it too.
But who wants the nuclear treaty more?
Russia or the US? Probably Russia, because again, their economy is small.
For Russia to keep up with us with nuclear weaponry, It's harder, ten times harder, because they're one-tenth of our size of the economy.
So Russia wants this probably more than we do.
In both cases, there are no real plans to nuke each other.
But we'd like to get the cost down and the risk down, so Russia probably cares a little bit more than we do.
And then there's some diplomats that were expelled, but that's not terribly important.
So we have a number of pressure or leverage points with Russia.
And this leverage mostly is either new or it has increased recently.
So in other words, just by waiting for more time to go by, the things that cost Russia money, like the military and keeping up with the nukes and all that, is worse for them than it is for us.
So again, Time is a little bit on our side.
I've talked about this before.
President Trump likes to put time on his side so that he can just wait, right?
He just waits for North Korea's economy to collapse.
He waits for Iran's economy to collapse.
So whenever he can put himself in a position where time is on his side, he doesn't.
And I would say that given the mounting pressure on Russia, financially especially, that there's a little bit more leverage on them than there is on us.
Now, let me paint a picture where it looks at the moment where everything with Russia is the end of the world to at least half of the public in the United States.
There is something, somebody coined this term, and I tried to amplify it on social media today, on Twitter.
Somebody used the words false fear.
So, if you imagine a medical condition in which something like 25% to 50% of the population of the United States, they're suffering from some kind of false fear.
I think it's false, because half of the country doesn't have it, and we're looking at the same facts.
Generally, if two people are looking at the same set of objective facts, and one of them is scared to death, and the other one says, um, I don't see it.
Usually, the one that's scared is the one having the problem, because half of the country is looking at it and saying, I don't see it.
All right. So, That's the worst case scenario.
The worst case scenario is that Russia is our enemy.
They're going to double-cross us once again.
They're going to muck up everything.
They've interfered in our elections.
It's going to get ugly.
It might go to war. So that's the worst case scenario.
That's the president has been co-opted by Putin false fear.
But what's the other side?
That's the glasses half empty.
So the pessimists The false fear people say it's all going to fall apart.
Let me give you a story of how this board is a lot like the pool table I showed you earlier.
It looks like President Trump has seven balls left on the table.
And it looks like Putin is down to two.
But there's another way to look at this.
Look at all this leverage that we have with Putin.
And what happened in the last week?
I don't even have this up here.
But in the past week, largely because of the summit, the opinion of the population of the United States, which does drive our government, Is that Putin's past transgressions of hacking us or trying to mess with our elections, which probably have been happening for decades, you know, in different ways.
But don't you imagine Russia has always been messing with our elections in any way that they could, probably for decades?
We never quite cared about it as much.
Today, in the last week, what Russia has working against it is the entire public of the United States, the right, the left, entire government saying, Russia, if you cross the line again, we're done ignoring it.
So Russia is in a vice grip.
And they have every reason to play well with us.
In other words, President Trump has given them enough space Political space enough dignity and enough flexibility that if they play well with us in this range of things, they can have a good outcome.
And if they don't, things are just going to get uglier.
And here's the important point.
The population of the United States, the people who, through social media and voting and everything else, control our government We're frickin' pissed at Russia.
Never underestimate the power of the public opinion who is frickin' pissed at Russia for meddling with our election.
These guys are in a very tight spot right now.
And if they're in a tight spot, and I think that's objectively true, Then all of this stuff, the pressure that the President has on them, should give him enough leverage, because he's playing well with Putin, to get some good results.
Let me tell you what that might look like.
Let me paint a picture of what the next year or so could look like.
Now this is short of a prediction.
This isn't a prediction.
This is something that could be the best case scenario and we're right on the edge of it.
It would take very little for the best case scenario to happen and it looks like this.
You want Russia's help with North Korea in particular to give them security guarantees.
North Korea, in order to get rid of its nukes, needs Russia, China, US, and South Korea, at least, maybe the UN, to give them security guarantees that if they get rid of their nukes, that they will be protected by the major powers from attack.
Russia is pretty key to that guarantee.
And Russia has recently said and reiterated, yes, we will be part of the security guarantees.
It could be, and I think this is close to true, the security guarantees from Russia might have been the last puzzle piece to give North Korea the freedom they need to really denuclearize.
So there's a very good chance that Russia's cooperation with us, which I think is genuine because they don't want any trouble in North Korea either, I think Russia's involvement, they seem like a credible guarantor because if Russia says anybody who comes into North Korea, we're gonna be against them, even if it's the United States, that's pretty credible.
North Korea is not going to want to believe just President Trump.
Hey, we don't want to attack you.
He's going to want one other person who is, wait for it, an adversary of the United States.
So if North Korea gets a guarantee from the United States and its adversary, that's pretty strong.
You've got both sides, the adversary and the non-adversary.
So North Korea is likely to go in the right direction and Russia is likely to be very important to that.
Now if Russia starts doing something that is more good for the president and not obviously as self-serving as some other things would do, what does that do to the election interference and collusion story?
Because collusion is part of this, right?
Collusion. So these are, you know, biggest problems in the United States, at least politically, is the thought of collusion.
What happens if Russia starts acting in the United States' best interest?
Now, it would also be in Russia's best interest, but very conspicuously works on the United States' biggest priorities.
North Korea, and I'll get to this in a second, Well, that kind of blows the collusion story out of the water, eventually.
Because if Russia keeps doing things that are good for the United States, it's going to be harder to explain why there was collusion, you know, if we're just working together in a cooperative way.
Likewise, Russia has lots of influence in the Middle East at the moment, primarily through their connection and their bases in Syria.
Now, because Syria and Iran are linked at the hip, are we better off if Iran is in Syria or if Russia is the dominant player in Syria?
Well, I'll tell you, if you're Israel, you're pretty happy that the Russians are controlling the parts of Syria that are close to your border.
Because Israel doesn't want Syrian control or Iranian control on their border.
That's the last thing they want.
Russia? They kind of get along with Israel, right?
So Israel is actually, I think, I'm no expert in the Middle East, but seems to me better off with a Russian presence to be sort of a buffer between Iranian and Syrian military that might be a problem.
So, do we care if Russia has a strong role in Syria?
Yeah, we care.
It probably helps us if they do it right.
All right. Now, all of these things are kind of connected.
Iran is, of course, one of the negative forces in terms of terrorism, in terms of supporting the bad elements of the Palestinian folks.
And so this entire situation could get close to a solution if Russia decides to be productive.
And decides to do what's good for us.
Now, what would they get out of that?
Well, they might get to keep their warm water port and their influence over Syria.
But who cares? We don't care.
Israel's probably happy with it, and we'd be happy too.
Then you've got China. China isn't any kind of a direct threat, but their military is beefing up and they're becoming more important.
If you look at the three powers, China, Russia, and the United States, Russia is kind of, you know, third in that race, and that's probably not a comfortable place to be.
What would be the smartest thing to do if you were third in a race between three people?
The smartest thing you could do is try to team up with one of them.
Are they more likely to, say, team up with the United States or with China?
Well, if we're working with them productively and their prestige and influence is growing because they're doing good things with the United States, that gets us a little bit closer to them than China.
And that's probably good, because China's ambitions will be at least psychologically checked if the US and Russia seem to be getting friendlier, especially in terms of world relations.
So China can be productive simply by being more of a friend than a foe in the future.
You have, of course, the budget questions.
Budgets are always big questions everywhere.
And the budget is, to a large extent, one of the big variables is the military budget.
So our budget depends on, to some extent, the budget in the United States depends on Russia.
So if Russia decided to spend less on nukes and being aggressive looking, we could spend less on defending against them.
Maybe someday less on NATO. So we've got this huge benefit that would benefit Russia even more than us, which is to stop spending so much money on military to oppose each other when we don't really have a reason for that.
Now, below here we have the alleged and actual, I guess, crimes of Russia and Putin in particular.
The Crimea, Eastern Ukraine, poisonings, etc.
This is where the pardon comes in.
The President has very pointedly said, let's move on from the past.
These things are the present, but they're also things that quickly become the past.
We could probably work something out In terms of, let's say, having the citizens decide what country they want to be in.
I believe if you held a referendum, Crimea would say, well, let's just be Russian.
So they might actually be happy with that.
I don't know as much about eastern Ukraine, how much of that is actual Russian-leaning folks and not.
But you could probably work this stuff out.
I'm not the expert on that, but you could probably work this out.
You could probably threaten them to say, stop doing the poisonings, that's just ruining everything.
So now, think about this bigger picture.
The President has arrayed this fairly impressive pile of leverage against Russia.
Russia is the linchpin for just about everything we care about that still matters.
Just about everything. Just by weird coincidence, Russia's right in the middle.
Putin is capable, and he has the incentive, a big incentive, because he's got all this leverage against him, to do what we would like.
Now, if you saw this board, this game board, And you didn't understand the world and the context and how everything is created.
And all you saw was the meeting between Putin and Trump.
What would be your limited impression of that if that's all you saw?
You just saw the meeting between Trump and Putin.
Well, you might say, as many of the critics are, hey, Trump's being too nice to this Putin guy.
Why are we kissing his butt?
Why are we not being tough to him?
Well, if being tough to him was getting us what we wanted, or it seemed like it might, that would be a good strategy.
But what would be a better strategy?
A better strategy would be to see the whole board and say, look, we've got all of this serious leverage against you.
I don't need to embarrass you in public.
If you have all the leverage, let me put it in this terms, if you're the one who has all the leverage, Do you want to embarrass the person that you need to influence in public by calling him out in front of the press?
That would be a bad play.
That would be a very, very, very bad play.
So what we see is that the president, partly through luck, because he's coming in at a good point, but partly by design, has created a chess board, or if you want to use the pool table analogy, he has such a good position on the board that it's entirely possible that you're going to see a denuclearized North Korea Tremendous success in Iran.
Probably a stable situation in Syria that Israel is happy about.
And the poor Palestinians are going to be sort of out of allies.
You saw recently that Saudi Arabia even said that they're a little bit tired of the Palestinians.
If Iran gets pulled away from the Palestinians as well, which seems like a likely outcome through Russia's help by isolating them, then we have a situation where President Trump might be able to run the table.
So he's set it up so that the critics are saying, well, if you look through this narrow keyhole at just any one of the things happening, it doesn't look like it's going well.
Very much like the pool table, where seven balls in the table looks like a lot worse than two.
But if you see it in its context, he's very close to being able to run the table.
Now, again, I'm going to say this is not a prediction because the world is a messy place.
There are so many variables.
Something could happen tomorrow that changes everything.
But the main point was we humans are very bad at knowing the difference between everything is going to fall apart in a minute versus it's almost time to run the table because it is very close To the president being able to run the table.
He needs one thing to happen, which is for Russia to recognize its own best interest and pursue it.
Think about that. Think about this for a moment.
The only thing that stops all of this goodness from happening Where we end up saving money and we've got peace and denuclearizing all over the place.
The only thing that's stopping it from happening is President Putin recognizing his own best self-interest.
Do you think that's hard?
I don't think it is.
Putin seems pretty good at recognizing his own best interest, and this is clearly it.
Imagine a world where Putin decides to be an adversary and just a dick.
Imagine Putin making the huge mistake of messing with our elections again at the midterm.
Imagine that. Putin is going to be under the weight of history.
There's nothing good that comes out of that.
Nothing good. But If he becomes an ally and starts working with Trump, what would Putin accomplish?
Putin would be part of denuclearizing North Korea, part of denuclearizing Iran, and, here's the cool part, part of denuclearizing Russia and the United States, because both of them would like to get their levels down.
And what would happen if the United States and Russia agreed to reduce their nukes?
Well, maybe it has an effect on China.
I don't know. But you're right on the border, right on the edge of Putin and Trump working together.
I know you don't like to hear that, but working together to be the greatest denuclearizers the world has ever seen.
And it's in both of their best interests.
Tremendously in their best interest.
You know, amazingly in their best interest.
It's not even close. So can you trust President Trump to do something that is in President Trump's best interest?
Even his critics would say yes, right?
Even his critics would say yes, President Trump will pursue his own best interest.
It happens that President Trump's best interest is to do a good job and get all this stuff done.
Can we trust Putin to do what's in his own best interest?
Yes. What is in his best interest?
To work with Trump, who in Trump he has a partner I think he could work with, to get all of this stuff done.
Putin can come out of this from being under a pile of wet logs, which is where he is now.
It's like Russia's under a pile of wet logs.
He can get out of this.
President Trump has offered him an escape hatch.
He can get out of all these problems, he can get a pardon for his past behavior, and he can join the world stage as one of the greatest leaders of all of history.
It's his. And all he has to do is say yes.
Basically take yes for an answer.
Putin just has to work with Trump to get some of this stuff done.
And if Russia works with Trump to get this stuff done, guess what happens to election interference?
Guess what happens to the Mueller thing and the thought that Trump is in the bag for Putin and all that?
It just goes away. Because Trump's play all along.
Remember, Trump said from the beginning, I think we're better off if Russia, you know, if we're working constructively with him.
And this would be an example of that.
All right. Somebody said, can you start over?
Now, I'm sure that you can make a story where everything is terrible and the world is going to end.
And you see the critics doing that.
It's like, my God, you've given Putin everything he needs and all we got was a soccer ball.
But the main point, the big point, Is that we humans, and Mark Twain said this first, we humans are terrible at knowing the difference between good news and bad news.
We actually...
Oh, add down flight MH17. Yeah.
Somebody said...
To add the flight that the Russians knocked down.
The reason I didn't have that on the list originally is because I can't imagine that Russia intentionally shot down a passenger plane.
Yes, it's on them for doing it, but it doesn't feel like it was intentional.
So maybe I don't know enough about that situation, but I can't imagine that that was anything but a horrible accident they wish hadn't happened.
But still, it's on the list of bad behavior that requires a pardon, if you will.
All right. Now, the people are saying, you're so naive.
You may be joining us late in the process because I have been called naive before.
Has anybody heard me being called naive before?
Was it when I said candidate Trump will win the election?
Yes, they all called me naive.
Was it when, a year ago, I said, I think we're actually closer to a breakthrough with North Korea than we are to nuclear war?
Does anybody remember me being the first person on the planet to say, no, no, it looks like North Korea is the worst thing ever, but you're seeing it wrong?
If you look at the big picture, we're probably right on the edge of the biggest breakthrough.
Which happened? Well, it turns out we were on the edge of a big breakthrough.
And if you look at this, half of the country or more is saying, you know, it's doomed and this thing with Putin is bad and we've got a president who's a Russian mole and all that.
That sounds pretty bad. But I'm telling you, it's not quite a prediction.
But we are right on the cusp of having the board completely in our favor.
Now, remember I told you that one of President Trump's negotiating strengths is his ability to shake the box until something good lines up for him.
So you saw him shake the box by agreeing to have a summit with Putin.
And that got everybody's hair on fire.
Then you saw him have the actual meeting and the box is shaken again and people's hair is on fire.
But while he was doing all this shaking, what was the biggest thing that actually changed in the world?
In other words, which variable is now completely different than, say, a year ago?
The biggest variable that changed, because of the shake in the box, is the attitude of the American public.
I think the American public went from, hey, Russia tried to hack us, but didn't succeed?
Wow, that's bad on them.
We're probably doing the same thing to them.
So I think the Russian election hacking went from, yeah, we should worry about that.
That sounds important, but I'm not going to put it on my top 20.
If you were to ask today, people would say, my God, this Russian hacking of the election is now a 10 out of 10.
If Russia crosses the line, the U.S. public will not stand for it.
So the U.S. public will require an aggressive response and the government's going to have to deliver it or we get ourselves a different government.
That's different. That was never the situation before.
So that's sort of a last year, and I would say even the last month or so, it's sort of, you know, crystallized into this super powerful variable, where before it was just another variable.
So Russia is in a vice grip right now.
They've got one path, bad analogy, vice grip, but they're in a bind.
Because public opinion is so aggressively against them on the hacking question that both the left and the right are united against Russia.
So Russia, in its attempt to divide America, did succeed in terms of the political discourse.
So I don't know how much they succeeded.
But it does look like Russia probably had some gains in terms of worsening our political discourse.
But there was an unintended consequence.
And the unintended consequence is that there's nothing Americans like better than a common enemy.
There's nothing Americans like better than a common enemy.
And Putin completely accidentally Finds himself the common enemy.
Is there anybody on the left who thinks he should get away with messing with our elections?
Nope. None.
Is there anybody on the right who thinks he should get away with messing with our elections again?
Even a little bit. Nope.
Not one person. And how much do we care about it now?
Well, a year ago, I didn't care that much.
Today? Pretty important.
So that is completely different.
And that's... That's what you get when President Trump shakes the box.
Eventually, variables are going to line up in his favor, and that's when he stops shaking.
Because you don't shake it again once you get the board in your favor.
And right now, the board is completely favoring Trump.
And Putin, he also has a very, very favorable path.
Very favorable. Like, if you were a leader of a country, and you had this opportunity, I mean, literally, to solve the biggest problems in the world in the next 12 months.
If you think about it, in 12 months, Putin could be one of the greatest leaders of all history.
You know, along with the other leaders who are helping out.
President Trump being the prime.
So that's where our situation is.
Give me some feedback.
Was any of this new or interesting to you?
I'd like to hear your comments, because when I do the complicated stuff, I don't read your comments as they're going by.
Somebody asked me if I saw the lights go out when Trump was giving his talk.
Yeah, so some of you noticed that Some of you noticed that I tweeted that Russia had succeeded in uniting the country into saying that if they cross the line again, that we would turn off their lights for them.
So I used the phrase in a tweet, we would turn off their lights for them, meaning Russia, if they mess with us again.
And then the president goes on TV within, I don't know, a couple hours of me saying that, and as he's talking his lights go off.
And I heard that story and I thought, Well, you know, I was talking about Russia's lights going off, but that's a heck of a coincidence.
So it makes me think we're in a simulation and it's a case of code reuse.
Have you ever noticed that when there's a new idea somewhere in the world, and this is an actual effect, it seems like when there's a new idea in the world, it pops up everywhere in the world.
Have you noticed that?
And one explanation is, well, the world was just ready.
You know, the world was ready for that idea.
It was because of all the other things sort of suggested this new thing and everybody started seeing it at the same time.
I suppose that's one explanation.
The other explanation is code reuse.
Because imagine every time you're adding a new piece of code to your simulation, you want it to be as useful as possible.
So you introduce it and it gets reused in a variety of settings.
So it might be evidence or in the simulation.
Could be reticular activation.
It could be. But I think I would have noticed The lights going out.
It's also more likely selective attention.
So I just notice things that look like coincidences and I don't notice things that don't look like coincidences.
So there are normal explanations for it that don't require...
Yeah, Rupert Sheldrake, you're right.
He was the guy behind that idea that people have ideas in the same places.
Now Sheldrake was not...
Credible, but he is associated with that idea.
Alright, I'm going to sign off for now.
Looks like people like this presentation, and I'll keep it relatively short.
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