Episode 150 Scott Adams: The Next Putin Summit

Guess what I've got. And I'll bet more than a few of you have this, too. It's a little thing I call coffee. It's in another little thing I call a coffee mug. And it's going to be some good drinking, or sipping, as I like to say. Are you ready for this simultaneous sip, the highlight of your day, and coffee with Scott Adams. Grab your cup, grab your vessel, grab your mug. It's time for the simultaneous sip. Ah. So I hope you saw my periscope from last night. That could not have been more fun. You. You'd have to see it to know what I'm talking about. But it's my pinned tweet, so if you can't get enough of me, that one would be a good one to watch. If you only had to watch one, if you never watched more than one, that would be the one to watch. Not this one. This one's going to be terrible. No, I'll try to elevate. I'll try to try to make it better every time. So the big story since the last time I spoke with you is that President Trump has agreed to host Putin in October. And what did the media say when they heard that he was going to host Putin in the United States? It went a little something like this. This is either hair on fire or hair standing straight up. You can interpret it either way. Ah. Ah. Now, one of the things that I hate to keep referring to this, I referred to this as my last periscope. Chris Cuomo referred to what we're seeing as something like a movie, and he made that reference several times that the. The Trump Russia saga is like a movie. And if it's a movie, you just saw the third act. So the third act of any movie is. Well, let me start from the first act. Somebody's life changes in some way. In this case, the President became president. And then there's a bunch of fun and games where he's acting presidential and people are fighting him, but he comes out okay all the time. And then there's that thing that was foreshadowed because anything Russian seemed to have been foreshadowed. Right. And then when the summit with Putin happened, it felt like everybody thought, there it is. The worst of our fears. He likes Putin more than he likes our country. Nothing like that happened, of course, but in one of the movies that people are running in their heads, that's exactly what happened. So it looks like things could not be worse. Things could not be worse. We've got a president who cares more about a Russian strongman who's done many bad things than he does about his own intelligence service. And I'm watching all that happen. And then Trump invites Putin to another meeting, this time in the States. Now, probably this will be something like a third act. A third act is when things look the worst, like, oh, my God, it's the end of the world. And that's how it will be reported right up to and including during the summit, the second summit in October. But there are a few things that you need to know about it. Number one, the President has now had practice. Practice makes everything better, right? It's hard to think of anything that doesn't get better with practice. So President Trump has had one summit with Putin in which he saw how people reacted to all the elements of it, what did people get excited about, what did people like about it, etc. Now he's going to get ready. He'll have plenty of time to get ready for a second one. Does the President like to lose? He does not. Does he prepare as much as he. As people think he should for big events? He does not. If you give him a little bit of practice, does he elevate his game? Oh, yeah, he does. You saw that in the campaign, when his debate performances seem to get better. And I would argue that his whole presidential thing is also improving with practice. So the second Trump summit is likely to go much better. Even if the only thing that changes is how he manages the optics and the press conference and that sort of thing, it will just be way better. So the odds are this is a good thing. Now, what I love about it is that when people's hair was already on fire and before the. Before the hair had burned down to their skull, they were still running around. Hair's on fire, hair's on fire. He takes control of the narrative by doubling down and saying, hey, why don't you come to the United States, Putin, and we'll have another meeting. And then everybody's like, what? Ah. Double ah. So he has, once again completely controlled the narrative. And now we're going to be talking about the future, because the past, we're already exhausted with the past. And when I say the past, I mean this past week, one week. But we're already exhausted with it. And he's given us new, fresh stuff to talk about, which is the upcoming summit. So that part is good. The experts are saying, no, no, you should not meet with him, you should not invite him to the United States. But what was one of the big problems with the summit? It seemed to be that the president seemed to not have the status that his critics thought. It seemed like he had actually put himself at such a conciliatory place that it actually elevated Putin almost like he was a little higher than Trump. That's at least some of the impressions that people were getting. I didn't see that, but a lot of people saw that when they watched it. And so when you invite Putin to your country, who has the situational advantage? Who has the advantage? Putin who is visiting, or Trump who actually lives in the, you know, lives and works in the White House? All right, Putin is going to be on Trump's home turf. Trump will absolutely have the visual advantage because, you know, blah, blah, White, White House flag symbols and all those things. And what will Putin have? His suit. Putin will show up with the clothes on his back in terms of what we see. So we're going to see Putin and Putin's clothing. That's it. That's all we'll see of Putin. But we're going to see the White House, the flags. We're going to see the military. We're going to see. You're going to see so much America surrounding Putin that the visual persuasion game will be won before it starts. So I think it's a. And let me ask you this. In the business world, if you're the one who goes to someone else's office, who is the alpha? Is the alpha person the person who goes to visit the other person or the person who waits for the person to visit them? It's always the host. So Trump has one before he starts the second summit because the setup is just so favorable to Trump that it would be hard for that to go wrong. Visually. Now you also have the advantage of low expectations. People thought that the first summit went so poorly. Whether or not that's true, the impression is that it did. That Trump's bar that he has to cross to look like he's getting better at this or things are moving in the right direction is very low. Also a perfect situation. He's got practice with lots of feedback and criticisms, lots of things to work with. He might have progress by then, meaning that presumably the meeting won't even happen unless Russia's delivered at least a little bit, or at least something to plan to announce at the summit. So it's very likely he'll have something that he can at least show as progress. He'll have practice, he'll have the home field advantage, and he'll have low expectations. So things are set up for Trump to have A good meeting. Now, of course, the news will find new things to obsess about, but as I was talking in my periscope last night, the news is totally lost in the weeds. Trump and the White House are trying to make sure that the risk of nuclear war is lowered in all the hot spots around the world. He's trying to calm down the Middle east and maybe actually make something work. North Korea, denuclearization. So Trump is up here working on the very top priorities and his. His enemy, press, if we can say that, is talking about, well, did he say would or wouldn't? Did he say no? And then there's a new one down in the weeds, the unimportant stuff. The new one is that apparently this summit with Putin, the second one was in the news and announced when Dan Coats, who's the Director of National Intelligence, I believe, was on stage at some event being interviewed, and he learned of it by somebody reading it off their phone in public while he was in front of a crowd. Now, if you didn't see it, Coates was very funny because he did a sort of a comedic double take with, what did you say? And made it clear that he didn't know anything about it. Now, the media reported this as hair's on fire. How can Trump make such a decision and not even inform his Director of National Intelligence, who has to learn about it while he's giving a speech? It's the worst thing in the world. It was. Andrea Mitchell was interviewing him and told him about it. So here's my feedback on that. So. That's my feedback to the entire story that Coates wasn't in the loop. So here's the thing. Whose decision was it? Trump's. What if Trump had talked to everybody and gotten all their feedback, what would they have said? They would have said, I think don't do it because that last one went so poorly. Do you know who says don't do it because the last one went so poorly? People who believe history repeats. Do you know what history never does? It never repeats. It can't, because the situation changes. The fact that we observed something happening in the first summit changes what can happen in the second summit. Trump got practice. Trump learned what works and what doesn't. Trump's putting him, you know, taking the home field advantage. Trump's going to make sure probably that there's some kind of progress or something to announce the bar is lower because of the lesson. So nothing is the same. What do you think Trump's advisors would have told him to do? They would have told them not to do it? Did he need to ask them for their advice when he already knew what they would say and it wasn't going to be what he decided to do? There's only one person who needs to make the decision. It wasn't Dan Coats. And it doesn't really matter how he found out, because Trump made the decision. People probably should have told Dan Coats a little sooner. I assume somebody in his organization, you know, might have heard wind of it before the media. And you know what? Even if. Even if Trump. I don't know if this happened, but even if Trump had told the media before he told even one person, am I okay with that? Yep. Totally okay with that. Whose decision is it? Trump's decision alone. His decision alone. What does everybody else have to do with that decision? They find out about it after he makes it. So Dan Coates found out about it after he makes it. Is that ideal? No, probably not. It'd look better if everybody knew and they were on the same page. But does it matter? No, it does not. Do you remember that disastrous summit that President Trump had with Putin? He said things about our intelligence agencies that most people agree with, but he said it while he was standing next to Putin. And so it's the worst thing in the world. Ah. And so I read about the end of the world, and I saw about stories about the end of the world because of that horrible, horrible tragedy at the summit that Trump said something that shocked people because he's never done that before. Has Trump ever done anything that shocked people? I'm so surprised. And then the next day, after that terrible tragedy at the summit, I woke up and I got myself some coffee. And I thought to myself, this coffee will be ruined now. How can I go on because of that awkward thing that happened at that summit in another country? Let me tentatively taste my coffee. Wait a minute. This coffee tastes exactly the same as yesterday. My clothes are not on fire, and I still have my job. I'm pretty sure it was the end of the world this week. Why has everything looked the same? Am I already dead? Am I in heaven? Why is nothing worse? CNN told me things were worse, but my coffee tastes exactly the same. It's not even dripping out of the bottom of the cup. How can this be? How can I explain my world? My world doesn't make sense. So the president's critics have some good points to make. They're not necessarily completely making up news. It's. And their criticisms of what happened at the first summit are not completely off base. They just are completely unimportant. Did he say would or wouldn't? It doesn't really matter. Did he say no about Putin's meddling in cyber ways? It doesn't really matter. We know what he thinks. We know what the government thinks, we know what his strategy is. It's a good strategy and seems to be heading in the right direction. Do we care that Dan Coats was surprised about the information and that he was not consulted on something that his opinion would not have mattered in any way? Nope. Coffee still tastes the same. Now, if President Trump and Putin succeed in calming the Middle east, getting a good result in North Korea, maybe even taking down their nuclear threats toward each other, is anybody going to remember any of this? Will the historians say, just imagine, think of the future. It's a year from now and there's tremendous progress on everything nuclear, from Iran to North Korea to the US And Russian stockpiles. Will the historian say, yeah, the. They made tremendous progress working together, but we can't get over that wood and wooden thing. And we were shocked that Dan Coats was surprised about something at an event somewhere. No, historians will not remember any of that. They will not care. So what do we expect out of this upcoming summit? First of all, it's classic Trump to once he has all of this energy, there was so much hair on fire and reporting and explaining that he took all of this energy and then he refocused it as he does. I've told you that 50% of persuasion is just keeping your attention because whatever your attention is on, you will eventually convince yourself is more credible, more important than whatever else you were thinking of, because you're just focused on it. So now we're focused on this summit and the President has brought into focus. Well, let me tell you something else that connects a few dots. Remember I kept telling, I keep telling you for two years now or so that the President likes to shake the box whenever the variables are not lined up in a way that's good for him. So he'll shake the box, and if he still doesn't get what he wants, he'll shake again and he'll shake again. And I've said that only he can shake the box, and he can do it as many times as he needs to until the variables line up the way he wants. And that other people can't shake the box, so they have a big disadvantage. They can't shake the box because they can't take the heat. You watch the President shake the hell out of the Russia box by having the summit and didn't go exactly the way people planned. And what happened because he shook that box? What variables are different? There are some important variables that got shifted around in the box. Here's the most important variable. How important did you think it was, I don't know, few years ago or even six months ago, the Russian cyber meddling, you probably thought it was important. But if you were going to make, if I asked you, make a list of your top 20 things that you think are the important things in the world, where would Russia's cyber meddling and just Russia's bad acting in the world, where would that be in your top 20 just six months ago? Probably not that high. Now, I'm not going to argue that it should be higher in the priorities, but I will tell you that it is. So the President has taken this lower level, second tier priority in the public's mind. I'm not saying it's not important. I'm not saying that our experts are wrong about the incredible risk there is. Just saying that in the public's mind, it just was sort of down the list somewhere. It was way after the economy, way after North Korea. And where is it right now? Top of the headlines. Is it more important? Because we're talking about it and focusing on it and Trump has created a lot of energy around it. Well, it didn't get more important, it just got more attention. And what has that done? It has hardened the American public's opinion against Trump. I'm sorry? Well, half the public is against Trump, but at the same time, whether or not they're against Trump, separately, the entire public, left and right, is against Putin and specifically against him messing with us. That level of energy, that variable is new. Trump shook the box until the public left and right lined up with him against an external threat. Now he's not treating it as an external threat. He's playing as smarter. He's saying two things. Be our friend. Be our friend. Being our friend is great. It's great. You know, the proverbial carrot. Hey, it's a delicious carrot. I've got the best carrots. Our carrots are awesome. You should have a carrot. Would you like a carrot? So he's got the carrot part better than anybody's ever done it. And remember the importance of contrast. It's not enough to say, we'll hurt you if you don't want, do what we want. You also need the big contrast play, which is. And if you do what we like, oh, my God, we could change the world. You could be one of the Greatest leaders of all time, Mr. Putin. Which is true, by the way, Completely true. Putin has this amazing place in the world right now where he can be, despite anything he's been accused of, true or not, he is the center of history right now. And he can either become one of the greatest leaders, even with his laws. I'm not discounting any of the bad stuff. We all know what it is. We can all make our list of bad Putin behavior. But if he decides to go legit, if you will, and work with Trump on denuclearizing and is productive in the Middle east and all that, he becomes one of the greatest leaders in history. It will really be amazing. Trump has created that out of nothing. If Putin had simply played well with us before, let's say a year ago or before Trump, let's say, would Putin have gotten as much credit? Not really. He just would have been a bad guy that we pushed into helping us somehow. Or he's just not even part of the important part of the story. He's. He's just a footnote. But Trump has elevated him to the center stage and put the entire focus of, you know, the, of the American public on Putin. Putin now has something to gain and something to lose that just didn't exist before, at least not in that scale, not in that level of importance. Trump has created an asset out of nothing. How many times have you heard me say that? He has conjured up an asset out of nothing but psychology and persuasion in which Putin has a huge thing to gain. Being one of the most important leaders of all history if he partners with Trump or one of the biggest losers of all of history, because the President has also made it clear that he would be Putin's worst enemy. What does he mean by that? It means what you think. It doesn't mean war in all likelihood, because I don't think we'd be that dumb. But does it mean that Putin's going to have a successful leadership for the rest of his time on this earth? It does not. Putin would not have a good rest of his life and Trump would make sure that very, very cleanly and decisively. I believe nobody believes that Trump would forget about it if he gets screwed here and nobody would feel bad if he returned the favor in a very aggressive way. So we have this situation where the variables are now different. The American public is aligned against Putin. So if things went bad and the President said, look, we're going to have to get super rough on Russia because Putin, he's got the public on his side, now, both left and right, how often does that happen? So the variables are not what they were, the variables even, because. And here's the coincidence or not part, because the first summit was reported, widely reported to be not good on a number of levels. That brought all the attention exactly where Trump needs it to set the table for the second meeting. How would you like to be Putin and walk into this summit in October and have nothing to offer? Think about it. Imagine Putin showing up in Washington and having nothing to offer. And imagine that it's been a few more months of bad behavior and he's just walking into the White House doing nothing for us. How's that meeting going to go? How's the rest of Putin's life going to go? Not so well. So, yeah, it would make Putin look foolish. There's also a very important thing going on that I'm going to call the Bro Code. For the women who are watching this, this will be a mysterious conversation in which you will not completely understand what's going on here. Probably some of you might. You've heard something called the Bro Code. There's sort of an understood way that men deal with other men that is different than the way men would deal with, let's say, a crowd, different than they would deal with a family member, different than they would deal with a woman. No matter what the relationship was. Two men have sort of an understanding that's just built into culture and experience that there are some rules at play that are not written down anywhere. Here's one of the rules. President Trump took a lot of heat to help rehabilitate Putin. In other words, to allow Putin to even stand on the world stage, President Trump had to eat about a mile of shit in public. So even though President Trump has doubled down and said, yes, Russia did a lot of cyber stuff and meddled in the election, he's confirmed that a number of times. But in public and when he talks about Putin, he's giving him all kinds of forgiveness, if you can call it that. Get rid of this guy. He's giving him all kinds of respect. Putin, because of the Bro Code, owes Trump a favor. He owes him a favor. This has nothing to do with politics. It has nothing to do with. Has nothing to do with diplomacy. It has a lot to do. It has a lot to do with just the brocode. There's just a way that people, the two males work with each other. Now, if Putin violates what we want as a country, he's in a lot of trouble. If Putin, on top of that, violates The Bro code. In other words, if he just screws the president, who just gave him space and protected him essentially in public, if Putin does that, he's crossed a line that you can't uncross, and I think he knows it. I would expect a favorable result in October, but it will be reported as if it's the end of the world coming by the enemy press. Trump negged himself. Yeah, sort of, yeah. So the. You saw at the last summit, there was this talk about, hey, what if Mueller goes over to Russia and talks to the suspects in the election meddling, and in return, what if some Russian law enforcement people of some sort come to the United States and on our soil talk to some people related to that Bill Browder situation. Now, the experts, the diplomats said, ah, you can't do that. You can't give up our diplomats just because you're Putin's best friend. You can never give up an ambassador or a diplomat. You got to keep that diplomatic immunity going. Well, here's the thing. That whole offer of exchanging people, none of that was real. Neither Putin nor Trump could have possibly thought that was a good idea. But it sounded good. It was something you say in public, and it sounded like, oh, that's reasonable, I guess, well, that's better than nothing. But when you come right down to it, what would that look like? Keeping in mind that the laws of the other country don't apply in a foreign land. So what's the worst case scenario for whoever Russia wants to talk to? Here's the worst case scenario. That person goes to a meeting in which there's heavy security and talks to their Russian law enforcement. And the Russian law enforcement says, here's my question. And the diplomat says, I'm not going to answer that. And then they ask another question, and diplomat says, I'm not going to answer that, etcetera, until the Russian legal, whoever they are, just leaves. Now, what recourse does Russia have if the diplomat just says, I'm in America and I don't really have to answer your question? That's it. And there's security standing there and you're in America, you're perfectly safe. That's it. That's the whole meeting. The whole meeting is just a diplomat saying, I'm not going to talk to you. Now, could the diplomat talk to the Russians and answer their questions if they wanted to? Well, they could, but it would be stupid because the right approach is to create a precedent that, yeah, you can come over, take a flight over, you could be in the room with me and my heaviest security. But I'm never going to answer a question for a foreign country. It's just not going to happen. Likewise, if Mueller goes over to talk to the Russians, you would assume that the Russians would lie about everything or just not answer questions. And it wouldn't matter because Mueller has no power. He can't indict them, he can't find them guilty of obstruction of justice. It's a toothless, ridiculous offer that they exchange people. I think it was designed to sound like there was something that wasn't nothing, but it was closer to nothing than something giving Tony Podesta immunity. Yeah, I saw something about that story, but I don't know enough about it or what the implication of that is. But it does look like. Manafort's in big trouble. Why are you assuming it's on home soil, Scott? Because no American would go to a neutral place to talk to Russian law enforcement about something they don't want to talk to. There's no law that would force them to do it, and they certainly wouldn't do it willingly. This is part of an existing treaty with Russia. Makes sense. All right, that's all for now. I got to do some stuff. I'll talk to you later. Bye.