What game theory teaches us about war | Simon Sinek

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] thanks very much at the end of the Cold War the United States made a policy decision that maybe one of the biggest mistakes of the 20th century it's contributed to create chaos and uncertainty in this current day and it's not based on politics it's based on games in game theory there are two types of games there are finite games and there are infinite games a finite game is defined as known players fixed rules and agreed-upon objective baseball right an infinite game is defined as known and unknown players the rules are changeable and the objective is to perpetuate the game when you pit a finite player versus a finite player the system is stable baseball is stable so is conventional war for that matter when you pit an infinite player versus an infinite player the system is also stable the Cold War was stable and that's because in an infinite game there are no winners and losers we cannot lose the game and so we work to keep the game in play right in fact because there are no winners and losers the only thing a player can do is drop out when they either run out of the resources or the will to play problems arise however when you pit a finite player versus an infinite player it's the finite player who then gets caught in quagmire this happens in business all the time the game of business is an infinite game the concept of business has existed longer than every single company that exists right now and it'll exist long after all the companies that exist right now go away the funny thing about business is the number of companies that are playing finite they're playing to win they're playing to be the best they're playing to beat the quarter or the year and they're always frustrated by that company that has an amazing vision a long-term vision that seems to drive them crazy and over the long term that player will always win and the other player will run out of resources or the will and they'll either go out of business will be bought or sold or mirrage required at whatever it is this is also what happened to the United States in Vietnam the United States was fighting to win the Vietcong were fighting for their lives they would fight forever if necessary this is also what happened when the Soviet Union was in Afghanistan the Soviets were fighting to beat the Mujahideen and the Mujahideen were fighting to survive fighting for their very very lives now when it comes to policy you have to know what game you're playing so you can play the right rules and this became completely clear to me when the Soviets actually drove their tracked tanks into Afghanistan and Brzezinski the National Security Advisor for President Carter was called into the president's office and the president asked him what is the policy of the United States and Brzezinski said the policy of the United States is to eject the Soviet it's a finite goal and then almost as an offhanded comment he says and if we can't do that we'll make it as expensive as possible for them to stay in other words the United States accidentally had an infinite strategy which is not fixed in time and we don't know exactly what it looks like what we're trying to do is drain the enemy of will and the resources to continue to play and ten years later the Soviets drove their tanks out of Afghanistan running out of resources and the will now if you think about what happened when the Berlin Wall came down we were in an infinite game Soviets and the United States and the Berlin Wall came down and the United States made again one of the greatest perhaps one of the greatest blunders policy blunders of the 20th century they announced that they had won the game they had won the Cold War no they didn't the player dropped out because they ran out of the will or the resources to play and the problem is is because they thought they had won the war they started acting like victors and the United States imposed their will on the world for about 11 years and as it turns out the world didn't like that too much and as what happens in all infinite contests new players started to him if you consider how the Cold War existed it really existed on three tensions there was a nuclear tension both both states had nuclear weapons to end all life there was an ideological tension one was an exporter of democracy and capitalism the other one is an exporter of soviet-style communism and there was an economic tension that's what kept the Cold War alive and well not coincidentally life liberty and the pursuit of happiness the only three things for which we will bear any burden and pay any price and fight forever to defend now the nuclear tension has been replaced by Pakistan and China China was already there Pakistan North Korea maybe Iran the ideological tension soviet-style communism has been replaced by Islamic extremism and the economic tension the Soviet Union has been replaced by China we don't fear nuclear war with China but the point is as all three tensions are alive and well and you see the problem is is they all know who their enemy is but we don't realize that the Cold War 2.0 is happening and we are still trying to decide which one is more important we're trying to win and beat all of these things and not realize that the game is infinite not finite and the United States policies these days are become shorter and shorter term which creates turmoil and chaos in strategy in how we present ourselves to the world the easiest way to understand the game you're in is when you have an opposing force in other words not that right so you want great leadership you want somebody to say what we stand for but if you don't have that you get to say not that so it was really easy the intelligence services for example during the Cold War they fought like cats and dogs like they fight now but they could all agree on one thing not that and they worked really really well to combine their forces to face the Soviet Union we don't have a singular not that anymore and so we're all over the place but all of our enemies all have a singular not that and it's us ideally we want to run all of our decisions through our values this is these are what make us enduring our values our enduring and this is what is the foundation of an infinite contest so you've consider up here is where our values lie what I call the why our values right these things are infinite they're enduring right down here you have what I call the what these are our interests and they are finite and ideally what you want to do is you run all decisions through our values and then through our interests let me show you what that looks like sometimes they go in our favor and sometimes they don't so for example when we go into a battlefield and we shoot a bad guy we will take his injured body we will bring him into our hospitals and we will risk American lives to bring him into the hospitals use American doctors American beds American medicines to nurse him back to health that's not in our interests but the reason we do it because it's kind of who we are it's kind of what we do it's like it's our thing right when we make a decision based solely on our interests it looks like this right so should we torture people now the reason we did it offshore is because everybody kind of knew that that was an era thing because if we had no problem with it we just do it here so we hit it away because we knew it was uncomfortable because we know what our values are so what's been happening in the world is we've been evaluating all of the things that have been going on by ignoring our values because we don't realize we're in an infinite contest and we only look at our interests so we think about what should we do in Syria and we make a very very good decision based on Syria our interest in Syria we make a decision and what would she do what should we do in Crimea and what would she what should we do with regards to Putin and what should we do with regards to Iraq and Afghanistan and we're all over the place and the problem is when you pull back and take a look now nobody has any idea what we stand for this is confusing for our allies who no longer trust us because we're no longer predictable and it's fantastic for our enemies because they can exploit it ideally what we do is we run all decisions through our values first and though it may not always go our way just like I said we make decisions all the time that aren't always in our interests like bringing an injured bad guy in putting them in our hospitals not our interests but what that does it makes us predictable and it makes our allies trust us because they know what we stand for and they will either stand with us or they'll stand against us and together we will go through the infinite contest for as long as it takes this is what we're in right now the Cold War is alive and well and we will not help contribute to stabilizing the world until we start playing the game were in rather than playing the game were not in thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: undefined

Views: 2,803,941

Rating: 4.7863078 out of 5

Keywords: war, America, strategy, allies, conflict, gaming, game theory

Id: 0bFs6ZiynSU

Length: 9min 48sec (588 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 08 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/ram-ok]

Snake oil salesman are alive and well, the player and what hes selling is different but the game is the same.

[u/intjengineer]

That's self proving argument. Picking it apart on specific examples is a finite strategy. Saying America doesn't have values is taking the infinite strategy that proves the argument.

Thanks for posting.

[u/boski39]

Who even is this guy and why do we keep giving him a platform from which he can spew this nonsense? He has no idea what he's talking about and no concept of international relations. He just drew a bunch of circles with arrows.....

[u/zebulo]

This is a bunch of gobbledigook... whenever people say "oh, this happened in history and oh by the way it's just like in business" -no.

[u/blue_strat]

He claims that the US's approaches in Syria, Crimea, Russia, Iraq, and Afghanistan are inconsistent because they're based on short-term interests and not long-term values. Well, that's the nature of intelligence and the process of deciding to go to war. In each case (excluding the vague problem of "Putin") the US engaged because of x value that they're supposed to hold so deeply - opposition to tyranny, or the self-determination of a people - and then the picture changed.

Iraq was first deemed to have WMDs that hadn't been surrendered after the First Gulf War, then it wasn't. Afghanistan was Al-Qaeda's base and probably the location of Bin Laden, then it wasn't. Syria's government was genocidal (which under the 1948 UN convention on genocide, the US must intervene to prevent), then it was the representative of order against international insurgents, then it was some combination of the two.

All foreign politics are based on the possibility or probability of something happening, and that is usually a threat to domestic interests or international treaties. In the 1920s-30s, spy networks exploded in size across Europe because everyone realised that they were mostly vulnerable to surprise attack, so they each needed to know what any potential enemy was planning before they did it. They also needed to not appear that they knew what their neighbours were planning since they weren't yet at war, but when they found they were planning something, what could they do? It's not a simple decision you can base on core values like "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Everyone wants those, but it doesn't mean that every foreign action is guided by all of them at the same time.

It depended on the situation, and while most countries had self-defence as their obvious motive, when it came to making a military decision they had to go based on what they knew, which usually wasn't a simple threat of invasion. Obviously international warfare is more complicated than a ten-minute video can convey, but his central point ignores the change in perspective that we take on wars over time. He could probably paint a war from a hundred years ago in broad strokes, while a current or recent war seems driven by small and confusing details. That's just hindsight, and infinite games are made of finite ones.

[u/VulcanHobo]

This sounds like the blithering of one of those people who read a one-liner in a wiki article and try to extrapolate that to everything, discarding pesky things like details and nuance.