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June 14, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
32:06
Episode 92 - How to End Racism
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Hey everybody!
I thought I was alone but I see hundreds of you streaming in because you know the coffee doesn't taste as excellent As it does when I drink coffee with you.
It's time for the simultaneous sip.
Everybody, grab your vessel of beverage and go for it.
Now, many of you have messaged me privately to say, I don't know what it is, but when I have my beverage at the same time that you do, it tastes better.
That's not an accident.
By the way, I was thinking of doing a Periscope, not today, on the psychology of food.
How to make your food taste better with psychology.
So forget about the seasonings and the preparation.
That's important too. But there's a whole psychological part that stuff I picked up when I owned restaurants.
And a lot of it's non-obvious.
So I think I'll do that one of these days, not today.
So yesterday I got a message from Hawk Newsome, leader of Black Lives Matter, Greater New York chapter, and he sent me a video clip somebody just took on a phone.
It's sort of hard to hear, but it's a clip of Hawk giving a speech to, I'm not sure exactly what group it was, but he was giving a speech.
And it was really interesting.
First of all, he's a great speaker.
And secondly, he made it incredibly clear to the audience, and here's how he put it.
He said, Black Lives Matter formed when President Obama was president and after eight years of democratic control.
And he said, basically, what the hell have they done for us?
And the message was that Democrats don't have the automatic black vote.
And that they haven't done enough to keep their vote.
Think about that.
Have you heard that before?
That is a really powerful statement.
And he's saying it as clear as you could possibly say.
Well, he doesn't say it in these words, so these are my own words.
But should Republicans step up with some policies, some results, he's saying there's nothing to stop us from voting Republican if you've got a better plan.
That is what power looks like.
Because it's not power if you're automatically going to vote Democrat, no matter what they do.
So he's untapping.
He's sort of unlocking this great potential.
It's fun to watch.
I don't know if he's going to tweet it, but if he does, I'll retweet that for you.
That was, somebody said, who was that?
That was Hawk Newsome, head of Black Lives Matter and of New York, the greater New York chapter.
Probably their most effective leader.
I don't know every leader of Black Lives Matter, but my guess is he would be.
And I wanted to run something by you.
I'm feeling all good and optimistic after my talk yesterday with...
With Bill Pulte, which I did on Periscope, I hope most of you saw it.
It's my pinned tweet.
And so most of you know that Bill Pulte's Blight Authority project, they're clearing out huge contiguous blocks of blight in urban areas, Detroit and Pontiac.
And getting rid of all the crime at the same time, because once you take it down to just land, the crime goes away because there's no place to hide.
And now there's an opportunity to rebuild that into something.
And I spent the entire day yesterday...
Brainstorming how to build maybe residential homes that are optimized for that, etc.
Bill followed up, he said, I think he's got about 30 messages from people who saw the Periscope offering to help, offering to buy land, offering their companies assistance.
What do just about all of those people have in common?
Well, they watch this Periscope, they're probably Trump supporters.
And they were spring-loaded to help If they just had an opportunity that made sense for the skills and the passions that they have.
And Bill's project does that because it creates this greenfield situation where everybody can imagine, oh, in this situation, I could contribute this.
I could put an idea out there.
I could invest. So there's something powerful about making it possible for people to jump in and help.
So I promised you in the title of this periscope that I'd tell you how to solve racism.
Now racism, you know, obviously you can't make racism per se go away, but you can certainly do a lot to heal the great divide, which is that half of the country believes that the other half are racist.
I think most of you on this periscope, because of the filtering mechanism of who watches this, doesn't think that's true.
And I think it's a catastrophe that half of the country is living with that psychological burden Which I can't, it's hard to even imagine.
Try to put yourself in the head.
Imagine you believed you were in a country where half of the people just frickin' hated you or disrespected you or something.
I don't think we live in that country.
I think we live in a country where there are serious racists, but fortunately it's a small number.
So I wanted to propose this thought.
And I think I'm safe in saying that the majority of you watching are conservatives or Trump supporters, not all of you, but a disproportionate number.
And let me put this thought out here.
I'm going to say it once, and then I'm just going to let it hang there for a while and look at your comments.
Because I want to see if you agree or disagree.
Because if you don't agree, then it's a nothing.
If you do agree, it might be a something.
So here's the thought.
Race relations in the United States will improve substantially the moment that the left realizes that the right has greater respect for, greater respect for, a black lesbian with a job compared to a white guy who doesn't have one and isn't looking for one.
Just read the comments.
Hey, you see that?
Yep. Now there's some people who are saying no, but I believe that those people saying no are not answering for themselves.
I believe the people, and there are only a few of you who have disagreed.
The people who disagreed, I think you're saying, I don't think other people will agree with that.
I don't believe there's anyone here who disagrees with that statement.
So make sure you're answering for yourself.
Don't make an assumption about other people.
Yeah, just look at the...
Rarely do you ever see this much agreement.
All right? So here's the thing.
It's not about racism.
It's about respect.
That's it. If the left understood the right, they would have an airtight...
System for creating the world they want to live in.
What's the world you want to live in?
If you think you're in a world where half the country is racist, and you don't like that, of course, what's the world you want to live in?
The world you want to live in is one where you have a strategy to make that go away.
Here's a strategy for making that go away.
Be a good citizen.
That's it. You could ask the same question that I asked you.
You could ask it a whole variety of ways.
Let me give you another one.
Let's just talk about conservatives and people on the right.
Would the people on the right have more respect for a black person following the law or a white person violating the law?
It's easy. If you're talking about respect, conservatives are very consistent.
Follow the Constitution, follow the law, try to contribute.
And you notice that I said try to contribute.
Not everybody can contribute.
We're not in a world where everybody has the wherewithal, the resources, the opportunity, the time.
Not everybody can contribute.
But you can tell if people are trying, or if they're at least trying to reduce the burden they have on other people.
For conservatives, and I remind my viewers, I'm not one.
I appreciate conservatives largely because of this thing that I'm talking about.
The conservatives have a code, if you will, a way of looking at the world, which makes it really easy for them to like you.
Contribute. Do something useful.
That's about it. All right.
So, to the extent that you can change the frame from Are people racist?
Are you more racist? These are unanswerable, impossible to solve problems because you're talking about one person's mental state and another person's mental state and I'm guessing what you're thinking, but I'm guessing wrong.
The whole racism conversation is a dead end.
There's nothing at the end of the road there.
But respect is not only easy to understand, It's easy to achieve.
Equality may be impossible because everybody has a different idea of what an equal situation is.
So even if equality somehow were possible, we wouldn't agree that we were there.
Nobody can ever agree what's equal.
We're just not built that way.
We can never agree what's equal on any topic.
Is it equal that I pay a higher percentage of my taxes than you do because I'm rich?
Or should I pay the same dollar amount?
We could just argue all day about what's equal.
You can never settle fair.
You can never settle equal.
You can never settle, is this racist or is this not racist?
These are unsolvable problems.
So why not have a problem that's solvable?
It's easy. How about we treat each other with respect?
Best you could do. Treat everybody with respect.
And how hard is it to get respect from the right?
Doesn't matter who you are.
Just contribute.
Now, as we saw with the Bill Pulte's project, the Urban Light Project, it's kind of rare that I would do a periscope and somebody would get, you know, immediately 30 messages and growing of how can I help?
How can I contribute for literally nothing in return?
That's a rare situation.
But it's also, it's common in the sense that because there was something people could imagine how they could help, It just became practical.
And so, when it was practical, you saw the good impulses of people kick in.
People have good impulses that are sort of trapped in their own mental prison, if you will.
You know, the goodwill of the people who have a good situation in this world, and I'm one of them, is a little bit trapped.
We'd like to do more.
I wake up, I swear to God, I wake up every morning thinking, how can I make the world a better place?
And I see a lot of obstacles, and it defines what I can and can't do.
I try to push through them, but there are obstacles.
So to the extent that there are some obstacles to our good intentions, it hides The respect and the goodness that people would like to see on the right.
So what does the left see from the right?
What's in front of them?
What is it that they notice most?
Bad behavior, right?
If you're on the left and you go on social media and you look at anything anybody is saying on the right, what's it look like?
Well, it looks like a bunch of assholes.
If you're on the left and you're reading social media and you're reading what the right is saying, you're saying, what a bunch of assholes.
If you're on the right and you're reading anything from the left on social media, what are you going to think?
Oh my God, a bunch of assholes.
That's what's in front of our face because we spend all day on social media.
What we don't spend all day doing is what Bill Pulte is doing, which is fixing stuff.
He's actually making the world better.
He's literally removing urban blight.
He's creating great feelings and feelings of optimism and potential and all this.
But if all you do is hang out on social media, you just think the other side are just terrible people.
So here's my solution.
If you want to end racism, change the frame to respect because that's something we can measure and it's easy to know whether you've achieved it.
If you're staying on the right side of the law and you're trying, you're in school, you're looking for a job, you're seeking mentors, you're trying to figure out what's wrong, maybe you're working on your health, Maybe you're helping somebody else.
You're contributing. You're working in the right direction.
You've got all the respect that you could handle.
So let's make it easy.
Let's change the frame. Let's give each other a little bit of respect.
You could start on social media.
And if you do, oh my God, what a world we could be living in.
I know it's more fun to fight back.
It's more fun to defend yourself.
But try to stick with the ideas.
Try to show some respect while disagreeing.
You can disagree as aggressively as the situation requires, but you can do it respectfully.
And by the way, this is advice that I have not taken for myself in the past.
So I'm going to make a concerted effort to be a better person in terms of how I present myself.
I don't think my innards aren't any different, but in terms of how I present myself, I'm going to try to fix that up a little bit.
So you're seeing the importance of respect in the Kim Jong-un North Korea situation.
And you're seeing how powerful that is.
You know, taking people who are literally, you know, mortal enemies, you know, North Korea and the United States, mortal enemies, like literally on the verge of wiping out each other.
And as soon as one of them increased its respect for the other, this was President Trump, he simply allowed the respect to even out, suddenly we're talking.
Now, if you say to yourself, my God, this will not lead to a good result, I don't know exactly why North Korea would want to nuke us if we're being nice to them.
You don't really nuke people who are not at war with you and are trying to help.
That's just not who you nuke.
Now, I'm hoping that we'll be successful in denuclearizing the peninsula, but at the very least, if they start to see us as being a helpful player, we're heading in the right direction.
But I think denuclearization has to be the goal.
All right. I'll tell you, I was very annoyed at the Washington Post.
I don't know if they were the first one to break the story, but they reported that Chairman Kim, that's the respectful name for him, apparently, is Chairman Kim, Would have trouble paying for a hotel room in Singapore.
Now here's what I think.
Probably not true.
It seems very unlikely that that was true.
But secondarily, even if you thought it was true, what are you doing reporting that?
This is real...
This is real sensitive stuff.
And the President has clearly indicated that a proper tone of respect is what's going to get us where we want to go.
And to me, this is one of those situations where it wouldn't matter if it was President Trump or President Obama.
In this case, he's operating as Commander in Chief.
And he's very clearly told the country what is the right tone to set because the public opinion is connected with leadership in our country.
Chairman Kim is not going to want to make a deal with a leader who's at odds with the people.
Because the very next president might reverse the deal.
So it's pretty important that the public is generally on the same side with the president, especially in showing respect.
I saw that article in the Washington Post and I said, first of all, probably not true.
Probably fake news.
And secondly, so unhelpful That it just shocks the conscience.
I mean, it's shocking.
I read that, and I wanted to retweet it, but I also didn't want to make a bigger deal of it.
And my head just was like, blah, blah, blah.
What team is the Washington Post on?
You know, are they trying to make the world better?
I get that, you know, you could argue that it's news, but But it's not the news that matters.
It's the news that can only hurt.
Should you report news that can only make the world worse?
You know, you could make an argument that there's some news that's hard to hear, but we need to hear it.
It might be important to know it, even though it's unpleasant and can cause some trouble.
That's still a fair game.
But if you have a news story that can only make the world worse, and potentially really worse, like nuclear war worse, and you say, yeah, that's good enough, let's publish that.
You've just got to ask what team you're on.
This isn't the time to kneecap the Commander-in-Chief.
There's plenty of time to get back to politics once we get something good going with North Korea.
Nobody's going to tell anybody to stay nice forever.
But this is one of those times.
This is sort of a rallying time.
This isn't an undercut the president time.
And yes, I would say this no matter who the president was.
All right.
Just looking at your comments.
So somebody's saying, what does a nuclear deal look like?
Well, I'm no expert, but if there's any realistic chance of nuclear war, I would say that we've not achieved what we wanted to achieve.
There is no objective standard for this will make the world worse.
Right, there's no objective standard, but the news business is a judgment business.
And I think it would be easy to say that something had a downside and no upside.
That wouldn't be a hard determination.
Somebody said, did Kanye help persuade you for the summer of love idea?
Um... I can't say that I've thought of it in exactly those terms, but now that you've asked the question, I'd say yes.
The fact that Kanye said it makes it look possible.
So what he did is sort of help people out of a little mental prison.
And if the jailbreak is happening, Then it changes my opinion of what's possible.
Before the jailbreak, if you will, the mental jailbreak, I would have said, ah, it doesn't matter what you say.
There's no place, there's no winning path here.
But once you see that there's the potential for people to think differently, just think differently.
I'm not even saying what they should think or are thinking or anything.
Just allowing themselves to say, all right, what if?
Just what if? What if we allowed the Republicans and the Democrats to compete for the black vote and give us some policies and we'll work with you, we'll help pick the good ones, we'll advise, we'll help implement? What if?
Talk about my CNN tweet this morning.
Yes, there was a guest on CNN, there was a clip in which the, I think her title was a CNN culture critic or something like that, something about culture.
And she claimed in front of two horrified CNN hosts that she was specifically saying that everyone who voted for Trump is a racist.
You could see the...
I shouldn't laugh about this because it was horrible.
But the host could almost feel the ratings of CNN go down 25% and never come back.
That was the sort of opinion that deserved, I think, in the views of the public, We're good to go.
So they gave her an out.
They gave her a trapdoor.
They said, alright, you said something.
Let's make sure you know what you just said so that you can back it up if you need to.
Fair. It's hard to imagine a view that would be that damaging to CNN as a network that they would let slide.
So in terms of a business decision, it was just catastrophic.
In terms of how the news should be presented, that's up to them.
But as a business decision to let somebody associated with their network say that and to leave it unchallenged except to make sure that she had clarified it, I don't know how you get your ratings back after that.
I've seen a number of people asking me if I can debate Van Jones.
You know, I've said before, Van Jones is one of the best communicators in the anti-Trump world.
So he did invite me on his show once when his new show was kicking off.
I did get an invitation to be on it.
Which I appreciated. But I would have had to fly to New York to do that.
It didn't work with my schedule.
But I did appreciate that invitation.
And yeah, I would talk to him anytime you wanted to.
If it was...
We'd probably have to do it electronically.
But if we were in the same place, absolutely.
And for the reasons that you stated.
That he feels like the most credible voice on the left who also agrees with the general theme over there.
A lot of voices on both the left and the right are in agreement with, say, their side, but they don't feel credible.
They just feel like team play.
Van looks like somebody who's, you know, we're all influenced by the team effect, but he looks like an independent thinker, in my opinion.
So that's my take on him.
So I would say he would be one of the most credible people in the game and one of the best communicators.
Yeah, he was caught on tape admitting Russia was a nothing burger.
Yeah, that's... Well, he wasn't caught on tape.
He said it on tape.
There's a big difference. It wasn't a secret meeting.
He knew he was being recorded, and he gave you an honest opinion, right?
That wasn't a secret recording, I don't think.
So, yeah, Van, apparently he coined the phrase White Lash. - Oh my gosh.
Which is both clever and not entirely wrong.
There very much was a white lash.
It wasn't the whole story, but it was there.
Oh, is somebody questioning whether there was a white lash?
Well, keep in mind that I don't talk in absolutes.
But clearly there were white people who were saying, we found a black president, let's try a white president.
Or things went too far, or we went past fairness and we overshot the mark.
That was real. That was a real thing.
I couldn't put a size on it.
If you told me that was, you know, 10% of people's thinking or 40%, I wouldn't have any way to agree or disagree.
But it existed. It was a variable.
And by the way, it would be just as fair to say that President Obama, what helped him get elected was that he was black and he didn't make a big deal about it.
The smartest thing Obama ever did, well, that's not fair, because that lowers the bar too much.
He did a lot of smart stuff, but one of the smart things he did that really stands out is that he ran for president as a black man who didn't make a big deal about being a black man.
And that, more than anything, allowed people to say, thank goodness, we want to We want to be open-minded about stuff.
Just make it easy for us.
Just make it easy for us to be open-minded.
And he did. So that was part of his genius.
I know you don't like that, but some of you don't like it.
But in terms of politics, he was brilliant.
Somebody saying that he totally claimed it.
I think you mean being a black man part.
He didn't deny it, and certainly he mentioned it, but in no way was it a central theme.
He minimized it, obviously and intentionally.
Compared to Hillary Clinton, who made as a central point of her race, of her campaign, That she was a woman.
That was a gigantic political mistake.
Had Hillary Clinton never once said, I'm a woman and that should matter?
If she had never said that, she would be president.
I don't remember hearing that on her list of why she lost.
That's not on her list, right?
Does she realize that if she'd never mentioned being female, that she would be president?
Quite easily, in my mind.
It would have been a slam dunk.
Oh, it is on her list?
Maybe it is.
All right.
I think I've said enough for today.
All right.
I'm reading a funny comment that I'm not going to report.
Alright, that's it for today.
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