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June 16, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
36:36
Episode 55 - Structural Racism Plus Iran
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Hello and good morning.
Oh, it is a good morning, at least where I am.
It's sunny and beautiful and I have my coffee.
If you have your beverage of choice, make a coffee because you know that's the good one.
Okay, tea works too.
Any beverage, it's fine.
We're being permissive today, and it's time for the simultaneous sip.
Oh, that's the way to start the day.
You know, I've tried drinking coffee without all of you.
Doesn't taste as good.
But when you're all watching and simultaneously sipping...
Good stuff. So, how many of you saw Candace Owens' mention in President Trump's tweet?
So, how would you like to wake up to that?
So, the President essentially just endorsed a human being.
When does that ever happen?
When do you wake up and find out that the President of the United States decided to endorse you as a human being?
That's pretty good.
But anyway, it reminded me of a topic that I mentioned before, but I want to really take it home.
It's a question of, let's say, structural, institutional racism.
So if we accept that the laws of the land and the Constitution say everybody's equal, well, that's only part of the battle, right?
Because there's still hearts and minds and there's still, you know, just built-in advantages to being born white.
Let's just say what it is.
And I was making the point that, in my opinion, of all of the various structural disadvantages of being African American in particular, is your lack of connection to people who have resources and can help you.
So the point is, people tend to hang around with the people that are like them.
So if you're African American and you're hanging around with other African American folks primarily, you're somewhat accidentally cut off.
From all of the resources and the network, the investments, the hiring decisions, and all of the advice, the mentoring, and all the stuff you could get from white people, because the white people have lots of resources.
And, as I said before, the greatest untapped resource in the world for African Americans Is that white people like to help.
You know, I say that like maybe other people don't like to help, but of course everybody likes to help.
But white people in particular, we like to help.
Plus, here's the fun part.
White people have all the resources.
Yeah, I'm exaggerating.
We don't have all the resources.
But you know what I mean.
And so I wanted to give you an actual live demonstration of this point.
Okay, so Candace Owens got retweeted by the president this morning.
She's getting lots of well-deserved attention because she's doing a tremendous job of expressing a point of view that had been underserved.
Now, I watch that tweet and I watch her work and I think to myself, wow, she's doing really good things.
And what is the next thing you would expect from Candace to do in the natural arc of her career.
Probably write a book, right?
Now, I don't know if she wants to write a book, but for people who get prominence and get a lot of attention in the political sphere, the normal path is to write a book.
It gives you speaking income.
It gives you sort of an introduction to a lot of places that you just wouldn't get without writing a book.
And here again... I'm going to give you a demonstration of how useful it is to have friends who are white people.
So Candace follows me on Twitter.
We've never met. We've never had any communication.
And since we follow each other on Twitter, I can send her a message.
So, live while you're watching, I've composed a message from me to Candice.
Now, I don't know if she'll see it, because imagine how much Twitter traffic she's getting, especially today.
But I'm going to send this message, and it says this.
If you're looking for a book publisher, and I hope you are, I would be happy to introduce you to my literary agent in New York City.
Now, what would you pay...
For an introduction by a best-selling author to his literary agent who can almost guaranteed get you a deal.
So if you don't know how publishing works...
Let me send this while you're here.
Send... Okay, so because Candice has expanded her network outside of the African-American channel, and she has created insanely good contacts in the white world where people have resources, we like to help.
Good things can happen just from that alone.
And if there was a way to scale up What she's done so that other African-American folks have the same advantage of, you know, just connection.
How valuable would that be?
All right, so I just sent the tweet.
Don't know if she'll ever see it, but sitting in her DMs would be a recommendation to one of the top literary agents in New York City, a personal recommendation, so that she would definitely get a meeting, would get a look, And if the literary agent likes it, some agents are powerful enough that working with an author, they can usually put a package together that the publishers want, too.
So the agent is actually the big break, because a good agent can get you placed with a publisher.
So there's an example.
Now I try to do this sort of thing any time I run into anybody who's got fewer connections and could use them.
Let me give you another example.
This not in an African-American example, but have you ever seen a comic called Pearls Before Swine?
Pearls Before Swine.
It's one of the top comics in the world right now.
And what's interesting about that is that Stephan Postis, the author of the comic, one of the things that he did to transfer from being a lawyer, that was his primary job, to one of the top cartoonists in the world, is he called me...
He contacted me, I forget how, and said, can we have a meeting?
Can we go to lunch? I want to pick your brain about how to be a cartoonist.
So in the beginning, I gave him some attention that he wasn't getting when he was starting out, and that actually created kind of the first attention he got to get published, at least in newspapers.
He was already online.
And then we met in person, and I gave him lots of in-person advice.
Who could give better advice on being a cartoonist, really?
I mean, if you were going to go to somebody and say, hey, I'd like to get some advice on being a cartoonist, you'd want to go to somebody who literally wrote a book on advice.
And is a cartoonist and is succeeding.
So because he had an easy access to me, his career was a lot easier getting started and now he's a huge success.
How unfair is it that he was so comfortable You know, talking to me because, hey, he's a white guy, I'm a white guy.
It was one less thing that could have been a form of hesitation or friction.
So if that same benefit were opened up to everyone, it could be a better world.
So that's my point on there.
Let's talk about Iran. I'm a little bit early on my thinking about Iran and where that's all going, but let's do some speculation.
about the situation to see if we can get an early indication of where things might be heading.
Now, one of the things I keep hearing is that although the Iranian people are surprisingly pro-American, or at least they don't have a problem with Americans, and they say, Americans?
Well, they're nice. Whereas the leadership of Iran We believe, literally, it wants to kill us and kill Israel, kill America, maybe die in a giant fireball or something like that.
Now, what is your first impression when you hear that?
That there are people who are willing to die, destroy their own country, destroy Israel, destroy the United States, and yet they've been in power for a while and have not destroyed themselves or done something that would cause us to destroy them.
So it's been many years of these crazy suicidal people in charge who haven't actually crossed the line Where we would clearly just wipe them out.
Or they have not fully committed to even wiping out Israel.
Now what does it look like for Iran to be fully committed?
Well, take the Iraq War.
If you remember your history, Iraq had a stronger military, but they couldn't make too much headway attacking Iran.
This is back in Saddam's time.
Because the Iranians were just like human, sacrificial whatever, just running toward the Iraqi army with incomplete weaponry, just getting slaughtered.
But they were so brave and so committed that Iraq just...
We've seen what it looks like when the Iranian leaders and the Iranian public are committed to something.
When they're committed, there doesn't seem to be any limit to what they're willing to do.
But then we look at their language about death to America, and it doesn't look like that kind of commitment.
But, as I've said many times, if you're Israel, you have to treat that risk like it's a 100% chance of happening.
So Israel has no wiggle room.
They have to treat it like it's a war that's already happening.
You saw that there are reports where Israel attacked an alleged Iranian missile site in Syria, so they're very much treating it like they're in the middle of a war, and they have to.
It's deadly serious to them.
But what we're trying to do is understand where the leverage is, where the buttons are, what might be in play that we didn't think was in play, what might be an illusion, etc.
And in that world, we can be a little more permissive in our thinking because we're not Israel who's in imminent risk of being destroyed.
So they have to treat it like it's just a fact 100%.
You would never want to talk to them out of that position because it's the only rational position.
But let me toss out some ideas.
One of the things that made North Korea work, two things I think, two things made North Korea heading toward a good result.
One is that we added variables to the calculation.
So North Korea had been nukes or no nukes.
Nukes or no nukes.
Very few variables.
We wanted them not to have them.
They wanted them to have them.
Well, we're done. But when the reunification variable was added in, and then maybe the uncertainty that we had a crazy president who might attack them any moment, suddenly there were all kinds of variables on the table.
And we had a president who was willing to negotiate, a president who could get along with crazy dictators better than any other president.
So President Trump took a situation with only a few variables, North Korea, and he added a bunch of variables.
Now, I think Kim Jong-un added some variables himself because he may have been the first one who brought up reunification.
I don't know how those conversations went, but the point is, if you can't get a result, you can sometimes add variables.
So when you're looking at the Iranian situation, we don't want them to have nukes and missiles, and we don't want them to be funding bad people.
But how could we add some variables to that?
Well, one way to add the variable is to expand the conversation until it's about peace in the Middle East.
So you make the conversation About Hamas, about Hezbollah, about Iran, about Israel.
You add variables. So this is just a general concept.
If you can't get a result with the variables you're working with, and you have a chance to expand the variables, it gives you more options for peace.
So, would Iran be funding Hezbollah and Hamas to cause damage to Israel if there was a comprehensive peace plan in which all of those parties were getting at least enough of whatever it was they wanted, short of destroying Israel?
We don't know because we haven't done that, but it's possible.
The other thing that we might discover is that the alleged belief that although all of the people, the citizens in Iran are perfectly rational and nice people that we'd like to have over for dinner, that we believe the leadership is actually literally crazy.
We believe the same thing about Kim Jong-un.
We believe the same thing about every dictator who's on the other side.
It's the normal thing you believe that the other side is irrational.
Might be true this time.
You do get your Hitler's now and then, right?
So you can't say that any leader is rational.
You don't know. You just don't know.
So But I think we should push against that hypothesis, and there might be a way we can reach an agreement where it doesn't matter so much how crazy they are.
Now, let me give you a reframe.
I saved the crazy stuff for the end of my Periscope, so those of you who stick around, get a little bonus.
I'm working on the following reframe about Iran.
Remember I said that in order to get a good deal in these big international negotiations, the other thing you need, besides more variables, You need both sides to have something that looks like a victory path.
North Korea figured out how to have a victory path.
Because reunification is something that will make Kim Jong-un a legendary figure forever.
Kim Jong-un is going for the long ball.
Quite wisely, I think.
It's too early to know, right?
But it looks like Kim Jong-un just said, hey, I'm going to go for the long ball.
I'm not just looking for a good result.
I want to be like the royal family is to Great Britain.
I'm not sure that's where they're heading.
But it looks like he's going for the whole enchilada.
So is there a path Where Iran and the rest of the Middle East, let's say Hamas and Hezbollah and stuff, is there a path where they can have victory while Israel stays a country, gets recognized, and nobody's trying to destroy the United States or fund terrorists?
Is there any path that we can imagine that Iran has short of destroying the United States and destroying themselves and destroying Israel?
And I'm going to suggest the following reframe.
Listen to this and see if this makes sense to you.
In the original days of the founding of Islam, they had a certain set of tools for war.
You know, swords and stabby things, right?
So technology was modest.
So in Muhammad's day, they used the tools that they had.
Now, how could you spread religion in the days of Muhammad?
Like, what techniques could you use?
Well, Weapons.
You used the only tools you could.
So if you started with the belief that God, Allah, wants you to spread your religion, what was the one and only way you could do it?
Kill people. So you would conquer.
Now, what happened as the technology of war improved?
If you see a modern radical Islamist do a terror attack, are they likely to use a sword and a spear?
Probably not. They've probably upgraded their tools, right?
So there's no Islamic prohibition about using better tools of war.
So they could use swords?
That was fine. And now they use machine guns and bombs.
Better technology. But it's the same philosophy.
They're trying to use conquest, beheadings and stuff.
They're trying to use those tools to further the spread of Islam.
Now, if there were an even better weapon invented, would they be allowed to use it?
So here's your thought experiment.
If Islam had an even better weapon to further the spread of Islam, conquest you could call it, could they use it?
And the answer is, of course they could.
Because that's the history of Islam.
If there are new tools, there's nothing that stops them from using a new tool.
Here's the reframe.
Nuclear weapons are not as an effective tool for spreading Islam as the Internet is.
So in the old days your best tool for spreading Islam was a sword.
Then maybe you thought your best tool was guns and explosions and mortars and missiles and nuclear weapons.
But look at North Korea.
Did their nuclear weapons help them?
Not so much. It actually caused a problem.
Look at Iran.
Were their nuclear weapons helping them?
Not so much.
Even the development of nuclear weapons caused this problem.
They're not spreading anywhere because of those nukes.
But imagine That in the year 2018 and beyond, we have this thing called the internet.
And let's move the war of religion from the battlefield, where we used old tools, because that's all we had.
You use the tools you have.
You don't use the tools you don't have.
Now we have better tools.
Spreading Islam is a It's a battle of ideas.
The internet is what you use in the battle of ideas.
So, could Iran translate their version of Iran without giving up anything?
No sacrifice to a war of ideas in which we say, look Iran, not only are we not going to block you on social media, we'll give you a full platform.
You can take your ideas anywhere you want.
Just leave behind the weapons that were effective.
Alright, so hold on. So the point is, killing people to spread your religion is the old technology.
The new technology is persuasion and communication.
And if Iran does not believe that exposing people to their ideas, their persuasion, their information about Islam, if they don't believe that's enough, then they don't have confidence in their own God.
In the battle of ideas, in the battle of ideas, is God going to let them lose?
Well, I guess the only way to find out is to do it.
Now, I see some of the comments, and you're making exactly the right comment I agree with my critics who are in real time saying some version of this.
My God, you're so naive.
You don't understand how they think.
To even imagine that they would want to move from the war of physical violence to the war of ideas.
You're so dumb, Scott.
This could never happen.
Just keep in mind You were saying that before President Trump got elected.
Not you necessarily.
But look how the world thought about the odds of Trump getting elected.
It just seemed impossible.
But then it happened. What were the odds that President Trump would speedily solve North Korea?
How much of the world thought that was even remotely possible?
Not many people.
I saw Trump coming a mile away, and you all watched it in real time.
You saw me go out on a limb in 2015 and bet my entire reputation on it.
My income, my reputation, I bet everything on it.
And then I doubled down by describing for the past year how we could get a good result in North Korea with a President Trump and that reunification was probably part of it and this war on companies instead of just countries would probably be a key and here we are.
I'm telling you also that I don't see anything That would rule out a big win for everybody, except the way we're thinking about it.
There's nothing else stopping us.
There are no physical limitations to thinking differently about the situation.
But you would have to give Iran and the various opponents of Israel a win, an unambiguous win.
And if you ask me, the unambiguous win is to take the battle from the field, put it into the war of ideas where it belongs.
The internet is exactly where you should be discussing religion.
And if Iran is not confident that their god will display their ideas more effectively, Well, then they're questioning their own religion.
Let me put it another way.
The only way this isn't a good idea is if Iran doesn't believe their own god.
Because if they believe they're God, they're going to win on the battlefield of ideas, as long as we don't limit their traffic.
Now, the interesting thing about this idea is that the biggest obstacle to make it work Is that even conservatives in the United States don't get fair hearing on our social media.
So you might find that Twitter and Facebook are the biggest obstacles to success if they're censoring thought about Islam that they don't like.
So if we're censoring them just because we don't like it, I don't think we're playing fairly.
You can't out logic and directives from God if you truly believe.
Well, what I'm saying is that the suggestion of moving from the physical battlefield to the internet and the battle of ideas is that there's nothing un-Islamic about that.
And it's just perfectly compatible as far as I know.
I'm not going to present myself as the expert on Islamic thought.
But if it's true that Islam allows you to upgrade your tools of war, then the best tool of war for persuading people to change to your religion is At the moment, in 2018, it's not bombs.
It just doesn't work that well.
We saw the caliphate didn't get that far.
And it's almost like God was trying to tell the caliphate, hey, use the internet, idiots.
Stop trying to beat military forces that are far superior.
Yeah. Sharia is not compatible with American values.
That is correct, but that's why you battle it out in the war of ideas on the internet.
Alright, so having presented that idea, your objection should be, I can't believe that Iran's leadership would buy that big change in thinking to say, let's move our battle to the internet.
If that's your only problem, if that's the only problem with us, it's not impossible.
If that's the only problem, it's not impossible.
So this is not a prediction.
I'm just telling you that if you can't imagine, if you can't even imagine how this all could be solved, well, it might be a failure of imagination.
You know, you hear me say this a lot, right?
Sometimes we don't act because we can't imagine there's anything that could work.
So you sit there and say, okay, what if I do that?
No, that wouldn't work.
What if I do that?
No, that won't work.
So what do you do? You just sit in your chair because you can't imagine anything that would work.
I'm telling you, I can imagine a good result.
And it's where you take it from the war of weapons to a war of ideas.
And you can't tell me that's not the natural place for discussions of Islamic thought.
Can I imagine myself some hair, somebody says.
I can, actually. That's a funny question.
So one of the jokesters on here said, can I imagine myself with hair?
And the funny thing is that I always think to myself, you know, Sometime probably in my lifetime still.
I'm hoping I have another 30 or 40 years left.
I'll probably have a full head of hair.
But I'll be 95 when it happens.
Somebody say, hey, take this pill and we can solve that problem you had for 70 years.
I'll be like, oh, thanks. I look like a desiccated fruit, but I got great hair.
All right, give me some feedback on my idea of expanding the Iranian question to the whole area and saying, hey everybody, let's move this to the war of ideas because the borders aren't going to change.
What about the pleasure of killing infidels?
Well, I don't think the leaders enjoy that pleasure.
War of ideas is not a fair fight.
Uh-oh. So somebody said in the war of ideas it wouldn't be a fair fight.
In other words, somebody is saying that Islam would not do well just on the internet in a war of ideas.
I think you're wrong.
I think Islam would thrive.
In fact, it already is.
I mean, we don't have to wonder, right?
So it would only work if they think they have a chance of winning the idea war.
Do you think that someone who really believes that God is on their side thinks they would lose an idea war?
If it's a fair idea war, nobody's censoring.
I don't think people think that way.
I think they think if God's on their side, they're definitely going to win the idea war.
Would it work on you?
It's really not about individuals.
It's about, you know, populations.
Alright. So, it looks like I have a tepid response.
Is that true? It looks like most of you are not committing.
Does anybody think that my reframe would be productive?
As in, it might actually make a difference.
Because imagine if you would, the United States saying consistently, look, you're fighting in the wrong place.
You're fighting on the battlefield.
That's just not modern times anymore.
You know, the civilization is leaving you behind because the battles are battles of the mind now.
And, you know, we can effectively arm Iran with better weapons than they have now.
And that's not even a joke.
If what Iran wants is to wipe Israel off the map but not in a military way, because every once in a while they They clarify, or maybe it's not clarification.
Maybe they're shading their true intentions.
But when they talk about Israel, it's like, well, we don't mean destroy all the people.
We mean Israel as a functioning state.
They would want it not to be a Jewish state.
Well, here's the thing. The war of ideas gets you to a place where Israel has to open up their immigration, and demographics are a bitch.
If Israel did not have war, what would they have to do?
Think about it.
If Israel was not in a legitimate state of permanent war with their various neighbors, what would they have to do?
They would have History would almost force them to start allowing more Muslims into the country.
And in the long run, Israel stops being the Jewish only state.
Now, if I said, hey, people in Israel, do you want to stop being a Jewish state?
They would say, hell no. Look at all the work we did to get here.
Everything we've sacrificed, everything we've done is to get our own state.
Why the heck would we ever want to lose that?
And the answer is when it doesn't matter anymore.
Israel exists as a Jewish state In large part, I mean, there's historical reasons and there are irrational reasons and rational reasons and everything, so it's never one thing.
But a big part of it is that it's necessary.
Someday it won't be.
It just won't be necessary.
If the Israelis and the Muslims were living together in peace and happiness, nobody would care that much You know, about the composition of the leadership of the country.
As long as everybody's happy, everybody be okay.
All right. You are wrong, says somebody.
To be determined.
Somebody says, Islam has nothing to offer to the West.
I say, we don't know that.
We know that in its current form, it's sort of associated with violence, and that's not very attractive to a lot of people.
But what if it were not?
What if Islam lost its bad characters and became literally a religion of peace?
Would Westerners say, hey, I don't want any of that religion of peace stuff?
Don't know? Alright, yes, which sect of Islam?
Well, that's part of the war of ideas.
So Islam needs to work out its own positions in the war of ideas along with everybody else.
Alright, that's enough for now.
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