All Episodes
Previous Next
May 30, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
56:22
Episode 1005 Scott Adams: My Goodness, So Much News. Let's Talk.
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Well, let's look at the beautiful view and get ready for No Coffee with Scott Adams.
We've got a loyal dog.
She seems like she's stuffed, but I can promise you, there you go.
She's actually a real dog.
She can move. Sit down.
Go back to sleep. Alright, well, we've got a lot to talk about.
Has there ever been a newsier day?
Alexa, turn on studio.
Or not. There, that's better.
Yes, yes, yes, we've got all kinds of news.
Let's jump right into it.
First of all, Trump has decided he's leaving the World Health Organization.
Now, maybe it's still negotiating, because I'm sure if they gave him what he wanted, he would get back in.
But I think it's a strong move, because Trump always does the thing that everybody says, well, you can't do that.
And then he does it.
And then people say, okay, that worked.
Like closing travel from China.
People said, you can't do that.
And then it worked out.
There are a lot of things he does that people say, you can't do that.
You can't negotiate a trade deal with China.
They'll be mad that he just does.
Looks like it didn't work out.
So I think the real problem with China is that they're not buying the American goods they said they would, because things are so tense.
So if China is not going to buy the goods that they promised to buy, I think we have nothing left to do with them.
It's time. It's time to organize the rest of the world against China, which it looks like we're doing.
So there's some thought about turning the G7 into a G10, bringing in a few more countries to bolster the collective power versus China.
So that's all good.
I would say that's all positive for the United States.
So the president, of course, used some terms which he knows will get his critics buzzing.
One of them was, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.
Now, CNN and the other completely disreputable people are saying, well, it's clearly a racial message.
To which I say, do you think Trump knew that?
Come on!
Do you think Trump knew that, that it had some racial overtones?
Because looting is not a racial term, and shooting is not a racial term, and I'm watching the riots, and to me it looks like there are ten white people to every one black person.
Are you watching the same riots I am?
All the riots I'm watching, there are way more white people in the protest slash situation.
So when the president says, when the looting starts, the shooting starts, you have to really kind of work at it to make that a racial thing.
And then he also calls them thugs, which again, there were about 10 white people for every black person in attendance.
And Uh, thugs is just a word.
And so far, CNN has turned this into wall-to-wall coverage about Trump's racism.
So much so that they actually ran the find people hoax again.
So Jake Tapper actually ran, you know, a clip piece on his show.
In which he was showing all the assumed examples of the president's racism.
Of course, none of them are real.
It's just a laundry list of things that didn't happen or misinterpreted.
But the fine people hoax was still on the list.
Still on the list.
So I finally had to give up with Jake.
So I blocked him.
I'm just never going to deal with him again.
Fucking piece of shit, really.
Because I was giving him the benefit of a doubt.
Because I'd talked to him personally, and I'd explained to him what the fine people hoax was about, and indeed he's even said it himself once on his show.
He said that the president at the same time said that he completely disavows the racists, which is the part that usually gets cut out.
But I don't think there's any excuse at this point.
There was a time when you could say, well, maybe they really think that's what happened.
But once you show them the transcript, it's pretty obvious it didn't happen.
But still reporting it today is just too far.
I mean, that's just... We're race-baiting, and I don't have any patience for it.
I don't think you can be a good person and do what they're doing.
I just don't think you can.
So I'm sorry, Jake. I wanted to think you were a good person, but you've proved otherwise, sadly.
So I'm cutting him out of my life forever.
Not that we had much connection.
We did the cartoon thing for charity a few times, but that was it.
I'm really disappointed.
I'm disappointed that it even exists, that we're even in this place.
But if you're watching the news, and probably maybe you didn't see it on CNN for a while, until it was over, but CNN was not reporting the news.
The CNN's headquarters in Atlanta was surrounded by protesters, and they were Destroying the big CNN logo statue or whatever you want to call it that was outside.
They're just ripping it on and doing graffiti on it.
Breaking windows, I think, at least one window.
And you might say to yourself, uh, why would they attack CNN? Right?
Why would you attack CNN? Because isn't CNN supporting you in every way?
Well, here's my speculation.
And it goes like this.
CNN has been whipping up racial animosity for years.
What if they succeeded and they got their racial animosity?
If they succeeded in making it racial, I'm not sure people see political party anymore.
Because once you make it racial, It's just racial.
The politics, sort of, is the second most important part.
But once the most important part is overwhelming everything else, congratulations, CNN. You took something that didn't need to be racial, because we're mostly on the same side.
With the shooting, especially this latest shooting of George Floyd, the president is aggressively and unambiguously on the side of the protesters.
He was saying it was a bad deal, bad cop.
He says, respect the memory of George Lloyd.
He couldn't be more on their side.
Maybe they noticed, because it's hard to not notice the president, right?
But don't you think that there's just a general hatred...
of white people who are elites in power I think CNN created a situation where they've weaponized the public against themselves because in the CNN world there's this difference between Fox News and CNN but I think we're learning that that's only in the heads of people who watch a lot of news apparently if you don't watch a lot of news it's just white people in power And that's what it looked like.
So again, I think there were 10 to 1 white people to black people protesting at CNN too, based on just looking at the crowd.
But I think they all got whipped up into this thought that it's the powerful white people who have the control of things who are the bad guys.
So I think they created themselves as bad guys.
Because how else can you explain that they would go after CNN? Now, somebody had a good counter theory, which is you go where the cameras are.
But any place that's populated, that you have a big crowd, the cameras are going to get there.
So the CNN thing kind of came from left field, but you can kind of almost understand it.
Because they've been actively agitating for a race war without realizing that they might be the victims of it.
That the people might turn on them and it looks like at least a little bit that happened So the president said he's going to treat Hong Kong as part of China and no longer treat it like it's special which I think is It's just practical It's just unfortunately.
There's just nothing anybody can do.
There's nothing the United States can do.
There's nothing Hong Kong can do that they're geographically Doomed to be controlled by China, and that's what's happening.
On a normal day, this would have been the biggest story, but it just gets lost in the shovel, that the actual Flynn phone call transcripts where he was talking to Kislyak, the Russian, and the very thing that got him arrested and convicted, turns out there's no evidence of it.
There's no evidence.
The thing that got him convicted When you actually see it, there's no evidence.
No evidence of a lie.
No evidence of anything.
It was just the most normal phone call in the world in which not much happened.
That's it. Now that we see the actual words, you can see that the whole thing was a little bit sketchy.
It gets sketchier every day.
So, there's at least...
Some thought that there's another shoe to drop.
I don't want to report that yet because I won't hear it from other sources.
But there's some other really interesting stuff on this story that might be coming out really soon.
It might involve some other personalities that are not very popular among Trump people.
We'll wait for that.
Minnesota governor said today that sunlight is a disinfectant.
Which is weird to see a governor suggest that you drink bleach to stop looting.
Oh, that's not how you interpret that?
I've been trained by CNN to interpret the news this way.
If a politician says sunlight is a disinfectant, I should translate that into my mind as the governor is recommending that you drink bleach because it would stop looting.
Did I do it wrong? I'm pretty sure that's right.
I've been watching CNN do this for a long time.
I think I got it right. Alright.
Did you see the video of the guy with the umbrella?
This is the best story on the internet.
If you haven't seen this yet, you've got a good story to look forward to.
Alright, so there's a video.
Of an unidentified, tall, white guy.
You can tell he's white because he turns and looks at you.
Even though he has a professional gas mask on.
But you can see his eyes.
You can tell he's a white guy.
He's a big white guy.
Tall guy. And he's got an umbrella.
And a hammer. Now here's what's interesting about the guy with the umbrella and the hammer and the full gas mask.
And they're all black so he's completely unidentified.
He walks up with his hammer to the AutoZone store, the one you saw burning in Minnesota, and he's the guy who initially knocked down all the windows.
So he walks up to it nonchalantly, like he's not even one of the protesters, like he's not even angry about anything, like it's not an act of passion, it's not an act where he got caught up with a crowd, he's all by himself, comes out of the shadows, Breaks these windows like, almost like a professional.
Like he was just doing a job.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
As soon as he breaks a few windows, which history will record, was the beginning of the looting.
Because until those windows were broken, I don't believe there was any looting going on.
But once they were broken, well, you know, the window's gone.
And so, the man with the umbrella, and the hammer, and the gas mask, starts walking away.
Some of the people who were there, including one, I'm guessing maybe late teenagers, early 20s something, African American man, tries to stop him, and also accuses him of being a cop.
So in other words, the locals, the people who were actually protesting, The actual protesters said, wait a minute, you're not one of us.
Now, people are saying he's a cop, and I don't think there's evidence of that.
But, there is certainly evidence that he wanted to start a riot, or start some looting.
So, why would he have an umbrella?
Anybody? Anybody?
Why did he have an umbrella? Why did he have an umbrella?
If you get why he had an umbrella, you're going to be a lot closer to the answer to the question.
Why do you have an umbrella?
I'm waiting for somebody in the comments.
If you don't know this, you're going to have a surprise coming.
Why the umbrella?
I'm looking, looking.
If you're playing along at home, we're not seeing anybody answering the question.
Why the umbrella?
Well, I guess you don't know, so I'm going to tell you the answer.
It's because of drones and because of security cameras.
The umbrella... Takes care of any drones that could take a picture of his face, as well as any security cameras that might have had a downshot.
Now, he's the only one I saw who had a full mask that covered every part of him, including his hair.
So he was completely unidentifiable.
I don't believe there was any exposed skin except a little bit of his eyeballs, you can see.
So the umbrella tells me that this was somebody who was prepared.
And he was not prepared like a protester.
He was prepared like a person with a specific mission.
So, no, I don't think it was to disguise the hammer, because the hammer was this big.
You know, he could stick it under his coat pretty easily.
Yes, so he didn't want to be caught by cameras, and he came prepared.
For that. Nobody else had an umbrella.
There's no protester who had an umbrella.
He came to cause some trouble.
He seemed a little bit too prepared.
Meaning he looked like a professional to me.
Now, what kind of professional?
Intelligence agents?
From another country?
How hard would it be for the Russians to send somebody there?
Now, I think that he spoke...
To the African-American man who was chasing him down to figure out what was going on.
I think he talked to him.
So at least there's one person who would know if he had an accent, but I don't think he did, because I think we can hear a little bit on the video.
So I sounded American.
And he did say he was going to take a go at the guy, because he was much bigger than the guy who was chasing him.
And then he just walked away.
Yeah, he was a professional of some sort.
So when you say that there was rioting going on, you can't leave him out of the story.
You can't leave him out of the story.
He caused it.
Who was he? We want to know.
Alright, that was interesting.
There's something good happening and something bad happening at the same time.
I'm going to get into that a little bit.
But first I want to ask you about how confident you are that what you saw on the video of the cop killing George Floyd, how confident are you that what you saw on that video, I mean you saw it with your own eyes, lots of people saw it, there were eyewitnesses, how confident are you that what you saw It gives you an accurate impression of what happened.
Because if you say to yourself, I know what happened because I saw it on video and I saw it with my own eyes, you've learned nothing.
You've learned nothing.
Where have you been for the last four years?
If there's anything that is guaranteed to be true, it's the video lies.
Now did the video lie so much that there was no crime committed?
I doubt it, because it looked like a crime to me.
So I'm going to be very careful when I talk about this next topic, because it'll be real easy for somebody to take me out of context.
It looked to me like murder.
It looked to you like murder.
We all think it looked like murder.
I think. Then we learned from the autopsy that he didn't die from the knee on his neck.
At least, that wasn't the single cause.
He didn't have a sign of asphyxiation.
What? Now, the speculation, subject to more study, is that what killed him was probably some combination of effects.
Probably something about the way he was restrained, something about the way they were on top of him.
Something about the intoxicants, perhaps.
We don't know if or what he had in them.
Something about underlying conditions.
He had a heart condition and hypertension, and it was a tense situation.
Maybe all of those things.
Maybe it was a combination of all of those things.
But apparently he was not asphyxiated or strangled by the knee.
They say they can tell.
Can they tell? They seem pretty confident about it, but they said they can tell.
Now, does the video lie?
Well, the video I saw when I made my decision that he was clearly and obviously a murderer murdering a guy right in front of us, the video I saw showed only one person on the suspect.
That's the one you saw, too.
Just one person. He had his knee on the guy's neck.
But then we saw, later we saw a reverse view, and it shows that there were three cops on him.
One was on the neck, one was, I think, more in the back, and one was sort of controlling the legs.
So that's what we saw.
Now that's very different than one guy on him, right?
So if you said to yourself, okay, I saw this video, I know exactly what happened.
It was that cop, he killed the guy.
What you didn't see is right behind the bumper were two other cops on him.
What's up with that? Now it gets a little more complicated, because I didn't see that in the first video.
Do you know what else you didn't see?
You didn't see any video of just before they took him down.
You saw the video when he first got out of the car, and you saw the video when it was like a few minutes before the end of the man's life.
What you didn't see is why three cops were on top of him.
Now, I'm not going to say that excuses anybody.
I'm going to block anybody who imagines that I'm saying the cops are innocent, okay?
And I know that's going to happen.
Somebody in the comments is going to say, oh, you're saying they're innocent.
I'm not saying that. I'm just talking about the facts we know and the facts we don't know.
So I will block you the moment you imagine I'm saying that, okay?
So, let's look at what we've got here.
We're going to the whiteboard. Here's the...
Here's...
I don't know if it's the simulation winking at us, but this might be more good news than bad, what I'm going to show you next.
Remember when Kaepernick did his protest and he famously took a knee?
And that, of course, created great division in the country.
People on the right said, oh, you're disrespecting our country.
People on the left said, well, there's a good reason.
It's a perfectly legitimate protest.
And so there was great division in the country, and so that lasted a while.
Never really healed.
It was just sort of we stopped talking about it for a while.
Now we have this situation where the policeman kills a black man by putting a knee on his neck.
Now when I tweeted about this, some people thought I was joking.
This isn't funny.
Why would this be funny?
It's murder. Or something like it.
I mean, somebody got killed.
Nothing funny about that.
It is, however, potentially powerful.
And powerful in this specific way.
That nobody in the world can miss the show.
Because the weirdness that's baked into it, that the protest would be taking a knee, And then sort of what I would call the final straw, the moment when every single white person said, oh, okay, that's what you're talking about.
Now some of us were already there, many of us were already there, that the police can sometimes be abusive.
We all know that that's true, and we hope it's not the majority, but we know it's true.
At this point, I think the entire country got, I don't know, red-pilled or white-pilled or whatever pill it is.
Because what exactly is going through your head?
So here's the question. What is going through your head when you go to protest racial discrimination, especially with the police, and you show up in the city, and there are more white people there to protest with you than there are black people?
Now, are you seeing the same thing I'm seeing?
There are more white people protesting this latest event than there are black people.
I think by a lot. How do you feel if your black lives matter and you show up and you think it's you against, I don't know, white people?
Who do you think is on the other side?
Who's on the other side?
Because you look around and the people who are supporting you are all white people.
I think this is the point when there's sort of a recognition That this was more a problem about the press, how they whip us into hysteria, how they frame things, and the police need some help.
Now, they may need some help no matter who they're stopping.
This doesn't mean they need some help racially specifically, but it does mean that maybe they need a little extra work on making sure that this doesn't happen no matter who gets stopped.
But I think there's something magical about the fact that That there's this weird coincidence built into the story.
I mean, it's a really weird coincidence.
That a knee, which is so powerful in our minds, the way we think of knees, it has to do with submission, it has to do with somebody having power over another one.
It's just every bad image is sort of baked into knees.
So because this is so powerful, and because I think the entire country is on the same side, did you see that there were protesters who went to the White House?
The president was completely on their side from the jump.
There was no hesitation. He was always on the side of the protesters.
And in fact, the Department of Justice is acting on it.
So who's on the other side?
Who's on the other side?
There's nobody on the other side.
And I think that maybe Kaepernick is the big winner, in a weird way, the big winner, because he looks right.
All right, now here's the part where I'll get in trouble, but I can't get canceled, so I'm going to do it anyway.
As we're trying to figure out what really happened there, I like to build a grid so I can work through my own thinking about it.
So this has more to do with a way of thinking of things.
So if the only thing you got out of it is, oh, that's a good way to think of a complicated thing, I might use that myself.
And what I do is, I just put the three possible explanations.
And then I figure out what we know, which of course is changing by the minute.
So this of course would have to be updated every five minutes because we're still in the fog of war.
But in terms of how you would look at it, this is a good start.
So was it something like murder?
I guess third degree murder is exactly what he's been charged with in addition to manslaughter.
And third degree murder is defined as this in Minnesota, so it's different by state.
So, it could still be murder, even if he didn't mean it.
But it would be worse than manslaughter, if I understand this correctly.
I could have some of the legalities wrong.
But I think manslaughter would be just an accident that you should have known better, whereas the third-degree murder is a little worse than that, meaning that not only should it not have happened, not only should you have known better, but there is something about your attitude or your intentions That seemed like you didn't even try.
With manslaughter, it's a little bit more like an accident that you should have known better.
Whereas this one is not an accident necessarily.
It's just you didn't care or you just didn't even do the minimum that you needed to keep somebody from dying.
Alright, so here's what we know.
Did the police follow procedures?
You would say no, right?
Wouldn't you say no? I think you might be surprised.
If it goes to trial, I think you might be surprised that it's closer to yes.
And the only reason I can say that is that the autopsy, at least preliminarily, says he was not killed by the knee on the neck.
So if the knee on the neck didn't kill him, and there were four officers there, none of them seemed to be protesting what anybody else was doing, That suggests that they probably all thought they were doing something close to the procedure.
Now, can you put a knee on somebody's neck and have two other officers hold them down if they were resisting arrest?
Which, by the way, is not in evidence.
So, so far, there's no evidence that George Floyd was resisting arrest.
That's not in evidence.
But, later if it became in evidence, Suppose the missing video, the minute just before the police took him down, suppose somebody finds that.
And suppose it looked like there was some resisting.
If there was resisting, just moments before the three of them were trying to hold them down, then it's going to look a lot closer until they followed a procedure.
Because remember, the knee on the neck didn't kill him.
Whatever it was, was probably a combination of things which the police would not necessarily know was happening.
Now the next thing you say to yourself is, but Scott, he was saying, you're killing me.
He said it directly, repeatedly.
The witnesses heard it.
How in the world do the police not give him help when he's saying, I can't breathe, I'm dying?
I don't know. But I would ask you this.
How often do the police hear that kind of complaint?
My guess is that it's common.
And maybe they just learn not to take it seriously unless they see a little bit more evidence that it's real.
So, suppose they just didn't take it seriously.
They didn't kill him by putting their pressure on the neck.
This is all just suppose.
I'm not saying it's true.
Everything could change.
It's going to look like maybe they were just dumb.
They thought they were following the procedures and they should have been a little bit more aware of the situation.
So it's going to look like stupidity.
What about the autopsy?
The autopsy seems to have ruled out intentional murder, because if it had been intentional murder, we would have a specific cause.
Oh, you did this.
But not necessarily that third-degree murder, which is closer to manslaughter.
So is manslaughter ruled out?
No. No.
Because just because they didn't kill him on the neck part...
The totality of what they were doing apparently did kill him, unless it was the biggest coincidence in the world and he died.
Nobody thinks he died just coincidentally at that very moment from natural causes.
So manslaughter is still in, and stupidity is still in.
What about the fact that they did everything they did in front of witnesses who had phones?
If you were planning, if your mind was on murder, would you do it in front of witnesses, casually, All four of you, casually, while they had their phones out.
No. No!
Not in any world would they be thinking murder.
So I think you could eliminate, in fact, the charges.
The charges do not have in them any element of intention.
So intention is not even part of the charges.
And then there's this part that we just learned, that there were three cops on top of him.
Why do you ever have three cops on top of you if you are cooperating with the police?
Is it because the police like to get on the ground with their clean uniforms?
Probably not. There's nobody who wants to be wrestling with a perpetrator's feet on the ground unless they've got a pretty good reason.
So the evidence that we have That there were three cops sitting on top of him, neck, back, and somebody trying to control his feet, strongly suggests that he was not cooperating a moment before then.
Now, here's the interesting part to me.
And by the way, I'll say this every minute or so.
It looks like a crime was committed to me.
I'm just going through what we know and what we don't know.
So don't confuse what we know and what we don't know with my opinion.
I'll tell you my opinion.
It looks like he was killed.
You don't need to explain to me that the totality of what the police did almost certainly contributed to the man's death.
I would say something close to 100% certainty, because what are the odds he would die by accident just then?
And Here's my conspiracy theory that I would like to add to it.
Do you believe that the one video that's missing is the important one?
Well, important to answer the mystery.
Why is it that we have good video of before that, and we have good video after he's on the ground, but the part that caused three police officers to be on top of him We do not have that video.
Does that seem like an accident?
Let me add this to the conspiracy theory.
Just as it is very unlikely that he would have died by natural causes at just that moment when the police are sitting on top of him.
Nobody believes that, because it's just too unlikely.
But do you believe that with all the cameras around, the only part that we need to know Do you believe that that's missing by accident?
I'm going to go with this hypothesis.
Somebody has that video and they're not showing it to you intentionally because it doesn't fit what they want to happen.
I think that video exists and I think somebody doesn't want you to see it.
That's what I think.
Now, that said, I've never seen the country more unified racially in the sense that everything that Colin Kaepernick was saying, now we feel it in a more visceral way.
You kind of knew that there was, you know, a problem, but you also thought, well, it must be happening to white people too.
It's a police problem.
But now that you see it, The visual of watching a man's life being snuffed out by a police officer in what seemed to be complete casual business as usual is so horrifying, just so completely horrifying, that I think it unified us in a weird way.
Now, I see some people worried that this is the end of civilization and the riots will go out of control and things are fragile, etc.
And I think nothing like that's happening.
Nothing like that's happening.
If you see a crowd in which it's only black people or only white people, something's happening.
That's dangerous.
You don't want to see a riot with just one ethnicity.
If you see that, you know, you better get a gun and hide in your house.
But if you see a multi-ethnic group protesting for You know, more equitable, fair, safer police enforcement, and it's completely multi-ethnic, you're closer to a really good thing than a really bad thing.
It just doesn't feel like it because of the things on fire.
Now when you turn on the news, they're going to show that one car that's on fire over and over again because it's the only fire.
Gigantic city, one car on fire.
What is the news going to be?
Let's see how many times we can film this one car on fire from different angles.
I hope it keeps burning because it's the only thing interesting.
Otherwise it's just people standing around.
Give me the car on fire.
So the first thing you need to know is that we're being fed a diet of way more danger than is actually there because those are the interesting things.
So of course we see them.
The other thing you need to know is that I would say at least 40 to 60% of everything you see is probably because of the lockdown and because the weather turned good.
People were anxious and angry and frustrated and then warm weather came and they finally said, What can I do today?
Will I go to a restaurant?
No. Will I go to the club?
No. Will I go to a bar?
No. Can I hang out and have a house party?
No. What if I have a riot?
Can't stop a riot.
You could call it a protest.
Same thing. It's hard to stop.
If you get enough people, nobody's going to stop you.
So I think that the way this has to be looked at is it's kind of emotionally...
There are two things that kind of collided.
Emotionally, the video of George Floyd being killed is, of course, the big topic.
But the way we feel about everything, whether it was this story or some other trigger, the way we feel about everything is just a little extra weight on it because we've been locked up and we just need to get out.
So, I would not expect this to be a permanent situation because, number one, everybody agrees.
Everybody agrees.
Who exactly are they protesting?
Are they protesting the governor of Minnesota?
No. He wants those guys in jail.
Are they protesting the legal system?
No. They've already arrested that guy.
Are they protesting the court decision?
No. Hasn't happened. Are they protesting the president?
No. He agrees with them so hard that I think it confuses them.
Who are they protesting?
Now, of course, they're protesting, you know, I guess, institutional racism.
They're protesting maybe some tendencies, some human biases.
But what are you going to do about that?
What are you going to do about it?
I mean, I do think there are lots of ways you can improve Police work.
They should all have body cams at the very least.
That's the least they should have is body cams.
Maybe they need to revise some rules because it's not the first time a black man has died screaming for medical care.
If this had been the first and only time a black man had died while begging for medical care, Then you say, oh, it's just a one-off mistake.
It's terrible. It's a tragedy, but we don't need to fix anything because it just happened that one time.
But it's not one time.
It's not one time.
How many cases have you heard of?
Three or four now?
Where it sounds a lot the same.
So maybe there is some other process.
Let me give you my recommendation that I gave to Black Lives Matter a few years ago when something like this was coming up.
Here's my recommendation for a change in the police procedure.
And it goes like this.
If your suspect claims a medical problem, and as long as you have control of him, so it's not a dangerous situation, you will immediately Call your telehealth doctor and say, hey, telehealth doctor, I've got a suspect, he's in handcuffs, he's complaining of breathing problems or whatever.
Can you talk to me and him at the same time to see if this is real?
And the doctor gets on and says, you know, can you tell me what's going on?
And then the doctor recommends Do you take them to the hospital right away?
Do you treat them in some specific way?
Or does the doctor say, it looks like this could wait?
But, if you put it off on the doctor, it's a little bit harder to protest if things go wrong, because we accept that doctors don't get it right every time.
That's sort of built into our understanding of healthcare, is that doctors don't get it right every time.
So now that you can call a doctor on a video, By the device in your pocket, and you can thank the people who are watching this Periscope for the fact that at least we were part of the push to make it legal for telehealth, you know, the online doctors to practice across state borders, which makes it viable for the first time.
So I say just go with the obvious.
Phone a doctor, you should have one who's always available just for this.
Somebody who's seen, let's say somebody who's seen police work enough that they also have an understanding that the perpetrators sometimes tell stories.
That would be good background for the doctor that they use.
So, now would that work?
Maybe not. Maybe that wouldn't work by itself to make everything better.
But there are other little tweaks you can make.
For example, you could increase the penalty for falsifying a police report.
I think that was one of Black Lives Matter's suggestions as well.
To which I say, I wouldn't object to that.
Would you? Would you object to increasing the penalty for falsifying a police report by the police if they did something bad and they're just covering it up with their police report?
I don't think I would disagree with that.
So I think you would find that there are a lot of things that would work for Colin Kaepernick, a lot of things that would work for Black Lives Matter, that somebody like President Trump or any like-minded governors or mayors, wherever these decisions need to be made, could simply say, let's try it.
Here's one. Not all of the police have body cams, and the reason is primarily, primarily budget.
So just suppose, I'll just put this out there, suppose the President of the United States said that this is no longer just a state problem because we have a racism concern.
And that's federal.
So the President could easily say, because we have a history of this, that states can't get away with discriminating.
And if the reason they're getting away with it is that they have a budget problem, I'm going to solve that, but I'm going to make the budget available that they can all buy body cams.
If the President of the United States, especially this President, if Trump said, here's a billion dollars, I'm going to put this bill through Congress, it's a billion dollars, and it's nothing except buying body cams.
Because we want to reduce this problem in every way we can, That's just one of the things we could do.
Maybe he could do an executive order that would be like a suggestion to the states to make falsifying a police report more of a penalty.
He could suggest that.
They'd still have to do it at a state level.
So anyway, the point is, there are very practical things which smart people have worked out that are worth trying.
If you don't try, Then it cannot be said that you're valuing black lives or any other lives.
If you don't try, of course you should try.
What are we doing? So you've got protesters in the streets of a bunch of major cities.
It's the biggest story going.
They're destroying property.
It's just a horrible situation.
But what's anybody doing?
What are the suggestions?
I think the president could just say, I haven't heard any good suggestions, but I'm going to do these things.
I'm going to fund the body cams.
I'm going to make sure that they'll recommend that they toughen the laws on something.
And I could recommend that they have a doctor opinion if somebody says that they can't breathe.
So that's three very specific things that you could just put out there and say, let's try this.
Let's just try it. Alright, so that's where I'm at with all this stuff.
Again, I want to assure everybody who's watching this, I've never seen the public of the United States this unified, and the only reason that we're not talking about that is because the news is telling you it's not.
The news is still telling you we're not unified.
We could not be more unified on this question.
We couldn't be.
Because you know what?
I don't even think Colin Kaepernick wants to disrespect the country.
I think he wants the country just to do better.
Now, I realize that's a generous interpretation, but I think it's a good time to be generous.
It's a good time to be generous.
So my take on Kaepernick from the beginning is that he was very effective.
And so I praised him for his effectiveness, even if he didn't like the fact that he didn't have any specific suggestions to fix anything.
And I don't think he did. So I still respect him for the message and for the effectiveness of it.
And because it's something that a great deal, many of my fellow Americans are concerned about, and that's good enough for me.
If there are a lot of Americans who are deeply, deeply, deeply concerned about this issue, I'm not going to talk them out of it.
I'm not going to tell them, you know, you should look at it differently, shouldn't think of it that way, it's not that big of a problem.
I'm not going to do that. The fact is that there's a gigantic percentage, I don't know the percentage, but it's a big percentage, of the population who's got real pain, real concern, you know, a real issue.
This is as real as it gets.
If you think the police are killing you because of the way you look, that's a 10 out of 10.
How do you live in that country?
So I can assure you, I get that, and I understand that that's the reality.
Now, you can try to argue it away and say, well, you know, white people get killed too, and it's not really racial and stuff like that.
But the lived truth Is that they've got this extra risk.
And I think you have to deal with it as a lived truth.
Which is a good... I love that phrase, by the way.
Because it gets to the fact that reality is subjective.
And nothing could be more subjective than this situation.
The way everybody feels about it is really a reflection of their own life and things that have happened to them and who they are and all that.
All right. Did we talk stupid protests yet?
Well, this is the reason that I think the protests have as much to do with the lockdown plus the good weather.
Because, as I said, they don't know who to protest because nobody's on the other side.
And by the way, am I the only person saying this?
Is there anybody else in the media, the punditry, on social media, is there anybody else who's pointing out what I am?
Which is that this is being looked at backwards.
This is the most unifying event in the history of the United States since Pearl Harbor.
Maybe 9-11. I don't think racially we've ever been more on the same side.
And we should be celebrating that.
We are so on the same side.
Turn on CNN. It looks like it's Basically the same story on Fox News.
How often does that happen?
Now the difference, of course, is that CNN is blaming the president for being a racist and therefore it's all his fault.
They've turned it into this ridiculous political thing, when in fact the biggest story in the world is unfolding right in front of us and it's invisible.
It's literally invisible.
The most unifying situation we've ever had, socially, And it's invisible.
Why? Because the media has the public hypnotized by their framing of things.
And they have framed this as a problem with racial inequality.
It's exactly the opposite.
Now, independent of what those individual cops were thinking in their head, we don't know that.
But we're not talking about individuals.
I'm talking about tens of thousands of people in the street.
Just look at the video.
All racial groups, all genders, gay, straight.
It's the most unifying thing we've ever experienced.
Thank you for reminding me that Van Jones, the way that he's characterized this, is he said, if you're looking for racism in Trump's...
I'll paraphrase, so he said it better, but basically saying, you know, it's not the racists who are like the real legitimate racists.
That are all the problem.
But rather, it's the people who think they're good people and vote for Democrats.
But then when you approach them in the park with your dog, suddenly they turn into raging racists.
And Van Jones, quite insightfully, is saying, maybe the problem isn't this group.
Maybe the problem is people.
Maybe the problem is people.
And if we stop slicing it into this kind of people and this kind of people and just say, maybe we're just a biased, discriminating, prejudiced people.
Now, my take on this is that that's how the brain works.
Your brain is a pattern recognition machine.
It operates on patterns.
I've seen this before. This worked before, this didn't work before, I'll do what worked before.
It's all patterns. The trouble is, we're really bad at it.
So we have a pattern recognition machine in our head that makes all our decisions, and it's not good at recognizing patterns.
That couldn't be worse, but it is the situation we're in.
And prejudice and bias is all based on the fact that you've got a pattern recognition machine, and you've got a bad pattern in there.
Now if you have a good pattern in there, you're actually able to predict the future.
Oh, every time I see this situation, this happens.
So that's what a good pattern can do for you.
A bad pattern says, oh, every time I see an Elbonian wearing a hat, he's going to punch me in the face.
Because the last three Elbonians wearing a hat punched me in the face.
Or worse, worse, I've never been punched in the face by an Elbonian, but I was raised to think that they punch you in the face.
Now that Would be a bad pattern, assuming that Elbonians do not punch people in the face more than the average.
That would be a pattern that's just a faulty pattern.
So what do you do when people are naturally pattern recognition machines and they're not good at it?
I think that's what you have to deal with.
You should deal with the fact that we're all biased by design.
You can't be unbiased.
Anybody who tells you that they don't have bias They're just lying.
They're just liars. Now, I think you can love somebody at the same time you have bias.
I think you can rise above your bias.
I think you can say to yourself, okay, I don't have a good feeling about this for whatever bias reason, but I'm going to give everybody a fair chance.
I'm going to look at the resume.
I'm not going to look at the skin color.
I'm going to look at what you can do, how you did in the interview.
I'm not going to look at your gender, etc.
So I think we should maybe just accept that being biased in every possible way, whether it's ethnically or politically, anything.
That's just who we are.
And I don't think we should pretend...
See, the worst thing we do is pretend there are people who are not that person.
That just doesn't exist.
There are people who can overcome their bias, but there are no people who don't have bias.
That's just not possible.
Somebody says it works both ways, Scott.
Of course it does. What I'm talking about is people.
So, of course, it would work in every direction.
Totally agree, but that's not the name of the game.
Yeah, obviously the name of the game is politics and power.
So people will make claims that are not true.
But the trouble is the public believes them.
It's one thing...
Oh, I'm glad I lifted your spirits, Kathy.
Yeah, I've said before that we can't tell the difference between being on the edge of doom and being on the edge of greatness.
It looks the same.
Being right on the edge of the worst day you're ever going to have And being right on the edge of the best day you ever have can look identical.
So when we're focusing on these riots, etc., we're just being blinded to the fact that there's nobody on the other side.
I don't know how many times I can say that and still be the only person who says it.
There's no one on the other side.
There's no one on the other side.
When do we realize that?
There's no one on the other side.
It'll be okay. If there was someone on the other side, maybe it wouldn't be okay.
But there's no one on the other side.
We're all in this together, completely on the same page.
Now, we've got some facts that we'll find out, and maybe later that will split us up.
But at the moment, we're pretty good.
All right. That's all I've got for now.
I will leave you with that positive thought, and I will talk to you in the morning.
There will probably be ten new headline stories by then, because it's that kind of a month.
▲
Export Selection