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June 1, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:07:59
Episode 1011 Scott Adams: Let's Talk About Antifa and Looters Setting Civil Rights Back a Decade
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Hey everybody, come on in.
Golden age. Oh, well.
You know what the third act is, right?
The third act is the place in the movie where you think it can't get any worse.
And the third act was the coronavirus.
Now you're saying to yourself, but wait, Scott, we had the third act, the coronavirus.
It does seem like we've beaten it, you know, a lot of work to do, still people will die, but it does seem like we've gotten over the top of that.
So it seems like we beat the third act, the place where the hero of the movie has this impossible task.
But here we are in the protests slash riots slash destroying retail everywhere, and you might say to yourself, this looks worse.
No, no, no, no.
In script writing terms, after the third act, quite often there's that part where the Terminator comes back to life for about a minute, and then the hero has to kill the bad guy one more time.
Or he's already killed the top henchman, but the top bad guy is still alive.
So it's very common that after the third act, there's another seemingly impossible problem that gets solved.
Now, I told you before that I see the protest as, of course, there's a combination of lots of social factors in history and all that.
And there's a trigger, a specific trigger, but I see it as an energy problem, meaning that there's a whole bunch of people who have been cooped up all winter, cooped up for the coronavirus, didn't get to exercise, often didn't get to work, just too much energy.
And if Caesar the dog walker taught us nothing, it's that you can't have a well-behaved A dog, unless you burn off his energy.
People are not that different.
People are not that different.
I'm talking about all people, so don't make it racial.
All people, human beings.
If we have too much energy, we can get in trouble.
And when we've burned off our energy and we're ready to relax, well, we're easier to deal with, just like any other animal.
And we have a serious energy problem.
There's way too much energy.
Now, I think this weekend may have burned off a little bit.
But we'll talk about that after.
The most important part of the morning, the simultaneous sip.
You don't need much to participate.
All you need is a cup or mug, a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine.
It is the day the thing that makes everything better.
Including the coronavirus, including the protests.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now.
Go! Yep, temperatures falling as we speak.
Well, here's my take on the whole ugly situation.
First of all, the protests have reached my territory.
So I'm no longer speaking hypothetically.
The places where I planned to shop for my summer shorts and such don't exist anymore.
So the stores that I would normally shop at just got destroyed last night in Walnut Creek.
Now, I hear the Pleasanton stores were targeted, the mall, the one that's actually closest to me, but I haven't heard an update on that.
Now, I did hear that there was a protest scheduled for my town, which is just walking distance, last night.
But I didn't hear any outcome from it because I didn't want to get too close to it.
And when I heard it was being organized, it was being organized as a peaceful protest.
But aren't they all?
They're sort of all organized as peaceful protests.
They just... Well, I guess they're not all.
The Antifa is not peaceful at all.
But at least the Black Lives Matter part of it is supposed to be peaceful.
And when I saw somebody organizing one for my town yesterday, I had two very seriously different thoughts.
One was, well, isn't it good that people want to demonstrate in favor of equality and treating everybody well?
That part's good. It's good that people want to demonstrate for those things.
What I thought was amazingly stupid was doing it now and in that way because it would invite trouble and the downtown stores would be vulnerable.
So I have to be stark about this.
I don't want to leave any wiggle room or gray area.
So I'm going to say this as clearly as I possibly can.
For the first several days, this triggering event, the George Floyd killing, was so horrible that the nation needed to do something, needed to act, needed to change, needed to improve, needed to get it out of their system, needed to scream.
And so for a few days, I was quite tolerant with the fact that protests brought with them some violence.
I was quite tolerant when we got a little caught off guard and things got broken and destroyed, because I would say not everybody saw it coming.
You didn't exactly know where it was going to go.
The chief, you know, the top priority was keeping everybody physically safe.
It was economically bad, very bad for the store owners and such, but at least not too many people died.
So at least that was good.
So I would say that for the first several days, and including the weekend, an argument could be made that those protests, if you will, are legitimate.
Would you agree? Would you agree that protests, given the seriousness of the situation and the trigger, Demonstrations, protests, completely legitimate.
I think we'd all agree, right?
Free speech, people had something to say.
That's what we do.
It's America. You got something to say?
It's important.
Free speech. Go say it.
All good. However, not everything that starts good stays good.
Likewise, I was quite in favor, initially, with the coronavirus lockdown of the economy.
I said to myself, a month, six weeks, probably more good than bad, worth a shot.
Two months, not comfortable, but maybe still makes sense.
But if you lock down long enough, it just turns bad.
That's what we're seeing with the protests.
They started out legitimate, and here's the weird thing.
It started out with everyone on their side.
Generally, the whole point of a protest is that there's somebody on the other side of the argument.
Who's on the other side of the argument?
Nobody. Nobody.
So, again, it made perfect sense to express feelings, to get it out of our system, and I'm even a little bit forgiving, a little bit, a little bit forgiving, that there was damage and destruction that came with it, because there was a lot of anger, a lot of emotions, a lot of energy.
You can't control all of it even if you tried.
And in fact, controlling it might have made things worse.
So I would say I'm willing to, sort of in a mental, social way, to offer a pass, To everybody who's been involved with good intentions.
Because the people with good intentions created a situation where very bad things happened.
But I don't think you can completely blame them.
Because the people with good intentions have the right of free speech.
They have a right to be mad.
Certainly have a right to be mad.
They're free people.
They get to say what they need to say and get it out of their system and be heard.
All good. But now it's Monday.
Now it's Monday.
Now it's Monday.
Monday is time to get back to work.
If people were on different sides of this I would even say, all right, keep demonstrating.
Even at the high cost that we're seeing, if people still disagreed, and there was still any resistance to making things better, fairer, just better for everybody, if there were any resistance to it, more protests make sense.
But there's not.
There just isn't.
You had to say, hello.
Meaning everybody that Black Lives Matter feels that they would like to persuade to their side, we started there.
Meaning that we all watched the George Floyd video.
We watched it too.
And you watch that thing and you take sides with Black Lives Matter on this issue anyway.
Right away. Right away you take sides with them.
They had us at hello.
Now they've lost us.
So I would say that I personally have felt a great turn in my attitude toward really everything.
I would say that I've turned from completely productive, meaning if I can help, I would certainly like to, Two more along the lines of, I think I need to just get out and dodge, because I don't think this can be fixed.
Meaning that distance looks like the only thing that I can do for myself.
So I would look to get distance from any urban center.
You know, I have distance, so I was safe so far.
But certainly I would look to maintain that.
I think cities may be dead.
Other people are saying the same thing, but it's not because of this specifically.
I think there were a number of forces from coronavirus to traffic to lifestyle and pollution and you name it.
I think cities maybe have run their course.
I don't know that they make sense anymore.
They made sense in a different economic time.
But I don't think they make sense anymore.
They seem too dangerous, and I think that they will peter out.
Or become completely segregated, I suppose that's possible too.
So here's my take on Black Lives Matter, just to complete the thought.
Black Lives Matter, as a concept, all good.
As a concept, as an idea, as a notion that we should all want to agree on, all good.
Protest for several days, even with the damage.
I'm going to say, you know, not ideal.
Nobody wants damage, nobody wants anybody to get hurt.
The enormity of the trigger, the enormity of the situation, I think it deserved a big response.
Now it's happened.
But now we know what happens when we have more protests and we know that they don't move the needle except in the wrong direction.
From this point on, Black Lives Matter organizers, if you organize another protest peacefully, You have to know that it will be worse for your cause because you will be thought of much worse.
I'm speaking for myself, but I assume a lot of people would feel similar.
I don't like to put thoughts into other people's heads, but I know my own reaction toward Black Lives Matter turned this weekend.
So I'm sort of sitting on the fence waiting to see what happens.
Things calm down and Black Lives Matter takes it to the useful field of here's some ideas.
This is what we can do. Can we meet with you, Mr.
President? Can we meet with the governor?
We got some ideas. Are you open to it?
Yes. Yes, absolutely open to it.
And if that's the way Black Lives Matter goes, I'm going to say, you know, I'm just going to let the past be the past, try to sweep up, try to clean up, just try to move forward.
But if Black Lives Matter organizes new events, after we've all agreed, and knowing that it will attract Antifa and looters, then I would think that anybody who participates in that Would have to be considered domestic terrorists, along with Antifa.
Because I don't think you could, there's no rational way you could understand a continued protest.
Again, completely validating the protests that have happened so far, even with the damage.
But if you keep going, It's taking a good thing too far, and I think that America will just treat you, at least mentally, as domestic terrorists.
At least I would. So I would say anybody who's demonstrating after tonight, I mean tonight and forward, any further demonstrations?
I would just personally see it as domestic terror, because there's no other way it's going to go.
If you know how it's going to turn out, it's domestic terrorism.
If you didn't know, or you really were concerned about something else and it just happened, that's just a bad situation.
But now it would be intentional.
So we don't have to guess what happens if we do this again tonight.
So I think, I read an article, let's see, it was Andrew McCarthy, was saying that, talking about the president designating Antifa, and by the way, I didn't see in the comments, but I know that somebody is going to say, Scott, Scott, Scott, the troublemakers are not Black Lives Matter.
You know I'm not saying that, right?
I'm not saying Black Lives Matter is causing, that they are doing the looting, I'm not saying Black Lives Matter, the organizers anyway.
I'm not saying they're Antifa.
I'm saying if they do another event, they're inviting those forces so we can no longer separate them, going forward.
But in the past, sure.
So Andrew McCarthy said that the president designating Antifa as a domestic terror organization is meaningless.
Or pointless, he says.
He says the purported designation would be pointless because we already have all the laws we need.
We don't need any extra designation to have all the power we need to fight Antifa.
I completely disagree with Andrew McCarthy on this, except that I, of course, agree with him on the legal point he's making.
Legally, I have no reason to disagree, because he has more understanding of this field, of course.
So, here's why I disagree.
There's a big difference between saying that something is sort of ongoing police concern versus a domestic terrorist organization.
The fact that it doesn't trigger any special laws You know, that's interesting, but I don't think that's the point of it.
The point of it is to shame Antifa out of existence.
The point of the designation is persuasion.
If it also somehow turned into, you know, you could make some special rules because of it, well, I suppose that might be a bonus.
But this is about, hey, mom and dad, you know your kid in the basement?
Remember your kid in the basement said he was getting involved with Antifa and you thought, well, they don't have any special goals and it's just a youthful thing and blah, blah, blah.
But how does mom and dad feel if they are harboring a terrorist?
Right? You see it now, right?
If you're living at home with your parents, and honestly, I don't know how Antifa feeds itself, Actually, literally, that's a serious question.
I don't know. Are they all being fed by other people?
Because they couldn't possibly have jobs.
I'm not saying that as a joke.
I'm saying that it seems like it would be inconsistent with their philosophy to have a job, because they'd be working for some big fascist corporation or something.
So, that's an actual serious question, and I would love to know, how do they eat?
So, if you've got a group of people who need jobs, and they need a place to live, what do you think of being designated as a terrorist?
A terrorist! What do you think that does to your job prospects?
What do you think that does to your college application?
And what do you think that does to mom and dad Who now are harboring a terrorist, harboring a terrorist in their house.
Do you think that changes the dynamic?
Mom and Dad, it's not just fun anymore.
Now you're harboring a terrorist in your house.
Okay, so Andrew McCarthy, I could not disagree.
In stronger terms.
But I do agree with you on the legal technicalities.
It doesn't create any new powers or new laws.
I mean, I don't have any knowledge of that field.
I'll just assume that Andrew McCarthy is right, because he's smart and he's right about this stuff, generally speaking.
But man, the president is right on with this.
He is right on point with that.
Speaking of the president, has anybody seen him?
Trump is still president, right?
Right? We still have a president?
Because it looked to me like the country was on fire last night and don't remember seeing the president.
Anybody see the president? Are you happy about that?
Are you happy about the president some of you voted for and you didn't see him during the time when the country was on fire?
Because tweets not enough sometimes.
Well, here's my take on that.
I don't know that Trump is making a strategic mistake.
I do know that the public would like him to step up and do more and fix it, and be sort of magic.
Use your magic and go fix it.
But it's possible that there's no play here, meaning that there isn't anything he can do, and anything he does makes it worse.
For example, if Trump went in public and said, all right, I'm going to give this speech to bring us all together, how would that go?
If Trump gave a speech to bring us all together, what would be the outcome of a really well-written speech designed to bring us together?
You know what would happen, right?
Yeah, you know what would happen.
CNN would fine people him again.
They would fine people him.
They would fine some word he used that suggests he was looking out for white supremacists.
You know that would happen.
Anything he says on this is going to be turned into a fine people hoax part two.
So that doesn't mean he gets to not do his job, just to be clear.
Just because there's no way it will work doesn't mean he shouldn't do it.
It's the weirdest thing.
It's like the protests. The protesters on some level probably knew it was going to make things worse, but they just had to do it anyway.
The energy was too great.
I assume that most of the protesters at least suspected it would only make things worse, and they were still okay with it because of the energy.
The President, if he gives a speech, no matter how well written, no matter how well delivered, no matter how sincere, will almost certainly work against him.
Don't you agree? Because they're just going to twist his words into exactly the opposite of what he says.
They will report it nonstop.
The people who read the news are reading that news.
They're not going to read Fox News saying, oh, they took that all out of context.
They're not going to say that.
So, if he talks in public, it will make everything worse because of the illegitimate press, and he still has to do it.
Is that a fucked up situation or what?
He still has to do it.
He still has to do it.
It's going to make it worse.
He still has to do it.
Somebody says he just gave the speech at NASA. How'd that go?
Somebody says he spoke Saturday.
Well, you know, he hasn't spoken at night when the riots are raging.
Some people think that that would be important.
I doubt it. Here's the only thing that Trump can do that will work.
Will he be clever enough to do this?
Well, let's put it this way.
So here's the fun. Are you ready?
Here's the fun. The fun is that I think you probably all know by now that there are enough people watching my Periscope that if any good suggestions came out of it, they would get to at least White House staff.
So any good ideas we collectively come up with here, they actually get heard.
Believe it or not, it's very consistently, you know, you can track this over time, that the White House, I would say one of its best qualities, that is completely underrated, completely underrated.
This White House is really good at keeping its ear to the ground, you know, reading the room, and feeling social media's pulse.
They're really good at it.
So, not only does the White House monitor what's said in the New York Times and CNN and Fox News and everyone else, they're monitoring also, I would say, influencers.
You could pretty much guarantee that if Mike Cernovich or Jack Posobiec said something that was really useful on social media, like an idea or a way of looking at something, the White House hears that.
They actually do watch the larger accounts that are influential.
So what I'm going to say next, I want to promise you, it's guaranteed to reach the White House.
It's guaranteed. Because they do such a good job of watching for ideas.
And here's the idea.
The next thing the president should do is be a call for specific solutions.
He should keep it simple and say, what's happening is terrible.
We can't have it.
What happened to George Floyd is terrible.
We can't have it.
Bring me solutions.
I'm going to have a committee.
I'm going to have a meeting. I'm going to have a roundtable.
We're going to look at the top five solutions and we're going to see what we can do.
Maybe we can try them in a few places.
If they need federal funding in order to try them, such as, let's say, buying more body cams or whatever, we'll look into it.
If the president says, we're going to move to solutions now, let's hear your solutions, let's talk about it, he's re-elected.
I'll put it in the most Cleanest terms you can put it in.
If the President says, I totally hear you, I've been on your side since I saw the video, no question about it.
Bring me solutions.
That's all I want to talk about.
We can talk about how bad it was, we can talk about the tragedy, but understand we're all on the same side.
There's nobody left to convince.
There's nobody left to persuade.
We're in the action part.
This is the action part.
Tell me what you need to do.
Now, of course, part of the problem is that what the protesters want is for the other three policemen to be arrested and charged.
Wouldn't you say? Probably nothing short of that is going to make a difference to the heat of the moment.
But do the protesters really want them to be arrested when there's no case that can be made.
My assumption is that the reason that the three officers are not arrested yet could still happen because the feds are there.
But if the reason that they're not arrested yet is because there's no case, we kind of need to hear that.
And we need to hear the legal argument that says, look, we don't think they're angels, we don't think they're innocent per se, but there's nothing there that would allow us to convict them.
Does the black public, does black lives matter, Want to convict three people on sketchy evidence that would, let me not call it sketchy, let's say that there would be enough ambiguity with the other three officers,
because you couldn't exactly see what they were doing on camera, if one guy was just standing there and wasn't paying attention, another was holding the guy's legs, it's not entirely clear what they knew and when, so there's probably no case.
Because remember, you need to get to beyond a reasonable doubt.
Can you tell me that the guy holding George Floyd's feet, the guy holding his feet, can you tell me that without a reasonable doubt you think he was a murderer or were involved in something that would be a crime with whatever word you want to put on it?
Can you tell me without a reasonable doubt that the guy holding the feet committed a crime?
You feel it, right?
You might feel it.
It feels like a crime, maybe, but I don't know how you're ever going to get a conviction on the foot guy.
I don't know how you're going to get a conviction on the guy who was just standing there watching the crowd.
He literally wasn't even facing the action as it was happening, and People who are under police custody do yell about their health routinely.
So they're kind of used to hearing it, I think.
I don't know. So I think Trump has one play, and it's to go as solutions.
If he doesn't go as solutions, I mean, ideally, I'd like to see him come with one specific solution and then ask for more.
Like a home run play would look like this.
Look, here's the deal. I'm going to fund body cams for every frickin' cop in the country, period.
Nobody's going to tell me they don't have money for body cams.
You're all getting body cams.
Now, body cams doesn't solve the whole problem, right?
Doesn't come close.
But it would show action.
It would show clarity.
There'd be no doubt that somebody wants to fix this, because it's real money, real action.
And then he can say, look, this is one thing we can do, give me some other things we can do, like actual practical things, give us some stuff.
If the president does that, he wins, and I think he's got to make the same case that I did, that the protests have been completely legitimate, even with the damage, but now they're not, because the message is received.
The day the president says the message is received, That's the day the protesters need to stop.
Message has been received.
Protests have to stop.
Anyway, if he pulls that off, it would be great, but we do have to wonder where he's been.
Now, if you're going to actually question the president's strategy, let me ask you this.
How has hiding done for Joe Biden?
Joe Biden has done well.
By hiding. Right?
Joe Biden's poll numbers are probably better because he's been invisible.
I'm not sure that wouldn't be the same for Trump.
You might find that the less he does in this situation, it might help him.
Because he's the law and order president, even if he's sort of invisible at the moment, and people are going to say to themselves, All right, I'm watching a riot on TV every day.
Who do you want to be president?
The law and order person or the non-law and order person?
All right. Here's my Strategic suggestion to the black community.
And let me frame this again as I have before.
If you're trying to persuade yourself or people who are just like you in some important way, you would use one form of persuasion, which is sort of the language, if you will, the emotional state, if you will, of the people you're persuading.
But since the point is not for black people to persuade other black people that there's police brutality that needs to be addressed, they're already on that.
They need to persuade other people.
They need to persuade white people and everybody else.
So if you're going to persuade other people, you need to know how to speak in their language.
And I want to give By the way, I'm being completely serious here.
In case you think this is some tongue-in-cheek thing, this is not.
Completely serious strategy suggestion, and the strategy hinges on an understanding of who you're trying to persuade.
Understand this.
If you protest tonight, you're persuading in the wrong direction.
Okay? Every protest after last night It's worse for the black community, period.
No matter if it was organized with good intentions or not, it doesn't matter.
At this point, it's just all bad, because it's going to be producing bad visuals of bad things.
So here's my advice.
You want to use the right tool for the job.
And when race relations were the worst, let's say during slavery, that had to be the worst, Then the right tool for the job might be a revolution, violence.
Because it's a big problem, you've got to use the biggest tool, and that might be a revolution, a civil war.
Not a revolution, a civil war.
And once you get past that, and you still have tons of inequality in your civilization, well then maybe it needs to go to the court system, and then civil rights, maybe you do some marching.
So the civil rights movement was the next...
You know, less blunt instrument, but it was sort of appropriate for the size of the problem.
I would say when we're talking about institutional racism, you need a new tool.
The new tool is going to be the hardest one.
It's the easiest one.
It's the easiest one to do.
It's the hardest one to understand.
All right? So I'm going to give the black community A magic persuasion gift.
The thing I'm going to tell you next is so powerful that if you were a Harry Potter fan, it's virtually like a spell.
Not all persuasion is this powerful.
Some persuasion is weak, some is much stronger.
This persuasion that I'm going to give you is so powerful and so reliable, it's practically like a magic spell.
And it's one that white people know, and black people sometimes know, but I'm starting to think I could use a little reminder.
And I don't know if it's a cultural difference.
Because I don't have good visibility of what it's like to be a black man in America.
I'm not going to pretend that I have some sense of what that's like.
And vice versa, which is my whole point.
If you're a black person in America, do you know what white people are thinking?
Well, you think you do in the big stuff, but not really.
Same as nobody else knows what you're thinking.
Not really. You can get the big stuff, but not really.
You know, for the totality of it.
And here's the tip, now that I've built it up.
I'm going to give you the tip in the form of a story, because stories with visuals are also very persuasive.
And here's the story.
There's a shopkeeper in an urban place.
He's a white guy.
Doesn't matter who he is.
He's a white guy. And he's at his shop that's been destroyed.
And he's there this morning.
And he is trying to clean up the rubble through his tears because he's watched much of what he has built for his whole life be destroyed while he watched on TV. Black man walks up to him with a broom and says, Can I help you?
My name is whatever.
Would you mind?
If I help you clean up?
That's it. That's the magic spell.
Would you mind if I help you clean up?
Shop owner says, I can't afford to pay you.
I'm broke. Black man says, I'm not asking for pay.
I'm asking if I can help.
Now, if you don't understand what just happened, I guess that spell will never be available to you.
But reciprocity is a superpower that works on white people.
Now, I'm not going to say it doesn't work on other people.
I'm going to stick with my central claim That you can know a little bit about the people you are, but we're just guessing about other people.
I mean, you can try as hard as you can to listen to them, understand them, have empathy, but you just can't know what it's like to be another person.
If you're black, you can't know what it's like to be me.
Not that you should.
But if you like a magic power, if you like a magic spell, That takes you that last mile.
You want something that's not as big as a civil war, because that's the wrong tool.
You want something that's not as big as the entire civil rights movement, because that's not exactly the tool, because the court system is pretty good right now about making sure that we're treated right, at least legally, you know, wherever we can catch it, we try to fix it.
But now you've got this so-called institutional racism.
It's subtle and pervasive.
It's just sort of in the fabric.
It's just sort of built into us.
How do you get rid of bad patterns in people's heads?
Because racism, bigotry, prejudice, are patterns that we have in our heads which are unproductive.
If you have an unproductive pattern in your head, and that's the last mile, Remember, first mile, civil war.
Second mile, civil rights, court systems, sue the people who were not being good people.
Last mile, this is the last mile.
This is really tinkering with the fabric.
If you want the last mile to work, reciprocity works every time.
Every time. So, let me go back to the story.
A young African-American man shows up with a broom, helps the shop cleaner clean up, introduces himself at the end and says, keep in touch, here's my phone number.
That's it. Asks for nothing.
Asks for nothing, walks away.
Now, if that shopkeeper ever needs to hire somebody, In the future, he needs to hire somebody.
Who does he call? Who does he call?
That's right. He finds that phone number of that one black guy who showed up unasked and helped him clean up his store.
It's five years later.
He still has the phone number.
He still calls him.
Gives him the job.
He calls him, and the guy has a better job already, because a guy like that's going to get a job pretty quickly.
That guy that showed up with the broom, he probably doesn't need a job.
Probably doesn't need one. Because the guy that shows up with the broom, he can get a job.
Probably already has one. But now the shopkeeper says, you know, all right, you're not available.
Maybe I'll hire the next young black guy that comes in here.
Pay it back. Pay it forward.
If there's one thing you can depend on with your average khaki-wearing, cubicle-working, low-mowing, barbecuing white man, reciprocity works every time.
I'll tell you the first time that I learned this story.
It was crazy.
I was, let's see, 12 years old maybe, maybe 11 or 12 years old.
And I used to shovel snow from my neighbor, who was not directly a neighbor, but I had to walk to his house.
And he was a rich guy, and I didn't know why.
Turns out there was some criminal enterprise in the family, but I didn't know that at the time.
So he was an old guy who was born in Greece, and he was the nicest guy ever.
He wasn't personally involved in any crime, but members of the family were.
My deal with him is that if it snowed overnight, I would wake up before the sun came up and I would trudge through the snow with my shovel.
And I would shovel his driveway and his walkway all the way around his house.
He had a sidewalk all the way around the house.
And I'd shovel all that and it'd be exhausting then, you know, go to school and stuff.
And he would sometimes offer to overpay me.
He would offer to overpay me.
I would sometimes refuse because he was paying me too much.
Do you know how much that guy loved me because I would refuse to take all of his money?
A lot. Now, I didn't do it, you know, to get some kind of advantage.
I did it because he actually was paying me so much it was embarrassing.
Like, you know, even as a kid, I was like, hmm, that's a lot, you know?
And he sat me down one time.
So one day I refused his generosity because it was just too much.
And he said, put down the shovel.
I remember I'm like 11 or 12, he's probably 70.
He goes, put down your shovel for a minute.
I'm like, oh no, I'm in trouble.
And he sat down and he said, I want to tell you something.
It's like one of the most important things you'll ever learn.
I'm like, okay, here it comes.
And he goes, when someone offers to give you something, it's because they want you to have it.
It was one of the most important things I ever learned.
He goes, yeah, if somebody offers you something, it's because they want you to have it.
In other words, they're better off if you take it.
Do it for me. And I listened to it and I thought, I never thought of it that way.
That he's not doing me a favor.
He's doing it because he wants to.
And who am I to not give him what he wants?
He wants me to have this money.
He has decided that I'm worth this amount of money.
He wants it. He's not going to be happy if I don't take it.
And I learned that lesson, and I can't tell you how well that has served me through life, to just understand that if somebody offers something, they want you to have it.
Now, you have to look in case they're playing some kind of a scheme or something, but it's quite often the case.
It was one of those lessons I learned about reciprocity, that because I was sort of extra good to him, he couldn't turn it off.
He didn't know how to be anything but extra good to me, and he needed it.
He needed it.
That's the magic part.
I created, just accidentally, by doing my job better than he expected, which is sort of my strategy in life.
If somebody says, this is the job we want you to do, I'm always going to try to do better than that, because it's just my strategy.
Let me tell you another one.
I was in my 20s, barely making it financially, And I was living in an in-law apartment below the landlord's home in San Francisco.
It was a one bedroom, one window, a little window, just sort of a hovel.
But my landlord was this German guy.
So he was born in Germany, but an American.
And one day I had a bunch of trash and I needed to get rid of it.
So I called my landlord and I said, I've ordered a dumpster to come and I'm going to fill it up with my stuff, but I won't fill it up.
So if you'd like, you know, since the dumpster will be here anyway, if you'd like, you can use the rest of the dumpster.
If you have anything you want to throw away and I'll pay for it.
Made him crazy.
Do you know why? Why did it make my neighbor crazy that I offered to let him use at no charge my dumpster?
And he didn't mind the dumpster coming.
He was fine with that. But when I offered to let him use it, the half of it that was going to be empty for free, he went crazy.
Do you know why? Because I obligated him.
Right. I obligated him.
He begged me To let him pay for the whole dumpster.
He begged me.
He said, absolutely not.
Just couldn't live with it.
He could not live with me giving him something because I had no money and he had a lot.
I had no money and he had a lot.
Couldn't live with me just giving him something that he wanted.
He actually wanted it. He insisted that he pay for the entire dumpster.
For me! Now, because I had learned from my neighbor that when somebody offers to do something for you, it's because they want to.
So I did put up resistance because, you know, you make an offer, you don't just take it away, right?
So I made my offer.
I let him argue with me, and then I said, you know, okay.
Because I believed he actually wanted to do it, and he did pay for it.
That It's how the Harry Potter reciprocity works on white people.
Now again, it probably works just fine on everybody, because it's a universal principle.
But when I say it works great on white people, I'm not saying only on white people.
That would be racist. I'm saying that it's all I know.
That's all I know, right?
I'm only going to talk about what I know.
And if you want to influence my Greek neighbor, Who's deceased?
If you wanted to influence my old German landlord, now deceased, I assume, you want to influence me, you want to influence the shopkeeper, and you want to get rid of the last vial, the institutional racism, the part that's just sort of baked into the fabric of stuff and you don't even know how to get it out.
It's like a stain that's hard to remove.
If you want to get rid of the stain, Reciprocity.
What we're seeing tonight is the opposite of reciprocity.
You're literally seeing videos of black people beating their shit out of white people who did whatever.
That's the opposite of reciprocity.
It's taking you backwards.
And I would say that black people in the United States have probably lost 10 years of progress this weekend.
Probably. I think black America's lost 10 years of progress.
And it's because of this, that the tool to fix it was to recognize that we were all on the same side and to offer something.
Here's the offer.
President Trump, how can we be successful together?
How can I help you get re-elected?
This is the extreme example.
I'm not saying you should agree with this one necessarily, but to demonstrate the technique.
President Trump, we're going to help you get re-elected.
Here's some things we need.
Can we talk about these five things that might make things better?
What do you think you'll say?
Yes. Yes.
He's going to say yes.
If Black Lives Matter is even a little bit serious about fixing anything versus having it as an issue, if they're even a little bit serious about fixing it, it's right there.
The table is cleared.
The invitation is on.
All the tools are in place.
All the ears are listening.
All the eyes are looking.
Just give us something.
Give us something where we can help you.
Tell us how we can be useful.
Do you know why people like being useful?
It's true. Again, when I say white people like to be useful, I'm not saying other people don't.
I'm just sticking to what I know.
I'm not going to speak for anybody else.
I really can't even speak for white people in general, but I feel like I got a little bit of sense of that life, if you know what I mean.
Somebody says they just want the issue.
I'm sure some do. So, just to make it as clear as possible, my patience for the protesting ended last night.
From Monday on, it's war.
It's just war.
If you need it to be war, it's going to be war.
But, the smart play would be to be productive.
So compare, if you will, how Fox News treats the fine people hoax compared to CNN.
So CNN, even as recently as yesterday, was running the fine people hoax.
They put it in the form of quoting Susan Rice, who quoted the fine people hoax, but they don't fact check it.
They just run it like it's some kind of fact.
I will tell you that I had a tense exchange with Jake Tapper after I blocked him and called him a liar in public.
So he did contact me and we had some back and forth on that extensively.
And here was the outcome of that.
The outcome of that is I withdraw my accusation That Jake Tapper is a liar on the topic of the fine people hoax.
So, based on the conversation, the exchange, it is clear he's not lying.
It's clear that he's experiencing cognitive dissonance that's pretty severe.
Now, I imagine he wouldn't like to hear that either, but that's how cognitive dissonance works.
You're the only person who doesn't know you have it.
So cognitive dissonance is not something you can discover in yourself.
It's just something you can see in other people.
Unfortunately, that's the nature of it.
And here's how you can tell.
So he and I had an exchange in which, you know, he's a very reasonable guy, very smart, so it doesn't take long to kind of climb down to which facts you disagree on.
So guess which facts we disagreed on, on the factual level that we disagreed on?
Turns out none. When we took it down to the fact level, there actually weren't any facts we disagreed on.
Isn't that weird? There were no facts we disagreed on.
A little bit surprised.
So once we agreed on the facts, I said, well, okay, that was pretty clear.
The president disavowed the racist.
He talked to his assumption that there were some people there who were not racist, who were just there about the statues.
And then here's the key part.
And then I said, but it doesn't matter if he was right or wrong about the composition of the crowd, it's not relevant.
Because he stated his assumption, and then he spoke to the assumption.
If it turns out the crowd was a different composition than he thought, There's no story there.
It just means that he doesn't know something that nobody else knows either.
Because do you know who else knows the composition of the crowd as Charlottesville?
Nobody. Nobody did a poll.
They were dressed in, except for the people marching with tiki torches, nobody was dressed to show what their opinion was.
They were just dressed in normal clothing.
How could you tell what their opinions were?
So my point was, once I said to Jake, It doesn't matter what the composition of the crowd is.
He spoke to his assumption and it was very clear.
What do you think Jake's reaction to that was?
Well, it was mostly talking about how the crowd actually didn't have any good people in it.
And then I would say, well, that's irrelevant, because he stated his assumption and he talked to it.
If you're saying he had an accurate perception of who was in the crowd, that would be just like everybody else, because none of us know who was in the crowd exactly.
And so there'd be no story.
But the point is that the way you identify cognitive dissonance is if somebody can't address a point.
They can only address a different point.
So I kept trying to get him to address the point that the worst it could be is that he was confused about who was there, just like everybody else.
And he wouldn't address that point.
He would only say, well, that's your opinion, or there were bad people there.
So what's that?
If you can't address the point, it's always cognitive dissonance, or somebody's lying, or they're misleading.
I would say that there's nothing about him which suggests that he's lying, but his inability to even talk about the topic Which is that Trump talked to his own assumptions and stated them clearly, so there's nothing there.
He couldn't go there.
He couldn't even deal with that point.
He would only deal with other points no matter how many times I continue to make the only one point that mattered.
Now compare that to how Fox News treats the hoax as recently as today.
All right? So it was in the context of some other story.
They were just giving some context.
And here's how Fox News, in one of their articles on their online, treated it.
It said, President Trump quickly condemned white supremacists.
So that's the first sentence from Fox News about the fine people hoax.
The president quickly condemned white supremacists.
Now, you can argue quickly.
Because as I've said many times, everything good should have happened sooner.
No exception. If it was a good thing to condemn them, you can't be quick enough.
So you could argue about it quickly, but I don't think that's a big point.
And then I said, while noting that not everyone protesting the statue removal was necessarily a neo-Nazi or white supremacist.
That's fair. That's exactly what he did.
He noted that not all the protesters were there because they were neo-Nazis or white supremacists.
And then it says, however, his comments were widely misinterpreted, and then it links to a Steve Cortez article describing how it was misinterpreted as praising white supremacists, galvanizing Antifa and bolstering its momentum, blah, blah.
So Fox News reports this exactly right.
Exactly right. They showed what he said about white supremacists.
Basically, they showed the whole context.
So, now you go over to CNN, and I saw If you look at the individual videos, if you go on social media, you're going to see lots of videos, especially if you have any kind of Trump supporters as followers, you can see lots of videos of the protesters beating up other people.
Shopkeepers, protesters beating up some white guy who was standing on the sidelines.
Shopkeepers pulling somebody out of a truck.
I'm sorry, protesters pulling somebody out of a truck.
So, on social media, I'm getting this non-stop diet of protesters being violent against people who are not protesters.
On CNN, they've got this one video of a cop beating up a black woman.
And you can't tell if she was resisting arrest.
I mean, he was punching her in the face, which I'm assuming was police abuse.
But that was the one thing that CNN decided to run.
While the country is on fire, They looked at all these videos of people behaving badly, and the one they picked out is the one that would make it worse.
It's the only one. The only one that would make the violence worse was that one video.
Everything else would be more of a caution to say, oh, we've gone too far.
Now we've got to slow down and be less violent.
They showed the only one that would make it worse.
Amazingly. You're thinking of a different video in the comments.
There was a different video of a black woman punching a white cop, and then a black cop punched the black woman.
That's one video. There's a separate video on CNN of two cops arresting a couple, and you couldn't tell their ethnicities of either the cops or the couple, because it was sort of dark and far away.
But then one of the cops ends up punching the wife who was resisting arrest.
So, I'm not defending the cop.
I'm just saying that that's the one they pick.
Amazing. So, singer Lana Del Rey posted some video on Instagram of looters.
So, it's just video that you're seeing everywhere of looters.
What do you think happened when Lana Del Rey posted just video of looters looting, just like everybody else is posting?
Turns out there was a big backlash from her fans who thought that she was showing the faces of looters and that would get them in trouble.
That's right. She had to take down her post because her post had the faces of looters and those looters might get in trouble.
And she took it down.
I don't have anything to say about that.
But there are a lot of fans who are willing to say that they were supporting looters destroying innocent people's property, which is shocking.
It's shocking.
All right.
That is the big news of the day.
Now, I think we're all having the same weird reaction to the coronavirus situation, that weren't we having some kind of a pandemic problem or something that just completely is out of the news?
In two weeks, we're going to learn a lot about how dangerous it is to have a lot of people in one place.
So we should see either a gigantic spike in COVID cases, or what if we don't?
What if we don't? Because, you know, a lot of the people protesting were young people, and they're not exactly the most at risk.
What if we don't?
Because if we don't see anything that looks like a big spike in COVID cases, I've got a feeling that, at least in terms of safety, we're back.
How can we fix this, Scott?
Well, it depends what you're fixing.
My suggestion for the president is to say the protests are over.
You made your point. Bring me your suggestions.
I think if he did that, it'd be over tomorrow.
I don't think he's going to do it.
I don't know why. I mean, we don't know why he's missing in action.
If I had to hazard a guess, Of why the president is a little bit low profile.
It's either a combination of he doesn't want to make it worse, and I do think that's a risk, and that would be...
I'm not sure I would criticize that, because he just might think it would make it worse.
And he might be right.
But the other possibility is that there's something brewing.
I don't think you can rule that out.
And by the something brewing, I mean something international.
So don't be surprised if all the coronavirus stuff plus the riots has made at least one of our adversaries a little adventurous.
In other words, there may be some foreign adversary that has seen that they can take advantage of the situation.
So it could be just putting all the possibilities out there.
I'm not predicting it. I'm just saying one of the things that I would look at for why the president is a little quiet on this situation might be There's something big brewing.
We'll see. What if they had done something productive?
I don't know who they is.
But if you mean the protesters, I would say that would be naive.
Because remember, you have to look at it from the energy standpoint.
There's a certain amount of energy that just needed to be released.
And you could want it not to.
But it's still going to be released.
You're wanting it not to be released won't help at all.
So I think it just had to be released.
Maybe this weekend was enough.
We'll see. Civil unrest brewing?
Well, it's the weirdest civil unrest in the world because everybody agrees.
What kind of civil rest do you have when everybody is on the same side?
I mean, really. I don't think you can call the looters or Antifa civil unrest.
Black Lives Matter was trying to be productive, and I give them credit for that.
But if they continue the protest knowing that it attracts Antifa looters, then I would say it's both stupid and unproductive, and their credibility would be basically gone at that point.
Yeah, there's some notion that China is trying to make it worse.
There's some notion that Russia is trying to make it worse.
Poor SpaceX. Elon Musk's tremendous success at NASA's, the country's success, I guess.
It's so sad that that got overshadowed by the bad events, because that could have been just amazing.
I mean, it was amazing.
All right.
That's all I got going for now, and I will talk to you maybe tonight.
What is today?
What's the date today?
Oh, today's the first.
I did promise you that I was going to do the evening podcasts, the evening periscopes, until June 1st.
So I may not be here tonight.
Because I gotta tell you that doing two of these a day is really, really hard.
Not hard in terms of the content, Hard in terms of what it does to my day, because I'm always getting ready for one, and then I go to sleep, and then I'm getting ready for one.
So I may take my leave tonight.
If you don't see me on Periscope tonight, it's because I decided to take the night off.
If events go bad tonight, I might be back on just because there's something to talk about.
But I feel like we made it to June 1st.
Can we have a little standing ovation for all of us to get to June 1st?
I'll give you one.
Standing ovation.
You know, because when we were looking at this in February, June was a long ways away.
I...
June was a long ways away.
But ladies and gentlemen, And anything else you want to designate yourself?
It's June. I think we beat the coronavirus.
Sure, we've got this little protest thing going on, but that's not going to last forever.
It's June. And it's time to get the country back to where it belongs.
So I would expect a good summer and an amazing end of the year.
I think this business, this ugliness is going to linger for a little while, but we're talking a week or two.
We're not talking forever. I think we made it.
I think we made it, at least in terms of the coronavirus.
For those of you who are getting super tense about the protests, I can almost guarantee that we're not going to have them next week because the energy will have, you know, filtered out by then.
So you might have a few more days of it.
It might be bad, but I wouldn't worry about it being the end of civilization because we don't want that.
Not enough people want that.
So the applauses are catching up in the comments.
So thank you for joining me in that mutual round of applause.
I think we made it. I think we got there.
I think we did it.
Congratulations. I will see you at least tomorrow.
I hope not tonight.
If I do, it means there's trouble tonight.
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