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June 3, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
33:19
Episode 1015 Scott Adams: Let's Watch the Peaceful Protestors Have a Polite Chat With De Blasio
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Hey everybody!
Oh, you thought you could get rid of me?
No, no.
It turns out there's a new crisis.
New crisis, new periscope.
And I have to admit that I wasn't going to go live tonight.
I told you I was going to phase out after June 1st.
I wasn't going to go live tonight, but I saw on Twitter that somebody was looking forward to it tonight.
And I thought, oh, somebody's actually looking forward to it.
I thought, well, I can't really not do it now.
So here I am. So let's talk about some of the things.
I saw... First of all, the clips we're seeing on the news, I've got all the news nailed up, so I've got CNN I'm watching and Fox News over there, so I can sort of keep an eye on them.
But they don't seem to show any of the good stuff.
Have you noticed that?
The good stuff meaning anything that's actually in the action.
They're all standing behind police lines.
So, I thought I saw on Twitter that the crowd was marching toward...
Bill de Blasio's residence.
Is that true? And it's a peaceful crowd, right?
Why would a peaceful crowd need to go to Bill de Blasio's residence?
Right? Doesn't Bill de Blasio support them even more than they support themselves?
Why would they be going to his place?
Just because he's the only thing in town?
I don't know. Speaking of town, I just did a little tour of my town.
Just drove through to see if there was any damage yet.
And some of the local shop owners apparently don't watch the news that much because they put up the big wood plywood over the windows.
So that part's good.
So they've watched the news enough To know that their storefronts are at risk, and so some of them have boarded up.
But here's the funny part, which tells me they don't watch the news.
They decided to be extra safe, so they spray painted on their own plywood that they support Black Lives Matter and just very pro-Black Lives Matter.
So the whole storefront is like pro-Black Lives Matter.
To which I say, I don't think they've been watching the news.
That's what happens when you only watch a little bit of news.
If you watch a little bit of news, you think, I got it.
I'll just say I'm on their side.
That should work. Now, I happened to see this immediately after watching a little viral video.
You can see it in my Twitter feed from tonight.
There was this young white kid.
He looked like maybe a college student, you know, roughly that age, 20-ish maybe.
And he's looking out a window of what looks to be his apartment.
I think it's in New York City, but I'm not sure, an urban area.
And he's watching the protesters go by.
And he might be on, I don't know, second or third floor or something.
And he's looking out the window with his phone and everything, and he's thumbs up, because he's very pro-protesters.
He believes in their cause.
He's like, thumbs up, guys, thumbs up.
And he's filming with his camera.
As he's filming, One of the protesters turns and hurls a brick through the window right next to him.
It just breaks the whole window.
And he's like, what the?
What the hell? And he runs back to the window that's not yet broken.
And he's trying to plead with the protesters, who of course can't hear him.
He's just a white guy in a window.
And he's like, I'm on your side.
I'm on your side.
And about the second time he said...
I'm on your side. You see one of the other protestors reach back and you think to yourself, no.
This isn't going to be as good as I hope it is.
Is it? Because that first protestor had a really good arm.
I mean, it couldn't have been that easy to hit the exact window he was aiming for from the street.
It wasn't an easy shot.
There was some distance involved.
And I see this other protestor reach back and I'm thinking, Probably not.
It goes right through the window that the guy with the thumbs up is doing.
Now, it looked like it didn't hurt him.
I wouldn't be laughing if he got hurt, but watching the protesters or whoever, the looters, I don't know, whoever, but they were in the line with the protesters, but watching them take out one of their own was the funniest thing you'll ever see in your life because And this is the point.
The guy in the window who was doing thumbs up, he thought that siding with them would matter.
He thought that would matter.
The people in my town, they also think that it matters whose side they're on.
No. It matters if you have a big window.
If you don't have a big window, you might be okay.
If you have a big window, And they happen to be nearby.
It doesn't really matter what side you're on.
And if you've missed that, you've missed the show.
So I was trying to think of all the things that could solve this problem.
Now the conventional wisdom is that the only way to solve it is with massive but non-violent means.
Meaning lots of arrests and presents and maybe some tear gas.
Maybe some water, I don't know, whatever they use these days.
But not deadly force.
But I don't know...
I see something else is on fire in New York City.
But I don't know exactly if that's going to work.
Thanks LA, Jen.
I only came on here because I saw your tweet.
And So what could possibly stop it?
Well, maybe it could be this massive application of force.
But it seems to me that Antifa can simply reconstitute as often as it wants.
So it's kind of like a terrorist group.
It wouldn't matter if you caught one of the cells.
There would just be another cell tomorrow.
So I don't know that you could ever use nonviolent means to stop it.
Because they don't care about any of that.
None of that seems to be even slightly influencing them.
So what else can you do?
You can wait it out.
If you wait it out, though, I would imagine they would just pick town after town after town and get rid of them.
But, you know, I always say that life is not a slippery slope.
That things only slip until there's a counterforce, and there's always a counterforce?
So what we're waiting for is a counterforce.
Now it could be that the counterforce is the US military.
It could be, but of course there needs to be some coordination with the locals.
But it could be that we just send in lots of scary looking soldiers, again non-violently, and the show of force is enough.
But I don't think it would be, because wouldn't they just plan another one later in a different place?
So I don't see that working either.
So what would work?
You can imagine some charismatic leader on the left talking people down, can't you?
No, you can't.
You can't think of that at all.
There's nobody on the left who would have the ability and the willingness to talk them out of it.
You know, just say, Even Oprah.
I don't think Oprah can do it at this point.
It's beyond all of that. So they can't be talked out of it, and they can't be convinced with non-lethal force.
And because I'm on a public social network, I'm certainly not going to advocate violence.
So let me say that as clearly as possible.
I don't advocate violence.
But predicting violence is different.
And I believe that all problems go until people decide to take whatever steps are necessary to solve it.
And that's probably going to be violent.
I can't see another option.
So again, I'm not promoting violence, I'm predicting.
Now there are a few ways that this could go.
The lowest loss of life would be to kill one person in spectacular fashion.
I don't think that's going to happen, right?
And I don't promote it.
I'm just saying that that could work.
You can imagine, for example, a vigilante sniper.
Imagine a vigilante sniper who just takes out looters but nobody else.
If a vigilante sniper, and again, I hope this doesn't happen, But you have to assume that violence is down the road.
There's going to be a violent response.
We don't know what nature it would take, but we hope it takes the nature, if it takes any at all.
You'd rather it didn't take any violent nature at all.
But if that has to happen because the other ways just can't work, they're just, systemically, they're impossible to work because the other side has a response to everything.
So, if violence is the only solution, in the end, you want it to be the smallest amount.
What would be the smallest amount?
Probably a sniper.
Ideally, a sniper who was never caught.
Now, here's the weird part about this.
If you remember, there was once some citizen sniper who was just killing people randomly years ago, and it was like the biggest...
Problem in the country like it practically shut down the country because people didn't want to go anywhere because it was actually some crazy sniper on the loose But so it's you know, it's a big problem.
You don't want a crazy sniper on the loose But here's the weird thing as Michael Knowles said on his video I think it was this morning.
He said who knew that protests would cure coronavirus?
Like who knew that?
And the weird thing is that it really did take one disaster.
It didn't really cure it, but you know what I mean.
In the joke sense, it cured it.
And I saw a report, I don't know if it's verified yet, that there were some pipe bombs hidden for use later tonight at one of the locations.
Now, what if that's true?
There were pipe bombs.
Do you think those pipe bombs were only meant to kill whoever they wanted to kill or only meant to blow up a building?
If there are multiple pipe bombs, a bunch of innocent protesters are going to get killed just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It kind of stands to reason, if you have enough people and enough pipe bombs, innocent people get killed.
Now, that could be the wake-up call.
It could be that there's an accident by some of the bad actors that killed too many of the people who were marching with them, and then it just changes the narrative instantly.
So that would be a much larger loss of life.
So you hope that one doesn't happen, of course, or any of the ones that have lost life.
What else could do it?
An Islamic terror attack could get it done.
Again, I'm not promoting an Islamic terror attack, obviously, but if Islamic terrorists said, oh, this is the perfect time to attack because there's so many people in one place and there's police there, it's just sort of the perfect place, if it happened, you hope it doesn't, it would solve the protests.
So it would be this weird situation of like one...
One horrible thing could solve the other horrible thing, but then you've got to solve the next horrible thing, and you can only solve that with another horrible thing.
So it's a weird dimension we're in where only horrible things are solutions, but they create their own problems.
Does anybody know what the death count is so far from the protests?
Do you know the death count?
The death count...
I know of two African-American men who were killed, one in Omaha and then a security guard somewhere else.
So we know that at least two black men in America died while protesters were protesting.
What? Because we all agree.
Now, let me ask you this.
Are the protesters protesting for justice?
I haven't heard that. I don't think the protesters are protesting for justice.
They're going to say that, of course.
But when you're talking about the other three cops, and they need them to be arrested and tried, or there will be no peace, I don't think they're asking for justice.
Because if they were asking for justice, it would look more like this.
Alright, if you're not going to charge these guys, you need to explain why.
I mean, it really needs to be good.
But, If it's explained and the evidence is available to the public and the public sees it and they say to themselves, oh, I really want those other three cops to be charged, but I also wouldn't want to be charged with evidence this week if it were me.
So it looks like there's a setup here where the only thing that can fix an unfair Let's say justice slash police system is another unfair justice slash police system in which people, in this case the three cops who were not charged, and again this is speculative because we don't know all the evidence, but just work with me through the thinking of this.
It looks like the only thing that would stop the protesters is to Arrest people who you would not arrest if not for the protests, meaning people for whom the evidence is too weak to bring a successful case, even if you think they're up to no good or they did something bad.
If you wouldn't charge regular people under regular circumstances with evidence this week, if we do go ahead and charge these three cops for the purpose of social We will have used really a gigantic injustice.
Again, justice meaning using our legal system in a consistent way.
It's not the kind of justice that people are thinking of that's more revenge-y.
That's the justice they're thinking of.
But if you're being consistent, treating everybody the same under the law, those three people probably would not be charged if not for this situation.
So if they do get charged, and that's the only way to defuse this thing, it will be one of the greatest tragedies in American justice under the assumption That there's a reason they weren't charged in the first place.
We haven't heard the argument, so I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit.
They might get charged, and it might come out later that there was such a good reason that we haven't heard.
In other words, evidence we haven't heard.
Not reason we haven't heard, but evidence.
We'll see. But so far, the The peaceful protesters have killed several people and injured 50 people at the White House.
So you would have to say that their credibility is sort of zero-ish at this point, wouldn't you?
Murder hornets.
Somebody's suggesting the murder hornets are our only solution.
It's not a bad idea.
There's a theoretical number of murder hornets That would clear any city street.
And then maybe the hornets die anyway because they don't have much to eat in the city.
Huh. You know, not the funny thing, but the frustrating thing about this is the reason it's not already solved, obviously, the reason it's not already solved is that nobody knows the solution.
Nobody knows one. If we knew one, somebody would do it.
So whatever the solution is, it's probably going to be ugly.
And I'd be really amazed if there's not a lot of deaths tonight.
Speaking of deaths, again, we're not hoping that happens, just in case anybody's wondering about that.
So it looks like the protesters are going to willfully ignore the curfew, which guarantees that the looters come in behind them, because there'll be lots of cover, and they'll outnumber the police.
So, CNN is reporting that there are fine people marching with the looters and the domestic terrorists.
Do you think that fine people could ever be marching with looters and domestic terrorists?
Because in this case, they're actually marching with them.
In the case of the Charlottesville fine people hoax, the fine people weren't actually marching.
They just showed up.
As soon as they showed up, the cops said, you can't be here, and they herded them away.
So the president didn't know, but they didn't get to do much protesting.
Alright, so, and I swear I thought I imagined it, but I turned on CNN, and I think they were trying to blame it on right-wing white supremacists.
That's really happening, right?
Am I imagining The CNN is trying to put this on right-wing operatives.
That is just the craziest thing ever.
Now, it could be that there are a number of outside people, but if there were many far-right agitators there, I'd be certainly surprised.
Very surprised. Apparently Trump's disapproval level hit an all-time high for any president ever.
So he's got that record.
The most disapproval of any president ever.
Now I think, and you've heard a number of people say this, that this situation has lost him a lot of support.
And I've been very critical of it as well.
But it's not over.
This will be judged by things that haven't happened yet.
So let me say that again.
How history and voters judge What's going on with the protest will be entirely based on things that haven't happened yet.
David Dorn is the African-American gentleman who got murdered.
Is that correct, David Dorn?
There's some social media action around the fact that CNN won't report it at all.
How would you like to work as CNN and know that It's widely reported that an African-American man was killed during looting that came with these protests, and they're not reporting it.
How would you like to work for that network and know that a black man got murdered, but because he was a policeman, it didn't get reported?
Or he was a security guard, I think.
How could you work for that network?
I mean, wouldn't you be updating your page every minute and say, okay, I know I'm working for a network that tells real news because people who work there probably believe that.
And they're like, I know they're going to report this.
And then you refresh your screen and...
Nope.
Nope. What do you do?
How do you explain that away?
Do you just say, oh, I guess that's not the news?
I don't know. I don't know how you rationalize that.
Joe Biden had a good solution for training the police...
To have less fatal interactions.
His idea is that the police should be trained to wing a suspect in the leg if the suspect is coming at them with a knife.
So that's Joe Biden's very constructive suggestion.
We'll retrain the police to be leg shooters.
They might have to change out some of the targets at the target range.
Because a leg's a little smaller than a torso.
So you're going to want to put just a leg up there.
So it should be maybe just a leg and a foot.
And that would be your target.
And of course when you shoot, you don't want to cripple somebody for life.
Duh! So you're going to have to go to the target range and practice shooting around the perimeter of the leg.
Just so you wing them.
Now, Joe Biden thinks that that's a perfectly practical plan.
And I think it could be.
I think that you're mocking him too quickly.
Because you're probably thinking to yourself, Scott, it's kind of hard to hit a leg of somebody who's running at you with a knife and wing them.
Maybe I'd go for the torso.
It's a bigger target.
But I don't think you're thinking in terms of actual tactics.
If you're trying to hit the edge of somebody's leg who's running at you with a knife, you don't want to aim at the edge because that wouldn't give you enough margin for error.
Just a little bit off to the left, you miss entirely.
So if you're trying to shoot somebody in the legs and they're coming at you, you want to aim for their balls.
Because if you aim for the balls and you're a little bit off left or right, you're still going to get a little leg.
If you happen to be a really good shot, well, you get the balls, and that will certainly slow them down.
And my understanding of medical literature is that that will make them less aggressive in the future.
So the Joe Biden plan for shooting protesters in the leg, which really, you aim for the balls because you don't want to miss on the left or the right, is a pretty good suggestion.
I think that could work.
All right. I can't remember if I talked about this this morning, but it's just blowing my mind, so I'm going to say it again.
So Jeff Bezos, as you know, owns not only Amazon, but the Washington Post.
The Washington Post, I assume, like most left-leaning anti-Trump publications, might be a little bit forgiving to the violence that we're seeing.
Just assuming. Is it coincidence that Jeff Bezos' Amazon just is watching on television and his news organ is reporting the complete destruction of Amazon's competitors?
Amazon just watched and reported on all of its competition being destroyed.
So I don't give you investment advice.
You really, really should not take investment advice from me.
I'm just going to tell you this because it's part of the story, not investment advice.
When the riots started, and I saw that Antifa was targeting storefronts, I took every dollar of cash I had and bought Amazon stock, which I also bought at the bottom of the crisis, the coronavirus crisis.
Now, I'm not saying I'm proud of it.
And again, I'm not recommending it because tomorrow, you know, buying one stock is never a good idea, just in general.
But I only put in an amount of money that I can afford to lose, and I thought, I think Amazon's going to pull this off.
I think Amazon is actually going to destroy all retail business on Earth, and it's just going to look like they were reporting on it.
I think he's going to pull this off.
It will be the greatest move of any entrepreneur ever.
Pure evil, of course.
I'm only being a little bit hyperbolic here.
In the sense that he is actually making money by watching all of his competitors being destroyed.
Because he's got the Washington Post.
You know, I don't think it was a plan.
I think that would be going too far.
It's going too far to say it was a plan.
But one wonders how hard the Washington Post is going to try to stop it, given that if they stop it, their parent company makes a lot less money.
Now, of course, you assume they're all good people, so their conscious intentions would all be right.
I believe that's true.
I don't think there's anybody working for the Washington Post, maybe a few of the opinion people, but generally speaking, there's nobody there who has bad intentions.
So I don't think they planned to be part of an evil plot to destroy retail businesses and enrich Amazon, but it's happening.
I mean, they didn't ask to be there, I'm sure, but that's happening.
Could this conflict of interest, which is the most extreme conflict I've ever seen...
Let me ask you this. Have you ever seen more conflict of interest than that?
That's about the most conflict of interest you'll ever see.
Are you puzzled that the stock market is reaching new highs, even as America is burning?
Are you puzzled By why the complete decimation of retail stores in urban areas is not even bothering the stock market a little bit?
Does that make sense to you?
Do you have a little theory in your head why we're watching on the news the complete destruction of retail and restaurants and basically everything in urban areas that's on the ground floor And the stock market's up?
How do you explain that?
Have you thought about that?
I mean, that's really sort of a puzzle.
So I've been thinking about that today, and I have some speculation.
I mean, I don't think I know what's going on, but let me toss out a few ideas.
One idea Is that the stock market is now a safe place to put money.
In other words, if you were to look at all the places that you could park your money to be safe, you could put it in a bank.
I don't know. Are banks the safest place for money?
Not over a certain amount.
How about buying gold?
It's worked out a number of times But with digital currency and Bitcoin and China's got their own digital currency, is gold always going to be the place you want to go to for safety?
Maybe. Maybe not.
But what about the stock market of the United States?
I think that investors are using the strategy that I took on back in 2008 and 2009 when the economy went in the toilet and it looked like everything was just going to be over.
That's my DoorDash, so I'll get that in a little bit.
So anyway, the point is...
Let me just make sure there's not somebody standing out there waiting for me.
Alright, all good. So what was I talking?
Oh yeah, stocks. So the point is that it could be that investors are thinking the following.
If the U.S. stock market goes down, in other words...
The economy in general.
It doesn't matter where your money is.
You're just in trouble.
So it could be that the U.S. stock market has been so resilient for so long that it just looks like the safest place to put money.
So it used to be a dangerous place, but now interest rates are basically zero.
It probably makes a big difference.
The interest rates are zero. So there's no place else to put money that's both safe and could make a little interest and stuff.
So that's weird. The other possibility is even more shocking.
And let me just... I'll just run it by you.
Retail stores are unnecessary.
Could be. Take, for example, an ordinary brand store.
Can't they sell as much as they want online?
I'm not sure the stores even make money.
Because eventually the Eventually the landlord eats all of the profits of the retail.
Any kind of a retail storefront is going to be marginally profitable at best.
So one of the things that might have happened is that smart investors, the people who drive the markets the most, they may have said to themselves, we didn't lose anything.
Because that's what the market's kind of saying.
The market is kind of saying that every one of those storefronts Didn't have economic value.
They might not be wrong.
So they had lots of economic value in terms of giving people jobs, but I don't know that they were profitable.
And the stock market doesn't care so much if the retail worker lost a job, but they would certainly care if profits go up or down for the parent company.
So that's just speculating, but it's kind of a puzzle why the stock market is so resilient.
I'm glad it is. Apparently Cuomo is smack-talking de Blasio for being weak.
Weakness apparently is not working.
And we will find out tonight how far this goes.
So my prediction is that ultimately violence is going to happen.
You don't want it to happen, but it's probably the only way we get to the other side.
You hope that the violence does not come from the police.
If the violence came from our military, it would go down a lot better, wouldn't it?
If any of the police kill a looter, it's just worse.
It doesn't matter what the situation is, it's just worse.
If a U.S. military person takes out a looter, what are you going to do?
What are you going to do? If the U.S. military takes out a looter, because let's say they brandished a weapon and came at them or something, what are you going to do?
I feel like the U.S. military has so much credibility that people would just live with it.
I think. I think they'd just live with it.
So it could be that the military would need to show some tragic toughness, let's say.
Something that you wouldn't want anybody to do, but it might happen anyway.
Alright, that's all I've got for now.
That's all I've got for now.
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