Episode 1018 Scott Adams: Employment, News NOT Covering Protests, Biden Hates Us and More
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Dismantle police departments?
News coverage is an accelerant
MSM reporting, changes how people act
Prank: White women shaving heads to support BLM
Kamala Harris versus Rand Paul on anti-lynching bill
Writers and artists who struggle with critical thinking
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A lot of people don't know we're in it, but it started two days ago.
You saw the jobs report.
We'll talk about all of that in a minute.
But first, what's the best part of the day?
Yeah, that's right, the simultaneous sip.
And all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind to fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It cured the pandemic, it's making employment go up, and tensions are going down.
Join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Go! Yep, I can feel those door fronts being repaired and People hogging all over the place.
Well, let's talk about some of the things.
So, you've come to believe now that we're all living in our own little bubbles, our own different realities.
And still, every time you see a stark example of living in your own little bubble reality, it's always funny and worth calling out.
So yesterday afternoon, I was spending some time trying to figure out a specific plan to help inner-city black schoolrooms.
Students, not the room, but the students.
So I'm literally spending my own free time and offering my own money, reputation, everything, to help inner-city black students.
Just telling you the truth.
And then I get on Twitter and I open up Twitter and it's like, you're a racist, you're a racist, stop your racist BS, you're a racist.
What? What do non-racists look like?
I'll bet there wasn't one of my critics yesterday who did anything useful for anybody, much less the black community.
So I have more to tell you about what I'm cooking up.
It won't be big. It'll just be a little test.
But it could be interesting. Here's something that I don't think people understand.
And it's one of the biggest realizations you'll ever have.
You ready? Here's one of the most useful reframings of your reality you'll ever have.
You control other people when they're in the room with you.
If they're in the same place with you, you control how they feel and how they act.
Now, until you know that, you're a victim.
You're a victim because you have no control over anything.
The world is bad and people are bad and they're doing things to you and you're just a victim.
But the moment you learn That you're the one in charge of how other people feel and how they act.
That's the moment you're free.
Now, the specific examples are if the police stop you, you can control that police officer.
If there's somebody who's bad to you at work, you can control that person if they're in the room with you.
You can't control them when they're somewhere else.
And the way you do that is understanding that people are imitation machines.
We imitate. We pick up what other people are feeling and doing and then we just imitate it.
So if you walk into a room and you're angry, I'm angry, I'm tense, I'm angry, what does it immediately do to all the other people in the room?
Makes them tense. Might even make them angry.
Let's say you're laughing and you're in a great mood and you just come into the room with your great mood.
What's it do to the other people?
Puts them in a better mood.
What do you do when a policeman walks up to you and you act a little bit aggressive?
What do you do to the policeman?
You make him aggressive.
No, he didn't walk up to you aggressive.
You made him aggressive. What happens if a police officer stops you and you've got your hands on the top of the wheel showing that you respect the police officer's safety and your own?
Because that's what it means when you're showing your hands, so you're keeping people safe.
And suppose you turned to that officer and said, Good morning, officer.
What can we do today to keep us both safe?
What happens? If the first thing you say to a policeman who walks up to you, no matter who you are or why you stopped you, Good morning, officer.
What can we do to keep us both safe today?
How is it going to go?
Does that person ever get the shit beat out of them?
No. I mean, maybe you could test it to just see.
I don't even think you need to test it.
If you want to not get the shit beat out of you by the police...
How about controlling them?
Now, if you think you can't do that, it's because you don't have the tools.
And the tools are easy.
The first part of the tool is to understand that you can do it.
If you don't understand that, then nothing else matters.
You'll just think you can't do it.
Practice it. Practice it in a small way and watch it work.
Just Pick a situation and go in and see if you can change the mood in the room, which would of course change how people act.
If you don't believe it, just test it in your own life.
It's easy. Go to have any interaction with any person and just say to yourself, I wonder if I could make this person's mood and therefore their actions change.
And then just change yourself and watch them follow.
It's really easy to do.
Once you've done it enough times, You realize it's a real thing.
And then realizing it is the first step to getting out of victimhood.
Here's something I need people to understand.
I tweeted this.
If you protest against people who are disagreeing with you, you're a protester.
That's what it means, right?
You're protesting against people who disagree with you.
And you might have some really good points.
Protesters most of the time have good points.
I would say 80% of the time I agree with the protesters no matter who they are, because they usually have some good points.
But if you protest against people who agree with you and want to work with you, then you're not really a protester.
Because the whole protest thing has to have something to protest against, which has to be people.
Because you don't protest against bad luck.
You don't protest against bad events.
What would that do?
Because it's already happened.
So you don't protest about something that happened exactly.
The point of the protest, that might be the trigger, of course.
The George Floyd death was the trigger.
But what are you protesting against?
Who exactly...
It's a silly protest in the sense that everybody is willing to be productive.
You just have to ask.
You just have to have a good idea, something you might want to test.
It turns out that one of the things that a number of the left-leaning cities want to test is dismantling or defunding the police department.
I think I speak for everybody who's not a left-leaning Democrat when I say, sure, sure, give it a try.
Take a run at it.
Now, I mean that completely seriously.
Unlike, probably 100% of you watching this, unlike you, I think you probably could in some situation, not every situation, but in some situations, I'll bet you could replace the police department with some other mechanism.
Not every time.
Most of the time it would be a gigantic mistake.
But it does seem like there are some creative ways you could do that.
Let me give you an example. If you had far more connected, let's say, neighborhood watch, more security, more citizens willing to get directly involved, you could imagine some combination of things where the citizens, in some ways, replaced some things that police were doing.
And that's not crazy.
It's actually not.
It sounds crazy when you first hear it.
Oh, there's rioting and looting and crime.
Let's get rid of the police.
Like, it sounds crazy when you first hear it.
And it's got to be crazy probably for most places in most situations.
It's crazy. Because the criminals, of course, would take advantage.
But I think it's at least worth exploring a situation where you replace police with some other mechanism.
Somebody says community, but you need more than community.
You need connections.
You need organization.
You need some kind of technology.
I say give it a try.
Give it a try. What I wouldn't do is dismantle police in all the major cities next week.
That wouldn't be a good idea.
If somebody says vigilantes, there might actually be a vigilante answer to it.
Who knows? Maybe vigilantes are part of the solution in some special cases.
So I'm going to be consistent and say if there's anything that can be tested small, and this is a perfect example, if you could find just the right size, let's say a small city, and just test it.
You know, you'd have to come up with a pretty concrete plan.
I'm not talking about just dismantling the police and seeing what happens.
I'm talking about having a real plan for something that would replace some aspects of the police.
Try it out. I'm totally on board with that.
I just wouldn't go big all at once.
And I probably wouldn't do it in Minneapolis first.
Seems like sort of a big place.
All right. If everybody's on the same side, what exactly are the protesters protesting?
Have you ever asked yourself that?
If everybody agrees, I don't think there's anybody who disagrees with the idea that we should be talking about some specific solutions to reduce the actual and perceived, because perception matters for these things, to reduce the actual and perceived police abuse.
Everybody's open to that.
I think if everybody's open to the conversation and there's still lots of protesting, it's kind of turned into a protest against white people.
By white people.
Mostly. Am I wrong?
It feels like the protest is a protest against white people, largely by other white people who are protesting the awfulness of white people.
I mean, it looks like that.
If we're not talking about Specific things that we can change with the police, then what are we there for?
It just sort of turned into this gigantic white people are bad and they should stop being bad thing.
I don't know. So that's what it looks like it turned into.
I don't think that was the point.
I did another thing that would get me cancelled probably pretty soon.
And I tweeted this, that from a persuasion perspective only, so we're only talking about the tools of persuasion here, the phrase Black Lives Matter is one of the biggest branding mistakes I've ever seen, probably in all of history.
I think Black Lives Matter, as a rallying cry, is maybe the biggest mistake in persuasion that I've ever seen.
You know, the size of it is immense.
If you don't see why, you're going to see it in a moment when I tell you.
And as soon as I tell you, you're going to slap yourself in the head and you're going to say, Oh my God, you're right.
You ready? Here it goes.
Why is your goal just to matter?
Just to matter? I think you need to aim higher.
Because you know what? I don't know anybody who wants black people simply to matter.
Like, even people who are not black would rather that they thrive.
Wouldn't you like to see your black neighbors, your black friends, your black co-workers not just matter?
For God's sakes, matter?
That is the lowest goal I've ever seen anybody set.
And I think you already matter.
So setting a goal that's low, and honestly, it's already been exceeded.
There's nobody who really thinks that black people don't matter.
That's not a real thing.
I mean, I've never seen anybody who had that point of view.
Have you ever seen anybody who had that point of view?
I literally never met anybody who thought black people don't matter.
How's that even a thing?
So persuasion-wise, and again, nobody should take this as advice.
I'm not black.
Can't get inside your heads.
Don't want to imagine I could appreciate your situation.
I think it's disrespectful, frankly, to think that you can know what anybody else is thinking.
It works both ways.
But just from a persuasion perspective, so it's not even political, it's not racial, it's not anything.
It's just persuasion, just as a tool.
You couldn't have picked a worst solution.
It's just the worst one I've ever seen.
It just shoots so low.
So I tell you that as sort of a persuasion lesson.
It won't change anything for what's happening today.
The virtual news blackout continues.
It's a total blackout on real coverage of the bad events, because we know there are some scuffles and some problems with the protests, but they're completely not being covered by the mainstream news.
I don't know that that's a bad thing, so I'm not going to criticize that, because it looks like people have realized that That the news coverage is an accelerant.
And we don't need an accelerant on something that's already burning so fast it might be too hard to control.
So it appears that the news business has made some kind of a...
I don't know if it's independently they all decided.
I don't know if they talked about it.
I don't know if the government asked them.
Because that would be my guess.
If I had to guess what's going on, I don't have to, but I will.
I'm going to guess that maybe the government said, hey, news business, please cover the news, but just be aware that what you focus on is what is driving emotions.
So it's one thing to say, you know, here are our stats, three people got injured last night, etc.
Statistics don't really drive emotions.
But there's still the news, and we still need to know.
So give us the information.
But the things you show the visuals of, the things you run in clips, the things your opinion people talk about incessantly, that becomes the active part of the news.
That's what drives people to protest, to feel bad, to be racist or not racist.
Those are the things that are driving people.
And it's obvious that they've Stopped doing it.
And they stopped doing it at the same time, both the left and the right.
And here's the interesting thing about that.
It's a complete recognition that the news can cause insurrection.
Think about it. The news would not have suddenly stopped covering the news, meaning the worst parts of the protests, the violent parts.
They wouldn't have done that.
Unless they knew that the nature of the news changes how people act.
So it's sort of a stark admission that they know they're brainwashing the masses, and they wanted to pull back on the brainwashing because they'd gone too far.
That's exactly what happened.
The news business realized that the brainwashing had gone too far, and they pulled back.
Think about that. You live in a brainwash society in which pretty much all of the opinions of the public are assigned to them by the media they watch.
If you don't believe that opinions are assigned to people, have a conversation with a person.
See if you can find a person who has an opinion that they didn't get from some media source.
Good luck. All of our opinions, coincidentally, just match some media source that happens to be a preferred media source.
If you think that's a coincidence, then you probably think it's also a coincidence that people have the same religion as their parents, mostly.
Is it because people grew up and looked at their parents' choice of religion and said to themselves, you know, I've looked at all the options, And my parents nailed it.
I'm going to do what they did.
I'm so glad that my parents got the right religion.
And yet all over the world people have been saying the same things and coming to different conclusions.
Well, it's not because you thought about it.
That's not how it works.
Although for some people it's true.
But for 80% of the world, they didn't really do research.
They just accepted what was handed to them.
YouTuber Jake Paul, if you don't know him, very famous YouTuber, has been charged with criminal trespass and unlawful assembly.
So he was one of the protesters and followed the looters into a mall in Scottsdale, Arizona.
And I guess he was taking video from inside the mall.
So he's being charged.
What do you think of that? Do you think a YouTuber who was not looting himself But did follow Luter's end, and he was certainly someplace that the property owner would not have wanted him to be.
Should he be charged for that?
I say yes.
I say yes. I don't know if you've heard, but there's a movement for the women who are supporting Black Lives Matter, not necessarily black women, but You know, the protesters in general, to shave their heads.
So there's a movement for the women to shave their heads to show their solidarity with Black Lives Matter.
Of course, this is a prank.
I think it started in 4chan or something.
So it's just a total prank made by people on the right.
But Stix Hexenhammer666, I'm sure most of you follow him on YouTube as well, or wherever he is, Bish.
I'm not sure where he's broadcasting from these days, but maybe both.
He tweets, I strongly support the entirely organic Go Bald for Black Lives Matter movement, and any leftist not following suit should be shamed.
It's pretty funny.
The political pranksterism, I always appreciate.
Alright, here's something.
As you might imagine, because of the protests and the George Floyd tragic death, that the topic of this lynching legislation, anti-lynching legislation, has come up.
So I guess Cory Booker and Kamala Harris are pushing that.
Rand Paul Rand Paul actually had the stones to publicly oppose a lynching bill during a race riot.
I don't know. Rand, maybe you should have read the room a little bit better.
Now, I've told you, I've told you, The thing I like best about Rand Paul is that Rand Paul does not care what you think.
He really doesn't care what you think.
He's just going to do what he thinks is consistent with his philosophy.
But watching him be the only person opposing an anti-lynching bill during a race riot, that takes a lot of guts.
Because nobody in the world is going to take his argument seriously.
And I don't even know what his argument is because it doesn't matter.
Nobody's going to listen to it anyway.
But I think his argument has something to do with the fact that the law already has plenty of penalties.
If you lynch somebody, you're going to be punished pretty hard.
So maybe you don't need a little extra on that.
So that's his point. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with that.
I'm just saying it's hilarious that he would have the guts to make that point on principle during these times.
But here's the bigger story.
So Kamala Harris got her moment, you know, she had a moment because she spoke apparently passionately against Rand Paul's But here's the interesting part.
So, a long time ago, I don't know how many months ago this was, I made the following weird prediction.
I said that Kamala Harris is one of the worst public speakers I've ever seen.
I mean, she's the worst campaigner, just talking impromptu in public, just terrible.
And I predicted that when she dropped out of the race, that she would not only come back as a vice presidential pick by Biden, but there would be another element to it.
And that she would be coached to being really good, and it would happen kind of suddenly.
Sort of suddenly, like if you watch American Idol, you watch these people who don't have any professionalism per se, but they have some talent at singing.
And then the coaches and the professionals who work with the show start working with the ones who are going to make it to the top ten.
And the top ten start getting better looking and they just improve like really quickly because they had raw talent but then they got coached by really good professionals and you just see this dramatic change.
They become just better looking, more charisma, just everything's better and it happens kind of suddenly.
And I predicted that that would happen to Kamala Harris, that she would get world-class coaching, and that there would be this fairly quick improvement, and I think you could see it in her response yesterday.
So I watched it with the sound off.
Which is a really good thing to do.
With the sound off, it looks like she cured all of her jumpiness problems.
For those of you who are watching, she used to do this jumpy shoulder thing.
She'd be talking and she'd be like...
Her body language was all nervous and unconfident.
It was just basically a mess.
And then I watched her with the sound off yesterday.
And it was really good.
It was really good.
She went from a D minus, in terms of just the, let's say the visual part of her speaking.
Everything from her style, to the clothes she wears, to her body language, and all of it just went to A plus.
It went to A plus really quickly.
So, Yeah, now we haven't seen if she's stopped the snickering, as somebody said in the comments, because she does the thing where she laughs nervously.
Now, it could be that it was the topic That kept her serious, so she didn't have a nervous laugh.
It looked like she was really in the moment, and she probably knew she was having a big moment in her career.
So she maybe didn't have the opportunity to giggle at her own jokes.
It just wasn't a time when anybody would do that.
So we don't know if she's cured that.
But I'll bet she has for the same reason.
It looks like a professional is involved.
All right. Yes, we're going to talk about employment.
Let's talk about that now. So the employment level unexpectedly was pretty good.
Pretty good compared to what people thought it would be.
So it turns out that we added jobs.
What? We added jobs.
Things actually looked up last week.
I told you it was the golden age.
The violence from the protest?
Practically gone. Disagreement about racism?
Not much. Everybody's on the same team if we could just stop marching and have some ideas to play with.
And the economy?
The economy is looking strong.
Stock market's up.
So we have this weird situation where it looks like the end of the world.
And things have never been better.
Things have never been better.
It looks like the end of the world.
Now, when I say things have never been better, obviously the economy was better a few months ago and stuff like that.
But the situation we're in has never been better.
Because just breaking everything, breaking all of our old assumptions, breaking a lot of our economic models, It's going to unleash a lot of good stuff because we had to shake the box before we could really make some big changes.
It looks like that's happening.
So Joe Biden said that 10-15% of Americans are quote, not very good people.
So I think BuzzFeed put that at approximately 50 million people.
So there are 50 million people who Joe Biden thinks Not very good.
Even the New York Times turned on him for that, because you can't really be the president of the whole country and say that 50 million of them sort of suck, especially if I'm in that category.
All right, so here's what I tweeted.
I said, Joe Biden wants to be the president of all Americans, not just the 50 million people like me who says Biden are not very good people.
On the plus side, Biden will train police to only shoot me in the leg.
And that feels like a step in the right direction, if I could walk.
So I don't know if this will make any difference.
It feels like the kind of thing that moves elections.
I was asked earlier this morning what I thought of Trump's new campaign commercial.
If you haven't seen that, there's a new Trump campaign commercial which is very respectful to George Floyd, says every right word about bringing us together and uniting and all that.
So it's a Trump commercial that hits every right note for the political mood, the mood of the country, etc.
Won't move the dial a bit.
Because there's no Democrats going to watch that commercial.
You would watch the first five seconds and you'd say, I'm out, because it's Trump.
So I don't know if political ads make any difference except to the base, and I don't think it changes the base's mind because there's nothing new from the base.
It's sort of where everybody already was.
I don't know. I don't think political commercials in this climate make any difference.
But Joe Biden saying that 50 million people are not very good, that could change an election.
That could move the needle.
I do think that Hillary's deplorable comments, at the very least, increased people showing up on the conservative side.
All right. New York City witnessed zero confirmed deaths from coronavirus on Wednesday.
Zero deaths from coronavirus on Wednesday.
What? What?
I've got questions.
How is that possible?
Really? How is that possible?
So there's something going on.
That we don't quite understand.
And when I say we, I don't think anybody understands.
How in the world is coronavirus just sort of stopping?
Did something happen?
Trump's on TV now?
Who is he? Let's see.
What's he saying?
I'm guessing he's saying something about the protests or he's doing something on prime time?
It's over.
You don't see the problem in Minnesota now at all.
Not even a little bit.
You take a look at a great city.
Alright, well we'll catch up with that later.
Alright, so...
So we don't know what's going on with these COVID deaths, but two days ago I told you it was the beginning of the golden age.
Coronavirus disappearing, we don't know why.
Economy coming back.
All the protesters and the country on the same side.
We're all on the same side.
Just have to realize it and get something going.
Alright. We saw the video of the old man who got pushed down by the police.
Eh, fuck him. Fuck him.
Do you care about the old man who got pushed down by the police because he was resisting the police?
I don't care a bit. I don't care even a little bit about the old man who got pushed down by the police because he was resisting police.
Now it's terrible that he got hurt.
Like, I have, you know, empathy for anybody who got hurt.
But I can't care about anybody who opposes the police when they know they're going to get their ass kicked.
If the police kick your ass because you're getting in their face, I just don't care about you.
I don't care about you at all.
Don't ask me to.
But obviously I care about anybody who was just abused by the police who did nothing to bring it on.
Of course I care about that.
Now, I guess a lot of Democrats are talking about Trump might reject the election.
As Jake Novak points out, that when Democrats are saying that Trump might not accept the results of the election, I think they're broadcasting that they're not going to accept.
That's what Jake says, and I agree with it.
They're broadcasting that they don't plan to accept the result of the election.
So I do think that there is real talk going on.
I don't think it's going to turn into real action.
I hope not. But there is real talk about an actual physical insurrection by the Democrats.
I think that's I think it's gone from just talk to actual planning, but I don't expect it to be executed.
Because if it were executed, well, I don't even have to finish the sentence.
It wouldn't work out well.
Can we just leave it at this?
On behalf of the people who love the Second Amendment, If the country were overthrown with an insurrection, it's not going to go well for the people who wanted it to go well.
It just isn't.
I'm being widely mocked by people who can't understand things, and by that I mean artists and writers.
So I was amusing a lot of my followers on Twitter by tweeting all of the people who were criticizing me that day.
And by the way, it was all of them.
Everyone who criticized me yesterday, I tweeted them with the same comment.
I looked at their profile, and they were writers or artists, every one of them.
And that's my running joke, that writers and artists can't follow critical thinking, and so when they encounter me, they don't understand what I'm saying, they misinterpret it, and then they get mad at their misinterpretation.
So it's very consistent.
I don't have economists, I don't have engineers who are coming after me with just insults.
Now, there are plenty of economists and engineers and lawyers who disagree with a fact or something I said or even the logic I'm using, and they usually just say those things.
Oh, this fact is wrong.
Here's a link. You did the math wrong.
That sort of thing. That's fine.
But the ones who come after me personally?
All artists. Writers and artists.
And usually... Almost always they're not quite that successful, which I think is part of the problem.
So today what they're doing is, I wrote a long thread the other day about how the Joker movie is actually strong persuasion, and you could easily see that the Joker movie caused a pattern in people's minds that increased the likelihood they would act like the Joker.
Now, That got turned by writers and artists into, Scott thinks the only thing that caused the protests is the Joker movie, and therefore I'm a racist.
Now, that's pretty far from what I was saying.
Pretty far from what I was saying.
We don't live in a one variable world.
I don't believe that people were peace-loving and had no inclinations or no already primed emotions.
I'm just saying that the Joker movie is an underappreciated variable in a world of lots of variables.
It's not like the Joker movie was more important than watching the video of George Floyd being killed by a cop.
I didn't say that!
So for the writers and artists, they have to turn what I say that makes sense into something weird and ridiculous.
And then there's this awful publication called The Mary Sue, That I think we're writers going to die.
That's got a whole article, a hit piece on me today.
If you haven't experienced what it's like to have hit pieces written on you on a regular basis, you really should.
Somebody said, did Elon Musk cut his own hair?
That would be hilarious if he did.
All right. So when Minneapolis said that they were going to, with the exact phrase, dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with a transformative new model of public safety, I don't think you should take that as literally getting rid of police, because it's a little more nuanced than that.
When they talk about replacing it with a transformative new model of public safety, it doesn't mean that doesn't involve police.
It could mean just a new system in which the police, you know, operate differently or something like that.
Yeah, and then the artist, as somebody's reminding me in the comments, the artist will attack me for just being a cartoonist, but they never check my other body of work.
At this point, cartooning is the smallest part of what I do.
Somebody says I want more hip pieces.
They are kind of fun, I have to admit.
Scott says artists aren't logical.
They certainly are not, as a rule.
Now that doesn't mean there can't be artists who also have built their talent stack, as I have.
I mean, I'm an economist and a business person and a trained hypnotist and some other things.
So there could be artists who also do those things, and they would be perfectly capable of critical thinking.
But not a single non-artist came at me yesterday.
Coincidence? You decide.
Could the rioters be made to clean up their damage for a live publication?
You mean to shame them so that we see them cleaning stuff up?
I'm not a big fan of shaming people when you punish them.
Yeah, the Dow is up 700 points.
Let's see how much Black Lives Matter has made for me.
Oh, looks good.
Holy cow.
Yeah, the stock market is really up.
Wow. What would you do if you were marching to dismantle You know, privilege and white privilege and the elites, and the more you marched, the more the stock market went up.
I mean, how would you feel about that?
How would you feel that you're trying to dismantle the system of the elites and you're making them richer as you protest?
because that's what's happening.
Scott is an artist.
Yeah, so for those who don't follow the point, let me just say it one more time because there are some artists on here.
So I know the rest of you already understand this.
So the next thing I'm going to explain is because there are also some artists watching the live stream and they're all confused now.
I know most of you get it.
It goes like this.
Being an artist by itself doesn't make you bad at critical thinking.
Being an artist only Might make you bad at critical thinking because you haven't learned it.
If you're an artist and also a lawyer, you might be good at it.
If you're an artist and also an engineer, you work in tech, you're a software developer, you're used to solving problems and using critical thinking, you probably have those skills.
But if you're only an artist, You don't, and here's the tough part, you also don't know that you don't have the skill.
Because we all think we're logical, but until you've seen what it really means to learn how to think critically, like reading my book LoserThink would get you there, until you've actually seen how to do it properly the first time, you really don't know how bad you are.
Because it's not common sense.
Critical thinking is not common sense.
They're worlds apart.
And people who think they have common sense incorrectly think, well, then I also have critical thinking.
They don't. They're just different.
All right. Somebody says, I'm a friend and web developer.
Are you an engineer or an artist?
You're both. That's a good talent stack.
What's the slaughter beater?
Well, you know, the slaughter meter was a funny concept.
It was the idea of if you were to say nothing changed after today, who would win the election?
But of course it's a ridiculous idea because, by the way, how many times when I gave you the slaughter meter, if you remember this, how many times did I say this is what it would be if nothing changes, but something always changes?
Because you knew there were big things coming, you just didn't know what they were.
I didn't know what it was.
I just knew big things were coming.
I also know more big things are coming.
Some of the big things I know about.
Some of them I don't know about.
So when I tell you big things are coming, here's how you should interpret that.
I do know about some of them.
And there's some really fun shit coming.
So... Just understand that the slaughter meter today is sort of worthless and it's just for fun because there's so much that's going to change between now and Election Day.
And some of it's going to be really big and it's going to be fun.
So the slaughter meter is at about 300% today.
Why? Well, the conservatives won every argument this week.
They won every argument.
All of them. Every one.
The only thing that could be better for the president is if Ruth Bader Ginsburg died this week.
Well, actually, that wouldn't work, because I think the Democrats would stall, so they'd stall past the election.
So at this point, between now and Election Day, I don't think there's any chance of any Supreme Court seats being filled.
But my point is, so let me drop that point.
Let me just make the larger point that Gun control is dead, obviously.
So conservatives have completely won on the issue of guns being necessary.
Because the biggest complaint about guns is that the government has guns, that's all you need.
Citizens don't need guns because you've got your police, you've got the army, you've got the government protecting you.
But now that we know the government won't protect us, And they will aggressively not protect us under certain situations.
It's obvious that you need a gun.
Now it's kind of obvious.
Now, certainly nothing's obvious to everybody at the same time.
But in terms of the direction of that argument, that direction just went so far right, meaning that the right is winning the argument, that it's just off the table.
What about reparations?
This was reparations.
We don't have to talk about reparations.
It just happened.
Because the trillions of dollars we lost in these protests are far more than reparations would have been, and it's on the same topic.
If Black Lives Matter wanted to spend their reparations this way, to sort of put it all in one basket and say, let's make a few weeks of protesting and whatever comes out of that, They had the option.
That's the way they went.
So reparations is off the table.
You've got the President of the United States agreeing immediately and aggressively with the black community about the police action against George Floyd.
That looks pretty good.
You've got the coronavirus that appears to be solved.
And I didn't see any other countries do a better job, did you?
Not really. I mean, people are going to say, oh, look at, look at, I don't know, Sweden, or look at some other country, look at South Korea.
But I don't think we really compare ourselves to them, nor should we.
So I think we're going to see that we're past coronavirus, you're going to see the economy zooming, even maybe better than the president promised you.
It's just all good.
It's just all good.
But from today's perspective, it just looks scary and bad because of the way the news frames things.
But I don't think we're close to or even heading toward any kind of a permanent change of government or some kind of an insurrection that matters.
If you were to add up all of the protesters, would it be a million?
So let me put that as a question.
If you added together all the protests in all the places yesterday in America, would it be over a million?
It might be. But my point is, there are, what, 370 million people in the country?
A million people marching is a lot and could change laws, could change the way we think about things, could be productive.
We'll see. But it doesn't overthrow the government.
We're not anywhere in that realm.
Somebody else with the last name of Floyd died after pepper spray.
That would be weird.
I don't know if that's up.
Somebody says the Dow is up 750 points.
Will Bill Barr release the Antifa communications?
I don't know. I think it depends on what else is in there, or if it gives away any of our secrets.
The camera lies on the scale of the protest.
That is correct. Yeah, if there's one thing you should understand is that video lies, and video lies every time.
Remember, it used to be a thing that a picture doesn't lie.
It then came Photoshop.
Now pictures do lie.
In fact, Instagram is nothing but pictures lying.
It's like there's a multi-billion dollar social media service that's nothing but pictures lying.
It's called Instagram. And you could argue that Facebook is nothing but pictures lying because we only show our happy times, which is a big ol' lie about who we are.
Oh yeah, here's my happy time.
Look at my vacation. Total lies because they leave out the rest of your life.
But video is even a bigger liar.
You know, the camera phone video is the biggest liar of all.
Let me give you one example.
You can't really tell how hard the police officer was placing his knee on the neck of George Floyd.
You've got the coroner report that says his face was scarred, but you don't know if that happened because of the knee or it happened when they got him down, etc., right?
So my point is that the video is mostly a lie, but we don't treat it that way.
And I don't mean that video in particular.
I mean pretty much all of them.
Let me put a number on it.
I would say this. If you see something with your own eyes and you're there and you can see the whole context and you know who's behind the car and everything else, you could be right most of the time.
Maybe 80% of the time your impression of what happened would be correct.
But I'm going to give you this number.
I would say that video of a real event will be misleading in an important way 80% of the time.
So the number you should have in your head is if you see a new video of some horrible thing that happened.
In your mind, you should be saying to yourself, there's an 80% chance that this is misleading.
It's about right. I mean, just observationally, about 80% of videos are misleading.
Did you see the one where it looked like the cop was pointing one of those rubber bullet things directly at a protester who had a child on his back?
So it looked like he was either pointing it at the guy or even the kid.
And you look at the photo and you say, well, photos don't lie.
This cop was pointing this rubber bullet gun right in the face of this guy who was standing right in front of him.
Except that they weren't even next to each other.
You could kind of tell if you look at it that they were beside each other and that where the cop was aiming was...
To the side of the guy at some other target.
It's just the angle of the picture.
It made it look like he was pointing it directly in somebody's face.
But if you just look at it a little bit more, you can see, oh, the people are a little bit closer.
he's just pointing to the other side of them as something else.
So, your artist enemies are going to misrepresent what I said.
They always do. Alright, that's all I've got for now.