Episode 1019 Scott Adams: Empathy as a System, The Thing That Could Have Ended Protests, Trump's Best Week Ever
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Empathy and decision making
Facts don't matter in decision making
Uninformed Anti-Tucker hit piece
CNN stock market graphic
Coronavirus appears to be weakening
BOTH anti-hydroxychloroquine studies RETRACTED
Likely black voters, 41% approval of President Trump
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I don't know what other categories there are, but just say there are.
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It's going to be really good.
But first, to ensure everything goes well, what do you need?
Yeah, I think you know.
You need a cup or mug or a glass, a stank or...
Let me try it again.
Let me put my real teeth in.
Okay. A cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It fixed the pandemic.
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Well, maybe not yet, but after this sip, get ready, join me.
Go! Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I feel the racial tension decreasing.
Is it just my imagination?
No, I think it's real.
Well, let's talk about all the things that are happening.
If you missed it, last night I did a live stream with Hotep Jesus.
If you are not following him, you should.
Just look for Hotep Jesus.
H-O-T-E-P And we talked about all things related to COVID and all things related to the George Floyd situation, and I'm getting a lot of good feedback from that.
And one of the things that occurs to me after our conversation, I finally realized that it's impossible for any one person by themselves, just one speaker, to communicate on this topic.
And the reason is there are things that I just can't say, because they would be offensive, but he can say.
Because, you know, who is doing the saying makes a big difference, right?
And I think there would be some things in the other direction as well.
So I feel as though, like I had this little light bulb went on when we were talking, because if you added the two of us together, we could say everything that needed to be said.
But if we're talking individually and we're not there literally at the same time in the same conversation, as soon as you separate us, we can both only say what we can say.
Now, maybe it only works one direction, but I assume it works both directions.
So there were topics that we could cover as a duo that neither of us could talk about individually.
It's fascinating, really, when you think about that limitation on just communicating.
It's not a limitation on free speech per se.
It's just a communication limit that we place on each other.
And here are some of the things that came out of this.
And I guess I would put these as sort of preliminary understandings subject to future improvement.
If these are roughly getting closer to the answer, that's good enough, because it would show progress.
I don't think I'm there yet, but here's what I'm talking about.
So, Hotep was making the point that black lives matter, and the feelings of the protesters, the black community in particular, is that conservatives and Republicans don't have empathy They don't have the right feeling, the feeling in your heart toward the black community.
And I thought to myself, I wonder why they think that.
Because that's not my impression at all.
I spend tons of time with the left and the right, and I don't really see that.
I don't see any lack of empathy whatsoever.
But it kind of occurred to me that they do see it, and there's an obvious reason why.
The obvious reason why is that the black community is mostly seeing the conservative Republican opinion as spoken by people on TV and in the news and stuff, more so than in person.
If you were in person, you'd get a different impression than if you're looking at somebody's public pronouncements.
And here's the insight.
See if this rings true to you.
That conservatives and Republicans, by philosophy, reject empathy.
Because empathy is a way to take power illegitimately.
In other words, if you go too far in empathy, you've departed the rule of law, you've The higher reasoning, you've departed maybe the Constitution, because those guiding documents tell you everything you need to do.
Empathy in a political sense, not in an individual sense.
So my claim is that conservatives and Republicans are identical to everyone else in empathy.
They're just identical.
But as a political philosophy, They choose not to use empathy for decision-making because it's an inefficient way to make decisions.
You should have empathy, but it should not be necessarily part of your decision-making.
So, in other words, the Constitution can say everybody gets a fair shot, but that's not going to work out for everybody.
And if you said, oh, we gave everybody a fair shot, but it didn't work out for some people, they had bad luck or whatever it was that went wrong, let's fix that.
As soon as you do that, then you don't have the same system anymore.
Because you can't fix everybody who gets behind without making everybody equal, and then you end up with socialism.
So I believe that what the black community, at least through HOTEP's Again, we're limited by just the people we talk to.
We don't know everybody's opinion.
But Hotep's view that the conservatives and the Republicans were hurting themselves, essentially, because they weren't showing the degree of empathy that is clearly being requested.
And I would say that it is clearly being requested, demanded, if you will, but certainly requested.
We need this much empathy in order to move on.
In order to be productive, in order to get past this, we need this much empathy, and you're just not giving it to us.
Why not? Like President Trump, where's your empathy?
And I was thinking about it, and I thought to myself, yeah, if you didn't already know that conservatives and Republicans are identical to everybody else in terms of empathy, If you didn't know that in their hearts, there's no real difference.
And all you saw was their public philosophical look and the political philosophical look is that you don't use empathy to make decisions.
It's just a bad way to make decisions.
A better way is the law, the constitution, democracy, the republic, you know, the actual structures.
So, and it felt like I don't know that that point of view had ever been communicated before.
And indeed, I don't know that I'd ever thought of it before.
Because it never really came up.
It was just something I knew to be true, but I didn't know it was relevant in some way to this conversation.
So that was interesting. A point that I made that Hotep seemed to agree with is I made the following analogy, that you shouldn't look to the source of the problem for your solution.
I talk about that in my book, Loser Think.
One of the biggest problems people make is they say, all right, if my problem is coming from here, that's what I've got to fix.
I've got to fix the thing that's the problem.
Common sense, right?
This is my problem.
That's what I've got to fix.
Except it's not common sense.
And we don't do that commonly.
And the analogy I used was, let's say the problem is it's raining.
Can you stop the rain?
You cannot. The problem is it's raining.
What do you do? Or you could even generalize it to bad weather.
But the problem is rain.
You can't stop the rain.
But what you can do is go indoors.
You can build a structure with a roof that stops rain.
You can buy yourself an umbrella and a little rain hat.
You can wait until it stops raining.
Sometimes there's a problem that just by its nature, you can't really address the problem.
You can only find a good strategy that makes the problem irrelevant.
And so I was making the point that if young black kids were taught strategy, racism would still exist because people are pattern recognition machines.
And even if you cured all racism in all living people today, the very next baby that was born would be a racist.
Because it would be born with a pattern recognition brain, and we're not good at pattern recognition.
That's what racism is.
Your pattern recognition, you have it, but it's not giving you the right pattern.
Because it's assuming that everybody is some way, and obviously that's never the case.
So, So my analogy was, if you worked on the strategy directly, that's a lever that's a big lever, and it's available.
You can pull it.
And I gave this specific example.
How many 12-year-old African-American kids know the following is true?
That if they went to a job interview at a Fortune 500 company, and there was one other person, just to keep it simple, who was a white person with identical credentials, which one of you gets the job every time?
It's the black candidate every time.
It doesn't matter who's interviewing them, and it doesn't even matter what company it is.
If it's a big company, they need to hire minority candidates.
And it's a real problem, because they need to recruit, they're going to have to go look for them, and the pool of opportunity isn't as large as they would like it to be.
So the Fortune 500 companies are competing.
For the black candidate.
They're not competing for the white candidate in the same way, even though the job market is tight.
But I said, how many 12-year-old kids know that they have a total lock on a job if they stay in jail and don't get somebody pregnant and study in school?
You know, just the basics. If you just do the basics, how many know that you're guaranteed a good life?
I mean, nothing's really guaranteed, but, you know, it's as close as you can get.
To being pretty sure things are going to work out for you in the long run, if not right away.
So anyway, HOTEP seemed to be in agreement on the basic point that you don't look to solve the problem, especially if it's an unsolvable problem.
People have pattern recognition machines as brains.
You can't solve that.
It's like the rain.
There's always going to be pattern recognition in human brains.
There will always be rain.
You can build a roof, and in the case of your pattern recognition brain, you can find strategies to overcome it.
You can make laws to make it illegal.
You can teach people.
You can train them. You can live by experience.
You can tweak it. And there's just tons of stuff you can do strategy-wise.
But the reason that you're not succeeding in getting rid of racism is that it's not possible.
It's not possible.
It would require rebooting the nature of a brain itself.
And again, I'm not saying just white people being biased.
I mean, every form of bias is baked into every brain.
You can't get rid of that.
But you can make a strategy that says, all right, what do you do with that?
How about we just admit it's there?
Why don't we just say it's there all the time and just work with it?
Anyway, I thought it was pretty productive.
You should look in my Twitter feed or hoteps to find that.
A lot of people say they're enjoying it.
All right. If we were a species that used facts to make decisions, there's a fact that just happened, something we all know to be a fact, This should have changed how we see this whole George Floyd thing.
But it didn't. It didn't even change it a little bit.
So this is one of those examples where you can tell yourself, you know, I've been saying for several years, in fact, it's the subtitle of one of my books, that facts don't matter.
Two decisions. Of course facts matter to what actually happens in the world, but they don't influence us for our decisions, which is weird.
Because you think a fact would actually matter.
But here's the fact I'm talking about.
So we watched in Buffalo as police pushed a 75-year-old white guy.
They pushed him on.
I guess he fell and hurt himself.
He had, I don't know, some head injury.
And when we watched the video, we were all sort of similarly horrified because the police seemed uninterested in his well-being.
In other words, they just pushed him to the ground, One started to look after him, and the other policeman pulled him away.
It looked like somebody was calling an EMT, so they were doing something for him, but they were not showing much that it looked like empathy.
It looked like almost robots.
It was like, push it out of the way.
Okay, don't help him.
We'll call somebody else to help him.
Just keep going. So there was something cold and robotic, and it lacked humanity.
But here's the thing.
It was a white guy. It was a white guy.
You saw a white guy being treated by police with what, at least on video, we can't see, you know, we can't tell what they're thinking, obviously.
But on video, the way it looked to us is police treating an old white guy with, I don't know, a complete lack of passion.
Compassion. Complete lack of compassion.
Now, if we were a fact-based species, we would say to ourselves, wait a minute, what does that look like?
Now, obviously, killing a man with your knee on his neck for nine minutes is a whole level different than just pushing an old man who hits his head.
I'm not going to say those are morally equivalent.
Don't get me in that morally equivalent trap, because that's not where we're going.
I'm saying it's another piece of information.
That you watched police, seemingly indifferent to his race.
You know, if what we had watched is the white guy comes up and resists, basically he resisted what the police were telling him to do, and I guess they knew him to be an agitator who was looking for some trouble.
But if they had said, hey, white guy, good job, go back to protesting, You know, how are the kids?
If they had done that, I'd say, whoa, we got a big problem here because they killed the black guy who was resisting, but the white guy, they pat on the back and say, we'll see you at the barbecue.
What's up with this?
But that didn't happen.
They just shoved the white guy and hurt him and walked around him.
They called the EMT, I think.
So, maybe this should be...
It's almost like the simulation was trying to send us a hint to see if we were smart enough to get it.
Hey, hey, maybe you're looking at the wrong thing.
Psst, psst, watch this.
Watch what I do to this old white guy.
See if this tells you anything that you didn't already know.
Hey, psst. Now this brings us to another point.
There's a hilariously failed hit piece...
Hit piece in terms of a tweet thread that's a hit tweet thread against Tucker Carlson.
And the weirdest thing about it is it didn't lay a glove on him.
It was the weakest hit piece I've ever seen in my life.
Because it started out talking about his grandparents or his parents who had a company and they used immigrant labor and blah, blah, blah.
And I'm thinking to myself, That's your hit piece against Tucker?
Is something his parents did when he was a baby?
You've got to try harder than that, right?
But then they did try harder.
And here's what they said exactly.
So here's an actual quote from the tweet thread against Tucker.
Remember, this is supposed to be an anti-Tucker hit piece right here, okay?
So one of the tweets says, it is this crisis, meaning the protests and stuff, coupled with the realities of climate change, what?
I don't know why you're throwing that in there, the drive revolts against neoliberalism, like we saw recently in France.
In the U.S., the way to classically deal with such a problem has usually been, wait for this, in the U.S., the way to classically deal with such a problem is has usually been to divide the working class against itself along race lines.
Now this is a sentence in a hit piece that's supposed to be against Tucker Carlson, except I don't think they've ever watched his show because on almost every single show Tucker Carlson's primary theme, if I can say it's a primary theme, which is the one I see the most by far, is this.
This. Tucker Carlson is the number one voice in the country against having the elites separate the working class by race.
So the thing that was a hit against Tucker was so uninformed about the major theme of his show, Stop Dividing Us by Race, that they thought this was something to feature as a hit against him.
To say that Tucker Carlson is contributing to this problem, as opposed to the number one voice in the country...
In terms of how many people see him and how often he talks about it, and how strongly he talks about it, is that stop dividing us by race.
It's what he says almost, not almost, I think every single show.
How could you not know that about Tucker Carlson?
It's the very thing that defines him.
If you could define it, it's like his central identity, almost, at least the TV identity, is stop dividing us by race.
There's nothing he says more than that.
And this is the hit piece, that he is contributing to it.
Okay, that's a pretty weak hit piece.
Anyway, you should be so lucky to have hit pieces against you that are so weak that they make you look better.
Here's something that CNN is criticizing Fox News for, and normally I don't pay too much attention to the back and forth, because CNN and Fox News are like siblings that are always fighting.
So they always fight about each other's coverage, and I don't pay too much attention to it, except sometimes it's fun.
But this one's a pretty good criticism.
It's so bad that it's funny.
I'm laughing because it's bad.
I'm not laughing at the content.
There's a difference. Laughing at something because it's so inappropriate doesn't mean you're laughing at the inappropriate part.
You're laughing because it's so inappropriate.
That's an important distinction.
I guess Fox had a...
They showed a graphic of how well the stock market does every...
Every time a black person is killed.
And this is so bad that it's funny, right?
Like, I don't know how this got on TV. And then I didn't believe it when CNN was saying it, but they showed the actual graphic.
And it showed what percentage the stock market went up after MLK was assassinated.
After the death of Rodney King, after the death of Michael Brown, and the death of George Floyd, and in each of those cases the stock market went up.
And I'm thinking, okay, I get that it might be true.
But the fact that it's true, I don't know if that's a good enough reason to put that on the screen.
Like, I don't know what you were thinking when you put that on the screen, but let's just say that wasn't your finest day.
And again, I'm not laughing, of course, at the deaths of anybody.
I'm laughing at the ridiculousness that somebody gave the green light to that graphic.
That's just a head shaker.
I mean, you can't take that too seriously, because I don't think it means...
There's no bad intention.
And, you know, no matter which way the criticism is going, I generally am in favor of saying, all right, this wasn't bad intention.
But, wow, there was a blind spot there.
You gowser. So now we're hearing more information about the other three cops that were involved in the George Floyd incident, and two of them were brand new police.
Uh-oh. You know what that means, right?
The two who were brand new were necessarily relying on Chauvin's opinion on what to do.
If you're a juror, And somebody said, all right, these guys are rookies, they're brand new, and they're looking to the veteran of 19 years, Chauvin, to tell him what to do.
And indeed, that's the conversation that was reported, is that I believe the rookies were asking Chauvin, what should we do?
And he was telling them what to do.
And it turns out he told them what to do wrong, and it caused the death of this guy.
You know, the totality of the events did.
And then I guess the third witness is cooperating.
Now do the math. You've got two who are rookies, and probably that's going to be good enough for the jury to get them off or to get some kind of reduced thing that doesn't make anybody happy.
And then the third is cooperating, and I don't know if that means a reduced sentence or reduced charges, something like that.
So you might have the three supporting police Already in a legal situation where it's unlikely that they'll get any kind of a serious penalty.
And then, as I've talked to you before, I think Chauvin's defense, forget about what you think about it morally, forget about for the moment, just for this conversation, what you think about it as a human being and how it registered with you.
From a purely legal strategy perspective, I think Chauvin's definitely going to get off.
I think all four cops are going to get off.
So if you're not getting ready for the next wave of this, you need to.
So, I mean, it's already baked in.
You could just put it on your calendar at this point, the second set of destructions.
All right. So that's bad.
You know, I think that Trump had maybe one of the best weeks of his life, but I don't know that it'll be recognized as such.
But look at the things that went right for Trump.
So the jobs, as you know, the jobs were just way better than anybody expected.
And even though we're coming off a low base, so anything looks good coming off of the low base, we're all happy about it.
It's unambiguously good news.
Except that apparently it was not good news for black unemployment, which didn't go up as quickly.
So that's no good.
But in terms of jobs in general, they went up, and one assumes that if everything's heading in the right direction, everybody gets to go along eventually.
So jobs are great.
That's good for Trump. But it also...
At the same time, the COVID deaths just fell off a cliff.
Why? Why did COVID deaths suddenly just plummet?
We don't know yet, but the theories floating around are that the virus might be weakening.
And just so you know the lay of the land here information-wise, it was only maybe 48 hours ago.
That I proposed the idea that the virus might be weakening.
And at least on social media, people said there's no evidence of that.
And it was people who knew what they're talking about.
And I thought, oh, okay, there's no evidence of that.
We probably would have seen it by now if there was evidence it was weakening.
But as of the news yesterday, some experts were saying that's probably what's happening.
That it probably is weakening.
And the thinking is...
That viruses tend to weaken because if they got stronger they would kill you and then they couldn't spread as easily because you're dead so you're not walking around and spreading it.
So the idea is that viruses generally will weaken over time because they can spread faster if they're weaker.
You'll carry them longer to spread them.
That's the theory. I'm not sure I'm completely buying The cause and the effect of that being a clean cause and effect.
But there's thought that the virus may have weakened.
On top of that, and I haven't heard many people say it directly, at least this week.
We heard a lot of it before.
Vitamin D has just got to be in this story somewhere, right?
Because one of the ways that it would look to you as if the virus was weakening is if everybody just went outdoors and got some sun.
It could be that just the good weather, everybody went outside and got some sun, and then it looked like the virus was weaker because people were getting it and not getting as many symptoms because they had vitamin D. So it could be something about the summer that's the heat.
It could be the humidity.
It could be the vitamin D that you get from the sun.
It could be that it's weakening.
But whatever it is, Trump was the one that said, Well, what if it just goes away?
Do you remember how badly Trump was mocked for saying that the virus would just go away?
And it looks like the things that made the most difference, in addition to the masks, I guess, and probably in addition to learning how to use the ventilators in a less deadly way, I think that was part of the story.
Weren't we all shocked at how suddenly it appears, sudden, that the virus went from a civilization-ending problem to, hey, where's that virus?
It happened kind of quickly.
And although the president thought it would happen sooner, maybe, no, I'm not even sure he thought it would happen sooner.
I think he did say something, didn't he?
Didn't Trump say something like, it might just go away?
And then we're watching it.
And it hasn't gone away, and indeed there might be a second wave of it if it doesn't go away.
But it's remarkable how close to his prediction this is, that New York City went from hundreds of deaths down to 42, and I think the day before zero.
And that's a pretty big jump.
So he's got that going for him, and because the COVID deaths plummeted at exactly the same time that things were reopening, It's going to make Trump look like, wait for it, wait for it,
the coincidental timing of the COVID ferocity falling off a cliff at the same time that Trump was pushing to reopen because it was time is going to make it look like his instincts are freaking amazing.
Amazing. In retrospect, he won't get any credit in the short run because people don't do that.
But when you look back on this thing, you're going to look at Trump's timing because he was pushing things to open up a little bit earlier.
Pushing, pushing, pushing.
His instinct on that is going to look dead on in retrospect.
How about his instinct for closing travel?
Dead on. Dead on.
He closed travel when the experts were saying, don't do it.
He did. How about hydroxychloroquine?
He was pushing hydroxychloroquine, as you know, and then there were two studies that came out that said, no, no, no, you fool.
Hydroxychloroquine will kill these COVID patients.
It's so deadly. We did some studies and found out it didn't help a bit, but it sure killed people in some cases.
There were two studies.
Both of them have been retracted.
Both studies, which were the basis for mocking Trump for, what, two months?
How much has he been mocked for the last two months for this hydroxychloroquine?
Viciously. And a lot of that mocking, if not all of it, almost all of it, was based on two studies that were withdrawn for being bogus.
In fact, the database that both of them used apparently is just some stuff that some guy made up.
Apparently there's no credibility in the data whatsoever.
So you can't have a much better week than surprisingly good job numbers.
I mean, what makes Trump happier?
Seriously. Is there anything that makes Trump happier than good employment numbers?
You know, good, relatively speaking.
So he got jobs.
He timed the back-to-work thing to perfection.
To perfection.
His instinct on this was frickin' awesome.
I don't know that he'll ever get credit for that.
Because we just don't do that.
We just don't give credit for that sort of thing.
He'll just be called anti-science, I think.
And then...
Here's my opinion about the protests.
It's easy to imagine that the protests are some sign of racism getting worse or whatever.
As I was saying to Hotep Jesus yesterday, I was saying...
The pictures I see, there are way more white people marching for racial equality than there are black people.
If you tell me that this country is in trouble because there are more white people marching for the end of racism than there are black people, I say there's something wrong with your eyes.
Use your eyes.
Just look at the crowd. Number one, that's a lot of people marching against racism.
That's good. Now, find somebody who's opposed to their message.
Nobody. Nobody.
There's nobody on the other side.
It's one of the biggest protests in this country.
Nobody on the other side.
I just saw a message that just totally threw me off.
Somebody said Bill Mitchell was right.
No, Bill Mitchell wasn't right.
We don't have time for that, but I can't let that go.
I think Bill Mitchell was claiming that the virus was not dangerous and it was no more than the flu.
He wasn't right about that.
And nobody knew if it would stop, and nobody knows if it has stopped yet.
So I'm not going to give you Bill Mitchell was right.
But back to Trump's good week.
I would say that Race relations in this country are at an all-time best this week.
That's right. That's a shocking claim, is it not?
In my opinion, and I'm quite serious about this, and I'm quite confident in it, actually.
I don't think there's any question about it.
Race relations in the United States have reached an all-time best this week.
Today. Today, I'd say.
Is somebody accusing me of virtue signaling?
Because if that's about me, you're gonna get blocked.
Because I don't do that.
I just don't have any value in it.
So we're seeing it all as bad news, but actually it's great news.
And of course, we shook the box on this economy to the point where there's no question it's going to come back stronger because there's so much more to work with.
We're rethinking everything from scratch.
It's going to be amazing. All right, so Trump had one of the best weeks ever.
I don't know that the public will notice that.
Oh, there's one other little good piece of news for Trump.
Did I forget to mention this?
Yeah, I forgot to mention it.
If you didn't see it, there was a poll of likely black voters.
41% of them approve of President Trump's performance.
41% of likely black voters, 41% approve of the President's performance, according to Rasmussen.
Now, it's funny, I said this to somebody, and their first response, you know what the first response is?
Well, it's Rasmussen.
Rasmussen? You know, that's not reliable.
To which I say, on Trump-related stuff, I'm pretty sure they were the best.
I think they smoked everybody, didn't they?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the entire time, Rasmussen was the only poll that had accurate numbers about Trump.
Trump that said he was in the hunt the whole time.
So, I wouldn't discount them.
Of course, everything depends on how the question is asked, but what if...
Let me just put this hypothetical out there.
What if...
What if...
White people are not as racist as we assumed, and what if...
This is just an if. You don't have to accept it yet.
Just a what if. What if white people are not as racist as assumed, and what if black people don't like crime?
Maybe they don't like crime.
Maybe they like good economies.
Maybe this 41% is exactly what you would think it would be.
If I had to guess, where would black approval of the president be?
If I'd never seen any poll, I'd never seen anything, I would have guessed somewhere in this range, 40 to 60%.
That's where I would have guessed.
Because... I'm kidding, of course, because it's obvious that there are plenty of white people who are not racist in any problematic way.
I think everybody's biased all the time, but I don't think most people are racist in any actionable, problematic way, no matter their ethnicity.
And I also think that, generally speaking, every category of people would prefer less crime than more crime.
It's just sort of, duh.
Is there any group of people who wants more crime?
No. Of course not.
All right. Let's see what else we got going on here.
I think we're doing well.
I do think that the president has not nailed his messaging with all of this George Floyd stuff.
And yesterday was a good example of it.
Everybody's getting on the president because he said George Floyd...
And again, I'm laughing because of how bad it is.
I'm not laughing at any people.
I'm laughing just how bad this is.
He said George Floyd would be looking down and thinking it was a great day because employment had improved.
The employment numbers were good.
And I'm thinking to myself, there's probably a better way to say that There had to be a better way to say that.
But again, I go back to my earlier comments when I was talking to Hotep Jesus, that Republicans by philosophy don't do empathy.
So, you know, the Republicans will give you the required minimum amount of empathy.
But if they go beyond that, then they've changed their political philosophy and they don't do that.
And their political philosophy is, I'm not going to give you power because you complained the most.
I'm not going to give you power because you were the biggest victim.
I'm not going to give you power because you hurt the most.
I'm not going to give you power because I feel bad for you.
Like, those are not a workable system.
So, again, while it is objectively true that the president's messaging on the whole protests and racial division, etc., feels to me completely lacking as well.
If I'm being honest, I could find a hundred ways that could have been better.
But, requiring it or expecting it to be better...
And I think another Republican could have done a better job, so I'll say that directly.
It's not just because he's conservative.
It's not just because he's Republican.
He just didn't hit a home run on this at bat.
I would say at that time at bat, he struck out.
Now, I like to be consistent and say...
I'm forgiving of everybody's mistakes if they're adjusting and tweaking and learning from it, etc.
Judging people from mistakes is just a bad way to live.
You should judge them by how they deal with their mistakes.
So, the president getting lots of pushback for saying that George Floyd would be happy looking down at these good employment numbers...
Let's see if he can adjust and improve that message.
If he does, it's the standard I would apply to him.
It would be the same I would apply to anybody else.
It doesn't matter your political party.
I would say if you struck out and then you adjusted, and then you got a nice base hit on the next bat, you're all good.
You're all good. I see people calling out the hoax part.
Yeah, there was a hoax element to this in which the context was left out, and I think that's what you're prompting me in the comments.
So if you leave out the context, it sounds more bad than it was with the full context.
Good. Is everybody with me on that?
That the clips that are being shown about his comments...
When they're shortened, which is the trick the illegitimate fake news uses all the time, if you shorten it, it takes out the context which would have softened it.
And you all agree with that, right?
But he did make comments which left him open to this interpretation.
And I would call that, for anybody who's been trained in media stuff, that's just an error.
So it could be true That they built a hoax on top of his error, but it doesn't take the error away.
It was just an error.
Somebody says he didn't say it.
Okay, well, I heard it.
Now, if you're saying he didn't say it in that context, that's true.
But he did say that George Floyd would be looking down and be happy about how well things are going.
That's not a hoax, right?
You're actually saying that he didn't say that.
This is kind of interesting.
Is it possible? Wow.
A lot of you think that's a hoax.
Let's find it. Let's find out.
So the claim of the people who are watching this, and it seems quite consistent, is that I've fallen for a hoax and that he did not say...
That George Floyd was looking down.
Let's see if we can find it. Because I don't think you're criticizing me for what you think you are.
But let's find out. Looking down and was happy.
Let's see how quickly I can find that.
I don't want you to wait all day.
Alright, so here it is, The Guardian.
Trump condemned for saying George Floyd is praising the economy.
Of course he didn't say that.
Trump suggests George Floyd is happy about U.S. job members.
So obviously the headlines are hoaxes.
Equal justice under the law must mean that every American receives equal treatment in every encounter with law enforcement, regardless of race, color, gender, or creed.
They have to receive fair treatment.
So there's the good context.
Law enforcement, they have to receive it.
We saw what happened last week.
We can't let that happen.
I don't know how long this clip is.
Hopefully George is looking down right now and saying, there's a great thing that's happening for our country.
There's a great day for him.
It's a great day for everybody.
This is a great day for everybody.
This is a great, great day in terms of equality.
It's really what our Constitution requires, and it's what our country is doing.
You're totally right.
It was a hoax.
It was a hoax.
You're totally right.
I got totally taken by the headlines.
I have to admit, I'd never heard the full quote, but I'd seen so many quotes.
I'd heard so many quotes that I thought he had said That it was about the good economy that George Floyd was looking down and he'd be happy.
None of that actually happened.
One reporter even retracted.
So the comments are a little behind this.
So I've played it.
So if you're just coming on, I was challenged for saying that the president blew the communications about George Floyd by saying that George Floyd would be happy that the economy was picking up.
Which is the way it was reported.
And that just never happened.
It was a complete hoax.
That was interesting.
Alright, so I stand corrected.
Can those of you who say, Scott, you never say you're wrong, can you make a mental note?
I don't want to hear from anybody on this Periscope ever again.
You can never say, Scott, you never say when you're wrong.
Because I'm saying it right now.
I couldn't have been more wrong.
Alright? Now let me ask you this.
Am I embarrassed that I was this wrong in public?
Nope. Nope.
You really need to build this part of your talent stack.
If you can learn to not be embarrassed by being this wrong, I mean, that was as wrong, honestly, that's as wrong as you could be.
And you just watched me do it right in public.
And I don't even feel a little bit embarrassed.
Because, remember, what is my standard?
The standard I told you just minutes ago is mistakes are normal, and therefore I don't judge them.
I don't judge your mistake, but I also don't judge my own, which is very important.
I don't judge my own mistakes.
I do judge how I dealt with them.
In this case, the way I dealt with it is I listened to your criticism, I went back to the original data, I listened to it, found out I was wrong, and then I admitted it clearly.
That's how you deal with a mistake.
Now, if everybody did that, You'd be happy with everybody.
You wouldn't be blaming them for their mistakes.
You'd say, well, what'd you do about it?
What'd you do about it? By the way, there's nothing better you could train a young person at than young people, teenagers especially.
They're going to make every mistake you could possibly make.
It's almost their job description to make every mistake and see if they can learn anything.
And one of the best messages you can say is, well, I'm not going to dwell on the mistake.
What did you do about it?
How did you learn something from that?
Alright, I've got a question for you.
Is there anybody out there who has, let's say, a significant following on social media who is also a conservative and found that their social media has exploded in the last week?
Has anybody who is, let's say, a Trump supporter Notice that your social media traffic just exploded in the last five days or so.
The reason I'm asking you is because that's what happened to mine.
The number of people who are signing up on Twitter Suddenly just went through the roof.
So I'm just looking at my numbers here.
I use an app called Social Blade that tells you how many people are following you each day, how many are signing up each day.
So you can tell if you're picking up people based on what you did that day.
So my normal number of people that I would get, just looking through the history, is like 200, 500, 200, 500.
And then suddenly, the last day of May, it was 760, then 1400, 3400, 1800, 1400, 800 yesterday.
So suddenly it just went through the roof.
And at the same time, my tweets are performing just way better than usual.
Just ordinary tweets that wouldn't normally go viral or you're getting 1500.
So I wanted to see if it So I'm looking at your answers now because they're just catching up.
I'm seeing a yes and a no and a me.
Somebody said they've heard this.
Wow, I'm seeing yeses.
Okay. Somebody's asking if it's bots.
I don't know. Somebody says they're banned.
Somebody says bigger, no.
I know some are deplatformed.
You're good, that's why, but I haven't been extra good this week or something.
There's not something I did this week.
Now, the president did retweet me again right about the beginning of this traffic, but I don't think that retweet in the past, so the president has retweeted me in the past, and it didn't make that much difference in my social media.
You'd think it would, but it really doesn't.
Drew Brees. You know, I'm not going to talk about Drew Brees because it's such a small...
I don't know.
It's just an athlete who said something.
They made him apologize.
He apologized. I don't know.
It's just not a story I care about.
Somebody says they were accused of being me.
Yeah, I know retweets make it grow.
So it could be just I was tweeting well this week because I speak truth.
Okay, so it looks like a lot of no's and some yes's, which would suggest that there's nothing that's some obvious trend.
Anyway, I was just wondering about that.
Yeah, Trump retweeted me when I had a tweet that said that some of the protesters were fine people or something to that effect.
Somebody says I'm very popular in Russia.
Is that true? Are you in Russia and you know that?
Because I do actually have a number of Russian followers.
I'm aware of that.
All right.
Somebody says more conservative stuff is showing up on Twitter.
Well, I guess I'm asking if there was some change that anybody noticed, and I'm not sure we can say that based on these replies.
