Episode 1020 Scott Adams: I Solve Institutional Racism While You Wait. Someone Should Have Asked me Sooner.
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Content:
Institutional racism is an undefined problem
You can't solve a problem when you're not allowed to discuss it
Eliminating the police, transfers power to men
Suggestions for eliminating the police
Whiteboard1: Political Focus
Whiteboard2: Discussion Funnel
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I hear there's a little problem called institutional racism.
As soon as I heard about it, I said to myself, well I'm going to solve that.
And so this morning I will solve institutional racism, probably end all of the protests, I don't know, by the end of the hour.
And it made me wonder, why didn't somebody ask me before?
You just had to ask me.
I could have solved all this before.
But we'll get to that in a moment.
But first, is there something we're forgetting?
Yeah. Yeah, there is.
It's called the Simultaneous Hub.
And all you need to participate You know.
All you need is 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.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including institutional racism, but only if you drink it black.
It's time for the simultaneous sip.
Go! I feel the racism declining everywhere in America.
Just a little bit. And you might not notice it on the first day, but it's only one sip.
Imagine what you could do with multiple sips and everybody sipping together.
I know. It's unbelievable.
So, I've decided to go on strike.
I'm going on strike.
And here's what I'm no longer going to do.
I'm no longer going to pretend I know what the fuck institutional racism means.
I'm just not going to pretend I know what that means.
Do you know what it means?
Do you know what you're supposed to do about it?
When you go to fix that institutional racism, do you know exactly where the buttons are?
How about the levers?
Do you know where the levers are?
Can you go fix that institutional racism because you know exactly what it is?
But you know, that's not the biggest problem in the world.
Because if somebody has a problem and they tell you what it is but they haven't defined it, it's easy enough to talk to them until you figure out what it is they're talking about.
You work through it and say, alright, what exactly do you mean?
Let's get down to it.
Let's look at some data so we can Tease out what's really racism and what's just the things happening the way they happen.
But in order to do any of that, the part where you have a discussion and you figure out exactly what it means and what you can do about it, you would need to be able to fucking talk about it.
Do you know what you're not allowed to do?
You're not allowed to talk about it.
So here's the setup.
We've got this vague undefined thing It's a big problem, and we demand that you fix it, our big undefined thing.
But you can't ask us any details, because if you did, you'd be a little bit racist.
For example, the top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer has stepped down from his role after the newspaper published an article with the headline, Buildings Matter Too, Last week, according to an internal memo, CNN is reporting this.
That's right. An editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, one of the most prestigious of the local newspapers, 20-year employee had to step down because he used the wrong words.
Do you think that this 20-year employee is a racist?
Well, he used the wrong words.
He used the Black Lives Matter saying, but he used it about buildings and implied that a building is important as a black life.
Well, you gotta go.
You gotta go. Those 20 years you spent?
Pfft. Out the door.
Goodbye, racist.
Goodbye. If you think the economy is important, which is what he's talking about when he talks about buildings, If you think the economy is important to keeping people alive, racist.
You gotta go. You gotta go.
If you think that people destroying their own means of economic recovery is a bad idea, you're a racist.
I'm using Tucker Carlson's, the way he says racist, racist.
So I'm going on strike.
I'm not gonna pretend To be useful.
I'm not going to pretend I can help.
I'm not going to pretend you're even serious.
I'm not going to pretend that there's anybody who really wants this problem solved until you can let me talk about it.
So as soon as I get, I and everybody else, it's not just about me, but as soon as we get a pass, that we can even have the conversation.
We can't even fucking have the conversation without getting cancelled.
Don't expect me to fucking help if I can't even talk about it.
Now, when I was talking to Hotep Jesus the other day, and if you watch that, you realize that there were some spots where I said to him directly, well, you can say that, but I can't.
You can say that, and he did.
He said it in direct words, and I said, I can't even say that.
I wouldn't even be part of that conversation.
Because I can't even agree with you.
You can say it and I can't even agree with you.
How the fuck am I supposed to help, really?
Now, I think we should stop kidding ourselves that when somebody says we're going to march until you fix institutional racism, that that's actually a useful thing.
Meaning that it's useful the way it's framed.
I don't doubt that there is such a thing as racism.
I don't doubt there is such a thing as the institution set up to advantage or disadvantage somebody.
I don't doubt any of that.
I'm not questioning the existence of a problem.
I'm just saying if you can't define it a little bit better and I'm not even allowed to talk about it, don't fucking expect me to help.
I mean, really, don't expect me to help if you won't let me even talk about it.
That's a basic. Here's another thing you need to do.
In order to get me off of strike?
Take yes for an answer.
How about that? How about when you say, would you like to help, and I say, yes?
You say, oh, okay.
Let's see if we can figure this out.
How about not protesting me after I say yes?
How about not burning down shit after people say yes?
How about after you get our attention, And everybody is like, yeah, yeah, let's do it.
What do you got? Give us some ideas.
Let's bounce this around.
How about if you won't take yes for an answer, don't expect me to fucking help.
If you try to change my mind from no to yes, okay, protest away.
My help. But once I've said yes, and you're still burning down my shit, or other people's shit, don't expect me to jump in there and be helpful.
I'm not going to do that.
So I'm on strike.
Happy to help. Happy to be useful.
Happy to talk about anything.
Happy to consider any proposal.
Any proposal. In fact, you've even seen me, those of you who have been around for a while, you've seen me discuss seriously reparations, right?
I took that conversation seriously, and I bounced it around to try to figure out Is there a way to do it that doesn't make everybody more mad than if you hadn't done it?
Is there a way to do it? And I'm also going to be talking about eliminating the police.
And I'm taking it seriously.
Because as far as I know, that's the only specific suggestion that's on the table.
And so my commitment is that if you give me a serious suggestion, I will treat it seriously.
I'm not going to just reject it.
I'm going to really bounce it around.
See if there's something to work with here.
A little creativity, maybe a little brainstorming.
Maybe you get to something.
We'll see. We'll talk about that in a minute.
So, one of the ways I know I'm right when I say you can't solve a problem that you're not allowed to discuss is that if you look at the number of retweets to likes, you ever do that?
So if somebody has a favorable opinion of your tweet, they have two ways to show it.
They can simply like it, which is the weak way, or they can retweet it, which is the powerful way, and often when it gets retweeted, it's also liked.
So when I said, how do you solve a problem you're not allowed to discuss, the number of likes was really high, and the number of retweets was really low.
What does that tell you?
Well, if you spend time on Twitter, you know that what that told you is there was a whole lot of people who agreed with it, Timidly.
So there's a lot of agreement, but not so much agreement you'd want to retweet it because you might get cancelled.
You might get cancelled just for retweeting an opinion that it's hard to talk about the problem.
That's how bad it is.
There are people who thought they would get cancelled for retweeting a tweet that says just this.
How do you solve a problem you're not allowed to discuss?
That's the whole tweet. There's nothing in there about race.
That's it. How do you solve a problem you're not allowed to discuss?
Is that controversial?
Well, apparently that's controversial enough that a lot of people liked it.
Not that many people retweeted it.
So I think I'm going to call that as proof.
Here's a thought for you if you'd like to completely destroy the idea of eliminating the police department.
Are you ready? Now, you might not want to.
And in fact, I'm going to talk about some ways you could eliminate most of what the police department is.
So, unlike most of you, I think, watching this, who would say, that's crazy, eliminating the police.
It's not crazy.
Let me say that as clearly as possible.
It's not crazy. It just hasn't been thought through entirely.
There might be some special cases where you could actually test it.
And I'd be in favor of that.
So here's the kill shot if you just didn't even want to have that conversation.
And it goes like this. Eliminating police transfers power to men.
That's it. That's the end of it.
Eliminating police transfers power to men.
Because Where does power go when there's a vacuum?
Well, when there's a vacuum of power, it's going to go somewhere.
Somebody always emerges to take power, have power, rises to power.
Power just sort of happens.
If you put a bunch of people together, sooner or later somebody's going to be the leader, they're going to be a warlord, they're going to be a gang leader, they're going to be the president.
We just always have leaders.
So if you take If you take the police and the power that the police have to keep order in a certain way, if you take them out of the equation, it seems to me that men abusing women would go up.
And it seems to me that a woman would have to depend on a man to defend the house.
And if the woman is depending on a man to defend the house, it gives that man a lot more power over the relationship, too.
Because the woman would not be as comfortable, it's never really comfortable, to be in a bad neighborhood and not have a man in the house if there's also no police.
So if you're a woman and some stuff goes down, who do you call?
Vigilante? Police?
Who do you call? So I think in a world with no police, the relative power balance between men and women would shift fairly radically.
And men would be suddenly at a greater premium.
In other words, if you have a police force, you don't need men in your town as much because they don't have a protective power.
You know, the police are taking some of that.
Not all of it, of course, but they take some of that burden.
So the value of men to society, because we don't have babies, you know, we're not allowed...
Not allowed. We can't physically have babies.
But one of the things we can do is...
Kill people, basically.
Unfortunately, men are optimized for protecting children of their own and killing anything that gets in the way.
We're sort of designed for that.
And if you take the police away, men would fill that role.
Gangs will form, warlord situations, neighborhood watches.
But the The muscle in it would be mostly men.
So if you want men to have more power in poor neighborhoods, get rid of the police.
That would be an obvious way to do it.
Let's talk about, could you ever get rid of the police and have something that's good?
Now your immediate thought, when you think of that, you immediately think, alright, a situation with police, like now, versus a situation where there's just no police.
And in your mind, you see the criminals running wild and everything's getting looted because there are no police.
But I don't think anybody's talking about that.
I think that's just a conservative, exaggerated, comic version of what no police means.
No police doesn't mean no police.
The moment you think that getting rid of or dismantling the police actually means there are no police, then you've completely misunderstood the proposition, in my opinion.
In my opinion, what this really means is you're changing the definition of what a police officer is.
So that a police officer would no longer be someone who's in.
Wait for it. Wait for it.
The key part is coming.
A police officer of the future in this police-less town would be somebody who's not in the police union.
That's pretty much it. Just somebody who's not in the police union, maybe doesn't even take a paycheck from the city.
Could be taking a paycheck from the community, homeowners association.
You could imagine a lot of different models where there's somebody with professional training, they have a gun, and they have some authority, and they have a paycheck.
So if you've got a gun, you've got training and law enforcement type stuff, security type stuff, and you've got a paycheck, You don't have to be a police officer in the police union.
You could just be the person they hired to take care of things.
If you remove the police unions, say the critics, and I don't have an independent opinion on this because I'd have to dig into it a lot more, but the concern is that the unions are too strong.
And really, I think when people are talking about getting rid of the police, It's really a code for get rid of the police unions, because probably the only way you could do it is to say, well, we don't have police.
We got rid of our police, so there's nobody to be in the union.
But we have these private contractors we hired for exactly the same price that are taking care of things, but they're not part of a union.
And they also maybe don't meet with each other so much, so they're not protecting each other.
You can imagine, for example, ways to get better prosecutions.
You can imagine rules changes like that.
You can imagine more security cameras, etc.
But let me throw a wild idea into the mix.
You ready? This one you'll have to just think about for a while.
Because you're going to have to pull together a whole bunch of imaginary future elements to see if this makes sense in your head.
It goes like this. If you wanted to design a town from scratch in which you didn't need police, and when I say don't need police, you should always translate that into your head to you don't need much in the way of police.
Because you would always need at least a police officer or somebody who does a job like that to be within driving distance, right?
So in every situation, there's going to be somebody with a gun And training in a car who can get there relatively quickly in every situation.
So there will be no exception to that.
But you could reduce what you would call a police force from a lot to some smaller presence and wait for this idea.
This will blow your mind. You ready?
I predict slash speculate That you could get rid of 75% of police functions if you had only self-driving cars that were commonly owned,
like Uber. So imagine you had a town in which you couldn't own a private automobile, but you could walk out to the sidewalk and a self-driving car would pull up and stop and you just get in and you say to the car, you know, take me to Safeway.
And it just drives you to Safeway.
Now imagine that all of the cars are also self-driving, and they are also aware of all the other cars.
So the odds of a traffic accident drop to zero.
Now again, use your imagination.
When I say traffic accidents drop to zero, nothing drops to zero.
But you know what I'm talking about.
It just gets really, really small.
So you have a really small accident, so now you don't need police to deal with traffic fatalities and accidents.
You don't need police to pull people over.
How many of the fatal police encounters happened with vehicles involved?
Quite a few. How many gangbangers are going to get into a vehicle that has internal cameras on all the time?
Imagine getting into your self-driving Uber and you're a gang member and as soon as you get in the cameras are on you all the time.
You're just always on camera when you're When you're in the Uber.
Now, so you wouldn't be able to talk about stuff.
You wouldn't be able to take out your cool gun.
You wouldn't be able to do much criminal stuff in the car.
And it would be such an uncool car that you wouldn't feel like, you know, going and doing some crime in that car.
Because it'd be like, alright, we did some bad stuff.
Jump in the self-driving Prius.
Let's get us out of here.
So you couldn't have a getaway.
You couldn't do a drive-by shooting.
You wouldn't have bad traffic stops where somebody gets hurt.
You wouldn't have speeding. You wouldn't have drunk driving.
You wouldn't have a lot of vehicular problems.
Now, imagine you put cameras on the outside of the self-driving cars.
And these cameras are pointing in every direction, and it's part of the navigation.
But it's also a moving, continuous security system Because if you're anywhere within view of a road, a car is going to eventually drive by and you're going to be on camera.
So you're going to say to yourself, well, I don't like this world with no privacy and self-driving cars.
Well, I'm not arguing that.
I'm not saying you should live there.
I'm just saying that you could design a town from the ground up in which you had almost no need for police.
Here's another suggestion.
Make sure you have enough grandmothers.
Make sure you have enough grandmothers seated in places around.
Now, this is an idea that I've heard from black people who were giving me some insight that I didn't have.
So the next thing you hear comes from other people who know what they're talking about.
So when you say, Scott, you don't know what that world is like.
You're not part of that culture.
Right, right, right. I'm just passing it along.
And it goes like this.
Apparently the elder females in the African American urban community in the United States have an unusual amount of power.
Meaning that, you know, if I walked up to a young black man in an urban neighborhood and started trouble, I would get my ass kicked.
You would get your ass kicked too.
But his grandma doesn't.
So, grandma Grandma can walk up to a group of dealers on the street or gang members and tell them to get home and cut their hair and get off the street.
Grandma can do that, apparently.
I'm told, and again, I have no independent way to know any of this to be true, but I'm told by people who know what they're talking about.
Culturally speaking, you throw a grandma in the mix, and really I'm just talking about the older female parts of the community.
You just put one in the mix, and it just sort of ruins everything.
It ruins all the crime.
Now, I don't know that to be true, but you can imagine engineering a community in which you have strategically placed literally a grandmother In places that have great, let's say, apartment or views where they can see the street.
So every time you go out and you're sort of hanging out in the street, somebody's grandma's watching you.
And they can call their security people if they don't like it.
But even better, they can call your mom.
They can call your mom and say, did you know that your son is hanging out in the street and he looks like he's getting out of control there?
Maybe you want to call him home? I don't know.
Would that work? Now again, every single idea that you hear along these lines, you have to say to yourself, could you test it?
Is there a way to test that in a small setting?
And if you can test it, and if it has even a little bit of rational, you know, good thinking behind it, why not?
Why not just test it?
We've got time.
It's a long-term problem.
Maybe long-term solutions are what we need.
So then imagine this.
Imagine a town in which you got rid of identification.
Suppose all of your identification in the town was biometric.
So it's either your fingerprint or your face or something.
So nobody has to show ID anymore.
Do you know what would happen to crime In a city where nobody had to show ID because identification was 100% certain every time.
You would just walk into the store and the point of sale terminal would see you coming and your face and your identification would pop up on the screen and then you'd say, I'd like a pack of whatever.
They hand it to you and Price pops up on the screen and you take your phone and you go, okay, boop, nobody touches any money.
You just touch your own phone and it just sends a signal.
Identification is done because it saw you.
Now, how much crime could you eliminate by making sure that identification is 100% every time?
You'd have to walk in with actually a mask on to commit any crime at all.
You couldn't even walk in the front door unless you had a mask on.
And if you had a mask on, that should trigger a, let's say, whatever replaces the police, a security force immediately.
Let's say that you've got cameras everywhere.
This is the future town that doesn't exist.
And there's somebody who's up to no good, and they know there's cameras everywhere, so they put on a mask.
And let's say it's not the pandemic, so a mask is unusual.
Well, the camera sees a person and sees a mask.
Because I think if you can do facial recognition, it stands to reason you could also identify a mask, I think.
By process of elimination, if there's not enough of a face you can see, it must be a mask.
The moment the camera sees a mask, it should dispatch.
It should be illegal to wear a mask in the future non-pandemic town that hasn't been built yet.
Make it illegal to wear a mask so you don't get any antifa problems.
And then, as soon as anybody shows up with a mask, if a camera sees them, it's an immediate dispatch.
And let's say the first dispatch, wait for it, is a drone.
Yeah. See where I'm going with this?
The first dispatch is a drone.
So a guy puts on a mask, and you have to walk there because you don't want to use your self-driving Ubers for your getaway car.
So already, it's got to be within walking distance or it's too hard to do and get away with it.
So, a criminal is within walking distance, puts on his mask in the alleyway, goes into the convenience store, and robs it.
The moment the mask went on, and he walked past the camera, a drone was dispatched.
A small one. And the drone came up from, I don't know, a block away.
Because you've got drones on rooftops, strategically placed, so there's maybe one drone every block or so.
The drone goes straight up the moment the camera sees that a guy has a mask, goes straight up, goes right over it, identifies the person with the mask as they walk out, and then follows them home.
Just follows them home.
The police, or the replacement for the police, who are some kind of security force with no union, get an alert, and they see that the drone has already dispatched.
No humans involved.
Because the drone isn't doing anything dangerous, it's just watching people.
So it jumps up and the drone is watching this guy.
And you see the picture from the camera.
So the drone footage and now the security camera both show up on your phone.
So you can see them both.
You can see what the drone saw and why it launched.
Oh, guy with mask walking into 7-Eleven.
And drone got his identification.
No, it's not an identification because he's wearing a mask.
But it's okay. The drone is following him.
And it looks like, okay, drone is...
Looks like he'll be going past Elm Street in about a minute.
I'll just send him a message on his phone.
Hey, I see you in that self-driving car and you've been identified as having robbed the convenience store.
If you go back and give everything back, we'll let it go.
Let's say there was no gun involved.
Maybe it was a fake gun or something.
I don't know. But you can imagine the situation.
You can begin to imagine That you can actually get rid of police.
But, in order to do it, you would also have to get rid of privacy.
So all of you who are saying 1984 and Big Brother and all of our privacy is gone, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
That's exactly what I'm talking about.
So you don't have to tell me that.
That's what I'm telling you. I'm telling you there would be lots of surveillance and a lot of people wouldn't like it.
But here's the catch. Totally optional.
It's optional. You say you wouldn't live there, and I say, good for you.
Go live somewhere else.
That's it. Go live somewhere else.
It's okay with me. All right, here's another idea to throw on this.
I said that the self-driving cars would all have cameras, and somebody in the comments said, I'll paraphrase, but you don't want cameras on you all the time.
Sometimes you need a little privacy, if you know what I mean.
And here's my idea.
All the cameras would be encrypted.
And nobody could unencrypt them, including the company that built the encryption.
So like Apple does.
Apple makes an encryption for your phone that allegedly even they can't break.
There's just no way to get it.
But there is one way to unlock the video that's running all the time inside and outside your car.
There's only one way to unlock it with a core order by a special court whose only job, just one job, is to unlock those videos only if there's so much evidence of a crime that it makes sense.
And then only those judges would get to see the full video and then only the judges would get to edit out anything that was just embarrassing or personal just down to the part that told you whether a crime happened or did not happen.
So in other words, There would be lots of recording all the time because storage is cheap, but it would be encrypted and literally nobody could unencrypt it unless it was a specific crime, went through a court system, special court unlocked it, and then edited it down to just the part that mattered.
Now, would there be FISA-like abuse?
Yeah, there would be.
Because literally every system you build has problems, right?
So there's no way you could build that system without problems, but you'd probably learn how to tweak it and fix it and adjust it and move forward just like everything else.
All right, so you don't need to love all of those ideas, which would not be the point at all.
The point is that you actually could imagine, I think you could, A world that did not have a standard police force in which you could legitimately say we got rid of the police, but we replaced all those functions with these other better ideas and new designs and stuff like that.
I think it's possible.
For those of you who are talking about the FISA court, I acknowledged you don't need to tell me That there would be abuse.
Because I'm telling you there would be abuse.
So you don't have to all tell me that the FISA court had abuses and therefore this would have abuse.
I'm telling you that there would be abuse.
But it might still be worth it if you net it all out.
Alright, so I've been listening to this whole national racism conversation and I've been trying to Trying to build a framework in my mind to understand it all.
Because until you understand it all, you can't really move forward, right?
So I'm going to give you my current understanding, and of course everything's subject to change, but this is my best understanding of where we're at and why we're having trouble talking, especially on the left and the right.
A lot of this came after...
Talking to Hotep Jesus, which made me think kind of deeply on some things I hadn't thought before.
And as you already know, the left and the right have very different ways of looking at the world, but they also have different language.
And you probably all suspect...
That part of the problem with these protests and what seems to be some kind of a division, but not really, in the sense that we all seem to be on the same team, and yet we're acting like we're not.
It's like we're talking different languages or something.
And here's why I think that's true.
I think that conservatives, and then I'm just going to lump everybody on the left, all the progressives and liberals and Democrats and stuff, so I'm just going to take these two categories.
And I would say that they focus differently.
And that this is where some of the source of the problem is.
In my observation, this is not based on research, it's just observation, it seems that conservatives focus on respect, they also have empathy.
Whereas the left seems to focus on the empathy, but of course they also have respect.
So it's not that one has all of one and none of the other, it's a matter of focus.
And here's the different reasons why they focus differently.
I think conservatives say that empathy is a bad system.
That you can have empathy, you can feel empathy, but displaying empathy is a bad system that's bad for everybody.
It's bad for the person you're displaying the empathy for, it's bad for you, it's bad for everybody.
It's just all-around bad.
And here's why.
If you let empathy be part of your structure, then the person who complains the most effectively gets the power.
That would be the system.
If empathy drives your system, then whoever complains the most effectively gets the most power.
Can you build a system around who complains the most effectively is transferred wealth and power?
Now when I say transferred wealth, if you transfer it to poor people, It doesn't feel like wealth, of course, but just transferring resources, let's say, not wealth.
So I would say that conservatives are seen as monsters, in a sense, by the left, because the left keeps saying, why can't you show me that black lives matter?
Why can't you show me empathy?
What is the entire complaint about President Trump's handling of the protests?
The complaints about President Trump are almost entirely, he's not showing, and it's the showing that matters, he's not showing the empathy.
Now he agreed instantly and completely with what the protesters were saying about George Floyd.
Complete agreement.
Complete agreement.
And when President Trump speaks about George Floyd, Is he speaking from respect?
Primarily. Or empathy?
Primarily. I think you'd agree that he's done both.
He has said words that can only be interpreted as showing empathy.
And he has shown great respect.
I think you'd agree.
He has shown great respect to the family and also to George Floyd.
Now, of course, the critics are trying to find something he said that Makes it look like that's not the case, but it is the case.
He has shown tremendous respect, not as much empathy as the left would want, but the right doesn't want that empathy because it transfers power.
And if you said to the left, well, why are you focusing on empathy instead of respect?
Respect has the sense in it that we have a constitution and everybody is treated the same.
So everybody is treated with the same respect under the law, under the Constitution, and under God if you're a believer.
So respect is sort of like the key thing here.
If you get this right, then everybody who's on the right is going to like you.
Now I've said before that my secret weapon, if you can call it that, for being accepted And I'll use the word accepted by the audience that's watching me right now, which are primarily conservatives and Republicans and pro-Trumpers.
Probably 90% if you are.
And the reason you accept me, even when I say directly and often that I'm left of Bernie, is because...
Why?
Why do you accept me when you know I disagree with you on such fundamental things and that I've proven over and over again that I'm left of Bernie?
The reason that the right accepts me is that I give this.
I don't just expect it.
I don't just expect respect.
I give it.
And what have I told you about reciprocity and about how you control other people?
Conservatives do not control me.
I control you.
In the same way that you control other people, right?
Everybody controls other people.
And the way I control You and the way I'm controlling you right now.
Literally right now, I'm controlling you because you're giving me attention, which is what I want.
I mean, I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't want people to watch.
And because I give you respect, and when I talk about religion, for example, when I talk about religion, I'm not a believer.
How easy would it be for me as not a believer to be disrespectful to you if you're a believer?
Real easy, right?
I've been there. I've done that, right?
But my current sort of philosophy of life is that there are just different filters on life and nobody really has the right answer.
So I don't privilege my filter on life.
If you have one that works well, and I observe that Christianity and other religions, they do work well.
They work really well for the people using them.
So if it works well, I'm really happy for you.
That's great. Because I don't think I have the right...
I don't think I got the right answer and you got the wrong one.
We're just using different filters.
If yours works for you, maybe it wouldn't work for me, but I'm not going to criticize it if it works for you.
So I come at you with complete respect.
And it's real. It's complete respect.
So I can have a conversation with you on any topic, and I can walk away even if I... Probably the most common thing I hear from people who respond to me privately about the periscopes is people will say, yeah, you're making me really mad, but I like tossing these ideas around so I keep coming back.
So that's what I'm going for.
I don't mind that you get mad at an opinion as long as you know it's not about us.
It's not about me and you.
We're talking about the opinion, your opinion, my opinion.
They live separately. They're like They're like creatures we're watching.
So what do you do about this?
Oh, and then there's one other extra confounder, which is that if you're on the left and you're talking to anybody on the right, and I wish I'd reversed these on the graphic, but if you're trying to talk to them, because the people on the right filter things through the language of religion quite often, It doesn't sound scientific.
So you only need one or two senators who are Republican to come out and say, well, God will determine the temperature of the earth.
And then if you're over here and you're saying, um, what?
God will determine the temperature of the earth?
Okay, we're out. We don't respect you anymore.
You're anti-science.
So the left just can't even have a, doesn't even know how to talk.
To this group, because they require respect, they're not getting it.
Because they're saying, ah, you're anti-science because religion gets woven into it.
Now, I've never met a conservative who was anti-science.
Have you? Have you ever met anybody who was anti-science?
You know, somebody who didn't believe that if you run a controlled experiment and it gives you a statistically valid result, that that doesn't mean anything because what?
Because God? I've never met a conservative who didn't think a controlled clinical trial wasn't a good idea.
I've never met a conservative who thought that testing things and moving toward truth with the scientific method was a bad idea.
I've never heard of that.
But the left thinks that's true because of the religious filter that a lot of the right uses to talk about things.
So what do you do about this?
Well, the first thing you'd have to do is recognize it, which is that the conservatives are saying, well, you're saying that we have this institutional racism, and you're saying that what you want is empathy?
Well, how does empathy fix it?
How does empathy solve anything?
Empathy actually makes things worse, because conservatives are...
Let's say that they have an incentive-based view of the world.
That capitalism creates incentives, that's good.
Voting and democracy creates incentives, that's good.
The Constitution creates a system where people have incentives to act a certain way, that's good.
So if you've built a system that takes into account people's human motivations and how people act in the real world, that's a good system.
So if you've got something you're trying to fix, institutional racism, And the way you're trying to fix a system is with empathy.
That's just the wrong tool.
It's the wrong tool.
If we gave you what you asked for, you would be worse off, not better.
You don't believe it?
Here's how it goes. Give us empathy.
Alright, here's our empathy.
Now, we've got the empathy.
Give us what we want. You've got all this empathy.
Give us what we want.
Let's say you do. Let's say it worked.
Let's say the protests and everything created more empathy and the more empathy caused more resources and attention to be given.
What kind of system would you have built if you took that path, you followed the empathy and you acted upon it?
You would have created a system that guarantees the destruction of your country because the next group says, wait a minute, did that work?
Are you telling me that worked?
What does the next group do?
The next group says, oh, that's how you get power.
You get power by being the best complainer, demonizing the people that you don't like as racists or devils of some kind, and so I'll do some of that.
If you incentivize complaining, complaining, that's what this is, is asking for empathy, is pretty much just complaining.
There's no solution offered.
There are no specifics.
There's no bill that's being offered.
No, nothing. That system is not a system.
It's a system that can't work anywhere.
But if you could find something that was an actual system, conservatives would be all over it.
But in order to get to any kind of a workable solution or legislation or process or training or anything that's useful whatsoever, You have to at least agree what the problem is in the way you talk about it.
And here's what happens when we talk about this stuff.
It always goes down this funnel, and it goes like this.
How many times have you seen this?
Somebody, a conservative, might say, hey, more white people are killed by police than black people.
Is that true? That is true.
There are way more white people who are killed by police than black people.
So is that the end of the conversation?
No, no. No, that's not the end.
That's more like the beginning.
Because more black people are killed by police as a percentage of their population.
So there are only 13%, I think, black citizens of the United States.
13%. But the police will kill more than their share of the black population compared to the white population.
Because there's so many more white people.
So even though the raw number of white people is higher, as a percentage of the population, it's reversed.
But wait, are we done?
No, no, we're not done.
Because more whites are killed as a percentage of police encounters.
Isn't that the way you should measure it?
It's not a percentage of the population because most of the population never talks to the police.
The police don't Stop and get into a crime-related conversation with most of the public.
Most of the public just doesn't get in this situation at all.
So if you eliminate all the people who don't have any contact with the police, at least any meaningful contact, I'm not talking about a traffic ticket, you come to, well, wait, there are more white people who get killed by the police as a percentage of police encounters, so we're done, right?
That's all you need to know.
Alright, let's all go home.
Nope, can't go home.
Because police stop more black people.
It doesn't matter if the percentage of white people who get killed is higher as a percentage of stops.
If they're only stopping one white person for every ten black people, you're still going to have way more problems of the police killing black people because they've They've just encountered more of them.
So that's the end of the story, right?
It's racism. Well, no, it's not the end of the story.
Because why do police stop more black people?
What's up with that?
Because I would imagine that even black police officers, of which I heard today there are 20% of police officers are black.
Now, 13% of the population is black, but 20% of police officers are black.
So at least within the police hiring situation, you got plenty of...
I mean, that situation looks good, at least by the numbers.
But why did police stop more black citizens?
Well, I would call it the Willie Sutton problem.
Willie Sutton was a famous bank robber who allegedly said, and I don't think he really said this, you know how quotes get manufactured after the fact, so he didn't really say this, but it's attributed to him.
And he was asked, why does he rob banks?
Because he was a famous bank robber.
And when asked, why does he rob banks, he says, that's where the money is.
What are you going to rob?
You're going to rob something with money, and banks have the money, so he robs banks.
Where are the police supposed to go to do police work?
Don't they go where there's more crime?
Wouldn't you expect? Wouldn't you expect that you would send more police into a high-crime neighborhood?
If it's a high-crime neighborhood, and you could just say because of poverty, because of economics, etc., you don't even have to bring race into this.
The police will always go to the high-crime neighborhood and stop more people in a high-crime neighborhood.
So what do you do about that?
What do you do about that?
And then here's where the trail goes cold.
So, if you watch my conversation with Hotep Jesus yesterday, I asked him this question, and I said, I can't talk to this question.
But you can. Because there's some things that you can say in this world of ours that I just can't.
And I said to Hotep, would you say, in your opinion, that the different cultures and ethnicities respond to police the same way?
And he laughed and he said no, basically.
And in his experience, young black men can be a little bit more, let's say, display some attitude or a little bit more resistance than maybe some other group would.
Now, if I said that, which I wouldn't, I'd get cancelled immediately.
So how do I get in the conversation?
I can't even have this conversation, right?
Without getting cancelled.
And it seems to be really the key to unlocking all of these statistics that people who are bad at math get trapped by.
Because most people just stop at one of these boxes and say, oh, well, there it is.
That's the end of the story, this one box.
But you really have to work through all the boxes and all the percentages, and it's always going to come back to this with a question mark.
Is there something different that's happening at these stops?
Now, would you expect that it would be true that young black men resist more?
Which would be a racist statement that I'm not making.
So I'm not making that claim.
But I'll make the following claim.
If I lived in any place where I thought the police were more likely to stop me and hassle me and kill me, so in other words, if I believed that the police were oppressing me, How would I respond when they stopped me for something I thought was an illegitimate stop?
What would be my attitude as a young, white, white man?
Let's say I'm 23, and it's me.
It's literally me at 23.
I'm a young, white man.
And I've come to believe that in my town, young, white men are stopped by the police more often.
Doesn't mean it's true.
Doesn't mean there's not a reason for it.
There's a lot of crime there. It doesn't matter the facts of it.
It's in my head, true or not, that I'm being victimized by the police.
Now the police pulled me over and I was just minding my own business.
What's my attitude?
I'm young. I'm male.
23 years old.
I think I'm abused by the police.
I'm stopped for nothing.
And I'm a white guy, so it has nothing to do with race.
What's my attitude?
What's my attitude?
A little bit aggressive.
It's a little bit aggressive.
I would probably step toward the cop.
I might even close the distance, because I want that cop to know I'm not afraid of him.
I want that cop to know he's not going to get over on me.
I want that cop to know He can arrest me, he can put me in handcuffs, but he's not going to break my spirit because I'm not going to let these cops walk all over me and my territory.
I'm not going to let them discriminate against me for being young or whatever.
So I don't see any way to fix this because you could substitute black people for poor people and wouldn't you get exactly the same outcome?
It's almost like the race disappeared.
If you work it all the way down to the end, it's the simple fact that there's more police activity in high crime neighborhoods that largely guarantees the people in that neighborhood will feel oppressed.
Now, it doesn't matter if they are or are not, wouldn't you feel oppressed?
If the police were just always beating up people who look like you and not beating up people who look like something else, and the news stories that you hear are only the people like you getting abused by the police.
How many news stories have you heard this week of white people being abused by the police?
The only one I know of is that 75-year-old white guy who got pushed down in Buffalo, and the only reason you know that is that the context was a Black Lives Matter protest.
If it had been any other context, nobody would have cared, right?
Nobody would have even noticed.
It wouldn't be news. Certainly it wouldn't be news.
So you have this unsolvable problem That is the nature of it, that you could remove race entirely, and it would look exactly the same.
It would look exactly the same.
Because there's more police activity, you're just naturally going to think they're on you, you're going to act a certain way.
And now, how would you solve something like this?
The way you would solve it is to be able to talk about it honestly.
To be able to say, look, everything's on the table, There's no cancelling of anybody.
Let's just talk about it honestly.
But you can't.
Because that's the other rule.
You're not allowed to talk about it honestly.
You just can't.
You'll get cancelled. Just like the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer who got cancelled for simply having a non-standard opinion.
And so I say to you, as long as This institutional racism is an undefined concept with no specific activities requested.
As long as I, as a white person in America, am not allowed to even discuss the topic, not even allowed to talk about it, how the fuck am I going to help, really?
So I'm on strike for being helpful.
As long as there's no specific suggestion and I'm not allowed to talk about it And people won't take yes for an answer.
If you won't take yes for an answer, I can't talk about it, and you don't have any suggestions to even talk about, I'm on strike.
I can't help you.
And I feel sorry for people, anybody who's getting hurt or their property is being destroyed or any of that.
But I would say the leadership of the black community has failed you as hard as anything has ever failed anything ever in the history of failures.
And it's a tragedy.
Because it wouldn't take much in terms of good leadership to produce some kind of a better outcome.
But there doesn't seem to be any...
In fact, I don't even know who the leader is, right?
Do you even know who the leader of Black Lives Matter is?
Or is there even one?
Is there one leader?
I don't even know. Do you?
As long as this has been going on, can you conjure up in your mind the face or the name of a leader of any of it?
I mean, we've seen people who are leaderish locally, but until there's somebody who's sort of a leader who can speak for the group and is credible, there's also nobody to negotiate with.
There's nobody who could give you a suggestion that you could deal with it.
Because it's a group of people who don't have a common goal.
If the people marching had a common goal with specifics, they do have a common goal of ending racism.
So that part is common.
But until they have a common formula for how to do it, it's just a bunch of angry people.
There's nothing you can do with that.
I'm seeing somebody say in the comments that the fatherless situation is the cause of it, and I don't think that's true.
Let me just put that out there.
It's the most common thing that conservatives say, and I don't think it's true.
I think that that's one of just a lot of variables.
It's a big one. I would say that the cohesiveness of the parental unit is a big variable, but it's just a lot of other stuff that really matters.
A lot in the individual, a lot in the situation, etc.
You know, I haven't heard of Hawk Newsome since any of this started, so I don't know if he's still active or he's just not doing stuff that's getting attention.
Has anybody heard of Hawk Newsome being active in this?
I haven't seen anything. DeRay McKesson?
I've not seen him speaking in public.
I haven't seen him on TV. I don't know if he wants to or whatever.
Is DeRay still involved?
Because there's this weird leadership vacuum where you'd expect that whoever was the leader would be on TV every day.
Because that's the whole point, right?
Is to communicate.
To get the message out.
So I don't know if he's being locked out.
Is it possible that the The major news networks are freezing him out from coverage.
Is that possible? Because why wouldn't they be at his house or putting a microphone in his face every 10 minutes for the last two weeks?
It seems like that would be the obvious thing to do.
So there's something going on leadership-wise, and I'm not sure that Black Lives Matter has a formal leadership, because I don't know if all the groups Do they all get together and vote in some way?
I don't know how that works. Alright.
Start with fathers and move up the list.
Yeah, I just don't think so.
I think it starts with strategy.
I believe it starts with strategy and that if you ignore that for other factors, you're just going to go down the wrong trail.
And when I say strategy, I'll just repeat the fast version of what I said Or before in other periscopes, that if you find a way around racism, that's your smarter play.
Because trying to make it go away is just not possible.
Because the very next baby who's born tomorrow is going to have pattern recognition as part of a natural part of its brain.
And that pattern recognition is not very good.
It's these patterns that aren't real.
And that's what gives you bias.
So you can't get rid of the fact that the brain is a bias-generating machine because it always makes decisions all day long without the benefit of a clinical scientific trial.
It just says, well, it worked last time.
I'll try it again. That's pretty much your whole brain right there.
It worked three times. The last three times I tried it, I'll try it again.
It's a pattern. So As long as that's the truth, the best you can do is find a strategy that makes it not matter.
Just as you can't stop the rain, but you can find a strategy for getting out of the rain.
Build a roof, get an umbrella.
All right. So that's what I got to say for today.
There's an interview on Vice TV today with whom, I'm guessing, with a Black Lives Matter leader.