Episode 1023 Scott Adams: I Fix the Racism Problem in America With a Whiteboard, Ironically. You Won't Want to Miss it.
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Mark Cuban's 50% honest tweet
Vernon Jones legislation protects GOP from hate crimes
Fired for being a supporter of President Trump...hate crime?
Election day, the day Republicans have free speech
AG Bill Barr is aware of social media censorship
Whiteboard: Fixing Racism
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*Rams on* *Pum, pum, pum, pum, pum* *Pum, pum, pum, pum* *Pum, pum, pum, pum, pum* Hey everybody - Come on in It's time. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
Best part of the day, best part of the week, sometimes the best part of the year.
And today will be an extra special one because I'm going to solve racism.
Yeah, I know what took me so long.
You'll be mad at me for not doing it sooner, once you see it.
But before we solve racism, can it wait another minute?
We can wait on that, right?
Alright, so we'll wait on solving racism for a few minutes.
First, we're going to have to do something called the simultaneous sip.
But what do you need for that? Not much.
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 of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including pandemics, including racism, including the economy.
It's all getting better now, folks.
Take a sip. It's a simultaneous sip.
Go! More improvement.
Well, I haven't checked the stock market today.
I can't believe it would be up again, but let's see.
It should be If I had to guess, it will pull back a little bit today.
Yep. So far, a little bit.
I don't know what's up with Apple.
Apple's just going nuts.
And Amazon. Alright.
Let's talk about all the things.
Mark Cuban was at some kind of an event where they're talking about racism.
And he tweeted, We need to stop being defensive about white privilege.
We need to stop being defensive about white privilege.
I would say that that is true.
True statement. It is, however, only 50% of what we need to be honest about.
So I would call this a call to be half as honest as you need to be to make any difference at all.
So I completely agree.
Nobody should be defensive about any of this.
Right? So, white privilege is either a thing or it's not a thing.
It applies here, it doesn't apply here, it does or it doesn't.
But you don't need to be defensive about it.
You should just be able to discuss it along with everything else.
But since you can't discuss everything else, there's really no point.
There's no point at all.
As long as you don't have freedom of speech, and I don't, some of you might, but I don't personally have freedom of speech Except in a legal, technical way.
In a practical sense, as a person who lives in the country and wants to survive and thrive, I don't have freedom of speech.
Question. What is the right amount of time to wait for an example of systemic racism before discarding it as an illusion?
Now, here's the reason I ask this.
When I first started hearing the idea that there was systemic and institutional racism, I thought to myself, what's that?
What's that mean? And then I heard a definition of it, and it has to do with the entire structure of how things are put together could favor or not favor one group or another.
And I thought, alright, that makes sense.
I could totally see how systems would be formed.
And would not favor one group over another.
That makes complete sense.
And then I kept waiting for some examples.
And I thought to myself, I don't want to be rude.
I don't want to question whether this is real or imagined.
Because that would be kind of obnoxious, isn't it?
If somebody says I have this gigantic problem, it's like one of the biggest problems in my life in the country...
And it's called this.
You don't say, no, it isn't.
You kind of wait, right?
I mean, good social behavior, good manners says that you wait.
You listen. And you say, all right, all right, you know, let me know what you're thinking.
And I waited, and I thought, well, pretty soon we're going to be talking about some examples.
Because until you get into the actual examples of, like, oh, here's one.
Here's some institutional or systemic racism.
Here's an example. And once you see a few examples, you could maybe spy your own.
Once I've seen what you're talking about, I go, oh, okay.
Now I get the concept.
And then I could pick out some examples without any help because I get the theme.
And I waited.
And I waited. And I waited.
I'm still waiting.
It has been now years since I first heard this term, systemic racism, and I've never heard an example.
Now, again, I don't want to be rude.
Just, you know, normal, good social behavior says that you don't say it doesn't exist.
But isn't it fair to ask for an example at this point?
You know, now that, you know, the country's on fire and figuratively speaking on fire.
A little bit now, figuratively, recently.
But shouldn't this be the time when we start seeing some examples?
I've seen exactly one example and it applied to poor people equally.
The only example I've ever seen, I don't remember what it was because it applied to poor people equally, so it wasn't a good example.
So, let me say this.
So the reason I put it in this form of a question, how long should you wait for an example before you discard it as an illusion, I would say a week, a week more.
What do you think is fair?
Given that we're all having this conversation, given that hundreds of thousands of people will see this periscope eventually, given all of that attention, how long should I wait for Before I get an example.
And I'm not telling you I'm arguing with the examples.
I'm just saying that I need to see one.
Because I think I could help.
Right? I've said this before.
The greatest untapped resource in the United States is the helpfulness of white people.
We like to help.
If I can make that gross generalization about people who coincidentally look like me in one particular way.
If there's some way I can help make this institutional racism go away, I'm all in.
I like fixing stuff.
And if there's some inequality, why wouldn't I want to fix it?
What would be my incentive not to fix an inequality?
I don't have any. So, examples please.
But if at the end of the week, let's say a week from today, let's say a week from today, if I've not heard any examples, given the amount of attention I'll get just by asking for them, if I haven't heard any examples, would it be wrong for me to conclude it doesn't exist?
That it's more of an illusion?
Is that fair? Because I think that's fair.
To wait a full week for just an example of something that's pervasive and everywhere?
So give it a week.
And then I would have to conclude that it's more of a hallucination than a real thing.
But with all the people who say it's real, I assume it's real, and I assume I'll get some examples, but it's weird that I haven't seen any yet.
Alright, were there any protests yesterday?
I saw zero coverage of protests yesterday.
Can anybody confirm were there...
Because I guess it was the funeral yesterday.
So maybe the funeral was a stand-in for what would have been protests?
Because I think the protests might be starting to fizzle out.
Now, one of the predictions that I made is that you're not seeing...
You're not seeing a genuine phenomenon.
You're seeing a phenomenon which is a coincidence of a perfect storm of something happening that is rare.
And the perfect storm is that people were locked up for months and then warm weather came.
If you lock people up for months and their energy is kind of building up and not being released, it needs to be released.
The trigger, of course, was the video.
And everybody had the same feeling about the video.
We were all appalled by it.
We think everybody thinks it looks like a crime.
But that was the trigger.
Now, when I said this before, of course, because I don't have freedom of speech, somebody committed a hate crime against me by saying I must be a racist because I'm white, basically, and I say good things about Trump now and then.
So anyway, police were everywhere last night in San Diego.
go.
Anyway, my point is, I think it may be that although the trigger was the video, and then somebody said, you racist, don't you realize that there were huge underlying problems?
And of course I do.
I'm just saying that those huge underlying problems would not have turned into this specific form of expression.
That ended up attracting looters and everything else, that that wouldn't have happened without the trigger.
If you took that trigger away, we just would have limped into the summer with all the same problems we always had, but without the riots.
Now, you could argue that the protests and the looting, etc., were productive, but I don't think you could argue that they would have happened on their own, not without some trigger.
So, you had a trigger, but I think that If you take the energy out of the situation, which is what happens when everybody just gets tired, if you've gone out, let's say you protested three or four nights, how many more nights do you want to do it?
Your energy to protest the first night, sky high.
Second night, still high.
Third night's pretty good.
Fourth night?
Do you protest a fourth night, you know, an individual?
You start to run out of energy.
So I think the natural direction of this is to reduce an energy.
It has, however, I would say that the protesters have accomplished at least one thing that never happened before.
One thing that they've accomplished for sure is that a lot more people are talking about specific solutions.
So we never saw before, I don't think, maybe, I could be wrong, But we've never seen before Congress putting together an actual set of laws and legislation to try to deal with police brutality.
Or let's say just police conduct, police misconduct.
So something happened.
You can't argue that it didn't create some kind of activity.
Now, none of those laws have been passed.
Who knows if any of it will turn into anything.
But I would say that it did turn into something, at least something positive, even if the net was not as positive.
I, of course, have told you that I'm not interested in talking about the specifics of fixing the problem, because unlike some people in America, I don't have free speech.
Now, I don't have freedom of speech in the sense that the entire topic of racism...
I can only sort of talk about in surface-y ways, you know, approved surface-y ways.
So I don't have actual freedom of speech to really get into the details and talk about what is true and what's not true and the data and stuff like that.
If I did have freedom of speech in this country, and again, I don't mean legally.
Of course, legally I have freedom of speech.
But in a practical sense, I don't, like most of you don't.
So you can't really work on the suggestions without the ability to talk about them.
So I'd say it's a waste of time to actually talk about the solutions as a citizen.
If Congress passes something and it works, that'd be great.
But in terms of my contribution, I couldn't possibly be useful without being able to talk about it.
So there's that.
So here's something really interesting.
A Democrat. Key word, Democrat.
Now, when I tell you the rest of the story, just keep in your mind, this is a Democrat.
Okay? That's the key part of the story.
Democrat, Vernon Jones, a representative from Georgia, he says he's, let's call this what it is, a hate crime.
Basically, he said, I've watched, this is a tweet from him, Vernon Jones, I've watched countless videos of Trump supporters getting attacked in the streets simply due to their support of Donald Trump.
Let's call this what this is, a hate crime.
He's a Democrat.
A hate crime.
And as we return to the legislature next week, I'll be introducing legislation that'll make it such.
So, it's a Democrat.
Vernon Jones, I believe he's African American, which also...
It gives a little context to the story.
He's recommending legislation to make it illegal to attack a Trump supporter for just being a Trump supporter, such as wearing a MAGA hat or something.
Now, how much do you love this guy?
How much do you love Vernon Jones?
A Democrat.
A Democrat. He's the guy introducing legislation to protect Republicans.
So I asked myself, Republicans, where were the Republicans?
There's not one Republican who wanted to introduce some legislation to protect Republicans.
It had to come from Vernon Jones, an African American Democrat.
Now, what if I taught you about reciprocity?
I've been teaching you that reciprocity is the single most Probably the most important tool for success.
If you could get one thing right, of all the things you should do right for success, you know, you want to stay out of jail and stuff like that, but reciprocity is just the king of the hill for getting what you want out of life.
Do something for somebody else.
That's it. You do something for somebody else, And it's going to far increase your odds that something good will come back to you, directly or indirectly.
So, did I just spend 10 minutes praising a Democrat I've never met, named Vernon Jones, and thank you.
So, Vernon Jones, thank you.
Sincerely, thank you.
This is what actual leadership looks like, because he's bucking the majority, I would imagine.
I would like to take this excellent idea and extend it.
I will extend it thusly.
Suppose a social media group attacks somebody for being a Trump supporter so much so that they lose their job.
Let's say that somebody's tweets are rounded up and they're not that bad.
They just show that somebody is an avid Trump supporter.
Let's say they take those tweets and they send them to an employer and it causes somebody to get fired.
Should it be illegal to get somebody fired for being a Trump supporter?
Well, I would say it should not only be illegal, it should be a hate crime.
Because if somebody is attacked because of their support, Of a political party that is a completely legal, functioning political party, Republican.
If you get fired for that, and the reason you get fired is that somebody organized an attack to talk to your employer to get you fired, under those conditions, should that not be a hate crime?
Because it is. If you steal somebody's job just because you hate them, basically getting them fired, that's stealing their job.
You're not stealing it to keep it, but you're taking it from them.
If you take money from somebody, or let's say you burn down somebody.
Let me give you a cleaner example.
If I burned down your house because you were a certain political party, would it be called a hate crime?
Yeah, it would be. If I burned your house, even if you weren't in it, let's say there was no danger to anybody physically.
If I burned down your house because of your race, your beliefs, your religion, is that a hate crime?
And the answer is yes.
Now, a house is just an economic good, right?
It's something that has a dollar amount.
It's not a person.
It's just a dollar amount economic entity.
Now, you live in it and you've got your private pictures in there, so it's worse.
But my point is, if you take somebody's job, it's not that different from burning down their house.
And if you would agree that it would be certainly a hate crime to burn down somebody's house for being a certain political party, it's a fucking crime if you get them fired.
If you get them fired...
For their political beliefs, and this is happening in this country.
I'll be telling you a story about one that I know of later, but not today.
This needs to be a hate crime, not just a crime.
It needs to be a hate crime, and there should be jail time.
So I think you should actually go to jail...
If you're getting somebody fired or even trying to, I would say even if you tried to get somebody fired for their political beliefs and have failed, you should still go to jail.
Jail. Actual jail.
I'm not talking about a fine.
I'm not talking about being sued.
I'm talking about jail.
I'm talking about Put you in a cell and you spend some time there.
Because if you burn down somebody's house for their political views, would you go to jail?
You would go to fucking jail every time.
Assuming you got convicted and everything.
Every time. So what is the real difference between burning down somebody's house for their political views versus organizing a mob Organizing a mob to take the person's job.
There's no difference. It's the same fucking crime.
Jail. There should be jail for that.
Alright. Let's talk about some other things.
There's a Rasmus and Pol that I'm going to break some news for you.
You want to hear some Rasmus and Pol results that you have not heard anywhere else because I actually got permission to I got permission to tell you before it gets posted, which will be very soon.
Alright, here was the survey.
Rasmussen reports.
A thousand U.S. likely voters.
And they conducted this June 3rd and 4th.
So, use your imagination to wind back your brain to June 3rd or 4th.
We're sort of right in the middle of a lot of the protests when things were pretty hot.
And here was the first question.
Do you have a very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable, or very unfavorable impression of Black Lives Matter?
So this is the existing thing.
So a very favorable, 32%.
Somewhat favorable, 30%.
So the favorables are 62% when you put them all together.
62% of the people surveyed And the survey, I believe, I saw the details, was very close to the population of the United States.
So they asked about 13% African Americans, and they got a mix that was similar to the United States demographic.
And 62% have a favorable view of Black Lives Matter, right in the middle of the protests.
And then the somewhat unfavorable and unfavorables added up to 31%.
So twice as many people have a positive view as a negative view.
But here's the more interesting question.
After several days of protests and following the death of George Floyd, do you have a more favorable or less favorable opinion of Black Lives Matter?
So here's the interesting thing.
Did all of the recent news cause people to like Black Lives Matter more or less?
What is your guess?
Give me your guess before I give you the answer.
Did the protests make the public at large like Black Lives Matter more or less?
The answer is both.
The people who said they had a more favorable opinion, 30%.
The people who said they had a less favorable opinion, exactly 30%.
In other words, it broke even.
Now, it didn't really break even because those aren't necessarily the same people, and maybe they were already favorable, but they're a little more favorable now.
And 38% said their opinion is about the same.
I don't know how your opinion could be about the same.
What kind of person could watch all that and say, eh, opinion is about the same?
I guess that's possible.
Yeah, I suppose if you already had a very high opinion or a very low opinion, it probably wouldn't change.
You would just feel stronger about it.
Yeah, so I'm watching the comments go by, and I think what we would find is that the conservatives liked Black Lives Matter less, and I'm just speculating.
This is not based on the data that I'm looking at, but probably, you know, Probably people on the left like Black Lives Matter more because it was doing more, you know, more active, raising the issue.
All right. So that's from Rasmussen.
And so I tweeted a little test tweet.
So I've been testing this concept that Republicans feel as if they don't have freedom of speech.
So I tweeted and pinned this just to see how many likes I got.
And here was the sentence.
I said, Republicans only have free speech on election day.
Now, the point of that was to find out if the Republicans who are watching this would sort of agree that they don't have free speech, but that the price will be paid.
In other words, if you're a Republican and you are aware that there's a big national topic, And you are also aware that you don't have freedom of speech.
Where are you going to go to compensate for that?
Like your incentive to vote is just sort of through the roof.
Because it'll be the first time you can be honest.
The one time you can be honest is when you walk in that voting booth and you pull the lever or fill out your form or whatever.
Because you can honestly vote.
You can totally, honestly vote.
But you can't honestly talk.
You don't have freedom of speech in a practical sense.
You do in a legal sense, of course.
And it got 4,400 retweets, which on the size of my account is a lot.
So I love that I could use Twitter to quickly test a notion.
So I was quickly testing if other people were feeling the same.
And then this morning I wake up to at least three major accounts tweeting the same concept that we don't have freedom of speech so we can't really talk about the topic honestly.
I think four different accounts had the same theme that we can't make progress because we can't talk about it.
So you're going to see more of that.
You know, I would also say it should be a hate crime For social media, somebody on social media to label a Trump supporter a white supremacist.
What do you think of that?
If somebody on social media were to call a Trump supporter who's just a Trump supporter, hasn't done anything specific to be objectionable, and they're labeled a white supremacist just for being a Trump supporter, is that a hate crime?
If they do it publicly.
If somebody calls you out I would.
I would. Because, you know, you couldn't use the N-word.
You couldn't call somebody any other kind of offensive, hateful thing.
Now, calling somebody a white supremacist really is an invitation to violence, I would say.
Because I think that most people would feel justified in violence against a white supremacist.
So I would say that if somebody labels you a white supremacist for having just an opinion about things, and it's not a white supremacist opinion, you're just a Republican, I would say that's a hate crime because it is an invitation to violence, directly and indirectly.
So I'd like to see those changes and without those changes I think social media just has to be regulated like any other utility or publisher.
Let's see. There's additional scientific evidence for the fact that your genetics make a big difference in how susceptible you are to COVID and coronavirus.
So there's now a second study There was one in China that had the same result that found that blood type O is more resistant.
Now, it's not completely resistant.
It's in the teens of resistance.
It might be 10 to 19 percent or something in that range.
But there is a pretty measurable difference.
If you've got type O, you're more resistant.
My guess is that there are other factors...
In your genetics, that would also be predictive.
So, remember I told you early on, if you're keeping score, if you're keeping score of which pundits predicted correctly as we went, one of my earliest predictions is that there would be a strong genetic component, and if we knew that genetic component, it might help us determine who to keep safe and who's at risk.
Remember that was one of the first things I said months ago, and now science has confirmed.
So I was right about masks, right about closing the airports, even before the president said it.
You know, I don't know how many times to say it because it blows my mind that my medical advice was consistently superior to the World Health Organization.
Most of you, too.
I think if you could, a monkey with a dartboard would have been better than the World Health Organization.
But man, I freaking nailed it.
Let me say this as starkly as I can.
If you had ignored the World Health Organization and just took your medical advice from me, so far, you would have been way ahead.
Now, in the future, I don't recommend you take medical advice from me.
That would be probably a bad idea as a general principle.
But it is nonetheless true that if you'd only listened to my medical advice, and I have no medical training, obviously, you would have been a way ahead.
That's just a fact.
There's no way you can argue that statement.
So guessing is better than expertise, sometimes.
Bill Barr says, and when he's talking about the social media companies, he says, quote, I think there are, clearly these entities are now engaged in censorship.
They originally held themselves as open forums.
So I think that's a direct statement from the Attorney General that he is aware.
I mean, it's kind of...
Wouldn't you say that it's a pretty strong statement from the Attorney General to say that they are engaged in censorship?
So the Attorney General did not say, he did not say we're looking into censorship.
He did not say we're concerned that they might.
He's not saying people have complained that they do.
He said, he's the Attorney General of the United States, and he said, Clearly, these entities are now engaged in censorship.
He said clearly.
Like it's a done deal.
What? Alright.
Let me cure racism.
I'm going to take some things which I've said before, but I've not said them as well as I'm going to package them now.
So I'm going to take you to my whiteboard.
And I'm going to solve racism for you.
Sure, maybe not all at once, but the cumulative effect will be a complete solution to racism.
It comes from understanding it like this.
So some of this you've seen before, but I'm going to package it better.
You have a brain.
It's a big old lump of stuff inside your skull.
Your brain...
is a pattern recognition machine.
But it's not a very good one.
And that's where all our problems come from.
So your brain doesn't have a choice of being biased.
It's designed to be biased.
Because you can't do a scientific controlled experiment for all of the thousands of decisions you make every day.
From whether to cross the street, how to start your car, What clothes you put on, thousands of decisions every day, and you don't have any data or scientific studies, so you use your bias.
You say to yourself, well, the last five times I did whatever, it worked out well, so I'll do that again.
Or the last three times I tried this, it didn't work, so I won't do that again.
So your brain is really just a pattern recognition machine that's running all the time, and you can't turn that off.
Even though it doesn't do a good job of it.
So if you see a pattern that's not a real pattern, you're still going to think it's a pattern.
Because you don't have time to do a deep dive and everything.
So you can be misled by your pattern-generating machine, and being misled will make you biased, bigoted, racist, sexist, ageist, and all the other isms.
Because your brain is very biased.
It just looks for patterns.
It's dumb. It sees a pattern, even if it's not a real pattern.
It could be an imagined pattern.
And it just says, well, it's the best I got.
I'll go with it. Now, the problem with Black Lives Matter and their approach to things and systemic racism, etc., is that they're trying to fix this.
They're trying to fix the fact that people are biased, bigoted, racist, sexist, etc.
Well, they don't care about the bottom one so much, but they're working on the racist part.
This, the problem they're trying to solve, can't be solved.
So if you're wondering why racism hasn't been solved, it's because it can't.
It's not a thing.
It's not a thing that has a solution.
I'm not saying it's hard, I'm not saying we don't know how.
I mean it is logically unsolvable by its nature.
Because to solve this, you'd have to remove our brains.
Because you can't rewire a brain to make it not a pattern recognition machine.
That's its basic nature.
If you made your brain not capable, or at least not automatically operating on patterns, it would also no longer be a brain.
It just wouldn't do anything. You would just sit in a chair and starve to death.
So this is not solvable in any sense.
There's nothing you can do. You cannot solve the basic nature of the human brain.
And if you try, you're doomed to fail, and here we are.
Here's what you can do.
So instead of doing what you can't do, how about doing what you can do?
Your bias is permanent.
You can't get rid of bias.
It might change over time as you have new experiences and they cause new or revised biases, but you're always going to have bias.
But what you can do is make sure that your filters are strong.
Your moral filter says, No, I don't want to treat people with bias.
So I'll use my higher-level thinking to try to tamp down that instinct.
You could put your social filter on it and say, no, I want to be a good person.
All my friends are good people.
I want to be a good person.
I don't want to be that kind of person.
So I'll use my social filter to tamp down my bias.
And then there's a practical filter, which is, how would society work If we just go around discriminating against each other for race or anything else, it doesn't work very well.
So from a practical perspective, if you want to have a better world, of course you want to tamp down your bias because it just works better.
If somebody comes in and asks for a job, do you want to lose the possibility that you could have hired the best employee you'd ever had because you were being biased?
No. It's just not practical.
You would rather look at the resume and say, oh, okay, I was a little biased when you walked in the door because you weigh 110 pounds and the job requires lifting heavy objects.
But now that I've looked at your resume, I see here that you're a bodybuilder.
Couldn't tell the way you're dressed, but it looks like you could actually handle this job.
Okay, you're hired. So on a practical basis, you don't want to lose the chance to hire the best person you ever had for the job.
So you want to overcome your bias.
So here's what I'm saying.
If you spend your time trying to fix this, it's just a waste of time.
You can't fix it.
You shouldn't fix it. It's the basic nature of your operating system for your brain.
You can't change that.
But you can certainly strengthen your filters.
You can strengthen your filters.
So imagine starting early and saying to kids, look, you're going to be biased.
There's nothing you can do about that.
But you can strengthen your filters.
Here's why being biased doesn't work for anybody.
Here's why it's immoral.
Here's why you're not going to have a good time with your social life.
It's just not going to be as good if you're operating on your biases.
To some extent, I'm stealing these ideas from Morgan Freeman, for example.
Morgan Freeman, and this isn't his version of it, but I borrowed from his version as inspiration.
So I'd say I used Morgan Freeman as inspiration, which is that you just sort of ignore the racism part and laugh about it.
Now, imagine a world, I'm not going to say I have a dream, but you can see where I'm going here.
Imagine a world Where somebody walks in for a job interview or just walks in the room in a social setting, and your first thought is whatever your bias is, and you can make a joke about it.
And the other person can make a joke about it too.
Let me give you an example.
If somebody mocks me for being a white guy who has no rhythm and can't dance, what is my first impression to that?
Let's say a black guy Mocks me for being a bad dresser, which I am, or being a bad dancer.
If he mocks me in a funny way, I just think it's kind of funny.
Because it's true.
I don't dress well.
I don't have style. I don't have rhythm.
Now, I don't care if these stereotypes do or do not have some kind of statistical meaning.
I don't really care. Because they don't apply to me.
I just think it's funny.
And anytime somebody teases me for, you know, playing air guitar, I don't play air guitar, but you know what I mean, or dancing with an overbite, do I say to myself, ah, hate crime, hate crime, or do I say to myself, ah, that's kind of funny.
Kind of funny. So I think Morgan Freeman is my inspiration here, that you should just accept Let me say it more directly.
What we're trying to do is to minimize our feelings of bias so that in our interactions they don't come out.
It's probably exactly the wrong instinct.
It's probably backwards.
Don't know. But imagine it going exactly the other way.
What if we could speak freely about our biases?
What if we could just speak freely about it?
But at the same time, You would strengthen your filters to the point where you could overcome it.
So somebody walks into your office for an interview and you say, oh man, you do not look like the right person for the job.
For whatever reason.
You're too short, you're too old, you're the wrong gender.
Maybe you're even a racist.
But imagine a world where you could just say that.
Say, man, I don't even think you're the right person for the job.
You just laugh about it.
And then the person pulls out their resume and Says, well, my Harvard degree and my ten years, you know, writing published papers and this says otherwise.
And then the person who was laughing says, oh damn, pretty darn good, you're hired.
And nobody thinks anything about it.
They just say, okay, I had a bias because I'm a human.
How about just saying humans have bias?
But we also have tools.
So just accept your bias And then use your tools.
Make sure you strengthen your filters so you can build a system that works best.
So that's what I would suggest.
All of the stuff about how you feel about it and trying to cleanse your soul and, you know, because you speak a certain way, in your dark heart you've got these bad feelings.
Every bit of that is counterproductive because it imagines a person the way we are not.
Which is free from bias or we can be free from bias.
Or that there are some people who don't have bias and some people who do.
That's a big illusion.
Everybody's got bias.
Somebody says, you are such a tool.
That's a good productive comment there.
Thanks for jumping in with such useful advice.
Somebody says, unrealistic, but good.
Yes, it is unrealistic in the sense that I do not expect that people will automatically say, oh, okay, good idea.
You got me now.
Let me tell you how this works.
If this is a good frame, it will live on its own, meaning that there are enough people here who will see it that if I said anything useful on this topic or anything else, It forms sort of almost a creature.
A good idea is almost an entity that can travel, and it can be spread like a virus from one person to another.
So one of two things just happened.
Either I had an idea that doesn't have much traction, and that's the end of it.
Last time you'll ever hear of it.
Or there are some few people who heard this who said, Damn, that really gives me a better way to think about it and maybe I can do something about that.
And if it's a good idea, it will grow on its own over time.
So you can just release an idea like that and find out if it has any power.
Alright. Somebody says it's not a good frame.
Well, you would need to define that a little bit better.
I'm not going to block you.
I have a If you're new, it's my policy to block people who have a criticism that doesn't have a reason attached.
You don't have to go deep with your reason, but when you said it's not practical or something, not a good frame, give me just a hint of a reason if you can summarize it.
Usually you can. All right.
I swaddled me, Captain.
That's always funny every time I hear it.
Yeah, and I've said this before, but we should be concentrating on strategy.
Here's something that's provocative that I would love to tell a 12-year-old, a class of 12-year-old black Americans.
So if I could talk to a classroom at that age, I would tell them this.
Yeah, racism will always be a problem.
It's not going away.
It can't go away, really.
But, while you might be disadvantaged, let's say socially or even systemically, I haven't heard examples of that, but I'm sure I will.
So you might be disadvantaged in this life because of racism, etc.
But you also have a tactical advantage.
And they would say, what?
Yes, that's right. You have a disadvantage because of racism, but you also have a tactical advantage if you have the right strategy.
And the tactical advantage, and I'll just give you the one obvious example, which is you could walk into any Fortune 500 company, and if you have the same qualifications as a white candidate, you'll get the job every time.
Because the company needs diversity as well as employees.
So if you can get a good employee who has the same capability as everybody else who's applying, but you can also get some diversity, far preferred.
And that's as close to a universally true statement as you can make about corporate America.
So I would teach the class, yes, you were born into a world that's going to have some racism.
It's always going to be there.
So here's your strategy.
Be tactical.
You can slice through that like it didn't even exist because your tactical advantage is so strong if you use it, if you have the right strategy.
So that's the way I would go.
Let's find out if we have any freedom of speech and we'll get back to social media and we'll find out.
