Episode 1026 Scott Adams: Today I Solve Systemic Racism, But Only in the Independent Nation of my House
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Content:
Antifaland's borders, armed border guards, fully monitored society
Bill Maher says "defund the police" hands election to Trump
Dave Chappelle's emotional special on George Floyd
Sam Harris's masterpiece of critical thinking on George Floyd
Whiteboard1: "System" Problem
Whiteboard2: Alternative
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Let's get to it. We've got a lot of problems to solve today.
Systemic racism.
We've got breakaway nations in the United States.
We've got economic problems.
We've got stress. But I'm here to fix all of that.
And it won't be difficult once we prepare ourselves and all we need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or 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 coronavirus, including racial relations, the economy, Even trade deals.
Let's call the simultaneous sip and it happens now.
Go! So I just tweeted a video inside Antifaland.
I guess we're calling the Autonomous Zone that they call CHAZ. Other people are calling Antifaland.
And I saw a video where they were having a pickup game of dodgeball.
And let me ask you, how do you think a pickup game of dodgeball turns out in a land in which people don't like to have rules?
Just about the way you thought.
So that's funny.
I just saw a notice that the Main Street in my town is going to close Main Street, where all the restaurants are, most of them anyway.
We're going to close Main Street on weekends so that the table seating can extend into the streets.
Not a bad idea, is it?
Who came up with that idea?
Yes, I did suggest that to the restaurant owners through the one restaurant owner that I know the best.
So I did suggest that to him, and he did say he was going to talk to the town about it.
I don't know if that's why it happened, but I like to think that one of the best things that came out of these crises, you know, it's way too early to be looking for any good news during the middle of a triple crisis.
But it is true that we've noticed this a number of times, that people became very flexible to a good suggestion.
Right? Didn't you see this everywhere?
Suddenly the entire world became flexible to listen to a good idea.
And if you had a good idea, a week later the law would change.
You saw it with telehealth and doctors being able to practice across borders.
Somebody comes up with an idea, hey, let's change that, because it would help a lot with this COVID situation.
A week later, there's an executive order, and the law of the land is different.
You've never seen this before.
You've never seen an ordinary citizen say, hey, I got an idea.
Why don't we do X? And then a week later, X is actually implemented.
I mean, it's kind of fun in its own way.
There's something fun about that.
I don't think that'll last, but certainly an identifying characteristic of this time that is quite different.
How many of you saw my appearance on Tucker Carlson's show last night?
Raise your hands. I can't see you.
Oh, that's right. I'm the only one on video.
Well, I don't think my...
Answers on Tucker's show went exactly in the direction he was expecting.
I was talking about Chaz.
That was the topic I was asked to talk about.
And I was unusually, probably surprisingly, supportive of the Chaz people.
And I'm going to continue to say that.
Now, I'm not ignoring all the cost of it.
I'm not ignoring that.
I'm taking full appreciation That there are victims involved, the people who live there, have businesses there.
It's a gigantic inconvenience-slash-abusive situation.
So none of that is minimized, but we're adults.
We can talk about the whole picture.
And part of the whole picture is, it's a really interesting experiment.
Honest to God, I don't think I could be more interested in what's happening in Antifa land than just about anything that's happened in the news in a long time.
You know, President Trump has gotten a little quiet lately.
Have you noticed that?
I mean, by his standards, he's getting a little bit quiet, maybe to a fault, given that he could be doing some useful stuff.
But Antifa and Antifa land, or CHAZ if you prefer, is really interesting.
Good and bad, It's really interesting.
So here are the things that interest me about it.
Number one is to see how quickly they, let's say, evolve toward the system that they were trying to escape.
So the things that we've already seen them immediately realize they needed, and I'm not the first to point this out, but walls.
They needed a border. The very first thing they did was create a border.
That should be...
In other words, our national consciousness should be moved a little bit without any argument being involved simply because we observed that the people who, one assumes, are the most against borders, the moment they were in charge, the first thing they did was create a border wall.
First thing. It wasn't even the second.
It was just first thing. Got to have a border wall.
So even though this is not directly connected to, you know, any border immigration question, I don't know how this couldn't affect you, right?
Because the question of, are borders necessary?
I feel like that's been answered now.
The other thing that Antifa Land had to do, well, I don't know if they had to do it, or it just emerged, that the few people who had guns turned out to be the security force.
Now, imagine if Antifa had no guns.
It turns out they've got some guns.
But what if they had no guns?
Well, then you and I could conquer Antifaland with just a couple of guns.
If nobody else had a gun, all you need is a couple of high-powered weapons.
Just go into Antifaland and say, I'm your new king.
So I think one of the things they're realizing is if you don't have...
A credible and functional security force that anybody can conquer you.
And indeed, it looks like a rapper named Raz has conquered Antifa Land.
I don't know if they know it yet.
Now, of course, I'm exaggerating for comic purposes.
It could be that Raz is just trying to help out.
Because we know that he has at least access to guns.
We know that he's sort of self-appointed security there.
He could be just helping.
I mean, it could be nothing but productive.
No, no. But you have to wonder if the people there are completely, let's say, comfortable with somebody assuming the mantle of armed security force in their new nations.
That's got to make them think about things in a different way.
Here's another thing.
Because everybody in Antifa land has a phone, and as soon as there's any kind of action in public, they turn on their phone.
Antifa land is the first place to, I would say, fully implement 100% of public surveillance.
Think about it. Everybody there has a phone, and they're all trained that as soon as there's anything going on, they pull out their phones.
So even though it's not, you know, security cameras affixed to light poles, you know, to whatever, it's not security cameras, but they've created for themselves a situation in which there's 100% complete coverage of Because there's so much outdoors activity and they all have phones with them, that they are a completely monitored society.
Now, I think that might have been closer to the opposite of what they had in mind, but that's how it turned out.
So watching this is interesting.
Now, what I said on Tucker's show, and I'll say again, is that I think these small experiments We need to do more of these, but do them, you know, in a more organized, legal, planned way that doesn't take over anybody's existing property.
There must be plenty of property in the United States that would be a good place to try a little community.
See what happens with no police.
Maybe they use some other mechanism, maybe they use technology.
And what I said on Tucker's show is that we have a country that largely was designed pre-internet.
And then we just tried to tack the internet onto it as best we could to an existing system.
But I think one of the things that the protesters have exactly right is that we really haven't tried the other options.
You know? You and I can certainly say, Scott, if you try the no police option, it's all going to go bad and it's not going to work.
To which I say, you could be right.
You could be 100% right.
But I don't know that, because I don't know what the options are.
I don't know, you know, could you have a hybrid situation?
Could you have half as many regular police, so at least you reduce the number of armed people in the public?
But, you know, you compensate with other kinds of services?
Let's test it.
But let's test it in a clean, well-funded, organized way.
See what happens.
Could work. I just don't think it'll work everywhere.
Here's my big question about Antifa Land.
Will Black Lives Matter and Antifa coexist in peace in the long run?
In the short run, Antifa and Black Lives Matter had a common enemy, you know, the system.
What happens when they don't have a common enemy anymore?
Well, in theory, what should happen is anytime you don't have a common enemy, you end up fighting with each other.
It's pretty much guaranteed.
Now, we saw already that there was a sign.
Who knows how much is real?
Because, you know, photographs coming out of Antifa land could be staged, could be doctored, could be out of context.
So, you know, be careful about any pictures or video you see in general.
But there was a sign there that looked like they had to segregate their communal garden.
So they had to segregate it into a black garden and a white garden.
Now, if a few days into your nation...
You've decided that you need boarders, armed cops.
You ended up with 100% surveillance in public and segregation.
Maybe things are not heading in the right direction.
But on the other hand, we're learning a lot here.
I think they're learning a lot.
It's just really useful in a way that I don't think we fully realize.
This is really useful, but very expensive.
And I would argue that the value that we're going to get out of it might exceed the cost in the long run just because of how it will change how we think about things.
And of course, that's no comfort to the people losing their property and inconvenience at the moment.
I'm hearing more and more people who are afraid the whole world has fallen apart.
Do you feel that way?
Do you feel afraid that we're on the brink of total societal collapse, that the republic could be bending and ready to break, that civil society is about to fall apart and we can't talk to each other and everything's a mess?
How many of you think that?
Somebody says they think I'm stoned.
Unfortunately, no. This is what I actually sound like.
I wish I were, but sorry to disappoint you, I'm not.
So, here's my take on that.
There's one central fact of life They should keep in your head and never let it leave.
So it should be the filter that you put on just about anything you're seeing in the world.
And it goes like this.
In the old days, the news was sort of reporting the news.
In the modern world, in 2020, the news is really just a way to spike the chemicals in your brain.
It's not news in the way that news is supposed to be news, like useful information that you can take advantage of to make a better world, or any of that.
The news is not that.
So if you still think the news is something like a way to transmit information, you're going to be very lost and confused.
Life won't make any sense.
Because the news doesn't do that anymore.
It's not their business model.
There's no intention to do that.
It's not even an intention.
The news is there to make money.
They've got a business model. They need eyeballs and attention.
And the way to do that is to jack up your emotional state, the audience that is, to the point where they can't look away.
Now, here's what I've noticed.
If I were to walk outside my home today, how many problems would I encounter?
None. None.
If I were to encounter an African-American gentleman somewhere in my travels or my workday today, would he and I have any issues?
Nope. None.
Not a single issue.
If I go into public, is there going to be some problems or some riots where I live?
Nope. Nope.
In fact, if you took the map of the country...
And then you tried to, you know, with a magic marker on your map, you tried to, you know, mark all the places where there's bad stuff happening.
Let's say looting, let's say Antifa land, put them all together.
It would look like this big map that had just some pinpricks on it.
That's it. Of the entire geographic United States, there are a few pinpricks that are making a lot of news.
The vast majority of the country Sort of not engaged.
They're just trying to go to work and take care of their family, live their life.
So the first thing that I would, if you find yourself stressed out because you think the Republic's on the brink of failing, I would say this.
You should reduce in your mind, just intellectually, dial back however much you're worried by 80%.
Okay? So that would be about the right dial back to get from your attenuated state that's artificial because you've been watching these little pinpricks.
You know, you're watching the George Floyd situation.
I mean, the actual video of literally the last moments of his life.
These are super, super powerful emotional things.
So everybody in the country who's watching the news...
It's just cranked up beyond belief.
But the people who are not watching the news, they're not having a bad time at all.
So I would say this, that the perceived problem is 80% larger than the actual problem.
The actual problem is small compared to what the United States can handle.
If you'd like to feel good about something, let me suggest this.
If you live in the United States, if you're American, you're living in a country that is simultaneously handling race protests slash riots slash looting, whatever you want, but a racial crisis.
We're handling a health crisis, the biggest we've seen.
And we're handling, I don't know, maybe AIDS was bigger, depending on how you count things.
And then an economic crisis.
We're handling three gigantic crises at the same time.
And do you know how we're doing? Pretty well.
Pretty well, actually.
We're actually doing really well.
That's the whole story.
The United States is handling three unprecedented crises, any one of which would be a pretty big issue.
I mean, obviously, a really big issue.
Any one of them individually.
We're handling three.
Three at the same time.
And we're handling it.
We're totally handling it.
And take, for example, I'm hearing more craziness about President Trump.
Let's see, what was it Biden said that if Trump lost the election, the military would have to take him out of the White House?
And Sam Harris has similar concerns.
That the president will tend toward a dictatorship if he gets re-elected?
Now, does any of that sound even a little bit like the world you live in?
Because the world I live in, President Trump would actually be the last person in the world who would try to stay in the White House if he lost an election.
Like, in my mind, it's inconceivable.
It would be like saying, Scott, here's what I'm worried about.
I'm worried that rabbits will grow fangs and wings and start flying after us and attacking us with their fangs.
To which I say, maybe that's not what you should be worried about.
Because I suppose anything's possible, but I don't think a rabbit's going to grow fangs and wings all of a sudden for no reason and start attacking people.
So, anyway, I wouldn't worry about things that are that unlikely.
So, certainly the president leaving the White House if he loses the election will...
I don't even know how to take it seriously, honestly.
Like, I wanted to give you reasons why he wouldn't leave, but it is so frickin' stupid.
No, it's not stupid.
I'll withdraw that.
It is so delusional to imagine...
That the president, who doesn't even want to use the military overseas...
And let me ask you this.
Has this president killed fewer people than any other president?
I'm wondering if you compared presidents over time.
I would guess...
I'm not sure about this.
I could be wrong about this.
But I'll bet if you looked at President Trump's body count, if you count other countries, right?
Anybody that a president has somewhat directly killed by their orders, I would think Trump would be among the lowest, wouldn't he?
All right.
So...
If you're worried about the world falling apart, I think that that is an artifact of television and the news and that you should worry a lot less about it, like 80% less.
Bill Maher continues to be extra interesting lately because, and I say this, I compliment him often even when I disagree with his opinions, which is fair, I think.
And I compliment Bill Maher because he is one of the few public People who is capable of seeing both sides.
Now, that doesn't mean he sees them the way I see them.
That's a little bit different.
But Bill Maher literally is capable of looking at arguments on both sides.
Now, why is that impressive?
Well, it shouldn't be.
Like, why am I impressed at that?
That should be the most routine, ordinary thing that anybody can do.
But in fact, it's so rare...
That I would like to compliment Bill Maher in public for being one of the most useful thinkers.
Because even if you disagree with him, it's really useful to watch somebody in public have an actual independent mind.
Like, the more of that you see, the more likely it's going to rub off on you a little bit.
So again, it's not about what he says.
It's the fact that he's even able...
Just even able to look at both sides in his view of both sides.
So here's an example. So Maher was saying that it's a bad strategy to call it defund the police.
Now, in his view, liberals want to just divert some portion of funds.
Maybe it's additional funds.
Maybe it's some a little bit taken from the police.
But in Maher's version, it's not eliminating the police.
It's just building a better system that has some additional elements.
But I don't think that's everybody's opinion.
As the New York Times ran an opinion piece that said, no, we really do mean get rid of the police.
But even that, I don't know if that means get rid of the police.
It might mean we change their names, we get rid of all the existing ones, we train new ones, but they're sort of police-like, but we don't call them police.
So I don't think that Marr is wrong in the big picture.
The big picture meaning there'll be something like police no matter what.
So I think he's right about that.
But he criticizes defund the police because it just hands...
Basically, he hands Trump the victory.
So, Bill Maher is smart enough to know that the Democrats' strategy of everybody getting on board, Nancy Pelosi, everybody else, to defund the police is basically just handing the election to Trump.
Now, who knows?
There's still way too many days between now and Election Day to say that anything means anything.
There will be too many changes between now.
But I think he's on to something.
I don't think there are too many people who are against law and order in general.
So, let's talk about the two most interesting pieces of content yesterday.
And I tweeted that you should consume them in this order.
Dave Chappelle did a surprise, I guess it was a special on Netflix that they put on YouTube.
So instead, I think you can see it on YouTube, you don't need Netflix.
So as Dave Chappelle, so he did, it looked like maybe it was a local event outdoors during coronavirus, so it's fairly new, and it happened since the George Floyd incident.
So it's a comedy act in which Dave Chappelle does no comedy.
So that's the first thing you need to know about it.
It's a Dave Chappelle stand-up comedy in which he doesn't do any comedy, nor is he trying to do any comedy.
He's just really angry and worked up about the George Floyd incident.
And so most of his act was a very watchable, very interesting film.
Explanation of how he feels and how black Americans feel about the whole situation.
Now, yeah, I'm seeing in the comments.
The other thing you need to know about it is that he was very inebriated.
Now, he was either drunk or he was on some kind of drugs, so he could barely stand up.
I would say that he didn't do himself any favors.
In terms of whatever you think of Dave Chappelle, I don't know that doing an act that drunk...
It's very common for comedians on stage to be buzzed or even pretty drunk.
But I've never seen anybody try to do a stage act that drunk, actually.
I mean, he was in bad shape.
Or drunk or high or whatever it was.
But he also doesn't hide that part of his personality.
And so, you know, just to take that into account, it's not like he's being a hypocrite or something.
Even in his act, he talks about his love of marijuana, etc.
So I don't think he's being a hypocrite, and obviously comedians are their own separate category of professionals.
Yeah, and he said some nasty things about Candace Owens, etc.
But here's the reason I recommend it.
On an entertainment level, Don't look for any laughs because he's not trying to give you any.
He's trying to make you think.
He definitely makes you think.
So I would say that the emotional trip that he takes you on is really worth going on because you want to take the trip with him as your tour guide because you're going to feel how he feels.
Now here's what's interesting about it because the next content I'm going to recommend is Sam Harris.
Who I believe has probably been canceled already.
I'll have to check in on him.
But he dropped a podcast last night.
And if he doesn't get canceled for this thing, nobody's ever...
I'll be amazed.
Because what Sam Harris did was he went to every third rail.
And basically, I feel like he felt it was...
I don't want to read his mind...
But I can sense in his podcast, which was extraordinary, by the way, the Sam Harris' podcast, I think it's one for the ages, really.
I mean, one of the top podcasts you might ever hear, like of all podcasts from anybody in all time.
It's actually that good because it's sort of a masterpiece of critical thinking against a backdrop of none of that.
And when you see him lay out the critical thinking, right after you've watched Chappelle's lack of critical thinking, the contrast is just amazing.
Chappelle is a very smart guy, but of course, could you be objective and just purely rational if you had identified, and this is what Chappelle says in his act, if you had identified with George Floyd, like, oh my God, that's if you had identified with George Floyd, like, oh my God, that's me, or oh my God, that could be my son if you identified on that level, How could you possibly be rational about it, really?
Is that even something you would ask of somebody?
If you saw a family member being killed, can I ask you to be rational about it?
No. It's not a fair question.
It's just not a fair request.
I'm not going to ask you to be rational in a situation where a rational person should not be rational.
Not at all. But seeing Dave Chappelle's version of the world in which black people are being hunted down by white people and killed is really useful.
If you're not black, it's really useful to get his good explanation of it.
Because what Chappelle does better than most people in the world is he's an amazing communicator.
So he communicates it with a depth of emotion.
And Getting back to the thing about how drunk he was, I think maybe he just needed to be.
I think maybe he needed to be.
Because I think the place he went, I just don't know if you could go there if you weren't on something.
And I think he felt he needed to go there.
But here's the fascinating thing about the Sam Harris.
So what Sam Harris did was went through the statistics.
And if you go through the statistics, it does not support all of the claims of Black Lives Matter.
I think that's an understatement.
But to hear him go through it, and it's just...
I mean, it's devastatingly well done.
But he goes to some really dangerous places.
And the most dangerous place he goes...
I have also flirted with, which is the idea that it wasn't the cop with the knee on the neck that killed him.
It probably wasn't.
And if you listen to Sam Harris's explanation, he gives a very compelling argument that in all likelihood what killed him was the cop on his back, because we know that's deadly.
The cop on his back would be compressing his chest, He was having trouble breathing.
He gave another example of somebody on video that police killed exactly the same way, and fentanyl was involved.
So there's actually another video of a white guy being killed exactly the same way by police, and they also didn't know that the guy was dying because somebody had a knee on the suspect's back, and this was the other case.
And the suspect was saying, I can't breathe, I can't breathe.
And the cops were just joking.
Because they didn't think they were doing anything that could in any way be considered deadly or dangerous.
And then the guy died right in front of him.
So when you hear Sam Harris add the context and show you there are other cases, in my opinion, I don't think the guy with his knee on the neck necessarily was the cause of death.
And we don't know, because there's some ambiguity there, but even calling out the ambiguity is probably cause for cancellation.
So anyway, so the Sam Harris view of the world, completely opposite of the Dave Chappelle view of the world, and if you listen to them one after another, you're really going to be fascinated, I think, because they both do such a good job of painting a picture of their different worlds.
It's like visiting two different planets in two hours.
But here was what interested me the most.
Because although Sam's explanation of the race relations situations, I would say matched my own almost identically, and he added things that I didn't know about, which were compatible with what I was thinking as well.
But of course, we differ starkly on the question of President Trump.
So of course, Sam throws in some things that I would consider TDS. He would consider, I think, plainly obvious.
But those are two different worlds.
About Trump. Now, here's the part that really, really interests me.
Sam Harris doesn't seem to be aware that he's part of the race problem.
Or at least he didn't mention it.
So I can't assume he's not aware of it.
But it goes like this.
Other smart people have said that the protests and the racial animus is much worse under Trump.
Would you all agree that that's true?
The racial division, at least at the moment, seems like it probably would never have been this bad if Trump had not been president.
Would you agree? Would you agree that maybe if Obama had been president, people would have just felt differently?
I'm saying no, no, no.
So I don't know what your no is to, so I'm not sure I'm interpreting that correctly.
Now, if you were to look at statistics...
Oh, let me clarify.
I think I know what you're saying no to.
If you were to look at statistics, I don't believe that there's any worse race relations.
So I think that's what you're saying in the comments.
Statistically, I don't think race relations are worse.
So I'd agree with you that Trump did not make that worse.
But if you were to look at the news and you look at the pundits, do you think the news and the pundits are talking about race in a far more provocative way because it's part of getting at Trump?
In my opinion, all the people with Trump derangement syndrome who have been calling him a racist for years Have created this situation.
So, meaning the spark.
Obviously, they didn't create the legacy of slavery.
They didn't create systemic racism, if we can identify it.
They didn't create racism.
So that part's already there.
But in terms of the energy that's being put into it at the moment, that's a combination of two factors in addition to the baseline racism that is a problem.
And the two other factors are there was a video that probably is misleading, but nobody will ever believe it.
That's the first thing.
Videos are all lies.
By the way, let me say this as clearly as possible.
From now on, you should say to yourself that all videos are a lie.
And the reason you should do that is because all videos are a lie.
All of them. Sometimes by exclusion, sometimes because of the angle, sometimes because you can't hear what's happening but you can see it.
But I would say that all video is a lie.
And that applies to the next video you see as well, whatever that is.
I'm not even talking about the George Floyd video in particular.
It's a universal statement that in small ways and big ways, all videos lie.
Period. You could say that about photos as well.
So there is no awareness by the media that they have created this situation by continuously calling half of the country racist.
If you're calling the president racist and you're saying anybody who supports it must be also, either they are a racist or they're supporting a racist, you've created a situation where you guarantee race riots.
How do you not get a race riot If the most powerful forms of persuasion, which are social media plus the news, if the two most powerful weaponized pieces of persuasion are telling you every day something that's mostly not true, it's fake news.
How much did the fake news about the fine people in Charlottesville, how much did that obviously fake news, because the president said the opposite of what was reported, how much of that fake news is behind these problems?
Will the media ever report on their own culpability in creating a hallucination that half of the country bought into and shut down the whole nation over it?
The fact that we don't look at CNN as the primary cause of these problems is shocking.
It's just shocking.
CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, the anti-Trump press is one of the three parts that cause this problem.
One part is the racism itself.
I'm not minimizing that, of course.
The other part is the video, which is a lie.
We don't know how, and obviously something terrible happened, and it looked like a crime to me, too.
So everybody who saw it was horrified it looked like a crime.
But you don't know what was happening, because you don't know what was in their minds.
You don't know exactly what killed them.
Was it the guy in the back?
You don't know what they were thinking.
The video is a lie.
The video is a lie.
We just don't know in what way.
It could actually be worse.
One of the ways it could be lying is what if it's worse?
What if they had just been saying some n-word things five minutes before the video rolled?
If you didn't see something happening before the video came on and it would make the situation even worse, well that's a lie too.
Because the situation would be much worse.
As bad as it was, it could even be worse.
So the video always lies, you just don't know how.
There are four days left in my one-week challenge to have somebody explain to me what systemic racism is before I disregard it as an illusion.
I have a rule that has been developed over my lifetime, and it goes like this.
If you can't describe something to somebody else, you don't know what it is.
In other words, you don't understand it yourself.
When you ask people to describe systemic racism, you will get a million different explanations.
Which, first of all, tells you that only one of them could be right.
It's not really a million, but you get a lot of different explanations.
And if one of them is right, it means that all the other people who thought they knew what systemic racism is, they're all wrong.
And it doesn't matter which one is right, because there are lots of different explanations.
If any one of them is right, everybody who thinks they know what it is is wrong.
So you don't have something you can deal with because I don't know which one of them is right.
And it's usually a word salad when you ask somebody.
Let me give you an example. Alright.
I wanted to give you an exact example that I hope I wrote down.
Dammit! I forgot to write that down.
Anyway. Look at my questions about this, my tweets on asking people for examples.
And you'll see that it's sort of word salad-y and crazy.
So people will use analogies because they don't have anything that they can point out.
They'll use historical examples.
They'll imagine that things are legal today that are not legal, like redlining.
So I don't know what the problem is, but nobody can give me an example.
If somebody can't explain it to you, they don't know what it is.
Every single time.
Alright. I asked a following question and I've been asked if I'm trolling or serious or I'm just trying to cause trouble.
Interestingly, I wasn't trying to cause trouble.
I think I get blamed for being too much of a troll even when I'm not.
So here's the question I asked.
Do we have any statistics on Ivy League educated Black people who have been killed by police.
And compare that to Ivy League educated people from other ethnicities.
And the reason I asked it that way is because that would control for a lot more variables.
In other words, race would be the thing that really stood out as the one thing that's different.
Could you imagine that an Ivy League graduate would be smarter?
You know, on average, if you went to an Ivy League school, you're probably smarter than somebody who didn't.
So if you're a smart black person who gets stopped, and you're a smart white person, or a smart Asian American, whatever you are, you're just a smart person, and you're probably polite.
If you went to an Ivy League school, are you more polite than the average person?
Probably. Probably.
Yeah, that's been my experience.
They just have good manners. Because it's just part of the culture, part of the learning experience.
And at the very least, even if you didn't have good manners before you went to your Ivy League college, well, you spend four years around people who have really good manners.
You probably pick up something, right?
So if it's true that police would, let's say, injure or kill an Ivy League-educated black man in America at some significantly larger rate Would that tell you something?
Now, it was pointed out to me that that would be a bad comparison because your Ivy League educated people, no matter what their ethnicity, are probably going to be stopped by police in an upper class town.
Fair enough. It still works.
Because even if only rich people were being stopped by well-qualified police in an upscale town, if you didn't have any difference between how the black motorists were treated by the police and anybody else, I think that would tell you something.
Now the trouble with all of these statistics is That any one measure of any of this stuff doesn't tell you enough.
It just doesn't tell you enough.
When somebody says insufficient data set, I don't know.
I doubt it. Because there must be thousands and thousands of people that you could poll for that data set.
All right. So, let's talk about...
Let's talk about how to cure this systemic racism.
We'll go to the whiteboard.
So as I'm thinking through this, like, what's a system?
So if there's systemic racism, it means there's a problem with the system.
By definition, it's not a problem with the people.
It's something about the systems.
So your first system that everybody is involved with in life is your family.
If your family system is bad, How well are you going to do in school?
Well, on average, not so well.
If this system is broken, your school is broken, and then you don't get the good job, you don't get to the good college.
Basically, everything that you can measure in these systems is all pre-broken.
So if you imagine that these systems are racist, you might be looking in the wrong place.
Because if you get this part right, there's a lot less problem in all the rest of it.
But how do you fix this part?
You know, I think conservatives are a little bit harsh, I think, on this question.
Because if you're lucky enough to have an intact family, and you know, your family unit is pretty strong, you know, nothing's perfect, but your family unit is strong, you don't have any divorce, and it's two parents and all that, well, congratulations.
Aren't you lucky? But you know, that's not the rest of the world.
A kid doesn't get to choose if they have two loving parents.
In the real world, it doesn't always work out.
Here's the problem with the family.
I finally came up to a way that I can just use math to explain the problem.
The problem with family as a system is the same problem as trying to invest in an individual stock.
What's the problem in investing in one stock?
No diversification, right?
So if that one stock turns out to be bad, you've lost all the money you ever had.
Because in this example, you put all of your money you ever made into one stock.
If it goes bad, you've lost everything.
That's why it's a bad idea.
Instead, you buy a basket of stocks that represent the whole market.
Some of them can be bad, some of them can be good, but on average, they'll be more good than bad.
So that's just using math.
To learn how to invest.
The family unit is the same problem.
You've got two parents.
What are the odds that both of them are good?
Meaning that one of them is not an abuser.
One of them is not a pedophile.
One of them doesn't have a drug problem.
One of them isn't cheating.
What are the odds that you get two good ones?
Well, there are lots of people who got lucky.
Maybe a third in the country I don't know what the number is, but maybe a third of people got lucky and they got a strong family unit.
But I don't think it's more than a third.
I'll bet two-thirds have at least one bad parent or none, or no good parents, right?
So what could you do to compensate for the fact that you don't have diversification in your family?
So if you get a bad one, You're in bad shape.
Now imagine, if you will, that you also have the ripple effect from the legacy of slavery, the original sin.
Is it likely that even these many years after it, and Dave Chappelle makes a good point, it was his, Dave Chappelle's great-grandfather was actually a slave.
He was actually a slave.
So as Chappelle says, that's today.
If you knew somebody, or you can name somebody in your own family who was actually a slave, that's today.
That's his point, that that ripple effect is not like some tiny ripple from a million years ago.
It's pretty present.
If you look at history in general, it's kind of close.
And so one could imagine that that would have effects on the family, which would then have a ripple effect.
All the way through. Now, what do you do about that?
Nobody knows. Nobody knows.
Literally nobody has a good idea what to do about this.
Because there's no way to really fix a family.
Is there? How do you fix families?
The problem is, the problem is, math.
There's a simple diversification problem and you just can't diversify with just two people.
The math doesn't work.
The odds that one of them will be bad is just so high.
And that has nothing to do with ethnicity.
It's just math. There aren't that many good people in the world that you could expect most people to have two good parents.
And so I suggest the following as something to be tested.
Here's my hypothesis.
And it goes like this. There are some people in some situations...
That needs something more like a tribe.
Now, we're not getting ethnic here.
Tribe applies to Antifa, all the white people in Antifastan.
It feels like they have built a tribal kind of society, which is why I'm so interested in it.
If you look at the videos coming out of Antifastan, there are two things that occur to me.
One, it's not economically viable.
In other words, it can't last because it doesn't have the systems in place to make it last.
So that's obvious. But number two, they seem to be having a good time.
Right? They seem to be having a good time.
Secondly, I don't think there's been that much violence compared to how much you would expect without police, right?
And I wonder if there are not...
At least for some period of life, a situation where you'd be better off in a village.
And here's why.
If you have two parents, what are the odds that one of them would be a good mentor?
You only have two.
Let's make it harder.
You only have one parent.
Very common, right?
How many households have one parent?
It's big. It's like 40%.
Giant number. You only have one parent.
What are the odds that that one parent has good advice for life?
They might. They might.
I would say that my mother had good life advice, so I got lucky.
My father suggested that I go work for the post office because they have good benefits.
So I had two parents.
One of them, my mother, gave me extraordinary life advice.
You know, in a variety of ways.
My father gave me the worst life advice I've ever heard in my whole fucking life, which is go get a job for the post office, which is where he worked, because the health care benefits are great.
What if I'd had no parents who were good at giving life advice?
What if there were none?
Right? That's got to be very, very common.
But now imagine that you're part of a tribe.
And you can define tribe any way you want, but let's just say it's a loose structure of people who have some mutual support there.
Well, the odds that at least one person in the tribe has some good advice is pretty good.
It's pretty good. So, the argument that I'm going to make is just math.
That there might be some people in some situation, not you, not you, If a family works for you, do the family.
That seems like a pretty good deal.
But I just don't think it works for everybody.
And I think we have to recognize there's not one size fits all.
Now, a trend that I think supports this idea, the tribal experiment idea, is that apparently young people are growing up slower.
Have you heard that? Now, I don't know exactly what that means, but there's some sense that, even biologically, that young people are not maturing in the same way as in the past.
In the old days, if you were 16, you could run a business, literally.
A friend of mine was running a bowling alley.
He was in charge. He was the boss.
His father had invested in it, and he just ran the bowling alley.
So he was running a business completely, At age 16.
How did it work out?
Great. He went on to become a rich entrepreneur.
He's retired and travels around in golf now.
Now, was that experience, you know, but how often does that happen today?
Do you know any 16 year olds who are running adult businesses?
I mean, I think people are just postponing the adult part as long as possible.
And I think if you've got people who have aged and of high school, They're not in college, but they're not yet mature enough to have their own family.
What do you do with them? What do you do with people who are not so young their parents are taking care of them, but they haven't matured to the place where they can just start their own family or go into business and be a good citizen?
There's a whole bunch of people who need a little extra maturing, and maybe college is not their calling.
What do you do with them? Well, it could be this.
It could be Antifastan.
It could be a tribe. And if you get the first part right, in other words, if you don't break a kid in the first few years of their life, if you get the first few years right, that's a pretty good basis for the other systems to work out.
So here's my overall point.
When we talk about systemic racism, we're talking about everything from college to jobs to banking and loans to What?
Basically everything, right?
The legal system.
But is it not true that every one of those systems is really just an outcome of the very first system being broken?
The first system being the family.
And I think that's the conservative view.
But what's not the conservative view is that the way to fix it is just have a better family.
That's not a thing, conservatives.
Let me speak to the conservatives who are listening here.
If your advice for black people is have better families because that's what worked for you, that's terrible advice.
I mean, it would be great if you could do it, right?
If that were something people could just want to do, oh, now you told me.
Why didn't you tell me?
All I had to do was have a strong family.
All right, problem solved.
It's just not actionable advice.
It's just useless to have that opinion because it doesn't help anybody.
Unless you're going to say, all right, here's how to fix it, and nobody's suggested anything like that, you're going to have to try something else.
So I say let's experiment a little bit.
Maybe all this, especially the male energy, which is the most dangerous, maybe you put it in a tribe.
So here's the other thing.
If you see the pictures from Antifa stand, You see that they want to be in groups.
You know, they had a dodgeball pickup game that didn't go well because they don't have rules.
But the fact that they just wanted to be together in a tribal kind of situation, it might be that that's exactly what they need, but maybe you do that for a few years, and then you're mature enough, and then you say, huh, I met somebody in my tribe, now we're going to go start a family.
But now we're ready. We've matured enough.
We got some good mentoring.
You know, we're in a good situation.
And now we'll go to the next system because we're ready.
All right. Howard Stern's in trouble for blackface.
That's the whole story.
Howard Stern's in trouble for blackface.
Nobody's safe. Why in the world anybody had ever put on blackface?
Was there ever a time in my lifetime that that was okay?
Even if you were a shock jock, at what point was that ever okay?
I don't remember any time when that was okay.
Yet a lot of people didn't.
All right. Let's see if I covered all my incredibly fascinating points.
It seems that the protests, if they're still going on, are still not being covered by the news.
Is that true? Are you still noticing that the news is not covering the protests?
If there's one thing you need to understand, it's that the news is assigning our opinions.
If you could understand that one thing, you would know what needs to be changed in the system.
What needs to be changed in the system is you either need more competition for the news, So you're not being fed sort of a mainstream narrative, which is what's happening now, or just a better way to understand what's going on in your world.
Now let me make a general statement that when I thought of it, it's sort of a crushing thought, but I think we can get past it.
It goes like this. For my entire lifetime and probably several lifetimes before mine, Would you agree with the following statement, that humanity has been doing its best to move from an emotional, irrational civilization early humanity to a fact-based rational data-driven civilization
you'd accept that as a truth that we have really been trying hard to move toward using facts and data to make our decisions I think you'd agree with that but there was one problem we didn't see coming that is that all of our data would be a lie so we've built an entire civilization to depend on having facts and data that we would then put our analytics on to make decisions
but what we didn't see coming is that 100% of our data is fake And Now, it doesn't have to be.
It didn't have to be.
But the people who give us the data, at least the stuff we make decisions on in politics, it's all lies.
It's all out of context.
The videos are all lies.
As I said before, there's always something before or after the video, something that's not shown in the video.
So we've created a civilization that can't work.
Let me say that again.
We have consciously created a system, a civilization, that depends on good data to make decisions, while also creating a system that guarantees that data will never be good.
Not even sometimes.
Not even by accident.
It will never be good.
Because people are making up their versions of their political data.
Well, I think I'll leave out this data, because that doesn't support my side.
I think I'll leave out the other data, because that doesn't support my side.
Oh, all the data turned out to be wrong?
Let's run a correction that nobody will see.
So we've actually created a system which, if you were to look at it objectively, you know, I like to use the example of the advanced species of alien land on the planet, and they're the only ones who are unbiased.
So they look at our system, and they're trying to study us as just scientists who are dispassionate about our existence.
They just want to understand it.
They look down and say, all right, what's the system they got there?
Okay, good. They really like facts.
Excellent. They want to use reason and science.
Okay, good. Good.
And now let's look at their facts.
Oh, they also invented a system to lie to you on all the facts.
All of them. Now, your first thought is like, oh, Scott, you're talking about political facts.
You know, I get that. Everybody discounts that because you know both sides are lying about their political facts.
Oh, no. I'm not talking about political facts.
Because it turns out that all facts are political.
You know, it didn't have to be that way.
How about gun control facts?
How about climate change facts?
How about race relations facts?
How about economic facts?
How about trade relations facts?
International facts? Who got gassed and who didn't facts?
None of it's true.
None of it. Absolutely none of it is dependable.
In fact, the using of models to predict is sort of a confession that is made up.
It really is. That's a longer argument.
But the models are to fool you into thinking that the data is useful.
Because if you looked at the data, you'd have questions.
You'd say, I'm not sure that data is correct for this reason or that reason.
But if you look at the model, it makes you think past the sale.
The model makes you focus on the model.
It doesn't make you focus on the data that went into the model.
So that's part of the magic trick.
Look at my model.
Where'd you get the data?
Look at my model. Can I take a look at your data?
Look at my model.
My model is beautiful.
Look at that curve. But where's your data?
Have you seen my model?
So that's the world we've created, one in which we consciously build systems that can't work together.
You know, one requires facts, and the other, make sure you don't know them.
That's the system. So I think we can improve on that, and I think we'll be fine, by the way.
And I do agree with the uber-optimists The top optimists for the economy.
I think the economy is really going to surprise you how well it does.
And here's the other thing that the news is lying to you about at the moment.
Have you seen all the reporting about the new cases of coronavirus?
There's a lot of them, right? Now, some of it might be because there's more testing, but there does seem to be, you know, I do buy into the likelihood that there's also just lots more infection because people are getting out more.
But do you know what they are de-emphasizing?
They're de-emphasizing deaths.
Do you know why they're de-emphasizing deaths?
Because deaths are going down, or at least staying flat.
We're not having more people dying.
We're just having lots more infections.
If it stays that way, and I think it might, because you could have lots of infections so long as you're extra protecting the vulnerable people.
As long as you've learned to use ventilators correctly.
Maybe the therapeutics are already working.
Some people say the hydroxychloroquine already works, and that might be behind some of the drop in deaths.
I'd say that's unconfirmed.
So look at the deaths.
If you see that all of the reporting is about the number of infections, that's fake news.
Because what you care about the most Is deaths.
If people get it and get better, now of course there is the worry that there are long-term repercussions.
I'm not minimizing that.
But so far, that doesn't seem to be a giant problem.
It seems to be on the smaller side, unless you haven't.
If it's you who gets at them, of course it's a big problem.
Yeah, I don't know if the number of new tests explains the number of infections I'm speculating that it doesn't, but you're right, that's an open question.
Hospital admissions are only relevant if they're impacted, meaning that if their capacity is tested.
And it seems to me if the death rate is going down or staying the same, that even if the hospitals are impacted, it's not the kind of impact that we saw in the beginning.
If people are dying and being put on ventilators, That is a big impact.
But if people are simply being treated and outpatient, maybe they're in the hospital for a little bit, but they don't go all the way to the ICU, that's not nearly as bad as packing your ICUs and then the people die anyway.
That's your worst situation. How many people died from the flu this year?
Well, you know there's a big question about whether the regular flu kills more than a few thousand people because the number is not counted.
It's actually estimated.
And I believe, I would say, the evidence strongly suggests that the people who estimate the number of people who die from the regular flu are probably lying, probably know it, and they're doing it to get you to take the flu shot.
So my guess is that Like all the other data in the world, that it's just fake, the number of regular deaths.
And the reason that, well, you can know, let me say it's stronger.
The number of regular flu deaths is fake news.
It's just fake. Here's how you know.
And you can test this, right?
The number of people that they say die from the flu, which really means pneumonia, because the flu causes the pneumonia, that's how it usually happens, is around in that 50,000-a-year range.
Something else that's in that same range of deaths per year is the number of people who die from fentanyl.
Now, do you know anybody who died from a fentanyl overdose?
Almost certainly. I'll bet you do.
I certainly do.
My stepson died from it.
And, you know, and I know other people.
But I'll bet you've never heard of anybody who died from a flu that gave them pneumonia that they died.
I've never heard of it. I've been around for a long time.
Never heard of it once.
That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I mean that it's just a smaller number.
So, you know, if I had heard of people dying of regular flu that caused pneumonia that caused them to die, then I'd say, oh, that probably is 50,000 of those a year because that's about how often I hear of somebody dying from an overdose.
If you're hearing about them at about the same rate, even approximately, you could say to yourself, okay, they're probably in the same general range.
But if you've heard of nobody, nobody, it was always fake news.
