Episode 1027 Scott Adams: I Solve Police Racism in Terms of Killing, Talk About Deadly Force.
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
President Trump, slippery shoes and a slippery ramp
Christian preacher choked out in Antifastan
CNN's despicable fanning the flames of racism
Conservative view on criminals...regardless of race
Whiteboard1: Plan to Eliminate Police Racism (Killings)
Whiteboard2: Low Information Voter Test
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If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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Just a little bit better.
By the way, if any of you tried this experiment, turn off all of your screens and walk outside.
Is it different? Let me show you the difference between looking at any of my screens.
I'll use my phone as an example.
Versus turning my phone off and going outside.
First, I'd like to give you my impression of just walking outside without my screens.
Oh, what a nice day!
Summer's coming! Okay, that's me just walking outside without any of my screens.
And now, a one-act play of me looking at any of my screens this month.
Let's see what's in the news.
And scene.
And so I suggest, if any of you are feeling a little bit of tension, A little bit of stress?
Are you worried about the future?
Maybe turn off these things that are jacked into the part of your brain that causes you to be excited and stressed out.
Maybe put that aside a little bit.
Just a little bit. You'll feel a lot better.
Let's talk about the news.
Wendy's, the hamburger chain, last week announced they were going to give half a million dollars To, I think, some cause that would help with Black Lives Matter.
To end racial discrimination and calm down the racial problems in this country.
Half a million dollars from Wendy's.
That was pretty good. In unrelated news, protesters burned down a Wendy's last night.
So, I guess that didn't work out.
In other news, Trump is 74 today.
He's 74 years old.
Which is way too old to be president.
Let's be honest. The fact that we even consider candidates who will be over 70 when they're serving as president is just not good.
That's just not good managing of your country.
It really isn't. But, I gotta say, Trump won fair and square against who he ran against.
So there's that.
You saw the video.
The Trump critics are trying to turn this into something.
So Trump gave his speech yesterday, and then a military person helped him down a ramp after his speech.
Now, as he was going down the ramp, he was moving very carefully, as if there's something wrong.
And so, of course, his critics figured that the something wrong...
It was Trump. There must be something wrong with him.
He can't walk, blah, blah, blah.
However, let me give you some context, just to throw in there.
I don't know why he was walking the way he was walking as it appeared on camera, but I will give you this context.
If you're wearing a suit, and you're the president, and you have all the money in the world, The odds of your shoes being newish is pretty high, right?
I don't think the president wears old, worn-out shoes.
Probably got quite a few pairs, and they're almost certainly on the newer side of things.
New shoes are slippery.
New shoes are slippery.
And so are ramps.
Ramps are slippery.
If you are a certain age, and you've got slippery shoes, and you're walking down a slippery ramp, You walk exactly the way the president did.
And if you're smart, you've got somebody next to you holding your arm because the odds of you going down are pretty good.
They're pretty good. It doesn't matter who you are.
If you've got slippery shoes on a slippery ramp.
Now, do I know that the ramp was slippery?
Nope. Do not.
But I can tell you that I've given lots of speeches on stages.
Sometimes there were ramps.
Sometimes I had to navigate a ramp with slippery shoes on.
Do you know how I walked?
Just like Trump. You take steps that are like one inch.
You're like, uh, uh, uh.
So you don't take big steps.
You take the smallest step you can and just try to stay over yourself because you think you're going down, especially if people are watching, right?
So I would say that's a lot of nothing, but I would extend that point to this.
Video lies.
Now, you're saying to yourself, oh yeah, I know that a video can be manipulated.
No, no, no. I'm not talking about manipulated video.
I'm talking about ordinary video.
Ordinary video lies basically every time.
Now, why do I say that?
I don't mean that it lies intentionally.
I mean that all video leaves out stuff.
And the stuff it leaves out could easily be as important as what you see.
For example, the video of the president walking down the ramp.
What was shown was the president having some concern walking down a ramp.
The video showed that very clearly.
What did it not show you?
Well, it didn't show you his shoes.
It didn't show you the bottom of his shoes to see if they're newish and slippery.
It didn't show you the ramp so you could get an idea if they had modified it to have any gripping stuff on it.
Because if there was some kind of a rug on the ramp or a mat in which it was not slippery at all, you'd say to yourself, oh, okay, that's good context.
So now I really do have to wonder why he was walking that way.
The video doesn't show you what the president was wearing under his suit.
Probably a lot of armor, right?
Body armor. He's in public.
So he's got unusual body weighting.
He's 74 years old.
He's on a ramp. It's probably slippery.
How much of that did you see on the video?
Basically none. The important variables weren't even on the video.
Likewise, I would say that every video that you see about every topic is a lie.
It is a lie. And that should be your first assumption.
Our first assumption at the moment is if you see something on video, video for God's sakes.
You see it on video, it's just like you're there.
So your first instinct is, well, if I'm looking at it, and it's right on video, the odds of it being misleading or wrong are what?
What's your first instinct if you see it with your own eyes on video?
Your instinct is, well, it could be misleading.
I mean, it could be.
But I'm looking right at it.
So I'm gonna say, I don't know, top of my head, 95% chance that what I'm seeing is the correct and accurate story.
About 95% chance.
Do you know what the real number is?
I don't either, but I'm gonna put a guess on it.
The real number of the times that you would see a video Let's limit it to videos that are national topics.
So I'm not talking about a video of your kid's birthday party.
That might be perfectly accurate.
I'm talking about any video that has caused a national conversation.
I'm talking about the important ones, the ones that really move the news.
What percentage of them do you think are accurate?
Now, accurate would mean that it gives you enough of the story that you don't need anything else.
There's nothing left out.
There's no context that's important.
There's nothing after the video ended that mattered.
And there's nothing before it happened that mattered.
So how often under that scenario, how often is the video that you see on big national events, how often is it accurate?
I would say closer to 20% of the time.
That would be my guess.
Because there's a rule in play that's very counterintuitive.
And the rule is that the reason it's in the news is because it's shocking.
What makes something shocking?
What makes something shocking is that it shouldn't happen.
It's a violation of expectations in a very major way, or a violation of what's right or proper or should happen, that sort of thing.
In any case, whether there's a video or no video, and I suppose you just heard this, you don't know if there's a video, you don't know what evidence is involved, but there's a claim, and it's a shocking claim.
That's all you know. Something that doesn't often happen or shouldn't happen or should never happen in a world that's operating right is reported to have happened.
How often does it turn out that it's true?
And the answer is almost never.
Yeah, you don't realize that because you get caught up in the details of things and there are so many things that do turn out just the way you thought that you don't notice this special category.
And the first time I read about this, it just blew my head off because once you've heard about it, you see it everywhere.
And the special category is that you hear a story that a man bit a dog.
So that's wrong, right?
A dog bites a man, that's not so unusual.
But a man bites a dog?
Well, that's in the news. How often, when you find out all the details about that story, about the man who bit a dog, how many times, out of all the times that it's happened, does the story turn out to be exactly what you thought?
There was a man. There was a dog.
That man bit a dog.
And the answer is close to zero.
Close to zero.
So the moment you hear a story like that, man bit a dog, your instinct should be close to zero that it's true.
But in fact, your instinct is the exact opposite because you still Even people who know that fake news is massively pervasive, even people like that, you still think the news is probably true 95% of the time.
It's just a reflex.
You can't really turn it off, because it comes from sources that, by their design, are meant to look credible.
So, I'm going to extend that point about anything that is an unusual story, of the type of man bites dog, that if the video shows a man biting a dog, it's also a lie.
Not every time.
Not 100% of the time, but really close.
Really close to 100% of the time.
So your first assumption should be on every video you see from today on, because now you've learned this, right?
So from this day forward, no matter how obvious that video is, and let's say, again, we're limiting it to things that were so shocking they made it on the news, your first reaction should be, probably not true.
And in fact, probably should be in the 90% range plus.
But in fact, we have a society that operates on the opposite assumption, and this is what we got.
So what you get is exactly what you see, and it should be getting much worse.
Because now that it's clear that you can use a misleading video to make any point you want, what are the odds that there will be more misleading videos in the atmosphere?
100%. 100%.
So you should be seeing in the next few months just a blizzard of misleading video.
Most of them will be lies.
Now, the weird thing about these lies, if I can call them that, is that they can even lie in the right direction.
And what I mean by that is the video could be completely misleading and give you the opposite conclusion from what you should have concluded, but it could also be completely misleading and lead you to a conclusion that's correct, just by coincidence.
So it could be that everything you saw on the video was just total BS, but by coincidence, the bad impression you got was also coincidentally true.
So that could happen.
So it's a very confusing situation.
Speaking of news that gets corrected, Brett Baer apologized for Fox News showing an offensive graphic.
I talked about this before, but the apology is worth noting.
And the graphic showed how the stock market reacts based on different tragedies, including famous in-the-news shootings of black people, including MLK. Now, of course, most of you have probably exactly the same reaction that I had when I saw it, which was, is this even real?
Did somebody think that was okay to put on TV? Turns out it was real.
It was real.
They really put that on TV. Now, I would not call that a man-biting-a-dog weird situation because weird and offensive graphics on the news are pretty common.
Pretty common. So that doesn't fit into so unusual that you shouldn't believe it.
But here's what I liked about this story, if I could add some positivity.
So Brett Baer, I guess it was on his show that it was shown, gave an apology.
And it was unequivocal.
Unequivocable. Meaning it was just a complete apology.
Complete mistake. Sorry.
Fixed it. I give Bret Baier A+. And Fox News as well.
Now again, I remind you that my standard for judging people is the following, and I recommend it to you all.
I do not judge people by their mistakes.
Because if you did, you're going to hate everybody.
Right? If you judge people by their mistakes, who's left, really?
I mean, I hate to be Jesus for a moment, but, you know, let he who is without sin cast the first stone kind of rings true in my world, right?
You know, show me the perfect people.
You can't. So judging people by their mistakes, well, of course, in the sense of the legal system, you still have to judge them because you have to have a system that works.
But in terms of non-legal issues of just, you know, offense, if somebody apologizes this cleanly, and I think it was within 48 hours, I use that as my standard for quick enough, I say A+. So Fox News,
based on the standard which I apply, which I'd apply to anybody, you know, everybody's the same on the standard, A perfectly clean and clear apology, no ambiguity, no excuses, A+. I would like to see a lot more of that in the world.
Now, I'm not big on apologies in general.
I'm not big on apologizing just because you offended somebody.
But in this case, the apology is very clear.
This was a mistake.
We see it too. Didn't see it at first, but now we see it.
And apologizing for an actual mistake Always acceptable in my world.
Apologizing for somebody's opinion of what you did, well, that's a little different.
You don't always have to apologize just because someone else was offended.
But if you can see it too, once they point it out, you go, oh, man, I see it too.
Yeah, apologize.
That's my advice.
All right. Facebook fired.
I love this story. I got all these feel-good stories for you today.
I'm also going to solve racism in policing.
So I'm going to do that today, a little bit later.
That's worth waiting for. We'll go to the whiteboard for that.
So Facebook fired an employee because the employee criticized another employee on Twitter for not adding a statement of support for Black Lives Matter to documentation on an open source project.
So let me say this to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.
You know, I, like many people, I've been critical of Facebook.
I've said lots of bad things about Facebook, right?
You know, we all have.
We all have our criticisms.
As a company, it's one of the great companies of all time.
Zuckerberg himself, say what you will about, you know, I know you've got your opinions, but as a CEO... And as an entrepreneur, he's pretty damn good.
I mean, really, really, really good.
And I think there's general agreement that Zuckerberg is just really, really good at this stuff.
It's not an accident that Facebook is big.
And so they fired the employee who complained, as opposed to firing...
Of course, that wouldn't make sense, because the other employee was on...
Wait, fired an employee who publicly criticized...
Oh, yeah. No, it was a Facebook employee.
So, Facebook employee criticized the Facebook employee and got fired for it.
And I say, good job, Facebook.
I wasn't expecting Facebook to be the one that drew the line.
You know, like, what's too far?
You figure that it would be the conservatives who are pushing back At whatever this, you know, creeping change in society is.
And then if it gets too far, it will be the, let's say, the conservative wall of resistance that stops it if it can be stopped at all.
But it looks like Facebook just said, eh, that's far enough.
If you're complaining about another employee who isn't complaining enough, you're just a dick.
Alright, that's no longer about the issue.
That's about you being a dick to another employee.
And if you're going to be a dick to another employee, your ass is fired at Facebook.
Facebook. You know, I gotta be fair.
I criticize them all the time, but they got this right.
They got that as right as you can get something right.
Alright. Another fun story, in a weird way, is in Antifa stand, a Christian preacher somehow got into the mix there.
He snuck in somehow, started preaching some stuff, and they didn't like what he was saying.
I think it was maybe not pro-Antifa enough.
And so a group of Antifa grabbed the preacher and put him in a chokehold, and They put him in a chokehold.
And as they put the chokehold on him, and the guy's yelling, you're choking me.
I can't breathe.
So, you know, and I'm not making fun of George Floyd.
That part is beyond, you know, way beyond anybody joking about that.
I'm only joking about Antifa Stan and this preacher guy getting choked.
Because if there's one thing...
Well, alright, the fun part about this is watching Antifistan realize that they're going to have to recreate everything that they hated.
In order to exist, they'll just recreate systems that were a problem.
So they've already got a wall.
They built a racist wall on day one.
They built a racist police force on day two.
Now they're putting people in chokeholds for...
For violating freedom of speech.
And I guess they're pro-gun now.
And they segregated their...
They even started Jim Crow laws.
Jim Crow laws in their public garden.
Anyway. And again, I tweeted this yesterday and I didn't get very many retweets.
I have these two feelings about the people in Antifa stand.
On one hand, it's completely unacceptable.
They're taking other people's property.
We can't have a system that allows random chaos.
You have to have some kind of control for society to work.
So I've got a long list of my complaints, right?
But it's not all complaints.
I can't shake the fact That I have a natural affection for rebels.
People who just can't stand the system.
People who are going to break the system.
Now, it's one thing if you're just a criminal.
If you're just a criminal, I don't have too much sympathy for you.
But, if your higher level thinking is that you're not trying to hurt anybody per se, you just have a different idea of how the world should run, etc.
Even if it's a wrong idea.
There's something about rebel energy that I just like.
I like it. And I'm not going to apologize for that, because I know you'd like me to, right?
Wouldn't you like me to apologize for that?
Because I shouldn't say anything positive about the lawless rebels who are taking over Antifa stand.
I agree to the whole list of what's wrong with that.
The whole list.
Every checkbox. There's nothing on the list that I disagree with you about the bad parts.
But I just sort of like rebels.
You know? And I don't want to hide it.
Because I feel like I'd just be lying to you if I hid that.
And I'll go further and say that although Antifastan by itself may not be the most productive use of energy, we're going to learn a lot.
And if the only thing that came out of this is, hey, let's try this same experiment, but in a more appropriate place.
Some place where they've planned it better, some place where the only people there, other people who want to be there, some place where they haven't taken over anybody's land or property or anything like that.
So I think there's a way for that energy to be channeled into something that I would be fully supportive of, which is people who just want to try something new.
Now, trying to change the entire country, because some small group of people have an idea about that, Well, maybe it's impractical.
But trying it in a community, and then finding out it works, or what works and what doesn't, and then extending that learning to other communities, or maybe in 20 years the whole country says, you know, these experiments work so well, let's just change our whole system.
Could happen. Wouldn't rule it out.
I am supportive in a weird, emotional way, while I agree with you 100% that law and order must be restored eventually.
I wouldn't hurry about it, because I think we're learning something just by watching it.
And a week or two isn't going to make that much difference to anybody.
All right. I know you want me to talk about the new video of Rayshard Brooks, who was...
The man who was killed at the Wendy's by police.
And I'm going to make a general comment about it.
So I'm only going to talk generally.
So it's not about this incident.
It's not about black people.
It's not about race.
General comments.
I don't care about anybody.
I don't care their ethnicity.
Not relevant. I don't care about anybody who fights with a police officer and gets killed.
I don't. I just don't care about them.
Now, that's different from saying everybody did the right thing.
It's different from saying the police did exactly what they should have.
That's different from saying maybe there's a better system where this can never happen.
I'm up for all of those conversations.
But I will not care.
You can't make me care about somebody who wrestled with a cop and got his ass shot.
Now CNN is reporting this as this poor man was getting ready to celebrate with his daughter her birthday.
Okay, everybody's human.
Everybody's got a human side.
But that feels like trying to whip up racial division.
So that CNN headline looks like nothing but an attempt, a naked attempt, to make people more racist.
Meaning, make people hate each other for race.
So, CNN's despicable that they would treat it that way.
Now, I also agree that any person who is killed, whether it be in the line of crime or anything else, they're still human beings and still have to be fully valued as human beings.
No exceptions to that.
But how much I care personally about any person, you know, white, black, or anything else, Who gets killed by a cop after wrestling with a cop?
I mean, they were actually on the ground and it looked like the cop, at least one of them, might have been injured.
It looked like he was limping.
And, I don't know, I'm going to save all of my sympathy for other people.
Do you know who I care more about?
A lot more. A black kid who couldn't get lunch today.
I care about that.
I care about a black kid who couldn't get lunch.
I care about that a lot.
Do I care about a guy who wrestled with the police and got his ass shot?
Zero. Zero fucks.
I don't care about that even a little bit.
And you can't make me. There's nothing you can do to make me care about that.
So, and then on top of that, my other larger issue is stop making me look like an idiot by debating anecdotes.
I refuse to be an anecdote idiot.
Can we all agree that the problem is not what happened one day in one place, ever?
The big conversation, even if that's a tragedy, even if it's a crime, that's not what the conversation is about.
It's about the larger issue of pervasive racism.
Don't show me anecdotes if that's your argument.
If your argument is the big picture, show me the data of the big picture and take all the anecdotes away.
Because the anecdotes do nothing but make it worse.
I would argue, however, that the George Floyd thing did one very useful thing for society, which is it made us really talk about an issue that we're having trouble talking about.
And there's a very interesting thing happening right now, as in right now, which is that, you know, the first several days, because everything was so raw, first several days after the George Floyd tragedy, emotions were so raw that I think by general common sense and decency that anybody who had a dissenting opinion on that just said,
and I think you have to have some appreciation for this, I think everybody should appreciate the following statement.
There were a lot of people who had dissenting opinions right away about their opinion of what we could or could not know about that situation based on the video.
Those people with dissenting opinions, just out of a sense of decency and also self-preservation, I'm sure, held off and just said, let's step back.
And we're not going to be quibbling the details on this one.
This one isn't the one for debate.
This is the one we all felt it the same way.
The details, the legalities, the technicalities of it, that's going to come later, and those will matter a lot.
But what we saw was a shared experience.
And I think that I've never seen so much unity on anything in the United States, which was The first hours and days after it, the people with dissenting opinions just kept them to themselves.
And I think that that was, again, it's the dog that doesn't bark so you don't notice it so much.
You don't notice what doesn't happen.
But this was a gigantic thing that didn't happen.
Meaning that a lot of well-meaning people said, okay, I see it.
I'd heard it in the statistics.
I'd heard the argument.
Maybe I had a different sense of the statistics, but I didn't feel it.
I could hear the complaints from the black community about police abuse.
I hear it. I'll feel it.
And then you watch the video, and now it's different.
Now you hear it, but you also feel it.
You can feel it.
It's almost like it's you.
Because you were just there.
It was part of almost your experience.
Even though the video gave you some distance, it didn't feel like distance.
It didn't feel like much of a distance at all when you were watching it.
It felt like you were inside the video.
It was that powerful. So I would like to shout out to the people who held off.
The people out of just simple human decency said, at the moment, this is not for fighting.
This is not the debate moment.
This is a moment for something else.
So they stood back.
However, there's a time and a place for everything.
The brave people who were waiting in include people like Sam Harris, who I think risked his entire life and career by doing a podcast in which he simply talked about the data and the statistics and tried to put this in context in the most rational way that you can.
And we'll probably be cancelled for it.
I don't know if he has been yet, but it was pretty provocative without being bad intentions and without anything that I heard that was wrong.
There was some TDS in there, but that wasn't the topic of it.
And then I was just listening to Ben Shapiro yesterday, and Ben Shapiro was also, finally, I think he too, like everybody else, just out of a sense of decency, just held off a little bit.
But now he's just starting to ramp up into full speed.
This is one of those situations where you need a full Shapiro.
You know what I mean? You don't want Ben Shapiro operating at 25% power because that's not enough.
You want a Ben Shapiro that's full-throated.
Got that yesterday. I don't know how much he said before that.
I'm sure he's been leading up to this.
But at this point, he's just telling you the truth as he sees it.
And again, we're all seeing our own truth, but he's a strong voice.
So now you've got a Sam Harris who's telling you, you know, in very, what's the, just honest and well-meaning, but provocative as hell.
Even though it's honest and well-meaning.
And now Shapiro's in the fight.
So those are two people who just risked their entire lives to make this better.
They did. They both risked, when I say their life, well yeah, literally their life.
Because I think you could be in physical danger.
You could be in physical danger for even having the opinions that they've expressed in public.
Even though they're well-meaning and based on facts and rational, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter at all.
You know, Tucker's a little bit of a different category because I think he's playing to an audience a little bit more.
So if you were to compare Tucker's presentation, it's a little more, let's say, right-leaning.
Whereas, I would say that Sam Harris is not right-leaning at all, but he makes a similar case.
He just doesn't do it with a right-leaning bent.
And I would say that Ben Shapiro's take on it, you'd expect it to be leaning right, but you don't see that much of it.
I mean, there's reference to family, of course, but you take that out, otherwise it's just statistics.
So, and I've been trying to speak honestly on this topic, but of course it gets harder and harder.
But I'm going to be a little bit more, you know, following their lead, if you will.
If we assume that they're taking a leadership position on the question, and I think that's obvious, they are, then I will follow their leadership and, you know, move in the same direction, just being, trying to be a little more honest about a topic that is hard to be honest about.
So I'll just try to move that a little bit.
And we'll do that today in a minute.
All right. Here's an illusion that I think is hurting the world.
See if you think this is an illusion.
Conservatives don't care about other conservatives who break the law.
Now, Let me put it this way.
If you heard a story in the news about a black American who broke a law and the police killed him in the process of trying to catch up, let's say there was some resistance.
And then there was an identical story of a white Trump supporter who was also a criminal, broke the law, resisted arrest, police killed him.
Two identical stories.
Black guy and a white conservative.
If you're black, What do you think conservatives think about those two stories?
What's your opinion?
Because you probably think...
I'm just guessing.
Actually, I'll put this in terms of a question.
So rather than make it a statement, because I don't have facts to back it up, I'll put it in the form of a question.
If you're a member of the black community in America, do you think conservatives would see those two identical situations the same?
Would they see a Trump supporter who broke a law Resisted arrest and got killed the same as if a black Democrat did exactly the same thing.
Would conservatives see them the same?
And the answer is not just yes, but hell yes.
Why would you even ask that stupid question?
It's hell yes, right?
It's not even yes. It's yes squared, yes times a thousand.
How many times can I say yes?
Those are fucking identical.
to conservatives. Identical.
Because there's one standard.
Did you follow the law?
Did you follow the Constitution?
Did you yourself do some dumbass thing that got you shot?
Not my problem.
Alright? Not my problem.
I think that that would be the conservative view.
I think that the black population believes that conservatives would favor A conservative who is in exactly the same situation.
If you changed this Wendy's situation and you just replace Rayshard Brooks, the person who was killed, if you just replace him with a white guy, do I give a fuck about that white guy?
Not any.
Not even a little.
I do not care about that white guy.
In fact, that white guy is making me look bad, right?
Because everybody thinks that I'm responsible for everything that any white person does.
Isn't that how it works? Like, you're all responsible for anything that anybody does who has any commonality with you, even if you've never met them.
I hate that frickin' white guy.
I'm glad the police gunned him down, in case you're wondering what I think about the white guys.
No love, no affection, no fucks.
I don't give a fuck about the white guy who got shot by police if he wrestled with him.
And I'm certainly not going to extend that caring to any other group.
So I just think that's useful to know for context.
Here's a question. What should the police do if the suspect runs?
What does the law allow the police to do if a suspect runs?
Because if the police can't shoot a suspect who is running, and the suspect is capable of outrunning them, which I would think would be many suspects.
A lot of the people who get stopped often are young and healthy.
The police officer who stops them is often burdened with equipment on his body and typically not nearly as healthy or as fast as a young 20-something person of any race who gets stopped.
What is the rule for what a police officer can do if they can't catch him on foot and they can't shoot him?
So if I get stopped by the police...
For any crime. Let's say I was wanted for robbing a bank.
Let's say I was wanted for murder.
But I don't have a weapon on me.
So there's no weapon on me.
And I've been stopped on suspicion of murder.
The police say, hey, you know, put up your hands and turn around.
And then I do this. I put up my hands, and then I turn around and I just run.
I just run. I'm not a risk.
I have no weapon. Right?
So I just run. Can they shoot me?
Because I'm 63 years old and I don't even think they could catch me.
Honestly, I don't think they could catch me.
Even at my age.
I'll bet I can outrun the police.
Most of them. Not every cop, right?
A 20-something-year-old cop is going to catch me.
But give me a 45-year-old cop with full police gear on him.
I can outrun that guy.
So should I do that?
Should I just outrun him every time?
Because you can't have a system based on that.
So I just have a question about the rules.
Now, obviously, if the person running away was a serial killer, and you were pretty sure about that, you could probably kill him because you're saving society.
If it's a terrorist, and you're pretty sure about that, you could probably kill him if he's running away.
If he just shot somebody, and he still has a gun in his hand, and he's running away, you could probably kill him.
So there's lots of situations where you could certainly shoot somebody in the back.
I think.
Am I wrong about that?
I'm seeing lots of no's going by, but I don't know which question you're asking.
So, let me suggest the following.
The police should always have a body cam, or at the very least, they should have a camera.
And when they stop somebody, before that person turns to run away...
You should take a picture. If you have somebody's picture, and especially if you have their car with their license plate, you know who they are.
If you have identified somebody either by taking their picture, because later you could do facial recognition on that, so a picture or a license plate or looking at their ID probably tells you who they are.
In the specific case where you know the identity of somebody who's running away and they're not an immediate risk, shouldn't that be good enough if you know who they are?
So this is in the form of a question, because I think you'd have to really work in police enforcement to have a better sense if that's a good or a bad idea.
But what's different is you can now take a picture of somebody and Identify them.
Maybe not on the spot, but you could certainly figure out who they are from their picture.
If you can identify somebody, can you force them to come in to the police department and give themselves up?
Maybe in the old days you couldn't.
In the new days, you could close down their entire life.
In other words, let's say the police know that you ran away, and they have their name, so the first thing they do is they send you an alert on your phone.
The police have a warrant out for you.
Come in or your phone service will be turned off.
And you're like, whoa.
Next day, you don't come in.
Your phone service will now be limited.
You cannot use the internet.
Your phone service is now limited.
You can't text.
You can make a regular phone call and call 911.
That's it. Your next message comes in.
Your name has been given to all retailers.
So you can't buy anything.
Comes in, your credit has been ruined.
You'll never be able to get a loan.
You'll never be able to renew your license.
You'll never be able to buy insurance.
You'll never be able to get married, own a gun, legally, own a gun.
You'll never be able to have the rights of a citizen.
And we're going to track you forever.
Because since you have now surrendered, We're going to track your phone everywhere, and we're going to listen in on it anytime we want.
Now, obviously, they'd have to get a burner phone or something like that.
But the point is, you could create so much discomfort digitally that you could probably force some people to either come in or to live a life off the grid, which is pretty hard these days.
So I don't know if that's a good idea or a bad.
I'll just throw it in the mix. And the only thing I'm adding is that technology allows us to know who somebody is in a way we never could have known before.
And once you know who somebody is, there might be other ways to squeeze them rather than shooting them in the back as they run away.
Greg Gutfeld asked this provocative question.
When this is over, how will we deal with all the anchors who incited a race war and ignored the statistics?
Because that is what happened.
There were people who went on TV and sparked a race war for money.
You know, because it's their job.
They get paid. And they knew that that would be good for ratings.
So who knows what they were thinking, but that's what happened.
Here's the funniest thing, the funniest tweet I saw today.
I laugh pretty hard at this.
So this is from Ephraim Norwood, Twitter user.
And he was referring to a tweet of mine about Brian Stelter's new book.
Now, Brian Stelter has a book, and the funny thing is that the title of the book is Hoax.
He works for a network that does nothing but push hoaxes, and indeed, Mike Cernovich did this acclaimed documentary called Hoaxed, with an ED on the end, which is one of the best things you'll ever see, by the way.
If you haven't watched Cernovich's movie, Hoaxed.
Google it and find it and watch it.
It's sort of mind-blowing.
I would say it's in the past year, I've only probably absorbed three or four things that I really enjoyed in terms of movies, and that was one of them.
So watch that. Anyway, so Brian Stelter.
Imagine him in your head.
You all know who Brian Stelter is.
He wrote a book named Hoax, and this is what Ephraim Norwood said in his tweet.
He said, it's writing a book?
My God, it's evolving.
Where's this going next?
It's evolving.
Now, I appreciate a good insult, even when it's directed at me.
You've probably seen this.
Every once in a while, there'll be a troll who insults me so cleverly on Twitter.
That I could just have to give it a like.
Because I'm like, oh, that's pretty good.
Gotta admit, that's a pretty good insult.
So I always appreciate a good insult.
So nothing personal against Brian Stelter.
I'm not really a big fan of making fun of people for appearance.
But that's pretty funny.
He's evolving. I don't know why that's so perfect.
Alright. Now let's cure racism.
I've got ten minutes left. Last night I had this thought.
I may or may not have been a little bit high, and I wrote it on my whiteboard because I wasn't sure I would remember it in the morning.
And when I first had the thought, I thought to myself, I think this is a great idea, but I wonder what it will look like in the morning.
You ever have that situation?
Yeah, in the You know, at night you write down an idea or you wake up from a dream or something and you write down an idea and then the next morning you look at your idea and you're like, what the hell is wrong with me?
I should seek help. This is the worst idea ever.
Well, this idea seemed brilliant last night and was just as good this morning.
And I think I can end police racism killing.
So I'm just going to narrow it to police Killing more black people than white people as a ratio, right?
Here it is. By the way, you're going to love this.
You're going to love it and hate it at the same time.
Here's the idea. Create a prediction market, also known as a betting market.
And you make the predictions based on what you think the coming year will yield in terms of police killings.
I'm looking at the comments.
You see it, don't you?
I don't even have to finish this, do I? If you make a betting market on the statistics of police shooting, and so long as you're tracking it several ways, because that's the problem, right?
You want all the different statistics that anybody thinks are relevant.
So one would be making a bet on the total number of white people killed in the coming year by police.
Another would be the total number of black people killed.
Now, of course, that doesn't tell you anything about racism, because you'd have to dig deeper.
So you'd have those betting markets as well.
You'd have the betting market for the percentage as a percentage of population.
But that also doesn't tell you everything you need to know.
You'd have one for the percentage of people who were stopped by police.
Versus the whole population.
But again, that doesn't tell you everything you need to know.
So you want to look at it for as many things as you can measure.
You get them all. Everything you can measure, even if you think it's not the total answer by itself, it's part of the mosaic of data.
You build a betting market, and here's what's going to happen.
What will people on the left bet?
People on the left will bet that the statistics will show there is racism, and they're going to bet on that.
What happens if they lose?
Well, if they lose, then our ideas of what the statistics are will come together.
Right now, there are two different worlds of statistics.
There's the left statistics that say that racism is rampant and it's obvious in the data.
The conservatives have different data that says the data doesn't show racism the way you're explaining it anyway.
Racism does exist.
Everybody agrees. But in terms of police killing by race, conservatives say all the data says that isn't happening.
So how do you fix a problem when people can't agree on the data?
A betting market.
Let's call it a prediction market because it would be highly inappropriate to bet on people being killed, especially by race.
So can we all agree that there's extreme inappropriateness of betting on police killing people by race?
You would agree, right? Extremely inappropriate.
And you wouldn't do this unless you were adult enough to know where it's heading.
And the adult enough to know where it's heading is It's probably the only thing that will bring us together.
Because when you take it down to money, people stop screwing around.
I will say something, well, maybe I wouldn't.
People will say something that is a little bit untrue to win for their team.
But they won't do it when they bet their money on it.
People don't bet against what they think is going to happen.
But they will certainly argue against what they think will happen.
They will certainly exaggerate something if it gives them advantage in an argument, but they won't bet on it if it's their own money.
So if you turn it into a betting market and you have the right things tracked, which is also key if you're tracking the wrong things, it's not going to help you at all.
But if you track enough of the things, you will eliminate disagreement about the statistics.
And once you've eliminated disagreement about About the statistics, you've also eliminated that.
Now let's say it goes the other way.
What if conservatives are the ones that are completely wrong, and once they start tracking this thing, conservatives keep losing their bets?
So what would happen if, let's say, conservatives bet billions of dollars That discrimination of this specific type would not be found in the data.
What happens if they bet billions of dollars and then lost?
Well, that would be billions of dollars that would be transferred to the people who are aggrieved, assuming that they're betting on their own opinions.
So black people could, just theoretically here, black people could bet That their version of reality will be reflected in the data in 2021.
So they could place bets, and if they win, probably the odds are going to be in their favor, right?
They might have 10 to 1 odds that they're going to be right, because a lot of people think that they're right.
So they would win billions of dollars that would effectively be reparations.
Somebody beat me to it in the comments.
That's right. So the betting market would be, in effect, a reparations market, and the only thing that black people would need to do in order to take advantage of it is to be accurate in their understanding of the world.
So if their understanding of the world is more accurate than the people betting against them, they would make a windfall, and it would be a money machine.
You could just keep betting and winning and betting and winning.
Every year. You can bet every year.
And win every year. Unless they're wrong, in which case that moves you ahead too.
But am I done? Oh, I'm not done.
Come on. You think that's enough?
No way. I would also just like to see an internet test to identify low-information voters.
There was a new study that was written up in some Stanford publication.
It doesn't matter who the study is for my purposes.
But it was a new study that said...
So this is brand new.
Just today, I just read about it.
I'm not sure when it came out, but I think you'll see it in my Twitter feed.
Study comes out and it says that in Oakland...
So Oakland's important, so you have to know where the place is.
A study showed that police would stop, frisk, and handcuff black motorists...
I just made up that number, but it's some multiple like that, three to five times more.
It's way more. It's not even close.
So it's way, way more.
And then you would have a test, and you'd say, list at least three errors or omissions that would make this less credible than they would like it to be.
Now, I did this on Twitter just before I got on here, and I didn't tell people, I did not tell people what the three errors were.
Because it turns out there are more than three.
But let me give you just a sense of them.
Here's what they left out.
Did black police officers stop black motorists at the same rate as white police officers?
Isn't that obviously missing?
Because what if you found out...
We don't know. What if you found out that black police officers in Oakland...
Stopped black motorists exactly the same rate.
That's pretty important.
It's not there.
Not only is it not there, it's not called out as missing.
It's one thing not to track it.
It's a very big problem if you don't say, it would also be good to know if this held across different kinds of police officers, but we don't have that data.
That's left out.
That is really left out.
In fact, it's left out to the point of being criminal.
Because it's going to cause people to be killed.
You can see it in the riots, right?
That is actually, not tactically, but from a moral standpoint, that is a criminal omission.
Because it will inspire people to violence.
It's almost like it's designed to do that.
And that omission is so obvious that you'd have to think that the authors were aware That it was missing and chose to leave it out.
It was a decision to leave it out.
How important is that?
Pretty darn important.
Here's another thing that was left out.
What is the crime rate in Oakland between young black men and, let's say, everybody else?
Now, as Ben Shapiro pointed out, I'm going to give you approximate statistics.
It's somewhere in this range.
There's something like 13% of the population of America is African American, but the rate of crime is like 50% of some kinds of crimes.
50 or 60%, depending on if it's violent or property crimes, I guess.
And Ben Shapiro points out that even that is completely misleading.
And until he pointed it out, even I was thinking that that was a useful statistic.
Is it useful to know that 13% of African Americans, the population is 13% African American, but that for some types of crimes, 60% of them are committed by African Americans?
Is that statistic useful and accurate enough?
And the answer is, not even close.
And Ben Shapiro fixed it for me, and I've never had anybody say that, and it goes like this.
It's not 13%, because that would assume that women and men are committing crimes at about the same rate, and they're not.
That 13% really should be adjusted down to half of that, because that's the men.
It's the men, right?
So it's not exactly half, a little more than half, because women do commit crimes.
But it's more like 7% of the population Young black men, men, because men are the problem here, are committing 50 to 60% of the crime.
Now, if you thought that 7% of the people were committing 50 to 60% of the crime, and I told you that that same group were being stopped quite a bit more, say five times more, does that sound out of line?
No, it doesn't. Suddenly, because you've added context, it sounds like, well, that's about what you'd expect.
That seems, you know, it's in line with the crime.
Now, what's missing, also, is what were these motorists doing that caused them to be stopped?
For example, does the average 20-year-old black person speed at the same rate in Oakland as the average anybody else?
Because if there's a difference, you would expect the people who are speeding the most to get pulled over the most.
Suppose young men are the problem.
How many young white men are in Oakland compared to how many young black men are in Oakland?
I don't know. It's not in the study, right?
So one of the big things this does is that it mixes up the fact that It's young men who are the problem and it doesn't isolate that.
It's talking about black people and white people.
You should way isolate that a lot more down to men, mostly, and young ones.
It's mostly young men.
Alright, so I did see a study, and I don't know that there's any truth to it, that African American men, they actually sped more than other people.
I don't know if I believe that.
It's possible. But let me tell you my experience for driving through Oakland lots of times.
So I have personally driven an 880 that passes basically through Oakland lots and lots of times because that's my local area.
There is sort of a running joke, if you will, that the lane on the left, it's a multiple lane highway, that the lane on the left is the black lane.
Now, the reason for that is that if you're driving there and you make the mistake of getting in that lane, somebody will pull up to you at high speed right up to your bumper and sort of encourage you to get out of that lane, and that car will always be young black men.
Now, I've driven that highway a lot of times, and I stay out of the left lane because if I get in it, a car full of, it won't even be one driver, it'll be a car packed with Young black men will pull up to my bumper at a high speed, even if I'm doing 85, they'll pull up to my bumper and I have to get out of the way.
Now, do I watch them getting tickets?
Never seen it. I've literally never seen anybody get pulled over on 880 for driving too fast in the left lane.
I've never seen it.
And you can drive there all day long and watch cars full of young black men just zipping through that lane, exceeding the speed level.
Now, of course, what I'm telling you is completely anecdotal.
Should you reach any conclusions based on one guy's story about driving on a road?
No. No. It has no analytical value.
None. So you should discount it.
I'm just telling you my experience.
That I've been to this very place that they did the study, and I'm telling you, visually, haven't done the study, but visually and experientially, there's a really big difference in how everybody's acting.
And again, it's emphasis on young.
Because if you removed all the black people from Oakland, I'm pretty sure that young white men would still be exceeding the speed limit.
You would just replace them with other young men, and they'd probably be doing more illegal stuff than the rest of the public.
How about this?
What did the study say about how the people who were stopped reacted to the police?
Was it the same as everybody else?
Because if the police stop me, I'm very polite.
I'm very polite.
But I do not come from a history of racism.
I have not been told by the media that the police are targeting people like me.
I have not lived a life where I'm hearing story after story of somebody I know who was stopped and hassled by the police.
I do not live a life in which I have been pulled over often by the police.
I have been pulled over for things I didn't do, and it's pretty common, but not really hassled.
I mean, they all Those situations went perfectly smoothly.
So I don't have anything that would bias me toward the police in particular.
Like no experience in my life that really does that.
So how hard is it for me to be reasonable when the police stop me?
It's easy. It's easy.
Put me in the life of a young black man now.
Just my brain just gets transported into a young black man.
And now I get to live his experience.
And now the police pull me over.
Do I act exactly the same?
I doubt it. It's not because I'm black.
Because in this experience, I move my brain into the black person, right?
Just for the thought experience.
I'm not mad because I'm black.
I'm mad because I've got experience that says people will look like that guy, a police officer.
It's trouble. And I don't like it.
It offends my sense of pride.
It offends me on an identity level.
At my core, I'm offended by this person.
Am I gonna have some words?
Am I gonna show a little bit of attitude?
Am I gonna resist a little bit?
See how much I can get away with?
I might, especially if I'm 23 years old.
I might. So, I don't think it's racist, even slightly, to suggest that some populations have different experience.
If the way you act is based on your experience, well, who's going to say that's racist?
Of course you act differently based on your experience.
So, do all the people who have a different experience act the same as people who have yet another different experience?
Of course not. Where's that in the study?
Of course, it's silent on that.
Not only is it silent on that, but it's silent on being silent about it.
It doesn't even say, you know, if we knew this, we'd know more, or maybe we should study this additional thing.
It's just silent. It's a lie by omission.
How about is it corrected for income?
Don't know. Probably not.
Is it corrected for level of, let's say, education?
No, probably not.
How many of the citizens themselves were racists?
Who knows? You know, I'm not sure some of those questions are important.
But the point is, if you could get people to understand that if they can't look at a study like this and immediately just pick out three major problems that completely invalidate its credibility.
Now, that doesn't mean it's not true.
This is an important distinction.
Even if this study is complete bunk, meaning that analytically they did everything wrong, that doesn't mean there's no racism.
It just means the study isn't good.
So don't think that if the study doesn't show it, it doesn't exist.
It doesn't work that way.
You could have all the racism in the world, but if a study is poorly designed, you don't know what you're looking at.
That's all I'm saying. So we should at least educate people up to the point where they would know for themselves if they are low-information voters.
And if they could have a little specific test, give them all the same tests and the same questions, and say, tell us where the bias is.
If you can locate it, I will listen to your opinions.
If you can't tell where all the gigantic problems are in something like this, we can't yet talk.
You need to educate yourself up to at least the level that you know data is lying to you routinely.
If you don't know that the data is lying to you routinely, it's tough to move forward.