Episode 1028 Scott Adams: I Help You Calculate Reparations, CHAZ Updates, How to Fix Everything That is Broken
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Content:
CHAZ community concepts and racial strife
We now know...all our trusted institutions are corrupt
Our foundational crisis is a broken news business
A preference for victimhood
Whiteboard: Everything Wrong With the World Right Now
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It's time. It's time for a coffee with Scott Adams.
And you already know who you are.
So put us all together and you've got everything you need except you might need some kind of a container for your beverage.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including coronaviruses, economies, and race relations.
Yeah, everything.
Happens now. Sip.
Go. I can even feel some of our natural disasters mitigating just a little bit.
The wind is dying down a few degrees.
Yeah, it's looking good.
So you can tell that the anti-Trumpers are running out of material when they start to repeat.
And some of their attacks are the dumbest attacks you've ever seen.
For example, they're going after Trump for his health.
Now, I think it's fair to go after anybody over 70 for their health if they're running for president.
So the attack in general, perfectly fair.
But the trouble is, the candidate he's running against is actually decomposing in a basement somewhere.
So, any health issues that you highlight on Trump, even if they're true, it's going to bring the question of health issues I'm seeing more and more evidence that Kamala Harris will be the vice presidential pick.
The smart people have decided that she's the only one who can be picked.
Guess why? Because of her race and her gender.
Why is it okay that The job of Vice President of the United States, at least the candidacy on the Democrat side, will be determined by race and gender.
Why are we okay with that?
Did it just sort of...
We just ended up here without paying attention?
Isn't the very thing we're supposed to be guarding against is picking a candidate based on their skin color and their gender?
And we're not even pretending...
In the old days, you would sort of pretend you weren't, but you really were.
When Obama got elected, he got something like 95% of the black vote.
Nobody was, well, not nobody, but people didn't want to say, well, we want a black president, but people sort of wanted a black president.
There were a lot of people who just said, yeah, it's time.
Let's get us a black president.
I was one of those people.
And I still think it was good that we had a black president for two terms.
I think it served us well in terms of how the country feels about itself.
It did not solve racism, as it turns out.
It didn't really solve anything.
All right, so I wouldn't worry about the attack on Trump's health.
He did say that the ramp was slippery.
That's what I told you.
So if you want to find out the future, you know where to come.
There's a funny story about the ticket sales for Trump's rally.
Reportedly, they've sold or people have asked for something like a million tickets, but there's only room for a few hundred thousand or whatever.
So the ticket sales, or at least the inquiries, are through the roof.
But here's what's funny.
So there's some suggestion...
That Democrats were buying tickets so that they could essentially keep Republicans out of there so that, you know, it would be empty.
But I don't think they thought this through because there are always so many people outdoors that if the Democrats bought a bunch of tickets for seats and then didn't show up, they would just let the people who were outdoors inside.
And they would have not had to pay for a ticket because the Democrats paid for their tickets.
So I don't know that they've thought this through.
Because I think they've cleverly figured out a way for Democrats to buy tickets for Republicans.
If any of that's happening, that would be hilarious.
So the President is apparently going to sign some kind of executive order on policing tomorrow.
I don't know what the details are.
But, do you think that will help?
No. No.
Doing something isn't going to help.
So the protesters have a number of demands.
Let's say you met them all.
Let's say they had 15 demands and you just gave them all 15 things.
What would happen? Would the activists then retire?
No. Because that's their job.
If you're an activist, you're sort of stuck being an activist.
You don't really go from activist to Well, I think I'll be an accountant now.
Once you're an activist, you're sort of locked into that activist life.
So if the activists for Black Lives Matter, just as a mental experiment, suppose they got everything they asked for.
Well, they're not going to retire and claim victory.
It doesn't work that way.
They would still be activists.
So if you gave them everything you wanted, they don't have any kind of retirement plan.
They would have to keep telling you that you didn't give them enough.
Because it's sort of the job.
So, while I do think that one should look to fix any systems that have problems, and policing certainly is quite imperfect, I don't think we should think of them in terms of solving the problem.
Because you could solve the police problem, but it doesn't really have much to do with the overall racism problem.
That's sort of an evergreen situation.
I saw a funny headline on Fox News that Black Lives Matter is starting to doubt the sincerity of the white activists in the CHAS zone.
They're starting to wonder if the white activists are quite in there for the right reasons.
So, I don't know what could be funnier than difficult race relations within the protesters themselves.
Now, I don't want to see anybody get hurt, but I wouldn't be unabused if racial strife broke out within the people protesting against racial strife, just for entertainment purposes.
Again, I wouldn't want anybody to get hurt, but for entertainment purposes, that would be quite terrific, and it looks like it's heading in that direction.
I woke up early this morning to start work 3am or so.
The first thing I see on Twitter is Jack Posobiec did a live stream as he was leaving the CHAZ zone where apparently he's been undercover for three days.
So Jack and somebody who was working with on this were undercover with masks and hats and stuff and they were just operating and taking videos and stuff within the CHAZ zone and Now he's out.
So he's letting us know because he's left the zone.
He's not going back. But good job.
Do you remember seeing all that good video on CNN from inside Chaz?
Nope. You didn't see any of that.
Do you remember on Fox News all that good video inside Chaz?
No, you didn't see any.
But you did see a lot of video coming out of Chaz.
And some large percentage of that, I guess, came from Jack Posobiec.
So, we're going to talk more about that in a minute.
I decided to be in favor of reparations, but not for the reasons you might imagine.
I'm in favor of reparations because I really, really want to see people try to calculate it.
Don't you?
Aren't you just a little bit curious about that?
I don't think there would be anything funnier than watching the dog catch the car.
They always say, dogs chase cars, but what if they catch one?
What are they going to do with it?
Well, similarly, I'm not comparing anybody to a dog, so don't say that.
It's just an analogy.
Similarly, what would happen if everybody agreed to calculate reparations?
What if people said, you know, yeah, that's a good idea.
Let's sit down, let's get out the pencil, let's get out the spreadsheet, let's figure out who's owed what and what do they owe?
For example, I have some open questions.
I'm descended from abolitionists, people who try to end slavery.
So, as a descendant of abolitionists, how much do I owe Oprah?
Because that's my understanding, is that I would owe Oprah some money, because not only was I descended from people who fought to end slavery and did not own any slaves themselves, they sacrificed to try to end it, but also I'm white, so that there's got to be some expense involved with that, By coincidentally being white.
So I would just like to know how much I owe Oprah.
That's just one question.
Some of you would have questions too.
For example, let's say you didn't have any of these, the immense privileges that you thought were owed to you by being white.
Well, do you still have to pay?
Well, yes you do.
And it's explained to me That even if you were poor and white and your family didn't do anything useful for you and you had to make it on your own, that you still owe black people money because your family could have taken advantage of being white and it's not black people's fault if you didn't do it.
If your family didn't do it, that's sort of on you.
So that's the argument, I've been told.
You might find that unconvincing.
But that's the argument. So I've got two days left in my one-week challenge for somebody to explain to me what systemic racism means with a current example.
Now, lots of people have explained to me what it means with examples of things that don't apply anymore, like laws that used to be the laws, etc.
Tim Pool had an interesting definition.
Which I've never heard from anybody else.
So I don't know how common it is.
I can only say that I've never heard it before.
And it goes like this.
And I think there's a phrase here called going on tour, which refers to getting in a small amount of trouble, which you can't get out of, and it just magnifies the rest of your life.
For example, let's say you got a traffic ticket, but you couldn't afford to pay it because you're poor and you're black.
The poor part being more important than the black part.
And so you don't pay your ticket, and then you get pulled over again, and now you've got an outstanding ticket.
They take your license, but you still have to drive your car, because that's the only way to get to work.
And then the next time you get pulled over, now you've got tickets and no license.
Now you go to jail, but you can't afford a lawyer.
Now you've got a criminal record.
So that by being poor, You can't extricate yourself from small problems because you can't even pay a fine.
Now, I don't know how...
So this... Don't take too much from the specific example, but rather generalize it to the larger point that small troubles can be compounded over time and that Tim Pool would like to define that as sort of a structural systemic racism.
But it still doesn't pass the test of how does any other poor person get out of this?
If you're poor and white, how do you pay your ticket?
I mean, there's something terribly missing from this.
Do the poor white people suddenly produce money out of nothing, and they can pay the ticket with having no money before they got stopped?
Like, how do they get out of trouble?
Why isn't it exactly the same for all poor people?
So what makes it systemic racism if it applies to everybody who doesn't have...
Now, I think there was, on top of this, there was the example of something that no longer is the case, where each municipality would be stopping people, and maybe they stopped black people at a higher rate.
So if black people were being stopped at a higher rate for no particular reason, well, that would be just regular racism.
I don't know if that's systemic.
That would just be a cop being a racist.
And if there were more than one cop, of course there are, who would also have those same opinions, there would be multiple cops who are racist.
But is that systemic racism?
It just looks like cops being racist.
Just like every other profession would have some people being racist.
So, two days left.
Nobody has given me a coherent argument.
I've gotten lots of definitions, and now I've gotten lots of examples.
But the examples are all the things that are illegal now.
They're all examples from the past.
I tweeted today that if it seems as if every one of your trusted institutions have lost credibility in the past few years, that's probably an illusion.
Now you're thinking to yourself, wait a minute, The news went bad.
The Congress went extra bad.
Basically, our intelligence agencies, the police, basically everything went bad.
All the things we trusted turned out to be corrupt.
All of them. Everything. Basically, everybody's lying to you, top to bottom.
Government, or just everybody.
Corporations, you name it.
And here was my take on that.
My take is that nothing changed.
The only thing changed is that now you know it.
That those institutions were not worse.
They were not worse now than they have been in the past.
You just found out.
They were all always corrupt.
They were all always lying to you.
You just found out.
Now, there's certainly a matter of degree, and I think that is certainly in the news business, There's been a worsening.
But it's not like the news was always giving it to you straight.
Right? I mean, back in the Walter Cronkite days, do you think the news was always honest?
Right down the middle?
I don't think so.
I don't think so. But now we're just more aware of it.
Now, I will point out that when Trump was running for president, even before he was elected, I told you, Not all of you, but I said publicly a number of times that he would change more than politics.
He would change our view of reality.
And he did. He sure did.
Because some of the things you've learned about reality are that we don't make decisions based on facts and reason.
A few years ago, you would have said we did.
You know, sure, we don't do it well, so we need to improve it.
But now you know it's not even part of the process, don't you?
Now you know facts and reason don't work.
And the reason they don't work is we don't know what their facts are.
They're all lies.
All of our facts are unreliable.
But, at least you have your sense of reason, right?
But we observe in public people unable to reason.
So what happened was, over time, We human beings, we started out being irrational and superstitious.
We didn't have any ability to reason.
We didn't have any math or philosophy skills.
We were just primitive people.
But over time, oh boy, did we evolve mentally.
We learned science.
We learned how to do controlled tests.
We learned reason and logic.
And then we put them all together, our ability to find facts, and then marry that with logic and reason to make good decisions.
How'd that work out?
Not at all. Soon as you get it outside of the realm of science or math, where you can actually check to see if something makes sense, you run the math, you test it, you can find out if something's true or not over time.
But in the messy real world, all of our facts are lies.
Or even if they're true, we don't know they're true, so you can't even trust them.
Things sometimes are true by coincidence.
So in a world in which your facts are all lies, or at least you can't trust them, and there's no two people you can put in a room who will agree what is a logical way to approach something, we've created a system that can't work.
That's right. We've created a system which absolutely favors logic and data, and there are two things that we don't have any of and can't get.
Logic and accurate data.
So we built a system that relies completely on the two things we don't have and can't get.
That's where we are. Now, amazingly, we have such robust systems that they seem to survive all of this.
Somehow, the republic keeps chugging along.
Somehow, democracy and the republic seem to work.
Somehow, capitalism keeps chugging along.
We have protests and stuff, but we get past them.
So, amazingly, we built a system that can't work.
Just by design, it can't work.
If you don't have the right data and you don't have anybody who can do logic and reason, that's not much of a system.
But that's where we are.
I would say that, so anyway, the big point is that nothing got worse, you got smarter.
Nothing got worse, you just found out.
And that was the Trump effect.
Because if Trump had not framed the news as fake news, it probably would not be nearly as convincing that they really do make up the news.
Like, actually just make it up.
I don't know that we would have understood that as a civilization.
And now I think everybody understands it.
Although half of the country thinks it only happens with the other side.
There's still half of the country that has not reached the level of awareness to know it's both sides that make stuff up.
They still think it's only the other side.
If that's where you're at, you need to catch up.
There's no such thing as the one side that's telling you the truth and the other side that's lying.
If you're stuck there, you're very confused about your world.
But I have hope that you'll make it to the next level.
I have a suspicion that the inhabitants of CHAZ, the new autonomous zone in what used to be Seattle, whatever's left of Seattle, I have a feeling that they are not economists on the whole, probably not a lot of engineers in there, but I bet they have a lot of artists.
So this is a, and I've said this before, and I know that people can't tell if I'm kidding about this, because parody and reality have gotten so close, but I'll tell you directly, and this will be my promise to you.
If I ever tell you directly, the way I'm doing it now, I am telling you directly, you can trust it.
If I tried to leave something out, or I'm trying to, I don't know, if I were trying to just persuade people You know, that might look a little different.
But if I tell you directly, I forgot what I was going to say.
You know, have you noticed how often I'll go on a tangent, and then when I get down the tangent, I'm like, ah, I wish I knew what that was related to by the time I got to the end of it.
This is one of those times when having no sense of embarrassment really comes in handy.
Anyway, I don't think Chas has many engineers or economists.
Oh, here's the part I was going to say.
I am completely serious.
No parody. Completely serious when I say I am very interested in how Chas works out.
I'm very interested in letting it run a little bit.
Now, I don't think he can run forever because the city has to be reclaimed.
I don't think you can have a lawless zone in the middle of the city.
But I'm completely in favor of the very, very, very gentle way that it's being treated.
I'm very much in favor of learning something from it, and I'm very much in favor of the people involved learning something from it.
I just watched a video, I don't know if I retweeted it, I just watched it before I got on, of a black activist who, and why do I have to say black, right?
What's wrong with the world that this story that has nothing to do with the guy being black, I still think it's important to the story?
And it is. It actually is important to the story.
But it sure shouldn't be.
So he's an activist who happens to be black, and because we're in the middle of what we're in the middle of, the part about being black actually is important to the story.
And he was an activist against Police brutality against black population in particular.
And the police asked him to come in for a training day so that he would train like a police officer.
And they gave him certain set-up situations where a police officer would pretend to be uncooperative, being arrested and such things.
And at the end of the training, the activists said, okay, change my mind completely.
Now that I see the split-second decisions And the amount of perceived risk that even I had just in an artificial environment.
He said he completely changed his mind and people should cooperate with police.
And that the real problem is people not knowing they really need to cooperate with the police.
Now, that was just one guy and one anecdote.
I don't know that that could be repeated.
But I think there's something happening with Chaz that's just like that.
Because they're watching themselves have racial strife.
I guarantee that there's at least somebody there who is worried about the fact that the security slash police force is mostly black, if not all black.
I don't know. So you don't think there's somebody white in Chaz who is worried about the fact that the police force seems mostly black and that maybe there might be some bias involved?
I don't know. Since this is a self-selected group of people who identify as having a lack of bias, maybe not.
Maybe they're so self-selected and filtered that that doesn't register as any kind of a bias.
But I think if you let the experiment run a little bit longer, some racial tension will emerge, which would be interesting to know, since these are all the anti-racist people.
I think they'll recreate systems and find out that they need money and economies and all those things, incentives.
So let's run it.
But ultimately they have to leave there because it's not their property and I would love to see this experiment taken somewhere else.
Like I would love, love, love to see some part of a state just carved out for experimenting.
Let people go there and develop a system.
And see if they can live with no police force.
Because I think if you designed your community right, and part of the design would be deciding who could be there and who couldn't.
So you can imagine controlling the elements of a design of a community.
I can imagine that you could get your need for a police force down to almost nothing.
For example, imagine you built a community and one of the rules is that every block had to have a working or retired police officer who owned a gun.
Just imagine that every block you know there's at least one police officer and you just make that a rule.
Alright, one of these apartments or one of these homes has to be reserved for a police officer.
Now, that police officer doesn't need to be working in that community.
Their job could be, you know, miles away somewhere else.
It's just that if you put a certain kind of person with a certain kind of training and you sprinkle them around the community, you probably get a better result, right?
Just one of many things you could do to design a safer place.
All right. I would love to see an experiment in which something like CHAZ gets set up in which the dominant theme is a victim, let's say a victim dominant system.
Meaning that whoever can most effectively make the case that they're the biggest victim in whatever situation is involved, That the biggest victim gets the most say.
That the most resources and attention goes to whoever can present themselves most effectively as the biggest victim.
Now that's the system that CHAZ, not explicitly, but by their collective actions, seemed to favor.
I'd like to see how it goes.
Because I think they need to see how it goes too.
Now the alternative to this would be a system that's more aspirational and self-reliant and you can do what you want to do.
And then just run an experiment.
Alright, let me tell you what I think is wrong with everything in the world right now.
I'm going to do this on the whiteboard.
Yes, there's a whiteboard.
And what I've done is I've taken our current situation, the world situation, and I put it into the model of a car engine.
Now, if you don't know how car engines work, I'll give you the really quick explanation of just the car part.
And then I'll talk about the human system that's operating like a car.
So in a car, you've got this thing called a carburetor.
That takes air and gasoline, mixes them into a sort of a mist, if you will, and feeds that mist over to the spark plug, which adds the fire to the gasoline that's now in a mist.
There's another word for it, a gaseous air form.
What would you call it? But anyway, the spark plug ignites that and the timing of the spark plug is controlled by other devices in the car.
These small explosions in confined spaces make the pistons move and the pistons are connected to the wheels through A series of gears.
So, if all of this is working the way it's supposed to, you would have the air and the gas mixed in just the right amount.
You would have a spark plug, which is really well timed, so it's sparking just right against just the right amount of gas and air, and then it makes the pistons and wheel turn.
Now, the second layer is in the purple letters, so just By way of overlaying the human system on top of this, so you can see it as a machine.
Oh, and by the way, this is a...
Vapor is the word, thank you.
Fumes, vapor, atomizes, those are the words I was looking for.
Not mist. Now, what you're seeing here is a technique I use a lot when I'm trying to think through a complicated situation.
Often I'll translate it into my mind into a machine so that I can look at the machine in my mind and rotate it and see all the parts.
And then I diagnose it like an engineer.
And it's just a way to hold things in your mind in a way that you can see them connected.
So it doesn't matter what the machine is as long as it forms a good analogy.
So that's what I've done here. Imagine, if you will, that the gas is the GOP and the Democrats are the air.
Now, it's just kind of fun that you've got air and gas, and if you had to assign a political party to those, you would definitely give the Democrats the air and the Republicans the gas, right?
It just seems like it fits.
But anyway, so they're feeding their stuff into the carburetor, which is like the news.
So the news is the thing that takes all of these inputs and sort of normalizes it and turns it into a workable form for the public and for the government.
And then sends it over to the spark plug.
The spark plug is like Trump.
The president in general, but Trump right now.
Now normally the spark plug is controlled by advisors.
So the president doesn't just It's filtered and massaged and any controversial or offensive things are taken out of it.
It's all scrubbed up so it's nice and clean and tight and doesn't offend anyone.
That's what advisors do.
But we don't have that situation.
What we have is a president who has a Twitter account, and the advisors are not controlling his timing.
So you've got a wild spark plug, and you've got a news business that no longer acts as a carburetor.
Instead, it acts as an accelerant because their business model changed.
In the old days, the news was trying to give you something that was sort of a common view of the world that would also be productive.
So the carburetor used to work to make things work better.
Even if the news wasn't right, we were all on the same page.
So the carburetor used to be helpful.
But now the news really just tries to throw as much fuel onto the fire as possible.
So they're putting way too rich a formula onto the spark plug.
So you've got the news, who is ramped up out of control.
It's like a broken carburetor.
And it's feeding too much fuel to the spark plug, which is Trump, who has already got his own timing issues.
So you've got a wild ride going on here.
And, of course, you can still move forward.
Maybe just lurching instead of smoothly driving.
But here's my take on the engine of society.
The engine of society is broken, and it's primarily because the news business is no longer a traditional news business.
The news business is in the business of, as many smart people have told you, jacking up that part of your brain that gets you excited.
So it's not about informing you whatsoever.
It's just about getting you excited.
So your excitation gets applied to issues which you might have handled differently if you had not been all excited by the news.
And so my view of the problem with the world is the news.
And that if you fix that one thing, everything else would be easier to fix.
So, in my opinion, the foundational crisis is the news.
The news business being broken.
Completely broken. Just absolutely worthless.
And the news business is no longer trying to help the country.
They've simply taken a team, and they're just trying to help their team.
Nobody's helping the country.
Did I say nobody?
Nobody's helping the country?
Well, what's interesting is that this engine...
has a new factor, which is the independent journalists and voices on the internet.
I'm talking about your Tim Pools.
I'm talking about your Mike Cernovich's.
I'm talking about me.
You know, just anybody who is an independent voice and isn't especially worried about getting canceled.
Now, to some extent, it would also be like a Jack Posobiec, but he works for a larger news entity.
But the people who are not in, let's say, that The most mainstream of the mainstream news.
It's people outside of that who are trying to hold this model together.
We're trying to keep the car in the road.
Because the news business used to do that function.
It used to be a carburetor, but now it's not.
So, you do see the independent internet personalities Trying to calm down the system, trying to give it a little more, a little less fakeness in the news, calling out the mistakes, etc. It helps a little.
I don't know if it's enough.
Yeah, Taibbi is another good example.
Cheryl Atkinson, another good example.
Informational warlords, Somebody's using that phrase, informational warlords.
Or persuasion of warlords.
Yeah, there is something like that.
So, I believe that our problems with race are mostly a news problem.
Meaning, I'm not saying that the problems don't exist, because somebody will take me out of context and say, you said there's no problems.
No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the way we're approaching the problems...
Or because the news has assigned us opinions to make us fight, basically.
So the news business is the foundational crisis.
The other crises happen on top of that, right?
And they're in many ways caused by a broken news business.
All right. What about sharks with laser guns?
Somebody asked me. Alright, that's all I wanted to say about that topic.
Let's see what else we've got going on here.
Do you think it's immoral to tell people that they're victims?
I was thinking that today.
It seems to me that the way black people are being abused in this country It just changed forms and it didn't stop happening.
In other words, all of the past racial injustices, to a large extent, we've been working pretty hard as a society to try to reduce those.
But then we just come up with a whole new way to abuse black people.
And right now it's happening because we're all lying to them.
Me included, of course.
I don't take myself out of that.
We're just lying to black people.
Do you know why we're lying to black people?
It's because the news is broken.
The news is broken.
So you have to lie.
Because it's a survival thing.
What do I think black people need to do differently to have more success?
I don't know if I can tell them.
Because I feel like I'm sort of forced into lying...
Because to move forward with anything, you pretty much have to be able to talk about it.
How do you make a decision or work together when you can't even talk?
That doesn't make sense.
That's where we are. So we have a news business which has fully endorsed the victim-driven system that if you complain the most and you make the best case, that you get more resources.
If you were to design a system that was based on that principle, it would surely fail.
So we have a system that can't work, and we have a news business that can't tell you it can't work.
And then you have people like me, who I'd love to help.
I mean, I really would.
I'd really like to be helpful.
But I'm forced to lie to black people because black people require it.
I mean, it's basically, you know, it's almost demanded.
White people require it, the news requires it, my career requires it.
We just all have to lie. So, anybody who wants the truth, you're going to have to do something different to get it, because what you're doing now isn't going to give you any truth.
So as long as victimhood is the dominant preference, there's not much we can do here.
And so, I ask you this.
Suppose you've got your...
Average young black man.
And your average white black man.
I'm sorry, the average young white man.
So just consider young black man, young white man.
And you tell the young black man that the deck is stacked against him and the system is racist and he's going to have all these problems.
Now forget about for a moment whether that's true or untrue.
Because it's not going to matter to my point.
My point is that people have sort of an operating system about how to succeed.
If you give somebody an operating system that says the system is stacked against you specifically, how are they going to perform?
Poorly. Poorly.
And we know that because there have been experiments in which school children are told they're gifted or not, and if they're told they're gifted, they perform better.
When people are told that they can succeed, they perform better.
When people are told, no, there's a problem.
It's a big problem.
It's beyond what you can handle.
In other words, you can't personally fix racism.
It's something bigger than you.
You're just a victim of it.
So, you know, good luck.
You're not going to succeed as well as other people.
I would say it's immoral to give anybody that message because it would so handicap their abilities to succeed I mean, it just feels like evil.
I don't know how else to say it.
It's not just bad advice.
It's so bad, it's evil.
Even if it's true.
So if you're hung up on, but Scott, it's true.
There is racism.
It is a problem.
It will be an obstacle.
I say to you, you're off my point.
Whether it's true or not, and obviously it's true, but that's irrelevant to what strategy that you use.
If your strategy is to act like it's not a problem, you'll have a better life.
And isn't that what everybody wants?
To simply go through life like, yeah, it's an obstacle, but it's like a cardboard obstacle.
Because I have these good strategies, and my mental game is strong, my physical game is strong, my career is good, my family is good.
Yeah, there's this little cardboard in the way, but push that cardboard out of the way.
Ah, there's more cardboard.
Are you kidding me?
There's more cardboard?
So you probably never have to stop pushing the cardboard out of the way, because like I said, racism's sort of built into the system.
You can't get rid of it completely, no matter how hard you try.
But you can certainly have a life strategy that makes it cardboard instead of concrete.
I think that is realistic.
So I would say that the current messaging from all the people who mean well is absolutely immoral, even if true.
Because your strategy has to be separate from the facts.
The facts don't limit your strategy.
Your strategy should be whatever works best.
So there you have it.
And... When did race become a privileged problem?
And here's what I mean by that.
Now, I don't want to diminish racial problems.
So, accepting that racial problems have been big, are big, will be big, no diminishing of that.
Aren't there other problems that people have?
If you have cancer, Is that a bigger problem or a smaller problem than being black in America?
If you're 4'9", is that a bigger problem or a smaller problem, trying to get a job, trying to have a good life, than being black in America?
If you're really ugly, is that...
And I can say that because I... I'm a part of that community.
If you're really ugly, is your life going to be just as good?
Are you going to have the same number of obstacles as everybody else?
So here's my point.
Or let's say you have mental illness.
Let's say you're addicted and you've got a genetic propensity for it.
Is your life great because you're also white in these cases?
How is it that race became such a privileged situation The problem that sits over above all problems.
I don't know.
Seems to me lots of people have problems.
Yes, and of course, We've just overshot the mark here.
The fact that we're talking about Kamala Harris really being the only one that Joe Biden can pick because she's black, or person of color, whatever, however details you want to put on that.
I don't know. I don't feel like that's a better world.
I really don't think it is.
I understand how we got here, but at this point, I think it's immoral to continue lying to Black people, and let me be more specific about the lie.
The lie looks like this.
The lie is that you should take the truth and then build your strategy of victimhood around that, and that that will get you to a good place.
It's just a lie.
The truth is, if you use the basic principles of strategy that everybody else who succeeds uses, your odds of succeeding are really high.
Really, really high, like almost guaranteed, if you do the right strategy.
So denying people, anybody, the truth that your strategy is what you should be working on, not your victimhood, is immoral.
It's just flat-out immoral that people like me can't just be honest and say, look, I know you've got issues.
Everybody's got problems. What's your best strategy?
And then work on the thing you can change.
That's it. Just looking at your comments for a moment.
I guess one of the things I've heard as systemic racism is...
I read an example from an African-American woman on Twitter who was saying she told this story about when she went in to get a loan for her first home, the lender said, you know, maybe you could get family members to help you with a down payment, $50,000, $100,000.
You know, get a family member to help.
And as she tells the story, She doesn't have any family members who have an extra $50,000 or $100,000.
So if you do, you're starting from a privileged, white privileged position.
To which I say, you're right.
It's not the white part though.
Isn't it the money part?
Which part of that was the white part?
Because there are poor white people who are not getting $50,000 and $100,000 from their parents either.
In fact, what percentage of white people have ever gotten $50,000 from their parents?
I don't know the answer to this, but it's not a big number, right?
I've never gotten $50,000 from my parents.
In fact, I help support my parents.
I pay them. So, I don't know, if you were to put a number on it, let me put a guess on this.
The number of white families, percentage-wise, who could help a child get a house.
So we're talking, you know, tens of thousands, whatever number you want to put on it.
What percentage of white families could do that?
20%? I'm going to say maximum 20%?
Does that feel right? Maybe 10%, but no more than 20%.
So you've got 80% of the white world who is just being thrown under the bus because they don't have money and they don't have any victim privilege.
So their white privilege didn't buy them a fucking thing because their parents got nothing and they didn't even get good advice.
So they got nothing. And they're not even victims.
So they don't get that extra victim juice.
If you're a poor black kid, all you need is an education.
And you can walk into any Fortune 500 company and you're hired that same day.
Now if you don't know that, then your strategy needs work.
Because you can. Every time.
You can just walk into any Fortune 500 company with a college degree.
Probably 100% of them would hire you, as long as you didn't have, you know, any bad, I don't know, criminal record or some weird thing.
So I'm seeing guesses from 5 to 20%, but certainly 80% can't do that.
So every time I see one of these examples of somebody telling me what they think systemic racism is, I always apply it to the same test.
All right, a poor white kid with no money...
Now talk me through this.
How does the poor kid with no money get a benefit because there are other strangers who are also white who have money?
How does that work?
Do I get their money because I'm also white?
How does that work? So these are the conversations that the news business and social media and the activists have decided that even if we want to be helpful, we have to instead Treat black people like they're children, and they can't have an honest conversation.
I guess the rules of society are that I can't be useful, I can't be helpful, can't help anybody with any strategy, because I would just be racist.
