Episode 1029 Scott Adams: Let's Get Me Cancelled Today
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Content:
Our primary identity as Americans
3 Simultaneous crisis in America, all caused by China
China stole all our jobs and bribed our elites to say that's okay
The search for a current systemic racism example
Calculating reparations
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Bum bum bum bum Bum bum bum bum Bum bum bum bum bum bum Hey everybody Come on in Yes, I am a little bit late today.
There was just so much news I had to catch up on.
I don't think I caught up on all of it.
But get in here and we'll see if we can get me cancelled this week.
Might as well get it over with.
I figure I'm definitely on that slippery slide toward cancellation one way or another.
Not that I deserve it, but I don't know that anybody who gets cancelled necessarily deserves it.
Maybe some do.
Alright, but before we get on to that, what do you need?
That's right, yes.
You need a A cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or sign, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I know I have some here somewhere.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine here of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Pandemics, economics, racism, you name it.
It's all better with a simultaneous sip.
Go! Well, there are really some interesting things happening with the psychology of the country.
Some really big things.
We don't know where to all shake out yet, but let me give you some big thoughts.
One of the things I think I had a blind spot for was our...
Let's see, our brainwashing process for children.
I had kind of made a bad assumption, because I have a blind spot for it, which is that children today would be raised largely the same as when I was a kid, just in this one element,
not in general, but in this one specific area, which is how brainwashed You are, as a child, to become a patriot, to become an American, and to see that as your primary identity.
Now, I don't know that that's happening the same way it did when I was a kid, and I had argued in public before that you don't have to worry about the Republic being ripped apart because our brainwashing, and I mean it in a positive way in this sense, The brainwashing that we do to our children is so strong that they're always going to have a preference for the country over other preferences.
So in other words, in the end we'll come together, but it's a sibling squabble.
But what I don't know is if the current brainwashing is as good as when I was a kid.
Because they would make us stand up and do the Pledge of Allegiance, and we'd have to answer questions and write essays and It just felt like we were being indoctrinated into this American melting pot world very effectively.
Now, it is brainwashing, and you could argue that it's immoral.
It's also probably the only way to keep a country together.
You have to kind of brainwash them to be on the same page, have the same general feelings about stuff.
Otherwise, they just fall apart and there's just too much division.
Which is what we're noticing today.
And so I wonder if the people who came up through the system who are protesting may have been brainwashed differently.
I think that's a factor and it's a big question mark.
I teased on Twitter that there's a giant red pill coming.
Maybe the biggest of all time.
And we're almost ready for it.
We're almost there.
So wait for that.
A few other things in no particular order.
If you're not following Alexander Cortez, AJ, AJ Cortez on Twitter, if you're not following him, you're missing a really good follow.
Here's one of his tweets today.
And what I like about him is AJ is one of these people.
You don't see many of them.
But he's just operating at a higher level of understanding about how everything works.
Basically the whole reality and the universe and people.
So his tweets are extra good.
Here's one today. He says, lack of fathers is definitely a problem.
But on a broader level, it's the lack of adults that is the meta issue.
There are many older people, the boomers, but there are very few wise ones.
Loss of elder wisdom is real.
Now that sounds really true, doesn't it?
But I think there might be another level to this.
And it goes like this.
A hundred years ago, if you had an adult or a parent and they were going to give you any life advice, what would it look like?
So a hundred years ago, here's some adult advice.
Could be a parent, could be an uncle, just anybody who's been through stuff before.
Here's the kind of advice they might have given you a hundred years ago.
Work hard. Stay in jail.
Basic stuff. Work hard.
Do what your boss tells you.
You know, get a haircut.
Take a bath. Pretty easy stuff, huh?
That was a hundred years ago.
So it wasn't hard to be a wise village elder 100 years ago.
I just showed you.
Work hard, take a bath, eat your vegetables.
You're pretty much done.
Now fast forward to 2020.
Imagine giving wise advice in 2020.
What's it even look like?
The world is so complicated that people don't know what to do.
It's actually too hard to give advice for most people.
The average adult is way over their head.
They barely know what they're supposed to do themselves, much less give useful advice to other people.
And this, in part, I think, explains one of the phenomenon I've talked about before, that there are a number of people who are, let's say, internet personalities.
Let's say Twitter personalities, to keep it simple.
Who have become somewhat accidental stand-ins for parents.
And I'm one of them.
I never set out to do that.
but when I wrote my book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, I was consciously trying to capture adult wisdom as best I could to try to make a little bit of advice, if you will, or life explanation that would be useful for or life explanation that would be useful for people of a certain age, really every age, but the younger the better.
The sooner you get it, the better.
And the idea was that we didn't have these adults giving people advice anymore, largely because people were incapable.
So, for example, when I gave my advice in my book that you should build a talent stack and layer together Things you're good at, but you don't have to be the best in the world until your stack of talents makes you unique and valuable.
How many of your parents ever gave you that advice?
Zero? How about zero?
A hundred years ago, would you have given that advice?
It still would have been good advice a hundred years ago, but it wasn't really as necessary.
Because a hundred years ago, you were like, well, what are you going to do when you grow up?
I guess I'll work on the farm.
Like my father and my father's father.
I guess I'll be a, I don't know, I'll be some other, what are old jobs?
I'm suddenly blanking on, I'll be a furrier.
I don't even know exactly what that is.
Do they take fur from animals or something, turn it into products?
I'll be a furrier.
So things were simpler back then, and now I think that if you're going to find any parental guidance, you're going to have to find it from people who are not your parents, because your parents are probably incapable of giving you advice that's good enough for the modern age.
Things are complicated now, so look to other places.
Here's a little eye-opener for you.
We have three simultaneous crises in the United States.
I think you'd agree. We've got the coronavirus.
We've got an economic crisis caused by it.
And we've got great racial unrest that seems to have hit some kind of a spark point because of the videos, etc.
Here's a little bit of a red pill.
This is not the big one that's coming.
It goes like this.
All three of our crises were caused by China.
China. Yeah.
China released the coronavirus and didn't warn us sufficiently.
Didn't close their borders.
The coronavirus killed our economy.
So they gave us the disease.
They killed our economy.
Those are our two biggest problems.
And then what about this racial unrest we're having?
And you're saying, Scott, Scott, Scott, China didn't cause that.
That was here.
That was always brewing.
Yes. So let me accept that the baseline racial feelings were all always here.
But if you take away the lockdown You take away the coronavirus and you take away the economic impact and you take away the fact that people didn't have options for what to do with their energy.
It was the spark.
Now, of course, you needed the specific spark, which was the video of George Floyd being tragically killed by a cop.
Without that, would it have happened?
Yeah, it would have happened when the Atlanta cop got shot.
If the Atlanta cop hadn't got shot in the back, would it happen?
Would you see the protest?
Yeah. Because it wouldn't have been long before there's yet another video that shows yet another shocking situation that you think needs action.
But I don't think that short of the situation that China had caused that we would have seen this much pain.
If China had not screwed the U.S. by essentially stealing all our jobs and bribing our elites to say it was a good idea, which is what's happened, if that hadn't happened, what would be the current situation for black Americans?
Because all of those jobs, let's say the jobs that people need to hold to get the next generation a leg up, those good solid middle class jobs, those all went away to China.
So China is actually the problem causing all of our problems.
And Eventually that understanding will sink in.
Now you say to yourself, Scott, Scott, Scott, that's not all of our problems.
I mean, look at, for example, our budget deficit.
China didn't cause our budget deficit.
Yes, they did.
Yes, they did.
How big of a military would we need if China were not threatening?
Much less. It would be a lot less expensive, wouldn't it?
What would the situation be with our deficit if we hadn't shipped our jobs to China?
Much better, right?
So, yeah, fentanyl comes from China, our theft of IP, our economic downturn, the coronavirus, and because of all those things, a problem that was going to be a problem on its own anyway was exacerbated to the point of what you're seeing.
Now again, don't want to take away from the fact that people have real concerns and they must be addressed.
China didn't cause people to have those concerns.
It just added the match.
It certainly added to the baseline of those concerns by making the economic system worse.
So one of the things that we're waking up to is that China is the problem.
We have a bunch of problems we think are individual problems, Well, maybe it's just one.
Maybe it's just one problem.
Just put that out there for you to think about.
All right. And let me ask you this.
Is this the first time we've seen national protests?
Because we've had national protests lots of times in the past.
But is this the first time we've seen national protests because people believed authority figures?
Because it seems in the past that people were not trusting authority and that that was sort of the reason, the spark and stuff.
Not the spark, but a big reason behind protests.
I think what's weird about this is that the authority figures now Have convinced the protesters of a reality that might not be quite the thing they think it is.
We'll talk about that in a minute.
So I have a feeling, like, if I were to call these protests anything, I would call them CNN protests.
Because they are sparked by the news.
Not just CNN, of course, but I use them as a proxy.
Here's a completely unrelated bit from Mike Cernovich's Twitter feed.
In the news...
Fifty-four scientists have resigned or been fired as a result of an ongoing investigation by the NIH into the failure of NIH grantees to disclose financial ties to foreign governments.
Gosh, 54 scientists were being paid by foreign governments to do research in the United States, and they didn't disclose that.
I wonder what countries were involved.
Let's see. Reading further down in the tweet, Mike Cernovich notes from the article that 93% of those cases, the hidden funding came from a Chinese institution.
It's just China.
It's just China.
We have one problem that's showing up in every possible problem we have, and we think, oh, here's a problem, here's an unrelated problem, here's an unrelated problem.
They're not unrelated.
It's all China.
It's all fucking China.
All right. So I tweeted again.
That I have not yet seen.
I've got a one-week challenge for somebody to describe an example of systemic racism.
Now I know, I know, the people who were commenting to me said, here's an example.
Asian Americans are discriminated to get into college in favor of black Americans.
So that's systemic racism.
Well, that's not the kind I was looking for.
I will grant that that happens, and that's a fact.
But we're looking for the specific kind, the flavor of systemic racism against black Americans in particular.
We all accept that there's plenty of regular racism, meaning there's an individual who holds a set of beliefs.
So nobody is questioning That racism is rampant.
And I've gone further than that.
I've gone further than rampant.
I would say that 100% of people are racist in different ways, in different situations.
But because our brains are pattern recognition machines, it's not something you can really turn off.
It's not an option.
You can overcome it.
With your higher reasoning and your sense of moral rightness and your love of the Constitution, your preference for the Bible, whatever.
I mean, you can overcome it, but you can't not have it.
Because that's just how your brain is organized.
It looks for patterns, but it finds false patterns just as easily as real ones.
So it's racist by design.
So I guess your brain is a racist system.
I wouldn't argue with that.
But what we're talking about is systems in the country.
Let's say the United States and current ones.
Now, I'll give you the two examples that I think are worth mentioning.
One comes from Tim Poole.
He called me a liar this morning for refusing his example.
Because he can't see any reason that I would refuse his example as being an example of systemic racism unless I was lying.
So I blocked him.
That's automatic. It has nothing to do with whether I like Tim Poole or not, because I like him fine.
And I think he's a valuable contribution to the world.
But it's my rule that if anybody assigns me a motive in public, that I block them.
So I don't really have a forgiveness for that.
So suggesting that my motivation on this was lying, even if he's right, he's not.
I wasn't lying.
But just putting that in public is a permanent block.
So Tim Poole has gone from my life forever.
And again, not with any I don't have a bad feeling about him or anything, so there's no criticism.
It's just a rule, and I choose to maintain that rule because it makes my life better.
So nothing personal there.
But his example was that, let's say a black person who is low income gets a ticket for exceeding the speed limit.
Can't pay the ticket.
Next time he gets picked up, there's multiple tickets.
Eventually, the fact that he can't solve any of his small problems just by paying the fine.
Maybe he loses his license.
Then he gets picked up for not driving without a license.
The next thing you know, he can't get a job because he can't drive to it.
What are your options? And suddenly, it just spirals out of control.
I reject that as an example because it would apply equally to anybody poor.
So it's not systemic racism.
If everybody poor would be in the same situation.
Now, that would not be the case if the racist police were targeting black people.
I don't know that that's currently the situation.
I believe it has been in the past.
But since I was asking for current examples, apparently that's not one of them.
Because that would be more of an example of a police officer being a racist Not it being part of the system.
So you could end up with racist results because the people who are in a system happen to be racists.
But that's not the system or systemic unless you have a different definition of it.
Now part of the problem is that systemic and systematic and any words in that realm, institutional, etc., apparently everybody has a different definition.
One of the definitions would allow this example to be the one example that I've seen so far.
So this is...
Where did this come from?
Damn it. Was it Barron's?
Alex Barron's? Yeah, Alex Barron's argues that there's plenty of data, and he pointed to it, so yes, there is plenty of data, To show that prosecutors and the court system in general is harsher on minorities.
And he said that would be an example of systemic racism.
Now let me accept the statement that the justice system is harsher on minorities.
So he pointed to some data.
I have no reason to doubt the data.
So let's take that as an assumption that's true.
Is that because the system Or is it because there are people in the system who are racists?
And so here's the question you'd ask about that.
Do black judges give harsher penalties to black defendants?
I don't know. Do you?
Because if you don't know that, do you really know what's going on?
Because I don't.
You know, it's easy to imagine that racism would be You know, part of the justice system.
But, you know, if you look at the police, it would be easy to imagine that the police are also shooting more black people.
But when you look at the data, and you normalize it by, or at least you analyze it by number of stops, that actually disappears.
So what you think would be obviously true, people are racist, Put them into any system.
They'll still be racist.
They'll still be doing racist opinions and racist things.
So it's more about the people.
So in my opinion if you could fix the outcome by changing the people it's not the system.
Unless you say the system is that you can't change the people I suppose.
So if you have a system where minorities were We're treated more harshly, and you couldn't fix that by replacing the people, then I would say the system is broken.
Otherwise, I'd say it's a system that has too many racists in it.
Now, the tricky part with the justice system, So is this a good example of systemic racism?
What is your vote?
Let's say you accept that there's different outcomes and it's Different outcomes in the same system.
I would argue that you'd have to have a different system to have systemic racism.
In other words, the system would have to call out your race to say, okay, black people, you are treated this way.
White people, you are treated this way.
Short of that, it's not systemic.
Otherwise, it's still a problem.
I'm not saying you don't need to address it.
So if you're hearing that, you're hearing the wrong thing.
Of course you need to address different outcomes.
You need to understand what's behind that.
And if what's behind it is some kind of implicit or unconscious bias, you want to know that so you can do something about it and fix it.
Now, I don't know enough about the justice system to know...
To have a really good opinion in this category.
Because here are the things I would ask.
Number one, do black judges have the same outcomes as white judges?
If it turns out that they're different, maybe one way to fix it would be that you get to request a judge who's your own ethnicity.
Or pick a judge who's whatever ethnicity you want.
Let me ask you this.
If you had a choice, Let's say a tweak to the system.
This is probably impractical, but imagine you could do it.
Imagine it's practical because there are enough judges that you'd have this option.
Could you ever say that you could, as a defendant, that you would have the choice of rejecting a judge just for ethnicity?
Would you allow that into the system?
Now, let's say that the purpose of it is to reduce racism.
So if you're a black defendant, you say to yourself, I think I'm going to get a better shake from a black judge.
Would you deny a black defendant the option of having a black judge?
I would not.
I would not.
I would not deny somebody that option.
Because I think if these statistics are correct, that Alex Behrens points out that the outcomes look, if you look at just the data, it looks like there's something going on.
So if it looks like there's something going on, that's a problem even if there isn't.
Because there are riots right now in the streets based on probably a misreading of data.
So if people believe there's a problem, that is a problem in this realm.
The belief of a problem is the problem.
If there's really a problem, well, that's kind of like two problems.
There is a problem, and you believe it's a problem, which might allow you to get to a solution.
So maybe believing it's a problem is a step forward.
So how about this?
If you would not accept that as a tweak to the system, the justice system, That the defendant can choose the ethnicity of their judge.
And by the way, maybe you wouldn't always choose your own ethnicity.
Maybe you wouldn't. Maybe you would say, you know, for this particular crime, the thing I'm accused of, I kind of want an Asian American judge.
I mean, I don't know why.
I can't think of an example of why you'd want that.
But you could imagine that there would be some specific situation...
Where you could say, okay, I'm going to pick a judge who's got a little familiarity with this area.
Somebody I think has no gripe with me because of my skin color.
I don't know. If you had enough judges, and that's really the problem, right?
You don't have enough judges.
If you had enough, I think I might be okay with that.
I think I might be okay with that.
Although I think technically it would be racist to...
I think it would be racist to allow a defendant to pick a judge based on ethnicity.
But if he could, I would at least consider that option.
I mean, if black people wanted that, let's take that as an assumption.
It would be useless to do it if black Americans said, no, that's not going to help for whatever reason.
But if black Americans really, really wanted that change, To say, look, I don't want a white judge.
I live in a racist country.
I just don't want a white judge.
I'd be okay with that.
Well, let me say, I'd definitely be okay with looking into that more.
Because these are the kind of things where somebody smarter might say, Scott, Scott, Scott, you're forgetting this other problem, and maybe I am.
What about, suppose you had this option.
Let's say an independent group They would look at every judge's decision, or jury decision, I suppose.
No, not jury decision.
So they would not look at guilty or innocent.
So let's just say they're looking at sentencing, because I think sentencing was the real issue that we're talking about here.
There may be also a difference in who gets a guilty verdict.
But let's just look at sentencing for a moment.
Suppose you had an independent body, Who reviewed all sentences.
But the identities and the ethnicity of the perpetrator have been removed so that the independent body only gets the raw facts.
Perpetrator did this crime.
Perpetrators, let's say, the other considerations for reasons why we'd either extend the, either lengthen the sentence or reduce it, are as follows.
Maybe the person's never had a prior.
Maybe the person has, I don't know, they've really helped poor people all their life.
Something. I don't know what you take into consideration, really.
The person showed remorse, as far as I can tell.
That one gets a little dicier.
But let's say that every single sentence is stripped of all of its identifying characteristics and sent to a group of independent people whose only job is to say, all right, this one looks like this one.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know anything about the ethnicities and I can't tell because even the city that they came from is concealed, so I can't even guess.
All right, yeah, this one looks like too extreme.
So you mark that one, and it just gets marked down to the average.
Should a convicted person be able to request that their sentence be stripped of its identifiers and given to an independent body who don't know anything except just these details?
They say, yeah, it looks like this is the same as this one or not.
I'd say yes.
I'd say yes, that if you are a black defendant and you get sentenced to something that even you suspect, you're even just a little curious that it might be racially biased, I think you should get a second opinion.
I think that's fair.
Because that would be a better system.
So let me say this.
I think I will accept Alex's definition of systemic racism in this example if you allow the definition of systemic is similar to widespread and hard to get rid of.
So if something is widespread and hard to get rid of and it's sort of What would be the right word?
It flows through an existing system, then maybe you can call that systemic racism.
And again, no matter what name you put on it, that doesn't tell you you should work on it or not work on it.
Because if it's not systemic, it could be just regular racism.
And why wouldn't you want to have a better system?
Where is the conversation on tweaking the justice system to get rid of those real and or perceived biases?
Is anything suggested?
I'd be open to that. So bring me a suggestion.
You will note that Alex Behrens did not get blocked by me because he didn't call me a liar.
He just disagreed.
Disagreeing is great.
I like a good disagreement, especially this kind.
This was a really productive disagreement.
It came with facts, with a link, an argument, or even sent me a definition.
He gave me a definition, gave me data that looked pretty reliable, and an argument that made complete sense and did not insult me or put any opinions into my head to insult me.
Good job, Alex.
I'd like to see more of that.
Let's see what else we got going on here.
Alright, so I tweeted this to see if I can get myself cancelled today.
So this is something that would have gotten me cancelled any other month.
So if you're paying attention, there's something happening with the Black Lives Matter movement and all that comes with it.
There's something happening here that is slowly but definitely Improving our ability to talk about it.
The fact that I could just even have this conversation about whether systemic racism even exists, and I've been doing this for a week, and I haven't been canceled?
I haven't been canceled.
For a week, I've been saying, can anybody give me an example of systemic racism?
Basically something that would have gotten you canceled two months ago.
Right? Two months ago, I would have been canceled.
But I didn't get cancelled this week.
Why not? Why did I not get cancelled?
Here's something I tweeted today.
If this doesn't get me cancelled, you can guarantee that there's something happening that might be good.
Good in the sense that either our willingness or our ability to talk about things we haven't talked about before, or at least being honest about them, May have lurched forward, oddly enough.
All right, so here's my tweet. And tell me if you think this won't get me, wouldn't get me canceled under normal times, which these are not.
So I said that I've learned three things from Black Lives Matter so far.
One is that systemic racism doesn't exist except against whites and Asian Americans.
Again, I'm saying this to be provocative because I want somebody to give me examples.
The more people give me examples, and by the way, I wrote this just before Alex's example, which I'm accepting if you accept his definition of what systemic means.
I said, resisting arrest is the only thing that gets you killed, not race.
Shouldn't that get me canceled?
I just said that resisting arrest is the only thing that gets you killed by cops, not race.
How about this? I said, number three, reparations would be negative if you calculated them correctly.
So those are three statements.
Individually, all of them would get me canceled in a normal month.
Don't you agree? Every one of these would get me canceled?
I just put three of them in one tweet, and I just look at the comments, and it's just like, you know, people who agree with me, and crickets.
What's happening? What's going on here?
Is something happening?
Because there's no way I could have tweeted this three months ago.
No way!
I would already be completely cancelled.
And I'm trying to figure out why.
And I have some speculation, but I'll just run it past you.
It goes like this.
Number one, I'm sort of a unique voice.
And that I have enough of a track record that anybody who looks into it, you know, anybody who looks at my writing or my tweets or my periscopes, they would come to the conclusion that I'm actually trying to help.
Literally, actively, aggressively, energetically trying to help.
And I don't think there's any doubt about that, because what would be in it for me not to try to help?
Do I have some advantage of just being a public asshole?
Is that good for me?
Because otherwise that's all it is, right?
If the only reason I were doing any of this is to troll or to build my audience or something, I would just be a gigantic public asshole.
But I don't think that people necessarily get that feeling about me if they're looking at my history.
And of course, with these situations, people do.
That's the first thing they do.
It's like, oh, you said this?
Let's see what else you've said.
And then they look into it.
So I think if you have unambiguously positive intentions, you can get a little bit more freedom.
The second thing is, that might make me at least a little bit unique, I hope not, but at least it helps, is that I'm always respectful.
About, you know, at least individual citizens who have earned respect.
Now, there are individuals who do terrible things, and I may be disrespectful to individuals, but in terms of any group of people, I would never be disrespectful to any ethnic group.
It's just, there's nothing in me that would ever want to do that.
If I did, it would be a complete accident, you know, and anybody can make a mistake.
But if you are respectful and unambiguously trying to be helpful, it does give you a little bit of body armor that you wouldn't get.
But even those things would not be enough.
I think you'd agree. Three months ago, that wouldn't have protected me.
Here's what I think it is.
That the people who would normally cancel me suspect that I'm right about all three things.
Now, I'm just speculating, and of course, nobody thinks in exactly the same fashion, so a million people have a million different opinions.
I don't want to lump anybody to have one opinion.
But I have a suspicion that I have survived this so far.
I mean, I could be canceled by the end of today.
But if I don't get canceled by the end of today, maybe tomorrow at the latest, because that's how long it takes to write articles, If I don't get canceled right away, it might be because people who look at these three things don't want any attention on them.
Because if you put attention on them, it just might not go the way you want it.
Now... Somebody says they disrespect all groups.
I respect that.
I think disrespecting all groups is actually a perfectly functional...
And a useful way to approach life.
In fact, respecting all groups equally and disrespecting all groups equally, very similar.
Very similar.
You know, the difference almost disappears.
So, let me explain my other statements.
So I said resisting arrest is the only thing that gets you killed.
I could change my mind with just data.
I asked for the data and I said, how many people got killed, no matter their ethnicity, regardless of ethnicity, how many people were killed by police who were not resisting arrest?
It's probably zero.
It's probably zero if you take out things that everybody would agree is just an accident.
Because there are guns involved, so there are going to be accidents and mistaken identities, and somebody thought somebody had a gun in their hand, but it wasn't a gun.
So if you take out the things where people just made a mistake, it's pretty much resisting arrest is it.
And we're suckers if we imagine it's something else.
Now, that doesn't say that police aren't treating black Americans differently.
I accept that that's almost certainly the case.
But in terms of actually getting killed, which is really the thing that's sparking the riots, in terms of getting killed, I don't know that there are any situations except accidents and people who resisted arrest.
Which again, doesn't mean they should have been killed.
But it does tell you that there's a rock solid way to not get killed.
And if you're not willing to accept that you have an ability to not get killed and it's all on you, Let's not say all, because it's a sloppy world, but it's almost all on you if it's also true.
And again, I could change my mind with one fact check if this fact is wrong, that police don't kill people who don't resist arrest.
And then I said reparations would be negative if you calculated them correctly.
So here's the way you would calculate them.
You'd have to compare to some base case.
You can't just say something is good or bad.
You have to say, well, compared to what?
The way it's typically done is compared to white incomes.
And people say, well, there's the disparity.
That would be the basis upon which you would begin your calculations for reparations.
And of course, that would just be bad analysis.
So forgetting about anybody's preferences or biases, etc.
Just in terms of what an analysis looks like, just for anything, is you compare it to the thing that would have happened if you hadn't done the thing.
In all cases. It doesn't matter if you talk about race or you talk about buying a new computer for your company.
What you compare it to is don't buy a new computer for your company.
Right? You don't compare it to what another company did with their computer.
That wouldn't make sense.
You compare you buying a computer for your company and you not buying a computer for your company.
That's what you compare.
If you were to compare from the point of slavery to today, if you were to make a comparison of what the reparation should be, the proper analysis It's to compare the black lives in America who came from a slavery legacy, how are they doing economically, compared to how they would be doing if they had never been slaves.
If their family line had stayed in Africa and lived a happy life in Africa, how would that go?
The people who came to America, even under the worst possible conditions, if they survived, they're making a lot more money than their relatives that they've left behind.
The difference is probably something like, and I'm going to make these numbers up, but it's somewhere in this range.
I think the annual income in Africa is probably below $2,000 a year.
The annual average income of African Americans today in America?
I don't know. The average income is around $63,000.
So that's everybody.
If you assume that the average income for African Americans is a fraction of what it is on average, I think that's true for sure, let's say it's $25,000.
I don't know if that's close, but just to get in the range.
So you're comparing a population who is earning 25,000 on average to a population that was earning 2,000 on average.
So somebody says, what about the opportunity costs?
Yeah, the opportunity costs also work in the same direction.
So if slavery had never existed, you'd look at the total situation from that day to today for people who had stayed in Africa and never been molested, never been tortured, never been enslaved.
And then you compare it to the other situation.
Now, money is not the only question, right?
Money is not the only question.
Because there's also reparations for just doing horrible things to people.
But the history of reparations for doing horrible things to people, correct me if I'm wrong, so I need a fact check on this as well, that history is for people who are alive.
Am I right? If you look at the Japanese internment, reparations were paid.
But unless I'm wrong, and I was kind of close to that, because at the time of the reparations for Japanese internment, I was living with a Japanese-American woman whose brother had been in an internment camp.
So that's how close I was to that.
I was living with a woman whose older brother...
was born in a prison camp in the fucking United States.
In the United States, an American was born into a fucking prison camp in World War II. You know, because the Japanese Americans were rounded up and interned.
That's about as awful as things can get.
No, slavery's worse, but in terms of more modern things, that's way up there for badness.
Now, the reparations that were paid were paid exclusively to living survivors of the internment camps.
So the woman I was living with did not get a check, even though her parents and her brother were living in an internment camp, and even though They'd lost all their property.
Basically, they were taken off of the property that they owned, and white people just stole it.
They just stole their property and kept it.
It was never corrected.
Think about that.
You were rounded up and you were put in a prison camp for doing nothing.
Fucking nothing.
Except going to work and doing your job.
Just your ethnicity.
Rounded up and put in a prison camp.
In the 1940s.
And then, while you're in camp, all your shit is stolen.
The land that you owned, I don't know how they do it, I guess they bribe somebody in the county recorder office or something, just to change the names on something, and they just steal all your land.
So, does it make sense to pay reparations?
To the people who were rounded up because of their ethnicity are still alive and clearly were just raped in every way that you can be.
As soon as you extend that standard to people who have passed, no matter how reasonable it might be, you're opening up a pretty big can of worms that you can't close back.
So I think as a standard, reparation payments for people who are alive, I would always consider that.
But reparations for people who descended from people who were wrong in some prior generation, You have to think that through a little more carefully.
But if you're going to calculate it, I think you'd run into all kinds of trouble.
And as I said in a tweet yesterday, how much would I have to pay Oprah if you calculated the reparations?
Given that I descended from abolitionists, how much do I owe Oprah?
I mean, if you tried to calculate the Any reparations, it would just descend into silliness or some kind of new racist system or something.
So it's a tough one. But if you calculated it properly, just the economics, it would be negative.
If you calculated the pain and suffering, those people are dead.
As tragic as it all was, you can't fix things for dead people.
And if you try to find the ripple effect, it's going to be tough to calculate.
Although it's there. It's just tough to calculate.
All right. Yeah, what about people who are mixed race?
What about people who came from other countries?
Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I don't see that reparations in terms of cash payments can ever happen.
Now, there's one version of reparations, which is being floated by Black Lives Matter, or at least some person associated with them.
I don't know if they have a common view or not.
But one person was suggesting that black people should receive a basic minimum income for life.
The odds of that happening are exactly zero.
But I wouldn't be surprised if poor people someday are getting a basic minimum income.
I think Andrew Yang was ahead of his time.
I think he will be, you could argue he's already been proven right because of the payments during the coronavirus.
So I think that some kind of guaranteed minimum payment, whether you like it or not, I'm not arguing you should like it, and I'm not arguing you shouldn't.
I'm just telling you it's going to happen.
It's a prediction. I think it's somewhat inevitable.
And as soon as you introduce more robots, it's just guaranteed.
So Andrew Yang was exactly right.
The more robots you have, the more you're going to need this guaranteed income.
And I would love to see it in the future.
Probably. All right.
Do you have a Q&A at the end?
Well, I didn't plug in my headpiece that allows me to take questions on this.
So, no. Hasn't the New York chapter of Black Lives Matter asked for $14 trillion?
I don't know. Maybe.
UBI discourages creativity.
Maybe, but most people are not creative anyway.
Um, all right.
That's all I got for today.
Check in with me to see if I'm cancelled.
If I do get cancelled, you'll be able to find me on the Locals platform, L-O-C-A-L-S. It's a subscription-based platform, so people who get cancelled who still have an audience can go pay some small amount per month and then they still have their content.
Somebody says, is that the red pill?
Not yet. It's coming.
Think about how the way we think has changed in the last few years.
Just the way we think about everything.
It's phenomenal. I told you it was going to happen.