Episode 1050 Scott Adams: I'll Be Testing My Freedom of Speech Today. Confederate Flags, Fake College, Bad Experts
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
The press is illegitimately hiding COVID decreasing death rate
The weird and unintentional impact of BLM
Solving problems you aren't allowed to discuss
Protesters are the dumbest among us
How you act when stopped by police, determines the outcome
Does vitamin D explain why viruses die out in summer?
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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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Yeah, you do. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
And have I printed out my notes?
No, I have not. So that's going to happen while we're waiting.
But before we talk about all the things, Let's first enjoy a little thing I like to call the simultaneous sip.
And all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a cantine jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Including the death rate of coronavirus, have you noticed that since we've been sipping, it's been going lower?
Yeah. One sip will make the coronavirus death rate go down in your state.
Try it. Go.
Uh-huh. Yeah.
I can feel my stock prices going up and the death rate going down.
I think you can feel it too.
Stay right there. Stay right there.
Don't go anywhere. Don't go anywhere.
Stay. Alright, I'm back.
I know it was hard to go on without me.
Alright, we're going to do a little experiment today.
Are you ready? Depending what devices you're using right now to watch me, you might be able to open up Twitter separately and put the alert on so that you get an alert from me.
Because in a moment, I'm going to send a tweet that has no purpose other than to see if you get an alert.
Okay? So I'll do that in a little bit.
I'll just send out a test tweet, and you'll tell me in real time if you got an alert or you did not.
So hold on that, but you've got a few minutes if you have two devices to see if you can make sure your alerts are set for my tweets, and then we'll test it.
One of my critics today, Jordan Sather, said that I said Trump was on a losing path, which I'll talk about in a minute.
And Jordan Sather said to me, you think Trump is on a losing path?
That's loser think.
Now, I invented the term loser think.
So I said, thanks for incorrectly defining the term I invented.
Sounds like your troll school went online.
May I take a bow for the following troll response?
You may use this.
You are welcome to borrow this.
Let me read it again. Sounds like your troll school went online.
Come on, that's pretty good.
Because you know your Harvard education isn't going to mean quite as much if you've never stepped foot on the campus.
You know that, don't you?
All right. I remind you that according to virology experts, virologists you might call them, nobody knows why viruses go away.
Isn't that the most mind effing thing you've ever heard in your life?
You've probably heard it before.
Some of you have.
But just think about the fact that we have all these experts talking about, you know, which way is the curve going?
Are we bending the curve?
And, you know, which countries are eradicating the virus?
And, you know, this works, and masks works, and what about the hydroxychloroquine?
And all the stuff we're talking about.
And let me read this again.
No one knows why any virus goes away.
And you're thinking to yourself, well, I know.
I know. It's because of herd immunity.
It's because of vaccinations work.
Nope. Nope.
It's not. We don't know.
Nobody knows why they go away.
Now, you can check that, but I did hear that from a top virologist in some interview who just tossed that little completely...
It's like a hand grenade that goes into your thinking process.
Oh, here's a little hand grenade.
Okay. Here you go.
Did you know nobody knows why a virus goes away?
And I think we're in that situation because we're watching the infection rates zoom.
And of course, people have stories.
It's because the testing is more blah, blah, blah.
But we don't know why the infection rate is zooming while the death rate is dropping like crazy.
Something's going on.
And it could be DNA. It could be some kind of You know, accidental immunity because people had other kinds of colds.
A new study showed that there's some DNA genetic propensity to be more susceptible.
Who knows?
Who knows? But may I tell you a narcissistic story?
I'm going to ask for permission to be narcissistic.
In other words, I'm going to tell you a story Which is just a fun story, but since it makes me look good, I'm going to ask you in advance.
Do you mind a story that makes me look good if it's an interesting story?
If you don't like stories that make me look good, you probably want to sign off.
So the story goes like this.
It's a two-parter. Part one happened in the 80s?
I don't know. I was working at...
90s, I guess. I was working at Pacific Bell, the local phone company.
And my department had a training session.
And the training session was on problem solving.
And we learned a rigorous process for looking at a complicated situation and being able to very...
We could systematically break it down from its complexity into its simplest questions and then solve it.
It was a general format for solving any kind of problem.
And then we broke into teams after we learned the technique and the instructor gave us all the same problem.
A complicated problem that we had to use the structure to solve.
So we go into our breakout teams and here is the story.
So this is based on a real-world event.
There was an airline that was having a problem because its flight attendants kept getting a rash during flights.
So they'd get a rash on their upper chest.
It was always in the same place.
They didn't get rashes in other places.
It was always just upper chest.
And here's the story that we were asked to solve.
Some of you may have heard this story.
And here are the facts.
It only happened on international flights.
Weird, right? It only happened on international flights.
It only happened to women.
It didn't happen to men.
Men didn't get the rash.
Weird, right?
So only international flights, only men, and it only happened at the beginning of flights, like near the start of the flight, and never toward the end.
So there was nobody who was clear Until toward the end of the flight, and then just suddenly got it at the end.
Now, and there were some other details, but those are kind of the key ones.
So we were given this complicated story, so imagine those details, but there were lots of others to complicate the story.
And we were asked to do the process.
And I read the story, and I did what I know some of you are doing right now.
I solved it.
But I solved it without the process.
I just read the story and I said...
Okay, I'm seeing it in the comments.
That's right. It's the life preservers.
I just read the story and said, well, what's different about international versus domestic?
Well, they do the life preserver thing if you're going to fly over water.
But domestically, you're generally not.
So they generally don't do it.
Why would it be women instead of men?
Maybe they dress differently.
Maybe women have an open collar.
Maybe men have it buttoned.
And so I guessed that they were allergic to the life preservers, the ones that they would demonstrate at the beginning of flights because they put it on, it touches their skin, they get allergic, and that's it.
So I presented that to the group and I said, I think it's the life preservers because it fits all the facts.
And everybody looked at me and they looked at each other and they said, well, that sounds right.
What do we do now?
Because we didn't do any of the process.
We didn't do any of the problem-solving process.
So I said, well, let's take it back to the instructor and see what he says.
Because we're supposed to come back to him as soon as we'd solved it.
So we go back to him, and I think we were done in 15 minutes or something.
It was supposed to take hours.
And we find the instructor and we say, we think we have the answer.
We think they're having an allergic reaction to the...
To the life preservers.
Or what do you call it? The life jackets.
And it turns out that the real answer was that there might have been some paint on it that was coming off.
So it wasn't a rash per se.
It was actually just something on the life preserver that was rubbing off on the skin, I think.
But basically it was the right answer.
And here's what happened next.
The instructor accused me of cheating.
That's right. The instructor accused me flat out of cheating.
And he said, I've been teaching this course for however many years.
We always use the same example.
Nobody's ever solved it without using the process.
And I said, but is it right?
And he said, yeah, it's right.
But I think you cheated.
I think you heard the story somewhere in the news.
And maybe you remembered it.
And it wasn't familiar to me.
So instead of being the hero for solving the story, I was judged a cheater, and I think it ended like that.
I tried to defend myself, but you can't really.
You can't defend yourself by saying, I never read about this story in the past in the newspaper or something.
How can you prove it? You can't prove that.
So keep that story in mind, alright?
Just hold that story.
And now here's the second story, seemingly completely disconnected.
Or not. So when the COVID thing started and we started getting information about who was being more affected and who was less affected, I had that same feeling and I flashed back to that time.
And the feeling was this.
I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, gosh, I feel like I'm seeing some kind of correlation that's just jumping out at me.
Does it seem like low vitamin D is explaining everything?
In terms of how bad it was in some places and not others.
So I started Googling.
Do black people have less vitamin D? The answer is yes.
The skin color, etc., doesn't absorb as well.
And black people were having much worse experience.
I thought, all right, how about overweight people?
Well, sure enough.
If you're obese, or if you have diabetes, or if you're just sick, or if you're elderly and you're in a rest zone, low vitamin D. But what about those Scandinavian countries?
They were ruining everything.
Because the Scandinavian countries didn't seem to have any bad problems.
But they would, you would expect, have the least vitamin D just because where they're physically located.
Less sun. But it turns out, if you look into it, they know they have a vitamin D problem there.
So part of their culture is they supplement with vitamin D like crazy.
More so than anybody else would.
But it's because they need to.
So they know they need to. Yeah, fish oil, exactly.
They do fish oil to supplement.
So it turns out that every place you look for it, vitamin D just stands out as being an obvious thing.
So here's what I'm going to say.
I think that when this is all said and done, there will be some point at which somebody says, you know, if we had just gotten everybody's vitamin D up, We could have just gone back to work.
Now maybe you also have to keep the people in rest homes and old folks homes.
You have to probably protect them specially.
But for anybody who did not have an obvious comorbidity, I'll bet we could have just supplemented with vitamin D. Because why is it that a virus always goes away in the summer?
Could it be that in the summer everybody has more vitamin D? You know, I'm not a scientist.
There's not a study that backs us up exactly, although you see little studies that suggest it might be true.
But that's where I'm at.
So I think we're going to find that vitamin D was the big actor that was unrecognized.
All right, let's talk about some other things.
Trump is doing his usual Trump thing, where he'll make an exaggerated claim to make people look into it.
Now, does he do that as a strategy?
Well, I don't know his internal mental process.
I just know he does it all the time and it works every time.
And by that I mean when he says that 99% of people survive coronavirus.
Is that true? No.
No, that's not true.
It's not true that 99% survive.
But what's it make you do?
It makes you pay attention to the survival rate.
It makes you look into it.
And if you look into it, it kind of favors his preferred plan, which is we get back to work a little sooner than other people might like.
So once again, it works.
And then he's also made the completely false claim that the U.S. coronavirus death is the lowest worldwide.
Apparently, not really even close to being the lowest worldwide.
Not really even close.
But it makes you look at the death rate, doesn't it?
Do you think you're more or less likely to look at the death rate if the president makes wild claims about it?
More likely. Way more likely.
What was the base claim that Trump is most complaining about?
Same as me. They're not showing us the death rate numbers.
The press is completely illegitimately hiding the death rate numbers from the public.
So what does that allow Trump to do?
Any fucking thing he wants, because they're not showing you the numbers.
So the president just goes out, and again, I don't know what his internal thought process is, but he has the freedom to go out and say, 99% of you will be fined.
Because the only thing that the press can do is show the mortality numbers.
And that's all he wanted in the first place.
He just wanted the press to show us the mortality numbers, which are going down.
Does it change your opinion about what to do if your survival rate is 99% or if it's 96%?
If you know you don't have a comorbidity, so you're not even in the people who are likely to get it, Do you change your behavior because a president incorrectly said you had a 99% chance of survival, but because of your lack of comorbidity, it's really not 99%.
From you personally, it's more like 98%.
So do you act differently?
Do you manage your life differently because, oh my God, he's so wrong, he said 99, but in my particular case, I'm 25, no comorbidities.
I get a 98% chance, or whatever it is.
I'm just making up numbers now.
But the president's totally made-up number doesn't hurt anything, but it causes the fake news to present real news.
I call that a success.
Here's a note, because there may be...
So this is a note to one person who may or may not be watching me right now.
I did get a message from an African-American viewer.
And I only say the African-American part so you can identify yourself.
It's not important to the story.
But if you contacted me with a specific question, I saw it, I put it aside, I was going to answer, and then I lost it.
So I'm not ignoring you.
Just resend your message.
I looked for it. I can't find it.
So I wanted to answer your question.
All right. Put that out there.
Are you waiting for the part where I exercise my free speech?
It's coming. It's coming.
I just read an article somebody sent me in which it gave a very eloquent, I would say, and academic-sounding good explanation of why white people need to change their mindset about racism and structural racism and systemic racism and all that.
So white people need to change their mindset.
And the word mindset was actually used.
Now, that may be true.
It might be true that white people need to change the way they're thinking, but it is so wrong to focus there.
Because let me give you two possibilities.
Number one, white people change the way they think about racism.
So let's say you can only change one thing.
You could change the mindset.
You could just use magic, snap your fingers, and all white people would have a different mindset about racism and structural racism, and it would be more compatible with what the black community themselves think.
So let's just say that's one possibility.
You've got magic. You make all the white people change their minds about how they think of these things.
Or, number two, black people change their mindset to say, yeah, racism exists, but so does rain.
And I don't spend any time trying to stop it from raining, but I do spend time buying a raincoat.
I do go inside when it rains.
So I can avoid the rain By managing my own life.
How much do you complain about rain in your life?
Well, if you did nothing to manage it, it would be a big problem.
You'd be out in the rain all the time.
You'd be getting wet, and it'd be a problem.
But because you manage it, if I ask you what are your big problems in life, nobody ever says rain.
It's because we manage it.
So managing your own mindset will always be the winning play.
Trying to manage other people's mindset is worth trying.
You know, it's worth trying to get other people to see more the way you see.
It's worth trying to get people to just sort of, you know, live through your eyes for a little while, sort of get your point of view.
That's all good. Doesn't solve anything.
So while it may be good and useful and proper and appropriate to ask white people to change their mindset, and I think it's a good exercise, by the way, I would be all in favor of taking my mind to a new place if it's useful.
But it doesn't come close to solving racism.
Not even close.
Because the people involved are going to have to have a strategy that works.
More about that in a moment.
Alright, let's do the test tweet.
Those of you who were prepared, or maybe you have already set your alerts on Twitter, I'm going to hit the button and send literally a test tweet, and you will tell me in the comments, there will be a little delay there, you will tell me in the comments, bam, sending it right now. Alright, sent.
You will tell me if you got the alert or not.
Now let me tell you, so a number of people are saying that they think I'm shadow banned because they don't get alerts.
But I'm not so sure that's the case.
I think maybe more likely people don't get alerts just in general.
It could be because of the way you set your filters.
Could be because alerts don't alert you every time.
I don't know. But my suspicion is That problems with alerts are probably not shadow banning.
It's probably something else.
Alright, so I'm looking at your comments.
Got it, got it, got it.
Got it, got it, got it.
Yes, yes, yes.
Yes, yes, yes. Got it, got it, got it.
Somebody says, how do you set the alert on Twitter?
Well, you could Google that and you would get the...
Alright, so I'm not seeing any no's, but I'm not sure if the people who didn't get it would leave a comment.
I don't think I set this up very well.
Yeah, so it looks like you're getting it.
Now, could it be that it depends what kind of tweet I send?
Could it be looking for keywords?
And deciding that if it sees some, it doesn't send you an alert?
I don't think so.
I kind of feel like the alert thing might be confirmation bias, meaning that it probably works just fine and there's no shadow banning in the alerts, but it just feels like it sometimes because you don't hear it, don't see it, whatever.
All right. Oh, somebody's saying no now.
No alert. Nope.
Now I'm getting some no's.
Oh, all the no's are coming in now.
So that makes sense.
The people who heard it were first to respond.
People who didn't hear it were waiting.
They were waiting to see if they would get it.
And look at that.
A lot of people didn't get it.
Interesting. So those of you who did not get it, if you know how to set your alerts and you could confirm...
So the tweet I sent was just a test tweet.
You'll see it. It's at the top of my feed.
Could you put in the comments that you confirmed you had your alerts set and make sure you had your phone on, right?
Don't have your alerts turned off on your phone and don't have it turned off within the Twitter app.
So there are two places you have to have on.
The physical phone and the app itself both have to be in the right setting.
So just tell me if you really didn't get it.
Alright, enough on that. I would say that what makes the United States the United States is our operating system.
Meaning that the thing that makes a country is, of course, borders and a common understanding of things.
But I would say that there's sort of a DNA or a...
An operating system, I'll just use operating system, for the country.
And when I grew up, that operating system was patriotism.
So patriotism and capitalism were sort of the things that were drilled into us as kids.
And those were a really functional operating system.
The operating system worked pretty well and the country did well for decades.
But lately there's a bug in the operating system.
The bug seems to take the form of the education system.
The education system, for whatever reason, produces a certain kind of person who wants to teach.
And that certain person who wants to teach tends to have a view of the world that is not entirely compatible with capitalism or patriotism.
So it's like there's a bug in the operating system and it's the education system.
Now, what's happening, interestingly, is that Current events with the protests are almost like a system upgrade.
Meaning it's almost like we're waiting for the new operating system to come in and we don't know what features it has yet.
Because the country is sort of wrestling with who we are.
And that's a pretty big question.
The country doesn't know, are we still patriotic and capitalist?
Or is that the old way and now we're going to be a little more Marxist-Socialist?
A little less patriotic and more identity politics.
So is identity politics the new operating system?
Well, I would suggest that if it is, that is an operating system that doesn't work.
However, as these things go, the unintended consequences of the protests and everything else from coronavirus to the economy, it's all one big ball of problem right now, right?
Coronavirus economics and the protests about race, they feel like they're not even separate anymore.
It's like one big thing that's affecting us with their own little features.
But here are just some of the things that the new operating system suggests are our new features.
Are you ready? So here are the new features of our new operating system that's being installed through the events that are happening in the world.
Number one, climate change just changed.
We will never be able to see climate change the same because we now have no trust in experts.
And we know that the experts are winging it, they're making it up.
We know that the media is a complete liar.
And so the odds that we will take climate change to be the end of the world scenario, it's really different now.
And we weren't talking about climate change for months.
Climate change was basically just completely off the table, but because we were learning what experts and scientists and doctors and our government, we were learning more about how much we can trust them, and we found out we can't trust them at all.
Not at all. So are you going to trust them for climate change?
I don't think so. By the way, I'm reading Michael Schellenberger's book, Almost Done With It, Apocalypse Never, which talks about how we're really not doomed.
Yes, the temperature's going up, but we adapt so well, and there's so much good news that it will overwhelm whatever negative comes from the higher temperature.
And I'll have Michael on Coffee with Scott Adams when I'm done with the book, Which I thought I'd be done with, but almost done.
All right. Here's some other changes.
Gun control.
Do you remember when gun control was questioned?
Not anymore. Nope.
We've sold more guns than we've ever sold in a three-month period in the history of the United States.
Gun ownership reached a new high.
But more importantly, that visual image that we all have of the McCloskeys protecting their home with their guns against a mob.
That picture is sort of the end of gun control, in my opinion.
I mean, I suppose if no Republicans were in Congress, you could push something through, but I don't think the country is ready to accept it at this point.
I think if you push through gun control at this point, you'd have trouble getting reelected.
So gun control is pretty much dead.
Commuting. I think commuting will never be the same because people just said, I'm going to work at home.
So I think commuting is going to change.
College is probably never going to be the same.
The online college thing really, it really lays bare that the college education thing is half bullshit and half useful.
And the bullshit part probably will go away.
I'll talk more about that.
I think we might find that vitamin D and exercise are closer to essential activities than optional.
So I think our whole... When I go outside and see how many people are walking and biking, it's really impressive.
The number of people who are taking matters into their own hands to get outside, get a little sun, get a little vitamin D, get your legs moving, get some exercise, it's really different.
It feels like it's now a widespread habit Whereas before it wasn't so widespread.
We're certainly going to know way more about pandemics.
We'll probably develop lots of technologies and understanding.
So probably our risk of future pandemics went way down because we had to work so hard on this one.
We'll be more ready. We lost all of our trust of experts.
We lost all of our trust in the news.
Anybody who thought the news was really the news, I think that that's gone.
And nobody trusts data.
And the protesters, the good news about both the CHOP, which used to be CHAZ, and also the defund the police calls, you can see in real time that they don't work.
So the police have said, okay, fine.
How about you have your protest to defund us, and maybe we'll put a little less attention into your neighborhood.
Murders doubled.
So the black community is just basically...
A crime wave is rolling over it, and the police are just stepping back, and they're just letting it happen.
Now, that's what you get.
I'm not saying that in a, you know, this is what you get.
I'm not saying that in a, like, revenge-y kind of way.
I'm just saying that cause and effect, if you have fewer police, you have more crime, and then you get to prove it by watching it happen in real time.
That's valuable. It's really valuable.
The President continues to be the President.
So, excuse me.
I thought I'd wait 48 hours to see what the President did about his Confederate flag tweet where he was tweeting at Bubba Wallace and mentioned something that sounded, at least to a lot of people, sounded like he was supporting the Confederate flag.
At the same time, he was accusing a black guy of something that wasn't his fault.
You couldn't make a worse tweet when you're running for president.
You really couldn't. Now, is it a clever play, people will say, is it clever to sort of semi-support the Confederate flag and That Kayleigh McEnany tried to play off as, well, he wasn't pro-flag, but he wasn't anti-flag.
He really wasn't talking about the flag.
It was in the quote as context, but he wasn't showing his opinion.
Unfortunately, there's nothing that even Kayleigh McEnany can do about that tweet.
That tweet is so far over the line in terms of, there's just no way you can redeem it.
So, As long as the president is iffy on the Confederate flag, he's not really qualified to be president.
Sorry. You can't really be iffy on the Confederate flag if you're running for president.
Can't really do that.
Now, will he get elected?
Well, he might if Kanye decides to really run.
That might be enough to give the President the win.
But I can't imagine a worse approach than somewhat maybe kind of supporting the Confederate flag.
Now, did you hear an opinion about the Confederate flag from me?
Did you? You thought you did, but you didn't.
Did I give you my personal opinion of the Confederate flag?
No, you did not hear it.
I'm only talking about other people and what would be good political strategy.
My personal opinion is that while free speech is a wonderful thing, the Confederate flag is clearly divisive and you have to weigh your free speech against destroying the country one stab at a time.
It doesn't even look like the President is trying to win at this point because that whole Confederate flag thing It's such an own goal and so easy to avoid.
Really? I mean, all the president would have to do is say, look, that's a local issue.
I'm not in favor of the Confederate flag.
You guys can work it out.
It's not a federal problem.
It's not my job.
That would be okay. I'd be okay with that.
Just, hey, I'm just not going to worry about it.
You figure it out. If the states want to take them down, they can do it.
All right. This is what CNN said about the president.
So this is, I think this was Stephen Collinson.
So he's the one that I always mock as being the most ridiculous, TDS, just crazy, mind-reading opinions on CNN. But here's one thing he said that I just completely agreed with, and it was clever, so I'm going to quote it.
He said, one-fifth of the way through the 21st century...
Donald Trump is seemingly running to be the last president of the Confederacy.
Which is clever.
Come on. You have to admit, it's pretty clever.
And it does look like Trump is running to be the president of the Confederacy.
He wants his Confederate statues.
He's at least open to the Confederate flag.
And what did he say this week about the future?
Do you remember it? Do you remember all the things that President Trump said he would do for the future?
All the things that would be better and he'd fix it and stuff?
No. Nothing.
So the Trump campaign is literally running a campaign to take you back to the past.
I mean, accidentally.
It's not what they're trying to do.
But sort of they got trapped into talking about the past.
Meanwhile, Biden tweets that he's going to transform the country.
Do you want the country transformed?
Well, probably not, because he's talking about changing capitalism and some things you might like.
But there's no way around the fact that Biden is associated with sort of the AOC world of let's change everything.
Biden is very much about the future and change just because he's sort of surrounded by all the changey people.
Whereas the president seems to be kind of locked in the past.
Now, if you didn't know anything else about the race, except that one person was focusing on the past, a racist past.
I mean, it almost sounds like a joke.
It's like, oh, there are two people.
The only thing you know about them is one of them is very fond of our racist past, our statues and symbolism.
And the other one is looking to, you know, really change things in the future for the better.
It's kind of no contest.
The one who wants to change something, the one who wants to go to the future should win that every time.
Now, those are not the only variables.
Those are not the only variables.
And so that doesn't mean that this will determine anything.
But at the moment, Trump has a backwards-looking campaign, and Biden has a forward-looking one.
Even if you don't like what he wants to do, it's still forward-looking.
It's tough to beat.
It's tough to beat the forward-looking campaign with a backward-looking campaign.
If that doesn't change, I would expect Biden to win.
So at the moment, the...
The slaughter meter, which is the meter I use to show if nothing changed, what would the election look like?
But of course, lots of things will change, so it's not a prediction.
It's just a point in time.
Point in time, the slaughter meter is negative, meaning that if nothing changed between now and Election Day, you'd expect Biden to win.
But lots of things will change.
Kanye, who knows?
Lots of things are going to change.
Are you ready for some free speech?
I was tweeting that I was going to exercise my free speech today.
And so this will also be a little test to see if I can say things that would have gotten me cancelled a month ago.
Alright? So this might be the last time you ever hear me.
We'll see. I've said that a few times and so far not cancelled.
So I'll keep pushing it to see what I can get away with.
Here's my I believe that Black Lives Matter has had a weird and good unintentional impact.
The weird and good unintentional impact is that it begs for free speech in an area in which it never existed.
I don't have to tell you If you happen to be non-black, I don't have to tell you that you've probably been lying because you can't tell the truth.
In other words, you can't really give your actual opinion on anything about Black Lives Matter because then you get cancelled.
Am I right? So first of all, I think you'd all agree with that statement.
If you're non-white, that if you said something that was really kind of, you know, a little too honest, That you would get cancelled.
But I think that's changing.
And I think that people are willing now to just be a little more honest.
And we have a weird problem that if you don't speak of it honestly, you don't really have a chance of solving it, do you?
Can you think of any problem that can get solved when you're not allowed to talk about it honestly?
So here's the context.
We're talking about...
Police and how they are more brutal to the black community.
And we're taking that as our starting point for discussion.
And that's obviously racism.
And then we go from there.
So that's the big trigger.
It's not the only problem, of course, but it's the trigger for the Black Lives Matter movements.
And here's the part that white people can't say in public.
Are you ready? Here's the good part.
I don't think there's a white person in the world or a black person who will disagree with the following statement.
A young black person, on average, does not respond to police the same as any other group.
Meaning, If we're not looking at the actual individual strategy and behavior of the person who's stopped by the police, we don't know anything.
We don't know anything.
There's not a single fucking person in the world who thinks that a young black guy from an urban area responds the same way as, I'll pick a random example, Asian American in the suburbs.
There's just nobody in the world who thinks they act the same way.
Now, if you act in a way that's different, should you get the same outcomes?
No. No, you should not.
And there's nobody who believes, nobody black, nobody white, nobody anything, who would disagree that on average different cultures will have a different response to police.
Now, Am I saying that there's something wrong with black people?
No. If you heard that, you're just reading something into it.
What I'm saying is that everybody has a different way of reacting, and it could be because of their history.
Suppose you had a history in which, observationally, anecdotally, the news tells you that you're being hunted by the police, basically.
If you thought you were being abused by the police and that was like a basic truth of your life, would you respond the same to them if they pull up on you?
No! No!
Would I respond the same way to the police if I had been told my entire life that they were there to beat me up and kill me and they're all bad or whatever?
No! No, of course I wouldn't.
Now, because I don't believe the police are there to hurt me, how do I respond when the police roll up on me?
Politely. Politely.
Do you think a police officer can tell in one second that I'm no danger?
Probably. Probably.
And it's not just because I look like I'm not dangerous.
It's because I act like it.
I mean, it's two things. Let me ask you this.
Do you remember when you saw the studies of how many black women were killed by police stops versus white women killed by the police?
Do you remember those? It was a gigantic story.
Everybody was talking about it and it was so useful because once you know the answer to it are the women who are being stopped by police also being killed, the black women at a higher rate Than white women?
Oh, oh wait, you've never seen that statistic, have you?
Because nobody will show it to you.
What do you think it would show?
Would it show that the police kill women?
Maybe they do, but I'll bet the number of women killed by police is really low.
Like, close to zero?
Now, why would that be?
Why would that be?
Could it be... No!
No! And if they did, would the police officer be as afraid of a woman?
No. Because the police officers can physically control someone who is less muscular.
Someone who is a smaller human being, the police are less afraid of.
They're not going to resort to a gun because they just don't need it.
Now, let me ask you this.
Have you seen the statistics?
And again, they were everywhere.
So how could he miss it?
It was a headline. The study that showed that police are more likely to use violence if you're larger.
Larger, just taller or more muscular.
Have you seen that study?
They showed that black people who were under 5'8", Had about the same rate of being killed as other people who were under 5'8".
Have you seen that study?
Oh, you haven't seen it!
Because nobody fucking did it?
How important would that be?
Seriously. Do you think the police act exactly the same with a 6'3 guy who looks like he could lift a house versus me?
No, they don't.
Of course they don't.
They act completely different because I'm not a threat.
They can beat me up with one hand.
So of course they're not going to resort to whatever the more drastic things are.
Does anybody need to put me in a chokehold?
Not so much.
Not so much. All right, so here's the thing.
Here's my free speech.
The whole black...
Black people get treated worse than police is all bullshit.
The entire protests are based on poorly educated people who don't know how to compare things, don't know how to analyze things, and been sold a bill of goods by undereducated people who think they're overeducated.
The people on the left believe that they have most of the knowledge, and they do have some advantages in terms of, you know, they might be a little more scientific on some topics.
I'll give them that. But they also don't have any appreciation of the other side of an argument.
Any argument. They only hear one side, where conservatives tend to hear both.
So, part of the problem is that the lefties, I'll say the white, lefty-type people, is that they think they are informed, but they are deeply uninformed.
Very deeply uninformed.
They don't even know what the other argument is.
It would be one thing to hear the other argument and say, okay, but I don't buy it and hear my reasons.
That's not what's happening.
They haven't ever heard what I just said.
How many people on the left have heard what I just said?
None. You know why?
Because you'd get cancelled if you say it.
You can't say what I just said directly.
Let me say it again directly now that I couched it in ways that make it a little more acceptable.
Directly. The whole police treat black people worse is complete bullshit, and I don't know any white person who believes it.
There might be. I mean, it's a big world and there are lots of people.
So there must be people who believe it.
But I've never met one.
So can I say this to any black viewers?
Any white person who tells you that they think this issue is real, they are lying.
Most of them. There might be some people who just haven't been exposed to any way to analyze things, but they're mostly lying.
Can you solve a problem if somebody's lying to you?
You know, one of the things you hear a lot, and I inhibited to say this, is that people will tell you exactly what they want if you can listen to them.
But you have to listen, because you tend to hear what you think they're saying.
You don't hear what people say, and it's actually a different skill.
It's a skill. You have to learn to listen to what they're saying instead of immediately interpreting it into what you think they're meaning.
And one of the things that black people say all the time, and you've heard lots of different examples, lots of interviews, I'll bet you've all heard this, which is the white liberals who pretend to be on their side are bothering them.
Bothering them because it feels like they're racist too and they're liars.
So it's like they're racist and they're liars and they're trying to be on our side, but they're burning up buildings, making us look bad.
I don't think the black community is loving the white liberals taking their cause without really understanding it either.
You'll hear black people say fairly often, you know, give me a choice.
I'd rather talk to someone who's straight-up racist, because at least we're talking about the same topic.
At least we're talking about something that you could deal with it.
You could figure out how to change it or whatever.
But if you're only talking to a liar, how can you make progress?
So that's the first bit of truth.
Now, Let me give you some background to this.
The other day, there was an old Trump video from 1989 that surfaced.
And on it, Trump was saying that in 1989, so you have to think of the time, he was saying that he thought it was an advantage to be black in terms of employment.
So he limited it to employment.
He said it would be an advantage to be black for employment.
And the context, of course, is that businesses were actively trying to improve diversity.
Which I approve of.
They should actively try to do that.
And the only way you can do that, there is no other way.
You have to favor diversity.
Otherwise, how would it happen?
If it hadn't happened yet, you need to put a little more muscle into it.
So that was a completely non-controversial statement.
That I thought, given the times, might be a bigger one.
So I retweeted it, and then I added some gasoline to the fire by saying that in 1989, guess what was happening to me?
So I made it vague so that people would say, well, what's happening to you?
And of course, if you look at my pinned tweet, you'll see that I was...
I lost one job for being white and male, a banking job, and they told me directly, can't promote you because you're white and male.
So I left, went to the phone company, and there I was again told that I couldn't be promoted because I was white and male.
And for those of you who are new, they said it in those words, directly to my face.
There's no interpretation going on here.
And that was about when I decided to not have a boss anymore and started working on what became the Dilber comic.
So, and that situation remains to some extent.
In other words, it's still easier to get a job if you are black and educated.
I think the president said educated, so he was doing apples to apples.
If you're educated and you're black, you have an advantage over somebody who's educated and white.
Although it may be harder to become educated because of the schools being not as good.
So here's the other thing that people don't say out loud.
The protesters are our dumbest citizens.
The protesters are our dumbest citizens.
We should just say that because it matters.
And when I say they're our dumbest, it's because they're our youngest.
And young people just don't know as much as people who've been around a while.
Nobody knows as much at 20 as they know at 40.
It's just a fact. There's just no argument to that.
If you've experienced all of those ages, you know what I'm talking about.
If you're 20, you probably doubt it.
But you'll know. Just wait.
So we have people who are educated poorly at big colleges and only gave them some weird We should just be able to say that, that it's the dumbest people.
And how can you prove that they're dumb?
They don't know how to analyze any situations.
For example, they still can't even sort out that you should look at not the percentage of black people who were killed compared to the population of black people.
That doesn't make any sense.
You should look at the number of black people who were killed by police Based on the number of stops.
And then the problem goes away if you look at it correctly.
So if you analyze things correctly, sometimes the problem isn't even there.
Now, is there a problem with racism?
Of course. Of course.
Is there a legacy from slavery?
Of course.
Of course there is.
But here's how I would say that you should proceed.
If you have a strategy, and here's just one of many books...
Libraries and Amazon.com is full of books that will tell you how to change your own mindset, which makes sense, as opposed to changing someone else's.
How to have a strategy for life that makes whatever your obstacles are less.
So you can make the problem of racism go away if you're Michael Jordan.
Does Oprah have a lot of problems with racism?
Well, maybe in terms of personal encounters that are unpleasant, but it doesn't hurt her job.
I think her job's going pretty well.
So the idea is to simply be successful.
And that part you can pretty much control.
So while it is...
And let me say it as clearly as possible.
All of the protesters, the young people, are dumbest citizens because they're young.
Just the young part. That's the only part I'm focusing on.
Nothing about ethnicity.
They're just young. They don't understand that strategy makes a better approach.
So instead of saying, let's look at the data incorrectly because we don't know how to look at data, and then looking at it all wrong and deciding there's a gigantic problem and protesting and burning cities over your inability to understand the data, and that's what happened.
Let me say that again as clearly as possible, so I'll get cancelled by being clear, not unclear.
Well, I said it. That's fine.
It was fine the way it was.
So until we have data about how anybody is acting differently during a stop, which we do not have.
There is no data.
Nobody's ever studied it, as far as I know, to show that the way you act during a stop will have some impact on the outcome.
Obviously, it makes a difference.
So I am now rejecting the infantilizing way of the past, which is to act like you can't speak honestly to black people.
If there's anybody black watching, do you appreciate that I'm speaking to you honestly?
And don't you think you could work with that?
Because even if I said something that I think is honestly true, but you can say, oh, you're looking at the wrong data.
Look at this data. I'm happy to do that.
But if I can't tell you the truth, how can we get there?
Like, I've got to tell you the truth first, and then you can tell me to look at different data, and then I'm happy to.
I'm happy to. I told you the example the other day where it blew my mind that the whole problem of black kids being less likely to have two parents turns out that, at least partially, might be a fake data because there are lots of couples who are unmarried in the black community and they just act like a parental couple and that doesn't show up in the data.
So even So that's a perfect example of where my opinion was modified by data.
Now, I need some confirmation on that, but I certainly was willing to change my opinion on it.
Trump wants to open schools, which I think is a really winning political strategy.
Because mothers want to open schools.
And fathers too.
So I think he's got a really strong play there.
Because the public is pretty much on his side about opening the schools.
Did you see the Don Lemon interview with Terry Crews?
So Terry Crews, despite being an African American man, insists on thinking for himself.
And so Terry Crews has some I don't know if he would describe himself as a conservative, but just for understanding purposes, he's not buying into the full Black Lives Matter narrative.
Let's just put it that way. And Don Lemon interviews him and literally wouldn't let him talk.
You have to see it. Mike Cernovich tweeted it and I retweeted him.
But you have to actually see that clip to understand how afraid Don Lemon is of a black man with a different opinion.
He actually wouldn't let him talk.
He just talked over him.
It was amazing to watch.
Alright. There's a new idea for testing for coronavirus That people who are smart say it could be a big breakthrough.
Now you've heard of the idea before, but I don't think I understood how powerful it was until somebody who is smarter worked through it.
And the idea is this, that instead of testing individuals, you start focusing on groups.
So instead of testing you, They would test the group you belong to.
If you're in a nursing home, they test the whole nursing home, and they just throw all the blood in one pile and test it.
If nobody in the entire nursing home has COVID, well, you're done.
You've effectively tested everybody in their nursing home, but you did it with just one test because you threw all the blood together, and you just tested it, and there was no coronavirus in there.
So I'm doing a bad job of explaining it, but smart people will say that if you maximize that technique of pooling it, and then if you find something you can dig in further, they say that that would just amazingly change the nature of what we know about it very quickly.
So that's an example of just human ingenuity.
That you didn't really see that one coming, because that just came out of the left field.
I mean, we've been hearing about it for a while.
It's not brand new.
But what's brand new is a more rigorous analysis of how useful that would be, and it's way more useful than you might have thought just commonsensically.
Over in Bethel, Ohio, there was going to be a small town, and they were going to have a protest Which didn't go well because hundreds of bikers showed up to make sure they didn't destroy the town.
Now, of course, some of the people who showed up were outright racists.
The N-word was hurled, which we do not support.
And it was an ugly situation.
But the town did not get destroyed.
Now, I don't think that the 50 protesters were going to destroy this little town.
So I don't know that there was any real danger.
But here's my point. If you're worried about the slippery slope, I've always said to myself from the start that all of this, at least the looting and protesting part, the parts that are physical damage to places, I thought to myself, well, there's sort of a logical end to that.
Because as soon as it gets to the point where armed Americans are part of the game, that's it.
That's it. Because the protesters are probably not going to take up arms.
I mean, some of the people in the group have small arms.
But as a general statement, these are intended as peaceful protests that get out of control.
But as soon as they hit armed America, like this little town of Bethel, I think it's over.
I don't think it can, it just can't spread into armed America.
Because the people in the rural places will say, how about no?
How about we say you can't do that?
That's just going to be the end of it.
I love the fact that Harvard is going to charge full tuition, but you can only go there online.
I guess maybe some freshmen will be able to come in in person.
And I was thinking that instead of calling it Harvard, because if you can't go there and network and do all those things, it's not really Harvard anymore, is it?
It's not really Harvard.
If you can't network, you're not there in person.
It's just some online classes.
And I'm thinking they should rename Harvard to, because Harvard is a racist guy from the past, to call it George Floyd University.
So is there any reason they can't just rename it George Floyd University?
Because I think that would be compatible with their view of the world.
I don't see any reason they wouldn't do that.
And now that Harvard, as a name, doesn't have much value because an online class is an online class.
It doesn't matter if you're at Harvard or anywhere else.
Let's call it George Floyd University, and we'll see how that goes.
All right. The president has apparently decided that foreign students in America have to go home if their college is only online.
If they can't go to the college anyway, the president is saying, well, you have to go home.
Now, this will destroy a lot of lives, it seems to me, not in a way that they can't recover, but it's kind of expensive to come live in the United States, and it's kind of expensive and doesn't give you what you want if you have to go back to your country and study online in the middle of the night because, let's say, the time zones are different.
You have to go home and study in the middle of the night.
It's really bad.
If you were a foreign student in America, this is really, really bad.
That said, there are some benefits to it.
And benefits, I'm going to put quotation marks around because it depends on your point of view whether these are benefits.
Apparently a third of the money that universities make comes from foreign tuition because they don't get, if you're from another country, you don't get any scholarships.
So they're paying full price.
It's about a third of what the colleges make.
If you take away the foreign students, a lot of colleges aren't going to make it.
And that may be part of the plan.
It may be part of the plan to put these colleges out of business.
If you're a conservative, you're saying to yourself, well, maybe put them out of business.
Are they helping? It looks like the colleges are destroying the country at the moment, and people are kind of anti-college as a trend.
Not everybody, of course, but there's a growing trend toward anti-college.
But here's another thing.
The Chinese students, of which there were many, The ones born in China, Chinese citizens studying in the United States.
I don't think they're ever coming back.
My guess is that sending everybody home is a way to make it easier to not invite everybody back.
In other words, if you're from France and you got sent home, you probably get to come back.
If you're from China and you got sent home, Probably not coming back.
I don't think Chinese students are necessarily going to ever come back.
So that might be a decision because there's a spying problem and because we might want to put pressure on China.
And let's see.
I saw an article in which somebody was complaining that one of the problems with scientists and academics is that their writing is so stilted and academic that the regular public can't read what they're saying, and so their knowledge is sort of lost because they don't know how to communicate.
The interesting thing about it is that the woman who wrote an article on how science can communicate better is really a bad writer.
And when I say bad, I mean it in Scott's personal definition, not in the sense that she couldn't get a book published because she does have...
She has a high level of writing skill that obviously came from some college or university education.
And she was an English major, she says.
But her sentences are almost unreadable because they're complicated.
And she's writing an article about how the other people are too complicated that you can't read them easily.
And I'm looking at her sentence structure and I'm thinking...
Man, I'm working hard to read this article.
And ultimately I skipped it.
So my point is that these are college-educated people arguing that the other ones are basically useless because they can't communicate.
And it turns out they're all useless because they can't communicate.
The only skill in writing that you need in the real world is business writing.
Business writing...
It gets rid of all the adjectives that you don't need, the adverbs you don't need, simple direct sentences, and no long sentences with multiple points in them, which is sort of how this article was written.
College is just ruining people.
This is what's the bad part.
College is just ruining people.
In this case, somebody went to college to become a far worse writer than they could have become with a one-day class of business writing.
Now, that's just a fact. This is somebody who got an English major degree, and the net effect of all this English major writing and reading is that The result is an adult who can't write well.
Think about it.
It was a course on English, English literature, being an English major, and the result was somebody who was taught to write poorly.
It's just poor writing, in my opinion.
Mike Pompeo is reportedly looking at banning TikTok.
Now, will Mike Pompeo be in favor of banning TikTok?
Will the government? Let's say the president.
Well, here's what Mike Pompeo said.
Here's an exact quote, and see if you can read between the lines of this Mike Pompeo quote talking about banning TikTok.
He says, I don't want to get out in front of the president, but it's something we're looking at, he says.
I don't want to get out in front of the president, but it's something we're looking at.
Read between the lines.
They've already decided to ban TikTok.
So TikTok is definitely getting banned.
Because you don't say this sentence, because they asked Pompeo, do you think it should be banned?
He goes, I don't want to get out in front of the president.
That is not something you say if it's not going to be banned.
It's going to be banned.
All right. I think those were my main points.
Let me quickly look at them just to make sure I didn't miss anything that was exciting and good.
No, I didn't. It's all there.
So I think keep your vitamin D levels up and you will be in good shape.
Oh, do you want some more free speech?
I saved a little nugget for you.
Here's some free speech.
The other day, I think it was CNN, ran a story about a tragic death of a young, I think 17-year-old, and ran a picture of him and said he didn't have any comorbidities.
But you look at the picture, and he was clearly obese, and he was black.
Now, did he have low vitamin D? I would like to know that.
Wouldn't you? Because the odds are, unless he was supplementing, he did.
Because if you're black, you have more trouble getting it just from the sun in this part of the world.
He was obese.
And they didn't mention that.
They said there was no comorbidity.
And I'm looking at the picture and I'm saying, are you fucking kidding me?
Now, I get it.
And I am completely opposed to fat shaming.
And if this sounds like it's fat shaming, You're hearing it wrong.
Your weight is just a medical situation.
I don't mock people for medical situations.
What would be the point of that?
Nothing good can come from that.
I'm just making a fact that if you can't speak freely and say a 17-year-old died who had two comorbidities, one of them probably low vitamin D. Probably, statistically, very, very high likelihood of low vitamin D. And the other one, he was obese.
Unless the picture was wrong.
So, we just got to have a little bit more free speech.
It will be a little bit safer from the coronavirus.
And we'll be way ahead in terms of race relations.
So, let me close on a positive note.
You don't have to read my book.
How to fail at almost everything and still win big.
Although, if you look at the reviews, you'll see it's changing people's lives.
What it teaches you is a life strategy that would make racism or whatever your problem is.
If your problem is not racism, you've got some other problem.
You're short, you're old, you're whatever.
Just pick something that you think is your obstacle.
And it will make it much less important.
So you can't get rid of racism and those who are trying to do it are trying to solve an unsolvable problem.
You can't make the rain go away, but you can buy a raincoat.
You can get an umbrella.
That's my advice.
If the black community would like to work on strategy, I'd like to help.
Strategy for individuals works every time.
Trying to get rid of racism in people who were born racist and die racist and will always be so, because brains are pattern recognition machines.
You can use your higher level thinking and your moral sense to overcome it, but it's hard.
It's hard, and you're not going to get rid of it.
You can only overcome it.
All right. Just looking at your reactions.
Somebody said, ugly people are the true victims.
Yeah, there's another thing that you can't say out loud, but watch me, because I have freedom of speech now.
The biggest problem you could have in the world is to be less attractive than the average.
There's no way that being a tall, good-looking, well-educated black man is a disadvantage in America compared to A short, poor, didn't go to college person who doesn't look so good.
There's no way that those are equal.
They're not even close. You'll take the six foot three healthy black guy with a good college education every time.
That person has a good life ahead of him.
That's it. Alright, so that was a little bit of free speech for you.
