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Sept. 27, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:08:02
Episode 1137 Scott Adams: Biden Brain Farts, Black Strategy Matters, Why Antifa Wants Trump to Win, Seattle Solves Racism

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: 3 key things, Seattle has done to overcome systemic racism Ibram X. Kendi...wonderfully provocative BLM/Antifa protesters do NOT want Joe Biden to win FBI used Russian agent to spy on Trump campaign 1,000 Proud Boys and NO major conflicts The domestic terrorist group, ironically named Antifa ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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Turn your phones off!
Ringers off. Okay, you don't really have to do that because it turns out I wouldn't even be able to hear it if it rang.
But you might hear mine, so I'll turn mine off.
You know what you need today?
Yeah, let me tell you what you need today.
First of all, this is going to be one of the best days ever.
Not for any particular reason.
It just is.
You don't need a reason.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass.
A tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
And fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the dopamine hit of the day, the unparalleled pleasure, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip, and I know you came here for it.
Join me now for that delight.
Go! I guess the day going, doesn't it?
Everything's starting to turn up.
Looking a little better.
You started out a little bit slow today, but look how much better things are already.
It happens quickly. I saw today that the company Ring that makes the home security, they have a new prototype of an indoor drone for security.
And apparently, they've already made it, but they're not selling it yet, a little drone that will pop up from its little charging station and do a predetermined route through the air through your home and send you back pictures so you can look at what's going on.
Now, if that's not cool, I guess I don't know what cool is, because that got me all excited.
Here's another little positive trend.
That is unexpected positivity from the coronavirus tragedy.
Hydroponic farms are doing great.
I have a tiny, tiny little investment in a desktop hydroponic company.
And their revenue just went crazy because of coronavirus.
And what they make is called Click and Grow, if you're looking for it.
And they make these little desktop garden things.
They have their own light source and pods and seeds and stuff.
They're pretty cool. But apparently the full-size farms, hydroponic farms, just went from, well, that's a good idea.
I suppose you could make an indoor farm if you really needed to.
It apparently has completely shifted off to, we need some hydroponic farms.
Because if our food source gets cut off, like it sort of almost did with coronavirus, we need a backup plan.
And having local hydroponic farms is a pretty good way to go.
So that's good news.
There's some fake news about Joe Biden today.
Of course, he's the gaffe maker.
So when Joe Biden makes a joke intentionally in the context of so many gaffes, sometimes you can't tell.
But this one is being reported as a gaffe that was clearly him making a joke.
In which he said, in one of his Zoom appearances, he said, I got to the Senate 180 years ago.
And the Trump campaign tweeted that as a gaffe.
I don't think it was a gaffe.
I'm willing to place a sizable bet that even Joe Biden knows that he's less than 180 years old.
So I think he was just joking about how long ago it was.
But things are so crazy that it's reported as, well, maybe.
He's doing so poorly that maybe?
Maybe he doesn't know he's less than 180 years old?
Maybe. But I think that was a joke.
Here's the funniest tweet I saw yesterday, and I'm going to read you the punchline before I read you the set-up.
That wouldn't make sense until you hear it, okay?
And it's because it's the way I consumed it, because Twitter shows the retweet message before the thing that got retweeted.
So I'm looking through the Twitter feed yesterday, and I see a Ted Cruz tweet.
And like you, I don't know what he's referring to yet.
So just consume it the same way I did.
He said, You know, there are decaffeinated brands on the market that are just as tasty.
And I read that, and I was like, what?
What? What kind of message is that a reply to?
You know, there are decaffeinated brands on the market that are just as tasty.
And then I read what he was retweeting, and it was Elizabeth Warren.
And listen to this word salad that she tweeted.
This sleazy Supreme Court double-dealing is the last gasp of a corrupt Republican leadership, numb to its own hypocrisy, the last gasp of a billionaire-fueled party that's undemocratically overrepresented and desperately clinging to power in order to impose its extremist agenda.
Ted Cruz, you know, there are decaffeinated brands on the market that are just as tasty.
You have to admit, that's one of the all-time great tweets.
Here's some good news.
All these protests are happening, and you're thinking to yourself, well, what good is coming out of all these protests?
You'd like to think that with all that disruption, there's something good coming out of it.
And I'm here to report, finally, serious progress against systemic racism.
And this comes courtesy of Seattle.
So Seattle has voted in and approved The following change is, thank God, because the long nightmare of systemic racism is finally coming to a close, at least in Seattle.
I would imagine a lot of places are going to copy this model because once you hear it, what they've done to eliminate systemic racism, you're going to say to yourself, it's obvious once you hear it.
Until you hear it, you say to yourself, I don't know, it feels like such a big problem.
I don't even know where to begin.
But once you see what Seattle's done, you're going to be slapping yourself in the head and saying, why did we not do this before?
Why? So here's the three things they've done.
They've eliminated the police unit that clears homeless camps.
Now, I think you know that if you eliminate friction for something, it just stops happening, right?
That's the Seattle...
The theory is if they stop clearing out these homeless camps, things should be good.
Now some people are going to say, I know critics are going to say, Scott, if you stop clearing out the homeless camps, isn't the guaranteed effect of that to attract more homeless camps?
To which I say, I don't think you understand how systemic racism works.
You're in crazy land.
No. If you stop clearing the homeless camps, Systemic racism goes away.
You're thinking about how removing obstacles will make more of something happen, such as more homeless people will stream into Seattle because it's a good place to be homeless?
That's just crazy.
Because this will get rid of systemic racism.
But it's not all. If that was all, that would be pretty amazing.
But there's more to it.
Second thing they've done is they've agreed to cut the command staff of the police pay.
There'll still be as many people on the staff, apparently, or it's a little unclear, but it looks like that what they're doing is mostly just cutting the pay of the people who are in charge of making things better for police.
Now, I don't have to tell you, if you're a student of human nature, that one way to get a better result from people is And if you really want them to work hard and give you a good performance, cutting their pay, that's the way to go.
So these command staff police officers who are being asked to do more with less, they've also been asked to cut their pay, and I think that should motivate them in the right direction, obviously.
How else are you going to motivate people other than cutting their pay?
That just feels obvious.
After they do it, You know, until they did this, honestly, I feel dumb, but I wouldn't have even thought of this.
You know, I might have thought of the...
This is how dumb I am.
I would have thought, you know, if you want more out of these people to do a better job, better training of their staff, etc., I would have been thinking in terms of getting better people and paying them more to get more performance.
But I think Seattle's on the right track here.
Just cut their pay.
That should make them work harder and have better morale, and so you should get better results.
Then they're also going to reduce 100 officers.
Now, if you want to make your city better, take the thing that holds it together, law and order, and get rid of that.
Because the law and order was becoming sort of a A Trojan horse, if you will, for racism.
A lot of people wouldn't realize that.
You'd probably think to yourself, law and order?
Wait a minute, isn't that good for black people and white people and brown people and people of all types?
Is there somebody for whom an active police force that is pursuing law and order, is there some demographic group for whom that's bad?
Well, Seattle has spoken.
And again, these weren't obvious solutions.
If any of this was obvious, it would have been done before, right?
You need sort of an out-of-the-box thinking.
You need some genius. And Seattle has stepped up.
So they're reducing the number of police officers, cut the command staff pay, and they got rid of the unit that is clearing the homeless camps.
So those three steps, I think, are bold.
I think they should be...
Observed for how effective they are, and probably in a few weeks the rest of the country should go this way, because I can't imagine this not working.
Imagine your Black Lives Matter, and you hear this announcement, and you think, I'm out here every day, I'm protesting, I'm trying to get rid of systemic racism, but nothing's happening, nothing's happening, why is nothing happening?
And then you see this, and you say, whoa.
I think I've overperformed.
I was trying to get rid of systemic racism in Seattle, but I may have done it in the whole world.
Because once these three ideas get out, there's nothing that's going to stop them from spreading to all of the other smart cities that also want to get rid of systemic racism.
So that's all good news.
You should be pretty, pretty happy about that.
Here's some more news.
It's going to be harder and harder to run against Trump and call him a racist.
Number one, I love the fact that the organizer of the Charlottesville Fine People race is endorsing Joe Biden.
So Joe Biden's primary campaign claim is that the president called the racist in Charlottesville Fine People.
Now, of course, that didn't happen.
That was fake news.
He said exactly the opposite.
He condemned them. But the organizer of the Charlottesville, he endorses Joe Biden for president.
So that's interesting.
At the same time, Trump, I forgot to mention this yesterday, but Trump in his speech explicitly said, and I don't know if he said this before, he said that school choice is the civil rights issue of our time.
In other words, if you get school choice right, Then everybody's going to do better and essentially that's effectively a civil rights issue that's so big and so important to the black community.
So that's a big deal.
Have you ever had a president who said there's a gigantic civil rights issue and I'm going to make it a top priority to get rid of it?
What is Joe Biden's big civil rights issue?
He has none.
Because Seattle already solved it.
This whole systemic racism thing used to be a topic that Biden could talk about, but now Seattle's kind of taking it off the table with their so effective solution.
But the president still is working on a civil rights issue, which is education is terribly unfair and poorly done.
So the president's done the prison reform, he's massively funded the historically black colleges, We'll talk more about them.
There's a Biden story there.
He's funded the Opportunity Zones.
He's putting $500 billion into capital for black American businesses.
He's got black unemployment to the best level it's ever been.
Before coronavirus, it's coming back already.
He's designated the KKK a domestic terror group.
Even Obama didn't do that.
I mean, seriously?
Obama didn't do that.
Okay. He's the law and order president, and by a majority, the black population does like law and order.
Surprise! Surprise!
Surprise that people like law and order no matter who they are.
It's amazing that that's a surprise.
All right. But here's the other thing that sort of snuck up on us.
Trump is the first U.S. president to nominate a mother of black children to the Supreme Court.
He's the first one to nominate a mother of black children to the Supreme Court.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, in terms of diversity on the Supreme Court, wouldn't it be better for an actual black woman with black children to be nominated?
Yeah, but Yeah, okay.
I see that point. You know, it would be a little bit more on the nose.
You know, you'd say to yourself, all right, that's exactly, you know, that's the segment we want to fill in there.
But I'd have to say, you know, if you don't have that, you know, the more ideal solution that everybody would recognize is like, oh, okay, that would be good to get that kind of diversity.
I would think that a strong second place would Is a woman who has black children.
Because I don't think the mom reflex gets turned off.
I mean, I've got a feeling that quite legitimately, Amy Coney Barrett feels that all of her children are awesome.
So having somebody on here who has that sensibility, let me put this into a visual persuasion.
When Amy Coney Barrett watched the George Floyd shocking video of the moment of his death, do you think that she looked at it the same as people who do not have black children?
I'll bet not.
I'll bet the fact that she has black children She changes her filter on seeing the George Floyd situation to make it not exactly what a black citizen of this country felt.
You can't really feel what other people feel.
But if you wanted to get close to it, if you wanted to get into the general zip code of that, she's a strong choice.
It's interesting to have somebody who has one leg in each world.
She has one leg, sort of, in the parent of black kids, and one leg in sort of a generic white person world.
It's kind of a good perspective.
You've probably heard of Dr.
Ibram Kendi.
Who's a Boston University Mellon professor, National Book Award winner, best-selling author, and he wrote How to Be an Anti-Racist.
So he's sort of a public anti-racist advocate.
He recently made some news because I guess Jack Dorsey gave his group, I guess, $10 million unrestricted money.
To help them work on unqualified support of his vision of putting academic researchers at the forefront of the movement to dismantle policies supporting racial inequality and injustice.
Now, what do you think of the general idea of having academic researchers at the forefront of how to dismantle racism?
That's not bad. I would say you sort of have to see how it works out, right?
Everything's in implementation.
There's no such thing as just a good idea.
You need a good idea that is implemented well.
But on the surface, on the surface, don't you think that an academic approach to really understand, as best we can, things such as are black people really being targeted by the police?
I think we need the researchers and the scientists and stuff to sort of take the lead and tell us what's true.
What is true?
Where can we identify this stuff and where we can't?
Now, of course, you have the risk that because they're academics, it'll just all be bullshit.
And then you make policies that are based on complete bullshit.
So the execution matters, right?
It could be executed completely wrong.
But in general, if you have a real academic who's got real credentials and working with other academics and they want to dig in to really understand what's going on here with the systemic racism, not a bad way to go.
So he said something that was so delightfully provocative in a tweet that it made me like him.
So I didn't know anything about him.
Until this tweet, and then I started looking into it and connecting the dots.
And I'm going to say I have a positive opinion of him.
This may be different than some of your opinions, but I'll tell you why.
The same thing that makes me like Trump is his provocative way of just going in and shaking the box.
Because there are a lot of cases where just going in and shaking things up is exactly what you need.
You don't write it out that way on paper, right?
You don't make a plan, I'm going to just shake everything up.
But sometimes you need that.
So somebody made a tweet that's been deleted now about it would be hard to make fun of Amy Coney Barrett because she has two black adopted children from Haiti.
And you think to yourself, okay, that's unassailable.
Who could possibly...
Who could possibly complain about her in terms of racism when she's gone so far as to adopt two kids from Haiti?
So she's beyond criticism, right?
Well, not according to Dr.
Ibram, and here's the part that made me like him.
And I know you're not going to have the same impression, but just understand where I'm coming from, that I like provocative people who shake the box.
They don't have to agree with me.
So that's the part that you're missing.
I'm not agreeing with his positions, necessarily.
I might agree with some of them.
I don't know. I'm just saying that I like how provocative he is.
Here's what he tweeted about Amy Coney Barrett.
He goes, some white colonizers, quote, adopted black children.
They, quote, civilized these, quote, savage children in the, quote, superior ways of white people while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the pictures of humanity.
Now, come on.
You have to appreciate how wonderfully provocative that is.
You can agree. You disagree with it.
You find it offensive.
I get that. But just agree with me on this point.
The way you feel when you hear this has got to be very similar to the way Democrats feel when they look at a Trump tweet, right?
It's going to look kind of similar.
You're going to hate it, but you can't look away.
What if I told you about persuasion?
50% of persuasion Is getting your attention.
One way to do it, and nobody's come up with a better way to do it, is to be just so crazy provocative that people can't look away.
He has that.
He has that.
So if you're tempted to dismiss him because you say, I don't agree with any of the things he's saying, I would give it another look.
Because there's a whole lot of X factor that comes out of this.
It just sprays out of this.
The same kind of X factor that an AOC has.
Same kind of X factor that a President Trump has.
It's just coming out of his pores.
Now, once he gets all this attention, what's he do with it?
So here's the second part, right?
Now that he's got all this attention, being provocative, what's he do with it?
Here's what he does with it.
He follows it up with this.
He says, and whether this is Barrett or not is not the point.
It is a belief too many white people have.
If they have or adopt a child of color, then they can't be a racist.
So basically he's making the point, by analogy, that if you say you have a black friend, that doesn't mean you're not a racist.
It just means you have a black friend.
And he's extending that to say, Just because you adopted a black child, that alone doesn't make you not a racist.
It just means you did this one good thing.
So he's challenging that idea.
Now, is that fair? Is it fair for him to say that that's not far enough?
Like, you need to go to the extra level, just having a black friend or a black adoptee?
Not enough. I think that's completely fair.
Yeah. That's a completely fair statement.
It is also a complete loser statement.
Here's why. The difference between winning and losing strategies is that winning strategies encourage good things to happen more, and losing strategies discourage good things from happening more.
That's it. That's the whole tweet, if I can use that statement.
And when When you see somebody adopting a baby or babies from Haiti, you know, a white person adopting black babies, what is the winner way to look at that?
The winner way to look at that is, she's awesome.
That's it. As soon as you add something to, okay, that's awesome, I respect that, 100% respect it, and now we're done talking about it.
As soon as you depart, it's just good, and you put that, well, it's not good, you're still sort of a jerk, you have put a penalty on good behavior.
Good behavior?
Adopting black orphans.
It's good behavior.
I think we'd all be happy about that.
But he penalized it.
A little bit. Every time you penalize good behavior, Or support bad behavior, let's say violence and looting.
You are a loser strategy.
And there's no real debate about this.
There's no domain in the world.
There's no professional coach.
There's no mentor.
There's nobody who knows how the world works who would say you should ever, ever, ever put a penalty on good behavior.
Nor should you ever, ever, ever say good things about the behavior you don't want to see more of.
It's very simple human nature that people will do more of the things that they get praised for and less of the things they don't get praised for.
And I'm going to talk about this a little bit more in a minute.
Paul Graham, famous investor Paul Graham, asked this in a tweet.
He said... I wonder if the protesters in Portland, etc.
realize that roughly 100% of the effect they're having, the protests that is, on the upcoming presidential election is to help Trump.
That's weird, isn't it?
Don't you wonder why the protesters are so obviously helping Trump, because they're playing right into his message, at the same time, he would be their biggest problem, the person they would most want to leave.
How does that make sense?
How does it make sense that every day that they're putting lots of personal risk and energy and money into getting Trump re-elected?
How can you explain that?
Here's how I explain it.
They need Trump to get re-elected.
Not all of them.
You know, a lot of the protesters are legitimately just protesting racism, and that's great.
But in terms of the organizer class, which are really the ones who make it happen, Most people are just attendees, most people are followers.
There's a small group of people, let's call them the organizing class, that make it all happen.
Among the organizing class, do they want to overthrow the government, or do they want Joe Biden to be president?
They want to overthrow the government.
They don't want Joe Biden to be president.
You don't see the protesters carrying Joe Biden signs, do you?
Do you see any of the protesters with Biden signs?
You don't. Because they don't want Joe Biden to win.
Do you know why? Because if Joe Biden wins, it takes the steam out of their protests.
It takes the energy out of their revolutions.
The worst thing that could happen from the perspective of Black Lives Matter is for Joe Biden to get elected.
Because the moment he gets elected, the people who are protesting are going to say, we got something.
We didn't get everything we want, but at least now Joe Biden will head us in the right direction.
Kamala Harris, they'll be moving us toward a better world.
Thank God this Trump is gone.
They don't want that world.
I'm pretty sure the organizers would prefer the perfect situation would be a non-credible election where Trump wins and stays in office.
And then they can complain that it was a rigged election, it was not credible, Trump is still the problem, nothing's been fixed, we have to overthrow the system.
So watch for the protesters to be very unenthusiastic about Biden for that reason.
Dan Bongino points out that it's incredible that it's been confirmed that the FBI used a suspected Russian agent to spy on a Trump campaign and it's not a front page story.
Think about that.
Just try to imagine this as not a front page story.
That the FBI actually used a Russian agent to spy on the, or a suspected Russian agent, to spy on the Trump campaign.
And it's just sort of ignored.
Now, if you think you live in a world where you form your own opinions, you look at the news, you form your own opinions, you don't.
I don't know if that world ever existed, but it definitely doesn't exist now.
What happens is you are shown a little sliver of the news that That is designed to give you the opinion that is being assigned to you.
If they showed you more than the sliver of news, you might get too much context and you would not accept the assigned opinion.
Because you might say, well, I see your point, but what about all this other stuff?
As long as they just leave out all the other stuff, they can give you a sliver of reality.
You'll say, looks good to me.
If I don't know anything else, I just know that sliver.
My opinion has been assigned to me.
I accept it. By the way, on a more concerning note, Dan Bongino noted publicly that he's got some kind of a lump on his neck that seems to be a concern, and maybe a big concern.
We don't know yet, so wishing him the best on that.
I will add this story, just if it makes Dan feel any better.
In my 20s, I had a lump on my neck, went to my doctor at Kaiser, and they said, I don't know, that looks, we better look into that.
We better get a closer look.
Took an x-ray. I go in and they looked at the x-ray and they said, ah, this doesn't look good.
And I said, well, what does it mean if it's not nothing, which is the other alternative?
They said, it could be nothing.
It could be just a They said one of those things.
That was the actual phrase. It could be just one of those things and we just drain this little bump and there's nothing.
That's it. It could be it.
Or you have a horrible cancerous problem and your life will never be the same.
Those are your two possibilities.
Why don't you come back next week and we'll figure out which one it is.
So I had to wait With basically almost a death sentence preliminary diagnosis of a lump on my neck, I had to wait days to figure out what it was.
Now it turns out that the way to confirm whether it was going to kill me or not, and of course, spoiler, I lived, they would stick a needle into it and draw out the fluid, And if the fluid was blood, I'm in big trouble because it means there's some cancer going on there.
But if it was a clear fluid, it was just some kind of minor infection, no big deal.
So I'm sitting there and I can't see the needle because it's back here.
And I feel it go in and I feel the liquid come out.
And I'm sitting there thinking, you frickin' asshole.
You see the liquid now.
You know if I'm dead or I'm fine.
Tell me. I had to actually ask.
It still bothers me to this day.
The moment it came out, he should have been saying, Ah, no problem.
You're all good. It turns out it was no problem.
It was all good. So Dan, I hope your situation goes like mine did.
I have more empathy than you can imagine.
But I'm going to hope that It's just one of those things and everything's fine.
So I tweeted this yesterday.
I said, I know lots of people who wrote to success on the strategy of skill acquisition and positivity, which is a pretty good package.
If your life strategy is to continually acquire skills, pretty good strategy.
And to approach life with positivity, which affects other people and affects yourself, that's a pretty good strategy.
And I know people have done that, but I don't know anybody who complained their way to success.
It might exist.
But if you have a choice of those two things, either building skills and having a positive attitude, or complaining and not doing anything useful, Pick the one that works.
Now, weirdly, Elon Musk tweeted a reply.
And a lot of people took note because when Elon Musk tweets at me, people think, you guys need to talk or something.
For some reason, people get excited when that happens.
So Elon Musk tweeted this.
And I'm not sure exactly how it relates to my tweet, but he said, There are times when I feel like I'm living in a Dilbert cartoon.
So I tweeted back, the simulation doesn't write itself.
Wait until you see what I have planned for you.
And then, you know, he laughed with some emoticons.
And so anyway, that was fun.
Ted Cruz also retweeted me yesterday.
I had a good day for getting retweeted.
Did you think it was weird when ACB, Amy Coney Barrett, when she was giving her sort of nomination acceptance speech, I guess you'd call it, she went to great lengths to describe her husband as subservient to her?
Was that weird?
And I didn't understand why until the analyst explained it to me, which was, so people were criticizing ACB for being part of a A church group that allegedly, and I think this is incorrect, but the allegation was that the people in that church, the women, were taught by their religion to be subservient to their husbands or something.
I think that's inaccurate.
I think that it never taught that.
I think it had to do with their use of the word handmaidens, but it was really a biblical reference.
It wasn't a reference to subservience.
So she goes in and...
I didn't like this at all, honestly.
It's the thing that felt the creepiest.
She needed to describe her husband as basically the house husband in the group, the one who was serving her needs.
And although he's an attorney and has a practice of his own, he seemed to be the primary caregiver for the seven children because her job was even more high-profile.
And it seemed to me that she was sort of suggesting that the way she could handle an immense workload of being on the Supreme Court while having seven children is that her husband was unusually supportive in terms of raising the kids and supportive of her.
Now, I don't criticize any couple if they have a situation that works.
It's not my issue.
So if anybody has any kind of arrangement That makes them happy and their family.
It's great to me.
But it felt just uncomfortable that she threw her husband under the bus to help her nomination.
I didn't like it.
I just didn't like it.
Now, I'm not saying it wasn't an accurate description, and I'm not entirely sure that the husband has any problem with it.
He was probably perfectly happy with it.
But, I don't know.
Didn't feel right. Didn't love it.
But it probably worked.
So what else is going on?
So up in Portland, the Proud Boy rally ended with no major clashes.
So there were a number of arrests, and there were a number of people throwing stuff, and the usual amount of relatively low-level violence.
Enough so that you could characterize it as no major clashes, but here's the part I found interesting.
So you knew that the Proud Boys were going to show up, and you knew that there would be counter-protesters.
Here's the interesting part.
There were a thousand people that showed up with the Proud Boys, a thousand, and there were 500 who showed up as the counter-protesters.
Now, if you recall, I've been asking for some time Why is it that the news does not report how many protesters are at each of these events?
It's conspicuously missing.
The most obvious thing that you would say about any protest is how many people showed up.
It is the number one determinant of how much I should care.
If six people show up to a protest, I probably don't care.
If a thousand people show up to a protest, you have my attention.
All right? And it's not reported.
And it's It's characteristically not reported.
And the reason I thought that was important, not just in terms of news value, is that you might recall that I said the following.
If the rest of the country knew how many protesters there were, it would allow them to send more non-protesters into the area and take care of it.
If you had enough locals who were anti-protester, Whatever that number of locals is, you could get enough of them, so they would so overwhelm the number of protesters, they would effectively become the police force.
In other words, that the locals, if they had enough, could just cause the protesters to behave, because it would be too much muscle in the general area.
Because force is really the only thing that changes anything in this world.
And here it is.
A thousand Proud Boys showed up and supporters, and only 500 anti-fascists, and the result was no major clashes.
Why was there no major clashes?
Well, I would say it's because the Proud Boys outnumbered the anti-protesters, right?
And it shows you a model It's dangerous, of course, because if you send lots of people willing to fight into an area, you've got some trouble.
So let me say that this is not a recommendation or a suggestion from me about how to handle it.
Rather, I would say it's one of several ways this could end.
There are several paths you could predict you might go down, but one of the paths is that if the police force Decides not to be the primary power in the area, and that's what they've decided.
The police forces decided that they will play for a tie.
The police have decided that they're not going to defeat the protesters.
The protesters know they can't defeat the police.
They're both playing for a tie.
But the Proud Boys were not playing for a tie.
And in theory, you could bring in enough people who just want the protests to stop, That the sheer number of bodies of the non-protesters would make it stop.
There would just be too much power put into the area.
So that's one way it could happen.
It could be that the citizens mobilize in enough numbers that they just overwhelm the protesters, and or there are enough people to make sure looting doesn't happen.
Because really, if you just had enough Kyle Rittenhouse...
The problem with Kyle Rittenhouse was not Kyle Rittenhouse.
The problem with Kyle Rittenhouse is there were not enough Kyle Rittenhouses there.
If the Kyle Rittenhouses had outnumbered the people who attacked him and some of them ultimately got shot, two of them were killed, if the Kyle Rittenhouses had been the majority instead of the lone ranger trying to help things, it would have been different and it probably would have been a lot less violence.
Here's something interesting.
In Electionland ProPublica, that's a publication, Electionland ProPublica, they're reporting that in North Carolina, so far this year, I guess they're already counting the absentee ballots, and already there are three times as many ballots from black citizens that are rejected compared to white.
Now what's the first thing you say about that?
Oh my god. There are discriminating people rejecting ballots because they're doing three times as many black ones as white.
But the story goes on to say that there's no demographic information on the ballots that are being rejected.
And I'm thinking, but isn't there at least a name?
There's a name on the ballot, right?
A printed name?
Don't you know where the ballot came from?
Am I wrong about that?
Because that is demographic information.
It isn't too hard, if you are a racist, to try to guess which names belong to black people.
You wouldn't get every one.
But you could get pretty close, couldn't you?
If you just picked out the obvious ones.
So I'm not sure I believe that you can't tell completely who voted.
But the problems that they call out for why they were being rejected were missing a signature or missing a witness signature.
Now that's pretty black and white, right?
There's either a signature or not.
There's a witness signature or not.
What would be the reason that both in 2018 and now in 2020, three times as many black voters did not fill in one of those two things?
What causes that? Do you have any idea what causes that?
If I had to take a guess, I would say it's correlated with educational levels.
And that the more educated you are, the more adept you are at reading the form correctly, filling it out correctly, and not making any mistakes.
So it probably is just correlated with economic situation and an education situation.
But it does It does certainly raise the question that Trump has been raising, that these ballots are a problem.
All right. But I didn't know this, that apparently the system this year allows the voters, apparently they have time, I don't know if in every case, but they would have time to fix their errors, because I guess they get notified, Now, if they're notified of the errors, there must be some information on the ballot that tells you something about people.
So they can either fix it or they can go vote in person.
But as you might imagine, not everybody fixes it.
So the original problem persists, even though they could have fixed it.
All right, so maybe that'll make a difference.
We'll see. Remember I asked you, I said I couldn't understand why people were criticizing Trump for saying that doing extra testing is surfacing extra infections.
And I thought to myself, how could that not be true?
How could you do extra testing without finding extra people?
I feel like that's just obvious.
And Nate Silver basically said the same thing in the tweet.
He said, it's not clear whether COVID cases are actually on the rise in the US or if it's because there's more testing.
And I thought to myself, that's the first time I've seen anybody who I would imagine is more associated with the left.
I don't know if he says that about himself.
He may not identify with the left.
I don't know. But it's the first time I've heard somebody who wasn't obviously a Trump supporter say, yeah, if you test more, you're going to find more infections.
It seems sort of obvious.
And now Mae Silver is saying it, and I'm wondering, what am I missing?
What am I not understanding about this situation that it could ever not be true that more testing wouldn't find more things?
Isn't the reason you test to find more stuff?
I'm really confused on that.
So I asked by a tweet today, can someone ask Democratic leaders, including BLM, if they'll commit to a peaceful continuation of the Why is nobody asking Democrats if they will commit to a peaceful transfer if Trump wins?
Isn't that a pretty obvious question for democratic leadership of all type?
Here's another one.
And why are democratic leaders not being asked by the press to disavow the domestic terrorist organization that is ironically called Antifa?
Now that Antifa has been designated a domestic terror organization, isn't the obvious thing to ask Democrat leaders, do you disavow them now that they're domestic terrorists?
It's a good question.
It's the most obvious question you should ask, and it's not being asked.
Alright, so a lot of people have asked me, you know, what kind of persuasion or linguistic kill shot should you use against The protesters that you think are going too far.
And sometimes you have to wait a little bit and see how the public is naturally responding to things, and then you find out how people are naturally responding.
You can design a linguistic kill shot that plays to the thing they're already thinking.
That's much easier than just trying to make up some kind of persuasion out of nothing.
It really helps to know how people already think about something.
Now that a little time has gone by, I have this suggestion for a linguistic kill shot on Antifa.
And you just heard me use it.
And it is that the press should always refer to them, when describing Antifa, they should be described as the domestic terrorist organization ironically named Antifa.
It's the ironically named That takes their power away.
Because what Antifa did that was super clever, and has served them really well, they called themselves anti-fascists, even though they weren't, in a way that you would consider it.
And therefore, anybody who criticized them was calling themselves a fascist.
One of the best things anybody ever did, in terms of persuasion.
So, in order to take the power out of that, You could simply refer to them as the ironically named Antifa.
Now, you can feel it, right?
If you said that often enough, say the domestic terrorist organization ironically named Antifa, it would completely take the power out of Antifa.
So that's my suggestion.
Somebody found a video from 1991 in which Joe Biden said, He was talking about a justice suitor, I think, that was being considered at the time and talking about how old people would be in 2020.
And Biden said, in the year 2020, I'll be dead and gone in all probability.
Now, what are the odds that there would be an actual video of Joe Biden predicting his own death by 2020 at the exact same time that we're all wondering if he'll live to Election Day In 2020.
Did he say that about lots of other years?
Is there also a video of Joe Biden saying he might not live to 2025?
Maybe it's something he says a lot and they just found the one that had the 2020 year in it.
But that is very simulation-y.
Very, very simulation-y.
Alright. And there's another video of Biden doing a gaffe that doesn't make any sense at all.
And the gaffe is he suddenly injects somebody named John into his answer.
And there is nobody named John involved in any way with the question or the answer.
You have to hear that to know what's going on.
But I've now learned...
I've learned what Biden does when he loses his train of thought.
And it might be a trick I'll use myself because I often lose my train of thought when I'm doing these periscopes.
Probably I'm losing my mind.
What he does is, if he starts into a point and he loses his train of thought, he doesn't even know what the topic is anymore.
He reverts to this generic statement, which is, we can't let Trump keep doing what he's doing.
Because that fits everything.
So he'll be like, We've got to change the economy, change the taxes, and then he forgets completely what he's talking about.
He's like, well, here's the thing.
We just can't let Trump keep getting away with what he's getting away with.
So whenever he does that, that means he completely forgot what he was talking about.
So look for that. All right.
Some of you are thinking that it's Trump's middle name, Donald John...
Trump, or that he was thinking his name was Donald Trump.
I don't know who he was talking about.
There's another tape that surfaced of Biden.
This is the trouble with being in politics for so long.
There are an infinite number of old Biden tapes of him saying bizarre things.
But Jonathan Turley, who's writing about this today, he said that a tape has surfaced of Biden claiming back at some point, it wasn't too long ago, That he, quote, started at a historically black college.
He actually claimed, Biden did, in front of a...
It looked like a crowd of mostly black voters.
He claimed that he had started out at a historically black college, which, it turns out, never happened, as far as anybody can tell.
And they don't even know what he meant.
They can't even figure out, well...
When he says he started out, does he mean he went to school there?
Or did he have some involvement with them?
It's just sort of bizarre and unstated.
But the fact that you could have a presidential candidate claim that he, or at least apparently claim, this could be misinterpreted, but apparently claim that he went to a historically black college and nobody, and people just let that go.
Nothing to see here.
Yeah, he went to a historically black college.
Why not? Why not?
I tell you all the time, and it's always good to remember this, that the human brain is tuned toward change.
We get used to whatever our situation is.
So even if something is really, really bad, if we do it long enough, we stop complaining about it so much because we just get used to it.
But if something is moving in the wrong direction, even a little bit, our hair will be on fire and we'll be, oh, it's moving in the wrong direction.
So we're far more affected by the direction of things than where things are.
That's just a good thing to understand about human beings because that dynamic, you'll see it all the time.
And one of the ways that it's really, really important at the moment is Is that apparently the COVID deaths in the United States are kind of flat.
And as long as they stay about the same, even though it's way too high, a thousand people a day or something in that neighborhood are dying, even at a thousand deaths a day, as long as it just sort of stays there, and even if the 200,000 deaths that are now, I don't know, 200...
4,000 or 5,000 deaths.
As long as that stays around a few hundred thousand, you know, it might creep up to, I don't know, 230,000 by Election Day or something, wherever it is.
As long as it's in that 200,000-ish range, it's going to feel like it didn't change much.
And the fact that it seems stable-ish is really, really going to work for the President.
Because we can't stay interested in things that are the same, even when they're bad.
We get way more interested in what's on fire today and what somebody said today.
So I think the president's biggest problem is that what people think of coronavirus is becoming smaller and smaller in people's minds, even though the problem isn't going away.
I would say this about how to interpret that the United States has such a bad outcome with coronavirus, according to the experts.
I'm not convinced that if you looked at all the variables, it would look so bad.
In other words, if you considered our obesity, you considered our higher percentage of African-American citizens, if you considered everything, probably it wouldn't look so bad.
But we don't.
And I would say that one factor that we don't count enough Is that Americans just like freedom.
And Americans like freedom more than they like life itself.
That's built into us.
We're actually designed that way, to like freedom more than life itself.
We're literally trained from childhood, at least my generation was.
I don't think it happens anymore. But my generation was trained from childhood that if you had a choice of, you know, You can't get freedom unless you die trying to get it.
We'll die. So this coronavirus is no different than every other challenge the United States has faced since its inception.
What's my trade-off?
Yes, you could be much, much safer if you do the following things.
Or maybe. You could be skeptical, but the experts are telling you you could be much safer if you do these things.
But to do these things, You're going to have to give up this other thing called freedom.
Do Americans say, sure, sure, let's give up some freedom.
I'm in. I'll save some lives.
No, we don't do that.
And we don't want to be those people.
That's the bigger part.
In order for us to have had the same success as other countries, we would have to be like them.
In other words, the thing that killed 200,000 people in this country This is going to sound really ugly, but I think you'll understand what I'm saying.
The thing that killed over 200,000 Americans, to an extent, is a feature, not a bug.
That's cruel.
It's horrible. It's an ugly thought.
But there is something that makes America a little bit special, and it's this.
It's the fact that we don't believe authority.
It's the fact that we don't trust the experts all the time.
It's the fact that if you give us a choice between living like a slave and being healthy, or living like a free person and maybe killing your own grandmother, you'll kill your own grandmother.
You will kill your grandmother for freedom.
You'd kill yourself too. You'd kill anybody for freedom.
It's a feature.
It's a feature, not a bug.
So did President Trump preside over a country that got a worse outcome than other countries?
Maybe. Again, I think you'd really have to dig into the difference in the variables to know that for sure.
But let's say it's true.
Was it a mistake?
It's being couched as a mistake.
I would say it's a choice.
I would say that the country made a conscious choice.
Now, did President Trump Influenced by his own behavior, let's say not wearing masks, let's say downplaying the virus, did he influence anybody's opinion by his own actions?
Perhaps so.
Perhaps so. Is that wrong?
Well, if the way he's persuading Americans is to be more American, it's a hard argument to make that it was wrong.
Unless you think being more American, in other words, preferring freedom over life itself, unless you think that's a bug, he was persuading toward a feature, not a bug.
So that's just one way I'd frame it.
All right. There was a sign I saw at a protest at Yorba Linda.
So it looked like there were some protesters and some counter-protesters.
And one of the signs held up by, it looked like a white counter-protester to BLM, said, black behavior matters.
So the response to black lives matter from this counter-protester was black behavior matters.
Pretty offensive, isn't it?
It is. It's offensive.
Now, of course, he made it to be provocative, so you can't, again, that was a feature, not a bug.
This is somebody who's trying to get your blood boiling, and it worked.
I would say that strikes me as offensive, even though I agree with the thought.
The thought I agree with completely, that people have to take responsibility for themselves, even if somebody else caused the problem.
So I agree with the thought, but here's how I would have said it better.
Instead of saying black behavior matters, I would have said black strategy matters.
In fact, if somebody asked me if black lives matter, here's one way I might answer.
If somebody said, Scott, say it, say it, do black lives matter?
I'm not going to be the jerk that says no.
I'm not going to say the first thing out of my mouth is not going to be all lives matter, because I'm not an idiot.
Why would I cause trouble that doesn't need to be caused?
Here's how I might handle it.
Absolutely, black lives matter.
Super, super true.
Black lives matter, black lives matter.
I might even put up my fist and scream it.
And then I would say, would you agree that black strategy matters?
In other words, that if you have a good strategy, you'll probably get a good outcome.
If you have a bad strategy, you might have a bad outcome.
Would you agree with that?
Because that's my problem.
My problem is not Black Lives Matter, because of course they do.
Duh! My problem is your strategy sucks.
If you use a strategy that is guaranteed to get you the wrong answer, don't blame me when you get the wrong answer.
Don't put it on me.
When you're doing an objectively, obviously, clearly bad strategy, that's not on me.
You gotta take that on yourself.
Here's a general rule that I think is a good one.
If you have somebody who's protesting or wants some kind of change, and you've got other people who seem to be the ones who are in the way, if one of those sides says, let's work together, I'll do some things differently.
Maybe you'll do some things differently.
I acknowledge that the problem might not be me.
I mean, I might not have caused the problem we're trying to fix.
And maybe you didn't cause the problem we're trying to fix.
But if you're not approaching this from the perspective of both of us need to do something differently, you are not really a credible player.
If somebody comes to you and says, Only you need to change.
You'll never get there.
You can never get there if your starting assumption is that one side needs to change.
Even if all the problems are on the other side.
The group that maybe doesn't think it's their fault still needs to say, you know, I don't think we did anything wrong.
But if you're willing to change...
I want to do whatever I can to make it easy for you to change.
In other words, I'll do something different.
Even though it's not my fault, it might not even be my responsibility.
But, if you want to be productive, both sides every time have to say, I'm going to do something different.
You need to do something different too.
But we have to start with that assumption.
As soon as you say, you need to do something different and I don't, That's the end of the story.
You can just walk away.
Stop. I want to tell you a story about that, but I can't for privacy reasons.
But I have been in that situation, shall I say, in the past, where it was expected that I would only change and the other person would not.
And that can never work.
Can't work. Never negotiate with yourself.
All right. Millions of acres have burned in California, but my air quality is good at the moment.
So still keeping an eye on that.
All right. That's all I got for today.
All divorced men have been there, buddy.
All right. I guess you knew what I was talking about, didn't you?
I didn't disguise that well at all, did I? I'm going to tell you the story.
I'm going to hope that my ex-wife will be okay with this, because I don't want to do anything that's too personal here.
But toward the end of my marriage, we did what married people do if they're having trouble.
We went to a counselor.
And I wanted to make sure that I got the best outcome from a marriage counselor, so I said, You pick the marriage counselor.
So this will be my deal.
In order for me to feel like you got the best shot, I want you alone to decide who the marriage counselor is.
Because I was so confident that my point of view would be well represented no matter who the marriage counselor was.
It really didn't matter who it was.
So my ex-wife I picked a woman as the marriage counselor, in which I said, all right, this is perfect.
Because if a woman agrees with anything I say, it's going to carry a little more weight, I think, with my ex-wife.
So I thought, this is perfect.
You picked a marriage counselor, and it's a woman.
This is ideal. Because I'm pretty persuasive, right?
Have you ever met me?
I'm kind of persuasive.
So I thought this is a perfect setup.
I could not have asked for a better situation.
I think it was on probably day one when the marriage counselor told me this was the rule.
That I had to change, but my ex-wife did not need to change in any way whatsoever.
How do you think it turned out?
I argued like a wounded dog I argued, okay, we've got to change that.
We can't even talk about any details about what any issues are.
We have to change that assumption.
Because if we go into it with the assumption that I'm the only one who needs to change in any way, they can't possibly have a good outcome.
And she could not be persuaded away from that.
She never changed her opinion.
That independent of what the actual issues were, I was the only one who needed to change.
Now, I never really even understood it.
I never understood it.
I didn't understand why that wasn't obviously the worst advice anybody ever got anywhere in the history of advice, but it happened.
Now, how many of you had the same situation?
I won't wait for your answers, but I know there are a few of them.
Alright, so that's the story, and I will talk to you.
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