Episode 1349 Scott Adams: I Use Ari Cohn's Tweets to Teach You How to Spot Bad Thinking, Vaccine Misinformation Wars, More
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Maxine Watters, a clear case of bad behavior
Officer Chauvin, tried for being a white cop?
Johnson & Johnson vaccine controversy
Gavin Newsom, hotel housing of homeless
Ari Cohn's response to my tweet
Mental slaves versus free thinkers
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Well, I'd like to start with the good news.
The good news is America has achieved Air superiority on Mars.
Oh, yeah, on Mars.
So we actually, we, I'm taking credit for anything that America does, right?
Well, we just put a drone on Mars.
The drone's been there, but they did a test flight.
Short test flight, and for the first time in the history of the universe, human beings flew a spacecraft In the atmosphere of Mars.
Now, do you think it's a big deal that America is first to get air superiority?
I mean, not really.
But we're heading in that direction where we would control the skies over Mars.
It's probably a big deal.
Whoever has control of the airspace and Mars Someday, 50 years, 75 years from now, whenever it really comes to matter, it's going to matter a lot.
It's going to matter a lot.
So I think we're... This is probably one of the most...
If you add this plus what Elon Musk is doing, these are the most important things for the future of the country, if you're looking at the 50-year mark.
It's not climate change.
As big a deal as climate change is or is not, Controlling space and being dominant in space in the long run is everything.
Because whoever controls that will control the wealth because there are trillions of dollars of rare minerals up there and asteroids and stuff.
But whoever has the superior airspace just controls the ground.
If we don't get a 50-year head start on that, it's going to be trouble.
China's gonna own space.
All right, but we're doing a good job on that.
So good work, American technology people.
Rasmussen will be reporting a little later this morning that 48% of likely voters say withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan is a good idea.
How would we know?
How does the public know anything?
About whether it's a good idea to remove troops from Afghanistan.
Now, I certainly favor it.
So if you ask me, you know, what do I think we should do?
I say yes. Let's get rid of our troops.
But how confident am I that that's the right decision?
And what would I base that on?
Do I base that on all my secret intel about what the Taliban are up to?
I don't really have any secret stuff.
So you end up defaulting to really a reasonable but knowledge-free opinion.
Because if you don't really know what's going on over there, and how many of us do, really?
Do you understand what is the current feeling of Pakistan's leadership about the Taliban?
Is the Taliban changed over time?
Any of that. We don't know any of that.
But... I think it's a fairly good rule that if you can't articulate a good reason for being there, you kind of have to get out, right?
So we can't articulate anymore any reason to be there, at least not one that seems convincing.
So yes, I would say that America is wise to do this, and I do give Biden credit.
I would have given Trump credit.
He would have done the same thing, I think.
So yeah, good job.
And by the way, maybe it takes a Joe Biden to get this done, right?
Have I told you a million times that there's no such thing as a good president?
And there's no such thing as a bad president?
There are only presidents who are suited for the challenges that happen to be going on at the moment.
So a good war president would be useless during peacetime and vice versa.
So it could be that just because Biden is less controversial, that he could get the last of the troops out a little bit easier than Trump could, because it's just automatic against him for that.
So it's possible Biden was exactly the right person for this specific task.
Don't know. In the same way that I believe Trump was exactly the right president for the Middle East, for North Korea, just certain people fit in certain situations.
Chris Cuomo.
I don't know why it's so fun to talk about Chris Cuomo.
There's something about him where he projects maximum sincerity while a lot of observers are observing minimum sincerity.
There's something about the disconnect between the sincerity that he projects.
I mean, it looks real on screen.
If he were just to judge how he operates in his job, he's good at his job.
I think he's very good at his job, actually.
That's why he still has his job.
But there is something that triggers people about him, and I get it.
I know what it is, but I can't put my finger on it.
But he said that the only way there'll be fewer police shootings or police killings of the Chauvin-Floyd kind, I suppose that's what we're talking about, even though that wasn't a shooting, he says that only will happen when more white people are killed by police.
So Chris Cuomo thinks that more white people killed by police would get white people more interested in solving this problem.
Well, as many people pointed out, twice as many white people are killed by police, but it's a smaller percentage of the population.
So fewer as a percentage of white people get shot, but twice as many of them.
So I'm not sure that the data...
is going to give us a solution to this.
But I would like to point out this.
I've never met a white person who celebrated a criminal who resisted arrest and got killed by police.
Have you? I mean, maybe there is one, but I can't think of one.
Is there any case you've ever heard of in which white people rallied around the victim When the victim caused his own demise by resisting arrest.
Do you know what I say about white people who get killed by the police?
Resisting arrest? Good for police.
Alright? Does anybody even disagree with that?
Is there anybody here who identifies as white?
Who says we really want to celebrate the victim, the person who caused the problem in the first place?
I don't think I've ever seen that in my whole life.
And so, as Candace Owens has wisely pointed out, trying to be helpful to the black community, and I genuinely think she's trying to be helpful and says really helpful things, it's just hard to get the message across.
And the message is, if you have bad strategy, you're gonna get a bad result.
Do you know what's a bad strategy?
Listen to Candace Owens.
She says it as clearly as you can.
It's a bad strategy to try to raise the situation for whatever group of people you're talking about, in this case, black Americans.
If you're trying to improve their situation, don't make heroes out of criminals.
That's never going to work.
So you should adopt a strategy that you observe working.
And I observe that white people, of course, everybody's different, right?
When you say white people, it doesn't mean everybody's acting the same.
Same with every group.
And I think you're smart enough to know that.
I don't have to say it every time.
But I feel like it's just a better strategy to demonize your criminals and to celebrate your police who kill them.
Am I wrong? Isn't that obviously a better strategy for improving the lot of whatever people you want to improve?
I mean, to me, that's so glaringly obvious that I'm surprised anybody would disagree.
Well, we have Maxine Waters going full hypocrite and calling for more protesting slash wink-wink violence, especially if the Chauvin case has an acquittal.
Now, of course, Kevin McCarthy and other Republicans, Ted Cruz, etc., lots of people, are quite rightly pushing back on Maxine Waters and saying, hey, that's the same thing you blamed President Trump for.
You said Trump was getting people all riled up to go protest, and obviously it turned into violence, and therefore, if you're going to blame Trump, You're going to have to blame yourself, Maxine Waters.
So I don't know if there's ever been a clearer case of bad behavior than whatever it is that Maxine Waters is doing right now.
I think she needs to lose her job if there's any way that Congress can get rid of her.
Because anybody who's an elected official who's calling for unrest, I feel like maybe they're just not in the right job.
And should she call for unrest, and then there is unrest, and I guess there was a shooting right after that, I feel as if the phrase, blood on your hands, is pretty, pretty accurate in this case.
Now keep in mind that I'm being consistent, because I criticized Trump for not doing enough to stop the rioting at the Capitol, and I'm criticizing Maxine Waters for effectively blundering into the same space.
So at least I'm being consistent.
I could be right, or I could be wrong, but at least I'm on the same side in both cases.
It doesn't matter what your party is.
But here's where this is heading.
So take this story about Maxine Waters, who says, basically, there's going to be rioting if Chauvin is acquitted.
If you're the jury, and you know that acquitting means you cause riots, does that affect your judgment?
It should, right?
Because you're a human being.
The whole point of a jury trial Is that the idea is that American citizens can use their judgment on top of the law, but it's always on top of the law.
Right? There's the law, and we all revere it, but the reason it's humans who make the final decisions is that we all agree that we'd rather have a human make the decision, or a group of them who are reasonable.
Right? If I'm a reasonable human, I am definitely affected by the possibility that I could spark a riot by my decision in the trial.
How would I not be affected by that?
I'd have to be an idiot not to be affected by that.
So keep that in mind.
That's just one thing. Now, apparently we heard that an expert witness for the defense, a place he used to live, and people thought he still lived there, was assaulted by people who put pig blood and a pig's head, I guess, on the porch or something.
So some poor person who bought that house became the victim of a mob, and they had nothing to do with anything.
Right? They just found a dead pig head on their porch and pig blood on their house, which is pretty nasty.
Now, Again, I don't know if the jury has a way to hear news.
Do you? Can somebody tell me what level of sequestering the jury is experiencing?
I keep looking for that.
I thought it would be like, or maybe we don't know that yet because they're not sequestered.
Or, yeah, they would have to be sequestered already, right?
So somebody clear me up on that.
I don't have either the legal knowledge or the background of the case.
They're not sequestered.
Somebody says they go home.
So, all right, let's say that...
Oh, there was no sequestration until today.
It was denied.
Sequestered over the weekend, people are telling me.
All right, so there's some question about what kind of sequestering there is.
But it seems to me, as long as they have electronic devices, it's not really a thing, is it?
Do you think the courts are monitoring their digital access?
That's not a thing, is it?
Can somebody tell me if that is a thing?
Because I don't think it is.
It seems like that would be illegal.
So if the jurors have their digital devices, it doesn't matter where they are, does it?
How can you sequester somebody unless you take away their access?
And there's no way that would be legal.
It couldn't possibly be legal.
To take somebody's phone away from them for weeks, could it?
Or digital access?
So, can we all agree that there's no such thing as sequestering in the modern world?
Does anybody disagree with that?
Because I don't want to make that assumption yet.
But I'm going to... Let me start with this.
I don't think there's any such thing as keeping the information from the jury.
So let's assume that whatever sequestration happens is porous and stuff is getting through.
That's fair, right? Are we all on the same page?
That the jury definitely knows what's going on.
Everybody? I think we're all on the same page, right?
So, if you knew about the pig head for the guy who was just an expert, he was just an expert doing his job, and he gets a pig head.
And then Max Whedon Waters is calling for violence, and then you're seeing all manner of, you know, suggestion that there would be violence and threats.
And how would you handle this if you were the jury?
What would you do?
Could you vote to acquit him?
I don't think you could.
Because if you're the jury and you vote 12 to nothing to acquit, let's say, on all charges, very unlikely, but let's say you did.
Well, that would cause violence.
So one thing that's out of the question, if you want to avoid violence, it's out of the question to acquit them of everything.
It's just out of the question.
At least three powerful lawyers who actually know criminal defense have said in public, out loud, with no pushback, this case will probably not be decided on the facts or the law.
It will probably be decided on public opinion and influence and just how we feel about the whole situation, maybe politics and all that stuff.
But there's probably an 80% chance that this cop is being tried for being white and being a cop.
Hear that clearly.
Officer Chauvin may or may not be guilty of crimes for which he should be punished.
It's hard for me to tell as a layperson.
But separate from what he did or did not do that would be legal or illegal, that's not what the trial is about, according to lawyers.
This is not even my own opinion.
This is people who know way more than I do.
They say he's on trial for being a white cop in 2021.
And we're okay with that.
Are you okay with that?
He's on trial for his fucking race, for all practical purposes.
Like on paper, It's about a crime and there's a process.
But in reality, according to the people, no.
Again, this is not some whack idea I came up with on my own.
People who understand this space, like Alan Dershowitz types, Robert Barnes, people who really know this stuff, they say it's not going to be decided on the facts.
Well, what's left?
If it's not going to be decided on the facts, it's not going to be decided on the law, What the fuck is left?
His race and his occupation.
Right? So he's not exactly being tried for being white.
He's not exactly being tried for being a cop.
But he is being tried for being a white cop in 2021.
That's really what it's about.
And we're just sitting here watching this like that's fucking okay.
It's not. It's not okay.
It's not okay at all.
And of course... Can I say that without a bunch of idiots coming in and saying, oh, well, you're supporting a racist killer?
Of course not. Somebody will come in and say, Scott, how can you support a racist killer?
I'm not. I'm supporting a system which should be giving all people a presumption of innocence and a fair trial.
And nothing like that's happening.
It's happening right in front of us.
We all see it.
We all see it, and we're letting it happen right in front of us.
We should be ashamed.
You should actually be ashamed.
Like, really ashamed that you're letting this happen right in front of you with no pushback at all.
Well, here's an idea from Twitter user HappyHanner.
And she suggested this by a tweet.
She said, the jury should vote guilty And send a note to the judge explaining that they are not following the law or the facts, but protecting their families from a violent mob.
The judge should affirm the verdict and say he's doing so only to protect himself and his family from the mob.
Now, I don't quite buy into this exact suggestion, but I'm going to modify it a little bit.
So I'm going to take this as a...
Have you ever heard me use the phrase, The bad idea is always useful because it suggests the good idea.
So I would call this a really productive bad idea because it makes you think differently, and then maybe you can come up with a good idea.
Here's what I consider a good idea.
If I were on this jury, and none of this is a joke, none of this is slightly hyperbole, this is literally, absolutely, positively, 100% what I would do if I were on this jury.
I would convince the rest of the jurors, and it wouldn't be hard, that we would vote guilty on all points with no deliberation, and we would include a note that said we did it for our own safety with no regard to the facts of the case.
And I would give the judge and the public, you have to give it to the media or else nobody knows, you say, yeah, we voted guilty on all counts without deliberation, and we did it to protect our families.
There you go. And do you know what I would add to the end of the note?
Fuck you, Judge.
Fuck you for putting us in this situation.
Fuck you, Judge, for risking our lives for fucking nothing.
Because at the end of this, are we going to have a trial which people trust and a system that we value?
No. It's going to be worse.
The result of this, judge, is to make the system worse if this goes through to some kind of a normal result.
The system will be worse.
The credibility of the system will be worse.
There will be a tremendous violation of justice independent of whether Chauvin did something that should be punished.
I'm not even talking about that.
I'm talking about the fact that if you punish him for being a white cop in 2021, which is what's happening, you haven't even talked about whether he committed a crime.
I'd like to talk about that.
We should all be talking about whether that was a crime.
Really important. But that's not what he's being tried for in any practical sense.
So yes, if I were on that jury, there's no way in hell that I would let them...
Convict or not convict in any, like, normal way.
I would tear the room apart before I let that happen.
I mean mentally tear it apart, not physically.
And I could get the other 11 jurors to go with that.
And by the way, how hard would it be, how hard would it be for me, specifically me, to convince 11 jurors to go with this plan?
Do you think I could do it?
Yeah, of course I could.
Because people will vote for their own self-interest.
And I would just reframe it as saying, forget about the trial.
The judge just absolutely fucked you and your family.
If you want the judge to fuck you and your family, and you don't want to protect your family, do whatever the fuck you want.
But it's not going to happen to me.
Join the side of the people protecting their families, and don't be part of a corrupt system that makes everything worse.
They can retry this in a smarter way, and you can force them to do it.
Now, keep in mind, it's about the system.
It's got to be about the system.
You've got to protect the system if it's a good system.
And I am so in favor of our laws being decided by a jury of our peers, and I would hope that my peers, the jury in this trial, would try to figure out what's right.
Not what the law says.
Because if the only thing they're looking at is the law, first of all, we don't believe it.
We don't believe that that's what they would do.
But they need to They need to look at what's good for the public and what's good for their families.
And I support the jury for walking out, even.
You know, I would even consider walking out.
If you put me on that jury, the day that I heard that the expert witness got a dead pig on his porch, here's what would happen.
Your Honor, you know, the court would open up and I'd raise my hand.
And the judge would say, this isn't the time for talking to the jury.
And then I would say, Well, if you don't talk to me, I'll be leaving right now.
Because I can't be physically constrained.
So the judge is going to say, okay, okay.
Say what you need to say.
And I would say, look, people are already being attacked for their opinions on this case.
Today's my last day.
What do we need to do to make this civilized?
Because today's my last day as a juror.
What would happen? That would be the end of the case, wouldn't it?
I mean, maybe they replace me.
But the next person should be smart and say, if he got away with that, and this guy just said, I'm done today and I'm going home, I'm going to do it too.
I'm pretty sure I could take down the whole trial.
I don't think it would be hard.
And it should happen. Remember I told you yesterday that I was a little bit suspicious.
This is not an allegation.
So I don't want to get sued.
So I'm making no allegations in this next piece.
I'm simply saying, speculatively and hypothetically and based on the things you know from your own experience, do big companies ever lie about their competition to get an edge?
Has that ever happened in the real world?
Yes. Yes.
Big companies do lie about other companies.
And sometimes you don't know where that lie came from.
Because it might have worked its way through the media, and then you think a reporter said something bad about the competition, but it really came from the other company who was trying to kill their competition.
Now you get that that's the real world, right?
And I suggested that maybe, and again, this is not an accusation, I'm just saying we live in a world where you have to consider this, that when the J&J vaccination, the one that was, if it did not have Dangerous side effects that we don't know yet.
But if it did not have, it was clearly the best one.
Because you only needed one of them.
And it was based on the established technology that we'd feel a little safer with because we've used it before.
So, coincidentally, this news comes out about these exotic blood clots that only affect the best one.
And I said, what are the odds that It's legitimately the best one, the one you only need one of in standard technology, and also I guess it's stable, so it's easier to ship, and it's just better in every way.
What are the odds that the best one is the only one to have these exotic side effects?
And I said, you have to at least be open to the possibility that there's something bad happening in the background.
Some competitor, or maybe even an investor, doesn't even have to be one of the companies, It could be just an investor trying to change things up, get an advantage.
And if you thought to yourself when you heard that, I don't think big established companies would do something like that, right?
Big company wouldn't do that, would they?
Well, here's the news today.
Apparently J&J has said in public that their competitors also have blood clot problems.
Except that there's no evidence of that.
So J&J, a big pharmaceutical company, just said in public, right, with no ambiguity, they said it in public, that their competitors have these problems, that there is no data to support that that actually exists.
So if you're wondering, Could it be that the competitors, just hypothetically, I don't have any evidence of this, but could they be the type of people who would be in a situation to say something bad and untrue about J&J? Well, we just watched J&J say something in public, clearly untrue, bad about their competitors.
So yes, this happens.
Um... Let me tell you my current thinking about vaccines.
If I can, I'm going to hold out for the J&J vaccination.
So the one that's getting the most heat is the one I'm most interested in right now.
Because number one, I don't trust the criticisms.
I think they could be economically motivated.
Don't know, right?
There's no evidence of it.
Let me be clear. I've seen no fact to support that suspicion.
It's just an industry in which this just happens all the time.
And we're watching it.
We're watching it right in front of us.
Happening right now. So you don't even have to wonder if it's a thing.
It's happening. So if we get to the point where the J&J thing becomes back on the market, even if it's only for men, because maybe it's safer for men, we don't know yet.
I think I would take that one.
I feel like that's the one I want, if only because it's one shot, and I think it doesn't knock you out like the other ones do after the second shot.
All right, here's an interesting story, and I don't know what to make of it yet.
And I'm going to hold my opinion.
Gavin Newsom is bragging, and maybe he's right.
Maybe he's right. Now, context here.
I live in California.
I've been fairly brutal in my...
In my criticism of our governor.
But if he did something right, I would like to call it out.
I just don't know.
So let me run it by you.
So the reporting is that the governor in the state of New York used the pandemic as an excuse to do something really fast for the homeless.
And what they did, and I know when you first hear this, this sounds like the worst idea you've ever heard.
So just... Suspend your criticism until I finish.
Because when I get to the end, it's going to look like a better idea than when I start.
Because at the beginning, it looks like the dumbest idea you've ever heard.
Which is they bought up a bunch of hotels and moved all the homeless people into hotels.
Now, part of it was for a COVID separation.
But part of it was they wanted to put the homeless somewhere.
Now, many of you are...
More trained in understanding the news than the general public.
How many of you are thinking right now, Scott, you're solving the wrong problem, or California's.
It's not a homeless problem.
It's a mental health and addiction problem.
And even if you give everybody a home, they're not going to want to be in it, because they've got mental health problems or whatever, and addictions, and who knows?
And they couldn't take care of it, and blah, blah, blah, whatever you think.
But... These are paired with social services.
So you're putting a bunch of homeless people in one place.
And, of course, environments do affect people.
We're very programmed by the physical environment.
So could people who are in the worst situation mentally, let's say, could they be helped by simply having a cleaner, safer physical environment?
I'd say yes. I mean, if they could stay there and, you know, if they can work with it, yes.
It helps your mental situation.
But the real key to this is the quality, I think, of these social services that would be paired with the facilities that have a lot of homeless.
Now, I don't know how much this costs.
You know, it was like pushing a billion dollars to buy the hotels.
Then how many billions is it going to cost every year for the social services, etc.?
But I'm going to suspend my criticism of this.
Because when you add the fact that They're adding the social services to the combining them in one place.
You might have something.
So I'm going to say, let's find out, right?
Who is it who's...
How did I get out of NXIVM? That's a strange question.
Okay, I was never in it.
Let's find out. Let's find out if this experiment works.
I mean, I'm skeptical.
But let's find out if it works.
If it does, credit him.
If it doesn't, well, not surprised.
All right. I made a tweet yesterday that caused a little problem with one person in particular, Ari Cohn.
You might know him as a First Amendment and defamation lawyer that you see on MSNBC and, I don't know, CNN or wherever.
I'm not sure. He's on one of those left-leading networks.
And I'll tell you the tweet I made.
I talked about this yesterday. And then I'll tell you his response to it and see if we can find the cognitive dissonance.
All right? Now, most of you, if you've been following me for a while, have been trained in identifying fake news and trained in critical thinking far more than the average of the public.
So I think you'll be able to spot this pretty quickly.
All right, so starting with my tweet.
So here's my tweet. One way to eliminate police shootings during traffic stops is to allow only, and only is important here, Uber-like self-driving cars, and no other cars in urban areas.
If a perp is in one of those, police can override its controls, lock in the perp, and make it drive to police headquarters for safe handling.
All right. Now, first of all, let me put on your reading comprehension hats.
Alright, reading comprehension.
Forget about the quality of the ideas there.
Reading comprehension.
Do both of these ideas, because there's sort of two ideas in there, Do they seem similarly serious to you?
So the first idea is that if you had self-driving cars only, and they were not owned by individuals, rather they were owned by, say, an Uber-like company, that you would eliminate all traffic stops, and therefore no problems could happen, because nobody would ever be stopped.
There would never be a reason to stop a car in which the car's movement is controlled by a company.
So you might give a ticket to the company, but you would never have a reason to stop an individual in an Uber-like self-driving car.
So the first part of it is serious, which is self-driving cars are coming.
If you did it right, you could eliminate a whole bunch of potential problems.
Does anybody disagree with that?
Now, you might disagree whether it would ever be practical to have self-driving cars.
I think if you got rid of the other cars on the road, it becomes a lot easier.
It's only self-driving cars.
They can be networked to each other.
Even if one goes bad, the other cars will know it because they're networked and they would know to avoid it and stuff.
So I think it's inevitable that there will be self-driving cars.
It's not inevitable that they'll be owned by one company and networked together, but that's what I'm saying could be a solution.
All right, so the first part of the tweet I think is you should have taken it as completely serious, saying that we have a self-solving problem.
The problem of police stops will solve itself if we did nothing.
It would just take 20 years or whatever it is, and we could probably accelerate that.
The second part of the tweet is that if a perp is in one of those self-driving cars, the police can override its controls, lock in the perp, And make it drive to police headquarters for safe handling.
All right. Reading comprehension.
Was that a serious suggestion in the comments?
Did you take that as a serious suggestion?
Or tell me how you did take it.
I won't lead the witness. Tell me how your reading comprehension took that.
Now somebody says satire.
No, it's not a satire.
But I know you're basically trying to say it's not serious, but I wouldn't use the word satire.
Somebody says it's a joke.
Well, I wouldn't call it a joke.
I would say it's whimsical, meaning that it is kind of funny, but that wasn't the purpose.
So I didn't write it because I had a good punchline.
Somebody said a thought experiment.
You're getting close. Alright, I already primed you earlier.
I wondered if the priming would help.
It's the bad idea.
I just told you that.
On another topic, right?
And I've told you a number of times in these broadcasts.
There's nothing more useful than a creative bad idea.
Because the bad idea makes you think, well, that won't work.
Sure, that's a bad idea. But what if you modified it a little bit?
Are you ready? Let's take the bad idea...
Let's see if we can modify it so it actually works.
Here's a modification.
Instead of driving it automatically to the police, suppose there's facial recognition, which there probably would be.
You get into your car, and the car knows who you are, and it knows you have an arrest warrant.
And a little message comes on that says you have two choices.
You can go nowhere, or you can drive to the police department To a secure area that's got concrete walls and the door closes behind you.
And the police will just keep you in there as long as you want.
You'd like to stay in there a couple days and not surrender?
That's okay. Just stay there.
We don't care. It's completely safe.
You can't get out. And it's concrete walls.
So you could certainly wait until you could get the person out safely.
So there's certainly no possibility...
That is more dangerous than a traffic stop.
If they drove to a secure place with concrete walls and blah blah.
So the first thing is, don't assume it's being implemented in the worst possible way.
That's the dumbest way to read anything.
Okay, let's assume that the idea has as a base assumption that we'll implement it in the worst possible way.
There's no such thing as a good idea that still works if you implement it in the worst possible way.
So how about assuming you don't do that?
How about assuming that you work through the problems and you figure out what works and what doesn't?
So certainly if you gave the person the option of driving to the police and essentially surrendering, Or it doesn't go anywhere.
Is that more dangerous than our current situation?
It feels like it's less dangerous, right?
And it's just a little bit of modification to the bad idea.
The bad idea is that the car just takes you to the police station whether you like it or not, right?
That would be the bad idea.
But it's easy to take that and then tweak it a little bit and say, all right, well, what if you just got one option?
It's the only place it'll take you.
Otherwise, you're going to have to work out your problems.
Alright, but let's see how Ari Cohn dealt with this.
So after reading my tweet, this is what Ari said.
And keep in mind he's the lawyer.
He says, And then parenthetically, And then he goes on, But on a more fundamental level, just what kind of traffic stop are cops going to be doing on self-driving cars?
And then he ended by characterizing me as, and I quote, fucking dumb.
Well, let's pull apart Ari's analysis.
So first of all, he says, what kind of legal problems could there be with an automatic arrest for traffic stops?
The idea is there are no traffic stops.
So Ari's criticism of, huh, how about we eliminate the possibility of any traffic stops?
Because there wouldn't be any reason to stop a self-driving car that was owned by an Uber-like company, because who are you going to give the ticket to?
Uber? The programmer?
The person in the car is completely innocent.
They didn't have any choice. So Ari, first of all, doesn't understand...
That there would be no scenario in which you would give a ticket to the driver, because there is no driver, of a self-driving car.
Alright, so first of all, complete lack of understanding of a simple concept.
And then he takes this to the cops, re-reading this, what could possibly go wrong if the cops arrest you because they feel like it?
Read, you're not white.
To which I said, How did this become racial?
What part of my idea even suggested in any way that it would be a racial component?
But Ari's problem is that the cops would be sitting there with their remote control, and they'd see, like, white people go by in cars.
And remember, every car is obeying the law, because they're self-driving cars.
None of them are breaking the law.
But in Ari's reading, the cop would be sitting there, white driver, good.
White driver, white driver, white driver, black driver, bump!
Black driver, got him.
And then the car would be taken over by the police, but only the black drivers, because, you know, police are racist.
And then they would make only the black drivers drive to the police department and surrender themselves.
Now, what would they be surrendering for?
Well, apparently, no crime.
They would be surrendering for being black in a self-driving car, according to Ari Cohn.
That was his interpretation of where this would go.
Ari, you do understand that the problem we're trying to fix is that there's a concern that the police are targeting people of color.
That's the current situation.
That's the part we're trying to not do.
That's the part that goes away.
That the police wouldn't have any reason to target anybody.
They wouldn't even be there.
They wouldn't even have a reason.
So that was his insightful...
And keep in mind that he capped it off by calling me fucking dumb.
All right. So how was I going to respond to this?
Now keep in mind...
That yesterday I told you, before anybody was even blowing this up on Twitter, I told you that I wasn't completely serious, or I said, you shouldn't take me that too seriously, the part about the car drives to the police department.
You heard that, right?
Yesterday I said, before any of this happened, I said, don't take that part too seriously.
That's more just a thought experiment, right?
Now somebody pointed out, and this is a good point, What if there's an armed person in one of these cars, and what if they try to escape the car by shooting the window out?
That'd be pretty bad for people around there.
Yeah, that's a problem.
If you actually forced the person not to be able to get out of the car under any circumstance and drove them to the police department, that would be a problem.
So just don't do that.
Just give them a choice of going to the police department, or I can't go anywhere.
That's all. And you're done.
Now, it wouldn't be more dangerous than police stopping somebody who is close to being able to pull a trigger.
I mean, you don't want the police to be stopping them, so almost anything is better than what's happening now.
All right, but here's the trap.
Suppose I had responded to Ari and saying, Ari, you're taking seriously part of a tweet you should not take that seriously.
I don't do...
I don't design products on Twitter.
Twitter's just sort of, you know, top-of-the-head idea.
See where it goes. And...
But here's the trap.
Do you see the trap? Because he asked me to defend myself.
But what would happen if I had?
What would happen if my response to him saying my idea is fucking dumb?
What if I'd said...
Oh, you took the tweet seriously.
It wasn't meant to be taken at that level of seriousness.
What would have happened? Do you see the trap?
The trap is, yeah, the trap is I lose.
It was a trap.
So the trap was that if I'd said, Ari, you're taking me seriously, when this shouldn't be taken as like a product design.
Everybody would have jumped in and said, oh, nice try, Scott.
You got caught.
You said something stupid, and now you're trying to defend it as not that serious.
Oh, it's just a joke. I get it.
It's just satire. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
Gotcha. We gotcha.
We gotcha backpedaling, and we gotcha being stupid.
That's two crimes.
One is being stupid, and the other is lying about it and saying you were just joking.
Gotcha. Gotcha.
So having lots of experience in media stuff, I could see the trap forming.
So what do you do?
How do you avoid the trap?
So here's how I tried to do it.
Not so sure I did it well.
I just retweeted him and I said that I'd let the commenters go first and let the commenters...
So my best play was to let the other people who were watching the conversation come in and say that they understood, without me telling them, that that wasn't to be taken seriously.
Which I did. So lots of people poured in and said, I don't think you're supposed to take that part too seriously, which was the correct interpretation.
So once other people had said they read it differently, then finally I can come in.
But if I came in first, it would look like I primed the other people and they were just agreeing with me.
So I had to have other people go first, and then I could go in.
Do you get that? This is, you know, Living in the media and in the public as I do, you learn to see these traps before they form.
All right, so here's how it went.
So I let other people comment, and then Ari commented this.
He said, so what you're saying is you can't defend your own idea, lol.
Have I ever taught you how to spot cognitive dissonance?
It's in that book right behind me, Win Bigly.
I think I also put it in lose or think, but it's definitely in win bigly.
And the trick is this.
When somebody starts a sentence with so, and then they mischaracterize your opinion after that, that's cognitive dissonance.
Pretty much every time.
Now, I can't say it's 100%, but I haven't seen an exception.
Every time you see a sentence in this form, starts with the word so...
And it's followed by some weird absolute.
That's a person who's been triggered, literally, into a condition of cognitive dissonance.
Now you have to look for the trigger.
There's no cognitive dissonance without a trigger.
There has to be something that causes it.
It doesn't just sort of happen.
And here the trigger is very obvious.
The trigger is that he had committed to calling me fucking dumb in public.
And then when people poured into the comments and told them that they read it properly, And that a proper reading would remove the objections.
What's he going to do?
What do you do if you're a public lawyer and your job is to be smart in public?
That's his job. He's on TV being smart in public.
That's why he's hired.
And then you find out that you were really, really dumb in public.
That's the trigger.
So the trigger is he can't, and this would be any person, like you put any normal person in the same situation, they would be triggered exactly the same way.
So this is not a comment about Ari Cohn.
This is a universal comment.
Anybody in this situation would have his exact experience, which is you can't integrate that my entire job and identity is being smart in public But I just did something so amazingly dumb in public, like really dumb, those can't be reconciled.
So when that happens, cognitive dissonance comes in to explain how two opposites, I'm very smart, but I just did something very dumb, how they can be integrated.
And the integration is, LOL, you can't defend yourself, can you, Scott?
Well, he didn't see part two, which is first I had to let the commenters show him that a A wiser reading of the words gives you a different outcome.
All right, so... Just to show that other people saw it differently than Ari, here are some other replies.
David Gilley replied, he said to Ari, where did Scott say anything about an automatic arrest?
Waiting, waiting. We'll be waiting through infinity for this answer.
Yes, correct. There was a little too much red into that.
Then... An engineer, JD Christiani, says, I'd imagine they would need a warrant for an automatic arrest still.
And to be honest, I'd much prefer having a self-driving car take me to a police station compared to having my door kicked in and my house trashed all while my neighbors are watching.
Now, what did this commenter who is an engineer and maybe watches my content, what did he do correctly?
What he did correctly...
Was compare it to the alternative.
What do I talk about all the time?
You can't judge anything until you've compared it to an alternative.
So, he did.
He compared it to the alternative.
Right? That's good thinking.
Now, you could disagree with his conclusion, but not the fact that he compared it to an alternative.
So that's just smart.
Then somebody else said, I guess, J. Sinsatex, whoever that is, They pretty much can do the former now, meaning just, you know, stop anybody they want for any reason.
And the whole point is that there wouldn't be a cause for any traffic stops.
So now that people are agreeing that they see it the same way.
Blah, blah, blah. And...
Okay.
So the other thing that people do when they see this kind of thing is that they imagine it would be designed in the worst possible way.
I think I mentioned that. And that would be a case of Joe Uchill.
I think he's a reporter.
And he commented, he said, just to make me look extra stupid, he put some dots in this.
He goes, the dot, dot, dot, dot.
The driver still needs to exit the car at some point.
Scott, I mean, the driver still has to exit the car.
But this is an example of assuming you would design the dumbest possible system.
You would make sure, if you did this at all, you'd make sure that it went to a safe place so that when the person exited the car, it's the safest possible way to exit the car.
But yeah, they have to exit the car.
One is a dumb way.
One is a smart way.
Why would you assume you'd design it the dumb way?
All right. Here's another criticism.
Since less than 1% of traffic stops result in harm, it's a needless policy.
So a notorious legal, somebody who has some kind of legal background, believes that it's a waste of time trying to fix this, you know, problem of police stopping people because less than 1% of traffic stops result in harm.
To which I say, well, that might be true.
I mean, somewhere in that neighborhood, less than 1% probably.
But those are the ones that cause the riots.
The 1% that cause the harm are 100% of the riots.
It's 100% of the racist animosity.
So... How bad could you be at math to look at the traffic stops and ignore the riots that are destroying the country together?
Anyway, and I'm pretty sure that because I agree Black Lives Matter, I'm pretty sure that stopping 1% of the problematic traffic stops to stop 100% of the riots is a positive thing.
All right. And then here's my favorite.
Have I told you that about half of the news is based on imaginary people?
All right, here's another one that's just based on an imaginary person.
So some user called SirFoodalot is weighing in with this conversation and says on Twitter, Why are these F-nuts, he swears, perfectly fine with the government taking control of your car, But won't wear an effing mask.
So here, this Twitter user believes there's a person who is perfectly fine with the government controlling your self-driving car, but they won't wear a mask.
Who is that? He's really mad about the imaginary people.
It's not me. That doesn't describe me.
All right. In the Kyle Rittenhouse case, you all know Kyle shot two people in what looked like self-defense, but he's going to be on trial for murder.
And there was a GoFundMe, and the news came out that, I guess, the list of donors leaked.
And one of them was a Utah paramedic.
So he donated to the defense fund for Kyle Rittenhouse, and it was like $10, right?
Just a small donation. And the Guardian wrote about it, and the next thing you know...
A reporter shows up at his house, this Utah paramedic, to try to shame him, I guess.
I mean, on the surface, it was news.
But why are you going to this guy's house?
He gave $10.
He gave $10 to something that he thought was supporting justice.
And this guy needs to be dragged through the news.
We're going to make a victim of And this Utah paramedic, paramedics save lives.
This guy's not a jerk.
He's a guy who looked at the video just like all of us did.
He reached an opinion, made a free person's decision to put some of his money behind his opinion, and then the news is going to take him down for that?
This is the most disgusting, Unethical, immoral thing you'll ever see in the news.
I mean, really, truly disgusting.
Alright, here's something that made me laugh a lot, especially lately.
James Lindsay, also known as Conceptual James sometimes on Twitter.
I believe he has done some or said some controversial things which I'm not fully informed on, so I'm not buying into any controversial ideas that he may or may not have said because I don't even know what they are.
But I know that he's provocative.
So I'm just telling you I'm not aligning with all of his opinions.
I'm just giving you this one's kind of brilliant.
Two tweets. And he says, And then he goes on.
I suspect a lot of the reason so many academic temperament types turn to Marxism and other Marxian ideologies is that they're simultaneously not good at making money, smarter than average, and suckers for theoretical constructs that would work if only people were smarter.
Oh my God, that hits exactly home, doesn't it?
You know, When you see people complaining about anything, you always have to ask, okay, are they really complaining about that, or is it just political, or is it just some personal problem they're having at home?
And this just hits...
This feels right, doesn't it?
It feels that the academics are working off some kind of anger or guilt or feelings of low self-esteem, and that the way they do it is this way.
And... Maybe that's all that's going on.
Now, of course, I doubt it's all that's going on, but this is definitely part of it.
There's definitely a jealousy, arrogance element in all of this.
All right. Here's a prediction for you.
This is my prediction. Before long, I said the consumers of ad-based news, which is most of it, right?
Most of the news is supported by advertising, that the consumers of that will be seen as mental slaves.
To ridiculous narratives.
That's largely the situation now, right?
People who are consuming CNN and MSNBC, especially, are basically victims.
They're mental slaves to ridiculous narratives.
Now, are you going to jump on me and say, but what about Fox News?
Yeah, Fox News 2. Fox News 2.
The only difference, and I feel strongly about this, is that...
The people who consume news on the right, Fox News, etc., tend to also be exposed to the news on the left.
They might prefer the narratives on the right, but at least they see both of them more likely than the people on the left.
I think that's anecdotally so obvious that I feel like science would support it.
But then I'm going to go on and say that The consumers of subscription-based news.
Let's say Substack is one.
Locals is another platform with subscription.
That's the one I'm on. And that they will be the only free thinkers.
And that the world is actually going to bifurcate into people who are mental slaves to narratives they've been fed.
That will be all the advertising-based news.
But people who have moved to at least including some of the subscription-based stuff And I'm going to call out, as I often do, Glenn Greenwald, as he's in Substack.
Matt Taibbi, also in Substack.
I'm in Locals. Greg Goffeld is in Locals.
Lots of people are in Locals as well.
So I think that's where it's going.
The future will be two types of people, mental slaves and free thinkers.
And if you don't have a subscription, So that you can get the free thinkers, you will be just a slave to the narrative.
And that's where it's going.
All right. That is my show for the day.
And pretty soon, can anybody tell me when the closing arguments for the defense happened in the Chauvin trial?
Does anybody know when that happens?
It's this week, right? So here's my other prediction.
No matter what the evidence seems to show in this case with Chauvin and Floyd, no matter what the evidence showed, I do believe that the closing arguments, and especially this attorney, he appears to be quite qualified, I believe that he can, in his closing comments, absolutely destroy the prosecution.
He couldn't do it with experts because they kind of fell a little bit short.
But I think that it would be easy to demonstrate probable cause.
And the way I'd do it is what I've told you before.
I would just say, imagine you're this police officer.
The whole case depends on him knowing he's causing this danger to Floyd.
The whole case depends on his mental knowledge that he knew he was doing it and preferred to do it.
Maybe he didn't know he was going to kill him, but knew he could put him in a situation where he might have a tragic outcome.
How does that make sense with the fact that he did it slowly in front of people filming him?
That's the end of the case.
Nobody, you can't even imagine it in your mind, that somebody did it intentionally, but they also did it in front of a crowd of spectators filming it.
It's unimaginable that that happened.
And so, that's a lot of reasonable doubt.
And it wouldn't matter what the evidence said.
As soon as you framed it like that, I'd say, oh, okay.
I just know in my own mind he couldn't have been thinking that.
That's the end of it. You don't need any evidence for that.
Now, I don't know if you can say that in a closing argument.
Can you? Can the closing argument depart from the facts presented in the trial?
I think they can a little bit, right?
There must be some limit to what you can do.
But I feel like you could ask people to judge the case using common sense and that you could encourage them what that looks like.
I think that's okay, right?
All right. Somebody says, ask Ari.
But you've already said facts won't matter in the verdict.
Correct. What I just said was that the argument wouldn't be based on so much the facts that were presented and But the facts that are already in people's heads.
Putting a fact into a head and making it matter is really, really hard.
But telling people to use the facts that they already accept as facts and just reframe it, that's really easy.
So that's why this looks easy to me.
You don't have to introduce any facts.
You just reframe it.
And anybody who hears the reframe is going to say, well, that at least gives me some doubt.
