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April 21, 2021 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:10:16
Episode 1352 Scott Adams: Chauvin Verdict and What it Means About America

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All right. It's time.
Come on in. Come on in.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
And can you make a guess what we'll be talking about today?
I think you can. I think you can.
And if you'd like to enjoy it, I mean really, really enjoy it, like better than you've ever enjoyed, Coffee with Scott Adams?
Well, all you need is a cup or mug or glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask.
A vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid I like.
Coffee. You might like racism, but don't drink that.
No, never. Drink a delicious beverage, beverage?
A beverage instead.
And I'd like you to join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Go! Oh, that was a simultaneous gulp.
Yeah, a little bit extra.
A little bit extra.
Well, everything in the world is backwards and upside down today.
Have you noticed that nothing seems to be right today?
Everything's just a little bit off.
And you don't notice it until you see all the examples, but I'll give you some as we go.
So I'd like to start out with a big damn you, damn you to Andres Backhaus, who I talk about often because he's great on data analysis for any of the stuff in the news.
But he made me retweet Aaron Rupar's tweet, and I can't forgive him for that.
But it's the first time I've unironically retweeted him, I think.
But if you don't know who Aaron Rupar is, he's...
He's a character who's, let's say, interesting.
We'll just keep it at that.
But normally I would not agree with his tweets, but here he was responding to Nancy Pelosi's speech after the Chauvin-Floyd verdict.
And Nancy Pelosi managed to reach into this big basket of things that you could say And managed to pull out the only thing that was wrong.
You could have gone in a hundred different directions and not messed this up as badly as she did, to the point where Erin Rupar is retweeting you with condemnation.
She said...
Thank you, George Floyd, for giving your life for...
I'm not even going to finish it.
But let's just say...
In the history of politicians saying dumb shit, this was notable.
Even her own side had said, well, we're out.
If you're Nancy Pelosi and Aaron Rupar is listening to you and the first thing he says, I'm out.
I'm out. I don't want any part of this.
You've really gone off.
You've gone too far.
In other news, there's a Norfolk police lieutenant who was fired because it was leaked that he donated some money to Kyle Rittenhouse's defense and gave him some words of encouragement.
He got fired for that.
Thank you.
He got fired for an opinion that was backed by the video that For a person who is presumed innocent until proven guilty, and he got fired for it.
So that's the Norfolk Police Department for you.
That's pretty pathetic.
Now, here's the good news.
If you are, let's say, a police union, and your contracts come up, I'm assuming the union does the negotiating for the police contracts, What would you ask for in terms of a raise this coming round?
I feel like 30% would be the right number, right?
That doesn't mean they'll be able to get it, because there are lots of forces pushing back.
But I would say that the police unions have a rock-solid argument that the environment of risk has changed so substantially that the risk-reward of their job can't be looked at the same anymore.
And that on top of the physical violence risk, which was always extreme, which is why we have so much respect for the police, they're doing stuff you and I don't want to do, for the most part.
But I would say that given now the legal and social risk on top of the violence risk, it looks different now.
I would say I would back the cops for a 30% raise, minimum.
And that's just based on how society has changed the risk that we're willing to put on the police.
Now, I would say that before, you could argue, but wait, we should put this risk on the police.
That's not even the argument.
So whether you think that the Floyd trial went just the way it should have, or you don't, irrelevant.
It doesn't matter any of that.
To my point, that the police are in a new situation of risk.
Whether they should be there or not is a separate question.
But they are there, and it's different, and it's more.
Risk-reward suggests that police should get, I would say, a minimum of 30% raise, because I don't know how you could retain them otherwise.
The thing they signed up for just doesn't exist.
Because the thing they signed up for is if it was a gray area, they were probably going to get away with it.
When I say get away with it, I don't mean that they necessarily did something wrong.
I just mean that if it's a gray area, and they were trying to do their job, they probably would have gotten away with it in the past.
And I guess I'm biasing by saying getting away with it, because maybe there was nothing to get away with.
But 30% pay raise for police.
I think that is called for.
So I would overfund the police based on this new situation.
So whoever wanted to defund the police, probably this moved in the wrong direction.
And by the way, there's no economist who would disagree with me.
Right? It's the same job, except way extra risk.
You have to pay extra for that.
That's how it works.
So if defunding the police is what anybody wanted, I'm pretty sure this should work the other way, if economics works the way it's supposed to.
The Nextdoor app, I hear, has a new feature that'll tell you if you're being racist before you send your message.
What do you think of that? What do you think of the Nextdoor app before you send out a little message to the neighbors?
Apparently it's got some artificial intelligence built in that's just looking for keywords such as Blue Lives Matter.
It'll flag that.
That's actually one of the examples.
It'll flag it to say, you know, some people would take Blue Lives Matter as a racist statement.
Are you sure you want to send it?
It'll still let you send it.
Or All Lives Matter.
If you type All Lives Matter into the app, it'll stop you and say, you know what's going on here, right?
It's going to look a little racist.
Think twice. What do you think about that?
Are you up for that?
Are you down for that? I have mixed opinions.
I usually violate the common thinking whenever information is presented that's useful.
So, in my opinion, Nextdoor is presenting actually useful information.
Because there might be people who literally don't know that they're about to ruin their own life by saying something that they think is supporting all life and equality, but other people are going to think you're a racist.
I don't know. I think it's worth trying.
Maybe see how people think about it.
Give it a whirl. If they were actually blocking you for saying it, then that's another question.
But if it's just information, and it's information that can save your life, literally, it's worth a try.
They can always reverse it if the users don't like it.
But anytime you can try something cheaply, And it's got a good purpose behind it.
Yeah, why not? Give it a try.
It's a little creepy, but it's a test.
Everything's a test if you can reverse it easily.
All right, let's talk about the Chauvin outcome.
If you didn't hear me last night, I did a live stream last night, but let me recap my opinion.
Number one, I am satisfied with the jury's work on this.
I thank the jurors.
I do not think that the jury's job is to decide the law.
So this is where I might differ with some of you.
I don't believe that the jury's duty, and I use this word, you know, intentionally, I don't think that the jury's duty Was to attend to the letter of the law as instructed by the judge.
That was their job description, right?
It's not their duty.
Their duty under the law is to follow the law just as best they can.
So certainly if the only duty you were talking about is what their legal required description of their responsibility is, then it was their duty to follow the letter of the law.
But what's the higher law than the legal law, the one that's written down?
Is there any higher law?
Of course there is.
Of course there is.
There's the greater good.
If you ever ran into a situation where following the letter of the law was clearly bad for the greater good, what would be the duty of the jury?
I'm going to give you an artificial example where the jury knows that following the letter of the law would just be a wrong.
What's their duty? Is their duty to follow that law that they know is wrong?
No. Never.
Their duty is to be humans.
Their duty is to be Americans.
Their duty is to their fellow citizens for whom they have taken some sacrifice to serve on this jury.
Now, before we discuss the question of whether they handled it right, separately, can we agree that their duty is to do the best they can for the greater good?
They might not get it right, but their duty is not to follow the law if the greater good is in a different direction.
Does anybody disagree with that?
I want to see if there are those who would say that they should follow the law even if they knew the law was an evil.
I'm not saying that's the case in the Chauvin case, just as a principle.
There are a lot of people here.
A lot of people disagree.
I will take your disagreement with respect.
Meaning that I respect that point of view completely.
I have complete respect for the opposite view of mine, which is if you think that following the law is just always going to be better, even if there's some evil in a specific case, I can see that.
That's not a terrible argument, by the way, because there's an assumption built in that following the letter of the law gets you to a, you know, in the long run, you've got a better situation, right?
Yeah, that's fairly good.
But I disagree.
I disagree. The human law is always higher than the real law, the written law, in my opinion.
And the problem is whether you are wise enough to know when to make this critical exception.
And that's a problem, right?
Because maybe humans are not wise enough to make these exceptions.
But there is a reason that we have jury trials, and it's because we're all more comfortable with a system in which some capable people who mean well Do the best they can.
That's as good as you can get.
It's a pretty good system.
And I would say the system worked in that sense.
And I do think that the jurors took into account their own safety, which I support.
I think they took into account what would happen to society, which I would support them doing that, just in this specific case.
I think they took into account potential riots.
I think they took into account how the police would be viewed.
I think they took into account racial animosity.
I think they took into account how it feels.
Should they? Well, most of you think no.
But they did, because you can't not.
Nobody has the ability to turn that off.
It's all part of the forces.
So... Here's what I like about the outcome.
I do believe that it was a close call in terms of whether he was guilty of anything versus not guilty.
I think that the jury heard all of the evidence, and I didn't.
That's important. The jury heard all of the evidence.
I didn't. Most of you, almost 100% of you, also didn't hear all of the evidence.
You didn't live through it.
So if the people who lived through it and saw all of it have a different feeling about it than I got from my little keyhole, I'm not going to say they're wrong.
Because the assumption is, if all 12 of them voted the same way, it's more likely that I would have voted that way too.
If I'd seen what they saw, experienced what they experienced, but I didn't.
So I'm not going to second-guess people who did the work when I didn't do it.
And when I watch anybody online who also didn't do the work, didn't watch every minute of the trial, I don't value their opinion as much as I value the jurors.
And there was nothing in the jury description, which I found actually helpful, even though it has the bad effect of probably doxing them, But actually reading about the backgrounds and the way they answered the questions, I actually have a lot of confidence in that group.
And it was mostly white people in the jury who convicted a white guy, which also helps a little bit for the credibility.
Now, did they make a wise decision?
Well, let's look at some of the outcomes.
So we don't know if it's wise, but I do feel like they were credible and tried.
And here's one of the outcomes, according to Axios reporting, senior Democrat and Republican aides.
So both Democrats and Republicans, this is important to the story, the aides say they would have never let their bosses say it on the record, but privately they told Axios that a guilty verdict in the Chauvin trial has lessened pressure to act on police reform.
So one of the outcomes of this verdict...
It's less likely there will be police reform.
Because it looks like this was police reform, right?
It made sure that police know not to do this.
Might have made a big difference.
But it may not turn into legislation, and we don't know what the net of that is.
So there's that.
We also didn't have much in the way of riots last night.
I think Portland had a little action.
There was a police officer who was assaulted.
Some windows got broken.
But basically, there were no riots, right?
I mean, I think Portland was just going to be Portland no matter what.
But is that fair to say?
Or is it just not being reported?
I'm looking at your comments to see if I missed it.
Well, I would say that it's mostly peaceful.
So does that mean that the outcome was right?
Well, as I've told you, it feels like we can't confirm this.
Maybe someday we can. It feels like the jury sent a message to the world, which is there's something wrong with this police officer.
We're going to sacrifice him.
And we're going to send you a message by making him guilty on all counts.
Which even the experts didn't really think was going to happen, did they?
So I think the jury is sending a message that they're making a, let's say, not according to the letter of the law decision.
I feel like that's the message.
Could be wrong. Could easily be misinterpreting it.
But it feels like it to me.
So I'm just telling you what I'm receiving.
I'm not telling you what they sent.
And it feels like...
Well, let me tell you why I'm not disappointed in any way about the outcome, even though with what I knew, it would have gone the other way if they'd used the letter of the law.
But that's just based on what I knew.
incomplete.
All right?
So it seems to me that there was something wrong with Derek Chauvin.
And did anybody else get that?
No matter whether you thought he was technically guilty, you know, beyond a reasonable doubt, no matter what you thought about that, there was something wrong with him, wasn't there?
You know how humans, this has been proven...
Humans can actually detect if somebody is physically ill by looking at their face.
I think people could probably detect if people are...
I've heard this.
Tell me if I'm wrong.
You can detect if somebody is likely to be gay by their face.
Not every time, of course, but better than the chance would suggest.
So there are a lot of things about us that just sort of come out, you know, that people can recognize.
And I was trying to think yesterday, what is it about Derek Chauvin that bothered me and maybe everybody else so much?
Because it wasn't exactly what he was doing, right?
Because what he was doing, there was enough of an argument that it was part of the policy and hadn't hurt people before, and Maybe he didn't know how bad he was doing it.
It was part of the argument. But beyond the argument, there was something wrong with his attitude?
Or he seemed a little bit too happy?
Did anybody get that?
Like, was anybody feeling...
Somebody says it's called prejudice.
Yeah, of course. So we're not talking about science here.
I'm talking about how you felt about him.
Did you have a bad feeling about him?
I'm looking at your comments now to see if anybody had that.
I'm seeing some yeses, some nos, some people signing off because of that.
Are you trying to persuade?
Fear? You had fear?
No. There was...
I'll tell you what it looked like to me.
There was a lack of empathy that has gone all the way through the trial.
Should there not have been some point in which we heard a statement from Derek Chauvin, and maybe we did, if he made the statement, let me know.
Should Derek Chauvin have not said at some point, you know, once he knew he was going to be tried for it, couldn't he make a statement that says...
My God, I certainly didn't intend this.
I feel sorry for the family.
I never would have done this had I been aware that the danger was so much.
You know, something like that.
Now, somebody says, no, don't do that because it would imply guilt.
But you don't have to have guilt over a death, do you?
You can feel bad about the death without admitting guilt.
Indeed, you could say, I feel terrible for the family.
I feel awful about what happened.
I hope that the jury will show that I wasn't a participant in that.
Because that's what I felt at the time.
Would that be incriminating?
To simply have empathy or...
Remorse is the wrong word.
Because remorse would suggest that he did know he did something wrong.
So you'd have to be careful there.
But you could have empathy.
Right? And I feel that he didn't show it in a way people were expecting, which doesn't mean anything.
He just didn't show it the way people expected at the moment that...
And I think this changed a lot of minds.
Apparently there was a moment when he knew there was no heartbeat and he didn't change his behavior.
Right? If you were on top of somebody holding them down and you knew that their heart stopped beating, how does that not immediately change your behavior?
And I don't think it changed his behavior.
Somebody says Asperger's.
Well, that would be interesting. Certainly that wasn't...
That would be really interesting.
If that were even a little bit true, that would be certainly part of the defense or part of the Part of the sentencing, but I doubt it was true.
We would have heard about it. Anyway, so I think this jury looked at a person who had no empathy, and he was close enough to doing something that looked like murder, that when they looked at all of the variables, including their own safety, what it would do to society, just what feels right, I feel like the jury made the right decision.
Now, is that the same as saying that the That the trial was fair.
I don't think it was even close to fair.
Not even close.
But I think the jury could have a right decision without the trial being even close to fair.
And that would be okay.
In my mind, I could hold both of those as true.
But I've heard earlier that you couldn't, and that's a legitimate opinion.
Yeah, I think it was a human sacrifice.
And here's something that I think that the black population of this country doesn't fully understand.
And I'm going to illustrate it by playing two parts.
I'll now give you a skit in which I play...
A representative group of black Americans, not any specific person, and a representative person representing white people, not any one white person.
And black people say, hey, you white people, let's see if you can now punish a white person for doing something that, you know, maybe there's a little argument about how bad it was.
Let's see if you can do that.
Hey, white people, do you think you can punish a white person?
And then the white people say, sure, watch this.
Then the black people say, but can you punish an actual white person when there's some disagreement about the nature of the crime?
Do you think you can do that?
And the white people say, we just said yes.
I don't even know why you're asking.
Of course we can. Of course we can.
We do it every day.
Punishing other white people...
It's like breathing if you're a white person.
Do you know how many white people I've punished?
Who had it coming? Lots of them.
Every day. Punishing other white people is the easiest thing we do.
Let me give you a story that a lot of people didn't believe when I... I've been telling this story for years.
It's completely true. But when I tell it, there's a certain percentage of you who will swear I'm lying.
Trust me, I've been saying it for, I don't know, 25 years since I've been able to tell the story.
And there would be literally thousands of witnesses still alive who would be refuting me because I tell this story all the time.
Plenty of people could refute it if it were not true, and it goes like this.
When I worked for a big bank, it was Crocker National Bank, years ago, beginning of my career, my career was going well, and it looked like I'd be sort of a management-type person, and my boss called me into my office, a white woman, and she said, I don't know how to tell you this, but the word has come down from management That we can't promote you, now or for any time in the future that we can see, because you're white and because you're a man.
And they said the reason is that the company was getting some heat because there was not enough diversity in senior management.
So, now you may have heard me tell the story, but here's the twist on it.
Who was it who screwed me?
Who did that? Was it black people?
No. No.
It was old white men threw me under the bus in a heartbeat to protect themselves.
Because they could keep their job as senior management so long as they screwed enough white people in lower levels to let people of color, you know, sort of leapfrog them and get up to senior management.
Now, independent of whether you think that was a good idea to have this reverse discrimination, not legally, but the way companies implemented it was like that.
So, independent of whether you think that's a good or bad idea, the only point I'm going to make today is that when white men were asked to destroy my life for their convenience...
They didn't hesitate. They didn't hesitate for a fucking second.
So let me tell you, black Americans, if you're ever wondering, will white people punish other white people to protect themselves?
Yeah, like really quickly.
So the punchline is that I moved from that bank.
I quit almost immediately.
Quit the bank, moved to the phone company where I got on the management fast track and I was going to be senior management in the phone company and my boss called me in and said, I don't know how to tell you this, but the word just came down.
We can't promote white people anymore.
Not white men anyway.
Women, maybe. But we can't promote any white men because we got caught.
It's only white people in senior management.
So, second company.
How long did it take the white people to throw me under the bus?
One second. No hesitation.
If you want to kill white people, ask white people to do it.
Because they're really willing.
No hesitation. So I think that's largely an invisible thing.
Imagine being a black person in America.
Some of you are.
You don't have to imagine it at all.
Imagine what that would be like if the news just kept showing you George Floyd situations, black people being abused, black people being abused.
And it's greater than the percentages in the public, so it's a real thing, like a real issue.
But if you don't see all the times that white people are stomping on the heads of other white people for their own benefit, you're kind of missing some context.
It feels like white people are oppressing black people, and the part you miss is that successful white people are just screwing everybody.
They're just screwing everybody.
Because that's what's good for them, to keep things just the way they are.
Anyway, that's useful context for you right there.
Do you think that there's no rioting because of the Chauvin verdict?
I feel like that's the smartest thing they did, is to make it guilty on everything.
Because at least they had a chance of averting the riots, and it looks like it worked.
It looks like it worked.
You know, I said yesterday that, I've said this a lot, that I don't believe there's any such thing as bad presidents and good presidents.
Because by the time you get elected president, you do have a certain minimum amount of talent.
So they all have the minimum talent.
But what makes you good or bad is just luck.
Is your specific set of talents and your personality suited for the exact problems that come up while you're president?
Now, COVID was exactly the wrong problem for President Trump.
And I'm not even sure his supporters would disagree with that too much, right?
It just wasn't the right match because optimism, which was the Trump thing, optimism and the pandemic, they just didn't fit together.
But optimism and the economy, great.
You know, Trump and the economy, I love that combination.
Optimism, economics, works great.
I feel as if Biden was exactly the right president for this.
Doesn't make him the right president for other things.
But for this, I feel like he was exactly the right guy.
Because he's boring.
He didn't make it about, you know, him.
Even though he put pressure on, you know, in some ways you could argue that the politicians put pressure on the jury.
But there wasn't going to be a fair trial anyway.
So... I think Biden might have been maybe exactly the right person, because he took all the energy out of it.
If there's one thing that Biden can do, it's suck the energy out of a topic.
And what did you need this topic to have?
Less energy, right?
When I talk about Trump being an energy monster, it's usually in a positive sense.
He can take energy and turn it into stuff.
Biden's like an energy sink.
He can just suck the energy out of stuff.
This is a topic where sucking the energy out of it was the right play.
And he pulled it off by doing nothing, basically.
Here's an opinion worth noting.
Mike Cernovich. I was waiting to see what he said about this.
I'll just read you his... Here's a tweet, because he always has good stuff to say about this kind of thing.
He said, I'd agree with that.
He could have been properly convicted.
So it might have gone exactly this way, no matter what.
But he did not get a fair trial, as everyone from rioters to a member of Congress to the POTUS tampered with the outcome.
I'd agree with that. Today is one of national disgrace, a true insurrection.
So his opinion is that this is a bad outcome because it was an unfair trial.
I agree on the facts.
There's no way it could have been a fair trial.
Here's where I would disagree on the opinion.
There wasn't a chance for a fair trial.
I would completely agree with the opinion if it had been an option to have a fair trial.
But that option never existed.
It can't exist.
The story was simply too big.
And people's ability to communicate simply too good.
There wasn't really an option for a fair trial.
So given that there was no option for a fair trial, and Chauvin didn't really have the option, really, of anything like justice according to the details of the law and reasonable doubt, and none of those things really applied, in my opinion, to the case.
I think it was emotional, social, peer pressure.
I think it was all those things.
But again, I would say that the jurors had the hardest job in the world.
They had to figure out what was the greater good in all of this mess.
Because there were no good solutions.
There was nothing that the jury could do that would solve all the problems.
They could only choose which problems to keep and which problems to try to reduce.
And that's only trying.
There were no good outcomes in the sense of everybody gets justice or anything like that.
It never was possible.
And so these jurors, again, I can't tell you how much respect I have for this group of jurors.
They reached into the hardest situation in the world.
The whole country was watching, and really, in a way, the whole world.
Because where America goes affects everybody.
I think they did a tremendous job.
And if they didn't follow the letter of the law, I respect it.
Because I think they may have been looking at a higher law.
And that would be okay with me.
Now, we may find out later that my interpretation of the jurors is way too nice.
And if we find that out later, I will modify my opinion.
But I'm not going to make the assumption that That this group of patriotic Americans was anything but well-meaning, well-intentioned, and did a good job in the face of the impossible.
That's my current position.
Happy to modify it if we find out later that something's different.
All right.
Let's see. What else we got going on?
As I say once or twice a week, if you're not following Glenn Greenwald on Twitter, you really have to.
Just stop what you're doing and just give him a follow.
Because watching him spank CNN and MSNBC and the other media for being essentially propaganda organs is just really good entertainment.
And useful. Like, you really need to see how often it happens to fully feel what's going on.
And nobody does a better job than Greenwald in spanking them.
So today's example was the Officer Sicknick story.
He's the officer who was killed.
Well, I'm sorry. Back up, back up, back up.
Erase everything I just said.
He's the officer who died soon after.
The Capitol insurrection or riots or protest, whatever you want to call it.
And CNN had been reporting that he'd been killed with a fire extinguisher, hit in the head with it.
And then they reported that the bear spray might have killed him somehow.
And now we know that he died of natural causes.
It was just sadly linked to that date.
And how did CNN handle the fact that they had been misreporting, I mean, seriously misreporting, this story for a long time?
They kind of just glossed over it a little bit.
And Greenwald has busted their balls on it.
So that's fun to see. Alright, you want some real fun?
Here's some fun. Rasmussen is going to be reporting in a little bit.
It's not out yet for the rest of you, but I've got a sneak preview.
And they were asking a question about the opinions about Coca-Cola.
You know that Coca-Cola weighed in and complained about Georgia's voting law changes and got involved in politics and, as you might imagine, Liberals and Democrats went different directions on their feelings about Coca-Cola.
But here's the funniest shit you've ever seen in your life.
Here's the Rasmussen poll results to this question.
Does the Georgia voting laws and Coca-Cola's response make you more likely or less likely to drink Coca-Cola products?
The GOP... Was 52% less likely to purchase Coca-Cola products?
That's a pretty big deal, isn't it?
Over half of conservatives, or basically conservatives, say they're less likely to drink the product.
That's kind of devastating, isn't it?
You did notice that Coca-Cola seemed to pull back a little bit.
And I asked, I wonder if there's anything happening with their sales.
Well, if over half of Republicans decided they're going to drink less of these products, Coca-Cola probably noticed.
But... Here's the good part.
Are you ready for the good part?
Here's the money shot.
I don't think anything's made me laugh more than this lately.
Liberals are 37% more likely to consume Coca-Cola products.
They're more likely.
Now, if Coke were, let's say, a healthy product, this story would look really good.
Healthy in terms of improved your health.
I'm not making any claims about health and products because I would get sued.
I have no evidence that this product is bad for you.
But I think I can say it is not intended to be a medicine.
And I would imagine that dieticians would have something to say about the value of drinking Coke or Diet Coke.
They have lots of other products, of course, but those are the ones you think of.
So I wonder if the GOP should come out in favor of quitting cigarettes to see how many liberals would start smoking.
Because I think, you know, the Republicans are always worried That immigration is, at least the way the Democrats want to do it, is really a clever way to get more Democrat voters through immigration.
Oh, that's your real reason, isn't it?
But now Republicans have their own play like that.
They can just come out against anything that's bad for you.
Democrats will immediately do more of the things that are bad for them and will kill them, and then there will be fewer Democrats.
I'm just saying it's a strategy that would work.
It's working right now, because apparently they convinced Democrats to drink more sugar water.
I mean, seriously, is that not funny?
Okay. Somebody said...
That's so bad. I'm going to repeat it.
Somebody else said this.
This is not my idea. I'm just looking at it in the comments.
Somebody said that Republicans are already doing that with abortion.
By being opposed to abortion, it's making Democrats abort their own babies.
That's not funny, except it kind of is.
Here's how the AP is reporting a story that you probably heard about.
So this is their tweet, their exact words.
Police shot and killed a teenage black girl in Columbus, Ohio, just as the verdict was being announced in the trial for the killing of George Floyd.
Oh my God.
Police are terrible, aren't they?
I mean, just listen to this.
Police shot and killed a teenage girl just as the verdict was announced in the Floyd trial.
It's just going from bad to worse.
Police just killing this teenage girl.
Oh, there's more to it. Body cam footage appeared to show the girl attempting to stab two people with a knife while she was in the act.
Oh, feels like that could have been the lead sentence.
Here's another way this headline could have run instead of police shot and killed a teenage black girl.
Another way it could have gone is police saved the life of a black girl by quick action.
Just as the verdict for the George Floyd thing was being read.
Both of those are true.
If you see the body cam, by the way, who knows what a jury will say, but the body cam shows a police officer doing some of the best police work I've ever seen.
Because if you didn't see the video, it was one young woman with a knife in the act getting ready to stab another woman who was defensively trying to protect herself.
And as the knife was coming down, a police officer with a pistol, not a rifle with a sight, from a fairly good distance took out the knife woman without hurting the potential victim.
That was really good police work, wasn't it?
Yeah. Like, I'd hate to say there's anything called a good shooting, but that was as good a shooting as you can get.
It saved a life in real time, and it was really tight.
And he acted quickly.
Let me put this in another perspective, especially.
What kind of risk did that police officer take for himself?
Huge. Huge.
That was somebody who, in a moment with no time to think, took a gigantic risk of his whole life, that police officer, you know, because we know the George Floyd thing is changing how people are saying things.
He took the risk of his own life to save a young black woman who at any moment was going to be stabbed to death.
He took that chance, his own chance.
That's what happened. But it's reported as police shot and killed a teenage black girl just as the Floyd verdict was being read.
Propaganda, people. It's propaganda.
Here's a provocative thought you've seen on Facebook and other places that it's pretty easy now, technologically, to replace the face of anybody on a video.
You've all seen it, right?
You've all seen the examples. It's no big deal to replace somebody's face.
Suppose you got to the point where you could replace it so well, and I think we're kind of there, where you couldn't tell that a face had been replaced by another face.
And then, imagine that you use that technology to reverse the ethnicities on any video crime.
So that if you see the police attacking or in a conflict with somebody, it just automatically reverses their ethnicities, but everything else stays the same.
And then you play for the jury the reversed ethnicities and you never show them the original.
Would you get the same verdict?
Of course you wouldn't. Not every time.
Sometimes you would, if the facts were clear.
But no, it would change things, for sure.
And what if you did that face swap...
Let's say you wait 10 years until there's some college students who have never heard of George Floyd.
I don't know if that's possible.
But you wait 10 years, and you run the entire trial by this bunch of students, but just reversing the ethnicities with the...
And by then, maybe the culture is different, things are different.
And just see if you get the same verdict.
Somebody says they already race-swapped George Zimmerman.
I'm not sure what you mean by that.
But think about the fact that this is now a technology that actually works.
That would be interesting.
So Fox News is interesting about the verdict on the Floyd Chauvin case.
So apparently Hannity is backing the jury and says it was a good result.
Not too far from my own opinion, although I'm not sure the facts of the case exactly supported it, but I like the outcome.
Whereas Tucker Carlson is talking about the trial being unfair.
I like the fact that these opinions are different.
I just like that fact.
You know, independent of whether I agree with them, it's just healthy that they're not on the same page.
Remember I told you, I think I told you, that I'm waiting for the J&J vaccine?
That's the one I want.
It's the only one banned, at least in the United States.
Or maybe there's another one banned.
But they're looking into these rare blood clots, and that's why the J&J vaccine, the only one that is one shot, and one of the ones that uses existing technology instead of the mRNA stuff.
And here's what a blood clotting expert says about this.
So here are the actual odds.
And by the way, compliments to CNN. Compliments to CNN. Weird, huh?
CNN actually did an opinion piece in which they showed the math and they did a cost-benefit analysis.
What? What?
How often have you ever seen that?
When was the last time you saw CNN report a story with like a proper...
Cost-benefit analysis, so you can see both sides.
It's really rare.
So when it happened, good job, CNN. In fact, this should have been on Fox News.
So CNN, I'm going to give you an A-plus for what I'm going to read right now, for just the way they handled this story.
So this is a blood-clotting expert talking about the J&J vaccine.
It says, quote, the chances of you being, oh wait, back up, The chances of getting what we are calling vaccine-induced immunothrombotic thrombisotipinia, I think I pronounced that correctly, or VITT, is one in a million.
All right, so let's just call it blood clots.
So the chance of getting a blood clot from this vaccine is one in a million.
Hold that number in your head.
The chances of being hospitalized with COVID is roughly one in a hundred.
For the adult population.
And the chances of having a blood clot, once you are hospitalized, is probably one in five or one in six.
And a little more, it's like one in three if you're in the ICU. So put those benefits, put those numbers together.
A one in a million chance that the vaccine gives you a blood clot.
But there's a one in a hundred chance that if you get the COVID, You're going to be...
that you've got a 1 in 6 chance of getting it.
Now, the math is too much to do the direct-direct, but I think you can see just from the magnitude that we're not talking about more risk from the vaccine.
We're talking about lower risk if this is the only way to get the vaccine.
Now, to be fair, the real comparison should have been Getting this vaccine versus the other vaccine.
So if I'm being fair, I think I have to knock their A-plus down to maybe a C-plus as I'm thinking about it, because they did the wrong comparison.
So if you had enough vaccines so everybody could get one, why not get rid of this one risk that doesn't seem to be the case with the other vaccines?
But do you really know the risk with the other vaccines?
Because they're the new technology.
Maybe they're a risk later, and you don't know.
So that's got to be in there.
And what about the risk that you don't get the COVID at all?
So this risk of 1 in 100 being hospitalized, that's only if they get it.
But you have to multiply that by, or you have to factor in what are the odds of getting it in the first place, which is not in here.
So I'll at least give them credit for waving their arms at the magnitudes.
And I think they got the magnitudes right.
The risk is really low.
And especially since I'm male, and it seems that the risk is more for females, for this J&J, I'm really waiting for this one to come available.
Because this is the one I would run to.
At the moment, I'm sort of waiting for the availability to get better.
I just talked to somebody who got the shot in my area.
How long do you think somebody had to wait in their car...
To get a vaccination in my area.
Take a guess. How long does somebody just wait in Northern California to get the vaccination?
Five hours.
Five hours.
In a car, waiting for the vaccination.
I'm not going to wait five hours in my car for a vaccination.
You're going to have to get a little better than that.
So if this J&J vaccine becomes back in availability, I'm hoping that one will have a shorter line, if you know what I mean.
So I'm going to be all over that one.
I hope that that one comes through.
Let me give you an update on the Dilber NFT. If you know what they are, it's digital art that's tied to the blockchain.
And so the blockchain tells you that you have the one and only original.
And so there's Dilber NFT, two of them, one with clean punchline and one with the F word and the punchline.
And I just wanted to give you the current number is the one with the F word is selling for, or at least the auction number so far, is 10 times as much as the clean one.
So, in terms of collectability, the naughty one is 10 times more valuable.
The real bidding won't happen until the last day of the auction, so you can't really tell what it'll go for now, but I think it's May 1st is the last day of the auction.
But the naughty one's up to $12,000, and there's not really a strong reason for anybody to bid until it gets close to the last day.
So we'll see where that goes.
Somebody was accusing me of being a grifter for being in this NFT market.
Let me talk about the definition of a grifter.
If you're doing something where you're trying to fool somebody into believing something that's not true, you might be a grifter.
If you tell them exactly what you're doing and show your work with full transparency, that could never be grifting.
So I'm seeing in the comments, you're saying, tulips for sale, grifter.
Does anybody argue with the point that as long as you're fully transparent, you couldn't be grifting?
Because there's nothing hidden. Right?
Nor is there anything especially persuasive.
There's not even anything manipulative to it.
So the cartoon itself, the one that is the NFT, literally says that NFTs don't have any value.
That's the topic of the cartoon.
And when I talk about it, I tell you there's no reason to own one.
But people collect things for whatever reason, so I'm not going to stop them.
I'm making it available.
So look at the names that people are calling me.
Huckster. Tulips.
Now, you have to examine yourself, don't you?
Because what it feels like, I can't read your mind, but what it feels like is people being angry that I could make money on this.
Doesn't it feel like that's all that's going on?
Because remember, we're a free country.
I've completely shown my work.
I've told you there's no reason to buy it.
I told you there's no reason to buy it.
I don't think I can be more transparent than that.
Right? But still, people have that feeling that you don't like other people to succeed.
Um... There is a theory that what makes Democrats and Republicans different is how happy you are for somebody else's success.
Let's test that.
When I see that people are successful, I can definitely feel like pangs of jealousy if they did something I didn't do, or if somebody's a billionaire and I'm not a billionaire.
I can feel it. A little bit of, I wish I had that.
But I'm always happy for them.
I mean, you could be jealous and happy at the same time.
So, how do you feel when people are successful around you?
So that's my question.
In the comments, tell me how you feel when you hear that somebody else has succeeded in a big way.
Do you feel happy? Or does it bother you a little bit?
And you feel like, I don't think the way they did it is good, or I think they must have stolen something, or there must be something wrong, or something.
Somebody says inspired.
Here's a...
So Brock Justnick says he would feel inspired by somebody else successful.
That, my friends, is a winning attitude.
If your feeling about other people's success is, wow, maybe I can do that too, then you are in good shape.
If your feeling about somebody else's success is, they probably stole it, they didn't deserve it, they're grifting, they're hucksters, you're going to fail.
You're going to fail. You can almost predict it.
In fact, if you were doing job interviews, and you gave me a choice of just throwing away people's resumes so I don't even know what their experience is, but they could just answer a few questions, how do you feel about this?
You couldn't get an honest answer, but imagine you could get an honest answer.
I feel the way they would answer a few questions about other people's success and about their own ability to be successful, that they have agency and the ability to be successful, I feel like that would tell me everything I needed.
Because if somebody comes in and says, I believe that my success is entirely up to me, what do you think they've done up to that point?
They probably worked really hard to build a set of talents, go to school, stay out of jail, because you know that's their philosophy.
Of course they were following it, if you believed it's their philosophy.
So I feel like you could boil down somebody's entire economic value within capitalism.
Their entire economic value could be predicted almost entirely By that attitude, whether they think that their hard work is what makes them successful, or it's mostly about race and luck and who you were born to and who you know and all that stuff.
Jay says, sometimes Scott really is truly a boomer.
All right, Jay, I'm going to erase you.
Because probably the most bankrupt opinion, the most empty opinion that you could ever say is, somebody's acting like a boomer.
You're acting like a boomer.
Now, sometimes that's funny.
Like, there is a context when it's funny because you recognize, oh yeah, that is a boomer thing.
And I think those are funny, too.
Because I do recognize how often I fall into the stereotype.
But here's the thing.
You're just being useless.
Just throwing me into a group...
It's just the most useless thing you could do.
And you need to go examine your life.
Because if you thought that was a good comment and one that the society needed or somehow helping you or entertained you, there's just something wrong with you.
Right? There's just something wrong with you.
If tying me into a category is somehow important to you, if that was a priority, like that's what you thought, oh, this will be important, Let me tie him to a category.
Why the fuck?
Really, what good was that?
Here's another idiot.
I'm going to call out just the idiots today.
Rustic says, in all caps, Scott has thin skin, question mark.
Has anybody paid attention to anything I've done for the last five years?
If there's anything I don't have, it's thin skin.
You don't do this job if you have thin skin.
I couldn't possibly wake up in the morning and do what I do day after day with just withering...
You should see the messages I get every day.
Every day I get more criticism than you will ever get in your whole fucking worthless life.
And I don't think I've ever gone to sleep feeling bad about it.
Not once. Now, if you can't tell the difference between thick skin and thin skin, you are so far from understanding anything about your fucking world.
And I feel sorry for you.
Some of this is genetic.
I think maybe so.
A lot of it is practiced, but it's hard to sort out how much is practice and a skill to be thick skinned and how much is natural.
Then why are you angry now?
Do I seem angry?
You haven't seen me angry.
Maybe you have. But I try really hard to not be angry because you don't want to see me angry.
That's a level that I'm pretty sure you've never seen on video.
But you don't want to see that.
And this isn't that.
This is a condemnation, let's say.
I'm condemning you because I think it's good for life.
There should be less of you.
It's good for the world.
It's good for the world if people like you are slapped down.
The people who are just bad for the world and don't have anything useful to say.
They should be slapped down. Yeah, one of the reasons...
Somebody was asking me yesterday if I've ever been in a fight, like a physical fight.
And I've been in physical altercations, but usually I was just beating somebody up.
Not usually. The only times it's happened, I was just beating the hell out of somebody.
Now, in both of those cases, they were bullies who had been my bully, and I just reached a level where I needed to just beat the shit out of them in front of other people to make the problem go away, which works wonderfully, by the way.
I don't recommend it in 2021.
You'll just go to jail if you beat somebody up.
But back when I was a kid, if you just beat the shit out of somebody in front of witnesses, it would solve your bully problem pretty well.
But I've noticed that neither of the bullies fought back.
They just took it.
And I've noticed that not once in my entire life has anybody been in a physical confrontation with me that turned into a fight.
And I've always wondered about that.
Because in the comments, by the way, those of you who are male, how many fights have you been in?
It's not zero, is it?
It's not zero. But I would say I've been in zero fights where the other person is fighting back.
I think zero. Yeah, look at the numbers.
That's what it's like to be a man.
A man in America, or any place I guess, look at the number of fights they've been in.
15, 50, 2, 1, 3, 0.
I don't know how you did that, but okay.
And I've always wondered if that's because I look scary to other people.
Because I've always thought the scariest thing you can encounter is somebody who's not afraid of you.
That's the scariest thing.
Because if you get in a fight with somebody who's not going to ever quit, and is not going to run away, and is going to finish you off, you don't want to be in that fight.
Right? And it doesn't even matter if physically you have more skills or whatever.
You just don't want to get in a fight with anybody who's not going to ever quit.
And my view is there are only two kinds of fights that are worth having.
One is the one you know you're going to win.
That's worth having. And if it looks like you're going to lose, you should run away.
And then come back and kill the person when they're not looking.
If it was worth fighting in the first place.
So I would never get in a fight unless it was worth killing somebody.
Which is probably why I've never been in a proper fight.
If it's not worth killing somebody, I'm not even going to get involved.
And if it is worth killing them...
And they start winning, I'm going to run away, and then come back and kill them when they're not looking.
That's my philosophy.
If somebody's worth killing, it's worth waiting.
It's worth waiting.
So if there's anybody out there who's done anything to me that they think is worthy of me killing them, just know that if it hasn't happened yet, it doesn't mean it won't.
I'm willing to wait as long as it takes.
You can't tell if I'm kidding.
And that's good. If we've learned anything from President Trump, it was that unpredictability is a natural advantage.
So as long as you don't know, that's to my benefit.
Getting closer to being cancelled...
Are you tall?
No, I'm not tall. Which is a good question.
because if you're big, people don't want to get in a fight with you.
Somebody says what he says, Asperger's is a talent stack creator.
We have to learn more than others to fit in.
Well, Woody, that's true.
That's true. Yeah.
Yeah. One of the national assets we have in this country is all the Asperger's types.
Because it's the strangest condition, if you will, which is it's very difficult for the persons who have it.
Like, it creates extra challenges socially, etc.
But they're sort of national assets.
Like, you know, who is it that's inventing all the technology?
There's just stuff...
that the Asperger's people are doing for America and for the world, that's just insanely valuable.
Only losers hate when other people make money.
How many of you are...
By the way, I know from history that I attract a lot of Asperger types by content.
How many of you are on the spectrum?
This will be interesting.
So take a second for the comments to come in.
How many of you watching this right now are on the spectrum?
Wait until you see this.
You're going to be surprised. Here it comes.
I am. Yep.
Nope. Yes.
Not me. My wife says I am.
Yes. My son is.
Not officially. Maybe.
My kid is. My husband.
Barely on it. Yes.
Yes. Nope.
Me. Me, me, me.
Nope, nope, nope. Crikey.
Maybe. I think my husband could be.
Could be. I suspect I am.
Never diagnosed, but I think I am.
Yepers. Are you impressed?
There's probably no group that I attract to my content more reliably than the Asperger's folks.
Look at these comments.
This is blowing you away, isn't it?
Because think about the percentage in the population in general and then look at my comments.
Yeah, it's filled with them.
Now part of it is, somebody asked me the question in the comments if I'm Asperger's or if I'm on the spectrum.
And the answer is, I don't quite know.
I don't quite know.
Because it's not exactly well defined, is it?
My personal opinion is maybe not...
But if I am, I'd be sort of on the, I don't know, at one end of the scale.
A little bit, maybe.
I don't know. I feel not.
But I feel like I'm close enough that I, you know, I feel like I'm within breathing distance of it, meaning that I'm so compatible with it, it would be hard to imagine I'm not on the spectrum.
Is that a thing? Being compatible with the spectrum without being on it?
I don't know if that's even a thing.
Just identify. Oh, somebody says my conversation is too good.
Yeah, you know, there's all kinds of different functionality.
But I would imagine I'm not, but I don't know.
Gates here.
All right.
So that's all for now, and I will talk to you all tomorrow.
And, yeah, it is interesting, isn't it?
It is interesting.
That'll give you something to think about.
Think about why there are so many people on the spectrum who follow my content.
And when you figure that out, it's going to be interesting.
I'll give you my hypothesis.
Well, a couple of hypotheses.
One, of course, is that I make the Dilbert comic, and you can imagine easily that Dilbert's on the spectrum.
And I make it that way.
So, you know, I've got that natural compatibility.
But also, I try to remove the emotion from decisions, which I believe is quite compatible if you're on the spectrum.
Because you like to see the emotion stripped out so you can see what's left.
And then I can add it back in, and then people can see the whole structure.
So I think that's what's going on, but I don't know.
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