Episode 2060 Scott Adams: TikTok Shows Us Who Is Bought Off, CRT Lowers Black Test Scores?
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Trump charges dropped?
Why AI will be illegal
School choice strategy that works
TikTok shows us which politicians are bought off
CRT lowers Black test scores
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams.
There's never been a better time.
And if you made the mistake of watching anything else at this time, well, you're probably regretting it already.
Because you can take this experience up to levels where nobody's ever seen it before.
And all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tankard, chalices, dye, and a canteen jug.
A vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine.
The day thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now.
Go.
Ah, that was a strange sip.
Strange but beautiful.
Graceful, elegant.
Classy, really.
Alright, well, we got a lot going on here, so I'd like to start with my favorite story.
Which I will look for on Twitter to show you if you haven't seen it already.
There's some gentleman, I'm not sure where it was, it might have been an African country.
Couldn't tell from the background.
But there's a clever gentleman who rigged a bicycle so that if you tried to steal the bicycle, and it was left unlocked in an easy place to steal, the seat would collapse when he got on it and the pole that normally holds the seat would go right up your ass.
So, you would be shoving a metal pole up your ass with the force of your own body weight when you sat on it.
Now, if you don't think that's funny, well, you don't know me.
Because there's a compilation video of all the people sitting on it.
Now, the funny part is watching them, none of them steal the bike.
they all walk around like this.
Alright, the thing I love about it, the thing I love about it is that none of them actually steal the bike.
Theoretically, you could still ride the bike or push it away and get the seat fixed, but everybody is completely done with the bike after it shoves a pole up their ass.
I so want to get that bike or build my own.
That's just the funniest thing ever.
Well, Chicago is going to have flying taxis.
That's really going to happen.
So if you go to the Chicago airport and you're heading to the middle of the city, in maybe a year or so, United will allow you to take a short hop flight.
In a vertical takeoff plane.
So the plane will just go straight up over and straight down in the middle of the city.
And apparently they've already purchased the hardware and they've got the plan and it's actually gonna happen.
So there will be flying taxis in a year.
It's not flying cars.
I think it takes, you know, six people or something.
But that's pretty exciting.
So you miss all of the traffic.
150 miles an hour.
Can't wait.
There's your flying cars, kind of, but flying taxis.
Alright, I saw an interesting prediction from Naval Ravikant.
And if you don't know who Naval is, the only thing you need to know is, if he predicts something, pay attention.
That's my whole commercial.
If he says something, you should look at it.
You should pay attention to that.
By the way, here's his prediction on Twitter.
He said, Microsoft ships a phone built around AI by the end of the year.
And then he says, look at Apple and Google.
So what do you think?
So Microsoft has some ownership of this big chat GPT, OpenAI, whatever it's called.
And so their Bing search engine already uses it.
And Naval is thinking that they might build it into a phone.
Now, how long have I been telling you?
Probably five years or more, I've been saying.
The ultimate obvious place that the phone interface will go is no apps.
No apps.
You just start doing what you want to do.
The perfect interface for a phone would be a blank screen.
Just a blank screen.
And if you say to it, hey, Make a spreadsheet and add up these numbers.
Then it just creates a spreadsheet right in front of you.
Or if you say, send a message, it just creates the app and sends the message and then deletes the app.
Or it could save it, I suppose.
But you'll never have to worry about apps.
You just tell it what to do and it goes and figures out how to do it.
I think that's what's going to happen.
I think your phone is just going to be a blank screen and you talk to it.
Alternately, here's how I would have designed the phone already.
I would have designed it so that you pick it up and start doing the thing you want to do.
Just start doing it.
If you want to search for something on Facebook, you just type in blah blah blah, and then You just type in the search term.
And then as you type it in, the AI says, well, I don't know what this is about.
He could be writing an email, could be sending a message, or it could be a search term.
So it would pop up several choices.
And as soon as you typed it in, you'd say, the best place to eat in San Francisco.
You type it in.
And among the choices are a Google search, a Bing search, or an email.
But you know it's a search, so you just hit boop.
So interfaces are backwards.
You should never have to deal with the app before you do the activity you wanted the app for.
You should start the activity, and then AI should figure out what apps or app would make sense with what you're doing.
So it should look at your context, and then figure out the app for you.
Imagine how much less thinking that would be.
Do you know how much time?
Why type?
Well, you type because people are listening.
So you can't always speak out loud to your phone.
That's the way it's going, right?
There's no way that 10 years from now, you're going to be selecting an app and then telling it what to do.
There's no way that that could last.
All right.
Twitter is fun again.
So I guess Musk is giving some stock grants to employees, which value the company at about half of what he bought it for.
So he bought it for $44 billion.
He's valuing it, at least in terms of valuing the stock options, at $20 billion.
But he suggests that in 10 years or so, it could be worth $250 billion, and that there's a difficult but Very doable path to 250 billion valuation.
What do you think?
If it gets to 250 billion, and he's the richest person times three, I think.
I think it's possible.
Yeah, I think it's possible.
Because to do that, he would have to fold in different functions like payments.
You know, have a better advertising, you know, situation, have payments in there.
Yeah, I think that's all gonna happen.
Do you think there'll be a Twitter phone?
Could be.
Could be.
It's also easy to imagine that you would get Twitter plus Skylink.
Somehow there'd be something like a combined deal or something.
You could imagine that happening.
Anyway, I do think that there are paths to $250 billion valuation.
But the funniest thing about Twitter is that they close down their press contact.
So it used to be if you emailed press at twitter.com you could ask a question if you were the press.
And now if you email you get an automatic response from press at twitter.com of a poop emoji.
That's all you get.
It just gives you an automatic poop emoji.
Now, you tell me that that could be more perfect.
No.
Nope.
That is the perfect interface.
Well, Trump is saying out loud that he thinks that Bragg has already dropped the Stormy Daniels case.
He told reporters on his plane.
What do you think?
Do you think the charges are already dropped?
I guess the grand jury's meeting again today.
I don't know if it's already dropped, but I don't see how it could go forward.
Alan Dershowitz has gone so far as to say that the case is so weak and the main guy who would probably testify would be Michael Cohen.
And now that Michael Cohen's own lawyer produced a document that would show that Cohen is a liar, either is a liar or was a liar, but it's going to end up looking the same.
Because if he's a liar and you put him on the screen, and you think he's going to say the opposite of what he said in writing he believed, you could get disbarred.
Because you could get disbarred for knowingly put a liar on the stand.
If it's his witness and he knows he's a liar, and he needs that lie to make his case, and he puts him on the stand, he could be disbarred.
Now, I think you'd have to prove he knows it's a lie, so I don't think it could really happen, but Dershowitz is putting on the pressure.
Like, well, you know, there's a possibility that this could end with Bragg being the one who loses his job instead of Trump.
I like that he put it out there.
I don't think it's likely, but I like that it's out there.
So I'm going to predict that the charges will not go forward.
What's your prediction?
That one way or another the charges will not proceed.
And I think that if it were still politically good, but legally sketchy, it would go through.
But now it's obvious that it's a political disaster as well as a legal disaster.
So legally it was always weak, but politically maybe you could get some points.
But now it's obvious that even the threat of it made Trump more popular.
Even the threat of it.
So I tried to play a video on CNN.
The tease of it was that Jon Stewart said something along the lines in a recent interview that this is why Trump got elected.
Now wouldn't you want to know what that video said?
What did Jon Stewart say about Trump, this is why he got elected?
I mean it feels like this.
It feels like the Bragg situation.
The Alvin Bragg situation.
But have you noticed that the more you want to watch a video, the less likely it will ever play?
You can click on that motherfucker all day long and it won't play.
And the same thing on Fox News.
Fox News will say, sexy picture of somebody you actually want to look at.
You know, sexy bikini picture.
And I'll be like, well, I'm here anyway.
Got a little extra time.
I think I'll just maybe click on that sexy bikini picture and see what all the news is about.
Because I'm not the kind who just looks at the headlines.
I like to do my own research.
That's why I like to click on the stories and get the pictures and then I'll be like, well, okay, if this is the sexiest picture ever from this person, I think I got to see it.
Click.
Nothing.
Nothing.
You want a guaranteed video that won't play?
Put a headline on CNN that says, Trump agrees he should not be president.
And then whatever that video is, it'll never play.
It will never play.
Because it's too interesting.
So somehow there's some kind of technology that makes anything interesting unplayable at the same time.
And it's a direct correlation.
If it's some boring-ass story of a general said, oh, I'm a general, and blah, blah, Ukraine.
Oh, that'll play.
Yeah, that'll play just fine, first try.
Or how about the Pope comes out against war?
Oh, that'll play.
That'll play.
But if they say, here's a video of Nancy Pelosi having sex with Adam Schiff, caught on video, that won't play.
No, you could click on that all day long.
That will not play.
So that's how you know... Well, I don't know what you know from that.
It's just a fact.
Alright, I saw an opinion piece on why the school choice movement is working well at the moment, when for so long it didn't get much traction.
A lot of it is being credited to Corey D'Angelo and his strategy.
Now, some of it, of course, was the pandemic, right?
People got to see Zoom school and see how horrible it was and got more interested in their kids' education and all that.
So some of it's that.
Some of it's the alleged CRT in classrooms.
Some of it's the teaching young kids too much about sex too early, say, people.
So there's lots of reasons why people would be more interested in homeschooling.
But the current thinking is that homeschooling is being driven on values as opposed to education.
Do you buy that?
That feels right.
I don't have data to support that.
But it feels like people are saying, OK, I was OK when I didn't know if my kid was learning to read and write.
It seemed like everybody was in the same boat, so you sort of went along.
What are you going to do anyway?
But as soon as you find out your kids are being taught that they're either victims or oppressed, or that their gender is sort of up to them, then the parents end up getting really involved.
So I think when you say, what will you teach my kids?
People go, well, you know, I guess I could put up with some imperfection.
But when you say, what will I turn my kids into?
That's a whole different game.
Because the, you know, that's not about math.
That's actually turning them into the kind of people that is somebody's idea of a good citizen, but maybe not the parent's idea of a good citizen.
So you can see why this is getting energy right now.
It's the social part of it.
So if you're going to argue it with anybody, I would go with the social argument seems stronger than the they can get better grades if they do this.
All right.
So I watched a clip from NBC News where Chuck Dodd is talking to Senator Warren about TikTok.
And Senator Warren talked about the privacy issue and never mentioned the big problem which is persuasion, which is the Chinese Communist Party can essentially push one button to make anything viral and that's not even hyperbole.
There is actually literally a button called heat, it's actually labeled the heat button, where they can make anything viral.
So that's a gigantic risk, because, I don't know, 150 million Americans use it, and they can make anything a fact.
Because our minds are programmed by what we see, and then how often it's repeated.
That's it.
That's your whole operating system for your brain.
So they have control over what you see on TikTok, and how often you see it.
That's complete control of your brain.
That's all it takes.
Now, I'm talking on average.
I don't mean every single person will be immediately programmed by some memes.
I mean that on average, you can move the average reliably.
By how much you show them of what?
Reliably.
And you can see that in every poll.
If you look at the poll, you know, the Democrats always go one way, the Republicans always go the other way.
Even on issues that are not political.
That's how you know that you're being programmed.
If you were not being programmed by some third party, then when a topic comes up that has no political connection whatsoever, the opinions would be sort of mixed all over the place.
But they're not!
Every topic just becomes political, which is proof that you're being programmed.
So TikTok has that power.
And Elizabeth Warren never even mentions that risk.
She only talks about data privacy.
And Chuck Dodd doesn't mention it either.
So it's a story about the risk of TikTok without mentioning the big risk of TikTok.
Now, how in the world is that an accident?
How is that an accident?
It couldn't possibly be an accident at this point.
At this point, there's no way you can say that's an accident.
These have to be two entities that are in the bag for China.
This looks like pro-CCP propaganda.
Now, I told you yesterday that AOC also came out in favor of not banning TikTok.
And her answer looked so obviously bought off That people just said, well, she must be accepting money.
Because there's no way you could have that opinion unless somebody just paid you to have it.
Because it's dumb.
And now we find out that Fox News Digital ...reported that By Dance, TikTok's Chinese parent company, funneled six-figure contributions to nonprofits aligned with the Congressional Black and Hispanic Caucuses.
Huh.
Didn't we just see a member of the Black Caucus saying we shouldn't ban TikTok?
I think I just saw that recently.
Or somebody who was aligned with them.
And so they gave $150,000 to these two, the Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Foundation.
Huh.
I wonder if AOC has any connection to the Hispanic Caucus Institute.
Oh yeah, she's a member.
She's a member.
Any other questions?
There's your answer.
There's your answer.
China just bought her.
Not only did China buy her, but we have the receipt.
They left the receipt.
It's not even in question.
You know, usually it's sort of speculative.
Like, I don't know, how did Elizabeth Warren benefit in any way?
I don't know.
Maybe she just likes these two caucuses, too.
Or wants their support or something.
But there it is.
Plain as day.
Now, the beauty of the TikTok story is that there is only one right answer.
And the right answer is to ban it.
And there is no argument among people who are willing to describe the risk.
So let me say that again because it's important.
There's nobody who can describe the risk of TikTok who thinks it should be legal in America.
Everybody who can say there are two risks, one is data security and the other one is persuasion.
Anybody who can say those two things out loud also says ban it.
Anybody who doesn't say it's a persuasion risk mostly, they're in favor of keeping it.
But they know.
They know there's another risk.
And that means you can tell for sure, and this has never been true before, but you can tell for sure who's been bought off by China.
Now, when I say bought off, I don't mean directly.
It could be funding for a caucus, something like that.
But it's very clear that anybody who's still in favor of keeping TikTok are just bought off.
I've never seen one this clear before.
Have you?
Usually there's some argument on both sides, but what makes this an interesting one is there isn't.
There is no argument on both sides.
There is one argument.
A hundred percent of people are on the same side if they can state the argument out loud.
If they can't state it out loud, it's intentional.
Because they know the argument at this point.
It's amazing that any of these people keep their jobs.
Well, here's an interesting update on the reparations situation in California.
Now, there are two reparations stories in California.
One is what San Francisco came up with, which is, you know, super crazy time, $5 million per descendants of black slaves, and $1 houses you could buy, and $90,000 beer.
But there's a lesser but still crazy one for the state itself.
And the news is that Governor Newsom has been quiet and not weighed in on the recommendations.
Now, I started by telling you that he was being brilliant, because by telling the committees to go work out a recommendation, I said to myself, oh, that's brilliant.
They'll come back with something that's so stupid that he can easily ignore it without being the one who turned it down.
And I thought, that's pretty good.
Here's what I got totally wrong.
If you like it when I admit I'm wrong.
Oh my God was I wrong.
Here's why.
Apparently there's no level of stupidity that Californians will recognize as stupid.
I thought I thought it would be so far over the line of reasonable that we would just laugh at it and ignore it.
And then that would be the end of it.
But apparently there are enough people in the state I'm guessing, especially the black citizens of California, who are treating this seriously.
They're actually acting like it's a real thing.
Which puts Gavin Newsom in a bad spot.
Because if he were to approve this, that's the end of his political life.
Would you agree?
That would be absolutely the end of his political life.
Does anybody disagree with that?
There's no way he could be a national, a national politician.
And that looks like what he wants.
Yeah, so he's in a tough shot, tough place.
He can't say yes and he can't say no.
Whichever he says will end him politically.
And he put himself in that position.
So, I'm going to take back how clever I was.
I vastly underestimated the gullibility of Californians.
I mean, honestly, I should have seen it coming.
Can you spend a minute just insulting me?
Because I have it coming.
I think this would be good for all of us.
Could you tell me how fucking stupid I was?
Just let it out.
Just put it all out there.
Free pass.
Nobody gets blocked.
I deserve it.
Keep it coming.
Idiot.
Yes.
Idiot.
Keep it coming.
Bring it.
Bring it.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Good job.
And those who use all caps for their insults, extra credit.
Extra credit.
Yeah.
Totally moronic.
Did not see how gullible and stupid my state is.
Now, but I'm going to put it in a larger trend.
Okay, you can stop insulting me now.
Or you had your fun.
Wrap it up.
This would be a good time to wrap that up.
Wrap it up.
Wrap it up.
Let's get back on another trail.
Here's a related story.
Or is it?
Or is it?
Is this related to that story?
You decide.
Okay.
They did a special video package to celebrate Women's History Month and they did it by honoring trans swimmer Leah Thomas.
So for Black History Month the ESPN is focusing on trans athlete Leah Thomas.
Now what does that have to do with the California reparations story?
Do you see anything that they have in common?
Do you see it yet?
Ridiculousness is close.
It looks like the white people in California have decided to embrace and amplify to end wokeism.
Not just California, but wherever ESPN is at.
It looks like there is a secret plan by white men, mostly men, to pretend to be so on board with wokeness that they're going to break the system.
Because there's no way women are going to let ESPN get away with celebrating Leah Thomas, a trans athlete, on Women's History Month.
There's no way women are going to let anybody get away with that.
So to me it looks like this is like forced shark jumping.
You know, when they talk about poorly written TV shows, they say, oh, it jumped the shark.
It's a reference to the old Happy Days TV show.
And it looks like white men are pushing the shark.
They're like pushing you over the shark.
It's like, well, if this is where you want to go, let's go there as fast as possible.
Let's get there right away.
Let's take that slippery slope right to the bottom.
So, let's find out what those reparations are.
Because those are totally practical.
Yeah, that'll work.
Everything will be fine.
It's all fine.
Five million dollars per person.
Who would complain?
What problems could you possibly have?
And how about Women's History Month?
Oh, well.
You know, as Ricky Gervais says, those old classic, old style women with vaginas and wombs and shit?
No, that's old school.
We like the new women.
We like the new women with penises, or had penises.
Yeah, we like that kind of women.
So, I believe that the next thing you're going to see is a movement by white men to punish white men and white women more severely.
Maybe public whippings.
Because I think we've got to push this thing till we figure out what is too far.
Because too far, I thought we'd already reached too far.
But we have not.
We've got to keep going.
Keep making it more ridiculous.
All right, we'll get back to that.
Here's why I think Chad GPT and AI will be illegal.
Here's why.
So I asked One of the sample questions on the chat GPT thing was, did Trump incite January 6th violence?
That's a pretty big question, isn't it?
Did Trump incite the violence?
What do you think AI said?
Well, AI didn't want to commit to that interpretation, so that's good.
But it described what Trump said, and said that some people interpreted it as calling for violence.
Guess what they left out of his quotes?
What part of his quotes from the speech just before the January 6th bad stuff happened, what part of his speech do you think they left out?
They did quote his speech, but they left out a part.
It's the part about protest peacefully.
They left out, peacefully and patriotically, make your voices heard today.
AI left that out.
Why do you think they left that out?
Do you think it was programmed to leave it out?
Well, here's what I think.
I don't think it's directly programmed to do that.
My understanding is it's a word prediction system.
So in other words, it simply looks at how everybody has ever talked ever, And then tries to talk the way most people talk.
And if the thing you're trained on mostly said that Trump was not in it for a peaceful situation, That's what people said.
If most of the people who talked about January 6th completed a sentence with, January 6, Trump incited violence, if there's more of that than, January 6, Trump called for peaceful protest, it's just going to go with the majority.
That's my understanding.
I mean, if that's wrong, somebody needs to correct me.
But my understanding is you're just looking for word patterns.
It's not thinking.
It's just looking for word patterns.
This word usually comes after that word.
I was using some autofill program.
I forget what it was.
Some app.
And I started a sentence, and it started suggesting the next word.
And I thought, oh, that is the next word.
So I hit it.
And then from the first two words I'd written, it suggested three words that are most likely the next word after those two.
And one of them was correct.
I wrote the whole sentence from the first word without ever typing another word.
From the first sentence, it gave me choices and then narrowed down what I was going to say until by the end it was sort of only one choice for the last word.
Yeah.
That'll spin your brain around a little bit.
All right.
Here's what I've been saying about AI that will become more and more true the longer we learn about it.
It goes like this.
We are not learning how to make machines intelligent.
That's what you thought we were doing.
We are not teaching machines to be intelligent.
Here's what we're doing.
We're proving we never were.
AI can only prove that humans were never intelligent and only imagined that they were.
That's what this proved.
The way humans think is also word pattern repetition.
The way you can see it yourself.
If you go on Twitter, you know how a person's going to end a sentence because of the way they started.
Don't you?
You can tell, oh, it's one of those, one of those people, whoever those people is.
You could be on either side and still say the same thing.
Oh, it's one of those people.
The left would say, it's one of those MAGA people.
I know what they're going to say.
And MAGA people would say, oh, it's a leftist progressive.
I know what they're going to say.
And they're right.
They're both right.
Because both sides are just imagining their thinking, but they're not.
When I tell you that the news assigns you your opinions, and you reject that and say, well, not me, but it probably does assign those opinions to the other people.
Probably does.
But not me.
I use my reason No.
Your opinion is based on the pattern of what you saw the most.
And if you watched Fox News and, you know, right-leaning media the most, then when you complete a sentence, you're going to complete it the way they did.
And you will believe that you thought.
You'll believe that reason happened in your brain, but you'll just be doing pattern recognition exactly like the AI is.
What is the most likely end of the following sentence?
Okay, I watch Fox News all day.
The end of the sentence is, Trump was framed.
Framed.
Okay, now I go over to watch CNN all day, and I'd watch CNN and MSNBC and nothing else all day.
Finish the sentence.
Trump is Guilty of multiple crimes.
And that's it.
That is what you think is thinking.
I know you don't believe it.
Yesterday I told you about a study that we've known for decades.
That the critical thinking part of your brain doesn't engage until half a second after you decide.
Did you know that?
The critical thinking part of your brain Doesn't even come online.
It doesn't even activate until after you've decided.
And we've known that for decades.
What does that tell you?
It means that the decision is based on this irrational pattern recognition thing, just like AI.
Right?
But then we have another process where we rationalize it after the fact.
The rationalizing is why the things we say don't seem to make sense.
The cognitive dissonance.
Every now and then, the things we say do make sense.
But it's a coincidence.
It's a coincidence.
And by coincidence, if the thing you say makes sense, then you don't get cognitive dissonance.
Because it's all consistent.
You only get cognitive dissonance when your pattern recognition and your word fill-in thinking comes up with something that the rest of your brain says, ah, that seems inconsistent, but you have to go with it anyway.
So you paper it over with cognitive dissonance, where you literally hallucinate that the things that don't make sense, make sense.
So, you don't know this yet, But this is the biggest risk of AI.
The biggest risk of AI is not what it does.
The biggest risk of AI is what you realize about yourself.
Or people realize.
It's going to get rid of religion.
It's going to get rid of political preference.
You will start to recognize them as programmed effects in your brain.
You will recognize that your opinions are not real.
That's going to take some adjustment.
Once you realize your opinions are not real, they're not even coming from you, they're just pattern recognition, and that comes from the outside.
Once you realize that, everything's different.
Now, it won't kill you, because I've been on that menu since I was probably 23.
Probably age 23, I first realized that your brain is not a logical engine.
When I learned hypnosis, that's the first thing you learn.
First thing you learn in hypnosis is that people are not logical engines.
If they were logical, you couldn't hypnotize them.
Did you know that?
Hypnosis wouldn't work if people had logical brains the way you think they do.
It works because what I make you focus on And what I repeat becomes your operating system.
It's just that simple.
All right.
Here's a reframe that's going to change everything.
Back in, let's see, when was it?
1982, I think.
There was a study, oh no, it was longer ago, 1964.
It was a study in which teachers were randomly, there was a group that were randomly selected in a classroom.
And the teachers were told that they were the smart ones.
And so the teachers treated one group like they were gifted.
And then treated everybody else the same.
What do you think happened?
You already know.
The group that thought it was gifted because their teacher acted like that, their performance went way up.
Now, I was looking for whether that study had been repeated.
I didn't find it.
But it is accepted.
It is accepted, because I see it a lot.
But I'd love to know if that's been debunked.
I don't think it's been debunked.
I believe there's plenty of evidence to suggest that how you expect to succeed is how it'll turn out.
Now, you could say that that's a winner's mindset, wouldn't you?
If you expect to do well, do you do better?
Everybody knows that.
Everybody knows that if you expect to do well, You're probably going to do better than if you expect to not do well.
Now, is there anybody who doubts the premise before I go on?
I need you all to buy into the premise that what you expect to accomplish is really going to make a difference.
Look at Elon Musk.
He expected that he could build a rocket ship to Mars.
Other people expected that they couldn't.
The only one who expected he could do it, did it.
This is very consistent.
I expected, I know this is weird, and I know it doesn't make me sound good when I say it, but before I became a cartoonist, I was reading a newspaper, looking at the comics, and I said to myself, I feel like I could do this on the first try.
And then I did.
I actually expected that with no experience whatsoever, I could become a famous cartoonist.
And then I did.
Now, were my expectations necessary?
Of course!
My odds of succeeding in this field were like 1 in 10,000.
Or maybe 1 in 100,000.
It was just crazy.
But I expected it would work.
So I did it, and then it worked.
Coincidence?
I don't know.
But I can tell you that in my life, when I expect something to work, I expect it to work.
Even if it's irrational.
I still expect it to work.
You know, some of it is just pure optimism.
It's not based on fact.
But when I expect something to work, damn it, I expect it to work.
When I learned to play drums, I expected it to work.
And so a year and a half, two years of trying with no, no progress at all.
Imagine doing something for a year and a half and you couldn't even make it sound like a beat.
I mean, nothing even remotely like music.
Didn't stop me for a minute.
Did not slow me down.
You know why?
Because I expected to succeed.
Now, eventually, once I got limb independence, you know, everything came easily.
So now I could probably play just about anything you could play on drums.
I would just have to practice that specific stuff.
I'm also playing the guitar.
Here's the problem.
I don't expect I can do it.
I don't.
I'm playing it as if I'm not believing my own opinion.
So I'm still taking lessons and I'm going to grind away for, yeah, I'll probably grind away for a year or so, no matter what, just to find out.
But I don't expect it.
And that's a problem.
Don't you think?
If I expected it, do you think I'd try harder?
I think I would.
I think I would.
Yeah.
So expectations Make your performance different.
Everybody's on board with that, right?
I want to make sure there's nobody who disagrees with that statement.
Okay, I think I've got full agreement.
All right, now let's talk about critical race theory and what children are taught in school.
Are the white children taught that they can't succeed?
Nope.
Are the Asian kids taught that they can't succeed?
Nope.
Are the Indian American kids taught they can't succeed?
Nope.
Nope.
Are the Hispanic children taught they can't succeed?
Well, they've often, if they're immigrants, they've got a language issue and stuff.
So those are real.
But otherwise, no.
They think they can do whatever they want.
If you're a black American kid, do you expect to succeed?
Or do you expect that systemic racism will prevent you from success?
Well, you're being taught That systemic racism is a barrier that you have that other people don't have.
What would be the predictable outcome of telling black kids they have more obstacles to success than white kids?
What would you predict?
Lower test scores, right?
Isn't that the most predictable thing?
Lower test scores.
And sure enough, there are lower test scores.
Now, Isn't the purpose of CRT to improve the lives of black kids if it's in school?
Now of course there's the argument whether they teach CRT or they just talk about the same elements of it in different ways, which is, I'm not going to say that's different.
It's all the same.
So here you have something that scientifically a hundred percent of people would agree is bad for black kids.
Would you agree?
Do you think that there's any psychologist, any, black, white, Asian, do you think there's any trained psychologist who would say it's good for black kids to learn that they have an extra thing preventing them from success?
I don't believe anybody who has a degree or any credentials in psychology would be in favor of teaching some kids that they're not going to succeed.
Now, they don't say it that way.
They don't say, you're not going to succeed.
But that's sort of the message.
You're in a class of people who have this special problem.
You'll always have this problem.
No matter what you do, you'll run into this problem.
If you told me that every day, I don't know that I would try so hard.
I would just figure out if something wasn't working.
After a few years of plugging along, I'd say, well, They were right.
The systemic racism is keeping me from success.
But it might have been that third year of plugging that you needed.
I don't see any scenario in which CRT is not super harmful to black Americans.
What do you say?
Anybody disagree?
Is there any counter to that at all?
I don't see any.
Yeah.
And yet we're okay with that.
We're okay with it.
I think the way to make the CRT stuff disappear is that you should call it what it is.
It's a way to suppress black progress.
CRT, it wasn't designed that way.
It's nobody's intention.
But it's clearly going to do it.
Clearly.
And even those, the black students who succeed anyway, Are they better off?
Do you think a black successful person is better off knowing that the people who are looking at their success are thinking it was probably some kind of favoritism?
It's not really good for people who are actually successful.
I would be really pissed.
Imagine how much I would hate it.
If, you know, I had a successful career and people would just look at me and say, yeah, because of your race, you got a little boost there, didn't you?
Got a little extra.
I wouldn't like it at all.
All right.
So that's the way to, I think, fix all this.
Now, let me get a little more controversial by quoting I'm following an account on Twitter by Tyrone Williams.
His Twitter thing is ImmuneHack, all as one word.
ImmuneHack.
Now he doesn't have that many followers, a few thousand, six thousand followers, something like that.
But he is pushing a message That the difference in black performance compared to other races in America needs to be looked at more deeply.
And I think his complaint is that if you look at just poverty and you look at just any IQ, you might be missing the real reasons for the difference.
So Tyrone, this is not me, right?
If I tweeted this I'd be double cancelled, but Tyrone is trying to use what I'll call some tough love.
So my take is that Tyrone is really trying to help and he's putting himself out there at great risk because he probably thinks, I think, I mean this is just my impression of it, I'm not a mind reader, but it looks like he's just trying to help.
And he's trying to help the black community in particular with some tough love and tough honesty.
But he's also making very useful Very useful additions to the conversation.
For example, he said, this is his tweet, Tyrone Williams, he says, blacks are less likely to, one, optimize their prenatal diet, exercise, and sleep.
Now I don't know if that's true.
But he seems to have looked into it because he's kind of data-driven.
But he says that.
Optimize their prenatal diet to exercise and sleep.
Less likely to breastfeed, less likely to read to their kids, less likely to ensure their kids attend school, stay out of trouble in their proficient in math and reading, and less likely to do well on tests.
And then he says, but they expect equal representation at top universities.
So that's the tough love part.
So the useful part is, and I would really like to know about this, haven't we determined that breastfeeding improves your intelligence?
Am I wrong that that's scientifically demonstrated?
We know that, right?
Yeah.
And if it's true that there's a difference, well, there's a very specific lever that you could go after.
You know, there might be an education thing, might be a practical thing too.
There may be some practical reason that some people can do it and some can't.
So, that's really useful.
To me, that's useful.
It's a specific thing you could target and you could say, let's do better on this.
Reading to your kids, something you could target.
Optimizing prenatal diet.
Well, I would think that this is a problem for everybody who is low income.
I don't know if there's any racial difference in exercise and sleep.
I don't know that.
But if there is, it's probably something you could find out.
If there is a difference, those things would, in fact, have an impact on IQ.
We know that proper exercise helps your IQ.
We know that diet helps your IQ, don't we?
Is there any doubt that these three things would help your IQ?
Breastfeeding, better prenatal diet, and more focus on exercise and sleep.
And that's pretty much guaranteed stuff, right?
So this is why Tyrone's so useful.
He's going for solutions, not politics.
And then, you know, ensuring your kids stay in school and do well in tests and stuff like that.
It's pretty basic stuff.
So, I would say we have some, several Very promising.
And also somebody mentioned lead and paint might be another factor that is disproportionately affecting black Americans.
So there might be some environmental, nutritional, mindset things.
And CRT and the message that white people are victimizing you and holding you down is almost certainly reducing test scores and success.
Now if you want it to be useful, These are things you could really make a difference on.
Like you could actually move the needle on all of those things.
And then find out, find out what's what.
Does it close the gap?
Does it not close the gap?
I'd like to know.
All right.
Yeah.
The growth mindset tempers the effects of poverty on academic achievement.
All right, so here's something from... I forget where I saw it, but basically it's saying that your mindset of whether you can succeed is one of the biggest important things for success.
Now, where do people get a mindset?
Where do you get your mindset from?
Where do you think that comes from?
Do you think you're born with it?
Now, I've seen a lot of studies that say having a single father gets you a good result, but having a single mother doesn't.
Have you seen that?
I don't know if it was limited to black population, but it might have been.
But the study showed that if you only had one parent, and it was a mother, you'd have some issues.
But if the one parent is a father, that the kid would perform as well as anybody who had two parents.
I'm a little skeptical about that, because I think there's a selection bias in that.
The selection bias being that if the dad is capable of and wants to be a dad, That probably sorts people into the better category automatically.
So I'm not sure you're seeing a father effect as much as a filtering effect of who decides to be the father, who decides to be a single father in the first place.
I think that's a filtering effect.
Right.
Okay.
Mother's matter, father's matter.
Yeah.
But I think mindset comes from your peers.
It comes from your parents.
And, but where does success mindset come from specifically?
I wonder if that does come from dad.
No, in my case, it came from my mother.
So I can't speak to any other situation.
But in my case, my mother was the one who said, you're going to college from the time I was a fetus.
Told me I'd be successful from the time I could understand language.
Always did.
And when I was a teenager, I was already consuming self-help books.
Have I ever told you that?
By the time I was a teenager, and certainly by my early 20s, I was consuming everything I could about how somebody got famous, or how they got successful.
I would read every story about somebody who started with nothing and made it.
Every story.
I'd read every book that said, here's the secret to success.
I just absorbed it all the time.
Now where did that come from?
Where did I get that habit?
Because all I remember is thinking, oh wait a minute, there might be a formula for success?
Are you telling me if I just learned the formula that I would be successful?
You know, assuming I'm a functional person.
And so I came to believe that if I learned the formula that I could be successful.
So I spent years and years trying to figure out the formula, putting it together.
And that's where I came up with the talent stack idea of combining useful talents.
It's by studying other people's ways, looking for patterns.
And it's where I came up with the system is more important than a goal.
That you have to be doing something every day to improve your odds in general, not just working toward this one goal in a straight line way.
Maybe you thought of something without being assigned to you?
I don't think so.
I think it came from my mother.
Because my mother was always the go to school and it's all within your power to have whatever you want.
My mother would say the old 50s and 60s thing, you can be whatever you want.
So my mother was always, if you put it in the work, And you learn how to do the work right, you know, college or anything else.
So if you figure out how to do it right and you put in the work, you can do anything you want.
That's exactly how my life turned out.
Now, I don't think that works for everybody.
So I'm biased by my own experience.
But how in the world did that not help me?
Compared to, let's say, a parent who said, you know, nobody succeeded in this family because all that discrimination or something.
I never heard that story.
I never heard that I couldn't succeed.
I only heard that I could.
I never heard anything else.
That's got to make a difference.
Don't you think?
It's got to make a difference.
All right, let me check with you.
How many consider yourself successful and had parents who had a positive mindset?
I'm looking for the double.
You consider your life successful, however you define it.
Doesn't have to be financial.
Yeses and yeses.
Yes and yes.
Yes and yes.
Double yes and yes.
No and no.
Okay, that's interesting.
I'll bet there aren't too many people whose parents told them they could do anything they wanted, and then they consider themselves a failure at middle age.
I'll bet it's rare.
You can see the effect of mindset.
It's everything.
All right.
So, let me remind you, give you a little backup in context.
Do you remember I got in a little trouble for saying something with a racial overtones?
A few weeks ago, anybody remember that?
There were headlines about it.
And when it happened, I realized that something that wasn't obvious had happened at the same time.
Which is, I can talk about the topic of race productively without worrying about getting canceled now.
And I'm like the only person who can do it.
I'm the only one.
I'm the only one who can have an honest conversation about race.
So, people, if you want to have an honest conversation, I'm the one.
And I'm fairly well informed, so I think I have something I could add.
Even if the only thing I added was honesty.
Because, you know, how many teachers... Let me put it this way.
Don't you think that professional teachers are fully aware that telling some group they're victims suppresses their performance?
Now, if I know it, you don't think teachers know it?
I mean, I'll ask my sister.
She was a teacher for years.
She's retired.
But if I ask my sister, who's probably listening right now, well, text me.
All right, sister?
I won't say your name just so people don't get all over you.
But sister of mine, text me right now and tell me.
Tell me if you're not fully aware The people will rise to their expectations.
Yeah.
Her last name is not Adams, so you can't find her.
I'll bet in a moment she'll weigh in.
Actually, I don't know if she watches it live or watches it recorded.
I think she watches it recorded, maybe.
But I don't think there's anybody who disagrees that expectations affect performance.
And nobody would disagree that telling people that they've got this invisible yoke on them called systemic racism.
That's got to affect performance.
It just has to.
Teachers also know that parents are mostly to blame when the kids are a disaster.
