Episode 1137 Scott Adams - Black Strategy Matters, Antifa Wants Trump to Win, Seattle Solves Racism

turn your phones off ringer's off okay you don't really have to do that because it turns out i wouldn't even be able to hear it if it rang but you might hear mine so i'll turn mine off you know what you need today yeah let me tell you what you need today first of all this is going to be one of the best days ever not for any particular reason it just is you don't need a reason all you need is a copper mug or glass a tanker challenger steiner canteen jugger flask of vessel of any kind and fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee enjoy me now for the dopamine hit of the day the unparalleled pleasure the thing that makes everything better it's called the simultaneous sip and i know you came here for it join me now for that delight go um wow i guess the day going doesn't it everything's starting to turn up look a little better you you started out a little bit slow today but look how much better things are already it happens quickly i saw today that the the company ring that makes the home security they have a new prototype of an indoor drone for security and apparently they'll be they've already made it but they're not selling it yet a little drone that will pop up from its little charging station and do a predetermined route through the air through your uh your home and send you back pictures so you can look at look at what's going on now if that's not cool i guess i don't know what cool is because that got me all excited here's another another little positive trend that is unexpected positivity from the coronavirus tragedy hydroponic farms are doing great i have a tiny tiny little investment in a desktop hydroponic company and their their revenue just went crazy because of coronavirus and and what they make is uh it's called click and grow if you're looking for it and they make these little uh desktop garden things that have their own light source and pods and seeds and stuff they're pretty cool but apparently the the full-size farms hydroponic farms just went from well that's a good idea i suppose you could make an indoor farm if you really needed to it it apparently has completely shifted off to we need some hydroponic farms because if our food source gets cut off like it sort of almost did with coronavirus we need a backup plan and having local hydroponic farms is a pretty good way to go so that's good news there's some fake news about joe biden today of course he's the gaff maker so when joe biden makes a joke intentionally in the context of so many gaffes sometimes you can't tell but this one is being reported as a gaffe this was clearly him making a joke in which he said in one of his zoom appearances he said uh i got to the senate 180 years ago and uh the the trump campaign tweeted that as a gaffe i don't think it was a gaffe i i'm willing to place a sizable bet that even joe biden knows that he's less than 180 years old so i think he was he was just joking about how long ago it was but things are so crazy that it's reported as well maybe you know he's doing so poorly that maybe maybe he doesn't know he's less than 180 years old maybe but i think that was a joke here's the funniest tweet i saw yesterday and i'm gonna read you the punchline before i read you the setup that wouldn't make sense until you hear it okay and it's because it's the way i consumed it because twitter shows the shows the tweet the retweet message before the thing that got retweeted so i'm looking through the through the twitter feed yesterday and i see a ted cruz tweet and i did and like you i don't know what he's referring to yet so just consume it the same the same way i did he said you know there are decaffeinated brands on the market that are just as tasty and i read that and i was like what what what kind of message is that a reply to you know there are decaffeinated brands on the market that are just as tasty and then i read what he was retweeting and it was elizabeth warren and listen to this word salad that she tweeted this sleazy supreme court double dealing is the last gasp of a corrupt republican leadership numb to its own hypocrisy the last gasp of the billionaire-fueled party that's undemocratically over-represented and desperately clinging to power in order to impose its extremist agenda ted cruz you know there are decaffeinated brands on the market that are just as tasty you have to admit that's one of the all-time great tweets here's some good news you know you're all these protests are happening and you're you're thinking to yourself well what good is coming out of all these protests you know you'd like you'd like to think that with all that disruption there's something good coming out of it and i'm here to report finally serious progress against systemic racism and this comes courtesy of the uh of seattle so seattle has uh voted in and approved the following changes thank god because our the long nightmare of systemic racism is finally coming to a close at least in seattle i would imagine a lot of places are going to copy this model because once you hear it what they've done to eliminate systemic racism you're going to say to yourself it's obvious once you hear it until you hear it you say to yourself i don't know it feels like such a big problem i don't even know where to begin but once you see what seattle's done you're going to be slapping yourself in the head and saying why did we not do this before why so here's the three things they've done they've eliminated the police unit that clears homeless camps now i think you know that if you eliminate friction for something it just stops happening right that's that's the seattle theory is if they stop clearing out these homeless camps things should be good now some people are going to say i know critics are going to say scott if you stop clearing out the homeless camps isn't the guaranteed effect of that to attract more homeless camps to which i say i don't think you understand how systemic racism works you're you're in crazy land no if you stop clearing the homeless camps systemic racism goes away you're thinking about how removing obstacles will make more of something happen such as more homeless people will stream into seattle because it's a good place to be homeless that's just crazy because this will get rid of systemic racism but it's not all you know if that was all that would be pretty amazing but there's more to it second thing they've done is they've agreed to cut the command to staff of the police pay they'll still be as many people on the staff apparently or it's a little bit little unclear but it looks like that what they're doing is mostly just cutting the pay of the people who are in charge of making things better for police now i don't have to tell you if you're a student of human nature that one way to get a better result from people and if you really want them to work hard and and give you a good performance cutting their pay that's the way to go so these command staff police officers were being asked to do more with less they've also been asked to cut their pay and i think that should motivate them in the right direction obviously how else are you going to motivate people other than cutting their pay that just feels obvious after they do it you know until they did this honestly i feel dumb but i wouldn't have even thought of this you know i might have thought of the this is how dumb i am i i would have thought you know if you want more out of these people to do a better job better cha better training of their staff etc i would be i would have been thinking in terms of getting better people and paying them more to get more performance but i think seattle's on the right track here just cut their pay that should make them work harder and have better morale and so you should get better results then they're also going to reduce 100 officers now if you want to make your city better take the thing that holds it together law and order and get rid of that because the law and order was becoming sort of a trojan horse if you will for racism a lot of people wouldn't realize that you probably think to yourself law and order wait a minute isn't that good for black people and white people and brown people and people of all types is there somebody for whom a an active police force that is pursuing law and order is there is there some demographic group for whom that's bad well seattle has spoken and again these are these weren't obvious solutions if any of this was obvious it would have been done before right you need you need sort of a out of the box thinking you need some genius and seattle has stepped up so the reducing the number of police officers cut the command staff bay and they got rid of the unit that is clearing the homeless camps so those three steps i think are bold i think they should be uh observed for how effective they are and probably in a few weeks the rest of the country should go this way because i can't imagine this not working imagine your black lives matter and you you hear this announcement and you think i'm out here every day i'm protesting i'm trying to get rid of systemic racism but nothing's happening nothing's happening why is nothing happening and then you see this and you say whoa i think i've over performed i was trying to get rid of systemic racism in seattle but i may have done it in the whole world because once once these three ideas get out there's nothing that's going to stop them from spreading to all of the other smart cities that also want to get rid of systemic racism so that's all good news you should be pretty pretty happy about that here's some more news it's going to be harder and harder to run against trump and call him a racist number one i love the fact that the organizer of the charlottesville finding people race is endorsing joe biden so joe biden's primary campaign claim is that the the president's called the racist and charlottesville fine people now of course that didn't happen that was fake news uh he he said exactly the opposite he condemned them but the organizer of the charlottesville he uh he endorses uh joe biden for president so that's interesting at the same time trump i forgot to mention this yesterday but trump in his speech explicitly said and i don't know if he said this before he said that school choice is the civil rights issue of our time in other words if you get school choice right then everybody's going to do better and essentially that's effectively a civil rights issue it's so big and so important to the black community so that's a big deal have you ever had a president who said there's a gigantic civil rights issue and i'm going to make it a top priority to get rid of it what is what is joe biden's big civil rights issue he has none because seattle already solved it this whole race systemic racism thing used to be a topic that biden could talk about but now seattle's kind of taking it off the table with their with their so effective solution but the president still is working on a civil rights issue which is education is terribly unfair and poorly done so the president's done prison reform he's massively funded the historically black colleges we'll talk more about them there's a biden story there he's funded the opportunity zones he's putting 500 billion dollars into uh capital for black american businesses he's he's got black unemployment to the best level it's ever been before coronavirus it's coming back already he's designated the kkk a domestic terror group even obama didn't do that i mean seriously obama didn't do that okay he's the law and order president and by a majority the black population does like law and order surprise surprise you're surprised that people like law and order no matter who they are it's amazing that that's a surprise all right but here's the other the other thing that sort of snuck up on us trump is the first u.s president to nominate a mother of black children to the supreme court he's the first one to nominate a mother of black children to the supreme court now i know what you're thinking you're thinking in terms of diversity on the supreme court wouldn't it be better for an actual black woman with black children to be nominated yeah yeah okay i see that point you know it would be a little bit more on the nose you know you'd say to yourself all right that's exactly you know that's the segment we we want to fill in there but i'd have to say you know if you don't have that you know the the more ideal solution that everybody would recognize is like oh okay that would be good to get that kind of diversity i would think that a strong second place is a woman who has black children because i don't think the mom reflex gets turned off i mean i i've got a feeling that quite legitimately uh amy cody barrett feels that all of her children are awesome so having somebody on here who has that sensibility let me let me put this into a visual persuasion when amy coney barrett watched the george floyd you know a shocking video of of the moment of his death do you think that she looked at it the same as people who do not have black children i'll bet not i'll bet the fact that she has black children you know changes her filter on seeing the george floyd situation to make it not exactly what a black citizen to this country felt i mean that's you know you can't really feel what other people feel but if you wanted to get close to it you know if you wanted to get into the the general zip code of that she's a strong choice it's a it's interesting to have somebody who can who has one leg in each world i mean she has one leg sort of you know in the in the parent of black uh kids and one one leg in sort of a generic white person world it's kind of a good perspective um you you've probably heard of dr ibrahim kendi who's a boston university mellon professor professor national book award winner best-selling author and he wrote had to be an anti-racist and recently so he's a sort of a public anti-racist advocate uh he he recently made some news because i guess jack dorsey gave him uh gave his group i guess 10 million dollars unrestricted money to help them work on let's see how is it described unqualified support of his vision of putting academic researchers at the forefront of the movement to dismantle policies uh supporting racial inequality and injustice now what do you think of the general idea of having academic researchers at the forefront of how to dismantle racism that's not bad i i would say you sort of have to see how it works out right everything's an implementation there's no such thing as just a good idea you need a good idea that is implemented well but on the surface on the surface don't you think that an academic approach to really understand as best we can things such as are black people really being targeted by the police i i think we need the researchers and the scientists and stuff to sort of take the the lead and tell us what's true what is true you know where can we identify this stuff and where we can't now of course you have the risk that because they're academics it'll just all be and then you make policies that are based on complete so the execution matters right it could be executed completely wrong but in general if you have a real academic who's got real credentials and working with other academics and they want to dig in to really understand what's going on here with the the systemic racism not a bad way to go so he said something that was so delightfully provocative uh in a tweet that it made me like him so i didn't know anything about him until this tweet and then then i started looking into it and connecting the dots and i'm going to say i have a positive opinion of him this may be different than some of your opinions all right but i'll tell you why the same thing that makes me like trump is his provocative way of just going in and shaking the box because there are a lot of cases where just going in and shaking things up is exactly what you need it's you know you don't write it out that way on paper right you know you don't make a plan i'm gonna just shake everything up but sometimes you need that here so somebody made a tweet that's been deleted now about um it would be hard to make fun of amy coney barrett because she has two black adopted children from haiti and you think to yourself okay that's unassailable who could possibly who could possibly complain about her in terms of racism when she's gone so far as to adopt two kids from haiti so she's beyond criticism right well not according to dr abram and here's the part that made me like him all right and i know you're not going to have the same impression but just just understand where i'm coming from that i like provocative people who shake the box they don't have to agree with me all right so that's the part that you're missing i'm not agreeing with his positions necessarily i might agree with some of them i don't know i'm just saying that i like i like how provocative he is here's what he tweeted about amy coney barrett he goes some white colonizers quote adopted black children they quote civilized these quote savage children in the quote superior ways of white people while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture is a feminine of humanity now come on you have to you have to appreciate how wonderfully provocative that is you can agree you disagree with it you find it you find it offensive i get that but just but just agree with me on this point the way you feel when you hear this has got to be very similar to the way democrats feel when they they look at a trump tweet right it's going to look kind of similar you're going to hate it but you can't look away what if i told you about persuasion 50 percent of persuasion is getting your attention one way to do it and nobody's come up with a better way to do it is to be just so crazy provocative that people can't look away he has that he has that so if you if you're tempted to dismiss him because you say i don't believe i don't want you know i don't agree with any of the things he's saying i would give it another look because there's there's a whole lot of x factor that comes out of this it just sprays out of this the same kind of x factor that an aoc has same kind of x factor that a president trump has it just it's just coming out of his pores now once he gets all this attention what's he do with it so here's the second part right now that he's got all this attention being provocative what's he do with it here's what he does with it he follows it up with this uh he says and whether this is barrett or not is not the point it is belief too many white people have if they have uh if they have or adopt a child of color then they can't be a racist so basically he's making the point by analogy that if you say you have a black friend that doesn't mean you're not a racist it just means you have a black friend and he's extending that to say just because you adopted a black child that alone doesn't make you not a racist it just means you did this one good thing so he's challenging that idea now is that fair is it fair for him to say that uh that's not far enough like you know you you need to go to the extra level just having a black friend or a black adoptee not enough i think that's completely fair yeah that's a completely fair statement it is also a complete loser statement here's why the difference between winning and losing strategies is that winning strategies encourage good things to happen more and losing strategies discourage good things from happening more that's it that's that's the whole tweet if i can use that statement and when when you see somebody adopting a baby or babies from haiti you know a white person adopting black babies what is the winner way to look at that the winner way to look at that is she's awesome that's it as soon as you add something to okay that's awesome i i respect that 100 respect it and now we're done talking about it as soon as you depart it's just good and you put that well it's not good you're still sort of a jerk you have you have put a penalty on good behavior good behavior adopting um black orphans it's good behavior i think we'd all be happy about that but he penalized it a little bit right every time you penalize good behavior or support bad behavior let's say violence and looting you are in a loser strategy and there's no there there's no real debate about this there's no domain in the world there's no there's no professional coach there's no mentor there's nobody who knows how the world works who would say you should ever ever ever put a penalty on good behavior nor should you ever ever ever say good things about the behavior you don't want to see more of it's very simple human nature that people will do more of the things that they get praised for and less of the things they don't get praised for so and i'm going to talk about this a little bit more in a minute paul graham famous famous investor paul graham uh asked this of a tweet he said uh i wonder if the protesters in portland et cetera realize that roughly a hundred percent of the effect they're having the protest that is on the upcoming presidential election is to help trump that's weird isn't it don't don't you wonder why the protesters are so obviously helping trump because they're playing right into his message at the same time he would be their biggest problem the person they would most want to leave how does that make sense how does it make sense that every day that they're putting lots of personal risk and energy and money into getting trump reelected how can you explain that here's how i explain it they need trump to get re-elected not all of them you know a lot of the protesters are legitimately just protesting racism and and that's great but in terms of the organizer class which are really the ones that make it happen right there most people are just attendees most people are followers there's a small group of people let's call them the organizing class that make it all happen among the organizing class do they want to overthrow the government or do they want joe biden to be president they want to overthrow the government they don't want joe biden to be president you don't see the protesters calling carrying joe biden signs do you do you see any of the protesters with biden signs you don't because they don't want joe biden to win do you know why because if joe biden wins it takes the steam end of their protests takes the energy and of the revolution the worst thing that could happen from this perspective of black lives matter is for joe biden to get elected because the moment he gets elected the the people who are protesting are going to say we got something you know we didn't get everything we want but at least now joe biden will head us in the right direction and kamala harris they'll be moving us toward a better world thank god this trump is gone they don't want that world i'm pretty sure the organizers would prefer the perfect situation would be a non-credible election where trump wins and stays in office and then they can complain that it was a rigged election it was not credible trump is still the problem nothing's been fixed we have to overthrow the system so watch for the protesters to be very unenthusiastic about biden for that reason dan bongino points out that the that is uh it's incredible that it's been confirmed that the fbi used the suspected russian agent to spy on a trump campaign and it's not a front page story think about that just try to imagine this as not a front page story that the fbi actually used a russian agent to spy on the suspected russian agent to spy on the trump campaign and it's just sort of ignored now if you think you live in a world where you form your own opinions you know you look at the news you form your own opinions you don't that i don't know if that world ever existed but it definitely doesn't exist now what happens is you are shown a a little sliver of the news that is designed to give you the opinion that is being assigned to you if they showed you more than the sliver of news you might get too much context and you would not accept the assigned opinion because you might say well i see your point but what about all this other stuff as long as they just leave out all the other stuff they can give you a sliver of reality you'll say looks good to me if i don't know anything else i just know that sliver my my opinion has been assigned to me i accept it um by the way on a uh a more concerning note dan bongino noted publicly that he's got some kind of a lump on his neck that seems to be a concern and maybe a big concern we don't know yet so wishing him the best on that i i will add this story uh just if it makes dan feel any better in my 20s i had a lump on my neck went to my doctor at kaiser and they said i don't know that looks we better look into that we better get a closer look took an x-ray i go in and they and they looked at the x-ray and they said ah this doesn't look good and i said well what does it mean if it's not nothing which is the other alternative they said it could be nothing it could be just a they said one of those things that was the actual phrase it could be just one of those things and and we just drain this little bump and there's nothing that's it it could be it or or you have a horrible cancerous problem and your life will never be the same those are your two possibilities why don't you come back next week and we'll figure out which one it is so i had to wait with a basically you know almost a death sentence preliminary diagnosis of a lump on my neck i had to wait days to figure out what it was now it turns out that the the way to confirm whether it was going to kill me or not and of course spoiler i i lived they would stick a needle into it and draw out the fluid and if the fluid was blood i'm in big trouble because it means there's some cancer going on there but if it was a clear fluid it was just some kind of minor infection no big deal so i'm sitting there and i can't see the needle because it's back here and i feel it go in and i feel the liquid come out and i'm sitting there thinking you freaking you see the liquid now you know if i'm dead or i'm fine tell me i had to actually ask all right it still bothers me to this day the moment it came out he should have been saying ah no problem you're all good and it turns out it was no problem it was all good so dan i hope your situation goes like mine did i i have more empathy than you can imagine but i'm going to hope that it's just one of those things and your everything's fine so i tweeted this yesterday i said i know lots of people who wrote to success on the strategy of skill acquisition and positivity which is a pretty good package package if your life strategy is to continually acquire skills pretty good strategy and to to approach life with positivity which affects other people and affects yourself that's a pretty good strategy and i know people have done that but i don't know anybody who complained their way to success they might exist but if you have a choice of those two things either building skills and having a positive attitude or complaining and not doing anything useful um you know pick the one that works now weirdly elon musk tweeted a reply so and a lot of people took note because when elon musk tweets at me people people think you guys need to talk or something i don't know but for some reason people get excited when when that happens so elon musk tweeted this and i'm not sure exactly how it relates to my tweet but he said there are times when i feel like i'm living in a dilbert cartoon so i tweeted back the simulation doesn't write itself wait until you see what i have planned for you and then you know he laughed with some some emoticons and so anyway that that was fun uh and uh ted cruz also retweeted me yesterday i had a good day for getting retweeted um did you think it was weird when uh acb amy coney barrett when she was giving her a sort of nomination acceptance speech i guess you'd call it she went to great lengths to describe her husband as subservient to her was that weird and i didn't understand why until the analyst explained it to me which was so people were criticizing acb for being part of a a church group that allegedly and i think this is incorrect but the the allegation was that the people in that church the women were taught by their religion to be subservient to their husbands or something i think that's inaccurate i think that it never taught that i think it had to do with their use of the word hand maidens but it was really a biblical reference it wasn't it wasn't a reference to subservience so she goes in and i didn't like this at all honestly like it's the thing that felt the creepiest she she needed to describe her her husband as basically the house husband in the group the the one who is serving her needs and although he's an attorney and has a practice of his own he seemed to be the primary caregiver for the seven children because her job was even more high profile and it seemed to me that she was sort of suggesting that the way she could handle an immense workload of being on the supreme court while having seven children is that her husband was unusually supportive in terms of raising the kids and supportive of her now i have of course i don't criticize any couple if they have a situation that works it's not my it's not my issue so if anybody has any kind of arrangement that makes them happy in their family it's great great to me but it felt just uncomfortable that she threw her husband under the bus to help her nomination i didn't like it i just didn't like it now i'm not i'm not saying it wasn't an accurate description and i'm not entirely sure that the husband has any problem with it he was probably perfectly happy with it but i don't know didn't feel right didn't didn't love it but it probably worked um so what else is going on so uh up in portland the proud boy rally ended with no major clashes so there were a number of rests and there were a number of you know people throwing stuff and the usual amount of relatively low level violence uh enough so you could characterize it as no major clashes but here's the part i found interesting so you knew that the proud boys were going to show up and you knew that there would be counter protesters here's the interesting part there were a thousand people that showed up with the proud boys the thousand and there were 500 who showed up as the counter protesters now if you recall i've been asking for some time why is it that the news does not report how many protesters there are at each of these events it's conspicuously missing the most obvious thing that you would say about any protest is how many people showed up it is the number one determinant of how much i should care if six people show up to a protest i probably don't care if a thousand people show up to a protest you have my attention all right and it's not reported and it's it's characteristically not reported and the reason i thought that was important not just in terms of news value is that you might recall that i said the following if the rest of the country knew how many protesters there were it would allow them to send more non-protesters into the area and take care of it if you had enough locals who were anti-protester whatever that number of locals is you could get enough of them so they would so overwhelm the number of protesters they would effectively become the police force in other words the that the locals if they had enough could just cause the protesters to behave because it would be too much muscle in the general area because force is really the only thing that changes anything in this world and and here it is a thousand proud boys showed up and and supporters and only 500 anti-fascists and the result was no major clashes why was there no major clashes well i would say it's because the proud boys outnumbered the anti-protesters right and it shows you a model that you know it's dangerous of course because if you send lots of you know people willing to fight into an area you know you've got some trouble but so so let me say that this is not a recommendation or a suggestion from me about how to handle it rather i would say it's one of several ways this could end you know there are several paths you could predict you might go down but one of the paths is that if the police force decides not to be the primary power in the area and that's what they've decided the police force has decided that they will they will play for a tie the police have decided that they're not going to defeat the protesters the protesters know they can't defeat the police they're both playing for a tie but the proud boys were not playing for a tie and in theory you could bring in enough people who just want the protest to stop that the the sheer number of bodies of the non-protesters would make it stop there would just be too much power put into the area so that's one way it could happen it could be that the citizens mobilize in enough numbers that they just overwhelm the protesters and or there are enough people to make sure looting doesn't happen because really if you just had enough kyle ridden house the the problem with kyle rittenhouse was now a kyle rittenhouse the problem with kyle rittenhouse is there were not enough kyle ridden houses there if the kyle written houses had outnumbered the people who attacked him and some of them ultimately got shot two of them were killed if the kyle riddenhausers had been the majority instead of the lone ranger trying to help things it would have been different and it probably would have been a lot less violence here's something interesting in election land pro-publica that's a publication election land propublica they're reporting that in north carolina so far this year i guess we're already counting the absentee ballots and already there are three times as many ballots from black citizens that are rejected compared to white now what's the first thing you say about that oh my god there there are discriminating people rejecting ballots because they're doing three times as many black ones as white but the story goes on to say that there's no demographic information on the ballots that are being rejected and i'm thinking but isn't there at least a name there's a name on the ballot right a printed name don't you know where the ballot came from am i wrong about that because that is demographic information it isn't too hard if you are a racist to try to guess which names belong to black people you wouldn't get everyone but you could get pretty close couldn't you you know if you if you just picked out the obvious ones so i'm not sure i believe that you can't tell uh completely who voted but the problems that they call out for why they were being rejected were missing a signature or missing a witness signature now that's pretty black and white right there's either a signature or not there's a witness your signature or not what would be the reason that both in 2018 and now in 2020 three times as many black voters did not fill in one of those two things what causes that do you have any idea what causes that if i had to take a guess i would say it's correlated with educational levels and that the the more educated you are the more adept you are at reading a forum correctly filling it out correctly and not making any mistakes so it probably is just correlated with economic situation and and education situation but it does it does certainly raise the question that trump has been raising that these ballots are a problem all right um but i didn't know this that apparently the system this year allows the voters to they have apparently they have time i don't know if in every case but they would have time to fix their errors because i guess they get notified now if they're notified of the errors there must be some information on the the ballot that tells you something about people so they can either fix it or they can go vote in person but as you might imagine not everybody fixes it so the original problem persists even though they could have fixed it all right so maybe that'll make a difference we'll see remember i asked you i said i couldn't understand why people were criticizing trump for saying that doing extra testing is surfacing extra infections and i thought to myself how could that not be true how could you do extra testing without finding extra people feel feel like i feel like that's just obvious and nay silver basically said the same thing in the tweet he said it's not clear whether covet cases are actually on the rise in the us or if it's because there's more testing and i thought to myself that's the first time i've seen anybody who i would imagine is more associated with the left i don't know if he he says that about himself he may not identify with the left i don't know but it's the first time i've heard somebody who wasn't obviously a trump supporter say yeah if you test more you're going to find more infection it seems sort of obvious and now nay silver is saying it and i'm wondering what am i missing what am i not understanding about this situation that it could ever not be true that more testing wouldn't find more things isn't the reason you test to find more stuff i'm really confused on that um so i i asked by tweet today can someone ask democratic leaders including blm if they'll commit to a peaceful continuation of the trump administration if he wins why is nobody asking democrats if they will commit to a peaceful transfer if trump wins isn't that a pretty obvious question for democratic leadership of all type here's another one and why are democratic leaders not being asked by the press to disavow the domestic terrorist organization that is ironically called antifa now the antifa has been designated a domestic terror organization isn't the obvious thing to ask democrat leaders do you disavow them now that they're domestic terrorists it's a good question it's the most obvious question you should ask and it's not being asked all right so um a lot of people have asked me you know what kind of persuasion or linguistic kill shot should you use against the protesters uh that you think are going too far and sometimes you have to wait a little bit and see how the public is naturally responding to things and then you find out how people are naturally responding you can design a linguistic kill shot that that plays to the thing they're already thinking that's much easier than just trying to make up some kind of persuasion out of nothing it really helps to know how people already think about something and now that a little time has gone by i have this suggestion for a linguistic kill shot on antifa and you just heard me use it and it is that the press should always refer to them when describing antifa they should be described as the domestic terrorist organization ironically named antifa it's the ironically named that takes their power away because what antifa did that was super clever and has served them really well they called themselves anti-fascists even though they weren't you know in a way that you would you would consider it um and therefore anybody who criticized them was calling themselves a fascist one of the best things anybody ever did in terms of persuasion so in order to take the power out of that you could simply refer to them as the ironically named antifa now you could feel it right if you said that often enough and say the domestic terrorist organization ironically named antifa it would completely take the power out of antifa so that's my suggestion um somebody found a video from 1991 in which joe biden said he was talking about a justice that shooter i think that was being considered at the time and talking about how old people would be in 2020 and biden said in the year 2020 i'll be dead and gone in all probability now what are the odds that there would be an actual video of of joe biden predicting his own death by 2020 at the exact same time that we're all wondering if he'll live to election day in 2020.

did he say that about lots of other years you know is there also a video of joe biden saying he might not live to 2025 or maybe it's something he says a lot and you know they just found the one that had the the 20 20 year in it but that is very simulation a very very simulationy all right um and there's another video of biden doing a gaff that that doesn't make any sense at all and the gap is he he suddenly injects somebody named john into his answer and there is nobody named john involved in any way with the question or the answer you have to hear that to know what's going on but i've now learned i've learned what biden does when he loses his train of thought and it might be a trick i'll use myself because i often lose my train of thought when i'm doing these periscopes probably i'm losing my mind what he does is if he if he starts into a point and he loses his train of thought he doesn't even know what the topic is anymore he reverts to this generic statement which is we can't let we can't let uh trump keep doing what he's doing because that fits everything so he'll be like we've got to change the economy and check the change the taxes and then he forgets completely what he's talking about he's like well here's the thing we just can't let trump keep getting away with what he's getting away with so whenever he does that that means he completely forgot what he was talking about so look for that all right um some of you are thinking that it's trump's middle name donald john trump or that he was thinking his name was donald trump i don't know who he was talking about uh there's another tape that surfaced of biden this is the trouble with being in politics for so long there are infinite number of old biden tapes of him saying bizarre things but jonathan turley was writing about this today he said that a tape has surfaced of biden claiming back at some point wasn't too long ago that he quote started at a historically black college he actually claimed biden did in front of a it looked like a crowd of mostly black voters he claimed that he had started out at a historically black college which it turns out never happened as far as anybody can tell and they don't even know what he meant you know they can't even figure out well when he says he started out does he mean he went to school there or did or did he have some involvement with them it's just sort of bizarre and unstated but the fact that you could have a presidential candidate claim that he or at least apparently claim this could be misinterpreted but apparently claimed that he went to a historically black college and nobody and people just let that go nothing to see here yeah he went to his historically black college why not why not i tell you all the time and it's always good to remember this that the human brain is tuned toward change we get used to whatever our situation is so even if something is really really bad if we do it long enough we stop complaining about it so much because we just get used to it but if something is moving in the wrong direction even a little bit you our hair will be on fire and we wow it's moving in the wrong direction so we're far more affected by the direction of things than where things are that's just a good thing to understand about human beings because that that dynamic you'll see it all the time and one of the ways that it's really really important at the moment is that apparently the covid deaths in the united states are kind of flat and as long as they stay about the same even though it's way too high a thousand people a day or something in that neighborhood are dying even at a thousand deaths a day as long as it just sort of stays there and even if the 200 000 deaths are now i don't know 200 4 or 5 000 deaths as long as that stays around a few hundred thousand you know it might creep up to i don't know 230 000 by election day or something whatever it is as long as it's in that 200 000-ish range it's going to feel like it didn't change much and the fact that it seems stable-ish is really really going to work for the president because we can't stay interested in things that are the same even when they're bad we get way more interested in what's on fire today and what somebody said today so i think the president's biggest you know problem is that what people think of coronavirus is becoming smaller and smaller in people's minds even though the problem isn't going away i would say this about how to interpret that the united states has such a bad about outcome with coronavirus according to the experts i'm not convinced that if you looked at all the variables it would look so bad in other words if you considered our obesity you considered a higher percentage of african-american citizens if you considered everything probably wouldn't look so bad but we don't and i would say that one factor that we don't count enough is that americans just like freedom and americans like freedom more than they like life itself that's built into us we're actually designed that way to like freedom more than life itself we're literally trained from childhood at least my generation was i don't think it happens anymore but my generation was trained from childhood that if you had a choice of you know you can't get freedom unless you die trying to get it we'll die so this coronavirus is no different than every other challenge the united states has faced since its inception what's my trade-off yes you could be much much safer if you do the following things or maybe you know i don't you could be skeptical but the experts are telling you you could be much safer if you do these things but to do these things you're gonna have to give up this other thing called freedom do americans say sure sure let's give up some freedom i'm in i'll save some lives no we don't do that and we don't want to be those people that's the bigger part in order for us to have had the same success as other countries we would have to be like them in other words the thing that killed two hundred thousand people in this country this is going to sound really ugly but i think you'll understand what i'm saying the thing that killed over two hundred thousand americans to it to an extent is a feature not a bug that's cruel it's horrible it's a terror is an ugly thought but there is something that makes america a little bit special and it's this it's it's the fact that we don't believe authority it's the fact that we don't trust the experts all the time it's the fact that if you give us a choice between living like a slave uh and and being healthy or living like a free person and maybe killing your own grandmother you'll kill your own grandmother you will kill your grandmother for freedom you kill yourself too you kill anybody for freedom it's a feature it's a feature not a bug so did president trump preside over a country that got a worse outcome than other countries maybe again i think you really have to dig into the difference in the variables to know that for sure but let's say it's true was it a mistake it's being couched as a mistake i would say it's a choice i would say that the country made a conscious choice now did president trump influence by his own behavior let's say not wear a mask let's say downplaying the virus did he influence anybody's opinion by his own actions perhaps so perhaps so is that wrong well if the way he's the way he's persuading americans is to be more american it's a hard argument to make that it was wrong unless you think being more american in other words preferring freedom over life itself unless you think that's a bug he was he was persuading toward a feature not a bug so that's just one way i'd frame it all right um there was a sign i saw at a protest at yorba linda so it looked like there were some protesters and some counter-protesters and one of the signs held up by it looked like a white counter protester to blm said black behavior matters so the response to black lives matter from this counter-protester was black behavior matters pretty offensive isn't it it is it's offensive now of course he made it to be provocative so you can't again that was a feature not a bug this is somebody who's trying to get your blood boiling and it worked i would say that strikes me as offensive even though i agree with the thought the thought i agree with completely that people have to take responsibility for themselves even if somebody else caused the problem so i agree with the thought but here's how i would have said it better instead of saying black behavior matters i would have said black strategy matters in fact if somebody asked me if black lives matter here's one way i might answer if somebody said scott say it say it do black lives matter i'm not going to be the jerk that says no i'm not going to say the first thing out of my mouth is not going to be all lives matter because i'm not an idiot why would i cause trouble that doesn't need to be caused here's how i might handle it absolutely black lives matter super super true black lives matter black lives matter i might even put up my fist and scream it and then i would say would you agree that black strategy matters in other words that if you have a good strategy you'll probably get a good outcome if you have a bad strategy you might have a bad outcome would you agree with that because that's my problem my problem is not black lives matter because of course they do duh my problem is your strategy sucks if you use a strategy that is guaranteed to get you the wrong answer don't blame me when you get the wrong answer don't put it on me when you're doing an objectively obviously clearly bad strategy that's not on me you got to take that on yourself here's here's a general rule that i think is a good one if you have somebody who's protesting or wants some kind of change and you've got other people who seem to be the ones who are in the way if one of those sides says let's work together i'll do some things differently maybe you'll do some things differently i acknowledge that the problem might not be me i mean i might not have caused the problem we're trying to fix and maybe you didn't cause the problem we're trying to fix but if you're not approaching this from the perspective of both of us need to do something differently you are not really a credible player if somebody comes to you and says only you need to change you'll never get there you can never get there if if you're starting assumption is that one side needs to change even if all the problems are on the other side the problem the the group that maybe doesn't think it's their fault still needs to say you know i don't think we did anything wrong but if you're willing to change i want to do whatever i can to make it easy for you to change in other words i'll do something different even though it's not my fault it might not even be my responsibility but if you want to be productive both sides every time have to say i'm going to do something different you need to do something different too but we have to start with that assumption as soon as you say you need to do something different and i don't that's the end of the story you can just walk away stop i i want to tell you a story about that but i can't for privacy reasons but i have been in that situation shall i say in the past where it was expected that i would only change and the other person would not and that can never work can't work never negotiate with yourself all right millions of acres have burned in california but my air quality is good at the moment so still keeping an eye on that all right that's all i got for today um all divorced men have been there buddy all right i guess you knew what i was talking about didn't you i didn't i didn't disguise that well at all did i i'm gonna tell you the story all right i'm gonna hope that my uh my ex-wife will be okay with this because i i don't want to i don't want to do anything that's uh too personal here but uh toward the end of my my marriage we did what marriage married people do if they're having trouble we went to a a counselor and i wanted to make sure that i got the best outcome from a marriage counselor so i said you pick the marriage counselor so this will be this will be my deal in order for me to feel like like you got the best shot i want you alone to decide who the marriage counselor is because i was so confident that my point of view would um would be well represented no matter who the marriage counselor was it really didn't matter who it was so my ex-wife picked a woman as the marriage counselor in which i said all right this is perfect because if a woman agrees with anything i say it's going to carry a little more weight i think with my ex-wife so i thought this is perfect you picked a marriage counselor and it's a woman this is ideal because i'm pretty persuasive right have you ever met me i'm kind of persuasive so i thought this is a perfect setup i could i could not have asked for a better situation i think it was on probably day one when the marriage counselor told me this was the rule that i had to change but my ex-wife did not need to change in any way whatsoever how do you think it turned out i i argued like like a wounded dog i argued okay we got to change that right we can't even talk about any details about you know what any issues are we have to change that assumption because if we go into it with the assumption that i'm the only one who needs to change in any way they can't possibly have a good outcome and she could not be persuaded away from that she never changed her opinion that independent of what the actual issues were i was the only one who needed to change now i never really even understood it and never understood it i didn't understand why that wasn't obviously the worst advice anybody ever got anywhere in the history of advice but it happened now how many how many of you had the same situation i won't wait for your answers but i know there's a few of it alright so that's the story and i will talk to you later

turn your phones off

ringer's off okay you don't really have

to do that because it turns out

i wouldn't even be able to hear it if it

rang but you might hear mine so i'll

turn mine off

you know what you need today yeah let me

tell you what you need today

first of all this is going to be one of

the best days ever

not for any particular reason it just

is you don't need a reason all you need

is

a copper mug or glass a tanker

challenger steiner canteen jugger flask

of vessel of any kind

and fill it with your favorite liquid i

like coffee

enjoy me now for the dopamine hit of the

day the

unparalleled pleasure the thing that

makes everything better

it's called the simultaneous sip and i

know you came here for it

join me now for that delight go

um

wow i guess the day going doesn't it

everything's starting to turn up look a

little better you

you started out a little bit slow today

but look how much better things are

already it happens quickly i saw today

that

the the company ring that makes the home

security

they have a new prototype of an indoor

drone

for security and apparently they'll be

they've already made it but they're not

selling it yet a little drone

that will pop up from its little

charging station

and do a predetermined route through the

air through your uh

your home and send you back pictures so

you can look at

look at what's going on now if that's

not cool

i guess i don't know what cool is

because

that got me all excited here's another

another little positive trend

that is unexpected positivity from the

coronavirus

tragedy hydroponic farms are doing great

i have a tiny tiny little investment in

a desktop

hydroponic company and their

their revenue just went crazy because of

coronavirus

and and what they make is uh it's called

click and grow if you're looking for it

and they make these little uh

desktop garden things that have their

own light source and

pods and seeds and stuff they're pretty

cool but apparently the

the full-size farms hydroponic farms

just went from well that's a good idea

i suppose you could make an indoor farm

if you really needed to

it it apparently has completely shifted

off to

we need some hydroponic farms because if

our food source gets cut off

like it sort of almost did with

coronavirus

we need a backup plan and having local

hydroponic farms

is a pretty good way to go so that's

good news

there's some fake news about joe biden

today

of course he's the gaff maker so

when joe biden makes a joke

intentionally

in the context of so many gaffes

sometimes you can't tell

but this one is being reported as a

gaffe this was clearly him making a joke

in which he said in one of his zoom

appearances he said uh i got to the

senate 180 years ago

and uh the the trump campaign tweeted

that as a gaffe

i don't think it was a gaffe i i'm

willing to place a sizable bet

that even joe biden knows that he's less

than 180 years old

so i think he was he was just joking

about how long ago it was

but things are so crazy that it's

reported as well maybe

you know he's doing so poorly that

maybe maybe he doesn't know he's less

than 180 years old

maybe but i think that was a joke

here's the funniest tweet i saw

yesterday

and i'm gonna read you the punchline

before i read you the setup

that wouldn't make sense until you hear

it okay

and it's because it's the way i consumed

it because twitter shows the

shows the tweet the retweet message

before the thing that got retweeted

so i'm looking through the through the

twitter feed yesterday and i see a

ted cruz tweet and i did

and like you i don't know what he's

referring to yet

so just consume it the same the same way

i did he said

you know there are decaffeinated brands

on the market that are just as tasty

and i read that and i was like what

what what kind of message is that a

reply to

you know there are decaffeinated brands

on the market that are just as tasty

and then i read what he was retweeting

and it was elizabeth warren

and listen to this word salad that she

tweeted

this sleazy supreme court double dealing

is the last

gasp of a corrupt republican leadership

numb to its own hypocrisy

the last gasp of the billionaire-fueled

party

that's undemocratically over-represented

and desperately clinging to power

in order to impose its extremist agenda

ted cruz you know there are

decaffeinated brands on the market that

are just as tasty

you have to admit that's one of the

all-time great tweets

here's some good news you know you're

all these protests are happening

and you're you're thinking to yourself

well what good is coming

out of all these protests you know you'd

like you'd like to think that with all

that disruption there's something good

coming out of it and i'm here to report

finally serious progress against

systemic racism and this comes courtesy

of the

uh of seattle so seattle has uh

voted in and approved the following

changes

thank god because our the long nightmare

of systemic racism

is finally coming to a close at least in

seattle

i would imagine a lot of places are

going to copy this model

because once you hear it what they've

done to eliminate

systemic racism you're going to say to

yourself

it's obvious once you hear it until you

hear it

you say to yourself i don't know it

feels like such a big problem

i don't even know where to begin but

once you see what seattle's done

you're going to be slapping yourself in

the head and saying why

did we not do this before why so here's

the three things they've done they've

eliminated the police unit that clears

homeless camps

now i think you know that if you

eliminate

friction for something it just stops

happening right

that's that's the seattle theory is if

they stop

clearing out these homeless camps things

should be good

now some people are going to say i know

critics are going to say

scott if you stop clearing out the

homeless camps

isn't the guaranteed effect of that to

attract

more homeless camps to which i say

i don't think you understand how

systemic racism works

you're you're in crazy land

no if you stop clearing the homeless

camps

systemic racism goes away

you're thinking about how removing

obstacles will make more of something

happen such as

more homeless people will stream into

seattle because it's a good place to be

homeless

that's just crazy because this will get

rid of systemic

racism but it's not all you know if that

was all that would be

pretty amazing but there's more to it

second thing they've done is they've

agreed to cut the command to staff of

the police

pay they'll still be as many people on

the staff apparently

or it's a little bit little unclear but

it looks like that what they're doing is

mostly just

cutting the pay of the people who are in

charge of making things better

for police now i don't have to tell you

if you're a student of human nature that

one way to get a better result from

people

and if you really want them to work hard

and and give you a good performance

cutting their pay that's the way to go

so these command staff police officers

were being asked to do more with less

they've also been asked to cut their pay

and i think that should motivate them in

the right direction

obviously how else are you going to

motivate people other than cutting their

pay

that just feels obvious after they do it

you know until they did this

honestly i feel dumb but i wouldn't have

even

thought of this you know i might have

thought of the

this is how dumb i am i i would have

thought you know if you want more out of

these people

to do a better job better cha better

training of their staff etc

i would be i would have been thinking in

terms of getting better people and

paying them more

to get more performance but i think

seattle's on the right track here

just cut their pay that should make them

work harder

and have better morale and so you should

get better results

then they're also going to reduce 100

officers

now if you want to make your city better

take the thing that holds it together

law and order and get rid of that

because the law and order was becoming

sort of a

trojan horse if you will for racism a

lot of people wouldn't realize that you

probably think to yourself

law and order wait a minute isn't that

good for black people

and white people and brown people and

people of all types

is there somebody for whom a an

active police force that is pursuing law

and order is there

is there some demographic group for whom

that's bad

well seattle has spoken and again these

are

these weren't obvious solutions if any

of this was obvious it would have been

done before right

you need you need sort of a out of the

box thinking you need some genius

and seattle has stepped up so the

reducing the number of police officers

cut the command staff bay and they got

rid of the unit

that is clearing the homeless camps so

those three steps i think are bold

i think they should be uh observed for

how effective they are

and probably in a few weeks the rest of

the country should go this way

because i can't imagine this not working

imagine

your black lives matter and you you hear

this announcement

and you think i'm out here every day i'm

protesting i'm trying to get rid of

systemic racism but nothing's happening

nothing's happening

why is nothing happening and then you

see this

and you say whoa i think i've over

performed i was trying to get rid of

systemic racism in seattle

but i may have done it in the whole

world because

once once these three ideas get out

there's nothing that's going to stop

them from spreading to all of the other

smart cities that also want to get rid

of systemic racism

so that's all good news you should be

pretty pretty happy about that

here's some more news

it's going to be harder and harder to

run against trump

and call him a racist number one

i love the fact that the organizer of

the

charlottesville finding people race is

endorsing joe biden

so joe biden's primary campaign

claim is that the the president's called

the racist and charlottesville fine

people

now of course that didn't happen that

was fake news

uh he he said exactly the opposite he

condemned them

but the organizer of the charlottesville

he uh he endorses uh joe biden for

president

so that's interesting at the same time

trump i forgot to mention this yesterday

but trump in his speech

explicitly said and i don't know if he

said this before

he said that school choice is the civil

rights issue of our time

in other words if you get school choice

right

then everybody's going to do better and

essentially that's

effectively a civil rights issue it's so

big and so important to the

black community

so that's a big deal have you ever had a

president who said

there's a gigantic civil rights issue

and i'm going to make it a top priority

to get rid of it what is

what is joe biden's big civil rights

issue

he has none because seattle already

solved it

this whole race systemic racism thing

used to be a topic that biden could talk

about but now seattle's kind of taking

it off the table

with their with their so effective

solution

but the president still is working on a

civil rights issue which is

education is terribly unfair and

poorly done so the president's done

prison reform he's

massively funded the historically black

colleges

we'll talk more about them there's a

biden story there

he's funded the opportunity zones he's

putting 500 billion dollars into

uh capital for black american businesses

he's

he's got black unemployment to the best

level it's ever been

before coronavirus it's coming back

already he's designated the kkk a

domestic terror group

even obama didn't do that i mean

seriously

obama didn't do that okay

he's the law and order president and by

a majority

the black population does like law and

order

surprise surprise

you're surprised that people like law

and order no matter who they are

it's amazing that that's a surprise all

right

but here's the other the other thing

that sort of snuck up on us

trump is the first u.s president to

nominate

a mother of black children to the

supreme court

he's the first one to nominate a mother

of black

children to the supreme court now i know

what you're

thinking you're thinking in terms of

diversity on the supreme court wouldn't

it be better

for an actual black woman with black

children

to be nominated yeah yeah okay

i see that point you know it would be a

little bit more on the nose

you know you'd say to yourself all right

that's exactly

you know that's the segment we we want

to fill in there

but i'd have to say

you know if you don't have that you know

the the more

ideal solution that everybody would

recognize is like oh okay

that would be good to get that kind of

diversity

i would think that a strong second place

is a woman who has black children

because i don't think the mom reflex

gets turned off

i mean i i've got a feeling that quite

legitimately

uh amy cody barrett feels that all of

her children

are awesome so having somebody on here

who has that sensibility let me let me

put this into a visual

persuasion when amy coney barrett

watched the george floyd you know a

shocking video of

of the moment of his death do you think

that she looked at it the same

as people who do not have black children

i'll bet not i'll bet the fact that she

has

black children you know changes her

filter

on seeing the george floyd situation to

make it

not exactly what a black citizen to this

country felt

i mean that's you know you can't really

feel what other people feel

but if you wanted to get close to it you

know if you wanted to get into the

the general zip code of that she's a

strong choice

it's a it's interesting to have somebody

who can who has one leg in each world

i mean she has one leg sort of you know

in the

in the parent of black uh kids

and one one leg in sort of a generic

white person world it's kind of a good

perspective

um you you've probably heard of

dr ibrahim kendi who's a

boston university mellon professor

professor

national book award winner best-selling

author and he wrote

had to be an anti-racist and recently so

he's a

sort of a public anti-racist advocate

uh he he recently made some news because

i guess jack dorsey

gave him uh gave his group i guess

10 million dollars unrestricted

money to help them work on

let's see how is it described

unqualified support of his vision of

putting

academic researchers at the forefront

of the movement to dismantle policies uh

supporting

racial inequality and injustice now what

do you think of the general idea

of having academic researchers at the

forefront

of how to dismantle racism

that's not bad i i would say you sort of

have to

see how it works out right everything's

an implementation

there's no such thing as just a good

idea you need a good idea that is

implemented well

but on the surface on the surface

don't you think that an academic

approach

to really understand as best we can

things such as are black people really

being targeted

by the police i i think we need the

researchers and the

scientists and stuff to sort of take the

the lead and tell us what's true what is

true

you know where can we identify this

stuff and where we can't

now of course you have the risk that

because they're academics it'll just all

be

and then you make policies that are

based on complete

so the execution matters right it could

be executed completely wrong

but in general if you have a real

academic who's got real credentials

and working with other academics and

they want to dig in to really understand

what's going on here with the the

systemic racism

not a bad way to go so he said something

that was so delightfully provocative

uh in a tweet that it made me like him

so i didn't know anything about him

until this tweet

and then then i started looking into it

and connecting the dots

and i'm going to say i have a positive

opinion of him

this may be different than some of your

opinions all right but i'll tell you why

the same thing that makes me like trump

is his provocative way of just going in

and shaking the box

because there are a lot of cases where

just going in and shaking things up

is exactly what you need it's you know

you don't write it out that way on paper

right

you know you don't make a plan i'm gonna

just shake everything up

but sometimes you need that here

so somebody made a tweet that's been

deleted now about

um it would be hard to make fun of amy

coney barrett

because she has two black adopted

children

from haiti and you think to yourself

okay

that's unassailable who could possibly

who could possibly complain about her

in terms of racism when she's gone so

far as to adopt

two kids from haiti so she's beyond

criticism right well not according to dr

abram and here's the part that made me

like him all right and i know you're not

going to have the same impression

but just just understand where i'm

coming from

that i like provocative people who shake

the box

they don't have to agree with me all

right so that's the part that you're

missing

i'm not agreeing with his positions

necessarily i might agree with some of

them i don't know

i'm just saying that i like i like how

provocative he is

here's what he tweeted about amy coney

barrett

he goes some white colonizers

quote adopted black children

they quote civilized these quote savage

children

in the quote superior ways of white

people

while using them as props in their

lifelong pictures of denial

while cutting the biological parents of

these children

out of the picture is a feminine of

humanity

now come on you have to you have to

appreciate

how wonderfully provocative that is

you can agree you disagree with it you

find it you find it offensive

i get that but just but just

agree with me on this point the way you

feel when you hear this has got to be

very similar to the way democrats feel

when they they look at a trump

tweet right it's going to look kind of

similar

you're going to hate it but you can't

look away

what if i told you about persuasion 50

percent of persuasion

is getting your attention one way to do

it and nobody's come up with a better

way to do it is to be

just so crazy provocative that people

can't look away

he has that he has that

so if you if you're tempted to dismiss

him

because you say i don't believe i don't

want you know i don't agree with any of

the things he's saying

i would give it another look because

there's

there's a whole lot of x factor that

comes out of this it just

sprays out of this the same kind of x

factor that an aoc

has same kind of x factor that a

president trump has

it just it's just coming out of his

pores

now once he gets all this attention

what's he do with it so here's the

second part right

now that he's got all this attention

being provocative

what's he do with it here's what he does

with it he follows it up

with this uh he says and whether this is

barrett

or not is not the point it is belief too

many white people have

if they have uh if they have or adopt a

child of color

then they can't be a racist so basically

he's making the point

by analogy that if you say you have a

black

friend that doesn't mean you're not a

racist

it just means you have a black friend

and he's extending that to say

just because you adopted a black child

that alone doesn't make you not a racist

it just means you did this one good

thing

so he's challenging that idea now is

that fair

is it fair for him to say that

uh that's not far enough like you know

you you need to go to the extra level

just having a black friend or a black

adoptee

not enough i think that's completely

fair

yeah that's a completely fair statement

it is also

a complete loser statement

here's why the difference between

winning and losing

strategies is that winning strategies

encourage

good things to happen more and losing

strategies

discourage good things from happening

more that's it

that's that's the whole tweet if i can

use that statement

and when when you see somebody adopting

a baby or babies from haiti

you know a white person adopting black

babies what is

the winner way to look at that the

winner way to look at that

is she's awesome that's it

as soon as you add something to okay

that's awesome

i i respect that 100 respect it and now

we're done talking about it

as soon as you depart it's just good and

you put that well it's not good you're

still

sort of a jerk you have you have put a

penalty

on good behavior good behavior

adopting um black orphans it's good

behavior

i think we'd all be happy about that but

he penalized it

a little bit right every time you

penalize

good behavior or support bad behavior

let's say violence and looting you are

in a loser strategy and there's no

there there's no real debate about this

there's no domain in the world there's

no there's no professional

coach there's no mentor there's nobody

who knows how the world works

who would say you should ever ever ever

put a penalty on good behavior

nor should you ever ever ever

say good things about the behavior you

don't want to see more of

it's very simple human nature that

people will do more of the things that

they get praised for and less of the

things they don't get praised for

so and i'm going to talk about this a

little bit more in a minute paul graham

famous

famous investor paul graham uh asked

this of a tweet he said uh

i wonder if the protesters in portland

et cetera realize

that roughly a hundred percent of the

effect they're having the protest that

is

on the upcoming presidential election is

to help

trump that's weird isn't it don't

don't you wonder why the protesters are

so

obviously helping trump because they're

playing right into his message

at the same time he would be their

biggest problem

the person they would most want to leave

how does that make sense

how does it make sense that every day

that they're putting lots of

personal risk and energy and money

into getting trump reelected how can you

explain that

here's how i explain it they need trump

to get re-elected

not all of them you know a lot of the

protesters are legitimately just

protesting

racism and and that's great but

in terms of the organizer class which

are really the ones that make it happen

right there most people are just

attendees most people are followers

there's a small group of people let's

call them the organizing class that make

it all happen

among the organizing class do they want

to overthrow the government or do they

want joe biden to be president

they want to overthrow the government

they don't want joe biden to be

president

you don't see the protesters calling

carrying joe biden signs

do you do you see any of the protesters

with biden signs you don't

because they don't want joe biden to win

do you know why because if joe biden

wins it takes the steam end of their

protests

takes the energy and of the revolution

the worst thing that could happen

from this perspective of black lives

matter is for joe biden to get elected

because the moment he gets elected the

the people who are

protesting are going to say we got

something you know we didn't get

everything we want

but at least now joe biden will head us

in the right direction and kamala harris

they'll be moving us toward a better

world thank god this

trump is gone they don't want that world

i'm pretty sure the organizers would

prefer

the perfect situation would be a

non-credible election

where trump wins and stays in office and

then they can complain that it was a

rigged election

it was not credible trump is still the

problem

nothing's been fixed we have to

overthrow the system

so watch for the protesters to be

very unenthusiastic about biden for

that reason dan bongino points out

that the that is

uh it's incredible that it's been

confirmed that the fbi used the

suspected

russian agent to spy on a trump campaign

and it's not a front page story

think about that just try to imagine

this

as not a front page story that the fbi

actually used a russian agent to spy on

the

suspected russian agent to spy on the

trump campaign

and it's just sort of ignored now

if you think you live in a world where

you form your own opinions

you know you look at the news you form

your own opinions you don't

that i don't know if that world ever

existed but it definitely doesn't exist

now

what happens is you are shown a a little

sliver of the news

that is designed to give you the opinion

that is being assigned to you

if they showed you more than the sliver

of news you might get too much context

and you would not accept the assigned

opinion because you might say well

i see your point but what about all this

other stuff

as long as they just leave out all the

other stuff

they can give you a sliver of reality

you'll say

looks good to me if i don't know

anything else i just know that sliver

my my opinion has been assigned to me i

accept it

um by the way on a uh

a more concerning note dan bongino

noted publicly that he's got some kind

of a lump on his neck

that seems to be a concern and maybe a

big concern we don't know yet so wishing

him the best on that

i i will add this story uh just if it

makes

dan feel any better in my 20s i had a

lump on my neck

went to my doctor at kaiser and they

said i don't know that looks

we better look into that we better get a

closer look

took an x-ray i go in and they and they

looked at the x-ray and they said

ah this doesn't look good and i said

well what does it mean if it's not

nothing which is the other alternative

they said it could be nothing

it could be just a they said one of

those things that was the actual

phrase it could be just one of those

things and

and we just drain this little bump and

there's nothing

that's it it could be it or or

you have a horrible cancerous

problem and your life will never be the

same

those are your two possibilities why

don't you come back next week and we'll

figure out which one it is

so i had to wait with a

basically you know almost a death

sentence

preliminary diagnosis of a lump on my

neck

i had to wait days to figure out what it

was

now it turns out that the the way to

confirm whether it was going to kill me

or not

and of course spoiler i i lived

they would stick a needle into it and

draw out the fluid

and if the fluid was blood i'm in big

trouble

because it means there's some cancer

going on there but

if it was a clear fluid it was just some

kind of minor infection

no big deal so i'm sitting there and i

can't see the needle because it's back

here

and i feel it go in and i feel the

liquid come out

and i'm sitting there thinking you

freaking

you see the liquid now you know

if i'm dead or i'm fine

tell me i had to actually ask

all right it still bothers me to this

day the moment it came out he should

have been saying ah no problem you're

all good

and it turns out it was no problem it

was all good

so dan i hope your situation goes like

mine did

i i have more empathy than you can

imagine

but i'm going to hope that it's just one

of those things and your everything's

fine

so i tweeted this yesterday i said i

know lots of people who wrote to success

on the strategy of skill acquisition

and positivity which is a pretty good

package package

if your life strategy is to continually

acquire

skills pretty good strategy and to

to approach life with positivity which

affects other people and affects

yourself

that's a pretty good strategy and i know

people have done that but i don't know

anybody who complained their way to

success

they might exist but if you have a

choice of those two things

either building skills and having a

positive attitude

or complaining and not doing anything

useful

um you know pick the one that works now

weirdly

elon musk tweeted a reply

so and a lot of people took note because

when elon musk tweets at me

people people think you guys need to

talk or something i don't know but for

some reason people get excited when

when that happens so elon musk tweeted

this and i'm not sure exactly how it

relates to

my tweet but he said there are times

when i feel like i'm living in a dilbert

cartoon

so i tweeted back the simulation doesn't

write itself

wait until you see what i have planned

for you and then you know

he laughed with some some emoticons

and

so anyway that that was fun uh and uh

ted cruz also retweeted me yesterday i

had a good day for getting retweeted

um did you think it was weird when

uh acb amy coney barrett

when she was giving her a sort of

nomination

acceptance speech i guess you'd call it

she

went to great lengths to describe her

husband as subservient to her

was that weird and i didn't understand

why until the analyst explained it to me

which was so people were criticizing

acb for being part of a a church group

that allegedly and i think this is

incorrect but the

the allegation was that the people in

that church

the women were taught by their religion

to be subservient to their husbands or

something

i think that's inaccurate i think that

it never taught that

i think it had to do with their use of

the word hand maidens but it was really

a biblical reference it wasn't

it wasn't a reference to subservience so

she goes in

and i didn't like this at all

honestly like it's the thing that felt

the creepiest

she she needed to describe her her

husband

as basically the house husband in the

group

the the one who is serving her needs

and although he's an attorney and has a

practice of his own

he seemed to be the primary caregiver

for the seven children

because her job was even more high

profile

and it seemed to me that she was sort of

suggesting that the way she could handle

an immense workload of being on the

supreme court

while having seven children is that her

husband was unusually

supportive in terms of raising the kids

and supportive of her

now i have of course i don't criticize

any couple

if they have a situation that works it's

not my

it's not my issue so if anybody has any

kind of arrangement

that makes them happy in their family

it's

great great to me but it felt

just uncomfortable that she threw her

husband under the bus

to help her nomination i didn't like it

i just didn't like it now i'm not i'm

not saying it wasn't an

accurate description and i'm not

entirely sure that the husband has any

problem with it he was probably

perfectly happy with it

but i don't know didn't feel right

didn't didn't love it but it probably

worked

um so what else is going on

so uh up in portland the proud boy

rally ended with no major clashes so

there were a number of

rests and there were a number of you

know people throwing stuff and

the usual amount of relatively low level

violence

uh enough so you could characterize it

as no major clashes

but here's the part i found interesting

so you knew that the proud boys were

going to show up

and you knew that there would be counter

protesters

here's the interesting part there were a

thousand people that showed up

with the proud boys the thousand

and there were 500 who showed up as the

counter protesters

now if you recall i've been asking for

some time

why is it that the news does not report

how many protesters there are at each of

these events

it's conspicuously missing the most

obvious thing that you would say about

any protest

is how many people showed up it is the

number one determinant

of how much i should care if six people

show up to a protest

i probably don't care if a thousand

people show up to a protest

you have my attention all right and it's

not reported

and it's it's

characteristically not reported and the

reason i thought that was important

not just in terms of news value is that

you might recall that i said the

following

if the rest of the country knew how many

protesters there were

it would allow them to send more

non-protesters into the area

and take care of it if you had enough

locals who were anti-protester

whatever that number of locals is you

could get enough of them

so they would so overwhelm the number of

protesters

they would effectively become the police

force in other words the

that the locals if they had enough could

just cause the protesters to

behave because it would be too much

muscle in the general area

because force is really the only thing

that changes anything in this world

and and here it is a thousand

proud boys showed up and and supporters

and

only 500 anti-fascists and the result

was

no major clashes why was there no major

clashes

well i would say it's because the proud

boys outnumbered

the anti-protesters right and it shows

you a model

that you know it's dangerous of course

because if you send lots of

you know people willing to fight into an

area

you know you've got some trouble but so

so let me say that this is not a

recommendation or a suggestion from me

about how to handle it rather i would

say it's one of several ways this could

end

you know there are several paths you

could predict you might go down

but one of the paths is that if the

police force

decides not to be the primary power in

the area and that's what they've decided

the police force has decided that they

will they will play for a tie

the police have decided that they're not

going to defeat the protesters

the protesters know they can't defeat

the police

they're both playing for a tie but

the proud boys were not playing for a

tie and in theory

you could bring in enough people who

just want the protest to stop

that the the sheer number of bodies of

the non-protesters would make it stop

there would just be too much power put

into the area

so that's one way it could happen it

could be that the citizens mobilize

in enough numbers that they just

overwhelm the protesters

and or there are enough people to make

sure looting doesn't happen

because really if you just had enough

kyle ridden house

the the problem with kyle rittenhouse

was now a kyle rittenhouse

the problem with kyle rittenhouse is

there were not enough

kyle ridden houses there if the kyle

written houses

had outnumbered the people who attacked

him and some of them ultimately got

shot two of them were killed if the kyle

riddenhausers had been the majority

instead of the lone ranger trying to

help things

it would have been different and it

probably would have been a lot less

violence here's something

interesting in election land pro-publica

that's a

publication election land propublica

they're reporting that in north carolina

so far this year i guess we're already

counting the absentee ballots

and already there are three times as

many

ballots from black citizens that are

rejected

compared to white now what's the first

thing you say about that

oh my god there there are discriminating

people

rejecting ballots because they're doing

three times as many black ones as white

but the story goes on to say that

there's no demographic information

on the ballots that are being rejected

and i'm thinking

but isn't there at least a name there's

a name on the ballot right

a printed name don't you know where the

ballot came from

am i wrong about that because that is

demographic information

it isn't too hard if you are a racist

to try to guess which names belong to

black people

you wouldn't get everyone but you could

get pretty close

couldn't you you know if you if you just

picked out the obvious ones

so i'm not sure i believe that you can't

tell

uh completely who voted

but the problems that they call out for

why they were being rejected

were missing a signature or missing

a witness signature

now that's pretty black and white right

there's either a signature or not

there's a witness your signature or not

what would be the reason that both in

2018 and now in 2020

three times as many black voters did not

fill in one of those two things what

causes that

do you have any idea what causes that if

i had to take a guess

i would say it's correlated with

educational levels

and that the the more educated you are

the more

adept you are at reading a forum

correctly filling it out correctly

and not making any mistakes so it

probably is just correlated with

economic

situation and and education

situation but it does

it does certainly raise the question

that trump has been raising

that these ballots are a problem

all right um

but i didn't know this that apparently

the system

this year allows the voters to they have

apparently they have time i don't know

if in every case but they would

have time to fix their errors because i

guess they get notified

now if they're notified of the errors

there must be some information on the

the ballot that tells you something

about people

so they can either fix it or they can go

vote in person

but as you might imagine not everybody

fixes it so the original problem

persists even though they could have

fixed it

all right so maybe that'll make a

difference we'll see

remember i asked you i said i couldn't

understand

why people were criticizing trump for

saying that doing

extra testing is surfacing extra

infections and i thought to myself how

could that not be true

how could you do extra testing without

finding extra people

feel feel like i feel like that's just

obvious and nay silver basically said

the same thing in the tweet he said

it's not clear whether covet cases are

actually on the rise in the us

or if it's because there's more testing

and i thought to myself

that's the first time i've seen anybody

who

i would imagine is more associated with

the left

i don't know if he he says that about

himself he may not

identify with the left i don't know but

it's the first time i've heard somebody

who wasn't

obviously a trump supporter say

yeah if you test more you're going to

find more infection

it seems sort of obvious and now

nay silver is saying it and i'm

wondering what am i missing

[Laughter]

what am i not understanding about this

situation that it could ever

not be true that more testing wouldn't

find more things

isn't the reason you test to find more

stuff

i'm really confused on that um

so i i asked by tweet today can someone

ask democratic leaders

including blm if they'll commit to a

peaceful continuation

of the trump administration if he wins

why is nobody asking democrats if they

will

commit to a peaceful transfer if trump

wins

isn't that a pretty obvious question for

democratic leadership of all type

here's another one and

why are democratic leaders not being

asked

by the press to disavow the domestic

terrorist organization

that is ironically called antifa now the

antifa has been designated

a domestic terror organization

isn't the obvious thing to ask democrat

leaders

do you disavow them now that they're

domestic terrorists

it's a good question it's the most

obvious question you should ask

and it's not being asked all right so

um a lot of people have asked me you

know what kind of

persuasion or linguistic kill shot

should you use against

the protesters uh that you think are

going too far

and sometimes you have to wait a little

bit and see how the public

is naturally responding to things and

then you find out how people are

naturally responding

you can design a linguistic kill shot

that

that plays to the thing they're already

thinking that's much easier

than just trying to make up some kind of

persuasion out of nothing

it really helps to know how people

already think about something

and now that a little time has gone by i

have this suggestion

for a linguistic kill shot on antifa

and you just heard me use it and it is

that the press should always refer to

them when describing antifa

they should be described as the domestic

terrorist

organization ironically named antifa

it's the ironically named that takes

their power away

because what antifa did that was super

clever

and has served them really well they

called themselves

anti-fascists even though they weren't

you know in a way that you would you

would consider it

um and therefore anybody who criticized

them

was calling themselves a fascist one of

the best things anybody ever did

in terms of persuasion so in order to

take the power out of that you could

simply refer to them

as the ironically named antifa

now you could feel it right

if you said that often enough and say

the domestic terrorist organization

ironically named antifa it would

completely take the power out of antifa

so that's my suggestion um

somebody found a video from 1991 in

which joe biden said

he was talking about a justice that

shooter i think that was being

considered at the time and talking about

how old people would be

in 2020 and biden said in the year 2020

i'll be dead and gone in all probability

now what are the odds that there would

be an actual video

of of joe biden predicting his own death

by 2020 at the exact same time

that we're all wondering if he'll live

to election day in 2020.

did he say that about lots of other

years

you know is there also a video of joe

biden saying

he might not live to 2025

or maybe it's something he says a lot

and you know they just found the one

that had the the 20 20 year in it

but that is very simulation a very very

simulationy

all right um

and there's another video of biden doing

a gaff

that that doesn't make any sense at all

and the gap is he he suddenly injects

somebody named john into his answer

and there is nobody named john involved

in any way with the question or the

answer

you have to hear that to know what's

going on but

i've now learned i've learned what

biden does when he loses his train of

thought

and it might be a trick i'll use myself

because i often lose my train of thought

when i'm doing these periscopes

probably i'm losing my mind what he does

is if he

if he starts into a point and he loses

his train of thought

he doesn't even know what the topic is

anymore he reverts

to this generic statement which is we

can't let

we can't let uh trump keep doing what

he's doing

because that fits everything so he'll be

like

we've got to change the economy and

check the change the taxes and then he

forgets completely what he's talking

about

he's like well here's the thing

we just can't let trump keep getting

away with what he's getting away with

so whenever he does that that means he

completely forgot what he was talking

about

so look for that all right um

some of you are thinking that it's

trump's middle name

donald john trump or that he was

thinking his name was

donald trump i don't know who he was

talking about

uh there's another tape that surfaced of

biden this is the trouble with being in

politics for so long

there are infinite number of old biden

tapes of him saying

bizarre things but jonathan turley was

writing about this today

he said that a tape has surfaced

of biden claiming back at some point

wasn't too long ago that he quote

started at a historically black

college

he actually claimed biden did

in front of a it looked like a

crowd of mostly black voters

he claimed that he had started out at a

historically black

college which it turns out

never happened as far as anybody can

tell and they don't even know what he

meant

you know they can't even figure out well

when he says he started out

does he mean he went to school there or

did or did he have some involvement with

them

it's just sort of bizarre and unstated

but the fact that you could have a

presidential candidate

claim that he or at least apparently

claim

this could be misinterpreted but

apparently claimed that he went to a

historically black college and nobody

and people just let that go

nothing to see here yeah he went to his

historically black college

why not why not

i tell you all the time and it's always

good to remember this

that the human brain is tuned toward

change

we get used to whatever our situation is

so even if something is really really

bad

if we do it long enough we stop

complaining about it so much because we

just get used to it

but if something is moving in the wrong

direction

even a little bit you our hair will be

on fire and we wow it's moving in the

wrong direction

so we're far more affected by the

direction of things

than where things are that's just a good

thing to understand

about human beings because that that

dynamic you'll see it all the time and

one of the ways that it's

really really important at the moment is

that apparently the

covid deaths in the united states

are kind of flat and as long as they

stay

about the same even though it's way too

high a thousand people a day or

something in that neighborhood are dying

even at a thousand deaths a day as long

as

it just sort of stays there and even if

the 200

000 deaths are now i don't know 200 4 or

5 000 deaths

as long as that stays around a few

hundred thousand

you know it might creep up to i don't

know 230

000 by election day or something

whatever it is as long as it's in that

200 000-ish range it's going to feel

like it didn't change much

and the fact that it seems stable-ish

is really really going to work for the

president because we can't stay

interested in things that are the same

even when they're bad

we get way more interested in what's on

fire today and what somebody said today

so i think the president's biggest you

know

problem is that what people think of

coronavirus

is becoming smaller and smaller in

people's minds

even though the problem isn't going away

i would say this about how to interpret

that the united states has such a bad

about outcome with coronavirus according

to the experts

i'm not convinced that if you looked at

all the variables it would look so bad

in other words if you considered our

obesity you considered a

higher percentage of african-american

citizens if you considered everything

probably wouldn't look so bad but we

don't

and i would say that one factor that we

don't count

enough is that americans just like

freedom

and americans like freedom more than

they like life

itself that's built into us we're

actually designed

that way to like freedom more than life

itself we're literally trained from

childhood at least my generation was i

don't think it happens anymore

but my generation was trained from

childhood

that if you had a choice of you know

you can't get freedom unless you die

trying to get it

we'll die so this coronavirus

is no different than every other

challenge the united states has faced

since its inception what's my trade-off

yes you could be much much safer if you

do the following things

or maybe you know i don't you could be

skeptical but

the experts are telling you you could be

much safer if you do these things

but to do these things you're gonna have

to give up this other thing called

freedom

do americans say sure sure

let's give up some freedom i'm in i'll

save some lives

no we don't do that and we don't want to

be those people

that's the bigger part in order for us

to have had

the same success as other countries we

would have to be like them

in other words the thing that killed

two hundred thousand people in this

country

this is going to sound really ugly but i

think you'll understand what i'm saying

the thing that killed over two hundred

thousand americans

to it to an extent is a feature

not a bug that's cruel

it's horrible it's a terror is an ugly

thought but

there is something that makes america a

little bit special

and it's this it's it's the fact that we

don't believe authority

it's the fact that we don't trust the

experts all the time

it's the fact that if you give us a

choice between living like a slave

uh and and being healthy or living like

a free person and maybe killing

your own grandmother you'll kill your

own grandmother

you will kill your grandmother for

freedom you kill yourself too

you kill anybody for freedom it's a

feature

it's a feature not a bug so

did president trump preside over a

country

that got a worse outcome than other

countries maybe

again i think you really have to dig

into the difference in the variables to

know that for sure

but let's say it's true

was it a mistake it's being couched as a

mistake

i would say it's a choice i would say

that the country

made a conscious choice now did

president trump

influence by his own behavior let's say

not wear a mask

let's say downplaying the virus did he

influence anybody's opinion

by his own actions perhaps so

perhaps so is that wrong

well if the way he's the way he's

persuading americans

is to be more american

it's a hard argument to make that it was

wrong unless you think

being more american in other words

preferring freedom over

life itself unless you think that's

a bug he was he was

persuading toward a feature not a bug

so that's just one way i'd frame it

all right um

there was a sign i saw at a protest at

yorba linda

so it looked like there were some

protesters and some counter-protesters

and one of the signs held up by it

looked like a white

counter protester to blm said

black behavior matters

so the response to black lives matter

from this counter-protester was black

behavior matters

pretty offensive isn't it it is

it's offensive now of course he made it

to be provocative

so you can't again that was a feature

not a bug

this is somebody who's trying to get

your blood boiling and it worked

i would say that strikes me as offensive

even though i agree with the thought the

thought i agree with completely

that people have to take responsibility

for themselves

even if somebody else caused the problem

so i agree with the thought but here's

how i would have said it better

instead of saying black behavior matters

i would have said black

strategy matters in fact if somebody

asked me if

black lives matter here's one way i

might answer

if somebody said scott say it say it

do black lives matter i'm not going to

be the jerk that says no

i'm not going to say the first thing out

of my mouth is not going to be

all lives matter because i'm not an

idiot

why would i cause trouble that doesn't

need to be caused here's how i might

handle it

absolutely black lives matter

super super true black lives matter

black lives matter

i might even put up my fist and scream

it

and then i would say would you agree

that black strategy matters

in other words that if you have a good

strategy you'll probably get a good

outcome

if you have a bad strategy you might

have a bad outcome would you agree with

that

because that's my problem my problem is

not

black lives matter because of course

they do duh

my problem is your strategy sucks

if you use a strategy that is guaranteed

to get you the wrong answer

don't blame me when you get the wrong

answer don't put it on me

when you're doing an objectively

obviously

clearly bad strategy that's not on me

you got to take that on yourself here's

here's a general rule that i think is a

good one

if you have somebody who's protesting or

wants some kind of change

and you've got other people who seem to

be the ones

who are in the way if one of those sides

says let's work together i'll do some

things differently

maybe you'll do some things differently

i acknowledge that the problem might not

be me

i mean i might not have caused the

problem we're trying to fix and maybe

you didn't cause the problem we're

trying to fix

but if you're not approaching this from

the perspective of both of us need to do

something differently

you are not really a credible player

if somebody comes to you and says only

you need to change

you'll never get there you can never get

there

if if you're starting assumption is that

one side needs to change

even if all the problems are on the

other side

the problem the the group that maybe

doesn't think it's their fault

still needs to say you know i don't

think we did anything wrong

but if you're willing to change i want

to do whatever i can to make it easy for

you to change

in other words i'll do something

different even though it's not my fault

it might not even be my responsibility

but

if you want to be productive both sides

every time have to say i'm going to do

something different

you need to do something different too

but we have to start with that

assumption

as soon as you say you need to do

something different

and i don't that's the end of the story

you can just walk away stop

i i want to tell you a story about that

but

i can't for privacy reasons but i have

been in that situation shall i say

in the past where it was expected that i

would only change and the other person

would not

and that can never work can't work

never negotiate with yourself all right

[Music]

millions of acres have burned in

california but

my air quality is good at the moment so

still keeping an eye on that

all right that's all i got for today

um all divorced men have been there

buddy

all right i guess you knew what i was

talking about didn't you

i didn't i didn't disguise that well at

all did i i'm gonna tell you the story

all right i'm gonna hope that my uh my

ex-wife will be okay with this

because i i don't want to i don't want

to do anything that's

uh too personal here but

uh toward the end of my my marriage

we did what marriage married people do

if they're having trouble we went to a

a counselor and i wanted to make sure

that i got the best

outcome from a marriage counselor so i

said you pick the marriage counselor

so this will be this will be my deal in

order for me to feel

like like you got the best shot i want

you alone

to decide who the marriage counselor is

because i was so confident

that my point of view would um would be

well

represented no matter who the marriage

counselor was

it really didn't matter who it was so

my ex-wife picked a woman as the

marriage counselor in which i said all

right this is perfect

because if a woman

agrees with anything i say it's going to

carry a little more weight

i think with my ex-wife so i thought

this is perfect

you picked a marriage counselor and it's

a woman

this is ideal because i'm pretty

persuasive right

have you ever met me i'm kind of

persuasive so i thought this is a

perfect setup i could i could not have

asked for a better situation

i think it was on probably day one

when the marriage counselor told me this

was the rule

that i had to change but my ex-wife did

not need to change

in any way whatsoever

how do you think it turned out

i i argued like like a wounded dog

i argued okay we got to change that

right

we can't even talk about any details

about you know what any issues are

we have to change that assumption

because if we go into it with the

assumption

that i'm the only one who needs to

change in any way

they can't possibly have a good outcome

and she could not be persuaded away from

that

she never changed her opinion that

independent of what the actual issues

were

i was the only one who needed to change

now i never really even understood it

and never understood it i didn't

understand why that

wasn't obviously the worst advice

anybody ever got anywhere in the history

of

advice but it happened

now how many how many of you had the

same situation

i won't wait for your answers but i know

there's a few of it

alright so that's the story and

i will talk to you later