Episode 1340 Scott Adams - Court Packing, Floyd Trial, Vaccination Passports, North Korea and Fun
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: ----------- - 40% of Marines not getting vaccinated - Punished for having a different opinion - My court packing prediction - Chauvin trial, cause of death - Homicide isn't a crime - Conflating murder with homicide to create riots ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
Oh, do I have a show for you today. Yeah, today will be the best Coffee with Scott Adams of all time, and I don't say that lightly. Well, what are we going to do first? Yes, it's a simultaneous sip. And all you need is a cup or a glass. I think your chalice is not a canteen, junk flask, a vessel of…
View segment →do with moderate coffee drinking, think what you can do when you just start swilling it by the gallon. Yeah, superpowers. That's how science works. Join me now for the simultaneous sip. Go. Hold on, hold on
View segment →, hold on. That's not enough. We're trying to protect our health now. One more. Go. Ah, I feel a little bit. I think I had a little cancer in my shoulder but it feels better now. Yeah, cardiovascular 20 percent better. Oh wow, I'll tell you, you don't expect it to work that quickly but here it is.…
View segment →rking. It's working. My plan is working. I love the fact that every Saturday Bill Maher is trending for something he said. And I say to myself, okay, I get that it's a political show and stuff, so you know those things make news. But every week, every week he's trending. And I'm trying to figure ou…
View segment →ems reasonable — trained in risk management, and they've also been trained to not be afraid of... right now I don't think COVID is... I'm saying that if you looked at their specific risks the big one is bullets and fragmentation from bombs, right? That's like the big risk of going to war. That's lik…
View segment →there's some situation where the misinformation is bad for society and they have to do something about it. But if it's a valid just difference of opinion they can punish you for your opinion. That's the current system. Well if I get punished for my opinions you can find me on the Locals platform, s…
View segment →ter how big the court is. What matters is that would eliminate independence or even the semblance of independence of the judiciary. It would effectively destroy the republic as it was originally conceived. Now you could argue I'd like to destroy the republic but if you're not arguing that you would…
View segment →tty much, not a hundred percent but pretty much, determines what they're going to decide before they even get a case. Right, so I can't believe that you would even get Democrats who are actual scholars, right, real scholars — I'm not sure you can get a Democrat scholar to buy into this. Now I was…
View segment →ed him to die from drugs at coincidentally the time the police were holding him down. Now I'm going to talk about drugs being part of the cause. You know they're part of the story for sure in my opinion. But here's what you need to know about homicide. It's not a crime. Did you know that? Many in t…
View segment →r. So if Chauvin and his lawyers can demonstrate that a reasonable person wouldn't have known this could kill somebody no crime is committed. There has to be something in the officer's head that gets to either intention. And by the way he's not even being charged with intentionally killing him. Did…
View segment →data and the politics than most people. Yeah here's what he tweeted and this I laughed for like a long time over this. He goes 54 percent of people who have already been vaccinated are still very or somewhat worried about catching COVID and but only 29 percent of people who refuse to get vaccinated…
View segment →what I'm saying is that and this is just speculation right so don't take this as anything you should believe. More of a question I guess. Even question if you were to let's say hypothetically you vaccinated everybody over 70 and everybody over 50 who's obese and I think we could do that right? That…
View segment →g seniors. All right that's all I got to say for today and I'll talk to you tomorrow.
View segment →Oh, do I have a show for you today. Yeah, today will be the best Coffee with Scott Adams of all time, and I don't say that lightly. Well, what are we going to do first? Yes, it's a simultaneous sip. And all you need is a cup or a glass. I think your chalice is not a canteen, junk flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
Wait, hold on. Breaking news. I'm getting breaking news. There's a new study that shows that drinking coffee in moderation — keyword moderation — substantially reduces cancer and all cardiovascular problems. True story, by the way. I just tweeted it. Thank you, Ian, for pointing that out.
So just think about this for a moment. Just think about this. Moderate coffee drinking reduces your cancer and your cardiovascular risk. If that's what you can do with moderate coffee drinking, think what you can do when you just start swilling it by the gallon. Yeah, superpowers. That's how science works.
Join me now for the simultaneous sip. Go.
Hold on, hold on, hold on. That's not enough. We're trying to protect our health now. One more. Go.
Ah, I feel a little bit. I think I had a little cancer in my shoulder but it feels better now. Yeah, cardiovascular 20 percent better. Oh wow, I'll tell you, you don't expect it to work that quickly but here it is.
All right. Well, I like to think that everybody who watches my content gets healthier and smarter, and I actually think that's really happening. You know, based on my feedback from people. You don't get to see it, so you don't see the view that I see. But the number of people who contact me literally every day — you know, multiple people every day — they've lost weight, they're healthier, they're happier, they're getting younger, and apparently they're drinking coffee and reducing the risk of serious illness. So it's all working. It's working. My plan is working.
I love the fact that every Saturday Bill Maher is trending for something he said. And I say to myself, okay, I get that it's a political show and stuff, so you know those things make news. But every week, every week he's trending. And I'm trying to figure out what is it he does that makes him trend every week. And I think the answer is he sometimes tells the truth. Now I think actually most of the time he tells the truth like most people, but they don't do it on TV. He actually tells the truth on TV and everybody goes, whoa, what the hell. The next thing you know it's trending on Twitter. And that literally is what's happening. He literally is just telling you the truth and it becomes like a national story. It's so rare.
But he apparently is joining me somewhat in this opinion that movies are no longer worth your time. And this is what he said in a tweet today about the current batch of movies. I love this tweet. So Bill Maher says, I don't have to leave the theater whistling, but would it kill Hollywood to once in a while make a movie that doesn't make me want to take a bath with the toaster? He says we all had a rough year. A little escapism would have been appreciated.
Now let me climb on that a little bit. You know I've been telling you for a long time that if you willingly consume sad fiction, there's just a bunch of people with problems because that's what a movie is. You know the movie arc is I got a really big problem and I'm going to make you look at my big problems for three hours and maybe at the end they'll be happy or maybe at the end a lot of people will be dead. One of those.
And yeah, I hear Godzilla versus Kong is actually pretty good. I'm surprised. I can't believe — honestly I can't even imagine how that movie could be good. Here's a spoiler for the King Kong and Godzilla movie. So if you're going to watch the movie, I haven't watched it, so I'm going to give you a spoiler for the movie having never watched it and never heard anything about it. All right, this hand is Godzilla. This hand is King Kong. I will now show you the entire movie. Godzilla versus King Kong. The end. That is the entire movie. And I believe I've saved you a little bit of money there and also a little bit of risk of getting COVID. So yeah, there's no reason to watch bad entertainment.
That's why I'm not trying to do a commercial for YouTube but YouTube gets it totally right because YouTube gets you short little bits that are often educational, useful, expand your awareness and don't hurt. You can watch YouTube for days and never see anything — I mean if you want to you'd have to look for it. You can find stuff that'll make you sad if you look for it. But mostly YouTube is about things that make you smarter or make you happy. Why would anybody ever watch a movie again unless it's a comedy, which they don't make anymore?
Yeah, sure, superhero one is really a comedy. When I watch these superhero movies, which I do watch those, I watch them for the dialogue in between the fight scenes because sometimes it's really funny. Like when the Hulk was banging Loki against the ground. That was just funny. So that's the closest Hollywood gets to humor now.
There's a story that 40 percent of Marines say they won't get vaccinated. What do you think of that? Do you know what would have been a good statistic to include with that story? I'll bet it wasn't there. I haven't read all of the reports of it but I would like to know what exactly is the death rate for unusually healthy young people with perfect diets and zero obesity. I'm thinking it's kind of low.
So isn't this exactly the group of people that you wouldn't be surprised — you know, forget about what your opinion is whether they should or should not do it — but I wouldn't be surprised. Because here's what we did wrong with the Marines. We meaning America, right, collectively. I've never gone through any basic training or Marine training or firearms training in the military or anything like that. But I have to make an assumption. Is it fair to assume that teaching somebody to be a Marine includes a good dose of risk management training? In other words, learning that this situation is more dangerous than this one even if it's not obvious on the surface, right? In order to win a war it's all risk management decisions plus violence. That's sort of all it is. Risk management, resources I guess, and violence.
So should we be surprised that the very people who have the lowest risk — and I think this is speculative but it seems reasonable — trained in risk management, and they've also been trained to not be afraid of... right now I don't think COVID is... I'm saying that if you looked at their specific risks the big one is bullets and fragmentation from bombs, right? That's like the big risk of going to war. That's like a real risk. We've actually trained this specific group of people plus whatever they brought to the show to not be afraid even in the scariest situation. Should you be surprised that they're also not afraid in the least scary situation for them?
Now of course COVID is a very scary situation for the world. For them specifically it's kind of the last thing they need to worry about. Let's say you're a Marine and you get infected. What is the downside? One week off with pay, right? I mean maybe you're not where you want to be but it's sort of not the worst thing in the world. A week off with pay.
All right, so I'm not saying that the Marines should or should not get vaccinated. I'll leave that to them and the medical professionals and the military professionals. There's certainly some precedent that you could. Don't be surprised if it becomes mandatory. I wouldn't be surprised. But we'll wait on that.
If I told you we're going to develop a system, a new system for the world in addition to existing systems, and then the new system would have this feature that you could be punished because a stranger holds a different opinion — right, we're not talking about anybody breaking a law or anything like that — would you agree to a system that allowed you to be punished because a stranger, somebody you don't even know, holds a different opinion than you do? Would you ever agree to that?
That's our current system. That's the system we sort of evolved into without thinking about it too much. Because here's the setup. If you have the opinion which no court has upheld — actually I can't even say this because I think I get banned from YouTube even mentioning the topic — but there's a topic that had something to do with let's say electing. And somebody, you can guess what that might be. And there are some people who have different opinions about let's say the perfection of the system. There's some people who think it was closer to perfect and other people who might have a different opinion.
Now since we haven't done a fully transparent look at everything there is to look at, both of those are opinions. Meaning that nobody could know they're right. You couldn't know which one is right. So it's just an opinion. But our current system is that if the people who manage the various platforms have a different opinion than you do they can punish you by taking you off the platform. Because in the modern world that is punishment. It could punish you economically. It could punish you socially. It's punishment.
Our current system allows a stranger to punish you for having a different opinion. Now it would be one thing if their opinion was confirmed by science. You know it was like two plus two is four so it's not really an opinion. In that case you could imagine there's some situation where the misinformation is bad for society and they have to do something about it. But if it's a valid just difference of opinion they can punish you for your opinion. That's the current system.
Well if I get punished for my opinions you can find me on the Locals platform, subscription platform that's growing like crazy by the way. I've got thousands of subscribers now and I'm giving them micro lessons on improving their life with the promise that they will get thousands of dollars of life value per month. So far people are saying that they're getting that so we'll see if we can keep it up.
All right. Biden is putting together a commission of so-called independent scholars and whatnot to talk about court packing and other court reforms. Now what do you think of that? Does this mean that Joe Biden is in favor of court packing and he's just putting a commission together to cover himself so that when he does it you can say, hey all these independent people, Democrats and Republicans, they said it'd be okay? Do you think that's what's going to happen?
I'm going to make a prediction and it goes like this. I of course, and you may have noticed, have sometimes been critical of President Biden. I've been critical of his let's say mental capabilities etc. But if you wanted to kill something with bureaucracy and make it look like the shot was fired by someone else you couldn't do much better than Joe Biden. Because it looks to me like Joe Biden is creating the commission specifically to not do court packing.
So this is my prediction. I believe most people on the right are saying oh no this is the first step to court packing so he plans to do it and he's just giving some cover for himself. Totally possible. All right so let me say as clearly as possible I'm not ruling that out. If you're just looking at the surface it kind of looks that way doesn't it? It looks sort of like he does plan to do it. So I will acknowledge that it looks exactly like he plans to do it. I'll acknowledge that that could be actually literally the reality. But I'm going to predict the opposite.
I predict that this is just cover so that when the scholars, most of them or all of them, say this is a bad idea and why, that Biden will have cover for not doing it. Now I think he might do some other court reforms. I don't know what they are but there might — you know it's always good to look at reforms. Here's why I think the commission will not recommend court packing. It's kind of obvious isn't it? Because the next president would just court pack again and then when it changes parties again they'd court pack again. Why wouldn't they? And then where does it stop? How big is the court?
But more importantly it doesn't even matter how big the court is. What matters is that would eliminate independence or even the semblance of independence of the judiciary. It would effectively destroy the republic as it was originally conceived. Now you could argue I'd like to destroy the republic but if you're not arguing that you would like to destroy the republic that's the bad idea. Because the independence of the three branches of government is the most essential part of the government and this would eliminate it. It would make them basically — it would make the court a captive of the executive office. So there's no point in having a court if the executive office pretty much, not a hundred percent but pretty much, determines what they're going to decide before they even get a case.
Right, so I can't believe that you would even get Democrats who are actual scholars, right, real scholars — I'm not sure you can get a Democrat scholar to buy into this.
Now I was thinking the other day and I'm going to modify a suggestion I had a long time ago. I was thinking once, wouldn't we be better off if you always made the court balanced so they actually have the same amount of conservative leaning and right leaning people? And that was my first thought. It's like well that would be perfect because then they wouldn't make any decisions unless you could get at least one person to kind of go over to the other side. Otherwise it would just be tie, tie, tie, tie. But if it was something important and the court really thought they need to move on it somebody could go over to the other side. That's what I was thinking.
I feel now that was a terrible idea. Here's why. If it's even your incentive to start trading gets really high. As in well we can't get anything done on anything but you'd like to get this thing done you conservatives and we liberals would like to get this other thing passed. Why don't we make a deal? We just need one of you to come over on this issue and then we'll have one of us go over on that other issue.
Now I don't believe that the justices have ever had a conversation like that. I mean I would like to believe that these are serious people who would never come close to any kind of horse trading. But right now they don't have to. What happens if they had to? It would be just like Congress. It would just be horse trading. And then what happens if you get that situation? Are they more susceptible to bribery? If you take nine justices and expand it to any larger number have you increased or decreased or kept the same the risk of bribery or blackmail? It's more. It's more because there are more people to bribe. So there are all kinds of things wrong with court packing.
And I think and I predict that Joe Biden is using the bureaucracy and the system basically to kill it. But he might do some court reforms that you might like. Who knows?
South Korea reportedly — and I don't believe any news that comes out of — I'm sorry, North Korea. I don't believe any news that comes out of North Korea. But the news is that there was some guy who was an official in education who had been tasked with fixing education in some way in North Korea but given no resources to do it. And I guess he made the mistake of complaining that he wasn't getting enough resources to do his job. And the way Kim Jong-un decided to fix this was by executing him. Which is not funny. Just the fact that I laughed, that's just because I'm a terrible person. It's not because it's funny. Let's just get that clear. It's not funny. I'm a terrible person.
So this is what the guy said before they killed him allegedly. The chairman reportedly said I don't understand why the authorities would choose to implement the act, create this commission and call busy professors away from their university jobs if they were not going to give the commission any resources. Park said even if we make suggestions they just tell us to keep our mouths shut so let's go through the motions of gathering and then go home. He reportedly told his commission members.
Now doesn't that sound like every employee of a big company? You gave me this assignment but you didn't give me enough resources. And then the pointy-haired boss just executes them. So this is a case of the simulation and code reuse. Kim Jong-un has just become the pointy-haired boss. Have you seen the picture of Kim Jong-un? He is getting closer and closer to the little pointy hair thing. Sort of like flatter in the middle, a little bit pointy-haired. Code reuse. Simulation.
All right, let's talk about the big news of the day. The Floyd trial. And before I give you my legal analysis here's the thing you need to know and hear this clearly. Number one you should never get medical advice from a cartoonist. Number two don't take your financial advice from cartoonists. Number three don't take legal advice from cartoonists. All right, we're going to do this just for fun. Most of us are not lawyers. Although weirdly I have a very large percentage of lawyers who watch this based on the messages I get. So you people who are really lawyers can you please keep me honest? I'll be watching the comments as I make my ignorant and ill-informed analysis.
All right, are we all on the same page that what we'll follow will be ignorant and uninformed but fun? But fun, right?
So I think one of the things I would like to do is do my analysis from a citizen perspective not a lawyer's perspective. Because there really are two things happening. There's the lawyers doing lawyer things and they understand that world and they know what they're doing and that will create some kind of result. But then there's this other thing which is unfortunately bigger and more important which is how the public is viewing it. The public are for the most part not lawyers just like us. Most of us, right? So I'm going to be talking in a way that I don't think is too far off from what this big batch of non-lawyers will be thinking and feeling. In other words very approximate and inaccurate and not really understanding the law. So I'm in that group.
So let's talk about that. In my opinion after watching both the prosecution and the defense do their job yesterday I would say that the cause of death is established. That the cause of death is established now in my opinion. So this is my opinion as just a person watching it like a non-lawyer. And in my opinion homicide has been established by both the prosecution and the defense. So right now the defense witness — I believe has, and I get the names confused of who's the which doctor is saying what — but I believe that even the defense has said that it was the police action that was the cause. And that means homicide, right?
So here's the first part I want to assert. That homicide, that question is now answered. And I believe that even the jury will say to themselves okay homicide has now been proven. And what I mean by that is that the evidence for a drug overdose I think has been eliminated because there's nobody who testified he had pills in the stomach or that he had immediately ingested it right before. You know we had all heard that right? Hadn't we all heard that it looked like he had taken some pills during the arrest or something? But there was no indication that it was in his stomach. So we don't have evidence that he did anything that is likely in any realistic way to have coincidentally caused him to die from drugs at coincidentally the time the police were holding him down.
Now I'm going to talk about drugs being part of the cause. You know they're part of the story for sure in my opinion. But here's what you need to know about homicide. It's not a crime. Did you know that? Many in the comments tell me how many of you knew that homicide is not a crime. But homicide has been demonstrated to be true. It's just not a crime. And he hasn't been charged with homicide. Do you know why he hasn't been charged with homicide? Because it's not a crime. Right? Yeah, watch the comments. Some people are saying what? Yeah that's the way you should be saying. I'm trying to trigger you into saying what are you talking about? How could homicide not be a crime? It's not. Look it up.
Homicide simply means that a human killed somebody. And killed is somewhat strictly defined you know or let's say by precedent to mean that a human did the last thing that was like push them over the edge. So it could be that the human shot them or it could be that the human did some other kind of action that was the final variable. Now this is really important. If a human was the final variable in the death that's homicide. And I think that both the — I think all of the medical people have said that if you took away the police action it's unlikely he would have died. Because what are the odds that he somehow had an overdose without taking drugs recently? Like you don't really — my understanding is overdoses happen pretty quickly after you take the wrong amount of drugs. So it would be weird if he had taken the drugs hours before and then just by coincidence he happened to have an overdose death right when the police were sitting on him. I mean what are the odds?
So yes the police action resulted in his death. That's homicide. All right so are we all on the same page the homicide at least I think from the jury's perspective has been completely proven? Because there is no medical person who says anything different. There's no medical person who is saying the cause was an overdose or the cause was his health. Nobody's saying that. So it is homicide. Right? Again I'm speaking as a non-lawyer just like a person. Just a person. It's homicide. But that is not illegal per se. Because there are different reasons that you could be not guilty of any crime. One would be self-defense. If you kill somebody in self-defense it's homicide. It just doesn't happen to be illegal.
And I think that Chauvin has one other opportunity to do homicide without being illegal and it goes like this. A reasonable person would not know that what he was doing was a mortal danger. So if Chauvin and his lawyers can demonstrate that a reasonable person wouldn't have known this could kill somebody no crime is committed. There has to be something in the officer's head that gets to either intention. And by the way he's not even being charged with intentionally killing him. Did you know that? The charge does not include any thought that he did it intentionally. It's just not even in the charges. That would I think be first degree, right?
The charge is that a reasonable person should have known that his actions would put at least a risk of death. So that's what the prosecution has to show. Let me give you a little more detail on this. Here in Psychology Today — I know it's not a legal document but there was a writer Barrett Brogaard who did a real good job of just sort of laying out what the charges are.
So here are the charges. He's charged with second degree unintentional murder, third degree murder, and second degree manslaughter. Now here's a little bit more on that. Now first of all is this confusing? This is really confusing stuff. How many people in the jury are going to be capable of really sorting through this amount of nuance? It's kind of hard. You know we're asking ordinary people to do a pretty tough task here. But I think they'll take it very seriously and I have at least some optimism that they'll get it right.
So here's what we need to know. There's nothing about intentional in the charges. But proving second degree unintentional murder this is what it would require. Showing that the defendant officer Chauvin caused the victim's death — that part we know from the medical examiners or at least that's the testimony — and had specific intent to inflict bodily harm short of death. So was the officer trying to harm Floyd but maybe he didn't think that would kill him but he was trying to cause him a lot of harm? And if that went too far he would be guilty of murder. Is that what happened?
Well how do you treat a police officer who does intentional harm in the act of subduing somebody? Don't you? If you tase somebody and they die with a taser are you guilty of murder? Because we know that a taser can kill people. Do you know what kind of people can be killed by a taser? People with weak hearts. Such as I'll just pick one example of a person with a weak heart: George Floyd. If George Floyd had been tased there was a pretty high likelihood he would have died from being tased. Is tasing an ordinary thing that police do? Well I hate to use the word ordinary but we see it a lot. If you're a citizen you've seen lots of footage of police tasing people. And there is evidence that if you had a weak heart and you got tased you could die. There's some evidence. A number of people have died that way.
Now I don't believe that this situation was taser worthy meaning that I don't think he would have appropriately used the taser in that case because that might have been a little bit more. I don't know that for sure but it seemed like it wasn't really called for. The police had enough human power and Floyd was sort of only half resisting. It didn't look like a taser situation to me. But suppose you knew that within police procedure there's this thing called a taser and it would have killed him or could have. You know there's more risks with him. That sort of gives you a context in your head as just a citizen that police do things that can kill people without intending to kill him. That it's actually a normal fairly routine. The police are putting let's say force on people in a variety of ways and each of those variety of ways could actually kill somebody.
So I don't believe that in the context of police work holding somebody down with the intent that it would hurt if they tried to get up — it didn't look like trying to hurt him so much as obviously trying to contain him. Or since we're talking about reasonable doubt a reasonable person could say I don't know I can't read his mind. I don't know if his intention to hurt him. It looked like it was his intention just to keep him subdued. So I think this part about specific intent to inflict bodily harm short of death is not demonstrated by any evidence is it? Does anybody have any evidence from anybody that would suggest we know the officer's internal mental thoughts? I don't think so. So it looks like the prosecution hasn't made that case. So that one is a second degree unintentional murder.
So here's another one. Third degree murder. It requires showing that the accused officer Chauvin caused the victim's death and their acts were eminently dangerous and were performed with a depraved mind. Now a depraved mind means that you have — you're just sort of an evil person. You're an evil person and you did things that you knew put somebody in mortal danger but you did it anyway because you're just sort of a bastard, right?
What evidence has been presented that would show that Chauvin has a depraved mind? None, right? I don't believe there's any evidence presented to that. Is there? Has anybody seen any evidence even proposed that goes in that direction? I haven't seen any. And that their acts were eminently dangerous. Now this so it's even two parts because there's the word and here. So I'd have to be a lawyer to know that if you could really separate these ands. But let's take it the way this writer wrote it and say that it has to be both eminently dangerous and done with this depraved mind thing. There's no evidence of a depraved mind. No motivation in evidence etc.
So eminently dangerous. Let's just look at that and see what evidence we have for that. Now remember the standard is reasonable doubt. The standard is not we know what happened. The standard is is there a reasonable doubt about the prosecution story? So let's see if there is.
What would — oh this is interesting. Before I do that. So without anybody really making note of it the prosecution and the defense have agreed that the video has been debunked. Do you believe that is my statement true? That as of yesterday both the prosecution and the defense are on the same page on this following fact. That the video has been debunked. Here's what I mean. Up until really about yesterday a hundred percent of the world believed that his knee was on George Floyd's neck for nine minutes. Pretty much that's all anybody's talking about. His knee was on his neck for nine minutes.
And now both the prosecution and the defense based on witnesses agree that wasn't the case. It looked like it but it wasn't. Because the video shows that his knee was in different places. And I'm saying that the prosecution agrees because they changed the way they talked about it. Now they're talking about the knee in the neck area on the back and the neck area. They've started moving it off the artery stuff and now it's just sort of in that area and we don't know how much pressure was on it etc.
So this is although the fact that his knee was not on a neck did not change the potential liability for the officer. Because we have medical testimony now that wherever that knee was whether it was sort of backish or neckish both of them could have killed him or would have been the cause of death. So it's no defense apparently to say no it wasn't exactly on the neck the whole time. Because the position of him with the handcuffs on on the ground with a guy on his back and a bad heart and had some drugs in him he put all that together and he could have. And one of the medical people said he was killed cause of death by the knee on the neckish backish area.
But here's the point. It debunks the video. It doesn't defend Chauvin because the new theory of death about the specifics of it still would make him guilty of something if he did it with this depraved whatever and some kind of knowledge that it would be bad. But it's important that the defense change their entire theory in the middle of the thing. The entire world believed that the one thing that we all believed to be true was that this damn knee was on George Floyd's neck for nine minutes. And we just found out that wasn't true. And even the defense is acknowledging it. That's a big deal.
Here's why. It showed that you can't tell what's happening on videos, right? That's the takeaway. The takeaway is we were all — defense, prosecution, public, 100 percent of the people who saw the video initially were all wrong about a really important point. Where exactly was that knee? Because if the knee was on the neck the whole time suddenly that feels like you know a little bit about his intentions, right? Maybe you don't but it feels like you do doesn't it? That feels like an intention. But if you see that he moved it around now you've got reasonable doubt. But that reasonable doubt would be removed perhaps if you thought that Chauvin knew that no matter where his knee was this positional asphyxiation thing was potentially going to be fatal. Did he know that?
So I think it's amazing that the video has been debunked but it's still the evidence.
All right so here's how I would approach it if I were the defense. And again I'm not a lawyer so just assume that I don't even know what's going to be allowable in court right? Doesn't mean any of this could actually happen. I'm just giving you my human being defense not a lawyer defense.
I would start by saying that we live in a world in which it is typical to see two movies on one screen. And I would explain that. Let's say how many of you in the jury are familiar with the Laurel and Yanny situation? And you would see the people nervously giggle in the jury because most of them are familiar with how easily they're fooled with the Laurel and Yanny. And then I'd say and ladies and gentlemen of the jury you know that before you came in here every one of us — and I have to admit even the defense — before we looked at the video in detail we too thought that knee was on his neck for nine minutes. That was the movie we thought we were watching.
But now that we've watched it from a number of angles and had experts testify we know that there was another movie playing at the same time. There was one that we all thought we saw and there's one that's different. So different in fact that the prosecution has changed the cause of death. Still they say it's my client but a completely different mechanism of death that we're just learning now. It was the video that got us here and we've all just agreed that we didn't see it right? Video is bad evidence. Laurel and Yanny taught you that. You've probably seen a number of videos you know in your own experience. I don't have to mention which ones but in your own experience have you had let's say in the last year or two have you seen anything that looked real on video and later you found out it wasn't? Besides this case. And most people would be yeah I can think of an example.
And by the way it's good hypnosis to let them come up with their own example. If you give them an example they'll fight with it and say I'm not sure that's an example. If you say have you ever seen an example where people were fooled by video and maybe you were, people will come up with their own example that they don't fight with. So that's why you let them fill in the blank. You don't fill it in for them.
So once I have established that the prosecution had changed their entire argument from the neck thing to the positional thing I would say look how easily we can be fooled. Just to put some doubt in their heads right? And then I would say if we're trying to figure out whether Derek Chauvin knew that he was putting Floyd in risk here are the questions we must ask.
Number one why did all the other police officers who were in the scene not intervene? Well there's a number of possibilities and we don't have it in evidence right? One possibility is they were just maybe they were timid. They didn't want to interfere with a veteran officer. One is they were all racists. Every one of them was a racist and they were just happy to see Floyd killed. I don't think that's the case but I'm just saying all the things that are possible.
Here's another thing that's possible. Did you notice that all the police did nothing but yet all of the non-police the citizens were quite sure that he was being killed? But none of the police at least acted as if they thought that was a serious risk. Why would that be? Well I'll give you a few possibilities. One you're a bum bro. I'll just get rid of you if it's the best you can do is yell at me in all caps. And by the way you haven't heard my conclusion yet so I'm just saying what the defense could be. Don't assume this is my opinion all right? I'm just telling you what the defense could be.
All right so why did all the cops stand down and the non-cops thought it looked like murder? Here's one possibility. Remember we're only going for reasonable doubt so you don't have to agree that this is the reason. You just have to agree it's one of the possible reasons and we don't know. That's all I'm going for. One of the possible reasons is police are experienced and they're trained. Citizens are not experienced in police stops and they're not trained. The police probably are aware of the guy who is the police trainer who testified and said that in his opinion Chauvin used the least amount of force that was to get the job done and that it was not a deadly situation.
Now is he right or is he wrong the police trainer? It doesn't matter. Here's why. The police trainer is a reasonable person. Nobody said he's crazy. He's a reasonable person. If you would put the police trainer in Chauvin's situation he was saying he would have acted about the same and he trains it. He not only trained Chauvin but he probably directly or indirectly was involved with the training for all of the other officers. Could it be that the reason people who are trained didn't get into it is because the training told them this was safe? But if you were a citizen you had not been trained by that. You've never heard this training. Remember they usually say they can't breathe. They say they're in pain. The handcuffs are hurting their wrists. They all say it. It doesn't mean it's true. But the public's never had that training. Never had that experience.
So I would say that the activity of the other police officers the fact that not one of them would get involved suggest that police are watching a different movie. The movie they were seeing is just somebody taken down according to policy and it would be safe according to their movie. The way they were trained. The citizens were seeing somebody with a knee on their neck for nine minutes as the lights were going out in his life. They were watching a different movie.
So to imagine that these people who have viewed the same incident is just not true. They weren't viewing the same incident. It was the same facts but the way they filtered it had to be different. One was filtered through training and experience. One was filtered through no training and experience. So there's some reasonable doubt right there.
Now what about the way Chauvin himself acted? Do you think that if he believed that he was putting Floyd in mortal danger that he would have continued to do it in front of lots of witnesses in front of other police cameras going? Could Chauvin have reasonably believed that putting himself just the officer himself in a situation where witnesses would watch him end the life of a black man who's on the ground? Do you think that Chauvin thought that there would be no consequences if something bad happened to Floyd in that situation? Not reasonably. No reasonable person would think that he would be just go about his day if Floyd died.
Is there any evidence that Chauvin is a sociopath? I don't believe so. I don't believe there's any evidence that he's some kind of weird sociopath. How would you feel if you held somebody down and they died? How would you feel? It would ruin your freaking life if you killed somebody accidentally. You would never get over that even if you're a cop right? Cops are a little tougher right? They've seen more things. They've got training. But even a cop it's going to ruin his freaking life if he accidentally kills a guy because he had his knee on him for nine minutes.
All right so is it reasonable to imagine that even Chauvin knew that he was putting this guy in that much danger when his trainer would have done the same thing the police around him apparently either didn't intervene or would have done the same thing? Now you could ask yourself should he have known and that would be an interesting question but I don't think it would be legally useful because all you have to demonstrate is that a reasonable person in that same situation would have acted the same way. A reasonable person. And we have that proof because the trainer acted the same way and all of the other police officers acted the same way. Everybody who had similar training everybody acted the same way. And everybody who didn't have that training acted in a different way. Two movies on one screen with a perfect explanation of why people are seeing the movie differently.
All right there's also the issue that the crowd was threatening and apparently police procedure is that you take care of the threat to the officers first and then you treat anybody who might be having medical problems. You could argue that it shouldn't be that way but it is that way and that's exculpatory too.
But here's the interesting thing. So here are two kinds of demonstrations that the defense could do. Now I don't know if these would be allowed right? So there's a question of what the judge allows. But imagine the defense attorney takes in a bathroom scale puts it on the floor during closing arguments gets down on two knees one knee on the bathroom scale and one knee on the floor. What do you think the scale would register as weight assuming that you're trying to not put your full weight on the down knee? What would be the weight? It would well have you tried it? I tried it this morning. I put down it looks like somebody tried it because they have a number there. So with me it was around 50 pounds. All right so my weight is probably 158 something like that. Chauvin was 140 so not too far out of the range and mine was about 50 pounds.
Okay so one demonstration is just having somebody get down and about the same size as Chauvin or have Chauvin himself I guess you could have him do it himself just get down on the thing and show that it looks like about 50 pounds at minimum. Now does that mean that Chauvin was giving him only 50 pounds of pressure or could he have been leaning right into it? It'd be hard to tell in the video but it gives reasonable doubt because now you're not sure was he putting 140 pounds on it or is he putting 50 pounds on it? Because George Floyd was a big guy right?
Let me ask you this. Well actually let's take the next example first. The other thing and I don't think this would necessarily be allowed by the judge but you can imagine the defense attorney giving his closing arguments on handcuffed and on his stomach while three people were sitting on him and he just talks through it you know. So he could demonstrate it that way.
But let me tell you the most persuasive way to do a demonstration. One of the things that the video lies about is the sizes of the people involved. Remember you know a picture doesn't lie. Yes it does. Pictures lie better than anything. There's nothing that lies better than a picture. Pictures are the best way to lie. But one of the things that the video doesn't give you when you're seeing George Floyd's head basically and then you're seeing Chauvin you can't tell how big either of them are. Floyd was like six four and probably 200 something and he was big strapping youngish guy. Chauvin was 140 pounds and five eight I think five eight.
So if you did your demonstration in the courtroom and you were trying to show the jury what they didn't necessarily see on video somebody says six six and 240 pounds I could say that it's somewhere in that range. So here's how you do the demonstration in the court. You would get a very large wait for it white man to play George Floyd. Got to be white but about the same size about the same age big healthy looking muscular youngish big white guy. Then you get three black guys who are about 140 pounds to play the role of the police officers. And then you could see that there was a big difference between the people on top and the person that they were subduing. Because imagine the jury is seeing the actual dimensions of the people which you can't tell on the video. It doesn't show you right?
Somebody thinks I'm a right-wing shill. If anybody's new to this I'm left of Bernie and I don't identify with too many things that you would call right wing. So do your homework. Don't be a. Learn something about me before you criticize okay? Just don't be a about it. Just try to up your game a little bit. Criticism's fine. You're welcome to criticize but just get a little bit of information before you do it. Because if you're criticizing without even knowing who I am you're just being a. So don't be that okay?
All right and it is fair and interesting to talk about the trial and how it will go. This is not a political thing it's a legal thing and it's interesting. It's also a prediction thing. Let you know where things are going.
All right so if you did that demonstration I think people would see it. And if you reversed the ethnicities of the people involved it would really mess up the brains of the jury because then they would see with their own eyes that race had influenced them. You want the jury to know that the races of the people involved bias them and the way to do it is give a demonstration where you reverse the races and nobody would give a if a 140 pound black police officer put his knee for nine minutes on a 240 pound strapping six foot six white guy on the ground. Nobody would give a right? And I'm not saying that has anything to do with racism. It has to do with there's a natural what would you call it revulsion toward the powerful beating up the less powerful. It's a natural revulsion and you could even be a racist and you'd have the revulsion right? Because when you see somebody in power doing something bad to somebody who you think is a group that has no power that's way worse than if you reversed it and the person getting hurt is the powerful one in other situations right?
And reversing the ethnicities to do your demonstration you wouldn't have to say any of that. The people in the jury would get it. They would say why did this seem so bad when the races were the other way? And the answer is it is worse when the races are the other way. That's not it's not an illusion. It is worse when the powerful are squishing the less powerful. That's worse. But that doesn't change the legal liability. The fact that it feels worse and is worse it is worse right? I won't even say it feels worse. It's just worse you know. Squashing the less powerful is just the worst. But it's not worse from a legal perspective. No worse from a legal perspective. And this is the context.
So let's see. Here's a question I have. If it takes three things to kill somebody which one is the cause of death? So the defense's witness said that the death was caused by a collection of three things. That he had a bad heart he was on drugs which can change your breathing and breathing was the issue and the police officers put him in a position that restricted his breathing. Now legally that's homicide as I said. And legally it puts the last action as the cause. The last action was the police. So technically legally the way definitions work the way the law works the cop killed him. Doesn't mean it's illegal because he maybe didn't know it.
But the important thing here is that your common sense about this is a little different than how the law treats it and necessarily right? That doesn't mean anything's broken. My common sense goes like this. If it took all three of those things to kill him they were all the cause. I get that the last thing that happens always looks like the cause but that's an illusion. It required all three things. Or at least wait for it there's a reasonable doubt that he would have died without the first two things. Is there anybody who testified that if he did anybody testify that it's we could know he would have died short of having a heart problem and the drug problem? You kind of don't know. If you took those other two things away the drugs that affects your breathing the heart that affects your breathing and then he died because he couldn't breathe. I don't know. I feel like I get that one has to be the cause. It's just the last thing that happened. But our common sense says three things killed him. Because if you took away any of those one any one of the three he'd probably be alive right? If the police hadn't stopped him I think he'd be alive. If he didn't have a heart problem don't know but there's a good chance he'd be alive. If he hadn't done drugs don't know if it made a difference for sure but there's a good chance. So we're only talking about reasonable doubt right? That's pretty reasonable in the doubt category I would say. Especially when we know that tasing can actually kill you if you have a heart like George Floyd's. Actually I shouldn't say that that would be a little bit too much medical certainty but say somebody has a weak heart would be in trouble.
So let's see what else we got here. All right that's enough for that.
So my take on it is that the news will be pro so far the news is reporting this. The news is reporting that homicide has largely been demonstrated. What they don't tell you is what I just told you that that doesn't mean it's a crime. Watch how illegitimate the press is when they describe the homicide without telling you that's not illegal by itself. They won't tell you that. You will be led to believe that proving it was homicide which I believe has been proven and to my satisfaction anyway they're going to tell you that that's the same as murder by sort of just talking about it the same way. They won't say it directly. They'll just conflate murder with homicide until you can't tell the difference and you want to riot over it. That's where it's going.
Speaking of propaganda let me give you two sentences and you tell me which one of these is propaganda and which one of these is just an accurate statement. We'll take a hypothetical. Hypothetically let's say there was a congressperson who had been charged with something and there were two ways to describe this thing. They had been but not charged with let's say accused. They'll say there's a congressman who's merely been accused of something. No trial. He's been accused of something. And there are two ways to say it. One way goes like this. The congressman is accused of having sex with a minor. Here's the second way to say it and both of these will be true. The congressman has been accused of having sex with a 17 year old. Which one of those is propaganda and which one of those is just the news? Which one did CNN say? CNN always says sex with a minor right? And they're trying to trap you into saying wait a minute 17 is not so bad. Oh what did you say pedophile? It's a trap.
So somebody says the first one yeah. So when you see propaganda like that where the first thing that you say is the thing people remember. Now I think I saw Jake Tapper say he was accused of having sex with a minor and then clarified a 17 year old. Wouldn't it be better to say he was accused of having sex with a 17 year old who's technically a minor? Do those sound the same to you? Because one of them is trying to get a result and the other one is describing what happened. I would say and by the way if you have two ways to describe something and it's only an allegation you do have a social responsibility to use the description that doesn't make him look guilty because there's not even a charge much less a court case. We don't even have a victim and they're already talking about him like he's guilty without a victim meaning we don't know there's a real person yet if there ever is.
All right Nate Silver was hilarious in a tweet. You should be following Nate Silver. He does a better job of sticking with the data and the politics than most people. Yeah here's what he tweeted and this I laughed for like a long time over this. He goes 54 percent of people who have already been vaccinated are still very or somewhat worried about catching COVID and but only 29 percent of people who refuse to get vaccinated are very or somewhat worried about catching COVID. And then here's his punchline. Great job everyone. That's like a perfect punchline. Great job everyone. It's so droll. Basically it doesn't matter what you do you're going to be unhappy I guess one way or another you'll be unhappy.
All right there's a video that I think YouTube took down but I saw it. I don't know I'm not sure how it took down it is since I saw it but there's this Dr. Cole who's made a couple of claims and I want to run them by you because I don't know that they're true. And he said the following. So fact check me on this. He said all super spreader events have been indoors. Can somebody fact check that first of all? I'm not sure we know where all the super spreader events have been because I'm not sure you'd know there was a super spreader event. You just know a lot of people are infected. But is that true that all super spreader events have been indoors? Because that would be a pretty big deal. Yeah all known. So the problem is whether that's just the ones that are known.
Here's the other thing he said which I have much lower opinion of its credibility. He said there's no such thing as flu and cold season there's only low vitamin D season. In other words he's saying that in some seasons your vitamin D is low and that's why you catch things that you wouldn't normally catch otherwise. Do you buy that?
Here's the problem with the vitamin D thing and you might remember that you know a year ago I was making all kinds of noise about the fact that it looked like vitamin D was the big correlation here. It just seemed to be that where there was lots of vitamin D people had better results. And I didn't know that that was anything but a coincidence but it was worth looking at. And I still think that you have to be careful about that correlation because people who are old and sick have low vitamin D. It could be just another way to know you're old and sick. It doesn't have to necessarily yeah it doesn't necessarily have to be the vitamin D works. It could just be a correlation that sick people don't have much vitamin D. But that said I'm still going to keep my vitamin D up because it's good for you in general.
Here's my next speculative question. We've all been told that herd immunity is when you get to 70 80 percent or whatever. I think this virus they're thinking is higher because it's so spready. But does the herd immunity number in that 70 range does that make sense when your virus attacks certain parts of the population and leaves others largely unhurt? And when only the only people who are super spreaders are the people who are pretty sick and obese and they're the ones who are getting vaccinated first. It seems to me that the idea of herd immunity that made sense for all other things doesn't make sense in this case.
And what I'm saying is that and this is just speculation right so don't take this as anything you should believe. More of a question I guess. Even question if you were to let's say hypothetically you vaccinated everybody over 70 and everybody over 50 who's obese and I think we could do that right? That or at least you get almost all of them. Everybody else could still get the virus and it could rage through the rest of the community but there wouldn't be any super spreaders right? How fast does this virus spread if you could snap your fingers and the only kind of spread was the one to one type and that's it and the person's getting it never got sick because let's say they're young or whatever they are? I don't know that 70 is necessary. I think it's more like getting all the super spreaders and then maybe it takes care of itself. I don't know. Just a question.
I have a second question. Is there anything like micro immunity? So we've heard that the amount of the viral load you get has a lot to do with how sick you get you know that plus your natural health. So what would happen to a perfectly healthy person who was exposed to just a little bit of virus? Could they beat the virus without getting symptoms and become sort of micro immune? And you get to herd immunity just because they were exposed but maybe they don't even test. Could you have could you test negative for COVID but have antibodies? Is that a thing? I don't know.
And if you can't get COVID outdoors and we don't think you get it on airplanes enough to stop flights where the hell are you getting it? You know I have this theory that I've never said before let's say hypothesis that it's a sexually transmitted problem. I'm just going to put that out there. I just have a theory that it might be sexually transmitted. I'm only kidding about that but when you see the kids are not having bad problems and the seniors are there's actually a there is rampant sex in old folks homes and nursing homes. A lot of people don't know that but there is pretty rampant unprotected sex among seniors.
All right that's all I got to say for today and I'll talk to you tomorrow.
oh do i have a show for you today yeah today will be the best coffee with scott adams of all time and i don't say that lightly well what are we going to do first yes it's a simultaneous sip and all you need is a couple of marker glasses i think your chalice is not a canteen junk flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee wait hold breaking news i'm getting breaking news there's a new study that shows that drinking coffee in moderation keyword moderation substantially reduces cancer and all cardiovascular problems true story by the way i just tweeted it thank you ian for pointing that out so just think about this for a moment just think about this moderate coffee drinking reduces your cancer and your cardiovascular risk if that's what you can do with moderate coffee drinking think what you can do when you just start swilling it by the gallon yeah superpowers that's how science works join me now for the simultaneous sip go hold on hold on hold on that's not enough we're trying to protect our health now one more go ah i feel a little bit i think i had a little cancer in my shoulder but it feels better now yeah cardiovascular 20 better oh wow i'll tell you you don't expect it to work that quickly but here it is all right well i like to think that everybody who watches my content gets healthier and smarter and i actually think that's really happening you know based on my feedback from people you don't get to see it so you don't you don't see the the view that i see but the number of people who contact me literally every day you know multiple people every day they've lost weight they you know they're healthier they're happier they're getting younger and apparently they're drinking coffee and and reducing the risk of serious illness so it's all working it's working my plan is working i love the fact that every saturday bill maher is trending for something he said and i say to myself okay i get that it's a political show and stuff so you know those things make news but every week every week he's trending and i'm trying to figure out what is it he does that makes him trend every week and i think the answer is he sometimes tells the truth now i think actually most of the time he tells the truth like most people but they don't do it on tv he actually tells the truth on tv and everybody goes whoa what the hell the next thing you know it's like trending on twitter and and that literally is what's happening he literally is just telling you the truth and it becomes like a national story it's so rare but he apparently he's joining me uh somewhat in this opinion that movies are no longer worth your time and this is what he said in a tweet today about about the current batch of movies i love this tweet so bill maher says i don't have to leave the theater whistling but would it kill hollywood to once in a while make a movie that doesn't make me want to take a bath with the toaster he says we all had a rough year a little escapism would have been appreciated now let me let me climb on that a little bit you know i've been telling you for a long time that if you willingly consume uh sad fiction there's just a bunch of people with problems because that's what a movie is you know the movie arc is i got a really big problem and i'm going to make you look at my big problems for three hours and maybe at the end they'll be happy or maybe at the end a lot of people will be dead one of those and yeah i hear godzilla versus kong is actually pretty good i'm surprised i can't belie honestly i can't even imagine how that movie could be good here's a spoiler for the king kong and godzilla movie so if if you're going to watch the movie i haven't watched it so i'm going to give you a spoiler for the movie having never watched it and never heard anything about it alright this hand is godzilla this hand is king kong i will now show you the entire movie godzilla vs king kong the end that is the entire movie and i believe i've saved you a little bit money there and also a little bit of risk of getting covered so yeah there's no reason to watch uh bad entertainment that's why um i'm not trying to do a commercial for youtube but youtube gets it totally right because youtube gets you you know short little bits that are often educational useful expand your awareness and don't hurt you can watch youtube for days and never see anything i mean if you want to you'd have to look for it you can find stuff that'll make you sad if you look for it but mostly youtube's youtube is about things that make you smarter or make you happy why would anybody ever watch a movie again unless it's a comedy which they don't make anymore yeah sure super super hero one is really a comedy when i watch these superhero movies which i do watch those i watch them for the dialogue in between the fight scenes because sometimes it's really funny like when the hulk was you know banging loki against the the ground that was just funny so that's the closest hollywood gifts to humor now there's a story that 40 percent of marines say they won't get vaccinated what do you think of that do you know what would have been a good uh statistic to include with that story i'll bet it wasn't there i haven't read all of the reports of it but i would like to know what exactly is the death rate for unusually healthy young people with perfect diets and no zero obesity i'm thinking it's kind of low so isn't this exactly the group of people that you wouldn't be surprised you know forget about what your opinion is whether they should or should not do it but i wouldn't be surprised because here's what we did wrong with the marines we meaning america right collectively i've never gone through any basic training or marine training or firearms training in the military or anything like that but i have to make an assumption does it is it fair to assume that teaching somebody to be a marine includes a good dose of risk management training in other words learning that this situation is more dangerous than this one if even if it's not obvious on the surface right in order to win a war it's all risk management decisions plus violence that's sort of all it is risk management resources i guess and violence so should we be surprised that the very people who have the lowest risk and i think this is speculative but it seems reasonable trained in risk management and they've also been trained to not be afraid of right now i don't think covet is i'm saying that if you looked at their specific risks the big one is bullets and you know fragmentation from bombs right that's like the big risk of going to the war that's like a real risk we've actually trained this specific group of people plus you know whatever whatever they brought to the show to not be afraid even in the scariest situation should you be surprised that they're also not afraid and the least the least scary situation for them now of course covet is a very schedule scary situation for the world for for them specifically it's kind of the last thing they need to worry about let's say you're a marine and you get you get infected what is the downside one week off with pay right right i mean maybe you're not where you want to be but it's sort of not the worst thing in the world a week off with pay all right so i'm not saying that the marines should or should not get vaccinated i'll leave that to them and and the medical professionals and the military professionals there's certainly some precedent that you could don't be surprised if it becomes mandatory i wouldn't be surprised but we'll wait on that if i told you we're going to develop a system a new system for the world in addition to existing systems and then the new system would have this feature that you could be punished because a stranger holds a different opinion opinion right we're not talking about any anybody breaking a law or anything like that would you agree to a system that allowed you to be because punished stranger somebody you don't even know holds a different opinion than you do would you ever agree to that that's our current system that's that's the system we we sort of evolved into without thinking about it too much because here's the setup if you have the opinion which no court has has upheld actually i can't even say this because uh i think i get banned from youtube even mentioning the topic but there's a topic that had something to do with let's say electing and somebody you can you can guess what that might be and there are some people who have different opinions about let's say the the perfection of the system there's some people who think it was closer to perfect and other people who might have a different opinion now since we haven't done a fully transparent look at everything there is to look at both of those are opinions meaning that nobody could know they're right you couldn't know which one is right so it's just an opinion but our current system is that if the people who manage the various platforms have a different opinion than you do they can punish you by taking you off the platform because in the modern world that is punishment it could punish you economically it could punish you socially it's punishment our current system allows a stranger to punish you for having a different opinion now it would be one thing if their opinion was confirmed by science you know it was like two plus two is four so it's not really an opinion in that case you could imagine there's some situation where you know the misinformation is bad for society and they have to they have to do something about it but if it's a valid just difference of opinion they can punish you for your opinion current that's the current system well if i get punished for my opinions uh you can find me on the locals platform subscription platform uh that's growing like crazy by the way i've got thousands of subscribers now and i'm giving them micro lessons on improving their life with the promise that they will get thousands of dollars of life value per month so far people are saying that they're getting that so we'll see if we can keep it up all right um biden is uh is putting together a commission of uh so-called independent scholars and whatnot to talk about court packing and other court reforms now what do you think of that does this mean that joe biden is in favor of court packing and he's just putting a commission together to cover himself so that when he does it you can say hey all these independent people democrats and republicans they said it'd be okay do you think that's what's going to happen i'm going to make a prediction and it goes like this i of course and you may have noticed have sometimes been critical of president biden i've been critical of his let's say mental capabilities etc but if you wanted to kill something with bureaucracy and make it look like the the shot was fired by someone else you couldn't do much better than joe biden because it looks to me like joe biden is creating the commission specifically to not do court packing so that this is my prediction uh i believe most people on the right are saying oh no this is the first step to court packing so he plans to do it and he's just giving some cover for himself totally possible all right so let me say as clearly as possible i'm not ruling that out if you're just looking at the surface kind of looks that way doesn't it it looks sort of like he does plan to do it so i will acknowledge that it looks exactly like he plans to do it i'll acknowledge that that could be actually literally the reality but i'm going to predict the opposite i predict that this is just cover so that when the scholars most of them or all of them say this is a bad idea and why that that biden will have cover for not doing it now i think he might do some other court reforms i don't know what they are but there might you know it's always good to look at reforms here's why i think the commission will not recommend court packing it's kind of obvious isn't it because the next president would just court pack again and then when it changes parties again they'd court back again why wouldn't they and then where does it stop how big is the court but more importantly it doesn't even matter how big the court is what matters is that would uh eliminate independence or even the semblance of independence of the judiciary it would effectively destroy the republic as it was originally conceived now now you could argue i'd like to destroy the republic but if you're not arguing that you would like to destroy the public the republic uh that's the bad idea because it would the the independence of the three branches of government is the most essential part of the government and this would eliminate it it would make them basically it would make the court a captive of the executive of office so there's no point in having a court if the executive office pretty much not a hundred percent but pretty much determines what they're gonna decide before they even get a case right so i can't believe that you would even get democrats who are actual scholars right real scholars i'm not sure you can get a democrat scholar to buy into this now i was thinking the other day and i'm going to modify a suggestion i had a long time ago i was thinking once wouldn't we be better off if you always made the court balanced so they actually have the same amount of conservative leaning and right leading people and that was my first thought it's like well that would be perfect because then they wouldn't make any decisions unless you could get at least one person to kind of go over to the other side otherwise it would just be tie tie tie tie but if it was something important and the court you know really thought they need to move on it somebody could go over to the other side that's what i was thinking i feel now that was a terrible idea here's why if it's even your incentive to start trading gets really high as in well we can't get anything done on anything but you'd like to get this thing done you conservatives and we liberals would like to get this other thing passed why don't we make a deal we just need one of you to come over on this issue and then we'll have one of us go over on that other issue now i don't believe that the justices have ever had a conversation like that i mean i i would like to believe that these are serious people who would never come close to any kind of horse trading but right now they don't have to what happens if they had to it would be just like congress it would just be horse trading and then what happens if you get that situation are they more susceptible to bribery if you take nine justices and expand it to any larger number have you increased or decreased or kept the same the risk of bribery or blackmail it's more right it's more because there are more people to bribe so there are all kinds of things wrong with court packing and i think and i predict that joe biden is using the bureaucracy and the system basically to kill it but he might do some court reforms that you might like who knows um south korea reportedly and i don't believe any news that comes out of i'm sorry north korea i don't believe any news that comes out of north korea but the news is that there was some guy who was a official in education who had been tasked with fixing education in some way in north korea but given no resources to do it and i guess he made the mistake of complaining that he wasn't getting enough resources to do his job and the way kim jong-un decided to fix this was my ex executing him which is not funny just the fact that i laughed uh that's just because i'm a terrible person it's not because it's funny let's just get that clear it's not funny i'm a terrible person um so this is what the guy said before they killed him allegedly the chairman reportedly said i don't understand why the authorities would choose to implement the act create this commission and call busy professors away from their university jobs if they were not going to give the commission any resources park said even if we make suggestions they just tell us to keep our mouths shut so let's go through the motions of gathering and then go home he reportedly told his commission members now doesn't that sound like every employee of a big company you gave me this assignment but you didn't give me enough resources and then the pointy-haired boss just executes them so this is a case of the simulation and code reuse kim jong-un has just become the pointy head boss pointy-haired boss have you seen the picture of kim jong-un he is getting closer and closer to the little pointy hair thing sort of like flatter in the middle a little bit a little bit pointy haired code reuse simulation all right let's talk about the big news of the day the floyd trial and before i give you my uh legal analysis here's the thing you need to know and hear this clearly number one you should never get medical advice from a cartoonist number two don't take your financial advice from cartoonists number three don't take legal advice from cartoonists all right we're going to do this just for fun most of us are not lawyers although weirdly i have a very large percentage of lawyers who watch this based on based on the messages i get so you people who are really lawyers can you please keep me honest i'll be watching the comments as i make my ignorant and ill-informed analysis all right are we all on the same page that what we'll follow will be ignorant and uninformed but fun but fun right so i think one of the things i would like to do is do my analysis from a citizen perspective not a lawyer's perspective because there really are two two things happening there's the the lawyers doing lawyer things and they understand that world and they know what they're doing and that will create some kind of result but then there's this other thing which is unfortunately bigger and more important which is how the public is viewing it the public are for the most part not lawyers just like us most of us right so i'm going to be talking in a way that i don't think is too far off from what this big batch of non-lawyers will be thinking and feeling in other words very approximate and inaccurate and not really understanding the law so i'm in that group so let's talk about that in my opinion after watching both the prosecution and the defense do their job yesterday uh i would say that they that the cause of death is established that the cause of death is established now in my opinion so this is my opinion as just a person watching it like a non-lawyer and in my opinion homicide has been established by both the prosecution and the defense so right now the defense witness i believe has they and i get the names confused of you know who's the which doctor is is saying what but um i believe that even the defense has said that it was the police action that was the the cause and that means homicide right so here's here's the first part i want to assert that homicide that question is now answered and i believe that even the the jury will say to themselves okay homicide has now been proven and what i mean by that is that the evidence for a drug overdose i think has been eliminated because the there's nobody who testified he had pills in the stomach or that he had immediately ingested it right before you know we had all heard that right hadn't we all heard that it looked like he had taken some pills during the arrest or something but there weren't there was no indication that it was in his stomach so we don't have evidence that he did anything that is likely in any realistic way to have coincidentally caused him to die from drugs at coincidentally the time the police were holding him down right now i'm going to talk about drugs being part of the cause you know they're part of the story for sure in my opinion but here's what you need to know about homicide it's not a crime did you know that many in the comments tell me how many of you knew that homicide is not a crime but homicide has been demonstrated to be true it's just not a crime and he hasn't been charged with homicide do you know why he hasn't been charged with homicide because it's not a crime right yeah watch the comments some people are saying what the yeah that's the way you should be saying i'm trying to trigger you into saying what are you talking about how could homicide not be a crime it's not look it up homicide simply means that a human killed somebody and killed is somewhat strictly defined you know or let's say by precedent to mean that a human did the last thing that was like push them over the edge so it could be that the human shot them or it could be that the human did some other kind of action that was the the final variable now this is really important if a human was the final variable in the death that's homicide and i think that both the i think all of the medical people have said that if you took away the police action um it's unlikely he would have died because what are the odds that he somehow had an overdose without taking drugs recently like you don't really do my understanding is overdoses happen pretty quickly after you take the wrong amount of drugs so it would be weird if he had taken the drugs hours before and then just by coincidence he happened to have an overdose death right when the police were sitting on him i mean what are the odds so yes the police the police action resulted in his death that's homicide all right so are we all on the same page the homicide at least i think from the jury's perspective has been completely proven because there's there is no medical person who says anything different there's no medical person who is saying the cause was an overdose or the cause was his health nobody's saying that so it is homicide right again i'm speaking as a non-lawyer just like a person just a person it's homicide but that is not illegal per se because there are different reasons that you could be not guilty of any crime one would be self-defense if you kill somebody in self-defense it's homicide it just doesn't happen to be illegal and i think that shaven has one other opportunity to do homicide without being illegal and it goes like this a reasonable person would not know that what he was doing was a a mortal danger so if shaven chauvin whatever and his lawyers can demonstrate that a reasonable person wouldn't have known this could kill somebody no crime is committed there has to be something in the officer's head that gets to either intention and by the way he's not even being charged with intentionally killing him did you know that the charge does not include any thought that he did it intentionally it's just not even in the charges that would i think that'd be first degree right um the charge is that a reasonable person should have known that his actions would put at least at least a risk of death so that's what the prosecution has to show let me give you a little more detail on this here in psychology today i know it's not a legal document but there was a writer uh barrett brogard who did a real good job of just sort of laying out you know what the charges are so here are the charges he's charged with second degree unintentional murder third degree murder and second degree manslaughter now here's a little bit more on that now first of all is this confusing this is really confusing stuff how many people in the jury are going to be capable of really sorting through this amount of nuance it's kind of hard you know we're asking ordinary people to do a pretty tough task here but i think they'll take it very seriously and and i have at least some optimism that they'll they'll get it right um so here's what we need to know there's nothing about intentional in the charges but proving second degree unintentional murder this is what it would require showing that the defendant officer shavin chauvin chavin caused the victim's death that part we know from the medical examiners or at least that's the testimony and had specific intent to hold on inflict bodily harm short of death so was the officer trying to harm floyd but maybe he didn't think that would kill him but he was trying to cause him a lot of harm and if that went too far he would be guilty of murder is that what happened well how do you treat um a police officer who does intentional harm in the in the uh in the act of subduing somebody don't you if you tase somebody and they die with a taser are you guilty of murder because we know that a taser can kill people do you know what kind of people can be killed by a taser people with weak hearts such as i'll just pick one example of a person with a weak heart george floyd if george floyd had been tased there was a pretty high likelihood he would have died from being tased is tasing an ordinary thing that police do well i i hate to use the word ordinary but we see it a lot if you're a citizen you've seen lots of footage of police tasing people and there is evidence that if you had a weak heart and you got tased you could die there's there's some evidence a number of people have died that way now i don't believe that this situation was taser worthy meaning that i don't think he would have appropriately used the taser in that case because that might have been a little bit more i don't know that for sure but it seemed like it wasn't really called for the the police had enough human power and floyd was sort of only half resisting it didn't look like a teaser situation to me but suppose you knew that within police procedure there's this thing called a taser and it would have killed him or could have you know there's more risks with him that sort of gives you a context in your head as just a citizen that police do things that can kill people without intending to kill him that it's actually a normal fairly routine the police are putting let's say force on people in a variety of ways and each of those variety of ways could actually kill somebody so i don't believe that in the context of police work holding somebody down with the intent that it would hurt if they tried to get up it didn't look like trying to hurt him so much as obviously trying to contain him or since we're talking about reasonable doubt a reasonable person could say i don't know i can't read his mind i don't know if his intention to hurt him it looked like it was his intention just to keep him subdued so i think this part about specific intent to inflict bodily harm short of death is not demonstrated by any evidence is it does anybody have any evidence from anybody that would suggest we know the officer's internal mental thoughts i don't think so so it looks like the prosecution hasn't made that case so that one is a second degree unintentional murder so here's another one third degree murder it requires showing that the accused officer shaven caused the victim's death and their acts were eminently dangerous and were performed with a depraved mind now a depraved mind means that you have you're just sort of an evil person you're an evil person and you did things that you knew put somebody in mortal danger but you did it anyway because you're just sort of a bastard right what evidence has been presented that would show that uh chauvin has a depraved mind none right i don't believe there's any evidence presented to that is there has anybody seen any evidence even proposed that goes in that direction i haven't seen any um and that their acts were eminently dangerous now this so it's even two parts because there's the word and here so i'd have to be a lawyer to know that if you could really separate these ands but let's take it the way this writer wrote it and say that it has to be both eminently dangerous and done with this depraved mind thing there's no evidence of a depraved mind no motivation in in evidence etc um so eminently dangerous let's just look at that and see what evidence we have for that now remember the standard is reasonable doubt the standard is not we know what happened the standard is is there a reasonable doubt about the prosecution story so let's see if there is what would uh oh this is interesting before i do that so without anybody really making note of it the prosecution and the defense have agreed that the video has been debunked do you believe that is my statement true that as of yesterday both the prosecution and the defense are on the same page on this following fact that the video has been debunked here's what i mean up until really about yesterday a hundred percent of the world believed that his knee was on uh george floyd's neck for nine minutes pretty much that's all anybody's talking about his knee was on his neck for nine minutes and now both the prosecution and the defense based on witnesses agree that wasn't the case it looked like it but it wasn't because the video shows that his his knee was in different places and i'm saying that the prosecution agrees because they changed the way they talked about it now they're talking about the knee in the neck area on the on the back and the neck area they've started moving it off the you know off of the artery stuff and now it's just sort of in that area and we don't know how much pressure was on it et cetera so this is um although the um the fact that his knee was not on a neck did not change the potential liability for the officer because we have medical testimony now that wherever that knee was whether it was sort of backish or neckish both of them could have killed them or would have been the cause of death so it's no defense apparently to say no it wasn't exactly on the neck the whole time because the position of him with the handcuffs on on the ground with a guy on his back and a bad heart and had some drugs in him he put all that together and he could have and one of the medical people said he was killed cause of death by the knee on the neckish backish area but here's the point it debunks the video it doesn't it doesn't defend shaven because the the new theory of death about the specifics of it still would make him guilty of something if he did it with this depraved whatever and some kind of uh knowledge that it would be bad but it's important that the defense change their entire theory in the middle of the the thing the entire world believed that the one thing that we all believed to be true was that this damn knee was on george floyd's neck for nine minutes and we just found out that wasn't true and even the defense is acknowledging it that's a big deal here's why it showed that you can't tell what's happening on videos right that's the takeaway the takeaway is we were all defense prosecution public 100 of the people who saw the video initially were all wrong about a really important point where exactly was that knee because if the knee was on the neck the whole time suddenly that feels like you know a little bit about his intentions right maybe you don't but it feels like you do doesn't it that feels like an intention but if you see that he moved it around now you've got reasonable doubt but that reasonable debt would be removed perhaps if you thought that shaven knew that no matter where his knee was this positional asphyxiation thing was potentially going to be fatal did he know that so um i i think it's amazing that the video has been debunked but it's still the evidence all right so here's how i would approach it if i were the defense and again i'm not a lawyer so just assume that i don't even know what's going to be allowable in court right doesn't mean any of this could actually happen i'm just giving you my human being defense not a lawyer defense i would start by saying that we live in a world in which it is typical to see two movies on one screen and i would explain that let's say how many of you in the jury are familiar with the laurel and yanny situation and you would see the people nervously giggle and the jury because most of them are familiar with how easily they're fooled with the laurel and yachty and then you say then i'd say and ladies and gentlemen of the jury you know that before you came in here every one of us and i have to admit even the defense before we looked at the the video in detail we too thought that knee was on his neck for nine minutes that was the movie we thought we were watching but now that we've watched it from a number of angles and had experts testify we know that there was another movie playing at the same time there was one that we all thought we saw and there's one that's different so different in fact that the prosecution has changed the cause of death still they say it's my client but a completely different mechanism of death that we're just learning now it was the video that got us here and we've all just agreed that we didn't see it right video is bad evidence laurel and yani taught you that you've probably seen a number of videos you know in your own experience i don't have to mention which ones but in your own experience have you had let's say in the last year or two have you seen anything that looked real on video and later you found out it wasn't besides this case and most people would be yeah i can think of an example and by the way it's good hypnosis to let them come up with their own example if you give them an example they'll fight with it and say i'm not sure that's an example if you say have you ever seen an example where people were fooled by video and maybe you were people will come up with their own example that they don't fight with so that's why you you let them fill in the blank you don't you don't fill it in for them so once i have established that the prosecution had changed their entire argument from the neck thing to the positional thing i would say look how easily we can be fooled just to put some doubt in their heads right and then i would say if we're trying to figure out whether derek shaven knew that he was putting his client in risk here are the questions we must ask number one why did all the other police officers who were in the scene not intervene well there's a number of possibilities and we don't have it in evidence right one possibility is they were just um maybe they were timid they didn't want to you know interfere with a veteran officer one is there they were all racists every one of them was a racist and they were just happy to see floyd killed i don't think that's the case but i'm just saying all the things that are possible here's another thing that's possible did you notice that all the police did nothing but yet all of the non-police the citizens were quite sure that he was being killed but none of the police at least acted as if they thought that was a serious risk why would that be well i'll give you a few possibilities one you're a bum bro um i'll just get rid of you if it's the best you can do is yell at me in all caps um and by the way you haven't heard my conclusion yet so i'm just i'm just saying what the defense could be uh don't assume this is my opinion all right i'm just telling you what the defense could be all right um so why did all the cops stand down and the non-cops thought it looked like murder here's one possibility remember we're only going for reasonable doubt so you don't have to agree that this is the reason you just have to agree it's one of the possible reasons and we don't know that's all i'm going for one of the possible reasons is police are experienced and they're trained citizens are not experienced in police stops and they're not trained the police probably are aware of the guy who is the police trainer who testified and said that in his opinion chauvin used the least amount of force that was the you know to get the job done and that it was not a deadly situation now is he right or is he wrong the police trainer it doesn't matter here's why the police trainer is a reasonable person nobody said he's crazy he's a reasonable person if you would put the police trainer in shaven's situation he was saying he would have acted about the same and he trains it he not only trained shaven but he probably directly or indirectly was involved with the training for all of the other officers could it be that the reason people who are trained didn't get into it is because the training told them this was safe but if you were a citizen you had not been trained by that you've never heard this training remember they usually say they can't breathe they say they're in pain the handcuffs are hurting their wrists they all say it it doesn't mean it's true but the public's never had that training never had that experience so i would say that the the activity of the other police officers the fact that not one of them would get involved suggest that police are watching a different movie the movie they were seeing is just somebody taken down according to policy the moot and it would be safe according to their movie the way they were trained the citizens were seeing somebody with uh with a neck with a knee on their neck for nine minutes as the lights were going out in in his life they were watching a different movie so to imagine that these people who have viewed the same incident is just not true they weren't viewing the same incident it was the same facts but the way they they filtered it had to be different one was filtered through training and experience one was filtered through no training and experience so there's some reasonable doubt right there now what about the way shaven himself acted do you think that if he believed that he was putting floyd in mortal danger that he would have continued to do it in front of lots of witnesses in front of other police cameras going could shaven have reasonably believed that putting himself just the officer himself in a situation where witnesses would watch him end the life of a black man who's on the ground do you think that shaven thought that there would be no consequences if something bad happened to floyd in that situation not reasonably no reasonable person would think that he would be you know just go about his day if floyd died is there any evidence that shaven is a sociopath i don't believe so i don't believe there's any evidence that he's some kind of weird sociopath how would you feel if you if you held somebody down and they died how would you feel it would ruin your freaking life if you killed somebody accidentally you would never get over that even if you're a cop right cops are a little tougher right they've seen more things they've got training but even a cop it's going to ruin his freaking life if he accidentally kills a guy because he had his knee on him for nine minutes all right so is it reasonable to imagine that even chauvin shaven knew that he was putting this guy in that much danger when his trainer would have done the same thing the police around him apparently either didn't intervene or would have done the same thing now you could ask yourself should he have known and that would be an interesting question but i don't think it would be legally useful because all you have to demonstrate is that a reasonable person in that same situation would have acted the same way a reasonable person and we have that proof because the trainer acted the same way and all of the other police officers acted the same way everybody who had similar training everybody acted the same way and everybody who didn't have that training act in a different way two movies on one screen with a perfect explanation of why people are seeing the movie differently all right there's also the issue that the crowd was threatening and apparently police procedure is that you take care of the threat to the officers first and then you treat anybody who might be having medical problems you could argue that it shouldn't be that way but it is that way and that's exculpatory too but here's the interesting thing oh so here are two kinds of demonstrations that the um the defense could do now i don't know if these would be allowed right so there's a question of what the judge allows but imagine the defense attorney takes in a bathroom scale puts it on the floor during closing arguments gets down on two knees one knee on the bathroom scale and one knee on the floor what do you think the scale would register as weight assuming that you're you're trying to not put your full weight on the the down knee what would be the weight it would well have you tried it i tried it this morning i i put down it looks like somebody tried it because they've already because they have a number there so with me it was around 50 pounds all right so i my weight is uh probably 158 something like that shaven was 140 so not too far out of the the range and my mine was about 50 pounds okay so one demonstration is just having somebody get down and about the same size as shaven or have shaven himself i guess you could have him do it himself just get down on the on the thing and show that it looks like about 50 pounds at minimum now does that mean that shaven was giving him only 50 pounds of pressure or could he have been leaning right into it it'd be hard to tell in the video but it gives reasonable doubt because now you're not sure was he putting you know 140 pounds on it or is he putting 50 pounds on it because george floyd was a big guy right let me ask you this well actually let's take the next example first the other thing and i don't think this would necessarily be allowed by the judge but you can imagine the defense attorney giving his closing arguments on handcuffed and on his stomach while three people were sitting on him and he just you know talks through it you know so so he could demonstrate it that way but let me tell you the most persuasive way to do a demonstration one of the things that the that the video lies about is the sizes of the people involved remember you know a picture doesn't lie yes it does pictures lie better than than anything there's nothing that lies better than a picture pictures are the best way to lie but one of the things that the video doesn't give you when you're seeing george floyd's head basically and then you're seeing shaven you can't tell how big either of them are floyd was like six uh six four and you know probably 200 something and he was big strapping youngish guy shaven was 140 pounds and five eight i think five eight so if you did your demonstration in the courtroom and you were trying to show the jury what they didn't necessarily see on video somebody says six six and 240 pounds i could say that it's somewhere in that range so here's how you do the demonstration in the court you would get a very large wait for it white man to play george floyd got to be white but about the same size about the same age big healthy looking muscular youngish big white guy then you get three black guys who are about 140 pounds to play the role of the police officers and then you could see that there was a big difference between the people on top and the person that they were subduing because imagine imagine the the jury is seeing the actual dimensions of the people which you can't tell on the video it doesn't show you right somebody thinks i'm a right-wing shill if anybody's new to this i'm left of bernie and i don't identify with too many things that you would call right wing uh so do your homework don't be a learn something about me before you before you criticize okay just just don't be a about it just try to up your game a little bit criticism's fine you're welcome to criticize but just get a little bit of information before you do it because if you're criticizing without even knowing who i am you're just being a so don't be that okay all right uh and it is fair and interesting to talk about the trial and how it will go this is not a political thing it's a legal thing and it's interesting it's also a prediction thing let you know where things are going all right so if you did that demonstration i think people would see it and if you reversed the ethnicities of the people involved it would really mess up the brains of the jury because then they would see with their own eyes that race had influenced them you want the jury to know that the races of the people involved bias them and the way to do it is give a demonstration where you reverse the races and nobody would give a if a if a if 140 pound black police officer put his knee for nine minutes on a 240 pound strapping six foot six white guy on the ground nobody would give a right and and i'm not saying that has anything to do with racism it has to do with um there's a natural there's a natural what would you call it revulsion toward the powerful beating up the less powerful it's a natural revulsion and you you could even be a racist and you'd have the revulsion right because when you see somebody in power doing something bad to somebody who you know you think is a group that has no power that's way worse than if you reversed it and the person getting hurt is the powerful one in in other situations right and reversing the ethnicities to do your demonstration you wouldn't have to say any of that the people in the jury would get it they would say why did this seem so bad when the races were the other way and the answer is it is worse when the races are the other way that's not it's not um it's not an illusion it is worse when when the powerful are squishing the less powerful that's worse but that doesn't change the legal liability the fact that it feels worse and is worse it is worse right i won't even say it feels worse it's just worse you know squashing the less powerful is just the worst but it's not worse from a legal perspective no worse from a legal perspective and this is the context so um let's see um here's a question i have if you if it takes three things to kill somebody which one is the cause of death so the uh defense's witness said that the death was caused by a a collection of three things that he had a bad heart he was on drugs which can change your breathing and breathing was the issue and the police officers put him in a position that restricted his breathing now legally that's homicide as i said and legally it puts the last action as the cause the last action was the police so technically legally the way definitions work the way the law works the cop killed him doesn't mean it's illegal because he maybe didn't know it but the the important thing here is that your common sense about this is a little different than how the law treats it and necessarily right that doesn't mean anything's broken my common sense goes like this if it took all three of those things to kill him they were all the cause i get that the last thing that happens always looks like the cause but that's an illusion it required all three things or at least wait for it there's a reasonable doubt that he would have died without the first two things is there anybody who testified that if he did anybody testify that it's we could know he would have died short of having a heart problem and the drug problem you kind of don't know if you took those other two things away the drugs that affects your breathing the heart that affects your breathing and then he died because he couldn't breathe i don't know i feel like i get that one has to be the cause it's just the last thing that happened but our common sense says three things killed him because if you took away any of those one any one of the three he'd probably be alive right if the police hadn't stopped him i think he'd be alive if he didn't have a heart problem don't know but there's a good chance he'd be alive if he hadn't done drugs don't know if it made a difference for sure but there's a good chance so we're only talking about reasonable doubt right that's pretty reasonable in the doubt category i would say especially when we know that tasing can actually kill you if you have a heart like george floyd's actually i shouldn't say that that would be a little bit too much medical certainty but say somebody has a weak heart would be in trouble um so let's see what else we got here all right that's enough for that so my my take on it is that the news will be pro so far the news is reporting this the news is reporting that uh homicide has largely been demonstrated what they don't tell you is what i just told you that that doesn't mean it's a crime watch how illegitimate the press is when they uh when they describe the homicide without telling you that's not illegal by itself they won't tell you that you will be led to believe that proving it was homicide which i believe has been proven and to my satisfaction anyway they're going to tell you that that's the same as murder by sort of just talking about it the same way they won't say it directly they'll just conflate murder with homicide until you can't tell the difference and you want to riot over it that's what's that's where it's going speaking of propaganda let me give you two sentences and you tell me which one of these is propaganda and which one of these is just an accurate statement we'll take a hypothetical hypothetically let's say there was a congress person who had been charged with something and there were two ways to describe this thing they had been but not not charged with let's say accused they'll say there's a congressman who's merely been accused of something no trial he's been accused of something and uh there are two ways to say it one way goes like this the congressman is accused of having sex with a minor here's the second way to say it and both of these will be true the congressman has been accused of having sex with a 17 year old which one of those is propaganda and which one of those is just the news which one did cnn say cnn always says sex with a minor right and they're trying to trap you into saying wait a minute 17 is not so bad oh what did you say pedophile it's a trap so uh somebody says the first one yeah so when you see propaganda like that where the the first thing that you say is the thing people remember now i think i saw jake tapper say he was accused of having sex with a minor and then clarified a 17 year old wouldn't it be better to say he was accused of having sex with a 17 year old who's technically a minor do those sound the same to you because one of them is trying to get a result and the other one is describing what happened i would say and by the way if you have two ways to describe something and it's only an allegation you do have a social responsibility to use the description that doesn't make him look guilty because there's not even a there's not even a charge much less a court case we don't even have a victim and they're already talking about him like he's guilty without a victim meaning we don't we don't know there's a real person yet if there ever is all right nate silver was hilarious and a tweet you should be following nate silver uh he does a better job of sticking with the uh the data and the politics than most people yeah here's what he tweeted and this i laughed for like a long time over this he goes uh 54 of people who have already been vaccinated are still very or somewhat worried about catching covet and but only 29 of people who refuse to get vaccinated are very or somewhat worried about catching covet and then here's his punchline great job everyone that's like a perfect punchline great job everyone it's so droll basically it doesn't matter what you do you're going to be unhappy i guess one way or another you'll be unhappy all right uh there's a video that i think youtube took down but i i saw it i don't know i'm not sure how it took down it is since i saw it but uh there's this dr cole who's made a couple of claims and i want to run them by you because i don't know that they're true and he said the following so fact-checked me on this he said all super spreader events have been indoors can somebody fact check that first of all i'm not sure we know where all the uh super spreader events have been because i'm not sure you'd know there was a super spreader event you just know a lot of people are infected um but is that true that uh all super spreader events have been indoors because that would be a pretty big deal yeah all known so the problem is whether that's just the ones that are known here's the other uh thing he said which i have much lower opinion of its credibility he said there's no such thing as flu and cold season there's only low vitamin d season in other words he's saying that in some seasons your vitamin d is low and that's why you catch things that you wouldn't normally catch otherwise do you buy that here's here's the problem with the vitamin d thing and you might remember that you know a year ago i was making all kinds of noise about the fact that it looked like vitamin d was the the big correlation here it just seemed to be that where there was lots of vitamin d people had better results and i didn't know that that was anything but a coincidence but it was worth looking at and i still think that you have to be careful about that correlation because people who are old and sick have low vitamin d it could be just another way to know you're old and sick it doesn't have to necessarily yeah it doesn't necessarily have to be the vitamin d works it could just be a correlation that sick people don't have much vitamin d but that said i'm still going to keep my vitamin d up because it's good for you in general here's my next speculative question we've all been told that herd immunity is when you get to use 70 80 percent or whatever i think this virus they're thinking is higher because it's so spready but does the herd immunity number in that 70 range does that make sense when your virus attacks certain parts of the population and leaves others largely un unhurt and when only the only people who are super spreaders are the people who are pretty sick and obese and they're the ones who are getting vaccinated first it seems to me that the idea of herd immunity that made sense for all other things doesn't make sense in this case and what i'm saying is that and this is just speculation right so don't take this as anything you should believe more of a question i guess even question if you were to uh let's say hypothetically you vaccinated everybody over 70 and everybody over 50 who's obese and i think we could do that right that or at least you get almost all of them everybody else could still get the virus and it could rage through the rest of the community but there wouldn't be any super spreaders right how fast does this virus spread if you could snap your fingers and the only kind of spread was the one to one type and that's it and the the person's getting it never got sick because let's say they're young or whatever they are um i don't know that 70 is necessary i think it's more like getting all the super spreaders and then maybe it takes care of itself i don't know just a question i have a second question is there anything like micro immunity so we've heard that the the amount of the viral load you get has a lot to do with how sick you get you know that plus your natural health so what would happen to a perfectly healthy person who was exposed to just a little bit of virus could they beat the virus without getting symptoms and become sort of micro immune and you get to hurt immunity just because they were exposed but maybe they don't even test could could you have uh could you test negative for covid but have antibodies is that a thing i don't know and if you can't get covent outdoors and we don't think you get it on airplanes enough to stop flights where the hell are you getting it you know i have this uh this theory that i've never said before let's say hypothesis that it's a sexually transmitted problem i'm just going to put that out there i just have a theory that it might be sexually transmitted i'm only kidding about that but uh but when you see the kids are not having bad problems and the seniors are uh there's actually a there is rampant sex in old folks homes and nursing homes a lot of people don't know that but there is pretty rampant unprotected sex among seniors all right that's all i got to say for today and i'll talk to you tomorrow
oh do i have a show for you today
yeah today will be the best
coffee with scott adams of all time
and i don't say that lightly well
what are we going to do first yes it's a
simultaneous sip and all you need is a
couple of marker glasses i think your
chalice is not a canteen junk flask
a vessel of any kind fill it with your
favorite liquid i like
coffee wait hold
breaking news i'm getting breaking news
there's a new study that shows that
drinking coffee
in moderation keyword moderation
substantially reduces cancer and all
cardiovascular problems
true story by the way i just tweeted it
thank you ian
for pointing that out so
just think about this for a moment just
think about this
moderate coffee drinking reduces your
cancer
and your cardiovascular risk
if that's what you can do with moderate
coffee drinking
think what you can do when you just
start swilling it by the gallon
yeah superpowers that's how science
works
join me now for the simultaneous sip go
hold on hold on hold on that's not
enough
we're trying to protect our health now
one more go
ah i feel a little bit i think i had a
little cancer in my shoulder but it
feels better
now yeah cardiovascular
20 better oh wow
i'll tell you you don't expect it to
work that quickly
but here it is all right well i like to
think
that everybody who watches
my content gets healthier
and smarter and i actually think that's
really happening
you know based on my feedback from
people
you don't get to see it so you don't you
don't see the the view that i see
but the number of people who contact me
literally every day
you know multiple people every day
they've lost weight
they you know they're healthier they're
happier they're getting younger
and apparently they're drinking coffee
and and reducing the risk of serious
illness
so it's all working it's working my plan
is working i love the fact
that every saturday bill maher
is trending for something he said
and i say to myself okay i get that it's
a political show and stuff
so you know those things make news but
every week every week he's trending
and i'm trying to figure out what is it
he does that makes him trend
every week and i think the answer is he
sometimes tells the truth
now i think actually most of the time he
tells the truth
like most people but they don't do it on
tv
he actually tells the truth on tv and
everybody goes
whoa what the hell the next thing you
know it's like trending on twitter
and and that literally is what's
happening he literally is just telling
you the truth
and it becomes like a national story
it's so rare
but he apparently he's joining me
uh somewhat in this opinion that movies
are no longer worth your time
and this is what he said
in a tweet today about
about the current batch of movies i love
this tweet
so bill maher says i don't have to leave
the theater whistling
but would it kill hollywood to once in a
while make a movie that doesn't make me
want to take a bath with the toaster
he says we all had a rough year a little
escapism
would have been appreciated now let me
let me climb on that a little bit you
know i've been telling you for a long
time that if you willingly consume
uh sad fiction there's just a bunch of
people with problems because that's what
a movie is
you know the movie arc is i got a really
big problem
and i'm going to make you look at my big
problems for three hours and maybe at
the end they'll be happy
or maybe at the end a lot of people will
be dead one of those
and yeah i hear godzilla versus kong is
actually pretty good
i'm surprised i can't belie honestly
i can't even imagine how that movie
could be good
here's a spoiler for the king kong and
godzilla movie
so if if you're going to watch the movie
i haven't watched it
so i'm going to give you a spoiler for
the movie having never watched it and
never heard anything about it
alright this hand is godzilla
this hand is king kong i will now
show you the entire movie godzilla vs
king kong
the end that
is the entire movie and i believe i've
saved you a little bit money there
and also a little bit of risk of getting
covered
so yeah there's no reason to watch uh
bad entertainment that's why
um i'm not trying to do a commercial for
youtube
but youtube gets it totally right
because youtube gets you
you know short little bits that are
often
educational useful expand your awareness
and don't hurt you can watch youtube
for days and never see anything
i mean if you want to you'd have to look
for it
you can find stuff that'll make you sad
if you look for it but mostly
youtube's youtube is about things that
make you smarter
or make you happy why would anybody ever
watch a movie again
unless it's a comedy which they don't
make anymore
yeah sure super super hero one is really
a comedy
when i watch these superhero movies
which i do watch those
i watch them for the dialogue in between
the fight scenes
because sometimes it's really funny like
when the hulk was
you know banging loki against the the
ground that was just funny
so that's the closest hollywood gifts to
humor now
there's a story that 40 percent of
marines say they won't get vaccinated
what do you think of that do you know
what would have been a good
uh statistic to include with that story
i'll bet it wasn't there i haven't read
all of the reports of it but
i would like to know what exactly is the
death rate
for unusually healthy young people with
perfect diets and no
zero obesity
i'm thinking it's kind of low so
isn't this exactly the group of people
that
you wouldn't be surprised you know
forget about what your opinion is
whether they should or should not do it
but i wouldn't be surprised because
here's what we did wrong with the
marines
we meaning america right collectively
i've never gone through any basic
training
or marine training or firearms training
in the military or anything like that
but i have to make an assumption
does it is it fair to assume that
teaching somebody to be a marine
includes a good dose of risk management
training in other words learning
that this situation is more dangerous
than this one if even if it's not
obvious on the surface
right in order to win a war it's all
risk management decisions
plus violence that's sort of all it is
risk management resources i guess and
violence
so should we be surprised
that the very people who have the lowest
risk
and i think this is speculative but it
seems reasonable
trained in risk management
and they've also been trained
to not be afraid of right now
i don't think covet is i'm
saying that if you looked at their
specific risks
the big one is bullets
and you know fragmentation from bombs
right that's like
the big risk of going to the war
that's like a real risk we've actually
trained this specific group of people
plus
you know whatever whatever they brought
to the show to not be afraid
even in the scariest situation
should you be surprised that they're
also not afraid and
the least the least scary situation for
them
now of course covet is a very schedule
scary situation for the world
for for them specifically it's kind of
the last
thing they need to worry about let's say
you're a marine
and you get you get infected
what is the downside
one week off with pay right
right i mean maybe you're not where you
want to be but
it's sort of not the worst thing in the
world a week off with pay
all right so i'm not saying that the
marines should or should not get
vaccinated
i'll leave that to them and and the
medical professionals and the military
professionals
there's certainly some precedent that
you could don't be surprised if it
becomes mandatory
i wouldn't be surprised but we'll wait
on that
if i told you we're going to develop a
system a new system for the world
in addition to existing systems and then
the new system would have this feature
that you could be punished because a
stranger holds a different opinion
opinion right we're not talking about
any anybody breaking a law or anything
like that
would you agree to a system that allowed
you to be
because punished stranger somebody you
don't even know holds a different
opinion than you do
would you ever agree to that that's our
current system
that's that's the system we we sort of
evolved into without thinking about it
too much
because here's the setup
if you have the opinion which no court
has
has upheld actually i can't even say
this
because uh i think i get banned from
youtube even mentioning the topic
but there's a topic that had something
to do with let's say
electing and somebody
you can you can guess what that might be
and there are some people who have
different opinions
about let's say
the the perfection of the system
there's some people who think it was
closer to perfect
and other people who might have a
different opinion
now since we haven't done a fully
transparent look at everything there is
to look at
both of those are opinions meaning that
nobody could know they're right
you couldn't know which one is right so
it's just an opinion
but our current system is that if the
people who manage the various platforms
have a different opinion than you do
they can punish you by taking you off
the platform
because in the modern world that is
punishment it could punish you
economically it could punish you
socially it's punishment
our current system allows a stranger
to punish you for having a different
opinion
now it would be one thing if their
opinion was confirmed by science
you know it was like two plus two is
four so it's not really an opinion
in that case you could imagine there's
some situation where
you know the misinformation is bad for
society and they have to
they have to do something about it but
if it's a valid just difference of
opinion
they can punish you for your opinion
current that's the current system
well if i get punished for my opinions
uh you can find me on the
locals platform subscription platform uh
that's growing like crazy by the way
i've got thousands of subscribers now
and i'm giving them micro lessons on
improving their life
with the promise that they will get
thousands of dollars of
life value per month so far
people are saying that they're getting
that so we'll see if we can keep it up
all right um biden is uh
is putting together a commission of uh
so-called
independent scholars and whatnot to talk
about
court packing and other court reforms
now what do you think of that does this
mean that joe biden
is in favor of court packing and he's
just putting a commission together to
cover himself so that when he does it
you can say hey
all these independent people democrats
and republicans
they said it'd be okay do you think
that's what's going to happen
i'm going to make a prediction and it
goes like this
i of course and you may have noticed
have sometimes been critical
of president biden i've been critical of
his
let's say mental capabilities etc
but if you wanted to kill something
with bureaucracy and make it look like
the
the shot was fired by someone else
you couldn't do much better than joe
biden
because it looks to me like joe biden is
creating the commission
specifically to not do court packing so
that
this is my prediction uh i believe most
people on the right are saying oh no
this is the first step to court packing
so he plans to do it and he's just
giving some cover for himself totally
possible
all right so let me say as clearly as
possible i'm not ruling that out
if you're just looking at the surface
kind of looks that way
doesn't it it looks sort of like he does
plan to do it
so i will acknowledge that it looks
exactly like he plans to do it
i'll acknowledge that that could be
actually literally the reality
but i'm going to predict the opposite
i predict that this is just cover
so that when the scholars most of them
or all of them say
this is a bad idea and why
that that biden will have cover for not
doing it
now i think he might do some other court
reforms i don't know what they are
but there might you know it's always
good to look at reforms
here's why i think the commission will
not recommend
court packing it's kind of obvious isn't
it
because the next president would just
court pack again
and then when it changes parties again
they'd
court back again why wouldn't they
and then where does it stop how big is
the court
but more importantly it doesn't even
matter how big the court is what matters
is that would
uh eliminate independence or even the
semblance of independence
of the judiciary it would effectively
destroy the republic
as it was originally conceived now now
you could argue
i'd like to destroy the republic but if
you're not arguing that you would like
to destroy the public the republic
uh that's the bad idea because it would
the
the independence of the three branches
of government is the most essential part
of the government
and this would eliminate it it would
make them basically it would make the
court a captive of the executive
of office so there's no point in having
a court
if the executive office pretty much not
a hundred percent
but pretty much determines what they're
gonna decide before they even get a case
right so i can't believe that you would
even get
democrats who are actual scholars
right real scholars i'm not sure you can
get a democrat
scholar to buy into this now i was
thinking the other day
and i'm going to modify a suggestion i
had a long time ago
i was thinking once wouldn't we be
better off
if you always made the court balanced
so they actually have the same amount of
conservative leaning and right leading
people
and that was my first thought it's like
well that would be perfect
because then they wouldn't make any
decisions unless you could get at least
one person
to kind of go over to the other side
otherwise it would just be
tie tie tie tie but
if it was something important and the
court you know
really thought they need to move on it
somebody could
go over to the other side that's what i
was thinking i feel now that was a
terrible idea
here's why if it's even
your incentive to start trading
gets really high as in well we can't get
anything done
on anything but you'd like to get this
thing done you
conservatives and we liberals would like
to get this other thing passed
why don't we make a deal we just need
one of you
to come over on this issue and then
we'll have one of us
go over on that other issue now i don't
believe that the
justices have ever had a conversation
like that
i mean i i would like to believe that
these are serious people who would never
come close to any kind of horse trading
but right now they don't have to what
happens if they had to
it would be just like congress it would
just be horse trading
and then what happens if you get that
situation are they more susceptible to
bribery
if you take nine justices and expand it
to
any larger number have you increased or
decreased or kept the same
the risk of bribery or blackmail
it's more right it's more because there
are more people to bribe
so there are all kinds of things wrong
with court packing and i think
and i predict that joe biden is using
the bureaucracy
and the system basically to kill it
but he might do some court reforms that
you might like who knows
um south korea reportedly and i don't
believe any news that comes out of
i'm sorry north korea i don't believe
any news that comes out of north korea
but the news is that there was some
guy who was a official in education
who had been tasked with fixing
education in some way in north korea
but given no resources to do it and i
guess he made the mistake
of complaining that he wasn't getting
enough resources
to do his job and
the way kim jong-un decided to
fix this was my ex executing him
which is not funny just the fact that i
laughed
uh that's just because i'm a terrible
person it's not because it's funny
let's just get that clear it's not funny
i'm a terrible person um
so this is what the guy
said before they killed him
allegedly the chairman reportedly said i
don't understand why
the authorities would choose to
implement the act
create this commission and call busy
professors away from their university
jobs
if they were not going to give the
commission any resources
park said even if we make suggestions
they just tell us to keep our mouths
shut
so let's go through the motions of
gathering and then go home he reportedly
told his
commission members now doesn't that
sound like every employee of a big
company
you gave me this assignment but you
didn't give me enough resources
and then the pointy-haired boss just
executes them
so this is a case of the simulation and
code reuse
kim jong-un has just become the pointy
head boss
pointy-haired boss have you seen the
picture of kim jong-un
he is getting closer and closer to the
little pointy hair thing
sort of like flatter in the middle a
little bit a little bit pointy haired
code reuse simulation all right let's
talk about the big news of the day the
floyd trial
and before i give you my
uh legal analysis
here's the thing you need to know and
hear this clearly
number one you should never get medical
advice from a cartoonist
number two don't take your financial
advice from cartoonists
number three don't take legal advice
from cartoonists all right we're going
to do this just for fun
most of us are not lawyers although
weirdly i have a very large
percentage of lawyers who watch this
based on based on the
messages i get so you people who are
really lawyers
can you please keep me honest i'll be
watching the
comments as i make my ignorant and
ill-informed
analysis all right are we all on the
same page that what we'll follow
will be ignorant and uninformed but fun
but fun right so i think one of the
things i would like to do is
do my analysis from a
citizen perspective not a lawyer's
perspective
because there really are two two things
happening there's the
the lawyers doing lawyer things and they
understand that world and they know what
they're doing
and that will create some kind of result
but then there's this other thing which
is
unfortunately bigger and more important
which is how the public is viewing it
the public are for the most part not
lawyers just like us
most of us right so i'm going to be
talking in a way that i don't think is
too far
off from what this big batch of
non-lawyers will be thinking and feeling
in other words very approximate and
inaccurate and not
really understanding the law so i'm in
that group
so let's talk about that
in my opinion after watching both the
prosecution
and the defense do their job yesterday
uh
i would say that they that the cause of
death
is established that the cause of death
is established now in my opinion so this
is my opinion
as just a person watching it like a
non-lawyer
and in my opinion homicide has been
established
by both the prosecution
and the defense so
right now the defense witness i believe
has
they and i get the names confused of you
know who's the
which doctor is is saying what but um
i believe that even the defense has said
that it was the police action
that was the the cause and that means
homicide
right so here's here's the first part i
want to assert
that homicide that question is now
answered
and i believe that even the the jury
will say to themselves
okay homicide has now been proven
and what i mean by that is that the
evidence for
a drug overdose i think has been
eliminated
because the there's nobody who testified
he had pills in the stomach
or that he had immediately ingested it
right before
you know we had all heard that right
hadn't we all heard
that it looked like he had taken some
pills during the arrest or something
but there weren't there was no
indication that it was in his stomach
so we don't have evidence that he did
anything that is likely in any
realistic way to have coincidentally
caused him to die from drugs at
coincidentally the time the police were
holding him down
right now i'm going to talk about drugs
being part of the cause
you know they're part of the story for
sure in my opinion
but here's what you need to know about
homicide
it's not a crime did you know that
many in the comments tell me how many of
you knew
that homicide is not a crime
but homicide has been demonstrated to be
true
it's just not a crime
and he hasn't been charged with homicide
do you know why he hasn't been charged
with homicide
because it's not a crime right
yeah watch the comments some people are
saying what the
yeah that's the way you should be saying
i'm trying to trigger you into saying
what are you talking about how could
homicide not be a crime
it's not look it up homicide simply
means that a human
killed somebody and killed is
somewhat strictly defined you know or
let's say by precedent
to mean that a human did the last
thing that was like push them over the
edge
so it could be that the human shot them
or it could be that the human did some
other kind of action that was the
the final variable now
this is really important if a human was
the final variable
in the death that's homicide
and i think that both the i think all of
the medical people have said
that if you took away the police action
um it's unlikely he would have died
because what are the odds that he
somehow had an overdose
without taking drugs recently like
you don't really do my understanding is
overdoses happen pretty quickly after
you take the wrong amount of drugs
so it would be weird if he had taken the
drugs hours before
and then just by coincidence he happened
to have an overdose death
right when the police were sitting on
him i mean what are the odds
so yes the police the police action
resulted in his death
that's homicide all right so are we all
on the same page
the homicide at least i think from the
jury's perspective has been completely
proven because there's there is no
medical person who says anything
different
there's no medical person who is saying
the cause was an overdose or the cause
was his health
nobody's saying that so it is homicide
right again i'm speaking as a non-lawyer
just like a person
just a person it's homicide but that is
not illegal
per se because there are different
reasons that you could be
not guilty of any crime one would be
self-defense
if you kill somebody in self-defense
it's homicide
it just doesn't happen to be illegal and
i think that
shaven has one other opportunity to do
homicide without being illegal and it
goes like this
a reasonable person would not know
that what he was doing was a a mortal
danger
so if shaven chauvin whatever and his
lawyers can demonstrate
that a reasonable person wouldn't have
known this could kill somebody
no crime is committed there has to be
something in the
officer's head that gets to either
intention and by the way he's not even
being
charged with intentionally killing him
did you know that
the charge does not include any thought
that he did it intentionally
it's just not even in the charges that
would i think that'd be first degree
right
um the charge is that a reasonable
person
should have known that his actions would
put at least
at least a risk of death
so that's what the prosecution has to
show let me give you a little more
detail on this
here in psychology today i know it's not
a legal document but there was a writer
uh barrett brogard who did a real good
job of just sort of
laying out you know what the charges are
so here are the charges
he's charged with second degree
unintentional murder
third degree murder and second degree
manslaughter now
here's a little bit more on that now
first of all
is this confusing this is really
confusing stuff
how many people in the jury are going to
be capable of really sorting through
this
amount of nuance it's kind of hard you
know we're asking ordinary people to do
a pretty tough task here
but i think they'll take it very
seriously and and i have at least some
optimism that they'll
they'll get it right um
so here's what we need to know there's
nothing about intentional in the charges
but proving second degree unintentional
murder
this is what it would require showing
that the defendant
officer shavin chauvin chavin caused the
victim's death that part we know
from the medical examiners or at least
that's the testimony
and had specific intent to hold on
inflict bodily harm short of death so
was the officer trying to harm
floyd but maybe he didn't think that
would kill him
but he was trying to cause him a lot of
harm and if that went too far he would
be guilty of murder
is that what happened well
how do you treat um a police officer who
does intentional harm in the in the uh
in the act of subduing somebody
don't you if you tase somebody and they
die
with a taser are you guilty of murder
because we know that a taser can kill
people
do you know what kind of people can be
killed by a taser
people with weak hearts
such as i'll just pick one example of a
person with a weak heart
george floyd if george floyd had been
tased there was a pretty high likelihood
he would have died from being tased
is tasing an ordinary thing that police
do
well i i hate to use the word ordinary
but we see it a lot
if you're a citizen you've seen lots of
footage of
police tasing people and there is
evidence that if you had a weak heart
and you got tased you could die there's
there's some evidence
a number of people have died that way
now
i don't believe that this situation was
taser worthy
meaning that i don't think he would have
appropriately used the taser in that
case
because that might have been a little
bit more i don't know that for sure but
it seemed like it wasn't really called
for
the the police had enough human power
and
floyd was sort of only half resisting it
didn't look like a teaser situation to
me
but suppose you knew that within police
procedure there's this thing called a
taser
and it would have killed him or could
have you know
there's more risks with him that sort of
gives you
a context in your head as just a citizen
that police do things that can kill
people
without intending to kill him that it's
actually a normal
fairly routine the police are putting
let's say force on people in a variety
of ways
and each of those variety of ways could
actually kill somebody
so i don't believe that in the context
of police work
holding somebody down with the intent
that it would hurt if they tried to get
up
it didn't look like trying to hurt him
so much as
obviously trying to contain him or since
we're talking about reasonable doubt
a reasonable person could say i don't
know i can't read his mind
i don't know if his intention to hurt
him it looked like it was
his intention just to keep him subdued
so i think this part about specific
intent to inflict bodily harm
short of death is not demonstrated by
any evidence
is it does anybody have any evidence
from anybody that would suggest
we know the officer's internal mental
thoughts i don't think so
so it looks like the prosecution hasn't
made that case
so that one is a second degree
unintentional murder
so here's another one third degree
murder it requires showing that the
accused
officer shaven caused the victim's death
and their acts were eminently dangerous
and were performed with a depraved mind
now a depraved mind means that you have
you're just sort of an evil person
you're an evil person
and you did things that you knew put
somebody in mortal danger
but you did it anyway because you're
just sort of a bastard
right what evidence has been presented
that would show that uh chauvin has a
depraved mind
none right i don't believe there's any
evidence presented to that
is there has anybody seen any evidence
even
proposed that goes in that direction i
haven't seen any
um and that their acts were eminently
dangerous
now this so it's even two parts because
there's the word and here
so i'd have to be a lawyer to know that
if you could really separate these ands
but let's take it the way this writer
wrote it and say that it has to be both
eminently dangerous and done with this
depraved mind thing
there's no evidence of a depraved mind
no motivation
in in evidence etc um
so eminently dangerous let's just look
at that
and see what evidence we have for that
now remember the standard is reasonable
doubt
the standard is not we know what
happened the standard is
is there a reasonable doubt about the
prosecution story
so let's see if there is what would uh
oh this is interesting before i do that
so without anybody really making note of
it
the prosecution and the defense have
agreed
that the video has been debunked
do you believe that is my statement true
that as of yesterday both the
prosecution
and the defense are on the same page on
this following fact
that the video has been debunked
here's what i mean up until
really about yesterday a hundred percent
of the world
believed that his knee was on uh george
floyd's neck for nine minutes
pretty much that's all anybody's talking
about
his knee was on his neck for nine
minutes
and now both the prosecution and the
defense based on witnesses
agree that wasn't the case it looked
like it
but it wasn't because the video shows
that his
his knee was in different places and i'm
saying that the prosecution agrees
because they changed the way they talked
about it
now they're talking about the knee in
the neck area
on the on the back and the neck area
they've started moving it off the
you know off of the artery stuff and now
it's just sort of in that area
and we don't know how much pressure was
on it et cetera
so this is um
although the um the fact that his knee
was not on a neck
did not change the potential liability
for the officer
because we have medical testimony now
that wherever that knee was
whether it was sort of backish or
neckish
both of them could have killed them or
would have been the cause of death
so it's no defense apparently to say
no it wasn't exactly on the neck the
whole time because the position of him
with the handcuffs on
on the ground with a guy on his back and
a bad heart and had some drugs in him
he put all that together and he could
have
and one of the medical people said he
was killed cause of death
by the knee on the neckish backish area
but here's the point it debunks the
video
it doesn't it doesn't defend shaven
because the the new theory of death
about the specifics of it
still would make him guilty of something
if he did it with this depraved
whatever and some kind of uh knowledge
that it would be bad
but it's important that the defense
change their entire theory
in the middle of the the thing
the entire world believed that the one
thing that we all believed to be true
was that this damn knee was on george
floyd's neck
for nine minutes and we just found out
that wasn't true
and even the defense is acknowledging it
that's a big deal here's why
it showed that you can't tell what's
happening on videos
right that's the takeaway the takeaway
is we were all
defense prosecution public
100 of the people who saw the video
initially
were all wrong about a really important
point
where exactly was that knee because if
the knee was on the neck the whole time
suddenly that feels like you know a
little bit about his intentions right
maybe you don't
but it feels like you do doesn't it that
feels like an intention
but if you see that he moved it around
now you've got reasonable doubt but
that reasonable debt would be removed
perhaps
if you thought that shaven knew that no
matter where his knee was
this positional asphyxiation thing was
potentially
going to be fatal did he know that
so um i
i think it's amazing that the video has
been debunked but it's still the
evidence
all right so here's how i would approach
it if i were the defense and again
i'm not a lawyer so just assume that i
don't even know what's going to be
allowable in court
right doesn't mean any of this could
actually happen i'm just giving you my
human being defense not a lawyer defense
i would start by saying that
we live in a world in which it is
typical to see
two movies on one screen
and i would explain that let's say how
many of you in the jury
are familiar with the laurel and yanny
situation
and you would see the people nervously
giggle and the jury
because most of them are familiar with
how easily they're fooled with the
laurel and yachty and then you say then
i'd say
and ladies and gentlemen of the jury you
know that before you came in here
every one of us and i have to admit even
the defense
before we looked at the the video in
detail
we too thought that knee was on his neck
for nine minutes
that was the movie we thought we were
watching but now that we've watched it
from a number of angles and had
experts testify we know that there was
another movie playing at the same time
there was one that we all thought we saw
and there's one that's different
so different in fact that the
prosecution has changed the cause of
death
still they say it's my client but a
completely different mechanism of death
that we're just learning now it was the
video that got us here
and we've all just agreed that we didn't
see it right
video is bad evidence
laurel and yani taught you that you've
probably seen a number of videos
you know in your own experience i don't
have to mention which ones
but in your own experience have you had
let's say in the last year or two
have you seen anything that looked real
on video and later you found out it
wasn't
besides this case and most people would
be
yeah i can think of an example and by
the way it's good hypnosis
to let them come up with their own
example if you give them an example
they'll fight with it and say i'm not
sure that's an example
if you say have you ever seen an example
where people were fooled by video and
maybe you were
people will come up with their own
example that they don't fight with
so that's why you you let them fill in
the blank you don't you don't fill it in
for them
so once i have established that the
prosecution had changed their entire
argument from the neck thing to the
positional thing
i would say look how easily we can be
fooled just to put some doubt in their
heads right
and then i would say if we're trying to
figure out
whether derek shaven knew that he was
putting his client in risk
here are the questions we must ask
number one
why did all the other police officers
who were in the scene
not intervene well there's a number of
possibilities and we don't have it in
evidence right
one possibility is they were just um
maybe they were timid they didn't want
to you know
interfere with a veteran officer
one is there they were all racists every
one of them was a racist and they were
just happy to see
floyd killed i don't think that's the
case
but i'm just saying all the things that
are possible here's another thing that's
possible
did you notice that all the police did
nothing
but yet all of the non-police the
citizens
were quite sure that he was being killed
but none of the police at least acted as
if
they thought that was a serious risk
why would that be well i'll give you a
few possibilities
one you're a bum bro
um
i'll just get rid of you
if it's the best you can do is yell at
me in all caps
um and by the way you haven't heard my
conclusion yet so i'm just
i'm just saying what the defense could
be uh
don't assume this is my opinion all
right i'm just telling you what the
defense could be all right um so why did
all the cops stand down and the
non-cops thought it looked like murder
here's one possibility
remember we're only going for reasonable
doubt
so you don't have to agree that this is
the reason
you just have to agree it's one of the
possible reasons and we don't know
that's all i'm going for one of the
possible reasons
is police are experienced
and they're trained citizens are not
experienced in
police stops and they're not trained
the police probably are aware of the guy
who is the police trainer who testified
and said that in his opinion chauvin
used the least amount of force that was
the you know to get the job done and
that it was not a deadly situation
now is he right or is he wrong
the police trainer it doesn't matter
here's why the police trainer
is a reasonable person
nobody said he's crazy he's a reasonable
person
if you would put the police trainer in
shaven's situation
he was saying he would have acted about
the same
and he trains it he not only trained
shaven but he probably
directly or indirectly was involved with
the training for all of the other
officers
could it be that the reason people who
are trained
didn't get into it is because the
training told them
this was safe but if you were a citizen
you had not been trained by that
you've never heard this training
remember
they usually say they can't breathe they
say they're in pain
the handcuffs are hurting their wrists
they all say it
it doesn't mean it's true but the
public's never had that training
never had that experience so i would say
that the
the activity of the other police
officers
the fact that not one of them would get
involved suggest that
police are watching a different movie
the movie they were seeing is just
somebody taken down according to policy
the moot and it would be safe according
to their movie the way they were trained
the citizens were seeing somebody with
uh
with a neck with a knee on their neck
for nine minutes as the lights were
going out in in his life
they were watching a different movie so
to imagine that these people who have
viewed the same incident
is just not true they weren't viewing
the same incident it was the same
facts but the way they they filtered it
had to be different one was filtered
through training and experience
one was filtered through no training and
experience
so there's some reasonable doubt right
there
now what about the way shaven himself
acted
do you think that if he believed that he
was putting floyd in mortal danger
that he would have continued to do it in
front of lots of witnesses
in front of other police cameras going
could shaven have reasonably believed
that putting himself just the officer
himself
in a situation where witnesses would
watch him
end the life of a black man who's on the
ground
do you think that shaven thought that
there would be no consequences if
something bad happened to floyd in that
situation
not reasonably no reasonable person
would think that he would be you know
just go about his day
if floyd died is there any evidence
that shaven is a sociopath
i don't believe so i don't believe
there's any evidence that he's some kind
of weird sociopath
how would you feel if you if you
held somebody down and they died
how would you feel it would ruin your
freaking life
if you killed somebody accidentally you
would never
get over that even if you're a cop right
cops are a little tougher right they've
seen more things they've got training
but even a cop it's going to ruin his
freaking life if he accidentally kills a
guy
because he had his knee on him for nine
minutes all right
so is it reasonable to imagine that even
chauvin
shaven knew that he was putting this guy
in that much danger
when his trainer would have done the
same thing
the police around him apparently either
didn't intervene or would have done the
same thing
now you could ask yourself should he
have known
and that would be an interesting
question but i don't think it would be
legally useful
because all you have to demonstrate is
that a reasonable person
in that same situation would have acted
the same way
a reasonable person and we have that
proof
because the trainer acted the same way
and all of the other police officers
acted the same way everybody who had
similar training
everybody acted the same way and
everybody who didn't have that training
act in a different way two movies
on one screen with a perfect explanation
of why people are seeing the movie
differently
all right
there's also the issue that the crowd
was threatening and apparently police
procedure is that you take care of the
threat to the officers first and then
you treat
anybody who might be having medical
problems you could argue that it
shouldn't be that way but it is that way
and that's exculpatory too
but here's the interesting thing oh
so here are two kinds of demonstrations
that the
um the defense could do now i don't know
if these would be allowed right so
there's a question of what the judge
allows
but imagine the defense attorney takes
in a bathroom scale
puts it on the floor during closing
arguments gets down on two knees one
knee on the bathroom scale and one knee
on the floor
what do you think the scale would
register as weight
assuming that you're you're trying to
not put your full weight
on the the down knee what would be
the weight it would well have you tried
it
i tried it this morning i i put down
it looks like somebody tried it because
they've already because they have a
number there
so with me it was around 50 pounds
all right so i my weight is uh
probably 158 something like that shaven
was 140
so not too far out of the the range and
my mine was about 50 pounds
okay so one demonstration is just having
somebody get down
and about the same size as shaven or
have shaven himself
i guess you could have him do it himself
just get down on the on the thing and
show that
it looks like about 50 pounds at minimum
now
does that mean that shaven was
giving him only 50 pounds of pressure or
could he have been leaning right into it
it'd be hard to tell in the video but it
gives
reasonable doubt because now you're not
sure
was he putting you know 140 pounds on it
or is he putting 50 pounds on it
because george floyd was a big guy right
let me ask you this well actually
let's take the next example first the
other thing and i don't think this would
necessarily be allowed by the judge
but you can imagine the defense attorney
giving his closing arguments
on handcuffed and on his stomach
while three people were sitting on him
and he just you know talks through it
you know so so he could demonstrate it
that way but let me tell you the most
persuasive way to do a demonstration
one of the things that the that the
video lies about
is the sizes of the people involved
remember you know a picture doesn't lie
yes it does
pictures lie better than than anything
there's nothing that lies better than a
picture pictures are the best way to lie
but one of the things that the video
doesn't give you when you're seeing
george floyd's head basically and then
you're seeing
shaven you can't tell how big either of
them are
floyd was like six uh
six four and you know probably 200
something and he was big strapping
youngish guy shaven was 140 pounds and
five eight i think five eight
so if you did your demonstration in the
courtroom and you were trying to show
the jury
what they didn't necessarily see on
video
somebody says six six and 240 pounds
i could say that it's somewhere in that
range
so here's how you do the demonstration
in the court
you would get a very large wait for it
white man to play george floyd
got to be white but about the same size
about the same age
big healthy looking muscular youngish
big white guy then you get three black
guys
who are about 140 pounds to play the
role of the police officers
and then you could see that there was a
big difference between the
people on top and the person that they
were subduing
because imagine imagine the
the jury is seeing the actual dimensions
of the people
which you can't tell on the video it
doesn't show you
right somebody thinks i'm a
right-wing shill
if anybody's new to this i'm left of
bernie
and i don't identify with too many
things that you would call
right wing uh so
do your homework don't be a
learn something about me before you
before you criticize
okay just just don't be a about it
just try to up your game a little bit
criticism's fine
you're welcome to criticize but just get
a little bit of information before you
do it
because if you're criticizing without
even knowing who i am
you're just being a so don't be
that okay
all right uh and it is fair and
interesting to talk about the trial and
how it will go
this is not a political thing it's a
legal thing and it's interesting it's
also a prediction thing
let you know where things are going all
right so if you did that demonstration
i think people would see it and if you
reversed the ethnicities of the people
involved
it would really mess up the brains of
the jury because then they would
see with their own eyes that race had
influenced them
you want the jury to know that the races
of the people involved
bias them and the way to do it is give a
demonstration
where you reverse the races and nobody
would give a
if a if a if 140 pound
black police officer put his knee for
nine minutes
on a 240 pound strapping six foot six
white guy on the ground nobody would
give
a right and
and i'm not saying that has anything to
do with racism
it has to do with um there's a natural
there's a natural what would you call it
revulsion
toward the powerful beating up the less
powerful
it's a natural revulsion and
you you could even be a racist and you'd
have the revulsion
right because when you see somebody in
power
doing something bad to somebody who you
know you think is a group that has no
power
that's way worse than if you reversed it
and the person getting hurt
is the powerful one in in other
situations right
and reversing the ethnicities to do your
demonstration
you wouldn't have to say any of that the
people in the jury would get it
they would say why did this seem so bad
when the races were the other way
and the answer is it is worse
when the races are the other way that's
not it's not
um it's not an illusion
it is worse when when the powerful
are squishing the less powerful that's
worse
but that doesn't change the legal
liability
the fact that it feels worse and is
worse it is worse right
i won't even say it feels worse it's
just worse you know squashing the less
powerful is just the worst
but it's not worse from a legal
perspective
no worse from a legal perspective and
this is the context
so um
let's see um
[Music]
here's a question i have if you if it
takes three things to kill somebody
which one is the cause of death
so the uh defense's witness
said that the death was caused by a a
collection of three things
that he had a bad heart he was on drugs
which can change your breathing
and breathing was the issue and the
police officers put him in a position
that restricted his breathing now
legally that's homicide as i said and
legally
it puts the last action as the cause
the last action was the police so
technically legally the way definitions
work the way the law works
the cop killed him doesn't mean it's
illegal because he maybe didn't know it
but the the important thing
here is that your common sense about
this is a little different than how the
law treats it
and necessarily right that doesn't mean
anything's broken
my common sense goes like this
if it took all three of those things to
kill him
they were all the cause i get
that the last thing that happens always
looks like the cause
but that's an illusion it required all
three things
or at least wait for it
there's a reasonable doubt that he would
have died without the first two things
is there anybody who testified that if
he
did anybody testify that it's we could
know he would have died
short of having a heart problem and the
drug problem
you kind of don't know if you took those
other two things away
the drugs that affects your breathing
the heart
that affects your breathing and then he
died because he couldn't breathe
i don't know i feel like
i get that one has to be the cause it's
just the last thing that happened
but our common sense says three things
killed him
because if you took away any of those
one any one of the three
he'd probably be alive right if the
police hadn't stopped him i think he'd
be alive
if he didn't have a heart problem don't
know
but there's a good chance he'd be alive
if he hadn't done drugs
don't know if it made a difference for
sure but there's a good chance
so we're only talking about reasonable
doubt right
that's pretty reasonable in the doubt
category i would say
especially when we know that tasing can
actually kill you
if you have a heart like george floyd's
actually i shouldn't say that that would
be a little bit too much
medical certainty but say somebody has a
weak heart
would be in trouble um
so let's see what else we got here all
right that's enough for that so my
my take on it is that the news will be
pro
so far the news is reporting this the
news is reporting that
uh homicide has largely been
demonstrated
what they don't tell you is what i just
told you that that doesn't mean it's a
crime
watch how illegitimate the press is when
they
uh when they describe the homicide
without telling you that's not illegal
by itself
they won't tell you that you will be led
to believe
that proving it was homicide which i
believe has been proven
and to my satisfaction anyway they're
going to tell you that that's
the same as murder by sort of just
talking about it the same way they won't
say it directly
they'll just conflate murder with
homicide
until you can't tell the difference and
you want to riot over it
that's what's that's where it's going
speaking of
propaganda let me give you two sentences
and you tell me which one of these is
propaganda
and which one of these is just an
accurate statement
we'll take a hypothetical hypothetically
let's say there was a congress person
who had been charged with something
and there were two ways to describe this
thing they had been but not not charged
with let's say accused
they'll say there's a congressman who's
merely been accused of something
no trial he's been accused of something
and
uh there are two ways to say it
one way goes like this the congressman
is accused of having sex with a minor
here's the second way to say it and both
of these will be true
the congressman has been accused of
having sex with a 17 year old
which one of those is propaganda and
which one of those is just the news
which one did cnn say cnn always says
sex with a minor
right and they're trying to trap you
into saying wait a minute 17 is not so
bad
oh what did you say pedophile
it's a trap so uh
somebody says the first one yeah so
when you see propaganda like that
where the the first thing that you say
is the thing people remember
now i think i saw jake tapper say he was
accused of having sex with a minor
and then clarified a 17 year old
wouldn't it be better to say he was
accused of having sex
with a 17 year old who's technically a
minor
do those sound the same to you because
one of them is trying to get a result
and the other one is describing what
happened
i would say and by the way if you have
two ways to describe something and it's
only an allegation
you do have a social responsibility to
use the description
that doesn't make him look guilty
because
there's not even a there's not even a
charge much less a court case
we don't even have a victim and they're
already talking about him like he's
guilty
without a victim meaning we don't we
don't know there's a real person yet
if there ever is all right
nate silver was hilarious and a tweet
you should be following nate silver
uh he does a better job of sticking with
the uh the data and the politics than
most people
yeah here's what he tweeted and this i
laughed for like a long
time over this he goes uh 54
of people who have already been
vaccinated are still very or somewhat
worried about catching covet
and but only 29 of people who refuse to
get vaccinated are very or somewhat
worried about catching covet
and then here's his punchline great job
everyone
that's like a perfect punchline great
job everyone
it's so droll
basically it doesn't matter what you do
you're going to be unhappy i guess
one way or another you'll be unhappy all
right uh
there's a video that i think youtube
took down but i i saw it
i don't know i'm not sure how it took
down it is since i saw it
but uh there's this dr cole
who's made a couple of claims and i want
to run them by you because i don't know
that they're true
and he said the following so
fact-checked me on this he said
all super spreader events have been
indoors
can somebody fact check that first of
all i'm not sure we know where all the
uh super spreader events have been
because i'm not sure you'd know there
was a super spreader event you just know
a lot of people are
infected um but is that true
that uh all super spreader events have
been indoors
because that would be a pretty big deal
yeah all known so the problem is whether
that's just the ones that are known
here's the other uh thing he said which
i have
much lower opinion of its credibility
he said there's no such thing as flu and
cold season there's only low vitamin d
season in other words he's saying that
in some seasons your vitamin d is low
and that's why you catch things
that you wouldn't normally catch
otherwise do you buy that
here's here's the problem with the
vitamin d thing
and you might remember that you know a
year ago i was
making all kinds of noise about the fact
that it looked like vitamin d was the
the big correlation here it just seemed
to be
that where there was lots of vitamin d
people had better results
and i didn't know that that was anything
but a coincidence
but it was worth looking at and i still
think that you have to be careful about
that
correlation because people who are old
and sick have low vitamin d
it could be just another way to know
you're old and sick
it doesn't have to necessarily
yeah it doesn't necessarily have to be
the vitamin d works it could just be a
correlation that
sick people don't have much vitamin d
but that said
i'm still going to keep my vitamin d up
because it's good for you in general
here's my next speculative question
we've all been told that herd immunity
is when you get to
use 70 80 percent or whatever i think
this virus they're thinking is
higher because it's so spready
but does the herd immunity number
in that 70 range does
that make sense when your virus attacks
certain parts of the population and
leaves others
largely un unhurt and
when only the only people who are super
spreaders
are the people who are pretty sick and
obese and they're the ones who are
getting vaccinated first
it seems to me that
the idea of herd immunity that made
sense for all other things
doesn't make sense in this case and what
i'm saying is
that and this is just speculation right
so don't take this as anything
you should believe more of a question i
guess
even question if you were to uh let's
say hypothetically
you vaccinated everybody over 70
and everybody over 50 who's obese
and i think we could do that right that
or at least you get almost all of them
everybody else could still get the virus
and it could
rage through the rest of the community
but
there wouldn't be any super spreaders
right
how fast does this virus spread if you
could
snap your fingers and the only kind of
spread was the one to one type
and that's it and the the person's
getting it
never got sick because let's say they're
young or whatever they are
um
i don't know that 70 is necessary
i think it's more like getting all the
super spreaders and then
maybe it takes care of itself i don't
know just a question
i have a second question
is there anything like micro immunity
so we've heard that the the amount of
the viral load you get
has a lot to do with how sick you get
you know that plus
your natural health so what would happen
to a perfectly healthy person
who was exposed to just a little bit of
virus
could they beat the virus without
getting symptoms
and become sort of micro immune
and you get to hurt immunity just
because they were exposed
but maybe they don't even test could
could you have uh
could you test negative for covid but
have antibodies
is that a thing
i don't know and if you can't get
covent outdoors and we don't think you
get it on airplanes
enough to stop flights where the hell
are you getting it
you know i have this uh this theory
that i've never said before let's say
hypothesis
that it's a sexually transmitted problem
i'm just going to put that out there i
just have a theory that it might be
sexually transmitted
i'm only kidding about that but uh
but when you see the kids are not having
bad problems and
the seniors are uh there's actually a
there is rampant sex
in old folks homes and nursing homes a
lot of people don't know that
but there is pretty rampant unprotected
sex
among seniors
all right that's all i got to say for
today and i'll talk to you
tomorrow
