Episode 1021 Scott Adams - Lying Statistics, Trump Polls Plummet, Democrat Strategy Debacle, BLM
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: ----------- - The look on Alisyn Camerota's face - Foot washing protesters and reciprocity - Leonydus Johnson's thought provoking tweet - Van Jones, best choice for police reform leadership? - Democrat Mayor riot failures, election consequences? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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.
Hey everybody, it's time. Funk juice. Good to see you. Always a pleasure. Well everybody, what a great day today is. What a great day. Sixty-three years ago today I came out of my mother's body, so today is my birthday. Yay. Shall we celebrate wit
View segment →h a simultaneous sip? I think that would be in order. And all you need to do to participate is find yourself a copper mug or a glass, a tankard, a chalice or stein, a can, a jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind, and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that m…
View segment →ugh about me. Let's talk about the world. Is the world still there? All right, here are some things for you to think about. Ninety percent of the people who are killed by police are men. Is that proof of sexism? Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Now I just put that out there to cause trouble. Why is it only m…
View segment →rs, right? I don't think the data changed. I think what changed was the persuasion. What you saw on television. Who was the president? You know, how many stories were run of a certain type? What did social media do? So without the data changing at all, I mean I haven't even looked at the data, but I…
View segment →s interviewing somebody named Bender who is in favor of defunding the police. And Alison Camerota asked this question which I think is on all of your minds. And here's the question: What if in the middle of the night my home is broken into? Who do I call? Now here's what you need to watch. In that…
View segment →akes the box like everything that you think about people and power and racism and who thinks what and does what. This just shakes it all up. It just makes you think. And it gets you mad or excited or you put yourself in the place. But the trick of this is if you have enough people, there's always so…
View segment →ob, I like to be productive, I like to create things that people want and pay for, and I would like to be paid for those things because it just works better that way. So I'm finding that I'm becoming increasingly uncancellable. If you have FU money you're uncancellable. But if you also care about yo…
View segment →true that statistically slightly more white people are killed, not even slightly but more white people are killed by police than Black people. But what if Black people encounter the police ten times more? What if there's just more police presence in Black communities because they tend, at least in t…
View segment →iendly advice with affection to Van Jones, because I think he's one of the most productive people in the country right now, I don't think the sexism helps us. We probably didn't need that. All right, here's my favorite story that didn't get many retweets. Now the fact that this didn't get many retw…
View segment →saving up to get a car. So somebody just gave him a Mustang. Now here's the fun part of the story. His late mother had that same car. And so it wasn't just a car. It was like really a meaningful who's-programming-the-simulation kind of a car. Of all the cars in the world he was given as a gift the c…
View segment →police, let's say law enforcement world, and she does. But you also want the other foot to be with the protesters, with Black Lives Matter, clearly progressive. Somebody who can see both sides. How many people have that? She actually is exactly the right person. She's not even approximately the righ…
View segment →u could not have a dissenting opinion even if you're respectful and even if your data was on your side and even if you're well-meaning. Not allowed. And number four, the protest has a low regard for public safety. And I think that's true. So I don't know how to participate in a debate in which you…
View segment →nment that just comes in for two years and then they have to leave. You know what? No two ways about it. Now I wouldn't worry about consultants taking over a city and staying. I don't feel like that's a big risk. I feel like they'd want to make their money and move to another city. Yeah and you know…
View segment →Hey everybody, it's time. Funk juice. Good to see you. Always a pleasure.
Well everybody, what a great day today is. What a great day. Sixty-three years ago today I came out of my mother's body, so today is my birthday. Yay. Shall we celebrate with a simultaneous sip? I think that would be in order. And all you need to do to participate is find yourself a copper mug or a glass, a tankard, a chalice or stein, a can, a jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind, and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the pandemic, including racism. It'll even make your birthday better, but it's my birthday, not yours, so it might not help you at all. To the simultaneous sip. Go.
Happy birthday also to Kanye West and to JFK, people who share my birthday.
All right, but enough about me. Let's talk about the world. Is the world still there? All right, here are some things for you to think about. Ninety percent of the people who are killed by police are men. Is that proof of sexism? Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Now I just put that out there to cause trouble. Why is it only men who are getting killed by police? It's proof of sexism, isn't it? Now when you say, "Uh, Scott, no, because the men are committing the crimes," I say to you, how sexist of you to say that. I just put that out there to cause trouble.
Here's some more trouble-causing statistics. Have you noticed that we humans can't calculate anything correctly? And we can't calculate anything correctly. We don't know how many people are going to die from the virus. We don't know how many people died from the regular flu. We don't know what the unemployment rate really is, because even that got revised. So that got revised up from what we thought was great, great news to just pretty good news. The unemployment got corrected up to 16.3 percent, and Black unemployment is the highest in more than 10 years, according to Camala Harris, and Latino unemployment is 17.6. Yikes. So as Kamala Harris is saying, that's nothing to celebrate about. But of course nobody is celebrating the absolute number. Do you think anybody was celebrating the absolute number? No. I think they were celebrating the change. I think there was celebration for the direction, celebration for the hoped-for future. But it's one more example of how we humans, we should just give up on numbers. We should just give up on trying to calculate anything, because we always do it wrong. Or if we do it right, the other side doesn't believe it. It just doesn't make any difference if you've got good numbers or bad.
Here's some more numbers. So according to Rasmussen, and I believe that's coming out any moment now, back in 2016 this was the opinion. All right, so in 2016, 38 percent of voters thought most Black Americans were treated unfairly by the police. So it was 38 in 2016. Today it's 51. It went from 38 thought Black Americans were treated unfairly by the police to 51 during Trump's administration. What changed? What changed? Was it the data? Did the data change? No, I'll bet not. I mean, not in three years, right? I don't think the data changed. I think what changed was the persuasion. What you saw on television. Who was the president? You know, how many stories were run of a certain type? What did social media do? So without the data changing at all, I mean I haven't even looked at the data, but I don't think it got worse between 2016 and 2019, did it? Or 2020. It didn't get worse. I mean if it did it's like some small amount, but basically it's the same. But our opinion of it completely changed. So do you think opinions change because of data? No. The data stayed the same and the opinions wildly changed because of persuasion. So if you don't see that the data didn't make any difference and the persuasion made all the difference, you're watching the wrong world.
So let's talk about some more fun stuff. So I've told you before that fear is the primary persuasive force. There is nothing more persuasive, period, than fear, because fear is the top of your concern stack. If you're literally afraid at the moment, you're going to take care of that first. You won't even eat first if you're afraid. First you take care of afraid. Go hide. Protect yourself. Do what you need to do and then you eat. So there's nothing that competes even close to fear as a primary persuasive variable.
And here's what the Democrats are doing for their campaign strategy. They're calling for defunding the police at exactly the same time other Democrats, and I say that more jokingly because I'm just doing that thing that all pundits do. I act like the one percent of the bad characters represent the whole. Obviously the looters do not represent Democrats. Can we agree looters are not representative of Democrats? Even if you think it, even if you think that's true for fun, it's not true mathematically. But it is nonetheless true that in a political season, if the Democrats are producing two things simultaneously, it's not a good look. One of the things they're producing is a very powerful and maybe successful call to defund the police. So that's one thing they're doing. But other people who will be associated with the Democrats because they lean in that direction, even if they're not registered Democrats, even if they're not voting, is the people doing the violence on videos. So we have all this video of what happens when the police are not there, which is, if I can be blunt, white people being killed by Black people. I'm not saying that that describes the world. I'm saying it describes these selective little videos that are running nonstop because those are the anecdotes we're getting.
So if you're doing two things simultaneously, the Democrats saying let's defund the police while all of the visual persuasion, what do I tell you about visual persuasion? It overwhelms other kinds of persuasions that involve your senses. It's not as strong as fear, but the visual can be part of the fear persuasion too, of course. But the fact that it's visual, it's on video and it's horrible and you're seeing people just being killed by rioters and looters breaking store windows, you couldn't have a weaker strategy going into the election. In fact, if you were to sit down and try to design on paper the worst campaign strategy, it would be defund the police while simultaneously showing nonstop images of what happens when the police are not standing right there. I don't know that that could be worse from their side. Am I wrong? Highest form of persuasion, and they're creating a situation to scare you to death.
Now if you haven't seen this clip, I just tweeted it. You have to watch it just for the reaction. It's a CNN clip in which Alison Camerota is interviewing somebody named Bender who is in favor of defunding the police. And Alison Camerota asked this question which I think is on all of your minds. And here's the question: What if in the middle of the night my home is broken into? Who do I call?
Now here's what you need to watch. In that question, Alison Camerota is a CNN host, I think, and the way she words the question is personal. That's important. All right, because you're trying to understand what she's thinking as well as what she's saying. We can't read minds, but how we receive the communication makes you think that they're thinking a certain way even if you're wrong. So she puts it in a personal form of a question. What if in the middle of the night my home is broken into? All right, this is very important. She's putting herself in the movie. She's not saying what if something happens to somebody and somebody needs to do something. No, Alison Camerota said what if my home is broken into. She put herself in the movie.
Now watch the response. And Bender said, yes, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors and I know, and myself too, and I know that that comes from a place of privilege. So that was the moment that Democrats lost CNN. They lost CNN because you could watch, you had to see the look on Camerota's face. Now again, you can't really tell what people are thinking by a look on their face, but I'll tell you the impression I got. Because remember when I talk about persuasion, it's not about what's right. It's what impression did you get. And the impression I got was Alison Camerota saying, thinking that doesn't work for me. That doesn't work for me. That's what I saw in her face. Again, I warn you, you can't read other people's minds. She may have had a completely different thought, but that's how I received it. It looked like CNN was lost on that day because seriously, one CNN host with a good income is going to say, yeah, that's a good idea if somebody is trying to break in my front door that there's nobody to call. There's nobody on CNN, no, not even Don Lemon, is going to get behind that. If you've lost Don Lemon, well, you've lost the election.
Now of course Don Lemon is not going to side with having more police, but I don't think even he could say directly and on camera, you know this would be a better world if somebody's breaking into my house and I don't have anybody to call. That would be an upgrade. I don't think he's going to say that. So I don't know how they can recover from that.
But despite all that, it turns out that the latest poll numbers on Trump versus Biden is that Biden is just blowing him away. So the difference between Biden and Trump in the national polls just widened. It widened. Trump just had the best week of his life and the polls widened. Now when I say it's the best week of his life, I don't mean that people realize that. I'm just saying I realize it because he did get us through the pandemic and I think he called the timing about right, pushing for the opening looks like exactly the right thing. He was criticized for it. Being tough on China looks smarter every day. The economy will probably pick up and Trump is very directly involved in at least the psychology of that. I don't think Trump's ever had a better week, but I also don't think it registered that way to everybody. I'm not sure that intellectually people realize what a good week this was.
Now when I say a good week that includes the looting, because although the president did not do something directly to stop the looting, think about the fact that you brought in the National Guard and it kind of stopped at the same time. Am I wrong that the looting kind of went from a lot to not too much immediately upon the National Guard showing up? I think that's true. I mean it feels true even if it's not. And if we're talking about persuasion, what feels true is right. So I think the president actually had one of the highest, almost borders on gifted honestly, performances. With the exception, just so you know that I'm not just praising Trump for everything, I think they completely blew the messaging on a lot of this stuff. Everything from the pandemic messaging to the protester, the George Floyd stuff. I don't think the messaging was good. So I'm not just complimenting everything he does just mindlessly. I'm telling you that if you're watching looting on television and your choices are the pro-law-and-order guy or the who-knows-what guy, the pro-law-and-order guy is just going to get a bump from watching crime on TV that has nothing to do with his performance. He's just had to exist and be that guy and it's going to help him. Likewise the economy going up will help Trump. Likewise the coronavirus just getting in our rearview mirror at least a little bit will help him. So I think he had his strongest week, but his poll numbers are the weakest.
And I have speculated that this is the biggest practical joke in the history of politics, that Republicans are literally lying to pollsters in massive numbers. I feel that's true. Now I can't prove it. It's just an instinct, but I feel it's true. I also feel like it's a long time until election day and I don't know the polls are telling us as much today as they should because they're pretty frothy at this point.
All right, so let's talk about those protesters washing the feet of Black Lives Matter leaders. And I guess police were washing the feet of Black religious leaders as well. Not all the police, not all the protesters, obviously. But here was my take on that. It's pretty good persuasion because you can't look away. It gets your attention and it shakes the box like everything that you think about people and power and racism and who thinks what and does what. This just shakes it all up. It just makes you think. And it gets you mad or excited or you put yourself in the place. But the trick of this is if you have enough people, there's always somebody who's willing to do anything. If you have a million people you can get somebody out of the million people to do literally anything. You can get them to do harm to themselves, just anything, if you have enough people. So when you're watching some small number of people do something that you wouldn't do, it doesn't mean anything. It just means that you're seeing a small number of people do something you wouldn't do. That's it. So it doesn't have any meaning beyond the fact it really shakes up your head.
So persuasion-wise I give it an A-plus because the more upset you are about it, the better it works. That is its power. Its power is that it upsets you. So if I'm just looking at it from a persuasion as a technique, A-plus. Yeah, if it disgusted you, if it angered you, if you couldn't turn away, that's what makes it work. So I wouldn't worry about it becoming a trend. You don't have to worry about it being a trend. You know it's never going to be guaranteed. It'll never be required. It'll always be optional. So this is the power that the media has. They can take something that's unusual and give it a lot of attention until you think it's some kind of a normal thing or it's the beginning of a trend or it's happening everywhere. It's the smallest little thing that some very unique people could do but you couldn't do. Nobody's gonna ask you to do it. It just doesn't matter. But persuasion-wise it was strong.
I swear to God almost all of our problems in society are because we can't calculate percentages right. Am I wrong about that? Like if we could calculate percentages, meaning that we knew the right numerator and the right denominator, if we could always get that right and then calculate it right and know which one is the one that matters, I don't think we'd have nearly as many problems in the world. It's like we can't calculate anything right.
I'll give you some specifics on that. For example, a guy who follows me on Twitter, which is no way to describe a person because that's the least important part of his personality is following me on Twitter, but I don't know anything else about him, so other than his name is Leonidas Johnson. He may or may not be watching this Periscope and he's African-American, which you need to know for the purpose of the story. And he tweeted this, and I presume he leans conservative. He says for every ten thousand Black people arrested for violent crimes, three are killed. For every ten thousand white people arrested for violent crime, four are killed. And then Leonidas goes on, he says I'm going to keep tweeting this until someone can explain to me how this is possible if there is truly pervasive racial bias in policing.
So he's a Black man so he can tweet this. Do you know what I can't do? Tweet that. I can't tweet that. I don't have freedom of speech in a practical sense. I have freedom of speech in a legal sense. I can say anything I want. But in a practical sense my life would just be worse if I had been the one who tweeted this. But because Leonidas is Black he can tweet it and then I can retweet it. I'm okay. So I did that. But I certainly don't have freedom of speech the way Black people do. Let me just say that directly. I have less freedom of speech than Black people. Would you agree? Is that even controversial? Because it's true that Black people can say more things in public with less repercussions than I can. It's not even close really. And now regardless of whether I'm right or wrong, which is a separate question, there are just whole classes of things, including data. I wouldn't even be able to talk about data in public. Think about that. That I can't talk about data in public.
Now I've told you before that one of my advantages is that I have, I wasn't going to swear today so I'll give you the PG version, that I have FU money. Meaning that the worst thing that could happen to me is I retire and live on the money I already made. But because I'm still in the workforce and I would still like to have an actual job, I like to be productive, I like to create things that people want and pay for, and I would like to be paid for those things because it just works better that way. So I'm finding that I'm becoming increasingly uncancellable. If you have FU money you're uncancellable. But if you also care about your ongoing career you're not completely uncancellable because I'd still like to be a cartoonist. I'd still like to be able to come on video and talk to you. I still like people to buy my books. So I'm not completely uncancellable but I'm getting closer because I always talk to you about Locals, the new platform which I've joined now. Locals is a subscription platform and it's growing so it's becoming a larger percentage of my overall income. At the moment it's still the minority part of my overall income but it's growing pretty quickly. When it reaches a point where it's competitive with my income in general, meaning that even if I lost everything else I would still have a real job, it would just be limited to Locals which would be fine if that was a big enough community, and I'm becoming increasingly uncancellable. And I don't know what that does because I haven't been there before. I've never been in a place where I not only have FU money but I have an FU job. I've never had that before. I've only had the money, not a job that was invulnerable. And I'm getting close to that. I'm getting closer and closer to being actually invulnerable. And I'm wondering if at some point I would have freedom of speech. I'm getting close and it's kind of exciting because I would like to be able to have freedom of speech the way Black Americans do, the way women do. Women less than Black Americans. But someday, God willing, I will have freedom of speech. I don't know if that will make me speak any differently. I actually don't. But it's kind of exciting. I got real excited the other day when I thought, hey, are you kidding me? I could actually tweet some data that was actually just useful and true. I could just tweet true data and I don't have to lose my career. Could be good. Could be good.
Anyway, in response to Leonidas's tweet there was of course lots of interaction on it and he went into some detail in the thread which I would recommend to you. And so look for it in my Twitter thread. I just tweeted it this morning.
So starting with the claim that for every 10,000 Black people arrested for violent crimes, now this is the key phrase here, violent crimes, three are killed. For every 10,000 white people arrested for, again, violent crimes, four are killed. Now of course the big question mark is well what about non-violent crimes? What about all the people getting hassled and abused, beat up, humiliated, all those other bad things for non-violent crimes? What about all that? I mean that's got to be part of the equation, doesn't it? And so I don't know the answer to that. But I tweeted back that which group gets stopped and hassled the most by police? Because let's say these statistics are true and let's take out the violent crime. Let's say that it was true that statistically slightly more white people are killed, not even slightly but more white people are killed by police than Black people. But what if Black people encounter the police ten times more? What if there's just more police presence in Black communities because they tend, at least in the urban areas, they're going to be lower income. More crime comes with lower income so there's going to be more police. So how do you factor that in? So is it the whole story that it's the percentage of people arrested for violent crimes? It's not really the whole story because you have to look at who's getting stopped and why. Is there a racial component to that? And most Americans apparently think there is a racial component to that and it would be hard to debate. I mean it's hard to argue that there's, who could really argue that? I would think that race has a big impact on who gets stopped. Now but which doesn't mean that the people doing the stopping are racist because apparently there's not much difference between how Black police officers and white police officers treat anybody. If Black and white police officers are basically the same in how they treat people it's kind of hard to find the racial component when you take that into consideration.
But what Leonidas argued in response to other people questioning the totality of the stuff is that Leonidas makes a really good rational point and it goes like this. That people being stopped for violent crimes is not the whole story. He'd be in complete agreement that he's taking a slice of the whole story. But he says quite reasonably that if this racial bias was what people say it is, this is exactly where it would show up the strongest. I don't know that that's true. I also don't know that statistics are accurate because where does statistics come from? The police, right? So is it possible that the police aren't good at accurately documenting who got killed for what? Maybe. I mean that wouldn't be surprising. But it's an interesting point. Leonidas says that it would show up there and it doesn't. Is that persuasive to you? I wouldn't say it's completely persuasive but I would say it's exactly the right question, isn't it? It's exactly the right question because we should understand that no matter what the answer is, even if the answer is the data was bad, I'd like to understand that for sure.
All right. Van Jones tweeted today that women leaders globally kicked coronavirus in the ass. Male leaders across the board blew it. Facts. Hashtag pandemic, etc. And then he linked to the story on that. Now was that helpful to say that women leaders did a good job and male leaders did not? Because I don't feel like what we needed was more sexism because I'm pretty sure that you can't document that their gender is what made them more successful. One of the successful female leaders was New Zealand. I don't want to be unkind to New Zealand and I don't want to be unkind to the leader who's a woman who apparently is leading a country that claims to have actually eliminated coronavirus. That's pretty good. But it needs to be said it's an island. It's an island. And it could be that once again humans are bad at calculating percentages. And do you think it's fair or accurate or helpful to say that women beat the coronavirus but male leaders blew it? To me that feels like just sexism because I don't think you can make that claim based on the data.
Now here's what's ironic about this. Literally the day before I was thinking to myself who's the only person who would have enough credibility to fix the race relations in this country and maybe come up with something practical that we could work on. You know, come up with some specific proposals we could toss around and see what we can do. And I thought, well Van Jones. Van Jones is probably one of the few people in the world who can, well he's bilingual meaning that he can talk to Black people, he can talk to white people and he knows what they mean. I don't know how many people there are in the whole world who have credibility, ability to communicate, have the interest, have the aptitude, the history, the history of success especially with prison reform. I mean really, come up with one other person on the planet who would be more perfect for being in the middle of this and getting it fixed.
Now in the comments somebody's saying Kanye. Kanye is a force of nature and one of the most productive ones you'll ever see in lots of ways, socially as well as economically productive. But I don't know that Kanye is the right one to dig in and get into some details about how to fix policing. I see Kanye as more of an almost spiritual kind of a leader, not a nuts and bolts here's my policy kind of a leader. And if you want to get down into some real practical stuff I'm thinking Van Jones. I'm thinking Van Jones would be the best choice I can think of. Can you think of a better one? I'm looking at your comments to see if anybody suggests anybody. Larry Elder would be too associated with the right. You really need somebody who's more associated with the left but knows how to work with the right. And it really just sort of comes down to Van Jones. So I hope he gets in the game. But my friendly advice with affection to Van Jones, because I think he's one of the most productive people in the country right now, I don't think the sexism helps us. We probably didn't need that.
All right, here's my favorite story that didn't get many retweets. Now the fact that this didn't get many retweets compared to everything else I tweeted today tells me that the message is not getting through or it's getting through and it's being rejected. And now I'm going to tell you something that'll be one of the most important things you'll ever hear. Indeed it's so important it could end racism. I just let that hang in the air for a moment. I'm going to give you a suggestion, a persuasion suggestion that's so powerful it could completely end racism. It's a pretty big claim isn't it?
Let me tell you the story. Buffalo teenager, 18 years old who is African-American, which is important to the story. After Buffalo was hit by the looting, I guess there was glass all over the streets, and this 18-year-old gentleman decides to just on his own go out with a broom and start sweeping the streets. And he spent 10 hours cleaning the street by himself. Just one guy by himself and a broom cleaning the street. What do you think happened? Have you ever heard of the power of reciprocity? I talk about this and it's documented. It's in the book Influence by Cialdini. So it's been studied. This is not some new agey kind of let's all get along kind of thing. It's been studied and it's scientifically true that if you just give somebody something and ask nothing in return, the odds of them being flexible with you in the future and wanting to work with you and do good things for you that you didn't ask for goes through the roof. Now I don't know that reciprocity works everywhere all the same. There could be a cultural element to it. But I can tell you as your representative white person that, and again I assume it works with everybody but I can only speak to the group that I have the most information about, among white people reciprocity is like a freaking nuclear weapon. We can't ignore it. We can't. If you do something good for me I just gotta return the favor. I got to. And if I can't find a way to do it right away it will bother me for years. Years literally will bother me for years if I can't pay back a kindness.
So what happened to the 18-year-old African-American guy who just saw glass in the streets and said you know it'd be a better world if I just swept up this glass, spent 10 hours doing it? If you've ever swept for 10 hours, because I have not 10 hours but I've swept for hours and it's hard after the first few hours. Here's what happened. One gentleman gave him a car. I think a Mustang. It was a classic one. It was a few years old because he checked his social media, the person who gave him the car, and found that he said he was saving up to get a car. So somebody just gave him a Mustang. Now here's the fun part of the story. His late mother had that same car. And so it wasn't just a car. It was like really a meaningful who's-programming-the-simulation kind of a car. Of all the cars in the world he was given as a gift the car that had the most meaning to it. That was a coincidence. He gets a car and then somebody hears that story and they say what good's a car without car insurance. So somebody bought him insurance. So he got a brand new, not a brand new, it was a used but it was a classic Mustang, you know maybe better than a new car depending on what kind of cars you like. And then somebody paid for his college education. They gave him a car, car insurance, and they paid for college because he spent 10 hours sweeping the streets and asking for nothing. My cat is visiting. If you see a tail go by. He asked for nothing and he got a car, car insurance, and a free education.
Now how often does this work? Well it doesn't work like that too often. Like you're not going to get a car and a college education just for helping people out. But the concept of reciprocity will work every time. What are white people doing to try to make the world better? You're watching the protests. The white people are washing the feet of Black Lives Matter people and the leaders of Black churches. Why are they doing that? Well who knows. You can't really see in their minds. But it is a reciprocity play because if you're watching that and you're Black, let's say you're a Black leader and some white people said can we wash your feet on camera and you said yes and it happened, how do you feel? Do you say ah suckers, you suckers, hahaha that changed nothing? You might try to feel that way. You might try to feel like these stupid white people they don't know that this doesn't work but sure I'll humiliate them. I'll let them wash my feet. I don't know what you're thinking intellectually but I gotta tell you it probably worked because reciprocity doesn't ever not work. It works every time.
So if the Black Lives Matter people wanted equality there is a four-lane highway with no traffic to get there. It's called reciprocity. But could you use a reciprocity strategy if you were let's say still suffering in your opinion from the effects of slavery? All right, if you still felt oppressed today and you felt it was the legacy of slavery and all the bad Jim Crow laws and everything in the history, if that's what's on your mind and that's sort of defining your worldview, how in the world could you ever use reciprocity as a tool? It just doesn't feel like giving something is the right solution when the problem is people took too much. I mean slavery is somebody taking too much from you. Your very liberty, your life, your safety, everything. Slavery is taking everything from you. So how do you get from that mindset, something that's still rippling through history, how do you get from that mindset to the most productive and reliable persuasion technique in the world, reciprocity?
Well I would look at an 18-year-old Buffalo teen who did that. He actually did that. He was born into the same world you were born into. Slavery is still a historical fact in his world, right? This 18-year-old was not born into a world where slavery never happened. Nope. He was not born into a world where Black people are treated exactly the same as white people. Nope. He wasn't born into that world. Wasn't born into a world where everything is fair. Nope. Wasn't born into a world where racism doesn't exist. Nope. He had every obstacle in the world against him. Every obstacle in the world against him. And he fixed it with a broom. A broom. He changed his life with a broom in 10 hours. And if you had asked me ahead of time, Scott do you think this is a good idea? Will this work? I would have said not only will it work, it could change your life. Might even change the world. I doubt it because I don't just think it's realistic to find too many people that have as much on the ball as this 18-year-old has. This 18-year-old is just operating at a different level. If this guy doesn't run for office someday it would be a crime because this is the guy you need to be in charge. I would vote for this guy. He's 18 years old. He already has my vote for president frankly.
All right, so let's see what else is coming down the road. Let's talk about Biden and his vice presidential pick. Some smart people are saying it's narrowed down to Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris. So I did a little Twitter poll to find out how you thought about it and Kamala Harris was a winner of the unscientific Twitter poll with almost 70 percent of the vote. It's sort of a two to one let's say. So two to one of probably mostly pro-Trump people who voted in my unscientific Twitter poll, two to one thought Kamala Harris was the stronger candidate. Stronger meaning the one that would help Biden the most. And I agree with that completely. Some people complained and said no way because Kamala Harris was a prosecutor and she is more associated with putting Black people in jail than she is associated with defunding the police which is the popular thing for Democrats. But I would argue this. That if you're Democrats and you're worried about scaring Republicans with too much of the defund the police stuff, and I think Biden's not going to go fully, he might flirt with defunding the police but he's not going to be an eliminate the police guy I don't think. I think Harris is actually perfect for that because she straddles both worlds like nobody else you can think of. You want somebody who's got one foot in the world of the police, let's say law enforcement world, and she does. But you also want the other foot to be with the protesters, with Black Lives Matter, clearly progressive. Somebody who can see both sides. How many people have that? She actually is exactly the right person. She's not even approximately the right person. She's exactly the right person because you want somebody who can see both sides. You're not going to get to the end without a few leaders who can do that.
Now I don't think she is necessarily the unifying leader that we need but she has what you need for vice president. I think it's a slam dunk. All right, so we could be surprised by some candidate we didn't know of who just was even more perfect. But at this point I'd say at least a fifty percent chance it's Kamala Harris. But I would say there's a hundred percent chance it's not Elizabeth Warren. So there could be some still surprises.
I checked my predicted bets. So where I go to the betting market and actually bet on stuff. Now all of my bets are many months old so there's nothing that I bet recently. Everything is 2019, maybe early 2020. I don't remember some of them. So there's nothing new and I've got six bets. All six of them are right except that only four of them I think will pay. Here's why I say they're all correct bets but only three or four of them are going to pay. One of my bets was that Kamala Harris would get the top ticket nomination. That will not happen because Biden already got it. But we also agree that if she's the vice presidential pick it will be like she is the presidential candidate. So I'm going to lose my bet and predict it because they're going to be technical about that. You know they tell you in advance what the standard is and it wouldn't meet that standard. So I'm going to lose the bet at the same time that I won the bet. So I think it was either six out of six, might have been five out of six.
So one of the bets I won is that the nominee would be over 70. So that's Biden. One of the ones I won is that, oh I lost the bet that the Democrats would nominate a woman but again if Kamala Harris is vice president and people see her as the top of the ticket I kind of won the bet even though I'll have to pay on the bet and lose it. So anyway I think Harris is gonna get it.
That's about all I got for now. Just checking to make sure. Oh so here's something I tweeted yesterday. I had this pinned for a while and even Ann Coulter liked it. So I got over 11,000 retweets. Now given the size of my Twitter following a really good viral tweet from me would be about 1,500 retweets. All right so this is approximately, it's approaching 10 times. It probably will get to 10 times more than my good normal viral tweet. So that means that this is hitting a chord with people way beyond normal tweets. And here's what it is. Most of you saw it. I said I can't respect the protest. I do, I always respect the people of course but you know you can disrespect activities. I can't respect a protest that has these qualities. Number one, no specific suggestions on what to change. You know defunding the police isn't too specific. Data is not allowed into the debate because you're not really allowed to look at the data, right? Dissenting opinions, no matter how respectful and well-meaning, are not allowed. That's true. You could not have a dissenting opinion even if you're respectful and even if your data was on your side and even if you're well-meaning. Not allowed. And number four, the protest has a low regard for public safety. And I think that's true.
So I don't know how to participate in a debate in which you can't talk about the data, you can't have a different opinion, there's no real suggestions, and they're not even concerned with public well-being. Like I don't know. What's that? Part of the reason that I think the protests are so big, and again nobody seems to want to say this out loud but I will, it's because the weather is good and there are no alternatives for something to do. Imagine if this was just a regular summer and people had their summer vacations planned and kids were going to camps and you know you're just busy running around and you could go to clubs and bars, you could go out to restaurants, you're at the beach and you've got all these other things you can do. How big would the protest be now? You'd like to believe they'd be the same size, right? Because what's more important, going to the beach or protesting to try to improve life and reduce racism? So your logical mind says well they'd be the same size because it's so important compared to going to the beach. Have you met people? If you've got that many human beings there are a lot of those people who would have gone to the beach. They would have gone to the beach. It doesn't mean that the issue is any less. Certainly not saying that. I'm just saying if you're looking at the size of the crowd it's completely misleading because they just didn't have anything else to do. It was outdoors that you could leave the house. So I think we're being fooled not only by selective images on our TV. We're being fooled because we ignore the alternatives. You know the alternative was to do something else and it didn't exist.
All right, it's the perfect time for a protest. Weather's good and there's nothing else to do. I don't even think the protest would be this big if they were in August because it'd be too hot. I mean that alone would be a factor.
You just described Florida. Do you think it'll matter that people are saying that Democratic mayors all failed? Do you think that that's going to matter to anything? I have a feeling it won't. I really do. I'd love to see some kind of a city, let's say consultants like Bain consultants or people like that. I'd love to see them put together a city rescue service. So it would be a contracted service and you would say to some big consulting company, McKinsey, just somebody who's got a lot of smart people, and you'd say we're gonna have an election in our city and if we choose this by referendum then you're going to come in for two years and at two years you're out of here. But two years will bring in professional consultants who have a package of, you know, they figured out how to do things, what works and what doesn't, and they'll come in and they'll just implement these changes. We'll run it for two years and then the consultants will have to leave no matter how well they do. They don't live here. They're not elected. They've got to leave after two years and then we'll try to fill positions with regular elected people to keep the momentum going. Do you think anybody would use that? Would anybody use a city rescue service? Like it would be like a government in a box, you know, a canned government that just comes in for two years and then they have to leave. You know what? No two ways about it. Now I wouldn't worry about consultants taking over a city and staying. I don't feel like that's a big risk. I feel like they'd want to make their money and move to another city. Yeah and you know maybe you appoint a city manager to implement things but that manager would be more of an implementer anyway. Pork is a problem. That is correct, Ben. I think that the professional consultants would be less susceptible to the pork because they would be highly paid on day one. They wouldn't have to take bribes because they have good jobs.
All right, that's all for now and I will talk to you later. Have a great day.
hey everybody it's time funk juice good to see you always a pleasure well everybody what a great day today is what a great day 63 years ago today i came out of my mother's body so today is my birthday yay shall we celebrate with a simultaneous sip i think that would be an order and all you need to do to participate is find yourself a copper mug or a glass attacker chalice or stein a candy jugger flask a vessel of any kind and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure the dopamine of the day the thing that makes everything better including the pandemic including racism it'll even make your birthday better but it's my birthday not yours so might not help you at all to the simultaneous step go happy birthday also to kanye west and to jfk people who share my birthday all right but enough about me let's talk about the world is the world still there all right here are some things for you to think about uh ninety percent of the people who are killed by police are men is that proof of sexism go uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh um now i just put that out there to cause trouble why is it only men who are getting killed by police it's proof of sexism isn't it now when you say uh scott um no because the men are committing the crimes i say to you how sexist of you to say that i just put that out there to cause trouble here's the more uh trouble-causing statistics have you noticed that we humans can't calculate anything correctly and we can't calculate anything correctly we don't know how many people are going to die from the virus we don't know how many people died from the regular flu we don't know what the unemployment rate really is because even that got revised so that got revised up from uh what we thought was great great news to just pretty good news uh the unemployment got corrected up to 16.3 percent and black black unemployment is the highest in more than 10 years according to camellaris and latino unemployment is 17.6 yikes so as kabul harris is saying that's nothing to celebrate about but of course nobody is celebrating the absolute number do you think anybody was celebrating the absolute number no i think they were celebrating the change i think there was celebration for the direction celebration for the hoped for a future but it's one more example of how we humans we should just give up on numbers we should just give up on trying to calculate anything because we always do it wrong or if we do it right the other side doesn't believe it it just doesn't make any difference if you've got good numbers or bad here's some more numbers uh so according to rasmussen and i believe that's coming out any moment now the uh back in 2016 this was the opinion all right so in 2016 38 of voters thought most black americans were treated unfairly by the police so it was 38 in 2016.
today it's 51 it went from 38 thought black americans were treated unfairly by the police to 51 during trump's administration what changed what changed was it the data did the data change no i'll bet not i mean not in three years right i don't think the data changed i think what changed was the persuasion what you saw on television who was the president you know how many stories were run of a certain type what did social media do so without the data changing at all i mean i haven't even looked at the data but i don't think it got worse between 2016 and 2019 did it or 2020 it didn't get worse i mean if it did it's like some small amount but basically it's the same but our opinion of it completely changed so do you think opinions change because of data no the data stayed the same and the opinions wildly changed because of persuasion so if you don't if you don't see that the data didn't make any difference and the persuasion made all the difference you're watching the wrong world um so let's uh talk about some more fun stuff so i've told you before that fear is the the primary persuasion persuasive force there is nothing more persuasive period than fear because fear is the top of your concerned stack if you're literally afraid at the moment you're going to take care of that first you won't even eat first if you're afraid first you take care of afraid go hide protect yourself do what you need to do and then you eat so there's nothing that competes even close to fear as a primary persuasive variable and here's what the democrats are doing for their campaign strategy they're they're calling for defunding the police at exactly the same time other democrats and i say that more jokingly because i'm just you know i i'm doing that thing that all pundits do i act like the the one percent of the bad characters represent the whole obviously the looters do not represent democrats can we agree looters are not representative of democrats even if you think it even if you think that's true for fun it's not true mathematically but it is nonetheless true that in a political season if the democrats are producing two things simultaneously it's not a good look one of the things they're producing is a very powerful and maybe successful call to defund the police so that's one thing they're doing but other people who will be associated with the democrats because they lean in that direction even if they're not registered democrats even if they're not voting is the people doing the violence on videos so we have all this video of what happens when the police are not there which is if i can be blunt white people being killed by black people i'm not saying that that describes the world i'm saying it describes these selective little videos that are running non-stop because those are the anecdotes we're getting so if you're doing two things simultaneously the democrats saying let's defund the police while all of the visual persuasion what uh what do i tell you about visual persuasion it overwhelms other kinds of persuasions that evolve your senses it's not as strong as fear but the visual can be part of the fear of persuasion too of course but the fact that it's visual it's on video and it's horrible and you're seeing people just being killed by writers and and and looters breaking store windows you couldn't have a weaker strategy going into the election in fact if you were to sit down and try to design on paper the worst campaign strategy it would be defund the police while simultaneously showing non-stop images of what happens when the police are not standing right there i don't know that that could be worse from their side am i wrong highest form of persuasion and they're they're creating a situation to scare you to death now if you haven't seen this clip i just tweeted it you have to watch it just for the reaction it's a cnn clip in which uh allison camarado is interviewing um somebody named bender who is in favor of defunding the police and allison camarado asked this question which i think is on all of your minds and here's the question what if in the middle of the night my heart my home is broken into who do i call now here's what you need to watch in that question allison camarado is a cnn what's the right word course host whatever is the right word for that uh host i think and the way she words the question is personal that's important all right because you're trying to understand what what she's thinking as well as what she's saying we can't read minds but how we receive the communication you know makes you think that they're thinking a certain way even if you're wrong so she puts it in a personal form of a question what if in the middle of the night my home is broken into all right this is very important she's putting herself in the movie she's not saying what if something happens to somebody and somebody you know needs to do something no alison camarado said what if my home is broken into she put herself in the movie now watch the response and bender said yes i hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors and i know and myself too and i know that that comes from a place of privilege so that was the moment that democrats lost cnn they lost cnn because you could watch you had to see the the look on camarado's face now again you can't really tell what people are thinking by a look on their face but i'll tell you the impression i got because remember when i talk about persuasion it's not about what's right it's what impression did you get and the impression i got was alison camarado saying thinking that doesn't work for me that doesn't work for me that's what that's what i saw in her face again i warn you you can't read other people's minds she may have had a completely different thought but that's how i received it it looked like cnn was lost on that day because seriously one cnn host with a good income is going to say uh yeah that's a good idea if if somebody is trying to break in my front door that there's nobody to call there's nobody on cnn no not even don lemon is going to be is going to get behind that if you lose if you've lost don lemon well you've lost the election now of course don levin is not going to side with uh you know having more police but i don't think even he could say directly and on camera you know this would be a better world if somebody's breaking into my house and i don't have anybody to call that would be an upgrade i don't think he's going to say that so i don't know how they can recover from that but despite all that it turns out that latest poll numbers on trump versus biden is that biden is just blowing him away so that the difference between biden and trump and the national polls just widened it widened trump just had the best week of his life and the polls widened now when i say it's the best week of his life i don't mean that people realize that i'm just saying i realize it because he did get us through the pandemic and i think he he called the timing about right pushing for the opening looks like exactly the right thing he was criticized for it um being tough on china looks smarter every day the economy will probably pick up and trump is very directly involved in at least the psychology of that i don't think trump's ever had a better week but i also don't think it registered that way to everybody i'm not sure that intellectually people realize what a good week this was now when i say a good week that includes the looting because although the president did not do something directly to stop the looting think about the fact that you brought in the national guard and it kind of stopped at the same time am i wrong that the looting kind of went from a lot to not too much immediately upon the national guard showing up i think that's true i mean it feels true even if it's not and if we're talking about persuasion what feels true is right so i think the president actually had one of the highest um almost borders on gifted honestly uh performances with the exception just see just so you know that i'm not just praising trump for everything i think they completely blew the messaging on a lot of this stuff everything from the pandemic messaging to the the protester the george floyd stuff i don't think the messaging was good so i'm not just complimenting everything he does just mindlessly i'm telling you that if you're watching if you're watching looting on television and your choices are the pro law order guy or the who knows what guy the pro-law and archer guy is just going to get a bump from watching crime on tv that has nothing to do with his performance he's just had to exist and be that guy and it's going to help him likewise the economy going up will help trump likewise you know the coronavirus just getting in our rear-view mirror at least a little bit will help him so i think he had his strongest weak but his poll numbers are the weakest and i have i have speculated that this is the biggest practical joke in the history of politics that republicans are literally lying to pollsters in a massive numbers i feel that's true now i can't prove it it's just an instinct but i feel it's true i also feel like it's a long time until election day and i don't know the polls are telling us as much today as as they should because you know they're pretty pretty frothy at this point all right um so let's talk about those protesters washing the feet of black lives matter leaders and i guess police were washing the feet of black religious leaders as well not all the police not all the protesters obviously but here was my take on that it's pretty good persuasion because you can't look away it gets your attention and it shakes the box like everything that you think about people and power and racism and who thinks what and does what this just shakes it all up it just makes you think what and it gets you mad or excited or you put yourself in the place but the the trick of this is if you have enough people there's always somebody who's willing to do anything if you have a million people you can get somebody out of the million people to do literally anything you can get them to you do harm to themselves just anything if you have enough people so when you're watching some small number of people do something that you wouldn't do it doesn't mean anything it just means that you're seeing a small number of people do something you wouldn't do that's it so it doesn't have any meaning beyond the fact it really shakes up your head so persuasion wise i give it an a-plus because the matter or the more upset you are about it the better it works that is its power its power is that it upsets you so if i'm if i'm just looking at it from a persuasion as a technique a plus yeah if it disgusted you if it angered you if you couldn't turn away that's what makes it work so i wouldn't worry about it becoming a trend you don't have to worry about it being a trend you know it's never going to be guaranteed it'll never be required it'll always be optional so this is the power that the media has they can take something that's unusual and give it a lot of attention until you think it's some kind of a normal thing or it's the beginning of a trend or it's happening everywhere it's the smallest little thing that some very unique people could do but you couldn't do nobody's gonna ask you to do it it just doesn't matter so but persuasion-wise it was strong um i swear to god almost all of our problems in society are because we can't calculate percentages right am i wrong about that like if we could calculate percentages meaning that we knew the right nominated numerator and the right denominator if we could always get that right and then calculate it right and know which one is the one that matters i don't think we'd have nearly as many problems in the world it's like we can't calculate anything right i'll give you some specifics on that for example a a guy who follows me on twitter which is no way to describe a person because that's the least important part of his personality is following me on twitter but i don't know anything else about him so other than his name is leonidas johnson he may or may not be watching this periscope and he's african-american which you need to know for the purpose of the story and he tweeted this and i i presume he leans conservative he says for every ten thousand black people arrested for violent crimes three are killed for every ten thousand white people arrested for violent crime four are killed and then leonidas goes on he says i'm going to keep tweeting this until someone can explain to me how this is possible if there is truly pervasive racial bias in policing so so he's a black man so he can tweet this do you know what i can't do tweet that i can't tweet that i don't have i don't have freedom of speech in a practical sense i have freedom of speech in a legal sense i can say anything i want but in a practical sense my life would just be worse if i had been the one who tweeted this but because leonidas is black he can tweet it and then i can retweet it i'm okay so i did that but i certainly don't have freedom of speech the way black people do let me just say that directly i have less freedom of speech than black people would you agree is that is that even controversial because it's true that black people can say more things in public with less repercussions than i can it's not even close really and now regardless of whether i'm right or wrong which is a separate question they're just whole classes of things including data i wouldn't even be able to talk about data in public think about that that i can't talk about data in public now i've told you before that one of my advantages is that i have uh i wasn't going to swear today so i'll give you the pg version that i have fu money meaning that the worst thing that could happen to me is i retire and live on the money i already made but because i'm still you know in the workforce and i would still like to have an actual job i like to be productive i like to i like to create things that people want and pay for and i would like to be paid for those things because it just works better that way so i'm finding that i'm becoming increasingly uncancelable if you have fu money you're uncancelable but if you also care about your ongoing career you're not you're not completely uncancelable because i'd still like to be a cartoonist i'd still like to be able to come on video and talk to you i still like people to buy my books so i'm not completely uncancelable but i'm getting closer because i always talk to you about locals the new platform uh which i've joined now locals is a subscription platform so and it's growing so it's becoming a larger percentage of my overall income at the moment it's still the minority part of my overall income but it's growing pretty quickly when it reaches a point where it's competitive with my income in general meaning that even if i lost everything else i would still have a real job it would just be limited to locals which would be fine if that was a big enough community and i'm becoming increasingly uncancelable and i don't know what that does because i haven't been there before i've never been in a place where i not only have fu money but i have an fu job i've never had that before i've only had the money not a job that was invulnerable and i'm getting close to that i'm getting closer and closer to being actually invulnerable and i'm wondering if at some point i would have freedom of speech i'm getting close and it's kind of exciting because i would like to be able to have freedom of speech the way black americans do the way women do women less than black americans but but um someday god willing i will have freedom of speech i don't know if that will make me speak any differently i actually don't but it's kind of exciting i got real excited the other day when i thought hey are you kidding me i could actually i could actually tweet some data that was actually just useful and true i could i could just tweet true data and i don't have to lose my my career could be good could be good anyway in response to leonidas um tweet there was of course lots of interaction on it and he went into some detail in the thread which i would recommend to you and so look for it in my twitter thread i just tweeted it this morning so all right so starting with the claim that for every 10 000 black people arrested for violent crimes now this is the key phrase here violent crimes three are killed for every ten thousand white people arrested for again violent crimes four are killed now of course the big question mark is well what about non-violent crimes what about what about all the people getting hassled and you know i don't know abused beat up humiliated uh all those other bad things for non-violent crimes what about all that i mean that's got to be part of the equation doesn't it and so i don't know the answer that but i tweeted back that um that which group gets stopped and hassled the most by police because let's say these statistics are true and let's take out the violent crime let's say that it was true that uh statistically slightly more white people are killed not even slightly but more white people are killed by police than black people but what if black people encounter the police ten times more what if there's just more police presence in black communities because they tend at least in the urban areas they're going to be lower income more crime comes with lower income so there's going to be more police so how do you factor that in so is it the whole story that it's the percentage of people arrested for violent crimes it's not really the whole story because you have to look at you know who's getting stopped and why is there a racial component to that and most americans apparently think there is a racial component to that and it would be hard to debate i mean it's hard to argue that there's who could really argue that i i would think that race has a big impact on who gets stopped now but which doesn't mean that the people doing the stopping are racist because apparently there's not much difference between how black police officers and white police officers treat anybody if black and white police officers are basically the same in how they treat people it's it's kind of hard to find the racial component when you take that into consideration but um what leonid leonidas argued in response to other people you know questioning the totality of the stuff is that leonidas makes a really good um rational point and it goes like this that people being stopped for violent crimes is not the whole story he'd be in complete agreement that he's taking a slice of the whole story but he says quite reasonably that if this racial if the racial bias was what people say it is this is exactly where it would show up the strongest i don't know that that's true i also don't know that statistics are accurate because where does statistics come from the police right so is it possible that the police aren't good at accurately you know documenting who got killed for what maybe i mean that wouldn't be surprising but it's an interesting point leonidas says that it would show up there and it doesn't is that persuasive to you i wouldn't say it's completely persuasive but i would say it's it's exactly the right question isn't it it's exactly the right question because we should understand that no matter what the answer is even if the answer is the data was bad i'd like to understand that for sure all right um van jones tweeted today that uh women leaders globally kicked hashtag coronavirus in the ass male leaders across the board blew it facts hashtag pandemic etc and then he linked to the story on that now was that helpful to say that women leaders did a good job and male leaders did not because i don't feel like what we needed was more sexism because i'm pretty sure that you can't document that their gender is what made them more successful one of the successful female leaders was new zealand i don't want to be unkind to new zealand and i don't want to be unkind to the leader who's a woman who apparently is leading a country that claims to have actually eliminated coronavirus that's pretty good but it needs to be said it's an island it's an island and it could be that once again humans are bad at calculating percentages and and do you think it's fair or accurate or helpful to say that women beat the coronavirus but male leaders blew it to me that feels like just sexism because i don't think you can make that claim based on the data now here's what's ironic about this literally the day before i was thinking to myself who's the only person who would have enough credibility to fix the you know to do something constructive about the protests and and race relations in this country and maybe come up with something practical that we could work on you know come up with some specific proposals we could toss around and see what we can do and i thought well van jones van jones is probably one of the few people in the world who can uh well he's bilingual meaning that he can talk to black people he can talk to white people and he knows what they mean i don't know how many people there are in the whole world who have credibility ability to communicate uh have the interest have the you know have the aptitude the history the the history of success especially with prison reform i mean really come up with come up with one other person on the planet who would be more perfect for being in the middle of this and getting it fixed now in the comments somebody's saying kanye kanye is a force of nature and one of the most productive ones you'll ever see in in lots of ways socially as well as economically productive but i don't know that kanye is the right one to dig in and get into some details about how to fix policing i i see i see kanye as more of a almost as spiritual kind of a leader not not a you know nuts and bolts here's my policy kind of a leader and if you want to get down into some real practical stuff i'm thinking van jones i'm thinking van jones would be the best choice i can think of can you think of a better one i'm looking at your comments to see if anybody suggests anybody larry elder would be too associated with the right you really need somebody who's more associated with the left but knows how to work with the right and it really just sort of comes down to van jones so i hope it gets in the game but my friendly advice with affection it to van jones because i think he's one of the most productive people um in the country right now um i don't think the sexism helps us we didn't probably didn't need that all right here's my favorite story that didn't get many retweets now the fact that this didn't get many retweets compared to everything else i tweeted today tells me that the message is not getting through or it's getting through and it's being rejected and now i'm going to tell you something that'll be one of the most important things you'll ever hear indeed it's so important it could end racism i just let that hang in the air for a moment i'm going to give you a suggestion a persuasion suggestion that's so powerful it could completely end racism it's a pretty big claim isn't it let me tell you the story buffalo teenager 18 years old who is african-american which is important to the story after buffalo was hit by the looting i guess there was glass all over the streets and this 18 year old gentleman decides to just on his own go out with a broom and start sweeping the streets and he spent 10 hours cleaning the street by himself just one guy by himself and a broom cleaning the street what do you think happened have you ever heard of the power of reciprocity i talk about this right and it's documented right it's in the book um influenced by childini so it's been studied this is not some new agey kind of let's let's all get along kind of thing it's been studied and it's scientifically true that if you just give somebody something and ask nothing in return the odds of them being flexible with you in the future and wanting to work with you and do good things for you that you didn't ask for goes through the roof now i don't know that reciprocity works everywhere all the same there could be a cultural element to it but i can tell you as your representative white person that and again i assume it works with everybody but i can only speak to the group that i you know have the most information about among white people reciprocity is like a freaking nuclear weapon we can't ignore it we can't if you do something good for me i just gotta return the favor i got to and i'll be and if i can't find a way to do it right away it'll it will bother me for years years literally will bother me for years if i can't pay back a kindness so what happened to the 18 year old african-american guy who just saw a glass in the streets and said you know it'd be a better world if i just swept up this glass spent 10 hours doing if you've ever swept for 10 hours because i have not 10 hours but i've swept for hours and it's hard after the first few hours here's what happened um one gentleman gave him a car i think a mustang it was a classic one it was a few years old because uh because he checked his social media the person who gave him the car and found that he said he was saving up to get a car so somebody just gave him a mustang now here's the fun part of the story his late mother had that same car and so it wasn't just a car it was like really a meaningful who's programming the simulation kind of a car of all the cars in the world he was given as a gift the car that had the most meaning to it that was a coincidence he gets a car and then somebody hears that story and they say what good's a car without car insurance so somebody bought him insurance so he made a brand new not a brand new was a used but it was a classic mustang you know maybe better than a new car depending on what kind of cars you like and then somebody paid for his college education they gave him a car car insurance and they paid for college because he spent 10 hours sweeping the streets and asking for nothing my cat is visiting if you see a tale go by he asked for nothing and he got a car car insurance and a free education now how often does this work well it doesn't work like that too often like you're not going to get a car in a college education just for helping people out but the concept of reciprocity will work every time what are white people doing to try to make the world better you're watching the protests the white people are washing the feet of black lives matter people and and the leaders of black churches why are they doing that well who knows you can't really see in their minds but it is a reciprocity play because if you're watching that and you're black let's say you're a black leader and some white people said can we wash your feet on camera and you said yes and it happened how do you feel do you say ah suckers you suckers hahaha that changed nothing you might try to feel that way you might try to feel like these stupid white people they don't know that this doesn't work but sure i'll humiliate them i'll let them wash my feet i don't know what you're thinking intellectually but i gotta tell you it probably worked because reciprocity doesn't ever not work it works every time so should if if the um the black lives matter people wanted equality there is a four-lane highway with no traffic to get there it's called reciprocity but could you use a reciprocity strategy if you were let's say still suffering in your opinion from the effects of slavery all right it if you still felt oppressed today and you felt it was the legacy of slavery and you know all the all the bad you know jim pro laws and everything in the history if that's what's on your mind and that's sort of defining your worldview how in the world could you ever use reciprocity as a tool it just doesn't feel like giving something is the right solution when the problem is people took too much right i mean the slavery is somebody taking too much from you your your very liberty your life your you know your safety everything you know slavery is taking everything from you so how do you get from that mindset something that's still rippling through history how do you get from that mindset to the most productive and reliable persuasion technique in the world reciprocity well i would look at an 18 year old buffalo teen who did that he actually did that he was born into the same world you were born into slavery is still a historical fact in his world right he this 18 year old was not born into a world where slavery never happened nope he was not born into a world where black people are treated exactly the same as white people nope he wasn't born into that world wasn't born into a world where everything is fair nope nope wasn't born into a world where racism doesn't exist nope nope he had every obstacle in the world against him every obstacle in the world against him and he fixed it with a broom a broom he changed his life with a broom in 10 hours and if you had asked me ahead of time scott do you think this is a good idea will this work i would have said not only will it work could change your life might even change the world i doubt it because i you know i don't just don't think it's realistic to find too many people that have um as much on the ball as this 18 year old has this 18 year old is just operating at a different level if if this guy doesn't run for office someday it would be a crime because this is this is the guy you need to be in charge i i would vote for this guy he's 18 years old he already has my vote for president frankly all right so let's see what else is coming down the road let's talk about biden and his uh vice presidential pick um some smart people are saying it's narrowed down to elizabeth warren or kamala harris so i did a little twitter poll to find out how you thought about it and um kamal harris was a winner of the unscientific twitter poll with almost 70 percent of the vote it's sort of a two to one let's say so two to one of probably mostly pro-trump people who voted in my unscientific twitter poll two to one thought kamal harris was the stronger candidate stronger meaning the one that would help biden the most and i agree with that completely some people complained and said no no way because kamala harris was a prosecutor and she is more associated with putting black people in jail then she is associated with defunding the police which is the popular thing for democrats but i would argue this that if you're democrats and you're worried about scaring republicans with too much of the defund the police stuff and i think biden's not going to go fully he might flirt with defunding the police but he's not going to be and eliminate the police guy i don't think i think harris is actually perfect for that because she straddles she straddles both worlds like nobody else you can think of you want somebody who's got one foot in the world of the police let's say law enforcement world and she does but you also want the other foot to be with the protesters with black lives matter clearly progressive somebody who can see both sides how many people have that she actually is exactly the right person she's not even approximately the right person she's exactly the right person because you want somebody who can see both sides you're not going to get to the end without a few leaders who can do that now i don't i don't think she is necessarily the unifying leader that we need but she has what you need for vice president i think it's a slam dunk all right so uh we could be surprised by some candidate we didn't know of who just was even more perfect but at this point i'd say at least a fifty percent chance it's kamal harris but i would say there's a hundred percent chance it's not elizabeth warren so there could be some still surprises i checked my predicted um my predicted bets so where i go to the the betting market and actually bet on stuff now all of my bets are are many months old so there's nothing that i bet recently everything is 2019 maybe early 2020 i don't remember some of them so there's nothing new and i've got six bets all six of them are right except that only four of them i think will pay here's why i say they're all correct bets but only three or four of them are going to pay one of my bets was that kamala harris would get the top ticket nomination that will not happen because biden already got it but we also agree that if she's the vice presidential pick it will be like she is the presidential candidate so i'm going to lose my bet and predict it because they're going to be technical about that you know they they tell you in advance what the standard is and it wouldn't meet that standard so i'm going to lose the bet at the same time that i won the bet um so i think it was either 6 out of 6 might have been 5 and a 6.
so one of the bets i won is that the nominee would be over 70.
so that's biden um one of the ones i won is that oh i lost the bet that the democrats would nominate a woman but again if camalleris is vice president and people see her as the top of the ticket i kind of won the bet even though i'll have to pay on the bet and lose it um so anyway i think i think harris is gonna get it uh that's about uh that's about all i got for now just checking to make sure oh so here's something i tweeted yesterday i had this pin for a while and even ann coulter liked it um so i got over 11 000 retweets now in given the size of my twitter following a really good viral tweet from me would be about 1500 retweets all right so this is approximately it's approaching 10 times it probably will get to 10 times more than my a good normal viral tweet so that means that this is hitting a chord with people way way beyond normal tweets and here's what it is most of you saw i said i can't respect the protest i do i always respect the people of course but you know you can disrespect activities i can't respect a protest that has these qualities number one no specific suggestions on what to change you know defunding the police isn't too specific data is not allowed into the debate because it's not you're not really allowed to look at the data right uh dissenting opinions no matter how respectful and well-meaning are not allowed that's true you could not have a dissenting opinion even if you're respectful and even if your data was on your side and even if you're well-meaning not allowed and number four the protest has a low regard for public safety and i think that's true so um i don't know i don't know how to participate in a debate in which you can't talk about the data you can't have a different opinion there's no real suggestions and they're not even concerned with public well-being like i don't know what's that part of the reason that i think the protests are so big and that again nobody seems to want to say this out loud but i will it's because the weather is good and there are no alternatives for something to do imagine if this was just a regular summer and people had their summer vacations planned and kids were going to camps and you know you're just busy busy running around and you could go to clubs and bars you could go out to restaurants you're at the beach and you've got all these other things you can do how big would the protest be now you'd like to believe they'd be the same size right because what's more important going to the beach or protesting to try to improve life and reduce racism so your your lost your logical mind says well they'd be the same size because it's so important compared to going to the beach have you met people if you've got that many human beings there are a lot of those people who would have gone to the beach they would have gone to the beach it doesn't mean that the that the issue is any less certainly not saying that i'm just saying if you're looking at the size of the crowd it's completely misleading because they just didn't have anything else to do it was outdoors that you could leave the house so i think we're being fooled not only by selective images on our tv we're being fooled because we're we ignore the alternatives you know the alternative was to do something else and it didn't exist all right um it's the perfect time for a protest weather's good and there's nothing else to do i don't even think the protest would be this big if they were in august because it'd be too hot i mean that alone would be a factor you just described florida do you think it'll matter that people are saying that uh democratic mayors all failed do you do you think that that's going to matter to anything i have a feeling it won't i really do i'd love to see some kind of a city let's say uh consultants like bain consultants or people like that i'd love to see them put together a city rescue service so it would be a contracted service and you would say to some big consulting company mackenzie just you know somebody who's got a lot of smart people and you'd say we're gonna have an election in our city and if we if we choose this by referendum then you're going to come in for two years and at two years you're out of here but two years will bring in professional consultants who have a package of you know they figured out how to do things what works and what doesn't and they'll come in and they'll just implement these changes we'll run it for two years and then the consultants will have to leave no matter how well they do they don't live here they're not elected they've got to leave after two years and then we'll try to fill positions with regular elected people to keep the momentum going do you think anybody would use that would anybody use a city rescue service like it would be like a government in a box you know a canned government that just comes in for two years and then they have to leave you know what no two ways about it now i wouldn't worry about you know consultants taking over a city and staying i don't feel like that's a big risk i feel like they'd want to make their money and move to another city yeah and you know maybe you appoint a city manager to implement things but that manager would be more of an implementer anyway pork is a problem that is correct ben i think that the professional consultants would be less susceptible to the pork because they would be highly paid on day one they wouldn't have to take bribes because they have good jobs all right uh that's all for now and i will talk to you later have a great day
hey everybody
it's time funk juice good to see you
always a pleasure well everybody
what a great day today is what a great
day
63 years ago today
i came out of my mother's body
so today is my birthday yay shall we
celebrate with a simultaneous sip
i think that would be an order and all
you need to do
to participate is find yourself a
copper mug or a glass attacker chalice
or stein a candy jugger flask a vessel
of any kind
and join me now for the unparalleled
pleasure the dopamine of the day the
thing that makes everything
better including the pandemic including
racism
it'll even make your birthday better but
it's my birthday not yours so
might not help you at all to the
simultaneous step
go
happy birthday also to kanye west
and to jfk people who share my birthday
all right but enough about me let's talk
about the world
is the world still there all right
here are some things for you to think
about uh
ninety percent of the people who are
killed by police are men
is that proof of sexism go
uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh um
now i just put that out there to cause
trouble
why is it only men who are getting
killed by police
it's proof of sexism isn't it
now when you say uh scott um
no because the men are committing the
crimes i say to you
how sexist of you to say that i just put
that out there to cause trouble here's
the more
uh trouble-causing statistics
have you noticed that we humans can't
calculate anything correctly
and we can't calculate anything
correctly we don't know how many people
are going to die from the virus we don't
know how many people died from the
regular flu
we don't know what the unemployment rate
really is because even that got revised
so that got revised up from uh what we
thought was great great news to just
pretty good news
uh the unemployment got corrected up to
16.3 percent
and black black unemployment is the
highest in more than 10 years
according to camellaris and latino
unemployment is 17.6
yikes so as kabul harris is saying
that's nothing to celebrate
about but of course nobody is
celebrating the absolute number
do you think anybody was celebrating the
absolute number
no i think they were celebrating the
change
i think there was celebration for the
direction
celebration for the hoped for a future
but it's one more example of how we
humans
we should just give up on numbers we
should just give up
on trying to calculate anything because
we always do it wrong
or if we do it right the other side
doesn't believe it
it just doesn't make any difference if
you've got good numbers or bad
here's some more numbers uh
so according to rasmussen and
i believe that's coming out any moment
now the
uh back in 2016
this was the opinion all right so in
2016
38 of voters thought most black
americans were treated unfairly by the
police
so it was 38 in 2016.
today it's 51 it went from
38 thought black americans were treated
unfairly by the police
to 51 during
trump's administration
what changed what changed
was it the data did the data change
no i'll bet not i mean not in three
years right
i don't think the data changed i think
what changed was the persuasion
what you saw on television who was the
president
you know how many stories were run of a
certain type what did social media do
so without the data changing at all
i mean i haven't even looked at the data
but i don't think it got worse
between 2016 and 2019 did it
or 2020 it didn't get worse
i mean if it did it's like some small
amount but basically it's
the same but our opinion of it
completely changed
so do you think opinions change because
of data
no the data stayed the same
and the opinions wildly changed
because of persuasion so if you don't if
you don't see that the data didn't make
any difference
and the persuasion made all the
difference you're watching the wrong
world
um so
let's uh talk about some more fun stuff
so i've told you before that
fear is the the primary persuasion
persuasive force there is nothing more
persuasive
period than fear because fear is the top
of your
concerned stack if you're literally
afraid at the moment
you're going to take care of that first
you won't even
eat first if you're afraid
first you take care of afraid go hide
protect yourself do what you need to do
and then you eat so there's nothing that
competes even close
to fear as a primary persuasive
variable and here's what the democrats
are doing for their campaign strategy
they're they're calling for defunding
the police
at exactly the same time other democrats
and i say that
more jokingly because i'm just you know
i i'm doing that thing that all pundits
do
i act like the the one percent of the
bad characters
represent the whole obviously the
looters do not represent democrats
can we agree looters are not
representative
of democrats even if you think it
even if you think that's true for fun
it's not true
mathematically but it is nonetheless
true that in a political season if the
democrats are producing
two things simultaneously it's not a
good look
one of the things they're producing is a
very
powerful and maybe successful call to
defund the police
so that's one thing they're doing but
other people who will be associated with
the democrats because they lean in that
direction even if they're not registered
democrats
even if they're not voting is the people
doing the violence on videos
so we have all this video of what
happens when the police are not there
which is if i can be blunt white people
being killed by black people
i'm not saying that that describes the
world i'm saying it describes these
selective little videos
that are running non-stop because those
are the anecdotes we're getting
so if you're doing two things
simultaneously
the democrats saying let's defund the
police
while all of the visual persuasion
what uh what do i tell you about visual
persuasion
it overwhelms other kinds of persuasions
that evolve your senses
it's not as strong as fear but the
visual can be part of the fear of
persuasion too of course
but the fact that it's visual it's on
video
and it's horrible and you're seeing
people just being killed by writers and
and and looters breaking store windows
you couldn't have a weaker strategy
going into the election
in fact if you were to sit down and try
to design on paper the worst
campaign strategy it would be defund the
police
while simultaneously showing non-stop
images
of what happens when the police are not
standing right there
i don't know that that could be worse
from their side
am i wrong highest form of persuasion
and they're they're creating a situation
to scare you
to death now if you haven't seen this
clip i just tweeted it
you have to watch it just for the
reaction
it's a cnn clip in which uh allison
camarado is interviewing um
somebody named bender who is
in favor of defunding the police
and allison camarado asked this question
which i think is on all of your minds
and here's the question what if in the
middle of the night
my heart my home is broken into who do i
call
now here's what you need to watch in
that question
allison camarado is a cnn
what's the right word course host
whatever is the right word for that uh
host i think
and the way she words the question is
personal
that's important all right because
you're trying to understand what
what she's thinking as well as what
she's saying we can't read minds
but how we receive the communication
you know makes you think that they're
thinking a certain way even if you're
wrong
so she puts it in a personal form of a
question
what if in the middle of the night my
home is broken into
all right this is very important she's
putting herself in the movie
she's not saying what if something
happens to somebody and somebody
you know needs to do something no
alison camarado said what if my home is
broken into
she put herself in the movie now watch
the response
and bender said yes i hear that loud and
clear from a lot of my neighbors
and i know and myself too
and i know that that comes from a place
of privilege
so that was the moment that democrats
lost cnn they lost
cnn because you could watch you had to
see the
the look on camarado's face
now again you can't really tell what
people are thinking
by a look on their face but i'll tell
you the impression i got
because remember when i talk about
persuasion it's not about what's right
it's what impression did you get and the
impression i got was
alison camarado saying thinking
that doesn't work for me that doesn't
work for me
that's what that's what i saw in her
face again
i warn you you can't read other people's
minds she may have had a completely
different thought
but that's how i received it it looked
like
cnn was lost on that day
because seriously one cnn host with a
good income
is going to say uh yeah that's a good
idea
if if somebody is trying to break in my
front door that there's nobody to call
there's nobody on cnn no not even don
lemon is going to be
is going to get behind that if you lose
if you've lost don lemon well you've
lost the election
now of course don levin is not going to
side with uh you know having more police
but i don't think even he could say
directly and on camera
you know this would be a better world if
somebody's breaking into my house and i
don't have anybody to call
that would be an upgrade i don't think
he's going to say that
so i don't know how they can recover
from that but
despite all that it turns out that
latest poll numbers on trump versus
biden
is that biden is just blowing him away
so that the difference between biden and
trump and the national polls just
widened
it widened trump just had the best week
of his life
and the polls widened now when i say
it's the best
week of his life i don't mean that
people realize that
i'm just saying i realize it because he
did get us through the pandemic
and i think he he called the timing
about right pushing for the opening
looks like exactly the right thing he
was criticized for it
um being tough on china looks smarter
every day
the economy will probably pick up and
trump is very directly
involved in at least the psychology of
that
i don't think trump's ever had a better
week but i also don't think it
registered that way to everybody
i'm not sure that intellectually people
realize what a good week this was
now when i say a good week that includes
the looting
because although the president did not
do something directly to stop
the looting think about the fact that
you brought in the
national guard and it kind of stopped at
the same time
am i wrong that the looting kind of
went from a lot to not too much
immediately upon the national guard
showing up
i think that's true i mean it feels true
even if it's not
and if we're talking about persuasion
what feels true is right
so i think the president actually had
one of the highest
um almost borders on gifted
honestly uh performances
with the exception just see just so you
know
that i'm not just praising trump for
everything i think they completely blew
the messaging on a lot of this stuff
everything from the pandemic messaging
to the
the protester the george floyd stuff i
don't think the messaging was good
so i'm not just complimenting everything
he does just
mindlessly i'm telling you that if
you're watching
if you're watching looting on television
and your choices are the pro
law order guy or the who knows what guy
the pro-law and archer guy
is just going to get a bump from
watching crime on tv
that has nothing to do with his
performance he's just had to exist and
be that guy and it's going to help him
likewise the economy going up will help
trump likewise
you know the coronavirus just getting in
our rear-view mirror at least a little
bit
will help him so i think he had his
strongest weak but his poll numbers are
the weakest
and i have i have speculated
that this is the biggest practical joke
in the history of politics
that republicans are literally lying to
pollsters
in a massive numbers i feel that's true
now i can't prove it it's just an
instinct
but i feel it's true i also feel like
it's a long time until election day and
i don't know the polls are telling us as
much
today as as they should because
you know they're pretty pretty frothy at
this point
all right um so
let's talk about those protesters
washing the feet
of black lives matter leaders and i
guess police were washing the feet of
black religious leaders as well not all
the police
not all the protesters obviously but
here was my take on that
it's pretty good persuasion because you
can't look away it gets your attention
and it shakes the box like everything
that you think about
people and power and racism and who
thinks what and does what
this just shakes it all up it just makes
you think what
and it gets you mad or excited or you
put yourself in the place
but the the trick of this is if you have
enough people
there's always somebody who's willing to
do anything if you have a million people
you can get
somebody out of the million people to do
literally anything
you can get them to you do harm to
themselves just anything
if you have enough people so when you're
watching some small number of people do
something that you wouldn't do
it doesn't mean anything it just means
that you're seeing a small number of
people do something you wouldn't do
that's it so it doesn't have any meaning
beyond the fact it really shakes up your
head
so persuasion wise i give it an a-plus
because the matter or the more upset you
are about it
the better it works that is its power
its power is that it upsets you so
if i'm if i'm just looking at it from a
persuasion
as a technique a plus
yeah if it disgusted you if it angered
you
if you couldn't turn away that's what
makes it work
so i wouldn't worry about it becoming a
trend
you don't have to worry about it being a
trend you know
it's never going to be guaranteed it'll
never be required
it'll always be optional so this is the
power that the media has
they can take something that's unusual
and give it a lot of attention
until you think it's some kind of a
normal thing or it's the beginning of a
trend or it's happening everywhere
it's the smallest little thing that some
very unique people could do but you
couldn't do
nobody's gonna ask you to do it it just
doesn't matter
so but persuasion-wise it was strong um
i swear to god almost all of our
problems in society
are because we can't calculate
percentages right
am i wrong about that like if we could
calculate
percentages meaning that we knew the
right nominated
numerator and the right denominator if
we could always get that right and then
calculate it right and know which one is
the one that matters
i don't think we'd have nearly as many
problems in the world
it's like we can't calculate anything
right i'll give you some
specifics on that
for example
a a guy who follows me on twitter
which is no way to describe a person
because that's
the least important part of his
personality is following me on twitter
but i don't know anything else about him
so other than
his name is leonidas johnson he may or
may not be watching this periscope
and he's african-american which you need
to know for the purpose of the story
and he tweeted this and i
i presume he leans conservative he says
for every ten thousand black people
arrested for violent crimes
three are killed for every ten thousand
white people arrested for violent crime
four are killed and then
leonidas goes on he says i'm going to
keep tweeting this until someone can
explain to me
how this is possible if there is truly
pervasive racial bias in policing
so so he's a black man
so he can tweet this do you know what i
can't do
tweet that i can't tweet that i don't
have
i don't have freedom of speech
in a practical sense i have freedom of
speech in a legal sense i can say
anything i want
but in a practical sense my life would
just be worse
if i had been the one who tweeted this
but because
leonidas is black he can tweet it and
then i can retweet it i'm okay
so i did that but i certainly don't have
freedom of speech the way black people
do
let me just say that directly i have
less freedom of speech than black people
would you agree is that is that even
controversial
because it's true that black people can
say more things in public
with less repercussions than i can it's
not even close
really and now regardless of whether i'm
right or wrong
which is a separate question they're
just whole classes
of things including data i wouldn't even
be able to
talk about data in public think about
that
that i can't talk about data in public
now i've told you before that one of my
advantages
is that i have uh i wasn't going to
swear today
so i'll give you the pg version
that i have fu money meaning that
the worst thing that could happen to me
is i retire and live on the money i
already made
but because i'm still
you know in the workforce and i would
still like to have an actual job
i like to be productive i like to i like
to create things that people want
and pay for and i would like to be paid
for those things because it just works
better that way
so i'm finding that i'm becoming
increasingly uncancelable
if you have fu money you're uncancelable
but if you
also care about your ongoing career
you're not you're not completely
uncancelable
because i'd still like to be a
cartoonist i'd still like to be able to
come on video and talk to you
i still like people to buy my books so
i'm not completely
uncancelable but i'm getting closer
because i always talk to you about
locals the new platform
uh which i've joined now locals is a
subscription platform
so and it's growing so it's becoming a
larger percentage of my overall income
at the moment it's still the minority
part of my overall
income but it's growing pretty quickly
when it reaches a point where it's
competitive with my
income in general meaning that even if i
lost
everything else i would still have a
real job
it would just be limited to locals which
would be fine if that was a big enough
community
and i'm becoming increasingly
uncancelable and i don't know what that
does
because i haven't been there before i've
never been in a place
where i not only have fu money
but i have an fu job
i've never had that before i've only had
the money
not a job that was invulnerable and i'm
getting close to that
i'm getting closer and closer to being
actually invulnerable
and i'm wondering if at some point i
would have freedom of speech
i'm getting close and it's kind of
exciting
because i would like to be able to have
freedom of speech the way black
americans do
the way women do women less than black
americans
but but um someday
god willing i will have freedom of
speech
i don't know if that will make me speak
any differently i actually don't
but it's kind of exciting i got real
excited the other day when i thought
hey are you kidding me i could actually
i could actually tweet some data
that was actually just useful and true
i could i could just tweet true data
and i don't have to lose my my career
could be good could be good anyway in
response to leonidas
um tweet there was of course lots of
interaction on it and he went into
some detail in the thread which i would
recommend to you
and so look for it in my twitter thread
i just tweeted it this morning
so all right so starting with the claim
that for every 10 000 black people
arrested for violent crimes now this is
the key
phrase here violent crimes three are
killed for every ten thousand white
people arrested for
again violent crimes four are killed
now of course the big question mark is
well what about non-violent crimes
what about what about all the people
getting hassled and
you know i don't know abused beat up
humiliated uh
all those other bad things for
non-violent crimes what about all that
i mean that's got to be part of the
equation doesn't it
and so i don't know the answer that but
i tweeted back
that um that which group
gets stopped and hassled the most by
police
because let's say these statistics are
true and
let's take out the violent crime let's
say that it was true
that uh statistically slightly more
white people are killed not even
slightly but more white people are
killed by police
than black people but what if
black people encounter the police ten
times more
what if there's just more police
presence in black communities because
they tend
at least in the urban areas they're
going to be lower income
more crime comes with lower income so
there's going to be more police
so how do you factor that in so
is it the whole story that it's the
percentage of people
arrested for violent crimes it's not
really the whole story
because you have to look at you know
who's getting stopped and why is there a
racial component to that
and most americans apparently think
there is
a racial component to that and it would
be hard to debate
i mean it's hard to argue that there's
who could really argue that
i i would think that race has a big
impact on who gets stopped
now but which doesn't mean that the
people doing the stopping are racist
because apparently there's not much
difference between how
black police officers and white police
officers treat anybody
if black and white police officers are
basically the same
in how they treat people it's it's kind
of hard to find
the racial component when you take that
into consideration
but um what leonid leonidas argued
in response to other people you know
questioning the
totality of the stuff is that leonidas
makes a really good um rational point
and it goes like this
that people being stopped for violent
crimes is not the whole story
he'd be in complete agreement that he's
taking a slice
of the whole story but he says quite
reasonably
that if this racial if the racial bias
was what people say it is this is
exactly where it would show up
the strongest i don't know that that's
true i also don't know that statistics
are accurate
because where does statistics come from
the police right so
is it possible that the police aren't
good
at accurately you know documenting who
got killed for what
maybe i mean that wouldn't be surprising
but
it's an interesting point leonidas says
that it would show up there
and it doesn't
is that persuasive to you i wouldn't say
it's completely persuasive
but i would say it's it's exactly the
right question
isn't it it's exactly the right question
because we should understand that
no matter what the answer is even if the
answer is the data was bad i'd like to
understand that
for sure all right
um van jones tweeted
today that uh women leaders globally
kicked
hashtag coronavirus in the ass male
leaders
across the board blew it facts
hashtag pandemic etc and then he linked
to
the story on that now
was that helpful to say that women
leaders did a good job and male leaders
did not
because i don't feel like what we needed
was more sexism
because i'm pretty sure that you can't
document that their gender is what made
them
more successful one of the successful
female leaders was
new zealand i don't want to be unkind
to new zealand and i don't want to be
unkind to the leader who's a woman
who apparently is leading a country that
claims to have
actually eliminated coronavirus that's
pretty good
but it needs to be said it's an island
it's an island and
it could be that once again
humans are bad at calculating
percentages
and and do you think it's
fair or accurate or helpful to say that
women
beat the coronavirus but male leaders
blew it
to me that feels like just sexism
because i don't think you can make that
claim based on the data
now here's what's ironic about this
literally the day before i was thinking
to myself
who's the only person who would have
enough credibility to fix the
you know to do something constructive
about the protests and
and race relations in this country and
maybe come up with something practical
that we could work on
you know come up with some specific
proposals we could
toss around and see what we can do and i
thought well van jones
van jones is probably one of the few
people in the world
who can uh well he's bilingual
meaning that he can talk to black people
he can talk to white people and he knows
what they mean
i don't know how many people there are
in the whole world
who have credibility ability to
communicate
uh have the interest have the you know
have the aptitude the history
the the history of success especially
with
prison reform i mean really come up with
come up with one other person on the
planet
who would be more perfect for being in
the middle of this and getting it fixed
now in the comments somebody's saying
kanye kanye is a
force of nature and one of the most
productive ones you'll ever see in in
lots of ways socially as well as
economically productive but i don't know
that
kanye is the right one to dig in and get
into some details
about how to fix policing i i see
i see kanye as more of a almost as
spiritual
kind of a leader not not a you know nuts
and bolts
here's my policy kind of a leader and if
you want to get down into
some real practical stuff
i'm thinking van jones i'm thinking van
jones would be
the best choice i can think of can you
think of a better one
i'm looking at your comments to see if
anybody suggests anybody
larry elder would be too associated with
the right
you really need somebody who's more
associated with the left
but knows how to work with the right and
it really just sort of comes down to
van jones so i hope it gets in the game
but
my friendly advice with affection it to
van jones
because i think he's one of the most
productive people um
in the country right now um
i don't think the sexism helps us we
didn't probably didn't need that
all right here's my favorite story
that didn't get many retweets now the
fact that this didn't get many retweets
compared to everything else i tweeted
today
tells me that the message is not getting
through
or it's getting through and it's being
rejected
and now i'm going to tell you something
that'll be one of the most important
things you'll ever hear
indeed it's so important it could end
racism
i just let that hang in the air for a
moment i'm going to give you a
suggestion a persuasion suggestion
that's so powerful it could completely
end racism it's a pretty big claim isn't
it
let me tell you the story buffalo
teenager
18 years old who is african-american
which is important to the story
after buffalo was hit by the looting i
guess there was glass all over the
streets
and this 18 year old gentleman
decides to just on his own go out with a
broom and start sweeping the streets
and he spent 10 hours cleaning the
street by himself
just one guy by himself and a broom
cleaning the street what do you think
happened
have you ever heard of the power of
reciprocity
i talk about this right and it's
documented
right it's in the book um influenced by
childini
so it's been studied this is not some
new agey
kind of let's let's all get along kind
of thing it's been studied and it's
scientifically true
that if you just give somebody something
and ask
nothing in return the odds of them being
flexible with you in the future
and wanting to work with you and do good
things for you that you didn't ask for
goes through the roof now i don't know
that reciprocity works everywhere
all the same there could be a cultural
element to it
but i can tell you as your
representative white person
that and again i assume it works with
everybody
but i can only speak to the group that i
you know have the most information about
among white people reciprocity is like
a freaking nuclear weapon
we can't ignore it we can't
if you do something good for me i just
gotta return the favor i got to and i'll
be and if i can't find a way to do it
right away it'll
it will bother me for years years
literally will bother me for years if i
can't pay back a kindness
so what happened to the 18 year old
african-american
guy who just saw a glass in the streets
and said you know it'd be a better world
if i just swept up this glass
spent 10 hours
doing if you've ever swept for 10 hours
because i have not 10 hours but i've
swept for hours
and it's hard after the first few hours
here's what happened um
one gentleman gave him a car
i think a mustang it was a
classic one it was a few years old
because uh
because he checked his social media the
person who gave him the car
and found that he said he was saving up
to get a car
so somebody just gave him a mustang
now here's the fun part of the story his
late mother had that same car
and so it wasn't just a car it was like
really
a meaningful who's programming the
simulation kind of a car
of all the cars in the world
he was given as a gift the car
that had the most meaning to it that was
a coincidence
he gets a car and then somebody hears
that story and they say what good's a
car without car insurance
so somebody bought him insurance so he
made
a brand new not a brand new was a used
but it was a classic
mustang you know maybe better than a new
car depending
on what kind of cars you like and then
somebody paid for his college education
they gave him a car car insurance
and they paid for college
because he spent 10 hours sweeping the
streets
and asking for nothing
my cat is visiting if you see a tale go
by
he asked for nothing and he got a car
car insurance and a free education
now how often does this work well it
doesn't work like that
too often like you're not going to get a
car in a college education just for
helping people out
but the concept of reciprocity will work
every time
what are white people doing to try to
make the world better
you're watching the protests the white
people
are washing the feet of black lives
matter people
and and the leaders of black churches
why are they doing that well who knows
you can't really see in their minds
but it is a reciprocity play
because if you're watching that and
you're black let's say you're a black
leader and some
white people said can we wash your feet
on camera
and you said yes and it happened
how do you feel do you say ah suckers
you suckers hahaha that changed nothing
you might try to feel that way you might
try to feel like these stupid white
people they don't know
that this doesn't work but sure i'll
humiliate them
i'll let them wash my feet i don't know
what you're thinking
intellectually but i gotta tell you
it probably worked because reciprocity
doesn't ever not work it works every
time
so should if if the
um the black lives matter people
wanted equality there is a
four-lane highway with no traffic to get
there
it's called reciprocity
but could you use a reciprocity strategy
if you were let's say
still suffering in your opinion from the
effects of
slavery all right
it if you still felt oppressed today
and you felt it was the legacy of
slavery
and you know all the all the bad you
know
jim pro laws and everything in the
history
if that's what's on your mind and that's
sort of defining your worldview
how in the world could you ever use
reciprocity as a tool
it just doesn't feel like giving
something is the right solution
when the problem is people took too much
right i mean the slavery is somebody
taking too much from you your
your very liberty your life your you
know your safety everything
you know slavery is taking everything
from you so how do you get from that
mindset
something that's still rippling through
history how do you get from that mindset
to the most productive and reliable
persuasion technique in the world
reciprocity
well i would look at an 18 year old
buffalo teen who did that
he actually did that he was born into
the same world you were born into
slavery is still a historical fact in
his world
right he this 18 year old was not born
into a world where slavery never
happened
nope he was not born into a world where
black people are treated
exactly the same as white people nope he
wasn't born into that world
wasn't born into a world where
everything is fair
nope nope wasn't born into a world where
racism doesn't exist
nope nope he had every obstacle
in the world against him every obstacle
in the world against him and he fixed it
with a broom a broom
he changed his life with a broom
in 10 hours and if you had asked me
ahead of time
scott do you think this is a good idea
will this work
i would have said not only will it work
could change your life might even
change the world i doubt it
because i you know i don't just don't
think it's realistic
to find too many people that have um
as much on the ball as this 18 year old
has this 18 year old
is just operating at a different level
if if this guy
doesn't run for office someday
it would be a crime because
this is this is the guy you need to be
in charge i
i would vote for this guy he's 18 years
old he already has my vote for president
frankly all right
so let's see what else is coming down
the road let's talk about biden and his
uh vice presidential pick um some smart
people are saying it's narrowed down to
elizabeth warren or kamala harris
so i did a little twitter poll to find
out how you thought about it
and um kamal harris
was a winner of the unscientific twitter
poll
with almost 70 percent of the vote
it's sort of a two to one let's say so
two to one
of probably mostly pro-trump people who
voted in my unscientific twitter poll
two to one thought kamal harris was the
stronger candidate
stronger meaning the one that would help
biden the most and i agree with that
completely some people complained and
said
no no way because kamala harris was a
prosecutor
and she is more associated with putting
black people in jail
then she is associated with defunding
the police which is
the popular thing for democrats but
i would argue this that if you're
democrats and you're worried about
scaring republicans with too much of the
defund the police stuff
and i think biden's not going to go
fully he might
flirt with defunding the police but he's
not going to be and eliminate the police
guy
i don't think i think
harris is actually perfect for that
because she straddles
she straddles both worlds like nobody
else you can think of
you want somebody who's got one foot in
the world of
the police let's say law enforcement
world and she does
but you also want the other foot to be
with the protesters with black lives
matter
clearly progressive somebody who can see
both sides
how many people have that she actually
is exactly the right person
she's not even approximately the right
person she's exactly the right person
because you want somebody who can see
both sides you're not going to get to
the end without a few leaders who can do
that
now i don't i don't think she is
necessarily the
unifying leader that we need but she has
what you need for vice president i think
it's a slam dunk
all right so uh
we could be surprised by some candidate
we didn't know of
who just was even more perfect but
at this point i'd say at least a fifty
percent chance
it's kamal harris but i would say
there's a hundred percent chance
it's not elizabeth warren so there could
be some still
surprises i checked my predicted um
my predicted bets so where i go to the
the betting market and actually bet on
stuff
now all of my bets are are many months
old
so there's nothing that i bet recently
everything is
2019 maybe early 2020 i don't remember
some of them
so there's nothing new and i've got six
bets
all six of them are right except that
only four of them i think will pay
here's why i say they're all correct
bets but only
three or four of them are going to pay
one of my bets was that kamala harris
would get the top ticket nomination
that will not happen because biden
already got it
but we also agree that if she's the vice
presidential pick
it will be like she is the presidential
candidate
so i'm going to lose my bet and predict
it because they're going to be
technical about that you know they they
tell you in advance what the standard is
and it wouldn't meet that standard
so i'm going to lose the bet at the same
time
that i won the bet
um so i think it was either 6 out of 6
might have been 5 and a 6.
so one of the bets i won is that the
nominee
would be over 70. so that's biden
um one of the ones i won is that
oh i lost the bet that the democrats
would
nominate a woman but again
if camalleris is vice president and
people see her as the top of the ticket
i kind of won the bet even though i'll
have to
pay on the bet and lose it um
so anyway i think i think harris is
gonna get it
uh that's about uh
that's about all i got for now just
checking to make sure
oh so here's something i tweeted
yesterday i had this pin for a while
and even ann coulter liked it
um so i got over 11 000
retweets now in given the size of my
twitter following
a really good viral tweet from me would
be about
1500 retweets all right so this
is approximately it's approaching 10
times
it probably will get to 10 times more
than my a good normal viral tweet
so that means that this is hitting a
chord with people
way way beyond normal tweets and here's
what it is most of you saw
i said i can't respect the protest i do
i always respect the people of course
but
you know you can disrespect activities
i can't respect a protest that has these
qualities number one
no specific suggestions on what to
change
you know defunding the police isn't too
specific
data is not allowed into the debate
because it's not
you're not really allowed to look at the
data right
uh dissenting opinions no matter how
respectful and well-meaning are not
allowed
that's true you could not have a
dissenting
opinion even if you're respectful and
even if your data was on your side
and even if you're well-meaning not
allowed
and number four the protest has a low
regard for public safety and i think
that's
true so
um
i don't know i don't know how to
participate in a debate
in which you can't talk about the data
you can't have a different opinion
there's no real suggestions and they're
not even
concerned with public well-being like
i don't know what's that part of the
reason that i think the protests are so
big
and that again nobody seems to want to
say this out loud but i will
it's because the weather is good and
there are no alternatives
for something to do imagine if this was
just a regular summer and people had
their summer vacations planned and
kids were going to camps and you know
you're just busy busy running around
and you could go to clubs and bars you
could go out to restaurants you're at
the beach
and you've got all these other things
you can do
how big would the protest be now you'd
like to believe they'd be the same size
right because what's more important
going to the beach
or protesting to try to improve life
and reduce racism so
your your lost your logical mind says
well they'd be the same size because
it's so important compared to going to
the beach
have you met people
if you've got that many human beings
there are a lot of those people who
would have gone to the beach
they would have gone to the beach it
doesn't mean that the
that the issue is any less certainly not
saying that
i'm just saying if you're looking at the
size of the crowd it's completely
misleading
because they just didn't have anything
else to do
it was outdoors that you could leave the
house
so i think we're being fooled not only
by selective images on our tv
we're being fooled because we're we
ignore the alternatives
you know the alternative was to do
something else and it didn't exist
all right um it's the perfect time for a
protest
weather's good and there's nothing else
to do
i don't even think the protest would be
this big if they were in august
because it'd be too hot i mean that
alone would be a factor
you just described florida
do you think it'll matter that people
are saying that uh democratic
mayors all failed do you do you think
that that's going to matter to anything
i have a feeling it won't i really do
i'd love to see some kind of a city
let's say uh consultants like bain
consultants or people like that
i'd love to see them put together a city
rescue service
so it would be a contracted service
and you would say to some big consulting
company mackenzie just
you know somebody who's got a lot of
smart people
and you'd say we're gonna have an
election in our city
and if we if we choose this by
referendum
then you're going to come in for two
years and at two years
you're out of here but two years will
bring in professional
consultants who have a package of you
know
they figured out how to do things what
works and what doesn't and they'll come
in and they'll just implement these
changes
we'll run it for two years and then the
consultants will have to leave
no matter how well they do they don't
live here they're not elected they've
got to leave after two years
and then we'll try to fill positions
with
regular elected people to keep the
momentum going
do you think anybody would use that
would anybody use a
city rescue service
like it would be like a government in a
box
you know a canned government that just
comes in for two years and then they
have to leave
you know what no two ways about it now i
wouldn't worry about
you know consultants taking over a city
and staying
i don't feel like that's a big risk i
feel like they'd want to make their
money and move to another city
yeah and you know maybe you appoint a
city manager to implement things
but that manager would be more of an
implementer
anyway pork is a problem that is correct
ben i think that the professional
consultants would be less
susceptible to the pork because they
would be highly paid
on day one they wouldn't have to take
bribes because they have good jobs
all right uh that's all for now
and i will talk to you later have a
great day
