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Sept. 30, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
51:54
Episode 241 Scott Adams: Temperament, False Accusations, Voting Persuasion and Ye
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
Hey Andrew, come on in.
Is everybody sleeping or in church?
Kyle, Duke, Pike, Devin, Stephan, Andrew?
It seems it's all guys this morning.
Oh, Donna, okay.
We have a few women coming in.
Alright. So, did everybody see the clip of Kanye, who we now call just Ye?
Kanye has decided that his new name will just be Ye, Y-E. He'll be joining the pantheon of people like Prince and Madonna and people who have one name.
So at the end of Saturday Night Live, he talked to the crowd and he talked about being bullied backstage for wearing his Make America Great Again hat, which apparently he redesigned because he liked a different brim, which is funny in and of itself.
Just think about this.
Kanye redesigned the Make America Great Again hat.
How many of those is he going to sell?
Because realistically, he's really actually a great designer.
I haven't really seen the differences between his hat and the main regular hats, but I kind of think it's probably better.
Don't you? It's kind of hilarious that he improved.
He was willing to wear the hat, but not the way it was.
It's like, I've got to fix his design a little bit.
And he probably did fix it.
Alright, let's talk about, there's a pivot now from Kavanaugh is definitely guilty, which is perhaps turning some people off.
You know, the notion of convicting somebody in the, at least in the public's eye, convicting him of a heinous crime based on unsubstantiated allegations.
Apparently not everybody thinks that's a good idea.
It's not as popular as you think.
Surprise! Turns out that blaming people for crimes and not having solid evidence is not popular with everyone.
So there seems to be a distinct pivot in the throw-everything-against-the-wall effort to stop Kavanaugh to questioning his, quote, temperament.
And that's the word that keeps getting used.
He doesn't have the temperament to be a judge.
I have two things to say about that.
Number one... What exactly is the temperament you should display when you're sitting in a room for the first time with the very people who for political purposes have destroyed your life, the life of your family, and ruined your reputation forever by branding you as a sex offender In his mind, falsely.
Now, keep in mind that you and I and most people don't know what happened or did not happen 35 years ago, but you know who does know?
In all likelihood, you know, not getting the possibility he was blacked out or something, but in all likelihood, Kavanaugh either knows he's innocent or believes it in a way that's quite credible.
What is the appropriate way to act in front of the people who just destroyed your family?
Is there any such thing as being too angry?
I mean, seriously.
What exactly is angry enough?
And then how much would be too angry, given that you're just using words, right?
I mean, all that was said was words and attitude and some body language.
But what exactly would too angry look like In that situation where somebody just tainted you as a sex offender and ruined your whole life.
Because even if he's appointed, every time he walks down the street, He's going to be that sex offender guy.
That doesn't wash off.
Ask Clarence Thomas.
Ask Clarence Thomas if people are forgetting his confirmation.
I don't think so. Now, again, I don't know if Clarence Thomas was guilty or innocent, but we can say for certain that it doesn't wash off, guilty or innocent.
So Kavanaugh's claimed that his life is ruined.
I've heard some people on Twitter were pushing back this morning and saying, how is his life ruined?
Come on, he's either just going to go back to his excellent job as a circuit judge or he gets confirmed.
That's not ruined.
Well, how would you feel if you were branded publicly as a sex offender and, in your mind, you weren't?
You wouldn't like it, my guess is.
Here's my second point about that.
I think most of you are aware that the word hysterical When applied to women is considered sexist.
And I agree with that given the origin of the word.
Because hysteria comes from hysterectomy.
It was associated with women.
So it comes from some junk science from the past.
Now it did, the word sort of passed into common usage that you could apply to anybody.
But as a practical matter, it tends to be more applied to women and it has a sexist overtone to it that, you know, it's hard to miss.
Now, that doesn't mean every person who uses the word is a sexist because it's just a common word and not everybody even knows that it would be offensive.
It's just a word. It still comes across that way.
It's received that way.
It's been called out enough times that an educated person should know to stay away from that word when talking about a woman because it is received as sexist and may in fact be delivered as sexist depending on who's saying it.
But it seems to me that this word temperament is reserved for men.
Again, not every time, not universally.
I'm not saying no woman has ever been accused of having a bad temperament.
But we saw it applied to Trump and we see it applied to Kavanaugh for what I would consider entirely normal male behavior.
Am I wrong about that?
It may be true that Trump yells at people in the course of his job.
He might get pretty angry about people attacking him for things he thinks are unfair.
But isn't it pretty typical male behavior?
To get worked up about stuff, to swear, to yell, to get emotional about being attacked, to defend yourself.
If you defend yourself in an angry way, even if you're not being physical about it, it's just words, and you're being accused of having a bad temperament, Isn't that really sort of reserved for men, that word? Not entirely.
Nothing's 100%.
So when the trolls come after me later and say, let me give you my troll impression.
Where's Dale?
Dale, I summon you.
Oh Scott, so you're saying that every single time in the history of the world somebody used the word temperament it was sexist and it was only applied to men, right?
Is that what you're saying? Stupid!
LOL LOL! No Dale, I'm not saying that.
Words are still used in a general sense in lots of different contexts.
But much like hysteria has that taint of sexism about it, which I agree it does, temperament has now sort of entered that arena.
That's my feeling.
Now, I think a lot of people are going to disagree with this, but you're going to have to watch this.
Watch how often temperament gets applied to men.
And do you know why that's so sexist?
It's because the conversation is about somebody who is alleged to have done something physical using his physicality, using his larger size.
Now, if somebody's just big and harmless, you don't care.
Somebody's big and harmless, they don't bother you.
Somebody who's got a bad temper, but they're small, you know, like a, let's say you had a chihuahua with a bad temper, you wouldn't be afraid of it.
Be small. But what if something is big, like a big male human, and also has a bad temper in it?
Might be some physical problems from that, right?
So when they use temperament about Kavanaugh, it is sexist.
It is very persuasive.
It isn't, from a persuasion point of view, I like to make the distinction between what is good technique and what is morally, ethically true and what is somewhat literally true if we can determine what is true.
Oh my God, how far have we gone without...
The simultaneous sip.
We can go no longer.
It's time. Raise your cup, your mug, your glass, your vessel, your chalice.
Filled with the liquid of your choice, I like coffee.
And it's time for the simultaneous sip.
Join me. I think it was extra good because I made you wait.
Now, here's one of the pieces of information that you would absolutely need to know to make a decision about Kavanaugh's likely innocence or likely guilt.
Because we will never know, but since it's not a court, it's a job interview, as some people have said.
It does matter if you think he's probably guilty or probably innocent.
It does matter even if you can't be 100% sure.
And part of that determination, part of our opinions on that, would have to depend on the following fact.
What are the percentage of sex crime accusations that turn out to be false?
Now, I was watching a Michelle Malcolm video in which she was talking about this.
I can't confirm any of the things she said in the video, but she seems like a well-researched sort of a person, so I'm going to assume that she probably got this right.
There's a number that floats around that only 2% of accusations, I think it was limited to sex crimes, yeah, turn out to be false.
But when you research that, you find out there's no actual study that would support the idea that it's 2%.
And that actual studies and estimates by people who do this for a living are somewhere in the, you know, 10 to 40% range That's the range.
The range is between 10 and 40% are false accusations.
Now, I can't say that's true, because I'm not the researcher and I don't have a link to give you.
I'm just telling you that almost nobody in this conversation Nobody knows what that is.
Nobody has a confident idea of what percentage of sex abuse accusations turn out to be false.
Nobody knows. And if somebody studied it, how would they know they had a good number?
Because how would you know that just because somebody was accused and went to jail, that they were also guilty because apparently a number of people go to jail who were innocent.
I don't know what percentage but how would you calculate that?
So could you ever know for sure how many of them were false?
The only thing you can know for sure is let's say somebody went to trial and was was not found guilty but that doesn't mean they're innocent or you could find that some people got convicted But that doesn't mean they're guilty, because there are plenty of examples of people guilty.
So I don't think it's knowable what percentage of people had false allegations compared to all the people who had allegations.
But here's the thing that everybody's going to get wrong.
If we could find that out, suppose there was some way to find out, with certainty or close to it, what the general number is of false accusations to accurate accusations.
Would that apply to this situation?
In other words, is the average number, does that tell you something useful for this specific case?
And I would say, a little bit.
It tells you a little bit, but here's how I would put it.
If we could find that real number, it would tell you the floor.
In other words, if it turned out that, let's say, 25% of accusations of sexual abuse turned out to be false, and there's no way to study that.
There's just no way to ever know.
But if it turned out, it was 25%.
Is that the number you should apply to this situation to say to yourself, okay, one in four chance it's not real?
No, you should not.
Here's why. Because the rate of accusations, false accusations, probably varies a great deal depending on the circumstance.
So, for example, if you're black and you were accused of a sex crime, is there more likelihood that there's a mistaken identity?
There might be.
There might be. I don't know.
But you'd have to look into that.
So Kavanaugh is not black.
So whatever experience of black people is, maybe get accused of more crimes or more falsely accused.
I don't know. But I'd want to know that, right?
What about the number of times that people are falsely accused of sex crimes in the context of a divorce or a custody battle?
Probably pretty high.
I would expect that in that context you would see a higher percentage of false accusations.
So should you use those numbers when you're looking at Kavanaugh?
That doesn't seem fair because that would be a biased group of people who are more likely to be liars.
So you can't really take the average and say this applies to Kavanaugh.
But here's the other thing you have to understand.
Famous people, powerful people, rich people, and I'm going to put myself in that category for this example, we get accused of false crimes all the frickin' time!
Me getting accused of something I didn't do is literally every freaking day.
Most of it happens on Twitter.
Today, I got in a Twitter back and forth with an anti-Kavanaugh person whose belief is that this whole false memory thing is BS. So that's the context.
I'm having a Twitter exchange with somebody who believes that the whole idea of a false memory is ridiculous.
In that exchange, it took her about 10 seconds to mischaracterize my opinion as a completely different opinion because she had a false memory of my opinion.
Right in front of me. So the person who is arguing the false memories are rare, exhibited in public, Well, unquestionably, because I can tell you my opinion.
It's all over Twitter. It's all over this.
It's been very clear.
My opinion is you'll never know.
We'll never know the truth of it.
It just can't be known. That's my opinion.
She characterized it as completely different, that he's innocent.
That's a very different opinion.
And then she criticized me for it.
So that's how common false accusations are in my life.
One already today.
Oh no, two.
I've had two or three false accusations based on false memory.
I think in at least one to three of those cases.
That's how common it is.
Is it more common that somebody will have a fake memory in which they insert the wrong person and they're famous?
It probably is, because famous people are on your mind.
The people who are on your mind in any way are the ones you're going to insert into a false memory.
If you're not thinking of somebody, you're not going to put them in a false memory.
They're just not in your mind.
So the life of a famous person is one in which false accusations are coming like a fire hose.
They're not all important, but they're all false, and they're all based on fake memory.
Not all of them. Many of them are based on false memory.
So I did a little Twitter poll yesterday and I asked people if they had been accused falsely of anything.
Had they been falsely accused of anything?
What do you think was the percentage of people?
So it was just a yes, no.
Have you been falsely accused of anything?
What was the percentage of people who said yes?
Falsely accused?
67%. Yeah, it was pushing 70%.
So two out of three people have been falsely accused of things that were important enough that they remember them and that, you know, they made some difference.
I think the number is closer to 100% and the people saying that they haven't been either live very uninteresting lives or they're not remembering.
So it's probably a case of false memory, which is ironic.
So the context that I would put on this is that if two-thirds of people have been falsely accused, it's pretty darn common.
And my guess is that the filter that people are putting on this Kavanaugh situation is completely based on their own experience.
That would be a normal situation.
We all base our opinions through a filter of our own experience.
If you had ever been sexually abused, what filter are you going to put on this situation?
Well, unless you really, really, really, really want this judge, you're going to say, hmm, I was sexually abused.
This guy looks like a sexual abuser to me.
I think he's 100% guilty.
It won't be based on the facts, because we don't really use facts to make decisions.
It will be based on what you want it to be.
So people are seeing what they want to see.
The people who have been tragically victims of sexual abuse are very primed For somebody who is credibly accused to be actually guilty and to pay a price.
So that's their filter.
But there's another large group of people, and I'm in that category, Who had been falsely accused of major, major things.
Like really important things.
Major crimes. I almost got fired once.
This was when I was probably 20 or so.
I was working at a resort as a busboy when I was in college.
And my boss literally cornered me in this little coffee making area.
And he was this big guy and he threatened to kick my ass.
This is one of my bosses.
It was a family owned resort.
He actually cornered me and physically threatened me.
He said he should fire me and he should kick my ass.
And I was like, uh, why?
And then he told a story of something I had said to one of the servers who she had reported to her boss, who was his sister, and by the time the story got told and retold, it had turned into an insult To his sister, who I had never even mentioned.
I hadn't even talked about her.
It was just a translation problem.
So here I was about to get fired and physically get beaten up.
He was a big guy and he meant it when he said he was thinking about kicking my ass.
Because he was a guy who could kick some ass.
That's for sure.
I've seen him do it. In my life, being falsely accused of stuff is pretty normal.
And that was before I was famous.
Oh, somebody said, what did I do to the server?
The server was actually a woman I was seeing romantically.
So the server who told the story wrong wasn't even intending to get me in trouble.
It was 100% miscommunication.
There was no bad intent on anybody's part.
It just turned into this bad thing.
Now, when I told This boss fellow, when I told him that I didn't say anything like that, that I literally hadn't even been involved in a conversation that would involve anything that he was saying I said, do you think he believed me?
Or do you think he believed his sister?
Who do you think he believed?
His sister?
Or a guy who just happens to be one of many people working for him.
He didn't believe me.
But, as luck would have it, I'm pretty persuasive.
So, as has often been the case in my life, I talked my way out of a dangerous situation and I didn't get fired.
But it was very awkward from that day on and it wasn't a good place to work.
Now, I've also been accused by my stalkers and other people who had verifiable mental illness of various crimes.
And it's ordinary, completely ordinary situation for anybody who's in the public eye.
So what are the odds of a famous person and somebody as controversial as Kavanaugh being the subject of a fake accusation in this specific situation?
There's nothing about this that would be like the average.
There's nothing about this situation that would be similar to what ordinary people have in their life.
The odds of him getting a fake sexual accusation, I would put at close to 100%.
Because we've seen three accusations of which at least one of them is so ridiculous that I think even the people who don't want him to be a judge, even they are saying, okay, that one, the gang rape one, I don't think that one's true.
So, even without Christine Ford...
He is the subject of two other accusations.
One of them is ridiculously untrue, in my opinion.
Can't know for sure, but I don't think he went to multiple gang rape parties.
Probably not. And then the other one about exposing himself, and apparently that one has no credibility according to law enforcement either.
We don't have to wonder if this person in this situation would attract fake accusations.
There's no mystery there.
We're watching it.
Even if you believe Christine Ford is true, you can simply observe that this man in this situation in this environment is going to have fake accusations.
Now, if you can see that there are verifiable fake accusations against them, and come on, I think we all agree that the gang rape part of the accusations doesn't pass any kind of a sniff test.
You don't have to wonder if it's likely that there are false accusations.
You don't have to wonder, because there they are.
They're right in front of you. The evidence is right there.
Alright, somebody's mentioning his beer comments, which were also mocked.
I have mixed feelings about Kavanaugh's beer comments.
I think it was important that he acknowledged that he likes beer and he drank beer, and he did it in high school too, because to not do that would be sort of sketchy.
But just talking about it the way he did made it easy to mock, so that part was not good.
But here's the part that might be good.
A lot of people drink beer.
Republicans. They like beer.
And you know how beer commercials in the old days, they don't do it.
I don't think they do it anymore.
But in the old days, they would show attractive women to get you to like beer.
Because if you like one thing, you're more likely to like the other thing because they're associated.
So when Kavanaugh associates himself with beer, It might make him more popular with at least people who like beer, because people are saying, I've had beer and I've done some things that are maybe a little questionable.
So persuasion-wise, the beer comment might work for him.
It might, but I think it's closer to a push.
One of the comments I'm getting online a lot is, because the goal posts keep moving, of course, is that even if he's not guilty of these charges, Even if he's not guilty of these charges, he's disqualified because he definitely lied under oath.
And the examples they give are, number one, that he said the drinking age allowed him to drink in his senior year.
So there was something about the drinking age that he got technically wrong.
That doesn't sound like a lie.
That sounds like somebody who got a minor fact wrong.
So, okay. I mean, in no world would anybody be prosecuted for getting that fact wrong in public.
The other things that they're accusing him of is never drinking to blackout.
Again, something that nobody could ever be accused of, even if a hundred witnesses come forward and say, yeah, I saw him blacked out.
Because I don't know that there's any definition of that.
Because he did say, I have had beer and then gone to sleep.
So, if lots of people saw him have beer and do drunken things and then go to sleep, who can say he blacked out?
Where do you draw that line?
How much do you have to remember?
How much do you have to forget to cross that line from an ordinary person who had too many beers and doesn't remember all the details?
That's what beer does to you.
If you drink enough beer, you're not going to remember some of the details from last night.
And you don't have to black out to do that.
So some people are kind of playing with the definition of blackout and likelihood that, you know, he was a teenager, so he must have drank until he passed down at least once, must have had some memory problems at least once.
And I say to him, Maybe, you know, maybe that's technically a lie, but it's unprovable.
And certainly it's just going to be a judgment call about whether or not that was a lie or technically accurate.
So you're really getting into the weeds if you think the stuff he talked about.
Oh, and then it was the stuff about the yearbook.
In my opinion, there's a high likelihood that he lied about the yearbook.
Now, that doesn't mean he did, but there's a high likelihood.
Now, how do I feel about the fact that he may have protected the reputation of this girl named Renata by lying about what it meant?
Well, if he lied to protect somebody's reputation, And it wasn't important, because it wasn't.
I don't know.
Technically, I guess that's a lie.
Right? Or technically it is a lie.
But is it important?
Is it important?
It doesn't feel important.
So, it is true that lying under oath can get you in trouble.
But somebody needs to fact check me on the next statement I'm going to make.
It's my understanding that lying, or being inaccurate, but even lying, about trivial stuff is not a legal jeopardy.
You can lie about things that aren't terribly important to the case and you don't get prosecuted, I believe.
But somebody needs to fact check me that.
So for example, if you were accused of murder and somebody said, you know, and what did you do before the alleged crime?
And you said, well, I went to 7-Eleven and I bought a pack of gum.
But let's say the truth was you bought a pack of cigarettes.
You just didn't want somebody else to know that you're still smoking.
The fact that you bought a pack of gum or a pack of cigarettes, that would be an actual lie and one that could be presumably verified.
But it doesn't get to the meat of the problem.
Now, the question of whether an attitude about girls when he was 17, whether that gets to the question of whether he abused somebody, I would say it does not.
Because do you know what every 17-year-old boy does?
It acts like that. So evidence that a 17-year-old boy acted like most 17-year-old boys is not really important evidence that he may have done a sex crime, because those two things just are not necessarily leading to the other.
So I would say that is an immaterial lie at best.
So if the anti-Kavanaugh people are banking on immaterial lies being disqualifying, good luck with that.
Now, I have mixed feelings about Kavanaugh getting appointed to the court.
And it goes like this.
On one hand, I would hate to see a precedent that you could just make an accusation and without much in terms of corroboration, that's enough to derail somebody's entire life.
So as a precedent, it would be terrible.
And then if he gets on the court, Well, that's problematic too, because now you'd have two Supreme Court members who were tainted by accusations and people wouldn't know if they were true or false.
So that's not ideal.
But I have to admit, I have a strange And again, I shouldn't feel this way.
So I'm going to confess, I guess, a mildly evil part of my mind, which is, I kind of want to see what happens if he doesn't get confirmed.
I kind of wonder what would happen.
I think what would happen if he doesn't get confirmed is that you would see the highest level of Republican turnout for an election and it would just swamp whatever the Democrats did in terms of getting out the vote.
And it would be sort of fun to watch.
And it would be a repeat of 2016 when you get to watch the faces of the pundits on TV as they realize that the blue wave that everybody was sure about just got killed with a tsunami of red votes.
I'm kind of curious about that.
And so this is one of those situations where I think the Democrats have made the only play that is bad for them no matter what happens.
It feels like it's bad for them no matter what.
And it looks like it's going to be another situation where Trump can win both ways.
So here are the two ways Trump can win.
If he gets Kavanaugh on the court, even tainted, it will unambiguously be another major, major fact that people can use to say that this president is the most consequential president in 100 years.
Now, if you forget the founders and if you forget Abe Lincoln, but let's say it just lasts 100 years.
Presidents in the last hundred years, not too many of them have a claim to being the most consequential president.
And if he gets another Supreme Court nomination, and North Korea keeps going well, and the economy keeps going well, it's gonna be hard to keep President Trump off of the list of best presidents of all time.
It's gonna be hard. So if he gets the nomination through, it's one more major building block in the claim that he's one of the best presidents of all time, or at least most effective.
You might not like what he does in some cases, but most effective for his base.
Now, if Kavanaugh doesn't get elected, it's really going to be a red wave.
Or if Kavanaugh doesn't get confirmed, Republicans are just going to go, It's just gonna go nuts.
And you think you've seen Trump derangement syndrome?
Well, you haven't seen anything.
You haven't seen anything.
So part of me It's kind of open to the fun of it if Kavanaugh didn't get nominated.
Now, I can't fully embrace that option because this is the evil part of that.
In order for that fun to happen, Kavanaugh's life would have to be destroyed with no compensation.
At least if he gets on the Supreme Court, He won, right?
He still has this taint to live with, but at least he won on the big battle.
So I think I prefer him to win because I want his family to be okay and I haven't seen anything in the last 35 years that would suggest he's anything but a good judge.
But if he loses, if it's gonna happen anyway, I'm not gonna hope for it.
I think that would be wrong and it would be evil.
But if it happens, it's going to be really interesting.
Alright, now let's talk about how to get out the vote.
Oh, by the way, for those of you who don't know, I have famously been saying that I don't vote.
It keeps me independent as much as that's possible, and I know that's not entirely possible, but it keeps me a little less biased than if I had cast a vote, because then you're committed to your team.
But I did register to vote yesterday.
And part of the reason I did it was I was curious about the process.
I hadn't done it in so long.
I just wondered if it was easy or hard.
And it turns out it's easy.
You could just Google how to register to vote, click a link, fill in your particulars, and there you are.
You're registered. But I registered for one reason only.
I registered independent.
And the only votes I'm going to cast are against incumbents who are over 80.
I don't care what team they're on.
I don't care what their party is.
I don't care how good they've been in the past.
I don't care how much I like them.
If you're 80 and you're still in Congress, It's time to let some new blood in.
Now, I'm not saying that nobody over 80 could ever do a good job.
Clearly, there are examples where that's true.
But it's not a good standard.
If you're looking at any one person, it might be bad for them and bad for the country.
Oh, that person was good. We really don't want to lose that one who's over 80.
But in general, In general, in the long term, we're really better off if we lower the age of service one way or the other.
So I'll be voting against Dianne Feinstein because I'm in California.
I don't know if I'll vote for anything else.
I'm going to get my ballot in the mail.
I'm going to vote by mail. I'm just going to look for her name and then I'm going to vote for whoever is running against her.
And I don't even care who it is. I don't care what his policies are.
I don't care. I don't care anything.
I'm just going to vote against anybody over 80.
And I'm not suggesting necessarily that you do it.
You can do anything you want.
I don't make recommendations like that.
I'm just telling you what I did.
Now, let's say you wanted to persuade people to vote Republican.
And you're wondering, what could you do?
What can you practically do?
And I'm going to give you some persuasion tips here.
And I'd be interested if any of you try my tips that I'm going to give you to see if you got a good result.
So here's the first thing you need to know about persuasion if you're trying to get somebody who wasn't going to vote.
Oh, and here's the important point.
I'm not talking about getting people to change their vote from Democrat to Republican or vice versa.
So this is not about changing anybody's mind.
This is about getting somebody to vote who would not have otherwise voted, but you're sure that if they do vote, they're gonna vote the same way you would.
So it's about getting more people like yourself to vote.
Here's what you need to know about persuasion.
When a situation is complicated, People won't act.
They need to know something's simple.
So if you can take something that people don't know how to do, or they're confused about it, or it seems complicated, you can find a way to simplify it.
And I'll tell you how to do that in a moment.
You've taken away 80% of the resistance.
People don't like to figure stuff out because they think it might be hard to figure out how to vote.
Do I have to drive to the DMV? Am I going to be on a list?
What's going to happen? So people have these objections, so if you can reduce them, that makes a difference.
I'll tell you how in a minute. The other thing that's good for persuasion is to get somebody to do something small if you want them to do something bigger.
So if you can get somebody to cooperate in any small way, Then you've primed them to do a little more.
So the first thing you should do if you're trying to get somebody to vote because you think they'll vote the same way you will, is to figure out the smallest thing you can get them to do right away.
And so here's how I would approach this.
This is just a suggestion.
This is not proven by science, but it's compatible with what anybody would know about persuasion if they study this field.
So here's how I do it. I would go online and Google how to register to vote.
You're probably going to be influencing somebody in your state, so the links will be different based on your state.
But find the link for your state.
And put that in a little, you might want to even shorten it.
Shorten it from a big link into a small link.
Or link a word in your email so that people don't see a big scary link.
So you don't want a big scary link.
You either want to use Bitly or one of the link shorteners.
Or, in your email, just use a word like, you know, if it says, go here to register to vote, then you just put a hyperlink behind the words go here.
So you want to simplify it.
You want to keep your email to the person you're trying to influence as short as possible.
Short, short email.
And you're going to say, Bob, if you...
If you want to register to vote, did you know you can do it by mail?
And all you have to do is click this link and you can register in less than 60 seconds.
That's about what it takes. If you just pulled up the link and start typing in your name and address and stuff, something like 60 seconds.
So now you've given a tiny, tiny little email.
With a link and this information that you can vote by mail.
People who don't vote are not necessarily sure that they can vote by mail.
They probably think they have to take some time off, gotta drive in, gotta find the polling place, you gotta figure out what to do.
So, if you have, and by the way, I'm no expert on voting, so I assume everybody can vote by mail, but there may be some restrictions on that.
So, the first time you talk to the person you're trying to persuade, oh, here's the other advice.
Try to pick one person.
Two or three tops.
But try to keep the number of people you're trying to persuade into a very small number.
Okay? Because that just keeps it clean and easy.
So you want to talk to them first and say, hey, are you thinking of voting?
If they say no, and if you know that they would probably vote the same way you would, the first thing you say is, hey, I'll send you a link in case you want to register.
So you've talked to them first.
Now there's like a personal connection to this topic.
And you say, oh, I'll just send you the link.
It takes you 60 seconds to register.
And then you can just do it by mail.
We can do it during lunch.
If you have any questions, I'm going to fill out mine and break during lunch.
And once you get your ballot, if you want to talk about it, do that.
And then you can also say, and by the way, You don't have to vote for everything.
You can just vote for the top few things you understand.
You don't have to fill out every form.
So now you've taken this big scary thing that people who don't vote don't really understand.
I'm going to make a confession to you.
I haven't voted in so many years that I didn't know how.
And the fact that I didn't know how It felt like friction.
It felt like something I didn't want to take time to figure out.
And if I did take time to figure it out, would it require driving anywhere?
Would it require me scheduling something?
Would it put me on jury duty?
I had some questions, but until yesterday, I didn't bother to find out the answers.
So if you're trying to persuade somebody, go simple, simple, simple.
Give them a link. Say click here.
Tell them it'll take them 60 seconds.
Tell them they can vote by mail.
There's an option there. Usually you can just say vote by mail.
And tell them you'll help them fill it out during lunch.
And they only have to vote for the few things they care about.
They can ignore the rest. That is your mission.
If anybody wants to try this, I want to report back.
I'll probably ask you in a week or so.
Report back. If you can get anybody to click that link and sign up to vote by mail.
See, the by mail part is pretty important because it's pretty easy to vote by mail.
It's harder to take time off and find your polling station and everything else.
So, report back to me so we can do some A-B testing and I will tell you if...
Then we'll see for ourselves if anybody can get more people to vote.
Now, the bad way to get people to vote...
Is just telling them to vote.
Because again, they don't understand it.
They think there might be something that will embarrass them.
They think they might have to take time off.
They don't really understand it.
So simplify it to a link.
Tell them it will take 60 seconds.
Tell them to vote by mail.
And tell them they only need to vote for the things they already understand.
That's it. It's the simplest thing in the world.
Alright. That is my advice for the day.
Let me look at my notes.
Oh! So, we keep hearing about the slush fund in Congress to pay off sex abuse accusations.
Now, I'm pretty sure that that's a true thing, that there really is a slush fund really used to pay off sex accusations of members of Congress.
And here's the thing I want to ask.
How many of the accusations that were paid off were false accusations?
I'll just let that sit there.
If they paid off the accusers, but they thought the accusers were telling the truth, that's not right.
But if they paid off the accusers specifically because they thought the accusations were not credible, well then we have a base.
So I would be interested in how many members of Congress have paid off false accusations in their own opinion.
We'll never know if they're false or not.
But in their opinion, how many of them were false accusations?
I suspect that Congress, if you just looked at their own numbers that you could probably find out, you would find out that there are many, many, many, many, many, many False accusations against members of Congress.
Now, how do you know they're false accusations?
Just ask the Democrats who have been accused.
They'll tell you they're false accusations.
If you want to find out how many false accusations there are against famous politicians such as Kavanaugh.
You know, he's a judge, but same concept.
Ask how many Democrats have been accused falsely of crimes.
I believe they will tell you that everything they've been accused of is false.
So then we'd have a baseline.
We'd say, look, based on your own numbers, you famous Democrats who have been falsely accused, it looks like 80% of you have been falsely accused.
So let's use that as our baseline when we're understanding this new situation.
Yeah, that was really clever.
You're right. I'm going to leave it on that.
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