Episode 1326 Scott Adams: Georgia Voting Laws, North Korea Persuasion, China Persuasion, Cults, Vitamin D
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Content:
Georgia's new voting law
Do you know anyone who doesn't have an ID?
Is Biden's North Korea strategy stupid?
Vaccination requirements soon
NXIVM "cult" HOAX
Branding lesson
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And how many of you were taught by one of your parents, or maybe both, that on time is late?
How many of you were taught that if you can't show up on time, you can't do anything?
You better show up on time.
That was drilled into being young.
We had a tradition that my family, my mother said, you have to be home at 5 o'clock to eat dinner every night.
No exceptions. So wherever you were, if you didn't have a cell phone or whatever, no excuses.
You had to find your way back to the house at 5 o'clock every night, seven days a week, no exceptions.
It was a great rule. It doesn't work in 2021, though.
Well, if you'd like to enjoy this program to its maximum, Potential.
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Well, no, because there weren't millions of them, but someday there will be.
Someday. We have mere hundreds of thousands today.
Well, Georgia passed some new voting rules, including a requirement for ID, even for voting by mail.
And, of course, Democrats are calling this a Jim Crow law, which works really well, because most people don't know anything about history, and they say to themselves, I've heard that phrase, Jim Crow.
Pretty sure it's bad.
Oh, this is one of those?
Well, that must be bad.
But if you actually knew your history, you would not see a lot in common with Jim Crow laws, which were pretty aggressive and racist, and people who just want ID for voting.
Now, here's the question. Watch the dog that wasn't barking.
You ready? One of the things I like to do when I talk about the news, because nobody else does this, is to tell you what you didn't hear that's important.
So the story is sort of incomplete, wouldn't you say, if this piece of information is missing.
And it goes like this. There's an assumption here that your poor, uneducated people, the ones who would have the most difficulty getting identification, because it actually costs something, To get identification.
You've got to get your birth certificate.
That might be like $175.
You've got to travel somewhere.
You've got to maybe take a day off of work, whatever.
If you're working. But the assumption is that if these people voted, instead of being shut out from the system, they'd be better off.
Isn't that kind of a big assumption?
That if these people who don't have identification, Voted that they themselves would be better off.
Do you believe that?
Because I think I'd like to see some evidence of that.
Isn't the entire reason that the United States is not a democratic system?
You know, we have democratic elements within a republic.
Isn't the whole point of a republic that giving the masses full control And let the majority just win every time.
Well, there are more of you, so you win.
Wasn't that the whole point?
That the masses can't be trusted.
You want the smarter people who actually care about them to be the ones making the decisions.
So there is that concept.
And so I would say we should at least test the assumption That even if all these extra people got to vote, let's say we helped them get IDs or whatever it took, that they would be happier.
That they would get what they wanted.
Do you think that's true?
Do you think if you let uneducated people, because by and large these are the least educated part of the population.
Now you don't have to be uneducated to be poor, but you know, on average, that's where it's going.
So I don't know.
I think there's some basic assumptions in here that need to be challenged.
We like the concept that everybody gets to vote.
There's nobody who's against that.
But shouldn't we at least challenge whether there's any purpose of it?
What do we get out of it?
Yeah, we want everybody to vote.
Everybody agrees on that.
And why?
Why do we want everybody to vote?
To get a better outcome.
Or at least get an outcome that the public says is credible, because the right people voted and everybody could did.
So I think we should test our assumptions about why we care about anybody voting.
Why can't children vote?
Is there a reason that we don't let children, let's say toddlers, is there a reason we don't let them vote?
And what is it?
What is that reason?
Can you think of any reason that school children should not vote?
What would be the thinking?
Well, I believe the thinking is that they're not as capable, right?
Is there any other reason that you can think of?
Why would we deny the vote to an 11-year-old?
Now, I'm in favor of denying the vote to an 11-year-old, but I'm asking you, what's the reason?
Isn't the reason that we think the quality of the decisions would not be helped by letting 11-year-olds vote?
Right? And don't we believe that the 11-year-old...
Here's the key point, right?
So here's the key point. Don't we believe that if the 11-year-old were allowed to pursue their own interests, that they wouldn't do it right?
Right? Isn't that the assumption?
Because otherwise we'd let them vote.
We'd say, oh, you know what's good for you, and we want what's good for you too, so go ahead and vote.
And you'll have a greater chance of getting what's good for you.
Nobody thinks that.
Because you know an 11-year-old isn't good at knowing what's good for them.
They're not going to understand the topics.
They would be easily misled.
Let me ask you this. Are people who are, let's say, 11-year-old kids, or, and I realize this is offensive, but I'm going to do it anyway, I'm going to lump the uneducated adult population in and say, are they better off?
Could you make the case that making sure more of that group voted, and again, this has nothing to do with race, I'm going to talk about race in a moment, but for now we're just talking about people who are uneducated and poor.
And there are lots of them of all types.
Do we get a better result?
Because people who are the most easily duped got to vote.
And I don't think you would doubt that, would you?
Well, no, that's not true.
Maybe senior citizens are...
I think we should at least test the theory that the republic form of government is better than the other kind.
Because letting everybody vote, even if they weren't really that interested and not that informed, is not really the republic model as much as it is a straight democracy model.
And we should decide which one we like better.
Let me ask you this.
Do you think that poor...
And I guess the poor part is irrelevant to the question, but let's say undereducated people.
Do you think undereducated people should make their own legal and medical decisions?
Now, of course they can.
That's their right. And there's some advantages to that, right?
But do you think that the uneducated person who goes into their doctor...
And the doctor says, well, you've got a bad case of X, and here are the pills that will take care of it.
Two weeks, you'll be all set.
Definitely you have X. Definitely these pills are going to make you better.
Here you go. Should the poor person just say, you know, I don't know medicine.
I think I'll just take your advice.
Would they be better off with that?
Because the doctor doesn't necessarily have your best interests in mind, right?
It's still sort of up to you to make your decisions.
That's the way the system works.
But I think an uneducated person who is uneducated about, let's say, medical science might want to just take the advice of the person who has their interests in mind.
At least enough of their interests in mind.
How about should an uneducated person make their own complicated legal decisions?
Why not? Why not?
Just because they don't know how.
Why would that stop them?
It's their right. And the answer is, no, they shouldn't.
They should wait for a real lawyer to give them some advice, and then they might make some decisions about whether they want to take the advice, but you want somebody smart to help you with the hard stuff, right?
That's why we have a republic, to send the smart people up to do the things that we're not going to get into the details on ourselves.
All right. That's enough on that.
Then let's talk about the racial part.
Here's the part that's missing that I wonder why it is.
So the assumption here is that the Georgia voting rules will disenfranchise and or reduce at least the percentage of black voters.
And that could change the entire outcome of the election.
So it's important.
And I ask you this.
Do we win or lose elections based on the percentage of a racial group that voted for you?
Is that how our system works?
Oh, you got elected because you got the greatest percentage of a specific racial group.
Like, that's not the system.
The system is just the greatest number, right?
Whoever gets the most votes.
It's not a percentage.
It's whoever gets the most.
We just compare two sets of votes.
Which one's bigger? That's the whole system.
But we're talking about percentages of this group and percentages of that.
We should check ourselves every once in a while.
And here's a question I haven't seen answered.
Are there more poor white people who don't have IDs or poor black people?
Now, as a percentage, it's not even close.
Percentage-wise, I think it was like 25% of black people American citizens don't have regular ID. Now, I don't believe that's true, but it is a statistic I saw.
I have trouble believing it's 25%.
I can't believe it's even close to that, actually.
If I had to guess, put it closer to 10 or 15, it just feels like it couldn't possibly be 25.
But again, if you're not close to that population, maybe you just don't see it.
Could be just invisible to people like me.
So, here's the question.
Why are we talking about the percentage of black people that aren't voting?
Shouldn't we talk about the number of people who are not voting, no matter what they are?
Is that really the important part?
The percentage of a racial group?
Now, I get the point, right?
You'd want every group to be represented But we don't have a constitution that requires that.
Where in the constitution does it say that among ethnic groups there should be similar rates of voting?
The reason it's not part of the constitution is it wouldn't be a good idea.
Even if you could do it easily, I just don't know that that would be a good idea.
Maybe the people who vote should be the ones who care and are well informed and as well as they can be.
Here's an interesting comment.
Alright, so Andrew on YouTube, he has this comment.
He says, I'm a black immigrant and know plenty of poor black people.
And he says, I've never met anyone who doesn't have an ID. So there's a black adult immigrant in the United States who knows lots of poor black people, doesn't know anybody who doesn't have an ID. Have you ever met anybody who doesn't have an ID? Now, part of the problem is maybe you just don't meet the people who don't have IDs.
Like, the people who don't have IDs probably meet each other.
And the people who do have IDs probably meet each other.
But I can't tell you the last time I had a conversation with somebody who even might not have an ID. You know, somebody whose situation is so bad in society that you could reasonably think, I'm not even sure this person has an ID. When was the last time you had a conversation with anybody like that?
Right? Probably not.
And so I'm not sure that just because you haven't met any, that's telling you much.
However, to the point that there was a stat that said that something like 25% of black Americans don't have ID, that couldn't possibly be true, could it?
Could it? I mean, I'd really like to know if it's true, because if it's that high, that does change my opinion on the whole topic, right?
It's one thing to say, which I am saying, I don't think there's a constitutional reason that percentages of voting need to be equal.
It's just not in the Constitution.
But, at the same time, if 25% of black Americans can't vote because they don't have IDs, that's way too big.
That's so big you've got to do something about it, right?
Like if it were a small problem, you'd just say, ah, you know.
But a big problem, if it's true.
So I guess we don't have the fact check on that in a way that I believe it.
But what I would like to see in the number that's missing is the number of white people, just the number, the raw number, compared to the raw number of black Americans who don't have ID and therefore can't vote.
Which one is bigger? Which number is bigger?
Because I don't believe the 25% number.
But do you think there are more raw numbers of white people who are poor and can't vote because of ID, or more...
Somebody says, you're a racist.
You don't understand.
So somebody's calling me a racist in the comments.
A typical thing. First of all, you may have missed the story that I self-identify as black now.
I am allowed to do that, and I take that right as my own.
So first of all, I can't be racist because I self-identify as black.
So that's the first thing. Second thing is, I'm not only not racist, I'm pro-black.
Super pro-black.
In fact, I've spent quite a bit of time and my own money trying to make the world better specifically for black people.
And you've seen me do it.
I've done quite a bit of work even in public.
Now... So first of all, it's not possible, right?
So by definition, you can't be a racist in this country if you're black.
And that's one of the reasons that I self-identify as black, so that I don't have that problem.
And... I know what some of you are saying right now.
Some of you are saying, I think this is a gag, right?
You're not really self-identifying as black, are you?
That's just a joke, right? Nope.
Nope. It's not a joke.
I'm literally self-identifying as black.
I do have black DNA, so I don't know how much you need.
But the rules say that you can self-identify.
I don't make the rules.
And I've told you before, one of the most persuasive things you can do is follow the rules exactly as they're written.
I am following the rules exactly as they're written.
Exactly. And if that changes the rules, well, maybe the rules weren't good.
But don't blame me for following the rules.
I'm going to follow them sincerely.
If that makes anything bad for you, well, you'll have to deal with that.
Let's talk about North Korea bad persuasion.
So here is the position of the Biden administration.
And they're not the first ones to have this position.
But think about how stupid this is.
These are actually elected politicians who are, theoretically, they're capable of doing stuff like this.
And here's the American position.
That before we are willing to negotiate with North Korea, their leader has to agree in advance to a humiliating defeat in the negotiations.
In advance.
We won't negotiate to you until you agree to lose the negotiations.
In this context, it means agree in advance to give up nuclear weapons.
Now, is that a reasonable thing to ask?
Is that a reasonable position?
Because who is it that wants to nuke you in the first place?
I'll tell you who wants to nuke us.
People who insist that they lose before we're willing to fucking talk to them.
Yeah, they should nuke us, maybe.
Because we're acting like we deserve to get nuked.
If anybody ever deserved to get nuked, it would be a country that says, yeah, we'll only talk to you if you agree to a humiliating defeat before the first word is spoken.
That's not smart.
What did Trump do instead?
Trump said, if you make a move in our direction, we will wipe you out.
But we'd love to talk.
How would you like to get together?
Compare those two.
They are not even close.
In terms of the right approach persuasion-wise.
One of them is obviously the dumbest fucking thing you've ever seen in your life.
We'd love to negotiate with you because it's very important to both of us.
And if we don't negotiate with you, there could be a nuclear war.
That's how important it is to negotiate with you.
Now, having established that it's of vital planetary importance, here's how we're going to approach it.
We're not even going to talk to you until you agree to lose.
And not only lose, you have to lose the most important thing in a visible, very high-visible, humiliating way.
So that's our opening position.
Are you serious?
Can we get any dumber?
How could that possibly work?
Now, I heard a hypothesis this morning that I kind of liked.
I'm going to toss it down here and see what you say.
Speaking of tossing, it's the username on Twitter who suggested this.
I don't know if I want to read his name in public, but it's on Twitter, so I'll just read it.
So his user named Fudge Tosser.
And he tweets this about our opening position of negotiations with North Korea.
And when I point out that it's an impossible, ridiculous, failing in advance position to say you have to lose before we start, this user says, and listen to this, this is actually a good hypothesis.
He says it's intentional.
In other words, we're intentionally losing.
This with North Korea is not strategically desirable.
Huh. And then he goes on, he says, it gives us an excuse to keep forces in the neighborhood.
Huh. That's not a bad hypothesis, is it?
Because it would explain why we'd be doing something so stupid in public.
Usually you try to hide your stupid stuff, right?
But why would we be so stupid in public for so long?
This is not a bad hypothesis, that we're literally not trying to have peace with North Korea, because if we did, we wouldn't have an excuse to keep forces there on the border of China, basically, or near it.
And then this user went on to say that's why John Bolton sabotaged Trump's peace summit by going on TV just before it and saying the Libya model was one way of dealing with the North, which did sort of sabotage things.
And maybe John Bolton was just thinking the last thing we want is to take forces out of South Korea at a time when China is militarizing the area.
And I said to myself, that's not bad, as a hypothesis is it.
That's not bad.
Because we probably do want some kind of military presence in that area as China is rising and very military, let's say, they seem to be indicating a high military interest in controlling the whole area.
Interesting. I'll just put that out there.
What do you think? Somebody says it's a good strategic move.
It's a good strategic move under the assumption that they don't nuke us, accidentally nuke us, or sell the nukes to somebody who would, or sell the technology to somebody who would.
So it's not only dangerous, but maybe there is a strategic reason.
You never know. I keep asking this question, and maybe this is also something that somebody smarter can explain.
Wouldn't you think, given that China is by far our biggest, you know, future challenge, wouldn't you think that we should be working on a military alliance with Russia?
Instead of having a military alliance, NATO, against Russia, shouldn't we be looking to have a military alliance with Russia?
Because how else would China be kept in check?
Because just their pure size would suggest that if you fast forward 50 years, China owns everything.
So it seems to me that we should be smarter.
Because the one thing I like about Putin...
Are you allowed to say that?
I guess I'll have to say he's a murderous dictator and he's all bad.
But... There is one thing that makes him useful from the perspective of the United States, which is he's a pragmatist.
You kind of know exactly what Putin wants all the time, right?
You know, when he does something provocative with Syria or whatever, we don't wonder why he's doing it.
It's like, oh, you want warm water ports and blah, blah, blah.
So he's completely transparent and operates more like a crime family boss, meaning you can make a deal with him.
And so he's not based on some religious or dogmatic thing.
He's just doing what's good for him, doing what's good for Russia.
So I feel like that's exactly the guy you can work with.
Now that doesn't mean he wouldn't try to put one over on us, even if we were on the same side, etc.
Every now and then you have to check your assumption.
You know, you wake up in the morning and you realize that Russia and the United States have nuclear weapons pointed at each other.
Why? Why?
Why? Well, we have ours pointed at them because theirs are pointed at us.
And theirs are pointed at us because ours are pointed at them.
But neither of us have a real reason, do we?
I think there might have been, in the past.
But I don't think there is one now.
And indeed, I would think the biggest threat for both Russia and the United States would be a rising China.
To me, it seems obvious we have to go this way.
Necessity will push us together in the future, so why not just do it now?
Let's skip 10 years of being enemies, because we're going to end up on the same team.
I just feel like there's no way around it.
Just like World War II, right?
In World War II, there wasn't any question we're going to be sort of on the Russian team against the Nazis.
And it looks to me I'm not comparing China to the Nazis.
They both had concentration camps in which they put ethnic minorities to eradicate them in genocide, but I'm not comparing them.
I'm not comparing them.
They do have a little similarity, but I'm not comparing them.
All right. So, here's something I'd like to point out.
There was a survey, if you can call it that, that the Chicago Council on Global Affairs published.
And they were asking Americans about their attitudes about China.
And the way they do it, they ask the question, they have this thing they call the feeling thermometer question, allowing responses on a 100-point scale, ranging from very warm...
That would be a favorable feeling about China, of 100, to very cold, which would be zero.
Nearly 1,200 Americans came back with an average response that was, well, according to this article, freezing at 32.
So in terms of, and it looks like that's at an all-time low, or at least, I don't know, it looks pretty low.
And here's the thing I'd like to point out.
Do you remember back in 2016, I was telling you that Trump was very persuasive?
Do you remember that? And people said to me, well, where's all his persuasion?
You're saying he's so persuasive, but show it to me.
Where's his persuasion?
Where is it? Let's see him persuade me.
He's not persuading me. I don't see any persuasion.
He spends four years telling you that China is the biggest problem in the world, and then it Then a survey comes out that suggests that Americans think China is the biggest problem in the world.
That was Trump. Now, I've said this before.
Now, that's not to say there aren't plenty of China hawks.
You've got your Tom Cartons, your Changs, your Gordon Changs, etc.
So there are plenty of high-profile people who are also railing against China.
But they don't have the same skills.
And I believe that they wouldn't have moved the needle.
You know, a Gordon Chang, a Tom Cotton are excellent in terms of command of the facts and being smart about how they think of it in a practical way.
You know, highest level thinking and knowledge.
But I don't see in either one of them specifically persuasion skills the way I see it in Trump.
Trump is a persuader.
He will change your mind.
Tom Cotton might tell you something you didn't know.
Gordon Chang will tell you something you didn't know, maybe frame it a new way.
But I don't know if he has the persuasive specific skills like Trump does.
Now, I told you before that there's a weird thing that I've been tracking for a long time, which is that whenever I'm involved in persuading anything, it always goes my way.
And I can't tell If I just am good at picking the right topic.
So maybe I'm just good at picking the right side, and then my team wins, but it's only because I was on the right side, it wasn't because I made any difference.
But I don't think there are too many regular citizens who have persuaded with actual persuasion tools against China more than I have since 2018.
I'll bet you if you looked at a graph of feelings about China, You would see that in 2018 when my stepson died of fentanyl overdose, which I blame on China, I think you would see that around 2018 there's a fairly sharp change in the opinion of China.
I don't know that, but I'll bet you'd find it.
And it wouldn't be an accident.
Just putting it out there.
Let's talk about that big ol' ship that's stuck in the Suez Canal, which is weirdly interesting.
It's way more interesting than I think.
Here's the question I would ask you, because I'm a little bit obsessed about the engineering to get that thing out of there.
Can you string tugboats together?
How many tugboats could you string together?
Because it seems to me...
Let's see if I can do this with you.
Let's see. Let's say this phone here is the boat, the ship.
Let's say it's going forward, which will be up in my example, and then it gets turned sideways and it gets wedged.
Now, the front part of the wedge presumably would be deep into the sand, and it looks like they're trying to dig out the front.
The back is also on the bank, but I would think that the bank maybe isn't dug in so much on the back.
I would think the front, because it dug in, is probably way in there.
So getting the front out seems hard.
Getting the back out seems easier, and I feel like they're working on the front.
So that's the first thing I'd ask, is are they working on the right side?
The second thing I'd ask is how many ships and or tugboats Can you string together to increase the power of them all?
Is there a limit? Because the limit might be that the chain at the end would break or something, because there wouldn't be enough.
But it seems to me that you could chain enough boats, and maybe you could throw in another freighter in there to get the weight, right?
And just pull on that thing from the back.
I wouldn't try to get the front out.
I think that's a mistake.
I would pull on the back, because that's probably wedged in the least.
If you get the back out, I think the front will come out.
That's my guess. So I'm just going to put that out there.
It's just an engineering question.
Why can't you just string a bunch of tugboats together until you have enough of them?
How many would it take?
Because presumably you would have unlimited resources to do this, right?
And there must be a ton of tugboats in there.
Get a hundred of them. Somebody said blow it up.
I think the problem is that the cleanup would take as long as getting it out of there.
All right. Rutgers University is going to require vaccinations to go back to in-person classes.
We will expect a lot more of that.
I would expect that traveling will require vaccinations more.
At least some kinds of traveling.
I'm thinking schools will require it because the teachers' unions will just say, got to do it or else we won't go to work.
I feel as if society will have enough places that you have to be vaccinated that a lot of people who wouldn't have gotten it are going to say, ah, I still want to function in society.
I want to go to my gym, so might as well do it.
I think that's the way it's happening.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, I identify as black now, and Dr.
Interracial on Twitter, who's probably watching this right now, hello doctor, held up a copy of my, and by the way, Dr.
Interracial is exactly what it sounds like.
It's an interracial marriage.
One of them is a doctor, apparently.
I don't know which one is the doctor, but there's a Dr.
Interracial, And let's say that it's the husband.
I'm not sure that's the case, but he held up my book, Had to Fail in Almost Everything, and he tweeted, my new favorite self-identified black author.
Now, as I said, it's a black man who's doing this tweet.
And I think it's working.
Now, part of that tweet thread asked why I can't be, or should I be, on the New York Times best-selling black authors list.
Now, I didn't know such a thing existed, but apparently the New York Times has a special carve-out, a little best-selling list just for black authors.
And Dr.
Interracial and his wife are asking, why am I not on it?
Shouldn't my books be on that list?
Well, maybe at the moment they're not selling enough, but in theory...
What would make me ineligible for that list?
Would the New York Times get to...
Would they be the ones who get to identify my race?
Because that's not their rule, right?
If you ask the New York Times, how does it work?
Is it you, the New York Times, who gets to say what ethnicity I am or racial makeup?
Or do I get to say that?
I think they would agree that I get to say it, right?
I'm not joking. If you ask the New York Times, would they not agree with me That the individual gets to identify the way they want to be.
That's right.
I'm not making that up.
So by their own rule, would I not be eligible for the New York Times bestselling black authors list?
And if I'm not, how do they explain that?
Now, if they explain it because they think I'm just joking, let me say again, I'm not.
I'm not. I'm following a real rule because it advantages me.
If you live in the United States and there's a real rule that everybody agrees with, it doesn't have to be the law per se, but everybody agrees with it, you can use the rule.
It's available to everybody.
There's no rule that says I can't use the rule, because then it would be useless if you can't use it.
Right.
They'd be racist for omitting me based on their own definition of things.
Um, Now, as I told you before, one of the best ways to change rules you don't like is to use them and adhere to them strictly.
So here you're watching me do it.
I've given you examples before where I've broken systems.
This is a good hypnosis persuasion trick.
You can break any system by following its rules.
The only way any system works is if people are bending the rules all the time.
Because there's very rarely can you make a system that works for all situations.
So the only way you can make it work at all is to be doing a lot of bending the rules and all the strange situations.
Almost nothing is the exception to that.
So if you want to break a societal rule, follow it.
And don't make the exception.
Just follow it.
and it will break on its own.
Yeah, you know, there's interesting news on the DNA part about the Neanderthal genes.
Apparently the Neanderthal genes can tell you a lot about your likelihood of a bad COVID response.
But it's not as clean as if you have it or don't.
I guess there's some subcategories within the category that could make you good or bad based on that.
Alright, let's talk about vitamin D. There's a new meta-study with 50 different studies that overwhelmingly show, overwhelmingly, like overwhelmingly, the studies are all on the same side, that if your vitamin D level is good, you'll have better outcomes with the coronavirus, and by a lot.
Now, most of the studies are just showing the correlation, so you've got to be careful.
Correlation doesn't mean causation.
And it also doesn't mean that if you just took more vitamins, you would necessarily be better off, but I think it's a good bet.
So I do take D3. So I take vitamin D. Just because the risk is zero, but the upside might be life and death.
So of course I take it.
But I don't know if the thing I get over the counter makes any difference.
There's some suggestion that maybe it's, you know, Could be good, but it's not a big, big thing.
The thing I'd worry about here is that the correlation is fooling us.
Because it is true that people who are unhealthy in general, for whatever reason, if they're unhealthy for any reason, they almost always have low vitamin D. So since unhealthy people are the people who die of COVID,
it could be just a coincidence that they also have low vitamin D. But it's a strong enough correlation, and the risk of taking it is so low that I think you'd be literally just stupid not to try to supplement your vitamin D, given that it has other benefits that are more obviously true according to science.
So get your vitamin D, but I don't know that that's like the magic bullet or anything like that.
All right. How many of you...
Oh, let me give you a lead into this one.
There was a user named Peter online who, in one of the Twitter conversations, mentioned two bad things about President Trump.
The fine people hoax and the drinking bleach hoax.
Except poor Peter didn't know both of them are hoaxes.
And then poor Peter had the bad luck of running into user magician...
And Magician, quite courteously, showed him the transcript of the fine people hoax, to know that it was a hoax, and then the transcript of the drinking bleach hoax, to see that he never said drinking bleach.
He always talked about light, and that's all a hoax.
Now, what do you think Peter did when he realized, because you could just read it, right?
He doesn't have to wonder if he was wrong.
You could just read it. It's obvious he was wrong.
What do you think he did? Did he say, whoa, whoa, I was not aware of these facts.
And now that you have informed me, and I can see the transcripts, I changed my mind.
Those are no true stories at all.
Those are hoaxes.
Do you think that happened with Peter?
No. Because it never works.
Facts are completely unpersuasive.
And always will be. Once you learn that, you understand the world.
If you think that facts can change somebody's mind on politics, you haven't been paying attention, because it doesn't.
So after that, I weighed in myself, and I noted in my tweet that poor Peter, and I used narrator voice, narrator, this was the moment That Peter realized he had been double Rupard.
Double Rupard.
Now, you all know that being a Rupard is based on Vox writer Aaron Rupar.
I think that's his first name.
R-U-P-A-R. And it became an actual word in the Urban Dictionary.
It may have been removed by now.
But it was in there as someone who passes around edited videos that are misleading and does it intentionally.
And so I said that poor Peter had been double Ruppard.
Two hoaxes. Now, I'm going to re-emphasize something I said before, because I didn't think I said it well enough as I thought about it.
And it goes like this. Words carry persuasion.
Now, you kind of knew that, but I'm going to add a little to it.
Which is that every word is like a little unit of logic...
Or persuasion, I guess you could say.
Better to say persuasion.
They're not necessarily logical.
But words carry their own logic and reasons and explanations just by being a word.
And so if you can create a word, like being Ruppard, you can imbue it with a credibility that it never earned.
Because words do that.
They just absorb things like credibility.
They absorb lack of credibility, a different word.
They absorb things that they don't earn and there's no logic to it.
They just absorb them. So by creating an official word for this, you let the word absorb the credibility that it doesn't earn.
And it makes your persuasion better simply because there's a word that you and the person you're talking to have both heard to describe this thing.
That's why I'm pushing the Rupar thing so much.
Not because it's funny and it makes fun of this one individual, but because you actually are creating a packet of persuasion that can just sort of live there forever after I leave.
If the Rupar thing stayed as a general reference, I could walk away and it would just stay there as being persuasive forever.
So words are packets of persuasion.
Think of them that way. Here's another hoax.
How many of you follow the NXIVM sex cult story?
Most of you know what that is, right?
Keith Ranieri is in jail right now for unrelated things that had nothing to do with being a cult specifically, but just things he was accused of and convicted of.
But how many of you think it's true that That there was such a thing as a sex cult...
Now, some of you know that there was a subgroup associated with NXIVM, but it wasn't NXIVM per se, but some of the same people, and they had a subgroup called DOS, doesn't matter what it means, and that that subgroup had up to 100 women, I think, only, who...
some of them agreed to get a brand...
Now, when you hear that, you say, well, that's a cult.
And some number of them had a personal, physical relationship with the leader, Keith Ranieri.
But it was a consensual, well-understood set of relationships.
Nobody was forced to do anything.
Now, you say to yourself, well, what about the brands?
What? If somebody's in a group that is Scott, Scott, Scott, I know you're not calling them a cult, but if they're getting branded, they're in a cult.
Well, let me give you some details.
When you heard that they got branded, what did you think of?
You thought of a branding iron, didn't you?
And you thought it was like cattle, and then somebody put it over the hot coals, And it was glowing for a while.
And then somebody held down the person.
And they were like...
And there's like the smell of burning flesh.
Might be a little fire coming up off of it.
In your mind, it's pretty bad, right?
Well, it wasn't exactly a branding iron.
It was a cauterizing pen.
It was a cauterizing pen.
Which apparently is not that uncommon for people who get tattoos to get this treatment.
Because it's actually closer to a tattoo than it is to branding a cow.
It's closer to a tattoo.
And it ends up with a little bit of a scar tissue that you can barely see.
That's it. Now is that the way you heard it?
When you heard that The women were being branded.
And do you remember seeing pictures of the brand?
How big were the pictures of the brand?
Well, if you look at the picture, this looks pretty scary.
It was a pretty big brand.
But you never saw the whole person, did you?
You only saw close-ups of the brand, did you?
You never saw the person, so you could see the size of the brand.
Little thing. It's just a little thing.
So just know that you've been manipulated to think that they were branded like cattle.
No. They had the option of having a little tattoo-like brand.
You could call it a brand because it disturbs the skin in a semi-permanent way.
Or you could call it permanent.
That would be a better description. And they did it because they wanted to.
It was just part of the things that were offered.
Some said yes, some said no.
That's it. Now, does that sound like a cult?
A hundred people, they had this option.
Some said yes, some said no.
Does that sound like a cult?
But that's not the only definition of a cult.
One of the definitions would be that you're not allowed to leave.
Did that apply to anything in NXIVM or in DOS, the subgroup?
Nope. No.
People did leave.
People joined.
People left. The definition of a cult is E.K.L. leave.
And the people left, were they punished?
No. They just left.
Because it's voluntary. You could join or you could leave.
And by the way, there's no evidence that they couldn't leave.
Nor was there any court case about them being a cult.
In other words, the courts didn't deal with the question of, are you a cult or not, because that's not a law.
It's not illegal to have a cult, if they had been one.
Now, what is the other definition of a cult?
The other definition is that the cult members are cut off from the rest of the world.
They can't have contact, don't want them to get any bad ideas in their head.
Was that the case? With either the NXIVM or the DOS? Not really.
They did have a secrecy agreement that you had to agree to before you joined.
And part of that was this collateral thing, where you had to give them something embarrassing to prove that you weren't going to be talking about the group.
Because if you were talking about the group, it wouldn't sound good to other people, and it's just not good.
So you want to have a private group, And part of the mechanism for that is they say, give us some embarrassing things about you that if you talked, you know, would be dangerous.
Now they never released any of it, and people did in fact leave.
But there was never any, you know, intention of releasing any of it, because it wasn't a blackmail operation.
It was part of the psychological buy-in process.
Now, when you say to me, Scott, I think you're being a little facile here.
If somebody gives you blackmail material and you're supposed to do something or else it'll be used, that's just blackmail, isn't it?
Aren't you trying to spin this a little too hard?
Well... No.
No. Because it was just a bunch of people doing what they wanted to do.
Nobody was ever punished for anything.
If anybody had ever been punished for anything, then you'd have a pretty good case.
Oh, yeah. If they tried to talk to the outside world, they got punished.
That never happened. If they tried to talk to the outside world, they'd be ostracized.
Well, the only secrecy was about the group itself.
What other group has secrecy?
Well, how about Alcoholics Anonymous?
The anonymous is right in the name.
It's not unusual for groups that are voluntary groups to want to stay anonymous.
It's probably, I don't know, hundreds, thousands of them.
Right? How about the Masons?
Right? Do the Masons have some secret things that they tell you you can't tell the outside world?
Yeah. But it's all a voluntary group, and they can be there or not be there.
They can leave or come. So here's my point.
There's no evidence that's ever been presented that NXIVM or the subgroup DOS met any of the qualifications of a cult.
And yet... Probably every one of you believed that that was a cult.
It didn't meet any of the definitions.
Nor did any court rule on it.
It wasn't even a question. There were just some specific allegations that might have been true and they might have been false.
But that was the subject of the court case.
So, when you say it was a cult, it's a hoax.
It's just another hoax.
Somebody says AA is not a cult.
No, I'm not saying that AA is a cult.
I'm saying the opposite of that.
I'm saying that Alcoholics Anonymous is not a cult, but they do have that secrecy thing, because it just has a function.
There's a purpose to secrecy.
It's useful. So that's my whole point, is that Alcoholics Anonymous is not a cult, Just because they have secrecy.
Nor would the DOS be a cult just because they have secrecy.
That's a fairly common thing.
Businesses have secrecy.
Businesses, they don't tell anybody our intellectual property secrets.
Secrets is nothing.
That's not anything about a cult.
All right.
Somebody's saying the DNC is a cult.
What?
Well, I've written that the Democratic and Republican Party are evolving to become a cult.
Because, you know, remember the definition of a cult is that you can't leave without being ostracized.
If you were a Republican and you left to join the Democrats, would you have a penalty?
Yeah, you would.
You would have a penalty if you left your political party.
The people you left would be pretty mad, and they would probably make you pay.
So that meets the definition of a cult, right?
The definition of a cult is you'll be punished if you leave the group.
How about being cut off from the rest of the world?
CNN. Yeah.
The Democrats have created a media enterprise that effectively cuts them off, and if they watched...
Imagine being a Democrat, and your family, they're all Democrats, and you're the only one home at the moment.
You turn on the TV and you say, I think I'll give this Fox News a try.
I think I'll just give it a try.
Nobody's looking. I'm a Democrat, but I'll just give this Fox News a little try.
I'll just sample it.
And then you start watching it, and you say, wow, the production values are pretty good.
Oh, I kind of like this host.
Oh, these are some facts I hadn't heard before.
This is a point of view I had never seen.
And you're happily, you're a Democrat, and you're happily noticed that you could get something out of Fox News, and you're watching, and then your family comes home.
And they see you sitting there watching Fox News.
And you're all super Democrats.
But you're sitting there and you got caught.
Fox News. It's on right in front of you.
How's that go? How's that go?
Do you have a good day after that?
Or do they mock you until you will never look at that channel again?
They will mock you until you never watch that channel again.
You won't even watch it when you're alone.
Yeah. Does that meet the definition of a cult?
It's exactly the definition of a cult.
That they keep you from other information, aggressively.
They punish you if you leave.
True. Right?
And they create a narrative that is disconnected from reality.
Do they do that?
Yes, they do. The definition of a cult is met exactly by the two political parties.
Not one more than the other.
Not one more than the other.
Hear that clearly. In this one way, just in this one way, they are identical.
You can't leave them easily without some kind of penalty.
They keep you from the other information.
And they have a narrative of the world that is disconnected, in some ways, from the real world.
Now, I know that the Republicans are saying, well, but the Republican narrative is closer to truth, and the Democratic is closer to crazy, so that's not the same.
And I feel that too, right?
Like, I do feel that the Republican conservative, let's say, systems are more complete...
They consider human motivation especially.
So they seem more realistic.
But I would argue that they're only more functional.
They're not necessarily a better picture of reality.
And that both of them are probably a little disconnected from reality because humans can't see reality.
We're not designed to see reality.
We're designed to create a subjective picture of reality that we treat as reality.
That's what we're designed for.
So, to say that the Republicans are the ones who get it right and the Democrats are the ones that get it wrong is to misunderstand the nature of reality.
Because you don't know what's right and wrong.
And you don't know what's reality.
But you can tell what works.
And I do believe that the Republican-slash-Conservative set of ideas are far more functional and that they work.
And you can implement them Over and over again, and then observe that they work.
For example, competition.
It's hard to think of any situation where you introduced real competition and it didn't make the thing better.
Right? It's pretty consistent.
So, in that way, the Republicans are more, let's say, they have more of a passing association with reality than Democrats, because they have a narrative that isn't real.
I would say the Republicans, like all humans...
Have narratives that are not real.
But one of them works.
Like, one of them consistently is repeatable.
And one of them consistently fails every time you do it.
That's the difference. All right.
But just in case anybody's new to my broadcast here, I'm left to Bernie, but better at math.
Meaning that I'm not... Wed to any policies of either group.
I look at them individually and look for what's practical.
And a lot of the democratic stuff is just great ideas that are not practical.
All right. That, I believe, represents the totality of the magic and majesty of Coffee with Scott Adams.
I don't think it could have been better.
I think you'd agree.
Maybe it gets better every single time.
I don't want to say that. I don't want to jinx it.
But it feels like it gets better every time.
And if you learn something today, oh my goodness, somebody says Mike Lindell is starting a new web platform.
Wouldn't that be interesting?
Do you know what Mike Lindell should call his new web platform?
I don't know if it's like a social media platform or whatever.
He should call it Pillow.
Am I right? Am I right?
Now, maybe it's taken, so he can't use it.
But if he started a social media platform, Mike Lindell, it should be named just one word.
Because you don't want to be, like, the Facebook.
You just want to be Facebook.
You don't want to be the Twitter.
You just want to be Twitter.
And you don't want to be MyPillow.
You just want to be Pillow.
You see, you're trying to dress it up with pillow talk.
I get it. Pillow talk is clever.
It's catchy. But here's my...
Well, let me ask you.
Let's do a branding survey.
Here we're helping Mike Lindell.
I don't know if he needs any help. But if you had a choice of just pillow...
For the name of your social network.
Or anything with pillow extra.
Like pillow talk.
Pillow case. My pillow.
Which one's better? The pillow?
Alright. Let me give you a lesson on branding.
Here's the first lesson.
Almost everybody is bad at it.
That's what you need to know.
Almost everybody...
Probably 99% of the world is really, really bad at this kind of a decision.
So I'm looking at your answers, and you can see they're all over the place.
Yeah, they're all over the place.
But there are quite a few people who are saying that pillow by itself...
I think I may have led the witness here.
I may have influenced you.
But yeah, pillow is right.
And you'll see lots...
And the reason that pillow is right is that it fits the form better.
If you're an experienced internet user and you hear that there's a network called Pillow Talk, or you hear that there's a network called Pillow, which one do you assume is more competently built?
Pillow. I mean, you might not be right, but your subjective feeling, if you're an experienced internet user, you would recognize the name just Pillow, To be put together by people who knew what they were doing.
Am I right? How about this?
Just the people who are really, really part of the internet.
Like you're a real digital native.
You really spent some time.
Maybe you've worked on a startup.
Maybe you've even been involved with technology.
If you're really in that world, and you hear that it's the one word, pillow, You will think that more capable people are working on that.
That's my hypothesis.
All right. Sounds like Zillow.
Yeah. And like I said, it's probably already trademarked.
There's probably enough things named to Pillow that you couldn't use it, but it would be great.
It would be great if you could.
Oh, Red Pillow.
Oh, damn it, that's good.
Red Pillow. Red Pillow is pretty darn clever.
But I would still call it Pillow, and then I might have features within it or subcategories or groups, and maybe one of them could be Red Pillow.
That would be pretty great.
All right, that's all for now. I'll talk to you tomorrow.
All right, YouTubers. You got me for another minute.
Today, I posted on my local channel how to deal with imposter syndrome.
I think I just posted.
I had it scheduled. Imposter syndrome and how to have better self-esteem.
And the day before, I had posted some tips on dealing with criticism that people are telling me is the best thing I've ever done.
I don't know if that's true, but People are really, really happy about it.
A lot of people are saying it's life-changing.
How do you make a billion dollars?
It's easy. Start with two billion and buy a boat.
You see, I combined two old jokes there.
Why are you so infatuated with NXIVM? I think it's interesting on every level.
Because NXIVM is a...
I connect to it on a whole bunch of levels.
One is that it's a persuasion story.
So that's my sweet spot.
The other part is that it's a fake news story.
My other sweet spot.
And the other part of it is maybe the thing that interests me the most, which is, I've told you that I spend, and always have since I was young, if I find somebody who has accomplished somebody or has success, can't talk for a second, if I see somebody who is very successful or very capable, I love to dig in and find out why.
Like, what are you doing? What's your technique?
What are you doing that works? And then the Keith Ranieri situation, at least looking from the outside, because we can't know too much about what happened there, but from the outside, it appears that he had an unusual skill set.
And I'm very interested to know, could I learn anything from that?
You don't have to use your powers for evil, right?
If you think that's what happened.
But having power is power.
So I would say that, and I'll tell you something that sounds horrible, but I do know people who have studied Mein Kampf and various Nazi stuff just to learn technique, persuasion technique.
In fact, it's fairly common.
I would guess that intelligence people were involved in persuasion.
They've probably all read the Nazi propaganda.
So it's very useful to just find out what people's technique is, no matter what you think about what they did with their technique.
It's useful to know.
So there are many, many points of interest there.
And then some of you know that I... Sorry, my cat's making things hard here.
Did I defend the indefensible on Clubhouse?
No, I think I'm going to reschedule all that for next week.
I'm just having a scheduling issue.
Best color for persuasion, somebody says.
What's the best color for persuasion?
Well, it depends on the topic.
So you want to match your color to the topic and to the mood.
That's the answer. So there's no such thing as one color that's the right color for all of the different purposes.
At the moment, if you were going to put a button on a website and you wanted more people to click that button, I think burnt umber wins whenever you compete.
So if you do a rapid test where you say, I'm going to give people a bunch of different looks of the same website, everything will be the same except the color of one button, you will consistently find that people will push the burnt umber, kind of the bad orange, before they will press other colors.
So there are some that you can just test that get more clicks, and it has more to do with Yeah, burnt umber.
It has more to do with just testing it to find out.
