Episode 1377 Scott Adams: Persuasion Lessons For China Trolls, and Lots More
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Content:
Comparing Biden to Carter
Israel shifts press attention
Biden's Police Week statement
Persuasion tip for Stephen Richer
Persuasion tip for Chen Weihua
Transparent lies about masks
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Go! Oh, yeah.
That's good. So, Christina and I went out to eat last night in our local downtown.
And, uh... I think it was only maybe a day ago that people were almost all wearing masks outdoors still.
But as of last night, we put on our masks to walk down the sidewalk and almost no other masks.
So finally, Californians have decided that they don't need masks outdoors.
We're a little bit slow.
A little bit slow, but we're catching on.
And I gotta say, it's starting to feel like we're back to normal.
Just starting to feel like right on the edge of feeling back to normal.
We're planning a trip.
We're acting almost like normal people.
We're getting there. Apparently, the theory of the virus having escaped from a lab is still in play, thanks to a letter that was published in a journal called Science by a bunch of prominent epidemiologists and biologists who said you can't rule out the possibility that it escaped from a lab.
So, haven't we been told by experts For the past year, at least some of the experts were saying that they had kind of ruled out the gain of function and escape from the lab thing.
None of that was true.
There was no way it ever could have been ruled out.
So, let's follow the science.
You know, follow the science.
It's pointing that way. And at the same time, it's pointing that way.
So when you see the sign, follow the science.
Definitely go right, but also definitely go left.
Make sure you follow the science.
And if you think that's going to be hard, well, you're a science denier.
Because you just need to follow the science.
Don't ask questions. Just follow it.
Follow it! Have I told you before that your worldview could be evaluated in terms of its accuracy by whether it predicts?
Now, sometimes you'll have an inaccurate worldview that will predict once or twice just by luck.
But if you have a really accurate worldview, it's going to predict fairly, you know, accurately and consistently.
So, let's see if you can make this prediction.
I asked this on Twitter.
Let's say the next time you hear a news report that there's been a credible sighting of a UFO by an American military entity.
What would you predict about the quality of the video?
Will it be, A, a grainy blob with indistinct features, or will it be, B, a shiny alien technology?
So let's use your worldview and make a prediction.
Grainy blob?
Or shiny alien technology?
Yeah. The more times you see your prediction come true, sometime in the next year there'll be videos of a UFO in distinct blob.
So that should tell you something.
Here's the provocative question that I asked yesterday, because I'm trying to ruin everything.
And when you hear this question, I want you to ask yourself why you didn't think of it.
All right, here's the question.
So we know we have two types of, well, three vaccinations in this country.
We've got two of them that require two shots, the Moderna and Pfizer, but then the J&J requires one.
Now we know that the one shot is not as effective as the two shots.
But recently we've learned that the one shot isn't even as effective as the first shot of the double shot.
So, here's my question.
Let's say you wanted to travel internationally.
And you had gotten the J&J. So your level of vaccination is whatever the J&J gives you.
But you are considered vaccinated.
So you could travel.
But let's say instead of the J&J, single shot, you went for the two-shot dose.
Your first shot apparently is better than the J&J. But you still have to wait weeks longer to get the second shot Before you were considered free to, you know, be vaccinated and travel.
Why is it that the one shot gives you all the freedom of being vaccinated when the one shot from the two-shot dose is better, better, you're more vaccinated, but you're not considered vaccinated?
How many of you have had that thought?
It didn't occur to me until yesterday.
For some reason, you get so stuck into your patterns that we've just been told that you need two of this one and one of this one, that when the new news came out that the first shot of the two doses is actually really, really good.
I don't know. Seems like that should have been a big news story, but I feel like it wasn't.
Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't get the second shot, I'm sure there's extra benefit, and I'm sure they thought it through.
But my understanding is that the only reason that we require two of one and one of the other is that that's the way they were tested.
I don't believe the two-shot doses were tested as one shot.
Correct me on that, but I think that's the case.
So the way the rules are, you can only use them the way they've been tested.
So the two shots were only tested as two shots, I think.
Fact check me on that. Alright, there's a new persuasion play from the, let's say, the right, the Republican side, in which there's a major push, and Fox News is doing this a lot, to compare Biden to Jimmy Carter.
In fact, there's a headline You know, that Biden is Jimmy Carter 2.0, and a number of different personalities on Fox making that comparison.
Now, number one, is the comparison reasonable?
Well, actually it is.
You know, there's a number of stories that mirror the 70s, and there's a little bit of comparison that's worth making there.
But here's what it occurred to me when I saw this.
When Democrats were trying to take out Trump, Or indeed, when Democrats are trying to take out any Republican leader, who do they compare that Republican to?
Hitler, right? So Democrats, when they want to take you out and really prove that you're the worst person in the world, they'll compare you to Hitler.
But when Republicans want to take out a Democratic leader and they want to really make him look bad, they compare him to Jimmy Carter.
They compare him to another Democrat.
So in order to insult a Republican, you have to compare him to some foreign guy who years ago did horrible things named Hitler.
But to insult a Democrat, you just compare him to another Democrat.
That's all you need. Now, somebody needs to tell Jimmy Carter that his legacy is not working out the way he wanted.
Because, hey, Jimmy, turns out that you're being used as the example of the worst thing that anybody could be as a president.
You're not quite Hiller, but you're being used in the same sense.
We're not saying you're Hiller, Jimmy Carter.
You're the opposite of Hiller. But we're just saying that your name is used in very much the same utility.
So maybe that's not the best thing.
Speaking of persuasion, Israel did some of the best persuasion in wartime I've ever seen.
Not only the persuasion that got the Hamas fighters into the tunnels so they could be bombed by faking out with the news, but they managed to make the press more interested in the press than they were interested in the Palestinians.
Now, if you've ever seen better persuasion than that, let me know.
Because the one thing you can guarantee is that the press wants to write stories about the press.
So when Israel bombed that building that had the AP offices in it, you know, everybody had evacuated.
So no deaths in that particular attack.
But of course, the other story is that there was some Hamas Secret Service or something that was illegitimate, not illegitimately, but was using that building.
And Israel cleverly has made the press use up their shelf space talking about the press.
Now, when I say shelf space, I use this concept for the news.
Because the news has, let's say, a front page, which they're going to say, okay, the news of the day, about 20% will be this story, 30% will be this story, 10% will be this story.
So there's a sense of shelf space, right?
There's not infinite news.
The news fits into the little bucket because the bucket's about the same size every day.
So if you can take something about a story that you don't like being out there, such as casualties, that would be a story that Israel would not want a lot of focus on, right?
Doesn't want a lot of pictures of casualties, doesn't want that to be the main conversation.
So they took this shelf space and That would have been the Israeli Hamas-Gaza conflict, and that bucket that was going to be the story about Israel was a little bit flexible.
It could get bigger, but it couldn't get infinitely bigger.
It was going to still only be a portion of the news, because this is America, right?
We've got other stuff to talk about.
So Israel managed to take that little portion that was going to be about the story And force a big part of it to be about the bombing of the AP building.
And how do you feel about the bombing of the AP building?
Well, assuming that the story is correct, that they gave warning and nobody was hurt, no casualties, so you're not offended by that.
How about the fact that allegedly there was Hamas' use of the building?
Do you believe that Israel believed, and was probably correct, that Hamas was using the building?
Because the AP says they were not aware of it.
Well, I don't know that the AP would be aware of it, would they?
If it's a secret use of a building, I don't think they were advertising, hey, by the way, see you at the water cooler, and by the way, we're a major terrorist organization, what do you do for a living?
Well, I'm in the AP. I mean, I don't think the AP would have necessarily known what everybody was doing in the building.
So you're probably looking at the story and saying, okay, if Hamas was in there, it was a legitimate target and nobody got hurt.
But here's the other part.
How much do people like the press?
Imagine these two questions, just asked of people in the United States as an example.
How much do you like or care about or have empathy for the Palestinian people?
Well, you'd find a lot of people in the United States who say, I have lots of empathy.
Tons. Maybe you do or do not approve of what their leaders are doing, but the actual mom and dad and kids just trying to survive everyday life?
Of course. You've got all kinds of empathy for them, even if you think Israel's doing the right stuff.
But how much empathy do you have for the press?
Not as much, right?
So Israel has managed to convert some of your attention, which somewhat naturally would have been in empathy, at least some of it is being transferred over to, well, the press.
Do you care? Now, because nobody got hurt, it just doesn't feel the same, right?
It just feels like computers getting blown up and they were probably backed up anyway.
So, how many people in the comments...
Let's see.
In the comments, tell me how many Palestinians have been killed so far in the recent fighting in Gaza.
In the comments, I want to see how well informed you are.
Have the distractions...
Gotten to you yet? So give me your estimate in the comments and I'll see, I'll read them out, and I'll tell you how close you are before I tell you how many people died.
I'm seeing 150, 30, more than 100, 9.
Let's see some more. I see 0, 50, 25, 25, 150, 75, 160.
The people who are in that 150, 160 range are about right.
So you are the more informed ones.
But those who have smaller numbers, maybe distraction helps that.
Yeah. All right.
So I would say this is like the greatest persuasion, military persuasion I've ever seen.
Because it just makes the press care about the press.
Gary Pruitt, the CEO of the AP... He said this, he said, talking about it, a closing statement about it, he said, the world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what transpired today, meaning the blowing up the AP building.
Now, is that good for Israel or bad for Israel?
It's kind of good, isn't it?
Isn't the last thing that Israel wants is more reporting within Gaza?
Because that's where the casualties are going to be.
So it's the last thing they want.
So I would say Israel totally got away with blowing up that building, totally got away with reducing the amount of reporting that will come out of there, totally got away with transferring our attention to a story that's not about the casualties so much.
This is a home run, persuasion-wise.
Now, this has nothing to do with Whether you support Israel's actions or support the Palestinians' actions, we're only talking about technique.
In terms of technique of persuasion, this is as good as you get.
I mean, this is like the play of the decade or something.
And, just to make the point, I just saw a Joel Pollack report in Breitbart that the Abraham Accords are holding.
So the other Arab countries...
Apparently, you're just tired of the Palestinians.
So the other Arab countries, and largely they would be aligned against Iran, who is supporting Hamas.
So it kind of makes sense. But apparently the other countries have just said, work it out.
It's not about us anymore.
Work it out. So, honestly, I don't know that Israel could have created a better situation out of a terrible situation.
The terrible situation being the bloodshed.
Now, the other thing that Israel is doing right, how many videos have you seen of the actual rockets being launched out of Gaza?
You've seen that, right?
Probably a lot of them.
How many videos have you seen of the Iron Dome trying to stop those rockets?
Probably a bunch, right?
So, have I told you far too often, the visual persuasion is the only one that matters, really.
Unless you have an immediate fear Fear is always the biggest motivator.
But if you're not operating personally from fear, then visual persuasion is what's getting you the most.
All the concepts, the history, whatever you think about the blah, blah, blah, it's nothing compared to the picture.
And Israel controls the picture.
Somehow. I mean, you see lots of missiles and you say to yourself, my God, Israel has a right to respond.
Look at all those missiles. How many of you know how many missiles were fired into Israel, roughly?
In the comments, let's see if this information got through, but the number of casualties, maybe not so much.
We'll test this hypothesis.
Number of What is the number of...
Somebody says there's an irritating sound coming from my nose.
I don't think it's coming from my nose, so I don't know what you're hearing.
Alright, so number of rockets fired.
Looks like you know the number of rockets fired.
So 1,500, 2,000, that's in the range.
It's over a thousand, so by now it's in that range.
So look at how well you knew how many rockets were fired at Israel, right?
But look how only maybe half of you had an idea what the casualties were.
Think about it.
You knew the number of rockets, but you didn't know the number of casualties as much.
Some of you knew both.
All right. So that's what visual persuasion's getting you.
Lindsey Graham apparently was on...
Not apparently. He was on Judge Jeanine's show and called for the death penalty for cyberterrorism.
Thank you, Lindsey Graham.
I feel like...
You know, there are times when I don't agree with Lindsey Graham.
Probably quite a few times.
You know, if you looked at all the things we could talk about.
But I gotta say...
That Lindsey Graham is one of the ones who's, you know, smarter.
He's just smarter than other people.
You know, even if you don't like where he's heading, he's smarter.
And he's calling for the death penalty for cyberterrorism.
I agree with that.
And I think we should have had that in place when we were negotiating with this hacker group for the Colonial Pipeline, which I understand is back in action.
So that got sorted out.
But any hacker who's doing something to the United States as big as a pipeline hack, they should be looked at for the death penalty.
So Joe Biden was, he issued a statement for Police Week.
If you're the President of the United States and you release a statement for Police Week, wouldn't you kind of expect it to be sort of a positive statement?
We're celebrating the police who risk their lives every day to keep our country safe.
Feels like Police Week would be a good time to say something nice about the police.
But if you're a Democrat leader, apparently you can't do that anymore.
So instead, he said there was a deep sense of distrust Black Americans feel toward the cops in the wake of high-profile custody deaths.
I mean, he used his own words, but that's what he said.
And I will say the following.
Have we yet heard any cases of, let's say, a black man in America being killed by police unless either there was a resisting arrest or the person tragically had something in their hand like a cell phone that was mistaken as a weapon?
Because mistaking something for a weapon just feels like its own category.
I don't feel like you should put that into any other category.
Mistaking a weapon is just a mistake.
It's a bad one. It's the worst one you can make.
But it's a mistake.
There's nobody who made a decision, oh, there's a person with a gun in their hand, but they're black, so I guess I'll shoot, versus, oh, they're white, I guess I won't shoot.
Nobody's doing that. It's just a mistake.
So until I start hearing stories, any of them really, where there was either no resisting arrest or there wasn't something in their hand that could have been gun-like, which I have to say is a little bit like resisting arrest.
Let me tell you what I'm not going to do if the police are aiming at me.
I'm not going to hold something in my hand.
If the police come toward me and I see a gun out, Hands go open and they go up.
Boop, drop whatever you got, do this.
If you're behind a car and you're going to emerge from behind the car with something in your hand, put it down, go like this, walk around the car.
Anybody who's not doing that and getting shot, there's a limit to my empathy for anybody who's acting like that.
Here's a little persuasion lesson for you.
So Stephan, I think it's Stephan, Richer, who's the Maricopa County recorder, and apparently he's got some official job in Maricopa County where the recount is happening.
So there's an election recount happening, and one of the claims that ex-president Trump made And lots of other people have made in the press, etc.
The claim, allegedly, is that some part of the database is missing and has been deleted.
Something that they needed to look at.
Now, Stephen Richer says the following...
In a tweet he said, here's a great example of a plain as day lie that will lead our Arizona residents to think the Maricopa County database has been entirely deleted.
Help me call out this lie.
And before this he said he was literally sitting in front of his computer looking at the database.
So his claim is Is that no databases have been deleted.
He's sitting there looking at it himself, and he's calling out the president for being completely wrong, and he says that the database has not been entirely deleted.
It's not been entirely deleted.
So, I tweeted back this persuasion tip.
Next time say, quote, no part of the data has been deleted.
Because when you say the database hasn't been entirely deleted, it reads exactly like a confession.
If somebody in your personal life used this wording, wouldn't it sound like a confession?
It doesn't sound like a defense.
It sounds exactly, exactly like a confession.
Scott, did you throw out the yogurt that was in the refrigerator?
I did not throw out everything in the refrigerator.
See what I'm saying?
Scott, did you take that charger out of the bedroom?
I did not remove all the bedroom furniture.
Scott, did you get a haircut?
I did not shave my body.
What? Scott, did you eat a bagel this morning?
I did not eat all the food in the world.
There are still people in China with plenty of food.
I can prove it. Worst tweet of all time.
And now for my favorite lesson in persuasion.
There's presumably a Chinese government troll.
I'm going to make that allegation without having proof of it, but I'd say the evidence is strong.
And he's worth following because he's so funny.
His name is Chen.
Weihua, maybe? W-E-I-H-U-A? Weihua?
Is that the right pronunciation?
But anyway, Chen often comes in and tweets about things I've said or other people have said, and he seems obviously like a Chinese government troll.
I don't think there's any doubt about it, really.
I mean, I might be wrong, maybe.
So I'll just say it's an allegation, but One which I treat as true, whether it is or not.
And he was tweeting about Israel blowing up the AP building.
And he said this, If China or Russia had done anything remotely like this, Psaki, Blinken, Biden, Sullivan, Rubio, Cotton, Hawley would all go berserk.
Now they are all pretending brain dead.
This is why I like his tweets.
Now they are all pretending braindead.
So I tweeted back at Chen and I said, is your government still shipping fentanyl to the Mexican cartels to poison America?
Ask your free media to look into it.
Now, I don't know why Chen thinks it's a good idea to tweet back at me.
Because he really should just let it go.
He's not really winning when he tweets back at me.
And then he said back to me, Chen said, you seem to be a fervent believer of Trump slash Pompeo lies.
All right. All right.
Got his attention. And so I tweeted back a persuasion tip to Chen.
I said, next time, say, quote, China is doing no such thing as your denial.
When you attack the credibility of the sources instead, it comes off as a confession over here in America.
I hope you didn't get executed by your government for that huge mistake.
I'd miss you. So, I don't know if I just killed a Chinese spy...
But maybe. Maybe.
It could be a tough day for him.
How would you like to be the Chinese spy or the alleged or the Chinese troll and have to explain to your boss that you just confessed to the biggest crime of the decade or the century?
I don't know. So...
These are the type of lessons which you would be learning on the Locals platform if you were a subscriber.
Somebody says the CCP can't debate.
Yeah, it's really tough for them to debate because anywhere that they go, if you're debating anybody who's associated with the Chinese government, It's going to take me about one degree of separation before I'm bringing up fentanyl or genocide.
It's all going to go that way.
What's the topic? Oh, let's talk about the weather.
I'll bet it's raining on the Uyghurs, who are subjected to genocide.
So it's going to be nothing but genocide and fentanyl any time I have any conversation with China, and I don't care about anything else.
Alright. Don, thank you for subscribing to Locals.
I appreciate that. All right, is there anything else going on?
It seems like we're in this weird dearth of news because Trump is not mixing things up.
Oh, apparently Trump now has his own website.
It's called, can somebody help me, From the Desk Of?
Is that the name of his website?
So I think Trump, and there was some technical problem with it, it probably crashed from traffic or something.
Scott, can you tell us about the tennis ball incident again?
What incident was that?
I don't remember. Remind me.
Oh, is there an expiration date on the locals' offer?
I don't have a planned expiration date on that, but at some point I'll remove it.
Let me just see what comments you have here.
Homelessness in California is a mess.
We'll talk about that in a minute.
Mark asked me, Scott, hypothetically, if you had the opportunity to do so, would you have any interest in interviewing an individual who is a CCP official?
Eh... I mean, I don't know what would be the point of that because it would just be a bunch of lies and they would be obvious lies.
I don't know. Is there really a point to that?
I don't know if there is. So speaking of the homeless.
Yeah, so California is doing, I think it's called a housing first idea.
If you get them housed first and then provide a number of support services for mental health and addiction mostly, that that's the best way to go.
I think there are others who think that treating the addiction and the mental illness first is the big problem because housing isn't going to work unless you do those things.
So, all I can say is that California somehow has a budget surplus, and we're spending a lot of money on the homeless.
No, Logan, I have not seen John Cullen's video.
So, I don't think we're overspending.
If we have a budget surplus, maybe we're overtaxing.
That would be the other way to look at it.
But I don't know that anybody has the right answer with homeless stuff.
Because the problem is that trying to turn people who can't figure out how to get that part of their life together, I just don't know how much they can be moved.
Probably just 10% of them can be moved back into the productive cycle, I would imagine.
I can't imagine it would be much more than that.
Is California's pension fund part of the budget?
I don't know, but it's an interesting question.
All right. How many of you would lie and say you were fully vaccinated if you were only partially vaccinated?
In the comments, if you were on the two-shot regimen and you had had one shot and waited a week, You're pretty well vaccinated after one shot.
Would you ever lie?
Let's say you didn't need to show a passport, but you had to...
Would you lie and say you're vaccinated?
I would get caught, I would, me, sure.
So almost all of you would lie.
I see a few no's, but almost all of you would.
Let me give a little tip to our government.
Here's a little advice for the American government, similar to advice I would give anyway.
If your citizens won't obey you, and it's obvious that they won't.
I mean, this is complete.
I mean, I see a few no's, but I see almost complete disobedience.
Almost complete disobedience.
It's like 90% disobedient, based on the comments.
If your citizens, 90% of them are going to disobey your recommendation, you've lost credibility.
You've lost it.
And that's a pretty big thing to lose, certainly on a health question.
And I do think that, you know, I've said this before, you want your government to be in charge when there's an emergency.
Even if they make mistakes, it's still better than everybody just running around randomly, right?
So you definitely want the government calling the shots in the middle of the emergency.
But as you get toward the end, the government is the wrong decision maker.
Because once you get to the end, you've got these more nuanced decisions about the quality of life, everybody's individual risk, etc.
And the general rules are not going to work so well for individuals.
At that point, the citizens just have to take control.
I would argue that that's already happened, and that the government and the CDC probably, I feel, followed public opinion.
Give me a read on that.
In my opinion, the public decided that masks outdoors had to go, and then the CDC agreed.
Did you see it that way?
To me, it looks like the public's already in control.
There's just a little time lag between the time that The public demands it, and the time that the CDC says, well, okay.
So when you're looking at the stores that may or may not require you to wear a mask and all that, that's all going to take care of itself.
Because the public, I believe, in my opinion right now, the public is managing the crisis, or the end of the crisis, right?
I don't think it's the government in charge anymore.
I think they lost their moral authority through a number of sketchy decisions that were transparently false.
When they lied about the masks, we were already...
As soon as the lying about the mask thing happened, I think everybody was a little bit...
I'm going to look at you really carefully from now on.
All right. Somebody says the CDC was never following the science.
Well, I disagree with that statement.
I would only add this qualifier, which is people don't know what the science is.
Even the CDC, probably the experts were debating what is true and what isn't and how much risk you put into any of this.
So I wouldn't say they weren't following the science.
I would say they tried.
It's just not easy.
I'd like to hear Scott talk about when we reach herd immunity.
Well, I don't have an opinion that's much different than the experts.
70%. You know, if the experts are saying 70%, I'm not going to debate the math.
I don't have a better idea.
But I do think that this is a unique kind of virus because of how it doesn't attack the young people so much.
So it could be that you just count young people as effectively vaccinated.
Like, if you took the young people who are healthy, who just aren't going to have a problem, and just say, ah, let's count them as good as vaccinated.
Now, they're not as good as vaccinated, because they might be able to transmit it better than vaccinated people.
I don't know. But it feels like that.
Yeah, there's a Cernovich quote somebody's giving me that all experts are right one day and wrong a week later.
At some point, we just have to live our lives.
So you really need to learn how to make decisions in a world in which the experts can't be trusted.
That's the world we're in.
Maybe I've always been there.
Has anybody reached out to me about the debt crisis once I started talking about it?
A number of people have commented, yes.
But it looks like inflation is going to be what we're going to do to get rid of it, which is not ideal.
All right. I'm going to end a little bit early today.