Episode 1441 Scott Adams: Persuasion Tips Based on the Headlines, and Lots More
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Credit for the vaccines and distribution
Eventually, everyone will get COVID
Vaccine persuasion for under 40 and healthy
Cuba, "most equal multi-racial country"?
Cardboard anti-fornication beds?
74,000 AZ ballots explained
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
All of you YouTubers, I've already been talking to the people on Locals.
And man, are you in for a good coffee with Scott Adams today.
One of the very best, I dare say, and I haven't even done it yet.
That's how confident I am that this will be terrific.
And the only thing that could make it better, really the only thing I can think of, Nothing else could make this better, except a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind, which you would probably fill with your favorite liquid if you're thinking ahead.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it's going to happen now.
Go. Oh, so good.
Now, let's talk about some of the news.
Rasmussen did a poll and asked likely voters, asked the likely voters, who deserves more credit for the COVID-19 vaccinations?
Surprisingly, it did not go the way that you would think it would go.
Because wouldn't you expect that that question would go purely along political lines?
Who did better on the COVID vaccination, Trump or Biden?
You'd expect that to be on straight party lines, wouldn't you?
You know, any Biden versus Trump question.
But no. Trump got 51%, as should get more credit, and Biden only 41%, which is pretty substantial.
Pretty substantial.
But here's the interesting part about this.
In the age group of 40 to 64, what makes the age group of 40 to 64 interesting?
What's interesting about them is that they're the experienced workers.
People who have experienced in life are between 40 and 64.
They've just got a little bit more vision about how things work.
And I think that that group had 58% said Trump.
So the people who have the most experience in life, you know, before they become senior citizens, 58% of them gave more credit to Trump.
Now here's why.
Compare these two tasks.
Rolling out vaccinations so that everybody gets it and everybody is informed and it's paid for.
So that's a big logistics issue, right?
How do you get all these vaccinations to different places, etc.?
So that's what Biden is mostly doing.
Then compare that to getting government institutions to operate four years faster than normal.
Right? These are not equal tasks.
The task of actually getting the vaccinations out to everybody...
It probably was just a budget question, because I don't think the president was personally coordinating the trucks.
You've got to get storage.
Do you have enough storage for these trucks?
No. No.
All that stuff, the states were coordinating it.
It was driven down to the lowest, presumably driven down to the lowest operators, the people who knew where the trucks were.
Where is my refrigeration?
How do I get it there? So I think the Biden stuff would have looked the same under every president.
Would you agree with that?
That the Biden's contribution to the vaccination rollout, which is impressive, you know, I give him an A, Rolling it out.
But I think any president would have gotten an A because the president doesn't even do the work.
They just say, roll it out, and then stuff happens.
But how hard was it for Trump to get all of these institutions to operate faster?
That was bordering on magic.
And I'm surprised that there are so many people in the public who notice it.
But the real tell is that the working-age people...
The people with the most experience, they recognize that what Trump did is far more of an accomplishment than what Biden did.
Even though what Biden will do is more energy, because the rollout is a bigger deal than anything.
But, yeah, I think Trump properly gets more credit for that.
I saw a tweet which I agree with from Ian Martisis, who says, and I quote...
Due to the relatively rapid emergence of COVID variants, I'm just summarizing here, so because there's so many variants popping up, all people will eventually be infected by the virus.
Do you agree with that?
Now that we know that being vaccinated won't stop you from getting the virus, it just reduces the symptoms, Would you say it's true, given that we're now in our second season and this virus is not burning out?
It's actually getting stronger.
I hate to say it, but it's getting stronger.
Remember even the Spanish flu burned out in a year?
Or did it take two?
I can't remember the Spanish flu.
But I don't feel like this thing's burning out.
It feels permanent, which also suggests it's engineered, of course.
But it feels like it's here to stay.
So when you make your decisions about how to handle your life from here on in, do you assume you'll get it or assume that you won't?
Because I agree with this.
I think basically almost everybody's going to get it.
Maybe 85%, something like that.
So let's say you're going to make your decisions.
Here is your...
Persuasion tip if you're the government.
You ready for this? You're going to like this one.
There's somebody who says that they turn off the live stream when I tease you about how good something's going to be before I say it.
But I do it anyway.
If I were going to advise the government how to get people vaccinated, I would say this.
Probably if you have comorbidities, you've already gotten vaccinated.
Probably, right? The people with comorbidities are far more vaccinated because it just makes sense.
Their risk is different than everybody else's.
But how do you get somebody vaccinated who's under 40 and healthy?
That's the problem, right?
Because if you say to somebody who's under 40 and healthy...
Hey, get vaccinated.
They'll usually say, well, tell me, what's the risk of the vaccination itself, which is non-zero?
There's a risk. And what's the risk of dying from COVID? And they're going to say, I don't know, but the risk of COVID is vanishingly small, but I don't know enough about this vaccination.
So, you know, everybody's guessing, because you don't really know the odds of anything.
But a reasonable person...
Could say, I'll wait it out.
Would you agree? Would all of you agree that a reasonable, healthy young person could make a reasonable decision if the only thing they're looking at is the risk of death, it would be reasonable not to take the vaccination?
Do I get banned for saying that?
But hold on, don't ban me yet.
There's a punchline coming.
Don't ban me. Don't ban me.
I'm going to say something state approved in a moment here and redeem myself.
It goes like this.
Suppose they change the branding for what the vaccine is.
Because right now, you think of it as a thing that keeps you alive, right?
Right? If the only thing the virus did was make you pretty sick...
We wouldn't be that worried about it.
You'd get plenty sick.
You'd get over it. It would be just like when I was a kid.
We would just get chicken pox and just get over it.
But suppose you change the branding for people under 40 and you called the vaccination, wait for it, wait for it, the treatment or the prevention for long-haul COVID, and you don't even talk about the risk of death, You know why? Because if you're under 40, you think your risk of death is so small that you don't even put it in your decision.
But if you're trying to persuade people to get vaccinated, if they're healthy and, say, under 40, just to pick a number, I would say, hey, would you like the vaccination to prevent long-haul COVID? Now, they might say, come on, how likely is it that I'll get long-haul COVID? Well, what are the chances?
So I looked that up before I got on here.
There's at least one study that says you have a 25% chance of long-haul COVID. Now, go back to the prior tweet.
Remember, Ian Martisis is telling us, in his view, this is just an opinion, kind of speculative, that we'll all get infected.
Suppose that's true. I think it's reasonable.
I don't know what the odds are that everybody will get infected, but it looks like it.
I mean, if I had to guess, I'd say 85% will be infected eventually.
But I don't know that for sure.
However, it's reasonable.
Now, suppose you had nearly 100% chance, or 85% chance, let's say, of getting infected, and a 25% chance of long-haul problems.
Would you take a vaccine that was only to prevent the long-haul problems?
And that's all they sold it to you for.
It's like, hey, if you're over 40, we've got a vaccination that will keep you from dying because that's what you care about.
If you're under 40 and you're healthy, no comorbidities, we've got this vaccine that will prevent you from getting long-haul COVID. It's different, right?
Because every time I argue...
Not argue, but any time I talk with somebody who's anti-vaccine, they only talk about the risk of death.
So don't talk about that.
Talk about long-haul.
Do you want the long-haul vaccine or not?
That's what it is. Because, honestly, the risk of death from either the vaccination itself or from COVID is so low, stop talking about it.
It just doesn't matter anymore to decision-making.
It definitely matters if you die.
You know, if your family member happens to be one of the few people who die, yeah, that matters, of course.
That's tragic. But it doesn't matter to you and I for our decision-making.
The risk is too small. You don't make a decision when you go to get bread that you're going to die.
But you might, right?
You go to buy a loaf of bread, you might die.
But you don't put it in your decision-making because it's too small.
Now, here's another percentage that I don't know the answer to.
Let's say it's true that 25% of people who get COVID get some long-haul symptoms.
They seem to be along the lines of inflammation, don't they?
Is everything that COVID long haul does to you, is it all under the umbrella of inflammation?
Like inflamed organs and inflamed brain?
And here's my question.
What do we know about the permanent, the risk of permanent danger?
Could we say that maybe 4% I'm just making this number up, right?
Could you say that 4% of all the people who get long haul Or maybe just 4% of the people who get COVID could get some kind of permanent restructuring of their organs that might not be optimal.
I don't know. I don't know.
But I'll tell you, if it is that high, I'd want to know about it.
All right, changing the topic. The founder of the 1619 Project, you probably all know her, Nicole Hannah-Jones.
So she's getting criticized because at some point she had been asked in an interview what was the most, I guess, equal country.
A country where there was the least racism, I believe, was the context.
And she answered that it might be Cuba.
Cuba. And noted that Cuba does very well in having a variety of black and brown and white people and seems to handle that diversity better than other countries.
Now, as you might expect, people said, you know, that comes with a big dose of socialism, that comes with a big dose of you don't have any food.
So there's a downside, but are they related?
Are they related? Is it the socialism that's somehow causing them to have a good result?
Why would socialism cause you to have a better result integrating people?
Is it because there would be no rich people?
Everybody's equal because we're in poverty, right?
I feel like That's what's going on.
That the way you get equality is by destroying the economy so that you don't have rich people.
Yeah, so she's getting criticized for that, maybe quite reasonably.
But here's my question.
Hold in your mind an image of Nicole Hannah-Jones, the founder of the 1619 Project.
And if there's somebody on Locals who wants to paste in a photo for the rest of you, that would help.
Now, I'm not going to show it to you here because then it gets taken out of context and blah, blah, blah.
And I don't believe in making fun of people's appearances as a general rule.
But if somebody makes a fashion choice, I think you can comment on that, right?
Right? So if somebody just is not attractive, I don't think that's not reasonable to bring up in public.
No reason for it.
But suppose somebody consciously chooses a look to present something.
Let's say Hillary Clinton would wear her pantsuits, which I think was actually a pretty good choice to make her look professional, etc.
Could I comment on the Hillary...
Hillary Clinton's pantsuit.
I think yes. I think yes.
Could I comment on Donald Trump's haircut?
I say yes, because that's a choice.
He wasn't born with a haircut.
It's a choice.
Likewise, Project 1619 founder Nicole Hannah-Jones has made a fashion choice to have, on locals we're seeing a picture of her, to have red hair, dyed red hair, That sort of toughs out in two directions.
So rather than being, let's say, fully rounded like, say, the head of a mushroom, it's more distributed toward two directions.
Is it just me, or do you see Bozo the Clown?
Now, find a picture of Bozo the Clown.
And again, I'm not trying to be unkind.
We're talking about persuasion.
I'm talking about somebody who is a public figure, who makes conscious decisions about her appearance, who has decided to go with a look which, to my mind, suggests Bozo the Clown.
Like, that's the first thing I think of.
And I'm not trying to be unkind.
We're talking about the topic of persuasion, right?
If you're trying to persuade somebody on a deadly serious topic, racism, right, slavery, like deadly, literally deadly serious topics, do you want to pick a look that reminds people of Bozo the Clown?
No. No, don't do that.
So that would be a persuasion fail.
If anybody looks at your look and says to themselves, I think I'm being reminded of something, it's either Bozo the Clown or a rat.
I hear a piano being played at 7.17 in the morning.
That's weird. Okay, I don't know what that's all about.
One of the things about being me is I never know who's living in my house at any moment, but apparently there's more than one piano player.
So here's my other comment about Hannah Nicole Jones.
No, Nicole Hannah Jones.
She's got one of those names that you can put in any order.
Let's call her Nicole Hannah Jones.
And... If you have a look that looks like Bozo the Clown, it makes it seem as though you don't have any friends who can be honest with you.
Doesn't it feel like that's true?
Somebody in the comments says, you're like Larry David.
True. So for quite a number of years, people have said to me, you remind me of somebody.
It's often Larry David.
So I accept that.
I accept that. Now, there's not much I can do about it.
I don't have much to work with here.
But it certainly would be worth noting if it was some choice I made.
All right. Here's something I learned about Epstein's death in jail.
I guess there's a new book coming out by, let's see, investigative reporter Julie Brown called The Jeffrey Epstein Story.
Perversion of Justice, the Jeffrey Epstein story is called.
And here's what she says that I did not know.
Here's a little bit more about Epstein's cellmate.
Do you know anything about Epstein's cellmate?
Well, his name was Nicholas Tartaglione.
Tartaglione. He's described as a hulking ex-cop facing the death penalty...
On federal murder and drug charges.
I think he killed four people.
And he was Epstein's cellmate.
Now, Epstein was not dangerous in that normal way, you know, the violence way.
He was obviously plenty physically dangerous in his way.
But is that normal?
You put somebody on death row in with an Epstein?
Is that normal procedure?
Don't know. But...
Apparently, here's the part that blew me away.
Tartaglione had an illegal cell phone.
Epstein's cellmate had a cell phone.
He had it.
He had a cell phone.
Here's my question.
How many prisoners have an illegal cell phone?
Like, as a percentage. Is it a lot?
I mean, maybe it's a lot.
How the hell do you smuggle in a cell phone?
It has to be through the staff, right?
Can you get a cell phone to a prisoner in any way except through the staff?
The guards, right?
You'd have to have an insider being in on that, wouldn't you?
I mean, especially because I believe Epstein's cell had a camera in it So the cellmate apparently had an illegal phone in a cell that was being monitored by cameras.
How do you get away with that?
How does the jail not have some way to detect a cell phone by now?
Can't you detect a cell phone?
Is there no device that will tell you that a cell phone signal is being given off nearby?
No. How do you have a cell phone in jail in 2021 unless they're not trying very hard to prevent it?
So I would say that's pretty damning.
And then cell officials say that the contents of this illegal phone was, quote, inadvertently destroyed.
The contents of his phone was inadvertently destroyed.
Because that happens, right?
The most important investigation of the last 10 years, probably, and some evidence, just inadvertently, because nobody thought to save any evidence.
It was like, well, most important alleged suicide ever, but, you know, better not save any evidence.
So that's all looking pretty unusual.
Yeah. God, I wish I could tell you some of the things I know.
One of the hard things about being me is that I do hear news like long before you do.
Sometimes months, if not years, before you hear it.
And there's stuff I hear that I just can't tell you.
And it's...
Well, I know.
It's annoying when I say that.
So let's talk about the Tokyo Olympics.
Reportedly, and I don't really believe this story, but we're going to go with this because I think this is fake news, but it's fun.
It's fun fake news.
Allegedly, the beds for the athletes are made out of cardboard and they're designed so that they will collapse under the weight of fornication.
That's right. You can sleep on them fine, but But if you get all busy on them and you become an Olympic fornicator, these beds are designed to collapse.
Now, let me stop and say, I don't believe anything about this story.
I do not believe that beds were designed intentionally to prevent fornication at the Olympics.
But it is a story, right?
So I'm going to talk about it because it's a story, but I don't believe it's true.
However, it raises some interesting questions.
If you're a young single person at the Olympics and you're competing, which of the other athletes looks the sexiest to you?
I'm wondering, do they have a lot of private conversations over lunch?
It's like, I've got to get me a gymnast.
Why, because you think they're sexy?
No, because I have a cardboard bed and I need the smallest amount of weight.
And I'm thinking gymnast.
98 pounds. You know?
I could probably make that work.
Or is it the javelin throwers?
Is it just something about the javelin?
You know what I mean? You know what I mean?
Wink, wink, wink. Javelin thrower?
Yeah? Do the ladies like the javelin thrower?
You know what I mean? You know what I mean?
Okay. Or is it the weightlifters?
Is it the big bulky guys?
Or do they like the freaks?
Do they like the ones who can ski and shoot?
Yeah. You get a lover who can ski and shoot and you've got to ask yourself, what else can they do?
Yeah. Can they tickle your balls?
Well, never mind. Never mind.
I'm just saying that some athletes can multitask.
They're better at, you know, two things.
Some people can only do one thing.
Some people can only shoot.
Some people can only ski.
But some people can shoot and ski.
And I'm saying that could be a tell for a good lover.
Not every time, but I feel like the odds are in your favor.
Anyway, these are the questions I think of.
Which Olympic athletes would be the best lovers?
I said the other day there should be a fleet of drones.
How is the word drone exactly the name?
Appearing on my screen in the comments, exactly as I said, the story about drones.
That's weird. Anyway, I said there should be drones for forest fires.
In other words, drones that are looking for forest fires and spotting them, but also an army of drones to bring water and try to get to the fire as quickly as possible.
Now, the drones that could bring water are probably a pretty big problem because how do you load them up with water without a pilot?
I suppose that's pretty hard.
But could be done.
It's certainly well within the ability of technology someday, if we spend enough money, to have drones that would fly down, grab water.
Hey, Carpe, good to see you and all the Olympic fornicators.
But it turns out that California does have a fleet of drones.
Did not know that.
So we do have a fleet of drones that I think are just looking for fires.
They're not treating them. And maybe, yeah, maybe small volume of chemical foam, exactly.
So if you cut the fire fast enough, maybe, you know, maybe 100 drones with chemical retardant, because it's not as heavy, I'm guessing, as water.
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe that gets it done.
But if I were the California governor, here is my persuasion tip.
Persuasion tip. I would be talking more about this stuff.
Because the news is all about stuff burning up.
It's just non-stop bad news and what are you doing about it?
And if you're a citizen, it looks like the governor is doing basically nothing.
Now, what are the odds that the governor and the state of California are actually doing nothing?
Nothing more than they did last year.
Is that possible?
Are they really just doing nothing more than they did last year when the whole damn state seemed like it was on fire?
No, they're probably doing stuff.
And it probably matters, and it's probably pretty good stuff.
So why aren't we hearing about it?
So here's my persuasion tip for the governor.
if you're doing something about these forest fires, then maybe...
Goodbye, user.
If you're...
Anyway.
Skipping topics. Have you seen the photo?
I'll bet all of you have by now.
If you follow the news, you've seen the photo of the Texas state Democrats who got on a plane or a bus or something and they ran away.
And... And they took a selfie of how happy they were and pleased with themselves and smug on that bus.
Here's my persuasion tip.
Don't release a photo that your enemies are going to be really happy to publish over and over and over again.
Look at the face of the woman who's closest to the camera.
She was probably the one who was holding the camera.
Yeah, I'm seeing on Locals, somebody's posting it.
There's a woman there with a creepy big smile.
I'm going to try to do it.
Like this? I think I nailed it, actually.
This is her look. And the problem is that she's too pleased with herself.
Am I right? Yes.
She doesn't look like somebody who's doing something for the good of the country or, you know, she's found the only thing you could do to try to solve a problem.
She doesn't have that problem-solver look, if you know what I mean.
She has the crazed Karen look.
Right? Karen.
And she took the picture, and she was probably dumb enough to be the one who published it, but really...
Anybody else would have known.
Like the people who did not take the picture probably looked at it and said, well, there's my brand.
Come on, you love it when I make that face.
If you're listening to this on the podcast and you can't see the visual of the best physical impression anybody's ever done of the Karen on the bus, well, you've missed something good.
I'm going to do it again. You're going to miss it again.
Pretty good, wasn't it? I think that was my best work.
Well, here's some fake news that you didn't think was fake news.
Have you been hearing that the Arizona audit, the election audit, found 74,000-ish ballots that don't have a record of being mailed in?
What? Have you heard that?
It's all over the news, all over social media, that they found 74,000 ballots that don't seem to have a record of having been mailed Valid mail-in ballots.
So have you heard that story?
Do you know it's fake news?
How many of you know it's fake news?
Here's the real story.
That 74,000 includes early voting.
People who did not mail in a ballot, they just voted early.
And it includes things that came in after some date where they came up with their numbers.
So between the two things...
The fact that it also includes a whole different category of voters, which should not be linked to online voting, so of course they're not in the records as online voters, because they weren't.
They were never online voters.
They just showed up early and voted in person.
So the whole 74,000 thing looks like fake news based on the auditors not knowing how the system works.
That's awkward. Now, I could be wrong, because I'm using, you know, a CNN fact check on this.
So it could be bullshit.
But I feel as if the bias here is in favor of the fact checkers.
I feel as if the fact checkers probably got this one right.
Probably. So ask yourself...
If you watched a news source or somebody tweeted that number around like it was a fact and you accepted it as a fact, check where you got it from.
Just take a look at where you got it from and see if you want to trust that source going forward.
Now, remember what I told you early on when the election was being questioned and audits were happening and all that?
I told you from the very start that no matter whether there was any impropriety or not, irregardless of how much there was, or regardless of how much there was, that 95% of the claims would be bullshit.
Even if someday we find that 5% are true, which we haven't found.
Nobody's done that. But even if we did, still 95% of the claims would be utter bullshit.
And apparently this is one of them.
All right, The Guardian is doing an investigative piece that looks like it could be important on some kind of spyware program called Pegasus.
So there's a company, the NSO Group, who sells this surveillance software that allows you to surveil people on their cell phone.
But they say they're selling it to only intelligence agencies and, you know, the good guys.
Do you believe that?
Well, you're safe, because this technology to look into anybody's phone is only being given to the good guys.
So, it's Project Pegasus.
Yes, thank you.
So, yeah.
Your phone can be spied on by anybody who has this software, and that means any intelligence agency, basically, can get into your phone.
Now, the scary part is that there was some kind of hack where The Guardian got a hold of a list of people that are being spied on by this software.
Journalists. Right?
Now... I'm going to have to check that list to see if I'm fucking on it.
Right? Now, I don't know if I would be called a journalist.
But I work in that domain, right?
I'm an opinion maker in the political sense.
So I would think I would be exactly in the crosshairs of what somebody would want to spy on.
Because I have an influence and I talk about the topic that people spy on.
So when the list comes out, I have to check the fucking list to see if I'm on it.
Like, really, I have to check the list.
Now, I bet I'm not.
You know, if I had to take a guess, the odds are low.
But I have to check.
Now, I suppose somebody might have told me by now.
I probably would have been informed by now if I were on it.
Anyway. We also have news that China has apparently been doing the Russia trick of hiring criminal contract hackers.
So things can't be tied as easily back to the government.
They just hire criminals to do the hacking, and apparently they've been hacking and blackmailing American companies.
And I don't know what to say about China anymore.
China's brand...
Is fentanyl mass murder, cyber crimes, ethnic genocide, IP theft, climate destruction, illegal trade practices, selling the organs of living dissidents, and unleashing the coronavirus on the world.
That's their brand.
Like, when you think about them, you think of just all that shit.
And apparently they can just hack on us, too, because there's no penalty.
I think we have to expel all of their diplomats.
Don't you? I feel as if the fentanyl issue alone should cause us to just expel all of their diplomats and treat them as if they're a pariah country until they at least fix that.
I mean, with the cyber stuff, I could sort of imagine that maybe we're doing it back to them.
So maybe we're a bunch of hypocrites and I would imagine the United States is hacking China.
I doubt we're blackmailing them.
And doing ransomware.
I doubt we're doing that. Maybe.
Who knows? But fentanyl, I don't think we're sending them fentanyl.
So we should just say, look, we're closing business with you guys.
Trade with anybody you want, but not us.
Because you've got to stop the fentanyl.
That's the ticket to get into the conversation.
You don't negotiate fentanyl.
That's what Trump did wrong.
Trump negotiated fentanyl.
You don't negotiate with a mass murderer who's literally murdering you, because whatever reason they're doing it, they wanted to keep doing it.
You don't negotiate that.
You just tell them what the penalty is, and then you apply it.
That's it. You don't negotiate fucking fentanyl.
So, yeah, Trump got that completely wrong.
At least he tried. Here's some more semi-fake news.
So I saw an article, and I made the mistake of tweeting it myself, so I added to the fake newsness, which is that there is a Northern California county, I think it might be my county or the one next to me, I'm not sure which one, but that changed the way it counts coronavirus deaths and decreased their number of fatalities by 25%.
What?
They decreased the number of past fatalities by 25%, and here's what they did.
They stopped counting people who died in, for example, car crashes who might have also had COVID. Wait, what?
They were counting people who died in violent car crashes as COVID deaths if they had COVID too.
First question, why do they even test them?
Is it standard now?
If anybody is in the hospital, do they all get tested?
Which would make sense, I suppose.
But... Really?
Now, do you believe this news?
Okay. How many believe the news?
This is reported by a local news entity...
I tweeted it around.
It says, my county has changed their methodology and it increased the deaths by 25%.
Real news or fake news?
Real news or fake news?
The answer is semi-fake.
Because the state...
Didn't count it this way.
So when you were looking at the state's results, they were always accurate.
So the state was not including somebody who died in a car accident who also had COVID. The county was, but when they reported to the state, the state would subtract those out, I guess.
So apparently the state number was not distorted in this way.
But the county was. Does that matter?
Because that means that our overall numbers are still correct.
So I'm going to call this semi-fake news.
But very persuasive.
And here's the persuasion tip.
The thing that made this fake news sell is that the part about the state correcting for this was way toward the end of the article.
And if I've taught you anything, we pay attention to things that happen first.
That's it. That's a really important rule.
Whatever gets our attention first sticks in our minds, and everything after that is lessened.
That's why first impressions are so important.
So if you write an article that says, hey, past deaths are reduced 25% because we changed how we do it in the county, most people, including me the first time I read it quickly, completely miss the fact that the state doesn't make that mistake.
So, there you go.
Semi-fake news.
That is your live stream for today.
Was it one of the best you've ever seen?
Well, I don't know. I don't know.
But it's up there.
And I have a question and a request.
The YouTube traffic for this live stream is down about one-third...
Since I started live streaming on Locals.
Is that because a third of you went to Locals?
Because you preferred something about it?
Maybe there's no commercials, that's why you like it?
But anyway, if you're going to stay on YouTube, could you do me a big favor and hit the subscribe button that is, let's see, to my side, it would be here?
Is it down here or is it down over there?
It's on one of those sides. But anyway, if you subscribe to things anyway, hitting that button will give you a notice that I'm going live.
So do that if you feel inclined.
Otherwise, go to Locals.
It's a subscription service, and you won't get commercials there.
It says, you lied.
Still have ads when subscribed.
No, the subscription is not what...
Let me clarify. That wasn't a lie, but it was a good question.
Somebody's saying that if you subscribe to the YouTube channel, that I said you won't see commercials.
If I said that, then I misspoke.
What I meant was, if you subscribe to YouTube, which is paying a fee, to YouTube in general, then you don't get ads for any content you watch.
So I probably messed up the description of that.
That might be on me. But what I meant to say is the subscription does nothing but give you a notice, I think.
It does nothing but give you a notice that the content is there.
But to not see the commercials, you would have to subscribe not by pushing the button but by paying a fee every month to YouTube.
