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July 24, 2021 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
37:33
Episode 1446 Scott Adams: Persuasion Lessons Using China and Vaccinations as the Topics Plus More Fun
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Hey everybody! Welcome to Coffee with Scott Adams.
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Go! Oh, yeah.
Oh, my goodness.
Well, I hear the Olympics are on.
Is anybody watching that? Probably not.
Seriously, in the comments, are any of you watching the Olympics?
And if you are, why are you doing that?
What would be the point of that?
For entertainment? I just don't know why people watch it.
Let me cough it out today.
Sorry about that. So here's a question for you.
You've been following the big lie, the branded big lie.
Now, that's what the anti-Trump, anti-Republican folks are calling Trump's claim and other people's claim that the 2020 election was rigged.
It's a big lie.
Now, here's the thing that's different about the big lie, persuasion, versus almost anything else we see.
And the difference is that this one looks professional.
I've told you that before, right?
But the big lie doesn't look like something that just grew organically and maybe somebody used it and other people said, oh, that sounds good, I'll use it too.
Maybe. I wouldn't rule it out.
But it's a little too professional.
So it looks to me like some professional persuader who had enough power to make something happen said, just call it the big lie and that will make it go away because anybody who agrees with it will be a Nazi.
Which is beautiful. It's the same strategy as Antifa.
Antifa, when they named themselves...
It was a perfect name because if you say, well, I'm against the people who are against fascists, what does that make you?
A fascist, right?
How about Black Lives Matter?
If you're opposed to Black Lives Matter, well, you're a racist.
It doesn't matter why you're opposed or what you're opposed to.
It could be their funding or whatever.
But the name itself is a trap.
And the same technique is being used with this big lie.
If you brand something the big lie, then anybody who buys into it is a Nazi, because that's where the origin of the big lie comes from.
We've got this big professional thing out there, and I asked the question on Twitter in my highly unscientific poll, which topic best fits the description, the big lie?
I gave three options.
One is Trump's claims of election fraud.
The other is the fine people hoax that Biden pushed to get elected.
And the other is that the January 6th riot was an insurrection.
Which of those is the big lie?
Not so clear, is it?
Think about the damage that the fine people hoax did.
That's really damaging.
Think about the fact that we're currently right in the middle of a hoax in which the entire left of the country believes an insurrection was attempted with no weapons.
I mean, no weapons that would be useful for an insurrection.
And... That is actually happening.
We're being sold this big lie that January 6th was an insurrection.
That is the big lie, right?
To me, this looks like the big lie.
But you can't say that because they already took it.
They already took that big lie thing.
But do you remember what Trump did with the phrase fake news?
He took the gun out of their hand and flipped it around, and he made fake news the brand for the people who were using it against him.
And it worked. Fake news now only means the left.
You don't even think of Fox News when you think of the term, even though it could apply to anything that's fake news.
But Trump just completely turned that brand around.
Could he do it with the big lie?
Well, he can't, because he's shut out of the social media machine.
So he doesn't have the power to do that at the moment.
But I would think that everywhere you saw the January 6th thing being called an insurrection, if you were to start referring to it as hashtag the big lie, then anybody who searched the hashtag would find you calling out the insurrection as bullshit, maybe some reasons that you gave.
So I think the public could change this big lie branding into something else.
And that would be interesting.
Just see if you could do it. But for sure, that's a professional...
I would say there's a really high likelihood, can't say 100%, that this is professional work.
Now, somebody said to me on Twitter that there's no amount of persuasion that could be applied to the vaccination question that would get lots more people to get vaccinated.
And the idea was...
That it's because people have already made up their mind.
What do you think of that?
Do you think it's true that because people have already made up their mind about vaccinations, and that part's probably true, most people have made up their minds, but do you think that therefore it would be immune to, let's say, a massive government brainwashing operation?
Do you think that the people, the individuals, could hold off a full-scale professional persuasion?
I don't think so.
I don't think you know how powerful persuasion could be when applied to its maximum amount.
Because what we're used to is a bad persuader trying to convince one person of something and it doesn't work.
So 99% of everything you see that is somebody trying to persuade somebody doesn't work because they're not good at persuading.
And like I said, people make up their minds and it's hard to change them.
But if a government wanted to change your mind with all the resources of a government, and let's say they got the social media platforms on their side, could they change your mind?
Now, also with a professional, So whoever came up with the big lie, somebody who has that kind of skill, working with all the power of a government and all the power of social media, you don't think that they could make you do any damn thing that they want?
They could. They could make the public do almost anything, right?
They would just have to push hard enough.
So it's really just a question of how hard they wanted to push.
And whether they had a professional helping them and that sort of thing.
But yeah, you could move anybody to do anything if you push hard enough.
Because the social media companies and the news are essentially captured...
So big...
Well, I'm not going to say your name, big, bad word, Floyd.
But he's saying, Scott is a sheep, LOL. You fucking idiot.
First of all, have a little bit of sense about what I'm actually saying so your fucking hallucination doesn't become your opinion.
You don't know what my opinion is, but you've got a pretty strong opinion about my opinion, which isn't even on the right fucking planet.
So let me be really clear.
I don't care if you get a vaccination.
I don't care if you wear a mask.
And the reason is, I don't care if you fucking die.
Seriously. I don't care if you die.
Can I be more clear about that?
I'm not trying to make you wear a mask.
I'm not trying to make you get vaccinated.
Because I don't fucking care about you.
Is that clear? Do you think you can hold that in your brain long enough to form a reasonable opinion?
Come back to me when you're not such a fucking idiot, okay?
And then you can leave another opinion.
All right. Um...
All right, just looking at your comments there.
So I suggested this, and this is a persuasion lesson, but I don't expect this to happen.
But in knowing why it could work, you're going to learn something, okay?
So here's your little lesson on persuasion for today.
If the, let's say the news industry wanted to, and the government, wanted you to get more vaccinated, here's how they can do it.
They could just report the death rate from COVID by political party.
Do you see it without me explaining why that would work?
Because the first thing you might say to yourself, that's not going to make any difference.
The Republicans know that they're less vaccinated.
And they know that if they're less vaccinated and more of them die, well, that was just the choice they made.
Right? So why would that change anybody's mind just to know the death rate Of the Democrats versus the Republicans.
Why would that be persuasive?
Well, let me tell you why.
Here's a little trick of persuasion that really comes from the field of management.
Whatever you track is what you manage to.
Whatever you can track is what you will manage to.
This is just one of the reasons why following the money is such a good way to predict the future, or even predict the past, in a sense, to find out what happened.
People will bias their decisions toward things which can be measured.
If something can be measured, they will pay more attention to it.
They'll work toward making that number better in whatever way.
But if something is not measurable...
Or even not measured.
It doesn't even have to be accurately measured.
If nobody's measuring it, nobody cares.
Nobody does anything about it.
But the moment you measure it, people start acting differently.
It's a basic management concept.
Now, given the tribalism in politics in the United States, if you said, here's how many Democrats died as a percentage of Democrats, here's how many Republicans died this week from COVID as a percentage of Republicans, you wouldn't have to say another thing about the vaccinations.
You wouldn't. Now, if it turns out, let's say three possibilities.
One is that Republicans are dying at a much higher rate because they're less vaccinated.
What would that cause other Republicans to do?
Well, you might not care about the vaccination, but you're sure as shit not wanting your team to lose.
And not wanting your team to lose, meaning not have more Republicans dying from preventable illnesses, you're going to change your behavior.
So you would actually do things to win an argument that you wouldn't do to protect your own life.
Let me say that again.
People will do things to win an argument to be right, to be on the side that got the good result.
More importantly, then they will save their own life.
Because we do reckless stuff all the time.
Like, every day, people do reckless stuff.
So that's just normal.
But winning an argument?
People don't walk away from an argument if they think they can win.
Well, maybe if I did get vaccinated, my team would have a little better chance.
So, and then also there's an interesting element to this, which is if we found out that one political side had a higher death rate, it would almost immediately turn into a voter suppression question.
Let me ask you this.
Is Biden involved in voter suppression by recommending that everybody get a vaccination?
Think about it.
Biden recommends that everybody gets a vaccination is that voter suppression.
It is. Because when a Democrat says get vaccinated, it makes Republicans say, well, maybe not.
Am I right? The people just have a natural aversion to what the other team wants them to do.
So... In all likelihood, Biden encouraging Republicans to get vaccinated might cause fewer of them to get vaccinated because it sounds like a Democrat idea, which would cause more Republicans to die, which would be voter suppression.
Now, I'm not saying that would be big enough to make a difference, but you could imagine the argument.
All right. Here's a factoid.
Here's another... Persuasion and psychology kind of a topic.
So Max Abrams reports on Twitter that I guess there's a study that says the rate of suicide attempts appears to have been inversely related to school closures.
Now what's the... Wouldn't you just imagine...
That the school closures would cause more suicides because the kids would be depressed, they wouldn't be with their friends, couldn't do what they want to do, don't have a social life.
You'd expect more suicides, right?
But it turns out it's the other way around, according to one study, that the people who went to school were committing more suicides than the people who were remote learning.
Does that make sense to you?
I saw Claire Lehman refer to it as non-intuitive.
I'm not so sure. I'm not so sure you shouldn't have expected that result.
Here's why. The kids who are doing remote learning got closer to their families.
Wouldn't you say? I mean, maybe not every family.
But if you stay home all day, and you don't have the option of playing with your friends, you end up getting a little closer to your family, I would think.
So, I would think that would reduce suicides.
You're... More supervised, closer to your family.
But also, I don't think people quite realize the toxic lethality of bullying.
The bullying happens when you go to school, doesn't it?
There's bullying online, but I have to think that the in-person stuff is the bad stuff.
And it's the bullying that causes people to kill people, kill each other.
If you take a loner...
And you say, hey, you loner, how do you feel?
They might say, everybody else is happy, but I'm a loner, so I need to end things.
But what if the loner knows that everybody's a loner?
Suddenly everybody's a loner.
You're on the same boat. All those popular people, all the popular people, they're loners during the pandemic.
So I would think that that would also make you feel more like everybody else.
Same boat. So I can think of a number of mechanisms that would work on this to make the remote learning safer, at least in terms of taking your own life.
Not surprised at all.
All right, here's another surprise.
So Biden's got this proposed $3.5 trillion infrastructure package.
What do you think the economists say about that?
Pretty easy question, right?
Okay. We've already got some...
Not some.
We've got a lot of debt pressure.
We've got inflation pressure from all the money that flowed in for the pandemic stuff.
So don't you think that economists could at least get this question right?
Does the $3.5 trillion infrastructure package increase inflation or decrease it?
Very basic. You know, if you went to school for years to become an economist, I don't think there could be a more basic question than this.
And, of course, economists disagree.
What? Here's everything that you need to know about economists.
The simplest fucking question in the world they're disagreeing on.
Do you know what is the simplest question in the world?
Will adding $3.5 trillion to the economy in spending increase inflation?
Now, when I say it's the simplest question, I don't mean that I know the answer.
I've got a degree in economics.
I've got an MBA from a top school.
I don't know the answer.
That's everything you need to know about economics.
It's the simplest question...
And nobody knows the answer.
I mean, a lot of people think they know the answer.
But here's some of the argument.
Now, the argument that it would increase inflation is obvious, because you add a bunch of money into the economy, and there's more money chasing the same amount of goods and services, so those people just increase their prices because they can get it.
There's all this money here.
Hey, I'll raise my prices.
Somebody will pay it. So there's an obvious reason why the inflation might go up, but what is the argument that it might not be?
How in the world can you make an argument that it won't inflate?
Well, it turns out there is an argument.
And one part of the argument is there are tons of people who are unemployed.
So they can just go back to work so the employees will not necessarily put pressure on employers to raise their prices.
To raise their pay. Because if you have plenty of employees who could just go back to work any time they made themselves available, then in the long run it should not put pressure on wages and that should keep inflation under control.
Does that make sense? And another part of the reason, and this part is just bullshit politics reasons, but I'll put it out there anyway, part of what Biden's package wants to do is to create low-cost housing that doesn't exist.
And so part of the argument is, hey, all these people who would have been paying for more expensive housing will now have low-cost housing, but there's no way that that's going to happen fast, and there's no way that that's going to be enough of a difference to be seen in the economy as a whole.
So I would say that's a bullshit reason.
It's true. I mean, building low-cost housing means your housing costs less, I guess, right?
All other things being equal.
But I don't think that's big enough to make a difference.
So, what do you do when your experts disagree and the facts are not in dispute?
Because this is one of those rare questions where you have all the facts.
The only thing you don't have is what happens in the future.
You know how much money you'd put in.
You know how much is there. You know what the inflation is.
You know what the GDP is.
You know what the employment rate is.
You know all the facts. So it's experts looking at the same damn facts and coming up with opposite conclusions.
How good are your experts?
No good at all, apparently.
And my...
My well-trained instinct is that it has to increase inflation.
But at the same time, if you know anything about economics, you know that your common sense about what's going to happen next doesn't mean much.
So, you know, my common sense says, yeah, of course there has to be inflation.
How could there not be? But I could be wrong very easily.
Very easily could be wrong.
All right, here's one of these stories that...
It's just sort of a mind-blowing reminder about how the world works.
And I don't know if this is mind-blowing just because the story involves me.
So maybe you can judge whether it looks mind-blowing from the outside.
But you heard the story about the so-called Pegasus software...
That some intelligence agencies in a lot of different countries, actually, are using to penetrate people's phones and spy on their phones.
And one of the people on the list was ex-president of Mexico, Felipe Calderon.
And by coincidence, Felipe Calderon follows me on Twitter.
So I followed him on Twitter when I noticed it some time ago.
And so I thought to myself...
I wonder if this individual who was named in this story...
I wonder if it's true.
Because sometimes, you know, it could be fake news.
So I thought, well, I'll just send a DM, a direct message, to the ex-president of Mexico, and I'll just ask him myself, did you have this spyware on your phone?
Now, just think about this.
I'm just sitting here in my little office in California...
And I see this major international story with the ex-president of Mexico in it, and I think to myself, huh, I think I'll ask him.
Boop, boop, boop, boop. So I sent him a message.
I said, do you think the Pegasus software got on your phone?
I just saw the Washington Post report saying you were on the list after leaving office.
And a few days later, I get a private message back from the ex-president of Mexico.
Who confirms that, yes, he said, yes, I do, it happened.
Now, how mind-blowing is it that there are, you know, seven plus whatever billion people in the world, and I'm just sitting here in California, and I see a world headline, and I can just pick up this device in my hand, and I can type a few things, and I'm talking to the one person out of seven billion people To ask the exact question that I wanted to ask.
And he answers. And he was the president of Mexico.
Am I right? This is mind-blowing.
Now, I can't tell you how many times something like this has happened.
You know, I'll do a topic on here and I'll check my DMs and somebody who would be quite famous is weighing in on something.
But... I tell you, it just makes me feel like the world is just not whatever it is that it looks like.
Because you know that experiment in physics in which you, I don't know, you separate a particle and you change the spin wherever you are and the other half changes at the same time?
Or some version of that?
It feels like that. It feels like I'm connected to every story in the world.
And that I can touch it if I want.
I can't tell you how weird that is.
Yeah, and there are two other themes that are haunting me right now because there are a couple of things happening in my personal life.
And so there's one company that just keeps coming up everywhere and there's one car model that I always keep parking next to.
It's just the weirdest thing because both of them have some relevance in my life right now.
So it feels like I'm moving the simulation myself.
All right. The biggest fake news story in the country is about critical race theory.
And the fake news part is that the people on the political right say, hey, stop that critical race theory teaching because it's racist itself.
And then the people on the left, what do they say?
Do they say, oh, we'll stop that right now?
They just act like it isn't happening.
They act like critical race theory is the same as teaching history.
It's not. No, it's not an escalade, but that was a good guess.
And... Every time I see this story, and I think it was AOC was doing this trick where somebody says, should we teach critical race theory?
And then they say, well, of course you have to teach the real history of the United States to the children.
Who exactly was fighting against that?
So the response to the claims just have nothing to do with the claims.
They just answer a whole different question.
And somehow they get away with that.
The news allows them to do that.
Because the news does not publish useful facts.
It seems like there's a space available in the news galaxy.
Don't you think there needs to be at least one news entity that just gives you context so that every time you wade into a story and you say to yourself, hey, these people are saying critical race theory is being taught...
These other people are saying it's not.
That's usually how the news teaches it.
And then you don't know. Well, I just see two competing claims.
But where's the news site that just gives you whatever statistics there are?
It says, yeah, it's being taught here or it's not.
Nobody would watch.
Nobody would watch if it were a news channel.
That's right, Adam. But if it were a written website with resources, then everybody who argued on social media would have to link to it.
So it would be basically a link farm.
Basically, actually, maybe you can call it that.
Call it a link farm, where you take the best arguments for every side and you just organize them.
Here are the best arguments for why masks work.
Here are the best arguments for why they don't.
I see somebody saying Tim Kast.
Does he have that there? I've not heard of anybody doing that.
But I think in order to do it, you would have to show the best links on both sides.
If you only showed the links that you think are the answer to the question, then you just become a partisan.
You have to show the best from both sides, I think.
Otherwise, it's a waste. LAUGHTER In the comments on YouTube, somebody said, dealing with people like that is why Prussian bayonets were invented.
Okay. I would like to now give you some television viewing recommendations.
If you're like me, you've noticed that television is terrible.
And I don't know if it got worse or if it's just the pandemic or my attention span or what, but I'm going to give you the only things that are worth watching on television as far as I can tell.
Number one, Rick and Morty.
You've got to try several episodes before you can get in the feel, but the fourth season is just beyond brilliant.
I watched a few of the early ones, and I have to admit...
One of the characters was sort of gross, like I found it hard to watch.
But once you see the whole arc of where they've taken this thing, by the fourth year, it's extraordinary.
It's visually better than anything I've ever seen from an animated show.
And it's smarter than anything I've seen in an animated show by far.
So I believe it's on...
Hulu has it at the moment.
I don't know what other platforms it's on.
Now, on the Disney streaming network, here's another recommendation.
And I was totally surprised that this was good.
Loki, L-O-K-I. So Loki, the god of mischief from the Marvel Universe, he has now his own spin-off, and it's a series.
Now, I kind of like the Loki character in Marvel.
But I didn't really think he could hold his own show.
Because I thought, well, I just don't know there's enough to this particular character to make a show.
But here's what I didn't count on.
The actor who plays that part is really good.
He's like a way better actor than I think comes out in the other Marvel movies.
So when they focus on him and he gets to hold the scene and really be a complete character...
Oh my God, he's so good!
So it's worth watching.
Yeah, and Owen Wilson plays sort of the bad guy in that.
And watching Owen Wilson play the bad guy is really, really good.
It's really good.
So the writing is spectacular.
And the dialogue and stuff.
I don't really like watching the superhero films for the action because the action is just a blur of boring stuff you've seen before.
But the dialogue is always funny.
And Loki is very dialogue heavy in a very good way.
Yeah, I think there are only six episodes, but they're terrific.
Now here's an anti-recommendation.
Scarlett Johansson's film, The Black Widow, is out.
I tried to watch that.
Oh, my God.
It's terrible.
And I tried to watch Black Mirror the other day, and oh, my God, it's terrible.
It's terrible.
And what I mean by that is it's slow, because our attention spans have all changed, and it's just way too slow to watch like a movie.
But... Both the Black Widow and then the Black...
It's weird. They're both Black something.
But Black Mirror, they both started out by trying to make the viewer feel terrible.
Now, I guess that the point of it was if they could make the viewer feel terrible, then maybe they could make you feel good at the end and you'll feel the difference and maybe that'll make you happy or something.
But... I'm not down for any TV show or movie that makes me feel terrible in the first part of the movie so that I'll have a better feeling later.
If you think that's a good idea, I'd like to talk you out of it.
Now, here's why I love Star Trek and Star Wars and those kinds of films, because they don't do that.
Those films will have a problem that happens in the beginning of the movie because all movies need a problem to solve.
But you don't really feel it in your bones.
You know you're watching a movie.
It's like, oh yeah, some bad things happened to people in the movie.
It didn't affect me. But anyway, Star Trek just feels good from beginning to end.
Even when the characters are in trouble, they're cracking jokes and it doesn't seem that bad.
So please give me more entertainment that does not require me to feel bad.
All right. That is your recommendation for today.
I see people saying that The Last Kingdom is good.
That's about the Vikings. I tried that, but I don't know.
I felt I couldn't get through it.
I hear on the comments here that the sci-fi show called The Expanse is even better than Star Trek.
I would say they're both great.
The Expanse is great.
The thing I like about the sci-fi stuff is that they bring you into a world so you feel yourself brought in.
I'm seeing a recommendation for Ted Lasso, which won a bunch of awards, I understand.
And I'm definitely going to try that, but I have not tried it yet.
So I'll let you know. Yeah, and watching Norm Macdonald clips on YouTube is better than all of that.
I mean, I never get bored of that.
I can't tell you how many Norm Macdonald clips I've watched on YouTube.
You just set them up and it'll recommend new ones.
I could watch that all day.
All right. That's all I got for now.
It's kind of a slow news day.
And I'm going to do a, separately, I'm going to do a video a little bit later that will be available for everybody.
And the topic is, is China safe for business?
Is China safe for business?
And let me tell you what I'm going to do, persuasion-wise, just so you can follow along.
In my unique role as the Dilbert guy, I have a weird credibility with business people.
So if I tell business people there's a business process that is bullshit...
People find that credible because for 30 years I've been accurately calling out business bullshit.
And so if I say it, people say, okay, that's probably you're calling out some bullshit.
And one of the things that I can do because of that weird role is I can talk to people about the risk of doing business in China until it's unsafe to make a decision to do business in China.
And so my credibility can be part of that messaging in a way that the random person could not do as effectively.
So I'm going to give you a little whiteboard talk on why it's unsafe to do business in China, and we'll see if we can move the needle on that.
And let's see if I'm still alive in a week.
I should probably say this out loud.
I'm not planning to kill myself.
Okay? Did you all hear that?
There may be some bad things happening in my life from time to time, as comes in any life, but nothing like that.
So if China tries to knock me off, please complete the work for me, but I'll get it going.
And... You know, the funny thing about having somebody kill your stepson, which is what China did by sending fentanyl to Mexico, which I believe got into my stepson, and killed him.
The thing about that experience is, if China killed me over this, you know, if somehow they found a way to get to me and just took me out, totally worth it.
Like, I wouldn't even care about that.
Because that alone would be a story.
So it's me against them, and you don't want to get in a battle with somebody who doesn't mind dying.
That's what China has right now.
They've got a battle with me, and they're in a battle of self-preservation, and I'm not.
I'm in a battle to take them down.
That's all I care about.
And if I go at the same time, that's the way it goes.
So, I would hate to be them right now.
They don't know what's coming for them.
But you'll find out later when I give you my whiteboard talk.
I hope you join me.
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