Episode 1464 Scott Adams: Get Ready For the Funniest Coffee With Scott Adams of All Time
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Mao's corpse fan
Hunter Biden artwork ethics
Pediatric units "filling up"?
Hunting MAGA influencers
Wokeness destroys advertising
Larry Elder, in it to win it persuasion
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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.
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Today? Well, today is going to be one of the best coffees with Scott Adams of all time.
Really. Now, I don't want to oversell it, but I really don't think I could.
I mean, it's going to be that good.
A lot of you have been saying to me, Scott, you seem angry lately.
You seem to be sort of a bummer.
Not anymore. Not anymore.
This is all going to be fun today.
And how do you make it even better?
Oh, wow! The simultaneous sip.
That's right. That's right.
Right? And all you need is a cup or a mug, a glass of tank or chalice, a stein, a canteen, a jug of glass, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. 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 watch it boost your immune response to the COVID. Yeah, it's true.
Go. I feel invulnerable.
In a way. Well, you know, sometimes the news is uninteresting.
But sometimes, sometimes it's not.
Today is one of those days when the news is serving up, oh, a bountiful harvest.
I would like to begin with a story that I don't know if it's true, but can we all just act like it is?
Just for our entertainment purposes.
Might not be a true story, but act like it's true now, okay?
Okay. So Twitter user Christopher Hill alerted me to this headline.
China, man faces execution after rubbing his penis on Mao Zedong's corpse.
And Christopher said, it is no to me.
I felt like I needed to make sure you know of this legendary hero.
Well, here's my take on him.
Number one, let's not judge him.
Let's not judge him. We should be a little bit open-minded about people's sexual preferences.
Here's a man. He's not part of a large, organized group.
And so, you know, there are people who have sexual preferences, and if there are enough of them, they can organize to, you know, get respect in society.
But if you're born with a sexual preference for rubbing your penis on...
The face of a deceased dictator.
You don't have enough people in your cohort to, you know, organize properly.
And I don't think that's fair.
And I don't think we should judge him.
But I do have questions. I have questions.
Number one, there's no word on whether he was interrupted before he finished.
I'm assuming that he was hoping for some kind of a conclusion, if you know what I mean.
You know what I mean? And we don't know if the guards let him finish because that would probably go to how much they liked Mao themselves.
But I can imagine if I were a guard, I'd be like, hey, hey, get off that...
All right, I'll give you a couple more minutes.
But 15 minutes from now, you have to get off of that thing.
That's how I would have handled it, because, you know, not a fan of Mao.
Other questions we have about this story.
The mugshot is a little suspicious.
If you've ever seen mugshots, unless somebody's drunk, they usually look unhappy to be arrested.
But this gentleman had a, let's say, a satisfied look on his face.
A satisfied look.
And I can't quite describe the look.
You almost have to follow the path to it.
And I'll try to describe it this way.
The look in his mugshot, after rubbing his penis on Chairman Mao's dead face, was sort of satisfied.
And it was very similar to what I imagine my face looks like when my wife, Christina, says, well, I don't have time to make love, but I might have time to satisfy you.
And when she says the first part, you know, I probably don't have time to make love, my face first goes, oh, sort of like that.
It droops like, oh. But then when she does the second part, but I might have time to do you, I go, oh.
And somewhere in between the, oh, and the, oh, you get this weird thing that this Chinese guy had after he had been arrested for rubbing his penis on Chairman Mao's dead face.
And I don't know. I don't know if it's exactly the same, because I've never looked at myself in the mirror in this situation, but I feel like it's the same.
It feels like it's very similar.
Another question I have is, did he climb on top of the casket and straddle the leader's face, or did he stand sort of on the side on his tiptoes and sort of lean over?
I don't know how you get there exactly.
There must have been some kind of a You imagine there's some kind of a rope.
I also wonder there's no report on whether he was turgid or just really trying to teabag the leader's face.
I think we need to know that.
And if there's one thing that I can tell you about the deceased, what do they complain about the most?
Dead people? Yeah, dead people are always complaining about not enough foreplay.
Not enough foreplay. But in this one case, I guess he got enough.
And then the funniest part about this, apparently this guy has been executed or is going to be executed, but one imagines that prior to the execution he was probably in jail and probably had a cellmate.
If you were this gentleman's cellmate, wouldn't you sleep with a bucket over your head?
I mean, I would. I'd just request a bucket, and whenever I want to sleep, I'd just be like, put the bucket over my head!
Just to be extra careful.
All right, well, that's not the only good story today.
There's a survey, and I think Rasmussen can learn something from this.
So this is not a Rasmussen poll.
But Dr. Anarchy on Twitter sent this to me.
There's a poll that said Americans are more confident than Britons that they could beat any animal in a fight.
Now, there was a list of the animals that people were asked about individually.
They were asked, you know, do you think you could beat a...
And this is barehanded, not with weapons.
Do you think you could beat a bear, a wolf, a kangaroo, a crocodile, and...
Large dog. Those were some of the choices.
And Americans were largely more confident that they could take on a bear, wolf, kangaroo, crocodile, or large dog.
Now, I can relate to this.
I can relate to this.
Because I imagine myself against any one of these.
Let's take the kangaroo because they're funnier.
Me versus a kangaroo.
Versus a British guy and that same kangaroo.
I don't know. I like my odds.
I feel like I could take the kangaroo.
I know they've got a lot of leaping and leg action.
They're pretty good at the MMA stuff.
But at the top, they don't have much reach.
Little arms. Now, my arms aren't that long, but better than a kangaroo.
And part of my kangaroo fighting strategy would involve misdirection.
I'd say, hey, there's something in your pocket.
And the kangaroo would look down, bam.
And then I would punch it.
But I don't think the British, they don't know how to fight dirty.
Not like Americans.
I mean, you put me in a fight with a kangaroo, am I going to follow all the rules?
No. I'm going to kick the kangaroo in his kangaroo balls.
I'm not going to fight fair. But, you know, I think the British are like, all right, all right.
You know, let's do this the proper way.
And then the kangaroo kicks their ass.
So I can understand the survey.
But here's the funniest part about the survey.
It wasn't all about big animals.
Some of the animals that people were asked if they thought they could beat it in a fair fight included a medium-sized dog, a goose, a house cat, and a rat.
And surprisingly, as Dr.
Anderke points out, 25% of people in America don't think they can beat up a rat.
Now, as somebody pointed out, this might have more to do with how seriously people took the poll.
I think 25% of the people would be jokesters and say to themselves, I think it'd be funny if I answered this poll saying I can't beat up a rat.
But I could also imagine 25% of the country saying I'm not going to get near a rat.
How many women would fight a rat hand-to-hand?
I don't even know one.
In fact, I don't even know any men who would fight a rat.
So maybe this answer is pretty smart because if I saw a rat...
Imagine you go into your basement and there's a rat there.
But unlike a regular rat, this is a fighting rat.
And you see the rat get up on its back legs and gets into a fighting stance like this.
What do you do? Do you say to yourself, I'm an American, damn it.
You're not fighting any British guy now.
And I would just probably go in and fight that rat.
And probably, I don't know, two to one chance I'd win.
But I can imagine a lot of people would go into that basement, they'd see the rat up on its back legs with its little front paws up in fighting position, and they'd say to themselves...
I'm out of here. That rat looks crazy.
They just run away. So I think maybe this is an accurate survey.
I'd also like to think that I could be a medium-sized dog in a fair fight.
But, you know, Americans.
Americans, we think we can do everything.
Well, Hunter Biden's artwork, as you know, is going to go out for sale pretty soon, and there are questions about the ethics of it.
One of the people...
Asking questions about the ethics is Walter Schaub, who headed the Office of Government Ethics under Obama and shortly under Trump.
He lasted a little while.
And he says, shame on POTUS, meaning Biden, if he doesn't ask Hunter to stop.
If that fails, he should ask that the names of buyers be released and pledged to notify us if any buyer ever meets with admin officials.
To me, this seems like a quite reasonable ethical stand.
But what it really tells me is that Don Jr.
needs to get into the art business.
May I make some...
just a brief pause to give some advice, some financial advice, to Don Jr.
Don, if you're watching this, I know you get a lot of advice from a lot of people, but this is some solid economic advice mixed with art.
If I were you, I would get busy making some art, and I would do stick figures, and I would have those stick figures...
Acting out Hunter Biden snorting coke off a stripper.
That's right. I would do a stick figure drawing of Hunter Biden snorting coke off a stripper, and then I would put it up for sale for $1 million.
Signed, Don Jr.
Now... Somebody might buy that thing.
If there were only one, and if you knew that Don Jr.
actually painted it, and it was literally his stick figures, and you could tell that his own hand had painted it and he signed it, somebody might pay a million dollars for it.
But I think it would be funny just to do it.
So if nobody pays anything for it, it's still funny.
Now if, let's say Don Jr.
made this painting and then turned it into digital art and sold it as an NFT. Now if you don't follow the crypto world, that doesn't mean anything to you.
But you can sell a digital version of something that's sort of certified by the blockchain to be the original.
You could probably get a million dollars for it.
And that's real.
You could probably actually legitimately get a million dollars for the NFT. Now, it could also sell for $5,000.
It would be embarrassing, so I'm not sure you'd do it.
All right. Here's some more reports from Fake News!
So the first report of fake news is the Florida Sun Sentinel reported that Florida, I guess this was yesterday, they said the state hit yet another record number of new daily cases on Sunday.
But is that real?
Did they really hit a record number of daily cases in Florida, which would make Governor DeSantis look like a bad governor?
Well... No, it's fake news.
Apparently the CDC released, they combined multiple days into one so that that one day inadvertently looked like a record.
So that's fake news.
Now that's not to say that the COVID situation in Florida is good.
Because it doesn't look that great anywhere at the moment.
It looks like everybody's having some Delta variant problems.
But at least that news was fake.
Here's another one. This is implied fake news.
So I couldn't really call this fake news, but it's sort of implied fake news, which I call implied fake news.
I don't really call it that, but...
Let's call it that. So in a CNN opinion piece, so this is not the news, this is an opinion piece, Stephen Collinson, you might know him as a Trump attack dog, but he writes about other stuff too.
And he says, he just puts this in a story about...
He says, this at a moment when pediatric units in his state are filling with young COVID patients.
I think he's talking about Florida.
So do you think this is true?
It's in an opinion piece.
But it says pediatric units in his state are filling with young COVID patients.
What's that mean? What's it mean to be filling?
Question number one.
How much capacity...
Do pediatric units have in the first place?
Because kids don't die that often, right?
Wouldn't you imagine that a pediatric unit would be small by its nature?
So that's the first thing. Are we filling up something that was small by its nature, like a phone booth, which would be no big deal?
At least in terms of numbers, it wouldn't be a big deal.
It would be a big deal to anybody who lost a kid, obviously.
But you kind of need that, right?
Don't you kind of need that?
Secondly, what does it mean to be filling up?
Define filling up.
If you had a pediatric unit, don't you think that you would operate it at 60 to 80% capacity every day anyway?
So don't these things run at 60 to 80% capacity?
So what does it mean to fill it up?
Because he didn't say it's filled up.
He said filling up.
Right. So I think 60 to 80% is normal.
Right. Suppose they went from 60% to 80%.
It's a human tragedy for anybody involved in the actual illness.
But would it be fair to say that the units are filling up?
Well, sort of technically, they would be in the direction of filling.
But are they in trouble?
Are they going to overflow?
Are there any that are beyond capacity?
And if they're beyond capacity...
Can you use other facilities easily?
In other words, is there anything special about a pediatric unit that you couldn't just use general hospital facilities if you needed to overflow?
So this is the sort of statement that is probably technically accurate, that the pediatric units are getting more patients than normal, i.e.
filling up. But will they fill up?
And will it become a problem?
I don't think we know that.
So that's sort of an indication of fake news.
Remember, I told you, was it last year, I told you that Republicans will be hunted if Biden is elected.
And people laughed.
They laughed. Ha, ha, ha, ha.
They laughed.
And then, of course, we see what's happening with the January 6th people.
Many of them are bad actors and need to be dealt with with the justice system.
Nobody's doubting that. But there does seem to be an interest in hunting down people who might have just been there.
And that doesn't look cool.
And now we're seeing another example.
I'm not going to give you the name of it, but I just saw news.
There's a new documentary...
On what happened to the MAGA supporting personalities.
So they're basically bayonetting the remaining...
Anybody who was associated with Trump during the presidency and before, they're trying to put them on a list in this documentary, whose name I won't give you, to destroy whatever's left of their reputations.
Now, I happen to be on the list.
So apparently I'm in this documentary as one of the Trump supporters who is...
I guess the context is we're all grifters.
So they have targeted me as one of the people for destruction.
In this case, reputation and economic destruction.
Tim Pool is in it.
Now, interestingly, at the time that I first said that MAGA supporters would be hunted down, Tim Pool was one of the people who publicly said that that was, you know, crazy.
That that was going way too far.
And now Tim Pool is in a documentary in which basically he and I and other people associated with supporting Trump are being rounded up for destruction.
Now, the way we're being hunted is not using, you know, the typical weapons, but is using the weapons of 2021.
A weapon of 2021 is a documentary.
That's a weapon. You can destroy somebody's life.
Social media would be a weapon.
So here is Tim Pool, who, by the way, revised his opinion as other events unfold.
So he and I were on the same opinion of this.
But here he is. He's being targeted specifically because he had said good things about Trump in the context of being an independent journalist.
And me too.
Now, I don't know if I'll ever watch the documentary.
Like, I literally didn't even take note of the name of it because it looks pretty weak and biased.
But there it is.
I know. I feel like I can conclude that my prediction was correct if you allow that a documentary is a weapon.
If you allow me that flexibility, then I would say that this is further proof.
All right, here's good news for you.
Economists finally have a purpose.
You probably didn't see that coming.
You know, when I got my degree in economics many years ago, it was a little bit like learning math.
As somebody once joked, the only reason to learn higher-level math, you know, the kind you never use in daily life, the only reason to learn it is that you'll become a math teacher someday, to teach more people something they don't need unless they're going to become math teachers.
Now, of course, that's an exaggeration, because we need our scientists and our engineers and our insurance people and everybody else who deals with real higher-level math to But I always wondered about the real value of economists, even as I became one.
Because when economists are talking about the economy, they're all over the board and they don't agree, as Andres Beckhaus, an economist himself, said today on Twitter that if you ask a bunch of economists to tell you about the national debt, they're just going to be all over the board.
So economists not only do seem like Often not very applied, meaning not useful in the real world.
It especially seemed not useful in their own domain, economics.
But something's changed.
One of the things that economists are really good at It's figuring out how to analyze things to know if cause and effect has been properly teased out of the data, to know if the data is accurate, to know if you've even compared the right things.
So the study of economics is about economics, But in order to study economics, you learn a set of tools that just make you more rational about understanding long-term versus short-term, friction, sunk costs, and a whole bunch of things that are useful for just analyzing any situation.
And so, I noted today, because I saw another example of it, whenever an economist, somebody actually has an economist in their profile, whenever an economist enters a conversation...
I'm seeing a funny drawing on the locals' channel of a stick figure snorting blow off a stripper.
I guess that's Hunter Biden.
So my point was that when you take the skill set of an economist, but you take it out of the realm of economics and you apply it to Twitter, where people are trying to figure out what are my odds of dying from a vaccination versus not getting a vaccination, economists...
Just end conversations on Twitter.
I don't know if you've watched it, but I've seen...
I can't tell you how many times I've watched it.
There'll be this raging conversation, and then one economist will come in, make one comment, and just shuts down the whole thing because they actually know how to look at the data, and they tell you how to look at it correctly.
And the first time you hear how to do something correctly, even if you were not an expert, you say to yourself, oh, crap, that's right.
But you have to hear it, usually.
It's the economist who says, remember, this is a sunk cost.
You shouldn't count that, or whatever the topic is.
As soon as you hear it, you say, oh, yeah, that is a sunk cost.
It doesn't matter because it's already spent.
But lots of the economic stuff, you need to hear it before it sinks in that it matters to your current topic.
So I would say that here's my idea.
My idea is that we should look to economists to help us on the logic.
Because economists have a weird combination of math and statistical and psychological skills.
Because economics is partly the math and partly what humans do.
How do humans behave?
What is their psychology? So if you take those two things, understanding how math and logic and comparing things work, and you bash it against the psychology of how a human behaves...
You're in really good shape for figuring out how to analyze anything in politics.
So I would say we should look to our economists as our argument clarifiers.
You don't have to agree with them. You could get a different conclusion than they get, but let them clarify how to look at it.
Just, you know, how to tease it out.
So this is my insight for today.
Economists, as a class, went from largely useless, you know, not completely useless, right?
The ones working in important fields, doing important things.
Yeah, they're useful.
Yeah. But 95% of people with an economics degree are not going to do any economics.
You know, they're going to do some other related thing.
But now they might be the biggest asset we have in the world because economists are uniquely suited for fixing arguments.
All right, here's an update on the election.
Big lie! The big lie!
I use the big lie to refer to the idea that we know for sure that the election was either fair or unfair.
We don't know for sure.
We don't have any evidence that there was widespread fraud.
Well, let me say, we don't have court-validated proof of any fraud.
So it would be a lie to say it didn't happen because we don't know.
Nobody could audit it at the level that would give you certainty.
But the new news is that Dominion Voting Systems is suing Newsmax and OAN, One American News Network, and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne for defamation.
Apparently all of those entities...
And Patrick Byrne have said things that now Dominion probably feels that their business has been so damaged that they need $1.6 billion in compensation.
Now, here's my question, and can somebody who knows something about the law sort it out for me?
And the question is this.
Does this open Dominion to discovery?
Excuse me. Got to reboot the locals platform.
It's got a 28-minute timer because it's in beta.
So, for some reason, every 28 minutes it times out.
We'll get that fixed.
All right. Where are we?
One moment, please.
Bear with me. We'll be right back on this.
All right. We're good to go, I think, in a moment.
Allow my camera. Boom!
Here we are. Sorry about that.
That was a 28-minute problem.
All right. So that's the question.
If anybody's a lawyer, can you tell me if Dominion gets into a lawsuit with Trick Burn and OAN and Newsmax, can those entities make them prove that they're wrong?
And does that give them access to their software?
Hmm. Because this is an interesting thing, because I feel as if this was always the play, wasn't it?
Did Dominion walk into a trap?
Because it feels like the trap was to get them to sue.
Yeah, let's see what Viva and Barnes say about this on their live stream.
They'll probably talk about this.
I'm guessing this will be on the topics.
So that would be the best source I would go to to get an opinion on that.
But this is going to be a big deal.
If it's true that this gives the skeptics some discovery and some access to the code and access to the servers, or if it just proves that you don't have access, suppose the only takeaway is that there's no way to audit the system.
That's kind of a big takeaway, too.
All right, how many of you saw the viral video of a doctor whose name I didn't get talking to some group And he seemed to be some kind of expert on infectious diseases.
And he was talking about all the problems with the vaccine and that the vaccine basically makes things worse.
How many of you saw that?
It's going all over the place.
All right. I was going to play it and then see if we could pull it apart.
But I'm just going to give you a couple of things to look at.
Maybe give you a different way to look at it.
Remember I told you there was a CIA expert who had a list of things to look for to detect lies.
Now, I didn't see anything in what this gentleman did that I would call a lie, per se.
But I did see a few things that make me think...
You shouldn't treat him as credible.
Now, I think he said a few things that are true.
One of them is that animals could be a reservoir for the coronavirus, and therefore, no matter what you do to humans, since the vaccines don't kill it, it just helps your symptoms.
So his thought is that as long as animals can get it, animals can give it back.
It'll always have a place to hide.
There's no way to eradicate it.
You could eradicate something like smallpox because smallpox won't hide in animals.
So if you get all the humans vaccinated, well, you're done.
But you could get every human vaccinated for coronavirus, and if a frickin' squirrel gives it to another human someday, it's back!
So I thought that point probably makes sense.
I'm no expert, so don't take my word for it.
Anyway, he had a number of other complaints, but here's where his credibility fell apart.
He talked about he's had 15 patients he's treated for COVID, and he gave them...
Zinc, vitamin D, and hydroxychloroquine, and all 15 of them avoided hospitalization.
And therefore, he says, you've got these treatments that are great, and they're an alternative to vaccinations, and he treated 15 patients, so he's confident that it worked.
What do you think of that?
Well, in my opinion, that eliminates his credibility.
Because if he'd said, look at these studies, I would have said, oh, he's got data, he's got studies, we can look at them, they're either right or wrong, but at least it's scientific.
He's telling us to look at studies.
But he's telling us to look at his 15-patient anecdotal experience.
If anybody who is a person of science stands in front of you and tries to tell you that they have the scientific thinking and everybody else is a jerk...
Which is sort of what this guy is saying.
He's like, everybody else is dumb, and I'm a genius, and let me tell you why I got everything right and the whole scientific world is wrong.
And then he tells us that we should draw some conclusion from his experience with 15 patients.
That sounds like somebody who doesn't know the first thing about science.
It's way too small a group.
He didn't have any control.
I mean, just everything is wrong with that, right?
It's purely observational.
It has no value at all.
And what are the odds all 50 of them would have avoided the hospital anyway?
Really high. Pick 15 people with COVID. Any 15.
What are the odds that even one of them is going to go to the hospital?
It's low. So this actually didn't prove anything.
All right. So that was just one of the things that stood out.
He also...
I don't think he mentioned long COVID as one of the variables.
So look for the dog that's not barking.
Don't look just for the things he says that are true, because there are a bunch of them in there that look to me to be true, or they sound true, or they sound convincing.
But he doesn't mention...
The benefit of vaccinations for protecting against long COVID, which would be a gigantic part of the whole decision.
If you leave that out when you're talking about that topic, I feel like your credibility has to take a big hit there.
So those are the things I look at.
Does somebody look at anecdotal stuff and try to sell it as persuasive?
That's no good. And do they leave out maybe the biggest variable?
Long COVID could be the biggest variable in the long run.
So here's what I would say.
The animal reserve argument sounds pretty strong.
He's got some other arguments that sound pretty strong.
I have a feeling there's something to what he's saying.
You know, he's not a complete grifter.
It doesn't look like that to me.
There's something there, but I wouldn't trust it.
Honestly. So my take is that don't put too much credibility in that.
There are at least two tells for something wrong.
So I'll just put that out there.
Meanwhile, in related news, wild U.S. deer have been found with coronavirus antibodies.
So a study found that 40% of deer that were tested had coronavirus antibodies.
Deer. 40% of them had the antibodies.
But they said the risk of animals spreading the COVID to people is considered low, the USDA told National Geographic.
Well, I think the risk is low for most of us.
But I don't know who needs to hear this, but if you see a dead deer, let's say on the street, maybe it's roadkill, if you see a dead deer, do not rub your penis on his face.
Because you're just asking for trouble.
Now, if you were to stay away from the deer, I think you'd be pretty safe.
But if you're a Chinese guy who likes rubbing your penis on stuff, just stay away from the deer.
Because 40% of them have been exposed to coronavirus.
All right. I was in a few retail stores in the last few days, clothing stores, and I was amused by the fact that wokeness has destroyed advertising as we know it.
What is the point of advertising?
Isn't the point of advertising to make you want somebody's product more?
Right? That's the basic idea.
But wokeness has caused these retail establishments to change out their highly attractive models.
And usually this is in the context of female clothing.
So they've gotten rid of their models that look like they have eating disorders, but people like it anyway.
People like looking at it, even if they don't think they're healthy.
And that probably sells clothes because people look at models wearing the clothes and they say, my goodness, those clothes look good.
But it's because the model, right?
The models make the clothes look good.
So what happens when you get woke, as these stores I was in did, and they've changed their advertisement to feature what I'll call more ordinary or normal people.
Now when I say normal and ordinary people, I mean fat.
Now I don't do fat shaming.
Don't laugh at that. We don't do fat shaming here, because I don't believe in free will, and I don't think anybody chooses to be overweight.
I mean, some people do.
I mean, there's always somebody. But generally speaking, people are fighting their weight problems, and it's hard, because the modern American diet doesn't give you much of a chance.
But forget about the fat shaming.
I'm just making a point that if you look at a poster and you're in the store to buy these clothes and you see a, let's say, not a model, can we be kind?
If you see not a thin model wearing them, do you say to yourself, I've got to get some of those clothes?
Because I don't think so.
I think the whole point of modeling is you're associating something that people respond to reflexively...
An attractive woman in the mating years.
You know, the most universally attractive thing in all of humankind.
A young, attractive woman in her mating years.
And you replace that with, you know, older people and, you know, a variety of, let's say, humankind that is not visually attractive.
Have you not been forced to make people dislike your product to be woke?
Because I guess they still have a marketing budget, so they still produce marketing.
It's just they're not allowed to do it in a way that works, pairing the clothing with something attractive.
So now they're pairing their clothing with something, I hate to say it, but unattractive.
Unattractive. Intentionally.
And by the way, when I say unattractive, I mean they chose them to be unattractive.
Knowing that this would not be the standard that the public at large would find attractive, it's intentional.
It's not my opinion. So that's one example where wokeness actually destroyed the entire marketing profession that has been decimated.
I'm sorry. Pause.
Hold on for a moment.
Pause. The pedantic people are going nuts right now.
Let me pause and say yes.
I do know that decimated means a 10% reduction.
I do know that. I did use the word in its more casual form, which people use to mean totally destroyed, which is the opposite of its meaning, really.
Can you deal with that?
Can I get on? Can I go?
Are we good? All right.
Thank you. So they...
Here's another example. I can't watch car insurance commercials because they're so anti-male.
Can you? When I watch those car insurance companies where they make all men look like morons, but women are geniuses, I just say to myself, make a mental note of that company, because they're assholes.
I don't want to buy their product.
Now, do you think that's what they intended?
Do you think that the insurance company who made those commercials and paid people to do marketing and advertising and all that, do you think that what they paid for was for me to hate their product and their company by making commercials that target me as a moron?
I feel like the whole marketing industry has just fallen apart.
It's all fallen apart.
Here's my favorite one.
Did you hear what Subway, the Subway sandwich people said?
So apparently there's some pushback about having Megan Rapinoe as part of their advertising campaign because some people are calling her un-American for protesting the flag.
Now, poor Subway has had some bad experience with advertising.
Do you know what I mean?
Do you know what I mean? Yeah, they had Jared as their symbol.
Now, I don't want to...
I don't want to get in trouble for saying something about Jared.
Is Jared in prison?
Somebody says he's in prison.
Let's just say he was accused of being a pedophile.
So that was their first take at marketing was to associate with a pedophile.
And they thought, well, we can't make that kind of mistake twice.
We're never going to make that mistake twice.
So they decided to go with a good American, you know, all-American Olympic athlete who is now being branded as anti-American.
If you asked her, she would not say she's anti-American.
So, you know, I think only Megan Rapinoe gets to say what she is in her mind.
But certainly the way people are perceiving her is anti-American.
We're not going to argue with that, some significant portion of the public.
And so how did wokeness work out for Subway?
So somebody gets bitten by an accused pedophile and goes to the wokeness cesspool and just gets killed twice.
So marketing is not so useful in these days.
Now let's talk about the Rasmussen poll.
They did a poll on, do you agree or disagree, on this statement.
Defund the police has to happen.
We need to defund the police and put that money into social safety nets.
So that was the question, how many people agreed or not.
Strongly agreed, 12%.
Somewhat agreed, 19%.
So we've got 31% that agree in some fashion with defunding the police.
But somewhat disagree, 12%.
Strongly disagree, 51%.
So the big majority disagree with defunding police.
And then not sure, 6%.
Remember I always tell you that 25% of every mole are mole funds?
Where's the 25% in this one?
Start kidding a little bit.
I'll speculate. First of all, the people who somewhat agree on defunding the police, that may not be what you think.
Because I'm in that category.
I somewhat agree.
And here's what I mean.
If you ask me this question, do you somewhat agree to move some money from the police budgets to social safety nets, I would answer as someone who was a manager of large budgets for a large corporation.
Hold on. Hold on.
Hold on.
This is going to be better than you think.
Don't get ahead of me and think that I went all Bernie Sanders.
You'll like it. Just hold on.
Okay? Here's my argument.
If you have managed large budgets, you know the following is true.
You can always make them better.
So there's a large budget for police.
There's a large budget for social services.
Anybody who's ever worked on budgets will tell you what I'm going to tell you right now.
You could do a better job with those budgets.
Because you always can. There's no situation where you cannot say, okay, but what if we took some of the stuff for the police that wasn't helping, and we just try moving that over to some place that we know helps in social safety nets, but it's underfunded.
You don't think you could move $1?
From a police budget where it's being wasted in some fashion.
Police work is not wasted, but some part of every big budget is wasted.
There's no exception to that.
You don't think you could move a little bit, do a little bit of tuning?
Of course you could. So if you asked me this question, I would answer like a little bit too informed budget person, and I'd say, of course you can.
You can improve any budget.
That's just always true.
But as soon as you put it into this political context, people are going to run away from it.
So I think that the people who said somewhat agree might actually be the sophisticated people answering, along with a few morons mixed in there.
But what about the people who somewhat disagree?
Well, I don't think those people understand that budgets are as flexible as I just explained.
And I think the people who disagree with it somewhat are probably missing a nuance.
The people who strongly disagree would also be missing the nuance, but I don't think they're dumb.
Because in a political context, taking the simple, easy approach, the simplicity of it might...
So I think people are just saying, no, what you really mean to do is take police off the streets.
No way. There's no way that works.
They strongly disagree. So they're probably smart, even though they give up some nuance.
And then not sure, 6%.
So I think there are some dumb people spread across both groups here, and people answer this kind of question politically.
They don't answer it technically in the way they think is exactly correct.
They're going to answer it the way they want you to see the poll.
So I think there's some combination of 25% in the strongly agree and the somewhat disagree.
So I think the dumb people are on both sides in this case, somewhat hidden.
One of the other questions on it was, are most police officers racist?
18% said yes.
68% said no.
Now, this is another one where the interpretation of the question matters.
If you asked me, are most police racist, if I knew it was a political question, I'd say no.
No. Because I'd say they don't act that way.
In general, they don't act that way.
Statistically. But if you ask me, not in terms of a survey, you just ask me personally, are most police officers racist?
I'd say, people are racist.
How could they not be?
Because they're people. If you take the set of human beings, my opinion is that 100% of us are racist by reflex.
By reflex. By reflex.
We're racist by reflex.
We're born that way. We're designed that way.
We evolve that way. We evolve to prefer things that look like us.
Our own kids, our people in the tribe.
It's just normal. But do you have the higher level thinking and morality where you can not act that way?
So if he asked me, I'd say, yeah, every person in every profession is a racist.
No exceptions. Not you, not me, nobody.
There's no exceptions. Because you're human.
You're all racists, period.
But some people act on it.
Some people don't, etc.
Here's what I think would be a more productive way to go with that question.
I think we should admit it and mock it.
I think the way you get rid of racism is to admit it and then mock it, in yourself as well as others.
Let me give you an example. I think you would all agree that it's true that all Italians, two things we know about all Italians, they make excellent spaghetti sauce and they're in the mafia.
Now, you recognize these as stereotypes, right?
Only half true.
All Italian people do make excellent spaghetti sauce.
You just have to ask them. But there are not very many of them in the mafia.
Very few of them in the mafia.
Okay, you see what I did? I took a stereotype, and I just sort of mocked it as being stupid, and I laughed about it, blah, blah, blah.
Is that not healthier than...
Because in a sense I'm mocking myself for thinking, even saying that all Italians make good spaghetti sauce, even though it's true.
Just ask them. Why can't we laugh about that?
Why can't we just have fun with it?
When a black woman told me that one of the stereotypes about white people is that we like cheese, I laughed for a week.
Because it's true. White people like cheese.
Or it seems true.
It's funny either way.
So it seems to me...
Now, of course, I'm picking the harmless ones, right?
Liking cheese and stuff. But I think the rest of them are equally mockable.
Because, you know, if there's anybody out there who thinks...
What? If you're an Elbonian, you can't work in STEM or something?
I mean, you would just have to be an idiot to think that everybody in some group can't do something.
Like, there's too much evidence against that.
So I think we should treat racism as just a special branch of stupidity and have fun with it.
Just mock it. And we could just mock it out of importance, anyway.
All right. Larry Elder, as you know, running for governor of California.
And it looks like the recall is going to be successful in terms of the initial vote to recall.
But there's a second component of that, which is that the governor, Newsom, can run for re-election at the same time in the same vote as he's recalled, if I understand that right.
So Larry Elder looks to be the leading contender.
And I looked at his webpage to see what he's doing persuasion-wise.
And here's his vision statement.
So it literally says, vision.
And it is this.
I'm in it to win it.
What do you think of that?
We're just going to look at the persuasion power.
I'm in it to win it.
Give me your opinions in the comments.
I would like to know, before I give you my opinion, is it strong or weak?
Okay, I'm seeing mixed opinions.
I'm seeing mostly weak. I have a mixed opinion on this one, and here's why.
Biden won on basically this slogan.
I think Joe Biden won based on telling you he could win because they wanted so much for, at least the people who voted against him, wanted so much for Trump to leave that the only thing they wanted to hear is that he could win.
They didn't care about anything.
Nothing else mattered.
Just, can he win?
And maybe Newsom is in that same situation.
He's not too popular at the moment in California.
And maybe the only thing that Californians care about is not even who replaces him.
They might just care if he can win.
And so I had mixed feelings when I said it.
I relate to what you said.
It doesn't have sizzle.
And it also is about him.
I would never do a...
I would never do a slogan with I in it.
Because it's talking about him.
I'm in it to win it.
It's about him, right?
So Larry, if you watch this, it should be more about the state.
That would be what would appeal to me best.
And I'll tell you what I'm hungriest for as a citizen of California.
Competent and ethical management.
Competent and ethical.
You've got to throw that in there. Management.
And because it's a Republican, you've got to throw in the ethical so people will know that you care about that stuff.
I'm sure Larry Elder does.
So I don't know how to make that sexy, but if you told me, look, I'm going to run against Newsom, you've got problems with the pandemic, schools, water, electricity, forest management, homeless, and borders, and none of it is being managed competently and ethically...
So if you gave me that proposition, look, you don't have competence and you don't have ethical leadership.
I'll give you that. Boom.
I'm sold. Because it's an easy sale because people are unhappy with what's happening there now.
They're looking for a change.
But I'm in it to win it?
Mixed feelings. It could be that you want somebody besides Newsom so badly that maybe that's all you care about.
And maybe it's possible that he hit the only message that matters.
I don't know. This is one of those things where I think trained persuaders could have different opinions.
And I think you'd have to test it somehow.
Maybe you did. Maybe he has tested it.
I don't know. But that's my advice to Larry Elder.
And I saw you retweeted me this morning.
We follow each other.
So maybe he'll get that message.
And maybe he doesn't need it.
Because, like I said, I'm in it to win it.
I'm not going to say that's bad.
It might be genius.
I don't know. Could be right on, but I'd test it.
That's what I'd do. Somebody says it's unoriginal.
I'll tell you what else it has is it rhymes.
Do you think that doesn't make a difference?
It does. Things that rhyme are actually perceived as more persuasive.
That's why OJ and the glove, if the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit.
It's not an accident that it rhymed.
That was to make it more persuasive.
So I'm in it to win it.
How's that going for it?
So it makes me wonder.
It could have been professionally designed.
Maybe he had some advice on that.
But I'm very curious if it's been tested.
As opposed to what?
In it to lose? Well, in it to provide competent and ethical management.
I don't think Californians are looking for a lot of sizzle.
We like it.
It's the entertainment state, right?
We like our Arnold Schwarzeneggers and stuff.
But I feel like we're just desperate for somebody who can just manage it.
I don't know if that's what Larry Elder will look like to voters, but that's what we need.
Well... I guess it's been 28 minutes because locals just shut off.
And I'm going to end this stream on YouTube, and I will talk to you tomorrow.
