Episode 1469 Scott Adams: Don't Miss My Impression of Negotiating With the Taliban, Plus Persuasion Lessons
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Content:
Larry Elder's election slogan
California's livability issues
Spanking Biden over Afghanistan
Vaccine most hesitant groups
NYC vaccine passports
Hospital capacity Fake News
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All right. Here's the first item today.
As you know, Larry Elder is running for governor in the recall election with Gavin Newsom.
He's the leading person who's not Gavin Newsom, and it looks like he's got a real shot.
He's definitely in striking distance.
And full disclosure...
Larry Elder did reach out to me and, you know, asked me to communicate with his team, which I plan to do.
But I thought I'd test this out, his slogan.
His current slogan, if he hasn't changed it in the last few days, is, I'm in it to win it.
I'm in it to win it.
Now, I thought that was a little bit too much about him and not enough about the state, so I did a little Twitter poll, very unscientific, and I said, which do you like better as a slogan for Larry Elder?
I'm in it to win it, or make California livable again.
Now, I chose the livable part because that captures all of the problems from the The fact that I can't go outside today because there's too much smoke in the air from forest fires, to the fact that I can't go to a restaurant without my mask on, to the fact, you know, just, you know, crime, you name it.
I don't have electricity, water, reliably, anyway.
So we got all kinds of livability problems, high taxes, etc.
So I thought that captured a lot.
So when I did it in my...
In my Twitter feed, I did that little poll, and 90% said they like Make California Livable Again, and a little over 9% said his original slogan was better.
Now, does that mean he should switch immediately to Make California Livable Again?
No, because it's not a good slogan.
It won, you know, 10 to 1.
It's a bad slogan because it's too Trumpy.
And it creates a problem that you don't need to create.
Because he's already going to be painted with whatever hatred the Democrats have for Trump.
So you want to put some distance there.
And I would modify it.
Instead of saying it, make California livable again, which sounds too much like make America great again, how about just shorten it to let's make California livable.
Let's make California livable.
So now it doesn't sound like, you know, Trump, but it also puts the livable in there, and it also says let's.
Meaning, you know, working together.
So it gets rid of the, you know, I'm in it to win it, which is a little too much about Larry, and turns it into something about making it more livable, but we're all working together.
So, is it sexy?
Not really. Not really.
So this is the way you would work through this process.
You would take some reasonable guesses based on what you know about persuasion and about people, and then you'd have to test it.
So if you think I can come up with a winning slogan just by brainstorming, you're wrong.
I mean, I could, but it'd just be luck.
More likely, you just come up with a bunch of ideas and test them until you get one that works.
So that's how the process works.
The funniest response to Obama having his birthday party, and then I guess he pared it down from a larger crowd to a still large but smaller crowd, and he had to go through the embarrassing process of uninviting people who had been invited to Imagine that?
Can you imagine having a party and inviting all these famous people?
And then you have to uninvite the famous people?
Ouch! That's pretty rugged.
I can't think of anything that would be more socially awkward than uninviting all these people who already made plans, travel plans, move their schedule.
And these are important people, right?
So I guess people like David Axelrod got uninvited, right?
Now, I'm not sure people like that matter because they probably saw Obama plenty.
But I think Stephen Colbert got uninvited.
One of the people who got uninvited was Larry David.
And apparently Larry David was worried that they were going to ask him to do some comedy there.
And he couldn't come up with any good jokes for the situation.
And so when they called him and told him that he was uninvited, he screamed, thank you, thank you!
Then I hung up the phone, poured myself a drink, and finished my crossword puzzle.
Now, you think to yourself, isn't that a terrible day when you get uninvited to Obama's birthday party, like you'd be all excited?
I felt exactly like Larry David did in this.
I remember hearing a story, this is a true story, about Charles Schultz being invited to the White House, I think during, I don't know, Reagan administration or something.
And Charles Schultz got invited to some state dinner at the White House, and he turned it down.
And I asked him why he turned down an invitation to the White House.
Like, who turns down an invitation to the White House?
Seriously, who turns that down?
Charles Schultz does.
You know why he turned it down?
He said, I already did that.
He'd been there once.
Didn't see another reason to do it again.
So when Larry David turns down Obama's birthday party and feels like he just avoided a bunch of work, I thought to myself, I think that's exactly how I would have felt.
If I had been invited and then uninvited, I would just feel relieved.
I'd be like, oh, thank God I don't have to make conversation with Beyonce.
I'm just using her as an example.
I think making conversation with Beyonce would be fun.
Let's talk about Afghanistan.
Even Jake Tapper is giving the Biden administration a serious spanking on CNN, asking them pointedly how they got it so wrong.
Now, of course, Trump is not out of the woods here, because he started the process, and maybe the government was bound by it, but...
Maybe not. I mean, we're not really bound by it, are we?
Any agreements?
So there's plenty of blame to go around, but Biden gets the most of it because it happens on his watch.
And I suppose he could have pivoted and could have changed something and didn't.
But he also made the big mistake of predicting it would go fine.
Who was it who advised Biden, all right, if they ask you how things are going to go in Afghanistan once we pull out our troops...
Tell them it'll be fine.
Who gave him that advice?
Or did he come up with that on his own?
Like, what did that look like?
Did people laugh when they said it?
Tell them it'll be fine.
No, seriously. Just tell them.
Tell them it'll be fine. The Taliban?
Flexible. If there's anything you can say about the Taliban, those guys are flexible and they've gone too far.
Oh, we've gone too far now.
We'll back up a little bit.
So that's how the Taliban works.
Well, do you believe that Biden ever believed that things would go fine and that we'd train the Afghan government to defend itself?
Do you think he thought that?
Do you think anybody thought that?
Do you think Trump thought that when he started the process?
I don't think so. I think every single person knew that the Taliban would take over fairly quickly.
I mean, we're surprised at how quickly it happened, but you knew it was going to happen, right?
Did anybody not know it was going to happen?
And, of course, that's because the Afghan government is thoroughly corrupt and can't be fixed.
So did Biden just lie to us?
When Biden told us things would be fine, was that what I would call a convenient lie?
Because the thing that was going to happen is we were going to withdraw, and a lot of our allies who fought with us and should not die are going to be killed.
We know that's going to happen.
Was it a good lie?
Meaning it was more benefit than cost.
Was it a good lie?
To tell the public, oh, yeah, they'll be fine until the process is too far along to stop it.
Because it's going to happen, right?
You can't really manage the unmanageable.
It was going to happen anyway.
So I think it gave the government, Biden administration, a little bit of cover so that they could say, oops, I wish I'd known that all of our allies were going to be slaughtered.
Oops! I mean, if we'd known that in the beginning, we wouldn't have pulled out, because we're not that kind of people.
Oops! Who saw it?
I guess it was just a failure of intelligence.
We tried really hard.
Guys, we tried to save you, but we didn't see it coming.
Blindsided. It seems to me like it was an intentional lie.
We don't know, because we can't read Biden's addled brain.
But it feels like he knew it was going to happen, and he just told us it wasn't going to happen, so that he could say, well, I didn't see it coming.
If I'd known all our allies were going to be slaughtered, I would have tried harder to prevent it.
But now we're out of Afghanistan.
So I'm not even sure I mind.
Do you? Let me ask you in the comments.
If you knew for sure that Biden just lied to the country and said, yeah, it'll be fine, but it was the only way to get us out of there, are you okay with it?
Because I actually am.
If that was a bold-faced lie, I'm okay with it.
Because it would have been, under this hypothesis, it would have been a lie for the benefit of the country that would have been maybe terrible for the Afghan people, But it would be America first.
And it would be something that was going to happen anyway, sooner or later.
So, yeah, I mean, you could have...
I think you could allow for differences of opinion on this.
But sometimes the government needs to lie to you.
And military operations are the one place that we do give...
We expressly give our government permission to lie to us, right?
I mean, kind of.
We kind of say, if it's in our interest...
And we find out later that you lied to us.
But as long as it was in our interest, we're going to be okay with that.
Right? Really. In the real world, we are.
And I'm wondering what the...
Now we're hearing that the Afghan government is negotiating with the Taliban...
And I'm wondering what that looks like in the context of the Taliban being on the verge of taking over everything no matter what.
How does that negotiation go?
Well, I'd like to give you my impression of negotiating with the Taliban.
That's why you come here.
It's for the impressions. And the impressions go like this.
Scene. Mr.
Taliban, thank you for coming here to negotiate with the Afghan government.
And your first offer is very generous.
You've offered to behead all of our children and use their heads as soccer balls for your fighters.
And I'd like to push back on that a little bit and say that perhaps you could spare two of my children, two of my five, use three of their heads for soccer balls, and two of them just leave them alone.
Taliban says, I understand your offer.
I can see why you'd make that offer.
But here's my next offer.
We're going to use all five of your children's heads for soccer balls, and we're going to rape your wife in front of you.
And the Afghan government guy says, OK, OK, I think we're making some progress.
How about you behead all five of my children, but you don't hurt my wife?
The Taliban says, OK, OK, good offer.
Here's what we'll do. We'll use your children's heads for soccer balls.
We'll rape your wife in front of you and kill her.
And then we'll kill you so it doesn't bother you.
And the Afghan guy says, that would solve my problem.
It is the best offer I'm going to get.
I guess I'll take it.
I guess I'll take it.
And that is what I call negotiating with the Taliban.
Scene. Well...
Or maybe they would just negotiate to, you could kill my in-laws.
Anyway. So I would like to give you the most optimistic thought about Afghanistan.
This will not happen.
I'm not predicting this will happen.
But it could happen. Not impossible.
Did you see the video of the Taliban finding all these perfectly intact stocks of weapons that we left behind?
Like all these big-ass weapons, you know, the rifles that are, you know, as big as a car and stuff.
You see the Taliban just happily picking up all the major weapons.
How many of those weapons do you think have tracking devices in them?
Just asking. We left all this heavy equipment there.
You don't think we have any tracking devices in them?
Nobody thought of that? Now, I don't know...
Yeah, I mean, I'm seeing in the comments, I thought of that.
I mean, half of you in the comments thought of that.
Now, I don't know how hard it would be to locate the tracking devices in each of them, but I don't feel that the Taliban are too sophisticated.
I feel like...
If they got some good heavy equipment, you could probably hide a tracking device in one of them, couldn't you?
Secondly, the process of taking over a country guarantees that your fighters are visible, and that where you meet people, they would be visible, and your armies would no longer be spread out and hiding.
They'd be right where you could see them.
If we wanted to, could we wait three weeks and destroy the Taliban completely?
Just because they'd be visible.
Either through the tracking devices that may or may not exist, or the fact that once they're the legitimate government, they're out in the open.
They would probably have military exercises.
They would all just be in one place.
You could just bomb them all together.
I don't know. I don't think it's worth saving anything in Afghanistan.
I don't think the government showed that it was worthy of saving.
And I don't think we have any interest there.
I'm just saying, if it was a clever, clever plan, it would have been kind of clever, but it's not going to happen.
You saw me speculating, I think it was even yesterday, that I didn't understand the question of how vaccinations could make more variants.
Because that's a common thing that's on the internet, right?
A lot of people say, no, the vaccinations just create this filter that might stop the regular virus, but the variants will be unleashed.
To which I said, explain to me how having less infection...
Because that's what the vaccine will do.
It'll cause fewer people to be infected.
You can still get infected if you have it, but it would vastly reduce the rate of infection, at least.
How could reducing the rate of infection create more variants?
It seems to me, without being a scientist, that the more virus there is in the world, the more total amount of virus in people, the more variants.
Right? How could that be wrong?
So if the vaccine reduces the total amount of people who could have the virus, it's still more than ever, but it's less than it would be without the vaccination, isn't that a smaller pool of potential variants?
Well, it turns out that there was a recent study, University of Maryland, in which they showed the full vaccination against COVID actually suppresses variants, exactly like I said.
Exactly like I assumed.
How could more virus not create more variants?
And how could reducing the total amount of variants do anything but decrease the risk of variants?
So, of course, you know, those are not the only variables.
Yeah, I'm sure I'm missing some mechanisms there.
I can say that fairly confidently.
But it didn't seem to me that anybody had ever described a mechanism in which a variance could be increased by vaccination.
I'd heard experts say it.
But when it came to, well, explain why.
Why does that do it?
I never heard an explanation.
So if this study holds up, and of course, remember, studies are maybe 50% reliable, I've been criticized quite rightly, I'll say.
This would be one of those criticisms that I accept uncritically.
That I often say when a study agrees with me, it sounds pretty good.
And when a study disagrees with me, I say, well, kind of sketchy study.
So I would say, take that same warning with this study.
It might not be true, but it does agree with me.
So that makes it seem more credible than...
Yeah, ask Brett Weinstein.
Well, I've watched some of Brett's content on that, but I don't think I ever saw the mechanism.
Anyway, my common sense told me that it would come out this way, and so did the study.
But we don't know if either of us are right yet.
You probably saw on the Internet a graph that shows you who's the most skeptical of vaccinations.
And you find that the people with the least education are the most skeptical.
Oh, wait... Also PhDs.
So the two most skeptical groups are the least educated and the most educated.
The people who are most comfortable with vaccinations are the people who have, say, a master's degree or a four-year college degree.
So they're not as educated as the PhDs, but they're far more educated than the uneducated.
So, what's that tell you? Well, it's been passed around the internet as evidence that the PhDs, the most informed people, are most skeptical, and therefore so should you be.
Because the smart people are skeptical.
Do you buy that? Who's on board with that thinking?
If the PhDs are the most skeptical, shouldn't you be?
Right? Right? Well, let me tell you some real-world information about PhDs.
Number one, what is your PhD in?
If your PhD is economics, like Andres Backhaus, you know, I mention him all the time from Twitter, if that's your PhD, then yes.
Yes, you should definitely listen to that person and give them a little bit more weight.
Than somebody who doesn't have a degree in economics.
Because economics teaches you decision-making.
It teaches you how to weigh the costs and benefits of things.
Now, suppose you had a PhD in literature.
What good is that?
Can you make better medical decisions?
Because you've got a PhD in literature?
In the real world, how many have had this example?
Watch the comments now.
How many of you have worked in a big corporation...
And worked with people who have PhDs.
Were they the smart ones?
Did you notice that all the people with the PhDs made all the good decisions?
And the people who didn't have them couldn't make good decisions?
Nope. Nope.
People who have a master's degree, the people who are the least skeptical, would be people like me.
So I have also a master's degree in business.
So if you have an MBA... What do you learn?
Decision-making. You literally got a degree in how to make good decisions.
Risk analysis. I've got two.
One degree in economics teaches you how to make decisions.
One degree in, you know, an MBA teaches you how to make decisions.
So if you put me in the same room with a PhD in literature, who would you trust?
It's not even close. It's not even close.
You would trust me every time, if you're smart.
Which is not to say I'm right.
Being right is slightly different than being credible.
Well, not slightly different.
Completely different than being credible.
But PhDs are not credible.
Unless they have the right PhD.
And if you just average PhDs together, you get some weird soup of people who are highly trained to make decisions.
So now let's compare me with my two degrees in decision-making.
Can I analyze things as well as, let's say, Andres Bacchus with a PhD in economics?
Nope. Nope.
I'm nowhere near as good as he is at doing the same thing I'm trained at.
The very thing I'm trained at, he does better than me because he has a higher degree and proves it all the time.
So, yeah, don't believe that the PhDs are where you need to get your decision-making from.
All right, how about this?
So vaccine passports are being rolled out in New York City, probably other places, and I'm in favor of that.
Surprise? I'm just saying this to get you all riled up.
So there's a twist at the end.
But I'm in favor of New York City having vaccine passports, so you can't do indoor stuff mostly, I guess, unless you've got one of those passports.
Why am I in favor of it?
Because I don't live there.
I don't live in New York City.
And I do think that we should be testing different processes in different places.
So if New York City wants to test this, I think they should.
Because wouldn't you like to know if it works?
My anticipation is that it won't work, meaning that there'll be no noticeable difference in the infection rate.
But don't you want to test it?
Because even if you're completely against vaccination passports, and I oppose them, I'm one of the people who oppose them, but even if you're completely against them, don't you want to know if they work?
Because we might have to make the decision even if you don't like it.
You could imagine... You could easily imagine that we'll be forced into making a decision we don't want to make at all.
Which, yeah, let's say there's another variant, and it's just, you know, death.
Maybe. I'd like to know if it worked, and it's not my city, so I'm glad somebody's trying it.
At least we'll find out.
But I would add this to that.
And again, let me say clearly, I oppose vaccine passports in the United States.
Although if somebody wants to visit from another country...
Maybe they need to be vaccinated with the right kind of vaccination.
But here's what I would add to this.
I think if your doctor writes you a note that says you're the kind of person who has low BMI, so you're not obese, you're not too old, let's say under 40 or 50, whatever your doctor decides, and you don't have other major comorbidities, why can't your doctor write you a letter that says that you're as good as vaccinated?
Because in both cases you can get it.
I guess being vaccinated, a little less chance of getting it.
But I would think that that should count.
If you can get a doctor to say, for whatever reason, that your risk is low.
The whole point of a passport is to have only low-risk people in the room, right?
So why not add that?
I know you're going to add to that people who have...
Already got infected and can prove it.
And I would add those as well.
I mean, your doctor could also test you, find out you have antibodies, write you a letter.
So, yeah. If you're going to do vaccine passports, you need to include all the low-risk people.
Because otherwise, it's just crazy.
How about hospital capacity?
Let's put this under fake news of the day.
Fake news. Fake news.
Hospital capacity.
This is fake news.
Why? Which part is fake news?
Is it fake news that the hospitals are being crushed?
Or... Is it fake news that they're not?
Because you're seeing both, right?
You're seeing reports that some hospitals are crushed and some are not.
Well, it turns out that there's a hospital capacity checker.
It's very good, actually.
I think it's the CDC site.
It shows you every hospital in the United States and color codes them by how impacted they are.
So I checked my local area, and sure enough, there are hospitals that are at capacity.
Yikes. There are hospitals in my area, which I don't think is a hot spot at all, but the hospitals are at capacity.
But, fake news, fake news, only some of them are.
Others are low.
They're not even high capacity.
They're not even, like, toward the top.
They're, like, right in the middle.
Why is that? Why is one hospital at capacity and the one right next to it is not?
And how do you judge that?
Because don't you send people to other hospitals for sharing capacity?
Somebody says, because it's smaller.
Oh, that's actually not a bad...
Theory? Location? Well, I'm saying that the locations are near each other.
You know, they're almost walking distance.
And one is at capacity and the other is not.
Literally walking distance.
Yes. So I think some of the answer has to do with specialty.
Some of it has to do with, I would guess, some hospitals are specialty for COVID, have more capacity.
If you knew one hospital was great at handling COVID, wouldn't you send everybody there until it reached capacity?
I mean, if the best hospitals are at capacity, it kind of means you're doing everything right.
Doesn't it? But I don't know if that's the case.
Maybe it's not the best ones that are at capacity.
So here's what's true and what's false.
Some hospitals are at capacity in the very same areas as hospitals are nowhere near capacity.
Can somebody give me a little explanation of why that is?
Wouldn't you expect all of the hospitals to be sort of moving in unison?
Because as one fills up, the capacity moves over to the others.
And yeah, maybe there'd be a little lag.
But wouldn't they be moving together, largely?
But they're not. Some are largely full and some are not.
Now... If I had seen the results, like my entire area was very similar, then I'd say, oh, we're in trouble.
But if it's only some hospitals, and I don't know how many, 20%, maybe, it looked like, I don't know what that means.
So I would say that the news we're getting about hospital capacity is either incorrect or lacks some kind of context, so we can't really figure out if it's a problem or not.
You know, the usual problem.
Bad data. I have a feeling that we may be seeing a long-term trend toward depopulating cities.
Because, you know, it started with the pandemic, of course.
But I feel as if the long-term risk of living in a dense place isn't worth it anymore.
Because you don't need to live in a dense place to have a job.
Because you can do everything remotely now, so that's different.
You don't want the commute, of course.
You don't want the crime. But mostly, I don't want to live in an area that's an easy target.
We're entering a time when an ordinary person can build a weapon of mass destruction.
Let me say that again.
We're rapidly entering a time when an ordinary person can create a weapon of mass destruction.
You'll probably have a biological agent and a small drone, and you could just...
Attack a city. Now, if you had such ability, you could personally make a mass weapon, where would you use it?
Would you come to my town, where everything's sort of spread out and there are no high-rises?
No, no. You would never attack my town because the number of people you could kill would be low because we're sort of spread out here.
You would only attack a city.
So I've got a feeling that just living in a city will be one attack after another until they just become depopulated.
What's it say? Many jobs cannot be done online, you old fool.
Right. But if you depopulate the city, you have far fewer jobs that need to be done in general.
All right. So I think cities are just going to, in the long term, will disappear.
But slowly. Here's an interesting data.
I haven't seen anybody talk about this.
But as you know, vaccine hesitancy has been very high in the black population of the United States.
Now, we all know why, right?
You don't have to be like a genius to figure out why black people would have less trust in the government.
Right? Has anything ever happened to black people in this country because of the government?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, like everything.
So, yeah, it makes complete sense that the black population, as well as it makes sense that the conservative population, would be the most hesitant.
But here's the interesting part.
The hesitancy has dropped rapidly among black people.
Whereas everybody else's hesitancy is also trending down, meaning that every day that goes by we know more about the risk of the vaccination.
So it makes sense that everybody's hesitancy is going down because they're working.
And we haven't seen people dropping dead on the streets so much.
But why is black hesitation dropping faster than everybody else's by a lot?
I mean, it's very dramatic if you look at the lines.
And I'd say two reasons.
Number one would be whoever had the most hesitancy probably is going to get the fastest rate of drop, just as we inform people.
So it might be just that they started from a different base than everybody else.
It could be the whole story. But I would add one little bit about it, which is I think the black population in this country, like many others, are a...
I'll call it a microculture, meaning that mostly you talk to yourself, right?
Which would be true for lots of microcultures within the United States.
If you're Hispanic, or let's say you're in the immigrant culture, you probably talk to other immigrants a lot.
So it doesn't surprise me that the black...
Folks in the United States may have been talking to each other, but now the information is so widespread that everybody's getting it from everywhere at this point.
So it kind of makes sense that there would be a delay just because the communication would have to penetrate, let's say, a culture that talks to itself.
And then once it did, then it makes a difference.
That's probably what's happening. So there was an interesting meme that went around...
It looks like we didn't lose our signal here after 28 minutes.
So I think the locals platform must have fixed that bug.
It wasn't a bug, actually.
It was a testing limit because we're still in beta.
Looks like they took that limit off.
Anyway... There was a meme that went around that got a lot of play, and I want to talk about how persuasive it was.
So here's what it was.
It was a little black-and-white meme, and there was a photo of Rod Serling from the old Twilight Zone series.
And so it was a good image, so that was the first thing.
And here's the text.
It said, Imagine a vaccine so safe you have to be threatened to take it.
And then there's a picture of Rod Serling.
And then at the bottom it says, for a disease so deadly, you have to be tested to know you have it.
All right, so I'll read it again as one.
Imagine a vaccine so safe you have to be threatened to take it.
For a disease so deadly, you have to be tested to know you have it.
It's pretty good persuasion.
Now, it's good persuasion that won't change anybody's mind.
Because people are locked in on their opinions on the vaccinations and stuff.
For the most part. I mean, it's a very slow change.
But let me tell you what works about it.
Number one, it's visual.
So the picture of Rod Serling with the little swirly lines like something weird is going on draws you in.
If you've ever seen the difference between a tweet that has an image versus a tweet that's just text, the viral tweets are mostly the ones with images.
So just adding an image to a tweet, so here's your first recommendation.
If you're trying to build users or followers on Twitter, add images.
Images, get your retweets.
So I signed up for a stock service, stock photos, iStock, I guess I'm using.
And so if I have a tweet that I think could be viral and it's just going to be text, I'll get some generic image and watch the retweets just go through the roof.
You can test it yourself.
It's a very obvious effect.
Add an image and your retweets just jump.
So if you're trying to build Twitter followers without images, you're really just marching through quicksand there.
The next thing is that the image of Rod Serling is a great priming image.
Because over a certain age, young people don't know Rod Serling, but over a certain age, it's a very familiar...
Let's say it's an image you like, you understand it.
As soon as you see it, you start hearing the music.
Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do.
And you think, oh, it's a crazy world and anything bizarre could happen.
So it's perfect priming.
So you've got a visual...
That's good. Great, really.
You've got priming to make you think Twilight Zone-y before they've even done the language.
And then he uses the word imagine.
He says, imagine a vaccine so safe.
I think that word imagine is strong persuasion.
Now, I'm speculating here.
This is not based on some scientific thing I've seen.
But it makes sense, based on everything I know, as a trained hypnotist, I tell you too often...
That if you put somebody's mind into imagination mode, you can persuade them.
Better than if you have them in critical thinking mode.
And you can tell if somebody's in imagination mode versus critical thinking.
You can identify it.
And if somebody's in imagination mode, then they let the rules go for a while.
Okay, I'll imagine it.
I'll just use my imagination.
When you're imagining, everything's possible, including changing your mind.
If you're in data mode, you're probably locked in and you're going to reject any data that doesn't agree with you anyway.
So I think just telling somebody to imagine, probably, I don't have science for this, but my guess is that it primes you to be more persuaded.
So I like that part.
The next part is oversimplification, especially if that oversimplification makes it sound clever.
Have you ever heard that people who are funny, have a good sense of humor, are considered smarter?
It's true. If you can make somebody laugh, they think you're smarter.
You just seem smart.
Now, it doesn't mean that you're smart.
But you do seem smarter.
Apparently the studies show that.
So if you could do a clever oversimplification, which is what this meme did, you sound clever, and you sound funny, And you sound smarter.
Now, if you sound smart, people are more likely to accept what you said.
And if you sound funny, people are more likely to accept what you said.
Because we like it.
The same reason you like rhymes.
Apparently there's science that says if you make something rhyme, as in, if the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit, people will think it's more persuasive, just because it rhymes.
That's been tested.
I mean, it's weird.
But it's been tested. So I'll read it again, and watch how clever this simplification is.
Imagine a vaccine so safe you have to be threatened to take it for a disease so deadly you have to be tested to know you have it.
Now, the form of it is not a rhyme.
But it's rhyme-like because it uses the same form for the first sentence as the second.
You know, to imagine something that's so weird.
Imagine something so weird.
So I think it sort of hits what a rhyme does to your brain without being a rhyme.
And it's clever. Now, here's the part that is completely illegitimate.
Imagine a vaccine so safe you have to be threatened to take it.
Well, people aren't really being threatened.
They are certainly having their rights reduced.
I'm not sure threatened is the right word, but it's a good oversimplification.
And for a disease so deadly you have to be tested to know you have it, well, that's an oversimplification.
If you get into the hospital with low oxygen and no other obvious problem, You know, you probably don't need to test.
You probably start treating them before you test.
I'm guessing. If you came in with all of the symptoms of COVID, and you're near death's door, wouldn't they slap the Regeneron into your IV before they even had the test to know if you really had COVID? I think they would.
I mean, I don't know. So anyway, these are oversimplifications to the point of being false, but they're still persuasive.
All right, here's something that we need for our government.
We need somebody to negotiate with our own government.
Now you say to yourself, you know, you don't need that.
That's what Congress is for.
Congress negotiates with itself and with the president for the benefit of the people.
No, they don't. No, they don't.
Congress negotiates for itself.
They're trying to keep their jobs, trying to get elected.
Their incentives are not yours.
You're not even on the same game.
They're trying to keep their jobs.
You're trying to stay alive.
It's different. So what would happen if you had somebody who could negotiate with your own government, literally a negotiator?
Now, I don't know how you could actually do that, but here's the point.
We have this situation coming up where Our election systems, we know, are not transparent and they're not auditable.
Now, they're not transparent in the sense that you don't know what's happening in the electronics.
You don't know what the software is really doing.
You don't know what the servers are doing, any of the counting stuff, because we can't get access to the code.
And apparently you can't audit everything because there are lots of records that are lost.
People don't label things.
There's about 20 different reasons that you can't actually audit these things, and especially the digital portion is hard to audit.
So here's what I would do.
If I were a negotiator for the public, I would say, we're not going to vote until you make the elections transparent and auditable.
I would literally say, here's the deal, we're just not going to vote.
Negotiating on behalf of the public, I'm going to say, we're done.
You fix the election, and then we'll vote.
So that's what I would negotiate.
No vote until you fix the election.
There's a quote I saw that's attributed to Mark Twain, but apparently he never said this, but I like it anyway.
If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it.
That's another one of those oversimplifications.
Like, it's not true, but it's so simplified that it sounds clever.
So whoever said that's pretty clever.
All right, here's another thing I would negotiate with the government.
So your government is asking you to get vaccinated and wear masks in the United States.
But at the same time, they refused to give us the relevant data to support that decision.
The relevant data to support the government telling you to get vaccinations and wear masks would be the number of deaths and hospitalizations in every state from COVID filtered by age and BMI, weight, obesity. So if you don't give us that information every day, We're not going to get vaccinated, and we're not going to wear masks, even though we know we should, right?
Because lots of times negotiating is a process of telling somebody that you'll hurt yourself rather than make that deal.
So you've got to be willing to hurt yourself to negotiate well, actually.
So I would say, if I were negotiating with the government, it's like, yeah, great.
I know you want us to get vaccination and wear masks.
How about no? How about no?
Until you give us the minimum, which is every day, national news, tell us the hospitalizations and the deaths from COVID by state, filtered by age and BMI. Then we'll be on board.
So we need a negotiator.
I saw a user named Abacus on Twitter saying this, replying to something I tweeted.
He says, now we're getting medical advice from cartoonists.
Are you smarter than a fifth grader?
Well, what do you think about that?
Getting medical advice from a cartoonist.
Is that a fair statement?
Yes. Yes, it's very fair.
It's definitely fair to question the medical qualifications of a cartoonist.
You should. If you're not questioning my medical qualifications, why aren't you?
You should be. If you're taking medical advice from cartoonists, better have a good reason.
So I agree with that part, for sure.
But it's also a fact that if you took my advice instead of the experts, you would have done better.
That's just a fact.
You can check my track record.
You can see what I recommended.
You can see what the experts recommended.
You just compare it. And it probably isn't an accident.
Because getting back to the earlier point, number one, I pick my spots.
So have you seen me give an opinion on everything that there is medical about the COVID stuff?
No. No, because I'm not an expert and I wouldn't have anything to add.
But there are these specific things...
Such as... Well, you know, you've heard all the examples.
There are specific things that you can just tell are lies.
For example, when the government first told us that masks don't work and you shouldn't use them...
And by the way, I'm not going to argue whether they do or don't, because that won't matter to this next point.
I knew the government was lying, and so I called it out.
Now, it could turn out...
It's possible that they were right the first time and masks are useless.
Could be. I'm open to that.
But I knew that they didn't believe it.
I knew that. So I called it out publicly, and I was right.
They didn't believe it. They changed as soon as they admitted that they were lying to conserve supply.
So my qualifications, and the only thing I would put forward as expertise, is that I can identify bullshit better than other people.
So if you look into somebody to identify bullshit...
I wouldn't go to a doctor. They're not trained to do that.
I would go to me. Or I would go to, you know, Andres Backhaus, PhD in economics.
Somebody who's trained to do it.
So if you want medical advice, don't listen to a cartoonist.
If you want somebody who will call bullshit on somebody else's medical advice, talk to me.
I can do that.
I can call bullshit on stuff.
So partly the reason that my medical track record is better than the experts is that I only pick the things I'm pretty sure are bullshit.
So it's easy to cherry-pick the things I talk about.
So yes, absolutely, my track record is better than the experts.
It's just a fact.
But it's because I pick easy targets.
All right. I believe that is just about everything I want to talk about today.
Is there anything I missed?
Call BS on Cuomo.
I think everybody's done that.
The BS meter...
Okay. Hasn't done studies on mask effectiveness.
The CDC can't do studies of COVID mask effectiveness.
They can't do that. Because you need a control group, and they're not going to tell some people to not wear masks.
Okay. When you get the booster jab, will you get the same kind?
Good question. Let's say I got the Moderna, two shots so far.
If I get a booster, would I get the same one?
My understanding is that you might get some benefit from getting a second one.
Can anybody confirm that?
I think that's a supposition that's untested.
I saw some speculation from some people who knew what they were doing that adding them together might make them more effective.
But as I'm seeing in the comments, that would also be something that had never been tested.
Now, we've never tested the boosters.
Right? Because we didn't do the initial...
Whatever we did for the emergency authorization did not include boosters.
So the booster takes some risk with it.
But also, I would imagine, combining any two different vaccinations is something that hasn't been tested.
So I would guess that there's some added risk...
But remember, the risk of all this stuff starts high on day one, you know, when you first roll it out.
But as you can observe data over time, the risk of the unknown drops pretty fast.
So after six months of vaccinations, the risk of the unknown is pretty low.
When you talk masks without specifying the grade of masks, you know it's all BS.
No, no, that's not fair.
The experts say Sidney Powell was a mark for election interference.
What's your blind spot?
How would I know my blind spot?
Is that the problem?
It's not really a blind spot if you know it.
Anyway, I was going to say that the experts say that all the masks make some difference and some are better than others.
There's some suggestion that the J&J vaccine should be a booster.
Yeah, but again, who tested that stuff?
Yeah, I'm anti-mask at the moment because I would agree with those who say that the difference in the mask wearing no longer...
you know, whatever difference it gives you probably doesn't justify the lack of freedoms that would be caused by it.
That's my current thinking.
J&J can't be a booster.
No, I wouldn't call...
If you added the J&J shot...
To either Moderna or Pfizer, you probably wouldn't call it a booster because it's not boosting them, it's just adding its own thing.
So I don't know that that means you can't do it.
I think you just maybe wouldn't call it a booster, but it would act the same way.
All right.
Masks are child abuse.
Oh, there's a suggestion for a Larry Elder slogan, bring back California.
Maybe. It sounds a little bit too much like again.
All right, just looking at some more of your comments.
Three shots, why not take five?
Well, you probably will give five.
I mean, they are talking about infinite vaccinations now.
And I don't know if that's good or bad.
Build California better?
I'm not sure I like build.
Build doesn't sound like an inspirational word.
Make does. Make is a good word, but it was used.
Imagine a livable California.
Well, that's not bad.
So somebody said, imagine a livable California.
It's not bad. Yeah, I'm not sure.
Yeah, it's not bad.
That's one I would test.
I can't tell you that's good or bad, but that's test-worthy.
Make the Golden State golden again.
No, I don't think you want make and again in there.
It's too Trumpy.
It just adds a reason to not vote for them.
You don't need that. Free California.
Now that's interesting.
Free California. Yeah.
Let's see.
After the prednisone debacle, you were still willing to engage the medical industry?
What was my option?
Am I supposed to disavow all medical care because the medical industry makes mistakes?
How would you play it?
Just ignore healthcare?
Well, there are people who die from medical accidents.
I better never go to a doctor again.
Probably works for some people.
Prenzazone makes you heavy?
Well, I'll tell you, I ate like a mofo.
You can't stop eating on prednisone.
That stuff, I mean, your body just needs food like crazy.
