Episode 1494 Scott Adams： Lots of Good Persuasion Content Today, and Trump Too
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Summary
In this episode: The Taliban agree to let 200 Americans and foreign workers out of the airport, Jennifer Aniston is sexy at 52 years old, and a government plan to blackmail itself to get us out of a hostage situation.
Transcript
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Is it my imagination, or do you all look sexier than usual?
00:00:30.000
I've got a problem with my technology on one of my platforms here, so let's do this, do
00:00:51.620
I'm going to implement the Rumble platform, too.
00:01:02.820
For some reason, your interface doesn't allow me to know if I've hit the right buttons.
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Do you realize that I almost read the news without the simultaneous zip?
00:01:26.720
But you need that sip, and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of dopamine to the day, the thing that makes
00:01:54.780
The Taliban have apparently agreed to let 200 Americans and foreign workers who were trapped
00:02:07.900
Do you think the Taliban said, when we asked, hey, you've got 200 Americans, can you let them
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Did they say, oh, oh, yeah, we didn't even know they were there.
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Or is it possible that our government promised them something that the public probably shouldn't
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We kind of self-blackmailed ourselves on this situation, didn't we?
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We put ourselves in a situation where we blackmailed ourselves by leaving enough people there that
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we knew we'd have to pay something, I assume, or agree to something, in order to get them
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So I don't know how much worse you can do as a government than blackmailing yourself.
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Has anybody failed that hard in the history of governments?
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Instead of blackmailing our competition, just hear me out on this.
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In other big news, Jennifer Aniston is launching some hair care situation.
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And the Daily Mail shows pictures of her, and it describes it this way.
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Now, the story, of course, the point of it was that she's attractive, and she's 52 years
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Have you seen a picture of Jennifer Aniston at 52?
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Because I have a feeling a lot of that is just lifestyle choices and doing the right stuff.
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Now, I would always say that it's easier if you're a famous, rich movie star because being
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If somebody paid you a million dollars a year to go to the gym, you'd probably go to the
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So, you know, if you're a movie star, you're basically being paid to go to the gym.
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But I only point that out because you know the story about the four-minute mile.
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Until the first human being ran a mile under four minutes, it was assumed just not even
00:05:07.700
But as soon as the first person did it, then the record just fell like crazy.
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And there's something in the psychology about what's possible.
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And when you look at Jennifer Aniston at 52, and they're still doing like glamour pictures
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of her to advertise her product, and the point of the pictures is that she's sexy, that completely
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changes your view of what looking young and sexy could be.
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I mean, if you could look like her into your 50s, maybe it's worth trying, right?
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How many people even try to be good-looking in their 50s?
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Who in their 50s who just has a normal job, you know, you just commute to work, how many
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people in their 50s are saying to themselves, I'm going to work extra hard to like really
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You just think, well, even if I worked all day long, I'm going to be a 50-year-old or whatever.
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I mean, there's a limit to how good I can look.
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Jennifer Aniston is showing you that whatever you thought was the limit, you probably weren't
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Fox News is dunking on its competition by noting that they're ignoring another big story.
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The story they're ignoring is about the documents that The Intercept published that suggests that
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Fauci lied to Congress about NIH funding for the Wuhan lab.
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Even if you were going to debunk the story, it's a big story.
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And it was not covered by CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, or Washington Post, among others.
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Now, personally, I don't think it's that big of a story.
00:07:10.640
I think that the lying to Congress was more like weasel words, meaning he was just using
00:07:17.780
gain of function in a slightly different context, I guess.
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So I'm not sure it was a lie so much as a corporate weaseling persuasion thing that wasn't so cool.
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I think they did need to fund gain of functions research.
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But I don't know that it made a difference that he funded it.
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United Airlines is requiring vaccinations for all of their staff.
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Any of the United Airlines staff who claim they don't want to get the vaccination for religious exemptions,
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If you claim a religious exemption, you don't have to get the vaccination.
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I guess they figured people would just claim religious exemptions to get out of it.
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So Biden has announced he's got a six-pronged plan to deal with COVID.
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Now, some people would say, I have a six-point plan.
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Anyway, if you watch Ted Lasso, that's funnier.
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So federal employees must be vaccinated in this six-pronged plan.
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So one of the prongs of the six-pronged plan is they all got to get vaccinated.
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Seems to me that that would lose us about 20% of our federal employees.
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Don't you think 20% of the federal employees are just going to not get vaccinated?
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All right, I've told you before that CNN has a one-anecdote-per-day schedule for anecdotal persuasion.
00:10:01.740
And every single day, they will run one new story about the poor bastard who wishes they'd gotten a vaccination.
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Because data matters, but not as much as anecdotes.
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Before she died of COVID-19, she begged TikTok followers to get the vaccine.
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Megan Alexandra Blankenbiller was waiting to get vaccinated until she had convinced her family to do it together.
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So she didn't get vaccinated, and she wishes she had.
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What was the reported weight of the tragic death of Ms. Blankenbiller?
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Well, it wasn't reported, but they do have a photograph.
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Now, I feel as if the news and the medical community are just screwing us by not reporting the weight class of the people who are dying.
00:11:20.460
I mean, they do report it, you know, as a statistic and stuff every now and then.
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But every single day, they should report, we had 300 overweight people die and six people of normal weight.
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If you weren't overweight, you wouldn't get vaccinated.
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They have to fool you and manipulate you to get vaccinated.
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And so they don't want to tell you that your risk, if you're not overweight, is not nearly the same as overweight people.
00:12:07.100
Now, you know, whether or not you should get a vaccination should probably have nothing to do with your weight.
00:12:13.620
I mean, logically, the choice to get vaccinated probably shouldn't depend on that.
00:12:22.540
I mean, people will make their decisions based on stuff like that.
00:12:31.540
So here's a persuasion, subjective opinion I want from you.
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When Texas introduced their new anti-abortion law that allowed private citizens to sue abortion providers,
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did that make it more or less likely that the governor of California would be recalled?
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Because abortion is such a rallying cry that it might make people want to make sure that they maintain that they're democratic governors to maintain abortion.
00:13:08.400
Now, I don't think California is really at risk to have any kind of law like they have in Texas.
00:13:14.820
We're so far away from that being a thing in California.
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If people are afraid, they'll just vote based on their fear.
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And so if Texas makes them afraid to lose their abortion rights, and that's their top issue,
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Texas may have guaranteed that Democrats keep a majority in Congress.
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Because the California recall isn't just about the governor.
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If Feinstein leaves office, and she's not going to last that long.
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If she leaves office, she'll be replaced by the governor.
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If it's Larry Elder, he's going to put a Republican in there.
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And then, you know, the balance of the Senate changes.
00:14:06.200
And suddenly, Texas, with their little abortion law,
00:14:10.040
may have changed the entire nature of the political equation in the country.
00:14:15.320
Now, it's probably good that they did this well before 2022.
00:14:23.140
I have a feeling that the Texas abortion law could be one of the biggest variables
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for the next, I don't know, five or ten years of political life.
00:14:39.320
Because I live in California, and if you tell me, you know,
00:14:43.120
I should be influenced by something that happened in Texas,
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I say, well, I hear your argument, but I just don't feel it.
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It just feels like it's the other side of the world.
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but if they can be made to feel it, it'll matter.
00:14:57.500
Did you see Greg Guffeld's interview with Trump?
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I guess it's going to be airing in three parts, started last night.
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I haven't watched all of it, but I've watched a number of the clips.
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Watch especially the clip where Greg asked Trump how to convince Greg's wife to get vaccinated.
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So, you know, she was born in Russia, and so they both joke about her being hard to convince.
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But you have to see the quality of Trump's answer.
00:15:38.280
So first, you have to agree with the person you're trying to persuade.
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So watch when Trump is asked to persuade Greg's wife.
00:16:06.960
And he's making sure that he's acknowledged that completely.
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And that's what the bad persuaders are getting wrong.
00:16:17.080
You have to acknowledge the other side's argument, or you're done before you start.
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If you can't acknowledge their argument, then they know you're not really arguing,
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or you're not persuading, you're just, you know, talking.
00:16:33.020
And then watch how gently he gets into his reasons why she should be considering vaccination.
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And then he says, you know, but I think the vaccinations may have saved millions of people.
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It's the same topic, but he takes it away from Greg's wife so that it's not like a personal thing.
00:17:11.100
He says, you know, I think we saved millions of people.
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I don't know if that's true, but it's good persuasion.
00:17:20.300
Oh, he added that if you get the vaccination and then you get infected, your odds of having a bad outcome are really low.
00:17:31.640
But he got to the kill shot while you thought he was serving you tea and biscuits.
00:17:45.840
Did he save millions of people with the vaccination?
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The last thing he says, so it sticks in your mind, is that the vaccination will keep you from getting really sick or dying.
00:18:03.780
Now, did he go after his statistics and science and stuff like that?
00:18:12.240
Because probably none of that would have been persuasive.
00:18:17.700
You don't realize it until you understand technique.
00:18:21.360
Once you understand technique, you see him apply it correctly time after time.
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And yesterday in the live stream, I talked to you about the doctors who are doing exactly the opposite of good technique.
00:18:33.060
And you watch them side by side, and then you learn the technique, and you can see the difference.
00:18:43.200
There's a few more coming up on subsequent nights.
00:18:46.060
The Robert E. Lee statue, the biggest one in the country, came down in Virginia.
00:18:53.120
But speaking of Donald Trump, speaking of that, what did Trump say about the statue?
00:19:07.580
He said, oh, he said that Robert E. Lee, if he'd been the general in Afghanistan, he would have won the war in Afghanistan for the United States.
00:19:37.880
That's the funniest thing anybody ever said in public, or at least this week, because it's so provocative.
00:19:53.260
That's not a comment you could hear and then think of something else right away.
00:19:58.360
You put that thought in somebody's head, and they have to stop and think about it.
00:20:04.180
It's just so diabolical, the way he takes this normal, he takes this totally normal topic,
00:20:11.880
and he combines it with, like, gasoline and matches.
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You know, Robert E. Lee, I think he would have won in Afghanistan.
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Like, if you don't get it, that he does this intentionally, if you don't know it's intentional, you don't get it.
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The other person who's like this is, have you ever watched a Norm MacDonald comedy?
00:20:49.000
Especially at these, I think it's still on, a show on a live stream.
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And one of his continuing themes he does in his stand-up and his shows is he tells jokes that are going to make you really uncomfortable.
00:21:03.960
And usually it's because it's uncomfortably sort of racist, but it's not.
00:21:13.720
And you say to yourself, I'm having a reaction to this.
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Even though it's not racist, it's like so uncomfortably close, and that's the joke.
00:21:24.220
He's making you uncomfortably close to something that you don't want to deal with.
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And then it's funny, because he's just making you uncomfortable, but he's doing it intentionally.
00:21:33.120
And he does it with, you know, sexism jokes and stuff like that.
00:21:36.720
You know, you'll tell the joke and you'll think to yourself, well, that's really sexist.
00:21:49.520
So the joke is not the joke with Norm MacDonald, often.
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The joke is what he made you think and how you reacted to it.
00:22:02.220
You know, you don't realize that you're always part of the larger part of the joke.
00:22:07.860
It's either on you, or at least you're laughing from the sidelines knowing what he's up to.
00:22:20.880
Here's some interesting info I got from Machiavelli's Underbelly.
00:22:36.820
And he asked people, or he gave some statistics.
00:22:44.100
Apparently, exercising, if you are not an exerciser, but you get on an exercise program,
00:22:51.860
your odds of having a bad outcome with COVID go way down if you're a regular exerciser.
00:23:03.660
And so this issue of weight and exercise is a big deal.
00:23:09.700
I don't know if we've ever had a better president for fitness.
00:23:23.740
Will you give me that, even if you're anti-Biden, if you don't like him as president?
00:23:28.540
But will you give me that he is a good role model for health?
00:23:41.320
On that one area, he's actually a really good role model.
00:23:47.080
I think he's been running up until recently, probably.
00:23:56.980
I'm not sure that's the worst problem in the world.
00:24:01.680
I don't think that's the problem relative to...
00:24:04.480
You know, I see ice cream as entertainment, whereas eating at McDonald's is a meal.
00:24:10.820
So anyway, I think Biden is missing a big play because he should be telling the country to exercise.
00:24:31.840
And that seventh prong should be, get outside, you bastards.
00:24:42.420
And just give us statistics and say it'll improve your odds against the coronavirus by whatever percentage.
00:24:49.220
And also at Machiavelli's underbelly, he tweeted this.
00:24:58.380
He said, based on reactions I've received to tweeting the most up-to-date science on exercise and weight,
00:25:04.620
the stuff I just told you about, as it relates to COVID outcomes,
00:25:08.620
he thinks that the biggest reason is, quote, I have given up on life is the reason I perceive.
00:25:18.480
But he says the more overweight someone is, the more they have given up.
00:25:22.240
And the more they object to data quality, saying, ah, the data's not good.
00:25:40.600
Now, this is my own little, you could call it a hypothesis if you prefer.
00:25:48.160
That every human being needs a certain minimum amount of pleasure in their day,
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They'll just literally put a bullet in their head.
00:26:11.400
Well, huge, huge portions of our pleasure just were taken from us.
00:26:20.020
And you're going to make up the difference in any way you can.
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Because if you can't find a healthy way to get pleasure,
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A day without pleasure is you'd rather be dead, literally.
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You will do whatever it takes to get enough pleasure,
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And that's a model that explains almost everything you see, basically.
00:26:59.040
So when I was watching a kid's stream out of high school the other day,
00:27:04.700
I was noticing that, I don't know, it could be just confirmation bias,
00:27:08.620
but they look a lot fatter than they did last year.
00:27:20.120
or watch a high school class streaming out of class at the end of the day.
00:27:33.880
I mean, we're actually killing ourselves by locking ourselves in
00:27:50.200
Make sure that they're getting enough pleasure,
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Might be getting rid of some mandates or whatever.
00:27:56.980
But you've got to make sure they get enough pleasure
00:28:03.480
Because you don't even have the option of losing weight
00:28:42.620
Does it require willpower to resist the cookie?
00:28:51.440
And you know ice cream isn't the healthiest thing in the world.
00:29:06.260
And when somebody can resist food and somebody can't,
00:29:26.240
although you should take this with a grain of salt,
00:29:28.500
because there's been periodic good news in fusion energy for 30 years,
00:29:39.960
Now, if you're predicting the next 80 years of climate change,
00:29:51.360
You've got an 80-year prediction of what the planet's going to be like
00:29:55.220
with your solar power and your windmills and whatever.
00:30:04.980
Are we going to get fusion in the next, I don't know, 30 years,
00:30:15.340
One of the smartest people in the technology field
00:30:24.740
because he was a billionaire and still is a billionaire.
00:30:31.340
because you'd be thinking about the person instead of the point.
00:31:03.460
you're going to use more energy than you produce.
00:31:22.000
And let me put this in terms that some of you will understand
00:31:53.460
When something is reduced to an engineering problem,
00:31:58.240
it basically guarantees it's going to be solved.
00:32:01.600
Because engineering is trial and error, trial and error,
00:32:11.380
We didn't necessarily know how to invent it in the first place,
00:32:25.820
Well, maybe there's some science in there, too.
00:32:27.240
So, this is one of those stories that you could just totally miss.
00:32:33.680
You know, you're just looking at the headlines.
00:32:37.620
But there is some possibility it's the biggest news in the world.
00:32:47.200
the entire energy model of the world changes permanently.
00:33:06.700
All right, let's talk about a dog that is not barking.
00:33:11.820
Do you remember when it was common to see groups in the streets
00:33:18.900
Most of you are old enough to remember that, right?
00:33:31.060
Where is the person going on television to tell you nuclear power is a problem?
00:33:41.600
Do you know why nobody is going on television to tell you nuclear power is a bad idea?
00:33:45.300
Because nobody smart thinks it's a bad idea anymore.
00:33:54.900
But if you'd made your job for the last 20 years in the media of saying bad things about nuclear energy,
00:34:01.620
can you just change and just put people on and say, oh, well, it turns out that it's safe.
00:34:08.180
Now, a lot of it is because time has passed and we know how to do things more safely.
00:34:15.800
They just store it on site now, which is the obvious thing to do.
00:34:18.460
You know, because it's already a nuclear power plant, right?
00:34:23.680
So the question of do you want to live near a nuclear power plant is sort of already solved.
00:34:30.120
So they just store the nuclear waste next to the power plant.
00:34:34.560
It turns out it was sort of obvious because it's the one place that, you know, what else were you going to do with it?
00:34:40.860
Just use part of the parking lot and turn it into your storage area.
00:34:46.020
There are other ways to take care of the waste.
00:34:48.240
For example, Generation 4 nuclear power plants will burn it for fuel.
00:34:52.200
So you can take all of that waste and just repurpose it for fuel for the newer generation of nuclear reactors.
00:35:01.220
We didn't notice, because it happened gradually, that all of the opponents for nuclear power stopped talking in public.
00:35:07.720
They'll still talk privately, but as soon as you tell them that their information is out of date,
00:35:16.260
Because people's opinions against nuclear energy are really data-related.
00:35:21.040
You know, the data says it's unsafe, you know, whatever.
00:35:24.480
But once you show them that current data makes it obviously the thing you need to do,
00:35:34.180
So I don't know why, but nobody wants to talk about the fact that nuclear energy is now liked by the left and the right.
00:35:45.360
He just doesn't make a big enough deal of it, in my opinion.
00:35:48.340
Well, China has threatened to send a warship to our coastal waters,
00:35:52.540
because apparently we sent a warship within 12 miles of one of their artificial islands made in the South China Sea.
00:36:01.900
Now, if China sends a warship to our coastal waters, should we sink the first one?
00:36:12.620
Because then, you know, they'd feel like they had to sink one of ours in the South China Sea, right?
00:36:27.340
I feel like we should at least consider sinking it.
00:36:46.760
As a citizen, I don't know if I would fault my government if we took out your warship,
00:36:54.860
I don't know that I would fault them, even if there was a pretty big blowback.
00:37:01.880
So, if you want to send your warship, just tell your sailors.
00:37:12.780
So, these are three things that China has ruined in 2021.
00:37:16.540
These are three things that used to be okay, but now they've ruined them.
00:37:26.580
Yeah, we can't breathe anymore, because we'll breathe in the coronavirus.
00:37:33.040
The ocean is no longer safe, because they're going to start a war in the ocean and make
00:37:48.620
Commerce isn't safe, because they're going to steal your IP, and they're going to do bad
00:37:54.920
So, if you liked any of these things, breathing, the ocean, economics, commerce, if you liked
00:38:08.620
Now, as you know, China has some big problems coming.
00:38:25.020
So, to anybody in China, you better think twice about your form of government, because your
00:38:39.460
Now, it isn't up to me to tell you in China how to run your government, but it's taking you
00:38:49.180
If you don't like that, maybe you might want to think of a change.
00:38:52.520
I'd also like to reiterate that the U.S. has every right to kill your fentanyl dealers
00:39:04.100
And I encourage the government to do exactly that as soon as possible.
00:39:08.200
I want to see bodies hitting the ground, fentanyl dealers, the big ones.
00:39:12.480
I'm not talking about a street dealer, but the big ones in China that are sending the massive
00:39:38.440
And they decided not to do anything about it, apparently.
00:39:47.420
There is no moral, ethical, or legal restriction anymore that I recognize against killing those
00:39:58.600
And I know the first time you hear that, it's so shocking.
00:40:19.760
I'm going to do a little testing on the Rumble platform.
00:40:40.380
Well, I did hear he had a little, uh, some issue, uh, at an event.
00:40:50.180
You know, when I see somebody, uh, protesting Larry Elder, I guess they were dressed in a
00:41:01.460
I'm not so sure that was an anti-Larry Elder protester.
00:41:08.040
Because would that hurt him or help him to know that he was being treated poorly by racists
00:41:19.340
It's hard for me to imagine that whoever put on the gorilla outfit, uh, thought that
00:41:24.240
this would hurt Larry Elder because it doesn't.
00:41:30.460
He's pretty anti-fragile, if you know what I mean.
00:41:34.560
Anti-fragile in the sense that, uh, if you, if you go after him, all it does is give him
00:41:41.220
attention and the attacks don't seem to be, you know, having any effect.
00:41:45.960
So the more they go after him, I just think it raises his profile.
00:41:49.360
It makes him look like the leader, makes people think, why do I want to vote for the person
00:41:53.040
who has 1% support when I can do the one that might actually win?