right? And I feel like inevitably they're going to keep a few. But let's say, I'll just give you a number, let's say they keep 20. I don't know, 20 Americans that didn't get out. And but we get everybody else out. So suppose we lose 20 souls. They happen to be American. What did we avoid? Probably a hundred thousand deaths, 50,000 if the civil war happened.

So Biden may have accidentally traded 20 American lives — this is just a speculation, this is not based on data — he could have accidentally traded 20 lives to save 50,000 Afghans. Is that immoral? Well it's not America first, but I don't know if it's immoral. You know, you could argue that one.

All right. Rasmussen poll asked if Taliban takes American hostages, should the U.S. use military to rescue them? And 78% say yes. Is that good news or bad news? It's good news because the Taliban needs to know that we're going to get our hostages out or there's going to be big trouble. Hostages slash evacuees. And having 78% of the public say yes, send the military in, while about the same amount of the public says get Adams to Afghanistan, that is exactly the right situation for the Taliban to say, you know, if we don't let everybody out we're really effed, right?

So this is the best poll I've ever seen in my life because it says the American public are completely on the same side. I mean 78% is as good as you can get in the American public. And then Rasmussen poll also asked, is the Biden administration doing enough to evacuate Americans? And 59% said no. And I think this is under the category of how could you do enough? You know, really, how could you do enough? You know it's always going to look like it wasn't soon enough, didn't do enough. But it does look like it's not enough.

All right. Here's the question that I asked on Twitter, and this topic will be more about persuasion than about whether you should get a vaccination. Can we agree that I don't care if you get vaccinated? Everybody, everybody, I don't care if you get vaccinated. So anything I say next is going to be about vaccination persuasion, but it's not intended to work on you really. It's not a trick, right?

Let me say it again. This is not some kind of like backward psychology hypnosis trick. I really don't want to persuade you on this. I really, really don't. It's totally unethical because it's a health decision. You got to make your own decision on that. I'll persuade you on politics. I'll be happy to do that. I'll persuade you on how to live your life better, how to have systems instead of goals. I'll persuade you on all kinds of stuff, but not your health decisions. Not that. That's on you totally.

But let's talk about the persuasion game because it's happening whether I participate or not. And Omar Khatib alerted me to a series of tweets from advertising insiders in which they asked some advertising professionals what the governments could do to persuade more people to get the vaccination. Now, did the advertising executives say much the same thing I did, which is hold on, even if we could persuade people to get the vaccinations, it would be unethical, so let me back out of this conversation right away because I'm a marketing professional and I'm not going to cross that ethical barrier? Well that didn't happen.

Instead they gave you pretty good specific suggestions for doing the most unethical thing in the world: persuading people to get a health outcome, a particular treatment. So here are some of their persuasion points, and I'm going to evaluate them so you can get a little lesson on persuasion at the same time.

Number one: Are marketing executives good at persuasion? Anybody? Anybody who works at a big company where there are professional marketing people, are those professional marketing people trained in persuasion, let's say the way I am? I'm a hypnotist, etc. Do you think they have the same kind of persuasion training as this cartoonist? No, not even close. But they do have a lot of tools, so they can do polls and they can do focus groups and they can A/B test things. So they can use brute force to get to a good outcome because you can just randomly try stuff, semi-randomly, and then just test it and see if it works and then do more of the stuff that works. So that's marketing.

But here's what marketers are not good at: the first try. Because almost nobody is right. The first thing you try isn't necessarily going to work. So here are some of their first things to try from, let's see, this is from these different marketing executives. This from Jim Lasser suggests using humor to disarm those who oppose the vaccine. Nope, nope. You can use humor. It'll maybe make a good commercial for selling your soap or your beer, but humor isn't going to change your health care decisions. I'm sorry, it just isn't.

Now maybe he's right. That's why you test it, right? So what is the value of my opinion on the initial input, the thing that you could test? Well I think my opinion is pretty good, better than the average, because I study this field. But I could be wrong. Maybe you test this and it's exactly the right thing, but I doubt it. My instinct tells me the humor is not where you go on this. Definitely not. In fact I would go with fear, the opposite of humor. Humor is ha ha ha, I'm relaxed, I'm having a good time. That's not the head you want to put people in. If you want somebody to do something as radical as putting a needle in their arm, you've got to scare the out of them, right? That'll work. You got to scare them. I don't think anything else will work.

Let's go on with these other ideas. He said that the same guy said that the stickiness of puns can be effective. I don't know about that. Now the stickiness of puns in terms of wordplay, that does have some scientific support. If the glove doesn't fit you must acquit, sort of word play. It's a rhyme. The rhyme does actually create some persuasion, so science supports that. But that's not enough to get somebody vaccinated.

All right. Another guy, a marketing professional, said let's turn it from you've got to get protected to let's hunt this thing down and kill it. So Mike Lee I think said that. Well I'm not sure about the attribution but the idea is that you got to get tough with it, talk tough. And then people say yeah, let's go to war against that virus. Terrible idea. Terrible idea. I mean I don't even know what to say about it. It's just a terrible idea. All right, so forget that one.

Another said that who originally cast a doubt on the vaccine should play the Trump card and give him credit for starting the vaccine program and directing the resources. Possibly the worst of all the ideas. If you bring Trump into the conversation of vaccinations, do people even try to make a medical decision? No. As soon as you add Trump to the conversation it's a political conversation. It doesn't matter what the data is. You throw Trump into any conversation about health care and it's just a Trump conversation. So this is a horrible idea. Like really, really, really bad from this marketing professional. Don't throw Trump into the conversation. That just makes everything worse.

All right. Here's another one. An effective campaign: we have to find people who are anti-vaccine and convert them. So you'd have to find the anti-vaccine people and get them to be pro-vaccine and then help sell it. Would that convince you if you saw somebody who is anti-vaccine? Let's say you are and they were that anti-vaccine just like you but unlike you they had changed to be pro-vaccine. Would that change your mind? No, no, no it wouldn't. Not even for a second. The first thing you say is well they bought off. Another sheep. Looks like another sheep went to slaughter. No, it would be the least persuasive thing in the world to see what other people are doing.

Now suppose all you did was show that smart, good-looking people were getting vaccinated and the people who were not getting vaccinated were unhealthy looking slobs who make lots of bad decisions in general. Well that might work. That might work. Not a specific person because we discount celebrities' opinions completely. But what if it was a montage of smart, beautiful looking people getting vaccinated and you know obese bad decision makers not getting vaccinated? That might work because people are tribal and they'd say oh I want to be in that tribe, not that tribe. So I mean it would move some people in either direction but I think your net would be good. And when I say that again remember you'd have to test it. I'm not smart enough nor is anybody to know what will work without testing it. Persuasion doesn't really work that way. Even the hypnotist who's hypnotizing you in real time, just the two of you in a room, that hypnotist is still A/B testing because you're trying stuff, you're looking at the reaction, try something else, look at the reaction. So without the testing you don't really have a system for persuasion. They have to be part of the team.

All right. Here's some more. You shouldn't assume everyone is motivated by politics. Okay, that's real helpful because well how does that persuade you? I guess the point is to make it non-political but we've tried that. That didn't seem to make any difference.

Someone who is pregnant and also a marketing professional said that she was persuaded by hearing from people who are genuinely concerned for you. Interesting. So her suggestion was that she was persuaded by hearing from people who were genuinely concerned for her. Now we're getting closer. Now that's some real persuasion, at least good thinking, because we are persuaded by people who genuinely care for us. Why is it that you don't think the pharmaceutical companies can be trusted? Because they don't care for you. Why is it that you don't think the government could be trusted? They don't care for you. Why do you not believe the pundit you see on the news? Don't care for you. In fact it might be the same pundit who wants to hunt you down. It might be in a lot of cases.

So now most of the people telling you to get the vaccination are people who don't care for you, literally don't care about you one bit. They don't even know you. You're a stranger. But how persuasive would it be, somebody who actually does care for you? Now they may not be experts on vaccinations but I'll bet it is persuasive. So I don't know how you could ramp that up to get lots of concerned people talking to unvaccinated people. And I'm not suggesting you should. I'm just saying that at least this is genuine persuasion smartness. You know it looks like something you could test.

All right. Here's another one. You should treat the campaign for the vaccination persuasion with the kind of budget and tactics you'd see a political party use to get out the vote. I think they did, didn't they? Wouldn't you say that the government did exactly that? Used the same kind of mass persuasion as get out the vote. I feel like that's sort of a non-answer. That's a very marketing meeting answer.

All right. Here's my take. So I'm going to add my own persuasion suggestions. Again I'm not trying to persuade you. I'm teaching you how to do persuasion, okay? Can we all deal with that distinction? Not trying to persuade you. That would be unethical. But I'll tell you how persuasion works.

I think you need a "fake because." In other words I think there are a bunch of people who are close to being persuaded and would like to but they're still stuck in their old opinion. So they need a "fake because," something that they can say, oh, something changed, so now my old opinion was right but now my new opinion is right too because something changed. So you need that "fake because." The FDA approval might be that. So I think some people are going to say, even though the polls suggest it's not going to make much difference, I think it will. I think the polls are misleading. I think that the FDA approval is even going to make the Moderna vaccination more popular even though it doesn't have FDA approval. People are going to kind of expect that it will get it because the Pfizer got it. So there's some crossover persuasion that the Pfizer thing will make the Moderna thing look safer even though they're different things. It's just how your brain works.

So the "fake because." I would look for other "fake becauses," not just the FDA approval, but how about we've waited long enough that the odds of problems are way down because you would have seen most of them pop up. That would be a "fake because." But there could be others too.

As I said, you need fear and visual persuasion. Anything less is barely trying. So you need to show people dying of COVID like in the worst possible ways and saying I should have gotten the vaccination and then dying. And there are plenty of anecdotes like that. CNN is promoting that kind of persuasion with their story choices and I think it works. I mean you could argue that CNN shouldn't be in the persuasion game but unfortunately they are. And I would say that those anecdotal terrible visuals where you can sort of put yourself in the bed, you say oh I can see myself being that guy. Don't be that guy.

Show people that you like getting vaccinated. That's similar to showing the two groups, you know one is beautiful and one is not.

I would also like to see an expert explaining risk management to people. You've never seen that except me and I'm far from an expert. If you can't show me, let's say Nate Silver. I like to use him because a lot of you disagree with some of his opinions so he's sort of perfect for this. You can disagree with his opinions but not his rationale, meaning that his thinking process is generally pretty close to flawless. It's his field. He knows how to think statistically. He's good at it. Wouldn't you like to see somebody who is just flat out good at it? Maybe a few of them. So you've got a few different opinions explaining to you the risk benefit, thinking through all of the risks we know about and all the ones we don't, putting some kind of statistics on them and just walking you through it. Say okay here's the risk of getting vaccinated, all these potential risks, here's what we know about them. Here's the risk of not getting vaccinated, here's what we know about it. Put some numbers on it. I think that would be at least a "fake because" for some people. Some people would say you know nobody ever explained it that well, right?

All right. Let me okay here here's the persuasion that would work. You ready for this? Again I'm not suggesting it. This is an example of what would work. You take Nate Silver and you sit him down for a couple hours with Mike Rowe. You all know Mike Rowe. If you're not American you might not. Mike Rowe's a famous personality who is sort of an everyman. He does what's called Dirty Jobs. He did a show where he would do like these awful jobs where you literally get physically dirty doing gross stuff. So he's famous for being like a level-headed rational person who just can see how to get stuff done, right? That's sort of his brand.

So you take Nate Silver and you spend two hours with Mike Rowe teaching him how to look at the statistics and then you have Mike Rowe explain the statistics to the public. Why? Because if Nate Silver does it you're not going to understand it, right? He's almost too good because his explanation would have enough nuance in it to be accurate but maybe a little confusing because you can't follow the nuance of statistics. But you take that stuff and you package it up with Mike Rowe, a really, really credible voice, especially to the right who has a lot of resistance. Mike Rowe could sell the out of this. You really could.

Now people are saying is he a scientist? Is he a statistician? No, no he's you. That's why it works. Do you know who would be the most persuasive person for you? The person who would convince you specifically the best would be you. If you could make a digital version of yourself and give it a script written by somebody who knows what they're talking about and then that digital version talks you into getting vaccinated, it would be the most persuasive thing that could happen. You couldn't beat that, right?

Mike Rowe is you. That's sort of his brand. You know I hate to characterize other people because he might not want to characterize himself that way which is unfair, but in my view the thing that makes him popular is you say yeah I think just like that. Mike Rowe is saying the words coming out of his mouth are the ones I'm thinking but he's saying it better than I'm thinking it. That's the ultimate. He says what you're thinking but he says it better than you're thinking it.

Somebody says why a white person? That's a good question. If you could take the same concept and replace Mike Rowe with, I'm going to say Charles Barkley just to pick a name, right? I picked Charles Barkley because I don't know if anybody's been more popular with everybody. If you don't follow basketball that's an unfamiliar reference but Charles Barkley is Black but his sort of approach to race is so commonsensical that it just appeals to left and right in a weird kind of way. So yeah, you take a Charles Barkley who everybody likes and he's famous for being a plain talker, common sense kind of guy. Yeah that's actually that might even be an upgrade on my idea. I think Mike Rowe would be great but yeah a Charles Barkley absolutely he could do that.

Somebody says Steve Harvey maybe. I know. I think Charles Barkley is more relatable. I feel like more the everyman talks like you do kind of thing.

And here's another idea. It seems to me that the anti-vaxxers like to call the people who are taking the vaccination sheep. What would Trump do if he were the recipient of a thing like that? He