r door with three IDs and made us scream its name while asking us for its home address.

I'll just let that sit there for a moment.

Now here's a humor writing lesson. You ready? Humor writing lesson. What makes this sentence funny? We wouldn't recognize good science and good data if it showed up at our door with three IDs and made us scream its name while asking us for its home address. What makes that work? Well, it's visual, right? It's also cruel. It's bizarre. You know, these are the dimensions of humor. If you get any two of the six dimensions of humor in there, it's gonna be funny. So you've got cruelty, bizarre, it's clever. It's got basically three or four.

But here's the technique I want to share with you. It's that third and last clause, "at its home address," right? So if you're going to exaggerate something, this is a simple humor technique. You just say, okay, something's bad. Let me describe how bad it is in a funny way. Now if I said we wouldn't know good science and good data if it showed us three IDs, is that funny? We wouldn't know it if it showed us three sources of identification. No, not really. It just sort of sits there, makes a point, you know, in an analogy kind of way, but it just sits there, right?

If I say we wouldn't know good science and good data if it showed us three IDs and made us scream its name while asking us, well now you're talking. Now it's getting a little funny because we've got the naughty part in there and it's bizarre and it's got everything. But here's the part I want to teach you. It's the third thing that sells it, right? The second part, you know, the first part is just a setup. We wouldn't know good science if it showed us three IDs. Not funny yet. It's just a setup. But then the payoff is making us scream its name while asking us. But then the real dessert, you know, the thing that ties this together, makes it work, is the third thing. Because it's hard to come up with three things that fit, three things that cause you to be able to positively identify it. And the third thing was it's at its home address, which took a little work to come up with that third thing.

So that's the technique. If you're going to exaggerate, have three levels of exaggeration. First one, okay, it's just setting me up. Second one, you need to get the laugh. Second one needs to make them laugh. All right, all right, I see where you're going. You're done now, right? As soon as they think you're done, that's where you add the third one. The third one is what puts it over the line and makes it, you know, one for the ages. Two could be funny if you could get that third one in there. People will remember that, right? So that's your lesson for the day on humor.

Well, apparently CNN is already worried about Trump. He is the top story today. Can you believe it? Trump is the top story on CNN. Do you know what made Trump the top story on CNN? He talked. He just opened his mouth. He just talked. And he's the biggest story in the world. And what he talked about was that he's reminding people that he believes the election was rigged and that that might be a major theme of his reelection.

Now do you think Trump could get reelected making the election itself a major theme? Would that be strong enough if he just said, hey, I got robbed, I got robbed, let's do this right, reelect me, it was rigged? I say no. I say no. Yeah, and I'm seeing more no's in the comments. No way, right? Because it's whiny. It's small, right? It's small. It's whiny. And you just think maybe if he tried already he could have won, right? So even if you think it's true, it doesn't work, does it? Because you feel like he should win anyway, right?

If you're complaining about the referee, well maybe you should have shot better baskets. If you think you lost the game because of the ref, well maybe you should have played better. I mean that's sort of automatically what we think. Complaining about the rules, it's too small. That's about him, right? That's not even about you. You don't want your president running for him or her. You want the president running for you.

Well when Trump ran the first time he said make America great again. That was about you. When he said build a wall, that was for you. And people recognized it. But if he runs because he's got a personal gripe about the election, that's not going to work. That's not going to work. This is not strong enough. I mean he could win it anyway. I mean maybe he could make that work because people just are sick of whatever's happening. But it's not a good approach even if he got elected anyway.

But here's what would be. You ready? Let's take Trump's complaint that really is all about himself and now let's turn that into a winning campaign formula. You ready? I'm going to give Trump the winning formula. This is the campaign issue that would work. We can't know if I won or not. I happen to think I did. But we have to make elections auditable. Make elections fully auditable. You should know if you voted the moment the elections close. At the moment the votes close you should get a text to say yeah we got your vote, here it is. Or some kind of a system. I'm not saying that that would be the system.

But if President Trump runs for reelection and makes his main campaign theme I'm going to fix elections, now could he do that? Because the federal government has limited capabilities when it comes to the states. Yeah, he could. He could make money available. He could threaten the states with losing money. He could do a lot. I mean I don't know if he could fix it in one term but he can do a lot, I think. Now I need a fact check from smarter people to tell me if that's practical, but I think it is. And if he does that, then it's about us, right?

I don't mind his complaint that he thinks he won, despite no proof of that at the moment. I don't mind that complaint because that's an opinion. He gets to have an opinion. But if he tells me he's going to fix the system or work hard at it or at least work as hard as he did on the wall even if it didn't work out, we need somebody who cares to make our system auditable again.

If Trump runs with a main theme of fixing our election system, I'm all in. So let me say that again. Like most of you, I haven't made any decision about who I would support in 2024. I don't even know who's running. But if Trump makes this a major theme, to fix the elections, to make them auditable, I'm all in. Because you know what? I don't care about anything else.

So OAN is reporting that some Republicans are being told when they go to vote in the election recall, which is happening right now, they're being told that they already voted. Now it's on OAN, so you can reasonably ask yourself, is that accurate? How many people? Is this one person or more? We don't know. All right, so because it's in the media you have to say to yourself is it true? I don't know. Doesn't mean it's true just because it's reported.

But and also Project Veritas, I saw they're asking Californians if they see anything that looks sketchy to let them know. I can report that I have heard reports of something very sketchy. I'm not going to mention it yet, but personally I've heard anecdotally a report that sounded sketchy as hell to me. Don't know if it's true, so I'm not going to repeat it.

Now these, the fact that we have these reports, anecdotal and not 100 percent reliable, does that mean that the election is bad? Does that mean that this election is corrupt or rigged because we hear these stories? No, it doesn't mean that. I mean we don't have anything that's like some kind of proof of that. But here's what we also don't have. We don't have an election that we could audit fully. So when it's done we won't know if we voted or not. And we no longer live in a world in which trusting our officials makes sense at all.

Now as I was looking at this I thought to myself, you know this is a bad situation that you've got elections that people don't trust in a way that our system requires them to trust it in order to work. And I thought to myself that's bad and that makes me angry. But not as angry as this. We had two years to fix this, right? And we've also got time to fix it for 2022. But as far as I know nobody's working on it. And we have, maybe Texas made a step, but even they don't have an auditable system. Yeah, maybe they have a system that's just captured by Republicans instead of Democrats, right? So you know maybe different states are captured by different parties.

But 2022 is coming and 2024 is coming and nobody's working on fixing the problem. I'm going to lose my mind. It's one thing to have a problem and you know you can complain about it, but the people in charge have not even made this a priority. It's not even mentioned. And so I'd like to say to all of our elected officials and even those running for election who are not talking about this as their top priority, every one of you, you're a goddamn useless piece of shit. You need to give us an election system that we can trust.

I don't even give a shit who gets elected. Give us a system that is compatible with democracy and the republic. Give us an effort. I don't even care if it's hard and you can't figure out how to do it. Tell us it's your top priority. Because you know what my top priority is? This. Everything else matters less. If we don't know who was in the country or how they got elected, it doesn't matter what your policies are, right? Because you lost your country. We need to get the country back. And the only way that's going to happen is to fix the election process so it's fully auditable. And instantly somebody needs to be working on that.

If nobody's working on it, we don't have a government. We don't even have a government if nobody's working on that. We don't have a government that's on our side. We have a government that's, I don't know, working for itself or not working or I don't know what they're doing, but they're not working for us. This needs to be our number one, number one topic. Needs to be bigger than climate change. Because how are you going to change climate if you can't even run your government, right? It needs to be bigger than the defense budget. It needs to be bigger than everything. Bigger than Afghanistan, bigger than the wall, bigger than all that.

There is no bigger problem in the country than the election system not being credible to the public. And if you give me a politician who will say that out loud with some kind of an effort towards fixing it that looks credible, I will be fully behind that politician. And I don't give a shit what their other policies are. If they can get that one thing done for me, I would even sign up to vote for the first time.

All right, so how about, hey, tell us about your fiscal policy, Joe Biden. No. Your fiscal policy, your infrastructure, your immigration plan, your vaccinations, everything about you, your goddamn dysfunctional brain that's basically a bowl of oatmeal at this moment, everything about you, fix the election or at least work on it, at least tell us it's a priority.

President Trump, I got some tough love for you too. If you run for election and all you're doing is complaining about the election was rigged, that you don't have as your top priority some way to fix it, don't run. Don't run. You're no good to us. You have no value, Mr. Trump, who I liked by the way. I like him personally. But tough love, right? Tough love. If this isn't right at the top of your priorities and all you're doing is complaining about the last time, I don't care. I don't care if you run. I'm not going to support that. All right, it's just going to make things worse, wouldn't it? I mean it's just going to make a revolution or something. So no Trump, no Biden. We want an election system. I don't care who it is that runs on that platform.

Andrew Yang looks like he might be joining a third party or something. If you come up with a plan to fix our election system, I don't even care what the other stuff is. Don't even care. Just fix the election system and I will give you my full support if you can have a credible idea and you know some actual chance of doing that.

So here's where I am on all that. Nothing else matters. And you're doing this right in front of us, politicians. So yeah, I guess that's maybe the part that made me snap. It would be one thing if things happen and you go, oh God, I didn't know that was happening. Man, that happened without me noticing. Afghanistan, for example, snuck up on me, right? If you had asked me, hey Scott, you know a month ago, do you think that's going to be a disaster, the withdrawal, I would have said I don't know. And maybe, maybe not. Who knows? It was just sort of opaque.

But the election problem is not opaque. I know exactly what the problem is. The problem is it can't be audited. It's very objective. And you're not working on it. And it's our top problem, number one problem, and you're not working on it. Nothing.

All right, well I'm disgusted.

Here's a thought experiment. I'm changing topics a little bit here. Suppose there were two groups of humans and the only thing you knew about them that was different is that one group was told they're valuable just by existing. Hey you group, you are valuable. You just have to exist. Just be healthy, be whatever you are. Just exist. You are valuable. Now there's a second group. You're told that their value is only from what they do. They have to perform. They have to be useful. They have to make something work. They've got to build something. They gotta make some money. They gotta go do something.

Then you check back in 20 years. Which of the two groups excelled at making money and success? Was it the group that is told that they ar