ser to 80%. My guess is that 80% of adults, male and female, are actively medicating. 80%. And the other 20% wish they had. But that's another story.

What do you think? What would be your guess as to the popularity of abortion, having it legalized anyway? What will happen if you make it... well what do you think was the predictable outcome of the Supreme Court? All right, the Supreme Court said it's up to the states to decide. But what do you think the public on average did? Did the public move more pro-abortion or more anti-abortion? What happened? And what was predictable? What was the predictable outcome?

See, neither, in both, no change, negligible, confusion. All right, let's apply what we've learned from persuasion. What happened when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe? What did it do to the supply of abortions, of legal abortions? What happened to the supply of legal abortions? It went down, right? You could still get them but you'd have to work harder and go somewhere else in some cases. So if the supply goes down, what does that do to the price? It goes up. It goes up, right?

When the supply is down but the demand stays high, then the price goes up. Now price is another way to say value, right? Roughly their proxies. So it's not surprising to me that when you make something harder to get, like a luxury good, that people have a higher opinion of it. It could be that just restricting the supply makes people want it more. And by the way you would expect that, right? Because everything we know about restricted supply changes the psychology of how valuable it is. To say oh these are hard to get. If they're hard to get they must be valuable. Am I wrong?

Just the fact that they're hard to get makes it seem more valuable. Like you'd be a little more desperate to get it if it were hard to get. And also I think the Supreme Court decision made people think about themselves or their loved ones in that situation. If it's not in the headlines you don't have to think about yourself or what if this happens to me. But as soon as you think what if it happens to me or my loved ones, suddenly you say to yourself I think I want options. Right? If you're forced to think about it in terms of your personal experience you're going to lean toward at least having options.

So it doesn't surprise me at all that there's a survey that says that legal abortion went up in popularity. So I don't know if I wouldn't necessarily say that one survey is conclusive but it wouldn't be surprising. That's actually the way, if you understood persuasion, you would kind of expect it to get more popular because it's restricted now.

To test my theory, what about cigarette smoking? Cigarette smoking is actually way down compared to what it used to be. It's like 10 or 11% of the public smokes now I think. It used to be at least a third or a half or something like that. It was crazy at one point. So smoking was restricted in a sense but popularity went down. But it wasn't really restricted, was it? Because anybody underage could always get his cigarettes any time they wanted. So it wasn't really restricted. Not in any serious way. Yeah, and then the vape was more available, right? So I'm not sure that's a good example but all right.

Have you ever heard of the Festinger cognitive dissonance experiment? Probably not. Let me tell you about it. Here's what to take away from this experiment. I'm going to describe it. First of all this is repeatable. So you could do this experiment all day long and you would get the same result. So that's unusual and wonderful that it is repeatable. And it works like this.

You ask a bunch of volunteers to do a boring task. They're just like piling up blocks or something. It's just super boring. And then at the end of it you offer them either twenty dollars or one dollar. Back when twenty dollars was worth more than it is now. You'd offer them either twenty dollars or one dollar and they wouldn't know that people were getting different offers. That would be secret. And yo