l play a pretty high-risk kind of a game. I don't think there's evidence they panicked, so let's not say that.

Here's some for you. Usually you're going to see more and more articles about how the economy is the worst since the 1930s. You know, the worst since the Great Depression. Oh, this is all ridiculous. It's all ridiculous. Here's what didn't happen in the Great Depression: sixty percent of the public making money. Because I think that's what just happened. I think forty percent of us, and I'm in the category of people who got hit bad by the coronavirus. My income will probably drop ninety percent this year. But you know, I'm not asking for sympathy. I'm just telling you a fact. Probably forty percent of us took a hit, but there's a good solid sixty percent who made money. That didn't happen in the Depression. All the people who made money still want to spend it, and they've got more than they had before when we go back to work. So all these comparisons to the Depression, where basically the entire world went down, it's so inappropriate. If sixty percent of the people made money, forty lost, that really speaks to a quick recovery.

Now the real wild card is whether people will go back into stores and restaurants and stuff. That's going to be pretty iffy for a while. But certainly buying products, they got the money and they want to buy them.

All right. Can you believe that in this most basic question the experts still don't agree? Which is, is it safe for kids to go back to school? You can add this question to the long list of very basic, seemingly basic questions that our best experts don't know, got it wrong, or they disagree. What the hell good are our experts? I mean, this is a pretty basic question. Is it safe for kids to go back? So some people say, well, kids don't get it. They probably don't spread it much. It's a low risk. Go ahead, send them back. There's some other study that says that that causes spread. Of course it would. Who's right? I don't know. I guess we can't ask the experts because they disagree.

I tweeted out an article on advertising on the internet, and I wondered how many people already knew this. So in the comments tell me if you knew this. Did you know that advertising is not real, that it doesn't work? How many of you knew that? Because we live in a world that's driven by advertisement. All of our media, the internet, it's all advertising based. But did you know it's all... I'm going to modify "all," so I'm going to say mostly, and then I'll go back to some special cases where it's not. Yeah, some of you did.

Here's how I found out. The way I found out that advertising isn't even a real thing is I advertised. You should try it sometime. Whatever your product is, or you can even just try this as an experiment. Try advertising anything. It won't make any difference. I've advertised restaurants. I've done radio, print. I've done every kind of advertising that you could do. Didn't make one dime of difference. Likewise for startups, etc. Done advertising, didn't make any difference.

Now the exception is if there's something that somebody doesn't know exists but they know they have a need for it. Then you're telling them about it for the first time. If you tell somebody about something for the first time and they want it, then it can work, of course. But they're not necessarily going to find it with a search engine. That's harder. So the kind of advertisement that doesn't work is brand advertisement especially. And the article that I tweeted around this morning gives a perfect example of that. It talked about somebody who understood statistics and stuff coming into this world and thinking to himself, am I crazy? Because it looks like none of this was real, and yet everybody's pretending it's real. And that our giant platforms all depend on selling it to people who think it's real.

And this guy said, well, why do you think it's real? And they would say, well, look, we ran this ad. Let's say it was eBay, because he used them for an example. We ran an ad for eBay, and then you look at all the people who clicked on the ad, and then you can tell that they bought a bunch of stuff. It's obvious. We run an ad, people click on it, then they buy. And the economist says, how many of those people were going to buy anyway? And they say, well, you know, we don't know, but they clicked the ad and then they bought, so the ads work.

And so the economist said, why don't we try this experiment? Because the ad that people are clicking on shows up in the search directly above the organic search, the one nobody paid for. If you were searching for eBay by name, you typed in eBay. The thing that comes up at the top is the advertisement that takes you to eBay. The one right below it that didn't cost you a dime is the organic search and also takes you to eBay. And now what do people click? They click the one on the top. So the economist said, why don't we try this? Why don't we try picking some regions of the country and not advertising on those and just see if it compares? So they did that. What do you think the answer was? The advertising made no difference.

So eBay was paying twenty whatever million dollars a year for these ads, and in one day, in a very easy test, he showed that they had no value. But his other examples of people who seem to know that advertising doesn't work but they still do it. And you say to yourself, okay, I'm confused. Are you telling me that everybody knows it doesn't work but they still do it? What exactly is behind that?

And he explained it in a way that I already understood as the creator of Dilbert and having spent a lot of time in big companies and done a lot of advertising myself. I knew the answer to this, but it was funny watching him sort of discover it. And it goes like this: The marketing department in your big company isn't just marketing externally. They're also marketing themselves. And what the marketing department in your big company wants is the biggest possible budget, because that makes them more important. It's good for their careers. They want to manage the biggest possible thing.

So when they go into their senior management, do they say advertisement doesn't work? No. They say you need the biggest advertisement budget you could possibly get. And then they get that. And then the boss is going to ask them, did it work? And what are they going to do? They're going to show them how many people clicked on the advertisement and how much they bought. And they're going to say, look at all that extra stuff people bought. And it's all not real.

Now somebody says I'm seeing a lot of people mention MyPillow. MyPillow is a special case, and I'll tell you why. Number one, did you know there was such a thing as an improved pillow? So it's the perfect example of something that can be advertised because you didn't know it existed, right? I thought a pillow was a pillow, but there's a better one. Oh, okay. Now once you know it exists, then your next question should be, but Scott, I know it exists now. That I know it exists, what good is the extra advertising?

Well, here's what good it is. Mike Lindell is not like an average advertiser. What he does is so darn persuasive that you can't compare it to a written ad on the internet. All right? Listening to him do his real thing over and over again and showing you examples and hearing the people using it and here's my graph and his funny stories and stuff. In a way he's selling himself, wouldn't you say? Mike Lindell is sort of selling himself. And you didn't know you needed him, did you? So that's the part you weren't looking for. Were you looking to find Mike Lindell? No, you weren't. But you did. So now you've found him and he gives his made-in-America stuff and people like him. So you like Mike Lindell and you say, well, I can always use a better pillow. And then suddenly that works.

So in the special cases, that can tell you why the normal cases don't work. All right? So if you just put a little print ad on Google, you know, buy my stuff, you're not Mike Lindell. They don't know you. They don't care about you. They didn't fall in love with you. They weren't interested in your story about how you came from nothing. They don't care if it's built in America. None of that's there. But if you can go full Mike Lindell, yeah, I would think in his case advertising works.

All right. But yeah, so the reason is the internal marketing departments are lying to their management becaus