Episode 931 Scott Adams: Let's Make Bad Comparisons Like Pundits and Drink Delicious Beverages
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Michael Moore killed Green New Deal
Why are gyms opening in phase 1?
Dr. Rick Bright deserved to be fired
President Trump says ok to take out Iranian gun boats
Pelosi accuses President Trump of being control of Putin
Alex Berenson's contrarian opinions
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I feel as if sometime in the next week, maybe two weeks, there's going to be some really good news.
Like really good news.
I can feel it coming. Sometime in the next two weeks.
Oh, we'll have plenty of bad news.
But I feel like there's something big coming.
Maybe something medical.
Maybe something better.
We'll see. But while we're waiting for that, we could enjoy the simultaneous sip, and all you need is a cupper, a mug, or a glass, a tank, or a chalice, or a stein, a canteen jug, or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything, including the coronavirus, better.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip, and it happens now.
Go. Mmm.
Yeah. So I have an entertainment recommendation for you.
Now this entertainment recommendation comes with a caveat.
That if I had not told you it's good, you wouldn't be able to tell by looking at the advertisements for it.
Alright? There's a TV show on FX. It's new.
I think it's several episodes they've already got in the can.
And it's called What We Do in the Shadows.
What We Do in the Shadows on FX. And the setup...
There's three vampires who've been living together for 100 years in Staten Island.
And they're sort of lazy vampires.
And they have a human who they call a familiar.
And it is the funniest frickin' thing that you've seen in a long time.
Now, they use the technique that the show The Office used.
Where they act like they're in real life, but they'll occasionally turn to the camera, sort of like Modern Family did.
So it's like a half-documentary-ish, fake documentary of people living their real life.
So it's like a fake reality show, if you will.
But man, is that clever.
Now I'm just going to tell you, I don't want to ruin it for you, but I'm just going to tell you one concept from the show, all right?
So it's three vampires living in Staten Island, and one familiar, which is the, or maybe more familiars, they're the humans who take care of them.
And then there's one who's a special kind of vampire.
He's an energy vampire.
And he looks like Dilbert, and he just works in a cubicle.
And all he does is he goes from cubicle to cubicle, and he makes conversation, and he feeds off your energy while he drains it out of you.
I'm just going to tell you this one thing that is all you need to know about how clever this is.
The actual vampires who suck blood, the only thing that they're afraid of is this guy.
That's it. That's all you need to know about how clever this show is.
That the vampires are afraid of the guy from the cubicle who will suck their energy out of him.
And in one episode, again, I don't want to give away too much.
I just need you to know how clever this is.
The real vampires get to their virgins that they're going to drink their blood.
They've captured some human virgins.
And they find their human virgins by having their familiar joined live-action role-playing groups.
Where he recruits all the virgins for the vampires to suck their blood, because I guess virgin blood is extra good.
I hear. I mean, that's what I hear.
But in one episode, The real vampires get to the virgins too late because the energy vampires already sucked all their life force out.
And they're like, no, no good.
No nutritional value.
It is so good, you have to watch it.
Anyway, if all you saw was the commercial for it, the commercial doesn't sell it at all.
Usually the trailer for a movie is sometimes better than the movie itself, but this is very much the reverse.
You would have no idea how good this is just by watching the commercials for it.
Alright, there is still a big mystery for me in why we're not hearing more about this Michael Moore-backed documentary, Planet of the Humans.
Because it pretty much debunks the green energy whole field.
How is that not a gigantic story that's the only thing we can talk about today?
I mean, besides coronavirus.
It would be the second biggest story.
But how is that not getting more attention?
Is there something going on here that I don't understand?
Somebody pointed out that even Fox News is not hammering on this as much as one would expect.
You would expect that they would be talking about this non-stop.
And I know it's been mentioned.
I'm pretty sure it's been mentioned.
I think it was mentioned on The Five, probably, at least.
But whether or not it's been mentioned...
Wouldn't you expect, and it's been mentioned on the website, of course, Fox News website, but shouldn't this be like the main story?
I feel like there's just something missing in all of this, and I don't know what it is.
One thing missing was, of course, talk about nuclear power, that this, of course, brings up that question.
But there's just something going on, and I don't quite understand it yet, about how we're dealing with this story.
It could be that people just can't wrap their heads around it.
It could be that it's so mind-destabilizing to think that Michael Moore may have killed the Green New Deal, because he did.
He killed the Green New Deal.
It might be that people just can't wrap their heads around it, and so we just talk about the things that are easier to talk about.
I don't know. Something's going on. I hear that in phase one of the reopening plan that the government has put together, That apparently there were some friends and lobbyists and stuff who got included in the first phase that gyms could reopen.
So gyms would be in the first phase of reopening if certain requirements were met by states.
Now, this raises a question.
Because only one of two things can be true.
So you decide which of these things are true.
I would like to warn you, That if you have children who are already awake, probably not, but they should not listen to this next part.
There might be a curse word coming up.
I think only one today, so if you want to get past this one, you'll probably be okay after that.
But there are certain topics that can only be expressed with an obscene word, and it's coming up.
So there are two possibilities to explain why gyms are included in phase one.
Number one, everything we've ever been told about how coronavirus spreads is wrong.
Because that would make sense, right?
Because a gym is really a place where people go to breathe hard and expel water droplets in a variety of ways.
So if you were to design a place that would have the maximum spread of coronavirus, you'd say, well, I don't know, let's put people in close proximity.
We'll make them sweaty, you know, we'll get them nice and moist on their hands and stuff.
And then we'll have them exercise hard, breathing hard, and stand close together, use the same circulation system, and make sure they touch a lot of the same things, you know, all the equipment and stuff.
So that's what we'll do.
We'll build a system that maximizes the spread.
Wouldn't it look like a gym?
So here's my swear word coming up.
There are only two possibilities for explaining why gyms are in phase one.
Number one, everything we've been told about the coronavirus is a lie.
That's one possibility.
Or number two, we have achieved new levels of dumb fuckery.
Because if there's anything dumber than fucking opening a gym during a pandemic, I haven't heard it.
Can you top it? Can you top that for dumb fuckery?
Or... Or, everything we've been told is just a lie.
That it doesn't travel through the air?
You can't pick it up by touching things that infected people have touched?
I mean, maybe.
Why is somebody delivering something right now?
Okay. So...
Creepy old guy, stay home.
Okay. I'm reading a comment.
I don't know what that was related to.
Now, I am an avid gym goer for over 30 years.
I've been going to the same gym.
I love the gym.
And mine was like a full health club.
So it wasn't just gym equipment.
There's snack bars and, you know, babysitters and classes and stuff.
I don't think there's anybody in the country who wants gyms to open more than I do, because it's really the only other place I go.
You know, 50% of all of my outside-the-home exposure is my gym.
So nobody wants those gyms open more than I do.
I mean, I really want the gym open.
But I don't understand what's happening.
My love of gyms is not independent from my love of understanding what's going on.
Either this is the worst idea in the world, to have them in phase one, or everything we've been told is a lie.
Pick one. That said, I also believe in freedom, and I also think We've probably reached the point where the country is willing to take the hundreds of thousands of deaths in order to get open.
And why don't I just say it out loud?
Because I feel like people are just hesitant to say it because we don't want to be bad people.
So let me say it out loud.
And I'll start it by saying, A special message for the dumb people.
So for the dumb people who are listening to this next part, I would be sad if somebody I knew died of the coronavirus, just so you know that, because otherwise you're going to ask that question as soon as I say the next thing.
The next thing is, I don't see any possibility That there's any way to get to the other end of this without killing a few hundred thousand Americans.
Just Americans. Forget about how many people would die in the rest of the world.
But just Americans.
I don't see any way to get there.
Everything that I see has pretty big drawbacks, won't work, etc.
So I'm okay with opening the gyms, as long as we're honest about it.
If we're honest about it, opening the gyms sort of is the opposite of our strategy of social distancing, right?
And if we're going to open the gyms, just say fuck it.
I'm sorry. If we're going to open the gyms, just open everything.
With the exception of maybe large sporting events or maybe clubs and bars might be special.
But If you're going to open the gyms, certainly open the restaurants, certainly open business, certainly open everything else, and let's just take the price.
And a couple hundred thousand people are going to die.
I don't see a way around that.
And if there's no way around it, it is not an adult decision to put it off.
If you can't get around it, and delaying doesn't seem to be kicking up any kind of a solution so far, there's a whole bunch of cool things that are on the horizon, but they're still on the horizon.
I don't see them running to the rescue.
So every day there's a new story of a vaccine that's done earlier than we thought, and they're testing it, and the thing they tried that worked or didn't work.
But we don't have anything that looks like a solution.
We have nothing, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't believe we have anything in the pipeline that reasonably would allow us to open up the economy and also avoid a few hundred thousand deaths.
Right? I don't see anything that would do that, because even if we're really good at testing, it just means we know who got it.
I mean, it's not really going to stop it from ripping through the population.
So, let's be honest about it.
It's going to be a few hundred thousand Americans are going to die.
And for the dumb people watching this, yes, I would be sad if it were a family member.
Yeah, in case you're wondering about that.
Yeah, I would be sad if a family member died, you hypothetical dumb people.
All right, there's a story about Dr.
Rick Bright. And because the simulation loves us and wants to entertain us, This doctor's last name is Bright.
His first name is Rick, which is, of course, short for Richard.
What's the other nickname that people named Richard have?
Sometimes they're called Rick.
Sometimes they're called Rich.
Sometimes Richard.
Sometimes Dick.
So, Dick Bright...
He issued a statement talking about how he was removed from his position as Director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority and the HHS Deputy Assistant Director.
Okay, it's all too boring what his job title was.
But he says that he was removed because he kept saying that hydroxychloroquine should not be promoted because it had not gone through the proper testing.
For effectiveness more than safety, I would think.
And he was demoted, or basically moved to another part of the government where he would be less trouble.
And this story was presented as though he was sort of a whistleblower.
They didn't use that word, but it was presented that way.
He's sort of a A brave whistleblower who's complaining about how his expert advice was not being taken seriously and he was demoted for it.
But I read his story.
I mean, I only read his side of the story without even seeing the other side of the story, which is even worse.
Just reading his side of the story, I concluded I would have fired him.
I mean, I don't even know if I would have reassigned him.
I think I would have just fired him.
Because everything about this guy looked like he was quite a Richard, if you know what I mean.
And he looked like he would be impossible to work with.
And he seemed to think that it was his decision about risk management.
Where I remind the world that risk management is the boss's job.
Risk management is not the expert's job.
The expert is to inform the boss of the risks if you do this or that.
They're information.
They are not in the risk management business directly.
It's the boss. The boss in this case being Trump.
And if Trump decided that everything he'd seen was Made a good risk management decision to, let's say, promote the hydroxychloroquine, presumably in combination with azithromycin and zinc, because that's when, at least anecdotally, that's when it seems like it works.
If the president made a risk management decision, it's his to make.
It might be right, it might be wrong, but it's only the president's to make.
After he's gotten input.
And you have to fire people who don't understand that.
Certainly, if you were in the military, you would be demoted or fired or reassigned right away.
If you told your boss your opinion, and you fully expressed it, and you know he heard it, and that he makes a decision that's not the way you would have gone, so that's how it works.
The president is Including other considerations, which maybe Dr.
Richard Bright did not have as his priorities.
I'm loving this story about the president tweeting his orders.
I don't even know if he told the military or he just tweeted it.
I assume he told the military too, but he could have just tweeted it.
That the military has permission basically to blow up the Iranian gunboats that are hassling them.
Now, I'm so interested to know how this plays out.
Number one, does that really mean that our US Navy is going to just blow up those ships if they get near?
Probably not, right?
Because if you're the captain of the ship, you're probably going to be pretty flexible and you're not going to blow up an Iranian boat because it's killing people.
I mean, you don't kill people just to make a point.
You need a better reason.
So, will the Iranians just sort of back up a little bit and say, we're not touching you, we're not touching you, we're just in the area, and try to game the system and find out where the limit is?
Or will they just say, I think we better stop doing this?
Because they haven't blasted one yet, right?
Somebody says, Trump is a con man.
Alright, I'm going to... I'm going to block you for coming into here and saying Trump is a con man.
It's not because I disagree with you or because I agree with you.
Completely irrelevant. It's just that you didn't pass the Turing test.
So to be a guest and to comment here, you have to at least pass the test that it doesn't look like a laundry list of common phrases have been messaged out in order.
It should show some kind of human thought Possibly connected to the topic.
But if you just say, orange man bad, you haven't passed the Turing test.
Because I could write a program pretty easily.
I could use the basic language, you know, print, quotes, orange man bad.
So a computer can do what you're doing.
It can say, Trump is a cop man.
But why would I do it?
What would be the point of it?
So you will be sent into the...
Oh, I lost you.
Damn it. This interface lost you.
But anyway, if I see you again, I will block you for that.
You have to show some signs of being a human being.
That's like a minimum. If I can't even tell if you're human by your comment, maybe I would like less exposure to you.
Nancy Pelosi was speculating on a public interview that Putin must have some blackmail material on Trump, because it's the only thing that explains it.
Now, shouldn't she be removed from office for that?
I would say that if the Speaker of the House The president of the United States is actually being controlled by a foreign government.
Shouldn't you be removed from office immediately for speculating that?
Now, if she had evidence, if she had evidence, of course we want to know.
Like, if Nancy Pelosi had some evidence that Trump was being...
Blackmailed by Putin?
Yeah, we want to know.
But if she doesn't have evidence, she should be immediately removed from office for saying something so insanely dangerous during a crisis.
Immediately, what is the process for that?
Is there some process for removing a Speaker of the House from office?
But that should be started.
All right. So Fox News is reporting that in 2012, it was first reported in 2012, so this is a story that's sort of been around for a while, that Joe Biden was Osama bin Laden's preference for president.
So apparently the reporting is that we have some intelligence that Bin Laden was trying to get somebody else in Al-Qaeda to assassinate President Obama when he was flying over to the Middle East, I guess, and also Petraeus, and that Bin Laden, his reasoning was that he really wanted Biden to become the president because Biden is, quote, Which will lead the U.S. into a crisis.
So... I don't know if any of this is real.
Do you? Somebody says Bitcoin is surging.
Really? Let's see what Bitcoin's doing.
It's surging so much...
Oh, it's surging 6%.
Okay.
Alright. So...
I have to tell you, I made an investment decision several months ago based on an 11-year-old.
So an 11-year-old was telling me about Snapchat, and when I saw the new feature that they'd added, Snap Maps, where you can see all your friends and chat with them and stuff.
And then you listen to an 11-year-old, and they'll tell you it's the only app they use.
I mean, they use TikTok and stuff, but for communicating, it's basically...
It's basically Snapchat.
So I bought a stock in Snapchat, and they went up 32% yesterday.
So they're doing something right.
So I got lucky on that one.
I don't tell you the ones where...
If I only tell you a stock that did well, don't assume that's my only stock I bought.
Because buying individual stocks is a fool's game, and you should only do it for entertainment or if you have some special knowledge about a company.
But generally, it's a bad idea.
I just got lucky on that one.
Because I took advice from an 11-year-old.
Literally. I literally took that advice from an 11-year-old.
So, the story about Obama wanting Biden to be president, who knows how true that is, but it's a funny story.
So, I woke up in sort of a competitive mode this morning.
Because, you know, we're all having this Groundhog Day feeling.
It feels like every day you wake up and it's just more stories about this or that therapeutic works or doesn't work, this or that state is doing better, this or that, comparing something that shouldn't be compared.
And so it's making me a little crazy about how bad we are as a society in making decisions.
And the decisions...
The decisions that we make most of the time are not going to end civilization if you get them wrong.
Most of the time. But the decisions we make this year with the coronavirus could actually end civilization on Earth, I suppose, if you did the worst-case scenario.
So we got really, really big stakes, and if we don't think about them correctly, we're in trouble.
It's almost to the point where I'm not even sure you can call this a virus crisis anymore.
It sort of started as a virus.
That's the part of the physical world that is the trigger for it all.
And of course the virus is killing people, so that matters a lot.
But it feels like the problem has morphed into a thinking problem and a decision-making problem.
Because if we made the right decisions...
The problem we would have would be much less than if we make the wrong decisions.
And so, let me make this case.
Would you say that getting hit by a car is your biggest problem today?
Like as a pedestrian.
Would you say that's your biggest problem?
And the answer is no. No, you wouldn't say that's a big problem.
And the reason is because you know not to make the decision to walk in front of a car.
So if your decision-making is good, I think I will not walk in front of a speeding car, then you don't have to worry about the physical part, because the physical part didn't change.
It's still a car, still speeding down the road, but you made the proper decision.
I think I will not walk in front of that car.
And so it is with the coronavirus, except that the right decision is a little less obvious than walking in front of a car.
There is a right play.
We just don't know what it is, and if we're not good at thinking, we're not going to find it.
So it feels to me like the coronavirus is a little bit like the speeding car in a terrible analogy way.
I know there are lots of differences, right?
But the point is, if you think about either one of them right, you get a much better result than if you think about it wrong.
And when I wrote my book, Loser Think, which was tips on how to think better on the Internet, basically, I didn't realize how timely it would be.
Because loser think could actually destroy civilization.
And a lot of it has to do with making bad comparisons.
And let me tell you a few of them that are happening today.
So there's a writer named Alex Berenson who's getting a lot of attention because he's being somewhat of a contrarian about the press, about Coronavirus, and his position seems to be that it's an overstated problem, and that maybe hysteria is the bigger problem than the virus, and maybe we should go back to work.
That sort of vibe.
So he's on the maybe it's overstated, get back to work side of things.
The real problem is not the virus in his case.
The real problem is how he thinks about it, and then people who don't know the difference think he's thinking about it right, and so they agree with him.
Here's what he said today, after I had tweeted tongue-in-cheek that it would be another day of comparing the wrong things.
And he tweets a New York Times story, and he says they'd be more credible if they mentioned that Only New York City and maybe New Orleans and Detroit have had serious problems.
Now his point is that the New York Times should carve out, and I would agree with this point, that whatever's happening in New York City and the other hotspots is entirely different from what's happening in the rest of the country.
And then I say, so?
So? What do you do with that?
Now, I think what Alex Berenson said Well, one of the things that's different about them is that they're earlier in the cycle.
So he's making the mistake of comparing what they are now With what they would be if you stopped mitigating, as if those would be similar.
The entire point of it is that if you opened up now, you would have an outbreak of massive infections, and it would become more like New York City.
So if he's comparing New York City in the middle of what might be their peak to Nebraska that hasn't started getting it yet, that's just a bad comparison problem.
So it's not about the virus, it's about how you think about it.
So the thinking is broken.
Let me give you some other examples.
You'll see in the news today, as you've seen yesterday and last week, that people will tell you that there's a study about hydroxychloroquine that shows that it doesn't work.
But of course, when you drill down, you'll find out that it's the wrong comparison.
Because they gave the hydroxychloroquine...
Without the azithromycin and zinc, the zinc being the secret ingredient that you need in there.
So they would test it without that, and they would give it to people who were already ready for a ventilator when basically it's too late.
So all of the studies are going to be comparing the wrong thing to the wrong thing.
They always have.
It looks like they always will be.
It looks like all of our news will be the wrong things being compared.
How about comparing the United States to Sweden and then making a decision based on Sweden doing it differently, and they seem like they're not going down the tube, so why don't we do that?
Well, how about because the United States and Sweden have too many differences?
And how about we don't really even know how many people are infected?
We don't know if the testing is just as good.
We don't know if Sweden will have a good result in the long run.
We don't know anything about Sweden.
Except that it's so different, of course we expect that they would be having a different experience.
But what does that tell us about us?
Did you go to your summer cabin?
What? You didn't go to your summer cabin?
Well, if you'd lived in Sweden, about half of them have a summer cabin.
So is it easier to socially isolate when half of your public has a summer cabin?
And also, apparently half of the public, I'm not sure if this is true, but I read it, half of the public in Sweden is living alone, and they don't have the same kind of density we have.
So you'll see more of those comparisons.
How about everybody saying that if we have some temporary tracking of people, And some temporary restrictions about going to parks and stuff that we're clearly slipping into Nazi Germany.
You're going to hear a lot of that today.
To which I say, you know, coughing into your elbow is obviously a slippery slope to the Holocaust.
Right? Because coughing into your elbow is just giving in to the fascist demands of your overlords.
Because you want to cough in the air.
You just want to go...
You don't want to be told you've got to cough into your elbow.
Because if you start giving in on the little stuff, and it's like, okay, I'll cough in my elbow.
That's not a big deal. The next thing you know, they're going to be tracking you.
And then after that, they round you up and they murder you.
It's obvious. Boop, boop, boop.
ABC. So if you're coughing in your elbow, you're only two jumps away from Nazi Germany.
You're going to hear a lot of that today.
And yes, I'm kidding if anybody's coming in here late.
Now let's also compare Trump's diplomatic public statements about President Xi...
To how you and your friends would talk about President Xi in private.
Because if you were in private and it was just you and your friend, you'd probably say something like, well, that Chinese government is a murderous regime and President Xi is a terrible dictator and he's taken the organs from dissidents and he's rounded up Uyghurs and put them in prison camps and he's killing Americans with fentanyl.
That's what you'd say to your friend.
Yeah, you'd say that quite honestly to your friend privately.
But if you're the President of the United States and you're trying to avoid economic meltdown, you're trying to avoid a nuclear confrontation, how might you talk about the person that you need to negotiate with?
Might you be polite?
Yes, you might. Might you be respectful even if you don't feel it on the inside?
Yes, you might.
So let us not compare how the president treats Putin in public, or President Xi in public, or Kim Jong-un in public.
Let us not compare that to how you would talk privately to your friend about these same topics.
Bad comparison. Are hospitals anywhere overwhelmed?
Okay, so that's an example of loser think.
I won't call you out.
But whoever said, are hospitals overwhelmed?
You know what's wrong with that, right?
You know you're comparing places that are experiencing the peak with places that are predicted that they would have a peak if we had not already done mitigation.
So when you say to yourself, here's a little, oh God, I don't want to insult my audience, but I kind of have to, because there's so many of you who have the same feeling.
I'm going to insult you for utility, okay?
I wouldn't do it just to be mean, and I wouldn't do it just because I'm in a bad mood.
I'm going to insult you, some of you, not all of you.
I'm going to insult some of you So it'll hurt a little bit more when you say things that don't make sense.
I'm going to add a little pain to it.
If you've ever said in the last week, hey, hospitals and parts of the country are not busy, you're being fucking stupid.
Okay? Because you're comparing...
A full mitigation scenario where, honestly, we can't predict exactly the week that something would be overloaded.
We just know there was a risk, and so people overprepared.
If you don't understand that being overprepared doesn't mean you did it wrong.
Do you not understand that?
That being overprepared probably means you erred in the correct direction.
Because we didn't have the option of hitting the nail on the head from a thousand yards away with a BB. If we could hit the nail on the head from a thousand yards away with a BB, every one of our hospitals would have just the right amount of capacity.
Just right. They'd be operating 75% capacity, 25% left over just in case.
Man, those hospitals would be nailing it.
If you could shoot a BB a thousand yards and hit the top of a nail, if you could do that, then it would make sense to wonder why the hospitals are so empty.
But if you're wondering why the hospitals are empty and you think that that means that the virus is not so bad, that's fucking stupid.
It's fucking stupid.
Don't ever say that in public.
If you don't want half of the people who hear it to think, oh my God, why is he comparing the hospitals who couldn't possibly know what was going to happen?
Why is he angry that they over-prepared?
Now, wouldn't it be better if they prepared exactly the right amount?
Yeah, it would.
It would be better.
How could they know that?
How could they possibly know that?
They couldn't. So they over-prepared.
Should they maybe look to correct a little bit?
Oh, I would think so. I think some are.
I think some of the hospitals are saying, hey, we over-corrected.
Maybe we should do some more elective surgeries, at least until things look worse.
Maybe the mitigation is working better than we thought.
But man, if you're comparing those empty hospitals to...
If you're saying that the empty hospitals tell us That's the reason that it's okay to open up the country.
You're not understanding anything.
You really are not understanding anything.
Sorry. I didn't mean to be mean.
But somebody has to be mean to the people who are looking at the empty hospitals and declaring that therefore it's no worse than seasonal flu.
That is such broken brain thinking that that needs to be expunged from the conversation.
Do you feel it is an unsolicited panic?
I don't know what that means. They could cause a famine due to the supply lines.
Well, panic can cause problems, yes.
So let's shut the country down with bad information.
Have I ever told you about the...
So here this user is saying in the comments, so let's shut down the country with bad information.
I actually wrote a book, two of them actually, I mentioned this, When you start the sentence with so, at least on the internet, everything that comes after so is just your own imagination.
It's not something that ever happened.
So this user is like, so, let's shut down the country down with bad information.
Did I suggest that?
Did it sound like I suggested let's use bad information to shut the country?
Is that what you heard? Because you need to check your thinking if you thought that I was suggesting, hey, let's use bad information and shut down the country.
That's what you heard? How about, we don't know what's going to happen in the future, so sometimes it's better to over-prepare.
That's what you should have heard.
And nobody can be exactly right in knowing how much to over-prepare.
Because the models are not that accurate.
We don't know how well mitigation would work.
And maybe you adjust.
It's probably time to adjust.
But it cannot be said that it was a mistake.
How about comparing President Trump's performance to that other president that you imagine could have been the president who has the gift of Of ESP, and unlike President Trump,
who's a normal human being who can't see the future, especially in the fog of war and a brand new situation in which even the models and the experts look like they're just guessing, compare that and Trump's terrible performance as a regular human being to what we could have had.
For example, we could have had a Joe Biden.
We could have had a Hillary Clinton.
And they have the gift of hindsight, meaning that if they know what happened in the past, they can also know what will happen in the future.
It's an amazing power, and regular humans don't have it.
But they could have made all the right decisions.
And why can't we have one of them?
Why can't we have a magic president?
I mean, really, why did we make such a big mistake and elect a human president With the inability to see the future, the inability to make all the right decisions when there's no data that is reliable, why can't we get the president who's magic?
I mean, every time I look at our normal human president, I'm so disappointed in him not being magic when it's obvious we could have had a magic president who would know what to do even when it's unknowable.
Come on! Give us a magic president.
All right, well... I feel like I'm exhibit A of how this lockdown is not good for our mental health.
Are you having the experience where you'll have bouts of anger?
And the anger doesn't seem to be necessarily related to what's happening around you.
You can certainly make the case why you should be angry, but you can always make that case.
You can always be angry.
Being angry is sort of a choice.
You know, you can decide how you feel about stuff and that's really up to you.
And, you know, there's a morning like this where I just open up Twitter and I just fly into a rage because I think I might die because people are bad at comparing things.
And I've always thought that, you know, we're all going to die, right?
Well, I mean, I might be immortal in the sense that I'll become a computer entity someday in the cloud.
But my physical body, you know, it's going to die.
And one of the things I think about is I don't want to die in a dumb way.
You know, imagine one of the reasons I'm not a rock climber is because what I think about, if I think about, you know, that dangerous job of being a free rock climber with just your fingertips and, you know, there's nothing holding you up there.
What I think about is if I slipped...
And it took, let's say, 10 seconds to reach the ground to my death.
And as I was falling down, I'd be thinking to myself, why was I so stupid?
I shouldn't have been a free climber.
I'm not good at this.
And then I'm dead. And the part I worry about is not the dead part.
The part I worry about is that 10-second fall...
Where I feel so disgusted at myself for being so stupid to think it was a good risk management to climb rocks when I'm sort of not good at that.
And when I look at Twitter and I see the quality of the thinking, and I realize that my life, to some extent, will depend on the quality of other people's thinking, because collectively we have to think right So that our leaders can make the right decisions, right? Because we sort of have to support the decisions or they don't get implemented.
So watching the United States not be able to compare the simplest things makes me mad.
And what it makes me mad about...
Somebody says, you blocked me on Twitter.
Well, you probably had it coming.
If you got blocked on Twitter in the last few days...
It's because you said something in public which claimed to show your superior knowledge of my opinion and it was different from my own opinion that I've stated.
If you're stating my opinions for me, you're using Twitter wrong.
You should be using Twitter to state your opinions and then people can interact with you.
But if you're stating other people's opinions incorrectly and then you're using it to Insult them for what you imagined was their opinion but wasn't.
Well, then you're not using Twitter right.
Although you're using it in the most common way.
Somebody says, you're in a rage because your amygdala is swollen.
Maybe so. Update.
You thinking catch or avoid coronavirus today?
I'm thinking that...
I would prefer to catch it and get it over with.
But that's not a logical choice, meaning that there's a personality element to this.
So my personal risk management is that I don't want to spend the next year worrying about getting it.
And I don't think it's going to be gone in a year, because I just feel like it's going to be with us.
So I don't want to spend A few quality years of my life hiding in my house worrying that I might die.
I'm ready to make the risk that I would die or be deeply injured somehow in return for my freedom.
And for the economy to be working.
So I will make an attempt.
I'll make all the smart attempts to avoid getting too close to people and stuff.
But I no longer want to worry about getting it.
I want to just do the things that are smart and then clear my mind of worrying about getting it and rather put myself in the mindset of I might get it, I might not.
It doesn't matter. Somebody says, you blocked me because of my vaccine's opinion.
Yeah, I would block somebody for a vaccine opinion.
That sounds like something I would have done.
If I blocked you for a vaccine opinion, it means that I thought your opinion was literally dangerous.
I'm no vaccine expert, but if you were making weird claims about Bill Gates using vaccines to conquer the world or something like that, then I blocked you.
If you made any kind of a vaccine conspiracy theory, I blocked you.
Now, I do have some sympathy or empathy.
I guess I agree with the anti-vaxxers So the anti-vaxxers who say, hey, we haven't really tested all of these vaccinations in combination.
We've only tested them individually, but we give them in combination.
And it might be too much for the body to handle, blah, blah, especially if you give them to children.
Now, I don't know if that's true.
I don't know that that's bad for you.
But it certainly raises the question.
If the entire point of medical testing is that you want to test things because you don't know, you don't know.
If you don't know it's dangerous, that's why you test it.
But we're giving massive combinations of vaccines to kids, and we've never tested the combinations.
So we are doing with vaccines the thing which every medical expert would say you shouldn't do.
That should be noted, right?
That's just an objective statement, that there's a standard in science, there's a reason for the standard, and it is flagrantly being not done.
Now, it could be, and I think this is probably the argument, that there's no way to do it.
Because in order to test the combination of vaccines, Wouldn't you have to not vaccinate a certain number of children?
Because you'd have to test children.
They're the ones who get the vaccines.
If you tested adults, you wouldn't really know.
Could be different. So, we have a situation where we probably can't ethically test, but we also can't know if it's safe without it.
So, smart people, we hope they're smart, have said, you know, we've got these two unknowns.
We've got these vaccines in combination, We think we'd maybe see a problem.
We think it would be obvious if a problem pops up, maybe we can dig into it and see if we can know more about it.
But we think that overall, it's sort of a best professional guess that you're better off doing this, even if it does cause some problems, you're better off doing it.
We can't test it.
We wish we could. But we think this is the best risk management reward.
I can see why we got in this situation.
No vaccine has been double-blind tested.
No vaccine has been double-blind tested.
I think I've heard that claim before.
But we can tell that we don't have measles, right?
What we can't tell is if there might be some new kind of health problem They got introduced from vaccines and we thought it was from something else.
Somebody says, sorry, that's the Dunning-Kruger effect.
What is? You'd have to be more specific.
Vaccines are liability-free.
Well, shouldn't they be?
There's a reason that governments are liability-free.
Because governments have to make decisions that kill people.
But if they do it right, they're making decisions to save more people than they kill.
So there's a reason that governments can't be sued for a lot of stuff.
And the governments are sort of the ones who are behind vaccinations.
So it does make sense to me that vaccine companies could not be sued or they have a special court.
That does make sense. Because otherwise there wouldn't be any vaccines.
So if you have one, you need the other probably.
You know, I'm going to throw out a concept that I kept throwing out earlier, and I couldn't get anybody to agree with it except on social media.
I've never seen anybody in the government or on TV arguing this, and it goes like this.
Why are we opening by zip code?
Is there any argument and or model or experience that would tell us that opening by My physical location is the way to do it.
Because wouldn't it make more sense for everybody who has an individual situation that's low risk to open up no matter where they are?
I mean, is there a reason that the safest situation in New York City can't open today?
If it's the safest situation?
Let's say the safest situation is a store vendor Who already has recovered from coronavirus, I'll just give an example, has been tested for antibodies, wears a mask, and doesn't touch the food or whatever it is.
Is there a reason that person can't open up?
I mean, there's no customers, but besides that.
So I just ask the question, it seems to me that we should open everything right away to the people who are in the safest situations.
And that we could probably just discourage people who are in a bad situation from going to work.
Half of them would go to work anyway, because they just want to take the risk, or they need the money, or whatever.
And the other half would probably say, yeah, you know, because I can stay home a little bit longer, I think I will.
I'll ride this out a little bit longer.
Just let everybody make their own choice.
I think you would be surprised how many people choose correctly, especially under the glare of public opinion.
You know, if you look at the number of people who recycle, the number of people who wear their seatbelt, even though you get a ticket if you don't wear your seatbelt, I think people mostly wear their seatbelt for safety.
I can't prove it.
But, you know, when you put on your seatbelt, is the reason you're putting it on to avoid a ticket?
That's not the reason I put my seatbelt on.
So I think you could get pretty darn good compliance, maybe half of the people at risk.
The other half will take the chance.
Some percentage of them will get the coronavirus.
We could probably flex our hospitals up to handle that.
They would be overwhelmed, maybe.
But nobody has modeled that.
And if they did, the modeling wouldn't be If they did, the modeling wouldn't be reliable.
Yeah, experts are monitoring by country.
It all doesn't make sense to me.
Now, we're hearing more reports as of yesterday that young people are getting strokes and young people are having problems.
You know what I'm starting to wonder about?
I'm wondering if the reports about young people dying from coronavirus are either Well, I'm sure it's true, first of all.
But since it's so rare, it makes me wonder if it's foreign influence.
Because if you were China or Russia and you wanted to mess with the United States, what messages would you want to reinforce?
Well, if I were Russia or China and I wanted to mess with the United States, I would say it's killing children, too.
It's killing young people, too.
The reason I would say that is that then we won't open up.
The longer we believe that it also kills young people, and frankly we just care more about young people, you know, children, it feels like disinformation.
It's what it feels like.
Which is not to say that young people are dying, but they're probably dying at such a small number that it would only make sense for that to be a national story if you were in the disinformation world.
It's not disinformation, but if you're in the business of trying to ruin the United States, that would be the story you'd push.
So I got my questions.
What are the sources of that story?
And New Jersey hasn't hit plateau yet.
Most of you know Tony Heller, who's famous for his skepticism about climate change.
And He came after me yesterday.
I ended up blocking him because he was comparing things poorly.
And what was his argument?
I'm forgetting his argument.
He had a terrible comparison.
And he got blocked for that.
Elizabeth Warren's brother has died of COVID.
Did that really happen?
Well, that still hasn't satisfied my...
Somebody in the comments said that.
I don't know that that's true.
Somebody says the asthma vulnerability was debunked by Washington University School of Medicine.
I would love to see that link because I have a suspicion.
I think that's the reason you told me that, is that I'd expressed a suspicion that asthma wasn't the problem that people said it was.
And the reason that I'm suspecting that, and certainly don't take your medical advice from me, that's your warning.
The reason I suspect that is that the way the lungs were responding under coronavirus was weird, meaning that their oxygen level could be down to like 50 or 60, and they could still be walking around when they should be dead.
So there's something about how it was affecting the lungs that wasn't You know, the straightforward way you'd imagine.
Then there was also the report that smokers were doing better, not worse, which also makes me think, okay, whatever this is, it has a very unique way it works on the lungs, and it could be that that unique way it works just doesn't interfere with asthma, doesn't make it worse.
So I was at least speculating that we would have known For sure, if asthma was a death sentence, if you got coronavirus, because we would have enough data by now.
So the dog that wasn't barking is after all these cases of coronavirus, I was seeing the list that always had asthma in it would sometimes not have asthma in it anymore.
So remember that the list of things that would kill you would be like overweight, heart problems, high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma...
And then suddenly I would notice the list would just, asthma wasn't on the list anymore.
And smoking fell off the list too.
Have you noticed that? Remember in the early days, smoking was, you know, if you're a smoker, you're pretty much dead.
And then apparently that's not the case.
We don't have confirmation on that, but there was one study that said that smokers actually did better than non-smokers.
Could be because the smoke interferes with the ability of whatever to get into whatever.
So it could be just an oddity.
And then today I was seeing that almost everybody who was dying in New York City had some pretty serious health problems, and diabetes seems to be a big one.
So diabetes is sort of moving up the charts, along with heart and blood pressure problems.
So it's starting to look like diabetes, weight, and cardiovascular are the biggest risks.
Somebody says you have a blood oxygen saturation of 60?
Wow. I didn't know you could survive that in normal situations.
Somebody says 10,000 deaths in the U.S. are from nursing homes.
Yeah. So, if it turns out that smoking and asthma are not actually the death sentences than we thought, I'm really going to want to open up the economy even more than I do.
Alright, maybe the smoke going into the lungs kills the virus?
I don't know. I saw a story the other day about a company, and I think I interpreted this correctly.
Maybe somebody can confirm this.
I thought it was a company that was developing a far-UV light that kills viruses that would actually be like a ventilator that you would stick into the lungs and then turn on the light.
And the idea was that the UV light literally shining in your lungs might kill enough virus to give your immune system a little bit of a boost on its own.
I mean, it wouldn't boost your immune system.
It would just let your immune system do what it was.
I don't know that vaping is good for you.
Something tells me vaping is a whole different situation.
Insulin receptors, somebody says, is the issue.
Alright, so that's about all I have for today.
I'm going to talk to you tonight.
Diabetes and high BMI. You know, I say open up the country to everybody who is under 60 and doesn't have a heart problem or diabetes.
Let's just go for it.
I'm ready to just go for it.
Now, of course, maybe the hot spots need to do something differently.
But in my neighborhood, my neighborhood doesn't seem to have a problem.
And if it became a problem, I think I'd probably still be okay with it.
Because those are the risks.
Is it clear at this point that all of our problems are from huddling people indoors?
