Episode 962 Scott Adams: No One Knows Anything But We Still Have to Decide How to reopen Economy
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
The Plague of Corruption video
General Flynn
San Antonio makes phrase "Chinese virus" hate speech
Vitamin D deficiency and coronavirus
Testing, flattening the curve, magical thinking
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If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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Sure, I'm a little bit late this morning, but I think that just built the anticipation.
How many of you were looking at the clock?
It was 7 a.m.
or 10 a.m. on your coast, and you said, he's usually right on time.
Well, I was here and ready, but I got caught up in something.
Hold on. Stay there.
Don't go anywhere. Come right back.
With notes.
Yes. And...
Well, I didn't mean to panic you.
So, we have much fun to talk about.
Today's going to be a good one.
I guarantee it.
But to enjoy it fully, you must be prepared.
And to be prepared, you don't need much.
All you need...
Here's a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or 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 hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the damn pandemic.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now.
Go. Yep.
Yep, I can feel my...
Coronavirus antibodies forming in my body and I haven't even been exposed.
That's how good the coffee is.
I hope yours is good too.
So you know how I've been telling you a number of times that there's just something weird about the simulation and my connection to it.
And I keep telling you that although I'm pretty sure there are 7.6 billion people in the world, for reasons I don't quite understand, I keep finding myself in the middle of major stories.
And you don't know how often this happens because I can't tell you all the times that I get pulled into an international, not so much international, sometimes, but more international.
National, but sometimes international.
I tend to get pulled into a lot of stuff because people just say, this guy might be able to help, or he was interested, or I just know him.
I'll just tell him something.
And so I find myself drawn into these giant stories.
I don't know how to explain it, but it happens so often.
Let me give you an example. The other day, somebody sent me a book.
And it's fairly common for people to send books to other authors.
Usually they're looking for a book blurb or sometimes they think you'll be interested.
Maybe they're trying to strike up some kind of a connection.
But it's very common for authors to go to their mailbox and unsolicited somebody has sent them a book.
Now I guess so many of them that of course I can't read them and I don't always even know why they sent them to me in some cases.
So I sort of just put them in a pile.
And I look at them once in a while, and I think, maybe I'll read something in that pile, and I hardly ever get around to it.
So I get this book, and it was called The Plague of Corruption.
And I looked at it, and I thought, huh, I wonder why somebody thinks I need to look at this.
You might recognize that name, because there's a viral video that YouTube keeps taking down from a Dr.
Judy Mikovits, and the book, anyway, is from co-author Kent Heckenlively.
And so I didn't think much of it at the time.
I'd never heard of the video at the time.
I just put the book with my other books.
Actually, I had it sitting on a little stand.
I guess I liked the cover or something.
So I didn't actually put it on the pile with the other books.
It was sort of featured.
But I wasn't really planning on reading it.
And then the YouTube thing blows up.
And it gets more interesting.
Because you're thinking to yourself, well, Scott...
You got something in the mail.
That's not really like being pulled into the middle of a major story.
That's not really like that at all.
But I'm not done yet.
Didn't you know there's another part of the story?
Of course there is. So the other day, maybe a week after I got the book, and I had already talked about the video a little bit on Periscope, there's a note in my mailbox without an envelope.
Now if you get a note without an envelope in your mailbox, it means that somebody knows where you live and they didn't need to put a stamp on it.
So somebody walked up to my mailbox and physically put a note in my mailbox.
Now that's also not the first time that's happened.
Again, if you're in the public eye, it's not that strange.
I'll open my front door and there'll be A package with no postage or a note, an envelope.
It's fairly common.
I've had people knock on my door just to talk to me.
It doesn't happen often, but every now and then.
It's rare, but it happens.
So I get this note without an envelope, and the note is from Kent Heckenlively, the co-author of the book.
Who apparently lives close enough to my house that he knows which one is my house.
And he drove over and stuck the note in my...
So you can't see it, but that's the note in the book.
And he asked me to call him to talk about it.
Now, what are the odds that this would be this gigantic story, at least on the Internet it's a gigantic story, not in the mainstream press, But, you know, I've talked about it.
It becomes this big thing.
And then the author lives in my town and drops a note in my mailbox, hey, do you want to talk?
I mean, really, there's something weird going on, isn't there?
I mean, I wish I could tell you the other instances in which I get drawn into big stories.
I mean, it's happened, I think, three times this week.
Most of them I can't tell you about.
But it's crazy.
I mean, it's just crazy.
So, anyway, I've been asked a few times on the Locals platform where subscribers get to see extra stuff from me.
And some people asked me to comment on this, not knowing, of course, presumably not knowing that I had already commented on it.
So I'm going to comment again, because I've had more time to think about it.
And it goes like this.
So Christina and I were talking about the video.
She saw it separately.
And when she listened to it, she found it very persuasive and compelling.
And I said, that's funny because I felt the opposite.
I do think there's plenty in it that's true and also quite concerning, but not really that far from what you already assume to be true about big pharmaceutical companies.
But then there's sort of another level of Of, let's say, allegation stuff that I don't know that I can go that far.
So I won't even repeat the level that I'm not sure has credibility.
But there's certainly a base of credible and concerning things there.
I just think maybe it goes too far.
So my own take on it is that I did not find it credible.
While Christina listened to the whole thing and found it credible.
Now, she and I usually think similarly enough that I was really surprised.
And we talked about it in the car, and I said, really?
You found that compelling?
Because I was getting the opposite vibe, like really strongly.
And then it came out that she listened to it, whereas I watched it.
Have any of you had that experience?
So the viral video about the plague of corruption.
Has anybody listened to it without watching it?
And if so, was it more compelling when you listened than when you watched?
Because, I have to be honest, the visual of it...
You know how we're visual creatures, and you make assumptions about people's credibility by their body language, their mannerisms, and probably some of the wrong stuff too, like their gender, their age, their ethnicity, because we're all biased, terrible people.
So even if you try not to let those things influence you, you're still human, right?
So you can try really hard not to be that kind of person, but we are pattern recognition animals, and you can't really turn it off.
And so, my experience of watching it was that she wasn't credible.
And when I say not credible, I don't mean she's not right.
That's a completely different question.
Because I can't judge if she's right.
How would I? I mean, really, do I have some kind of independent information that I can look at her claims and, well, based on my research, no, nothing like that.
It is purely looking at the individual and Somewhat the same way you would do, let's say, a job interview if you were hiring somebody.
You would judge them not just by what their resume said.
You would judge them not just by the facts of the person.
You would also judge them by the vibe, wouldn't you?
And you'd say, I don't know, there was something about that person I wasn't quite comfortable with.
I can't put my finger on it.
But there was somebody with the same skills and I am comfortable with them.
I'm going to go with them. So it's completely natural that we make these judgments.
And the visual is very important.
And I don't know how to say this because I don't want to just be mindlessly insulting or something.
But I found Dr.
Judy Mikvitz not persuasive.
Her vibe, if you will.
There was something that was just triggering me and I don't know what it is.
I don't want to think that it was gender because I don't have any experience in my life of thinking that women are less credible if they're talking scientifically or it's the field that they're experts in.
I've never had that thought before.
So I don't think it's that.
But you always have to be on guard for that, right?
So that's my take.
Now, I would...
I would urge this, that if you're going to decide whether you buy into this, you should Google the names of at least Dr.
Judy Mikovits. You should Google her and see if you can find at least the counter-arguments.
Now what I haven't seen yet, which is weird, and maybe this matters, where are the people who are, let's say, the accused, Because, you know, Tony Fauci is a big character in her accusations.
So there are executives, there are companies, there are named individuals who have been alleged to be in bad behavior.
Here's what's missing.
Those same people who have been accused doing a fact check on it and saying, um, that fact's not right.
That's out of context.
Now, have you seen it?
Now, somebody says...
I'm seeing a URL there, but I don't want to say it.
So that might exist by now.
But here's what I would caution.
The credibility you should apply to this when you haven't heard the other side is none.
The appropriate amount of credibility is none if you haven't heard the other side.
And that's for everything.
There's no... There should be no exception to this.
If you haven't heard the other side, no credibility.
But what if you wait a few months, and it's a big viral thing, and it's impossible to ignore, and still the people who have been accused just don't comment?
But instead, YouTube just keeps taking the accusations off of YouTube, and the Internet is trying to scrub it.
What would that tell you?
If the other side doesn't fact check it, because how hard would it be?
How hard would it be to put a little statement that says, you know, Dr.
Judy Mikovits made the following claim.
Here's the document that shows that didn't happen.
Or, I was there, I promise you that didn't happen.
Where's that? Kind of missing, isn't it?
Now, it could be it just takes a while.
It could be that the legal counsel for all involved said, hey, it's just better just to let it go.
You don't want to give it attention.
If you respond, you give it attention.
But that's a pretty good strategy, actually.
Oh, Forbes has an article on it today.
Good. I'm going to go check that out.
So here's what I would expect.
So I would expect if an independent, credible reporter dug into it, that what they would find is that a whole bunch of things she says are true.
But on top of the truth, there's probably a level of interpretation, which is where things are going to be interesting.
So I'd like to see that Forbes article and see what they say.
All right. Let's talk about a few other things.
I found out recently that General Flynn is connected to me on Twitter.
It's such a small world.
I've never had any connection with him.
I've tweeted about his situation a number of times, and that probably got his attention.
So I sent him a note today, and I just sent him a congratulation DM. I don't know What are the odds that General Flynn checks his DMs and reads them all, especially on a day like this?
Probably got quite a few.
But I made him the following offer, which is that if he decides to write a book, I can hook him up with a top literary agent.
He probably has one already.
And if he writes a book, I'll tweet it out and give him some attention.
Because here's how I feel about this.
I don't think justice has yet been served.
Do you? I feel like justice was half-served, but you can't really make up for the time you took from him.
There's just no way to fix that.
That time is just gone.
But it's also the past.
We don't dwell on the past.
But what about the financial hit?
I mean, it's not really justice if he comes out of this at a certain age, sort of approaching retirement age, and he's been wiped out.
That's not justice.
Justice would be a $10 million book deal, which I will help him promote the shit out of it, to sell that thing onto the top of the bestseller list.
Because wouldn't you like to hear his story?
Oh yes you would!
You would like to hear his story.
I don't know if he'll ever be free to tell it.
Maybe he just can't tell the story for a variety of reasons.
But I thought I'd put the offer out there, because in this small world somehow I had a direct channel.
To the guy who's the biggest story in the country.
And if he reads my DM, and if he decides he wants to do a book, I'll help him out.
Alright. Someone also on the Locals platform had this idea.
And it's a really good one.
So let me run this one by you.
Alright, so here's the idea.
That the CNN types and the anti-Trumpers are trying to make whatever they can out of this Flynn thing.
They're trying to spin it any way they can so it's not so bad.
And one of the things that you're hearing them say is, he pled guilty.
So how could it be fake if there was a guilty plea?
And so that's actually a pretty good point.
For the low-information watchers, if they're just trying to convince their base that it wasn't as bad as people say, even though it was as bad as the worst thing you could think, it was actually a coup, that's what it was.
But here was the suggestion.
When somebody says, yeah, but he pled guilty, you can't ignore that.
And here's the response to that.
Are you ready? So did the Central Park Five.
It's pretty good, isn't it?
Now, I'd forgotten this, and I think it's true.
Do a fact check on me that.
I want to make sure that's true. But did not the Central Park Five confess?
And then it must have been a coerced confession or something.
And of course, Flynn's guilty plea was also coerced.
It was coerced.
So, how is that different?
So, just try this out.
So the suggestion on locals was to try this out, because apparently it's fun.
You can induce cognitive dissonance.
I've told you how to spot cognitive dissonance before, but let me remind you.
you can induce cognitive dissonance when you get people, you watch them carefully, the eyes and the face especially.
And they'll actually go into a reboot mode where there's a vacant expression for a moment and it lasts a little bit too long for the social situation.
So, it'd be like this, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, bla, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, you know, Flynn, you know, he pled guilty So, you know, he got that.
And then you say, So did the sensual part five.
They were coerced too.
Then look at the face, and what you should see is the vacant expression that lasts too long, like...
And then the next thing that comes out of their mouth, if it's cognitive dissonance, will be nonsense.
The words will fit together like a sentence, but you'll hear it and you'll say, I don't even know what that sentence meant.
Because it sounded like nonsense.
So the way cognitive dissonance works is that the person is trying to find a way that they're still right and that they understand the world even though clearly they're wrong and they didn't.
And so they invent a little patch sort of on the fly.
It's like a little logic patch to connect things that shouldn't connect.
And that logic patch will just be ridiculous because you can't connect things that don't connect.
And then their brain reboots.
So try that at home. Look for the blank stare that lasts too long.
It might only be two seconds.
But in a social situation, that's going to look too long.
All right. Rasmussen has the Rasmussen poll.
And on Twitter, it's a great account to follow.
If you don't follow Rasmussen, the polling company, on Twitter, you're missing something.
Because their social media game is...
Very non-corporate.
You know, Rasmussen knows how to use Twitter the way Twitter should be used.
You know, not your dumb little corporate tweets like, well, we said this and we're announcing this.
But, you know, they're funny and engaging and a little provocative.
So the Rasmussen account is fun to follow.
And here's a little observation that will blow your mind.
Do you remember the 2018 midterm election?
And all the smart people said...
Probably the reason that the Democrats did well and the Republicans didn't was probably health care, because that was such a big issue.
People prefer the Democrats for health care.
But as Rasmussen determined when they did some polling to dig down on what happened in that midterm election in 2018, they found out that the biggest issue for people who ended up voting, let's say, against the Republicans Trump was credibly accused of working for Russia.
So we're all looking at these midterms like that told us something.
It's like, well, the Democrats are on a roll.
They won those midterms.
So that tells us something.
Here's what it tells us.
It tells us how powerful fake news is.
Because That Russian collusion wasn't true.
Didn't happen.
There's no evidence of it, and now all the people involved are admitting that freely.
There was no evidence that the president or members of his group were actively doing anything.
There's evidence that Russia was playing with our election, but that was on them.
That's not on Trump.
So it turns out that we're coming into an election cycle in which The Russia collusion story, the biggest thing that the Democrats had going for them in the midterm, just blew up in their faces.
So, you know, I'm not sure that in a presidential election year that policies even matter.
I mean, I really don't.
I don't think anybody's policy is going to make a difference.
I think people are voting for personalities this time for president.
All right. Seattle...
Did something interesting and smart, and I would love to see other places do that.
They closed 20 miles of streets to traffic so residents can exercise and bike on them.
So instead of having your narrow little sidewalks where everybody would be bunching up, they just closed the street to traffic.
I think the locals can get out of their garage and get back in and stuff.
So if you're a local, you can drive slowly on the street.
They closed it and just make it a big exercise place so everybody can get outside somewhat safely.
And I say to myself, I want that.
I mean, I've already suggested that in my town.
So I've already emailed somebody to get that idea into the powers that be locally.
I would expect my local town to close their main street because it's just too obviously a good idea.
It's just really obviously a good idea.
If you saw the main street where I live, a number of restaurants, and there's plenty of roads and parking around that street.
It's one block away.
It's the perfect solution.
So I'm glad Seattle pulled the trigger on that.
So you're probably watching the news that the San Antonio City Council voted unanimously.
I don't know how often they vote unanimously on anything, but they voted unanimously to approve a resolution labeling the term, quote, Chinese virus as hate speech.
And they encouraged people to report it to authorities.
Yeah, I know what you think about that.
I know what you think about that.
To which I ask the following question.
Can I still refer to Mexican drug cartels?
Or should I just call them drug cartels?
I can call them Mexican drug cartels, can't I? Because wouldn't that be just as racist?
Because there are a lot of people in Mexico, and as a percentage, very few of them are members of a cartel.
So, when you say Mexican drug cartel, you're kind of throwing all Mexicans under the bus, aren't you?
No, you're not. Because everybody knows you're talking about just the cartel.
Likewise, when people say Chinese virus, I don't think they're blaming the citizens of China.
I don't think anybody's saying, we got this virus because you're Chinese.
I mean, everybody understands they're referring to where it came from, but...
I have a suggestion to make everyone happy.
Somebody says, don't be racist, Scott.
Oh no, I'm not. Watch this.
Watch my next move.
You said it in the comments.
It's the China virus.
China is a place.
Chinese could be referring to a place or a people.
A little bit ambiguous.
A little bit open to interpretation.
And so you can see why the people who want to make something of it will say, oh, you're talking about people.
Why are you saying Chinese?
Which I say is not a terrible point.
Why couldn't we call it the China virus?
Because China clearly is talking about the government and the place.
And that's unambiguous.
Chinese! I hear it too.
You know, and while I'm sure the people saying it are not saying it for some weird racist reason, why bother?
If you can just call it the China flu, there's no ambiguity.
Why not? It tells you where it came from.
All right, so that would be my suggestion, to call it the China flu.
However, I bristled at the notion that it was hate speech Because I've done so much worse talking about China's government.
I always hasten to say that the people are awesome.
I love the people.
The citizens. Great people.
The government? Pure evil.
Pure evil.
Oh, I see some people like China virus.
Yeah, the beauty of China virus is there's not a...
I was going to swear.
There's not a darn thing...
You can complain about that.
It gets you the same thing you wanted, which is tagging China with the problem, because that's sort of what you wanted.
But how is that racist?
It's the name of the country.
I mean, we didn't name their country.
That's not on us.
All right. How about this vitamin D correlation?
So, I tweeted this thread yesterday, in which I was...
Sort of, let's say, extending an existing conversation about vitamin D. Now, the existing conversation was, hey, this looks like this could be really helpful, maybe as a therapy.
It looks like people who are low on vitamin D are doing worse with it.
So this vitamin D seems to have importance.
So that was already known and widely tweeted, at least.
And certainly science is very firm on the understanding that vitamin D has a role in immunity.
So I think we're beyond wondering if it has a role.
But here's where I've extended it a little bit.
And the extension is to look at all of the hotspots and the people who are doing the worst, and I just Google them and said, all right, suppose you had diabetes.
And I Google it and it says, people with diabetes often have vitamin D deficiency.
And I said, uh, okay.
Google black people.
I don't know what I Googled.
It wasn't black people. But I wanted to see if you're black, do you have lower vitamin D? You do.
Because it takes more sun if you're skinned or darker.
So, alright, that fits.
And then I just went down the line.
Old people, less vitamin D. Overweight, Google it.
Overweight people have vitamin D deficiency.
You'd think the opposite, right?
Because if you're overweight, you should be getting a lot of food.
Must be some vitamin D in there somewhere.
But apparently being overweight is also a risk factor.
So anyway, I went right down the line.
And, you know, how about Smoggy City?
Sure. But the two that were standing out as kind of weird were Spain and Italy.
And there was some thought that Italy is older.
Could be. That could be a factor.
But what about Spain?
Spain is pretty sunny, right?
And I don't know if they have any special problem.
I don't know if they're especially old.
But somebody who had been studying this vitamin D connection told me this.
Let me say that I'm just reporting what somebody who looked into us said.
So I can't tell you that this is absolutely true.
But the thought is this.
That in different parts of the world, even if it's sunny, you still can't get enough vitamin D. Because apparently the angle of the sun toward your country has some big effect on the good stuff getting through, if you know what I mean. So it's not enough that you just have sun.
You need sun at a certain angle and for a certain amount of time.
So apparently noon is the best time to get your sun.
If you've got sunscreen on your face and it's the only thing uncovered and you go out in the sun, well, it probably helps a little, but you're not getting what you need.
So I would recommend, I'm no doctor, so if anybody wants to overrule me, I'm just going to make a common sense statement.
If I go outside and my head and my hands are the only things exposed, that feels like a bad plan.
Because first of all, I'd rather wear sunscreen.
This is where I'm going to get my...
If I'm going to get skin cancer, it's going to be up here somewhere first.
Because that's where the sun is.
So I would recommend going out at noon with your shorts on.
Put your face under a hat or in the shade.
Put your legs out. And I don't know about you, but I can't even remember the last time I got a sunburn on my legs.
I mean, I go, I wear shorts all summer in California, and I never put sunscreen on my legs, and I barely even get tanned.
And I'm out there all the time.
So there's something about, I don't know, legs don't burn very fast.
So if you're a guy, maybe you take off your shirt for a few minutes.
So 15 minutes in the noon sun.
Anyway, circling back to my point, Apparently, both Spain and Italy, where the COVID problem is pretty bad, they actually have low vitamin D because of the angle of the sun.
Plenty of sun, but low vitamin D because they're not getting the right angle of sun, or so I'm told.
I would like you to fact-check everything I say on this topic because I'm way out of my comfort zone of knowledge.
I'm just passing stuff along at whatever credibility you want to put on it.
All right. Here's another thing I found.
You know that prisons...
We're having this weird discovery about prisons that something like 90% of some prisons have been exposed to the virus.
Something like 90%.
Yet the deaths is fairly low.
So why would prisons...
Have plenty of, you know, 90% infected, but also not much problem with it health-wise.
Why would that be?
Because men are more susceptible.
The prisons we're talking about are mostly male prisons.
African Americans, more susceptible.
Plenty of African Americans in prison.
And they don't get much sun.
So wouldn't you expect that the prison situation would be really dire, and instead it's the opposite?
Well, here's something I found out.
Now, first of all, you'd have to factor in the fact that people in prison tend to be, they don't have a lot of job stress, they probably get plenty of rest, and they work out, they lift weights, and they're youngish.
So there's probably lots of reasons that are a little bit extra healthy anyway.
But here's what I found out.
Prison meals are engineered.
Makes sense, right?
Because for humanitarian reasons, you can't give prisoners unhealthy food.
It would be cruel and unusual.
So it turns out, and I didn't see this coming, that the class of people in America...
Who have the best diets, including supplementation for vitamin D specifically, 600 whatever units, are prison meals.
So prisoners actually have the best diet of anybody in the United States.
And part of the reason is they're forced to eat it.
They don't have a choice. And the government is forced to give them healthy food.
They don't have a choice either.
Because somebody would complain, right?
So, they also have free healthcare, yeah.
Although free is a weird word for a prison situation.
So, could it be that vitamin D really is, I don't know, 80% of the answer?
Apparently we can check for vitamin D sufficiency.
So it looks like there's home tests.
I don't know if you spit or take a finger prick at what you do.
But apparently there's some home tests where you can test your vitamin D level.
And here's the question I would ask you.
I'll just put this out here.
As we're deciding how to reopen and who can go back to work and who has to hide, how good a correlation would we find If we were to study all the people with vitamin D sufficiency and insufficiency, would we discover that no matter who you are, if your vitamin D level is good, you could go back to work?
Take me, for example.
A perfect example.
I have four comorbidities.
I have four comorbidities.
I'm male. I'm over 60.
I've got asthma.
And I'm talking about it in public, which, as you know, makes the simulation target you to get coronavirus and kill you.
So if I hadn't mentioned this publicly, I would only have three comorbidities.
But since I said it in public, you know how this works, right?
The simulation is looking at me and saying, did you talk about this in public?
Because that's a comorbidity bastard.
We're going to come for you. If there's anybody who's going to get coronavirus now, it's going to be the asshole who's talking about it in public too much.
Because you're in the target list now.
So I think you'd agree.
Four comorbidities.
But, on the plus side, I'm otherwise unusually fit.
And unusually healthy.
If, you know, all things considered.
I also am very dedicated to eating right.
And I am literally going outside every day and getting my 15 minutes of sun.
Now, it's California sun, so I hope it's a good kind.
But presumably, given my light pigmentation and given my dedication to getting sun every day and eating a healthy meal otherwise, and I do eat fish, so I probably get a little that way, would I be likely to have a bad time with coronavirus?
For comorbidities, including talking about it on the internet, but what if my vitamin D is good?
Tell me you're not curious about that.
Find me the people with comorbidities, if such a thing exists, who also, through, I don't know, the sun or supplementation, also has good vitamin D. Do we have that information?
Show me the high vitamin D people.
And apparently you can be too high as well.
There's some thought that there's a right amount of vitamin D. You don't want too little, but too much could actually cause you problems too.
Not just directly, but wouldn't be as good for dealing with the coronavirus.
Elon Musk on Rogan.
I haven't watched that yet, but I will.
They took asthma off the list.
I thought they did.
You know, I don't know if they, did they intentionally take it off the list or did it quietly stop being on the list?
Because I noted before that I was watching the list and it seemed to quietly be taken off the list.
Is that what you saw as well?
So I think there's still some question about it.
Alright, so there's my challenge to the world.
Instead of testing for coronavirus, instead of testing for antibodies, although those are all good things to test for also, could we cheaply and quickly test our own vitamin D levels?
Could we? Is that the fastest way to get back to work healthily?
Check your vitamin D levels.
If you can get them back into a healthy range, go back to work.
If you can't, hide.
Wait for the therapies.
Wait for the convalescent blood therapy would probably be the smart one.
I haven't seen anybody suggest that, right?
Has anybody suggested that we decide who goes back to work based on our vitamin D level?
I don't think I've heard anybody say that.
I'll just put it out there because it's very studyable.
So it's vulnerable to data.
In other words, you can get the data.
And you could probably get the data in a way that would be fairly reliable because there's so many examples and so much energy around it.
Yes, somebody says their doctor warned them about too much vitamin D. I am told, and again, don't take any medical advice from me.
That would be a bad idea.
So this is not medical advice.
But I am told there is such thing as too much vitamin D so that the way you would most likely run into a problem is try to do it yourself.
You know, try to do it without a doctor's advice and just like pumping a bunch of vitamin D into you because you're afraid.
It would be bad medical technique.
Bad medical technique.
All right. In New York City, 66% of the people who got the virus got it while socially isolating, which would also suggest that staying indoors is not the best thing.
There's also a theory, I just saw it on the Internet, and again, it's not like it's passed some kind of rigorous scientific testing.
But given the nature of the virus, there's a high likelihood that if you are in a shared ventilation area, that you're at greater risk.
So shared ventilation you might see in a prison.
Shared ventilation you might see at a nursing home.
Shared ventilation you might see on a cruise ship.
And in office buildings also.
That might be one of the biggest risk factors because there is some sense that it's airborne, so it may actually live through the air conditioning.
Anecdotally, I know one person who got it by being in the same building but not having direct contact with, in fact never even meeting, a person who had confirmed a case of coronavirus.
So somebody who shared a Who shared a ventilation system with the neighbor downstairs, I think?
Got it without ever having any contact or even actually knowing that that neighbor existed.
Now, I suppose it could have gotten it in the elevator or the common mail area or something.
I suppose that's possible. But I put it out there as something that we need to know more about.
Now, once again, it's another day of this stupidity.
And it goes like this.
All the smart people say, we need more testing.
Why is our government so bad?
Don't you know that everybody gets out of this with more testing?
Look at those little countries doing so well with all their testing.
We need more testing.
All the smart people say that.
But the people who are smarter...
Then the smart people have a little bit different take on it.
And it goes like this.
If we could do that much testing, we'd already be doing it.
Okay? If you see a tweet or like a quote from Melinda Gates recently saying we should do more testing, you know, we're doing it wrong because we're not testing enough, it makes my head explode that Because does Melinda think the government didn't have that idea yet?
Does Melinda Gates think that Tony Fauci and Dr.
Birx hadn't thought of that?
And they're like looking at Twitter and Dr.
Birx is like, let me check my Twitter.
Melinda Gates, whoa, we need to do more testing.
Whoa, why didn't I think of that?
I've been working on this for so many years and more testing.
That's brilliant.
Let's do that.
I'm so angry.
My head wants to explode.
And here's the problem. The task force made the mistake of selling testing sufficiency under the context of having enough to open up in these phases.
But the enough testing to open up in phases, which the president and the task force repeats over and over, we have enough tests.
You can open up in phases according to guidelines.
You can meet the guidelines.
We have enough tests.
So the world interprets that as, we have enough tests.
So, wait a minute.
If we have enough tests, and the smart people like Melinda Gates are saying we should test more, Well, it must be just stupidity, right?
We must just be stupid.
We have all these tests.
Everybody smart says we should test more.
Why don't we use all of our existing extra testing to do what works?
All the smart people say so.
And why didn't Tony Fauci ever think of doing more testing?
What is wrong with him?
And all the other experts They were waiting for this tweet from Melinda Gates to say we should do more testing, and now they know.
Here's what's happening. We do have, I think, it seems to be true, that we have enough testing to open up in phases, but that's a very limited testing.
It's, you know, doctor's orders, and it's under certain conditions.
It's a tiny percent of the country.
It's not the kind of testing you do if you want to get rid of a virus quickly.
You need to do massive testing, drive-ins, you've got to do something more like South Korea, etc.
If we could do that quickly, do you think that we wouldn't be doing that?
Seriously. Do you think there's any chance that if we could do a lot more testing, that we wouldn't already be doing it?
It's obvious that the problem is we can't do it.
Isn't it? Somebody says Texas is doing it right.
Texas is doing one thing very right, which is they're focusing their resources on the hotspots.
Why other people weren't doing that, or at least not doing it as well, I don't know, that's for them to explain.
Maybe they are, and just Texas is doing a better job of explaining it.
But I have a suspicion that Texas is just doing it smarter.
It could be it's just that.
It's a very capable state, They have a very capable governor.
They're very practical.
Texas isn't going to do anything as a state.
They're not going to do anything that's just politically correct.
They're a little more practical about things.
So if they're not testing massively, it's because they can't.
They don't have enough tests.
And how long would it take to have enough tests to do that?
Have you seen all the news reports about how long it would take based on everybody ramping up?
Let's say we even use the War Powers Act.
Whatever it takes. The best case scenario, how long would it take to ramp up?
It would be sometime after the economy had crashed.
So testing, unless somebody invents some new thing that can be scaled up, it's just not a thing.
So all the smart people saying that we should do more testing, Just stop doing it.
What you should be saying is, how could we make it possible to do more testing?
Now, one of the issues I don't know enough about, but Balaji Srinivasan was saying this, and he's far more informed about this whole area.
He suggests that one of the things holding back sufficient testing in this country is the FDA needs to approve the at-home kits.
Now, there might be one that's approved.
Maybe they need to approve more.
There might be more to the story that I don't understand.
But it could be that that's a breakthrough.
It could be that the breakthrough is allowing home testing and then letting the capitalism do what it does.
Because if you said home testing will be legal beyond what's already approved, I think at least one is approved.
But if you said they're all approved, you just have to Show your numbers and meet some standards or whatever.
What would you pay to do a home test?
If you could buy a home test right now and you didn't need doctor's approval, and let's say you thought it was 99% reliable, what would you pay right now with no symptoms?
So only the people who don't have any reason to think that they have it.
What would you pay? So I would say I would pay...
Well, mine's different because my income is higher.
But let's say I'd probably pay...
Well, instead of saying what I'd pay, because I'd be willing to overpay in this situation, so that's not fair.
But let's say I had a normal job and I was a normal person.
It's hard for me to imagine that.
I'd probably pay $250.
And I might pay it four times a year, just to test every once in a while.
So I think, but anyway, let's say you might pay, you'd be willing to pay less.
Maybe you would pay $25 or $100.
So everybody's, somebody says zero.
I like your attitude, the ones who would pay zero.
Alright, so I'm seeing some numbers come through.
$50, $5, $20, $99, $300, $0, etc.
Alright, so here's my point.
If it were legal for more companies to make these at-home testing kits, I would imagine capitalism would ramp up to do that pretty quickly because the profit potential would be enormous.
So it could be just that the President needs to remove some more red tape, but I don't know enough about that situation.
Or even if it would be safe to do that.
Here's some good news. Israel gets a FDA approval for study of treatment of Pleuristem.
So it's a new experimental drug that Israelis gave to six critical patients who are the ventilator types.
So it's six patients who in the normal world Maybe four or five of them would die.
So once you get to that advanced stage where you're on the ventilator, your prognosis turns really bad really fast.
So if they tested six people who were at that stage of really critical, if the drug didn't work, you'd expect something like three or four of them to die.
Because that's just the, at least.
You might expect all six of them to die.
And that wouldn't even be unusual.
But I would say two to five dying is almost guaranteed if you gave them a drug that didn't do anything.
Wouldn't you say? Six critically ill people?
Now it's not big enough for a proper analysis.
But given that if you took any six people who are on ventilators for this, they're not all going home.
Ever, right? Would you agree with that?
They're not all six going home.
Unfortunately, that just doesn't happen.
But all six went home.
Actually, I'm exaggerating.
All six got off critical care.
In other words, they improved enough that it looks like they're going to come off ventilators and be fine.
Six out of six.
Six out of six.
What are the statistical odds?
Let's say everybody's telling the truth and there's nothing that we don't know.
Statistically, what are the odds they would get six out of six?
I don't know. A thousand to one or something.
Pretty low. Now, of course, it's not enough to be comfortable.
You still have to do the tests.
Who knows if there's some...
It might be unhealthy in different ways.
It needs to be tested. But it's pretty positive.
Pretty positive. I told you the other day I was getting in a debate online with somebody who knows way more than I do about epidemiology and biology, etc.
Professor Bergstrom.
And he had made a claim that I challenged, but I want to now take his side and suggest a better way he could have persuaded me.
And it's this. His claim was that flattening the curve...
Did not simply delay things, but rather reduced the total number of people who would die.
And I said, what's the logic for that?
Because extending it, by definition, shouldn't change the area under the curve.
What would be the mechanism...
That would change the area under the curve unless you had a vaccine or something, and we don't see that happening.
I mean, it's not anytime soon.
And so his argument, he tried a few approaches, and I just said, I'm not getting that.
Like, I'm open to the argument, but I'm not hearing it.
And it turns out that there is support for the idea that flattening the curve does reduce the total number of people who get it.
And now I'm going to improve that argument.
And it goes like this.
If you let the virus go unchecked and it has that big infection bump and then tails off, that would be similar to driving a car at 100 miles an hour and then hitting the brakes.
If you're driving 100 miles an hour and you hit the brakes, you might overshoot where you want it to stop.
Because you can't stop that quickly at 100 miles an hour.
And so the virus unchecked, it's going to overshoot the mark of herd immunity because it's just so fast.
And even though your town might reach herd immunity, people are still traveling and stuff, so it just overshoots.
Whereas, if you were traveling 20 miles an hour, which would be a flattened curve, and you're getting close to herd immunity, you can gently apply the brakes Now, analogies are not persuasive in and of themselves, but they're really good for explaining a concept that you hadn't heard before or thought of in that way.
So, I would say that it is more persuasive because I am convinced that there is science behind the concept that flattening the curve could actually save lives.
Now, that assumption is based on different viruses.
So I would throw this caution into the conversation, that if you have a virus that has a super high asymptomatic number and also a super long incubation period, I don't know if the flattening the curve works the same in that case.
Because it seems to me, and this has been my argument, that if 90% of the people in jail got the coronavirus, There's nothing you can do to stop it.
So my argument was, you're going to get to herd immunity no matter what.
You can do everything you want.
I'm hearing people say that there are some countries that are successfully driving the infection rate to zero, to which I say, that's not a thing, unless they're also buttoning up the border, because it doesn't matter if they drive to zero.
As long as somebody else didn't, it's coming back.
Maybe slowly, maybe quickly, but there's no such thing as an individual country driving it to zero and still having an airport.
So I'm seeing magical thinking about people who think we can drive it to zero in this country.
That's not a thing.
I'm seeing magical thinking that we could ever have enough tests, at least in the next several months when things are critical, to test our way to Do anything useful.
So those are just magical thinkings.
But I do think there is something to the flattening the curve could.
Don't know if it works with this virus because of that long incubation period.
But could lower the number of people dead.
But I don't think we have time to wait for it anyway.
So my favorite Twitter economist, Joshua Gans, Made the statement that a quick way to calculate whether it was worth it to damage the economy to save X number of lives, that the numbers you would look at was the estimated, I think, $500 billion a quarter in lost GDP. So that's what you look at.
Okay, we'll lose $500 billion a quarter, but we can save X tens of thousands of lives, potentially a million, maybe two million, based on the high numbers.
Here was my response, and I'm not especially good at this, so somebody who is smarter, check my numbers, okay?
Because I was trying to calculate the part that was missing, which is how many people die if you damage the economy.
Now keep in mind, if we were to go back to work today, I don't think the economy is mortally wounded, if we go back today.
If we go back at the end of May, I also don't think the economy is mortally wounded, and I would still look for a good 2021.
But if we really tried to drive infections down to something close to zero, I think you're talking about August.
Right? And in August, I'm no longer confident that I can tell you that we can revive the economy the same way we could if we started now.
I mean, there might be a permanent effect.
We could get behind China.
Our military spending might be impossible.
We could be less safe in a million ways.
So anyway, I looked for an estimate of how many people extra die in poverty.
And I got an estimate So let's work that through.
Let's say that we wait too long to revive the economy And it causes 50 million citizens to be impoverished in a way that they would not have otherwise.
Is that too high?
50 million? Well, everything depends on how long we wait, right?
At some point it would be 50 million.
I don't know if that happens in June, but at some point 50 million people would be impoverished.
50 million people impoverished at 500 extra deaths per 100,000, check my math, would be 250,000 extra dead per year just from the poverty.
But keep in mind, poverty is not, it doesn't end in the calendar year.
If you've got that much poverty, if 50 million people are suddenly impoverished, that doesn't fix itself in a year.
So let's say four years.
So let's say four years of a quarter million people dying extra from poverty, that's a million people.
So I would say that the risk of, say, waiting until the end of the summer, and again, nobody knows.
These are all just gut instincts based on who knows what.
So there's no science in what I'm going to say next.
It's my judgment based on living on this earth as long as I have, that if we were to wait to, say, the end of the summer...
We would probably put a quarter of a million to a million people at risk.
But if we were to go back to work with full semi-mitigation, semi-mitigation.
Dr. Drew, you missed all the good doctor stuff.
Just joining? You'll have to check out the early stuff and find out if I said everything wrong.
I'm way over my skis on this, Dr.
Drew. I'm way over my skis.
So I need you to pull me back into the place where cartoonists should be.
But anyway, the poverty alone could kill a million people if we wait too long to revive the economy.
And how many people would you expect to die from the virus if we phase back to work the way the federal government said?
Or some version of that.
The states are violating the guidelines, but they get to choose, right?
It's up to the states to violate the guidelines.
How many are likely to die extra if we just put a glass wall around the nursing homes We protect the most vulnerable, the elderly.
We're not going to go back to work anyway.
They don't work, or at least some portion of them.
And what if we just wore our masks, did our distancing, closed the streets in front of restaurants, maybe paused the big events, the stadium events, until the end of the year, until we know what's what.
But if we did all of that stuff, would we lose 250,000 people?
Because I don't think so.
I don't think so.
But again, I can't calculate it.
So anyway, I would just summarize this.
That I do buy the argument, and I did not before because I hadn't heard of the reason.
But now that I've heard of the reason, I accept that there's some scientific or at least logical backing for the idea that flattening the curve could actually reduce the total number of people who ever die Because when you flatten it, you have less risk of overshooting herd immunity.
So let's say herd immunity was 60% of the public having it.
If you let it go free, it goes right past that and maybe stops at 70%.
You got your herd immunity, but that's a lot of people who got it infected that didn't need it to be.
If you slow it with flattening the curve, you might be able to inch up on herd immunity Maybe hit it more gently.
Don't overshoot it.
But you've got to calculate the economic hit for waiting that long.
So that's what I think.
I will give you a better review of the Plague of Corruption movie when the actual full-length movie is available, or if I dig into the book.
So my current feeling is that it is not credible as presented, because you haven't heard the other side.
So nothing is credible until you hear the other side.
But I'll keep watching it.
I'm not going to dismiss it yet.
So I'm going to give it its due of credit because the people involved, this Dr.
Judy Mikovits, she has credentials.
If she did not have credentials, I'd probably just blow it off.
But she does have exactly the right credentials.
So although I'm not convinced that I have not heard the full story, and I'll listen to it.
The parts I am less likely to believe are anybody else's interpretation of the inner intentions of strangers.
That's where it gets dicey, so we'll see.
Somebody says, can we undershoot too?
I don't think you can undershoot by flattening the curve.
Because flattening it doesn't stop it.
So it would just take as long as it took, but you'd hit herd immunity.
All right. So Mary is pointing out that I think she's not credible, but Christina says she is, so maybe it's sexism that makes me think she's not credible.
You may have missed the first part of the Periscope where I addressed that.
Christina listened to it, and I watched it.
And my sense of credibility was about her vibe and her physicality.
There was something about it that was raising a flag.
But it could be sexism.
Because how would I know?
The whole point of bias is that you're the one who doesn't know, right?
I can't rule it out.
I'm just... I'm guarding against it, and I don't think it is.
But I'm not the person who can rule it out.
It doesn't work that way.
All right. That's enough for now.
Oh, Grinnell dropped off a few more files to bar, somebody says.
Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho.
Um... Did I recognize it as a persuasion technique?
The Plague of Corruption movies as a persuasion technique?
Well, only not a special one, not in terms of using the tools of hypnosis or anything exotic, but only in the sense that it is a credible person telling a story.
So if you've got a credible person telling a story, it's persuasive.
I mean, it's obviously persuasive.
But I didn't see anything that I would call technique that goes beyond the obvious.
